diff --git "a/L-CiteEval-Data/multi_news.json" "b/L-CiteEval-Data/multi_news.json" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/L-CiteEval-Data/multi_news.json" @@ -0,0 +1,14763 @@ +[ + { + "id": 1, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A 600-foot tunnel was discovered leading from under a bed in Mexico to the kitchen of a former KFC restaurant in Arizona\u2014and authorities do not believe a fast food aficionado was responsible. Authorities say the cross-border tunnel was used to smuggle drugs including methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl, the BBC reports. The tunnel was found after Yuma, Arizona, resident Ivan Lopez was pulled over on Aug. 13 and officers found hundreds of pounds of narcotics in the trailer his pickup was towing, including 7 pounds of fentanyl, enough for about 3 million doses of the powerful opioid, KYMA reports. Authorities say the drugs had a street value of around $1.2 million. Court records state that Lopez bought the abandoned KFC building, which sits around 200 yards north of the Mexican city of San Luis Colorado, in April, paying $390,000 in cash, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports. The tunnel was discovered after investigators searched the building and spotted a hole in the floor. \"This tunnel would take this drug trafficking organization a long time to construct and would have been very expensive,\" a federal complaint states. It would have required a \"combination of several individuals on both sides of the border, engaged in an intricate, risky transnational conspiracy to construct such a secretive structure.\" (A 2,600-foot drug tunnel was found in California in 2016.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Agents find drug tunnel after significant drug bust\n\nSAN LUIS, Ariz - Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol held a press conference Wednesday morning disclosing more details of the cross-border found in San Luis, Ariz. believed to be used for drug smuggling.\n\nSan Luis Tunnel Video\n\nHSI said a traffic stop conducted Monday, August 13, by the San Luis Police Department led to the discovery of narcotics that were removed from the former Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant located at 552 San Luis Plaza Drive in San Luis, Ariz.\n\nSan Luis police stopped Ivan Lopez, a resident of Yuma, Ariz. and a canine unit alerted officers to two toolboxes that were found in the trailer of the truck Lopez was driving.", + " Authorities said they found 168 kilograms of hard narcotics inside the toolboxes.\n\nHSI's Special Agent in Charge Scott Brown said authorities found 118 kilograms of methamphetamine, six grams of cocaine, three kilograms of fentanyl, 13 kilograms of white heroin, and six kilograms of brown heroin inside the toolboxes. The fentanyl alone could supply three million dosage units.\n\nBrown said Lopez, who is also the owner of the building that formerly served as a KFC restaurant, had been seen removing the toolboxes from the building earlier that day.\n\nAgents executed a search warrant at both the former restaurant and Lopez\u2019s residence. The entrance of the tunnel was found in the kitchen area.", + " It is only eight inches in diameter.\n\nHSI officials said the tunnel was 22 feet deep and extended to 590 feet long towards its end point at a residence in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico.\n\nYuma Sector Border Patrol Yuma Sector Border Patrol\n\nAt the Mexican side, a trap door was found underneath a bed. Authorities believe the narcotics being smuggled through the tunnel were being pulled up with a rope. ", + " These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web. Crawls of supported \"No More 404\" sites. ", + " Image copyright Homeland Security Investigations/Yuma Sector BP Image caption The tunnel is suspected to have been used to shuffle drugs from Mexico into the US\n\nUS authorities have found a secret drug tunnel stretching from a former KFC in the state of Arizona to Mexico.\n\nThe 600ft (180m) passageway was in the basement of the old restaurant in San Luis, leading under the border to a home in San Luis Rio Colorado.\n\nAuthorities made the discovery last week and have arrested the southern Arizona building's owner.\n\nThey were alerted to the tunnel after the suspect, Ivan Lopez, was pulled over, according to KYMA News.\n\nDuring the traffic stop,", + " police dogs reportedly led officers to two containers of hard narcotics with a street value of more than $1m in Lopez's vehicle.\n\nInvestigators say the containers held more than 118kg (260lb) of methamphetamine, 6kg of cocaine, 3kg of fentanyl, and 19kg of heroin.\n\nAgents searched Lopez's home and his old KFC, discovering the tunnel's entrance in the kitchen of the former fast-food joint.\n\nImage copyright Homeland Security Investigations/Yuma Sector BP Image caption The tunnel led from an old KFC restaurant to a home in Mexico\n\nImage copyright Homeland Security Investigations/Yuma Sector BP Image caption A video showing the tunnel walls\n\nThe passageway was 22ft deep,", + " 5ft tall and 3ft wide, and ended at a trap door under a bed in a home in Mexico, said US officials.\n\nThe drugs are believed to have been pulled up through the tunnel with a rope.\n\nThis is not the first such discovery - two years ago a 2,600ft tunnel was found by authorities in San Diego, California.\n\nAuthorities said it was one of the longest such drug tunnels ever discovered, used to transport an \"unprecedented cache\" of cocaine and marijuana.\n\nIn July alone, US Border Patrol seized 15kg of heroin, 24lbs of cocaine, 327kg of methamphetamine and 1,", + "900kg of marijuana at border checkpoints nationwide.\n" + ], + "length": 914, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 2, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 He's a shoe-in for baseball's Hall of Fame, he's this years' reigning Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year, and his Yankees are battling to stay atop the American League East standings. On Wednesday night against the Tampa Bay Rays, Derek Jeter admittedly feigned an injury from a pitch that ricocheted off the end of his bat and was awarded first base for being hit by a pitch, which he was not. Minutes later he crossed home plate off a Curtis Granderson home run, giving the Yanks a short-lived lead. The Rays eventually won 4-3 and moved into first place alone following the game. Baseball insiders have mostly yawned or applauded Jeter and indicated it's just part of the game. While the controversy continues, people generally do seem to agree on one thing\u2014it certainly was good acting. For more details and acting reviews, see the Tampa Tribune, New York Times, and USA Today. For previous Jeter coverage, click here.\n", + "docs": [ + "And, in the case of Jeter, who represented the tying run in a taut game, it allows a player to pretend that a pitch hit him when it did not.\n\nPhoto\n\nFans from just about everywhere weighed in on Jeter\u2019s performance Thursday, some applauding his cleverness, others condemning him as a fraud and not the role model he is supposed to be.\n\nThose who make their living in baseball just shrugged.\n\n\u201cI cannot understand what the commotion is,\u201d said the Fox baseball broadcaster Tim McCarver, a former major league catcher, as he took stock of the uproar.\n\n\u201cWhy question that?\u201d he said of Jeter\u2019s actions.", + " \u201cI can\u2019t believe anyone would say that\u2019s cheating.\u201d\n\nMinnesota Twins Manager Ron Gardenhire, whose team has lost repeatedly to Jeter\u2019s Yankees in the postseason, agreed.\n\n\u201cYou have to be an actor in this game, you have to be,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s unfortunate, but it\u2019s part of the game. Jeter, you could see him staring over there in the video, sly as a cat. It\u2019s just the way it is. Call it what you want to call it, it happens. It\u2019s happened forever.\u201d\n\nThe play in question occurred in the top of the seventh, with one out and the Yankees trailing,", + " Tampa Bay, 2-1, with first place on the line in the American League East.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThe first pitch from Chad Qualls came in on Jeter\u2019s hands \u2014 where he often does get hit \u2014 and smacked the knob of his bat as he spun away. He tossed his bat, clutched his elbow and hopped toward the Yankees\u2019 dugout.\n\nPhoto\n\nHaving been awarded first base by the plate umpire, Lance Barksdale, Jeter continued to pretend he was in discomfort. Manager Joe Girardi raced out, as did the Yankees trainer, Gene Monahan, who examined Jeter\u2019s arm.\n\n\u201cGeno acted more than I did,", + " I guess,\u201d Jeter said afterward.\n\nSome of those who criticized Jeter on blog posts pointed to the elaborate way he feigned being hurt, saying his actions crossed over into outright dishonesty. They asked: Why not just jog to first right away?\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.", + " Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\nBut Jeter probably had good cause to lather it on. After the ball hit his bat (and apparently grazed his uniform), it bounced into fair territory. The Rays even threw the ball to first, so Jeter knew that if the umpires reversed the initial call, he might be called out.\n\nRays Manager Joe Maddon was barking, the umpires were getting ready to huddle, a game was on the line. An Emmy performance was called for, and Jeter does have acting experience. And sure enough,", + " after Jeter took first, Curtis Granderson homered to give the Yankees a temporary lead.\n\nMcCarver lauded Jeter\u2019s awareness of what was at stake \u2014 that the umpires might change their minds, that they might need some extra convincing.\n\n\u201cWhat upset some people, perhaps, is that he was so demonstrative when it hit the bat, but to think that quickly is remarkable,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can\u2019t say, \u2018No, the ball didn\u2019t hit me.\u2019 You\u2019re trying to get on base; you\u2019re trying to win the game.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s gamesmanship,\u201d Bob Costas, another veteran baseball commentator, said approvingly of Jeter\u2019s actions.", + " \u201cThis is completely different from steroids or stealing signs with a pair of binoculars.\u201d\n\nPhoto\n\nIn his decade and a half in baseball, Jeter has built up respect as the captain of the Yankees and the winner of five championships.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nHe is held in such high esteem that peers use him as a counterpoint to comment on others\u2019 transgressions. In chiding Jeter\u2019s teammate, Alex Rodriguez, for running across the pitcher\u2019s mound earlier this season, Oakland\u2019s Dallas Braden suggested that he \u201cwatch his captain a little more often.\u201d\n\nCurt Schilling slammed Rodriguez for his infamous slap play against the Boston Red Sox in the 2004 A.L.", + " Championship Series with a barb that cut to Rodriguez\u2019s insecurities and Jeter\u2019s aura: \u201cWould Derek Jeter ever do that?\u201d he asked. \u201cNo chance.\u201d\n\nRodriguez has a way of operating outside those unwritten rules. He was mocked for the slap play and called out by the umpires, a key moment in Boston\u2019s historic comeback in that series. In 2007, he was belittled when he yelled \u201cHa!\u201d as he ran past a Toronto infielder settling under a pop-up. The ball fell for a hit, and a brawl nearly ensued.\n\nHad it been Rodriguez who feigned being hit by a pitch,", + " he would have been called a clown \u2014 or worse. Jeter? No one is about to call him that. Instead, on Thursday, some in baseball were ready to smile along with him.\n\nHisanori Takahashi, the Japanese left-hander for the Mets, recalled a catcher for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp who would pretend he was hit by a pitch by pinching the back of his hand and leaving a red mark.\n\nAnd Keith Hernandez, the Mets broadcaster and former first baseman, said he would have \u201cno issue whatsoever\u201d if he had been manning first and someone reached base on a phantom hit-by-pitch.\n\nWould he say anything to the player?", + " \u201cI would call him Laurence Olivier and say, \u2018Good one,\u2019 \u201d Hernandez said. ", + " Jeter a cheater? Act strikes a nerve\n\nDerek Jeter \u2026 cheater?\n\nWell, there's a new one.\n\nJeter, the New York Yankees' Hall of Fame-bound shortstop, was honored last year as Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year. When the World Series champion Yankees visited the White House in April, President Barack Obama singled out Jeter and lauded him for \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 a career of superior sportsmanship.\n\nNow this.\n\nWednesday night at Tropicana Field, Jeter was awarded first base with his Oscar-worthy performance on a phantom hit-by-pitch sequence. He feigned injury,", + " flinging the bat away, doubling over and grimacing as trainer Gene Monaghan rushed to home plate. TV replays indicated the inside pitch by Tampa Bay's Chad Qualls actually struck the knob of Jeter's bat, not his arm, making a clearly audible whack. Umpires bought Jeter's act.\n\nIt immediately set up a two-run homer by Curtis Granderson, temporarily giving New York a one-run lead. But the Rays rallied to win 4-3 and reclaim first place in the American League East, diffusing much of the play's impact.\n\nStill, the controversy won't die.\n\nClearwater's Robert Reader,", + " a retired insurance man, felt his anger growing while watching Jeter fake the injury. Then he thought of something else.\n\n\"My 12-year-old grandson might be seeing this,\" Reader said Thursday. \"Is this really the proper behavior for a guy who is a role model for millions of kids?\"\n\n\"I'm just kind of sad,\" said Tampa's Mary Ann Newsome. \"My son plays ball. He looks up to a guy like Derek Jeter, who, I always thought, was the best one out there. I really don't want kids to think it's OK to do this.\"\n\nPublic debate met uncomfortably at the confluence of mainstream ethics and baseball tradition,", + " where practices such as stealing signs and doctoring balls are not only accepted, they are often celebrated.\n\n\"Baseball seems to be the only sport where cheating is looked upon with some degree of fondness,\" said Tampa lawyer Marquis Heilig, who writes a Tampa Bay Rays blog (TheRayArea.com) that is part of ESPN.com's \"Sweet Spot\" network. \"If you're looking for your kids to learn life lessons, I guess you should put them in golf, not baseball.\"\n\nPart of the game?\n\nIt's commonplace for professional golfers to call rules violations on themselves. At the PGA Championships, Dustin Johnson was penalized for grounding his club in a bunker after finishing the 18th hole in an apparent three-way tie.\n\nIt seemed harsh to casual golf fans,", + " but officials and the golf establishment had a simple justification: Rules are rules.\n\n\"That has been the gentleman's game for years and years,\" said Pop Cuesta, the baseball coach at Jefferson High School since 1973. \"That's not a good comparison. Baseball has its own way and what happened with Derek Jeter is part of the game.\"\n\nPart of the game. You hear that a lot from baseball people.\n\nCuesta remembers learning something from a cousin who played professional baseball. If the ball comes in on you, the cousin said, pinch yourself on the arm. Leave a red mark. If the umpire sees it, you might get awarded first base.\n\n\"That stuff has been going on a long time,\" Cuesta said.\n\nKing High School coach Jim Macaluso said it's OK to steal signs from the dugout by picking up the pattern of an opposing coach.", + " It's not OK for a baserunner to reach second, watch the catcher's signals, then tip off the batter on a curveball or inside pitch.\n\n\"You see pitches that just nick a puffed-out jersey, a guy turns into it, sells it, the umpire thinks he got hit,\" Macaluso said. \"It is part of the game. It's the batter's job to get to first base. That was Derek Jeter's job. You're not going to refuse to go to first base. It's the umpire's job to get the call right.\"\n\nThe baseball philosophy runs counter to a popular sportsmanship television commercial,", + " produced by the Foundation for a Better Life. In a tight high school basketball game, possession is awarded to the home team. But one player speaks up, saying he actually knocked the ball out of bounds.\n\n\"I touched it, Coach. It's their ball,\" the player says before apologizing to his disgusted teammates, realizing his honesty might decide the championship.\n\nThe coach, initially downcast, suddenly waves the player back: \"Good call.\"\n\nIdealistic? Probably. Unrealistic in the world of professional sports? Absolutely.\n\n\"Trust me, I'm not one to condone cheating, but there are different forms of cheating,\" said Jim Rome,", + " host of a nationally syndicated sports radio program. \"If you want to say to me, 'Well, I thought Jeter was different. \u2026 No, he's not. Not in that regard.\n\n\"Personally, I don't have a problem with this. And I don't think he let down our nation's youth. \u2026 Have you watched a lot of major league baseball? If you do, you know it happens all the time. How is this a news flash to anybody?\"\n\nDetractors and defenders\n\nThe news flash might be that America's sports fans, for the first time ever, are questioning the character of Jeter,", + " a Tampa resident who does considerable local charitable work with his Turn 2 Foundation.\n\n\"I've heard this talk, but look, it's a baseball game,\" University of South Florida baseball coach Lelo Prado said. \"Every parent should want their kid to be like Derek Jeter. He's one of the classiest people to ever play this game.\"\n\nThe Rays agree with that.\n\n\"I admire Derek a lot,\" Rays pitcher James Shields said. \"He stands for everything that's right with this game.\"\n\nRays manager Joe Maddon was incredulous at the call, particularly because the ball caromed back into fair territory.\n\n\"I thought it was going to be a line drive to right field,\" Maddon said.\n\nAt the same time,", + " Maddon added, \"If one of our guys had done it, I would've applauded, too. It was a great performance.\"\n\nJeter admitted the same afterward.\n\nHe said his dramatic reaction was due to the bat's \"vibration.\"\n\nPause.\n\n\"And acting.\"\n\n\"I've been hit before and they said it hit the bat,\" Jeter said. \"So it goes both ways. Fortunately for us, it paid off at the time. But surely, it would have been a bigger story had we won the game.\"\n\nMonday, on the first day of this week's Rays-Yankees three-game series, a reporter asked Jeter about his sterling reputation.\n\n\"It's not like I never make mistakes in my life,\" Jeter said.", + " \"I try to carry myself in the best manner possible.\"\n\nFair or not, a lot of people viewed Jeter in a different light Wednesday night.\n\n\"I know he does a lot of good for a lot of people,\" said Newsome, the mother of a Little League player. \"Maybe I'm na\u00efve. I guess I just expected better.\"\n\nReporter Joey Johnston can be reached at (813) 259-7353.\n\nShare this: ", + " The critics agree! It's the role of a lifetime! We laughed, we cried!\n\n(Quite a few cursed, too, but we'll get to that in a minute.)\n\nAnd now, the Oscar for the best performance by a.262 hitter in a starring role goes to...\n\nDerek Jeter, of course. It's a landslide for 2010. He was even better than Robert Duvall in Get Low.\n\nAs the debate still howls, let's first make sure due notice is given to the presence of mind and stage talent this required. A pitch caroms off the end of Jeter's bat Wednesday night with a crack loud enough to carry to the cheap seats at Tropicana Field and,", + " without rehearsal, Jeter immediately wins over the home-plate umpire by shaking his arm as if he had just been winged by John Wayne. Talk about your Night at the Improv.\n\n\"A heady play,\" Joe Maddon called it, and he manages for the other team, the Tampa Bay Rays.\n\nSo why is everyone throwing a hissy fit?\n\nBecause he's Jeter, and the captain is supposed to be Mr. Clean, above such unsavory behavior as trying to dupe the umpire? Lots of people just noticed his last name rhymes with cheater.\n\nBecause it's the Yankees, and since they already get all of the money and attention,", + " why should they get all of the calls?\n\nBecause it's right there on television, and if we couldn't watch the Brink's robbery in slow motion, at least we can watch this?\n\nProbably yes to all of the above. Here's a guess. Jarrod Dyson led off for the Kansas City Royals on Wednesday, the same as Jeter did for the Yankees. Had Dyson pulled this thespian act, would there have been a peep of moral outrage? Doubtful.\n\nBut the talk shows have boiled ever since Jeter turned into Leonardo DiCaprio in a Yankees cap. Some are charging a crime against the propriety of baseball (a sport where they steal signs with glee).\n\nSo what should we do,", + " make him give the base back, like it was Reggie Bush's Heisman Trophy?\n\nJeter is what makes this so fascinating. You wonder if that.262 average has him desperate to find new ways to get on base. You try to decide if there is something unsettling in watching a Bronx god indulge in human chicanery.\n\nPerhaps. But there is really no more reason for condemnation here than there is for the receiver who holds the football high in the air with two hands after trapping a pass, trying to convince the side judge a catch was made.\n\nOr the shortstop who holds up his glove, trying to win an out call on a tag he missed.\n\nOr the basketball forward who collapses like a souffl\u00e9,", + " hoping to draw a charge. Some notoriously flop, but nearly everyone at least... emphasizes.\n\nThe word is \"gamesmanship,\" and this is the way it is in professional sport, where not only glory but also livelihoods are at stake. More accurately, it is trying to make use of the power of suggestion. Feel free to throw this matter onto the pile of reasons for the use of more replay in baseball. The camera is immune to the power of suggestion.\n\nIf one could quibble with anything about Jeter's performance, it'd be his postgame script. He needed to be, ah, fuzzier in his memory of the event.\n\nThat way,", + " he would not have stated so plainly that home-plate umpire Lance Barksdale was the proud new owner of the Brooklyn Bridge. Of all the nouns that umpires are called, \"sucker\" is probably among their least favorite.\n\nHow many stars for the Jeter Show? Four, for creativity? None, for lousy sportsmanship? Some of you have asked what the children will think. Not a trivial concern, but there are so many other flaws in our games and those who play them that send terrible messages, this is way down the list. Does it really deserve so much noise?\n\nStill, it could have been worse.\n\nImagine the storm had Alex Rodriguez pulled this.\n" + ], + "length": 3616, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 3, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A Pennsylvania man is behind bars after allegedly telling state police he'd had sex with an underage girl. What's unusual: He told them while applying for a job as a state trooper, the AP reports via the Patriot-News. Police say Joseph White, 29, made the admission during a polygraph pretest at the Meadville state police barracks on Jan. 15. He allegedly admitted to consensual sex and other sexual contact with the girl four years ago; she's now 19. Police say the victim later corroborated the incidents, which occurred in a field in South Shenango Township, the Meadville Tribune reports. White was arrested Thursday on multiple charges of unlawful sexual contact with a minor and corruption of minors, and jailed on $25,000 bond. \"Needless to say, he won't be getting an interview,\" quips the Patriot-News.\n", + "docs": [ + "The Pennsylvania State Police have a rigorous application process, which includes a polygraph pretest. Recently, a Crawford County man applying to become a state trooper apparently failed his polygraph so spectacularly, not only didn't he get the job, he ended up under arrest, instead.\n\nThe Associated Press reports that 29-year-old Joseph Adam White, of Hartstown, was at the Meadville barracks for his police cadet lie detector exam when he admitted having sex with an underage girl four years ago during the polygraph pretest.\n\nThe story doesn't detail how the subject came up. Only that White allegedly told the examiner that he had had consensual sex and other contact with the girl in 2011.", + " She is now 19.\n\nPolice tell AP they charged White on Thursday with four counts of unlawful sexual contact with a minor and 10 counts of corruption of minors after interviewing the woman and corroborating that information.\n\nNeedless to say, he won't be getting an interview. ", + " MEADVILLE, Pa. (AP) \u2014 Police say a Pennsylvania man applying to become a state trooper has been arrested after saying during a polygraph pretest that he had sex with an underage girl four years ago.\n\nState police say 29-year-old Joseph Adam White, of Hartstown, was at the Meadville barracks Jan. 15 for his police cadet lie detector exam. They say during the pretest, he told the examiner he had consensual sex and other contact with the girl in 2011. She is now 19.\n\nPolice say they charged White on Thursday with four counts of unlawful sexual contact with a minor and 10 counts of corruption of minors after interviewing the woman and corroborating that information.\n\nOnline court records don't list an attorney for White,", + " and he doesn't have a listed phone number.\n" + ], + "length": 371, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 4, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The grim details are taking shape in the wake of today's shooting at Kabul's airport. All nine victims were Americans\u2014eight US troops and one contractor\u2014who were training members of Afghanistan's fledgling air force. The shooter, an Afghan pilot, got into an argument with the trainers, left the room, then re-entered and forced the Americans to remove their weapons, reports ABC News. When they were disarmed, he shot them with a US-provided semi-automatic. He then apparently fatally shot himself. The Taliban immediately claimed responsibility and said it was yet another infiltrator attack. But that looks unlikely, notes AP, which talked to the pilot's brother. \"He was under economic pressures and recently he sold his house. He was not in a normal frame of mind because of these pressures,\" said the brother. \"He loved his people and his country. He had no link with Taliban or al-Qaeda.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "A veteran Afghan military pilot said to be distressed over his personal finances opened fire at Kabul airport after an argument Wednesday, killing eight U.S. troops and an American civilian contractor.\n\nAn Afghan soldier patrols outside a gateway to Kabul's airport following a shooting incident on Wednesday April 27, 2011, in Kabul, Afghanistan. An Afghan Army officer opened fire on foreign troops... (Associated Press)\n\nAn Afghan soldier patrols outside a gateway to Kabul's airport following a shooting incident on Wednesday April 27, 2011, in Kabul, Afghanistan. An Afghan Army officer opened fire on foreign troops... (Associated Press)\n\nAn Afghan soldier holds his rifle outside a gateway to Kabul's airport following a shooting incident on Wednesday,", + " April 27, 2011, in Kabul, Afghanistan. An Afghan Army officer opened fire on foreign... (Associated Press)\n\nAn Afghan soldier is seen through the barbed wires, standing guard on a roof of one of the gates to Kabul's airport following a shooting incident on Wednesday April 27, 2011, in Kabul, Afghanistan.... (Associated Press)\n\nAn Afghan soldier peeps out from a security window hole at a gateway to Kabul's airport following a shooting incident on Wednesday April 27, 2011, in Kabul, Afghanistan. An Afghan Army officer opened... (Associated Press)\n\nAfghan soldiers look out through the security hole of one of the gates at the airport after a firing incident in Kabul,", + " Afghanistan on Wednesday, April 27, 2011. An Afghan Army officer opened fire on... (Associated Press)\n\nAfghan soldiers stand guard outside an airport gate in Kabul, after a shooting incident in Kabul, Afghanistan on Wednesday, April 27, 2011. An Afghan Army officer opened fire on foreign troops Wednesday... (Associated Press)\n\nAfghan soldier patrols outside a gateway to Kabul's airport following a shooting incident on Wednesday April 27, 2011, in Kabul, Afghanistan. An Afghan Army officer opened fire on foreign troops Wednesday... (Associated Press)\n\nThose killed were trainers and advisers for the nascent Afghan air force.", + " The shooting was the deadliest attack by a member of the Afghan security forces, or an insurgent impersonating them, on coalition troops or Afghan soldiers or policemen. There have been seven such attacks so far this year.\n\nAlthough the individual circumstances may differ, the incidents of Afghans turning against their coalition partners seem to reflect growing anti-foreigner sentiment independent of the Taliban. Afghans are increasingly tired of the nearly decade-long war and think their lives have not improved despite billions of dollars in international aid.\n\nThe Taliban, who are currently staging their opening salvos of the spring fighting season, boasted that the gunman in Wednesday's airport attack was a militant impersonating an army officer.\n\nThis claim did not seem credible,", + " however.\n\nDefense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said the gunman was an officer who had served as a pilot in the Afghan military for the past 20 years. The gunman _ identified as Ahmad Gul, 48, of Tarakhail district in Kabul province _ died in an exchange of fire that followed his attack.\n\nThe gunman's brother insisted he was not a Taliban sympathizer.\n\n\"He was under economic pressures and recently he sold his house. He was not in a normal frame of mind because of these pressures,\" said the brother, Dr. Mohammad Hassan Sahibi. \"He was going through a very difficult period of time in his life.\"\n\n\"He served his country for years,\" Sahibi told Tolo,", + " a private television station in Kabul. \"He loved his people and his country. He had no link with Taliban or al-Qaida.\"\n\nSahibi said his brother was wounded four or five times during his military service _ once seriously when his helicopter crashed.\n\nThe shooting took place at 10:25 a.m. at Kabul's airport. The gunman opened fire at a meeting in an operations room at the Afghan Air Corps following an argument with foreigners, Afghan defense officials said.\n\nIt was unclear what the argument was about.\n\n\"Suddenly, in the middle of the meeting, shooting started,\" said Afghan Air Corps spokesman Col. Bahader, who uses only one name.", + " \"After the shooting started, we saw a number of Afghan army officers and soldiers running out of the building. Some were even throwing themselves out of the windows to get away.\"\n\nFive Afghan soldiers were injured. At least one Afghan soldier was shot _ in the wrist _ but most of the soldiers suffered broken bones and cuts, Bahader said.\n\nAfghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the shooting and offered his condolences to the relatives of the victims.\n\nLt. Gen. William Caldwell, who leads the NATO training mission, called the deaths of nine trainers a \"tragic loss.\"\n\nNATO officials said the Taliban are quick to take credit for any attack that results in the death of pro-government forces.", + " They say militants want to undermine trust between coalition and Afghan forces, who are increasingly partnered as the Afghans prepare to take the lead in securing the nation by the end of 2014.\n\nLast year, there were 10,400 partnered operations _ up from 530 in 2009, the coalition said.\n\nIncreased partnering has created bonds, but also friction among troops who have drastically different lifestyles, cultures and religion. Some coalition troops have expressed exasperation at their less professional Afghan partners. Increased nationalistic rhetoric uttered by the Afghan president also has fueled the rising anti-American sentiment among Afghans.\n\nOn April 4 in Faryab province of northwest Afghanistan,", + " a man wearing an Afghan border police uniform shot and killed two American military personnel. NATO intelligence officials said the shooter was upset over the recent burning of the Quran at a Florida church. The Quran burning, which Karzai denounced, also was the impetus for angry protesters to storm a U.N. compound in Masar-i-Sharif on April 1 and kill four Nepalese guards and three international U.N. staffers.\n\nIn February, an Afghan soldier who felt he had been personally offended by his German partners shot and killed three German soldiers and wounded six others in the northern province of Baghlan.\n\nIn January, an Afghan soldier killed an Italian soldier and wounded another in Badghis province.\n\nBefore the airport shooting,", + " the coalition had recorded 20 incidents since March 2009 where a member of the Afghan security forces or someone wearing a uniform used by them attacked coalition forces, killing a total of 36. It is not known how many of the 282,000 members of the Afghan security forces have been killed in these type of incidents.\n\nAccording to information compiled by NATO, half of the 20 incidents involved the impersonation of an Afghan policeman or soldier. The cause of the other 10 incidents were attributed to combat stress or unknown reasons.\n\nNATO said that so far, there is no solid evidence _ despite Taliban assertions _ that any insurgent has joined the Afghan security forces for the sole purpose of conducting attacks on coalition or Afghan forces.\n\nInvestigators currently are trying to understand why an Afghan soldier walked into a meeting of NATO trainers and Afghan troops at a base in eastern Laghman province on April 16 and detonated a vest of explosives.", + " The bombing killed six American troops, four Afghan soldiers and an interpreter.\n\nU.S. and French forces have trained 220 Afghan soldiers to spot possible Taliban infiltrators, disgruntled soldiers within the ranks and other conditions that could make the force vulnerable to attack. The plan is to have 445 soldiers trained in counterintelligence by the end of the year.\n\nMark Moyar, research director of the U.S.-based counterinsurgency consultancy Orbis Operations, said he did not think the recent incidents would affect partnering. Coalition commanders generally recognize that Afghan soldiers can interact with the population and collect information better than international troops, he said.\n\n\"These incidents are very small in number given the tens of thousands of foreign troops who are partnered with Afghan forces,\" he said.\n\nSeparately,", + " two other NATO service members were killed Wednesday _ one by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan and another in an insurgent attack in the east. So far this month, 45 foreign troops have died in Afghanistan _ at least 40 of them American. The coalition death toll in April of last year was 33.\n\n___\n\nAssociated Press Writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report. ", + " An Afghan Air Corps pilot, angered by an argument with nine American trainers at Kabul airport, pulled a gun on the Americans, disarmed them and methodically killed them, officials said today.\n\nThe shooter then apparently shot and killed himself.\n\nThe Afghan military said the gunman was a 20 year veteran of the Afghan Air Corps who had gotten in an argument with the American trainers during a meeting in a conference room at the Afghan Air Force headquarters.\n\nA U.S. official told ABC News they believe the pilot left the meeting after the argument, then returned and forced the Americans to remove their weapons before shooting them with a U.S. provided M9 semi-automatic weapon.\n\n\"After the shooting started,", + " we saw a number of Afghan army officers and soldiers running out of the building. Some were even throwing themselves out of the windows to get away,\" said Afghan Air Corps spokesman Col. Bahader.\n\nA quick reaction force arrived at the scene shortly after the shootings and found the shooter dead. Officials believe the gunman killed himself.\n\nThe dead included eight U.S military personnel and one American contractor. Five Afghan soldiers were also injured in the shooting, said Bahader.\n\nIt was the deadliest incident so far of an Afghan ally turning against his coalition partners, officials said. This is the seventh time this year that coalition soldiers or Afghan security forces have been killed by either members of the Afghan security force or insurgents impersonating them.\n\nThe Taliban claimed the shooter was an insurgent who impersonated an officer to gain access to the secure area.", + " Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said the gunman impersonated an officer and gained access to the facility with the help of others working there.\n\nThe Taliban have been known to take credit for attacks they are not connected to, and Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said the gunman worked \"for 20 years flying for the Afghan Air Force\" and was not an insurgent.\n\n\"An argument happened between him and the foreigners and we have to investigate that,\" Azimi said.\n\nAn Afghan pilot, who requested not to be named, said the gunman was 50-year-old Ahmad Gul from Tarakhail district of Kabul province.\n\nAfghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the violence and ordered his defense and security officials to investigate the cause of the recent incidents.\n\nOther Incidents:\n\nApril 18 - An insurgent kills two Afghan soldiers and an officer at the Afghan Defense Ministry.\n\nApril 16 - Six American troops,", + " four Afghan soldiers and an interpreter are killed when an Afghan soldier detonates an explosive vest at Forward Operating Base Gamberi in Laghman.\n\nApril 15 - A suicide bomber impersonating a policeman blows himself up inside the Kandahar police headquarters complex, killing the top law enforcement official in the southern province.\n\nApril 4 - Two American military personnel are shot and killed by a man wearing an Afghan border police uniform.\n\nFebruary - An Afghan solider shoots nine German soldiers, killing three and injuring six.\n\nJanuary - One Italian soldier is killed and another is wounded after an Afghan soldier opens fire on them.\n\nThe Associated Press contributed to this report.\n" + ], + "length": 2326, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 5, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A $134 million debt payment due Monday was the final straw for the business Richard Warren Sears started in 1886. Sears, an American institution for many years, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early Monday, CNN reports. The company, which also owns Kmart, says it plans to remain in business through the holiday season, keeping profitable stores open, along with online businesses, but it's not clear whether a viable company will be able to emerge from the bankruptcy process, reports the AP. The filing follow years of bad news for the company, which had been struggling with huge debts, falling sales, and major losses. Its share price has gone from a high of around $141 in early 2007 to less than 50 cents today. Sears, described by CNN as \"both the Walmart and Amazon of its time,\" was once America's largest retailer, but struggled along with many others as shopping habits changed. \"It\u2019s a sad day for American retail,\" Craig Johnson of the Customer Growth Partners retail consulting firm tells the New York Times. \"There are generations of people who grew up on Sears and now it\u2019s not relevant. When you are in the retail business, it\u2019s all about newness. But Sears stopped innovating.\" As part of the bankruptcy filing, Sears said it will be closing another 142 stores by the end of the year, on top of the 42 closures announced in August. Hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert, who promised years ago to bring back the glory days of Sears, has resigned as CEO but will remain as chairman.\n", + "docs": [ + "FILE- In this Aug. 26, 1948, file photo women's hats are pictured in a 1907 Sears Roebuck catalog from the shelves of the Chicago Public Library, in Chicago. Sears has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy... (Associated Press)\n\nNEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Sears has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, buckling under its massive debt load and staggering losses.\n\nSears once dominated the American retail landscape. But the big question is whether the shrunken version of itself can be viable or will it be forced to go out of business, closing the final chapter for an iconic name that originated more than a century ago.\n\nThe company,", + " which started out as a mail order catalog in the 1880s, has been on a slow march toward extinction as it lagged far behind its peers and has incurred massive losses over the years. The operator of Sears and Kmart stores joins a growing list of retailers that have filed for bankruptcy or liquidated in the last few years amid a fiercely competitive climate. Some like Payless ShoeSource have had success emerging from reorganization in bankruptcy court but plenty of others haven't, like Toys R Us and Bon-Ton Stores Inc. Both retailers were forced to shutter their operations this year soon after a Chapter 11 filing.\n\n\"This is a company that in the 1950s stood like a colossus over the American retail landscape,\" said Craig Johnson,", + " president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail consultancy. \"Hopefully, a smaller new Sears will be healthier.\"\n\nGiven its sheer size, Sears' bankruptcy filing will have wide ripple effects on everything from already ailing landlords to its tens of thousands of workers.\n\nThe filing, which is happening ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season, comes after rescue efforts engineered by its CEO and chairman Eddie Lampert have kept it outside of bankruptcy court \u2014 until now. Lampert, the largest shareholder, has been loaning out his own money for years and has put together deals to prop up the company, which in turn has benefited his own ESL hedge fund.\n\nLast year,", + " Sears sold its famous Craftsman brand to Stanley Black & Decker Inc., following its earlier moves to spin off pieces of its Sears Hometown and Outlet division and Lands' End.\n\nIn recent weeks, Lampert has been pushing for a debt restructuring and offering to buy some of Sears' key assets like Kenmore through his hedge fund as a $134 million debt repayment comes due on Monday. Lampert personally owns 31 percent of the company's shares. His hedge fund has an 18.5 percent stake, according to FactSet.\n\n\"It is all well and good to undertake financial engineering, but the company is in the business of retailing and without a clear retail plan,", + " the firm simply has no reason to exist,\" said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, in a recent analyst note.\n\nSears' stock has fallen from about $6 over the past year to below the minimum $1 level that Nasdaq stocks are required to trade in order to remain on the stock index. In April 2007, shares were trading at around $141. The company, which once had 350,000 workers, has seen its workforce shrink to fewer than 90,000 people as of earlier this year.\n\nThe company has racked up $6.26 billion in losses, excluding one-time events, since its last annual profit in 2010,", + " according to Ken Perkins, who heads the research firm Retail Metrics LLC. It's had 11 years of straight annual drops in revenue. In its last fiscal year, it generated $16.7 billion in sales, down from more than $50 billion in 2008.\n\nAs of May, it had fewer than 900 stores, down from about 1,000 at the end of last year. The number of stores peaked in 2012 at 4,000, including its Sears Canada division that was later spun off.\n\nIn a March 2017 government filing, Sears said there was \"substantial doubt\" it would be able to keep its doors open \u2014 but insisted its turnaround efforts would mitigate that risk.\n\nBut its losses continued into this year.", + " In the fiscal second quarter ended Aug. 4, net losses in the quarter swelled to $508 million, or $4.68 per share, compared with a loss of $250 million, or $2.33 cents per share in the same quarter a year ago.\n\nSuch financial woes contrast with the promise that Lampert made when he combined Sears and Kmart in 2005, two years after he helped bring Kmart out of bankruptcy. Back then, it operated 2,200 stores in total.\n\nLampert pledged to return Sears to greatness by leveraging its best-known brands and its vast holdings of land, and more recently planned to entice customers with a loyalty program.", + " But it struggled to get more people through the doors or to shop online.\n\nJennifer Roberts, 36 of Dayton, Ohio, had been a long-time fan of Sears and has fond memories of shopping there for clothes as a child. But in recent years, she's been disappointed by the lack of customer service and outdated stores.\n\n\"My mom had always bought her appliances from Sears. That's where my dad got his tools,\" she said. \"But they don't care about their customers anymore.\"\n\nShe said a refrigerator her mother bought at Sears broke after two years and it still hasn't been fixed for almost a month with no help from the retailer.\n\n\"If they don't value a customer,", + " then they don't need my money,\" said Roberts, who voiced her complaints on Sears' Facebook page.\n\nSales at the company's established locations tumbled nearly 4 percent during its fiscal second quarter. Still, that was an improvement from the same period a year ago when it fell 11.5 percent. Total revenue dropped 30 percent in the most recent quarter, hurt by continued store closings.\n\nThe bleak figures are an outlier to chains like Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Macy's, which have been enjoying stronger sales as they benefit from a robust economy and efforts to make the shopping experience more inviting by investing heavily on remodeling and de-cluttering their stores.\n\nFor decades,", + " Sears was king of the American shopping landscape. Sears, Roebuck and Co.'s iconic catalog featured items from bicycles to sewing machines to houses, and could generate excitement throughout a household when it arrived. The company began opening retail locations in 1925 and expanded swiftly in suburban malls from the 1950s to 1970s. But the onset of discounters like Walmart created challenges for Sears that have only grown. Sears faced even more competition from online sellers and appliance retailers like Lowe's and Home Depot. Its stores became an albatross.\n\nStore shelves have been left bare as many vendors have demanded more stringent payment terms, says Mark Cohen,", + " a professor of retailing at Columbia University and a former Sears executive.\n\nMeanwhile, Sears workers are nervous about what kind of severance they'll receive if their store closes.\n\nJohn Germann, 46, works full-time and makes $14 per hour as the lead worker unloading merchandise from trucks at the Chicago Ridge, Illinois store, which has been drastically reducing its staff since he started nine years ago. Germann now has only 11 people on his team, compared with about 30 a few years ago.\n\n\"We're doing the job of two to three people. It's not safe,\" he said. \"We're lifting treadmills and refrigerators.\"\n\nReal estate experts believe that Sears'", + " move to further shutter stores as part of its restructuring would be a mixed blessing for landlords. For the healthy malls, landlords would welcome a Sears departure, allowing them to cut up the space and fill it with several smaller successful stores that combined would bring in higher revenue.\n\nBut for the struggling malls, Cohen says it will be a \"death knell\" since it will be harder for them to bring in new tenants. Many of these malls already have had difficulty filling in the void from J.C. Penney and Macy's closures.\n\nSaunders of GlobalData Retail spared no criticism of Sears in his analyst note, listing failing after failing of the company.\n\n\"The problem in Sears case is that it is a poor retailer,\" he wrote.", + " \"Put bluntly, it has failed on every facet of retailing from assortment to service to merchandise to basic shop keeping standards. Under benign conditions, this would be problematic enough but in today's hyper-competitive retail environment it is a recipe for failure on a grand scale.\" ", + " New York (CNN Business) Sears, the once-dominant retail chain that changed how Americans shopped and lived, has filed for bankruptcy.\n\nSears Holdings ( SHLD ), the parent company of Sears and Kmart, is among dozens of prominent retailers to declare bankruptcy in the era of Amazon ( AMZN ).\n\nThe filing in federal bankruptcy court in New York came in the early hours of Monday morning. The company issued a statement saying it intends to stay in business, keeping open stores that are profitable, along with the Sears and Kmart websites.\n\nAs of the filing, about 700 stores remained open and the company employed 68,000 workers.", + " That's down from 1,000 stores with 89,000 employees that it had as recently as February.\n\nBut Sears said that it's looking for a buyer for a large number of its remaining stores, and it will close at least 142 stores near the end of this year. That's in addition to the 46 store closings already planned for next month. The company did not rule out additional store closings as the bankruptcy process proceeds.\n\nEddie Lampert, the company's chairman and largest shareholder, gave up the title of CEO. The company will now be run by three of the company's top executives.\n\nFor years,", + " Lampert has claimed the company was making progress to end its years of ongoing losses.\n\n\"While we have made progress, the plan has yet to deliver the results we have desired,\" Lampert said in a statement Monday. He said the bankruptcy process would allow the company to shed debt and costs and \"become a profitable and more competitive retailer.\"\n\nAlthough retailers typically file for bankruptcy with the intention of staying in business, many end up going bust after filing. In recent years, Toys \"R\" Us RadioShack and Sports Authority have followed that path to the graveyard.\n\nThe upcoming holiday season will be a particular challenge for Sears. It will need to do better than last year.", + " While other traditional retailers enjoyed strong holiday sales, Sears and Kmart both reported sharp drops.\n\nSears' problems go back decades\n\nSears fell out of shoppers' favor over the past decades as online stores and big box rivals, including Walmart ( WMT ) and Home Depot ( HD ), beat Sears on price and convenience.\n\nSears store in Jackson, Mississippi, 1949.\n\nBut many of Sears' problems were self-inflicted. Its management tried to compete by closing stores and cutting costs. It slashed spending on advertising and it failed to invest in the upkeep and modernization of its outlets. Sears and Kmart stores grew barren and rundown.\n\n,", + " and the company's cash reserves disappeared. Sears sold many of its most valuable assets, including its massive real estate footprint, to raise the cash it needed to survive. According to the bankruptcy filing, the company was losing about $125,000 a month. Sales declined. Losses piled up in the billions of dollars. Debt mounted, and the company's cash reserves disappeared. Sears sold many of its most valuable assets, including its massive real estate footprint, to raise the cash it needed to survive. According to the bankruptcy filing, the company was losing about $125,000 a month.\n\nIt ditched Lands End in 2014. Three years later,", + " Sears dumped the Craftsman brand, which it had sold exclusively. The company has been looking for a buyer for its Kenmore brand of appliances for years. The only acquirer it could find was Lampert, who offered $400 million for Kenmore through his hedge fund. The Sears board never accepted the offer.\n\nBy last month, Sears' market value had fallen below $100 million, less than quarter of the value of Kenmore itself.\n\nThe retailer's problems have mounted in recent years. Sears warned investors last year there was \" substantial doubt \" it would be able to stay in business. It has lost $11.7 billion since 2010,", + " its last profitable year. Sales have plunged 60% since then. The company shuttered more than 2,800 stores over the past 13 years.\n\nWith the writing on the wall that a bankruptcy was imminent, suppliers demanded Sears pay cash up front for the items in its stores, putting it at an even greater competitive disadvantage with other retailers.\n\nWhirlpool, ( WHR ) which had started in business more than a century ago selling its appliances at Sears, pulled its various brands out of Sears and Kmart stores last year. Once the dominant appliance retailer in the country, Sears accounted for only 3% of Whirlpool's sales worldwide in 2017.\n\nIn September,", + " Lampert proposed that Sears restructure its finances without filing bankruptcy. But he warned that the company was running out of cash. The company's stock quickly fell below $1 a share for the first time in its history.\n\nCreditors opted instead to try their hand in bankruptcy court. Without a deal and with $134 million in debt payments due Monday, Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.\n\nThe brand that shaped a nation\n\nSears was once the nation's largest retailer and its largest employer. In its heyday, it was both the Walmart and Amazon of its time.\n\nBeauty department of a sears store, 1955.\n\nFormed in 1886 by railroad station agent Richard Sears,", + " the company started as a watch business in North Redwood, Minnesota. Sears moved to Chicago in 1887, and he hired watchmaker Alvah Roebuck as his partner. The first Sears Roebuck catalog, which sold watches and jewelry, was printed in 1896.\n\nThe Sears catalog was the way many Americans first started to buy mass-produced goods. That was an enormous shift for people who lived on farms and in small towns and made many of the goods they needed on their own, including clothes and furniture.\n\nSears' stores helped reshape America, drawing shoppers away from the traditional Main Street merchants. Sears brought people into malls,", + " contributing to the suburbanization of America in the post-World War II era. Its Kenmore appliances introduced many American homes to labor-saving devices that changed family dynamics. Its Craftsman tools and their lifetime guarantees were a mainstay of middle-class America.\n\nBut long before the rise of Amazon and online shopping, Sears was struggling to keep up with Americans' changing shopping habits. Big box retailers such as Walmart beat it on both price and merchandise selection.\n\nIn 1999, it was booted out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, where it had been for 75 years. Big box rival Home Depot took its place.\n\nSears and Kmart merged to form Sears Holdings in 2005.", + " At the time, they had 3,500 US stores between them. They have fewer than 900 today.\n\nIn July, Sears closed its last store in Chicago, once its hometown. In August, the company announced another 46 store closings. The company had 89,000 employees as of February. That's down from 317,000 US employees in early 2006, soon after the merger.\n" + ], + "length": 3178, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 6, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Utah's Orrin Hatch, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, says he won't be running for re-election in 2018. The 83-year-old announced the move on Twitter. \u201cEvery good fighter knows when to hang up the gloves,\" he says in a video. \"And for me, that time is soon approaching. That\u2019s why after much prayer and discussion with family and friends, I\u2019ve decided to retire at the end of this term.\" The move paves the way for Mitt Romney, a frequent critic of President Trump, to run for his seat. Details and developments: Unpopular at home: Hatch has been in the Senate for four decades and currently chairs the powerful Finance Committee, a post that allowed him to play a big role in the GOP's recent tax overhaul. But his clout doesn't seem to matter in Utah, where polls show that about 75% of residents wanted him to retire, reports the Salt Lake Tribune. (The newspaper itself issued a scathing editorial calling for him to do just that.) Trump unhappy: The president is \"very sad\" upon hearing the news, says spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The New York Times reports that the president, pleased with Hatch's work on the tax plan, had been encouraging him to run again. If nothing else, that would keep Romney\u2014who has been vocal in his criticism of Trump\u2014out of the Senate. (Still, Trump reportedly considered Romney for secretary of state.)\n", + "docs": [ + "1 of 44 View Caption\n\n(Tribune file photo) Sen. Orrin Hatch with Bob Dole in 1988. (Tribune file photo) Sen. Orrin Hatch in 1990. October 30, 1982 Sen. Orring Hatch & Pres. Ronald Reagan The Salt Lake Tribune Library (Tribune file photo) Muhammad Ali and Sen Orrin Hatch in 1988. (Trent Nelson | Tribune file photo) Senators Bob Bennett and Orrin Hatch in 1998. (Tribune file photo) Ronald Reagan and Orrin Hatch in 1976. (Tribune file photo)", + " Orrin Hatch in 1976. (Tribune File Photo) Orrin Hatch, Nov. 20, 1977. (Steve Griffin | Tribune file photo) US senator Orrin Hatch and challenger Pete Ashdown shake hands following a televised d... (Photo Courtesy of U.S. Senate Historical Office) Sen Orrin Hatch and his wife Elaine pose for a photo at a reception for new... (Tribune file photo) Sen. Orrin Hatch and Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1982. Republican presidential hopeful Orrin Hatch, foreground, smiles as his wife, Elaine, shown seated next to Hatch, and others f... (Andr\u008e Chung | special to The Salt Lake Tribune)", + " Senator Orrin Hatch is the senior senator from Utah, Chairman of the Senat... Senate Judiciary Committee member, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, uses a cellphone camera as Chief Justice nominee John Roberts te... Senator Orrin Hatch, left talks to Forest Service Chief Stan Tixier about trying to get the Snowbasin landswap reversed, duri... Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, left, greets Attorney General Janet Reno on Capitol Hill Wednes... (Chris Detrick | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch speaks during a Memorial Day celebration at Hogan Park in Woo... (Andr\u008e Chung | special to The Salt Lake Tribune)", + " Followed by his security staff Sen. Hatch makes his way to a luncheon in W... (Andr\u008e Chung | special to The Salt Lake Tribune) Flanked by his security staff on the left and Matt Whitlock, his communica... Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Senator Orrin Hatch speaks to the Utah delegation at a breakfast honoring him (Omelets... (Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune) Senator Orrin Hatch is interviewed on a local Salt Lake TV news program at the G... President Bush waves to the crowd during a fundraiser for the reelection campaign of Sen Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, right,", + " on Thurs... President Reagan appears at a fundraiser for Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, Wednesday night in Washington. Reagan urged Utah's... (Photo Courtesy of U.S. Senate Historical Office) Vice President Normal Rockefeller administers the oath of office to Sen. Or... (Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sen. Orrin Hatch walks across the stage during a debate against Scott Howell at the... (Chris Detrick | Tribune file photo) Senator Orrin Hatch, left, talks with Dave Hansen back stage before Hatch's speech be... (Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) U. S.", + " Senator Orrin Hatch was given an honorary degree during the undergraduate cere... (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) U.S. President Donald Trump is joined by Senator Orrin Hatch at the Utah Cap... (Tribune file photo) Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, talks to reporters during a press conference in Washington Thursday. Hatch bri... Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, right, talks to Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt on Capitol Hill Tuesday April 29, 1997 prior to their testif... Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky gathers other Republican senators to call for an amendment to the Consti... Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan,", + " President Barack Obama's choice to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, meets with... Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, talks about the subpoena issued to President Clinton du... (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a member and former Chairman of the Senate... Judge Samuel Alito, right, meets with Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Pre... U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah,", + " talks to the media as Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., left, watches during a break in the Senate imp... U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Ut., left, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, speaks during a news conference with U.S. Sen... (Al Hartmann | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Senator Orrin Hatch with Utah Governor Gary Herbert, left, speaks at the opening... Bill co-sponsors Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., listen as President Barack Obama speaks before s... (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)", + " U.S. President Donald Trump takes the stage at the Utah Capitol on Monday, De... (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, cent... Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., left, shares a laugh with Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah., second from right, during a news confere... (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) U.S. President Donald Trump, surrounded by Utah representatives looks at Sen.... Orrin Hatch, U.S. Senator from Utah, speaks at a news conference on the State Children's Health Insurance Program,", + " known as S... ", + " Tweet with a location\n\nYou can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more\n" + ], + "length": 1278, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 7, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Westboro Baptist Church has lost two of its own. Megan Phelps-Roper, a prominent member of the group who found herself in the news more than once, has left the church her grandfather founded. Younger sister Grace went with her. Phelps-Roper, credited with getting the WBC onto social media, had been silent on Twitter for months before posting a link to an open letter yesterday. In the letter, she admits: \"We know that we've done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn't the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren't so, and regret that hurt.\" She promises to \"try to find a better way to live from here on.\" She also says they still love their family (the girls have nine more siblings), but have been cut off from them as \"betrayers.\" Jeff Chu offers some background on the situation on Medium.com: Megan, 27, left the church in November. Her doubts started after a conversation she had with an Israeli web developer about her understanding of how the Bible justifies what appears on one of Westboro's signs: \"Death Penalty for Fags.\" That's when she first realized maybe God doesn't actually want gay people put to death. She and her sister are staying with cousin Libby Phelps Alvarez, who left Westboro in 2009, and they're trying new things, like sushi. As for Westboro, a spokesperson tells the Kansas City Star that if the women don't change their ways, \"they're going to hell.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "Two granddaughters of Westboro Baptist Church firebrand Fred Phelps have split with the Topeka-based congregation, indicating their views have evolved and they now regret the pain they have caused others.\n\nOne of them, 27-year-old Megan Phelps-Roper, had been a highly visible member of the church who spoke to media outlets and spread its message via Twitter.\n\nShe and a younger sister, Grace Phelps-Roper, in November left the congregation known for its anti-gay stance and for picketing funerals of fallen soldiers and others.\n\n\u0093We ripped the Band-Aid off,\u0094 Megan wrote in a text Wednesday to The Star.\n\nA statement signed by both sisters and posted on social media Wednesday said the two were trying to figure out their future.\n\n\u0093We know that we\u0092ve done and said things that hurt people,", + "\u0094 the statement said. \u0093Inflicting pain on others wasn\u0092t the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren\u0092t so and regret that hurt.\u0094\n\nSteve Drain, a spokesman for the church, said in an interview Wednesday that the sisters had rejected the Lord.\n\n\u0093We can\u0092t control whether or not somebody decides, when they grow up, that they don\u0092t want to be here,\u0094 Drain said. \u0093Those two girls were kind of straddling the idea that they wanted to be of the world but that they would also miss their family, the only thing they ever knew.", + " If they continue with the position that they have, those two girls, yeah, they\u0092re going to hell.\u0094\n\nMegan and Grace are among 11 children of Brent and Shirley Roper, who is the daughter of Westboro pastor Fred Phelps.\n\nLibby Phelps Alvarez, who left Westboro in 2009 after becoming disenchanted with some of its radical beliefs, told The Star on Wednesday that Megan and Grace had been staying at the Lawrence home she shares with her husband.\n\nMegan had emerged in recent years as the face of the church during a time when the group\u0092s notoriety seemed to swell. She handled many of the various media requests that came pouring in,", + " and was active in social media. She also made regular appearances on \u0093Afentra\u0092s Big Fat Morning Buzz,\u0094 one of Kansas City\u0092s most popular morning radio shows.\n\nIn interviews with The Star in 2011, she spoke excitedly about the work she was doing as part of the church. She had begun handling some of the duties once carried out by her mother, Shirley Phelps-Roper, and called her membership in the group a \u0093great blessing and privilege.\u0094\n\nAfter her defection became known on Wednesday, she told The Star:\n\n\u0093We\u0092ve really appreciated the supportive words people have shared with us today.", + " The environment we grew up in was very \u0091us vs. them\u0092; it\u0092s been nice to see that the \u0091them\u0092 have been overwhelmingly kind \u0097 as we\u0092d kind of hoped and suspected.\u0094\n\nAlvarez said Wednesday that she invited Megan and Grace to live with her after Megan contacted her about the possibility of leaving the church last fall.\n\nSince then, she said, she has attempted to help comfort her two cousins while also preparing both for the practical and emotional changes they\u0092ll now face.\n\n\u0093It took me a couple years,\u0094 said Alvarez. \u0093I still think about my parents, and it\u0092s still hard that I can\u0092t spend time with them.", + " It\u0092ll be a rough road for a while, but I\u0092m here to talk with them whenever they need it.\u0094\n\nThe Westboro church has become notorious over the years for picketing funerals and other events with placards that say \u0093God hates America\u0094 because of its tolerance of homosexuality.\n\nThe group threatened to picket the funeral of the murdered principal of the Newtown, Conn., massacre, but it was foiled by counter protesters.\n\nIn 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the church was protected by the First Amendment from a lawsuit stemming from the picketing of a soldier\u0092s funeral.\n\nIn 2010,", + " Megan won a court challenge when a judge overturned Nebraska\u0092s flag-desecration law. She was the plaintiff in a lawsuit saying the law infringed on the church\u0092s right to free speech in trampling the flag during its protests.\n\nBut the church\u0092s actions have stirred deep public antipathy. As of Wednesday, nearly 335,000 people had signed an online petition to the White House to have the church declared a hate group.\n\nIn an article posted online Wednesday, reporter Jeff Chu wrote that Megan told him her views began to change when she had a discussion with a Jewish man who quoted Jesus to her.\n\nShe started to question church placards that said \u0093Death penalty for fags\u0094 and \u0093Fags can\u0092t repent.", + "\u0094 Megan told Chu she began to feel that didn\u0092t make sense.\n\nDrain said Wednesday that Megan was calling God a liar.\n\nIn their joint statement, Megan and Grace said they continue to dearly love their family.\n\n\u0093They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned,\u0094 the statement said. \u0093We will never not love them.\u0094 ", + " I first met Megan in the summer of 2011, when I went to Topeka to spend a few days with the Westboro folks for my book project. During that visit, we talked about faith, we talked about church, we talked about marriage (and Megan\u2019s feeling that, given the prospects, it would require no small amount of divine intervention in her case), and we talked about Harry Potter (for the record, she\u2019s a fan). She seemed so sure in her beliefs, that I could not have imagined that some fifteen months later, we\u2019d be having a conversation in which she tearfully told me that she was no longer with her family or with the church.\n\nMostly,", + " the tears have subsided\u2014\u201cin public, anyway,\u201d she says one afternoon, as we sit in a Tribeca caf\u00e9. \u201cI still cry a lot.\u201d Forget what you know of the church. Just imagine what it is like to walk away from everything you have ever known. Consider how traumatic it would be to know that your family is never supposed to speak to you again. Think of how hard it would be to have a fortress of faith built around you, and to have to dismantle it yourself, brick by brick, examining each one and deciding whether there\u2019s something worth keeping or whether it\u2019s not as solid as you thought it was.\n\nAs we talk,", + " Megan repeatedly emphasizes how much she loves those she has left behind. \u201cI don\u2019t want to hurt them,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t want to hurt them.\u201d\n\nHer departure has hurt them already\u2014she knew it would\u2014yet there was no way she could stay. \u201cMy doubts started with a conversation I had with David Abitbol,\u201d she says. Megan met David, an Israeli web developer who\u2019s part of the team behind the blog Jewlicious, on Twitter. \u201cI would ask him questions about Judaism, and he would ask me questions about church doctrine. One day, he asked a specific question about one of our signs\u2014\u2018Death Penalty for Fags\u2019\u2014and I was arguing for the church\u2019s position,", + " that it was a Levitical punishment and as completely appropriate now as it was then. He said, \u2018But Jesus said\u2019\u2014and I thought it was funny he was quoting Jesus\u2014\u2018Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.\u2019 And then he connected it to another member of the church who had done something that, according to the Old Testament, was also punishable by death. I realized that if the death penalty was instituted for any sin, you completely cut off the opportunity to repent. And that\u2019s what Jesus was talking about.\u201d\n\nTo some, this story might seem simple\u2014even overly so. But we all have moments of epiphany,", + " when things that are plate-glass clear to others but opaque to us suddenly become apparent. This was, for Megan, one of those moments, and this window led to another and another and another. Over the subsequent weeks and months, \u201cI tried to put it aside. I decided I wasn\u2019t going to hold that sign, \u2018Death Penalty for Fags.\u2019\u201d (She had, for the most part, preferred the gentler, much less offensive \u201cMourn for Your Sins\u201d or \u201cGod Hates Your Idols\u201d anyway.)\n\nWhat \u201cseemed like a small thing at the time,\u201d she says, snowballed.", + " She started to question another Westboro sign, \u201cFags can\u2019t repent.\u201d \u201cIt seemed misleading and dishonest. Anybody can repent if God gives them repentance, according to the church. But this one thing\u2014it gives the impression that homosexuality is an unforgivable sin,\u201d she says. \u201cIt didn\u2019t make sense. It seemed a wrong message for us to be sending. It\u2019s like saying, \u2018You\u2019re doomed! Bye!\u2019 and gives no hope for salvation.\u201d\n\nShe kept trying to conquer the doubts. Westboro teaches that one cannot trust his or her feelings. They\u2019re unreliable. Human nature \u201cis inherently sinful and inherently completely sinful,\u201d Megan explains.", + " \u201cAll that\u2019s trustworthy is the Bible. And if you have a feeling or a thought that\u2019s against the church\u2019s interpretations of the Bible, then it\u2019s a feeling or a thought against God himself.\u201d\n\nThis, of course, assumes that the church\u2019s teachings and God\u2019s feelings are one and the same. And this, of course, assumes that the church\u2019s interpretation of the Bible is infallible, that this much-debated document handed down over the centuries has, in 2013, been processed and understood correctly only by a small band of believers in Topeka. \u201cNow?\u201d Megan says. \u201cThat sounds crazy to me.\u201d\n\nIn December,", + " she went to a public library in Lawrence, Kansas. She was looking through books on philosophy and religion, and it struck her that people had devoted their entire lives to studying these questions of how to live and what is right and wrong. \u201cThe idea that only WBC had the right answer seemed crazy,\u201d she says. \u201cIt just seemed impossible.\u201d ", + " \u201cThere's no fresh start in today's world. Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what you did. Everything we do is collated and quantified. Everything sticks.\u201d\n\nDon\u2019t act surprised that I\u2019m quoting Batman. At WBC, reciting lines from pop culture is par for the course. And why not? The sentiments they express are readily identifiable by the masses \u2013 and shifting their meaning is as easy as giving them new context. So put Selina Kyle\u2019s words in a different framework:\n\nIn a city in a state in the center of a country lives a group of people who believe they are the center of the universe;", + " they know Right and Wrong, and they are Right. They work hard and go to school and get married and have kids who they take to church and teach that continually protesting the lives, deaths, and daily activities of The World is the only genuine statement of compassion that a God-loving human can sincerely make. As parents, they are attentive and engaged, and the children learn their lessons well.\n\nThis is my framework.\n\nUntil very recently, this is what I lived, breathed, studied, believed, preached \u2013 loudly, daily, and for nearly 27 years.\n\nI never thought it would change. I never wanted it to.\n\nThen suddenly: it did.\n\nAnd I left.\n\nWhere do you go from there?\n\nI don't know,", + " exactly. My sister Grace is with me, though. We\u2019re trying to figure it out together.\n\nThere are some things we do know.\n\nWe know that we\u2019ve done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn\u2019t the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren\u2019t so, and regret that hurt.\n\nWe know that we dearly love our family. They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned. We will never not love them.\n\nWe know that we can\u2019t undo our whole lives. We can\u2019t even say we\u2019d want to if we could;", + " we are who we are because of all the experiences that brought us to this point. What we can do is try to find a better way to live from here on. That\u2019s our focus.\n\nUp until now, our names have been synonymous with \u201cGod Hates Fags.\u201d Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what we did. We hope Ms. Kyle was right about the other part, too, though \u2013 that everything sticks \u2013 and that the changes we make in our lives will speak for themselves.\n\nMegan and Grace ", + " \u201cThere\u2019s no fresh start in today\u2019s world. Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what you did. Everything we do is collated and quantified. Everything sticks.\u201d\n\nDon\u2019t act surprised that I\u2019m quoting Batman. At WBC, reciting lines from pop culture is par for the course. And why not? The sentiments they express are readily identifiable by the masses \u2013 and shifting their meaning is as easy as giving them new context. So put Selina Kyle\u2019s words in a different framework:\n\nIn a city in a state in the center of a country lives a group of people who believe they are the center of the universe;", + " they know Right and Wrong, and they are Right. They work hard and go to school and get married and have kids who they take to church and teach that continually protesting the lives, deaths, and daily activities of The World is the only genuine statement of compassion that a God-loving human can sincerely make. As parents, they are attentive and engaged, and the children learn their lessons well.\n\nThis is my framework.\n\nUntil very recently, this is what I lived, breathed, studied, believed, preached \u2013 loudly, daily, and for nearly 27 years.\n\nI never thought it would change. I never wanted it to.\n\nThen suddenly: it did.\n\nAnd I left.\n" + ], + "length": 2915, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 8, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 US employers ramped up hiring last month and more Americans began looking for work, a sign that President Trump has inherited a robust job market, reports AP. The Labor Department says employers added 227,000 jobs in January, the most since September and higher than last year's average monthly gain of 187,000. The unemployment rate ticked up to a low 4.8% last month from 4.7% in December. Yet the rate rose for a mostly good reason: More Americans started looking for work. The percentage of adults working or looking for jobs increased to its highest level since September. Yet some of the economy's weak spots remain: Average hourly wages barely increased last month. And the number of people working part-time but who would prefer full-time work rose. A blog post at the Wall Street Journal notes that the retail sector added the most new jobs in January (46,000), which is unusual in that it's a post-holiday month. \"Who said the mall is dead?\"\n", + "docs": [ + "Small U.S. employers have complained that it\u2019s difficult to find the right workers. Now, with unemployment near its lowest in nine years, they are doing more of the difficult work of training them.\n\nNearly two-thirds of small businesses are spending more time training workers than they were a year ago, according to a survey by The Wall Street Journal and Vistage International, a San Diego executive-advisory group.\n\nThat could give more Americans access to skilled manufacturing jobs as companies invest the time and resources to bring in less-experienced workers.\n\n\u201cThe biggest challenge confronting firms is their need to expand hiring in an already-tight labor market,\u201d said Richard Curtin,", + " a University of Michigan economist who oversaw the survey.\n\nRead Full Article\n" + ], + "length": 148, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 9, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The white supremacist who killed six Sikh worshipers at a temple in Wisconsin had a major personality change in the year before the shooting, according to a newly released investigative report. Wade Michael Page's sister told investigators that he had become more intense, lost his sense of humor, and had become bloated, probably due to drinking. The county medical examiner's official report confirms that Page, who had been shot in the belly by responding officers, died of a self-inflicted shot to the head, reports Reuters. Toxicology reports are still pending, but the police chief whose officers responded to the shooting says it would be an \"excuse\" to blame alcohol for the mass shooting. \"He has those thoughts, and they're there. The alcohol didn't cause that,\" the chief tells AP. A police officer Page ambushed and shot nine times at close range was released from a local hospital last week.\n", + "docs": [ + "The man who killed six Sikh worshippers at a Wisconsin temple before fatally shooting himself had a history of alcohol problems and underwent a noticeable personality change in the preceding year, according to an investigative report released Tuesday.\n\nWade Michael Page's sister told investigators he had a bloated appearance that made her wonder if he had been drinking recently, the report said. Kimberly Van Buskirk also said she noticed her brother become more intense over the past year, as if he had lost his wit and sense of humor. He took everything literally, she said.\n\nPage, 40, opened fire Aug. 5 before a service was to start at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee.", + " He killed six people and wounded four others before he was shot in the abdomen during a firefight with police. He died after he shot himself in the head.\n\nThe Milwaukee County medical examiner's office, which released the investigative report, officially ruled his death a suicide.\n\nPage's sister told authorities her brother didn't use drugs but had a history of alcohol problems. She did not immediately return a phone message left Tuesday by The Associated Press.\n\nOnline court records show Page had a history of drunken driving and a 1994 arrest in Texas after Page got drunk and kicked holes in the wall of a bar.\n\nToxicology reports, which would show whether he had drugs or alcohol in his system during the shooting spree,", + " are still pending.\n\nOak Creek Police Chief John Edwards, whose officers responded to the shooting, said it would be an \"excuse\" to blame alcohol for what Page did. Many people drink alcohol, but they don't commit murder, he said.\n\n\"He has those thoughts, and they're there. The alcohol didn't cause that,\" Edwards said. \"So whether he had that or not, I don't think that's the cause or the root of it.\"\n\nThe FBI and local authorities are still trying to piece together Page's motive in the attack. He had ties to white supremacy groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center civil rights group,", + " and had recently broken up with his girlfriend.\n\nIn the days after the shooting, there was speculation that Page targeted Sikhs because he mistook them for Muslims because of their beards and turbans. Edwards said Tuesday he didn't think Page was targeting Sikhs or Muslims, but he declined to explain why, citing the ongoing investigation.\n\n\"There's been no specific group he was after or disliked more than the other,\" Edwards said. \"It was a group that was different from him.... It's a person with hate.\"\n\nEdwards joined Oak Creek's mayor and fire chief at a lunch meeting where they discussed the emergency response to the shooting rampage.\n\nOne temple member asked why police took more than 12 hours to release the victims'", + " identities, while their relatives agonized in uncertainty. Edwards said police had limited options.\n\nHe noted that police legally cannot touch dead bodies until the medical examiner has released them, so even though one FBI agent who swept through the building was a temple member who knew others by face, that agent could do nothing to identify those who died face-down.\n\nOne police officer was wounded while responding to the attack. Oak Creek Police Lt. Brian Murphy was ambushed and shot nine times at close range. He was released from the hospital last week.\n\nEdwards said Murphy was hit in the throat and can speak only in a whisper. To protect his voice, he communicates by typing.\n\n\"He's probably going to have permanent injuries,\" Edwards said.\n\nThree Sikh worshippers were wounded,", + " and one remained hospitalized in critical condition Tuesday. Another was released after 10 days, and the third was treated for a minor injury on the day of the shooting.\n\n___\n\nDinesh Ramde can be reached at dramde(at)ap.org. ", + " Alleged gunman Wade Michael Page is seen in this undated handout from the FBI, released at the Oak Creek Police Department on August 6, 2012.\n\nMILWAUKEE A white supremacist who killed six people during a shooting rampage at a Wisconsin Sikh temple earlier this month committed suicide, according to the official report of the county medical examiner released on Tuesday.\n\nMichael Wade Page, 40, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after he killed six worshippers and wounded three others as they prepared for Sunday services at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek on August 5. Investigators initially thought a responding officer killed Page with a gunshot to the stomach.\n\nThe report by the Milwaukee County medical examiner also shed light on Page's disposition leading up to the shooting.", + " Page's sister, Kimberly Van Buskirk, told investigators that her brother had a history of alcohol problems and appeared somewhat bloated during the months before the shooting. She suggested to investigators that he had been drinking.\n\nVan Buskirk also told investigators that Page's demeanor changed over the past year, according to investigators.\n\n\"He had become more intense and had lost his sense of humor and wit and perceived everything very literally,\" the report quoted her as saying.\n\nA final autopsy report showing what was in Page's system during the shooting has not been released.\n\nPage, a U.S. Army veteran, had links to racist groups and was a member of a number of white power bands with names such as End Apathy and Definite Hate.", + " Investigators have not determined why Page targeted the Sikh temple. Some experts have suggested that he might have thought Sikhs were Muslim. The Sikh religion originated in India and is not related to Islam.\n\nOak Creek Lieutenant Brian Murphy, who was also shot eight or nine times during the shooting, was released from the hospital on August 22. Punjab Singh, 65, who was shot once in the face, remains in critical condition, according to Milwaukee's Froedtert Hospital. A third injured person was released soon after the shooting.\n\n(Editing by Greg McCune and Andrew Hay)\n" + ], + "length": 1187, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 10, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 One of the three suspects in the London Bridge attack was known to police. Khuram Shazad Butt, who may have had links to jihadist group Al-Muhajiroun, had been the subject of a Metropolitan Police investigation beginning in 2015. However, the investigation was \"prioritized in the lower echelons\" because \"there was no intelligence to suggest that this attack was being planned,\" a rep tells the BBC. A man and a woman living in east London had both contacted police about Butt, with the woman suggesting he had tried to radicalize her children. According to the Times, Butt had links to both radical Islamic preacher Anjem Choudary and Mohammad Sidique Khan, who planned the 2005 London bombings. Khan worked at an Ilford fitness center that Butt, a 27-year-old father of two, would frequent to try and radicalize youth, the Times reports. Butt also appeared in a 2016 Channel 4 documentary about Islamist extremists with ties to Choudary. He was seen arguing with police after carrying an Islamic State flag. Yet Butt still managed to get a job with the London Underground. The UK citizen born in Pakistan served as a trainee customer service assistant for almost six months in 2016, per the BBC. \"People are going to look at the front pages today and they are going to say 'how on earth could we have let this guy\u2014or possible more\u2014through the net,'\" Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says, per Buzzfeed. Police previously identified Rachid Redouane, 30, who claimed to be Moroccan and Libyan, as another of the attackers. On Tuesday, they named the third: Youssef Zaghba, 22, believed to an Italian national of Moroccan descent, reports the AP. Neither he nor Redouane appeared to be on police radar prior to the attack.\n", + "docs": [ + "Image copyright Met Police Image caption Attackers Khuram Butt (left) who was known to police and the security service and Rachid Redouane\n\nThe Metropolitan Police have defended a decision to downgrade an inquiry into one of the men who carried out Saturday night's terror attack.\n\nThey said Pakistan-born Khuram Butt, 27, of Barking, London, was known to police and MI5 in 2015, but there had been no evidence of a plot.\n\nThe two other perpetrators were not known to security services.\n\nA minute's silence was held at 11:00 BST on Tuesday to remember victims and those who were affected.\n\nSeven people were killed and 48 injured in the attack which began at 21:", + "58 BST on Saturday night. NHS England said 36 people remained in hospital, with 18 in a critical condition.\n\nAll 12 people arrested on Sunday after the London attack have now been released without charge.\n\nOn Tuesday, counter-terror officers were searching a property in Ilford, east London, after entering the address at around 01:30 BST. No arrests had been made, police said.\n\nButt and his two accomplices drove a hired van into pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing people in the area around Borough Market.\n\nAll three men were shot dead by police within eight minutes of receiving a 999 call.\n\nButt had featured in a Channel 4 documentary The Jihadis Next Door,", + " broadcast last year.\n\nAnother of the attackers has been named by police as Rachid Radouane, 30, from Barking. He was a chef who also used the name Rachid Elkhdar and police said he claimed to be Moroccan-Libyan.\n\nWhat did police know about Khuram Butt?\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Khuram Butt was shown in a documentary about extremists\n\nButt featured in a Channel 4 documentary last year about Islamist extremists with links to the jailed preacher Anjem Choudary.\n\nThe married father-of-two, who worked for London Underground as a trainee customer services assistant for nearly six months last year,", + " could be seen in the programme arguing with police officers in the street, after displaying a flag used by so-called Islamic State in a London park.\n\nTwo people in Barking, east London, had also raised concerns about Butt, the BBC's home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani said.\n\nOne man called the anti-terrorism hotline in 2015, and a woman went to the local police because she was scared Butt was trying to radicalise her children.\n\nMetropolitan Police assistant commissioner Mark Rowley said an investigation into Butt began in 2015, but \"there was no intelligence to suggest that this attack was being planned and the investigation had been prioritised accordingly\".\n\nThe inquiry was \"prioritised in the lower echelons of our investigative work\", Mr Rowley added.\n\nAsked if that had been a poor decision,", + " Mr Rowley said he had seen nothing yet to suggest it, according to the BBC's home affairs correspondent, Danny Shaw.\n\nAt any one time there are around 500 active counter-terrorism investigations concerning 3,000 people of interest.\n\nMr Rowley said work was continuing to understand more about the attackers, \"their connections and whether they were assisted or supported by anyone else\".\n\nAnalysis: Khuram Butt showed his extremist colours\n\nBy Dominic Casciani, BBC Home Affairs correspondent\n\nImage copyright Patrick Evans\n\nIt's still not clear when Khuram Butt got involved in radical Islamist politics, but there is ample evidence that he was involved in the al-Muhajiroun network - certainly in 2015 and potentially at least two years earlier still.\n\nThe main evidence comes from his appearance in a Channel 4 documentary,", + " The Jihadis Next Door, broadcast last year.\n\nThe film was a close encounter with part of the ALM network and one of its subjects was Siddhartha Dhar, one of Anjem Choudary's right-hand men.\n\nDhar later skipped bail for Syria. Once there, he appeared in a black mask in an IS execution video.\n\nButt's links may go back further still. Mohammed Shafiq of the Manchester-based Ramadhan Foundation, an anti-extremism group, says that he believes he was verbally assaulted by Butt in 2013 - the day after another ALM follower killed Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich,", + " south-east London.\n\nWho were the victims?\n\nImage copyright Family handout/Reuters Image caption James McMullan's family believe he was among those killed. Chrissy Archibald (right) had come to London to be with her fiance.\n\nCanadian national Chrissy Archibald, 30, was the first victim to be named. Her family said she had died in her fianc\u00e9's arms after being struck by the attackers' speeding van.\n\nThe sister of 32-year-old James McMullan, from Hackney, east London, said he was believed to be among those who died, after his bank card was found on a body at the scene.\n\nA French national was also killed in the attack,", + " according to foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.\n\nThe Met have set up a casualty bureau on 0800 096 1233 and 020 7158 0197 for people concerned about friends or relatives.\n\n'You will not win'\n\nA vigil was held at Potters Field Park by the River Thames on Monday evening to remember the victims.\n\nMayor of London Sadiq Khan led the short ceremony. Addressing the attackers, he said: \"We will defeat you. You will not win.\"\n\nA book of condolences will open on Tuesday at Southwark Council's headquarters in Tooley Street.\n\nPrime Minister Theresa May,", + " who has already signed it, said in her message that British values are \"superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate\".\n\nImage copyright PA\n\nIn the days since the attack, Labour has been targeting cuts to the Home Office's policing budget, accusing Theresa May of \"letting austerity damage her ability to keep us safe\".\n\nSpeaking on Tuesday, Mr Khan warned it could be harder to \"foil future terrorist attacks\" if the Conservatives cut police budgets in London.\n\n\"The Conservative plans mean another \u00a3400m of cuts to the Met,\" he said. \"I'm simply not willing to stand by and let this happen.\"\n\nForeign Secretary Boris Johnson insisted police numbers \"remained high\"", + " and that the security services did an \"incredible job at keeping people safe\".\n\nMr Johnson told BBC Breakfast: \"All that argument detracts from the responsibility of those scumbags and what they have done.\"\n\nGet news from the BBC in your inbox, each weekday morning ", + " A child looks at the floral tributes after a vigil for victims of Saturday's attack in London Bridge, at Potter's Field Park in London, Monday, June 5, 2017. Police arrested several people and are widening... (Associated Press)\n\nLONDON (AP) \u2014 British police have named the third London Bridge attacker as 22-year-old Youssef Zaghba, and said that he is believed to be an Italian national of Moroccan descent.\n\nPolice said Tuesday he lived in east London and that his family has been notified, adding that he was not a \"subject of interest\" to police or the intelligence services.\n\nThe other two attackers were named Monday as Khuram Shazad Butt and Rachid Redouane.\n\nThe identity of the last attacker in Saturday's attack that left seven dead and dozens wounded came as a new search was underway in a neighborhood in east London near the home of two of the London Bridge attackers.", + " The search in Ilford, just north of Barking, is seeking to determine whether the group had accomplices.\n\nLondon police have said all 12 people held since the attack late Saturday from the Barking neighborhood, have been freed.\n\nThe attack, the third in Britain in three months, has raised questions over the government's ability to protect Britain following cuts to police numbers in recent years. The issue has become a key one in the run-up to Thursday's general election.\n\nPrime Minister Theresa May, who called the snap election in hopes of strengthening her mandate for discussions over Britain's exit from the European Union, has come under fire for the cuts to police numbers over recent years.", + " A string of opinion polls over the past couple of weeks have pointed to a narrowing in the gap between her Conservative Party and the main opposition Labour Party.\n\nOne of the attackers, Butt, had appeared in a documentary \"The Jihadis Next Door\" and was known to investigators but police said he was not believed to be plotting an attack. The second man, Rachid Redouane, had not aroused any suspicions. The three, who were wearing fake suicide vests, were shot dead during the attack.\n\nThe Islamic gym where one of the London Bridge attackers trained says they saw nothing of concern during his time there.\n\nIn a letter posted outside Tuesday,", + " the Ummah Fitness Centre said staff would \"help the police in any way we can\" as investigators try to learn more about Khuram Shazad Butt, who was one of those who rammed a van into pedestrians on London Bridge and then slashed and stabbed people in nearby Borough Market.\n\nNeighbors described Butt as an avid weightlifter and Transport for London confirmed he worked for London Underground in customer service before leaving last October.\n\nLondon Mayor Sadiq Khan said questions would need to be asked about what the police knew about Butt. He has said cuts in the number of police officers have had an impact on the ability to prevent attacks.\n\nMuch of the area around London Bridge remained cordoned off as commuters struggled to work in the driving rain.\n\nThe area around Borough Market is not expected to reopen Tuesday.\n\nThe nearby London Bridge station was operational though one of the exits that leads to the cordoned off area on Borough High Street remained closed.\n\nTransport for London,", + " which oversees the capital's transport network, has advised commuters to make alternative journeys as the station will be busy.\n\nA minute's silence was observed in Britain at 11 a.m. local time (1000 GMT) in memory of those killed during the attack.\n\nQuestions remain over whether investigators had the resources to look into complaints such as those leveled by Butt's neighbors about his attempts to radicalize children and whether crucial opportunities were missed that could have saved lives.\n\nSaturday's attack was the third in as many months involving suspects who had been on the radar of British authorities. All three have been claimed by the Islamic State group.\n\nThe country's official terror threat level remains at \"severe,\" one notch down from the highest.\n\nIt had been set at \"critical\"", + " in the days after the Manchester concert bombing on May 22 that killed 22 people \u2014 reflecting a judgment that an attack might be imminent because accomplices with similar bombs might be on the loose.\n\nIt was lowered once intelligence agencies were comfortable this wasn't the case. Authorities have said the London attack was apparently unconnected to the Manchester bombing.\n" + ], + "length": 2230, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 11, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 What would a condom that successfully imparted \"a new feeling of intimacy and comfort never felt in condoms before\" be worth? Seven figures, apparently. The Swedish company LELO, which has enjoyed a pleasurable ride selling millions of award-winning sex toys worldwide, recently announced that it has managed to raise more than $1 million from 30,000 backers for its HEX condom. Nearly $400,000 poured in via its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, an amount that is 3246% of the original goal. The rest came via website orders for what LELO is calling \"the first major condom innovation in 70 years.\" The HEX has been eight years in the making, with the goal being to address three key complaints users (or non-users, in many dissatisfied cases) have: discomfort, slippage, and breakage. One of HEX's differentiators is visible: a honeycomb lattice pattern. Inspired by graphene's \"hexagonal molecular structure,\" LELO incorporated such a structure into the HEX, which it says is less likely to slip or tear and \"maximize[s] sensitivity.\" And if it does tear, Melia Robinson writes for Business Insider that puncture is contained within the affected cell. She watched LELO founder Filip Sedic try and fail to break a HEX with his fingernails and a pen: Mashable tried to pierce one with a needle and couldn't. One writer for Bustle gave the condom, which starts at $19.90 for a 12-pack, a go with her partner and found it easy to open; easy to tell up from down; incredibly stretchy; both super thin and strong; and pleasingly transparent. Her man called it the \"strongest\" orgasm he's ever had wearing a condom. (HEX has a celebrity spokesman.)\n", + "docs": [ + "LELO, that high-end sex toy brand you probably know about because you lust after their super-sleek products, recently announced that they were revolutionizing the condom. Yeah, those things that you know you should wear to protect yourself against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and unwanted pregnancy, but that aren\u2019t, you know, something you\u2019re necessarily jumping for joy to put on. They're called HEX condoms, and their design is being branded as \u201cThe World\u2019s First Re-Engineered Condom\u201d. The patented HEX structure (there are actually tiny hexagons on the condom) claims to address the three main issues that come along with most condoms:", + " discomfort, slippage, and breakage.\n\nI was skeptical \u2014 but excited by the idea of a breakthrough. Condoms have been around for a long long time, with some folks saying they date back to 11,000 B.C., although we know for sure that by the 1400s A.D. people were using products including animal intestine, oiled silk paper, and animal horns or shells to cover the tip of the penis. Condoms as we know them came into existence in 1839, when a guy named Charles Goodyear made the first rubber one (aka not out of part of an animal). Hence the term \u201crubber\u201d. But I digress.\n\nWhile condoms are not only a great method of birth control and are the primary way humans can get freaky without transmitting STDs,", + " the reality is that people aren\u2019t using them as much as public health folks want us to. For instance, only 60 percent of sexually active teenagers use condoms. Which is, let\u2019s face it, a grade D, if not a D-. And it gets worse \u2014 rates of condom use go down the older people get. Somebody do something!\n\nIn 2013, Bill and Melinda Gates, owners of much money, launched a competition to revolutionize the condom, which hadn\u2019t experienced much innovation lately. Their $100,000 award spurred some pretty wild ideas, but none have yet to hit the market. Enter LELO's new HEX condom \u2014 could this be the breakthrough we're waiting for?\n\nMy partner and I checked out the HEX condom,", + " and here is what we found.\n\nLELO HEX Condoms, $20, Amazon\n\n1. The Packaging Is Easy To Open\n\nHEX is packaged with what feels like strong paper, as opposed to the usual tin foil or plastic. This makes it easy to rip with your fingers. My partner said he felt like he could open it in the dark, which is I guess relevant to how some people have sex. I liked that it was easy to open with hands already slippery from lube or vaginal juices, which is often the case by the time you are ready to grab a condom.\n\n2. It\u2019s Easy To Tell Up From Down\n\nYou know how with most condoms you pull it out of the package and then you have to look at it,", + " turn it up and down, to figure out which way is right side up? HEX comes just the slightest bit more unrolled so you can easily tell which direction is correct. Which is a great time-saver for when you\u2019re ready to get it on!\n\n3. It\u2019s Very Stretchy\n\nOne of the main complaints about condoms is that they constrict the penis, making the person attached to that body part feel less pleasure. This has a lot to do with people wearing condoms that aren\u2019t a good fit for them (and we\u2019ll say that while this was a good fit for my partner, it probably won\u2019t be for everyone because there\u2019s so much variety out there!), but we were both impressed by how stretchy the HEX condom is.", + " Yes, we blew one up to show you just how stretchy we mean.\n\n4. The Base Isn\u2019t Constrictive\n\nThis is sort of a corollary to the HEX\u2019s stretchiness, but it\u2019s so important for fit that we wanted to separate it out. Most condoms feel like they rely mostly on the base to stay on, which can provide much of the constrictive feeling people don\u2019t like. HEX stayed on without putting so much pressure on this area \u2014 at least for him. It also didn\u2019t roll up during the action, which happens with lots of condoms and can be stressful, if you have to constantly pay attention to it.\n\n5.", + " The Material Is Very Thin\n\nThe challenge of condom engineering is to use a material that basically feels like it\u2019s not there, but that is also durable enough to reliably protect you. HEX felt super thin and strong \u2014 I felt the hexagonal pattern ever so slightly in the beginning, but then I, you know, got distracted. (Plus, the pattern had a nice feel while I was noticing it.) My partner said it was the thinnest feeling condom he\u2019d ever tried, but that he wasn\u2019t worried it was going to break as a result.\n\n6. We Liked The Aesthetic When It Was On, Too\n\nLELOHEX on YouTube\n\nEven if you don\u2019t get a colored condom,", + " most condoms on the market still have some sort of color to them, which makes the penis wearing them look a bit alien. HEX was way more transparent than other \u201cclear\u201d condoms we had on hand, and it didn\u2019t have that powdered look latex condoms often have. Since we both like how penises look, it was great to be able to have one all wrapped up and safe but in a way that you can see it!\n\nThe Final Verdict\n\nWe both thoroughly enjoyed our romp with the HEX. My partner said it was the strongest orgasm of his life that he's had wearing a condom (with lots of that attributed to his partner of course!!)", + " and I had a similarly delightful time. Does HEX \u201crevolutionize the world of condoms for good,\u201d as LELO boasts on its website? I think that completely depends on an individual\u2019s personal barriers against condom use. If penis constriction is the main one, HEX might solve that. It did for us.\n\nOf course, you still have to put it on before you have sex, an annoyance many cite as a reason why they don\u2019t use condoms. And if the reason why you don\u2019t like condoms is that there\u2019s a physical barrier between you and your partner, while the HEX barrier feels thinner than other condom options currently on the market,", + " it definitely still exists. That said, I think I can safely say these condoms are well worth the price of admission.\n\nImages: Marley Russell; LELO; Giphy\n\nFYI, Bustle may receive a portion of sales from products purchased from this article. ", + " We rely on tech products daily, and expect constant evolution. Without improved effectiveness and user experience, tech innovations quickly become outdated. Imagine if Apple went a year without an iOS or iPhone upgrade\u2014totally unacceptable, right?\n\nYet nearly a century has passed without innovation on the tech product perhaps closest to our bodies: the condom.\n\nThat antiquated trend ended this week, with the new, structurally re-engineered condom LELO Hex.\n\nLaunched by LELO, a Swedish intimacy company dubbed \u201cthe Apple of the pleasure product industry,\u201d HEX condoms represent one of the first major advances in condom technology since the reservoir tip was added almost 70 years ago.\n\nThe new design\n\nThe inside of the Lelo Hex condom.", + " Image: LELO\n\nLELO engineers spent seven years developing their new condom, driven by one crucial discovery: it didn\u2019t require new materials but an upgraded structure.\n\n\u201cThe challenge was to make something radically different with a material already approved for condom use,\" Filip Sedec, LELO founder and inventor of LELO HEX, told Mashable. \"We did this because people need to be having great, safe sex today, not ten years from now.\u201d\n\nWhy hexagons? It turns out this six-sided shape is among the most durable under pressure and seep-resistant, as represented in nature.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s a reason why honeycombs are the shape they are,", + " and why snake scales move the way they do. It\u2019s because hexagons are strong, symmetrical, and tessellate perfectly,\" Sedec explained. \"They\u2019re one of nature\u2019s go-to shapes for anything needing to be at once lightweight, and incredibly strong. That\u2019s why the structure of Graphene \u2013 the thinnest, strongest material we know of today is... you guessed it, hexagonal.\u201d\n\nUnlike others on the market, HEX condoms feature a honeycomb hexagonal lattice. Each HEX condom integrates 350 small hexagons through its latex surface, resulting in effective performance.\n\nThe extremely thin hexagonal panels also flex and mold to the wearer.", + " It's more forgiving of friction and stress, preventing the latex from tearing, LELO claims. Even when repeatedly poked with a needle, the taut HEX doesn\u2019t rip\u2014trust me, I tried!\n\nThe hexagonal ridge is on the inside of the condom is a big reason why the condom is less flimsy \u2014 it acts like a tire on water, gripping and flexing with the penis. The poked hole stays within the hexagonal cell and doesn\u2019t rip the entire latex condom.\n\nWhy should you care?\n\nIn America, condom use is dropping significantly, while STIs are on the rise. In fact, the largest-ever nationwide study on sexuality in 2010 found that only 1 in 4 acts of vaginal intercourse are protected by condoms in the U.S., according to Indiana University.\n\nAmericans aren\u2019t ditching \u201cno glove,", + " no love\u201d because condoms are hard to find; rather, it's due to physical appeal. A 2007 study surveying hundreds of college students published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that men and women who reported unprotected sex as more pleasurable were less likely to use condoms.\n\nBut 20 million people contract STIs annually in the U.S., though only half are aware. Meanwhile, 49% of U.S. pregnancies were unintended.\n\nThese dangerous realities make condom innovation not only important, but essential.\n\nActor Charlie Sheen, who publicly announced that he is HIV-Positive in November 2015, endorsed the product at its launch event,", + " as a part of an effort he says to reduce stigma around condom use and encourage STI education.\n\n\u201cAnnouncing my HIV condition gave me a new sense of purpose in speaking actively on sexual health,\" Sheen said.\n\n\u201cAnnouncing my HIV condition gave me a new sense of purpose in speaking actively on sexual health,\" Sheen said. \"That\u2019s why LELO HEX is such an important project for me.\"\n\n\u201cWe all know condoms are the best defense against STIs, but less and less people want to use them,' he added. \"I hope my experiences can remind of their importance, while LELO\u2019s innovation offers a genuine alternative.\"\n\nThe company,", + " which is currently looking for crowdfunding on Indiegogo, joins a saturated contraception market, but it\u2019s important to remember the Pill, IUD, patch, diaphragm and hormone implants do not protect you from most STIs and STDs as a condom can.\n\nUltimately, whether hexagonally super-powered or not, condoms aren\u2019t for everyone. But whether you love with a glove or not, LELO\u2019s call for safe sex rings true. Always ask your partners if they\u2019ve contracted any STIs or STDs before engaging sexually, and have your sexual health checked by a doctor regularly\u2014you, and your partners, won\u2019t regret it.\n\nAnd for the skeptics out there,", + " don\u2019t be wary: We tried the HEX personally and can report top-notch pleasure.\n\nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. ", + " LELO\n\nThe condom that's hard to break has shattered its crowdfunding goal.\n\nThe HEX condom, made by the Swedish company LELO, raised over $1 million from 30,000 backers through crowdfunding on Indiegogo and its website.\n\nThe first time I saw the HEX, I was sitting in a conference room across from LELO founder Filip Sedic. The condom, an eggshell-colored piece of latex, looked pretty ordinary.\n\nSedic then punched his hand inside the condom and fanned his fingers, revealing a faint, hexagonal pattern etched into the material. The latex clung around his fingernails, but didn't break.", + " He grabbed a pen from the table and tried to puncture it again.\n\n\"People say, 'I don't use it because it might break.' Give me a break,\" Sedic said. \"But people will still use that as an excuse. We have to make sure to eliminate all of these excuses.\"\n\nMelia Robinson/Business Insider\n\nThere's a correlation between disliking condoms and leaving them in the nightstand. In the largest nationwide study on sexuality, in 2010, 45% of men and 63% of women reported not using a condom in their most recent sexual encounter with a \"new acquaintance,\" according to Indiana University.", + " Such negligence can invite a host of complications, including disease.\n\nEight years ago, LELO \u2014 which has been awarded for its upscale line of sex toys and vibrators \u2014 set out to make a condom that men would actually want to use. Or, at the very least, tolerate.\n\nLELO reengineered the mold used to make rubbers, creating a honeycomb latticelike pattern inside the condom that makes it less likely to slip or tear, according to Sedic.\n\nSedic said that when pressure is applied at any point to the HEX condom, it stretches in six directions. This flexibility makes it more forgiving of tension.", + " If you poke a hole in it, the damage stays contained in the single cell; it doesn't rip like traditional condoms.\n\nI pulled a HEX condom over a drinking glass to test its strength. Melia Robinson/Business Insider\n\nAccording to a company spokesperson, 73% of backers across the crowdfunding campaigns were male and 27% were female.\n\nIt's also worth noting nearly 70% of backers were millennials, which you might chalk up to the fact that crowdfunding campaigns are especially popular among younger internet users. However, their enthusiasm might be indicative of something more: LELO made the condom sexy with its redesign.\n\nThe condom's all-white packaging wouldn't look out of place on shelves in an Apple store.", + " And the marketing video that introduced it has helped. Electronic music plays over animations of the condom. It has the intensity of a trailer scored by Hans Zimmer.\n\nThe HEX sells online for $19.90 for a 12-pack or $34.90 for a 36-pack. A LELO spokesperson told Business Insider the company will soon start selling in retail stores around the world.\n\nWhatever their reason for buying, more young people wearing condoms can only be a good thing. ", + " These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web. Crawls of supported \"No More 404\" sites.\n" + ], + "length": 3142, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 12, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Big news from SeaWorld: CEO Joel Manby announced Monday that next year will be the final year featuring killer whale shows at the San Diego park. Starting in 2017, a \"new orca experience\" with a \"strong conservation message\" will debut, he said, per CNN. As the AP puts it, the new experience will \"focus on the animal's natural setting and behaviors.\" Manby made the announcement at an investor conference, citing customer feedback as the reason.\n", + "docs": [ + "SAN DIEGO (AP) \u2014 The Latest from the announcement by SeaWorld that its orca shows at the company's San Diego park will end by 2017. (all times local)\n\n11:50 p.m.\n\nA SeaWorld executive says orca shows at the company's San Diego park will end by 2017.\n\nCEO Joel Manby cited customer feedback as the reason for the move in an anouncement Monday to investors.\n\nManby said the park would offer a different kind of orca experience and focus on the animal's natural setting and behaviors.\n\nThe news came days after SeaWorld Entertainment Inc. reported third-quarter earnings missed Wall Street expectations.\n\nThe Orlando,", + " Florida-based company has seen revenue drop since the release of the documentary \"Blackfish\" that criticized its treatment of killer whales in captivity. ", + " SeaWorld is closing the curtain on killer whale shows at its San Diego park next year.\n\nThe company said Monday it plans to reinvent the attraction that's been the center of animal-cruelty claims against SeaWorld (SEAS).\n\nShows at the San Diego park will stop by the end of 2016, said CEO Joel Manby, while a \"new orca experience\" will debut in 2017 with a \"strong conservation message.\" Manby said that customers in Southern California don't want to see the whales performing tricks and prefer a more \"natural\" experience.\n\nSan Diego's SeaWorld may also scrap plans for a massive expansion of its killer whale environment.", + " Manby cited concerns that pending regulations could hamper those plans.\n\n\"I'm not willing to put $100 million into a market when there's regulatory questions,\" Manby said.\n\nCalifornia authorities banned breeding killer whales in captivity last month, and SeaWorld says it does not capture new animals from the wild.\n\nTheatrical killer whale shows will continue at other SeaWorld parks.\n\nSeaWorld announced the change at an investor conference.\n\nAn earnings update last week left investors worried about the company's outlook. In the six days since then, its shares have plunged more than 10%.\n\nSeaWorld's reputation was badly damaged in part by \"Blackfish,\" a 2013 documentary co-produced by CNNFilms.", + " The film generated criticism from lawmakers and advocacy groups like PETA.\n\nAttendance at SeaWorld's theme parks has waned, and its San Diego park has been particularly troublesome.\n\nTo help its boost the company's image, Manby also said the company will \"aggressively communicate\" its animal care and rescue efforts.\n\nSeaWorld is also planning new attractions and changes to its pricing.\n\nCorrection: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported details of SeaWorld's pricing changes.\n" + ], + "length": 536, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 13, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Even as Texas suffers perhaps the worst natural disaster in its history, congressmen from the northeast are using Hurricane Harvey as an opportunity to lash out at their Texas colleagues for voting against aid following Hurricane Sandy back in 2013. After Sandy devastated parts of New Jersey and New York in 2012, nearly the entire Texas Republican caucus, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, refused to vote for a multi-billion-dollar aid package, Politico reports. Since the rains started falling in Houston on Friday, several northeastern Republicans have attacked their colleagues for that vote. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called the Texas congressional delegation \"hypocrites,\" and Reps. Peter King and Frank LoBiondo have tweeted their lingering displeasure. These New York and New Jersey congressmen have called the group who voted against the $50.5 billion aid package the \"Comeuppance Caucus,\" the Texas Tribune reports. Cruz, however, says he stands by his vote, even in light of the huge storm in Texas, saying that the 2013 bill was full of unnecessary pork-barrel spending. \"Two-thirds of that bill was unrelated spending that had nothing to do with Sandy,\" Cruz said Monday. Despite their frustration, the lawmakers who have taken a shot at the Texas delegation in the last few days have also promised to vote for a Harvey aid package. \"NY wont abandon Texas,\" King tweeted Saturday. \"1 bad turn doesnt deserve another.\u201d\n", + "docs": [ + "Tweet with a location\n\nYou can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ", + " Texas Republicans in Congress once stood nearly united against a bill to send billions of dollars in aid to Northeastern states recovering from Hurricane Sandy. Sen. Ted Cruz even ripped the legislation as \u201ca Christmas tree\u201d with billions of dollars in extraneous goodies.\n\nNew York and New Jersey Republicans haven\u2019t forgotten the slight. And with Hurricane Harvey wreaking devastation down South \u2014 and Congress beginning to contemplate what will likely be a massive aid package \u2014 the tough-on-spending Texans could find themselves in an awkward spot.\n\nStory Continued Below\n\n\u201cThe congressional members in Texas are hypocrites, and I said back in 2012 they\u2019d be proven to be hypocrites.", + " It was just a matter of time,\u201d New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told reporters Monday. \u201cWe were the disaster that was the longest in waiting in terms of federal aid, and I hope that\u2019s not what happens to the folks in Texas.\u201d\n\nChristie's comments came as GOP lawmakers from the region also vented their frustration at how Texas Republicans handled Sandy aid \u2014 even as they said they wouldn't repeat history in return.\n\n\u201cDespite my TX colleagues refusal to support aid in #SouthJersey time of need, I will support emergency disaster $$ for those impacted,\u201d Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-N.J.) tweeted on Monday morning.\n\nRep.", + " Peter King (R-N.Y.) took aim directly at Cruz.\n\n\u201cTed Cruz & Texas cohorts voted vs NY/NJ aid after Sandy but I'll vote 4 Harvey aid. NY wont abandon Texas. 1 bad turn doesn\u2019t deserve another,\u201d King tweeted over the weekend, as Harvey continued to pummel Houston.\n\nThe most reliable politics newsletter. Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning \u2014 in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.\n\nIt's the reason disaster aid has largely been a bipartisan issue in Congress:", + " Every lawmaker's district may, at some point, need federal assistance. And it's also the reason taking a rigid anti-spending stand on disaster relief is a risk: Now that Texas needs help, the lawmakers who once opposed aid to the Northeast are getting nicked by colleagues for hypocrisy.\n\n\"Many Texas reps and notoriously, @SenTedCruz fought against Sandy aid, so crucial to CT,\" tweeted Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.). \"Going with my better angels to fight FOR Texas aid.\"\n\nThe rare public rebuke by two fellow Republicans \u2014 and less surprising Democratic criticism \u2014 underscores the frustration felt by many lawmakers whose districts were similarly hammered by Sandy.", + " New York and New Jersey ultimately received aid amounting to nearly $60 billion, but not until conservative lawmakers attempted to pay for the package with spending cuts to other domestic programs.\n\n\u201cThe United States Senate should not be in the business of exploiting victims of natural disasters to fund pork projects that further expand our debt,\u201d Cruz said at the time.\n\nCruz reiterated his complaint on Monday. The Sandy bill, he said on MSNBC, was \"filled w/ unrelated pork.\" A spokesman for Sen. Jon Cornyn (R-Texas), who also ultimately voted against the final Sandy relief package, emphasized on Twitter that Cornyn was supportive of the measure until \"extraneous $ for non-relief items\"", + " was added.\n\nIt\u2019s unclear whether Cruz will apply the same standards for federal aid this time. On Monday, Cruz said he appreciated assurances from President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence that \u201cfull federal assistance\u201d would be ready to help Houston rebuild when the storm fully passes.\n\nPresident Donald Trump, too, predicted Monday that there would be \"fast\" action on a spending bill to send aid to Texas.\n\nIt\u2019s unclear how large an aid package will be needed. Rain was still pelting the Houston area late Monday, and the precise extent of the apparently massive damage to the area was uncertain.\n\nBut the Trump administration seemed to indicate that more federal aid would be coming.\n\n\u201cI think what you\u2019re going to see is that the national government,", + " and we anticipate the Congress, are going to make the resources available to see Texas through the rescue operation, through the recovery,\u201d Vice President Mike Pence said in an interview with Houston\u2019s KTRH.\n\nHouse Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California hinted at previous GOP reluctance to authorize disaster aid in a statement issued Monday afternoon.\n\n\u201cRepublicans must be ready to join Democrats,\u201d she said, \u201cin passing a timely relief bill that makes all necessary resources available through emergency spending.\u201d\n\nThere\u2019s no indication yet that congressional leaders are coordinating a relief package. It\u2019s too early for them to assess the funding needs for the region. But Trump is slated to huddle with congressional leaders next week to outline the September agenda,", + " and the issue of disaster aid is certain to come up.\n\nKatherine Landergan contributed to this report. ", + " The devastation was swift, and the recovery is far from over. Sign up for our ongoing coverage of Hurricane Harvey's aftermath. You can help by sharing your story here or sending a tip to harvey@texastribune.org. More in this series\n\nWASHINGTON \u2013 Many New Yorkers and New Jerseyans serving in Congress have, for nearly five years now, kept a list of names handy to roll out at a moment\u2019s notice. They call it \u201cthe Comeuppance Caucus.\u201d\n\nFor some, the list is on a physical paper or bookmarked on a computer. For others, it's merely tattooed into their brains. It consists of which colleagues voted against Hurricane Sandy funding back in 2013,", + " and it\u2019s chock full of Texas Republicans.\n\nIn fact, nearly every Texas Republican who was serving in Congress at the time voted against the $50.5 billion aid bill. And now their own constituents are facing the biggest natural disaster in state history.\n\n\u201cThere is deep and lingering resentment by members of Congress who needed help in their districts when Sandy just ravaged their constituents,\u201d said former U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, a Democrat who represented Long Island until he retired last January. \u201c[U.S. Sen] Ted Cruz and others led the fight against that aid, and a lot of people said there would be a day of reckoning.\u201d\n\nThe Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors.", + " Become one.\n\nIsrael served in the Democratic House leadership in 2013, and his comments reflect numerous conversations happening within both the New Jersey and New York delegations since Harvey landed in Southeast Texas over the weekend, sparking widespread devastation and flooding.\n\nBack in early 2013, Congress easily passed a massive funding package to support the victims of Hurricane Sandy, a storm that hammered the northern Eastern Seaboard just before the 2012 election.\n\nYet it galled many members from the region at the time that Republicans representing coastal states like Texas that are also susceptible to hurricanes would not back the bill, citing spending in it viewed by some as pork-barrel spending.\n\n\"Hurricane Sandy inflicted devastating damage on the East Coast,", + " and Congress appropriately responded with hurricane relief,\" said Cruz in a statement at the time. \"Unfortunately, cynical politicians in Washington could not resist loading up this relief bill with billions in new spending utterly unrelated to Sandy.\"\n\nBoth Cruz and his fellow senator from Texas, John Cornyn, as well as every Texas Republican in the U.S. House save for John Culberson of Houston, ultimately voted against the Disaster Relief Act of 2013.\n\nYet Cruz \u2013 often viewed as the most brash of the Texas delegation \u2013 has become the favorite target in recent days of current and former Northeast members gleefully noting that the shoe is now on the other foot.\n\nThe Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors.", + " Become one.\n\nU.S. Rep Peter King, a Long Island Republican, took the biggest shot at the delegation on Saturday, tweeting, \u201cTed Cruz & Texas cohorts voted vs NY/NJ aid after Sandy but I'll vote 4 Harvey aid. NY wont abandon Texas. 1 bad turn doesnt deserve another.\u201d\n\nDemocratic U.S. Rep. Kathleen Rice, concurred with her Long Island neighbor an hour later on Twitter.\n\nAnd then on Monday, U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo, a New Jersey moderate Republican, added to the dogpile, calling the Texans who voted against Sandy relief \u201chypocritical based on geography.\u201d\n\nEven New Jersey Gov.", + " Chris Christie joined in.\n\n\"The congressional members in Texas are hypocrites,\" Christie told reporters Monday. \"Even though I'm sure there's going to be some temptation by New Jersey House members in particular to drag their feet a little bit based upon what these folks in Texas did to us during Sandy, I'm going to be urging all our members to rise above that and provide the aid as quickly as possible.\"\n\nThat U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell offered some of the more measured criticism of the Texas delegation, remarkable considering the fiery New Jersey Democrat's reputation for rumbling with Republicans at any opportunity.\n\nSome #TX members tried to deny #NJ aid after Sandy,", + " but federal gov't must support fellow Americans in time of need. You have mine. #Harvey The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one. August 26, 2017\n\nCruz called the commentary \u201cpolitical sniping\u201d in a Fox News interview Monday.\n\n\u201cI have been spending day and night... trying to marshal federal assets to save lives,\u201d he said. \u201cThat needs to be the priority. The silliness of Washington, we can worry about that a different time.\u201d\n\nWhen asked if Hurricane Harvey had changed his mind about his stance in 2013, Cruz stood by his vote.\n\n\u201cOf course not,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cAs I said at the time, hurricane funding is a very important federal responsibility, and I would have eagerly supported funding for that, but I didn\u2019t think it was appropriate to engage in pork-barrel spending, where two-thirds of that bill was unrelated spending that had nothing to do with Sandy.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt was simply politicians wasting money,\u201d he added. \u201cThat shouldn\u2019t happen.\u201d\n\nBut Israel countered that what Cruz and others might consider as pork \"was significantly vital to rebuilding our region.\"\n\nThe Washington Post's Fact Checker dug into Cruz's latest remarks on Monday and ruled that \"it is wildly incorrect to claim that the bill was 'filled with unrelated pork.' The bill was largely aimed at dealing with Sandy,", + " along with relatively minor items to address other or future disasters.\"\n\nPrivately, several sources close to Texas Republican members echoed Cruz\u2019s comments about wasteful spending but did not want to speak publicly about the issue.\n\nBut also, there was a sense that many in Texas were startled to see such anger from Northeast members of Congress while the rain still fell in Houston. And some northeastern sources in Congress bristled some at the timing of the angry tweets and comments, given the suffering in Texas.\n\nAnd not everyone is mad at the Texas GOP delegation.\n\nU.S. Rep. Leonard Lance, R-New Jersey, had no interest on Monday in engaging in the regional political war.\n\n\u201cI want to make clear and be as emphatic as possible:", + " I do not approach with this a sense of anger,\u201d he told the Tribune. \u201cI supported funding for Sandy and will for this horrible situation.\u201d\n\nAnd U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a New York City Democrat, tweeted: \"I'm praying for anyone suffering from Hurricane Harvey & stand ready to support any federal assistance needed.\"\n\nCongress returns on Tuesday and will have a whole host of new problems to sort out, on top of a slew of budget deadlines barreling toward the two chambers. Is there a chance that the Sandy vote will come back to haunt Texas?\n\nThe bipartisan message blowing in from the Northeast: Congress will deliver the funds to Texas.", + " While there is no interest in punishing fellow Americans, these members do want those in Congress from Texas to know just how personally they took those \"no\" vote when their own constituents were in trouble four and a half years ago.\n\n\u201cNew Yorkers made the argument that when a storm strikes, it\u2019s not striking one region, it\u2019s striking the whole country, and I think my colleagues will be faithful to put their [voting] cards in and pushing the button,\u201d said Israel.\n\n\u201cUntil then, I think they\u2019re enjoying making a point.\u201d\n\nPatrick Svitek contributed to this report.\n" + ], + "length": 2529, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 14, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Days before the September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons that Tony Blair used to justify sending British troops to join the US in Iraq, an MI6 officer met with Iraq's head of intelligence and was told that Saddam Hussein had no active weapons of mass destruction, according to an investigative report by the BBC. The CIA had its own secret meeting in the months before the invasion, this one with Hussein's foreign minister, and was also told that Iraq had \"virtually nothing\" when it came to WMDs, according to the Guardian. But MI6 and the CIA dismissed the intelligence, and the information was not passed along to relevant officials for subsequent inquiries. But, while dismissing information from high-level officials, MI6 stood by information gleaned from unreliable sources (such as the claim that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger) even after other intelligence agencies dismissed them, and MI6 and the CIA continued to take such claims seriously even after the sources were found to be unreliable.\n", + "docs": [ + "A Panorama investigation is to reveal key aspects of the secret intelligence used by Downing Street and the White House to justify the invasion of Iraq.\n\nPeter Taylor reports on how two crucial pieces of intelligence from perhaps the best sources Western intelligence ever had, were used selectively or simply ignored.\n\nSpeaking to the Today programme, he said: \"We've conducted a forensic investigation of the intelligence, and we've found that key elements were based on fabrication, wishful thinking and lies.\n\n\"But we've also revealed that there was intelligence that was accurate - that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.\"\n\nFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Monday 18 March 2013.", + " MI6 and CIA were told before invasion that Iraq had no active WMD\n\nFresh evidence has been revealed about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.\n\nTony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was \"active\", \"growing\" and \"up and running\".\n\nA special BBC Panorama programme aired on Monday night details how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.\n\nIt describes how Naji Sabri,", + " Saddam's foreign minister, told the CIA's station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had \"virtually nothing\" in terms of WMD.\n\nSabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was \"totally fabricated\".\n\nHowever, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq's head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002.\n\nLord Butler,", + " the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that he was not told about Sabri's comments, and that he should have been.\n\nButler says of the use of intelligence: \"There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages.\"\n\nWhen it was suggested to him that the body that probably felt most misled of all was the British public, Butler replied: \"Yes, I think they're, they're, they got every reason think that.\"\n\nThe programme shows how the then chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, responded to information from Iraqi sources later acknowledged to be unreliable.\n\nOne unidentified MI6 officer has told the Chilcot inquiry that at one stage information was \"being torn off the teleprinter and rushed across to Number 10\".\n\nAnother said it was \"wishful thinking\u2026 [that]", + " promised the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow\".\n\nThe programme says that MI6 stood by claims that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger, though these were dismissed by other intelligence agencies, including the French.\n\nIt also shows how claims by Iraqis were treated seriously by elements in MI6 and the CIA even after they were exposed as fabricated including claims, notably about alleged mobile biological warfare containers, made by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German source codenamed Curveball. He admitted to the Guardian in 2011 that all the information he gave to the west was fabricated.\n\nPanorama says it asked for an interview with Blair but he said he was \"too busy\".\n\n\u2022 The Spies Who Fooled the World,", + " BBC Panorama Special, BBC1, Monday, 18 March, 10.35pm\n" + ], + "length": 770, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 15, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Woody Harrelson plays a deluded superhero in Defendor, Canadian writer-director Peter Stebbings' debut. The filmmaker's compatriots get where he's coming from; critics south of the border, not so much: \"Made for $3.5-million, it looks, if anything, cheaper,\" James Adams writes in the Globe and Mail. But Harrelson's \"expressive rubber face and intense blue eyes\" paint a \"convincing portrait of a lonely, damaged schlub whose moral code and sense of the heroic\" come exclusively from comic books. The flick has \"a proper pace, well punctuated with laughs at the right time, and outrage and sympathy at others,\" writes Linda Barnard in the Toronto Star. At its core is Harrelson's \"unrelenting seriousness and dedication to the literal truth.\" Harrelson is \"winning,\" but \"Stebbings is more interested in deconstructing heroism than creating a concrete world,\" Glenn Whipp writes in the Los Angeles Times. The result is that \"the film never meshes into something cohesive.\" \"Imagine Woody Harrelson's slaphappy simpleton Woody Boyd from Cheers if he were mad as hell and not planning to take it anymore,\" David Germain writes for the AP, and you've got Defendor. Intriguing, but \"you end up not so much rooting for him as for the psychiatric profession, hoping it lives up to its destiny and gets this nut case off the streets.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "If, as the song instructs, you don't tug on Superman's cape, how exactly would you approach Woody Harrelson's would-be superhero in \"Defendor\"?\n\nFor starters, don't point out to this man-child dressed in black tights with a shoe-polish eye mask and the letter \"D\" duct-taped on his chest that his name should be Defender not Defendor. He might flip out and throw a bunch of marbles at you. And don't question the validity of his mission -- defeating the evil drug lord Captain Industry -- or he might really get angry and crack open a jar containing angry wasps.\n\n\"", + "Defendor\" writer-director Peter Stebbings hopes you chuckle at his crime-fighter's idiosyncrasies but he's after more than laughs with this shaggy-dog character study. Tackling the idea of heroism itself, Stebbings wants us to look at his underdog daredevil and see that it's possible to affect change in the face of great odds, even if you aren't armed with a trench club.\n\nThat's a tall order for a wisp of a movie containing many different -- and, often, conflicting -- ambitions. Through flashback interviews with a court-appointed forensic psychiatrist (Sandra Oh), we learn that Arthur Poppington,", + " a.k.a. Defendor (Harrelson, completely winning in his clench-jawed purposefulness), dons his costume both to escape and avenge the pain that came when his mother abandoned him as a child. ", + " Defendor (out of four) Starring Woody Harrelson, Kat Dennings, Elias Koteas and Sandra Oh. Written and directed by Peter Stebbings. 95 minutes. At AMC Yonge-Dundas. 14A\n\nThe antidote for all those brooding comic-book superheroes wrestling with inner torment and battling computer-generated baddies can be found in a seriously dedicated dude with a duct-tape D on his sweater and a jar of marbles as his secret weapon.\n\nFirst-time Canadian director Peter Stebbings presents a sweetly engaging and very watchable take on an unlikely hero tale with Defendor, which premiered at the Toronto film festival last year.\n\nWoody Harrelson is superb as Arthur Poppington,", + " a 40-something man-child who truly believes he is Defendor, self-appointed protector of the citizens of Hamilton from \"punks.\" (There's no attempt to hide Steeltown's gritty, wintry identity; the radio call-in show signs in from \"the Hammer\" and locals thumb tabloid-size copies of The Spectator.)\n\nWe first meet Arthur as he undergoes a psychiatric assessment with a sympathetic court-appointed shrink (Sandra Oh) after his arrest for dumping a local drycleaner head-first into a garbage can. Arthur has his reasons for doing it, but he's not telling. \"It's classified,\" he says evenly.\n\nA flagman for the city,", + " he's been squatting in the municipal works yard, perfecting his arsenal of homemade punk-busting weaponry. At night, Arthur dons his \"uniform\" of bike helmet, utility belt and face-paint mask to take to the streets as Defendor. In between stopping crime, he's on the lookout for Capt. Industry, the mythic \"evil mastermind\" he is sure is behind the town's ills.\n\nStuck in the mindset of a comic-book-loving kid, steely-eyed Arthur is fond of using hero-speak: \"Trouble has a way of following me.\" So when he \"rescues\" lippy Katarina (Kat Dennings), a crack-smoking teen hooker,", + " Arthur sees it as a civic duty and a chance to set her on the straight and narrow. She sees it as a free place to crash and a gullible guy to rip off.\n\nDennings makes Katarina both tough and reluctantly tender, a trope that could be an annoying stereotype in less-skilled hands. But Stebbings has given her a lot to work with, and there's plenty of onscreen chemistry with Harrelson's Arthur that makes us genuinely care about these characters.\n\nRhetorical questions have no place in Arthur's world. \"Who writes your dialogue, Spider-Man?\" sneers Kat. \"I write it myself,\" he replies,", + " slightly hurt.\n\nMontreal actor Elias Koteas plays crooked cop Dooney with malevolent glee. He's especially good when going toe-to-toe with Defendor/Arthur, who tries to elicit information by squirting lime juice in his eyes. Take that!\n\nStebbings fills Defendor was humorous bits, comic treats dropped in quickly and without fanfare. It gives the movie a proper pace, well punctuated with laughs at the right time, and outrage and sympathy at others. What makes the film work so well is Arthur's unrelenting seriousness and dedication to the literal truth. He is a superhero; bullets cannot harm him.", + " If it happened on The Rockford Files, it must be true. This isn't a game to Arthur and while others may find his mission hilarious, he will not waver.\n\n\"I can't relax,\" he protests. \"Not while there are people out there who need me.\"\n\nJohn Rowley's score marches along nicely in the early scenes, sounding like a vintage episode of TV's Superman as Defendor heads out to make the gritty streets safe again in a utility bucket truck, the Mack bulldog hood ornament similarly masked and labelled \"Defendog.\"\n\nThere's another dimension of the superhero at work in Defendor and a suggestion that this kind of work can be the business of mere mortals,", + " too. Taking on the mantel of protector is perhaps the most heroic deed of all.\n\nRelated article: Director got Defendor costume at Value Village\n\n", + " Imagine Woody Harrelson's slaphappy simpleton Woody Boyd from \"Cheers\" if he were mad as hell and not planning to take it anymore. Then give him a nasty, vintage World War I trench club and turn him loose on the mean streets.\n\nThat roughly is the scenario in writer-director Peter Stebbings' \"Defendor,\" with Harrelson as a wannabe superhero with no superpowers and no abundance of brain power, either.\n\nThe low-budget movie continually shifts from comic-book spoof to gritty crime story to mental-health drama, the inconsistent tone preventing it from ever fully working as one or another.\n\nHarrelson's Arthur Poppington has much of the aw-shucks innocence of Harrelson's Iowa farm boy Woody on \"Cheers,\" with little of the charm.", + " And what appeal Arthur does have winds up seriously undermined when he starts using a nutcracker to break knuckles or bashing people in the head with his truncheon.\n\nStebbings sees Arthur as a vigilante with a heart of gold going after sadistic drug and prostitute traffickers. Trouble is, Arthur seems as much a sadist as the bad guys.\n\nIn Arthur's deluded world, he is a black-clad fighter for justice named Defendor, wearing a capital D in duct tape across his chest, his arsenal including jars of wasps he lobs like grenades and fistfuls of marbles he lets fly like shrapnel.\n\nThough he'll take on whatever thugs the night coughs up,", + " Arthur always is hunting for his nemesis, a criminal mastermind he calls Captain Industry, whom he blames for his mother's death.\n\nArthur continually crosses paths with corrupt cop Dooney (Elias Koteas), who is working with a gang smuggling drugs and women. Both men take repeated shellackings that would leave them in intensive care, yet the next time we see them, they are ready for more. Apparently, it is not just big Hollywood action films that seriously overestimate the resilience of the human body.\n\nAllies and witnesses to Arthur's quest line up throughout, led by spirited hooker Katerina (Kat Dennings), who becomes both sidekick and damsel for our hero.\n\nThe action is told in flashback mode through interview segments with Sandra Oh as a court-appointed psychiatrist,", + " evaluating Arthur's mental state after he attacks a store owner and dumps him in a garbage can.\n\nWe also get some deeper flashbacks to Arthur's childhood, meant to explain his nuttiness, though the sequences really do not clarify what pushed him this far off the deep end.\n\nEmpathy comes and goes with Arthur, Harrelson at times coming across as a hurt man-child, other times simply exploding in ugly fury.\n\nWith Arthur resembling a raccoon from the black grease paint he slathers about his eyes to become Defendor, you end up not so much rooting for him as for the psychiatric profession, hoping it lives up to its destiny and gets this nut case off the streets and into a facility that can do him some good.\n\n\"", + "Defendor,\" a Darius Films release, is rated R for drug use and language throughout, violence and sexual content. Running time: 102 minutes. Two stars out of four. ", + " Defendor\n\nDirected and written by Peter Stebbings\n\nStarring Woody Harrelson, Kat Dennings, Elias Koteas\n\nClassification: 14A\n\nThe old notion that to surrender to the charms of a movie, you need to suspend disbelief in the artifices that make up the movie really gets put to the test in Defendor.\n\nThe debut feature of Vancouver-born director/writer Peter Stebbings, Defendor is a comic book of a film that dares to be taken seriously and dares you to be moved in turn. Amazingly, it succeeds. Not entirely, mind you, but enough to prove that the buzz the film enjoyed as a world premiere at last year\u2019s Toronto International Film Festival was not undeserved.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDefendor certainly embraces pretty much all the conceits of the superhero comic book,", + " but in a decidedly down-market way. Made for $3.5-million, it looks, if anything, cheaper. Its tropes include the obligatory costumed hero (with the equally obligatory tragic origin story), the attractive damsel in distress, cruel villains, under-resourced cops and an urban milieu riven with corruption and crime.\n\nOnly here the milieu isn\u2019t New York, Metropolis or some other fantastical fantasyland, it\u2019s Hamilton, pop. 500,000 \u2013 and the Hammer in winter no less! The damsel, moreover, is a teen hooker with a crack habit, her dark knight a dimwitted man-child who,", + " for all his purity of heart and nobility of intentions, is of greater danger to himself than the denizens of the Steeltown underworld.\n\nBy day, Woody Harrelson is Arthur Poppington, bored traffic controller at a construction site. At night he becomes Defendor, black-clad battler of crime and/or evil with an arsenal of gadgets that includes jars filled with enraged hornets, a trench club from the First World War, marbles and a surveillance camera that records to VHS tapes. Of course, he has a Batmobile \u2013 but here it\u2019s a lumbering City of Hamilton construction-crane truck housed in the Public Works garage where he\u2019s living illegally.", + " His identity-concealing mask is shoe polish smeared around the eyes, the Defendor chest logo a crudely lettered \u201cD\u201d made of pieces of duct tape.\n\nWoody Harrelson stars in Defendor.\n\nWhile all these degradations of comic book iconography are quite clever (and funny), they could have ended up being only that \u2013 smarty-pants touches in a progressively more feeble genre exercise. Fortunately, the script has enough twists and tweaks and tonal shifts that the homemade \u201cspecial\u201d effects aren\u2019t Defendor\u2019s only distinction. Certainly the plot has gaping holes of logic. We\u2019re talking comics, after all.", + " Yet like the best comics (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Batman), Defendor resonates as a journey into the mythic, a meditation on heroism, hubris, resourcefulness and redemption as old as the legends of Arthur and the epics of Homer, and with almost as much gravitas.\n\nPlus, Stebbings \u2013 a fine actor when he\u2019s not behind the camera \u2013 has a superb cast to carry his inspired silliness. Sandra Oh, for one, is pitch-perfect as the psychiatrist who must convince a disbelieving judge that Arthur, delusional though he may be, belongs in the world at large and not in an institution.", + " Ditto Elias Koteas as Dooney, the sleazy, utterly corrupt cop/pimp at the beck and call of the reptilian criminal mastermind Vladimir Kristic (A.C. Peterson). Kat Dennings is winning, too, as Katerina, the lush-lipped streetwalker who gradually lets Arthur\u2019s noble soul find both the hurt and the heart of gold beneath the crack-encrusted exterior.\n\nThe biggest kudos, though, must go to Harrelson. Blessed with an expressive rubber face and intense blue eyes, he persuasively conveys Arthur\u2019s determination and urgency, his frustration and impishness, as well as the great wells of childhood pain that birthed his alter-", + "ego and fuel his seemingly suicidal crime-busting quest. Harrelson never breaks character, never throws the audience a knowing wink or smirk. The result is a convincing portrait of a lonely, damaged schlub whose moral code and sense of the heroic gesture continue to be shaped by the pulp wisdom and narrative comfort he found decades earlier at the comic book rack in his grandfather\u2019s general store.\n\nDefendor is more a refreshment of a genre than a transcendence of it. But thanks to Harrelson, you\u2019ll be a believer.\n" + ], + "length": 2804, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 16, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Chief Wahoo's days are numbered. The Cleveland Indians will remove the controversial logo of a caricatured Indian brave's face as of the 2019 season, reports the AP. That means the logo, which has been used since 1947 but is today deemed racist by Native American groups and others, will be seen on the team's uniforms for just one more season. However, the team will continue to sell merchandise adorned with Chief Wahoo in northeast Ohio, a decision the AP says was made to keep trademark rules in place. The move came after negotiations with Major League Baseball, which considers the logo inappropriate, reports the New York Times. The issue had come to a head in recent years as the Indians turned into a powerhouse team in the league and thus drew more attention. In fact, the team had been taking steps to limit the logo's exposure in recent years, notes Cleveland.com. For instance, Chief Wahoo is not displayed during the team's spring training camp in Arizona, out of respect for the area's Native American population. (Meanwhile, a similar controversy continues over the Washington Redskins' team name.)\n", + "docs": [ + "CLEVELAND, Ohio - Chief Wahoo, the longtime logo of the Indians, will be gone after the 2018 season.\n\nThe Indians will disassociate themselves with the logo and will no longer wear it on their uniforms or caps following the 2018 season. The logo has been a flashpoint for the team for several years, drawing criticism and lawsuits from Native American groups who consider it racist.\n\nThe New York Times was the first to report the story.\n\nChief Wahoo, in one rendition or another, has been worn on Indians uniforms since 1947. Then-owner Bill Veeck made it part of the team's uniform.", + " Walter Goldbach, a 17-year-old draftsman, designed the first logo. Goldbach, 88, died in December.\n\nThe Indians name will remain unchanged. The charter member of the American League has been called the Indians since 1915. The Block C and script Indians will be the team's main logos after 2018.\n\nThe logo recently has drawn criticism from Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred. Owner Paul Dolan and Manfred have met several times since 2016 to discuss the matter. When Manfred awarded the Indians the 2019 All-Star Game, it seemed unlikely that any Cleveland player participating in the Midsummer Classic would be wearing Chief Wahoo on his uniform.\n\nWhen the Indians played Toronto in the AL Championship Series in 2016,", + " Douglas Cardinal, a member of the Blackfoot nation and a Native American activist, brought a lawsuit against MLB and the Indians. The suit sought to ban Cleveland from using its team name and logo in the series. A judge in Toronto rejected the request and dismissed the suit.\n\nLast May, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal ruled that an Ontario court can hear a case contending that the Indians team name and Chief Wahoo logo are discriminatory. The ruling was an offshoot of Cardinal's suit in 2016.\n\nIn response to that court ruling, Manfred said, \"We were hoping that case was going to be dismissed. It was not. I think it points out the ongoing practical problems that are posed by this particular logo.\"\n\nThe Indians have been downsizing their use of Chief Wahoo for the last several years.", + " Their more recent primary logo has been the block C. When they conduct spring training in Goodyear, Ariz., Chief Wahoo is nowhere to be found on their uniforms or advertising. The only place it can be found is in the gift shop.\n\n* Read the 2014 cleveland.com editorial calling for the end of Chief Wahoo\n\nThe team does not use it there out of respect for the heavy Native American population in Arizona.\n\nThe Indians will maintain the trademark and retail rights to Chief Wahoo. They will maintain a local presence for The Chief, meaning they'll still sell merchandise bearing its image. ", + " FILE - This June 26, 2015, file photo, shows the Cleveland Indians logo on a jersey during a baseball game against the Baltimore Orioles in Baltimore. Indians are taking the divisive Chief Wahoo logo... (Associated Press)\n\nFILE - This June 26, 2015, file photo, shows the Cleveland Indians logo on a jersey during a baseball game against the Baltimore Orioles in Baltimore. Indians are taking the divisive Chief Wahoo logo off their uniforms and caps, starting in 2019. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File) (Associated Press)\n\nCLEVELAND (AP) \u2014 Divisive and hotly debated,", + " the Chief Wahoo logo is being removed from the Cleveland Indians' uniform next year.\n\nThe polarizing mascot is coming off the team's jersey sleeves and caps starting in the 2019 season, a move that will end Chief Wahoo's presence on the field but may not completely silence those who deem it racist.\n\nThe Associated Press was informed of the decision before an official announcement was planned for Monday by Major League Baseball.\n\nAfter lengthy discussions between team owner Paul Dolan and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, the Indians are taking the extraordinary step of shelving the big-toothed, smiling, red-faced caricature, which has been used in used in various expressions by the team since 1947.\n\nHowever,", + " the American League team will continue to wear the Wahoo logo on its uniform sleeves and caps in 2018, and the club will still sell merchandise featuring the mascot in Northeast Ohio. The team must maintain a retail presence so that MLB and the Indians can keep ownership of the trademark.\n\n\"Major League Baseball is committed to building a culture of diversity and inclusion throughout the game,\" Manfred said in a statement. \"Over the past year, we encouraged dialogue with the Indians organization about the club's use of the Chief Wahoo logo. During our constructive conversations, Paul Dolan made clear that there are fans who have a longstanding attachment to the logo and its place in the history of the team.\n\n\"", + "Nonetheless, the club ultimately agreed with my position that the logo is no longer appropriate for on-field use in Major League Baseball, and I appreciate Mr. Dolan's acknowledgement that removing it from the on-field uniform by the start of the 2019 season is the right course.\"\n\nUnder growing pressure to eliminate Chief Wahoo, the club has been transitioning away from the logo in recent years. The Indians introduced a block \"C'' insignia on some of their caps and have removed signs with the Wahoo logo in and around Progressive Field, the team's downtown ballpark.\n\nNational criticism and scrutiny about the Indians' allegiance to Chief Wahoo grew in 2016,", + " when the Indians made the World Series and Manfred expressed his desire to have the team eradicate the symbol. Earlier in that postseason, a lawsuit was filed while the club was playing in Toronto to have the logo and team name banned from appearing on Canadian TV. That court case was dismissed by a judge.\n\nThe Indians' bid to host the 2019 All-Star Game, which it was ultimately awarded, further heightened debate over Wahoo.\n\n\"We have consistently maintained that we are cognizant and sensitive to both sides of the discussion,\" Dolan said. \"While we recognize many of our fans have a long-standing attachment to Chief Wahoo, I'm ultimately in agreement with Commissioner Manfred's desire to remove the logo from our uniforms in 2019.\"\n\nThe fight over Wahoo has spanned decades in Cleveland.\n\nEvery year,", + " groups of Native Americans and their supporters have protested outside the stadium before the home opener in hopes of not only getting the team to abolish Chief Wahoo but to change the Indians' nickname, which they feel is an offensive depiction of their race.\n\nThose dissenting voices have been met with fans devoted to preserving Chief Wahoo's place in team history. The Indians' resurgence in the mid-1990s helped spur a downtown renaissance in Cleveland.\n\nThe NFL's Washington Redskins have come under similar fire to change their logo and nickname but so far have resisted. Last year, a Supreme Court ruling in another case cleared the way for the Redskins to preserve the trademark on its logo.\n\n___\n\nMore AP baseball:", + " https://apnews.com/tag/MLBbaseball\n" + ], + "length": 1445, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 17, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The bottom of the Atlantic Ocean has been burping methane for at least 1,000 years, scientists have discovered. NOAA surveyed the Atlantic Coast using sound waves and found at least 570 methane \"seeps\" from Cape Hatteras to Nantucket, right where the continental shelf meets the ocean, LiveScience reports. They found the methane in two forms depending on the seeps' depth\u2014most are between 800 and 2,000 feet, reports the New York Times. Shallow seeps are coming from burping microbes, but deeper down it turns into a sludge called methane hydrate that releases the gas when it's warmed, the BBC explains. The find is odd because methane seeps usually occur in \"tectonically active\" spots; the quiet East Coast is \"cold, old, and boring,\" says study co-author Carolyn Ruppel, who adds that \"we're setting the stage for a decade of discovery.\" Methane is a greenhouse gas, and the seeps could serve as a lab for studying climate change and its potential effects. The seeps aren't causing environmental concern\u2014one expert says the amount of methane released is \"probably on the order of a feedlot\" and is dissolving in the ocean. In a biological side note, scientists have also found new life near the seeps\u2014chemosynthetic creatures that get energy from chemical reactions and not the sun. LiveScience has photos of the methane seeps here.\n", + "docs": [ + "Image copyright A.Skarke Image caption A sonar image of a new methane plume discovered off the US east coast\n\nResearchers say they have found more than 500 bubbling methane vents on the seafloor off the US east coast.\n\nThe unexpected discovery indicates there are large volumes of the gas contained in a type of sludgy ice called methane hydrate.\n\nThere are concerns that these new seeps could be making a hitherto unnoticed contribution to global warming.\n\nThe scientists say there could be about 30,000 of these hidden methane vents worldwide.\n\nPrevious surveys along the Atlantic seaboard have shown only three seep areas beyond the edge of the US continental shelf.\n\nDeep seep\n\nThe team behind the new findings studied what is termed the continental margin,", + " the region of the ocean floor that stands between the coast and the deep ocean.\n\nIn an area between North Carolina and Massachusetts, they have now found at least 570 seeps at varying depths between 50m and 1,700m.\n\nTheir findings came as a bit of a surprise.\n\nWhat is methane hydrate? Methane hydrate is in the form of a 3D ice structure with natural gas locked inside\n\nThe substance looks like white ice, but it does not behave like it\n\nIf methane hydrate is either warmed or depressurised, it will break down into water and natural gas\n\nThe energy content of methane occurring in hydrate form is immense\n\nIn the Gulf of Mexico,", + " gas hydrate resources have recently been assessed at more than 6,000 trillion cubic feet Source: US Department of Energy\n\n\"It is the first time we have seen this level of seepage outside the Arctic that is not associated with features like oil or gas reservoirs or active tectonic margins,\" said Prof Adam Skarke from Mississippi State University, who led the study.\n\nThe scientists have observed streams of bubbles but they have not yet sampled the gas within them.\n\nHowever, they believe there is an abundance of circumstantial evidence pointing to methane.\n\nMost of the seeping vents were located around 500m down, which is just the right temperature and pressure to create a sludgy confection of ice and gas called methane hydrate,", + " or clathrate.\n\nThe scientists say that the warming of ocean temperatures might be causing these hydrates to send bubbles of gas drifting through the water column.\n\nThey do not appear to be reaching the surface.\n\n\"The methane is dissolving into the ocean at depths of hundreds of metres and being oxidised to CO2,\" said Prof Skarke.\n\nImage copyright USGS Image caption Methane hydrates recovered in the Gulf of Mexico by the US Geological Survey\n\n\"But it is important to say we simply don't have any evidence in this paper to suggest that any carbon coming from these seeps is entering the atmosphere.\"\n\nThis research, though, does highlight the scale of methane that is under the waters.\n\nEstimates suggest that these undersea sediments are one of the largest reservoirs on Earth,", + " and contains around 10 times more carbon than the atmosphere.\n\nCarbon budget revisions\n\nProf Skarke and his colleagues estimate that worldwide, there may be around 30,000 of the type of seeps they have discovered.\n\nThey acknowledge that this is a rough calculation but they believe that it could be significant.\n\nWhile the vents may not be posing an immediate global warming threat, the sheer number means that our calculations on the potential sources of greenhouse gases may need revising.\n\nThe scientists also found abundant life around many of these seeps, but not perhaps as we know it.\n\nThe creatures they describe are termed chemosynthetic, meaning they derive energy from chemical reactions and not from the Sun as do photosynthetic organisms.\n\nOthers who have collaborated on the search for seeps say these discoveries are important.\n\n\"These are significant geochemically,", + " as they and our research teams found perhaps one of the largest seeps yet discovered with very active methane bubbling and large amounts of frozen hydrates,\" said Prof Steve Ross, from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.\n\n\"These seeps are also significant biologically, as we have found unique chemosynthetic communities, huge range extensions and increased biodiversity.\"\n\nAs to the energy potential of these new seeping sources, Prof Skarke is fairly pessimistic.\n\n\"There is no evidence to say that these clathrates are related to conventional gas reservoirs, so there is no evidence to say they are a recoverable resource.\"\n\nThe research has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.\n\nFollow Matt on Twitter @mattmcgrathbbc.", + " These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web. Crawls of supported \"No More 404\" sites. ", + " In an unexpected discovery, hundreds of gas plumes bubbling up from the seafloor were spotted during a sweeping survey of the U.S. Atlantic Coast.\n\nEven though ocean explorers have yet to test the gas, the bubbles are almost certainly methane, researchers report today (Aug. 24) in the journal Nature Geoscience.\n\n\"We don't know of any explanation that fits as well as methane,\" said lead study author Adam Skarke, a geologist at Mississippi State University in Mississippi State.\n\nSurprising seeps\n\nBetween North Carolina's Cape Hatteras and Massachusetts' Georges Bank, 570 methane seeps cluster in about eight regions,", + " according to sonar and video gathered by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration ship Okeanos Explorer between 2011 and 2013. The vast majority of the seeps dot the continental slope break, where the seafloor topography swoops down toward the Atlantic Ocean basin. [Gallery: Amazing images of Atlantic Methane Seeps]\n\nThe Okeanos Explorer used sound waves to detect the methane bubbles and map the seafloor. The technique, called multibeam sonar, calculates the time and distance it takes for sound waves to travel from the ship to the seafloor and back. The sonar can also detect the density contrast between gas bubbles and seawater.\n\nHuge canyons etched in the shallow continental shelf also hide bubble plumes,", + " as well as diverse ecosystems that are based on methane-loving bacteria. In 2013, researchers explored a handful of these seeps with Jason, a remotely operated vehicle, finding them teeming with crabs, fish and mussel beds. In Norfolk canyon off the coast of Virginia, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington discovered the largest methane seep ever found in the Atlantic Ocean, and possibly all the world's oceans. [Photos: Unique Life Found at East Coast Gas Seep]\n\nMost of the methane seeps are in water less than 1,640 feet (500 meters) deep. Most of these shallow methane seeps seem to arise from microbes blurping out methane,", + " the researchers said. The researchers did find some deeper methane vents, at which the ROV Jason glimpsed patches of methane hydrate. This is the icy mix of methane and water that appears when deep ocean pressures and cold temperatures force methane to solidify. Any type of methane gas can form hydrates.\n\nAn illustration of the Atlantic margin showing the relationship between methane seeps and seafloor features. Credit: A. Skarke and C. Ruppel/Nature Geoscience\n\nWhile methane vents are common around the world, only three natural gas seeps \u2014 where methane escapes from seafloor sediments \u2014 had been found off the East Coast before 2012.\n\n\"It was a surprise to find these features,\" Skarke said.", + " \"It was unexpected because many of the common things associated with methane gas do not exist on the Atlantic margin.\"\n\nGas, gas, gas?\n\nThe East Coast is a passive margin, and methane isn't expected to come out of this environment. The margin hasn't been squeezed or pulled by plate tectonic activity for tens of millions of years, and that means a lack of escape routes for methane. \"I usually describe passive margins as cold, old and boring,\" said study co-author Carolyn Ruppel, chief of the U.S. Geological Survey gas hydrates project in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. [In Images: How North America Grew as a Continent]\n\nAlso missing from the Atlantic Coast are layers of salt,", + " which are responsible for the Gulf of Mexico's oil and gas.\n\nWithout more exploring, the researchers can't say for sure why there are so many methane plumes along the Atlantic coastline. \"It's a huge research area that needs to be pursued,\" Ruppel said.\n\nIf the East Coast could hide hundreds of bubbling methane pits, then it's likely there are nearly 30,000 more awaiting discovery in the world's oceans, the researchers said.\n\n\"These processes may be happening in places we didn't expect them,\" Skarke said.\n\nCup corals and bubblegum corals live on rock near the edge of the mussel bed.", + " Credit: NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, 2013 Northeast U.S. Canyons Expedition\n\nThere's also a good chance more methane vents will be found off the East Coast, but that doesn't mean one should expect new drilling platforms popping up offshore to extract the gas, the researchers said. \"We have no evidence to suggest this material would be a recoverable resource,\" Skarke told Live Science. \"There is no evidence whatsoever that there are conventional deep-seated oil and gas reservoirs underneath the Atlantic margin.\"\n\nThe more likely scenario: A fleet of research ships hurries to claim the seeps. The methane seeps are near ports where many of the U.S.", + " research ships dock. The ease of access has set off an exploration stampede, with several new projects in planning stages or already funded.\n\n\"We're setting the stage for a decade of discovery,\" Ruppel said.\n\nFrom the Arctic to Atlantic\n\nInterest is running high because the seeps could be a laboratory for studying how methane hydrates respond to climate change.\n\nMethane is a greenhouse gas that disappears more quickly than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but has more warming power than carbon dioxide. Millions of tons of methane are frozen in Arctic permafrost, both on land and in the seafloor. Recently, several studies have warned that rapid warming in the Arctic could upset these deposits,", + " melting them and freeing the gas. This would boost the planet's greenhouse gas levels and could accelerate climate change.\n\nA close-up of methane hydrate observed at a depth of 3,460 feet (1,055 meters) off the U.S. Atlantic Coast. Credit: NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program/2013 Northeast U.S. Canyons Expedition\n\n\"Now we have a study site where we can monitor these locations and see how they change,\" said David Valentine, a geochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. \"Finally we have a place where we can begin to address some of the questions about how water temperatures are influencing methane.\"\n\nAt present,", + " scientists think the East Coast seeps don't contribute much methane to climate change.\n\nMost of the methane gas dissolves in the ocean before reaching the surface, Ruppel said. The total amount of gas is also much smaller than sources on land, such as cows or gas drilling. \"It's probably on the order of a feedlot of methane,\" Valentine said. However, some shallow-water seeps could vent methane to the surface, and researchers expect that future surveys will uncover even more shallow seeps. These regions only received a cursory look during the survey.\n\nEven though the methane may not escape to the atmosphere, the gas still adds to the ocean's overall carbon budget \u2014 which is still a wildly uncertain number.\n\n\"It's not a huge number,", + " but it's an important number for us to know,\" Ruppel said.\n\nEmail Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.\n" + ], + "length": 2538, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 18, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A judge in Oregon is refusing to perform same-sex marriages because of \"deeply held religious beliefs,\" reports KGW. Judge Vance Day\u2014former chairman of the state's Republican Party\u2014created a legal defense fund yesterday, apparently to pay for expenses he expects to incur fighting allegations he's violating the state's Code of Judicial Conduct as well as its constitution, reports Oregon Live. \u201cIt\u2019s an exercise of his religious freedom rights under the First Amendment,\u201d his spokesperson tells KGW. The station reports Day hasn't performed any same-sex marriages since becoming a judge in 2011\u2014telling his clerks to send gay couples elsewhere\u2014and stopped performing marriages entirely in the spring. Oregon law does not require judges to perform marriages, and there are apparently six other judges in Day's county available to perform them. Day's spokesperson says the judge is facing an ethics investigation, though details on what exactly is being investigated haven't been released. In Oregon, public officials are allowed to set up trusts to pay for legal defenses against government investigations, Oregon Live reports.\n", + "docs": [ + "Marion County Circuit Judge Vance Day, a former chairman of the Oregon Republican Party, took steps Thursday to create a legal defense fund in an apparent response to his decision not to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies.\n\nDay took action because of what he described as \"deeply-held religious beliefs,\" KGW reported.\n\n\"It's an exercise of his religious freedom rights under the First Amendment,\" Day spokesman Patrick Korten told the news station.\n\nIn recent months, Day has not performed any marriage ceremonies, KGW reported. His courtroom is in Salem.\n\nThe Oregon Government Ethics Commission voted unanimously Thursday to approve Day's request to establish a legal defense fund.\n\nDay noted in an affidavit signed Aug.", + " 19 that he was seeking to establish the fund to defray legal expenses in connection with inquiries by the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability involving allegations of violations of the Oregon Code of Judicial Conduct and the Oregon Constitution.\n\n\"These legal expenses arose by virtue of, and were related to, my service as an Oregon Circuit Judge,\" Day wrote in the affidavit.\n\nHe acknowledged in the affidavit that he is bound by provisions of state law that spell out the establishment, administration and termination of legal expense trusts.\n\nState law allows public officials to set up such trusts to collect money for their legal defense in a variety of circumstances, including investigations brought by public bodies.\n\nIt was not immediately clear whether Day was under investigation.\n\nOregon law allows a wide range of officiants at marriage ceremonies.", + " Among those allowed to conduct such proceedings, known in legal parlance as \"solemnizing\" the marriage, are state judges, federal judges (including magistrates), county clerks and religious congregations.\n\nThe judge didn't return messages from The Oregonian/OregonLive for comment.\n\nThe Marion Circuit Court website lists six judges available to perform weddings: four Circuit judges among the current roster of 14, one retired Circuit judge and a Municipal Court judge.\n\nIt also includes this disclaimer: \"This list is informational only and does not guarantee that a particular judge will be available to perform any particular wedding ceremony.\"\n\n-- Bryan Denson\n\nbdenson@", + "oregonian.com\n\n503-294-7614; @Bryan_Denson\n\nThis post has been modified to reflect the following correction: County clerks (not court clerks) can solemnize marriages in Oregon. ", + " Vance D. Day is sworn in as a Marion County Circuit Court Judge Monday, Oct. 10, 2011. (Photo: KOBBI R. BLAIR, Statesman Journal)\n\nPORTLAND, Ore. \u2013 A Marion County judge has refused to perform same-sex marriages and has asked his clerks to refer couples seeking same-sex marriages to other county judges.\n\nJudge Vance Day, a circuit court judge and former chairman of the Oregon Republican Party, is now facing an ethics investigation over that decision, according to the judge\u2019s spokesman.\n\nThe story was first reported by talk radio host Lars Larson.\n\nSpokesman Patrick Korten said Day instructed his staff to tell couples that the judge will not perform same-sex marriages.", + " The staffers were instructed to refer same-sex couples to other Marion County judges willing to issue them a marriage license.\n\nKorten said Day took the action based on his \u201cdeeply-held religious beliefs.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s an exercise of his religious freedom rights under the First Amendment,\u201d Korten said.\n\nPortland school in hot water after withdrawing job offer to gay person\n\nDay hasn\u2019t performed any same-sex marriages since he joined the bench in 2011, but only stopped doing marriages of any kind this past spring. Judges in Marion County are not required to perform marriages, and Marion County\u2019s website lists five active judges and one retired judge who are available for marriage ceremonies.\n\nThat decision led to an ethics investigation by the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness,", + " Korten said.\n\nKorten said he couldn\u2019t discuss specifics of the complaint against Day until the commission released it to the public.\n\nIt\u2019s not clear when that complaint will be made public. Until that happens we won\u2019t know the exact details of what Day is accused of doing, aside from what he publicly discusses.\n\nAccording to Phil Lemon with the Oregon Judicial Department, the commission isn\u2019t required to publicize complaints until they schedule a public hearing.\n\n\u201cWe have no problem with releasing it,\u201d Korten said.\n\nThe commission\u2019s director did not immediately return calls for comment.\n\nDay\u2019s decision came to light on Thursday when the Oregon Government Ethics Commission gave Day permission to create a legal fund for himself.\n\n(The Oregon Government Ethics Commission is a separate board from the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness.)\n\nDay told the commission that he needed to fund to help cover legal expenses he expects to incur defending himself during the judicial ethics investigation.\n\nTop Local Headlines:\n\nSt.", + " Mary's Academy 'deeply sorry' for community turmoil\n\nMilwaukie area neighbors fighting proposed development\n\nMarcus Mariota enters 'Heisman House,' gets distracted by ice cream\n\nKeep up with the latest news in Portland and beyond. Tap to get our free KGW News app!\n\nRead or Share this story: http://on.kgw.com/1UvGQLU\n" + ], + "length": 1032, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 19, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Chuck Hagel has cleared his first hurdle in becoming secretary of defense: The Senate Armed Services panel voted 14-11 to approve President Obama's pick to succeed Leon Panetta. All of the Democrats on the committee backed Hagel, and all of the Republicans opposed him. The nomination now goes to the full Senate, and while AP says the former Nebraska senator is expected to prevail in the end, the outcome is anything but a sure thing. Some Republicans are threatening to take the rare action of filibustering a Cabinet pick, reports Politico. A Senate vote could take place Thursday. Click to read some of the common criticisms against him.\n", + "docs": [ + "Some Senate Republicans are prepared to filibuster Chuck Hagel\u2019s nomination to become the next secretary of defense, a rare maneuver to block a Cabinet-level nominee that demonstrates the lingering hostility from GOP senators toward a man who used to serve with them.\n\nHagel, a former Nebraska GOP senator for a dozen years, still appears likely to eventually garner the votes for Senate confirmation when Republican opponents force Democrats to jump through procedural hoops to move toward a final vote.\n\nText Size -\n\n+\n\nreset Graham: No confirmation without information Hagel nomination clears committee\n\n(Also on POLITICO: Reid 'confident' GOP won't filibuster Hagel)\n\nBut the filibuster threat \u2014 reiterated Monday by Sen.", + " Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee \u2014 would make Hagel just the third Cabinet nominee in history to require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster on the Senate floor. The other two nominees were President Ronald Reagan\u2019s 1987 choice to head his Commerce Department, C. William Verity, and President George W. Bush\u2019s 2006 choice of Dirk Kempthorne to be secretary of the interior.\n\nEven if Hagel cracks the 60-vote threshold, the GOP will have sent a message to President Barack Obama: Nobody gets a free pass on confirmations.\n\nNever before has a defense secretary nominee required 60 votes on the floor to overcome a filibuster threat,", + " the closest being Bush\u2019s 2006 pick to be an assistant secretary of defense, Peter Flory, according to the Senate\u2019s historical office.\n\n\u201cYes, I will,\u201d Inhofe said when asked by POLITICO whether he would filibuster Hagel\u2019s nomination, adding that he didn\u2019t know that the move would be a first.\n\nOf course, it\u2019s still possible that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) cut a deal and a Hagel filibuster is avoided \u2014 or that Inhofe, or another GOP senator, backs down from their threats.\n\nBut the filibuster warnings are the latest twist in a rocky confirmation process that would be likely to weaken the new defense secretary\u2019s relationship with Congress at a key time for the Pentagon.", + " They come after Hagel has endured blistering attacks from Republicans on past statements and positions \u2014 on Iran, Israel, Iraq and nuclear arms control \u2014 and after a shaky confirmation hearing failed to quell GOP concerns. Republicans have demanded more information on the source of his income after he left office, which Democrats have called unfair.\n\nThe criticism started even before Hagel was nominated, and the unusual months-long confirmation battle has been fought with campaign-style media buys, opposition research and op-ed columns. On Tuesday, Republicans are prepared to cede a tactical defeat, letting Hagel pass through the Armed Services Committee on what\u2019s expected to be a partisan vote.\n\nBut that doesn\u2019t mean Hagel\u2019s GOP foes,", + " many of whom are his former Senate friends, are giving up the fight.\n\nOn Monday, Inhofe made clear his threat to require 60 votes for Hagel to win confirmation, a precedent-setting move certain to be replicated by future Senates.\n\n\u201cSen. Inhofe is prepared to take necessary measures to ensure there is a 60-vote threshold,\u201d Inhofe spokeswoman Donelle Harder said.\n\nThat threat has been echoed by other Senate Republicans, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has publicly warned that he\u2019ll place a hold on Hagel\u2019s nomination until the Obama administration provides a more detailed accounting of last year\u2019s deadly attacks in Benghazi.", + " A bitterly divided Senate panel on Tuesday voted to approve President Barack Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel to be the nation's defense secretary at a time of turmoil for the military with looming budget cuts, a fresh sign of North Korea's nuclear ambitions and drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.\n\nFILE - In this Jan. 31, 2103 file photo, former Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, President Obama's choice for defense secretary, testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation... (Associated Press)\n\nThe Armed Services Committee voted 14-11 to send the nomination to the full Senate, with all the panel's Democrats backing the president's choice to succeed Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.", + " The committee's Republicans were unified in their opposition to their onetime colleague, a former two-term Republican senator from Nebraska and twice-wounded Vietnam combat veteran.\n\nSenate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he would move ahead with a full Senate vote despite Republican complaints that he was \"jamming it through.\" A vote is expected on Thursday, and barring any surprises, the Senate is likely to confirm Hagel for the president's second-term national security team.\n\nHagel, 66, would take charge of a military facing deep cuts in projected spending; challenges from North Korea, Iran and Syria; and the reduction of U.S.", + " combat forces in Afghanistan.\n\nDemocrats, who hold a 55-45 edge in the Senate, have the numbers to confirm Hagel on a majority vote, but would need the support of five Republicans before an up-or-down vote on the president's Cabinet choice would be allowed.\n\nMore than a dozen Republicans oppose the nomination, and the committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, is insisting that any confirmation be based on 60 votes rather than a majority of the Senate. But several Republicans reject what would be an unprecedented effort to delay a vote on a Cabinet nominee for defense secretary.\n\nHagel faces fierce opposition from Republicans who have challenged his past statements and votes on Israel,", + " Iran, Iraq and nuclear weapons. Just hours before Tuesday's vote, foes circulated a memo arguing for more information about Hagel's personal finances and highlighting past statements by Democratic senators demanding further disclosures when the Senate considered nominees by Republican presidents.\n\nThe panel's chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the GOP demands were beyond the scope of those traditionally asked of previous nominees, Republican and Democrat _ a point echoed by his Republican colleague, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.\n\nBut Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, continued to demand that Hagel provide personal financial information for the past five years instead of the standard two years of committee and Senate rules,", + " and suggested that the panel doesn't know whether Hagel received compensation from \"extreme and radical groups.\" He also suggested that Hagel was hiding information.\n\nThat angered Levin, who rejected the notion of a different standard for Hagel than for other nominees and said he was \"not going to accept your suggestion and innuendo.\"\n\nSen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., accused Cruz over going over the line.\n\n\"You basically have impugned the patriotism of the nominee\" with suggestions that he is cozy with Iran, Nelson said. \"You also stated your opinion that you don't think he's truthful. Those are two fairly strong statements.\"\n\nInhofe said reported comments about Iranian leaders praising Hagel backs up Cruz's claim.", + " \"You can't get cozier,\" the panel's top Republican said.\n\nThe testy exchanges about Hagel prompted McCain to interject, \"Sen. Hagel is an honorable man. No one on this committee should impugn his character and integrity.\"\n\nSen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., insisted that the former GOP senator was out of the mainstream. \"He's in a league of his own,\" Graham said.\n\nMcCain, who was a close friend of Hagel's but split over the Iraq war and politics, said Tuesday he would vote against confirmation. However, late Monday McCain met privately with several committee Republicans and urged them not to filibuster the nomination,", + " pointing out that the roles could be reversed someday with a Republican president and GOP-controlled Senate.\n\n\"I'm encouraging my colleagues if they want to vote against Sen. Hagel that's one thing, and that's a principled stand,\" McCain told a group of reporters. \"We do not want to filibuster. We have not filibustered a Cabinet appointee in the past and I believe that we should move forward with his nomination, bring it to the floor and vote up or down.\"\n\nAll 55 Democrats are expected to back Hagel, and two Republicans _ Sens. Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Mike Johanns of Nebraska _ have said they will vote for the nominee.", + " At least five Republicans have said they oppose a filibuster despite their reservations or opposition toward the nominee.\n\nMore than a dozen Republicans have said they will oppose their former colleague, and several others have indicated they are likely to vote no. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., a member of the Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday she would vote against the nominee, citing his performance at his confirmation hearing.\n\nHagel seemed ill-prepared under withering cross-examination from committee Republicans in nearly eight hours of testimony on Jan. 31. He was repeatedly pressed about past statements and votes on Israel, Iran and nuclear weapons, with GOP lawmakers suggesting he wasn't sufficiently supportive of Israel or anti-Iran.\n\nIn the memo circulated Tuesday,", + " Republicans focused on the 2005 fight over President George W. Bush's nomination of John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, and Democrats who tried to stop the nomination. The position is not Cabinet-level, however.\n\nFaced with a Democratic filibuster, Bush circumvented the Senate and made Bolton a recess appointment.\n\nGraham has signaled that he would block the nominations of Hagel and CIA Director-designate John Brennan if he doesn't get more answers about the deadly raid on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in September.\n\n\"I'm insisting that the president answer... what he did that night. That's all.", + " It would take five minutes to answer my question,\" Graham told reporters. \"It's the only leverage I have.\"\n\nThe White House pushed back Monday, with spokesman Jay Carney insisting the administration had answered lingering questions about Libya and the president's actions on that fateful day.\n\n\"What is unfortunate here is the continuing attempt to politicize an issue, in this case through nominees that themselves had nothing to do with Benghazi, and to do so in a way that only does harm to our national security interests,\" Carney said. \"Sen. Hagel, Mr. Brennan, they need to be confirmed.\"\n" + ], + "length": 2090, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 20, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 It's the anti-Prius: An Austrian company has essentially put a mini-mansion on wheels. The 40-foot-long Elemment Palazzo from Marchi Mobile has an en suite bedroom, underfloor heating, a 40-inch TV, a bar area, and a pop-out roof terrace, reports Time. Glow-in-the-dark paint is optional. But get ready to cough up: The futuristic-looking vehicle has a starting price of $3 million. Gizmag has more details. (Click to read about Beyonce's million-dollar \"mom van.\")\n", + "docs": [ + "Marchi Mobile has launched its eleMMent series of ultra-luxurious recreational vehicles. Designed to offer a mansion away from the mansion, the series comes in three, fully configurable flavors and offers everything you'll never need on the road, including automatic boarding stairs, a flybridge and an operational fireplace.\n\nPartially based on a 2001 design by Luigi Colani, this mobile luxury villa resting on a DAF XF 105 track chassis features deliberately radical elements such as the highly conspicuous oval windscreen that make the it stand out at first sight. It owes its shape to something more than a designer's whim, however, as the vehicle's aerodynamic properties result in up to 20 percent reduction in fuel consumption.", + " This eco-friendly touch is nicely off-set by a \"truly sportive\", max 530 horsepower turbo charged diesel engine, a rear diffuser made of carbon-fiber and a double tube sport exhaust. The vehicle also boasts an above average safety rating.\n\neleMMent PALAZZO - MOBILE HOME\n\nThe eleMMent PALAZZO is a four wheel luxury mansion. The fully automatic, pop-up flybridge lounge with multiple bars towers over two floors that contain, among other things, a kitchen, a master bedroom with an integrated bathroom and a couch that can be converted into bar furniture at the push of a button. All the automatic setting-up and dismantling is handled via a touch screen control panel.", + " An additional, mobile control unit with remote video streaming functionality enables the prudent owner to keep an eye on all the important indicators and play with lighting and temperature settings from afar.\n\neleMMent VIVA - VIP SHUTTLE\n\nThis is Marchi Mobile's take on business mobility. The six business lounge swivel armchairs with massage features make eleMMent VIVA probably one of the most comfortable mobile conference rooms on the planet - or at least the road. The 8.2 foot (2.5 m) tall interior provides a lot of breathing space for serious business negotiations.\n\neleMMent VISIONE - PROMOTION VEHICLE\n\nThe Visione is the only eleMMent vehicle built for the working class.", + " It is marketed as a \"superior tool to enthuse and inspire the superior target\". It is essentially a mobile showroom that enables the display wares in style. The 39.37 foot (12 m) long vehicle offers 215.27 square feet (20 sq. m) to 430.55 square feet (40 sq.m) of display space.\n\nThe three set-ups described above can be configured at will and can be fitted with pretty much everything you can find in a luxury mansion. This includes an operational fireplace (for use when parked), floor heating and a rainfall shower, not to mention such obvious conveniences as mobile Internet or a 40-inch flat screen satellite TV.", + " To top things off, the more creative buyers can even design their own fluorescent coating pattern, which should make the eleMMent stand out in the crowd even in the event of a black-out.\n\nSee the Marchi Mobile's website for an interactive tour-de-eleMMent. ", + " Courtesy of Marchi Mobiles\n\nWealthy road warriors can now custom order a seriously decked out \u2014 and seriously weird-looking \u2014 mobile home.\n\nIt looks abruptly futuristic on the outside, but that\u2019s only the half of it. The Elemment Palazzo, made by Austrian company Marchi Mobile features an en suite bedroom, a pop-out roof terrace, under-floor heating, a skylight, a rainfall shower, a 40-inch television and a bar area that pops out of one side of the vehicle.\n\nMost of these indulgences are visible in the pictures shown on the company\u2019s website, as is the peculiar choice of decor.", + " Whoever designed the interiors of the show model decided to mix \u201970s discotheque sofas, Victorian-style gilded door and window frames, and au natural wooden floorboards. NewsFeed would also like to direct the reader\u2019s attention to the large mirror hanging above the bed.\n\nThe fancy RV is also painted in glow-in-the-dark paint. If all this isn\u2019t over-the-top enough, buyers can come up with more outrageous add-ons \u2014 $3 million is just the starting price.\n\nMORE: A Flying Car? Yep, And Now It\u2019s Officially Road Legal Too\n" + ], + "length": 881, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 21, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Harvey has made landfall again, this time as a tropical storm near the Louisiana-Texas border on the day after the 12th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. ABC News reports the storm came ashore just west of Cameron, La., around 5am ET, with CNN noting that winds of roughly 40mph and a storm surge of 2 to 4 feet are expected. NOAA's public advisory now predicts another 3 to 6 inches of rain in southwestern Louisiana, the eastern Texas border area, and western Kentucky through Friday, with some areas getting as many as 10 inches. But as one National Hurricane Center meteorologist puts it, it's not the end, but the \"end of the beginning\": Per NOAA, \"While the threat of heavy rains has ended in the Houston/Galveston area, catastrophic and life-threatening flooding will continue in and around Houston eastward into southwest Louisiana for the rest of the week.\" More: The AP describes things as \"dire\" in Port Arthur, Texas, near the Louisiana border, on Wednesday morning, as rising floodwaters inundated homes. Port Arthur Mayor Derrick Freeman said on his Facebook page that the \"city is underwater right now but we are coming!\" The AP also suggests some potential relief, at least from the rain, for Houston, with expected rainfall for Wednesday at less than an inch. People reports on one of Harvey's victims: a 41-year-old mother from Beaumont, Texas, who police say \"absolutely\" saved the life of her 3-year-old daughter; the child was found floating in a canal with her mother after the two became stuck while driving. \"The baby also had a backpack that was helping her float on her back and she was holding on to her mom,\" says an officer. Add this to Harvey's toll: two ExxonMobil refineries, which sustained storm-related damage that facilitated the release of pollutants. The Washington Post has the details on the damage at the Baytown oil refinery, America's second-biggest, and the Beaumont petrochemical refinery. NPR explains that the cleanup bill for Harvey could be as much as $100 billion, and while Congress will likely approve the funding needed, \"it probably won't be easy.\" It explains why, and the waves in which the funding would be issued. The New York Times reports that a 12am to 5am curfew is now in place in Houston, and came partly in response to reports of \"small-scale looting.\" The Times puts the death toll at no less than 30. A longtime Houston cop is among the dead.\n", + "docs": [ + "Why Approving Emergency Funding For Harvey Might Not Be Easy For Congress\n\nEnlarge this image toggle caption Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images\n\nWhen the floodwaters in Texas eventually recede, the cleanup and rebuilding will begin.\n\nThe cleanup bill will likely be hefty \u2014 possibly topping $100 billion \u2014 and the vast majority of those efforts will be funded by the federal government.\n\nPresident Trump doesn't seem worried about Congress footing the bill. \"You're going to see very rapid action from Congress,\" he told reporters Monday. \"You're going to get your funding.\"\n\nIn a visit to Austin on Tuesday, Trump met with the state's two Republican senators and again alluded to the price tag for federal help.\n\n\"We'll be working with these characters over there and think we'll come through with a really,", + " you know the right solution,\" the president said, adding recovery from Harvey is \"going to be a costly proposition.\"\n\nBut emergency response legislation has become increasingly partisan in recent years, and Congress is already facing a daunting stretch of must-pass bills when it returns next week.\n\nFunding for cleanup and rebuilding will likely pass \u2014 but it probably won't be easy.\n\n\"I sort of see it as everyone holding their breath,\" Sarah Binder, a congressional expert at the Brookings Institution, said about the coming stretch of deadlines.\n\nFunding for the government expires Sept. 30. The deadline for raising the debt ceiling hits next month, too. It has been increasingly hard to round up conservative support for both measures in recent years.", + " \"It's not yet clear how exactly they're going to proceed,\" Binder said. \"And there's the wild card of the president who has threatened to shut down the government if they don't fund a border wall.\"\n\nSeveral popular government programs expire at the end of September, too, and need reauthorization votes beforehand.\n\nThat is the backdrop that urgent Harvey funding will be added to.\n\n\"The federal funds are absolutely essential to recovery,\" says Edward Richards, director of Louisiana State University's Climate Change Law and Policy Project.\n\nOver the past six decades, the federal government has become the prime funder and driver of recovery efforts after major storms.\n\nOn Tuesday night,", + " Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao announced that her department would make $25 million \"immediately available to help Texas with repairs on flood-damaged roads and bridges,\" following a request by the state. A statement from the secretary said the funding \"represents the beginning of our commitment to help repair Texas' affected infrastructure.\"\n\nRichards describes federal funding as coming in three waves: first, initial grants doled out to individuals and businesses by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.\n\nAfter that, the National Flood Insurance Program issues billions in claims for flooded-out homes and businesses. \"That is fairly swift and fairly certain money. It's the most reliable relief after a flood,\" Richards says.\n\nExcept for this:", + " The National Flood Insurance Program happens to be one of those federal programs that expires on Sept. 30.\n\nA spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., insists that won't be a problem. \"Details are still being worked through, but the flood insurance program will be reauthorized,\" said Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong in a statement.\n\nBut the program has its share of critics and is still in debt because of major claims payments from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.\n\nThe third wave of federal funding is even more politically precarious: It's the individual relief bills Congress passes after major disasters.\n\nAfter Superstorm Sandy in 2012, 179 House Republicans voted against relief for the New York-New Jersey area,", + " including several members of the Texas delegation.\n\nTexas Sen. Ted Cruz did as well, in one of his first votes after joining the Senate. Cruz has found himself defending that vote all week. \"The problem with that particular bill is it became a $50 billion bill that was filled with unrelated pork,\" he said on MSNBC. \"Two-thirds of that bill had nothing to do with Sandy.\n\nFact-checkers disagree \u2014 and many lawmakers still remember that vote. \"Ted Cruz was one of the leaders who was trying to keep New York and New Jersey and Long Island from getting the funding we needed, and now he's the first one in asking for aid to Texas,\" New York Rep.", + " Peter King, a fellow Republican, told Long Island's News 12. \"But as bad as I feel toward Ted Cruz \u2014 what a hypocrite he is \u2014 I'm not going to take that out on Texas.\"\n\nAnother quote being resuscitated this week: a 2005 floor speech delivered by then-Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., warning against funding Katrina relief without cutting funding elsewhere. \"Congress must ensure that a catastrophe of nature does not become a catastrophe of debt,\" Pence said at the time.\n\nBinder says both Cruz and Pence are good examples of a longtime legislative adage: \"Where you stand depends on where you sit.\" In other words,", + " changing circumstances can lead to changing opinions.\n\nTo wit, the recent caveat-free promise Pence made to Houston station KTRH: \"I think what you're going to see is the national government \u2014 and we anticipate the Congress \u2014 are going to make the resources available to see Texas through the rescue operation, through the recovery.\"\n\nHouse Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says Democrats are ready and willing to vote for a relief bill. And House Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., said in a statement that \"my committee stands at the ready to provide any necessary additional funding for relief and recovery.\"\n\nSo, the measure will likely pass.", + " The big questions are how much it will ultimately cost and how much it affects all of Congress' other must-pass bills. ", + " Thousands of people likely remain stranded, and an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 homes have been destroyed in the Houston area as Hurricane Harvey, now a tropical depression, continues to batter the Gulf Coast with torrential rains, flooding and strong winds, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said.\n\nInterested in Hurricane Harvey? Add Hurricane Harvey as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Hurricane Harvey news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Add Interest\n\nHarvey made its third landfall, just west of Cameron, Louisiana, Wednesday at 4 a.m. CDT, with maximum sustained winds of 35 mph, according to the National Weather Service.", + " As of 11 p.m. EDT, the slow-moving storm had picked up some speed, moving northeast at 9 mph, with its center was about 30 miles northeast of Alexandria, Louisiana.\n\nThe storm was starting to fall apart overnight, with rain scattered in nature and falling over Mississippi and Arkansas. Residents in western Tennessee, around Memphis, should expect heavy rains on Thursday morning and possible flash flooding as up to 8 inches of rain are possible locally.\n\nBefore that, it battered the Beaumont-Port Arthur area in southeastern Texas, dumping more than 2 feet of rain in some parts. By Wednesday evening, the storm had weakened from a tropical storm to a tropical depression.\n\n\"We have people who are on the second floor of their homes.", + " They're riding it out, and they're waiting for the waters to go down,\" Emmett, who is also the director of Texas' Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said in an interview Wednesday with ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on \"Good Morning America.\"\n\n\"We've got probably [30,000] to 40,000 homes that have been destroyed,\" Emmett added.\n\nPower outages in the Houston area are down to 75,000, but 32,000 of those outages are inaccessible to crews, officials said Wednesday.\n\nThe brunt of the storm's impact has begun to shift to western and northern Louisiana.", + " Now, for Harris County, \"the biggest challenge is going to get people back in their homes,\" Emmett said. \"We've got to get those people back into their normal lives as soon as possible.\"\n\nThe Houston Airport System announced that it has lifted restrictions on commercial operations. On Saturday, Southwest Airlines will ramp up the number of flights, according to the airport system.\n\nA curfew from midnight to 5 a.m. will take effect in Houston for the second night in a row, Mayor Sylvester Turner said in a press conference. No arrests were made during Tuesday night's curfew, a spokesperson for the Houston Police Department said at the press conference.\n\nThe Houston Fire Department has received about 15,", + "000 calls for assistance, a spokesperson said Wednesday evening. The fire department will begin recovery operations in certain areas and conduct door-to-door checks of accessible homes that got more than 3 feet of water, the spokesperson said.\n\nHouston Police Chief Art Acevedo said 911 calls for water rescues were down to about 40 an hour as of this morning. Still, the Coast Guard is taking more than 1,000 calls per hour from people needing rescue.\n\nThe Navy is sending two ships -- the USS Kearsarge and the USS Oak Hill -- to the Gulf of Mexico to held with storm relief efforts, it announced Wednesday.\n\nVice President Mike Pence said on Wednesday that he will travel to Texas Thursday.", + " \"@POTUS asked me to travel to Texas tomorrow with his message: 'We will be with you every single day to restore, recover, and rebuild,'\" the vice president tweeted.\n\n.@POTUS asked me to travel to Texas tomorrow with his message: \"We will be with you every single day to restore, recover, and rebuild.\" pic.twitter.com/jQ0A9BGnPK \u2014 Vice President Pence (@VP) August 31, 2017\n\nHarris County Flood Control District meteorologist Jeff Lidner told reporters this morning that the lowest homes near the Addicks and Barker reservoirs have 3 to 6 feet of water.\n\nHarvey,", + " which first came ashore last Friday in Texas as a category 4 hurricane, dumped more than 51 inches of rain on some parts of the state, according to preliminary reports from the National Weather Service. The storm led to at least 31 deaths over the past five days, according to The Associated Press. Harris County officials, where Houston is located, confirmed six new deaths late Wednesday.\n\nTexas Gov. Greg Abbott -- who spoke by phone Wednesday with the president while the commander in chief was on board Air Force One, returning from Missouri -- said most of the deaths were due to people driving vehicles into high water.\n\n.@POTUS @realDonaldTrump speaks w/", + " Texas @GovAbbott on Air Force One - returning to Washington, D.C. from Missouri w/COS General John Kelly. pic.twitter.com/oTwxwM4VMU \u2014 Dan Scavino Jr. (@Scavino45) August 30, 2017\n\nAn undetermined number of people are missing. The Coast Guard is leading a search for two volunteer rescuers missing after their boat crashed and capsized on Cypress Creek near the North Freeway early Wednesday. Authorities found a third rescuer clinging to a tree, according to the Harris County Sheriff's Office.\n\nThe Harris County Sheriff's Office urged people awaiting rescue to \"hang a towel or sheet prominently\"", + " for rescuers to see because addresses are difficult to spot.\n\nHarvey is expected to weaken and continue moving to the north and east across the Lower Mississippi Valley and Tennessee Valley through Thursday. But the National Weather Service said Harvey still has the potential to cause \"life-threatening flooding.\"\n\n\"Catastrophic and life-threatening flooding continues in southeastern Texas and portions of southwestern Louisiana,\" the service said in an advisory this morning. \"Excessive runoff from heavy rainfall will cause flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses, as well as other drainage areas and low-lying spots.\"\n\nThe situation became serious in eastern Texas Wednesday.", + " The National Weather Service issued a flash-flood warning for parts of southeastern Texas, including the cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur, which received more than 26 inches of rain in some areas on Tuesday alone.\n\nPort Arthur Mayor Derrick Freeman urged residents to get to higher ground in a Facebook post early Wednesday.\n\n\"Our whole city is underwater right now but we are coming!\" Freeman wrote in one post. \"Please get to higher ground if you can, but please try stay out of attics.\"\n\nThe largest oil refinery in the United States is shutting down because of the devastating floods. Its owner, Motiva Enterprises, announced in a statement early Wednesday that it began a \"controlled shutdown of the Port Arthur refinery in response to increasing local flood conditions.\"\n\nThe refinery won't reopen until floodwaters recede,", + " the company said.\n\nOfficials were forced to evacuate the shelter at the Bob Bower Civic Center in Port Arthur this morning after it began to fill with water. One witness, who was forced to relocate, said some areas of the center had almost 4 feet of water inside.\n\nDisplaced residents were taken to a secondary evacuation site at the Carl Parker Center, according to ABC Texas affiliate KBMT-TV.\n\nThe disastrous rainfall Wednesday led the National Weather Service to further extend a flash-flood emergency for the cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur until 4:30 p.m. CT in anticipation of additional rain that morning.\n\nThe worst is not over for Texas,", + " Abbott warned Wednesday. He said 24,000 National Guard troops, including all of Texas' force, have been deployed in the state and will be crucial in the weeks and months to come to help restore order.\n\nThe National Guard has made 8,500 rescues, evacuated 26,000 people and done 1,400 shelter-in-place welfare checks in Texas so far. Meanwhile, there are 32,000 people in shelters throughout the state, Abbott said.\n\nFive days after Harvey first made landfall, FEMA said it's still in \"life-saving, life-sustaining\" mode, with recovering survivors being the top priority.", + " FEMA Administrator Brock Long said at a news conference Wednesday that there are more than 12,000 emergency staffers on the ground in Texas and Louisiana, spread across 50 counties. The agency is operating more than 230 shelters in Texas, housing more than 30,000 people.\n\nThe George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston is no longer accepting evacuees, Turner said. About 8,000 people are currently at the convention center, down from 10,000 people on Tuesday night. The city had opened up the Toyota Center as an additional shelter to ease the overcrowding at the convention center.\n\nLong said the FEMA travel trailers used after Hurricane Katrina are a \"last resort\"", + " and the agency will first try to move displaced residents into local hotels before helping them clear out their inundated houses so they can return to them. FEMA has already placed more than 1,800 flood survivors in hotels, he said.\n\nThe Air Force said it was providing aircraft assistance in response to Harvey, including two HC-130J Combat King IIs, three HH-60G Pave Hawks, air crews and other support personnel to College Station, Texas. Two C-17 Globemaster IIIs are carrying more than 30 tons of relief supplies to Louisiana's Alexandria International Airport.\n\nHelp is also coming from overseas. Gov. Abbott said on Wednesday that Texas is accepting resources from Mexico,", + " including boats, food and other supplies. And Israel's embassy in Washington tweeted, \"A team from the Israeli Rescue Coalition will arrive in #Houston on Thursday to help victims of #HurricaneHarvey.\"\n\nA team from the Israeli Rescue Coalition will arrive in #Houston on Thursday to help victims of #HurricaneHarveyhttps://t.co/Wd7Kl3fs7B pic.twitter.com/rbBL0NNHWX \u2014 Embassy of Israel (@IsraelinUSA) August 30, 2017\n\nABC News' Max Golembo, Serena Marshall, Whitney Lloyd, Luis Martinez and Zunaira Zaki contributed to this report.\n\nTake part in Disney's Day of Giving:", + " To support people impacted by Hurricane Harvey, call 1-855-999-GIVE, donate at www.RedCross.org/ABC or text \"HARVEY\" to 90999 to make a $10 donation. ", + " HOUSTON \u2014 Five days after the pummeling began \u2014 a time when big storms have usually blown through, the sun has come out, and evacuees have returned home \u2014 Tropical Storm Harvey refused to go away, battering southeast Texas even more on Tuesday, spreading the destruction into Louisiana and shattering records for rainfall and flooding.\n\nAlong 300 miles of Gulf Coast, people poured into shelters by the thousands, straining their capacity; as heavy rain kept falling, some rivers were still rising and floodwater in some areas had not crested yet; and with whole neighborhoods flooded, others were covered in water for the first time.\n\nOfficials cautioned that the full-fledged rescue-and-", + "escape phase of the crisis, usually finished by now, would continue, and that they still had no way to gauge the scale of the catastrophe \u2014 how many dead, how many survivors taking shelter inland or still hunkered down in flooded communities, and how many homes destroyed.\n\nFor everybody, it was another head-shaking 24 hours:\n\n\u2022 The storm made its second landfall early Wednesday morning in Louisiana, just west of the town of Cameron, the National Hurricane Center announced at 4 a.m. As Harvey moves northeast through the state scarred by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, forecasters expect it to gradually weaken and become a tropical depression by Wednesday night.\n\n\u2022 Local officials in Texas said at least 30 deaths were believed to have been caused by the storm through Tuesday,", + " up from eight a day earlier. The dead included a Houston police officer, Sgt. Steve Perez, 60, who was caught in flooding on Sunday while trying to report for duty. \u201cI expect that number to be significantly higher once the roads become passable,\u201d said Erin Barnhart, the chief medical examiner for Galveston County.\n\n\u2022 The city of Houston imposed a curfew from midnight to 5 a.m., starting Tuesday night and continuing until further notice. The curfew was requested by the Houston Police Department, partly in response to reports of \u201csmall-scale looting\u201d and other crimes, Chief Art Acevedo said at a news conference Tuesday evening.", + " He added that the curfew would help search and rescue teams get around without interference.\n\n\u2022 Parts of the Houston area broke the record for rainfall from a single storm anywhere in the continental United States, with a top reading on Tuesday afternoon, since the storm began, of 51.88 inches in Cedar Bayou, east of Houston, the National Weather Service reported. The previous record was 48 inches in Medina, Tex., from Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978, and with the rain still falling along the Gulf Coast, Harvey could top the 52 inches recorded in Kauai, Hawaii in 1950 from Hurricane Hiki.\n\n\u2022 Houston officials had at first limited the city\u2019s main shelter,", + " the George R. Brown Convention Center, to 5,000 evacuees, but by Tuesday morning it had swelled to more than 9,000, with more arriving by the hour, Mayor Sylvester Turner said. By the evening, evacuated residents were setting up cots in corridors because they said the main dormitories were uncomfortably crowded.\n\nOne of the people bunking at the convention center, Keimaine Percel, a mechanic, had not seen his home since it flooded, but he was trying not to think about it. \u201cI heard it was real bad,\u201d said Mr. Percel, 35. \u201cI don\u2019t know unless I get back.\u201d\n\nThe Red Cross said that in Houston alone,", + " 17,000 people began their day Tuesday in shelters, and the numbers were rising there and in inland cities that had taken evacuees such as Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. Mr. Turner said Houston would create new shelters, Dallas opened its convention center on Tuesday as a shelter for 5,000 people, and Fort Worth said it would open shelters, as well.\n\nIn the Kingwood neighborhood of Houston, people waved towels from apartment windows and yelled \u201cwe\u2019re here\u201d and \u201cfamily of three needs help,\u201d hoping to draw one of the volunteers piloting fishing boats, inflatable rafts and kayaks. ", + " (CNN) With countless Houstonians still awaiting rescue, Tropical Depression Harvey devoured another Texas city.\n\nThe unrelenting storm unleashed its wrath on a wide swath east of Houston, leaving thousands stranded in flooded homes and forcing the evacuation of a nursing facility and even an emergency shelter where residents had sought refuge.\n\n\"Our whole city is underwater right now but we are coming!\" Port Arthur Mayor Derrick Freeman posted Wednesday on Facebook. \"If you called, we are coming. Please get to higher ground if you can, but please try (to) stay out of attics.\"\n\nMy uncles have been rescuing people in Port Arthur for 24hrs!", + " So blessed to have such a helpful family who help others in times like this! pic.twitter.com/O2qIVGHqxR\n\nAt least 37 deaths related to Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath have been reported in Texas. One of them, Houston police Sgt. Steve Perez, drowned while trying to get to work.\n\n\"To those Americans who have lost loved ones, all of America is grieving with you and our hearts are joined with yours forever,\" President Donald Trump said in Springfield, Missouri.\n\nThe storm left record-setting rain in Harris County -- which saw 19 deaths -- before unleashing 15 inches in the Beaumont area, Texas Gov.", + " Greg Abbott said.\n\n\"While there may still be flooding, the good news is there shouldn't be any rain in the region for the next several days,\" said CNN Meteorologist Taylor Ward.\n\nEvacuees at the Bob Bowers Civic Center in Port Arthur face flooding again as waters rise at the shelter.\n\nMisery in Houston\n\nWhile heavy rains have ended in the Houston area, more danger looms.\n\nEmergency workers and throngs of volunteers went door to door for a fifth day Wednesday, trying to rescue victims of the flood. Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said authorities have received 60,000 to 70,000 calls for help.\n\n\"We just pray that the body count... won't rise significantly.\" Acevedo said.\n\nThe US Coast Guard is searching for two civilian rescuers who were swept away after their boat capsized Tuesday night,", + " the Harris County Sheriff's Office tweeted Wednesday.\n\nThree volunteers were trying to cross Cypress Creek when their boat crashed and capsized, sending all three under a bridge. One of the volunteers was found clinging to a tree.\n\nJUST WATCHED Torrential downpour submerges parts of Houston Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Torrential downpour submerges parts of Houston 01:06\n\nAbout one-third of the Houston area is covered in water. And it's unclear exactly how many people still need to be rescued, Texas Military Department spokesman Lt. Col. Travis Walters said.\n\nFor the first time since the weekend, authorities said, the flooding in Houston is slowly receding in some areas.\n\nThe Houston Astros announced they will play a doubleheader at home on Saturday against the New York Mets.", + " The team played the Texas Rangers in St. Petersburg, Florida, earlier this week because of the hurricane.\n\nHouston Mayor Sylvester Turner said the home game will provide \"a much needed boost for our city\" and offer residents \"some aspect of normal life.\"\n\nBut dangerous flooding will continue from Houston all the way into southwestern Louisiana for the rest of the week, the National Weather Service said.\n\nHouses built 'inside a lake' could degrade\n\nControversy has surrounded the placement of houses near Houston's Barker and Addicks reservoirs, especially since floodwater overflowed the latter.\n\nResidents evacuate their homes Tuesday near the Addicks Reservoir in Houston.\n\n\"They allowed them to build homes inside the reservoir.", + " And these homes are flooded -- 2,500 homes are flooded, some of them up to 5 feet deep,\" CNN meteorologist Chad Myers said Wednesday. \"They built homes inside a lake.\"\n\nAnd those homes \"will be inundated for several weeks,\" said Jeff Lindner with Harris County Flood Control.\n\n\"The closest comparison that I can draw to those homes... is Hurricane Katrina,\" Lindner said.\n\n\"When water sits in a house for several weeks, the house begins to degrade.\"\n\nLindner said those residents will be able to return after several weeks, but \"we are not sure what the condition of those homes are going to be.\"\n\nHe also said it's unclear whether rebuilding homes in the same area will be allowed.\n\nLouisiana weathers Harvey,", + " Texas 'taking it on the chin'\n\nLouisiana was largely spared from Harvey's wrath on Wednesday.\n\n\"While things are still serious and there is a long way to go, we... have fared much better than we'd feared might be the case, but our neighbors are still taking it on the chin,\" Gov. John Bel Edwards said. \"In Texas, we're going to do everything we can do to be good neighbors to them.\"\n\nEdwards requested a federal disaster declaration be extended to seven additional Louisiana parishes.\n\nHarvey is still threatening to dump an additional 3 to 6 inches of rain from northern Louisiana into western Kentucky, forecasters said.", + " It weakened over land and fizzled to a tropical depression Wednesday night, with winds of 35 mph.\n\nNew Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said volunteers helped New Orleans recover after Katrina and they will do the same for Texas residents affected by Harvey.\n\nNew Orleans officials announced a fundraiser to help the residents of Houston and other flooded Texas cities recover from Harvey.\n\n\"No city was more welcoming for the citizens of New Orleans than the people of Houston,\" Landrieu said. \"And our heart breaks for them as they go through their trying to times.\"\n\nMore rescues, mother dies\n\nIn Beaumont, rescuers Tuesday afternoon came upon a toddler in a pink backpack clinging to her mother's body in floodwaters about a half mile from their car.", + " The mother was getting out of her car when she stepped into a canal, Mayor Becky Ames said.\n\nThe girl was in stable condition with hypothermia.\n\n\"Had we been a few moments later, they would have been swept underneath (a trestle) and our boats wouldn't have been able to get them,\" Haley Morrow, spokeswoman for the Beaumont Emergency Management Office, told CNN on Wednesday.\n\n\"A true testament of a mother who put her own life at risk and sacrificed her life to save her child. That was devastating.\"\n\nIn Port Arthur, about 90 miles east of the devastated Houston area, the deluge was so severe that floodwaters overwhelmed the Bob Bowers Civic Center,", + " which was serving as a shelter. It was evacuated Wednesday after taking on water overnight, according to volunteer Ana Platero.\n\nCots where people slept the night before floated on 2 feet of water on Wednesday as people waited on tables or sat on elevated bleachers to be evacuated to a nearby middle school.\n\nAt Lake Arthur Place, a nursing home in Port Arthur, rescue workers evacuated up to 74 bedridden patients after an altercation involving relatives who tried to take out loved ones on their own, CNN affiliate KTRK reported.\n\nAll residents were taken to local hospitals in Beaumont, the nursing home operator said.\n\nSome Port Arthur residents sought shelter in a bowling alley.\n\nCynthia Harmon told CNN by phone that she was trapped with her two sons and two grandsons in the attic of her Port Arthur home.", + " They began waiting for rescuers at midnight Tuesday and had run out of food and water by Wednesday afternoon.\n\n\"I didn't think the water was going to rise like that,\" she said. \"I've never been in anything like this.\"\n\nThe family was rescued later on Wednesday.\n\nPolice made an appeal for volunteers to bring boats and help.\n\n\"Rescue boats welcome in Port Arthur to assist emergency personnel,\" the police department posted on Facebook. The city asked anyone trapped to hang a white towel, sheet or shirt outside to alert rescuers.\n\nPhotos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Downtown Houston is reflected in the flooded Buffalo Bayou on Wednesday, August 30,", + " five days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas. The Category 4 storm came ashore late Friday, August 25, just north of Port Aransas, and has caused historic flooding. Correction: Previous versions of this gallery incorrectly reported that Hurricane Harvey is the strongest storm to make landfall in the United States since Wilma in 2005. Harvey is actually the strongest storm to make landfall in the United States since Charley in 2004. Hide Caption 1 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Members of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Louisiana National Guard help rescue elderly people from a flooded assisted living home in Orange,", + " Texas, on August 30. Hide Caption 2 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A baby sits with family belongings at a Gallery Furniture store in Houston being used as a temporary shelter on August 30. Hide Caption 3 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Floodwaters engulf homes in Port Arthur on August 30. Hide Caption 4 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Janice Forse cries at an emergency shelter in Beaumont on August 30. Her home in Beaumont was flooded Wednesday morning. \"Even Katrina wasn't this bad,\" Forse told the Austin American-Statesman.", + " Hide Caption 5 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Tammy Dominguez, left, and her husband, Christopher Dominguez, sleep on cots at the George R. Brown Convention Center, where nearly 10,000 people are taking shelter in Houston, on August 30. Hide Caption 6 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A cat tries to find dry ground around a flooded apartment complex on August 30 in Houston. Hide Caption 7 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Volunteer rescue workers help a woman from her flooded home in Port Arthur on August 30. Hide Caption 8 of 74 Photos:", + " Hurricane Harvey slams Texas The Florida Air Force Reserve Pararescue team from the 308th Rescue Squadron helps evacuees board a helicopter in Port Arthur on August 30. Hide Caption 9 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Water from the Addicks Reservoir flows into neighborhoods in Houston as floodwaters rise Tuesday, August 29. Hide Caption 10 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Chris Gutierrez, second from right, helps his grandmother, Edelmira Gutierrez, down the stairs of their flooded house and into a waiting firetruck in the Concord Bridge neighborhood of Houston on August 29.", + " Hide Caption 11 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Members of the National Guard rest at a furniture store in Richmond, Texas, on August 29. Hide Caption 12 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Alexis Hernandez holds her daughter Faith at the George R. Brown Convention Center, which is serving as a shelter in Houston. Hide Caption 13 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Evacuees make their way though floodwaters in Houston on August 29. Hide Caption 14 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas President Donald Trump takes part in a briefing on Harvey as he visits Corpus Christi on August 29.", + " In a stop in Austin, Trump spoke of the long-term effort and stiff costs that will be needed to rebuild the region. \"Nobody's seen this kind of water,\" he said. \"Probably, there's never been something so expensive in our country's history.\" While talking about recovery and relief efforts, Trump said, \"We want to do it better than ever before.\" Hide Caption 15 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Civilian rescuers put a boat into a flooded road to search for people in Cypress on August 29. Hide Caption 16 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Volunteers organize items donated for Hurricane Harvey victims in Dallas on August 29.", + " Hide Caption 17 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas An overview of downtown Houston on August 29 shows the scale of the catastrophic flooding. Hide Caption 18 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Matthew Koser searches for important papers and heirlooms inside his grandfather's house in Houston's Bear Creek neighborhood on August 29. The neighborhood flooded after water was released from nearby Addicks Reservoir. Hide Caption 19 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Shane Johnson removes items from a family home in Rockport, Texas, on August 29. Hide Caption 20 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Airplanes sit at a flooded airport in Houston on August 29.", + " Hide Caption 21 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas People set up a shelter for volunteer rescue workers at Fairfield Baptist Church in Cypress, Texas, on August 29. Hide Caption 22 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Shardea Harrison looks at her 3-week-old baby, Sarai, as Dean Mize, right, and Jason Legnon use an airboat to rescue them from their home in Houston on Monday, August 28. Hide Caption 23 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Thousands take shelter at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on August 28. Hide Caption 24 of 74 Photos:", + " Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Rescue boats fill Tidwell Road in Houston as they help flood victims evacuate the area on August 28. Hide Caption 25 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas People wait to be rescued from their flooded home in Houston on August 28. Hide Caption 26 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A firefighter helps Sara Golden and her daughters Paisley, Poppy and Piper board a Texas Air National Guard C-130 at Scholes International Airport in Galveston, Texas, on August 28. Hide Caption 27 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas People make their way out of a flooded neighborhood in Houston on August 28.", + " Hide Caption 28 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Sam Speights removes possessions from his damaged home in Rockport on August 28. Hide Caption 29 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Flood victims wait to unload from the back of a heavy-duty truck after being evacuated from their homes in Houston on August 28. Hide Caption 30 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas People leave a flooded area of Houston on August 28. Hide Caption 31 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas People are rescued in Houston on August 28. Hide Caption 32 of 74 Photos:", + " Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Bridget Brundrett presents an American flag to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott while he was in Rockport on August 28. The flag had been recovered from city hall after flying during the hurricane. Hide Caption 33 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A Coast Guard helicopter hoists a wheelchair on board after lifting a person to safety from a flooded area of Houston on August 28. Hide Caption 34 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Houston flood victims eat and rest at the George R. Brown Convention Center on August 28. Hide Caption 35 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Belinda Penn holds her dogs Winston and Baxter after being rescued from their home in Spring,", + " Texas, on August 28. Hide Caption 36 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A firefighter is wheeled to a waiting ambulance after he became fatigued while fighting an office-building fire in downtown Houston on August 28. Hide Caption 37 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas People evacuate a neighborhood in west Houston on August 28. Hide Caption 38 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Julie Martinez, right, hugs her daughter, Gabrielle Jackson, in front of a relative's damaged apartment in Rockport on August 28. Hide Caption 39 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Cattle are stranded in a flooded pasture in La Grange,", + " Texas, on August 28. Hide Caption 40 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Volunteer rescue boats make their way into a flooded subdivision in Spring, Texas, on August 28. Hide Caption 41 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Houston police officer Daryl Hudeck carries Catherine Pham and her 13-month-old son, Aiden, after rescuing them from floodwaters on Sunday, August 27. Hide Caption 42 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas People push a stalled pickup through a flooded street in Houston on August 27. Hide Caption 43 of 74 Photos:", + " Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Residents of Rockport return to their destroyed home on August 27. Hide Caption 44 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas The Buffalo Bayou floods parts of Houston on August 27. Hide Caption 45 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Two men try to beat the current that was pushing them down an overflowing Brays Bayou in Houston on August 27. Hide Caption 46 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Jane Rhodes is rescued by neighbors in Friendswood, Texas, on August 27. Hide Caption 47 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Volunteers at Sacred Heart Catholic Church prepare cots for evacuees in Elgin,", + " Texas, on August 27. Hide Caption 48 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Damage to a home is seen in the Key Allegro neighborhood of Rockport on August 27. Hide Caption 49 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Melani Zurawski cries while inspecting her home in Port Aransas on August 27. Hide Caption 50 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Wilford Martinez, right, is rescued from his flooded car along Interstate 610 in Houston on August 27. Assisting him here is Richard Wagner of the Harris County Sheriff's Department. Hide Caption 51 of 74 Photos:", + " Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A car is submerged by floodwaters on a freeway near downtown Houston on August 27. Hide Caption 52 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A resident of the Bayou on the Bend apartment complex watches its first floor flood in Houston on August 27. Hide Caption 53 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A city flag, tattered by the effects of Hurricane Harvey, flaps in the wind over the police station in Rockport on August 27. Hide Caption 54 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls and Lucas Wu lift Ethan Wu into an airboat as they evacuate the Orchard Lakes subdivision in Fort Bend County,", + " Texas, on August 27. Hide Caption 55 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Damage is seen at a boat storage building in Rockport on August 27. Hide Caption 56 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Water rushes from a large sinkhole along a highway in Rosenberg, Texas, on August 27. Hide Caption 57 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Evacuees wade through a flooded section of Interstate 610 in Houston on August 27. Hide Caption 58 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Evacuees are loaded onto a truck on an Interstate 610 overpass in Houston on August 27.", + " Hide Caption 59 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A graveyard is flooded in Pearland, Texas, on August 27. Hide Caption 60 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A driver works his way through a maze of fallen utility poles in Taft, Texas, on Saturday, August 26. Hide Caption 61 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Steve Culver comforts his dog Otis on August 26 as he talks about what he said was the \"most terrifying event in his life.\" Hurricane Harvey destroyed most of his home in Rockport while he and his wife were there.", + " Hide Caption 62 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas People walk through flooded streets in Galveston on August 26. Hide Caption 63 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Aaron Tobias stands in what is left of his Rockport home on August 26. Tobias said he was able to get his wife and kids out before the storm arrived, but he stayed there and rode it out. Hide Caption 64 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Brad Matheney offers help to a man in a wheelchair in Galveston on August 26. Hide Caption 65 of 74 Photos:", + " Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Jessica Campbell hugs Jonathan Fitzgerald after riding out Hurricane Harvey in an apartment in Rockport. Hide Caption 66 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Boats are damaged in Rockport on August 26. Hide Caption 67 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A damaged home in Rockport on August 26. Hide Caption 68 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Donna Raney makes her way out of the wreckage of her home as Daisy Graham assists her in Rockport on August 26. Raney was hiding in the shower after the roof blew off and the walls of her home caved in.", + " Hide Caption 69 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A laundromat's machines are exposed to the elements in Rockport on August 26. Hide Caption 70 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas A semi-truck is overturned on a highway south of Houston on August 26. Hide Caption 71 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas An American flag flies in front of a damaged mobile-home park in Rockport on August 26. Hide Caption 72 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas NASA astronaut Jack Fischer photographed Hurricane Harvey from the International Space Station on Friday, August 25.", + " Hide Caption 73 of 74 Photos: Hurricane Harvey slams Texas Waves pound the shore as Harvey approaches Corpus Christi, Texas, on August 25. Hide Caption 74 of 74\n\nThe disaster in Port Arthur is part of Tropical Storm Harvey's devastating encore. Harvey made landfall once again Wednesday morning, slamming into the Louisiana coast near the Texas border.\n\n26 inches in 24 hours\n\nHarvey has broken the US record for rainfall from a single storm, CNN senior meteorologist Dave Hennen said. It has dumped almost 52 inches of rain in parts of Texas.\n\nThe coastal cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur got pummeled with 26 inches of rain in 24 hours.\n\n\"", + "Life-threatening flash flooding continues in far east Texas around Beaumont and Port Arthur,\" Hennen said.\n\nPort Arthur, a city of about 55,000, is in exceptional danger because water from Beaumont is expected to flow toward it.\n\nIn Beaumont, a man who accidentally drove a truck into a flooded ravine that looked like a street was rescued by CNN correspondent Drew Griffin, producer Brian Rokus and photographer Scott Pisczek on Wednesday. \"I want to thank these guys for saving my life,\" said the driver, Jerry Sumrall.\n\nIn Woodville, a town north of Beaumont, US Rep. Brian Babin was trapped for part of Wednesday at home with members of his family after a creek overflowed.\n\n\"I'm in my home in Tyler County,", + " and we could not get out unless a helicopter plucks me out or I get my boat and launch it,\" the Texas Republican told CNN by phone early in the day. \"We're fine. These waters are going to recede hopefully sometime this evening.\"\n\nOn Wednesday afternoon, a US Navy helicopter plucked seven people from floodwaters.\n\n'We help each other out'\n\nStrangers from across the country descended on Texas and braved treacherous floodwater to evacuate victims.\n\nJUST WATCHED CNN crew helps rescue man from truck Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH CNN crew helps rescue man from truck 02:05\n\nTom Dickers is among those who came hauling boats from Dallas and San Antonio.\n\n\"This is what Texans would do.", + " We help each other out,\" Dickers said.\n\nAt least 9,000 to 10,000 people have been rescued in the Houston region by first responders. Volunteers said they have helped as many as 400 in one day.\n\nSome would just \"come crying, just wanting help,\" volunteer Bobba Bedri said. \"I just felt like I had to get more people out, keep going and keep going.\"\n\nCLARIFICATION: Harvey made its first landfall at 10 p.m. local time Friday, initially striking a barrier island near Port Aransas, Texas, before moving onto the US mainland two hours later near Copano Bay,", + " Texas. After re-emerging into the Gulf of Mexico on Monday, it made another landfall Wednesday in Louisiana. ", + " The catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Harvey is not limited to Texas, it's also affecting parts of southwest Louisiana where preparations are underway to evacuate some areas.\n\nInterested in Hurricane Harvey? Add Hurricane Harvey as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Hurricane Harvey news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Add Interest\n\nAs the heavy band of rain stretches over southwest Louisiana, residents in the Lake Charles region are once again bracing for impact like they did for Hurricane Katrina 12 years ago.\n\nAccording to the National Weather Service, Harvey will make landfall again later early Wednesday morning as a tropical storm.\n\nDick Gremillion, director of homeland security and preparedness,", + " said Tuesday, \"We are not going to escape this, we are going to get more rain.\"\n\nLouisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said 671 members of the National Guard have been activated. The 15 soldiers who are stationed in New Orleans are reporting on the status of the city's drainage pumps, Edwards said.\n\nFirst responders have rescued about 500 people so far, and there are currently 269 people in shelters in southwest Louisiana, 200 of whom were rescued, Edwards said.\n\nWhile the department is not enforcing mandatory evacuations, \"we strongly suggest it,\" especially for areas \"prone to flooding,\" Gremillion said.\n\nSurrounding areas in southwest Louisiana have already received 10 to 20 inches of rain and another 10 to 15 inches of rain is still possible.", + " The NWS expects major flooding in Calcasieu River, winds of 45 miles-per-hour and falling trees due to heavy rain and tornadoes.\n\nLake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter warned residents on Tuesday that if they were concerned about homes flooding last night they should \"pull the trigger today and let us help you get out.\"\n\nThe storm could leave the area as early as Wednesday night, but extended rain bands may continue into Thursday.\n\nOn Monday night, water rose to chest-high in some areas, flooding homes and forcing hundreds of evacuations in one neighborhood, according to Lake Charles Fire Department Division Chief Lennie LaFleur.\n\nAmong the nearly 500 rescued,", + " one family displaced by the rising water said they were forced to move quickly in the middle of the night to flee their flooded home.\n\nWhen the water rose to four feet high, a single father's four children began to blow up inflatable boats using their own breath to help their dad and grandma. The father pulled his family atop the inflatables for nearly half a mile from their home to an evacuation center.\n\nLocal authorities are concerned the floodwater surrounding the shelter could continue to rise as the rain picks back up Tuesday evening.\n\nAs storm forecasts show further movement into the state, Louisiana's governor is warning that \"the worst is likely to come for us here.\"\n\nHeavy rain is developing along the south LA coast & expected to expand inland through predawn hours.", + " Flash Flood Watch continues #LAwx #MSwx pic.twitter.com/6SJcuhqyQO \u2014 NWS New Orleans (@NWSNewOrleans) August 29, 2017\n\nHarvey \"does remain a named tropical storm and it's going to drop an awful lot of rain,\" Edwards said at a news conference Monday. \"We do have a long way to go with this particular storm.\"\n\nFlash flood warnings and watches are in effect as the outer bands that have done the most damage in Houston are expected to move further inland into Louisiana by Wednesday, ABC News meteorologists said. Officials are monitoring storm surge and high tides,", + " which could increase flooding.\n\nThe storm will make landfall again the day after the 12-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In a press conference, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said the memories from Hurricane Katrina are \"flashing back to us as the images from Houston rain down on us.\"\n\n\"If that storm came our way, we would likely experience the same thing as Houston, if not worse,\" Landrieu said.\n\nLandrieu said the city of New Orleans will \"never forget the incredible compassion\" it received from the people of Houston. On Monday, he reactivated the NOLA Pay It Forward Fund, which raised $250,", + "000 last year when the city of Baton Rouge was affected by widespread flooding.\n\nNew Orleans public schools will be open Thursday, Landrieu said, but he asked residents to \"stay alert and stay vigilant tonight\" in case the storm deviates. City workers are continuing to man pump stations to get all pumps and power back, Landrieu said.\n\nThe mayor asked residents to prepare to stay off the streets in the event of flash flooding. ", + " Lauren Durst holds onto her ten-month-old son, Wyatt Durst, as they evacuate from the Savannah Estates neighborhood as Addicks Reservoir nears capacity during Tropical Storm Harvey, Tuesday, Aug. 29,... (Associated Press)\n\nHOUSTON (AP) \u2014 The latest weather forecast delivered hope to Houston after five days of torrential rain submerged the nation's fourth-largest city: Less than an inch of rain and perhaps even sunshine.\n\nBut the dangers remain far from over Wednesday. With at least 18 dead and 13,000 people rescued in the Houston area and surrounding cities and counties in Southeast Texas, others were still trying to escape from their inundated homes.", + " Weakened levees were in danger of failing and a less-ferocious but still potent Harvey returned to shore, making landfall in southwestern Louisiana.\n\nThe situation was dire early Wednesday in Port Arthur, Texas, near the Louisiana border, where homes were starting to fill with rising floodwaters and residents were unsure of how to evacuate the city, KFDM-TV reported. Jefferson County Sheriff Zena Stephens said county resources could not get to Port Arthur because of the flooding.\n\nPort Arthur Mayor Derrick Freeman said on his Facebook page that the \"city is underwater right now but we are coming!\" He also urged residents to get to higher ground and to avoid becoming trapped in attics.\n\nAuthorities expected the human toll to continue to mount,", + " both in deaths and in the tens of thousands of people made homeless by the catastrophic storm that is now the heaviest tropical downpour in U.S. history. In all, more than 17,000 people have sought refuge in Texas shelters, and that number seemed certain to increase, the American Red Cross said.\n\nHouston's largest shelter housed 10,000 of the displaced \u2014 twice its initial intended capacity \u2014 as two additional mega-shelters opened Tuesday for the overflow. Louisiana's governor offered to take in Harvey victims from Texas, and televangelist Joel Osteen opened his Houston megachurch, a 16,000-seat former arena,", + " after critics blasted him on social media for not acting to help families displaced by the storm.\n\nIn an apparent response to scattered reports of looting, a curfew was put into effect from midnight to 5 a.m., with police saying violators would be questioned, searched and arrested.\n\nA much-weakened Tropical Storm Harvey steered into new territory, coming ashore again early Wednesday just west of Cameron, Louisiana, with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph (72 kph), the National Hurricane Center said.\n\nHarvey is expected to weaken, but will slog through Louisiana for much of the day before taking its downpours north. Arkansas,", + " Tennessee and parts of Missouri are on alert for Harvey flooding in the next couple of days.\n\n\"Once we get this thing inland during the day, it's the end of the beginning,\" said National Hurricane Center meteorologist Dennis Feltgen. \"Texas is going to get a chance to finally dry out as this system pulls out.\"\n\nBut Feltgen cautioned: \"We're not done with this. There's still an awful lot of real estate and a lot of people who are going to feel the impacts of the storm.\"\n\nStill, the reprieve from the rain in Houston was welcome.\n\nEugene Rideaux, a 42-year-old mechanic who showed up at Osteen's Lakewood Church to sort donations for evacuees,", + " said he had not been able to work or do much since the storm first hit, so he was eager to get out of his dark house and help.\n\n\"It's been so dark for days now, I'm just ready to see some light. Some sunshine. I'm tired of the darkness,\" Rideaux said. \"But it's a tough city, and we're going to make this into a positive and come together.\"\n\nThe city has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for more supplies, including cots and food, for an additional 10,000 people, said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who hoped to get the supplies no later than Wednesday.\n\nFour days after the storm ravaged the Texas coastline as a Category 4 hurricane,", + " authorities and family members reported at least 18 deaths from Harvey. They include a former football and track coach in suburban Houston and a woman who died after she and her young daughter were swept into a rain-swollen drainage canal. Two Beaumont, Texas, police officers and two fire-rescue divers spotted the woman floating with the child, who was holding onto her mother.\n\nAuthorities acknowledge that fatalities from Harvey could soar once the floodwaters start to recede from one of America's largest metropolitan centers.\n\nA pair of 70-year-old reservoir dams that protect downtown Houston and a levee in a suburban subdivision began overflowing Tuesday, adding to the rising floodwaters.\n\nEngineers began releasing water from the Addicks and Barker reservoirs Monday to ease the strain on the dams.", + " But the releases were not enough to relieve the pressure after the relentless downpours, Army Corps of Engineers officials said. Both reservoirs are at record highs.\n\nThe release of the water means that more homes and streets will flood, and some homes will be inundated for up to a month, said Jeff Linder of the Harris County Flood Control District.\n\nOfficials in Houston were also keeping an eye on infrastructure such as bridges, roads and pipelines that are in the path of the floodwaters.\n\nWater in the Houston Ship Channel, which serves the Port of Houston and Houston's petrochemical complex, is at levels never seen before, Linder said.\n\nThe San Jacinto River,", + " which empties into the channel, has pipelines, roads and bridges not designed for the current deluge, Linder said, and the chance of infrastructure failures will increase the \"longer we keep the water in place.\"\n\nAmong the worries is debris coming down the river and crashing into structures and the possibility that pipelines in the riverbed will be scoured by swift currents. In 1994, a pipeline ruptured on the river near Interstate 10 and caught fire.\n\nAfter five consecutive days of rain, Harvey set a new continental U.S. record for rainfall for a tropical system.\n\nThe rains in Cedar Bayou, near Mont Belvieu,", + " Texas, totaled 51.88 inches (132 centimeters) as of Tuesday afternoon. That's a record for both Texas and the continental United States, but it does not quite surpass the 52 inches (133 centimeters) from Tropical Cyclone Hiki in Kauai, Hawaii, in 1950, before Hawaii became a state.\n\n___\n\nAssociated Press writers Frank Bajak and Michael Graczyk in Houston, Diana Heidgerd and David Warren in Dallas, Seth Borenstein in Washington and Tammy Webber in Chicago contributed to this report.\n\n___\n\nSign up for AP's daily newsletter showcasing our best all-formats reporting on Harvey and its aftermath:", + " http://apne.ws/ahYQGtb. ", + "\n\nThe ExxonMobil refinery in Baytown, Tex., in 2008. (Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters)\n\nExxonMobil acknowledged Tuesday that Hurricane Harvey damaged two of its refineries, causing the release of hazardous pollutants.\n\nThe acknowledgment, in a regulatory filing with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, follows repeated complaints on Twitter of an \u201cunbearable\u201d chemical smell over parts of Houston. However, it was not immediately clear what caused the smell.\n\nExxonMobil said in the filings that a floating roof covering a tank at the company\u2019s Baytown oil refinery sank in heavy rains, dipping below the surface of oil or other material stored there and causing unusually high emissions,", + " especially of volatile organic compounds, a category of regulated chemicals.\n\n[Houston dam spills over while police say more than 3,500 rescued during Harvey flooding]\n\nThe Baytown refinery is the second-largest in the country. The company said in its filing that it would need to empty the tank to make repairs, though it wasn\u2019t clear when the weather would permit that.\n\nAn ExxonMobil spokeswoman said the company would \u201cconduct an assessment to determine the impact of the storm once it is safe to do so.\u201d It would not say what was in the tank.\n\nAt the company\u2019s Beaumont petrochemical refinery, Harvey damaged a sulfur thermal oxidizer,", + " a piece of equipment that captures and burns sulfur dioxide. As a result, the plant released 1,312.84 pounds of sulfur dioxide, well in excess of the amounts allowed by the company\u2019s permits.\n\n\u201cThe unit was stabilized. No impact to the community has been reported,\u201d the company said in its filing. \u201cActions were taken to minimize emissions and to restore the refinery to normal operations.\u201d\n\nA variety of other chemicals was emitted during the shutdown of the plants. Amy Graham, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency, said that ExxonMobil had filed a report at the National Response Center operated by the U.S. Coast Guard saying the Baytown refinery would release about 15 pounds of benzene into the air.\n\n\u201cMost of the unauthorized emissions come from the process of shutting down,", + " and then starting up, the various units of the plant, when pollution control devices can\u2019t be operated properly and there\u2019s lots of flaring,\u201d said Luke Metzger, director of the group Environment Texas.\n\nFlaring is generally done when releasing chemicals without burning them is more hazardous for people and the environment. ExxonMobil said it had flared hazardous materials at its Baytown refinery Sunday and Monday.\n\nMost of the other facilities belonging to major companies also filed notices with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Chevron Phillips, for example, said that it expected its Cedar Bayou chemical plant to exceed permitted limits for several hazardous pollutants, such as 1,", + "3-butadiene, benzene and ethylene, during shutdown procedures.\n\nEnvironment Texas and the Sierra Club sued ExxonMobil in 2010 alleging that the company\u2019s Baytown complex had emitted 8 million pounds of hazardous chemicals over a five-year period. A federal judge imposed a $20 million penalty on the company.\n\n\u201cAny release of carcinogens (like benzene, 1,3-butadiene) adds to the increased cancer risk for those living near these plants,\u201d Metzger said in an email. He said that large releases of nitrogen oxides or sulfur dioxide \u201cand other respiratory irritants adds to the respiratory problems people in the area suffer from at high rates.\u201d\n\nSeparately,", + " the Houston Chronicle reported that there was a chemical leak from a pipeline that ruptured in La Porte, Texas on Monday. Local authorities urged residents to stay inside. The warning applied to people living as far away as Shoreacres and Baytown. The warning was later lifted.\n\nThe Energy Department said that all six oil refineries in the Corpus Christi area, seven\n\noil refineries in the Houston and Galveston area, and one refinery in the Beaumont/Port Arthur area were shut down or in the process of shutting down. The idle refineries have a capacity of 3.2 million barrels a day, equal to a third of Gulf coast capacity and 17.", + "6 percent of total U.S. refining capacity. Further closures are likely as the storm moves east into Louisiana, where there is another 1.65 million barrels a day of oil refining capacity.\n\nThe logjam of tankers and trucks was adding to woes. Valero, which had closed its two refineries in the Corpus Christi area, said it was looking to reopen the facilities but that damaged pipeline, port and transportation infrastructure could delay re-openings.\n\nBloomberg News reported that Marathon said it was closing its Galveston Bay refinery because it was running out of crude, which could not be delivered because of port closures.\n\nGasoline prices for September delivery also rose amid signs that the Gulf\u2019s woes could spread.", + " The Colonial Pipeline, the main link between the heart of the nation\u2019s oil and gas industry and consumers in the northeast, said that supplies of refined petroleum products from the Houston area had been disrupted.\n\nRead more about Hurricane Harvey:\n\nWhere Harvey is hitting hardest, 80 percent lack flood insurance\n\nHouston is experiencing its third \u2018500-year\u2019 flood in 3 years. How is that possible?\n\nHurricane Harvey shows how we underestimate flooding risks in coastal cities, scientists say\n" + ], + "length": 12682, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 22, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The Situation Room photo taken during the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound has quickly gained \"icon\" status, racking up 1.6 million views in 38 hours. On Salon, Joan Walsh called it \"riveting,\" noting that \"Hillary Clinton is beyond anguished; her hand is over her mouth, her eyes red-rimmed.\" But it turns out she might not have been \"anguished\" so much as \"suffering from allergies,\" the AP reports. \"Those were 38 of the most intense minutes,\" Clinton says. \"I have no idea what any of us were looking at at that particular millisecond when the picture was taken.\" But why was her hand over her mouth? \"I am somewhat sheepishly concerned that it was my preventing one of my early spring allergic coughs,\" she explains. \"So, it may have no great meaning whatsoever.\" Click for another reason to be wary of the photograph.\n", + "docs": [ + "U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday she has \"no idea\" what she and the rest of President Barack Obama's national security team were watching at the precise moment that a photographer snapped what has become an iconic image of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.\n\nIn this image released by the White House and digitally altered by the source to diffuse the paper in front of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe... (Associated Press)\n\nU.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, during a press conference ahead of a diplomatic meeting on Libya, at Rome's Foreign Ministry, Thursday,", + " May 5, 2011. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham... (Associated Press)\n\nU.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives at Rome's Ciampino military airport, early Thursday, May 5, 2011. Clinton arrived in Italy for a two-day meeting to talk on strategy with international... (Associated Press)\n\n\"Those were 38 of the most intense minutes,\" Clinton said of the raid on bin Laden's compound by U.S. Navy SEALs. \"I have no idea what any of us were looking at at that particular millisecond when the picture was taken.\"\n\nThe photo was taken by the White House photographer Sunday night as Obama and his national security team monitored the assault.", + " Clinton is covering her mouth with her right hand, but she said Thursday that the gesture might not convey any special significance.\n\n\"I am somewhat sheepishly concerned that it was my preventing one of my early spring allergic coughs,\" she said. \"So, it may have no great meaning whatsoever.\"\n\nThe story behind the photograph has been a subject of intense curiosity, but U.S. officials have refused to discuss details of what exactly was happening when it was taken, saying that could compromise intelligence efforts and capabilities.\n\nNonetheless, Clinton said bin Laden's death \"sent an unmistakable message about the strength and the resolve of the international community to stand against extremism and those who perpetuate it.\"\n\n\"I think our resolve is even stronger after bin Laden's death because we know it will have an impact on those who are on the battlefield in Afghanistan,\" she said.", + " She and other officials have expressed hope that al-Qaida sympathizers and other militants may now be more inclined to give up violence and rejoin Afghan society.\n\nClinton said U.S. plans to begin drawing down American forces in Afghanistan in July will continue apace even as she acknowledged that the battle against terrorism was far from over.\n\n\"Let us not forget that the battle to stop al-Qaida and its affiliates does not end with one death,\" she said. \"We have to renew our resolve and redouble our efforts, not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan but around the world. It is especially important that there be no doubt that those who pursue a terrorist agenda,", + " the criminals who indiscriminately murder innocent people, will be brought to justice.\"\n\nMany in the U.S. have questioned Pakistan's reliability as an ally, given that bin Laden was found hiding in plain sight in a military garrison town outside Islamabad. Lawmakers are questioning U.S. aid to Pakistan, something the Obama administration has said is vital to war on terror.\n\nClinton maintained the U.S. must remain engaged with Pakistan.\n\n\"It is not always an easy relationship,\" she said. \"But on the other hand, it is a productive one for both of our countries and we are going to continue to cooperate between our governments, our militaries,", + " our law enforcement agencies.\"\n\nClinton spoke during a press conference with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini. She was in Rome for a meeting of the Libyan Contact Group, representatives of 22 nations and five international organizations who are discussing ways to support the rebels fighting longtime Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. ", + " The establishment media just keep getting worse. They're further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways. A significant recent example is the New Yorker's vaunted August 8 exclusive on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden.\n\nThe piece, trumpeted as the most detailed account to date of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was an instant hit. \"Got the chills half dozen times reading @NewYorker killing bin Laden tick tock... exquisite journalism,\" tweeted the digital director of the PBS show Frontline. The author,", + " freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, was quickly featured on the Charlie Rose show, an influential determiner of \"chattering class\" opinion. Other news outlets rushed to praise the story as \"exhaustive,\" \"utterly compelling,\" and on and on.\n\nTo be sure, it is the kind of granular, heroic story that the public loves, that generates follow-up bestsellers and movie options. The takedown even has a Hollywood-esque code name: \"Operation Neptune's Spear.\"\n\nHere's the introduction to the mission commander, full of minute details that help give it a ring of authenticity and the most intimate reportorial access:\n\nJames,", + " a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer's frame that one might expect of a SEAL -- he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A \"blowout kit,\" for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James's back.", + " Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.\n\nOn and on went the \"tick-tock.\" Yet as Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, noted, that narrative was misleading in the extreme, because the New Yorker reporter never actually spoke to James -- nor to a single one of James's fellow SEALs (who have never been identified or photographed -- even from behind -- to protect their identity.) Instead,", + " every word of Schmidle's narrative was provided to him by people who were not present at the raid. Complains Farhi:\n\n...a casual reader of the article wouldn't know that; neither the article nor an editor's note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.\n\nThat didn't trouble New Yorker editor David Remnick, according to Farhi:\n\nRemnick says he's satisfied with the accuracy of the account. \"The sources spoke to our fact-checkers,\" he said.", + " \"I know who they are.\"\n\nBut we don't.\n\nOn a story of this gravity, should we automatically join in with the huzzahs because it has the imprimatur of America's most respected magazine? Or would we be wise to approach it with caution?\n\n***\n\nMost of us are not the trusting na\u00effs we once were. And with good reason.\n\nThe list of consequential events packaged for us by media and Hollywood in unsatisfactory ways continues to grow. It starts, certainly, with the official version of the JFK assassination, widely discredited yet still carried forward by most major media organizations. (For more on that, see this.) More and more people realize that the heroic Woodward & Bernstein story of Nixon's demise is deeply problematical.", + " (I've written extensively on both of these in my book \"Family of Secrets\".)\n\nAnd untold millions don't think we've heard the real (or at least complete) story of the phenomenal, complex success of those 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. Skeptics now include former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who recently speculated that the hijackers may have been able to enter the US and move freely precisely because American intelligence hoped to recruit them as double agents -- and that an ongoing cover-up is designed to hide this. And then, of course, there are the Pentagon's account of the heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq,", + " which turned out to be a hoax, and the Pentagon's fabricated account of the heroic battle death of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, who turned out to be a victim of friendly fire. These are just a few from scores of examples of deceit perpetrated upon the American people. Hardly the kind of track record to inspire confidence in official explanations with the imprimatur of the military and the CIA.\n\nWhatever one thinks of these other matters, we're certainly now at a point where we ought to be prudent in embracing authorized accounts of the latest seismic event: the dramatic end to one of America's most reviled and storied nemeses.\n\nThe bin Laden raid presents us with every reason to be cautious.", + " The government's initial claims about what transpired at that house in Abbottabad have changed, then changed again, with no proper explanation of the discrepancies. Even making allowances for human error in such shifting accounts, almost every aspect of what we were told requires a willing suspension of disbelief -- from the manner of Osama's death and burial to the purported pornography found at the site. (For more on these issues, see previous articles we wrote on the subject, here, here and here.)\n\nClarke's theory will seem less outrageous later, as we explore Saudi intelligence's crucial, and bizarre, role at the end of bin Laden's life -- working directly with the man who now holds Clarke's job.\n\nAdd to all of this the discovery that the reporter providing this newest account wasn't even allowed to talk to any raid participants -- and the magazine's lack of candor on this point -- and you've got an almost unassailable case for treating the New Yorker story with extreme caution.\n\n***\n\nWe might begin by asking the question:", + " Who provided the New Yorker with its exclusive, and what was their agenda in doing so? To try and sort out Schmidle's sources, I read through the piece carefully several times.\n\nOne person who spoke to the reporter, and who is identified by name is John O. Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism adviser. Brennan is quoted directly, briefly, near the top, describing to Schmidle pre-raid debate over whether such an operation would be a success or failure:\n\nJohn Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President's advisers began an \"interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation,", + " you're going to disprove the theory that bin Laden was there.\"\n\nThe mere fact of Schmidle's reliance on Brennan at all should send up a flare for the cautious reader. After all, that's the very same Brennan who was the principal source of incorrect details in the hours and days after the raid. These included the claim that the SEALs encountered substantial armed resistance, not least from bin Laden himself; that it took them an astounding 40 minutes to get to bin Laden, and that the White House got to hear the soldiers' conversations in real time.\n\nHere's a Washington Post account from Brennan published on May 3, less than 48 hours after the raid:\n\nHalf an hour had passed on the ground,", + " but the American commandos raiding Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideaway had yet to find their long-sought target. \u2026The commandos swept methodically through the compound's main building, clearing one room and then another as they made their way to the upper floors where they expected to find bin Laden. As they did so, Obama administration officials in the White House Situation Room listened to the SEAL team's conversations over secure lines. \"The minutes passed like days,\" said John O. Brennan, the administration's chief counterterrorism adviser. \"It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled.\" Finally,", + " shortly before 2 a.m. in Pakistan, the commandos burst into an upstairs room.Inside, an armed bin Laden took cover behind a woman, Brennan said. With a burst of gunfire, one of the longest and costliest manhunts in modern history was over... The commandos moved inside, and finally reached bin Laden's upstairs living quarters after nearly 40 minutes on the ground.\n\nAlmost all that turns out to be hogwash -- according to the new account produced by the New Yorker three months later. An account that, again, it seems, comes courtesy of Brennan. The minutes did not pass like days. Bin Laden was not armed,", + " and did not take cover behind a woman. And the commandoes most certainly were not on the ground for 40 minutes. Some of them were up the stairs to the higher floors almost in a flash, and it didn't take long for them to run into and kill bin Laden.\n\nFor another take, consider this account from NBC News' Pentagon correspondent -- also reported the week after the raid -- two days after Brennan told the Washington Post a completely different story. This one appears to be based on a briefing from military officials who would have been likely to have good knowledge of the operational details:\n\nAccording to the officials' account, as the first SEAL team moved into the compound,", + " they took small-arms fire from the guest house in the compound. The SEALs returned fire, killing bin Laden's courier and the courier's wife, who died in the crossfire. It was the only time the SEALs were shot at. The second SEAL team entered the first floor of the main residence and could see a man standing in the dark with one hand behind his back. Fearing he was hiding a weapon, the SEALs shot and killed the lone man, who turned out to be unarmed. As the U.S. commandos moved through the house, they found several stashes of weapons and barricades, as if the residents were prepared for a violent and lengthy standoff -- which never materialized.", + " The SEALs then made their way up a staircase, where they ran into one of bin Laden's sons. The Americans immediately shot and killed the 19-year-old son, who was also unarmed, according to the officials. Hearing the shots, bin Laden peered over the railing from the floor above. The SEALs fired but missed bin Laden, who ducked back into his bedroom. As the SEALs stormed up the stairs, two young girls ran from the room. One SEAL scooped them up and carried them out of harm's way. The other two commandos stormed into bin Laden's bedroom. One of bin Laden's wives rushed toward the Navy SEAL,", + " who shot her in the leg. Then, without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fired two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head. Although there were weapons in that bedroom, bin Laden was also unarmed when he was shot. Instead of a chaotic firefight, the U.S. officials said, the American commando assault was a precision operation, with SEALs moving carefully through the compound, room to room, floor to floor. In fact, most of the operation was spent in what the military calls \"exploiting the site,\" gathering up the computers,", + " hard drives, cellphones and files that could provide valuable intelligence on al-Qaida operatives and potential operations worldwide. The U.S. officials describing the operation said the SEALs carefully gathered up 22 women and children to ensure they were not harmed. Some of the women were put in \"flexi-cuffs\" the plastic straps used to bind someone's hands at the wrists, and left them for Pakistani security forces to discover.\n\n***\n\nGiven that Brennan's initial version of the raid was strikingly erroneous, his later account to the New Yorker is suspect as well. So who else besides Brennan might have been Schmidle's sources? At one point in his piece,", + " he cites an unnamed counterterrorism official:\n\nA senior counterterrorism official who visited the JSOC redoubt described it as an enclave of unusual secrecy and discretion. \"Everything they were working on was closely held,\" the official said.\n\nLater, that same unnamed counterterrorism official is again cited, this time seeming to continue Brennan's narrative of the meeting before the raid, in which participants disagreed on the likely success of such a mission:\n\nThat day in Washington, Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound.", + " The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages \"ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent,\" and added, \"This was a circumstantial case.\"\n\nFrom the story's construction, one could reasonably conclude that the unnamed counterterrorism official may indeed still just be Brennan. If not, who could it be? How many different white House counterterrorism officials would have debriefed the SEALs, if indeed that is even their role? How many would have been privy to that planning meeting? And how many different officials would have gotten authorization to sum up the events of that important day for this New Yorker writer? Also,", + " it's an old journalistic trick to quote the same source, on and off the record -- thereby giving the source extra cover when discussing particularly delicate matters.\n\nSo, we don't know whether the article was based on anything more than Brennan, under marching orders to clean up the conflicting accounts he originally put out.\n\nUNEXPLAINED DISPUTES\n\nIt's curious that the source chooses to emphasize the fundamental disagreement over whether the raid was a good idea. Presumably, there was a purpose in emphasizing this, but the New Yorker's \"tick-tock\", which is very light on analysis or context, doesn't tell us what it was. It may have been intended to show Obama as brave,", + " inclined toward big risks (thereby running counter to his reputation) -- we can only guess.\n\nThis internal discord will get the attention of anyone who remembers all the assertions from intelligence officials over the years that bin Laden was almost certainly already dead -- either of natural causes or killed at some previous time.\n\nHere's a bit more from the New Yorker's on officials' doubts going into the raid:\n\nSeveral analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.'s analysis; their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent. The center's director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad.\n\nThose doubts are particularly interesting for several reasons:", + " the CIA has had a long history of disputes between its covert action wing, which tends to advocate activity, and its analysis section, historically prone to caution. The action wing also has a history of publicizing its being right -- when it could purport to be right -- and covering up its failures. So when an insider chooses to make public these disagreements, we should be willing to consider motives.\n\nThis dispute can also be seen as an intriguing prologue to the rush to dump Bin Laden's body and not provide proof to the public that it was indeed bin Laden. What if it wasn't bin Laden that they killed? Would the government announce that after such a high-stakes operation?", + " (\"While we thought he'd be there, we accidentally killed someone else instead\"? Seems unlikely.)\n\n***\n\nNow, let us go to the next antechamber of this warren of shadowy entities and unstated agendas.\n\nWho exactly wanted bin Laden shot rather than taken alive and interrogated -- and why? There's been much discussion about the purported reasons for terminating him on sight, but the fact remains that he would have been a source of tremendous intelligence of real value to the safety of Americans and others.\n\nYet, early in the piece, Schmidle writes:\n\nIf all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound,", + " overpower bin Laden's guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.\n\nThat was the plan? Whose plan? We've never been explicitly told by the White House that such a decision had been made. In fact, we'd previously been informed that the president was glad to have the master plotter taken alive if he was unarmed and did not resist. So, that's a huge and problematical discrepancy that is only heightened by Schmidle's misleadingly matter-of-fact treatment of the matter.\n\nGET ME RIYADH\n\nIf the justification for killing Osama presented in the New Yorker's warrants concern,", + " the account of how -- and why -- they disposed of his body ought to send alarm bells clanging.\n\nAt the time of the raid, the decision to hastily dump Osama's body in the ocean rather than make it available for authoritative forensic examination was a highly controversial one -- that only led to more speculation that the White House was hiding something. The justifications, including not wanting to bury him on land for fear of creating a shrine, were almost laughable.\n\nSo what do we learn about this from the New Yorker? It's truly bizarre: the SEALS themselves made the decision. That's strange enough. But then we learn that Brennan took it upon himself to verify that was the right decision.", + " How did he do this? Not by speaking with the president or top military, diplomatic or legal brass. No, he called some foreigners -- get ready -- the Saudis, who told him that dumping at sea sounded like a good plan.\n\nHere's Schmidle's account:\n\nAll along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden's corpse into the sea -- a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth. They had successfully pulled off a similar scheme before. During a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside Somalia in September, 2009, SEALs had killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of East Africa's top Al Qaeda leaders;", + " Nabhan's corpse was then flown to a ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper Muslim rites, and thrown overboard. Before taking that step for bin Laden, however, John Brennan made a call. Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, phoned a former counterpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan told the man what had occurred in Abbottabad and informed him of the plan to deposit bin Laden's remains at sea. As Brennan knew, bin Laden's relatives were still a prominent family in the Kingdom, and Osama had once been a Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi government have any interest in taking the body? \"Your plan sounds like a good one,\" the Saudi replied.\n\nLet's consider this.", + " The most wanted man in the world; substantive professional doubts about whether the man in the Abbottabad house is him; tremendous public doubts about whether it could even be him; the most important operation of the Obama presidency; yet the decision about what to do with the body is left to low-level operatives. Keep in mind SEALs are trained to follow orders given by others. They're expected to apply what they know to unexpected scenarios that come up, but the key strategic decisions -- arrived at in advance -- are not theirs to make.\n\nEven more strange that Brennan would discuss this with a foreign power. And not just any foreign power, but the regime that is inextricably linked with the domestically-influential family of bin Laden -- and home to many of the hijackers who worked for him.\n\nIs it just me,", + " or does this sound preposterous? Obama's Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser is just winging it with key aspects of one of America's most important, complex and risky operations? And the Saudi government is the one deciding to discard the remains of a man from one of Saudi Arabia's most powerful families, before the public could receive proper proof of the identity of the body? A regime with a great deal at stake and perhaps plenty to hide.\n\nAlso please consider this important caveat: As we noted in a previous article, the claim that the body had already been positively identified via DNA has been disputed by a DNA expert who said that insufficient time had elapsed before the sea burial to complete such tests.\n\nThe line about Brennan himself having been a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia is just sort of dropped in there.", + " No recognition of what it means that a person of that background was put into that position after 9/11, no recognition that a person of that background and those fraught personal connections is controlling this narrative. He's not just a \"counterterrorism expert\" -- he is a longtime member of an agency whose mandate includes the frequent use of disinformation. And one who has his own historic direct links to the Saudi regime, a key and problematical player in the larger chess game playing out.\n\nIt's relevant to note that Brennan is not only a career CIA officer (they say no one ever really leaves the Agency, no matter their new title)", + " but one with a lot of baggage. He was deputy director of the CIA at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He was an adviser to Obama's presidential campaign, after which Obama initially planned to name him CIA director. That appointment was pulled, in part due to criticism from human rights advocates over statements he had made in support of sending terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured.\n\nOf course, there could have been other sources besides Brennan. In addition to the unnamed \"counterterrorism official\" previously cited, the New Yorker mentions a \"special operations officer,\" as in:\n\n\u2026according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid.\n\nSubsequent quotes from him indicate that this had to be a supervisory special ops officer.", + " His comments are surprising:\n\n\"This wasn't a hard op,\" the special-operations officer told me. \"It would be like hitting a target in McLean\" -- the upscale Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.\n\nWhoops! Here's a Special Ops guy saying the Special Ops raid was actually no big deal! Shouldn't that, if a valid assessment, get more attention? Especially given the endless praise and frequent statements of how difficult the operation was. I mean, the toughness and diciness of the Abbottabad mission is the prime reason we want to read the New Yorker's account in the first place!\n\nTo further underline the point,", + " consider that this fellow is not alone in his assessment:\n\nIn the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the \"Black Hawk Down\" incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that \"this was not one of three missions.\"\u2026. He likened the routine of evening raids to \"mowing the lawn.\"\n\nWhy would a person overseeing an operation like this deflate the bubble of adoration? It doesn't seem helpful to the interests of Special Operations \u2013 and it doesn't seem credible, either. So there's presumably a reason that this person is -- again speaking to the New Yorker's after this important exclusive has been carefully considered and strategized.", + " We just don't know what it is, and the magazine doesn't even bother to wonder.\n\n***\n\nMost of the other sources seem to play bit roles. One is \"a senior adviser to the President\" whose only comment is that Obama decided not to trust the Pakistanis with advance notice of the raid -- which we already knew. Another -- named -- source is Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, who does not evince any intimate knowledge of the raid itself.\n\nThe New Yorker's also includes a few other officials who brief Schmidle on general background, like a \"senior defense department official\" explaining the overall relationship between Special Operations and CIA personnel,", + " and a named former CIA counsel explaining that the Abottabad raid amounted to \"a complete incorporation of JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] into a C.I.A. operation.\"\n\nThat's only slipped into the article, but it is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the piece, along with a brief mention of the way in which former Iraq/Afghan commander General David Petraeus has gone to CIA while CIA director Panetta has been made Defense Secretary. (For more on these important but confusing games of high-level musical chairs, which were not deeply scrutinized in the conventional media, see our WhoWhatWhy pieces here and here.)\n\nThis may sound too technical for your taste,", + " but the takeaway point is that fundamental realignments are afoot in that vast, massively-funded, powerful and secretive part of the US government that is treated by the corporate press almost as if it does not exist. The tales of internal intrigue that we do not hear would begin to provide us with the real narratives that are not ours to have.\n\nIn the New Yorker's piece, we do learn lots of things we did not know before -- for example, that Special Ops considered tunneling in or coming in by foot rather than helicopter. We learn that CIA director Robert Gates wanted to drop massive bombs on the house. General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,", + " shared that view -- Cartwright is one of the few who is directly identified as a source for Schmidle. That's important stuff, and worth more than brief mention. And, once again, we need more effort to try and understand why we are being told these things.\n\n\"WE REALLY DIDN'T KNOW... WHAT WAS GOING ON\"\n\nAbout two-thirds of the article is a sort of scene-setter, a prologue to on-the-ground story we've all been waiting for. But when the big moment arrives, the New Yorker's Schmidle instead punts:\n\nMeanwhile, James, the squadron commander, had breached one wall,", + " crossed a section of the yard covered with trellises, breached a second wall, and joined up with the SEALs from helo one, who were entering the ground floor of the house. What happened next is not precisely clear. \"I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on,\" Panetta said later, on \"PBS NewsHour.\" Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone's video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams, contrary to a widely cited report by CBS.", + " None of them had any previous knowledge of the house's floor plan, and they were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollections -- on which this account is based -- may be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute.\n\nSchmidle claims that the SEALs' \"recollections -- on which this account is based\" -- are subject to dispute. But as I've noted, the article is NOT based on their recollections, but on what some source claims to Schmidle were their recollections. Why the summary may be imprecise and thus subject to dispute after it has been filtered by a person controlling the scenario,", + " must be asked. Perhaps this is why the New Yorker is not permitted to speak directly to the SEALs -- because of what they could tell the magazine.\n\nNow, killing the men who lived in the compound: First, the SEALs shot and killed the courier, who they say was armed, and his wife, who they say was not, when they emerged from the guesthouse. Then they killed the courier's brother inside the main house, who they say was armed. Then they moved up the stairs:\n\n... three SEALs marched up the stairs. Midway up, they saw bin Laden's twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid,", + " craning his neck around the corner. He then appeared at the top of the staircase with an AK-47. Khalid, who wore a white T-shirt with an overstretched neckline and had short hair and a clipped beard, fired down at the Americans. (The counterterrorism official claims that Khalid was unarmed, though still a threat worth taking seriously. \"You have an adult male, late at night, in the dark, coming down the stairs at you in an Al Qaeda house -- your assumption is that you're encountering a hostile.\") At least two of the SEALs shot back and killed Khalid.\n\nOk, that's pretty strange.", + " First, Schmidle asserts that Khalid bin Laden was armed and fired with an AK-47. Then he quotes the counterterrorism official -- who could in fact be Brennan -- saying that Khalid was unarmed. Why does the New Yorker first run the \"Khalid was armed\" claim as a fact, and then include the official disclaimer? What's really going on here, even from the New Yorker's editorial standpoint?\n\nHere's another such instance: A dispute over where Osama was when they first saw him:\n\nThree SEALs shuttled past Khalid's body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor.", + " Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft [codename for Osama]. (The counterterrorism official asserts that the SEAL first saw bin Laden on the landing, and fired but missed.)\n\nWhat's the purpose of all this? How good is intelligence work when they can't reconstruct whether the singular focus of the operation was first spotted peeking out from a doorway,", + " or standing on the landing above them?\n\nAnd then one of the most interesting passages, about the kill:\n\nA second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden's chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. \"There was never any question of detaining or capturing him -- it wasn't a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,\" the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.)\n\nUh-oh. So who is this Special Operations officer?", + " He is directly disputing the administration's claim on what surely matters greatly -- what were President Obama's intentions here? And did they always plan to just ignore them? That the New Yorker just drops this in with no further analysis or context is, simply put, shocking.\n\nIt seems almost as if Panetta, Obama, and the people in the story who most closely approximate actual representatives of the public in a functioning democracy, were basically cut off from observing what went down that day -- or from influencing what transpired.\n\nConsider this statement from Panetta, not included in the New Yorker piece:\n\n\"Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on.", + " And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information. \"We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound.\"\n\nPanetta's \"lost 25 minutes\" needs to be seen in the context of a man with civilian roots, notwithstanding two mid-60s years as a Lt. in military intel: Former Congressman, Clinton White House budget chief and Chief of Staff, credentials with civil rights and environment movements -- a fellow with real distance from the true spook/military mojo.\n\nTaken together, here's what we have:", + " President Obama did not know exactly what was going on. He did not decide that bin Laden should be shot. And he did not decide to dump his body in the ocean. The CIA and its Special Ops allies made all the decisions.\n\nThen Brennan, the CIA's man, put out the version that CIA wanted. (Keep in mind that, as noted earlier, CIA was really running the operation -- with Special Ops under its direction).\n\nWhat we're looking at, folks, is the reality of democracy in America: A permanent entrenched covert establishment that marches to its own drummer or to drummers unknown. It's exactly the kind of thing that never gets reported.", + " Too scary. Too real. Better to dismiss this line of inquiry as too \"conspiracy theory.\"\n\nIf that sounds like hyperbole, let me add this rather significant consideration. It is the background of Nicholas Schmidle, the freelancer who wrote the New Yorker piece. It may give us insight into how he landed this extraordinary exclusive on this extraordinarily sensitive matter -- information again, significantly, not shared by the New Yorker with its readers:\n\nSchmidle's father is Marine Lt. General Robert E. \"Rooster\" Schmidle Jr. General Schmidle served as Commanding Officer of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (Experimental)", + " -- that's essentially Special Operations akin to Navy SEALs. In recent years, he was \"assistant deputy commandant for Programs and Resources (Programs)\" -- where, among other things, he oversaw \"irregular warfare.\" (See various, including contract specs here on \"Special Operations,\" and picture caption here) In 2010, he moved into another piece of this, when Obama appointed him deputy commander, U.S. Cyber Command. Cumulatively, this makes the author's father a very important man in precisely the sort of circles who care how the raid is publicly portrayed -- and who would be quite intimate with some of the folks hunkering down with Obama in the Situation Room on the big day.\n\nYou can see a photo of Gen.", + " Schmidle on a 2010 panel about \"Warring Futures.\" Event co-sponsors include Slate magazine and the New America Foundation, both of which, according to Nicholas Schmidle's website, have also provided Schmidle's son with an ongoing perch (with Slate giving him a platform for numerous articles from war zones and the foundation employing him as a Fellow.) These parallel relationships grow more disturbing with contemplation.\n\n***\n\nSo let's get back to the question, Who is driving this Ship of State?\n\nFirst, consider this passage:\n\nObama returned to the White House at two o'clock, after playing nine holes of golf at Andrews Air Force Base.", + " The Black Hawks departed from Jalalabad thirty minutes later. Just before four o'clock, Panetta announced to the group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching Abbottabad.\n\nTo be really useful reporting here, rather than just meaningless \"color\", we'd need some context. Was the golf game's purpose to blow off steam at an especially tense time? Did Obama not think it important enough for him to be constantly present in the hours leading up to the raid? Is this typical of his schedule when huge things are happening? We desperately need a more realistic sense of what presidents do, how much they're really in charge, or, instead,", + " figureheads for unnamed individuals who make most of the critical decisions.\n\nHere's something just as strange: we are told the President took a commanding role in determining key operational tactics, but then didn't seem interested in important details, after the fact.\n\nForty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could \"fight their way out of Pakistan.\"\n\nNow,", + " consider the following climactic New Yorker account of Obama meeting with the squadron commander after it's all over, with bin Laden dead and the troops home and safe. Schmidle decides to call the commander \"James... the names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed.\" The anecdote will feature a canine, one who, in true furry dog story fashion, had already been introduced early in the New Yorker piece, as \"Cairo\" (it's not clear whether the dog's name, too, was changed):\n\nAs James talked about the raid, he mentioned Cairo's role. \"There was a dog?\" Obama interrupted.", + " James nodded and said that Cairo was in an adjoining room, muzzled, at the request of the Secret Service. \"I want to meet that dog,\" Obama said. \"If you want to meet the dog, Mr. President, I advise you to bring treats,\" James joked. Obama went over to pet Cairo, but the dog's muzzle was left on.\n\nHere's the ending:\n\nBefore the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.\n\nWhy did the president not want to ask for specifics on the most important parts of the operation -- but seemed so interested in a dog that participated?", + " While it is certainly plausible that this happened, we should be wary of one of the oldest p.r. tricks around -- get people cooing over an animal, while the real action is elsewhere.\n\nCertainly, Obama's reaction differs dramatically from that of other previous presidents who always demanded detailed briefings and would have stayed on top of it all throughout -- including fellow Democrats JFK, Carter and Clinton. At minimum, it shows a degree of caution or ceremony based upon a desire not to know too much -- or an understanding that he may not ask. Does anyone doubt that Bill Clinton would have been on watch 24/7 during this operation, parsing legal,", + " political and operational details throughout, and would have demanded to know who felled America's most wanted?\n\nSumming up about the reliability of this account, which is now likely to become required reading for every student in America, long into the future:\n\n\u2022It is based on reporting by a man who fails to disclose that he never spoke to the people who conducted the raid, or that his father has a long background himself running such operations (this even suggests the possibility that Nicholas Schmidle's own father could have been one of those \"unnamed sources.\")\n\n\u2022It seems to have depended heavily on trusting second-hand accounts by people with a poor track record for accurate summations,", + " and an incentive to spin.\n\n\u2022The alleged decisions on killing bin Laden and disposing of his body lack credibility.\n\n\u2022The DNA evidence that the SEALs actually got their man is questionable.\n\n\u2022Though certain members of Congress say they have seen photos of the body (or, to be precise, a body), the rest of us have not seen anything.\n\n\u2022Promised photos of the ceremonial dumping of the body at sea have not materialized.\n\n\u2022The eyewitnesses from the house -- including the surviving wives -- have disappeared without comment.\n\nWe weren't allowed to hear from the raid participants. And on August 6, seventeen Navy SEALs died when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan.", + " We're told that fifteen of them came, amazingly, from the same SEAL Team 6 that carried out the Abbottabad raid -- but that none of the dead were present for the raid. We do get to hear the stories of those men, and their names.\n\nOf course, if any of those men had been in the Abbottabad raid -- or knew anything about it of broad public interest, we'd be none the wiser -- because, the only \"reliable sources\" still available (and featured by the New Yorker) are military and intelligence professionals, coming out of a long tradition of cover-ups and fabrications.\n\nMeanwhile, we have this president,", + " this one who according to the magazine article didn't ask about the core issues -- why this man was killed, who killed him, under whose orders, what would be done with the body.\n\nWell, he may not want answers. But we ought to want them. Otherwise, it's all just a game.\n" + ], + "length": 9085, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 23, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A new study has bolstered the case that the key to preventing peanut allergies in kids is to feed kids peanuts. A study conducted last year found that babies who were fed \"peanut butter mush\" were 80% less likely to develop a peanut allergy by age 5, NPR reports. The youngsters in that study, who started eating peanuts between 4 and 11 months, were deemed high-risk due to family history or eczema. In a follow-up study released Friday, researchers found that kids' tolerance of peanuts remained even after they stopped eating peanuts for a year. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Friday released proposed guidelines based on the finding that recommend kids at high risk of allergies be fed peanuts starting between 4 and 6 months, the New York Times reports. That, the Times notes, runs counter to the World Health Organization recommendation that babies consume only breast milk for the first six months of life. The new guidelines do recommend that infants that already have an egg allergy or eczema be evaluated by an allergist before peanuts are introduced. And early introduction of other commonly allergenic foods\u2014such as eggs, yogurt, sesame, whitefish, and wheat\u2014may also prevent allergies, according to a King's College London study that found just 2.4% of kids who ate those foods on a regular basis developed an allergy. Of kids who were fed only breast milk in their first six months, more than 7% developed allergies.\n", + "docs": [ + "In a randomized trial, the early introduction of peanuts in infants at high risk for allergy was shown to prevent peanut allergy. In this follow-up study, we investigated whether the rate of peanut allergy remained low after 12 months of peanut avoidance among participants who had consumed peanuts during the primary trial (peanut-consumption group), as compared with those who had avoided peanuts (peanut-avoidance group).\n\nAt the end of the primary trial, we instructed all the participants to avoid peanuts for 12 months. The primary outcome was the percentage of participants with peanut allergy at the end of the 12-month period, when the participants were 72 months of age.\n\nWe enrolled 556 of 628 eligible participants (88.", + "5%) from the primary trial; 550 participants (98.9%) had complete primary-outcome data. The rate of adherence to avoidance in the follow-up study was high (90.4% in the peanut-avoidance group and 69.3% in the peanut-consumption group). Peanut allergy at 72 months was significantly more prevalent among participants in the peanut-avoidance group than among those in the peanut-consumption group (18.6% [52 of 280 participants] vs. 4.8% [13 of 270], P<0.001). Three new cases of allergy developed in each group,", + " but after 12 months of avoidance there was no significant increase in the prevalence of allergy among participants in the consumption group (3.6% [10 of 274 participants] at 60 months and 4.8% [13 of 270] at 72 months, P=0.25). Fewer participants in the peanut-consumption group than in the peanut-avoidance group had high levels of Ara h2 (a component of peanut protein)\u2013specific IgE and peanut-specific IgE; in addition, participants in the peanut-consumption group continued to have a higher level of peanut-specific IgG4 and a higher peanut-specific IgG4:IgE ratio.\n\nAmong children at high risk for allergy in whom peanuts had been introduced in the first year of life and continued until 5 years of age,", + " a 12-month period of peanut avoidance was not associated with an increase in the prevalence of peanut allergy. Longer-term effects are not known. (Funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and others; LEAP-On ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01366846.)\n\nSupported by grants (NO1-AI-15416, UM1AI109565, HHSN272200800029C, and UM2AI117870) from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health and by Food Allergy Research and Education, the Medical Research Council and Asthma U.K.", + " Centre, and the U.K. Department of Health through a National Institute for Health Research comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre award to Guy\u2019s and St. Thomas\u2019 NHS Foundation Trust, in partnership with King\u2019s College London and King\u2019s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. The clinical trials unit was supported by the National Peanut Board, Atlanta. The U.K. Food Standards Agency provided additional support for the costs of phlebotomy.\n\nDisclosure forms provided by the authors are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.\n\nDrs. Sayre and Roberts contributed equally to this article.\n\nThe views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.\n\nThis article was published on March 4,", + " 2016, at NEJM.org.\n\nWe thank Dr. Daniel Rotrosen and Dr. Gerald Nepom for critical insights and helpful comments; the many nurses, dietitians, doctors, and administrative staff of the Guy\u2019s and St. Thomas\u2019 NHS Foundation Trust Children\u2019s Allergy Service for clinical and logistic assistance over the period of the study; Ms. Poling Lau for administrative support in the preparation of an earlier version of the manuscript; medical colleagues Drs. Tom Marrs and Michael Perkin for medical support; Dr. Kirsty Logan for project-management support; Ms. Lia Weiner and Mr. Agustin Calatroni for statistical support;", + " Mr. Jeremy Wildfire, Mr. Spencer Childress, Mr. Nathan Bryant, Mr. Shane Rosanbalm, and Mr. Ryan Bailey for help with the interactive graphics on the study website (www.itntrialshare.org/LEAPOn.url); and above all, all the children and their families who took part in this study. ", + " Photo\n\nLOS ANGELES \u2014 Evidence is accumulating that food allergies in children might be prevented by feeding peanuts and other allergenic food to infants in their first year of life, researchers reported here Friday.\n\nThat finding would challenge the recommendation of the World Health Organization that babies be fed exclusively breast milk for the first six months of life.\n\n\u201cAt least as far as peanut is concerned, I would recommend parting from that,\u201d Dr. Gideon Lack, professor of pediatric allergy at King\u2019s College London, said in an interview.\n\nDr. Lack was the senior author of a study last year that found feeding peanuts to young children starting when they are 4 to 11 months old sharply reduced the risk of their developing peanut allergies.\n\nThat upended the conventional wisdom that it is best to avoid introducing peanuts until children are older.\n\nOn Friday,", + " the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which helped pay for that study, issued proposed new guidelines recommending that children at risk of peanut allergies be fed peanuts starting at 4 to 6 months of age, though they should be tested first to make sure they do not already have an allergy.\n\nBut that initial study also left several unanswered questions. Some of those questions were answered by two additional studies that were set to be published online in The New England Journal of Medicine and were presented here at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology on Friday.\n\nOne question was whether children who consume peanuts from an early age will still remain free of allergies if they stop consuming them.", + " The researchers followed the children from the original study for another year, from the time they turned 5 until they turned 6. For that year, they were not supposed to eat peanuts at all. The results found no big increase in allergies. \u201cIt tells you the protective effect is stable,\u201d Dr. Lack said.\n\nAnother question was whether the early feeding technique could be applied to other types of foods and to children at normal risk of allergies. (The original study involved children deemed to have a high risk of peanut allergy.)\n\nThe researchers conducted a second study at King\u2019s College London involving 1,300 infants who were 3 months old and being fed only breast milk.", + " Half were randomly assigned to continue on only breast milk until 6 months of age, which is the recommended practice in Britain by the United Kingdom Department of Health.The other half were to be regularly fed small amounts of peanut butter and five other allergenic foods: eggs, yogurt, sesame, white fish and wheat. The children were assessed for allergies when they turned 3.\n\nOver all, 5.6 percent of the infants who were fed the allergenic foods early on developed an allergy to at least one of the six foods, a modest improvement from the 7.1 percent in the breast-milk-only group. However, the difference was not statistically significant,", + " meaning it could have occurred by chance.\n\nOne problem was that fewer than half of the parents in the early-introduction group actually fed their children the required six foods on a regular basis. But when researchers looked only at those children whose parents adhered to the feeding regimen, there was a statistically significant reduction in allergies. Only 2.4 percent of those children developed a food allergy, compared with 7.3 percent of those whose parents faithfully stuck to only breast milk for six months. There were also significant reductions in peanut and egg allergies alone.\n\nOne conclusion could be that feeding allergenic foods to infants early really does work to prevent allergies,", + " providing that parents consistently follow the feeding regimen.\n\nBut researchers cautioned that there could be another explanation. One reason parents stopped feeding the foods is that they thought their children were having a possible allergic reaction to them. In that case, looking only at the children who were actually fed the food would overstate the effectiveness of the technique.\n\nDr. Lack said he did not think that was an explanation because the children in the early-introduction group whose parents did not adhere to the feeding protocol did not have an unusually high rate of allergies at age 3.\n\nDr. James R. Baker Jr., chief executive of Food Allergy Research & Education, a patient advocacy group,", + " said that even if the benefits of early introduction were not totally clear for all the foods, there appeared to be little harm from that practice.\n\n\u201cI think for a very long time here we\u2019ve vilified these foods,\u2019\u2019 he said at a news conference here. \u201cThere\u2019s no reason not to do this. There\u2019s no harm that comes from early introduction.\u2019\u2019\n\nIn a commentary in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Gary W.K. Wong, a pediatrician at Chinese University of Hong Kong, cautioned against unproven conclusions. He said the fact that so many parents did not stick to the regimen suggested that it was too demanding to be practical and that less-burdensome ways must be found to introduce allergenic foods early.\n\n\u201cIn the meantime,\u201d he said,", + " \u201cevidence is building that early consumption rather than delayed introduction of foods is likely to be more beneficial as a strategy for the primary prevention of food allergy.\u201d ", + " Feeding Babies Foods With Peanuts Appears To Prevent Allergies\n\nBabies at high risk for becoming allergic to peanuts are much less likely to develop the allergy if they are regularly fed foods containing the legumes starting in their first year of life.\n\nThat's according to a big new study released Monday involving hundreds of British babies. The researchers found that those who consumed the equivalent of about 4 heaping teaspoons of peanut butter each week, starting when they were between 4 and 11 months old, were about 80 percent less likely to develop a peanut allergy by their fifth birthday.\n\n\"This is certainly good news,\" says Gideon Lack of King's College London,", + " who led the study. He presented the research at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. It was also published in The New England Journal of Medicine.\n\nAs many as 2 million U.S. children are estimated to be allergic to peanuts \u2014 an allergy that has been increasing rapidly in the United States, Britain and other countries in recent years. While most children who are allergic to peanuts only experience relatively mild symptoms, such as hives, some have life-threatening reactions that can include trouble breathing and heart problems.\n\n\"Peanut allergy can be extremely serious,\" Lack says.\n\nLack's study was launched after he noticed that Israeli kids are much less likely to have peanut allergies than are Jewish kids in Britain and the United States.\n\n\"My Israeli colleagues and friends and young parents were telling me,", + " 'Look, we give peanuts to these children very early. Not whole peanuts, but peanut snacks,' \" Lack says.\n\nPeanut snacks called Bamba, which are made of peanut butter and corn, are wildly popular in Israel, where parents give them to their kids when they're very young. That's very different from what parents do in Britain and the United States, where fears about food allergies have prompted many parents to keep their children away from peanuts, even though the American Academy of Pediatrics revised a recommendation to do so in 2008.\n\n\"That raised the question whether early exposure would prevent these allergies\" by training babies' immune systems not to overreact to peanuts,", + " Lack says. \"It's really a very fundamental change in the way we're approaching these children.\"\n\nTo try to find out, Lack and his colleagues got funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to launch a study. They found 640 babies who were at high risk for developing peanut allergies because they already had eczema or egg allergy. They asked half of the infants' parents to start feeding them Bamba, peanut butter, peanut soup or peanut in some other form before their first birthday and followed them for about five years.\n\n\"What we found was a very great reduction in the rate of peanut allergy,\" Lack says. About 17 percent of the kids who avoided peanuts developed peanut allergies,", + " compared with only 3.2 percent of the kids who ate peanuts, the researchers reported.\n\nBased on the findings, Lack thinks most parents should start feeding their babies peanut products as early as possible \u2014 not whole peanuts or globs of peanut butter, but peanut mixed in some other food to avoid any possible choking hazard.\n\n\"We've moved, really, 180 degrees from complete avoidance to we should give peanuts to young children actively,\" Lack says.\n\nOther allergy experts hailed the results as an important advance.\n\n\"This is a major study \u2014 really what we would call a landmark study,\" says Scott Sicherer, who advises the American Academy of Pediatrics on allergies.", + " \"There's been a huge question about why there's an increase in peanut allergy and what we can do to try to stem that increase. And this is a study that directly addresses that issue.\"\n\nBut Sicherer says we have to be careful, since some kids are really sensitive to peanuts.\n\n\"If you're a parent sitting at home with your child looking at them saying, 'Well, gee, they didn't eat peanut yet. Maybe I should run to the cupboard and get some peanut butter for them,' it could be a little bit dangerous because if you do that and the child has a bad allergic reaction, you would be at home and have a problem,\" Sicherer says.\n\nSo Sicherer says parents who have some reason to think their kids might be allergic to peanuts should get them tested first and then only try feeding them peanuts with a doctor in the room.\n\nBut other specialists say for most parents,", + " the new findings should encourage them to start feeding their kids peanuts as early as possible.\n\n\"This is a question we get asked constantly in our clinic. When parents come in, they often have young children. They want to know what should they do. This really provides us with the answer,\" says Hugh Sampson, who heads the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai in New York. Sampson co-authored an editorial being published with the study.\n\n\"So now I think we're on firm ground, and we can go forward and look the parents in the eye and say, 'This is something that will be beneficial,' \" Sampson says.\n\nA key question is whether kids will have to keep eating peanuts to keep any allergy at bay.", + " Lack is following the kids in his study to find out what happened to them after they stopped eating peanuts regularly. ", + " Peanut Mush In Infancy Cuts Allergy Risk. New Study Adds To Evidence\n\nEnlarge this image toggle caption iStockphoto iStockphoto\n\nParenting can be an angst-ridden journey.\n\nAnd one bump along the road is that horrible feeling that comes over you when you see your baby break out in hives after eating a particular food \u2013 say, peanuts \u2014 for the first time. (One of my three kids gave me that kind of scare.)\n\nThe concern is real. Between 1997 and 2008, the incidence of peanut and tree nut allergies nearly tripled, according to one published study.\n\nNow, there's a growing consensus about how to prevent peanut allergies in kids who are at high risk.", + " This includes children with a strong family history of food allergies and those with eczema.\n\nLast year, a landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that high-risk babies who were fed a soupy, peanut-butter mush (starting between 4 and 11 months of age) were about 80 percent less likely to develop a peanut allergy by age 5, compared with kids who were not exposed.\n\n\"Giving peanuts very early on actually protected them from developing a peanut allergy,\" says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.\n\nPreviously, parents of high-risk kids had been advised to delay the introduction of peanuts.\n\nNow,", + " a new follow-up study involving the same group of children adds to the evidence that, contrary to previous advice, early exposure can be beneficial.\n\nResearchers followed the kids for one additional year. The kids were between 5 and 6 years old during this follow-up period. It turned out, these high-risk kids' tolerance to peanuts held up even if they stopped eating peanuts.\n\n\"A 12-month period of peanut avoidance was not associated with an increase in the prevalence of peanut allergy,\" the authors write in the paper.\n\nThis is an important finding, because it wasn't known whether the kids would need to maintain regular weekly consumption of peanuts in order to stave off developing an allergy.\n\n\"This new study is great because... it looks like the benefit [of early exposure]", + " is essentially permanent,\" says Scott Sicherer, a pediatric immunologist and allergy specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital. Immunologists will continue to study this.\n\nSicherer has helped develop new interim guidance based on the emerging evidence of the benefits of early, rather than delayed, introduction of peanut.\n\n\"There is now scientific evidence that health care providers should recommend introducing peanut-containing products into the diets of \"high-risk\" infants early on in life (between 4 and 11 months of age),\" the consensus guidance states.\n\nBut that doesn't mean all parents should just rush in with the peanut mush. The guidance recommends that \"infants with eczema or egg allergy in the first 4 to 6 months of life might benefit from evaluation by an allergist\"", + " \u2014 before they're introduced to peanut-based foods.\n\nThe evidence from the two studies together represents an important step forward in immunology, says Anthony Fauci. \"It's a very important proof of concept,\" Fauci says.\n\nAnd he says it's possible that early exposure will turn out to be a successful strategy to prevent other allergies as well. ", + " Observational studies suggest that the early introduction of peanut, 3 egg, 4 or cow\u2019s milk 5 may prevent the development of allergy to these foods. The randomized, controlled Learning Early about Peanut Allergy (LEAP) trial showed that the early consumption of peanut in high-risk infants with severe eczema, egg allergy, or both reduced the development of peanut allergy by 80% by 5 years of age. 6 The Persistence of Oral Tolerance to Peanut (LEAP-On) study has now shown that the absence of reactivity is maintained in these infants. 7 However, the LEAP trial did not investigate the efficacy of introduction of other allergenic foods,", + " nor did it examine whether this approach could prevent peanut allergy in children in the general population. The Enquiring about Tolerance (EAT) trial was therefore conceived to determine whether the early introduction of common dietary allergens (peanut, cooked hen\u2019s egg, cow\u2019s milk, sesame, whitefish, and wheat) from 3 months of age in exclusively breast-fed infants in the general population would prevent food allergies, as compared with infants who were exclusively breast-fed for approximately 6 months.\n\nThe World Health Organization recommends exclusive breast-feeding of infants for their first 6 months of life. 1 Two national guidelines that had previously recommended the delayed introduction of allergenic foods have been withdrawn (see the Introduction section in the Supplementary Appendix,", + " available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org). In the 2010 United Kingdom Infant Feeding Survey, 45% of the mothers of infants 8 to 10 months of age reported avoiding giving their infant a particular food: 48% avoided nuts, 14% eggs, 10% dairy, and 6% fish. 2 Fear of allergy was the most common reason for avoiding foods, followed by a belief that the baby was too young.\n\nThe per-protocol population included all participants who adhered adequately to the assigned regimen, which was defined as follows. In each group, breast-feeding was continued to at least 5 months of age.", + " In the standard-introduction group, there was no consumption of peanut, egg, sesame, fish, or wheat before 5 months of age and consumption of less than 300 ml per day of formula milk between 3 and 6 months of age. In the early-introduction group, there was consumption of at least five of the early-introduction foods, for at least 5 weeks between 3 and 6 months of age, of at least 75% of the recommended dose (i.e., 3 g per week of allergenic protein). The per-protocol population for food-specific allergy used the same consumption criterion \u2014 consumption for at least 5 weeks between 3 and 6 months of age of at least 75%", + " of the recommended dose of that food (i.e., 3 g per week of allergenic protein). The data set will be made publicly available by August 2017.\n\nThe intention-to-treat analysis for the primary outcome included all the participants who had data that could be evaluated. The analysis, which compared the proportion of participants in the two groups who had food allergy to one or more of the early-introduction foods, was performed with a chi-square test. For secondary analyses, comparisons were made with the chi-square test or Fisher\u2019s exact test, as appropriate. The trial had 80% power at the 5% significance level to detect a halving of the prevalence of food allergy,", + " from 8% in the standard-introduction group to 4% in the early-introduction group. 8\n\nThe statistical analysis followed a prespecified analysis plan. Post hoc analyses included a dominance analysis of factors contributing to having a positive result with respect to the primary outcome and to not adhering to the protocol in the two study groups. Dominance analysis discerns the relative importance of independent variables in an estimation model on the basis of the contribution of each variable to the fit statistics of the overall model (all post hoc analyses are listed in the Methods section in the Supplementary Appendix ).\n\nThe primary outcome was challenge-proven food allergy to one or more of the six early-introduction foods between 1 year and 3 years of age.", + " In two exceptional circumstances, reactions to foods that occurred before 1 year of age were also included in the primary outcome. Categories of evidence for food allergy are presented in the Methods section in the Supplementary Appendix. Secondary outcomes were allergy to individual foods and positive results on skin-prick testing for individual foods.\n\nPeanut-protein levels were measured in dust collected from the participant\u2019s bed at 3 months of age (before the consumption of allergenic foods commenced in the early-introduction group) and at 12 months of age as an independent measure of adherence to the dietary intervention. 9,10 Participants had scheduled assessments at 1 year of age and 3 years of age and had unscheduled clinic visits for the investigation of parent-reported symptoms that were suggestive of food allergy.", + " Additional details are provided in the Methods section and Tables S1, S2, and S3 and Figs. S2, S3, and S4 in the Supplementary Appendix.\n\nAll the families completed an online questionnaire each month to 1 year of age, and then every 3 months until the child reached 3 years of age. This questionnaire recorded the frequency of consumption of allergenic foods in the two groups. In addition, the parents of the participants in the early-introduction group kept a weekly diary to record the quantity of the six foods consumed. 8\n\nInfants in the early-introduction group who had a wheal of any size on skin-prick testing at baseline underwent an open-label incremental food challenge totaling 2 g of protein of that food.", + " Families of infants in the early-introduction group who had negative results on skin-prick testing or who had positive results on skin-prick testing but negative results on the food challenge were asked to continue feeding their infants 2 g of the allergen protein twice weekly. Families of infants who had a positive result on the food challenge at baseline were instructed to avoid giving the infants that food but to continue feeding the infants the other foods.\n\nEnrollment took place from November 2, 2009, to July 30, 2012. Details of the trial procedures have been published previously. 8 Singleton infants who were 3 months of age and exclusively breast-fed were recruited from the general population in England and Wales.", + " Participants were randomly assigned by an independent online service to the standard-introduction group or the early-introduction group (Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Appendix ). Participants in the standard-introduction group were to be exclusively breast-fed to approximately 6 months of age. After 6 months of age, the consumption of allergenic foods was allowed according to parental discretion. After skin-prick testing in duplicate at baseline, participants in the early-introduction group had six allergenic foods introduced: cow\u2019s milk (yogurt) first, followed (in random order) by peanut, cooked (boiled) hen\u2019s egg, sesame, and whitefish;", + " wheat was introduced last. The infants in the standard-introduction group did not undergo skin-prick testing at baseline because the results could have influenced the timing of the introduction of allergenic foods.\n\nThis randomized, controlled trial was conducted at a single site in the United Kingdom. Ethics approval was provided by the St. Thomas\u2019 Hospital research ethics committee. Written informed consent was obtained from parents or guardians, and safety data were reviewed by an independent data and safety monitoring committee. The trial protocol is available at NEJM.org.\n\nAll the reactions in the seven participants who had positive results on challenges at baseline were mild (Table S30 in the Supplementary Appendix ). There were 10 positive challenges among these seven participants;", + " 6 reactions required no treatment, and 4 were treated with antihistamines. There were no cases of anaphylaxis during the challenges, and no intramuscular epinephrine was administered.\n\nAt enrollment, 33 of the 652 participants in the early-introduction group (5.1%) had a positive skin-prick test to an early-introduction food. All 33 participants were invited to undergo food challenges to the relevant foods: 7 participants had positive results (to one or more foods), 22 had negative results (to one or more foods), and 4 did not return for the challenges. Of the 7 participants who had a positive result on a challenge at baseline,", + " 5 subsequently had a positive result with respect to the primary outcome, 1 had a negative result, and 1 withdrew from the trial. Of the 22 participants who had negative results on the challenge at baseline, 1 subsequently had a positive result with respect to the primary outcome, 3 could not be evaluated, and 18 had a negative result. Details are provided in Table S29A in the Supplementary Appendix.\n\nThe rate of visits to the emergency department was similar in the two groups. The early-introduction regimen did not affect the growth of the participants or the duration of breast-feeding. 8 Details on safety outcomes are provided in Tables S17 through S28 and Figures S9 through S19 in the Supplementary Appendix.\n\nNo deaths occurred in the trial.", + " There were three life-threatening events, all of which occurred in the standard-introduction group; none were related to allergic disease (heart-valve damage, prolonged febrile convulsion, and extensive burns). There were no significant between-group differences in the rates of hospitalization. There were no cases of anaphylaxis with the introduction of foods at home in the early-introduction group. The use of the epinephrine autoinjector is discussed in the Results section in the Supplementary Appendix.\n\nThe mean weekly consumption of egg and peanut protein between enrollment and 6 months of age was calculated and divided into quartiles. The prevalence of allergy to peanut and egg and the prevalence of positive responses on skin-prick testing to peanut,", + " egg, and raw egg white diminished with increasing quartile levels of consumption (Fig. S8 in the Supplementary Appendix ). The mean weekly consumption data were used to generate predictive probability plots that were based on logistic modeling; analysis showed that higher consumption was associated with a lower prevalence of allergy and sensitization to that food ( Figure 3 Figure 3 Dose\u2013Response Analysis of the Relationship between Mean Weekly Dose of Peanut or Egg Protein Consumed and Allergy or Positive Result on Skin-Prick Testing to Peanut, Egg, and Raw Egg White.). The mean weekly consumption of 2 g of peanut protein and 4 g of egg protein (equivalent to 2 g of egg-white protein)", + " was associated with the prevention of these two respective food allergies. The consumption of cooked egg was equally effective in inhibiting reactivity to raw egg-white protein and egg extract on skin-prick testing at 3 years of age.\n\nVariations in the number of foods consumed, the weekly dose of each food consumed, and the number of weeks during which this dose was consumed resulted in a rate of adherence in the early-introduction group that ranged from 6% to 81%. The prevalence of food allergy overall and the prevalence of allergy to specific foods were reduced in concert with increases in any of these variables. At a consumption level of 2 g or more per week of allergenic protein for 4 or more weeks,", + " peanut was consumed by 85.3% of the participants in the early-introduction group for whom adherence with peanut consumption could be determined (419 of 491 participants) and egg by 75.5% (370 of 490). The corresponding rates of allergy were 0.2% for peanut and 1.9% for egg. Details are provided in Tables S15A, S15B, and S16 in the Supplementary Appendix.\n\nThe levels of peanut protein in bed dust were similar at baseline in the early-introduction group and the standard-introduction group (median, 7.6 \u03bcg of peanut protein per gram of dust and 9.", + "7 \u03bcg per gram, respectively). However, by 1 year of age, the levels were significantly higher in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group (387.9 \u03bcg of peanut protein per gram of dust vs. 77.0 \u03bcg per gram, P<0.001). At 1 year of age, participants in the early-introduction group who adhered to the protocol had higher levels of peanut protein in bed dust than did those in the same trial group who did not adhere to the protocol (P=0.04) (Fig. S7 in the Supplementary Appendix ). Further details on adherence to the protocol are provided in the Results section in the Supplementary Appendix.\n\nThe rate of adherence to the protocol with respect to individual foods in the early-introduction group varied.", + " The rates were as follows: 43.1% for egg (215 of 499 participants), 50.7% for sesame (266 of 505), 60.0% for fish (297 of 495), 61.9% for peanut (310 of 501), and 85.2% for milk (415 of 487).\n\nA total of 42.8% of the participants in the early-introduction group whose primary-outcome status could be determined (208 of 486 participants) adhered to the protocol (representing 31.9% of the total number of participants enrolled in the early-introduction group)", + " (Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Appendix ). Four factors accounted for 78% of the nonadherence in the dominance analysis: nonwhite race (odds ratio, 2.21; 95% CI, 1.18 to 4.14), parentally perceived symptoms in the child related to any of the early-introduction foods (odds ratio, 1.70; 95% CI, 1.02 to 2.86), reduced maternal quality of life (psychological domain) (odds ratio, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.47 to 1.", + "00), and the presence of eczema in the child at enrollment (odds ratio, 1.38; 95% CI, 0.87 to 2.19) (Tables S12 and S14 in the Supplementary Appendix ).\n\nA total of 92.9% of the participants in the standard-introduction group whose primary-outcome status could be determined (524 of 564 participants) adhered to the protocol (Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Appendix ). In the dominance analysis, shorter duration of maternal education and maternal smoking accounted for the majority of the variation in the fit statistic of the overall model (Tables S12 and S13 in the Supplementary Appendix ). A total of 85.", + "6% of the participants in the standard-introduction group consumed no cow\u2019s milk formula before 6 months of age.\n\nIn the per-protocol analyses, the early-introduction group had a significant 42% lower rate of positive skin-prick tests to any food than the standard-introduction group at 12 months of age (P=0.01) and a significant 67% lower rate at 36 months of age (P=0.002). On food-specific testing, the relative risk of a positive result on skin-prick testing at 12 months of age was consistently lower, by approximately 50%, in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group for every food with the exception of fish;", + " the difference was significant with respect to egg (P=0.009) and peanut (P=0.04). At 36 months of age, the effect was greater; the relative risk of a positive result on skin-prick testing was 67% lower in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group with respect to peanut (P=0.007), 48% lower with respect to egg (P=0.10), 88% lower with respect to milk (P=0.02), 100% lower with respect to both sesame (P=0.04) and fish (P=0.", + "17), and 69% lower with respect to wheat (P=0.12). The rate of a positive skin-prick test to raw egg white was also lower in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group at 36 months of age; the 49% lower relative risk (P=0.07) was similar to that observed with commercial egg extract ( Figure 2, and Table S11 in the Supplementary Appendix ).\n\nA similar pattern was seen for the results of skin-prick testing ( Figure 2 Figure 2 Secondary Outcome of Results on Skin-Prick Testing.). In the intention-to-treat analyses,", + " the risk of a positive skin-prick test to any food was 22% lower in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group at 12 months of age (P=0.07) and 12% lower at 36 months of age (P=0.47); both differences were nonsignificant. Positive skin-prick tests to wheat occurred significantly less frequently in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group at 12 months (1.3% vs. 3.2%, P=0.03) and at 36 months of age (1.4% vs. 3.", + "2%, P=0.04). The prevalence of positive skin-prick tests at 12 months and 36 months of age was nonsignificantly lower in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group for every other food, with the exception of fish at 12 months of age, which had a higher prevalence in the early-introduction group ( Figure 2, and Fig. S6 and Table S11 in the Supplementary Appendix ).\n\nParticipants in the two trial groups who did not adhere to the protocol or whose adherence could not be evaluated had rates of allergy that were similar to the rate among the participants in the standard-introduction group who adhered to the protocol.", + " Statistical comparisons between the participants in the standard-introduction group who adhered to the protocol and the participants in the early-introduction group who did not adhere to the protocol or whose adherence could not be evaluated were all nonsignificant (Table S10B in the Supplementary Appendix ).\n\nAlthough adjustment for multiple testing was not part of the statistical analysis plan, if these six component food tests were adjusted for multiple testing with the use of a Bonferroni correction, the critical value for statistical significance would be 0.0085 (i.e., 1\u22120.95 1/6 ). Under this constraint, in the per-protocol analysis the effect on peanut allergy would remain significant,", + " and the results for egg would remain borderline significant (see the Discussion section in the Supplementary Appendix ).\n\nWith regard to food-specific per-protocol consumption, the protective effects with respect to egg and peanut were larger in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group. In the per-protocol analysis of peanut consumption, there were no cases of peanut allergy among the 310 participants in the early-introduction group, as compared with 13 cases among 525 participants (2.5%) in the standard-introduction group (P=0.003) ( Figure 1 ). The prevalence of egg allergy among participants who adhered to the protocol with respect to egg consumption was 1.", + "4% in the early-introduction group versus 5.5% in the standard-introduction group, representing a 75% lower relative risk (P=0.009) ( Figure 1 ). The rates of food allergy in the per-protocol analysis were lower, but not significantly so, in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group for milk (P=0.63) and sesame (P=0.56). There were no cases of wheat allergy in either group in the per-protocol analysis. The rate of fish allergy was nonsignificantly higher in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group (P=", + "1.00) (Fig. S5 in the Supplementary Appendix ).\n\nIn the per-protocol analysis, the rate of the primary outcome was significantly lower in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group (2.4% [5 of 208 participants] vs. 7.3% [38 of 524]). The relative risk in the early-introduction group was 0.33 (95% CI, 0.13 to 0.83; P=0.01), representing a prevalence that was 67% lower than that in the standard-introduction group ( Figure 1 ).\n\nPeanut allergy occurred in 1.", + "2% of the participants in the early-introduction group and in 2.5% of those in the standard-introduction group, representing a nonsignificant 51% lower relative risk in the early-introduction group (P=0.11). Egg allergy occurred in 3.7% of the participants in the early-introduction group and in 5.4% of those in the standard-introduction group, representing a nonsignificant 31% lower relative risk in the early-introduction group (P=0.17) ( Figure 1 ).\n\nFor the primary outcome, 595 of 651 enrolled participants (91.", + "4%) in the standard-introduction group and 567 of 652 (87.0%) in the early-introduction group were included in the intention-to-treat analysis (Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Appendix ). The rate of the primary outcome was nonsignificantly lower in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group (5.6% [32 of 567 participants] and 7.1% [42 of 595], respectively), which represented a relative risk of 0.80 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.51 to 1.25; P=0.32), with the point estimate representing a 20%", + " lower prevalence in the early-introduction group ( Figure 1 Figure 1 Primary Outcome of Allergy to One or More Foods and Secondary Outcomes of Allergy to Peanut and to Egg., and Table S6 in the Supplementary Appendix ). The prevalence of allergy to more than one food was nonsignificantly lower in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group (P=0.17) (Table S7 in the Supplementary Appendix ).\n\nA food allergy developed in 74 participants. In 70 of these participants (39 in the standard-introduction group and 31 in the early-introduction group), diagnoses were made on the basis of double-blind,", + " placebo-controlled food challenges (primary-outcome categories 1A and 1B), and in 4 (3 in the standard-introduction group and 1 in early-introduction group), diagnoses were made on the basis of an allergic reaction that resulted in a wheal size of 5 mm or more in diameter on skin-prick testing (primary-outcome category 3). A diagnosis of any food allergy was significantly associated with the presence of eczema at enrollment, nonwhite race, and having siblings. In the post hoc dominance analysis, these three factors accounted for 92.6% of the variation in the fit statistic of the overall logistic model (Table S5 in the Supplementary Appendix ).\n\nThe median age of the participants at enrollment was 3.", + "4 months. The two groups were balanced, except for a significantly higher rate of birth by cesarean section in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group (Table S4 in the Supplementary Appendix ). A total of 91.3% of the participants attended the final clinic visit, 90.0% of whom attended within the visit window (by 4 years of age). A total of 94.0% of the participants\u2019 families completed the 3-year questionnaire.\n\nDiscussion\n\nThis trial did not show efficacy of early introduction of allergenic foods versus standard introduction in an intention-to-treat analysis; there was a nonsignificant 20%", + " lower relative risk of food allergy in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group. In the per-protocol analysis, there was a significant 67% lower relative risk of food allergy overall in the early-introduction group. Unexpectedly, in the per-protocol analysis, significantly lower relative risks of peanut allergy and egg allergy were observed in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group (P=0.003 and P=0.009, respectively). The rates of other food allergies were too low to show any effects. Nevertheless, at 36 months of age, the average relative risk of a positive skin-prick test to the six individual foods was 79%", + " lower in the early-introduction group than in the standard-introduction group; findings were significant for peanut (P=0.007), milk (P=0.02), and sesame (P=0.04). The efficacy of the intervention was related to the duration of consumption of the specific food and the quantity of food consumed between 3 months and 6 months of age.\n\nWe found that the early introduction of allergenic foods was safe, with no cases of anaphylaxis during the initial introduction regimen and no adverse effects on breast-feeding or growth.8 Partial adherence among participants in the early-introduction group was not associated with any increase in the prevalence of allergy.", + " Seven participants in the early-introduction group had positive results on food challenges at baseline, and hence complete adherence to the early-introduction protocol in this trial would not have prevented all cases of food allergy from occurring.\n\nThe per-protocol consumption of cooked egg resulted in a lower rate of a positive skin-prick test to raw egg white (by 49%) and to commercial egg extract, which suggests that the possible protective effect is not confined to the form in which the individual food is consumed. The Hen\u2019s Egg Allergy Prevention (HEAP) study, which enrolled patients from the general population,11 and the Solids Timing for Allergy Research (STAR)", + " study, which enrolled high-risk patients,12 introduced raw-egg powder but showed significant side effects. Our data suggest that the introduction of cooked egg is a safe strategy and may be effective for prevention.\n\nThe rates of food allergy were higher among nonwhite participants than among whites and higher among participants with eczema at enrollment than among those without eczema \u2014 findings that are consistent with those in the literature; however, adherence to the trial protocol was significantly lower among participants in the early-introduction group who were nonwhite and was lower (but not significantly) among those who had eczema than among the rest of the standard-introduction group.", + "13-15 Adherence was also lower in cases in which parents perceived symptoms in their child with the early introduction of the foods and in cases in which mothers had a lower psychological quality of life at enrollment. These results raise the question of whether targeted clinical and dietetic support to these families at the earliest stages of food introduction could possibly augment adherence, and this concept requires further consideration if early introduction is to be considered as a policy to reduce the prevalence of food allergies.\n\nThe strengths of our trial included a high retention rate, the fact that nearly all cases of allergy were confirmed in a double-blind, placebo-controlled challenge, the enrollment of an unselected population of exclusively breast-fed infants,", + " and the fact that all the children with a positive skin-prick test were invited to undergo a food challenge. The main weakness of the study was the low rate of per-protocol adherence in the early-introduction group, as discussed below.\n\nThere are a number of possible explanations for the finding of efficacy at the per-protocol level as opposed to the intention-to-treat level. The first is that the early introduction of allergenic foods prevented the development of food allergy. This explanation has some plausibility, given the food-specific findings and an apparent dose\u2013response relationship for protection against peanut allergy and egg allergy. Reverse causality would provide a second explanation,", + " reflecting the possibility that infants with nascent food allergy were less likely to successfully consume the foods because of aversive feeding behavior, which is the first sign of clinical food allergy. If this were the case, we would anticipate an excess of food allergy among the participants in the early-introduction group who did not adhere to the protocol, but there was no evidence of this. Furthermore, the 3-month-old infants who were most at risk for nascent food allergy (positive skin-prick test at enrollment but negative result on the food challenge at baseline) did not have lower rates of adherence to the early-introduction protocol than those in this group who had a negative skin-prick test.\n\nA third potential explanation is that of bias leading to a higher prevalence of atopy and food allergy among children outside the per-", + "protocol analysis. This is an important consideration, given that only 31.9% of all the enrolled participants in the early-introduction group (208 of 652 participants) adhered to the protocol and had a primary outcome that could be evaluated, as compared with 80.5% in the standard-introduction group (524 of 651). Differential attrition between the two groups potentially introduces bias. An analysis for evidence of bias in the participants who were not in the group that adhered to the protocol does not provide an explanation for the apparent efficacy in the per-protocol analyses (Tables S12 and S31 in the Supplementary Appendix).\n\nFinally,", + " we eliminated the possibility that our findings were the result of an artifact of study design \u2014 the selective removal of participants who had food allergy at baseline exclusively from the early-introduction group. When the participants were 3 months of age, we evaluated food allergy only in the early-introduction group. Participants with confirmed food allergy at this point were unable to adhere to the protocol, which thus artificially lowered the rate of food allergy in this group. We therefore undertook an adjusted per-protocol analysis in which we subtracted the same number of participants with food allergy from the standard-introduction group. The results remained significant after the adjustment (Figure 1). Nevertheless,", + " we cannot be certain whether unmeasured sources of bias still exist.\n\nModeling determined that 2 g or more of peanut or egg-white protein per week may prevent these respective allergies. This level of consumption matches the median level of consumption observed in Israeli infants 8 to 14 months of age (7.1 g per month), who have a rate of peanut allergy that is 10 times lower than that among Jewish children in the United Kingdom, who consume very little peanut (0.17% vs. 1.85%).3 In the EAT trial, this level of peanut consumption for at least 4 weeks also resulted in a rate of peanut allergy that was 10 times lower than that among the participants in the standard-introduction group (2.", + "5% vs. 0.2%) \u2014 a finding that mirrors that of Du Toit et al.3 The results of our trial are complementary to those of the LEAP trial. Only 9 of the 1303 participants in our trial would have been considered to be at sufficiently high risk to enroll in the LEAP trial. It should be noted that 76% of the participants in the standard-introduction group did not have eczema at 3 months of age, and yet they accounted for 38% of the participants in the standard-introduction group with food allergy to one or more of the foods tested (Table S32 in the Supplementary Appendix;", + " additional information regarding many of the findings discussed in this section is available in the Discussion section of the Supplementary Appendix).\n\nThis trial failed to show the efficacy of early introduction of allergenic foods as compared with standard introduction of those foods in an intention-to-treat analysis. Further analysis suggests that the possibility of preventing food allergy by means of the early introduction of multiple allergenic foods in normal breast-fed infants may depend on adherence and dose.\n" + ], + "length": 10273, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 24, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 On Monday, the US will have a view of a total solar eclipse for the first time in 99 years. We know that thanks to the hard, sometimes-life-risking work of astronomers over thousands of years. In a history of eclipse predictions, BuzzFeed reports two Chinese astronomers were beheaded by the emperor after failing to predict a total solar eclipse in 2134 BCE. Their failure could perhaps be forgiven\u2014it would be nearly 4,000 years before astronomers were able to start making reliable ground maps of eclipses. Here's what else you need to know about the upcoming celestial show: 24/7 Wall St. is warning of massive traffic jams as up to 7 million people travel to the 70-mile-wide strip stretching from Oregon to South Carolina where the total eclipse will be visible. And that can mean headaches for some small towns in that strip, the Guardian reports. \"Why is God mad at us?\" asks the mayor of Weiser, a tiny Idaho town of 5,500 that is expecting up to 70,000 for the eclipse but was only able to procure 70 port-a-potties for their use. But human behavior researchers tell the New York Times a total solar eclipse is worth braving the crowds to view alongside other people. It makes the experience more emotional and provides a way to connect with others, even for a few minutes. One thing that can make massive crowds more tolerable: alcohol. The Daily Beast provides a \"drinker's guide\" to the eclipse, including a distiller in Oregon selling 97-proof eclipse whiskey and a winery in Illinois that bottled 100 cases of eclipse wine for the 5,000 people it's expecting. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed talks to a bunch of eclipse fanatics to find out what makes total solar eclipses so special. \u201cI feel as if I am in the presence of a deity, and I understand that in this vast universe, I am nothing,\" one such fanatic explains. Need a soundtrack for your eclipse viewing? Time reports Bonnie Tyler will sing her 1983 hit \"Total Eclipse of the Heart\" during Royal Caribbean's Total Eclipse Cruise, which will be positioned in the eclipse's path off the East Coast. At least one person in America isn't planning on viewing Monday's eclipse. According to USA Today, Lou Tomososki of Oregon still has permanent eye damage\u2014a permanent blurry spot in his vision\u2014from staring at a partial eclipse in 1962 without eye protection. Don't be like Lou Tomososki. NPR has a video showing how to make your own eclipse viewer so you can watch the action without burning out your retinas.\n", + "docs": [ + "Next Monday, sky watchers from the beaches of Oregon through the midsection of America and down the South Carolina coastline, will be trying to catch a glimpse of the first total solar eclipse across the U.S. in 99 years. But in the so-called path of totality\u2014a 70-or-so-mile-wide band in which parts of the country will be in complete daytime darkness for two-plus minutes\u2014bartenders, winemakers, and distillers are hoping for another cosmic call: \u201cAnother round, please!\u201d\n\nHere\u2019s how five distillers, winemakers, and brewers are prepping for when the sun suddenly goes dark.\n\nMADRAS,", + " OREGON\u2014Totality Strikes: 10:19 a.m. PDT\n\nWhen it comes to claims to fame, tiny Madras, Oregon (pop: roughly 6,700), usually boasts about being America\u2019s carrot seed capital. But on eclipse day, Madras becomes a prime viewing spot in the state where the eclipse first strikes U.S. soil. More than 100,000 people are expected to cram into the central Oregon high-desert town for the event, attracted by wide-open vistas, predictably clear summer skies, and 2 minutes, 2 seconds of total darkness, one of the longest spans in the Northwest.\n\nRick Molitor has something else waiting for them:", + " American Strong\u2019er, a 97-proof whiskey he has distilled specially for eclipse day. Two years ago, Molitor, along with four drinking buddies, opened New Basin and came out with American Strong Light, a whiskey named after Jedediah Strong Smith, an early Western settler. For the Strong\u2019er version, he tweaked the final product, upping the proof from 80 to 97. Why 97? It\u2019s a nod to Highway 97, which bisects Madras and will lead many an eclipse watcher into town for the moon show\u2014and ideally to his distillery.\n\nIn the days leading up to the eclipse Madras will stage Solarfest,", + " a county fair-like celebration featuring 20 bands, balloon rides, and NASA scientists holding court for the thousands of campers slated to hit town. Molitor is also hosting a VIP breakfast that day for about 50 guests. They\u2019ll first get to see his 300-gallon still, and then sit back and view the eclipse without having to compete with the throngs for a spot. He\u2019s also thinking of using the three hours it takes for the moon to pass by the sun to keep his still running. \u201cIf we do a small batch and get it just dialed,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019ll be able to claim that it was made during the eclipse.\u201d\n\nCASPER,", + " WYOMING\u2014Totality Strikes: 11:42 a.m. MDT\n\nAmber Pollock says her hometown of Casper, Wyoming, has long been viewed as \u201ca beer-drinking town.\u201d Come eclipse day, she\u2019s seeking to change that perception\u2014if not forever then at least for the time it takes for midday darkness to come and go.\n\nShe\u2019s hosting an all-day watch party at her family-owned Backwards Distilling Company, and during two-hour blocks, Pollock will serve cocktails named after the evolving sky. For instance, starting at 9 a.m., there\u2019s the Eclipse Chaser\u2014cold-brewed coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice,", + " with muddled blueberries, tiki bitters, and an optional shot of Backwards\u2019 own Sword Swallower Rum. Then, around 11 a.m., shortly after the moon first starts shading the sun, Pollock will offer up the First Contact: house-made pineapple lemonade, house-made grenadine, and 307 Eclipse Edition Vodka, a special version of the spirit that helped launch her family\u2019s distillery two-and-a-half years ago.\n\nNamed after Wyoming\u2019s sole area code, the 307 Vodka was developed by Pollock\u2019s younger brother, Chad. \u201cThere were a lot of places serving Jack & Cokes [in Casper], but not many where you were going to find fresh squeezed juice,\u201d says Pollock,", + " a former elementary school teacher who launched Backwards with her brother and parents in 2014. \u201cWe had to open a facility to showcase our products in a way we wanted them to be showcased.\u201d\n\nBackwards, Casper\u2019s only spirits distillery, has a tasting area that seats 52. Pollock hopes to double that number on eclipse day, drawing from the 35,000 visitors the city is expecting. (Total eclipse time in Casper: 2 minute, 26 seconds.) Besides offering unobstructed views from the distillery\u2019s site, located on an elevated space away from downtown, Pollock has booked Inda Eaton,", + " a Long Island-based singer-songwriter who grew up in Casper, to perform. Eaton goes on once the sun returns, and once Pollock\u2019s last eclipse-day concoction\u2014the Corona, a mix of milk can cinnamon moonshine, pineapple juice, lemon juice, vanilla, and bitters\u2014is making the rounds.\n\nMAKANDA, ILLINOIS\u2014Totality Strikes: 1:20 p.m. CDT\n\nGet The Beast In Your Inbox! Daily Digest Start and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast. Cheat Sheet A speedy, smart summary of all the news you need to know (and nothing you don't). By clicking \u201cSubscribe,\u201d you agree to have read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Subscribe Thank You!", + " You are now subscribed to the Daily Digest and Cheat Sheet. We will not share your email with anyone for any reason.\n\nBack in 2014, Jim Ewers, who owns and operates Blue Sky Vineyard in Makanda, got a call from a stargazing junkie in Germany. The caller wanted to know if she could book a room at Ewers\u2019 winery\u2014for August 2017. Before that reservation request, Ewers had no clue about the coming eclipse, and that his vineyard was prime real estate for eclipse chasers. \u201cI basically added 50 percent to the price I was charging at the time,\u201d recalls Ewers,", + " whose winery includes a few guest rooms. \u201cShe never took it, which worked out well because I\u2019ve since gotten more [for the room].\u201d\n\nIf the moon and sun line up according to star experts\u2019 predictions, then Makanda is considered Ground Zero; total darkness in the southern Illinois town (pop: 544) is slated to last 2 minutes, 40.2 seconds, the longest duration of darkness in the country. Ewers plans to take full advantage of the designation. He\u2019s expecting 3,000 to 5,000 people to make use of his 600-acre vineyard in the Shawnee Hills region of southern Illinois.", + " (Ewers is charging $100 a night for RV campers.) He also bottled 100 cases of Solar Eclipse Wine, a specially made dry and, befitting the day, dark red wine he hopes to sell out by the time the crowds leave. The wine is a blend of two grapes grown in Ewers\u2019 vineyard: Champbourcin, a French-American hybrid that Ewers says is low in tannin and fairly fruity, and Norton, a dark grape. \u201cYou can crush it and you get a high percentage of skin to juice,\u201d Ewers explains. \u201cYou can extract more color out of the skin so you get a nice rich color out of it.\u201d\n\nAlong with pushing the wine,", + " Ewers has used the final days before the eclipse to map out where the rush of RVs will park, where to put a group of stargazing enthusiasts from Spain so they have a bit of seclusion and where to mount a specially commissioned piece of abstract artwork\u2014 aptly titled \u201cHe Flew Too Close to the Sun\u201d\u2014near the winery. The pace has left Ewers to admit, \u201cI can\u2019t wait until the 22nd. I want it all behind me.\u201d\n\nPerhaps, but he also knows what lies ahead. Come April 8, 2024, when the next total solar eclipse is slated for the U.S., his vineyard once again will be in the path of totality.\n\nHOPKINSVILLE,", + " KENTUCKY\u2014Totality Strikes: 1:24 p.m. CDT\n\nPeg Hays has been aware of the approaching eclipse for 10 years, even before she and her husband, AJ Jones, bought land in Hopkinsville and decided to open the Casey Jones Distillery on it. She\u2019s watched dozens of clips of past eclipses on YouTube. She jokingly calls herself the \u201cEmpress of the Eclipse.\u201d\n\nSo, when darkness strikes on Aug. 21, she\u2019ll be ready. Totality, she says, is \u201cat 1:24 pm Central Daylight Time, for 2:40 seconds.", + " At 1:20 I\u2019m going to go to the bathroom; I have that on my calendar already. Then I\u2019m going to get outside and be with the crowd and watch it, let everything else go to hell, and watch this eclipse.\u201d\n\nA couple of weeks before the big day, Hays isn\u2019t sure if the crowd camping out on her property will be \u201c500 or 5,000.\u201d Doesn\u2019t matter. She\u2019s hosting a three-day party featuring blue-grass bands, food trucks, and a barber giving E-clips.\n\nAnd, no doubt, she\u2019ll be pouring her distillery\u2019s Total Eclipse Moonshine, made from yellow dent corn that\u2019s locally grown.", + " \u201cWe are Kentucky proud,\u201d she boasts, then jokes: \u201cYou can have a total or partial eclipse right now by opening up a bottle.\u201d\n\nThe trademarked 100-proof spirit comes from a still that\u2019s a duplicate of the last one built by Casey Jones, a Prohibition-era still maker and AJ\u2019s grandfather. \u201cThis region [western Kentucky] was known during Prohibition as a great place to get great moonshine product,\u201d says Hays, who began distilling on her property with AJ two years ago.\n\nHays has already sold more than 5,000 bottles of the special moonshine. During eclipse weekend, she expects to sell a few more.", + " That\u2019s because Hopkinsville, with 32,000 residents, is gearing up for 200,000 sightseers, scientists, and, well, party-chasers to come for eclipse weekend. Hopkinsville even rebranded itself \u201cEclipseville\u201d thanks to researchers determining it\u2019s where the Point of Greatest Eclipse will occur\u2014or \u201cwhere the width of the moon\u2019s shadow is widest,\u201d according to Solar.com. (Darkness in Hopkinsville will be just.1 second shorter than in Makanda.)\n\nBut come totality time don\u2019t expect Hays to be behind the counter. \u201cIn fact,\u201d she says, \u201cwhen we hand out parking passes,", + " we\u2019re going to tell people that at 1 p.m. we\u2019re locking up the distillery and letting everyone experience the eclipse, including our staff.\u201d She pauses, then, with a laugh, says, \u201cLast call.\u201d\n\nCOLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA\u2014Totality Strikes: 2:41 p.m. EDT\n\nSpeaking of last call\u2026 Two years ago, when Bryan O\u2019Neal heard that his home state, South Carolina, would be the end of the line for Eclipse 2017, it got him thinking. And then, when he heard about the estimated number of out-of-state visitors the eclipse would draw to the state capital,", + " Columbia, located 50 miles south of his brewery, it really got him thinking. He told himself, \u201cIf there\u2019s going to be a million people, we\u2019re going to brew a beer for this. This is a once-in-a hundred-year opportunity.\u201d\n\nO\u2019Neal, who built swimming pools for 22 years before opening Benford Brewing on his cattle farm in Lancaster four years ago, quickly got to work. Wanting an \u201cextremely dark\u201d IPA for the day, he tweaked one of his recipes by using midnight wheat. \u201cSo it has a hint of porter at the beginning,\u201d says O\u2019Neal, \u201cand then the hops explode with Mosaic,", + " El Dorado, and Citra.\u201d He called it Carolina Blackout and had a specially designed label prepared for it, using a variation of the state symbol\u2014a Palmetto tree with a crescent moon\u2014by switching in an eclipse moon. He included the date, Aug. 21, 2017.\n\nAnd he trademarked Carolina Blackout. By starting early, he says, \u201cwe would beat all the other brewers to the punch and own the eclipse. And this is what pretty much happened.\u201d Fortunately for O\u2019Neal, the path of totality in South Carolina includes Columbia, Clemson, and Charleston, locations of many of his retailers.", + " \u201cIt\u2019s going to be like St. Patrick\u2019s Day,\u201d says O\u2019Neal. \u201cIn the week of the eclipse they are going to want [Carolina Blackout] like they want green beer.\u201d\n\nOn eclipse day, O\u2019Neal will head to Columbia to watch the moon at work from a friend\u2019s rooftop terrace, have a Blackout (or two), and revel in a once-in-a-lifetime sight. \u201cSouth Carolina is home, and I am proud of my state,\u201d says O\u2019Neal. \u201cThe fact that we are getting this attention nationally is a good opportunity for the brewery and the state. It\u2019s going to be a pretty special day.\u201d ", + " Weiser, Idaho, could see its population of 5,507 swell to 70,000 for the total solar eclipse. As the big day looms, will things go smoothly?\n\nThe portable toilets began arriving in Weiser, Idaho, on Tuesday, the first of around 70 orange outhouses ordered by local agengies for the Great American Eclipse.\n\nThey will serve a crowd that could reach 70,000 by the time this tiny town on the Oregon border is plunged into total darkness on Monday.\n\nYou don\u2019t even have to do the math. Patrick Nauman will do it for you: \u201cIt\u2019s about a thousand per... It\u2019s all we could get.\u201d\n\nWhat you need to see the total solar eclipse across America Read more\n\nNauman,", + " chairman of Eclipse Fest 2017 and co-owner of Weiser Classic Candy, where eclipse cookies sell for $2.50 a pop, views the once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event as \u201ca huge opportunity. I look at this as Mother Nature\u2019s apology for the hard winter. This is a big economic shot in the arm.\u201d\n\nMayor Diana Thomas, however, is not so sunny. Some in her struggling town, she notes wryly, are asking, \u201cWhy is God mad at us? Two things like this in one year?\u201d\n\nFirst, a record cold winter and two months of record snowfall caused the roof to collapse on Weiser\u2019s only grocery store and took out the bowling alley,", + " among other buildings. The market reopened but the bowling alley\u2019s a goner.\n\n\n\nAnd now comes the eclipse, which has cast a pall of uncertainty over this Idaho town, population 5,507.\n\nThe last time a solar eclipse\u2019s path of totality crossed the US from Pacific to Atlantic was 1918. And, as the Idaho department of commerce-tourism development notes on its website, \u201cthere won\u2019t be another one in Idaho for 152 years!\u201d.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Brynlee Watkins, six, in Weiser, Idaho. She plans to sell water from a wagon during the total eclipse. Photograph: Otto Kitsinger for the Guardian\n\nWhile the tourism department exhorts travelers to \u201cmake plans to be part of this amazing experience\u201d, the transportation agency warns that hundreds of thousands of people are expected to descend on this rural state.", + " And it cautions visitors: bring paper maps and lots of water. Make sure your gas tanks are full. Please, don\u2019t set the tinder-dry state on fire.\n\nWariness was on full display Monday evening, during Weiser\u2019s last pre-eclipse city council meeting.\n\n\n\nIt started with an invocation by pastor Kevin Bettinger: \u201cI pray for our people that protect us. I pray for the people that make decisions. I pray for the events that we have coming up here in our area with the eclipse and all the many details.\u201d\n\nThat got a very loud group \u201camen\u201d. Then police lieutenant Troy Krahn outlined the city\u2019s preparations.\n\nThe 12-person police department has borrowed two officers from the nearby town of Emmett.", + " Police will work 10- to 12-hour shifts during the five days of festival and eclipse.\n\nThe school district will run shuttle buses from parking areas to the festival site at Memorial Park. Fire trucks will be placed in strategic spots to avoid getting stuck in traffic should disaster strike.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Mayor Diana Thomas discusses preparation strategy. Tens of thousands are expected to descend on the town. Photograph: Otto Kitsinger for the Guardian\n\nBecause traffic is probably the major headache.\n\nThere\u2019s a technical term for Weiser\u2019s location: the middle of nowhere. It is reachable via three two-lane highways and more than half of the eclipse-viewers streaming into Weiser (rhymes with \u201cgeezer\u201d) are expected to arrive on Monday.", + " Or they\u2019ll try to.\n\nOn 14 August, Nauman said the estimated driving time from Boise, the state capital, will be somewhere between five and eight hours, instead of the normal 90 minutes. On 15 August, mayor Thomas revised the commute time up \u2013 to somewhere between 10 and 10.5 hours.\n\nAnd then there\u2019s the question of accommodations. Right now, the best you can expect is a spot to pitch a tent on the grounds of Weiser High School, home of the Wolverines, or, maybe, in someone\u2019s back yard. For a price, of course.\n\n\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest Eclipse glasses for sale at Weiser Classic Candy.", + " Photograph: Otto Kitsinger for the Guardian\n\nWeiser High has already rented out more than 170 camp sites of 300 available on school grounds. A hundred bucks rents one spot for Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, with space for two tents and one vehicle.In addition, the school has rented out 200 parking spots at $10-per-day per spot.\n\nThe cheerleaders will operate a food booth Monday. The girls\u2019 soccer team and the science club will have an information booth all weekend, complete with eclipse glasses for sale. The track club will sell water and coffee.\n\n\u201cThe big question is if 60,000 people try to get into Weiser at the same time Monday,", + " is that possible?\u201d principal Dave Davies wondered, adding. \u201cI\u2019d just be sad if someone had their heart set on viewing the eclipse and had to see it from their car on US Route 95.\u201d\n\nBy 15 August, Jim Metzger had already turned away around 50 pilots who wanted to reserve space at the city\u2019s airport. There are usually 14 tie-downs, said the airport manager; he\u2019s capped it at 118 for the eclipse and expects pilots and passengers to camp beneath their airplane wings.\n\nWeiser only has three motels for a total of 40 or 50 rooms. All were booked at least a year ago.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest A stage in the Weiser,", + " Idaho, backyard of Dolli Walsh, who is offering camping spaces for $75 a night. Photograph: Otto Kitsinger for the Guardian\n\nMatt Penn found that out the hard way.\n\nPenn is an astronomer with the National Solar Observatory. For Monday\u2019s eclipse, he\u2019s directing a coast-to-coast experiment called CitizenCATE, with telescopes recording at 68 sites along the path of totality from Oregon to South Carolina. Because Weiser is so small and the weather is so good, Penn said, he chose the town as his base.\n\n'Most spectacular thing I\u2019ve ever seen in my life': US readies for total eclipse Read more\n\nPenn \u2013 who said he was \u201ctotally excited\u201d \u2013 is so eager that he called each motel five months ago to book a room for him and his family.\n\nNo go.", + " Instead, they\u2019ll be bunking at the home of Weiser\u2019s schools superintendent.\n\nOnce the heavens return to normal Monday, Penn plans to head home.\n\nHe will leave Weiser via a two-lane country highway. Along with 70,000 or so other astronomy buffs. More or less at the same time.\n\nThat\u2019s the moment that has mayor Thomas most concerned.\n\n\u201cHow,\u201d she asks, \u201cdo we get people out of here when it\u2019s over?\u201d ", + " A universal pop song and the universe are about to align.\n\nGuests aboard the Royal Caribbean\u2019s Total Eclipse Cruise have an extra surprise in store for their once-in-a-lifetime viewing experience: Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh songstress of \u201cTotal Eclipse of the Heart\u201d fame, will be on board to perform her 1983 hit just as the moon sails across the sun. (The cruise ship will be positioned in the path of totality for this critical moment. \u201cBonnie Tyler was a natural choice for this once-in-a-lifetime moment,\u201d said the president and CEO of Royal Caribbean International, Michael Bayley.)\n\nTyler\u2019s song launched her to stardom and remains a classic today,", + " especially as a karaoke favorite. But this is the first time she\u2019ll be performing it during this highly anticipated astronomical event.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s going to be so exciting,\u201d Tyler told TIME, speaking from a brief stopover in Wales. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t happen very often, does it?\u201d\n\nBonnie Tyler\n\nTyler is a special guest on the Oasis of the Seas for a few days of the week-long cruise, which departs from Orlando, Fla. for the Caribbean on Aug. 20. Her performance will be backed by the pop-rock band DNCE, helmed by Joe Jonas and best known for their 2015 hit \u201cCake By the Ocean.\u201d Tyler,", + " meanwhile, has carried on a multi-decade career that has taken her around the world; she\u2019s recently been on tour in New Zealand, eastern Europe and South America.\n\nDon\u2019t worry about her getting seasick while on board the Oasis of the Seas or being thrown off by the eclipse. \u201cI have a ship of my own,\u201d she told TIME. \u201cI go with the flow, darling. I\u2019m not worried about things like that.\u201d\n\nTo prepare, Tyler and DNCE will rehearse for the day prior. Tyler also always works with her voice coach on vocal exercises to prep for a show. \u201cSo if anybody hears strange noises coming from my cabin while aboard ship,", + " they\u2019ll know what it is,\u201d she warned.\n\nMORE: See How the Solar Eclipse Will Look From Anywhere in the U.S.\n\n\u201cThe eclipse of the sun lasts 2 minutes and 40 seconds, I\u2019m told,\u201d Tyler elaborated. \u201cUnlike my song. It had to be chopped about, because it was so long. I never thought it would be played on the radio, in the beginning.\u201d\n\nIn fact, \u201cTotal Eclipse of the Heart\u201d almost never happened at all. After finding success in the U.S. with 1978 ballad \u201cIt\u2019s a Heartache,\u201d Tyler sought to change tacks and work with the songwriter behind Meat Loaf,", + " Jim Steinman.\n\n\u201cThe A&R guy said, \u2018Are you crazy? He\u2019s never going to work with you.\u2019 And I said, \u2018Well, ask him!\u2019 You don\u2019t get until you ask,\u201d Tyler recalled. \u201cSo they asked him, and\u2026 I went over to meet him, and within three weeks he\u2019d finished writing the song for me, \u2018Total Eclipse of the Heart,\u2019 that he\u2019d started writing many years ago. And he finished it off and gave it to me to sing. I wouldn\u2019t have had this hit record without bloody asking. And I got it.\u201d\n\nUpon first hearing the track, Tyler had a strong emotional response.", + " \u201cIt made me cry, because I loved it so much,\u201d she remembers. She was right to believe in the song: the original hit was one of the decade\u2019s best-selling records with six million copies sold, and was nominated for multiple Grammys in 1984. That year, Tyler lost out to Michael Jackson and Irene Cara, for \u201cFlashdance\u2014What a Feeling.\u201d \u201cNow, I don\u2019t mind losing out to Michael Jackson, I\u2019ll tell you that much,\u201d she said with a laugh.\n\nBut over the years, it\u2019s remained popular as an enduring karaoke favorite. \u201cGod knows why, because it\u2019s not an easy song to sing.", + " But it\u2019s a beautiful song,\u201d Tyler added. \u201cIt\u2019s a massive song, an evergreen song that you hear on the radio all the time, whether it\u2019s an eclipse or not. And you know, you can bet your life on all these talent shows \u2014 X Factor, Britain\u2019s Got Talent \u2014 [it] pops up so often with the contestants.\u201d\n\nIt also spikes in popularity right around eclipses. Spotify tracked a 75 percent increase in streams the day after last year\u2019s March total solar eclipse, and YouTube views for the music video are already growing in anticipation of August\u2019s event, putting her at more than 300 million and counting.", + " The music video, filmed over the course of two days in the Holloway Sanatorium outside London, is also a cult classic for its otherworldly themes and non-sequitur scenes. \u201cIt was snowing on the ground, and I had to run barefoot,\u201d Tyler remembered of making the clip.\n\nThe Total Eclipse Cruise experience will be more straightforward for viewers \u2014 although certainly unique in its own way.\n\nWhile the cruise will continue on to visit islands in the Caribbean, Tyler will be ducking out to continue touring. Her most recent album, a Nashville-recorded collection is called Rocks and Honey.\n\nWrite to Raisa Bruner at raisa.bruner@", + "time.com. ", + " Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE Lou Tomososki burned his retina while looking at a partial eclipse at 1962 and now hopes to warn others of the dangers. USA TODAY\n\nAn Oregon City man is warning people to be extra careful on the day of the eclipse. (Photo: Courtesy of Mike Benner)\n\nOREGON CITY, Ore. -- An Oregon man who burned his retina while looking at a partial eclipse, is warning people about the dangers of viewing the solar eclipse without proper eye protection.\n\nLou Tomososki and a friend viewed a partial eclipse outside of Marshall High School in 1962.\n\n\u201cThe sun at that time,", + " at 3:30 p.m., was in the one o\u2019clock position,\u201d said Tomososki. \u201cI said to Roger, \u2018If you stare at it long enough the brightness goes away.\u2019\u201d\n\nWhat seemed like a silly dare at the time turned into one of the biggest mistakes of their lives. By nightfall, both Tomososki and his buddy were having vision problems.\n\n\u201cIt doesn\u2019t get any worse and it doesn\u2019t get any better,\u201d said Tomososki.\n\nBoth Tomososki and his friend, now 70 years old, have vision problems to this day.\n\n\u201cYou know how the news people blur a license plate out,\u201d said Tomososki.", + " \u201cThat\u2019s what I have on the right eye, about the size of a pea, I can\u2019t see around that.\u201d\n\nMore coverage:\n\nA doctor later told Tomososki his retina was burned during the partial eclipse. Dr. Brandon Lujan of the Casey Eye Institute said people should not look at the sun without eye protection during the total eclipse.\n\n\u201cI think anytime is too much,\u201d Lujan told KGW-TV. \u201cAnytime looking can do damage.\u201d\n\nTomososki is living proof of that. He is excited about the eclipse on Aug. 21, but he will not be looking towards the sky.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m going to go out and enjoy it,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cBut I\u2019ll stand and watch it get dark.\u201d\n\nRead or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2w6owYH ", + " A Babylonian clay tablet gives the oldest intact record of a solar eclipse, on March 5, 1223 BCE. \u201cThe sun went down, its gatekeeper was Mars,\u201d the tablet says.\n\nOn Oct. 22 in 2134 BCE, a total solar eclipse occurred over China, with the Emperor Chung K\u2019ang\u2019s records noting that \u201cthe Sun and Moon did not meet harmoniously.\u201d\n\nTwo court astronomers, named Hsi and Ho, were quickly beheaded for not predicting the event. In the 4,000 years since, astronomers have gotten much better at predicting eclipses. \u201cIt has been centuries of gradual improvement that just piled up over time,\u201d former NASA astronomer Fred Espenak told BuzzFeed News.", + " Only in the 1700s did reliable ground maps of eclipses appear, and their calculation was quite laborious until the 1970s. \u201cThe floodgates really opened when digital computers came online,\u201d he said. Ancient Chinese astronomers feared a celestial dragon had eaten the sun during an eclipse. The Babylonians worried that the moon god had been surrounded by seven demons. And those were the top guys when it came to recording eclipses. The oldest intact record of a solar eclipse comes from a clay tablet from the Babylonian city of Ugarit that records a total solar eclipse on March 5, 1223 BCE. \u201cThe sun went down,", + " its gatekeeper was Mars,\u201d alarmed astronomers noted on the tablet. \u201cTwo livers were examined: danger.\u201d Back then, diviners would look to the innards of animals sacrificed to the gods as signs from heaven, so this message was a sign of bad news to come for the king.\n\nThe earliest Babylonian records of lunar eclipse predictions come from 745 BCE, classical scholar John Steele of Brown University told BuzzFeed News. It was about the same time the neo-Assyrian empire (today\u2019s northern Iraq) began to take over the Middle East, aided by very large, well-organized armies equipped with a hot new invention: iron weapons.", + " The neo-Assyrians believed the sky was a solid dome on which the stars traveled, which was in turn covered by a celestial ocean. By 600 BCE, predicting lunar eclipses was a regular occurrence, Steele said. Warning letters regularly went from astronomers to Assyrian and Babylonian rulers about possible upcoming eclipses. A survey of 61 solar eclipse predictions from 357 BCE to the year 6 found they were 100% accurate in predicting, to within eight hours, the time of an eclipse happening somewhere on Earth. But only 28 of them were visible from Babylon. How did they do it? Basically, by keeping records of past eclipses over the centuries,", + " the astronomers detected an eclipse cycle and formalized its rules. The key to the astronomers\u2019 partial success was the so-called Saros cycle \u2014 a period of 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours \u2014 which saw lunar and solar eclipses repeat on five- and six-month intervals. By the Middle Ages, astronomers had compiled long tables of lunar, solar, and planetary crossings \u2014 called \u201cephemerides\u201d \u2014 which were used to predict eclipses. Most of them relied on methods owed to the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, dating to around the year 150.\n\nFor eclipses, the tables grew slowly less useful because,", + " unknown to astronomers, the length of the day slowly increases over the centuries, throwing off predictions. This increase is caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, which robs rotational energy from the Earth as it creates the tides, adding about 40 seconds per century to the length of the day. The exact, changing distance from the Earth to the moon wasn\u2019t measured until astronauts left mirror reflectors on the moon during the Apollo landings.\n\nIsaac Newton\u2019s 1687 theory of gravity \u2014 and the calculation of eclipses made from it in the next few decades by famous comet discoverer Edmond Halley \u2014 started the modern age of eclipse path predictions.", + " Halley published the first public \u201cbroadsheet\u201d depiction of an eclipse\u2019s path, tracking a solar eclipse across England in 1715. He was about 20 miles off on its path but, according to the historian Alice Waters of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, he saved \u201cthe Publick\u201d and King George I from fears that the eclipse was a bad omen, a real fear after a year of civil unrest in England. The most eagerly awaited eclipse prediction of the next few centuries came in 1919, around the total solar eclipse falling on the island of Pr\u00edncipe. There, the English astronomer Arthur Eddington waited to measure just how much the sun\u2019s gravity bent the light from distant stars passing close to the sun,", + " normally impossible to see in the glare of sunlight, during six minutes of total eclipse. Albert Einstein\u2019s new theory of gravity predicted that light from the constellation Taurus would bend nearly twice as much as Newton\u2019s theory said it would as it passed by the sun. To some controversy, Eddington found the light bent just that much, a confirmation that set Einstein on his path to worldwide acclaim. Astronomers have since repeated the experiment, confirming the theory of gravity every time \u2014 and they\u2019ll be doing it again this August, in Wyoming and Oregon. With computers doing the calculations since the 1970s, a lot of the number-crunching work of predicting eclipse paths has gone away,", + " said Espenak, who for decades ran NASA\u2019s eclipse website. Even now, though, long-term predictions of exactly where eclipses will fall are a bit dicey because of the moon\u2019s recession from Earth, he said. The moon is tipped 5 degrees from Earth\u2019s equator and it feels a tug from both the Earth and sun, as well as a tiny pull from Jupiter. \u201cThey pull it up and down \u2014 that causes all kinds of problems,\u201d Espenak said, affecting the placement of the eclipse map. \u201cThe moon is devilishly difficult to predict.\u201d Climate change, which is raising sea levels and melting ice packs,", + " might in turn affect tides, and also throw lunar eclipse predictions out of whack. \u201cWe can\u2019t be certain how that will go in the coming centuries,\u201d he added. \u201cBut we are certainly a lot better at predicting than they were all those centuries ago.\u201d\n\nSee all of BuzzFeed's eclipse stories here, and buy your BuzzFeed eclipse viewing glasses here!\n\nDan Vergano is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC. Contact Dan Vergano at dan.vergano@buzzfeed.com. Got a confidential tip? Submit it here. ", + " So we asked eclipse fanatics to tell us what makes them so damn special.\n\nAs you might've heard, the total solar eclipse that will occur on Aug. 21 is kind of a big deal. For the first time in 99 years, the moon's shadow will make its way across the entire United States from the west coast to the east. This means that for the first time in a few generations, anyone in the contiguous 48 states will be within a day's drive of the path of totality, when the moon will completely block the sun and day will briefly turn to night. Experiencing an eclipse from within the path of totality is considered so singular and marvelous that amateur eclipse chasers and professional astronomers alike started booking travel,", + " scheduling transportation, and reserving lodging years in advance. BuzzFeed News talked to eclipse chasers and challenged them to describe as best they could the life-changing magic of witnessing a total solar eclipse. Here's what they shared.\n\n\u201cI feel as if I am in the presence of a deity, and I understand that in this vast universe, I am nothing.\u201d \"Experiencing a total solar eclipse is the closest most of us will ever get to space travel. During totality, the earth's blue sky draws back like a receding curtain, revealing what's above our heads but unseen at any other time: the inner reaches of our solar system.", + " You see a most un-sunlike sun \u2014 a frilly, shimmering halo \u2014 flanked by planets and bright stars.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nIt's as if you are standing on some distant world, looking back at creation.\n\nI should note that in my normal life I am a staid, logical, scientifically minded person. A total solar eclipse taps a whole other part of my being. I feel as if I am in the presence of a deity, and I understand that in this vast universe, I am nothing. It's a terrifying and humbling realization, and yet \u2014paradoxically \u2014 it brings me great peace.\" \u2014David Baron\n\nauthor of American Eclipse:", + " A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World\n\nBoulder, Colorado\n\n\u201cThe sky is a lovely shade of twilight blue, and a handful of bright stars and planets will shine forth, and all around the horizon you\u2019ll see pastel sunset colors \u2026\u201d \"Inside the path of totality, you will see the most spectacularly beautiful sight you have ever seen in nature: the everyday sun totally blocked by the moon, revealing the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere, or corona. The silhouette of the moon appears blacker than any black you\u2019ve ever seen. The solar corona is a diaphanous glow all around the sun,", + " pearly white, with loops and streamers extending several solar diameters in various directions, tracing the sun\u2019s otherwise invisible magnetic field.\n\nAt the very beginning/end of totality, you\u2019ll see brilliant red arcs of the sun\u2019s chromosphere, or lower atmosphere, just beyond the moon\u2019s advancing/retreating limb, or edge, and you may see some prominences \u2014 jets, arcs, or loops of red chromospheric gas \u2014 jutting off the edge of the sun. The sky is a lovely shade of twilight blue, and a handful of bright stars and planets will shine forth, and all around the horizon you\u2019ll see pastel sunset colors coming from beyond the moon\u2019s shadow in all directions,", + " where the sun is still shining. You\u2019ll feel the temperature drop noticeably, and you may feel changes in the wind \u2014 both its speed and its direction. All of this lasts just a couple minutes, though it feels as if it\u2019s over within seconds.\"\n\n\u2014Rick Fienberg\n\npress officer, American Astronomical Society\n\nWashington, DC\n\n\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\u201cThe only thing I can compare that to is if you\u2019re snorkeling... things underwater look all different colors than they do up on land.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhen you experience a total eclipse, it kind of looks like the end of the world. It really does. If it\u2019s a clear day,", + " the sun is high in the sky. It\u2019s supposed to be there \u2014 there\u2019s not supposed to be a black hole in the sky right where the sun should be. And that black hole has pink flames and silver streamers around it. Then it gets dark \u2014 it\u2019s doesn\u2019t get totally dark \u2014 it\u2019s more like a deep dusk. And because the light that\u2019s provided is coming from the sun\u2019s silvery corona, what you see all has a different color than normal.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThe only thing I can compare that to is if you\u2019re snorkeling... things underwater look all different colors than they do up on land. But you know you\u2019re not snorkeling \u2014 you know you\u2019re not under the water.", + " And so it\u2019s the only time in my life where all the colors that I\u2019m used to living with every day start to go weird. Your brain goes, Whoa, what\u2019s going on? I\u2019m not on a drug. I\u2019m not in a movie. Yet everything is changing. And that happens just before the total eclipse, maybe a couple minutes before. And whenever that happens, the hair on the back of my neck starts to stand up, because it\u2019s just so weird... and I\u2019ve now chased about 10 or 12 of them since 1970.\u201d\n\n\u2014Doug Duncan\n\nastronomer, Department of Astrophysical & Planetary Sciences of the University of Colorado\n\ndirector of the Fiske Planetarium\n\nBoulder,", + " Colorado\n\n\"It became eerily dark on the hills and over the bay, where intermittent camera flashes signaled the presence of unseen boats.\" \u201cI went to southern England for the total solar eclipse in 1999. But of course, England isn't known for clear skies, and my choice to watch from there came with some degree of risk. When the day came, I gathered with a small group of locals on a hill overlooking the ocean, and we stood under a clouded sky to wait. As the eclipse progressed, once in a while, the crescent sun peeked through a break in the clouds, and we watched the strange narrowing shape with our eclipse glasses.", + " By the time totality arrived, the cloud cover was complete, but the occasion was deeply surreal and affecting nonetheless. It became eerily dark on the hills and over the bay, where intermittent camera flashes signaled the presence of unseen boats. The air grew colder. Streetlights came over the road. Sea birds shrieked and flew about, confused.\n\nAnd in every direction, all along the horizon, we saw a pale glow like a 360-degree sunset, where the land in the distance was still in the bright light of midday.\n\nIt would have been nice to see the solar corona around the darkened sun. But even without that,", + " the experience of being in a momentary island of full night surrounded by daylight was an extraordinary one, and it made visceral the connection we have to the usually predictable motions of the cosmos. Go for clear skies if you can find them, but even under a blanket of clouds, standing on the Earth in the midst of a total solar eclipse is a phenomenal thing.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u2014Katie Mack\n\ntheoretical astrophysicist\n\nMelbourne, Australia\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\u201cThe moon has reached the sun, moving in front of it in a slow waltz.\u201d \u201cEclipse day arrives. Four years of preparation had gone by, months of building the equipment,", + " weeks of testing, days of assembling and retesting and an early morning of finalizing details. Despite how tired everyone is, we are all filled with anxiety and excitement.\n\nAll of us stand in the cold, waiting for the moment of truth. Someone in the distance shouts, \u2018First contact, first contact!\u2019 The moon has reached the sun, moving in front of it in a slow waltz. Spectators watch, take pictures, and do jumping jacks in an effort to keep warm while totality is reached, knowing that the temperature will drop a few more degrees. Finally, totality is reached. The moon stands between us and our sun not knowing,", + " or perhaps knowing, what phenomenon she has created. Darkness comes. The sun\u2019s atmosphere reveals itself, shining over us. \u2026 No words can describe the feeling one gets when witnessing such an event. The entire world around us has disappeared. It is just us and the eclipse.\n\nHow lucky we are! Slowly, as the moon starts to eclipse our star, I start to realize how small we truly are and how small we truly feel. I realize how wonderful life is and how fortunate we all are to be in this very spot as scientists \u2014 but beyond that, as people who have come together to make this an unforgettable week. The moon continues to waltz her way across the sky.", + " The sun slowly appears behind the moon. Light ensues once again, final pictures and videos are taken, a few more cheers can be heard and lots of smiles can be seen.... The moon has left the stage and the sun proudly shines knowing we are all talking about him.\"\n\n\u2014Nathalia Alzate\n\npostdoctoral research associate in Space Weather, Aberystwyth University, Wales\n\nUK visiting scientist, Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawai'i, Manoa Honolulu\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\u201cChasing a total solar eclipse is the act of looking for unusual events to break up your usual routine.\u201d \u201cFor me a total solar eclipse is not just the passage of the moon in front of the sun\u2019s face.", + " It\u2019s a pretext for seeing the world in a different way. Day is not always shiny; it can be as dark as night even at midday. Chasing a total solar eclipse is the act of looking for unusual events to break up your usual routine, and discover new things.\n\nA total solar eclipse can be very inspiring and teachable, and it can be the beginning of a new life, as it was for me. Witnessing a total solar eclipse mesmerized me, and got me addicted to the world of astronomy, the world of spectacular and exciting science-based phenomena. A total solar eclipse consists of the most interesting and exciting activities \u2014 traveling,", + " adventure, photography, education, observation, etc. It\u2019s fantastic to find yourself among the lovely family of eclipse chasers, including a great number of members all around the world.\u201d \u2014Mohamad Soltanolkotabi\n\namateur astronomer and astrophotographer\n\nGirona, Spain\n\n\u201cIt looks like it\u2019s electrified. It\u2019s purely an electrical, magical effect.\u201d\n\n\u201cThere was Aruba in 1998. That was my second total solar eclipse and I was jumping for joy.... You\u2019ve got this beautiful coastal beach and this turquoise water. You looked up and you had this redness around the horizon... and then you had this violet sky and there\u2019s a silvery sheen,", + " the rays of the corona extending in two directions \u2014 they\u2019re streaming out.... That\u2019s the real sun that you don\u2019t [usually] see. Now it\u2019s exposed itself to you \u2014 it\u2019s showing you what it\u2019s got. The moon took over. The moon did it for you.\n\nIt really blew me away. The colors, the electricity of it all. It looks like it\u2019s electrified. It\u2019s purely an electrical, magical effect.\n\nThen everything goes back to normal within seconds, and then it\u2019s like, Where\u2019s the next one? You want to do that again immediately... you want to just take it in again.", + " Well, guess what, you have to wait \u2014 not days or months, but years.... Time stops, too, when you\u2019re there.\u201d\n\n\u2014Mike Kentrianakis\n\nsolar eclipse project manager at the American Astronomical Society\n\nNew York City\n\n\u201cI am not a very emotional person, but when I listen to recordings I have made at previous eclipses, I often get tears in my eyes.\u201d \u201cTotal solar eclipses are truly awe-inspiring. Other natural phenomena can be spectacular, such as the aurora borealis, Yosemite Valley, or a beautiful sunset, but none of those shake you to your core in such a fundamental way.", + " The sun is so central to life on Earth that when it slowly disappears and then is suddenly replaced by a jet-black circle surrounded by the white wispy corona, your lizard brain can scarcely comprehend it. And no other phenomenon elicits such universal reactions of joy and excitement among all those who experience it. No photo or video can convey the experience of a total eclipse, but audio recordings come closest. I am not a very emotional person, but when I listen to recordings I have made at previous eclipses, I often get tears in my eyes.\u201d\n\n\u2014Evan Zucker\n\neclipse chaser\n\nSan Diego\n\n\u201cYou might gasp, scream,", + " or perhaps cry at this astonishing vision.\u201d\n\n\u201cA total eclipse of the sun is unlike any other experience you can witness in nature. The moment when the moon's shadow envelopes you will be a full sensory experience; the sky suddenly darkens, planets and brighter stars reveal themselves, and the sun's corona, invisible to us all our lives except for the few precious minutes of total eclipse, will stun you with its beauty. You might gasp, scream, or perhaps cry at this astonishing vision.\n\n\n\nWhen totality draws to a close, you will be a changed person. You will feel a new connection to our universe and your spirit will be lifted above the Earth.", + " Your emotion at this moment will be bittersweet; [you'll feel both] giddy from the experience of totality, and sadness it has drawn to an end. Your first thought after totality will be When and where is the next one? And you will resolve to see the next great American eclipse passing from Texas to Maine on April 8, 2024.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u2014Michael Zeiler\n\nco-owner and operator of Great American Eclipse\n\nSanta Fe, New Mexico\n\n\u201cIt looked like a black hole in the sky.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe were on the beach on the northwest corner of the big island of Hawaii, in a state park. The wind died down and so did the waves that were coming in \u2014 there were no waves at all by the time of totality.", + " The birds had gone to roost for the 'night' and all the tropical frogs were chirping in abundance. The clouds were breaking up over the mountain, and there it was! The partial eclipse was well on its way. A short time later, it happened \u2014 the black moon took over and blocked out the sun \u2014 it looked like a black hole in the sky! At the same time, the corona burst out all around it and I was just totally overwhelmed with the magnificent beauty of it! It was an explosion of colors in my heart and mind, and I was covered by waves of goosebumps from head to toe. Even now,", + " 26 years later, I have tears running down my face reliving it again. Each new total eclipse that I see, I just relax and let the same thing happen to me again. I can hardly wait until Aug. 21.\"\n\n\u2014Jackie Beucher\n\nvice president of the Astronomical Society of Kansas City\n\nOverland Park, Kansas\n\n\u201cWhen totality is over, and the normal world returns, I feel an incredible loss and a yearning to stand in that familiar shadow again.\u201d\n\n\u201cFor me, a total solar eclipse is an intense emotional moment \u2014 it's like I feel every human emotion in a short period of time.", + " There is a rush of intense emotion, a sense of wrongness when it starts to go dim, a primitive fear that gives me shudders and goosebumps at the creeping darkness of the moon's shadow, and intense euphoria as the sun is fully covered and the world goes dark.\n\nThen comes the stupendous awe of what I am seeing \u2014 there is a hole in the sky where the sun should be. It is wonderful, thrilling, exciting, and incredible. This is followed by moments of deep reflection; I am struck by how vast our universe is, and how incredibly small and insignificant I am within it. It reminds me that we are all connected,", + " and makes me feel humbled by how lucky I am to experience such incredible beauty. Time stops and is, indeed, no longer relevant. I love looking around at the world, seeing sunset colors all around, and feeling as if I am in a different reality. When totality is over, and the normal world returns, I feel an incredible loss and a yearning to stand in that familiar shadow again.\u201d \u2014Kate Russo\n\npsychologist and author, Being in the Shadow\n\nBelfast\n\nSee all of BuzzFeed's eclipse stories here, and buy your BuzzFeed eclipse viewing glasses here!\n\n\n\n\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAdvertisement\n\nSally Tamarkin is a health editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.", + " Contact Sally Tamarkin at sally.tamarkin@buzzfeed.com. Got a confidential tip? Submit it here. ", + " Right about now, maybe you\u2019re looking at your bank account and reports of unprecedented traffic and wondering why you thought it was a good idea to experience the eclipse in the particular spot you chose.\n\nYou felt original, planning to watch near a mountain of cars (Carhenge, near Alliance, Neb.) or along the moon\u2019s limb (Glendo, Wyo.). But then you saw that thousands of other people had the same idea.\n\nSome are warning of a \u201czombie apocalypse,\u201d as hordes of befuddled sky-gazers strain the resources of towns more accustomed to hosting pancake breakfasts than managing Coachella-size gatherings.\n\nDon\u2019t worry.", + " Here are four reasons human behavior researchers say that you made the right decision to experience the eclipse in a crowd \u2014 even if the portable toilets overflow. ", + " Make Your Own Eclipse Viewer\n\nNPR's Skunk Bear YouTube\n\nHundreds of years before solar viewing glasses were readily available, scientists and casual spectators could still enjoy these rare celestial events without frying their eyeballs. They'd use a combination of pinholes and mirrors to redirect the sun's rays onto a screen.\n\nEnlarge this image toggle caption Bettmann Archive/Getty Images Bettmann Archive/Getty Images\n\nIt took a while to figure out how to build the so-called camera obscura. Ancient Chinese and Greek scholars puzzled over pinholes for centuries before an Arab mathematician and scientist came up with a design.\n\nYou can rig up your own version with simple household items.", + " It's easy. Skunk Bear's latest video shows you how.\n\nAnd remember, never look directly at the sun without appropriate eye protection.\n\n____\n\nEclipses are beautiful, and they're also really important to scientists. Skunk Bear's latest video explores the many discoveries sparked by solar eclipses. Check it out over on Skunk Bear's YouTube channel. ", + " What has been dubbed the U.S. eclipse of the century could draw as many as 7 million people to the areas in which the sun will be 100% blocked out. The region runs from Oregon diagonally across the country to South Carolina.\n\nGreatAmericanEclipse.com reports that 12.25 million people already live in the area where the sun will be completely blotted out by the moon. This area is about 65 miles wide. Based on the location of the path, a huge number of Americans could travel to the area to watch the event on August 21. The organization\u2019s experts report:\n\nThe path of totality cuts a diagonal path across the nation from Oregon to South Carolina and most Americans live within a day\u2019s drive to the path of totality.", + " The United States has an excellent highway system and most American families have it within their means to take a short driving vacation. August is an ideal month for a vacation; the weather is warm and the chance of summer storms has diminished in much of the nation. Most schools have not yet begun their fall session by August 21st and some schools near the path of totality are scheduling a late start. Social media will have a huge impact on motivating eclipse visitors. The eclipse is exactly the type of event guaranteed to go viral on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms. We expect that many people will only make plans to go in the week before eclipse day.\n\nTake a vacation,", + " see the eclipse.\n\nThe organization did some very rough math about how many people would actually travel to witness the event, and the range of their estimate is very broad:\n\nA person who is 200 miles away from the centerline of eclipse will have certainly heard about the eclipse within the week before from TV or social media. This average person will receive the impression that the total solar eclipse is something very special to see. Not every one has the freedom to travel. Monday is a work day and for some, a school day. Some may also be deterred by myths about viewing the eclipse or scary stories of traffic congestion. Despite the many news stories about the spectacle of the eclipse,", + " some people will be completely disinterested in the eclipse. Based on this profile of an average person living 200 miles away, I estimate that this population has a high probability of 2% to drive into the path of totality and a low probability of 0.5%. I halve these estimates for people living 400 miles away. I further halve these estimates for people living 800 miles away. I apply this formula to every populated area in the United States using ArcGIS software by Esri.\n\nThe sum estimate from this analysis is that between 1.85 and 7.4 million people will visit the path of totality on eclipse day.\n\nThe \u201cschool day\u201d part is s real hindrance to people who want to see a once-in-a-lifetime event.\n" + ], + "length": 11528, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 25, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Celebrity catfight alert? Louis CK recently sat down with NPR\u2014and, in an amusing tidbit of the interview picked up on by Vanity Fair, the comedian revealed that he was not a fan of Robert Redford's sailing drama, All Is Lost. You see, CK has a yacht, just like Redford's character in the movie and, well, \"you shouldn't see movies about something you know about because I'm very into the boating and I know how to navigate,\" CK explains. \"But this guy in that movie, he made so many stupid choices. So every 10 seconds I was just yelling at the screen.\" He continues: \"You know, there was a million things he could've done to ensure his safety that he didn't. Like, he's trying to figure out how to use a flare gun. I'm like who doesn't know how to use a flare gun who's in the ocean? You're in the open ocean and you're sleeping? He didn't have his water anchor out. A million things that he did that were stupid and it just made me mad.\" As for boating, though, CK explains that he loves it because \"I love to learn. ... I have this 42-foot boat that can sleep six people and it can go anywhere almost in the world. I love that I used to stand next to a boat and go I have no idea how to do that. And now I do, from trying it.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "TERRY GROSS, HOST:\n\nThis is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Louis C.K., is now commonly acknowledged as one of the greatest comics of his generation. His FX series \"Louie\" started its fourth season a couple of weeks ago, after a 19-month hiatus. Episodes Five and Six air back to back tonight.\n\nLouis C.K. created, writes, directs and stars in the series as a standup comic named Louie who, like Louis C.K., is the divorced father of two girls and shares custody with their mother. Louis C.K. had prominent roles in two films last year - Woody Allen's \"Blue Jasmine\"", + " and David O. Russell's \"American Hustle.\" This year he hosted \"Saturday Night Live\" for the second time.\n\nLet's start with a scene from Episode Two of this season's \"Louie.\" The show often features guest comics playing themselves. In this episode, Jerry Seinfeld has asked Louie to open for him at a benefit for the National Heart Alliance. It's a last-minute request; the comic who was supposed to open had just backed out. Louie agrees and shows up in his black T-shirt, defined it's a black tie event, and the guests are super-rich. Knowing he's all wrong for this crowd,", + " he walks uncomfortably onstage.\n\n(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION PROGRAM, \"LOUIE\")\n\nLOUIS C.K.: Uh, hi there, good - thank you very much, thank you. Give yourselves a great time for coming - give yourselves a round - for coming out, good job for you guys. Hey, it's cold outside. I mean, what is it, you know, it was pretty warm. I don't know, it's crazy.\n\nUh, do you ever - chickens are dumb, right? They don't even - how long have we been eating chickens, and they don't get - they're not a little wary at this point?", + " They don't - haven't risen up. Because there's been no Martin Luther Chicken.\n\nIf there was one of those. You know when you go to the supermarket, not that any of you would ever do your own shopping, I know you guys don't shop yourselves, of course.\n\nBecause you all have slaves somehow still. No, I mean, you know, I just mean people that work for you who you don't pay.\n\nGROSS: OK, Louis C.K. welcome back to FRESH AIR. It's great to have your show back on the air. That's such a great example, I guess, of what can happen when you're in front of an audience that isn't your audience,", + " and you don't know what you're doing there, and neither do they.\n\nC.K.: Yeah, yes.\n\nGROSS: What's the worst example of that happening to you?\n\nC.K.: Jeez, when I was a young comic, I often ran into situations like that. I think I remember doing shows in, like, country clubs once in a blue moon. I'd be miscast in one of those. And that's always what it felt like. It's beyond, like, not having stage presence. It was like being in the wrong place, being somewhere I just didn't belong.\n\nGROSS: Did you insult the audience like you did in this?\n\nC.K.: No,", + " I never did that. I don't think I've ever done that. Well, you know what, though, actually this one - I'm remembering better. This show came a little bit from a benefit I did do. I did a benefit that was in a huge place, at the Jacob Javits Center. It was way too big.\n\nGROSS: That's a big convention center in New York.\n\nC.K.: Massive, and comedy is an intimate thing, and this was a benefit for one of these, you know, huge charities that almost becomes like a Wal-Mart, you know, one of these massive charities. And Elton John was on before me,", + " and Elton John played, like, three of his best songs.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: Like \"Tiny Dancer\" and, you know, and they ignored him. They talked over him like he was, like a lounge piano player. And I couldn't - I was really startled. And I went onstage, and I scolded them for that. I was like, you know, Elton John was up here, and you guys just didn't care. And they laughed. And then I sort of made fun of them for being rich, and then it got cold really fast.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: Like I lost them completely,", + " and I couldn't get them back. And this is about a year ago. This isn't that long ago, totally lost the audience, and it just felt like the power and the wealth in the room created a really strange vacuum that I couldn't fill.\n\nGROSS: The Martin Luther Chicken joke...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nGROSS: Did you write that for this occasion, or have you actually ever used that?\n\nC.K.: Yeah, I did. I never would've - I mean, I never tell jokey jokes like that.\n\nGROSS: I know.\n\nC.K.: So when you're out of your element, when you're told you can't do what you usually do,", + " like be clean, you just become a bad comedian, you know, if you're told you can't do what comes naturally. So that's sort of what happened there. But I thought that audience, which was all extras, they did a pretty good job. I mean, after the Martin Luther Chicken joke, you can hear the bottom fall out of the room. That's a very special sound.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: It's not just silence. You hear people turn to each other. There's sort of like this (makes noise). You can feel it, even hearing it now on your show. You - it's an amazing feeling that I think only comedians experience,", + " which is the an audience really dropping from quietly listening to aghast silence. You can hear that.\n\nGROSS: And when that happens, do you feel like why don't we end the agony for you and for the audience and just exit?\n\nC.K.: Well, you can't. You've got a job to do. You have to stay up there. That's always - when you start doing standup, that's the big thing is filling the time, is that you've got time to do. You know, you can't just leave because there's probably somebody on after you, and they're not ready yet. And,", + " you know, there's a quota, there's a show to fill.\n\nSo being onstage when nobody wants you there and not being able to leave, those are the early - that's what comedy is like when you're first starting.\n\nGROSS: Just one more thing about this, this scene. Like you show up in your kind of signature black T-shirt and sneakers.\n\nC.K.: Yeah, yeah.\n\nGROSS: In a taxicab, and everybody else is getting out of, like, limos, they have bodyguards, they're gazillionaires. They're wearing black tie. Do you consider your black T-shirt a costume that you wear for your show \"Louie,\" or do you wear that all the time in real life?\n\nC.K.: You know what?", + " I've gotten really tired of it onstage, and I've done so many, like, standup specials where I'm wearing that shirt and the same jeans and everything, and I'm a little sick of it now. So actually this season on the show, I'm wearing a bunch of colored T-shirts. I mean, it's not a big shift, you know, a green T-shirt instead of a black one.\n\nBut yeah, I've started to - but now in regular life, it's just - it's cotton. I love cotton. I have a very sweaty, misshapen body. So I don't - I can't wear like a really nice,", + " structured shirt out of some kind of linen or something that needs to stay stiff. I just need cotton that just smooshes with me. So I feel good when I'm wearing that. I wish I was a guy in a suit. I wish I was a guy in a suit. That's what I thought I was going to be when I started doing standup.\n\nGROSS: You did?\n\nC.K.: Yeah, I figured I'm going to wear a suit and, you know, that's what I thought I would wear, a tie even. But it's never worked for me, yeah.\n\nGROSS: It's so good to have your show \"Louie\"", + " back on the air. And when you went on a hiatus, on an indefinite hiatus, I thought that might be code for you were thinking over whether you wanted to even come back. What did you do during that hiatus to kind of recharge the show and get the kinds of ideas that you wanted to have before starting up again?\n\nC.K.: Well, I wanted the show to feel new again. I wanted - I felt like I did three seasons that were all one spurt, you know, and that felt good, and then I wanted to forget the show. So I took time to forget about it. I aggressively forgot the show existed for a few months.", + " And I went on tour and did standup, and I did other work. I acted in some movies and stuff.\n\nBut I stayed busy, but I just forgot the show existed. And then after about only really a month off, like vacation, I started to think about the show again and think about, like, the first episode being like a pilot again. That's sort of the way I approached this season, was like do a show that, it's brand new. Even though I'm bringing back some characters and stuff, I tried to start from scratch.\n\nSo I spent way more time writing the show than I ever have before,", + " like thinking of the stories and plotting them out, and I spent a year doing the season instead of - usually I spent about six months or less from the beginning of the writing until the end of the editing. It's usually six months. This time it was a year.\n\nGROSS: My guest is Louis C.K. Two episodes of his series \"Louie\" air back to back tonight on FX. More after a break; this is FRESH AIR.\n\n(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\n\nGROSS: My guest is Louis C.K., and his show \"Louie\" is back on the air after a hiatus. I want to play a scene from another episode of \"Louie,\" and this an episode in which you've been trying to go out with one of the waitresses in the comedy club where you work,", + " but she keeps turning you down. But another waitress keeps asking you to hang out, and she seems smart and really funny, but she's also heavy. She's, you know, somewhere between chubby and fat, depending on the word you want to use.\n\nAnd you keep coming up with excuses about why you're busy, and finally you agree to spend some time with her, you're walking with her along the river, and she starts talking about how difficult it is to be a fat girl and single, and then you try to reassure her that she's not fat. She's played - her name is Vanessa in the show, and she's played by Sara Baker.", + " So here you are reassuring her that she's not fat.\n\n(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION PROGRAM, \"LOUIE\")\n\nGROSS: That's a scene from Louis C.K.'s show \"Louie.\" I think that's a terrific scene. There's a lot more of it. We just played a short excerpt. And I think there's so much truth in what she's saying about how certain men will only be comfortable hanging out with attractive women and certainly will only date a really attractive woman, even if they're not attractive themselves. Do you know what I mean?\n\nC.K.: Yeah.\n\nGROSS: And the way you've written your character in this,", + " he's just, like, totally pigged out.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: Yeah.\n\nGROSS: You know, he's had like two meals, two full meals back to back with a really fat friend of his, a male friend. And so it's like, you know, it's so hypocritical that he'd be uncomfortable walking with a fat girl when, you know, one of his good friends is, like, super-overweight and...\n\nC.K.: Yeah, yeah, and he's also - him and his friend, that's my brother actually on the show, Bobby, we're looking over it,", + " around it, at women on the street and wishing, you know, like we're looking at candy through a window, like though they are very untouchable to us, you know. So it's a weird pecking order.\n\nGROSS: So how did you start thinking about writing that part for the role of Vanessa? Had you had a similar conversation with somebody? Was somebody you know telling you her point of view? Did you just kind of figure this out yourself?\n\nC.K.: I actually, I actually had a conversation many, many years ago with a guy who was heavy and kind of, you know, big eyebrows and,", + " you know, kind of a guy somebody might, you know, describe as a troll. And he's - he just said, and you're not used to hearing people talk like this, he said it's not fair that people aren't attracted to me and that I'm just excluded from certain basic human joys that everybody else partakes in.\n\nAnd it's true. I mean, there's always - everybody's in that position somewhere relatively, not everybody, some people just seem to be universally attractive, but, I mean, I know that that feels like too. I've been several weights in my life, and I know what it feels like to just feel like you're in the outside looking in of the real party in life,", + " you know?\n\nAnd it's - there's a lot to be said about it. That's why I was attracted to the idea to write about, because for one thing it's sad. It's sad that people can't connect because they're not, quote-unquote, attracted to each other.\n\nGROSS: So at what point in your life did you arrive at the point of thinking the kinds of things that you just said? Is that a recent realization, or have you been thinking that for a long time?\n\nC.K.: I've always thought about it because, I mean, when I was in - when I was a kid in school,", + " which is the cruelest time of those years, you know, I didn't - I mean, I don't know, in school you're confronted with kids saying stuff to you. I was heavy for parts of my school life, or awkward at least. And then, and then when you grow up, then - you know, at least in high school kids make fun of you. After high school, you're just alone.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: Like there's just no people. You just get left alone. So I know what it feels to feel that way. I'm certainly not as heavy as some people,", + " but I've been heavy, and I went bald at, like, 24. So I've always thought about it.\n\nGROSS: So, but now that you're so well-known for being really funny, now that your show is so good, now that a lot of people talk about you, rightfully so, as perhaps the best comic of your generation, are you much sexier?\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nGROSS: Do you know what I mean?\n\nC.K.: Jeez, I don't know. I mean, I don't - I'm not out being single, trying to get laid like I used to be.", + " So I never had a heyday sexually. I mean, I've, you know - I'm, I've always been somewhat confident, even though I've been awkward and lumpy. I mean, when I was in junior high school, I used to ask every - I asked every girl out, every girl in the school.\n\nAnd in high school too, the cheerleaders, everybody. It never bothered me to get rejected. So I would go up to the cutest girl in school...\n\nGROSS: Good preparation for being a comic.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: Yeah, exactly. What's so bad? You go up to a very attractive girl who's got,", + " like, you know, who's like a queen bee, just ask her out. And I was nobody, but I'd be like, hey, you want to go out with me? And you'd always get at least one second of sympathy and kind of, oh, that's - no, no, definitely not, but wow, you came up and asked me.\n\nSo I don't know, it never bothered me. And so, you know, I was married, and I've had girlfriends and, you know, casual sex, all kinds of stuff. And I'm in a relationship now. So I'm not out, you know,", + " I don't know how sexy I am in the marketplace. I'm not testing it right now.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: Your character is always either getting picked up by a woman or, you know, trying to hit on a woman, and he's always winding up with women who are such trouble. Even if they're beautiful, there's something kind of mentally unstable about them. Why is that?\n\nYou know, I don't know. It sort of became a trend after a couple of seasons. I think the thing to me, what's fun to do with this guy on the show is just put stuff in front of him that he can't resist.", + " You know what I mean? Here's a beautiful woman, and she doesn't seem like a good choice for you, but there you go. There you go doing that.\n\nAnd I think I'm trying to beat something into his head that this season sort of is about making that turn, you know, like the episode about the model, he gets confronted with the idea that if you're intimate with a total stranger, it's a reckless thing to do. You know, getting into bed with somebody who you don't know, simply because you like their body or because they came on to you, these always lead to bad choices.\n\nSo I like showing a guy deal with bad choices.", + " To me the show wouldn't be very interesting if I was sort of confronted with all very well-balanced women, and then we go and have coffee and everything works out well, and maybe we kiss, and that's the end of the episode. That's not that funny to me.\n\nSo I've been playing that game over and over again for a while because it's still fun for me. That's why I'm still telling that story. It certainly doesn't represent to me that that's what women are like. To me it's funny when people want a show to say this - to be an ideal of this is what we all feel is the best version of a woman and a man.", + " I'm looking for weaknesses on both sides. It's fun.\n\nBut this season I sort of try to fall in love for real and try to have a more real relationship. So...\n\nGROSS: At the risk of getting too personal, have you had your share of experiences where you wake up in the morning in a stranger's bed and think what have I done, why am I here?\n\nC.K.: Yeah, oh sure. I usually don't make it to the morning in situations like that.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: I usually find a way to get the hell out of there, yeah. It's usually right after the act.", + " I'm like wait, this is such a bad idea for both of us. I'm upset for myself and her. Yeah, I think every - almost every single time I've had sex with somebody for the first time, I should've waited, pretty much 100 percent of the time I should've waited a little. It never hurts.\n\nYou get two benefits. One is you realize you didn't want to after all, and there's something about her that, you know, you didn't want to get that intimate. Or you get more fond of each other, and there's more to connect about if you wait.\n\nGROSS:", + " Part of what you just said sounds like a rehearsal for when your daughters get just a little bit older.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nGROSS: Like take it from me, you should wait.\n\nC.K.: Yeah, exactly. Well, I do think we should tell our kids when they start making these choices, tell them the real thing. Like don't tell them hocus pocus, you know, spooky stories, you know, you're going to get - someone's going to kill you, Jesus is going to hate you if you do this. Tell them the truth, which is you're going to feel crappy if you do this.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: You're going to feel - it's not worth it.", + " Just wait. It's a very big deal to be naked in a room with a human being - to be naked in a bed with another person. That is so intimate. That's such a big deal. And when you don't treat it like a big deal, you get confronted with how big a deal it is as a surprise when you're - you know, when that urge is over that got you there. So yeah, it took me, you know, about 1,000 repetitions of the mistake to sort of start to think of it as one, which I think is probably pretty common.\n\nGROSS: Louis C.K.", + " will be back in the second half of the show. Two new episodes of his series \"Louie\" air back to back tonight on FX. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.\n\n(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\n\nGROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with comic Louis C.K. His FX series \"Louie\" is about a comic who, like Louis C.K., is a divorced father of two young girls. Episodes Five and Six of Season Four air back to back tonight. Here's a clip from one of last week's episodes. Louie is with his two daughters in the New York City subway.\n\nJust before getting on the train,", + " Louie reminds the girls of the family subway rules. The rule if one of the girls gets separated is to stay put until daddy comes and gets you. Then the three of them get on a train, but just as the subway doors are closing, the younger daughter, Jane, steps out on to the platform. Louie yells for the train to stop, but it pulls out of the station without Jane.\n\nPanicked, Louie then follows the subway rules. He and his older daughter get out at the next station and run to get the next train back to where Jane is. When they finally get there - out of breath and terrified - they're relieved to find Jane has obeyed the rules and stayed in place.", + " Louis grabs her. And she repeats what she's been saying all morning, that she's asleep and still dreaming.\n\n(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, \"LOUIE\")\n\n(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\n\nGROSS: Oh, it's just so upsetting just to hear that.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: Yeah. Brutal.\n\nGROSS: So...\n\nC.K.: It's a comedy show, by the way.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: A comedy. This is a comedy.\n\nGROSS: That's hysterical.\n\nC.K.: Yeah.\n\nGROSS: No, but there's, you know,", + " I mean parents are supposed to reassure, but I guess there's a time when you really got to like scare them and let them know there really is a dangerous world.\n\nC.K.: Mm-hmm.\n\nGROSS: But you're also trying to reassure them, it's OK. It's not - the bogeyman isn't in the room.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: Yeah.\n\nGROSS: So...\n\nC.K.: Well, the bogeyman is not in the room, but you're too little to be alone. I mean you got to connect your kid to the fear they should be feeling, you know what I mean?\n\nGROSS:", + " Yeah. Yeah.\n\nC.K.: If your kid does something that's dangerous and they are not afraid, you've got to connect them to some fear. I mean you got - sometimes you got to make those connections for kids. You got to sort of go, here you are, here's what, this is the choice you just made, here's how you ought to feel about it. You know, sometimes that's empathy, like geez, you just slapped that baby and you're not - you don't seem upset or whatever.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: So that's - yeah.\n\nGROSS: Do you remember like the first time you had to give that kind of speech to one of your daughters?\n\nC.K.: Well,", + " my kids are pretty bright and they were raised largely in New York City, so a lot of these things are already impulses for them. I mean and the subway rules are a real thing. When you're getting the rules, that's the tricky part because you want to say like, here's what'll happen if this terrifying thing happens, here's how you should act. Now it's never going to happen.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: You know, you want your kids to feel safe. You want them to feel confident that you're there for them. But, you know, I don't think that's an absolute,", + " at a premium, kids must feel safe. They shouldn't feel safe if they're not. They should be aware of what maintains their safety. Why not? Why shelter them from that? You know, a very kid, like a three-year-old, you don't want to tell them, you know, things could happen to you. But this kid is supposed to be, you know, nine. And there is a story line in the season where this particular kid is kind of starting to become a real concern. In this scene I'm reacting emotionally. This was the easiest acting I ever did because the idea of it was so easy to channel,", + " of how terrifying and horrible it would be if my kid did something like this.\n\nGROSS: Part of the series \"Louie\" is about your character playing an active part in the lives of his daughters, co-parenting. You know, he's divorced.\n\nC.K.: Mm-hmm.\n\nGROSS: And you've maintained a really active role in your children's lives. You're divorced. When your parents divorced when you were young, you grew up in Mexico for the first seven years of your life. And your father - my understanding is your father stayed there and you haven't had a lot of contact with him. So he did not remain an active presence in your life in the way that you've remained an active presence in your children's lives.", + " Did that...\n\nC.K.: That's not entirely true.\n\nGROSS: It's not entirely true? Oh, sorry.\n\nC.K.: No we - I lived in Mexico 'til I was about seven and we moved to the states and when I was about 10 or 11, my parents got divorced. But we were all living in Massachusetts. And so when my parents got divorced, my father stayed in town, he was still around but he wasn't actively involved in raising me. He would just - he would come around sometimes but he wasn't - he wasn't in the day-to-day - he didn't have any custody of me.", + " I never spent nights at his house or any extended period of time with him. I just lived with my mom and once in a while my dad would come around. But he was in America, so.\n\nGROSS: Did that have an effect on what you wanted to do as a divorced parent?\n\nC.K.: Oh definitely. I mean when I was married, I was very - and when we had two kids - I was very connected to the kids. As soon as I had one kid that sort of became the most important thing in my life was my kid's life. And so once I was with two kids, that was a big part of life to me was being with my kids and spending time with them and them expecting me there and taking part in their daily life.", + " And actually, when my marriage to their mom started to, you know, come towards a place where it had to end, I was scared to because I assumed it would be like my dad, that I wouldn't really see them, that I wouldn't really be an active part of their lives anymore and that to me was not OK. To me, that wasn't something I was willing to do. And then I met a guy named Andrew Dice Clay, of all people.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: I'd never met Andrew...\n\nGROSS: Mr. Sensitivity. Yes.\n\nC.K.: Yes. Exactly. And I met Andrew at a show and we talked about marriage and he said - I said I didn't think my marriage was going well,", + " but that I didn't want to get out because I wanted to be with the kids. And he told me, you know, hey, I'm divorced, I got kids. And he told me that he had found that in divorce life you stay in your kid's life. This is something I had to go out and learn, that there's a version of divorce life where you're partners and you're both taking care of the kids, the kids are spending equal time with each parent and there's balance there and there's harmony between the parents because they're not married in a bad marriage anymore. If you do it right it's a much better life for the kids.\n\nSo I was determined to make sure that my kids still felt to me in their lives after divorce.", + " And that's what - and then I was astonished to find out that they wanted to be with me all the time, so - and that this was positive for them.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: You know, I kind of pictured that they'd be like, do we have to go to dad's smelly apartment? And also, that motivated me to make a good life for myself so that the kids would have a good own what they came to my place. So, yeah, and their mom is a good co-parent, we're good partners together, we're friends and we've both, I think, done a pretty good job of letting the kids feel like they have everything.", + " They have a mom and they have a dad who get along and who are both there for them. And they have...\n\nGROSS: So you have a better relationship than the divorced couple does on the series \"Louie.\"\n\nC.K.: Yeah. Yeah. I definitely - the mom and my kids' mom in real life, you know, the kids on \"Louie\" are nothing like my kids. All the stuff on the show has really departed into its own world based on the cast. The two girls that play my girls, I write towards them not towards my own kids.\n\nGROSS: Mm-hmm.\n\nC.K.: And Susan Kelechi Watson,", + " that plays my ex-wife, she's got this amazing slow burn and this great way of staring me down.\n\nGROSS: Yeah.\n\nC.K.: So that's what I've been writing towards.\n\nGROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Louis C.K. and his series \"Louie\" is back on FX. Let's take a short break, then we'll talk some more.\n\nC.K.: Sure.\n\nGROSS: This is FRESH AIR.\n\n(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\n\nGROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Louis C.K. And his comedy series on FX \"Louie\"", + " is back on the air. Episodes five and six will be shown tonight.\n\nYou've hosted \"Saturday Night Live\" twice?\n\nC.K.: Yeah.\n\nGROSS: And it's great because your opening monologue, it doesn't seem like the kind of opening monologue that the script writers write for most of the guests. It seems like you bring your stories and you tell them as if you were the comic whose show it was. You don't do the typical guest host thing. And your monologues have been great. And I want to play an excerpt of the most recent one. And so this is Louis C.K. on \"Saturday Night Live\"", + " and you manage to talk about religion in this.\n\n(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, \"SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE \")\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: I'm supposed to make a universe, and then another whole amazing place for afterwards? You guys are greedy (beep) down there. Well, where do I go? Just stand in this room with me now.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: I don't like it. Tell me about it, I've been here since 1983, or whenever, I don't know when God started, but I'm not religious. I don't know if there's a God,", + " but that's all I can say, honestly, is I don't know. Some people think that they know that there isn't. That's a weird thing to think you can know. Yeah, there's no God. Are you sure? Yeah, no, there's no God. How do you know? Because I didn't see him.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: There's a vast universe. You can see for about a hundred yards when there's not a building in the way. How could you possibly? Did you look everywhere? Did you look in the downstairs bathroom, where he goes sometimes? I haven't seen him.", + " Yeah, I haven't seen \"12 Years a Slave\" yet, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I'm just going to wait until it comes on cable.\n\nGROSS: That's hysterical and very profound.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nGROSS: Can you talk a little bit about the process of writing that and deciding you were going to do a bit about is there a God?\n\nC.K.: When they asked me to host the show again, to me the one thing I wanted to really have was a great monologue. They give you total free rein on the monologue, I mean if you're a standup.", + " And I wanted to take advantage of - that's the biggest audience I ever see is the top of the show \"Saturday Night Live.\" I don't know how many people it is but it's something like, I don't know, four million people watch that show? I don't know four million people watch my show. Like no - I never tap four million people except for in \"SNL's\" monologue. So I thought if I can really make some - not just have it go well. The first time I've hosted \"SNL\" I realized I learned something that I didn't know, which is that the audience there is a pretty young audience.", + " They're families that go together. It's kind of a Disney audience. It's very - and I'm not putting these people down - they're tourists from outside of New York usually. And they're not a dark people, you know what I mean, like in their intent or their feelings. They're not nightclub standup, you know, let it hang out people. They're cheerful, ready for good show, sweet, sweet middle of America people. And...\n\nGROSS: Not your audience.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: Not my audience. Well, I mean I played to those audiences all over the country. I play every city in America but usually when I go to like Minneapolis,", + " yeah, I'm tapping Minneapolis's more nefarious types. I'm not...\n\nGROSS: Right.\n\nC.K.: I'm not getting the chamber of commerce and, you know, the Catholic League coming. So yeah, I thought I wanted to do something that's compelling and really a good monologue, but the crowd might not be there for it. It may not be there thing. So I trained for that monologue. I did a lot of sets in town and I did a lot of clubs where there was no audience really, or places where I knew I would do poorly because I wanted to be sure that the monologue would go well whether the audience likes me or not.", + " I wanted to be ready for that.\n\nThat's great. So how do you find a place that you know you're going to do poorly?\n\nGROSS: Well, there's places that just you're up against it. There's like, you know, open mic type places where there's not much of an audience or the audience is just other comedians with notebooks waiting for you to get off stage. You know, I went into any places I'm not usually - don't feel totally comfortable in. I feel comfortable in most of New York in some places that it's just it's a little off in there or there's only,", + " you know, I did a lot of awake night sets, like a Tuesday night, 8:30 p.m. show somewhere where there's really only eight people in the audience, that kind of thing. I found a lot of...\n\nThey must've been surprised to see you.\n\nC.K.: Yes. Yeah. People were usually surprised that I would walk in, depending on the place. Some places nobody cared. But I kept working on the set, working on the ideas in the set and connecting to the material and not worrying about what the audience was doing. And then I got lucky. The crowd at \"SNL\" was awesome.", + " They loved it and they were ready for it and they were excited. And something I've learned over the years is that when you talk about religion, you want to talk to religious people. Even if you're talking about something that's contrary religiously or provocative, a religious audience is a better audience for that. If you talk to a bunch of cool atheists in leather and suede, you know, sucking on their vape sticks or whatever they're doing, they're not going to get it because they don't even think about God. It's not even on their radar, you know? So they're - but if you tell religious people,", + " I don't know if there's a God, I don't think there's a heaven, where's God's ex-wife, these things, they have a connection to it that means something.\n\nGROSS: Did that monologue sum up where you stand on the question? That, like, you don't believe in God but how can you really know?\n\nC.K.: Yes. I do. That's how I feel. I feel like the math in my head tells me that we're just - that everything is just science and randomness and patterns but the main thing I feel is that it's a great mystery. I feel like I need to be humbled before the mysteries of life.", + " I have no idea what's caused all of this.\n\nGROSS: Your father...\n\nC.K.: So you have to consider every possibility.\n\nGROSS: Your father is Jewish and I think your mother Irish Catholic. Were you raised with any religion?\n\nC.K.: My mom was sort of from an Irish Catholic world but it didn't matter to her, you know. My dad converted later in life. He was raised Catholic. My mom made the decision to give us Catholic upbringing so that we would have some religious context. She didn't want to force religion on us and she didn't want to force atheism on us.\n\nSo she thought if she gave us - exposed us to a level of training - and for her it was Catholic because it's what she knew - up to a certain age we were made to go to Catholic,", + " like, after-school training until we got our First Communion. So she thought if you give a kid that far, after that you let them choose. And obviously, you know, whatever I was at 10 years old, if I was told I didn't have to go anymore, I certainly didn't want to go.\n\nBut I'm glad she did that because I understand what religion is and I have a touchstone to it.\n\nGROSS: Did you say that your father converted from Catholicism to Judaism?\n\nC.K.: Yeah. Yeah, he did. His father was Jewish and migrated from Hungary to Mexico. And in Mexico he married a Catholic woman,", + " who is my grandmother, and agreed to let the kids all be raised Catholic. But he was quietly Jewish on my own, my grandfather.\n\nGROSS: I see.\n\nC.K.: Hungarian Jewish doctor came to Mexico because he couldn't come to America so easily. But he was a very brilliant guy and he managed to make a great life in Mexico. But then my father, when he was later in life and after he divorced, he connected with his father's religion and he also married a Jewish woman and he converted to Judaism. He's like an Orthodox Jew, my dad.\n\nGROSS: Oh.\n\nC.K.: Yeah.\n\nGROSS:", + " You've said that your specialty is going to - as a comic, your specialty is going to a place where people get uncomfortable and then you stay there.\n\nC.K.: Um-hum.\n\nGROSS: How did you realize that was your comedy, that that's what you do?\n\nC.K.: I kind of couldn't help it, you know? It's like stuff like the stuff in that monologue. It's very touchy stuff. The areas I'm going into, you know, are touchy. Maybe there's a God, maybe there isn't. Is God divorced? Did God kill his wife? You know, some things that are like,", + " oh, boy, you feel a little sweat on the back of your neck when you get there.\n\nBut if you stay there for a second, you can find something joyful and funny in it. And it's such a great thing to go to a scary place and laugh. I mean, what's better than that? I guess I found out, though, because I couldn't help it. I just couldn't help straying into these areas. I'm also not afraid of it. I'm not afraid of if I go somewhere and I upset everybody. I've been there.\n\nI don't know. I guess I was in trouble a lot when I was a kid so I got used to it.", + " Like, when you're never in trouble you can never go to places like that. But if you're in trouble all the time it's like why not? I mean, I know what this feels like. I know I can survive everybody being pissed off at me. So when I started going onstage I realized, yeah, if I talk about this stuff I might upset people in the room but it's worth it.\n\nBecause maybe there's something there.\n\nGROSS: My guest is comic Louis C.K.. Two episodes of his series \"Louie\" air back to back tonight on FX. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.\n\n(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)\n\nGROSS:", + " This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with comic Louis C.K.. Two episodes of his series \"Louie\" air tonight on FX. So help me out here. You know, when I introduce somebody on the show in the minute-long introduction that I read before the interview starts, which I always do live even though the interview is prerecorded, I give their full name.\n\nAnd then for the rest of the intro I do their last name. So if I was introducing myself I would say my guest is Terry Gross. Gross has been hosting the show for this many years, blah, blah, blah.\n\nC.K.: Um-hum.\n\nGROSS:", + " When I introduce you it's like my guest is Louis C.K.. And then what do I do, call you CK after that? Or call you Louis after...\n\nC.K.: I guess so.\n\nGROSS: Or just keep going, like, Louis C.K. every time?\n\nC.K.: I think you go to the first name with me because my last name is just an absence of a last name. I think you're better off saying Louie has done this, Louie has done that.\n\nGROSS: OK.\n\nC.K.: Or Louis. It's up to - the Louis or Louie to me is about how it flows.\n\nGROSS:", + " I looked at one New York Times article and...\n\nC.K.: Yeah.\n\nGROSS:...my impression was they just kept writing Louis C.K. and then tried to not say your name again.\n\nC.K.: Yeah. No, it's a pain. My name stinks. I hate it. I hate it. I mean, it's always...\n\nGROSS: You made it up. Come on, CK.\n\nC.K.: I know. It was to fix my last - real last name is a mess too. I've never - my name has always been an albatross to me.\n\nGROSS: Pronounce it for me the way - your birth name.\n\nC.K.: It's really See-kay,", + " or Say-kay.\n\nGROSS: Oh.\n\nC.K.: That's how you pronounce it.\n\nGROSS: It's spelled complicatedly.\n\nC.K.: But it's spelled S-Z-E-K-E-L-Y. Yeah, it's Hungarian. Hungarian is a language that doesn't have any attachment to any other language in the world. It's actually true. A little Finnish, but Hungarian has no romance language connection, so Slavic, nothing. It's its own pain in the ass language. So all the names have Zs in them and you can't hear any of the Zs. So it's really a mess.\n\nGROSS:", + " There's a great episode of Jerry Seinfeld's what's it called? \"Comedians...\n\nC.K.: \"Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.\"\n\nGROSS:...Getting Coffee.\" Yeah.\n\nC.K.: Yes.\n\nGROSS: Where he picks you up in a weird little doorless orange car. And then you take him on your boat. You actually have a yacht on the river in New York.\n\nC.K.: I do, yeah.\n\nGROSS: And there's this incredible story that you tell. It's a long and wonderful story that people should just go watch.\n\nC.K.: Yeah.\n\nGROSS: I was wondering did you see the Redford film \"All Is Lost\"?\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: I did see it.", + " Yes, I did.\n\nGROSS: Because he's on this yacht in the middle of the Indian Ocean and, like, one disaster after another happens.\n\nC.K.: Yes.\n\nGROSS: And, you know...\n\nC.K.: Yeah.\n\nGROSS:...the boat is, like, sinking and sinking and he's alone.\n\nC.K.: Yep.\n\nGROSS: How did that make you feel about your God?\n\nC.K.: I got anxious. I didn't like that movie because I - you know, you shouldn't see movies about something you know about because I'm very into the boating and I know how to navigate.", + " I'm not - there's a lot of people better than me but I can get my boat all the way up the Hudson and I can get it out, you know, I can get it to Cape Cod from New York.\n\nI can go a lot of places and I know what I'm doing. I haven't - I'm not nearly as experienced as a lot of captains. But this guy in that movie, he made so many stupid choices. So every 10 seconds I was just yelling at the screen.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nC.K.: You know, get that stuff out of the water. You know, there was a million things he could've done to ensure his safety that he didn't.", + " Like, he's trying to figure out how to use a flare gun. I'm like who doesn't know how to use a flare gun who's in the ocean? You're in the open ocean and you're sleeping? He didn't have his water anchor out. A million things that he did that were stupid and it just made me mad.\n\nI love boating because it's a - I love to learn. That's my favorite thing in life, is learning stuff, and the idea that if you're a person standing next to - I have this 42-foot boat that can sleep six people and it can go anywhere almost in the world.", + " I love that I used to stand next to a boat and go I have no idea how to do that. And now I do, from trying it.\n\nAnd I know the waters all around New York Harbor. And all the way up to Massachusetts. Like I know the depths of a lot of these places. I know where the boating channels are. I'm very careful because I have my kids on the boat a lot. So I don't go out in bad weather. I just - I'm very thorough with checking reports before I go anywhere.\n\nBut, yeah, it's one of my favorite things. That's my thing I love to do when I'm not working.\n\nGROSS:", + " Do you have that confidence on stage? Like I know how to do this. If there's a hurricane...\n\nC.K.: Sure. Yes, I do.\n\nGROSS:...the audience hates me, I know what to do.\n\nC.K.: That's exactly right. There really isn't a situation on stage that I feel like I won't know how to handle it. There are some that I know I can't overcome. There are things where I'm like, well, this crowd is just not going to like me. But I also have a plan for that. I know how to stay - you have to stay cool. You can't let them change your plan.\n\nSo,", + " yes, I have that confidence on stage. I know even if it doesn't - if I don't open well, it'll be OK. Even if I lose them, I'll get them back. And that's come from never shying away - when I was first starting in New York they had prom shows where they'd fill the audience with kids that were just at their prom. And they're all drunk on limousine booze. And there is no - as soon as you got on stage they'd start yelling at you.\n\nThey'd start booing as soon as you get - before deciding if they like you or not. They think it's fun to just go boo,", + " start booing when you hit the stage. And I used to eat prom shows for dinner. I used to book as many prom shows as I could. First of all, they pay twice as much money because it's so hard. It's the only time comedy clubs are ever compassionate to comedians, is that they'll pay you twice the money for a prom show.\n\nBut I've been on stage with people yelling and booing and throwing stuff at me and I've hung in there. I know how to handle that. So nothing scares me now on stage.\n\nGROSS: That's great.\n\nC.K.: But if it starts raining,", + " I park my boat. You know, I'm out of my depth there.\n\nGROSS: Louis C.K., it has been so great to have you back on the show. Thank you so much for being here and thank you for starting up your show \"Louie\" again. It's great to have it back.\n\nC.K.: Oh, I love doing - this is one my favorite things ever, is doing your show. I also - my friend Pamela Adlon wants me to say hello to you. She loves you.\n\nGROSS: Oh, well, say hello for me.\n\nC.K.: And your show.\n\nGROSS:", + " Oh, she's so great. Yeah.\n\nC.K.: She's the best.\n\nGROSS: She was terrific on our show. Yeah.\n\nC.K.: I know. It was great.\n\nGROSS: Oh. Well, thank you...\n\nC.K.: Thank you, Terry.\n\nGROSS:...so much. Louis C.K. writes, directs, and stars in the FX comedy series \"Louie.\" Two new episodes air back to back tonight. There's a story we didn't have time for about his performance in the movie \"American Hustle.\" You can listen to that story on our blog on Tumblr at nprfreshair.tumblr.com.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2014 NPR.", + " All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.\n\nNPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR\u2019s programming is the audio record. ", + " One thing you may not know about Louis C.K.: the man owns a yacht. He\u2019s showed it off on Jerry Seinfeld\u2019s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee Web series and talked about it on late-night television. So when the comedian stopped by NPR today, host Terry Gross asked Louis C.K., a yacht owner who takes tremendous pride in his sailing skills, what he thought about last year\u2019s Robert Redford sailing drama All Is Lost.\n\nAs it turns out: Louis C.K. really did not love it. Per the conversation:\n\nI didn\u2019t like that movie because... you know, you shouldn\u2019t see movies about something you know about because I\u2019m very into the boating and I know how to navigate.", + " There [are] a lot of people better than me but I can get my boat all the way up the Hudson and I can get it out, you know, I can get it to Cape Cod from New York. [...] I\u2019m not nearly as experienced as a lot of captains. But this guy in that movie, he made so many stupid choices. So every 10 seconds I was just yelling at the screen.\n\nWhat exactly are some of Louis C.K.\u2019s critiques of Redford\u2019s sailing technique?\n\nYou know, there w[ere] a million things he could\u2019ve done to ensure his safety that he didn\u2019t.", + " Like, he\u2019s trying to figure out how to use a flare gun. I\u2019m like who doesn\u2019t know how to use a flare gun who\u2019s in the ocean? You\u2019re in the open ocean and you\u2019re sleeping? He didn\u2019t have his water anchor out. A million things that he did that were stupid and it just made me mad.\n\nIf only Robert Redford had had Louis C.K. on his boat\u2014imagine how much different (and funnier) that All Is Lost voyage could have been.\n\nRelated: Louis C.K.: The Proust Questionnaire\n" + ], + "length": 11470, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 26, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Certain dogs apparently feel like they're perpetually in the doghouse, according to a University of Sydney study that says some dogs are pessimists, getting demoralized more easily than other dogs and just giving up on tasks when they've had enough. The research, published this week in the Plos One journal, isn't saying that pessimistic dogs are necessarily sad: It's just that they're more risk-averse because they expect the worst after experiencing setbacks and are more likely than their more \"optimistic\" canine counterparts to just accept the way things are rather than try to change them. The 40 dogs in the study had to touch a target upon hearing two tones two octaves apart; one tone would reward them with milk, the other with water, the Washington Post reports. It's when the researchers sandwiched \"ambiguous\" tones in between the two main ones that some dogs' moods started going south: Certain dogs kept hitting the targets no matter what reward resulted, while \"pessimistic\" dogs stopped touching the target altogether after not receiving the coveted milk. The Post notes that perhaps the dogs aren't pessimists at all, but realists\u2014one University of Colorado professor says he's curious if they're actually pessimistic or just got tired of waiting. But the results could have useful training applications: Dogs that take risks could be used for tasks that require more persistence, such as searching for explosives, while wary pups could serve as more careful guide dogs. (In other dog news, the Bay Area is overrun with thousands of chihuahuas.)\n", + "docs": [ + "New research from the University of Sydney shows evidence that dogs can be distinctly optimistic or pessimistic. (The University of Sydney)\n\nDoes your dog think the water dish is half empty? New research from the University of Sydney shows evidence that dogs can be distinctly optimistic or pessimistic. Just like humans, optimistic canines have a distinctly sunnier outlook on life, while pessimistic pups are likely to expect the worst.\n\nThe dogs were trained to touch a target after hearing one of two tones -- two octaves apart -- to receive a drink. One tone meant they'd receive milk, a reward, while the other just meant they'd get water. Once they'd learned what those tones meant,", + " they were presented with new tones in-between the \"milk\" and \"water\" pitch.\n\nIf a dog kept happily hitting the target through these ambiguous tones, the researchers claim, it's probably because it was hopeful that one of them would lead to a reward. On the other hand, the researchers report, the \"pessimistic\" dogs grew distressed when ambiguous tones didn't result in milk, and avoided repeating the task.\n\nThis study is really meant as a proof-of-concept for a sort of doggy personality test-- one that could help determine the best service dogs for particular tasks. The researchers found that pessimistic dogs, for instance,", + " were doing better in their training to be guide animals for the disabled. They were careful and anxious about taking risks. But a persistent, optimistic dog might do a better job in search-and-rescue missions.\n\nMarc Bekoff, an author and professor emeritus at University of Colorado who wasn't involved in the study, was hesitant to call the dogs who gave up \"pessimists.\"\n\n\"The paradigm of the study is great -- most dog studies use 10 dogs or so, and this has 40 dogs of all different breeds and ages. And it's possible that these dogs were pessimists -- but maybe they just gave up,\" Bekoff said.\n\nIn other words,", + " maybe the dogs who stopped looking for milk that would never come were just realists. To track down a pathologically pessimistic pup, Bekoff suggested, one might see if a failure during the milk and water task led them to be less interested in unrelated reward-based experiments.\n\nBut Bekoff has no doubt that dogs possess these personality differences, and he thinks the test is an intriguing attempt to asses the traits. \"Especially in dogs who are abused early on, you definitely see animals who just really won't work that hard to get love or affection, having failed before,\" Bekoff said. \"I think it's perfectly legitimate to say that there are optimistic and pessimistic dogs -- and that you can change their behavior.\" ", + " The University of Sydney\n\nYou are here: ", + " Recent advances in animal welfare science used judgement bias, a type of cognitive bias, as a means to objectively measure an animal's affective state. It is postulated that animals showing heightened expectation of positive outcomes may be categorised optimistic, while those showing heightened expectations of negative outcomes may be considered pessimistic. This study pioneers the use of a portable, automated apparatus to train and test the judgement bias of dogs. Dogs were trained in a discrimination task in which they learned to touch a target after a tone associated with a lactose-free milk reward and abstain from touching the target after a tone associated with water. Their judgement bias was then probed by presenting tones between those learned in the discrimination task and measuring their latency to respond by touching the target.", + " A Cox's Proportional Hazards model was used to analyse censored response latency data. Dog and Cue both had a highly significant effect on latency and risk of touching a target. This indicates that judgement bias both exists in dogs and differs between dogs. Test number also had a significant effect, indicating that dogs were less likely to touch the target over successive tests. Detailed examination of the response latencies revealed tipping points where average latency increased by 100% or more, giving an indication of where dogs began to treat ambiguous cues as predicting more negative outcomes than positive ones. Variability scores were calculated to provide an index of optimism using average latency and standard deviation at cues after the tipping point.", + " The use of a mathematical approach to assessing judgement bias data in animal studies offers a more detailed interpretation than traditional statistical analyses. This study provides proof of concept for the use of an automated apparatus for measuring cognitive bias in dogs.\n\nCompeting interests: Small financial contributions for funding support were received by Black Dog Wear Pty Ltd. and Positive Puppies. Denis Cody is employed by Indice Ecotech Pty Ltd and Timothy R. Starling by Wikimedia Foundation Inc. The views expressed in this manuscript are those of the authors and not necessarily held by either Indice Ecotech Pty Ltd or Wikimedia Foundation Inc. The financial contributions and commercial affiliations declared here do not alter the authors'", + " adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.\n\nThis study provides proof of concept for the use of a novel, portable, automated apparatus to train an operant, auditory discrimination task and subsequently test cognitive bias. The apparatus auto-shapes dogs to perform an auditory discrimination task, then records their latency to respond to reveal their expectations and therefore their judgement bias. It was designed to collect data on judgement bias in a range of dogs from different environments, investigate population levels of optimism and pessimism and explore factors that may affect the expression of judgement bias. This study reports on baseline optimism in companion dogs, dogs in training for assistance roles,", + " and security and detection dogs, and introduces a novel method of analysing cognitive bias data to produce an optimism index.\n\nOne potential method of identifying positive and negative affective states in animals is testing cognitive bias. Cognitive bias is a term that has been used in the human literature to describe the effects of affective state on a range of cognitive processes such as information processing and decision-making [5], [6]. It is now being put to similar use in non-human animals, where it has been found that the cognitive process of judging how to interpret ambiguous signals is under the influence of current affective state. This specific form of cognitive bias is called judgement bias.", + " A judgement bias refers to how animals interpret ambiguous signals and whether they expect more positive or negative outcomes. A negative affective state leads to an expectation of negative outcomes and thus a negative bias in the interpretation of ambiguous signals. This has been referred to in the animal literature as pessimism [7], [8]. In contrast, a positive affective state leads to an expectation of positive outcomes and positive biases in signal interpretation, which has been referred to as optimism [9], [10]. Environmental conditions that induce either a state of positive or negative affect can be used to test this concept in animals by changing environmental conditions to induce either a putative positive or negative affect and then testing whether judgement bias changes correspondingly.", + " This approach has been reported in rats [11], [12], starlings [7], [9], [10], [13], [14], sheep [15] \u2013 [17], chickens [18], [19], cats [20], primates [21], [22], pigs [14], dogs [23], [24] and honeybees [25]. In the species studied to date, negative judgement biases positively correlate with conditions known to induce negative affect, and positive judgement biases positively correlate with conditions known to induce positive affect. Furthermore, pessimism has been reduced with the use of drugs designed to reduce fear in lambs [17]", + " and pessimism has been associated with physiological indicators of elevated distress in honeybees [25]. Complexities in optimism and pessimism expression have been recorded in starlings [13] and tufted capuchins [22], in that higher frequency of stereotypic behaviours have been associated with heightened pessimism. Similarly, dogs that show indications of heightened separation-related distress have been shown to be more pessimistic than those with fewer indicators of separation-related distress [23]. These results support the use of judgement bias in animals as a potential indicator of both positive and negative affective state, but the role of personality in the expression of optimism and pessimism remains unclear.\n\nAnimal welfare science focuses on the assessment and the potential optimisation of the quality of life of animals.", + " Animal welfare studies have traditionally focused on identifying negative states tied to stressors such as those causing pain, fear, anxiety and frustration [1], [2], as it was assumed that these conditions reflect poor welfare and that therefore good welfare results from the absence of these states [1], [2]. However, there are problems with this approach. For example, negative states are adaptive and consequences of a stress response may be protective [3]. It has been suggested that assessments of animal welfare should not focus purely on avoiding pain and suffering, but should also place value on positive, pleasurable activities and resources [4]. It is therefore of growing importance to identify accurate indicators of positive and negative affective state in animals.\n\nThe results from the mathematical model were compared with subjective rankings of the dogs derived from the owners or trainers.", + " Three dog \u2018types\u2019 were described in subjective terms based on the response latency data and behavioural data recorded during training and testing. These descriptions are shown in Table 5. Descriptions were sent to two separate people who knew the dogs well \u2013 either living with them or training them. These people were asked to categorise the dogs according to the type that best described them. Categorising dogs as between types was allowed.\n\nThe results of cognitive bias tests were processed in Mathematica 8 (Wolfram Industries) and interpreted in terms of a mathematical model rather than a frequentist statistical model. This was done to enable us to identify the clear but subtle patterns in the results without depending on measures of statistical significance that may not be appropriate for use with a small sample size such as that reported here.", + " The mathematical model can be defined in words and is shown in Table 4. This is based on simple statistics. A consistent pattern was detected from the data of the 20 dogs that completed cognitive bias tests whereby average latencies for each tone suddenly increased by 100% or more. This was defined as the tipping point. The tipping point was used to indicate where expectation of probe outcomes switched from positive to negative. A variability score was calculated from data following the tipping point (excluding data related to water tones) to give a measure of how quickly dogs responded to probe tones after the expectation switch. The variability score was simply the sum of the average latency at each tone divided by the standard deviation of latency at that tone,", + " i.e. average latency at tipping point/SD at tipping point+average latency at probe adjacent to tipping point/SD at that probe +\u2026 through to the probe adjacent to the water tone. If a tipping point were at P7, the formula would be: (average latency at P7/SD at P7)+(average latency at P8/SD at P8)+(average latency at P9/SD at P9). The purpose of this was to devise a measure of how variable responses were after the tipping point. High variability would indicate dogs that are still in a state of flux with their interpretations of probes, but are still responding to some tones relatively quickly as if they were expecting a positive outcome.\n\nAll statistical analyses were carried out in R,", + " version 2.15 (R Foundation for Statistical Computing). A one-tailed Mann-Whitney U-test (with a significance level of p<0.05) was used on each dog in TP3 to test whether dogs were significantly faster to touch the target after milk tones than after water tones. A one-tailed test was used because, for the judgement bias test to be meaningful, the average latency for milk tones had to be significantly less than the average latency for water tones rather than significantly different in either direction. Davis et al. [27] have shown the startle reflex to be sub-cortical and to not involve cognitive processing.", + " As such, a minimum response latency of 500 ms was set to exclude responses unlikely to be cognitive. This was based on the minimum response time to auditory cues in rats [28]. Such responses were substituted with the mean latency for the corresponding tone in that session if the response was to milk or water tones. If latency was less than 500 ms for a probe tone, that response was excluded as there were far fewer responses available to form an accurate mean substitution, and much greater variability in probe responses. The \u2018survival\u2019 package was used to analyse cognitive bias tests using a Cox proportional hazards regression model. This model was chosen as the data were censored at 10 seconds.", + " If dogs had not touched the target within 10 seconds of the tone, their latency was recorded as 10 seconds and marked as censored. The dependent variable in a survival model has two parts: the event indicator and the latency to the event. In this case, the event indicator is touching the target (or reaching the end of the 10-second window without touching the target), and critical latency is the time it takes to touch the target after a tone. The regression model was built using the stepwise method. The terms in the model were tested using the \u2018anova\u2019 function, comparing the model containing the new term with a model excluding the new term and retaining the term if there was a significant difference in models.", + " Terms that were considered for inclusion were \u201cDog\u201d, \u201cTrial\u201d (CBT1-3), \u201cProtocol\u201d (A or B), \u201cBackground\u201d and \u201cCue\u201d was the dependent variable.\n\nCognitive bias testing involved the presentation of auditory probes. The apparatus logged the latency of the dog to respond to probe tones by automatically recording when the dog broke the infrared beam of the photointerruptor. The probes were interspersed throughout a regular training session. Probe tones were presented randomly and milk and water tones were presented pseudo-randomly, with no more than two milk tones or two water tones in a row. Each of the 9 probes were presented twice and milk and water tones were each presented 15 times throughout the test.", + " Each dog was given 3 cognitive bias tests over the space of 2 weeks. These were alternated with two regular training sessions of TP3 in the sequence CBT1\u2192TP3\u2192CBT2\u2192TP3\u2192CBT3 to ensure responses to milk and water tones remained consistent.\n\nThe objective was to train dogs to discriminate between the milk tone and a new tone (\u201cwater tone\u201d) that signalled that moving the nose to the target would result in the delivery of water instead of milk. Milk and water tones were played such that no more than two of the same tones were played in succession. This was in alignment with other similar cognitive bias studies in animals [13]", + ", [15]. Tones were followed by a 10-second response window, reward delivery if applicable, 20-second inter-trial interval (ITI), and then the next tone. The criterion for success in TP3 was that dogs demonstrated their discrimination between milk and water tones by touching the target significantly faster after milk tones than after water tones. This was determined by a one-tailed Mann-Whitney U test. Dogs were required to show this discrimination in two successive training sessions or two out of three training sessions. They were given a maximum of 25 sessions (48 cues per session) on TP3 to achieve the criterion.\n\nThe objective of TP2A was to ensure dogs were responding to the tone and not the fixed interval between tones,", + " and to gradually ease dogs into the lower reward rate of TP3 and cognitive bias tests. Criterion in Table 3 was implemented. There were 32 trials in a session. Dogs were excluded from the study if they were not able to meet the criterion for success in three sessions.\n\nTP2 trained dogs to move their nose to the target on cue. The cue was an auditory tone (henceforth \u201cmilk tone\u201d). The training protocol is shown in Table 3. Dogs were given one full session on TP2, after which criterion in Table 3 was implemented if it had not already been met. There were 48 trials in a session.", + " Dogs were excluded from the study if they were not able to meet the criterion for success in three sessions.\n\nTP1 trained dogs to touch the target by delivering a reward each time the dog passed through the photointerruptor in front of the target. There was an 8-second block on the photointerruptor after it had been activated so that subsequent triggering did not result in the immediate delivery of further rewards. This prevented the delivery of a double dose of lactose-free milk before the dog had consumed the first reward. There was no set number of trials in this phase, as no tones were presented and dogs would receive a reward any time they touched the target outside of the 8-second block after a previous touch.", + " The maximum number of trials the program could support in a session of this phase with the 8-second block was 150 and the minimum was 0. Dogs were given at least one full session, after which the criterion in Table 3 was implemented if it had not already been met.\n\nThe experimenter was always within 3 m of the apparatus and always in sight of the dog during training and testing. The experimenter could hear the tones, but was able to predict the tone that would be presented only when the previous two tones had been the same. Given most of the dogs worked or lived with humans, it was challenging to control and impossible to eliminate experimenter effects on dog behaviour while still being within sight of the dog and monitoring their interaction with the apparatus.", + " However, experimenter intervention followed a protocol in an attempt to control such effects. If the dogs did not respond to two milk tones in a row during training phases, the experimenter called their name once and pointed to the apparatus. If the dogs did not approach, this was followed by calling \u201ccome here\u201d in a light, high tone and clicking the fingers. If the dogs still did not approach, this procedure was followed after dogs had failed to respond to a further two milk tones. If the dogs still did not approach, the procedure was repeated after the dogs had failed to respond to a further 4 milk tones. If the dogs did not respond to any further tones in that block,", + " the session was aborted at the end of the block. If, during training, the dogs lay down too far from the apparatus to access the target and did not get up upon hearing one tone, the apparatus was moved to within 30 cm of the point where their chest touched the ground.\n\nThree training phases were used to train the dogs in the discrimination task. These phases and criteria for learning are summarised in Table 3. The testing phase was the judgement bias test itself and was the only phase that included ambiguous signals. Training and test sessions lasted no longer than 30-minutes and consisted of four 5-minute training blocks and a 3-minute rest period between each training block.", + " The structure of training and test sessions is shown in Figure 2. Dogs that had not met success criteria within 30-minutes, were given a subsequent training session within 24 hours. Dogs received up to two sessions a day and had no more than five days between sessions.\n\nDogs were trained in a go/no-go discrimination task where they were required to touch a target with their nose after a tone in order to trigger the delivery of a lactose-free milk reward or water. The tone informed the dog which outcome would be delivered, and thus whether they should go ahead and touch the target or avoid touching. When dogs showed a significant difference in their response to the two tones,", + " the dog's judgement bias was assessed by presenting 9 new, ambiguous tones that fell between the milk and water tones.\n\nTwo coin tosses were used to assign each dog randomly to an auditory protocol and a milk tray side. Dogs were then habituated to the apparatus through a brief habituation program that involved placing a set number (n = 14) of small liver treats around the apparatus for the dogs to find and consume. The apparatus was turned on and set to Training Phase 1 (TP1). The tone volume was increased in successive triggering events until the dog's ears came up and forward when the marker tone sounded. At this point,", + " the volume above background noise of the tone was recorded (in decibels) using a sound level meter held within 5 cm of the apparatus speaker, and the apparatus volume was set at this level above background noise prior to all interactions the dog had with the apparatus. If dogs did not show an observable response to the tone, the volume was set at maximum for that dog. The milk pump was activated manually when the dog was investigating the apparatus. The dog was allowed to consume the milk delivered to the milk tray and the milk pump was activated manually until the dog moved away from the milk tray or until the pump had run for approximately 7 seconds if the dog did not move away.", + " Any dog that did move away was given approximately 5 seconds to return to the milk tray. If they did not return on their own, dogs were encouraged with verbal coaxing and tapping of the milk tray by the experimenter. This process was repeated until each dog had consumed milk from the tray without a reaction to the sound of the pump for approximately 7 seconds.\n\nFour buttons provided a means to select options displayed on the LCD screen. This interface allowed the operator to select the weight class of the dog (0\u20137 kg, 8\u201327 kg, 28\u201347 kg, 48 kg+), the auditory protocol,", + " the training phase, and to start the training session. The remaining two buttons activated the two pumps outside of the training program. This was essential for cleaning the tubes and pumps and priming the tubes before the training program began. A speaker volume control dial allowed adjustment of the volume of the tones emitted. The frequencies of auditory tones are shown in Table 2.\n\nThe apparatus prototype was constructed around an Arduino Uno micro-controller board (SmartProjects, Italy). The Arduino Uno controlled an LCD screen (V1.2 and V1.2: DFRobot, Beijing, China; V2.1: FORDATA ELECTRONIC Co.", + " LTD, China), two peristaltic pumps (SmallPumps, Arlington, Texas, USA; part # SP200 517), six pin buttons (generic manufacturer, part# SP0710) used to set the training program variables, a power switch (generic manufacturer, part #:SK0960), and an infrared photointerruptor. The photointerruptor consisted of an infrared LED (Osram, Malaysia) and a phototransistor (Vishay, Germany). The flow rate on the pumps was approximately 100 mL/minute. Peristaltic pumps deliver small amounts of liquid by compressing a silicone delivery tube,", + " thus ensuring the tubes were primed to deliver liquid the moment the pump was activated. The pumps were calibrated by measuring the volume of liquid they dispensed in a second. Reservoirs in the form of 500 mL intravenous transfusion bags were connected to plastic and silicone tubing, which delivered milk and water to the two pumps. Plastic tubing also delivered liquid from the pumps to two feed trays fixed in front of the target. Each delivery tube was dedicated to delivering either milk or water, and could be configured to deliver fluid into either the left hand tray or the right hand tray, thus allowing milk to be delivered to either side and controlling for any individual's bias to prefer one side over the other.", + " Two alternate auditory protocols were generated to account for tone-generated biases. Protocol A used the lowest tone as the milk tone and the highest as the water tone, and this was reversed in Protocol B.\n\nThe apparatus used in this study was designed to be portable and easy to set up and operate. A diagram of the apparatus is shown in Figure 1. It consisted of three major external components: an interactive target that detected movement through the use of an infrared photointerruptor, and two feed trays assigned to either lactose-free milk or water. As a diet high in lactose is associated with diarrhoea in some dogs [26],", + " lactose-free milk was chosen as a liquid reward to avoid causing digestive upsets. Throughout training and testing, dogs received a set volume of lactose-free milk and water ranging from 1\u20135 mL, depending on their bodyweight.\n\nThe subjects included 40 dogs of various breeds. Seventeen of the dogs (aged 1\u20136 years) were recruited via a positive training and pet boarding company based in the North Shore suburbs of Sydney, Australia. These dogs belonged to companion animal owners and thus were subject to variable housing, feeding and exercise arrangements. Twelve dogs were sourced from Assistance Dogs Australia's (Heathcote, NSW,", + " Australia) advanced training facility. These dogs were 1\u20132 years old. Eleven dogs (aged 1\u20133 years) were sourced from a private security company. Dogs were recruited from different environments chiefly in the interests of accessing as many dogs as possible. Details of the dogs in the study are shown in Table 1. Dogs older than eight years were excluded to avoid recruiting dogs that may have been affected by canine cognitive dysfunction. Dogs younger than one year were excluded to avoid the possible influence of social immaturity on cognitive bias.\n\nAll dogs that completed cognitive bias testing had at least one optimism rating from an owner or trainer, and 18 of the 20 dogs had two or more ratings.", + " There were not enough data to perform an inter-rater agreement analysis on ratings. A Spearman's rank correlation was performed on a mean of the trainer and owner ratings (n = 43) with the behavioural data. The results indicate a weak relationship that was not significant (r s = 0.382, p = 0.118). Rater results are shown in Table 8. There was a tendency for owners and trainers to over-estimate the optimism of dogs belonging to pessimistic, moderately pessimistic, and balanced groups, and to under-estimate the optimism of dogs in moderately optimistic and optimistic groups.\n\nIn all graphs cue is on the x-axis,", + " with probes arranged in a scale from closest to milk to closest to water. Latency in seconds is shown on the y-axis. Graph a) shows the pooled responses of dogs (n = 4), categorised as optimistic (1 on the rating scale in Table 8 ), characterised by standard deviation approaching the mean latency and average latency higher than the probability of a slower than average response. Graph b) shows the pooled responses of dogs (n = 4), categorised as moderately optimistic (2 on the rating scale). Standard deviation is lower, but the pattern of average latency is similar to that of optimistic dogs. Graph c) shows pooled responses of dogs (n = 3), categorised as balanced (3 on rating scale). Characteristics are similar to those in the moderately optimistic graph.", + " Graph d) shows pooled responses of dogs (n = 3), categorised as moderately pessimistic (4 on rating scale). Average latency tends to be higher than in other graphs. Graph e) shows the pooled responses of dogs (n = 4), categorised as pessimistic, typified by high initial latencies and low standard deviation. Graph f) shows the responses of a single dog, characterised as optimistic. Tipping point can be seen where average latency increases by 100% or more, indicated by \u201cTP\u201d. Standard deviation approaches mean latency and probability of faster than average response remains high for much of the graph.\n\nVariance scores were used to place dogs in optimism categories.", + " Results from dogs with high variance scores, standard deviation approaching mean latencies, and average latencies higher than the probability of slower than average responses were pooled to show a typical graph for optimistic dogs (variance score >5). Results from dogs with moderate to moderately low variability in latencies, and moderate to high probabilities of slower than average responses were pooled to show a typical graph for moderately optimistic (variance score >3.5 and <5), balanced (variance score >2 and <3.5) and moderately pessimistic (variance score <2) dogs. The dogs with high latencies precluding variability scores and low standard deviation and high probabilities of slower than average responses were pooled to show a typical graph for dogs that were pessimistic.", + " These graphs are shown in Figure 5 alongside a graph from an optimistic dog to allow a comparison between the individual dog and the optimism category they were assigned to.\n\nThe Cox's proportional hazards model showed that there was a significant effect of Dog (DF = 18.57, LRT = 261.86, P<0.001) and Cue (DF = 10.19, LRT = 616.9, P<0.001) as well as test number (DF = 2.0, LRT = 16.45, P<0.001) on latency and the risk of the dog touching the target within the 10-second window.", + " \u201cRisk\u201d here is very similar to \u201clikelihood\u201d, but does not share the same statistical meaning. It may be considered the probability of an individual touching the target within the 10-second window while considering time in many small intervals. A summary of the terms included in the final model is shown in Table 6. Protocol did not have a significant effect on latency and the risk of touching the target in the survival analysis, and nor did the dog's background, and both terms were excluded from the model. The log of the risk of each dog touching the target within the 10-second window is shown in Figure 3. This shows that some dogs are far more likely to touch the target after any tone than others.", + " Figure 4 shows how the risk of dogs touching the target differs between cues. There was no significant difference in risk of touching the target between the first and second cognitive bias tests, but there was a significant decrease in the risk of dogs touching the target in the third test compared to the first, indicating that dogs were significantly less likely to touch the target in the third test.\n\nThe fate of all dogs in the study is shown in Table 1. Twenty of the 40 dogs included in the study completed all three cognitive bias tests. The exclusion rate was highest in security dogs (72%, n = 11), lower in pet dogs (47%, n = 19)", + " and lowest in Assistance Dogs Australia advanced training dogs (33%, n = 12). Reasons for exclusion of dogs during the training program included inconsistent or low rates of targeting resulting in a failure to meet the criterion for TP1 and extinction of targeting in later training phases when reinforcement rates decreased. In addition, two dogs appeared to dislike the lactose-free milk, avoiding the milk tray and ignoring attempts to coax them towards it. Dogs that completed training took 9\u201333 training sessions (Mean = 20 \u00b1 S.D = 6.769) from habituation and TP1 to meeting the criterion at the end of TP3. The twenty dogs that completed cognitive bias tests gave 144 responses each to various cues over the three cognitive bias tests.", + " One dog had data for only two cognitive bias tests as the equipment failed during the second test, resulting in no latency data for that test. The percentage of water tones responded to was calculated for the last two training sessions before testing commenced (n = 47 trials per dog) and the cognitive bias tests (n = 45 trials per dog) to examine possible effects of novelty on response rate. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test showed that the response rate for water tones calculated from 20 dogs before cognitive bias tests and those from the same 20 dogs during cognitive bias tests differed significantly (W = 210; p<0.001;", + " r = 0.670).\n\nDiscussion\n\nLatency to touch the target differed significantly between probes, with dogs being, on average, slower to touch the target as probes became more similar to the water tone. This supports the prediction that dogs would respond differentially to signals and that this may correspond to their expectations of positive and negative outcomes. The differing responses between dogs in this study suggest probes are interpreted differently at an individual dog level. While this seems to support the hypothesis that judgement bias exists in dogs and can be measured objectively, it is unclear how much the differences in responses between dogs can be attributed to affective state. Cognitive biases in humans are sensitive to both short-term changes in an individual's level of anxiety (state anxiety)", + " and long-term, individual difference in an individual's tendency to experience anxiety (trait anxiety, dispositional optimism) [29]. There is evidence in animals that some individuals may be inherently more pessimistic than others, for example, stereotyping starlings and macaques are more pessimistic than non-stereotyping or reduced stereotyping conspecifics [13], [21], and dogs that show indications of separation-related distress are more pessimistic than dogs that do not [23]. Dogs from Assistance Dogs Australia and security dogs in this study shared the same training and trainers, and the same care and management practices with all the other dogs from their facility,", + " providing largely standardised conditions within each group. Differences in responses between dogs housed at the same facilities may represent a fundamental difference in individual dogs' ability to cope with challenging environments, or an inherent tendency towards optimism or pessimism akin to the trait anxiety described above.\n\nDogs in this study had a higher risk of touching the target after the water tone than some probe tones. This has not been observed in other judgement bias studies in dogs. There were many probe tones presented during testing. It is possible dogs responded to familiar tones more readily than unfamiliar probe tones, and sometimes made errors in discrimination as a result. This is unlikely to be a case of the mere exposure effect,", + " whereby stimuli become preferred simply through repeated exposures, as this is associated with neutral stimuli and positive affect [30]. Dogs have been shown to prefer novel stimuli over negative stimuli [31] but it is possible, given the low cost of an error in discrimination in this task, that neophobia may to some degree overcome the avoidance of errors. An examination of whether particular dogs were responsible for the overall elevated response rate to water tones and whether these dogs were the more pessimistic individuals may offer support for a role of neophobia in these results. Percentage of water tones responded to in the training sessions immediately prior to testing are presented in Table 7, and show large variation in response rate to water tones across all optimism scores.", + " The percentage of water tones responded to differed significantly between these training sessions and cognitive bias tests but it declined over time, suggesting that neophobia does not play a role in the response rate to water. Future explorations into the role of motivation on cognitive bias results would likely be very beneficial. Finally, reducing the number of probes or the frequency with which they are presented and comparing results would be a worthwhile exercise to establish whether a large number of probes affects discrimination between the milk and water tone. It would also help to establish the ideal number of probes.\n\nThe high exclusion rate was problematic in this study, and may result in a skewed representation of base level optimism in dog populations if used in its current form.", + " Further refinements of the design and program would likely improve this. Using food rather than a liquid reward may improve motivation to interact with the apparatus, and making the transition between training phases more gentle, such as with slower reductions in reinforcement rate, may also lower the exclusion rate. A version of this apparatus that operated completely automatically and delivered a large portion of a dog's daily food allowance through interaction with it is anticipated to solve many of the exclusion rate problems.\n\nThe exclusion rates differed between groups. It is unclear from the data collected why security dogs had a higher exclusion rate than the other two groups. Their training differed considerably from that of the companion dogs,", + " all of whom were recruited through a training school with an emphasis on positive reinforcement, and the assistance dogs, who were being trained for much calmer and steadier responses than the security dogs. Many of the security dogs were excluded early in the training and typically took twice as many sessions for them to progress to TP2, if they did at all, than it did for dogs in the other two groups. This may hint at difficulties with reward saliency.\n\nThe test number had a significant effect on latency and risk of touching the target. This was analysed to search for a learning effect, which would manifest in dogs responding to fewer probes over time as they learn that probes are not reinforced.", + " This effect has been documented in sheep [32] and starlings [33], but despite being searched for in dogs, has not been identified [23]. There was no significant difference between the first and second tests, but there was a significant decline in latency and risk of touching the target in the third test compared to the first. It is possible this effect was not found before in dogs because the method used by Mendl et al. [23] required fewer trials (21\u201361 as opposed to at least 9 sessions of 48 trials each in this study) with fewer probes (4 vs 9 in this study), thus not giving dogs (n = 24)", + " the opportunity to learn that probes are unreinforced. A refinement of the methodology presented here by reducing the number of probes may aid in reducing the test effect. However, reducing the number of probes may also reduce the power of detecting fine scale differences in optimism and pessimism between dogs. It was beyond the scope of this study to test the optimal number of probes to present, and this is part of the cognitive bias methodology that has not yet been systematically investigated. The data presented here suggest steps should be taken in future studies to avoid a possible effect of test number.\n\nThe statistical model detects broad patterns and differences in the data, but does not provide the means to interpret the data of individual dogs.", + " We have taken a novel approach in interpreting the data of individual dogs using a simple mathematical model in addition to the statistical model. This is a preliminary measure that ideally will be honed with additional data in the future. Examining patterns in mean response latency reveals clear tipping points (see Table 4 for definition) in most dogs, showing a specific tone where dogs' average latency is longer or the response rate drops sharply from the previous tone. The location of tipping points on the scale between the learned positive and negative tones varied between dogs. This may indicate differences in interpretation of ambiguous tones, suggesting differing judgement biases. An alternative interpretation is that differences in tipping point may reflect learning differences in cue discrimination.", + " Discrimination was assumed to have occurred when responses to milk tones were significantly faster than responses to water tones for two of three consecutive sessions. Despite this statistical approach to the criterion for testing cognitive bias, it is possible some dogs had different error rates than others for the milk and water tones when their cognitive bias was tested, and this may have influenced their tipping point.\n\nExamining the variability of responses after the tipping point is therefore likely to be most revealing of optimism as it does not depend on discrimination ability. The tipping point shows that dogs are discriminating between tones and supports the hypothesis that they are interpreting some ambiguous signals as signalling a positive outcome and some as signalling a negative outcome as well as pinpointing where that switch in interpretation occurs.", + " Standard deviations that approach the mean latency coupled with lower probabilities of a latency longer than average after the tipping point suggests that the dog is responding to some probe tones that are, on average, provoking long latencies such as those associated with the water tone with short latencies akin to those associated with the milk tone. This may indicate that either the dog is interpreting a proportion of those probes after the tipping point as signalling a positive outcome or the dog is taking risks by responding to some ambiguous signals in case they are signalling a positive outcome. We propose that either interpretation is a stronger indication of optimism than the tipping point alone. Conversely, standard deviations lower than the average latency and high probabilities of longer latencies than average after the tipping point indicates the dog is responding to the majority of probes after the tipping point with long latencies or not touching the target at all.", + " This suggests that the dog is either interpreting a greater proportion of probes after the tipping point as signalling a negative outcome or is not willing to risk touching the target in case the ambiguous signal indicated a negative outcome. We propose that either interpretation is a stronger indicator of pessimism than tipping point alone. Validation of this method was not possible in this study due to resource constraints, but remains a difficulty in cognitive bias studies on animals in general. Some studies have found evidence that physiological measures indicating heightened stress correlate with pessimism [17], [25]. However, a disconnect between cortisol concentration and judgement bias has been reported in sheep [15], and in some cases,", + " both cortisol concentration and judgement bias have failed to differentiate between treatments [34], [35]. It is possible that taking into account typical baseline cortisol concentrations, typical cortisol responses and inherent optimism or pessimism in individuals may improve the sensitivity and efficacy of the method. Previous studies have shown tantalising potential in the use of judgement bias in assessing affective state in animals, but results may be confounded by factors such as individual motivation, reward and signal salience, and personality. Until such factors have been accounted for in judgement bias data, validity may prove elusive, results may vary, and comparisons between methods may be of limited use.\n\nThe variability score calculated from standard deviation and average latency at each probe after the tipping point gives a single measure of the conditions described in the previous paragraph and thus a possible surrogate for a single optimism score.", + " This gives the opportunity to place dogs on a pessimistic-optimistic scale and compare their degree of optimism with that of other dogs. This represents a more detailed interpretation of judgement bias data than that presented in any other animal studies to date. It is anticipated this mathematical model can be improved on with more data that may allow a weighted algorithm taking into account tipping point and variability score differentially. One potential problem with the current optimism index is that it relies heavily on standard deviation with the assumption that, on average, responses after the tipping point are slow or there is no response at all. A dog with very short latencies may show a tipping point,", + " yet also respond very quickly to many probe tones, in which case the standard deviation may be small and the resultant optimism score may be lower than it should be were it truly reflecting optimism for that dog. As such, including a measure of response rate in the anticipated algorithm may improve the accuracy of the optimism score.\n\nThere was no significant correlation between the optimism rating of owners and trainers and the data. Owners and trainers tended to label optimistic and moderately optimistic dogs as less optimistic than our empirical data suggested, but balanced, moderately pessimistic and pessimistic dogs as more optimistic than the data suggested. This may reflect the subset of the dog population that completed testing.", + " There was also a difference between dogs in different populations that may alter the experiences of the owners and trainers with dogs in general. For example, the exclusion rate was very high in security dogs and of the three security dogs that did complete the tests none were in the optimistic group. Trainers working with such dogs are likely to label them relative to other dogs in that population, which may be skewed towards pessimism, leading to elevated optimism ratings, as indeed occurred in the two dogs that were categorised (according to the empirical data) as balanced and pessimistic.\n\nThere is growing empirical support for the use of judgement bias in objective assessment of affective state in animals [16], [17], [25]. The focus of this study was not on validating this method as a measure of affective state,", + " and as such the dogs in this study were not subjected to any manipulations intended to alter their affective state, and no measures of affective state were attempted. Therefore, no conclusions can be drawn from this study regarding the efficacy of judgement bias in measuring affective state in dogs. However, the variation seen in responses from dogs even within the same facilities suggests that personality may play a role in judgement bias results that has not been quantified as yet. Further research in judgement bias in animals should address the possible impact of personality on test results and consider how this may confound future attempts to find a treatment effect in groups of animals assumed to be roughly equal in susceptibility to a given treatment.\n\nFurther research into the personality of dogs excluded from the study may reveal patterns in personality traits that may explain why some dogs were not able to complete the training.", + " It is likely a certain level of optimism is necessary for dogs to persist with the self-directed training when reinforcement rates drop as the training progresses. The reinforcement rate was stepped down over three phases during training, which was adequate for many dogs, but may have been too fast or have included a drop between phases that was too large for other dogs. A study that found that rats were more sensitive to reward loss when their welfare was compromised [36] may help to explain why dogs failed to meet criteria during training. Although it is difficult to draw parallels between reward loss and a reduction in reinforcement rate, further research into the personality of those dogs being excluded due to extinction of the targeting behaviour may prove insightful.\n" + ], + "length": 9244, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 27, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 After just short of 20 years, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey is as much of a mystery as ever\u2014especially in light of a new examination of DNA evidence. A joint investigation by the Boulder Daily Camera and 9News calls into question former District Attorney Mary Lacy's decision to exonerate the Ramsey family. At the time, Lacy concluded that DNA evidence found on JonBenet's underwear and long johns belonged to a male intruder who was not part of the Ramsey family. But now three forensic experts who examined the DNA test results and lab reports used by Lacy say they do not support her conclusion. For one thing, a sample on her underwear identified as coming from \"Unknown Male 1\" may in fact be a composite from multiple people and thus \"worthless as evidence,\" says the news report. Another revelation that further muddles the picture: DNA samples on her long johns appear to come from JonBenet and at least two other people, not one, a fact that has never been revealed before. What's more, the independent experts say all of the unknown DNA may be the result of \"inconsequential contact with other people,\" reports the Camera. With the exoneration, \"I was trying to prevent a horrible travesty of justice,\" Lacy tells ABC. (The interview was done before these latest revelations.) \"I was scared to death that despite the fact that there was no evidence, no psychopathy, and no motive, the case was a train going down the track and the Ramseys were tied to that track.\" Comparison to the DNA profile now in doubt was used to exonerate dozens of other potential suspects. (JonBenet's older brother is suing a pathologist who accused him of the killing.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Presence of 3rd person's genetic markers never before revealed\n\nJohn Ramsey looks on as his wife Patsy Ramsey holds an ad promising a reward for information leading to the conviction of the killer of their 6-year-old daughter, JonBenet, during a television interview on May 1, 1997. Eleven years later, Boulder's top prosecutor exonerated the Ramseys \u2014 but a new independent analysis of DNA evidence in the case calls that into question. ( Patrick Davison / Rocky Mountain News via AP )\n\nThe DNA evidence in the JonBenet Ramsey case doesn't support a pivotal and controversial development in Colorado's most vexing unsolved murder \u2014 a former Boulder prosecutor's decision to clear the girl's family from all suspicion in her death,", + " a joint Daily Camera/9NEWS investigation has found.\n\nForensic experts who examined the results of DNA tests obtained exclusively by the two news organizations disputed former District Attorney Mary Lacy's conclusion that a DNA profile found in one place on JonBenet's underpants and two locations on her long johns was necessarily the killer's \u2014 which Lacy had asserted in clearing JonBenet's family of suspicion.\n\nIn fact, those experts said the evidence showed that the DNA samples recovered from the long johns came from at least two people in addition to JonBenet \u2014 something Lacy's office was told, according to documents obtained by the Camera and 9NEWS,", + " but that she made no mention of in clearing the Ramseys.\n\nThe presence of a third person's genetic markers has never before been publicly revealed.\n\nAdditionally, the independent experts raised the possibility that the original DNA sample recovered from JonBenet's underwear \u2014 long used to identify or exclude potential suspects \u2014 could be a composite and not that of a single individual.\n\nAbout this story Charlie Brennan of the Daily Camera and Kevin Vaughan of 9NEWS exclusively obtained laboratory test results and reports from the JonBenet Ramsey case on which then-Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy based her decision to exonerate members of the Ramsey family. The reporters sought a review of that evidence by independent experts.", + " This is the result of their investigation.\n\nMore from 9NEWS See additional coverage of the DNA evidence in the JonBenet Ramsey case at 9 and 10 p.m. Thursday and Friday on KUSA-Channel 9, or watch the full report at 9NEWS.com.\n\n\"It's a rather obvious point, but I mean, if you're looking for someone that doesn't exist, because actually it's several people, it's a problem,\" said Troy Eid, a former U.S. Attorney for Colorado.\n\nThe documents obtained by the Camera and 9NEWS included results from the actual DNA testing process on the long johns and summary reports sent to Lacy's office in the months leading up her July 9,", + " 2008, letter exonerating the Ramseys.\n\nThe experts who examined the laboratory results at the request of the Camera and 9NEWS reached similar conclusions on multiple points:\n\n\u2022 Two of the three samples that led Lacy to declare publicly that no one in the Ramsey family could be responsible for the murder actually appear to include genetic material from at least three people: JonBenet, the person whose DNA profile originally was located in JonBenet's underwear during testing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, plus at least one additional as-yet-unidentified person or persons. Consequently, its meaning is far from clear.\n\n\u2022 The DNA profile referred to as Unknown Male 1 \u2014 first identified during testing on the panties \u2014 may not be the DNA of a single person at all,", + " but, rather, a composite of genetic material from multiple individuals. As a result, it may be worthless as evidence.\n\n\u2022 The presence of that DNA on JonBenet's underwear and long johns, be it from one or multiple people, may very well be innocent; the profiles were developed from minute samples that could have been the result of inconsequential contact with other people, or transferred from another piece of clothing. If true, it would contradict the assertions that DNA will be key to finding JonBenet's killer.\n\nA Boulder police officer sits in her cruiser on Jan. 3, 1997, outside the 15th Street home in which 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was found dead on Dec.", + " 26, 1996. The murder remains unsolved nearly 20 years later. (David Zalubowski / Associated Press)\n\nThis represents the first time independent experts have reviewed the DNA evidence on which Lacy based her widely questioned exoneration of the family.\n\nAnd the findings could cut both ways.\n\n\"It's certainly possible that an intruder was responsible for the murder, but I don't think that the DNA evidence proves it,\" said William C. Thompson, a professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California-Irvine and an internationally respected authority on DNA evidence and its applications in the criminal justice system.\n\nSimilarly,", + " the findings don't implicate or exonerate anyone in the family.\n\nRamsey lawyer Lin Wood, who has not reviewed the documents or the work of the experts consulted by the Camera and 9NEWS, said, however, \"I have absolute and total confidence in the integrity of former District Attorney Mary Lacy, and I am also aware of internet comments by former Boulder police Chief Mark Beckner where he, within the last several months, affirmed that the Ramsey case was a DNA case.\n\n\"So I know what Chief Beckner has said publicly in recent months, I know what... former District Attorney Mary Lacy has said, and until someone impugns her integrity,", + " or contradicts former Chief Beckner's statement, I continue to believe, as I have said before, that this is a DNA case and that the best chance for solving the case will be a hit and match on the DNA in the future. I hope that day comes.\"\n\n'The silver bullet misfired'\n\nLacy was long known as a believer in the Ramseys' innocence, something others noticed as early as June 1998, when Boulder police detectives put on a detailed two-day presentation of the evidence and sought either charges against John and Patsy Ramsey or a grand jury investigation.\n\n\"My impression of her response to that was that she was among the very,", + " very skeptical,\" said former Adams County District Attorney Bob Grant, who attended the police presentation in his role as adviser to then-Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter.\n\nThe experts consulted by the Camera and 9NEWS suggested that Lacy may have been guilty of \"confirmation bias,\" a phenomenon in which investigators become so blinded by their own theories that they give extra credence to evidence that supports them, and ignore evidence that does not.\n\nThe lab that performed the DNA testing, for example, told Lacy in March 2008 that it was \"likely\" the two samples found on JonBenet's long johns came from \"more than two people\"", + " and \"should not be considered a single-source profile,\" according to the documents obtained by the Camera and 9NEWS.\n\nBut in exonerating the Ramseys with a three-page letter made public July 9, 2008, Lacy failed to disclose any of that, writing that \"the previously identified profile from the crotch of the underwear worn by JonBenet at the time of the murder matched the DNA recovered from the long johns.\"\n\nThe word \"match\" actually never appears in the reports from Bode Technology, which conducted the testing in March through June of 2008.\n\nSimilarly, the Camera and 9NEWS have learned that investigators in Lacy's office suggested no additional testing was needed once they learned male DNA had been located on the long johns that she later labeled as a \"match\"", + " to the DNA found in JonBenet's panties.\n\nCorrespondence from an investigator on Lacy's staff indicated that \"my bosses\" were \"very excited\" and \"pleased\" about the purported match, \"and don't see the need for additional testing (unless you strongly recommend otherwise).\"\n\nThe twin realities pointed to by the experts \u2014 that the genetic profile may not be from a single individual and that DNA on the girl's clothing may have landed there innocently \u2014 turn on its head Lacy's assertion that investigators had identified the killer's genetic fingerprint and that it was the key critical to solving the case.\n\nThompson, the UC-Irvine professor,", + " noted that many people have come to see DNA evidence as a foolproof \"silver bullet\" to solving many crimes.\n\n\"Here, the silver bullet misfired,\" said Thompson, one of the experts who reviewed the evidence at the news organizations' request.\n\n'Something I can't explain'\n\nFormer Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, who called for a review of the Ramsey case in October 1999 to determine whether it merited the attention of a statewide grand jury \u2014 his panel of advisers told him it did not \u2014 said Lacy's exoneration made no sense to him at the time and is even more troubling now.\n\n\"This is an important development.", + " This is new information,\" Owens said.\n\n\"She knew, based on your investigation, that this DNA wasn't necessarily from one person and that it, in fact, was potentially accumulated DNA,\" Owens said. \"She knew it at the time, and why she used this evidence to clear the Ramsey family... is something I can't explain. And she should explain.\"\n\nLacy did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story, sent to her by email, U.S. mail and left at her home.\n\nDonald R. Von Hagen, a spokesman for Virginia-based Bode Cellmark Forensics, as the lab is now known,", + " said in an email that the company's report \"stands on its own\" and that he would not have further comment.\n\nThe murder of JonBenet exploded into the national consciousness within days of the discovery of her body on Dec. 26, 1996, in the sprawling home she shared with her parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, and older brother, Burke, on 15th Street in Boulder. The 6-year-old's skull was fractured by a blow to the head, and her killer cinched a garrote around her neck, placed duct tape over her mouth and bound her wrists.\n\nEveryone from seasoned investigators to amateur sleuths to talk show hosts quickly settled on one of two theories:", + " That JonBenet was slain by someone in her family, either accidentally or in a fit of rage, and that the killer then tried to make it look like a botched kidnapping; or, that she was the victim of a cunning intruder who intended to spirit the child out of the house, but ended up committing murder instead.\n\nJohn Ramsey, the girl's father, declined a request for an interview.\n\n\"I think we have said all that can be said and I need to get back to my job!\" Ramsey wrote in an email.\n\n'We don't actually have to live with it'\n\nThe implications of the conclusions reached by the experts consulted by the Camera and 9NEWS could,", + " if considered by investigators still working the state's most famous cold case, dramatically impact the future direction of their work. At the time the Bode results were returned, Lacy's office had control of the Ramsey investigation, and Boulder police did not reclaim responsibility for the probe until Lacy left office the following year.\n\nOn one hand, it could lead detectives to consider anew the possibility that someone in JonBenet's family was responsible for her death. And it could also lead them to take a new look at dozens of potential suspects who were ruled out because their DNA didn't match the profile known as Unknown Male 1.\n\nEid, who served as Owens'", + " chief counsel and was on the governor's statewide panel that reviewed the case in 1999, said in a recent interview he had suspected in 2008 that Lacy's exoneration was, at the very least, misleading.\n\n\"But now, it really looks wrong in the scheme of things,\" Eid said. \"And it's not one of these instances where you think, in hindsight, she made a tough call, but we've got to live with it. No, we actually don't have to live with it anymore. Right?\"\n\nLacy's successor as Boulder's district attorney, Stan Garnett, remembers exactly where he was when he learned of Lacy's decision to exonerate the Ramseys:", + " sitting at LaGuardia Airport in New York waiting for a flight home when news of Lacy's letter crawled across a television screen. Although he called Lacy \"an honorable person\" and an \"honest district attorney,\" he also said he was \u2014 and is \u2014 puzzled by her decision.\n\nThe job of a district attorney is to file charges in cases where the evidence warrants it, Garnett said.\n\n\"Our role is not to issue random exonerations of people in cases, and it's very confusing when that happens,\" Garnett added.\n\nAlthough Garnett said he is not bound by Lacy's decision, it has lasting ramifications for countless people beyond John Ramsey and Burke Ramsey,", + " now 29. Patsy Ramsey succumbed to ovarian cancer in June 2006.\n\nBoulder police investigators continue to use the problematic DNA profile known as Unknown Male 1 to clear others who might potentially have been involved in the killing. A case investigator said dozens of suspects have been cleared that way.\n\nBoulder police Chief Greg Testa declined this week to comment on the DNA evidence. But in a video statement released to all media on Sept. 1, Testa said detectives in the department had submitted more than 200 DNA samples in the case for analysis.\n\n'This could easily be a composite profile'\n\nAt the crux of the evidence is the DNA profile referred to as Unknown Male 1.\n\nThat profile was first developed in late 1998 and early 1999 from tests on JonBenet's panties \u2014 but analysts couldn't at that time identify sufficient genetic markers.", + " Sending it to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System \u2014 the national genetic database commonly known as CODIS \u2014 requires at least 10 markers.\n\nFurther lab work in 2003 yielded an additional marker, and the profile, featuring the required minimum of 10 genetic markers, was entered into CODIS that December.\n\n\"People believed back in those days almost all mixtures are two-person mixtures \u2014 that was like gospel truth,\" said Phillip Danielson, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Denver and science adviser to the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center.\n\nIn the ensuing years, as the \"kits\" used to detect DNA became ever more sensitive,", + " scientists came to realize that many mixtures contained genetic markers from more than two people.\n\n\"You know,\" Danielson said, \"looking at the profiles in this case, it seems pretty clear that their idea of this 'unknown male' \u2014 this could easily be a composite profile. Meaning that we have multiple contributors. But because of the low sensitivity of the kit, they interpreted those multiple contributors as being just one extra person.\"\n\nHowever, Lacy \u2014 and others \u2014 concluded that profile must belong to JonBenet's killer.\n\nAgainst that backdrop, an investigator in Lacy's office submitted JonBenet's panties, long johns, nightgown and other items for further testing at Bode's lab in Lorton,", + " Va., in late 2007 and early 2008.\n\nThe Bode scientists could not replicate the profile found in JonBenet's panties, which bothered Danielson as he examined the materials obtained by the two news organizations.\n\n\"Reproducibility and repeatability is a hallmark of science,\" Danielson said. \"To me, as a scientist, that does raise concern. If there was this unknown male DNA on the underwear, you would expect that Bode would have been able to reproduce that. Now, are there any possible explanations why they would not be? Sure.\"\n\nThe sample could have been degraded, though Danielson said that's not likely given the way evidence is handled and stored.", + " Another possibility is that the original tests consumed all of the foreign genetic material in the panties. It's also possible that variations in the way the original tests were done could account for the failure to find the same profile in the panties during the 2008 tests.\n\n'Should not be considered a single source profile'\n\nWhen analysts at Bode tested the long johns, they focused on four distinct areas: the inside and outside of both the upper left and upper right sides of the garment. The tests on the two spots on the inside of the long johns yielded too little DNA to be useful.\n\nBut on the outside of the long johns,", + " Bode analysts found much more DNA.\n\nAccording to a March 24, 2008, report from Bode, a copy of which was obtained by the Camera and 9NEWS, the sample from the right side, labeled as 2S07-101-05A, included DNA containing \"a mixture of at least two individuals including the victim and at least one male contributor.\" They got the same results on the left side, which was labeled 2S07-101-05B.\n\nBut in notes included with the report, it's clear the Bode analysts concluded that those two samples contained genetic material from at least three people.", + " After assuming that JonBenet was one of those people, the analysts were left with the \"remaining DNA contribution.\"\n\n\"Based on the results,\" according to the report, \"it is likely more than two people contributed to the mixtures observed in 2S07-101-05A and 2S07-101-05B therefore, the remaining DNA contribution should not be considered a single source profile.\"\n\nChristopher McKee, a former public defender in both Atlanta and Washington, D.C., and now director of the Schaden Experiential Learning & Public Service Programs at the University of Colorado Law School, concurred.\n\n\"My own personal review of the material and looking at the allele information at the various loci is that it looks and appears to me to be at least three individuals,\" McKee said.", + " McKee also teaches an advanced course on Forensic Science in the Courts at the CU Law School, teaches on the subject around the country and has been recognized by courts and nationally as an expert on the topic.\n\nDanielson also said, \"There are too many alleles to be accounted for by only JonBenet and this alleged Unknown Male No. 1 profile.\"\n\nAn allele is a specific genetic marker.\n\nLacy's investigator asked Bode's analysts to compare the DNA from the two spots on the outside of the long johns with the Unknown Male 1 profile.\n\nBode's analysts concluded that Unknown Male 1 \"could not be excluded as a possible contributor to the mixture DNA profile\"", + " obtained from the outside of the long johns on the right side, according to a June 20, 2008, report obtained by the Camera and 9NEWS. On the left side, the Unknown Male 1 profile \"cannot be included or excluded from the mixture DNA profile.\"\n\nIn other words, the link between the two spots on the long johns and the DNA in the underwear is tenuous at best, according to analysts at the lab Lacy used for the testing.\n\n'There is no innocent explanation'\n\nBut a little more than two weeks later, Lacy wrote the letter clearing members of the Ramsey family of suspicion. However,", + " she included none of the caveats spelled out in the Bode reports and used language suggesting the lab work was ironclad.\n\n\"The Bode Technology laboratory was able to develop a profile from DNA recovered from the two sides of the long johns,\" Lacy wrote. \"The previously identified profile from the crotch of the underwear worn by JonBenet at the time of the murder matched the DNA recovered from the long johns at Bode.\n\n\"Despite substantial efforts over the years to identify the source of this DNA, there is no innocent explanation for its incriminating presence at three sites on those two different items of clothing that JonBenet was wearing at the time of her murder.\"\n\nThe experts consulted by the news organizations disagreed,", + " to varying degrees, on both assertions \u2014 that the Unknown Male 1 profile \"matched\" the DNA found on the outside of the long johns, and that there was \"no innocent explanation\" for the presence of that DNA on JonBenet's clothing.\n\n\"You have to understand a match is an analyst's judgment that the two samples fall into the 'included' category,\" Thompson said. \"A match doesn't mean that the material examined is necessarily identical \u2014 just that there's a sufficient consistency to think that it might have come from the same source.\"\n\nThompson said his analysis found \"a strong level of consistency\" between the two long johns samples and the Unknown Male 1 profile.\n\n\"But,\" he said,", + " \"there are also some genetic characteristics that could not be accounted for by either JonBenet Ramsey or Unknown Male 1, thus suggesting there could be DNA from other people.\"\n\nDanielson and another expert consulted by the Camera and 9NEWS offered similar opinions.\n\n\"To simply state that there's no innocent way that this DNA could have arrived at separate sites on JonBenet's underwear... there's simply no scientific justification to make such a statement,\" Danielson said. \"It's just simply not true.\"\n\nDanielson offered a hypothetical: Say JonBenet had physical contact with other kids she was recently playing with, or had contact at a party on Christmas night,", + " or say she touched anything bearing others' DNA; she could have then transferred that genetic material to her own clothes simply while getting dressed.\n\nMcKee, based on his review of the evidence, called Lacy's actions based on the lab reports \"a cautionary tale.\"\n\n\"I don't think her letter at all reflects an appreciation or understanding for what that said in the report,\" McKee said. \"You know, as I read the (Lacy) letter, it seems to suggest that there's just one single profile that was found here.\"\n\n'False logic of declaring this as exonerating'\n\nMichael Kane, who served as lead counsel to the Ramsey grand jury,", + " is now senior legal counsel to the Judiciary Committee in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. He expressed little surprise that Lacy's decision had been thrown into serious doubt.\n\n\"Until you ID who that (unknown sample) is, you can't make that kind of statement (that Lacy made),\" Kane said in an email. \"There may be circumstances where male DNA is discovered on or in the body of a victim of a sexual assault where you can say with a degree of certainty that had to have been from the perpetrator and from that, draw the conclusion that someone who doesn't meet that profile is excluded.\n\n\"But in a case like this, where the DNA is not from sperm,", + " is only on the clothing and not her body, until you know whose it is, you can't say how it got there. And until you can say how it got there, you can't connect it to the crime and conclude it excludes anyone else as the perpetrator. And that's the false logic of declaring this as exonerating. It seems to me to be pretty self-evident.\"\n\nAs for potentially innocent explanations to the presence of DNA on the clothes JonBenet was wearing when she died, all three experts said they are numerous.\n\n\"There have been some very intriguing studies where they had people hold hands for a very short period of time and then touch a knife handle,\" Danielson said.\n\nIn some cases,", + " subsequent tests found DNA from both people on the knife. In others, DNA from only the person who actually touched the knife. And in still others, no DNA was found from the person who actually touched the knife, yet DNA from the other person was found.\n\nThompson recently testified in a case involving sex toys. Analysts located DNA on the sex toys, Thompson said, in \"quantities comparable\" to that found on JonBenet's long johns \u2014 but it turned out to have no link to the crime.\n\n\"The DNA came from a person who had carried the wrapped items from the crime scene to a truck to take to the crime lab,\" Thompson said.", + " \"So somebody who had never touched the items, but had touched the exterior of the wrappers of the items, that person's DNA was apparently transferred onto the wrappers. Then when the wrapped items got back to the crime lab and were unwrapped, the analyst apparently touched the wrappers and then touched the items, transferring it onto the items \u2014 in a way that made it indistinguishable from DNA that would have been deposited there during that crime.\n\n\"So if that can happen in this sexual assault case that I worked on, it's easy to imagine similar scenarios that could have gotten the DNA found on JonBenet Ramsey's clothing to where it was found.", + " And I think the fact that DNA can be transferred so easily in small quantities is a weakness of the technology at this time.\"\n\n'Can't get my arms around that one'\n\nLacy established herself as a supporter of the intruder theory in the Ramsey case when she was still Mary Keenan, a chief deputy specializing in sexual assault cases under the man she would soon succeed, then-District Attorney Alex Hunter.\n\nIn June 1998, JonBenet's parents were questioned at length for the second time \u2014 Patsy Ramsey by Denver district attorney's investigator Tom Haney and Boulder prosecutor Trip DeMuth, and John Ramsey by retired El Paso County homicide detective Lou Smit and Kane,", + " the attorney who directed the grand jury investigation.\n\nLacy wasn't directly involved in the interrogations. But Haney recalls that after she saw videotape of the interview with Patsy Ramsey, Lacy chided him for being hard on JonBenet's mother.\n\nHaney said Lacy volunteering such an opinion seemed odd to him at the time. And, he said in a recent interview, \"It still does.\"\n\nLacy took other steps that left many to believe she ruled out the Ramseys as suspects long before she issued her letter in 2008.\n\nLacy succeeded Hunter as Boulder County's elected district attorney in 2001.", + " It was in that role that, in 2003, she made her first public proclamation on her belief in the Ramseys' innocence.\n\nA federal judge in Atlanta \u2014 in dismissing a libel case filed against the Ramseys by a journalist they named as a potential suspect in their 2000 book \"The Death of Innocence\" \u2014 ruled that exhibits in the case led her to believe an intruder was more likely to have killed JonBenet than Patsy Ramsey.\n\nAlthough Lacy had not been a party to that suit, she nevertheless volunteered a public statement in support of the federal judge's ruling, saying, \"I agree with the conclusion that the weight of the evidence is more consistent with the theory that an intruder murdered JonBenet than it is with a theory that Mrs.", + " Ramsey did so.\"\n\nAfter Patsy Ramsey succumbed to ovarian cancer in 2006 following a 13-year battle, she was buried alongside JonBenet in St. James Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta, Ga. Lacy attended her funeral.\n\nFormer Boulder police detective Steve Thomas, who had investigated the case in its first years, said that stunned him.\n\n\"I know of no other case in which a sitting district attorney or prosecutor attended the funeral of a person whom she knew a grand jury had voted to criminally indict, and traveled across the country to do so, as Mary Lacy did in the case of Patsy Ramsey,\" he wrote in an email.\n\n\"I can't get my arms around that one.", + " I can assure you that many in law enforcement were also distressed by it.\"\n\nThomas quit the investigation in August 1998 over multiple frustrations, including Hunter's reluctance at that time to take the case to a grand jury. He later wrote a book about the case and was sued by the Ramseys. That suit resulted in an undisclosed settlement.\n\n'Culmination of what she wanted'\n\nLacy also presided over what is widely seen as one of the greatest debacles in a case marred by numerous missteps: the high-profile 2006 arrest of John Mark Karr, a suspect unearthed by University of Colorado journalism professor Michael Tracey,", + " followed almost immediately by an about-face.\n\nKarr was arrested in Thailand and brought back to Boulder with a sea of photographers recording virtually every moment of his transport \u2014 only to be abruptly cut loose a few days after arriving in Colorado when his DNA was found not to match the Unknown Male 1 sample.\n\nNumerous experts have cautioned about the importance of maintaining objectivity, both that of the scientists examining forensic samples, and those who are evaluating the results. They also underscored the importance of severely limiting what is termed contextual information, which is supplied to a laboratory along with items to be tested.\n\nIn the case of testing done by Bode Technology for Lacy's office,", + " the Bode staff was provided not only a PowerPoint presentation on the case, but a six-page Nov. 7, 2007, letter providing background so extensive that it even made mention that John Ramsey was president of Access Graphics, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary that had just cleared $1 billion in sales at the time of JonBenet's murder.\n\n\"Just as they need to make sure that evidence is not physically contaminated, you want to make sure that they're not cognitively contaminated, so that they're not aware and influenced by irrelevant contextual information that biases how they perceive and interpret the information, the judgments they make,\" said Itiel Dror,", + " senior cognitive neuroscience researcher at University College London. He has presented training at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the California Department of Justice and elsewhere on objectivity in forensic examination.\n\n\"The investigators, the lawyers and everybody else need to stay emotionally disconnected from the case as much as humanly possible, so they keep as objective as possible and not fall into a lot of cognitive problems, wishful thinking, self-fulfilling prophecy,\" Dror said.\n\nGrant, the former Adams County district attorney, was skeptical about the Karr arrest at the time as he watched it unfold from a distance.\n\n\"Just listening to him, and seeing the televised interviews, it just struck me as improbable that he had anything to do with it,\" Grant said.\n\nLacy,", + " he said, \"was one of the folks that was more skeptical of the someone-in-the-house theory from the beginning. When she agreed \u2014 I thought, hastily \u2014 to bring Mr. Karr back on the flimsiest of non-evidence, it kind of cemented for me that she was looking for some way to bolster the intruder theory.\"\n\nAnd alluding to the exoneration letter of July 2008, Grant said, \"That was the culmination of what she wanted to do all along.\"\n\nNot a DNA case 'pure and simple'\n\nThe ramifications for the case in the wake of Lacy's letter were considerable, and continue to reverberate to this day.\n\nThe day Lacy issued the letter,", + " John Ramsey hailed the news in an exclusive interview with 9NEWS.\n\n\"The most significant thing to me was the fact that we now have pretty irrefutable DNA evidence, according to the DA's office,\" Ramsey said. \"And that's the most significant thing to me. And certainly we are grateful that they acknowledged that we, you know based on that, certainly could not have been involved. But the most important thing was we now have very, very solid evidence.\"\n\nIt was first reported by the Camera in January 2013 that the grand jury that heard the Ramsey case from September 1998 to October 1999 had signed indictments against both John and Patsy Ramsey,", + " charging both with child abuse resulting in death.\n\nHunter declined to file those indictments with the court and prosecute the case at trial. While the standard for filing of charges is that of probable cause, the hurdle for conviction is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and Hunter didn't believe the evidence was strong enough for him to do so.\n\nA lawsuit filed against Garnett in September 2013 led to the unsealing the following month of the 1999 indictments, confirming the child abuse charges as well as charges against both parents for accessory to first-degree murder.\n\nBut still, the subsequent Lacy exoneration held sway for many, coming,", + " as it did, nearly 10 years later, from the very same office that had secured those indictments.\n\nAs recently as September, Wood, the lawyer for the Ramsey family, cited the DNA-based exoneration in a tweet in the wake of national television broadcasts that had raised anew the question of whether someone in JonBenet's family was involved in her murder.\n\n\"In 2008, Boulder DA publicly exonerated them and apologized. DNA evidence conclusive. End of story,\" Wood tweeted.\n\nAnd the same day, Wood tweeted, \" This is a DNA case plain and simple.\"\n\nThat contention is flatly refuted by the independent experts consulted by the Camera and 9NEWS.\n\n\"No,", + " it is not,\" Danielson said. \"It's clearly not. We have a questioned profile that is very low level in terms of the amount of DNA. The quantity of DNA is very small, the profile is extremely complex. The one thing this case is not, it is not a 'DNA case pure and simple.'\"\n\nMcKee, at the University of Colorado, agreed.\n\n\"I don't think any case is just a DNA case. And laboratories across the country operate, and their analysts are trained, not to talk in terms like that,\" said McKee, emphasizing that genetic evidence should be considered an investigative thread that is part of a larger fabric to be considered in its entirety.\n\n\"I think it would be a big mistake to say that,", + " you know, DNA is the only thing that you're going to look at,\" McKee said. \"And certainly, in this case, I don't think it is the only thing to look at.\"\n\nThey were echoed by Thompson, the UC-Irvine professor.\n\n\"I would say that the DNA evidence is not conclusive,\" Thompson said. \"I would say that the DNA evidence is indeterminate, leaving us uncertain as to what really happened in this case, and who really killed this little girl.\"\n\nThompson added, \"I mean, wasn't there other evidence in this case as well? I heard something about a ransom note, and handwriting analysis,", + " and so on.\"\n\nWood, in an interview, said his tweets were based on Lacy's official statements, and on comments by former Boulder police Chief Beckner, made in a Reddit conversation on Feb. 24, 2015.\n\n\"My statements are 100 percent supported by the public statements of the Boulder district attorney and the former Boulder police chief,\" Wood said. \"They're almost verbatim.\"\n\nBut those waiting for nearly 13 years for a match in the CODIS database to the Unknown Male 1 profile could wait forever for something that is never going to happen, Danielson said.\n\nAlthough the unknown male sample had been entered into CODIS,", + " it has never been matched to any of the other DNA profiles in the system. According to the FBI, as of August that included 12,517,059 offender profiles, 2,462,335 arrestee profiles and 726,709 forensic profiles of unknown individuals, such as the one submitted from the Ramsey case.\n\nOne possible answer to the question of why a match has never occurred is that the profile is a composite containing genetic material from multiple people.\n\n\"As I looked at this case, the more I looked, I was just like, 'Oh, OK, that would explain why no database hits,'\" Danielson said.\n\nA call for new testing\n\nThe JonBenet Ramsey investigation remains under the control of the Boulder Police Department,", + " which has been in command of the case since Garnett passed it back to the department's detectives when he became DA in 2009.\n\nRevelations about the questioned value of the DNA evidence as it now stands is stirring calls for renewed action on the case.\n\nOwens hesitated to be telling others what should happen now, but said he was unsurprised to have his longtime suspicions that the DNA cited by Lacy could, in fact, be innocently explained \u2014 and may even be insignificant to the investigation \u2014 confirmed.\n\n\"And it would be very good to hear from Mary Lacy or from others involved, in terms of what this new evidence should show them in terms of where we should go,\" Owens said.\n\nEid,", + " his former chief counsel who was part of the governor's October 1999 case review, hopes it will prod new action in the investigation, possibly employing the latest in DNA technology, which has evolved by quantum leaps since Lacy's letter was issued.\n\nNo new DNA testing in the Ramsey case has been conducted since 2008.\n\n\"And there ought to be a process to reevaluate this in light of what you have brought forward. That's my view,\" Eid said. \"And you shouldn't feel locked in because some person who is no longer an elected official made a decision and said something. How many people have said things about this case that turned out to not be very relevant,", + " or very accurate?\"\n\nOne important step in the evolution of DNA testing, which was available in 2008 but has matured considerably since then, is known as Y-STR testing, which looks exclusively at male-inherited Y chromosome DNA.\n\nTesting in this manner on key pieces of evidence, such as JonBenet's underwear, long johns and perhaps the cord on the garotte used to strangle her or other items associated with the crime scene, would not pick up any of JonBenet's genetic markers. That would enable analysts to focus with greater accuracy on only male contributors to the mixed samples.\n\n\"If you are able to ignore,", + " completely, the female contribution, and can focus just on the male, you are able to then get much more robust results,\" McKee said. \"I don't really see a reason why it hasn't been done, or why you couldn't do it.\"\n\nDanielson agreed, saying, \"With the Y-STR testing, you eliminate all of the female DNA. So you can amplify male DNA, even if the male DNA is a fraction of 1 percent of the DNA of the females' on the samples. So that's, if I were going to do any additional testing, that's the additional testing that I would do. It would help to at least answer some of the questions.\"\n\nGrant,", + " the former Adams County district attorney and one-time adviser to Boulder prosecutors, also pointed out that if Lacy truly had faith in the profile on which she based her exoneration, she could have done far more than simply write a letter.\n\n\"A prosecutor can file a John Doe warrant identifying the suspect by that DNA profile,\" Grant said. \"If then-District Attorney Lacy was convinced that that suspect, that DNA profile, was the killer, and she was going to exonerate somebody else, then that's what she should have done.\n\n\"The fact that she didn't do that tells me something \u2014 tells me something about how strong she thinks the DNA evidence may or may not be.\"\n\nGarnett expressed faith in the work of the Boulder Police Department,", + " and also said his own office remains committed to doing whatever can be done to solve a case that he sees as still severely compromised by mistakes made in the past.\n\n\"I'm not going to talk publicly about what we're doing or what we would do,\" Garnett said. \"But what I can tell you is that DNA evidence and the theory behind DNA work is changing almost daily, and I have excellent people on staff who review those issues and handle that, and we will make sure that any appropriate testing that can be done to update the theories of the evidence is done.\"\n\nGarnett said Lacy's 2008 decision was \"legally insignificant\"", + " and \"has no meaning,\" largely due to the fact that the evidence she cited in her letter was never subjected to the rigorous scrutiny and cross-examination that all evidence in any case goes through in a courtroom.\n\n\"None of that happened with the bits and pieces of evidence that was the basis of the exoneration,\" Garnett said. \"And so it's just not significant.\"\n\nEid observed that \"it's incredible the number of cases that get solved later. And also as DNA testing gets better, it sometimes removes doubt and sometimes adds doubt.\"\n\nEid remains convinced that, \"It's not too late for justice.\"\n\nCharlie Brennan: 303-", + "473-1327, brennanc@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/chasbrennan\n\nKevin Vaughan: 303-871-1862, kevin.vaughan@9news.com or twitter.com/writerkev ", + " Mary Lacy was one of a team of four who walked through the home of JonBenet Ramsey just days after the 6-year-old beauty contestant was discovered dead in the house's basement in Boulder, Colorado, on Dec. 26, 1996.\n\nInterested in Jon Benet Ramsey? Add Jon Benet Ramsey as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Jon Benet Ramsey news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Add Interest\n\nJust around the corner from JonBenet's room on the second floor, an indentation in the carpet was spotted and chills ran down her spine, she told ABC News. \"It was a butt print.", + " We all saw it. The entire area was undisturbed except for that place in the rug,\" Lacy, who was then the chief deputy district attorney heading up the Sexual Assault Unit under Boulder County DA Alex Hunter, said. \"Whoever did this sat outside of her room and waited until everyone was asleep to kill her.\"\n\nThe apparent presence of that indentation went on to help form a theory that Lacy believes to this day.\n\nThe morning after Christmas in 1996, JonBenet was reported missing by her parents after they said a ransom note was found in their home. Her body bound and her mouth covered with duct tape, JonBenet was later discovered in the basement.", + " An autopsy concluded that the cause of death was asphyxiation due to strangulation. The coroner's report stated that a blunt object had hit her so hard, there was an 8-inch fracture to her tiny skull. The report also showed some damage to JonBenet's hymen, indicating possible sexual assault.\n\nJohn and Patsy Ramsey, as well as JonBenet's brother, Burke Ramsey, were the only other people known to be in the house at the time of the slaying, and for years after her death, they were each trailed by a cloud of suspicion. John and Patsy Ramsey were at one point considered persons of interest in the case by authorities.\n\nBut in 2008,", + " Lacy -- who by then had been named Boulder County DA and taken over the investigation -- surprised even some of the most seasoned of her fellow prosecutors by exonerating the family.\n\nNow, for the first time in eight years, the former prosecutor is speaking out to ABC News about her decision to clear the Ramsey family as her exoneration letter has now come under scrutiny following a joint investigation by the Boulder Daily Camera and Denver's KUSA-TV/9News.\n\nHelen Davis/AP Photo\n\n'Trying to Prevent a Horrible Travesty of Justice'\n\nFormer Adams County DA Bob Grant, one of a number of consultants on the case brought in early on by the Boulder County DA at the time,", + " Hunter, told ABC News he was confounded by Lacy's 2008 decision. \"This is craziness,\" he said. \"This is not what prosecutors do. If prosecutors are going to exonerate someone they do it by charging someone else.\"\n\nBut Lacy didn't charge anyone else in the murder. Instead, armed with newly discovered DNA evidence found on JonBenet's long johns that Lacy said she believes belongs to JonBenet's unknown murderer, she sent the Ramseys a letter of apology. It read, in part, \"to the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime,", + " I am deeply sorry.\" The letter made international news.\n\nThe DNA evidence was discovered after Lacy sent the long johns to Bode Cellmark Forensics to be tested for touch DNA. She had attended a seminar in the summer of 2007 that explained the relatively new process. She felt it could advance the seemingly stalled case, she said.\n\nSome Boulder Police Department detectives who had long worked on the investigation and still considered the Ramseys persons of interests were furious.\n\n\"Here\u2019s what I was doing with the exoneration letter,\" Lacy explained. \"I was trying to prevent a horrible travesty of justice. I was scared to death that despite the fact that there was no evidence,", + " no psychopathy and no motive, the case was a train going down the track and the Ramseys were tied to that track.\"\n\nIn the 2008 letter, Lacy hung her hat on newly discovered touch DNA found on JonBenet's long johns, which she said was found to belong to an unknown male. Lacy argued that this unknown male DNA matched DNA found in two spots of blood in the crotch of JonBenet's panties. The unknown male DNA, reasoned Lacy, was the smoking gun that pointed to JonBenet's killer and that killer was not anyone in her family. Family members and 200 other potential suspects were excluded from the unknown male DNA found on the panties and long johns,", + " she said.\n\nLacy's theory? When the Ramseys left to have Christmas night dinner with friends, they left the front door unlocked, and a male intruder simply walked inside and waited for hours for the family to come home. During that time, Lacy believes, he wrote the rambling two-and-a-half page ransom note.\n\nThat note referenced several lines from movies. \"The Boulder police should have checked all of the video stores to see who was renting those movies and they never did,\" said Lacy.\n\nHowever, the Boulder Daily Camera's investigation published Thursday found the DNA results in the Bode report are not necessarily as clear cut as Lacy concluded they were.", + " According to the Daily Camera, they showed the Bode report to independent experts who say that the DNA samples from both the underwear and long johns may be composite samples from multiple people: JonBenet, an unknown male and, in one sample, a third unidentified person. To the extent composites were used in the search to identify the killer, the investigation states that the DNA profile \"may be worthless as evidence.\" According to the paper, the possible presence of a third individual's DNA on the long johns has never been publicly revealed.\n\nThe experts also stated that the presence of the DNA on JonBenet's undergarments could have an innocent explanation because the \"profiles were developed from minute samples that could have been the result of inconsequential contact with other people or transferred from another piece of clothing.\"\n\nAccording to the paper,", + " these opinions \"cut both ways\" on the competing theories of the case. They neither disprove the intruder theory nor \"implicate or exonerate anyone in the family.\"\n\nWhen asked about the impending Daily Camera report ahead of its publication Thursday, Lacy said she has taken criticism for her decision to write the exoneration letter in the past. \"I've withstood worse than this,\" she said. \"And it's nothing compared to what the Ramsey family has gone through targeted as suspects in their own daughter's murder.\" Lacy has not responded to ABC News' request for comment since the Daily Camera report was published.\n\nIs JonBenet's Murder a DNA Case or Not?\n\nThere have been conflicting views over whether the mystery of JonBenet's murder can be solved by DNA alone.\n\nFormer Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner,", + " who headed up the department from 1998 to 2014, said in an \"Ask Me Anything\" session on Reddit last year that the investigation considered the DNA important, but that there was other crucial evidence in the case that couldn't be ignored.\n\n\"Mary Lacy, the DA who said the DNA exonerated them, made up her mind years before that a mother could not do that to a child, thus the family was innocent,\" Beckner wrote.\n\nStan Garnett, the current Boulder County DA, told ABC News that no case is ever solely reliant on DNA. \"DNA is a part of the case,\" he said.", + " \"But you have to account for everything else. There were problems with crime scene, you have the ransom note... you have debates about the cause of death -- to solve this case we have to account for all of that.\"\n\nBut forensic pathologist Lawrence Kobilinsky with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who has not worked on the case but who reviewed a summary of the Bode report put together by Boulder County investigator Andy Horita prior to the publication of the Daily Camera report, told ABC News that ignoring the unknown male DNA would be a huge mistake. \"This is definitely a DNA case,\" he said. Kobilinsky said the markers found on the long johns are not enough of a profile to \"match\"", + " those found in the panties, as Lacy wrote in her letter exonerating the Ramseys, but he would describe the markers from both the long johns and the panties as being \"consistent\" and noted that the DNA does belong to an unknown male. \"Lacy did the right thing [in clearing the Ramsey family],\" he said.\n\nWhen questioned about hanging her hat on the DNA in her exoneration letter, Lacy said that she only did that because the DNA was \"something tangible people could understand.\" The truth is, she said, she cleared the Ramseys not just based on the DNA, but also from looking at the totality of the evidence.\n\n\"There was no motive [for the parents], and no psychopathy,\" Lacy said.", + " She added that she is one of only two people who have read the entire transcripts of Patsy Ramsey's psychiatric interviews, in which Lacy said she saw no indication of jealousy toward JonBenet or any violent tendencies. In 2006 when Patsy Ramsey was dying of cancer and even on her deathbed, Lacy said the distraught mother was trying to solve the death of her daughter.\n\nLacy, who was the Boulder County DA from 2001 until 2009, said the Boulder police investigation had ignored important evidence that pointed away from the Ramseys and instead focused on them while \"trying to get the death penalty.\"\n\n\"They were running around the country looking for something negative on that family,\" Lacy said.", + " But the Ramseys, she said, were clean.\n\nThe case is currently cold, but Boulder police say they are continuing to investigate any lead that comes in. It's recently attracted new attention this fall as the 20th anniversary of JonBenet's death approaches, and police have received hundreds of new tips.\n\nEd Andrieski-Pool/Getty Images\n\nA Lacy 'Apology Tour'\n\nPeople who worked with Lacy remember her bringing John Ramsey into the Boulder County prosecutor's office around the time she exonerated the family. \"She wanted us all to shake hands with him. We didn't know what to say... it was like an apology tour,\" said one of Lacy's former DA investigators,", + " Gordon Coombes.\n\nCoombes, who worked in the Boulder prosecutor's office from 2008 to 2011, said he feels Lacy got too close to the family and lost her objectivity. \"It was understood that if you didn't fall in line with the intruder theory, you were out,\" he said.\n\nAnother investigator who worked under Lacy, Ruth Aten-Shearwood, who is now a social worker in England, said that apart from a tight network of advisers, Lacy did not allow other investigators to work on the Ramsey case. Aten-Shearwood said she found out about the exoneration letter from watching the news.", + " Said Aten-Shearwood, \"I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.\"\n\nGarnett, the current Boulder County DA, is running unopposed for his third term. Of Lacy's exoneration letter, he said, \"This letter is not legally binding. It's a good-faith opinion and has no legal importance but the opinion of the person who had the job before I did, whom I respect.\"\n\nWhen asked about the Ramseys, he said, \"They, like everyone else, are presumed innocent. There's not enough admissible evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to charge anyone with this crime.\"\n\nThe Ramseys have always maintained their innocence.", + " Burke Ramsey, now 29, recently filed a $150 million defamation suit against a forensic pathologist who claimed he was involved in the murder on CBS\u2019 \"The Case of: JonBenet Ramsey.\" Burke's attorney, Lin Wood, told ABC News that Burke was falsely accused of being responsible for the death of his sister.\n\nWood told ABC News he has tremendous respect for Lacy and the work she did during her time as DA. \"This was a one-side, unfounded and brutal attack on Lacy who served well the citizens of Boulder for eight years,\" he said of the Daily Camera report.\n\nLater, he added that he is encouraged that the DNA is being called into question because \"now maybe all of those other suspects who were excluded will have to be reinvestigated.\"\n\nLacy told ABC News she stands by her decision to exonerate the Ramseys,", + " insisting that \"if the evidence had been there [to prosecute them], I'd have gone for it.\"\n" + ], + "length": 11026, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 28, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The quotes are so incendiary that some are questioning their veracity. But Axios reports Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House author Michael Wolff has \"dozens of hours\" of tapes to back up statements that appear in the book. And in an excerpt running in the Hollywood Reporter, Wolff (who is the co-founder of Newser) explains just how he got access to them. A June 2016 Hollywood Reporter article may have helped grease things: Hope Hicks emailed Wolff to say Trump was pleased with the cover. Post-election, Wolff says he floated the idea of him coming to the White House \"journalistically, as a fly on the wall\" to gather information for a future book. Trump seemed disinterested in the idea of a book, but \"his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around,\" writes Wolff. And so Wolff writes he spent each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, scheduled appointments with senior staffers, and \"plunk[ed] myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.\" The excerpt shares other tidbits\u2014how the Secret Service protested the president's attempts to lock himself in his bedroom; how Trump's post-dinner calls to billionaire pals spurred leaks; how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought Anthony Scaramucci would be the White House's saving grace\u2014which Trump's lawyer is now trying to block from release. The Washington Post reports Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt and Co., have been sent a letter that demands they \"immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release, or dissemination of the book\" or any excerpts; the lawyer also wants a copy and says a libel suit is being considered.\n", + "docs": [ + "Wolff on Media\n\nAt home in Beverly Hills, the candidate talks Murdoch, what he's reading, how he'll redo electoral math and Ari Emanuel's offer to script his convention.\n\nThe long day is ending for Donald Trump with a pint of vanilla Haagen-Dazs ice cream. We're settling in for a late-night chat at his Beverly Hills house, a 5,395-square-foot Colonial mansion directly across from the Beverly Hills Hotel. He's here for the final presidential primary, a California coronation of sorts, after rallies in Orange County (where violence broke out and seven people were arrested). He is, as he has been for much of our conversation \u2014 and perhaps much of the last year \u2014 marveling at his own campaign.", + " \"You looked outside before, you see what's going on,\" he boasts about the police surrounding his house, and the Secret Service detail cramming his garage and snaking around the pool at the center of the front drive. And he's just returned from a big donor fundraiser in Brentwood for the Republican Party at the home of Tom Barrack, the investor and former Miramax co-owner. \"There had to be over a thousand policeman. They had a neighborhood roped off, four or five blocks away from this beautiful house. Machine guns all over the place.\"\n\nOne thing to understand about Trump is that, rather unexpectedly, he's neither angry nor combative.", + " He may be the most threatening and frightening and menacing presidential candidate in modern life, and yet, in person he's almost soothing. His extreme self-satisfaction rubs off. He's a New Yorker who actually might be more at home in California (in fact, he says he usually comes to his home here \u2014 two buildings on Rodeo Drive \u2014 only once a year). Life is sunny. Trump is an optimist \u2014 at least about himself. He's in easy and relaxed form campaigning here in these final days before the June 7 California primary, even with Hillary Clinton's biggest backers and a city that is about half Latino surrounding him.\n\nEarlier in the day,", + " I'd met with Trump at a taping of ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live! at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where he was the single guest for the evening (musicians The Weeknd and Belly canceled upon learning of his appearance). \"Have you ever seen anything like this?\" he asked. He meant this, the Trump phenomenon. Circumventing any chance that I might dampen the sentiment, he quickly answered his own question: \"No one ever has.\"\n\nHis son-in-law, New York Observer owner Jared Kushner, married to his daughter Ivanka and also a real estate scion \u2014 but clearly a more modest and tempered fellow,", + " a wisp next to his beefsteak father-in-law \u2014 offered that they may have reached 100 percent name recognition. In other words, Trump could be the most famous man in the world right now. \"I may be,\" says Trump, almost philosophically, and referencing the many people who have told him they've never seen anything like this. \"Bill O'Reilly said in his lifetime this is the greatest phenomenon he's ever seen.\"\n\nThat notion is what's at the center of this improbable campaign, its own brilliant success. It's its main subject \u2014 the one you can't argue with. You can argue about issues, but you can't argue with success.", + " Hence, to Trump, you're really foolish to argue with the Trump campaign. \"I've spent $50 million of my own money to go through the primaries. Other people spent $230 million and they came in last. You know what I'm saying?\" And this provides him the reason to talk endlessly and repetitively about the phenomenon of the campaign. That phenomenon is, of course, Trump himself, about whom Trump spends a lot of time talking in the third person.\n\nYou can try, but it's hard to resist this admiration for himself. The certainty of it, the enthusiasm for it and the lack of not just doubt, but of any negativity.", + " It's all upbeat and positive. The dark, scary, virulent heart of American politics is having the best time anyone has ever had.\n\nTrump at a May 25 rally in Anaheim. Violent clashes between protesters and police followed him through California.\n\nIf onstage he calls people names, more privately he has only good, embracing things to say about almost everybody. (For most public people I know, it is the opposite.) He loves everybody. Genuinely seems to love everybody \u2014 at least everybody who's rich and successful (he doesn't really talk about anyone who isn't). Expressing love for everybody, for most of us, would clearly seem to be an act.", + " But with Trump, it's the name-calling and bluster that might be the act.\n\nI offer that there are quite a number of people in New York, some we know in common, who are puzzled that the generous, eager-to-be-liked and liking-everyone-in-return Donald has morphed into a snarling and reactionary public enemy, at least a liberal enemy. This, I suggest, might be a source of the continuing dialectic \u2014 or to some, wishful thinking \u2014 that he does not necessarily believe what he says.\n\nI might detect the most mild sort of annoyance here. Trump says it's that he just never talked about his beliefs in the past \u2014 after all,", + " he wasn't a politician. \"Who thought this was going to happen?\" But his larger point seems to be that such a topic \u2014 what he says \u2014 is a silly thing to focus on. The point is not about politics, or policies, but about how people, about how many people, have responded to him. It's too big to ignore the bigness. \"You heard Jimmy announce tonight that I have the most votes in the history of the Republican Party,\" he says by way of explanation for the larger issues at hand \u2014 i.e., him.\n\nIn a way, what this evening's Kimmel show was about was treating Trump's positions as though they are,", + " well, Trump's positions, qualitatively different than other politicians' positions. In fact, you might logically see the Kimmel show as a devastating attack on Trump's views and claims. Kimmel flat out doesn't believe him. That recording of the PR person alleged to be Trump sounding like a PR person? Trump: \"It didn't sound like me.\" Kimmel: \"No. Sounded like you.\" (An exchange repeated similarly several times, with no rancor from either Trump or Kimmel.) \"And oh,\" says Kimmel, \"remember when you liked Hillary?\" Trump: \"I just said I like her.", + " I say I like everybody.\" And there was Kimmel, at every opportunity, happily mocking Trump, the overexposed media whore.\n\nThe effect is not only not damaging, it's fun-loving, comic, even joyous. Kimmel is tickled to have such a good sport to poke fun at, and Trump is tickled that Kimmel is tickled. Everybody's in on it. There are no phonies here. Or everybody here is honest about being a phony. Nobody is taking anyone very seriously \u2014 forget what might be at stake in a presidential election. If Trump is the subject of the conversation, then Trump is happy.", + " If Kimmel has Trump as a guest, he's happy. Everybody's happy. (Trump has a staffer take a picture of another picture of Trump when he was previously on the Kimmel show that's now hanging on the studio wall.)\n\nIt is this media frisson that, with countless other professional and amateur analyzers, I'm trying to plumb. Surely a big part of the answer lies in the nature of Trump's performance, an unself-consciousness so extreme that he has passed through hurdles of humiliation that would have destroyed nearly all others to emerge as though free of a private self. Trump is only fully alive in public. But another aspect is that,", + " differentiating himself from every other candidate, he has a long, intimate relationship with nearly every significant player in the media and, indeed, lavishes copious praise on almost all of them. He may know few people in Washington, and care about them less, but he knows his moguls and where they rank on the modern suck-up-to list.\n\nOn Murdoch: \"Rupert is a tremendous guy. I think Rupert [who for several years lived in the Trump building on 59th and Park Avenue in Manhattan] is one of the people I really respect and like. And I think Rupert respects what I've done.\" But what about Murdoch's grumpy Trump tweets?", + " \"When I got into the world of politics, that was a different realm for me and maybe he felt differently. But I think he respects what I've done and he's a tremendous guy and I think we have a very good relationship.\"\n\nOn Redstone: \"Sumner, well, he's had a good run. Good run. Terrible it comes to this, but a good run. He'd give me anything. Loved me.\"\n\nOn Leslie Moonves: \"Great guy. The greatest. We're on the same page. We think alike.\"\n\nThese are the bulls of his real party.\n\nThe party whips, to strain this metaphor,", + " are the news heads: Roger Ailes at Fox News, Jeff Zucker at CNN (who previously at NBC bought The Apprentice and launched Trump as a national TV star) and Andy Lack, now the head of NBC News. Despite his tweets about the \"dishonest media,\" Trump is lavish in his praise of all of them. I ask him to rate them. \"That's an unfair question,\" he says, making a rare grab for politesse. \"I know Jeff very well. I know Roger very well. And, less well, but I think Andy has done a very good job.\"\n\nAmong his frequent media and now political confidants is WME co-", + "CEO Ari Emanuel \u2014 whose brother, Rahm, the mayor of Chicago, was once Obama's chief of staff \u2014 whom Trump says has offered to take charge of the Trump celebratory convention film. Emanuel and Trump, while at seeming odds politically, might in fact be even better united in a kind of hyper salesmanship. \"He's a very good friend of mine,\" says Trump. \"He calls me a lot. I call him a lot and we talk. He's very political. Even though he's not political, he's political. He gets it. You're shocked to hear that, right? [About the movie.] But yeah,", + " I might do something with Ari. Does he represent you?\"\n\nSanders called a Trump win a \"real danger to the entire world\" on May 27.\n\nTrump will turn 70 on June 14, but he shows no sign of fatigue even as our conversation drifts toward 11 p.m. He's been at this since either 4 a.m. or 6 a.m. (he offers different times at different moments). \"Today, I'm up at six in the morning, I'm meeting some of the biggest people in the world. I then had to give a speech to a big group, then I had to give a speech at 12 to [Dole Food mogul]", + " David Murdock, [real estate magnate] Donald Bren, tremendous guys. Then I had to drive to Anaheim and give a speech in front of thousands of people. Then I came back and did more meetings, then I did a fundraiser tonight, then I did Kimmel. And now you. You're not a two-minute interview guy.\"\n\nHe hands me a water bottle from the refrigerator (it only contains water and about a dozen pints of ice cream), and we walk through the dark house decorated with hotel-like furniture (a four-star rather than a five-star hotel lobby). He reclines, still in his standard boxy suit,", + " tie slightly loosened, with his Haagen-Dazs on an overstuffed couch in the living room (he asks me not to put my water bottle on the fabric-covered ottoman).\n\nIf there's any pattern to his conversation, it's that he's vague on all subjects outside himself, his campaign and the media. Everything else is mere distraction. But I press him about Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who, earlier in the day, has admitted to funding the $140 million Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker. Thiel also is his most prominent Silicon Valley backer and will go to the convention in July as a pledged delegate.", + " But Trump needs reminding who he is, and then concludes he must be a friend of his son-in-law Jared. (\"Wow, I love him! So he funded it for Hulk Hogan? You think Hulk Hogan would have enough money, but he probably doesn't.\") Indeed, Trump doesn't appear to be interested in Silicon Valley, except to roll off his numbers on each social media platform. (\"On Facebook, I have close to 8 million people. On Twitter, I have 8.5 million. On Instagram, I have over a million people. I'm inching on 20 million people. I have friends, somebody that's a great writer,", + " where they write a book and call me up and say, 'Can you do me a favor, can you tweet it?' \" \"Can you,\" I interject, \"tweet my book, please?\" \"I will!\")\n\nFinishing his pint, he reflects again on the remarkableness of the campaign, asking his traveling staffers, Corey Lewandowski and press secretary Hope Hicks, as well as his son-in-law, to confirm again how remarkable it is. Lewandowski recites the latest polls (as of press time, they show Trump inching to within a few percentage points of Clinton in a head-to-head matchup), and Trump,", + " with something beyond confidence, seems to declare de facto victory.\n\nI broach his problems with women and Hispanics and the common wisdom that he'll have to do at least as well with these groups as Mitt Romney did in 2012. The \"pivot\" is the word more politico pros are using to refer to his expected turn to the center. \"Unless,\" I offer, \"you think you can remake the electoral math.\" He says he absolutely can. So no pivot. \"It'll be different math than they've ever seen.\" He is, he says, bigger than anything anyone has ever seen. \"I have a much bigger base than Romney.", + " Romney was a stiff!\" And he'll be bigger with the people he's bigger with, but also he'll be bigger with women and Hispanics and blacks, too. He believes, no matter what positions he holds or slurs he has made, that he is irresistible.\n\nI ask if he sees himself as having similarities with leaders of the growing anti-immigrant (some would say outright racist) European nativist movements, like Marine Le Pen in France and Matteo Salvini in Italy, whom The Wall Street Journal reported Trump had met with and endorsed in Philadelphia. (\"Matteo, I wish you become the next Italian premier soon,\" Trump was quoted as saying.) In fact,", + " he insists he didn't meet Salvini. \"I didn't want to meet him.\" And, in sum, he doesn't particularly see similarities \u2014 or at least isn't interested in them \u2014 between those movements and the anti-immigrant nationalism he is promoting in this country.\n\n\"And Brexit? Your position?\" I ask.\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Brexit.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\"\n\n\"The Brits leaving the EU,\" I prompt, realizing that his lack of familiarity with one of the most pressing issues in Europe is for him no concern nor liability at all.\n\n\"Oh yeah, I think they should leave.\"\n\nIt is hard not to feel that Trump understands himself,", + " and that we're all in on this kind of spectacular joke. His shamelessness is just so \u2026 shameless. So how much, I ask \u2014 quite thinking he will get the nuance here \u2014 is the Trump brand based on exaggeration? He responds, with perfect literalness, none at all. I try again. He must understand. How could he not? \"You've talked about negotiation, which is about compromise and about establishing positions that you can walk back from. How much about being a successful person involves \u2026 well, bullshitting? How much of success is playing games?\"\n\nIf he does understand, he's definitely not taking this bait.", + " I try again: \"How much are you a salesman?\"\n\nSalesman, in the Trump worldview, is hardly a bad word, and he is quite willing to accept it, although, curiously, he doesn't want to be thought of that way when it comes to real estate. But as a politician, he's OK as a salesman.\n\nTrump says he's reading Edward Klein's book Unlikeable: The Problem With Hillary.\n\nIn this, he sees himself \u2014 and becomes almost eloquent in talking about himself \u2014 as a sort of performer and voter whisperer. He is, he takes obvious pride in saying, the only politician who doesn't regularly use a teleprompter.", + " With a prompter, he says, you can't work the crowd. You can't feel it. \"You got to look at them in the eye. Have you ever seen me speak in front of a large group of people? Have you ever watched?\" He reflects on the lack of self-consciousness that's necessary to make spontaneous utterances before a crowd. He cites a well-known actor (whose name he asks me not to use, \"I don't want to hurt anybody\"), who had wanted to run for office but, without a script, was a blithering idiot. Trump was never fed lines on The Apprentice, he says.", + " It was all him: \"You have to have a natural ability.\"\n\nI ask if he'll use a teleprompter for his acceptance speech at the convention and, almost sorrowfully, he says he probably will. I find myself urging him not to, precisely for the theater of it all. The spontaneity. Who would want to miss that? Let Trump be Trump.\n\n\"Very interesting. What he's saying is very interesting,\" he notes to Lewandowski.\n\nHe's punted on Hillary as a topic since we started our conversation, as though to talk about her was not to talk about him. If in public he needs to treat her as his cause,", + " in private he doesn't want her taking up his time. But I sneak it back.\n\n\"Did you ever vote for Bill?\" I ask, thinking that both men have as much in common as they have that separates them.\n\n\"Let's see \u2026 did I ever? Eh, I don't want to say who I voted for.\"\n\nIndeed. These two '80s guys were undoubtedly once quite in sync.\n\nThe anti-Christ Trump, the Trump of bizarre, outre, impractical and reactionary policies that most reasonable people yet believe will lead to an astounding defeat in November, is really hard to summon from Trump in person. He deflects that person,", + " or, even, dissembles about what that person might have said (as much, he dissembles for conservatives about what the more liberal Trump might have said), and is impatient that anyone might want to focus on that version of Trump. It does then feel that the policies, such as they are, and the slurs, are not him. They are just a means to the end \u2014 to the phenomenon. To the center of attention. The biggest thing that has ever happened in politics. In America. The biggest thing is the theme. It's what he always wants to come back to. Bigness is unavoidable and inevitable. Bigness always wins.\n\nBefore Trump trundles off to bed \u2014 actually,", + " before that, never too tired, he plans to watch himself on Kimmel \u2014 I ask that de rigeur presidential question, which does not seem yet to have been asked of him. \"What books are you reading?\"\n\nHe knows he's caught (it's a question that all politicians are prepped on, but who among his not-bookish coterie would have prepped him even with the standard GOP politician answer: the Bible?). But he goes for it.\n\n\"I'm reading the Ed Klein book on Hillary Clinton\" \u2014 a particular hatchet job, which at the very least has certainly been digested for him. \"And I'm reading the book on Richard Nixon that was,", + " well, I'll get you the exact information on it. I'm reading a book that I've read before, it's one of my favorite books, All Quiet on the Western Front, which is one of the greatest books of all time.\" And one I suspect he's suddenly remembering from high school. But what the hell.\n\nDonald Trump simply believes he is a unique individual, one whose singular conviction that he is special makes him appealing. And pay no attention to everything else.\n\nA version of this story first appeared in the June 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe. ", + " Why it matters: A funding freeze could be seen as a slap against the organization \u2014 which the U.S. and Israel consider to be biased against Israel and too politicized \u2014 and an attempt to pressure the Palestinians to return to peace talks with Israel. But a State Department official said that the fact the money wasn't transferred on Jan. 1 doesn't mean it was frozen. \"There are still deliberations taking place, and we have until mid January to decide what we are going to do,\u201d the official said.\n\nThe Trump administration has frozen $125 million in funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees,", + " according to three Western diplomats who were informed of the move. They said the funding, one third of the annual U.S. donations to the agency, was supposed to be transferred by Jan. 1 but was withheld.\n\nThe details: The diplomats, who asked to speak on conditions of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the funding was frozen until the Trump administration finishes its review of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority.\n\nThe move comes after the Palestinian Authority suspended their contacts with the Trump administration in response to its decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. A senior White House official said no decision have been made yet,", + " but confirmed that a review of the U.S. assistance to the Palestinians is underway \"in light of the Palestinians' recent conduct.\"\n\nThe diplomats added that U.S. officials told U.N. officials in the last two days that President Trump is considering totally cutting the part of the funding which was frozen, and is even considering cutting up to $180 million, which amounts to half of the U.S. funding to UNRWA.\n\nThe impact: The Western diplomats said freezing or cutting of such a big part of the U.S. funding would be catastrophic for the organization, would hamper its work and might lead to negative consequences for the Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza,", + " the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon.\n\nU.N. secretary general Ant\u00f3nio Guterres has spoken with senior U.S. official about the UNRWA funding and also consulted with foreign ministers from other donor countries, according to the diplomats.\n\nThe Israeli security establishment and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories \u2014 the Israeli organization that oversees government activities in the West Bank and Gaza \u2014 are concerned about possible freezing or cutting of U.S. funding to UNRWA, fearing the escalation of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.\n\n\u201cThe humanitarian situation in Gaza is complicated enough and harming UNRWA funding will only make it more complicated,\" a senior Israeli security official told me.\n\nWhat we're hearing:", + " Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not enthusiastic about the cutting of U.S. funding to UNRWA, but is politically pressed by conservative ministers in his cabinet and by the fact he can't be more dovish on the Palestinian issue than President Trump.\n\nOfficials in the prime minister's office told diplomats from several western countries that Israel does not object to the cutting of U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority, but prefers that the U.S. doesn't cut funding to UNRWA due to the fact it also serves Israeli security interests.\n\nA senior Israeli official told me Netanyahu is in touch with the White House on the UNRWA funding issue, and conveyed the message that Israel prefers \u201cgradual disengagement\"", + " with UNRWA by the U.S. and not a big funding cut.\n\nThe prime minister's office said in a statement: \"Netanyahu supports President Trump's critical attitude towards UNRWA and believes practical steps need to be taken in order to change the fact that UNRWA is being used to entrench the Palestinian refugee problem instead of solving it.\" ", + " Author and columnist Michael Wolff was given extraordinary access to the Trump administration and now details the feuds, the fights and the alarming chaos he witnessed while reporting what turned into a new book.\n\nEditor\u2019s Note: Author and Hollywood Reporter columnist Michael Wolff\u2019s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt & Co.), is a detailed account of the 45th president\u2019s election and first year in office based on extensive access to the White House and more than 200 interviews with Trump and senior staff over a period of 18 months. In advance of the Jan. 9 publication of the book, which Trump is already attacking,", + " Wolff has written this extracted column about his time in the White House based on the reporting included in Fire and Fury.\n\nI interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked \u2014 or not disliked \u2014 the piece I wrote. \"Great cover!\" his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses). After the election, I proposed to him that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication \u2014 journalistically, as a fly on the wall \u2014 which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job.", + " No, I said. I'd like to just watch and write a book. \"A book?\" he responded, losing interest. \"I hear a lot of people want to write books,\" he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. \"Do you know Ed Klein?\"\u2014 author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. \"Great guy. I think he should write a book about me.\" But sure, Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out.\n\nSince the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around \u2014 checking in each week at the Hay-", + "Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the \"system,\" and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.\n\nThe West Wing is configured in such a way that the anteroom is quite a thoroughfare \u2014 everybody passes by. Assistants \u2014 young women in the Trump uniform of short skirts, high boots, long and loose hair \u2014 as well as, in situation-comedy proximity, all the new stars of the show: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence,", + " Gary Cohn, Michael Flynn (and after Flynn's abrupt departure less than a month into the job for his involvement in the Russia affair, his replacement, H.R. McMaster), all neatly accessible.\n\nThe nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment \u2014 with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce.\n\nA new president typically surrounds himself with a small group of committed insiders and loyalists. But few on the Trump team knew him very well \u2014 most of his advisors had been with him only since the fall.", + " Even his family, now closely gathered around him, seemed nonplussed. \"You know, we never saw that much of him until he got the nomination,\" Eric Trump's wife, Lara, told one senior staffer. If much of the country was incredulous, his staff, trying to cement their poker faces, were at least as confused.\n\nTheir initial response was to hawkishly defend him \u2014 he demanded it \u2014 and by defending him they seemed to be defending themselves. Politics is a game, of course, of determined role-playing, but the difficulties of staying in character in the Trump White House became evident almost from the first day.\n\n\"You can't make this shit up,\" Sean Spicer,", + " soon to be portrayed as the most hapless man in America, muttered to himself after his tortured press briefing on the first day of the new administration, when he was called to justify the president's inaugural crowd numbers \u2014 and soon enough, he adopted this as a personal mantra. Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, had, shortly after the announcement of his appointment in November, started to think he would not last until the inauguration. Then, making it to the White House, he hoped he could last a respectable year, but he quickly scaled back his goal to six months. Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump's public comments,", + " continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.)\n\nSteve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show \u2014 commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet \"President Bannon\"", + " was less than entirely humorous. Within the first few weeks, even rote conversations with senior staff trying to explain the new White House's policies and positions would turn into a body-language ballet of eye-rolling and shrugs and pantomime of jaws dropping. Leaking became the political manifestation of the don't-blame-me eye roll.\n\nThe surreal sense of the Trump presidency was being lived as intensely inside the White House as out. Trump was, for the people closest to him, the ultimate enigma. He had been elected president, that through-the-eye-of-the-needle feat, but obviously, he was yet \u2026 Trump. Indeed,", + " he seemed as confused as anyone to find himself in the White House, even attempting to barricade himself into his bedroom with his own lock over the protests of the Secret Service.\n\nThere was some effort to ascribe to Trump magical powers. In an early conversation \u2014 half comic, half desperate \u2014 Bannon tried to explain him as having a particular kind of Jungian brilliance. Trump, obviously without having read Jung, somehow had access to the collective unconscious of the other half of the country, and, too, a gift for inventing archetypes: Little Marco \u2026 Low-Energy Jeb \u2026 the Failing New York Times. Everybody in the West Wing tried,", + " with some panic, to explain him, and, sheepishly, their own reason for being here. He's intuitive, he gets it, he has a mind-meld with his base. But there was palpable relief, of an Emperor's New Clothes sort, when longtime Trump staffer Sam Nunberg \u2014 fired by Trump during the campaign but credited with knowing him better than anyone else \u2014 came back into the fold and said, widely, \"He's just a fucking fool.\"\n\nPart of that foolishness was his inability to deal with his own family. In a way, this gave him a human dimension. Even Donald Trump couldn't say no to his kids.", + " \"It's a littleee, littleee complicated \u2026\" he explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs. But the effect of their leadership roles was to compound his own boundless inexperience in Washington, creating from the outset frustration and then disbelief and then rage on the part of the professionals in his employ.\n\nThe men and women of the West Wing, for all that the media was ridiculing them, actually felt they had a responsibility to the country. \"Trump,\" said one senior Republican, \"turned selfish careerists into patriots.\" Their job was to maintain the pretense of relative sanity,", + " even as each individually came to the conclusion that, in generous terms, it was insane to think you could run a White House without experience, organizational structure or a real purpose.\n\nOn March 30, after the collapse of the health care bill, 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff, the effective administration chief of the West Wing, a stalwart political pro and stellar example of governing craft, walked out. Little more than two months in, she quit. Couldn't take it anymore. Nutso. To lose your deputy chief of staff at the get-go would be a sign of crisis in any other administration, but inside an obviously exploding one it was hardly noticed.\n\nWhile there might be a scary national movement of Trumpers,", + " the reality in the White House was stranger still: There was Jared and Ivanka, Democrats; there was Priebus, a mainstream Republican; and there was Bannon, whose reasonable claim to be the one person actually representing Trumpism so infuriated Trump that Bannon was hopelessly sidelined by April. \"How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!\" Trump muttered and stormed. To say that no one was in charge, that there were no guiding principles, not even a working org chart, would again be an understatement. \"What do these people do?\" asked everyone pretty much of everyone else.\n\nThe competition to take charge,", + " which, because each side represented an inimical position to the other, became not so much a struggle for leadership, but a near-violent factional war. Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day. By late spring, the larger political landscape seemed to become almost irrelevant, with everyone focused on the more lethal battles within the White House itself. This included screaming fights in the halls and in front of a bemused Trump in the Oval Office (when he was not the one screaming himself), together with leaks about what Russians your opponents might have been talking to.\n\nReigning over all of this was Trump,", + " enigma, cipher and disruptor. How to get along with Trump \u2014 who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. \"I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?\" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, \"like a child.\" A chronic naysayer,", + " Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him. His billionaire friends then shared this with their billionaire friends, creating the endless leaks which the president so furiously railed against.\n\nOne of these frequent callers was Rupert Murdoch, who before the election had only ever expressed contempt for Trump. Now Murdoch constantly sought him out, but to his own colleagues, friends and family, continued to derisively ridicule Trump: \"What a fucking moron,\" said Murdoch after one call.\n\nWith the Comey firing, the Mueller appointment and murderous White House infighting, by early summer Bannon was engaged in an uninterrupted monologue directed to almost anyone who would listen.", + " It was so caustic, so scabrous and so hilarious that it might form one of the great underground political treatises.\n\nBy July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming Trump himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! \"The daughter,\" Bannon declared, \"will bring down the father.\"\n\nPriebus and Spicer were merely counting down to the day \u2014 and every day seemed to promise it would be the next day \u2014 when they would be out.\n\nAnd,", + " indeed, suddenly there were the 11 days of Anthony Scaramucci.\n\nScaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York \u2014 he knew their world. In effect, the couple had hired Scaramucci \u2014 as preposterous a hire in West Wing annals as any \u2014 to replace Priebus and Bannon and take over running the White House.\n\nThere was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown,", + " hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.\n\nMost succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia \"collusion,\" Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation,", + " nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)\n\nThere was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories \u2014 now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions \u2014 he just couldn't stop saying something.\n\nBy summer's end, in something of a historic sweep \u2014 more usual for the end of a president's first term than the end of his first six months \u2014 almost the entire senior staff,", + " save Trump's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller \u2014 for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing \u2014 was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff \u2014 without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand. Grim and stoic, accepting that he could not control the president, Kelly seemed compelled by a sense of duty to be,", + " in case of disaster, the adult in the room who might, if needed, stand up to the president \u2026 if that is comfort.\n\nAs telling, with his daughter and son-in-law sidelined by their legal problems, Hope Hicks, Trump's 29-year-old personal aide and confidant, became, practically speaking, his most powerful White House advisor. (With Melania a nonpresence, the staff referred to Ivanka as the \"real wife\" and Hicks as the \"real daughter.\") Hicks' primary function was to tend to the Trump ego, to reassure him, to protect him, to buffer him, to soothe him. It was Hicks who,", + " attentive to his lapses and repetitions, urged him to forgo an interview that was set to open the 60 Minutes fall season. Instead, the interview went to Fox News' Sean Hannity who, White House insiders happily explained, was willing to supply the questions beforehand. Indeed, the plan was to have all interviewers going forward provide the questions.\n\nAs the first year wound down, Trump finally got a bill to sign. The tax bill, his singular accomplishment, was, arguably, quite a reversal of his populist promises, and confirmation of what Mitch McConnell had seen early on as the silver Trump lining: \"He'll sign anything we put in front of him.\" With new bravado,", + " he was encouraging partisans like Fox News to pursue an anti-Mueller campaign on his behalf. Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is Trump's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family.\n\nSteve Bannon was openly handicapping a 33.3 percent chance of impeachment, a 33.3 percent chance of resignation in the shadow of the 25th amendment and a 33.3 percent chance that he might limp to the finish line on the strength of liberal arrogance and weakness.\n\nDonald Trump's small staff of factotums,", + " advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would \u2014 or, in many cases, should \u2014 have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all \u2014 100 percent \u2014 came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.\n\nAt Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.\n\nHappy first anniversary of the Trump administration.\n" + ], + "length": 8655, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 29, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Oliver Stone and a New York Times movie critic are feuding over a scathing review of Stone's documentary on Hugo Chavez, South of the Border. It began when the Times' Larry Rohter wrote this piece, in which he accuses Stone of \"mistakes, misstatements, and missing details.\" Stone fired back with this detailed rebuttal, telling Rohter to get his own facts straight. And now, of course, Rohter has responded with a rebuttal of his own, reprinted at the Huffington Post. \"I've been scrupulously honest in my reporting and writing, and (Stone and company) are offended and embarrassed at having their many errors and inaccuracies disclosed,\" writes Rohter. Stone, meanwhile, accuses his critic of \"animus and conflict of interest,\" because the documentary criticizes both the Times coverage of Venezuela and Rohter's own \"anti-Chavez\" reporting from years earlier. \"The Times should apologize for having published it,\" he concludes.\n", + "docs": [ + "Media Misperceptions\n\nVenezuela: The Spin vs. The Truth\n\nAs demonstrated in numerous examples in \u201cSouth of the Border,\u201d major U.S. media outlets have distorted their audiences\u2019 perceptions of Venezuela and the government of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez. Most media reports on Venezuela frame their stories in ways that are likely to make American audiences distrustful and apprehensive of Venezuela. These frames are reinforced by commonly repeated media myths and inaccuracies that further tend to portray the Venezuelan government as an enemy of the United States, and as an increasingly totalitarian government that is stifling dissent, cracking down on the press, and eroding democratic freedoms. These frames and myths \u2013 \u201cspin,\u201d in public relations-speak \u2013 overlook an abundance of evidence to the contrary.\n\nSpin:", + " Hugo Ch\u00e1vez is a dictator.\n\nTruth: The government of Venezuela has held, and Ch\u00e1vez and his party have won, repeated elections throughout his time in office. These elections have been considered free and fair by the Organization of American States (OAS), the European Union (EU) and the Carter Center \u2014 three major electoral observation bodies. Some criticize the Ch\u00e1vez government because his political party has near total control over the National Assembly; however this is a direct result of the opposition\u2019s actions. Just days before the 2005 legislative elections most of the opposition decided to stage a boycott of the vote. This came only a few days after their representatives had told the OAS and other electoral observers that conditions had been met for their participation.", + " The move handed almost complete control in the National Assembly to Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s allies while failing to delegitimize the legislature internationally. Prior to these elections, the opposition held significant power in the National Assembly, which allowed them to block many of the Ch\u00e1vez administration\u2019s policies.\n\nReal attacks on democracy have come from sectors of the Venezuelan opposition. In April 2002, a broad group of opposition forces directly supported and participated in a short-lived coup d\u2019etat against the elected government. In late 2002 and early 2003, opposition groups paralyzed the oil industry and provoked a deep recession, in a second attempt to force President Ch\u00e1vez from power.", + " In 2005, the country\u2019s main opposition parties tried to provoke a destabilizing political crisis by boycotting the legislative elections. All of these undemocratic actions only succeeded in further discrediting an opposition movement that many Venezuelans identify with the failed policies of the unpopular governments of the past.\n\nThe Ch\u00e1vez government continues to enjoy an overwhelming majority support of voters in most national elections. In the 2006 presidential election, in which a record number of voters participated, Ch\u00e1vez won with 63 percent of the vote, and in the 2008 regional elections his party won in 17 of 22 states. The next legislative elections are in September,", + " and the opposition is expected to significantly increase its presence in the National Assembly. However the opposition remains divided and trails far behind the government in terms of popular support.\n\nDemocratic participation has increased greatly under Ch\u00e1vez as well. For example, while turnout was around 54 percent in the 1998 elections in which Ch\u00e1vez was first elected, in the 2006 presidential election, voter participation jumped to 75 percent. For perspective, in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, voter participation was around 60 percent, and this was one of the highest totals in some 40 years. The Ch\u00e1vez administration has made it a priority to promote electoral participation within poor communities that traditionally had a low voter turnout;", + " this has included large voter registration drives and the creation of voting centers in poor areas.\n\nDespite media reports to the contrary Venezuelans are satisfied with their democracy. The Chilean Latinbar\u00f3metro, one of the most exhaustive and well respected polling companies in the region, consistently shows that Venezuela ranks near the top of countries in the hemisphere in terms of the level of satisfaction with democracy.\n\nSpin: Ch\u00e1vez is clamping down on freedom of the press.\n\nThe Truth: Venezuela continues to have strong opposition broadcast and print media, as any casual visitor to Venezuela can plainly see. The supposed deterioration of freedom of the press under the Ch\u00e1vez government is a favorite theme of U.S.", + " media coverage of Venezuela, and it is regarding this topic that the gap between reality and media claims is usually at its widest. Anyone who travels to Venezuela will easily find numerous front-page criticisms and broadcast denunciations of the Ch\u00e1vez government that go well beyond the sort of attacks on Obama that appear in the U.S. press. Yet that Ch\u00e1vez is attempting to \u201celiminate independent media\u201d[1] by \u201cmuzzling the press\u201d[2] are favorite themes for U.S. editorial pages, with news articles chiming in that \u201cChavez\u2019s administration is moving to tighten its grip over Venezuela\u2019s media industry.\u201d[", + "3] U.S. media coverage has often also distorted the facts regarding the Venezuelan government\u2019s conflicts with opposition media outlets, some of which have openly supported undemocratic and extra-constitutional means to undermine or even overthrow the government.\n\nClaims that Ch\u00e1vez is an enemy of press freedom reached a peak in 2007 when the Venezuelan government chose not to renew the broadcast license of opposition TV station RCTV. U.S. media and commentators claimed that RCTV was being \u201ccensored\u201d[4] and \u201cshut down\u201d[5], but in reality, RCTV continued to broadcast via cable and Internet with large audience numbers,", + " and maintaining its anti-Ch\u00e1vez line. While opponents of the government criticized the decision to allow RCTV\u2019s license to expire, it is important to note that a TV station that had done even some of the things that RCTV had done would never obtain a broadcast license in the United States or any European democracy. Most importantly \u2013 as was admitted in news articles on the controversy,[6] RCTV openly supported the 2002 coup against Ch\u00e1vez by encouraging people to participate in opposition protests, by reporting the false information that Ch\u00e1vez had resigned,[7] and then, when Ch\u00e1vez returned to power, by airing Disney cartoons rather than report this news.[8]", + " RCTV head Marcel Granier met with coup president Pedro Carmona during the coup, as Carmona enlisted the media\u2019s help in attempting to ensure the coup\u2019s success.[9] RCTV also actively promoted the oil strike (2002-2003) that attempted to topple the government, and other, legal political and electoral campaigns.\n\nEven some observers who harshly criticized the government\u2019s decision on RCTV admitted that the issue was much more complicated, and that RCTV was not automatically entitled to its license. \u201cBroadcasting companies in any country in the world, especially in democratic countries, are not entitled to renewal of their licenses,\u201d Jos\u00e9 Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch explained.", + " \u201cThe lack of renewal of the contract, per se, is not a free speech issue. Just per se.\u201d[10]\n\nIn the years since the RCTV decision, instead of correcting its hyperbolic claims of Venezuelan censorship, U.S. media outlets have continued the theme. The new focus is on broadcaster Globovisi\u00f3n, routinely described as \u201cVenezuela\u2019s only remaining opposition TV television station on the open airwaves.\u201d[11] This characterization is simply false, as numerous local TV stations in Venezuela have an opposition political line (and national broadcasters such as Televen continue to run programs with a strong opposition slant). The great majority of Venezuelan media continues to be privately owned,", + " and the opposition dominates the newspaper industry as well. As Human Rights Watch \u2013 a frequent critic of freedom of the press in Venezuela \u2013 noted in a 2008 report, \u201cthe balance of forces in the print media has not changed significantly\u201d, with the majority of Venezuelan newspapers continuing to be privately-owned and two of the three top newspapers maintaining an opposition political line (the third is neutral).[12]\n\nU.S. press reports also frequently describe a shift among some opposition media, such as TV station Venevisi\u00f3n, towards being less critical of the government.[13] While U.S. media often suggests that this could be out of fear of \u201ccensorship,\u201d Venezuela-analyst Greg Wilpert offers another theory:", + " \u201cI think some of the TV stations have slightly moderated [their opposition to the government] not because of intimidation, but because they were losing audience share. Over half of the population is supportive of Ch\u00e1vez. They\u2019ve reduced the number of anti-Ch\u00e1vez programs that they used to have. But those that continue to exist are just as anti-Ch\u00e1vez as they were before.\u201d[14]\n\nSpin: Poverty has worsened under Ch\u00e1vez.\n\nThe Truth: Poverty has fallen dramatically in Venezuela since Hugo Ch\u00e1vez was elected president. While poverty did rise overall from 1999 \u2013 2003, this was largely due to the economic impact of the coup d\u2019etat in 2002 and the severely damaging oil lockout in late 2002/", + "early 2003. The resulting recession was extreme: a 24 percent loss of GDP from the third quarter of 2002 until the first quarter of 2003. Media outlets in the past used poverty data from 2003 or 2004 to \u201cprove\u201d that poverty increased under Ch\u00e1vez \u2013 even when more recent poverty data was available. This distorted the reality of what happened. From the first half of 2003 to the second half of 2009 the percentage of households below the poverty line declined from 54 percent to just 24.2 percent, a 55 percent decrease. Extreme poverty has also declined precipitously,", + " from 30.2 percent in 2003 to 7.4 percent in 2009, a decline of over 75 percent.\n\nIt is important to note that these poverty measures only include income measures and do not take into account the non-income benefits generated by numerous social programs that have benefited the poor. Access to health care, education and discounted food all contribute to improving the conditions of Venezuela\u2019s poor. In addition, Venezuela has made important strides in reducing inequality. From 2002-2008, Venezuela led Latin America in decreased inequality, and currently has the most equitable distribution of income in the region.\n\nSpin: Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s spend-happy policies have led to dangerously high inflation,", + " leading to serious economic problems.\n\nThe Truth: While the inflation rate in Venezuela is relatively high, it has not reached dangerous levels, as is often reported. Inflation was 31 percent in 2008, however much of this was in the first half of the year due to temporary price shocks. In 2009, inflation slowed to around 26 percent. To put this in perspective, when Ch\u00e1vez took office inflation was 29.5 percent, and reached 100 percent in 1996. Over the last seven years inflation has averaged roughly 21 percent per year, but this is barely over the threshold of 20 percent inflation that research has shown to negatively effect growth.\n\nThe minimum wage has also largely tracked inflation.", + " In addition, while some goods have increased more in price than the general index, some important goods have not. For instance, since December 2007, the cost of housing, household services, clothing, communications, and education have all increased less than the general rate of inflation. While food and health have both increased more, these are areas where the government of Venezuela has increased access and affordability for the poor.\n\nSpin: Venezuela\u2019s economic growth is the result of an \u201coil boom\u201d that\u2019s headed for a bust.\n\nThe Truth: While the rise in the price of oil clearly contributed to Venezuela\u2019s strong growth, it was not the only reason and there are signs that the economy can withstand fluctuations.", + " After the oil lock-out and subsequent recession the economy took off, growing 95 percent over the following five and half years. At the same time world oil prices continued to sharply rise. This led many media commentators to claim that Venezuela\u2019s growth is dependent on an unsustainable oil boom. However, during those five years of rapid growth it was in fact non-oil GDP that was the prime contributor to GDP growth. In fact, from 2005-2007 the oil sector was actually a drag on growth, decreasing around two percent a year, while on the other hand non-oil GDP was growing at around ten percent during the same period.\n\nLooking at the current recession in Venezuela also provides evidence that the economy is not based on an oil boom.", + " While Venezuela saw negative growth in 2009, this did not have to be so bad. The country has accumulated massive international reserves, and when oil prices dropped and the economy began to slow, the government could have used these reserves to fund stimulus measures to make up for the loss in demand. With relatively low levels of public debt, Venezuela also could have borrowed money internationally to finance counter-cyclical spending. Further evidence of this is that despite that the economy shrank 3.3 percent, poverty rates continued to decline and unemployment was less affected than in many other countries hit by the global recession.\n\nSpin: Venezuela supports terrorist groups including the FARC.\n\nThe Truth:", + " No specific proof of Venezuelan support for terrorist groups has ever been presented. Groups and individuals opposed to the Venezuelan government, both in Venezuela and internationally, have continually made allegations that the Venezuelan government supports groups on the State Department list of terrorist organizations, most commonly the FARC. Despite this, no specific, verifiable proof has ever been presented; indeed many of the allegations are based on a single, discredited source (see below). Venezuela and Colombia share a border of more than 2000 km, much of which is dense, sparsely populated jungle; it is likely that the FARC operates on both sides of the border area.\n\nA new round of allegations of Venezuelan support for the FARC occurred after a March 2008 raid on a FARC camp in the eastern jungle of Ecuador near the Colombian border.", + " Although the bombing raid killed 26 people and destroyed much of the camp, the Colombian military (itself responsible for horrific human rights abuses and ties to right wing paramilitaries) claims to have recovered laptops, hard drives and memory cards that were not damaged in the raid. The Colombian government has since made numerous allegations of Venezuelan (and Ecuadorean) support for the FARC based on these files. Colombian officials have leaked excerpts of the documents, exaggerating the significance of the contents for possible political purposes. Colombia also made a number of other allegations that stemmed from the laptops regarding an alleged FARC \u201cdirty bomb\u201d and the FARC\u2019s ties to Ecuador,", + " both of which were quickly proven false. Some experts expressed skepticism regarding the laptop documents in part due to how quickly Colombia appeared to find incriminating information. An Interpol analysis stated that it would take more than one thousand years to read through it all, at a rate of a hundred pages per day, yet Colombia began releasing some of what would be the most damning evidence within just days of the raid. Yet the Colombian authorities continued to claim to find evidence from the computer files linking not only the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian governments to the FARC, but also investigative journalists, activists, and others. Recently released Colombian government documents show that some of these individuals were the targets of \u201csmear campaigns\u201d by the Colombian presidency and the intelligence agency.\n\nThe allegation that received the most press coverage was that Ch\u00e1vez had offered some $300 million in support to the FARC.", + " This turned out, however, to be based on a far-reaching interpretation of sections of the files, and it is also possible that various alleged communications between the FARC and Venezuelan government actually related to Venezuela\u2019s role in the months just prior to the raid in negotiating the release of high-profile hostages from the FARC. After a phone call from President George W. Bush, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe abruptly ended Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s official mediation role. The released hostage Pablo Moncoyo, after being freed following over a decade in captivity, thanked Ch\u00e1vez but not Uribe for his release.\n\nAlthough the U.S. and Colombia have both cited the laptops as evidence of Venezuelan support for the FARC,", + " most other countries and international bodies have not, and in April 2008 OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza testified before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs that there was no evidence of Venezuelan support for the FARC.\n\nAn Interpol analysis of the laptops concluded that because of the handling of the evidence by the Colombian government for days before it was turned over, that it would not hold up in judicial proceedings. The computers and other devices were in control of the Colombia military for two days until they were handed over to computer experts, and then it was another week before they were given to Interpol. Interpol did not analyze the contents of the documents,", + " in fact they had non-Spanish speakers evaluate the contents, despite that most \u2013 if not all \u2013 of the emails and other text was in Spanish.\n\nRecently, further allegations have been made about Venezuelan support for both the FARC and the ETA (the Basque separatist group that is also labeled a terrorist organization). This made a splash in the media in March 2010 when a Spanish judge brought charges against Venezuela claiming Venezuelan support for the ETA. The evidence cited was again from the recovered FARC laptops, and during a recent hearing before the Senate Armed Service Committee, Douglas Fraser, the U.S. Commander of the U.S. Southern Command,", + " testified that he was not aware of any evidence of Venezuelan support for the ETA. Although he later recanted these statements after meeting with the U.S. State Department, this seems more political than factual. It is unlikely that the head of the U.S. military in Latin America would not be aware of this evidence, had if it existed.\n\nSpin: Hugo Ch\u00e1vez controls everything that happens in Venezuela in a \u201ctop-down\u201d fashion.\n\nThe Truth: Venezuela\u2019s \u201cBolivarian Revolution\u201d empowers communities to make decisions and exert more control over their lives in a \u201cbottom-up\u201d distribution of power. Most media coverage of Venezuela focuses on the role of president Ch\u00e1vez,", + " framing coverage of developments in Venezuela whereby decision-making appears to be unilaterally made by Ch\u00e1vez. This ignores, however, the efforts that have been made in Venezuela to increase political participation and empower grassroots organizations, not to mention the role of the legislature, the judiciary, government agencies, and political parties \u2013 both Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s and independent parties.\n\nDemocratic participation has increased greatly under Ch\u00e1vez. As noted above, voter participation increased from 54 percent to 73 percent from the 1998 presidential election to the 2006 election. This was the result of policies such as voter registration drives that allowed millions of previously disenfranchised voters to have a voice in politics.\n\nParticipation extends beyond elections,", + " with community councils being a main source for grassroots empowerment. The new Constitution in 1999 formed the legal basis for a participatory democracy through the codification of Local Public Planning Councils. In 2006 the law was modified to give more power and control directly to Community Councils; there are an estimated 20,000 of these in Venezuela. The councils can plan and implement community projects, and can request funding from the state. They have drastically changed the previous system, where the decision-making process in such projects was concentrated in the hands of local and national authorities.\n\nSelf-organization has been a dominant theme throughout the Ch\u00e1vez administration,", + " and was the primary force that overturned the April 2002 coup d\u2019etat. After the military ousted Ch\u00e1vez in April 2002, and the coup leaders dissolved the nation\u2019s institutions, it was the grassroots that took to the streets demanding that democracy be respected. The successful mobilization led to the rapid overturning of the coup and the return of the democratically-elected Ch\u00e1vez to power.\n\nThe roots of these grassroots efforts come from an event in 1989 in Venezuela which became known as the Caracazo. Former president Carlos Andr\u00e9s P\u00e9rez, at the urging of the International Monetary Fund, implemented austere economic policies in the face of high inflation and high unemployment.", + " When bus fares were raised in the capital city of Caracas, popular protests ensued. The government responded with a harsh military crackdown, resulting in the death of at least 450 Venezuelans.\n\nResources:\n\nOnline:\n\nVenezuela Analysis\n\nJules Boykoff, \u201cDevil or Democrat? Hugo Ch\u00e1vez and the US Prestige Press.\u201d New Political Science, Volume 31, Issue 1 March 2009, pages 3 \u2013 26. (A shortened version of this article was posted on Venezuela Analysis.)\n\nDan Beeton, \u201cWrong Numbers: Distorting Venezuela\u2019s record on poverty,\u201d Extra!, November/December 2006\n\nLee Salter,", + " \u201cA Decade of Propaganda? The BBC\u2019s Reporting of Venezuela.\u201d Venezuelanalysis.com, December 14th 2009\n\nMark Weisbrot\u2019s op-ed\u2019s and columns on Venezuela, Center for Economic and Policy Research.\n\n[1] The Washington Post, \u201cMeddle With Mr. Chavez.\u201d (Editorial) March 1, 2003. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A18965-2003Feb28\u00acFound=true] Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[2] The Los Angeles Times, \u201cHugo Chavez flexes his muzzle.\u201d (Editorial)", + " January 26, 2010. [http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/26/opinion/la-ed-rctv26-2010jan26] Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[3] Darcy Crowe, \u201cVenezuela\u2019s Chavez Moves to Tighten Control Over Private Media.\u201d The Wall Street Journal. July 9, 2009 [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124717745352519889.html] Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[4] Miguel Perez, \u201cMuzzling the news media broadcasts a loss of Venezuela democracy.\u201d Chicago Sun-Times.", + " January 9, 2007. Reposted at http://www.creators.com/opinion/miguel-perez/say-adios-to-venezuelan-democracy.html. Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[5] Andres Oppenheimer, \u201cOAS silence on Venezuela censorship scary.\u201d The Miami Herald. June 7, 2007.\n\nReposted at http://www.hacer.org/current/Vene145.php. Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[6] Simon Romero, \u201cNonrenewal of TV License Stokes Debate in Venezuela.\u201d New York Times, January 1,", + " 2007. [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/world/americas/01venez.html?_r=1] Accessed April 26, 2010.\n\n[7] Carlos Chirinos, \u201cVenezuela investiga el \u201cCarmonazo\u201d.\u201d BBC Mundo, October 5, 2004. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/latin_america/newsid_3718000/3718810.stm] Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[8] David Adams and Phil Gunson, \u201cMedia accused in failed coup.\u201d St.", + " Petersburg Times, April 18, 2002. [http://www.stpetersburgtimes.com/2002/04/18/Worldandnation/Media_accused_in_fail.shtml] Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[9] On the Media (NPR), \u201cPulling the Plug.\u201d May 18, 2007. [http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/05/18/05] Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[10] Patrick McElwee, \u201cIs Free Speech Really at Stake? Venezuela and RCTV.\u201d VenezuelaAnalysis.com.", + " May 23rd 2007. [http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2398] Accessed April 26, 2010.\n\n[11] Christopher Toothaker, \u201cLast Anti-Chavez TV Station Faces Probe, Shutdown.\u201d Associated Press. May 16, 2009. [http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=7604504] Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[12] Human Rights Watch, \u201cA Decade Under Ch\u00e1vez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela.\u201d September 18, 2008. (footnote 184,", + " p.74; footnote 181, p.73) [http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/venezuela0908web.pdf] Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[13] Simon Romero, \u201cCh\u00e1vez Looks at His Critics in the Media and Sees the Enemy.\u201d The New York Times. June 1, 2007. [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/world/americas/01venez.html] Accessed April 27, 2010.\n\n[14] McElwee. ", + " When this and several other discrepancies were pointed out to Mr. Stone in the interview, his attitudes varied. \u201cI\u2019m sorry about that, and I apologize,\u201d he said about the 1998 election. But he also complained of \u201cnitpicking\u201d and \u201csplitting hairs\u201d and said that it was not his intention to make either a program for C-Span or engage in what he called \u201ca cruel and brutal\u201d Mike Wallace-style interrogation of Mr. Ch\u00e1vez that the BBC broadcast this month.\n\n\u201cWe are dealing with a big picture, and we don\u2019t stop to go into a lot of the criticism and details of each country,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cIt\u2019s a 101 introduction to a situation in South America that most Americans and Europeans don\u2019t know about,\u201d he added, because of \u201cyears and years of blighted journalism.\u201d\n\nPhoto\n\n\u201cI think there has been so much unbalance that we are definitely a counter to that,\u201d he also said.\n\nTariq Ali, the British-Pakistani historian and commentator who helped write the screenplay, added: \u201cIt\u2019s hardly a secret that we support the other side. It\u2019s an opinionated documentary.\u201d\n\nInitial reviews of \u201cSouth of the Border\u201d have been tepid. Stephen Holden in The New York Times called it a \u201cprovocative,", + " if shallow, exaltation of Latin American socialism,\u201d while Entertainment Weekly described it as \u201crose-colored agitprop.\u201d\n\nSome of the misinformation that Mr. Stone, who consistently mispronounces Mr. Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s name as Sha-VEZ instead of CHA-vez, inserts into \u201cSouth of the Border\u201d is relatively benign. A flight from Caracas to La Paz, Bolivia, flies mostly over the Amazon, not the Andes, and the United States does not \u201cimport more oil from Venezuela than any other OPEC nation,\u201d a distinction that has belonged to Saudi Arabia during the period 2004-10.\n\nBut other questionable assertions relate to fundamental issues,", + " including Mr. Stone\u2019s contention that human rights, a concern in Latin America since the Jimmy Carter era, is \u201ca new buzz phrase,\u201d used mainly to clobber Mr. Ch\u00e1vez. Mr. Stone argues in the film that Colombia, which \u201chas a far worse human rights record than Venezuela,\u201d gets \u201ca pass in the media that Ch\u00e1vez doesn\u2019t\u201d because of his hostility to the United States.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nAs Mr. Stone begins to speak, the logo of Human Rights Watch, which closely monitors the situation in both Colombia and Venezuela and has issued tough reports on both, appears on the screen.", + " That would seem to imply that the organization is part of the \u201cpolitical double standard\u201d of which Mr. Stone complains.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s true that many of Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s fiercest critics in Washington have turned a blind eye to Colombia\u2019s appalling human rights record,\u201d said Jos\u00e9 Miguel Vivanco, director of the group\u2019s Americas division. \u201cBut that\u2019s no reason to ignore the serious damage that Ch\u00e1vez has done to human rights and the rule of law in Venezuela,\u201d which includes summarily expelling Mr. Vivanco and an associate, in violation of Venezuelan law, after Human Rights Watch issued a critical report in 2008.\n\nPhoto\n\nA similarly tendentious attitude pervades Mr.", + " Stone\u2019s treatment of the April 2002 coup that briefly toppled Mr. Ch\u00e1vez. One of the key events in that crisis, perhaps its instigation, was the \u201cLlaguno Bridge Massacre,\u201d in which 19 people were shot to death in circumstances that remain murky, with Ch\u00e1vez supporters blaming the opposition, and vice versa.\n\nMr. Stone\u2019s film includes some new footage from the confrontation at the bridge, but its basic argument hews closely to that of \u201cThe Revolution Will Not Be Televised,\u201d a film the Ch\u00e1vez camp has endorsed. That documentary, however, has been subject to rebuttal by another,", + " called \u201cX-Ray of a Lie,\u201d and by Brian A. Nelson\u2019s book \u201cThe Silence and the Scorpion: The Coup Against Ch\u00e1vez and the Making of Modern Venezuela\u201d (Nation Books), neither of which Mr. Stone mentions.\n\nInstead Mr. Stone relies heavily on the account of Gregory Wilpert, who witnessed some of the exchange of gunfire and is described as an American academic. But Mr. Wilpert is also the husband of Mr. Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s consul-general in New York, Carol Delgado, and a longtime editor and president of the board of a Web site, Venezuelanalysis.com, set up with donations from the Venezuelan government,", + " affiliations that Mr. Stone does not disclose.\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\nLike Mr. Stone\u2019s take on the Kennedy assassination, this section of \u201cSouth of the Border\u201d hinges on the identity of a sniper or snipers who may or may not have been part of a larger conspiracy.", + " As Mr. Stone puts it in the film, \u201cShots were fired from the rooftops of buildings, and members from both sides were hit in the head.\u201d\n\nIn a telephone interview this week, Mr. Wilpert acknowledged that the first shots seem to have been fired from a building known as La Nacional, which housed the administrative offices of Freddy Bernal, the pro-Ch\u00e1vez mayor of central Caracas. In a congressional investigation following the coup, Mr. Bernal, who led an elite police squadron before taking office, was questioned about a military officer\u2019s testimony that the Defense Ministry had ordered Mr. Bernal to fire on opposition demonstrators.", + " Mr. Bernal described that charge as \u201ctotally false.\u201d\n\n\u201cI did not know about that, I didn\u2019t even know it was a Ch\u00e1vista building,\u201d Mr. Stone said initially, before retreating to his original position. \u201cShow me some Zapruder footage, and it might be different,\u201d he said.\n\nThe second half of \u201cSouth of the Border\u201d is a road movie in which Mr. Stone, sometimes accompanied by Mr. Ch\u00e1vez, meets with leaders of Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Ecuador and Cuba. But here, too, he bends facts and omits information that might undermine his thesis of a continent-wide \u201cBolivarian revolution,\u201d with Mr.", + " Ch\u00e1vez in the forefront.\n\nPhoto\n\nVisiting Argentina, for example, he accurately describes the economic collapse of 2001. But then he jumps to N\u00e9stor Kirchner\u2019s election to the presidency in May 2003 and lets Mr. Kirchner and his successor \u2014 and wife \u2014 Cristina Fern\u00e1ndez de Kirchner claim that \u201cwe began a different policy than before.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nIn reality, Mr. Kirchner\u2019s presidential predecessor, Eduardo Duhalde, and Mr. Duhalde\u2019s finance minister, Roberto Lavagna, were the architects of that policy shift and the subsequent economic recovery, which began while Mr.", + " Kirchner was still the obscure governor of a small province in Patagonia. Mr. Kirchner was originally a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Mr. Duhalde\u2019s, but the two men are now political enemies, which explains the Kirchners\u2019 desire to write him out of their version of history.\n\nTrying to explain the rise of Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia who is a Ch\u00e1vez acolyte, Mr. Ali refers to a controversial and botched water privatization in the city of Cochabamba.\n\n\u201cThe government decided to sell the water supply of Cochabamba to Bechtel, a U.S. corporation,\u201d he says,", + " \u201cand this corporation, one of the things it got the government to do was to pass a law saying that from now on it was illegal for poor people to go out onto the roofs and collect rainwater in receptacles.\u201d\n\nIn reality, the government did not sell the water supply: it granted a consortium that included Bechtel a 40-year management concession in return for injections of capital to expand and improve water service and construction of a dam for electricity and irrigation. Nor is the issue of water collection by the poor exactly as Mr. Ali presents it.\n\n\u201cThe rainwater permit issue always comes up,\u201d Jim Shultz, a water privatization critic and co-editor of \u201cDignity and Defiance:", + " Stories of Bolivia\u2019s Challenge to Globalization\u201d (University of California Press), said in an e-mail message. \u201cWhat I can say is that the privatization of the public water system was accompanied by a government plan to require permits in order to dig wells and such, and that it could have potentially granted management concessions to Bechtel or others.\u201d\n\nBut \u201cit never got that far,\u201d he added, and \u201cit remains unclear to me to this day what type of water collection systems would have been included.\u201d He concluded: \u201cMany believed that would have included some rain collection systems. That could also easily be hype.\u201d\n\nAsked about the discrepancy,", + " Mr. Ali replied that \u201cwe can talk about all this endlessly,\u201d but \u201cthe aim of our film is very clear and basic.\u201d In \u201cSouth of the Border,\u201d he added: \u201cWe were not writing a book, or having an academic debate. It was to have a sympathetic view of these governments.\u201d ", + " New York Times reporter Larry Rohter turned in a factually challenged fact-check of Oliver Stone's new film South of the Border. So Stone and the film's co-writers Mark Weisbrot and Tariq Ali wrote a devastating rebuttal. A reader passed along a link to that piece to Rohter, suggesting that he \"should be embarrassed\" by his review.\n\nUnsurprisingly, Rohter would not seem to be embarrassed at all, judging his reply email, which FAIR has received:\n\nDear Mr. Fuentes: Actually, it's Oliver Stone and company who need to heed your advice. I've been scrupulously honest in my reporting and writing,", + " and they are offended and embarrassed at having their many errors and inaccuracies disclosed. Rather than owning up to those mistakes, they've chosen to double down and up the ante. Where they might merely have been mistaken before, they are now lying outright, the letter you link to below being the prime example. Don't take my word for it. I urge you to go back and look at what Stone and his screenwriters are saying in that letter. As regards the issue of U.S. oil imports from OPEC countries, for example, go ahead and click on the two links that Stone & Weisbrot provide and look at the numbers contained there.", + " You will see that the United States has imported more oil from Saudi Arabia than Venezuela every year since 2000. So no matter how Stone and company want to slice, dice bend or twist it, the assertion they make in the film about U.S. oil imports is simply wrong. The numbers are clear and indisputable. Same thing goes for the 1998 Venezuela presidential race. The numbers don't lie: Irene Saez got only 3 percent of the vote, compared to 40 percent for Henrique Salas Romer, yet she is Chavez's \"main opponent\" and he is not? Let's apply that same pretzel logic to some other elections and see what we come up with.", + " Was George Bush's \"main opponent\" in 2000 Al Gore or Ralph Nader? Was Harry Truman's \"main opponent\" in 1948 Thomas E. Dewey or the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond? Was Jimmy Carter's \"main opponent\" in 1980 Ronald Reagan or John Anderson? It's also worthwhile using a little bit of simple logic to analyze the issue of the Cochabamba water privatization. Tariq Ali's argument seems to be that there is no substantial difference between a sale and a 40 year lease. Granted that the notion of private ownership may be anathema to someone with his ideological leanings,", + " and therefore his understanding of different property regimens may be flawed. But the outright sale of an asset is not the same as granting a concession to use that asset for a fixed period of time, as anyone who has ever leased a car knows well. The devil is in the details, and Stone and company have chosen to ignore those. I could subject each of their other wild and erroneous claims to the same kind of dissection for you, but I trust you get the picture from the examples I've cited. Thank you for writing.\n\nTalk about doubling down.\n\nRohter, for some reason, decided that this passing comment in the film deserved to be debunked:", + " \"We import more oil from Venezuela than any other OPEC nations.\" As the film makes clear, that comment was made by an oil industry analyst in a 2002 TV appearance, though Rohter's Times piece oddly cited 2004-10 data to contradict him. Stone and co. cite 1997-2001 as a more relevant time frame; in that period, the United States did in fact buy more oil from Venezuela than from Saudi Arabia (though in 2000-01, Saudi Arabia was the bigger supplier). In his emailed response, Rohter ignores this explanation, and says the links provided by Stone,", + " Weisbrot and Ali don't support their point. It would seem that they do. It's a strange item to seize on, anyway; the filmmakers included the oil analyst to make the point that various business interests--including oil companies--supported the coup against Chavez, which is not at all controversial.\n\nRohter's complaint about Chavez's 1998 election is similarly tendentious. Irene Saez was considered by many observers to be Chavez's main rival in the presidential campaign. That's what reporter Bart Jones says in the documentary; it's also what the New York Times reported shortly after Chavez's victory (12/9/", + "98):\n\nUntil last spring, Irene Saez, a former Miss Universe, had been leading in voter surveys, peaking at 35.7 percent to Mr. Chavez's 20.6 percent. Then the price of oil, which underpins Venezuela's entire economy, fell steeply. \"We went from an optimistic country to a pessimistic one,\" said Luis Vicente Leon, director of the Datanalysis polling agency. The following month, Miss Saez accepted a lukewarm endorsement from one of the two traditional parties. The backing compromised her claims to being an outsider and her popularity ratings slid into the single digits.\n\nOn the debate over Bolivian water rights,", + " the matter seems hardly worth reviewing; it comes down to how one chooses to characterize a deal that would hand a private company 40-year control over a nation's water supply. Apparently in Rohter's mind, calling such a deal \"privatization\" is evidence that someone has the wrong \"ideological leanings\" to understand complex financial transactions.\n\nRohter assures that he \"could subject each of their other wild and erroneous claims to the same kind of dissection for you.\" I think we've seen enough.\n" + ], + "length": 8372, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 30, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 With John Kerry blasting the \"screaming\" evidence of a chemical weapons attack in Syria, the Obama administration is moving closer to launching a military strike on the country. On Saturday, President Obama held a three-hour meeting with his national security team on the issue, and CBS News last night shared three notable details by way of sources: There was absolutely no questioning the use of force, Obama wants the public to see a declassified report backing a potential military move before that force is used (CBS says it could be out today or tomorrow), and the president has ordered the presentation of legal justifications for a strike. Chuck Hagel, for his part, tells the BBC that the military is \"ready to go\" and prepped to \"comply with whatever option the president wishes to take.\" A US strike would likely last two days at the most; Washington would likely use cruise missiles or long-range bombers aimed at military targets\u2014though not ones directly linked to chemical weapons, the Washington Post reports. (Time reports that US officials have suggested they'll likely aim for artillery, missile launchers, and other weapons with the potential to launch chemical agents.) Four warships, as well as a British submarine, are said to be at the ready in the Mediterranean, CBS notes, adding that an attack would probably occur at night, minimizing civilian casualties. Meanwhile: The regime says claims it used chemical weapons are \"utterly and completely\" off the mark, and is calling on the US to reveal evidence to the contrary, the Guardian notes in a liveblog. \"There is no country in the world that uses a weapon of ultimate destruction against its own people,\" says Syria's foreign minister, per the BBC. The UK is also considering possible military action, and British lawmakers have been called back from vacation to address the situation, CNN notes. Tweets David Cameron: \"Speaker agrees my request to recall Parliament on Thurs. There'll be a clear Govt motion & vote on UK response to chemical weapons attacks.\" Russia and China are warning against any military strike by the US and allies, the BBC reports. Such a move would bring \"new suffering in Syria and catastrophic consequences for other countries of the Middle East and North Africa,\" says a rep for Moscow's foreign ministry.\n", + "docs": [ + "Image caption The UN team spoke to witnesses and survivors in Muadhamiya\n\nRussia and China have stepped up their warnings against military intervention in Syria, with Moscow saying any such action would have \"catastrophic consequences\" for the region.\n\nThe US and its allies are considering launching strikes on Syria in response to deadly attacks last week.\n\nThe US said there was \"undeniable\" proof of a chemical attack, on Monday.\n\nUN chemical weapons inspectors are due to start a second day of investigations in the suburbs of Damascus.\n\nThe UN team came under sniper fire as they tried to visit an area west of the city on Monday.\n\nA spokesman for UK Prime Minister David Cameron says the UK is making contingency plans for military action in Syria.\n\nMr Cameron has cut short his holiday and returned to London to deal with the Syrian crisis.\n\nThe administration has deliberately left itself almost no room for manoeuvre - its credibility would now be zero if it failed to take some form of military action How Syria conflict affects neighbours\n\nRussian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich has called on the international community to show \"prudence\"", + " over the crisis and observe international law.\n\n\"Attempts to bypass the Security Council, once again to create artificial groundless excuses for a military intervention in the region are fraught with new suffering in Syria and catastrophic consequences for other countries of the Middle East and North Africa,\" he said in a statement.\n\nLate on Monday, the US said it was postponing a meeting on Syria with Russian diplomats, citing \"ongoing consultations\" about alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria.\n\nHours later, Russia expressed regret about the decision. The two sides had been due to meet in The Hague on Wednesday to discuss setting up an international conference on finding a political solution to the crisis.\n\nThe Russian deputy defence minister,", + " Gennady Gatilov said working out the political parameters for a resolution on Syria would be especially useful, with the threat of force hanging over the country.\n\nImage caption UN chemical weapons inspectors spent nearly three hours in the suburb of Muadhamiya in western Damascus on Monday. Image caption The inspectors visited two hospitals and interviewed survivors, eyewitnesses and doctors over last week's suspected chemical attack near the Syrian capital. Image caption Amateur video was posted online apparently showing a UN inspector measuring and photographing a canister. previous slide next slide\n\nOn Monday, Mr Cameron spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin who said there was no evidence yet that Syria had used chemical weapons against rebels,", + " Mr Cameron's office said.\n\nThe official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said Western powers were rushing to conclusions about who may have used chemical weapons in Syria before UN inspectors had completed their investigation.\n\nUN visit\n\nBoth the Syrian government and rebels have blamed each other for last Wednesday's attacks.\n\nMedical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said three hospitals it supported in the Damascus area had treated about 3,600 patients with \"neurotoxic symptoms\", of whom 355 had died.\n\nModels for possible intervention Iraq 1991: US-led global military coalition, anchored in international law; explicit mandate from UN Security Council to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait\n\nUS-led global military coalition,", + " anchored in international law; explicit mandate from UN Security Council to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait Balkans 1990s: US arms supplied to anti-Serb resistance in Croatia and Bosnia in defiance of UN-mandated embargo; later US-led air campaign against Serb paramilitaries. In 1999, US jets provided bulk of 38,000 Nato sorties against Serbia to prevent massacres in Kosovo - legally controversial with UN Security Council resolutions linked to \"enforcement measures\"\n\nUS arms supplied to anti-Serb resistance in Croatia and Bosnia in defiance of UN-mandated embargo; later US-led air campaign against Serb paramilitaries.", + " In 1999, US jets provided bulk of 38,000 Nato sorties against Serbia to prevent massacres in Kosovo - legally controversial with UN Security Council resolutions linked to \"enforcement measures\" Somalia 1992-93: UN Security Council authorised creation of international force with aim of facilitating humanitarian supplies as Somali state failed. Gradual US military involvement without clear objective culminated in Black Hawk Down disaster in 1993. US troops pulled out\n\nUN Security Council authorised creation of international force with aim of facilitating humanitarian supplies as Somali state failed. Gradual US military involvement without clear objective culminated in Black Hawk Down disaster in 1993.", + " US troops pulled out Libya 2011: France and UK sought UN Security Council authorisation for humanitarian operation in Benghazi in 2011. Russia and China abstained but did not veto resolution. Air offensive continued until fall of Gaddafi Models for possible intervention\n\nUS officials said there was \"little doubt\" that President Bashar al-Assad's government was to blame.\n\nUN inspectors spent nearly three hours in the western district of Muadhamiya on Monday where they visited two hospitals and interviewed survivors, eyewitnesses and doctors.\n\nA UN spokesman said they had collected some samples.\n\nEarlier in the day, the UN convoy came under fire from unidentified snipers and was forced to turn back before resuming its journey.\n\nUN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned the shooting and asked the UN team in Syria to register a complaint.\n\n'", + "Accountability'\n\nIn the most forceful US reaction yet, US Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday described the recent attacks in the Damascus area as a \"moral obscenity\".\n\nHe said the delay in allowing UN inspectors to the sites was a sign the Syrian government had something to hide.\n\nHe said Washington had additional information about the attacks that it would make public in the days ahead.\n\n\"What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world. It defies any code of morality,\" Mr Kerry said at a news conference on Monday.\n\n\"Make no mistake, President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world's most heinous weapons against the world's most vulnerable people.\"\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption John Kerry:", + " \"There is a clear reason that the world has banned entirely the use of chemical weapons\"\n\nWashington has recently bolstered its naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean and military leaders from the US, UK and their allies have convened a meeting in Jordan.\n\nAnalysts believe the most likely US action would be sea-launched cruise missiles targeting Syrian military installations.\n\nBut Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters on Monday the West had not produced any proof that President Assad's forces had used chemical weapons.\n\nHe was responding to suggestions from some Western countries that military action against the Syrian government could be taken without a UN mandate.\n\nMr Lavrov said the use of force without Security Council backing would be \"a crude violation of international law\".\n\nEarlier,", + " UK Foreign Secretary William Hague told the BBC an international military response to the suspected use of chemical weapons would be possible without the backing of the UN.\n\nThe UN Security Council is divided, with Russia and China opposing military intervention and the UK and France warning that the UN could be bypassed if there was \"great humanitarian need\".\n\nIn a column in The Times newspaper, former UK PM Tony Blair has written that if the West does not intervene to support freedom and democracy in Egypt and Syria, the Middle East will face catastrophe\n\nThe UN says more than 100,000 people have been killed since the uprising against President Assad began more than two years ago.", + " The conflict has produced more than 1.7 million registered refugees. ", + " In October 1983, the United States led a military invasion of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island nation, after a bloody coup ousted the government of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, who was assassinated. President Ronald Reagan was said to have been concerned about a 10,000-foot-long airstrip that the communist country's military was building, which he thought would enable planes loaded with arms from Cuba to reach insurgents in Central America. The administration was also concerned about the safety of 800 American medical students studying in Grenada.\n\nGrenada: Unilateral U.S. military action In October 1983, the United States led a military invasion of Grenada,", + " a tiny Caribbean island nation, after a bloody coup ousted the government of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, who was assassinated. President Ronald Reagan was said to have been concerned about a 10,000-foot-long airstrip that the communist country's military was building, which he thought would enable planes loaded with arms from Cuba to reach insurgents in Central America. The administration was also concerned about the safety of 800 American medical students studying in Grenada. AP\n\nSince the Vietnam War, the United States has engaged in several military interventions. As the West looks ready to act against Syria, accused of using chemical weapons against its own citizens, here are 10 instances when America has intervened,", + " sometimes without authorization from the United Nations. Produced by Anup Kaphle.\n\nPresident Obama is weighing a military strike against Syria that would be of limited scope and duration, designed to serve as punishment for Syria\u2019s use of chemical weapons and as a deterrent, while keeping the United States out of deeper involvement in that country\u2019s civil war, according to senior administration officials.\n\nThe timing of such an attack, which would probably last no more than two days and involve sea-launched cruise missiles \u2014 or, possibly, long-range bombers \u2014 striking military targets not directly related to Syria\u2019s chemical weapons arsenal, would be dependent on three factors: completion of an intelligence report assessing Syrian government culpability in last week\u2019s alleged chemical attack;", + " ongoing consultation with allies and Congress; and determination of a justification under international law.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re actively looking at the various legal angles that would inform a decision,\u201d said an official who spoke about the presidential deliberations on the condition of anonymity. Missile-armed U.S. warships are already positioned in the Mediterranean.\n\nAs the administration moved rapidly toward a decision, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said the use of chemical weapons in an attack Wednesday against opposition strongholds on the outskirts of Damascus is now \u201cundeniable.\u201d\n\nEvidence being gathered by United Nations experts in Syria was important, Kerry said, but not necessary to prove what is already \u201cgrounded in facts,", + " informed by conscience and guided by common sense.\u201d\n\nThe team of U.N. weapons investigators on Monday visited one of three rebel-held suburbs where the alleged attack took place, after first being forced to withdraw when their vehicles came under sniper fire. The Syrian government, which along with Russia has suggested that the rebels were responsible for the chemical attack, agreed to the U.N. inspection over the weekend.\n\nVideos and statements by witnesses and relief organizations such as Doctors Without Borders have proved that an attack occurred, Kerry said. The U.S. intelligence report is to be released this week.\n\nAmong the factors, officials said, are that only the government is known to possess chemical weapons and the rockets to deliver them,", + " and its continuing control of chemical stocks has been closely monitored by U.S. intelligence.\n\nKerry said Syrian forces had engaged in a \u201ccynical attempt to cover up\u201d their actions, not only by delaying the arrival of the U.N. team but by shelling the affected area continually. Any U.S. strike would probably await the departure of the U.N. inspectors from Syria.\n\nKerry\u2019s statement, which he read to reporters in the State Department briefing room without taking questions, was part of an escalating administration drumbeat, which is likely to include a public statement by Obama in coming days. Officials said the public warnings are designed partly to wring any possible cooperation out of Russia \u2014 or an unlikely admission from the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad \u2014 before Obama makes his decision.\n\nThe administration decided to postpone a meeting with the Russians this week in The Hague to discuss a negotiated solution to the Syrian war,", + " \u201cgiven our ongoing consultations about the appropriate response to the chemical weapons attack in Syria on August 21,\u201d a State Department official said.\n\nAt the State Department, Kerry said, \u201cMake no mistake: President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world\u2019s most heinous weapons against the world\u2019s most vulnerable people. Nothing today is more serious, and nothing is receiving more serious scrutiny.\u201d\n\nHe and other officials drew a sharp distinction between U.S. action related to a violation of international law by what they called Assad\u2019s \u201cmassive\u201d use of chemical weapons and any direct military involvement in the Syrian conflict, which is in its third year.\n\n\u201cWhat we are talking about here is a potential response.", + ".. to this specific violation of international norms,\u201d White House press secretary Jay Carney said. \u201cWhile it is part of this ongoing Syrian conflict in which we have an interest and in which we have a clearly stated position, it is distinct in that regard.\u201d\n\nObama and other officials have said repeatedly that no U.S. troops would be sent to Syria. But despite Obama\u2019s year-old threat of an unspecified U.S. response if Assad crossed a \u201cred line\u201d by using chemical weapons, even a limited military engagement seemed unlikely before Wednesday\u2019s attack near Damascus.\n\n\u201cThis international norm cannot be violated without consequences,\u201d Kerry said.\n\nThe options under consideration are neither new nor open-ended,", + " officials said. The use of \u201climited stand-off strikes\u201d has long been among the options the Pentagon has provided Obama. \u201cPotential targets include high-value regime air defense, air, ground, missile, and naval forces as well as the supporting military facilities and command nodes,\u201d Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a June letter to Congress. \u201cStand-off air and missile systems could be used to strike hundreds of targets at a tempo of our choosing.\u201d\n\nAlthough Dempsey, who has questioned the wisdom of direct military involvement in Syria, said that such an operation would require \u201chundreds\u201d of ships and aircraft and potentially cost \u201cin the billions,\u201d the action that is being contemplated would be far smaller and designed more to send a message than to cripple Assad\u2019s military and change the balance of forces on the ground.", + " Syrian chemical weapons storage areas, which are numerous and widely dispersed, are seen as unlikely targets.\n\nThe language of international criminality has clearly resonated among U.S. allies and lawmakers.\n\n\u201cWe will have to act,\u201d said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who has long opposed any U.S. intervention, including the administration\u2019s decision this summer to send light arms to Syrian opposition forces. \u201cI don\u2019t think we can allow repeated use of chemical weapons now, an escalated use of chemical weapons, to stand.\u201d\n\nSen. Bob Corker (Tenn.), the senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee,", + " emphasized that a U.S. strike should not be directed at altering the dynamic of Syria\u2019s larger civil war.\n\n\u201cI think it should be surgical. It should be proportional. It should be in response to what\u2019s happened with the chemicals,\u201d Corker said in an NBC interview. \u201cBut the fact is, I don\u2019t want us to get involved in such a way that we change that dynamic on the ground.\u201d The senator said he thought the administration\u2019s response to the attack was \u201cimminent.\u201d\n\nHouse Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said he had been in touch with the White House. In a statement, Boehner echoed concerns expressed by lawmakers from both parties that the administration further consult Congress before taking action.\n\nThe administration has said that it will follow international law in shaping its response.", + " Authorization for the use of force against another nation normally comes only from the U.N. Security Council \u2014 where Russia and China have vetoed previous resolutions against Assad \u2014 or in a NATO operation similar to the one launched in the former Yugoslavia in 1999, without a U.N. mandate.\n\nBut much of international law is untested, and administration lawyers are also examining possible legal justifications based on a violation of international prohibitions on chemical weapons use, or on an appeal for assistance from a neighboring nation such as Turkey.\n\nBritain, France and Turkey have said that they would support action if the use of chemical weapons was confirmed, but a clear-cut case is also likely to make approval easier for allies such as Germany,", + " which disagreed with NATO\u2019s 2011 operation in Libya despite the existence of a U.N. resolution.\n\n\u201cThe use of chemical weapons would be a crime against civilization,\u201d German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Monday. \u201cThe international community must act should the use of such weapons be confirmed.\u201d\n\nConsultations on Syria have been ongoing at the ambassadorial level at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where a meeting is scheduled for Wednesday. The Arab League, which approved the Libya operation, is also due to meet this week to discuss Syria.\n\nEd O\u2019Keefe contributed to this report. ", + " MC1(AW) Nathanael Miller / U.S. Navy The destroyer USS Barry, currently steaming in the Mediterranean Sea awaiting possible orders to attack Syria with Tomahawk cruise missiles, launches one against Libya on Mar. 19, 2011.\n\nTaking out Syria\u2019s chemical-weapons stockpile isn\u2019t easy \u2013 and is fraught with perils, including creating plumes of deadly vapors that could kill civilians downwind of such attacks.\n\nThat\u2019s why Pentagon officials suggest that any U.S. and allied military strike against Syria will tilt toward military, and command and control, targets \u2014including artillery and missile units that could be used to launch chemical weapons \u2014 instead of the bunkers believed to contain them.\n\nSecretary of State John Kerry made clear Monday that military action is all but inevitable in the coming days.", + " \u201cWe know that the Syrian regime maintains custody of these chemical weapons. We know that the Syrian regime has the capacity to do this with rockets,\u201d he said. \u201cPresident Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world\u2019s most heinous weapons against the world\u2019s most vulnerable people.\u201d\n\nBut targeting the weapons themselves may not make the most military sense.\n\nFor starters, neither the U.S. nor its allies know where Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is keeping his cache of hundreds of tons of sarin, mustard gas and other chemical agents. That means that any military strike to take them out will surely leave some untouched.\n\n(MORE:", + " The Two Big Reasons Obama Might Strike Syria)\n\nAfter more than two years of civil war, the Syrian military has distributed many of its chemical arms beyond the original 15 or so major storage sites where Western intelligence agencies believe they were housed when the conflict began. \u201cDispersing the stuff would make [attacking it] more difficult,\u201d says Eliot Cohen, a former Pentagon official now at the Johns Hopkins University\u2019s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Blowing up storage sites, he warns, also could \u201cleave the facilities so shattered that people can come in and pick the stuff up that you don\u2019t want them to pick up.\u201d\n\nSecondly,", + " the Obama Administration and its allies aren\u2019t considering deploying troops to seize and secure such weapons. The Pentagon has estimated that mission could take 75,000 troops.\n\nLast month, Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, detailed for Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the armed services committee, the difficulties associated with using military force to seize control of Syria\u2019s chemical stockpile.\n\n\u201cWe do this by destroying portions of Syria\u2019s massive stockpile, interdicting its movement and delivery, or by seizing and securing program components,\u201d he said in his July 19 letter assessing U.S. military options in Syria. \u201cAt a minimum,", + " this option would call for a no-fly zone as well as air and missile strikes involving hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines, and other enablers. Thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces would be needed to assault and secure critical sites.\u201d\n\nNeither the nation\u2014nor President Obama\u2014has any desire for U.S. combat boots on Syrian soil. So U.S. defense officials are weighing air strikes to punish Assad\u2019s government for their suspected use of chemical weapons. But because the Pentagon doesn\u2019t want to put primarily U.S. pilots at risk of being shot down and held hostage by Damascus, it\u2019s leaning toward the use of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles\u2014TLAMs\u2014against Syrian targets.\n\n(MORE:", + " Assad Taunts U.S. Over Iraq, Vietnam)\n\nUnfortunately for U.S. war planners, Tomahawk cruise missiles pack a relatively puny 1,000-pound warhead. That\u2019s unlikely to punch through buried chemical-weapons bunkers and generate the intense, sustained heat needed to incinerate sarin or other chemical weapons inside.\n\n\u201cDoing this with Tomahawks is going to be a challenge,\u201d says Amy Smithson, a chemical-weapons expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington. \u201cYou may get half of them with Tomahawks, but I have plume concerns\u2014anybody in the neighborhood is going to be in big,", + " bad trouble\u201d if the poisonous agents drift their way.\n\nBulk chemicals not already loaded into individual shells are especially vulnerable to being spread by bombing. That\u2019s why Smithson believes that Western governments should provide those near targeted chemical-storage sites with protective gear before launching any attacks. \u201cSyrian civilians and rebel forces,\u201d she says, \u201ccould benefit greatly from gas masks.\u201d\n\nDempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, sketched out a likely U.S. military response to Syria\u2019s use of chemical weapons in that July letter to Levin. He termed it Conduct Limited Stand-off Strikes:\n\nThis option uses lethal force to strike targets that enable the regime to conduct military operations,", + " proliferate advanced weapons, and defend itself. Potential targets include high-value regime air defense, air, ground, missile, and naval forces as well as the supporting military facilities and command nodes. Stand-off air and missile systems could be used to strike hundreds of targets at a tempo of our choosing.\n\nCohen is leery of a tit-for-tat strike that he fears the Obama Administration is considering. The apparent indiscriminate use of deadly agents against civilians, he argues, requires a disproportionate response by the U.S. to convince other states from doing the same.\n\n\u201cYou want people to understand that, if you do this, you lose your war,\u201d Cohen says.", + " The Obama Administration should consider destroying Syria\u2019s air force, its air defenses, and many of its airfields to retaliate if Syria\u2019s use of chemical weapons is confirmed. \u201cThe objective,\u201d he argues, \u201cshould be crippling the regime.\u201d\n\nMORE: Obama Can Strike Syria Unilaterally ", + " Obama orders release of report justifying Syria strike\n\nThe storied football team of Gallaudet, the nation's first university for the deaf\n\nStorm chaser on rescuing typhoon victims: \"You don't think about it, you just go\"\n\n(CBS News) President Barack Obama called his national security team together Saturday to talk about the next move in Syria. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led off the three-hour White House meeting with detailed analysis of the evidence about the chemical weapons attack, the disposition of victims and what the administration now believes is a near air-tight circumstantial case that the Syrian regime was behind it.\n\nObama ordered a declassified report be prepared for public release before any military strike commences.", + " That report, top advisers tell CBS News, is due to be released in a day or two.\n\nThere was no debate at the Saturday meeting that a military response is necessary. Obama ordered up legal justifications for a military strike, should he order one, outside of the United Nations Security Council. That process is well underway, and particular emphasis is being placed on alleged violations of the Geneva Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention.\n\nWatch: Kerry says Syria's chemical weapons \"should shock the conscience of the world.\"\n\nSecretary of State John Kerry said Monday the evidence \"is screaming at us\" that chemical weapons were used in Syria, and he said President Obama believes \"there must be accountability\"", + " -- the latest sign that the administration is getting ready for a possible military strike against the Assad regime.\n\nKerry said he had looked again at the pictures we all saw last week of the victims of the attack -- many of them children -- and can't get them out of his head.\n\n\"What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world,\" Kerry said. \"It defies any code of morality. Let me be clear: The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. By any standard, it is inexcusable and -- despite the excuses and equivocations that some have manufactured -- it is undeniable.\"\n\nThe words Kerry used and the force with which he delivered them left little doubt the U.S.", + " will soon strike Syria.\n\n\"President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who used the world's most heinous weapons against the world's most vulnerable people,\" he said.\n\nFour U.S. Navy warships are already in position in the eastern Mediterranean, ready to launch cruise missiles within hours of receiving the order from Obama. A British submarine is also reported to be in position.\n\nWatch: Kerry leaves little doubt U.S. will strike Syria, David Martin reports.\n\nThey would almost certainly fire their weapons in the middle of the night, the time when the U.S. military prefers to strike and when most civilians would be off the streets and less likely to be injured.\n\nAn attack limited to cruise missiles would fall well short of the shock and awe campaign on the opening night of the Iraq War,", + " but officials said it would be large enough to damage the Syrian military's ability to launch future chemical weapons attacks.\n\nThe U.S. has huge military advantage, so there is little doubt cruise missiles could destroy targets ranging from command centers to launchers used to fire chemical weapons.\n\nObama wants to send a message about the consequences of using chemical weapons, but the Syrian regime is playing for much bigger stakes: it is fighting for its life. ", + " Damascus, Syria (CNN) -- Saying \"there is no doubt who is responsible for this heinous use of chemical weapons attack in Syria: the Syrian regime,\" Vice President Joe Biden signaled Tuesday that the United States -- with its allies -- was ready to act.\n\n\"Those who use chemical weapons against defenseless men, women and children should and must be held accountable,\" Biden said in a speech to the American Legion.\n\nThe vice president's remarks echo those made by other U.S. officials in recent days, as well as many of the nation's foremost allies.\n\nFrench President Francois Hollande said his administration was \"ready to punish those who made the decision to gas these innocent people,\" adding that \"everything leads us to believe\"", + " that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces are responsible.\n\nBritish Prime Minister David Cameron -- who talked Tuesday with U.S. President Barack Obama -- called lawmakers back from their summer vacations to consider a response to Syria, as the UK military prepares contingency plans.\n\nAnd U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told the BBC on Tuesday that U.S. forces are \"ready to go\" if ordered to strike Syria by President Barack Obama.\n\n\"The options are there. The United States Department of Defense is ready to carry out those options,\" Hagel said.\n\nWestern leaders were reacting to a growing consensus that the Syrian regime was responsible for an August 21 attack that killed more than 1,", + "300 people, most of them dying from exposure to toxic gases, according to rebel officials. The opposition -- which has said it's been targeted by chemical weapons attacks in the past as well -- backed up its latest allegations with gruesome video of rows of dead bodies, including women and children, with no visible wounds.\n\nOpinion: For U.S., Syria is truly a problem from hell\n\nSyrian officials, though, have steadfastly denied using chemical weapons in this or other cases.\n\nForeign Minister Walid Moallem said Tuesday that his government would never use such munitions against its own people, daring those who disagree to present evidence publicly.\n\nHe said rebel forces were to blame for security concerns near the suspected chemical sites,", + " arguing that Western leaders are using the claims as an excuse to go after al-Assad's regime.\n\n\"We all hear the drums of war,\" Moallem said. \"They want to attack Syria. I believe to use chemical weapons as a pretext is not a right.\"\n\nAnd if foreign powers do strike the Middle Eastern nation, its foreign minister said the government and its forces will fight back.\n\n\"Syria is not easy to swallow,\" said Moallem. \"We have the materials to defend ourselves. We will surprise others.\"\n\nU.N. inspectors in Syria, but what will they find?\n\nThe United Nations has sent inspectors to Syria to try to get to the bottom of the wildly conflicting accounts of chemical warfare.\n\nThe opposition says chemical payloads were among the ordnance fired into the rebel stronghold of Ghouta.", + " The government, via state TV reports, claims that its forces came into contact with toxic gas Saturday in Jobar, on the edge of Damascus -- blaming this on \"terrorists,\" the term it commonly uses for rebel fighters.\n\nCNN could not independently confirm either account, including videos purported to show the aftermath of each.\n\nMissile strikes on Syria likely response to chemical attack\n\nOn Monday, U.N. inspectors visited the town of Moadamiyet al-Sham, despite a close call with snipers that left one of their vehicles damaged and an explosion nearby.\n\nThe inspectors had been expected Tuesday to head to Ghouta, but that trip was pushed back a day \"in order to improve preparedness and safety for the team.\"\n\nMoallem blamed rebel forces for failing to guarantee the U.N.", + " group's safety and denying that its forces have delayed inspections by continually shelling Ghouta.\n\nVideo posted Tuesday to YouTube purported to show the area being shelled, though CNN could not verify this video's authenticity.\n\nYet Biden reiterated the claim that Syrian forces were shelling the suspected chemical attack site. And U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said it may be too late for a valid inspection of what happened -- saying \"too much time has passed\" and accusing al-Assad's government of using the U.N. investigation \"as a stalling tactic or a charade to hide behind.\"\n\nThe United States, meanwhile, is conducting its own investigation:", + " An intelligence report detailing evidence of the alleged attack could be released as early as Tuesday, a U.S. official told CNN. The report will include forensic evidence and intercepted communications among Syrian military commanders, according to the official.\n\nThe vice president said that beyond whatever inspectors do or do not find, common sense and the recent past point to one culprit.\n\n\"The Syrian regime are the only ones who have the weapons, have used chemical weapons multiple times in the past, have the means of delivering those weapons, have been determined to wipe out exactly the places that were attacked by chemical weapons,\" he said Tuesday.\n\nRussia leads international charge against strikes\n\nThe calls for a military response were not without opposition.\n\nRussia is leading the charge internationally,", + " with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov having said there is no proof yet Syria's government is behind last week's chemical attack. His office compares the Western allegations against Syria to claims Iraq was hoarding weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003 -- allegations that fell apart once American troops began searching for them.\n\nIntervening in Middle East turmoil: Mission impossible?\n\nAnd Tuesday, Russia's foreign ministry accused Washington of trying to \"create artificial groundless excuses for military intervention.\"\n\nMoscow bemoaned the U.S. postponement of a meeting that was scheduled for Wednesday in The Hague, where top diplomats from both countries had planned to discuss the war in Syria.\n\nAnd Russia criticized the United States for,", + " in its view, trying to bypass the U.N. Security Council to take action on the reported chemical attack.\n\nShould anything be moved through the U.N. council, Russia -- which has a permanent seat on it -- could block it.\n\nStill, that's what former British Foreign Secretary David Owen urged world leaders to do before unleashing missiles or warplanes on Syrian targets.\n\nOmran al-Zoubi, Syria's information minister, on Tuesday challenged the United States to \"present this proof to the rest of the world\" -- claiming that they are asking for trouble if they do not.\n\n\"If they don't have proof or evidence, then how are they going to stand up to the American public opinion and to the world public opinion and explain why they are attacking Syria?\" al-Zoubi told CNN from Damascus.\n\nSome worldwide have expressed concern that intervening in Syria may provoke broader conflict in the Middle East or ensnare Western powers in another bloody conflict after years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.\n\nCameron said that he understands those concerns,", + " vowing that any action would have to be \"proportionate,... legal (and) would have to be specifically about deterring the use of chemical weapons.\"\n\nStill, he said it's critically important that action be taken to show the international taboo against chemical weapons will not be tolerated.\n\n\"This is not about wars in the Middle East; this is not even about the Syrian conflict,\" he said. \"It's about use of chemical weapons and making sure, as a world, we deter their use and we deter the appalling scenes we've all seen on our television screens.\n\nSyria diplomacy: Why Jordan wants military meeting to be hush-hush\n\nCNN's Fred Pleitgen reported from Syria.", + " CNN's Hamdi Alkhshali reported from Atlanta and Jomana Karadsheh from Jordan. Michael Pearson wrote and reported from Atlanta. CNN's Greg Botelho, Ben Brumfield, Boriana Milanova, Chris Lawrence, Jim Acosta, Josh Levs, Joe Sterling, Elise Labott, Jill Dougherty and Saskya Vandoorne also contributed to this report. ", + " Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption In a BBC interview, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel says the military is \"ready to go\" in responding to Syria\n\nAmerican forces are \"ready\" to launch strikes on Syria if President Barack Obama chooses to order an attack, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel says.\n\n\"We have moved assets in place to be able to fulfil and comply with whatever option the president wishes to take,\" Mr Hagel told the BBC.\n\nThe White House said the US would release intelligence on last week's suspected attack in the next few days.\n\nThe UK Parliament is to be recalled on Thursday to discuss possible responses.\n\nPrime Minister David Cameron said the world could \"not stand idly by\"", + " after seeing \"appalling scenes of death and suffering\" caused by suspected chemical weapons attacks.\n\nAt the scene A good number of Syrians, in particular those supporting the regime, believe the visit of the UN chemical weapons investigation team is nothing but a move to justify a military attack on Syria. The opposition, however, thinks that these visits will lead to some evidence being unearthed, proving that chemical weapons have been used against civilians by the Syrian regime. Above all, fear and discomfort are palpable among those living in the capital. People are haunted by the possibility of a Western military strike on Syria, discussion of which is dominating the headlines of satellite channels.", + " \"I don't want Syria to become another Iraq... Enough bloodshed,\" cried one Syrian woman. \"We, and thousands like us across Syria, will face any country that tries to attack us,\" threatened a young man, pointing at his weapon, which he uses to protect his neighbourhood. \"These are Syria's problems and it is up to us, Syrians, to solve them.\"\n\nThe crisis follows last Wednesday's suspected chemical attack near the Syrian capital, Damascus, which reportedly killed more than 300 people.\n\nUS Vice President Joe Biden said there was \"no doubt who was responsible for this heinous use of chemical weapons in Syria: The Syrian regime\".\n\nIn a speech to a veterans'", + " group in Houston, Mr Biden said that \"those who use chemical weapons against defenceless men, women, and children... must be held accountable\".\n\nFrench President Francois Hollande said France was \"ready to punish\" whoever was behind the attack, and had decided to increase military support for Syria's main opposition.\n\nBBC diplomatic correspondent James Robbins says the US, UK and France will now have the larger task of building as wide a coalition as possible to support limited military action.\n\nMeanwhile the Arab League said it held Syrian President Bashar al-Assad responsible for the attacks and called for UN action.\n\nSyrian opposition sources have said they have been told to expect a Western intervention in the conflict imminently.\n\n\"There is no precise timing... but one can speak of an imminent international intervention against the regime.", + " It's a question of days and not weeks,\" AFP news agency quoted Syrian National Coalition official Ahmad Ramadan as saying.\n\n\"There have been meetings between the Coalition, the [rebel] Free Syrian Army and allied countries during which possible targets have been discussed.\"\n\nMr Kerry is of course right that most people will think as he does, simply from watching the TV pictures. Some, however, will demand much stronger proof, particularly in the wake of the faulty intelligence that was used as a reason to go to war against Iraq\n\nRussia and China, allies of the Syrian government, have stepped up their warnings against military intervention, with Moscow saying any such action would have \"catastrophic consequences\"", + " for the region.\n\nSyrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem has said he rejects \"utterly and completely\" claims that Syrian forces used chemical weapons, and his government has blamed rebel fighters.\n\nOn Monday, United Nations weapons inspectors were fired on while investigating one of the five alleged chemical weapons attack sites around Damascus.\n\n'We are prepared'\n\nMr Hagel said the US Department of Defense had provided President Obama with \"all options for all contingencies\".\n\nImage caption The head of the UN chemical inspectors team, Ake Sellstrom, and the UN's disarmament chief, Angela Kane, left their hotel in Damascus on Tuesday. Image caption UN chemical weapons inspectors spent nearly three hours in the suburb of Muadhamiya in western Damascus on Monday.", + " Image caption The inspectors visited two hospitals and interviewed survivors, eyewitnesses and doctors over last week's suspected chemical attack near the Syrian capital. Image caption The inspectors were seen speaking to residents of Muadhamiya. previous slide next slide\n\n\"He has seen them, we are prepared,\" he told the BBC's Jon Sopel, adding: \"We are ready to go.\"\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jay Carney says the US is weighing an \"appropriate response\" to the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria\n\nMr Hagel said that intelligence currently being gathered by the UN inspectors would confirm that the Syrian government was responsible for the chemical attack last week.\n\n\"I think it's pretty clear that chemical weapons were used against people in Syria,\" he said.\n\nOur correspondent says Mr Hagel left little doubt that he believed the Assad government was responsible,", + " and was ready to execute the orders of his commander-in-chief.\n\nModels for possible intervention Iraq 1991: US-led global military coalition, anchored in international law; explicit mandate from UN Security Council to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait\n\nUS-led global military coalition, anchored in international law; explicit mandate from UN Security Council to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait Balkans 1990s: US arms supplied to anti-Serb resistance in Croatia and Bosnia in defiance of UN-mandated embargo; later US-led air campaign against Serb paramilitaries. In 1999, US jets provided bulk of 38,000 Nato sorties against Serbia to prevent massacres in Kosovo - legally controversial with UN Security Council resolutions linked to \"enforcement measures\"\n\nUS arms supplied to anti-Serb resistance in Croatia and Bosnia in defiance of UN-mandated embargo;", + " later US-led air campaign against Serb paramilitaries. In 1999, US jets provided bulk of 38,000 Nato sorties against Serbia to prevent massacres in Kosovo - legally controversial with UN Security Council resolutions linked to \"enforcement measures\" Somalia 1992-93: UN Security Council authorised creation of international force with aim of facilitating humanitarian supplies as Somali state failed. Gradual US military involvement without clear objective culminated in Black Hawk Down disaster in 1993. US troops pulled out\n\nUN Security Council authorised creation of international force with aim of facilitating humanitarian supplies as Somali state failed. Gradual US military involvement without clear objective culminated in Black Hawk Down disaster in 1993.", + " US troops pulled out Libya 2011: France and UK sought UN Security Council authorisation for humanitarian operation in Benghazi in 2011. Russia and China abstained but did not veto resolution. Air offensive continued until fall of Gaddafi Syria crisis: Western military options Models for possible intervention Press apprehension as Syria tension builds Syria crisis: Where key countries stand\n\nWhite House spokesman Jay Carney later said that a separate report on chemical weapons use being compiled by the US intelligence community would be published this week.\n\nMr Carney said that Mr Obama had a variety of options and was not limited to the use of force, adding that it was not Washington's intention to remove Mr Assad.\n\n\"The options we are considering are not about regime change,\" he said.\n\nMeanwhile,", + " warnings have been issued on sites linked to Islamist militants fighting for the rebels in Syria, saying that their leaders and training camps might also be targeted by a possible US-led attack, says BBC Arab affairs editor Sebastian Usher.\n\nSeveral online sites linked to the Nusra Front and similar groups have advised militants not to hold meetings or gather in large numbers, and to change routines and locations, he says.\n\nWestern powers have made clear their distrust and dislike of groups like the Nusra Front, which have spearheaded rebel victories, although there has been no indication from the US or anyone else that jihadists would be targeted, he adds.\n\nThe UN says more than 100,", + "000 people have been killed since the uprising against President Assad began more than two years ago. The conflict has produced more than 1.7 million registered refugees.\n\nImage caption Syrian and Russian media said a cargo plane arrived in Latakia to evacuate Russian citizens\n\nEarlier on Tuesday, a Russian transport plane landed in the Syrian city of Latakia with a cargo of humanitarian aid.\n\nThe aircraft later left with dozens of Russian citizens on board, an official spokeswoman for the Russian Emergencies Ministry, Irina Rossius, told Russian news agencies.\n\nThe flight was intended to evacuate Russians who wanted to leave Syria, she added.\n" + ], + "length": 8615, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 31, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 During this year's Super Bowl, advertisers mostly played it safe\u2014apart from Fiat Chrysler, which faced a major backlash after using a Martin Luther King Jr. speech in an ad for Dodge Ram trucks. \"Recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That's a new definition of greatness,\" the civil rights leader said in the Feb. 4, 1968 speech. The company said it had obtained permission from King's estate, though the King Center nonprofit said it hadn't approved the ad, USA Today reports. Critics noted that MLK's dream \"probably wasn't to drive a Ram\"\u2014and that in the same speech used in the commercial, he said families shouldn't spend too much of their income on automobiles. Some other standout ads, which can be seen in the gallery: NFL. The \"Touchdown Celebration\" NFL spot featuring Eli Manning and Odell Beckham Jr. in a Dirty Dancing spoof got some laughs at AdAge, which writes: \"Not since the Super Bowl shuffle have we so enjoyed seeing these big lugs boogie.\" Amazon. The company's \"Alexa Loses Her Voice\" ad featured an appearance from CEO Jeff Bezos, as well as celebrities including Gordon Ramsey, Cardi B, and Sir Anthony Hopkins. Doritos/Mountain Dew. Peter Dinklage and Morgan Freeman trade rhymes in an ad for Doritos Blaze versus Mountain Dew Ice that Billboard describes as \"the rap battle of the 21st century.\" Tide. David Harbour stars in what he tells AdWeek was a \"wildly self-aware\" series of ads mimicking ads for other products designed to make viewers wonder, \"Wow, maybe every ad is like a Tide ad.\" Pringles. Pringles brought out Bill Hader and what AdAge calls a collection of \"slack-jawed wacky types\" to introduce the concept of \"stacking\" Pringles for new flavor combinations. Budweiser. In one of several socially conscious beer ads, Budweiser, the game's largest advertiser, highlighted its efforts to send water to places in need. Toyota. Toyota promoted its Paralympics sponsorship by telling the story of skiier Lauren Woolstencroft, reports the AP, which notes that a fifth of this year's ads involved social causes, up from 6% last year. Hyundai. The automaker tugged at heart strings with an ad focusing on its pediatric cancer research charity. \"This is the first time Hyundai has trotted out its charity in a Super Bowl ad, and we're betting it isn't the last,\" CNET predicts. Tourism Australia. The Dundee ad came as part of an elaborate Australian marketing campaign featuring a nonexistent sequel to Crocodile Dundee, reports the New York Times.\n", + "docs": [ + "CLOSE In the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ram truck owners also believe in a life of serving others.\n\nA still from a Ram Trucks Super Bowl ad featuring the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. (Photo: Ram Trucks)\n\nWhen Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon imploring hearers to imitate the servanthood of Jesus, he probably didn't envision them buying Ram trucks to do so.\n\nAnd yet there was King's voice Sunday night, booming through millions of TV speakers during Ram's latest Super Bowl ad:\n\n\"If you want to be important\u2014wonderful. If you want to be recognized\u2014wonderful.", + " If you want to be great\u2014wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That's a new definition of greatness.\"\n\nThe speech, delivered 50 years ago on Feb. 4, 1968, served to inspire a Ram Trucks ad of American workers wiping brows, fishing and riding horses, doing pushups and, of course, driving ram Trucks.\n\nAfter King's speech culminates, the ad's tagline appears: Built to serve.\n\nThe use of King's sermon to sell trucks did not sit well with many viewers, who voiced reactions ranging from uneasiness to repulsion.\n\nMore:\n\nAll the Super Bowl 2018 ads from the first half in the order they were released\n\nAll the Super Bowl 2018 ads from the second half in the order they were released\n\nThere was audible painful groaning at the Super Bowl party I\u2019m at as everyone realized Dodge Ram was trying to profit off of an MLK speech \u2014 Hunter Walker (@hunterw)", + " February 5, 2018\n\nNot sure MLK\u2019s dream was to drive a Dodge Ram. \u2014 ItsTheReal (@itsthereal) February 5, 2018\n\nmlk died to sell RAM TRUCKS \u2014 deaux (@dstfelix) February 5, 2018\n\nNot everyone seemed to oppose the ad, however:\n\nIt\u2019s fine. I\u2019m not crying after a Dodge Ram commercial. #MLK#SuperBowlCommercial \u2014 Melinda Doolittle (@mdoolittle) February 5, 2018\n\nThe King Center, the Atlanta-based nonprofit dedicated to King's legacy,", + " denied approving the use of King's words in the commercial:\n\nNeither @TheKingCenter nor @BerniceKing is the entity that approves the use of #MLK\u2019s words or imagery for use in merchandise, entertainment (movies, music, artwork, etc) or advertisement, including tonight\u2019s @Dodge#SuperBowl commercial. \u2014 The King Center (@TheKingCenter) February 5, 2018\n\nA spokesperson for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, responding by email, said: \u201cWe worked closely with the representatives of the Martin Luther King Jr. estate to receive the necessary approvals and estate representatives were a very important part of the creative process.\u201d\n\nAs reporter Kate Aronoff noted,", + " King himself discourages listeners from overspending for automobiles in the very same sermon Ram sampled. A new Ram 1500 can cost about $27,000.\n\nNot totally sure the Dodge RAM ad guys read that whole MLK speech.. https://t.co/QPa16BGv3dpic.twitter.com/3eFVZjb3BB \u2014 Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) February 5, 2018\n\nWatch all the Super Bowl ads from this year:\n\nContributing: Erik Brady ", + " Peter Dinklage Spits Busta Rhymes, Morgan Freeman Raps Missy Elliott In Fiery Super Bowl Commercial\n\nThe rap battle of the 21st century arrived at Super Bowl LII when Peter Dinklage faced off against Morgan Freeman. Dinklage spit flames delivering Busta Rhymes\u2019 tongue-twisting verse from Chris Brown\u2019s \u201cLook at Me Now\u201d (to promote Doritos Blaze) and Freeman was cold as ice rapping Missy Elliott\u2019s \u201cGet Ur Freak On\u201d (to rep for Mountain Dew Ice). Rhymes and Elliott even popped up on the commercial to bless the proceedings, appearing as moving portraits hanging on the wall.\n\n\u201cIt's an incredible moment and I'm definitely proud of it.", + " I think it's the hottest commercial on the planet,\u201d Busta told Billboard about the spot. \u201cI feel that it's one of the best commercials in Super Bowl history\u2026. Our culture of hip-hop is being properly represented. It's a great bag of energy and vibes. I loved doing it -- the experience on the set was incredible and watching people's energy over it was even more fulfilling for me. I'm basking in the moment.\u201d\n\nWatch below. ", + " This photo provided by PepsiCo shows Presley Gerber in a scene from the company's Pepsi Super Bowl spot. For the 2018 Super Bowl, marketers are paying more than $5 million per 30-second spot to capture... (Associated Press)\n\nThis photo provided by PepsiCo shows Presley Gerber in a scene from the company's Pepsi Super Bowl spot. For the 2018 Super Bowl, marketers are paying more than $5 million per 30-second spot to capture the attention of more than 110 million viewers. (PepsiCo via AP) (Associated Press)\n\nNEW YORK (AP) \u2014 This year's Super Bowl ads ran the gamut from tame humor to... tame messages about social causes.\n\nAfter a divisive year,", + " advertisers during the Big Game worked overtime to win over audiences with messages that entertained and strove not to offend. The slapstick humor and sexual innuendo that used to be commonplace during Super Bowl ad breaks were nowhere in sight.\n\nInstead, Budweiser, as always the largest advertiser during the game, eschewed the usual puppies and Clydesdales to showcase employees that send water to places in need. Verizon showed people thanking first responders who saved them. And Tide tried to make people laugh (and perhaps forget about its Tide Pod problem ) with a humorous series of ads that starred \"Stranger Things'\" actor David Harbour.\n\n\"This is a year where people are feeling a little frayed around the edges because the divisive political environment on both sides,\" said Kelly O'", + "Keefe, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Brandcenter. \"They want to feel like there's something still good in the world.\"\n\nWhile the Philadelphia Eagles bested the New England Patriots in a nailbiter on the field, advertisers were fighting a similar battle to win over the hearts and minds of viewers. It's the largest live stage for advertising all year, so advertisers brought their A-game.\n\nTide took a novel approach with ads each quarter that poked fun at typical Super Bowl ads. Harbour popped up in familiar-looking ads that appear to be about different products: a car, an insurance company, jewelry and Old Spice (another P&", + "G product). The twist? They're really all Tide ads, because there are no stains on anyone's clothing.\n\nTame comedy like the Tide ad was a theme throughout the night. In a year that saw the #MeToo movement shine a spotlight on sexual harassment, the vast majority of ads sill starred men but there weren't any that focused on scantily-clad women or sexual innuendo, save for an awkwardly dancing \u2014 and fully dressed \u2014 woman in a Diet Coke ad.\n\nComedian Keegan Michael-Key cut through complex jargon to put things plainly in a humorous ad for Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. When a restaurant patron is confused by what a \"beef-protein gluten-free pate\"", + " is, he explains: \"It's a burrito, filled with plants pretending to be meat.\"\n\nAn Amazon ad showcased different celebrities \u2014 including actress Rebel Wilson, actor Anthony Hopkins, singer Cardi B and chef Gordon Ramsay \u2014 filling in as the voice of Amazon's Alexa voice assistant.\n\nM&M's featured Danny DeVito as a human M&M. And Mountain Dew and Doritos staged an epic hip-hop lip sync battle between actors Morgan Freeman and Peter Dinklage. The two synced to Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes, respectively.\n\n\"There's a reason so many marketers are using celebrity combined with comedy \u2014 because it breaks through the clutter,", + " delivers the message and gets buzz,\" said Aaron Shapiro, CEO of ad agency Huge.\n\nAn ad for Blacture, rapper Pras' new media platform, was one of the few ads to make an overtly political statement. It showed an African-American man standing alone on stage with tape over his mouth and a blindfold on his eyes. \"Blacture. Be celebrated. Not Tolerated,\" text on the screen read. And T-Mobile's ad showed babies and enlisted Kerry Washington for a voiceover that talked about equality.\n\n\"The (T-Mobile) message is terrific but all the way through, if you asked consumers who the ad is for,", + " nobody would know,\" said Kimberly Whitler, marketing professor at the University of Virginia.\n\nThat kind of attempt to connect brands to social causes was a big theme of the night. Charles Taylor, a marketing professor at Villanova University, said a fifth of all Super Bowl ads featured causes, compared with just 6 percent last year.\n\nToyota kicked things off by depicting the story of Lauren Woolstencroft, a Paraolympic skier who was born missing her left arm below the elbow as well as both legs below the knees, to promote its Paralympic sponsorship.\n\nBudweiser showcased employees from its Cartersville,", + " Georgia, brewery as they canned water to send to places in need like Puerto Rico and California.\n\nHyundai showcased its donations to fight pediatric cancer by bringing real Hyundai owners into a room during the pre-game Super Bowl festivities and letting them meet cancer survivors. Hyundai donates each time someone buys one of its cars.\n\n\"There's a lot of research that says millennials really like it when brands link themselves to causes,\" said Taylor. \"It's just refreshing for a lot of people to see these unifying types of messages by the advertiser.\"\n\nBut advertisers can stumble in these efforts when the connection seems tenuous. There was some negative reaction when Fiat Chrysler's Ram trucks ad featured a speech by Martin Luther King,", + " Jr. The commercial, timed to the 50th anniversary of the speech, showed people doing good deeds like giving out food to the needy and rescuing a boy from a fire.\n\n\"Everyone was offended,\" said Zach Mann, who watched the game in Venice, California, with a group of 15 thirtysomethings. \"It seems insensitive. We know it's Black History Month, but using an American hero to sell a Dodge was off-putting.\" (Ram trucks are no longer affiliated with the Dodge brand.)\n\nInstead, it was the humorous ads like the Tide spots that won that group over.\n\n\"Everyone seems to be moving into more comedy,", + " quirky, unique (ideas), which my friends and I all are enjoying way more\" than past years, Mann said. \"I think we all need more laughter these days.\"\n\n___\n\nEds: An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to the brand \"Ram trucks,\" which is no longer affiliated with the Dodge brand. ", + " Because Hyundai knows that the American public is a bunch of suckers for charity, it decided to pull out all the stops this Super Bowl Sunday with a 60-second ad spot showcasing its charity \"Hyundai Hope On Wheels\" that benefits pediatric cancer research. Yeah, we weren't expecting it either, and it got us right in the feels.\n\nIn the spot, people are shown going through security to an event that was billed as the Super Bowl Experience by Genesis. Each time someone with a set of Hyundai keys went through the metal detector, a heart popped up, and they were directed down a side hall for further security screening. Only, there were no detector wands or rubber gloves waiting for them when they reached the screening room.\n\nIn the screening room,", + " they were greeted by recorded thank you videos from survivors of pediatric cancer and then the survivors came out to hug the unwitting families. This is the first time Hyundai has trotted out its charity in a Super Bowl ad, and we're betting it isn't the last. ", + " Credit: Tide\n\nSo that happened. The 2018 Super Bowl spots were generally either silly or sincere\u2014and all of them played it safe. If there are any major takeaways, it's that brands were largely disinclined to make any kind of statement other than \"everyone is a special snowflake.\" We wish we could say the same in return.\n\nSee how 4,000 marketing pros rated the ads for entertainment but also effectivness in Ad Age's first Super Bowl Ranking with Morning Consult.\n\nAmazon, \"Alexa Loses Her Voice\"\n\nLucky Generals and D1\n\nThe most surprising thing about this ad full of surprises is that Jeff Bezos has a decently compelling screen presence and can actually sort of act.", + " Pretty funny for a terrifying boss. That's our main takeaway, anyway. Also, it would be excellent to have Cardi B as the voice of Alexa at all times.\n\nCurrent mood: laughing\n\nNFL: \"Touchdown Celebration\"\n\nGrey NY\n\nTo celebrate its newer, more lenient rules regarding end-zone celebrations, the NFL put out this spot to combat its \"No Fun League\" rep. Here we get Eli Manning and Odell Beckham Jr. recreating the iconic climax to \"Dirty Dancing\" set to its theme song, \"(I've Had) The Time of My Life.\" Not since the Super Bowl shuffle have we so enjoyed seeing these big lugs boogie.\n\nCurrent mood:", + " laughing\n\nTourism Australia, \"Dundee\"\n\nDroga5\n\nImagine being tasked to make an ad for Australia: You're instantly battling icons, from Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee to, uh, Paul Hogan slipping \"an extra shrimp on the barbie\" to, er, Yahoo Serious. It speaks volumes about the state of moviemaking that the spot's head-fake premise is so plausible. You call yours an ad? Now, this is an ad.\n\nCurrent mood: laughing\n\nSprint, \"Evelyn\"\n\nDroga5\n\nThis genuinely amusing ad suggests that when our robots gain sentience they may not be as vengeance-bent as the droids on \"Westworld.\" But they will tease us without mercy (albeit without much skill either). If it's in the interest of ostensibly saving us money,", + " we'll take it.\n\nCurrent mood: laughing\n\nFebreze, \"The Only Man Whose Bleep Don't Stink\"\n\nGrey New York\n\nBrands invite trouble when they create their own hashtags, but Febreze no doubt gamed every possible way #BleepDontStink could go awry\u2014and stuck with it anyway. For taking a common expression and making us think of it in new ways, Febreze comes off just as fresh as we all wish, well, our bleeps did.\n\nCurrent mood: laughing\n\nTide, \"It's a Tide Ad\"\n\nSaatchi & Saatchi\n\nTide gets uber-meta in this suite of four increasingly funny spots.", + " Banking off his \"Stranger Things\" lovable everyman Hopper, David Harbour riffs on commercial clich\u00e9s, hangs out with Isaiah Mustafa (we missed you, buddy!), marvels at a majestic Clydesdale and grinds like Mr Clean. One thing he definitely never does is eat a Tide pod. Mmmm, Tide pods.\n\nCurrent mood: between smiling and laughing\n\nDoritos and Mtn Dew, \"Doritos Blaze vs. Mtn Dew Ice\"\n\nGoodby, Silverstein & Partners\n\nSome things about 2018 are actually good. We may have to wait till 2125 for the final season of \"Game of Thrones,\" but at least we can see the Dink lip-sync ferociously to Busta Rhymes'", + " verse in (ugh) Chris Brown's \"Look at Me Now.\" Then we get Morgan Freeman, the coolest man alive, slaying Missy Elliott's \"Get Ur Freak On.\" Bonus: Both rappers get cameos here.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling\n\nToyota: \"One Team\"\n\nSaatchi & Saatchi\n\nA priest, a rabbi, an imam and a Buddhist monk all go to a football game. It sounds like the setup to a joke. Instead it's the set-piece for this delightful spot that deftly delivers the message of togetherness\u2014without beating anyone over the head with it.\n\nCurrent mood:", + " smiling\n\nBlacture: \"Be Celebrated\"\n\nMcKinney\n\nRapper Pras is using the Super Bowl to launch Blacture, a new media platform for black culture that celebrates, in his words, \"black excellence.\" In this ad, the Grammy-winning founding Fugee attempts to pique curiosity with some startling imagery: He appears onstage in an empty ballroom, wearing black tie, blindfolded, with duct tape over his mouth. He removes them to the tagline \"Be celebrated. Not tolerated.\" It got our attention.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling\n\nQuicken Loans: \"Translator\"\n\nHuge\n\nKeegan-Michael Key's anger translator was so beloved that he made an appearance at President Obama's final White House Correspondents Dinner.", + " Here he's back, but without the anger (or the edge), to deftly de-jargon pretentious waiters, deliberately obfuscating Tinder profiles and, of course, the mortgage process. Frankly, we wish we could take him everywhere.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling\n\nLexus, \"Long Live the King\"\n\nWalton Isaacson\n\nLexus injects a healthy dose of badass into an ad slate that otherwise leans either silly or sincere. \"Black Panther\" fans have to wait until Feb. 16 for the film to come out, but this spot\u2014complete with actual film footage and a snip from Run the Jewels'", + " soundtrack\u2014should tide them over 'til their king descends from Wakanda.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling\n\nBud Light, \"Ye Olde Pep Talk\" and \"Bud Knight\"\n\nWieden & Kennedy\n\nSure, the \"Dilly Dilly\" stuff is silly silly, but it's so pliable it's taken quick root in the vernacular. Now we finally get some kind of logical connection between the knights, their Dillies and Bud Light. OK, maybe \"logical\" is a stretch, but here we meet Bud Knight in an execution that is consistently on point. Now Bud just needs to turn the slogan into sales.\n\nCurrent mood:", + " smiling\n\nJeep: 'Jeep Jurassic'\n\nDDB Chicago\n\nIn making so many different ads for one game, Jeep is betting that something will stick with everyone. We're never not happy to see Jeff Goldblum at any age\u2014and this spot will appeal to all generations of \"Jurassic Park\" fans even at the risk of reminding us how old we're getting.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling\n\nAvocados From Mexico, \"#GuacWorld\"\n\nGSD&M;\n\nAvocados From Mexico returns for its fourth consecutive year with yet another smart-funny bit of lighthearted fun. The brand plays up the versatility of avocados here,", + " with a nod to that millennial darling, avocado toast. As Gen X-ers, we love Chris Elliott just for showing up\u2014and perhaps even more for not really ever having a reason for being there. Pass the guac.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling\n\nWendy's, \"Iceberg\"\n\nVML\n\nThis commercial throws so much shade, we need a glass of iced tea. Wendy's pulls no punches here and we love it for it. After telling us that McDonald's publicly claims its burgers are flash-frozen, the ad reminds us that \"the iceberg that sank the Titanic was frozen, too.\" Oooh. Need some aloe for that flame-broiled burn,", + " McD's?\n\nCurrent mood: smiling\n\nE-Trade, \"This Is Getting Old\"\n\nMullenLowe\n\nSome things in life will always be true: Saving money is boring. And old people doing young people stuff is hi-lar-i-ous. To the tune of \"Banana Boat Song (Day O),\" these oldsters sing about the misery of still having to punch a clock: \"I'm 85 and I want to go home.\" It's a nice spoonful of sugar for some tough medicine: More than a third of Americans have no retirement savings.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling\n\nIntuit, \"Giant Skip Ad\"\n\nPhenomenon/", + "Passion Animation Studio\n\nFinally a Super Bowl ad that admits no one actually likes ads.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling\n\nKia, \"Feel Something Again\"\n\nDavid & Goliath\n\nSteven Tyler returns to the Super Bowl (last seen there in a Skittles ad), this time to reclaim the glories of youth. While Aerosmith continues to exist, against all odds, Tyler has emerged as something of a national pervy-great-uncle/magician. Also, he looks more and more like my mom every year. This is getting weird. But the ad works.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling and a bit confused\n\nRam Trucks:", + " 'Icelandic Vikings'\n\nGoodby, Silverstein & Partners\n\nThe Vikings may not be in the Super Bowl, but that's not stopping them from trying to get to their home stadium\u2014-by truck and by boat. The highlight here is the resurfacing of a rare amped-up BBC performance of Queen's \"We Will Rock You.\" The punchline takes a bit of deciphering, but it turns out these warriors are forlorn about not getting to do battle. Because, get it?, the Vikings aren't in the Super Bowl.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling and confused.\n\nSquarespace: \"Make it Happen\"\n\nIn-house\n\nDelightfully weird and mildly confusing,", + " this spot trots out the millennial sentiment that \"there has never been anyone just like you,\" only in a creepy tone and with Keanu Reeves inexplicably standing on a rolling motorcycle. Like last year's John Malkovich spot, this manages to be both compelling (the music helps) and slightly unsettling. It's unclear what it all has to do with Squarespace, though we're not sure we care.\n\nCurrent mood: smiling, but confused\n\nTurboTax, \"Thing Under the Bed\" and \"Noise in the Attic\"\n\nWieden & Kennedy\n\nBy anthropomorphizing well-known bogeymen,", + " this spot charmingly works to dispel the fear of taxes. The monsters are endearing, it turns out! Nothing to be scared of here. Now if only TurboTax would put out a similar spot to quell our crippling fear of inexorable decline and death. Hey, pass the guac!\n\nCurrent mood: between meh and smiling\n\nMichelob Ultra, \"I Like Beer\"\n\nFCB Chicago\n\nMove over, Pratt. The real star of this ad is the song. If there's any justice in the world, Tom T. Hall, who wrote the 1975 waltz featured in this spot will soar to the top of the charts this week.", + " Heck, make him next year's halftime act\u2014he'll only be 82, roughly the average age of the American TV viewer. Also the auteur of \"Harper Valley P.T.A.,\" Hall's as American as they come. Bottoms up!\n\nCurrent mood: smiling\n\nMichelob Ultra, \"The Perfect Fit\"\n\nFCB Chicago\n\nWho doesn't love Chris Pratt? (Other than Anna Faris, maybe.) Handsome, funny, handsome, fit and handsome, the \"Jurassic World\" star should be able to parlay this high-profile beer spot\u2014his first\u2014into some real success. We kid, but it's testament to Pratt's likability that he outshines the ad's mediocre premise and downright lame punchline.\n\nCurrent mood:", + " meh\n\nYouTube\n\nHook\n\nYouTube has a message for cord cutters: For just $35 you can stream more than 40 channels of live entertainment over your set top box. Will anyone actually pay $35 for YouTube TV? The ad ran between the coin toss and kickoff and by the time the game started we had forgotten it aired.\n\nCurrent mood: meh\n\nJeep: 'The Road'\n\nFCB Chicago\n\n\"The road is someone else's idea,\" this ad reminds us. \"The road always ends.\" A stirring call to adventure, this spot urges us outdoors and off the beaten path. We're in. Who's driving?\n\nCurrent mood:", + " meh\n\nUniversal Parks and Resorts, \"Peyton Manning: Vacation Quarterback\"\n\nIn-house\n\nNote to self: Next time Peyton Manning invites us to a Universal theme park, tell him we're holding out for an invite from pervy uncle/magician Steven Tyler.\n\nCurrent mood: meh\n\nPersil ProClean, \"The Professional\"\n\nDDB New York\n\nThis spot would have been way more fun if the titular professional emerged from the TV more like the girl in \"The Ring.\" Here, this old visual trick offers nothing new aside from the straight-man reactions of the game watchers: \"What was in those brownies?\" Maybe the creative team actually should have spiked them.\n\nCurrent mood:", + " meh\n\nWix.com, \"Rhett & Link\"\n\nIn-house\n\nWe first learned about Rhett and Link when our kids showed us clips from their YouTube show \"Good Mythical Morning,\" so we feel slightly ahead of the curve. Mostly, we're trying really hard not to type the word \"influencers.\" Ach. Damn. Anyway, these dudes are charming enough and the ad actually shows us what Wix.com does. Utilitarian, if not especially riveting, fare.\n\nCurrent mood: meh\n\nCoca-Cola, \"The Wonder of Us\"\n\nWieden & Kennedy\n\nA diversity play, but less bold than 2014's multilingual \"It's Beautiful\"", + " spot: Everyone is a special, unique snowflake! Except when it comes to Coke: We all drink the same thing! To be sure, Coke wants to evoke that one time it taught the world to sing in perfect harmony. And the subtle nod to the transgendered community with \"them\" was a nice touch. But this is a millennial pander. Also the tagline, \"Taste the feeling,\" could really alienate the synesthesia community.\n\nCurrent mood: meh\n\nT-Mobile, \"Little Ones\"\n\nin-house and Laundry Service\n\nWe wonder what Kurt Cobain would make of this. Set to a lullaby version of \"All Apologies,\" the spot reminds us that babies aren't judgmental.", + " Maybe he'd take a line from his own song: \"I wish I was like you/ Easily amused.\" Maybe he'd switch to Sprint. We love the full-throated embrace of tolerance and equality here. We're just not sure what it has to do with T-Mobile.\n\nCurrent mood: meh, but also confused\n\nPepsi, \"This Is the Pepsi\"\n\nIn-house\n\nWhy make a new commercial when you can just do a greatest-hits mashup of all your golden oldies? Pepsi leans into the nostalgia angle with this quick-moving trip down memory lane. Hey, remember that Pepsi spot with Cindy Crawford? With Britney?", + " With Michael (wait, didn't they accidentally set him on fire)? Well, the gang's all here. Everyone, that is, except Kendall.\n\nCurrent mood: mildly confused\n\nBudweiser, \"Stand by You\"\n\nDavid\n\nAB InBev goes for the do-gooder vibe in this disaster-relief spot for Budweis\u2014uh, America. Emotionally much more manipulative than the Stella Artois spot, here we have a soupy cover of \"Stand by Me\" to convey that in times of trouble, the beer brand\u2014and the everyday Joes who work there\u2014are there for you. For this we sacrificed Clydesdales?\n\nCurrent mood:", + " confused\n\nTurkish Airlines: 'Five Senses'\n\nThis beautifully shot ad makes us suddenly desperate to visit Turkey. It also makes us desperate to never see Dr. Oz again.\n\nCurrent mood: confused\n\nDiet Coke: \"Groove\"\n\nAnomaly Los Angeles\n\nJust because \"I can\" doesn't mean \"I should.\" This spot, starring Australian actress Hayley Magnus, was originally shot as a quick social media video. It's possible it should have stayed that way. The no-doubt adorkable Magnus dances in mismatched rainbow socks in front of a mango-hued wall as a way to explain the \"why\"", + " of Diet Coke Mango. The goofy-sexy shimmy is more awkward than compelling, though, and does little to entice us to try the new flavor.\n\nCurrent mood: confused\n\nWeatherTech, \"American Factory\"\n\nPinnacle Advertising\n\nIf we didn't know what WeatherTech did before this ad, we certainly still don't know now. We do, however, know that they have\u2014again\u2014chosen to lead with a lily-white manly #MAGA jingoism, which will no doubt resonate in the red states. So, good for them?\n\nCurrent mood: mostly confused\n\nToyota, \"Mobility for All\"", + " and \"Good Odds\"\n\nSaatchi & Saatchi and Dentsu\n\nWe're not crying, you're crying. Toyota looks beyond cars and into mobility of all kinds. \"When we're free to move,\" the tagline concludes, \"anything is possible.\" Case in point: the inspirational story of eight-time Paralympic gold medalist Lauren Woolstencroft. Toyota, an Olympic and Paralympic sponsor, does the everyone's-a-special-unicorn messaging better than the rest.\n\nCurrent mood: sobbing (but in a good way?)\n\nHyundai: \"Hope Detector\"\n\nInnocean\n\nThis wasn't the ad Hyundai had planned to make,", + " but due to security concerns about filming in real time at the game itself, this is where it landed. It works. In this moving ad, real-life Hyundai owners are pulled aside as they arrive at the \"Super Bowl Experience\" at the Minneapolis Convention Center, and are greeted with real cancer patients. The purchase of their car, these game-goers learn, helped to fund pediatric cancer research. Tears and hugs follow.\n\nCurrent mood: sobbing\n\nVerizon, \"Answering the Call\"\n\nMcCann New York\n\nVerizon doesn't just tug at your heartstrings here, it practically reaches down your throat and rips them out. This touching homage to America's first responders is a message that absolutely anyone can get behind,", + " and Verizon works in its reason for being there in a mostly seamless and organic way.\n\nCurrent mood: sobbing\n\nM&M;'s, \"Human\"\n\nBBDO New York\n\nIf you didn't see the garbage truck coming a mile away, then this is the commercial you deserve. M&M;'s is going the KFC Colonel route of late, first with David Cross voicing the new caramel-filled iteration of the candy, and now with Danny DeVito as the human incarnation of the red M&M.; It's a time-honored tactic: Tap a celebrity with good will to carry your flaccid ad into the end zone.\n\nCurrent mood:", + " mad\n\nRam Trucks: 'Built to Serve'\n\nHighdive\n\nMartin Luther King Jr. delivered the speech played here 50 years ago tonight. The words alone\u2014a rousing call to service for all citizens\u2014are blazingly powerful. Layered over images of everyday heroes (and Ram trucks) the message feels co-opted. We're grateful to hear his voice tonight. It's just too bad it's being used to sell pickup trucks.\n\nCurrent mood: mad\n\nJeep: \"Anti-Manifesto'\n\nArnold Worldwide\n\nCommercials that brag about being un-commercials are somewhat tedious. The meta execution on the Tide spots tonight was spot on (pun not intended but we'll keep it). This just feels overly smug and pleased with its anti-commercialism (which,", + " of course, set the automaker back $5 million).\n\nCurrent mood: mad\n\nPringles, \"Wow\"\n\nGrey New York\n\nThe wacky-for-the-sake-of-wacky ad is a worn-out trope, and this one breaks no new ground. The ad's stagehand yokels are slack-jawed wacky types. Bill Hader is tediously bug-eyed and wacky. Together they stack Pringles to create new flavor combinations, which isn't going to make Pringles themselves taste any less like a cereal box.\n\nCurrent mood: mad\n\nStella Artois, \"Taps\"\n\nMother\n\nStella is to be lauded for teaming with Matt Damon's water.org to bring a global crisis to our attention.", + " But just because a spot highlights a worthy cause doesn't mean it has to be so anodyne. The solution? Buy beer mugs! Sorry, \"chalices.\" Stella's word, and it's distracting. (It did remind us to rewatch Danny Kaye in \"The Court Jester\": It's the chalice from the palace, after all, with the brew that is true.)\n\nCurrent mood: confused and a little mad\n\nGroupon, \"Who Wouldn't\"\n\nO'Keefe, Reinhard & Paul\n\nTiffany Haddish landed this spokesgig when she effused about Groupon during her \"Girls Trip\"", + " press tour. This spot feels like two commercials in one. First we get Haddish, who is funny and super-watchable. Then we get...a cheap hit-in-the-nuts gag. Groupon blew $5 million to gain the attention of 100 million people to show them an \"America's Funniest Home Videos\" outtake?\n\nCurrent mood: mad ", + " \u201cI was just thinking that one thing I haven\u2019t seen are those ads that objectify women, which is refreshing,\u201d Ms. Johnson said. \u201cAnd guess what? There\u2019s still funny stuff on the air. We\u2019re making progress.\u201d\n\nStill, some wished that there was more humor.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s really a pretty lame year,\u201d said Marianne Malina, president of the agency GSD&M in Austin, Tex. \u201cWhen the TV promos for the Olympics and \u2018The Voice\u2019 and the N.F.L. and Justin Timberlake overshadow a lot, that says everything.\u201d\n\nMs. Malina pointed out that that was a shift from the political tone of last year.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s an interesting insight into just the level of risk that people are comfortable with right now,\u201d Ms.", + " Malina said. \u201cLast year, people had a very strong response, and now, a year later, people are confused. Everyone\u2019s trying to get their head around all the things that are going on, so you can see how maybe the risk dial goes down.\u201d\n\n\u201cBut in reality,\u201d she added, \u201cthe risk dial maybe needs to go up.\u201d\n\nVerizon was among the brands that took a somber route. Its ad showed images of rescue situations and carried the voices of people thanking emergency workers, ending with the words: \u201cThey answer the call. Our job is to make sure they can get it.\u201d\n\n\u201cIn a culture and a climate where it\u2019s hard to find any kind of positive news out there at the moment,", + " it felt like something we wanted to really lean into and take on a very different message,\u201d said Andrew McKechnie, Verizon\u2019s chief creative officer.\n\nRam ad using Martin Luther King Jr. sermon draws criticism.\n\nThe blowback was swift for Ram after the carmaker used a sermon given by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the voice-over for one of its ads.\n\nThe general sentiment: Did it really just use Dr. King\u2019s words about the value of service to sell trucks?\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cMLK wanted equal rights and for me to buy a Dodge Ram,\u201d one Twitter user wrote.", + " Another wrote: \u201cBlack people cant kneel and play football but MLK should be used to sell trucks during the super bowl. Unbelievable.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s the wrong mistake to make given everything that\u2019s going on in the U.S. right now,\u201d said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University\u2019s Kellogg School of Management. \u201cThere\u2019s so much emotion right now around race in this country that this was a high-risk move, and clearly it\u2019s not going over very well.\n\n\u201cI think it was well intentioned, but they\u2019re going to have a lot of explaining to do,\u201d Mr. Calkins added.", + " \u201cThey did not release this ahead of time, so they went for the surprise. They got that, but at the same time, they now have a big problem with feedback and people being upset.\u201d\n\nAdding to the disconnect, the sermon in question, delivered exactly 50 years ago, touched on the danger of overspending on items like cars and discussed why people \u201care so often taken by advertisers.\u201d\n\nRam approached Dr. King\u2019s estate about using his voice in the commercial, said Eric D. Tidwell, the managing director of Intellectual Properties Management, the licenser of the estate.\n\n\u201cOnce the final creative was presented for approval, it was reviewed to ensure it met our standard integrity clearances,\u201d Mr.", + " Tidwell said in a statement on Sunday night. \u201cWe found that the overall message of the ad embodied Dr. King\u2019s philosophy that true greatness is achieved by serving others.\u201d\n\nFiat Chrysler Automobiles U.S. said in a statement: \u201cWe worked closely with the representatives of the Martin Luther King Jr. estate to receive the necessary approvals, and estate representatives were a very important part of the creative process every step of the way.\u201d\n\nThat\u2019s not a movie. It\u2019s just an ad.\n\nThe Super Bowl regularly draws elaborate schemes from advertisers, and this year is no exception. Tourism Australia \u2014 the Australian government agency responsible for attracting international visitors to the country \u2014 decided last April that it would buy a Super Bowl spot as part of a broader campaign geared toward drawing more visitors from North America.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThe form it took:", + " a big movie campaign for \u201cDundee,\u201d a sequel to the movie \u201cCrocodile Dundee,\u201d starring the actors Danny McBride and Chris Hemsworth.\n\nThe catch: \u201cDundee\u201d isn\u2019t actually being made, despite the entertaining trailers that have been released for the film, its movie website and IMDB page, and a cast introduction video that includes appearances from a host of famous Australians, including Hugh Jackman, Margot Robbie, Isla Fisher and Russell Crowe.\n\n\u201cWe did a scan around things like the Grammys and the Academy Awards and other sporting events like the N.B.A. Finals and the World Series, but the event that really stops this country is the Super Bowl,\u201d said John O\u2019Sullivan,", + " the managing director of Tourism Australia. \u201cIt\u2019s such a spectacle, right? If you look at it from a foreigner\u2019s point of view, it\u2019s this massive event which I think surpasses things like the Grand Slams in tennis and the Champions League final.\u201d\n\nNorth America is the second-most-valuable market for Australian tourism after mainland China, and one that the agency has decided to focus on in the last six months, Mr. O\u2019Sullivan said. While many people want to visit Australia, he said, the trick for the country is moving up from a \u201cbucket list\u201d destination to a place that people will go in the near future.\n\nThe concept for the campaign was created by the ad agency Droga5,", + " whose founder, David Droga, is Australian. Content tied to the pretend movie will morph after the Super Bowl ad and will continue to use Danny McBride and Chris Hemsworth, Mr. Droga said.\n\n\u201cThe beauty is there\u2019s also a lot of content that moves with Chris and Danny that\u2019s sort of them exploring the country as friends \u2014 as an Aussie showing around a mate,\u201d he said.\n\nMr. Droga also noted that the campaign for \u201cDundee\u201d benefited from the support of \u201cAussiewood\u201d stars like Mr. Jackman and Ms. Robbie, who worked on it for \u201cnothing.\u201d\n\n\u201cIf we had to pay commercial rights for those people,\u201d then it \u201cwould be the most expensive ad in the Super Bowl maybe ever,\u201d he said.\n\nVideo\n\nOne final Super Bowl connection:", + " Mr. O\u2019Sullivan noted that he spent a year of high school in Lebanon, Pa., making him a Philadelphia Eagles fan.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nSlow start for ads, though some bring smiles.\n\n\u201cTypically, you see the great work is front-loaded, and I guess my hope is that the better work is coming,\u201d Wendy Clark, the chief executive of DDB North America and a former marketing executive at Coca-Cola, said at the start of the game\u2019s second quarter. \u201cAt the end of the day, a Super Bowl ad is about epic, over-the-top production value,\u201d and the first quarter \u201cwas a little quiet in the end.\u201d\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box.", + " Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\nStill, Ms. Clark was a fan of the Tide ad and the Doritos-Mountain Dew ad featuring Peter Dinklage and Morgan Freeman lip-syncing to Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes.\n\n\u201cThe complete flip to Morgan Freeman,", + " it\u2019s just so good,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s a surprise aspect there, and it\u2019s really enjoyable watching those two characters rap \u2014 the complete 180 is fantastic.\u201d\n\nShe added, \u201cFunctionally, you\u2019re also thinking, \u2018Oh, my God, I would eat those together.\u201d\n\nTide drew the laughs heading into the second quarter with a meta commercial starring David Harbour (\u201cStranger Things\u201d) that showed a slew of setups for other ads before interrupting itself with, \u201cNo, it\u2019s a Tide ad.\u201d\n\n\u201cI want to see how they bring it to life and on social,\u201d Ms. Clark said. \u201cI assume they\u2019re going to comment on every single ad now from their handle.\u201d (That\u2019s @Tide on Twitter.)\n\nBeer makers push philanthropy.\n\nStella Artois ran a commercial featuring Matt Damon urging people to buy limited-edition chalices in order to give years of clean water to people in developing countries through a partnership with Water.org,", + " which works for safe water and sanitation. That was joined by a somber commercial from Budweiser, set to the song \u201cStand by Me,\u201d focused on the company\u2019s efforts to deliver cans of water to people affected by natural disasters.\n\n\u201cMillennials like brands that link themselves to a social cause,\u201d Charles R. Taylor, a professor of marketing at the Villanova University School of Business, said. \u201cWhat Stella Artois is doing with Water.org, I think, is really smart.\u201d\n\nStill, Stella Artois\u2019s effort spurred some skepticism, with news outlets fact-checking the ad\u2019s claims and some viewers asking why Stella Artois didn\u2019t simply donate the cost of the commercial to Water.org.", + " The company, through a public relations firm, declined to say whether it had paid Mr. Damon for the appearance.\n\nPringles tries to encourage \u2018stacking.\u2019\n\nPringles is running its first Super Bowl ad, starring the comedian Bill Hader, as it tries to popularize the notion of \u201cstacking\u201d chips with different flavors to arrive at a new, artificially flavored snack. (And, presumably, to encourage people to buy more than one pack of the chips at a time.)\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nYuvraj Arora, a senior vice president of marketing at Kellogg, explained how to use the process to approximate the taste of chicken wings.", + " \u201cYou take barbecue Pringles, buffalo ranch Pringles and ranch Pringles and you get a chicken-wing-like experience without the mess,\u201d he said.\n\nMr. Arora noted that the way the millennial generation interacts with food, especially on social media, was an inspiration for the idea.\n\n\u201cFood is so central to millennials\u2019 lifestyle,\u201d he said. \u201cAll around, you see there\u2019s mashups, new flavor experiences and a number of unique flavors.\u201d\n\nA huge audience with a big price tag.\n\nIn an era of cord-cutting and ad-skipping, the Super Bowl is a sweet salve for the nation\u2019s marketers. There\u2019s no bigger stage for advertisers \u2014 last year\u2019s game drew more than 111 million viewers \u2014 and that\u2019s why they\u2019re willing to shell out millions of dollars to be on it for 30 seconds.\n\nLast year,", + " commercials with social and political messages stole the show, but this year\u2019s crop of advertisers seemed to steer clear of such commentary and aimed for laughs and nostalgia.\n\nOf course, they\u2019re paying the same high-ticket prices: The average cost of a 30-second ad in the Super Bowl is more than $5 million this year, according to ad buyers, roughly in line with last year. And that doesn\u2019t count all the expenses tied to making and promoting an ad, like the star power. Cindy Crawford, Peter Dinklage and Danny DeVito are among the famous faces who will make commercial appearances this year.\n\nWhile some ads focused on philanthropy,", + " the tone seemed to have shifted from last year, when Airbnb and 84 Lumber ran spots that were viewed as responses to President Trump\u2019s rhetoric on immigration and Audi broadcast a commercial advocating equal pay for women. Some industry experts had expected at least one major ad focused on women this year, perhaps tied to the #MeToo movement.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cI\u2019m a little bit surprised,\u201d Charles R. Taylor, a professor of marketing at the Villanova University School of Business, said. \u201cSome of the best ads over the last 10 years have focused on female empowerment, like the Audi daughter ad.\u201d\n\nWomen are generally much less visible in Super Bowl ads than men,", + " even as Nielsen data shows that women were 47 percent of the audience for last year\u2019s game. Mr. Taylor, who recently studied Super Bowl ads from 2008 to 2017, found that 76 percent of the commercials showed a man as a principal character, while 43 percent featured a woman as a principal character.\n\nSusan Credle, the global chief creative officer at the agency FCB, said Super Bowl advertisers may be \u201cconcerned about looking opportunistic versus supportive.\u201d And humor, she noted, was particularly appealing given the social and political climate.\n\n\u201cSometimes when the world is troubled or America is feeling a little \u2014 well,", + " I wouldn\u2019t say it was an up 2017 for everybody \u2014 I think there is a tendency to want to balance out the energy,\u201d Ms. Credle said. \u201cLightheartedness and a little fun and joy is probably a good antidote to the reality that we\u2019re sitting in.\u201d\n\nA \u2018Game of Thrones\u2019 reference and a Jeff Bezos cameo.\n\nFans of HBO\u2019s \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d have been buzzing about a commercial for Doritos and Mountain Dew that stars the actors Peter Dinklage and Morgan Freeman, as well as the musicians Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes. The brands, owned by Pepsi,", + " cast Mr. Dinklage to represent fire, for a new spicy Doritos flavor, while Mr. Morgan plays ice for a new kind of Mountain Dew.\n\nGreg Lyons, the chief marketing officer of Pepsi\u2019s North American beverage unit, said the casting was not a reference to Mr. Dinklage\u2019s \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d character, who advises a queen who owns dragons. The actor, he said, is \u201cfiery on his own.\u201d\n\nMr. Lyons said, \u201cHe was in \u2018Elf\u2019 \u2014 he was pretty fiery in that as well.\u201d\n\nIn another kind of pop-culture moment, Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon,", + " who has become far more visible in recent months at Hollywood and charity events, will appear in his first ad for the company, which promotes its Echo device.\n\nHalf a billion dollars in commercial time.\n\nWhile it has never been easier for advertisers to reach vast numbers of people around the world, thanks to the internet, the lure of the Super Bowl is the one huge audience it provides. Advertisers spent a combined $534 million on ads before, during and after the game last year, according to the research firm Kantar. The company said that the roughly $5 million a 30-second commercial cost last year compared to $2.5 million for 30 seconds in the National Football Conference championship game and $1.", + "9 million for the same time in the Academy Awards.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a finite amount of inventory,\u201d Gibbs Haljun, managing director of media investment at GroupM, the media buying arm of WPP. \u201cThere\u2019s only one game, it\u2019s only on once a year, the ratings are relatively stable and it is what it is.\u201d\n\nStill, it appeared that NBC was selling at least some spots down to the wire, as illustrated by a last-minute buy from Wix.com that the company announced on Friday. In January, Wix.com was promoting its decision to sit out of this year\u2019s game and arranging press interviews with its chief marketing officer about alternative plans for the money.\n\nNBC said in an email late Friday that it had sold all of its ads for the game.\n\nThe network,", + " which is owned by Comcast, has had the dual challenge this year of selling ads for both the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics, which will begin on Friday.\n\n\u201cI can\u2019t remember the last time that occurred,\u201d Mr. Haljun said, \u201cso this is kind of an odd challenge for them and continues to make the negotiations a little more interesting and robust.\u201d ", + " It\u2019s an early evening in January, and David Harbour is already in his pajamas, lying on a mattress without sheets in a country club just outside of Los Angeles. Moments before, he had been jumping on the bed like a giddy teenager at a slumber party. He turns to his side, looks over his shoulder and, with a dreamy-creepy smile, takes a deep breath before earnestly exhaling, \u201cTide.\u201d\n\nThis is the task that Harbour, the actor best-known for playing Jim Hopper on Stranger Things, has been given by Tide and Saatchi & Saatchi New York. It\u2019s the second day of a four-day shoot for Tide\u2019s Super Bowl campaign,", + " and Harbour has already performed many scenes that are arguably just as surreal. (After the jumping, Harbour grabs a white rose from a vase, mugs for the camera and eats the entire flower\u2014chewing it slowly, as if it\u2019s a large wad of rose-flavored bubble gum.)\n\nThe point isn\u2019t so much to get weird with Tide\u2014though that\u2019s certainly happening\u2014but to give each moment some semblance of truth so that Saatchi & Saatchi\u2019s punchline lands.\n\nTide\u2019s wildly ambitious plan is much more involved than your average Super Bowl spot. The detergent brand\u2019s goal is to take over the Super Bowl with a campaign that positions Harbour as an omniscient narrator of sorts,", + " asking Super Bowl viewers to question every ad they see\u2014because if you\u2019re seeing clean clothes, you could be watching a Tide ad.\n\nTo accomplish this, the company bought an ad in every quarter\u2014a 45-second establishing spot in the first quarter, along with 15-second ads for each of the following three quarters. Tide then filmed each scene as a separate short spot in the genre of whatever product it\u2019s pretending to pitch. There\u2019s a car ad, a beer ad, a deodorant ad and a half-dozen others, all of which, through various twists, turn out to be pitching the same laundry detergent.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s wildly self-aware,\u201d Harbour tells Adweek in between scenes on set.", + " \u201cThe fact that you have this character who\u2019s sort of this Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone of advertising, sort of coming in and being like, \u2018Wow, maybe every ad is like a Tide ad,\u2019 and then he pops up in all of these different ads to kind of reveal to you that what you think you\u2019re watching is not actually what you\u2019re watching.\u201d\n\nTaking over the Super Bowl\n\nThe idea stemmed from Tide\u2019s position as the leader seller of detergent in the U.S. After all, the brand had more than a quarter of the market share in 2017, according to Statista. If people use Tide at home,", + " why wouldn\u2019t the styling teams for every ad in the Super Bowl also use it on set? (When asked, Tide\u2019s parent company Procter & Gamble said every piece of clothing used in its Super Bowl spots was indeed washed with Tide.)\n\n\u201cThe idea itself was really informed by the brand Tide being such an icon, that so many people use it,\u201d said Paul Bichler, Saatchi & Saatchi\u2019s executive creative director. \u201cSo it lends itself to this idea\u2014of the people you surround yourself with, half of them are essentially Tide ads.\u201d\n\nTide has been a regular contender in many Super Bowls over the past decade.", + " Last year, it surprised the audience by doing a stunt with Terry Bradshaw; the football-commentator-turned-Tide-spokesman played along with a fake stain on his shirt during what appeared to be a live broadcast, which was actually shot by Saatchi weeks earlier.\n\nThis year, the detergent brand is looking to pull off another stunt\u2014this time, writ large with a massive price tag. With 30 seconds of airtime in the Big Game costing more than $5 million, P&G\u2019s four spots (a total of 90 seconds) add up to around $15 million, without factoring in production, talent and agency fees.", + " What could be worth that much?\n\nContinue Reading\n" + ], + "length": 11107, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 32, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Undergoing questioning as a rape victim is difficult, but even more so if the victim is made to feel her recollections are untrustworthy\u2014a reaction that's more probable if she was intoxicated during the assault. \"Out of these concerns, the police might forgo interviewing victims,\" University of Leicester researcher Heather Flowe says, per a press release from the university. \"On the other hand, almost always in sexual offenses, the victim is the only one who can provide information about the crime to investigators.\" But Flowe and her team have study results that could help put those concerns to rest, finding that women who had a BAC at the legal driving limit of 0.08 may not have been able to recollect as much information as their sober counterparts about a hypothetical rape, but they were able to remember it just as accurately. For a study published in the journal Memory, researchers divided 88 female college students ages 18 to 31 into two groups: One group drank plain tonic water, the other group tonic and vodka\u2014enough to get, as Vocativ puts it, \"either a medium or high buzz.\" They then had to go through what Vocativ describes as a hypothetical \"choose your own adventure\" scenario with an attractive man, where they could opt out of the situation at any time as the sexual activity escalated; if they opted out, they'd be presented with a hypothetical sexual assault scenario based on real rape cases. When all participants were quizzed about the scenario 24 hours later, then again four months later, those who had been drinking said \"I don't know\" more often\u2014but when they did answer, their descriptions were just as accurate as those of the tonic-tippling group. One limitation of the study, researchers acknowledge: Reaction to hypotheticals in a lab may obviously not match that of those going through a real assault. (One group of sex-crime survivors have their own village.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Questions are often raised about the accuracy of sexual assault survivors\u2019 memories when alcohol is involved\u2014but a new study suggests that mistrust might be unfounded.\n\nWomen who drank before being presented with a hypothetical sexual assault scenario remembered less afterward about the storyline than those who were sober for the experiment. However, their recounting of what they did remember was just as accurate as the non-buzzed participants\u2019.\n\nThe researchers recruited 88 women between the ages of 18 and 31 at the University of Leicester in the U.K., all but one of them undergraduate students. In a laboratory, the placebo group received plain tonic water, while the remaining participants were given enough vodka tonics to achieve either a medium or high buzz.", + " (The latter was measured as a breath alcohol content of 0.08 percent, which meets the federal standard for intoxicated driving in the United States.)\n\nThen, they were asked to complete what is called an \u201cinteractive hypothetical sexual assault scenario\u201d\u2014basically a \u201cchoose your own adventure\u201d exercise in which you only have the illusion of choice. The women were told an imaginary story in which an attractive man began complimenting them. At each step of the way as the scenario progressed, they were asked whether they wanted to continue with the encounter or not. If they did, they gradually went from imagined kissing to imagined sex. If at any point they opted out,", + " they were confronted with a hypothetical sexual assault, the details of which were based on actual rape cases.\n\nThe participants were then asked to recount the story twice: first 24 hours after the fact and then again four months later. Researchers asked them a series of questions about the hypothetical scenario and found that participants who had been under the influence of alcohol responded more often with \u201cdon\u2019t know.\u201d But when they did answer, their memories were just as accurate as those of the sober participants.\n\nThis led the researchers to conclude \u201cthat intoxicated victims can provide accurate information to the police.\u201d They explained, \u201cAlthough compared to sober women, intoxicated women may remember less information,", + " our results imply that when intoxicated women provide testimony, the information they provide is just as accurate as sober women, all other things being equal.\u201d\n\nThe implications about trusting women\u2019s accounts of rape, even if they involve intoxication, are powerful, especially at a time of heated debate about alcohol and consent on college campuses. Clearly, though, the study has its limitations: There is a big difference between enduring an actual sexual assault and running through a hypothetical in a lab setting. As the researchers put it, \u201cThe psychological impact of the scenario, for obvious ethical reasons, of course, is not akin to experiencing an actual rape, and hence, we have to be cautious in generalising the results from this research to actual rape cases.\u201d ", + " Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) Limits: Adult Operators of Noncommercial Motor Vehicles Laws addressing blood alcohol concentration limits applicable to drivers of noncommercial automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles who have reached the legal drinking age of 21 years. Select another policy topic: TAXATION Beer Taxes Wine Taxes Distilled Spirits Taxes UNDERAGE DRINKING Possession/Consumption/Internal Possession Purchase Furnishing Age of Server-On-Premises Age of Seller-Off-Premises Use/Lose: Driving Privileges Hosting Underage Drinking Parties False Identification ALCOHOL BEVERAGES PRICING Drink Specials Wholesale Pricing Practices and Restrictions BLOOD ALCOHOL CONCENTRATION (BAC)", + " LIMITS Adult Drivers Drivers Under 21 Recreational Boaters TRANSPORTATION Open Container Vehicular Insurance: Losses Due to Intoxication RETAIL SALES Keg Registration Beverage Service Training Sunday Sales ALCOHOL CONTROL SYSTEMS Beer-Retail Beer-Wholesale Wine-Retail Wine-Wholesale Spirits-Retail Spirits-Wholesale PREGNANCY AND ALCOHOL Warning Signs: Drinking During Pregnancy Criminal Prosecution Civil Commitment Priority Treatment Child Abuse/Neglect Reporting Requirements HEALTH CARE SERVICES AND FINANCING Health Insurance: Losses due to Intoxication (\"UPPL\") Health Insurance Parity CANNABIS Recreational Use of Cannabis\n\n\n\nAbout This Policy Data on a Specific Date Changes Over Time Timeline of Changes Maps & Charts Variables Instructions New users are encouraged to look at the Instructions tab to understand how best to utilize the site.", + " Pick a tab to display the data. [Expand All] [Collapse All] Policy Description (Period Covered: 1/1/1998 through 1/1/2016) This policy topic covers laws addressing blood alcohol concentration limits applicable to drivers of noncommercial automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles who have reached the legal drinking age of 21 years. Blood alcohol concentration (BAC) is a measure of the amount of alcohol in a person's bloodstream. BAC is commonly expressed in percentage terms. For instance, having a BAC of 0.08 percent means that a person has eight parts alcohol per 10,000 parts blood in the body.", + " State laws generally specify BAC levels in terms of grams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood (often abbreviated as grams per deciliter, or g/dL). BAC levels can be detected by breath, blood, or urine tests. The laws of each jurisdiction specify the preferred or required types of tests used for measurement. BAC statutes establish criteria for determining when an operator of a vehicle is violating the law. This section provides information on State and Federal BAC laws that apply to drivers of noncommercial automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles who have reached the legal drinking age (21 years). All jurisdictions have enacted per se BAC laws for adults operating noncommercial motor vehicles.", + " A per se BAC statute establishes a BAC limit for a violation. If the operator has a BAC level at or above the per se limit, a violation has occurred without regard to other evidence of intoxication or sobriety. In other words, exceeding the BAC limit established in a per se statute is itself a violation. By limiting the use of evidence by defendants, per se laws make conviction more likely. [1]. In the past, some States without a per se law established other standards for using BAC levels as evidence of being under the influence of alcohol. In these jurisdictions, the weight given to the BAC evidence varied.", + " Some laws provided that a BAC at or above a particular level created a presumption of being under the influence of alcohol. Other laws provided that such evidence was prima facie evidence of being under the influence, or was admissible in making this determination. These evidentiary standards were even weaker than a presumption. Defendants in jurisdictions without a per se standard could provide evidence that, in spite of the BAC level, they were not under the influence and therefore not in violation. This differentiates other statutes from per se statutes, which provide that exceeding the BAC limit is itself a violation and only the validity of the BAC measurement is at issue.", + " For historical data, APIS distinguishes between per se and non-per se jurisdictions but does not distinguish the evidentiary weight of BAC evidence in jurisdictions without a per se standard. Cowan, J. and Joffie, S. \"Proof and disproof of alcohol-induced driving impairment through blood alcohol testing,\" 4 Am. Jur. POF 3d 229 (July 2002) Explanatory Notes and Limitations for Blood Alcohol Concentration Limits: Adult Operators of Noncommercial Motor Vehicles Explanatory Notes and Limitations Specifically Applicable to Blood Alcohol Concentration Limits: Adult Operators of Noncommercial Motor Vehicles This review examines only the specific BAC laws for drivers of noncommercial motor vehicles in each State and the District of Columbia and the specific Federal legislation cited.\n\nThis review does not address the following issues related to BAC limit laws:\n\nPenalties for violations of BAC laws.\n\nState and Federal laws related to enforcement of BAC laws.\n\nProvisions covering enhanced sanctions for violators whose BAC exceeds a specified level that is higher than the legal limit (e.g., BAC > 0.", + "20 g/dL).\n\nProvisions related to repeat offenders.\n\nProvisions that create a rebuttable presumption of impairment or other evidentiary standards at lower levels of BAC than the per se limits.\n\nBAC limits that apply to operators of commercial motor vehicles.\n\nLaws that may pertain to BAC limits for those who operate nonmotorized bicycles.\n\nSeparate laws for Indian Reservations. Approximately 200 tribes across the Nation have jurisdiction and responsibility for laws affecting their reservations. Many have passed their own BAC laws.\n\nBAC limits applicable specifically to persons who have not yet attained the legal drinking age (21 years of age). See related policy topic BAC:", + " Youth.\n\nExplanatory Notes and Limitations Applicable to All APIS Policy Topics State law may permit local jurisdictions to impose requirements in addition to those mandated by State law. Alternatively, State law may prohibit local legislation on this topic, thereby preempting local powers. For more information on the preemption doctrine, see the About Alcohol Policy page. APIS does not document policies established by local governments.\n\nIn addition to statutes and regulations, judicial decisions (case law) also may affect alcohol-related policies. APIS does not review case law except to determine whether judicial decisions have invalidated statutes or regulations that would otherwise affect the data presented in the comparison tables.\n\nAPIS reviews published administrative regulations.", + " However, administrative decisions or directives that are not included in a State's published regulatory codes may have an impact on implementation. This possibility has not been addressed by the APIS research.\n\nStatutes and regulations cited in tables on this policy topic may have been amended or repealed after the specific date or time period specified by the site user's search criteria.\n\nIf a conflict exists between a statute and a regulation addressing the same legal issue, APIS coding relies on the statute.\n\nA comprehensive understanding of the data presented in the comparison tables for this policy topic requires examination of the applicable Row Notes and Jurisdiction Notes, which can be accessed from the body of the table via links in the Jurisdiction column.", + " Federal Law for Blood Alcohol Concentration Limits: Adult Operators of Noncommercial Motor Vehicles (Policies in effect on: 1/1/2016) BAC limits on Federal properties vary according to the type of lands involved, the Federal agency responsible for their regulation, and the geographic and jurisdictional relationships of any specific Federal land to contiguous privately owned land or land under the jurisdiction of other governmental entities.\n\nFor Federal lands under the administration of the National Park Service, a 0.08 per se BAC limit has been operative since September 5, 2003. The applicable regulation applies to drivers who operate a vehicle on roadways or in parking areas within all park areas open to public traffic and that are under the legislative jurisdiction of the United States [36 C.F.R.", + " \u00a7 4.23]. It also provides that \"if State law that applies to operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol establishes more restrictive limits of alcohol concentration in the operator's blood or breath, those limits supersede the limits specified in this paragraph.\" A 0.08% blood alcohol concentration standard is the law on military installations, which are administered by the Department of Defense [ 32 C.F.R. \u00a7 634.34 ]. Operating a motor vehicle with a BAC of 0.10% or more is also a violation under the Uniform Code of Military Justice\n\n10 U.S.C. \u00a7 911 ]. Other types of Federal properties administered by the Bureau of Land Management,", + " the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of Agriculture are not amenable to a national BAC limit different from those established by the laws of the states in which the land is located. For example, some Federal properties are interspersed among State and privately owned tracts lacking clearly defined boundaries. For these lands, BAC legal limits vary.\n\nIndian tribes are domestic dependent sovereigns that have the right of self-government. As such, approximately 200 tribes across the nation have enacted their own BAC limit laws.\n\n1]\n\nIn 1998, the Administration called for widespread adoption of 0.08 BAC levels across the country and on Federal property.", + " Congress passed two laws to spur such action. In 1998, Congress created incentive grant programs for States that moved toward adoption and enforcement of stricter BAC laws. Then, in 2000, Federal legislation was adopted that required each State to pass a per se 0.08 BAC law by 2004 or lose a portion of Federal highway funds. See [ 23 U.S.C. \u00a7 163 ].\n\nMore recently, Congress passed legislation providing for incentive grants to States that adopt and implement programs to reduce driving under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or the combination of alcohol and drugs, including programs for improving BAC testing and reporting [ 23 U.S.C.", + " \u00a7 405 ]. Excerpts from these laws appear below. FEDERAL CITATIONS AND RELEVANT TEXT EXCERPTS 36 C.F.R. \u00a7 4.23 Code of Federal Regulations Title 36 - Parks, Forests, and Public Property CHAPTER I - NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR PART 4 - VEHICLES AND TRAFFIC SAFETY \u00a7 4.23. Operating under the influence of alcohol or drugs (a) Operating or being in actual physical control of a motor vehicle is prohibited while: (1) Under the influence of alcohol, or a drug, or drugs, or any combination thereof,", + " to a degree that renders the operator incapable of safe operation; or (2) The alcohol concentration in the operator's blood or breath is 0.08 grams or more of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood or 0.08 grams or more of alcohol per 210 liters of breath. Provided however, that if State law that applies to operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol establishes more restrictive limits of alcohol concentration in the operator's blood or breath, those limits supersede the limits specified in this paragraph.\n\n32 C.F.R. \u00a7 634.34 Code of Federal Regulations Title 32 - National Defense Subtitle A - Department of Defense CHAPTER V - DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY SUBCHAPTER I - LAW ENFORCEMENT AND CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS PART 634 - MOTOR VEHICLE TRAFFIC SUPERVISION Subpart D - Traffic Supervision \u00a7 634.", + "34. Blood alcohol concentration standards (a) Administrative revocation of driving privileges and other enforcement measures will be applied uniformly to offenders driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. When a person is tested under the implied consent provisions of \u00a7 634.8, the results of the test will be evaluated as follows: (1) If the percentage of alcohol in the person's blood is less than 0.05 percent, presume the person is not under the influence of alcohol. (2) If the percentage is 0.05 but less than 0.08, presume the person may be impaired. This standard may be considered with other competent evidence in determining whether the person was under the influence of alcohol.", + " (3) If the percentage is 0.08 or more, or if tests reflect the presence of illegal drugs, the person was driving while intoxicated. (b) Percentages in paragraph (a) of this section are percent of weight by volume of alcohol in the blood based on grams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood. These presumptions will be considered with other evidence in determining intoxication.\n\n10 U.S.C. \u00a7 911 United States Code Title 10 - ARMED FORCES\n\nSubtitle A - General Military Law\n\nPART II - PERSONNEL\n\nCHAPTER 47 - UNIFORM CODE OF MILITARY JUSTICE\n\nSUBCHAPTER X - PUNITIVE ARTICLES\n\n\u00a7 911.", + " Art. 111. Drunken or reckless operation of a vehicle, aircraft, or vessel (a) Any person subject to this chapter who\u2014 (1) operates or physically controls any vehicle, aircraft, or vessel in a reckless or wanton manner or while impaired by a substance described in section 912a(b) of this title (article 112a(b)), or (2) operates or is in actual physical control of any vehicle, aircraft, or vessel while drunk or when the alcohol concentration in the person's blood or breath is equal to or exceeds the applicable limit under subsection (b), shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.", + " (b)(1) For purposes of subsection (a), the applicable limit on the alcohol concentration in a person's blood or breath is as follows: (A) In the case of the operation or control of a vehicle, aircraft, or vessel in the United States, such limit is the lesser of\u2014 (i) the blood alcohol content limit under the law of the State in which the conduct occurred, except as may be provided under paragraph (2) for conduct on a military installation that is in more than one State; or (ii) the blood alcohol content limit specified in paragraph (3). (B) In the case of the operation or control of a vehicle,", + " aircraft, or vessel outside the United States, the applicable blood alcohol content limit is the blood alcohol content limit specified in paragraph (3) or such lower limit as the Secretary of Defense may by regulation prescribe. (2) In the case of a military installation that is in more than one State, if those States have different blood alcohol content limits under their respective State laws, the Secretary may select one such blood alcohol content limit to apply uniformly on that installation. (3) For purposes of paragraph (1), the blood alcohol content limit with respect to alcohol concentration in a person's blood is 0.10 grams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood and with respect to alcohol concentration in a person's breath is 0.", + "10 grams of alcohol per 210 liters of breath, as shown by chemical analysis. (4) In this subsection: (A) The term \u201cblood alcohol content limit\u201d means the amount of alcohol concentration in a person's blood or breath at which operation or control of a vehicle, aircraft, or vessel is prohibited. (B) The term \u201cUnited States\u201d includes the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa and the term \u201cState\u201d includes each of those jurisdictions. 23 U.S.C. \u00a7 163\n\nUnited States Code\n\nTitle 23 - HIGHWAYS\n\nCHAPTER 1 - FEDERAL-AID HIGHWAYS\n\n\u00a7 163.", + " Safety incentives to prevent operation of motor vehicles by intoxicated persons United States CodeTitle 23 - HIGHWAYSCHAPTER 1 - FEDERAL-AID HIGHWAYS (a) General Authority.\u2014The Secretary shall make a grant, in accordance with this section, to any State that has enacted and is enforcing a law that provides that any person with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent or greater while operating a motor vehicle in the State shall be deemed to have committed a per se offense of driving while intoxicated (or an equivalent per se offense). (b) Grants.\u2014For each fiscal year, funds authorized to carry out this section shall be apportioned to each State that has enacted and is enforcing a law meeting the requirements of subsection (a)", + " in an amount determined by multiplying\u2014 (1) the amount authorized to carry out this section for the fiscal year; by (2) the ratio that the amount of funds apportioned to each such State under section 402 for such fiscal year bears to the total amount of funds apportioned to all such States under section 402 for such fiscal year. (c) Use of Grants.\u2014A State may obligate funds apportioned under subsection (b) for any project eligible for assistance under this title. (d) Federal Share.\u2014The Federal share of the cost of a project funded under this section shall be 100 percent. (e)", + " Penalty.\u2014 (1) In general.\u2014On October 1, 2003, and October 1 of each fiscal year thereafter, if a State has not enacted or is not enforcing a law described in subsection (a), the Secretary shall withhold from amounts apportioned to the State on that date under each of paragraphs (1), (3), and (4) of section 104(b) an amount equal to the amount specified in paragraph (2). (2) Amount to be withheld.\u2014If a State is subject to a penalty under paragraph (1), the Secretary shall withhold for a fiscal year from the apportionments of the State described in paragraph (1)", + " an amount equal to a percentage of the funds apportioned to the State under paragraphs (1), (3), and (4) of section 104(b) for fiscal year 2003. The percentage shall be as follows: (A) For fiscal year 2004, 2 percent. (B) For fiscal year 2005, 4 percent. (C) For fiscal year 2006, 6 percent. (D) For fiscal year 2007, and each fiscal year thereafter, 8 percent. (3) Failure to comply.\u2014If, within 4 years from the date that an apportionment for a State is withheld in accordance with this subsection,", + " the Secretary determines that the State has enacted and is enforcing a law described in subsection (a), the apportionment of the State shall be increased by an amount equal to the amount withheld. If, at the end of such 4-year period, any State has not enacted or is not enforcing a law described in subsection (a) any amounts so withheld from such State shall lapse. 23 U.S.C. \u00a7 405 United States Code Title 23 - HIGHWAYS\n\nCHAPTER 4 - HIGHWAY SAFETY\n\n\u00a7 405. National priority safety programs (a) General authority.--Subject to the requirements of this section, the Secretary shall manage programs to address national priorities for reducing highway deaths and injuries.", + " Funds shall be allocated according to the following: (3) Impaired driving countermeasures.-- In each fiscal year, 52.5 percent of the funds provided under this section shall be allocated among States that meet requirements with respect to impaired driving countermeasures (as described in subsection (d)). * * * (d) Impaired driving countermeasures.-- (1) In general.--Subject to the requirements under this subsection, the Secretary of Transportation shall award grants to States that adopt and implement-- (A) effective programs to reduce driving under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or the combination of alcohol and drugs; or (B)", + " alcohol-ignition interlock laws. * * * (3) Eligibility.-- (A) Low-range States.--Low-range States shall be eligible for a grant under this subsection. (B) Mid-range States.--A mid-range State shall be eligible for a grant under this subsection if-- (i) a statewide impaired driving task force in the State developed a statewide plan during the most recent 3 calendar years to address the problem of impaired driving; or (ii) the State will convene a statewide impaired driving task force to develop such a plan during the first year of the grant. (C) High-range States.--A high-range State shall be eligible for a grant under this subsection if the State-- (i)(I)", + " conducted an assessment of the State's impaired driving program during the most recent 3 calendar years; or (II) will conduct such an assessment during the first year of the grant; (ii) convenes, during the first year of the grant, a statewide impaired driving task force to develop a statewide plan that-- (I) addresses any recommendations from the assessment conducted under clause (i); (II) includes a detailed plan for spending any grant funds provided under this subsection; and (III) describes how such spending supports the statewide program; and (iii)(I) submits the statewide plan to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during the first year of the grant for the agency's review and approval;", + " (II) annually updates the statewide plan in each subsequent year of the grant; and (III) submits each updated statewide plan for the agency's review and comment. (4) Use of grant amounts.-- (A) Required programs.--High-range States shall use grant funds for-- (i) high visibility enforcement efforts; and (ii) any of the activities described in subparagraph (B) if-- (I) the activity is described in the statewide plan; and (II) the Secretary approves the use of funding for such activity. (B) Authorized programs.--Medium-range and low-range States may use grant funds for-- (i) any of the purposes described in subparagraph (A); (ii)", + " hiring a full-time or part-time impaired driving coordinator of the State's activities to address the enforcement and adjudication of laws regarding driving while impaired by alcohol, drugs, or the combination of alcohol and drugs; (iii) court support of high visibility enforcement efforts, training and education of criminal justice professionals (including law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and probation officers) to assist such professionals in handling impaired driving cases, hiring traffic safety resource prosecutors, hiring judicial outreach liaisons, and establishing driving while intoxicated courts; (iv) alcohol ignition interlock programs; (v) improving blood-alcohol concentration testing and reporting; (vi) paid and earned media in support of high visibility enforcement efforts,", + " conducting standardized field sobriety training, advanced roadside impaired driving evaluation training, and drug recognition expert training for law enforcement, and equipment and related expenditures used in connection with impaired driving enforcement in accordance with criteria established by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; (vii) training on the use of alcohol and drug screening and brief intervention; (viii) training for and implementation of impaired driving assessment programs or other tools designed to increase the probability of identifying the recidivism risk of a person convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or a combination of alcohol and drugs and to determine the most effective mental health or substance abuse treatment or sanction that will reduce such risk;", + " (ix) developing impaired driving information systems; and (x) costs associated with a 24-7 sobriety program. (C) Other programs.--Low-range States may use grant funds for any expenditure designed to reduce impaired driving based on problem identification and may use not more than 50 percent of funds made available under this subsection for any project or activity eligible for funding under section 402. Medium-range and high-range States may use funds for any expenditure designed to reduce impaired driving based on problem identification upon approval by the Secretary. (5) Grant amount.-- Subject to paragraph (6), the allocation of grant funds to a State under this section for a fiscal year shall be in proportion to the State's apportionment under section 402 for fiscal year 2009.", + " (6) Additional grants.-- (A) Grants to States with alcohol-ignition interlock laws.--The Secretary shall make a separate grant under this subsection to each State that adopts and is enforcing a mandatory alcohol-ignition interlock law for all individuals convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol or of driving while intoxicated. (B) Grants to States with 24-7 sobriety programs.--The Secretary shall make a separate grant under this subsection to each State that-- (i) adopts and is enforcing a law that requires all individuals convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol or of driving while intoxicated to receive a restriction on driving privileges;", + " and (ii) provides a 24-7 sobriety program. (C) Use of funds.--Grants authorized under subparagraph (A) and subparagraph (B) may be used by recipient States for any eligible activities under this subsection or section 402. (D) Allocation.--Amounts made available under this paragraph shall be allocated among States described in subparagraph (A) and subparagraph (B) in proportion to the State's apportionment under section 402 for fiscal year 2009. (E) Funding.-- (i) Funding for grants to States with alcohol-ignition interlock laws.--Not more than 12 percent of the amounts made available to carry out this subsection in a fiscal year shall be made available by the Secretary for making grants under subparagraph (A). (ii)", + " Funding for grants to States with 24-7 sobriety programs.--Not more than 3 percent of the amounts made available to carry out this subsection in a fiscal year shall be made available by the Secretary for making grants under subparagraph (B). * * * (7) Definitions.--In this subsection: (A) 24-7 sobriety program.--The term \u201c24-7 sobriety program\u201d means a State law or program that authorizes a State court or an agency with jurisdiction, as a condition of bond, sentence, probation, parole, or work permit, to-- (i) require an individual who was arrested for,", + " plead guilty to, or was convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs to totally abstain from alcohol or drugs for a period of time; and (ii) require the individual to be subject to testing for alcohol or drugs-- (I) at least twice per day at a testing location; (II) by continuous transdermal alcohol monitoring via an electronic monitoring device; or (III) by an alternate method with the concurrence of the Secretary. (B) Average impaired driving fatality rate.--The term \u201caverage impaired driving fatality rate\u201d means the number of fatalities in motor vehicle crashes involving a driver with a blood alcohol concentration of at least 0.", + "08 percent for every 100,000,000 vehicle miles traveled, based on the most recently reported 3 calendar years of final data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, as calculated in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. (C) High-range state.--The term \u201chigh-range State\u201d means a State that has an average impaired driving fatality rate of 0.60 or higher. (D) Low-range state.--The term \u201clow-range State\u201d means a State that has an average impaired driving fatality rate of 0.30 or lower. (E) Mid-range state.--The term \u201cmid-range State\u201d means a State that has an average impaired driving fatality rate that is higher than 0.", + "30 and lower than 0.60. * * * Source for all citations on this page: FDsys, the Federal Digital System of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO).\n\nExcerpts from the United States Code are current as of 2015. Excerpts from the Code of Federal Regulations are current as of 2016. Excerpts from Public Laws of Congress are current as of the year of enactment.\n\nThe GPO\u2019s Public Domain/Copyright Notice is available under the Policies heading at http://www.gpo.gov/help/index.html. * * ** * * __________________ 1] U.S. Department of Transportation,", + " National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, \"Presidential Initiative for Making 0.08 BAC the National Legal Limit: Recommendations from the Secretary of Transportation,\" House Conference Report No. 105-550, August 1998, and Statement by President, see 1998 U.S. Code Cong. and Adm. News, p. 64. Selected References for Blood Alcohol Concentration Limits: Adult Operators of Noncommercial Motor Vehicles Barry, A.E., Chaney, B.H., and Stellefson, M.L. Breath alcohol concentrations of designated drivers. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 74(4):509-", + "13, July 2013.\n\nBrady, J.E., & Li, G. (2012). Prevalence of alcohol and other drugs in fatally injured drivers. Addiction 108(1), 104-114. DOI: 10.1111/j.1360-0443.2012.03993.x. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3467360/.\n\nChamlin, M.B. (2016). An interrupted time series analysis of the differential impact of New Jersey\u2019s BAC legislation on driver and passenger crash fatalities. Journal of Crime and Justice, (17 March): 1-", + "8.\n\nChang, K., Wu, C.C., and Ying, Y.H. The effectiveness of alcohol control policies on alcohol-related traffic fatalities in the United States. Accident Analysis & Prevention 45:406-415, 2012.\n\nFell, J.C., Fisher, D.A., Voas, R.B., Tippetts. A.S., and Blackman, K. Changes in alcohol-involved fatal crashes associated with tougher state alcohol legislation. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 33(7):1208-1219, 2009.\n\nFlowers, N.T., Naimi, T.S., Brewer,", + " R.D., Elder, R.W., Shults, R.A., and Jiles, R. Patterns of alcohol consumption and alcohol-impaired driving in the United States. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 32(4):639-644, 2008.\n\nKaplan, S., and Prato, C.G. Impact of BAC limit reduction on different population segments: A Poisson fixed-effect analysis. Accident Analysis and Prevention 39(6):1146-54, 2007.\n\nMacinko, J., & Silver, D. (2015). Diffusion of impaired driving laws among U.S. states.", + " American Journal of Public Health 105(9), 1893-1900. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2015.302670.\n\nNational Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Alcohol and Transportation Safety. Alcohol Alert No. 52. Rockville, MD: NIAAA.\n\nPhillips, D.P., Sousa, A.L.R., and Moshfegh, R.T. Official blame for drivers with very low blood alcohol content: There is no safe combination of drinking and driving. Injury Prevention January 7, 2014. (doi:10.1136/injuryprev-", + "2013-040925).\n\nRamstedt, M. Alcohol and fatal accidents in the United States\u2013A time series analysis for 1950\u20132002. Accident Analysis & Prevention 40(4):1273-1281, 2008.\n\nSanem, J.R., Erickson, D.J., Rutledge, P.C., Lenk, K.M., Nelson, T.F., Jones-Webb, R., et al. (2015). Association between alcohol-impaired driving enforcement-related strategies and alcohol-impaired driving. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 78: 104-109. doi: 10.1016/j.aap.", + "2015.02.018.\n\nScheetz, L.J. (2015). One for the road: A comparison of drinking and driving behavior among younger and older adults involved in fatal crashes. Journal of Trauma Nursing 22(4), 187-93. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/JTN.0000000000000141.\n\nU.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Setting Limits, Saving Lives: The Case for 0.08 BAC Laws. Department of Transportation Highway Safety 809: 241, 2001.\n\nVoas,", + " R.B., and Fell, J.C. Preventing impaired driving opportunities and problems. Alcohol Research and Health 34(2):225-235, 2011.\n\nVoas, R.B., Kelley-Baker, T., Romano, E., and Vishnuvajjala, R. Implied-consent laws: A review of the literature and examination of current problems and related statutes. Journal of Safety Research 40(2):77-83, 2009.\n\nVoas, R.B., Torres, P, Romano, E, and Lacey, J.H. (2012). Alcohol-related risk of driver fatalities:", + " An update using 2007 data. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 73(3):341-350. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2015.302670.\n\nWagenaar, A.C., and Maldonado-Molina, M.M. Effects of drivers' license suspension policies on alcohol-related crash involvement: Long-term follow-up in 46 states. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 31(8):1399-1406, 2007.\n\nWagenaar, A.C., Maldonado-Molina, M.M., Ma, L., Tobler,", + " A.L. and Komro, K.A. Effects of legal BAC limits on fatal crash involvement: Analyses of 28 states from 1976 through 2002. Journal of Safety Research 38(5):493-499, 2007.\n\nWilliams, A.F. Alcohol-impaired driving and its consequences in the United States: The past 25 years. Journal of Safety Research 37(2):123-38, 2006.\n\nXuan, Z., Blanchette, J.G., Nelson, T.F., Heeren, T.C. Nguyen,T.H., & Naimi, T.S. (2015). Alcohol policies and impaired driving in the United States:", + " Effects of driving- vs. drinking-oriented policies. The International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research ISSN 1925-7066. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7895/ijadr.v2i0.205. Retrieved from http://www.ijadr.org/index.php/ijadr/article/view/205/335.\n\nZaloshnja, E., Miller, T.R., & Lawrence, B.A. (2015, April 30). Economics of alcohol-involved traffic crashes in the USA: An input-output analysis. Injury Prevention. DOI: 10.1136/injuryprev-2014-", + "041485. Related Topics Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) Limits: Operators of Recreational Watercraft\n\n\n\nBlood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) Limits: Youth (Underage Operators of Noncommercial Motor Vehicles)\n\n\n\n\n\nLoading... ", + " University of Leicester study suggests that victims of sexual assault who were intoxicated during the crime could still be interviewed by the police\n\nIssued by University of Leicester Press Office on 18 August 2015\n\nResearch suggests intoxicated victims of sexual assault could accurately retain information from events\n\nFindings are being applied to develop National Guidelines for how the police could interview sexual assault victims who were intoxicated during the crime\n\nChallenges misconception that intoxicated victims and witnesses are unreliable\n\nPeople are often concerned about the accuracy of testimony given by victims who were intoxicated during a sexual assault\u2013 but a new study by University of Leicester researchers has found that while alcohol intoxicated participants report fewer pieces of information about an assault,", + " the information that they do provide is just as accurate as sober participants.\n\nThe research suggests that victims of sexual assault who were intoxicated during the crime can still report accurate information when interviewed by the police despite being intoxicated at the time of the offense.\n\nThe paper entitled \u2018Alcohol and remembering a hypothetical sexual assault: Can people who were under the influence of alcohol during the event provide accurate testimony?\u2019, published in the journal Memory, is one of the first studies to use a placebo controlled trial that investigates the effects of alcohol on memory within the context of sexual assault.\n\nThe team examined the influence of alcohol on remembering an interactive hypothetical sexual assault scenario in a laboratory setting using a balanced placebo design.\n\nFemale participants completed a memory test 24 hours and four months later.\n\nParticipants reported less information - by responding \u2018don\u2019t know\u2019 more often to questions - if they were under the influence of alcohol during the scenario than those who were not.\n\nHowever,", + " the accuracy of the information intoxicated participants reported did not differ compared to sober participants, suggesting intoxicated participants could accurately retain information from the event as well as those who were sober.\n\nDr Heather Flowe from the University of Leicester\u2019s Department of Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour who led the project said: \u201cSerious violent offenses often involve intoxicated witnesses and victims. In particular, in sexual assault and rape cases, victims and perpetrators are likely to have been under the influence of alcohol during the crime.\n\n\u201cWhen a victim is intoxicated during the crime, questions about the accuracy of testimony are raised in the minds of criminal investigators. Out of these concerns, the police might forgo interviewing victims who were intoxicated during the offence.", + " On the other hand, almost always in sexual offences, the victim is the only one who can provide information about the crime to investigators.\n\n\u201cConsequently, it is not likely that a crime will be solved without victim testimony. Bearing this in mind, we wondered whether intoxicated victims take their mental state during the crime into account when rendering their testimony to investigators. If they take into account that their memory has been impaired by alcohol, they should report information only when they believe it is likely to be accurate.\n\n\u201cAccordingly, intoxicated victims should report less information overall, but the accuracy of the information they do report might not be different from sober victims.\u201d\n\nTogether with the Crown Prosecution Service and Leicestershire Police,", + " the research findings are being applied to develop National Guidelines regarding how the police should interview sexual assault victims who were intoxicated during the crime.\n\nDetective Inspector Reme Gibson from Leicestershire Police\u2019s Rape Investigation Unit said: \u201cWorking alongside the University has been of huge benefit to our understanding of the effects alcohol has on memory.\n\n\u201cIt has been a long held misconception that victims and witnesses who are intoxicated are not able to give as good an account as they would when they are sober. The delays in speaking with victims accounts sometimes for loss of potential evidence, although alcohol is not the only factor that would influence whether or not an Officer would interview a victim.\n\n\u201cI hope these findings better support future investigations,", + " particularly in the sexual violence arena which is already often complex and not without challenges.\u201d\n\nThe team working on the guidelines also includes University of Leicester researchers Dr Anna Carline (School of Law), Dr Clare Gunby (Department of Criminology), Professor Graham Davies (School of Psychology), Professor Mandy Burton (School of Law), and Professor Vanessa Munro (School of Law).\n\nThe British Academy and Leverhulme Trust have funded a series of workshops to develop the National Guidelines.\n\nDr Flowe added: \u201cIt\u2019s fantastic to see the University of Leicester and the Police leading on this important topic. We are working to improve the quality of how testimony is gathered from victims.\u201d\n\nThe paper \u2018Alcohol and remembering a hypothetical sexual assault:", + " Can people who were under the influence of alcohol during the event provide accurate testimony?\u2019 published in the journal Memory is available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09658211.2015.1064536\n\nThe study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).\n\nENDS\n\nNotes to editors:\n\nFor more information please contact Dr Heather Flowe on hf49@le.ac.uk\n\nThe paper \u2018Alcohol and remembering a hypothetical sexual assault: Can people who were under the influence of alcohol during the event provide accurate testimony?\u2019 published in the journal Memory is available at:", + " http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09658211.2015.1064536\n\nFor a pdf version of the full paper email: er134@le.ac.uk\n\nAbout the ESRC:\n\nThe Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK\u2019s largest funder of research on the social and economic questions facing us today. It supports the development and training of the UK\u2019s future social scientists and also funds major studies that provide the infrastructure for research. ESRC-funded research informs policymakers and practitioners and helps make businesses, voluntary bodies and other organisations more effective. The ESRC also works collaboratively with six other UK research councils and Innovate UK to fund cross-disciplinary research and innovation addressing major societal challenges.", + " The ESRC is an independent organisation, established by Royal Charter in 1965, and funded mainly by the Government. In 2015 it celebrates its 50th anniversary.\n" + ], + "length": 9062, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 33, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The gas mask-wearing suspect arrested in connection with the hellish Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting is 24-year-old local resident James Holmes, ABC News reports. The Denver Post reports that police have thus far recovered a gas mask, rifle, handgun, and at least one other weapon; they also evacuated an apartment building tied to Holmes, then began searching it. KDVR reports that the suspect apparently told police the apartment contained explosives. Officers found the suspect near a car behind the theater, reports the AP. A rep for the city's police force said investigators don't believe anyone else was involved, and they don't believe Holmes had terrorist ties. Police have not indicated if there was a motive.\n", + "docs": [ + "\u00d7 Timeline: Updates in the Aurora movie theater shooting\n\nThe following information is updated as details become available:\n\nUPDATES:\n\nMonday, July 23, 2012\n\n3:09 PM: Court set up a web page for documents related to the People of the State of Colorado v. James Holmes.\n\n2:45 PM: Booking photo of the suspect, James Holmes, is released.\n\n2:00 PM: Lawyer for suspect\u2019s family holds news conference in San Diego to clarify mother\u2019s \u201cYou have the right person comment.\u201d She was referring to herself, and not her son.\n\n10:17 AM: We now have an 18-second video showing James Holmes\u2019 dazed demeanor at his court appearance this morning.\n\nIf you want to watch the entire video from Holmes\u2019 court appearance,", + " it\u2019s still on loop on our live stream at KWGN.com. For some analysis of Holmes\u2019 appearance, watch Everyday, which is streaming live on KDVR.com.\n\n10:09 AM: The district attorney\u2019s press conference has concluded.\n\nCarol Chambers, Arapahoe County district attorney, on Monday urged anybody who still has information that may be pertinent in the case to contact the police or the district attorney\u2019s office.\n\nAsked by a reporter if any medication or sedatives had been provided by the jail to Holmes, Chambers said she had no information about it.\n\n10:00 AM: \u201cIt\u2019s still a very active and ongoing investigation,\u201d Carol Chambers,", + " Arapahoe County district attorney, said Monday.\n\nDomestic terrorism charges would not be something state prosecutors would consider in the case, Carol Chambers, Arapahoe County district attorney, said Monday.\n\nVictims\u2019 families will be consulted before a decision is made on seeking the death penalty for Holmes, Carol Chambers, Arapahoe County district attorney, said. That decision is months away, she said.\n\nCarol Chambers, Arapahoe County district attorney, said \u201cthere is no such thing as a slam dunk case\u201d and prosecutors would be working hard to prove the charges against James Holmes.\n\n9:45 AM: Holmes\u2019 hair was dyed a bright orange during his court appearance Monday.\n\nHolmes\u2019 expression has changed little during the court hearing.", + " He has mostly been staring off into space.\n\n9:34 AM: Formal filing of charges will be Monday, July 30, at 9:30 a.m., the judge says.\n\nHolmes didn\u2019t look at the judge as the hearing started, just down as he was read his rights.\n\nJames Holmes appears before Judge William B. Sylvester. He is wearing a maroon jumpsuit.\n\n6:15 AM: Suspect James E. Holmes is scheduled to make his first court appearance at 9:30 AM today. The 24-year-old North Aurora native is being represented by Daniel King and Tamara Brady, chief trial attorney for the state public defender.\n\nThe decision to seek the death penalty will be up to the Arapahoe County District Attorney and will come 60 days after Holmes\u2019 arraignment.", + " The last executions in the state of Colorado occurred in 1976.\n\nSunday, July 22, 2012\n\n7:45 PM: University of Colorado-Denver Anschutz Medical Campus issues alert restricting access to areas of the campus.\n\n6:37 PM: Crowds are gathering at the Aurora memorial vigil\n\n5:50 PM: From @PeterBurnsRadio via Twitter:\n\nObama talked on @JessicaRedfield\u2019s sports passion. Was familiar with her story. Said \u201cshe was girl with passion that was going places\u201d\n\nEditor\u2019s note: Jessica was a former sports intern at FOX31 Denver.\n\n5:34 PM: #Broncos players meet with some of the hospital staff that treated victims of the Aurora shooting victims.\n\n5:", + "15 PM: From Eli Stokols:\n\nObama campaign will keep all ads off the air through the end of this week according to the campaign. Romney is following suit. Campaign says ads will be off the air \u201cuntil further notice.\u201d\n\n5:05 PM: This coming from CNN reporter on Twitter: \u200f@CNNValencia\n\nNEW- #CNN confirms #JamesHolmes received a Natl. Institutes of Health-sponsored Univ. grant worth $26,000. Got monthly check for ~$2,100\n\n4:50 PM: From @PeterBurnsRadio\n\nSuch a dichotomy of emotions after each Obama family meeting. Amazing celebrations of lives as well poignant issue discussions.\n\n4:", + "45 PM: From @PeterBurnsRadio\n\n\u201cPresident Obama has just come in and is sitting with each family individually. Amazing dialogue with each group.\u201d\n\nBurns is the morning radio host at WFAN and a close friend of Jessica Redfield/Ghawi.\n\n4:42 PM: from @allisonsherry (Denver Post Washington Bureau)\n\nWe arrived at University of Colorado Hospital at 3:52 p.m. local as spectacular summer thunderstorm rolled in, thunder, lightening and some much-needed rain.\n\nPOTUS was escorted up to visit patients. From the hospital: Twenty-three patients were brought to the hospital in the aftermath of the Cinema 16 Aurora theater shootings July 20.", + " Of those, one died and 12 were treated and released. Seven remain in critical condition and three in good condition, hospital officials said.\n\nNot sure of the 12 which one died at University hospital.\n\nPool is holding in a cafeteria. Patients and hospital visitors are pressed across the glass on all floors taking cell phone pictures of all the black cars parked near the holding area.\n\n4:40 PM: From Eli Stokols:\n\n>First stop is University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, where he is\n\n>meeting with families of victims killed in last Thursday\u00b9s tragedy. He\n\n>is joined by Governor Hickenlooper and Mayor Steve Hogan.\n\n>", + "Following the meeting, the President will make a statement to the press at\n\nthe Hospital.\n\n>a hospital spokesman says that this hospital initially received injured\n\n>23 shooting victims. Thirteen have been released and ten remain. Of\n\n>those, seven are still in critical condition and three are in good\n\n>condition.\n\n>\n\n>The hospital is about a five minute drive from the movie theater.\n\n4:34 PM: Members of the Denver Broncos met with victims today\n\n3:58 PM: Report: Denver Broncos Quarterback Peyton Manning called victims of the Aurora theater shooting.\n\n3:50 PM: Patient updates from Denver Health Medical Center\n\nDenver Health Medical Center received seven patients from the theatre shooting in Aurora.", + " All patients were treated for gunshot wounds and abrasions to the extremities.\n\nFive patients have now been treated and released. Two remain at the hospital in fair condition.\n\n1:44 PM:\n\nPer Aurora Police:\n\nUpdate regarding the Paris Street apartment address:\n\nThe law enforcement perimeter has been reduced down to include only the building located at 1690 North Paris Street. The processing and collection of evidence inside the suspect\u2019s apartment has concluded. Security of the building is still being maintained because of chemical hazards from the suspect\u2019s apartment. Residents are being allowed to get personal items. When it is deemed safe, they will be allowed to return home. It is not known when this will occur for certain.\n\nOnce the building is released to the residents,", + " the suspect\u2019s apartment will remain sealed off to maintain scene integrity.\n\nUpdate regarding crime scene at theater:\n\nThe theater crime scene is not expected to be released for up to a week. This is for evidentiary purposes for case preparation.\n\nSaturday, July 21, 2012\n\n9:05 PM: Police are looking for a second \u201cperson of interest\u201d in connection with the Aurora theater shooting and suspected gunman James Holmes\n\n8:49 PM: Per University of Colorado Hospital (as of Saturday evening):\n\n\n\n23 patients brought to University of Colorado Hospital\n\n12 treated and released\n\n1 deceased (our understanding is this person has been included in death toll from Aurora Police)\n\n7 patients in critical condition\n\n3 patients in good condition\n\n7:", + "17 PM: (CNN) \u2014 President Barack Obama will be in Aurora, Colorado, on Sunday to visit with victims of a shooting rampage inside a movie theater, a White House official said Saturday.\n\n6:47 PM: Per Aurora Police:\n\n\u2013 All hazards have been removed.\n\n\u2013 The FBI Evidence Response Team (ERT) remains on scene processing the apartment for evidence. This will be the case for several more hours. The FBI ERT will continue those efforts tomorrow.\n\n\u2013 The hazards have been removed and transported to a disposal site.\n\n\u2013 All evacuated residents can return to their homes. WITH THE EXCEPTION OF 1690 PARIS STREET. This building will remain secure for the purpose of preserving evidence.\n\n\u2013 The only remaining street closure is in the 1600 block of Paris.\n\n3:", + "38 PM: The Arapahoe County Coroner\u2019s Office released the following list of victim\u2019s names:\n\nThe Arapahoe County Coroner\u2019s Office has definitively identified 11 of the 12 victims who were killed inside the Century 16 movie theater:\n\nJessica N. Ghawi (11/27/1987)\n\nVeronica Moser-Sullivan (12/23/2005)\n\nJohn T. Larimer (2/16/1985)\n\nAlexander J. Boik (9/20/1993)\n\nJesse E. Childress (1/5/1983)\n\nJonathan T. Blunk (1/20/", + "1986)\n\nRebecca Ann Wingo (10/8/1979)\n\nAlex M. Sullivan (7/20/1985)\n\nGordon W. Cowden (11/17/1960)\n\nMicayla C. Medek (5/5/1989)\n\nAlexander C. Teves (6/1/1988)\n\nOn Additional victim, Matthew R. McQuinn (3/26/1985), has been presumptively identified, but is awaiting definitive identification.\n\nAll of the families have been notified.\n\nAs of July 21, 2012, autopsies have been carried out on all of the victims.", + " The cause of death in all cases is related to gunshot wounds. The manner of death is homicide.\n\nThe Arapahoe County Coroner\u2019s Office wishes to convey its sincerest condolences to the family and friends of the victims.\n\n3:07 PM: FOX31 Denver reporter Mark Meredith tweets from a press briefing held by the Aurora Police Department:\n\n#theatershooting shooting victims names could be released as early as today from coroners office.\n\n#theatershooting police say it\u2019s important that information comes out in court. The names of victims will be released by coroner\n\n#theatershooting \u2013 someone how loud music went off in apartment of suspect.", + " But police not releasing a theory of what shooter may hav wanted\n\n#theatershooting \u2013 police: the gun purchases were legal.\n\n#theatershooting \u2013 police: at this time this appears to be a state prosecuted case.\n\n#theatershooting police: we simply hope to wrap up work at the suspects apartment in the 12-24 hours\n\n#theatershooting \u2013 vigil planned 630-730 tomorrow \u2013 many people expected from Colorado political leadership.\n\n#theatershooting police: aurora public schools has setup disaster recovery centers for victims and families.\n\n#theatershooting chief says people shouldn\u2019t be afraid \u2013 be able to go to the movies.", + " \u201cColorado is a special place in how it helps victims\u201d\n\n#theatershooting aurora fire chief: we truly feel for the families and victims. Very proud of the firefighters of the response in last 48hrs\n\n@KDVR online now #theatershooting briefing. \u201cwe sure as hell are angry about what has happened to our city\u201d says police chief\n\n#theatershooting police not ready to discuss any possible motive in case. Details will come out in court and not right now.\n\n#theatershooting police: we think well be out of the movie theater by Monday. Suspects defense team to see it on Tuesday.\n\n#", + "theatershooting \u2013 police: no further hazards in theater. Personal effects being removed including purses wallets\n\n#theatershooting POLICE: tip line working well. 84 leads from tips so far. Anyone with info 720-913-7867\n\n#theatershooting \u2013 police: our suspect has had high volume of packages from last 4 months. Explains how ammunition got to suspect.\n\n@KDVR #theatershooting \u2013 FBI says this was challenging for all involved. Both local and national asserts have been working on situation\n\n#theatershooting FBI says suspects apartment was very dangerous situation. If someone had opened the door people may have lost their life\n\n@", + "KDVR #theatershooting FBI says most people who live near suspects apartment will be going home tomorrow\n\n2:05 PM: From @CJose at the suspect\u2019s apartment:\n\nstill active scene at apt. & the 4 surrounding buildings that are also evacuated. doesn\u2019t appear families will return soon\n\n12:48 PM: Aurora PD statement:\n\nWe have been successful in disabling a second triggering device through a controlled detonation.\n\nAlthough NOT certain \u2013 we are hopeful we have eliminated the remaining major threats.\n\nHowever, we will not know for sure until we enter the apartment.\n\nMany hazards remain inside. We will continue to be at this location for hours collecting evidence and mitigating those hazards.\n\nIn the event that more triggering devices are found,", + " there is a possibility of more controlled disruptions to occur.\n\n11:47 AM: Emergency crews entered suspect\u2019s apartment, which is filled with explosive devices and triggers. Disarming the devices will take place in three phases:\n\nAPD statement:\n\nMost immediate threat was a tripwire rigged to the apartment\u2019s door.\n\nThe controlled detonation was successful. Still more work to be done in the apartment to include dealing with other devices. There is a possibility of more controlled detonations. We will keep you updated. Streets open now.\n\nFriday, July 20, 2012\n\n10:20 PM: In addition to Jessica Ghawi, two additional victims have been identified:\n\nAJ Boik (age unknown at this time)\n\nMicayla Medek,", + " 23\n\nAlex Sullivan, 27, was celebrating his birthday the night of the shootings.\n\nHis family issued the following statement:\n\n\u201cThe Sullivan family lost a cherished member of their family today. Alex was smart, funny, and above all loved dearly by his friends and family. Today was his 27th birthday.\u201d\n\n10:10 PM: \u201cMy heart goes out to the families and the victims,\u201d Deborah Wood-Graves told FOX31 Denver on Friday. Wood-Graves frequently saw Holmes at a nearby store.\n\n10:00 PM: Residents living at and near 1690 Paris Street remain evacuated from their homes this evening.\n\nEvacuees are staying at Aurora Central High School.\n\n7:", + "50 PM: James Holmes\u2019 family issued the following statement:\n\nOur hearts go out to those who were involved in this tragedy and to the families and friends of those involved. We ask that the media respect our privacy during this difficult time.\n\nOur family is cooperating with authorities in both San Diego, California and Aurora, Colorado. We are still trying to process this information and we appreciate that people will respect our privacy.\n\n6:33 PM: Per the incident commander at the Century 16 Theatre, citizens will not be permitted to pick up their vehicles after 7PM. They will be allowed to retrieve their vehicles tomorrow at 9AM\n\n6:", + "12 PM: The Aurora Coroner\u2019s Office said it will identify the names of the dead to families at 8 p.m.\n\n5:54 PM: Per the incident commander at the Paris Street scene. Residents of the following addresses will be able to return to their residences to pick up emergency items, such as medicine and baby items:\n\n11948 East 17th Avenue\n\n1686 Paris Street\n\n1685 Paris Street\n\n1678 Paris Street\n\nEvacuees should meet at Paris Elementary School (1635 Paris Street) at 7PM. They will be escorted by a Police Officer and will only have a limited amount of time to pick up items.", + " Residents will be required to show identification and no children will be permitted to enter the buildings.\n\nNO ONE will be permitted to enter 1690 Paris Street.\n\n5:49 PM: \u201cBatman\u201d director Christopher Nolan condemns shooting in the following statement via TMZ:\n\n\u201cSpeaking on behalf of the cast and crew of \u2018The Dark Knight Rises\u2019, I would like to express our profound sorrow at the senseless tragedy that has befallen the entire Aurora community.\n\nI would not presume to know anything about the victims of the shooting but that they were there last night to watch a movie. I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime.", + " MORE>>>\n\n5:45 PM: Metro area theaters will have increased security this weekend in wake of Aurora shooting.\n\nSeveral theaters are either discouraging or banning costumes.\n\n5:38 PM: Hendrik Sybrandy reporting live from shooting suspect\u2019s San Diego home. \u201cNot clear if there were true warning signs\u201d prior to shooting. James Holmes grew up in upper-middle class neighborhood.\n\n4:46 PM: Authorities at the Aurora Medical Center have said the volume of patients they received from the Aurora theater shooting is the most extreme they\u2019ve seen \u2014 more so, even, than the Columbine tragedy.\n\n\u201cWe got more patients in a shorter period of time,\u201d Center surgeon James Denton said.", + " \u201cWe were better prepared for it. Some of our distaster planning and training served us well.\u201d\n\nDenton said the injuries ranged from gunshot wounds to the head, chest and abdomen, along with \u201csubstantial wounds to extremities.\u201d\n\n4:29 PM: We have a video interview with a man who shared beers with James Holmes at the Zephyr Lounge in Aurora. Jackie Mitchell called Holmes a \u2018well-educated\u2019 owner of an \u2018intelligent smirk\u2019\n\n3:39 PM: Police will shut down parts of Peoria Street at 6 p.m. as they attempt to enter James Holmes\u2019 booby-trapped apartment either with personnel or a bomb robot.\n\n3:", + "33 PM: There is a new report out that while James Holmes may not have been dressed like the Joker, he had colored his hair read and told police he \u201cwas the Joker.\u201d Read the story about an earlier report from the NYPD that may have been misreported.\n\n3:07 PM: Colorado State football recruit Zack Golditch, who was slated to be an incoming freshman for the Rams this season, was the one person who was struck by a bullet in Theater 8, the adjacent theater to where the attacks occurred.\n\nGolditch was shot in the neck \u2014 under the ear \u2014 and the bullet passed through his body. He is currently recovering at home.", + " We will sit down with him for an interview later today.\n\n3:02 PM: Anyone wanting to donate to victims of the Aurora theater shooting are being urged to call 303-739-6346.\n\n2:28 PM: Bunkley Air Force Base has confirmed that one of its four missing or injured service members has died.\n\n2:18 PM: ABC\u2019s Brian Ross reported earlier Friday that James Holmes might be a radical member of the Tea Party organization. ABC issued the following note retracting those statements:\n\n\u201cEditor\u2019s Note: An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect,", + " but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.\u201d\n\n2:04 PM: A statement from the department of defense reports that one sailors has been injured, along with two airmen at the Aurora theater shooting. A fourth service member known to be at the theater is unaccounted for.\n\n1:57PM: James Holmes did purchase the weapons he used in the attack legally, though he did not have a permit to carry concealed weapons. Also, Holmes is scheduled to make his first court appearance at 8 a.m. Monday.\n\n1:42 PM:", + " More information from the Medical Center of Aurora: The hospital has just received three additional patients. The Center does not currently have status on these three patients, but hope to provide that information shortly.\n\n1:25 PM: According to the Associated Press, a federal law enforcement official said suspect James Holmes first bought a ticket to the movie, and then is believed to have propped open an exit door in the theater as the movie was playing. He slipped out midway through the showing, put on his ballistic gear and re-entered the theater.\n\n1:00 PM: Shantyl Toledo, who posted one of the most trafficked YouTube video of victims on the scene of the Aurora theater shooting,", + " emailed us and wanted to issue this apology. Apparently he\u2019s taking quite a bit of heat for the video.\n\nThe apology featured many typos that we\u2019ve tried to interpret and correct. This is the amended version that Toledo agrees captures the original intent of the letter:\n\n\u201cI would like to comment to the public stating my apology, if my shooting the video offended anyone. I just wanted to capture people\u2019s fighting spirit at the scene. My heart goes out to families. I was in theater 16 and walked out of front door alive. Thank God.\u201d\n\n12:53 PM: Our Chris Parente has contacted all Denver-area cinemas. None are planning to cancel showings of \u201cThe Dark Knights Rises.\u201d All are planning on having increased security on hand.\n\n12:", + "50 PM: Obama orders flags at half staff for the day in honor of Aurora movie theater shooting victims.\n\n12:43 PM: Multiple coroner vehicles are arriving at the scene of the Aurora movie theater shooting.\n\n12:41 PM: The Washington examiner is reporting that in the 1985 comic book, \u201cBatman: The Dark Knight Returns,\u201d there is a scene in which a lunatic kills three people in a movie theater.\n\n12:45 PM: CU Police are clearing some buildings on Anschutz Medical Campus as a robot is about to enter Holmes\u2019 apartment, which is three blocks away from campus.\n\n12:32 PM: We now have video of the 3-month-old who was released from University Hospital this morning \u2014 one of the few positive stories to come out on this tragic day.\n\n12:", + "24 PM: We\u2019ve found that suspect, James Holmes was not licensed to carry firearms.\n\n12:18 PM: All of the following information comes from Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates\n\nSuspect James Holmes, 24, of Aurora, had one traffic summons for speeding in 2011. Other than that, he had no prior criminal record.\n\nWithin one hour of the shooting early Friday morning, there were approximately 25 officers on the scene who apprehended Holmes.\n\nThere were eventually approximately 200 officers on the scene several hours later.\n\nHolmes was apprehended with three weapons: one was left inside the crime scene. On his person,", + " Holmes had an AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun and a 40-caliber Glock handgun. He had another 40-caliber Glock handgun in his car.\n\nThe police have no capability of estimating the amount of shots fired. There were \u201cmany, many shots fired.\u201d\n\n71 people were shot \u2014 12 are deceased. Two died at area hospitals, 10 died at the scene\n\nWe are not looking for any other suspects, \u201cwe are confident that Holmes acted alone.\u2019\n\nSome rounds penetrated into an adjoining theater \u2014 at least one person was struck by a bullet in the adjoining theater\n\nThe suspect was dressed in all black,", + " ballistic attire that included throat, hand and leg covering as well as head and chest protection.\n\nAnyone with additional information is being encourage to call a tip line at 303-739-1862. For those who feel traumatized, you can call a help line at 303-617-2300.\n\nThe crime scene is large, and includes some cars in the parking lot. The police are working to get those cars released, but \u201cwe will be (at the crime scene) for some time.\u201d\n\nHolmes\u2019 Paris Street apartment is booby-trapped with trip wire, incendiary devices and chemical devises. Five buildings in the area have been evacuated.\n\nThere were four showings of \u201cThe Dark Knight Rises\u201d at the theater.", + " All were sold out. Police interviewed close to 200 witnesses.\n\nPolice are analyzing all social media \u2014 there are a lot of fake reports. Someone called a national media station and said he was Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates.\n\nPolice were on scene within a minute to a minute and a half of the first call and apprehended Holmes at that point.\n\nAurora police often station off-duty officers at the theater. They were not there last night\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re not going to get into why (Holmes) did what he did. We don\u2019t have that information,\u201d Oates said.\n\n\u201cThere is pretty significant evidence he used the assault rifle,", + " shotgun and handgun in the theater,\u201d Oates aid.\n\nOates said that he used to work for the NYPD, but he would not comment on the NYPD report that Holmes was dressed as the Joker from the Batman franchise. \u201cHe was dressed as I described,\u201d Oates said.\n\n11:51 AM: Hickenlooper called the shooting an \u201cact of a deranged mind,\u201d in the Aurora Theater shooting press conference, which is streaming live now. We\u2019ve also learned that the suspected gunman, James Holmes, may been dressed as the joker when he entered the theater last night.\n\n11:46 AM: We now have a video interview with a man who was detained by Aurora Police in the Aurora Medical Center after he became enraged about the information that his 6-year-old child had been killed and his ex-wife had suffered a gunshot wound to the chest.", + " When told that the suspected gunman was still alive, the man said \u201chopefully not for long.\u201d\n\n10:46 AM: Mitt Romney, who also cancelled his campaign events Tuesday in New Hampshire, just issued a live statement. Here are a few of his comments.\n\n\u201cThis morning, Colorado lost youthful voices,\u201d Romney said. \u201cThere will be justice for those responsible. But that\u2019s another matter for another day.\u201d\n\nInstead, Romney said he wanted to offer these words of comfort today: \u201cOur prayer is that the Comforter will bring the peace to the souls (of the victims and their families) that surpasses their understanding. The Apostle Paul explains:", + " Blessed be God, who comforteth us in all our tribulations that we will be able to comfort them if they are in any trouble.\u201d\n\n10:27 AM: The death total has now been upgraded to 13 from 12. It had initially been reported at 14.\n\n10:26 AM: Buckley Air Force Base confirms that the three casualties reported earlier by the Pentagon are actually injuries, not fatalities. No word on the further condition of those individuals.\n\n10:22 AM: Of the 15 patients initially admitted to the Aurora Medical Center South, five are in critical condition. Call 303-873-5393 for a status of the patients at that location.\n\n10:", + "18 AM: We have now received confirmation that a 7-year-old has now been reported dead. In addition, we have learned that suspect James Holmes had no prior criminal record.\n\n9:59 AM: We now have a 30-image photo gallery featuring everything from victims being treated on the scene to the suspects apartment and his riot gear to the plethora of police command posts that have been set up.\n\n9:15 AM: CU-Denver Medical Campus said that suspected shooter was a student in the Fall of 2011. He was studying some form of neuroscience at the Medical Campus and withdrew in June.\n\n9:11 AM: Police say they\u2019ve evacuated 5 buildings near suspect James Holmes\u2019 booby-trapped apartment.", + " \u201cIt appears that\u2019s sufficient at this time,\u201d officials said. They continued to say \u201cit could be hours, it could be days\u201d until the apartment is ruled safe again.\n\n9:06 AM: Police reports state the suspect in this shooting, James Holmes, moved to Colorado from San Diego to pursue a PhD. The owner of the booby-trapped apartment said that Holmes just moved in to his building.\n\n8:58 AM: Aurora Police are saying that the third floor of James Holmes\u2019 apartment is booby-trapped with sophisticated explosives. The entire building and surrounding area at 17th and Oswego have been evacuated.\n\n8:", + "53 AM: President Obama, speaking to crowd at campaign rally in Ft. Myers, Fla., offers condolences to victims\u2019 families. He says, \u201cThere will be other days for politics. This, I think, is a day for prayer and reflection.\u201d Obama and Romney campaigns also announce they will temporarily pull down TV ads out of respect to the victims.\n\n8:47 AM: President Obama is speaking live now. Watch it here\n\n8:33 PM: Morgan Freeman has released a statement via Twitter: \u201cDeeply saddened to hear about the #theatershooting at the screen of The Dark Knight Rises. My prayers go out to the families and friends.\u201d\n\n8:", + "29 PM: One of the confirmed dead, Jessica Refield, who interned here for a brief time at FOX31, wrote a blog post \u2014 now, a very chilling blog post \u2014 about narrowly escaping a deadly mall shooting in Toronto last month.\n\n8:22 AM: Governor John Hickenlooper has released a statement.\n\n\u201cThis is not only an act of extreme violence, it is also an act of depravity. It is beyond the power of words to fully express our sorrow this morning. Our prayers and condolences go first to the families of those killed, and we share the grief of everyone affected by this senseless event. We appreciate the swift work by local,", + " state and federal law enforcement. Coloradans have a remarkable ability to support one another in times of crisis. This one of those times.\u201d\n\n8:12 AM: Children\u2019s Hospital Colorado has received 6 victims \u2014 one child and five adults, ages 18 \u2013 31 \u2014 from last night\u2019s shooting at the Aurora movie theater. One patient has passed and the other five range in condition from good to critical.\n\n8:09 AM: President Obama has cancelled his Florida campaign stop in response to the shooting.\n\n8:02 AM: The Medical Center of Aurora received 15 patients. Call the medical Center at 303-873-5292 for information.", + " The Center reported that 12 of the 15 patients have gunshot wounds. The three other patients had chemical exposure, and have been released. The University Hospital now has 23 patients.\n\n7:59 AM: Watch the video of our interview with a witness who said the shooter pointed a gun in her face. She said most people in the theater initially thought the gunman was a prop \u2014 a part of the show.\n\n7:50 AM: Of the 38 injured, nine are being reported in critical condition at University Hospital in Aurora and two are reported in critical condition at Swedish Medical Center in Englewood.\n\n7:46 AM: We\u2019re tracking the emotional response that\u2019s pouring out via social media.", + " For some of the tweets, click here.\n\n7:40 AM: We reportedly earlier that a girl named Jessica Ghawi was reported dead along with Jessica Redfield. We\u2019re now being told that this girl is the same person. Her mother tells us that Ghawi is her \u201cbirth name,\u201d but that she\u201d never went by that last name.\u201d She always went by Redfield.\n\n7:36 AM: Watch the emotional interview from witness Ben Fernandez, who was in theater 9, and said he saw one 12-year-old with two bullet wounds and others \u201ccovered in blood.\u201d\n\n7:11 AM: A 3-month-old victim was recently released from hospital.", + " A father has confirmed his 6-year-old daughter was killed.\n\n7:05 AM: Congressman Ed Perlmutter, whose district includes the area where this shooting took place, has just released a statement.\n\n\u201cI am stunned and furious at the news of the shooting at the Aurora Century 16 Movie theater this morning. Our heart and prayers are with the families and loved ones of the victims of this tragedy. Colorado is not a violent place, but we have some violent people. We are a strong and resilient community, and we will lean on each other in the days, weeks and months to come.\u201d\n\n6:58 AM: New photos of victims being treated on the scene can be found below.", + " Also, President Obama will be addressing the shootings at his morning briefing at 9:20 a.m. this morning.\n\n6:52 AM: The mother of suspect, James Holmes, is talking to ABC: \u201cYou have the right person,\u201d she said, apparently speaking on gut instinct. \u201cI need to call the police\u2026 I need to fly out to Colorado.\u201d\n\n6:47 AM: Refield\u2019s friend is on the phone with us now on the live stream. Click here to watch.\n\n6:42 AM: We are getting reports now that there are 38 confirmed wounded.\n\n6:37 AM: The Premiere of the \u201cThe Dark Knight Rises\u201d in Paris has been cancelled.\n\n6:", + "36 AM: Our Melody Mendez is reporting that another one of the 12 dead is Jessica Refield, a native of Texas who moved to Colorado last year. She interned for FOX31 for a brief time. Mendez said she was a huge sports fan, who also interned for a Denver radio station.\n\n6:29 AM: Continue to check the top of this post for our most recent multimedia. The most recent is updated footage of this morning\u2019s press conference with Aurora Police.\n\n6:26 AM: The new full statement from Mitt Romney addressing the shooting: \u201cAnn and I are deeply saddened by the news of the senseless violence that took the lives of 15 people in Colorado and injured dozens more.", + " We are praying for the families and loved ones of the victims during this time of deep shock and immense grief. We expect that the person responsible for this terrible crime will be quickly brought to justice.\u201d\n\n6:15 AM: We\u2019re now getting reports, according to scanner traffic, that a pregnant woman was shot in the chest. No further word on her condition.\n\n6:07 AM: Pete Williams at NBC is sourcing two federal officials who are saying the name of the 24-year-old suspect in custody is James Holmes, of North Aurora.\n\n6:00 AM: Very candid comments from Ben Fernandez, a witness who was in the theater. They will be up shortly.\n\n5:", + "58 AM: The identity of one girl killed in the attack has been released by a San Antonio TV station, KENS. That girl is Jessica Ghawi, a San Antonio native who has since moved to Colorado.\n\n5:55 AM: Police say bodies of 10 victims are still at the crime scene inside the theater.\n\n5:53 AM: Witness said \u201cit was tear gas\u201d that was used at the theater.\n\n5:49 AM: Police originally said that there were 14 dead, that number has now changed to 12, per an Aurora Police press release. As of this moment, we have reports that some of the victims are as young as 12 years old.\n\n5:", + "45 AM: Multiple police organization have responded, including the FBI and ATF. Suspect said he had two bombs \u2014 one in his home and one in his vehicle.\n\n5:43 AM: The gunman reportedly was also wearing a riot helmet and a bullet proof vest when he was discovered at his car int he back of the theater. He was also wearing a gas mask and carrying a handgun, a shotgun and a rifle.\n\n5:37 AM: Some of the vehicles at hospital are being reportedly treated for chemical exposure. We\u2019re told that most of the treatment is for tear gas.\n\nReports say that many of the dead are children.\n\n5:34 AM:", + " Police say that a fire alarm was pulled by an employee, which was the only reason anyone began evacuating the theater.\n\n5:31 AM: Police have evacuated residents at the apartment of 17th and Oswego in Aurora, which is expected to be the apartment of the suspect. The suspect alerted police he has some explosives in the apartment.\n\nA comment from a witness on the scene: \u201cThey said bullets were flying through the wall.\u201d Then, gesturing to her friend, the witness said, \u201cthe girl that was sitting next to her got hit in the jaw.\u201d\n\nThe bullets coming through the wall into theater 8 came from theater 9,", + " where the majority of the shooting occurred.\n\n5:30 AM: Chief Dan Oats of the Aurora Police just made a few brief comments/\n\nOates said the suspect in custody \u201cmade a statement to us about explosive in his residence, beyond that I have nothing more to say\u201d about the suspect\u2019s motivations.\n\nOates also answered a question referring to the possibility that there was a second shooter involved in the crime: \u201cWe have not been able to confirm reports of a second person. We have no evidence to support that right now. We are obviously very concerned about that.\u201d\n\n5:28 AM: The Red Cross is staffing an evacuation center at Gateway High School in Aurora with four mental health workers and a mobile feeding vehicle to help care for about 100 people who were evacuated from the scene.\n\n5:", + "26 AM: We\u2019re told that the attack took place during a shooting scene in the movie, Batman: The Dark Knight Rises.\n\nPresidential candidate Mitt Romney has also issued a brief statement: \u201cAnne and I are deeply saddened praying for families and loved ones of the victims.\u201d\n\n5:20 AM: President Obama has issued a statement from a campaign event in Florida.\n\nHis comments: \u201cMichelle and I are shocked and saddened by the horrific and tragic shooting in Colorado. Federal and local law enforcement are still responding, and my Administration will do everything we can to support the people of Aurora in this extraordinarily difficult time.\n\n\u201cWe are committed to bringing whoever was responsible to justice,", + " ensuring the safety of our people and caring for those who have been wounded. As we do when confronted by moments of darkness and challenge, we must now come together as one American family.\n\n\u201cAll of us must have the people of Aurora in our thoughts and prayer as they confront the loss of family, friends and neighbors, and we must stand together with them in the challenging hours and days to come.\u201d\n\n5:15 AM: The death toll is still standing at 14, according to Aurora Police, but police are now saying \u201cat least\u201d 50 people are injured. It has been reported that 10 of those 14 people died inside the theater,", + " with four dying later at area hospitals.\n\nA 24-year-old white male is said to have used homemade explosives in the attack. He was arrested with a shotgun, a handgun and a rifle in his possession, and he was wearing a gas mask.\n\nIf you suspect you had a loved one at the theater, call 303-739-6000 for more information. This is not an information line, but rather a line to check on possible victims of this shooting.\n\n4:33 AM: AURORA, Colo. \u2014 At least 14 people were killed and 50 more injured in a mass shooting during a midnight screening of \u201cThe Dark Knight Rises\u201d at an Aurora movie theater Friday.\n\nIt happened shortly after midnight at the Century 16 Movie Theaters just east of the Town Center at Aurora shopping mall near E.", + " Mississippi Ave. and I-225.\n\nWitnesses said the gunman came into the front of theater #9, threw a canister that released smoke, and then opened fire. people first thought the gunfire was part of the movie.\n\nAt least one person was in custody. It wasn\u2019t known if there were more suspects. Witnesses were taken to nearby Gateway High School for questioning.\n\nMULTIMEDIA:\n\n\n\nVideo: Investigation into suspected gunman leads to San Diego. Hendrik Sybrandy reports.\n\nVideo: In-depth coverage: Victims identified as investigation into shooting spree continues\n\nVideo: Columbine principal no stranger to tragedy\n\nVideo: Suspect described as \u201csmart,", + " quirky loner\u201d Hendrik Sybrandy reports from suspect\u2019s childhood neighborhood in San Diego.\n\nVideo: Many victims in theater shooting were kids\n\nVideo: Aurora Public Schools opens its doors to victims, evacuees (press release)\n\nVideo: Suspected gunman fits profile of a lone gunman, expert says\n\nVideo: Theaters boost security in wake of Aurora shootings\n\nVideo: Alleged gunman passed background check, legally purchased weapons\n\nPhoto Gallery: Aurora theater shooting scene, suspect\u2019s booby-trapped apartment \u2026\n\nVideo: Police detain man enraged over loss of child in Aurora theater shooting\n\nVideo: Man shared beers with suspect, called him \u2018well-educated\u2019 owner of \u2018intelligent smirk\u2019\n\nWeb Poll:", + " Should it be legal to own an assault rifle?\n\nRaw Video: Raw Video: 3-month-old injured in Aurora theater shooting released from hospital\n\nRaw Video: Crowd exits Aurora theater after shooting \u2026\n\nYouTube Video: Scene outside Aurora theater shooting \u2026\n\nRaw Video: Witnesses say \u2018bullets were flying through wall\u2019 of Aurora theater \u2026\n\nRaw Audio: Police radio communications from Aurora theater shooting \u2026\n\nRaw Video: Morning Aurora Police press conference from theater shooting \u2026\n\nRaw Video: Emotional Aurora theater shooting witness describes seeing wounded children \u2026\n\nSocial Media: Follow the public reaction online \u2026\n\nRaw Video: Witness says shooter \u2018had the gun in my face\u2019 ", + " Police are pictured outside of a Century 16 movie theatre where as many as 14 people were killed and many injured at a shooting during the showing of a movie at the in Aurora, Colo., Friday, July 20,... (Associated Press)\n\nA police spokesman says the gas mask-wearing suspect arrested in connection with a mass shooting in the Denver suburb of Aurora is a man in his early 20s.\n\nAurora police spokesman Frank Fania told ABC's \"Good Morning America\" Friday that investigators don't believe anyone else was involved.\n\nAurora Police Chief Dan Oates says witnesses reported the person released some type of a canister,", + " then they heard a hissing sound and saw a gas _ and then the gunman started shooting.\n\nOfficers found the suspect near a car behind the theater and also located a gas mask, rifle, handgun and at least another weapon.\n\nThe suspect's name hasn't been released and police haven't indicated if there was a motive.\n\nTHIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.\n\nA gunman wearing a gas mask opened fire early Friday at a suburban Denver theater at the opening of the Batman movie \"The Dark Knight Rises,\" killing 14 people and injuring at least 50 others, authorities said.\n\nThe gunman,", + " who is in custody, stood at the front of the theater and fired into the crowd about 12:30 a.m. MDT at a multiplex theater in a mall in Aurora.\n\n\"Witnesses tell us he released some sort of canister. They heard a hissing sound and some gas emerged and the gunman opened fire,\" Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said at a news conference.\n\nFBI spokesman Jason Pack said there's no indication in the investigation so far of any connection to terrorism.\n\nAurora police spokesman Frank Fania on ABC's \"Good Morning America\" said he didn't know yet if all the injuries were gunshot wounds.", + " He said some might have been caused by other things such as shrapnel.\n\nPolice, ambulances and emergency crews swarmed on the scene after frantic calls started flooding the 911 switchboard, officials said.\n\nOfficers came running in and telling people to leave the theater, Salina Jordan told the Denver Post. She said some police were carrying and dragging bodies.\n\nOfficers later found the gunman near a car behind the theater.\n\n\"A gas mask, rifle, handgun at least one additional weapon (were) found inside,\" he said.\n\nThe suspect was taken into custody, but no name was released. Oates said there's no evidence of any other attackers.", + " There was also no immediate word of any motive.\n\nThe suspect spoke of \"possible explosives in his residence. We are dealing with that potential threat,\" Oates said\n\nPolice were at the Denver-area apartment and had evacuated other residents of the building. Oates did not say whether any explosives had been found.\n\nHe said police also checked for explosives in the parking lot and at the Century 16 theater and secured those areas.\n\nPresident Barack Obama said he was saddened by the \"horrific and tragic shooting,\" pledging that his administration was \"committed to bringing whoever was responsible to justice, ensuring the safety of our people, and caring for those who have been wounded.\"\n\nMoviegoers spoke of their terror as violence erupted and people around them fell victim.\n\nBejamin Fernandez,", + " 30, told the Post that he heard a series of explosions. He said that people ran from the theater and there were gunshots as police shouted \"get down!\"\n\nFrenandez said he saw people falling, including one young girl.\n\nJordan told the paper that one girl was struck in cheek, others in stomach including a girl who looked to be around 9-years-old.\n\nJordan said it sounded like firecrackers until someone ran into Theater 8 yelling \"they're shooting out here!\"\n\nHayden Miller told KUSA-TV that he heard several shots.\n\n\"Like little explosions going on and shortly after that we heard people screaming,\" he told the station.\n\nHayden said at first he thought it was part of a louder movie next door.", + " But then he saw \"people hunched over leaving theater.\"\n\nThe police chief said 10 victims died at the theater and four at area hospitals.\n\nAt least 24 people were being treated at Denver area hospitals.\n\nKUSA reported that some hospitalized victims were being treated for chemical exposure, related apparently to canister thrown by gunman.\n\nEleven people were being treated at the Medical Center of Aurora for gunshots and ranged from minor to critical condition. Two others walked in to be treated for tear gas contamination.\n\nDenver Health had seven victims _ one in critical and the rest in fair condition.\n\nThe youngest victim reported was a 6-year-old being treated at Children's Hospital Colorado,", + " where a total of six victims were taken. Their condition wasn't known.\n\nTwo people in critical condition were rushed to nearby Swedish Medical Center, spokeswoman Nicole Williams said.\n\nAurora is on Denver's east side and is Colorado's third-largest city with 327,000 residents. It is home to a large Defense Department satellite intelligence operation at Buckley Air Force Base, as well as The Children's Hospital, the University of Colorado Hospital and a future Veterans Affairs hospital. ", + " AURORA \u2014 The family of 27-year-old Alex Sullivan confirmed Friday night that he was one of 12 people killed in the mass shooting at an Aurora movie theater.\n\nAnd The Associated Press was reporting that 23-year-old Micayla Medek was also among the dead. Her father's cousin, Anita Busch, said the sad news at least brought peace to the family.\n\nThe Sullivan family was notified at 8 p.m. after they had desperately searched for Alex for more than 14 hours, a release from the family said. They said it was Sullivan's birthday.\n\n\"The Sullivan family lost a cherished member of their family today,\" a release from the family said.", + " \"Alex was smart, funny, and above all loved dearly by his friends and family.\"\n\nSullivan is one of 12 people killed in the rampage. Fifty-eight others were wounded, 11 critically.\n\nAnother victim who has been identfied is an aspiring sports journalist Jessica Ghawi. Reports on Twitter said that her mother was asking that anyone using the microblogging service tweet under the hastag #RIPJessica because she wanted it to trend.\n\nAurora Police Chief Dan Oates said about 7 p.m. on Friday that the last of the 10 bodies in the Century 16 movie complex in Aurora Town Center were removed by 5 p.m.", + " and police hope to have identifications of the victims within the next couple of hours.\n\nHe said there were 70 casualties, including 12 confirmed dead. Two of the dead perished at local hospitals. The majority of the victims died from gunshot wounds. Many of the injuries were from bullets but a handful were the \" result of the chaos and trauma in the theater.\"\n\nGov. John Hickenlooper said that as of 3:30 p.m. 30 patients remained hospitalized, with 11 in critical condition.\n\nHe called the shootings that took place during a screening of the newest Batman movie an \"act that defies description.\"\n\nContact The Post If you have information or tips related to this story,", + " please call us at 303-893-TIPS or email us at tips@denverpost.com.\n\nThe suspected gunman James Eagan Holmes, 24, was in the Arapahoe County Jail and is scheduled for his first court appearance at 8:30 a.m. Monday, according to the chief.\n\nA prayer vigil honoring the victims was planned in Aurora for 6:30 p.m. Sunday.\n\nOates said the suspect is believed to have purchased four guns locally in the last two months and bought ammunition and magazines for his weapons over the Internet. With the weapons employed in the shooting \u2014 an AR-15 assault-style rifle,", + " a shotgun and a handgun \u2014 the gunman could have gotten off as many as 60 rounds a minute, Oates said.\n\nThe chief said authorities will wait until Saturday to attempt to gain entrance to the suspect's apartment in Aurora because the scene remains far too dangerous, laced with jars full of liquid and \"something that looks like mortar rounds.\" Aurora police are working with experts from the federal government to secure the apartment.\n\nOates families in four of the five apartments in the complex will be allowed to return briefly this evening to retrieve necessities such as medication, but they will be directed to evacuation centers or other accommodations for the night.\n\nThe chief said two Aurora high schools will be open Saturday beginning at 9 a.m.", + " for mental health counseling for anyone in need of services.\n\nJames Holmes (Handout courtesy University of Colorado)\n\nThe city plans a prayer vigil Sunday at 6:30 p.m. In front of the Aurora Municipsl Building.\n\nThe lone suspect in the shooting had a ticket to the midnight premiere of the newest Batman film and entered along with the crowd, investigators believe.\n\nThen he walked out of the theater's emergency door unnoticed, investigators said, propping it open. The suspect, later identified as Holmes, allegedly returned through the same door minutes later, clad in black ballistic gear, and opened fire.\n\nInformation about the shooter's movements was first reported by multiple news agencies citing anonymous sources in Washington,", + " D.C. A local source with knowledge of the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the information.\n\nA group of friends are overcome with emotion as they gather outside Gateway High School, Friday July 20, 2012, in Aurora. They got news that their friend was killed during a shooting, where about 50 people were shot 12 fatally early Friday inside an Aurora movie theater during a premiere showing of the new Batman movie, were taken to the high school by bus to be questioned by police. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post (RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)\n\nBloodied moviegoers, who had gathered at midnight to see \"The Dark Knight Rises,\" dragged one another from the chaotic smoke-filled theater 9 of the Century 16 complex.\n\n\"It was like something out of a movie,\" said Jacob King,", + " who was standing in the lobby when someone carried out the motionless body of a young girl, covered in blood. \"You don't want to believe it's real, but it is.\"\n\nThe child was handed to a police officer, who put her into the back of his squad car and sped away.\n\nOates said many of the shooting victims were transported to hospitals by some of the nearly 200 officers who converged on the theater complex at about 12:40 a.m. after the shooter stormed the theater with three guns and discharged two canisters of gas that clouded the room and stung people's eyes and throats.\n\nPolice arrested Holmes minutes after they arrived at the movie theater.", + " He surrendered behind the theater, near a white Hyundai.\n\nThe gunman shot the man sitting next to Chris Ramos, 20, in the chest. Ramos is haunted by the sight of the black-clad killer standing in the corner next to the movie screen, firing away, choosing the audience's fate with each bullet.\n\n\"No care for people's ages, or male or female, or anything,\" Ramos said. \"He was heartless. I panicked. I thought at that moment, I was going to die.\"\n\nWhen Ramos first saw the gunman come through the exit door, he saw objects flying in the air and thought they were fake bats, all in the spirit of the hour.", + " Then, three rows in front of him, what Ramos described as tear-gas grenades exploded and sent out a hissing cloud.\n\nThe man next to Ramos had already been shot, and others were falling. He used his own arm to jam his head down toward the floor and grabbed for his 17-year-old sister at the same time.\n\n\"People were jumping over seats, jumping on you,\" Ramos said.\n\nOn the floor, they felt bodies, and as they crawled, they came across a man with a bleeding leg wound. Ramos and his sister dragged him as far as they could and were eventually met in the lobby by police officers who took over.\n\nJordan Crofter,", + " 19, sneaked into theater 9 even though he had a ticket for the showing in the theater next door. He wanted to sit with his friends.\n\nWhen the gunman tossed a smoke canister, Crofter didn't think about getting down or being still \u2014 he just ran. He said he was first to the lobby. Crofter said the gunman appeared lackadaisical, \"as calm as can be,\" and didn't say a word.\n\n\"He was sitting there like target practice,\" Crofter said of the shooter. \"He was trying to shoot as many people as he could.\"\n\nA friend who had been sitting in the first row,", + " Crofter learned later, had been shot and collapsed. He did not know Friday afternoon whether his friend had lived or died.\n\nThree weapons were used in the shooting: a 12-gauge shotgun, an AR-15 assault-style weapon and a.40-caliber Glock handgun, according to Oates. A second Glock was found in Holmes' car, but police don't know if it was used in the attack.\n\nThe weapons were bought from two local stores of national chains, Gander Mountain Guns and Bass Pro Shop, beginning in May, law enforcement officials told NBC News.\n\nHolmes was wearing \"full ballistic gear,\" including a helmet,", + " vest, throat protector, gas mask and black tactical gloves, Oates said.\n\nOates said investigators are not able to calculate how many shots were fired in the theater but that \"lots of bullets fired very quickly.\"\n\nSome shots fired in theater 9 penetrated the walls of adjacent auditoriums, hitting at least one person in theater 8 next door.\n\nPolice found Holmes' north Aurora apartment booby-trapped, the same song seemingly playing on repeat on his stereo. His building in the 1600 block of Paris Street and five buildings around it have been evacuated.\n\nTen people died at the scene, and two others died at hospitals, Oates said.", + " Many others were critically injured.\n\nOne of the victims died at Children's Hospital in Aurora, but officials there would not say whether it was a child or an adult. The other five patients survived, including one who is in critical condition with buckshot injuries to the back.\n\nTwo of the victims at Children's were hit with a high-velocity rifle, perhaps from 60 to 80 feet away, emergency-room physician Dr. Guy Upshaw said.\n\nA U.S. Navy sailor who was at the Century 16 theater at the time of the shooting is unaccounted for, the Department of Defense announced Friday afternoon. The sailor was \"known to have been at the theatre that evening,\" the Defense Department said in a statement.\n\nOne other Navy sailor and two U.S.", + " Air Force airmen were injured in the attack, according to the statement.\n\nThe Defense Department also reported that Holmes is not and never has been a member of the military.\n\nPolice received multiple calls about the shooting beginning at 12:39 a.m. and arrived within two minutes at the complex, 14300 E. Alameda Ave.\n\nPolice say the suspect \"appeared\" at the front of one of the theaters showing \"The Dark Knight Rises.\" Witnesses told The Post he entered at the right front of theater 9 less than 10 minutes into the film.\n\nThe bodies of the 10 people who died at the theater remain at the scene while police continue to investigate.\n\nJosh Kelly,", + " 28, was watching the movie with his girlfriend of about four years. He lost her in the chaos.\n\nJosh called his father, Robert Kelly, from the theater and said: \"I can't find my girl.\" In the mayhem, the darkness and the smoke, and people panicking and trampling one another, he \"just lost track and he couldn't see,\" the elder Kelly said. \"My son is freaked out.\"\n\nRobert Kelly rushed to the theater after his son's call and found him outside covered in blood. Josh Kelly's girlfriend was among the fatalities, Robert Kelly said. Josh is now at home and sedated,", + " under a nurse's care.\n\nOutside the back exit of the theater, FBI agents have placed yellow tape and numbered evidence markers on objects in the parking lot, including a gas mask. A bloody jacket and spilled popcorn were on the pavement.\n\nAuthorities also searched a white car parked behind the movie theater, removing what appeared to be a combat helmet, a duffel bag, an ammunition clip and a vest.\n\nAfter his arrest, the suspect made a statement about possible explosives in his residence.\n\nPolice have blocked off a three-block area around an apartment complex in north Aurora. Residents in the area said they were evacuated around 2 a.m. while police searched the third floor of the apartment building.\n\nThe University of Colorado confirmed that Holmes was in the process of withdrawing from the university's graduate program in neurosciences.", + " Holmes enrolled at the university in June 2011.\n\nJackie Mitchell said he had drinks with Holmes a few nights ago at the Zephyr Lounge. Mitchell said the two talked about football.\n\nHolmes was \"geeky\" and had a \"swagger\" to him, Mitchell said.\n\n\"He just didn't seem the type to go into a movie theater and shoot it up,\" Mitchell said. \"He seemed like a real smart dude.\"\n\nBut Myron Melnick, the owner of Zephyr Lounge, remembers Jackie Mitchell in the bar Tuesday night, but not Holmes.\n\n\"We were not busy Tuesday night,\" he recalled. \"I'm there seven nights a week,", + " seven hours a night. I've talked to my bartenders, my security people, and we've never seen the guy.\n\n\"There's maybe a 2 percent chance he was there, but I don't believe it,\" he said.\n\nCorbin Dates and Jennifer Seeger were sitting in the second row of the theater when Dates saw someone in the front row answer a phone call during the opening credits and walk to the emergency door in the front of the theater.\n\nLater, a man dressed in black and wearing a gas mask and what looked like body armor entered through the same emergency exit. He lobbed two canisters, and almost instantly the theater filled with smoke.\n\nDates and Seeger,", + " like others in the theater, thought the man and the smoke were all part of the show. Just as their eyes began to tear up from the smoke, the man fired a shot at the ceiling.\n\nThe gunman moved through the crowd and stopped in front of Seeger. He pointed a long rifle at her face and said nothing.\n\nHe shot at the person sitting behind her, Seeger said. \"I have no idea why he didn't shoot me.\"\n\nThe two dived to the ground. They could feel hot shell casings hitting their legs as the tried to crawl through the dark theater now filled with smoke. Seeger's forehead has a burn from one of the casings.\n\nHer friends urged each other and the people around them to stay quiet,", + " desperate not to draw the attention of the gunman who was working his way up the aisle.\n\nAs she huddled on the ground, Seeger could see bodies of women and children lying around her.\n\nSeeger, who has some EMT training, tried to help a man bleeding next to her. She worked to find a pulse but was forced to leave him behind as they tried to flee the theater.\n\nPeople tried to exit through the main entrance of the theater, Seeger said. By then the gunman had worked his way to the back of the theater, shooting at people as they tried to run.\n\nSeeger estimates she was trapped in the theater for 10 to 15 minutes.", + " When she finally reached the lobby, she saw a police officer cocking a shotgun.\n\nOnce outside, Seeger called her father. \"My dad is not a sentimental guy, but he was crying on the phone,\" she said.\n\nJames Wilburn also was sitting in the second row of the theater when the emergency door opened. \"He was dressed in black,\" Wilburn said, \"wearing a flak jacket and a gas mask.\"\n\nThe man dropped a canister to the floor that began spewing gas before he fired several rounds toward the back of the theater.\n\nNaya Thompson, 21, said the gas spread quickly through the theater and thinks that the gunman may have dropped two canisters.\n\n\"It was like tear gas,\" Thompson said.", + " \"I was coughing and choking, and I couldn't breathe.\"\n\nBenjamin Fernandez, 30, said he was watching the movie when he heard a series of explosions. He said people ran from the theater and there were gunshots as police shouted, \"Get down!\"\n\nFernandez said he saw people falling, including one young girl.\n\nBrittany Romero was in theater 10 for the 12:15 a.m. showing. When the fire alarm sounded, people began throwing their popcorn and drinks in the air, assuming it was a practical joke, Romero said.\n\nSalina Jordan, 19, was in theater 8 and saw people fall after they were shot.", + " She said one girl was struck in a cheek, and others were wounded in the stomach, including a girl who looked to be around 9 years old.\n\nJordan said it sounded like firecrackers until someone ran into theater 8 yelling, \"They're shooting out here!\"\n\nThe police came running in, telling people to run out. Some police were carrying or dragging bodies, she said.\n\nMeghan Walton, 20, of Boulder said she was sitting beside her friend Gage Hankins, 18 of Ohio in Theater 8 when he was shot in the arm before he was rushed out of the theater.\n\n\"I saw a whole lot of smoke in the aisle,\" Walton said.", + " \"I saw about three or four bullets shot near the smoke.\"\n\nWalton was with 10 members of the group Friends: Association of Young People who Stutter.\n\n\"I ran outside and was holding his arm that was shot,\" Walton said. \"My eyes were blurred by the smoke. It was like chaos. People were crying hysterically.\"\n\nShe counted 12 people who were bleeding. Ambulances started arriving, but there were not enough to put everyone in them.\n\n\"The worst was a man who was shot in the head. He had his hand on his head,\" Walton said. \"They started doubling up, putting two people in the same ambulance.", + " One girl who wasn't injured as badly was placed in a police car and rushed away.\"\n\nPolice set up a command post near the Dillards department store and were interviewing hundreds of possible witnesses. Many were taken by bus to Gateway High School for questioning.\n\nRobert Jones, 28, was in theater 9 when the shooting started.\n\nJones said when he first saw smoke billowing from the front of the theater, he thought it was a special effect. Shots rang out almost immediately after.\n\n\"I thought it was pretty much the end of the world,\" Roberts said.\n\nRoberts stayed flat on the ground until police came into the theater.\n\nTammi Stevens said her son,", + " 18-year-old Jacob Stevens, was inside theater 9 when the shooting started. Stevens was waiting for her son at Gateway High School while police interviewed him.\n\nJacob told his mom that he saw a guy walk into the theater wearing body armor and throw some sort of cannister that then emitted some sort of gas.\n\n\"You let your kids go to a late night movie... you never think something like this would happen,\" Stevens said.\n\nPresident Barack Obama addressed the shooting from Fort Myers, Fla., Friday morning.\n\n\"We never understand what leads someone to terrorize their fellow human beings like this,\" Obama said. \"Life is very fragile, and it is precious.\"\n\nThe president issued a proclamation Friday,", + " ordering that all American flags be flown at half-staff until sunset on July 25.\n\nGov. John Hickenlooper released a statement Friday morning.\n\n\"It is beyond the power of words to fully express our sorrow this morning,\" Hickenlooper said. \"We appreciate the swift work by local, state and federal law enforcement. Coloradans have a remarkable ability to support one another in times of crisis. This is one of those times.\"\n\nIn a statement released Friday morning, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said that he was \"deeply saddened\" by the \"senseless violence.\"\n\nThe FBI is assisting in the investigation. Officers and deputies responded from almost every local police and sheriff's department in the metro area.\n\nThe FBI said that there was no indication that the shooting has any connection to terrorism.\n\nVictims were transported to at least six hospitals.", + " Several of them were rushed to hospitals in police cars. Ages of people injured and killed in the shooting vary.\n\nShortly after midnight, patients started arriving at the Medical Center of Aurora. A total of 15 patients \u2014 ranging from 16 to 31 years old \u2014 were sent to the medical center, 12 of them with gunshot wounds.\n\nAn additional 3 patients arrived at the hospital Friday afternoon. Information about those patients was not immediately available.\n\nEight of the patients have been discharged, five victims remain in critical condition and two patients are being prepared for surgery.\n\nAll of the patients came in with wounds to their torsos, heads or necks.", + " Doctors said the wounds were caused by a high-caliber weapon or what appeared to be shrapnel.\n\nSwedish Medical Center spokeswoman Nicole Williams says two people injured at the theater have arrived at the hospital in critical condition.\n\nShe says emergency workers said there could be several more patients.\n\nDenver Health Medical Center treated six victims from the shooting. All were treated for gunshot wounds and abrasions. Three victims have since been released, the other three remain in fair condition, hospital officials said.\n\nA total of 23 victims were taken to the University of Colorado Hospital. Nine of the victims are currently in critical condition.\n\nRep. Rhonda Fields of Aurora announced that she is hosting a prayer vigil for \"any and all\"", + " at 7 p.m. The location of the vigil was changed to 14701 E. Exposition Ave.\n\nWarner Bros. studio released a statement Friday morning saying the studio is \"deeply saddened to learn about this shocking incident. The studio has canceled the red carpet premier of 'The Dark Knight Rises' in Paris,\" The Hollywood Reporter said.\n\nAurora police are asking anyone with information about the shooting to call Crime Stoppers at 720-913-7867. Families looking for information about loved ones should call 303-739-1862.\n\nDenver Post Staff Writers Eric Gorski, Kieran Nicholson, Kirk Mitchell,", + " Michael Booth and Tegan Hanlon contributed to this report\n" + ], + "length": 13929, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 34, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Since a 19-year-old Detroit stripper named Aziah King (aka Zola) tweeted out a story of epic proportions on Oct. 27, she captivated millions of online readers, including studios, producers, and even Missy Elliott, who wrote: \"That Zola story wild. Ended up reading the whole thing like I was watching a movie on Twitter.\" A post at New York says the opening line\u2014\"Y'all wanna hear a story about why me & this b---- here fell out????????\"\u2014might be \"one of the best first lines in recent literary history.\" But which parts of the crazy narrative about a weekend trip involving a manic depressive boyfriend, an overbearing pimp, prostitution, kidnapping, suicide, and shooting are fact instead of fiction? The Washington Post has interviewed police investigators and several main subjects (not counting Zola herself, who is presumably bombarded with interview requests from the press, but who wouldn't comment to the Post) to give a detailed account. If you've read the full story\u2014it's here, but note that the language and content is rough\u2014rest assured no one was shot in the face or jumped off a fourth-floor balcony. But the real story is as grim as Zola's telling was gripping, involving actual human trafficking, forced prostitution, rape and other forms of physical and psychological assault on what began as a last-minute road trip to Tampa to make more money stripping. \"While [Zola's] story may have seemed 'crazy,' however, and while [Zola] herself is hilarious, there\u2019s nothing unusual (or funny) about its sheer level of violence,\" writes Caitlin Dewey at the Post. \"People think this story is fake, but they need to have an open mind,\" one victim says. \"All that stuff you see on TV, on SVU\u2014that\u2019s real. It happens. It happened to me.\" Next up: a movie version? King has said there's interest. (Raids on a network of sex traffickers in the southeastern US last week spanned eight states.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Add a location to your Tweets\n\nWhen you tweet with a location, Twitter stores that location. You can switch location on/off before each Tweet and always have the option to delete your location history. Learn more ", + " Y'all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It's kind of long but full of suspense \ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude2d\n\n\n\nOkay listen up. This story long. So I met this white bitch at hooters. I was her waitress! She came in with this old ass big ass black dude\n\n\n\nSo you know as a hooters girl we have to talk to our customers. So I sit with them & we get to talkin & she tells me she dances! So I'm like\n\n\n\nOh yes bitch me too! Then she tells me this hulking black man is her sugar daddy. & I'm like oh yes bitch my SD at home.", + " I feel it I feel it\n\n\n\nSo we vibing over our hoeism or whatever. & we exchange numbers!! & we like \"next time u dance hum ima come dance wit you!\" & they leave\n\n\n\nSo THE NEXT DAY I get a text like \"BITCH LETS GO TO FLORIDA!\" & I'm like huh??? She's like \"I'm going to dance in Florida, let's go!!\"\n\n\n\nNow I'm skeptical like DAMN bitch we just met and we already taking hoe trips together???? BUT I had went to FL 2 months prior & made 15K\n\n\n\nSo lowkey I was down. So I was like \"okay I'll go.", + " Who's all going & when we leaving.\" All this bitch says is \"be ready by 8\"\n\n\n\nSo I call her like \"bitch I SAID who's all going!\" & she says \"my boyfriend & our room mate & my room mate has a place in Tampa\"\n\n\n\nSo I'm like ok ok ok. I'll be ready. So I pack my baddest stripper wear & I'm ready. Now my nigga DID NOT want me to go. He was soooooo hurt\n\n\n\nSo I had to fuck him calm, & then I left. Now when I got in the car it was a white boy (her bf)", + " & this hulking black guy (NOT the same one)\n\n\n\nSO I texted her on the slick while in the backseat like \"another sugar daddy? U got a type bitch!\" & THE BLACL DUDE HAD HER DAMN PHONE!!!\n\n\n\nSo he starts laughing & he goes \"I'm using her GPS. no I'm not a SD I've known her & her dude for 8 years. We all live together..\"\n\n\n\nso jessica (the white bitch) pulls me to the side & is like \"we gone be at the club all night. This room for Jarrett. not us! dnt even trip\"\n\n\n\nSo I was like yea bitch okay.", + " But trust I am NOT laying my head here.. So we leave our shit at the motel wit Jarrett & head to the club\n\n\n\nSo we working. It was king of slow (it was early Friday night) the club had HELLA rules which I'm not use to (Ima full nude typa bitch)\n\n\n\nBut this club require pasties & boy shorts & all this other shit..whatever. So after making about $800, I was ready to go.\n\n\n\nShe was talking to some dude, tryna talk him out his wallet & they exchanged numbers. So I was like \"call ur man. I'm ready!\"..she calls\n\n\n\nThe black dude.", + " I'm like ummm that's not ur man but okay. So I pull her to the side before he pulled up like \"wassup wit ur roommate?\"\n\n\n\nAnd she was like we're really close. Before I met Jarrett I was with him. He was taking care of me. I was like OHHH well I don't need that\n\n\n\n\"Taking care of Me\" in stripper language means that was her pimp. So I was like does Jarrett know? & she goes \"of course not\"...strike 1\n\n\n\nSo then she goes \"I didn't make anything tonight. What u make because he's gna ask\"", + "..I said \"umm that's not yalls business Jess!\"..chill\n\n\n\nSo he pulls up & AS SOON as we get in he goes \"what y'all make\" we said at the same time \"nothing\"...so he goes damn my girl said she had a\n\n\n\nbad night too. We finna go pick her up. (His fiance who lives down here)..we pick her up & he goes \"nobody made shit. Y'all wanna trap?\"\n\n\n\nTrap in stripper lingo means trick. So jessica goes \"hell yea! U got some clients\" im in the back on mute. He was like \"u can get some!\"", + "\n\n\n\nSo jess is like \"yea i need to trap. But jarret is at the room!\" & he goes \"i wasnt putting yall in thay shit hole tht was for him not yall\"\n\n\n\nIm still quiet....we pull up to a nice ass hotel on the other side of town & he goes \"ill get the clients together & text yall off this\"..\n\n\n\nHe handed her a trap phone. So i am mind blown at this point.. So then we get to the room. Nice as fuck. Just me & jess & i start GOIN OFF\n\n\n\n\"BITCH U GOT ME FUCKED UP.", + " IM NOT ABOUT TO PLAY WIT U HO. IM GOIN HOME\" so she starts cryin & shes like \"i didn't wanna take this trip alone\n\n\n\nPlease dont leave me. I would be so scared alone\" shes fucking sobbing. Im like oooommmmgggggg really?! Now im feeling bad for the ho\n\n\n\nShe goes \"u can just check the guys in, he's not gna force u to trap\" i said \"OH BITCH I KNOW HE NOT I KILL DEAD ASS KILL YALL\" verbatim\n\n\n\nSo she cleans herself up & theres a knock at the door...i open the door & some fat white man goes \"im here for the white girl\"", + "...\n\n\n\nSo I check his pockets, take his wallet & let him in...they start fucking RIGHT on the bed next to me. It was a fucking mess. A MESS\n\n\n\nSo when they finished he gave her $100. I said \"jess, u sellin puss for $100???? Pussy is worth thousands. U trippin\" she goes \"i dont\n\n\n\nmake the prices. The prices are already discussed before they come in. So i was like bitch no. If u gone do this. Do it right...\n\n\n\nSo i took some pics of her & put em on backpage. Along with a the trap phone # wit a MINIMUM of $500.", + " The phone starts BLOWIN UP!!!\n\n\n\nI was like \"se bitch. I got u a nigga comin up RIGHT NOW giving $500 for 15 mins\"...he comes, I check him they get it in, he leaves..\n\n\n\nWe are doing this ALL NIGHT!!! She fucked about 20 dudes and her sorry ass pimp only sent 3 of them \ud83d\ude11\ud83d\ude11\ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12..so around 6am JARRET CALLS\n\n\n\nShe answers on speaker & he is going OFF!!!\"WHERE TF ARE U & ZOLA?! The club BEEN CLOSED!\" she goes \"we went 2 another club cus it was slow\"\n\n\n\nSo im googling 24h clubs (FL has a few)", + " tryna help her lie & he is NOT having it. Hes LIVID. He goes \"if u went home wit a dude ur DEAD!\"\n\n\n\nSo he asks to speak to ME?! I was likr maaannn ima end up killin these crazy white niggas tonight. So he starts cursing ME out!!!\n\n\n\n\"Where are yall! I kno she's lying!! Dont be a ho like her zola!!\" I said \"i PROMISE you, im not\"..he hangs up on me & that was it.\n\n\n\nWe didnt hear from him for the trst of the night..", + " We fall asleep. A fee hours later the black dude (I STILL DONT KNOW HIS NAME) comes up\n\n\n\nHe's like \"how much you make lastnight\" jess goes \"5,500\" i was like WTF WHY SHE TELLIN THE TRUTH?!?! I pimped her NOT HIM!!!!\n\n\n\nSo he goes \"wtf how? Thats good but i only sent u 3 clients\" she goes \"zola made me a backpage\" i was like WOOOWOWOWOWOWOWOOWOW. here we go...\n\n\n\nSo he goes \"u can do my job better than me?\" I said \"i was just helping her out.", + " Irdc. Ur clients were cheap\" he started laughing...\n\n\n\nHe goes \"give me the money\" she gave him ALL OF IT. & he goes \"thanks zola. U a real one\" & throws $500 at me....\n\n\n\nI put that shit right in my bra. Tf. & jess goes, what about me? & he said \"u owe me rent jess. U haven't paid in months\" i was like damnnnn\n\n\n\nSo we leave & head to jarret & the ragedy motel. Cus our shit was there. As we pull up, jarrett chillin outside smoking weed wit some dude\n\n\n\nPAY ATTENTION HERE!! We get out & walk up to them & jarrett goes \"here they go\"", + " the pimp goes \"HERE WHO GO LIL NIGGA, WHO DIS?!\"\n\n\n\nJarrett starts laughing & was like \"he was asking me who i was here wit & i said my girl & her friends thats all. Chill out\"..\n\n\n\nThe guy jarrett was talkin to laughs & goes \"ill catch u later man. Nice meeting u.\" & leaves. He was a black guy wit dreads. A FL nigga.\n\n\n\nSo we all go up to the room & the pimp is going OFF on jarrett. \"U dont knoe these niggas!! I can't believe u told him 2 bitches in here!!\"\n\n\n\n&", + " jarret goes \"he asked why i was out here mad lastnight. All i said was my girl went to work wit her friend & i aint want her to!\"\n\n\n\nNow the pimp SCREAMING \"SO THAT NIGGA KNO ITS MONEY UP HERE NOW?! HELL NO. WE GOTTA GO!! NOW\" me and jess are like \ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\n\n\n\nSo we pack our shit & head out. We went to a nicer hotel about 20 minutes away. So the pimp was like \"zola keep a eye on jarrett!\"\n\n\n\nI was like oh shit he den promoted me to look out & shit...so he leaves (to go back to his fiance at home)", + " & jarret & jess start arguing\n\n\n\nHe was like \"i know u was trappin jess. I saw the backpage add ho\" and he shows her a screenshot..i was like OH SHIT. HERE WE GOOOO\n\n\n\nSo he starts cryin like a bitch. I was like wow. Hes like \"i thought u were done wit this. I didnt come to FL for this. U messy\"..\n\n\n\nThen he turns 2 me & goes \"this what u came here for zola?!\" I said \"HELL NA jarret she lowkey set me up. Im not fuckin wit yall after this\"\n\n\n\nHe goes \"wow u even set up ur friend.", + " U such a ho\" so they arguing for hours. I leave & go down to the pool. I mean, i am in florida!\n\n\n\nSo MY MAN calls me! I lied & said everything was okay. I didnt want him worrying. I had a nice dinner & then the pimp calls the trap phone\n\n\n\nI answer & hes like \"since u a maadam & shit, do that shit again tonight. But set up outcalls only cus this hotel 2 nice 2 trap out of\"\n\n\n\nI was like cool. I gotchu. Especially for another $500. So i go up to the room & told jess to get ready.", + " Jarrett goes WTF AGAIN BITCH NO!!!!\n\n\n\nI said \"jarrett calm down. Please\" this white nigga starts PUNCHING HIMSELF!!!! Like crazy people do dawg!! I saw like OH HELLLL NAWLLL\n\n\n\nHe goes \"if u do this again jess. I will kill myself. I love u 2 much\"..I was like this nigga lost in the sauce & his bitch lost in the game\n\n\n\nSo i said \"jarret sit THE FUCK down. Jess come on so i can take some pics it's already 10oclock. Yall playin\" so i make her a fresh ad\n\n\n\nWe come out the bathroom (i did her hair & makeup & shit)", + " & jarret goes \"everybody knows you a ho now. Fuck u. I wanna go home!\" I said HUH?\n\n\n\nHe throws his phone at her and its HER FACEBOOK!!! A status of BOTH ads!!!!! HER MOM IS ON THERE GOIN OFFFFFF in the comments!!!\n\n\n\nJessica starts BAWLING!! \"Omg. My mom had my daughter this week! How could u!! She on the floor literally breaking down\"...i was like \ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\ud83d\ude33\n\n\n\nso jessica calls the pimp & tells \"JARRETT JUST PUT EVERYTHING ON FACEBOOK. MY WHOLR FAMILY SEES!\"", + " The pimp goes \"I TOLD ZO TO WATCH HIM!!!\"\n\n\n\nLITERALLY 5 mins later its the pimp BANGING at our door. He comes in wit his fiance this time. & snatches jarrett up by the neck\n\n\n\nHe wasted NO TIME!! He goes \"i should really kill yo ass.\" Jarrett is dangling off the ground crying \"please dont please\"..lowkey im cryin\n\n\n\nThe fiance pulls out a handgun yall!!! She goes \"u want to bae or what? Fuck him. He did OUR girl so wrong\" i was like OH MY FUCKING GOD!\n\n\n\nSo now jess steps in \"shes like please dont.", + " Just beat his ass Z\" i was like (oh his name z? Okay. Got it) so he puts him down...\n\n\n\nZ goes. Naw i am gone kill his manhood though.. And he sits on the bed next to his fiance...he goes \"sit in front of me jarrett\"....\n\n\n\nHe does...still crying. He goes \"delete the post. And give me ur phone\"...he did..then he goes \"come here jess\"...i was so lost\n\n\n\nHis FIANCE unbuckled his pants and jess gets on her knees & starts sucking his dick IN FRONT OF JARRET AND I!", + "!!!!!! I was like YOOOOOOOOOOO\n\n\n\nHe then gets up...and starts fucking jess from the back...jarret just sitting there...im standin wit my mouth to the FLOOR!!!!\n\n\n\nHe looks at jarret & says \"any questions?\" Jarret says \"i wanna go home\" \ud83d\ude02\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude02\ud83d\udc80\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude02 i laughed out loud. I couldnt help it.\n\n\n\n& z goes \"na. Ima spend the night wit my girl so YOU gone take jess to her outcalls. I was like DAMNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!! Thats fucked bro\n\n\n\nHe goes \"zola got the clients & addresses so yall can take her\"", + " & him & his fiance leave....the room is silent for the next 30 mins. Swear\n\n\n\nThe first client calls & says he ready....so jarrett takes us. Z left a handgun but told me not to tell them. He slid it to me on the slick\n\n\n\nHe texted the trap phone like \"im trusting u wit my bitch zola. If anything goes left. Use it\" i was like WHAT?! NIGGA I CANT!!!\n\n\n\nSo anyway, jarrett took us to about 4 clients & then the phone was slow. Me & jarrett were in the car together while she was workin so we\n\n\n\nStarting haviny deep convo.", + " He really wasnt a bad dude. But he was bipolar. VERY bipolar...so I understood his outburst a little more\n\n\n\nSo we head back to the hotel & i flget this one call late af. & the client says \"i got 5,000 but i want 2 bitches\" i said \"oh sorry we\n\n\n\nonly have 1.\" The client goes \"well i got 2,000 for 1 but its 4 dudes..& we only do incalls\" i was like wow. Whut?? So i text z & told him\n\n\n\nHe was like \"hell yea, tell him come on.\" So i set it up.", + " Then last min the client goes \"actually; out call is fine\" & gives me a address\n\n\n\nSo we get in the car & head to the address....jess goes \"its 4 of them can u just wait in the hall please\" i was like bitch\ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12 iight cmon\n\n\n\nSo we head up to the room number they gave & jess knocks. A dude goes \"who is it\" & she says \"incall\" the door FLINGS OPEN FAST AS FUCK\n\n\n\nAND TWO BIG BLACK DUDES SNATCHED JESS!!!!! Bitch.....i ran so got damn fast i couldnt even see straight.", + " I was OUT!!! Fuck that\n\n\n\nI run out and THE CAR IS GONE!!! Im screaming \"JARRETT!!!JARRETTT!! This fool gone. So i call him, STILL RUNING & he like \"yall done?!\"\n\n\n\nI said \"BITCH Z TOLD U TO NEVER LEAVE US!! WHERE ARE U!! Hes like \"im at the gas station. I was thirsty. I though she was gone be a min\"\n\n\n\nIm STILL RUNNING. lmfaoooo. Dont know WHERE im going. Im like \"they snatched her dude!! COME GET ME. IM CALLIN THE POLICE!!!\"", + "\n\n\n\nHe pulls up a minute later & is like \"dont call the police. Call z\" i was like \"z gone BEAT EVERYBODY ASS!! YOU WASNT SUPPOSED TO LEAVE\"\n\n\n\n& he's like \"well YOU have the gun. If u call the cops u done too!\" I was like shit. U right. So I called z & told him what happened!\n\n\n\nZ IS LIVID!!! and this deep african accent comes out!! I couldnt even understand him on the phone. I was like maaaannnnn. We dead bro\n\n\n\nSo z pulls up & is like \"let's go..\" I said \"ummm ima stay here.", + " Yall go\" he goes \"IM NOT IN THE MOOD RN. COME TF ON!!!!!\" So we all go\n\n\n\nMe & jarrett on the side of the hall where u cant see & z knocks on the door!..a man goes \"who is it\" z goes \"where my bitch man?!\"\n\n\n\nJessica SCREAMS. & the voice says \"aint no bitch in here bruh\" i was like oh. My. God...z goes \"open the door\"....guess who opens the door\n\n\n\nTHE NIGGA WIT DREADS THAT JARRETT WAS SMOKIN WIT AT THE RUN DOWN MOTEL!!!!!!!!!!!! I WAS LIKE YOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!\n\n\n\nSo he goes \"come in & check.\" To z.\n\nZ motioned for us to stay hidden.", + " THANK GOD. So he goes in the room & dread head there by himself rn\n\n\n\nZ sits on the bed wit his strap out & goes\"where she at man?\" Dreads goes \"well since she wants to steal work frm my girls. She clearly wants to be here wit us.....(we still dont see jess) so z goes to the closet and bust the door in & she in there. Tied up. Knocked tf out\n\n\n\nDreads goes \"i got 20K for her right now man & all is forgiven\" z said \"we made more then 20k this weekend alone. Get outta here!\"", + " So dreads goes \"my dudes downstairs not gone just let u walk out wit her like that\" & z said \"we'll see\"...mind u i can barely see\n\n\n\nIm around the corner. So I just hear everything...next thing i know i hear some shuffling & a gun goes off..once again I TAKE OFF\n\n\n\nBut i took off down the hall threw the back!! Jarrett wasnt far behind & then we look behind us & z is runnin too wit jess over his shoulder\n\n\n\nHe throws jess in the car & hops in the drivers seat! I hopped in wit him & jarret hopped in the other car & we got the fuck ON\n\n\n\nIm cryin.", + " I said \"wtf happened?!\" He goes \"that nigga reached for his piece. I shot him in the face man\" i was like OHHHMMAAAGAWDDD\n\n\n\nWe got back to our hotel, packed our shit & checked out. We went to z and his fiances condo...nice as FUCK by the way.\n\n\n\nJess is up now & she tells us what happened. Apparently they recognized her from the motel & set her up (clearly) & once they snatched her\n\n\n\nThey told her to trap for them & she said no. So they beat her ass.....thats what z interrupted when he knocked so they knocked her out...\n\n\n\nI was like......I REALLY gotta go home yall.", + " Sorry to kill the mood but i cant take nomore of this. Jarrett was like \"same\"\n\n\n\nZ's fiance was in the kitchen counting money dawg. Just like a rich ho. So z was like \"everybody get some sleep. I gotta get rid of this\"\n\n\n\n(Talkin about the gun) so he leaves...we all try to get some sleep. The next morning he comes in wit tickets for me & jarrett\n\n\n\nJarrett goes\"im not leaving jess here. Not after last night. She has a daughter & needs to come home\" z was like \"na we making money\"\n\n\n\nI was like wooooww wit a black eye & busted lip & some FL niggas looking for yall u STILL tryna trap?", + " Crazy. I was like \"WELL IM READY!\"\n\n\n\nJess goes \"itll be ok jarrett. I'll be home in 3 days\" jarrett started wit that punching himself shit again...i was like mannn. Here we go\n\n\n\nJarrett goes \"come with me or im killing myself\" z was like \"ugh. Not this shit again. Ill be in the car, Yall 2 hurry up!\"\n\n\n\nSo jarrett is literally breaking down. U ever seen someone hysterically crying? Its intense. & jess tryna calm him.. Im at the door ready\n\n\n\nJarrett randomly stops crying. Instantly.", + " Like some movie shit. & goes \"so u arent comin?!\" Jess said \"no jarrett. I cant\" this nigga jarret\n\n\n\nRUNS TOWARDS THEIR BALCONY & JUMPS!! I swear to GOD. bible. He fucking jumped. I screamed SO LOUD my heart stopped\n\n\n\nJess runs towards the balcony & this nigga jarrett was hanging. He didn't fall all the way. He was stuck by his pants. THANK GOD!!!!\n\n\n\nWe were only on the 4th floor but he still wouldve died. It was a good drop. So jess is helping him & i call z lmfaoo.", + " Still crying\n\n\n\nI was like \"jarrett is stuck. He tried to jump off ur balcony\" z was like \"WHAT IS WRONG WIT THIS NIGGA!! FAMILIES LIVE HERE BRO WTF\" \ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\udc80\ud83d\udc80\n\n\n\nSo z came up, helped get him. Slapped the fuck out of him (literally) & physically guided him to the car...jess comes out & goes\n\n\n\n\"I swear I didn't set u up Zola. I never intended for u to trap. Thats why u didnt! I hope we can be friends after\" \ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12\ud83d\ude12\n\n\n\nI looked at her like she wasn't speaking English & i said \"im not gone beat yo ass rn bcus u already in bad shape.", + " But i better not ever\n\n\n\nsee or hear from you again\" & she walked away....z LITERALLY buckled jarretts seat belt lmfao. & we went to the airport.\n\n\n\nBare with me. It's almost over.\n\nWhen we landed in Detroit my man picked us up. We both looked HORRIBLE. so washed up & tired\n\n\n\nMy man was like \"who is this white boy & wats wrong wit yall\" i said \"babe. Neither of us r the same. Just tak him 2 his car & tak me home\"\n\n\n\nWe drop jarrett off & on the way home i told him everything.", + " He couldnt even speak honestly..\n\n\n\nCheck this out, this the last 4 tweets\n\n\n\nI get a collect call 4 days later from a jail in LAS VEGAS! It's JESSICA! She goes \"we got caught trappin in vegas & we all got arrested\"\n\n\n\nI said \"oh. Why u callin me?\" She goes \"z was wanted for kidnapping 15 underage girls & is linked to 6 murders including FL\"\n\n\n\nI said \"Florida? Murder? U have the wrong number!\" She screams \"ASK JARRETT TO BAIL ME OUT, He wont answer my collect call\"\n\n\n\nI said \"JARRETT??? U really have the wrong number\"", + " i hung up & called jarrett. He goes \"yea i heard. Its on the news. Hes a huge trafficker\"\n\n\n\nI found out later that jessica & his fiance played victim & said they were forced & z who's name i cant pronounce was a african male & was\n\n\n\nWanted literally everywhere. He got sentenced to life & i hear jess is back in Detroit wit her mom & baby....\n\n\n\nAnd thats the end of that\n\n\n\nIf u stuck wit that whole story you are hilarious lol. \ud83d\ude0a\ud83d\ude0a\ud83d\ude0a\ud83d\ude18\ud83d\ude18\ud83d\ude18\n\n\n\nPeople still saying I'm lying \ud83d\ude12 BITCH.", + " where does our location say? At the strip club getting ready WHERE?!\n\n\n\nThey told me to take jarretts FB down cus yall gone harass the poor boy. This him & his new boo tho \ud83d\udc96\n\n\n\nFound her ass! Pregnant again...new family I guess. Cute. Everything of Z & the fiance gone off her shit (obviously) ", + " Last week's epic Zola Twitter story might have given us one of the best first lines in recent literary history (\u201cY\u2019all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch here fell out????????\u201d), but after days of discussing every detail, it's still unclear how much of the wild tale is true.\n\nRelated Stories The Zola Show and Why It Was Hard to Look Away\n\nThe Washington Post did a fairly deep investigation into Zola\u2019s story and interviewed the story\u2019s main subjects, including Jess Swiatkowski, Jess's ex-boyfriend Jarrett Scott, and police involved in a concurrent investigation. Here's a summary of what they found:\n\n\n\nAziah (Zola)", + " Wells did in fact meet Jess and her friend Rudy in a Detroit Hooter's. They all agreed to a 17-hour trip down to Tampa where Zola and Jess danced in two clubs to make money. They didn't make enough, so decided to \"trap,\" though it is still unclear who participated and who did not. Unfortunately, a client did get violent with Jess, but according to Tampa police there wasn\u2019t a shoot-out.\n\nRudy, a.k.a. Z, was arrested in Nevada, but all six charges are related to sex trafficking (sexual assault, battery, two counts of trafficking, and two counts of attempted pandering with threat of physical force), not murder,", + " as the original story suggested. Jarrett Scott didn\u2019t try and jump off a balcony, though he did post some emotional Facebook statuses regarding his relationship with Jess.\n\nAlso, it seems Jess and Rudy have pulled this scam before. The Post has interviews with two women who tell similar, darker versions of Zola\u2019s story.\n\n\n\nSo, yes, some version of this tale is true (and still crazy) \u2014 but whether or not it will soon be turned into a feature-length film directed by Ava DuVernay remains a mystery. ", + " A good story has strong characters, a good lead and a unique voice. The Post's Neely Tucker breaks down Aziah Wells's first-person narrative about a alleged stripping trip to Florida gone wrong, and explains how she was able to captivate the Internet. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)\n\nNo one actually tried to jump off a fourth-floor balcony, and no one ever got shot in the face. But in some ways, the true story of what happened to two young women in a Tampa hotel is even \u201ccrazier,\u201d quote-unquote, than the story that captivated the Internet last week.\n\n[A reader\u2019s guide to people who have become memes]\n\nOn Oct.", + " 27, a 19-year-old Detroit woman named Aziah Wells tweeted a story that\u2019s since been read by millions: In it, she describes an eyebrow-raising weekend trip with a woman she barely knows, her overbearing pimp, and the woman\u2019s teary, manic-depressive boyfriend. Wells, who thought she was going along to dance in high-end strip clubs, is surprised to find out her acquaintance is actually in Tampa to \u201ctrap.\u201d And from there, the surprises just keep coming: a kidnapping, a fatal shooting, a suicide attempt.\n\n\u201cThat Zola story wild,\u201d tweeted the rapper and producer Missy Elliott, one of more than 200,", + "000 people to tweet about Wells\u2019s story in the past week. \u201cEnded up reading the whole thing like I was watching a movie on Twitter.\u201d\n\nA movie may, in fact, be forthcoming: Wells has tweeted she\u2019s been approached by a number of studios and producers. But even as her story blew up, Wells has refused to clarify which details were true. (She did not respond to The Washington Post\u2019s request for comment on the score.) That\u2019s led some to conclude her story was fictive, another elaborate social media hoax.\n\n[The three stages of going viral in 2015]\n\nAfter interviews with the story\u2019s main subjects and police who have investigated the case,", + " however, The Post was able to verify large portions of Wells\u2019s tale. Wells may be called upon to retell her story again, in fact: \u201cZ,\u201d the pimp from Wells\u2019s saga, is on trial in January on charges ranging from sexual assault to trafficking.\n\nWhat really happened in Tampa\n\nIn mid-March, 2015, 20-year-old Jessica Swiatkowski said she went for lunch at a Hooters restaurant in Roseville, Mich. Swiatkowski, the single mother of a baby girl whose father had recently gained sole custody, was living in the Detroit suburbs with her boyfriend of one month, Jarrett Scott,", + " and Rudy, a longtime friend.\n\nTo pay the rent, Swiatkowski had been dancing in Detroit clubs, she said. She, Scott and Rudy were actually planning a weekend trip to Tampa, where she could make better money.\n\nWhen Swiatkowski heard that Wells, her Hooters waitress, also danced, she invited her along. It was sudden, but Rudy \u2014 who booked dancers for clubs \u2014 said the pay was good.\n\n\u201cRudy was making trips to Florida and back, saying \u2018look how much money you can make,\u2019\u201d said Scott, Swiatkowski\u2019s boyfriend. \u201cGo work one weekend, make 15 or 20 or $30,", + "000. That was the plan.\u201d\n\nDiffrent girls every time so z comes back the last time and starts convincing jess that she can make all this money just dancing down there \u2014 Jarrett Scott (@jarrettshere89) October 30, 2015\n\nOn March 27, Swiatkowski, Wells, Scott and Rudy \u2014 whose real name is Akporode Uwedjojevwe \u2014 packed into Rudy\u2019s fiancee\u2019s car and took the 17-hour trip from Detroit to Tampa. Scott, to hear him tell it, was along for the ride. Rudy acted as the girls\u2019 manager.\n\nFirst they went to the Tampa Gold Club,", + " Swiatkowski said, a topless club in Ybor City. Later, the girls danced at 2001 Odyssey.\n\nSwiatkowski and Wells disagree on exactly what happened next, but both women agree they weren\u2019t making a lot of money. According to both Wells and Scott, however, Rudy believed he had a solution: The girls could \u201ctrap\u201d out of their hotel, or engage in prostitution.\n\nIn tweets that she has since deleted, Wells said that Rudy took her phone and \u2014 against her will \u2014 made a profile for her on Backpage, a classified site popular with sex workers and escorts. Both that profile and a profile for Swiatkowski are still available in Internet archives,", + " though it\u2019s unclear who made Swiatkowski\u2019s \u2014 Wells claims, in her Twitter story, that she did. In an interview with The Post, Swiatkowski disputed that, saying she only danced. (\u201cNew in town for your pleasure,\u201d Swiatkowski\u2019s page reads. \u201cGive me a call, you will not be disappointed.\u201d)\n\n[Tweets are disappearing from Twitter: Why?]\n\nAccording to both Wells and Scott, that was not the end of Rudy\u2019s menacing behavior. Wells writes in her story that he booked a series of clients for Swiatkowski, then took all of the money. (Swiatkowski denies that this happened.) Rudy also bullied Scott,", + " he alleges, taking the younger man\u2019s phone and threatening to beat him up at several points over the weekend.\n\nAt one point, on their second day in Tampa, a client became violent with Swiatkowski, Scott said: He barred the door and tried to stop her from leaving the hotel. When she escaped to the lobby, where he and Rudy were waiting, she was hysterical, crying \u201cthis guy tried to kidnap me.\u201d Scott says that Rudy called the police.\n\nThis is, to be clear, the closest the real story gets to Wells\u2019s dramatic shooting. Tampa police confirmed to The Post that no incidents matching Wells\u2019s description happened the weekend of March 27.\n\nDespite the chaos,", + " Wells and Scott stuck around: Wells because she had no way home, Scott because he hoped he could bring Swiatkowski home with him.\n\n\u201cI begged her to stop,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it was like Rudy was controlling her mind or something. He kept saying, \u2018look at all this money,\u2019 or \u2018I\u2019ll get your daughter back\u2019.\u201d\n\nSwiatkowski had had a difficult life, Scott said: She\u2019d had a drug problem in high school, though she told The Post she\u2019s been sober for four years. She\u2019d also lost her daughter, Avarella, in an unpleasant custody battle.\n\nAfter two days, however, even Scott had had enough.", + " His Facebook activity from that weekend is just a string of increasingly distraught relationship memes: \u201cI just wanna settle down with the right one\u201d; then \u201csometimes, what a girl does is push the guy away to see if he\u2019ll still come back\u201d; then \u201cI don\u2019t care about losing people that don\u2019t wanna be in my life anymore.\u201d\n\nThis wasent the life that you wanted for your self you brought this all apoun your self when you choose to stay with him in florida \u2014 Jarrett Scott (@jarrettshere89) October 30, 2015\n\nRudy gave him and Wells enough money to get back home to Detroit,", + " Scott said. Days later, he and Wells claim they heard that Rudy was in jail in Nevada.\n\nRudy wasn\u2019t arrested for murder, however, as Zola\u2019s story claims. Instead, Uwedjojevwe is being charged on six counts, all related in some way to the sex trade: sexual assault, battery, two counts of trafficking, and two counts of attempted pandering with threat of physical force. This last charge essentially means that \u2014 days after Rudy made Wells a nonconsensual Backpage ad \u2014 someone else has accused him of compelling her to engage in prostitution.\n\nUnmasking \u2018Z\u2019, a.k.a. Rudy,", + " a.k.a Akporode Uwedjojevwe\n\nAkporode Uwedjojevwe\u2019s mugshot (Reno Police Department)\n\nHere is what we know about Akporode Uwedjojevwe, the 35-year-old man who was traveling the country with a series of women 15 years younger.\n\nAmong friends, he went by \u201cRudy Uwedjo,\u201d at least on Facebook, where his photo is a hulking black pitbull. He was, according to Swiatkowski and Scott, engaged to a Michigan woman who graduated from high school in 2012. She remains one of his 12 Facebook friends.\n\nRudy had a house in Michigan,", + " where Swiatkowski says she briefly lived \u2014 though his Facebook lists his hometown as Warri, Nigeria. Both in Wells\u2019s telling and that of others who knew him, he didn\u2019t generally speak with an accent. That only came out when Rudy, a hulking guy with small, flat eyes, got really upset.\n\nNineteen-year-old Jessica Lynn Forgie said she heard it for the first time in early April at an upscale Reno hotel \u2014 shortly after Rudy and Swiatkowski convinced Forgie and a friend to meet up and \u201cdance\u201d with them.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m sick and [expletive] tired of people backing Jessica up on the ZOLA story and saying it\u2019s a lie,\u201d Forgie wrote on Facebook Friday.", + " \u201cNo, it\u2019s definitely the DAMN TRUTH & Jessica knows it. She did almost the same thing with me & Breeonna [Pellow, her friend] \u2026 We were lucky to get out when we did.\u201d\n\n\n\nA redacted screenshot of the post Jessica Forgie made to Facebook.\n\nForgie and Pellow didn\u2019t know Rudy or Swiatkowski well. Both girls say they were driving through Nevada on their way home from a California road trip, when Pellow\u2019s truck broke down in Battle Mountain, a tiny town three hours northeast of Reno. State police drove the girls to a local gas station, but they had no way to get home from there.", + " There was only a couple hundred dollars left between them, Forgie said, and their families didn\u2019t have \u201cthe kind of money\u201d to buy them plane tickets.\n\nIn lieu of other options, the girls posted SOSes to Facebook. They were initially relieved, Pellow said, when Swiatkowski messaged that she could help: She and her friend Rudy were headed to Reno to dance in some local clubs, and they offered to meet up with them. Rudy sent a car for Forgie and Pellow, the girls say, then met them at Reno-Tahoe International Airport as soon as he and Swiatkowski landed.\n\n\u201cHe seemed like a normal guy,\u201d Forgie said on the phone from Michigan,", + " where she just celebrated her 20th birthday. \u201cHe talked normal, he dressed nice. He wasn\u2019t scary or anything.\u201d\n\nWithin hours of their arrival, however, the girls say that they began to worry that something was amiss. Rudy demanded that Pellow make a profile on Backpage, she said, even taking her phone from her and starting the page himself. Pellow said that Swiatkowski, who was in the room with them, did nothing to stop it.\n\nForgie, meanwhile, was just \u201calong for the ride\u201d: She\u2019d never danced before, and the plan had been for her to hang around the hotel while Pellow made enough money to get the two friends home.", + " Rudy demanded that she start a Backpage, too, Forgie said, then relented, deciding that she could work the phones.\n\nWhat happened that night is still difficult for Pellow and Forgie to relate. (\u201cI have to live with what they did too [sic] me for the rest of my life,\u201d Forgie wrote Friday on Facebook.) Swiatkowski stayed in Reno\u2019s Atlantis hotel, working, both girls say. Pellow hid in her bathroom, afraid to come out; Rudy had promised to \u201cbeat her a\u2013\u201d if she didn\u2019t meet with clients.\n\nA mile north on the South Virginia Street strip, Forgie was napping at the Peppermill hotel.", + " Rudy kept storming in and out, upset about different situations at the Atlantis, Forgie said. At one point, she begged Rudy to send her home.\n\n\u201cYou don\u2019t get something for nothing,\u201d Forgie said he responded. \u201cIf you want to go home, you\u2019ll have to f\u2014 your way out.\u201d\n\nForgie claims that Rudy then sexually assaulted her. When he got up to take a call in the bathroom, she fled.\n\nPolice records show that Rudy was arrested hours later on South Virginia Street, where the Peppermill hotel is located. Police took statements from Forgie, Pellow and Swiatkowski. They then referred all three women to victims\u2019 services;", + " a religious anti-trafficking organization, called Awaken INC, helped send them back to Michigan. (Reno police, who said they couldn\u2019t comment on the specifics of the investigation because the case is still open, offered no further statement by the time of publication.)\n\n\n\n(Reno Police Department)\n\nTo Forgie and Pellow, Zola\u2019s story isn\u2019t \u201ccrazy\u201d or \u201chilarious\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s evidence that Rudy and Swiatkowski were in league before. Both women believe that Swiatkowski lured them to Reno under false pretenses, always planning that they, too, would turn to \u201ctrapping.\u201d\n\n\u201cShe\u2019s been with him a while \u2014 they\u2019re definitely a team,\u201d said Forgie.", + " \u201cI\u2019m glad Zola told her story. I had no idea Jess did this to someone else.\u201d\n\nSwiatkowski would not respond to these allegations specifically: After speaking to The Post at some length on Friday and releasing a statement that disputed Wells\u2019s story, Swiatkowski stopped responding to calls and messages and deleted hundreds of photos from her public Instagram. While she had previously denied ever being in Reno, police records show that she was in fact with Rudy in Nevada at the time of his arrest.\n\nScreenshots purportedly taken from the now-deleted comments thread on the Facebook page of Awaken INC, the anti-trafficking agency that sent Swiatkowski back to Michigan,", + " indicate that she still sided with Rudy as of late July.\n\n\u201cThere has still been no sentencing because there is NO PROOF!\u201d she wrote. (In fact, he hadn\u2019t been sentenced because he hadn\u2019t been tried yet, though he was arraigned in July.) \u201cJust statements from two scared pressured girls. Who now refuse to talk. Good day.\u201d\n\n\u2018All that stuff you see on \u2018SVU\u2019 \u2014 that\u2019s real\u2019\n\nTo many of the hundreds of thousands of people who read Wells\u2019s tweets last week, her story was a glimpse into a world that they had never seen outside TV. There were immediate calls for Wells to write a memoir or a screenplay;", + " she\u2019s allegedly shopping a book around and has been approached by everyone from Rolling Stone to MTV. On Friday, she announced her plans to release a line of merchandise: T-shirts and beanies for her legions of new fans.\n\nWhile Wells\u2019s story may have seemed \u201ccrazy,\u201d however, and while Wells herself is hilarious, there\u2019s nothing unusual (or funny) about its sheer level of violence. According to a 2014 study published in the American Journal of Public Health, between 32 and 55 percent of all sex workers have experienced workplace violence in the past year. For some of them, that\u2019s physical assault. For others,", + " it\u2019s manipulation, coercion or psychological abuse.\n\n\u201cThe response [to Wells\u2019s story] is indicative of how unfamiliar people are with sex workers\u2019 lives,\u201d said Sienna Baskin, the managing director of the Sex Workers Project, a New York-based advocacy group. \u201cSex workers do experience a really high level of violence, in large part due to the criminalization and stigmatization of their work.\u201d\n\nWhatever their exact involvement in the industry, Baskin adds \u2014 whether they\u2019re a Swiatkowski, a Pellow or a Wells \u2014 it\u2019s \u201cdifficult for sex workers to seek assistance.\u201d\n\nOrganizations like the Sex Workers Project have proposed a number of solutions to situations like the ones that played out in Tampa and Reno.", + " Chief among them is destigmatizing, or even decriminalizing, prostitution: such a move would, advocates argue, empower sex workers to report crimes, such as assault or threats of violence, without fear of getting in trouble themselves.\n\nIn its 2012 recommendations on decreasing violence against sex workers, the World Health Organization also suggests passing explicit anti-discrimination laws and creating health programs and centers that cater specifically to the needs of sex workers. Sex workers are at a higher risk than the general population both of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and of having problems with alcohol or drug abuse.\n\nIn Reno, Forgie and Pellow benefitted from a system that works along that model:", + " In 2013, Nevada strengthened its laws against pimps, while making more social and medical services available to workers. After Forgie, Pellow and Swiatkowski gave their statements to police, the women were referred to the department\u2019s Victim Services Unit, which put them up in a hotel and arranged for them to fly home. Pellow and Forgie have been back for Rudy\u2019s court dates; they claim that Swiatkowski has avoided going with them.\n\n\u201cPeople think this story is fake, but they need to have an open mind,\u201d Pellow said. \u201cAll that stuff you see on TV, on \u2018SVU\u2019 \u2014 that\u2019s real.", + " It happens.\n\n\u201cIt happened to me.\u201d\n\nCorrection: This story originally misspelled Breeonna Pellow\u2019s last name. It\u2019s Pellow, not \u201cPella.\u201d The Post regrets the error.\n\nLiked that? Try these:\n" + ], + "length": 9577, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 35, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Snaring access to Edward Snowden, and all the documents in his possession, has generally been regarded a huge coup for the Guardian newspaper. But at least two other British newspapers don't agree. Following claims by MI5's new chief that the paper's exposes have been a \"guide book\" for terrorists (you can read about it at the Daily Mail), the former editor\u2014and current group content director\u2014of the UK's Independent, Chris Blackhurst, has written an op-ed arguing that the Guardian's decision to publish was dangerous and not what he would have done. \"If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest, and might harm their operations, who am I ... to disbelieve them?\" he writes. Blackhurst's column comes just days after an even more inflammatory Daily Mail editorial labeling the Guardian as \"the paper that helps Britain's enemies.\" Though the paper acknowledges that \"a line needs to be drawn\" between civil liberties and the interests of national security, it believes \"the Guardian, with lethal irresponsibility, has crossed that line by printing tens of thousands of words describing the secret techniques used to monitor terrorists.\" The Guardian's response? It published opinions by editors from 33 media organizations around the world, all arguing that the paper did the right thing.\n", + "docs": [ + "I was puzzled as to why she would be so angry \u2013 normally she and The Guardian would be of one mind. She cut me off. What was provoking her fury was the decision to release the US National Security Agency (NSA) material leaked by Edward Snowden. \u201cSince when,\u201d she asked, \u201chave [The Guardian editor] Alan Rusbridger and his colleagues been experts on national security? On what basis do they know whether something is safe to publish or not safe?\u201d She said she preferred to heed the views of the security services on that matter \u2013 and she noted the MI5 chief had accused the newspaper of doing \u201cenormous damage\u201d to Britain\u2019s ability to combat al-Qa\u2019ida.\n\nWhat was striking was her anger.", + " It\u2019s easy to assume that years of service in Whitehall had got to her, that she was an insider furious at what she deemed to be an outsider\u2019s irresponsibility. Hours spent in meetings, listening to senior officials issuing dire warnings and studying papers covered in legal notices, had clearly addled her brain. In her former radical, pre-government, pre-establishment life, she would have been up for The Guardian publishing \u2013 of course she would.\n\nNow, though, she is older and wiser, and able, as she did, to hurl the words \u201csixth-form\u201d in The Guardian\u2019s direction. There was also a discussion about male \u201cwilly-waving\u201d \u2013 she accused Rusbridger and co of being fixated on quantity,", + " not quality; that they seemed keen to show-off just how much of the stuff had come into their possession as opposed to what it contained. I admit to having been taken aback. I studied her closely. Her annoyance appeared genuine; if she was acting and hyping, she was convincing. Would I have done the same if I\u2019d been in Rusbridger\u2019s position? Fortunately, just then, she got dragged away \u2013 the speeches at the party were about to begin.\n\nAs a teenager, I was transfixed by All the President\u2019s Men; revelled in the dark psy-ops of Colin Wallace in Northern Ireland; read extensively about the US authorities\u2019 efforts to suppress the Pentagon Papers leaked to the New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan;", + " and found his subsequent brilliant book A Bright Shining Lie about the US peddling untruths in the Vietnam War an affirmation of everything that I imagined.\n\nAs a journalist, I\u2019ve done investigations and uncovered scandals; and experienced the difficulty of discovering even innocuous details in our supposedly open and liberal country. I can never forget, at this newspaper, covering the Scott inquiry into arms to Iraq, in 1996, and listening to the claim that this would be the first occasion the evidence given to a study of this nature would be released on CD. Excitedly, I put the CD into the slot in my terminal. The pages were there,", + " but blank: great swathes of text had been redacted.\n\nAs a reporter in the House of Commons, I learned to study every official report closely \u2013 and examine why one word had been chosen and not another, and wonder what had been left out. I\u2019m cynical about officialdom, having seen too many cover-ups and appalling injustices carried out in our name.\n\nSo, based on that and more, I would have been a dead cert to publish. Except that I would not have done. I don\u2019t deny The Guardian\u2019s right to do so \u2013 it was their belief, honestly held. My problem with publishing is twofold.", + " First, try as I might, I cannot get that excited about it. With the Snowden leaks I find myself speculating \u2013 as I did with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks \u2013 as to whether I am getting too old and losing the plot as a journalist. But, as with WikiLeaks, will someone please put the boasts about size and volume on one side and tell me: where is the story?\n\nIf it\u2019s that the security services monitor emails and phone calls, and use internet searches to track down terrorists and would-be terrorists \u2013 including, I now read, something called the \u201cdark net\u201d \u2013 I cannot get wound up about it. At Kings Place,", + " home of The Guardian, they will say my judgement is a mess. Never had any, they will probably sneer. Far too cosy to the powers-that-be, they might add.\n\nIn which case, guys, uncurl your lips and explain what it is, exactly, that the NSA and GCHQ, are doing that is so profoundly terrible? What justifies all the posturing we\u2019ve been subjected to these past months? I watched The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who obtained the Snowden scoop, on Newsnight the other evening and was nonplussed. I wanted him to say what the real scandal was that he had uncovered.", + " But he did not.\n\nAs he spoke, I was reminded of what he had said after the detention of his partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow, under the Terrorism Act (a move that was cack-handed). It hardly bodes well for his future objective journalism: \u201cI will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England, too. I have many documents on England\u2019s spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did.\u201d\n\nWhich leads on to the second issue. If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest,", + " and might harm their operations, who am I (despite my grounding from Watergate onwards) to disbelieve them?\n\nIn August, this paper also received information from the Snowden files. We did not publish much of the information we were given because the Government, in the shape of a Defence Advisory Notice or \u201cDA\u201d notice, asked us to desist, in the interests of national security. Several times in my career, I\u2019ve been served with a DA notice. On each occasion, I confess, I\u2019ve not published. Does that make me a coward and an establishment lackey? Or responsible and sensible?\n\nI\u2019m all for whistle-blowing \u2013 indeed,", + " I wrote a column, arguing for greater protection for whistleblowers in this paper only last Friday. Some of my best stories have come from people brave enough to leak, to break ranks and say something they\u2019re not authorised to say. Good on them. What we\u2019re into here appears to be not so much someone blowing the whistle on one story to highlight specific wrongdoing but the dumping of tons of information \u2013 and the recipient acting both as unqualified filter and feeling the need to brag about how much documentation it has received.\n\nI don\u2019t want my civil liberties infringed, and as a taxpayer I\u2019d like to know as much as possible about what the Government and its agents are doing with my money.", + " But I also want the security services to do their jobs properly, to make the world safer. I know they will make mistakes; I know that occasionally they will stray. I hope I\u2019m not complacent. Others, doubtless, will disagree.\n\nChris Blackhurst is group content director of The Independent, the Evening Standard and London Live. He was editor of The Independent, 2011-13 ", + " Guardian has handed a gift to terrorists', warns MI5 chief: Left-wing paper's leaks caused 'greatest damage to western security in history' say Whitehall insiders\n\nMI5 chief Andrew Parker called paper's expose a 'guide book' for terrorists\n\nHe said the coverage is a gift to 'thousands' of UK-based extremists\n\nSecret techniques of GCHQ laid bare by Guardian\n\n\n\nThe spy chief: MI5 director-general Andrew Parker has blasted the Guardian's publication of Britain's espionage capabilities\n\nA massive cache of stolen top-secret documents published in The Guardian has handed a \u2018gift\u2019 to terrorists, the head of MI5 warned last night.\n\nIn a blistering attack,", + " Andrew Parker said the publication of confidential files leaked by US fugitive Edward Snowden had caused huge \u2018harm\u2019 to the capability of Britain\u2019s intelligence services.\n\nSecurity officials say the expos\u00e9 amounts to a \u2018guide book\u2019, advising terrorists on the best way to avoid detection when plotting an atrocity.\n\n\n\nIn Whitehall, it is considered to have caused the greatest damage to the Western security apparatus in history. In his first public speech since taking the job earlier this year, Mr Parker said the leaks handed the \u2018advantage\u2019 to terrorists and were a \u2018gift they need to evade us and strike at will\u2019.\n\nHe said there were several thousand Islamist extremists living in the UK who \u2018see the British people as a legitimate target\u2019.\n\n\n\nThe security services were working round the clock to stop the fanatics,", + " but MI5 was now \u2018tackling threats on more fronts than ever before\u2019.\n\nSnowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, fled the US in May with thousands of classified documents about the NSA and GCHQ, which he gave to The Guardian.\n\nThe newspaper has since published tens of thousands of words on the secret techniques used by GCHQ to monitor emails, phone records and communications on the internet.\n\n\n\nThe first Guardian revelations came in early June, when it detailed how the NSA \u2013 which supplies intelligence to GCHQ, the organisation which gathers intelligence for MI5 and MI6 \u2013 had \u2018direct access\u2019 to the computer systems of AOL,", + " Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Paltalk, Skype, Yahoo and YouTube.\n\nThe newspaper also revealed how GCHQ has access to a network of cables carrying international phone calls and internet traffic and is processing vast amounts of \u2018personal information\u2019.\n\nBy the time his identity as the source of the leaks emerged, Snowden had fled his home in Hawaii for Hong Kong. After a week in hiding, he travelled to Moscow, where he remains out of the reach of US authorities.\n\n\n\nThe editor and the leaker: The Guardian's Alan Rusbridger and former NSA employee Edward Snowden\n\n\n\nIn August, police detained David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald,", + " for nine hours at Heathrow airport. Mr Miranda had been carrying intelligence files leaked by Snowden.\n\nAt the time it emerged David Cameron had authorised the destruction of computers at The Guardian offices. Security concerns were so acute that Mr Cameron sent Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to demand that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger destroy the files after warning they could fall into the hands of terrorists.\n\nMembers of GCHQ supervised the smashing of laptops and hard drives at the newspaper\u2019s offices.\n\nMr Parker said: \u2018What we know about the terrorists, and the detail of the capabilities we use against them, together represent our margin of advantage. That margin gives us the prospect of being able to detect their plots and stop them.\n\n\n\nGCHQ Headquarters.", + " Thousands of classified documents about the NSA and GCHQ were published by The Guardian\n\nMI5 Headquarters in London. The leak was described as the greatest damage to Western security apparatus in history\n\n\u2018But that margin is under attack. Reporting from GCHQ is vital to the safety of this country and its citizens.\n\n\u2018GCHQ intelligence has played a vital role in stopping many of the terrorist plots that MI5 and the police have tackled in the past decade.\n\n\u2018It causes enormous damage to make public the reach and limits of GCHQ techniques. Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists.\n\n'It is the gift they need to evade us and strike at will.", + " Unfashionable as it might seem, that is why we must keep secrets secret, and why not doing so causes such harm.\u2019\n\n\n\nIn a wide-ranging speech to the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, Mr Parker said the task of MI5 was \u2018getting harder\u2019. He pointed to the danger posed by British nationals returning from fighting in Syria.\n\nIn August, police detained David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, for nine hours at Heathrow airport. Mr Miranda had been carrying intelligence files leaked by Snowden\n\nThe spy chief said there is a 'growing proportion of groups and individuals taking it upon themselves to commit acts of terrorism'. Pictured is the 7/", + "7 London bombings, which killed 52 civilians\n\nMr Parker said: \u2018The ability of Al Qaeda to launch the centrally directed large-scale attacks of the last decade has been degraded, though not removed.\n\n\u2018We have seen the threat shift more to increasing numbers of smaller-scale attacks and a growing proportion of groups and individuals taking it upon themselves to commit acts of terrorism.\n\n'It remains the case that there are several thousand Islamist extremists here who see the British people as a legitimate target. Overall, I do not believe the terrorist threat is worse now than before. But it is more diffuse. More complicated. More unpredictable.\u2019\n\n\n\nMr Parker also warned that,", + " in some quarters, there could be an \u2018alarming degree of complacency\u2019 that MI5 and the police could foil all attacks.\n\nHe said: \u2018Terrorism, because of its nature and consequences, is the one area of crime where the expectation sometimes seems to be that the stats should be zero. Zero. Imagine applying the same target to murder in general, or major drugs trafficking. That is the stuff of \u201cpre-crime\u201d in the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report.\u2019\n\nMI5 has attracted criticism for failing to stop individuals \u2013 including two of the July 7 bombers \u2013 who were on its radar.\n\nBut Mr Parker, who replaced Jonathan Evans as director-general of the Security Service earlier this year,", + " said: \u2018With greater resources since 7/7 we have worked very hard to identify as many as possible of the people in the country who are active in some way in support of terrorism.\n\n\u2018The idea that we either can or would want to operate intensive scrutiny of thousands is fanciful. This is not East Germany, or North Korea. Knowing of an individual does not equate to knowing everything about them.\u2019\n\n\n\nHe also made the case for more powers to monitor emails and the internet. Mr Parker said: \u2018Shifts in technology can erode our capabilities.\n\nThere are choices to be made, including, for example, about how and whether communications data is retained.", + " It is not, however, an option to disregard such shifts with an unspoken assumption that somehow security will anyway be sustained. It will not. We cannot work without tools.\u2019\n\n\n\nA Guardian News & Media spokesman said: \u2018A huge number of people \u2013 from President Obama to the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper have now conceded that the Snowden revelations have prompted a debate which was both necessary and overdue.\n\n\u2018The President has even set up a review panel and there have been vigorous discussions in the US Congress and throughout Europe. Such a debate is only worthwhile if it is informed. That is what journalism should do.\u2019\n\nLaid bare,", + " how spies fight to protect Britain from attack\n\nEdward Snowden became one of the world\u2019s most wanted men in early June when he broke cover as the agent who leaked top-secret documents from the US National Security Agency.\n\nHis initial revelations detailed how the NSA harvested private information from the computer systems of companies including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype and YouTube using a secret US surveillance programme called Prism.\n\nThe Guardian then claimed the NSA supplied intelligence to GCHQ \u2013 accusing agents at the UK\u2019s listening post of attempting to bypass UK law.\n\nThe British spy agency compiled 197 intelligence dossiers from the system in a single year, sidestepping the need to obtain a court order.\n\nOn June 18,", + " the newspaper claimed UK intelligence agents hacked into the communications of politicians and senior officials from Turkey, South Africa and Russia during the G20 summit in London in 2009 \u2013 prompting a furious backlash ahead of the G8 meeting in Moscow.\n\nSnowden also revealed how GCHQ was able to hoover up vast amounts of personal information, including websites visited, emails sent and received, text messages, calls and passwords, using a state-of-the-art programme called Tempora.\n\nThe surveillance operation centres on using probes to access a network of fibre-optic cables coming into and out of the country. Telecoms firms allegedly involved in Tempora include BT,", + " Verizon and Vodafone Cable.\n\nThe Guardian then revealed that the NSA was providing millions of pounds of funding each year to GCHQ to allow it to trawl for personal data. One document leaked by Snowden and dating from 2010 suggested GCHQ must \u2018pull its weight\u2019 to meet the NSA\u2019s \u2018minimum expectations\u2019.\n\nSnowden also made the highly damaging revelation that the US government had hacked computers in mainland China and Hong Kong for years \u2013 threatening to consign relations between the super-powers to the deep freeze.\n\nUS intelligence chiefs responded to the leaks with fury. NSA director Keith Alexander told the US Senate the top-secret surveillance programmes had disrupted at least 50 terror plots.", + " The paper that helps Britain's enemies\n\nAndrew Parker's first speech as our spy chief was yesterday significantly endorsed by No10\n\nForget hacking voicemails or slipping payments to officials for stories that may or may not be in the public interest.\n\nSet to one side even (dare we say it?) this paper\u2019s provocative headline 12 days ago, questioning how a long-dead Marxist, who wanted to smash all the traditions and institutions which make Britain British, could be said to love his country.\n\nBy any objective yardstick, don\u2019t such crimes and controversies pale beside the accusation levelled against the Guardian on Tuesday by the new head of MI5?\n\nIndeed,", + " it is impossible to imagine a graver charge against a newspaper than that it has given succour to our country\u2019s enemies and endangered all our lives by handing terrorists \u2018the gift they need to evade us and strike at will\u2019.\n\nYet so said Andrew Parker, in his first speech as our spy chief, which yesterday was significantly endorsed by No10.\n\nSo isn\u2019t it staggering that the BBC, after spending all last week trumpeting Ed Miliband\u2019s attack on this paper over our charge that his father\u2019s Marxist views validated one of the most evil regimes in history, could hardly bring itself for much of yesterday to report Mr Parker\u2019s devastating indictment of the Guardian?\n\nThe problem,", + " and it\u2019s worse under the new director general, is that a wall of prejudice surrounds Broadcasting House \u2013 a belief that the Right merits relentless attack, while the BBC\u2019s soulmates on the liberal Left must always be protected.\n\nLet us be clear. The Mail has never believed that MI5 and GCHQ deserve unquestioning support.\n\nIn this column, we were highly critical of their demands for the power to detain suspects without trial for 90 days.\n\nWe led the charge against MI6\u2019s cosiness with Labour over the dodgy dossier on Iraq. And we have opposed secret courts and the so-called snoopers\u2019 charter.\n\nBut at the same time,", + " we accept that the security services would be guilty of dereliction of duty if they failed to monitor those who pose a threat to the UK.\n\nAnd we have always argued that a line needs to be drawn between the civil liberties we treasure and the interests of national security.\n\nWe believe the Guardian, with lethal irresponsibility, has crossed that line by printing tens of thousands of words describing the secret techniques used to monitor terrorists.\n\nSuch is certainly the view of UK national security adviser Oliver Robbins, who says the paper has \u2018already done real damage\u2019, while the information it still holds is likely to \u2018lead directly to widespread loss of life\u2019.\n\nIndeed,", + " so incendiary are these documents that British agents have had to be moved for their protection.\n\nYet, almost as astonishing as the BBC\u2019s reticence, the editor of the Guardian now says he will continue to release the material, arguing that he will take care to publish nothing that endangers lives.\n\nBut how, in the name of sanity, can he know? He\u2019s a journalist, not an expert on security.\n\nAs for his paper\u2019s attack on us over the Labour leader\u2019s father, let us say something in Ralph Miliband\u2019s favour.\n\nTrue, he hated so much about this country that he wanted a workers\u2019 revolution to overturn everything from the monarchy to parliament,", + " property rights and the common law. And, yes, his ideas chimed more with Stalin\u2019s than with Churchill\u2019s during the Cold War.\n\nBut he fought for Britain in the war. And never once, as far as we are aware, did he give practical help to our enemies.\n\nNor was he ever accused by the head of our security services of putting British lives at risk. ", + " On Thursday the Daily Mail described the Guardian as 'The paper that helps Britain's enemies'. We showed that article to many of the world's leading editors. This is what they said\n\nNew York Times masthead Photograph: New York Times\n\nIn a democracy, the press plays a vital role in informing the public and holding those in power accountable. The NSA has vast intelligence-gathering powers and capabilities and its role in society is an important subject for responsible newsgathering organisations such as the New York Times and the Guardian. A public debate about the proper perimeters for eavesdropping by intelligence agencies is healthy for the public and necessary.\n\nJill Abramson.", + " Photograph: Michael Loccisano/FilmMagic\n\nThe accurate and in-depth news articles published by the New York Times and the Guardian help inform the public in framing its thinking about these issues and deciding how to balance the need to protect against terrorism and to protect individual privacy. Vigorous news coverage and spirited public debate are both in the public interest. The journalists at the New York Times and the Guardian care deeply about the wellbeing and safety of their fellow citizens in carrying out their role in keeping the public informed.\n\nJill Abramson, executive editor, the New York Times\n\nDer Spiegel masthead. Photograph: Der Spiegel\n\nThe utmost duty of a journalist is to expose abuses and the abuse of power.", + " The global surveillance of digital communication by the NSA and GCHQ is no less than an abuse on a massive scale with consequences that at this point seem completely unpredictable.\n\nWolfgang Buechner Photograph: Wolfgang Buechner\n\nIt is understandable that the governments of the US and Britain aren't pleased that journalists, with the assistance of informants within government ranks, are exposing this abuse of power. It is a classic approach for governments to attack media that have the courage to publish such stories with arguments that they threaten national security or that they are supporting an enemy of the state. And it is a tragedy that media outlets aligned with governments are now accusing the journalists uncovering these abuses of \"lethal irresponsibility\".\n\nIn terms of DER SPIEGEL's position on this affair:", + " With each story we have published, we have given both the NSA and GCHQ the opportunity to comment prior to publication and to alert us to aspects that could be highly sensitive. The NSA took advantage of this opportunity, GCHQ did not.\n\nThe material contains myriad evidence of terrorist investigations. However, for good reason, we have refrained from reporting on these specific operations.\n\nIt is the indiscriminate mass surveillance of communications that DER SPIEGEL considers to be a scandal -- not the search for terrorists. As we stated, it is the media's duty in a free society to report on these abuses.\n\nExposing the intensity with which intelligence agencies conduct surveillance on the Internet does not provide proof that such reporting in any way assists terrorists.\n\nIt is common knowledge that security agencies monitor telephones,", + " and yet, terrorists still use them.\n\nWhat is clear is that the surveillance conducted by the NSA and GCHQ goes far beyond anti-terror measures.\n\nIt is for this reason that SPIEGEL and numerous other media outlets around the world will continue to take their duty seriously and report when a security apparatus spins out of control and acts beyond its remit.\n\nWolfgang Buechner, editor-in-chief, Der Spiegel\n\nHaaretz masthead Photograph: Haaretz\n\nJournalists have only one responsibility: to keep their readers informed and educated about whatever their government is doing on their behalf \u2013 and first and foremost on security and intelligence organisations,", + " which by their nature infringe on civil liberties. The Snowden revelations, and their publication by the Guardian, have been a prime example of fearlessly exercising this journalistic responsibility.\n\nAluf Benn Photograph: Haaretz\n\nIn Israel, the media are subject to pre-publication review by a military censor of any news related to security and intelligence. Israeli editors are therefore relieved from the dilemmas faced by our British or American counterparts, who should judge what might harm national security. Nevertheless, we struggle endlessly to push back the walls of government secrecy and concealment and expand the scope of public debate.\n\nAluf Benn, editor-in-chief, Haaretz\n\nLe Monde masthead.", + " Photograph: Le Monde\n\nThe decision by Edward Snowden to leak to the media an important amount of top-secret documents showing the unprecedented reach of electronic surveillance was a historic event. It has raised major questions on the control of the internet, on the balance between counter-terrorism and civil liberties, on the oversight of intelligence activities by democratic institutions.\n\nSylvie Kauffmann Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images\n\nThe debate is open, and all actors of public life are legitimate participants in it. The heads of intelligence services are entitled to voice their concern at the extent of the leaks, as ordinary citizens are entitled to ask what use is made, by whom and to what purpose,", + " of private data collected from their daily life activities. Editors of media organisations are central to this debate. The Guardian, with whom, among others, Le Monde collaborated in the publication of the WikiLeaks cables, made the right decision to publish the documents released by Snowden. It did so responsibly, acting in the public interest, as we had done with the WikiLeaks documents, and more recently with the \"OffshoreLeaks\" documents.\n\nSylvie Kauffmann, editorial director, Le Monde, France\n\nEl Pais masthead. Photograph: El Pais\n\nWhen a newspaper prints a story, or a series of stories, such as the Snowden case,", + " the first attacks are always aimed at its editors and publishers. State or homeland security reasons are always claimed.\n\nJavier Moreno Photograph: Javier Moreno\n\nIt happened when The New York Times and The Washington Post printed the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in 1973, and it happened with WikiLeaks. Now, the object of criticism is the Guardian for having printed Edward Snowden's revelations. What is sad, baffling and dangerous is that the attacks now come not only from governments but from other newspapers too. In doing so, they are ignoring their first and utmost obligation. The press must serve the citizens and comply with their right to have access to truthful and relevant informations when it comes to public affairs.", + " Newspapers have many duties. Having to protect governments and the powerful from embarrasing situations is not among them.\n\nThe Guardian's work in the Snowden case is an example of great journalism, the kind that changes history and the kind that citizens need more every day, in a world where the powerful are increasingly trying to hide information from their societies. The real danger is not in the so-called \"aid to the enemy\" denounced by the hypocrites, but in the actions of governments and state agencies that citizens cannot control. To fight it we need newspapers willing to do their job, rather than those ready to cheer on the self-interested deceptions of the powerful.\n\nJavier Moreno,", + " director, El Pa\u00eds, Spain\n\nSlate Photograph: Slate\n\nI have just been reading Tim Weiner's history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, which is heavily based on leaked and declassified government documents. Over and again, one is struck by how poorly Americans' interests have been served by secrecy \u2013 and by the folly, misjudgment, and abuse of power that might have been prevented by public knowledge. One does not have to admire Julian Assange or Edward Snowden to recognise that their revelations, filtered by scrupulous journalists, have served the fundamental democratic interest of knowing what our governments are up to and how they may be abridging our rights.\n\nJacob Weisberg Photograph:", + " Jacob Weisberg\n\nThe authorities seldom rate the public's right to know very highly. Editors, by contrast, have an excellent record in handling the security concerns related to classified material. The New York Times withheld revelations about the NSA's wireless wiretapping programme for a full year. Both the Guardian and the New York Times redacted or held back WikiLeaks documents that could have placed lives in danger. The Washington Post has been cautious and selective in publishing the Snowden material. Contra the Daily Mail, our best journalists very much are security experts, often with a better ability to make balanced judgments about disclosure than their security-cleared counterparts. Editors must weigh the potential security harm of public revelation again the certain damage to democratic accountability that comes from a public kept in the dark.", + " It bears noting that in historical terms, the downside of disclosure has been very small, while the cost of secrecy has been enormous.\n\nJacob Weisberg, chairman the Slate Group\n\nThe Hindu. Photograph: The Hindu\n\nAs an editor I am confronted every day with difficult questions about what to publish and what not to. A newspaper comes across documents from all kinds of sources but authenticity is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for disseminating the information these contain. Sensitive information must pass a twofold test: is publication in the public interest; and will it put lives at risk. Governments and intelligence agencies may have access to more information than the average editor but they do not have a monopoly over the ability to correctly answer these questions.\n\nSiddharth Varadarajan Photograph:", + " Siddharth Varadarajan\n\nWell before Edward Snowden came along, the editors of the Hindu have handled classified or sensitive information on a range of sensitive issues. Never has our newspaper behaved irresponsibly with that information. Those attacking the media on the NSA issue wilfully ignore the fact that what the Guardian, the New York Times, the Hindu and other newspapers around the world have published so far are details of snooping that is not even remotely related to fighting terrorism.\n\nOsama bin Laden did not need Edward Snowden's revelations about Prism to realise the US was listening in to every bit of electronic communication: he had already seceded from the world of telephony and reverted to couriers.", + " But millions of people in the US, the UK, Brazil, India and elsewhere, including national leaders, energy companies and others who are being spied upon for base reasons, were unaware of the fact that their privacy was being compromised.\n\nIn the hands of an irresponsible newspaper, the kind of care the Guardian and others who are working from this material are taking may not always prevail. But as Glenn Greenwald said on the BBC, the only people who have been reckless with this material are those who acted irresponsibly in collecting it in the first place: the NSA and GCHQ.\n\nSiddharth Varadarajan, editor the Hindu\n\nClarin.com Photograph:", + " Clarin\n\nIt is really striking and bold to accuse journalists of being allies of terrorism simply for performing their professional responsibilities. And it is even more dangerous when, in the name of a \"national interest\", censorship and concealing information is sponsored on the ground that journalists are not \"security experts\" to judge what can and should be published.\n\nRicardo Kirschbaum Photograph: Ricardo Kirschbaum\n\nLimits are only determined by the editors' responsibility in a political and legal system that might protect the right to freedom of expression on a democratic basis. The Guardian has already been subjected to procedures that claim to infringe its independence and to intimidate its editors and journalists.", + " This pressure must cease immediately.\n\nRicardo Kirschbaum, executive editor, Clarin, Argentina\n\nFrankfurter Allgemeine Photograph: Frankfurter Allgemeine\n\nThe Snowden affair, one day, will be understood as a historic milestone at which democratic societies began to realize that the political cost of new technologies still needed to be negotiated. Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, one of Germany's last great intellectuals and certainly not a leftist, sees it as a transition to a post-democratic society. And had the Snowden files not opened our eyes to this transition already, the way how the current debate about these documents unfolds, certainly did.These revelations are not only about secret services,", + " but just as much about all the new social touchpoints of every citizen who is equipped with a smartphone and online access: Who controls and analyses these touchpoints and why? Is it so difficult to understand that in a world in which \u2013 according to Eric Schmidt's concise formulation \u2013 the digital self not only mirrors but substitutes our true selves, all these issues become questions of human rights?\n\nFrank Schirrmacher Photograph: Frankfurter Allgemeine\n\nPresident Obama's Berlin declaration that he would welcome a debate about the right balance between security and freedom gave room for hope. And different from the distant military threats of the Cold War, are we now exposed to threatening systems which seem to function only as long as they are deeply interwoven and are interfering with a civil society's private communication.\n\nBefore Snowden,", + " we knew about this interference only theoretically. Since Snowden, we know about empirically as well.There is no indication whatsoever that those media organisations who reported about the NSA and GCHQ files have endangered our national security. None of the newspapers involved did create artificial drama as would have been customary in the 1980s, just to increase copy sales. None of the newspapers involved has questioned the duty and legitimate need of governments to prevent terrorism. No one has defended the ideology of terrorists or has even hinted at the idea that terrorism suspects should not be screened.\n\nWhat the newspapers involved did discuss is the integrity of the very democracies that terrorists are trying to destroy.", + " We all can feel and witness each other's tangible shock and dismay about the complete loss of democratic control over systems and secret services which seemingly feel entitled to decide on their own who is a friend and who is an enemy of our civil societies. We saw Jimmy Carter's deep concern. We saw how even an influential and staunchly conservative security expert such as Germany's Hans-Peter Uhl of the Bavarian CSU party defined the NSA files as a \"wake-up call\" that was hinting at a dangerous merger of private industries and secret services. If a conservative security expert like Germany's Hans-Peter Uhl ventures into such territory, we should realize that this affair is about much more than only a few powerpoint presentations.", + " Publishing the Snowden files has by no means been an attack on our freedom and security, but a crucial prerequisite for freedom to exist in the future.\n\nFrank Schirrmacher, publisher, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany\n\nNew York Times masthead Photograph: New York Times\n\nThere is a superficial appeal in the argument that intelligence \"professionals\" know better than editors what information must be suppressed, even if it has already escaped their control. Particularly in this time of terror, much of the public is impressed by that argument and so are American attorneys and judges, causing David Rudenstine of Cardozo Law School to name this the \"age of deference.\" Such deference was evident also when the Pentagon Papers case reached our Supreme Court.", + " The Chief Justice compared the papers to the \"White House silver,\" which, had it come into our possession we would have surely returned. Other justices felt that even if the Constitution prevented our being censored, we deserved to be prosecuted under Espionage statutes for aiding the enemy. Arrogant though it sounds, the fact is that experienced editors and correspondents who deal daily in the subject matter of \"national security\" know better than most judges and prosecutors whether a given piece of information could seriously threaten lives or damage national defence. Moreover, if in doubt, we have usually asked officials to demonstrate the danger of publication and in a minority of cases accepted their argument.", + " But we have demanded persuasive argument that distinguishes between a genuine threat and mere bureaucratic embarrassment or inconvenience.\n\nMax Frankel Photograph: Max Frankel\n\nWhy, ultimately, does experience argue almost always in favour of publication? Because a secret once lost by government, even if important, cannot be \"returned\". It can fly across the globe in an instant and even if momentarily suppressed, it must inform all those who have learned it as they in turn inform others. Even more persuasive is the reality that neither officials nor journalists can ever be sure of the consequences of publication: facts once distributed, like seeds in a garden, acquire a life of their own with consequences that can be salutary,", + " malignant, both, or neither. So while intelligence agents perceive a professional duty to cloak all their deeds and knowledge, it is a newspaper's duty to publish what it learns without presuming to predict a good or ill result. The tension thus created is probably the only tolerable way to proceed.\n\nMax Frankel, former executive editor, The New York Times\n\nThe Washington Post. Photograph: The Washington Post\n\nJournalists have not only the right but a responsibility to challenge government \u2013 its behaviour, its reasoning and its assertion of fact. There will always be times when an editor has to rely on his own judgment in making decisions about what to publish and weighing the implications.", + " Editors know these can be profoundly important decisions and they should listen with care to arguments from all sides, including government. Experience has taught scepticism.\n\nMarcus Brauchli Photograph: Marc Bryan-Brown/WireImage\n\nOfficial secrecy doesn't just cloak the national-security state; it hides everything from bureaucratic bungling and politicians' peccadillos to catastrophically bad policy. Officials can be just as aggressive in discouraging journalists from ferreting out mismanagement and waste as they often are in trying to block sensitive national security stories. That shouldn't keep editors from thoughtfully considering officials' arguments and at times being persuaded to hold something back.", + " But there is inherent, inevitable and \u2013 in the US, anyway \u2013 by-design tension between government and a free press that reflects the institutions' different functions. A responsible editor's bias must be towards publication and an informed public debate. Without sight of the facts, how can a democracy chart its course?\n\nMarcus Brauchli, vice-president, Washington Post Company\n\nSuddeustche Photograph: Suddeustche\n\nIt is journalism's most noble duty to write about and to describe what exists in our world. Our second duty is to add context to and to comment and to evaluate that which exists in our world. If it is a journalist's duty,", + " however, to describe what exists, then this inherently implies the duty to write about those things and events about which certain humans and institutions do not want us to write about. This tends to be case whenever journalists write about the activities of secret services and it was the case during these last weeks when The Guardian, the New York Times or S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung have written about the British secret services, most especially about GCHQ.\n\nWolfgang Krach. Photograph: Sueddeutsche Zeitung\n\nNo secret service likes it when its methods are being discussed openly, which is understandable as long as a secret service focuses on its core duties,", + " such as the surveillance of terror suspects. Once a secret service starts behaving like an octopus, though, with its tentacles reaching all across everyone's life and putting whole societies under collective suspicion with everyone falling victim to total surveillance, then the societal contract has been broken. There is no justification for such violation. Yet it is fully justifies that journalists reveal such unlawful state action. This is what the Guardian has done. Nothing else.\n\nTo claim that the Guardian had shown \"deadly irresponsibility\" or that it was \"helping the enemies\" of the UK has no foundation and is appalling. To publish such claims means to slander those who consistently and carefully fulfill their journalistic duty to society.\n\nWolfgang Krach,", + " deputy editor in chief, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany\n\nLa Repubblica Photograph: La Repubblica\n\nThe accusations of \"irresponsibility\" that The Daily Mail addressed to the Guardian sound familiar to my ears. La Repubblica repeatedly received this kind of allegations too, after the numerous investigative reportings that we published to reveal Silvio Berlusconi's network of corruption, abuse of power and manipulations during the many years in which he was at the head of the Italian government. We have been accused too of publishing documents, official wiretappings and revelations that \u2013 according to Silvio Berlusconi and his supporters \u2013 should have been kept secret,", + " confidential, hidden. But the role of a free press in a democratic country is to be the guardians \u2013 not the spokesmen \u2013 of power. Media is part of the check and balances system of an healthy democracy and they would betray their duty if they only reported what the power considers legitimate to reveal to the public opinion.\n\nEzio Mauro Photograph: Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images\n\nA responsible press knows the difference between to always publish everything, and to choose, select and verify the news before publishing them. This is what we did at La Repubblica and what the Guardian does. From the Washington Post with the Watergate case to the New York Times with the Pentagon Papers,", + " the history of journalism is full of revelations that, according to the people in power, should have been kept secret, but later it has become clear that to publish them was a service to democracy, not a \"lethally irresponsible\" act. After all our newspaper, as the media of many other countries, reported the Guardian's revelations. The Guardian is certainly not alone in this battle for the freedom of the press. A newspaper answers to public opinion, not to the government.\n\nEzio Mauro, editor-in-chief, La Repubblica, Italy\n\nThe Washington Post. Photograph: The Washington Post\n\nIntelligence agencies in the United States and elsewhere have acquired enormous capacity to monitor the communications of their countries'", + " citizens, residents, and those who live elsewhere. While the purpose is counterterrorism and other foreign intelligence, surveillance of such massive scale has sharply eroded the privacy that many citizens feel they are entitled to enjoy in a democracy that respects individual liberties. Citizens in a democracy are given the right to decide for themselves how to strike the proper balance between privacy and national security. They cannot do so, however, unless they know what their government is doing. A highly intrusive surveillance apparatus has been built without public knowledge and public debate.\n\nMartin Baron Photograph: Martin Baron\n\nPresident Obama has said the current debate over the tradeoff between security and civil liberties is \"healthy for our democracy\". There would have been no public debate had there been no disclosure.", + " Media organisations like ours consult closely with intelligence agencies in an effort to safeguard sources, methods, and lives, even as we seek to fulfill a central journalistic mission: bringing transparency to a government that wields enormous power.\n\nMartin Baron, executive editor, the Washington Post, US\n\nAftenposten Photograph: Aftenposten\n\nIn its reporting on the NSA stories, the Guardian has played a vital role in the global debate on how society in practice weighs freedom of speech and thought versus our common need for security.\n\nHilde Haugsgjerd. Photograph: Aftenposten\n\nTruths are at times inconvenient, but inconvenient truths are at times of the highest importance.", + " This is such a case, and we strongly support The Guardians decision to publish these stories.\n\nHilde Haugsgjerd, editor-in-chief, Aftenposten, Norway\n\nNew York Times masthead Photograph: New York Times\n\nBack in 2006, Dean Baquet (who was then the editor of the Los Angeles Times and is now managing editor of The New York Times) and I (who was then executive editor of the New York Times) published a joint statement in our two newspapers addressing what was by then already a very old controversy: when is it acceptable for news organizations to publish secrets? We explained that these are excruciating choices made with great care,", + " that as particular beneficiaries of democratic freedoms we take dangers to national security very seriously indeed, that responsible editors often (though for obvious reasons without fanfare) withhold information when we are convinced it could put lives at risk. The text is here. In that piece, we quoted Robert G. Kaiser of The Washington Post, as follows: \"You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?\"\n\nBill Keller. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images\n\nAnd that's the question I would pose to citizens of free societies,", + " and in particular to editors who join governments in denouncing the careful publication of secrets: which of the recent stories would you prefer not to know? Would you prefer not to be told how questionable intelligence led the United States and its allies into a misbegotten war in Iraq? Would you prefer to be ignorant of the existence of secret prisons, and the practice of torture? Would you really rather not know the extent of eavesdropping by governments or private contractors, and the safeguards or lack of safeguards against abuses of these powers? Democracy rests on the informed consent of the governed. Editors' highest responsibility is to assure that it is as informed as possible.\n\nBill Keller,", + " former executive editor, the New York Times\n\nDagens Nyheter Photograph: Dagens Nyheter\n\nPeter Wolodarski Photograph: Dagens Nyheter\n\nThe attacks against the Guardian by both the government and representatives of the British press are unacceptable. What the Guardian is doing is both brave and important for our democracies. We fully support the paper.\n\nPeter Wolodarski, editor-in-chief, Dagens Nyheter, Sweden\n\nLa Stampa Photograph: La Stampa\n\nThe freedom of the press is so precious that it cannot be restricted or compromised by the accusation of complicity with 'the enemies'. This does not,", + " of course, mean that newspapers can say whatever they want without any kind of control or any kind of responsibility. But from what I understand, the Guardian has carefully scrutinised the documents they received. This is important. In Italy we were very impressed with the time the Guardian took to publish these documents. It meant that you checked and scrutinised them. You cannot be accused of acting simply as a kind of post box. You received a lot of material and then you decided what was fit to print and what wasn't. In short, a judgement was made, and this cannot be underestimated.\n\nMario Calabresi Photograph: La Stampa\n\nI believe that this is the role of journalism in our society-", + " to decide what is important- what is valid- for the public interest. Now, I can disagree perhaps with some documents you have published or some opinions that you have expressed but I cannot disagree with your freedom to do journalism. And journalism means taking on the responsibility of deciding what is important for the public interest. This is what newspaper editors have to decide. This role cannot be given to the government or the secret services.\n\nMario Calabresi, editor, La Stampa, Italy\n\nNeue Z\u00fcrcher Zeitung Photograph: Neue Z\u00fcrcher Zeitung\n\nThe position of Neue Z\u00fcrcher Zeitung on publishing sensitive material is always based on journalistic,", + " ethical and legal considerations. We do not accept intervention by third parties \u2013 neither private nor by the government. We consider public interest higher than state interest as a principle, however, and respect our responsibility to safeguard professionalism in investigation, analysis and judgment \u2013 based on our core values as a quality brand.\n\nMarkus Spillmann. Photograph: Neue Zurcher Zeitung\n\nIt is clear that MI5 has by logic another agenda than the Guardian. In a functioning democracy, however, both sides are entitled to do their jobs within the framework of legality and their professional duties.\n\nMarkus Spillmann, editor-in-chief, Neue Z\u00fcrcher Zeitung,", + " Switzerland\n\nTagesspiegel Photograph: Tagesspiegel\n\nStephan-Andreas Casdorff Photograph: Tagesspiegel\n\nAs journalists, we are responsible towards society, not towards state institutions. This differentiation is essential for the work of an independent press. A diverse media landscape and freedom of speech are constitutive elements of democracy.\n\nEdward Snowden's revelations serve to educate society about transgressions by the government and potential abuse of power. To withhold such information would be a betrayal of a free press and would destroy its credibility.\n\nLorenz Maroldt Photograph: Tagesspiegel\n\nThe protection of privacy is an element of human dignity and has been defined as such in the universal declaration of human rights in 1948.", + " Since only a few decades, the policies of human rights are beginning to bear fruit. To a good extent, this positive development has been made possible also through our work, the work of a free press.\n\nStephan-Andreas Casdorff and Lorenz Maroldt, editors- in-chief, Tagesspiegel, Germany\n\nGazeta Wyborcza Photograph: Gazeta Wyborcza\n\nIt is with abhorrence that we have read today's editorial in the Daily Mail attacking the Guardian's coverage of Edward Snowden's revelations and accusing its competitor of \"aiding Britain's enemies\". It effectively amounts to the accusation of treason.\n\nPiotr Stasinski Photograph:", + " Gazeta Wyborcza\n\nWe fully support the Guardian's relentless disclosures of secret services' abuses of power and widespread spying on citizens, domestically as well as abroad. For many months now, the Guardian has been subject to unprecedented pressure by the British government, in order to discourage its reporters and editors from pursuing such stories. We are convinced that, in this case, the national security argument is largely overused; since the revealed massive surveillance of people cannot be justified by the war on terror.\n\nPiotr Stasinski, deputy editor-in-chief, Gazeta Wyborcza\n\nDer Spiegel masthead. Photograph: Der Spiegel\n\nIn October 1962 German authorities arrested journalists from the newsmagazine Der Spiegel,", + " including its founder and publisher Rudolf Augstein. After having published a cover story on the sorry state of the German armed forces - \"Partially ready to defend\" - they were accused of treason. Spiegel offices were closed. Augstein remained in custody for 103 days.\n\nGeorg Mascolo Photograph: Der Spiegel\n\nThe so called \"Spiegel Affair\" became a cornerstone in recent German history. It changed the country. The public - and the courts - defended the principle of freedom of information and its importance for a democratic society.\n\nAnd as of today fortunately German authorities have learned their lesson. Nobody would try to force German journalists to destroy computers in the basement.", + " I follow the events in Great Britain with great concern. I was engaged in dealing with intelligence issues, secret documents for more than 20 years. I know how difficult it can be to make decisions about the publication of relevant information - and sometimes, in a very few cases, to take the decision to withhold information from publication. To uncover the (dirty) secrets of governments is an essential part of good journalism. Do journalists have to publish all and every secret? No. Journalists and editors need to weigh arguments. Journalists and editors have responsibility of their own. I am confident that journalists take this responsibility seriously.\n\nShould we tell the names of sources,", + " if their life might be endangered by being made public? No. Should we warn suspects, if we know, that authorities are after them? No. Should we report about the threat for our freedom being caused by he worldwide surveillance by intelligence services, the GCHQ or the NSA? We absolutely must.\n\nGeorg Mascolo, former editor-in-chief, Der Spiegel, Germany\n\nPolitiken Photograph: Politiken\n\nBo Lidegaard Photograph: Politiken\n\nIn an era of big data and big surveillance, we need a public and global debate on the borderlines between national security concern and democratic transparency. By publishing stories about the Snowden revelations,", + " the Guardian has made a significant contribution to this important debate. Citizens all over the world must ask themselves if democracies risk being harmed more than defended by a surveillance that is not only secret to the broader public but also seems to be out of democratic control. It is essential that the press engage in this debate and provides documentation to inform it.\n\nBo Lidegaard, executive editor-in-chief, Politiken, Denmark\n\nKnight Center for Digital Media Photograph: Knight Center for Digital Media\n\nGovernments lie and keep secrets for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it is to protect the public. Sometimes it is to protect the politicians and the officials who do their bidding,", + " even when what's being covered up is morally bankrupt or outright criminal. It happens again and again and again. Yes, governments need to keep some secrets. But secrecy takes hold as a value in itself, with corrosive effects. In western democracies, transparency is essential to secure the consent of the governed.\n\nDan Gillmor Photograph: Dan Gillmor\n\nThe Daily Mail apparently has absolute faith in the integrity and competence of its government on national security matters, despite the ample lessons of history. The Mail has a right to be the government's toady. We'll look elsewhere for actual journalism, which we still need.\n\nDan Gillmor, founding director,", + " Knight Centre for Digital Media Entrepreneurship\n\nThe Hindu. Photograph: The Hindu\n\nEdward Snowden's release of an unprecedented mass of classified material on the NSA's and GCHQ's mass surveillance programmes and technologies, and their publication by the Guardian, have triggered a lively and important debate round the world, including in India \u2013 a country that is directly affected by this surveillance. The debate is essentially about the limits of surveillance carried out amid whole populations, domestic and external, by intelligence agencies in the name of the global war against terrorism. It raises urgent questions about accountability, and the absence of adequate lawful oversight over the mass surveillance programmes.\n\nN. Ram Photograph:", + " N. Ram\n\nAs a former editor with some experience in investigating and exposing corruption and misconduct that the Indian state was determined to keep secret in the name of national security, I have the greatest admiration for the way the Guardian has handled the Snowden leaks. The moral courage, professional diligence, social responsibility, and editorial excellence that has gone into making this challenging mass of material, including technical information, accessible to general readers are in the finest traditions of public-spirited and impactful investigative journalism.\n\nI am not surprised by the attacks, considering the level of importance, the magnitude, and the ongoing nature of the leaks. But for journalists to suggest that editors of newspapers,", + " not being experts on security matters, are unfit to make decisions on publishing confidential material and must leave the whole field of surveillance and security to the state to handle as it thinks fit, under an impenetrable veil of secrecy, sounds to me like the worst kind of intellectual philistinism.\n\nN. Ram, former editor-in-chief, the Hindu\n\nBuzzfeed Photograph: Buzzfeed\n\nThe best way for government officials to avoid answering in public to embarrassing or illegal conduct is not to engage in it. Indeed, the free press has been the most reliable check on government officials lying to their constituents and violating their rights in the modern political era,", + " at least since the Pentagon Papers revealed the deep deceit in American conduct in the war in Vietnam.\n\nBen Smith. Photograph: BuzzFeed\n\nThe free and responsible American and English press also have an appropriate tradition of taking seriously their governments' concerns over physical safety and national security, which in some cases have themselves turned out to be overstated and deceptive.\n\nEditors, government officials and citizens share an interest in ensuring that this important democratic tradition continues into a new media era shaped on one side by new access to undigested information and on the other by encroaching government controls. Readers and sources should expect that when a reporter learns of government misconduct, the default should be to inform the public,", + " not to protect the government.\n\nBen Smith, editor-in-chief, Buzzfeed\n\nORF TV Photograph: ORF TV\n\nEverybody is entitled to his or her own opinions, even if they are utterly absurd. A journalist calling the well documented and carefully researched exposure of serious governmental wrong-doing a \"lethal irresponsibility\", of course, is such an absurdity: a professional forgetting the very purpose of his profession.\n\nArmin Wolf Photograph: Armin Wolf\n\nThe Guardian did what newspapers were invented to do: to make well-reasoned editorial judgements \u2013 in this case to reveal an abuse of power by American and British intelligence agencies on a scale which most people would have regarded unthinkable.\n\nIn my 28 years as a journalist,", + " I cannot think of a single topic that would have been more justified being debated publicly in a democratic society than Edward Snowden's, Glenn Greenwald's and the Guardian's revelations of these last few months. The former editor of the New York Times once said, it's not their primary task to deliver news but to provide judgement. The Guardian provided both and did it brilliantly.\n\nArmin Wolf, deputy editor-in-chief, ORF-TV, Austria\n\nDer Standard Photograph: Der Standard\n\nIt is the task of media in a functioning democracy to safeguard press freedom. Media play an important role in the protection of freedom of opinion and expression, the promotion of a free flow of news and information,", + " and the improvement of the practices of journalism.\n\nAlexandra F\u00f6derl-Schmid Photograph: Matthias Cremer/Der Standard\n\nWith the publication of the documents made available by Edward Snowden, the Guardian helps to inform the world about the surveillance by intelligence services such as the GCHQ or the NSA. We fully support the Guardian's efforts and are concerned about the threats the media organization is facing. We, as journalists, do not accept intervention by third parties. We have to stick to our professional ethics. The Snowden story is a milestone in professional journalism.\n\nAlexandra F\u00f6derl-Schmid, editor in chief, Der Standard\n\nFairfax Media Photograph:", + " theguardian.com\n\nIn a world awash with information, where facts are constantly and easily hijacked and distorted by opinion, scrutiny of governments and their taxpayer-funded instruments becomes more important than ever. To pass off the Guardian's reporting of the NSA as helping \"Britain's enemies\" is, at first glance, comical and would usually be consigned to the closest dustbin. But at a deeper level it hints at a profound and alarming complacency about the roles of media and government. Hell, let's not ask questions at all. Let's not scrutinise those with the power and ability to carry out widespread surveillance on their own citizens.", + " Let's keep the public in the dark, rather than serving their right to know. And when the state acts unlawfully, let us look the other way. Then we will truly have the society our enemies wish upon us.\n\nGarry Linnell, director, Fairfax Media\n\nSydney Morning Herald Photograph: theguardian.com\n\nIt beggars belief that a major news publisher should so willingly condemn the underlying principles of freedom of speech \u2013 and the need to hold those in power accountable through the publication of material that is in the public interest. The Heralds are rivals of the Guardian, but regardless of these competitive realities, we share a common trait in vigorously upholding the need for fair,", + " balanced and fearless independent reporting. Our own newspaper archives are littered with recent examples of how powerful politicians, agencies and individuals have acted against the public interest \u2026 almost always claiming at the time they were doing the right thing. No doubt, the test to determine what is in the public interest is a burdensome and serious responsibility for editors \u2013 and often has huge ramifications. But the debate should always be viewed with a bias towards exposing the truth, and giving our audience and communities as much information as possible.\n\nDarren Goodsir, editor-in-chief, Sydney Morning Herald and Sun-Herald\n\nThe Age Photograph: theguardian.com\n\nThe Age,", + " always an advocate of the public's right to know, condemns the attacks on the Guardian on the pretence that it has aided enemies of the state by publishing Edward Snowden's revelations. We have also revealed accounts by Snowden of interceptions of international calls and emails from Australia to Europe and Asia. Such revelations are demonstrably in the public interest. Casting a light into the dark corners of power causes discomfort among governments, bureaucracies and agencies with something to hide. But the knowledge of what our governments do to the public is essential for a democracy. The media must strive to publish responsibly, but never neglect its responsibility to publish.\n\nAndrew Holden, editor-in-chief,", + " the Age\n\nThe Conversation Photograph: theguardian.com\n\nThe Guardian's reporting of the Edward Snowden/NSA security files serves the public interest in that we are now better informed on the scale of government intelligence gathering. At the very least we now all know what we didn't know (though suspected), and what the US government never wanted us to know. Secrecy dressed up as national security has always been the card played by the powerful to keep the rest of us in the dark. Citizens have a right to know what their government is up to. And what the Guardian did is the proper role of the Fourth Estate. Those who attack that role have an altogether different agenda,", + " and that too should be the subject of legitimate public questioning and exposure.\n\nAndrew Jaspan, editor, the Conversation\n\nCrikey Photograph: theguardian.com\n\nYou would call the NSA revelations brave and brilliant journalism if it wasn't so blatantly obvious. Just like you would call the response by the Daily Mail simply sour grapes if it wasn't the antitheses of what journalism is about. Every publication genuinely committed to the principles of a free press \u2013 transparency, accountability, giving the public information it absolutely has a right to know \u2013 would have published this material. We can only be jealous. The media must always weigh freedom of information with the consequences of publication.", + " There seems little doubt the appropriate consideration was applied in this case. The result is clear: a public that is almost certainly no less safe but almost certainly much more informed about an issue that is likely to be a defining one of our generation.\n\nJason Whittaker, editor, Crikey\n\nHarold Evans\n\nI'd taken the accusations against the Guardian by other newspapers as part of the ritual dog-eat-dog fun of Fleet Street, but now the prime minister has taken up the charge, I'd like to learn what independent reporting was attempted in this difficult area. More, one would hope, than attempted by the critics of the Guardian during the years it was isolated in challenging the cover up of the hacking crimes.", + " Protecting the lives of its citizens is a first, sacred duty of government. No editor in his right mind wants to give aid and comfort to murderous enemies, but every editor is duty-bound to scrutinise the use of power, responsibly but fearlessly, however personally unappealing a leaker may be.\n\nSir Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian\n\nConflict between the conceptions of duty is inevitable, indeed healthy. Reporting often exposes an ill that government has not recognised or been willing to acknowledge. The state is not ominiscient. Nor is it unknown for government to conceal its own mistakes.", + " I have not been impressed by the blather about \"freedom of the press\" surrounding the narcissistic Edward Snowden, but one point he made on 17 October bears examination: he had to do what he did, he argues, because the NSA hierarchy required him to \"report wrong doing to those most responsible for it.\" True or false?\n\n\n\n\"Freedom of the press\" loses its moral force when it is played in aid of reckless conduct: the Washington Times telling Osama bin Laden that the US was able to monitor his cell phone was indefensible. But there is danger, too, when the respect due to \"national security\" is diluted by accusations that prove unsubstantiated.\n\nFrom the Pentagon Papers on,", + " there is a whole history of authority crying wolf. I don't know if this is another. What I do know is that the current attacks on The Guardian echo those levelled at the Sunday Times in a number of investigations. We took national security as seriously as anyone but over 14 years the barriers erected against legitimate inquiry on grounds of national security - reporting, not document dumps - proved spurious or self-serving.\n\nKim Philby betrayed his country and sent countless numbers to their deaths but when we exposed the full measure of his treacheries the outrage in government and sections of the press was directed not at Philby and those who protected him for years but at our reporters.", + " The diaries of the scholarly cabinet minister Richard Crossman have been recognised as shedding a valuable light on the way we are governed, but government made a full scale attempt to censor their publication.\n\nSame yet again in the long ordeal of Northern Ireland. Cheerleading was exalted and real reporting excoriated. The cautionary maxim of the Daily Beast writer Clive Irving's \"stasis principle\" remains valid. \"Every state's appetite for surveillance increases in exact proportion to its technical capacity to do so.\"\n\nBut at a deeper level it hints at a profound and alarming complacency about the roles of media and government. Hell, let's not ask questions at all.", + " Let's not scrutinise those with the power and ability to carry out widespread surveillance on their own citizens. Let's keep the public in the dark, rather than serving their right to know. And when the state acts unlawfully, let us look the other way. Then we will truly have the society our enemies wish upon us.\n\nHarold Evans is writing in a personal capacity. A former editor of the Sunday Times and the Times, Evans was voted the greatest newspaper editor of all time by readers of the Press Gazette and the British Journalism Review in 2002.\n" + ], + "length": 13451, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 36, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Paris prosecutor Francois Molins gave new details on the police raid on an alleged ISIS terror cell just north of Paris in a press conference Wednesday. Some highlights : Molins said about 5,000 rounds were fired by police during an hourlong gunfight between heavily armed police and those inside the Saint-Denis hideout, the AP reports. Investigators found \"a total war arsenal\" of Kalashnikovs, ammo, and explosives, per the Guardian. Law enforcement was bombarded with gunfire as they tried to fight their way in through a reinforced door, the AP notes. There's confusion whether alleged mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud was among those killed in the raid. Molins said during the press conference that two suspects were dead and eight arrested, though he said he can't yet ID them, per the Guardian. He added that neither Abaaoud nor Salah Abdeslam were among those arrested. But two anonymous senior EU intelligence officials tell the Washington Post that Abaaoud was indeed killed during the siege and that forensic experts had gathered evidence at the scene after the chaos had ended. The suspected terror cell was caught just in time, per authorities. \"A new team of terrorists was neutralized and all indications are that given their arms, their organizational structure, and their determination, the commando could have struck,\" Molins said, per AFP.\n", + "docs": [ + "PARIS (AP) \u2014 The latest on the deadly attacks in Paris. (All times local):\n\nA forensic expert walks from the scene in Saint-Denis, near Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm... (Associated Press)\n\nParis is seen as French Police officers stand on guard near the church of Sacre Coeur, on top of the Montmartre hill, in Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew... (Associated Press)\n\nA French soldier patrols at the Sacre Coeur basilica in Paris,", + " France, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm... (Associated Press)\n\nHooded police officers detain a man in Saint-Denis, near Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm a... (Associated Press)\n\nHooded police officers detain a man in Saint-Denis, near Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm a... (Associated Press)\n\nSoldiers operate in Saint-Denis,", + " a northern suburb of Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. Police say two suspects in last week's Paris attacks, a man and a woman, have been killed in a police operation north... (Associated Press)\n\nThis undated file photo provided by French Police shows 26-year old Salah Abdeslam, who is wanted by police in connection with recent terror attacks in Paris, as police investigations continue Friday,... (Associated Press)\n\nFrench soldiers patrol at the Sacre Coeur basilica in Paris, France, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm... (Associated Press)\n\nFrench soldiers patrol at the Sacre Coeur basilica in Paris,", + " France, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm... (Associated Press)\n\nA man rides his bicycle in front of a makeshift memorial next to the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday... (Associated Press)\n\nAn woman pays her respects at a makeshift memorial next to the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as... (Associated Press)\n\nAn elderly woman lights up a candle a makeshift memorial next to the Bataclan concert hall in Paris,", + " France, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday... (Associated Press)\n\nPolicemen read messages which left at a makeshift memorial next to the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday... (Associated Press)\n\nForensic experts examine the scene in Saint-Denis, near Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm a suburban... (Associated Press)\n\nA sign in a shop window reads Molenbeek with a peace sign,", + " on the main shopping street of Molenbeek, Belgium on Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. After a Wednesday morning raid in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis,... (Associated Press)\n\nTwo people walk past the clothing shop owned by Omar Abaaoud, the father of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, in the town square of Molenbeek, Belgium on Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. After a Wednesday morning raid in... (Associated Press)\n\nA sniper takes position on a church in Saint-Denis, near Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm a suburban... (Associated Press)\n\nFrench President Francois Hollande leaves the Elysee Palace after the weekly cabinet,", + " in Paris.,Wednesday, Nov.18, 2015. Hollande earlier held an emergency meeting at the Elysee Palace to monitor the... (Associated Press)\n\nPolice forces and soldiers patrol in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. Police say two suspects in last week's Paris attacks, a man and a woman, have been killed in a police... (Associated Press)\n\nPolice forces arrest a man in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. Police say two suspects in last week's Paris attacks, a man and a woman,", + " have been killed in a police operation... (Associated Press)\n\nPolice forces arrest a man in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. Police say two suspects in last week's Paris attacks, a man and a woman, have been killed in a police operation... (Associated Press)\n\nSoldiers patrol in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. Police say two suspects in last week's Paris attacks, a man and a woman, have been killed in a police operation north... (Associated Press)\n\nSoldiers and police forces patrol in Saint-Denis,", + " a northern suburb of Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. Police say two suspects in last week's Paris attacks, a man and a woman, have been killed in a police... (Associated Press)\n\nA soldier walks through Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. Police say two suspects in last week's Paris attacks, a man and a woman, have been killed in a police operation... (Associated Press)\n\nFrench President Francois Hollande leaves the Elysee Palace after the weekly cabinet, in Paris,Wednesday, Nov.18, 2015. Hollande earlier held an emergency meeting at the Elysee Palace to monitor the raid... (Associated Press)\n\nHooded police officers detain a man in Saint-Denis,", + " near Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm a... (Associated Press)\n\nPolice forces prepare in St. Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. Authorities in the Paris suburb of St. Denis are telling residents to stay inside during a large police operation... (Associated Press)\n\nToys, photographs, flowers, candles and messages are left at a makeshift memorial next to the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015.", + " A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest... (Associated Press)\n\nPolice forces operate in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015. Police say two suspects in last week's Paris attacks, a man and a woman, have been killed in a police operation... (Associated Press)\n\nFrench police officers storm a church after a raid in Paris suburb Saint-Denis, Wednesday, Nov.18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried... (Associated Press)\n\nForensic experts examine the scene in Saint-Denis, near Paris, Wednesday,", + " Nov. 18, 2015. A woman wearing an explosive suicide vest blew herself up Wednesday as heavily armed police tried to storm a suburban... (Associated Press)\n\n7:25 p.m.\n\nParis Prosecutor Francois Molins says police fired some 5,000 rounds during an hour-long exchange of fire at a hideout where a terrorist cell had holed up north of the capital.\n\nMolins says heavily armed police squads initially were thwarted by a reinforced door to the apartment in Saint-Denis north of Paris where the terror cell had holed up, and faced nearly incessant fire as they worked to enter.\n\n___\n\n7:20 p.m.\n\nParis Prosecutor Francois Molins says a terror cell neutralized in a massive police raid was ready to act.\n\nMolins told reporters the police assault in Saint-Denis north of Paris on Wednesday was connected with the terror attacks Friday in the capital against a concert hall,", + " nightspots and the national soccer stadium.\n\nTwo people were killed in the siege, including a woman who blew herself up, and seven others were arrested.\n\n___\n\n6:55 p.m.\n\nThe head of Sweden's intelligence service SAPO says police are searching for a man who is wanted in connection with a terror probe.\n\nAnders Thornberg said Wednesday that police have launched \"a preliminary investigation regarding preparation for a terrorist offense.\"\n\nHe said the Swedish case was not linked to the Paris attacks.\n\nHe said the suspect had entered Sweden this week, but declined to give any further details about the person.\n\nThe agency said earlier Wednesday it has raised the Scandinavian country's terror alert to the second-highest level after it received \"concrete information.\"\n\n___\n\n6:", + "20 p.m.\n\nMoldovan border police say they have detained two Moldovan citizens trying to illegally enter Romania and travel onto France. Police said they carried a book that \"propagated Islamic ideology.\"\n\nPolice fired three warning shots Wednesday near the southwestern town of Cahul after the men, aged 19 and 26, tried to flee. Police said the men were carrying Islamic objects and a Russian-language version of the book \"the Fortress of the Muslim.\"\n\nPolice did not identify the men but said one had been convicted of murder and had converted to Islam in prison.\n\n___\n\n6:05 p.m.\n\nFrance's health minister says 195 people remain hospitalized after last Friday's terror attacks in Paris.\n\nMinister Marisol Touraine told Parliament on Wednesday that three of them are still in critical condition and 41 are in intensive care.\n\nFrance's justice minister updated the overall number of injured in the Paris attacks to 368 people,", + " up from 352.\n\nIslamic State militants have claimed responsibility for the attacks, which left 129 people dead.\n\n___\n\n5:55 p.m.\n\nAcross Europe, the divide is deepening between those who see the massive migrant flow as a potential security threat that should be shut down and those who note that many refugees are the victims of Islamic extremism.\n\nIn Poland, the town of Szamocin, which had defied an anti-migrant mood across the country to welcome Syrian refugees, has now retracted the invitation. Mayor Eugeniusz Kucner said on his town's website that \"despite our sympathy for Syrian refugees, we cannot exclude that among them there will be terrorists.\"\n\nA new anti-migrant government in Poland,", + " which took office this week, is also deeply unhappy about the previous government's decision to accept 7,000 refugees as part of a European plan. New government officials vow that asylum applications will be scrutinized carefully.\n\n___\n\n5:45 p.m.\n\nItalian Premier Matteo Renzi views Russia's push for a \"grand coalition\" to defeat the Islamic State group as a \"a very right proposal.\"\n\nRenzi said he shares Russian President Vladimir Putin's urging that what's needed to combat IS is a grand coalition of countries, like one that came together in World War II to defeat Hitler.\n\nIn an interview Wednesday on Italy's Sky TG24 TV,", + " Renzi said bringing Russia into such an international coalition \"would be very positive.\"\n\nPutin on Tuesday ordered a Russian missile cruiser in the Mediterranean to start cooperating with the French military on operations in Syria against IS.\n\n___\n\n5:35 p.m.\n\nMembers of the band Eagles of Death Metal say they're home safe after the Paris attacks and \"are horrified and still trying to come to terms with what happened.\"\n\nThe U.S. band was to perform at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris last Friday when the deadly attacks occurred. Eighty-nine people were killed at the hall.\n\nThey say Wednesday their \"thoughts and hearts are first and foremost with our brother Nick Alexander,", + " our record company comrades Thomas Ayad, Marie Mosser, and Manu Perez, and all the friends and fans whose lives were taken in Paris.\"\n\nThe band, which released a new album last month, were on a European tour when the attacks occurred. They said all shows are on hold for now.\n\nThe band also thanked \"the French police, the FBI, the U.S. and French State Departments.\"\n\n___\n\n5:15 p.m.\n\nUEFA says all 40 matches in the Champions League and Europa League next week are scheduled to go ahead.\n\nUEFA confirmed its plans after the terror attacks in Paris and international friendly matches in Belgium and Germany were cancelled due to security alerts.\n\nNo clubs have contacted UEFA about potential changes to matches for next Tuesday through Thursday.", + " Still, UEFA is \"working closely with the home clubs and local authorities to ensure all necessary measures are implemented to guarantee safety.\"\n\nParis Saint-Germain plays next Wednesday at Swedish champion Malmo.\n\nThe Monaco and Anderlecht teams have banned the Brussels club's fans from traveling for a Europa League match on Nov. 26.\n\n___\n\n5 p.m.\n\nFrench lawmakers are paying tribute to police and security forces involved in the raid of a suburban Paris apartment where the suspected mastermind of last week's deadly attacks in Paris was believed to be hiding.\n\nClaude Bartolone, president of France's lower house of the Parliament, on Wednesday praised them for their \"determination,", + " efficiency and speed\" while put to a severe test. Before a standing ovation, Bartolone then expressed France's gratitude and admiration for \"their courage.\"\n\nThe siege ended Wednesday with two deaths and seven arrests but no clear information on the fugitive's fate.\n\n___\n\n4:55 p.m.\n\nItaly's president says terrorism is attacking \"our Europe\" and calls the recent attacks on the continent \"an attempt at global war by unprecedented methods.\"\n\nPresident Sergio Mattarella, Italy's head of state, also called on Europeans to \"be united, determined and together in affirming the principles of our humanism.\" He was speaking Wednesday at a ceremony in Florence,", + " the cradle of Italy's artistic and architectural Renaissance.\n\nMattarella, a constitutional law expert, said security for Europe's citizens must be guaranteed \"without renouncing freedoms gained.\"\n\nHe says \"we cannot eradicate hate by making it enter into our lives and our civilization.\"\n\n___\n\n4:45 p.m.\n\nThe Islamic State group again has claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris, vowing in its online English-language magazine to continue its attacks.\n\nThe magazine, released Wednesday, included the threat: \"The Islamic State will continue to stand firm in the face of their transgressions and retaliate with fire and bloodshed in revenge for the honor of the Prophet (Muhammad)", + " and the multitudes killed and injured in crusader airstrikes.\"\n\nThe magazine also included a claim that the group killed a Chinese and a Norwegian hostage and photographs of the bomb that it said brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula on Oct. 31.\n\nFriday's night of terror in Paris killed 129 people and wounded over 350 others.\n\n___\n\n4:15 p.m.\n\nA man who says he lives in the apartment raided by French SWAT teams says he let some people stay there as a favor and \"didn't know they're terrorists.\"\n\nJawad Bendaoud, who was detained during Wednesday's raid on suspects linked to last week's Paris attacks,", + " spoke to BFMTV as he was being led away by police.\n\nSpeaking outside the building in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, he says \"I learned it was at my place, and the individuals barricaded themselves in my place...I didn't know they're terrorists.\"\n\nHe said someone had \"asked me to put some people up for two, three days, and I provided this service.\"\n\nHe says \"I don't know where they come from... If I would have known, I wouldn't have let them stay.\"\n\nBendaoud's lawyer confirmed the man in the footage was his client, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for killing his best friend in a 2006 fight.\n\n___\n\n4:", + "05 p.m.\n\nFrance's secretary of sport says soccer matches around the country are going ahead this weekend despite the deadly terror attacks in Paris because \"life must go on.\"\n\nThierry Braillard said in an interview Wednesday with the sports daily L'Equipe that suspending games would be \"exactly what these barbarians want.\" He said French league President Frederic Thiriez is \"totally\" in agreement with the decision.\n\nFriday's night of terror in Paris killed 129 people and injured 350 others, leading to the cancellation of sporting events around Paris and other cities last weekend.\n\nThe French first division resumes Friday evening when Lyon travels to Nice.\n\n___\n\n4 p.m.\n\nSweden's security service says it has raised the Scandinavian country's terror alert to the second-highest level.\n\nSAPO said Wednesday it had received \"concrete information\"", + " and has decided to act \"with the framework of our contra-terror work.\"\n\nThe agency said it had raised the alert to level four of five possible graduations. It did not elaborate but a news conference was planned for later Wednesday.\n\n___\n\n3:55 p.m.\n\nBritain says one of the Royal Navy's most advanced warships will support a French aircraft carrier as it deploys to the Gulf to fight the Islamic State group.\n\nDefense Secretary Michael Fallon says the HMS Defender will provide air defense cover for France's Charles de Gaulle carrier, which has left Toulon to help French operations in Syria against IS.\n\nThe Defender, with 230 crew,", + " is on a nine-month deployment to the Middle East. The Royal Navy says can defend a group of ships against attack from the air, either by aircraft or missiles.\n\n___\n\n3:50 p.m.\n\nThere has been a visible increase in security around the Vatican following the Paris attacks and ahead of Pope Francis' big Jubilee Year, which opens Dec. 8.\n\nFrancis' personal security detail was nearly doubled during his Wednesday general audience, and the carabinieri were out in force in St. Peter's Square.\n\nItaly is already planning to close the airspace over Rome during special Jubilee celebrations. Rome's prefect, Franco Gabrielli, said Wednesday authorities were prepared to shoot down drones and ultralight aircraft if they violate the air space ban.\n\nMillions of pilgrims are expected to descend on Rome for various celebrations over the course of the Jubilee year.", + " Already, the government has added 700 extra soldiers for the capital.\n\n___\n\n3:40 p.m.\n\nThe Slovak government is planning to tighten anti-terrorist legislation following the attacks in Paris.\n\nPrime Minister Robert Fico says Wednesday that changes to anti-terror laws should be discussed by his government next week, and should include limiting rights of terror suspects.\n\nFico says: \"It is our duty to preventively have as soon as possible clear and strict anti-terror legislation.\" Fico also says the intelligence services and police force should be given more powers and the country will increase the number of police in special forces as well policemen.\n\n__\n\n3:", + "20 p.m.\n\nOvernight raids by French police across France have resulted in 25 arrests and the seizure of 34 weapons.\n\nThe new tally was announced Wednesday by the Interior Ministry.\n\nThe arrests are the latest in a nationwide police dragnet that has seen nightly raids by security forces under powers granted by the state of emergency declared after last week's attacks in Paris.\n\nIn all, French police have carried out 414 raids and made 60 arrests while seizing 75 weapons since Friday. The captured armory includes 11 military-style firearms, 33 rifles and 31 handguns. In addition to dozens of arrests, 118 more people have been placed under house arrest in another of the new powers permitted under France's state of emergency.\n\nParliament is expected to extend the state of emergency for three months later this week.\n\n___\n\n2:", + "40 p.m.\n\nA Spanish security official says French authorities have sent out a bulletin to police across Europe asking them to watch out for a Citroen Xsara car that could be carrying Salah Abdeslam, the fugitive wanted in the Paris attacks\n\nThe official spoke on condition of anonymity because of department rules preventing the official from being named.\n\nSpain's El Espanol digital publication first reported the bulletin Wednesday, publishing a document with the car's description and naming Abdeslam. It was sent by Spanish authorities to border control police in the northeastern Catalonia region next to France.\n\nThe security official said the bulletin was sent to authorities across Europe,", + " not only to Spain.\n\n\u2014 By Ciaran Giles in Madrid.\n\n___\n\n2:20 p.m.\n\nDanish police have called off a bomb scare at Copenhagen's international airport that prompted an hour-long evacuation of hundreds of passengers.\n\nPolice rushed Wednesday to Terminal 3, the main arrival and departure terminal for the Nordic region's hub, after \"a suspicious bag\" had been spotted.\n\nHowever, it was \"an overheard conversation about a bomb\" that sparked the evacuation, police said on Twitter. Bomb experts, fire trucks, police and ambulances were seen parked outside.\n\nCommuter train and subway lines to the airport also were briefly halted.", + " The airport said Terminal 3 was reopened but check-ins had been moved to Terminal 2 and delays were to be expected.\n\n___\n\n2:15 p.m.\n\nFrench President Francois Hollande says any places where people are \"glorifying terrorism\" will be shut down.\n\nA bill to extend France's state of emergency for three months includes a measure that enables authorities to close \"any association or gathering\" \u2014 which notably includes mosques and community groups\u2014 that would encourage people to carry out terrorist acts.\n\nThe bill is to be debated by both houses of Parliament on Thursday and Friday and expected to be voted on by the end of the week.\n\n___\n\n2:", + "05 p.m.\n\nBritish Prime Minister David Cameron has confirmed that three Britons wounded in the Paris attacks have been released from the hospital and returned to the U.K.\n\nCameron told lawmakers Wednesday that another 15 are being treated for trauma by the Foreign Office and the Red Cross. He did not provide any further details.\n\nOne Briton, 36-year-old Nick Alexander, was earlier confirmed killed in the Bataclan concert hall attack in Paris. In all, 129 people died in the Paris attacks last week that Islamic State militants claimed to have orchestrated.\n\n__\n\n2 p.m.\n\nTurkey's military says a suspected Islamic State militant has been killed while trying to illegally cross into Turkey from Syria.\n\nA brief military statement on Wednesday said the incident occurred a day earlier,", + " in Kilis province, which borders Syria. It said 21 other people were also detained during the incident, nine of them children.\n\nTurkey has reinforced its 900-kilometer (560-mile) border with Syria and has tightened controls in a bid to stem infiltrations by extremists.\n\n___\n\n1:55 p.m.\n\nPresident Francois Hollande says France will not \"cede to fear\" and is urging his compatriots to go back out to cafes and museums and live life to its fullest.\n\nHe says \"what would our country be without its cafes, concerts, sport events, museums?\" Hollande was speaking to mayors from around the country Wednesday,", + " after the country's deadliest violence in decades last week.\n\nThe French leader says \"life must resume in full,\" and is promising extra security to ensure that museums can reopen and \"our tourists can be welcomed.\"\n\nIslamic suicide bombers killed at least 129 people in attacks Friday night on a concert hall, cafes and France's national stadium.\n\n___\n\n1:45 p.m.\n\nJordan's monarch is optimistic the world will come together to fight terror in the wake of the Paris attacks, noting they were only the latest in a series of attacks that represent a global threat.\n\nAbdullah II says the Paris killings are another example of the need to fight \"a global war against terror.\" He says 100,", + "000 Muslims have been killed by IS in Syria and Iraq over the past year, adding the world needs a \"holistic approach\" on dealing with the terrorist scourge.\n\nThe king spoke to reporters Wednesday while on a visit to Austria.\n\n___\n\n1:35 p.m.\n\nAuthorities say the main terminal at Copenhagen's international airport, the Nordic region's main hub, has been evacuated because of \"a suspicious bag.\"\n\nPolice had no more details about Wednesday's evacuation of Terminal 3, the main arrival and departure terminal. Television footage shows bomb experts, fire trucks and police outside the airport building.\n\nThe commuter train and subway lines to and from the airport were also halted.\n\nAs of late October,", + " more than 22.6 million people have so far this year traveled through the Copenhagen airport.\n\n___\n\n1:25 p.m.\n\nFrench President Francois Hollande says France is 'at war' against terrorism by the Islamic State group.\n\nHollande says he wants \"large coalition\" working together against IS militants to destroy a group that threatens the whole world and \"commits massacres\" in the Mideast.\n\nHollande says \"we are at war.\" He was speaking in a televised address Wednesday after a seven-hour police siege on an apartment north of Paris where police suspected the mastermind of the deadly Paris attacks might have been.\n\nHe says the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle just left to help French military operations in Syria against IS.\n\n___\n\n1:", + "05 p.m.\n\nGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel says security agencies made the right decision to cancel the soccer match between Germany and the Netherlands due to attack fears.\n\nThe Tuesday night friendly match in Hannover was called off 90 minutes before the kickoff after German authorities received mounting information about a possible attack on the stadium.\n\nMerkel and several members of her Cabinet had been due to attend the match to demonstrate that Germany wouldn't bow to terror following the deadly attacks in Paris.\n\nMerkel said Wednesday \"I was just as sad as millions of fans that this cancellation had to happen, but the security agencies took a responsible decision.\"\n\nShe said \"these are difficult decisions,", + " possibly the most difficult decisions between freedom and security. But yesterday it was taken in favor of security, and that's right.\"\n\n___\n\n12:50 p.m.\n\nA father's heartwarming explanation to his son about the Paris terror attacks is electrifying social media, with more than 27 million views on Facebook alone.\n\nThe video shows an interview conducted by a reporter for France's Le Petit Journal in a Paris square where people are laying flowers and lighting candles to honor the 129 victims killed in the attacks.\n\nThe child tells the reporter the attacks were conducted by \"bad guys\" who were \"not very nice.\" He then expresses fear that his family will be forced to move,", + " although his father reassures him they won't because there are \"bad guys everywhere.\"\n\nWith his arm around his son, the father refers to the crowd at the square, and says, \"It's OK. They might have guns, but we have flowers.\"\n\n___\n\n12:45 p.m.\n\nThe French government says all 129 people killed in attacks Friday on a Paris stadium, a concert hall and cafes have been identified.\n\nA statement released after Wednesday's Cabinet meeting says about 100 families have come to see the bodies.\n\nAt least 350 people were also wounded in the Paris attacks, with scores of people still critically injured. The death toll may still rise if some of the wounded do not recover.\n\n___\n\n12:", + "30 p.m.\n\nParis prosecutor Francois Molins says authorities are working to determine the fate of the suspected mastermind of last week's Paris attacks after a seven-hour police raid on an apartment where he was believed to be hiding.\n\nFrancois Molins says the police began the raid Wednesday after gathering information that suspect Abdelhamid Abaaoud could be in a safe house apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.\n\nMolins said the information was collected from tapped telephone conversations, surveillance and witness accounts.\n\nHe told reporters in Saint-Denis after the operation was over that authorities are still working to determine who was inside. Seven people were arrested and two suspects were killed.\n\n___\n\n12:", + "05 p.m.\n\nA White House official says President Barack Obama has been briefed on the law enforcement operation in a suburb of Paris. This is a French law enforcement operation, but the president asked to be updated, the official said.\n\nObama is in Manila for an economic summit. The official was not authorized to discuss the briefing further.\n\nA French government spokesman says a seven-hour police operation north of Paris targeting the mastermind of the deadly Paris attacks and his accomplices, has ended. He says two people were killed in the operation and seven arrested.\n\n\u2014 Kathleen Hennessey in Manila.\n\n___\n\nnoon\n\nTurkey's state-run news agency says authorities have detained eight people at Istanbul's main airport who they suspect could be Islamic State militants planning to make their way to Germany,", + " posing as refugees.\n\nThe Anadolu Agency said Wednesday the eight arrived in Istanbul from Casablanca, Morocco, and were interviewed by criminal profiling teams at Ataturk Airport. Citing police sources, the agency said one of the suspects had a hand-drawn picture of a planned route from Turkey to Germany, via Greece, Serbia and Hungary.\n\nAnadolu said the eight claimed to be tourists visiting Istanbul but a hotel refuted claims they had reservations there.\n\n___\n\n11:50 a.m.\n\nFrench government spokesman Stephane Le Foll says a seven-hour police operation north of Paris targeting the mastermind of the Paris attacks and his accomplices, has ended.\n\nLe Foll spoke to reporters in the presidential palace after a Cabinet meeting,", + " saying \"the operation is over.\"\n\nPolice say two people were killed in the operation Wednesday including a female suicide bomber. Several police were injured and seven people were arrested.\n\nThe fate of the suspected mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, is unclear.\n\n___\n\n11:40 a.m.\n\nPolice say a police dog was killed in the siege of an apartment where some of the Paris attackers are thought to be holed up.\n\nThe National Police said in a tweet that a 7-year-old Belgian Malinois named Diesel, a SWAT team assault dog, was \"killed by terrorists\" during the raid in Saint-Denis, north of Paris.\n\nPolice say two suspects have died in the ongoing assault,", + " one of them a female suicide bomber. Seven people have been arrested in the apartment building. Several police officers were slightly injured.\n\nThe raid is targeting perpetrators of Friday's deadly gun-and-bomb attacks in Paris that killed 129 people.\n\n___\n\n11:30 a.m.\n\nPolice have escorted out children and others from the scene of a big police standoff with suspects in last week's Paris attacks.\n\nA woman in a purple headscarf wept while carrying a child. A man next to her carried another child wearing pink, and an older boy walked near them.\n\nIt is unclear whether they had been in the building where two people have been killed,", + " several police slightly injured and seven people arrested since the standoff began seven hours ago.\n\n___\n\n11:20 a.m.\n\nArmed security officers have fanned out around the historic Paris suburb of Saint-Denis during an hours-long standoff with police.\n\nJournalists, cameramen, police and curious residents waited nervously in the central Place Victor Hugo, as sirens echoed around the neighborhood.\n\nIt contrasted with the serenity of the Saint-Denis Basilica \u2014 one of the world's most majestic gothic churches \u2014 that towers over the area. Its famed stone tower was lit up beautifully in the unusually sunny November morning.\n\n___\n\n11:15 a.m.\n\nOfficials say seven people have been arrested in a raid on an apartment building where suspects in last week's Paris attacks were holed up.\n\nA senior police official and the Paris prosecutor's office say that the seven were arrested Wednesday in the building in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.\n\nThey did not identify those detained.\n\nAuthorities believe there may still be someone still hiding in an apartment.\n\nA loud bang rang out in the streets adjacent to the building around the time of the latest arrests.\n\n___\n\n11 a.m.\n\nThe governor of Lower Saxony is reassuring Germans after the cancellation of a soccer game over terrorism concerns that \"the security situation is stable\"", + " in the northern state.\n\nStephan Weil said Wednesday he knew people were worried, but asked \"all to trust in the security authorities.\"\n\nState Interior Minister Boris Pistorius said Tuesday night's Germany vs Netherlands match in Hannover was nixed at short notice after \"vague\" information that solidified late in the day.\n\nHe wouldn't give details, saying the \"more concrete information we give the more likely it is to reveal the source.\"\n\nHe says it's possible no arrests were made and no explosives were found because the plot was called off after the game was canceled.\n\nPistorius says \"we won't know what would have happened if we didn't cancel it.\"\n\n___\n\n10:", + "40 a.m.\n\nA bill to extend France's state of emergency for three months is being presented to a Cabinet meeting.\n\nFrench president Francois Hollande declared a state of emergency for 12 days following Friday night's attacks. Parliament must approve extending it.\n\nThe bill is to be debated in the Cabinet on Wednesday, the lower house on Thursday and at the Senate on Friday.\n\nThe state of emergency extends some police powers of search and arrest and limits public gatherings, among other changes.\n\n___\n\n10:25 a.m.\n\nAustria's interior ministry says a Belgian suspect sought in the Paris attacks was on an EU-wide police list when he was stopped in Austria in September,", + " and his presence in the country was reported back to Belgian authorities.\n\nMinistry official Karl-Heinz Gruendboeck says Belgium had registered Salah Abdeslam in the Schengen Information System on suspicion of unidentified criminal activity.\n\nHe said Wednesday Austrian police reported his presence to Belgian police.\n\nOfficials earlier said Abdeslam entered Austria from Germany Sept. 9 with two unidentified companions and they were stopped for a routine traffic check. They said they were planning a vacation in Vienna,\n\nAbdeslam, 26, is the suspected driver of a group of gunmen in the Paris attacks. His brother, Brahim, was among the suicide bombers and killed one civilian after blowing himself up outside a restaurant.\n\n___\n\n10:", + "10 a.m.\n\nFrench President Francois Hollande is holding an emergency meeting at the Elysee Palace to monitor the raid on a suburban Paris apartment.\n\nPrime Minister Manuel Valls, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Justice Minister Christiane Taubira are meeting with the president.\n\nA Cabinet meeting is to be held on Wednesday morning as previously scheduled, according to the French presidency.\n\n___\n\n9:30 a.m.\n\nA police official says that one person is still holed up in an apartment north of Paris after an hours-long standoff with police in which two have been killed and five arrested.\n\nThe official,", + " not authorized to be publicly named according to police rules, said the standoff is still going on after some five hours.\n\nThe person's identity has not been released. Authorities say the operation is targeting the mastermind of last week's Paris attacks that killed at least 129 people.\n\n\u2014 By Philippe Sotto\n\n___\n\n9:20 a.m.\n\nDenmark's National Police say it has raised its internal alert level, adding the Scandinavian country's intelligence agency's overall terror threat assessment has not been changed and remains \"serious.\"\n\nPolice says the reason for stepping up the alertness to \"significant elevated preparedness\" is \"a result of the current uncertain situation in several European countries.\"\n\nIn Wednesday's statement,", + " the police said the change is only internal, and citizens will not notice any changes.\n\nIn February, a lone gunman attacked a free speech event and a synagogue that left two people dead and wounded five in Copenhagen. The shooter Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein was killed in a shootout with a SWAT team.\n\n___\n\n9 a.m.\n\nThe Paris prosecutor's office says that SWAT teams have arrested three people in an apartment where police are in a standoff with suspects in last week's Paris attacks.\n\nIn a statement, the prosecutor's office says that the three haven't been identified yet.\n\nAnother man and woman were detained near the apartment, the statement says.", + " It says the standoff is ongoing.\n\nTwo people have been killed in the standoff, including a woman suicide bomber who blew herself up, the prosecutor said.\n\n___\n\n8:40 a.m.\n\nA French police official says a woman wearing an explosive suicide vest has blown herself up in a standoff between police and suspects in last week's Paris attacks.\n\nThe official said she is among two people killed in the ongoing standoff in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. The official, not authorized to be publicly named because of police rules, said four police officers have been injured. No hostages are being held.\n\nPolice have said the operation Wednesday is targeting the suspected orchestrator of last week's attacks,", + " holed up in an apartment in Saint-Denis with other armed people.\n\n\u2014By Jamey Keaten\n\n___\n\n8:20 a.m.\n\nPolice say two suspects in last week's Paris attacks \u2014 a man and a woman \u2014 have been killed in a police operation north of the capital.\n\nAn official with the Paris police department who was not authorized to be publicly named said two people have been detained, and two police officers injured in the standoff Wednesday in Saint-Denis.\n\nPolice have said the operation is targeting the suspected mastermind of last week's attacks, believed to be holed up in an apartment in Saint-Denis with several other heavily armed suspects.\n\n\u2014 By Jamey Keaten\n\n___\n\n7:", + "55 a.m.\n\nA senior French police official says a large police operation north of Paris is targeting the suspected mastermind of last week's attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud.\n\nThe official says authorities believe Abaaoud is holed up in an apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, along with up to five other heavily armed people.\n\nThe official, who was not authorized to be publicly named according to police rules but is informed routinely about the operation, says that scores of police who stormed the building early Wednesday were met with unexpectedly violent resistance. Reinforcements were summoned and several people were injured.\n\n___\n\n7:45 a.m.\n\nAuthorities in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis have evacuated about 20 residents from a building where suspects linked to the Paris attacks are holed up in a standoff with police.\n\nA city official not authorized to be publicly named told The Associated Press the residents were brought to city hall for protection.", + " City hall is about 200 meters (yards) from the apartment building where the standoff is taking place on rue du Cornillon, in the heart of the historic, multicultural town just north of Paris.\n\nThe site is less than 2 kilometers (about a mile) from the Stade de France national stadium. Three suicide bombers blew themselves up Friday near the stadium during an international soccer match with French President Francois Hollande in attendance.\n\nSaint-Denis is one of France's most historic places. French kings were crowned and buried through the centuries in its famed basilica. Today it is home to a vibrant and very ethnically diverse population and sees sporadic tension between police and violent youths.\n\n___\n\n7:", + "35 a.m.\n\nAt least seven explosions have been heard at the scene of a police standoff with suspects in last week's deadly Paris attacks.\n\nAssociated Press reporters at the scene could hear what sounded like grenade blasts from the direction of the standoff in the heart of the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.\n\nThe source of the blasts is unclear. Police say several people are holed up in an apartment and several police have been injured in an operation that has lasted at least three hours on Wednesday morning.\n\n___\n\n7:20 a.m.\n\nA resident of the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis describes intense gunfire and explosions during a police operation near the site of one of last week's deadly attacks.\n\nBaptiste Marie,", + " a 26-year-old independent journalist who lives near the scene of the standoff, tells The Associated Press: \"It started with an explosion. Then there was second big explosion. Then two more explosions. There was an hour of gunfire.\"\n\nResident Amine Guizani, 21, says: \"There were grenades. It was going, stopping. Kalashnikovs. Starting again.\"\n\nRiot police were clearing the streets early Wednesday, pointing guns at curious residents to move them off the roads.\n\nMarie said the officers seemed nervous.\n\n\"You could see it in their eyes, \" Marie said.\n\n___\n\n6:55 a.m.\n\nPolice say anti-", + "terrorist officers are raiding an apartment in a north Paris suburb where several men are holed up.\n\nThe Paris police department says officers have exchanged gunfire with the suspects and several police have been injured. The extent of their injuries is unknown.\n\nIt's unclear whether there are injuries among the suspects.\n\nPolice reinforcements are arriving at the scene in Saint-Denis.\n\n___\n\n6:27 a.m.\n\nPolice vans and fire trucks are rushing to the scene of a SWAT team operation in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis that is linked to the deadly Paris attacks.\n\nA helicopter is flying overhead at dawn Wednesday.\n\nFrench television BFM and i-Tele say that the suspects are inside an apartment building.\n\nPolice have cordoned off the area nearby,", + " including a pedestrian zone lined with shops and 19th-century apartment buildings.\n\nNeighborhood resident Fabien Crombe said on BFM television that gunshots have repeatedly broken out since the police operation began, punctuated by silence and the sound of sirens.\n\nSaint-Denis Mayor Didier Paillard said transport has been stopped and schools in the center of town will not open Wednesday.\n\n___\n\n6:15 a.m.\n\nAuthorities in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis are telling residents to stay inside during a large police operation near France's national stadium that two officials say is linked to last week's deadly attacks.\n\nDeputy Mayor Stephane Peu told i-", + "Tele television that there have been many gun shots and detonations in the operation that began at 4:25 a.m. (0325 GMT) Wednesday on rue de la Republique in the center of Saint-Denis.\n\nThe site is less than two kilometers (1.2 miles) from the Stade de France, targeted by three suicide bombers during Friday's attacks.\n\nHe urged residents to stay home, saying \"it is not a new attack but a police intervention.\"\n\nTwo officials say police operation now underway is connected to the investigation into Friday's attacks that killed 129 people. ", + " Gunfire broke out in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis early Wednesday as police pursued suspects from the terror attacks of Nov. 13. Witnesses documented the flood of police into the historic suburb as the raid grew. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)\n\nThe suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks was killed Wednesday in a massive pre-dawn raid by French police commandos, two senior European officials said, after investigators followed leads that the fugitive Islamic State militant was holed up north of the French capital and could be plotting another wave of violence.\n\nMore than 100 police officers and soldiers stormed an apartment building in Saint-Denis,", + " a bustling suburb home to many immigrants, during a seven-hour siege that left at least two people dead, officials said. The dead \u00adincluded the suspected overseer of the Paris bloodshed, Abdel\u00adhamid Abaaoud, according to the two senior European officials. Abaaoud, a Belgian extremist, had once boasted that he could slip easily between Europe and strongholds of the Islamic State militant group in Syria.\n\n[LIVE updates from Paris and elsewhere]\n\nParis prosecutor Fran\u00e7ois Molins, speaking to reporters hours after the siege, said he could not provide the identities of the people killed at the scene. A French security official declined to confirm or deny that Abaaoud had died.", + " U.S. officials said they were awaiting confirmation of the identities of those slain.\n\nThe two European officials from different countries, who have followed the case closely, said they had received the information about Abaaoud\u2019s death from French authorities. The two officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.\n\nIt was not immediately clear how Abaaoud died \u2014 whether in police gunfire, by his own hand or in a suicide blast triggered by a woman in the apartment.\n\n[How officials may have missed their chance to stop Paris terror suspects ]\n\nAfter the raid, forensics experts combed through blown-out windows and floors collapsed by explosions, presumably seeking DNA and other evidence.\n\nMolins said a discarded cellphone helped identify safe houses used by attackers to plan Friday\u2019s coordinated assaults,", + " which killed 129 people and wounded more than 350 in a series of attacks at a stadium, a concert hall and restaurants across Paris.\n\nMolins said police launched the raid after receiving a witness tip suggesting that Abaaoud was \u00ad\u201centrenched\u201d on the third floor of the Saint-Denis building. He said that neither Abaaoud nor another wanted suspect, Salah Abdeslam, was among eight people who were arrested at the apartment and surrounding locations on Wednesday. Three people were arrested in the raid itself, one of whom suffered a gunshot wound in the arm, he said.\n\nMolins said the sophisticated militant cell used three safe houses around Paris \u2014 including the Saint-Denis apartment \u2014 and three rental cars to launch the attack.", + " It was \u201ca huge logistics plan, meticulously carried out,\u201d he said.\n\nAbaaoud was the target of a major dragnet in the international search \u2014 which stretches from Belgium to Syria \u2014 for suspects in Friday\u2019s carnage.\n\n\n\n\n\nSupporters of the Islamic State, the extremist group whose vast domain straddles Syria and Iraq, have vowed to inflict repeated attacks on the West, including in Europe.\n\nThe raid was in part a response to what French officials thought was a plan to stage a follow-up terrorist attack in La Defense, a financial district northwest of Paris, two police officials and an investigator close to the investigation said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief members of the media.\n\nSeven men and one woman were arrested Wednesday in Saint-Denis,", + " Molins said.\n\nFive days after the worst violence on French soil since World War II, European nations remained on edge, enhancing vigilance against possible attacks by Islamist militants who have promised to bring the brutal tactics employed in Iraq and Syria to the West.\n\n[Why French airstrikes on ISIS\u2019s \u2018capital\u2019 probably haven\u2019t done much ]\n\nPresident Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, seeking to reassure French citizens unnerved by the bloodshed on the streets of Paris, said the attacks would not alter the French way of life.\n\n\u201cWe are at war against terrorism, terrorism which declared war on us,\u201d Hollande said at a meeting of French mayors. \u201cIt is the [Islamic State]", + " jihadist organization. It has an army. It has financial resources. It has oil. It has a territory.\n\n\u201cIt has allies in Europe, including in our country,\u201d he continued, \u201cwith young, radicalized Islamist people. It committed atrocities there and wants to kill here. It has killed here.\u201d\n\nHe renewed his case to extend a state of emergency decreed after the attacks and to make changes to the constitution that he said would make France safer.\n\nJean-Michel Fauvergue, chief of the elite police unit that carried out Wednesday\u2019s raid, said the operation began at 4:16 a.m. with an attempt to blast open the third-floor apartment door with explosives.", + " But the reinforced door would not open properly, and the element of surprise was lost, he said. The terrorists inside then blocked the door with a heavy object.\n\nFrench media identified the suicide bomber as Hasna Aitboulahcen, a cousin of Abaaoud\u2019s. The 26-year-old French citizen is a former manager of Beko Construction, a company in Epinay-sur-Seine, a town north of Saint-Denis. The company closed down in 2014.\n\nFauvergue said hundreds of shots were exchanged and each side threw projectiles.\n\nAs the raid progressed, heavily armed police clad in military gear \u2014 some with their faces covered by balaclavas \u2014 moved quickly through the dark streets,", + " while sharpshooters were posted on nearby buildings. Helicopters scanned from the skies, and police used a drone and two robots to conduct surveillance. For hours, traffic and public transportation were halted, and schools were shuttered.\n\nAuthorities say as many as 20 people may have been involved in the plot to attack Paris. Here's what we know about them so far. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)\n\nUthayaseelan Sanmugan, a 38-year-old cook who lives near the targeted apartment, said he woke up at 4:30 a.m. to the sound of gunfire, went to his window and saw the lights from weapons outside.\n\n\u201cWhen I got to the street,", + " I saw a lot of blood on the sidewalk. The blood of the terrorists.\u201d\n\nResidents were evacuated or instructed to stay inside their homes.\n\n\u201cI heard gunshots and, sometime around 7 a.m., a huge blast, an explosion,\u201d said Kelly Ovo, a 45-year-old day laborer who lives close to the apartment that was under siege.\n\nFrench police reported that a 7-year-old police dog named Diesel was \u201ckilled by the terrorists\u201d in the raid.\n\nAbaaoud, an ardent Islamic State supporter linked to several other terrorist attempts, was believed to be in Syria earlier this year. But some officials speculated earlier this week that he could have returned to Europe,", + " perhaps passing undetected among the flood of asylum seekers pouring into Greek islands from Turkey.\n\nThe siege appeared to have been aided by another potential breakthrough in the probe: the discovery of a mobile phone in a garbage can near the Bataclan concert hall, the site of one of Friday\u2019s assaults.\n\nThe phone\u2019s data contained a map of the music venue, which was the target of the most deadly attack last week. French media reported that the phone contained a chilling text message sent shortly after the first gunman entered: \u201cLet\u2019s go, we\u2019re starting.\u201d\n\n[The mystery surrounding the Paris bomber with a fake Syrian passport ]\n\nThe information on the phone opened fresh leads,", + " including to an apartment southeast of Paris in Alfortville, according to Mediapart, a French news outlet.\n\nFrench officials have cast a wide net in the hunt for suspects in Friday\u2019s attacks. Across France, 118 additional raids were conducted overnight on Tuesday, yielding at least 25 arrests. That brought to 414 the number of raids launched throughout France since Friday, the Interior Ministry said.\n\nThe attacks deepened questions about European intelligence agencies\u2019 ability to prevent militant violence. According to Eric Van Der Sypt, spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor, Belgian federal police interrogated Brahim Abdeslam, one of the Paris attackers, in February after he returned from Turkey.\n\nBelgian federal police also questioned Brahim\u2019s brother Salah,", + " who they knew had been radicalized, Van Der Sypt said. But Belgian officials said there was no indication that the brothers were going to get involved with terrorism, so they were released.\n\nAcross Europe, officials remained on high alert Wednesday. In Copenhagen, a terminal at the Danish capital\u2019s international airport was briefly evacuated after \u201can overheard conversation about a bomb,\u201d police said in a Twitter post. The terminal later reopened.\n\nCountries, including Sweden and Italy, raised terror alerts. At the Vatican, extra security was posted in St. Peter\u2019s Square, where Pope Francis addressed pilgrims.\n\nOn Tuesday, authorities in Hanover, Germany, abruptly called off a friendly soccer match between Germany and the Netherlands that Chancellor Angela Merkel had planned to attend,", + " officials said.\n\nTurmoil continued elsewhere in France on Wednesday when a history teacher at a Jewish school in Marseille was stabbed by three men. Brice Robin, the Marseille prosecutor, said one of the attackers had an Islamic State T-shirt. The teacher received medical aid and appeared to be in stable condition.\n\nAlso in Marseille, a young veiled Muslim woman was attacked by a man who punched her and wielded a box cutter. She was taken to an emergency room.\n\nSince last week\u2019s attacks, Hollande has vowed a withering French response. On Tuesday, France invoked a European Union mutual aid pact that calls for members of the bloc to assist other member states if they are attacked,", + " a historic if largely symbolic move.\n\n[The bombs exploded, and France\u2019s president called it \u2018war\u2019. It was 1986. ]\n\nDaniela Deane in London, Virgile Demoustier, Emily Badger and Karla Adam in Paris, and Loveday Morris in Baghdad contributed to this report.\n\n1 of 32 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad \u00d7 See photos of deadly police raid in France View Photos Two terrorism suspects are dead after the pre-dawn raid in Saint-Denis. Caption Two terrorism suspects are dead after the pre-dawn raid in Saint-Denis. Nov. 19, 2015 French crime scene investigators are seen outside the rue du Corbillon building in Saint-Denis,", + " a northern Paris suburb. Christophe Petit Tesson/European Pressphoto Agency Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.\n\nRead more:\n\nHow officials may have missed their chance to stop Paris terror suspects\n\nThe Paris attacks could mark the end of Europe\u2019s open borders, if the far right has its way\n\n5 stories you should read to really understand the Islamic State\n\nThe politics and hypocrisy of word-policing \u2018radical Islam\u2019\n\nThe long war against Islamist extremism has become more complicated than ever ", + " Paris (AFP) - The fate of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks, remained unknown Wednesday after a massive police assault on his alleged hideout, the city's prosecutor said.\n\nParis prosecutor Francois Molins outlined a seven-hour raid of an \"extreme difficulty\" which saw police fire nearly 5,000 rounds of ammunition in a battle with a group holed up in two apartments.\n\nA gargantuan probe undertaken since the Friday attacks saw police pore over video footage, telephone surveillance and witness reports which led them to the apartment in the poor multi-ethnic suburb of Saint-Denis.\n\nMolins said a witness report received Monday led investigators to believe that Abaaoud,", + " a known Belgian jihadist believed to be in Syria, was in fact on French territory.\n\n\"This is an individual suspected of being the instigator of a large number of attacks in Europe,\" said Molins.\n\nWary about the report, investigators ran \"numerous telephonic and bank verifications,\" he added.\n\nView gallery Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins holds a press conference in Paris on November 18, 2015 (AFP Photo/A \u2026\n\nThe police assault was launched at 4:20am (0320 GMT), putting Saint-Denis on lockdown as helicopters buzzed in the sky and snipers took up position on rooftops.\n\nHowever police immediately ran into difficulty.\n\n\"The reinforced door of the apartment at first resisted explosives laid by RAID (anti-", + "terror police) which allowed the terrorists to prepare their riposte,\" said Molins.\n\n\"Very sustained gunfire continued for nearly an hour,\" he said, adding that \"the complex nature of the operation required the use of assault rifles, snipers and explosives.\"\n\nThe operation was further complicated by an explosion -- later determined to be a woman who \"detonated an explosives vest\"-- and damage done to the building which led to the collapse of part of the floor.\n\nView gallery Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian suspected of orchestrating the Paris attacks, pictured in a February \u2026\n\nAnother body \"riddled with bullets\" was found in the debris,", + " but the state of the corpse did not allow for it to be identified.\n\nTherefore, Molins said: \"I am not able to give you a precise number and identity of those killed. There are at least two dead and verifications will likely take longer than expected\" due to the state of the apartment building.\n\n\"A new team of terrorists was neutralised and all indications are that given their arms, their organisational structure and their determination, the commando could have struck,\" he said.\n\nThree suspects were arrested inside the building, while outside police took into custody a man who lent the apartment to the jihadists and a woman accompanying him.\n\nTwo men were arrested after being found in the rubble.\n\nAn eighth man,", + " who was injured and found outside, was also taken into custody believed to have been involved in providing the apartment.\n\nThe vast probe also led police to discover a cellphone belonging to one of the attackers in a dustbin outside the Bataclan music venue, scene of the worst violence, where 89 people were gunned down.\n\nA total of 129 people were killed and 350 injured in the attacks.\n\nThe phone showed one of the gunmen had sent a message saying \"we're ready, let's go.\"\n\nThe message was sent at 9:42 pm, before the attack on the Bataclan, Molins said, adding that police were investigating who the message was sent to.\n\n\"We can say that a massive logistical operation was meticulously put in place by these terrorists,\" said Molins.\n" + ], + "length": 11749, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 37, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Buffalo's school board voted 6-2 Thursday to try to get rid of a controversial ninth member\u2014Carl Paladino, co-chair of Donald Trump's New York campaign. The board gave Paladino 24 hours to resign over what it called \"unambiguously racist\" and \"morally repugnant\" remarks about the Obamas he made last week, reports the Huffington Post. Paladino, who unsuccessfully ran for governor as a Republican in 2010, told Buffalo weekly Artvoice that he wanted to see President Obama die of mad cow disease in 2017, and for Michelle Obama to \"return to being a male\" and live in a cave in Zimbabwe with a gorilla. The board said that if Paladino won't quit, it will petition New York Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia to remove him, the Buffalo News reports. \"Words matter, Mr. Paladino,\" said School Board President Barbara Seals Nevergold at a raucous meeting Thursday, which Paladino did not attend. \"The impact on children of color, especially African-American children, is incalculable,\" she said. \"They would like me to tell you, 'You're fired.'\" Other board members accused Paladino of racism and other misconduct going back many years. Paladino, who has said he won't step down, issued a statement accusing the board of trying to get rid of him for exposing corruption. Earlier this week, Paladino\u2014whose comments were called \"reprehensible\" by the Trump transition team\u2014said his words were poorly chosen and claimed he had meant to forward his remarks to friends instead of sending them to Artvoice, the Wall Street Journal reports.\n", + "docs": [ + "The Buffalo School Board voted 6 to 2 on Thursday to call on the state education commissioner to remove Carl P. Paladino from office, a decision made amid the rallying cry of thousands of people outraged by controversial remarks he made about President Barack Obama and the first lady.\n\nA resolution approved by the board Thursday calls on Paladino to resign within 24 hours, or else the board will appeal to Commissioner MaryEllen Elia.\n\nPaladino, who has said he will not resign, was not at the meeting.\n\nHe later released a statement in response to the School Board vote.\n\nThe group that voted in favor of the resolution included all three board newcomers.", + " Larry Quinn and Patti Pierce, both Paladino allies, were the two members to oppose it.\n\nBoard member Hope Jay received a standing ovation from the audience after she introduced her resolution calling for Paladino's removal.\n\nPierce, who said she does not support Paladino's comments, nevertheless said she doesn't support the resolution.\n\n\"This is a watershed moment for us in this city,\" Pierce said. \"I suggest we take this opportunity to show the entire country that we are a city of good neighbors and we are about forgiveness.\"\n\nMany in the audience loudly booed Pierce and some yelled catcalls.\n\n\"If any of our Buffalo public school children said any of these offensive remarks... the student would be suspended,\" said School Board Member Paulette Woods.", + " \"We should also be held accountable for our words and our actions.\"\n\nShe accused Paladino of engaging in \"a pattern of racist behaviors going back over 10 to 20 years.\"\n\nHours before the board met, about 300 people attended a public rally supporting Paladino's ouster.\n\nThe vote came at the end of a special meeting in the Common Council chambers that attracted hundreds of parents, community leaders and activists, all urging the board to take action against Paladino for the remarks that gained international attention.\n\nThose comments, published last week in Artvoice, included saying he wished death by mad cow disease upon President Obama, referring to the first lady as a man and said he'd like her to be \"let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie,", + " the gorilla.\"\n\nThe remarks gained international attention because of Paladino's long political history. He ran unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for governor in 2010, and more recently served as the co-chairman for President-elect Donald J. Trump's campaign in New York.\n\n\"Words matter, Mr. Paladino,\" said School Board President Barbara Seals Nevergold. \"The impact on children of color, especially African-American children is incalculable.....They would like me to tell you, 'You're fired.'\"\n\nSchool board members in favor of seeking his removal have argued that Paladino's latest comments underscore an ongoing pattern of behavior that they said includes harassment and bullying of his colleagues on the board and members of the administration.", + " That behavior, they said, interferes with the board's ability to conduct business.\n\nThey also argued that Paladino's statements create a hostile and intimidating environment in a district where the majority of students are minorities, something they believe is a violation of the state's Dignity for All Students Act.\n\nPaladino criticized the board\u2019s decision in a statement released Thursday. \u201cThe Board of Education\u2019s action today is certainly not an illustration of a profile in courage or leadership,\u201d he wrote.\n\nThe vote touches off what could be a lengthy process for the commissioner to collect all of the relevant information and issue a ruling.\n\nThe commissioner\u2019s legal staff will not review the petition until the person charged has filed a response.", + " That process usually takes about eight weeks after the original petition is filed, unless the parties receive extensions.\n\nOnce the file is completed, the commissioner\u2019s Office of Counsel tries to issue a decision within six to eight months, or eight to 10 months after the petition was filed, according to its website. But with hundreds of petitions to the commissioner filed every year for a variety of actions, there is no guarantee of a specific time frame.\n\nElia has declined to comment on the situation because she has to step in as an impartial judge and make a decision. But on Wednesday, her office released its boldest statement yet, saying it is reviewing its options and monitoring the situation.\n\n\u201cWe are in the process of reviewing all of our options in this unusual situation and will closely watch the actions taken by the Buffalo Board of Education...,\" State Education Department spokeswoman Emily DeSantis wrote in a statement.\n\nNow,", + " Elia will have to weigh the board's arguments against Paladino's First Amendment right to free speech.\n\nBy appealing to the commissioner, the board declined to exercise its own authority to remove Paladino, something that has been done in other districts.\n\nIt also places Elia in the center of what has become a politically-charged controversy. Among those pushing for Paladino's removal are the state teachers union and several other elected officials who have been at odds with the Buffalo developer.\n\nRelated: Read the Buffalo School Board resolution to remove Paladino\n\nTweets by TiffanyLankes ", + " Brendan McDermid/Reuters Carl Paladino, Donald Trump's New York state campaign co-chair, has been in hot water since hoping for the death of President Barack Obama and saying he wants the first lady to go live with gorillas.\n\nBUFFALO, N.Y. \u2015 The Buffalo Board of Education voted 6-2 Thursday to issue a stunning ultimatum to Carl Paladino, one of their own members who has been under national fire for his racially charged comments about the Obamas: Resign within 24 hours, or the board will petition the state to remove you.\n\nPaladino was Donald Trump\u2019s New York campaign co-chair and currently sits on the nine-member Buffalo school board.", + " In recent days, he\u2019s faced intense criticism for his answers to a local newspaper\u2019s questionnaire about what he would like to see happen in 2017. Paladino said he\u2019d like President Barack Obama to die from mad cow disease and called first lady Michelle Obama a man who should go live with gorillas.\n\nBuffalonians sick of Paladino making their city look bad mobilized Thursday, first for a protest downtown in Niagara Square and later at a special school board meeting at city hall.\n\nThe board met to consider a fiery resolution that said if Paladino did not resign within 24 hours, they would petition New York Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia to remove him.", + " Elia has so far declined to weigh in on the controversy.\n\nThe resolution, introduced by board member Hope Jay, called Paladino\u2019s remarks about the Obamas \u201cunambiguously racist, morally repugnant, flagrantly disrespectful, inflammatory and inexcusable.\u201d It also said they reflected negatively on \u201cthe Buffalo Board of Education, the City of Buffalo and its leadership and its citizens, the State of New York, and every decent human being in America and abroad who has been shocked and offended by his words.\u201d\n\nWhen Jay read her resolution Thursday at the school board\u2019s special session, the crowd gave her an enthusiastic standing ovation.\n\nOnly two board members \u2015 Patti Pierce and Larry Quinn,", + " who are considered Paladino allies \u2015 did not support the resolution. They said they would like to see Paladino apologize to the students of the district rather than resign.\n\nPierce said she hoped the people in Buffalo could show Paladino some forgiveness for his comments and \u201ctake a page out of the horrific massacre that happened in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine innocent people in a house of worship were slain by a hateful, hate-filled man.\u201d\n\nThe comparison drew gasps from the audience and was too much for one woman, who left shouting that it was offensive to use the murdered African-American congregation members in this situation.\n\nThe Huffington Post Several hundred people gathered outside city hall Thursday to push for Carl Paladino to be removed from the Buffalo Board of Education.\n\n\u201cAlthough I do think he has a racial filter from time to time,", + " I don\u2019t know that it\u2019s that much different from many people on this board,\u201d Quinn said. The school board is majority black.\n\nHe also recounted a moment of racial understanding he had when he was younger, telling a story about the black woman his father hired to look after him when his mother was ill.\n\nThe protest Thursday morning drew several hundred people outside city hall, despite cold, slushy weather.\n\n\u201cHe\u2019s like a test case,\u201d said Ellie Dorritie, 74. \u201cIf we let him stay, if we give him a pass, if we even give him a week \u2015 it\u2019s like a green light for all the rest of the slime to come out of the sewer.", + " And because we have the Trump administration coming up \u2015 all of that garbage, flowing all around it \u2015 it means that we\u2019re going to give Trump a chance to do that. We\u2019ve had Carl Paladino\u2019s filth for so many years. It\u2019s got to end now.\u201d\n\nThe Huffington Post Many protesters said Paladino was reflecting poorly on the city of Buffalo.\n\nTrump was on the minds of many people at the protest.\n\nJosh Gordon, 31, came with his two kids, one of whom is set to begin school next year. He said he hasn\u2019t really been very involved in local politics but after this most recent election,", + " he\u2019s going to start doing more.\n\n\u201cI would like somebody to hear that this isn\u2019t OK,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cI want [my son] to go into a school system where the sort of people who say the sort of shit that Carl Paladino says \u2015 I don\u2019t want that in my city.... I know that I\u2019m pretty fed up with this kind of stuff, and the election of Trump, Paladino\u2019s support of Trump, has motivated me to do a little more than I\u2019ve been doing.\u201d\n\nPaladino\u2019s comments have drawn widespread criticism, including from his own son, who called them \u201cdisrespectful.\u201d\n\n\u201cCarl\u2019s comments are absolutely reprehensible,", + " and they serve no place in our public discourse,\u201d added a Trump campaign spokeswoman.\n\nRIGHT NOW: A Billboard is now up on the outbound 33 at Kensington concerning Carl Paladino. @WKBW pic.twitter.com/AjoBhfVKoj \u2014 Hannah Buehler (@HannahBuehler) December 29, 2016\n\nPaladino tried to issue a form of an apology this week, saying he never intended to hurt the \u201cminority community,\u201d is \u201ccertainly\u201d not a racist and actually meant to send the responses to friends \u2015 not to the publication Artvoice.\n\nHe has also indicated he won\u2019t step down.", + " In a statement released Thursday, he called the board\u2019s resolution calling for his resignation \u201ccertainly not an illustration of a profile in courage or leadership\u201d and said it was retaliation for his attempts to uncover corruption within their ranks. He added he would \u201cfight to the end to continue to expose the corruption.\u201d\n\nBut Paladino has been losing local support. This week, the Buffalo Common Council voted unanimously to call for Paladino\u2019s resignation, with one of his longtime supporters joining the other members. Thousands of people have signed petitions urging Elia to remove Paladino, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sent her a letter this week asking her to do the same.\n\nLarry Scott,", + " co-chair of the Buffalo Parent-Teacher Organization, told The Huffington Post this week that he was in the process of filing an official complaint with Elia about Paladino.\n\nIf Paladino doesn\u2019t immediately resign, getting rid of him could be a slow process. The Buffalo News explained that he would have the right to appeal the Buffalo board\u2019s decision to Elia. The whole process could take six to eight months.\n\nA handful of board members have been thrown out in recent years for misconduct \u2015 but it was their behavior, not their words, that landed them in trouble, making the Paladino case unusual. The school board\u2019s resolution argued that Paladino violates the New York Constitution and the Dignity for all Students Act,", + " which gives children the right to \u201can education free of discrimination and harassment.\u201d\n\nWhen Paladino ran for New York governor in 2010, he came under fire for sending emails to associates that included references to bestiality and offensive characterizations of Obama. In one email labeled \u201cObama Inauguration Rehearsal,\u201d there was a video clip of African tribesmen dancing around.\n\nLocal activists are launching an anti-Paladino website this weekend and on Jan. 5 will be marching to Paladino\u2019s house to protest.\n\nWant more updates from Amanda Terkel? Sign up for her newsletter, Piping Hot Truth, here.\n\nThe Huffington Post Protesters gathered in Niagara Square outside Buffalo City Hall.\n\nThe Huffington Post In addition to Thursday's protests,", + " thousands of people have signed petitions urging the New York education commissioner to remove Paladino.\n\nThe Huffington Post If Paladino doesn't resign, the process to remove him from the board could be slow. ", + " Former New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladinoissued a statement Tuesday expressing regret for widely condemned remarks he made wishing death upon President Barack Obama.\n\n\u201cI made a mistake,\u201d said Mr. Paladino, a Republican. \u201cI could not have made a worse choice in the words I used to express my feelings.\u201d\n\nThe comments that set off the... ", + " THE QUESTIONS WE POSED:\n\n1. What would you most like to happen in 2017?\n\n2. What would you like to see go away in 2017?\n\n3. Who would you like to see run for mayor of Buffalo in next year\u2019s election?\n\n4. Should the new $50 million Amtrak station be at Central Terminal or Canal Side?\n\n___________________________________\n\nSue Marfino \u2013\n\nOWNER OF SHOEFLY\n\n1. A return to shopping in communities and at brick & mortar stores.\n\n2. Mindless shopping onl ne\n\n3. Central Terminal\n\nVincenzo la Pera\n\n1. Bills get in the playoffs\n\n2.", + " The Ryan brothers and Tyrod Taylor leave town.\n\n4. Canalside; knock down Central Terminal.\n\nKorey Green\n\nDIRECTOR/CO-OWNER at KNUCKLE CITY FILMS\n\n1. I would like to see people think more for themselves instead of letting media, social media and publications do all the thinking for them. Everybody has something to say on varies situations without any real knowledge on it. If you don\u2019t know what your talking about please be quiet! So the rest of us can listen to people who\n\nAre actually knowledgeable in the matter\u2026.#educationmatters\n\n2. Hate. Please in 2017 \u201d Let there be no more hate\u201d I never seen so much hate over differences in my life!", + " Live and let live and celebrate diversity! Love that people are different than you and we as humans can have a better understanding for one another.\n\n3. Go Byron!!! Although it would be cool to see Larry Quinn run but I know he would never do it..\n\n4. Canal side. We as a city have been doing a lot of developing here so let\u2019s continue! Keep adding to the landmark and if we can get the Buffalo Bills here we will be ready!\n\nWhen a tourist goes to NYC they have to see the statute of liberty. When a tourist comes to buffalo they have to see canal side!\n\nWould you visit Niagara Falls Ny without checking out the waterfalls?", + " I know I know I over did it lol\n\nMaura Crawford \u2013\n\nOWNER COCO\u2019S RESTAURANT\n\n3. Pat Whelan\n\n4. I wish the new terminal could go in the old terminal but there are too many unresolved issues. Urban renewal of that area? Huge issue! We don\u2019t even have Uber let alone a light rail that would run downtown\u2026so regrettably I have to say Canalside.\n\nJan Jezioro\n\nARTVOICE CLASSICAL MUSIC COLUMNIST\n\n1. Impeachment of Donald Trump\n\n2. Donald Trump\n\n3. Byron Brown\n\n4. Central Terminal\n\nSam Savarino \u2013\n\nDEVELOPER\n\n1.", + " 2015\n\n2. 2016\n\n3. Byron Brown\n\n4. Canalside\n\nAnders Gunnerson \u2013\n\nURBAN FARMER- DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS FOR REDDY BIKE\n\n1. A big shift in renewable resources.\n\n2. Climate science deniers in public office\n\n4. I would love to see it in Central Terminal. There are so many reasons in my opinion to make the build there.\n\nLaurie Torrell\n\nDIRECTOR JUST BUFFALO LITERARY\n\n1. I\u2019d like 2017 to be a year of more kindness; and concern for the good work we need to do right here close to home to make the world a better more equitable place.\n\n2.", + " Haters who were emboldened by the political campaign \u2013 it\u2019s horrifying\n\n3. I have been a big Mayor Brown supporter. For those who want to follow him, I\u2019d like to learn more about their positions on issues I care about.\n\n4. I am a frequent Amtrak user, taking it regularly from Buffalo to NYC\u2026Anything will be better than what we have now!! I wish for high speed rail; and I think Central Terminal could give us Buffalo\u2019s version of Grand Central Station \u2013 it\u2019s so beautiful.\n\nJoey Marcella \u2013\n\nOWNER CLUB MARCELLA\n\n1. Attendants in every parking lot for safety;", + " and real people taking cash so cars won\u2019t be towed\n\n2. Discrimination\n\n3. I would be a great mayor, especially since I\u2019m moving back to Buffalo\n\n4. Central station, the old building\n\nAnn Colley\n\nDISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR BUFFALO STATE COLLEGE\n\n1. Given the international and national circumstances we find ourselves in, I would like to find hope by concentrating on Buffalo\u2019s growth and by finding reassurance in Buffalo\u2019s innovative activities.\n\n4. I would like the new Amtrak Station be at Central Terminal. The building is magnificent. The placement of the station at the Central Terminal would also help renovate what is now a neighborhood in need of help.\n\nAlthea Luerson\n\nCEO LEADERSHIP BUFFALO\n\n1.", + " What I want to see in 2017 is UBER coming to buffalo!\n\n2. Preconceived stereotypes. Judge people for peole as themselves.\n\n3. Byron Brown. We have a momentum going and we should continue moving forward\n\n4. Central Terminal. Canalside is awesome but is super successful. East Buffalo needs help and this may help tremendously. And the building is amazing!!\n\nDavid Granville\n\nEMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING COORDINATOR BMMHA\n\n1. I hope 2017 brings federal funds to Western New York. Our infrastructure needs to see capital improvements that are in poor condition. I wish success to the Racial Equity Roundtable initiative.", + " Along the lines of local relations, I hope efforts to build bridges and employ more of our neighbors who need good work keeps growing.\n\n2. Let\u2019s hope more local poverty goes away. Also, let\u2019s hope the drop out rate decreases. Let\u2019s keep our youths in schools that bring out the best and safeguard our future!\n\n3. I support Mayor Brown for a fourth term and predict he will have wide support in continuing to bring Buffalo back!\n\n4. Both! Buffalo will be so big, we will need investment at each location.\n\nJeff Mucciarelli\n\nCO-OWNER 31 CLUB\n\n1. ISIS removed from this earth.\n\n2.", + " President Obama and the Clinton corruption\n\n3. Carl Paladino\n\n4. Renovate the Central Terminal with a depot at Canalside.\n\nEddie Cotter\n\n1. Plans to expand the metro to the airport, Niagra Falls, and Southtowns\n\n2. New York States sales tax should be eliminated\n\n3. Mickey Kearns\n\n4. Both Canalside and Central Termial\n\nNorm Sham\n\nACTOR/COMEDIAN/SINGER\n\n1. Presidential impeachment\n\n2. The Electoral College\n\n3. Barack Obama\n\n4. Although Canalside might be nice I\u2019d prefer the Central Terminal, because it\u2019s a beautiful building and in hopes that it could bring growth to that part of the city.", + " Plus there\u2019s more room for parking.\n\nScott McCandles\n\nOWNER MCANDLES MARKETING AND MEDIA\n\n1. Western New York needs Uber. I think it will reduce DWI arrests and create more sales for our bars and restaurants.\n\n2. Snapchat, why is this a thing? I was hoping that Snapchat would join Periscope and Vine as replaceable social media. Runner up, Pokeman\u2019go\n\n3. Who would want that job?\n\n4. Canalside makes more sense as the Central Terminal is in the middle of nowhere. I love the Central Terminal building yet $50 million is not going to be enough to refurbish it.", + " Amtrak needs to be more aggressive attracting passengers with promotions and destinations. Canalside is a destination and downtown is where the action is. I could see NHL fans using Amtrak on their way to and from a game from cities like Philly, Washington, NY, Boston and even Toronto. Add Uber to the mix and now you have Buffalo as a weekend wonderland.\n\nPaul Marko\n\nCREATIVE DIRECTOR DOWNLOAD DESIGN\n\n1. Trump resigning in disgrace. Lets see all those horribly racist \u201cApprentice\u201d outtakes\u2026 if they would have been made public before the election, there is no way he would have won by those tiny margins in three swing states.\n\n2.", + " Trump\n\n3. Mark Schroeder. I\u2019m not one to be overly critical of Brown \u2013 but perhaps a change is due after three full terms.\n\n4. My heart says Central Terminal. My intellect says Canalside. But I\u2019d prefer an expansion of the light rail system over a costly station build out.\n\nIrwin Gelman\n\nCHAIR ROSWELL PARK CANCER INSTITUTE AND CANTOR\n\n1. I would like to see a refocus of funding from our military industrial complex to our roads and bridges, schools, higher education programs, and medical research.\n\n2. Fake news\n\n3. If Byron Brown does not run,", + " I would love to see Sean Ryan.\n\n4. Canalside, with the caveat that the rail system between Albany and Buffalo be upgraded for Acela-like fast trains\n\n\n\nJim Heaney\n\nEDITOR INVESTIGATIVE POST\n\n1. For those concerned about democracy, social justice and a free press to effectively deal with the coming onslaught from the Trump presidency.\n\n2. Carl Paladino. Enough, already.\n\n3. There\u2019s a thin bench, so I\u2019m not sure who would be a viable candidate against Mayor Byron Brown, but the city is clearly in need of more competent leadership.\n\n4. Patrick Whalen made a compelling argument in The Buffalo News that Amtrak doesn\u2019t handle enough passengers locally to warrant a major investment at either site.\n\nLeRoi Johnson\n\nATTORNEY AND ARTIST\n\n1.", + " Peace in the Middle East.\n\n2. The Clintons\n\n3. Byron Brown\n\n4. Central Terminal\n\nCarl Paladino\n\nDEVELOPER, SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER, POLITICAL ACTIVIST\n\n1. Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford. He dies before his trial and is buried in a cow pasture next to Valerie Jarret, who died weeks prior, after being convicted of sedition and treason, when a Jihady cell mate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.\n\n2. Michelle Obama. I\u2019d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie,", + " the gorilla.\n\n3. Someone with a brain, a set of balls and a lack of fear who has enough money so as not to owe anyone anything once elected and who believes in a market economy.\n\n4. We need a $50 million dollar train station as much as we need parasitic people like Lou Ciminelli, 80% of the school board and the dizziness of socialistic progressive politicians who never signed the front of a paycheck. At best 400 people a day take a train. They are not complaining about exchange or Depew. We are already the laughingstock of America for having the dumbest elected leaders ever.", + " Why add to it.\n\nKarl Frizlen\n\nARCHITECT\n\n1. Peace & prosperity\n\n2. Trump\n\n3. Byron\n\n4. Canalside\n\nTom Barone\n\nOWNER TRALF, CONCERT PROMOTER\n\n1. Continued growth. More businesses coming to the area offering jobs.\n\n2. High NYS corporate tax.\n\n3. Judge Franczyk.\n\n4. Canalside. Show visitors your best assets.\n\nJan Jezorio\n\n1. Impeachment of Donald Trump\n\n2. Donald Trump\n\n3. Byron Brown\n\n4. Central Terminal\n\nMichael Kumza\n\nATTORNEY\n\n1.", + " I\u2019d like to see the President-elect keep his word and rebuilt America\u2019s inner cities. Also, I\u2019d like to see President Obama release Native American activist and political prisoner Leonard Peltier before he vacates the White House.\n\n2. I\u2019d like to see the Clintons go away for good.\n\n3. I\u2019d like to see Dennis Kucinich move to Buffalo and run for Mayor.\n\n4. Without a doubt, the new Amtrak station should be located at the Central Terminal.\n\nFritz Abell\n\nVENTURE CAPITALIST, FOUNDER ECHO FAIR, COFOUNDER BEFFALO EXPAT NETWORK\n\n1.A demolition moratorium on a buildings built prior to 1960 in Buffalo (apart from third-party-reviewed emergency cases)\n\n2.Crappy new architecture;", + " hatred\n\n3. Harper Bishop\n\n4. Central Station, which would connect to the Belt Line (which would go to Canalside)\n\nCHAIRMAN, CEO HUNT REAL ESTATE\n\n1. The \u201cfeeling\u201d of positive momentum to continue throughout Western New York, particularly real progress at AM&A\u2019s, One Seneca Tower, and even the Statler\n\n2. Some of our tax burden and a lot of our regulatory burden\n\n3. Anyone who will commit to not being an obstructionist (Mayor Brown has done a pretty good job in this respect\u2014that is, he has not been an obstacle and has been an active supporter of getting things done)\n\n4.", + " Central Terminal, hands down (the land is too valuable at Canalside and there can still be an ancillary station there\u2014important thing will be to connect downtown to both north and south, and east and west lines)\n\n\u201cAirborn\u201d Eddy Dobosiewicz\n\nFOUNDER FORGOTTEN BUFFALO, COMEDIAN, TELEVISION PERSONALITY\n\n1. I would like the Russians to stop hacking my iTunes account. I swear I did not order Bimbo Bowlers from Bulgaria.\n\n2. Political correctness needs to go away in 2017 and stay away forever.\n\n3. How about Rex Ryan? He\u2019ll need a gig soon.", + " Seriously I\u2019d love to see someone with vision and the courage to lead, run for Mayor.\n\n4. The only logical choice is the Central Terminal. We already had this argument in 1929!!! Any other choice will be as regrettable as plowing an expressway through some of our most beautiful neighborhoods. A lot of \u201cgeniuses\u201d thought that was a good idea too.\n\nConnie Caldwell\n\nDIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY RELATIONS BUFFALO HISTORY MUSEUM\n\n1. It would be wonderfully exciting for the city to serve as a location for the screenplay written by Buffalo\u2019s own favorite son, film and TV star, William Fichtner,", + " this summer. It\u2019s a genuine precious gem of a story about friendship and doing the right thing (Boy, can we use those kinds stories in these times.) William Fichtner and Kim Coates (Sons of Anarchy), best friends in real life, will star and attract other known great artists to the area. Should that film project happen, it would be a lot of good news for Buffalo\u2019s native talent, its burgeoning film-making industry, and the general area \u2013 immeasurably.\n\n2. It\u2019s a real fantasy and kind of self-serving since I walk the area, but I would love to see the strip malls and Burger King on Delaware and Hertel Avenues go away with a plan to undergo some quality of life developments.", + " That intersection does not serve pedestrians. Snow removal is horribly managed, forcing people to walk on the street. It\u2019s an unpleasant walk to Delaware Park in every season. The corner lacks all imagination.\n\n3. Can Mayor Brown run again? He\u2019s been amazing.\n\n4. Without knowing the pros and cons of both locations I couldn\u2019t firmly say. The Central Terminal is there and majestic in stature \u2013 I can imagine connective synergies finding its way to Canalside but not vice versa. In Rome, the train station is centrally located. As a lone traveler and utterly direction challenged, the station was a godsend point of reference while walking a matrix of disorienting piazzas.", + " And, I was never hard-pressed to find someone who could point me in the direction of the station if I lost my way. I think that detail should be a consideration in the planning.\n\nLawrence Quinn\n\nDEVELOPER, FORMER CO-OWNER BUFFALO SABRES, SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER\n\n1. I would like to see Ivanka Trump take an active role in advocating for a climate change in her Father\u2019s administration.\n\n2. Show Ponies and Talking Heads on all networks replaced by real working journalists.\n\n3. Chris Jacobs\n\n4. Central Terminal together with a relocated Broadway market linked by a Haussmann style boulevard down Broadway and the removal of all the rail along the river from downtown to riverside.\n\nDan Shanahan\n\nARTISTIC DIRECTOR TORN SPACE THEATER\n\n1.", + " Continued investment in the infrastructure of Fillmore Ave and a further understanding that Fillmore Ave. is a key component to the development of the City and provides a strategic link to the current development of the City with the East Side; a comprehensive master plan defining a vision for Grant St, and the City of Buffalo providing basic services to Silo City i.e, electric and water that will capitalize on the tremendous work being done within the complex.\n\n2. The 198\n\n3. I\u2019ve been generally happy with the leadership of Mayor Brown. However for the purposes of the question I would select Rahwa Ghirmatzion (Deputy Director, PUSH). She understands the need to integrate environmental reforms within the cities planning process,", + " has a deep knowledge of public policy, appreciates and would have a strategic plan to address the deep segregation within the city, and would be a vocal proponent for an equitable distribution of economic development currently underway within Buffalo.\n\n4. The Central Train Terminal. Torn Space has made a long term commitment to the Broadway/Fillmore Corridor and we are developing a catalyst project that will encourage further investment in the area. But as the terminal goes so to does the neighborhood. Any plausible mixed use development plan of the terminal requires a component reliant on a fully functioning rail yard. This is a rare window opening for a realistic use of the terminal and hope the opportunity is taken.\n\nBill Zimmerman\n\nOWNER 7 SEAS SAILING\n\n1.", + " I\u2019d love to see Buffalo continue to take leaps and bounds in its progress on development, continue drawing interest from outside investors, and continuing to keep students here after they graduate.\n\n3. Buffalo has seen consistent growth and success under Mayor Brown\u2019s tenure, which one could hope continues into another term.\n\n4.I\u2019m definitely a waterfront guy, but in the case of the train station, the Central Terminal has my vote. It\u2019s an exquisite historical structure that deserves restoration and would encourage growth and revitalization to the East Side several decades ahead of any other possible efforts. It would prove a miracle development for that region of our city and for our region as a whole.\n\nBrian Higgins:\n\nUNITES STATES CONGRESSMAN\n\n1.", + " I would most like to see economic activity in the forgotten neighborhoods of Buffalo in 2017. These neighborhoods, including the Broadway- Fillmore area, have great fundamentals for growth and renewal. They are inactive and thus perceived as unsafe. I reject that perception and want for my city to challenge the limits of possibility. This I believe is possible in the new Buffalo.\n\n2. The Skyway is what I would like to see go away in 2017, or at least move closer to its replacement.\n\nNew York State has finally acknowledged this and is conducting a full and formal review of alternatives to the Skyway. Buffalo will spend $100 million to rehabilitate (again)", + " this \u201cstructurally deficient\u201d bridge or we will find a better, safer alternative to help the city realize its full waterfront potential.\n\n3. Central Terminal. Once carrying more than 200 passenger trains per day, the Central Terminal offers the only opportunity to fully restore passenger train service to Chicago and Cleveland (you can\u2019t get there from Canal Side). Also, we can make alive again this grand and historic structure\n\nand make a bold statement that in the new Buffalo, Polonia will rise again!\n\nCanalside is a great waterfront destination. But we should be careful not to stuff too much in there (remember the duck and traffic jams of last summer). Moreover,", + " a train station is not water dependent or enhanced. And a new train station at the Central Terminal will lead a revitalization of the Broadway Market and surrounding area. The Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood has the most beautiful and historically remarkable churches in Buffalo.\n\nFinally, while proximity to downtown is important, the Howard Zemsky led revitalization of Buffalo\u2019s first manufacturing district, the Hydraulics, to Larkinville is instructive here.\n\nZemsky\u2019s Larkinville also expanded the boundaries of downtown Buffalo.\n\nThe Central Terminal is about the same distance to City Hall as Larkinville\n\nWillard Brooks\n\nPRESIDENT BUFFALO NIAGARA BREWERS ASSOCIATION\n\n1.", + " More snow for a great ski season. And the bills to build up a super Bowl quality team.\n\n2. Economic Inequality.\n\n3. Mayor Brown\n\n4. Central Terminal!!!\n\nChris Parker\n\n1. I\u2019d like to see us put down our phones and relearn how to communicate with one another.\n\n2. Trump, fake news.\n\n3. I\u2019m not quite sure how this happened, but I don\u2019t have an answer on mayor. We still hold an election for that office? Feels to me like it\u2019ll be Byron until he decides to stop.\n\n4. Canalside.\n\nSteve Calveneso\n\nBUSINESSMAN, FORMER MAYORAL CANDIDATE\n\n1.", + " People to listen more, be more understanding and accepting and look out for each other\n\n2. Racism and separation\n\n3. Not sure but I think we need to give Mayor Brown some credit. Buffalo\u2019s looking pretty good and at the very very least. He hasn\u2019t gotten in the way with small minded politics\n\n4. I\u2019d love to see Central Terminal restored to its glory, the brickwork alone is incredible.\n\nJosh Holtzman\n\nGENERAL MANAGER BUFFALO IRONWORKS\n\n4. I strongly believe the Amtrak station should be built at Canalside. Reason being is that we need to drive more traffic downtown and continue to build up the fantastic work that is already been done.", + " Most cities have their core strength of their economy, tourism and entertainment come from downtown.\n\nRobby Takac\n\nFOUNDER MUSIC IS ART, MEMBER OF THE GOO GOO DOLLS\n\n1. Some sort of unity here in the US after the craziness and devicevness of this last election cycle.\n\n2. The self serving, self centered vibe that became a non stop loop of negativity during the aforementioned election cycle.\n\n3. Eric Starchild\n\n4. Central Terminal, of course.\n\nDon Metz\n\n1. I would like more pressure put on absentee landlords to maintain their property.\n\n2. Chris Collins\n\n3. I like Byron.\n\n4.", + " Central Terminal without a doubt\n\nEmil Novak\n\nOWNER QUEEN CITY COMIC BOOKSTORE\n\n1. Stop telling me IPA beer is amazing!\n\n2. Congressman Chris Collins\n\n3. Don\u2019t fix what ain\u2019t broken- Mayor Brown again.\n\n4. It has to be the the Central Terminal, can\u2019t grow only on area in WNY. Then make a shuttle service running directly from Terminal to City Hall.\n\nBill Rupp\n\nPHILANTHROPIST, FOUNDER KOOTSIE BALL\n\n1. Treat each other with more respect. So easy to do, and never more needed then now.And while you\u2019re at it,", + " give the ones closest to you the same dignity you give to an absolute stranger.\n\n2. Fear and Fear Merchants. Americans already live in the most dangerous society on the planet, and we get on with our lives. Don\u2019t buy into terror anxiety, real or imagined. It\u2019s a product no different then toothpaste.\n\nThe real terrorists are the ones sounding the alarm about terrorism.\n\n3. Mickey Kearns\n\nJordan Levy\n\nPARTNER SOFTBANK CAPITAL, PARTNER SEED CAPITAL\n\n1. Introduction of Phase Two of Gov. Coumo\u2019s Buffalo Billion initiative\n\n2. 30 MPH on Scajaquada Expressway\n\n3.", + " Howard Zemsky \u2013 would be our Michael Bloomberg!\n\n4. Canalside as $50MM would be drop in the bucket for Central Terminal and you will still drive through blighted neighborhood to get anyplace.\n\nNewell Nussbaumer\n\nFOUNDER BUFFALO RISING\n\n1. I would like to see the revival of the East Side. In fact, I believe that 2017 is the year for the East Side.\n\n2. I would like to see a concerted effort arise concerning the removal of the I-190 along the waterfront, or at least the downgrading.\n\n3. Tim Tielman. The guy is spot on with development in Buffalo.", + " Give him the keys.\n\n4. Central Terminal all the way. It would lend itself to the rebirth of the East Side. Development of the entire complex is key.\n\n\n\nJohn LaFalce\n\n1. I\u2019d love to see the Public Option passed as an amendment to Obamacare and have Chuck Schumer stick to his guns with Kathleen Sweet for Federal Judge. She is an OUTSTANDING nominee,and since Chuck and Trump will be dealing together,this should be a must for Chuck. I\u2019d like to see an alternative to the replacement for the Freezer Queen site.I do not like the height or the architecture of the present proposal.I\u2019d like the Senior citizen Center in the Town of Tonawanda relocated to a much more centrally located and more visible location;", + " a relative few know where it now is.I admire the Canopy of Neighbors progra m in the City of Buffalo,and would like to see it extended countywide.\n\n4. I\u2019d prefer an updated Amtrak Station Downtown rather than at the Central Terminal.Central Terminal is simply a bad location and does not hold the promise of such increased utilization to make it worthwhile.\n\nDan Syracuse\n\n1. Collaborative Learning take place more in society, specially the Government, and use past data to reinforce current decisions. Like they say history repeats itself, unfortunately so do mistakes.\n\n2. Big scale: Political Correctness, parental apathy, extreme liberalism,", + " terrorism. Smaller scale: bad food, poor lighting, overproduced crappy pop music, lawyer ads\n\nShare this: Twitter\n\nFacebook\n\nGoogle\n\n\n\nLike this: Like Loading...\n\n\n\n" + ], + "length": 8155, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 38, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Syria may have just fully inserted itself into Iraq's civil war. Syria launched cross-border airstrikes on several parts of Anbar province yesterday, killing at least 57 civilians and wounding more than 120 more, local officials tell CNN. The officials say they used scopes and other equipment to identify the planes, which bore Syrian flags, and returned to Syrian airspace. \"Unfortunately, (the) Syrian regime carried out barbarian attacks against civilians in Anbar province,\" the head of the Anbar provincial council said. \"Today we will hold an emergency meeting in Ramadi to address this issue.\" Iraq initially blamed US drones, notes the Washington Post, which says the strikes were aimed at Sunni militant targets. In other developments: Much of Iraq is in the hands of ISIS militants and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is ready to concede that loss temporarily to focus on protecting the capital, Iraqi officials say. The military's best-trained and best-equipped troops have been deployed in Baghdad, and Shiite militias are also focused on protecting the capital and Shiite shrines, the AP reports. ISIS fighters and allied Sunni tribes are battling Iraqi forces in a town just 55 miles north of the city, Reuters reports. Maliki also appeared to dash any hopes that he would form a unity government with Sunni rivals, calling any such move a \"coup against the constitution and an attempt to end the democratic experience,\" the BBC reports. He also blamed political rivals for \"coordinating\" the crisis. The Pentagon says the first US troops deployed to assist the Iraqi military have arrived in the country and started work, the BBC reports. Two teams with a total of 40 US troops are now on the front line, and hundreds more will arrive in the days to come. The UN says more than 1,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed over the last three weeks of fighting\u2014and that figure is \"very much a minimum.\" At Iraq's main oil refinery, fighting between militants and security forces continues, despite the militants' claim to have captured the Baiji facility yesterday, NBC reports. A government spokesman says security forces still control the site and they fought off a dawn raid by militants today.\n", + "docs": [ + "Image caption Isis rebels have overrun Iraq's second-biggest city, Mosul\n\nThe first US troops deployed to assist the Iraqi army in combating a growing Sunni militant insurgency have arrived and begun work, the Pentagon has said.\n\nNearly half the 300 special operations soldiers promised by US President Barack Obama are in Baghdad or on the front lines of the fight.\n\nThe rest are expected within days.\n\nAlso, US Secretary of State John Kerry called for regional unity to expel the Sunni Isis rebels who have taken large swathes of Iraq.\n\nOn Tuesday, two teams totalling 40 US troops began work assessing Iraqi troops on the front line, the Pentagon said.\n\nMedia caption John Kerry told the BBC's Kim Ghattas ''a united Iraq is a stronger Iraq'", + "'\n\nAn additional 90 personnel will work in Baghdad to set up a new joint operations command centre.\n\nThose teams will be joined by an additional four teams of 50 troops each in the next few days.\n\nThe Obama administration has stressed the troops are not intended as operational forces but instead are there to advise the Iraqis and provide intelligence, reports the BBC's David Willis in Washington.\n\nThe Iraqi government had requested American air strikes, but Mr Obama has been reluctant to do anything that could lead to accusations the US was taking sides in a sectarian conflict, our correspondent reports.\n\nThe insurgents, spearheaded by Islamists fighting under the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), have overrun much of north and west Iraq,", + " including the second-biggest city, Mosul.\n\nThe violence has claimed at least 1,075 lives in Iraq in June alone, most of them civilians, a United Nations human rights team has reported.\n\nMedia caption Sunni fighters target Baghdad as John Kerry calls for unity\n\nThe UN said the figures, which include a number of verified summary executions, should be viewed as an absolute minimum.\n\nIn an interview on Tuesday with the BBC, Mr Kerry called for a \"political strategy\" and for regional co-operation to resolve Iraq's unrest.\n\n\"Every country in the region will combine in order to take on and expel Isis because it is simply unacceptable to have a terrorist organisation grabbing territory and challenging the legitimacy of governments,\" Mr Kerry told the BBC's Kim Ghattas.\n\nCan Kerry pull Iraq back from the brink?\n\nVoices from northern Iraq:", + " \"The fighters are everywhere\"\n\nMr Kerry said the Kurdish leaders had agreed there was \"no military solution\", but called for \"a political solution that deals with empowering the people in the communities where Isis is today\".\n\n\"Just a strike alone is not going to change the outcome,\" he said. \"You need to have a full-fledged strategy... which is principally a political strategy.\"\n\nIraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a member of Iraq's Shia Muslim majority, has been criticised for concentrating power among his mostly Shia allies and excluding other groups including Sunni and Kurdish communities.\n\nImage caption Recruits line up in Baghdad to join the fight against Isis\n\nImage caption Ramadi,", + " in Anbar province, bears the scars of battle between Sunni rebels and government forces\n\nImage caption The refinery at Baiji has been a key objective for the Sunni rebels\n\nImage caption Declining fuel supplies have caused long queues at petrol stations, including here in Irbil\n\nMr Kerry has been talking to Kurdish leaders in the northern city of Irbil, where the rebels continue to advance and are fighting to take a key oil refinery.\n\nThe meetings came as the Kurdish region's President Massoud Barzani strongly suggested that it would seek formal independence from the rest of Iraq.\n\nIn a CNN interview, the Kurdish president said, \"Iraq is obviously falling apart... The time is here for the Kurdistan people to determine their future and the decision of the people is what we are going to uphold.\"\n\nBut Mr Kerry told the BBC the US believed a \"united Iraq is a stronger Iraq\".\n\nAir strikes\n\nThe rebels say they have now fully captured the country's main oil refinery at Baiji,", + " north of Baghdad.\n\nHowever, Iraqi officials said there was still fighting at the site and that troops were holding off the insurgents.\n\nThe refinery, in Salahuddin province, has been under siege for 10 days, with militant attacks repulsed several times. The complex supplies a third of Iraq's refined fuel and the battle has already led to petrol rationing.\n\nMedia caption Shia militants have been celebrating recent gains against Isis, as Jonathan Beale reports from the Baquba frontline\n\nThe AFP news agency quoted officials as saying that Iraqi air strikes near Baiji town on Tuesday had killed at least 19 people, with other air strikes on Husseibah in the west.\n\nReuters quoted Iraqi officials as saying rebels had attacked the huge al-Bakr air base,", + " north of Baghdad.\n\nThey are also fighting for control of key border crossings in Anbar province that link Iraq with Syria, pursuing their goal of forming a \"caliphate\" straddling both countries.\n\nThere were conflicting reports over who controlled the Walid border crossing with Syria and the Traybil crossing with Jordan.\n\nOn Tuesday morning, Sunni tribes aligned with Isis said they had seized the crossings, but Iraqi military spokesman Lt Gen Qassim Atta told a news conference in Baghdad they had been \"fully recaptured\" by security forces. ", + " BAGHDAD (AP) \u2014 Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is ready to concede, at least temporarily, the loss of much of Iraq to Sunni insurgents and is instead deploying the military's best-trained and equipped troops to defend Baghdad, Iraqi officials told The Associated Press Tuesday.\n\nMembers of an Iraqi volunteer force put on their newly issued boots in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki... (Associated Press)\n\nAn Iraqi volunteer force trains in the Shiite holy city of Karbala,", + " 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014. Iraq's top Kurdish leader warned visiting Secretary of State... (Associated Press)\n\nAn Iraqi volunteer force trains in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014. Iraq's top Kurdish leader warned visiting Secretary of State... (Associated Press)\n\nAn Iraqi army band performs at the main recruiting center during a recruiting drive for men to volunteer for military service in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014, after authorities urged Iraqis to... (Associated Press)\n\nVolunteers check in at the main army recruiting center to volunteer for military service in Baghdad,", + " Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014, after authorities urged Iraqis to help battle insurgents. Political leaders... (Associated Press)\n\nIraqi men line up for physical examinations at the main army recruiting center to volunteer for military service in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014, after authorities urged Iraqis to help battle... (Associated Press)\n\nIraqi men jupm out of a truck at the main recruiting center as they volunteer for military service in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014, after authorities urged Iraqis to help battle insurgents. Political... (Associated Press)\n\nAn Iraqi volunteer force trains in the Shiite holy city of Karbala,", + " 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014. Iraq's top Kurdish leader warned visiting Secretary of State... (Associated Press)\n\nA member of an Iraqi volunteer force puts on his newly issued boots in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014. Iraq's top Kurdish leader... (Associated Press)\n\nAn Iraqi man is examined by a military doctor at the main army recruiting center as he volunteers for military service in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014,", + " after authorities urged Iraqis to help... (Associated Press)\n\nIraqi army soldiers play music during a recruiting drive for men to volunteer for military service in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014, after authorities urged Iraqis to help battle insurgents. Political... (Associated Press)\n\nIraqi men check in at the main army recruiting center as they volunteer for military services in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014, after authorities urged Iraqis to help battle insurgents. Political... (Associated Press)\n\nIraqi men line up for physical examinations at the main army recruiting center to volunteer for military service in Baghdad,", + " Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014, after authorities urged Iraqis to help battle... (Associated Press)\n\nKurdish regional President Massoud Barzani, right, listens to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during a meeting at the presidential palace in Irbil, Iraq, Tuesday, June 24, 2014. Kerry arrived in Iraq's... (Associated Press)\n\nShiite militias responding to a call to arms by Iraq's top cleric are also focused on protecting the capital and Shiite shrines, while Kurdish fighters have grabbed a long-coveted oil-rich city outside their self-ruled territory,", + " ostensibly to defend it from the al-Qaida breakaway group.\n\nWith Iraq's bitterly divided sects focused on self-interests, the situation on the ground is increasingly looking like the fractured state the Americans have hoped to avoid.\n\n\"We are facing a new reality and a new Iraq,\" the top Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday in Irbil, capital of the self-ruled Kurdish region in northern Iraq.\n\nTwo weeks after a series of disastrous battlefield setbacks in the north and west, al-Maliki is struggling to devise an effective strategy to repel the relentless advances by militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,", + " a well-trained and mobile force thought to have some 10,000 fighters inside Iraq. The response by government forces has so far been far short of a counteroffensive, restricted mostly to areas where Shiites are in danger of falling prey to the Sunni extremists or around a major Shiite shrine north of Baghdad.\n\nThese weaknesses were highlighted when the government tried but failed to retake Tal Afar, a mixed Shiite-Sunni city of some 200,000 that sits strategically near the Syrian border. The government claimed it had retaken parts of the city but the area remains under the control of the militants after a battle in which some 30 volunteers and troops were killed.\n\nGovernment forces backed by helicopter gunships have also fought for a week to defend Iraq's largest oil refinery in Beiji,", + " north of Baghdad, where a top military official said Tuesday that Sunni militants were regrouping for another push to capture the sprawling facility.\n\nIn the face of militant advances that have virtually erased Iraq's western border with Syria and captured territory on the frontier with Jordan, al-Maliki's focus has been the defense of Baghdad, a majority Shiite city of 7 million fraught with growing tension. The city's Shiites fear they could be massacred and the revered al-Kazimiyah shrine destroyed if Islamic State fighters capture Baghdad. Sunni residents also fear the extremists, as well as Shiite militiamen in the city, who they worry could turn against them.\n\nThe militants have vowed to march to Baghdad and the holy Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala,", + " a threat that prompted the nation's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to issue an urgent call to arms that has resonated with young Shiite men.\n\nThe military's best-trained and equipped forces have been deployed to bolster Baghdad's defenses, aided by U.S. intelligence on the militants' movements, according to the Iraqi officials, who are close to al-Maliki's inner circle and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss such sensitive issues.\n\nThe number of troops normally deployed in Baghdad has doubled, they said, but declined to give a figure. Significant numbers are defending the Green Zone, the sprawling area on the west bank of the Tigris River that is home to al-Maliki's office,", + " as well as the U.S. Embassy.\n\n\"Al-Maliki is tense. He is up working until 4 a.m. every day. He angrily ordered staff at his office to stop watching TV news channels hostile to his government,\" one of the officials said.\n\nThe struggle has prompted the Obama administration to send hundreds of troops back into Iraq, nearly three years after the American military withdrew.\n\nThe Pentagon said Tuesday that nearly half of the roughly 300 U.S. advisers and special operations forces are now on the ground in Baghdad, where they have begun to assess the Iraqi forces and the fight against Sunni militants. Another four teams of special forces will arrive in days,", + " bringing the total to nearly 200.\n\nRear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, also said the U.S. is conducting up to 35 surveillance missions daily over Iraq to provide intelligence as Iraqi troops battle the aggressive and fast-moving insurgency. About 90 of the U.S. troops are setting up a joint operations center in Baghdad.\n\nIraqi officials said the U.S. advisers were expected to focus on the better units the Americans had closely worked with before pulling out.\n\nIraq's best-trained and equipped force is a 10,000-strong outfit once nicknamed the \"dirty division\" that fought alongside the Americans for years against Sunni extremists and Shiite militiamen.", + " Now it is stretched thin, with many of its men deployed in Anbar province in a months-long standoff with Sunni militants who have since January controlled a city 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Baghdad.\n\nThe focus on Baghdad, rather than recapturing the vast Sunni areas to the west and north, has been subtly conveyed to the media in daily briefings by chief military spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi. He has in recent days shifted from boilerplate assurances that the military is on the offensive to something less confident.\n\n\"Withdrawals from anywhere to another location does not mean defeat or that we permanently left an area,\" he said Monday.", + " \"It is a battlefield, and the fight includes going forward and backward and regrouping.\"\n\nThe Iraqi military, rife with corruption and torn by conflicting loyalties, lacks adequate air cover for its ground troops and armor, with the nation's infant air force operating two Cessna aircraft capable of firing U.S.-made Hellfire missiles. That leaves the army air wing of helicopter gunships stretched and overworked.\n\nWhile Iraq's security forces number a whopping 1.1 million, with 700,000 in the police and the rest in the army, corruption, desertion and sectarian divisions have been a major problem. With a monthly salary of $700 for newly enlisted men,", + " the forces have attracted many young Iraqis who would otherwise be unemployed. Once in, some bribe commanders so they can stay home and take a second job, lamented the officials.\n\nAl-Maliki's effort to bolster the defense of the capital coincides with Iraq's worst crisis since the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. forces, with the nation facing a serious danger of splitting up into warring Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves.\n\nThe declaration by Barzani, the Kurdish leader, of a \"new Iraq,\" was a thinly veiled reference to the newly won Kurdish control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk,", + " which the Kurds have long sought to incorporate into their self-rule region.\n\nControl of Kirkuk and Kurdish pockets in Diyala province and elsewhere have been at the heart of tension between the Kurdish region and the Baghdad government, and the Kurds are unlikely to want to give up that territory, regardless of the status of the fighting.\n\nAl-Maliki, who has no military background but gets the final say on major battlefield decisions, has looked to hundreds of thousands of Shiite volunteers who joined the security forces as the best hope to repel the Islamic State's offensive.\n\nWhile giving the conflict a sectarian slant \u2014 the overwhelming majority are Shiites \u2014 the volunteers have also been a logistical headache as the army tries to clothe,", + " feed and arm them. Furthermore, their inexperience means they will not be combat ready for weeks, even months.\n\nStill, some were sent straight to battle, with disastrous consequences.\n\nNew details about the fight for Tal Afar \u2014 the first attempt to retake a major city from the insurgents \u2014 underscore the challenges facing the Iraqi security forces.\n\nDozens of young volunteers disembarked last week at an airstrip near the isolated northern city and headed straight to battle, led by an army unit. The volunteers and the accompanying troops initially staved off advances by the militants, but were soon beaten back, according to military officials.\n\nThey took refuge in the airstrip,", + " but the militants shelled the facility so heavily the army unit pulled out, leaving 150 panicking volunteers to fend for themselves, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.\n\nThe ill-fated expedition \u2014 at least 30 volunteers and troops were killed and the rest of the recruits remain stranded at the airstrip \u2014 does not bode well for al-Maliki's declared plan to make them the backbone of Iraq's future army.\n\n___\n\nAssociated Press writers Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad and Lara Jakes in Irbil, Iraq, contributed to this report. ", + " Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Nouri Maliki said in his weekly TV address that ''Iraq is today facing a fierce terrorist onslaught''\n\nIraq's Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has rejected calls for a national salvation government to help counter the offensive by jihadist-led Sunni rebels.\n\nSuch calls represented a \"coup against the constitution and an attempt to end the democratic experience\", he warned.\n\nThe US has led appeals to the country's political leaders to rise above sectarian and ethnic divisions.\n\nGovernment forces have been unable to recapture the territory seized by the rebels this month.\n\nAlmost half of the 300 US military advisers assigned to help the Iraqi security forces have arrived.\n\nFighting was reported to have continued on Wednesday,", + " with an attack by rebels on the Balad airbase, about 80km (50 miles) north of Baghdad.\n\nAlso on Wednesday, a suicide bombing outside the main market in the northern city of Kirkuk left at least two people dead and many more injured.\n\nThe city was seized by Kurdish peshmerga fighters on 12 June when the Iraqi army fled in the face of the rebel advance.\n\nAt least nine people were also killed in attacks in the town of Mahmudiyah to the south of Baghdad.\n\n'Dangerous goals'\n\nIn his weekly televised address, Mr Maliki called on \"all political forces to reconcile\" in the face of a \"fierce terrorist onslaught\".\n\nBut the Shia prime minister gave no promise of greater representation in government for the minority Sunni Arab community,", + " whose anger at what they say are his sectarian and authoritarian policies has been exploited by jihadist militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis).\n\nMr Maliki said forming an emergency administration that included all religious and ethnic groups would go against the results of April's parliamentary elections, which were won by his State of Law alliance.\n\n\"The dangerous goals of forming a national salvation government are not hidden,\" he said. \"It is an attempt by those who are against the constitution to eliminate the young democratic process and steal the votes of the voters.\"\n\nMr Maliki committed to start forming a new governing coalition by 1 July.\n\nAnalysis: Richard Galpin,", + " Baghdad\n\nMr Maliki used his weekly TV address to the nation to make it clear he will not be bulldozed into forming a government which does not take into account the result of the election in April.\n\nHe is signalling he intends following the normal constitutional mechanism for forming the new government in the coming weeks.\n\nAnd that will give his alliance of Shia parties, known as the State of Law, the chance to build a coalition of its choice to secure a parliamentary majority and to select who will be the new prime minister.\n\nIt was Mr Maliki's political rival Ayad Allawi who raised the issue of a national salvation government which the prime minister has so firmly rejected.\n\nBut it seems Mr Maliki is also firing a warning shot across the bows of the international community.\n\nThe United States in particular has been putting intense pressure on him to ensure a new government is formed as quickly as possible,", + " with a broad spectrum of politicians.\n\nOne Western diplomat has said it should be a matter of days not weeks.\n\nImage copyright Reuters Image caption Government forces have been unable to launch any strategic counter-offensives to drive the rebels back\n\nImage copyright AFP Image caption The rebel offensive has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in northern and western Iraq\n\nImage copyright AFP Image caption Thousands of Iraqi Shia have responded to calls to take up arms and defend their country\n\nUS Secretary of State John Kerry, who has just returned from a two-day visit to Baghdad and Irbil, said he would be going to Saudi Arabia on Friday to hold further talks on the crisis.\n\nMr Kerry said Mr Maliki was \"following through\"", + " on commitments to move forward on the process of government formation.\n\nMeanwhile, US and Iraqi officials have been quoted as saying they believe Syrian planes struck rebel positions around the border town of Qaim on Tuesday.\n\nThe jihadist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) group has been active in the conflict in Syria and now controls territory on both sides of the border.\n\nAir strikes\n\nThe 130 US military advisers are setting up a joint military operations room with the Iraqi army in Baghdad and another in the north.\n\nUS officials have made it clear that this is not a \"rush to the rescue\", although the US advisers are in the position to call in air strikes against the militants if it is deemed necessary.\n\nTheir primary job is to assess the capabilities of the Iraqi forces and advise on what should be done,", + " says the BBC's Jim Muir in Irbil.\n\nThe US intelligence assessment is that the Sunni rebels spearheaded by Isis are capable of holding the territory they have captured.\n\nIraqi forces have tacitly recognised that, our correspondent adds. They have been unable to launch any strategic counter-offensives.\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Sunni fighters: \"Baghdad will fall within a month\"\n\nThey are mainly focusing on two things - harassing the rebels from the air, mainly with attack helicopters, and building up their deployment for the defence of Baghdad, where troop numbers have been doubled.\n\nThe Iraqi military's chief spokesman,", + " Gen Qassim Atta, told a news conference on Wednesday that troops were in \"full control\" of Iraq's largest refinery at Baiji, which has seen repeated clashes in recent days. ", + " BAGHDAD -- Sunni militants launched a dawn raid Wednesday on Iraq's largest oil refinery they have been trying to take for days but were repelled by security forces, a commander on the scene said. Government forces backed by helicopter gunships have fought for a week to defend the complex at Beiji, north of Baghdad.\n\nSign up for breaking news alerts from NBC News\n\nThe refinery is located in the heart of the Sunni-dominated areas in northern Iraq, where Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) militants have swallowed large swaths of land since June 10. Along with a nearby power plant, the refinery supplies Iraq with a third of its refined fuel and nearly a tenth of its electricity.", + " Col. Ali al-Quraishi, the commander of Iraqi counterterror forces at the scene, said his men exchanged fire with insurgents when they tried to attack a nearby oil pipeline, wounding one solider.\n\nThis Video Player Requires JavaScript It has come to our attention that the browser you are using is either not running javascript or out of date. Please enable javascript and/or update your browser if possible.\n\n\n\n\n\nThis Video Player Requires JavaScript It has come to our attention that the browser you are using is either not running javascript or out of date. Please enable javascript and/or update your browser if possible.\n\n\n\n\n\nThis Video Player Requires JavaScript It has come to our attention that the browser you are using is either not running javascript or out of date.", + " Please enable javascript and/or update your browser if possible.\n\n\n\n\n\nIn-Depth\n\n- The Associated Press\n\nFirst published June 25 2014, 1:42 AM ", + " 1 of 9. Members of the Iraqi security forces take their positions during an intensive security deployment west of Baghdad, June 24, 2014.\n\nBAGHDAD (Reuters) - Militants attacked one of Iraq's largest air bases and seized control of several small oilfields on Wednesday as U.S. special forces troops and intelligence analysts arrived to help Iraqi security forces counter a mounting Sunni insurgency.\n\nIraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who is fighting for his job and is under international pressure to create a more inclusive government, said he supported starting the process of forming a new cabinet within a week.\n\nHe also dismissed the call of mainly Sunni political and religious figures,", + " some with links to armed groups fighting Maliki, for a \"national salvation government\" that would choose figures to lead the country and, in effect, bypass the election held nearly three months ago.\n\nIn northern Iraq, the Sunni militants extended a two-week advance that has been led by the hardline Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) but also includes an amalgam of other Sunni groups angered by Maliki's rule.\n\nThey blame Maliki for marginalising their sect during eight years in power. The fighting threatens to rupture the country two and a half years after the end of U.S. occupation.\n\nU.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during a visit this week pressed Iraqi officials to form an \"inclusive\"", + " government and urged leaders of the autonomous Kurdish region to stand with Baghdad against the onslaught.\n\nA session of parliament is planned within a week that will start the process of forming a new government based on the results of elections held in April. Maliki's Shi'ite-led State of Law coalition won the most seats but needs the support of other Shi'ite groups, Sunnis and Kurds to build a government.\n\n\"We will attend the first session of parliament,\" Maliki said on state television, adding the commitment stemmed from \"loyalty to our people\" and respect for a call by Iraq's foremost Shi'ite clergy.\n\nOn Friday, Shi'ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,", + " the most respected cleric among Iraq's Shi'ite majority, called for the government formation process to begin.\n\nHe also warned the demands by mainly Sunni politicians and figures, with ties to the non-ISIL fighting groups who belong to the armed revolt against Baghdad, that calling for an emergency government, not based on the vote, \"represents a coup against the constitution.\"\n\nThe fighting waged by armed Sunni groups, with ISIL blazing the path, has knocked towns and cities across the north and west from the central government's control. Northern Iraq's largest city Mosul fell to Sunni insurgents on June 10.\n\nTwo days later, Kurdish forces moved into Kirkuk,", + " where violence also flared on Wednesday when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a crowded market entrance, killing six people and wounding 23, police and medics said.\n\nThe United Nations says more than 1,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed during the Sunni insurgents' advance in Iraq, spearheaded by al Qaeda offshoot ISIL.\n\nThe figure includes unarmed government troops machine-gunned in mass graves by insurgents, as well as several reported incidents of prisoners killed in their cells by retreating government forces.\n\nIn addition to the bloodshed, close to a million people have been displaced in Iraq this year. Amin Awad,", + " director of Middle East and North Africa bureau for the U.N. refugee agency, on Wednesday called Iraq \"a land of displacement\".\n\nINSURGENTS SEIZE OILFIELDS\n\nU.S. President Barack Obama has ruled out sending ground troops back to Iraq where they withdrew in 2011. He has offered up to 300 American military advisers, about 130 of whom have now been deployed. The advisers could gather information about targets for future air strikes although no decision has been taken to start American bombing.\n\nRear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said late on Tuesday an initial group sent to establish an operations centre included intelligence analysts and logistics experts as well as special operations troops.\n\nAnother 50 U.S.", + " military personnel working in the region are expected to arrive within the next few days to create four additional assessment teams, he said. U.S. military personnel are also flying regular manned and unmanned reconnaissance flights over Iraq.\n\nIraqi state television reported that newly arrived Pentagon advisers met Baghdad's operations commander and agreed to set up a joint operation command.\n\nBaghdad is racing against time as the insurgents consolidate their grip on Sunni provinces.\n\nOn Wednesday, militants overran the Ajeel oil site, 30 km (20 miles) east of Tikrit, which contains at least three small oilfields that produce 28,000 barrels per day, an engineer working at the field said.\n\nThe engineer said local tribes had taken responsibility for protecting the fields after police withdrew,", + " but that they also left after the nearby town of al-Alam was seized by militants.\n\nAjeel is connected to two pipelines, one running to Turkey's Ceyhan port and the other to the Baiji oil refinery, which remained a frontline early on Wednesday.\n\nState TV showed troop reinforcements being flown into the compound by helicopter to fend off the assault on Baiji, a strategic industrial complex 200 km north of Baghdad.\n\nLocal tribal leaders said they were negotiating with both the Shi'ite-led government and Sunni fighters to allow the tribes to run the plant if Iraqi forces withdraw. One government official said Baghdad wanted the tribes to break with ISIL and other Sunni armed factions,", + " and help defend the compound.\n\nThe plant has been fought over since last Wednesday, with sudden reversals for both sides and no clear winner so far.\n\nBORDER CROSSINGS FALL\n\nThe suicide bomber in Kirkuk blew himself up when police stopped him as he tried to enter the crowded market in a mostly Kurdish neighbourhood, police said. It was the first such attack since Kurdish forces occupied the city two weeks ago.\n\n\"The suicide attacker was wearing Kurdish dress. Kurdish security forces suspected he was hiding something under his clothes, and when they tried to stop him at the entrance to search him, he blew himself up,\" a Kurdish security source said.\n\nThe dead included two Kurdish security personnel.\n\nMilitants including ISIL and allied Sunni tribes battled Iraqi forces in the town of Yathrib,", + " 90 km north of Baghdad, into the early hours of Wednesday, witnesses and the deputy head of the municipality said. Four militants were killed, they said.\n\nInsurgents have surrounded a massive air base nearby, which was known as \"Camp Anaconda\" under U.S. occupation, and struck it with mortars. Witnesses said the air base had been surrounded on three sides.\n\nIn recent days, Baghdad's grip on the Western frontier with Syria and Jordan has also been challenged.\n\nOne post on the Syrian border has fallen to Sunni militants and another has been taken over by Kurds. A third crossing with Syria and the only crossing with Jordan are contested,", + " with anti-government fighters and Baghdad both claiming control.\n\nFor ISIL, capturing the frontier is a step towards the goal of erasing the modern border altogether and building a caliphate across swathes of Iraq and Syria.\n\nThe group gained another boost in that direction when members of Syria's al Qaeda wing, the Nusra Front, pledged allegiance to it in the border town of Albu Kamal, strengthening its control of the frontier.\n\nISIL supporters posted images online of what they said were Nusra fighters taking an oath of loyalty to ISIL in the town.\n\nISIL and the Nusra Front share hardline Sunni ideology but have periodically fought against each other in Syria.\n\nAn Iraqi military spokesman said on Tuesday the government had carried out air strikes on a militant gathering in the town of al-Qaim near the Syrian border,", + " which is under the control of the coalition of Sunni armed groups, including ISIL.\n\nLocals in al-Qaim and security officials in western Anbar province accused Syria of carrying out the air raid. The Syrian government officially denied the attack, but others in the security establishment there said they had carried out the strike. A senior Iraqi government official also said late Wednesday Syria had carried out the bombardment. If true, the bombardment could preherald a more overt interventionist stance by Iraq's neighbours.\n\nMeanwhile, Iraqi security forces and insurgents clashed to the west of Haditha, home of a critical dam, that Sunni fighters wish to claim.", + " Since Qaim and the border fell, the fighters have begun marching up the Euphrates River Valley.\n\nThey have clashed over the Haditha Dam for four days. \"Things are under the control of the tribes and police and army. We would rather die than give up the dam,\" said the local police chief, who called himself Farouq.\n\nIn Mosul, which has been under the control of ISIL and other insurgents for over two weeks, militants bombed a Shi'ite mosque in the Sharekhan neighbourhood in the city's northern outskirts, residents said.\n\n(Additional reporting by a reporter in Diyala, a reporter in Mosul,", + " a reporter in Tikrit, Isabel Coles in Arbil, David Alexander in Washington and Sylvia Westall in Beirut; Writing by Alexander Dziadosz; Editing by Anna Willard, Peter Graff, Alison Williams and Gunna Dickson) ", + " Members of the all-volunteer Iraq of Imam Hussein Regiment take up positions on a street corner as part of a basic-training course in the Iraqi holy city of Karbala. Shiite men have been ordered by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country\u2019s highest Shiite authority, to protect Shiite shrines and help counter the recent gains of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a Sunni insurgent group.\n\nJune 28, 2014 Members of the all-volunteer Iraq of Imam Hussein Regiment take up positions on a street corner as part of a basic-training course in the Iraqi holy city of Karbala. Shiite men have been ordered by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani,", + " the country\u2019s highest Shiite authority, to protect Shiite shrines and help counter the recent gains of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a Sunni insurgent group. Scott Nelson/For The Washington Post\n\nMembers of an all-volunteer force undergo training in the holy city of Karbala to protect Shiite shrines and help counter the recent gains of the Sunni insurgent group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.\n\nSecretary of State John F. Kerry conferred with Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq as fighters from local Sunni tribes wrested control of at least part of Iraq\u2019s largest oil refinery after battling for days with government troops over the key facility.\n\nSecretary of State John F.", + " Kerry conferred with Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq as fighters from local Sunni tribes wrested control of at least part of Iraq\u2019s largest oil refinery after battling for days with government troops over the key facility.\n\nSyrian government aircraft bombed Sunni militant targets inside Iraq on Tuesday, further broadening the Middle Eastern crisis a day after Israeli warplanes and rockets struck targets inside Syria.\n\nIraqi state media initially reported that the attacks near Iraq\u2019s western border with Syria were carried out by U.S. drones, a claim that was quickly and forcefully denied by the Pentagon.\n\nSeparately, the Pentagon said that 90 additional U.S. troops arrived in Iraq, part of a group of up to 300 military advisers that President Obama said last week he would deploy there to assess the situation before taking any further U.S.", + " military action. A statement said that U.S. aircraft are now flying 30 to 35 manned and unmanned daily surveillance flights over Iraq.\n\nReuters reported early Wednesday that militants had attacked one of Iraq\u2019s largest air bases, a site near the town of Yathrib that was once know as \u201cCamp Anaconda\u201d when U.S. troops were present. The news agency said the base had been surrounded on three sides and was under mortar fire from the militants.\n\nThe main U.S. effort Tuesday was on the diplomatic front, as Secretary of State John F. Kerry traveled to Irbil, the Kurdish regional capital, to urge leaders there to remain part of Iraq.", + " As they met, fighters from local Sunni tribes, apparently working with militant fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), wrested control of at least part of Iraq\u2019s largest oil refinery from government troops.\n\n\u201cWe are facing a new reality and a new Iraq,\u201d Massoud Barzani, president of the semi\u00adautonomous Kurdish government, told Kerry at the start of their meeting.\n\nAn independent country is a long-held goal for many in Iraq\u2019s Kurdish minority, numbering about 6.5 million. Some Kurdish leaders see an opportunity in the rapid advance of the insurgents and the slow, disorganized response by the Arab, Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.\n\nThroughout his visit to Iraq,", + " including in talks with Maliki and Sunni leaders Monday in Baghdad, Kerry has argued that Iraq risks collapsing unless a new governing coalition representing all sects and ethnicities is quickly formed.\n\nThat argument is harder to make in the Kurdish region, which has several vast oil fields and a long history of at least partial self-rule. The Kurds also have their own defense force, the pesh merga, separate from the Iraqi military that largely melted away in the face of advancing ISIS forces.\n\nThis month, as the ISIS militants overran the northwestern city of Mosul and headed south, pesh merga forces quickly secured the oil capital of Kirkuk,", + " which lies just outside the official regional borders but which Kurds have long demanded be included in their territory.\n\nPossible Kurdish secession\n\nU.S. officials traveling with Kerry, who arrived late Tuesday in Brussels for a NATO meeting, said he had raised the question of possible Kurdish secession during his hour-long session with Barzani, but that most of their discussion focused on strategy to form a new Iraqi government.\n\nIn an interview, Kerry was asked about Barzani\u2019s \u201cnew reality\u201d remark.\n\n\u201cA united Iraq is a stronger Iraq, and our policy is to respect the territorial integrity of Iraq as a whole,\u201d Kerry told NBC. \u201cPresident Barzani understands that\u201d and will participate in the government formation process,", + " he said. Iraq has until Monday to form a new parliament following elections in April; parliament will then choose a new government.\n\nThe United States has long feared that formation of an independent Kurdistan in present-day Iraq would not only weaken Iraq but also set off secession attempts or civil war in neighboring nations with Kurdish minorities.\n\nMeanwhile, Iraqi news media reported that at least 20 people were killed and 93 injured in the strike by Syrian jets in an Iraqi border town controlled by ISIS. Western officials who confirmed the attack said they had no casualty details on the strike, which targeted a market in the town of Qaim, according to the nongovernment National Iraqi News Agency.\n\nOn Monday,", + " Israeli warplanes and rockets struck nine targets, including what the Israel Defense Forces said was a Syrian military command headquarters, in retaliation for a missile attack from Syria on Sunday that killed one Israeli and wounded another in the Golan Heights.\n\nISIS militants are fighting the governments on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border, and an apparent decision by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to intervene to help Maliki further tangles the already complex knot of actors in the overlapping crises.\n\nIn Syria, the United States opposes both Assad and ISIS, which it condemns as a terrorist, al-Qaeda-inspired organization.\n\nIran supports both Assad and Maliki and is sending aid to both,", + " although Iraq\u2019s ambassador to Tehran on Tuesday denied reports that the leader of Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard Corps was in Baghdad helping the government there, Iran\u2019s Fars News Agency reported.\n\nMeeting in Paris\n\nShiite leaders in Iran and Iraq, as well as Assad, have accused Sunni governments in the Persian Gulf of aiding the militants. On Thursday, Kerry will meet in Paris with his counterparts from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan to ask them to intervene more forcefully with Sunni tribes in western Iraq to sever all ties with ISIS and join efforts to preserve a unified Iraq.\n\nArmed tribal factions apparently worked together with ISIS forces to seize the oil refinery in Baiji,", + " about 140 miles northwest of Baghdad, after days of battles with government troops over the key facility.\n\nThere were conflicting accounts late Tuesday of who was in charge at the facility. Iraqi soldiers who arrived in Irbil after fleeing the refinery Monday night said ISIS fighters spearheaded the assault, along with the al-Kaisi tribe that dominates in the region. A tribal council official said Tuesday that \u201cwe now control 90 percent of the refinery.\u201d\n\nThe Baghdad government insisted it was still in control, but refinery workers said the tribes had negotiated a cease-fire and the surrender of about 450 Iraqi army officers. Some took off their uniforms and put on blue refinery coveralls before leaving,", + " according to the workers\u2019 account, and the tribes arranged for buses to take them away.\n\nAccording to an official of the Baiji branch of the Military Council of the Revolutionary Tribes, a Sunni self-defense organization that includes the al-Kaisi tribe and other clans in the area, about 50 government troops remain holed up in one part of the refinery.\n\nThe official, who gave his name as Khalid al-Iraqi, said tribal fighters were joined by a smaller number of ISIS insurgents in the attack. He said the Military Council controls the refinery and described ISIS as not strong enough in the area to give orders.\n\nBut two Iraqi soldiers who took part in the defense,", + " interviewed on the outskirts of Irbil after having fled Baiji, said that ISIS fighters had done most of the attacking.\n\n\u201cThis really is a crisis,\u201d said a Western diplomat in Iraq, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set for a news briefing. \u201cIt poses questions as to Iraq\u2019s continued existence as a state. What we\u2019ve got is Sunnis controlling Sunni territory, Shias controlling Shia territory, Kurds controlling Kurdish territory.\u201d\n\nGearan reported from Irbil and Brussels, Van Heuvelen from Irbil. Abigail Hauslohner in Kirkuk, Iraq, and Loveday Morris and Liz Sly in Baghdad contributed to this report.\n" + ], + "length": 8687, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 39, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 CNN uses the term \"fever pitch.\" At this point it's only speculation, but the big question swirling around the Supreme Court has nothing to do with one of its cases. It's whether Justice Anthony Kennedy plans to step down\u2014and whether he may do so Monday. What you need to know: Slate points out that the speculation isn't fresh, but with Monday being the court's final public session of the term, that would be the time to do it if the 80-year-old is going to do it now. Another reason the speculation is ramping up: A number of reports on the topic cite unnamed sources close to him as well as his former law clerks who say they think he's thinking about it. CNN uses the phrase \"seriously considering.\" And this from the AP: \"Kennedy and his clerks were gathering over the weekend for a reunion that was pushed up a year and helped spark talk he might be leaving the court.\" Bill Kristol put it at \"at least 50-50\" in a Saturday tweet. The Washington Examiner throws one more log on the fire, reporting Senate Judiciary Committee members Ted Cruz and Chuck Grassley previously expressed that they expect a seat to open up this summer. A piece from New Zealand's Stuff calls Kennedy \"the man with the weight of America's goofy-shaped democracy on his shoulders,\" and that points to just how pivotal he has been. CNN frames it like so: \"Like no other justice in recent history, Kennedy has cast the vital swing vote in cases that grab the [country's] attention.\" Among the biggest: Obergefell v. Hodges, which allowed for same-sex marriage nationwide. On the flip side, CNN notes he wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC, which axed election spending limits for corporations. Should the retirement announcement come to pass, who might Trump replace him with? Trump addressed that question in a late April interview with the Washington Times, saying he'd pick from the list of candidates he put out during the election. Trump also addressed the Kennedy rumors, saying, \"I don\u2019t like talking about it. I've heard the same rumors that a lot of people have heard. And I have a lot of respect for that gentleman, a lot.\" Read one of the \"most powerful\" paragraphs written by Kennedy.\n", + "docs": [ + "ANALYSIS: Despite its population of more than 320 million, the weight of democracy in the USA now seems to rest on the shoulders of one man \u2013 the \"self-effacing, immensely polite\" Anthony Kennedy, often described as the swing vote between conservatives and liberals on the US Supreme Court.\n\nWhen the court this week decided to hear a challenge to the partisan gerrymandering that skews election results across the country, lawyers and analysts dusted off a messy, inconclusive decision by the court in 2004.\n\nBack then, the bench split five ways. But there was a single line in Kennedy's reasoning on which the latest challenge turns.\n\nCARLOS BARRIA/", + "REUTERS The US Supreme Court is trying to disentangle the roles of race and partisanship when drawing congressional district maps.\n\nA Ronald Reagan-era appointee to the court, Kennedy declared he might be amenable to a challenge if there was \"a workable standard\" by which it might be proved that the rigging of electoral boundaries crossed a constitutional line \u2013 but that no-one had shown him such a standard.\n\nREAD MORE:\n\n* Trump: 'Solar wall' on Mexican border will pay for itself\n\n* Trump: There are no tapes of Comey talks\n\n* Trump turns rally into a vent session\n\n* Obamacare replacement bill unveiled, tough debate expected\n\nLawyers and academics now believe they have devised a standard Kennedy can accept.\n\nThey'll spend the northern summer honing their briefs,", + " along with an army of \"friends of the court\" who'll be for and against any reform, and there'll be oral argument in October - on which more later.\n\nFirst, we must confront the existing reality.\n\nA democracy that holds itself up as a shining example to the world, that \"city on a hill\" invoked by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, tolerates the effective disenfranchisement of millions of voters and the stealing of dozens of congressional seats at every election by whichever party wins control of the political process at state level.\n\nIt's called gerrymandering, after an 1812 redistricting effort by then-Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry,", + " whose map-bending produced a district shaped like a salamander.\n\nBut one of the so-called US Founding Fathers did it first. In 1788, before there was a Congress, independence hero Patrick Henry had boundaries altered in colonial Virginia in a bid to thwart James Madison, his rival and later the fourth US president.\n\nToday's gerrymandering ruthlessly harnesses technology and big data to \"pack\" and \"crack\" voters in districts as bent and twisted as the names bestowed on them: \"Goofy kicking Donald Duck\" [Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional district]; the upside-down elephant [Texas' 35th]; the Latin earmuffs [Illinois'", + " 4th]; Bart Simpson holding a fishing pole [Michigan's 14th]; and the praying mantis [Maryland's 3rd].\n\nIdeally, all votes should have equal weight. But when \"packed\", electors of a particular persuasion are piled into one electorate so as not to dilute the majorities of the opposing party in adjoining seats. If \"cracked\". they are sprinkled among voters of the opposing party in numbers which ensure their candidate never wins.\n\nFlorida's 5th district, into which non-white voters are \"packed\", narrows at one point to cross a bridge \u2013 lest the GOP majorities in the adjoining 3rd and 6th districts be diluted.\n\nMichigan's GOP-drawn districts are so gerrymandered that only 21 of the state's 148 legislative seats are truly competitive \u2013 that is,", + " they were won by less than five points. Ohio usually is split about 50-50 in presidential polls, but the boundaries have been drawn to give Republicans 12 of the state's 16 seats.\n\nThe impact on American democracy is staggering. At the 2016 elections, the average winning margin for seats in Congress was more than 37 per cent. Only 17 of 435 seats were decided competitively \u2013 which is to say by less than five points.\n\nThis process has its own coarse and colourful jargon; creating new boundaries that put two legislators from one party into a single seat, forcing one to quit, is called \"scorpions in a bottle\".\n\nThe US Supreme Court has visited the issue of partisan gerrymandering on at least three occasions \u2013 in 1986,", + " 2004 and 2006 \u2013 variously branding the practice illegitimate; seriously harmful; incompatible with democratic principles; and a \"manipulation of the electorate\".\n\nYet the court has never ruled against it, though it has ordered that boundaries be redrawn when gerrymandering was found to be race-based.\n\nBut its refusal to call out rigging along partisan lines has become a tool in the mapmakers' arsenal: defending the boundaries of its 12th district, North Carolina recently argued that it was helping Republicans, not punishing blacks.\n\nA few states, including California and Arizona, have switched to independent redistricting commissions.\n\nAmong the 10 most ugly redistricting efforts,", + " eight are the handiwork of Republican state governments. The Democratic Party earns a place in the hall of shame for its current efforts in Maryland \u2013 and historically, for more rampant efforts from the 1960s through to the 1990s.\n\nIn 2010, the GOP caught the Democrats resting on their laurels. In the wake of the so-called wave election in 2008, Barack Obama was in the White House; Democrats had majorities in the House and Senate; the party was in control of both chambers in 27 states and one chamber in each of another six states.\n\nRepublican strategists devised a devilish plot.", + " Karl Rove opted for no less than the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal to reveal the thrust of what was to be known as the REDMAP Project.\n\nBeneath a heading that read: \"He who controls redistricting can control Congress\", Rove explained that the 2010 census was about to be taken, necessitating a round of redistricting, and the GOP would focus on state legislatures in 2010 and in 2012 \u2013 flipping any they could to ensure mapmaking pencils would be in Republican hands.\n\nIt was as black and white - or as red and blue - as that.\n\nIn 2010,", + " the Republicans gained almost 700 seats in state legislatures, enough to swing 20 chambers to their control.\n\nAt the 2012 elections, Obama held the state of Pennsylvania by about 300,000 votes and Democrats outpolled Republicans there by almost 100,000 votes \u2013 but of the state's 18 congressional seats, 13 were won by Republicans.\n\nAnd in the 2014 midterm elections, redistricting delivered Democrats their worst defeat in more than 70 years.\n\nSo what can the Supreme Court do about all this? Its decision to review the constitutionality of the Republicans' approach to district boundaries in Wisconsin could revolutionise electoral politics and rob Republicans of their advantage in the aftermath of the 2020 census.\n\nOn gaining full control of the Wisconsin legislature for the first time in decades in 2010,", + " the GOP rejigged district boundaries in such a way that on winning just 48.6 per cent of the vote, the party walked away with 60 of the 90 State Assembly seats; and at the next elections, they picked up 52 per cent of the vote but bagged 63 seats.\n\nThe maps, a lower appeal court found, were \"designed to make it more difficult for Democrats... to translate their votes into seats\". Or as Princeton professor Samuel Wang said, they were proof again that legislative 'foxes' were being allowed to design electoral \"henhouses\".\n\nNew York University constitutional law professor Richard Pildes is disturbed by the seeming indifference of many Americans to such an open scam.\n\nBut Pildes offers two explanations,", + " based on feedback from his speaking engagements: \"There's a major distrust of any body that is relatively independent, and the American culture of democratic participation leads many to believe we're better off with people who can be voted out of office doing the redistricting.\"\n\nAt the Brennan Centre for Justice, counsel Michael Li fears an all-out redistricting war after the 2020 census.\n\n\"Globally, no other country leaves redistricting in the hands of self-interested parties,\" he said. \"And Wisconsin is particularly pernicious because of how it locks in such a disproportionate share of seats for one party.\n\n\"The evidence is especially strong,", + " in terms of emails and depositions on what people were trying to do \u2013 and there's reason to believe that [Justice] Kennedy is still the sweet vote.\"\n\nBut American justice is a fickle business \u2013 often it's what is legal that is shocking, more than what is illegal. And Paul Smith, who will argue the Wisconsin case before the Supreme Court in October, is taking nothing for granted.\n\n\"We've got to this point before \u2013 and lost,\" he said.\n\nSmith, vice-president for litigation and strategy at the Campaign Legal Center, argued the 2004 case that split the bench five ways.\n\nHe frames the question for the court as finding a compromise somewhere between the \"wildly unrealistic\"", + " possibility of eliminating all politics and allowing \"a certain amount\" of politics in the process.\n\n\"There have never been five justices who will agree on where that line should be drawn... but maybe now they'll be more willing to draw a line between 'troublesome' and the really bad stuff.\"\n\nThe standard which backers of the case hope will find favour with Justice Kennedy is a complex equation called the Efficiency Gap (EG), that seeks to measure partisanship by tallying \"wasted votes\": those of Democrats \"packed\" into districts in numbers that exceed the number needed for a Democratic candidate to win.\n\nBased on the work of University of Chicago law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos,", + " the figures are massaged district by district to calculate the EG, which is measured as a percentage. Arguing that an EG in excess of 7 should be deemed unconstitutional, the Wisconsin EG was found to be 13.3 in 2012 and 9.6 in 2014.\n\nA 2015 study that applied the formula nationally, found that over a 43-year period, one-third of all redistricting in 41 states exceeded the 7 per cent standard and that elections in 2012 and 2014 produced EGs exceeding 10 points in Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina,", + " New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.\n\nFormer Wisconsin state senate leaders Timothy Cullen, a Democrat, and Dale Schultz, a Republican, have joined the Wisconsin fight. In a jointly written op-ed in The Washington Post, they argue: \"Fighting gerrymandering is about fighting abuse of power, no matter who does it. If our side wins the lawsuit, we will establish a principle that reins in not only Republicans in states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina but also Democrats in states such as Maryland and Illinois.\"\n\nSo, all eyes will be on Justice Kennedy. This case is proceeding because of the glimmer of light he shined on the redistricting scandal back in 2004.\n\nBut now some are wondering if he's swinging the other way.\n\nThe court's decision this week to take the Wisconsin case was a political bombshell.", + " But it came with a rider \u2013 it also allowed the disputed Wisconsin district maps to stand, which means they will be used for at least one more cycle of elections.\n\nAnd who signed off on that little wrinkle? No surprise that the court's four reliable conservatives were on board \u2013 justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.\n\nAnd the fifth? Ah yes \u2013 that was Justice Anthony Kennedy. ", + " Tweet with a location\n\nYou can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ", + " President Trump will stick with the same list of potential nominees for the next Supreme Court vacancy, he told The Washington Times in an exclusive interview in which he also waved aside the lack of a honeymoon from Capitol Hill, saying Republicans are \u201cgoing to get there\u201d and Democrats are still smarting over losing an election they thought they couldn\u2019t lose.\n\nSpeaking in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump said a repeal of Obamacare would have passed the House last week if Republican leaders had put it up for a vote. He now expects a vote early in May, which he acknowledged is outside the 100-day time frame he had hoped for but still much shorter than the 15 months it took President Obama to have the national health care bill enacted.\n\nHe also said he expects the near-universal opposition to his agenda from congressional Democrats to wane.\n\n\u201cI notice it calming down,\u201d he said.\n\nReflecting on his first weeks,", + " the businessman turned statesman took pride in having upended traditional procedures in Washington. He said he has already notched foreign policy successes that eluded Mr. Obama \u2014 such as the release of Egyptian-American charity worker Aya Hijazi from detention in Egypt \u2014 and has made his mark at home with the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.\n\n\u201cYou\u2019ll have hundreds of cases decided by 5-4, and you got that. So that\u2019s a great legacy,\u201d the president said, noting that at 49, Justice Gorsuch has decades of important decisions ahead of him.\n\nMr. Trump shook the election campaign last year when he announced a list of 21 potential Supreme Court nominees,", + " selected with the help of the Federalist Society and The Heritage Foundation. The list was an instant hit with conservatives and helped cement the candidate\u2019s support among the Republican base.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a great list. From the moment I put that list out, it solved that problem. And I was proud to say it was my idea,\u201d he said.\n\nMr. Trump said he has heard rumors that one of the justices will retire when the current court session ends in June but that he doesn\u2019t have any inside knowledge.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t know. I have a lot of respect for Justice Kennedy, but I just don\u2019t know,\u201d Mr. Trump said, referring to the senior member of the bench,", + " Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. \u201cI don\u2019t like talking about it. I\u2019ve heard the same rumors that a lot of people have heard. And I have a lot of respect for that gentleman, a lot.\u201d\n\nMr. Trump said conservative voters should be assured that his next choice will be \u201creally talented and of our views.\u201d Asked specifically whether he would pick from the list of candidates he put forward in the campaign, Mr. Trump was unequivocal: \u201cYes,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cThat list was a big thing.\u201d\n\nDemocrats rallied near-unanimous opposition and mounted a filibuster in the fight over Justice Gorsuch, forcing Senate Republican leaders to trigger the \u201cnuclear option\u201d and take a shortcut to change the rules.\n\nFighting the Democrats\n\nIt was just one of the areas where Democrats have vowed to resist Mr.", + " Trump at every turn.\n\nThe president took a dealmaker\u2019s view of the obstructions he had faced on Capitol Hill, particularly from Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, a fellow New Yorker.\n\nLast week, as the federal government teetered on the verge of a partial shutdown, Republican leaders said Mr. Schumer was refusing to even talk to Mr. Trump \u2014 particularly about permitting any money for Mr. Trump\u2019s Mexico border wall. The president, though, said Mr. Schumer is coming to the table.\n\n\u201cHe\u2019s negotiating. I spoke to him three days ago. He\u2019s negotiating from a standpoint where the Democrats have been decimated,\u201d the president said.", + " \u201cThey thought they were going to win. It\u2019s almost impossible for the Democrats to lose. And I think we\u2019re much stronger today than I was on election night. You\u2019ve seen some polls come out where I\u2019m stronger today than I was on election night. So they\u2019re not happy, they\u2019re very angry.\u201d\n\nThe Senate Democratic leader, though, said Sunday that it is Mr. Trump who isn\u2019t ready to talk about serious issues on Democrats\u2019 terms.\n\n\u201cOn the issues so far \u2014 taxes and health care \u2014 he doesn\u2019t consult us at all,\u201d Mr. Schumer said on \u201cFox News Sunday.\u201d \u201cHe puts together a plan that is very hard-right,", + " special-interest [and] wealth-oriented and says the way to be bipartisan is to just support his plan. That\u2019s not the way America works.\u201d\n\nMr. Trump has struggled to forge unity within Republican ranks, too, hindering his efforts to notch early-term accomplishments. But the president said he wasn\u2019t put off by the lack of a honeymoon even from his own party.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a tight margin. These are really terrific people, and they\u2019ve been very good to me in the sense that they say, \u2018We want to do this for our president,\u2019\u201d he said, adding that includes both the right and the centrists.\n\n\u201cI will say,", + " they have their views, their views are somewhat spread out, I believe they\u2019re going to get there,\u201d he said, pivoting to the debate over repealing Obamacare. \u201cI believe over the next week or two or three, I said take your time. You said Obama had a honeymoon. The truth is Obamacare took 17 months to get approved. I only started working this a month and a half in. We could have taken a vote today, I think it could have made it, but who wants to take the chance? So we\u2019ll wait till next week. This is an artificial barrier, which I helped cause to a certain extent,", + " but we\u2019ve done a lot.\u201d\n\nFighting the press\n\nA constant during Mr. Trump\u2019s first 100 days in office has been his running battle with the media. Despite his efforts to bypass the media by posting frequent messages on Twitter, Mr. Trump said his job approval ratings would be better if he weren\u2019t confronting a steady stream of what he calls \u201cfake news.\u201d\n\n\u201cI think I\u2019m polling really, really well, considering if you watch television. \u2026 You\u2019d say, \u2018How can this guy be at 48 percent?\u2019\u201d Mr. Trump said. \u201cAnywhere in that [range], how can you do that when every single story is a hit?\u201d\n\nOne of Mr.", + " Trump\u2019s biggest foreign policy challenges so far has been the threat posed by North Korea\u2019s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs. White House National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said Sunday that the U.S. would pay for the $1 billion THAAD missile defense system in South Korea, despite Mr. Trump\u2019s comments to The Times two days earlier about making Seoul pick up the tab.\n\n\u201cWhat I told our South Korean counterpart is until any renegotiation, that the deals in place, we\u2019ll adhere to our word,\u201d Mr. McMaster said on \u201cFox News Sunday.\u201d\n\nMr. Trump\u2019s comments had caused unease in Seoul, which was already nervous about the belligerent exchanges between Washington and Pyongyang.", + " Mr. McMaster sought to reassure the ally in call earlier Sunday and told Fox that he was not contradicting Mr. Trump.\n\n\u201cThe last thing I would ever do is contradict the president of the United States. And that\u2019s not what it was,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat the president has asked us to do, is to look across all of our alliances and to have appropriate burden-sharing, responsibility-sharing. We\u2019re looking at that with our great ally South Korea, we\u2019re looking at that with NATO.\u201d\n\nMr. McMaster also stressed that North Korea poses a \u201cgrave threat\u201d to the U.S. and allies in the region and that Mr. Trump was determined to resolve the issue \u201cone way or another.\u201d\n\nMr.", + " Trump also said in the interview with The Times that he wants to renegotiate or withdraw from the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement known as Korus, which enters a review period this week. The current version, first begun under the George W. Bush administration, took effect in March 2012 under the Obama administration.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s been a very bad deal for the United States, negotiated by [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton,\u201d Mr. Trump said.\n\n\u2981 S.A. Miller contributed to this report.\n\n\n\n\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2018 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. ", + " Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and his clerks moved up a long-planned reunion event for his staffers by a year, sparking rumors that the 30-year veteran of the high court was contemplating retirement. Should Kennedy step down, it would remove one of the Supreme Court's key swing votes and give President Trump the opportunity to give it a durable conservative majority.\n\nThe justice has not given any public indication of his plans. Nevertheless, inside-the-beltway gossip has speculated for months that Kennedy, 80, may soon step down. Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, both Senate Judiciary Committee members, have said that they expect another vacancy on the court to occur this summer.\n\nThe rumors intensified following the news that the weekend reunion event's date was advanced as well as a tweet by George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr,", + " a former Kennedy clerk, on Friday: \"Soon we'll know if rumors of Kennedy's retirement are accurate.\"\n\nIn a tweet Saturday Kerr indicated that his comment was just speculation: \"The news cycle in 2017: I am now tweeting about a Drudge banner that links to a story about speculation that quotes one of my tweets.\"\n\nIf Kennedy were to step down it would be certain to lead to an intense fight on Capitol Hill regarding Trump's eventual nominee to replace him. Past nominations that merely replaced one Supreme Court justice with a similar like-minded one were nevertheless hard-fought battles. Kennedy's replacement has the potential to shift the balance of the court for decades.\n\nRoger Stone,", + " a longtime adviser to President Trump, said earlier this year in an interview with Infowars host Alex Jones that the likely pick to replace Kennedy was \"clearly Neil Hartigan from the Western District of Pennsylvania,\" one of the judges Trump reportedly considered to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia before settling on Justice Neil Gorsuch. The Washington Examiner previously noted that while it is possible that Stone was referring to the former Democratic Illinois Attorney General Neil Hartigan, it's more likely he messed up the name of Judge Thomas Hardiman, a 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals judge who appeared on Trump's Supreme Court short lists. ", + " FILE - This Jan. 25, 2012, file photo, shows the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington. The Supreme Court enters its final week of work before a long summer hiatus with action expected on the Trump... (Associated Press)\n\nFILE - This Jan. 25, 2012, file photo, shows the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington. The Supreme Court enters its final week of work before a long summer hiatus with action expected on the Trump... (Associated Press)\n\nWASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 The Supreme Court enters its final week of work before a long summer hiatus with action expected on the Trump administration's travel ban and a decision due in a separation of church and state case that arises from a Missouri church playground.\n\nThe biggest news of all,", + " though, would be if Justice Anthony Kennedy were to use the court's last public session on Monday to announce his retirement.\n\nTo be sure, Kennedy has given no public sign that he will retire this year and give President Donald Trump his second high court pick in the first months of his administration. Kennedy's departure would allow conservatives to take firm control of the court.\n\nBut Kennedy turns 81 next month and has been on the court for nearly 30 years. Several of his former law clerks have said they think he is contemplating stepping down in the next year or so. Kennedy and his clerks were gathering over the weekend for a reunion that was pushed up a year and helped spark talk he might be leaving the court.\n\n\"Soon we'll know if rumors of Kennedy's retirement are accurate,\" one former Kennedy clerk,", + " George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, said on Twitter Friday.\n\nWhen the justices take the bench Monday, they are expected to decide the case of Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Missouri, which was excluded from a state grant program to pay for soft surfaces on playgrounds run by not-for-profit groups. The case is being closely watched by advocates of school vouchers, who hope the court will make it easier to use state money to pay for private, religious schooling in states that now prohibit it.\n\nMissouri has since changed its policy under Republican Gov. Eric Greitens so that churches may now apply for the money.\n\nAlso expected in the next few days,", + " though there's no deadline by which the court must decide, is a ruling on whether to allow the administration to immediately enforce a 90-day ban on visitors from six mostly Muslim countries.\n\nJustice Neil Gorsuch, Trump's first Supreme Court nominee, could play a pivotal role in both the travel ban and church playground cases.\n\nIn all, six cases that were argued between November and April remain undecided. Three of those, all involving immigrants or foreigners, were heard by an eight-justice court, before Gorsuch joined the bench in April.\n\nIf the eight justices are evenly divided, those cases could be argued a second time in the fall, with Gorsuch available to provide the tie-breaking vote.", + " Washington (CNN) Justice Anthony Kennedy, the man who so often determines the outcome of the most controversial Supreme Court cases, is himself the center of brewing speculation.\n\nWill he stay or will he go?\n\nThe rumors have swirled for months and the 80-year-old justice has done nothing either personally or though intermediaries to set the record straight on whether he will step down.\n\nHelping drive the speculation, dozens of Kennedy's former law clerks traveled to Washington this weekend to participate in a private clerk reunion that occurs regularly -- and many of them wondered if it will be their last chance to meet with him while he is still on the bench.\n\nAt the end of a dinner with the former clerks Saturday night,", + " Kennedy addressed the crowd, saying he had heard some speculation about an announcement tonight, \"and here it is,\" he said: The \"bar will be open after dinner.\"\n\nBut sources close to Kennedy say that he is seriously considering retirement, although they are unclear if it could occur as early as this term.\n\nHis departure would cause a seismic shift and offer President Donald Trump a chance to continue reshaping the court. Trump's first nominee -- Justice Neil Gorsuch, himself a former Kennedy clerk -- joined the court earlier this year.\n\nPresident Reagan meeting with Judge Anthony Kennedy in the Oval Office\n\nWhy is Kennedy so important?\n\nLike no other justice in recent history,", + " Kennedy has cast the vital swing vote in cases that grab the countries' attention.\n\nTo liberals he is a hero for Obergefell v. Hodges -- a landmark opinion that cleared the way for same-sex marriage in 2015 and will likely be his most lasting legacy.\n\n\"They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law and the Constitution grants them that right,\" Kennedy wrote.\n\nTo the delight of abortion rights supporters, Kennedy voted to reaffirm the core holding of Roe v. Wade in 1992.\n\n\"As the court's most important Justice -- at the center of the institution's ideological balance -- Justice Kennedy's ability to bridge the divide between left and right on critical issues such as the right to access abortion cannot be overstated,\" said Elizabeth Wydra,", + " president of the Constitutional Accountability Center. \"Replacing Justice Kennedy with a Trump nominee would almost certainly sound the death knell for Roe, just as candidate Trump promised during the 2016 campaign.\"\n\nBut nine years later, he sided once again with the liberals on the court to strike down a Texas law that abortion rights supporters thought was the most strict nationwide. Without Kennedy's vote, the law would have been allowed to go into effect, inspiring other states to pass similar legislation.\n\nIn the same term, Kennedy pivoted on the issue of affirmative action when he voted for the first time in favor of a race-conscious admissions plan at a public university.\n\nAfter that term,", + " former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said, \"It is very much Justice Kennedy's Court.\"\n\n\"You can't understand how important his affirmative action opinion is without understanding his earlier jurisprudence,\" said Katyal. \"For decades, he has been the court's most eloquent voice on the need to be color blind -- why he changed his mind is something historians will debate for decades.\"\n\nPhotos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Anthony Kennedy, the longest-serving member of the current Supreme Court, has announced that he will be retiring at the end of July. Kennedy, 81, was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. He is a conservative justice but has provided crucial swing votes in many cases.", + " Hide Caption 1 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy was born in Sacramento, California, on July 23, 1936. In this photo, circa 1939, he sits between his mother, Gladys, and his sister, Nancy. Hide Caption 2 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy wears his Cub Scout uniform as he poses with his brother, Tim, circa 1946. Hide Caption 3 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy, third from right in the front row, stands with other Cub Scouts in the 1940s. Hide Caption 4 of 38 Photos:", + " Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy, right, spent time with the California Army National Guard after finishing law school in 1961. The man on the left, John J. Hamlyn Jr., also became a lawyer like Kennedy. Hide Caption 5 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy, right, and Hamlyn pose for a photo after basic training. Hide Caption 6 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy After more than a decade as a lawyer, Kennedy became a judge on the US Court of Appeals in 1975. He was nominated by President Gerald Ford on the recommendation of California Gov. Ronald Reagan.", + " Hide Caption 7 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy This courtroom photo of Kennedy was taken in 1976. Hide Caption 8 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy has breakfast with his wife, Mary, and his son Gregory in 1984. Hide Caption 9 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy and his wife walk together in Sacramento, California, in 1987. Hide Caption 10 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy From 1965 to 1988, Kennedy was also a professor of constitutional law at the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law.", + " Hide Caption 11 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy In 1987, Kennedy was nominated by President Reagan to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by Lewis Powell's retirement. The nomination came after the confirmation failures of nominees Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg. Hide Caption 12 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy, center, talks with US Sens. Ted Kennedy, left, and Joe Biden before a confirmation hearing in Washington. The two Kennedys are not related. Hide Caption 13 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy meets with President Reagan in the Oval Office. Hide Caption 14 of 38 Photos:", + " Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy is joined by his wife as he is sworn in by Chief Justice William Rehnquist on February 18, 1988. Reagan is on the right. Hide Caption 15 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy, top right, appears in a formal Supreme Court portrait in April 1988. In the front row, from left, are Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan Jr., Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Byron White and and Harry Blackmun. In the back row, from left, are Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor and Kennedy. Hide Caption 16 of 38 Photos:", + " Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy speaks at the McGeorge School of Law in 1991. He delivered the inaugural address in a lecture series named for the late Archie Hefner, whose portrait is behind Kennedy. Hefner was a prominent Sacramento attorney active in numerous civic and charitable groups. He died in 1988. Hide Caption 17 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy is on the far right in this Supreme Court portrait from 1998. In the front row, from left, are Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor and Kennedy. In the back row,", + " from left, are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer. Hide Caption 18 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy In 2004, Kennedy speaks to high school students at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Hide Caption 19 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy speaks during a Senate subcommittee hearing in 2002. Hide Caption 20 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy discusses the court's budget requests with a House committee in April 2005. Hide Caption 21 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy participates in a panel discussion in Washington in November 2005.", + " Hide Caption 22 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy receives an honorary degree at New York University in May 2006. Hide Caption 23 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy delivers the commencement address at New York University. Hide Caption 24 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy In February 2007, Kennedy testifies at a Senate committee hearing on judicial security and independence. Hide Caption 25 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy testifies before a House subcommittee in March 2007. He and fellow Justice Clarence Thomas spoke about concerns with the ongoing remodeling of the court building,", + " the reduction of paperwork due to electronic media, and the disparity of pay between federal judges and lawyers working in the private sector. Hide Caption 26 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy The Supreme Court meets with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in September 2009. From left are Samuel Alito, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kennedy, John Paul Stevens, Chief Justice John Roberts, Obama, Sonia Sotomayor, Biden, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer and retired Justice David Souter. Hide Caption 27 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy leaves after a Catholic Mass in Washington in October 2009.", + " Hide Caption 28 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy joins the President and other officials at a memorial for the victims of a shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011. Hide Caption 29 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy smiles as he is introduced to faculty members at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in October 2013. Kennedy was teaching there for a week. Hide Caption 30 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy is saluted by sailors as he tours the USS John C. Stennis in 2015. Hide Caption 31 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy testifies about a Supreme Court budget request during a House subcommittee meeting in 2015.", + " Hide Caption 32 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy President Obama greets Kennedy and other Supreme Court justices before his final State of the Union address in January 2016. Hide Caption 33 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy, second from left, joins other Supreme Court justices in February 2017 during President Donald Trump's first address to a joint session of Congress. Hide Caption 34 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy As President Trump looks on, Kennedy administers the judicial oath to new Justice Neil Gorsuch in April 2017. Hide Caption 35 of 38 Photos:", + " Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Kennedy and Trump walk together after Gorsuch's swearing-in ceremony. Hide Caption 36 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Trump stands with the Supreme Court at Gorsuch's formal investiture ceremony in June 2017. From left are Elena Kagan, Samuel Alito, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kennedy, Chief Justice John Roberts, Trump, Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Hide Caption 37 of 38 Photos: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Several members of the Supreme Court pose for a portrait before taking part in a procession to mark Harvard Law School's bicentennial in October 2017.", + " On the top row, from left, are Kennedy, Roberts, Breyer and Gorsuch. In front of them are Kagan and retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Hide Caption 38 of 38\n\nStill a conservative\n\nHowever, sometimes Kennedy voted with the four conservatives on the bench. It was Kennedy who penned the majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC -- striking down election spending limits for corporations and unions in support of individual candidates.\n\nHe's also sided with the right side of the bench on issues such as gun control and voting rights. Kennedy joined Chief Justice John Roberts' 2012 opinion, Shelby County V. Holder striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.\n\nAnd Kennedy sided with George W.", + " Bush in the case that essentially decided the 2000 presidential election for the GOP candidate.\n\nWhy now?\n\nOn one side is his age -- a desire to spend more time with his grandchildren is driving any decision, and in many ways he has already established an enduring legacy on the court.\n\nIn terms of a replacement, Kennedy might take comfort in the list of 20 judges Trump has vowed to draw from when considering the next vacancy on the court.\n\nAnother consideration is that if Kennedy were to delay his retirement for a year, his replacement would face confirmation during the mid-term election year, something that could further inject politics into an already controversial process.\n\nOn the other hand,", + " Kennedy is well aware of his role on the court and could be alarmed by how politicized the confirmation process has become. Indeed, Republicans were forced to change Senate rules to make it easier to confirm Gorsuch after Democrats objected.\n\nKennedy might think it would make sense to remain on the bench until the political climate simmers down -- although there's no guarantee that would ever happen.\n\nRetiring at 81 would not be all that much different than retiring at 80 and he would get to serve longer with Gorsuch as well as take up a case on next term's docket concerning partisan gerrymandering -- an issue that might once again keep Kennedy in the spotlight.", + " Getty Images\n\nThe speculation is hardly new. For months now, Supreme Court watchers have been wondering whether Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is often the deciding vote in controversial cases, will be stepping down. (Slate\u2019s Dahlia Lithwick looked into the issue almost a month ago.) Now as the Supreme Court gets ready for its final week of work before the summer holiday, some are wondering whether Kennedy will use the court\u2019s last public session on Monday to announce his retirement. Kennedy himself hasn\u2019t actually said anything about the issue, but the prospect that President Donald Trump will be able to fill up a second Supreme Court seat is terrifying many liberals who are afraid that would allow conservatives to take decisive control over the highest court in the land.\n\nSo where is all this speculation coming from?", + " The Associated Press summarizes:\n\nKennedy turns 81 next month and has been on the court for nearly 30 years. Several of his former law clerks have said they think he is contemplating stepping down in the next year or so. Kennedy and his clerks were gathering over the weekend for a reunion that was pushed up a year and helped spark talk he might be leaving the court.\n\n\u201cSoon we\u2019ll know if rumors of Kennedy\u2019s retirement are accurate,\u201d one former Kennedy clerk, George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, said on Twitter Friday.\n\nSoon we'll know if rumors of Kennedy's retirement are accurate, which makes this post on time limits timely again.", + " https://t.co/Qw1hFJWAvC pic.twitter.com/NHMgtC0Ejx \u2014 Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) June 23, 2017\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nKerr seemed to dismiss the attention his tweet received, writing on Saturday that he was just thinking out loud and had no inside information on the issue. \u201cThe news cycle in 2017: I am now tweeting about a Drudge banner that links to a story about speculation that quotes one of my tweets,\u201d Kerr wrote.\n\nThe news cycle in 2017: I am now tweeting about a Drudge banner that links to a story about speculation that quotes one of my tweets.", + " pic.twitter.com/qmigtvCyYW \u2014 Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) June 24, 2017\n\nTo be clear, I have zero inside knowledge about if Kennedy will retire. I was just noting speculation in tweet about case for term limits. \u2014 Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) June 24, 2017\n\nCNN talks to \u201csources close to Kennedy\u201d who say the justice is seriously considering retirement, but they aren\u2019t sure about timing and whether it will happen this term. Several of his former clerks who will be attending this weekend\u2019s reunion are reportedly concerned this will be the last time they will see Kennedy as a justice.\n" + ], + "length": 8565, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 40, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The tributes to George Michael are pouring in, as are stories about his legacy on and off the stage. A sampling: Tim Teeman at the Daily Beast recounts how Michael defied expectations with his response to a 1998 arrest for lewd behavior and became an LGBT hero. He did so in \"shockingly brash and unapologetic\" fashion. \"For him, every hit meant a radical revision of who he was and what he stood for,\" writes Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone. Read why he was a \"true pop visionary\" here. GQ resurrects an interview from 2004 in which Michael talks about beating his addictions and depression and being outed as gay in the 1990s. Read it in full here. A fan of \"Carpool Karaoke?\" Michael was the very first participant, and you can thank him for helping make it popular. See CNN. Mashable collects anecdotes about his acts of kindness here. The Guardian explains how an early record deal dispute and that infamous arrest sullied his impression of America. Digital streams of his music have \"gone galactic\" since the news broke, and TMZ has the specifics here. Entertainment Weekly has \"10 essential\" songs, with links to videos here. A critic at Billboard counts down his 15 best here. Bustle collects his best quotes, including thoughts on his sexuality and stardom here. Check out a 1992 video that also features David Bowie.\n", + "docs": [ + "Star scored success in the US but relationship was soured by row with label and arrest that forced him to come out\n\nGeorge Michael found success quickly in the US, briefly eclipsing even superstars such as Michael Jackson and Madonna at the tail end of the 1980s.\n\n\n\nBut his experience and life in America were soured by a fight with his record label and arrest in a public bathroom that forced him to come out as a gay man.\n\nAs a solo artist and with Wham!, the singer collected 10 No 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including Faith, Father Figure, One More Try and Careless Whisper,", + " Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go and Everything She Wants.\n\n\n\nOver on the albums charts, Wham! claimed a No 1 with its breakthrough album Make It Big, while Michael led the list as a soloist with Faith, spending 12 weeks in the top spot in 1988.\n\nAs the Rolling Stone writer Greg Pond noted that year: \u201cHe is only 24 \u2013 three years younger than Prince, five years younger than Michael Jackson, and outselling both of them. He is ridiculously famous; he has more money than he can spend. And for most of his brief career, he has had virtually no artistic credibility.\u201d\n\nI Knew You Were Waiting,", + " his duet with Aretha Franklin in 1987, earned him a Grammy award for best R&B performance. But it was his first solo album, Faith, released in 1987, which catapulted him to true American superstardom.\n\nThat album\u2019s first single, I Want Your Sex, was banned by some radio stations, adding to its appeal. US radio host Casey Kasem would not say the song\u2019s name on the air.\n\nFaith spent 51 non-consecutive weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard 200, eventually selling more than 10m copies, and won album of the year at the Grammys in 1989.\n\nFacebook Twitter Pinterest George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley of Wham!", + " perform in Solid Gold, their first American TV appearance, in 1982. Photograph: Wolfson/Rex/Shutterstock\n\nBut Michael\u2019s fortunes soon began to slip. He believed his record label Sony had not sufficiently promoted Faith\u2019s follow-up, Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1. Michael\u2019s label complained that the David Fincher-directed video for Freedom 90, while featuring emerging supermodels Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington, did not feature the singer, causing the album to perform poorly compared with its predecessor.\n\nIn 1992, Michael went to court in an attempt to break free from his recording contract. He later explained he was \u201ctrying to get myself into a situation where I worked with a company that had some respect for me\u201d.\n\nBut he lost the case,", + " which had prevented him from releasing any new material for two years, and was obliged to pay Sony $30m -$40m (\u00a324m-\u00a333m) to release him.\n\nThe dispute put him in the same situation as Prince, who was also mounting a high-profile campaign against his label at the time. Prince reportedly kept phoning Michael during the trial. \u201cI just never rung him back. We weren\u2019t exactly in the same boat. All I really wanted to say to him was, \u2018Wipe that fucking word [\u2018slave\u2019] off your cheek, you\u2019re not exactly doing me any favours\u2019,\u201d Michael said.\n\nDespite making new deals with Virgin in Britain and DreamWorks in America that gave him the artistic freedom he craved,", + " Michael had trouble coming up with new material.\n\nHe told friends that it did not matter that he had signed with Geffen, run by a prominent gay executive and founder David Geffen, because the music industry functioned as an old boys\u2019 club, its contracts based on those used to tie stars to studios.\n\n\u201cIt was part of the reason he turned his back on America,\u201d recalls Kim Bowen, a close friend of the singer who before his death was announced had been opening Christmas presents for her children sent by the singer.\n\nAccording to Bowen, his arrest in 1998 for engaging in a lewd act in a public restroom in Beverly Hills and the subsequent response changed his view of the country.", + " \u201cHe was such a fabulous, truthful gay man and he loved America, but when all the stuff went down he was just over it,\u201d says Bowen, who styled the Outside video. \u201cAmerica had loved him so much, I think it really broke his heart.\u201d\n\nBut the star\u2019s tribulations were a source of strength for many gay men and women, Bowen believes.\n\n\u201cHis coming out, which he did not plan and was not managed by any publicity machine, was a very painful thing for him. But the way he handled it, and the way he braved it, and the way he made it all right for them, empowered a generation of young men.\u201d\n\nThat may turn out to be Michael\u2019s true legacy in the US.", + " He sold his house in Beverly Hills and visited only sporadically. In 2008, Michael appeared in the TV series Eli Stone and performed on American Idol in 2008. He released a new track called December Song in the same year and in 2011 participated in James Corden\u2019s first Carpool Karaoke with a cover version of New Order\u2019s 1987 hit True Faith. ", + " George Michael Song Plays Explode After Death\n\nGeorge Michael Song Plays Explode After Death\n\nEXCLUSIVE\n\nGeorge Michael's music has gone galactic since his death... with streams of his solo music skyrocketing by 3,158%.\n\nAn official from Spotify tells TMZ, the top 5 songs fans have been streaming Monday are:\n\n1. \"Last Christmas\"\n\n2. \"Careless Whisper\"\n\n3. \"Faith\"\n\n4. \"Freedom! '90\"\n\n5. \"Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go\"\n\nSpotify compared Monday's numbers with the date from the same period Sunday, before Michael's death was revealed. ", + " George Michael produced plenty of chart-topping songs, but he also played a big part in making one of television's most popular recurring segments.\n\nFive years ago, the pop star was the first celebrity to appear with comedian James Corden as part of a \"Carpool Karaoke\" sketch. Corden is now the host of The Late Late Show on CBS.\n\nMichael was found dead on Sunday. He was 53.\n\nThe Wham! star's \"Carpool Karaoke\" segment aired on the BBC in 2011 as part of a show to benefit Comic Relief, a British charity that fights poverty and hunger.\n\n\"Carpool Karaoke\"", + " is now a highly popular fixture on The Late Late Show. It features the English comedian and a musical act cruising the streets while belting out their favorite tunes.\n\nIts reach is massive: The segment with Adele has been viewed more than 140 million times on YouTube, while Justin Bieber's appearance has more than 100 million views.\n\nCorden recalled making the first edition with Michael during an interview with Howard Stern earlier this year.\n\n\"We sat in the car and we were singing Wham! songs, and we couldn't really put our finger on: 'Why is this so joyful?' \" Corden told the radio host. \"There's just a joy in it and we couldn't really work out why.\"\n\nCorden said that first taping would later help convince Mariah Carey,", + " who was friends with Michael, to be the first American celeb to do \"Carpool Karaoke\" when it was revived for the The Late Late Show.\n\nThe comedian paid tribute to Michael on Twitter following his death.\n\nI've loved George Michael for as long as I can remember. He was an absolute inspiration. Always ahead of his time. \u2014 James Corden (@JKCorden) December 25, 2016\n\n\"I've loved George Michael for as long as I can remember. He was an absolute inspiration. Always ahead of his time,\" Corden tweeted on Sunday. ", + " It appears that while many facets of George Michael's life were sensationalised and made public, he was very privately doing good deeds.\n\nAs the world mourns the 53-year-old's death, which was reported on Christmas, people are sharing stories of the pop star's acts of kindness.\n\nFor struggling individuals\n\nA good deed reported by Richard Osman, a UK television presenter and producer, is being widely shared.\n\nA woman on 'Deal Or No Deal' told us she needed \u00a315k for IVF treatment. George Michael secretly phoned the next day and gave her the \u00a315k. \u2014 Richard Osman (@richardosman) December 26,", + " 2016\n\nMashable has reached out to the show's production company, Endemol, to ask for confirmation. But there is a BBC story from 2008 about a couple who received \u00a39,000 ($11,057) from a mystery benefactor after one half of the couple, Steve Davies, appeared on the show to try and win money.\n\nAnother story says the same benefactor also donated \u00a391,000 to a charity that helps AIDS orphans in Kenya.\n\nOne of the replies on the thread, from someone who claims to be a trivia buff, claims that George Michael anonymously helped a stranger with debt.\n\n@", + "richardosman he gave a stranger in a cafe \u00a325k as she was crying over debt. Told the waitress to give her the cheque after he left. \u2014 VectorVictoria (@V3ct0rv1ct0r) December 26, 2016\n\nAnd Sali Hughes, a beauty writer for the Guardian, shared her experience of Michael's generosity.\n\nI wrote in a piece ages ago about a celeb I'd worked with tipping a barmaid \u00a35k because she was a student nurse in debt. Was George Michael. \u2014 Sali Hughes (@salihughes) December 26, 2016\n\nWhich leads us to...\n\nFor nurses\n\nGeorge Michael took the time to show NHS nurses how much he appreciated their help after their care for his mother Lesley,", + " who died of cancer in 1997.\n\nHis support for the LGBTQ community, the NHS and the miners marked George Michael out as an activist as well as a great artist. pic.twitter.com/tsKNp22Lr7 \u2014 Billy Bragg (@billybragg) December 26, 2016\n\nA nurse at that gig, Sally Lyons, said, \"A nervous George Michael took to the stage with a bad cold and told us he\u2019d played in front of crowds all over the world but was anxious because he\u2019d never performed in front of so many heroes before.\"\n\nMore people spoke about his gigs and generosity toward nurses.\n\nGeorge Michael used to give a bunch of free tickets to his shows to NHS nurses.", + " He allocated a whole area of Wembley to nurses. DEMOGRAPHIC. \u2014 Hayley Campbell (@hayleycampbell) December 26, 2016\n\n\n\n\n\nMy housemate (a junior dr) grabbed the hospital's spares, took the whole houseshare. That's how I ended up drunk among nurses at Wembley. \u2014 Hayley Campbell (@hayleycampbell) December 26, 2016\n\nFor the homeless\n\nActivist and actor Emilyne Mondo described how Michael would help out in a homeless shelter without calling a bit of attention to himself or the charitable endeavors.\n\nGeorge Michael worked anonymously at a homeless shelter I was volunteering at.", + " I've never told anyone, he asked we didn't. That's who he was \u2014 EMILYNE MONDO (@EmilyneMondo) December 26, 2016\n\nFor children\n\nThe founder of Childline, a charity that enables children to anonymously phone counsellors for help, revealed that George Michael had donated millions over the years.\n\n\u201cFor years now he has been the most extraordinarily generous philanthropist, giving money to Childline. But he was determined not to make his generosity public, so no-one outside the charity knew how much he gave to the nation\u2019s most vulnerable children,\u201d Dame Esther Rantzen told the Press Association.\n\n\u201cI think all of us have memories of particular Wham!", + " songs and George Michael songs which mean a great deal to us. Certainly, for Britain\u2019s children, George Michael meant so much more,\u201d she said.\n\nFor people with disabilities\n\nThe pop superstar also donated money to his Platinum Trust, which ran in aid of people with special educational needs according to a 2011 book about his life. Twitter users described it, too.\n\nHe kept quiet about it but #georgemichael also set up a Trust which gave grants to work supporting rights of #disabled children and adults. \u2014 jenny morris (@jennifermor) December 26, 2016\n\nRIP George Michael pop royalty and humanitarian.", + " The Platinum Trust run by his family helped so many disabled people. \u2014 Brenda Ellis (@sapphitweet) December 26, 2016\n\nGeorge Michael also more publicly supported groups like HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust, along with Band Aid and Live Aid, which raise money for anti-famine efforts.\n\nWe may never know the true extent of all George Michael's public and private charity efforts. But perhaps Buzzfeed editor Janine Gibson summed it up best in her tweet.\n\nIt's notable that George Michael's secrets seem to have been covert acts of extraordinary generosity \u2014 Janine Gibson (@janinegibson) December 26, 2016\n\nThe world has truly lost someone extraordinary.", + " The 15 Greatest George Michael Songs: Critic's Take\n\nGeorge Michael, who died on Sunday (Dec. 25) at the far-too-young age of 53, was almost certainly the most under-appreciated pop star of MTV's first decade. Not at the time, of course -- with ten Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles in nine years between his solo career and his work with early co-conspirator Andrew Ridgeley in Wham!, along with one diamond-selling album in 1987's Faith, at least we can say that the singer/songwriter/sex symbol was as contemporaneously beloved as a man of his peerless pop talents deserved.\n\nBut due to a relatively abrupt fade from Top 40's center,", + " a close association with some of the more overblown visual and sonic signifiers of the 1980s, and some less-than-progressive attitudes about his homosexuality -- and the way it manifested in both his music and public life -- have kept George Michael from maintaining the mononymic-level status afforded to peers like Madonna, Prince, Janet and Michael. Consequently, when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees are announced every year, not only is the artist born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou never included, but the Internet scarcely feigns outrage at his snubbing, as if he barely deserves accounting for in the rock canon -- despite the fact that he was responsible for the best Bo Diddley rip of the past 40 years,", + " and did more for the leather jacket than anyone since The King.\n\nGeorge Michael's music should be taken very seriously, and also very frivolously -- few songwriters of his era were as capable of writing both heart-wrenching torch ballads speaking to the essential isolation at the core of the human condition, and sugary pop trifles where the only word you needed to understand was \"jitterbug.\" And the best of his songs usually fell somewhere in between, bold and bubbly declarations of independence and deliverance that still admitted how scared and unsure he was about all of it, a too-rare combination of pro prowess and outsider insecurity that seemed to make him more relatable the more popular he became.\n\nIt's too late for George Michael to get the level of respect as an artist,", + " songwriter and overall icon that he deserved during his lifetime. But all he ever wanted from us was to listen without prejudice, and that (hopefully) we can still do. Here are the 15 best places to start.\n\n15. \"Outside\" (Ladies and Gentlemen, The Best of George Michael, 1998)\n\nIn which George Michael stared down one of the most scandalous arrests of the modern pop era and decided f--k 'em if they can't take a joke. With its euphoric sense of dance-floor release and doubled-down cheekiness (down to Michael playing a cop in a bathroom-turned-disco in the video)", + " \"Outside\" leaned so far in it fell all the way over, and while the thing flopped in the U.S. and effectively signaled his career's end stateside, he was probably having too much fun to notice.\n\n14. \"Move On\" (Older, 1996)\n\nMichael showed an odd affinity for post-Style Council faux-jazz arrangements over the course of his career -- maybe fancying himself the late-night club singer reflecting the denizens' loneliness back to them. It didn't always work, but one of the times it did was on the downtempo soft-shoe of Older's \"Move On,\" in which Michael softly reflects upon a life of tribulation -- which a few years earlier had expanded to include the death of lover Anselmo Feleppa to AIDS -- and states with the quiet determination of a muted trumpet:", + " \"I think of all the days and nights I spent crying / And I move on.\" The applause Michael receives at song's end is hard-earned.\n\n13. \"The Edge of Heaven\" (Music From the Edge of Heaven, 1986)\n\nThe absolutely absurd run of hits George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley experienced in just a three-year run as Wham! finally came to an end with farewell single \"The Edge of Heaven,\" though it hardly sounds like goodbye -- the breathless proficiency of its Motown-borrowed swing, with Michael riding it like a cowboy scared to loose his grip, suggests a duo still enjoying the view from the top of the pops.", + " It's overshadowed today because they'd done it better once or twice before; by anyone else \"The Edge of Heaven\" would be remembered as peak '80s.\n\n12. \"Something to Save\" (Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1, 1990)\n\nCertainly a less-remembered side of George Michael; with its rousing acoustic guitars, folky lyrical earnestness and weighty strings, \"Something to Save\" could be easily mistaken for college rock. But while George Michael fans are no doubt thankful he didn't dwell too long in this period of musical self-righteousness, he actually did it quite well -- the song still eschews chest-beating for soul-baring,", + " and by the time the pack harmonies hit halfway through, even the Black Crowes fans had to get their lighters up.\n\n11. \"A Different Corner\" (Music From the Edge of Heaven, 1986)\n\nMichael's official solo debut in the States, nestled within Wham!'s swansong LP, and a spellbinding test run. The bass line echoes Ben E. King's \"Stand By Me\" -- doubtlessly noted with no small amount of bitter irony by the soon-to-be-jettisoned Ridgeley -- and while the singer's repeated pronouncements of \"I'm so scared\" make him sound like anyone who's ever dared to love someone more than they seemed to return the favor,", + " they don't make him sound like someone particularly worried about his upcoming solo career.\n\n10. \"Careless Whisper\" (Make It Big, 1984)\n\nPerhaps only \"Bad to the Bone\" could claim an '80s opening riff as immediately recognizable as the sax star-wipe that introduces (and ultimately defines) \"Careless Whisper,\" a far more convincing argument against the one-night stand than Jermaine Stewart ever managed. That unshakeable main hook ensures the song's enduring virality, while the chorus makes it a karaoke all-timer -- that this might've only been the third-best single off Make It Big should tell you all you need to know about the caliber of George Michael's C.V.\n\n9.", + " \"Fastlove\" (Older, 1996)\n\nCalling your third solo album Older is not generally well-advised pop star behavior, but George Michael saw no need to hide his middle-agedness when it gave him a smooth self-confidence and louche charm to rival Jarvis Cocker. Over a G-funk-inspired groove, \"Fastlove\" sees Michael shaking off the last of his dancing feet's '80s-era guiltiness, and hitting the club to make some overdue memories: \"My friends got their ladies, they're all having babies / I just want to have some fun.\" Sounded like a plan, certainly.\n\n8.", + " \"I Want Your Sex\" (Faith, 1987)\n\nHard to believe that there was a time not so long ago where pop music actually had to go on the defensive about f--king, but the too-funky \"I Want Your Sex\" responded to mid-'80s AIDS paranoia with what could then have been perceived as a bold statement: \"Sex is natural, sex is good / Not everybody does, but everybody should.\" Of course, \"Sex\" landed Michael in boiling water, whose temperature was raised by those who misinterpreted its message as pro-promiscuity; Michael wrote \"Explore monogamy\" on his partner's body in lipstick in the video and made the song 100 times hotter.\n\n7.", + " \"Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go\" (Make It Big, 1984)\n\nThe shirts commanded \"Choose Life,\" but \"Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go\" hardly allowed room for another option -- few songs in the history of pop music have ever be so oppressively effervescent, making even Katrina and the Waves sound like a Leonard Cohen cover band by comparison. But the song had the teeth to make its painfully wide smile seem plausible, with every bass pop, horn blow, and vocal exhortation making Michael and Ridgeley sound like a couple of prizefighters whipping themselves into a frenzy before the big match -- even if all they're really getting pumped for is a night on the town,", + " which the singer ends up canceling anyway for a good snuggle.\n\n6. \"Amazing\" (Patience, 2004)\n\nA perfect late-period George Michael song, its guitar-pop breeziness making it relatively understated compared to most of his lead singles, which just allows one of his all-time best lyrics to shine through. Like Paul McCartney, Michael never permitted himself to become jaded about love, and \"Amazing\" stuns as a simple, consistently impressed testament to the sensation's restorative powers: \"The day you walked in and changed my life / I think it's amazing / The way that love can you set you free.\" As powerful as a bemused observation as anything Michael's ever belted with his full body.\n\n5.", + " \"Faith\" (Faith, 1987)\n\nMichael's ass-shaking solo statement of intent, getting a truly shocking amount of juice out of a hand-jiving guitar riff, some well-placed snaps, and an organ intro that gives gospel-like heft to the harmonies that follow. Finding so much joy and strength in the act of resisting temptation is a tough thing for a pop song to do, but \"Faith\" demonstrated how a record saying \"no\" could be just as steamy as one saying \"yes\" -- no small feat, given Faith's lead single. Of course, Fred Durst changed one pronoun in the first verse and nearly ruined the whole thing,", + " but two decades later, no one under the age of 25 needs know his version even exists.\n\n4. \"Everything She Wants\" (Make It Big, 1984)\n\nA remarkable thing about George Michael's first 15 years in pop music was how, even as a gay man pressured by forces around him to keep his sexuality hidden, his songwriting never came off as misdirecting or forced, even in retrospect. You could interpret the central conflict at the heart of Wham!'s 1985 chart-topper \"Everything She Wants\" -- Michael's incredulousness at his female lover's financial neediness, which increasingly outweigh his desire to keep her happy -- however you want,", + " but his (lack of) feelings for her are hardly veiled as he cries \"My God! I don't even think that I love you!\" The rawness of emotion always translated for the singer/songwriter -- and over the squelching disco juggernaut of a beat here, it sounded about as urgent as a nuclear war.\n\n3. \"One More Try\" (Faith, 1987)\n\nWith synths that presaged Sinead O'Connor's most incomparable hit and a power-waltz sway that paved the end of the road for Boyz II Men, \"One More Try\" stands as the closest thing George Michael has to a forgotten classic.", + " While \"Father Figure\" may be the better-remembered Faith ballad, \"One More Try\" is the more quintessential; a tortured maybe-breakup song that spends five minutes begging for merciful release from love, only to lose its nerve at the last second and agree to start all over again. From a lesser artist the ending would come off as cop-out or disappointment, but Michael invests so much of himself in the song's devastating, all-chambers-emptied vocal that it's clear throughout he's already pot-committed -- maybe he could leave, but there wouldn't be much of himself left to take with.\n\n2.", + " \"Last Christmas\" (Single, 1984)\n\nJeez, like it wasn't already hard enough to stay dry-eyed through this song. After this particular holiday season, the glistening synth-pop of \"Last Christmas\" is bound to take on an unfortunate and everlasting new resonance for George Michael fans, as the song's overpowering Yuletide melancholy inevitably gets wrapped up in depressing Where Were You When You Heard? memories. If there's one solace to take in the exponential emotional surge of \"Last Christmas,\" it's that an enduring lesson of Michael's seems to be that in music and in life, the misery that love causes us is inextricable from the joy it gives,", + " and that to take one for granted in focus on the other is to cheapen the whole experience. Anything that comes with the experience of giving your heart away is worthwhile, as long as you're giving it to someone special.\n\n1. \"Freedom '90\" (Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1)\n\nGeorge Michael had the unique misfortune among major rock-era pop stars of having to spend virtually his entire career rejecting the performer he had just finished being. So when the tight shorts of the Wham! era became comical, they gave way to the jeans and leather jacket of Faith, and once that was big enough to cease being backlash-proof,", + " he had to literally blow that look up in the \"Freedom '90\" video. Though it's hard to say when or if Michael was able to finally break the cycle, over the process he became an artist defined by redefinition, one whose most powerful statement was in his ability and decision to make whatever statement he then chose, regardless of who liked him better before or who would like him less after.\n\n\"Freedom '90\" was the song that best expressed this ethos, both literally and figuratively. The lyrics, which serve as both origin story and quasi-heel turn for Michael, essentially spell it out from the opening lines: \"Heaven knows I was just a young boy / Didn't know what I wanted to be.\" Throughout,", + " he tells of the way his image was co-opted and commodified, and how we now wants out -- though he acts as his own judge or jury in the court of public opinion for doing so (\"That's what you get for changing your mind!\") But he begs listeners to hear him out, and to put their trust first and foremost in what really matters: the music. \"Gotta have some faith in the sound,\" he pleads. \"It's the one good thing that I've got.\"\n\nAnd in the case of \"Freedom '90,\" the sound is beyond undeniable. Multiplying Aretha Franklin by The Rolling Stones by Elton John,", + " Michael summons a righteous fury of piano-led rock-and-soul to serve as his backing choir as he preaches the gospel, and the song builds to its titular chant -- through a deliberate, echoing verse and two (!!) lengthy pre-choruses -- with impossible patience, so that when the word finally arrives, it's as liberating as multiple snow days. It's the shortest six-and-a-half minute song in pop history, because all of it feels so essential, so powerful, so true. \"Please don't give me up,\" he implores us on the chorus. \"\u2018Cause I would really, really love to stick around.\" He should never have had to ask in the first place.", + " George Michael's house is tucked away alongside a block of flats in the dead end of a rather unremarkable west London road. His Range Rover barely squeezes onto the off-street parking area, and there are no security gates, no imposing entrance pillars, and not so much as a CCTV camera or concrete lion in sight. Britney et al would pale at the thought. The man even answers his own front door, for God's sake, greeting me with a cosmetically assisted Colgate smile that's the only clue to his superstar status.\n\n\"I'm just not security-minded,\" he shrugs, throwing coffee into two cups in his kitchen.", + " \"And I have a feeling that if you think that way, bad shit comes to you. If someone really wants to hurt you, they'll find a way whatever. I don't want to live my life worrying about it.\"\n\nThat said, he has had a couple of unsettling experiences with fans, most notably an English girl who lived under his house for four days. Built on a slope, the low-slung frontage leads into a spacious, split-level living room, propped up by stilts at the rear, overlooking a fabulously lush garden that belies its city location. \"I had no idea she was under there,\" George says.", + " \"I was talking to one of my friends one night, and I thought I could hear my name being called out. Then she suddenly presented herself.\" He called the police, but as there were no anti-stalking laws at the time, they told George there was nothing they could do. \"The only reason they eventually took her to the police station was because she punched one of them,\" he scoffs. \"She came back a few times, and a few months later they found her masturbating in the corner of my garden!\"\n\nAdvertisement\n\nHe's also found other fans lurking around the property, and a few have broken in and left gifts.", + " But he seems unfazed by this. \"Listen, if I had children, I would be Mr Security. I'd have all the trappings because I would be neurotic on their behalf. But as it's just me, no.\"\n\nUntil recently, a journalist's only hope of entering George's private world would probably have meant joining the crazed fan under the floorboards. But here I am, welcomed into his home, a cup of coffee in my hand and surrounded by scented candles which add to the relaxed atmosphere. Dressed in black with his Labradors Meg and Abby playing at his feet, this is a trim, healthy George,", + " finally at peace with who he is, a man who admits, since his arrest in 1998 for lewd behaviour in a Los Angeles public loo, he's been \"a better-off gay man.\"\n\nRead next The first... with Kojo Funds The first... with Kojo Funds Kojo Funds talks getting drunk, his first rider and cheating on his barber\n\nWhen 12-year-old Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou first met Andrew Ridgeley at Bushey Meads school in Hertfordshire in 1975, the seeds were sown for a musical career that was to gain him worldwide recognition and untold millions in the bank.", + " As Wham! they burst onto the pop scene in 1982 with the heady combination of micro shorts and George's major songwriting talent. By 1986 they called it a day and a new, more sombre George Michael emerged. His first solo album, 1987's Faith, sold ten million copies and won a Grammy. In 1990 there was Listen Without Prejudice, Vol 1, followed by Older in 1996, full of powerful ballads. Then... nothing. Although there were vast sales for his greatest hits CD, Ladies And Gentlemen, in 1998 and the contractual-obligation album of covers,", + " Songs From The Last Century in 1999, he suffered writer's block for nearly four years and despaired whether he'd ever write a hit again.\n\nWhile waiting for a house to be renovated, George moved back to the first house he ever bought - the one we're sitting in now and the one he most associates with his mother, who would insist on cleaning it for him. \"Something miraculous happened and I just started writing again,\" he says, convinced it has something to do with the feel of his mother in the house.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nIf I wasn't with my boyfriend, I would have sex with women, no question\n\nThe subsequent 2002 single \"Shoot The Dog\", a satire on Bush and Blair in the run-up to the Iraq War,", + " only got to No. 12 and George found himself criticised for meddling in politics. But he remains unrepentant and included it on his latest solo effort, Patience, which is Britain's fastest-selling album this year, selling 275,000 copies in its first week and reaching No.1. Sales are currently approaching four million worldwide and the album also received favourable reviews, with one commenting that it's a new George Michael \"who no longer minds being thought of as a pop star\".\n\nHe frowns, \"I never minded being thought of as a pop star. People have always thought I wanted to be seen as a serious musician,", + " but I didn't, I just wanted people to know that I was absolutely serious about pop music.\"\n\nRead next The songs that made 2018 worthwhile type-gallery The songs that made 2018 worthwhile Out of despair came the hits\n\nCertainly, many of his solo lyrics have a dark side a world away from the lyrical bubble gum of Wham!'s \"Club Tropicana\" and \"Wake Me Up Before You Go Go\". But little wonder, for George has, in his words, \"been into the abyss\" in his private life.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThe start of the downward spiral can be pinpointed to New Year 1991 when his Brazilian boyfriend Anselmo Feleppa flew to London to tell George he had tested positive for AIDS.", + " It was just three months after they met. \"He'd had the result earlier but he told me it was negative because he didn't want to spoil my Christmas,\" says George, who dedicated Older to Anselmo.\n\nAnselmo eventually died of a brain haemorrhage in 1993, shortly after returning to Brazil for a blood transfusion.\n\nBecause the death was unexpected, George wasn't with him, \"It was untimely, but that way he never lost his dignity, and I suppose I was spared the worst of what some people go through. But I'm still convinced that had he been in the USA or London,", + " he would have survived, because just six months later everyone was on combination therapy.\"\n\nStudies now show a three-drug combination of anti-HIV treatments is much more effective than a single drug or two-drug combinations in preventing disease progression. \"I think he went to Brazil because he feared what my fame would do to him and his family if he got treatment elsewhere,\" says George. \"I was devastated by that. The idea that he had the opportunity to go somewhere better but wouldn't take it because of my fame makes me feel very guilty.\"\n\nRead next Ten life lessons from The Rolling Stones Ten life lessons from The Rolling Stones As well as imparting countless rock & roll classics upon the world,", + " The Rolling Stones have taught us plenty too\n\nAnselmo had a strict Catholic upbringing and to this day, the effect it had on his life is something that leaves a bitter taste in George's mouth. \"I can't bear Catholicism. One of the most heartbreaking things I ever saw was when I went into Anselmo's room one afternoon and he was sitting there in bed with his prayer cards. I just thought to myself, 'Please don't tell me you think you're going to hell.' It makes me so angry and I sincerely hope he didn't fear that.\"\n\nAndrew MacPherson\n\nThe day after Anselmo's death,", + " George decided to finally admit to his parents he was gay, and he did so in a long letter. His mother Lesley's only reaction was devastation that she hadn't been able to help her son through such a traumatic experience. But what of Jack, the traditionally Greek father who had always had a more remote relationship with his young son, owing to prolonged absences running the family restaurant? \"He never displayed any disappointment or homophobia,\" says George. \"I'm sure he felt it, and it was hard for him, but he didn't lay any of it onto me which I have to thank him for. This is sad, but I do feel success can negate a parent's disappointment.", + " I genuinely feel that although his son is gay and not going to give him any grandkids, my dad's consolation is that I have done well in life.\"\n\nGeorge went into therapy as soon as Anselmo was diagnosed, and it was three years after his death before he felt able to consider another relationship. Then, in 1996, he met Kenny Goss the chisel-jawed Texan who shares his life to this day. They have always said they met in the LA department store Fred Segal, but the truth is they got talking in a respectable LA spa. \"We thought if we told the truth, certain people would think we met cruising each other!\"", + " he laughs. \"But that wasn't what happened at all. We just got chatting and I asked him out for dinner. I wasn't even sure if he was gay.\"\n\nThrilled that his life seemed to be on the up again, he rang his mother to share the good news. In the same call, she told him she had been diagnosed with cancer. \"So I didn't even get one day to feel happy about having met Kenny. I was back into the black hole,\" he says quietly. \"I haven't had any dark days for a long time now, but there was a point when that was all I had. I just used to sleep and sleep.", + " Some days I could barely put one foot in front of the other; it was real depression. I was on Prozac. It made a slight difference, but for it to have really worked I would have had to be pumped so full of drugs I think the side effects would have been dreadful.\"\n\nRead next Meet Jonas Blue, the DJ behind this year\u2019s biggest pop bangers Meet Jonas Blue, the DJ behind this year\u2019s biggest pop bangers The DJ on his fail-safe formula for pop success and working in a bar with Sam Smith pre-fame.\n\nI'm happier now. I seem to have progressed mentally, regardless of being a pothead\n\nHe would frequently snap out of the depression and think it was over,", + " telling anyone who'd listen how his life was back on track and how he'd write a successful album any day now. But then the smallest thing would trigger it again. \"I was so close to the edge all the time that I kept getting knocked back into the abyss, constantly looking over my shoulder wondering where the next blow would come from. But touch wood, things are good now. No one's died on me or betrayed me for a while,\" he laughs.\n\nBeing depressed is one thing, living with it quite another, and one wonders how Kenny coped with so much dark reality when the relationship was still in its fledgling stages.\n\nA lesser person might have run a mile,", + " and George is in no doubt quite how important his partner's support was. \"If he hadn't been around, I think my life would have been in danger, in terms of me,\" George says matter-of-factly. \"After Mum's death in 1997, when I couldn't write and I felt really worthless, I don't think I could have taken it really. I think I might have been one of those cowards who choose a nasty way out.\"\n\nDoes he mean suicide? He purses his lips and ponders the thought for a moment or two. \"I dont know for sure, but I would imagine it would have been a very strong possibility if I hadn't had someone as strong as Kenny to rely on.", + " He was there to put his arms around me and remind me there was something positive going on. I was never without stress from the moment I found out about Mum's cancer, but Kenny waited and he finally got to see me healthy and happy last year. Hopefully it was worth the wait. He gives a wry smile and lights up a Silk Cut.\n\nRead next The first... with Sam Fender The first... with Sam Fender From the first time Sam Fender had his heart broken to the first time he threw a punch\n\nMadonna's sexuality is hers. It's not for men. She's very strong. I had a feeling that sex with her would be like being with a man.", + " Maybe I should have tried it\n\nIt's well-documented that George also likes to smoke joints, once puffing his way through up to 18 a day. His intake is much fewer now, but at its height, does he think it contributed to his depression? \"If you've smoked it for a long time - which I have - it can be linked to depression, but I don't think that`s the case with me. I'm sure it's bad for me in some ways, but I love smoking. I wish to God I didn't, especially as a singer. It was the most stupid thing I ever did, but I`", + "m definitely a more together and happier man.\n\nIn other words, I seem to have progressed mentally, regardless of being a pothead!\" He pauses and puts on a mock serious tone. \"But I wouldn't recommend it to the young.\"\n\nHis laid-back attitude to his own wellbeing is in contrast to his concern for those close to him particularly Kenny, whose company sells sportswear to US schools and colleges. \"My biggest problem in life is fear of more loss. I fear Kenny's death far more than my own. I don't want to outlive him. I'd rather have a short life and not have to go through being torn apart again.", + " Kenny has to travel a lot with his job and we have fights before he flies because I try and get him to avoid British Airways or American Airlines in case he falls victim to a terrorist attack. When he leaves me, I panic. I can't relax until he's called to say he's arrived safely. But when I fly, I don't care and get straight on BA.\"\n\nSo much of their eight-year liaison is conventional. But recently, the relationship hit the headlines when George revealed they both have no-strings-attached sex with other men, \"Some gay men manage monogamy forever, and I envy them because it's a great thing.", + " But when you first meet someone, that chemical flows through your body and says 'fuck, fuck, fuck!' it's wondrous. If you can keep hold of that, great. But for me to experience that again in a relationship, I'd have to split with Kenny.\"\n\nRead next 15 not-boring questions with... Miles Kane 15 not-boring questions with... Miles Kane From the most important item on his rider, to his greatest extravagance...\n\nHis argument is that although they have sex with other men, they are emotionally monogamous. But here comes another George Michael revelation... sexually, he swings both ways, \"When I walk into a restaurant I check out the women before the men,", + " because they're more glamorous. If I wasn't with Kenny, I would have sex with women, no question,\" he enthuses. \"But I would never be able to have a relationship with a woman because I'd feel like a fake. I regard sexuality as being about who you pair off with, and I wouldn't pair off with a woman and stay with her. Emotionally, I'rn definitely a gay man.\"\n\nMost gay men will tell you they knew from as young as three or four that their sexuality was a predisposition they could do nothing about where does he stand on the nature versus nurture argument? \"In my case it was a nurture thing,", + " via the absence of my father who was always busy working. It meant I was exceptionally close to my mother. All of my early sexual fantasies were straight and totally readable. My first fantasy involved me being surrounded by a group of nuns who all had their tits out. I mean, how obvious can you get. I was lying helpless on some kind of medical table. I have no idea what that all means. And there was a female maths teacher I used to masturbate about as well, so all that led me to believe I was on the path to heterosexuality. It wasn't until puberty that I started fantasising about men,", + " and I do think it had something to do with my environment. But there are definitely those who have a predisposition to being gay in which the environment is irrelevant.\"\n\nPA Photos\n\nHe has said in the past that, as a child, he sometimes felt his mother didn't regard him as man enough, \"She was so liberal as a parent that it didn't make sense that she might feel like that,\" he says now. \"But I think it was because her brother Colin had killed himself the day after I was born, and she thought it was because he was gay. So I'm sure she was terrified of seeing anything gay about me because,", + " to her, being gay meant misery. I totally understand that, even though she was misguided in worrying about it.\" Thankfully, times have now changed to such an extent that Colin's famous nephew is open and happily gay and appearing on the cover of GQ. \"Every little bit helps,\" smiles George on this notable event.\n\nAt the age of 19, during the making of Wham!'s second album, George had worked out he was bisexual. He told Andrew Ridgeley and close friends immediately, and was ready to tell the world. \"I had very little fear about it, but basically my straight friends talked me out of it.", + " I think they thought as I was bisexual, there was no need to.\n\nRead next Glastonbury gives Kylie Minogue the chance to prove she is pop's greatest curator Glastonbury gives Kylie Minogue the chance to prove she is pop's greatest curator Nobody knows a hit better than her\n\nBut it's amazing how much more complicated it became because I didn't come out in the early days. I often wonder if my career would have taken a different path if I had.\"\n\nOne of the complications was not being able to be completely honest with people. \"I used to sleep with women quite a lot in the Wham! days but never felt it could develop into a relationship because I knew that,", + " emotionally, I was a gay man. I didn't want to commit to them but I was attracted to them. Then I became ashamed that I might be using them. I decided I had to stop, which I did when I began to worry about AIDS, which was becoming prevalent in Britain. Although I had always had safe sex, I didn't want to sleep with a woman without telling her I was bisexual. I felt that would be irresponsible. Basically, I didn't want to have that uncomfortable conversation that might ruin the moment, so I stopped sleeping with them,\"\n\nHis only bona fide girlfriend was Kathy Yueng who appeared in the video for \"I Want Your Sex\"; George says she knew he was bisexual.", + " He also confesses to having had a secret crush on Madonna \"during her chubby years\" and recalls their first meeting alone. \"I felt she was really trying to suss out whether I would go for it or not.\" He bends double with an expression of mock excruciation. \"God, I've never told anyone this before! \"But I was only 23 and was really intimidated because I felt like she was coming onto me and although I thought that she was sexy, she was just too powerful for me at that stage.\n\nShe's very strong. Her sexuality is hers, it's not for men, and I had a feeling it would be sex of an intensity that would feel like I was with a man.", + " I don't know why. Maybe I should have tried it!\"\n\nIn his autobiography, former Wham! manager Simon Napier-Bell described George and Andrew as having a \"beguiling homoerotic intimacy\". Did he ever fancy Andrew?\n\nRead next What a GQ Editor might say having just been interrupted by Kurupt FM What a GQ Editor might say having just been interrupted by Kurupt FM The day People Just Do Nothing entered GQ\n\nHe screws up his face at the thought. \"I can't think of anything more vile than sleeping with Andrew. I've known him since he was 11 and he's one of my best friends.\n\n\"There probably was something homoerotic there,", + " simply because we were so close. But luckily, I never fancied him. Also, he's just not my type, to be honest. Beautiful though.\"\n\nThe pair remain close friends, with George spending last New Year at Ridgeley's home in Cornwall, and Ridgeley recently staying at George's home in Goring, Oxfordshire, for the latter's 41st birthday party. Settled with a family, Ridgeley leads the quiet life, spending time with his children and indulging his passion for surfing.\n\nIt's an anonymity George craves but is philosophical he'll never achieve. \"In the very early days of Wham!", + " the attention felt great, but I do wonder how much freedom I gave away by trying to become something I wasn't. Much as I'm privileged and thankful to be in the position I am, there's no question I would have enjoyed my journey more if when I was 18, I hadn't chased the whole physical, sexual part of things.\"\n\nBut after 22 years of being in the public eye, the reality is that people's response to him gets stronger and stronger.\n\nRead next Watch the People Just Do Nothing characters hijack GQ Hype Watch the People Just Do Nothing characters hijack GQ Hype Consider this a Kurupt FM takeover\n\nAlthough they tend to give him space,", + " they feel they know him and he often encounters dropped-jaw expressions of shock that are quite discomforting. \"I once tried a disguise. It was when I had longer hair and I tucked it up in a baseball hat and wore my prescription glasses. I looked nothing like me, or so I thought. But within a few minutes of leaving the house, someone said, 'Hello George, I didn't know you wore specs.' So I gave up on that.\"\n\nThe upside of fame, he says, is that, generally, everyone is nice to him. And, of course, he receives accolades like GQ's Lifetime Achievement award.", + " \"Yes, that's what you get when you don't dye your grey hairs!\" he laughs. \"But seriously, I'm really flattered. Thank you.\"\n\nI don't know if I'd have committed suicide, but it'd have been a possibility if I hadn't had my boyfriend\n\nHis hunger for privacy was blown completely out of the water when he was arrested trying to pick up an undercover LA cop in 1998. He came out fighting on the talk show circuit, saying it was entrapment by the police and media. Previously, his explanation has been that it was a cry for help, his way of telling the world he was gay rather than giving the story to one journalist.", + " But now he's thought about it more deeply and has a likelier explanation. \"Now, I honestly think it was a desperate attempt to make the trauma in my life about me, because then, maybe, I could control the outcome,\" he says. \"Up to then, the traumas had been out of my control and the outcome always bad. From the point when Anselmo got sick, I felt out of control. There were also family problems too hurtful to talk about, but I was snowed under with things I couldn't do anything about. So I gave myself this six-month distraction from every day being about missing my mother.", + " For six months, I had to work hard to fight for my career, but once that was done there was nothing to stop what came after it, which was just total depression. But as subconscious plans go, it was pretty successfull\"\n\nHe says cruising was something he used to do occasionally when he was feeling bad about himself but that he no longer has that compulsion. \"I don't need that thrill any more and my sex life has become more conventional in a way. In general, I'm the happiest I've ever been. I have been through so much loss there's little for me to fear any more. The only worse experience in life,", + " I think, is to lose a child.\"\n\nHe reveals that he and Kenny have discussed having a child, but \"I have dismissed it out of hand because I know that's not the way I want to go. I think I would be a good dad, but terribly neurotic. And I wouldrf t be a very happy man if I had to make all those sacrifices.\" What, I ask, if Kenny's desire to have a child outweighs Georges wish not to? \"I'd have to let him go and find someone who wanted that too,\" he replies swiftly. \"You can't have a child just to keep a relationship together,", + " can you? I sometimes think it's a shame for Kenny because he could quite easily adopt with someone else. Hes fantastic with kids, and I have a feeling he'd do it much better than me. But he's not obsessed with having children.\"\n\nAdvertisement\n\nSo it's just George and Kenny, and the occasional lover or two who drifts in and out of their beds but is never allowed to encroach on their life together. It works for them and George genuinely seems like a man who has fought more than his fair share of demons but emerged stronger for it. \"Is my body a temple, or is my life a temple?\" he muses.", + " \"I'm definitely in the latter category and I think my life has been better since thinking that way.\"\n\nNow read more about George Michael\n\nOriginally published in the October 2004 issue of British GQ.\n\nLike this? Now read:\n\nThe George Michael documentary 'Freedom' is like 'Amy' \u2013 if Amy had directed it ", + " ITV/REX/Shutterstock\n\nDamn it, George Michael \u2013 another beloved pop legend gone in 2016, dying on Christmas at the far-too-young age of 53, or four years younger than Prince. This one really hurts, because George Michael was a true pop visionary, one of the great Eighties glam eccentrics. No one else could have scored a classic like \"Faith,\" his biggest, best and weirdest hit. It's one of the briefest Number One smashes of recent decades \u2013 under three minutes. Yet every moment is coded with sexual and stylistic provocations \u2013 the stubble, the black leather jacket,", + " the acoustic guitar and handclaps, the breathy gasps and careless whispers, the paranoid lyrics, the way he sabotages his own straight-boy makeover by tricking out that leather jacket with a string of pearls. Even when George was draping himself with scantily clad supermodels, he made it seem like a statement of principle.\n\n\n\nRelated PHOTOS: George Michael: 20 Essential Songs The best of the pop icon's hits, duets and reinventions\n\nGeorge always took his pop devotion seriously, which is why he redefined the art of pop stardom in the Eighties. For him, every hit meant a radical revision of who he was and what he stood for.", + " So when he rocked that leather jacket in \"Faith,\" it was a renunciation of his frivolous past, just as setting that jacket on fire in his \"Freedom '90\" video meant no, really, this time he was renouncing his past. But whatever his next disguise was, he made it witty and seductive. This guy got how the erotics of fandom worked. As he sang, \"I know all the games you play, because I play them too.\"\n\nIf you want a glimpse of the original, no-filter George the world first met, check out his bizarre 1984 TV appearance on the BBC chat show 8 Days a Week with Morrissey,", + " both gents sitting side by side to debate pop arcana from Joy Division to breakdancing. George wears a sequined tank top and sparkly earrings, casually toying with his Farrah locks as he speaks. \"I literally have never seen a film as bad as Footloose,\" he laughs. \"It was just so atrocious.\" Yet it's surprising how respectfully he and Morrissey defer to each other \u2013 they might be from different scenes, but they share the fierce conviction that these fan questions matter. (Surprise: George is the much bigger Joy Division booster of the two, especially Side Two of Closer.)\n\n\n\n\n\nHe first arrived with Wham!, the ultimate boy-boy duo \u2013 \"every little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy.\" Of all the 1980s British Invasion upstarts,", + " Wham! paid zero lip service to postpunk artiness \u2013 they came on as just two shamelessly ambitious teenage boys in tight shorts performing \"Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do).\" \"Success does not go hand in hand with credibility,\" he told Smash Hits in 1984. \"Look at what's happening to the Smiths now.\" George was schooled in Motown tunecraft \u2013 especially Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-Holland. But nobody could guess exactly what Andrew Ridgeley did. In their first big Rolling Stone interview in 1985, they got testy about it.", + " Andrew: \"My role is everything people don't see because they're not in pop bands.\" George: \"He just plays the guitar and has a good time.\"\n\nEither way, Wham! made themselves an easy target. As Dead or Alive's late, great Pete Burns said, \"They're just two toothpaste ads with a microphone, aren't they?\" (And he meant that as a compliment.) Eighties kids argued over whether Wham! even counted as New Wave; the exclamation point was seen as evidence for both sides. Make It Big cracked America with \"Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,\" \"Careless Whisper,\" \"Freedom\"", + " and \"Everything She Wants,\" where George bitchily arches an eyebrow at his pregnant bride: \"You've shown me you can take \u2013 you've got some giving to do.\" Harry Styles ended up getting \"Careless Whisper\" lyrics tattooed on his feet \u2013 \"never gonna\" on his right foot, \"dance again\" on his left. Now that's true pop immortality.\n\nWham! signed off with two killer farewell hits, \"I'm Your Man\" and \"The Edge of Heaven.\" But George's solo blockbuster Faith was the apex of everything he wanted and everything he was, from dance-pop glitz to obsessive late-night ballads like \"Father Figure.\" In the infamous \"I Want Your Sex\"", + " video, George provided MTV with an intro telling the kids at home \"This song is not about casual sex\" while scrawling \"explore monogamy\" in lipstick on the bare flesh of his make-up artist. Faith's best song wasn't even one of the hits \u2013 the deep cut \"Hard Day\" was a beatbox funk groove where George overdubbed a duet with himself, chanting \"Don't let me down\" to a taunting falsetto voice. The twin Georges bicker over sex and money and respect until they break down into their climactic call-and-response: \"Do you trust me?\" \"Yeah.\"\n\nThat inner conflict is all over Faith,", + " with regard to George's hotly debated sexuality. He blasted into the music game at a time when pop stardom practically required boys to pose as gay, but forbade them from coming out in real life. It's insane how the Eighties, now cherished as the queerest of pop decades, was so closeted at the time. Freddie Mercury didn't just deny being gay \u2013 he threatened to sue press outlets who dared to suggest otherwise. So Faith was a pop starlet struggling to figure it out for himself in public but spinning off more questions than answers. (As he sings in \"I Want Your Sex,\" there's things that you guess and things that you know.) For him it was complicated by his own inner denial \u2013 and then there was teaming up with Elton John for the ridiculous MTV smash \"Wrap Her Up,\" with both men drooling over Marilyn Monroe,", + " Joan Collins and Grace Jones. Last week I was karaoke-ing (\"Last Christmas,\" of course) with a couple of women who grew up in the Eighties \u2013 they interrupted the song to give heartfelt speeches about how their whole ideal of teen romance was shaped by the dream that George Michael might be straight. That's part of the role he played in his fans' lives. (And speaking of \"Last Christmas\" \u2013 how did I never hear Taylor Swift's version until last week? Talk about a songwriter built for Tay to interpret. I only wish George Michael lived long enough to cover \"New Romantics.\")\n\nBut George tired of the hustle faster than anyone would have guessed.", + " Listen Without Prejudice was where he abdicated, despite muted beauties like \"Praying for Time.\" In \"Freedom '90,\" he could only express his quest for artistic authenticity by bringing in Christy Turlington to do his lip-synching for him. His summer-'92 hit \"Too Funky\" was a slight but welcome comeback in disco-supermodel mode; Older had low-key ballads inspired by a dead lover. It took a 1998 bust in an L.A. park men's room to motivate him to come out, but with typical wit he turned the episode into his \"Outside\" video,", + " complete with beefcake cops. For his final album in 2014, Symphonica, he teamed up with an orchestra to do a set of lounge songs, some his own (\"One More Try,\" \"A Different Corner\") and others identified with torch singers like Nina Simone. One of the highlights, as it happens, was \"Wild Is the Wind,\" a song defined by the late David Bowie.\n\nI once saw a Patti Smith show in October 2004 (with Television opening) where she announced she had a song stuck in her head all day, after hearing it on the radio, so she wanted to give it a try onstage.", + " Then she wailed \"Father Figure,\" a ballad so perfect for her stern voice it was truly frightening. When Patti moaned the words, \"If you ever hunger, hunger for me,\" you could hear this was a song she was always meant to sing. (She covered it a couple more times on tour that month.) The moment was a glorious tribute from one cracked pop devotee to another. And only a moment like that could do justice to the strange, beautiful, timeless spirit of George Michael.\n\n", + " George Michael may not have had a discography to rival his fellow peers like Madonna and Prince \u2014 he released only five studio albums as a solo artist; three with Wham! \u2014 but his influence on pop music is undeniable. He scored two Grammys, eight No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, four MTV VMAs, and sold more than an estimated 100 million records worldwide. With news that the boundary-pushing icon died Sunday at the age of 53, EW is looking back on just a few of the songs that made him so special.\n\n\u201cWake Me Up Before You Go-Go,\u201d 1984\n\n\u201cI wanna hit that hiiiiiiiigh!\u201d Thirty-two years after its release,", + " Wham!\u2019s first major hit can still turn any disco into a glorious, jitterbugging party.\n\n\u201cCareless Whisper,\u201d 1984\n\nReleased on Wham!\u2019s 1984 album Make It Big, \u201cCareless Whisper\u201d set the stage for Michael to become a sex symbol for the \u201980s \u2014 and it still packs one of the most memorable saxophone hooks in pop.\n\n\u201cLast Christmas,\u201d 1984\n\nNext to Mariah Carey\u2019s \u201cAll I Want for Christmas Is You\u201d and Phil Spector\u2019s A Christmas Gift for You, it\u2019s perhaps the most iconic holiday pop song of the modern era. And Michael wrote and produced this seductive trifle himself.\n\n\u201cFaith,\u201d 1987\n\nIt starts with pious church organs,", + " but it\u2019s hardly overblown. Instead, Michael used the first track from his first solo album, Faith, to worship at the altar of his rock and roll influences: namely, Bo Diddley, whose signature Bo Diddley Beat gives this tune its driving pulse.\n\n\u201cI Want Your Sex,\u201d 1987\n\n\u201cI Want Your Sex\u201d might seem positively G-rated today, but Michael\u2019s most explicit song about doing the deed was wildly controversial in 1987, the height of the AIDS epidemic in America. The BBC banned it from daytime playlists, U.S. radio stations refused to add it, and Tipper Gore, founder of the PMRC,", + " no doubt lost sleep over it. Michael, however, insisted at the time that this disco-pop anthem, featured in Beverly Hills Cop II, went beyond celebrating casual sex: \u201c[It\u2019s] about attaching lust to love, not just to strangers.\u201d\n\n\u201cFather Figure,\u201d 1988\n\nMichael released this song years before coming out as gay in 1998, and the iconic video captured fashion model Tania Coleridge as the object of his desire. Still, it\u2019s hard not to hear this ballad as his aching plea for the affection another man \u2014 and his vocal performance is one of the most impassioned of his career.\n\n\u201cFreedom!", + " 90,\u201d 1990\n\n\u201cBut today the way I play the game is not the same, no way,\u201d Michael whispers, \u201cthink I\u2019m gonna get myself happy!\u201d With that simple declarative sentence, he torched the world\u2019s image of him as \u201980s pop heartthrob \u2014 and he did it with a joyful gospel-tinged celebration. Twenty-six years later, \u201cFreedom! 90\u201d is still an essential rallying cry for just about repressed group seeking comfort, strength, inspiration, and resolve. And that music video \u2014 starring every in-demand supermodel from the era? A stone classic.\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,\u201d 1991\n\nIf anyone could have matched Elton John on his own material,", + " it was Michael. And the two British pop icons teamed up for a hair-raising duet in 1991, which became a No. 1 hit on both sides of the Atlantic.\n\n\u201cToo Funky,\u201d 1992\n\nThe video for \u201cToo Funky\u201d may not have recaptured the magic of \u201cFreedom! 90\u201d \u2014 it starred supermodels like Eva Herzigova and Tyra Banks \u2014 but the song is a gloriously shameless pursuit of disco euphoria. Still too funky \u2019til this day.\n\n\u201cLet Her Down Easy,\u201d 2014\n\nThis highlight from Michael\u2019s final album, 2014\u2019s Symphonica,", + " was penned by another fellow pop star from the \u201990s: Terence Trent D\u2019Arby, who continues to write and record as Sananda Maitreya. It\u2019s a quiet lullaby, with little more than piano and strings, but it\u2019s a perfect showcase for Michael\u2019s soulful, velvety voice \u2014 the likes of which will never be matched again. ", + " Published on Mar 6, 2016\n\nThis was the comedic skit that inspired the now wildly popular Carpool Karaoke bits performed on The Late late Show with James Corden...long live Smithy! Includes the entire Comic Relief show taped in 2011 aired on the BBC channel in the UK. Check out all the amazing special guests like Paul McCartney & Kiera Knightley...and even a still quite young Justin Beiber back when he had 'the hair'!\n\n\n\nRIP GEORGE MICHAEL 6/25/63 to 12/25/16\n\n\n\nIf you enjoyed this video please click Like & Don't forget to Subscribe...Thank you!\n\n\n\nYouTube URL:", + " http://www.youtube.com/c/AndreaParga143\n\n\n\nJust starting my channel the One Stop Playlist Shop...please support me as I grow from the ground floor up!\n" + ], + "length": 14279, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 41, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 \"Excited\" and \"happy\" is how the San Antonio Four are feeling after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals officially exonerated them of child sexual abuse on Wednesday after a 20-year fight. Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Cassandra Rivera, and Anna Vasquez were declared innocent after being wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting two of Ramirez's nieces, then aged 7 and 9, in 1997 in what the state's expert witness then described as a \"satanic-related\" ritual. The alleged victims told police in 1994 that the women, who are openly gay, assaulted them at Ramirez's apartment but their testimony varied wildly, reports the San Antonio Current. Ramirez was later sentenced to 37.5 years in prison, while the others were sentenced to 15 years. Vasquez was paroled in 2012, while the others were granted bail a year later, after one of the two alleged victims recanted and the state's witness retracted her testimony. Earlier this year, a state district court judge overturned their convictions, which came at a time of anti-gay bias and \"national hysteria \u2026 over satanic sexual abuse,\" reports KSAT. But the judges on Wednesday found the woman, all in their 40s, \"have unquestionably established that they are innocent,\" and noted the father of Ramirez's nieces \"has engaged in a pattern of threatening behavior towards the complainants and false allegations of sexual assault.\" \"We have so much more to be thankful for,\" Rivera tells the Guardian, which notes each woman is now eligible to receive up to $80,000 for every year spent in prison.\n", + "docs": [ + "SAN ANTONIO - The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' finding of innocence proved overwhelming for the women who came to be known as the San Antonio Four.\n\nHours after learning they were exonerated, they described the ruling as \u201camazing\u201d and \u201cunbelievable.\u201d\n\nThey were accused in 1997 of sexually assaulting two young girls and threatening to kill them, but the court majority said their convictions nearly 20 years ago were based on \u201cfantastical allegations.\u201d\n\nElizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Cassandra Rivera and Anna Vasquez were convicted in 1997 of attacking Ramirez\u2019s nieces, ages 7 and 9.", + " The girls were bound and sexually assaulted and their lives were threatened if they told anyone, authorities said.\n\n\u201cI believe the judges said it perfectly,\u201d Vasquez said. \u201cThey\u2019re absolutely right how fantastical this story was from the beginning.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe were convicted just so easily for so many reasons that were unreal,\" Rivera said.\n\n\u201cI was just like, 'Why couldn\u2019t they have seen that from the beginning?'\u201d Ramirez said.\n\nMayhugh, who was working Wednesday, was unavailable for the interview.\n\nThe women served nearly 15 years in prison until one was paroled and the other three were released on bond after one of the alleged victims recanted her story.\n\nThe appeals court also pointed to the forensic evidence,", + " later described as \u201cjunk science,\u201d which also was recanted.\n\nThe ruling said due to those and other factors, \u201cThese inconsistencies can no longer be set aside in light of what we know now.\u201d\n\nThe national hysteria, at the time, over satanic sexual abuse, which also played a role in their controversial case, was detailed in a documentary that premiered at this year\u2019s Tribeca Film Festival \u2014 \u201cSouthwest of Salem\u201d by filmmaker Deborah Esquenazi.\n\nThe women believe their convictions in the late '90s were due in large part to the fact they are lesbian.\n\nVasquez said times have changed now, \u201cBut there\u2019s a lot further we must go.", + " People are ignorant and believe that because you\u2019re gay or because you\u2019re lesbian, you have tendencies to hurt children.\u201d\n\nVasquez said that kind of attitude is behind the objections to transgender people using certain bathrooms.\n\nThe appeals court ruling stating that they were wrongly convicted makes them eligible for compensation by the state of Texas.\n\n\u201cFrom the beginning, we were not worried about the compensation. We were worried about the fact we wanted our name cleared,\u201d Rivera said. \u201cWe want the world to know we are innocent.\u201d\n\nAttorney Mike Ware was one of the lawyers who represented the San Antonio Four. He said, \u201cThe opinion is well-written, it\u2019s excellent.\u201d\n\n\u201cThis court had the courage to reach the right results,", + " and I\u2019m very grateful for that,\u201d Ware said. \u201cThey (San Antonio Four) had their lives taken away from them when they were 19 and 20 years old, and they were given this horrible label, as having committed a crime which never even occurred.\u201d\n\nSan Antonio 4 Ruling\n\nCopyright 2016 by KSAT - All rights reserved. ", + " Four women who spent more than a decade in prison after being wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting two girls were declared innocent and exonerated on Wednesday by Texas\u2019s highest criminal court.\n\n\u201cThese four women have unquestionably established that they are innocent of these charges,\u201d Judge David Newell wrote in a majority opinion of the Texas court of criminal appeals. \u201cThose defendants have won the right to proclaim to the citizens of Texas that they did not commit a crime. That they are innocent. That they deserve to be exonerated.\u201d\n\nThe \u201cSan Antonio Four\u201d were convicted of gang-raping the girls at an apartment in the city largely as a result of scientific evidence that was later discredited and retracted by the state\u2019s expert witness.", + " One of the girls, who were seven and nine at the time of the alleged offense in 1994, recanted her accusation in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News in 2012.\n\n\u201cIt couldn\u2019t be more clear that they are acknowledging and declaring that these women are factually and legally innocent and that\u2019s obviously what we have been fighting and struggling for,\u201d said Mike Ware, an attorney with the Innocence Project who represented them.\n\nThe outcome will allow the four to seek compensation from the state that could amount to $80,000 each for every year spent in prison. It follows a long effort by the women and their supporters to win their release and clear their names.\n\nAs evidence mounted that the convictions were faulty,", + " the girls\u2019 aunt, Elizabeth Ramirez, Cassandra Rivera and Kristie Mayhugh were granted bail in 2013, and Anna Vasquez was paroled in 2012. All are in their early forties. Ramirez, who was pregnant when accused, was sentenced to 37 and a half years in prison in 1997 and the other three women to 15 years in 1998. The women were subject to bail restrictions, such as requiring permission to leave the San Antonio area.\n\n\u201cI think maybe it hasn\u2019t sunk in yet but we are so excited and so happy,\u201d said Rivera, who said she cried with joy after seeing the news posted on Facebook on Wednesday morning while having coffee with her brother.\n\n\u201cIt means everything to me,", + " to my family. I have a son and a daughter and I do not want them living with the fact that I had been charged with a crime I did not commit, especially one such as child molestation,\u201d she said.\n\n\u201cI have so much to be thankful for already because I have my children back in my life, I have a beautiful family that has always been supportive. I\u2019m thankful [for] every day that I\u2019m given because I was taken from them for 14 years so when I got this news this morning it\u2019s like \u2018wow, this year we\u2019re going to have a beautiful Thanksgiving because we have so much more to be thankful for.\u201d\n\nThe case emerged toward the end of the \u201csatanic panic\u201d era,", + " when fear swept the US that ritualistic child abuse was rampant and innocent people became ensnared in a climate likened to a modern-day witch-hunt.\n\nNancy Kellogg, the expert witness who examined the girls, wrote in her notes that what she supposedly saw \u201ccould be satanic-related\u201d.\n\nVasquez said earlier this year that homophobia may have been a factor in the prosecution and conviction. \u201cWhen we were being questioned by police, they made a point to put it out in there \u2013 that we were gay,\u201d she said. ", + " IN THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS\n\nOF TEXAS\n\nNOS. WR-84,700-01 & WR-84,700-02\n\nEX PARTE KRISTIE MAYHUGH, Applicant\n\nON APPLICATIONS FOR WRITS OF HABEAS CORPUS\n\nCAUSE NOS. 1995CR1255A-W1 & 1995CR1256A-W1\n\nIN THE 175TH DISTRICT COURT FROM BEXAR COUNTY\n\nNO. WR-84,701-01\n\nEX PARTE ELIZABETH RAMIREZ, Applicant\n\nON APPLICATION FOR A WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS\n\nCAUSE NO.", + " 1995CR1256B-W1\n\nIN THE 175TH DISTRICT COURT FROM BEXAR COUNTY\n\nNOS. WR-84,698-01 & WR-84,698-02\n\nEX PARTE CASSANDRA RIVERA, Applicant\n\nON APPLICATIONS FOR WRITS OF HABEAS CORPUS\n\nCAUSE NOS. 1995CR1255C-W1 & 1995CR1256C-W1\n\nIN THE 175TH DISTRICT COURT FROM BEXAR COUNTY\n\nNOS. WR-84,697-01 & WR-84,697-02\n\nEX PARTE ANNA VASQUEZ,", + " Applicant\n\nON APPLICATIONS FOR WRITS OF HABEAS CORPUS\n\nCAUSE NOS. 1995CR1255D-W1 & 1995CR1256D-W1\n\nIN THE 175TH DISTRICT COURT FROM BEXAR COUNTY\n\nNEWELL, J., delivered the opinion of the Court in which JOHNSON,\n\nand RICHARDSON, JJ., joined. KELLER, P.J., AND KEASLER, J., joined\n\nmajority opinion as to part three. ALCALA, J., filed a concurring\n\nopinion in which MEYERS, J., joined.", + " HERVEY and YEARY, JJ., did not\n\nparticipate.\n\nO P I N I O N\n\nAccording to Applicants\u2019 expert, Dr. Alexandria Doyle, the sexual-assault\n\nallegations in this case do not pass \u201cthe smell test.\u201d This emotional response\n\ncertainly captures the sense of outrage that so many harbor about these cases.\n\nWhether it is in articles or a documentary, these cases involving \u201cThe San\n\nAntonio Four\u201d have been well dissected in popular media. See e.g. Southwest\n\nof Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four (Deborah S. Esquenazi Productions\n\n2016); Bridgette Dunlap,", + " Inside Case Behind Wrongful Conviction Doc\n\nMayhugh et al\u20133\n\n'Southwest of Salem', ROLLING STONE, Oct. 13, 2016; Maurice Chammah, Case\n\nof \u201cSan Antonio Four\u201d Set to Enter its Final Act, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE, March 29,\n\n2015; Maurice Chammah, A Growing Battle for Exoneration, N.Y. TIMES, Nov.\n\n18, 2012.\n\nBut we are not asked to apply a \u201csmell test.\u201d Rather, we are asked to\n\ndecide whether the newly available evidence of innocence undermines the\n\nlegally sufficient,", + " but hard-to-believe version of events that led to the\n\nconvictions of these four women. We hold that it does and that these four\n\nwomen have unquestionably established that they are innocent of these\n\ncharges.\n\nI. Introduction\n\nIn the summer of 1994, two young girls alleged that four young lesbian\n\nwomen, including the girls\u2019 aunt, had spontaneously and violently gang-raped\n\nthem on two occasions within a single week. The who-what-when-and-where\n\nchanged from the outcries, to the statements made to the police, to the\n\nstatements made to the examining doctor, to the testimony at two trials.", + " But\n\nthose inconsistencies were easy to set aside given the physical findings\n\nassociated with child sexual abuse found by Dr. Nancy Kellogg, who asserted\n\nthat the older child showed physical, objective signs of sexual abuse: In light\n\nof Dr. Kellogg\u2019s testimony, the girls\u2019 stories had the ring of truth.\n\nThese inconsistencies can no longer be set aside in light of what we know\n\nMayhugh et al\u20134\n\nnow. Dr. Kellogg has retracted her testimony about the physical indicators of\n\npast trauma. She now agrees with the defense that there are no definitive\n\nsigns of sexual abuse, and she has acknowledged that her testimony at trial\n\nwas wrong.\n\nAll parties and courts,", + " including this one, agree that all four\n\nApplicants are entitled to have their convictions and sentences vacated because\n\nof the introduction of what is now known to be scientifically invalid or inaccurate\n\nevidence.\n\nBut there is a great deal more that casts doubt upon the reliability of the\n\nconvictions in these cases than just the unreliable scientific evidence. One of\n\nthe complainants, the younger sister, now an adult, has recanted her testimony\n\nand explained how and why she and her sister made up a story about her aunt\n\nand her aunt\u2019s three friends. Expert testimony regarding false allegations of\n\nsexual assault now establishes that this complainant\u2019s recantation was genuine,\n\nvoluntary,", + " and sincere, and her story fits the profile of other false claims of\n\nsexual abuse.\n\nThough the other complainant has not recanted her trial\n\ntestimony, her sister\u2019s recantation, credited by the trial court, cannot be\n\nlogically reconciled with the remaining testimony establishing guilt.\n\nFurthermore, the Applicants have also presented evidence that the\n\ncomplainants\u2019 father, Javier Limon, has engaged in a pattern of threatening\n\nbehavior towards the complainants and false allegations of sexual assault to\n\ngain leverage in disputes over custody of his children. The Applicants have\n\nMayhugh et al\u20135\n\npresented credible testimony that the complainants\u2019 father threatened and\n\nassaulted the two complainants to ensure that they accused these women of\n\nsexual abuse.\n\nMoreover,", + " the Applicants have presented credible expert\n\ntestimony explaining how the techniques used during the investigation of the\n\nalleged crimes could have reinforced the complainants\u2019 childhood belief in a\n\ncrime that never occurred.\n\nFinally, the Applicants have presented new expert testimony that they are\n\nnot sex offenders. None of the four Applicants fit the profile for sex offenders,\n\nand psychological evaluations have confirmed this. From the moment these\n\nallegations were made, all four Applicants have consistently maintained their\n\ninnocence and each other\u2019s innocence despite multiple, separate interviews.\n\nWe conclude that now, with this clear and convincing evidence\n\nestablishing innocence combined with the lack of reliable forensic opinion\n\ntestimony corroborating the fantastical allegations in this case,", + " no rational juror\n\ncould find any of the four Applicants guilty of any of the charges beyond a\n\nreasonable doubt. We agree with the habeas court that relief is required based\n\non new scientific evidence, but we also hold that the Applicants have carried\n\ntheir burden to establish a claim of actual innocence. Although the habeas\n\ncourt did not recommend granting relief on actual-innocence grounds, it did so\n\nstrictly because only one of the two complainants recanted. It relied upon a\n\n\u201clegal sufficiency\u201d analysis without considering the overwhelming evidence of\n\nMayhugh et al\u20136\n\ninnocence and its impact upon the State\u2019s already weak cases.", + " We disagree\n\nwith the habeas court's apparent assessment that the lack of a recantation from\n\none of the two complainants is fatal to Applicants\u2019 actual-innocence case. We\n\nexercise our authority to reach the contrary conclusion, and, accordingly, grant\n\nrelief under a more comprehensive and robust actual-innocence analysis. See\n\nEx parte Reed, 271 S.W.3d 698, 727\u201328 (Tex. Crim. App. 2008).\n\nII. The Facts as Presented in the Two Trials\n\nIn the summer of 1994, nine-year-old V.L. and her seven-year-old sister,\n\nS.L., stayed with their nineteen-year-old aunt,", + " Elizabeth Ramirez, for several\n\ndays while their mother, Rosemary Camarillo, was in Colorado.1 During the\n\ncourse of their stay with Elizabeth, who shared the apartment with her one-time\n\ngirlfriend, Kristie Mayhugh, another couple, Anna Vasquez and Cassandra\n\nRivera, visited the apartment frequently. Cassandra and her children even\n\nspent the night a few times during the week of the girls\u2019 visit.\n\nThe girls\u2019 grandmother, Serafina Limon,2 said that, when the girls came\n\nhome, they were not acting \u201cnormal;\u201d they were subdued, scared, and refused\n\nto make eye contact.", + " In mid-September, Serafina noticed the girls playing with\n\ntheir dolls in a sexual manner. When she asked the girls why they were doing\n\n1\n\nThe testim ony in both trials is not very specific with regard to when the events were\n\nhave alleged to have taken place. At least one version of events places the alleged assaults in\n\nAugust of 1994.\n\n2\n\nMs. Lim on\u2019s first nam e is spelled two different ways: Serifina and Serafina. W e use\n\nSerafina for consistency\u2019s sake. Also Elizabeth Ram irez is som etim es referred to as Liz and\n\nCassandra Rivera is som etim es referred to as Cassie.\n\nMayhugh et al\u20137\n\nthis,", + " V.L. told Serafina that she and her sister had been sexually assaulted at\n\ntheir aunt\u2019s apartment by the four women.\n\nThe girls\u2019 basic accounts were this: the four women stripped them, held\n\nthem down, fondled them, and stuck objects and liquids into their vaginas. The\n\ngirls stated they were assaulted on two different occasions. The assaults were\n\nback-to-back the first time, V.L. first and then S.L., and then simultaneously the\n\nnext time. According to both girls, these assaults were completely spontaneous\n\nwithout any suspicious behavior leading up to them.\n\nBy V.L.\u2019s account, the assaults occurred a couple of days into the visit to\n\ntheir aunt\u2019s apartment.", + " V.L. and her sister were playing outside when both girls\n\nwere called inside. According to V.L., the women began yelling things at her\n\nlike \u201cwhy did you do this? Why did you do that?\u201d V.L. was inconsistent when\n\nexplaining where S.L. was during the first assault; S.L. was either locked\n\noutside, or in the living room. V.L. was brought into Elizabeth\u2019s bedroom,\n\nwhere, according to V.L., Elizabeth held her down while the other women\n\nstarted touching her; the four women did not touch each other, only her. V.L.\n\nsaid she kicked and screamed as the women put stuff inside her vagina\u2013liquid\n\nstuff,", + " a powder, and \u201ca tampon or something.\u201d She said that it hurt. And after\n\nthey finished, they told her to go take a shower. According to V.L., she heard\n\nS.L. screaming and crying in the bedroom as she came out of the shower.\n\nThen, S.L. came out of the bedroom with no pants on, and the women told S.L.\n\nMayhugh et al\u20138\n\nto take a shower. V.L. then went back outside to play.\n\nV.L. said that the next time she was assaulted, it was again in the\n\nbedroom by Anna and Liz (and maybe Cassie), while S.L.", + " was assaulted in the\n\nliving room by Cassie.\n\nOr, they were assaulted together.\n\nShe made a\n\nstatement that \u201cthey started putting some kind of stuff in us. Then they put\n\nliquid in us. Cassie was the one that put the liquid in me. They did this to S.L.,\n\ntoo.\u201d\n\nS.L.\u2019s account was similar with regard to the fundamentals of being held\n\ndown and having things inserted into her vagina. But S.L. said that, during the\n\nfirst assault, when she came inside, she heard V.L. screaming in the bedroom.\n\nShe tried to peek in. Then everyone came out of the bedroom,", + " and she asked\n\nV.L. if she was okay. According to S.L., V.L. went outside to play, and the four\n\nwomen took her pants and underwear off and laid her down on the floor of the\n\nliving room. Then, Cassie \"put something in my private\" while the other women\n\nwere \"holding me down.\" S.L. indicated that the second assault happened the\n\nnext day in the living room, when \"they put the same thing in my private.\"\n\nBoth girls said that they were threatened by the women though they were\n\nunclear about whether it was with a knife, a gun, or two guns,", + " and whether it\n\nwas by Liz, Anna, Liz and Anna, or Cassie and told to keep quiet about the\n\nassaults.\n\nDiscerning a coherent picture of the alleged assaults from the different\n\nMayhugh et al\u20139\n\nversions provided by each complainant takes considerable intellectual effort.\n\nThere are multiple different versions of events, each one differing from the\n\nothers, sometimes irreconcilably so. And there are significant inconsistencies\n\nbetween the versions told by each complainant. While there appears to have\n\nbeen enough consistency to barely cover the essential elements of the offenses\n\nat issue, the stories by themselves provided weak evidence of guilt at best.\n\nOn September 28th,", + " the girls were taken by their father, Javier Limon,\n\nto a clinic for sexual-assault exams. Dr. Kellogg, an expert in the science of\n\nphysical findings associated with child sex abuse, took histories from the girls\n\nand examined them. She made physical findings that were consistent with the\n\nhistory of sexual abuse each girl related.\n\nMeanwhile the four women maintained their complete innocence. None\n\nhad ever been accused of any kind of criminal, violent, or otherwise anti-social\n\nbehavior, toward children or anyone else. Each completely cooperated with the\n\nhomicide detective assigned as the lead investigator in the case, without\n\ninvoking their right to an attorney.", + " All submitted to individual interrogations\n\nand gave signed written statements, expressing bewilderment at the\n\naccusations and maintaining their innocence.\n\nElizabeth Ramirez was tried first and alone, in 1997, for sexually\n\nassaulting V.L. V.L. testified, but S.L. did not. Dr. Kellogg testified that V.L.\u2019s\n\nstatements about the assaults were \u201cspontaneous... detailed... guileless.\n\nMayhugh et al\u201310\n\n.. uncontrived.\u201d3\n\nDr. Kellogg said V.L.\u2019s exam was not normal: There was a scar on the\n\nhymen,", + " a healed tear. The scar indicates \u201cpainful\u201d penetration. And although\n\nthere was no way to tell when the penetration happened, it was no longer than\n\nnine years before the exam because V.L. was nine at the time of the exam. Dr.\n\nKellogg also testified that playing with dolls in a sexual manner was acting out\n\nand \u201cwith sexual acting out it tends to be more specifically linked to sexual\n\nabuse.\u201d\n\nElizabeth, age 20, testified in her own defense. She said she did not do\n\nanything to the children, she had \u201cno knowledge how they could even think of\n\nme doing something like that.\u201d She said there was no gun,", + " no knife, no threat.\n\nNevertheless, she was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child and\n\nindecency with a child, and sentenced to 37 and 15 years\u2019 imprisonment. The\n\ncourt of appeals affirmed. Ramirez v. State, 04-97-00144-CR, 1998 WL 412437\n\n(Tex. App.\u2014San Antonio July 22, 1998, pet. ref\u2019d) (not designated for\n\npublication).\n\nKristie Mayhugh, Cassandra Rivera, and Anna Vasquez were tried\n\n3\n\nGenerally, expert testim ony that child victim s of sexual abuse have provided truthful\n\ntestim ony is inadm issible.", + " Yount v. State, 872 S.W.2d 706, 712 (Tex. Crim. App. 1993). W e\n\nhave held that testim ony that a child-abuse victim did not exhibit \u201cbehaviors that point to being\n\nm anipulated\u201d was not a direct com m ent on the truthfulness of the child victim \u2019s allegations.\n\nSchultz v. State, 957 S.W.2d 52, 73 (Tex. Crim. App. 1997). But here, Dr. Kellogg\u2019s opinion\n\ntestim ony was specific to the child\u2019s statem ents and characterized V.L.\u2019s testim ony as truthful.\n\nThus,", + " Dr. Kellogg\u2019s characterization of V.L.\u2019s allegations as \u201cguileless\u201d and \u201cuncontrived\u201d would\n\nrun afoul of the general prohibition against adm itting such testim ony that we announced in\n\nYount.\n\nMayhugh et al\u201311\n\ntogether a year later for sexually assaulting both S.L. and V.L.\n\ntestified.\n\nBoth girls\n\nBetween the two trials, Dr. Kellogg found out that the girls had\n\nundergone sexual assault exams in 1992.4\n\nDr. Kellogg testified that, in relating the events, S.L. was scared,\n\ndisconnected, uncontrived,", + " and very open. Dr. Kellogg said that, when she\n\nexamined S.L.\u2019s genitals, she had a lot of redness, which could be caused by\n\nirritation, inflammation, infection, or sexual trauma. Also, S.L.\u2019s hymen was\n\nthickened, which \u201ccould be due to abuse with trauma,\u201d or could have \u201cnothing\n\nto do with trauma but it\u2019s a normal variation.\u201d She observed that, in the 1992\n\nexam, S.L.\u2019s hymen was thickened, and red, but not as red as it was in the\n\n1994 exam. On cross examination,", + " she acknowledged that S.L.\u2019s exams were\n\nnormal but \u201cit doesn\u2019t rule out abuse.\u201d\n\nDr. Kellogg again testified about V.L.\u2019s statement and abnormal\n\nexam\u2013with the scarring on the hymen indicating vaginal penetration. And\n\nbecause the scar was not present in the photos taken during the 1992 exam,\n\nthe injury causing the scar happened \u201csince the exam of 92.\u201d\n\nAll three defendants testified. All three denied any inappropriate contact\n\nwith the girls. All three were convicted of two counts of aggravated sexual\n\n4\n\nThough it was never revealed to the jury in either trial, the 1992 sexual assault exam s\n\nwere the result of an allegation of sexual abuse orchestrated by Javier Lim on in Colorado prior\n\nto the allegations of sexual assault in these cases.", + " These 1992 allegations concerned claim s\n\nthat V.L. and S.L. and been sexually assaulted by a ten-year-old babysitter. At the hearing on\n\nthe Applicants\u2019 writ applications, these allegations were revealed to be false and that no such\n\nchild had ever existed.\n\nMayhugh et al\u201312\n\nassault of a child and two counts of indecency with a child. All three were\n\nsentenced to fifteen years\u2019 imprisonment on the aggravated-sexual-assault\n\ncharges, and ten years\u2019 imprisonment on the indecency charges. The court of\n\nappeals in three separate, but nearly identical opinions,", + " affirmed. Mayhugh v.\n\nState, Nos. 04-98-00262-CR & 04-98-00263-CR, 1999 WL 1246925 (Tex.\n\nApp.\u2014San Antonio Dec. 22, 1999, pet. ref\u2019d); Rivera v. State, Nos.\n\n04-98-00186-CR & 04-98-00187-CR, 1999 WL 1246934 (Tex. App.\u2014San\n\nAntonio Dec. 22, 1999, pet. ref\u2019d); Vasquez v. State, Nos. 04-98-", + "00245-CR,\n\n04-98-00246-CR, 1999 WL 12469321 (Tex. App.\u2014San Antonio Dec. 22, 1999,\n\npet. ref\u2019d).\n\nIII. Habeas Proceedings Part 1: The 11.073 Claim\n\nAll four women filed identical applications for post-conviction relief on the\n\nbasis of new science and actual innocence.\n\nArticle 11.073 new-science claim.\n\nJudge Mary Roman heard the\n\nThis claim was based on Dr. Kellogg\u2019s\n\nrecantation of the core of her trial testimony: that V.L.\u2019s scarred hymen\n\nindicated penetration.\n\nThe State and Applicants submitted agreed findings and a conclusion that\n\nApplicants were entitled to Article 11.", + "073 relief based on having met the Article\n\n11.073 standard. The findings recognized that new scientific studies within the\n\nfield of pediatrics\u2013showing that while injured hymens do heal, they do not leave\n\nscars in pubertal and prepubertal girls\u2013contradicted the medical testimony\n\nMayhugh et al\u201313\n\npresented at the trials.\n\nUnder the current scientific knowledge, and upon\n\nreview of the original photographs taken during the sexual assault\n\nexaminations, there were, in fact, no physical signs of abuse. The findings on\n\nthe joint trial cases, were, in part\n\n\u2022\n\nDr.", + " Kellogg recognizes that if the medical science in this area (as\n\npresented in Dr. McCann\u2019s study published in 2007) had been available\n\nto her in 1997 or in 1998, as an expert in the field of child sexual abuse\n\nshe \"would not have testified that the finding was indicative of trauma to\n\nthe hymen.\"\n\n\u2022\n\nThe only scientific evidence before the jury that a sexual assault occurred\n\nwas Dr. Kellogg\u2019s original trial testimony that she observed a \u201cscar\u201d on\n\nV.L.\u2019s hymen that was the result of \u201ca tear that had healed.\u201d5\n\n\u2022\n\nDr.", + " Kellogg testified that this medical finding was consistent with the\n\nsexual abuse V.L. described and \"vaginal penetration\" with some\n\nunknown object.\n\n\u2022\n\nAt trial, the State relied heavily on Dr. Kellogg\u2019s expert testimony to\n\nestablish first, that the crime as alleged, in fact occurred, and second, to\n\ncorroborate the complaining witness\u2019s testimony.\n\n\u2022\n\nDr. Kellogg's scientific testimony of V.L.'s \"hymenal scar,\" her physical\n\nfindings and her expert opinions and conclusions derived from her\n\nphysical findings, corroborated V.L.'s trial testimony that she was sexually\n\nabused by Applicant[s].\n\n\u2022\n\nAlthough Dr.", + " Kellogg did not testify to finding a \"hymenal scar\" during\n\nS.L.'s sexual assault exam, S.L. and V.L.'s testimonies were so\n\n5\n\nAlthough Dr. Kellogg did not expressly recant her testim ony about S.L.\u2019s physical exam,\n\nthe parties and courts appear to agree that her testim ony about the \u201credness\u201d was nonconsequential. As noted by Applicants, Dr. Astrid Heger, a nationally respected and recognized\n\nexpert and colleague of Dr. Kellogg's, reviewed the evidence, testim ony, and photographs and\n\nconcluded that she could say \u201cto a m edical certainty,", + " that neither V.L. nor S.L. showed any\n\nphysical indicators of past physical traum a to their hym ens or any other part of their sexual\n\norgans. Specifically, the Septem ber 28, 1994 photographs showed that both S.L. and V.L., as\n\nof that date, had perfectly norm al hym ens, with no physical indications of past traum as\n\nwhatsoever.\u201d\n\nMayhugh et al\u201314\n\ninextricably intertwined that Dr. Kellogg's scientific testimony\n\nundoubtedly corroborated S.L.'s testimony. Due to this connection, it is\n\nalso reasonable to believe that Dr.", + " Kellogg's scientific testimony factored\n\ninto the jury's evaluation of S.L.'s sexual assault exam, albeit deemed\n\n\"normal.\"\n\n\u2022\n\nThere is a reasonable probability that the outdated medical testimony\n\nconcerning the \"hymenal scar\" was indicative of penetrating trauma to\n\nthe hymen contributed to the jurors\u2019 belief that the offenses did occur.\n\nThe agreed conclusion was that \u201cmore likely than not had this newly available,\n\nrelevant scientific evidence regarding hymenal injuries been presented at trial,\n\nApplicant[s] would not have been convicted of the two counts in the\n\nindictment[s].\u201d\n\nNearly identical agreed findings and conclusions were made in Elizabeth\n\nRamirez\u2019s case.\n\nJudge Roman accepted and signed the findings and\n\nconclusions,", + " recommending that relief be granted on Applicants\u2019 Article 11.073\n\nclaims. These findings are supported by the record, and we hereby adopt\n\nthem. We, therefore, grant habeas corpus relief on Applicants\u2019 claims that,\n\nmore likely than not, they would not have been convicted had the newly\n\navailable scientific testimony been presented to the jury. The remaining claims\n\nof actual innocence were referred to Judge Pat Priest, who had presided over\n\nthe joint trial.6\n\nIV. Habeas Proceedings Part 2: The Actual-Innocence Claim\n\nA two-day evidentiary hearing was held on the Applicants\u2019 actual-\n\n6\n\nThe late Judge Mike Machado had presided over Elizabeth Ram irez\u2019s individual trial.\n\nMayhugh et al\u201315\n\ninnocence claims.\n\nAt this hearing,", + " Rosemary Camarillo testified about her\n\ndifficulties with her ex-husband, Javier, regarding their children. According to\n\nRosemary, Javier pulled a gun on her and threatened to kill her during an\n\nargument after she and her kids had moved to Colorado. All of the children saw\n\nthe incident. During that same weekend, Javier took their three children back\n\nto San Antonio over Rosemary\u2019s objections. That incident led to a custody\n\nbattle.\n\nTo gain leverage in the custody dispute, Javier made false accusations\n\nthat a man in Colorado, whom the girls had never been left alone with, had\n\nsexually assaulted the girls.", + " Javier also made a false accusation that a nonexistent 10-year-old boy in Colorado had sexually assaulted S.L.\n\nThat\n\naccusation led to a police report and the examinations of the girls in 1992, but\n\nthe investigation was ultimately dropped. According to Rosemary, Javier and\n\nhis mother, Serafina, had also made accusations against others about sexually\n\nassaulting children from Javier\u2019s other relationships. Those allegations were\n\nalso false; one turned out to be based on diaper rash.\n\nRosemary stated that she has always believed her sister to be completely\n\ninnocent of these charges and has never known her sister to possess or talk\n\nabout having a gun.", + " She testified that S.L. confirmed that when she came to\n\nlive with her as an adult, telling her, \u201cI know that nothing happened, you know,\n\nwith my Aunt Liz and her friends.... all the memories that I have is memories\n\nMayhugh et al\u201316\n\nof good things that we did together, where she would take us shopping, she\n\nwould take us to eat, her and her friends. We would go to the park. They\n\nwould take us swimming.... I don\u2019t remember anything bad happening to us.\u201d\n\nS.L., twenty-seven years old at the time of the hearing,", + " fully and\n\ncompletely recanted her claims of sexual abuse and explained how the false\n\nallegations originated, how they evolved, and how they were encouraged. She\n\nexplained that she remembered her mom and dad fighting over her and her\n\nsister and her brother, Max, when they were in Colorado, and that the \u201ccops\n\ncame out.\u201d She could remember visiting the apartment of her Aunt Liz with her\n\nsister when they were small and that they liked going there to visit. She said\n\nthat the allegations against her aunt and the other women arose when her\n\ngrandmother saw her, her sister V.L., and her female cousin playing a game.\n\nAs S.L.", + " put it, \u201cMe and my sister and cousin were in the room playing,\n\nand I was pretending to drive a car. And my sister V.L. and my cousin were in\n\nthe back\u201d pretending to be mom and dad and they were kissing, \u201cusing\n\ntongues.\u201d Their grandmother saw them and started screaming at them. Javier\n\nwas called. According to S.L., they were actually mimicking behavior they had\n\nseen their father engage in with other women in front of them. But when she\n\ntold her father this, he insisted that she learned it from watching her lesbian\n\naunt.\n\nS.L. testified at the habeas hearing that she heard Javier yell at V.L.,\n\nMayhugh et al\u201317\n\nsaying,", + " \u201cYou know your aunt did something to you, you know your Aunt Liz did\n\nsomething to you, you just need to be honest, what did she do, who showed\n\nyou how to kiss, who showed you how to make out like that.\u201d S.L. stated that\n\nthey were afraid of going against Javier because if they did so, he would hit\n\nthem.\n\nShe explained that she was never in the apartment alone with all of these\n\nApplicants. She said that the first time she ever saw Anna Vasquez was when\n\na police officer \u201cpulled out a book, and asked us to pick out one of the ladies\n\nthat touched us.", + " And we\u2013I'm going to say \u2018I,\u2019 pointed out the wrong lady. And\n\nthen he tells me no, and shows me the picture.\u201d\n\nShe stated that, from the time Javier told them that something happened\n\nto them through the medical examination and the police report, she and V.L.\n\nwere coached on what to say. If they got the story wrong, Javier would strike\n\nthem. And after the trials, Javier never allowed them to talk about their aunt\n\nbeing in prison. \u201cOne time I had asked him about it. And I said, what exactly\n\nhappened, and why is it they\u2019re there.", + " And he told me to shut up and never\n\nbring it up again.\u201d\n\nAccording to S.L., Javier was an abusive father, and when she was\n\nfourteen, she tried to commit suicide. She was put in treatment. After a few\n\nweeks she moved to a group home. She never moved back in with Javier. At\n\nnineteen, she told her counselor that she had never been sexually assaulted,\n\nMayhugh et al\u201318\n\nand her counselor urged her to do the right thing and come forward. She said\n\nthat she had hesitated because she was concerned about getting in trouble for\n\nnot having told the truth in court.", + " S.L. talked to Javier on the phone to tell him\n\nthat \u201cI was going to come and speak to somebody about the case, because I\n\ndon\u2019t remember it happening.... And when I did tell him that, he told me if\n\nI did that, that he was going to hit me where it hurt.\u201d That same year, 2012,\n\nhe accused her of being a bad mother and attempted to use the courts to take\n\nher children away, though his effort failed and she ultimately kept her children.\n\nFinally, S.L. addressed her sister\u2019s claims of abuse. According to S.L.,\n\nwhen she was about thirteen,", + " she talked to V.L. about why their Aunt Liz was\n\nin prison. \u201cI told her, I don\u2019t think anything ever happened to us. And she said\n\nit may not have happened to you but it happened to me.\u201d She last talked to\n\nV.L. about three years prior to the hearing. V.L. did not testify at the hearing.\n\nAt the hearing, Applicants also presented testimony from Maria Molett,\n\nthe executive director of the Counseling Institute of Texas. Molett performed\n\npsychosexual evaluations on Elizabeth, Cassandra, and Kristie, and looked at\n\nthe records of the person who did the evaluation on Anna.", + " She concluded that\n\nshe never would have accepted the women for sex-offender treatment because\n\n\u201cthese people are not sex offenders\u201d and so there would be nothing to treat.7\n\n7\n\nThough Ms. Mollett opinions were based in part on polygraphs, she testified that her\n\nopinions w ere also based upon research-based risk-assessm ent tools used in the practice of\n\nassessm ent and treatm ent of sex offenders.\n\nMayhugh et al\u201319\n\nAll four Applicants testified at the hearing\u2013as they had at their respective\n\ntrials\u2013that they are innocent of the charges.\n\nApplicants also introduced\n\ntestimony from forensic psychologist,", + " Dr. Alexandria Doyle, whose expertise is\n\nin evaluating claims of sexual assault and recantations of such claims. She\n\nopined that the original claims were fantastic\u2013nothing similar to what is typically\n\nseen in true child sexual-abuse cases\u2013but that the recantation was credible.\n\nAt the end of the hearing, Applicants argued to the habeas court that,\n\ngiven all the information now known and the extremely weak and unreliable\n\nnature of the only evidence left to support the convictions, no reasonable juror\n\ncould find Applicants guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The State did very little\n\nthroughout the whole hearing, asking very few questions on cross-examination\n\nand declining to put on any evidence.\n\nSignificantly,", + " the State did not\n\nrecommend denying or granting relief on actual innocence, but rather stated\n\nthat, now that it is known that Dr. Kellogg\u2019s testimony in the trials in the 1990's\n\nwas wrong, what is left is \u201cpurely the credibility of the witnesses, which is for\n\nthe Court to determine.\u201d\n\nIV. A. The Herrera Standard\n\nThis Court recognizes two types of \u201cinnocence\u201d claims. The one at issue\n\nin this case\u2014a Herrera claim\u2014is a substantive claim in which the person asserts\n\na bare claim of innocence based solely on newly discovered evidence. Ex parte\n\nElizondo, 947 S.W.", + "2d 202, 205 (Tex. Crim. App. 1996); Ex parte Brown, 205\n\nMayhugh et al\u201320\n\nS.W.3d 538, 544 (Tex. Crim. App. 2006).\n\nHerrera claims are evaluated on the assumption that the trial that\n\nresulted in conviction had been error-free. In such a case, when a petitioner\n\nhas been tried before a jury of his peers, with the full panoply of protections\n\nthat our Constitution affords criminal defendants, it is appropriate to apply an\n\nextraordinarily high standard of review.", + " Ex parte Franklin, 72 S.W.3d 671, 676\n\n(Tex. Crim. App. 2002). Thus, to succeed in an actual-innocence claim, the\n\napplicant must show by clear and convincing evidence that, despite the\n\nevidence of guilt that supports the conviction, no reasonable juror could have\n\nfound the applicant guilty in light of the new evidence. Brown, 205 S.W.3d at\n\n545; Ex parte Tuley, 109 S.W.3d 388, 392 (Tex. Crim. App. 2002).\n\nAn applicant must also prove that the evidence he relies on was not\n\nknown to him at the time of trial and could not be known to him even with the\n\nexercise of due diligence.", + " Brown, id. Although many actual-innocence cases\n\nare based on a single piece of new evidence such as DNA or the recantation of\n\na victim or witness, we have made clear that \u201cmultiple pieces of newly\n\ndiscovered evidence\u201d can together make a meritorious case for relief. Ex Parte\n\nMiles, 359 S.W.3d 647, 671 (Tex. Crim. App. 2012). In practice, we have\n\nhighlighted certain pieces of new evidence and discussed whether the new\n\nevidence persuasively establishes innocence when comparing it to the evidence\n\nestablishing guilt.", + " See e.g. Ex Parte Navarijo, 433 S.W.3d 558, 568 (Tex. Crim.\n\nMayhugh et al\u201321\n\nApp. 2014) (highlighting pieces of evidence and evaluating their persuasiveness\n\nbefore denying an actual-innocence claim). Ultimately, we look to whether the\n\ntotality of the new evidence of innocence unquestionably establishes that a jury\n\nwould not have found the defendant guilty in light of the new evidence when\n\nweighed against the old evidence establishing guilt. Brown, 205 S.W.3d at 545\n\nThe evidence presented in support of a Herrera innocence claim must be\n\n\u201caffirmative.\u201d Franklin,", + " 72 S.W.3d at 678. Once the applicant provides such\n\nevidence, it is appropriate for the habeas court to proceed with the weighing of\n\nnew evidence tending to show innocence against the evidence of guilt produced\n\nat trial. The habeas court then makes findings of fact and conclusions of law,\n\nand a recommendation to this Court.\n\nWhile we generally defer to findings of fact when the trial court is in a\n\nbetter position to determine witness credibility, we nevertheless can exercise\n\nour authority to make contrary or alternative findings and conclusions when our\n\nindependent review of the record reveals that the trial judge\u2019s findings and\n\nconclusions are not supported by the record.", + " Ex parte Reed, 271 S.W.3d 698,\n\n727 (Tex. Crim. App. 2008); see also Ex parte Weinstein, 421 S.W.3d 656, 664\n\n(Tex. Crim. App. 2014) (citing Ex parte Chavez, 371 S.W.3d 200, 207 (Tex.\n\nCrim. App. 2012)), Ex parte Flores, 387 S.W.3d 626, 634-35 (Tex. Crim. App.\n\n2012).\n\nSignificantly, we apply a de novo standard of review to the legal\n\nquestion,", + " \u201cDoes the applicant\u2019s new evidence, viewed in the light most\n\nMayhugh et al\u201322\n\nfavorable to the habeas court\u2019s factual findings and credibility determinations,\n\nactually prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that a jury would acquit him?\u201d\n\nSee Rivera v. State, 89 S.W.3d 55, 59 (Tex. Crim. App. 2002). In answering\n\nthis question, we consider the habeas court\u2019s conclusions of law as well as his\n\nrecommendation, but it is nonetheless a legal conclusion that this Court, as the\n\nfinal decision maker in habeas applications,", + " must make. Reed, 271 S.W.3d at\n\n727.\n\nAlthough courts must carefully examine claims of actual innocence\u2014even\n\none made many years after the alleged crime\u2014recantations in sexual assault\n\ncases are not rare. Such post-conviction claims should not be accepted without\n\nclose scrutiny nor, generally, without strong corroboration by independent\n\nevidence.\n\nEx parte Thompson, 153 S.W.3d 416, 420-21 (Tex. Crim. App.\n\n2005) (granting relief on the basis of actual innocence where complainant\u2019s\n\nrecantation was corroborated by normal medical examination results and\n\nevidence of manipulated allegations of abuse). For instance,", + " even in a case\n\nwhere the trial court found a complaining witness\u2019s recantation credible we have\n\nnevertheless denied relief to an applicant convicted of aggravated sexual\n\nassault of a child because of \u201c(1) the lack of detail in the complainant\u2019s\n\nrecantation testimony at the habeas hearing and the jury\u2019s rejection of evidence\n\nof the complainant\u2019s pre-trial recantation, and (2) the existence of inculpatory\n\nmedical testimony that has not been otherwise explained by the complainant\u2019s\n\nMayhugh et al\u201323\n\nrecantation.\u201d Navarijo, 433 S.W.", + "3d at 568. To support a finding of actual\n\ninnocence, a recantation must be direct, specific and certain. Franklin, 72\n\nS.W.3d at 678; Brown, 205 S.W.3d at 547.\n\nV. Applicants Presented Substantial Credible and Persuasive\n\nEvidence Establishing Their Innocence\n\nThis Court agrees with Applicants, the State, and Judges Roman and\n\nPriest that the newly available scientific evidence establishes, by a\n\npreponderance of the evidence that Applicants would not have been convicted.\n\nThe question remaining is whether the additional, newly available evidence\n\nwhen compared to the evidence establishing guilt moved this case to the next\n\nlevel,", + " that is, where no rational juror would have convicted Applicants. The\n\nhabeas court made several findings that suggest he found S.L.\u2019s, Elizabeth\u2019s\n\nand Rosemary\u2019s testimony at the habeas hearing credible, as well as the\n\ntestimony from the expert that none of the Applicants fit the profile of a sexual\n\noffender\u2013including the following:\n\n\u2022\n\nDuring the time that Elizabeth Ramirez lived with the Limon family, a very\n\nbad relationship developed between Elizabeth Ramirez and Javier Limon.\n\nElizabeth Ramirez testified at the writ hearing that Javier made sexual\n\nadvances toward her that she rejected, and when she became pregnant\n\nby another man,", + " Javier wanted to serve as father figure for the child,\n\nwhich she also rejected. Elizabeth Ramirez did not tell Rosemary Limon\n\nabout Javier\u2019s advances.\n\n\u2022\n\nSince the trial, Javier and Rosemary have divorced. Since the divorce,\n\nJavier has made false allegations that a Mr. Aguirre in Colorado, as well\n\nas a ten-year-old boy in that state, had sexually assaulted these two\n\ncomplainants. Their mother lost contact with these complainants because\n\nJavier was \"difficult with the girls,\u201d who told their mother they wanted\n\nMayhugh et al\u201324\n\nnothing to do with him. This is what occasioned the girls being in\n\nColorado with their mother,", + " but he went there, pulled a gun on their\n\nmother (who took it away from him), and brought the girls back to San\n\nAntonio via Greyhound bus.\n\n\u2022\n\nS.L. asserts that Javier was abusive to all the children and that it was\n\nJavier who instigated these complaints. All of the Applicants have\n\nexpressed that their sexual orientation is toward members of the same\n\nsex, and when Javier saw the complainants and a female cousin kissing\n\neach other, he assumed that they had done that due to the influence of\n\n\"Aunt Liz\" (Elizabeth Ramirez) and her friends (the other Applicants).\n\nJavier and his mother,", + " Serafina talked to the complainants, suggesting\n\nthat the girls had seen improprieties at Aunt Liz\u2019s house and that Aunt Liz\n\nand her friends had behaved inappropriately with the girls.\n\n\u2022\n\nS.L. considered coming forward with her recantation when she was 19,\n\nafter she informed a counselor that her testimony had been untruthful,\n\nbut Javier told her she\u2019d be prosecuted for lying and go to prison, so she\n\ndid not.\n\n\u2022\n\nBefore S.L. did come forward with her recantation, Javier told her he\n\nwould \"hit her where it hurts\" if she did so. When she did so,", + " Javier\n\ncomplained against her to Child Protective Services regarding her\n\nparenting of her own three children.\n\n\u2022\n\nRamirez, Rivera and Mayhugh were clinically assessed (psychosexually\n\nevaluated) by the Executive Director of the Counseling Institute of Texas,\n\nMaria Molett, who reviews sexual offenders for the State of Texas to\n\ndetermine whether they require civil commitment, and each was\n\ndetermined not to meet the profile of a sexual offender. Anna Vasquez\n\nwas not seen by Maria Molett, as she had been paroled, but a\n\npsychosexual evaluation of her by others employed in a similar capacity\n\nwas reviewed by her,", + " and that evaluation suggests that she, too, does\n\nnot meet the criteria.\n\nThe above findings of the habeas court are supported by the record.\n\nDespite these findings, the habeas court did not recommend granting\n\nrelief on actual-innocence grounds because, though S.L. recanted, V.L. had not,\n\nand her testimony would still be available at trial for the jury to weigh against\n\nMayhugh et al\u201325\n\nthe recantation evidence.\n\nAmong the trial court\u2019s conclusions are the\n\nstatements that\n\n*\n\n\u201cThere is no hard scientific evidence (such as DNA or the like) which\n\nscientifically establishes the guilt or innocence of any of the Applicants.\u201d\n\n*\n\n\u201cThere are only two eyewitnesses,", + " and one of them continues to assert\n\nthe truth of her trial testimony.\u201d8\n\n*\n\n\u201cThe credibility of these two witnesses is an issue for the jury to decide,\n\nand no scientific evidence conclusively settles the matter.\u201d\n\nBut in this regard, the habeas court appears to have conducted a legal-\n\nsufficiency analysis. The legal sufficiency maxims\u2013\u201ca child\u2019s testimony alone is\n\nsufficient to support a conviction for sexual assault,\u201d \u201cthe jury is the sole judge\n\nof credibility and weight to be attached to the testimony of witnesses,\u201d \u201cthe\n\nfact-finder is free to believe all, part, or none of a witness\u2019s testimony\u201d\u2013echo\n\nwithin these conclusions.", + " However, this is not a direct appeal.\n\nIn Elizondo, this Court deliberately stayed away from the issue of legal\n\nsufficiency of the evidence in actual-innocence cases because no one would\n\never be found actually innocent on habeas review if the original trial evidence\n\nwas legally sufficient to support guilt. As we stated in Elizondo,\n\nOn reflection, we now acknowledge that Jackson is not a suitable\n\nstandard for describing the applicant\u2019s burden of proof in a\n\ncollateral proceeding where he does not attack the rationality of a\n\nfactfinder\u2019s verdict. On the other hand, Justice Blackmun\u2019s\n\nformulation,", + " because it focuses on the applicant\u2019s burden of proof,\n\ndirects the habeas court, as factfinder, to weigh the newly\n\n8\n\nApplicants note that this conclusion is based, solely, on the fact that, when V.L. was\n\n15, she told S.L. that the abuse \u201cm ay not have happened to you but it happened to m e.\u201d\n\nMayhugh et al\u201326\n\ndiscovered, exculpatory evidence against the inculpatory evidence\n\noffered at trial for the purpose of determining whether it\n\naffirmatively shows the applicant to be innocent. Thus, Justice\n\nBlackmun continues:\n\nBecause placing the burden on the petitioner to prove\n\ninnocence creates a presumption that the conviction is\n\nvalid,", + " it is not necessary or appropriate to make further\n\npresumptions about the reliability of newly discovered\n\nevidence generally. Rather, the court charged with\n\ndeciding such a claim should make a case-by-case\n\ndetermination about the reliability of the newly\n\ndiscovered evidence under the circumstances. The\n\ncourt then should weigh the evidence in favor of the\n\nprisoner against the evidence of his guilt. Obviously,\n\nthe stronger the evidence of the prisoner\u2019s guilt, the\n\nmore persuasive the newly discovered evidence must\n\nbe.\n\nThis is a far more fitting approach to the resolution of factual\n\nissues, focusing on the burden and quantum of proof required for\n\nan affirmative finding in the first instance rather than on the\n\nstandard associated with a deferential review of that finding.\n\nAccordingly,", + " we now hold that, in the exercise of our postconviction\n\nhabeas jurisdiction under article 11.07 and 11.071 of the Code of\n\nCriminal Procedure, our job is not to review the jury\u2019s verdict but\n\nto decide whether the newly discovered evidence would have\n\nconvinced the jury of applicant\u2019s innocence.\n\nEx parte Elizondo, 947 S.W.2d 202, 207 (Tex. Crim. App. 1996) (quoting\n\nHerrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390, 443\u201344 (1993)(Blackmun,", + " J., dissenting)).\n\nThis \u201cweighing\u201d is why a guilty plea does not foreclose an actual-innocence\n\nclaim. Tuley, 109 S.W.3d at 392 (\u201cThe State says that a guilty plea waives any\n\ncontention regarding the sufficiency of the evidence.\n\nThis is true, but the\n\nState's assertion that a claim of actual innocence is nothing more than a\n\nchallenge to the sufficiency of the evidence is not true.\u201d).\n\nMayhugh et al\u201327\n\nThe habeas court appears to have concluded that, because V.L.\u2019s\n\ntestimony would still be available at trial,", + " it would be up to a jury on re-trial to\n\nresolve conflicts between V.L.\u2019s testimony and S.L.\u2019s recantation and determine\n\nwhich is more credible. But that is the same analytical framework we rejected\n\nin Ex parte Navarijo. 433 S.W.3d at 571-72. There, we denied relief because\n\nthe habeas court simply performed a one-to-one comparison between the new\n\nrecantation and the eyewitness testimony without considering the strength of\n\nthe State\u2019s case as a whole. Id. The same can be said of the habeas court\u2019s\n\nanalysis in this case.\n\nIndeed,", + " we have previously granted relief on an actual-innocence claim\n\nwhen newly available and credible recantation evidence undermined testimony\n\nthat would nevertheless have been legally sufficient under the one-eyewitness\n\nrule. Thompson, 153 S.W.3d at 420. In Thompson, the defendant was charged\n\nwith sexual assault of his daughter, and the only direct evidence of the sexual\n\nassault at issue that the jury could rely upon was the testimony of the eightyear-old complainant. Id. at 418. Because there was no physical evidence of\n\nassault, the State corroborated the complainant\u2019s testimony with the\n\ncomplainant\u2019s mother\u2019s testimony that she became suspicious of the defendant\n\nafter the complainant came home from time with her father wearing a torn\n\ndress.", + " Id. at 419.\n\nBut at the habeas hearing, the defendant presented a great deal of\n\nMayhugh et al\u201328\n\nevidence involving the on-going custody dispute between the defendant and his\n\nex-wife at the time of the accusations. Id. The complainant herself, a twentyyear-old woman, testified that the sexual abuse never happened, and that her\n\nmother had pressured her to testify falsely. Id. The complainant\u2019s mother\n\nadmitted that she had physically abused her daughter in the past, though she\n\ndenied there being any custody dispute at the time of the allegations. Id. She\n\nadmitted that her daughter had originally said that the dress had been torn on\n\na bus,", + " and the church bus driver corroborated this by testifying that she had\n\nwitnessed the complainant tearing her dress on the bus.\n\nId.\n\nFinally, the\n\ndefendant presented testimony from an expert on interviewing techniques and\n\nrecantations in child sexual-abuse cases who opined that the complainant\u2019s\n\nrecantation was valid. Id. at 420. After the consideration of the significant\n\nimpact that all this evidence would have upon the State\u2019s case, we granted\n\nhabeas corpus relief because no reasonable juror could have found the\n\ndefendant guilty.\n\nThough the math may become trickier when, as in this case,", + " there is only\n\none recantation between two accusers, the ultimate calculus should not change.\n\nHere, the evidence presented by the Applicants has eroded the persuasiveness\n\nof the State\u2019s already weak cases just as surely as the evidence presented at\n\nthe habeas hearing in Thompson did. In this case, V.L. and S.L.\u2019s interlocking\n\naccusations were presented to both juries via Detective Matjeka, Serafina\n\nLimon, Dr. Kellogg and the girls themselves\u2013V.L. at Elizabeth\u2019s trial, and both\n\nMayhugh et al\u201329\n\ngirls at the joint trial.", + " The accounts were so intertwined that the credibility of\n\none witness\u2019s version rested on the credibility of the other witness\u2019s version of\n\nevents. Both victims testified that they were either assaulted together or one\n\nright after the other. S.L.\u2019s habeas testimony that nothing happened cannot be\n\nreconciled with V.L.\u2019s trial testimony; a fact-finder could not rationally believe\n\nboth complainants.9\n\nA. S.L.\u2019s Recantation Is Credible and Corroborated\n\nNotably, S.L.\u2019s recantation is direct, detailed, certain, and strongly\n\ncorroborated.", + " See Thompson, 153 S.W.3d at 420-21. Her original testimony,\n\nlike V.L.\u2019s, was not strong to begin with, and her recantation completely\n\nundermines her trial testimony. S.L. testified in detail regarding the events that\n\nwere transpiring at the time that the false accusations came to light, and she\n\nexplained the underlying motivations that compelled her and her sister to\n\nfabricate those allegations. Cf. Franklin, 72 S.W.3d at 678 (actual innocence\n\nnot shown where child victim recanted testimony that she had never had sex\n\nwith any other man (other than Franklin); the evidence \u201ccalls into question her\n\nveracity in general,", + " but only collaterally affects her accusation against\n\napplicant\u201d); Cf. Brown, 205 S.W.3d at 547 (actual innocence not proven where\n\n9\n\nIt is worth noting that the habeas court has already reached a sim ilar conclusion with\n\nregard to the im pact of Dr. Kellogg\u2019s \u201crecantation.\u201d As discussed above, the habeas court found\n\nthat the testim ony of both com plainants was so inextricably intertwined that Dr. Kellogg\u2019s\n\ntestim ony corroborated the evidence supporting the crim es against both girls. W ithout that\n\ncorroboration,", + " the habeas court held, that the State\u2019s case was weakened enough that it was\n\n\u201cm ore likely than not\u201d that a rational jury would have acquitted the Applicants.\n\nMayhugh et al\u201330\n\nchild victim claimed a lack of memory and made a global denial of sexual\n\nabuse). Rather than provide information that would have merely undermined\n\nher credibility, S.L. provided affirmative evidence that the assaults never\n\noccurred. In effect, S.L. not only recanted her own trial testimony, she also\n\nprovided credible eyewitness evidence exonerating the women for the crimes\n\nagainst V.L.\n\nThe circumstances and timing of the recantation were not suspicious.", + " As\n\npointed out by Dr. Doyle, the first person S.L. came forward to about her\n\nrecantation was \u201ca third party who doesn't have a dog in the show.\u201d It was\n\nonly when she finally found herself in a comfortable, safe setting that she could\n\ndeal with her own feelings and thoughts. Cf. Brown, 205 S.W.3d at 548 (\u201cthe\n\ntiming of C.B.'s recantation is, at least on its face, highly suspicious. It was\n\nonly after applicant's guilt was adjudicated and he was sentenced to twelve\n\nyears in prison\u2014more than three years after the alleged offense\u2014that C.B.\n\nsuddenly told her mother that she had been lying all along\u201d).\n\nThe recantation is corroborated by Rosemary Carrillo\u2019s testimony that\n\nJavier,", + " with the occasional assistance of his mother, Serafina, had engaged in\n\na pattern of involving the children in false abuse allegations to gain leverage in\n\nlegal disputes. See Thompson, 153 S.W.3d at 419 (noting that new evidence\n\nof an ongoing custody dispute at the time of the accusations undermined the\n\nstrength of the State\u2019s case); see also Hammer v. State, 296 S.W.3d 555, 56970 (Tex. Crim. App. 2009) (noting that a history of making prior false\n\nMayhugh et al\u201331\n\nallegations against others could be probative evidence of whether allegations\n\nat issue in the case are false under the doctrine of chances). Moreover,", + " S.L.\u2019s\n\ntestimony, credited by the trial court, establishes that Javier repeatedly\n\nthreatened S.L. with prison when she first tried to come forward with her\n\nrecantation. This corroborated S.L.\u2019s account that her father had used threats\n\nto manipulate her into making the sexual assault allegations in the first place,\n\nand suggested a reason why V.L. had not recanted her testimony.\n\nAdditionally, S.L.\u2019s recantation is consistent with the new medical\n\ntestimony establishing that there was no physical evidence of sexual assault.\n\nThompson, 153 S.W.3d at 420 (noting that recantation testimony was\n\nconsistent with the lack of physical evidence of abuse from the physical\n\nexamination); Cf.", + " Navarijo, 433 S.W.3d at 571 (clear and convincing standard\n\nnot met in light of the still-standing medical evidence suggestive of sexual\n\nabuse that was presented at trial).\n\nThe combined force of S.L.\u2019s credible\n\ntestimony and the new scientific evidence that there are no physical signs of\n\nsexual assault distinguishes this case from the situation presented in Navarijo\n\nwhere the credible recantation testimony remained contradicted by viable\n\nmedical evidence that a sexual assault had occurred. Navarijo, 433 S.W.3d at\n\n570-71. And, as we have already held,", + " the Applicants would not have been\n\nconvicted of these offenses had they been allowed to consider the newly\n\navailable, relevant scientific evidence regarding the victim\u2019s injuries.\n\nFinally, Applicants presented expert psychological evidence to further\n\nMayhugh et al\u201332\n\nexplain why S.L.\u2019s recantation is both credible and very persuasive. In deciding\n\nwhether to grant habeas claims of actual innocence, this Court has considered\n\nthe testimony of experts who have training in the detection of false sexualabuse allegations and false recantations. C.f. Ex parte Harleston, 431 S.W.3d\n\n67, 79, 88 n.", + " 11 (Tex. Crim. App. 2014) (denying relief on an actual-innocence\n\nclaim, in part, because the testimony by K.D., the recanting witness at the live\n\nhabeas hearing, was \u201cinternally inconsistent and present[ed] implausible\n\nexplanations\u201d of why K.D. would have fabricated sexual-assault allegations\n\nagainst Harleston, and in part based on the State\u2019s evidence at trial that\n\nincluded \u201ca number of witnesses who supported the circumstances of K.D.\u2019s\n\nsexual-assault outcry as genuine.\u201d). Here, the Applicants\u2019 psychological experts\n\ndetailed their reasons for finding S.L.\u2019s recantation significantly more credible\n\nthan the trial testimony that was introduced in this case.\n\nSpecifically,", + " Dr. Doyle, testified as to her belief that S.L.\u2019s recantation\n\ntestimony was credible both in terms of the substance of the recantation and\n\nin the manner in which it came to light. She explained that psychological\n\nstudies have shown that telling a child a false story repeatedly eventually taints\n\nthe child\u2019s memory.\n\nDr. Doyle also explained that this could have been\n\nexacerbated by the investigation itself. At the time of S.L.\u2019s interview by police,\n\nthere was little research into effective interviewing techniques for children who\n\nclaim to have been sexually abused. Unlike more contemporary investigations\n\ninto child abuse allegations,", + " in which a trained forensic interviewer asks a child\n\nMayhugh et al\u201333\n\nopen-ended questions in a one-on-one interview, Dr. Doyle noted that S.L. had\n\nsometimes been interviewed in front of her father and alongside her sister.\n\nThese techniques, according to Dr. Doyle, are associated with inducing\n\nerroneous responses and increased the likelihood of a child acquiescing to\n\nmisinformation provided by the interviewer or the parent. Dr. Doyle\u2019s expert\n\ntestimony further supports the determination that S.L.\u2019s recantation is both\n\npersuasive and credible while simultaneously bringing V.L.\u2019s trial testimony\n\nfurther into question.\n\nAdditionally,", + " Applicants presented unchallenged testimony from the\n\ncurrent executive director of the Counseling Institute of Texas, Maria Molett,\n\nthat none of the Applicants had ever engaged in any behavior similar to the\n\nallegations in this case, further corroborating S.L.\u2019s testimony that the assaults\n\nnever occurred. Molett testified that she had previously spent ten years as a\n\nmember of the governor-appointed Council on Sex Offender Treatment, which\n\nis the organization that makes determinations and policies regarding civil\n\ncommitment of sexually violent predators.\n\nShe explained that she had\n\ndetermined who could become a licensed sex-offender-treatment provider for\n\nthe State-sponsored sex-offender-treatment programs in her capacity as chair\n\nof the education committee as well as a member of the Standards and Practice\n\ncommittee.\n\nShe also noted that she is a licensed sex-offender-treatment\n\nprovider.\n\nMolett recounted that she had conducted psychosexual evaluations on\n\nMayhugh et al\u201334\n\nthree of the Applicants,", + " Liz, Cassie, and Kristie, all of whom were still in prison\n\nwhen these allegations were being investigated. As part of this evaluation, she\n\nreviewed all of the records of the offenses for which the Applicants were\n\nconvicted. She did a risk assessment, a Hare Psychopathy, and community\n\nsupervision risk assessment level of service inventory. She also testified that\n\nshe utilized polygraph tests as a means of corroborating the information given\n\nto her by each Applicant during these evaluations. According to Molett, each\n\nApplicant she tested had passed the polygraph tests. She also explained that\n\nthough she did not perform an evaluation of Anna,", + " she examined the records\n\nand the test results from the person who had evaluated Anna. Molett concluded\n\nthat based upon these evaluations, none of the four women were sex offenders\n\nand none of them had engaged in deviant sexual behavior. As mentioned\n\nabove, the habeas court expressly found Dr. Mollett\u2019s opinion evidence credible.\n\nApplicants urge this Court to not only credit Molett\u2019s expert opinion\n\ntestimony relied upon by the habeas court, but also the exculpatory results of\n\nthe polygraph tests themselves as proof of their innocence. We have previously\n\nheld that polygraph results themselves are inadmissible because they are\n\nunreliable.", + " Leonard v. State, 385 S.W.3d 570, 577 (Tex. Crim. App. 2012)\n\n(\u201cFor more than sixty years, we have not once wavered from the proposition\n\nthat the results of polygraph examinations are inadmissible over proper\n\nobjection because the tests are unreliable.\u201d). In the context of an actualinnocence claim, we have refused to consider them as evidence of innocence.\n\nMayhugh et al\u201335\n\nMiles, 359 S.W.3d at 662 n. 14 (\u201cBecause polygraph exams are not admissible\n\nevidence,", + " we do not rely on these results as evidence of Applicant\u2019s\n\ninnocence.\u201d). And while we have acknowledged that Rule 703 allows an expert\n\nto base his or her opinion on otherwise inadmissible evidence, we specifically\n\ndeclined to allow this rule to be used to admit polygraph results by claiming that\n\nthe results themselves were necessary to support the expert\u2019s opinion.\n\nLeonard, 385 S.W.3d at 582. As we explained in Leonard, Rule 703 cannot be\n\nused a conduit for admitting opinions based on \u201cscientific, technical, or other\n\nspecialized knowledge\u201d that would not meet Rule 702's reliability requirement.\n\nId.", + " Though we seemed to leave open the possibility that an expert could base\n\nhis or her opinion on a polygraph result, we refused to admit the results of a\n\npolygraph test under the guise of an expert\u2019s opinion that was based solely\n\nupon the results themselves.\n\nWe do not need to rely upon the polygraph results themselves in these\n\ncases to determine whether the Applicants unquestionably established their\n\ninnocence. First, it would require this Court to overrule existing law. Applicants\n\nare trying to do exactly what we said the State could not do in Leonard, use\n\npolygraph test results to prove the truth of those results under the guise of\n\nexpert opinion testimony based on those results.", + " Applicants have not shown\n\nthat our previous precedent was wrongly decided or unworkable.\n\nSecond, the habeas corpus court clearly credited Molett\u2019s opinion that the\n\nApplicants in this case were not sex offenders, that they had never engaged in\n\nMayhugh et al\u201336\n\ndeviant sexual behavior, and that they were not at any risk to engage in any\n\nsuch behavior in the future. Molett\u2019s opinion was based upon a whole series of\n\nevaluations.\n\nThe polygraph results were used only to corroborate the\n\ninformation provided by the Applicants in some of those tests as part of an\n\noverall treatment evaluation.\n\n22 Tex.", + " Admin. Code \u00a7 810.64(c)(18)\n\n(\u201cpolygraph examinations shall be used as a part of a comprehensive treatment\n\nprogram\u201d). Even if the results themselves were credited, they would only\n\nprovide, at most, incremental proof of the Applicants\u2019 claims beyond what the\n\nhabeas court has already credited. Given how strong the new evidence of\n\ninnocence is when compared to how weak the remaining evidence of guilt is,\n\nApplicants\u2019 claims for relief simply do not turn upon the polygraph results\n\nthemselves. If the results of lie-detector tests were truly the lynchpin of the\n\nApplicants\u2019 claims,", + " it would be difficult to argue that Applicants have carried\n\ntheir Herculean burden to prove their claim of actual innocence. With a number\n\nof convictions in Texas being overturned due to the fact-finder\u2019s reliance upon\n\n\u201cjunk science,\u201d we see no reason to open the door to consideration of\n\nhistorically unreliable polygraph results themselves just because those results\n\nmight either enhance or discredit exoneration claims.\n\nIn these cases, it is unnecessary to do so. Applicants have presented\n\nsignificant new evidence that unquestionably establishes their innocence. S.L.\n\nnot only established that the offenses did not occur through her credible\n\nrecantation testimony, she explained in detail how her father forced her and her\n\nMayhugh et al\u201337\n\nsister to make the false allegations to the police in the first place.\n\nS.L.\u2019s\n\nrecantation is corroborated by other documented instances of S.L.\u2019s father\n\nfabricating allegations of abuse in order to manipulate his wife in an ongoing\n\ncustody dispute.", + " Dr. Doyle\u2019s expert testimony regarding false claims of abuse\n\nfurther corroborated S.L.\u2019s recantation, and Maria Molett\u2019s expert opinion\n\nsupports the Applicants\u2019 claims that they are not sex offenders and the alleged\n\nbehavior is completely inconsistent with their psychosexual histories and\n\npsychological evaluations. All of this evidence combines to paint a clear and\n\nconsistent picture of the Applicants\u2019 innocence.\n\nB. The Remaining Evidence of Guilt is Exceedingly Weak\n\nIn contrast, the evidence relied upon to convict the Applicants paints a\n\nfairly inconsistent picture establishing the Applicants\u2019 guilt.\n\nThe evidence\n\npresented at the two trials set forth multiple different versions of how the\n\nApplicants were alleged to have abused V.L.", + " and S.L. during the time they\n\nvisited their Aunt Liz\u2019s apartment. In one version both complainants were\n\ntogether in the same room during the assaults, but in another the complainants\n\nwere not in the apartment together because S.L. was locked outside while the\n\nApplicants purportedly assaulted V.L. inside the apartment. At one point, S.L.\n\nclaimed she saw V.L. leave the bedroom to take a shower after allegedly being\n\nassaulted. In another, V.L. left the bedroom to simply go outside and play\n\nimmediately after the alleged sexual assault. Sometimes it was a gun to V.L.\u2019s\n\nhead when she was on the phone to her father,", + " others it was a knife. The\n\nMayhugh et al\u201338\n\nstories also vary as to the claims about who held the complainants down and\n\nwho actually committed the sexual assaults.\n\nNone of the versions are\n\nconsistent regarding when these two events allegedly occurred during the week\n\nin question. These material conflicts are so great that it is difficult to tell which\n\nversion of events the jury believed.\n\nMost importantly, many of the details of these stories are simply\n\nimplausible. As Dr. Doyle, explained in the habeas hearing, these stories simply\n\ndid not make sense. Dr. Doyle could not find one piece of evidence or one\n\nstatement consistent with what one would expect in a true sexual-abuse\n\nallegation.", + " According to Dr. Doyle, the events described were more like a\n\nfraternity hazing without any of the elements of sexual abuse. For example, Dr.\n\nDoyle explained that unlike a typical family sexual-abuse scenario there was no\n\nevidence in this case of grooming or an attempt to isolate the children. Having\n\ninterviewed hundreds of people who had been sexually abused, Dr. Doyle\n\ntestified that she had never seen anything that came close to the alleged\n\nbehavior in this case. That is why she believed that this story was a generated\n\nstory; it did not hang together.\n\nS.L.\u2019s testimony did.\n\nThe State did not\n\nchallenge this testimony.\n\nGiven the implausible and contradictory nature of the allegations,", + " Dr.\n\nKellogg\u2019s medical testimony was crucial to the case. It was the only piece of\n\nevidence that could show a crime had ever occurred. Not surprisingly, this\n\nopinion testimony was central to the State\u2019s theory of criminal liability. From\n\nMayhugh et al\u201339\n\nopening argument, to closing argument, there were two themes in both trials:\n\nthe girls\u2019 stories were inconsistent, but that didn\u2019t matter in light of Dr.\n\nKellogg\u2019s testimony.\n\nAt Elizabeth\u2019s trial, the prosecutor dealt with the coming inconsistences\n\nhead-on stating, in an opening argument (that was made before it was known\n\nthat S.L.", + " would not testify), that \u201cthey\u2019re not going to be able to remember\n\neverything. And they may not be able to keep everything perfectly straight, but\n\nthey\u2019re going to do their best to tell you what happened.\u201d But \u201cyou will hear\n\nfrom Dr. Nancy Kellogg.... who has done it, if not thousands, at least\n\nhundreds and hundreds of rape examinations on children... And she will talk\n\nto you about... the medical finding which [was] consistent with the story that\n\nV.L. told about how Liz\u2013Aunt Liz and her friends raped her.\u201d\n\nV.L.", + " went on to testify in that trial that, immediately after the first\n\nassault, her father called and she answered the phone. Liz then pulled out a\n\ngun and pointed it to her head and said that \u201cif I told anybody that she was\n\ngoing to kill me and my family.\u201d She was sure \u201c100% sure\u201d it was Elizabeth.\n\nDr. Kellogg testified that, in taking the history from the girls, V.L. told her\n\nthat both Liz and Anna had guns. Serafina, the outcry witness, testified that\n\nV.L. told her that \u201cone of the girls had the knife and had told them\u2013threatened\n\nthem that they were going to do something to their dad and me.\u201d And in her\n\nstatement to police,", + " V.L. said that it was Cassandra who made the threat to kill.\n\nV.L. was cross-examined about these inconsistences, as well as ones\n\nMayhugh et al\u201340\n\nrelating to whether the two assaults happened on sequential or non-sequential\n\ndays, whether or not S.L. was present during the outcry to Serafina, whether\n\nElizabeth drank nothing or half a bottle of Tequila, whether V.L. herself was\n\nmade to drink wine with soda or nothing at all, whether S.L. was in the living\n\nroom playing during the first assault or whether she was locked outside,\n\nwhether they were made to go back outside to play after those assaults or\n\nwhether they stayed in the apartment,", + " whether the four women were there the\n\nentire week or not, whether the women were screaming at them or not,\n\nwhether liquids were inserted both days or just the first day, whether it was\n\nAnna who took off her pants or Kristie, whether the gun was held to her head\n\nor to both of their heads, whether S.L. was assaulted in the living room or the\n\nbedroom, whether the first assault was in the morning or at 2 p.m., and\n\nwhether she saw tattoos and on who.\n\nThe State dismissed the inconsistencies in light of Dr. Kellogg\u2019s testimony.\n\nYou heard lastly from Dr.", + " Kellogg. I think Dr. Kellogg, ladies and\n\ngentlemen, interestingly enough was perhaps one of the most\n\ncritical, if not the most critical, witness that you heard from....\n\nIt\u2019s interesting to me that after all of the emotion and after all the\n\ntechnical wizardry, it\u2019s this simple and this terrifying painful. That\n\nlittle tag, that scar at 3:00 o\u2019clock, don\u2019t ever, ever forget Dr.\n\nKellogg\u2019s words that scar, that healed tear is indicative not just of\n\npenetration. It is indicative of very painful penetration. Folks, we\n\ncan sit here all day long and talk about demeanor and we can talk\n\nabout well,", + " the inconsistencies they had were this. The\n\ninconsistencies they had were that. But the medical, physical\n\nevidence does not lie. You can\u2019t make that tag \u2014 you can\u2019t make\n\nthat painful tear, that painful healing, that painful scar, up. That\u2019s\n\nwhy we brought you Dr. Kellogg.\n\nMayhugh et al\u201341\n\nA year later, at the joint trial in 1998, V.L. testified that it was Anna who\n\nhad put the gun to her head and her Aunt Liz who had answered the phone\n\nafter the alleged assaults. She denied that she had said, in the 1997 trial,", + " that\n\nit was Liz who had the gun.10 V.L. was again thoroughly cross-examined on the\n\nvariations of the facts in her accounts, including whether the Applicants were\n\ndressed or partially undressed or fully undressed, whether she made an outcry\n\nto her grandmother because of pressure she felt or she did so in response to\n\nher grandmother\u2019s questioning about how the girls were playing with dolls,\n\nwhether the door to the outside was locked with a chain lock or regular lock,\n\nwhether she talked to her father about the assaults or whether her\n\ngrandmother told their father, whether or not Kristie was there the first day,\n\nwhether or not Kristie was there the second day,", + " and whether they were taken\n\nhome or picked up.\n\nV.L.\u2019s inconsistencies about significant details of the\n\noffense such as whether the defendants used a gun or a knife, who was or was\n\nnot present, and where the assault occurred are represented in this chart.\n\n10\n\nSerafina testified at the 1998 trial that the girls had told her about a gun, but that she\n\nhad forgotten to tell the police about the gun. She said she never m entioned a knife in her 1997\n\ntestim ony. She, like V.L., blam ed the court reporter for the discrepancy. S.L.", + " told prosecutors\n\nin 1996 that Kristie held a gun on them.\n\nMayhugh et al\u201342\n\n1994\n\n1994\n\n1994\n\n1996\n\n1997\n\n1998\n\noutcry to Serafina\n\nstatement to\n\nstatement to\n\ninterview with\n\ntrial\n\ntrial\n\nacc\u2019d to Serafina\n\nDr. Kellogg\n\npolice\n\nDA\n\nweapon\n\n\u201cheld hand real\n\nLiz had a gun and\n\nAfter the second\n\nAfter the first\n\nAfter the first\n\nAfter the first\n\nand/or phone\n\ntight\u201d during threat\n\nAnna had a gun\n\nassault,", + " \u201cAnna\n\nassault, Javier\n\nassault, Javier\n\nassault, Javier\n\ncall\n\n(statement to\n\n\u201cand they were\n\nheld the gun\n\ncalled, &\n\ncalled, V.L.\n\ncalled, Liz\n\npolice)\n\npointing it at my\n\nagainst both of\n\n\u201csomebody had\n\nanswered & Liz\n\nanswered &\n\nhead\u201d and said if\n\nour heads and\n\na gun and\n\npointed gun\n\nAnna\n\n\u201cone of the girls had\n\nthey told \u201cthey\n\nthey told us not\n\npointed it at\n\njust at V.L.\n\npointed gun just\n\nthe knife and had\n\nwould kill our\n\nto tell\u201d what\n\n[V.L.] and told\n\nand said \u201cif I\n\nat V.L.\n\ntold\n\nfamily\u201d\n\nhappened\n\nher they would\n\ntold anybody\n\nkill her\u201d\n\nthat she was\n\nthem\u2013threatened\n\nthem that they were\n\ngoing to kill\n\ngoing to do\n\nor\n\nsomething to me\n\nme and my\n\nfamily\u201d\n\nand my dad\u201d (97\n\n\u201cdidn\u2019t use\n\ntrial)\n\nphone there\n\nbecause Liz\n\ngun (98 trial)\n\ndisconnected\n\nphone before\n\nanything\n\nhappened,\u201d so\n\nran next door to\n\ncall Javier\n\n1st assault\n\n2nd assault\n\nonly three women\n\nall four women\n\nKristie not\n\nall four women\n\nall four women\n\nall four women\n\nthere (statement to\n\nthere;", + " S.L. in\n\nthere; S.L. in\n\nthere; S.L.\n\nthere; S.L.\n\nthere; S.L.\n\npolice)\n\nliving room\n\nliving room\n\ntrapped outside\n\ntrapped\n\ntrapped outside\n\nduring V.L.\u2019s\n\nduring V.L.\u2019s\n\nduring V.L.\u2019s\n\noutside during\n\nduring V.L.\u2019s\n\nall four women\n\nassault; then\n\nassault; then\n\nassault; then\n\nV.L.\u2019s assault;\n\nassault; then\n\nthere (97 trial)\n\ncalled into\n\ncalled into\n\ncalled inside\n\nthen called\n\ncalled inside\n\nbedroom\n\nbedroom\n\n\u201csame thing\n\nall four women\n\nall four women\n\nKristie not\n\nKristie not there\n\nhappened next\n\nthere;", + " assaulted\n\nthere; assaulted\n\nthere;\n\n\u201cshe had gone\n\nday\u201d\n\nsimultaneously\n\nsimultaneously\n\nassaulted\n\nto work or\n\nin same room\n\nin same room\n\nsimultaneously\n\nsomething\u201d;\n\nin separate\n\nassaulted\n\nrooms\n\nsimultaneously\n\ninside\n\nin separate\n\nor\n\nrooms\n\nall four women\n\nor \u201cShe was\n\nalways there\n\nthere.\u201d\n\nMayhugh et al\u201343\n\nAlthough the court of appeals dismissed all the inconsistences because\n\nnone were on the \u201cessential elements,\u201d it did so because the essential elements\n\nwere corroborated by Nancy Kellogg\u2019s testimony regarding the physical\n\nevidence of sexual assault.", + " See Mayhugh v. State, 1999 WL 1246925 at *4\n\n(Tex. App.\u2013San Antonio Dec. 22, 1999) (not designated for publication).\n\nDr. Kellogg has now recanted that testimony as scientifically unreliable.\n\nS.L. has recanted her testimony as well, admitting that the allegations were\n\nfabricated. Indeed, S.L. explained exactly why the girls were able to remain\n\nconsistent on those points and no others: their father would hit them if they did\n\nnot recount the story correctly. And finally, it is logically impossible to believe\n\nany one of V.L.'s versions if one believes S.L.'s recantation.", + " The State\u2019s theory\n\nof the case was that the girls were witnesses to each other's alleged abuse. If\n\nS.L. was not abused, neither was V.L.\n\nWithout Dr. Kellogg\u2019s or S.L.\u2019s\n\ntestimony, the State is left with an exceedingly weak case from one witness\n\nthat must stand against significant evidence of witness manipulation and\n\neyewitness testimony that the crimes never occurred.\n\nApplicants have presented considerable and extremely persuasive\n\nevidence to support their claim of innocence. The medical testimony relied\n\nupon to secure the convictions is now known to be unreliable. One of the\n\ncomplainants has not only recanted her own testimony,", + " she has provided\n\neyewitness testimony that no assaults ever occurred and that she and her sister\n\nwere forced to testify falsely against the Applicants.\n\nNew psychological\n\nMayhugh et al\u201344\n\nevidence corroborates Applicants\u2019 claims that these allegations were generated\n\nthrough the manipulation of the complainants\u2019 by their father in order to gain\n\nleverage in a custody dispute. Substantial evidence regarding a history of\n\nclaims of abuse brought forth by the complainant\u2019s father that we now know\n\nwere equally false further corroborates the recantation evidence in this case.\n\nAnd evaluations of each Applicant showing that they are not sex offenders and\n\nhave never engaged in deviant sexual behavior,", + " further establishes the claims\n\nof actual innocence.\n\nWhen this new evidence is compared to the State\u2019s\n\nexceedingly weak case for guilt, it is patent that the Applicants have\n\nunquestionably established their claim that no jury could rationally find them\n\nguilty.\n\nVI. Conclusion\n\nIt has been suggested that the term \u201cactual innocence\u201d is inappropriate\n\nbecause applicants who are successful when raising a claim of actual innocence\n\nnever truly prove that they did not commit the offense.\n\nBut when the\n\npresumptions are reversed, the State does not have to prove that a defendant\n\nis definitively guilty. The State does not prove that a person has committed a\n\ncrime beyond all doubt,", + " or even beyond a shadow of a doubt. By proving its\n\ncase at trial according to the applicable standard, the State secures the ability\n\nto proclaim to the citizens of Texas that the person responsible for a crime has\n\nbeen brought to justice, that the person is guilty.\n\nWhen defendants have\n\naccomplished the Herculean task of satisfying their burden on a claim of actual\n\nMayhugh et al\u201345\n\ninnocence, the converse is equally true. Those defendants have won the right\n\nto proclaim to the citizens of Texas that they did not commit a crime. That they\n\nare innocent. That they deserve to be exonerated.", + " These women have carried\n\nthat burden. They are innocent. And they are exonerated. This Court grants\n\nthem the relief they seek.\n\nFiled: November 23, 2016\n\nDo not Publish ", + " click to enlarge courtesy\n\nA critically-acclaimed documentary in the case had been critical in drumming up support and awareness for the so-called San Antonio Four\n\n\"Those defendants have won the right to proclaim to the citizens of Texas that they did not commit a crime. That they are innocent. That they deserve to be exonerated. These women have carried that burden. They are innocent. They are exonerated. This court grants them the relief they seek.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe claims were always fantastic \u2013 as in, difficult to believe.The girls, ages 7 and 9, told police and child protection workers that a weeklong visit to their aunt's Westside San Antonio apartment in the summer of 1994 had turned into a sadistic,", + " orgy-like nightmare. They said their aunt, Elizabeth Ramirez, had red, wild eyes as she forced them into her bedroom. The girls said Ramirez's friends \u2013 Kristie Mayhugh, Cassandra Rivera, and Anna Vasquez \u2014 held them down by their wrists and ankles, repeatedly raping them with various small objects. The girls spoke of syringes, vials of white powder, guns, and possibly a knife.All four women turned down plea deals that would have allowed them to avoid prison time, believing their innocence would be proven in court. During two separate trials, juries heard a maze of contradictions: The assaults happened at night, or sometime in the morning,", + " or maybe in the afternoon whilewas on TV. Mayhugh wasn't there. Or was she? Ramirez pointed a gun at the girls as they spoke to their father on the phone, threatening them to keep quiet. Or maybe Ramirez and Vasquez each had guns. Or maybe it was only Vasquez who was armed.It wasn't just the girls' testimony that sent them to prison, but flawed forensic analysis from a local child abuse expert who told jurors there were physical signs the girls had experienced sexual trauma.None of it was true, according to judges with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which on Wednesday issued a ruling exonerating the so-called San Antonio Four,", + " who have fought for more than two decades to prove their innocence.In its ruling, the state's highest criminal court blames the saga on a vindictive man named Javier Limon, the girls' father and Ramirez's one-time brother-in-law. Ramirez has testified that the allegations of abuse surfaced not long after she'd rejected Limon's sexual advances. She also says that when she was pregnant, Limon wanted to be a father figure for her child. When she turned him down, Limon was furious, according to Ramirez.In its ruling, the CCA says that Limon \"has engaged in a pattern of threatening behavior towards the complainants and false allegations of sexual assault to gain leverage in disputes over custody of his children.\" During a two-day evidentiary hearing last year,", + " one of Limon's ex-wives testified that he tracked her down, pulled a gun on her and threatened to kill her after she fled with their kids to Colorado. The incident led to a custody battle, during which, to gain leverage, Limon made up assault allegations against a man the girls had been left alone with. \"Javier also made false accusations that a non-existent 10-year-old boy in Colorado had sexually assaulted\" one of his children, the CCA concluded. An investigation into the assault was dropped in 1992 after sexual assault examinations of the girls turned up nothing.Stephanie, one of the girls who accused her aunt and three friends of graphic,", + " violent assault, years later, would ultimately testify that her father was abusive growing up. She testified that when she was 14, she tried to commit suicide, got treatment, wound up in a group home and never moved back in with him. When she was 19 years old, she told a counselor that she'd never been sexually assaulted \u2013 that the allegations against her aunt and her friends were lies. She says her counselor urged her to do the right thing and come forward.Which she ultimately did. In 2012, she recanted on camera to Deborah Esquenazi, the filmmaker behind the widely-acclaimed documentary on the San Antonio Four case.", + " On camera, Stephanie nervously read from a prepared statement, saying, \u201cI was threatened and I was told that if I did tell the truth that I would end up in prison, taken away, and even get my ass beat.\"In court, Stephanie said that when she called her father to let him know she was going to recant, \"he told me that if I did that, that he was going to hit me where it hurt.\" He followed through on his promise. In 2012, soon after his daughter recanted and blamed the lies on him, Limon accused his daughter of being a bad mother and tried to use the courts to take away her children (Limon's effort failed and Stephanie kept her kids). Stephanie's sister has not recanted her story.In 2013,", + " lawyers challenged the women's convictions under a new law that makes it easier to challenge a case based on junk science. Besides the girls' disjointed stories on the stand, prosecutors had leaned on testimony from Nancy Kellogg, a local pediatrician and supposed expert in the field of child sexual trauma who testified that a 2-3mm white \u201cscar\u201d on the hymen of the 9-year-old girl could have been evidence of sexual assault. In her exam notes, Kellogg also hinted at the long discredited \"Satanic Panic\" of the 1980s when she wrote that the abuse described by the girls \u201ccould be satanic-related.\" (Kellogg later recanted her trial testimony,", + " saying the science has since shifted.)In large part due to Esquenazi's documentary, the case of the San Antonio Four has, in the past several years, become a sort of cause celebre among criminal justice reformers (who call it the last gasp of the so-called \u201c ritual satanic abuse \u201d panic) and LGBTQ advocates, who see homophobia in the way the women were treated at trial. Some point to statements made by prosecutors about the women\u2019s \u201chomosexual relationships\u201d as sign that the four women, all lesbians, never had a chance at beating charges they molested little girls in the much more conservative San Antonio of the mid-", + "90s. When Esquenazi's documentary aired on national TV last month, Tonya Pacetti-Perkins threw a screening party to raise awareness of the case at Pendlebury Brew, a local coffee house she runs with her wife.\u201cI remember the atmosphere of that time \u2013 it was really volatile,\u201d Pacetti-Perkins told us. \u201cThe fear of groups, of other people you don\u2019t understand, that\u2019s what this case makes me think of. We feel like it could\u2019ve happened to any of us.\u201dEarlier this year, a state district court judge overturned the women's convictions but said they weren't \"actually innocent\"", + " \u2013 an important distinction that allows them to seek compensation from the state for time wrongly spent behind bars (all have already been released from prison).In its ruling, the CCA disagreed with the lower court, pointing to the state's \"exceedingly weak case for guilt.\" In many ways, the ruling reinforces what virtually every journalist who's looked at it has concluded. Take, for example, formerreporter Michelle Mondo's 2012 investigation of the case, which was the first to highlight the many serious problems with it.And in case anyone still has any doubts as to their innocence, here's how the CCA capped its ruling (which you can read here ):Keith Hampton,", + " who represented Ramirez in her post-conviction hearings, told theWednesday morning that \"we're all just celebrating right now.\" He says the court's ruling is \"basically everything we've wanted for such a long time.\" Ramirez, who prosecutors considered the ringleader in the bizarre ritual abuse case, had once been sentenced to 37 years in prison for the assault. Hampton says that when he spoke to her on the phone early Wednesday, she was emotional upon hearing that the state's highest criminal court had declared her unquestionably innocent.\"Liz was crying so heavily she couldn't really even talk,\" Hampton told us. \"They were tears of joy.", + " She's going to have a very happy Thanksgiving. All of us are.\"\n" + ], + "length": 20318, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 42, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A healthy 44-year-old man collapses while jogging in a posh London suburb and dies an \"unexplained\" death, per police, and of course there's more to this already intriguing-sounding story. Jeffrey E. Stern wades through the weeds of the mysterious 2012 death of Alexander Perepilichny for the Atlantic, detailing the Russian immigrant's evolution from DNA scientist, to computer coder and black-market distributor (a dangerous stint that proved extremely lucrative), to what he had hoped would eventually be a career as \"an aboveboard entrepreneur\" who wouldn't have to \"hide from thugs behind his apartment door.\" And yet despite that yearning to apply his business acumen to growing a legitimate corporate empire, Perepilichny fell into what Stern deems a \"perhaps \u2026 inevitable\" world of \"corruption and graft.\" And that world ended up involving Russian crime syndicates, a slew of deaths under \"mysterious circumstances,\" and a link to US investor and millionaire Bill Browder, who colluded with Vladimir Putin to manipulate stock prices in Russia and reap the profits. Browder also served as a \"cheerleader\" for Putin against his enemies\u2014until he himself fell out of the Russian leader's graces and fled to the UK. The story relays how one man's death ended up tying Browder to the quiet, ambitious, Perepilichny, and how falling on the wrong side of the Kremlin (perhaps making \"an enemy of Putin himself\") may have been Perepilichny's unwitting undoing, complete with whispers of a highly structured assassination and an exotic toxic plant once wielded into weapons in a lab built by Lenin. (Try to unravel the Perepilichny mystery here, including why his wife may be saying he died of \"sudden adult death syndrome.\")\n", + "docs": [ + "On November 10, 2012, Alexander Perepilichny was feeling a little under the weather. He decided to try to shake it off by taking a few laps around the gated community southwest of London where Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9s like him lived in multimillion-dollar mansions alongside members of the English elite. Perepilichny jogged through a neighborhood of homes once owned by Elton John, Kate Winslet, John Lennon, and Ringo Starr. He collapsed on Granville Road, within 100 meters of the house he was renting for $20,000 a month. Police and medics were called to the scene,", + " but within 30 minutes, Perepilichny was pronounced dead. Listen to the audio version of this article:\n\nDownload the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles. Police told the press the death was \u201cunexplained.\u201d A 44-year-old man of average build and above-average wealth had simply fallen down and died in the leafy suburb he\u2019d recently begun calling home. Among the material facts not known at the time was that Perepilichny was in good health, as proved by a physical he\u2019d had for a life-insurance policy soon before his death. That he\u2019d traveled that morning from Paris,", + " where he had, inexplicably, reserved two hotel rooms in different parts of the city for the same nights. That he\u2019d been meeting with a man he said was from the Russian government, but who was actually an affiliate of a Russian criminal syndicate. And that he\u2019d gotten an ominous phone call informing him that police had found his name on a hit list in the home of an alleged Chechen contract killer.\n\nThree years passed before a theory emerged that might explain what had happened to him. But highly interested parties\u2014including a wealthy American-born investor and quite possibly officials in the highest reaches of the British and Russian governments\u2014were watching the story the whole time.", + " Perepilichny\u2019s friend Yuri Panchul learned of his death on a blog maintained by a Russian opposition figure. Panchul thought it was strange that police didn\u2019t immediately suspect foul play: The Perepilichny he knew partook of few vices that could stop the heart of a healthy man. Panchul works as an engineer in Silicon Valley. He told me he met Perepilichny 30 years ago, in Moscow. He remembers his old friend as a shy young man who walked with his head down and carried his anxiety in his gait. He had the pale complexion and skinny frame of someone who spent most of his time indoors,", + " his nose buried in books. Growing up in Ukraine in the 1970s and early \u201980s, Perepilichny wanted to be a scientist. He performed well enough on the entrance exams to win admission to Phystech, a prestigious science university founded at the beginning of the Cold War, in part to develop better ballistic missiles. The residue of its security-oriented mission lingered: Perepilichny had to sign a document limiting his communication with foreigners. Submitting papers to international journals and traveling to conferences abroad required special permission. The campus was drab, but Perepilichny was surrounded by some of the brightest minds in the Soviet Union.", + " He dove into his research and discovered his passion: DNA. At parties he was quiet and sober while those around him drank and smoked heavily. He didn\u2019t need the thrill. The applications of what he was working on were limitless, unimaginable\u2014he was exploring what made people people. Perepilichny\u2019s arrival at the university coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s at the Kremlin; soon after came glasnost, the new leader\u2019s policy of \u201copenness\u201d\u2014including openness to ideas and information from abroad. Aspiring Soviet scientists were able to see more clearly just how far they lagged behind the West. To Perepilichny and Panchul,", + " it felt as though Russia had woken up to a world of important discoveries that had already been made. Perepilichny concluded that if he wanted to be a scientist, he would have to go to America.\n\nHe figured he\u2019d need $3,000\u2014a wildly ambitious sum, considering his stipend at Phystech was about $10 a month. But the same changes that lifted the veil on Russia\u2019s standing in the sciences brought an opportunity: Before Gorbachev, private enterprise had been virtually forbidden. Now demand soared for products that had been unavailable or very scarce in the Soviet Union. Products like personal computers. Government ministries wanted them;", + " so did the new businesses popping up. Panchul had been writing software since he was 13, and he began working for a group of fellow students who would buy computers, program them, and sell them at a markup. Their seed money came from a friend who\u2019d tapped into the demand for another Western innovation: the mood ring. He\u2019d made a relative fortune hawking a Soviet version of it on a busy Moscow street. The group invited Perepilichny to join them. He wasn\u2019t a great coder, but he established himself as something of a middleman, striking deals to outfit government offices and businesses with custom-programmed computers.", + " When the students started out, in the fall of 1989, they managed to sell a single computer every few weeks. But within a year they were moving dozens each month. Without access to a reliable credit system, Perepilichny had to deal in cash\u2014often in U.S. dollars, which he got on the black market. And because prices for foreign goods were extremely inflated, the amount of cash he had to have on hand was staggering. A single computer could sell for more than 100 times the average Soviet monthly salary.\n\nAttempted robberies became an occupational hazard. Once, in 1989, someone noticed Panchul carrying a computer into his apartment building and sent an attractive young woman to his door,", + " saying she wanted to go out with him. Panchul happily obliged, but asked a friend to stay in the apartment while he was gone. Sure enough, just after he left with his date, a man tried to get in. Perepilichny and Panchul heard stories of businessmen being tortured with electric clothes irons, even sodomized with soldering irons, by thieves trying to find money stashes. Perepilichny had a heavy metal door installed at the entrance to his apartment. Perepilichny wanted to become an aboveboard entrepreneur\u2014not someone who had to hide from thugs behind his apartment door.", + " In 1991, the two friends signed a contract to build a simulator for the computer system used in aircraft like the Su-24, a supersonic Russian fighter jet that could fly at low altitude and had been deployed to devastating effect during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Panchul used his earnings to buy a plane ticket to America. The next year, the United States passed a law that welcomed foreign scientists with expertise in weapons of mass destruction into the country (in order to prevent them from taking their knowledge elsewhere), and Panchul was able to leverage his work on the jet to get a green card.\n\nPerepilichny,", + " meanwhile, made the $3,000 he needed to study in the U.S.\u2014and then some. But he didn\u2019t go. When he graduated, his professors urged him to work toward a doctorate in biochemistry, but by then he\u2019d abandoned his dream of becoming a scientist in favor of a more lucrative calling. Panchul told me that before leaving Russia, he\u2019d earned more in a single year than his parents had in their entire lives. Perepilichny was doing even better. He had a new vision for his career. Panchul recalls Perepilichny smoking one night, for the first and only time Panchul can remember,", + " and declaring that he no longer wanted to be involved in backroom deals. He wanted to be an aboveboard entrepreneur like those in the West, with a nice office and proper accounting\u2014not someone who had to hide from thugs behind his apartment door. He would learn how to operate in a variety of industries, build companies, and become successful not because he was willing to be a middleman on the black market but because he understood business. And he did. After that night, Perepilichny began branching out. He got involved in money management, currency trading, and many other areas\u2014even condensed-milk and frozen-vegetable production.", + " Over the next decade, he would amass many millions of dollars. But the path he took didn\u2019t lead to the upstanding business career he\u2019d once envisioned. Perhaps that was inevitable: Corruption and graft were rampant, and much of the capital available for investment came from shadowy enterprises.\n\nAmong the names in Perepilichny\u2019s growing Rolodex, one in particular would prove fateful: Vladlen Stepanov, whom he met in the mid-1990s. Stepanov considered Perepilichny a financial wizard\u2014so much so that by the early 2000s he gave Perepilichny power of attorney,", + " then watched as Perepilichny multiplied his wealth. How Stepanov had money to invest in the first place is unclear; he was a low-wage worker who dug mines and laid fiber-optic cable for a living. The two would later have a falling-out, and Perepilichny would find himself on the wrong side of the Kremlin. Tomer Hanuka Not long after Perepilichny gave up his dream of studying in the U.S., an American-born businessman named Bill Browder set out on a path to Moscow. Browder worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Salomon Brothers before deciding, as he later wrote in his memoir,", + " Red Notice, that Russia had \u201csome of the most spectacular investment opportunities in the history of financial markets.\u201d Browder launched an investment fund in Moscow in 1996\u2014a time when few foreigners would even think about starting businesses there\u2014and, though he didn\u2019t speak Russian, managed to bring in staggering returns. By 2000, Browder was running the best-performing emerging-markets fund in the world; by 2005, his firm was managing $4.5 billion in assets. Browder\u2019s personal take reportedly rose to nearly $250 million a year.\n\nHis investment strategy relied on a very well-placed ally: Vladimir Putin,", + " who\u2019d been appointed the acting president of Russia in 1999. Though the two men never met, they had common adversaries in the oligarchs who controlled most of Russia\u2019s wealth, and whose power threatened Putin\u2019s. When Browder recognized an opportunity for huge returns at Gazprom, Russia\u2019s biggest energy company, he bought as many shares as he could, then gave the press evidence of theft and mismanagement. Putin intervened, firing the CEO and replacing him with one who promised to recover the stolen assets. As confidence in the new management soared, so did the stock price, and eventually the value of Browder\u2019s initial shares multiplied by 100 times.", + " Browder and Putin repeated this dance as Browder\u2019s fund grew, and Putin\u2019s enemies suffered. Browder had an obvious financial interest in promoting investment in Russia, and he became one of Putin\u2019s most outspoken cheerleaders. For a time, his views weren\u2019t far out of step with those of many European and American experts, who thought Putin was willing to work with the West. (These were the days of George W. Bush looking Putin in the eye and seeing his soul.) But as Putin grew more authoritarian and the Western view of him dimmed, Browder continued to praise and defend him. In 2003, for example,", + " a billionaire businessman named Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested for tax evasion and fraud and sent to a Siberian labor camp. Many observers in the West saw the move as a chilling abuse of power, the result of Khodorkovsky\u2019s having publicly challenged Putin and supported opposition groups. But Browder came to the president\u2019s defense. He wrote an article that was published in The Moscow Times arguing that \u201cwhile there may be some things about Putin that we disagree with, we should give him the benefit of the doubt in this area and fully support him in his task of taking back control of the country from the oligarchs.\u201d And then, abruptly,", + " Browder himself learned what it was like to cross Putin. According to Browder and others, Putin quietly switched tactics. Having demonstrated his willingness, and ability, to destroy one billionaire, he was a credible threat to the rest and could demand a cut of their profits in exchange for leaving them alone. Which meant that when Browder continued calling out oligarchs, he was unwittingly attacking Putin\u2019s financial interests. In November 2005\u2014just months after criticizing \u201chysteria\u201d and \u201calarmist predictions\u201d about Putin\u2014Browder was labeled a threat to national security and kicked out of Russia. He fled to England, pulling all his firm\u2019s money out of Russia but leaving behind a few dormant companies that he\u2019d need time to properly liquidate.", + " Though Browder and Perepilichny hadn\u2019t yet crossed paths, the defining events in both men\u2019s lives began, in part, with the same two people: Vladlen Stepanov and his wife, Olga Stepanova, who ran a tax office. (Stepanov has claimed that he and Olga divorced in 1992, but according to The Moscow Times, they were married until 2010. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.) The couple was involved with a Russian crime syndicate run by a man named Dimitry Klyuev. In April 2007, according to a complaint filed by the U.S.", + " Justice Department in an ongoing case, Klyuev flew on a private jet to Larnaca, Cyprus. He was accompanied by a lieutenant colonel in the interior ministry, the primary police arm of the Russian government. Several others arrived soon after, including a lawyer named Andrey Pavlov. The Stepanovs came too, and met with Klyuev in Cyprus on May 8. (Pavlov told me over email that there is no Klyuev crime syndicate, which he described as \u201cmythical\u201d and \u201ca smokescreen story.\u201d He said that he, Klyuev,", + " and the Stepanovs were in Cyprus separately on vacation.) Court filings and records from multiple government investigations lay out what happened next. Back in Moscow that June, the group set in motion an audacious plan. The lieutenant colonel led raids on Bill Browder\u2019s office and on the law firm that represented him. Dozens of police officers herded employees into conference rooms, drilled into safes, and spent hours taking documents. Klyuev\u2019s associates used the stolen documents to register Browder\u2019s companies to new owners. Then they forged contracts that would make the companies appear to owe large amounts of money and therefore be eligible for tax refunds.\n\nIn late December 2007,", + " they used Browder\u2019s companies to apply for what amounted to the biggest known tax refund in Russian history, a total of $230 million. The applications went to Tax Office No. 25 and to No. 28, where Olga Stepanova worked. The bulk of the refunds were approved within a single business day\u2014on Christmas Eve. The money was split up and dispatched through thousands of transactions in more than a dozen countries. Vladlen Stepanov had set up a pipeline to get his share out of Russia quickly, opening Swiss bank accounts and registering companies in countries with poorly regulated financial sectors. And he called on an old associate for help.", + " Nearly $6 million was routed through Moldova and Latvia before reaching a company registered in the British Virgin Islands to a soft-spoken polymath named Alexander Perepilichny. Perepilichny used another of his companies to send money back to Stepanov, and also bought property for him: a pair of luxury condos on the Palm Jumeirah, a man-made island in Dubai so big that astronauts can see its palm-tree shape from space. And because Stepanov trusted Perepilichny with bank statements and other records, Perepilichny was one of the few people who knew where the money went.", + " In 2008, Browder was trying to launch a new investment fund focused on emerging markets outside of Russia when something strange happened: His office got a call from a bailiff in St. Petersburg, asking when the company planned to pay a $71 million judgment it owed. Browder had no idea what the bailiff was talking about; he knew that his Moscow office had been raided but didn\u2019t know how the stolen documents had been used. He asked a tax attorney in Moscow named Sergei Magnitsky to look into it. Magnitsky eventually discovered that money had been funneled from the Russian treasury to the companies that had been stolen from Browder.", + " Magnitsky reported the people he\u2019d found to be behind the theft, including the lieutenant colonel from the interior ministry, and testified against them. But instead of the culprits, Magnitsky himself was arrested. He spent a year in prison, where, despite pressure, he refused to change his testimony. He suffered beatings and a series of health problems that prison doctors treated improperly or not at all. On November 16, 2009, he died. Lenin established a laboratory to study poisons and develop them into weapons. It became known as the Kamera\u2014the Chamber. Browder was devastated and enraged when he heard the news.", + " His team distributed a press release, which included a lengthy description of the torture that Magnitsky had written in prison and given to his lawyer. Novaya Gazeta, a major Russian newspaper, published Magnitsky\u2019s handwritten letters on its front page. The Russian government announced an investigation and then the firings of 20 prison officials, and a nongovernmental organization that monitors Russian prisons released a damning report confirming that Magnitsky had been tortured. But when the NGO sent its findings to five government agencies, none of them even replied. Browder learned that 19 of the 20 prison officials the government fired had had nothing to do with Magnitsky\u2019s death.", + " Some had worked at prisons thousands of miles away.\n\nBrowder was determined to get justice. He flew to Washington and began an impassioned lobbying effort that would result, in December 2012, in the passage of the Magnitsky Act, which imposed travel bans and sanctions on those believed to be responsible for the tax heist and Magnitsky\u2019s death. And he took to YouTube. When a young secretary in his office suggested posting videos to explain the crime, Browder figured, What the hell? He wasn\u2019t sure what good might come of it, but he was angry, and willing to try just about anything. Little did he know that 25 miles from his office,", + " in a rented house in St. George\u2019s Hill, a Russian who had recently arrived in England and had intimate knowledge of the heist would discover these videos and watch them with great interest. Deep in the Amazon basin, the Tupi Indians have, for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years used a heart-shaped leaf from a plant called curare to treat kidney stones, fever, testicular inflammation, snakebites, and other ailments. By the end of the 16th century, word of the plant\u2019s many applications had reached Europe by way of Sir Walter Raleigh and other explorers. Its uses were eventually reported on by medical experts.", + " But the Tupis knew that the heart-shaped leaf could be poisonous. The word curare comes from the Tupi words for \u201ckill\u201d and \u201cbird,\u201d and one of its chemical building blocks is an alkaloid that stops signals passing between the brain and muscles. The same leaf that can salve a tribesman\u2019s testicular pain can impede the neurological signals in a monkey high in the tree canopy, interfering with its ability to hang on to a branch, or even to breathe. It was this use that played a bit part in the course of world history in the summer of 1918, when a young Socialist revolutionary aimed a revolver at Vladimir Lenin and fired three times.", + " Lenin survived, of course. But his doctors determined that the bullets had been coated with poisonous curare resin, which intrigued Lenin. He established a laboratory to study poisons and develop them into weapons. He called it the Special Room. Over the years, the lab would move around and change names\u2014becoming Laboratory No. 1, Lab X, and Laboratory No. 12\u2014but it remained colloquially known as the Kamera. The Chamber. Its purpose, according to former intelligence agents, was to find ways to kill people without leaving a trace. Curare was one of the Kamera\u2019s first projects. The plant was used on a suspected double agent and a Ukrainian archbishop who preached resistance to the Soviets.", + " KGB operatives also used sodium fluoride, which in certain doses is lethal, and is difficult to identify as a cause of death because of its more common use: preventing tooth decay. Many people already have it in their bloodstream. Irradiated thallium was one of the Kamera\u2019s mid-century innovations. A medical team might recognize the symptoms of thallium poisoning\u2014it was commonly used in rat poison\u2014and set about treating a patient, not knowing that the person was actually dying of radiation exposure. The thallium would disintegrate by the time an autopsy could be performed, leaving no physical evidence of poisoning.\n\nAny time one of the Kamera\u2019s chemical tools was discovered,", + " future deaths from that same poison might be easily linked to Russia. So the lab kept innovating. It developed cyanide that could be deployed as a mist: A KGB defector admitted to having killed a prominent writer by spraying him in a stairwell with a canister hidden in a newspaper. In 1978, a Bulgarian dissident in London named Georgi Markov died four days after feeling a pinch on the back of his right thigh and turning in time to see a man behind him pick up an umbrella off the ground. Porton Down, the U.K.\u2019s military-science research facility, determined that Markov had been poisoned with ricin.", + " Twenty years later, another KGB defector admitted his involvement in the assassination: He said that the Kamera had fashioned ricin into a pellet that could be injected from the tip of an umbrella. Markov\u2019s death became known as the \u201cumbrella murder.\u201d (The former agent later denied his involvement, and British authorities decided that they had insufficient evidence to initiate legal proceedings.) In 2000, a prominent Russian politician named Anatoly Sobchak died of an apparent heart attack; two of his bodyguards fell ill, too. A Russian forensic expert turned investigative reporter later wrote that Sobchak may have been poisoned by a substance sprayed onto a reading lamp on his bedside table.", + " The heat from the bulb would have diffused the poison throughout the room, its lethal properties diminishing as it dispersed, leaving no trace. In 2004, the Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko became violently ill. Lesions covered his face and he nearly died. Though he had obviously been poisoned\u2014he had several thousand times the normal level of dioxin in his system, the second-highest level ever recorded\u2014it took a team of some 20 doctors, several of whom flew in from the U.S., to reach that diagnosis. Conspiracy theories began circulating almost immediately: that the U.S. had poisoned Yushchenko; that he had disfigured himself.", + " But the circumstantial evidence pointed strongly to Russia. Two years later, a former KGB agent turned Putin critic named Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with a radioactive isotope called Polonium-210. He survived for three weeks, helping investigators and even writing a statement from his hospital bed in London before he finally died. \u201cYou may succeed in silencing one man,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBut the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done.\u201d Though poisoning might seem like an easy way to kill someone,", + " ensuring that an assassination will remain anonymous requires a level of technical know-how, resources, and manpower difficult to marshal without government backing. Boris Volodarsky, a veteran of Russia\u2019s military-intelligence service and the author of The KGB\u2019s Poison Factory: From Lenin to Litvinenko, described the process to me by email. Once a plan is developed, it is passed down a formal chain of command, from the Kremlin to the chief of the secret service to the head of the FSB (the successor to the KGB) to the Kamera. Not even assassinations are exempt from the singular Russian bureaucracy. A target\u2019s body type,", + " weight, eating habits, and other details must be known by a specialist, who chooses a poison and calculates the dose. An assassin can\u2019t count on a second chance if the dose is too low, and might be exposed as the killer if the dose is too high and symptoms come on before he can escape. Sometimes\u2014for example, when the assassin and the target know each other\u2014the killer will practice by drawing the victim out of his safety zone during dry runs. The agent tries to get a target into a situation in which his defenses are down\u2014in which he feels comfortable, or is distracted. Sometimes agents perform \u201cpassive probes,\u201d in which they follow the target,", + " noting details of movement and habit. Agents draw on careful planning and a long history of tradecraft, which is why when enemies of the Kremlin die, blame is almost never conclusively established.\n\nTomer Hanuka\n\nBrowder was suspicious when, in August 2010, an email came in from a man who claimed to have seen his YouTube videos, and to know a key player in the massive theft from the Russian treasury. The man called himself \u201cAlejandro Sanches,\u201d which was obviously not a Russian name and struck Browder as fake. Browder had good reason to be cautious\u2014he\u2019d gone from being one of Putin\u2019s staunchest supporters to one of his loudest critics,", + " and he believed the Russian government was capable of just about anything. One of Browder\u2019s lawyers went to meet Sanches, whoever he was. The lawyer was accompanied by a four-man security detail. One guard carried a signal jammer. Another did a sweep with a Geiger counter, lest Sanches try to use radioactive poison\u2014Browder was acutely aware that another of Putin\u2019s enemies, Litvinenko, had been poisoned at a hotel less than a 10-minute walk away.\n\nAt the meeting, Sanches revealed his true identity: Alexander Perepilichny. He explained who he was and said he could point Browder to the criminals who had carried out the heist.", + " He said he\u2019d decided to come forward because he was troubled by Magnitsky\u2019s death: Corruption may have become an accepted part of doing business in Russia, but killing an innocent man was not okay. Browder didn\u2019t buy this motivation, but Perepilichny dropped clues that allowed him to piece together a story he found easier to believe: Perepilichny and the Stepanovs had fallen out over money Perepilichny had either lost or stolen during the 2008 financial crisis. The Stepanovs had used their influence to have criminal charges brought against him, and he\u2019d fled Russia with his wife and two children.", + " Now he figured if he could shine a light on the Stepanovs\u2019 crimes, he could hurt their credibility and weaken the case against him. Three others who knew about the fraud had died under mysterious circumstances. One fell from a balcony. Another dropped dead of liver failure at age 43. To Browder, Perepilichny was a criminal, plain and simple. But he was a criminal who could help him take down the people behind the tax fraud. Perepilichny handed over bank records and other evidence, and explained what it all meant. With the documents Perepilichny provided, Browder turned to YouTube again,", + " posting a video about the Stepanovs. It went live in mid-April and got 200,000 views by the end of the first day, half a million by the end of the month. Browder\u2019s lawyers used Perepilichny\u2019s information in a complaint to the attorney general of Switzerland, and the Swiss responded by freezing two accounts, which together contained at least $10 million. The Swiss also launched an investigation, and Browder\u2019s team gained access to the case file.\n\nJournalists from the nonprofit Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project turned up information that led to even more criminal investigations. Browder realized that the stolen funds hadn\u2019t gone just to exotic island destinations:", + " Members of the criminal syndicate also poured money into Manhattan real estate. He alerted the U.S. Justice Department, which began legal proceedings to seize property. The entire money-laundering scheme was coming into focus. To date, more than a dozen different countries have frozen accounts, launched investigations, or imposed sanctions. For Perepilichny, coming forward was a risky move: In addition to Magnitsky, at least three others who\u2019d known about the tax fraud had died under mysterious circumstances. One fell from a balcony. Another dropped dead of liver failure at age 43. A third died of heart failure at 53.", + " Browder and his associates tried to protect Perepilichny\u2019s identity by redacting details in court documents. But enough clues slipped through to tip off Vladlen Stepanov. Browder\u2019s YouTube video and his complaint to the Swiss listed the address of a property Stepanov had bought in Dubai. The only person who knew that address, besides the Stepanovs themselves, was Alexander Perepilichny.\n\nStepanov placed an ad in a Russian newspaper, formatted as an open letter, in which he asserted his innocence and threatened Perepilichny by name. \u201cTo the scam artists who have filched my money,", + " inflicted tangible financial damage upon me and, on top of everything, smeared my reputation,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI shall seek redress.\u201d Perepilichny was exposed. He\u2019d blown the whistle not just on a Russian crime boss but on police and officials high up in the interior ministry. Olga Stepanova had left the tax office to work at the defense ministry. The man who, according to Browder, had approved Magnitsky\u2019s arrest was a highly placed official in the FSB. And though no direct evidence exists to link Putin to the Klyuev group\u2019s tax fraud, Russia experts have told me it\u2019s nearly inconceivable that a theft of that magnitude would have happened without the president\u2019s blessing.", + " Which means Perepilichny may have made an enemy of Putin himself. Troubling things began to happen. A relative in Russia told Perepilichny that his name and other details were on a hit list police had found at the home of an alleged Chechen contract killer. Perepilichny went to Ukraine to visit family, and when he returned he told an acquaintance in England that he\u2019d been confronted in a restaurant by someone who seemed to be after him, and whose bodyguards attacked him. Then a company founded by a suspect in the Litvinenko poisoning brought a series of lawsuits against Perepilichny over alleged debts.\n\nDesperate,", + " Perepilichny began meeting with a man he told acquaintances was from the Russian interior ministry\u2014a man he said threatened him with more criminal charges but also offered a way for him to make things right with the Stepanovs. They met at least twice, first in Zurich, then at a caf\u00e9 in Heathrow Airport. But the man was not from the Russian government. He was an associate of the Klyuev group\u2014the lawyer Andrey Pavlov. (Pavlov told me Perepilichny initiated the meetings, asking for help in determining whether there were any Russian investigations against him, and that Perepilichny knew he was a lawyer,", + " not a government official.) In November, Perepilichny traveled to France. The details of this trip are murky and suspicious. He reserved rooms in two different Paris hotels\u2014one that had five stars, and a more modest one across town\u2014for the same nights, perhaps in an attempt to make his movements harder to follow. He spent more than $1,500 at a Prada store, but didn\u2019t bring anything back with him to London. When he got home, he told his wife he wasn\u2019t feeling well and went for a jog. After Perepilichny collapsed, a few neighbors turned him on his back and tried to administer CPR.", + " A shaky cellphone video taken by a young man who happened to be nearby shows the blurred outline of the whistle-blower, lying on a mostly dark street in the glare of a car\u2019s headlights. He was pronounced dead just before 5:40 p.m.\n\nBrowder had no doubt that Perepilichny was murdered. His lawyers wrote to the Surrey police to lay out the evidence and demand a toxicology report. Unsatisfied with the response from the police, Browder slipped reporters the letters he\u2019d sent to them, and as the circumstances surrounding Perepilichny\u2019s death circulated in the papers, the police officially opened a murder investigation.", + " Toxicology tests were performed. Police also met with Browder\u2019s team and took a witness statement from one of his employees. Then they ruled the death unsuspicious. The coroner, who in England must open an inquest if the post-mortem examination does not reveal a cause of death, scheduled hearings, but denied Browder\u2019s request to take part in them. Relegated to the sidelines, there was nothing else he could do. In the summer of 1879, an English medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle began experimenting. Several years earlier, while seeking a cure for his nerve pain, he had learned about an exotic flower.", + " Now he got a fresh tincture of the plant, called gelsemium, which has been known for hundreds of years to Chinese herbalists and to the hill tribes of Vietnam. He gave himself a tiny dose, less than one-tenth of a fluid ounce, and increased the amount ever so slightly each day. On the third day he took about one-fifth of an ounce. The effect was strange, and almost immediate. He became giddy, his limbs felt weak, and his pulse was faint. The next day, he had trouble focusing on distant objects. The day after that: headache, diarrhea, and fatigue. Then came persistent and prostrating diarrhea and depression.", + " His headache didn\u2019t abate. He deduced from his symptoms that the plant acted as a motor paralyzer, and he wasn\u2019t far off. It interferes with a receptor responsible for managing critical functions all over the body.\n\nHad Doyle continued increasing his dose, he would have become paralyzed and short-circuited his respiratory system. Instead, he decided he\u2019d had enough. He submitted his findings to a journal and later gave up the practice of medicine entirely\u2014becoming a novelist and narrating the exploits of Sherlock Holmes. A century later and about 100 miles away, a researcher named Monique Simmonds at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew was studying another plant that caused strange physiological effects.", + " She was investigating a condition that afflicted people in poor parts of the world, especially parts prone to extreme weather. The most visible symptom was that, simply put, they walked funny. Researchers discovered that the one thing people with the condition all had in common was that they\u2019d eaten legumes from the lathyrus plant, often used as a food of last resort because it can survive both drought and flood. Milmo sat up. Did the lawyer just say \u201cpoison\u201d? Simmonds used insects to test the ways in which chemicals in the plant might be acting on the brain. She learned that the lathyrus plant contained neurotoxins that confused signals between the brain and muscles.", + " As she continued in her research, Simmonds identified other plant compounds that could have strange effects. She found that chemicals in some plants actually hacked insects\u2019 brains and manipulated their feeding behavior, presumably as a kind of evolutionary armor against hungry predators. If plants could have such profound effects on insects, whose central nervous systems are similar to ours, how might they affect humans? The further she got into her research, the more she became known in the criminal-justice system, because in studying plants, she was also identifying poisons\u2014many of them exotic. When people turned up sick or dead and police suspected poison but didn\u2019t find anything with standard toxicology tests,", + " Simmonds was an invaluable resource. (Simmonds agreed to talk to The Atlantic about her research on the condition that no open cases be discussed.) So when a life-insurance company needed an expert to determine whether a client named Alexander Perepilichny had been murdered, even though a toxicology test hadn\u2019t detected anything, Simmonds was well placed to help. In May 2015, Cahal Milmo, then a reporter for The Independent, showed up for the opening hearing of the inquest into Perepilichny\u2019s death to find that he was one of the only reporters there. Others had checked in with the court and knew that the hearing had been downgraded to one of the usually boring affairs called a \u201cpre-inquest review hearing,\u201d where the parties talk about logistics.", + " Should we empanel a jury? What dates work for everyone? But Milmo hadn\u2019t remembered to check. So when he arrived at the courthouse and figured out what was going on, he resigned himself to a wasted morning. Then, a bombshell: Bob Moxon Browne, a lawyer for the life-insurance company, began speaking in a booming voice about how Monique Simmonds from Kew Gardens had found a chemical in the dead man\u2019s stomach associated with a poisonous plant that grows in China: gelsemium. Milmo sat up. Did the lawyer just say \u201cpoison\u201d? The coroner responded without surprise, giving Milmo the impression that this wasn\u2019t the first he\u2019d heard about Simmonds\u2019s findings.", + " \u201cThe real issue is,\u201d the coroner said, \u201cis there evidence that Mr. Perepilichny was poisoned?\u201d \u201cWe have a suspect substance in the stomach. That compound is only found in nature in five forms, all of which are associated with the highly toxic gelsemium plant,\u201d Browne said. \u201cGiven that it only grows in China and is a known weapon of assassination by Chinese and Russian contract killers, why was it in his stomach?\u201d He asked that whatever samples from the body remained be sent to Simmonds so that she could do more tests. The coroner agreed, delaying the proceedings for four months. As soon as the hearing ended,", + " Milmo raced to a coffee shop to file his story: \u201cBillionaire Russian Businessman Found Dead Outside Surrey Home Could Have Been Poisoned.\u201d By that night, other articles about the exotic flower that had apparently killed the whistle-blower were flying around the web. All of which set up a bizarre spectacle. With the suspicion of poison providing a new, even stronger suggestion of murder, Browder was allowed back into the proceedings as an \u201cinterested party.\u201d His lawyers made so many demands before the next hearing that the exasperated coroner opened it by castigating them. Browder didn\u2019t care. He remained certain that Perepilichny had been murdered.\n\nBut Browder\u2019s crusade put him at odds with the victim\u2019s own family.", + " Perepilichny left behind two children and a widow, who has an opinion of her own\u2014and it\u2019s not what one might expect. Whether because of pressure to keep quiet, or because she wants to move on from a painful chapter, or because murder jeopardizes the millions of dollars in life insurance Perepilichny took out weeks before he died, her lawyers have fought Browder\u2019s efforts to prove Perepilichny was assassinated. She has said she believes her husband probably died of something called sudden adult death syndrome. (Requests for comment to three different law firms that have represented her have gone unanswered.) Browder has suggested that Surrey police didn\u2019t thoroughly investigate Perepilichny\u2019s death in part because they\u2019re incompetent and in part because of the enormous influence that wealthy Russians wield in British business and politics.", + " He told a parliamentary committee that the stolen money Perepilichny helped expose passed through 12 British banks, and that millions of dollars went toward \u201can orgy of spending on luxury goods and services in the U.K.\u201d ", + " On November 10, 2012, Alexander Perepilichny was feeling a little under the weather. He decided to try to shake it off by taking a few laps around the gated community southwest of London where Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9s like him lived in multimillion-dollar mansions alongside members of the English elite. Perepilichny jogged through a neighborhood of homes once owned by Elton John, Kate Winslet, John Lennon, and Ringo Starr. He collapsed on Granville Road, within 100 meters of the house he was renting for $20,000 a month. Police and medics were called to the scene,", + " but within 30 minutes, Perepilichny was pronounced dead. Listen to the audio version of this article:\n\nDownload the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles. Police told the press the death was \u201cunexplained.\u201d A 44-year-old man of average build and above-average wealth had simply fallen down and died in the leafy suburb he\u2019d recently begun calling home. Among the material facts not known at the time was that Perepilichny was in good health, as proved by a physical he\u2019d had for a life-insurance policy soon before his death. That he\u2019d traveled that morning from Paris,", + " where he had, inexplicably, reserved two hotel rooms in different parts of the city for the same nights. That he\u2019d been meeting with a man he said was from the Russian government, but who was actually an affiliate of a Russian criminal syndicate. And that he\u2019d gotten an ominous phone call informing him that police had found his name on a hit list in the home of an alleged Chechen contract killer.\n\nThree years passed before a theory emerged that might explain what had happened to him. But highly interested parties\u2014including a wealthy American-born investor and quite possibly officials in the highest reaches of the British and Russian governments\u2014were watching the story the whole time.", + " Perepilichny\u2019s friend Yuri Panchul learned of his death on a blog maintained by a Russian opposition figure. Panchul thought it was strange that police didn\u2019t immediately suspect foul play: The Perepilichny he knew partook of few vices that could stop the heart of a healthy man. Panchul works as an engineer in Silicon Valley. He told me he met Perepilichny 30 years ago, in Moscow. He remembers his old friend as a shy young man who walked with his head down and carried his anxiety in his gait. He had the pale complexion and skinny frame of someone who spent most of his time indoors,", + " his nose buried in books. Growing up in Ukraine in the 1970s and early \u201980s, Perepilichny wanted to be a scientist. He performed well enough on the entrance exams to win admission to Phystech, a prestigious science university founded at the beginning of the Cold War, in part to develop better ballistic missiles. The residue of its security-oriented mission lingered: Perepilichny had to sign a document limiting his communication with foreigners. Submitting papers to international journals and traveling to conferences abroad required special permission. The campus was drab, but Perepilichny was surrounded by some of the brightest minds in the Soviet Union.", + " He dove into his research and discovered his passion: DNA. At parties he was quiet and sober while those around him drank and smoked heavily. He didn\u2019t need the thrill. The applications of what he was working on were limitless, unimaginable\u2014he was exploring what made people people. Perepilichny\u2019s arrival at the university coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev\u2019s at the Kremlin; soon after came glasnost, the new leader\u2019s policy of \u201copenness\u201d\u2014including openness to ideas and information from abroad. Aspiring Soviet scientists were able to see more clearly just how far they lagged behind the West. To Perepilichny and Panchul,", + " it felt as though Russia had woken up to a world of important discoveries that had already been made. Perepilichny concluded that if he wanted to be a scientist, he would have to go to America.\n\nHe figured he\u2019d need $3,000\u2014a wildly ambitious sum, considering his stipend at Phystech was about $10 a month. But the same changes that lifted the veil on Russia\u2019s standing in the sciences brought an opportunity: Before Gorbachev, private enterprise had been virtually forbidden. Now demand soared for products that had been unavailable or very scarce in the Soviet Union. Products like personal computers. Government ministries wanted them;", + " so did the new businesses popping up. Panchul had been writing software since he was 13, and he began working for a group of fellow students who would buy computers, program them, and sell them at a markup. Their seed money came from a friend who\u2019d tapped into the demand for another Western innovation: the mood ring. He\u2019d made a relative fortune hawking a Soviet version of it on a busy Moscow street. The group invited Perepilichny to join them. He wasn\u2019t a great coder, but he established himself as something of a middleman, striking deals to outfit government offices and businesses with custom-programmed computers.", + " When the students started out, in the fall of 1989, they managed to sell a single computer every few weeks. But within a year they were moving dozens each month. Without access to a reliable credit system, Perepilichny had to deal in cash\u2014often in U.S. dollars, which he got on the black market. And because prices for foreign goods were extremely inflated, the amount of cash he had to have on hand was staggering. A single computer could sell for more than 100 times the average Soviet monthly salary.\n\nAttempted robberies became an occupational hazard. Once, in 1989, someone noticed Panchul carrying a computer into his apartment building and sent an attractive young woman to his door,", + " saying she wanted to go out with him. Panchul happily obliged, but asked a friend to stay in the apartment while he was gone. Sure enough, just after he left with his date, a man tried to get in. Perepilichny and Panchul heard stories of businessmen being tortured with electric clothes irons, even sodomized with soldering irons, by thieves trying to find money stashes. Perepilichny had a heavy metal door installed at the entrance to his apartment. Perepilichny wanted to become an aboveboard entrepreneur\u2014not someone who had to hide from thugs behind his apartment door.", + " In 1991, the two friends signed a contract to build a simulator for the computer system used in aircraft like the Su-24, a supersonic Russian fighter jet that could fly at low altitude and had been deployed to devastating effect during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Panchul used his earnings to buy a plane ticket to America. The next year, the United States passed a law that welcomed foreign scientists with expertise in weapons of mass destruction into the country (in order to prevent them from taking their knowledge elsewhere), and Panchul was able to leverage his work on the jet to get a green card.\n\nPerepilichny,", + " meanwhile, made the $3,000 he needed to study in the U.S.\u2014and then some. But he didn\u2019t go. When he graduated, his professors urged him to work toward a doctorate in biochemistry, but by then he\u2019d abandoned his dream of becoming a scientist in favor of a more lucrative calling. Panchul told me that before leaving Russia, he\u2019d earned more in a single year than his parents had in their entire lives. Perepilichny was doing even better. He had a new vision for his career. Panchul recalls Perepilichny smoking one night, for the first and only time Panchul can remember,", + " and declaring that he no longer wanted to be involved in backroom deals. He wanted to be an aboveboard entrepreneur like those in the West, with a nice office and proper accounting\u2014not someone who had to hide from thugs behind his apartment door. He would learn how to operate in a variety of industries, build companies, and become successful not because he was willing to be a middleman on the black market but because he understood business. And he did. After that night, Perepilichny began branching out. He got involved in money management, currency trading, and many other areas\u2014even condensed-milk and frozen-vegetable production.", + " Over the next decade, he would amass many millions of dollars. But the path he took didn\u2019t lead to the upstanding business career he\u2019d once envisioned. Perhaps that was inevitable: Corruption and graft were rampant, and much of the capital available for investment came from shadowy enterprises.\n\nAmong the names in Perepilichny\u2019s growing Rolodex, one in particular would prove fateful: Vladlen Stepanov, whom he met in the mid-1990s. Stepanov considered Perepilichny a financial wizard\u2014so much so that by the early 2000s he gave Perepilichny power of attorney,", + " then watched as Perepilichny multiplied his wealth. How Stepanov had money to invest in the first place is unclear; he was a low-wage worker who dug mines and laid fiber-optic cable for a living. The two would later have a falling-out, and Perepilichny would find himself on the wrong side of the Kremlin. Tomer Hanuka Not long after Perepilichny gave up his dream of studying in the U.S., an American-born businessman named Bill Browder set out on a path to Moscow. Browder worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Salomon Brothers before deciding, as he later wrote in his memoir,", + " Red Notice, that Russia had \u201csome of the most spectacular investment opportunities in the history of financial markets.\u201d Browder launched an investment fund in Moscow in 1996\u2014a time when few foreigners would even think about starting businesses there\u2014and, though he didn\u2019t speak Russian, managed to bring in staggering returns. By 2000, Browder was running the best-performing emerging-markets fund in the world; by 2005, his firm was managing $4.5 billion in assets. Browder\u2019s personal take reportedly rose to nearly $250 million a year.\n\nHis investment strategy relied on a very well-placed ally: Vladimir Putin,", + " who\u2019d been appointed the acting president of Russia in 1999. Though the two men never met, they had common adversaries in the oligarchs who controlled most of Russia\u2019s wealth, and whose power threatened Putin\u2019s. When Browder recognized an opportunity for huge returns at Gazprom, Russia\u2019s biggest energy company, he bought as many shares as he could, then gave the press evidence of theft and mismanagement. Putin intervened, firing the CEO and replacing him with one who promised to recover the stolen assets. As confidence in the new management soared, so did the stock price, and eventually the value of Browder\u2019s initial shares multiplied by 100 times.", + " Browder and Putin repeated this dance as Browder\u2019s fund grew, and Putin\u2019s enemies suffered. Browder had an obvious financial interest in promoting investment in Russia, and he became one of Putin\u2019s most outspoken cheerleaders. For a time, his views weren\u2019t far out of step with those of many European and American experts, who thought Putin was willing to work with the West. (These were the days of George W. Bush looking Putin in the eye and seeing his soul.) But as Putin grew more authoritarian and the Western view of him dimmed, Browder continued to praise and defend him. In 2003, for example,", + " a billionaire businessman named Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested for tax evasion and fraud and sent to a Siberian labor camp. Many observers in the West saw the move as a chilling abuse of power, the result of Khodorkovsky\u2019s having publicly challenged Putin and supported opposition groups. But Browder came to the president\u2019s defense. He wrote an article that was published in The Moscow Times arguing that \u201cwhile there may be some things about Putin that we disagree with, we should give him the benefit of the doubt in this area and fully support him in his task of taking back control of the country from the oligarchs.\u201d And then, abruptly,", + " Browder himself learned what it was like to cross Putin. According to Browder and others, Putin quietly switched tactics. Having demonstrated his willingness, and ability, to destroy one billionaire, he was a credible threat to the rest and could demand a cut of their profits in exchange for leaving them alone. Which meant that when Browder continued calling out oligarchs, he was unwittingly attacking Putin\u2019s financial interests. In November 2005\u2014just months after criticizing \u201chysteria\u201d and \u201calarmist predictions\u201d about Putin\u2014Browder was labeled a threat to national security and kicked out of Russia. He fled to England, pulling all his firm\u2019s money out of Russia but leaving behind a few dormant companies that he\u2019d need time to properly liquidate.", + " Though Browder and Perepilichny hadn\u2019t yet crossed paths, the defining events in both men\u2019s lives began, in part, with the same two people: Vladlen Stepanov and his wife, Olga Stepanova, who ran a tax office. (Stepanov has claimed that he and Olga divorced in 1992, but according to The Moscow Times, they were married until 2010. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.) The couple was involved with a Russian crime syndicate run by a man named Dimitry Klyuev. In April 2007, according to a complaint filed by the U.S.", + " Justice Department in an ongoing case, Klyuev flew on a private jet to Larnaca, Cyprus. He was accompanied by a lieutenant colonel in the interior ministry, the primary police arm of the Russian government. Several others arrived soon after, including a lawyer named Andrey Pavlov. The Stepanovs came too, and met with Klyuev in Cyprus on May 8. (Pavlov told me over email that there is no Klyuev crime syndicate, which he described as \u201cmythical\u201d and \u201ca smokescreen story.\u201d He said that he, Klyuev,", + " and the Stepanovs were in Cyprus separately on vacation.) Court filings and records from multiple government investigations lay out what happened next. Back in Moscow that June, the group set in motion an audacious plan. The lieutenant colonel led raids on Bill Browder\u2019s office and on the law firm that represented him. Dozens of police officers herded employees into conference rooms, drilled into safes, and spent hours taking documents. Klyuev\u2019s associates used the stolen documents to register Browder\u2019s companies to new owners. Then they forged contracts that would make the companies appear to owe large amounts of money and therefore be eligible for tax refunds.\n\nIn late December 2007,", + " they used Browder\u2019s companies to apply for what amounted to the biggest known tax refund in Russian history, a total of $230 million. The applications went to Tax Office No. 25 and to No. 28, where Olga Stepanova worked. The bulk of the refunds were approved within a single business day\u2014on Christmas Eve. The money was split up and dispatched through thousands of transactions in more than a dozen countries. Vladlen Stepanov had set up a pipeline to get his share out of Russia quickly, opening Swiss bank accounts and registering companies in countries with poorly regulated financial sectors. And he called on an old associate for help.", + " Nearly $6 million was routed through Moldova and Latvia before reaching a company registered in the British Virgin Islands to a soft-spoken polymath named Alexander Perepilichny. Perepilichny used another of his companies to send money back to Stepanov, and also bought property for him: a pair of luxury condos on the Palm Jumeirah, a man-made island in Dubai so big that astronauts can see its palm-tree shape from space. And because Stepanov trusted Perepilichny with bank statements and other records, Perepilichny was one of the few people who knew where the money went.", + " In 2008, Browder was trying to launch a new investment fund focused on emerging markets outside of Russia when something strange happened: His office got a call from a bailiff in St. Petersburg, asking when the company planned to pay a $71 million judgment it owed. Browder had no idea what the bailiff was talking about; he knew that his Moscow office had been raided but didn\u2019t know how the stolen documents had been used. He asked a tax attorney in Moscow named Sergei Magnitsky to look into it. Magnitsky eventually discovered that money had been funneled from the Russian treasury to the companies that had been stolen from Browder.", + " Magnitsky reported the people he\u2019d found to be behind the theft, including the lieutenant colonel from the interior ministry, and testified against them. But instead of the culprits, Magnitsky himself was arrested. He spent a year in prison, where, despite pressure, he refused to change his testimony. He suffered beatings and a series of health problems that prison doctors treated improperly or not at all. On November 16, 2009, he died. Lenin established a laboratory to study poisons and develop them into weapons. It became known as the Kamera\u2014the Chamber. Browder was devastated and enraged when he heard the news.", + " His team distributed a press release, which included a lengthy description of the torture that Magnitsky had written in prison and given to his lawyer. Novaya Gazeta, a major Russian newspaper, published Magnitsky\u2019s handwritten letters on its front page. The Russian government announced an investigation and then the firings of 20 prison officials, and a nongovernmental organization that monitors Russian prisons released a damning report confirming that Magnitsky had been tortured. But when the NGO sent its findings to five government agencies, none of them even replied. Browder learned that 19 of the 20 prison officials the government fired had had nothing to do with Magnitsky\u2019s death.", + " Some had worked at prisons thousands of miles away.\n\nBrowder was determined to get justice. He flew to Washington and began an impassioned lobbying effort that would result, in December 2012, in the passage of the Magnitsky Act, which imposed travel bans and sanctions on those believed to be responsible for the tax heist and Magnitsky\u2019s death. And he took to YouTube. When a young secretary in his office suggested posting videos to explain the crime, Browder figured, What the hell? He wasn\u2019t sure what good might come of it, but he was angry, and willing to try just about anything. Little did he know that 25 miles from his office,", + " in a rented house in St. George\u2019s Hill, a Russian who had recently arrived in England and had intimate knowledge of the heist would discover these videos and watch them with great interest. Deep in the Amazon basin, the Tupi Indians have, for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years used a heart-shaped leaf from a plant called curare to treat kidney stones, fever, testicular inflammation, snakebites, and other ailments. By the end of the 16th century, word of the plant\u2019s many applications had reached Europe by way of Sir Walter Raleigh and other explorers. Its uses were eventually reported on by medical experts.", + " But the Tupis knew that the heart-shaped leaf could be poisonous. The word curare comes from the Tupi words for \u201ckill\u201d and \u201cbird,\u201d and one of its chemical building blocks is an alkaloid that stops signals passing between the brain and muscles. The same leaf that can salve a tribesman\u2019s testicular pain can impede the neurological signals in a monkey high in the tree canopy, interfering with its ability to hang on to a branch, or even to breathe. It was this use that played a bit part in the course of world history in the summer of 1918, when a young Socialist revolutionary aimed a revolver at Vladimir Lenin and fired three times.", + " Lenin survived, of course. But his doctors determined that the bullets had been coated with poisonous curare resin, which intrigued Lenin. He established a laboratory to study poisons and develop them into weapons. He called it the Special Room. Over the years, the lab would move around and change names\u2014becoming Laboratory No. 1, Lab X, and Laboratory No. 12\u2014but it remained colloquially known as the Kamera. The Chamber. Its purpose, according to former intelligence agents, was to find ways to kill people without leaving a trace. Curare was one of the Kamera\u2019s first projects. The plant was used on a suspected double agent and a Ukrainian archbishop who preached resistance to the Soviets.", + " KGB operatives also used sodium fluoride, which in certain doses is lethal, and is difficult to identify as a cause of death because of its more common use: preventing tooth decay. Many people already have it in their bloodstream. Irradiated thallium was one of the Kamera\u2019s mid-century innovations. A medical team might recognize the symptoms of thallium poisoning\u2014it was commonly used in rat poison\u2014and set about treating a patient, not knowing that the person was actually dying of radiation exposure. The thallium would disintegrate by the time an autopsy could be performed, leaving no physical evidence of poisoning.\n\nAny time one of the Kamera\u2019s chemical tools was discovered,", + " future deaths from that same poison might be easily linked to Russia. So the lab kept innovating. It developed cyanide that could be deployed as a mist: A KGB defector admitted to having killed a prominent writer by spraying him in a stairwell with a canister hidden in a newspaper. In 1978, a Bulgarian dissident in London named Georgi Markov died four days after feeling a pinch on the back of his right thigh and turning in time to see a man behind him pick up an umbrella off the ground. Porton Down, the U.K.\u2019s military-science research facility, determined that Markov had been poisoned with ricin.", + " Twenty years later, another KGB defector admitted his involvement in the assassination: He said that the Kamera had fashioned ricin into a pellet that could be injected from the tip of an umbrella. Markov\u2019s death became known as the \u201cumbrella murder.\u201d (The former agent later denied his involvement, and British authorities decided that they had insufficient evidence to initiate legal proceedings.) In 2000, a prominent Russian politician named Anatoly Sobchak died of an apparent heart attack; two of his bodyguards fell ill, too. A Russian forensic expert turned investigative reporter later wrote that Sobchak may have been poisoned by a substance sprayed onto a reading lamp on his bedside table.", + " The heat from the bulb would have diffused the poison throughout the room, its lethal properties diminishing as it dispersed, leaving no trace. In 2004, the Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko became violently ill. Lesions covered his face and he nearly died. Though he had obviously been poisoned\u2014he had several thousand times the normal level of dioxin in his system, the second-highest level ever recorded\u2014it took a team of some 20 doctors, several of whom flew in from the U.S., to reach that diagnosis. Conspiracy theories began circulating almost immediately: that the U.S. had poisoned Yushchenko; that he had disfigured himself.", + " But the circumstantial evidence pointed strongly to Russia. Two years later, a former KGB agent turned Putin critic named Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned with a radioactive isotope called Polonium-210. He survived for three weeks, helping investigators and even writing a statement from his hospital bed in London before he finally died. \u201cYou may succeed in silencing one man,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBut the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done.\u201d Though poisoning might seem like an easy way to kill someone,", + " ensuring that an assassination will remain anonymous requires a level of technical know-how, resources, and manpower difficult to marshal without government backing. Boris Volodarsky, a veteran of Russia\u2019s military-intelligence service and the author of The KGB\u2019s Poison Factory: From Lenin to Litvinenko, described the process to me by email. Once a plan is developed, it is passed down a formal chain of command, from the Kremlin to the chief of the secret service to the head of the FSB (the successor to the KGB) to the Kamera. Not even assassinations are exempt from the singular Russian bureaucracy. A target\u2019s body type,", + " weight, eating habits, and other details must be known by a specialist, who chooses a poison and calculates the dose. An assassin can\u2019t count on a second chance if the dose is too low, and might be exposed as the killer if the dose is too high and symptoms come on before he can escape. Sometimes\u2014for example, when the assassin and the target know each other\u2014the killer will practice by drawing the victim out of his safety zone during dry runs. The agent tries to get a target into a situation in which his defenses are down\u2014in which he feels comfortable, or is distracted. Sometimes agents perform \u201cpassive probes,\u201d in which they follow the target,", + " noting details of movement and habit. Agents draw on careful planning and a long history of tradecraft, which is why when enemies of the Kremlin die, blame is almost never conclusively established.\n\nTomer Hanuka\n\nBrowder was suspicious when, in August 2010, an email came in from a man who claimed to have seen his YouTube videos, and to know a key player in the massive theft from the Russian treasury. The man called himself \u201cAlejandro Sanches,\u201d which was obviously not a Russian name and struck Browder as fake. Browder had good reason to be cautious\u2014he\u2019d gone from being one of Putin\u2019s staunchest supporters to one of his loudest critics,", + " and he believed the Russian government was capable of just about anything. One of Browder\u2019s lawyers went to meet Sanches, whoever he was. The lawyer was accompanied by a four-man security detail. One guard carried a signal jammer. Another did a sweep with a Geiger counter, lest Sanches try to use radioactive poison\u2014Browder was acutely aware that another of Putin\u2019s enemies, Litvinenko, had been poisoned at a hotel less than a 10-minute walk away.\n\nAt the meeting, Sanches revealed his true identity: Alexander Perepilichny. He explained who he was and said he could point Browder to the criminals who had carried out the heist.", + " He said he\u2019d decided to come forward because he was troubled by Magnitsky\u2019s death: Corruption may have become an accepted part of doing business in Russia, but killing an innocent man was not okay. Browder didn\u2019t buy this motivation, but Perepilichny dropped clues that allowed him to piece together a story he found easier to believe: Perepilichny and the Stepanovs had fallen out over money Perepilichny had either lost or stolen during the 2008 financial crisis. The Stepanovs had used their influence to have criminal charges brought against him, and he\u2019d fled Russia with his wife and two children.", + " Now he figured if he could shine a light on the Stepanovs\u2019 crimes, he could hurt their credibility and weaken the case against him. Three others who knew about the fraud had died under mysterious circumstances. One fell from a balcony. Another dropped dead of liver failure at age 43. To Browder, Perepilichny was a criminal, plain and simple. But he was a criminal who could help him take down the people behind the tax fraud. Perepilichny handed over bank records and other evidence, and explained what it all meant. With the documents Perepilichny provided, Browder turned to YouTube again,", + " posting a video about the Stepanovs. It went live in mid-April and got 200,000 views by the end of the first day, half a million by the end of the month. Browder\u2019s lawyers used Perepilichny\u2019s information in a complaint to the attorney general of Switzerland, and the Swiss responded by freezing two accounts, which together contained at least $10 million. The Swiss also launched an investigation, and Browder\u2019s team gained access to the case file.\n\nJournalists from the nonprofit Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project turned up information that led to even more criminal investigations. Browder realized that the stolen funds hadn\u2019t gone just to exotic island destinations:", + " Members of the criminal syndicate also poured money into Manhattan real estate. He alerted the U.S. Justice Department, which began legal proceedings to seize property. The entire money-laundering scheme was coming into focus. To date, more than a dozen different countries have frozen accounts, launched investigations, or imposed sanctions. For Perepilichny, coming forward was a risky move: In addition to Magnitsky, at least three others who\u2019d known about the tax fraud had died under mysterious circumstances. One fell from a balcony. Another dropped dead of liver failure at age 43. A third died of heart failure at 53.", + " Browder and his associates tried to protect Perepilichny\u2019s identity by redacting details in court documents. But enough clues slipped through to tip off Vladlen Stepanov. Browder\u2019s YouTube video and his complaint to the Swiss listed the address of a property Stepanov had bought in Dubai. The only person who knew that address, besides the Stepanovs themselves, was Alexander Perepilichny.\n\nStepanov placed an ad in a Russian newspaper, formatted as an open letter, in which he asserted his innocence and threatened Perepilichny by name. \u201cTo the scam artists who have filched my money,", + " inflicted tangible financial damage upon me and, on top of everything, smeared my reputation,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI shall seek redress.\u201d Perepilichny was exposed. He\u2019d blown the whistle not just on a Russian crime boss but on police and officials high up in the interior ministry. Olga Stepanova had left the tax office to work at the defense ministry. The man who, according to Browder, had approved Magnitsky\u2019s arrest was a highly placed official in the FSB. And though no direct evidence exists to link Putin to the Klyuev group\u2019s tax fraud, Russia experts have told me it\u2019s nearly inconceivable that a theft of that magnitude would have happened without the president\u2019s blessing.", + " Which means Perepilichny may have made an enemy of Putin himself. Troubling things began to happen. A relative in Russia told Perepilichny that his name and other details were on a hit list police had found at the home of an alleged Chechen contract killer. Perepilichny went to Ukraine to visit family, and when he returned he told an acquaintance in England that he\u2019d been confronted in a restaurant by someone who seemed to be after him, and whose bodyguards attacked him. Then a company founded by a suspect in the Litvinenko poisoning brought a series of lawsuits against Perepilichny over alleged debts.\n\nDesperate,", + " Perepilichny began meeting with a man he told acquaintances was from the Russian interior ministry\u2014a man he said threatened him with more criminal charges but also offered a way for him to make things right with the Stepanovs. They met at least twice, first in Zurich, then at a caf\u00e9 in Heathrow Airport. But the man was not from the Russian government. He was an associate of the Klyuev group\u2014the lawyer Andrey Pavlov. (Pavlov told me Perepilichny initiated the meetings, asking for help in determining whether there were any Russian investigations against him, and that Perepilichny knew he was a lawyer,", + " not a government official.) In November, Perepilichny traveled to France. The details of this trip are murky and suspicious. He reserved rooms in two different Paris hotels\u2014one that had five stars, and a more modest one across town\u2014for the same nights, perhaps in an attempt to make his movements harder to follow. He spent more than $1,500 at a Prada store, but didn\u2019t bring anything back with him to London. When he got home, he told his wife he wasn\u2019t feeling well and went for a jog. After Perepilichny collapsed, a few neighbors turned him on his back and tried to administer CPR.", + " A shaky cellphone video taken by a young man who happened to be nearby shows the blurred outline of the whistle-blower, lying on a mostly dark street in the glare of a car\u2019s headlights. He was pronounced dead just before 5:40 p.m.\n\nBrowder had no doubt that Perepilichny was murdered. His lawyers wrote to the Surrey police to lay out the evidence and demand a toxicology report. Unsatisfied with the response from the police, Browder slipped reporters the letters he\u2019d sent to them, and as the circumstances surrounding Perepilichny\u2019s death circulated in the papers, the police officially opened a murder investigation.", + " Toxicology tests were performed. Police also met with Browder\u2019s team and took a witness statement from one of his employees. Then they ruled the death unsuspicious. The coroner, who in England must open an inquest if the post-mortem examination does not reveal a cause of death, scheduled hearings, but denied Browder\u2019s request to take part in them. Relegated to the sidelines, there was nothing else he could do. In the summer of 1879, an English medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle began experimenting. Several years earlier, while seeking a cure for his nerve pain, he had learned about an exotic flower.", + " Now he got a fresh tincture of the plant, called gelsemium, which has been known for hundreds of years to Chinese herbalists and to the hill tribes of Vietnam. He gave himself a tiny dose, less than one-tenth of a fluid ounce, and increased the amount ever so slightly each day. On the third day he took about one-fifth of an ounce. The effect was strange, and almost immediate. He became giddy, his limbs felt weak, and his pulse was faint. The next day, he had trouble focusing on distant objects. The day after that: headache, diarrhea, and fatigue. Then came persistent and prostrating diarrhea and depression.", + " His headache didn\u2019t abate. He deduced from his symptoms that the plant acted as a motor paralyzer, and he wasn\u2019t far off. It interferes with a receptor responsible for managing critical functions all over the body.\n\nHad Doyle continued increasing his dose, he would have become paralyzed and short-circuited his respiratory system. Instead, he decided he\u2019d had enough. He submitted his findings to a journal and later gave up the practice of medicine entirely\u2014becoming a novelist and narrating the exploits of Sherlock Holmes. A century later and about 100 miles away, a researcher named Monique Simmonds at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew was studying another plant that caused strange physiological effects.", + " She was investigating a condition that afflicted people in poor parts of the world, especially parts prone to extreme weather. The most visible symptom was that, simply put, they walked funny. Researchers discovered that the one thing people with the condition all had in common was that they\u2019d eaten legumes from the lathyrus plant, often used as a food of last resort because it can survive both drought and flood. Milmo sat up. Did the lawyer just say \u201cpoison\u201d? Simmonds used insects to test the ways in which chemicals in the plant might be acting on the brain. She learned that the lathyrus plant contained neurotoxins that confused signals between the brain and muscles.", + " As she continued in her research, Simmonds identified other plant compounds that could have strange effects. She found that chemicals in some plants actually hacked insects\u2019 brains and manipulated their feeding behavior, presumably as a kind of evolutionary armor against hungry predators. If plants could have such profound effects on insects, whose central nervous systems are similar to ours, how might they affect humans? The further she got into her research, the more she became known in the criminal-justice system, because in studying plants, she was also identifying poisons\u2014many of them exotic. When people turned up sick or dead and police suspected poison but didn\u2019t find anything with standard toxicology tests,", + " Simmonds was an invaluable resource. (Simmonds agreed to talk to The Atlantic about her research on the condition that no open cases be discussed.) So when a life-insurance company needed an expert to determine whether a client named Alexander Perepilichny had been murdered, even though a toxicology test hadn\u2019t detected anything, Simmonds was well placed to help. In May 2015, Cahal Milmo, then a reporter for The Independent, showed up for the opening hearing of the inquest into Perepilichny\u2019s death to find that he was one of the only reporters there. Others had checked in with the court and knew that the hearing had been downgraded to one of the usually boring affairs called a \u201cpre-inquest review hearing,\u201d where the parties talk about logistics.", + " Should we empanel a jury? What dates work for everyone? But Milmo hadn\u2019t remembered to check. So when he arrived at the courthouse and figured out what was going on, he resigned himself to a wasted morning. Then, a bombshell: Bob Moxon Browne, a lawyer for the life-insurance company, began speaking in a booming voice about how Monique Simmonds from Kew Gardens had found a chemical in the dead man\u2019s stomach associated with a poisonous plant that grows in China: gelsemium. Milmo sat up. Did the lawyer just say \u201cpoison\u201d? The coroner responded without surprise, giving Milmo the impression that this wasn\u2019t the first he\u2019d heard about Simmonds\u2019s findings.", + " \u201cThe real issue is,\u201d the coroner said, \u201cis there evidence that Mr. Perepilichny was poisoned?\u201d \u201cWe have a suspect substance in the stomach. That compound is only found in nature in five forms, all of which are associated with the highly toxic gelsemium plant,\u201d Browne said. \u201cGiven that it only grows in China and is a known weapon of assassination by Chinese and Russian contract killers, why was it in his stomach?\u201d He asked that whatever samples from the body remained be sent to Simmonds so that she could do more tests. The coroner agreed, delaying the proceedings for four months. As soon as the hearing ended,", + " Milmo raced to a coffee shop to file his story: \u201cBillionaire Russian Businessman Found Dead Outside Surrey Home Could Have Been Poisoned.\u201d By that night, other articles about the exotic flower that had apparently killed the whistle-blower were flying around the web. All of which set up a bizarre spectacle. With the suspicion of poison providing a new, even stronger suggestion of murder, Browder was allowed back into the proceedings as an \u201cinterested party.\u201d His lawyers made so many demands before the next hearing that the exasperated coroner opened it by castigating them. Browder didn\u2019t care. He remained certain that Perepilichny had been murdered.\n\nBut Browder\u2019s crusade put him at odds with the victim\u2019s own family.", + " Perepilichny left behind two children and a widow, who has an opinion of her own\u2014and it\u2019s not what one might expect. Whether because of pressure to keep quiet, or because she wants to move on from a painful chapter, or because murder jeopardizes the millions of dollars in life insurance Perepilichny took out weeks before he died, her lawyers have fought Browder\u2019s efforts to prove Perepilichny was assassinated. She has said she believes her husband probably died of something called sudden adult death syndrome. (Requests for comment to three different law firms that have represented her have gone unanswered.) Browder has suggested that Surrey police didn\u2019t thoroughly investigate Perepilichny\u2019s death in part because they\u2019re incompetent and in part because of the enormous influence that wealthy Russians wield in British business and politics.", + " He told a parliamentary committee that the stolen money Perepilichny helped expose passed through 12 British banks, and that millions of dollars went toward \u201can orgy of spending on luxury goods and services in the U.K.\u201d\n" + ], + "length": 16831, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 43, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Larry Upright may be dead, but he's still Republican and he still doesn't want you voting for Hillary Clinton\u2014at least according to his obituary. \"The family respectfully asks that you do not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016,\" reads his obit in the Independent Tribune in Concord, NC. \"R.I.P. Grandaddy.\" His family says that Upright, an \"avid golfer\" and Masonic Lodge member who died last Monday at 81, never shied away from talking politics, ABC News reports. \"He was very passionate about politics and probably passed a little of that on, so it was natural for me to think about that,\" says his daughter Jill McLain, who wrote the last-minute addition to his obit. Much of the reaction on a funeral home website that ran the obit was in agreement with Upright: \"We did not know your father but I bet he was a wonderful and kind man,\" reads one comment. \"God Bless ... we would not vote for Hillary if she was the only one running.\" But not everyone is persuaded, it seems: \"Sorry for your loss,\" reads another post, \"but I'm voting for Hillary anyway.\" Larry's son, Mike Upright, says his family approved the obit because Larry consistently voiced pro-GOP opinions, WSOC reports. \"We know he\u2019s up there giggling right now,\" Mike says. \"Just laughing out loud.\" (Other obituaries have been used to take shots at the Seahawks, the Kardashians, Obama, and the New York Times.)\n", + "docs": [ + "A Cabarrus County man died Monday night at Carolinas Medical Center Northeast. Larry Upright, 81, made one final request in his obituary -- written by his family.\n\n\n\n\u201cAlso, the family respectfully asks that you do not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. R.I.P. Grandaddy,\u201d it read.\n\nClick here to read his obituary.\n\n\n\nAs the family wrote Upright\u2019s obituary at the funeral home they thought it would be an appropriate message. Some people may find the message silly, but family members said Upright enjoyed politics.\n\n\n\n\u201cHe was very passionate about politics and probably passed a little of that on,", + " so it was natural for me to think about that,\u201d daughter Jill McLain said of putting the sentence about Clinton in Upright\u2019s obituary.\n\n\n\nUpright was politically informed his whole life, but never involved in public office, according to family members.\n\n\n\n\u201cWe have got some very sweet responses and some pretty nasty responses,\u201d Colleen Upright, his wife, told Channel 9.\n\n\n\n\u201cWe did this for him,\u201d son Mike Upright said. \u201cHe had nothing to do with it other than voicing his opinion time after time after time.\u201d\n\n\n\nUpright, who enjoyed golfing, fishing and spending time with his family,", + " was a diehard Republican.\n\n\n\n\u201cWe know he\u2019s up there giggling right now. Just laughing out loud,\u201d Mike Upright said. ", + " A North Carolina man may influence the 2016 presidential election from beyond the grave if his family gets their way.\n\nLarry Darrell Upright, an \u201cavid golfer\u201d who loved his family, died Monday in Concord, North Carolina. He was 81.\n\nUpright didn't, however, apparently share that love for Hillary Clinton.\n\n\"The family respectfully asks that you do not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016,\" read the obituary, which ran in the local newspaper. \"R.I.P. Grandaddy.\u201d\n\nHis family described Upright as a diehard Republican, according to ABC affiliate WSOC-TV in Charlotte,", + " North Carolina.\n\nWhitleys Funeral Home\n\n\u201cHe was very passionate about politics and probably passed a little of that on, so it was natural for me to think about that,\u201d his daughter, Jill McLain, said of adding the unconventional line at the last minute.\n\nUpright may get his final wish. Over a dozen well-wishers posting their condolences on a Kannapolis, N.C., funeral home\u2019s website, which also carried the obituary, made it clear they would steer clear of Clinton, the former secretary of state who announced last Sunday that she was running for president.\n\n\"Our deepest sympathies to the Upright family,\u201d wrote one.", + " \u201cRest assured we will NOT vote for Hillary in 2016.\"\n\n\"I am a stranger and I do not know you or your departed,\u201d another wrote. \u201cHowever, I saw the obit and wanted to express my condolences and to let you know that your sense of humor is wonderful. Please know that we will not be voting for Hillary.\u201d\n\nNot everyone was swayed, though.\n\n\"Sorry for your loss,\u201d wrote one poster, \u201cbut I'm voting for Hillary anyway.\" ", + " Larry Darrell Upright, 81, passed away Monday, April 13, 2015 at CMC-NorthEast. Darrell was born August 15, 1933 in Cabarrus County to the late Arthur and Mary Ruth Upright. He was also preceded in death by his son, Joel Allen Upright. He is survived by his beloved wife and devoted caregiver Colleen McDonald Upright; son Michael D. Upright; daughter Jill Upright McLain and husband, Phil; granddaughters McKenzie Upright Brady and husband, Logan, Lindsay McLain Leece and husband,", + " Jason, and Laura McLain. He was a member and past Master of Allen-Graham #695 Masonic Lodge and a former Shriner of the Year at Cabarrus Shrine Club. He retired from the Building Automation Industry and in his retirement was an avid golfer and member of The Club at Irish Creek. Darrell's greatest joy was his family and he will forever be remembered as a loving husband, father, and Grandaddy. The family will receive friends from 6-8 p.m. Wednesday at Whitley's Funeral Home. Services will be held at 2:00 PM Thursday, April 16, 2015 at Whitley's Funeral Home Chapel officiated by Mr.", + " Bill Jolley. Burial will follow at Carolina Memorial Park with Masonic rites. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be sent to Shriners Hospital for Children at 2900 Rocky Point Drive, Tampa, FL 33607. Also, the family respectfully asks that you do not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. R.I.P. Grandaddy.\n\nFrom: Debbie McLain\n\n\"I am so sorry for your loss. You all are in my thoughts and prayers. I love you all. Your dad, father, husband and granddaddy was a great man. May God give you all peace during this very hard time.", + " Love you, Debbie McLain\" From: Dennis White\n\n\"I am so sorry to hear about Darrell's passing. It was such a surprise! Mike and I were just discussing his parents a few days earlier. Mike and I have been friends since high school and some of my best memories are of spending time at the Upright home. Darrell and Colleen always made me feel like a memory of the family. My prayers go out to Colleen, Mike, Jill, and the rest of the family.\" From: Nolan & Barbara Moss\n\n\"Our Thoughts and Prayers Mike!! We will conform to your family request.\" From: Ed and Elaine Akerman\n\n\"Our deepest sympathy to the Upright family,", + " we are so sorry for your loss.\" From: Mike & Carolyn Lambeth\n\n\"We are very sorry about your dad. They are very special to all of us in their own ways. May your memories keep him close.\" From: Rosie\n\n\"Dear Mike and family, I am so sorry for your loss. I've been praying for you all. May God strengthen you, provide understanding and give you peace.\" From: Randy Wilson\n\n\"So sorry for your loss Mike, condolence to you and all the family.... PS will not vote for Hillary\" From: Daniel and Debby Fike\n\n\"Our deepest sympathy to the entire family. We promise not to vote for Hillary.", + " May your dad rest in peace Mike.\" From: Sid & Carolyn Hartley\n\n\"We are so sorry for your loss.We will be praying for the family.\" From: Bob and Barbara Bowles\n\n\"Our thoughts and prayers are for you and your family. We did not know your father but I bet he was a wonderful and kind man. Knowing you Mike he had to be, because that sort of thing rubs off on children. God Bless......we would not vote for Hillary if she was the only one running....Love you Mike\" From: Byrd & Susan Smith\n\n\"Thinking of you all with Love & Prayer. Treasure the precious memories & Smile knowing that there is a \"WELCOME HOME PARTY\"", + " in Heaven today.\" From: Terry Hair\n\n\"My condolence goes out to the family, may God bless each one of you, I am so sorry Jill.\" From: Geoff and Lesa Jones\n\n\"Our heart felt thoughts and prayers are with the family during this sad and trying time.\" From: Bill & Melissa Mason\n\n\"Our deepest sympathies to the Upright family. Rest assured we will NOT vote for Hillary in 2016.\" From: James and Linda Statham & Family\n\n\"To Colleen, Mike and Jill and all the Grandchildren, Our Hearts are broken. Darrell was such a great friend and though we didn't get to see each other often,", + " he was always considered family. Our prayers are with each of you and may you find comfort in the memories that you share. From James to Darrell, Gonna miss you my Brother...Rest in Peace Love to All, James and Linda, Kathy and Robin\" From: Donna Moss and Carmen Lentz\n\n\"Mike, McKenzie and family, We are so very sorry for the loss of your Dad and Granddad. May the love and support of family and friends give you strength at this time. May God wrap his loving arms around all of you.\" From: Susan Love\n\n\"To the Upright and McLain family - I am so sorry for your loss.", + " May God's strength and blessings carry you throughout the upcoming days.\" From: Joel Hill\n\n\"Darrell was my 1st cousin, although I have not seen him since my brothers passed away. Living in another state, I have not had a chance to be close, but I remember Darrell fondly. May God bless the family and provide comfort in this time of loss.\" From: Kim Carter Sellers\n\n\"So sorry Mike. My thoughts are with you and your family.\" From: Charl McLeod\n\n\"Condolences to the Upright family, especially the grandchildren! Your request not to vote for Hillary Clinton will certainly be honored by our family!", + " Blessings to each of you!\" From: Patrick D.M. Patch\n\n\"To the Upright Family: I am so sorry for your loss. Phil McLain is one of my business partners and a close friend. Jill you and your Mom and family are in my thoughts and prayers during this difficult time. Please know that I will abide by Larry's wishes and Mrs. Clinton will not be getting my vote in the upcoming 2016 election. My Best, Patrick D.M. Patch Paramount Marketing Group\" From: Jon\n\n\"My condolences on your loss. And thank you for helping me make up my mind so early in the Presidential race.", + " I know you support the electoral process and the right of every American to vote for the candidate of their choosing. Assuming Ms. Clinton gets her party's nomination, she gets my vote. Blessings to all.\" From: Crystal Hill Combs\n\n\"I am truly sorry for your loss. I will keep you in my thoughts and prayers.\" From: M Teague\n\n\"So sorry for your family's loss. Thoughts and prayers go out to each of you. P.S. Your wish is granted.....will Not vote for Hillary Clinton\" From: Sherrie Lynn\n\n\"I am a stranger and I do not know you or your departed. However, I saw the obit and wanted to express my condolences and to let you know that your sense of humor is wonderful.", + " Please know that we will not be voting for Hillary. Blessings to you and your family\" From: Sarah Holmes\n\n\"Prayers for you and your family at this most difficult time. I too promise to uphold the request and will not vote for Mrs. Clinton. Ever.\" From: WV Funeral Director\n\n\"Don't know you, but I will respectfully honor your request. RIP Mr. Upright!\" From: Paula Celino\n\n\"I am sorry for the loss of your loved one, and will be praying for your family. We do not know each other, but after reading the obituary, we share a common goal. My family and I will not be voting for Hillary.", + " In case you did not know the obit was posted on facebook\" From: Anonymous\n\n\"First let me say I am truly sorry for your loss. I saw this unique obituary on the news and wanted to let you know that I will gladly honor Mr. Upright's memory by not voting for Hillary in 2016 or any other year for that matter. Again, my condolences go to you all.\" From: Mike Spenser\n\n\"This obituary has helped me make up my mind as to who to vote for POTUS in 2016. Hilary Rodham Clinton for president. Thanks for helping me to choose who to vote for Larry.\" From:", + " Elizabeth Campbell\n\n\"I promise not to vote for Hillary Clinton. Praying for the family. God bless.\" From: Thom Owens\n\n\"Sorry for your loss, my condolences to you all, I will indeed along with my family respect and will follow your request, God Bless you all..\" From: Mark and Penny Ragan\n\n\"I just now read and seen your fathers name in the paper. I am so sorry that you have lost your father. Even when our loved ones are older and even when they have been sick it is still hard to let them go. But just carrying him with you day by day until the time you will always be together.\" From:", + " S. Duck\n\n\"I did not know Mr. Upright, although I can tell by reading the obituary that he was a fine gentleman with high personal values who always wanted the best for his family, friends and nation. May he rest in peace knowing that I will not vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From: Michelle Cousins, Mechanicsville, VA\n\n\"I am so very sorry for your loss. I will definitely NOT be voting for Hillary! Didn't vote for Bill or Obama either! Prayers for peace and comfort for your family. May Jesus be close to your hearts and may his memory be a blessing\" From: Sandy\n\n\"So sorry for your loss.", + " I also appreciate the humor of your dearly departed and I too will not be voting for Hillary.\" From: William May\n\n\"To the the family, sorry for you loss, and I will honor Larry's memory by not voting Hillary.\" From: No one in particular\n\n\"My sympathies to your family, but...WOW! What a horrible and hateful obituary!!! You really think that you should mix politics with death? That's pretty low and distasteful. Oh, btw, I WILL vote for Hillary!!!! And so are a lot of people!!!\" From: Joe Voter\n\n\"Sorry for your loss, but I'm voting for Hillary anyway.\" From:", + " R. David from Louisiana\n\n\"Please accept this condolence from a stranger who didn't have the privilege of knowing your loved one. I can tell he will be greatly missed, and I wish for peace for his family and friends. The voting request will be strictly honored in my household.\" From: Luke\n\n\"I'm so very sorry for your loss-we've never met, but after seeing this on Facebook I thought I'd send my condolences. I will honor your departed by also not voting for Clinton & donating to a quality conservative candidate in his honor.\" From: The McBriarty family\n\n\"Our deepest condolences. The entire McBriarty family will be voting for Hillary Clinton.\" From:", + " Jim Trebowski\n\n\"My condolences to the family. In honor of the family request, I will be making donations to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.\" From: Mrs. Pam Lamker\n\n\"My deepest sympathies to family and friends of Larry Upright. I don't know any of you nor knew him.. but you count on my not voting for H. Clinton. Never! God Bless\" From: a California admirer\n\n\"Mr. Upright, obviously nothing could daunt your courage and good humor as well as your principles. Your family was lucky to have you. I promise to honor your election request.\" From: Janis & Bill\n\n\"Our family's thoughts and prayers are with you and Mr.", + " Upright. We will indeed honor his wishes not to vote for Hillary. And for those who had the need to post political defiance of the family's request, a simple condolence would have been the classy thing to do. Unfortunately too much to hope for from some.\" From: Joe Potter\n\n\"Condolences on your loss. I hope you find peace before Hilary's inauguration, which will surely be a traumatic and challenging time for you.\" From: Proud Voter\n\n\"May Larry Rest in Peace at least until November 2016 when I'm sure he'll be rolling in his grave because Hillary Clinton has been elected President of the United States!!!!!\"", + " From: Mukesh Contractor\n\n\"My prayer for your brave soul in peace with God. Your service to mankind will always be rewarded by the lord and blessing from all souls you have touched through out your life. I also salute you to be bod enough to speak out against most lawless, corrupted, deceiving and breaking all laws of lord on this earth and power hungry Clinton!!! I AM SURE WILL NOT VOTE FOR HER OR ANY DEMOCRATS in coming election!!!! God Bless you and your family members!!!!\" From: Matthew B. Tepper\n\n\"I truly hope that Mr. Upright is in a better place now, as I am deeply saddened that his last days were transfigured by hate and spite.", + " If I were among his friends, I would now be faced with a moral dilemma, because I swear upon my life, my soul, my departed mother, and Almighty God Himself that I will vote for the Democratic candidate for president, whoever that might be. Rest well in the peace of Heaven, Mr. Upright, and I hope that you will by now have learned that human beings are not yours to enslave to your will.\" From: Lyn\n\n\"Sorry for your loss but Hillary GETS MY VOTE!\" From: Sharyn Bass\n\n\"Condolences to the family in their great loss. Your last name says it all,", + " Mr. Upright! I most definitely will not be voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016!\" From: Michael\n\n\"My condolences for you and your family. I am honoring your personal, last wish by signing up to be on Hillary Clinton's staff. I have been, and always shall be, your friend.\" From: Ms. Helen Green, Jacksonville, Florida\n\n\"To the family of Larry Darrell Upright, I am so sorry for your loss. I hope the memories that you have of your dad, granddad...will carry you throughout the years. I wanted to let you know that I agree with Mr. Larry D.", + " Upright - I will not vote for Hillary Clinton! ABSOLUTELY NOT!! God will carry you through this difficult time. Ms. Helen Green\" From: Shirl Petruzzi, Port Orange FL\n\n\"R.I.P. I will honor your wishes.\" From: Baron Frazier\n\n\"RIP, and Hillary For President.\" From: Ed Wood\n\n\"May God comfort you in this time of need, and may you find peace with God during the Hillary Clinton Presidency from 2017-2025.\" From: Priscilla Morales\n\n\"Dear Family and Loved Ones of Larry, I didn't know Larry, but his passing has made headlines.", + " Prayers for you all thorough the coming days and weeks as losing a loved one leaves an empty place. Lean on the Lord for comfort, he will see you trough. Also it gives me great pleasure NOT to vote for Hillary Clinton. With Sympathy, Priscilla Morales\" From: Thomas Willis\n\n\"I did not know Mr. Upright or any family member but I would like to extend my sincere condolences. Be known by all that I will honor the family's wished and not vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From: Mary Dawson\n\n\"May you rest in peace Mr. Upright. I can assure you that my family will never ever vote for a Clinton for anything!", + " Sending my sincere condolences to the family...\" From: Paige Morgan Foy Winston Salem, NC\n\n\"I am so sorry for your loss. I will honor your Grandfathers wish by not voting for Hillary! I am so very sorry he wont be here to cast his vote! I think we are going to need it!!!!! Prayers for your family! <3 <3 <3\" From: Barack Obama\n\n\"Thank you for your service to this country, and so sorry for your loss. No, I will NOT be voting for HiLIARy Clinton.\" From: Monica\n\n\"I am so, Sorry, for your loss, They say it gets easier.i am sorry i just can not,", + " grant that wish I Will be voting for Hillary, GOD BLESS\" From: Jerry\n\n\"I'm sorry for you loss, but to assume your loved one wanted you to spoil his respectful memory by publishing a political statement is stupid and presumptuous. I will be voting for Hilary Clinton and advise everyone I know to do the same. Sorry but she is going to win and continue the growth streak that President Obama has perpetuated for this country even with all the obstructions thrown at him by the elephants.\" From: @PatriotCzar\n\n\"Sending Prayers for your family; I am saddened to hear of your loss, yet thankful the news was made available to me.", + " It is so refreshing and a comfort to know there are other families across America who cherish the memories of \"OUR LOVED ONE'S\" that made America a GREAT place for us! What a Blessing it must be, to have known such a loving and giving CONSERVATIVE AMERICAN PATRIOT - May God continue to Bless You All, and comfort your hearts with the joys of HIS Promises - AMEN\" From: A sympathetic Yankee\n\n\"We will comply with your wishes. I hope this makes your family feel better.\" From: Anonymous\n\n\"Condolences on the death of your loved one. I will be thinking of you when I vote with pleasure for Mrs.", + " Clinton in 2016.\" From: John Galt\n\n\"In Sympathy in your time of loss... It is a pity the family has chosen to use politicize this event and utilize it as a device to attempt to further divide the citizens of this wonderful country. Perhaps you should consider these words: \u201cI swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.\u201d \u2015 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged\" From: Bobby Morris\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. Apparently he was an honest man and believed in the morals of our nation. I will not vote for Hillary.\" From:", + " MiddleUSTaxpayer\n\n\"SORRY ABOUT YOUR LOSS! Thanks. It's sad the RICH DONOT pay taxes;the POOR CANNOT PAY; THE MIDDLE CLASS PAYS ALL. THANKS TO MR UPRIGHT FAMILY, HELPED ME MAKE UP MY MIND AND GO TO THE POLLS TO VOTE FOR MRS. CLINTON. AGAIN, THANK YOU\" From: Mrs. C\n\n\"Rest in peace, fellow patriot. Thank you for leaving what appears to be a beautiful legacy. I will honor your memory by definitely NOT voting for Hillary Clinton. Hugs and condolences to your loving family.\" From:", + " MS Voter\n\n\"I plan to vote for Hillary. RIP or not?\" From: James\n\n\"Sorry for your loss and sorry you chose to politicize your family members death. I and all true Americans, will be voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 (and 2020)\" From: Wes Atkinson\n\n\"So sorry for your loss but I will happily comply with your wishes!\" From: Flint\n\n\"You will be missed. And I promise to turn down the volume when she gives her eight state of the union addresses.\" From: Linda in Joplin, MO\n\n\"What an honor it would have been to know this man! An obituary only tells part of a story,", + " but with one line, I know that he was a man who held his family dear, had a great since of humor, and holds the same values as I hold. May he get his final wish in 2016.\" From: Barbara\n\n\"I'm so sorry for your loss. It's so hard to lose a loved one. My own mother-in-law will soon be joining the afterlife and we will miss her as much as you miss your loved one. So, in both their honors, I will vote for Hillary to protect our basic rights as humans.\" From: Kathy\n\n\"Will honor Mr. Uprights wishes.\" From:", + " Joe\n\n\"RIP but still voting Hillary in 2016\" From: Paul\n\n\"Sorry for your loss, I will be making a memorial donation to Hillary's campaign in Larry's honor.\" From: Denise Smith\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. Your family will be in my thoughts and prayers! I'm voting for Clinton! in 2016!\" From: Gaye Hill\n\n\"To the family of Mr. Larry Darrell Upright, may God Bless you in all things and keep fresh your precious memories of such a fine man, Husband, Father and Grandaddy. It is my honor to help to make his last request come true.\" From:", + " Kevin Smith\n\n\"I am very sorry for your family's loss, however I do not feel that using his obituary to make a negative political statement was appropriate.\" From: Stacey\n\n\"May he rest in peace always and may you all sleep well knowing he isn't suffering. Rest assured, for I will not be voting for Hillary.\" From: Wendy\n\n\"My entire family had no intention of voting for Hillary, but now we will happily think, \"This is for you, Larry!!!\"\" From: An American Citizen\n\n\"May your cherished memories give you strength and comfort during this grievous time in your lives. You have many reasons to be proud of Mr.", + " Upright, but above all you can stand proud that he was a great American Citizen, not only taking care of you, but taking care of his country, even after death, by asking everyone to not vote for Hillary Clinton. He knew that if she is successful, it will be the last death blow to completely destroy the Republic. We will not vote for Hillary. God bless you all.\" From: A Military Wife\n\n\"My Condolences to the family and I will NOT vote for Hillary Clinton\" From: Suzanne Speights\n\n\"My thoughts and prayers to entire Upright family.... \"WILL NOT BE VOTING FOR HILLARY.\"\" From:", + " Zone 134\n\n\"Sorry for your loss, your father died with hatred in his heart, so what that say about him? Our God will always defeat you all.\" From: Jean Kerry\n\n\"God bless Larry. Thanks for trying to save our country from Hillary. I appreciate your effort and will honor your request.\" From: Mitt Romney\n\n\"You were a fine man. And I can assure you I will heed your words when I am at the ballot box.\" From: Susan Stoker\n\n\"So very sorry for your family loss. I have no doubt Mr Upright was a very upstanding fellow. My family will also honor his request,", + " NO Hillary 2016! May Mr Upright rest in peace and may God provide the comfort and peace in the days ahead for the family.\" From: Lisa Mitchell\n\n\"I did not know Larry, but read his obit on FB. My mom died almost 2 years ago and she would have loved this Obit It made me smile! She too had a complete and utter dislike of Hillary. Prayers to your family.\" From: Chuck Johnson\n\n\"Loved your obit. I wouldn't vote for Hellary if she were running for dogcatcher. Say \"Hi\" to my friend Paul who passed away Thursday.\" From:", + " Alva\n\n\"I'm so sorry for your loss, wish granted, will not vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From: Jerry\n\n\"R.I.P. Larry #Hillary2016\" From: J. Costello\n\n\"Very sorry for your loss, may you take comfort in your memories. I did not know Mr. Upright, but my thoughts and prayers are with you at this time. I read about the obituary on a news website...I am a Democrat and even I will not be voting for Hillary. RIP Mr. Upright\" From: Br. Michael Horton\n\n\"R.I.P. Brother! Rest assured that I'll NOT be voting for Hillary Clinton!", + " :) Enjoy the Celestial Lodge Above where the Supreme Architect of the Universe presides! Until we meet again Brother! Br. Michael Horton F&A.M; of Alaska!\" From: Mary and Fred\n\n\"May your good memories of your dad and granddad always fill your heart with love. Sorry he was full of hate for Hillary. We will definitely be voting for her since there is no one else running who can even come close to her intelligence and experience.\" From: A Sister OES\n\n\"My condolences for your family. Please don't worry Bro. Upright, we wouldn't vote for Hillary even if she was the only candidate running!", + " God Bless!\" From: James Pyon\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. I won't vote for that lying liberal Hilary in your honor.\" From: Ben\n\n\"Sorry for your loss but Hillary will win regardless. She doesn't need NC, but you know that now so it's all good.\" From: David Pennsylvania\n\n\"My Thoughts and Prayers are with your family. I will not vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From: Mike Powell\n\n\"I'm very sorry to hear of your loss. I feel that the political comment was a bit strange and lacked a bit of class, but I do sincerely wish your entire family well. I'm sure he was a wonderful man.\" From:", + " LWM\n\n\"It is my prayer that the hand of God will be on your family during this difficult time. I do believe however that this obituary will give you an idea just how many stupid people there are. I will certainly not be voting for Hillary in 2016 and I will encourage as many people as I can to not do the same thing. May Larry RIP. It sure seems he was a smart man\" From: Paul H Bortz Sr.\n\n\"To the Family of Brother Larry Upright, I can only pray that Brother Larry Upright is resting in peace with his Lord and Master, and being a good and faithful servant be granted his last wish on earth.", + " I want to let you know that I will cast my vote in memory of Larry, knowing he cared so much for this Great Country we call America. God Bless. Paul H.Bortz Sr.\" From: Donnertparty\n\n\"an honorable man I am sure. Not so sure about whoever wrote the obit.\" From: Renee Villani\n\n\"Mr. Upright sure seemed to be an \"upright\" man! May he rest in eternal peace and know that this is one who will NOT vote for Hillary Clinton!\" From: Ann\n\n\"I am so sorry for the loss of your husband and father. He seemed to be a fine man.", + " I will honor his memory by not casting my vote for Hillary in 2016.\" From: A Caring Stranger\n\n\"So sorry for your loss. However, your relative is no longer living, so he won't have to suffer through the pain the Rethuglikkkan party has put this nation through. Unless you all are in the 1% that got tax breaks last week, you will be suffering to. I will be voting for Mrs. Hilary Clinton, and urging all of my friend, family and frienemies to do so. May your loved one rest in peace. Maybe he will see the accomplishments of his nation under Hilary Clinton from the great beyond.\" From:", + " Sam\n\n\"Out of respect for your family I will NOT be voting for Hillary!\" From: Sam\n\n\"Out of respect for your family I will NOT be voting for Hillary!\" From: Lee\n\n\"May you rest in peace knowing my family and I would not waste a vote on a Clinton\" From: Stephanie\n\n\"My deepest condolences to the family and may this good man RIP. He apparently did have class and also knows the dangers of what's to come should we not take back our country from these frauds! I will not be voting for Hillary..no way!! God bless\" From: Andy Oldham\n\n\"I am so sorry for your loss.", + " RIP Grandaddy, I will NOT be voting for Hillary!!!\" From: Tim\n\n\"This is such a great obituary. It has motivated me to donate 500 to Hillary Clinton's campaign in Mr Uprights name.\" From: Bill Maine\n\n\"Didn't know Larry, but understand and agree with his position. No vote for Hillary or any other Democrat in '16\" From: Betsy Reeve Middletown Oh\n\n\"My condolences on your loss. What a wonderful way to use your right to have a voice in government until the very end. My family and I will be very happy to respect this last wish. May God bless your family.\" From:", + " Paul Gleason\n\n\"I am sorry for your loss. With that said, it's a shame that you have turned your grandfathers death into a political stunt. I WILL be voting for Hillary, despite your wishes.\" From: Chiara\n\n\"I do not know you but I love you:) RIP. Your final wish is my command.\" From: Pam P. in East Texas\n\n\"My condolences to your family on the passing of your Grandpa Larry. He sounds like an awesome man and just to let you know that this house will not Vote for Hillary2016 either.\" From: Voter in NH\n\n\"My suspicions are that your beloved Larry had more beautiful thoughts and concerns than an election as he passed into the next life.", + " May he rest in Peace knowing that he doesn't have to concern himself with politics. May he rest in peace knowing that he can love each individual though they be different than himself. You did him an injustice to make such comments on his obituary.\" From: Frank\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. However, I WILL be voting for Hillary. Thank you for helping me make up my mind.\" From: Kevin\n\n\"So sorry for your loss. Just buried my father three weeks ago. He was hoping to live long enough to see Hilary elected. Too bad my dad didn't live long enough, he would have been very pleased with her election next year.\" From:", + " N\u00f6elle Lorraine\n\n\"Rest in peace. Sounds to me like you were a true American. I assure you, my family and I will NOT be voting for that evil woman.\" From: Joseph Allen Cavin\n\n\"My condolences to the family and friends on your loss. But... Hillary gets my vote or Bernie.\" From: NOPE\n\n\"RIP Larry. I'm sorry your family hijacked your obituary to play politics. I'll be voting for Hillary anyway.\" From: Debra Gregston in Texas\n\n\"There's nothing like a grandfather who knows what's good for this country. He didn't have to ask me not to vote for Hillary.", + " I'm already on his side. Blessings and prayers for your family for such a great loss.\" From: Suz Voter\n\n\"R.I.P Mr. Upright. This obituary lacked any class and so sorry but I will be voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016.\" From: Jim and Tammy Faye\n\n\"Sorry to hear of Larrys passing he will be missed. Vote Hillary 2016.\" From: SAMMIEROB@MSN.COM\n\n\"I'm so sorry about your family's loss, but I am voting for Hillary\" From: Dremar\n\n\"RIP Mr Upright. I am sorry that your loved ones chose to make a mockery of your obituary.\" From:", + " Seth Perry\n\n\"My condolences to the family. We think of you even up here in PA and I appreciate that you are all making donations to shriners as well. Don't worry, I'm not voting for Hillary. :)\" From: Michele Pignatore\n\n\"So very sorry to hear about your loss. He sounds like he was a great man. Please tell the family that I will not be voting for Hillary.\" From: Marcia B.\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. However, I'll be voting for the candidate who'll promote policies that actually help working folks here in NC. Now, if I were a millionaire, I'd vote for the other party.\" From:", + " Petroleum V. Nasby\n\n\"I wish you many fond memories of your departed loved one, and I will be voting for the candidate who will do the most for the people of the Carolinas, and that will be the Democrat, whether Hillary or someone else. When Larry is up at the right hand of God, he will probably recognize the error of his ways here on earth.\" From: Tim R\n\n\"Rest in Peace, Mr. Upright. I'll honor your request and not vote for Hillary Clinton\" From: David Mohr\n\n\"I never knew Larry, but I am sure we would have been friends. I too am not voting for Hillary.\" From:", + " Janice Wilson\n\n\"R.I.P. Sir. My sincerest Condolences to the Family. I did not know you Sir, but I will adhere to your final request.\" From: Anonymous\n\n\"My heartfelt condolences to the upright family. May your loved one rest in peace. Seemed like a good man that I never knew, but in that I would like to respectfully decline saying that I will be voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign, and I think those who are only voting against to fulfill this man's wish is only doing a disservice to themselves and our country. I do however respect Mr. Upright and his family and hope that they can find peace in this heartbreaking time.\" From:", + " Chuck H.\n\n\"My wife and I are sorry for your loss...Our Country needs More people like Mr.Upright,... As for his request, My vote will NOT be for Hillary Clinton! Republican for 2016!\" From: V.F. Clinten\n\n\"RIP Mr. Upright and condolences to the family. Mrs. Clinton will make a fine President.\" From: William Cole (Windsor Locks, Connecticut)\n\n\"While we are total strangers please allow me to applaud your entire family for the courage to carry on Larry's firm standing and belief. You can rest assured that this Red Blooded New England Yankee will NOT vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or any election ever.", + " May Larry rest in peace and may you all take comfort in knowing he is in a better place. God bless you all!!!\" From: Sharron Neal\n\n\"Your Husband and, Father and Grandfather It is plaiin to see he was a wonderful Man... and may he rest in peace! For I will respect his wishes.... And Not Vote For Hillary Clinton!!\" From: Bruce Bowers\n\n\"The Great Architect has called you home as your Earthly duties are done. Godspeed, WB Larry. My deepest condolences to the family.\" From: Katy\n\n\"RIP!! Prayers to this family. I will not vote for that woman!", + " Can you please tell God to wrap this nation in his loving arms too? And for any sickos coming on here to say they vote for her. Stop just stop your typical looney left lobotomy success selves!\" From: California\n\n\"From the West Coast, myself and my family send our deepest condolences to the Upright family. Even in California, of all places, I don't know a soul who will vote for Hillary... And I plan to keep it that way! Anyone who would vote for her really isn't worth knowin' anyway. Thank you for your patriotism and for continuing the legacy of a legendary man.\" From:", + " Rosemary Dougherty\n\n\"I am very sorry for your loss. Larry's obituary paints a picture of a wonderful man. I will not be voting for Hillary Clinton....thanks for the tip, Larry. RIP\" From: A firend\n\n\"Sorry for your loss and my condolences. But, I will have to say this I am voting for Hillary hope that doesn't upset you to much in the after life.\" From: Marlene Storey; New York\n\n\"With deepest sympathy to the family of Mr. Upright. May his soul rest in peace. And, in his honor, it is with great pleasure that I will NOT be voting for HC.", + " God bless you all and may God bless the United States of America.\" From: Evelyn\n\n\"Did not know Mr Upright but I want his family to know that I will do my part to help him rest in peace. Not voting for Hillary!\" From: Treeva Wills\n\n\"My deepest sympathy on the loss of your beloved family member. P.S. Hillary couldn't pay me enough to vote for her.\" From: Kim Raper\n\n\"Another note from a stranger, who say the post on facebook. I think this man had an awesome sense of humor and wanted to share my sympathies with his family on the loss of what is obviously a light in their lives.", + " I am sorry for the diatribe a few folks have left who are very anxious to vote for Hillary. Rest assured my family is not part of that group either. But all that aside, my sympathies to you on the loss of a great man. Kim Raper\" From: Anonymous\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. I don't plan on voting for Hilary Clinton.\" From: David\n\n\"RIP Mr. Upright and your wisdom is acknowledged and respected with a Big Thank you. A big NO Way I would vote for that woman. Prayers for the Upright family at this time.\" From: James Rzepka\n\n\"\"I am a stranger and I do not know you or your departed.", + " However, I saw the obit and wanted to express my condolences and to let you know that your sense of humor is wonderful. Please know that we will not be voting for Hillary. Blessings to you and your family\"\" From: Maureen Heath - TX\n\n\"So sorry for your loss. Praying for your family. Rest assured, we will not be voting for Hillary in 2016 or any other year. RIP, sir.\" From: Richard\n\n\"My condolences to all the family. Rest in peace Larry....I will think of you when I step into that voting booth in Nov. 2016 and I can promise you I will not be voting for Hillary!\"", + " From: Winston Wallace\n\n\"I am sorry for your loss.I'm sure Mr Upright was a good man. I did not know him but I will honor his request not to vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From: John Gazarkiewicz\n\n\"N.W. Indiana is my location, I don't know you or your family Larry, but I wish you & your family prayers and RIP to you as well, and to tell you & your family y'all are very wise, I loved your obit and I also will not be voting for Hillary.\" From: Mary L\n\n\"I'm so sorry for your loss.\" From: R Brant\n\n\"", + "RIP Sir.....She will not have my vote...\" From: Diana in Wisconsin\n\n\"Loved your Obit, Mr. Upright. In YOUR honor, I will NOT vote for Hillary Clinton. May God Bless and Keep You Through Eternity! XXOO\" From: Victoria Johnson\n\n\"I didn't know the Upright family, this little item just came across one of my news feeds regarding the 'do not vote for Clinton in 2016'. I thought it was great! Rest assured I will NOT be voting for Hilary. Best wishes for your family at this difficult time.\" From: Beverly Ballard\n\n\"God bless you I lost my dad and I did not know your dad I agree with him no Hilary Clinton\"", + " From: Samantha Davenport\n\n\"Please accept my condolences on the loss of your Husband, Father and grandfather...He sounds like a remarkable man. I am pleased to say that I will honor his wish and not vote for Hillary in 2016 or any other year. R.I.P.Mr Upright\" From: Mike Goodson\n\n\"I just read an article about your Grandfather. Please accept my condolences. Based on his final wishes, I know he was a smart man who loved his country. God be with you all at this time.\" From: abston66\n\n\"So sorry for your loss. I definitely will not vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From:", + " Jackie Singler Weber\n\n\"Dear Grandpappy Please rest in peace knowing that I will not be voting for Hillary Clinton. Peace, prayers and blessings to your family Jackie Singler Weber Elk Rapids, Michigan\" From: rex m\n\n\"Rest in peace, and condolences to the famiy. I will not vote for Hillary or that RINO Jeb Bush.\" From: David Jones\n\n\"My condolences for your loss. I will not be voting for Hillary.\" From: Gregory Pennington\n\n\"I'm sorry for your loss. I do find it odd though to use the death of a family member to further your politics. I will not be following your advice in 2016.\" From:", + " Reva Ball\n\n\"so sorry for your loss. It sounds like he lived in honor of his good name; \"upright\". I will honor the request and not vote for Hillary.\" From: Alice Maggio\n\n\"I read this obituary on facebook and just wanted to say that I am so sorry for your loss. May God comfort you and bless you always. I also wanted to reassure you that I will NOT be voting for Hillary EVER!!!\" From: Mr Murphy\n\n\"Sorry for you loss. I was pleased to send 50 dollars in your grandfathers name to Ready for Hillary '16.\" From: Steve and Rhonda\n\n\"We are sorry for your loss.", + " We know that he has left behind a great legacy for his family to follow and many memories to be treasured. We will have to decline your request to not vote for Hillary as we have been waiting patiently for her to make her announcement public. Go Hillary!\" From: Rev. RR Jones\n\n\"My sincerce condolences to this family in their time of grief. And may each person feel free to vote their conscience and for the best candidate without pressure or emotional manipulation from their family members.\" From: melinda jahn\n\n\"RIP Sir I will not vote for HRC in 2016. Respectfully, Melinda Jahn\" From:", + " Dana\n\n\"Rest in peace, fine patriot.\" From: Jan\n\n\"It is shameful that some people have chosen to be disrespectful to the memory of your father.I did not know him but as for me and my family... all 4 of us, we will NOT vote for Hilary ever!! May God Bless you.\" From: Michele Decker\n\n\"My condolences to your family for your loss. Reading this makes me think of my own father who by the way would most definitely say the same thing about Hilary! Rest assured no one in this family will EVER vote for her. This world can use more strong value minded people just like Mr.", + " Upright!\" From: Sharon Zaborowski\n\n\"Condolences to the Upright family. Your request not to vote for Hillary Clinton will certainly be honored by our family! Blessings to each of you!\" From: S.WMS\n\n\"My prayers and thoughts are with the Upright family during this difficult time. But I have to vote for Hillary in 2016.\" From: Steve\n\n\"I did not know Mr Upright but he was obviously a very wise and good man. He passed away on my birthday and I said a prayer on his behalf. I will honor his request and not vote for Hillary Clinton.", + " Furthermore, I will ask others to not vote for her as well. May he RIP.\" From: Marlaina Lalonde\n\n\"I am truly sorry for your loss. I saw the obituary on my news feed and wanted to let you know that I will gladly honor Mr. Upright's memory by not voting for Hillary in 2016\" From: Douglas Corneil\n\n\"While I was not acquainted with the deceased, it was heartwarming to read of the tribute to this man as a husband, father, and grandfather from his family. I especially enjoyed reading about the family's request that anyone acquainted with Mr. Upright or anyone reading his obituary please refrain from voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016!", + " Clearly this man had a very clear point-of-view on America's politics. I hope he rests in peace.\" From: Leroy B.\n\n\"I am so sorry for your loss. May you rest in peace. I will vote for Hillary is I could vote. Family making a weird request in honor of your death? Humm? Has me thinking.\" From: Donna W Gustafson\n\n\"Greetings, condolences - your grand dad is a smart man. You will be able to carry on his wishes. HappyTrails\" From: Lannon & Jo\n\n\"Our deapest sympathy for the Upright family. Your last name say's it all,you're An Upright family & Larry(Colleen)", + " raised a great American loving family! Even in heaven he's still looking out for America,Thank you & rest in peace. Aloha!\" From: Gail S. from Missouri\n\n\"I wish I would have had the opportunity to know Mr. Upright. My sympathy is extended to your family. You can be assured that I will honor his political views and will NOT vote for Mrs. Clinton.\" From: Robert Kuta\n\n\"Sorry for your loss of a great father, husband and grandfather. Rest assured Larry, you request not to vote for Hillary (who?) will be on top of my list this voting season. regards Robert Kuta\"", + " From: An open minded voter\n\n\"I am sorry for your loss and will pray that the family knows peace in this difficult time however I will not allow a dead man or any man to tell me who to vote for.The men have done enough damage to this country a woman cannot do any worse. If the party picks her in 2016 I am team Hilary all the way......\" From: Stella Johnson\n\n\"So sorry for you loss. No words can heal you pain at this time. Mr. Upright you have my promise I will NOT be voting for Mrs. Clinton. RIP sir!\" From: Me in Tennessee\n\n\"I will grant Mr.", + " Upright's last request as well as my Wife whom will be voting for the first time in her life at 57. She and I wish with all our hearts the those that Mr. Upright would gather all those in Heaven that have gone before him and Call Billary home as well. Our Condolences.\" From: George\n\n\"Rest in peace and rest assured that I will never vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From: Selena\n\n\"My deepest condolences for your loss. I don't know you, but admire your family's convictions to include a political statement in the testament of his memory. I'll admit, when I saw the new trending about the Hillary Clinton comment,", + " it made me smile. It is a rare thing to be able to make people smile from something so sad. However, I believe that by making his political convictions part of his final memory, he will be remembered by more. What a blessing to make a stranger smile as his last memory! I hope you find this as a comfort. He will be remembered. God bless you and I pray you find peace in your loss. P.S. I also will not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.\" From: rosemary allen-duncan\n\n\"sorry for the family loss sounds like he was a GREAT MAN and i will be honored to go by his request and will share his request I WILL NOT VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON\"", + " From: Sharon Turner\n\n\"A wise man. I promise not to vote for Hillary Clinton in his honor.\" From: Anthony\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. I will not be voting for Mrs. Clinton. Semper Fi\" From: Richard Wilder (MI)\n\n\"Sorry for the loss of your loved one. I am looking forward to casting a vote for the first female President of the US.!! Hillary Clinton for President 2016!!\" From: Bob\n\n\"So for your loss but the dead knoweth nothing.So for the living and this great country if I am alive I will vote for Hillary.\" From: Xavier\n\n\"Sorry for your loss.", + " I'm voting for Hillary Clinton. Can't wait till she wins the election and becomes our next president.\" From: Linda Ulrich\n\n\"May you have everlasting Peace in your heavenly home. Our prayers are for you and your family~~~and, rest in good Faith that I would never vote for Hillary Clinton! Rejoice in the Lord Jesus Christ!\" From: Debra in Connecticut\n\n\"May Larry R.I.P. He sounds like a great man!! I will NOT vote for Hillary in 2016 or any other year!\" From: Dennis Case\n\n\"Condolences to the Upright family and friends...Mr.Upright's last wish to not vote for Hillary will be honored by myself..\" From:", + " Dr. Driscoll\n\n\"I will honor your last request. There isn't a chance in hell I'll vote for that scum ball Clinton. :)\" From: Andrew\n\n\"Sorry he's gone, but don't not vote for Hillary just because it's his dying wish. Whoever wins will affect US not him. WE are the ones WE are voting for. The election will not affect him. Don't vote a dying wish while making a decision affecting your future life.Sorry about the loss, but I could never respect such a wish, Democrat or Republican.\" From: Anonymous\n\n\"Sorry for your loss...... GO HILLARY 2016\"", + " From: Patti Catlin\n\n\"So very sorry for your loss. I will gladly honor Your GrandPappy's final request. This election, next election.........any election. Your grandpapp was looking out for what was in the best interest of this country till the time of his passing. Thank you sir.\" From: Magdalene Ruzza\n\n\"Condolences to your family. I am a democrat but I do not want hillary Clinton to be the next president. It would be very, very hard for me to cast a vote for her....any a,ternative would have to be really, really awful to do so.\" From:", + " Tyler Combs\n\n\"I don't know y'all's family, but I will keep your request and won't vote for Hillary. Sorry for your loss.\" From: Carolyn Boyd\n\n\"So sorry for your loss. I will respect his wishes and NOT VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON.\" From: Brent Dancy\n\n\"Mike and Jill, Sorry to hear the news of your dad. Wish I could have come by but did not get the news until late. He will always be the \"Big Kahuna\". NO to Hillary!\" From: Br. David McKenna\n\n\"May the Great Architect welcome you with open arms into the celestial house built not by human hands.Travel in peace on your continued journey my dear Brother.", + " Your 2016 request will gladly be honored without hesitation. Golden Ark #595 Taylor, Michigan\" From: NC Girl\n\n\"I'm so sorry for this families loss. It's great to see that they are trying to alleviate the loss with a little humor. I feel like it's a shame that some people feel the need to make rude remarks towards a man they did not know because his voting preference was made known. Prays for healing in this time of loss.\" From: DJR\n\n\"VOTE REPUBLICAN!! I AM!\" From: East NC\n\n\"My condolences and rest assured my vote will NOT go way of Hillary in 2016\"", + " From: Larry Snyder\n\n\"Thoughts and prayers for you and your family and I will honor your request not to vote for Hillary. Obama damaged America as he defined he would in his books by Downsizing America and Defeating Colonialism Once and for all. Hillary would continue on Obama's destructive path and continue to make America a joke in the world. America needs another Reagan - a strong leader with global respect which America hasn't had in 8 years. Unfortunately, today's majority are uneducated and illiterate and feel they are entitled by the government and these are the people who are responsible for what America has become.\" From: Someone from San Antonio\n\n\"", + "Rest in Peace Mr. Upright. You are with the angels now, no need to worry about who will be president. That is saved for the folks that are still on Gods Green Earth. ;)\" From: Anonymous\n\n\"So sorry for your loss. Though I did not know Larry personally I see he was a wise voter. RIP\" From: Deborah Bova\n\n\"I did not have the pleasure of knowing this gentleman, but his sentiments at the end of the page are a cautionary tale that all should heed...\"Don't vote for Hillary.\" From: the Wright's in Maryland\n\n\"So sorry to hear of your loss. My Dad was a mason and Shriner.", + " We will not be voting for Clinton in honor of you Dad' Granddad and Shriner. Keeping you all in our prayers\" From: S. James\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. I promise to not vote for Hillary, just to offset the votes of deceased persons that somehow can still vote Democrat.\" From: James A. Muncy, Jr.\n\n\"I know a man that your father met in Heavan my father; So funny not a fan of Hillary myself. Will not support her eather. Vote Republican it the only way out of this mess. Sorry for the families loss seems like a great guy. Things will get better he will not be forgotten.\" From:", + " John Kerner\n\n\"Mr. Upright, Rest in Peace knowing you have done your duty even after death! God Bless your families courage!\" From: Paula\n\n\"Our Condolences, I WILL NOT Vote For Hillary My Father Passed Away In 1987 And As Your Father, He Was A Hardcore Republican. God Bless And Ot Would Have Been An Honor To Have Met Your Father. I Am Sure He Is In Heaven Along With Mine.\" From: Sandi - Orange Park, FL\n\n\"God Bless you Mr. Upright. May your family know that you are in heaven smiling down on them. I will remember your advise when I go to the polls and vote.", + " No vote from me for Hillary Clinton.\" From: Diane Gagner\n\n\"I am so sorry to see that your loved one passed away.....I promise, I will NOT vote for Hillary or ANY Democrat as their views go against my Christian faith. I wish I could have met you Larry Upright, what a sense of humor!! God bless you and see you in heaven.\" From: Richard - Naples, FL\n\n\"To Larry Upright, may you rest in peace. Don't worry about the country, there are many good folks like yourself that yell at the TV too and will do something to save it for you. To the family,", + " our thoughts and prayers are with you.\" From: Joyce Belford\n\n\"My condolences to the family. I am with you on Hillary.\" From: Diane Fox\n\n\"Wish the world was full of men like your granddad! I am a facebooker and came across your grandfather's wish not to vote for Clinton. In his honor I give my word I won't. God Bless you and yours now and always!\" From: Gerri White Hofius\n\n\"Larry had his head screwed on straight. Obama put this country in the toilet and voting Hillary will allow her to pull the handle on the toilet. Larry clearly knew this. Vote who you will,", + " its still a free country. Jesus is my hope. RIP Larry RIP\" From: Gwen\n\n\"I don't know you, but am sorry for your loss. I am an OES member and will keep your family in my prayers. Definitely am NOT voting for Clinton!\" From: Rob Liszi\n\n\"Amen brother, I will gladly honor your last request!\" From: Theodore Nugent\n\n\"Omg. I'm so sad to hear of Larrys passing. His last wishes will of course be honored each of the the ten times I vote.\" From: Tom and Steve\n\n\"Our family is sending your family it's condolences during this sad time.", + " We wish we had known Lawrence better. Lots of love from Tom and Steve and our kids.\" From: Richard Linn\n\n\"As Past Master of Eulalia Lodge 342, Coudersport, PA, I respectfully send my condolences to your family. And a firm promise that I will also NOT be voting for Hilary Clinton.\" From: larry in south carolina.\n\n\"I absolutely promise to honer your voting request :), and pray you land in the warm lap of the Lord.\" From: Anonymous\n\n\"My deepest condolences on your husband/father/grandfather/friend. I did not know him but he sounds like a wonderful kind-hearted man who truly looked out for his family & country.", + " I hope he is getting a good laugh in Heaven. I hope you also find comfort in knowing his legacy has sparked family conversations around the nation. Politics is so often taboo, even amongst family. Regardless of position Mr. Upright has clearly broken through that barrier in life and now in death. Good heartfelt conversation is what this country needs and it is very fitting that it came courtesy of Mr. Upright. God works in mysterious ways. Many children were helped by this kind, charitable man in his work with Shriners. Many more will be helped with his legacy, if none other than to voice your opinions. Rest in peace Mr.", + " Upright. Rest in peace.\" From: Debra Daniel\n\n\"Please accept my condolences for the loss of you Husband, Father and Grandfather...I will NOT vote for Hillary!!!\" From: Gene & Sandy Johnston, Anacortes, WA\n\n\"R.I.P., Larry, you were a good man. We will not vote for Hillary, ever, under any circumstances, in any year, in your honor.\" From: Julie Duffy\n\n\"You do not know me. I live in Virginia and saw this on the internet. Mr. Upright sounds like he was a great man and I am deeply sorry for your loss.", + " A loss such as this will always live a hole, but your memories will be your help in accepting his passing. Love your families' request and just wanted you to know that I will definitely NOT VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON. Hopefully, this poison will go away!!\" From: GMan\n\n\"RIP - I won't be voting for Hillary Clinton.\" From: James\n\n\"Mr. Upright was the kind of gentleman I would have enjoyed knowing. I read obituaries daily and find the most interesting facts about the deceased, even those I thought I knew well. What a great final request! Please rest in peace,", + " and know there is one more person NOT voting for Hillary.\" From: brenda roberson\n\n\"as i have also lost my father, i understand the hurt you are going through..my condolences..as i am a democratic i wanted your family to know i will be voting republican in 2016..your father sounds like a very wise man..too bad i didn't have his advice in 2008...\" From: Jocelyn Hartwell Dipley\n\n\"I want to offer my deepest condolences. and we are not voting for her either\" From: Fred Wood\n\n\"Amen, Larry.....Amen!\" From: Richard\n\n\"I'm sorry for your passing.", + " I will not vote for Hillary Clinton and out of respect for your families wishes I will work to make sure as many people I can reach do not vote for Hillary but a well qualified Conservative.\" From: Staci T.\n\n\"Thoughts and prayers for the Upright family and friends during this time of loss. Mr. Upright sounds like he was a remarkable man. No worries, my family will not be voting for any Clinton or Bush. Hoping for Walker, Rubio, or Rand for 2016. God Bless you all and thank you for the chuckle.\" From: Tanya Palmer\n\n\"I will definitely NOT vote for Hillary in 2016.", + " May God Bless your entire family during this difficult time and may He give you the strength.\" From: Pete & Brenda\n\n\"We would not vote for the lying, Hillary Clinton for Dog Catcher. We will honor your request Mr.Larry. RIP\" From: Ed Plain, West Haven, CT\n\n\"Larry, in your honor, I will not vote for Hillary (though I'd rather die myself before I do anyway)\" From: Dianne\n\n\"I'm so sorry you lost your father but thanks for the comment \"dont vote for Hillary\"! love, love love it and God Bless you all, I'm praying for you- Good People!", + " Dianne\" From: Konstantinos\n\n\"Sorry for your loss! She WILL NOT get my vote not another Obama in\" From: Glenda Dillard,Nash,Tenn.\n\n\"THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS FOR THE UPRIGHT FAMILY.I WILL NOT VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON\" From: Corey C.\n\n\"RIP Larry. Also, RIP Hillary 2016\" From: Lark Wartenberg\n\n\"Sir, You can be reassured I will not vote for Hilary Clinton that is an easy last wish to fulfill. Peace and Prayers to your family. I also pray auto correct has not changed anything I have written as I can not see whole post.\" From:", + " Marty & Carrie Walker (Borger, TX)\n\n\"Our deepest sympathy to you and your family in your loss. As for this house we will serve the Lord!!! No Hillary!!!!\" From: Paula J\n\n\"I am so sorry for your loss and I will NOT vote for Hillary!\" From: Cathy\n\n\"Sorry for your loss...Love the Obit! no Hillary for me!!!\" From: Mickey and Patty Tidwell, Lakeland, FL\n\n\"We are sorry for your loss. Both Mickey and I have lost our dads and it is hard, no matter how old, or how ill. May God comfort you with His peace,", + " and warm memories. We enjoyed reading Mr. Upright's obituary online and want you to know we will not be voting for Hilary.\" From: Paul Wilhelm\n\n\"So sorry for your loss, it is a tough season to go through. Wish I would have known your dad, it looks like he raised a great family. Our family will be honoring his request come election day; one Clinton President was hard enough on this country.\" From: Leslie\n\n\"I didn't know your loved one, but after reading his obituary I am certain that I would have liked him. I will happily honor the family's request NOT to vote for Hilary in 2016.", + " R.I.P. Mr. Upright!\" From: anonymous in Pittsburgh, PA\n\n\"I am deeply sorry for your loss. I too will honor your request in November and not vote for Clinton.\" From: An Iowa Voter\n\n\"Your husband, father, and grandfather sounds like a good solid man. Keep your memories of him close to your heart and what a wonderful way to honor his last wishes. Good for you for carrying them out. I will NOT be voting for Hilary Clinton in 2016!\" From: Rick n Theresa Kelly Big Stone Gap VA\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. I have to say I love your Obit and with respect for your loss we will NOT vote for Hillary in 16.\" From:", + " James Crawford\n\n\"RIP Larry, my prayers for the family. I will never vote democrat!\" From: Apple Valley Patricia\n\n\"My condolences for the loss of a very smart man. No, we will NOT for for another Clinton.\" From: W & E Baxter\n\n\"We offer our sympathy to the family. Although we do not live in North Carolina but Florida we will honor his request and give to charity and NOT VOTE FOR HILLARY. God Bless and my he be in Heaven already.\" From: Frank Plant\n\n\"In honor of Larry, I definitely will not vote for Hillary Clinton. Regards, Frank Plant\" From: Waco,", + " Texas\n\n\"So sorry for your loss and Praying for your family. It is my pleasure to honor this family's request and not vote for Hillary in 2016. God speed from Texas.\" From: Shannon S. from Illinois\n\n\"Rest in Peace, Patriot. NOT VOTING FOR HILLARY! Rubio/Fiorina 2016\" From: Mike Jacks, Cedar Park, TX\n\n\"I am sorry for your loss. Your Dad reminds me of my father and sounds like the kind of man that makes me proud to be a Southerner. May God bless him and your family... PS: No Hillary votes in this conservative Texas family!", + " :)\" From: Angela Osborne\n\n\"I am so very sorry for your loss! I did not know Mr. Upright, but I was very touched by his obituary. I will honor his wishes, and will not vote for Hillary in 2016 or ever. You and your family are in my thoughts and prayers. I would also like to apologize for the imbeciles that posted on here not to memorialize Mr. Upright, but Ms. Clinton instead. My sincerest apologies.\" From: Donald Purciful\n\n\"I wish to convey my respectful regrets for the passing of your loved one Mr. Larry Darrel Upright.", + " I was hoping to know if he had made a decision for Jesus Christ as I would be please to tell him in person someday on his voting request as to me his salvation and departure into eternity is much more important. May you as a family strongly recognize that little ole me is a very conservative right wing Bible thumping saved Baptist that has no intentions ever to vote for a liberal at this never even a democratic. Although I regret I am a Yankee by birth a southern gentleman at heart and for sure I claim Texas as my citizenship renouncing my home state of Indiana. Thanks Y'all and yes in most sincerity. I truly am sadden by the loss of Mr.", + " Upright he sounds like a great man to have coffee with.\" From: GSCT\n\n\"My condolences to your family. If it is of any consolation Larry will be keeping good company in Heaven with the Heroes, that Hillary Clinton abandoned in Libya. I am sure he won't have any awkward meetings with her in the future.\" From: Philly John\n\n\"Rest in Peace, good patriot. Sorry your final years had to be during this administration. In your honor and memory, my family will most certainly NOT be voting for That Woman.\" From: Bill and Barbara Alsbury\n\n\"Our deepest sympathy, please know that we nor any of our friends will be voting for Hillary Clinton!!\"", + " From: Airman First Class Cutliff J.\n\n\"I wanted to pass on my condolences and say how much it made me laugh to read Mr.Upright's obituary.\" From: Marcia Tanno\n\n\"Rest in peace, dear Larry, and know that my husband and I will NOT vote for Hilliary Clinton!\" From: Sympathy\n\n\"Regrets from Rochester, NY. and your Obit is making national headlines! Had no intention of voting for Hillary anyway, but now it's a matter of honoring the death of what appears to have been a great guy!\" From: duffy355@yahoo.com\n\n\"", + "Rest assured, Hillary Clinton will NOT get my vote. Jackie in Ohio\" From: viola chronister\n\n\"That was great what you did for him.I agree with him.sorry for your loss.\" From: Cynthia, From: Katy, Texas\n\n\"Mr. Upright sounds like someone I would have enjoyed as a neighbor. Blessings of peace to you during this very difficult time. Surely, you will cherish many fond memories. I can only imagine, that among these great memories, you will recall a multitude of stories filled with his keen whit and sharp political mind. God bless your family.\" From: Debbie in Texas\n\n\"Your dad taught you well...I think it's awesome that you honored his beliefs this way and will share!\"", + " From: Mike\n\n\"We miss you, Larry, and of course we would never vote for Hillary.\" From: Long Island, New York\n\n\"So sorry for your loss. LOVE the don't vote for Hillary in 2016. I will gladly fulfill your father's wishes!\" From: Annie Jones\n\n\"So sorry for your loss. Praying for comfort. Rest in peace knowing this one will not be voting for Hillary :)\" From: Michele Bern\n\n\"So sorry for the loss of your father... just watching FOX news and hearing you talk of you dad with a smile in your eyes pays tribute to what a wonderful man he must of been. \"Dont vote for Hillary\"", + " must of been important to him it seems, and I bet he is looking down with the same smile in his eyes for you and your family... Best to you your family... (and I am not voting for Hillary either)\" From: Andrea-- Onawa Ia\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. I know you don't know me, but I was watching Fox & Friends this morning and saw this story. My brother died a few years ago and had the same thoughts towards Obama and in seeing this story, I wish we would have included this in his obituary also. My family and I will most definately not vote for Hillary!!! When the elections comes around I will think of your family.. Prayers to you and yours.\" From:", + " Mark from Michigan\n\n\"My deepest sympathy for your loss. I wish I could have met Larry because I know I would be better for the experience. I've been a staunch Republican my whole life so I will certainly honor Larry's wishes.\" From: James Miles\n\n\"My Condolences on the loss of your father, sounds like he was a great man. I saw the article on Fox News your dad can rest in peace as I will not be voting for Hillary. James Miles Ontonagon, Michigan\" From: Marcia Jennings\n\n\"I am very sorry for your loss and your family will be in my thoughts and prayers. Unfortunately, I did not have the privilege of knowing Mr.", + " Upright. However, I will gladly respect his wishes and not vote for Hilary Clinton.\" From: Nancy Lund\n\n\"I did not know Mr. upright, but I just saw his daughter on FOX News in NY and I thought what they did was brilliant! Asking folks not to vote for H.C. is a wonderful tribute to your dad. May he rest in peace and may the Lord be with you all in your time of sorrow. God bless America.\" From: Annie Dull\n\n\"My condolences to your family on the recent loss of your father and grandfather. I grew up spending my summers in Concord and Kannapolis visiting my grandparents and cousins.", + " I saw your fathers story on Fox News and I wish I had know your Dad. He sounds like he was very passionate about his family, country and politics....and had a great sense of humor! You have honored your father very well, and our family will honor the request and not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016!! or in any election!\" From: Joe Hawkins\n\n\"RIP Mr. Upright. I will vote against Hillary to honor your wishes and also to counter her using your name as a vote now.\" From: Fox & Friends Viewer Jana\n\n\"Sorry for your family's loss. Thanks for the refreshing humor,", + " rest in peace this household Will Not vote for the Hillary regime! God Bless\" From: Susan Mills - Tennessee\n\n\"I wish I had known Mr. Upright, he sounds like a wonderful man. He had to be a great husband and father for his family to have such a great sense of humor. My family and I will happily honor his wish in 2016 and any year thereafter that a member of the Clinton family is on the ballot.\" From: John Wetzel\n\n\"My Heartfelt Condolences go out to the family of this great man and patriot Rest In Peace Mr. Upright. I in honor of you WILL NOT VOTE FOR HILLARY!\"", + " From: Bill and Linda Parke\n\n\"Thank you for sharing your father's message. I am also a Shriner and have the same message. You can rest assure my family will honor your fathers request. NO VOTE FOR HC\" From: Kim and Art (Baltimore), MD\n\n\"Our condolences. Prayers to you and your family during this time (and always). It is truly beautiful how your family remembers to celebrate Larrys life during this difficult time. He sounds like a awesome man! We will surely honor Larry (and our country) on voting day! God bless!\" From: Donna Huiet\n\n\"Praying for this family and promising to abide by Larry's wishes.", + " I will NOT vote for Hillary (or any other democrat).\" From: Joy G from Pennsylvania\n\n\"\"I am sorry for your loss as your family is a testament to his life. Please know that many are standing with your fathers wish and know that those who have mean speech is the only thing they have. Stay strong and May God Bless your family!\"\" From: Penny M, Pennsylvania\n\n\"I'm so sorry for the loss of your father and grandfather. Please be assured that I will NOT vote for Hillary Clinton!\" From: Roger & Pam Burton\n\n\"Mr Upright can rest knowing that there will be ZERO votes for Hill in 2016 coming from our home in Chattanooga,", + " and our sons home in Knoxville. Could we request he speak with God and see if anything can de done to bring our country back to God and it senses?\" From: Victoria Lyle\n\n\"My deepest sympathy for the family. Although I did not know him, and I do not know the family, I do promise that I WILL NOT VOTE FOR HILARY CLINTON. Victoria Lyle Talbott, Tennessee\" From: Jim Meacham\n\n\"RIP, I did not plan to vote for Hillary; I will now not vote for her in your honor.\" From: Andre Soto (LA,CA) of all places\n\n\"", + "God bless the Upright family during this difficult time. My condolences to the Upright family and yes, my family and I will honor the request and not vote for Hillary, the elitist snob!\" From: Marc Myers\n\n\"Deepest sympathies and prayers - We will honor his last request! Land of the Free and Home of the Brave!\" From: Stranger in Indiana\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. Our family will NOT vote for Billary!\" From: frank williamson richmond, va\n\n\"I didn't know your Father, but sounds as if he was a true family man, a patriot and knew our amazing political ramblings in this gone crazy world that we are trying to diminish due to lack of leadership.", + " My wife and I will conform to the family's wishes. God bless Larry Upright and his family members and God bless the USA\" From: Lisa - North Texas\n\n\"My sincerest condolences for your entire family. I am also passionate about politics, and I will honor Larry's wishes - I will NOT vote for Hillary. By the way - Great idea!!!\" From: Billy & Donna McNees -Huntington, Arkansas\n\n\"Although we never had the honor of meeting this dear man or any of your family. After hearing your story on Fox News this morning we wanted to extend our sympathy to all of you & let you know we too will be two of the MANY of those who will NOT be voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016.", + " May God Bless & comfort each of you.\" From: B Squre\n\n\"My deepest condolences to your family. My family and I will definitely not vote for Hillary. She will ruin this country even further than the current president. Thank you for your obituary!\" From: Kim & Cindy Wiles of NH\n\n\"May Larry rest in peace.May God bless you all. We will not vote for Hillary.\" From: Roland Hall\n\n\"It is sad when a loved one is lost. A true patriot from what I have read. I was not fortunate to know Mr. Upright but I am sure he is in a much better place and we will all rejoice together sometime in the future.", + " God bless you and this wonderful man.\" From: NC voter\n\n\"I will be proudly voting for Hillary Clinton as well as campaigning for her in the state of NC.\" From: TjD jr\n\n\"My sincerest condolences to all the upright family and God Bless Larry and each of you. I don't know anyone that is foolish enough to vote for Hillary but if I run across someone I'll ask them in honor of Mr Upright to reconsider that foolish choice for a logical one. God's Blessings as you grieve peacefully.........\" From: Audrey Fennell Mitchell\n\n\"Dear Family, You don't know me but I'm from Concord,", + " now living in Texas. I saw Mr Upright's memorial on Facebook that was shared via Fox News. I shared this with some of my staunch Republican friends here with the hope that his wishes reach farther than you imagined...and I hope that this gives you a smile. My deepest condolences to each of you.\" From: Wayne Doland\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. Larry must have been a very smart man. I'm not voting for Hillary but there's still a lot of stupid people in this world that will.\" From: Lorraine duBouchet\n\n\"So very sorry for the Upright family's loss. I and my husband will certainly comply with your request and not vote for Hilary.", + " I woundn't vote for her if she were the only candidate running which, the way this country will be run if she and her ilk have their way, is how it will be in the future. Again, so sorry for the loss of a good man.\" From: HB\n\n\"My thoughts and prayers are with all the family for your loss. The Lord will see you through this time. I felt as if I knew Mr. Upright because he shared my thoughts as well. We can't afford her so Don't vote for Hillary Clinton and I don't plan on voting for her.\" From: Bob Amell\n\n\"Many condolences for the loss.", + " Sounds like Larry was a good man, and that his surname fit him well. May God bring you peace and comfort. As far as your request, I will be voting for Dr. Ben Carson; or someone like him. God Bless!\" From: Bob\n\n\"Thanks we will not vote for Hillary.\" From: Jeane Adams\n\n\"I am so very sorry for your loss. He must have been a fine man. His last wish will certainly be honored by me and my family. Thank you for including that in the obituary. If only more would. May God give you his deepest peace and greatest blessings.\" From: Tim Twedt in Colorado\n\n\"My deepest sympathy on the passing of your Dad.", + " I know by His wishes that he truly loved America. Keep His ideals alive. Nothing on this eath could make me vote for hillary clinton!\" From: Debbie Stenten\n\n\"I did not know Mr. Upright or any family member but I would like to extend my sincere condolences and let you all know that it will be my pleasure to honor the family's wished and not vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From: Missy- NMB, SC\n\n\"Very sorry for your loss. He is now at peace and will be honored to know that I will KEEP his last request by NOT voting for HillBilly!!! Prayers for the family.\" From:", + " Sean from Long Island\n\n\"Wishing Larry's family and friends my heartfelt condolences. He sounds like one heck of a man who lived a full and satisfying life. Larry can rest assured, I will not be voting for Hillary in 2016. Some day, (hopfully down the road a ways)I will look him up, shake his hand and share a good laugh!\" From: Roger H\n\n\"Larry was a fine gentleman and will be missed by all.I have sent flowers to the childrens hospital and I will not vote for Hillary.I also did not vote for Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.....R.I.P.Larry\" From:", + " David Hill\n\n\"Will be praying for all family and friends.....would never vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From: Florida\n\n\"Our family knows what it's like to lose a loved Grandfather. In respect for Mr. Upright and good common sense, we have 3 generations of family here that will never elect a democrat to office. May Mr. Upright Rest In Peace in Heaven.\" From: Cookie\n\n\"My deepest condolences to the entire Upright family. I did not know Larry, but he sounds like an honest, upstanding American who wants only the best for our country. I will certainly be honoring his wish. I will never vote for Hilary.", + " One Clinton in the White House was more than enough. I don't think that the U.S. should have to handle another embarrassment like the Clintons. RIP Larry!\" From: a fellow American\n\n\"My dad had strong political thoughts as well. When Clinton took office he took down his American flag and did not put it out again until he was out of office. If he were alive today, we too would not vote for Mrs. Clinton, nor am I. God bless you and your family, may we hope that enough other fellow Americans feel the same way as your dad.\" From: Cheryl price\n\n\"Sry for your dads passing you will sure miss his humor I wish I would have known him we sure had one thing in common no Hillary Clinton for sure God Bless to all\"", + " From: Dawn\n\n\"I am so sorry for the loss of your love one. He sounds like a wonderful man. In honor of him I will not vote for Hillary Clinton. God bless!\" From: Yankee in Virginia\n\n\"To the family of Mr. Upright, Wow. You were very fortunate to know such a wise and \"upright\" man, to say the least. His wisdom will be acknowledged and heeded by this yankee. Sorry about 1861, that was a mistake. Hopefully, things will improve as Mr. Upright most definitely hoped and maybe we will at least get a president that was actually born in America and loves America.", + " Anyone but Hillary. Amen. Godspeed to Mr. Upright and I look forward to meeting him someday.\" From: Kay Davis\n\n\"Condolences from Florida...so very sorry for your loss! We will gladly honor your wish to not vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From: Adrienne Madrid\n\n\"My deepest sympathy for your family. I will keep you in my prayers. Even though this is the first time we've \"met, Mr. Upright, I am quite sure you are with Jesus and trying to ease the pain your family is experiencing. It's an honor to be invited to leave you a message. It's an honor to know a true patriot.", + " Compassionately, A complete stranger to you and any of your family and friends.\" From: Bro. Arthur Thomm II, P.M.\n\n\"Bro Upright, I heard of your passing through social media, and although I didn't personally know you, I am sorry to hear of your passing. May your family have peace that you are with our God, the Great Architect of the Universe and in his loving arms. Thank you for your service to the fraternity, and to the Shriners! I am also a Past President of the Shriners and a Past Master of our blue lodge. Also - You gave me one more reason not to vote for Hillary!", + " I promise to honor your wishes Brother! SMIB, Art Thomm, P.M. Equality Lodge #44 Martinsburg, WV\" From: Tauheed Epps\n\n\"Dammm. Larry, I cant believe you kicked it. ME and Larry used to chill at the Course hollerin at all tha shawtys. Ima miss you thug. Keep it breazy Larry, so word to our boy Nemo up there. Keep it froggy fresh. Don't worry, Hillary isn't getting my vote, Rest in Pepperonis Larry.\" From: Kathy Rosenberg\n\n\"Idid not know him nor your family but may he rest in peace and may you all be assured I will not vote for Hilary.", + " Sincerely, Kathy Rosenberg\" From: Nina\n\n\"As an individual that cherishes family, freedom, honesty and truth, sounds like Mr. Upright held these cloI am so sorry by this great loss experienced by Mr. Upright's loved ones. Sadly humility, integrity and morality are sorely lacking today at the cost of our families and our children, whom are left with no role models of good character here is where his absence will be greatly missed. Our country is in dire need of more men and women of good character. Clearly an honest, hardworking man that placed love of family, honour and integrity first. Your request Mr.", + " Upright illustrates your intention, to protect your family and America from a very greedy and dishonest women. Dear Mr. Upright, I too will honour your request by not voting for Mrs. Clinton, she is not for the people she is a cruel human being, greedy, arrogant and twisted. Btw, this comment comes from a democrat. Rest in peace Mr. Upright, may God be with you.\" From: Laura Fennell-Trimble\n\n\"My condolences to your family. Thank you for giving me one more reason not to vote for H.R.C. I do it(or not as the case may be)", + " gladly and will think of your dearly departed as I enter the voting booth.\" From: connie sisco\n\n\"I am sorry the family's loss. I am so glad to be able to reply I will not vote for Hillary. Bengasi does make a difference.\" From: Bob Martin\n\n\"My condolences to family members, may Larry rest in peace knowing his message reached so many people. I assure you I will not vote for HC. RIP my Brother till we meet again in the big lodge. Bob Martin, ALTAMONT, NY. A brother Mason and Shriner.\" From: Jerry Martin\n\n\"My pride in NC (was born in Monroe,", + " raised in Charlotte, grad. in '56 from UNC, now live IN DE since '56)has greatly increased since reading the Upright obituary. I will promise right now that I will NOT vote for Hilary Clinton! I love the way politics have shifted to the GOP in NC! I'm DEEPLY sorry for your loss. God rest his soul. Jerry\" From: Victoria Lieb\n\n\"May the magic of his light shine upon you now and through 2016. God bless, and thank you for the levity of passions in your granddaddy's life.\" From: John Stigall\n\n\"", + "Sorry Larry, you are a cool guy but our whole family will vote for Hillary. We promised Grandma.\" From: Carl Welter\n\n\"My deepest sympathy about your grandfather. I just made a donation to Hillary PAC in his name.\" From: President Obama\n\n\"My deepest sympathy to your family. Hillary Clinton was an excellent Senator, Secretary of State, and friend and I can assure you I will be voting for her.\" From: Kelsey\n\n\"So very sorry for your loss. Mr. upright sounds like he was a wonderful man. I will never vote for Hillary Clinton.\" From: Greg Jordan\n\n\"So sorry for your loss. I will actually be voting for Hillary because I think she espouses a true Christian spirit of standing by her man,", + " and she is well qualified. But so glad you wanted this in your obit. If everyone was so concerned as you then we would be a lot better off. RIP fellow NC'er and blessings to your family.\" From: Clyde Jones\n\n\"So sorry for your loss,I agree with Mr. Larry D. Upright - I will not vote for Hillary Clinton!\" From: REP\n\n\"I'm so sorry for your loss, BUT I will be voting for Hillary Clinton. Thank you for living in the USA....\" From: Heywood Jablome\n\n\"How sad to see you go.\" From: Ben Dover\n\n\"Sad to see you go Larry and remembering the good times.\" From:", + " Anita Dump\n\n\"Sadly it was time to go.\" From: Ima Hoare\n\n\"My heartfelt sympaties to the family. He was always so generous.\" From: William Jefferson Clinton\n\n\"Sorry for your loss, PS I'm not voting for Hillary.\" From: Deanie Jacobi\n\n\"I did not know Larry, but guarantee I will not vote for Hillary. My husband is Potentate at Sahib Shrine, Sarasota, Florida and his condolences too! Larry must have been a great person and we would love to have known him. God Bless You and all the Family. Connie & Deanie Jacobi Sarasota, Florida\"", + " From: Bret Boozer\n\n\"This path as seen its end, but as the lights go out here they came on at the start of your next path. See you on the other side! Rest well!\" From: Voting American\n\n\"Well, since I'm still Upright,and expect to be on Election Day. I will vote for Secretary Clinton. My sincere condolences on your loss. A loving Grandaddy can't be replaced.\" From: dwayne vargeson\n\n\"DEAR UPRIGHT FAMILY, MY CONDOLENCES FOR THE PASSING OF LARRY. I AM RESPECTFULLY HONORING LARRY'S WISH AND WILL NOT VOTE FOR HILLARY ROTHAM CLINTON JUST AS I NEVER VOTED FOR BARAK OBUMA!!! RIP LARRY.", + " WE ALL LOVE YOU. DWAYNE & FAMILY, ELMIRA,NY\" From: Joe Fachet\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. I know that your dad, grandfather is in heaven with my dad watching For news. Our family respects his opinion and will honor his request. God bless you and your family. Maybe my dad and your dad (and grand daddy can have a good influence ftom up above. God Bless. Joe and Family ftom Pennsylvania\" From: Jamal Jackson\n\n\"I will honor your request NOT to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Your selfless service and generosity is appreciated. Some day we'll meet in heaven again.", + " May God bless you, your family and other loved ones.\" From: Charles Farley\n\n\"I am sorry for your loss but I will do as you ask will not vote for clinton\" From: ARKANSAS Stranger\n\n\"To the family my prayers go out to you and this is the best obituary I have ever read. Mr. Upright with your keen since humor even in the end I must say is priceless and as for me and mine we respectfully will never vote for Hillary for anything. RIP\" From: Anonymous\n\n\"I have no intention of voting for Hilary. Bernie gets my vote. Now there's an upright man.\" From:", + " Vicki\n\n\"Sorry for your loss. My husband and I are doing the best we can to send videos and statements to everyone we know, to let them know not to vote for Clinton. We are not going to vote for Clinton. We are asking everyone to pray that Donald Trump gets in. Again Sorry for your loss\" From: Cloie, Steve and Vicki Lynn\n\n\"We are sorry for your loss and Heaven's gain. Considering Hillary was - at best - substandard in her governmental positions, and - at worst - criminal, we will not join the less committed United States citizens in voting for her come November. \"Upright\"; your name says it all!", + " Perhaps we should search for an obituary for a \"Mr Mistaken\"; there we would find his final wish: \"Please don't vote for Donald!\" God bless your family, Mr Upright. Love, Cloie, Vicki and Steve\" From: Lol\n\n\"Well, Grandpa got his wish!\" From: Terry Messina\n\n\"Mr. Upright was a wise man. For all those who heeded his advice, you certainly got what you wished for and you certainly deserve it. Rest in blissful peace for ever, Mr. Upright, you certainly got the last laugh.\"\n" + ], + "length": 19773, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 44, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Bob Dylan delivered what was described as an \"eloquent\" lecture this month as part of his Nobel prize requirements\u2014but one writer says he may have approached the task like a high school student with an overdue project. Dylan discussed three favorite works from childhood and Andrea Pitzer at Slate suspects the Nobel Prize winner for literature may have cribbed much of the Moby Dick portion from SparkNotes. She says at least 20 of the 78 sentences involved strongly resemble SparkNotes passages and compares several of them side by side. Multiple phrases, including \"Ahab's lust for vengeance,\" appear both in SparkNotes and Dylan's talk, but not in Moby Dick itself. He had to give the talk to collect $922,000 in prize money. \"Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness,\" a quote that one blogger thought Dylan had invented, appears to be based on SparkNotes. Pitzer suggests that Dylan donate some of the prize money to the SparkNotes writer, though others are more forgiving. University of Minnesota music professor Alex Lubet tells the Star-Tribune that Dylan's lecture shouldn't be treated like a classroom assignment. \"His lecture is wild and strange,\" Lubet says. \"It\u2019s meant to be a post-modern work of art. Any kind of a collage technique is fair game.\" In a 2012 Rolling Stone interview, Dylan addressed claims he had lifted lyrics, saying that in songwriting, \"You make everything yours. We all do it.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images and SparkNotes.\n\nIf a songwriter can win the Nobel Prize for literature, can CliffsNotes be art? During his official lecture recorded on June 4, laureate Bob Dylan described the influence on him of three literary works from his childhood: The Odyssey, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Moby-Dick. Soon after, writer Ben Greenman noted that in his lecture Dylan seemed to have invented a quote from Moby-Dick.\n\nThose familiar with Dylan\u2019s music might recall that he winkingly attributed fabricated quotes to Abraham Lincoln in his \u201cTalkin\u2019 World War III Blues.\u201d So Dylan making up an imaginary quote is nothing new.", + " However, I soon discovered that the Moby-Dick line Dylan dreamed up last week seems to be cobbled together out of phrases on the website SparkNotes, the online equivalent of CliffsNotes.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nIn Dylan\u2019s recounting, a \u201cQuaker pacifist priest\u201d tells Flask, the third mate, \u201cSome men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness\u201d (my emphasis). No such line appears anywhere in Herman Melville\u2019s novel. However, SparkNotes\u2019 character list describes the preacher using similar phrasing, as \u201csomeone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness\u201d (again,", + " emphasis mine).\n\nFollowing up on this strange echo, I began delving into the two texts side by side and found that many lines Dylan used throughout his Nobel discussion of Moby-Dick appear to have been cribbed even more directly from the site. The SparkNotes summary for Moby-Dick explains, \u201cOne of the ships... carries Gabriel, a crazed prophet who predicts doom.\u201d Dylan\u2019s version reads, \u201cThere\u2019s a crazy prophet, Gabriel, on one of the vessels, and he predicts Ahab\u2019s doom.\u201d\n\nShortly after, the SparkNotes account relays that \u201cCaptain Boomer has lost an arm in an encounter with Moby Dick.", + "... Boomer, happy simply to have survived his encounter, cannot understand Ahab\u2019s lust for vengeance.\u201d In his lecture, Dylan says, \u201cCaptain Boomer\u2014he lost an arm to Moby. But... he\u2019s happy to have survived. He can\u2019t accept Ahab\u2019s lust for vengeance.\u201d\n\nAcross the 78 sentences in the lecture that Dylan spends describing Moby-Dick, even a cursory inspection reveals that more than a dozen of them appear to closely resemble lines from the SparkNotes site. And most of the key shared phrases in these passages (such as \u201cAhab\u2019s lust for vengeance\u201d in the above lines) do not appear in the novel Moby-Dick at all.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nI reached out to Columbia,", + " Dylan\u2019s record label, to try to connect with Dylan or his management for comment, but as of publication time, I have not heard back.\n\nTheft in the name of art is an ancient tradition, and Dylan has been a magpie since the 1960s. He has also frequently been open about his borrowings. In 2001, he even released an album titled \u201cLove and Theft,\u201d the quotation marks seeming to imply that the album title was itself taken from Eric Lott\u2019s acclaimed history of racial appropriation, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.\n\nWhen he started out, Dylan absorbed classic tunes and obscure compositions alike from musicians he met,", + " recording versions that would become more famous than anything by those who taught him the songs or even the original songwriters. His first album included two original numbers and 11 covers.\n\nYet in less than three years, he would learn to warp the Americana he collected into stupefyingly original work. Throwing everything from electric guitar and organ to tuba into the musical mix, he began crafting lyrics that combined machine-gun metaphor with motley casts of characters. Less likely to copy whole verses by then, his drive-by invocations of everything from the biblical Abraham to Verlaine and Rimbaud became more hit-and-run than kidnapping.", + " The lyrics accumulated into chaotic, juggling poetry from a trickster willing to drop a ball sometimes. They worked even when they shouldn\u2019t have.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nIn the past several years, Dylan seems to have expanded his appropriation. His 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One is filled with unacknowledged attributions. In more recent years, he has returned to recording covers, as many legends do. In Dylan\u2019s case, his past three albums (five discs in all) have been composed of standards.\n\nBob Dylan Is a Great Singer The Nobel laureate thinks we should laud his singing as much as his \u201cpoetry.\u201d He\u2019s right.\n\nDylan remains so reliant on appropriation that tracing his sourcing has become a cottage industry.", + " For more than a decade, writer Scott Warmuth, an admiring Ahab in pursuit, has tracked Dylan lyrics and writings to an astonishing range of texts, from multiple sentences copied out of a New Orleans travel brochure to lifted phrases and imagery from former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins. Warmuth dove into Dylan\u2019s Nobel lecture last week, too, and found that the phrase \u201cfaith in a meaningful world\u201d from the CliffsNotes description of All Quiet on the Western Front also shows up in Dylan\u2019s talk (but not in the book).\n\nEven many of the paintings Dylan produces as an artist are reproductions of well-known images, such as a photo from Henri Cartier-Bresson.", + " For Dylan, recapitulation has replaced invention.\n\nIf the Moby-Dick portion of his Nobel lecture was indeed cribbed from SparkNotes, then what is the world to make of it? Perhaps the use of SparkNotes can be seen as a sendup of the prestige-prize economy. Either way, through Dylan\u2019s Nobel lecture, SparkNotes material may well join Duchamp\u2019s urinal and Andy Warhol\u2019s fake Brillo pad boxes as a functional commodity now made immortal.\n\nIt\u2019s worth mentioning that Dylan turned in his lecture just before the six-month deadline, ensuring that he would get paid. In the interest of settling any potential moral debt,", + " I would encourage him to throw some of his $923,000 prize to whoever wrote the original version of the online summary. ", + " Did Bob Dylan make up a Moby-Dick quote for his Nobel Lecture?\n\n\n\n\n\nLast fall, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. There were immediate complications. Dylan did not contact the Nobel committee to acknowledge the honor, nor did he travel to Stockholm to pick it up\u2014Patti Smith filled in for him at the December ceremony, performing \u201cA Hard Rain\u2019s A-Gonna Fall.\u201d\n\nFor the award to be official conferred, Dylan also had to deliver a Nobel lecture. And that's exactly what he did. Yesterday, an audio version of the lecture appeared, produced a little bit like his old Theme Time Radio Hour (same sly cadence,", + " and piano backing for some of it), along with a transcript at the official Nobel site.\n\n\n\n\n\nEarly in the lecture, Dylan remembers discovering music, specifically Buddy Holly, who activated his sense of songwriting and performance. Late in the lecture, he tweaks the Nobel committee for equating songs and literature (\u201cSongs are not literature,\u201d he says, \u201cThey\u2019re meant to be sung, not read\u201d). In between, he considers three books that were especially influential to his: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and Homer\u2019s Odyssey. Through this tripartite structure (which he also used in Chronicles,", + " Vol. 1, his memoir, and Triplicate, his most recent record), Dylan discusses the works with passion and sensitivity, with an eye to both the great sweep of history and the intricate clockwork of individual decision-making. His remarks on Moby-Dick are perhaps the best of the three. He frames it as a novel that illustrates \u201chow different men react in different ways to the same experience.\u201d He talks about Captain Boomer, who also lost an arm to the great white whale but does not share Ahab\u2019s need for revenge. He cannily plays with the way the novel plays with surface and depth.\n\n\n\n\n\nOne paragraph is especially interesting.", + " Dylan mentions the typhoon that hits the ship, which is interpreted variously by different men: Ahab sees it as a good sign, Starbuck as a bad one. \u201cAs soon as the storm ends,\u201d he says, \u201ca crewmember falls from the ship\u2019s mast and drowns, foreshadowing what is to come.\u201d (As Melville describes it, \u201che had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard\u2014a cry and a rushing\u2014and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea.\u201d)\n\n\n\n\n\nDylan then includes a quote from the novel,", + " an aphoristic utterance from a Quaker priest to the third mate, Flask: \u201cSome men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness.\"\n\n\n\n\n\nWhen I read this paragraph, I was intrigued, both because the insight is a compelling one and because I did not remember it from the novel. In fairness, it\u2019s been a little while since I read the whole thing straight through, and it\u2019s a long book at that, more than 200,000 words. I went and looked, mostly around Chapter 126, \u201cThe Life-Buoy,\u201d which contains the falling phantom in the air. I couldn\u2019t find it.", + " I looked at another edition, and couldn\u2019t find it there either. I went online, found an e-text, and searched on the relevant keywords, \u201cinjuries\u201d (which doesn\u2019t appear, at least not in plural form) and \u201cbitterness\u201d (which appears only once, in relation to the resentment experienced by men who are placed in charge of men who are superior to them \u201cin general pride of manhood\u201d). I searched in the Kindle edition, found nothing (though there were six occurrences of \u201csubterranean\u201d).\n\n\n\n\n\nIt appears, from all available evidence, that Dylan invented the quote and inserted it into his reading of Moby-Dick.", + " Was it on purpose? Was it the result of a faulty memory? Was it an egg, left in the lawn to be discovered in case it\u2019s Eastertime too? Answering these questions would be drilling into the American Sphinx, and beside the point anyway. As it stands, it\u2019s very much in the spirit of his entire enterprise: to take various American masterworks and absorb and transform them. The mystery of it makes a wonderful lecture even more wonderful. And it\u2019s worth ending with a quote from Stubb, the second mate, about the transformative power of singing and its centrality to life itself:\n\n\n\n", + " I'm trying to explain something that can't be explained,\" says Bob Dylan. \"Help me out.\" It's a midsummer day, an hour or so before evening, and we are seated at a table on a shaded patio, at the rear of a Santa Monica restaurant. Dylan is dressed warmer than the Southern California weather invited, in a buttoned black leather jacket over a thick white T-shirt. He also wears a ski cap \u2013 black around its lower half, white at its dome \u2013 pulled down over his ears and low on his forehead. A fringe of moptop-style reddish-blond hair, clearly a wig, curls slightly out from the front of the cap,", + " above his eyebrows. He has a glass of cold water in front of him. In the 15 years since his 1997 album, Time Out of Mind, Dylan \u2013 who is now 71 \u2013 has enjoyed the most sustained period of creativity of his lifetime. His new album, Tempest, tells tales of mortal ends, moral faithlessness and hard-earned (if arbitrary) grace, culminating in a swirling, 14-minute epic about the Titanic, which mixes fact and fantasy, followed by a loving, mystical song about his late friend and peer John Lennon. It's unlikely, though, that Dylan will ever eclipse the renown of his explosion of music and style in the 1960s,", + " which transformed him into a definitive mythic force of those times. But Dylan wasn't always comfortable with the effects of that reputation. In 1966, following a series of mind-blazing and controversial electric performances, the young hero removed himself from his own moment after he was laid low by a motorcycle accident, in Woodstock. The music that he returned with, in the late 1960s \u2013 John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline \u2013 sounded as if Dylan had become a different man. In truth, he now says, that's what he was \u2013 or rather, what he was becoming. What Bob Dylan believes really happened to him after he survived his radical pinnacle is much more transformational than he has fully revealed before.", + " This was an incident he'd alluded to briefly in his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, but in this interview the matter took on deeper implications.\n\nAt moments, I pushed in on some questions, and Dylan pushed back. We continued the conversation over the next many days, on the phone and by way of some written responses. Dylan didn't hedge or attempt to guard himself as we went along. Just the opposite: He opened up unflinchingly, with no apologies. This is Bob Dylan as you've never known him before.\n\nDo you see Tempest as an eventful album, like Time Out of Mind or Love and Theft?\n\nTempest was like all the rest of them:", + " The songs just fall together. It's not the album I wanted to make, though. I had another one in mind. I wanted to make something more religious. That takes a lot more concentration \u2013 to pull that off 10 times with the same thread \u2013 than it does with a record like I ended up with, where anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense.\n\nNonetheless, this seems among your bigger works, like Time Out of Mind, though more outward, less inward.\n\nWell... the Time Out of Mind record, that was the beginning of me making records for an audience that I was playing to night after night.", + " They were different people from different walks of life, different environments and ages. There was no reason for these new people to hear songs I'd written 30 years earlier for different purposes. If I was going to continue on, what I needed were new songs, and I had to write them, not necessarily to make records, but to play for the public.\n\nThe songs on Time Out of Mind weren't meant for somebody to listen to at home. Most of the songs work, whereas before, there might have been better records, but the songs don't work. So I'll stick with what I was doing after Time Out of Mind, rather than what I was doing in the Seventies and Eighties,", + " where the songs just don't work.\n\nThat album was plainly received as a turning point. It began a sustained winning streak. Everything since then is a body of work that can stand on its own.\n\nI hope it can. It should connect with people. The thing about it is that there is the old and the new, and you have to connect with them both. The old goes out and the new comes in, but there is no sharp borderline. The old is still happening while the new enters the scene, sometimes unnoticed. The new is overlapping at the same time the old is weakening its hold. It goes on and on like that.", + " Forever through the centuries. Sooner or later, before you know it, everything is new, and what happened to the old? It's like a magician trick, but you have to keep connecting with it.\n\nIt's just like when talking about the Sixties. If you were here around that time, you would know that the early Sixties, up to maybe '64, '65, was really the Fifties, the late Fifties. They were still the Fifties, still the same culture, in America anyway. And it was still going strong but fading away. By '66, the new Sixties probably started coming in somewhere along that time and had taken over by the end of the decade.", + " Then, by the time of Woodstock, there was no more Fifties. I really wasn't so much a part of what they call \"the Sixties.\"\n\nEven though you're so identified with it?\n\nEvidently I was, and maybe even still am. I was there during that time, but I really couldn't identify with what was happening. It didn't mean that much to me. I had my own family by then. You know, for instance, [Timothy] Leary and others like him, they wouldn't have lasted a second in earlier days. Of course, the Vietnam War didn't help any.\n\nDo you ever worry that people interpreted your work in misguided ways?", + " For example, some people still see \"Rainy Day Women\" as coded about getting high.\n\nIt doesn't surprise me that some people would see it that way. But these are people that aren't familiar with the Book of Acts.\n\nSometimes you seem to have a distaste for the 1960s.\n\nThe Fifties were a simpler time, at least for me and the situation I was in. I didn't really experience what a lot of the other people my age experienced, from the more mainstream towns and cities. Where I grew up was as far from the cultural center as you could get. It was way out of the beaten path.", + " You had the whole town to roam around in, though, and there didn't seem to be any sadness or fear or insecurity. It was just woods and sky and rivers and streams, winter and summer, spring, autumn. The changing of the seasons. The culture was mainly circuses and carnivals, preachers and barnstorming pilots, hillbilly shows and comedians, big bands and whatnot. Powerful radio shows and powerful radio music. This was before supermarkets and malls and multiplexes and Home Depot and all the rest. You know, it was a lot simpler. And when you grow up that way, it stays in you.", + " Then I left, which was, I guess, toward the end of the Fifties, but I saw and felt a lot of things in the Fifties, which generates me to this day. It's sort of who I am.\n\nI guess the Fifties would have ended in about '65. I don't really have a warm feeling for that period of time. Why would I? Those days were cruel.\n\nWhy is that? Was it just too much upheaval, being at the white-hot center of it?\n\nYeah, that and a whole lot of other stuff. Things were beginning to get corporatized. That wouldn't have mattered to me,", + " but it was happening to the music, too. And I truly loved the music. I saw the death of what I love and a certain way of life that I'd come to take for granted.\n\nYet people thought your music spoke to and reflected the 1960s. Do you feel that's also the case with your music since 1997?\n\nSure, my music is always speaking to times that are recent. But let's not forget human nature isn't bound to any specific time in history. And it always starts with that. My songs are personal music; they're not communal. I wouldn't want people singing along with me.", + " It would sound funny. I'm not playing campfire meetings. I don't remember anyone singing along with Elvis, or Carl Perkins, or Little Richard. The thing you have to do is make people feel their own emotions. A performer, if he's doing what he's supposed to do, doesn't feel any emotion at all. It's a certain kind of alchemy that a performer has.\n\nDon't you think you're a particularly American voice \u2013 for how your songs reference our history, or have commented on it?\n\nThey're historical. But they're also biographical and geographical. They represent a particular state of mind. A particular territory.\n\nWhat others think about me,", + " or feel about me, that's so irrelevant. Any more than it is for me, when I go see a movie, say, Wuthering Heights or something, and have to wonder what's Laurence Olivier really like. When I see an actor on the stage or something, I don't think about what they're like. I'm there because I want to forget about myself, forget about what I care or do not care about. Entertaining is a type of sport.\n\n[Dylan suddenly seems excited.] Let me show you something. I want to show you something. You might be interested in this. You might take this someplace.", + " You might want to rephrase your questions, or think of new ones [laughs]. Let me show you this. [Gets up and walks to another table.]\n\nYou want me to come with you?\n\nNo, no, no, I got it right here. I thought this might interest you. [Brings a weathered paperback to the table!] See this book? Ever heard of this guy? [Shows me Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, by Sonny Barger.]\n\nYeah, sure.\n\nHe's a Hell's Angel.\n\nHe was \"the\" Hell's Angel.\n\nLook who wrote this book.", + " [Points at coauthors' names, Keith Zimmerman and Kent Zimmerman.] Do those names ring a bell? Do they look familiar? Do they? You wonder, \"What's that got to do with me?\" But they do look familiar, don't they? And there's two of them there. Aren't there two? One's not enough? Right? [Dylan's now seated, smiling.]\n\nI'm going to refer to this place here. [Opens the book to a dog-eared page.] Read it out loud here. Just read it out loud into your tape recorder.\n\n\"One of the early presidents of the Berdoo Hell's Angels was Bobby Zimmerman.", + " On our way home from the 1964 Bass Lake Run, Bobby was riding in his customary spot \u2013 front left \u2013 when his muffler fell off his bike. Thinking he could go back and retrieve it, Bobby whipped a quick U-turn from the front of the pack. At that same moment, a Richmond Hell's Angel named Jack Egan was hauling ass from the back of the pack toward the front. Egan was on the wrong side of the road, passing a long line of speeding bikes, just as Bobby whipped his U-turn. Jack broadsided poor Bobby and instantly killed him. We dragged Bobby's lifeless body to the side of the road.", + " There was nothing we could do but to send somebody on to town for help.\" Poor Bobby.\n\nYeah, poor Bobby. You know what this is called? It's called transfiguration. Have you ever heard of it?\n\nYes.\n\nWell, you're looking at somebody.\n\nThat... has been transfigured?\n\nYeah, absolutely. I'm not like you, am I? I'm not like him, either. I'm not like too many others. I'm only like another person who's been transfigured. How many people like that or like me do you know?\n\nBy transfiguration, you mean it in the sense of being transformed?", + " Or do you mean transmigration, when a soul passes into a different body?\n\nTransmigration is not what we are talking about. This is something else. I had a motorcycle accident in 1966.1 already explained to you about new and old. Right? Now, you can put this together any way you want. You can work on it any way you want. Transfiguration: You can go and learn about it from the Catholic Church, you can learn about it in some old mystical books, but it's a real concept. It's happened throughout the ages. Nobody knows who it's happened to, or why. But you get real proof of it here and there.", + " It's not like something you can dream up and think. It's not like conjuring up a reality or like reincarnation \u2013 or like when you might think you're somebody from the past but have no proof. It's not anything to do with the past or the future.\n\nSo when you ask some of your questions, you're asking them to a person who's long dead. You're asking them to a person that doesn't exist. But people make that mistake about me all the time. I've lived through a lot. Have you ever heard of a book called No Man Knows My History? It's about Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet.", + " The title could refer to me.\n\nTransfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it. That's how I can still do what I do and write the songs I sing and just keep on moving.\n\nWhen you say I'm talking to a person that's dead, do you mean the motorcyclist Bobby Zimmerman, or do you mean Bob Dylan?\n\nBob Dylan's here! You're talking to him.\n\nThen your transfiguration is...\n\nIt is whatever it is. I couldn't go back and find Bobby in a million years. Neither could you or anybody else on the face of the Earth.", + " He's gone. If I could, I would go back. I'd like to go back. At this point in time, I would love to go back and find him, put out my hand. And tell him he's got a friend. But I can't. He's gone. He doesn't exist.\n\nOK, so when you speak of transfiguration...\n\nI only know what I told you. You'll have to go and do the work yourself to find out what it's about.\n\nI'm trying to determine whom you've been transfigured from, or as.\n\nI just showed you. Go read the book.\n\nThat's who you have in mind?", + " What could the connection to that Bobby Zimmerman be other than name?\n\nI don't have it in mind. I didn't write that book. I didn't make it up. I didn't dream that. I'm not telling you I had a dream last night. Remember the song \"Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream\"? I didn't write that, either.\n\nI'm showing you a book that's been written and published. I mean, look at all the connecting things: motorcycles, Bobby Zimmerman, Keith and Kent Zimmerman, 1964, 1966. And there's more to it than even that. If you went to find this guy's family,", + " you'd find a whole bunch more that connected. I'm just explaining it to you. Go to the grave site.\n\nWhen did you come across this book?\n\nUh, you know. When did I come across that book? Somebody put it in my hand years ago. I'd met Sonny Barger in the Sixties, but didn't know him very well. He was friends with Jerry Garcia. Maybe I saw it on a bookshelf out there and the bookseller slipped it into my hand. But I began to read it, and I thought I was reading about Sonny, but then I got to that part and realized it wasn't about him at all.", + " I didn't even really check the authors' names until later and that blew my mind, too. About a year later, I went to a library in Rome and I found a book about transfiguration, because it's nothing you really hear about every day, and it's in that mystical realm, and I found out only enough to know that, uh, OK, I'm not an authority on it, but it kind of sets you straight on what sets you apart.\n\nI'd always been different than other people, but this book told me why. Like certain people are set apart. You know, it's just like the phrase,", + " \"peers\" \u2013 I mean, I see this, \"Well, your peers this, your peers that.\" And I've always wondered, who are my peers? When I received the Medal of Freedom I started thinking more about it. Like, who are they? But then it became clear. My peers are Aretha Franklin, Duke Ellington, B.B. King, John Glenn, Madeleine Albright, Pat Summitt, Toni Morrison, Jasper Johns, Martha Graham, Sidney Poitier. People like that, and they are set apart, too. And I'm proud to be counted among them.\n\nYou don't write the kind of songs I write just being a conventional type of songwriter.", + " And I don't think anybody will write them like this again, any more than anybody will ever write a Hank Williams or Irving Berlin song. That's pretty much for sure. I just think I've taken things to a new level because I've had to. Because I've been forced to. You have to constantly reshape things because everything keeps expanding on you. Life has a way of spreading out.\n\nWhy do you have that need to constantly reshape things?\n\nBecause that's the nature of existence. Nothing stays where it is for very long. Trees grow tall, leaves fall, rivers dry up and flowers die. New people are born every day.", + " Life doesn't stop.\n\nIs that part of what touring is about for you?\n\nTouring is about anything you want it to be about. Is there something strange about touring? About playing live shows? If there is, tell me what it is. Willie [Nelson]'s been playing them for years, and nobody ever asks him why he still tours. Look, you travel to different places and you encounter things that you might not encounter every day if you stayed home. And you get to play music for the people \u2013 all of the people, every nationality and in every country. Ask any performer or entertainer that does this, they'll all tell you the same thing.", + " That they like doing it and that it means a lot to people. It's just like any other line of work, only different.\n\nYet for a long time, from, 1966 to 1974, you left touring behind. Did you always expect to return to live performance, as part of doing what it is that you do?\n\nI know I left it behind, but then I picked it up again. Things change. Also, there are performers that don't go on the road. They might go to Vegas and just stay there. You could do it that way \u2013 who knows, I may do that, too, someday.", + " There are a lot of worse ways to end up.\n\nIt's always been this way for everybody who's ever done it, going back to those ancient days. The carnival came to town, the carnival left and you ran off with them. It's just what you did. You don't travel to the end of the line until someone gives you a gold watch and a pat on the back. That's not the way the game works. People really don't retire. They fade away. They run out of steam. People aren't interested in them anymore.\n\nWhat do you think of Bruce Springsteen? U2?\n\nI love Bruce like a brother.", + " He's a powerful performer \u2013 unlike anybody. I care about him deeply. U2's a force to be reckoned with. Bono's energy has far-reaching effects, and in some ways, he's his own tempest.\n\nMiles Davis had this idea that music was best heard in the moments in which it was performed \u2013 that that's where music is truly alive. Is your view similar?\n\nYeah, it's exactly the same as Miles' is. We used to talk about that. Songs don't come alive in a recording studio. You try your best, but there's always something missing. What's missing is a live audience.", + " Sinatra used to make records like that \u2013 used to bring people into the studio as an audience. It helped him get into the songs better.\n\nSo live performance is a purpose you find fulfilling?\n\nIf you're not fulfilled in other ways, performing can never make you happy. Performing is something you have to learn how to do. You do it, you get better at it and you keep going. And if you don't get better at it, you have to give it up. Is it a fulfilling way of life? Well, what kind of way of life is fulfilling? No kind of life is fulfilling if your soul hasn't been redeemed.\n\nYou've described what you do not as a career but as a calling.\n\nEverybody has a calling,", + " don't they? Some have a high calling, some have a low calling. Everybody is called but few are chosen. There's a lot of distraction for people, so you might not never find the real you. A lot of people don't.\n\nHow would you describe your calling?\n\nMine? Not any different than anybody else's. Some people are called to be a good sailor. Some people have a calling to be a good tiller of the land. Some people are called to be a good friend. You have to be the best at whatever you are called at. Whatever you do. You ought to be the best at it \u2013 highly skilled.", + " It's about confidence, not arrogance. You have to know that you're the best whether anybody else tells you that or not. And that you'll be around, in one way or another, longer than anybody else. Somewhere inside of you, you have to believe that.\n\nSome of us have seen your calling as somebody who has done his best to pay witness to the world, and the history that made that world.\n\nHistory's a funny thing, isn't it? History can be changed. The past can be changed and distorted and used for propaganda purposes. Things we've been told happened might not have happened at all. And things that we were told that didn't happen actually might have happened.", + " Newspapers do it all the time; history books do it all the time. Everybody changes the past in their own way. It's habitual, you know? We always see things the way they really weren't, or we see them the way we want to see them. We can't change the present or the future. We can only change the past, and we do it all the time.\n\nThere's that old wisdom \"History is written by the victors.\"\n\nAbsolutely. And then there's Henry Ford. He didn't have much use for history at all.\n\nBut you have a use for it. In Chronicles, you wrote about your interest in Civil War history.", + " You said that the spirit of division in that time made a template for what you've written about in your music. You wrote about reading the accounts from that time. Reading, say, Grant's remembrances is different than reading Shelby Foote's history of the Civil War.\n\nThe reports are hardly the same. Shelby Foote is looking down from a high mountain, and Grant is actually down there in it. Shelby Foote wasn't there. Neither were any of those guys who fight Civil War re-enactments. Grant was there, but he was off leading his army. He only wrote about it all once it was over. If you want to know what it was about,", + " read the daily newspapers from that time from both the North and South. You'll see things that you won't believe. There is just too much to go into here, but it's nothing like what you read in the history books. It's way more deadly and hateful.\n\nThere doesn't seem to be anything heroic or honorable about it at all. It was suicidal. Four years of looting and plunder and murder done the American way. It's amazing what you see in those newspaper articles. Places like the Pittsburgh Gazette, where they were warning workers that if the Southern states have their way, they are going to overthrow our factories and use slave labor in place of our workers and put an end to our way of life.", + " There's all kinds of stuff like that, and that's even before the first shot was fired.\n\nBut there were also claims and rumors from the South about the North...\n\nThere's a lot of that, too, about states' rights and loyalty to our state. But that didn't make any sense. The Southern states already had rights. Sometimes more than the Northern states. The North just wanted them to stop slavery, not even put an end to it \u2013 just stop exporting it. They weren't trying to take the slaves away. They just wanted to keep slavery from spreading. That's the only right that was being contested. Slavery didn't provide a working wage for people.", + " If that economic system was allowed to spread, then people in the North were going to take up arms. There was a lot of fear about slavery spreading.\n\nDo you see any parallels between the 1860s and present-day America?\n\nMmm, I don't know how to put it. It's like... the United States burned and destroyed itself for the sake of slavery. The USA wouldn't give it up. It had to be grinded out. The whole system had to be ripped out with force. A lot of killing. What, like, 500,000 people? A lot of destruction to end slavery. And that's what it really was all about.\n\nThis country is just too fucked up about color.", + " It's a distraction. People at each other's throats just because they are of a different color. It's the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back \u2013 or any neighborhood back. Or any anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery \u2013 that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.\n\nIt's doubtful that America's ever going to get rid of that stigmatization.", + " It's a country founded on the backs of slaves. You know what I mean? Because it goes way back. It's the root cause. If slavery had been given up in a more peaceful way, America would be far ahead today. Whoever invented the idea \"lost cause....\" There's nothing heroic about any lost cause. No such thing, though there are people who still believe it.\n\nDid you hope or imagine that the election of President Obama would signal a shift, or that it was in fact a sea change?\n\nI don't have any opinion on that. You have to change your heart if you want to change.\n\nSince his election,", + " there's been a great reaction by some against him They did the same to Bush, didn't they? They did the same thing to Clinton, too, and Jimmy Carter before that. Look what they did to Kennedy. Anybody who's going to take that job is going to be in for a rough time.\n\nDon't you think some of the reaction has stemmed from that kind of racial resonance you were talking about?\n\nI don't know. I don't know, but I don't think that's the same thing. I have no idea what they are saying for or against him. I really don't. I don't know how deep it goes or how shallow it is.\n\nYou are aware that he's been branded as un-American or a socialist \u2014\n\nYou can't pay any attention to that kind of stuff,", + " as if you've never heard those kind of words before. Eisenhower was accused of being un-American. And wasn't Nixon a socialist? Look what he did in China. They'll say bad things about the next guy, too.\n\nSo you don't think some of the reaction against Obama has been in reaction to the event that a black man has become president of the United States?\n\nDo you want me to repeat what I just said, word for word? What are you talking about? People loved the guy when he was elected. So what are we talking about? People changing their minds? Well, who are these people that changed their minds?", + " Talk to them. What are they changing their minds for? What'd they vote for him for? They should've voted for somebody else if they didn't think they were going to like him.\n\nThe point I'm making is that perhaps lingering American resentments about race are resonant in the opposition to President Obama, which has not been a quiet opposition.\n\nYou mean in the press? I don't know anybody personally that's saying this stuff that you're just saying. The press says all kinds of stuff. I don't know what they would be saying. Or why they would be saying it. You can't believe what you read in the press anyway.\n\nDo you vote?\n\nUh.", + "..\n\nShould we do that? Should we vote?\n\nYeah, why not vote? I respect the voting process. Everybody ought to have the right to vote. We live in a democracy. What do you want me to say? Voting is a good thing.\n\nI was curious if you vote.\n\n[Smiling] Huh?\n\nWhat's your estimation of President Obama been when you've met him?\n\nWhat do I think of him? I like him. But you're asking the wrong person. You know who you should be asking that to? You should be asking his wife what she thinks of him. She's the only one that matters.\n\nLook,", + " I only met him a few times. I mean, what do you want me to say? He loves music. He's personable. He dresses good. What the fuck do you want me to say?\n\nYou live in these times, you have reactions to various national ups and downs. Are you, for example, disappointed by the resistance the president has met with? Would you like to see him re-elected?\n\nI've lived through a lot of presidents! And you have too! Some are re-elected and some aren't. Being re-elected isn't the mark of a great president. Sometimes the guy you get rid of is the guy you wish you had back.\n\nI've brought up the subject partly because of something you said the night he was elected:", + " \"It looks like things are gonna change now.\" Do you feel that the change you anticipated has been borne out?\n\nYou want to repeat that again? I have no idea what I said.\n\nIt was Election Night 2008. Onstage at the University of Minnesota, introducing your band's members, you indicated your bassist and said, \"Tony Gamier, wearing the Obama button. Tony likes to think it's a brand-new time right now. An age of light. Me, I was born in 1941 \u2013 that's the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. Well, I been living in a world of darkness ever since. But it looks like things are gonna change now.\"\n\nI don't know what I said or didn't say.", + " As far as Tony goes, yeah, maybe he was wearing an Obama button and maybe I said some stuff because right there in the moment it all made sense. Maybe I said things looked like they could change. And maybe they did change. I don't think I could have predicted how they would change, but whatever was said, it was said for people in that hall for that night. You know what I'm saying? It wasn't said to be played on a record forever. Or did I go down to the middle of town and give a speech?\n\nIt was onstage.\n\nIt was on the streets?\n\nStage. Stage.\n\nOK. It was on the stage.", + " I don't know what I could have meant by that. You say things sometimes, you don't know what the hell you mean. But you're sincere when you say it. I would hope that things have changed. That's all I can say, for whatever it is that I said. I'm not going to deny what I said, but I would have hoped that things would've changed. I certainly hope they have.\n\nI get the impression when we talk that you're reluctant to say much about the president or how he's been criticized.\n\nWell, you know, I told you what I could.\n\nIn that case, let's return to Tempest.", + " Can you talk a little about your songwriting method these days?\n\nI can write a song in a crowded room. Inspiration can hit you anywhere. It's magical. It's really beyond me.\n\nWhat about your role as a producer? How would you describe the sound that you were trying to achieve here?\n\nThe sound goes with the song. But that's funny. Somebody was telling me that Justin Bieber couldn't sing any of these songs. I said I couldn't sing any of his songs either. And that person said, \"Baby, I'm so grateful for that.\"\n\nThere's a fair amount of mortality, certainly in the last three songs \u2013 \"Tin Angel,\" \"Tempest\"", + " and \"Roll On John.\" People come to hard endings.\n\nThe people in \"Frankie and Johnny,\" \"Stagger Lee\" and \"El Paso\" have come to hard endings, too, and definitely it's that way in one of my favorite songs, \"Delia.\" I can name you a hundred songs where everything ends in tragedy. It's called tradition, and that's what I deal in. Traditional, with a capital T. Maybe people have to have a simplistic way of identifying something, if they can't grasp it properly \u2013 use some term that they think they can understand, like mortality. Oh, like, \"These songs must be about mortality.", + " I mean, Dylan, isn't he an old guy? He must be thinking about that.\" You know what I say to that horseshit? I say these idiots don't know what they're talking about. Go find somebody else to pick on.\n\nThere's plenty of death songs. You may well know, in folk music every other song deals with death. Everybody sings them. Death is a part of life. The sooner you know that, the better off you'll be. That's the only way to look at it. As far as agreeing with what the common consensus is of what my songs mean or don't mean, it's just foolish.", + " I can't really verify or not verify what other people say my songs are about.\n\nIt was interesting that in the aftermath of the \"Titanic\" sinking there were many folk and blues and country songs on the subject. Why do you think that was?\n\nFolk musicians, blues musicians did write a lot of songs about the Titanic. That's what I feel that I'm best at, being a folk musician or a blues musician, so in my mind it's there to be done. If you're a folk singer, blues singer, rock & roll singer, whatever, in that realm, you oughta write a song about the Titanic,", + " because that's the bar you have to pass.\n\nToday we have so much media that before something happens, you see it. You know about it or you think you do. No one can tell you a thing. You don't need a song about the fire that happened in Chinatown last night because it was all over the news. In songs, you have to tell people about something they didn't see and weren't there for, and you have to do it as if you were. Nobody can contradict you on a song about the Titanic any more than they can contradict you on a song about Billy the Kid.\n\nThose folk musicians, though,", + " were people who never would've been let aboard the \"Titanic,\" or would've been in steerage.\n\nNo, but all the old country singers, country blues, hillbilly singers, rock & roll singers, what they all had in common was a powerful imagination. And I have that, too. It's not that unusual for me to write a song about the Titanic tragedy any more than it was for Leadbelly. It might be unusual to write such a long ballad about it, but not necessarily about the disaster itself.\n\nIn some \"Titanic\" songs, there were those who saw the event as a judgment on modern times,", + " on mankind for assuming that it could be unsinkable. Is there some of that in your song?\n\nNo, no, I try to stay away from all that stuff. I don't imply any of it. I'm not interested in it. I'm just interested in showing you what happened, on the level that it happened on. That's all. The meaning of it is beyond me.\n\nYou also have a song about John Lennon, \"Roll On John,\" on this album. What moved you to record this now?\n\nI can't remember \u2013 I just felt like doing it, and now would be as good a time as any.", + " I wasn't even sure that song fit on this record. I just took a chance and stuck it on there. I think I might've finished it to include it. It's not like it was just written yesterday. I started practicing it late last year on some stages.\n\nLennon said that he was inspired by you, but also felt competitive with you. You and Lennon were cultural lions in the 1960s and 1970s. Did that ever make for unease or for a sense of competition in each other's company?\n\nI think we covered peers a while back, did we not? John came from the northern regions of Britain.", + " The hinterlands. Just like I did in America, so we had some kind of environmental things in common. Both places were pretty isolated. Though mine was more landlocked than his. But everything is stacked against you when you come from that. You have to have the talent to overcome everything. That was something I had in common with him. We were all about the same age and heard the same exact things growing up. Our paths crossed at a certain time, and we both had faced a lot of adversity. We even had that in common. I wish that he was still here because we could talk about a lot of things now.\n\nYou went to visit Liverpool,", + " where Lennon grew up. How long ago was that?\n\nA couple years ago? Strawberry Field is right in back of his house. Didn't know that. Evidently, he grew up with his aunt. He'd be out there in the Strawberry Field, a park behind his house that was fenced off. Being in Britain, there's all this hanging history, chopping off heads. I mean, you grow up with that, if you're a Brit. I didn't quite understand the line about getting hung \u2013 \"Nothing to get hung about\" \u2013 well, time had moved on, it was like \"hung up,\" nothing to be hung up about.", + " But he was speaking literally: \"What are you doing out there, John?\" \"Don't worry, Mum, nothing they're going to hang me about, nothing to get hung about.\" I found that kind of interesting.\n\nIn \"Roll On John,\" there's a sense that Lennon was trapped in America, far away from home. Did you feel empathy for those experiences?\n\nHow could you not? There's so much you can say about any person's life. It's endless, really. I just picked out stuff that I thought that I was close enough to, to understand.\n\nI hear various sources and tributes in Tempest and your other recent music,", + " including the sounds of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, the spirit of Charley Patton. Do you think of yourself as a bluesman?\n\nBluesmen lead lives of great hardship. And I've got too much rock & roll in my blood to call myself a blues singer. Country blues, folk music and rock & roll make up the kind of music that I play.\n\nI also hear echoes of Bing Crosby, going all the may back to Nashville Skyline. Does he bear influence for you?\n\nA lot of people would like to sing like Bing Crosby, but very few could match his phrasing or depth of tone. He's influenced every real singer whether they know it or not.", + " I used to hear Bing Crosby as a kid and not really pay attention to him. But he got inside me nevertheless. Him and Nat King Cole were my father's favorite singers, and those records played in our house.\n\nYou said that you originally wanted to make a more religious album this time \u2013 can you tell me more about that?\n\nThe songs on Tempest were worked out in rehearsals on stages during sound-checks before live shows. The religious songs maybe I felt were too similar to each other to release as an album. Someplace along the line, I had to go with one or the other, and Tempest is what I went with.", + " I'm still not sure it was the right decision.\n\nWhen you say religious songs...\n\nNewly written songs, but ones that are traditionally motivated.\n\nMore like \"Slow Train Coming\"?\n\nNo. No. Not at all. They're more like \"Just a Closer Walk With Thee.\"\n\nFrom the 1980s on, there's been a lot of dark territory in your songs. Has any of this been a reflection of an ongoing religious struggle for you?\n\nNah, I don't have any of those religious struggles. I just showed you that book. Transfiguration eliminates all that stuff. You don't have those kinds of struggles.", + " You never did, and you never will. No. You have to amplify your faith. Those are struggles for other people. Other people that you don't know and never will. Everybody's facing some kind of struggle for sure.\n\nHas your sense of your faith changed?\n\nCertainly it has, o ye of little faith. Who's to say that I even have any faith or what kind? I see God's hand in everything. Every person, place and thing, every situation. I mean, we can have faith in just about anything. Can't we? You might have faith in that bloody mary you're drinking. It might quiet your nerves.\n\n[", + "Laughs] It's water \u2013 not a bloody mary.\n\nWell [laughs], it looks like a bloody mary to me. I'm gonna say that it is. I'll rewrite your history for you.\n\nYou've been willing to talk about these matters before.\n\nYeah, but that was before and this is now. I have enough faith for me to be faithful to myself. Faith is good \u2013 it could move mountains. Not that bloody-mary faith that you have, but the kind of faith that people like me have. You can tell whether other people have faith or no faith by the way they behave, by the shit that comes out of their mouths.", + " A little faith can go a long ways. It's the right thing for people to have. When we have little else, that will do. But it takes a while to acquire it. You just got to keep looking.\n\nSometimes people have acquired it, then feel like they lose faith.\n\nYeah, absolutely. You get hit hard in life. People get hit with everything. We all do. We all get hit upside the head. And some of us get hit harder than others. Some of us get no chance at all. Some of us get more than one chance. No two are alike. You have to push on. Make the best of it.", + " Just like the Woody Guthrie song \"Hard Travelin'.\"\n\nClearly, the language of the Bible still provides imagery in your songs.\n\nOf course, what else could there be? I believe in the Book of Revelation. I believe in disclosure, you know? There's truth in all books. In some kind of way. Confucius, Sun Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, the Koran, the Torah, the New Testament, the Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and many thousands more. You can't go through life without reading some kind of book.\n\n\"Time Out of Mind\"", + " started with this image of somebody walking through streets that are dead.\n\nA lot of walking in that record, right? I've heard that.\n\nWhen that narrator talks about walking this or that road, do you have pictures of those roads in your mind?\n\nYeah, but not in a specific kind of way. You can feel it, without being able to see it. It's an old-time thing: the walking blues.\n\nThe walking could be what somebody witnesses. It could be the road to death; it could be the road to illumination.\n\nSure, all those roads. How many roads must a man walk down? Not run down, drive down or crawl down?", + " I've been raised on that. The walking blues. \"Walking to New Orleans,\" \"Cadillac Walk,\" \"Hand Me Down My Walkin' Cane.\" It's the only way I know. It comes natural.\n\nThe person who's walking in these songs, is he walking alone?\n\nSometimes, but then again, sometimes not. Sometimes you got to get into your own space for a while. It never really dawns on me, though, whether I'm walking alone or not. Seems like I'm always walking with somebody.\n\nIn \"Sugar Baby,\" on \"Love and Theft,\" you sang, \"Every moment of existence seems like some dirty trick.\" Did these words convey a significant change from how you may have felt before?\n\nNo,", + " there's been no change whatsoever. I used to think most people felt that way about existence, and I still think that.\n\nI want to know more about the matter of transfiguration. Is there a specific moment in which you became aware of it?\n\nYeah, I can refer you to the book [the Sonny Barger biography]. It happens gradually. I'd say that that accident, however, if you want to call it that, I think that was about '64? [Referring to the death of Bobby Zimmerman, which, in fact, took place in 1961.] As I said earlier, I had a motorcycle accident myself,", + " in '66, so we're talking maybe about two years \u2013 a gradual kind of slipping away, and, uh, some kind of something else appearing out of nowhere.\n\nAnd it makes perfect sense, because in the truth world, nothing does begin or end. You know, it's like things begin while something else is ending. There's never any sharp borderline or dividing line. We've talked about this. You know how we have dividing lines between countries. We have boundaries. Well, boundaries in the cosmological world don't really exist, any more than they do between night and day.\n\nAfter your motorcycle accident, you were in some ways a different person?\n\nI'm trying to explain something that can't be explained.", + " Help me out. Read the pages of the book. Some people never really develop into who they're supposed to be. They get cut off. They go off another way. It happens a lot. We all see people that that's happened to. We see them on the street. It's like they have a sign hanging on them.\n\nDid you have an inkling of this before you read the Barger book?\n\nI didn't know who I was before I read the Barger book.\n\nHere's one way of looking at this: In the 1960s, people saw you as a revolutionary fireball up until the motorcycle accident.", + " Afterward, with the music made in Woodstock with the Band, and with \"John Wesley Harding\" and \"Nashville Skyline,\" some were bewildered by your transformation. You came back from that hiatus looking different, sounding different, in voice, music and words.\n\nWhy is it that when people talk about me they have to go crazy? What the fuck is the matter with them? Sure, I had a motorcycle accident. Sure, I played with the Band. Yeah, I made a record called John Wesley Harding. And sure, I sounded different. So fucking what? They want to know what can't be known. They are searching \u2013 they are seekers.", + " Like in the Pete Townshend song where he's trying to find his way to 50 million fables. For what? Why are they doing this? They don't really know. It's sad. It really is. May the Lord have mercy on them. They are lost souls. They really don't know. It's sad \u2013 it really is. It's sad for me, and it's sad for them.\n\nWhy do you think that is the case?\n\nI don't have a clue. If you ever find out, come and tell me.\n\nAre you saying that you can't really be known?\n\nNobody knows nothing. Who knows who's been transfigured and who has not?", + " Who knows? Maybe Aristotle? Maybe he was transfigured? I can't say. Maybe Julius Caesar was transfigured. I have no idea. Maybe Shakespeare. Maybe Dante. Maybe Napoleon. Maybe Churchill. You just never know, because it doesn't figure into the history books. That's all I'm saying.\n\nSometimes we can deepen ourselves or give aid to other people by trying to know them.\n\nIf we're responsible to ourselves, then we can be responsible for other people, too. But we have to know ourselves first. People listen to my songs and they must think I'm a certain type of way, and maybe I am.", + " But there's more to it than that. I think they can listen to my songs and figure out who they are, too.\n\nWhen you say that those who conjecture about you don't really know what they're talking about, does that mean that you feel misunderstood?\n\nIt doesn't mean that at all! [Laughs] I mean, what's there, like, to understand? I mean \u2013 no, no. Just the opposite. Who's supposed to understand? My in-laws? Am I supposed to be some misunderstood artist living in an attic? You tell me. What's there to understand? Please, can we stop now?\n\nWith this sort of question?", + " Just one more: In the past 10 years, you've written an autobiography; there was a fictional film biography, I'm Not There; and there was Martin Scorsese's documentary, No Direction Home \u2013 three big attempts to come to terms with your history, the biggest being your book, Chronicles. Wasn't that, in a way, an attempt to explain certain things about your life?\n\nIf you read Chronicles, you know it doesn't attempt to be any more than what it is. You're not going to find the meaning of life in it. Mine or anyone else's. And if you've seen No Direction Home,", + " you might have noticed that it ended in '66. And I'm Not There \u2013 I don't know anything about that movie. All I know is they licensed about 30 of my songs for it.\n\nDid you like I'm Not There?\n\nYeah, I thought it was all right. Do you think that the director was worried that people would understand it or not? I don't think he cared one bit. I just think he wanted to make a good movie. I thought it looked good, and those actors were incredible.\n\nI think the movie grew from a long-stated perception of you as somebody with a lot of phases and identities.\n\nI don't see myself that way.", + " But what does it matter? It's only a movie.\n\nIn Chronicles, you wrote about declining to write songs for a 1971 play by Archibald MacLeish because you thought the play, Scratch, \"spelled death for society with humanity lying facedown in its own blood.\" Wouldn't that same vision apply to the 2003 film you co-wrote, Masked and Anonymous?\n\nUh, yeah. You could look at it that way.\n\nWere you happy with Masked and Anonymous?\n\nNo. Whatever vision I had for that movie, that never could've carried to the screen. When you want to make a film and you're using outside money,", + " there's just too many people you have to listen to.\n\nI love that film.\n\nI'm glad some people like it. I know people who do. There's some performances in there. John Goodman. Isn't he great? And Jessica Lange. Everybody was really good in it. Everybody except me. Ha-ha! I had no business being in it, to tell you the truth. What's her name, Cate Blanchett [among the actors who played Dylan in I'm Not There], should've played the character that I played. It probably would've been a hit movie.\n\nWill there be a Chronicles 2?\n\nOh,", + " let's hope so. I'm always working on parts of it. But the last Chronicles I did all by myself. I'm not even really so sure I had a proper editor for that. I don't want really to say too much about that. But it's a lot of work. I don't mind writing it, but it's the rereading it and the time it takes to reread it \u2013 that for me is difficult.\n\nYou've said before there are certain things you just don't remember. I came away from Chronicles thinking that you remember almost everything. Why didn't you ever talk before about that life of the mind you've gone through?\n\nIt's not like I have a great memory.", + " I remember what I want to remember. And what I want to forget, I forget. When you're writing like that, it's just kind of like one thing leads to another and another, you just keep opening doors and sliding in and finding a way out. It's like links in a chain \u2013 you make connections as you go along.\n\nIn recent years, you've received numerous high honors, including one recently at the White House, where you were presented with a Medal of Freedom. You weren't always comfortable with this sort of event. What makes you more accepting now of these laurels?\n\nI turn down far more of those medals and honors than I pick up.", + " They come in from all over the place \u2013 all parts of the world. Most of them will get turned down because I can't physically be there to get them all. But every once in a while, there's something that is important, an incredibly high honor that I would never have dreamed to be receiving, like the Medal of Freedom. There's no way I would turn that down.\n\nDo you accept the awards in part for your family, for your posterity?\n\nI accept them for myself and myself only. And I don't think about it any other way, and I don't waste a lot of time over-thinking it. It's an incredible honor.\n\nReceiving the Medal of Freedom had to be a bit of a thrill.\n\nOh,", + " of course it's a thrill! I mean, who wouldn't want to get a letter from the White House? And the kind of people they were putting me in the category with was just amazing. People like John Glenn and Madeleine Albright, Toni Morrison and Pat Summitt, John Doer, William Foege and some others, too. These people who have done incredible things and have outstanding achievements. Pat Summitt alone has won more basketball games with her teams than any NCAA coach. John Glenn, we all know what he did. And Toni Morrison is as good as it gets. I loved spending time with them. What's the alternative?", + " Hanging around with hedge-fund hucksters or Hollywood gigolos? You know what I mean?\n\nThe Medal of Freedom, it's an encircled star on a ribbon that hangs around your neck?\n\nYeah, I guess so. You should've told me you wanted to see it. I'd've brought it by and you could look at it, if you wanted.\n\nMaybe next time.\n\nYeah. Sure, next time.\n\nIn July 2009, the police picked you up in Long Branch, New Jersey, while you were on a walk, supposedly looking for Bruce Springsteen's old home. What happened on that occasion?\n\nWe were staying at a hotel.", + " The bus was pulling out; I just decided I'd go for a walk. It was raining, and I guess that in that neck of the woods, they're not used to seeing people walking in the rain. I was the only one on the street. Somebody saw me out of a window and reported me. Next thing I know, a cop car pulled up and asked me for ID. Well, I didn't have any [laughs]. I wear so many changes of clothes all the time. The woman who was the police officer, she didn't know me. Because most people don't. They've heard the name. I might be in a place,", + " nobody knows me. Right? All of a sudden, somebody will walk in who knows me, and I'll have to tell everybody in the place, and then... it gets uncomfortable.\n\nThat's the side of people I see. People like to betray people. There's something in people that they just want to betray somebody. \"That's him over there.\" They want to deliver you up. Like they delivered Jesus. They want to be the one to do it. There's something in people that's just like that. I've experienced that. A lot.\n\nBefore we end the conversation, I want to ask about the controversy over your quotations in your songs from the works of other writers,", + " such as Japanese author Junichi Saga's \"Confessions of a Yakuza,\" and the Civil War poetry of Henry Timrod. Some critics say that you didn 't cite your sources clearly. Yet in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. What's your response to those kinds of charges?\n\nOh, yeah, in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It's true for everybody, but me. I mean, everyone else can do it but not me. There are different rules for me. And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him?", + " Who's been reading him lately? And who's pushed him to the forefront? Who's been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it's so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It's an old thing \u2013 it's part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you've been called a bad name,", + " try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.\n\nSeriously?\n\nI'm working within my art form. It's that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It's called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours.", + " We all do it.\n\nWhen those lines make their way into a song, you're conscious of it happening?\n\nWell, not really. But even if you are, you let it go. I'm not going to limit what I can say. I have to be true to the song. It's a particular art form that has its own rules. It's a different type of thing. All my stuff comes out of the folk tradition \u2013 it's not necessarily akin to the pop world.\n\nDo you find that sort of criticism irrelevant, or silly?\n\nI try to get past all that. I have to. When you ask me if I find criticism of my work irrelevant or silly,", + " no, not if it's constructive. If someone could point out here or there where my work could be improved upon, I guess I'd be willing to listen. The people who are obsessed with criticism \u2013 it's not honest criticism. They are not the people who I play to anyway.\n\nBut surely you've heard about this particular controversy?\n\nPeople have tried to stop me every inch of the way. They've always had bad stuff to say about me. Newsweek magazine lit the fuse way back when. Newsweek printed that some kid from New Jersey wrote \"Blowin' in the Wind\" and it wasn't me at all. And when that didn't fly,", + " people accused me of stealing the melody from a 16th-century Protestant hymn. And when that didn't work, they said they made a mistake and it was really an old Negro spiritual. So what's so different? It's gone on for so long I might not be able to live without it now. Fuck 'em. I'll see them all in their graves.\n\nEverything people say about you or me, they are saying about themselves. They're telling about themselves. Ever notice that? In my case, there's a whole world of scholars, professors and Dylanologists, and everything I do affects them in some way. And,", + " you know, in some ways, I've given them life. They'd be nowhere without me.\n\nAnd inspiration.\n\nNo, they're not good for that.\n\nThe flip side of people being critical...\n\nYeah, to hold someone in high admiration [laughs].\n\nThe flip side is, there's also the audience that really loves you.\n\nOf course. They think they do. They love the music and songs I play, not me.\n\nWhy do you say that?\n\nBecause that's the way people are. People say they love a lot of things, but they really don't. It's just a word that's been overused. When you put your life on the line for somebody,", + " that's love. But you'll never know it until you're in the moment. When someone will die for you, that's love, too.\n\nThis story is from the September 27th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.\n\n\n\n", + " Here we go again. Bob Dylan is being accused by a Washington, D.C., journalist of plagiarizing portions of his Nobel Prize for literature lecture from SparkNotes, a study guide like Cliffs Notes.\n\nDylan, who has been accused over the years of lifting passages from various poets and novelists for his song lyrics, was required by the Swedish Academy to give a lecture in order to receive his prize and the $920,000 that goes with it.\n\nOpting not to attend the Nobel ceremonies in December, Dylan submitted the recorded lecture on June 4. In his speech, the Minnesota-born bard says Herman Melville\u2019s classic novel \u201cMoby-Dick\u201d \u2014 as well as Erich Maria Remarque\u2019s \u201cAll Quiet on the Western Front\u201d and Homer\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d \u2014 had a big influence on him.", + " However, when he references \u201cMoby-Dick,\u201d the passages apparently were taken from the SparkNotes summary of the book, not the novel itself, journalist Andrea Pitzer asserts in a story published Tuesday in Slate.\n\nShe offers side-by-side passages of SparkNotes and Dylan\u2019s speech to support the theory that he cribbed narrative summaries. However, she does not accuse him of lifting opinions. Pitzer, a Washington, D.C., writer specializing in history, is the author of \u201cOne Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps\u201d and \u201cThe Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov.\u201d\n\nPitzer posits that 20 passages from SparkNotes\u2019 \u201cMoby-Dick\u201d notes show up in Dylan\u2019s Nobel lecture with similar wording.", + " For example:\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s a crazy prophet, Gabriel, on one of the vessels,\u201d Dylan offered, \u201cand he predicts Ahab\u2019s doom.\u201d\n\nComparing notes: Speech excerpts show similarity to SparkNotes analysis. A10\n\nPitzer cited the SparkNotes statement \u2014 \u201cOne of the ships... carries Gabriel, a crazed prophet who predicts doom\u201d \u2014 that does not appear in the novel.\n\nDylan\u2019s been accused before\n\nThis seems to be the latest in an ongoing series of kerfuffles over sources of Dylan\u2019s work, allegations that date to his first album of original material, 1963\u2019s \u201cThe Freewheelin\u2019 Bob Dylan.\u201d Detractors said he rewrote songs by Lead Belly and Henry Thomas,", + " which Dylan said was part of the folk tradition, and that he borrowed the melody for \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind\u201d from a 16th century Protestant hymn.\n\nMuch ado was made over Dylan\u2019s 2006 album \u201cModern Times,\u201d the final in a highly acclaimed trilogy of comeback albums of potent original material. Researchers pointed out that snippets of lyrics could be traced to the works of Ovid, Henry Timrod and other poets.\n\nDylan himself addressed the indictments in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview with journalist Mikal Gilmore.\n\n\u201cIn folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true.", + " It\u2019s true for everybody, but me. There are different rules for me,\u201d Dylan said. \u201cAnd as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? \u2026 And if you think it\u2019s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get.\u201d He added: \u201cIt\u2019s an old thing \u2014 it\u2019s part of the tradition. It goes way back.\u201d\n\nDylan continued: \u201cI\u2019m working within my art form. I work within the rules and limitations of it. It\u2019s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that,", + " anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.\u201d\n\nThe use of phrases from SparkNotes in the Nobel lecture is different from the folk process, said Alex Lubet, a University of Minnesota music professor who has taught classes on Dylan. He\u2019d be concerned if Dylan had turned in a classroom assignment using this approach. But he considers the context.\n\n\u201cHis lecture is wild and strange,\u201d Lubet said Tuesday. \u201cIt\u2019s meant to be a post-modern work of art. Any kind of a collage technique is fair game.\u201d\n\nCultural critic David Yaffe, a Syracuse University professor of humanities who teaches a class on singer-songwriters including Dylan,", + " doesn\u2019t see this alleged plagiarizing as detracting from the value of the lecture.\n\n\u201cI was very moved by his speech and I\u2019m not any less moved knowing this. I don\u2019t find myself feeling like a dupe,\u201d he said in an interview on Tuesday. \u201cHe\u2019s on the road all the time. He just turned 76. You could see him wanting to take a few shortcuts. I don\u2019t think it makes him any less Bob Dylan.\u201d\n\nWill the Swedish Academy rescind Dylan\u2019s Nobel Prize?\n\n\u201cThat would be historic,\u201d Yaffe said with a chuckle. \u201cI don\u2019t think they will.\u201d\n" + ], + "length": 16223, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 45, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Monica Lewinsky is set to deliver a speech at the TED conference later this month on a phenomenon she has described herself as \"Patient Zero\" of: online bullying. She will speak at TED 2015 Truth and Dare in Vancouver on March 19, reports the Daily Dot, which notes that her TED biography says the former White House intern \"advocates for a safer and more compassionate social media environment, drawing from her unique experiences at the epicenter of a media maelstrom in 1998.\" Earlier this week, artist Nelson Shanks revealed how he sneaked a reference to Lewinsky into the portrait of Bill Clinton that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.\n", + "docs": [ + "Monica Lewinsky broke her decade-long silence with an acclaimed essay written for Vanity Fair less than a year ago, and that was just the beginning.\n\nLewinsky, a self-proclaimed social activist, who was at the center of Bill Clinton's impeachment trial after being accused of having affair with the then-president, is scheduled to speak at the TED 2015 Truth and Dare in Vancouver, Canada, on March 19.\n\n\"Monica Lewinsky advocates for a safer and more compassionate social media environment, drawing from her unique experiences at the epicenter of a media maelstrom in 1998\" goes her TED biography.\n\nIn October Lewinsky spoke against cyberbullying at Forbes'", + " 30 Under 30 summit, where she referred to herself as \"patient zero\" of the Internet shaming era.\n\nIn her much-anticipated public address, the former mistress of President Clinton revealed her plans to launch a \"cultural revolution\" against online harassment.\n\nLewinsky launched her Twitter account Oct. 20 before speaking at the summit and has quickly gained over 70,000 followers.\n\nScreengrab via Forbes/YouTube ", + " Through his research and his (often amusing and unorthodox) experiments, he questions the forces that influence human behavior and the irrational ways in which we often all behave.\n\nThe dismal science of economics is not as firmly grounded in actual behavior as was once supposed. In \"Predictably Irrational,\" Dan Ariely told us why.\n\nInfluenced by Monk, Coltrane and his mutual fan, Herbie Hancock, Alexander's style is \"technically fluent and harmonically astute,\" says the New York Times, and marked by large-canvas musical ideas -- as seen in a legendary rehearsal-room take on \"Giant Steps\" in which the shifting chords and dizzy runs fly out from his tiny fingers.", + " His new record, My Favorite Things, was released in 2015.\n\nA native of Bali, Joey Alexander taught himself to play piano by listening to classic jazz albums his father shared with him. Alexander\u2019s father recognized his son\u2019s ear for jazz, and soon he was sitting in on jam sessions with senior musicians. And a (very) few years later, he's playing for worldwide audiences from Jakarta to Copenhagen to Washington, DC.\n\nHer latest work-in-progress is the MAI (Marina Abramovi\u0107 Institute), a sprawling upstate New York complex devoted to the preservation of durational performance pieces, arts education and the pursuit of heightened consciousness through Abramovi\u0107\u2019s artistic practices.\n\nMarina Abramovi\u0107 burst onto the '70s art scene with cathartic performances that tested the limits of spectator participation and personal safety.", + " The Artist Is Present, a Museum of Modern Art performance in which thousands of viewers queued for hours to face Abramovi\u0107 across a table, moved many to tears, and launched Abramovi\u0107 into mainstream celebrity.\n\nIn her performances she\u2019s been cut, burned, and nearly shot -- but Marina Abramovi\u0107's boldest work yet is a gargantuan institute dedicated to transformation through art.\n\nAn investigative journalist who reports on the FBI\u2019s misuse of informants in counterterrorism operations, Trevor Aaronson asks the question: Is the United States catching terrorists or creating them?\n\nTraveling to often dangerous extremes to discover unknown landscapes, Burkard composes images that transcend the simple action shots of action photography,", + " placing nature at the center of his compositions.\n\nFor most people, surfing evokes sunny sand and warm, blue water in tropical locales. In his book Distant Shores, self-taught photographer Chris Burkard detours to the coastlines of Norway, Iceland and Alaska, shooting surfers as they ride waves on icy beaches that have rarely been photographed -- let alone surfed.\n\nChris Burkard travels to remote, risky and often icy locations to capture stunning images that turn traditional surf photography on its head.\n\nA key player in the \"Boston miracle\" that lowered the rate of youth crime and gang violence, Rev. Jeffrey Brown is a Baptist minister.\n\nBrown graduated from LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts in New York City and she has a BFA from UNC School of the Arts.", + " She is the choreographer for the upcoming Magic Mike The Musical and PAL JOEY, and she is movement director for Broadway's Choir Boy and Toni Stone.\n\nIn addition to her company works, Brown brings a passion for storytelling to her choreography for Broadway and Off-Broadway theater productions. Notable theater credits for her choreography include: Tony-winning Broadway revival Once On This Island, The Emmy-winning Jesus Christ Superstar Live on NBC as well as A Streetcar Named Desire, The Fortress of Solitude (Lortel Nomination) and BELLA: An American Tall Tale (Lortel Nomination), among others.\n\nHer Company,", + " Camille A. Brown & Dancers (CABD), tours nationally and internationally. The repertory includes the Bessie award-winning Mr. TOL E. RAncE (2012), the Bessie-nominated BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play (2015) and ink (2017), which premiered at The Kennedy Center. CABD's community engagement platform, EVERY BODY MOVE, inspires collective action through the art of social dance and includes initiatives such as Black Girl Spectrum, Black Men Moving, The Gathering and more.\n\nCamille A. Brown is a prolific Black female choreographer reclaiming the cultural narrative of African American identity.", + " She is a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, Audelco Award recipient, four-time Princess Grace Award winner, Guggenheim Fellow, Jacob's Pillow Dance Award recipient, USA Jay Franke & David Herro Fellow, TED Fellow and Doris Duke Artist Award recipient.\n\nCamille A. Brown leads her dance company through excavations of ancestral stories, both timeless and traditional, that connect history with contemporary culture.\n\nHis recent book Superintelligence advances the ominous idea that \u201cthe first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.\u201d\n\nPhilosopher Nick Bostrom envisioned a future full of human enhancement, nanotechnology and machine intelligence long before they became mainstream concerns.", + " From his famous simulation argument -- which identified some striking implications of rejecting the Matrix-like idea that humans are living in a computer simulation -- to his work on existential risk, Bostrom approaches both the inevitable and the speculative using the tools of philosophy, probability theory, and scientific analysis. Since 2005, Bostrom has led the Future of Humanity Institute, a research group of mathematicians, philosophers and scientists at Oxford University tasked with investigating the big picture for the human condition and its future. He has been referred to as one of the most important thinkers of our age.\n\nNick Bostrom asks big questions: What should we do, as individuals and as a species,", + " to optimize our long-term prospects? Will humanity\u2019s technological advancements ultimately destroy us?\n\nBlacc is an active member of the nonprofit Malaria No more and a champion of songwriters\u2019 rights.\n\nAloe Blacc is a singer and songwriter who moves across genres, creating an effortless blend of folk and soul inspired by a tradition of hip-hop. Through hits like \u201cI Need a Dollar,\u201d \u201cThe Man\u201d and \u201cWake Me Up,\u201d Blacc makes music with an optimistic message. Despite his sometimes sobering lyrics about homelessness, inequality and unemployment, Blacc creates \u201crelentlessly feel-good\u201d music that leaves the listener feeling that the power of human emotion will ultimately prevail.", + " His third solo album is aptly named Lift Your Spirit.\n\nAloe Blacc is a musician who blends folk and soul to create songs that lift the spirit.\n\nBerti has written four books, and her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs.\n\nBenedetta Berti is an expert on the role of armed groups and the future of armed conflict, especially in the Middle East. She has spent over a decade researching non-state armed groups, from terrorists to insurgents to militias, and has worked with governments, international organizations and NGOs to offer new approaches to better understand and tackle modern conflict. As a security and humanitarian consultant, Berti has designed disarmament campaigns;", + " conducted trainings of counter-insurgency and protection of civilians; worked on violence prevention; and assisted humanitarian organizations on issues related to gaining access to war-torn areas. She has conducted research and worked across the globe -- from Central and Latin America to the Middle East, and from the United States to Eastern Africa -- and has focused her work on some of the world's most complex conflicts, from Syria, to Iraq, to Gaza, to Burundi.\n\nHe helps design, engineer and execute aerial stunts and shows for TV and film productions and many commercials, and is a past master at filming and communicating the sheer joy of being up in the air\n\nChuck Berry is a passionate filmmaker and a very frequent flyer.", + " He estimates he's done 6,500 skydives since he started in 1984; Red Bull calls him \"our longest serving professional athlete.\" He's wingsuit-jumped over Yokohama Harbor, he is a past Speed Hang Gliding Champion of New Zealand, and he did something called \"underground BASE jumping\" in China that almost does not bear contemplating.\n\nChuck Berry skydives, BASE jumps, wingsuits, hang-glides -- basically any way to get up into the sky, he'll do it, and film it\n\nSeth Berkley is an epidemiologist and the CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the global health organization protecting lives by improving access to vaccines in developing countries.", + " Seth joined Gavi in 2011 in a period of rapid acceleration of Gavi\u2019s programs. Now, with more than half a billion children immunized, he is leading Gavi\u2019s efforts to reach a further 300 million children in the next five years and build sustainability into country immunization programs. Prior to Gavi, he spearheaded the development of vaccines for HIV as founder and CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.\n\nEpidemiologist Seth Berkley is leading the charge to make sure vaccines are available to everyone, including those living in the developing world.\n\nAs CMO of Chiat/Day and TBWA\\Worldwide ad agency,", + " Laurie Coots worked on brands such as Apple and Visa. Now she's working on helping us get healthiert.\n\nConn spent the past decade as the University of Chicago\u2019s champion for the Giant Magellan Telescope. Now she is the vice president of strategy for B612 Foundation\u2019s Sentinel Mission, which will discover, map and track asteroids that are on a trajectory to impact Earth. She is building an international community of scientists and citizens to solve this asteroid problem.\n\nBig science projects -- space missions, giant telescopes -- have require big funds and big, healthy partnerships. Valerie Conn helps build those partnerships and raise those funds, so scientists in turn can take big leaps forward.\n\nScience maven Valerie Conn has focused her career on building the partnerships and raising the funds to help scientists explore the world.\n\nSince its 2008 debut,", + " Magik*Magik Orchestra has worked with over 150 artists and arts institutions on hundreds of collaborative records, concerts, dance performances, education projects and special events. To date M*MO has proudly earned and distributed half a million dollars to freelance orchestral musicians. The TED2015 iteration of Magik*Magik features Phil Brezina, Liana Berube, Michelle Kwon and Minna Choi.\n\nWith her Magik*Magik Orchestra, Minna Choi worked with artists such as Death Cab for Cutie, Weezer, How to Dress Well, Son Lux, The Dodos, John Vanderslice, Christina Vantzou,", + " Thao, and numerous others composing music arrangements together. She's conducted film scores including LOOPER and Kill the Messenger. She's also the choir director for City Church SF.\n\nMinna Choi is the founder and music director of Magik*Magik Orchestra, a made-to-order orchestra for artists and creatives, the size of which has ranged from a single violinist to a 80-piece symphony and choir.\n\nHis shows are dramatic events incorporating Chalayan\u2019s multidisciplinary artistic interests -- he\u2019s also a filmmaker, and represented Turkey in the 2005 Venice Biennale.\n\nDesigner Hussein Chalayan dazzles the fashion world with clothes drawing on experimental design from across disciplines,", + " including LED-illuminated fabrics and a \u201cremote control dress\u201d with rising and falling flaps. Hussein\u2019s designs aren\u2019t just theoretical: his highly-anticipated ready-to-wear collections dominate the fashion press each season.\n\nHussein Chalayan melds technology, politics and architectural forms in runway shows that blur the line between art and fashion.\n\nBut Cabrol\u2019s eyes are always fixed on Mars, which may have once had a climate similar to Earth\u2019s mountain deserts. As a science team member for NASA, Cabrol helps design interplanetary experiments for the Martian Spirit rover, and researches new technologies for future missions to Mars and beyond.\n\nWhile hunting for life in the fragile biomes of the Andes,", + " Nathalie Cabrol has braved earthquakes, set a diving record and gathered data on the threats faced by mountain ecosystems in the face of climate change.\n\nTo determine how life might persist on Mars, Nathalie Cabrol explores one of Earth\u2019s most extreme environments: high-elevation Andean lakes and deserts.\n\nDeSimone is one of less than twenty individuals who have been elected to all three branches of the National Academies: Institute of Medicine (2014), National Academy of Sciences (2012) and the National Academy of Engineering (2005), and in 2008 he won the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for Invention and Innovation.", + " He's the co-founder of several companies, including Micell Technologies, Bioabsorbable Vascular Solutions, Liquidia Technologies and Carbon3D.\n\nJoseph DeSimone is a scholar, inventor and serial entrepreneur. A longtime professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, he's taken leave to become the CEO at Carbon3D, the Silicon Valley 3D printing company he co-founded in 2013. DeSimone, an innovative polymer chemist, has made breakthrough contributions in fluoropolymer synthesis, colloid science, nano-biomaterials, green chemistry and most recently 3D printing. His company's Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP)", + " suggests a breakthrough way to make 3D parts.\n\nThe CEO of Carbon3D, Joseph DeSimone has made breakthrough contributions to the field of 3D printing.\n\nDavis is also the author of Caperture, a 3D-imaging app designed to create and share 3D images on any compatible smartphone.\n\nMIT PhD student, computer vision wizard and rap artist Abe Davis has co-created the world\u2019s most improbable audio instrument. In 2014, Davis and his collaborators debuted the \u201cvisual microphone,\u201d an algorithm that samples the sympathetic vibrations of ordinary objects (such as a potato chip bag) from ordinary high-speed video footage and transduces them into intelligible audio tracks.\n\nWhen he\u2019s not pondering how humans could rebuild civilization after a global catastrophe,", + " Lewis Dartnell hunts for microbial life on Earth\u2019s neighboring planets.\n\nDanino's work has been published in scientific journals and highlighted in several popular press venues. He actively develops \"Bio-Art\" projects that share perspectives and stories about science with recent projects featured in the New York Times, WIRED, and the Wall Street Journal.\n\nOriginally from Los Angeles, Danino received B.S. degrees from UCLA in Physics, Chemistry and Math, and received his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from UCSD. He did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently an assistant professor at Columbia University in New York.\n\nTal Danino's research explores the emerging frontier of combining biology,", + " engineering and medicine. His work as a synthetic biologist focuses on reprogramming bacteria to detect and treat diseases in our bodies such as cancer.\n\nTal Danino explores the emerging frontier of combining biology and engineering (and art). He is a 2015 TED Fellow.\n\nLeading up to this jump, Eustace and his partners in StratEx had spent years solving a key problem of stratosphere exploration: returning human beings to Earth from the edge of space using minimal life-support systems. In the process, they\u2019ve opened the door to cheaper and safer near-space travel.\n\nTwo years after Felix Baumgartner jumped from a capsule in the stratosphere for Red Bull,", + " a quiet group led by now-retired Google exec Alan Eustace beat the height record -- without a capsule. (Neither livestreamed nor promoted, the jump record was announced the next day.) In a custom 500-pound spacesuit, Eustace was strapped to a weather balloon, and rose to a height of over 135,000 feet, where he dove to Earth at speeds exceeding 821 mph -- breaking both the sound barrier and previous records for high-altitude jumps.\n\nAlan Eustace leapt to Earth from the edge of the stratosphere wearing only a spacesuit, shattering skydiving records and potentially revolutionizing the commercial space industry.\n\nEagleman is also the author of Sum,", + " an internationally bestselling short story collection speculating on life, death and what it means to be human. Translated into 28 languages, Sum has been turned into two separate operas at the Sydney Opera House and the Royal Opera House in London.\n\nAs the creator of stacks of compelling research, books and now the 6-part PBS series The Brain, grey matter expert David Eagleman is our most visible evangelist for neuroscience. He has helmed ground-breaking studies on time perception, brain plasticity and neurolaw. His latest research explores technology that bypasses sensory impairment -- such as a smartphone-controlled vest that translates sound into patterns of vibration for the deaf.\n\nDavid Eagleman decodes the mysteries of the tangled web of neurons and electricity that make our minds tick -- and also make us human.\n\nLaToya received her BFA in applied media arts from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and her MFA in art photography from Syracuse University.", + " She was the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow for visual arts at the American Academy in Berlin in 2013 and won a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2014. She is also a 2015 MacArthur Fellow.\n\nShe has exhibited her work widely in the United States and elsewhere, with solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Seattle Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. She is an assistant professor of photography at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, having previously taught at Yale, Rutgers and Syracuse University.\n\nTED Fellow LaToya Ruby Frazier uses photography,", + " video and performance to address issues of industrialism, rustbelt revitalization, environmental justice, healthcare inequality, family and communal history. Some of her work, which features images of her mother and grandmother (Grandma Ruby) was published in her first book, The Notion of Family, which received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award.\n\nLaToya Ruby Frazier focuses her camera lens on her family and her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, to explore themes of family, inequality, health care and environmental racism.\n\nFarsad is the author of the recently released How to Make White People Laugh, a memoir-meets-social-justice-comedy manifesto (published by Grand Central,", + " a division of Hachette). She is also the director/writer/star of the rom-com \"3RD Street Blackout,\" starring Janeane Garofalo, Ed Weeks and John Hodgman, set for a summer 2016 release. She has written for/appeared on Comedy Central, MTV, PBS, IFC, Nickelodeon and others. She is director/producer of the feature films The Muslims Are Coming! starring Jon Stewart, David Cross and Lewis Black, and Nerdcore Rising, starring Weird Al Yankovic. She has sued New York State\u2019s MTA over the right to put up funny posters about Muslims and won!", + " She started her comedy career as a Cornell and Columbia-educated policy advisor for the City of New York.\n\nNegin Farsad was named one of the Funniest Women of 2015 by Huffington Post, one of the 10 Best Feminist Comedians by Paper magazine and was selected as a TED Fellow for her work in social justice comedy.\n\nFarsad is the author of the recently released How to Make White People Laugh, a memoir-meets-social-justice-comedy manifesto (published by Grand Central, a division of Hachette). She is also the director/writer/star of the rom-com \"3RD Street Blackout,\" starring Janeane Garofalo,", + " Ed Weeks and John Hodgman, set for a summer 2016 release. She has written for/appeared on Comedy Central, MTV, PBS, IFC, Nickelodeon and others. She is director/producer of the feature films The Muslims Are Coming! starring Jon Stewart, David Cross and Lewis Black, and Nerdcore Rising, starring Weird Al Yankovic. She has sued New York State\u2019s MTA over the right to put up funny posters about Muslims and won! She started her comedy career as a Cornell and Columbia-educated policy advisor for the City of New York.\n\nNegin Farsad was named one of the Funniest Women of 2015 by Huffington Post,", + " one of the 10 Best Feminist Comedians by Paper magazine and was selected as a TED Fellow for her work in social justice comedy.\n\nAfter leaving Apple, Fadell founded Nest on a familiar experience -- frustration with household technology, still resolutely frozen in the 20th century. With its first products, Nest has brought the modern household one step closer to becoming a truly connected \u201csmarthome.\u201d In January 2014, Nest became Google\u2019s second-biggest acquisition to date, positioning both companies to become revolutionary players in home technology.\n\nTony Fadell became a tech superstar as a colleague of Steve Jobs and developer of the iPod,", + " which rejuvenated Apple, rebooted entire industries and changed the way the world consumes entertainment.\n\nAs the originator of the iPod, Tony Fadell is no stranger to disruptive technology. With Nest, he\u2019s zeroed in on tech\u2019s most elusive targets: household appliances.\n\nGross has been an entrepreneur since high school, when he founded a solar energy company. In college, he patented a new loudspeaker design, and after school he started a company that was later acquired by Lotus, and then launched an educational software publishing company. Now, he serves on the boards of companies in the areas of automation, software and renewable energy.\n\nBill Gross is the founder of Idealab,", + " a business incubator focused on new ideas. (He's now the chair and CEO.) He helped create GoTo.com, the first sponsored search company. He also created the Snap! search engine, which allows users to preview hyperlinks.\n\nGreen\u2019s 2004 feature-length film, the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground, tells the story of a group of radical young women and men who tried to violently overthrow the United States government during the late 1960s and 70s. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on PBS, included in the Whitney Biennial, and has screened widely around the world.", + " Green\u2019s previous long documentary, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, follows the bizarre rise and fall of a man who became famous during the 1970s by appearing at thousands of televised sporting events wearing a rainbow wig. The film premiered at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival.\n\nSam Green's 2014 \"live documentary,\" The Measure of All Things, meditates on record holders of all kinds. When it's screened (as it was at Sundance in 2014), it comes complete with in-person narration and a live soundtrack. The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, his 2012 doc,", + " was a live cinematic collaboration with the indie rock band Yo La Tengo.\n\nSam Green is a documentary filmmaker whose many movies include, most recently, \"The Measure of All Things\" and \"The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller,\" a live cinematic collaboration with the indie rock band Yo La Tengo.\n\nDana Goodyear has been on staff at the New Yorker since 1999, where she has written about the archaeology of the Donner Party, the director James Cameron, a therapist who treats writer's block in Hollywood, and eating bugs. Her first book of nonfiction is Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs,", + " Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture. Goodyear teaches at USC and is the co-founder of Figment, an online literary community for people who love young-adult fiction. She is also the author of two collections of poetry, Honey and Junk and The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard.\n\nBased in LA, Dana Goodyear writes for the New Yorker about food, culture, technology and ecology.\n\nGoffman is now an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a vocal advocate for change in America.\n\nGoffman spent six years in the community, the work transforming into her dissertation at Princeton and then into the book,", + " On the Run. In it, Goffman weaves groundbreaking research into a narrative amplifying neglected and often-ignored voices into a stirring, personal indictment of the social, economic and political forces that unwittingly conspire to push entire communities to the margins of society.\n\nAs an undergraduate studying sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Alice Goffman was inspired to write her senior thesis about the lives of the young people living in the historic African-American neighborhood that surrounded the school. She lived side-by-side with a group of young men in one of the US\u2019s most distressed communities, experiencing a troubling and rarely discussed side of urban policing -- the beatings,", + " late night raids and body searches that systematically pit young men against authority.\n\nRenny Gleeson is a skeptical/optimist. He leads interactive strategy for ad agency Wieden+Kennedy who started his career as a game developer. He has been wondering what we can learn about ourselves through the millions of deaths taking place inside video games. He serves on the board of directors of Rhizome.org and is the co-founder of the PIE tech accelerator in Portland, Oregon. A mentor for tech accelerators and startups worldwide, he believes stories -- from cave paintings to interfaces to video games -- shape worlds.\n\nRenny Gleeson helps navigate brands through fresh concepts,", + " such as viral marketing and social media, to find the pulse of the modern consumer.\n\nGiridharadas lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Priya Parker, and their son, Orion.\n\nAt the University of Chicago, where he is a professor and the director of arts and public life, Gates leads the Arts Incubator in Washington Park. Gates also leads an urban research initiative known as the Place Lab, a team of social scientists, architects, creative professionals and business leaders. With support from the Knight Foundation, Gates and his team will create frameworks for reimagining the role that culture plays in the redevelopment of transforming African American communities.\n\nThe latest example of this kind of work is the Stony Island Arts Bank,", + " set to open for the Chicago Architecture Biennial in October 2015. Gates will convert a formerly derelict bank on Chicago's south side to create an artwork -- and a communal and creative space.\n\nTheaster Gates is helping to define the future of artistic place-based efforts, in research and practice. Beginning with interventions in small-scale residences now known as Dorchester Projects, Gates\u2019 houses in Greater Grand Crossing in Chicago have become a nexus for globally engaged experiments in structures of individual and collective living, working and art-making. Launched into the international art world at Documenta(13), the houses embodied a new system of values and celebrated both a flexible use of space and provided a way for artists,", + " visitors and students to connect and collaborate.\n\nTheaster Gates is a potter whose ambitions stretch far beyond the wheel and the kiln. In Chicago, his leadership of artist-led spaces has catalyzed interest and excitement in a formerly neglected neighborhood, as he uses culture as a transformational weapon.\n\nRead a collection of Bill and Melinda Gates' annual letters, where they take stock of the Gates Foundation and the world. And follow his ongoing thinking on his personal website, The Gates Notes. His new paper, \"The Next Epidemic,\" is published by the New England Journal of Medicine.\n\nBill Gates is the founder and former CEO of Microsoft.", + " A geek icon, tech visionary and business trailblazer, Gates' leadership -- fueled by his long-held dream that millions might realize their potential through great software -- made Microsoft a personal computing powerhouse and a trendsetter in the Internet dawn. Whether you're a suit, chef, quant, artist, media maven, nurse or gamer, you've probably used a Microsoft product today. In summer of 2008, Gates left his day-to-day role with Microsoft to focus on philanthropy. Holding that all lives have equal value (no matter where they're being lived), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has now donated staggering sums to HIV/AIDS programs,", + " libraries, agriculture research and disaster relief -- and offered vital guidance and creative funding to programs in global health and education. Gates believes his tech-centric strategy for giving will prove the killer app of planet Earth's next big upgrade.\n\nA passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he's doing it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation.\n\nBefore becoming a neuroscientist, Gage worked as an electrical engineer making touchscreens. As he told the Huffington Post : \"Scientific equipment in general is pretty expensive, but it's silly because before [getting my PhD in neuroscience]", + " I was an electrical engineer, and you could see that you could make it yourself. So we started as a way to have fun, to show off to our colleagues, but we were also going into classrooms around that time and we thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could bring these gadgets with us so the stuff we were doing in advanced Ph.D. programs in neuroscience, you could also do in fifth grade?\" His latest pieces of gear: the Roboroach, a cockroach fitted with an electric backpack that makes it turn on command, and BYB SmartScope, a smartphone-powered microscope.\n\nAs half of Backyard Brains,", + " neuroscientist and engineer Greg Gage builds the SpikerBox -- a small rig that helps kids understand the electrical impulses that control the nervous system. He's passionate about helping students understand (viscerally) how our brains and our neurons work, because, as he said onstage at TED2012, we still know very little about how the brain works -- and we need to start inspiring kids early to want to know more.\n\nHoffman is a faculty member at UC Irvine and a recipient of the Troland Award of the US National Academy of Sciences.\n\nRather than as a set of absolute physical principles, reality is best understood as a set of phenomena our brain constructs to guide our behavior.", + " To put it simply: we actively create everything we see, and there is no aspect of reality that does not depend on consciousness.\n\nIn his research to uncover the underlying secrets of human perception, Donald Hoffman has discovered important clues pointing to the subjective nature of reality.\n\nDonald Hoffman studies how our visual perception, guided by millions of years of natural selection, authors every aspect of our everyday reality.\n\nIn The Locust Effect, Haugen outlines the catastrophic effect of everyday violence on the lives of the impoverished, and shows how rampant violence is undermining efforts to alleviate poverty.\n\nWhile a member of the 1994 United Nations team investigating war crimes in Rwanda, Gary Haugen\u2019s eyes were opened to the appalling extent of violence in the developing world.", + " Upon his return to the US, he founded International Justice Mission, an organization devoted to rescuing victims of global violence including trafficking and slavery.\n\nAs founder of International Justice Mission, Gary Haugen fights the chronically neglected global epidemic of violence against the poor.\n\nThe strength of this abundant local grass allows for towering, curvilinear structures with a notable sense of luminosity and comfort. Ibuku builds on a design process and an engineering system that were first established at the nearby Green School. Five years ago, Elora and her team chose one humble material, and with it they are building a whole new world.\n\nGrowing up in Bali with two artist parents,", + " Elora Hardy\u2019s creativity led her to design prints for one of New York's biggest fashion houses. Then, in a dramatic shift, she moved back home and founded Ibuku, a team that builds bespoke homes made and furnished almost entirely of bamboo.\n\nIsler is also interested in breaking down barriers that prevent many students \u2014 especially women of color \u2014 from becoming scienists. She works to make STEM accessible to new communities.\n\nIsler studies blazars \u2014 supermassive hyperactive black holes at the center of galaxies, some of which emit powerful streams of particles. Sometimes these are oriented toward Earth, offering us a unique perspective on the physics of the universe.", + " Isler is a Chancellor\u2019s Faculty Fellow in Physics at Syracuse University. She participates in the Future Faculty Leader program at Harvard's Center for Astrophysics and was named a 2015 TED Fellow.\n\nJedidah Isler has been staring at the stars since she was 11 or 12. But because neither her undergraduate college or the university where she got her first master\u2019s degree offered astronomy majors, she threw herself wholeheartedly into physics. It wasn\u2019t until she entered a doctoral program that she was able to dedicate her time to the studying the night sky. In 2014, she became the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D in Astrophysics from Yale.\n\nJedidah Isler studies blazars \u2014 supermassive hyperactive black holes that emit powerful jet streams.", + " They are the universe\u2019s most efficient particle accelerators, transferring energy throughout galaxies.\n\nAt TED2015, Isay shared an audacious wish for StoryCorps: to open up the format from its signature booths with a StoryCorps app that allows anyone to add to this \"digital archive of the collective wisdom of humanity.\" The vision: to broaden this idea, and begin to take it global.\n\nStoryCorps invites friends, loved ones and strangers to conduct 40-minute interviews at intimate recording booths in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, and (until 2011) New York, as well as in mobile studios nationwide. Offering moving and surprising glimpses into the hearts of often marginalized and forgotten subjects,", + " the interviews are a familiar feature of NPR\u2019s Morning Edition and Storycorps.org.\n\nFrom the first interview he recorded, 2015 TED Prize winner and MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay knew he\u2019d found his calling: preserving the stories of everyday Americans. Since then, Isay has amassed hundreds of thousands of recordings, most of previously unheard or ignored voices, all speaking in their own words. The archives of StoryCorps -- which Isay founded in 2003 -- are included at the Library of Congress\u2019 American Folklife Center, and now constitute the largest single collection of recorded voices in history.\n\nOver thousands of archived and broadcast interviews,", + " StoryCorps founder Dave Isay -- winner of the 2015 TED Prize -- has created an unprecedented document of the dreams and fears that touch us all.\n\nPaleontologist Nizar Ibrahim, a postdoc at the University of Chicago, wanted to uncover the mystery of the Spinosaurus, a gigantic predatory dinosaur whose only known remains were lost during World War II. After identifying a new skeleton at a dig in North Africa, Ibrahim made the landmark conclusion that the Spinosaurus may have been the largest carnivorous dinosaur to ever live. Its crocodile-like head, dense bones, short legs, and wide, paddle feet suggest it was a water dweller unlike any other.", + " \u201cThe entire skeleton has water-loving river monster written all over it,\u201d he says.\n\nNizar Ibrahim scours Northern Africa for clues to what things were like there in the Cretaceous period. A 2015 TED Fellow, he has spearheaded the recent search for the semi-aquatic dinosaur Spinosaurus.\n\nJones is an active philanthropist, including founding the Robin Hood Foundation and the Excellence Charter School, and he sits on the Boards of Just Capital, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Everglades Foundation, and Sonima Foundation. He is also a trustee of NYU's Langone Medical Center.\n\nPaul Tudor Jones II started to work on Wall Street in 1976.", + " \"If there was ever a free market free-for-all, this was it,\" he says. \"Men wearing ties but acting like gladiators fought literally and physically for a profit.\" Jones emerged victorious, and as founder of Tudor Investment Corporation and other companies within the Tudor Group, he engages in trading in the fixed income, equity, currency and commodity markets. Headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, Tudor manages some $13.7 billion and employs almost 400 people.\n\nJones' performances showcase a biting political awareness, and she has received commissions from Equality Now, the Kellogg Foundation and the National Immigration Forum to address issues of injustice and inequality.", + " She is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and has given multiple performances at the White House at the invitation of President and First Lady Obama. Jones is now at work on a new solo show called Sell/Buy/Date, commissioned by the Novo Foundation. She debuted material from it at TED2015. She is also working on a commission for Lincoln Center Theater and a television project based on her characters.\n\n\"Chameleon-like\" barely describes the astonishing ease with which Sarah Jones slips in and out of the characters in her solo performances -- as many as fourteen personae in her Broadway hit Bridge & Tunnel. Critics marvel not only at her ability to perfectly mimic accents and mannerisms,", + " but also to seemingly reshape her body, down to pupils and dimples, in the blink of an eye.\n\nJones is a 1994 MacArthur Fellow; he received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2010 and the National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2013. He has won two Tony awards for Best Choreography, for the Broadway musicals Spring Awakening in 207 and Fela! in 2010. Jones is the author of a memoir, Last Night on Earth, and Story/Time, a reflection on his 2012 piece inspired by the work of John Cage.\n\nIn 1982, Bill T.", + " Jones co-founded the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company with his partner Arnie Zane. As the company\u2019s artistic director and choreographer, Jones has created more than 140 works, and in 2011, merged his company with New York\u2019s historical Dance Theater Workshop to create New York Live Arts. The company\u2019s 2015 piece Analogy/Dora: Tramontane is based on Jones\u2019 mother-in-law\u2019s recollections of life under the Nazi occupation of France.\n\nWith his artistry and creativity, Bill T. Jones has inspired a generation of dancers, choreographers -- and audiences.\n\nFred Jansen manages the European Space Agency\u2019s Rosetta mission,", + " which guided a probe into orbit around a comet and dispatched a lander to its surface -- both firsts in space exploration. Although the lander Philae could not accomplish its full mission before going into hibernation, the data it\u2019s already gathered will immeasurably multiply our knowledge of comets and their contributions to the ingredients of life on Earth. In addition to his work with the Rosetta Mission, Jansen oversees the ESA\u2019s XMM-Newton, an orbiting x-ray space observatory delving into the most elusive secrets of the universe, including black holes and dark matter.\n\nAs manager of the Rosetta mission,", + " Fred Jansen is in charge of the project that could be instrumental in uncovering clues to the origins of life on Earth.\n\nThe Kitchen Sisters' talk is a collaboration with Nancy Mullane and Life of the Law.\n\nThe Kitchen Sisters, radio producers Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, have created hundreds of stories for public broadcast about the lives, histories, art and rituals of people who have shaped our diverse cultural heritage. They are the producers of Hidden Kitchens, Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project with Jay Allison. They are also the producers of The Hidden World of Girls, a series on NPR that explored the lives of girls and the women they become,", + " and The Making Of\u2026, about what people make in the Bay Area and why, a production with KQED and AIR. Hidden Kitchens explores the world of secret, unexpected, below-the-radar cooking across America \u2014 how communities come together through food. The series inspired their James Beard Award-winning book Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes, and More from NPR\u2019s The Kitchen Sisters. Other recent work includes the radio special Hidden Kitchens Texas, narrated by Willie Nelson; and Cry Me a River, a portrait of three pioneering river activists and the damming of wild rivers in the West, that aired as part of the series \"Stories from the Heart of the Land.\"\n\nWhen he was 13 months old,", + " Daniel Kish lost both eyes to retinal cancer. Driven by fearless curiosity, he taught himself to navigate by clicking his tongue and listening for echoes -- a method science calls echolocation, and that Kish calls FlashSonar. In 2000, Kish founded World Access for the Blind as a platform to teach FlashSonar, along with other methods that the blind can use to \u201csee\u201d and that the sighted can use to expand their awareness. Kish and many researchers believe that echolocation produces images similar to sight, and allows the visually impaired to transcend the limited expectations of society.\n\nDaniel Kish expands the perceptual toolbox of both blind and sighted humans by teaching echolocation -- the ability to observe our surroundings via sound.\n\nKim's novel,", + " The Interpreter, was a finalist for a PEN Hemingway Prize, and her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Harper's and The New York Review of Books. She is the author of the investigation Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite.\n\nHer work sheds a new light on the understanding of the North Korean society by delving into its day-to-day life and provides unprecedented insights into the psychology of its ruling class, about whom the world knows very little.\n\nSuki Kim is the only writer to ever go undercover into North Korea to write a book from the inside. Since 2002,", + " South Korean-born Kim travelled to North Korea, witnessing both Kim Jong-Il's 60th birthday celebration and his death at age 69 in 2011.\n\nSuki Kim's investigation, \"Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite,\" chronicles her six months undercover in Pyongyang during Kim Jong-Il's final six months. She worked as a teacher and a missionary in a university for future leaders -- all while writing her book.\n\nKenyon creates these projects through SWAMP, or Studies of Work Atmosphere and Mass Production. He teaches art at the University of Michigan's Stamps School of Art & Design.\n\nMatt Kenyon works at the intersection of art and technology,", + " creating pieces that question society\u2019s large, complex systems \u2014 from our reliance on global corporations and oil, to the military-industrial complex. His works include: \u201cSPORE 1.1,\u201d a self-sustaining ecosystem for a rubber tree, purchased from The Home Depot and watered in conjunction with Home Depot stock prices; \u201cSupermajor,\u201d a collection of vintage oilcans with droplets of oil that defy gravity and flow back into a punctured hole; and \u201dNotepad,\u201d a commemoration of the Iraqi civilians who died as a result of the US-led invasion, printed in the lines of what appear to be your average,", + " everyday legal pads.\n\nFrom a plant that lives or dies based on stock prices to an oilcan that flows backward, Matt Kenyon creates art that startles, amuses and challenges assumptions.\n\nManuel Lima studies how information can be organized -- into elegant and beautiful diagrams that illustrate the many unexpected twists of big data.\n\nUsing algorithms built on machine learning methods such as neural network models, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab led by Fei-Fei Li has created software capable of recognizing scenes in still photographs -- and accurately describe them using natural language. Li\u2019s work with neural networks and computer vision (with Stanford\u2019s Vision Lab) marks a significant step forward for AI research,", + " and could lead to applications ranging from more intuitive image searches to robots able to make autonomous decisions in unfamiliar situations.\n\nAs Director of Stanford\u2019s Artificial Intelligence Lab and Vision Lab, Fei-Fei Li is working to solve AI\u2019s trickiest problems -- including image recognition, learning and language processing.\n\nA virtuoso and fiery performer who treats the grand piano the way rock musicians treat a guitar, reaching into it to pluck strings and playing with explosive physicality, ELEW (Eric Lewis) has fused jazz and rock and in the process created a new genre, rockjazz. He has taken it from sold-out concert halls to a private performance at the White House,", + " reinterpreting and reenergizing songs by Coldplay, Nirvana, Radiohead and more. He is the composer in residence at Complexions Contemporary Ballet, and leads a parallel career as a DJ.\n\nLewinsky survived to reclaim her personal narrative. During a decade of silence she received her Masters in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2014, Lewinsky returned to the public eye with an acclaimed essay for Vanity Fair, which has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for best Essay Writing, and with a widely viewed speech at Forbes\u2019 30 Under 30 Summit.\n\nAfter becoming the focus of the history-changing federal investigation into her private life,", + " Monica Lewinsky found herself, at 24 years old, one of the first targets of a \u201cculture of humiliation\u201d: a now-familiar cycle of media, political and personal harassment \u2013 particularly online.\n\nMonica Lewinsky advocates for a safer and more compassionate social media environment, drawing from her unique experiences at the epicenter of a media maelstrom in 1998.\n\nA humanist in Silicon Valley, Tim Leberecht argues that in a time of artificial intelligence, big data and the quantification of everything, we are losing sight of the importance of the emotional and social aspects of our work.\n\nLang is also the author of Zero to Maker and a 2013 TED Fellow.", + " He lives on a sailboat in the San Francisco Bay.\n\nin 2010, Lang and NASA engineer Eric Stackpole went looking for lost gold (literally) in an underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierra Navada. But they weren't quite sure how to go about it. Without much expertise (or money), the two put initial designs for an underwater robot explorer online. Soon OpenROV was born: a community of citizen ocean explorers who build and constantly improve upon these small remote operated underwater robots.\n\nDavid Lang is a maker whose craving for adventure turned him into an amateur ocean explorer. He is the cofounder of Open Explorer,", + " a digital field journal for researchers, citizen scientists and explorers.\n\nDawn Landes, with her bright, supple voice and her restless imagination, is drawn to create and collaborate. A master of singer-songwriter pop, she is now writing a musical called \"Row.\"\n\nIn his new TED Book, The Laws of Medicine, he examines the three principles that govern modern medicine -- and every profession that confronts uncertainty and wonder.\n\nOver the next six years, Mukherjee wrote the influential, Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of All Maladies, a 4,000-year \u201cbiography\u201d of cancer. He collaborated with Ken Burns on a six-hour documentary for PBS based on his book,", + " updating the story with recent discoveries in oncology.\n\nWhile discussing a diagnosis with a patient, Siddhartha Mukherjee realized that there were no easy answers to the question, \u201cWhat is cancer?\u201d Faced with his hesitation, Mukherjee decided to do something about it.\n\nWhen he\u2019s not ferreting out the links between stem cells and malignant blood disease, Siddhartha Mukherjee writes and lectures on the history (and future) of medicine.\n\nBorn in Soweto, Patience got her PhD in physics from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 2012, she was named one of 20 Youngest Power Women in Africa by Forbes magazine;", + " that same year she was given the Order of Mapungubwe for her contribution in the field of biophotonics. She's also a TED Fellow.\n\nPatience Mthunzi is a research group leader at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria, South Africa. There, she uses laser \"tweezers\" to try and separate diseased cells from healthy ones. She's also developed a way to use laser pulses to target drug delivery into cells.\n\nTheir second album, This Is Cave Music, came out last fall; the title refers to the term Moon Hooch coined to describe their sound: like house music,", + " but more primitive and jagged and raw.\n\nMoon Hooch have played on subway platforms and in cow pastures, but wherever they go they seem to incite a little bit of disorder. (Watch their viral video \" Cattle Dance Party \" if you doubt.) Two sax players, Mike Wilbur and Wenzl McGowen, and drummer James Muschler whip together a brittle, funky sound using call-and-response horn parts amplified by whatever's handy -- PVC tubes, traffic cones.... After being banned from playing the Bedford Avenue station in Williamsburg, they've toured with They Might Be Giants, Lotus and Galactic as well as on their own.\n\nMiller\u2019s passion for palliative care stems from personal experience -- a shock sustained while a Princeton undergraduate cost him three limbs and nearly killed him.", + " But his experiences form the foundation of a hard-won empathy for patients who are running out of time.\n\nPalliative care specialist BJ Miller helps patients face their own deaths realistically, comfortably, and on their own terms. Miller is cultivating a model for palliative care organizations around the world, and emphasizing healthcare\u2019s quixotic relationship to the inevitability of death. He is a hospice and palliative medicine physician and sees patients and families at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.\n\nUsing empathy and a clear-eyed view of mortality, BJ Miller shines a light on healthcare\u2019s most ignored facet: preparing for death.\n\nBONUS:", + " Watch Alisa Miller's talk \" We need more women represented in media \" on the TED Archive.\n\nAlisa Miller wants to define the future of how people will engage with storytelling and technology. She's CEO of PRI, Public Radio International, and is leading the organization\u2019s transformation from a creator and distributor of news and audio into a multiplatform medium that informs and enables millions of people to act on stories that move them. An advocate for global perspectives in the news, she recently launched the Across Women's Lives Initiative at the Clinton Global Initiative to increase news coverage and engagement around global women\u2019s issues.\n\nAs the CEO of Public Radio International, Alisa Miller works to bring the most significant news stories to millions -- empowering Americans with the knowledge to make choices in an interconnected world.\n\nMilk's most recent contribution to the art and tech frontier is as founder and CEO of the virtual reality company Within (formerly Vrse). In collaboration with the New York Times,", + " Zach Richter and JR, Milk created two VR films, Walking New York and The Displaced, which were distributed along with Google Cardboard viewers to 1 million NYT subscribers in 2015. He has also collaborated on VR projects with the United Nations (Clouds Over Sidra and Waves of Grace), Vice, SNL and U2.\n\nChris Milk is a visual artist who has created music videos for Kanye West, Arcade Fire, Beck, U2, Johnny Cash, Gnarls Barkley and many more. He is known for weaving artistic and technological innovations in pursuit of the next great platform for storytelling. Milk's acclaimed interactive projects include Wilderness Downtown (with Arcade Fire), The Johnny Cash Project and The Treachery of Sanctuary.", + " His interactive installation artworks have been showcased at the MoMA, the Tate Modern and museums around the world.\n\nWorking at the frontiers of interactive technology, Chris Milk stretches virtual reality into a new canvas for storytelling.\n\nAs MIRA\u2019s CEO, Mihaiu now focuses on building relationships with medical institutions around the US and the UK, showing them how video games can make recovery more effective for patients and physical therapists alike.\n\nWhen Cosmin Mihaiu noticed that injured patients hated physical therapy \u2014 and often took longer to recover because of it \u2014 he dedicated himself to making the dreaded process more engaging, or even fun. In 2011 he and his colleagues founded MIRA Rehab,", + " where they develop software that lets patients play interactive, therapeutic games.\n\nCosmin Mihaiu is the CEO and co-founder of MIRA Rehab, which develops software that engages patients in interactive and therapeutic games, making physical rehabilitation fun.\n\nBut her investigations into public health don\u2019t stop there: she blogs and writes on the history of epidemics and the public health challenges posed by factory farming. For her forthcoming book, McKenna is researching the symbiotic history of food production and antibiotics, and how their use impacts our lives, societies and the potential for illness.\n\nMaryn McKenna\u2019s harrowing stories of hunting down anthrax with the CDC and her chronicle of antibiotic-resistant staph infections in Superbug earned her the nickname \u201cscary disease girl\u201d among her colleagues.\n\nMaryn McKenna recounts the often terrifying stories behind emerging drug-resistant diseases that medical science is barely keeping at bay.\n\nBefore Wordnik,", + " McKean was one of the youngest editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. She continues to serve as the editor of the language quarterly Verbatim (\"language and linguistics for the layperson since 1974\") and is the author of multiple books, including That's Amore and the entire Weird and Wonderful Words series. All that, and she maintains multiple blogs, too: McKean is the keen observationalist behind A Dress a Day and Dictionary Evangelist. Is there anything she can't do? Surprisingly, she is notoriously bad at Scrabble.\n\nErin McKean's job as a lexicographer involves living in a constant state of research.", + " She searches high and low -- from books to blogs, newspapers to cocktail parties -- for new words, new meanings for old words, or signs that old words have fallen out of use. In June of this year, she involved us all in the search by launching Wordnik, an online dictionary that houses all the traditionally accepted words and definitions, but also asks users to contribute new words and new uses for old words. Wordnik pulls real-time examples of word usage from Twitter, image representations from Flickr along with many more non-traditional, and highly useful, features.\n\nAs the co-founder of Reverb Technologies, the maker of the online dictionary Wordnik,", + " Erin McKean is reshaping how we interact with language itself.\n\nOver a series of three runaway crowdsourced fundraising campaigns, 99% Invisible generated over $1.2 million, making Mars the most successful crowdfunded journalist in Kickstarter history.\n\nFrom its humble beginnings in his home, Roman Mars\u2019 podcast and radio show 99% Invisible accumulated a massive following to become a broadcast and internet phenomenon. Its premise -- 10- to 20-minute episodes focused on a single compelling story -- subverts public radio\u2019s reliance on long, strictly formatted shows, and has garnered national praise.\n\nWith his show 99% Invisible, Roman Mars discovered new ways to jolt public radio out of its old paradigms,", + " while at the same time spinning riveting tales of design.\n\nA scuba diver from the age of 15, Marhaver is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her lab is based at the CARMABI Research Station on the island of Cura\u00e7ao.\n\nOutside the lab, Marhaver advocates for stronger ocean conservation and smarter science communication. Her talks and articles have been featured by Google, Wired UK, Mission Blue and by ocean and scuba festivals around the world.\n\nMarhaver's research has been covered by NPR, BBC, The Atlantic and Popular Science,", + " among hundreds of outlets. She's earned five fellowships and grants from the US National Science Foundation and multiple awards for science communication. Marhaver is a TED Senior Fellow, a WINGS Fellow, and a World Economic Forum Young Scientist.\n\nDr. Kristen Marhaver's work combines classic scientific methods with new technologies to help threatened coral species survive their early life stages. She was the first person to rear juveniles of the endangered Caribbean Pillar Coral. Now she's now developing bacterial tools to improve coral survival at all life stages.\n\nHis research spans various aspects of multi-agent systems and distributed artificial intelligence using decision-theoretic and game-theoretic frameworks and solutions.", + " His current interests focus on data analytics, visualization and real-time interaction to understand behavior in spatiotemporal domains. Like, say, the spatiotemporal domain around a basketball hoop.\n\nSports fans can get obsessed with stats about player performance and game-day physics. But basketball, a fluid and fast-moving game, has been tough to understand through numbers. Rajiv Maheswaran is working to change that, by offering pro basketball teams insight into game data to make better decisions. Maheswaran is the CEO and co-founder of Second Spectrum, a startup transforming sports through technology. He is also a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California's Computer Science Department and a Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering,", + " where he co-directs the Computational Behavior Group.\n\nMadrigal is co-creator of Longshot magazine, a publication created in 48 hours with the help of internet tools and hundreds of contributors. The magazine was awarded the 2010 Knight-Batten Award for innovation.\n\nHe is the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. His research has uncovered amazing stories of green technological experimentation from the past, forks in the road on the way to our present society.\n\nAlexis Madrigal is Fusion\u2019s Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, overseeing the company\u2019s digital and television platform as well as live events. Formerly,", + " as deputy editor for TheAtlantic.com, he launched their Techology Channel, where he was the lead writer as well as host, and followed science and technology for Wired.com and the blog Wired Science.\n\nAlexis Madrigal is the Silicon Valley Bureau Chief for Fusion, and the author of \"Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.\"\n\nIn 2010, she launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which works with education and business to accelerate the transition to a regenerative circular economy. She also runs the Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trust, using sailing to build confidence for kids following cancer treatment.\n\nIt's a tradition among British citizens:", + " If you circumnavigate the globe by sail, you'll earn royal honors. Ellen MacArthur was made a dame in 2005 after the fastest solo sail around the world. But when you sail alone around the world, things come into focus. Dame Ellen, at the top of her sailing career, had become acutely aware of the finite nature of the resources our linear economy relies on.\n\nAfter setting a record for sailing around the world, Dame Ellen MacArthur has turned her attention toward creating a more \"circular\" economy -- where resources and power recirculate and regenerate.\n\nThe history of science is \"brimming with tales stranger than fiction,\" says Latif Nasser,", + " who wrote his PhD dissertation on the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962. A writer and researcher, Nasser is now the research director at Radiolab, a job that allows him to dive into archives, talk to interesting people and tell stories as a way to think about science and society.\n\nLatif Nasser is the director of research at Radiolab, where he has reported on such disparate topics as culture-bound illnesses, snowflake photography, sinking islands and 16th-century automata.\n\nNeri Oxman creates designs that usher the next building revolution by constructing products that transcend parts and assemblies. Head of the Mediated Matter research group at the MIT Media Lab,", + " an architect and designer, she leads the search for ways in which digital fabrication technologies interact with natural environments and the biological world. Oxman\u2019s approach, termed \"Material Ecology,\" spans biology, computation, materials and digital fabrication. Her works are included in permanent collections in museums worldwide including the MoMA, Centre Pompidou, the Boston MFA and the Smithsonian Institution.\n\nFrom the micro scale to the building scale, Neri Oxman imagines and creates structures and objects that are inspired, informed and engineered by, for and with nature.\n\nPyne\u2019s books trace not only the natural history of fire -- they show how fire is an agent of change in every aspect of human culture,", + " examine the institutions different countries have devised to control it, and explore how fossil fuel burning has disrupted our planet\u2019s natural fire cycle.\n\nAfter detours through outer space (Voyager)and the Pleistocene (The Last Lost World), historian Stephen Pyne has returned to his favorite topic -- fire -- in order to address how humanity's relationship with fire has changed over time and is currently changing the earth\u2019s climate and ecosystems.\n\nStephen Pyne traces fire\u2019s role in building earth\u2019s ecosystems and cultures -- and the catastrophic dangers we face if we mismanage our monopoly over it.\n\nStephen Petranek untangles emerging technologies to predict which will become fixtures of our future lives -- and which could potentially save them.\n\nFor the first time in human history,", + " couples aren\u2019t having sex just to have kids; there\u2019s room for sustained desire and long-term sexual relationships. But how? Perel, a licensed marriage and family therapist with a practice in New York, travels the world to help people answer this question. For her research she works across cultures and is fluent in nine languages. She coaches, consults and speaks regularly on erotic intelligence, trauma, sexual honesty and conflict resolution. She is the author of Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic. Her latest work focuses on infidelity: what it is, why happy people do it and how couples can recover from it.", + " She aims to locate this very personal experience within a larger cultural context.\n\nPsychotherapist Esther Perel is changing the conversation on what it means to be in love and have a fulfilling sex life.\n\nHis newly found vision inspired him to return to college, and also to create luminous \u201cfractal drawings\u201d to illustrate what he sees. His book Struck by Genius explains his experience and gives hints of the science behind it.\n\nIn 2002, Jason Padgett was a constantly partying, 32-year-old wild man, when he was violently mugged outside a karaoke bar. His resulting head injury caused him to see cascades of crystals when he turned on the water faucet,", + " interlocking triangles when he looked at trees, and illuminated nets when the sun burst through the trees. He became a mathematics-obsessed hermit.\n\nAfter sustaining a head injury, Jason Padgett sees the world as a mesh of fractal shapes. Now he shares his visions with eye-popping geometric drawings.\n\nIn March 2015, Rudd published \" China under Xi Jinping: Alternative Futures for U.S.-China Relations,\" a series of three addresses on American and Chinese values, perceptions, interests, and strategic intentions, and their impact on the possibility of developing a common narrative for U.S.-China relations for the future.\n\nDrawing on a deep knowledge of Chinese culture,", + " language and history (and as a Senior Fellow with Harvard\u2019s Belfer Center), Kevin Rudd and his colleagues study alternate courses for US-China relations that guide us away from a seemingly inevitable confrontation. As Prime Minister during the global financial crisis (and as one of the founders of the G20), Rudd helped keep Australia out of recession with a stimulus strategy lauded by the IMF as exemplary among its member states. Rudd is also President of the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank specializing in Asian affairs.\n\nWhile studying future alternatives for China\u2019s global relations, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has come to an ominous conclusion: conflict is looming.\n\nRothkopf's books (including most recently National Insecurity,", + " which focuses on the treacherous post-9/11 national security climate) argue that the nature of power and those who wield it are fundamentally transforming. He is the author of the TED Book, The Great Questions of Tomorrow.\n\nDavid Rothkopf draws on decades of foreign policy experience to clarify the events shaking today\u2019s world -- and develops strategies for organizations to weather them and those looming ahead. Rothkopf is CEO of The Rothkopf Group, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former CEO and Editor of the FP Group (which publishes Foreign Policy Magazine and Foreign Policy.com).\n\nWith books and strategies, David Rothkopf helps people navigate the perils and opportunities of our contemporary geopolitical landscape.\n\nRothblatt\u2019s books include The Apartheid of Sex,", + " which (inspired by her experiences as a transgendered woman) takes on conventional wisdom surrounding gender. Her latest book, Virtually Human, explores human rights for the digital lifeforms just over the horizon.\n\nAfter creating satellite radio with a startup that went on to become Sirius XM, Martine Rothblatt was on the verge of retirement. But her daughter\u2019s rare lung disease inspired her to start United Therapeutics and develop an oral medication that changed the lives of thousands of patients. Now with the Terasem Foundation, she\u2019s researching the digital preservation of personality as a means to enable the contents of our minds to outlast our bodies.\n\nWhether she\u2019s inventing satellite radio,", + " developing life-saving drugs or digitizing the human mind, Martine Rothblatt has a knack for turning visionary ideas into commonplace technology.\n\nHer book Tomorrow\u2019s Table (co-authored with organic farmer Raoul Adamchak) argues that to advance sustainable agriculture, we must not focus on how a seed variety was developed. Instead we must ask what technology most enhances local food security and can provide safe, abundant and nutritious food to consumers.\n\nAs a proponent of sustainable agriculture using the most appropriate technologies, UC Davis researcher Pamela Ronald\u2019s holistic vision startles some. But the success of her genetic tinkering is uncontroversial: it shows that genetic improvement is a critical component of feeding the world without further destroying the environment.\n\nDubbed a \u201cClassical Rock Star\u201d by the press,", + " cellist Joshua Roman has earned a national reputation for performing a wide range of repertoire with an absolute commitment to communicating the essence of the music at its most organic level. Before embarking on a solo career, he was for two seasons principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony, a position he won in 2006 at the age of 22. For his ongoing creative initiatives on behalf of classical music, he has been selected as a 2011 TED Fellow, joining a select group of Next Generation innovators who have shown unusual accomplishments and the potential to positively affect the world. Roman\u2019s 2009\u201310 season engagements include debuts as concerto soloist with the San Francisco Symphony,", + " as well as the Albany, Arkansas, and Santa Barbara Symphonies, the New Philharmonic Orchestra in Illinois, Oklahoma\u2019s Signature Symphony, and Kentucky\u2019s Lexington Philharmonic. In recent seasons he has performed with the Seattle Symphony, where he gave the world premiere of David Stock\u2019s Cello Concerto, as well as with the Symphonies of Edmonton, Quad City, Spokane, and Stamford, and the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, among others. In 2008, Roman performed Britten\u2019s third Cello Suite during New York\u2019s Mostly Mozart Festival in a pre-concert recital at Avery Fisher Hall. In April 2009,", + " he was the only guest artist invited to play an unaccompanied solo during the YouTube Symphony Orchestra\u2019s debut concert at Carnegie Hall. In addition to his solo work, Roman is an avid chamber music performer. He has enjoyed collaborations with veterans like Earl Carlyss and Christian Zacharias, as well as the Seattle Chamber Music Society and the International Festival of Chamber Music in Lima, Peru. He often joins forces with other dynamic young soloists and performers from New York\u2019s contemporary music scene, including Alarm Will Sound, So Percussion, and artists from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center\u2019s CMS Two. In spring 2007, he was named Artistic Director of TownMusic,", + " an experimental chamber music series at Town Hall in Seattle, where he creates programs that feature new works and reflect the eclectic range of his musical influences and inspirations. Committed to making music accessible to a wider audience, Roman may be found anywhere from a club to a classroom, whether performing jazz, rock, chamber music, or a solo sonata by Bach or Kod\u00e1ly. His versatility as a performer and his ongoing exploration of new concertos, chamber music, and solo cello works have spawned projects with composers such as Aaron Jay Kernis, Mason Bates, and Dan Visconti. One of Roman\u2019s current undertakings is an online video series calledThe Popper Project\u2014wherever the cellist and his laptop find themselves,", + " he performs an \u00e9tude from David Popper\u2019s \u201cHigh School of Cello Playing\u201d and uploads it, unedited, to his YouTube channel. Roman\u2019s outreach endeavors have taken him to Uganda with his violin-playing siblings, where they played chamber music in schools, HIV/AIDS centers, and displacement camps, communicating a message of hope through music.\n\nDubbed a \u201cClassical Rock Star\u201d by the press, cellist Joshua Roman has earned a national reputation for performing a wide range of repertoire with an absolute commitment to communicating the essence of the music at its most organic level. Before embarking on a solo career, he was for two seasons principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony,", + " a position he won in 2006 at the age of 22. For his ongoing creative initiatives on behalf of classical music, he has been selected as a 2011 TED Fellow, joining a select group of Next Generation innovators who have shown unusual accomplishments and the potential to positively affect the world. Roman\u2019s 2009\u201310 season engagements include debuts as concerto soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, as well as the Albany, Arkansas, and Santa Barbara Symphonies, the New Philharmonic Orchestra in Illinois, Oklahoma\u2019s Signature Symphony, and Kentucky\u2019s Lexington Philharmonic. In recent seasons he has performed with the Seattle Symphony,", + " where he gave the world premiere of David Stock\u2019s Cello Concerto, as well as with the Symphonies of Edmonton, Quad City, Spokane, and Stamford, and the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, among others. In 2008, Roman performed Britten\u2019s third Cello Suite during New York\u2019s Mostly Mozart Festival in a pre-concert recital at Avery Fisher Hall. In April 2009, he was the only guest artist invited to play an unaccompanied solo during the YouTube Symphony Orchestra\u2019s debut concert at Carnegie Hall. In addition to his solo work, Roman is an avid chamber music performer. He has enjoyed collaborations with veterans like Earl Carlyss and Christian Zacharias,", + " as well as the Seattle Chamber Music Society and the International Festival of Chamber Music in Lima, Peru. He often joins forces with other dynamic young soloists and performers from New York\u2019s contemporary music scene, including Alarm Will Sound, So Percussion, and artists from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center\u2019s CMS Two. In spring 2007, he was named Artistic Director of TownMusic, an experimental chamber music series at Town Hall in Seattle, where he creates programs that feature new works and reflect the eclectic range of his musical influences and inspirations. Committed to making music accessible to a wider audience, Roman may be found anywhere from a club to a classroom,", + " whether performing jazz, rock, chamber music, or a solo sonata by Bach or Kod\u00e1ly. His versatility as a performer and his ongoing exploration of new concertos, chamber music, and solo cello works have spawned projects with composers such as Aaron Jay Kernis, Mason Bates, and Dan Visconti. One of Roman\u2019s current undertakings is an online video series calledThe Popper Project\u2014wherever the cellist and his laptop find themselves, he performs an \u00e9tude from David Popper\u2019s \u201cHigh School of Cello Playing\u201d and uploads it, unedited, to his YouTube channel. Roman\u2019s outreach endeavors have taken him to Uganda with his violin-playing siblings,", + " where they played chamber music in schools, HIV/AIDS centers, and displacement camps, communicating a message of hope through music.\n\n\"11:11\" followed in 2009, and the band went to Cuba in 2012 to record with local musicians for \"Area 52.\" The band's last studio album release was 2014's \"9 Dead Alive.\"\n\nFrom humble beginnings as buskers on Dublin's Grafton Street, endless touring and a great word of mouth buzz carried the band forward until their international break out with the release of their self-titled 2006 album, which spawned the hits \"Tamacun,\" \"Diablo Rojo\"", + " and their cover of \"Stairway To Heaven.\" The duo has appeared on Jools Holland, BBC TV's Glastonbury coverage, plus Letterman and Jay Leno in America.\n\nTheir film work includes the soundtracks to Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Puss In Boots, and they have collaborated onstage and on record with artists as diverse as Robert Trujillo (Metallica), Al Di Meola, Zack De La Rocha (Rage Against The Machine) and Anoushka Shankar. In 2010, Rodrigo y Gabriela played at The White House in Washington for President Obama.\n\nSince they left Mexico for Ireland in 1999,", + " Rodrigo y Gabriela have established themselves as one of the most popular acoustic instrumental bands in the world. They have sold in excess of 1.5 million albums worldwide and have sold out venues like the Hollywood Bowl, the Royal Albert Hall, Red Rocks Amphitheatre and Le Zenith in Paris on numerous occasions.\n\nUsman Riaz is the founder of Mano Animation Studios -- Pakistans first hand-drawn animation studio. Their first project, The Glassworker (\u0634\u06cc\u0634\u06c1 \u06af\u0631), was created by a team of creatives from Pakistan, Malaysia, Canada, South Africa, the US and the UK.\n\nSarah Sandman\n\nArtist + designer Sarah Sandman uses design to amplify messages of social justice.", + " Artist and designer Sarah Sandman creates experiences that amplify messages of social and environmental justice -- such as Brick x Brick, a public art performance inspired by the 2016 US election that builds human \"walls\" against the language of misogyny. TED Fellows Talks Session 1\n\nMon Mar 16, 2015\n\n12:30 \u2013 2:15\n\nKailash Satyarthi\n\nChildren\u2019s rights activist 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi is a tireless activist fighting to protect the rights of voiceless children everywhere. Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi has been leading the global fight against child slavery for over three decades.", + " As the founder of a grassroots nonprofit, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or Save Childhood Movement, he has rescued more than 80,000 Indian children to date from various forms of exploitation from child labor to child trafficking.\n\nKailash\u2019s work has involved organizing almost weekly raid, rescue and recovery missions on workplaces that employ and enslave children. Since 2001, Satyarthi\u2019s has risked his own life to rescue these children and has convinced families in more than 300 Indian villages to avoid sending their children to work, and instead putting them in school.\n\n\n\nSatyarthi\u2019s has also managed to grab and retain the world\u2019s attention on the problem.", + " He organized the Global March Against Child Labor in the 1990s to raise awareness and free millions of children shackled in various forms of modern slavery. His activism was also instrumental in the adoption of Convention No. 182 by the International Labour Organization, a statue that's become a guideline for many governments on child labor.\n\n\n\nIn 2014, he and Malala Yousafzai were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for \u201ctheir struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.\u201d Session 12: Endgame\n\nFri Mar 20, 2015\n\n9:30 \u2013 12:", + "00\n\nLaura Schulz\n\nCognitive scientist Developmental behavior studies spearheaded by Laura Schulz are changing our notions of how children learn. MIT Early Childhood Cognition Lab lead investigator Laura Schulz studies learning in early childhood. Her research bridges computational models of cognitive development and behavioral studies in order to understand the origins of inquiry and discovery. Working in play labs, children\u2019s museums, and a recently-launched citizen science website, Schultz is reshaping how we view young children\u2019s perceptions of the world around them. Some of the surprising results of her research: before the age of four, children expect hidden causes when events happen probabilistically, use simple experiments to distinguish causal hypotheses,", + " and trade off learning from instruction and exploration. Session 2: What Are We Thinking?\n\nTues Mar 17, 2015\n\n8:30 \u2013 10:15\n\nSophie Scott\n\nNeuroscientist, stand-up comic While exploring the neuroscience of speech and vocal behavior, Sophie Scott stumbled upon a surprising second vocation: making audiences laugh as a stand-up comic. As deputy director of the University College London\u2019s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Sophie Scott seeks out the neurological basis of communication, whether it\u2019s speech or vocalized emotion. As a pioneering researcher in the science of laughter, she\u2019s made some unexpected discoveries -- including that rats are ticklish,", + " and that the one tactic that\u2019s almost guaranteed to get someone to laugh is to show them someone else laughing. But as an occasional stand-up comedian with UCL\u2019s Bright Club, she shows that she\u2019s no slouch at getting laughs herself. Session 12: Endgame\n\nFri Mar 20, 2015\n\n9:30 \u2013 12:00\n\nSara Seager\n\nExoplanet expert Sara Seager\u2019s research led to the first discovery of an atmosphere on a planet outside our solar system. Now she\u2019s on the hunt for a twin Earth. Having helped pave the way for the current torrent of discoveries of planets outside of our solar system (or exoplanets), 2013 MacArthur Fellow Sara Seager is now preparing to fulfill her life dream of discovering a planet with nearly identical conditions to our own.\n\n\n\nSeager\u2019s present research and discovery mission projects include Earth-orbiting nanosatellite telescopes as well as the Starshade,", + " a sunflower-shaped giant screen to block intrusive starlight, allowing a space telescope to zoom in on the small exoplanets that have thus far eluded our sight. Session 4: Out of This World\n\nTues Mar 17, 2015\n\n2:15 \u2013 4:00\n\neL Seed\n\nArtist French-Tunisian artist eL Seed blends the historic art of Arabic calligraphy with graffti to portray messages of beauty, poetry and peace across all continents. Born in Paris to Tunisian parents, eL Seed travels the world, making art in Paris, New York, Jeddah, Melbourne,", + " Gabes, Doha and beyond. His goal: to create dialogue and promote tolerance as well as change global perceptions of what Arabic means. In 2012, for instance, he painted a message of unity on a 47-meter-high minaret on the Jara mosque in Gabes, Tunisia. This piece and others can be found in his book, Lost Walls: Graffiti Road Trip through Tunisia Most recently he created a sprawling mural in the Manshiyat Naser neighborhood of Cairo that spans 50 buildings and can only be viewed from a local mountaintop. Intending to honor the historic garbage collectors of the Manshiyat Naser neighborhood,", + " the piece reads, \"Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eye first.\" TED Fellows Talks Session 2\n\nMon Mar 16, 2015\n\n3:00 \u2013 4:30\n\nAomawa Shields\n\nAstronomer, astrobiologist, actor, writer Aomawa Shields studies the climate and habitability of planets outside of the Solar System. Dr. Aomawa Shields received her PhD in Astronomy and Astrobiology from the University of Washington in 2014. She also received an MFA in Acting from UCLA in 2001, and a Bachelor's degree in Earth, Atmospheric,", + " and Planetary Sciences from MIT in 1997. She is currently an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow, a UC President's Postdoctoral Program Fellow, and a 2015 TED Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.\n\n\n\nDr. Shields is the founder of Rising Stargirls, an organization dedicated to encouraging girls of all colors and backgrounds to explore and discover the universe using theater, writing, and visual art. She uses her theater and writing background to communicate science to the public in engaging, innovative ways. TED Fellows Talks Session 1\n\nMon Mar 16,", + " 2015\n\n12:30 \u2013 2:15\n\nDame Stephanie Shirley\n\nEntrepreneur and philanthropist In 1962, Dame Stephanie \"Steve\" Shirley founded Freelance Programmers, a software firm with innovative work practices -- and (mainly) women employees. In the austerity of post-World War II England, jobs were few, and opportunities for women to earn a wage were even fewer. So, on her dining room table, Stephanie Shirley founded the kind of company she'd like to work for -- one that posed challenging, rewarding tasks, built around flexible work rules that made it possible to have a real life.", + " Her software company, Freelance Programmers made her one of the richest women in England (and one of the few to have earned her own money). Initially employing only women -- Shirley often bid for contracts as \"Steve\" to compete in the male-dominated industry -- the company was eventually valued at $3 billion, while 70 of the staff became millionaires when it floated on the stock market. But money wasn't Shirley's object. \"A lot of people go into business to make money,\" she told the Guardian. \"I really didn't; I went in with a mission for women. Conversely, I was determined never, ever to be poor again.\" Freelance Programmers became the FI Group became Xansa;", + " it was acquired by Steria in 2007. Shirley retired in 1993, but she hasn't stopped pushing for progress in the fields she loves. For instance, she works tirelessly to push forward research into autism spectrum disorders, as well as to study and improve the IT industry and the role of the internet in society. She told the Guardian, \"I do get committed, and I don't just give my money; I try to give of myself.\" Session 5: Life Stories\n\nTues Mar 17, 2015\n\n5:00 \u2013 6:45\n\nSteve Silberman\n\nWriter and editor Steve Silberman is a writer and contributing editor for Wired who covers science and society.", + " His newest book explores neurodiversity and the link between autism and genius. Steve Silberman is a writer and contributing editor for Wired and other national magazines. In 2001, he published \"The Geek Syndrome,\" one of the first articles in the mainstream press to probe the complex relationship between autism and genius. The article was praised by experts in the field like neurologist Oliver Sacks and author Temple Grandin, but as time went on, Silberman was haunted by the biggest question that he had left unanswered: Why have rates of autism diagnosis increased so steeply in the past 30 years?\n\n\n\nThis question has become particularly pressing in the face of a resurgence of measles,", + " mumps, pertussis and other childhood diseases worldwide due to parental fears of vaccines, despite numerous studies debunking their alleged connection to autism. To solve that medical mystery for his new book, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, due out in August 2015, Silberman went back to the first years of autism research, where he uncovered a series of events -- some long forgotten, and others deliberately buried -- that will require the history of autism to be rewritten.\n\n\n\nA former teaching assistant for the poet Allen Ginsberg, Silberman has won numerous awards over the years for his science coverage in the New Yorker,", + " Nature and many other national and international magazines. Session 8: Pop-Up Magazine\n\nWed Mar 18, 2015\n\n5:00 \u2013 6:45\n\nJim Simons\n\nPhilanthropist, mathematician After astonishing success as a mathematician, code breaker and billionaire hedge fund manager, Jim Simons is mastering yet another field: philanthropy. As a mathematician who cracked codes for the National Security Agency on the side, Jim Simons had already revolutionized geometry -- and incidentally laid the foundation for string theory -- when he began to get restless. Along with a few hand-picked colleagues he started the investment firm that went on to become Renaissance,", + " a hedge fund working with hitherto untapped algorithms, and became a billionaire in the process. Now retired as Renaissance\u2019s CEO, Simons devotes his time to mathematics and philanthropy. The Simons Foundation has committed more than a billion dollars to math and science education and to autism research. Session 3: Machines That Learn\n\nTues Mar 17, 2015\n\n11:00 \u2013 12:45\n\nClint Smith\n\nPoet, educator Clint Smith's work blends art and activism. Clint Smith is a writer, teacher and doctoral candidate at Harvard University studying education, incarceration and inequality. Previously, he taught high school English in Prince George\u2019s County,", + " Maryland where, in 2013, he was named the Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. Clint is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion, an Individual World Poetry Slam Finalist, and author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. He has received fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Cave Canem and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Educational Review and elsewhere. He was born and raised in New Orleans, LA. Session 9: Just and Unjust\n\nThurs Mar 19,", + " 2015\n\n10:30 \u2013 12:30\n\nRick Smith\n\nEntrepreneur The true promise of 3D printing, suggests Rick Smith, is not found in home workshops but in large industrial production. Rick Smith is the cofounder of CloudDDM, a company focusing on 3D printing and additive manufacturing. An entrepreneur and inventor, he is the co-founder of a number of companies in digital manufacturing and business. He argues that the real impact of 3D printing will be on industrial production. He is the co-author of The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers and author of The Leap. He also created the Primary Color Assessment,", + " a model to assess one\u2019s unique professional abilities. TED University\n\nWed Mar 18, 2015\n\n2:15 \u2013 4:00\n\nChristopher Soghoian\n\nPrivacy researcher and activist Christopher Soghoian researches and exposes the high-tech surveillance tools that governments use to spy on their own citizens, and he is a champion of digital privacy rights. TED Fellow Christopher Soghoian is a champion of digital privacy rights, with a focus on the role that third-party service providers play in enabling governments to monitor citizens. As the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, he explores the intersection of federal surveillance and citizen's rights.", + " Before joining the ACLU, he was the first-ever technologist for the Federal Trade Commision's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, where he worked on investigations of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Netflix. Soghoian is also the creator of Do Not Track, an anti-tracking device that all major web browsers now use, and his work has been cited in court. TED Fellows Talks Session 2\n\nMon Mar 16, 2015\n\n3:00 \u2013 4:30\n\nSomi\n\nVocalist, composer and culturist With her lustrous voice and wide-ranging musical curiosity, Somi spins elegant vocal jazz from African legacies.", + " In late 2011, East African vocalist and songwriter Somi moved from New York City to Lagos, Nigeria, for 18 months in search of new inspiration. The result: her chart-topping 2014 major label debut, The Lagos Music Salon (Sony Music). The album, with guests Angelique Kidjo, Common and Ambrose Akinmusire, draws its material from the tropical city's boastful cosmopolitanism, urgent inspiration and giant spirit, straddling the worlds of African jazz, soul and pop with a newfound ease and voice that Vogue Magazine calls \"powerful.\" Born in Illinois to immigrants from Rwanda and Uganga,", + " African and Jazz legacies are crucial to Somi's sound. Referred to as a modern-day Miriam Makeba, JazzTimes magazine describes her performance as \"the earthy gutsiness of Nina Simone blended with the fluid vocal beauty of Dianne Reeves,\" while Billboard remarks that she's \"all elegance and awe... utterly captivating.\" In 2013, Somi was invited by Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to perform at the United Nations' General Assembly in commemoration of the International Day of Rememberance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. A TED Senior Fellow, inaugural Association of Performing Arts Presenters Fellow,", + " founder of the non-profit New Africa Live, and a two-time recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation's French-American Jazz Exchange Composers\u2019 Grant, Somi began an exploration of African and Arab jazz traditions alongside French-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf, while investigating the role of the female voice during the Arab Spring protests. That body of work was premiered at the Kennedy Center\u2019s 2014 Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival. Somi is a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. She is currently working on a jazz opera about the life and legacy of South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.", + " TED Fellows Talks Session 1\n\nMon Mar 16, 2015\n\n12:30 \u2013 2:15\n\nSomi\n\nVocalist, composer and culturist With her lustrous voice and wide-ranging musical curiosity, Somi spins elegant vocal jazz from African legacies. In late 2011, East African vocalist and songwriter Somi moved from New York City to Lagos, Nigeria, for 18 months in search of new inspiration. The result: her chart-topping 2014 major label debut, The Lagos Music Salon (Sony Music). The album, with guests Angelique Kidjo, Common and Ambrose Akinmusire,", + " draws its material from the tropical city's boastful cosmopolitanism, urgent inspiration and giant spirit, straddling the worlds of African jazz, soul and pop with a newfound ease and voice that Vogue Magazine calls \"powerful.\" Born in Illinois to immigrants from Rwanda and Uganga, African and Jazz legacies are crucial to Somi's sound. Referred to as a modern-day Miriam Makeba, JazzTimes magazine describes her performance as \"the earthy gutsiness of Nina Simone blended with the fluid vocal beauty of Dianne Reeves,\" while Billboard remarks that she's \"all elegance and awe... utterly captivating.\" In 2013,", + " Somi was invited by Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to perform at the United Nations' General Assembly in commemoration of the International Day of Rememberance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. A TED Senior Fellow, inaugural Association of Performing Arts Presenters Fellow, founder of the non-profit New Africa Live, and a two-time recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation's French-American Jazz Exchange Composers\u2019 Grant, Somi began an exploration of African and Arab jazz traditions alongside French-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf, while investigating the role of the female voice during the Arab Spring protests. That body of work was premiered at the Kennedy Center\u2019s 2014 Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival.", + " Somi is a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. She is currently working on a jazz opera about the life and legacy of South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba. Session 7: Creative Ignition\n\nWed Mar 18, 2015\n\n11:00 \u2013 12:45\n" + ], + "length": 19214, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 46, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 In Japan, there are a dozen basic colors that almost everyone in a recent survey was able to name using one word. And 11 of them\u2014black, white, gray, blue, green, yellow, red, purple, brown, pink, and orange\u2014all overlap with the basic colors Americans can describe in one word. But in Japan, a 12th color, \"mizu,\" which means water, has emerged as a basic color as distinct from blue as green is. Among Americans asked to name basic colors using just one word, \"light blue\" didn't come up as a color at all because we just don't have a single-word name for it, with the very rare exception of someone using \"sky,\" scientists report in a Eureka Alert news release. Italians, however, do have their own word for the \"mizu\" color\u2014\"celeste,\" reports IFL Science. And Americans do have a single word for other colors, like \"lavender,\" for which the Japanese do not. Researchers are investigating why certain color descriptions vary so dramatically while others are so consistent across cultures, and report on their findings in the Journal of Vision. While the case of light blue was a notable difference, it's only a recent one, given \"mizu\" was not a basic color name in Japan 30 years ago. \"What's really interesting is there are remarkable similarities in color descriptions amongst people who live thousands of miles apart, and there can be differences between next-door neighbors,\" one researcher says. (How about blue wine?)\n", + "docs": [ + "What\u2019s that color above? If you\u2019re English or American, your answer would probably be sky blue, or a light turquoise. But in Japanese it would be called mizu, which translates as \u201cwater\u201d.\n\nIt might sound somewhat unimportant, but the use of this word actually shows how the Japanese language has evolved over the last 30 years. And it highlights the cultural differences in how we describe color in different countries.\n\nThe fact you\u2019re reading this suggests you speak English, so you probably know how to describe colors as red, blue, green, and so on. How we get to those colors and what shades we define, starting from black and white,", + " is somewhat intriguing.\n\nThe 1969 book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution suggested that there was a hierarchy of colors in all cultures, starting with black and white, then things like red and blue, and finally more descriptive colors like orange or pink.\n\nIn this latest study, published in the Journal of Vision, researchers from Ohio State University found that in Japan, people had added mizu as a new color to their lexicon. A previous study in 1987 had identified 12 basic color terms (BCT), of which mizu was not one.\n\nThe researchers presented 57 native Japanese speakers with colors on cards. Each had to describe the colors in a single word,", + " with no modifiers like \u201clight\u201d or \u201cdark\u201d allowed.\n\nOut of the participants, 54 identified two or more color samples \u2013 one being the color above \u2013 as mizu. In the last 30 years, therefore, this color term has been adopted, and the researchers suggest it might be a new BCT. (Note, other countries also have words for similar colors, such as celeste in Italy)\n\nDifferences in basic color terms between Japan and the US. Angela Brown\n\n\u201cIn America, we don't have a single unique word for light blue,\u201d said co-author Angela Brown in a statement. \u201cThe closest thing we have is \u2018sky,\u2019 but when we ask,", + " we don't elicit that very often.\n\n\u201cIn Japan,'mizu' is as different from 'blue' as 'green' is from 'blue.\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s an interesting study, particularly at showing how different cultures arrive at naming colors. How do we decide what shade of blue is blue, for example? In some areas of the world, different colors are also combined together, such as green and blue being \u201cgrue\u201d. The use of magenta to describe \u201cpurplish-red\u201d in the US is another example.\n\nAside from a few differences like this, however, the researchers noted that there were remarkable similarities between descriptions of colors between countries.", + " So even thought we might not have a word for mizu, we're not that different really. ", + " COLUMBUS, Ohio - If a Japanese woman were to compliment a friend on her flattering pale-blue blouse, she'd probably employ a word with no English equivalent.\n\n\"Mizu\" translates to \"water\" and has emerged in recent decades as a unique shade in the Japenese lexicon, new research has found.\n\nEnglish speakers have \"light blue,\" sure. But \"mizu\" is its own color, not merely a shade of another. It's similar to how people in the United States use \"magenta,\" rather than \"purplish-red.\"\n\nResearchers from Japan and The Ohio State University collaborated on the study, which examines the color lexicon in Japan over time and compares the country's modern color terminology to words used in the United States.", + " The study appears in the Journal of Vision.\n\nThe researchers asked 57 native Japanese speakers to name the colors on cards placed before them. The study participants used 93 unique color terms. No modifiers such as \"light\" or \"dark\" were allowed.\n\nIdentification of basic long-standing color terms came as no surprise, but the use of \"mizu\" by almost everyone in the group is new and strong evidence that it should be included among 12 generally accepted basic Japanese color terms, the researchers concluded.\n\nFurthermore, they found differences between color language in the two modern, diverse societies.\n\nSome unique and commonly described color terms in one language are missing in the other.", + " In Japan, \"mizu\" is one, as is \"kon\" (dark blue.) In the U.S., native speakers often use the words \"teal,\" \"lavender,\" \"peach\" and \"magenta,\" none of which has a commonly used Japanese equivalent.\n\n\"Like animal species, language is constantly evolving,\" said Ohio State's Delwin Lindsey, a professor of psychology who worked on the study with optometry professor Angela Brown and Japanese colleagues from several institutions.\n\nHumans mostly see color in exactly the same way. But how we describe it varies widely and it tells researchers about more than just whether that pretty blouse is \"mizu\"", + " or \"light blue.\"\n\n\"In America, we don't have a single unique word for light blue. The closest thing we have is \"sky,\" but when we ask, we don't elicit that very often,\" Brown said.\n\n\"In Japan,'mizu' is as different from 'blue' as 'green' is from 'blue.'\"\n\nLindsey and Brown said the study of color language goes beyond how we describe a blouse, car or crayon.\n\n\"We're interested in how colors are represented through language and how that gets distributed through society. How is it that we all decide that blue is blue? We do so through interaction,\" Lindsey said.\n\nAdded Brown,", + " \"The study of color naming is fundamentally the study of how words come to be associated with things - all things that exist, from teacups to love.\"\n\nThe color lexicon happens to be easier to study than other aspects of language evolution. Colors are easily described, reproduced and displayed.\n\nAnd there is vast difference in what colors we use from culture to culture and individual to individual.\n\n\"The visual system can discern millions of colors,\" Brown said. \"But people only describe a limited number of them and that varies depending on their community and the variety of colors that enter into their daily lives.\"\n\nThere are areas of the world, for instance, where blue and green are lumped together - something color researchers call \"grue.\"\n\n\"People around the world have very different color-naming systems and that raises interesting questions about what we're born with and what's strongly contingent upon our culture,\" said Lindsey,", + " who teaches at Ohio State's Mansfield campus.\n\n\"In general, the more basic the color terms, the less technologically and economically advanced the culture,\" he said.\n\n\"But what's really interesting is there are remarkable similarities in color descriptions amongst people who live thousands of miles apart. And there can be differences between next-door neighbors.\"\n\n###\n\nThe study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Japan's Tohoku University.\n\nRyan Lange, now at the University of Chicago, worked on the study as a graduate student in Ohio State's College of Optometry.\n\nCONTACTS: Angela Brown, 614-292-4423;", + " Brown.112@osu.edu. Delwin Lindsey, 419-755-4359; Lindsey.43@osu.edu.\n\nWritten by Misti Crane, 614-292-5220; Crane.11@osu.edu ", + " Abstract Despite numerous prior studies, important questions about the Japanese color lexicon persist, particularly about the number of Japanese basic color terms and their deployment across color space. Here, 57 native Japanese speakers provided monolexemic terms for 320 chromatic and 10 achromatic Munsell color samples. Through k-means cluster analysis we revealed 16 statistically distinct Japanese chromatic categories. These included eight chromatic basic color terms (aka/red, ki/yellow, midori/green, ao/blue, pink, orange, cha/brown, and murasaki/purple) plus eight additional terms: mizu (\u201cwater\u201d)/light blue,", + " hada (\u201cskin tone\u201d)/peach, kon (\u201cindigo\u201d)/dark blue, matcha (\u201cgreen tea\u201d)/yellow-green, enji/maroon, oudo (\u201csand or mud\u201d)/mustard, yamabuki (\u201cglobeflower\u201d)/gold, and cream. Of these additional terms, mizu was used by 98% of informants, and emerged as a strong candidate for a 12th Japanese basic color term. Japanese and American English color-naming systems were broadly similar, except for color categories in one language (mizu, kon, teal, lavender, magenta, lime) that had no equivalent in the other.", + " Our analysis revealed two statistically distinct Japanese motifs (or color-naming systems), which differed mainly in the extension of mizu across our color palette. Comparison of the present data with an earlier study by Uchikawa & Boynton (1987) suggests that some changes in the Japanese color lexicon have occurred over the last 30 years.\n\nIntroduction\n\nThe association between color terms, the color categories they name, and the stimuli that elicit them is a classic model system for studying the relationship between words and their referents. This is because all languages have at least some color terms in their lexicons, because colors are easily specified quantitatively,", + " and because the physiology of the perception of color is better understood than the perception of many other stimuli. Furthermore, a physiological response to color categories may be present even in prelinguistic infants (Yang, Kanazawa, Yamaguchi, & Kuriki, 2016 ), although there remains some controversy about whether the acquisition of language modifies those innate categories (Franklin, Clifford, Williamson, & Davies, 2005 ; Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro, 2006 ).\n\nMuch of the modern work on color and language has been inspired by three key proposals in the seminal work of Berlin and Kay ( 1969 ). The first is that world languages contain salient terms for colors\u2014the basic color terms (BCTs)\u2014that are monolexemic,", + " that are known and used by all members of the language community, that can be used to communicate about the color of any type of object, and that name colors not covered by any other BCT. The second proposal is that the BCTs in every language name colors that are derived from a set of 11 universal categories. The third proposal is that cross-cultural differences in color naming exist because color lexicons are at different stages along a constrained trajectory of color-term evolution. As color lexicons evolve over time, they increase in size, adding BCTs in a highly constrained order. With this \u201cuniversalist\u201d framework in mind, we have examined the modern Japanese color lexicon.", + " We compare it to the contemporaneous American English color lexicon, and we compare it to an earlier study of the Japanese color lexicon for evidence of recent evolution of Japanese color terms.\n\nThe study of the Japanese color lexicon is important for three interrelated reasons. First, Japanese is spoken in a modern, highly industrialized society, where the chromatic environment is as diverse and colorful as anywhere on earth. According to the universalist perspective, the Japanese color lexicon should therefore closely approximate the lexicons of English and other languages spoken in industrialized societies. Second, there remain several questions regarding the number of BCTs in the Japanese color lexicon.", + " It is known from the earliest written records of vernacular Japanese (the Many\u014d-sh\u016b poems, dating from before 759 D.E.) that the Japanese words ao (blue) and midori (green) were used more or less interchangeably, in a usage pattern similar to the \u201cgrue\u201d motif of Lindsey and Brown ( 2009 ) for color-naming systems with a single term for green-or-blue. In present-day Japanese, ao is still used to denote certain green things, as well as being an abstract color term for blue things in general, whereas midori always names only green things. Moreover, historical linguists (e.g., Stanlaw,", + " 2010 ) sometimes include kon (indigo) as a word for dark blue among Japanese BCTs. Therefore, it is possible that Japanese, like many world languages spoken in nonindustrialized societies, might not conform to the color-category structure seen in English. Third, a quantitative, empirical study of Japanese color naming that was conducted 30 years ago by Uchikawa and Boynton ( 1987 ; U&B) suggested that three nonbasic color terms\u2014mizu (light blue), hada (peach), and kusa (yellow green)\u2014might achieve BCT status sometime in the future. Comparing the results of the present study to those of U&B allows us to examine the Japanese color lexicon for evidence of language change over the intervening years.\n\nU&B investigated Japanese color naming from the universalist perspective of Berlin and Kay.", + " Using a color palette consisting of the 425 samples comprising the OSA-UCS (Optical Society of America, Uniform Color Scale), U&B found that Japanese color terms conforming to Berlin and Kay's 11 BCTs showed better across-subjects consensus, better test\u2013retest reliability, and shorter reaction time than other nonbasic Japanese color terms, including mizu, hada, kusa, and kon. The present study diverges from U&B's methodology in two important respects. First, whereas U&B's samples spanned a relatively narrow range of generally low chromas (saturations), the present study adopts the 330 Munsell samples that were used by Lindsey and Brown ( 2014 ; L&B)", + " and most other modern studies of color naming, which contain a larger range of generally higher chromas.\n\n2009, Second, the present study applies several quantitative tools that Lindsey and Brown ( 2006 2014 ) have developed over the years for analyzing color-naming data. They showed that cluster analysis and associated statistical techniques can reveal important regularities in a language's color lexicon that might be missed by ethnographic studies or analyses of frequency of word usage alone (Lindsey & Brown, 2006 ). In particular, cluster analysis offers an objective way of controlling for synonymy in color naming by ignoring the color terms themselves and focusing instead on how they are deployed across color space.", + " In the languages that Lindsey and Brown have examined so far\u2014the 110 languages spoken in nonindustrialized societies that were included in the World Color Survey (Kay, Berlin, Maffi, Merrifield, & Cook, 2009 [WCS]; Lindsey & Brown, 2006 ) as well as English (L&B), Somali (Brown, Isse, & Lindsey, 2016 ), and Hadzane (Lindsey, Brown, Brainard, & Apicella, 2015 )\u2014the color terms glossed by cluster analysis correspond, with minor variations and some additions, to the standard list of universal BCTs from Berlin and Kay.\n\nLindsey and Brown ( 2009 ) applied a second cluster analysis to the color lexicons of the WCS,", + " revealing the existence of a limited number of common color-naming systems, which they called motifs. These motifs recur, with minor variation, throughout the WCS data set. Strikingly, almost all the languages in the WCS, as well as Somali (Brown et al., 2016 ) and English (L&B), contain multiple motifs among their speakers. The importance of the motif analysis is that it can reveal statistically significant regularities in subpopulations of informants in a diverse language community that would be missed if that community were assumed to be homogeneous. In the case of American English, speakers' color vocabularies are divided into two motifs.", + " Those motifs refine Berlin and Kay's concept of the BCT in that, in addition to the 11 original BCTs, some color terms (e.g., teal, lavender, peach, and maroon) are \u201cbasic\u201d for the individuals whose color idiolects fall into one motif but not for those whose color idiolects fall into the other motif.\n\nThe diversity of color idiolects seen in American English and elsewhere, as embodied in the motif concept, suggests a mechanism for color-term evolution that parallels biological evolution: Color lexicons evolve when the proportion of speakers in motifs with fewer BCTs declines and the proportion of speakers in motifs with more BCTs increases.", + " It is from this theoretical perspective that we compare the present structure of the Japanese color lexicon to that observed 30 years ago by U&B.\n\nMethods\n\nSubjects\n\nThirty-two subjects (18 men, 14 women) from Tohoku University and 25 from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (12 men, 13 women) took part in this study. All were native speakers of Japanese. Most subjects were graduate students, but Japanese authors IK, YM, KF, and RT also participated. Only the authors were aware of the purposes of the study at the time they were tested. All subjects had normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity,", + " and their color vision was confirmed to be normal with Ishihara pseudoisochromatic plates. The experimental procedures followed the precepts of the Declaration of Helsinki and were approved by the ethics committees of Tohoku University and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.\n\nApparatus\n\nColor samples and illuminant\n\n65 -simulating fluorescent lamps with high color-rendering index (FLR40S-D-EDL-D65, Toshiba, Minato, Japan) were mounted on the ceiling of an observation booth, providing an illuminance of 2,713 lx. An amber filter covered four lamps to adjust the color temperature of the illuminant to approximate 6000 K.", + " The color samples, illuminant, and background color papers were similar to those used in the WCS. The 330 color chips used in the present study were from the Munsell Book of Color glossy ed., X-Rite, Inc., www.munsell.com ). The chips were chosen to match the WCS samples with respect to hue, chroma, and value (although the WCS samples were from the matte edition). Each chip was mounted on a cardboard square 5 cm by 5 cm covered with gray matte paper approximating N5/ (in Munsell notation). Four pairs of 40-W D-simulating fluorescent lamps with high color-rendering index (FLR40S-D-", + "EDL-D65, Toshiba, Minato, Japan) were mounted on the ceiling of an observation booth, providing an illuminance of 2,713 lx. An amber filter covered four lamps to adjust the color temperature of the illuminant to approximate 6000 K.\n\nProcedure\n\nSubjects used a single, monolexemic color term to name each sample. They were not allowed to use compound color terms like ki-midori (yellow-green) or modifier words like usu-murasaki (pale purple). However, they were allowed to use the name of a substance if they felt that the name was generally agreed to represent a color and could be generalized to name the color of any type of object.", + " Each session took about 40 min.\n\nCluster analysis\n\nAnalysis of the Japanese color-naming data was performed in two steps, both of which involved k-means cluster analysis. The first cluster analysis was used to extract two entities from the raw data sets: (a) an estimate of the number of statistically significant named chromatic color categories in the Japanese language and (b) the extensions of each of these categories across color space. The second step used the results of the first cluster analysis to examine the color-naming patterns (motifs) used by Japanese informants by (a) estimating the number of motifs and (b) determining their categorical structures.\n\n2009,", + " All analyses were performed using MATLAB (MathWorks, Natick, MA) and Mathematica (Wolfram Research, Inc., Champaign, IL) software platforms. We used custom programs which had been used previously by Lindsey and Brown and their colleagues in their analyses of color-naming data (Brown et al., 2016 ; Lindsey & Brown, 2006 2014 ). Here we present an overview of our methodology; additional details may be found in the specific references cited.\n\n2009, The first k-means cluster analysis was used to classify feature vectors representing the sets of color samples associated with each chromatic color term deployed by each of our Japanese informants.", + " A chromatic color term was defined as a term used by a subject to name one or more of the 320 chromatic colors in the WCS chart but never used by that subject to name any of the 10 achromatic colors (achromatic color terms were handled separately, as described later). Each chromatic-term feature vector consisted of 320 elements, each of which was set to a value of 1 or 0 depending on whether (or not) the chromatic color term was used by the informant to name the WCS color sample represented by that particular vector element (for details, see Lindsey & Brown, 2006 2014 ). The resulting 828 binary feature vectors obtained from the chromatic words used by our 57 Japanese subjects were then sorted into k clusters using the kmeans(.) function in MATLAB.\n\nThis first k-means cluster analysis was designed to control for synonymy and homonymy in estimating the number of statistically significant named chromatic color categories in the Japanese language,", + " which we designate k L,opt. Cluster analysis classifies responses solely on the basis of how color terms are deployed across the 320 WCS chromatic colors, as embodied in the patterns of color-term deployment encoded in the binary feature vectors, without regard for the actual terms used by the subject. In American English (L&B), for example, k-means analysis showed that cyan and turquoise were synonymous with teal. The same analysis also revealed that tan has two meanings in American English; some subjects used it to name greenish-brown colors, which k-means analysis assigned to the olive English color category. Other subjects used tan to name light,", + " pale pinkish-orange colors, and these feature vectors were assigned to the beige category. As we show later, the Japanese color lexicon also contains chromatic synonyms and homonyms.\n\nL,opt without additional analysis. For this purpose, we relied on the gap statistic of Tibshirani, Walther, Hastie ( L,opt for a reference distribution is 1. Thus, as the value of k increases from 1 to k L,opt, the tightness of clustering of the data is expected to improve relative to that obtained from k-means clustering of the reference null distributions. Beyond k L,opt, increasing k should not lead to any further improvement in the relative tightness of clustering.", + " We express this result with the gap statistic G(k) (see L&B, equation 2): G(k) \u2265 0.0, 2 \u2264 k \u2264 k L,opt. A step-by-step computational framework for gap-statistic analysis is given by Tibshirani et al. ( By design, the k-means algorithm will produce a cluster solution for any predetermined number of clusters k from 1 to the total number N of feature vectors being sorted. Thus, k-means cannot estimate kwithout additional analysis. For this purpose, we relied on the gap statistic of Tibshirani, Walther, Hastie ( 2001 ). First we performed k-means analyses for values of k from 1 to 25.", + " Then, following the computational framework of Tibshirani et al., we performed gap-statistic analysis on these 25 separate cluster results by comparing, for each value of k, the tightness of clustering of the data to the tightness obtained by k-means clustering (using the same value of k) of reference null distributions derived from the data, as described later. By design, the expected value of kfor a reference distribution is 1. Thus, as the value of k increases from 1 to k, the tightness of clustering of the data is expected to improve relative to that obtained from k-means clustering of the reference null distributions.", + " Beyond k, increasing k should not lead to any further improvement in the relative tightness of clustering. We express this result with the gap statistic G(k) (see L&B, equation 2): G(k) \u2265 0.0, 2 \u2264 k \u2264 k. A step-by-step computational framework for gap-statistic analysis is given by Tibshirani et al. ( 2001, pp. 414\u2013415). See L&B (pp. 11\u201314) for additional details regarding our particular implementation of k-means/gap-statistic analysis.\n\n2009, A somewhat subjective aspect of our methodology involved the algorithm for creating suitable reference null distributions for the gap-statistic analysis.", + " For the present study, we adopted the algorithm used by Lindsey and Brown ( 2006 2014 ), which is similar to one used by Kay and Regier (2003) in their analysis of color-naming centroids obtained from the data of WCS informants. To create a reference null distribution, each informant's raw chromatic color terms were first arranged in a 40 \u00d7 8 matrix according to the informant's responses to the 40 Munsell hues \u00d7 8 Munsell lightnesses of the chromatic samples used in our study. We then circularly shifted the elements of each informant's matrix by a random number of columns on the \u201ccylindrical\u201d surface of the WCS color space (shifting in the hue dimension)", + " and then randomly reflected the rows of the resulting matrix (flipped the matrix vertically, corresponding to the lightness dimension) either zero times or one time. The resulting matrix was then decomposed into the appropriate feature vectors, as outlined earlier, based on the new mapping of color terms onto the WCS colors. In this way, our reference null distributions preserved much of the basic structure of patterns of Japanese color-term deployment\u2014for example, the sizes and shapes of the patterns\u2014while randomizing their locations within the 2-D hue/lightness coordinate frame of the WCS color chart. In this way, we obtained reference distributions with expected numbers of clusters of 1.\n\nL,opt.", + " Our conclusions regarding the size and structure of the Japanese color lexicon were based on the modal value of this histogram ( L&B noted some variation in the solutions produced from run to run in their k-means/gap-statistic analysis of the American English lexicon. Therefore, following their approach, we performed 1,000 different k-means/gap-statistic analyses, as described earlier (see Figure 4 ). The results of this procedure were compiled into a histogram of 1,000 resulting estimates of k. Our conclusions regarding the size and structure of the Japanese color lexicon were based on the modal value of this histogram ( Figure 4,", + " inset). As we show later, the first step in our analysis of Japanese color naming revealed 16 distinct clusters of chromatic color-term deployment.\n\nIn this approach, the color samples associated with the feature vectors assigned to each of the 16 clusters define the extensions of 16 chromatic color categories in color space. These collections of color samples can also be compiled and displayed as consensus plots (e.g., Figure 5 ) representing the color categories. Moreover, the feature-vector clusters can be given names, and thus may be used as a glossary for evaluating the diversity of color terms deployed by informants. We chose common Japanese color terms as names for each of the clusters:", + " aka (red), ao (blue), ki (yellow), and so on (see later for details). The samples contained in the clusters and the most frequent color terms associated with them thus form a glossary for classifying, within the context of our cluster analysis, all the different terms used by Japanese subjects. For example, if the feature vector for the color term moegi, as deployed by a particular informant, falls into the midori (green) cluster, then we say that \u201cmoegi glosses to midori.\u201d\n\nTo obtain the full Japanese glossary, we added three achromatic categories to the 16 chromatic categories determined by cluster analysis.", + " The achromatic categories were defined a priori in the follow way: The Japanese white category was defined as the set of samples (for that subject) that included the lightest among the achromatic WCS colors. Black was defined as the set of colors that included the darkest achromatic sample, and gray was defined as the set of color samples that included one or more of the remaining eight achromatic samples that were neither white nor black.\n\nWe next performed a second k-means/gap-statistic analysis to determine k M,opt, the number of statistically significant motifs in the Japanese color lexicon, and the structures of these motifs. Our conclusions were based on clustering 57 motif feature vectors,", + " each vector representing all 330 color-naming responses of a single Japanese subject. Each feature vector comprised 19 elements corresponding to the 19 color categories derived from the first step of our analysis: the 16 glossed chromatic categories (derived from the first cluster analysis) plus the three defined achromatic color categories. Each of the 19 elements was assigned a value between 0.0 and 1.0, which was the proportion of samples (out of 330 WCS samples) a given subject named with the glossed color term. For example, if the subject used the word aka to name three samples, the value of the aka element in that subject's motif feature vector would receive the number 3/", + "330 = 0.0091. The 57 feature vectors were then sorted into k clusters using the kmeans(.) MATLAB function. Gap-statistic analysis was used to determine k M,opt based on k-means results obtained for k = 1, \u2026, 5.\n\nM,opt for the second step of our analysis, the gap-statistic analysis was based on motif reference null distributions created by randomization of each of the 57 subject motif feature vectors. Randomization was accomplished by random permutation (scrambling the order) of the 19 values in each subject's motif feature vector. Our final estimate of the motifs in the Japanese color lexicon was based on the modal result from 1,", + "000 separate k-means/gap-statistic analyses. Further details are given by L&B (pp. 14\u201317). We obtained identical results from each of these 1,000 analyses. Subjects' glossed color-naming patterns were then compiled within motifs, and aggregate results were displayed as consensus diagrams (e.g., To determine kfor the second step of our analysis, the gap-statistic analysis was based on motif reference null distributions created by randomization of each of the 57 subject motif feature vectors. Randomization was accomplished by random permutation (scrambling the order) of the 19 values in each subject's motif feature vector.", + " Our final estimate of the motifs in the Japanese color lexicon was based on the modal result from 1,000 separate k-means/gap-statistic analyses. Further details are given by L&B (pp. 14\u201317). We obtained identical results from each of these 1,000 analyses. Subjects' glossed color-naming patterns were then compiled within motifs, and aggregate results were displayed as consensus diagrams (e.g., Figure 6 ).\n\nResults\n\nDescriptive statistics\n\nThe 57 Japanese subjects used a total of 93 unique color terms. L&B's 51 English-speaking subjects used 122 unique terms. We compared the two studies based on equal numbers of subjects by calculating the average number of color terms (and 95%", + " confidence interval) from 10,000 random N = 51 samples of our 57 Japanese subjects. The simulation yielded a value of 88.6 (95% CI [67, 93]) unique words per 51 Japanese subjects. In an effort to control for idiosyncratic responses, L&B also determined that 43 terms were used by four or more of their 51 subjects. In the present study, 32 terms were used by four or more of the 57 Japanese subjects, with an average of 30.4 (95% CI [28, 32]) terms per 51 subjects. U&B's 10 Japanese subjects used a total of 66 unique terms,", + " a value that falls within the range of our simulations (10,000 random N = 10 samples of 57 Japanese subjects), which yielded an average of 43 (95% CI [25, 72]) terms per 10 subjects. Thus, Japanese subjects in the present study used slightly fewer terms than were used by L&B's American subjects, but their color-term usage falls in line with that of U&B's Japanese subjects.\n\nA histogram of color-term usage by four or more subjects in our study is shown in Figure 1 Table 1 shows the number of subjects who used each color term (words in parentheses show direct English translations)", + " and the number of samples receiving each color term. Japanese equivalents of all of Berlin and Kay's ( 1969 ) BCTs were used by all 57 informants, with the exception of orange, pink, kuro (black), and hai (gray). Orange (n = 56) and pink (n = 55) have all but replaced the traditional Japanese terms daidai and momo, respectively. Kuro was used by 53 subjects, the remaining four subjects preferring instead terms meaning gray: nezumi, hai, and/or gray. Hai was used by 52 subjects; the remaining five subjects used gray instead.", + " Mizu (light blue; n = 55) and to a lesser extent hada (skin tone; n = 48) complete the inventory of terms used by a large majority of our Japanese subjects.\n\nTable 1 View Table Table 1\n\nAll subjects in the present study used 11 or more color terms ( Figure 2 ). The mean number of unique terms per subject was 17.68 \u00b1 6.7 (mode = 16). This number was smaller than the average 21.9 (mode = 19) color terms found in L&B's study of American English speakers.\n\nRank-order analysis\n\nMany investigators have observed that frequency of word usage often obeys a power law:", + " It falls on a straight line in log-log coordinates when plotted as a function of the rank order of word usage (Mitzenmacher, 2003 ). Figure 3 shows a log-log plot of the number of subjects who used each color term (the popularity of the color term) versus the rank order of that term's popularity. The flat part on the top, plotted with triangles, represents color terms that were used with very high consensus, while the steeply sloped distribution plotted with circles represents color terms used with lower consensus. Twelve color terms\u2014the 11 BCTs plus mizu (light blue)\u2014were used by >89%", + " of informants. On the falling limb, there is a gap between hada (skin tone) and oudo (light brown), and a larger gap between oudo and the next most popular term, kon (dark blue). U&B discussed mizu and hada as possible BCTs, and we consider them further later. U&B also suggested kusa (yellow-green) as another candidate BCT, but kusa was used by few informants (n = 3) in the present study.\n\nThis pattern of color-term popularity in Figure 3 differs slightly from what L&B found for the American English lexicon. Their raw data were best fitted with three straight-line segments,", + " which suggested three domains of American English color-term usage: a horizontal segment corresponding to highly popular BCTs, a modestly negatively sloping line segment corresponding to popular but emerging BCTs, and a steeply negatively sloping segment representing low-popularity nonbasic color terms. In contrast, the present data were fitted with only two segments, suggesting a set of established BCTs (the 11 BCTs of B&K plus mizu), followed by a steeply declining segment for nonbasic terms. Particularly, hada fell on this declining segment.\n\nJapanese color glosses\n\nL,opt as determined by the gap statistic (see L&B,", + " equations 1\u20133); choosing the modal value of k L,opt for this distribution yielded k L,opt = 16. After excluding achromatic colors, 828 vectors derived from all 57 subjects' color-term responses were used for k-means and gap-statistic analyses. Figure 4 shows the results of gap-statistic calculations for k = 2, \u2026, 25, with 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations for each value of k. There is some variation in the gap-statistic analyses, because variations in the sums of squared intracluster distances were associated with slightly varying k-means solutions for the data and the reference data sets.", + " The consistency and stability of k-means solutions are discussed in 1. The inset histogram shows the frequency of kas determined by the gap statistic (see L&B, equations 1\u20133); choosing the modal value of kfor this distribution yielded k= 16.\n\nConsensus maps for the 16 chromatic categories that were derived from our cluster analysis are shown in Figure 5, which are identified by their Japanese terms in the present study and their corresponding English color terms from L&B where possible. These maps were generated by element-wise summation of the binary vectors across subjects for each category, followed by scalar division by the maximum element for that category.", + " The first eight of these consensus maps (left two columns) correspond to the eight universal chromatic color categories of Berlin and Kay (Kay et al., 2009 ; Lindsey & Brown, 2006 ): aka (red), ki (yellow), midori (green), ao (blue), pink, orange, cha (brown), and murasaki (purple), all of which (except for ao) are similar in location and extent to their American English counterparts (see Discussion for further details). The right two columns show eight additional color categories\u2014mizu (light blue), hada (skin tone), oudo (light brown), kon (dark blue), cream,", + " matcha (yellowish green), enji (maroon/burgundy), and yamabuki (gold 1 )\u2014many of which also have similar representations in American English. By adding three achromatic color terms, which gloss to black, white, and gray, the optimal number of categorical color terms in Japanese was 19.\n\nFigure 3B shows a log-log plot of the popularity of the glossed color terms, sorted by rank. This plot is quite similar to the corresponding plot of raw color-term usage in Figure 3A, with one curiosity: In the glossed-usage rank plot, the ao category is used by only 56 subjects,", + " whereas the mizu category is used by all 57 informants; this is reversed in the raw rank-usage plot, where all 57 subjects used ao while only 55 used mizu. This occurred because one informant used ao to name all the bluish samples, and the k-means algorithm assigned this ao feature vector to the mizu cluster. Additionally, one subject used the mizu synonym sora (sky) exclusively; k-means glossed this to the mizu cluster.\n\nThe Japanese color motifs\n\nMotif analysis revealed two statistically significant motifs, shown in Figure 6. Median percentages of samples associated with each glossed term and the centroids for each corresponding category (in WCS coordinates)", + " are tabulated in Appendix B. Inspection of the consensus maps for these two motifs and the distribution of the glossed color terms used by a plurality of subjects reveals little difference between them, except in the extensions of the mizu (light blue) and hada (skin tone) categories across the WCS color chart (arrows). Kay et al. ( 2009 ) suggest a threshold of 80% or greater consensus for terms to be candidates for basicness in any particular language. That threshold is achieved for 12 of the 19 Japanese color categories (16 chromatic plus three achromatic) derived from our cluster analysis of the raw Japanese color-naming data.", + " Ten of these conform closely to the corresponding English BCTs: kuro/black, shiro/white, hai/gray, aka/red, ki/yellow, midori/green, pink/pink, orange/orange, cha/brown, and murasaki/purple. The eleventh, ao/blue, deviates from American English in that the English blue covers all shades of light and dark blue, whereas ao generally means medium to dark blue. The twelfth Japanese color category, mizu (light blue), does not have an equivalent category in American English, and represents a fundamental difference between it and the Japanese language in the lexical representation of color.\n\nThere was no difference in age between the members of the first and second motifs\u2014t(", + "55) = 0.669, p = 0.506\u2014which is not surprising considering the narrow overall range of informant ages. There was only a nonsignificant trend for the first motif to contain more male data sets and the second motif to contain more female data sets (p = 0.061, two tailed, on Fisher's exact test).\n\nThe existence of two motifs among speakers of modern Japanese adds to the growing body of evidence for diversity in color idiolects within the language communities of modern industrialized societies. This diversity is not arbitrary: It is structured in such a way that a few motifs are used, each with a relatively high consensus,", + " by different subpopulations of a language community. It is our view that this diversity is essential for the evolution of color lexicons: The number of BCTs in a language increases as more and more members of a language community adopt a motif that is a variant of the existing lexicon but that contains more color terms. Our cluster/gap-statistic analysis of modern Japanese provides a snapshot of this process at one point in time.\n\nDiscussion\n\nThis study investigated the characteristics, statistics, and evolution of the Japanese color language. We used color-term usage frequency and k-means clustering with gap-statistic analysis to determine the number of basic and salient color categories in Japanese.", + " We discovered two distinct motifs in Japanese color naming, which were distinguished primarily by usage of mizu. Finally, we compared Japanese and American English color categories using separate and combined k-means analyses. We add correlation analysis and group mutual information later.\n\nThe evolution of Japanese color-term usage\n\nA primary goal of this project was to determine whether the Japanese color lexicon had changed significantly in the 30 years since U&B's study. Although U&B and the present study used somewhat different palettes of color samples, certain trends are clear: Most color terms have changed little, but mizu has probably become a BCT, and a few nonbasic colors are named with new terms.\n\nIn general,", + " the raw color-naming data in the two studies show similar results. The terms for most Japanese basic color categories have not changed: Aka, ki, midori, ao, pink/momo, orange/daidai, cha, and murasaki still correspond to red, yellow, green, blue, pink, orange, brown, and purple, and the achromatic color terms kuro, shiro, and hai still correspond to black, white, and gray. Also, the nonbasic terms hada, oudo, yamabuki, and cream were all used similarly and with relatively high consensus, both here and in U&B.", + " The use of the English loanwords pink, orange, and gray instead of the traditional Japanese terms momo, daidai, and hai, respectively, remains unchanged. Thus, at this level of analysis, the Japanese color lexicon has evidently changed little since U&B's study.\n\nHowever, our results diverge from those of U&B in the usage of the terms for blue (mizu, ao, and kon). U&B rejected mizu as a BCT, even though the maximum consensus for mizu was high (nine out of 10 subjects). They did so primarily because 77% of samples named mizu by some of their subjects were named ao (blue)", + " by other subjects. Their tabulated data also show that 80% of the samples called sora (sky) were sometimes called ao. This suggested that mizu and sora were subsets of ao, and therefore not BCTs.\n\nIn contrast, we argue that light blue is now a basic color category among speakers of Japanese, and mizu is now a BCT. First, like U&B, we find that almost all subjects used mizu. Of the 57 subjects in the present study, 54 used mizu to name two or more color samples, one named a single sample mizu, and one used sora,", + " a synonym for mizu, to name the light-blue samples. Thus, only a single subject out of 57 failed to use any distinct term for light blue. Second, mizu named a large, well-delineated, generally contiguous range of samples (about the same size as the pink category; see Figure 5 ). The set of all samples that were ever called mizu contained a nucleus of color samples for which mizu itself was the most frequent color term ( Figure 6A ). It also contained many samples that were called by other color terms by a majority of subjects ( Figure 7 ). Notice that, although sora was used infrequently in the present data set,", + " its distribution matched that of mizu almost exactly (black dots in Figure 7 ).\n\nThird, the present data set contains evidence that mizu is no longer a subset of ao (blue). To compare our results to those of U&B, we repeated their calculation of the fraction of samples called mizu or sora by some subjects that were called ao by others. To make our results comparable to the U&B results, we created 10,000 10-subject subsets of the 54 subjects who used mizu or sora to name two or more samples. In 68% of the 10-subject subsets, there was at least one color sample that was called mizu by all 10 subjects.", + " The blue histogram in Figure 8 shows the distribution of the results of our simulation. The median value of the distribution was 0.59 (blue arrow and blue-ringed dot), which fell below the 95% confidence intervals around U&B's values (mizu: [0.668, 0.851]; sora: [0.664, 0.885]; horizontal blue bars in Figure 8 ). Furthermore, U&B's values for mizu (0.77) and sora (0.80; solid blue dots in Figure 8 ) fell in the 96th and 98th percentiles of our distribution,", + " respectively. Thus, our results are statistically significantly below those of U&B in Figure 8\n\nAll these results agree with our motif analysis in suggesting that the Japanese language now includes a light blue color category. The results were identical (within rounding error) when we included only the mizu data (line histogram in Figure 8 ), suggesting that mizu is now a BCT in its own right. We propose that Japanese be added to the list of world languages that include a distinct BCT for light blue. In contrast to English, light blue has been reported to be a standard (perhaps basic) color term in some Indo-European languages\u2014Russian (Paramei,", + " 2005 ; Winawer et al., 2007 ), modern Greek (Androulaki et al., 2006 ; Thierry, Athanasopoulos, Wiggett, Dering, & Kuipers, 2009 ), Italian (Bimler & Uusk\u00fcla, 2014 ), some forms of Spanish (Bolton, 1978 ; Harkness, 1973 ), Nepali (Bolton, Curtis, & Thomas, 1980 ), and Farsi (Friedl, 1979 )\u2014as well as some non-Indo-European languages: Turkish (Ozgen & Davies,", + " 1998 ) and some forms of Arabic (Al-Rasheed, Al-Sharif, Thabit, Al-Mohimeed, & Davies, 2011 ; Borg, 2007 ).\n\nHistorical linguists (e.g., Stanlaw, 2010 ) often include the term kon (indigo) for dark blue among Japanese BCTs. Although kon is associated with one of the 16 chromatic categories derived by our cluster analysis, it was used by only 37% of subjects ( Figure 1 ), which is fewer subjects than those who used either mizu or hada. U&B did not consider kon to be a possible BCT,", + " because of all the color terms they listed, the consensus level for kon was the lowest (20%) and response time the second-longest (2.8 s). However, U&B's centroid for kon in the OSA color sample space was not included in our Munsell stimulus set, because it was substantially less saturated than our corresponding samples (conversion charts from Nickerson, 1978 ). Also, our kon centroid was both darker and bluer (less purple) than that of U&B. In a related analysis, Stanlaw ( 2010 ) suggested that kon may be a necessary element of the modern Japanese color lexicon,", + " and he reported that kon applies to blue samples that were very dark and somewhat desaturated. Thus, we tentatively agree with U&B that kon is not a BCT. However, we acknowledge that the best examples of kon may fall outside our test palette, so we cannot determine whether there has been a change in the status of kon over the last 30 years.\n\nTurning to other regions of the color chart, U&B compare their results for ao versus mizu to their data for momo/pink versus aka (red). Because only 60% of the samples called aka were also called momo or pink (solid red dot in Figure 8 ), U&B concluded that momo/pink,", + " unlike mizu, was a BCT. We performed a parallel analysis on the present data set, examining the data from those subjects who named two or more samples aka to determine what fraction of the aka samples were also called momo or pink. The median result from our 10,000 10-subject subsamples was 0.45 (red arrow and red-ringed dot), which fell below the 95% confidence interval around U&B's 0.60 [0.462, 0.724] (horizontal red bar in Figure 8 ), and U&B's value of 0.60 fell in the 99th percentile of our aka/pink distribution (red histogram in Figure 8 ). Thus,", + " the present data set suggests that the momo/pink color category now covers an even more distinct region in color space than it did in the U&B data set. Therefore, our results concur with theirs that momo/pink is indeed a distinct color category and therefore a BCT. For comparison to mizu/ao and aka/pink, Figure 8 (green histogram) also shows that midori is not a subset of ao in the present data set.\n\nThere are also some differences between U&B's data and the present data set in the words themselves: Few subjects in the present study used kusa (grass) to refer to yellow-green samples,", + " preferring instead the term matcha (ceremonial green tea). Also, azuki (red beans) is now more commonly called enji (maroon).\n\nIn a summary of his work with the OSA color set, Boynton ( 1997 ) speculated that there might be room for a new universal color category in the area variously called peach or tan in English. Like U&B, we find common use of hada (skin tone) to denote colors in this range, but our cluster analysis also found that some subjects used it to mean cream. In showing a bimodal distribution of deployment, hada is similar to tan in American English,", + " which some informants used to label pale-orange samples while others used it to label olive samples.\n\nHada is often used to name the foundations of Japanese cosmetics, and is probably more specific than flesh is in English, because the range of variation in the skin tone has been smaller in Japan for a long time. The frequency of hada usage observed in the present data set (48/57) is interesting because it indicates that hada is still in common use in everyday life, even after an educational campaign to discourage its use on social occasions because of possible racial connotations. In the present data set, hada was used nearly as frequently as the Japanese BCTs and mizu,", + " and our rank-order-statistic analysis ( Figure 2 ) suggests that its popularity is more in line with the BCTs than with the other nonbasic terms we encountered in our study. Future study of hada will reveal whether it continues to occur frequently.\n\nJapanese is not a grue language\n\n)\u201d (\u201causpicious blue, vermilion [red] clay\u201d) as a metaphorical, honorific reference to the capital city Nara (over a dozen poems, including poems 29, 128, 1046, which are available in translation [McCauley, The oldest surviving written records in the Japanese language of ordinary people are the Many\u014d-Sh\u016b poems,", + " which date from approximately 750 (original text: Frellesvig, Wright, Russell, & Sells, 2016 ; available in translation: McCauley, 2001a ; reviewed in English: Stanlaw, 2007 2010 ; Conlan, 2005 ). The color terms ao (blue) and midori (green) existed side by side in this early period, and their uses were not well distinguished. For example, in the Many\u014d-Sh\u016b poems, the color term awo (precursor to the modern ao) was sometimes used to name the colors of things that were clearly gray (a dappled gray horse [poem 136]), things that could be either green or blue (seaweed [poem 131]; mountains seen in the distance [poems 688,", + " 923, 2707]), or things that were clearly green (leaves [poems 16, 2177]; grass [poem 2540]). Awo was also used frequently in the phrase \u201c()\u201d (\u201causpicious blue, vermilion [red] clay\u201d) as a metaphorical, honorific reference to the capital city Nara (over a dozen poems, including poems 29, 128, 1046, which are available in translation [McCauley, 2001a ], and poem 328, which is most famous [Haitani, 2007 ]). Awo was also used for clouds (e.g., poem 3329;", + " Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai, 1965, pg. 311) which were probably intended to be blue rather than green. Midori was used less frequently in Old Japanese, but it too sometimes meant blue, sometimes green. In a poem dating from 1192, midori named the sky (midori-no-sora), which was clearly blue (McCauley, 2001b ), but in Many\u014d-Sh\u016b poems 2177 and 2540, midori named the color of summer leaves and grass, respectively, which were clearly green. Whereas ao continued to be used to name some green things as well as blue things,", + " and sometimes black and gray things as well, over the next centuries midori became restricted to green. During the Meiji era (1868\u20131912), ao generally came to mean blue rather than green (e.g., a poem by Wakayama Bokusui, translated by Rimer & Gessel, 2005, pg. 311), but in a holdover from its previous meanings, ao is still used today as the color of fresh green shoots and the green traffic light. Contrary to these specific instances where ao denotes certain green things, the present results and the results of other studies indicate that modern Japanese is not a grue language:", + " Like modern English, the usual word for blue (ao) covers only blue samples ( Figures 5 and 6, and the green histogram in Figure 8 ), and phrases like midori-no-sora sound strange to the modern ear. The modern Japanese use of ao to name certain specific green things is best attributed to custom and cultural connotation, perhaps analogous to the English use of blue to name the color of the blood of an aristocrat.\n\nIn an interesting parallel to the development of Japanese, Old English had both a term for grue (h\u0153wen) and a term for green (grene; reviewed by Biggam, 1997 ). H\u0153wen meant green,", + " blue, gray, and possibly purple (Clark Hall, 1916, pg. 144) among the common people, but it was restricted to blue among the educated elite. Bleu moved from Norman French into Middle English in the 13th century, replacing h\u0153wen and meaning only blue, whereas the meaning of grene changed little. In modern English, blue and green are distinct color terms. It is important to recognize, however, that Japanese and English lexical divisions of blues and greens have been changing more recently in different ways. For example, the basic Japanese color term mizu (light blue) has no common equivalent in American English (L&B), whereas Japanese lacks a term that is equivalent to teal,", + " a common American English color category that straddles the boundary between blue and green.\n\nComparison of Japanese and English color lexicons\n\nIt has long been known that the Japanese and English color-naming systems have similar structures (Berlin & Kay, 1969 ). Our cluster analysis confirms this basic result, although quantitative analysis of the clusters does reveal 16 chromatic clusters in Japanese, as compared to 17 in American English (L&B). Seven of the 16 Japanese clusters are similar to color categories in American English (L&B), as well as the universal color categories derived from the WCS by Lindsey and Brown ( 2006 2009 ). To quantify these similarities,", + " we computed correlation coefficients for the seven pairs of consensus maps for the Japanese/English clusters: aka/red, ki/yellow, midori/green, pink/pink, orange/orange, cha/brown, and murasaki/purple. All those correlation coefficients were >0.95. The correlation coefficient for the eighth pair, ao/blue, was only 0.79. This is not surprising given that lighter and less saturated colors in Japanese fall into the mizu category, which has no common English equivalent. Other highly correlated Japanese/English category pairs are enji/maroon (r = 0.91) and hada/", + "peach (r = 0.76). Consensus maps for other Japanese and American English color terms have a good deal of overlap but generally do not match as well as the pairs listed already. For example the correlation coefficients for matcha/olive and yamabuki/gold were both 0.65, which was only slightly higher than those for oudo/olive (0.52) and oudo/gold (0.57). Moreover, L&B did not find an American English term corresponding to kon (dark blue). Conversely, our analysis did not reveal any Japanese terms corresponding to American English teal, magenta,", + " lavender, or lime, which were derived by cluster analysis in L&B.\n\nThe present analysis indicates that there are two statistically significant color-naming systems, or motifs, in the Japanese language; and L&B revealed two motifs in American English. However, the motifs found in the two languages are clearly different. The Japanese motifs differ from each other mainly in the extension of mizu, while the American English motifs differ qualitatively, in that one contains high-consensus terms corresponding to the 11 universal color categories of Berlin and Kay while the other includes the high-consensus, nonbasic terms maroon and peach (equivalents of which are found in Japanese)", + " as well as teal and lavender (which have no Japanese equivalents).\n\nWe compared Japanese and English color lexicons in another way, by pooling the two data sets and clustering them simultaneously to reveal a single set of glossed color categories and a single set of motifs. Our first k-means cluster step revealed 11 glossed chromatic color categories that were similar to corresponding categories in both Japanese ( Figure 5 ) and American English (L&B, figure 9). These are the eight chromatic color terms of Berlin and Kay, plus hada/peach, matcha/olive, and enji/maroon ( Figure 9,", + " panels with both Japanese and English terms). It also revealed six glossed color categories that are well represented in one language but not the other (panels with single terms). Our second analysis revealed three motifs, all of which contained the eight universal chromatic color categories of Berlin and Kay plus black, white, and gray. The first of the three pooled motifs ( Figure 10A ) contained mainly English data sets and featured a robust representation of Berlin and Kay's universal color categories only. The second ( Figure 10B ) contained mainly Japanese data sets, and added high-consensus mizu to the universal color categories. The third motif, which contained mainly English data sets ( Figure 10C ), added the high-consensus English categories teal,", + " lavender, and peach.\n\nColor communication in Japanese and American English\n\nL,opt,Jap = 16; L,opt,Eng = 17; L&B, figure 3), as revealed by cluster analyses. Moreover, although these analyses revealed two motifs for both the Japanese and English lexicons, the English motifs were more distinct from each other than the Japanese motifs were, with the two Japanese motifs differing only in how far mizu extends across the color chart. These comparisons suggested that Japanese color naming might be more consistent across subjects than English color naming is. In the present study, Japanese subjects used fewer terms than the American subjects did in L&B,", + " and there was also one fewer lexical category in Japanese (k= 16; Figure 5 ) than in American English (k= 17; L&B, figure 3), as revealed by cluster analyses. Moreover, although these analyses revealed two motifs for both the Japanese and English lexicons, the English motifs were more distinct from each other than the Japanese motifs were, with the two Japanese motifs differing only in how far mizu extends across the color chart. These comparisons suggested that Japanese color naming might be more consistent across subjects than English color naming is.\n\nWe therefore compared color-naming consistency in Japanese and American English, using an information-theoretic metric for color communication\u2014group mutual information (GMI)\u2014described by Lindsey et al.", + " ( 2015 ). GMI quantifies information transfer (in bits) within a language community, based on each informant's color names for a standard set of colors. It differs from other metrics for consistency, such as consensus, because it takes into account both the agreement across subjects in the deployment of a given lexicon and the number of different lexical color categories, and the relative extents of these categories across the chosen color palette.\n\nL,opt. When the synonyms in both languages are consolidated by cluster analysis, the GMI for Japanese (2.28) is still higher than the GMI for American English (2.15). Thus, it appears that that Japanese color terms are deployed more consistently across individuals,", + " producing better GMI, even though Japanese speakers have one fewer salient color term than English speakers do. This trend is also reflected in the steepness of the line fitted to the second segment in the log-log plot of rank-order analysis ( The GMIs for Japanese and American English, calculated from the raw color-naming data for each language, were 2.04 and 1.83 bits, respectively. These GMIs are substantially lower than the 3.46 bits expected from Berlin and Kay's 11 BCTs when the corresponding color terms are deployed optimally and consensus across speakers is perfect (Lindsey et al., 2015 ). If we were to assume that all 32 terms deployed by four or more Japanese subjects were deployed optimally and with perfect consensus,", + " then the GMI would be 5.0 bits. The differences between optimal and measured GMI reflect diversity across individuals in the number of named color categories, the choice of color terms, and the locations and sizes of these categories within color space. We also calculated the GMIs for Japanese and American English based on the glossed color-category clusters at their respective values of k. When the synonyms in both languages are consolidated by cluster analysis, the GMI for Japanese (2.28) is still higher than the GMI for American English (2.15). Thus, it appears that that Japanese color terms are deployed more consistently across individuals,", + " producing better GMI, even though Japanese speakers have one fewer salient color term than English speakers do. This trend is also reflected in the steepness of the line fitted to the second segment in the log-log plot of rank-order analysis ( Figure 3A ). Based upon these results, we hypothesize that Japanese speakers are more efficient at color communication than speakers of American English.\n\nSummary\n\nWe studied color naming in 57 native Japanese-speaking subjects using a diverse palette of 330 Munsell color samples that was used previously in the World Color Survey and in a recent study of American English (Lindsey & Brown, 2014 ). Japanese subjects used a total of 93 terms to name the color samples.", + " Thirty-two of these terms were used by four or more subjects. Our k-means/gap-statistic analyses suggest that there are no more than about 19 distinct lexical color categories in the Japanese language.\n\nComparison of the present results with those of a prior study by Uchikawa and Boynton ( 1987 ) revealed substantial similarities between the two studies. However, there were also differences, which suggested that the Japanese color lexicon has changed somewhat in the last 30 years. Notably, mizu (light blue) is likely emerging as a new basic color term. Kon (dark blue) appears more often and kusa (yellow-green)", + " less often here than in that study. It is important to keep in mind that the two studies used different color palettes, and this may account for some of the differences in results between them.\n\nComparison between the Japanese and American English color lexicons revealed significant similarities as well as differences between the two languages. Our k-means analysis showed that consensus maps for the eight chromatic basic color terms of Berlin and Kay (red, yellow, green, blue, pink, orange, brown, and purple) were strikingly similar across the two languages, with the exception of blue, which is truncated in extent in Japanese by the presence of mizu (light blue)", + " and kon (dark blue). Consensus maps for the minority color categories were less well correlated across the two languages. Moreover, some categories present in one language (mizu, kon, lavender, teal, magenta, and lime) were not present in the other language.\n\nCluster analysis revealed two motifs both in Japanese and in American English. The two Japanese motifs differed only in how many light blue samples were called mizu, whereas the American English motifs reported by Lindsey and Brown ( 2014 ) were distinguished by the use of teal, lavender, peach, and magenta in one motif but not the other. Here we found no evidence in either the raw color-naming data or the results of our cluster analysis for the premodern usage of ao as a grue (green-or-blue)", + " color term.\n\nInformation-theoretic analyses based on group mutual information reveal greater consistency in color naming across Japanese subjects as compared to American English subjects, regardless of whether the raw terms or k L,opt glossed terms were used in the analysis.\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nThis work was supported by a Cooperative Research Project (International type; No. H26/A25) of the Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University to KU, JSPS KAKENHI No. JP15H03460 to IK, and NSF BCS-1152841 to DTL. We thank Moe Seto for assistance in collecting data at Tohoku University.\n\nCommercial relationships:", + " none.\n\nCorresponding author: Ichiro Kuriki.\n\nAddress: Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.\n\nReferences\n\nAl-Rasheed, A., Al-Sharif, H. 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The Columbia anthology of modern Japanese literature. Vol. I: From restoration to occupation, 1868\u20131945. New York: Columbia University Press. Roberson, D., Davidoff, J., Davies, I. R., & Shapiro, L. R. (2006). Colour categories and category acquisition in Himba and English.", + " Progress in Colour Studies, 2, 159\u2013172. Stanlaw, J. (2007). Japanese color terms, from 400 CE to the present: Literature, orthography, and language contact in light of current cognitive theory. In MacLaury, R. Paramei, G. V. & Dedrick D. (Eds.), Anthropology of color: Interdisciplinary multilevel modeling (pp. 295\u2013318). Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Benjamins. Stanlaw, J. (2010). Language, contact, and vantages: Fifteen hundred years of Japanese color terms. Language Sciences,", + " 32 (2), 196\u2013224. Thierry, G., Athanasopoulos, P., Wiggett, A., Dering, B., & Kuipers, J.-R. (2009). Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on preattentive color perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 106 (11), 4567\u20134570. Tibshirani, R., Walther, G., & Hastie, T. (2001). Estimating the number of clusters in a data set via the gap statistic. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology), 63 (2), 411\u2013423.", + " Uchikawa, K., & Boynton, R. M. (1987). Categorical color perception of Japanese observers: Comparison with that of Americans. Vision Research, 27 (10), 1825\u20131833. Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 104, 7780\u20137785. Yang, J., Kanazawa, S., Yamaguchi,", + " M. K., & Kuriki, I. (2016). Cortical response to categorical color perception in infants investigated by near-infrared spectroscopy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 113, 2370\u20132375.\n\nHere, gold is the English term for a golden color; it should not be confused with the surface appearance of the precious metal.\n\nij be the number of times sample i is assigned to cluster j in N k-means runs. Assume i is assigned to a total of q i different clusters in N runs. It follows that a ij /N are frequencies of assignment and \u03a3a ij /N = 1.", + "0. Thus, if we calculate CI(i) as the average frequency of cluster assignment across q i clusters, CI(i) = (\u03a3a ij /N)/q i = 1/q i. Let abe the number of times sample i is assigned to cluster j in N k-means runs. Assume i is assigned to a total of qdifferent clusters in N runs. It follows that a/N are frequencies of assignment and \u03a3a/N = 1.0. Thus, if we calculate CI(i) as the average frequency of cluster assignment across qclusters, CI(i) = (\u03a3a/N)/q= 1/q\n\nAppendix A:", + " Stability of k-means solutions\n\nIt is known that k-means clustering can yield somewhat different solutions across runs, since k-means is an iterative algorithm designed to minimize the sums of total within-cluster differences across k clusters. Each k-means iteration begins with a set of k randomly assigned centroids, and different initial centroids can lead to solutions that are influenced by minimization of within-cluster differences around different local minima, especially when data sets are not particularly large.\n\nThe k-means analysis described in the main text revealed a specific set of 16 chromatic categories. It is natural to ask whether we would have obtained a substantially different set of chromatic categories on a different repetition of our k-means analysis of the Japanese color lexicon.", + " In this appendix, we describe an examination of the consistency and stability of k-means clusterings of our color-naming data across multiple k-means runs.\n\nWe defined a consistency index CI k, which specified the consistency with which, for a given value of k, the k-means algorithm assigned each of the 320 chromatic samples to the same cluster across n = 100 runs of the algorithm. Each run consisted of 100 repetitions of k-means clustering, and the solution for that run was the repetition that produced the tightest cluster result, as determined by the sums of squared intracluster distances.\n\nTo evaluate the consistency of solutions across runs,", + " each cluster in a given run was first uniquely \u201cmatched\u201d to a single cluster in each of the other runs. Matching was accomplished by sorting the clusters in each solution by the number of color samples in each cluster, together with the correlation coefficients between cluster vectors across runs. In this way, a cluster identified with a particular gloss (say, for example, red) in a given solution was uniquely matched with one cluster in each of the other solutions that also corresponded to that gloss, or to the cluster with which it was most similar.\n\nk was based on the frequencies with which the ith chromatic sample c(i) was assigned to the k matched and nonmatched clusters,", + " across the 100 k-means runs. Thus, if c(i) were always assigned to, say, the red cluster, then CI k (i) would be 1.0. In general, if c(i) were assigned to q i different clusters across the 100 k-means runs, then the average frequency in the assignment of c(i) across the q i clusters is just k is then the average of CI k (i) calculated for i = 1, \u2026, 320 chromatic samples: CIwas based on the frequencies with which the ith chromatic sample c(i) was assigned to the k matched and nonmatched clusters,", + " across the 100 k-means runs. Thus, if c(i) were always assigned to, say, the red cluster, then CI(i) would be 1.0. In general, if c(i) were assigned to qdifferent clusters across the 100 k-means runs, then the average frequency in the assignment of c(i) across the qclusters is just 2 CIis then the average of CI(i) calculated for i = 1, \u2026, 320 chromatic samples: It is important to recognize that inconsistency does not generally occur at the level of the individual color sample. Instead, it appears when groups of color samples associated with individual color terms are assigned to different categories from one run to the next.", + " This variation is due to variation in the random assignments of centroids at the start of each invocation of the k-means clustering algorithm. Figure A1B shows the results for the k-means solutions at k = 5, which gave the lowest CI in our analysis (see later). The inconsistencies at k = 5 appear in the form of large contiguous regions of the color chart where color samples have been assigned with somewhat low consistency; otherwise, consistency is uniformly at or near 1.0.\n\nThe process of computing CI k for 100 k-means runs was repeated 1,000 times, and the means and 95% confidence intervals were obtained for each value of k.\n\nThe results of average consistency for k = 2,", + " \u2026, 16 are plotted in Figure A1B. The horizontal axis shows the number of clusters k, and the vertical axis shows the consistency index, averaged across repetitions. The consistency of clusters across runs was high for k from 8 (which gives us 11 color categories) through 16 (the optimum number of categories revealed by our gap-statistic analysis). The consistency drops at k = 4, 5, 6, and 7, with a minimum at k = 5, but the lower 95% confidence interval around the mean consistency index was above 0.9 otherwise, even out to and including k = 16,", + " which we determined to be optimal based on our gap-statistic analysis.\n\nAppendix B View Table Appendix B\n\nAppendix B View Table Appendix B\n" + ], + "length": 17398, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 47, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The latest addition of 1,500 US troops to Iraq \"signals a new phase\" in the fight against ISIS (or ISIL, or Islamic State), but not one that includes Americans engaging in combat, President Obama says in a wide-ranging discussion with Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation, CBS News reports. \"The airstrikes have been very effective in degrading ISIL's capabilities and slowing the advance that they were making,\" he explains. \"Now what we need is ground troops, Iraqi ground troops, that can start pushing them back.\" American troops will only help by training Iraqi soldiers at four training centers, he says, and won't work in coalition with Iranians also fighting ISIS in Iraq. On that and other topics: \"There is some de-conflicting,\" says Obama about Iran, \"in the sense that since they have some troops or militias they control in and around Baghdad, yeah, we let them know, 'Don't mess with us. We're not here to mess with you. We're focused on our common enemy.'\" Obama implies that a post-election Cabinet shuffle may happen. \"There are always going to be changes,\" he says. \"We will be bringing in new folks here because people get tired. You know, it's a hard job.\" When Schieffer suggests that Obama doesn't seem to love politics, the president says, \"Here's, I think, a fair statement: If your name is Barack Hussein Obama, you had to have liked politics in order to get into this office.\" On immigration, he still welcomes action from Congress while warning that he may act on his own, Politico reports. He gives John Boehner until year's end to facilitate a bill, but then \"I'm going to have to take the steps that I can to improve the system. Every day that I wait we're misallocating resources, we're deporting people that shouldn't be deported, we're not deporting folks that are dangerous and need to be deported.\" On Syria: It's an \"almost absolute certainty\" that President Bashar al-Assad has no legitimacy left and must resign, CNN quotes Obama as saying\u2014but US military action remains off the table. \"We do want to see a political settlement inside of Syria. \u2026 We can't solve that militarily, nor are we trying to.\" See a full transcript of the interview at CBS News.\n", + "docs": [ + "The decision to nearly double the number of American advisers deployed to Iraq \"signals a new phase\" in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, or ISIL), President Obama said Sunday, but U.S. troops will still stay out of combat operations.\n\nMr. Obama sat down for a wide-ranging interview with CBS' News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer on the 60th Anniversary of \"Face the Nation.\"\n\n\"Rather than just try to halt ISIL's momentum, we're now in a position to start going on some offense. The airstrikes have been very effective in degrading ISIL's capabilities and slowing the advance that they were making.", + " Now what we need is ground troops, Iraqi ground troops, that can start pushing them back,\" Mr. Obama said. \"What hasn't changed is our troops are not going to be engaged in combat.\"\n\nInstead, he explained, the new deployment of up to 1,500 soldiers will work at four training centers with members of the U.S.-led coalition to train Iraqi soldiers and assist them with the strategy and logistics to fight ISIS on the ground. When they begin to go on the offense against ISIS, the U.S. will provide close air support.\n\nHe said U.S. commanders have said that there will be fewer troops over time,", + " not, less, as coalition members begin to help with the train and assist effort for local forces.\n\nThe Midterm Elections\n\n\"We got beat,\" Mr. Obama said of last week's midterm elections that saw Republicans take control of the Senate.\n\nThe president's low approval rating, hovering around 40 percent, is seen as part of the reason Republicans were so successful on Election Night and now control both the House and the Senate.\n\n\"Whenever, as the head of the party, it doesn't do well, I've got to take responsibility for it,\" Mr. Obama said. \"The message that I took from this election, and we've seen this in a number of elections,", + " successive elections, is people want to see this city work. And they feel as if it's not working.\"\n\nHe defended parts of his record, arguing that the economy has improved with more than 200,000 jobs created in October and a fast-declining unemployment rate. Still, he said, people are frustrated that their wages haven't gone up and it's difficult to save for retirement or college educations.\n\n\"They see Washington gridlocked and they're frustrated. And they know one person in Washington and that's the president of the United States. So I've got to make this city work better for them,\" he concluded.\n\nSchieffer noted that Mr.", + " Obama does not seem to share the same zest for politics as previous presidents like Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and others, and asked whether he even liked politics.\n\n\"I love this job,\" Mr. Obama said. \"Here's, I think, a fair statement: If your name is Barack Hussein Obama, you had to have liked politics in order to get into this office... I got into politics because I believed I could make a difference, and I would not have been successful and would not be sitting at this desk every day if I didn't love politics.\"\n\nAs evidence, he pointed to the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act,", + " which, he said, would not have been possible \"if there wasn't a whole bunch of arm twisting.\" And making progress on cutting the deficit also required cutting deals with Republicans, he said.\n\nBut he said he has learned some lessons on the way.\n\n\"It's not enough just to build a better mousetrap. People don't automatically come beating to your door. We've got to sell it. We've got to reach out to the other side and, where possible, persuade,\" he said.\n\nDespite the difficulty of a long summer driven by a series of crises, from ISIS to another war in Gaza to the Ebola virus outbreak, Mr.", + " Obama said he believed things were worse when he first took office in 2009.\n\n\"It was worse, because the economy not just here in the United States but globally was in a freefall. I have great confidence in the American people and I have great confidence in this administration being able to work through and eventually solve problems. Sometimes we don't do it at the speed that keeps up with, you know, the press cycle,\" he said.\n\nHe said his administration has \"handled Ebola well\" and also said no one recalls the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico because \"we actually had a really effective response.\"\n\n\"When you solve the problem,", + " sometimes the cameras have gone away,\" he said.\n\nThe remainder of his presidency\n\nAlthough presidents sometimes use big political losses as a cue to shake up their administration, Mr. Obama suggested that a staff reorganization may not be the answer.\n\n\"There are always going to be changes,\" he said. \"We will be bringing in new folks here because people get tired. You know, it's a hard job. And what I've told everybody is...I want you to have as much enthusiasm and energy on the last day of this administration as you do right now or you did when you first started. Otherwise you shouldn't be here.\"\n\nAmong the potential new faces is Loretta Lynch,", + " the U.S. Attorney Mr. Obama nominated Saturday to replace Attorney General Eric Holder, who is stepping down after six years.\n\nBut he also said that he will be looking for other ways to operate in the final two years of his presidency.\n\n\"I think that what you'll see is a constant effort to improve the way we deliver service to customers...experimenting with ways that I can reach out to Republicans more effectively. Making sure that we're reaching out and using the private sector more effectively,\" he said.\n\nOne likely area of conflict with the GOP is on immigration, where Mr. Obama has said he is still committed to taking executive action despite warnings by the Republican leaders not to do so.", + " On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner said unilateral action by the president will \"poison the well\" for legislative action by Congress.\n\nMr. Obama that after the Senate passed a bipartisan overhaul of the nation's immigration laws last year, he gave Boehner time for the House to work on the issue as well - but said that he had the legal authority to make improvements if they did not.\n\nStill, he said there is a role for congressional action even if he does make unilateral changes to the system.\n\n\"Their time hasn't run out,\" he said. \"The minute they pass a bill that addresses the problems with immigration reform, I will sign it and it supersedes whatever actions I take.", + " And I'm encouraging them to do so,\" he said.\n\n\"If, in fact, a bill gets passed, nobody's going to be happier than me to sign it, because that means it will be permanent rather than temporary,\" he added.\n\nOutstanding foreign policy questions\n\nIn addition to domestic issues, Mr. Obama is still juggling several complicated issues overseas that will demand much of his attention in the next two years. Last week, it became public that he sent a letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in mid-October.\n\nMr. Obama would not address the letter, saying, \"I tend not to comment on any communications that I have with various leaders.\"\n\nHe did say he is still committed to the talks aimed at getting Iran to abandon their nuclear ambitions,", + " calling those negotiations \"significant\" and saying that Iran has so far abided by freezing their nuclear program.\n\n\"The question now is are we going to be able to close this final gap so that they can reenter the international community, sanctions can be slowly reduced and we have verifiable, lock-tight assurances that they can't develop a nuclear weapon. There's still a big gap. We may not be able to get there,\" Mr. Obama said.\n\nHe also said that the U.S. will not be \"connecting in any way\" the nuclear talks to the fight against ISIS, which Iran also views as an enemy because it is primarily a Sunni Muslim group.\n\n\"There is some de-conflicting,", + " in the sense that since they have some troops or militias they control in and around Baghdad, yeah, we let them know, 'Don't mess with us. We're not here to mess with you. We're focused on our common enemy,'\" he said. \"But there is no coordination or common battle plan and there will not be.\"\n\nOther issues like sponsoring terrorism and anti-Israel behavior will prevent the two countries from ever becoming \"true allies,\" he said.\n\nMr. Obama also said that the U.S. still believes that Syrian President Bashar Assad needs to step down from power, despite the complex politics in the country's civil war that have ISIS fighting against Assad.\n\n\"It is still our policy,", + " and it's an almost absolute certainty that he has lost legitimacy with such a large portion of the country by dropping barrel bombs and killing children and destroying villages that were defenseless, that he can't regain the kind of legitimacy that would stitch that country back together again,\" the president said. ", + " Obama: 'The buck stops right here'\n\nPresident Barack Obama is taking blame for the Democratic drubbing in last week\u2019s midterm elections, saying \u201cthe buck stops right here at my desk.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhenever, as the head of the party, it doesn\u2019t do well, I\u2019ve got to take responsibility for it,\u201d the president said in a wide-ranging interview aired Sunday on CBS\u2019s \u201cFace the Nation.\u201d\n\nStory Continued Below\n\nObama also said one lesson from the midterms was that his party has to do a better job selling its policies.\n\n(Also on POLITICO: Can D.C. get something done? Fat chance)\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve got to reach out to the other side and,", + " where possible, persuade,\u201d he told host Bob Schieffer in the interview taped Friday at the White House before he left on a week-long trip to Asia. \u201cI think there are times, there\u2019s no doubt about it, where, you know, I think we have not been successful in going out there and letting people know what it is that we\u2019re trying to do and why this is the right direction.\u201d\n\nIn the interview, Obama also discussed his pending executive order on immigration and his decision to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.\n\n(Also on POLITICO: Dems face long coal country exile)\n\nOn immigration, Obama delivered an ultimatum to House Speaker John Boehner:", + " Pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill by the end of the year or there will be an executive order \u2014 a step the Ohio Republican said would \u201cpoison the well\u201d for cooperation with Congress. The House is unlikely to pass an immigration bill before the new Congress is seated in January.\n\n\u201cJohn, I\u2019m going to give you some time, but if you can\u2019t get it done before the end of the year I\u2019m going to have to take the steps that I can to improve the system,\u201d Obama said. \u201cEvery day that I wait we\u2019re misallocating resources, we\u2019re deporting people that shouldn\u2019t be deported, we\u2019re not deporting folks that are dangerous and need to be deported.\u201d\n\nObama also said time hasn\u2019t run out for an immigration bill \u2014 and that legislation passed next year would supersede his executive order.\n\n(", + "Also on POLITICO: DWS pledges party review)\n\n\u201cIf, in fact, a bill gets passed, nobody\u2019s going to be happier than me to sign it because that means it will be permanent rather than temporary,\u201d Obama said. \u201cThey have the ability, the authority, the control to supersede anything I do through my executive authority by simply carrying out their functions over there. And if in fact it\u2019s true that they want to pass a bill, they\u2019ve got good ideas, nobody\u2019s stopping them.\u201d\n\nOn Iraq, Obama said his decision Friday to double the number of U.S. troops there to about 3,000 signaled a new,", + " offensive stage in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.\n\n\u201cPhase One was getting an Iraqi government that was inclusive and credible, and we now have done that,\u201d Obama said. \u201cSo, now what we\u2019ve done is rather than just try to halt ISIL\u2019s momentum, we\u2019re now in a position to start going on some offense.\u201d\n\nThe U.S. troops in Iraq would not be engaged in combat, he said, but would be training Iraqi recruits, giving them equipment and helping them with strategy, logistics and close air support.\n\n\u201cNow what we need is ground troops, Iraqi ground troops, that can start pushing [ISIL]", + " back,\u201d Obama said.\n\nThe president also said it remained U.S. policy that Syrian President Bashar Assad must go \u2014 but that the problem cannot be solved militarily.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s an almost absolute certainty that he has lost legitimacy with such a large portion of the country by dropping barrel bombs and killing children and destroying villages that were defenseless, that he can\u2019t regain the kind of legitimacy that would stitch that country back together again,\u201d Obama said.\n\n\u201cOur priority is to go after ISIL,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd so what we have said is that we are not engaging in a military action against the Syrian regime. We are going after ISIL facilities and personnel who are using Syria as a safe haven,", + " in service of our strategy in Iraq. We do want to see a political settlement inside of Syria \u2026 We can\u2019t solve that militarily, nor are we trying to.\u201c ", + " Story highlights Decision to send Iraq more trainers reflects new phase in ISIS fight, Obama says\n\n\"Now what we need is ground troops, Iraqi ground troops,\" Obama tells CBS\n\nObama on Iran's role in Iraq: \"Don't mess with us. We're not here to mess with you\"\n\nMore death in Syria as government bombs kill 21 in ISIS-controlled town\n\nThe decision to increase U.S. troop deployments to Iraq isn't a sign the U.S. strategy against ISIS is failing, but rather a signal the campaign is entering a new phase, President Barack Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday on the CBS news program \"Face the Nation.\"\n\nThe additional 1,", + "500 troops are being sent to help train Iraqi army soldiers and militia fighters to battle ISIS on the ground after weeks of U.S. and allied airstrikes.\n\n\"The airstrikes have been very effective in degrading ISIL's capabilities and slowing the advance that they were making,\" Obama told the show. \"Now what we need is ground troops, Iraqi ground troops, that can start pushing them back.\" ISIL is another acronym for ISIS.\n\nU.S. forces will not go into combat, Obama said, reiterating previous promises that there won't be a U.S. ground role in the fighting. But, he said, the United States will provide local troops with \"close air support\"", + " once they are ready to go on the offensive against ISIS.\n\nThe group has seized large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, rebranding itself the \"Islamic State\" as it seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate in the region.\n\nThe ISIS terror threat 51 photos The ISIS terror threat 51 photos An Iraqi soldier takes photos of the demolished tomb of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Sunday, March 15. The tomb in Tikrit, Iraq, was destroyed as Iraqi forces battled the ISIS militant group for control of the city. Hide Caption 1 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Smoke rises from the front line of a clash south of Kirkuk,", + " Iraq, on Saturday, March 14. Hide Caption 2 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos A group of Kurdish Peshmerga troops take a break from fighting ISIS militants south of Kirkuk on March 14. Hide Caption 3 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Iraqi security forces and allied Shiite militiamen gather in Tikrit on Friday, March 13. Ousting ISIS from Tikrit is important for the United States-led coalition trying to thwart the extremist group's quest to grow its caliphate. ISIS wants to create an Islamic state across Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria. Hide Caption 4 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos A motorcyclist passes destroyed buildings in the Syrian town of Kobani on Thursday,", + " March 12, after it has been freed from ISIS militants. Hide Caption 5 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Smoke billows after a mortar shell hit an Anbar governorate building in Ramadi, Iraq, on Wednesday, March 11. ISIS has launched a coordinated attack on government-held areas of the western Iraqi city. Ramadi has been the focus of a fierce ISIS assault since Iraqi forces made gains against the group in Tikrit. Hide Caption 6 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos The parents of 19-year-old Mohammed Musallam react at the family's home in the East Jerusalem Jewish settlement of Neve Yaakov on Tuesday,", + " March 10. ISIS released a video purportedly showing a young boy executing Musallam, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian descent who ISIS claimed infiltrated the group in Syria to spy for the Jewish state. Musallam's family told CNN that he had no ties with the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, and had, in fact, been recruited by ISIS. Hide Caption 7 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Iraqi Shiite fighters cover their ears as a rocket is launched during a clash with ISIS militants in the town of Al-Alam, Iraq, on Monday, March 9. Hide Caption 8 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Displaced Assyrian women who fled their homes due to ISIS attacks pray at a church on the outskirts of Damascus,", + " Syria, on Sunday, March 1. ISIS militants recently abducted at least 220 Assyrians in Syria. Hide Caption 9 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Safi al-Kasasbeh, right, receives condolences from tribal leaders at his home village near Karak, Jordan, on Wednesday, February 4. Al-Kasasbeh's son, Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh, was burned alive in a video that was recently released by ISIS militants. Jordan is one of a handful of Middle Eastern nations taking part in the U.S.-led military coalition against ISIS. Hide Caption 10 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani on Friday,", + " January 30, after the city had been liberated from the ISIS militant group. The Syrian city, also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September. Hide Caption 11 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Smoke billows in Kirkuk as Kurdish Peshmerga fighters take position against ISIS militants on January 30. Hide Caption 12 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Kurdish people celebrate in Suruc, Turkey, near the Turkish-Syrian border, after ISIS militants were expelled from Kobani on Tuesday, January 27. Hide Caption 13 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Collapsed buildings are seen in Kobani on January 27 after Kurdish forces took control of the town from ISIS.", + " Hide Caption 14 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Junko Ishido, mother of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, reacts during a news conference in Tokyo on Friday, January 23. ISIS would later kill Goto and another Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa. Hide Caption 15 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos ISIS militants are seen through a rifle's scope during clashes with Peshmerga fighters in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday, January 21. Hide Caption 16 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos An elderly Yazidi man arrives in Kirkuk after being released by ISIS on Saturday,", + " January 17. The militant group released about 200 Yazidis who were held captive for five months in Iraq. Almost all of the freed prisoners were in poor health and bore signs of abuse and neglect, Kurdish officials said. Hide Caption 17 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Smoke billows behind an ISIS sign during an Iraqi military operation to regain control of the town of Sadiyah, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on Tuesday, November 25. Hide Caption 18 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Fighters from the Free Syrian Army and the Kurdish People's Protection Units join forces to fight ISIS in Kobani on Wednesday,", + " November 19. Hide Caption 19 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos A picture taken from Turkey shows smoke rising after ISIS militants fired mortar shells toward an area controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters near Kobani on Monday, November 3. Hide Caption 20 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Iraqi special forces search a house in Jurf al-Sakhar, Iraq, on Thursday, October 30, after retaking the area from ISIS. Hide Caption 21 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday,", + " October 23. The United States and several Arab nations have been bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the militant group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters. Hide Caption 22 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos A U.S. Air Force plane flies above Kobani on Saturday, October 18. Hide Caption 23 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Heavy smoke rises in Kobani following an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on October 18. Hide Caption 24 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Cundi Minaz, a female Kurdish fighter, is buried in a cemetery in the southeastern Turkish town of Suruc on Tuesday,", + " October 14. Minaz was reportedly killed during clashes with ISIS militants in nearby Kobani. Hide Caption 25 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Turkish police officers secure a basketball stadium in Suruc on October 14. Some Syrian Kurds were held there after crossing from Syria into Turkey. Tens of thousands of people fled Kobani to escape ISIS. Hide Caption 26 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Kiymet Ergun, a Syrian Kurd, celebrates in Mursitpinar, Turkey, after an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Kobani on Monday, October 13.", + " Hide Caption 27 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Alleged ISIS militants stand next to an ISIS flag atop a hill in Kobani on Monday, October 6. Hide Caption 28 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos In this photo released by the U.S. Air Force on Saturday, October 4, a U.S. Navy jet is refueled in Iraqi airspace after conducting an airstrike against ISIS militants. Hide Caption 29 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos A Kurdish Peshmerga soldier who was wounded in a battle with ISIS is wheeled to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Duhuk,", + " Iraq, on Tuesday, September 30. Hide Caption 30 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Syrian Kurds wait near a border crossing in Suruc as they wait to return to their homes in Kobani on Sunday, September 28. Hide Caption 31 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Tomahawk missiles, intended for ISIS targets in Syria, fly above the Persian Gulf after being fired by the USS Philippine Sea in this image released by the U.S. Navy on Tuesday, September 23. Hide Caption 32 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Turkish Kurds clash with Turkish security forces during a protest near Suruc on Monday,", + " September 22. According to Time magazine, the protests were over Turkey's temporary decision to close the border with Syria. Hide Caption 33 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Syrian Kurds fleeing ISIS militants wait behind a fence in Suruc on Sunday, September 21. Hide Caption 34 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos A elderly man is carried after crossing the Syria-Turkey border near Suruc on Saturday, September 20. Hide Caption 35 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos A Kurdish Peshmerga fighter launches mortar shells toward ISIS militants in Zumar, Iraq, on Monday,", + " September 15. Hide Caption 36 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS militant positions from their position on the top of Mount Zardak, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 9. Hide Caption 37 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Iraqi volunteer fighters celebrate breaking the Amerli siege on Monday, September 1. ISIS militants had surrounded Amerli, 70 miles north of Baquba, Iraq, since mid-June. Hide Caption 38 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Kurdish Peshmergas fight to regain control of the town of Celavle,", + " in Iraq's Diyala province, on August 24. Hide Caption 39 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Peshmerga fighters stand guard at Mosul Dam in northern Iraq on Thursday, August 21. With the help of U.S. military airstrikes, Kurdish and Iraqi forces retook the dam from ISIS militants on August 18. A breach of the dam would have been catastrophic for millions of Iraqis who live downstream from it. Hide Caption 40 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Displaced Iraqis receive clothes from a charity at a refugee camp near Feeshkhabour, Iraq, on Tuesday,", + " August 19. Hide Caption 41 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Peshmerga fighters inspect the remains of a car that reportedly belonged to ISIS militants and was targeted by a U.S. airstrike in the village of Baqufa, north of Mosul, on August 18. Hide Caption 42 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS in Khazair, Iraq, on Thursday, August 14. Hide Caption 43 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and some other Yazidi people are flown to safety Monday,", + " August 11, after a dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar. A CNN crew was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. But only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. Hide Caption 44 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Thousands of Yazidis are escorted to safety by Kurdish Peshmerga forces and a People's Protection Unit in Mosul on Saturday, August 9. Hide Caption 45 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos A Baiji oil refinery burns after an alleged ISIS attack in northern Selahaddin,", + " Iraq, on Thursday, July 31. Hide Caption 46 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos A Syrian rebel fighter lies on a stretcher at a makeshift hospital in Douma, Syria, on Wednesday, July 9. He was reportedly injured while fighting ISIS militants. Hide Caption 47 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos New army recruits gather in Najaf, Iraq, on Wednesday, June 18, following a call for Iraqis to take up arms against Islamic militant fighters. Hide Caption 48 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Kurdish Peshmerga forces, along with Iraqi special forces,", + " deploy their troops and armored vehicles outside of Kirkuk, Iraq, on June 12. Hide Caption 49 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Children stand next to a burnt vehicle during clashes between Iraqi security forces and ISIS militants in Mosul on Tuesday, June 10. Hide Caption 50 of 51 The ISIS terror threat 51 photos Civilians from Mosul escape to a refugee camp near Irbil, Iraq, on June 10. Hide Caption 51 of 51 EXPAND GALLERY\n\nJust Watched U.S. airstrikes target ISIS leader replay More Videos... U.S. airstrikes target ISIS leader 02:36 PLAY VIDEO\n\nMore deaths in Syria\n\nObama's comments come amid continuing violence in Syria and Iraq,", + " much of it in areas controlled by ISIS.\n\nSyrian government helicopters dropped barrel bombs on the ISIS-controlled town of al-Bab on Sunday, killing at least 21 people, including a child, a London-based monitoring group said.\n\nAt least 100 people were wounded in the attack on the Aleppo suburb, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.\n\nThe ongoing violence in Syria, Obama told CBS, shows that \"it's an almost absolute certainty\" that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has lost legitimacy within Syria and must leave power if the country is to come together again.\n\nBut, he said, the U.S. priority for now is defeating ISIS,", + " not taking action against the Syrian regime.\n\n\"We do want to see a political settlement inside of Syria,\" Obama said. \"That's a long-term proposition. We can't solve that militarily, nor are we trying to.\"\n\nMeanwhile, in neighboring Iraq, no evidence had yet emerged to back up unconfirmed reports that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was wounded in airstrikes on a convoy near Mosul.\n\nA Pentagon spokesman confirmed the airstrikes Saturday, saying they had targeted \"what was assessed to be a gathering of ISIL leaders.\"\n\nJust Watched Iranian general helps Iraq fight ISIS? replay More Videos... Iranian general helps Iraq fight ISIS? 02:", + "27 PLAY VIDEO\n\nJust Watched Source: Obama writes to Iran about ISIS replay More Videos... Source: Obama writes to Iran about ISIS 02:11 PLAY VIDEO\n\nBut Col. Patrick Ryan said he could not confirm reports that al-Baghdadi was in the convoy.\n\nWarplanes hit convoy near Mosul in attempt to kill ISIS leaders\n\nIran's role\n\nObama also addressed Iran's role in the fight against ISIS.\n\nWith no diplomatic relations with Iran and lingering concerns over its nuclear program and links to terrorist groups, the administration has had to walk a tightrope over Iran's involvement.\n\nU.S. officials have previously rejected suggestions that they coordinate with Iran to defeat ISIS,", + " something Obama reiterated on \"Face the Nation,\" while declining to discuss any possible response to a letter he recently wrote to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.\n\n\"There is some deconflicting, in the sense that since they have some troops or militias they control in and around Baghdad. Yeah, we let them know, 'Don't mess with us. We're not here to mess with you.' We're focused on our common enemy,\" Obama said. ", + " (CBS NEWS) -- Below is a transcript from the November 9th edition of Face the Nation. Guests included President Barack Obama, former President George W. Bush, Peggy Noonan, David Gergen, Bob Woodward and Michele Norris.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: I am Bob Schieffer. And on this sixtieth anniversary of FACE THE NATION from the Oval Office in Washington and the Bush Library in Dallas, two Presidents in one hour. President Obama reveals the next step in the war on ISIS.\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We're now in a position to start going on some offense.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER:", + " And former President Bush talks about the book he's written about his dad. And whether his brother Jeb will be the next Bush to seek the White House.\n\nPRESIDENT George W. BUSH: I think it's fifty-fifty.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Plus, an all-star panel of analysts. Sixty years of news, politics, presidents, foreign policy, analysis, and culture because this is FACE THE NATION.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Mister President, thank you so much for joining us on the sixtieth anniversary of FACE THE NATION.\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Congratulations.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER:", + " It's a pleasure to have you.\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Wonderful to have you here.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Thank you. I want to start with your decision to basically double the size of the American force in Iraq and bring it up to about three thousand. When you ordered the airstrikes three months ago you didn't seem to think that was going to be necessary. What is-- what is this signal that what we've done so far hasn't worked?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: No. Actually, what it signals is a new face. First of all, let's be clear. ISIL is a threat not only to Iraq but also the region and,", + " ultimately, over the long term could be a threat to the United States. This is an extreme group of the sort we haven't seen before, but it also combines terrorist tactics with on-the-ground capabilities, in part, because they incorporated a lot of Saddam Hussein's old military commanders. And, you know, this is a threat that we are committed not only to degrade but, ultimately, destroy. It's going to take some time. What we knew was that phase one was getting an Iraqi government. That was inclusive and credible. And we now have done that. And so now what we've done is rather than just try to halt ISIL's momentum.", + " We're now in a position to start going on some offense. The airstrikes have been very effective in degrading ISIL's capabilities and slowing the advance that they were making. Now what we need is ground troops, Iraqi ground troops that can start pushing them back.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Will these Americans be going into battle with them?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: No. So what hasn't changed is our troops are not engaged in combat. Essentially, what we're doing is we're taking four training centers with coalition members that allow us to bring in Iraqi recruits, some of the Sunni tribes that are still resisting ISIL,", + " giving them proper training, proper equipment, helping them with strategy, helping them with logistics. We will provide them close air support once they are prepared to start going on the offense against ISIL, but what we will not be doing is having our troops do the fighting. What we learned from the previous engagement in Iraq is that our military is always the best. We can always knock out, knock back any threat. But then when we leave, that threat comes back.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Should we expect that more troops may be needed before this is over?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: You know, as commander-in-chief,", + " I'm never going to say never. But what, you know, the commanders who presented the plan to me say is that we may actually see fewer troops over time because now we're seeing coalition members starting to partner with us on the training and assist effort.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: I want to get back to foreign policy but I also want to ask you about what happened on Tuesday.\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We got beaten.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Yeah. Harry Truman once famously said if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. And I thought of that when I heard the chief of staff of the Democratic leader of the Senate,", + " Harry Reid say and this is his quote, \"The President's approval rating is basically forty percent. What else more is there to say?\" He's basically saying it was your fault. Do you feel it was your fault?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, look, another saying of Harry Truman's was, the buck stops with me. With me, the buck stops right here at my desk. And so whenever, as the head of the party, it doesn't do well, I've got to take responsibility for it. The message that I took from this election and we've seen this in a number of elections, successive elections,", + " is people want to see this city work. And they feel as if it's not working. The economy has improved significantly. There's no doubt about it. We had a jobs report for October that showed that once again over two hundred thousand jobs created. We've now created more than ten million. The unemployment rate has come down faster than we could have anticipated. Just to give you some perspective, Bob, we've created more jobs in the United States than every other advanced economy combined since I came into office. And so we're making progress but people still feel like their wages haven't gone up, their incomes haven't gone up, still hard to save for retirement,", + " still hard to send a kid to college. And then they see Washington gridlocked and they're frustrated. And, you know, they know one person in Washington and that's the President of the United States. So I've got to make this city work better for them.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: All the Presidents in-- in modern history who have been successful, I mean, in various ways, LBJ, FDR, Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, they all seem to have a zest for politics. They-- they like the give and take. They like the twisting of arms. They like the cajoling.", + " They liked all the things that Presidents do. But I don't sense that you have the same feeling that they did. It makes me wonder-- do you like politicians, do you like politics?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: You know--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Do you like this job?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Let me tell you, Bob, I love this job. And here is I think a fair statement. If your name is Barack Hussein Obama, you-- you had to have liked politics in order to get into this office. And I-- I wasn't born into politics and wasn't encouraged to go into politics.", + " I got into politics because I believed I could make a difference and I would not have been successful and would not be sitting at this desk every day if I didn't love politics. You know the-- the-- the fact is that we wouldn't have gotten health care passed if there wasn't a whole bunch of arm-twisting. We would not have been able to make progress on the deficit if I hadn't been willing to cut some deals with Republicans. I think every President that you've mentioned would also say that while they were in office, people weren't always as complimentary of them as--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: But is it what you thought it would be?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:", + " You know, here-- here is one thing that I will say that campaigning and governance are two different things. I've ran two successful campaigns. And anybody who has seen me on the campaign trail can tell how much I love just being with the American people. And hearing what they care about and what-- you know how passionate I am about trying to help them. When you start governing, there is a tendency sometimes for me to start thinking. As long as I get the policy right then that's what should matter. And, you know, people have asked, you know, what you need to do differently going forward and I think you do that,", + " you got to check after every election.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: What do you need to do differently?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And I think that one thing that I do need to constantly remind myself and my team are is it's not enough just to build the better mousetrap. People don't automatically come beating to your door. We've got to sell it, we've got to reach out to the other side and where possible persuade. And I think there are times, there's no doubt about it where, you know, I think we have not been successful in going out there and letting people know what it is that we are trying to do and why this is the right direction.", + " So there-- there is a failure of politics there that we have got-- we got to improve on.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: What criticisms of your administration do you think are valid?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, I just mentioned one. I think that what is also true is that, you know, no matter how frustrating it can sometimes be for any President to deal with an opposition that has, yeah, pretty stubborn, and where there are really strong differences, you just got to keep on trying.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Let's talk about immigration. You have said you are going to change immigration policy with an executive order by the end of the year,", + " Republicans said don't do it. Mitch McConnell it's like waving a red flag in front of a bull. John Boehner, when you play with matches you take the risk of burning yourself. Why not give them a chance to see what they can do on that and then take the executive order?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Number one, everybody agrees the immigration system is broken. And we've been talking about it for years now in terms of fixing it. We need to be able to secure our border. We need to make legal immigration system that is more efficient. And we need to make sure that the millions of people, who are here,", + " many have been here for a decade or more, and have American kids, and for all practical purposes are part of our community, that they pay a fine, they pay any penalties, they learn English, they get to the back of the line but they have a capacity to legalize themselves here because we're not-- we don't have the capacity to deport eleven million people. Everybody agrees on that. I presided over a process in which the Senate produced a bipartisan bill. I then said to John Boehner, John, let's get this passed through the House. For a year I stood back and let him work on this. He decided not to call the Senate bill and he couldn't produce his own bill.", + " And I told him at the time, John, if you don't do it, I've got legal authority to make improvements on the system. I prefer and still prefer to see it done through Congress, but every day that I wait we're misallocating resources. We're deporting people that shouldn't be deported. We're not deporting folks that are dangerous and need to be deported. So, John, I'm going to give you some time, but if you can't get it done before the end of the year, I'm going to have to take the steps that I can to improve the system.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER:", + " So are you saying here today, their time has run out?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: What I am saying to them actually their time hasn't run out. I am going to do what I can do through executive action. It's not going to be everything that needs to get done. And it will take time to put that in place. And in the interim, the minute they pass a bill that addresses the problems with immigration reform, I will sign it and it supersedes whatever actions I take. And I'm encouraging them to do so. On parallel track, we're going to be implementing an executive action. But if,", + " in fact, a bill gets passed, nobody is going to be happier than me to sign it because that means it will be permanent rather than temporary. So they have the ability, the authority, the control to supersede anything I do through my executive authority by simply carrying out their functions over there. And if, in fact, it's true that they want to pass a bill, they've got good ideas, nobody is stopping them. And the minute they do it and the minute I sign that bill, then what I've done goes away.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: We're going to have to take a break here. We'll be back in one minute.\n\n(", + "ANNOUNCEMENTS)\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: You sent a secret letter to Iran's supreme commander or a supreme leader last month about our two countries' shared interest in fighting ISIS. I guess I'd ask you the first question, has he answered?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I tend not to comment on any communications that I have with various leaders. I'm-- I've got a whole bunch of channels where we're communicating to various leaders around the world. Let me speak more broadly about the policies vis-\u00e0-vis Iran. We have two big interests in Iran that are short term and then we got a long-term interest.", + " Our number one priority with respect to Iran is making sure they don't get nuclear weapon. And because of the unprecedented sanctions that this administration put forward and mobilized the world to abide by, they got squeezed, their economy tanked, and they came to the table in a serious way for the first time in a very, very long time. We've now had significant negotiations. They have abided by freezing their program and, in fact, reducing their stockpile of nuclear-grade material or-- or weapons-grade nuclear material. And the question now is are we going to be able to close this final gap so that they can reenter the international community,", + " sanctions can be slowly reduced, and we have verifiable, lock-tight assurances that they can't develop a nuclear weapon. There's still a big gap. We may-- may not be able to get there. The second thing that we have an interest in is that Iran has influence over Shia, both in Syria and in Iraq, and we do have a shared enemy in ISIL. But I've been very clear publicly and privately we are not connecting in any way the nuclear negotiations from the issue of ISIL. We're not coordinating with Iran on ISIL. There's some de-conflicting in the sense that since they have some troops or militias they control in and around Baghdad,", + " we let them know, don't mess with us, we're not here to mess with you, we're focused on common our enemy but there's no coordination or common battle plan and there will not be because, and this brings me to the third issue, we still have big differences with Iran's behavior vis-\u00e0-vis our allies. Then, you know, poking and prodding at-- and-- and creating unrest and sponsoring terrorism in the region, around the world, their anti-Israeli rhetoric and behavior so that's a whole another set of issues which prevents us from ever being true allies but--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER:", + " Is it still our policy that we want President Assad of Syria to go?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It is still our policy and it's an almost absolute certainty that he has lost legitimacy with such a large portion of the country by dropping barrel bombs and killing children and destroying villages that were defenseless that he can't regain the kind of legitimacy that would stitch that country back together again. Now, obviously, our priority is to go after ISIL and so what we have said is that we are not engaging in a military action against the Syrian regime, we are going after ISIL facilities and personnel who are using Syria as a safe haven in service of our strategy in Iraq.", + " We do want to see a political settlement inside of Syria. That's a long-term proposition. We can't solve that militarily nor are we trying to.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you this, you had a tough summer. We saw the rise of ISIS, the outbreak of Ebola, trouble in the Ukraine, illegal immigrants coming across the border. Did you ever go back to the residence at night and say, are we ever going to get a break here?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We have had a busy six years. This summer it seemed to compress even more. But, yeah, think about when I came into office.", + " It was worse. Because the economy not just here in the United States but globally was in a free fall. I have great confidence in the American people and I have great confidence in this administration being able to work through and, eventually, solve problems. Sometimes we don't do it at the speed that keeps up with, you know, the-- the press cycle. So we've handled Ebola well. But, you know-- and then folks aren't talking about it as much now but there was a period of time where people are anxious. You'll recall just a year in office when there was a big hole in the middle of the Gulf spewing out oil.", + " And we went through a month that was real tough. Nobody talks about it now because we actually had a really effective response against the worst environmental disaster in American history. But when you solve the problem sometimes the cameras have gone away. When the problem comes up it's tough. But-- but I tell you what keeps me going every day is to see how resilient the American people are. How hard they work. That-- nothing I go through compares to a guy who's lost his job or lost his home or lost his retirement savings or is trying to figure out how to send his kid to college. What I keep on telling my team here is,", + " don't worry about the fact that we're overworked or we're, you know, getting picked on, yeah, that's all irrelevant. What is relevant is we have the chance to help that person every single day, and we do. And sometimes you're going to get fanfare for it and sometimes you're not. But I still consider this the best job on earth and I'm going to try to squeeze every last ounce of-- of possibility and-- and the ability to do good out of this job in these next two years.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Six years into an administration is the time that Presidents seem to make changes,", + " some of them trying to really shake things up, they bring in new people, they launch new programs. Do I get the sense that you're not planning something like that?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, I think there are always going to be changes. I mean if you look at after each election--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: That I don't see that you-- from what I've heard from you so far, you don't plan to do much different than what-- what you've done so far.\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: You know, Bob, I think that what you'll see is a constant effort to improve the way we deliver service to customers,", + " experimenting with ways that I can reach out to Republicans more effectively, making sure that we're reaching out and using the private sector more effectively. One of the things we're learning is that there's a real power to being able to convene here in the White House, not every problem has to be solved just through a bill, just through legislation. We will be bringing in new folks here because people get tired. You know, it's a-- it's a hard job. And what I've told everybody is, you know, I want you to have as much enthusiasm and energy on the last day of this administration as you do right now or as you did when you first started,", + " otherwise you shouldn't be here.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: You came here talking about hope and change, do you still hope, is change, was it harder than you thought it would be?\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, you know, I-- I always thought change was going to be hard. But I will tell you, Bob, when I look back over the last six years I am really proud of the fact that people have jobs who didn't have them before. People have health insurance who didn't have before. Young people are going to college who couldn't afford it before. So we've made big changes,", + " but what makes me hopeful is the American people. And change is inevitable because we got the best cards, we got the best workers. We got the-- we got the-- this incredible system that attracts talent from around the world. We continue to be a beacon for freedom and-- and democracy. We've got an extraordinary military. We've got an economy that is growing faster than anybody else's. We've got these incredible natural resources and we are the most innovative than anybody on Earth. So there's no reason for us not to succeed. And change will happen. But America is always at the forefront of change. That's-- that's our trademark.", + " Even after, over two hundred years we're still a young country and-- and we don't fear the future, we grab it.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Thank you, Mister President.\n\n(End VT)\n\nPRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Thank you so much, Bob. I enjoyed it.\n\n(ANNOUNCEMENTS)\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: If you haven't figured it out by now the truth is I love moderating FACE THE NATION. I was going to tell you why, but then I thought, why not just show you.\n\n(Begin VT)\n\nTED KOOP: FACE THE NATION. How do you do?", + " Welcome to FACE THE NATION.\n\nSENATOR JOSEPH MCCARTHY (1954): I think a Lynching B is a good name for it.\n\nNIKITA KHRUSHCHEV (1957): I can prophesize that your grandchildren in America will live under socialism.\n\nFIDEL CASTRO (1959): We are not communist at all but I will never be against any right.\n\nDR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (1964): We find now that the forces of darkness are much more active, zealous and conscientious, and determined, than the forces of light.\n\nBILL STOUT (CBS News): Did you really call a fellow member of the board,", + " a lying son of a bitch?\n\nGOVERNOR RONALD REAGAN (1970): Very quietly I expressed a long-held opinion quite forcefully to the individual.\n\nHENRY KISSINGER (1985): With all due respect, the congressman carries, he's a congressman and he's not secretary of state.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER (1997): If, as you say, there is nothing there, Mister President. How can so many reputable, respected professionals keep pressing along with this?\n\nPRESIDENT BILL CLINTON (1997): Well, that's your characterization, not mine.\n\nBRITISH PM MARGARET THATCHER (1987): You may go on asking the same question in a hundred different ways,", + " and you will still get the same answer.\n\nREPRESENTATIVE JOHN LEWIS (2013): Doctor King would say my dream is in the process of becoming real.\n\nMAYA ANGELOU (2013): Listen to me, I'm here talking to Bob Schieffer. I'm doing anything.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER (2013): Well, may I just say that I think I've fallen in love with you and that hasn't happened to me on this broadcast very often.\n\n(End VT)\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: It doesn't get much better than that. We'll be right back.\n\n(", + "ANNOUNCEMENTS)\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Welcome back to FACE THE NATION. Former President George W. Bush has written a book about his dad, 41. And we went to his library in Dallas to talk with him about it. Many of you saw part one of that story on SUNDAY MORNING. In part two, the former President talked a little politics, including the possibility that his brother, Jeb, may run for President in 2016.\n\n(Begin VT)\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: You know there's a lot of speculation about him. I occasionally feel the speculation by saying that I hope he runs.", + " I think he'd be a very good President. I understand the decision-making process pretty well and I'm-- you know I know that he's wrestling with the decision.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: If you had to make an estimate right now, what-- what-- what do you think is going to happen? You think he's going to go with--\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I think it's fifty-fifty. He-- he and I are very close. On the other hand, he's not here knocking on my door, you know, agonizing about the decision. He-- he knows exactly,", + " you know, the ramifications on family, for example. He's seen his dad and his brother go through the presidency. I-- I would give it-- I would give it a tossup. I-- I know this about Jeb. He's not afraid to succeed. In other words, I think he knows he could do the job and nor is he afraid to fail.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: For your brother, is it worth putting a family through?\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah, it is. I think it is. Yeah. I mean I'd put our family through it. And one of the lessons you learned from George H.", + " W. Bush is that you can go into politics and still be a good father. In other words, the priorities of your life don't have to be compromised. I know Jeb's priority is his family, a priority his family, also know it's his country and his deep faith. And he has seen that you don't have to sell those out in order to be a politician.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: But it was family that almost kept 41 from running again. In 1991 George Bush told his son he was seriously considering not running again because of his son Neil's legal troubles with a failed savings and loan.", + " George W. Bush's response, \"You still got work to do and the country needs you.\" For Bush, the hardest part of being a President's son was seeing his father lose.\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The '92 defeat was really hard and it-- it ironically enough it did make it easier for me because when people criticized my dad, somebody who I admire greatly, I-- I didn't react well at times. And it really, really affected me. When they criticize me, the sting wasn't nearly as-- as-- as difficult actually--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Mm-Hm.\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W.", + " BUSH: --being his son during his presidency created kind of a layer of asbestos. The only thing I was concerned about was that how would my girls react when they were put in the same position I had been in.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Would his father had won reelection if Texas billionaire Ross Perot had not entered the race unexpectedly and made it a three-way contest with Bill Clinton?\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I think he would have one.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: You do think so?\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I do, yeah. Absolutely.", + " I think he would have won and I just can't prove it. I-- let me just odd conjecture of course, but I think he would have won because I think ultimately there would have been a, you know, a clear choice between, you know, a guy who had had a very good first term and a untested governor.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: After the Gulf War when your father drove Saddam Hussein back into Iraq, his favorable rating went to eighty-nine percent but then he was defeated in the--\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: --in the-- in the elections.\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W.", + " BUSH: (INDISTINCT) points from eighty-nine to thirty-nine on the poll that really mattered.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: How did that affect you?\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: It's an interesting lesson of-- of how to spend political capital. In the book I, you know, was somewhat dismayed about the inability for the White House to connect, you know, the message to connect with the American people that domestic politics really mattered for George Bush as much as international politics. In other words, he had a lot of capital to spend and I didn't, in retrospect, it-- it wasn't spent wisely.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER:", + " Mm-Hm. You write in the book, when you decided to send troops into Iraq it was not to finish what your dad had started.\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah. There're very few defensive moments of the book and that happens to be one. I-- I guess I was just responding to kind of the gossip that tends to work around the political circles that clearly he had only one thing in mind and that was to finish the job his father did because my dad decided not to go into Baghdad after routing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And the reason why is that was in the mission he stated and so I went in there as a result of a very changed environment because of September eleventh.", + " And the danger we were concerned about was that the weapons would be put into the hands of terrorist groups that would come and make attacks of 9/11 pale in comparison. And since this is a book about my dad I thought it was necessary to kind of set the record straight.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: But you said in the book he was right and I was right, too, in 2003?\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH: Right. I agree. I'm glad you read that part of it.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Were you surprised when you gave the ultimatum to Saddam that he didn't leave?", + " Did you think there was a chance he might leave?\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH: I really did. Yeah.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: You really did?\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH: I did. Yeah. You know when he was captured, I was told that the FBI agent that talked to him, he said, \"I just didn't believe Bush. And it's hard for me to believe he didn't believe me.\"\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Mm-Hm.\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH: We'd given an ultimatum to the Taliban and deliver him-- I make the point in the book,", + " of course, that-- and dad understood this better than anybody, that when you say something as President you better mean it. Words mean something.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Mm-Hm.\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: And he was very clear at times during his presidency, and meant it. I thought I was pretty clear at times during my presidency and meant it. Saddam Hussein didn't believe us, so I was surprised.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: But you thought that he would believe you and that he-- he would leave?\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I thought that there was a chance.", + " Yeah, I certainly hope so, but he didn't. And so that's why I put in the book he chose war. Twice he did, he choose war during 41 and 43.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: When former first lady Laura Bush joined us we turned back to the possibility of a Bush 45. So let's talk about the Bush dynasty here. Your mom says there have been enough Bushs running for President. What do you-- what do you two think about that?\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Sometimes her prognostications haven't been very accurate. And no, no,", + " I think you have to earn your way into politics. I don't think anything is ever given to you.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: I think the question that every candidate faces and you have a unique perspective on this is it worth putting the family through it?\n\nLAURA BUSH: Well that's, you know, that's what every candidate has to think about because it is-- even since George and I lived at the White House, the social media has increased so much, and lots of mean and terrible things on the internet about every family member--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Mm-Hm.\n\nLAURA BUSH:", + " --which -- even we didn't have. But I think that, you know, that everyone has to weigh that.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: From your perspective, has politics-- my sense it's just gotten a lot meaner.\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: In the older days I hated to be one of these guys who talked about the old days. You are able to do that yourself, by the way.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: A lot.\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: People were held to account for what they said. In other words, there was a pushback.", + " Now there's just so much stuff out there--flotsam out there that people say what they feel like saying without any consequences.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: If Jeb Bush does run will you be campaigning for him? That might be a different situation?\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: It would be totally different. I'll do whatever he wants. I will be one of his strongest backers if he wants me out there publicly, I'll be out there publicly. If he wants me behind the scenes, I'll be behind the scenes. You know I'm all in for him. He'd be a great President.", + " And country could use a optimistic view like his.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: What about you?\n\nLAURA BUSH: I agree, absolutely.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Would you campaign, too?\n\nLAURA BUSH: Sure, if he wanted me to I'd be happy to campaign for him.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Well, I want to wish you both the best.\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH: Thank you, Bob.\n\nLAURA BUSH: Thank you so much, Bob.\n\nPRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH: Really glad to have you have back in the Promised Land.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER:", + " It's great to be here, Sir. Thank you very much.\n\n(End VT)\n\n(ANNOUNCEMENTS)\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: And we're back now with our panel to talk about all of this and the election on Tuesday. Peggy Noonan, a contributor to CBS News now and Wall Street Journal columnist, of course; the legendary Bob Woodward of the Washington Post; Michele Norris from National Public Radio. Michele, you're not old enough to be a legend yet.\n\nMICHELE NORRIS (NPR): Oh, okay. There's still time.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: And David Gergen of Harvard who's been in both Republican and Democratic administrations.", + " It's really a contrast, isn't it, to see a President and a former President on the same broadcast. I think it's a lot easier for former Presidents to speak on television than Presidents. Michele.\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: Obviously, obviously. I mean, the-- just the body language, the comfort. President Bush talks about a layer of asbestos, a phrase that we probably would not hear roll off his tongue when he was in sort of the constrained and very scripted environment of the presidency. But it's also interesting that there was a through line for some of the things that they were saying when they were talking about the reasons for going to war,", + " when they were talking about-- when President Bush was talking about messaging, it sort of echoed some of the challenges that President Obama faces today. But, boy, what a contrast to see the two of them.\n\nPEGGY NOONAN (Wall Street Journal/CBS News Contributor): In part, it was-- what we saw here was a portrait of two presidents. One is a happy man having lived through history and being satisfied with the role he played. The other is a sitting President who just took it straight on the jaw in an election who's feeling stressed, who made a point of saying he loves his office but it made you sit back and think,", + " yeah, are you sure you do. It-- it was the difference between being in the thick of it and having the tranquility of reflection and retirement.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Bob, what's your takeaway?\n\nBOB WOODWARD (Washington Post): Well, one similarity is they're both selling something. George W. Bush is selling a book and Obama is selling what happened in the midterm election and trying to put the-- the best spin on it. I-- I-- I found the interview with Obama very revealing because he said he's going to reach out to the other side to persuade and sell. Now if you're going to reach out to the other side on something,", + " one of the things you want to do is listen but we didn't hear that. And what we heard is the continuous Obama line, \"I'm heading in the right direction.\" This is right. And, you know, no one knows better than Obama that all these powers are shared with Congress. And a \"Go it alone\" approach just is not going to work.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: David?\n\nDAVID GERGEN (Harvard University): I think we got a good, revealing example today of why ex-Presidents tend to go up in our popularity. Once they leave office, they can be more candid. They can be a little funnier and they can talk about-- they can show personality and they're not pulled into the politics of Washington and-- and-- and,", + " you know, what seems to diminish everybody who comes here. Once you're out of that, you know it's just more refreshing, it's more interesting. And I thought President Obama has the capacity. He wrote-- the first book he wrote was one of the best books ever written by politician, this is memoirs. I think he has a capacity to write the best memoir since Ulysses S. Grant, which was more about the war. But the way he now talks is-- everything is deflected, everything is-- you don't really get an understanding of who he is and what he's really thinking. You got a sense of what the line is.\n\nPEGGY NOONAN:", + " Yeah, yeah. He also I think the President has taken to putting a lot of padding in his sentences.\n\nBOB WOODWARD: Right.\n\nPEGGY NOONAN: You can say the words \"I like you\" or you can give a fourteen-word sentence that has (INDISTINCT) and parentheses and stuff, do you know what I mean. That's what you do when you're running out the clock and there's a certain running out going on. But I think one of the really big stories that we saw in your interview, but also in the past few days with the President is that a very significant, historic election occurred,", + " everybody looked at the President like, what does this change for you, and he has made it clear, one way and another. And in this interview, I think that this will not change his method of operation a bit which means he's not going to change his relationship with the Congress which means more of the past six years.\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: We don't know that.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Do you agree with that?\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: We don't know that.\n\nPEGGY NOONAN: Well, tell me.\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: We don't-- we don't know that,", + " though, because-- I mean part of presidential strategy, part of political strategy is not necessarily revealing your hand. And you-- you noted that the President may be running down the clock, and if you actually talk to people in the White House, there's an indication that that's not the case. In fact, Denis McDonough has been reminding people on staff of something that the President has said repeatedly that important things can and do happen in the fourth quarter. He is a very competitive guy.\n\nDAVID GERGEN: Yeah.\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: Anyone who knows him well knows just how competitive he is. So the idea of sitting back and running out the clock and doing the same thing that has led you to a point of defeat,", + " just doesn't seem like that would be the playbook going forward.\n\nDAVID GERGEN: I think that's fundamentally right about the fourth quarter. I think they do-- they do see it as a fourth quarter. He's got to pick up his game. He's got to-- he is twenty points back and he's acting like he's ahead and he has to communicate better. And one of the things we saw today was, which I thought was very, very clear, yet, once again he says, look, I want to change, I want to reach out to the Republicans, I want to change the whole thing, but by the way I'm going to sign this executive order,", + " period, end of sentence. And I think most people in Washington think that's going to throw a hand grenade into the middle of these conversations with--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Well, you know, the Washington Post said as much and they've not always been--\n\nDAVID GERGEN: Right.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: --that--\n\nDAVID GERGEN: He-- he could--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: --anxious to criticize the President.\n\nBOB WOODWARD: But it's a disengaged style that in terms of Congress that just is not working. And he looks isolated. Now,", + " if you--\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: It's kind of goes both ways though. That does go both ways.\n\nBOB WOODWARD: As you suggest, you talk to people in the White House and try to enter in and understand the mind of President Obama. He looks at the critics and he says, now, wait a minute, they are saying things like on your editorial page saying that it's been six years of economic catastrophe. And he says, now, wait a minute, look at all of the things we did and he's really got a point. And so you get-- you get this kind of wall that he builds up but so does the opposition.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER:", + " Well, that's what I--\n\nBOB WOODWARD: And somebody's got to tear that wall down.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: But--\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: You know-- you know what's--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: I'm just going to say this. Sources have told me that the President met with the congressional leaders on Friday for lunch. The President of the United States announced he-- to them and he held this announcement until he could brief these congressional leaders about it. He's sending more Americans into harm's way in a very dangerous place. He's doubling the size of the U.S.", + " military commitment there. Yet, I am told ninety percent of this meeting was an argument between the Republicans who were there and the President over whether he was going to issue this executive order on immigration. I think President has done a lot of things wrong in-- in how he deals with Washington but it seems to me, and I think you're right, the other side has got to-- kind of figure out a way to change the way they do business, too, if anything is going to happen.\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: There may be some indication, though, that the newly elected members that are heading to Washington get that message.", + " I mean Cory Gardner just said that-- that Washington has to lead with competence and maturity. They're-- you know, sending a message that they want to, perhaps, distance themselves from a do-nothing label that, perhaps, it is time the voters have spoken to get something done.\n\nBOB WOODWARD: But he's the CEO. He's the boss. And he's the one who has got to set the tone. And you have to-- and if you chart the time he spends in these meetings, in these discussions, it's not enough to really get to know somebody. I mean he said to you, he kept saying,", + " well, I'm going to sell and persuade. Two words we didn't hear. Listen and compromise. And that's what you have to do even when you're the boss.\n\nDAVID GERGEN: Yeah, and, Bob, can I take--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Peggy.\n\nPEGGY NOONAN: Yeah, could I also note that there were-- I think not enough of the big meeting on Friday between the congressional leaders and the President was devoted to the new decision on Iraq, I get that. But that decision came two days after the election which immediately makes people think, hey, what the heck. Did this-- did the timing of this decision and announcement have any connection with the fact that America was voting all day Tuesday and this will be a very controversial decision.", + " But I will say second, Bob's right. A President sets the tone, when the President of the United States on Wednesday afternoon listens to the soon-to-be-Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell say, I got to be frank, if the President does an exec-- big executive order on immigration and amnesty that that will, quote, poison the well with Congress. And the President an hour or two later came on and said, by the way, I am going to do this. I just-- I put my head in my hands I thought. Oh, no.\n\nDAVID GERGEN: Bob, I think you're absolutely right at a fundamental level that Republicans have to learn how to compromise as well.", + " They have to meet him half way. And I don't think we know yet whether John Boehner can still deliver the House. You know, I don't know-- I don't know whether he has the votes to-- to go to a compromise say on immigration, he couldn't get there last time. You know, can he get there now. I don't think we know. There the Tea Party, as we know, is stirring they're not happy with the direction the leadership is taking. We'll have to see how it all works out. Having said that the President is the one who lost the elections. So the graceful thing and is the person who loses,", + " the party that wins doesn't say, okay, we--we want to compromise. The loser has to say I'm going to believe-- to change course as Bob said. And then the Republicans have to respond. And if the President, the first time, first moment out of the box says, by the way, I really want to work with you, first I'm going to spit on your face over immigration and let's sit down and compromise.\n\nPEGGY NOONAN: Yeah.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Would-- would the President and the Democrats be better off if the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid resigned as party leaders often do when their party loses the majority?", + " I hear some people say, yes. And because what I'm wondering about after the talk-- after this election, I think the President's relations with the Democrats in the Senate may be as bad as his relations with the Republicans.\n\nBOB WOODWARD: That's absolutely true. And you get the Democrats in-- in-- in private and they are on fire, just because he won't spend the time because he won't listen. I mean Peggy said yesterday in her column, and I think there is a real truth here. Humility is power. And after you lose, you have to come out and kind of face up to that and there is a whole undercurrent in the President's approach that,", + " well, you know, it was bad but, you know, that-- that was worse than bad. And I think, optimistically, I think he's capable and, as you're suggesting, he's capable of changing and engaging in that outreach and he just needs to do and kind of get out of this bubble of that-- that he seems to be living.\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: Can I just point--\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: Yes.\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: --something out though at this very table expressions of humility have been interpreted as weakness. And-- and-- and often when he takes that posture,", + " when people were saying he should have been more contrite, you can almost hear the reaction to that, if that had happened and so there-- there is another way of looking at that.\n\nPEGGY NOONAN: Do you mean that happened before, that he was humble and-- and he was criticized for humility?\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: Yes, I do. I think we have all seen that.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: You know what I would say in the age of the internet and the web, the web has no sense of humor--\n\nPEGGY NOONAN: Yes.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER:", + " --the web has no sense of irony. You cannot be self-deprecating, because people say Bob Schieffer finally admitted--\n\nPEGGY NOONAN: That's right-- that's right.\n\nMICHELE NORRIS: There's no nuance.\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: --they don't know it's a joke. There may be something to what Michele says here. I want to thank all of you for joining with us today and being with us. We will be right back. Thank you all.\n\nDAVID GERGEN: Thank you.\n\n(ANNOUNCEMENTS)\n\n(Begin VT)\n\nTED KOOP (1954-", + "55): Now that the situation is well in hand, gentleman our time is up.\n\nSTUART NOVINS (1955-60): Thank you very much, indeed, for coming here to FACE THE NATION.\n\nPAUL NIVEN (1963-65): Gentlemen, I'm sorry, but our time is up. Thank you, Doctor King, for being our guest today on FACE THE NATION.\n\nMARTIN AGRONSKY (1965-68): Mister Carmichael, I sincerely regret, but our time is up. Thank you for being here to FACE THE NATION.\n\nGEORGE HERMAN (1969-", + "83): I'm sorry, Governor. We're just about off the clock at this point. Thank you very much for being with us here to FACE THE NATION.\n\nLESLEY STAHL (1983-91): I'm Lesley Stahl. Have a good week.\n\n(End VT)\n\nBOB SCHIEFFER: And that's it for us today. We'll see you next week right here on FACE THE NATION.\n\n***END OF TRANSCRIPT***\n\nPRESS CONTACT:\n\nJackie Berkowitz, berkowitzj@cbsnews.com\n\n(202) 600-6407\n" + ], + "length": 17147, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 48, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 In 2014, a New Jersey couple bought their dream home in Westfield, in what's ended up being one of the more headline-grabbing real estate purchases America has seen in recent years. That's all thanks to \"the Watcher,\" an anonymous sender of creepy and ominous letters to the new residents of 657 Boulevard. Except \"residents\" is a misnomer: Derek and Maria Broaddus and their three kids never actually moved in, having been so spooked by the contents of the letters, the first of which arrived as they were having renovations done. In a lengthy piece for the Cut, Reeves Wiedeman shares extensive excerpts from the letters, like this: \"Will the young blood play in the basement? Or are they too afraid to go down there alone. I would [be] very afraid if I were them. It is far away from the rest of the house. If you were upstairs you would never hear them scream.\" Wiedeman traces in great detail the ultimately fruitless hunt to unmask the Watcher: recounting clues (one letter referenced an easel on a porch that could only be seen from the backyard or next door); the neighbors the family suspected; the former FBI agents, security firm, and forensic linguist they hired to analyze the letters and their handwriting; and the one small bit of DNA evidence they had. The story simultaneously tracks their quest to get out from under the burden of their purchase, which they were unable to sell; an attempt to raze the home and divide the lot into two smaller ones was prohibited by the town's planning board after an outcry from residents. Some suspected a scam, lawsuits went nowhere, and the renter they finally found received, you guessed it, a letter from the Watcher. Derek's belief: \"In my view, [the sender lives in] one of ten houses in the world.\" Read the full story here. (Or read more longform stories here.)\n", + "docs": [ + "The home, 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey. Photo-Illustration: Gerald Slota\n\nOne night in June 2014, Derek Broaddus had just finished an evening of painting at his new home in Westfield, New Jersey, when he went outside to check the mail. Derek and his wife, Maria, had closed on the six-bedroom house at 657 Boulevard three days earlier and were doing some renovations before they moved in, so there wasn\u2019t much in the mail except a few bills and a white, card-shaped envelope. It was addressed in thick, clunky handwriting to \u201cThe New Owner,\u201d and the typed note inside began warmly:\n\nDearest new neighbor at 657 Boulevard,", + " Allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood.\n\nFor the Broadduses, buying 657 Boulevard had fulfilled a dream. Maria was raised in Westfield, and the house was a few blocks from her childhood home. Derek grew up working class in Maine, then moved his way up the ladder at an insurance company in Manhattan to become a senior vice-president with a salary large enough to afford the $1.3 million house. The Broadduses had bought 657 Boulevard just after Derek celebrated his 40th birthday, and their three kids were already debating which of the house\u2019s fireplaces Santa Claus would use.\n\nBut as Derek kept reading the letter from his new neighbor,", + " it took a turn. \u201cHow did you end up here?\u201d the writer asked. \u201cDid 657 Boulevard call to you with its force within?\u201d The letter went on:\n\n657 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now and as it approaches its 110th birthday, I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming. My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.\n\nThe author\u2019s reconnaissance had apparently already begun.", + " The letter identified the Broadduses\u2019 Honda minivan, as well as the workers renovating the home. \u201cI see already that you have flooded 657 Boulevard with contractors so that you can destroy the house as it was supposed to be,\u201d the person wrote. \u201cTsk, tsk, tsk \u2026 bad move. You don\u2019t want to make 657 Boulevard unhappy.\u201d Earlier in the week, Derek and Maria had gone to the house and chatted with their new neighbors while their children, who were 5, 8, and 10 years old, ran around the backyard with several kids from the neighborhood. The letter writer seemed to have noticed.", + " \u201cYou have children. I have seen them. So far I think there are three that I have counted,\u201d the anonymous correspondent wrote, before asking if there were \u201cmore on the way\u201d:\n\nDo you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested? Better for me. Was your old house too small for the growing family? Or was it greed to bring me your children? Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them too [sic] me.\n\nThe envelope had no return address. \u201cWho am I?\u201d the person wrote. \u201cThere are hundreds and hundreds of cars that drive by 657 Boulevard each day.", + " Maybe I am in one. Look at all the windows you can see from 657 Boulevard. Maybe I am in one. Look out any of the many windows in 657 Boulevard at all the people who stroll by each day. Maybe I am one.\u201d The letter concluded with a suggestion that this message would not be the last \u2014 \u201cWelcome my friends, welcome. Let the party begin\u201d \u2014 followed by a signature typed in a cursive font: \u201cThe Watcher.\u201d\n\nIt was after 10 p.m., and Derek Broaddus was alone. He raced around the house, turning off lights so no one could see inside, then called the Westfield Police Department.", + " An officer came to the house, read the letter, and said, \u201cWhat the fuck is this?\u201d He asked Derek if he had enemies and recommended moving a piece of construction equipment from the back porch in case The Watcher tried to toss it through a window.\n\nDerek rushed back to his wife and kids, who were living at their old home elsewhere in Westfield. That night, Derek and Maria wrote an email to John and Andrea Woods, the couple who sold them 657 Boulevard, to ask if they had any idea who The Watcher might be or why he or she had written, \u201cI asked the Woods to bring me young blood and it looks like they listened.\u201d\n\nWas your old house too small for the growing family?", + " Or was it greed to bring me your children? Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them too [sic] me.\n\nAndrea Woods replied the next morning: A few days before moving out, the Woodses had also received a letter from \u201cThe Watcher.\u201d The note had been \u201codd,\u201d she said, and made similar mention of The Watcher\u2019s family observing the house over time, but Andrea said she and her husband had never received anything like it in their 23 years in the house and had thrown the letter away without much thought. That day, the Woodses went with Maria to the police station,", + " where Detective Leonard Lugo told her not to tell anyone about the letters, including her new neighbors, most of whom she had never met \u2014 and all of whom were now suspects.\n\nThe Broadduses spent the coming weeks on high alert. Derek canceled a work trip, and whenever Maria took the kids to their new house, she would yell their names if they wandered into a corner of the yard. When Derek gave a tour of the renovation to a couple on the block, he froze when the wife said, \u201cIt\u2019ll be nice to have some young blood in the neighborhood.\u201d The Broadduses\u2019 general contractor arrived one morning to find that a heavy sign he\u2019d hammered into the front yard had been ripped out overnight.\n\nTwo weeks after the letter arrived,", + " Maria stopped by the house to look at some paint samples and check the mail. She recognized the thick black lettering on a card-shaped envelope and called the police. \u201cWelcome again to your new home at 657 Boulevard,\u201d The Watcher wrote. \u201cThe workers have been busy and I have been watching you unload carfuls of your personal belongings. The dumpster is a nice touch. Have they found what is in the walls yet? In time they will.\u201d\n\nThis time, The Watcher had addressed Derek and Maria directly, misspelling their names as \u201cMr. and Mrs. Braddus.\u201d Had The Watcher been close enough to hear one of the Broadduses\u2019 contractors addressing them?", + " The Watcher boasted of having learned a lot about the family in the preceding weeks, especially about their children. The letter identified the Broadduses\u2019 three kids by birth order and by their nicknames \u2014 the ones Maria had been yelling. \u201cI am pleased to know your names now and the name of the young blood you have brought to me,\u201d it said. \u201cYou certainly say their names often.\u201d The letter asked about one child in particular, whom the writer had seen using an easel inside an enclosed porch: \u201cIs she the artist in the family?\u201d\n\nThe letter continued:\n\n657 Boulevard is anxious for you to move in. It has been years and years since the young blood ruled the hallways of the house.", + " Have you found all of the secrets it holds yet? Will the young blood play in the basement? Or are they too afraid to go down there alone. I would [be] very afraid if I were them. It is far away from the rest of the house. If you were upstairs you would never hear them scream.\n\nWill they sleep in the attic? Or will you all sleep on the second floor? Who has the bedrooms facing the street? I\u2019ll know as soon as you move in. It will help me to know who is in which bedroom. Then I can plan better.\n\nAll of the windows and doors in 657 Boulevard allow me to watch you and track you as you move through the house.", + " Who am I? I am the Watcher and have been in control of 657 Boulevard for the better part of two decades now. The Woods family turned it over to you. It was their time to move on and kindly sold it when I asked them to.\n\nI pass by many times a day. 657 Boulevard is my job, my life, my obsession. And now you are too Braddus family. Welcome to the product of your greed! Greed is what brought the past three families to 657 Boulevard and now it has brought you to me.\n\nHave a happy moving in day. You know I will be watching.\n\nDerek and Maria stopped bringing their kids to the house.", + " They were no longer sure when, or if, they would move in. Several weeks later, a third letter arrived. \u201cWhere have you gone to?\u201d The Watcher wrote. \u201c657 Boulevard is missing you.\u201d\n\nMany Westfield residents compare their town to Mayberry, the idyllic setting for The Andy Griffith Show \u2014 the kind of place where a new neighbor might greet you with a welcoming note. Westfield is 45 minutes from New York and a bit too slow for singles, meaning the town\u2019s 30,000 residents are largely well-to-do families. This year, Bloomberg ranked Westfield the 99th-richest city in America \u2014 but only the 18th wealthiest in New Jersey \u2014 and in 2014,", + " when The Watcher struck, the website NeighborhoodScout named it the country\u2019s 30th-safest town. The most pressing local issues of late, according to residents, have been the temporary closure of Trader Joe\u2019s after a roof collapse and the rampant scourge of \u201cunconstitutional policing,\u201d by which they mean aggressive parking enforcement. (Westfield is 86 percent white.)\n\nOne activity all locals recognized as treacherous is trying to buy a house. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of money and a lot of ego,\u201d one resident, who requested anonymity before discussing Westfield real estate, told me. \u201cI\u2019ve seen bidding wars where friends lost by $300,", + "000.\u201d The Broadduses\u2019 house was on the Boulevard, a wide, tree-lined street with some of the more desirable homes in town, as The Watcher had noted: \u201cThe Boulevard used to be THE street to live on \u2026 You made it if you lived on the Boulevard.\u201d\n\nBuilt in 1905, 657 Boulevard was perhaps the grandest home on the block, and when the Woodses put it on the market, they had received multiple offers above their asking price. That led the Broadduses to initially suspect that The Watcher might be someone upset over losing out on the house. But the Woodses said one interested buyer had backed out after a bad medical diagnosis,", + " while another had already found a different home. In an email to the Broadduses, Andrea Woods proposed another theory: \u201cWould the mention of the contractor trucks [and] your children suggest that it was someone in the neighborhood?\u201d\n\nThe letters did indicate proximity. They had been processed in Kearny, the U.S. Postal Service\u2019s distribution center in northern New Jersey. The first was postmarked June 4, before the sale was public \u2014 the Woodses had never put up a for sale sign \u2014 and only a day after the contractors arrived. The renovations were mostly interior, and people who lived nearby say they didn\u2019t notice an unusual commotion,", + " even from the jackhammering in the basement. When Derek and Maria walked Detective Lugo around the house, they showed him that the easel on the porch was hidden from the street by vegetation, making it difficult to see unless someone was behind the house or right next door.\n\nA few days after the first letter, Maria and Derek went to a barbecue across the street welcoming them and another new homeowner to the block. The Broadduses hadn\u2019t told anyone about The Watcher, as the police had instructed, and found themselves scanning the party for clues while keeping tabs on their kids, who ran guilelessly through a crowd that made up much of the suspect pool.", + " \u201cWe kept screaming at them to stay close,\u201d Maria said. \u201cPeople must have thought we were crazy.\u201d\n\nAt one point, Derek was chatting with John Schmidt, who lived two doors down, when Schmidt told him about the Langfords, who lived between them. Peggy Langford was in her 90s, and several of her adult children, all in their 60s, lived with her. The family was a bit odd, Schmidt said, but harmless. He described one of the younger Langfords, Michael, who didn\u2019t work and had a beard like Ernest Hemingway, as \u201ckind of a Boo Radley character.\u201d\n\nDerek thought the case was solved.", + " The Langford house was right next to the easel on the porch. The family had lived there since the 1960s, when The Watcher\u2019s father, the letters said, had begun observing 657 Boulevard. Richard Langford, the family patriarch, had died 12 years earlier, and the current Watcher claimed to have been on the job for \u201cthe better part of two decades.\u201d\n\nWhen the Broadduses told Lugo about the family, he said he already knew, and a week after the first letter arrived, he brought Michael Langford to police headquarters for an interview. Michael denied knowing anything about the letters, but the Broadduses say that Lugo told them that \u201cthe narrative\u201d of what he said matched things mentioned in the letters.", + " \u201cThis isn\u2019t CSI: Westfield,\u201d Lugo later told the Broadduses. \u201cWhen the wife is dead, it\u2019s the husband.\u201d\n\nBut there wasn\u2019t much hard evidence, and after a few weeks, the police chief told the Broadduses that, short of an admission, there wasn\u2019t much the department could do. \u201cThis is someone who threatened my kids, and the police are saying, \u2018Probably nothing\u2019s gonna happen,\u2019 \u201d Derek said. \u201cProbably isn\u2019t good enough for me.\u201d After the second letter, Derek told the cops that if they didn\u2019t take care of the situation, they would have a different kind of case on their hands.", + " \u201cThis person attacked my family, and where I\u2019m from, if you do that, you get your ass beat,\u201d Derek told me.\n\nFrustrated, the Broadduses began their own investigation. Derek became especially obsessed. He set up webcams in 657 Boulevard and spent nights crouched in the dark, watching to see if anyone was watching the house at close range. \u201cMaria thought I was crazy,\u201d he told me recently at a coffee shop in Manhattan, where he covered a table with documents relating to the case, including copies of the letters, which he and his wife had shared with only a few friends and family members.", + " He showed me a map displaying when each of 657\u2019s neighbors had moved in \u2014 the Langfords were the only ones there since the \u201960s \u2014 with overlays marking possible sight lines for the easel and a circle for \u201cApproximate Range of \u2018Ear Shot\u2019 \u201d to estimate who might have heard Maria yelling their kids\u2019 names. Only a few homes fit both criteria.\n\nThe Broadduses also turned to several experts. They employed a private investigator, who staked out the neighborhood and ran background checks on the Langfords but didn\u2019t find anything noteworthy. Derek reached out to a former FBI agent who served as the inspiration for Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs \u2014 they were on a high-school board of trustees together \u2014 and they also hired Robert Lenehan,", + " another former FBI agent, to conduct a threat assessment. Lenehan recognized several old-fashioned tics in the letters that pointed to an older writer. The envelope was addressed to \u201cM/M Braddus,\u201d the salutations included the day\u2019s weather \u2014 \u201cWarm and humid,\u201d \u201cSunny and cool for a summer day\u201d \u2014 and the sentences had double spaces between them. The letters had a certain literary panache, which suggested a \u201cvoracious reader,\u201d and a surprising lack of profanity given the level of anger, which Lenehan thought meant a \u201cless macho\u201d writer. Maybe, he wondered, The Watcher had seen The Watcher,", + " starring Keanu Reeves as a serial killer who stalks the detective trying to catch him?\n\nLenehan didn\u2019t think The Watcher was likely to act on the threats, but the letters had enough typos and errors to imply a certain erraticism. (The first letter was dated \u201cTuesday, June 4th,\u201d but that day was a Wednesday.) There was also a \u201cseething anger\u201d directed at the wealthy in particular. The Watcher was upset by new money moving into town \u2014 \u201cAre you one of those Hoboken transplants who are ruining Westfield?\u201d \u2014 and by the Broadduses\u2019 relatively modest renovations:\n\nThe house is crying from all of the pain it is going through.", + " You have changed it and made it so fancy. You are stealing it\u2019s [sic] history. It cries for the past and what used to be in the time when I roamed it\u2019s [sic] halls. The 1960s were a good time for 657 Boulevard when I ran from room to room imagining the life with the rich occupants there. The house was full of life and young blood. Then it got old and so did my father. But he kept watching until the day he died. And now I watch and wait for the day when the young blood will be mine again.\n\nLenehan recommended looking into former housekeepers or their descendants.", + " Perhaps The Watcher was jealous that the Broadduses had bought a home that the writer couldn\u2019t afford.\n\nBut the focus remained on the Langfords. In cooperation with Westfield police, the Broadduses sent a letter to the Langfords announcing plans to tear down the house, hoping to prompt a response. (Nothing happened.) Detective Lugo brought Michael Langford in for a second interview but got nowhere, and his sister, Abby, accused the police of harassing their family. Eventually, the Broadduses hired Lee Levitt, a lawyer, who met with several members of the Langford family, as well as their attorney,", + " to show them the letters, along with photos explaining how their home was one of the few vantage points from which the easel could be seen. The meeting grew tense, Levitt told me, and the Langfords insisted Michael was innocent. One night, Derek had a dream in which he confronted Peggy, the eldest Langford, and demanded she build an eight-foot fence between the properties.\n\nMaria was having other kinds of dreams. One night, she woke up to an especially vivid one about a man who lived nearby. \u201cHe was wearing these boots and carrying a pitchfork and calling to the kids and I couldn\u2019t get to them in time,\u201d Maria said.", + " She thought almost anyone could be The Watcher, which made daily life feel like navigating a labyrinth of threats. She probed the faces of shoppers at Trader Joe\u2019s to see if they looked strangely at her kids and spent hours Googling anyone who seemed suspicious.\n\nThere were reasons to consider other suspects. For one thing, the police spoke to Michael before the second letter was sent, which would make sending two more especially reckless. (The Broadduses say that Lugo told them they wouldn\u2019t receive any more letters after he spoke to Michael.) Then there was the rest of the neighborhood to consider. The private investigator found two child sex offenders within a few blocks.", + " Bill Woodward, the Broadduses\u2019 housepainter, had also noticed something strange. The couple behind 657 Boulevard kept a pair of lawn chairs strangely close to the Broadduses\u2019 property. \u201cOne day, I was looking out the window and I saw this older guy sitting in one of the chairs,\u201d Woodward told me. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t facing his house \u2014 he was facing the Broadduses.\u2019 \u201d\n\nBut by the end of 2014, the investigation had stalled. The Watcher had left no digital trail, no fingerprints, and no way to place someone at the scene of a crime that could have been hatched from pretty much any mailbox in northern New Jersey.", + " The letters could be read closely for possible clues, or dismissed as the nonsensical ramblings of a sociopath. \u201cIt was like trying to find a needle in a haystack,\u201d said Scott Kraus, who helped investigate the case for the Union County Prosecutor\u2019s Office. In December, the Westfield police told the Broadduses they had run out of options. Derek showed\n\nthe letters to his priest, who agreed to bless the house.\n\nPhoto-Illustration: Gerald Slota\n\nThe renovations to 657 Boulevard, including a new alarm system, were finished within a few months. But the idea of moving in filled the Broadduses with overwhelming anxiety.", + " Could they let their kids play outside or have friends over? Would they get a new letter every week? Derek priced out trained German shepherds and posted a job on a website for military veterans \u2014 \u201cAll you have to do is work out in the backyard every day\u201d \u2014 but the Broadduses hadn\u2019t bought 657 to feel bunkered in a fortress. \u201cAt the end of the day, it came down to, What are you willing to risk?\u201d Maria told me. \u201cWe weren\u2019t going to put our kids in harm\u2019s way.\u201d Derek had been responding to occasional alarms at the house, sometimes in the middle of the night,", + " bringing a knife with him just in case. \u201cThey were so joyous about their new home, and then within days, they were petrified,\u201d Bill Woodward, the painter, said. \u201cI\u2019m a stranger, and Maria was crying and shaking in my arms.\u201d It didn\u2019t help that The Watcher seemed to be getting more and more unhinged:\n\n657 Boulevard is turning on me. It is coming after me. I don\u2019t understand why. What spell did you cast on it? It used to be my friend and now it is my enemy. I am in charge of 657 Boulevard. It is not in charge of me.", + " I will fend off its bad things and wait for it to become good again. It will not punish me. I will rise again. I will be patient and wait for this to pass and for you to bring the young blood back to me. 657 Boulevard needs young blood. It needs you. Come back. Let the young blood play again like I once did. Let the young blood sleep in 657 Boulevard. Stop changing it and let it alone.\n\nThe Broadduses had sold their old home, so they moved in with Maria\u2019s parents while continuing to pay the mortgage and property taxes on 657 Boulevard. \u201cI had to do things like shovel the driveway,\u201d Derek said.", + " \u201cJust picture that little indignity: I\u2019d go at five in the morning, then come back and do it again at my in-laws.\u201d They told only a handful of friends about the letters, which left others to ask why they weren\u2019t moving in \u2014 \u201cLegal issues,\u201d they said \u2014 and wonder if they were getting divorced. They fought constantly and started taking medication to fall asleep. \u201cI was a depressed wreck,\u201d Derek said. Maria decided to see a therapist after a routine doctor\u2019s visit that began with the question \u201cHow are you?\u201d caused her to burst into tears. The therapist said she was suffering post-traumatic stress that wouldn\u2019t go away until they got rid of the house.\n\nSix months after the letters arrived,", + " the Broadduses decided to sell 657 Boulevard. They initially listed it for more than they paid, to reflect the renovations they\u2019d done. But few worlds are more gossipy than suburban New Jersey real estate, and rumors had already begun to swirl about why the house sat empty. One broker emailed to say her client \u201cloved\u201d it but that \u201cthere are so many unsubstantiated rumors flying around,\u201d ranging \u201cfrom sexual predator to stalker,\u201d that they needed to know more. The Broadduses sent a partial disclosure mentioning the letters to interested buyers and told Coldwell Banker, their Realtor, that they intended to show the full letters to anyone whose offer was accepted.", + " Several preliminary bids came in well below the asking price, but the Broadduses weren\u2019t ready to take such a financial hit and only wanted to share the letters with likely buyers. No one got that far, even after they lowered the price. A Coldwell agent who hadn\u2019t read the letters told them in an email that they were being unnecessarily forthcoming \u2014 \u201cMy friend got horrible threatening letters about her dog barking and she didn\u2019t think to disclose\u201d \u2014 but the Broadduses insisted. \u201cI don\u2019t know how you live through what we did and think you could do it to somebody else,\u201d Derek said.\n\nDerek and Maria thought about what they would have done had the previous owners told them about their letter from The Watcher.", + " The Woodses, both retired scientists, told the Broadduses that they remembered the letter they received as more strange than threatening, thanking them for taking care of the house. They say they never had any issues. \u201cWe certainly never felt \u2018watched,\u2019 \u201d Andrea told them. They rarely even locked the doors.\n\nBut the Broadduses felt the name alone was ominous enough to merit mentioning to a new family moving in, and on June 2, 2015, a year after buying 657 Boulevard, they filed a legal complaint against the Woodses, arguing that the Woodses should have disclosed the letter just as they had the fact that water sometimes got in the basement.", + " The Broadduses say they hoped to reach a quiet settlement. Their kids still didn\u2019t know about The Watcher, and their lawyer assured them that, at most, a small legal newswire might pick up the story.\n\n\u201cWe do some creepy stories,\u201d Tamron Hall said on the Today show a few weeks later. \u201cThis might be top-ten creepy.\u201d A local reporter had found the complaint, which included snippets of The Watcher\u2019s menacing threats, and after a belated attempt by the Broadduses to seal it, the story went viral. News trucks camped out at 657 Boulevard, and one local reporter set up a lawn chair to conduct his own watch.", + " The Broadduses got more than 300 media requests, but with advice from a crisis-management consultant referred by one of Derek\u2019s colleagues, they decided not to speak publicly to spare their kids even more attention. They vacated Westfield and went to a friend\u2019s beach house. (They didn\u2019t find much peace: Maria\u2019s grandfather had a heart attack, and the friend they were staying with had a grand-mal seizure.) Eventually, Derek and Maria sat down with their children to explain the real reason they hadn\u2019t moved into their home. The kids had plenty of questions \u2014 Who is The Watcher? Where does this person live? Why is this person angry with us?", + " \u2014 to which Derek and Maria had few answers. \u201cCan you imagine having that conversation with a 5-year-old?\u201d Derek told me. \u201cYour town isn\u2019t as safe as you think it is, and there\u2019s a boogeyman obsessed with you.\u201d\n\nFrom a safer distance, The Watcher was a real-life mystery to solve. A commenter on nj.com suggested ground-penetrating radar to find whatever The Watcher claimed was in the walls. (The home inspector had already looked and told Derek the only issue was the aging home\u2019s lack of insulation.) A group of Reddit users obsessed over Google Maps\u2019 Street View, which showed a car parked in front of 657 that one user thought had \u201ca man holding a camera in the driver\u2019s seat.\u201d (Others,", + " more rationally, saw \u201cpixelated glare.\u201d) The range of proposed suspects included a jilted mistress, a spurned Realtor, a local high-schooler\u2019s creative-writing project, guerrilla marketing for a horror movie, and \u201cmall goths having fun.\u201d Some people just thought the Broadduses were wimps for not moving in \u2014 \u201cI would NEVER let this sicko stop me from moving into a house. Never back down from a TERRORIST\u201d \u2014 which irked the Broadduses. \u201cNone of them have read the letters or had their children threatened by someone they didn\u2019t know,\u201d Derek said.", + " \u201cTo decide whether this person\u2019s only nuts enough to write these letters and not to do something \u2014 what if something did happen? \u201d\n\nIn Westfield, people were on edge. Laurie Clancy, who teaches piano lessons in her house behind 657 Boulevard, told me one of her students came for a lesson shortly after news of The Watcher broke and started bawling. \u201cShe was terrified to walk down the Boulevard,\u201d Clancy said. At the first Westfield town-council meeting after the letters became public, Mayor Andy Skibitksy assured the public that The Watcher hadn\u2019t been heard from in a year and that even though the police hadn\u2019t solved the case,", + " their investigation had been \u201cexhaustive.\u201d\n\nThis was news to 657\u2019s neighbors, most of whom had never heard from the cops. \u201cWe are confounded as to how a thorough investigation can be conducted without talking to all the neighbors with proximity to the home,\u201d several of them wrote in a letter to the local paper. Under the glare of national attention, Barron Chambliss, a veteran detective in the Westfield police, was asked to look at the case. \u201cThe Broadduses are victims, and I don\u2019t think they got the support they needed,\u201d Chambliss, who has since retired, told me recently of the initial investigation.\n\nChambliss knew his colleagues had looked closely at Michael Langford.", + " According to his brother Sandy Langford, Michael had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man. He sometimes spooked newcomers to the neighborhood when he did strange things, like walk through their backyard or peek into the windows of homes that were being renovated. But those who knew him told me that the odd things he did were mostly just unusual neighborly kindnesses. \u201cHe goes out and gets the newspapers for me every morning,\u201d said John Schmidt, who lives next door. People who had known Michael for decades told me they didn\u2019t think he was capable of writing the letters.\n\nAs Chambliss looked into the case, he discovered something surprising:", + " Investigators had eventually conducted a DNA analysis on one of the envelopes and determined that the DNA belonged to a woman. Chambliss decided to look more closely at Abby Langford, Michael\u2019s sister, who worked as a real-estate agent. Was she upset about missing a commission right next door? She also worked at the local Lord & Taylor, and Chambliss coordinated with a security guard there to nab her plastic water bottle during a shift. But Chambliss says the DNA sample was not a match. Not long after, the prosecutor\u2019s office gave Derek and Maria some unexpected news: They wouldn\u2019t say why or how, but they had ruled out the Langfords as suspects.\n\nThe Broadduses were stunned.", + " They had recently told the prosecutors that they planned to file civil charges against the Langfords and wondered if the prosecutors were lying to prevent the story from blowing up again. \u201cMy family moved to the Boulevard in 1961, and we never caused a problem for anybody,\u201d Sandy Langford told me. \u201cThis guy gets all these letters, and all of a sudden people are pointing fingers.\u201d\n\nLeft without a suspect, the Broadduses reopened their personal investigation. They were still coy about sharing too much with their neighbors, who remained in the pool of suspects, but spent an afternoon walking the block with a picture of The Watcher\u2019s handwritten envelope.", + " They hoped someone might recognize the writing from a Christmas card, but the only notable encounter came when an older man who lived behind 657 said his son joked that The Watcher sounded a little bit like him. A neighbor across the street was the CEO of Kroll, the security firm, and the Broadduses hired the company to look for handwriting matches, but they found nothing. They also hired Robert Leonard, a renowned forensic linguist \u2014 and former member of the band Sha Na Na \u2014 who didn\u2019t find any noteworthy overlap when he scoured local online forums for similarities to The Watcher\u2019s writing, although he did think the author might watch Game of Thrones.", + " (Jon Snow is one of the \u201cWatchers on the Wall.\u201d) At one point, Derek persuaded a friend in tech to connect him to a hacker willing to try breaking into Wi-Fi networks in the neighborhood to look for incriminating documents, but doing so turned out to be both illegal and more difficult than the movies made it seem, so they didn\u2019t go through with it.\n\nChambliss and the Westfield police were also back at square one. The cops asked Andrea Woods for a DNA sample and interviewed her 21-year-old son, who was surprised to find that he suddenly seemed to be a suspect. A year after the fact,", + " it was hard to find fresh leads, and the initial police canvas had been so porous that it had missed a significant clue: Around the same time that the Broadduses had received their first letter, another family on the Boulevard got a similar note from The Watcher. The parents of that family had lived in their house for years and their kids were grown, so they threw the letter away just as the Woodses had. But after the news broke, one of their children posted about it on Facebook, then deleted the post. When investigators spoke to the family, they confirmed that the letter had been similar to the Broadduses\u2019. But its existence only made the case more confusing.", + " \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a whole lot to go on,\u201d Chambliss told me.\n\nOne night, Chambliss and a partner were sitting in the back of a van parked on Boulevard, watching the house through a pair of binoculars. Around 11 p.m., a car stopped in front of the house long enough for Chambliss to grow suspicious. He says he traced the car to a young woman in a nearby town whose boyfriend lived on the same block as 657. The woman told Chambliss her boyfriend was into \u201csome really dark video games,\u201d including, in Chambliss\u2019s memory, one in which he was playing as a specific character:", + " \u201cThe Watcher.\u201d As for the female DNA, Chambliss figured the girlfriend, or someone else, could have helped. The boyfriend was living elsewhere at the time, but Chambliss says he agreed to come in for an interview on two separate occasions. He didn\u2019t show up either time. Chambliss didn\u2019t have enough evidence to compel him to appear, and with the media attention dying down, he dropped the case and moved on.\n\nWhile the Broadduses continued to be consumed by stress and fear, for the rest of Westfield, the story became little more than a creepy urban legend \u2014 a house to walk by on Halloween if you were brave enough.", + " No one who had lived in the house before the Woodses could recall anything unusual, and it was hard for people to imagine that their idyllic neighborhood could be host to something so sinister. A woman who lives nearby told me that, after the news broke, she and ten or so of her neighbors had gathered in the street to puzzle out who might have sent the letters. Eventually, she said, they came to a consensus: Maybe the Broadduses had sent the letters to themselves?\n\nThe theory, so far as it went, was that the Broadduses had suffered buyer\u2019s remorse, or realized they couldn\u2019t afford the home,", + " and concocted an elaborate scheme to get out of the sale. Or Derek was cooking up some kind of insurance fraud. Or they were angling for a movie deal. (The Broadduses received several offers but turned them down; Lifetime eventually released a movie called The Watcher, despite a cease-and-desist letter from the Broadduses, arguing that the couple in its movie was biracial and the letters were signed \u201cthe Raven.\u201d) Some locals found it noteworthy that over the course of a decade, the Broadduses had upgraded from a $315,000 house to a $770,000 house to a $1.", + "3 million one and refinanced their mortgages. A few weeks after the letters became public, the Westfield Leader published an article in which anonymous neighbors were quoted asking why the Broadduses kept renovating a home they weren\u2019t moving into, or questioning whether they had really done that much renovating at all. The Leader even cast doubt on Maria\u2019s commitment to her family\u2019s safety, citing as evidence the fact that she had a public Facebook page with a photo of her kids. The paper did note that the police had tested Maria\u2019s DNA and it didn\u2019t match.\n\nNone of the theories made much logical sense. The Broadduses had answers to every question.", + " \u201cHow does someone go from a $300,000 house to a $1.3 million house in ten years?\u201d Derek told me. \u201cIt\u2019s America!\u201d But they weren\u2019t speaking publicly, and the rumors persisted. One Boulevard resident wrote a letter to the editor arguing that \u201can elaborate scheme is underway to defraud the Woods family for millions of dollars.\u201d Chambliss told me some Westfield cops even bought into the theory. There were even more skeptics online. \u201cI live in a neighboring town. If these letters have been happening for a while, there is NO DOUBT in my mind that it would have been made public way before this,\u201d LordFlufferNutter said on Reddit.", + " \u201cThis screams scam.\u201d\n\nThe Broadduses hadn\u2019t known how their neighbors would react to news about The Watcher, but they had lived in the area for a decade, and Maria\u2019s family had been a part of the community for much longer, so it was shocking to find themselves accused of being con artists. To Derek, it seemed that some in Westfield preferred the conspiracy theory to considering whether their town might be home to a menace. \u201cThere\u2019s a natural tendency to say, \u2018I\u2019ve lived here for 35 years; nothing\u2019s happened to me.\u2019 \u201d Derek said. \u201cWhat happened to my family is an affront to their contention that they\u2019re safe,", + " that there\u2019s no such thing as mental illness in their community. People don\u2019t want to believe this could happen in Westfield.\u201d\n\nWhile Maria looks back fondly on her childhood, she was born a few years after Westfield resident John List infamously murdered his wife, mother, and three children in their home, and remembers a period when she and other kids were warned to look out for a strange van driving around town. \u201cMy mother always told me don\u2019t have a false sense of security,\u201d she said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t that bad things were going on all the time, it was that bad things happen everywhere. She didn\u2019t want me to think that this is Mayberry.\u201d\n\nMany locals I spoke to did seem more concerned that the national press might ruin Westfield\u2019s good name.", + " Some were primarily worried about arson, or vandalism, or whether the Broadduses would maintain the lawn. (They did.) Mark LoGrippo, the neighborhood\u2019s representative on the Westfield town council, told me the primary concern he heard from residents was that they \u201cwere worried about their property value and the stigma of the neighborhood.\u201d\n\nThe Broadduses were suddenly outcasts not only from their home but also their town. Derek wanted to leave Westfield, but Maria insisted on not uprooting her kids. \u201cThis person took so much from us,\u201d Maria told me. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t let them take more.\u201d Two years after The Watcher\u2019s letters arrived,", + " the Broadduses borrowed money from family members to buy a second home in Westfield, using an LLC to keep the location private. But staying in town was stressful. The first time Maria let her daughter go to the pool with friends, she stared at the tracker on her daughter\u2019s iPhone the whole time. One of their kids was in language-arts class when the teacher led a debate about whether the family in a book they were reading should move to Westfield. The class thought they should, in part because of how safe it was. Afterward, one of the kids told the Broadduses\u2019 child, \u201cMy parents told me that no matter what your family says,", + " Westfield is safe.\u201d\n\nMeanwhile, the Broadduses still had to figure out what to do with 657 Boulevard. Their lawsuit was pending but seemed unlikely to succeed. Some states require sellers to disclose \u201ctransient social conditions\u201d like murders or possible hauntings \u2014 in a 1991 case involving an allegedly ghost-filled house, a New York court ruled that \u201cas a matter of law, the house is haunted\u201d \u2014 but New Jersey had no such regulation. (A judge later dismissed the lawsuit; the Woodses, through their attorney, declined to comment for this story.) Derek looked into renting the house to the Department of Veterans Affairs and a company that runs halfway homes.\n\nIn the spring of 2016,", + " they put 657 back on the market, hoping it might garner more interest given how many people had reacted to the letters by saying they would have ignored them and just moved in. The Broadduses held a well-attended open house, after which Derek and Maria spent hours researching every person who signed in and comparing their handwriting to The Watcher\u2019s, but each time a potential buyer expressed interest and met with the Broadduses\u2019 lawyer to read the letters, they backed out. \u201cSome cocky guy from Staten Island said, \u2018Fuck it, I\u2019m gonna get a house at a discount,\u2019 \u201d Derek recalled. \u201cHe reads the letters and we never hear from him again.\u201d\n\nFeeling as if they were out of options,", + " the Broadduses\u2019 real-estate lawyer proposed an idea: Sell the house to a developer, who could tear it down and split the property into two sellable homes. They thought they could get $1 million for the lot. Subdivisions like this had become common in Westfield, much to the chagrin of many locals, and 657 was one of the neighborhood\u2019s largest lots. Even so, dividing it would require the Westfield Planning Board to grant an exception: The two smaller lots would be 67.4 and 67.6 feet wide \u2014 just shy of the mandated 70 feet.\n\nWhen the proposal was publicly announced,", + " Westfield\u2019s Facebook groups lit up. Some expressed sympathy for the Broadduses, while others pointed out real estate is always a gamble. Another faction was convinced this was the culmination of a long con. \u201cOut of this whole scam-artist story there ends up being nothing more disturbing than this move,\u201d a local woman said. A man who coached the Broadduses\u2019 son in football wrote, \u201cThey were in over their head from day one.\u201d The application was jarring for the neighbors, who had learned about The Watcher from a lawsuit, and had always found it strange that the Broadduses didn\u2019t share more information, not seeming to understand they were following orders from the police and trying to protect their kids.", + " A typical Facebook conversation went like this one:\n\n\u201cSounds like this whole \u2018Watcher\u2019 thing was a ploy.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe owners are good people. Not a ploy.\u201d\n\n\u201cOkay. I know nothing about them.\u201d\n\nKristin Kemp, a friend of the Broadduses, had tried to defend them on one Facebook forum, but people started attacking her. \u201cSomebody asked, \u2018How do we know it\u2019s not you writing the letters?\u2019 \u201d Kemp told me.\n\nWhen the planning board met to decide the application in January 2017, it had already devoted a three-hour hearing to the issue. More than 100 residents showed up.", + " One of them, who lived across the street and had a daughter in the same grade as one of the Broadduses\u2019 kids, had retained a lawyer to fight the proposal. (Here was a new suspect: Who but The Watcher would go so far as to hire an attorney to preserve the house?) After a quick discussion about a Wells Fargo branch that wanted to use brighter lightbulbs than the town allowed, the room grew as tense as suburban-planning-board meetings get. James Foerst, the Broadduses\u2019 attorney, explained that the three-foot exemption was as narrow as the easel he was using to display a map of the neighborhood \u2014 a map that showed several lots on the block that were also too small.", + " The neighbors expressed concern that the plan might require knocking down trees and that the new homes would have aesthetically unpleasing front-facing garages. Foerst repeatedly threatened the halfway house as a possible alternative.\n\nAfter the lawyers, a parade of neighbors stood to speak. Glen Dumont, from across the street, said the proposal \u201cwould spell the end of the 600 block of Boulevard as we know it.\u201d A woman whose kids had been to the Broadduses\u2019 old home for a birthday party spoke on behalf of nine neighbors and presented 657 Boulevard as Westfield\u2019s Alamo. \u201cOur neighborhoods are constantly under attack from turf,", + " lights, parking decks, you name it,\u201d she said. \u201cIf we can\u2019t make a stand on Boulevard, where can we?\u201d At one point, Abby Langford stood up to say she had \u201cspent almost 60 years looking at a magnificent, beautiful house\u201d and didn\u2019t \u201cwant to be looking out at a driveway.\u201d\n\nThe hearing lasted four hours, during which there was little discussion of the reason the Broadduses had been driven to tear down their dream home in the first place. \u201cHas anybody thought about whether or not this lunatic who did this has been apprehended?\u201d said Tom Higgins, who lived across the street,", + " toward the end of the hearing. Even so, Higgins pointed out that there was no guarantee The Watcher wouldn\u2019t send letters to the two new houses and argued that aesthetics should rule the day. \u201cPutting up two houses there is gonna stick out like an old client of mine in Texas told me,\u201d Higgins said. \u201cIt\u2019s gonna stick out like a dog\u2019s balls.\u201d While some of the neighbors expressed compassion, their focus remained on what the Broadduses stood to gain financially \u2014 and what they themselves might lose.\n\nAt 11:30 p.m., the board unanimously rejected the proposal. (A New Jersey judge later denied the Broadduses\u2019 appeal of the decision.) Derek and Maria were distraught.", + " Even if the plan had gone through, it would have only stanched their financial bleeding. On top of the mortgage and renovations, they have paid around $100,000 in Westfield property taxes \u2014 the town denied their request for relief \u2014 and spent at least that amount investigating The Watcher and exploring ways to deal with the home, not to mention cleaning the gutters. The Broadduses recognized that 657 Boulevard was a beautiful house on a beautiful street that was worth maintaining but were surprised their neighbors didn\u2019t see the uniqueness of the situation. \u201cThis is my town,\u201d Maria told me recently. \u201cI grew up here. I came back,", + " I chose to raise my kids here. You know what we\u2019ve been through. You had the ability, two and a half years into a nightmare, to make it a little better. And you have decided that this house is more important than we are. That\u2019s really how it felt.\u201d (On top of all that, her dad had recently died unexpectedly.) Father Michael Saporito, the priest who blessed the house, went to one of the planning-board meetings and told me he was taken aback by how many people had come up to him and said they thought the whole thing was a hoax. \u201cI think the human element of the story was kind of lost on the neighbors,\u201d Saporito said.", + " The Watcher had expressed a desire to protect the Boulevard from change, but instead it had been torn apart.\n\nNot long after the planning board\u2019s decision, the Broadduses got some good news. A family with grown children and two big dogs had agreed to rent 657 Boulevard. The renter told the Star-Ledger he wasn\u2019t worried about The Watcher, though he had a clause in the lease that let him out in case of another letter.\n\nTwo weeks later, Derek went to 657 to deal with squirrels that had taken up residence in the roof. The renter handed him an envelope that had just arrived:\n\nViolent winds and bitter cold To the vile and spiteful Derek and his wench of a wife Maria,\n\nThis letter,", + " two and a half years after The Watcher appeared, came out of nowhere. It was dated February 13, the day the Broadduses gave depositions in their lawsuit against the Woodses. \u201cYou wonder who The Watcher is? Turn around idiots,\u201d the letter read. \u201cMaybe you even spoke to me, one of the so called neighbors who has no idea who The Watcher could be. Or maybe you do know and are too scared to tell anyone. Good move.\u201d The letter was less stylish and more wrathful than the others, and it seemed the writer had been closely following the story. They had seen the media coverage (\u201cI walked by the news trucks when they took over my neighborhood and mocked me\u201d), Derek\u2019s surreptitious investigatory efforts (\u201cI watched as you watched from the dark house in an attempt to find me \u2026 Telescopes and binoculars are wonderful inventions\u201d), and the attempt to tear down the house.", + " \u201c657 Boulevard survived your attempted assault and stood strong with its army of supporters barricading its gates,\u201d the letter read. \u201cMy soldiers of the Boulevard followed my orders to a T. They carried out their mission and saved the soul of 657 Boulevard with my orders. All hail The Watcher!!!\u201d The renter was mentioned \u2014 he was spooked but agreed to stay if the Broadduses installed cameras around the house \u2014 and the letter indicated revenge could come in many forms:\n\nMaybe a car accident. Maybe a fire. Maybe something as simple as a mild illness that never seems to go away but makes you fell sick day after day after day after day after day.", + " Maybe the mysterious death of a pet. Loved ones suddenly die. Planes and cars and bicycles crash. Bones break.\n\n\u201cIt was like we were back at the beginning,\u201d said Maria. But it also meant fresh evidence that might help invigorate the investigation. Derek took the letter to police headquarters, where a detective looked at a neighborhood map and traced a circle around the house 300 yards in diameter, suggesting The Watcher must be somewhere in there. Derek drew one much closer. \u201cIn my view, it\u2019s one of ten houses in the world,\u201d he said.\n\nThe Broadduses continued to press the case, but there still wasn\u2019t much for law enforcement to go on,", + " and it was possible to look up and down the street and see The Watcher in practically anyone. Residents mentioned to me a teenager whose father had grown up around the corner, and a man who sometimes walked around the neighborhood playing a flute. An elderly couple behind the house had been there 47 years. The husband was the man Bill Woodward had seen sitting in a lawn chair looking at the Broadduses\u2019 house. One of their kids had married a man who grew up in, of all places, 657 Boulevard. But these were bits of information that could mean everything or nothing depending on how hard you looked at them. The Broadduses sent new names to the investigators whenever they found something odd,", + " but their greatest fear was that The Watcher could be someone they\u2019d never suspect.\n\nOne day last spring, Derek picked me up at the Westfield train station. We drove past 657 Boulevard, which he and Maria try to avoid unless they have to pick up the tax bill. \u201cIt\u2019s all beautiful trees and beautiful houses, but all I feel is anxious,\u201d Derek said. \u201cSometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, What would my life be like if this didn\u2019t happen? We lost Christmas a couple times, and you don\u2019t get that back \u2014 Christmas with a 5-year-old.\u201d\n\nThe Broadduses no longer live in ever-present fear that The Watcher might strike at any moment,", + " but they continue to deal with lingering effects from the letters. They have a new tenant at 657, but the rent doesn\u2019t cover the mortgage. Their kids are occasionally teased at school. And the conspiratorial rumors persist. They try to avoid the people who spoke out against their planning-board application or accused them of being con artists, but suburban life makes that impossible. \u201cI see these people on the soccer field, at the train station, and my heart starts going like it did when I played hockey and was about to get in a fight,\u201d Derek said. When Maria found herself in a spin class at the YMCA with the head of the planning board,", + " she went up afterward and told him, \u201cYou continue to hurt my family every day.\u201d Earlier this year, the planning board approved splitting a lot around the corner that required an even larger exception than the Broadduses\u2019.\n\nMost people in Westfield told me they rarely thought of The Watcher anymore. The real-estate market was doing fine, for one, and many were surprised to find out the Broadduses were still dealing with the problem. Hindsight made Derek and Maria wonder if they should have sold the house at a loss, early on, and 657 Boulevard conjured too much emotional pain for them to ever consider moving in.", + " They hope that a few years of renting the place without incident will help them sell it. The prosecutor\u2019s office was continuing its investigation, but the Broadduses knew it was unlikely The Watcher would ever be caught and that the legal punishment would likely be minimal.\n\nThe Watcher was also no longer the only person sending anonymous letters in Westfield. Last Christmas Eve, several families received an envelope in their mailboxes. They\u2019d been delivered by hand to the homes of people who had been the most vocal in criticizing the Broadduses online. One of them, who lived a few blocks down on Boulevard, had written on Facebook: \u201cI wish we could go back to the days of tar and feathers.", + " I have just the couple in mind!\u201d Another family who got the letter told me it was \u201cweirdly poetic,\u201d as The Watcher\u2019s had been, and that it accused the families of speculating inaccurately about the Broadduses. It included several stories about recent acts of domestic terrorism in which signs of brewing mental illness had gone unnoticed. The typed letters were signed, \u201cFriends of the Broaddus Family.\u201d\n\nThe letter writer had clearly been infected not only with The Watcher\u2019s penchant for anonymous notes but also a simmering resentment: one that had snaked its way through Westfield, making enemies of neighbors. The people who received the letters didn\u2019t know who sent them,", + " but the tone had a familiar ring to me. When I asked Derek Broaddus whether he had written them, he paused for a moment, then admitted he had. He wasn\u2019t proud of it\u2014 he hadn\u2019t even told his wife \u2014 and said they were the only anonymous letters he\u2019d written. But he had felt driven to his wit\u2019s end, fed up with watching silently as people threw accusations at his family based on practically nothing. (One of the people who received the letter told me they had never met the Broadduses and had no interest in doing so.) The Watcher had been obsessed with 657 Boulevard, and Derek,", + " in turn, had become obsessed with The Watcher and everything the letters had set in motion. \u201cIt\u2019s like cancer,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe think about it everyday.\u201d\n\nSitting at the Westfield train station, Derek handed me his phone so I could read the fourth letter. \u201cYou are despised by the house,\u201d it read. \u201cAnd The Watcher won.\u201d\n\n*This article appears in the November 12, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now! ", + " The home, 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey. Photo-Illustration: Gerald Slota\n\nOne night in June 2014, Derek Broaddus had just finished an evening of painting at his new home in Westfield, New Jersey, when he went outside to check the mail. Derek and his wife, Maria, had closed on the six-bedroom house at 657 Boulevard three days earlier and were doing some renovations before they moved in, so there wasn\u2019t much in the mail except a few bills and a white, card-shaped envelope. It was addressed in thick, clunky handwriting to \u201cThe New Owner,\u201d and the typed note inside began warmly:\n\nDearest new neighbor at 657 Boulevard,", + " Allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood.\n\nFor the Broadduses, buying 657 Boulevard had fulfilled a dream. Maria was raised in Westfield, and the house was a few blocks from her childhood home. Derek grew up working class in Maine, then moved his way up the ladder at an insurance company in Manhattan to become a senior vice-president with a salary large enough to afford the $1.3 million house. The Broadduses had bought 657 Boulevard just after Derek celebrated his 40th birthday, and their three kids were already debating which of the house\u2019s fireplaces Santa Claus would use.\n\nBut as Derek kept reading the letter from his new neighbor,", + " it took a turn. \u201cHow did you end up here?\u201d the writer asked. \u201cDid 657 Boulevard call to you with its force within?\u201d The letter went on:\n\n657 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now and as it approaches its 110th birthday, I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming. My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.\n\nThe author\u2019s reconnaissance had apparently already begun.", + " The letter identified the Broadduses\u2019 Honda minivan, as well as the workers renovating the home. \u201cI see already that you have flooded 657 Boulevard with contractors so that you can destroy the house as it was supposed to be,\u201d the person wrote. \u201cTsk, tsk, tsk \u2026 bad move. You don\u2019t want to make 657 Boulevard unhappy.\u201d Earlier in the week, Derek and Maria had gone to the house and chatted with their new neighbors while their children, who were 5, 8, and 10 years old, ran around the backyard with several kids from the neighborhood. The letter writer seemed to have noticed.", + " \u201cYou have children. I have seen them. So far I think there are three that I have counted,\u201d the anonymous correspondent wrote, before asking if there were \u201cmore on the way\u201d:\n\nDo you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested? Better for me. Was your old house too small for the growing family? Or was it greed to bring me your children? Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them too [sic] me.\n\nThe envelope had no return address. \u201cWho am I?\u201d the person wrote. \u201cThere are hundreds and hundreds of cars that drive by 657 Boulevard each day.", + " Maybe I am in one. Look at all the windows you can see from 657 Boulevard. Maybe I am in one. Look out any of the many windows in 657 Boulevard at all the people who stroll by each day. Maybe I am one.\u201d The letter concluded with a suggestion that this message would not be the last \u2014 \u201cWelcome my friends, welcome. Let the party begin\u201d \u2014 followed by a signature typed in a cursive font: \u201cThe Watcher.\u201d\n\nIt was after 10 p.m., and Derek Broaddus was alone. He raced around the house, turning off lights so no one could see inside, then called the Westfield Police Department.", + " An officer came to the house, read the letter, and said, \u201cWhat the fuck is this?\u201d He asked Derek if he had enemies and recommended moving a piece of construction equipment from the back porch in case The Watcher tried to toss it through a window.\n\nDerek rushed back to his wife and kids, who were living at their old home elsewhere in Westfield. That night, Derek and Maria wrote an email to John and Andrea Woods, the couple who sold them 657 Boulevard, to ask if they had any idea who The Watcher might be or why he or she had written, \u201cI asked the Woods to bring me young blood and it looks like they listened.\u201d\n\nWas your old house too small for the growing family?", + " Or was it greed to bring me your children? Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them too [sic] me.\n\nAndrea Woods replied the next morning: A few days before moving out, the Woodses had also received a letter from \u201cThe Watcher.\u201d The note had been \u201codd,\u201d she said, and made similar mention of The Watcher\u2019s family observing the house over time, but Andrea said she and her husband had never received anything like it in their 23 years in the house and had thrown the letter away without much thought. That day, the Woodses went with Maria to the police station,", + " where Detective Leonard Lugo told her not to tell anyone about the letters, including her new neighbors, most of whom she had never met \u2014 and all of whom were now suspects.\n\nThe Broadduses spent the coming weeks on high alert. Derek canceled a work trip, and whenever Maria took the kids to their new house, she would yell their names if they wandered into a corner of the yard. When Derek gave a tour of the renovation to a couple on the block, he froze when the wife said, \u201cIt\u2019ll be nice to have some young blood in the neighborhood.\u201d The Broadduses\u2019 general contractor arrived one morning to find that a heavy sign he\u2019d hammered into the front yard had been ripped out overnight.\n\nTwo weeks after the letter arrived,", + " Maria stopped by the house to look at some paint samples and check the mail. She recognized the thick black lettering on a card-shaped envelope and called the police. \u201cWelcome again to your new home at 657 Boulevard,\u201d The Watcher wrote. \u201cThe workers have been busy and I have been watching you unload carfuls of your personal belongings. The dumpster is a nice touch. Have they found what is in the walls yet? In time they will.\u201d\n\nThis time, The Watcher had addressed Derek and Maria directly, misspelling their names as \u201cMr. and Mrs. Braddus.\u201d Had The Watcher been close enough to hear one of the Broadduses\u2019 contractors addressing them?", + " The Watcher boasted of having learned a lot about the family in the preceding weeks, especially about their children. The letter identified the Broadduses\u2019 three kids by birth order and by their nicknames \u2014 the ones Maria had been yelling. \u201cI am pleased to know your names now and the name of the young blood you have brought to me,\u201d it said. \u201cYou certainly say their names often.\u201d The letter asked about one child in particular, whom the writer had seen using an easel inside an enclosed porch: \u201cIs she the artist in the family?\u201d\n\nThe letter continued:\n\n657 Boulevard is anxious for you to move in. It has been years and years since the young blood ruled the hallways of the house.", + " Have you found all of the secrets it holds yet? Will the young blood play in the basement? Or are they too afraid to go down there alone. I would [be] very afraid if I were them. It is far away from the rest of the house. If you were upstairs you would never hear them scream.\n\nWill they sleep in the attic? Or will you all sleep on the second floor? Who has the bedrooms facing the street? I\u2019ll know as soon as you move in. It will help me to know who is in which bedroom. Then I can plan better.\n\nAll of the windows and doors in 657 Boulevard allow me to watch you and track you as you move through the house.", + " Who am I? I am the Watcher and have been in control of 657 Boulevard for the better part of two decades now. The Woods family turned it over to you. It was their time to move on and kindly sold it when I asked them to.\n\nI pass by many times a day. 657 Boulevard is my job, my life, my obsession. And now you are too Braddus family. Welcome to the product of your greed! Greed is what brought the past three families to 657 Boulevard and now it has brought you to me.\n\nHave a happy moving in day. You know I will be watching.\n\nDerek and Maria stopped bringing their kids to the house.", + " They were no longer sure when, or if, they would move in. Several weeks later, a third letter arrived. \u201cWhere have you gone to?\u201d The Watcher wrote. \u201c657 Boulevard is missing you.\u201d\n\nMany Westfield residents compare their town to Mayberry, the idyllic setting for The Andy Griffith Show \u2014 the kind of place where a new neighbor might greet you with a welcoming note. Westfield is 45 minutes from New York and a bit too slow for singles, meaning the town\u2019s 30,000 residents are largely well-to-do families. This year, Bloomberg ranked Westfield the 99th-richest city in America \u2014 but only the 18th wealthiest in New Jersey \u2014 and in 2014,", + " when The Watcher struck, the website NeighborhoodScout named it the country\u2019s 30th-safest town. The most pressing local issues of late, according to residents, have been the temporary closure of Trader Joe\u2019s after a roof collapse and the rampant scourge of \u201cunconstitutional policing,\u201d by which they mean aggressive parking enforcement. (Westfield is 86 percent white.)\n\nOne activity all locals recognized as treacherous is trying to buy a house. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of money and a lot of ego,\u201d one resident, who requested anonymity before discussing Westfield real estate, told me. \u201cI\u2019ve seen bidding wars where friends lost by $300,", + "000.\u201d The Broadduses\u2019 house was on the Boulevard, a wide, tree-lined street with some of the more desirable homes in town, as The Watcher had noted: \u201cThe Boulevard used to be THE street to live on \u2026 You made it if you lived on the Boulevard.\u201d\n\nBuilt in 1905, 657 Boulevard was perhaps the grandest home on the block, and when the Woodses put it on the market, they had received multiple offers above their asking price. That led the Broadduses to initially suspect that The Watcher might be someone upset over losing out on the house. But the Woodses said one interested buyer had backed out after a bad medical diagnosis,", + " while another had already found a different home. In an email to the Broadduses, Andrea Woods proposed another theory: \u201cWould the mention of the contractor trucks [and] your children suggest that it was someone in the neighborhood?\u201d\n\nThe letters did indicate proximity. They had been processed in Kearny, the U.S. Postal Service\u2019s distribution center in northern New Jersey. The first was postmarked June 4, before the sale was public \u2014 the Woodses had never put up a for sale sign \u2014 and only a day after the contractors arrived. The renovations were mostly interior, and people who lived nearby say they didn\u2019t notice an unusual commotion,", + " even from the jackhammering in the basement. When Derek and Maria walked Detective Lugo around the house, they showed him that the easel on the porch was hidden from the street by vegetation, making it difficult to see unless someone was behind the house or right next door.\n\nA few days after the first letter, Maria and Derek went to a barbecue across the street welcoming them and another new homeowner to the block. The Broadduses hadn\u2019t told anyone about The Watcher, as the police had instructed, and found themselves scanning the party for clues while keeping tabs on their kids, who ran guilelessly through a crowd that made up much of the suspect pool.", + " \u201cWe kept screaming at them to stay close,\u201d Maria said. \u201cPeople must have thought we were crazy.\u201d\n\nAt one point, Derek was chatting with John Schmidt, who lived two doors down, when Schmidt told him about the Langfords, who lived between them. Peggy Langford was in her 90s, and several of her adult children, all in their 60s, lived with her. The family was a bit odd, Schmidt said, but harmless. He described one of the younger Langfords, Michael, who didn\u2019t work and had a beard like Ernest Hemingway, as \u201ckind of a Boo Radley character.\u201d\n\nDerek thought the case was solved.", + " The Langford house was right next to the easel on the porch. The family had lived there since the 1960s, when The Watcher\u2019s father, the letters said, had begun observing 657 Boulevard. Richard Langford, the family patriarch, had died 12 years earlier, and the current Watcher claimed to have been on the job for \u201cthe better part of two decades.\u201d\n\nWhen the Broadduses told Lugo about the family, he said he already knew, and a week after the first letter arrived, he brought Michael Langford to police headquarters for an interview. Michael denied knowing anything about the letters, but the Broadduses say that Lugo told them that \u201cthe narrative\u201d of what he said matched things mentioned in the letters.", + " \u201cThis isn\u2019t CSI: Westfield,\u201d Lugo later told the Broadduses. \u201cWhen the wife is dead, it\u2019s the husband.\u201d\n\nBut there wasn\u2019t much hard evidence, and after a few weeks, the police chief told the Broadduses that, short of an admission, there wasn\u2019t much the department could do. \u201cThis is someone who threatened my kids, and the police are saying, \u2018Probably nothing\u2019s gonna happen,\u2019 \u201d Derek said. \u201cProbably isn\u2019t good enough for me.\u201d After the second letter, Derek told the cops that if they didn\u2019t take care of the situation, they would have a different kind of case on their hands.", + " \u201cThis person attacked my family, and where I\u2019m from, if you do that, you get your ass beat,\u201d Derek told me.\n\nFrustrated, the Broadduses began their own investigation. Derek became especially obsessed. He set up webcams in 657 Boulevard and spent nights crouched in the dark, watching to see if anyone was watching the house at close range. \u201cMaria thought I was crazy,\u201d he told me recently at a coffee shop in Manhattan, where he covered a table with documents relating to the case, including copies of the letters, which he and his wife had shared with only a few friends and family members.", + " He showed me a map displaying when each of 657\u2019s neighbors had moved in \u2014 the Langfords were the only ones there since the \u201960s \u2014 with overlays marking possible sight lines for the easel and a circle for \u201cApproximate Range of \u2018Ear Shot\u2019 \u201d to estimate who might have heard Maria yelling their kids\u2019 names. Only a few homes fit both criteria.\n\nThe Broadduses also turned to several experts. They employed a private investigator, who staked out the neighborhood and ran background checks on the Langfords but didn\u2019t find anything noteworthy. Derek reached out to a former FBI agent who served as the inspiration for Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs \u2014 they were on a high-school board of trustees together \u2014 and they also hired Robert Lenehan,", + " another former FBI agent, to conduct a threat assessment. Lenehan recognized several old-fashioned tics in the letters that pointed to an older writer. The envelope was addressed to \u201cM/M Braddus,\u201d the salutations included the day\u2019s weather \u2014 \u201cWarm and humid,\u201d \u201cSunny and cool for a summer day\u201d \u2014 and the sentences had double spaces between them. The letters had a certain literary panache, which suggested a \u201cvoracious reader,\u201d and a surprising lack of profanity given the level of anger, which Lenehan thought meant a \u201cless macho\u201d writer. Maybe, he wondered, The Watcher had seen The Watcher,", + " starring Keanu Reeves as a serial killer who stalks the detective trying to catch him?\n\nLenehan didn\u2019t think The Watcher was likely to act on the threats, but the letters had enough typos and errors to imply a certain erraticism. (The first letter was dated \u201cTuesday, June 4th,\u201d but that day was a Wednesday.) There was also a \u201cseething anger\u201d directed at the wealthy in particular. The Watcher was upset by new money moving into town \u2014 \u201cAre you one of those Hoboken transplants who are ruining Westfield?\u201d \u2014 and by the Broadduses\u2019 relatively modest renovations:\n\nThe house is crying from all of the pain it is going through.", + " You have changed it and made it so fancy. You are stealing it\u2019s [sic] history. It cries for the past and what used to be in the time when I roamed it\u2019s [sic] halls. The 1960s were a good time for 657 Boulevard when I ran from room to room imagining the life with the rich occupants there. The house was full of life and young blood. Then it got old and so did my father. But he kept watching until the day he died. And now I watch and wait for the day when the young blood will be mine again.\n\nLenehan recommended looking into former housekeepers or their descendants.", + " Perhaps The Watcher was jealous that the Broadduses had bought a home that the writer couldn\u2019t afford.\n\nBut the focus remained on the Langfords. In cooperation with Westfield police, the Broadduses sent a letter to the Langfords announcing plans to tear down the house, hoping to prompt a response. (Nothing happened.) Detective Lugo brought Michael Langford in for a second interview but got nowhere, and his sister, Abby, accused the police of harassing their family. Eventually, the Broadduses hired Lee Levitt, a lawyer, who met with several members of the Langford family, as well as their attorney,", + " to show them the letters, along with photos explaining how their home was one of the few vantage points from which the easel could be seen. The meeting grew tense, Levitt told me, and the Langfords insisted Michael was innocent. One night, Derek had a dream in which he confronted Peggy, the eldest Langford, and demanded she build an eight-foot fence between the properties.\n\nMaria was having other kinds of dreams. One night, she woke up to an especially vivid one about a man who lived nearby. \u201cHe was wearing these boots and carrying a pitchfork and calling to the kids and I couldn\u2019t get to them in time,\u201d Maria said.", + " She thought almost anyone could be The Watcher, which made daily life feel like navigating a labyrinth of threats. She probed the faces of shoppers at Trader Joe\u2019s to see if they looked strangely at her kids and spent hours Googling anyone who seemed suspicious.\n\nThere were reasons to consider other suspects. For one thing, the police spoke to Michael before the second letter was sent, which would make sending two more especially reckless. (The Broadduses say that Lugo told them they wouldn\u2019t receive any more letters after he spoke to Michael.) Then there was the rest of the neighborhood to consider. The private investigator found two child sex offenders within a few blocks.", + " Bill Woodward, the Broadduses\u2019 housepainter, had also noticed something strange. The couple behind 657 Boulevard kept a pair of lawn chairs strangely close to the Broadduses\u2019 property. \u201cOne day, I was looking out the window and I saw this older guy sitting in one of the chairs,\u201d Woodward told me. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t facing his house \u2014 he was facing the Broadduses.\u2019 \u201d\n\nBut by the end of 2014, the investigation had stalled. The Watcher had left no digital trail, no fingerprints, and no way to place someone at the scene of a crime that could have been hatched from pretty much any mailbox in northern New Jersey.", + " The letters could be read closely for possible clues, or dismissed as the nonsensical ramblings of a sociopath. \u201cIt was like trying to find a needle in a haystack,\u201d said Scott Kraus, who helped investigate the case for the Union County Prosecutor\u2019s Office. In December, the Westfield police told the Broadduses they had run out of options. Derek showed\n\nthe letters to his priest, who agreed to bless the house.\n\nPhoto-Illustration: Gerald Slota\n\nThe renovations to 657 Boulevard, including a new alarm system, were finished within a few months. But the idea of moving in filled the Broadduses with overwhelming anxiety.", + " Could they let their kids play outside or have friends over? Would they get a new letter every week? Derek priced out trained German shepherds and posted a job on a website for military veterans \u2014 \u201cAll you have to do is work out in the backyard every day\u201d \u2014 but the Broadduses hadn\u2019t bought 657 to feel bunkered in a fortress. \u201cAt the end of the day, it came down to, What are you willing to risk?\u201d Maria told me. \u201cWe weren\u2019t going to put our kids in harm\u2019s way.\u201d Derek had been responding to occasional alarms at the house, sometimes in the middle of the night,", + " bringing a knife with him just in case. \u201cThey were so joyous about their new home, and then within days, they were petrified,\u201d Bill Woodward, the painter, said. \u201cI\u2019m a stranger, and Maria was crying and shaking in my arms.\u201d It didn\u2019t help that The Watcher seemed to be getting more and more unhinged:\n\n657 Boulevard is turning on me. It is coming after me. I don\u2019t understand why. What spell did you cast on it? It used to be my friend and now it is my enemy. I am in charge of 657 Boulevard. It is not in charge of me.", + " I will fend off its bad things and wait for it to become good again. It will not punish me. I will rise again. I will be patient and wait for this to pass and for you to bring the young blood back to me. 657 Boulevard needs young blood. It needs you. Come back. Let the young blood play again like I once did. Let the young blood sleep in 657 Boulevard. Stop changing it and let it alone.\n\nThe Broadduses had sold their old home, so they moved in with Maria\u2019s parents while continuing to pay the mortgage and property taxes on 657 Boulevard. \u201cI had to do things like shovel the driveway,\u201d Derek said.", + " \u201cJust picture that little indignity: I\u2019d go at five in the morning, then come back and do it again at my in-laws.\u201d They told only a handful of friends about the letters, which left others to ask why they weren\u2019t moving in \u2014 \u201cLegal issues,\u201d they said \u2014 and wonder if they were getting divorced. They fought constantly and started taking medication to fall asleep. \u201cI was a depressed wreck,\u201d Derek said. Maria decided to see a therapist after a routine doctor\u2019s visit that began with the question \u201cHow are you?\u201d caused her to burst into tears. The therapist said she was suffering post-traumatic stress that wouldn\u2019t go away until they got rid of the house.\n\nSix months after the letters arrived,", + " the Broadduses decided to sell 657 Boulevard. They initially listed it for more than they paid, to reflect the renovations they\u2019d done. But few worlds are more gossipy than suburban New Jersey real estate, and rumors had already begun to swirl about why the house sat empty. One broker emailed to say her client \u201cloved\u201d it but that \u201cthere are so many unsubstantiated rumors flying around,\u201d ranging \u201cfrom sexual predator to stalker,\u201d that they needed to know more. The Broadduses sent a partial disclosure mentioning the letters to interested buyers and told Coldwell Banker, their Realtor, that they intended to show the full letters to anyone whose offer was accepted.", + " Several preliminary bids came in well below the asking price, but the Broadduses weren\u2019t ready to take such a financial hit and only wanted to share the letters with likely buyers. No one got that far, even after they lowered the price. A Coldwell agent who hadn\u2019t read the letters told them in an email that they were being unnecessarily forthcoming \u2014 \u201cMy friend got horrible threatening letters about her dog barking and she didn\u2019t think to disclose\u201d \u2014 but the Broadduses insisted. \u201cI don\u2019t know how you live through what we did and think you could do it to somebody else,\u201d Derek said.\n\nDerek and Maria thought about what they would have done had the previous owners told them about their letter from The Watcher.", + " The Woodses, both retired scientists, told the Broadduses that they remembered the letter they received as more strange than threatening, thanking them for taking care of the house. They say they never had any issues. \u201cWe certainly never felt \u2018watched,\u2019 \u201d Andrea told them. They rarely even locked the doors.\n\nBut the Broadduses felt the name alone was ominous enough to merit mentioning to a new family moving in, and on June 2, 2015, a year after buying 657 Boulevard, they filed a legal complaint against the Woodses, arguing that the Woodses should have disclosed the letter just as they had the fact that water sometimes got in the basement.", + " The Broadduses say they hoped to reach a quiet settlement. Their kids still didn\u2019t know about The Watcher, and their lawyer assured them that, at most, a small legal newswire might pick up the story.\n\n\u201cWe do some creepy stories,\u201d Tamron Hall said on the Today show a few weeks later. \u201cThis might be top-ten creepy.\u201d A local reporter had found the complaint, which included snippets of The Watcher\u2019s menacing threats, and after a belated attempt by the Broadduses to seal it, the story went viral. News trucks camped out at 657 Boulevard, and one local reporter set up a lawn chair to conduct his own watch.", + " The Broadduses got more than 300 media requests, but with advice from a crisis-management consultant referred by one of Derek\u2019s colleagues, they decided not to speak publicly to spare their kids even more attention. They vacated Westfield and went to a friend\u2019s beach house. (They didn\u2019t find much peace: Maria\u2019s grandfather had a heart attack, and the friend they were staying with had a grand-mal seizure.) Eventually, Derek and Maria sat down with their children to explain the real reason they hadn\u2019t moved into their home. The kids had plenty of questions \u2014 Who is The Watcher? Where does this person live? Why is this person angry with us?", + " \u2014 to which Derek and Maria had few answers. \u201cCan you imagine having that conversation with a 5-year-old?\u201d Derek told me. \u201cYour town isn\u2019t as safe as you think it is, and there\u2019s a boogeyman obsessed with you.\u201d\n\nFrom a safer distance, The Watcher was a real-life mystery to solve. A commenter on nj.com suggested ground-penetrating radar to find whatever The Watcher claimed was in the walls. (The home inspector had already looked and told Derek the only issue was the aging home\u2019s lack of insulation.) A group of Reddit users obsessed over Google Maps\u2019 Street View, which showed a car parked in front of 657 that one user thought had \u201ca man holding a camera in the driver\u2019s seat.\u201d (Others,", + " more rationally, saw \u201cpixelated glare.\u201d) The range of proposed suspects included a jilted mistress, a spurned Realtor, a local high-schooler\u2019s creative-writing project, guerrilla marketing for a horror movie, and \u201cmall goths having fun.\u201d Some people just thought the Broadduses were wimps for not moving in \u2014 \u201cI would NEVER let this sicko stop me from moving into a house. Never back down from a TERRORIST\u201d \u2014 which irked the Broadduses. \u201cNone of them have read the letters or had their children threatened by someone they didn\u2019t know,\u201d Derek said.", + " \u201cTo decide whether this person\u2019s only nuts enough to write these letters and not to do something \u2014 what if something did happen? \u201d\n\nIn Westfield, people were on edge. Laurie Clancy, who teaches piano lessons in her house behind 657 Boulevard, told me one of her students came for a lesson shortly after news of The Watcher broke and started bawling. \u201cShe was terrified to walk down the Boulevard,\u201d Clancy said. At the first Westfield town-council meeting after the letters became public, Mayor Andy Skibitksy assured the public that The Watcher hadn\u2019t been heard from in a year and that even though the police hadn\u2019t solved the case,", + " their investigation had been \u201cexhaustive.\u201d\n\nThis was news to 657\u2019s neighbors, most of whom had never heard from the cops. \u201cWe are confounded as to how a thorough investigation can be conducted without talking to all the neighbors with proximity to the home,\u201d several of them wrote in a letter to the local paper. Under the glare of national attention, Barron Chambliss, a veteran detective in the Westfield police, was asked to look at the case. \u201cThe Broadduses are victims, and I don\u2019t think they got the support they needed,\u201d Chambliss, who has since retired, told me recently of the initial investigation.\n\nChambliss knew his colleagues had looked closely at Michael Langford.", + " According to his brother Sandy Langford, Michael had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man. He sometimes spooked newcomers to the neighborhood when he did strange things, like walk through their backyard or peek into the windows of homes that were being renovated. But those who knew him told me that the odd things he did were mostly just unusual neighborly kindnesses. \u201cHe goes out and gets the newspapers for me every morning,\u201d said John Schmidt, who lives next door. People who had known Michael for decades told me they didn\u2019t think he was capable of writing the letters.\n\nAs Chambliss looked into the case, he discovered something surprising:", + " Investigators had eventually conducted a DNA analysis on one of the envelopes and determined that the DNA belonged to a woman. Chambliss decided to look more closely at Abby Langford, Michael\u2019s sister, who worked as a real-estate agent. Was she upset about missing a commission right next door? She also worked at the local Lord & Taylor, and Chambliss coordinated with a security guard there to nab her plastic water bottle during a shift. But Chambliss says the DNA sample was not a match. Not long after, the prosecutor\u2019s office gave Derek and Maria some unexpected news: They wouldn\u2019t say why or how, but they had ruled out the Langfords as suspects.\n\nThe Broadduses were stunned.", + " They had recently told the prosecutors that they planned to file civil charges against the Langfords and wondered if the prosecutors were lying to prevent the story from blowing up again. \u201cMy family moved to the Boulevard in 1961, and we never caused a problem for anybody,\u201d Sandy Langford told me. \u201cThis guy gets all these letters, and all of a sudden people are pointing fingers.\u201d\n\nLeft without a suspect, the Broadduses reopened their personal investigation. They were still coy about sharing too much with their neighbors, who remained in the pool of suspects, but spent an afternoon walking the block with a picture of The Watcher\u2019s handwritten envelope.", + " They hoped someone might recognize the writing from a Christmas card, but the only notable encounter came when an older man who lived behind 657 said his son joked that The Watcher sounded a little bit like him. A neighbor across the street was the CEO of Kroll, the security firm, and the Broadduses hired the company to look for handwriting matches, but they found nothing. They also hired Robert Leonard, a renowned forensic linguist \u2014 and former member of the band Sha Na Na \u2014 who didn\u2019t find any noteworthy overlap when he scoured local online forums for similarities to The Watcher\u2019s writing, although he did think the author might watch Game of Thrones.", + " (Jon Snow is one of the \u201cWatchers on the Wall.\u201d) At one point, Derek persuaded a friend in tech to connect him to a hacker willing to try breaking into Wi-Fi networks in the neighborhood to look for incriminating documents, but doing so turned out to be both illegal and more difficult than the movies made it seem, so they didn\u2019t go through with it.\n\nChambliss and the Westfield police were also back at square one. The cops asked Andrea Woods for a DNA sample and interviewed her 21-year-old son, who was surprised to find that he suddenly seemed to be a suspect. A year after the fact,", + " it was hard to find fresh leads, and the initial police canvas had been so porous that it had missed a significant clue: Around the same time that the Broadduses had received their first letter, another family on the Boulevard got a similar note from The Watcher. The parents of that family had lived in their house for years and their kids were grown, so they threw the letter away just as the Woodses had. But after the news broke, one of their children posted about it on Facebook, then deleted the post. When investigators spoke to the family, they confirmed that the letter had been similar to the Broadduses\u2019. But its existence only made the case more confusing.", + " \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a whole lot to go on,\u201d Chambliss told me.\n\nOne night, Chambliss and a partner were sitting in the back of a van parked on Boulevard, watching the house through a pair of binoculars. Around 11 p.m., a car stopped in front of the house long enough for Chambliss to grow suspicious. He says he traced the car to a young woman in a nearby town whose boyfriend lived on the same block as 657. The woman told Chambliss her boyfriend was into \u201csome really dark video games,\u201d including, in Chambliss\u2019s memory, one in which he was playing as a specific character:", + " \u201cThe Watcher.\u201d As for the female DNA, Chambliss figured the girlfriend, or someone else, could have helped. The boyfriend was living elsewhere at the time, but Chambliss says he agreed to come in for an interview on two separate occasions. He didn\u2019t show up either time. Chambliss didn\u2019t have enough evidence to compel him to appear, and with the media attention dying down, he dropped the case and moved on.\n\nWhile the Broadduses continued to be consumed by stress and fear, for the rest of Westfield, the story became little more than a creepy urban legend \u2014 a house to walk by on Halloween if you were brave enough.", + " No one who had lived in the house before the Woodses could recall anything unusual, and it was hard for people to imagine that their idyllic neighborhood could be host to something so sinister. A woman who lives nearby told me that, after the news broke, she and ten or so of her neighbors had gathered in the street to puzzle out who might have sent the letters. Eventually, she said, they came to a consensus: Maybe the Broadduses had sent the letters to themselves?\n\nThe theory, so far as it went, was that the Broadduses had suffered buyer\u2019s remorse, or realized they couldn\u2019t afford the home,", + " and concocted an elaborate scheme to get out of the sale. Or Derek was cooking up some kind of insurance fraud. Or they were angling for a movie deal. (The Broadduses received several offers but turned them down; Lifetime eventually released a movie called The Watcher, despite a cease-and-desist letter from the Broadduses, arguing that the couple in its movie was biracial and the letters were signed \u201cthe Raven.\u201d) Some locals found it noteworthy that over the course of a decade, the Broadduses had upgraded from a $315,000 house to a $770,000 house to a $1.", + "3 million one and refinanced their mortgages. A few weeks after the letters became public, the Westfield Leader published an article in which anonymous neighbors were quoted asking why the Broadduses kept renovating a home they weren\u2019t moving into, or questioning whether they had really done that much renovating at all. The Leader even cast doubt on Maria\u2019s commitment to her family\u2019s safety, citing as evidence the fact that she had a public Facebook page with a photo of her kids. The paper did note that the police had tested Maria\u2019s DNA and it didn\u2019t match.\n\nNone of the theories made much logical sense. The Broadduses had answers to every question.", + " \u201cHow does someone go from a $300,000 house to a $1.3 million house in ten years?\u201d Derek told me. \u201cIt\u2019s America!\u201d But they weren\u2019t speaking publicly, and the rumors persisted. One Boulevard resident wrote a letter to the editor arguing that \u201can elaborate scheme is underway to defraud the Woods family for millions of dollars.\u201d Chambliss told me some Westfield cops even bought into the theory. There were even more skeptics online. \u201cI live in a neighboring town. If these letters have been happening for a while, there is NO DOUBT in my mind that it would have been made public way before this,\u201d LordFlufferNutter said on Reddit.", + " \u201cThis screams scam.\u201d\n\nThe Broadduses hadn\u2019t known how their neighbors would react to news about The Watcher, but they had lived in the area for a decade, and Maria\u2019s family had been a part of the community for much longer, so it was shocking to find themselves accused of being con artists. To Derek, it seemed that some in Westfield preferred the conspiracy theory to considering whether their town might be home to a menace. \u201cThere\u2019s a natural tendency to say, \u2018I\u2019ve lived here for 35 years; nothing\u2019s happened to me.\u2019 \u201d Derek said. \u201cWhat happened to my family is an affront to their contention that they\u2019re safe,", + " that there\u2019s no such thing as mental illness in their community. People don\u2019t want to believe this could happen in Westfield.\u201d\n\nWhile Maria looks back fondly on her childhood, she was born a few years after Westfield resident John List infamously murdered his wife, mother, and three children in their home, and remembers a period when she and other kids were warned to look out for a strange van driving around town. \u201cMy mother always told me don\u2019t have a false sense of security,\u201d she said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t that bad things were going on all the time, it was that bad things happen everywhere. She didn\u2019t want me to think that this is Mayberry.\u201d\n\nMany locals I spoke to did seem more concerned that the national press might ruin Westfield\u2019s good name.", + " Some were primarily worried about arson, or vandalism, or whether the Broadduses would maintain the lawn. (They did.) Mark LoGrippo, the neighborhood\u2019s representative on the Westfield town council, told me the primary concern he heard from residents was that they \u201cwere worried about their property value and the stigma of the neighborhood.\u201d\n\nThe Broadduses were suddenly outcasts not only from their home but also their town. Derek wanted to leave Westfield, but Maria insisted on not uprooting her kids. \u201cThis person took so much from us,\u201d Maria told me. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t let them take more.\u201d Two years after The Watcher\u2019s letters arrived,", + " the Broadduses borrowed money from family members to buy a second home in Westfield, using an LLC to keep the location private. But staying in town was stressful. The first time Maria let her daughter go to the pool with friends, she stared at the tracker on her daughter\u2019s iPhone the whole time. One of their kids was in language-arts class when the teacher led a debate about whether the family in a book they were reading should move to Westfield. The class thought they should, in part because of how safe it was. Afterward, one of the kids told the Broadduses\u2019 child, \u201cMy parents told me that no matter what your family says,", + " Westfield is safe.\u201d\n\nMeanwhile, the Broadduses still had to figure out what to do with 657 Boulevard. Their lawsuit was pending but seemed unlikely to succeed. Some states require sellers to disclose \u201ctransient social conditions\u201d like murders or possible hauntings \u2014 in a 1991 case involving an allegedly ghost-filled house, a New York court ruled that \u201cas a matter of law, the house is haunted\u201d \u2014 but New Jersey had no such regulation. (A judge later dismissed the lawsuit; the Woodses, through their attorney, declined to comment for this story.) Derek looked into renting the house to the Department of Veterans Affairs and a company that runs halfway homes.\n\nIn the spring of 2016,", + " they put 657 back on the market, hoping it might garner more interest given how many people had reacted to the letters by saying they would have ignored them and just moved in. The Broadduses held a well-attended open house, after which Derek and Maria spent hours researching every person who signed in and comparing their handwriting to The Watcher\u2019s, but each time a potential buyer expressed interest and met with the Broadduses\u2019 lawyer to read the letters, they backed out. \u201cSome cocky guy from Staten Island said, \u2018Fuck it, I\u2019m gonna get a house at a discount,\u2019 \u201d Derek recalled. \u201cHe reads the letters and we never hear from him again.\u201d\n\nFeeling as if they were out of options,", + " the Broadduses\u2019 real-estate lawyer proposed an idea: Sell the house to a developer, who could tear it down and split the property into two sellable homes. They thought they could get $1 million for the lot. Subdivisions like this had become common in Westfield, much to the chagrin of many locals, and 657 was one of the neighborhood\u2019s largest lots. Even so, dividing it would require the Westfield Planning Board to grant an exception: The two smaller lots would be 67.4 and 67.6 feet wide \u2014 just shy of the mandated 70 feet.\n\nWhen the proposal was publicly announced,", + " Westfield\u2019s Facebook groups lit up. Some expressed sympathy for the Broadduses, while others pointed out real estate is always a gamble. Another faction was convinced this was the culmination of a long con. \u201cOut of this whole scam-artist story there ends up being nothing more disturbing than this move,\u201d a local woman said. A man who coached the Broadduses\u2019 son in football wrote, \u201cThey were in over their head from day one.\u201d The application was jarring for the neighbors, who had learned about The Watcher from a lawsuit, and had always found it strange that the Broadduses didn\u2019t share more information, not seeming to understand they were following orders from the police and trying to protect their kids.", + " A typical Facebook conversation went like this one:\n\n\u201cSounds like this whole \u2018Watcher\u2019 thing was a ploy.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe owners are good people. Not a ploy.\u201d\n\n\u201cOkay. I know nothing about them.\u201d\n\nKristin Kemp, a friend of the Broadduses, had tried to defend them on one Facebook forum, but people started attacking her. \u201cSomebody asked, \u2018How do we know it\u2019s not you writing the letters?\u2019 \u201d Kemp told me.\n\nWhen the planning board met to decide the application in January 2017, it had already devoted a three-hour hearing to the issue. More than 100 residents showed up.", + " One of them, who lived across the street and had a daughter in the same grade as one of the Broadduses\u2019 kids, had retained a lawyer to fight the proposal. (Here was a new suspect: Who but The Watcher would go so far as to hire an attorney to preserve the house?) After a quick discussion about a Wells Fargo branch that wanted to use brighter lightbulbs than the town allowed, the room grew as tense as suburban-planning-board meetings get. James Foerst, the Broadduses\u2019 attorney, explained that the three-foot exemption was as narrow as the easel he was using to display a map of the neighborhood \u2014 a map that showed several lots on the block that were also too small.", + " The neighbors expressed concern that the plan might require knocking down trees and that the new homes would have aesthetically unpleasing front-facing garages. Foerst repeatedly threatened the halfway house as a possible alternative.\n\nAfter the lawyers, a parade of neighbors stood to speak. Glen Dumont, from across the street, said the proposal \u201cwould spell the end of the 600 block of Boulevard as we know it.\u201d A woman whose kids had been to the Broadduses\u2019 old home for a birthday party spoke on behalf of nine neighbors and presented 657 Boulevard as Westfield\u2019s Alamo. \u201cOur neighborhoods are constantly under attack from turf,", + " lights, parking decks, you name it,\u201d she said. \u201cIf we can\u2019t make a stand on Boulevard, where can we?\u201d At one point, Abby Langford stood up to say she had \u201cspent almost 60 years looking at a magnificent, beautiful house\u201d and didn\u2019t \u201cwant to be looking out at a driveway.\u201d\n\nThe hearing lasted four hours, during which there was little discussion of the reason the Broadduses had been driven to tear down their dream home in the first place. \u201cHas anybody thought about whether or not this lunatic who did this has been apprehended?\u201d said Tom Higgins, who lived across the street,", + " toward the end of the hearing. Even so, Higgins pointed out that there was no guarantee The Watcher wouldn\u2019t send letters to the two new houses and argued that aesthetics should rule the day. \u201cPutting up two houses there is gonna stick out like an old client of mine in Texas told me,\u201d Higgins said. \u201cIt\u2019s gonna stick out like a dog\u2019s balls.\u201d While some of the neighbors expressed compassion, their focus remained on what the Broadduses stood to gain financially \u2014 and what they themselves might lose.\n\nAt 11:30 p.m., the board unanimously rejected the proposal. (A New Jersey judge later denied the Broadduses\u2019 appeal of the decision.) Derek and Maria were distraught.", + " Even if the plan had gone through, it would have only stanched their financial bleeding. On top of the mortgage and renovations, they have paid around $100,000 in Westfield property taxes \u2014 the town denied their request for relief \u2014 and spent at least that amount investigating The Watcher and exploring ways to deal with the home, not to mention cleaning the gutters. The Broadduses recognized that 657 Boulevard was a beautiful house on a beautiful street that was worth maintaining but were surprised their neighbors didn\u2019t see the uniqueness of the situation. \u201cThis is my town,\u201d Maria told me recently. \u201cI grew up here. I came back,", + " I chose to raise my kids here. You know what we\u2019ve been through. You had the ability, two and a half years into a nightmare, to make it a little better. And you have decided that this house is more important than we are. That\u2019s really how it felt.\u201d (On top of all that, her dad had recently died unexpectedly.) Father Michael Saporito, the priest who blessed the house, went to one of the planning-board meetings and told me he was taken aback by how many people had come up to him and said they thought the whole thing was a hoax. \u201cI think the human element of the story was kind of lost on the neighbors,\u201d Saporito said.", + " The Watcher had expressed a desire to protect the Boulevard from change, but instead it had been torn apart.\n\nNot long after the planning board\u2019s decision, the Broadduses got some good news. A family with grown children and two big dogs had agreed to rent 657 Boulevard. The renter told the Star-Ledger he wasn\u2019t worried about The Watcher, though he had a clause in the lease that let him out in case of another letter.\n\nTwo weeks later, Derek went to 657 to deal with squirrels that had taken up residence in the roof. The renter handed him an envelope that had just arrived:\n\nViolent winds and bitter cold To the vile and spiteful Derek and his wench of a wife Maria,\n\nThis letter,", + " two and a half years after The Watcher appeared, came out of nowhere. It was dated February 13, the day the Broadduses gave depositions in their lawsuit against the Woodses. \u201cYou wonder who The Watcher is? Turn around idiots,\u201d the letter read. \u201cMaybe you even spoke to me, one of the so called neighbors who has no idea who The Watcher could be. Or maybe you do know and are too scared to tell anyone. Good move.\u201d The letter was less stylish and more wrathful than the others, and it seemed the writer had been closely following the story. They had seen the media coverage (\u201cI walked by the news trucks when they took over my neighborhood and mocked me\u201d), Derek\u2019s surreptitious investigatory efforts (\u201cI watched as you watched from the dark house in an attempt to find me \u2026 Telescopes and binoculars are wonderful inventions\u201d), and the attempt to tear down the house.", + " \u201c657 Boulevard survived your attempted assault and stood strong with its army of supporters barricading its gates,\u201d the letter read. \u201cMy soldiers of the Boulevard followed my orders to a T. They carried out their mission and saved the soul of 657 Boulevard with my orders. All hail The Watcher!!!\u201d The renter was mentioned \u2014 he was spooked but agreed to stay if the Broadduses installed cameras around the house \u2014 and the letter indicated revenge could come in many forms:\n\nMaybe a car accident. Maybe a fire. Maybe something as simple as a mild illness that never seems to go away but makes you fell sick day after day after day after day after day.", + " Maybe the mysterious death of a pet. Loved ones suddenly die. Planes and cars and bicycles crash. Bones break.\n\n\u201cIt was like we were back at the beginning,\u201d said Maria. But it also meant fresh evidence that might help invigorate the investigation. Derek took the letter to police headquarters, where a detective looked at a neighborhood map and traced a circle around the house 300 yards in diameter, suggesting The Watcher must be somewhere in there. Derek drew one much closer. \u201cIn my view, it\u2019s one of ten houses in the world,\u201d he said.\n\nThe Broadduses continued to press the case, but there still wasn\u2019t much for law enforcement to go on,", + " and it was possible to look up and down the street and see The Watcher in practically anyone. Residents mentioned to me a teenager whose father had grown up around the corner, and a man who sometimes walked around the neighborhood playing a flute. An elderly couple behind the house had been there 47 years. The husband was the man Bill Woodward had seen sitting in a lawn chair looking at the Broadduses\u2019 house. One of their kids had married a man who grew up in, of all places, 657 Boulevard. But these were bits of information that could mean everything or nothing depending on how hard you looked at them. The Broadduses sent new names to the investigators whenever they found something odd,", + " but their greatest fear was that The Watcher could be someone they\u2019d never suspect.\n\nOne day last spring, Derek picked me up at the Westfield train station. We drove past 657 Boulevard, which he and Maria try to avoid unless they have to pick up the tax bill. \u201cIt\u2019s all beautiful trees and beautiful houses, but all I feel is anxious,\u201d Derek said. \u201cSometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, What would my life be like if this didn\u2019t happen? We lost Christmas a couple times, and you don\u2019t get that back \u2014 Christmas with a 5-year-old.\u201d\n\nThe Broadduses no longer live in ever-present fear that The Watcher might strike at any moment,", + " but they continue to deal with lingering effects from the letters. They have a new tenant at 657, but the rent doesn\u2019t cover the mortgage. Their kids are occasionally teased at school. And the conspiratorial rumors persist. They try to avoid the people who spoke out against their planning-board application or accused them of being con artists, but suburban life makes that impossible. \u201cI see these people on the soccer field, at the train station, and my heart starts going like it did when I played hockey and was about to get in a fight,\u201d Derek said. When Maria found herself in a spin class at the YMCA with the head of the planning board,", + " she went up afterward and told him, \u201cYou continue to hurt my family every day.\u201d Earlier this year, the planning board approved splitting a lot around the corner that required an even larger exception than the Broadduses\u2019.\n\nMost people in Westfield told me they rarely thought of The Watcher anymore. The real-estate market was doing fine, for one, and many were surprised to find out the Broadduses were still dealing with the problem. Hindsight made Derek and Maria wonder if they should have sold the house at a loss, early on, and 657 Boulevard conjured too much emotional pain for them to ever consider moving in.", + " They hope that a few years of renting the place without incident will help them sell it. The prosecutor\u2019s office was continuing its investigation, but the Broadduses knew it was unlikely The Watcher would ever be caught and that the legal punishment would likely be minimal.\n\nThe Watcher was also no longer the only person sending anonymous letters in Westfield. Last Christmas Eve, several families received an envelope in their mailboxes. They\u2019d been delivered by hand to the homes of people who had been the most vocal in criticizing the Broadduses online. One of them, who lived a few blocks down on Boulevard, had written on Facebook: \u201cI wish we could go back to the days of tar and feathers.", + " I have just the couple in mind!\u201d Another family who got the letter told me it was \u201cweirdly poetic,\u201d as The Watcher\u2019s had been, and that it accused the families of speculating inaccurately about the Broadduses. It included several stories about recent acts of domestic terrorism in which signs of brewing mental illness had gone unnoticed. The typed letters were signed, \u201cFriends of the Broaddus Family.\u201d\n\nThe letter writer had clearly been infected not only with The Watcher\u2019s penchant for anonymous notes but also a simmering resentment: one that had snaked its way through Westfield, making enemies of neighbors. The people who received the letters didn\u2019t know who sent them,", + " but the tone had a familiar ring to me. When I asked Derek Broaddus whether he had written them, he paused for a moment, then admitted he had. He wasn\u2019t proud of it\u2014 he hadn\u2019t even told his wife \u2014 and said they were the only anonymous letters he\u2019d written. But he had felt driven to his wit\u2019s end, fed up with watching silently as people threw accusations at his family based on practically nothing. (One of the people who received the letter told me they had never met the Broadduses and had no interest in doing so.) The Watcher had been obsessed with 657 Boulevard, and Derek,", + " in turn, had become obsessed with The Watcher and everything the letters had set in motion. \u201cIt\u2019s like cancer,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe think about it everyday.\u201d\n\nSitting at the Westfield train station, Derek handed me his phone so I could read the fourth letter. \u201cYou are despised by the house,\u201d it read. \u201cAnd The Watcher won.\u201d\n\n*This article appears in the November 12, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!\n" + ], + "length": 23203, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 49, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The post-mortems on Jeb Bush's failed campaign are rolling in. Some examples: Don't blame Donald Trump. \"What killed Jeb Bush\u2019s campaign was first the failure of his brother\u2019s administration, and then the emergence of Marco Rubio to present a more attractive face for its continuation,\" writes Jonathan Chait at New York. Still, Peter Beinart at the Atlantic explains why Bush was Trump's \"perfect foil.\" The Week sums things up by collecting 19 \"devastating quotes\" that compare coverage of Bush in early 2015 with more recent stories. One problem: His campaign underestimated \"Bush fatigue,\" observes the Washington Post. Another: He didn't have advisers who could recognize shortcomings and, more importantly, point them out to Bush himself, says this piece in Politico Magazine. How on earth do you spend $130 million and have so little to show for it? The New York Times digs into \"one of the least successful campaign spending binges in history.\" Those early stumbles on Iraq didn't help, notes CNN. Gary Legum at Salon bids \"good riddance\" to the \"Bush Dynasty\" with the question, \"Can anyone think of another family dynasty that has had such a huge role in a particular stretch of American history, yet has almost zero hold on the country\u2019s imagination?\"\n", + "docs": [ + "From the beginning of his candidacy last June, he pledged to run with \"joy\" and adopted a tortoise-and-the-hare strategy, earnestly believing that he would prevail in the end despite a crowded field of candidates.\n\nEven as his chances became grim over the past eight months, he started handing out tiny toy turtles from his pockets to children, telling them that \"slow and steady wins the race.\"\n\nBut in 2016, \"slow and steady\" was the opposite of what the country wanted.\n\nJUST WATCHED Jeb Bush suspends campaign: What went wrong? Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Jeb Bush suspends campaign: What went wrong?", + " 01:51\n\nThere's plenty of blame to go around for Bush's fall, but the central theme is the failure to read the mood of the GOP electorate that was angry and wanted change. Voters responded to Donald Trump, who Bush both underestimated and whose appeal he didn't understand.\n\nPhotos: Who's running for president? Photos: Who's running for president? Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, John Kasich, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Hide Caption 1 of 6 Photos: Who's running for president?\n\n\n\n\"So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,\" Trump told the crowd at his announcement.", + " Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House.\"So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,\" Trump told the crowd at his announcement. Hide Caption 2 of 6 Photos: Who's running for president?\n\n\n\n\"These are all of our stories,\" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. \"These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant.\" Sen.", + " Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23.\"These are all of our stories,\" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. \"These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant.\" Hide Caption 3 of 6 Photos: Who's running for president? Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid.\n\n\n\n\"I am here to ask you for your prayers,", + " for your support... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,\" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University. Hide Caption 4 of 6 Photos: Who's running for president?\n\n\n\n\"Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,\" she said in her announcement video. \"Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey.\" Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media.", + " The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates.\"Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,\" she said in her announcement video. \"Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey.\" Hide Caption 5 of 6 Photos: Who's running for president?\n\n\n\n\"This great nation and its government belong to all of the people and not to a handful of billionaires,", + " their super PACs and their lobbyists,\" Sanders said at a rally in Vermont on May 26. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, announced his run in an email to supporters on April 30. He has said the United States needs a \"political revolution\" of working-class Americans to take back control of the government from billionaires.\"This great nation and its government belong to all of the people and not to a handful of billionaires, their super PACs and their lobbyists,\" Sanders said at a rally in Vermont on May 26. Hide Caption 6 of 6\n\nBush was out of practice on the campaign trail,", + " something evidenced by his early stumbles answering questions on his stance on the war in Iraq -- a question that should have been anticipated with an answer ready. He declared early he was his \"own man,\" but also highlighted his connection to his father and brother, presidents both. And he raised over $100 million between his campaign and super PAC, but it didn't scare anyone out of the race.\n\nIn the final few days before the South Carolina primary, Bush started to realize that his White House bid might be coming to an end. He talked with less certitude about moving on to other states and appeared almost wistful at times.\n\nJUST WATCHED Jeb Bush:", + " 'I would repeal Obamacare' Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Jeb Bush: 'I would repeal Obamacare' 00:58\n\nBut it wasn't until late Saturday afternoon that he knew that he likely wouldn't be moving forward, according to campaign aides. Many staffers were told of his final decision just five minutes before he took the stage at the Hilton in Columbia.\n\n\"In this campaign I've stood my ground refusing to bend to the political winds,\" Bush said Saturday night. \"We put forward detailed, innovative conservative plans to address the mounting challenges that we face. Because despite what you might have heard, ideas matter... policy matters.\"\n\nBush spent much of his campaign focusing on his experience as governor of Florida and policy,", + " consistently rolling out new initiatives and plans. But 2016 was simply a different era from the last time he ran for office -- in 2002.\n\nBush adviser Sally Bradshaw told CNN Saturday night that 2016 simply \"was not his year.\"\n\n\"Look, this was a year that was bigger than a lot of the candidates in this race,\" Bradshaw said. Bush \"didn't equivocate, and he took on Donald Trump and he showed us what is best about our party and what is best about our country.\"\n\nAs CNN's embedded reporter with the Bush campaign, I followed the former Florida governor from the lofty moments, early in 2015 when he was preparing for his presidential run,", + " to the final days when he acknowledged that he would not be the third Bush to work in the Oval Office. I covered him at more than 100 events in 14 states over 11 months and this story is based on that experience.\n\nOn paper, an ideal candidate\n\nBush, who turned 63 last week, never placed above 18% as a candidate in the polls, but he remained the front-runner in the GOP field for the first month of his campaign.\n\nHe was a candidate who fulfilled what Republicans thought they needed after the 2012 election loss: an experienced governor from a swing state who could help expand the Republican base by appealing to Latinos and craft a narrative of a more compassionate party.\n\nBy the middle of the year,", + " his campaign and allies at the super PAC Right to Rise USA, had raised more than $100 million, far more than any other candidate. The haul was meant to send the message that Bush could dominate the field and be a formidable general election candidate.\n\nBut instead, 2016 appeared to be the election no one said no to running. From Bush's one-time prot\u00e9g\u00e9 from Florida Marco Rubio to Govs. Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker and former Govs. Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry, Bush's cash scared no one. And it turned out to be for good reason.\n\nJUST WATCHED Jeb Bush impersonates Donald Trump Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Jeb Bush impersonates Donald Trump 00:", + "41\n\nThen, a perceived sideshow candidate named Donald Trump -- who labeled undocumented immigrants as \"rapists\" in his announcement speech -- stole the show. He started to gain traction and within weeks became not only the front-runner, but took the lead and ran away with it.\n\nThe surge revealed a Republican electorate that was more angry than joyful, surprising the Washington political class and upending the Republican primary narrative. With every insult hurled, Trump's anti-establishment, verbose persona became more popular. It was clear that Bush would face an uphill battle.\n\nAnd Trump had his sights set on the former governor. He quickly began mocking Bush as an \"unhappy person\"", + " with \"low energy.\" Like many of the other candidates, Bush's campaign tried to stay above the fray and not engage with the reality TV star.\n\nIn Henderson, Nevada, in late July -- one of the first times Bush was asked to respond to Trump's \"rapists\" comment -- the candidate simply said: \"I disagree with him.\" Pressed for more, he replied curtly: \"I think he's wrong.\n\nA couple of weeks later, in Carson City, Nevada, when Bush was asked if he wanted to respond to Trump accusing him of promising favors to his donors, Bush looked this reporter in the eye and said: \"No.\"\n\nBush didn't start hitting back at Trump's accusations that Bush was \"low energy\"", + " until mid-September, but by then it was too late. The label had stuck.\n\nAides, advisers and even Bush, himself, have quietly acknowledged that the popularity and influence of Trump was underestimated at the beginning.\n\n\"People probably thought they could just let (Trump's) comments go into the ether, not take the bait,\" one adviser said. \"This campaign probably felt for some time that it was best to let Trump hang out there and make a fool of himself.\"\n\nMessages didn't stick\n\nBush, from the start, had high name recognition, but the campaign felt that people didn't know his conservative record as the two-term governor of Florida.\n\nBut those messages couldn't drown out the barrage of attacks coming his way from Trump,", + " especially the \"low energy\" brand that quickly became the meme of Bush's candidacy.\n\n\"I believe it hurt a lot,\" the adviser said.\n\nIt was especially frustrating for the campaign because, Bush, in fact, was anything but low energy. He campaigned tirelessly from the start of his bid and voters were routinely impressed and surprised by his passion when they saw him at his town halls.\n\nBut, having been out of campaign politics for more than a decade, Bush struggled early on to command the stage at debates and appeared awkward on TV, versus the looser, comfortable-in-his-own skin Bush that voters saw in person.\n\nOver that time,", + " Bush gradually stepped up his attacks against Trump, and at a debate in December, Bush tore into the front-runner repeatedly, solidifying himself as the \"anti-Trump\" candidate. Trump's locker-room language irritated Bush so much that the former governor started calling Trump a \"loser\" and a \"jerk,\" and painted him as a disparager of Hispanics, women, people with disabilities and prisoners of war.\n\nPhotos: The week in politics Photos: The week in politics Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton arrives gives a victory speech at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on Saturday, February 20, after edging out Bernie Sanders in Nevada's Democratic caucuses.", + " Hide Caption 1 of 14 Photos: The week in politics\n\nRepublican presidential candidate Jeb Bush announces that he is suspending his campaign in Columbia, South Carolina, on Saturday, February 20. Bush struggled for months to make inroads against Donald Trump, who constantly mocked the former Florida governor's \"low energy\" and for spending tens of millions of dollars on his campaign. Hide Caption 2 of 14 Photos: The week in politics Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump celebrates winning the South Carolina primary in Spartanburg on Saturday, February 20. Hide Caption 3 of 14 Photos: The week in politics U.S. Supreme Court justices attend a private ceremony in the court's Great Hall as the body of Justice Antonin Scalia lies in repose on Friday,", + " February 19. Facing the camera, from right, are justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan. Hide Caption 4 of 14 Photos: The week in politics A woman wears a campaign sticker for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate, ahead of a campaign rally in Aiken, South Carolina, on Monday, February 15. Hide Caption 5 of 14 Photos: The week in politics U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders meets a 3-month-old dressed like him at a campaign rally in Las Vegas on Sunday,", + " February 14. Sanders is seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for President. Hide Caption 6 of 14 Photos: The week in politics People in Livonia, Michigan, wait for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican presidential candidate, to arrive at a town-hall meeting on Tuesday, February 16. Hide Caption 7 of 14 Photos: The week in politics Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has makeup applied during a commercial break of the CNN town-hall event held Wednesday, February 17, in Greenville, South Carolina. Hide Caption 8 of 14 Photos: The week in politics South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley campaigns with U.S.", + " Sen. Marco Rubio, whom she endorsed Thursday, February 18, in Chapin, South Carolina. Hide Caption 9 of 14 Photos: The week in politics A Donald Trump supporter holds up a sign as former U.S. President Bill Clinton stumps for his wife in Riviera Beach, Florida, on Monday, February 15. The Trump supporter yelled to Clinton, \"You took his money!\" meaning Trump. \"I certainly did,\" Clinton responded. \"I took his money for my foundation, where I used it better than he's using it now.\" Hide Caption 10 of 14 Photos: The week in politics U.S.", + " President Barack Obama shows off the lifetime parking pass he received as gift from Chicago Blackhawks owner John McDonough on Thursday, February 18. McDonough and the Blackhawks were being honored at the White House for winning the NHL's Stanley Cup last season. Hide Caption 11 of 14 Photos: The week in politics New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie gestures as he delivers his budget at the Statehouse in Trenton, New Jersey, on Tuesday, February 16. Christie recently suspended his campaign for the presidency. Hide Caption 12 of 14 Photos: The week in politics John Mew photographs his wife Amy, and daughters Ireland, 6,", + " left, and Sailor, 4, after voting in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary Saturday, February 20 at Emmanuel Lutheran Church in West Columbia, South Carolina. Hide Caption 13 of 14 Photos: The week in politics Philanthropist David Rubenstein tours the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on Monday, February 15. The National Park Service announced that Rubenstein, who has already donated tens of millions of dollars to refurbish the Washington Monument and other icons, is giving $18.5 million to fix up the Lincoln Memorial. The money will go to repairing damaged masonry, cleaning the memorial and conserving murals inside. Hide Caption 14 of 14\n\nEven though Bush had fallen so far behind in the national polls -- he's been in the single digits since October -- Trump continued to pillory Bush,", + " and their feud manifested itself in daily attacks in stump speeches and over Twitter.\n\nMeanwhile, fingers started pointing. As Bush's campaign continued to struggle before the primary season started, donors and supporters were already starting to blame the super PAC and its chief, Bush confidant Mike Murphy, for not focusing hard enough on Trump and targeting other rivals like Rubio, instead.\n\nBush himself never denounced the ads put out by the super PAC but tried to keep as much distance possible from the group that he spent the first half of 2015 raising money for. During his campaign, he expressed frustration over the super PAC process and blamed the Citizens United ruling for making campaign finance so complicated -- not because too much money was being spent,", + " but because it meant so much was out of the control of the actual candidates.\n\nBush eventually saw more and more support for his offensive against Trump. At his last event in South Carolina, he received a standing ovation when Sen. Lindsey Graham, who campaigned for Bush in the final month, thanked Bush for \"standing up for just being decent.\"\n\nEarly stumbles on Iraq\n\nAdvisers, donors and Republican strategists say Trump wasn't the only factor that led to Bush's decline.\n\nJUST WATCHED Jeb Bush flip-flops on Iraq war opinion Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Jeb Bush flip-flops on Iraq war opinion 02:21\n\nHe stumbled even before he was a candidate when he failed to answer a question about the Iraq war last May -- a blunder that took Bush a week and multiple attempts to get right.\n\nThe episode alarmed donors and highlighted a level of Bush fatigue that the country was still feeling.", + " While the campaign earnestly believed that Bush would have plenty of time to define himself and distinguish his candidacy from that of his brother or father, that never fully happened.\n\nJUST WATCHED Wolfowitz: Jeb Bush \"is his own man\" Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Wolfowitz: Jeb Bush \"is his own man\" 03:39\n\nBut he then went the other way, bringing himself closer to his family and started using his \"front row seat\" to the presidencies of his brother and father as \"unique\" foreign policy credential. Nothing seemed to quell the concerns of a third Bush presidency, which voters continued to raise at town halls even until the end.\n\n\"What we're seeing right now on both sides of the aisle is the country is not rushing to have a repeat of Bush vs.", + " Clinton,\" said Leslie Sanchez, who served in the George W. Bush administration but is not affiliated with any candidate. \"There's nothing he could have done to overcome that national sentiment.\"\n\nAfter Rubio attack, a return to wonkishness\n\nJUST WATCHED Bush jabs Rubio over leadership experience Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Bush jabs Rubio over leadership experience 00:59\n\nAnother pivotal moment came in October when Bush tried to attack Rubio on the debate stage for abandoning his day job and missing votes in the Senate to campaign. But the carefully planned attack -- which Bush had been telegraphing for days -- backfired when Rubio skillfully deflected,", + " saying Bush never took issue with Sen. John McCain missing votes when he was running for president.\n\n\"The only reason you're doing it now is because we're running for the same position,\" Rubio said. \"Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.\"\n\nThe awkward encounter was embarrassing for Bush and the governor failed to mount a counterpunch. One day later, Bush was already facing questions about whether his campaign was over.\n\n\"It's not on life support,\" he insisted, facing a massive scrum of reporters and cameras in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.\n\nJUST WATCHED Jeb Bush: 'People need to show up for work' Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Jeb Bush:", + " 'People need to show up for work' 01:35\n\nIn the following months, Bush would lighten his attacks against Rubio, training his fire more on Trump instead. All the while, Bush kept a heavy commitment to rolling out policy plans nearly every week on a range of issues -- from entitlements to managing western public lands.\n\nWhile Bush's wonkish side impressed voters at his town halls, it never broke through as a winning profile in an election year where bluster, bombast and soaring rhetoric was more appealing to an angry and frustrated electorate.\n\nBush regularly bristled at the idea that he needed to change stylistically or put on a \"performance\"", + " at the all-important debates. But after the Rubio flap, his team hired a debate coach in November and tried to reset his campaign with a \"Jeb Can Fix It\" bus tour that zeroed in on his experience as governor. It coincided with the launch of his e-book, \"Reply All,\" that used his emails to tell the story of what he calls his \"servant leader's heart\" when he was governor.\n\nJUST WATCHED Bush's debate performance panned as Rubio rises Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Bush's debate performance panned as Rubio rises 03:51\n\nHis stump speech became more compelling and he spoke with more alluring cadence.", + " As he did before, Bush continued to woo voters at his town hall by his seeming ability to answer any question thrown his way. And he showed charm, compassion and accessibility as he took selfies and talked to any voter who wanted to meet him after his town halls.\n\n\"Every time he spoke at an event, he won hearts and minds,\" said David Oman, a senior adviser who worked on Bush's Iowa campaign. \"I wish we could have had more.\"\n\nSouth Carolina: One last family run\n\nJUST WATCHED Jeb Bush supporter: 'South Carolina is Bush country' Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Jeb Bush supporter: 'South Carolina is Bush country'", + " 02:45\n\nIn New Hampshire and South Carolina, Bush dramatically shook up his stump speech and directly tried to take on Rubio and Cruz for being first-term senators, comparing them to then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008 and calling them a \"risky bet.\"\n\nIt appeared Bush was on the verge of a mild comeback after the New Hampshire primary where he placed fourth, ahead of Rubio. It gave Bush enough to keep him afloat heading into South Carolina, but it still wasn't the resounding victory he was hoping for.\n\nWhen Bush landed in Hilton Head, South Carolina, the next morning after the primary, he was greeted to hundreds of voters in a retirement community in Bluffton,", + " and a strategy to further embrace his family name kicked off immediately.\n\n\"South Carolina has been good to the Bushes in the past, and I'm hoping and praying it will be good again,\" he said. Indeed the state catapulted the 2000 presidential bid of his brother, George W. Bush, and handed George H.W. Bush a victory in 1988.\n\nBush told reporters that morning that the New Hampshire primary \"pushed the pause button\" on the race and erased Rubio's \"coronation.\"\n\nHis campaign had two main strategies as he prepared to barnstorm the state of South Carolina: focus on the military and capitalize on the Bush name fanfare.\n\nJUST WATCHED George W.", + " Bush: 'Strongest is not the loudest' Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH George W. Bush: 'Strongest is not the loudest' 02:09\n\nGraham, the state's senior senator and an expert on the military and foreign policy issues, campaigned for Bush at nearly every event in South Carolina the past 10 days, warming up the crowds with his Southern wit and playing the role of attack dog by lambasting Trump and Rubio.\n\nThe senator became so passionate that he grabbed the microphone from Bush again at the end of a town hall in Columbia last week to deliver yet another speech --- this time a fiery closing argument that angrily ripped into Trump for attacking Bush's brother in the most recent debate.\n\n\"I will never vote for a man who says that George W.", + " Bush is a liar. You're not a Republican if you're asking Nancy Pelosi to impeach President Bush,\" he said. \"Any man who says what Donald Trump said about George W. Bush is not a Republican worthy of your support. That's crazy talk.\"\n\nFor the first time, the campaign trotted out the 43rd President on the trail, where he headlined a rally with his brother in North Charleston on Monday. The event drew hundreds more voters than a normal Jeb Bush event, and it provided the campaign a full day of positive headlines. His brother offered veiled swipes at Bush's more dramatic opponents and tried to underwrite his brother's credentials to be commander-in-chief.\n\nJUST WATCHED The Bush family and Iraq Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH The Bush family and Iraq 01:", + "44\n\n\"Strength is not empty rhetoric. It is not bluster. It is not theatrics. Real strength, strength of purpose, comes from integrity and character. And in my experience, the strongest person usually isn't the loudest one in the room,\" the former President said to applause. \"I've seen in my brother a quiet conviction and a core of conscience that cannot be shaken. And my hope is that the people of South Carolina will see this as well. This is a serious election for a serious job.\"\n\nBut two days later came a devastating blow. The state's popular governor, Nikki Haley, who Bush campaigned for in 2010 and helped advise her on policy,", + " announced she was endorsing Rubio.\n\nThe news came just as Bush was about to hold yet another town hall in Summerville, one of 22 cities in South Carolina that the candidate publicly campaigned in during the past week and a half.\n\n\"I'm disappointed,\" Bush told reporters at the time, but still took the high road. \"She's a very good governor and should I win the nomination there will be a role for her in the campaign, trust me, she's a great person.\"\n\nJUST WATCHED George W. Bush: 9/11 made me a 'wartime' president Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH George W. Bush:", + " 9/11 made me a 'wartime' president 02:12\n\nThe positive coverage quickly dwindled and poll numbers showed no noticeable improvement after George W. Bush's appearance. Bush's campaign continued with the family name strategy and brought former first lady Barbara Bush, 90, back on the campaign trail Thursday through Saturday. She helped generate buzz for her son in New Hampshire, and it was assumed she would be met with even more fanfare in South Carolina, where she attended high school at Ashley Hall in Charleston.\n\n\"He's done the most amazing things as governor. He's a great son. He's a great father. He's a great husband.", + " He's a great friend. He's loyal,\" she said, while introducing her son at his final South Carolina town hall in the town of Central on Friday night. \"And ladies and gentlemen, my boy, Jeb.\"\n\nAlso in attendance were his two brothers, Marvin and Neil, his wife Columba, and his son, Jeb, Jr., as well as a hoard of campaign staffers and volunteers -- some of whom appeared reflective in the wake of uncertainty surrounding Bush's campaign.\n\nAnd in a moment that raised eyebrows, Bush thanked his audience at the end of his stump speech, saying, \"Thank you very much for allowing us to close out our campaign here at your high school.\"\n\nJUST WATCHED Donald Trump:", + " Ted Cruz a liar, Bush lied about Iraq Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Donald Trump: Ted Cruz a liar, Bush lied about Iraq 03:50\n\nHis staff quickly assured reporters he was only talking about his South Carolina campaign, but the quote nonetheless underscored a sense of finality that was previously lacking in Bush's rhetoric.\n\nYet it would only be 24 hours later when Bush would give his actual closing speech.\n\n\"I'm proud of the campaign that we have run to unify the country. And to advocate for conservative solutions that would give more Americans the opportunity to rise up and reach their God-given potential. But the people of Iowa,", + " New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken,\" he said. \"I respect their decision.\"\n\nAfter his brief speech, he shook hands with supporters for a few minutes before immediately leaving the hotel to go back to Miami with his wife, making some emotional goodbyes as he got in his car. ", + " Former Florida governor Jeb Bush announced to supporters in South Carolina that he was suspending his presidential campaign after a disappointing performance in the state's GOP primary. (AP)\n\nFormer Florida governor Jeb Bush announced to supporters in South Carolina that he was suspending his presidential campaign after a disappointing performance in the state's GOP primary. (AP)\n\nFor Jeb Bush\u2019s campaign, August was a cruel month. Donald Trump\u2019s attacks on the former Florida governor as a \u00ad\u201clow-energy\u201d politician were beginning to stick, and the two were bickering over immigration. The issue before the Bush team was what to do about it.\n\nSome advisers argued for an aggressive response,", + " even to the point of challenging Trump to some kind of one-on-one confrontation. Others resisted, believing Trump\u2019s candidacy was unsustainable, while some cautioned against getting \u201cinto a pigpen with a pig,\u201d as one adviser recalled. Others described it as \u201ctrying to wrestle with a stump.\u201d\n\nThose summer days crystallized the plight of a campaign that had begun with enormous expectations and extraordinary resources, as the scion of one of America\u2019s dynastic political families sought to follow his father and brother to the presidency.\n\nAt what would become a crucial moment, Bush\u2019s team had no clear strategy for a rival who was beginning to hijack the Republican Party that the Bush family had helped to build,", + " other than to stay the course set months earlier of telling Bush\u2019s story to voters.\n\n\u201cThere was no consensus,\u201d senior strategist David Kochel said of the discussions about how to combat the threat of Trump\u2019s candidacy. Other campaigns were wrestling with the same problems, but as the front-runner in the polls at the time, Bush would suffer more than the others.\n\nJeb Bush suspended his campaign for president on Feb. 20. The Fix's Chris Cillizza breaks down why he was never going to be president. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)\n\nOn Saturday night, the candidacy that had begun with such promise ended quietly after a disappointingly weak fourth-place finish in South Carolina.\n\nEver the gracious realist,", + " Bush announced in his concession speech that he would end his campaign as Trump continued to soar as the GOP front-runner. \u201cI have stood my ground, refusing to bend to the political winds,\u201d he said.\n\nWhether Jeb Bush ever had a chance to win the Republican nomination in a campaign year that proved so ill fitting for a rusty politician who preferred policy papers to political combat is a question that will be debated long after the 2016 race has ended.\n\n\u201cDonald Trump channeled the worst fears, frustrations and anxiety of voters, but he also magnified those same feelings,\u201d Sally Bradshaw, Bush\u2019s chief strategist and confidant, said Sunday in an email.", + " \u201cIt would be difficult for any solutions-oriented conservative to tackle Trump in this environment, much less one who was seen as having been so much a part of the establishment. He was never going to be an angry guy \u2014 and voters wanted angry.\u201d\n\nMike Murphy, the chief strategist for Bush\u2019s super PAC, Right to Rise, explained what had happened this way on Sunday. \u201cOur theory was to dominate the establishment lane into the actual voting primaries,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was the strategy, and it did not work. I think it was the right strategy for Jeb. The problem was there was a huge anti-establishment wave. The establishment lane was smaller than we thought it would be.", + " The marketplace was looking for something different, and we\u2019ll find out how that ends when we have a nominee.\u201d\n\nThe result is one of the most startling failures in the modern history of American politics: the fall of the House of Bush. It is a human story about the struggles of one of the most successful former governors in America in his bid to become president, like his father and brother, set against the backdrop of one of the strangest political cycles the country has seen in years.\n\nBeyond underestimating the anger in the electorate, three other problems led to Bush\u2019s downfall. First, the candidate and his team misjudged the degree of Bush fatigue among Republicans.\n\n1 of 19 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad \u00d7 Candidates who have dropped out of the 2016 race so far,", + " and why View Photos With the primary season in full swing, several have dropped out in recent days. Caption With the primary season in full swing, several have dropped out in recent days. John Kasich Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), who ran as a sunny, center-right \u201cprince of light and hope\u201d but won only his home-state primary, bowed out of the presidential race on Wednesday with a reflective speech in Columbus. Read the story Kyle Grillot/For the Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.\n\nAides said an internal poll conducted last fall showed discouraging news: Roughly two-thirds of voters had issues with Bush\u2019s family ties.", + " \u201cBush stuff was holding him back,\u201d said one aide who saw the polling data. \u201cWe obviously knew it was an issue, but even still, the gap between it and other issues \u2014 I don\u2019t think we thought it would be that big.\u201d\n\n[For Jeb Bush, the challenge remains making it about \u2018Jeb,\u2019 not \u2018Bush\u2019]\n\nSecond, Bush and his team miscalculated the role and power of money and traditional television commercials in the 2016 race. During the first six months of 2015, Bush raised more than $100 million, most of it stockpiled in Right to Rise, a strategy that seemed right at the time but came at the cost of not dealing with other pressing needs.\n\n\u201cWe didn\u2019t use that time to introduce him as a unique brand,\u201d said Vin Weber,", + " an outside adviser. \u201cWe used it to raise money. I don\u2019t want to say they made an obvious and clear mistake, but in retrospect, it was a mistake.\u201d\n\nThe aggressive fundraising came to be known as \u201cshock and awe,\u201d an echo of the initial bombing of Iraq by U.S.-led forces before the 2003 invasion. In the campaign context, it could be read as code to other potential candidates to get out of the way. But the prodigious fundraising of Bush\u2019s broad network scared off no one. As the Bush campaign would learn, every credible candidate today has a few billionaire friends who can enrich a super PAC.", + " In the end, all that money came to symbolize frustration rather than power.\n\nThird, Bush ran a campaign that, whether deliberate or not, was rooted in the past, managed by loyalists who admired Bush and enjoyed his confidence but who, like the candidate, found themselves in unfamiliar political terrain.\n\nHis advisers were convinced from the start that the more voters learned about what Bush had done as governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, they would flock to him as their presidential candidate. Bush stubbornly held to that approach \u2014 even as evidence mounted that it was out of step with voters.\n\nDoug Gross, a prominent Iowa Republican,", + " recalled meeting with Bush in July 2014 in Kennebunkport, Maine, to talk about the impending campaign. \u201cHe definitely wanted to run. He\u2019s always had it in him and knew this was his last chance,\u201d Gross said. \u201cHe was trying to figure out how to do it his own way. I was struck by his obstinate avoidance of any political discussion.... He wanted to do it his way or no way.\u201d\n\nSkirmish, then turning away\n\nIn contrast to the doldrums of August 2015, July seemed a glorious time for the Bush team. Early that month, Team Jeb gathered in Kennebunkport to celebrate that the campaign and two allied political committees had together raised nearly an unprecedented $120 million.", + " The numbers were made public as nearly 300 major Bush fundraisers assembled to mingle with the Bush family and campaign advisers.\n\nGuests were transported in black-and-red trolleys to Walker\u2019s Point, the Bush family compound. The group gathered for a photo with former president George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush.\n\nThat evening, Bush touted the team\u2019s record fundraising as guests dined on lobster rolls and hamburgers at a luxury resort tucked among a forest of birch groves and balsam fir. \u201cIt was incredibly memorable to be there with several generations,\u201d said Jay Zeidman, a Houston-based investor who helped raise money from young professionals.\n\nThe next day,", + " the donors got briefings from senior Bush aides including Bradshaw, campaign manager Danny Diaz and finance director Heather Larrison. They laid out how the campaign planned to take on contenders such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Throughout, there was little mention of Donald Trump.\n\n[That time Jeb Bush invited 300 top donors to his parents\u2019 house]\n\n\u201cNone of us thought he would last the summer,\u201d said one person who was in attendance.\n\nAt that moment, however, Trump was already in the process of undermining Bush\u2019s candidacy. If Bush had ever gone up against someone like Trump,", + " it didn\u2019t show. Trump was a new and different kind of rival, one given to personal insults rather than policy debates, who monopolized media coverage and got away with provocative statements that would have sunk normal politicians.\n\nAfter marching in two July 4 parades on a rainy Saturday in New Hampshire, reporters asked Bush about Trump\u2019s claim that Mexico was allowing immigrants to illegally cross into the United States. It was one of the hundreds of times he would face such questions.\n\nBush said \u201cabsolutely\u201d he was offended by Trump\u2019s rhetoric. \u201cWe\u2019re going to win when we\u2019re hopeful and optimistic and big and broad rather than \u2018grrrrrr\u2019 \u201d he said \u2014 literally,", + " growling \u2013 \u201cjust angry all the time.\u201d\n\nThat very night, Trump attacked Bush as soft on immigration and took aim as well at Bush\u2019s wife, Columba, who was born in Mexico and entered the country legally \u2014 retweeting and then deleting a disparaging comment about her.\n\nNothing, however, cut as close to the bone as Trump\u2019s claim that Bush was too \u201clow-energy\u201d to serve as president.\n\nThe accusation was laughable \u2014 until it began to stick. Trump\u2019s charge was in fact a proxy for a different and more difficult argument to combat: that Bush was neither strong nor edgy enough for a party seething with anger at the grass roots.\n\n[", + "Inside the Bush-Trump melodrama: Decades of tension and discomfort]\n\n\u201cNobody tapped into it, for all the polling, all the focus groups,\u201d said Theresa Kostrzewa, a North Carolina lobbyist who raised money for the campaign. \u201cThe biggest thing they did was miss was just how angry the American electorate was and that Trump would be their Captain Ahab.\u201d\n\nBush\u2019s advisers would contest that claim. They could see the anger, they said. The issue was what to do about it. \u201cDonors, political operatives and big thinkers from around the country urged us to ignore Trump for months,\u201d Bradshaw said. \u201cThere was no one in the news media or the operative class at the time who felt Trump would ultimately be a serious contender for the nomination.\u201d\n\nAt the same time,", + " others feared that engaging Trump was almost beneath Bush and would thrust the candidate into a never-ending game of charge-countercharge. \u201cJeb should be bigger than this,\u201d another aide recalled thinking.\n\nOver at Right to Rise, Murphy sent a clear signal: Trump is not our fight right now.\n\n\u201cIf other campaigns wish that we\u2019re going to uncork money on Donald Trump, they\u2019ll be disappointed,\u201d Murphy told The Washington Post in late August. \u201cTrump is, frankly, other people\u2019s problem.\u201d\n\nAt that moment, the Bush team\u2019s analysis showed that no Trump voters were likely to shift their support to Bush. On Sunday, Murphy said that attacking Trump would only have benefited other candidates.", + " Bush\u2019s campaign needed to consolidate the establishment lane while hoping that Trump and Cruz would sort out the competition among the anti-establishment candidates.\n\nBradshaw also dismissed complaints from some donors that she cut the candidate off from advice. Noting that Bush long has been active on email, Bradshaw responded in a message by saying: \u201cDonors constantly gave conflicting advice \u2014 attack Trump, don\u2019t attack Trump; smile more; smile less \u2014 you look like you are smirking. I didn\u2019t tell people they were wrong \u2014 not my style \u2014 I did a lot of listening, and I\u2019m sure there were things we could have done better \u2014 but withholding info from the Governor simply did not happen in our campaign.\u201d\n\nFor much of the autumn,", + " Bush\u2019s engagement with Trump was on-again, off-again \u2014 skirmish, then turning away. Not until late last year did he truly start a concerted and sustained series of attacks. Aides said Bush was particularly affected by the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., and felt, as one adviser put it, that it was \u201ctime to stand up to the bully.\u201d\n\n\u201cJeb was the only candidate with the political courage at the time and frankly throughout the last six months to take on Trump directly for doing something that the governor felt was very harmful to the Party and to the country,\u201d Bradshaw wrote. \u201cThere was no hesitation at that point given his comments about women,", + " about Hispanics, his lack of knowledge on issues of national security and on and on.\u201d\n\nA flat-footed image\n\nBush\u2019s failure to come to terms with one of the downsides of his family name came to a head over a four-day period in May, when he stumbled over the decision by his brother, former president George W. Bush, to go to war in Iraq.\n\n[Jeb Bush faces hostile questions about Iraq war]\n\nChanging his answer on a daily basis, Bush came across as a flat-footed campaigner clearly uncomfortable articulating his views on the most critical moment of his brother\u2019s presidency. But it also highlighted the \u00addouble-edged nature of being a candidate named Bush.\n\nIn a January Washington Post-", + "ABC News poll, nearly 6 in 10 Americans held an unfavorable view of Bush. He was the only Republican with a negative favorability rating: 44 percent said they had a favorable impression of the former governor while 50 percent rated him negatively. His rankings grew worse as the campaign progressed.\n\nA fundamental weakness, supporters said, was the lack of a coherent rationale for Bush\u2019s candidacy and the failure to make inroads with activists on the right. \u201cAt the end of the day, it wasn\u2019t clear the name was ever surmountable,\u201d said a Bush donor. \u201cIf the name was going to be surmounted, it would have to be because there was a fresh set of ideas.\u201d\n\nBush offered ideas,", + " but in a campaign dominated by Trump, they were ignored or lost to most voters.\n\n\u2018The timing was not right\u2019\n\nOne of the biggest tactical advantages Bush appeared to have early on \u2014 a richly endowed super PAC \u2014 was not the invincible weapon his team thought it would be. It cut off his access to a key adviser, Murphy, whom he installed at the group\u2019s helm.\n\nIt also meant that during the first six months of last year, nearly all of the coverage about Bush focused on how he was socking away millions into the super PAC, all while maintaining that he had not decided whether to run. In an election brimming with anger toward the wealthy elite,", + " Bush seemed almost flippant about his pursuit of big dollars.\n\nMurphy was convinced that much of what was taking place was noise and that when the voters began to check in, the super PAC\u2019s financial might would be overpowering.\n\nFirst, the committee would use it to lay out Bush\u2019s biography. Then, as necessary, the group would turn its arsenal on his rivals. \u201cOur job is just to amplify his story and what he\u2019s saying and we banked enough cash that nobody\u2019s turning our speaker off,\u201d Murphy told Bloomberg Politics in October.\n\nBack at campaign headquarters, the team hewed to that timetable and sensibility. Once the Bush record was burned into voters\u2019 minds,", + " attitudes would shift, Bradshaw said at the time. A Bush donor complained, \u201cMurphy had a timetable, and nothing mattered until December and January.\u201d\n\nBy the end of January, Right to Rise had raced through at least $95.7 million out of the $118.6 million it had collected, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Almost $87 million went into a barrage of television ads, online videos, slick mailers and voter phone calls\u2014to no avail.\n\nMel Sembler, a former Bush ambassador who helped raise money for the super PAC and served on its governance board, said he believes the group\u2019s strategy was sound.\n\n\u201cWe had confidence in Mike,", + " and I think we did the best we could in deploying of resources,\u201d Sembler said. \u201cThat\u2019s not where the problem is.... The timing was not right for Jeb. Our candidate was just not connecting with the electorate.\u201d\n\nRetaining his good humor\n\nThe final months were difficult for Bush. After a particularly weak performance during a debate in Boulder, Colo., in October in which Rubio appeared to get the better of him, there were suggestions that he might quit the campaign right then.\n\nReporters who made inquiries about the possibility were brushed off. In the middle of it all, Bush spotted a reporter who was a regular on the trail with him.", + " \u201cHey \u2014 I didn\u2019t drop out, did I?\u201d he shouted. \u201cYou know, that kind of stuff really gets my juices going. I\u2019m going to win this thing, and when I do \u2014 you\u2019re going to give me a big hug.\u201d\n\nThrough it all, Bush attempted to keep both good humor and determination in the face of the inevitable.\n\n\u201cI was stunned by how well he handled the last month of this campaign when the writing was on the wall,\u201d said Tim Miller, Bush\u2019s communications director. \u201cIt is hard to go out there every day and put on a fake smiley face. He was in really high spirits and didn\u2019t lash out at people in private throughout the last two months.\u201d\n\nThe final indignity in a campaign that had suffered through many came three days before Saturday\u2019s primary,", + " when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley endorsed Rubio rather than a man she described as a friend and mentor.\n\nWhen it ended Saturday night, Bush told saddened supporters: \u201cWe put forward details, innovative, conservative plans to address the mounting challenges that we face. Because despite what you might have heard, ideas matter, policy matters.\u201d\n\nHis final remarks as a presidential candidate were a reflection of the campaign he had constructed from the start, one he had built to his unique specifications, which nonetheless proved to be a mismatch for a political environment that caught him by surprise \u2014 and for which he paid a hefty price. ", + " ADVERTISEMENT\n\nJeb Bush has finally put his presidential campaign out of its misery.\n\nBut it wasn't so long ago that Jeb was widely seen as the candidate to beat in the Republican presidential primary. Pundits predicted that Bush was almost as inevitable a nominee as Hillary Clinton was. Commentators cast Bush as the Republican Party's best chance at leaving Clinton shaking in her boots. Between his \"rock star name\" and the gusher of money he had flowing into his campaign before even announcing, Bush was thought to have the nomination nearly at his fingertips.\n\nThen reality intervened. The former Florida governor has been a pitiable punch line for months.", + " And the actual vote tallies are particularly embarrassing. Bush finished a woeful sixth in the Iowa caucuses, fourth in New Hampshire, and will come in either fourth or fifth in South Carolina when all the votes are finally tallied. No wonder he dropped out.\n\nIt's amazing how much can change in a year. Here's a look back at some headlines from early 2015, compared to the current news coverage of the man who would have been America's third President Bush.\n\nThen\n\n1. \"It's looking like Hillary vs. Jeb\"\n\n\"Barring a major disruption in the force field, it's looking like Hillary vs.", + " Jeb, and the same might still be true a year from now. The new dynamic of the GOP race, once totally up for grabs, is that someone has to knock out Jeb. It could be Walker, it could be Rubio, it could be Rand \u2014 but it'll be hard.\" \u2014Mike Allen, Politico's Playbook, Feb. 25, 2015\n\n2. \"A political rock star name\"\n\n\"Jeb Bush will be the Republican Party's 2016 presidential candidate because he has a political rock star name. And he isn't a hacker who the GOP likes to send out to carve up red meat in front of their hungry base.", + " So, he stands a good chance of going beyond primary season to where voters prefer a balanced meal.\" \u2014Ben Guise, The Des Moines Register, Jan. 30, 2015\n\n3. \"Could stand toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton\"\n\n\"He is arguably the most knowledgeable candidate on the widest array of issues and cannot credibly be typecast as a dim-witted Republican. Being able to discuss many issues intelligently suggests that he would have less of a learning curve if elected and could stand toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton.\" \u2014Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post, March 3, 2015\n\n4. \"Money,", + " momentum, Florida, big ideas\"\n\n\"He's got money, momentum, Florida, big ideas. His surprise, early signal that he's running is THE PLAY OF THE CAMPAIGN so far \u2014 pushing OUT Mitt and perhaps Christie by freezing or stealing their money and talent. Jeb will be first Republican to $100 million by a mile. Now, watch for the use of overwhelming force to lock up more talent, donors, and public endorsements.\" \u2014Mike Allen, Politico's Playbook, Feb. 15, 2015\n\n5. \"Serious strengths\"\n\n\"Bush's Decem\u00adber an\u00adnounce\u00adment that he plans to 'act\u00adively ex\u00adplore'", + " a run for the pres\u00adid\u00adency shook up the GOP primary. First, ma\u00adjor GOP donors have already star\u00adted flock\u00ading to him, a de\u00advel\u00adop\u00adment that could squeeze po\u00adten\u00adtial rivals. Second, the move made it clear how ser\u00adi\u00adous the son and broth\u00ader of pres\u00adid\u00adents is about run\u00adning after years of ru\u00admors that he would ul\u00adti\u00admately seek an\u00adoth\u00ader of\u00adfice once his term as Flor\u00adida gov\u00adernor had ended.\n\nBush has ser\u00adi\u00adous strengths, in\u00adclud\u00ading the sup\u00adport of donors from New York to Flor\u00adida to Texas.\" \u2014National Journal,", + " Jan. 4, 2015\n\n6. \"Someone who can win the general election and reach out beyond the party's core supporters\"\n\n\"He is the kind of candidate that a lot of Republican donors have been looking for \u2014 someone who can win the general election and reach out beyond the party's core supporters.\" \u2014John Rowe, co-chairman of the Illinois Business Immigration Coalition, The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 25, 2015\n\n7. \"A 2016 presidential fundraising juggernaut\"\n\n\"Jeb Bush, the former governor, brother of president 43 and son of president 41, has quietly but ruthlessly assembled a 2016 presidential fundraising juggernaut \u2014 one that Republican money men say will be impossible for any of the other 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls to emulate and could easily go stride for stride with the legendary Clinton fundraising machine when,", + " as expected, the former first lady announces her 2016 intentions.\" \u2014Charlie Gasparino, Fox Business, March 25, 2015\n\n8. \"Money + organization = success\"\n\n\"Money + organization = success. Bush is not a strong frontrunner and, as we've detailed in this space, has some major problems with the conservative base. But, his aggressiveness and seeming commitment to running puts him back on top.\" \u2014Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, Jan. 9, 2015\n\n9. \"Our best chance\"\n\n\"Jeb is our best chance of taking back the White House in 2016,", + " and I hope that you will join me in pushing him to run.\u201d \u2014Barbara Bush, The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2015\n\nNow\n\n1. \"A source of pity\"\n\n\"Against all odds (and logic), Jeb Bush's campaign continues to chug along. The campaign staff are disheartened and the candidate has become a source of pity for most New Hampshire voters. Despite Bush's exemplary record as a governor in Florida, and his moderate and intelligent positions on key policy issues, he continues to fade into the background. Sadly, no amount of town hall meetings, speeches filled with muddled sentences, and struggles to find words can save him at this point.\" \u2014Sydney Spreck,", + " Star Tribune, Jan. 31, 2016\n\n2. \"Really disappointing\"\n\n\u201cI'm resigned to it being over, frankly. It's really disappointing. I'd urge him to get out after New Hampshire if he doesn't do well, but he probably won't.\" \u2014top Bush Wall Street donor, Politico, Jan. 15, 2016\n\n3. \"So sad\"\n\n\"Donors I've talked to are desperate not to abandon Jeb because of their long bonds and loyalty with the family, but they are also recognizing there is no ROI [return on investment] on this campaign. The sense of these folks is it is so sad.", + " They whisper to each other, 'When will Jeb go?'\" \u2014Rick Wilson, veteran Florida political operative and Marco Rubio backer, Politico, Jan. 15, 2016\n\n4. \"A dreadful campaigner\"\n\n\"In truth, his problems are almost all of his own making: He is a dreadful campaigner with a tendency towards a reasonable and wonkish tone. All of which makes him singularly ill-suited to the angry, anti-establishment mood of his own party. His efforts to shoehorn himself into the election make him an even worse campaigner. In his desperate desire to fit the mood of the times,", + " he constantly miscues.\" \u2014Richard Wolffe, The Guardian, Feb. 2, 2016\n\n5. \"A struggling scion\"\n\n\"'Please clap,' the former Florida governor begged a New Hampshire crowd last Tuesday. If he was still the field's front-runner, the moment would have been written off as a nerdy candidate's nervous tic. How polite. How humble. But from the mouth of a struggling scion, 'Please clap' is a sad epilogue.\" \u2014Ron Fournier, The Atlantic, Feb. 7, 2016\n\n6. \"Doomed to fail\"\n\n\"Does anyone other than Jeb Bush believe that Americans marvel at how efficiently the president cleans out his inbox?", + " Or applaud him for successfully refereeing a dispute between the secretaries of commerce and agriculture? The voters aren't looking for an administrator-in-chief. Last fall Bush gambled otherwise \u2014 and released a 644-page book full of emails that he wrote as governor of Florida. If anyone read it \u2014 and if Amazon is any guide, almost no one did \u2014 they would first have had to wade through six pages of acronyms such as the BOG and the DCA (not to be confused with the DCF).\n\nThat's why Bush, the guy who was supposed to win, is losing. Even if he does somehow negative-ad his way to the presidency,", + " he's doomed to fail because he doesn't understand the theater of that office.\" \u2014Matt Latimer, The Los Angeles Times, Feb. 3, 2016\n\n7. \"Failing, disappointed, humiliated\"\n\n\"Failing, disappointed, humiliated by six months of well-aimed taunts from Donald Trump, Jeb Bush has had a horrible six months. Once the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, he probably, it turns out, never stood a chance of getting it. He is measured, thoughtful, wonkish; Republican voters want rage. He could scarcely be more of the GOP establishment that they decry.\" \u2014J.A., The Economist,", + " Jan. 15, 2016\n\n8. \"The most underwhelming of the entire race\"\n\n\"Bush's campaign has been the most underwhelming of the entire race. Coming in with a front-runner's presidential pedigree (quite literally), Bush has rarely looked the part on the campaign trail, trying several different tacks to get voters interested in his campaign (one was \"Jeb Can Fix It\") \u2014 none of which have worked.\" \u2014Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, Feb. 8, 2016\n\n9. \"When your supporters start feeling sorry for you\"\n\n\"It is never a good sign for a candidate when your supporters start feeling sorry for you,", + " but that is what has happened to Jeb Bush.\" \u2014Molly Ball, The Atlantic, Jan. 30, 2016\n\n10. \"Like buying a stock and watching it fall\"\n\n\"It's like buying a stock and watching it fall. Putting good money after bad? He certainly has enough for now. I think people are waiting to see if there's someone they can support and who has a chance to win.\" \u2014Steven Shafran, former Goldman Sachs partner and contributor to Bush's super PAC, Bloomberg, Feb. 1, 2016 ", + " If there is any justice in the universe (I know, but let\u2019s go with it), Jeb Bush\u2019s announcement Saturday night that he was ending his campaign for the Republican nomination marks the permanent end of the Bush family\u2019s presence in our national politics.\n\nCan anyone think of another family dynasty that has had such a huge role in a particular stretch of American history, yet has almost zero hold on the country\u2019s imagination?\n\nThe Roosevelt cousins Teddy and Franklin served altogether about five full presidential terms and had an outsized role in building and shaping the nation in the first half of the twentieth century; they are among the most notable personalities in our political history.", + " The martyrdom of Jack and Robert Kennedy, and the tragedies that befell other members of their family, might have ensured them a place in our national mythos out of proportion to their actual impact, a fact that drives the right crazy. (There is a reason conservatives to this day still make snarling references to Chappaquiddick.) Still, there is an argument to be made that the Great Society legislation later signed by Lyndon Johnson had its roots in JFK\u2019s administration (along with the long and brutal Vietnam War). And Teddy Kennedy was a consequential senator for over fifty years. His decades-long push for healthcare reform helped shove Obamacare over the finish line in his memory.\n\nBut the Bushes are in a class by themselves.", + " Of the last nine presidential elections, a Bush has been on the Republican ticket for six of them, winning five. They have had a profound impact on the nation we see around us today, from George Herbert Walker Bush\u2019s role in the Reagan administration and his waging of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, to George W. Bush\u2019s eight years of incompetent, bumbling rule that left the nation with a stunning budget deficit, a financial crisis the likes of which we had not seen since the 1930s, thousands of broken military veterans, and foreign entanglements that we may never be able to untangle.\n\nThe Bushes are like the McDonald\u2019s of political families.", + " They have popped up everywhere for half a century, and damn near everything they offer is unhealthy enough to kill you.\n\nBut when you think of them, do you think of the glamor of Camelot, or stoic leadership in the face of great national tragedies like the Great Depression or World War II, or an outsized personality promising basic fairness to citizens, fighting for progressive reforms, and not letting something small like getting shot stopping you from giving a speech before seeking medical attention? Do you think of either 41 or 43 as legends? What are the tales we\u2019ll be writing about them in our nation\u2019s history books? A couple of wars,", + " a hideous recession, and the infliction of Dick Cheney on the nation, an act for which W should never be allowed out in public again. These are not accomplishments that get your face carved on Mount Rushmore.\n\nIf it is the end for the Bushes, could there be a more fitting close than a member of the family blowing a boatload of money and good will on a hopeless campaign, the very nature of which befuddled him, and for which he seemed to be caught flatfooted, completely unprepared for the forces arrayed against the juggernaut he was so sure would roll over the opposition?\n\nBecause that was Jeb Bush for the last few months of his political career.", + " Granted, almost no one saw Donald Trump coming. But a year ago, Bush\u2019s nomination was supposed to be a sure thing. He was going to roll up huge amounts of fundraising. The RNC scheduled the primaries in such a way as to allegedly be advantageous to him. His name was supposed to be a plus for some reason. The Republican establishment, at least, seemed to think the Barack Obama that exists in the right-wing media bubble would fuel a nostalgia for the W years that would redound to Jeb\u2019s benefit. God knows why, but no one ever accused Reince Priebus of being the crispiest French fry in the Happy Meal.\n\nOthers have noted the irony of Bush\u2019s campaign ending in South Carolina,", + " the home state of famed weasel Lee Atwater, who helped get George H.W. Bush elected with the despicable Willie Horton ad in 1988, and where a 2000 whisper campaign begun by Atwater disciple Karl Rove regarding John McCain\u2019s alleged illegitimate black daughter helped W to victory in that year\u2019s primary. But that has always been the Bush way: Let someone else do the vicious dirty work while you keep your hands clean. Or operate so far in the background, as Poppy Bush did while serving as Reagan\u2019s vice-president, that you can mostly avoid the crap from something like the Iran-contra scandal splattering all over your loafers.\n\nJeb Bush never had his father\u2019s knack for avoiding that spillage.", + " Nor did he ever seem to really have any fire or passion in him for the presidency. You could see this on Saturday night, when he read his concession speech like he was giving a perfunctory toast at a Rotary Club dinner. When he awkwardly announced that he was happy to go home that night and sleep in his own bed with his best friend, his wife Columba, who was standing behind him, I half-expected a waiter to materialize onstage to put a plate of undercooked roast beef on the lectern.\n\nThat was Jeb Bush, whose campaign motto might as well have been \u201cSure, Why Not.\u201d As always with the Bushes,", + " one got the sense that the call to public service was not taken up out of some sort of great love for the nation or belief in their ability to make a difference. Elected office was just sort of there, and what the heck, someone had to sit in it.\n\nIt didn\u2019t help that the party Jeb claimed to love, which had nourished his family for decades, had passed him by, had become not so much a political party as a toxic cloud of xenophobia and inchoate rage. Of course, a close observer could have seen that before he blew upwards of a max NBA contract on a presidential campaign that lasted less than a year,", + " but the Bushes have always seemed so insulated from anything approaching reality.\n\nAs for the future, there is always Jeb\u2019s son George P. Bush, currently serving as Texas land commissioner and occasionally mentioned as the family\u2019s hope for continued political relevance. It\u2019s hard to see how the GOP will ever again embrace the family name, but who knows? When your party is about to nominate Donald Trump for the presidency, all bets involving logic and reason are off. ", + " Throughout 2015, news coverage of Jeb Bush tended to bracket him as his party\u2019s dynastic counterpart to Hillary Clinton. He was the boring, preordained candidate of his party\u2019s power structure. But the parallel has collapsed. Hillary Clinton has retained a bare but relatively firm command of her party\u2019s nominating contest, while Bush\u2019s campaign consisted of a long, painful demise punctuated by one aborted moment of relief. Perhaps the candidates and their circumstances were not so similar after all.\n\nBoth Bush and Clinton represent name-brand presidents of the relatively recent past. And both have squared off against populist insurgents. But there the similarity ends. Bush\u2019s candidacy has received a measure of dignity in its death that was denied it in life.", + " All sides now recall the dearly departed former governor as a sober, dignified voice of reason, the polar opposite of Donald Trump\u2019s bellicosity. Jeb, his supporters have told us, is the one candidate who stood up to Trump. But this encomium mistakes victimhood for courage. Bush did not choose Trump as his antagonist; Trump choose Bush. His vicious, relentless pummeling defined Bush in a way that was horrible to watch. Bush\u2019s strategy throughout was to hope Trump turned his attention to others. \u201cTrump is, frankly, other people\u2019s problem,\u201d confessed Bush\u2019s primary strategist last August. And he continued that strategy for months,", + " attacking everybody but Trump. Whenever Trump momentarily relented his abuse, Bush appeared gratified.\n\nPhoto: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images\n\nBernie Sanders is not an abusive jerk. He shouts but does not interrupt, and softens the edges of his personal attacks. (His accusation of corruption against Clinton is implied more than stated overtly.) Unlike Trump, Sanders has a coherent (if not realistic) programmatic alternative. But the main difference is that Sanders is attacking a successful model of governance. His campaign is built upon discontent with President Obama\u2019s achievements, and \u2014 to a lesser extent \u2014 discontent with Bill Clinton\u2019s. Hillary Clinton is running as the heir to both administrations,", + " a figure who will build upon their success.\n\nThis strategy is working because Bill Clinton was a successful president, and Obama has been an extremely successful one. There may be shortcomings in both of their records, but both of them managed to govern intelligently, competently, and in a way that looked after a relatively broad spectrum of interests.\n\nGeorge W. Bush\u2019s presidency did none of these things. His administration was an abject disaster both domestically and abroad. Jeb Bush never figured out how to divest himself from his brother\u2019s failure, and by the end reduced himself to running openly as his heir, bringing Dubya to campaign with him in his South Carolina box canyon stand.", + " The Bush disaster presented Jeb with a double trap he could never escape. His brand was poison for swing voters. And conservatives, who had fallen mostly in line with Dubya during his presidency, were forced to disavow him as a heretic by the end so that their ideology could escape the wreckage.\n\nThe direction of Republican politics since 2008 is mostly the continuing momentum of this explosion. One direction of Republican strategy has taken seriously the premise that Bush failed because of his moderation, and tried to steer the party toward a more austere version of the faith. That is the Cruz version. The Trump version is more of an inchoate rebellion against the party\u2019s donor class and its ideas,", + " embracing nationalism and affect. Marco Rubio represents the true continuation of Bushism within the party \u2014 massive tax cuts plus neoconservative foreign policy plus soft-pedaled social conservatism, all sold in a compassionate package with lots of high-profile outreach to Democratic constituencies. Rubio allows Republicans to double down on Bushism without saddling themselves with the liability of the Bush name or, by extension, acknowledging that they still believe Bush\u2019s ideas work.\n\nWhat killed Jeb Bush\u2019s campaign was first the failure of his brother\u2019s administration, and then the emergence of Marco Rubio to present a more attractive face for its continuation. Trump is the face Jeb Bush\u2019s admirers wish to present as his antagonist.", + " But the Bush campaign did not need Trump to kill it. ", + " Jeb Bush, the Republican establishment\u2019s last, best hope, began his 2016 campaign rationally enough, with a painstakingly collated operational blueprint his team called, with NFL swagger, \u201cThe Playbook.\u201d\n\nOn page after page kept safe in a binder, the playbook laid out a strategy for a race his advisers were certain would be played on Bush\u2019s terms \u2014 an updated, if familiar version of previous Bush family campaigns where cash, organization and a Republican electorate ultimately committed to an electable center-right candidate would prevail.\n\nStory Continued Below\n\nThe playbook, hatched by Sally Bradshaw, Mike Murphy and a handful of other Bush confidants in dozens of meetings during the first half of 2015 and described to POLITICO by some of Bush\u2019s closest and most influential supporters,", + " appealed to the Bush family penchant for shock-and-awe strategy. The campaign would commence with six months of fundraising for the Right to Rise super PAC and enough muscle to push aside Mitt Romney. There would be a massive, broad-based organizational effort to plant roots in March states at a time when other campaigns were mired in Iowa and New Hampshire. The plan outlined Bush\u2019s positive, future-focused message with an emphasis on his decade-old record of accomplishment as Florida governor.\n\nAnd it included several pages about Bush\u2019s case to prosecute against top rivals \u2014 dire political threats such as Wisconsin\u2019s Scott Walker.\n\nThe plan roundly underestimated threats: Bradshaw, his closest adviser and longtime defender,", + " for example, told at least one campaign aide that Marco Rubio wouldn\u2019t challenge Bush. Besides, Bradshaw and other top advisers believed, it would be next to impossible for someone with so little experience to beat him. \u201cThey thought there was going to be much more reverence and respect for the fact that Jeb Bush, a Bush, was getting into the race,\u201d said one Florida-based supporter, an alumnus of Bush\u2019s gubernatorial campaigns and former staffer. \u201cWhen they got Romney to step aside, they figured everyone else would too.\u201d\n\nMost critically, the playbook, people who have read it tell POLITICO, contained nothing about Donald Trump, who would spend the next excruciating year turning Bush into his personal patrician pi\u00f1ata.\n\n\u201cThe rules all changed this year.", + " It was all about taking on the establishment,\u201d said a Republican operative close to the Bush family. \u201cWhen you\u2019re the son and brother of former presidents, the grandson of a U.S. senator, how do you run in a year like this? It is just a year of personality, not message. All of a sudden, there was no path for him. They just kept falling back on his record as governor, which is all he has \u2014 and no one gives a shit.\u201d\n\nBush suspended his campaign Saturday night after a fourth-place finish in the South Carolina primary.\n\nInterviews with more than two dozen Bush insiders, donors and staff members illuminate the plight of an earnest and smart candidate who was tragicomically mismatched to the electorate of his own party and an unforgiving,", + " mean media environment that broadcast his flaws. The entire premise of Bush\u2019s candidacy, these insiders tell POLITICO, was an epic misread of a GOP base hostile to any establishment candidate, especially one with his baggage-weighted last name.\n\nAnd Bush, known for toughness and hard-work ethic in Tallahassee, just couldn\u2019t project the kind of Reagan-on-\u2019roids strength demanded by Trump.\n\n\u201cThey were just captive to it,\u201d one Washington-based Bush donor said. \u201cAnd they didn\u2019t adjust very nimbly.\u201d\n\n***\n\nBy August, just six weeks after officially launching his campaign, the only thing Bush\u2019s staff could agree on was the problem:", + " Donald J. Trump.\n\nThey\u2019d paid no attention to the New York celebrity\u2019s launch in June, just a day after their own. In early August, well after Trump began to dominate news coverage of the race, they still believed he was a blessing in disguise who would deprive Bush\u2019s lesser-known rivals of the media oxygen needed to break through. But as Labor Day neared, Bush found himself on the defensive, peppered daily with questions from reporters asking him to react to Trump\u2019s hard-line positions and seemingly outrageous statements on immigration.\n\nBut almost immediately, Trump baited Bush into a fight, staking out a position to the far right of the Floridian by calling for an end to automatic citizenship to any baby born in America.", + " He ridiculed Bush\u2019s earlier comment that immigrants who come to the United States illegally do it as an \u201cact of love\u201d for family, and called him unelectable.\n\nBush fired back, poorly. He went on conservative radio and used the derogatory term \u201canchor babies\u201d when making the case that he would be a tough enforcer of immigration laws \u2014 opening the floodgates of criticism.\n\nThe following week, inside a Mexican restaurant in McAllen, Texas, just a few miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, Bush compounded the problem he was trying to clean up when he explained rather didactically that he was referring to Asians,", + " not Mexicans, whom he argued were more guilty of taking advantage of the country\u2019s birthright citizenship provision.\n\nInside his Miami headquarters, Bush\u2019s senior staffers were coming to the collective realization that the race was veering out of their control.\n\nBut that\u2019s where the consensus ended.\n\nDavid Kochel, the early-state strategist initially hired to serve as campaign manager, and senior adviser Trent Wisecup, a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Murphy\u2019s, suggested that Bush challenge Trump to a one-hour, live televised debate on birthright citizenship, perhaps on \u201cThe O\u2019Reilly Factor.\u201d The Fox News host, they argued, supports birthright citizenship, and his show would offer a high-profile platform for Bush to demonstrate his policy knowledge and articulate his more unifying message,", + " bringing the contrast between himself and Trump into sharper relief.\n\nBut Bradshaw, the most senior figure in the operation, and campaign manager Danny Diaz couldn\u2019t be convinced it was a risk worth taking, according to high-level campaign staff.\n\n\n\nBy early August, Bush's team all agreed their main problem was Donald Trump, who had begun baiting Bush into fights almost immediately after his campaign launched. Above, the three candidates at the New Hampshire debate in early February. | AP\n\n\n\nDays later, on Aug. 25, Trump was on stage at a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, when he offered an impression of Bush and characterized him as \u201clow energy,\u201d a critique he\u2019d come up with after the first debate a few weeks earlier.\n\nBush\u2019s team was stunned,", + " first by the insult and then that it stuck. Kochel and Wisecup raced to respond and saw their already planned event that very same day \u2014 on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina \u2014 as the perfect opportunity for Bush to respond forcefully and directly to Trump. They envisioned Bush in Pensacola, Florida, speaking straight to Trump: \u201cYou think I\u2019m low energy, why don\u2019t you come down here and talk to these people about how I took charge in a crisis.\u201d\n\nBut once again, Bradshaw and Diaz couldn\u2019t be convinced. Trump, they decided, wasn\u2019t in Bush\u2019s \u201clane\u201d and so the campaign need not worry about responding to him.", + " They went ahead with the event as planned, rolling out a two-minute video telling the story of Bush\u2019s leadership during several hurricanes in 2004 and 2005. The following day, the headlines mainly served to remind readers of another Bush with a less-heralded record on Katrina\u2014George W. \u201cOne Bush gets praise for his handling of hurricanes\u201d was The Washington Post\u2019s version.\n\nThey got defined as \ufffd?low energy\u2019 by a guy who took an escalator to his own announcement.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe Jeb people knew that literally every day when he was governor, he\u2019d walk the steps of the Capitol at a jog pace,\u201d one longtime Bush bundler and confidant said recently.", + " \u201cThe building was 30 stories high. You\u2019d hide because you wouldn\u2019t want him to catch you and make you walk the stairs. He\u2019d email you at 5:30 a.m. This was not at all a low-energy guy. It wasn\u2019t true, but it stuck.\u201d\n\n\u201cThey got defined as \ufffd?low energy\u2019 by a guy who took an escalator to his own announcement.\u201d\n\n***\n\nThose pivotal days in late August were one of the most critical inflection points for Bush\u2019s troubled presidential campaign\u2014the moments when Bradshaw, Kochel and Diaz might have reconsidered the assumptions made months earlier and redirected their candidate. They didn\u2019t,", + " because that redirection wasn\u2019t part of the playbook.\n\n\u201cYou cannot run a political campaign and not have the ability to adapt, to pivot,\u201d one longtime Bush donor who has supported all five of the family\u2019s presidential campaigns. \u201cTo sit there and say \ufffd?We have a book\u2019 just shows the immaturity.\u201d\n\nBradshaw, who remained based in Tallahassee throughout the campaign, not the Miami headquarters, is exceedingly close to Bush. She has run all of his gubernatorial campaigns and served as his chief of staff. She acts as his strategist, his confidante and his muscle, defending him from critics and acting as a wall between Bush and almost everyone else.", + " But some donors worried that she and other Bush loyalists wouldn\u2019t be able to see his flaws as a candidate.\n\nEarly on, Murphy warned some incoming top aides about the loyalists. \u201cIf Jeb walks into a room and asks for a coconut,\u201d Murphy told them, \u201cthe loyalists would drop everything to make sure Jeb got a coconut.\u201d\n\nWhen Bradshaw held her first meeting with about 40 of the campaign\u2019s most connected donors in Washington, D.C., last spring, laying out the playbook, explaining the structure of the operation and confidently asserting the high likelihood of Bush becoming the GOP nominee, she left the sleek law-firm conference room without assuaging some donors\u2019 doubts about the plan \u2014 specifically,", + " the decision to focus the first half of 2015 almost exclusively on raising unlimited amounts of cash for the super PAC and the structure of the campaign itself \u2014 or her willingness to speak tough truths to Bush himself.\n\n\u201cShe told this story about how Jeb upset the young kid tasked with collecting and distributing the [news] clips because he said he didn\u2019t want anyone reading the clips, he wanted them focused,\u201d a top Bush bundler who attended the meeting recalled. \u201cAnd she said she told the kid, \ufffd?Don\u2019t worry, just take Jeb off the list and keep doing them.\u2019 She\u2019s in a room with 40 of us basically saying that she\u2019s hiding things from the principal.", + " We were like, \ufffd?Why are you telling us this?\u2019\u201d\n\nBradshaw brushed off donors\u2019 concerns that focusing so much on filling the super PAC\u2019s coffers might leave the campaign cash-poor. At the time, so much money was rolling in, that situation was hard to imagine. Bush\u2019s finance team, led by Heather Larrison and Jack Oliver, was confident it would have the money it needed and instructed Kochel, then serving as the unofficial campaign manager, to build out a massive campaign with ballot-access teams working every state and senior staffers earning more than $200,000 annual salaries. Early on in the campaign, for example,", + " Bush hired scores of policy aides \u2014 a reflection, perhaps, of his own wonkiness. Yet it was a luxury: Most of the campaigns hired only a small number of policy aides.\n\nOnce Diaz was named campaign manager in June, he went on a cost-cutting spree \u2014 implementing painful across-the-board cuts that affected staffers at nearly every corner of the campaign. Even junior staffers making mid-five figures found their salaries reduced. By late fall, the campaign was no longer leasing a second office space on the sixth floor of its Miami headquarters, with so many staffers having been either laid off or relocated to Iowa and New Hampshire.\n\n\u201c[Sally]", + " would be the one who could be direct with Jeb about his flaws \u2014 but she doesn\u2019t see the flaws,\u201d said a GOP operative who has worked with Bradshaw. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t understand how other people don\u2019t see it, and anyone who is critical of Jeb is dead to her.\u201d\n\nBradshaw especially was obsessed with Rubio, whose audacity in simply entering the race and challenging his friend and former mentor was, to many Bush loyalists, unforgivable. Once the GOP debates began in August, sparking new interest in the golden-tongued Rubio, Bush\u2019s team agreed it was time to engage with a challenger who, in its view,", + " posed a greater obstacle to Bush consolidating support from mainstream Republicans.\n\nIn October, Bush began laying the groundwork to prosecute his case against Rubio, dinging the first-term senator for his poor attendance record and missed votes in the Senate. Heading into the third GOP debate in Boulder, Colorado, on Oct. 28, Bush and his entire team were on the same page \u2014 and brimming with confidence. They hinted at what was coming, planting stories and calling reporters on debate day to ensure that the attack on Rubio was the dominant storyline.\n\nThey\u2019d rehearsed the attack on Rubio dozens of time during debate prep, but when it came time to execute on stage,", + " Bush \u201cjust whiffed,\u201d one senior staffer lamented later. \u201cThat stuff he said about being one of Marco\u2019s constituents and being disappointed, that wasn\u2019t anything we\u2019d practiced,\u201d the staffer continued. \u201cHe\u2019s Jeb Bush. No one is going to empathize with him as someone who needs his senator to work on his behalf.\u201d When Rubio hit back, dismissing Bush\u2019s attack by citing the fact that \u201cwe\u2019re now running for the same position,\u201d Bush failed to respond.\n\n\u201cSometimes you just fuck up,\u201d the Bush staffer said.\n\nIt wasn\u2019t until that debacle that Bush\u2019s advisers decided to address the candidate\u2019s poor performances themselves,", + " hiring Jon Kraushar, who generally works with television anchors, as a public speaking coach.\n\n***\n\nLooking back now after his early exit from a nomination battle he vowed to be in \u201cfor the long haul,\u201d his slow, awkward stumble from August through October encapsulates everything that caused the operation viewed as \u201cJeb!, Inc.\u201d to fail. Bush was on the wrong side of the most galvanizing issues for Republican primary voters; he himself was a rusty and maladroit campaigner and his campaign was riven by internal disagreements and a crippling fear that left it paralyzed and unable to react to Trump.\n\nThe problem, many donors say they believe,", + " is that there wasn\u2019t anyone on the team who both recognized his shortcomings and was willing to point them out to the principal himself.\n\n\u201cHe did not put an adult as the chairman of the campaign and a lot of the mistakes flow from that,\u201d said one longtime Bush donor. \u201cReagan put Bill Casey in that position. 41 put Jim Baker. 43 had Don Evans. You always had someone above the campaign manager who could tell people and the candidate what needed to happen, who could see the big picture. By putting Sally, who loves you, in charge, you don\u2019t get the fair perspective, the right perspective.\u201d\n\nBut the blame is not Bradshaw\u2019s alone.", + " The entire premise of Bush\u2019s candidacy now looks like a misread of an electorate that wasn\u2019t amenable to establishment candidates\u2014and a misunderstanding of a modern media environment ill-suited to a policy wonk who speaks in paragraphs, not punchy sound bites. He couldn\u2019t sell experience to an electorate that wanted emotion. He couldn\u2019t escape his last name. His millions couldn\u2019t buy popular support.\n\nGiven how the race has gone, the real mystery of Jeb Bush\u2019s campaign isn\u2019t why he failed \u2014 but why anyone ever thought he would succeed.\n\nGlenn Thrush and Alex Isenstadt contributed to this report.\n\nEli Stokols is a national politics reporter.\n" + ], + "length": 17179, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 50, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A recent New Yorker interview with President Obama reinforces a familiar point: He prefers \"complexity\" over black-and-white simplicity and likes to argue both sides of a debate. Or, as Michael Gerson at the Washington Post sums up, \"Every question is an opportunity for a seminar.\" Gerson admits that he, like others in the \"knowledge class,\" loves a good seminar. He's just not sure that it translates into good governing. \"Obama is in deep, second-term trouble,\" he writes, citing examples such as the \"structural failures\" of ObamaCare and his \"inaction\" on Syria, even after what Obama describes as \"careful, systematic study\" of the conflict. \"The president who embraces complexity is now besieged by complexity on every front.\" As Obama himself suggests in the New Yorker piece, Americans might be getting a little burned out on his ways. He mentions \"over-exposure\" after several years in the national spotlight and says it's natural for people to wonder, \"Is there somebody else out there who can give [people] that spark of inspiration or excitement?\" At the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan thinks the nation has tuned out. \"Nobody is really listening to the president anymore,\" she writes, detecting a decided lack of interest ahead of next week's State of the Union and going a wee bit further in her criticism of Obama than the president himself: \"He has been for five years a nonstop wind-up talk machine.\" Click for Gerson's full column, and Noonan's.\n", + "docs": [ + "On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One wearing a look of heavy-lidded annoyance. The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement and, for all its limitations, the most ambitious social legislation since the Great Society, half a century ago, was in jeopardy. His approval rating was down to forty per cent\u2014lower than George W. Bush\u2019s in December of 2005, when Bush admitted that the decision to invade Iraq had been based on intelligence that \u201cturned out to be wrong.\u201d Also, Obama said thickly, \u201cI\u2019ve got a fat lip.\u201d\n\nThat morning, while playing basketball at F.B.I.", + " headquarters, Obama went up for a rebound and came down empty-handed; he got, instead, the sort of humbling reserved for middle-aged men who stubbornly refuse the transition to the elliptical machine and Gentle Healing Yoga. This had happened before. In 2010, after taking a self-described \u201cshellacking\u201d in the midterm elections, Obama caught an elbow in the mouth while playing ball at Fort McNair. He wound up with a dozen stitches. The culprit then was one Reynaldo Decerega, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Decerega wasn\u2019t invited to play again, though Obama sent him a photograph inscribed \u201cFor Rey,", + " the only guy that ever hit the President and didn\u2019t get arrested. Barack.\u201d\n\nThis time, the injury was slighter and no assailant was named\u2014\u201cI think it was the ball,\u201d Obama said\u2014but the President needed little assistance in divining the metaphor in this latest insult to his person. The pundits were declaring 2013 the worst year of his Presidency. The Republicans had been sniping at Obamacare since its passage, nearly four years earlier, and HealthCare.gov, a Web site that was undertested and overmatched, was a gift to them. There were other beribboned boxes under the tree: Edward Snowden\u2019s revelations about the National Security Agency;", + " the failure to get anything passed on gun control or immigration reform; the unseemly waffling over whether the Egyptian coup was a coup; the solidifying wisdom in Washington that the President was \u201cdisengaged,\u201d allergic to the forensic and seductive arts of political persuasion. The congressional Republicans quashed nearly all legislation as a matter of principle and shut down the government for sixteen days, before relenting out of sheer tactical confusion and embarrassment\u2014and yet it was the President\u2019s miseries that dominated the year-end summations.\n\nObama worried his lip with his tongue and the tip of his index finger. He sighed, slumping in his chair.", + " The night before, Iran had agreed to freeze its nuclear program for six months. A final pact, if one could be arrived at, would end the prospect of a military strike on Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities and the hell that could follow: terror attacks, proxy battles, regional war\u2014take your pick. An agreement could even help normalize relations between the United States and Iran for the first time since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979. Obama put the odds of a final accord at less than even, but, still, how was this not good news?\n\nThe answer had arrived with breakfast. The Saudis, the Israelis, and the Republican leadership made their opposition known on the Sunday-morning shows and through diplomatic channels.", + " Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, called the agreement a \u201chistoric mistake.\u201d Even a putative ally like New York Senator Chuck Schumer could go on \u201cMeet the Press\u201d and, fearing no retribution from the White House, hint that he might help bollix up the deal. Obama hadn\u2019t tuned in. \u201cI don\u2019t watch Sunday-morning shows,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s been a well-established rule.\u201d Instead, he went out to play ball.\n\nUsually, Obama spends Sundays with his family. Now he was headed for a three-day fund-raising trip to Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, rattling the cup in one preposterous mansion after another.", + " The prospect was dispiriting. Obama had already run his last race, and the chances that the Democratic Party will win back the House of Representatives in the 2014 midterm elections are slight. The Democrats could, in fact, lose the Senate.\n\nFor an important trip abroad, Air Force One is crowded with advisers, military aides, Secret Service people, support staff, the press pool. This trip was smaller, and I was along for the ride, sitting in a guest cabin with a couple of aides and a staffer who was tasked with keeping watch over a dark suit bag with a tag reading \u201cThe President.\u201d\n\nObama spent his flight time in the private quarters in the nose of the plane,", + " in his office compartment, or in a conference room. At one point on the trip from Andrews Air Force Base to Seattle, I was invited up front for a conversation. Obama was sitting at his desk watching the Miami Dolphins\u2013Carolina Panthers game. Slender as a switch, he wore a white shirt and dark slacks; a flight jacket was slung over his high-backed leather chair. As we talked, mainly about the Middle East, his eyes wandered to the game. Reports of multiple concussions and retired players with early-onset dementia had been in the news all year, and so, before I left, I asked if he didn\u2019t feel at all ambivalent about following the sport.", + " He didn\u2019t.\n\n\u201cI would not let my son play pro football,\u201d he conceded. \u201cBut, I mean, you wrote a lot about boxing, right? We\u2019re sort of in the same realm.\u201d\n\nThe Miami defense was taking on a Keystone Kops quality, and Obama, who had lost hope on a Bears contest, was starting to lose interest in the Dolphins. \u201cAt this point, there\u2019s a little bit of caveat emptor,\u201d he went on. \u201cThese guys, they know what they\u2019re doing. They know what they\u2019re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It\u2019s sort of the feeling I have about smokers,", + " you know?\u201d\n\nObama chewed furtively on a piece of Nicorette. His carriage and the cadence of his conversation are usually so measured that I was thrown by the lingering habit, the trace of indiscipline. \u201cI\u2019m not a purist,\u201d he said.\n\nI\u2014ON THE CLOCK\n\nWhen Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a memoir. \u201cNow, that\u2019s a slam dunk,\u201d the former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars for the book\u2014the most ever for a work of nonfiction\u2014and around twelve million for Michelle Obama\u2019s memoirs.", + " (The First Lady has already started work on hers.) Obama\u2019s best friend, Marty Nesbitt, a Chicago businessman, told me that, important as the memoir might be to Obama\u2019s legacy and to his finances, \u201cI don\u2019t see him locked up in a room writing all the time. His capacity to crank stuff out is amazing. When he was writing his second book, he would say, \u2018I\u2019m gonna get up at seven and write this chapter\u2014and at nine we\u2019ll play golf.\u2019 I would think no, it\u2019s going to be a lot later, but he would knock on my door at nine and say, \u2018Let\u2019s go.\u2019 \u201d Nesbitt thinks that Obama will work on issues such as human rights,", + " education, and \u201chealth and wellness.\u201d \u201cHe was a local community organizer when he was young,\u201d he said. \u201cAt the back end of his career, I see him as an international and national community organizer.\u201d\n\nYet no post-Presidential project\u2014even one as worthy as Ulysses S. Grant\u2019s memoirs or Jimmy Carter\u2019s efforts to eradicate the Guinea worm in Africa\u2014can overshadow what can be accomplished in the White House with the stroke of a pen or a phone call. And, after a miserable year, Obama\u2019s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation since the Republicans took the House,", + " in 2010, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming.\n\n\u201cThe conventional wisdom is that a President\u2019s second term is a matter of minimizing the damage and playing defense rather than playing offense,\u201d Obama said in one of our conversations on the trip and at the White House. \u201cBut, as I\u2019ve reminded my team, the day after I was inaugurated for a second term, we\u2019re in charge of the largest organization on earth, and our capacity to do some good, both domestically and around the world, is unsurpassed, even if nobody is paying attention.\u201d\n\nIn 2007,", + " at the start of Obama\u2019s Presidential campaign, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, Richard Goodwin, who worked in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, visited him in his Senate office. \u201cI have no desire to be one of those Presidents who are just on the list\u2014you see their pictures lined up on the wall,\u201d Obama told them. \u201cI really want to be a President who makes a difference.\u201d As she put it to me then, \u201cThere was the sense that he wanted to be big. He didn\u2019t want to be Millard Fillmore or Franklin Pierce.\u201d\n\nThe question is whether Obama will satisfy the standard he set for himself.", + " His biggest early disappointment as President was being forced to recognize that his romantic vision of a post-partisan era, in which there are no red states or blue states, only the United States, was, in practical terms, a fantasy. It was a difficult fantasy to relinquish. The spirit of national conciliation was more than the rhetorical pixie dust of Obama\u2019s 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, in Boston, which had brought him to delirious national attention. It was also an elemental component of his self-conception, his sense that he was uniquely suited to transcend ideology and the grubby battles of the day. Obama is defensive about this now.", + " \u201cMy speech in Boston was an aspirational speech,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was not a description of our politics. It was a description of what I saw in the American people.\u201d\n\nThe structures of American division came into high relief once he was in office. The debate over the proper scale and scope of the federal government dates to the Founders, but it has intensified since the Reagan revolution. Both Bill Clinton and Obama have spent as much time defending progressive advances\u2014from Social Security and Medicare to voting rights and abortion rights\u2014as they have trying to extend them. The Republican Party is living through the late-mannerist phase of that revolution, fuelled less by ideas than by resentments.", + " The moderate Republican tradition is all but gone, and the reactionaries who claim Reagan\u2019s banner display none of his ideological finesse. Rejection is all. Obama can never be opposed vehemently enough.\n\nThe dream of bipartisan co\u00f6peration glimmered again after Obama won re\u00eblection against Mitt Romney with fifty-one per cent of the popular vote. The President talked of the election breaking the \u201cfever\u201d in Washington. \u201cWe didn\u2019t expect the floodgates would open and Boehner would be Tip O\u2019Neill to our Reagan,\u201d Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to the President, said. But re\u00eblection, he thought,", + " had \u201cliberated\u201d Obama. The second Inaugural Address was the most liberal since the nineteen-sixties. Obama pledged to take ambitious action on climate change, immigration, gun control, voting rights, infrastructure, tax reform. He warned of a nation at \u201cperpetual war.\u201d He celebrated the Seneca Falls Convention, the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, and the Stonewall riots as events in a narrative of righteous struggle. He pledged \u201ccollective action\u201d on economic fairness, and declared that the legacy of Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid does \u201cnot make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.\u201d Pfeiffer said,", + " \u201cHis point was that Congress won\u2019t set the limits of what I will do. I won\u2019t trim my vision. And, even if I can\u2019t get it done, I will set the stage so it does get done\u201d in the years ahead. Then came 2013, annus horribilis.\n\nObama\u2019s election was one of the great markers in the black freedom struggle. In the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more racially divided than it has been in a generation. Obama lost among white voters in 2012 by a margin greater than any victor in American history. The popular opposition to the Administration comes largely from older whites who feel threatened,", + " underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country. Obama\u2019s drop in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. \u201cThere\u2019s no doubt that there\u2019s some folks who just really dislike me because they don\u2019t like the idea of a black President,\u201d Obama said. \u201cNow, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I\u2019m a black President.\u201d The latter group has been less in evidence of late.\n\n\u201cThere is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country,", + " and sometimes it\u2019s hard to disentangle those issues,\u201d he went on. \u201cYou can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government\u2014that it\u2019s distant, that it\u2019s bureaucratic, that it\u2019s not accountable\u2014and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what\u2019s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states\u2019 rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There\u2019s a pretty long history there. And so I think it\u2019s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there\u2019s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans.", + " The flip side is I think it\u2019s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states\u2019 rights but, rather, because we are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire country to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are healthy.\u201d\n\nObama\u2019s advisers are convinced that if the Republicans don\u2019t find a way to attract non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and Asians,", + " they may lose the White House for two or three more election cycles. And yet Obama still makes every effort to maintain his careful, balancing tone, as if the unifying moment were still out there somewhere in the middle distance. \u201cThere were times in our history where Democrats didn\u2019t seem to be paying enough attention to the concerns of middle-class folks or working-class folks, black or white,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd this was one of the great gifts of Bill Clinton to the Party\u2014to say, you know what, it\u2019s entirely legitimate for folks to be concerned about getting mugged, and you can\u2019t just talk about police abuse. How about folks not feeling safe outside their homes?", + " It\u2019s all fine and good for you to want to do something about poverty, but if the only mechanism you have is raising taxes on folks who are already feeling strapped, then maybe you need to widen your lens a little bit. And I think that the Democratic Party is better for it. But that was a process. And I am confident that the Republicans will go through that same process.\u201d\n\nFor the moment, though, the opposition party is content to define itself, precisely, by its opposition. As Obama, a fan of the \u201cGodfather\u201d movies, has put it, \u201cIt turns out Marlon Brando had it easy, because,", + " when it comes to Congress, there is no such thing as an offer they can\u2019t refuse.\u201d\n\nII\u2014THE LONG VIEW\n\nAt dusk, Air Force One touched down at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Obama and his adviser Valerie Jarrett stood for a moment on the tarmac gazing at Mt. Rainier, the snow a candied pink. Then Obama nodded. Moment over. They got in the car and headed for town. Obama\u2019s limousine, a Cadillac said to weigh as much as fifteen thousand pounds, is known as the Beast. It is armored with ceramic, titanium, aluminum, and steel to withstand bomb blasts,", + " and it is sealed in case of biochemical attack. The doors are as heavy as those on a Boeing 757. The tires are gigantic \u201crun-flats,\u201d reinforced with Kevlar. A supply of blood matching the President\u2019s type is kept in the trunk.\n\nThe Beast ascended the driveway of Jon Shirley, in the Seattle suburb of Medina, on Lake Washington. (Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates live in town, too.) Shirley earned his pile during the early days of high tech, first at Tandy and then, in the eighties, at Microsoft, where he served as president. Shirley\u2019s lawn is littered with gargantuan modern sculptures.", + " A Claes Oldenburg safety pin loomed in the dark. The Beast pulled up to Shirley\u2019s front door.\n\nOne of the enduring mysteries of the Obama years is that so many members of the hyper-deluxe economy\u2014corporate C.E.O.s and Wall Street bankers\u2014have abandoned him. The Dow is more than twice what it was when Obama took office, in 2009; corporate profits are higher than they have been since the end of the Second World War; the financial crisis of 2008-09 vaporized more than nine trillion dollars in real-estate value, and no major purveyor of bogus mortgages or dodgy derivatives went to jail.", + " Obama bruised some feelings once or twice with remarks about \u201cfat-cat bankers\u201d and \u201creckless behavior and unchecked excess,\u201d but, in general, he dares not offend. In 2011, at an annual dinner he holds at the White House with American historians, he asked the group to help him find a language in which he could address the problem of growing inequality without being accused of class warfare.\n\nInside Shirley\u2019s house, blue-chip works of modern art\u2014paintings, sculpture, installations\u2014were on every wall, in every corner: Katz, Kline, Klein, Pollock, Zhang Huan, Richter, Arp,", + " Rothko, Close, Calder. The house measures more than twenty-seven thousand square feet. There are only two bedrooms. In the library, the President went through a familiar fund-raiser routine: a pre-event private \u201cclutch,\u201d where he shakes hands, makes small talk, and poses for pictures with an inner group\u2014the host, the governor, the chosen.\n\nDown the hall, in a room scaled like an airplane hangar, about seventy guests, having paid sixteen thousand dollars each to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee kitty, ate dinner and waited. Near some very artistic furniture, I stood with Valerie Jarrett, Obama\u2019s most intimate consigliere.", + " To admirers, Jarrett is known as \u201cthe third Obama\u201d; to wary aides, who envy her long history with the Obamas and her easy access to the living quarters of the White House, she is the Night Stalker. Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, David Plouffe, and many others in the Administration have clashed with her. They are gone. She remains\u2014a constant presence, at meetings, at meals, in the Beast. While we were waiting for Obama to speak to the group, I asked Jarrett whether the health-care rollout had been the worst political fiasco Obama had confronted so far.\n\n\u201cI really don\u2019t think so,\u201d she said.", + " Like all Obama advisers, she was convinced that the problems would get \u201cfixed\u201d\u2014just as Social Security was fixed after a balky start, in 1937\u2014and the memory of the botched rollout would recede. That was the hope and that was the spin. And then she said something that I\u2019ve come to think of as the Administration\u2019s mantra: \u201cThe President always takes the long view.\u201d\n\nThat appeal to patience and historical reckoning, an appeal that risks a maddening high-mindedness, is something that everyone around Obama trots out to combat the hysterias of any given moment. \u201cHe has learned through those vicissitudes that every day is Election Day in Washington and everyone is writing history in ten-minute intervals,\u201d Axelrod told me.", + " \u201cBut the truth is that history is written over a long period of time\u2014and he will be judged in the long term.\u201d\n\nObama stepped up to a platform and went to work. First ingratiation, then gratitude, then answers. He expressed awe at the sight of Mt. Rainier. Being in Seattle, he said, made him \u201cfeel the spirit of my mom,\u201d the late Ann Dunham, who went to high school nearby, on Mercer Island. He praised his host\u2019s hospitality. (\u201cThe only problem when I come to Jon\u2019s house is I want to just kind of roam around and check stuff out, and instead I\u2019ve got to talk.\u201d)", + " Then came a version of the long-game riff: \u201cOne thing that I always try to emphasize is that, if you look at American history, there have been frequent occasions in which it looked like we had insoluble problems\u2014either economic, political, security\u2014and, as long as there were those who stayed steady and clear-eyed and persistent, eventually we came up with an answer.\u201d\n\nAs Obama ticked off a list of first-term achievements\u2014the economic rescue, the forty-four straight months of job growth, a reduction in carbon emissions, a spike in clean-energy technology\u2014he seemed efficient but contained, running at three-quarters speed, like an athlete playing a midseason road game of modest consequence;", + " he was performing just hard enough to leave a decent impression, get paid, and avoid injury. Even in front of West Coast liberals, he is always careful to disavow liberalism\u2014the word, anyway. \u201cI\u2019m not a particularly ideological person,\u201d Obama told Jon Shirley and his guests. \u201cThere\u2019s things, some values I feel passionately about.\u201d He said that these included making sure that everybody is \u201cbeing treated with dignity or respect regardless of what they look like or what their last name is or who they love,\u201d providing a strong defense, and \u201cleaving a planet that is as spectacular as the one we inherited from our parents and our grandparents.\u201d He continued,", + " \u201cSo there are values I\u2019m passionate about, but I\u2019m pretty pragmatic when it comes to how we get there.\u201d\n\nObama said he\u2019d take some questions\u2014in \u201cboy, girl, boy, girl\u201d order. He tried to rally the Democrats and expressed dismay with the opposition. (\u201cThere are reasonable conservatives and there are those who just want to burn down the house.\u201d) He played both sides of the environment issues, rehearsing the arguments for and against the Keystone pipeline and sympathizing with the desire of China and India to lift millions out of poverty\u2014but if they consume energy the way the United States has \u201cwe\u2019ll be four feet under water.\u201d This is the archetypal Obama habit of mind and politics,", + " the calm, professorial immersion in complexity played out in front of ardent supporters who crave a rallying cry. It\u2019s what compelled him to declare himself a non-pacifist as he was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, in Oslo, and praise Ronald Reagan in a Democratic primary debate.\n\nAnd that was the end of the performance. A few minutes later, the motorcade was snaking through the streets of suburban Seattle\u2014kids in pajamas holding signs and sparklers, the occasional protester, Obama secured in the back seat of the Beast. He could hear nothing. The windows of his car are five inches thick.\n\nIII\u2014PRESIDENTIAL M&M\u2019S\n\nThe next morning,", + " a Monday, I woke early and turned on CNN. Senator Lindsey Graham, who is facing a primary challenge from four Tea Party candidates in South Carolina, was saying with utter confidence that Iran had hoodwinked the Administration in Geneva. Next came a poll showing that the majority of the country now believed that the President was neither truthful nor honest. The announcer added with a smile that GQ had put Obama at No. 17 on its \u201cleast influential\u201d list\u2014right up there with Pope Benedict XVI in his retirement, the cicadas that never showed up last summer, and Manti Te\u2019o\u2019s fake dead girlfriend.\n\nIn the hotel lobby,", + " I met Jeff Tiller, who works for the White House press operation. In college, he became interested in politics and later joined Obama\u2019s 2008 Presidential campaign. From there, he volunteered at the White House, which led to a string of staff jobs, and eventually he was doing advance work all over the world for the White House. The aides on the plane were like Tiller\u2014committed members of a cheerful, overworked microculture who could barely conceal their pleasure in Presidential propinquity. I\u2019m twenty-seven and this is my thirty-second time on Air Force One. \u201cI pinch myself sometimes,\u201d Tiller said. Dan Pfeiffer,", + " who has been with Obama since 2007, was so overworked last year that he suffered a series of mini-strokes. \u201cBut no worries,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019m good!\u201d\n\nWe arrived in San Francisco, and the motorcade raced along, free of traffic and red lights, from the airport to a community center in Chinatown named after Betty Ong, a flight attendant who perished when American Airlines Flight 11 was hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center. Obama was to give a speech on immigration. Out the window, you could see people waving, people hoisting their babies as if to witness history, people holding signs protesting one issue or another\u2014the Keystone pipeline,", + " especially\u2014and, everywhere, the iPhone clickers, the Samsung snappers.\n\nThe Beast pulled under a makeshift security tent. Obama gets to events like these through underground hallways, industrial kitchens, holding rooms\u2014all of which have been checked for bombs. At the Ong Center, he met with his hosts and their children. (\u201cI think I have some Presidential M&M\u2019s for you!\u201d) People get goggle-eyed when it\u2019s their turn for a picture. Obama tries to put them at ease: \u201cC\u2019mon in here! Let\u2019s do this!\u201d Sometimes there is teasing of the mildest sort: \u201cChuck Taylor All-Stars!", + " Old style, baby!\u201d A woman told the President that she was six months pregnant. She didn\u2019t look it. \u201cWhoa! Don\u2019t tell that to Michelle. She\u2019ll be all...\u201d The woman said she was having a girl. Obama was delighted: \u201cDaughters! You can\u2019t beat \u2019em!\u201d He pulled her in for the photo. From long experience, Obama has learned what works for him in pictures: a broad, toothy smile. A millisecond after the flash, the sash releases, the smile drops, a curtain falling.\n\nA little later, Betty Ong\u2019s mother and siblings arrived. Obama drew them into a huddle.", + " I heard him saying that Betty was a hero, though \u201cobviously, the heartache never goes away.\u201d Obama really is skilled at this kind of thing, the kibbitzing and the expressions of sympathy, the hugging and the eulogizing and the celebrating, the sheer animal activity of human politics\u2014but he suffers an anxiety of comparison. Bill Clinton was, and is, the master, a hyper-extrovert whose freakish memory for names and faces, and whose indomitable will to enfold and charm everyone in his path, remains unmatched. Obama can be a dynamic speaker before large audiences and charming in very small groups,", + " but, like a normal human being and unlike the near-pathological personalities who have so often held the office, he is depleted by the act of schmoozing a group of a hundred as if it were an intimate gathering. At fund-raisers, he would rather eat privately with a couple of aides before going out to perform. According to the Wall Street Journal, when Jeffrey Katzenberg threw a multi-million-dollar fund-raiser in Los Angeles two years ago, he told the President\u2019s staff that he expected Obama to stop at each of the fourteen tables and talk for a while. No one would have had to ask Clinton. Obama\u2019s staffers were alarmed.", + " When you talk about this with people in Obamaland, they let on that Clinton borders on the obsessive\u2014as if the appetite for connection were related to what got him in such deep trouble.\n\n\u201cObama is a genuinely respectful person, but he doesn\u2019t try to seduce everyone,\u201d Axelrod said. \u201cIt\u2019s never going to be who he\u2019ll be.\u201d Obama doesn\u2019t love fund-raising, he went on, \u201cand, if you don\u2019t love it in the first place, you\u2019re not likely to grow fonder of it over time.\u201d\n\nObama has other talents that serve him well in public. Like a seasoned standup comedian,", + " he has learned that a well-timed heckler can be his ally. It allows him to dramatize his open-mindedness, even his own philosophical ambivalences about a particularly difficult political or moral question. Last May, at the National Defense University, where he was giving a speech on counter-terrorism, a woman named Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of the group Code Pink, interrupted him, loudly and at length, to talk about drone strikes and about closing the American prison at Guant\u00e1namo Bay. While some in the audience tried to drown her out with applause, and security people proceeded to drag her away, Obama asserted Benjamin\u2019s right to \u201cfree speech,\u201d and declared,", + " \u201cThe voice of that woman is worth paying attention to.\u201d\n\nAt the Ong Center, an undocumented immigrant from South Korea named Ju Hong was in the crowd lined up behind the President. Toward the end of Obama\u2019s speech, Ju Hong, a Berkeley graduate, broke in, demanding that the President use his executive powers to stop deportations.\n\nObama wheeled around. \u201cIf, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so, but we\u2019re also a nation of laws,\u201d he said, making his case to a wash of applause.\n\nAt the next event, a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee at a music venue,", + " the SFJAZZ Center, Obama met the host\u2019s family (\u201cHold on, we got some White House M&M\u2019s\u201d) and then made his way to the backstage holding area. You could hear the murmur of security communications: \u201cRenegade with greeters\u201d\u2014Renegade being Obama\u2019s Secret Service handle.\n\nObama worked with more enthusiasm than at the midday event. He did the polite handshake; the full pull-in; the hug and double backslap; the slap-shake; the solicitous arm-around-the-older woman. (\u201cAnd you stand here.... Perfect!\u201d)\n\nThe clutch over, the crowd cleared away,", + " Obama turned to his aides and said, \u201cHow many we got out there?\u201d\n\n\u201cFive hundred. Five-fifty.\u201d\n\n\u201cFive-fifty?\u201d Obama said, walking toward the wings of the stage. \u201cWhat are we talking about? Politics? Can\u2019t we talk about something else? Sports?\u201d\n\nThe aides were, as ever, staring down at their iPhones, scrolling, tapping, mentally occupying a psychic space somewhere between where they were and the unspooling news cycle back in Washington.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re off the cuff,\u201d Pfeiffer said. No prepared speech.\n\n\u201cOff the cuff? Sounds good. Let\u2019s go do it.\u201d\n\nObama walked toward the stage and,", + " as he was announced, he mouthed the words: \u201cLadies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.\u201d\n\nThen it happened again: another heckler broke into Obama\u2019s speech. A man in the balcony repeatedly shouted out, \u201cExecutive order!,\u201d demanding that the President bypass Congress with more unilateral actions. Obama listened with odd indulgence. Finally, he said, \u201cI\u2019m going to actually pause on this issue, because a lot of people have been saying this lately on every problem, which is just, \u2018Sign an executive order and we can pretty much do anything and basically nullify Congress.\u2019 \u201d\n\nMany in the crowd applauded their approval.", + " Yes! Nullify it! Although Obama has infuriated the right with relatively modest executive orders on gun control and some stronger ones on climate change, he has issued the fewest of any modern President, except George H. W. Bush.\n\n\u201cWait, wait, wait,\u201d Obama said. \u201cBefore everybody starts clapping, that\u2019s not how it works. We\u2019ve got this Constitution, we\u2019ve got this whole thing about separation of powers. So there is no shortcut to politics, and there\u2019s no shortcut to democracy.\u201d The applause was hardly ecstatic. Everyone knew what he meant. The promises in the second inaugural could be a long time coming.\n\nIV\u2014THE WELCOME TABLE\n\nFor every flight aboard Air Force One,", + " there is a new name card at each seat; a catalogue of the Presidential Entertainment Library, with its hiply curated choices of movies and music; baskets of fruit and candy; a menu. Obama is generally a spare eater; the Air Force One menu seems designed for William Howard Taft. Breakfast one morning was \u201cpumpkin spiced French toast drizzled with caramel syrup and a dollop of fresh whipped cream. Served with scrambled eggs and maple sausage links.\u201d Plus juice, coffee, and, on the side, a \u201ccreamy vanilla yogurt layered with blackberries and cinnamon graham crackers.\u201d\n\nThe most curious character on the plane was Marvin Nicholson,", + " a tall, rangy man in his early forties who works as the President\u2019s trip director and ubiquitous factotum. He is six feet eight. Nicholson is the guy who is always around, who carries the bag and the jacket, who squeezes Purell onto the Presidential palms after a rope line or a clutch; he is the one who has the pens, the briefing books, the Nicorette, the Sharpies, the Advil, the throat lozenges, the iPad, the iPod, the protein bars, the bottle of Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. He and the President toss a football around, they shoot baskets,", + " they shoot the shit. In his twenties, Nicholson was living in Boston and working as a bartender and as a clerk in a windsurfing-equipment shop, where he met John Kerry. He moved to Nantucket and worked as a caddie. He carried the Senator\u2019s clubs and Kerry invited him to come to D.C. Since taking the job with Obama, in 2009, Nicholson has played golf with the President well over a hundred times. The Speaker of the House has played with him once.\n\nA fact like this can seem to chime with the sort of complaints you hear all the time about Obama, particularly along the Acela Corridor.", + " He is said to be a reluctant politician: aloof, insular, diffident, arrogant, inert, unwilling to jolly his allies along the fairway and take a 9-iron to his enemies. He doesn\u2019t know anyone in Congress. No one in the House or in the Senate, no one in foreign capitals fears him. He gives a great speech, but he doesn\u2019t understand power. He is a poor executive. Doesn\u2019t it seem as if he hates the job? And so on. This is the knowing talk on Wall Street, on K Street, on Capitol Hill, in green rooms\u2014the \u201cMorning Joe\u201d consensus.\n\nThere are other ways to assess the political skills of a President who won two terms,", + " as only seventeen of forty-four Presidents have, and did so as a black man, with an African father and a peculiar name, one consonant away from that of the world\u2019s most notorious terrorist. From the start, however, the political operatives who opposed him did what they are paid to do\u2014they drew a cartoon of him. \u201cEven if you never met him, you know this guy,\u201d Karl Rove said, in 2008. \u201cHe\u2019s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a Martini and a cigarette, that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.\u201d The less malign version is of a President who is bafflingly serene,", + " as committed to his duties as a husband and father\u2014six-thirty family dinner upstairs in the private residence is considered \u201csacrosanct,\u201d aides say\u2014as he is to his duties as Cajoler-in-Chief.\n\nStill, Obama\u2019s reluctance to break bread on a regular basis with his congressional allies is real, and a source of tribal mystification in Washington. \u201cPolitics was a strange career choice for Obama,\u201d David Frum, a conservative columnist, told me. \u201cMost politicians are not the kind of people you would choose to have as friends. Or they are the kind who, like John Edwards, seem to be one thing but then turn out to have a monster in the attic;", + " the friendship is contingent on something you can\u2019t see. Obama is exactly like all my friends. He would rather read a book than spend time with people he doesn\u2019t know or like.\u201d Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia who was elected to the Senate three years ago, said recently that Obama\u2019s distance from members of Congress has hurt his ability to pass legislation. \u201cWhen you don\u2019t build those personal relationships,\u201d Manchin told CNN, \u201cit\u2019s pretty easy for a person to say, \u2018Well, let me think about it.\u2019 \u201d\n\nHarry Truman once called the White House \u201cthe great white jail,\u201d but few Presidents seem to have felt as oppressed by Washington as Obama does.", + " At one stop on the West Coast trip, Marta Kauffman, a Democratic bundler who was one of the creators of \u201cFriends,\u201d said that she asked him what had surprised him most when he first became President. \u201cThe bubble,\u201d Obama said. He said he hoped that one day he might be able to take a walk in the park, drop by a bookstore, chat with people in a coffee shop. \u201cAfter all this is done,\u201d he said, \u201chow can I find that again?\u201d\n\n\u201cHave you considered a wig?\u201d she asked.\n\n\u201cMaybe fake dreads,\u201d her son added.\n\nThe President smiled. \u201cI never thought of that,\u201d he said.\n\nObama\u2019s circle of intimates is limited;", + " it has been since his days at Columbia and Harvard Law. In 2008, Obama called on John Podesta, who had worked extensively for Bill Clinton, to run his transition process. When Clinton took office, there was a huge list of people who needed to be taken care of with jobs; the \u201cfriends of Bill\u201d is a wide network. After Podesta talked to Obama and realized how few favors had to be distributed, he told a colleague, \u201cHe travels light.\u201d\n\nObama\u2019s favorite company is a small ensemble of Chicago friends\u2014Valerie Jarrett, Marty Nesbitt and his wife, Anita Blanchard, an obstetrician,", + " and Eric and Cheryl Whitaker, prominent doctors on the South Side. During the first Presidential campaign, the Obamas took a vow of \u201cno new friends.\u201d\n\n\u201cThere have been times where I\u2019ve been constrained by the fact that I had two young daughters who I wanted to spend time with\u2014and that I wasn\u2019t in a position to work the social scene in Washington,\u201d Obama told me. But, as Malia and Sasha have grown older, the Obamas have taken to hosting occasional off-the-record dinners in the residence upstairs at the White House. The guests ordinarily include a friendly political figure, a business leader, a journalist. Obama drinks a Martini or two (Rove was right about that), and he and the First Lady are welcoming,", + " funny, and warm. The dinners start at six. At around ten-thirty at one dinner last spring, the guests assumed the evening was winding down. But when Obama was asked whether they should leave, he laughed and said, \u201cHey, don\u2019t go! I\u2019m a night owl! Have another drink.\u201d The party went on past 1 A.M.\n\nAt the dinners with historians, Obama sometimes asks his guests to talk about their latest work. On one occasion, Doris Kearns Goodwin talked about what became \u201cThe Bully Pulpit,\u201d which is a study, in part, of the way that Theodore Roosevelt deployed his relentlessly gregarious personality and his close relations with crusading journalists to political advantage.", + " The portrait of T.R. muscling obstreperous foes on the issue of inequality\u2014particularly the laissez-faire dinosaurs in his own party, the G.O.P.\u2014couldn\u2019t fail to summon a contrasting portrait.\n\nThe biographer Robert Caro has also been a guest. Caro\u2019s ongoing volumes about Lyndon Johnson portray a President who used everything from the promise of appointment to bald-faced political threats to win passage of the legislative agenda that had languished under John Kennedy, including Medicare, a tax cut, and a civil-rights bill. Publicly, Johnson said of Kennedy, \u201cI had to take the dead man\u2019s program and turn it into a martyr\u2019s cause.\u201d Privately,", + " he disdained Kennedy\u2019s inability to get his program through Congress, cracking, according to Caro, that Kennedy\u2019s men knew less about politics on the Hill \u201cthan an old maid does about fucking.\u201d Senator Richard Russell, Jr., of Georgia, admitted that he and his Dixiecrat colleagues in the Senate could resist Kennedy \u201cbut not Lyndon\u201d: \u201cThat man will twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head in with it.\u201d\n\nObama delivers no such beatings. Last April, when, in the wake of the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, eighty-three per cent of Americans declared themselves in favor of background checks for gun purchases,", + " the Times ran a prominent article making the case that the Senate failed to follow the President\u2019s lead at least partly because of his passivity as a tactical politician. It described how Mark Begich, a Democratic senator from Alaska, had asked for, and received, a crucial favor from the White House, but then, four weeks later, when Begich voted against the bill on background checks, he paid no price. No one shut down any highway lanes in Anchorage; no Presidential fury was felt in Juneau or the Brooks Range. The historian Robert Dallek, another guest at the President\u2019s table, told the Times that Obama was \u201cinclined to believe that sweet reason is what you need to use with people in high office.\u201d\n\nYet Obama and his aides regard all such talk of breaking bread and breaking legs as wishful fantasy.", + " They maintain that they could invite every Republican in Congress to play golf until the end of time, could deliver punishments with ruthless regularity\u2014and never cut the Gordian knot of contemporary Washington. They have a point. An Alaska Democrat like Begich would never last in office had he voted with Obama. L.B.J., elected in a landslide victory in 1964, drew on whopping majorities in both houses of Congress. He could exploit ideological diversity within the parties and the lax regulations on earmarks and pork-barrel spending. \u201cWhen he lost that historic majority, and the glow of that landslide victory faded, he had the same problems with Congress that most Presidents at one point or another have,\u201d Obama told me.", + " \u201cI say that not to suggest that I\u2019m a master wheeler-dealer but, rather, to suggest that there are some structural institutional realities to our political system that don\u2019t have much to do with schmoozing.\u201d\n\nDallek said, \u201cJohnson could sit with Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, kneecap to kneecap, drinking bourbon and branch water, and Dirksen would mention that there was a fine young man in his state who would be a fine judge, and the deal would be cut. Nowadays, the media would know in an instant and rightly yell \u2018Corruption!\u2019 \u201d\n\nCaro finds the L.B.J.-B.H.O.", + " comparison ludicrous. \u201cJohnson was unique,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have never had anyone like him, as a legislative genius. I\u2019m working on his Presidency now. Wait till you see what he does to get Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act through. But is Obama a poor practitioner of power? I have a different opinion. No matter what the problems with the rollout of Obamacare, it\u2019s a major advance in the history of social justice to provide access to health care for thirty-one million people.\u201d\n\nAt the most recent dinner he attended at the White House, Caro had the distinct impression that Obama was cool to him,", + " annoyed, perhaps, at the notion appearing in the press that his latest Johnson volume was an implicit rebuke to him. \u201cAs we were leaving, I said to Obama, \u2018You know, my book wasn\u2019t an unspoken attack on you, it\u2019s a book about Lyndon Johnson,\u2019 \u201d Caro recalled. L.B.J. was, after all, also the President who made the catastrophic decision to deepen America\u2019s involvement in the quagmire of Vietnam. \u201cObama seems interested in winding down our foreign wars,\u201d Caro said approvingly.\n\nWhen Obama does ask Republicans to a social occasion, he is sometimes rebuffed. In the fall of 2012,", + " he organized a screening at the White House of Steven Spielberg\u2019s film \u201cLincoln.\u201d Spielberg, the cast, and the Democratic leadership found the time to come. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and three other Republicans declined their invitations, pleading the press of congressional business. In the current climate, a Republican, especially one facing challenges at home from the right, risks more than he gains by socializing or doing business with Obama. Boehner may be prepared to compromise on certain issues, but it looks better for him if he is seen to be making a deal with Harry Reid, in the Senate, than with Barack Obama. Obama\u2019s people say that the President\u2019s attitude is,", + " Fine, so long as we get there. Help me to help you.\n\nWhen I asked Obama if he had read or seen anything that fully captured the experience of being in his office, he laughed, as if to say, You just have no idea. \u201cThe truth is, in popular culture the President is usually a side character and a lot of times is pretty dull,\u201d he said. \u201cIf it\u2019s a paranoid conspiracy-theory movie, then there\u2019s an evil aide who is carrying something out. If it\u2019s a good President, then he is all-wise and all-knowing\u201d\u2014like the characters played by Martin Sheen in \u201cThe West Wing,\u201d and Michael Douglas in \u201cThe American President.\u201d Obama says that he is neither.", + " \u201cI\u2019ll tell you that watching \u2018Lincoln\u2019 was interesting, in part because you watched what obviously was a fictionalized account of the President I most admire, and there was such a gap between him and me that it made you want to be better.\u201d He spoke about envying Lincoln\u2019s \u201ccapacity to speak to and move the country without simplifying, and at the most fundamental of levels.\u201d But what struck him most, he said, was precisely what his critics think he most avoids\u2014\u201cthe messiness of getting something done.\u201d\n\nHe went on, \u201cThe real politics resonated with me, because I have yet to see something that we\u2019ve done,", + " or any President has done, that was really important and good, that did not involve some mess and some strong-arming and some shading of how it was initially talked about to a particular member of the legislature who you needed a vote from. Because, if you\u2019re doing big, hard things, then there is going to be some hair on it\u2014there\u2019s going to be some aspects of it that aren\u2019t clean and neat and immediately elicit applause from everybody. And so the nature of not only politics but, I think, social change of any sort is that it doesn\u2019t move in a straight line, and that those who are most successful typically are tacking like a sailor toward a particular direction but have to take into account winds and currents and occasionally the lack of any wind,", + " so that you\u2019re just sitting there for a while, and sometimes you\u2019re being blown all over the place.\u201d\n\nThe politician sensitive to winds and currents was visible in Obama\u2019s coy talk of his \u201cevolving\u201d position on gay marriage. Obama conceded in one of our later conversations only that it\u2019s \u201cfair to say that I may have come to that realization slightly before I actually made the announcement\u201d favoring gay marriage, in May of 2012. \u201cBut this was not a situation where I kind of did a wink and a nod and a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.\u201d The turn may not have been a sudden one-eighty;", + " to say that your views are \u201cevolving,\u201d though, is to say there is a position that you consider to be more advanced than the one you officially hold. And he held the \u201cevolved\u201d position in 1996, when, as a candidate for the Illinois state senate, he filled out a questionnaire from Outlines, a local gay and lesbian newspaper, saying, \u201cI favor legalizing same-sex marriages.\u201d\n\nWhen I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion\u2014the legalization of marijuana\u2014he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the issue. \u201cAs has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid,", + " and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don\u2019t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.\u201d\n\nIs it less dangerous? I asked.\n\nObama leaned back and let a moment go by. That\u2019s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision. Sometimes he will stop in the middle of a sentence and say, \u201cScratch that,\u201d or,", + " \u201cI think the grammar was all screwed up in that sentence, so let me start again.\u201d\n\nLess dangerous, he said, \u201cin terms of its impact on the individual consumer. It\u2019s not something I encourage, and I\u2019ve told my daughters I think it\u2019s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.\u201d What clearly does trouble him is the radically disproportionate arrests and incarcerations for marijuana among minorities. \u201cMiddle-class kids don\u2019t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.\u201d But,", + " he said, \u201cwe should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.\u201d Accordingly, he said of the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington that \u201cit\u2019s important for it to go forward because it\u2019s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.\u201d\n\nAs is his habit, he nimbly argued the other side. \u201cHaving said all that, those who argue that legalizing marijuana is a panacea and it solves all these social problems I think are probably overstating the case.", + " There is a lot of hair on that policy. And the experiment that\u2019s going to be taking place in Colorado and Washington is going to be, I think, a challenge.\u201d He noted the slippery-slope arguments that might arise. \u201cI also think that, when it comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the user is profound and the social costs are profound. And you do start getting into some difficult line-drawing issues. If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka, are we open to that?", + " If somebody says, We\u2019ve got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn\u2019t going to kill you or rot your teeth, are we O.K. with that?\u201d\n\nV\u2014MAGIC KINGDOMS\n\nBy Monday night, Obama was in Los Angeles, headed for Beverly Park, a gated community of private-equity barons, Saudi princes, and movie people. It was a night of fund-raisers\u2014the first hosted by Magic Johnson, who led the Lakers to five N.B.A. championships, in the eighties. In the Beast, on the way to Johnson\u2019s house, Obama told me, \u201cMagic has become a good friend.", + " I always tease him\u2014I think he supported Hillary the first time around, in \u201908.\u201d\n\n\u201cHe campaigned for her in Iowa!\u201d Josh Earnest, a press spokesman, said, still sounding chagrined.\n\n\u201cYeah, but we have developed a great relationship,\u201d Obama said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t a Lakers fan. I was a Philadelphia 76ers fan, because I loved Doctor J.\u201d\u2014Julius Erving\u2014\u201cand then became a Jordan fan, because I moved to Chicago. But, in my mind, at least, what has made Magic heroic was not simply the joy of his playing.\u201d Obama said that the way Johnson handled his H.I.V.", + " diagnosis changed \u201chow the culture thought about that\u2014which, actually, I think, ultimately had an impact about how the culture thought about the gay community.\u201d He also talked about Johnson\u2019s business success as something that was \u201cdeeply admired\u201d among African-Americans\u2014\u201cthe notion that here\u2019s somebody who would leverage fame and fortune in sports into a pretty remarkable business career.\u201d\n\n\u201cDo you not see that often enough, by your lights?\u201d I asked.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t,\u201d Obama said.\n\nThe Obamas are able to speak to people of color in a way that none of their predecessors could. And the President is quick to bring into the public realm the fact that,", + " for all his personal cool, he is a foursquare family man. He has plenty of hip-hop on his iPod, but he also worries about the moments of misogyny. Once, I mentioned to him that I knew that while Malia Obama, an aspiring filmmaker, was a fan of \u201cGirls,\u201d he and Michelle Obama were, at first, wary of the show.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m at the very young end of the Baby Boom generation, which meant that I did not come of age in the sixties\u2014took for granted certain freedoms, certain attitudes about gender, sexuality, equality for women, but didn\u2019t feel as if I was having to rebel against something,\u201d Obama said.", + " \u201cPrecisely because I didn\u2019t have a father in the home and moved around a lot as a kid and had a wonderfully loving mom and grandparents, but not a lot of structure growing up, I emerged on the other side of that with an appreciation for family and marriage and structure for the kids. I\u2019m sure that\u2019s part of why Michelle and her family held such appeal to me in the first place, because she did grow up with that kind of structure. And now, as parents, I don\u2019t think we\u2019re being particularly conservative\u2014we\u2019re actually not prudes.... But, as parents, what we have seen,", + " both in our own family and among our friends, is that kids with structure have an easier time of it.\u201d\n\nHe talked about a visit that he made last year to Hyde Park Academy, a public high school on Chicago\u2019s South Side, where he met with a group of about twenty boys in a program called Becoming a Man. \u201cThey\u2019re in this program because they\u2019re fundamentally good kids who could tip in the wrong direction if they didn\u2019t get some guidance and some structure,\u201d Obama recalled. \u201cWe went around the room and started telling each other stories. And one of the young men asked me about me growing up, and I explained,", + " You know what? I\u2019m just like you guys. I didn\u2019t have a dad. There were times where I was angry and wasn\u2019t sure why I was angry. I engaged in a bunch of anti-social behavior. I did drugs. I got drunk. Didn\u2019t take school seriously. The only difference between me and you is that I was in a more forgiving environment, and if I made a mistake I wasn\u2019t going to get shot. And, even if I didn\u2019t apply myself in school, I was at a good enough school that just through osmosis I\u2019d have the opportunity to go to college.\n\n\u201cAnd, as I\u2019m speaking,", + " the kid next to me looks over and he says, \u2018Are you talking about you?\u2019 And there was a benefit for them hearing that, because when I then said, You guys have to take yourselves more seriously, or you need to have a backup plan in case you don\u2019t end up being LeBron or Jay Z... they might listen. Now, that\u2019s not a liberal or a conservative thing. There have been times where some thoughtful and sometimes not so thoughtful African-American commentators have gotten on both Michelle and me, suggesting that we are not addressing enough sort of institutional barriers and racism, and we\u2019re engaging in sort of up-by-the-bootstraps,", + " Booker T. Washington messages that let the larger society off the hook.\u201d Obama thought that this reaction was sometimes knee-jerk. \u201cI always tell people to go read some of Dr. King\u2019s writings about the African-American community. For that matter, read Malcolm X.... There\u2019s no contradiction to say that there are issues of personal responsibility that have to be addressed, while still acknowledging that some of the specific pathologies in the African-American community are a direct result of our history.\u201d\n\nThe higher we went up into Beverly Hills, the grander the houses were. This was where the big donors lived. But Obama\u2019s thoughts have been down in the city.", + " The drama of racial inequality, in his mind, has come to presage a larger, transracial form of economic disparity, a deepening of the class divide. Indeed, if there is a theme for the remaining days of his term, it is inequality. In 2011, he went to Osawatomie, Kansas, the site of Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s 1910 New Nationalism speech\u2014a signal moment in the history of Progressivism\u2014and declared inequality the \u201cdefining issue of our time.\u201d He repeated the message at length, late last year, in Anacostia, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., this time noting that the gap between the rich and the poor in America now resembled that in Argentina and Jamaica,", + " rather than that in France, Germany, or Canada. American C.E.O.s once made, on average, thirty times as much as workers; now they make about two hundred and seventy times as much. The wealthy hire lobbyists; they try to secure their interests with campaign donations. Even as Obama travels for campaign alms and is as entangled in the funding system at least as much as any other politician, he insists that his commitment is to the middle class and the disadvantaged. Last summer, he received a letter from a single mother struggling to support herself and her daughter on a minimal income. She was drowning: \u201cI need help. I can\u2019t imagine being out in the streets with my daughter and if I don\u2019t get some type of relief soon,", + " I\u2019m afraid that\u2019s what may happen.\u201d \u201cCopy to Senior Advisers,\u201d Obama wrote at the bottom of the letter. \u201cThis is the person we are working for.\u201d\n\nIn one of our conversations, I asked him what he felt he must get done before leaving office. He was silent for a while and then broke into a pained grin. \u201cYou mean, now that the Web site is working?\u201d Yes, after that. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to anticipate events over the next three years,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you had asked F.D.R. what he had to accomplish in 1937, he would have told you, \u2018I\u2019ve got to stabilize the economy and reduce the deficit.\u2019 Turned out there were a few more things on his plate.\u201d He went on,", + " \u201cI think we are fortunate at the moment that we do not face a crisis of the scale and scope that Lincoln or F.D.R. faced. So I think it\u2019s unrealistic to suggest that I can narrow my focus the way those two Presidents did. But I can tell you that I will measure myself at the end of my Presidency in large part by whether I began the process of rebuilding the middle class and the ladders into the middle class, and reversing the trend toward economic bifurcation in this society.\u201d\n\nObama met last summer with Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist who became famous for a book he wrote on social atomization,", + " \u201cBowling Alone.\u201d For the past several years, Putnam and some colleagues have been working on a book about the growing opportunity gap between rich and poor kids. Putnam, who led a Kennedy School seminar on civic engagement that Obama was in, sent the President a memo about his findings. More and more, Putnam found, the crucial issue is class, and he believes that a black President might have an easier time explaining this trend to the American people and setting an agenda to combat it. Other prominent politicians\u2014including Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan, and Jeb Bush\u2014have also consulted Putnam. Putnam told me that, even if legislation combatting the widening class divide eludes Obama,", + " \u201cI am hoping he can be John the Baptist on this.\u201d And Obama, for his part, seems eager to take on that evangelizing role.\n\n\u201cYou have an economy,\u201d Obama told me, \u201cthat is ruthlessly squeezing workers and imposing efficiencies that make our flat-screen TVs really cheap but also puts enormous downward pressure on wages and salaries. That\u2019s making it more and more difficult not only for African-Americans or Latinos to get a foothold into the middle class but for everybody\u2014large majorities of people\u2014to get a foothold in the middle class or to feel secure there. You\u2019ve got folks like Bob Putnam, who\u2019s doing some really interesting studies indicating the degree to which some of those \u2018pathologies\u2019 that used to be attributed to the African-American community in particular\u2014single-parent households,", + " and drug abuse, and men dropping out of the labor force, and an underground economy\u2014you\u2019re now starting to see in larger numbers in white working-class communities as well, which would tend to vindicate what I think a lot of us always felt.\u201d\n\nVI\u2014A NEW EQUILIBRIUM\n\nAfter the event at Magic Johnson\u2019s place\u2014the highlight was a tour of an immense basement trophy room, where Johnson had installed a gleaming hardwood basketball floor and piped in the sound of crowds cheering and announcers declaring the glories of the Lakers\u2014the Beast made its way to the compound that the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers built. Haim Saban,", + " who made his billions as a self-described \u201ccartoon schlepper,\u201d was born in Egypt, came of age in Israel, and started his show-business career as the bass player in the Lions of Judah. His politics are not ambiguous. \u201cI am a one-issue guy,\u201d he once said, \u201cand my issue is Israel.\u201d His closest political relationship is with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and he was crushed when she lost to Obama, in 2008. Saban publicly expressed doubts about whether Obama was sufficiently ardent about Israel, but he has come around.\n\nThe main house on Saban\u2019s property is less of an art museum than Jon Shirley\u2019s,", + " though it features a Warhol diptych of Golda Meir and Albert Einstein over the fireplace. The fund-raiser was held in back of the main house, under a tent. Addressing a hundred and twenty guests, and being peppered with questions about the Middle East, Obama trotted around all the usual bases\u2014the hope for peace, the still strong alliance with Israel, the danger of \u201clone wolf\u201d terror threats. But, while a man who funds the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution may have warmed to Obama, there is no question that, in certain professional foreign-policy circles, Obama is often regarded with mistrust.", + " His Syria policy\u2014with its dubious \u201cred line\u201d and threats to get rid of Bashar al-Assad; with John Kerry\u2019s improvised press-conference gambit on chemical weapons\u2014has inspired little confidence. Neither did the decision to accelerate troop levels in Afghanistan and, at the same time, schedule a withdrawal.\n\nObama came to power without foreign-policy experience; but he won the election, in part, by advocating a foreign-policy sensibility that was wary of American overreach. If George W. Bush\u2019s foreign policy was largely a reaction to 9/11, Obama\u2019s has been a reaction to the reaction. He withdrew American forces from Iraq. He went to Cairo in 2009,", + " in an attempt to forge \u201ca new beginning\u201d between the United States and the Muslim world. American troops will come home from Afghanistan this year. As he promised in his first Presidential campaign\u2014to the outraged protests of Hillary Clinton and John McCain alike\u2014he has extended a hand to traditional enemies, from Iran to Cuba. And he has not hesitated in his public rhetoric to acknowledge, however subtly, the abuses, as well as the triumphs, of American power. He remembers going with his mother to live in Indonesia, in 1967\u2014shortly after a military coup, engineered with American help, led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.", + " This event, and the fact that so few Americans know much about it, made a lasting impression on Obama. He is convinced that an essential component of diplomacy is the public recognition of historical facts\u2014not only the taking of American hostages in Iran, in 1979, but also the American role in the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, in 1953.\n\nThe right\u2019s response has been to accuse Obama of conducting a foreign policy of apology. Last year, Republican senators on the Foreign Affairs Committee, including Marco Rubio, of Florida, demanded to know if Samantha Power, Obama\u2019s nominee for U.N.", + " Ambassador and the author of \u201cA Problem from Hell,\u201d a historical indictment of American passivity in the face of various genocides around the world, would ever \u201capologize\u201d for the United States. (In a depressing Kabuki drama, Power seemed forced to prove her patriotic bona fides by insisting repeatedly that the U.S. was \u201cthe greatest country on earth\u201d and that, no, she would \u201cnever apologize\u201d for it.) Obama\u2019s conservative critics, both at home and abroad, paint him as a President out to diminish American power. Josef Joffe, the hawkish editor of Die Zeit, the highbrow German weekly,", + " told me, \u201cThere is certainly consistency and coherence in his attempt to retract from the troubles of the world, to get the U.S. out of harm\u2019s way, in order to do \u2018a little nation-building at home,\u2019 as he has so often put it. If you want to be harsh about it, he wants to turn the U.S. into a very large medium power, into an XXL France or Germany.\u201d\n\nObama\u2019s \u201clong game\u201d on foreign policy calls for traditional categories of American power and ideology to be reordered. Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications, told me that Washington was \u201ctrapped in very stale narratives.\u201d\n\n\u201cIn the foreign-policy establishment,", + " to be an idealist you have to be for military intervention,\u201d Rhodes went on. \u201cIn the Democratic Party, these debates were defined in the nineties, and the idealists lined up for military intervention. For the President, Iraq was the defining issue, and now Syria is viewed through that lens, as was Libya\u2014to be an idealist, you have to be a military interventionist. We spent a trillion dollars in Iraq and had troops there for a decade, and you can\u2019t say it wielded positive influence. Just the opposite. We can\u2019t seem to get out of these boxes.\u201d\n\nObama may resist the idealism of a previous generation of interventionists,", + " but his realism, if that\u2019s what it is, diverges from the realism of Henry Kissinger or Brent Scowcroft. \u201cIt comes from the idea that change is organic and change comes to countries in its own way, modernization comes in its own way, rather than through liberation narratives coming from the West,\u201d Fareed Zakaria, a writer on foreign policy whom Obama reads and consults, says. Anne-Marie Slaughter, who worked at the State Department as Hillary Clinton\u2019s director of policy planning, says, \u201cObama has a real understanding of the limits of our power. It\u2019s not that the United States is in decline;", + " it\u2019s that sometimes the world has problems without the tools to fix them.\u201d Members of Obama\u2019s foreign-policy circle say that when he is criticized for his reaction to situations like Iran\u2019s Green Revolution, in 2009, or the last days of Hosni Mubarak\u2019s regime, in 2011, he complains that people imagine him to have a \u201cjoystick\u201d that allows him to manipulate precise outcomes.\n\nObama told me that what he needs isn\u2019t any new grand strategy\u2014\u201cI don\u2019t really even need George Kennan right now\u201d\u2014but, rather, the right strategic partners. \u201cThere are currents in history and you have to figure out how to move them in one direction or another,\u201d Rhodes said.", + " \u201cYou can\u2019t necessarily determine the final destination.... The President subscribes less to a great-man theory of history and more to a great-movement theory of history\u2014that change happens when people force it or circumstances do.\u201d (Later, Obama told me, \u201cI\u2019m not sure Ben is right about that. I believe in both.\u201d)\n\nThe President may scorn the joystick fantasy, but he does believe that his words\u2014at microphones from Cairo to Yangon\u2014can encourage positive change abroad, even if only in the long run. In Israel last March, he told university students that \u201cpolitical leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks.\u201d Obama,", + " who has pressed Netanyahu to muster the political will to take risks on his own, thinks he can help \u201ccreate a space\u201d\u2014that is the term around the White House\u2014for forward movement on the Palestinian issue, whether he is around to see the result or not.\n\nAdministration officials are convinced that their efforts to toughen the sanctions on Iran caused tremendous economic pain and helped Hassan Rouhani win popular support in the Iranian Presidential elections last year. Although Rouhani is no liberal\u2014he has revolutionary and religious credentials, which is why he was able to run\u2014he was not Ayatollah Ali Khamenei\u2019s favored candidate. Khamenei is an opaque,", + " cautious figure, Administration officials say, but he clearly acceded to Rouhani as he saw the political demands of the population shift.\n\nThe nuclear negotiations in Geneva, which were preceded by secret contacts with the Iranians in Oman and New York, were, from Obama\u2019s side, based on a series of strategic calculations that, he acknowledges, may not work out. As the Administration sees it, an Iranian nuclear weapon would be a violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and a threat to the entire region; it could spark a nuclear arms race reaching Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. (Israel has had nukes since 1967.) But the White House is prepared to accept a civilian nuclear capacity in Iran,", + " with strict oversight, while the Israelis and the Gulf states regard any Iranian nuclear technology at all as unacceptable. Obama has told Netanyahu and Republican senators that the absolutist benchmark is not achievable. Members of Obama\u2019s team believe that the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states, who are now allied as never before, want the U.S. to be their proxy in a struggle not merely for de-nuclearization in Iran but for regime change\u2014and that is not on the Administration\u2019s agenda, except, perhaps, as a hope.\n\nRepublican and Democratic senators have expressed doubts about even the interim agreement with Iran, and have threatened to tighten sanctions still further.", + " \u201cHistorically, there is hostility and suspicion toward Iran, not just among members of Congress but the American people,\u201d Obama said, adding that \u201cmembers of Congress are very attentive to what Israel says on its security issues.\u201d He went on, \u201cI don\u2019t think a new sanctions bill will reach my desk during this period, but, if it did, I would veto it and expect it to be sustained.\u201d\n\nUltimately, he envisages a new geopolitical equilibrium, one less turbulent than the current landscape of civil war, terror, and sectarian battle. \u201cIt would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren\u2019t intent on killing each other,\u201d he told me.", + " \u201cAnd although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion\u2014not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon\u2014you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there\u2019s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.\n\n\u201cWith respect to Israel, the interests of Israel in stability and security are actually very closely aligned with the interests of the Sunni states.\u201d As Saudi and Israeli diplomats berate Obama in unison, his reaction is, essentially, Use that. \u201cWhat\u2019s preventing them from entering into even an informal alliance with at least normalized diplomatic relations is not that their interests are profoundly in conflict but the Palestinian issue,", + " as well as a long history of anti-Semitism that\u2019s developed over the course of decades there, and anti-Arab sentiment that\u2019s increased inside of Israel based on seeing buses being blown up,\u201d Obama said. \u201cIf you can start unwinding some of that, that creates a new equilibrium. And so I think each individual piece of the puzzle is meant to paint a picture in which conflicts and competition still exist in the region but that it is contained, it is expressed in ways that don\u2019t exact such an enormous toll on the countries involved, and that allow us to work with functioning states to prevent extremists from emerging there.\u201d\n\nDuring Obama\u2019s performance under Saban\u2019s tent,", + " there was no talk of a Sunni-Israeli alignment, or of any failures of vision on Netanyahu\u2019s part. Obama did allow himself to be testy about the criticism he has received over his handling of the carnage in Syria. \u201cYou\u2019ll recall that that was the previous end of my Presidency, until it turned out that we are actually getting all the chemical weapons. And no one reports on that anymore.\u201d\n\nVII\u2014HAMMERS AND PLIERS\n\nObama\u2019s lowest moments in the Middle East have involved his handling of Syria. Last summer, when I visited Za\u2019atari, the biggest Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, one displaced person after another expressed anger and dismay at American inaction.", + " In a later conversation, I asked Obama if he was haunted by Syria, and, though the mask of his equipoise rarely slips, an indignant expression crossed his face. \u201cI am haunted by what\u2019s happened,\u201d he said. \u201cI am not haunted by my decision not to engage in another Middle Eastern war. It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which our involvement in Syria would have led to a better outcome, short of us being willing to undertake an effort in size and scope similar to what we did in Iraq. And when I hear people suggesting that somehow if we had just financed and armed the opposition earlier, that somehow Assad would be gone by now and we\u2019d have a peaceful transition,", + " it\u2019s magical thinking.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s not as if we didn\u2019t discuss this extensively down in the Situation Room. It\u2019s not as if we did not solicit\u2014and continue to solicit\u2014opinions from a wide range of folks. Very early in this process, I actually asked the C.I.A. to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn\u2019t come up with much. We have looked at this from every angle. And the truth is that the challenge there has been, and continues to be, that you have an authoritarian, brutal government who is willing to do anything to hang on to power,", + " and you have an opposition that is disorganized, ill-equipped, ill-trained, and is self-divided. All of that is on top of some of the sectarian divisions.... And, in that environment, our best chance of seeing a decent outcome at this point is to work the state actors who have invested so much in keeping Assad in power\u2014mainly the Iranians and the Russians\u2014as well as working with those who have been financing the opposition to make sure that they\u2019re not creating the kind of extremist force that we saw emerge out of Afghanistan when we were financing the mujahideen.\u201d\n\nAt the core of Obama\u2019s thinking is that American military involvement cannot be the primary instrument to achieve the new equilibrium that the region so desperately needs.", + " And yet thoughts of a pacific equilibrium are far from anyone\u2019s mind in the real, existing Middle East. In the 2012 campaign, Obama spoke not only of killing Osama bin Laden; he also said that Al Qaeda had been \u201cdecimated.\u201d I pointed out that the flag of Al Qaeda is now flying in Falluja, in Iraq, and among various rebel factions in Syria; Al Qaeda has asserted a presence in parts of Africa, too.\n\n\u201cThe analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn\u2019t make them Kobe Bryant,\u201d Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy.", + " \u201cI think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.\n\n\u201cLet\u2019s just keep in mind, Falluja is a profoundly conservative Sunni city in a country that, independent of anything we do, is deeply divided along sectarian lines. And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn\u2019t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us or something that we have to wade into.\u201d\n\nHe went on,", + " \u201cYou have a schism between Sunni and Shia throughout the region that is profound. Some of it is directed or abetted by states who are in contests for power there. You have failed states that are just dysfunctional, and various warlords and thugs and criminals are trying to gain leverage or a foothold so that they can control resources, populations, territory.... And failed states, conflict, refugees, displacement\u2014all that stuff has an impact on our long-term security. But how we approach those problems and the resources that we direct toward those problems is not going to be exactly the same as how we think about a transnational network of operatives who want to blow up the World Trade Center.", + " We have to be able to distinguish between these problems analytically, so that we\u2019re not using a pliers where we need a hammer, or we\u2019re not using a battalion when what we should be doing is partnering with the local government to train their police force more effectively, improve their intelligence capacities.\u201d\n\nThis wasn\u2019t realism or idealism; it was something closer to policy particularism (this thing is different from that thing; Syria is not Libya; Iran is not North Korea). Yet Obama\u2019s regular deployment of drones has been criticized as a one-size-fits-all recourse, in which the prospect of destroying an individual enemy too easily trumps broader strategic and diplomatic considerations,", + " to say nothing of moral ones. A few weeks before Obama left Washington to scour the West Coast for money, he invited to the White House Malala Yousafzai, the remarkable Pakistani teen-ager who campaigned for women\u2019s education and was shot in the head by the Taliban. Yousafzai thanked Obama for the material support that the U.S. government provided for education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and among Syrian refugees, but she also told him that drone strikes were \u201cfuelling terrorism\u201d and resentment in her country.\n\n\u201cI think any President should be troubled by any war or any kinetic action that leads to death,\u201d Obama told me when I brought up Yousafzai\u2019s remarks.", + " \u201cThe way I\u2019ve thought about this issue is, I have a solemn duty and responsibility to keep the American people safe. That\u2019s my most important obligation as President and Commander-in-Chief. And there are individuals and groups out there that are intent on killing Americans\u2014killing American civilians, killing American children, blowing up American planes. That\u2019s not speculation. It\u2019s their explicit agenda.\u201d\n\nObama said that, if terrorists can be captured and prosecuted, \u201cthat\u2019s always my preference. If we can\u2019t, I cannot stand by and do nothing. They operate in places where oftentimes we cannot reach them, or the countries are either unwilling or unable to capture them in partnership with us.", + " And that then narrows my options: we can simply be on defense and try to harden our defense. But in this day and age that\u2019s of limited\u2014well, that\u2019s insufficient. We can say to those countries, as my predecessor did, if you are harboring terrorists, we will hold you accountable\u2014in which case, we could be fighting a lot of wars around the world. And, statistically, it is indisputable that the costs in terms of not only our men and women in uniform but also innocent civilians would be much higher. Or, where possible, we can take targeted strikes, understanding that anytime you take a military strike there are risks involved.", + " What I\u2019ve tried to do is to tighten the process so much and limit the risks of civilian casualties so much that we have the least fallout from those actions. But it\u2019s not perfect.\u201d\n\nIt is far from that. In December, an American drone flying above Al Bayda province, in Yemen, fired on what U.S. intelligence believed was a column of Al Qaeda fighters. The \u201ccolumn\u201d was in fact a wedding party; twelve people were killed, and fifteen were seriously injured. Some of the victims, if not all, were civilians. This was no aberration. In Yemen and Pakistan, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism,", + " American drones have killed between some four hundred and a thousand civilians\u2014a civilian-to-combatant ratio that could be as high as one to three. Obama has never made it clear how the vast populations outraged and perhaps radicalized by such remote-control mayhem might figure into his calculations about American security.\n\n\u201cLook, you wrestle with it,\u201d Obama said. \u201cAnd those who have questioned our drone policy are doing exactly what should be done in a democracy\u2014asking some tough questions. The only time I get frustrated is when folks act like it\u2019s not complicated and there aren\u2019t some real tough decisions, and are sanctimonious, as if somehow these aren\u2019t complicated questions.", + " Listen, as I have often said to my national-security team, I didn\u2019t run for office so that I could go around blowing things up.\u201d\n\nObama told me that in all three of his main initiatives in the region\u2014with Iran, with Israel and the Palestinians, with Syria\u2014the odds of completing final treaties are less than fifty-fifty. \u201cOn the other hand,\u201d he said, \u201cin all three circumstances we may be able to push the boulder partway up the hill and maybe stabilize it so it doesn\u2019t roll back on us. And all three are connected. I do believe that the region is going through rapid change and inexorable change.", + " Some of it is demographics; some of it is technology; some of it is economics. And the old order, the old equilibrium, is no longer tenable. The question then becomes, What\u2019s next?\u201d\n\nVIII\u2014AMONG THE ALIENS\n\nOn his last day in Los Angeles, Obama romanced Hollywood, taking a helicopter to visit the DreamWorks studio, in Glendale. Jeffrey Katzenberg, Obama\u2019s host and the head of DreamWorks Animation, is one of the Democrats\u2019 most successful fund-raisers. But it is never a good idea for the White House to admit to any quid pro quo. When one of the pool reporters asked why the President was going to Katzenberg\u2019s studio and not,", + " say, Universal, a travelling spokesman replied, \u201cDreamWorks obviously is a thriving business and is creating lots of jobs in Southern California. And the fact of the matter is Mr. Katzenberg\u2019s support for the President\u2019s policies has no bearing on our decision to visit there.\u201d\n\nThat\u2019s pretty rich. Katzenberg has been a supporter from the start of Obama\u2019s national career, raising millions of dollars for him and for the Party\u2019s Super PACs. Nor has he been hurt by his political associations. Joe Biden helped pave the way with Xi Jinping and other officials so that DreamWorks and other Hollywood companies could build studios in China. (In an awkward postscript,", + " the S.E.C. reportedly began investigating, in 2012, whether DreamWorks, Twentieth Century Fox, and the Walt Disney Company paid bribes to Chinese officials, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.)\n\nA flock of military helicopters brought the Obama party to Glendale, and, after a short ride to DreamWorks Animation, Katzenberg greeted the President and gave him a tour. They stopped in a basement recording studio to watch a voice-over session for a new animated picture called \u201cHome,\u201d starring the voice of Steve Martin. Greeting Martin, Obama recalled that the last time they saw each other must have been when Martin played banjo with his band at the White House.\n\nMartin nodded.", + " \u201cI always say the fact that I played banjo at the White House was the biggest thrill of his life.\u201d\n\nKatzenberg explained that \u201cHome\u201d was the story of the Boov, an alien race that has taken over the planet. Martin is the voice of Captain Smek, the leader of the Boov.\n\n\u201cWhere did we go?\u201d Obama asked Tim Johnson, the director. \u201cDo they feed us?\u201d\n\n\u201cMostly ice cream.\u201d\n\nKatzenberg said that, unlike dramatic films with live actors, nineteen out of twenty of DreamWorks\u2019 animated pictures succeed.\n\n\u201cMy kids have aged out,\u201d Obama said. \u201cThey used to be my excuse to watch them all.\u201d\n\nKatzenberg led Obama to a conference room,", + " where the heads of most of the major movie and television studios were waiting. There would be touchy questions about business\u2014particularly about the \u201cNorth versus South\u201d civil war in progress between the high-tech libertarians in Silicon Valley and the \u201ccontent producers\u201d in Los Angeles. The war was over intellectual-property rights, and Obama showed little desire to get in the middle of these two constituencies. If anything, he knows that Silicon Valley is ascendant, younger, more able to mobilize active voters, and he was not about to offer the studio heads his unqualified muscle.\n\nFinally, the subject switched to global matters. Alan Horn, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios,", + " raised his hand. \u201cFirst,\u201d he said, \u201cI do recommend that you and your family see \u2018Frozen,\u2019 which is coming to a theatre near you. \u201d\n\nThen he asked about climate change.\n\nIX\u2014LISTENING IN\n\nOn the flight back to Washington, Obama read and played spades with some aides to pass the time. (He and his former body man Reggie Love took a break to play spades at one point during the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.) After a while, one of the aides led me to the front cabin to talk with the President some more. The week before, Obama had given out the annual Presidential Medals of Freedom.", + " One went to Benjamin C. Bradlee, the editor who built the Washington Post by joining the Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers, in 1971, and who stood behind Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they began publishing the Watergate expos\u00e9s that led to the fall of the Nixon Presidency. I asked Obama how he could reconcile such an award with his Administration\u2019s aggressive leak investigations, which have ensnared journalists and sources, and its hostility to Edward Snowden\u2019s exposure of the N.S.A.\u2019s blanket surveillance of American and foreign communications.\n\nAfter a long pause, Obama began to speak of how his first awareness of politics came when, as an eleven-year-old,", + " he went on a cross-country bus trip with his mother and grandmother and, at the end of each day, watched the Watergate hearings on television. \u201cI remember being fascinated by these figures and what was at stake, and the notion that even the President of the United States isn\u2019t above the law,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd Sam Ervin with his eyebrows, and Inouye, this guy from Hawaii\u2014it left a powerful impression on me. And so, as I got older, when I saw \u2018All the President\u2019s Men,\u2019 that was the iconic vision of journalism telling truth to power, and making sure our democracy worked. And I still believe that.", + " And so a lot of the tensions that have existed between my White House and the press are inherent in the institution. The press always wants more, and every White House, including ours, is trying to make sure that the things that we care most about are what\u2019s being reported on, and that we\u2019re not on any given day chasing after fifteen story lines.\u201d\n\nThen Obama insisted that what Snowden did was \u201cnot akin to Watergate or some scandal in which there were coverups involved.\u201d The leaks, he said, had \u201cput people at risk\u201d but revealed nothing illegal. And though the leaks raised \u201clegitimate policy questions\u201d about N.S.A.", + " operations, \u201cthe issue then is: Is the only way to do that by giving some twenty-nine-year-old free rein to basically dump a mountain of information, much of which is definitely legal, definitely necessary for national security, and should properly be classified?\u201d In Obama\u2019s view, \u201cthe benefit of the debate he generated was not worth the damage done, because there was another way of doing it.\u201d Once again, it was the President as Professor-in-Chief, assessing all sides, and observing the tilt of the scales. (The day before his speech last week on reforming the N.S.A., he told me, \u201cI do not have a yes/no answer on clemency for Edward Snowden.", + " This is an active case, where charges have been brought.\u201d)\n\nThe coverage of the leaks, Obama complained, paints \u201ca picture of a rogue agency out there running around and breaking a whole bunch of laws and engaging in a \u2018domestic spying program\u2019 that isn\u2019t accurate. But what that does is it synchs up with a public imagination that sees Big Brother looming everywhere.\u201d The greater damage, in his view, was the way the leaks heightened suspicions among foreign leaders. Obama enjoyed a good relationship with Angela Merkel, but he admitted that it was undermined by reports alleging that the U.S. tapped her cell phone. This, he said,", + " felt \u201clike a breach of trust and I can\u2019t argue with her being aggravated about that.\u201d\n\nBut, he said, \u201cthere are European governments that we know spy on us, and there is a little bit of Claude Rains in \u2018Casablanca\u2019\u2014shocked that gambling is going on.\u201d He added, \u201cNow, I will say that I automatically assume that there are a whole bunch of folks out there trying to spy on me, which is why I don\u2019t have a phone. I do not send out anything on my BlackBerry that I don\u2019t assume at some point will be on the front page of a newspaper, so it\u2019s pretty boring reading for the most part.\u201d\n\nObama admitted that the N.S.A.", + " has had \u201ctoo much leeway to do whatever it wanted or could.\u201d But he didn\u2019t feel \u201cany ambivalence\u201d about the decisions he has made. \u201cI actually feel confident that the way the N.S.A. operates does not threaten the privacy and constitutional rights of Americans and that the laws that are in place are sound, and, because we\u2019ve got three branches of government involved and a culture that has internalized that domestic spying is against the law, it actually works pretty well,\u201d he said. \u201cOver all, five years from now, when I\u2019m a private citizen, I\u2019m going to feel pretty confident that my government is not spying on me.\u201d\n\nObama has three years left,", + " but it\u2019s not difficult to sense a politician with an acute sense of time, a politician devising ways to widen his legacy without the benefit of any support from Congress. The State of the Union speech next week will be a catalogue of things hoped for, a resumption of the second inaugural, with an added emphasis on the theme of inequality. But Obama knows that major legislation\u2014with the possible exception of immigration\u2014is unlikely. And so there is in him a certain degree of reduced ambition, a sense that even well before the commentariat starts calling him a lame duck he will spend much of his time setting an agenda that can be resolved only after he has retired to the life of a writer and post-President.\n\n\u201cOne of the things that I\u2019ve learned to appreciate more as President is you are essentially a relay swimmer in a river full of rapids,", + " and that river is history,\u201d he later told me. \u201cYou don\u2019t start with a clean slate, and the things you start may not come to full fruition on your timetable. But you can move things forward. And sometimes the things that start small may turn out to be fairly significant. I suspect that Ronald Reagan, if you\u2019d asked him, would not have considered the earned-income-tax-credit provision in tax reform to be at the top of his list of accomplishments. On the other hand, what the E.I.T.C. has done, starting with him, being added to by Clinton, being used by me during the Recovery Act,", + " has probably kept more people out of poverty than a whole lot of other government programs that are currently in place.\u201d\n\nJohnson\u2019s Great Society will be fifty years old in 2014, but no Republican wants a repeat of that scale of government ambition. Obama acknowledges this, saying, \u201cThe appetite for tax-and-transfer strategies, even among Democrats, much less among independents or Republicans, is probably somewhat limited, because people are seeing their incomes haven\u2019t gone up, their wages haven\u2019t gone up. It\u2019s natural for them to think any new taxes may be going to somebody else, I\u2019m not confident in terms of how it\u2019s going to be spent,", + " I\u2019d much rather hang on to what I\u2019ve got.\u201d He will try to do things like set up partnerships with selected cities and citizens\u2019 groups, sign some executive orders, but a \u201cMarshall Plan for the inner city is not going to get through Congress anytime soon.\u201d\n\nIndeed, Obama is quick to show a measure of sympathy with the Reagan-era conservative analysis of government. \u201cThis is where sometimes progressives get frustrated with me,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause I actually think there was a legitimate critique of the welfare state getting bloated, and relying too much on command and control, top-down government programs to address it back in the seventies.", + " It\u2019s also why it\u2019s ironic when I\u2019m accused of being this raging socialist who wants to amass more and more power for their own government.... But I do think that some of the anti-government rhetoric, anti-tax rhetoric, anti-spending rhetoric that began before Reagan but fully flowered with the Reagan Presidency accelerated trends that were already existing, or at least robbed us of some tools to deal with the downsides of globalization and technology, and that with just some modest modification we could grow this economy faster and benefit more people and provide more opportunity.\n\n\u201cAfter we did all that, there would still be poverty and there would still be some inequality and there would still be a lot of work to do for the forty-fifth through fiftieth Presidents,\u201d he went on,", + " \u201cbut I\u2019d like to give voice to an impression I think a lot of Americans have, which is it\u2019s harder to make it now if you are just the average citizen who\u2019s willing to work hard and has good values, and wasn\u2019t born with huge advantages or having enjoyed extraordinary luck\u2014that the ground is less secure under your feet.\u201d\n\nIn the White House, advisers are resigned by now to the idea that some liberal voters, dismayed by a range of issues\u2014drones, the N.S.A., the half measures of health care and financial reform\u2014have turned away from Obama and to newer figures like Elizabeth Warren or Bill de Blasio.", + " \u201cWell, look, we live in a very fast-moving culture,\u201d Obama said. \u201cAnd, by definition, the President of the United States is overexposed, and it is natural, after six, seven years of me being on the national stage, that people start wanting to see...\u201d\n\n\u201cOther flavors?\u201d\n\n\u201cYes,\u201d he said. \u201c \u2018Is there somebody else out there who can give me that spark of inspiration or excitement?\u2019 I don\u2019t spend too much time worrying about that. I think the things that are exciting people are the same things that excite me and excited me back then. I might have given fresh voice to them,", + " but the values are essentially the same.\u201d\n\nX\u2014WHAT TIME ALLOWS\n\nObama came home from Los Angeles in a dark, freezing downpour. The weather was too rotten even for Marine One. He hustled down the steps of Air Force One and ducked into his car.\n\nA few weeks later, I was able to see him for a last conversation in the Oval Office. The Obamas had just had a long vacation in Hawaii\u2014sun, golf, family, and not much else. The President was sitting behind his desk\u2014the Resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes\u2014and he was reading from a folder marked \u201cSecret.\u201d He closed it,", + " walked across the room, and settled into an armchair near the fireplace. \u201cI got some rest,\u201d he said. \u201cBut time to get to work.\u201d\n\nObama has every right to claim a long list of victories since he took office: ending two wars; an economic rescue, no matter how imperfect; strong Supreme Court nominations; a lack of major scandal; essential support for an epochal advance in the civil rights of gays and lesbians; more progressive executive orders on climate change, gun control, and the end of torture; and, yes, health-care reform. But, no matter what one\u2019s politics, and however one weighs the arguments of his critics,", + " both partisan and principled, one has to wonder about any President\u2019s capacity to make these decisions amid a thousand uncertainties, so many of which are matters of life and death, survival and extinction.\n\n\u201cI have strengths and I have weaknesses, like every President, like every person,\u201d Obama said. \u201cI do think one of my strengths is temperament. I am comfortable with complexity, and I think I\u2019m pretty good at keeping my moral compass while recognizing that I am a product of original sin. And every morning and every night I\u2019m taking measure of my actions against the options and possibilities available to me, understanding that there are going to be mistakes that I make and my team makes and that America makes;", + " understanding that there are going to be limits to the good we can do and the bad that we can prevent, and that there\u2019s going to be tragedy out there and, by occupying this office, I am part of that tragedy occasionally, but that if I am doing my very best and basing my decisions on the core values and ideals that I was brought up with and that I think are pretty consistent with those of most Americans, that at the end of the day things will be better rather than worse.\u201d\n\nThe cheering crowds and hecklers from the West Coast trip seemed far away now. In the preternaturally quiet office, you could hear,", + " between every long pause that Obama took, the ticking of a grandfather clock just to his left.\n\n\u201cI think we are born into this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and sins of the past,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we also inherit the beauty and the joy and goodness of our forebears. And we\u2019re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have.\u201d The long view again. \u201cBut I think our decisions matter,\u201d he went on. \u201cAnd I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President.", + " If he hadn\u2019t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn\u2019t diminish Lincoln\u2019s achievements, but it acknowledges that at the end of the day we\u2019re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.\u201d\n\nA little while later, as we were leaving the Oval Office and walking under the colonnade, Obama said, \u201cI just wanted to add one thing to that business about the great-man theory of history.", + " The President of the United States cannot remake our society, and that\u2019s probably a good thing.\u201d He paused yet again, always self-editing. \u201cNot \u2018probably,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely a good thing.\u201d \u2666 ", + " So the president's State of the Union address is Tuesday night, and it's always such a promising moment, a chance to wake everyone up and say \"This I believe\" and \"Here we stand.\" The networks are focused and alert, waiting to be filled with a president's excellence and depth. It's a chance for the American president to say whatever the storm, however high the seas, the union stands \"rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible.\" That's how Stephen Vincent Benet had Daniel Webster put it, in a play.\n\nIn a State of the Union a president tries to put his stamp on things.", + " Here we are, here's where we're going, all roads lead forward. We can face whatever test, meet whatever challenge, united in the desire that we be the greatest nation in the history of man...\n\nWhat great moments this tradition has given us. JFK's father thought his son's first State of the Union was better than his Inaugural Address. It had a warmth. \"Mr. Speaker... it is a pleasure to return from whence I came. You are among my oldest friends in Washington\u2014and this House is my oldest home.\" Friends, home\u2014another era. LBJ taking the reins in 1964:", + " \"Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined.\" And you know, that's what it became. Nixon enjoyed dilating on history, and was interesting when he did.\n\nReagan dazzled, though he told his diary he never got used to it: \"I've made a mil. speeches in every kind of place to every kind of audience. Somehow there's a thing about entering that chamber\u2014goose bumps & a quiver.\" There was his speech after he'd recovered from being shot\u2014brio and gallantry. And of course Lenny Skutnik.", + " Just before Reagan's 1982 speech Mr. Skutnik, a government worker, saw Air Florida Flight 90 go into the Potomac. As others watched from the banks of the frozen river, Mr. Skutnik threw off his coat, dived in and swam like a golden retriever to save passengers. The night of the speech he was up there in the gallery next to the first lady, and when Reagan pointed him out the chamber exploded. This nice, quiet man who'd gone uncelebrated all his professional life, and then one day circumstances came together and he showed that beneath the bureaucrat's clothing was the beating heart of a hero.\n\n***\n\nWell.", + " History still beckons, waiting to be made. The great unstated question of today: Can America come back, reclaim her old spirit, confidence and joy, can we make things again, build them, grow, create, push out into the new?\n\nAnd here I think: Oh dear.\n\nBecause when I imagine Barack Obama's State of the Union, I see a handsome, dignified man standing at the podium and behind him Joe Biden, sleeping. And next to him John Boehner, snoring. And arrayed before the president the members, napping.\n\nNo one's really listening to the president now. He has been for five years a nonstop windup talk machine.", + " Most of it has been facile, bland, the same rounded words and rounded sentiments, the same soft accusations and excuses. I see him enjoying the sound of his voice as the network newsman leans forward eagerly, intently, nodding at the pearls, enacting interest, for this is the president and he is the anchorman and surely something important is being said with two such important men engaged.\n\nBut nothing interesting was being said! Looking back on this presidency, it has from the beginning been a 17,000 word New Yorker piece in which, calmly, sonorously, with his lovely intelligent voice, the president says nothing, or little that is helpful,", + " insightful or believable. \"I'm not a particularly ideological person.\" \"It's hard to anticipate events over the next three years.\" \"I don't really even need George Kennan right now.\" \"I am comfortable with complexity.\" \"Our capacity to do some good... is unsurpassed, even if nobody is paying attention.\"\n\nNobody is!\n\nHe gave a speech on the National Security Agency, that bitterly contested issue, the other day. Pew Research found half of those polled didn't notice. National Journal's Dustin Volz wrote that Americans greeted the speech with \"collective indifference and broad skepticism.\" Of the 1 in 10 who'd followed it,", + " more than 70% doubted his proposals would help protect privacy.\n\nThe bigger problem is that the president stands up there Tuesday night with ObamaCare not a hazy promise but a fact. People now know it was badly thought, badly written and disastrously executed. It was supposed to make life better by expanding coverage. It has made it worse, by throwing people off coverage. And\u2014as we all know now but did not last year\u2014the program was passed only with the aid of a giant lie. Now everyone knows if you liked your plan, your doctor, your deductible, you can't keep them.\n\nWhen the central domestic fact of your presidency was a fraud,", + " people won't listen to you anymore.\n\nThe poor speechwriters. They are always just a little more in touch with public sentiment than a president can be\u2014they get to move around in the world, they know what people are saying. They have to imitate the optimism of the speeches of yore, they have to rouse. They are the ones who know what a heavy freaking lift it is, what an impossible chore. And they have to do it with idiots in the staffing process scrawling on the margins of the draft: \"More applause lines!\" The speechwriters know the answer is fewer applause lines, more thought, more humility and candor.", + " Americans aren't impressed anymore by congressmen taking to their feet and cheering. They look as if they have electric buzzers on their butts that shoot them into the air when the applause line comes. \"Now I have to get up and enact enthusiasm\" is what they look like they're thinking. While the other party thinks \"Now we have to get up too, because what he said was anodyne and patriotic and we can't not stand up for that.\" And they applaud, diffidently, because they don't want the folks back home\u2014the few who are watching\u2014to say they looked a little too enthusiastic about the guy who just cost them their insurance.\n\nThey are all enacting.", + " They are all replicating. They're all imitating the past.\n\nYou know when we will know America is starting to come back? When some day the sergeant at arms bellows: \"Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States\" and the camera shows a bubble of suits and one person emerges from the pack and walks into the chamber and you're watching at home and you find yourself\u2014against everything you know, against all the accumulated knowledge of the past\u2014interested. It'll take you aback when you realize you're interested in what he'll say! And the members won't just be enacting, they'll be leaning forward to hear.\n\nAnd the president will speak,", + " and what he says will be pertinent to the problems of the United States of America. And thoughtful. And he'll offer ideas, and you'll think: \"Hey, that sounds right.\"\n\nThat is when you'll know America just might come back.\n\nUntil then, as John Dickerson just put it: Barack Obama, Inaction Figure.\n\nZzzzzzz. ", + " There have always been two not entirely consistent elements of Barack Obama\u2019s powerful political appeal: his aspirational ambition and his personal sense of complexity and limits.\n\nThe aspirational \u2014 the promise of transcending our national divisions, resetting our relations with Russia and the Muslim world, slowing the rise of the oceans and healing the planet \u2014 is behind us. In a recent, remarkable interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker, Obama admits as much. Assuming the role of political commentator, the president talks of being overexposed \u201cafter six, seven years of me being on the national stage\u201d and asks, \u201cIs there somebody else out there who can give [people]", + " that spark of inspiration or excitement?\u201d Perhaps someone else is the change we have been waiting for.\n\nMichael Gerson is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in The Post. View Archive\n\nBut it is exactly this objectivity \u2014 this ability to emotionally distance himself from, well, himself \u2014 that impresses many journalists and commentators. Remnick calls it the \u201carchetypal Obama habit of mind and politics, the calm, professorial immersion in complexity.\u201d Like many before him, Remnick is impressed with Obama\u2019s \u201cphilosophical ambivalences\u201d and his ability to \u201cnimbly\u201d argue the other side of debates.\n\nObama seems impressed with these traits as well.", + " In the course of the interview, he states: \u201cI\u2019m not a purist.\u201d And: \u201cI\u2019m pretty pragmatic.\u201d And: \u201cI\u2019m not a particularly ideological person.\u201d And: \u201cI do think one of my strengths is temperament. I am comfortable with complexity.\u201d On marijuana legalization, Obama convincingly argues for every possible side of the issue. On parenting, he favors both open-mindedness and structure. On federalism, he sees virtues and drawbacks. On pro football, he is a big fan but would not allow his son to play. Every question is an opportunity for a seminar.\n\nI have to admit \u2014 like many people in the business of producing and distributing symbolic knowledge \u2014 that I love seminars.", + " Writers, commentators, journalists and historians have often chosen their profession because they never wanted their late-night dorm room discussions to end. Those who write about politics have a natural affinity for Obama\u2019s mode of discourse. This is not so much an ideological bias \u2014 though that can play a part \u2014 as a kinship of intellectual approach and style. Just as Middle America found Richard Nixon to be \u201cone of us,\u201d America\u2019s knowledge class knows that Obama is very much like them.\n\n1 of 8 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad \u00d7 What Obama didn\u2019t know View Photos The many controversies that the White House says the president was kept in the dark about.", + " Caption The many controversies that the White House says the president was kept in the dark about. Health-care insurance cancellations\n\n\n\nIn fact, that wasn\u2019t the case. Thousands who had bought insurance have been receiving cancellations notices from insurers. The president said he wasn\u2019t aware his promise before the rollout would result in cancellations, and Obama had repeatedly stated that, although new health-care insurance would be available through the Affordable Care Act, those willing to stay on their plan would be able to do so.In fact, that wasn\u2019t the case. Thousands who had bought insurance have been receiving cancellations notices from insurers. The president said he wasn\u2019t aware his promise before the rollout would result in cancellations,", + " and has apologized for his assurances ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.\n\nRemnick\u2019s portrait of Obama typically leaves out the less attractive side of the academic persona \u2014 the tendency to view opponents as rubes and knaves. Few presidents have more consistently or aggressively questioned the motives of their political rivals. None, to my knowledge, used an inaugural address the way Obama used his second \u2014 to accuse his opponents of mistaking \u201cabsolutism for principle\u201d and treating \u201cname-calling as reasoned debate,\u201d and wanting the twilight years of seniors \u201cspent in poverty\u201d and ensuring that parents of disabled children have \u201cnowhere to turn,\u201d and reserving freedom \u201cfor the lucky.\u201d Those outside the seminar aren\u2019t treated quite as well.\n\nBut even judged on the terms of Remnick\u2019s praise,", + " Obama is in deep, second-term trouble. The president who embraces complexity is now besieged by complexity on every front. The U.S. health-care system has not responded as planned to the joystick manipulations of the Affordable Care Act. On the evidence of the article, Obama and his closest advisers are in denial about the structural failures of the program \u2014 the stingy coverage, narrow provider networks, high deductibles and adverse-selection spirals already underway in several states.\n\nAnd complexity is not a sufficient word to describe the chaos in the Middle East. Here Remnick raises questions about the utility of ambivalence in Obama\u2019s approach to Syria. In the article,", + " the president recounts the careful, systematic study that preceded inaction, as more than 100,000 people died and U.S.-affiliated groups were crushed. \u201cWe have looked at this from every angle,\u201d he insists.\n\nIn fact, at the outset of the struggle, Obama declared that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go without having a plan to make him go. Then the Obama administration announced it would supply arms to the rebels, which never materialized on a serious scale. This is a case where disengagement has undermined national credibility and betrayed friends. Obama is likely to spend a portion of his post-presidency defending his studied inaction in the face of mass atrocities.\n\nThe largest question raised by the Remnick article goes unasked:", + " Is the intellectual style that journalists find so amenable actually an effective governing strategy? The answer, it turns out, is complex.\n\nRead more from Michael Gerson\u2019s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.\n" + ], + "length": 23673, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 51, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Iraq's top Shiite cleric issued a statement during Friday prayers today, calling on everyone\u2014Shiite and Sunni alike\u2014to fight back against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the New York Times reports. It is \"the legal and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon, to hold it to defend the country,\" a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said in the holy city of Karbala, eliciting cheers of \"It will be done!\" The representative said these volunteers \"must fill the gaps in the security forces,\" and that those who died in the fight would be martyrs, but stopped short of calling for a general armed response. In other developments: Iran has deployed two Revolutionary Guard units to Iraq, with the goal of protecting Baghdad, Karbala, and fellow holy city Najaf, security officials tell the Wall Street Journal. Iran has also positioned troops along its border, and given its air force the go ahead to bomb ISIS rebels within 60 miles of it. ISIS rebels briefly seized two towns near the Iranian border, Saadiyah and Jalawla, but they were beaten back by government troops and Kurdish forces. But Kurdish forces have also seized the opportunity to take over the long-disputed oil city of Kirkuk, meaning Nouri al-Maliki now has essentially two foes to contend with. The chaos has sent oil prices to their highest level this year\u2014they touched $114.20 per barrel in morning trading today before settling back to $113.35. Analysts say that so far there's little direct threat to Iraq's top oil fields, but that the instability has markets nervous. A UN human rights official says there have been verified reports of 17 civilians killed, and unverified reports of as many as 30. Four women have also killed themselves after being raped. But he also chided Iraq's government for shelling civilian areas, the BBC reports. If ISIS can keep its hold on Mosul, BBC analyst Jeremy Bowen believes it will be \"the most significant act by a jihadist group since al-Qaeda attacked the US on 11 September 2001,\" and potentially force a redrawing of the Middle East's borders\u2014including breaking up Iraq along sectarian lines. The conflict is already having implications in Syria, as ISIS brings weapons seized from Iraq across the border, Reuters reports.\n", + "docs": [ + "Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nBAGHDAD \u2014 The specter of sectarian war and partition of Iraq grew on Friday as the country\u2019s top Shiite cleric implored his followers to take up arms against an insurgent army of marauding Sunni extremist militants who have captured broad stretches of northern territory this week in a sweep toward Baghdad.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe exhortation by the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, came as President Obama told the Iraqis they need to resolve the crisis themselves and vowed not to redeploy United States forces in Iraq, a country where nearly 4,500 American soldiers lost their lives and the United States spent more than $1 trillion in an eight-year war that Mr.", + " Obama said was history when the last troops left in 2011.\n\nWhile Mr. Obama said he would offer some help, it would not include troops, and he asserted that \u201cwe\u2019re not going to allow ourselves to be dragged back into a situation in which, while we\u2019re there, we\u2019re keeping a lid on things.\u201d\n\nHeeding the call to arms by Ayatollah Sistani, Shiite volunteers rushed to the front lines, reinforcing defenses of the holy city of Samarra 70 miles north of Baghdad, and helping thwart attacks by Sunni fighters of the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in some smaller cities to the east. The confrontations suggested that Shiites and Sunnis would once again engage in open conflict for control of Iraq,", + " as they did during the height of the American-led occupation that ousted Saddam Hussein.\n\nThat struggle between the sects has also helped shape the civil war in neighboring Syria and threatened to further destabilize the Middle East.\n\nWhile it was unclear from Mr. Obama\u2019s remarks what he might be prepared to do militarily to help the Maliki government, administration officials said the options included airstrikes by warplanes or drones, improved intelligence sharing and deployment of small numbers of Special Forces members.\n\nThe United States already has considerable military power deployed in the region, with 35,000 troops, in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and neighboring Gulf nations. In addition, the United States has an array of ships there,", + " as well as the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush with an accompanying Navy cruiser in the northern Arabian Sea. Two Navy destroyers from the Bush strike group have moved into the Persian Gulf, a Defense Department official said.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nContinue reading the main story Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi Efforts to stem the rise of the Islamic State. Control: Iraqi Security Forces Contested ISIS Previously contested area Albu Faraj Islamic State control Eighth Brigade Base Ramadi Iraqi government control Government complex The last ISIS fighters left the government buildings on Dec. 28. Tamim Iraqi forces advanced into central Ramadi Anbar University 1 Mile The Iraqi government continues to advance in contested areas,", + " but resistance remains to the north and east. Control: Iraqi Security Forces Contested ISIS Previously contested area Albu Faraj Islamic State control Eighth Brigade Base Ramadi Iraqi government control Government complex The last ISIS fighters left the government buildings on Dec. 28. Tamim Iraqi forces advanced into central Ramadi Anbar University 1 Mile The Iraqi government continues to advance in contested areas, but resistance remains to the north and east. Control: Iraqi Security Forces Contested ISIS Previously contested area Albu Faraj Islamic State control Eighth Brigade Base Ramadi Iraqi government control Government complex The last ISIS fighters left the government buildings on Dec. 28. Tamim Iraqi forces advanced into central Ramadi Anbar University 1 Mile The Iraqi government continues to advance in contested areas,", + " but resistance remains to the north and east. Previously contested areas Iraqi government control Islamic State control Ramadi Government complex Iraqi forces advanced into central Ramadi The last ISIS fighters left the government buildings on Dec. 28. The Iraqi government continues to advance in contested areas, but resistance remains to the north and east. Previously contested areas Iraqi government control Islamic State control Ramadi Government complex Iraqi forces advanced into central Ramadi The last ISIS fighters left the government buildings on Dec. 28. The Iraqi government continues to advance in contested areas, but resistance remains to the north and east. Source: Institute for the Study of War Control: Iraqi Security Forces Contested ISIS Contested Albu Faraj Albu Jalib Eighth Brigade ISIS control Ramadi ISIS losses since December 3 Tamim ISF control Anbar University 1 Mile Control:", + " Iraqi Security Forces Contested ISIS Contested Albu Faraj Albu Jalib Eighth Brigade ISIS control Ramadi ISIS losses since December 3 Tamim ISF control Anbar University 1 Mile Control: Iraqi Security Forces Contested ISIS Contested Albu Faraj Albu Jalib Eighth Brigade ISIS control Ramadi ISIS losses since December 3 Tamim ISF control Anbar University 1 Mile Contested Ramadi ISIS losses since Dec. 3 ISIS control ISF control Contested Ramadi ISIS losses since Dec. 3 ISIS control ISF control Source: Institute for the Study of War Demilitarized Syria 1,450 tent shelters Demilitarized Jordan Rukban check point SYRIA Jordan Rukban Hadalat 500 ft 1,", + "450 tent shelters Demilitarized Jordan Rukban check point SYRIA Jordan Rukban Hadalat 500 ft 1,450 tent shelters Demilitarized Jordan Rukban check point Jordan 500 ft 1,450 tent shelters Rukban check point Jordan 500 ft Sources: Human Rights Watch (satellite image), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 Indonesia Estimated number of jihadist fighters from top-source countries. Kyrgyzstan Egypt June 2014 December 2015 Libya Britain Germany Lebanon Morocco France Jordan Turkey Russia Saudi Arabia Tunisia Note:", + " Data showing the estimated number of fighters for some countries in 2014 did not change or was unavailable. Estimated number of jihadist fighters from top-source countries. June 2014 Dec. 2015 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 Indonesia Kyrgyzstan Egypt Libya Britain Germany Lebanon Morocco France Jordan Turkey Russia Saudi Arabia Tunisia 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 Note: Data showing the estimated number of fighters for some countries in 2014 did not change or was unavailable.", + " Source: The Soufan Group 2 Miles ISIS military encampments Raqqa SYRIA SYRIA Damascus ISIS headquarters ISIS security headquarters Raqqa National Hospital Al Khoder pharmacy Jihadi John (killed Nov. 12) Main ISIS headquarters Weapons cache Islamic Court Euphrates Training camp ISIS military encampment Airstrike locations 2 Miles Raqqa ISIS military encampments SYRIA SYRIA Damascus Raqqa ISIS security headquarters Jihadi John (killed Nov. 12) Weapons cache Main ISIS headquarters Euphrates ISIS military encampment Training camp Airstrike locations 2 Miles Raqqa ISIS military encampments SYRIA SYRIA Raqqa Main ISIS headquarters Jihadi John (killed Nov.", + " 12) Euphrates ISIS military encampments Airstrike locations Source: Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently SMOKE PLUME Sinjar Pesh merga 47 Y.P.G. and P.K.K. 1/4 MILE 1/4 MILE SMOKE PLUME Sinjar 47 Y.P.G. and P.K.K. Pesh merga 1/4 MILE SMOKE PLUME Sinjar Y.P.G. and P.K.K. Pesh merga 47 1/4 MILE SMOKE PLUME Sinjar Y.P.G. and P.K.K.", + " 47 Pesh merga SMOKE PLUME Sinjar 47 Pesh merga Y.P.G. and P.K.K. 1/4 MILE SMOKE PLUME Sinjar 47 Pesh merga Y.P.G. and P.K.K. 1/4 MILE Satellite image by Planet Labs El Isbah Syria Deir al-Zour Jafra Sijan Oil and natural gas fields Fields targeted by the United States Azraq Omar Barghooth Tanak Mosul Isis control Abu Hardan Syria Detail Baghdad Damascus 5 MILES Iraq Iraq El Isbah Syria Jafra Deir al-Zour Oil and natural gas fields Sijan Fields targeted by the United States Azraq Omar Barghooth Tanak Isis control Abu Hardan Syria Detail 5 MILES Iraq Iraq El Isbah Oil and natural gas fields Jafra Fields targeted by the U.S.", + " Sijan Omar Azraq Barghooth Tanak Abu Hardan 10 MILES Isis control Syria Syria Detail Iraq Iraq Sources: Al Furat Petroleum Company, East View Geospatial (roads), Institute for the Study of War ABOUT 120 MILES TO RAQQA SYRIA MOUNT SINJAR Sinjar IRAQ 47 ABOUT 60 MILES TO MOSUL Qamishli Turkey Dohuk MOUNT SINJAR Hasaka Mosul 47 Syria Tal Afar Sinjar Approx. section of road targeted by the operation ISIS currently moves freely through eastern Syria Raqqa Iraq Isis control Area of detail Syria Iraq Deir al-Zour 25 Miles ABOUT 120 MILES TO RAQQA SYRIA MOUNT SINJAR IRAQ Sinjar ABOUT 60 MILES TO MOSUL 47 Qamishli Dohuk Syria MOUNT SINJAR Hasaka Mosul 47 to Raqqa Tal Afar Approx.", + " section of road targeted by the operation Isis control ISIS currently moves freely through eastern Syria Iraq Area of detail SYRIA IRAQ 25 Miles SYRIA MOUNT SINJAR Sinjar IRAQ 47 Syria Dohuk Mosul MOUNT SINJAR 47 Tal Afar Approx. section of road targeted by the operation Isis control Iraq Area of detail Syria Iraq 25 Miles Source: IHS Conflict Monitor (control areas) 50 MILES Kobani TURKEY Hasaka Mosul Aleppo Erbil The U.S. is arming Syrian Arab fighters who will join Kurdish combatants to attack Raqqa. Iraqi forces and Shiite militias, aided by U.S.", + " airstrikes, retook the Baiji oil refinery from ISIS on Friday after contesting it for more than a year. Deir al-Zour Hawija ISIS control areas IRAQ Homs IRAN Tikrit Palmyra LEBANON SYRIA Iraqi forces have encircled Ramadi, which is defended by 600 to 1,000 militants, with the support of U.S. airstrikes and the Iraqi air force. Damascus Baghdad Falluja JORDAN 50 MILES Kobani TURKEY Hasaka Mosul Aleppo Erbil The U.S. is arming Syrian Arab fighters who will join Kurdish combatants to attack Raqqa. Iraqi forces and Shiite militias,", + " aided by U.S. airstrikes, retook the Baiji oil refinery from ISIS on Friday after contesting it for more than a year. Deir al-Zour Hawija ISIS control areas IRAQ Homs Tikrit Palmyra LEBANON SYRIA Iraqi forces have encircled Ramadi, which is defended by 600 to 1,000 militants, with the support of U.S. airstrikes and the Iraqi air force. Baghdad Falluja 50 MILES TURKEY Kobani Iraqi forces and Shiite militias, aided by U.S. airstrikes, retook the Baiji oil refinery on Friday. SYRIA ISIS control The U.S.", + " is arming Syrian Arab fighters who will join Kurdish combatants to attack Raqqa. Palmyra Tikrit Hawija IRAQ Baghdad Iraqi forces have encircled Ramadi, which is defended by 600 to 1,000 militants. JORDAN 50 MILES TURKEY Iraqi forces and Shiite militias, aided by U.S. airstrikes, retook the Baiji oil refinery on Friday. SYRIA ISIS control The U.S. is arming Syrian Arab fighters who will join Kurdish combatants to attack Raqqa. Tikrit Hawija IRAQ Iraqi forces have encircled Ramadi, which is defended by 600 to 1,", + "000 militants. Sources: IHS Conflict Monitor (control areas); Satellite image by Landsat via Google Earth Islamic State control Turkish control Kurdish control Rebel control Contested Diyarbakir air base A suicide bomber believed to have ties to ISIS killed at least 32 people in this ethnically Kurdish town. Turkey will allow U.S. airstrikes against ISIS to be conducted from air bases at Incirlik and Diyarbakir. Approximate safe zone where U.S. and Turkish forces seek to clear ISIS militants. TURKEY Incirlik air base Suruc Jarablus Ras al-Ain Kilis Tal Abyad Manbij Dabiq Hasaka Marea Ain Issa Al Bab SYRIA Aleppo 25 MILES Raqqa Islamic State control Turkish control Kurdish control Rebel control Contested Approximate safe zone where U.S.", + " and Turkish forces seek to clear ISIS militants. A suicide bomber believed to have ties to ISIS killed at least 32 people in this ethnically Kurdish town. TURKEY Suruc Ras al-Ain Jarablus Kilis Tal Abyad Manbij Dabiq Marea Ain Issa Al Bab Aleppo SYRIA Raqqa 25 MILES Islamic State control Turkish control Kurdish control Rebel control Contested Approximate safe zone where U.S. and Turkish forces seek to clear ISIS militants. A suicide bomber believed to have ties to ISIS killed at least 32 people in this ethnically Kurdish town. TURKEY Suruc Jarablus Kilis Tal Abyad Manbij Dabiq Marea Ain Issa Al Bab Aleppo SYRIA Raqqa 25 MILES Islamic State control Turkish control Kurdish control Rebel control Contested TURKEY Approximate safe zone where U.S.", + " and Turkish forces seek to clear ISIS militants. Suruc Jarablus Kilis Tal Abyad Manbij Dabiq Marea Ain Issa Al Bab Aleppo A suicide bomber believed to have ties to ISIS killed at least 32 people in this ethnically Kurdish town. SYRIA Raqqa 25 MILES Islamic State control Turkish control Kurdish control Rebel control Contested TURKEY Approximate safe zone where U.S. and Turkish forces seek to clear ISIS militants. Suruc Jarablus Kilis Manbij Dabiq Marea Al Bab Aleppo A suicide bomber believed to have ties to ISIS killed at least 32 people in this ethnically Kurdish town.", + " SYRIA 25 MILES United States military officials reported 54 airstrikes from July 12-19. Iraqi forces killed 30 Islamic State fighters in an airstrike on July 20. The Anbar offensive began near Falluja in early July but encountered strong resistance. 10 MILES 20 30 40 50 60 Ramadi Husayba University of Anbar Saqlawiyah Habbaniya Falluja Al Taqqadum airbase Baghdad Habbaniya Lake Abu Ghraib Iraqi forces clashed with the Islamic State on July 18. Iraqi forces attacked the Islamic State in Husayba and in areas south of Ramadi on July 19.", + " Cities labeled in red are under control of the Islamic State. United States military officials reported 54 airstrikes from July 12-19. Iraqi forces killed 30 Islamic State fighters in an airstrike on July 20. The Anbar offensive began near Falluja in early July but encountered strong resistance. 10 MILES 20 30 40 Ramadi Husayba University of Anbar Saqlawiyah Habbaniya Falluja Al Taqqadum airbase Habbaniya Lake Iraqi forces clashed with the Islamic State on July 18. Iraqi forces attacked the Islamic State in Husayba and in areas south of Ramadi on July 19.", + " Cities labeled in red are under control of the Islamic State. United States military officials reported 54 airstrikes from July 12-19. Iraqi forces killed 30 Islamic State fighters in an airstrike on July 20. The Anbar offensive began near Falluja in early July but encountered strong resistance. 10 MILES 20 30 Ramadi Husayba University of Anbar Saqlawiyah Habbaniya Falluja Al Taqqadum airbase Habbaniya Lake Iraqi forces clashed with the Islamic State on July 18. Iraqi forces attacked the Islamic State in Husayba and in areas south of Ramadi on July 19.", + " Cities labeled in red are under control of the Islamic State. United States military officials reported 54 airstrikes from July 12-19. Iraqi forces killed 30 Islamic State fighters in an airstrike on July 20. The Anbar offensive began near Falluja in early July but encountered strong resistance. 10 MILES 20 30 Ramadi Husayba University of Anbar Saqlawiyah Habbaniya Falluja Al Taqqadum airbase Habbaniya Lake Iraqi forces clashed with the Islamic State on July 18. Iraqi forces attacked the Islamic State in Husayba and in areas south of Ramadi on July 19.", + " Cities labeled in red are under control of the Islamic State. United States military officials reported 54 airstrikes from July 12-19. Iraqi forces killed 30 Islamic State fighters in an airstrike on July 20. 10 MILES Ramadi Husayba University of Anbar Habbaniya Al Taqqadum airbase Habbaniya Lake Iraqi forces clashed with the Islamic State on July 18. Iraqi forces attacked the Islamic State in Husayba and in areas south of Ramadi on July 19. Cities labeled in red are under control of the Islamic State. Sources: Institute for the Study of War; Defense Department;", + " Satellite image by DigitalGlobe via Google Earth Cities labeled in red are under ISIS control. ISIS carried out five car bomb attacks on July 10 in this Iraqi-held town. Iraqi forces have been fighting in this area since July 5. Ramadi Saqlawiyah Karma Khaldiya 30 MILES 20 10 5 Falluja Baghdad Abu Ghraib Iraqi forces advanced here on July 9 to threaten an ISIS supply route. Habbaniya Lake Cities labeled in red are under ISIS control. ISIS carried out five car bomb attacks on July 10 in this Iraqi-held town. Iraqi forces have been fighting in this area since July 5.", + " Ramadi Saqlawiyah Karma Khaldiya 30 MILES 20 10 5 Falluja Abu Ghraib Iraqi forces advanced here on July 9 to threaten an ISIS supply route. Habbaniya Lake Cities labeled in red are under ISIS control. ISIS carried out five car bomb attacks on July 10 in this Iraqi-held town. Iraqi forces have been fighting in this area since July 5. Ramadi Saqlawiyah Karma Khaldiya 30 MILES 20 10 5 Falluja Iraqi forces advanced here on July 9 to threaten an ISIS supply route. Habbaniya Lake ISIS carried out five car bomb attacks on July 10 in this Iraqi-held town.", + " Iraqi forces advanced here on July 9 to threaten an ISIS supply route. Saqlawiyah Karma Khaldiya 20 10 5 MILES Falluja Iraqi forces have been fighting in this area since July 5. Habbaniya Lake Cities labeled in red are under ISIS control. ISIS carried out five car bomb attacks on July 10 in this Iraqi-held town. Iraqi forces advanced here on July 9 to threaten an ISIS supply route. Karma Khaldiya Saqlawiyah 10 5 MILES Falluja Iraqi forces have been fighting in this area since July 5. Cities labeled in red are under ISIS control.", + " Sources: Institute for the Study of War; Satellite image by DigitalGlobe via Google Earth U.S.-led Airstrikes Against ISIS June 15 to July 5 Each circle represents a targeted area, sized by number of airstrikes. TURKEY Kobani 44 Tal Afar Hasaka U.S. officials called the 38 airstrikes on July 4 the most sustained campaign to date. Mosul 55 Tal Abyad Erbil Aleppo Sinjar Raqqa 32 Makhmur Airstrikes in Syria Kirkuk Hawija 29 Deir al-Zour 28 IRAQ 25 SYRIA Baiji 21 IRAN Homs Tikrit Palmyra Rawa Qaim Haditha Baghdadi Hit Falluja Damascus Baghdad Waleed Ramadi Jun.", + " 15 Jun. 21 Jul. 1 Jul. 5 Habbaniya Rutba 50 MILES Airstrikes in Iraq U.S.-led Airstrikes Against ISIS June 15 to July 5 TURKEY Tal Abyad Kobani U.S. officials called the 38 airstrikes on July 4 the most sustained campaign to date. 44 Tal Afar Mosul Hasaka 55 Aleppo Erbil Sinjar Raqqa 32 Makhmur Airstrikes in Syria 29 Hawija Kirkuk 28 Deir al-Zour IRAQ 25 Baiji SYRIA Tikrit Palmyra Rawa Qaim Haditha Baghdadi Hit Falluja Baghdad Waleed Ramadi Each circle represents a targeted area,", + " sized by number of airstrikes. Rutba Habbaniya Jun. 15 Jun. 21 Jul. 1 Jul. 5 50 MILES Airstrikes in Iraq U.S.-led Airstrikes Against ISIS June 15 to July 5 U.S. officials called the 38 airstrikes on July 4 the most sustained campaign to date. 29 28 25 Airstrikes in Syria Airstrikes in Iraq Jun. 15 Jun. 21 Jul. 1 Jul. 5 TURKEY Kobani 44 Tal Afar Mosul 55 Tal Abyad Aleppo Hasaka Sinjar Raqqa 32 Makhmur Kirkuk Hawija Deir al-Zour IRAQ Each circle represents a targeted area,", + " sized by number of airstrikes. Baiji SYRIA Rawa Qaim Haditha Baghdadi Hit Falluja Waleed Ramadi Habbaniya Rutba 50 MILES jordan U.S.-led Airstrikes Against ISIS June 15 to July 5 38 airstrikes on July 4 29 28 25 Airstrikes in Syria Airstrikes in Iraq Jun. 15 Jun. 21 Jul. 1 Jul. 5 Kobani Tal Abyad 44 Mosul 55 Aleppo Raqqa IRAQ Baiji SYRIA Ramadi 50 MILES Each circle represents a targeted area, sized by number of airstrikes.", + " Source: Based on Defense Department statements TURKEY Kobani Jarablus Ras al-Ain Tal Abyad U.S. military conducted 27 airstrikes from June 25 to 29 Hasaka Clashes displaced 60,000 people Ain Issa Aleppo Shadadi SYRIA Maskana Raqqa Markada Area of detail SYRIA Deir al-Zour Islamic State control Kurdish control Contested 25 MILES TURKEY Kobani Ras al-Ain Tal Abyad Hasaka U.S. military conducted 27 airstrikes from June 25 to 29 Clashes displaced 60,000 people Ain Issa Shadadi SYRIA Raqqa Markada Area of detail SYRIA Islamic State control Kurdish control Contested Deir al-Zour 25 MILES TURKEY Kobani Ras al-Ain Tal Abyad Hasaka Ain Issa SYRIA Shadadi Raqqa Markada Area of detail SYRIA Deir al-Zour Islamic State control Kurdish control Contested 25 MILES Sources:", + " Institute for the Study of War; The Long War Journal; Satellite image by Landsat via Google Earth; United Nations ISIS attacked a checkpoint here on May 31 ISIS lost its stronghold to local militias on June 14 Tripoli Misurata Bayda Darnah Dafnya Tobruk Benghazi Mediterranean Sea Surt Nofilya Area of detail Gardabya air base Ajdabiya Islamic State LIBYA Internationally recognized government libya Misurata-Tripoli faction 50 MILES Contested ISIS attacked a checkpoint here on May 31 ISIS lost its stronghold to local militias on June 14 Bayda Dafnya Darnah Misurata Benghazi Mediterranean Sea Surt Nofilya Gardabya air base Ajdabiya Islamic State LIBYA Internationally recognized government libya Misurata-Tripoli faction 50 MILES Contested ISIS lost its stronghold to local militias on June 14 ISIS attacked a checkpoint here on May 31 Dafnya Darnah Misurata Benghazi Surt Nofilya Gardabya air base Ajdabiya libya Islamic State LIBYA Government Misurata-Tripoli faction Contested 50 MILES Source:", + " IISS Armed Conflict Database (control) Area of detail TURKEY Kobani Ras al-Ayn SYRIA Jarablus Kurdish advances since mid-June. Tal Abyad Captured June 16 Hasaka Ain Issa Captured June 23 This important ISIS supply route between Turkey and Raqqa has been cut off. Kurdish-led forces now have increased control over this strategic highway. SYRIA Maskana Shadadi Raqqa Islamic State control Kurdish control Contested 20 MILES Ras al-Ayn TURKEY Kobani Kurdish advances since mid-June. Tal Abyad Captured June 16 SYRIA Ain Issa Captured June 23 This important ISIS supply route has been cut off.", + " Kurdish-led forces now have increased control over this strategic highway. Area of detail SYRIA Islamic State control Kurdish control Contested Raqqa 20 MILES TURKEY Tal Abyad Captured June 16 Kurdish advances since mid-June. Ain Issa Captured June 23 This important ISIS supply route between Turkey and Raqqa has been cut off. SYRIA Area of detail SYRIA Islamic State control Kurdish control 20 MILES Sources: Institute for the Study of War (control); Satellite image by Landsat via Google Earth Turkey Aleppo Kilis SYRIA Damascus Bab al-Salam crossing Azaz Isis Support Kirikhan Afrin Manbij ISIS Control Al Bab Syria Reyhanli Aleppo 10 MILES Turkey Kilis Bab al-Salam crossing Azaz Isis Support Afrin ISIS Control Al Bab Syria Aleppo Turkey Kilis Bab al-Salam crossing Azaz Afrin ISIS Control Syria Aleppo Sources:", + " Non-Islamic State insurgents, Institute for the Study of War ISIS established control in these central areas May 15 May 18 ramadi ramadi Iraqi Security Forces were evacuated from the Malab neighborhood Government Facilities Contested areas Areas under ISIS control 2 MILES Areas under Iraqi Security Forces control Final Days Assault A sandstorm forces the American-led airstrike campaign to pause, giving the group time to carry out 10 car bombings followed by a wave of ground attacks that overwhelms the Iraqi forces. Iraqi Security Forces Retreat Within days, Iraqi security forces flee, and Islamic State fighters take control of key government facilities. May 15 May 18 ramadi ramadi Contested areas Government Facilities Areas under ISIS control 2 MILES Areas under Iraqi Security Forces control Final Days Assault A sandstorm forces the American-led airstrike campaign to pause,", + " giving the group time to carry out 10 car bombings followed by a wave of ground attacks that overwhelms the Iraqi forces. Iraqi Security Forces Retreat Within days, Iraqi security forces flee, and Islamic State fighters take control of key government facilities. Government Facilities ramadi May 15 Final Days Assault 2 MILES ramadi May 18 Iraqi Security Forces Retreat Contested areas Areas under ISIS control Areas under Iraqi Security Forces control Source: Institute for the Study of War Area of detail Hit IRAQ Concentration of Shiite militia and Iraq government forces Taji Khaldiya Karma Falluja Ramadi Husayba Habbaniyah Baghdad 80 miles 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 Green Zone Abu Ghraib Habbaniyah Lake Amiriyat Fallujah Ramadi Cities under ISIS control Mahmudiyah Areas where ISIS can operate Area of detail IRAQ Concentration of Shiite militia and Iraq government forces Taji Khaldiya Karma Falluja Ramadi Husayba Baghdad Habbaniyah 70 miles 60 50 40 30 20 10 Abu Ghraib Green Zone Habbaniyah Lake Amiriyat Fallujah Ramadi Cities under ISIS control Mahmudiyah Areas where ISIS can operate Ramadi Cities under ISIS control Areas where ISIS can operate Tharthar Lake Habbaniyah Karma Falluja Ramadi Baghdad 60 40 20 miles Khaldiya Husayba Amiriyat Fallujah Ramadi Cities under ISIS control Areas where ISIS can operate Tharthar Lake Hit Habbaniyah Karma Ramadi Falluja Baghdad 80 miles 60 40 20 Khaldiya Husayba Amiriyat Fallujah Sources:", + " Institute for the Study of War (ISIS area of influence); International Crisis Group. 1 MILE ISIS fighters captured this district when the offensive began last week Amiriya Deir al-Zour 120 miles Palmyra Palmyra Airport and Military Airbase Tadmur Prison Ancient sites SYRIA Homs Deir al-Zour Road to Homs, 90 miles, and Damascus, 130 miles Palmyra Damascus 1 MILE Amiriya ISIS fighters captured this district when the offensive began last week Deir al-Zour 120 miles Palmyra Palmyra Airport and Military Airbase Tadmur Prison Ancient sites SYRIA Road to Homs,", + " 90 miles, and Damascus, 130 miles Homs Deir al-Zour Palmyra Damascus 1 MILE Amiriya ISIS fighters captured this district when the offensive began last week Deir al-Zour 120 miles Palmyra Palmyra Airport and Military Airbase Tadmur Prison Ancient sites Road to Homs, 90 miles, and Damascus, 130 miles SYRIA Homs Deir al-Zour Palmyra Damascus 1 MILE Amiriya Deir al-Zour 120 miles Palmyra Tadmur Prison Palmyra Airport and Military Airbase Ancient sites SYRIA Homs Deir al-Zour Palmyra Damascus 1 MILE Amiriya ISIS fighters captured this district when the offensive began last week Deir al-Zour 120 miles Palmyra Tadmur Prison Palmyra Airport and Military Airbase Ancient sites SYRIA Homs Road to Homs,", + " 90 miles, and Damascus, 130 miles Deir al-Zour Palmyra Damascus Source: Institute for the Study of War How ISIS Expands ISIS Finances Are Strong A Rogue State Along Two Rivers How the Air Campaign Against ISIS Grew Syria After Four Years of Mayhem Turkey Ethnic majority Sunni Arab Shiite Arab Kurd Other Kurdish fighters Mosul Erbil kurd ISIS strongholds Nineveh Areas under full ISIS control Kirkuk Kurdish fighters Syria Kurdish and Shiite fighters Iraq Tikrit Iran sunni Anbar Diyala Mostly Shiite militias Ramadi Falluja Baghdad Area of detail shiite Areas of ISIS influence IRAQ 50 MILES Ethnic majority Sunni Arab Shiite Arab Kurd Other ISIS strongholds Areas of ISIS influence Mosul Erbil kurd Nineveh Areas under full ISIS control Kirkuk Iraq Tikrit sunni Mostly Shiite militias Anbar Ramadi Falluja Baghdad Area of detail shiite IRAQ 50 MILES Sources:", + " Dr. M. Izady, Columbia University\u2019s Gulf 2000 project (ethnicity map), Institute for the Study of War (ISIS area of influence); International Crisis Group. Turkey Dohuk Iran Iraqi Kurdistan Mosul Erbil Areas under full ISIS control Syria Kirkuk Sulaimaniya Nineveh 3 Hawija 4 Iraq 1 Tikrit Qaim Jalawla Sammara Tharthar Lake Anbar Area of detail Ramadi Baghdad IRAQ 2 Dohuk Iraqi Kurdistan Mosul Erbil Areas under full ISIS control Kirkuk Nineveh 3 Hawija 4 Iraq 1 Tikrit Jalawla Sammara Tharthar Lake Ramadi Baghdad 2 Dohuk Iran Iraqi Kurdistan Mosul Erbil Areas under full ISIS control Kirkuk Sulaimaniya Nineveh 3 Hawija 4 Iraq 1 Tikrit Qaim Jalawla Sammara Tharthar Lake Anbar Ramadi Baghdad 2 1 Government forces and allied militias continued to battle ISIS militants in Tikrit.", + " 2 At the same time, ISIS fighters were mounting a fierce assault on Ramadi. 3 Kurdish and Sunni tribal fighters advanced on ISIS territory from the northern city of Kirkuk. 4 Residents of Hawija said that ISIS executed some of its own fighters for trying to flee as the group came under attack from Kurdish forces. 1 Government forces and allied militias continued to battle ISIS militants in Tikrit. 2 At the same time, ISIS fighters were mounting a fierce assault on Ramadi. 3 Kurdish and Sunni tribal fighters advanced on ISIS territory from the northern city of Kirkuk. 4 Residents of Hawija said that ISIS executed some of its own fighters for trying to flee as the group came under attack from Kurdish forces.", + " 1 Government forces and allied militias continued to battle ISIS militants in Tikrit. 2 At the same time, ISIS fighters were mounting a fierce assault on Ramadi. 3 Kurdish and Sunni tribal fighters advanced on ISIS territory from the northern city of Kirkuk. 4 Residents of Hawija said that ISIS executed some of its own fighters for trying to flee as the group came under attack from Kurdish forces. Source: Institute for the Study of War Alam Area of detail Camp Speicher IRAQ Tikrit Area still controlled by ISIS. Pro-Iraqi forces took control on March 12 Albu Ajeel Tigris R. Dour 5 Miles Alam Area of detail Camp Speicher IRAQ Tikrit Area still controlled by ISIS.", + " Pro-Iraqi forces took control on March 12 Albu Ajeel Tigris R. 5 Miles Dour Alam Area of detail Camp Speicher IRAQ Tikrit Area still controlled by ISIS. Pro-Iraqi forces took control on March 12 Albu Ajeel Tigris R. 5 Miles 1. On March 2, fighters approach Tikrit from the south and east, clearing villages along the way to Alam and Dour, two ISIS strongholds. 2. ISIS uses snipers, roadside bombs and other guerrilla tactics to keep pro-government forces from advancing. ISIS wired a major bridge to Tikrit from Tuz Khurmato with bombs.", + " 3. Pro-government forces take control of Dour and Alam. As they consolidate their hold on the area, they uncover two mass graves in Albu Ajeel, believed to be the remains of soldiers massacred last summer by ISIS. 4. Pro-government forces seize large sections of Tikrit on March 10 and 11. On March 12, they take control of the western neighborhoods, leaving only the presidential palace complex and small pockets of the city center in ISIS hands. 1. On March 2, fighters approach Tikrit from the south and east, clearing villages along the way to Alam and Dour, two ISIS strongholds.", + " 2. ISIS uses snipers, roadside bombs and other guerrilla tactics to keep pro-government forces from advancing. ISIS wired a major bridge to Tikrit from Tuz Khurmato with bombs. 3. Pro-government forces take control of Dour and Alam. As they consolidate their hold on the area, they uncover two mass graves in Albu Ajeel, believed to be the remains of soldiers massacred last summer by ISIS. 4. Pro-government forces seize large sections of Tikrit on March 10 and 11. On March 12, they take control of the western neighborhoods, leaving only the presidential palace complex and small pockets of the city center in ISIS hands.", + " 1. On March 2, fighters approach Tikrit from the south and east, clearing villages along the way to Alam and Dour, two ISIS strongholds. 2. ISIS uses snipers, roadside bombs and other guerrilla tactics to keep pro-government forces from advancing. ISIS wired a major bridge to Tikrit from Tuz Khurmato with bombs. 3. Pro-government forces take control of Dour and Alam. As they consolidate their hold on the area, they uncover two mass graves in Albu Ajeel, believed to be the remains of soldiers massacred last summer by ISIS. 4. Pro-government forces seize large sections of Tikrit on March 10 and 11.", + " On March 12, they take control of the western neighborhoods, leaving only the presidential palace complex and small pockets of the city center in ISIS hands. Source: Institute for the Study of War, Long War Journal, Iraqi government, Asa\u2019ab Ahl al-Haq TURKEY 100 miles IRAN Hasaka Mosul IRAQI KURDISTAN Raqqa Aleppo ISIS support areas Kirkuk Deir al-Zour Areas under full ISIS control Euphrates Tigris LEBANON SYRIA IRAQ Damascus Baghdad Rutba Falluja ISRAEL JORDAN 100 miles TURKEY IRAQI KURDISTAN IRAN Hasaka Mosul Erbil Aleppo Raqqa SYRIA IRAQ Kirkuk Deir al-Zour Areas under full ISIS control Euphrates Abu Kamal Tigris ISIS support areas LEBANON Damascus Baghdad Rutba Falluja ISRAEL JORDAN 100 miles Mosul Raqqa Aleppo IRAQI KURDISTAN IRAQ SYRIA Euphrates Tigris full ISIS control Damascus Baghdad Source:", + " Institute for the Study of War TURKEY Area of detail Aleppo Ras Al-Ayn SYRIA Tel Tamr Residents reported ISIS bombed the bridge over the river on Tuesday. Damascus Tel Shamiram ISIS reported to be holding about 60 women and children captive. Tel Goran Tel Hormizd SYRIA Hasaka There are 35 Assyrian villages on the Khabur River. 5 Miles TURKEY SYRIA Ras Al-Ayn Tel Tamr Residents reported ISIS bombed the bridge over the river on Tuesday. Tel Shamiram ISIS reported to be holding about 60 women and children captive. Tel Goran Tel Hormizd There are 35 Assyrian villages on the Khabur River.", + " Sources: Assyrian Human Rights Network, Assyrian International News Agency, Syriac Military Council North Africa and Middle East The largest share of foreign fighters counted in the study came from Tunisia, a country with one of the more stable post-Arab Spring governments. Saudi Arabia\u2019s share is also large, but recent government crackdowns have stanched the flow of fighters. Former Soviet States Decades of officially sanctioned religious persecution, ethnic conflicts and Islamic radicalization are key reasons for the flow of fighters from post-Soviet states, according to Peter Neumann, director of the I.C.S.R. Many fighters have combat experience from decades of war in the Caucasus.", + " Western Europe The war in Syria has drawn young Europeans, many of whom have used cheap flights to Turkey as a route to Syria. Mr. Neumann noted that some small European countries like Belgium produce a remarkable number of fighters in relation to their population. Other regions American law enforcement officials have focused not only on monitoring social media networks more aggressively, but also on educating state and local authorities about ways to identify potential travelers. Low end of estimate range China 300 BOSNIA 330 UzBEK. 500 PakISTAN 500 TurkM. U.K. 500 to 600 Ger. 500 to 600 Turkey 600 Russia 800 to 1,", + "500 France 1,200 Morocco 1,500 Tunisia 1,500 tO 3,000 FIGHTERS CAN. Kos. KaZ. SWE. Aus. BelgIUM 440 Tajikistan U.S. 100 fighters NETH. Spain Kyrgyzstan UKRAINE Jordan 1,500 Den. Aus. FinL. Saudi Arabia 1,500 to 2,500 Italy Lebanon 900 Egypt Libya 600 Sudan Alg. Isr. Yem. Somalia Kuwait North Africa and Middle East The largest share of foreign fighters counted in the study came from Tunisia, a country with one of the more stable post-Arab Spring governments.", + " Saudi Arabia\u2019s share is also large, but recent government crackdowns have stanched the flow of fighters. Morocco 1,500 Tunisia 1,500 tO 3,000 FIGHTERS Jordan 1,500 Saudi Arabia 1,500 to 2,500 Lebanon 900 Egypt Libya 600 Sudan Alg. Isr. Yem. Somalia Kuwait Former Soviet States Decades of officially sanctioned religious persecution, ethnic conflicts and Islamic radicalization are key reasons for the flow of fighters from post-Soviet states, according to Peter Neumann, director of the I.C.S.R. Many fighters have combat experience from decades of war in the Caucasus.", + " UzBEK. 500 TurkM. Russia 800 to 1,500 KaZ. Low end of estimate range Tajikistan UKRAINE Western Europe The war in Syria has drawn young Europeans, many of whom have used cheap flights to Turkey as a route to Syria. Mr. Neumann noted that some small European countries like Belgium produce a remarkable number of fighters in relation to their population. U.K. 500 to 600 Ger. 500 to 600 France 1,200 SWE. BelgIUM 440 NETH. Spain Den. Aus. FinL. Italy Other regions American law enforcement officials have focused not only on monitoring social media networks more aggressively,", + " but also on educating state and local authorities about ways to identify potential travelers. China 300 BOSNIA 330 PakISTAN 500 Turkey 600 CAN. Kos. Aus. U.S. 100 fighters U.K. 5-600 Ger. 5-600 UzBEK. 500 PakI. 500 BOS. China Turkey 600 TURKM. Russia 800 TO 1,500 France 1,200 Morocco 1,500 Tunisia 1,500 tO 3,000 FIGHTERS CAN. KaZ. SWE. Belg. U.S. 100 fighters NETH.", + " Jordan 1,500 Low end of estimate range Saudi Arabia 1,500 to 2,500 Leb. 900 Libya Isr. Sources: Country of origin data from Peter Neumann, King's College London; the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence 200 feet damaged buildings CRATER damaged buildings Destruction in Kobani Damage in the eastern part of the city. Several buildings appear to be destroyed or heavily damaged. 200 FEET Turkey ground Carved out for car storage border crossing syria Border Crossing Hundreds of vehicles clustered around a border crossing point on the Syrian side of the border. 200 feet Refugee Camp Refugee Camp Over the border in Turkey,", + " a camp has been created for the increasing numbers of refugees fleeing the violence. 200 feet damaged buildings CRATER damaged buildings Destruction in Kobani Damage in the eastern part of the city. Several buildings appear to be destroyed or heavily damaged. Satellite images by DigitalGlobe via Unitar/Unosat Rawa Area of detail Ana IRAQ Haditha Samarra Barwana Tharthar Lake Al-Asad air base Hit Kubaysa Control ISIS Iraqi government Contested Captured or contested since Sept. 1 Baghdad Ramadi Falluja Area of detail Haditha IRAQ Tharthar Lake Al-Asad air base Hit Kubaysa Control ISIS Iraqi government Contested Captured or contested since Sept.", + " 1 Ramadi Falluja Source: Institute for the Study of War CITY OF KOBANI Border SYRIA Mine fields Turkish tanks TURKEY Turkish Kurds watch the Islamist assault to the city while Turkish tanks stand. SYRIA CITY OF KOBANI Border Mine fields Turkish tank TURKEY Turkish Kurds watch the Islamist assault to the city while Turkish tanks stand. Photograph by Umit Bektas/Reuters. Turkish armored units enforced border crossing. TURKEY Mursitpinar Minefields Minefields SYRIA To Jerablus A huge plume rose in this area Wednesday. Black ISIS flag visible on hilltop. Kobani Airstrikes in this area have targeted tanks and armed vehicles.", + " Five latest U.S. airstrikes targeted areas south of the city only. 1 mile 500 miles to Baghdad Turkish armored units enforced border crossing. Mursitpinar TURKEY Minefields To Jarablus SYRIA A huge plume rose in this area Wednesday. Black ISIS flag visible on hilltop. Kobani Five latest U.S. airstrikes targeted areas south of the city only. 1 mile Source: Satellite image by DigitalGlobe, via Google Earth Turkey 843,779 Konya Refugee camps Tabriz Adana Iran Aleppo IRAQI KURDISTAN Raqqa Mosul Kirkuk syria Lebanon 1,185,275 Euphrates ISIS-controlled areas Beirut Mediterranean Sea Damascus Baghdad Iraq 215,", + "303 as of Sept. 15 Tel Aviv Amman Najaf Gaza israel Egypt 139,625 Jordan 615,792 saudi arabia Number of refugees Cairo Low high Refugee camps NO. of refugees Turkey 843,779 Low high Aleppo Raqqa syria Lebanon 1,185,275 Damascus Iraq 215,303 as of Sept. 15 israel Egypt 139,625 Jordan 615,792 saudi arabia Source: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Source: Based on Defense Department statements 100 miles TURKEY Attack on Khorasan group in this area Hasaka IRAN Mosul IRAQI KURDISTAN Aleppo Raqqa Kirkuk Deir al-Zour Locations hit by airstrikes IRAQ Euphrates Abu Kamal Tigris SYRIA LEBANON Approximate areas under full Islamic State control Damascus Baghdad Falluja ISRAEL JORDAN TURKEY 100 miles IRAQI KURDISTAN IRAN Mosul Hasaka Aleppo Erbil Raqqa Attack on Khorasan group near this area Kirkuk IRAQ Deir al-Zour Locations hit by airstrikes Euphrates Abu Kamal Tigris SYRIA Approximate areas under full Islamic State control LEBANON Damascus Baghdad Falluja Rutba Attacks on Khorasan ISIS locations hit by airstrikes TURKEY IRAN IRAQI KURDISTAN Aleppo Raqqa IRAQ Deir al-Zour Homs Tigris SYRIA Tigris Euphrates Baghdad Damascus 100 miles Sources:", + " Defense Department; Institute for the Study of War Sources: Satellite images on left from DigitalGlobe, via Google Earth; images of targeted structures from the Defense Department Strikes Reported Each Day Area of detail AuG. 8 IRAQ Baghdad KURDISH AUTONOMOUS REGION Mosul Dam Mosul Mount Sinjar AUG. 18 Erbil 0 15 Iraq Kirkuk Near Mount Sinjar At least 13 strikes Near Mosul Dam At least 35 Strikes Near Erbil At least 20 Strikes Strikes Reported Each Day 15 0 AUG. 18 Aug. 8 Area of detail Baghdad KURDISH AUTONOMOUS REGION Mosul Dam Mosul Mount Sinjar Erbil Iraq Near Mount Sinjar At least 13 strikes Near Erbil At least 20 Strikes Near Mosul Dam At least 35 Strikes Mount Sinjar Thousands of Yazidi refugees were trapped on the mountain after fleeing Islamist fighters.", + " Targets included: 3 armed vehicles 5 personnel carriers 1 armored vehicle 1 Humvee 3 trucks 1 mortar position 4 checkpoints Mosul Dam American strikes allowed Kurdish fighters to regain the dam, which they lost two weeks ago. Targets included: 19 armed vehicles 7 Humvees 2 antiaircraft guns 1 armored vehicle 9 fighting positions 3 checkpoints 2 I.E.D.s 2 personnel carriers Erbil Strikes in this area helped repel militants approaching the regional capital. Targets included: 7 armed vehicles 1 mobile artillery 7 vehicles 2 mortar positions 1 mine-resistant vehicle Note: Strikes were not reported comprehensively day by day,", + " so some may be missing from daily tallies. SYRIA IRAQ NORTH Red dots are vehicles visible in satellite imagery About 13 miles TO BORDER Sinuni ROADBLOCKS Kursi ABOUT 70 MILES TO MOSUL 25 miles Bara Sinjar Jaddala Sinjar Mountains Elevation 4,449 ft. Area visible Area of assessed satellite imagery Mosul IRAQ Baghdad ABOUT 250 MILES TO BAGHDAD Area of assessed satellite imagery SYRIA IRAQ Sinjar Red indicates vehicles on mountain Sinjar Mountains Elevation 4,449 ft. Source: Vehicle locations from satellite imagery by DigitalGlobe via Amnesty International January 1 to May 31 Over 151 days,", + " families, on average, were displaced daily. Anbar Province 321,210 families\n\nknown displaced Months before it became something of a household name, ISIS took control of much of Anbar Province, displacing an estimated 500,000 Iraqis. June 1 to July 31 Over 61 days, families, on average, were displaced daily. Anbar Province 321,210 families\n\nknown displaced Another half-million Iraqis were displaced in June and July when ISIS captured Mosul and advanced south toward Baghdad. August 1 to August 6 Over 6 days, families, on average, were displaced daily. Anbar Province 321,", + "210 families\n\nknown displaced In early August, ISIS seized several towns under Kurdish control, displacing Yazidis, Christians and other religious minority groups. Although the United Nations says that the capture of Sinjar may have displaced that number is not yet included in the official data. Note: The United Nations estimates one Iraqi family is equal to six individuals. Source: IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix Mosul Islamist militants have controlled Iraq's second-largest city since June 10. Mosul Dam Captured by militants on Thursday. ABOUT 150 MILES TO BAGHDAD Iraq Mahmour Bombed by American jets on Friday. Gwer Bombed on Thursday.", + " About 40 miles TO ERBIL About 35 miles TO ERBIL Kalak Historic citadel of Erbil United States Consulate is in this neighborhood Chammah ERBIL AIRPORT Area visible Erbil Erbil Kurdish capital IRAQ Baghdad NORTH Mahmour Bombed by American jets on Friday. Gwer Bombed on Thursday. Mosul Islamist militants have controlled Iraq's second-largest city since June 10. Mosul Dam Captured by militants on Thursday. Iraq About 40 miles TO ERBIL About 35 miles TO ERBIL Historic citadel of Erbil United States Consulate is in this neighborhood Area visible Erbil Kurdish capital Erbil IRAQ Baghdad NORTH Mahmour Bombed by American jets on Friday.", + " Mosul Dam Captured by militants on Thursday. Gwer Bombed on Thursday. Mosul About 40 miles TO ERBIL Erbil Kurdish capital Iraq NORTH Sources: American and Kurdish officials Click group names for more details. Naqshbandia Order/J.R.T.N. \u00bb Baathist Active in: Diyala, Salahuddin ISIS relationship: Fighting Established in 2007, the group's reputed leader was a high-ranking deputy in Saddam Hussein's regime. The group is believed to have initially assisted ISIS in its push south from Mosul. 1920 Revolution Brigades \u00bb Baathist Active in: Diyala, Anbar ISIS relationship:", + " Fighting in some areas Formed by disaffected Iraqi Army officers who were left without jobs after the Americans dissolved the military in 2003. Islamic Army of Iraq \u00bb Salafist Active in: Diyala, Salahuddin, Anbar ISIS relationship: Periodic fighting ISIS has targeted family members of the leadership of this group, which has long had a presence in Diyala and has been involved in past sectarian battles. Mujahedeen Army \u00bb Salafist Active in: Diyala, Salahuddin, Anbar ISIS relationship: Truce A nationalist Islamist group that advocates overthrowing the Iraqi government. Khata'ib al-Mustapha \u00bb Salafist Active in:", + " Diyala ISIS relationship: Truce Islamic militants who fight against the government. Army of Muhammad \u00bb Salafist Active in: Anbar ISIS relationship: Allies Islamic militants who fight against the government. Khata'ib Tawrat al-Ashreen \u00bb Anti-government Sunni Tribe Active in: Diyala, Salahuddin ISIS relationship: Truce Sunni tribes opposed to the Iraqi government. Ansar al-Islam/Ansar al-Sunna \u00bb Islamist Jihadist Active in: Diyala ISIS relationship: Fighting An Al Qaeda-affiliated group that has led a number of deadly attacks in Iraq over the years. Turkey PREDOMINANTLY KURDISH AREAS Iran Al Kasik military base Rabia Aleppo Mosul Sinjar Kirkuk Syria Tuz Khurmatu Leb.", + " Khanaqin Kurdish autonomous region Damascus Baghdad Iraq JORDAN Amman Najaf Turkey PREDOMINANTLY KURDISH AREAS Iran Al Kasik military base Rabia Sinjar Mosul Syria Kirkuk Tuz Khurmatu Khanaqin Kurdish autonomous region Baghdad Iraq Najaf Sources: Dr. M. Izady, Columbia University\u2019s Gulf 2000 project, Caerus Associates, Long War Journal, Institute for the Study of War turkey Syrian RefugeesMost of the Syrians who have been displaced have fled to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Nearly all of those fleeing to Iraq have gone to the Kurdish autonomous region. iran Mosul Raqqa Erbil Aleppo Kurdish autonomous region Kirkuk syria lebanon Damascus Thousands of refugees at destination Baghdad iraq ISRAEL jordan 10 100 Saudi Arabia turkey iran Displaced IraqisThe rapid advance of Sunni militants from Mosul toward Baghdad displaced an estimated 500,", + "000 Iraqis in recent weeks, adding to the hundreds of thousands displaced earlier this year. Many have gone to the already crowded camps in the Kurdish autonomous region. Mosul Raqqa Erbil Aleppo Kirkuk syria leb. Damascus iraq Baghdad jordan Amman ISRAEL Saudi Arabia THOUSANDS OF REFUGEES AT DESTINATION 10 100 Mosul Aleppo syria Kurdish autonomous region Leb. Damascus Baghdad iraq jordan Syrian RefugeesMost of the Syrians who have been displaced have fled to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Nearly all of those fleeing to Iraq have gone to the Kurdish autonomous region. turkey Mosul Erbil Aleppo Kirkuk syria leb.", + " Damascus iraq Baghdad jordan Displaced IraqisThe rapid advance of Sunni militants from Mosul toward Baghdad displaced an estimated 500,000 Iraqis in recent weeks, adding to the hundreds of thousands displaced earlier this year. Many have gone to the already crowded camps in the Kurdish autonomous region. Source: United Nations Ottoman Empire\n\nSykes-Picot Agreement\n\nCurrent Boundaries Ottoman provincial borders Current borders Adana Turkey Persia Aleppo Aleppo Nicosia Mosul Iran Zor Beirut Syria Lebanon Beirut Lebanon Damascus Baghdad Syria Iraq Beirut Baghdad Tel Aviv Amman Jerusalem Israel Basra Jordan Jerusalem Saudi Arabia Kuwait Kuwait Ottoman provincial borders Current borders Turkey Adana Persia Aleppo Aleppo Mosul Zor Iran Beirut Syria Lebanon Lebanon Damascus Baghdad Syria Beirut Baghdad Iraq Tel Aviv Israel Basra Jerusalem Saudi Arabia Sykes-Picot Current borders Turkey French Control Aleppo Independent Arab states under French influence Nicosia Iran Syria Lebanon British Control Beirut Damascus Iraq Independent Arab states under British influence International Zone Baghdad Tel Aviv Amman British Control Jerusalem Israel Jordan Saudi Arabia Kuwait Kuwait Sykes-Picot Current borders Turkey French Control Independent Arab states under French influence Iran Syria British Control Damascus Baghdad Iraq International Zone Independent Arab states under British influence British Control Israel Jordan Saudi Arabia Shiite Sunni Shiite/Sunni mixed Other religions Kurdish Turkey Aleppo Nicosia Iran Syria Lebanon Beirut Damascus Iraq Baghdad Tel Aviv Amman Jerusalem Israel Jordan Saudi Arabia Kuwait Kuwait Shiite Sunni Shiite/Sunni mixed Other religions Kurdish Turkey Aleppo Iran Syria Lebanon Damascus Baghdad Iraq Tel Aviv Israel Jordan Saudi Arabia Ottoman Empire Before WWI,", + " the Middle East was divided into several administrative provinces under the Ottoman Empire. Modern Iraq is roughly made up of the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. Sykes-Picot Agreement In 1916, Mark Sykes and Fran\u00e7ois Georges-Picot, British and French diplomats, secretly drew the first map to divide up the Ottoman Empire, beginning a series of border negotiations that led to the establishment of British and French mandates in 1920. Religious and Ethnic Regions Today Iraq's current boundaries bring together different, often adversarial, groups under one mixed national identity that has been strained by conflict. Still, if Iraq were to split, partition would not be so simple as drawing new borders along religious or ethnic lines.", + " Sources: Rand, McNally & Co. World Atlas (1911 Ottoman Empire map); United Kingdom National Archives (Sykes-Picot); Dr. M. Izady, Columbia University\u2019s Gulf 2000 project (religion and ethnicity map) Key\n\nSunni majority Shiite majority Christian majority Mixed areas 2003 Sadr City Kadhimiya Adhamiya BAGHDAD Green Zone Baghdad Airport Tigris River 2 miles 2009 Adhamiya Huriya BAGHDAD Green Zone Amiriya Baghdad Airport Tigris River 2 miles 2003: Before the Invasion Before the American invasion, Baghdad\u2019s major sectarian groups lived mostly side by side in mixed neighborhoods.", + " The city\u2019s Shiite and Sunni populations were roughly equal, according to Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor and Middle East expert. 2009: Violence Fuels Segregation Sectarian violence exploded in 2006. Families living in areas where another sect was predominant were threatened with violence if they did not move. By 2009 Shiites were a majority, with Sunnis reduced to about 10 percent to 15 percent of the population. \u2022 Kadhimiya, a historically Shiite neighborhood, is home to a sacred Shiite shrine. \u2022 Adhamiya, a historically Sunni neighborhood, contains the Abu Hanifa Mosque, a Sunni landmark.", + " \u2022 The Green Zone became the heavily fortified center of American operations during the occupation. \u2022 Sadr City was the center of the insurgent Mahdi Army, led by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. \u2022 Huriya was transformed in 2006 when the Mahdi Army pushed out hundreds of families in a brutal spasm of sectarian cleansing. \u2022 More than 8,000 displaced families relocated to Amiriya, the neighborhood where the Sunni Awakening began in Baghdad. \u2022 Adhamiya, a Sunni island in Shiite east Baghdad, was walled and restricted along with other neighborhoods in 2007 for security. \u2022 Neighborhoods east of the Tigris River are generally more densely populated than areas to the west.", + " 2003 Sadr City Kadhimiya Adhamiya BAGHDAD Green Zone Baghdad Airport Tigris River 2 miles 2003: Before the Invasion Before the American invasion, Baghdad\u2019s major sectarian groups lived mostly side by side in mixed neighborhoods. The city\u2019s Shiite and Sunni populations were roughly equal, according to Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor and Middle East expert. \u2022 Kadhimiya, a historically Shiite neighborhood, is home to a sacred Shiite shrine. \u2022 Adhamiya, a historically Sunni neighborhood, contains the Abu Hanifa Mosque, a Sunni landmark. \u2022 The Green Zone became the heavily fortified center of American operations during the occupation.", + " \u2022 Sadr City was the center of the insurgent Mahdi Army, led by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. 2009 Adhamiya Huriya BAGHDAD Green Zone Amiriya Baghdad Airport Tigris River 2 miles 2009: Violence Fuels Segregation Sectarian violence exploded in 2006. Families living in areas where another sect was predominant were threatened with violence if they did not move. By 2009 Shiites were a majority, with Sunnis reduced to about 10 percent to 15 percent of the population. \u2022 Huriya was transformed in 2006 when the Mahdi Army pushed out hundreds of families in a brutal spasm of sectarian cleansing.", + " \u2022 More than 8,000 displaced families relocated to Amiriya, the neighborhood where the Sunni Awakening began in Baghdad. \u2022 Adhamiya, a Sunni island in Shiite east Baghdad, was walled and restricted along with other neighborhoods in 2007 for security. \u2022 Neighborhoods east of the Tigris River are generally more densely populated than areas to the west. Source: Dr. M. Izady, Columbia University\u2019s Gulf 2000 project ABOUT 100 MILES TO MOSUL ABOUT 50 MILES TO KIRKUK Power plant 1 Tigris River Oil refinery Employee dormitories Village Employee village Village Smoke plume at 10:", + "30 a.m. Wednesday. Baiji ABOUT 115 MILES TO BAGHDAD 1 MILE 1 MILE Oil refinery Power plant ABOUT 100 MILES TO MOSUL Employee dormitories Village Employee village Tigris River Village Baiji Smoke plume at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. ABOUT 115 MILES TO BAGHDAD Source: Satellite image by NASA Key Towns attacked Bomb attacks ABOUT 140 MILES TO MOSUL Miles from Central Baghdad ABOUT 80 MILES TO KIRKUK Several clashes occurred at the outskirts of Samarra, where Shiite militiamen have been sent to protect the Al-", + "Askari Shrine. 70 Adhaim June 15 Samarra JUNE 11, 13, 17 60 Al-Mutasim JUNE 14 Dhuluiya JUNE 12 50 Ishaqi Muqdadiya The Iraqi army retook control of Ishaqi and Muqdadiya on June 14. In Muqdadiya, a Shiite militia assisted the government forces. 40 Dujail JUNE 14 30 Militants took control of several neighborhoods in Baquba on June 16 but were repulsed by security officers after a three-hour gun battle. Later, 44 Sunni prisoners were killed in a government-controlled police station.", + " Baquba June 16, 17 Tarmiyah JUNE 11 20 Falluja and many towns in the western province of Anbar have been under ISIS control for about six months. Tigris River 10 At least five bomb attacks occurred in Baghdad, mainly in Shiite areas, in the week after the rebel group took Mosul. The bodies of four young men were found shot on June 17 in a neighborhood controlled by Shiite militiamen. Sadr City Kadhimiya Falluja Bab al-Sheikh Al-Bab Al-Sharqi Baghdad Saidiyah Key Towns attacked Bomb attacks Miles from Central Baghdad 70 Adhaim Samarra 60 Al-Mutasim Dhuluiya Muqdadiya Ishaqi 40 Dujail 30 Baquba Tarmiyah 20 10 Falluja Baghdad Several clashes occurred at the outskirts of Samarra,", + " where Shiite militiamen have been sent to protect the Al-Askari Shrine. The Iraqi army retook control of Ishaqi and Muqdadiya on June 14. In Muqdadiya, a Shiite militia assisted the government forces. Militants took control of several neighborhoods in Baquba on June 16 but were repulsed by security officers after a three-hour gun battle. Later, 44 Sunni prisoners were killed in a government-controlled police station. At least five bomb attacks occurred in Baghdad, mainly in Shiite areas, in the week after the rebel group took Mosul. The bodies of four young men were found shot on June 17 in a neighborhood controlled by Shiite militiamen.", + " Falluja and many towns in the western province of Anbar have been under ISIS control for about six months. Sources: Institute for the Study of War, Long War Journal 100 80 60 Attacks That Could Be Attributed to ISIS 40 20 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Mosul Kirkuk Baghdad IRAQ Basra 2004 51 attacks 2005 58 attacks 2006 5 attacks 2007 56 attacks 2008 62 attacks 2009 78 attacks 2010 86 attacks 2011 34 attacks 2012 603 attacks 2013 419 attacks 100 80 Attacks That Could Be Attributed to ISIS 60 40 20 \u201904 \u201905 \u201906 \u201907 \u201908 \u201909 \u201910 \u201911 \u201912 \u201913 Mosul Baghdad IRAQ Basra 2004 51 attacks 2005 58 attacks 2006 5 attacks 2007 56 attacks 2008 62 attacks 2009 78 attacks 2010 86 attacks 2011 34 attacks 2012 603 attacks 2013 419 attacks 2004-", + "05 The group emerges as \u201cAl Qaeda in Iraq\u201d following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Its goal is to provoke a civil war. 2006-07 The group\u2019s February 2006 bombing of one of Iraq's most revered Shiite shrines ignites sectarian violence across the country. After merging with several other Sunni insurgent groups, it changes its name to the Islamic State of Iraq. 2008-10 I.S.I. claims responsibility for more than 200 attacks, many in densely-populated areas around Baghdad. 2011-12 The group is relatively quiet for most of 2011, but re-emerges after American troops withdraw from Iraq.", + " 2013 Seeing new opportunities for growth, I.S.I. enters Syria\u2019s civil war and changes its name to reflect a new aim of establishing an Islamic religious state spanning Iraq and Syria. Its success in Syria bleeds over the border to Iraq. 2004-05 The group emerges as \u201cAl Qaeda in Iraq\u201d following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Its goal is to provoke a civil war. 2006-07 The group\u2019s February 2006 bombing of one of Iraq's most revered Shiite shrines ignites sectarian violence across the country. After merging with several other Sunni insurgent groups, it changes its name to the Islamic State of Iraq.", + " 2008-10 I.S.I. claims responsibility for more than 200 attacks, many in densely-populated areas around Baghdad. 2011-12 The group is relatively quiet for most of 2011, but re-emerges after American troops withdraw from Iraq. 2013 Seeing new opportunities for growth, I.S.I. enters Syria\u2019s civil war and changes its name to reflect a new aim of establishing an Islamic religious state spanning Iraq and Syria. Its success in Syria bleeds over the border to Iraq. 2004-05 The group emerges as \u201cAl Qaeda in Iraq\u201d following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.", + " Its goal is to provoke a civil war. 2006-07 The group\u2019s February 2006 bombing of one of Iraq's most revered Shiite shrines ignites sectarian violence across the country. After merging with several other Sunni insurgent groups, it changes its name to the Islamic State of Iraq. 2008-10 I.S.I. claims responsibility for more than 200 attacks, many in densely-populated areas around Baghdad. 2011-12 The group is relatively quiet for most of 2011, but re-emerges after American troops withdraw from Iraq. 2013 Seeing new opportunities for growth, I.S.I.", + " enters Syria\u2019s civil war and changes its name to reflect a new aim of establishing an Islamic religious state spanning Iraq and Syria. Its success in Syria bleeds over the border to Iraq. 2004-05 The group emerges as \u201cAl Qaeda in Iraq\u201d following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Its goal is to provoke a civil war. 2006-07 The group\u2019s February 2006 bombing of one of Iraq's most revered Shiite shrines ignites sectarian violence across the country. After merging with several other Sunni insurgent groups, it changes its name to the Islamic State of Iraq. 2008-10 I.S.I.", + " claims responsibility for more than 200 attacks, many in densely-populated areas around Baghdad. 2011-12 The group is relatively quiet for most of 2011, but re-emerges after American troops withdraw from Iraq. 2013 Seeing new opportunities for growth, I.S.I. enters Syria\u2019s civil war and changes its name to reflect a new aim of establishing an Islamic religious state spanning Iraq and Syria. Its success in Syria bleeds over the border to Iraq. Note: Before 2011, less information was available on who was responsible for attacks, so the number of ISIS attacks from 2004 to 2010 may be undercounted.", + " Sources: Global Terrorism Database, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (attack data); Congressional Research Service; Council on Foreign Relations; Long War Journal; Institute for the Study of War turkey Hasakah Mosul Erbil Aleppo Raqqa Kirkuk Deir al-Zour iran Baiji syria Tikrit Homs Jalawla lebanon Samarra Dhuluiya Damascus iraq Baghdad israel saudi arabia jordan kuwait turkey Hasakah Mosul Aleppo Kirkuk syria iran Tikrit Homs leb. Samarra Damascus Baghdad iraq israel saudi arabia jordan kuwait Source: \u201cThe Islamic State in Iraq Returns to Diyala\u201d by Jessica Lewis,", + " Institute for the Study of War Mosul Kirkuk Baiji Tikrit Dhuluiyah Samarra Ramadi Baghdad Iraq Falluja Tigris Euphrates River Basra Predominant group Sunni Arab Shiite Arab Kurd 50 miles Source: Dr. M. Izady, Columbia University\u2019s Gulf 2000 project Mosul Iraq Mosul Then: American forces took control of Mosul in April 2003. What followed was a period of relative peace until mid-2004 when periodic insurgent attacks flared, resulting in a large-scale battle in November. The death toll reached dozens, including a number of Iraqi soldiers who were publicly beheaded. Related Article \u00bb Now:", + " In perhaps the most stunning recent development, Sunni militants drove Iraqi military forces out of Mosul on June 10, forcing a half-million residents to flee the city. Iraqi soldiers reportedly dropped their weapons and donned civilian clothing to escape ISIS insurgents. Moises Saman for The New York Times Falluja Iraq Falluja Then: Falluja played a pivotal role in the American invasion of Iraq. It was the site of a number of large-scale battles with insurgents. In April 2003, it became a hot bed for controversy when American soldiers opened fire on civilians after claiming they had been shot at. Incessant fighting left the city decimated,", + " leveling a majority of its infrastructure and leaving about half its original population. Related Article \u00bb Now: Sunni militants seized Falluja\u2019s primary municipal buildings on Jan. 3. The takeover came as an early and significant victory for the group, initiating a slew of attacks south of the city. Max Becherer for The New York Times Tikrit Iraq Tikrit Then: The home of Saddam Hussein, Tikrit became the target of an early American military operation during the Iraq war. Securing it proved cumbersome, however, as insurgents mounted continued attacks on the city for years afterward. On Dec. 14, 2003, Hussein was found hiding in an eight-foot deep hole,", + " just south of Tikrit. Related Article \u00bb Now: Tikrit fell to ISIS insurgents on June 11, clearing a path for them to march on to Baiji, home to one of Iraq\u2019s foremost oil-refining operations. After taking the city in less than a day, militants continued the fight just south, in Samarra. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Samarra Iraq Samarra Then: Samarra is home to the Askariya shrine, which was bombed in 2006, prompting an extended period of sectarian violence across the country. Related Article \u00bb Now: After an initial attack on June 5, ISIS insurgents have now positioned themselves just miles away from Samarra.", + " It is unclear whether they are capable of capturing the city in the coming days, but the Shiite shrine makes it a volatile target. Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times Videos How can ISIS be stopped? Cripple the organization\u2019s oil smuggling trade. A look at the goals of of the three main groups in Iraq \u2014 Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish \u2014 as the country threatens to split apart along sectarian lines. Background on goals, tactics and the potential long-term threat to the United States from the militant group known as the Islamic State. The groups fighting for Kobani meet the politics behind Turkey\u2019s decision to assist them in pushing back the Islamic State.\n\nThe sharp deterioration in Iraq represents a significant security issue to both the United States and Iran,", + " adversaries in a range of disputes, including the Syria conflict. Both were seeking ways to help avoid a collapse in the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite whose marginalization of Sunnis and other sects has been blamed by some critics for the dysfunction that has steadily worsened in Iraq since the American departure.\n\nFor Iran\u2019s Shiite leaders, the Iraq crisis represents a direct Sunni militant threat on their doorstep. The commander of Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, Gen. Qassim Suleimani, an architect of military strategy who has helped President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in his war against Sunni radicals,", + " arrived in Baghdad this week and has been reviewing how Iraq\u2019s Shiite militias are prepared to defend Baghdad and other areas.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cThe mobilization of the Shia militias, and Qassim Suleimani\u2019s presence, is a very good indication of how seriously they\u2019re taking this,\u201d Hayder al-Khoei, an associate fellow at the London-based Chatham House research group, said in an interview with Iranwire, a website run by expatriate Iranian journalists. But reports that Iran had sent hundreds of Quds fighters into Iraq were not confirmed.\n\nPhoto\n\nEven with their shared interests in a stable Iraq,", + " there was no overt sign of cooperation or communication between the United States and Iran on the crisis. Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters on Friday that \u201cwe are not talking to the Iranians about Iraq.\u201d\n\nThousands of Iraqi Shiites responded to the call by Ayatollah Sistani, 83, a respected figure among Iraq\u2019s rival sects, whose statements carry particular weight among the Shiite majority. The statement, read by his representative during Friday Prayer, said it was \u201cthe legal and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon to hold it to defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.\u201d\n\nThe representative of Ayatollah Sistani,", + " Sheikh Abdul Mehdi al-Karbalaie, spoke in Karbala, a southern city regarded by Shiites as one of Iraq\u2019s holiest. The sheikh said volunteers \u201cmust fill the gaps within the security forces.\u201d\n\nPhoto\n\nThe statement stopped short of calling for a general armed response to the incursion led by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which has emerged as one of the most potent opposition forces in the Syrian civil war and which now controls large areas of both Syria and northern Iraq.\n\nThe insurgents have pledged to march on Baghdad, but seizing and controlling the sprawling Iraqi capital, with its large population of Shiites, is likely to prove much more difficult than advancing across a Sunni heartland with little sympathy for the central government.", + " The sheikh emphasized that all Iraqis should join the fight, pulling together, so the country does not slide into all-out sectarian warfare. But in a time of mounting frictions and deepening distrust between the sects, it appeared unlikely that many Sunnis would answer the ayatollah\u2019s call. Many Sunnis feel little sympathy either for the government or for the extremists of ISIS.\n\nVolunteers began to appear at the southern gate to Baghdad, which leads to the predominantly Shiite south of the country, within an hour after Sheikh Abdul broadcast Ayatollah Sistani\u2019s call.\n\nPhoto\n\nFor the first time since the Sunni insurgents routed the government security forces on Tuesday in Mosul,", + " Iraq\u2019s second-largest city, their southward advance appeared to stall. The insurgents fanned out on Friday to the east of the Tigris River, and at least temporarily seized two towns near the Iranian border, Sadiyah and Jalawla. But security officials in Baghdad said government troops, backed by Kurdish forces, counterattacked several hours later and forced the insurgents to withdraw.\n\nShiite militia leaders reported they had also collaborated with security forces to take back control of Dhuluiya, a town about 60 miles north of Baghdad \u2014 the southernmost point of the Sunni insurgent advance.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nIraqiya,", + " the state television channel, reported Friday night that a son of Ezzat al-Douri, one of the top leaders of the Hussein era who was never captured by the Americans and is collaborating with the ISIS fighters, was killed in an Iraqi Air Force strike on Tikrit. There was no immediate way to corroborate the report.\n\nIn its language and tone, Ayatollah Sistani\u2019s statement portrayed it as a religious and patriotic act to volunteer either for the Iraqi Army or for a Shiite militia, two forces that are becoming difficult to distinguish.\n\nWhen the ayatollah\u2019s representative, Sheikh Abdul, said, \u201cWhoever can hold a weapon has to volunteer to join the security forces,\u201d the call was greeted with cheers and shouts of \u201cIt will be done!\u201d\n\nPeople in Ayatollah Sistani\u2019s office said the statement was a response to one issued by the leadership of ISIS threatening to seize not just the predominantly Sunni areas of northern Iraq,", + " but also Baghdad and the cities of Karbala and Najaf, which are sacred to Shiite Muslims.\n\n\u201cIraq and the Iraqi people are facing great danger,\u201d Sheikh Abdul said. \u201cThe terrorists are not aiming to control just several provinces. They said clearly they are targeting all other provinces, including Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf. So the responsibility to face them and fight them is the responsibility of all, not one sect or one party. The responsibility now is saving Iraq, saving our country, saving the holy places of Iraq.\u201d ", + " Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Video posted online purported to show militants at a former US base in Tikrit\n\nIraq's most senior Shia cleric has issued a call to arms after Sunni-led insurgents seized more towns.\n\nThe call by a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani came as the militants widened their grip in the north and east, and threatened to march south, towards Baghdad.\n\nThe UN says hundreds have been killed - with militants carrying out summary executions of civilians in Mosul.\n\nPresident Barack Obama has said the US is reviewing its options over Iraq.\n\nIran has also promised to help the fight against the insurgency.\n\nLed by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the Sunni insurgents have threatened to push towards the capital and other regions dominated by Iraq's Shia Muslim majority,", + " whom they regard as \"infidels\".\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Barack Obama: \"The US will do our part, but understand that ultimately it is up to the Iraqis as a sovereign nation to solve their problems.\"\n\nMr Obama told reporters on Friday that he \"will not be sending US troops back into Iraq\", but that Iraq needed additional support to \"break the momentum of extremist groups and bolster the capabilities of Iraqi security forces\".\n\nHe stressed that any US action \"has to be joined by a serious and sincere effort by Iraq's leaders to set aside sectarian differences\".\n\nThe BBC's North America editor Mark Mardell says Mr Obama made it clear the US would not be dragged into another conflict in Iraq.\n\nBritish Foreign Secretary William Hague also confirmed that the UK was not planning a British military intervention.\n\nThe price of Brent crude spiked on Friday over concerns about the ongoing violence.\n\nAt the scene,", + " Feras Kilani, BBC News, Baghdad\n\nFear is the thing that you feel the most as you walk through Baghdad's streets, as the militants come closer. People here are buying supplies and staying in front of their television sets. They remember what happened during the civil war of 2006-2008 and are very scared this will happen again.\n\nMany Iraqis no longer trust their national army after soldiers retreated from the ISIS advance. It's certainly not the same Baghdad it has been in the last few years.\n\nBBC reporters' Iraq round-up\n\nVoices from Mosul under ISIS control\n\nViewpoint: What are the goals of ISIS?\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption How strong is the army?", + " In 60 seconds.\n\nIn his sermon at Friday prayers in Karbala, Sheik Abdulmehdi al-Karbalai said: \"Citizens who are able to bear arms and fight terrorists, defending their country and their people and their holy places, should volunteer and join the security forces to achieve this holy purpose.\"\n\nThere are reports that thousands have already joined Shia militias which could play a crucial role in the defence of Baghdad, says the BBC's Richard Galpin there.\n\nMeanwhile Iraq's Ministry of Communications has started blocking social media sites in the capital, according to the privately-owned Iraqi news agency Al-Mada.\n\nAs the militants moved on to Diyala province on the border with Iran later on Friday,", + " they clashed with Shia militias in Udhaim, about 90km (60 miles) north of Baghdad and in Muqdadiya, 80km north-east of the capital, Reuters news agency says.\n\nPresident Hassan Rouhani of Iran called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki on Thursday and promised that Shia-majority Iran would \"not allow the supporters of terrorists to disrupt security and stability of Iraq through exporting terrorism to Iraq\".\n\nAccording to unnamed sources in both the the Wall Street Journal and CNN, Iran has already sent several elite units of its Revolutionary Guard to help the Iraqi government.\n\nBut according to the Associated Press, Iranian officials have denied that their forces are actively operating inside Iraq.\n\nImage copyright Reuters Image caption Volunteers have been gathering in numbers to join the fight against the Sunni-led militants\n\nImage copyright AFP Image caption Shia civilians are cleaning their weapons in readiness\n\nImage copyright AFP Image caption In the town of Taji,", + " near Baghdad, Iraqi policemen have begun digging trenches\n\nImage copyright Reuters Image caption Militants in Mosul have been celebrating their easy victory, as the army withdrew\n\nImage copyright AP Image caption A clean-up has begun in Mosul - now under militant control\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Waves of people seek refuge in Kurdish region, as Rami Ruhayem reports\n\nAnalysis: Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor\n\nThe success of ISIS can only make the turmoil in the Middle East worse. ISIS is an ultra-extremist Sunni Muslim group. Its success will deepen the sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias that is already the most dangerous fault line in the Middle East.\n\nIran,", + " which is a majority Shia Muslim country, shares a border with Iraq. It has a direct line to Iraq's Shia Muslim Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, and close links with some Iraqi Shia militias. The Iranians could direct their proxies, and even their own special forces units, at ISIS.\n\nThat might end up further inflaming the anger of Iraqi Sunnis, who have already helped the advance of ISIS through Iraq.\n\nUS air strikes, if they happen, might do the same thing. Once again in the Middle East, the Americans have limited options. Their invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 helped create and strengthen jihadist groups.\n\nNouri Maliki:", + " Iraq's leader under pressure\n\nSharpening Sunni-Shia schism bodes ill for Middle East\n\nWhat does Iraq's crisis mean for oil?\n\nRape and murder\n\nThe United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, says local authorities estimate that up to 300,000 people fled Mosul in the past few days - joining the more than 500,000 displaced by the conflict in Anbar province earlier.\n\nHowever, the number of those arriving has slowed down and some already there have begun to return.\n\nUN human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said on Friday that his office had verified reports that included the killing of 17 civilians working for the police and 12 Iraqi soldiers.\n\nHe said there had been government \"excesses\", too,", + " and cited the shelling of civilian areas on 6 and 8 June.\n\nISIS in Iraq\n\nImage copyright AP Image caption An Islamist fighter near a burning Iraqi army Humvee in Tikrit\n\nThe Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has 3,000 to 5,000 fighters, and grew out of an al-Qaeda-linked organisation in Iraq\n\nJoined in its offensives by other Sunni militant groups, including Saddam-era officers and soldiers, and sympathetic Sunni tribal fighters\n\nISIS has exploited the standoff between the Iraqi government and the minority Sunni Arab community, which complains that Shia Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is monopolising power\n\nThe organisation is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,", + " an obscure figure regarded as a battlefield commander and tactician\n\nCorrection 16 June 2014: The headline on this story has been amended to make clear that Grand Ayatollah Sistani called on all Iraqis, not just Shias, to defend their country. ", + " Of perhaps greater concern is that the growing instability in Iraq and the unrest in other big petroleum-producing countries could alter the geopolitical dynamics that have kept oil prices remarkably stable although relatively high for the last three years. The Russian annexation in Crimea and the chaos in Libya \u201cpoint to a systemic and seismic shift geopolitically,\u201d Edward L. Morse, head of commodities research at Citigroup, wrote in a note to clients on Friday.\n\nAmid the uncertainty, oil prices have been rising modestly in recent days. On Friday, Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose about 0.25 percent to $113.32. West Texas Intermediate,", + " the standard in the United States, was up 0.1 percent to $106.66.\n\nUntil recently, market participants have been expecting that the supply from Iraq, which is now producing about 3.3 million barrels a day, would continue to grow, as a result of international oil companies\u2019 investments in the country\u2019s rich but battered oil fields. In a benign world, Iraq could eventually produce about 6 million barrels a day, analysts estimate. If Iraq did attain that level, it would be about 60 percent of the roughly 10 million barrels a day that the leading oil-producing countries, Russia and Saudi Arabia, each produce.\n\n\u201cThe longer the insurgency lasts,", + " the more difficult it will be for Iraq to reach its potential,\u201d Mr. Morse wrote. The change in outlook on Iraq \u201chas radical implications for oil markets at a time of growing lost production worldwide due to intensifying disorder in a growing number of petroleum-producing countries,\u201d he added.\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later.", + " View all New York Times newsletters.\n\nChaos in Libya has reduced oil production there to around 10 percent of the 1.3 million barrels a day the country produced in 2012. Iran\u2019s output has been trimmed by international sanctions. Syria\u2019s civil war has severely diminished the country\u2019s oil production. And the industries of two other key exporters, Nigeria and Venezuela, are facing their own difficulties.\n\nMarket jitters may increase during the summer, when travel season increases demand for gasoline and jet fuel. The big Gulf Arab producers \u2014 Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirate \u2014 are expected to increase oil production to cope with increased demand,", + " but analysts say their buffer of unused, or spare, capacity is likely to be trimmed to about 2 million barrels a day. Reducing that buffer means it could be difficult to compensate for any further problems in oil-producing countries.\n\nIn the near term, concerns about Iraq are likely to remain paramount. Even if the Islamic fighters pause and try to consolidate their gains, the fighting has implications for Iraqi production.\n\nFor instance, one of Iraq\u2019s major export pipelines runs from Kirkuk in Iraq to Turkey\u2019s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. This pipeline has been frequently closed by sabotage and other problems for years and has recently been shut for several months.", + " Because it runs through the conflict zone, its reopening now looks delayed for the plannable future.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThe British oil company BP had been discussing investing in the giant Kirkuk field, where production has been about 200,000 barrels a day but could be substantially higher given the field\u2019s estimated 1.8 billion barrels of reserves. BP\u2019s plans now seem unlikely to go ahead anytime soon. A BP spokesman, Toby Odone, said that the company was advising North Oil Company, the Iraqi entity that operates the field, but that a decision on whether to move ahead with a major project was probably at least a year off.\n\nParadoxically,", + " the unrest may help increase exports from the oil-rich northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan. The Kurdish government has recently opened a pipeline directly linking oil fields in the enclave to Turkey, raising the possibility of substantial exports in the range of 400,000 barrels a day of Kurdish oil though Turkey.\n\nOil sales from Kurdistan have been hampered by the central government in Baghdad\u2019s insistence that Kurdish oil falls under its purview and must be sold through Baghdad\u2019s oil marketing arm, SOMO. Companies like Genel Energy, which is run by the former BP chief executive Tony Hayward, have been limited to trucking their oil out or selling it to local refineries.\n\nBut the fighting may increase the bargaining power of the Kurdistan Regional Government,", + " analysts say. Citigroup predicts that now that the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is in trouble and in need of the share of revenue it could gain from Kurdish oil, Baghdad may prove more flexible. ", + " Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Paul Wood met refugees who have fled to the Kurdish countryside\n\nIslamist militants in Iraq have seized two new towns, widening their control after threatening to move on Baghdad.\n\nThe Sunni-led Islamists advanced into Diyala province in the east - near Iran and close to the capital - having seized Mosul and Tikrit to the north.\n\nThe UN says hundreds have been killed - with militants carrying out summary executions of civilians in Mosul, including 17 civilians in one street.\n\nThe US says it is looking at \"all options\", including military action.\n\nLed by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the insurgents have threatened to push to the capital,", + " Baghdad and regions further south dominated by Iraq's Shia Muslim majority, whom they regard as \"infidels\".\n\nAt the scene, Feras Killani, BBC News, Baghdad\n\nFear is the thing that you feel the most as you walk through Baghdad's streets, as the militants come closer. People here are buying supplies and staying in front of their television sets. They remember what happened during the civil war of 2006-2008 and are very scared this will happen again.\n\nMany Iraqis no longer trust their national army after soldiers retreated from the ISIS advance. Some have even called for people to instead join militias to defend cities and holy sites.\n\nIt's certainly not the same Baghdad it has been in the last few years.\n\nIs this the end of Iraq?\n\nIraq crisis:", + " Voices from Mosul under ISIS control\n\nViewpoint: ISIS goals and possible future gains\n\nIraq conflict: US air power no remedy\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption US President Barack Obama: \"I don't rule out anything\"\n\nNeighbouring Shia-majority Iran has pledged to support Iraq. President Hassan Rouhani called Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and promised that Iran \"will not allow the supporters of terrorists to disrupt security and stability of Iraq through exporting terrorism to Iraq\".\n\nAccording to the Wall Street Journal - which cited unnamed sources - Iran has already deployed two battalions of the elite al-Quds forces of its Revolutionary Guard to help the Iraqi government.\n\nUS President Barack Obama said he did not \"rule out anything because we do have a stake in making sure these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in Iraq,", + " or Syria for that matter\".\n\nWhite House spokesman Jay Carney subsequently added that President Obama was referring to not ruling out air strikes. \"We are not contemplating ground troops,\" he said.\n\nFears of ISIS sparking a wider Sunni uprising have increased with reports that former Baath Party members loyal to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein have joined forces with the jihadists.\n\nThe US will be reluctant to get drawn back into Iraq, or give backing to one side in what appears to have some of the dimensions of civil war, says the BBC's Jim Muir in Irbil - an area in the autonomous Kurdish-controlled north.\n\nAnalysis: Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor\n\nIf ISIS can hold Mosul and consolidate its presence there,", + " it will have taken a giant step towards its goal of creating an Islamist emirate that straddles Iraq and Syria.\n\nIt would be the most significant act by a jihadist group since al-Qaeda attacked the US on 11 September 2001. It could also lead to other changes to the borders Britain and France imposed on the Middle East a century ago, starting with the break-up of Iraq on sectarian lines.\n\nThe success of ISIS can only make the turmoil in the Middle East worse. ISIS is an ultra-extremist Sunni Muslim group. Its success will deepen the sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias that is already the most dangerous fault line in the Middle East.\n\nIran,", + " which is a majority Shia Muslim country, shares a border with Iraq. It has a direct line to Iraq's Shia Muslim Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, and close links with some Iraqi Shia militias. The Iranians could direct their proxies, and even their own special forces units, at ISIS.\n\nThat might end up further inflaming the anger of Iraqi Sunnis, who have already helped the advance of ISIS through Iraq.\n\nUS air strikes, if they happen, might do the same thing. Once again in the Middle East, the Americans have limited options. Their invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 helped create and strengthen jihadist groups.\n\nSharpening Sunni-Shia schism bodes ill for Middle East\n\nIt is becoming clear that the insurgents are not foreign fighters as Mr Maliki alleges,", + " our correspondent says.\n\nMany strands of Sunni society alienated by Mr Maliki's rule appear to have joined them, he says.\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Iraq state TV airs footage said to be airstrikes on the ISIS-held city of Mosul\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Iraq's former PM Ayad Allawi says the country could be facing a break-up as a result of the insurgency led by Islamist militants\n\nImage copyright Reuters Image caption The advance of the militants has been swift - with the Iraqi army abandoning posts\n\nImage copyright Reuters Image caption However, with threats of a move on Baghdad, volunteers heeded a government call to join the resistance\n\nImage copyright AP Image caption The flow of refugees from Mosul has slowed down to a trickle\n\nUN human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said on Friday that his office had verified reports that included the killing of 17 civilians working for the police and 12 Iraqi soldiers.\n\nAmong the atrocities,", + " he listed four women who had killed themselves after being raped.\n\nHe said there had been government \"excesses\", too, and cited the shelling of civilian areas on 6 and 8 June.\n\n\"There are claims that up to 30 civilians may have been killed,\" Mr Colville said.\n\nThe United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, says local authorities estimate that up to 300,000 people fled Mosul in the past few days - joining the more than 500,000 displaced by the conflict in Anbar province earlier.\n\nHowever, the number of those arriving has slowed down and some already there have begun to return.\n\nIn the north of the country,", + " Kurdish forces have claimed control of the oil city of Kirkuk, saying government forces have fled.\n\nThe Kurds - seen as a bulwark against the Sunni Muslim insurgents - have also been locked for years in a dispute with Baghdad over Kirkuk, seeking to incorporate it into their own autonomous area.\n\nISIS in Iraq\n\nImage copyright AP Image caption An Islamist fighter near a burning Iraqi army Humvee in Tikrit ", + " BEIRUT\u2014The threat of Sunni extremists eclipsing the power of its Shiite-dominated Arab ally presents Iran with the biggest security and strategic challenge it has faced since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.\n\nWith the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, an offshoot of al Qaeda, rapidly gaining territory, Iran deployed Revolutionary Guards units to Iraq, according to Iranian security officials.\n\nIran has invested... ", + " Baghdad, Iraq Iraq's most senior Shi'ite Muslim cleric urged followers to take up arms against a full-blown Sunni militant insurgency to topple Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a conflict that threatens civil war and a possible break-up of the country.\n\nIn Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama said he was reviewing military options, short of sending combat troops, to help Iraq fight the insurgency but warned any U.S. action must be accompanied by an Iraqi effort to bridge political divisions. (Full Story)\n\nIn a rare intervention at Friday prayers in the holy city of Kerbala, a message from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,", + " who is the highest religious authority for Shi'ites in Iraq, said people should unite to fight back against a lightning advance by militants from the radical Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.\n\nFighters under the black flag of ISIL are sweeping south towards the capital Baghdad in a campaign to recreate a mediaeval caliphate carved out of fragmenting Iraq and Syria that has turned into a widespread rebellion against Maliki.\n\n\"People who are capable of carrying arms and fighting the terrorists in defense of their country... should volunteer to join the security forces to achieve this sacred goal,\" said Sheikh Abdulmehdi al-Karbalai, delivering Sistani's message.\n\nThose killed fighting ISIL militants would be martyrs,", + " he said as the faithful chanted in acknowledgement.\n\nAmidst the spreading chaos, Iraqi Kurdish forces seized control of Kirkuk, an oil hub just outside their autonomous enclave that they have long seen as their historical capital, three days after ISIL fighters captured the major city of Mosul.\n\nThere are concerns that sectarian and tribal conflict might dismember Iraq into Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish entities. The atmosphere in Baghdad was tense on Friday, the streets were empty, residents were stock-piling food and arming themselves.\n\nReflecting fears that ISIL's insurgency could erupt into a civil war and disrupt oil exports from a major OPEC member state, the price of Brent crude oil edged further above $113 a barrel on Friday,", + " up about $4 since the start of the week.\n\nMALIKI MUST ACT\n\nObama told reporters at the White House he would not send U.S. troops back into combat in Iraq but had asked his national security team to prepare \"a range of other options\" to help Iraqi security forces confront fighters from ISIL. He made clear he expected steps toward Iraqi political reconciliation.\n\n\"The United States is not simply going involve itself in a military action in the absence of a political plan by the Iraqis that gives us some assurance that they are prepared to work together,\" he said.\n\nThe U.S. president was facing a chorus of criticism from Republican opponents who say that his missteps in responding to the Syrian civil war and dithering on Iraq has left the United States with few options.\n\n\"We need to be hitting these columns of terrorists marching on Baghdad with drones now,\" said Representative Ed Royce,", + " the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Influential Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham also called for air strikes to deal the insurgents \"a crippling blow.\"\n\nAmerican officials have watched in dismay as the U.S.-trained and -armed Iraqi security forces have crumbled and fled in the face of an onslaught by the militants. Obama noted the United States had invested a lot of money and training in the Iraqi security forces.\n\n\"The fact that they are not willing to stand and fight and defend their posts... indicates that there's a problem with morale, there's a problem in terms of commitment,\" Obama said. \"Ultimately, that's rooted in the political problems that have plagued the country for a very long time.\"\n\nWestern officials have long complained that Maliki has done little to heal sectarian rifts that have left many of Iraq's minority Sunnis,", + " cut out of power since Saddam Hussein's demise, aggrieved and vengeful - a mood exploited by ISIL.\n\nA U.S. counterterrorism official questioned whether ISIL had the capacity to turn \"tactical victories in Iraq into strategic gains,\" noting that with just a few thousand fighters it was relying on Sunni nationalist groups that might not back it in the long run.\n\n\"There are still plenty of things that could go wrong for a group that typically has done well on its home Sunni turf but, if Syria is any guide, is hardly invincible when confronted in unfriendly territory by capable and motivated fighters,\" the official said.\n\nThe ISIL advance has been joined by former Baathist officers who were loyal to Saddam as well as disaffected armed groups and tribes who want to oust Maliki.", + " Cities and towns that have fallen to the militants so far have been mainly Sunni and the gains have largely been uncontested.\n\nIt had long been known that Mosul, a city of two million people, harbored not just ISIL but also the Baathist militant group the Naqshbandi Army, believed to be headed by Ezzat Ibrahim al Douri, a former close aide to Saddam.\n\nAfter the fall of Saddam to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, officers from the old Iraqi army who had not been reconciled to the new order collected in the Mosu l area. The city's proximity to the border with Syria allowed Baathists - Saddam's political party - and Islamic radicals freedom of movement.\n\nU.S.", + " AND IRAN INTERESTS COINCIDE\n\nOn the advance, a member of the Mujahideen Army, consisting of ex-military officers and more moderate Islamists, said: \"We were contacted by ISIL around three days before the attack on Mosul asking us to join them. Speaking honestly we were reluctant to join as we were not satisfied they could do the job and defeat thousands of government troops in Mosul.\n\n\"When ISIL entered Mosul and swept out government forces positions in hours... Only then did we decide to join forces and fight with them as long as we had a sole objective to kick Maliki forces out of Mosul and remove injustice.\"\n\nThe pace of events means that now,", + " an alarmed Shi'ite Islamic Republic of Iran, which in the 1980s fought Saddam for eight years at a time when the Sunni Iraqi leader enjoyed quiet U.S. support, may be willing to cooperate with the \"Great Satan\" Washington to bolster mutual ally Maliki.\n\nThe idea is being discussed internally among the Tehran leadership, a senior Iranian official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. \"We can work with Americans to end the insurgency in the Middle East,\" the official said, referring to the sudden escalation of conflict in Iraq. (Full Story)\n\nThe U.S. State Department said Washington was not discussing Iraq with Tehran.\n\nThrusting further to the southeast after their seizure of Mosul in the far north and Saddam's hometown of Tikrit,", + " ISIL entered two towns in Diyala province bordering Iran.\n\nSaadiyah and Jalawla had fallen to the Sunni Muslim insurgents after government troops fled their positions.\n\nIraqi army units subsequently subjected Saadiyah and Jalawla to artillery fire from the nearby town of Muqdadiya. ISIL fighters eventually withdrew from Jalawla and well-organized Kurdish Peshmerga fighters took over. Iraqi army helicopters fired rockets at one of the largest mosques in Tikrit on Friday, according to witnesses. There were no further details available.\n\n\"CHANCE TO REPENT\"\n\nGiving a hint of their vision of a caliphate, ISIL published sharia rules for the realm they have carved out in northern Iraq,", + " including a ban on drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and an edict on women to wear only all-covering, shapeless clothing.\n\nISIL militants were reported to have executed soldiers and policemen after their seizure of some towns.\n\nOn Friday, ISIL said it was giving soldiers and policemen a \"chance to repent... For those asking who we are, we are the soldiers of Islam and have shouldered the responsibility to restore the glory of the Islamic Caliphate\u201d.\n\nResidents near the border with Syria, where ISIL has exploited civil war to seize wide tracts of that country's east, watched militants bulldozing tracks through frontier sand berms.\n\nISIL has battled rival rebel factions in Syria for months and occasionally taken on President Bashar al-Assad's forces.\n\nISIL's Syria branch is now bringing in weapons seized in Iraq from retreating government forces,", + " according to Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group. But its fighters appear to have held back in Syria, especially in their eastern stronghold near the Iraqi border, while their Iraqi wing was making rapid military gains.\n\nAt Baiji, near Kirkuk, ISIL fighters ringed Iraq's largest refinery, underlining the incipient threat to the oil industry.\n\nFurther south, militant forces extended their advance to towns about an hour's drive from Baghdad, where Shi'ite militia were mobilizing for what could be a replay of the ethnic and sectarian bloodbath of 2006 and 2007. Trucks carrying Shi'", + "ite volunteers in uniform rumbled to front lines to defend Baghdad.\n\nSADR HOLDS FIRE\n\nDespite the call to arms from Sistani, influential Shi\u2019ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who led revolts against U.S. forces, has not called on his followers to mobilize. At Friday prayers, his faithful were told to wait for directions in the coming days on how to form \u201cpeace regiments\u201d that will defend holy sites.\n\nMaliki's army already lost control of much of the Euphrates valley west of the capital to ISIL last year. With the evaporation of the army in the Tigris valley to the north,", + " the government could be left with just Baghdad and areas south - home to the Shi'ite majority in Iraq's 32 million population.\n\nISIL has set up military councils to run the towns they captured. \u201c'Our final destination will be Baghdad, the decisive battle will be there' - that\u2019s what their leader kept repeating,\" said a regional tribal figure.\n\n(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut, Ziad al-Sinjary in Mosul Isabel Coles in Arbil, Steve Holland and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Writing by Peter Millership and David Alexander; Editing by Mark Heinrich and David Storey)\n" + ], + "length": 22020, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 52, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The death of Antonin Scalia has set the stage for a massive partisan battle during a time that was already unlikely to go down in history as a golden age of bipartisan cooperation in DC. The biggest dispute centers on whether nominating a Supreme Court successor during an election year should be considered outrageous or routine. Some related highlights: Scalia's death may affect six major cases this term on immigration, abortion, contraception, labor unions, voting rights, and affirmative action, and the New York Times lays them out. USA Today also has a breakdown. SCOTUSBlog looks at election-year nominations since 1900 and finds there have been several nominations and confirmations\u2014and there's little evidence of any tradition of leaving a seat open during election years. In a Sunday interview with ABC's This Week, Ted Cruz praised the \"incomparable\" Scalia and vowed to filibuster anybody Obama nominates to replace him. The tug-of-war for the \"ideological soul\" of the court is going to drastically change the nature of Obama's final year in office, the New York Times predicts in a look at where the nomination battle lines have been drawn. Politico looks at how Scalia's death has split the GOP presidential candidates, with senators taking a more hard-line approach than governors. The Washington Post dives into the \"chaos, confusion, and conflicting reports\" that followed Scalia's death at a West Texas ranch, noting that the judge who deemed his death a natural one did so over the phone without having seen his body. The New York Times looks at the remote ranch that Scalia was visiting, calling it a \"rugged oasis\" that has long attracted politicians and celebrities seeking peace and quiet. Anybody who thinks people with opposing political views can't be friends could learn a lot from the Supreme Court's most liberal and most conservative justices, Vox reports in a look at the close friendship between Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.\n", + "docs": [ + "HOUSTON \u2014 The closest community to the West Texas resort where Justice Antonin Scalia died is barely even a place anymore: It is a virtual ghost town where perhaps only a dozen people still live. And when a silver hearse drove across the rocks outside the Cibolo Creek Ranch on Saturday, it was from a funeral home at least an hour away.\n\n\u201cPeople go there with great confidentiality, I think,\u201d said Teresa Todd, the city attorney for Marfa, more than 30 miles from the ranch. \u201cPeople go there, and you\u2019re not bothered.\u201d\n\nFor years, public figures, including Justice Scalia and Mick Jagger, and wealthy,", + " anonymous vacationers have descended on the 30,000-acre enclave of the Chinati Mountains. It is a place where remoteness is cherished, and where, without ever leaving the grounds, guests can spend weeks in historic adobe forts. ", + " In the wake of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, questions have arisen about whether there is a standard practice of not nominating and confirming Supreme Court Justices during a presidential election year. The historical record does not reveal any instances since at least 1900 of the president failing to nominate and/or the Senate failing to confirm a nominee in a presidential election year because of the impending election. In that period, there were several nominations and confirmations of Justices during presidential election years.\n\nThe first nomination during an election year in the twentieth century came on March 13, 1912, when President William Taft (a Republican) nominated Mahlon Pitney to succeed John Marshall Harlan,", + " who died on October 14, 1911. The Republican-controlled Senate confirmed Pitney on March 18, 1912, by a vote of fifty to twenty-six.\n\nPresident Woodrow Wilson (a Democrat) made two nominations during 1916. On January 28, 1916, Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to replace Joseph Rucker Lamar, who died on January 2, 1916; the Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed Brandeis on June 1, 1916, by a vote of forty-seven to twenty-two. Charles Evans Hughes resigned from the Court on June 10, 1916 to run (unsuccessfully)", + " for president as a Republican. On July 14, 1916, Wilson nominated John Clarke to replace him; Clarke was confirmed unanimously ten days later.\n\nOn February 15, 1932, President Herbert Hoover (a Republican) nominated Benjamin Cardozo to succeed Oliver Wendell Holmes, who retired on January 12, 1932. A Republican-controlled Senate confirmed Cardozo by a unanimous voice vote on February 24, 1932.\n\nOn January 4, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt (a Democrat) nominated Frank Murphy to replace Pierce Butler, who died on November 16, 1939; Murphy was confirmed by a heavily Democratic Senate on January 16,", + " 1940, by a voice vote.\n\nOn November 30, 1987, President Ronald Reagan (a Republican) nominated Justice Anthony Kennedy to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Lewis Powell. A Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed Kennedy (who followed Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg as nominees for that slot) on February 3, 1988, by a vote of ninety-seven to zero.\n\nIn two instances in the twentieth century, presidents were not able to nominate and confirm a successor during an election year. But neither reflects a practice of leaving a seat open on the Supreme Court until after the election.\n\nOn September 7, 1956,", + " Sherman Minton announced his intent to retire in a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he served until October 15, 1956. With the Senate already adjourned, Eisenhower made a recess appointment of William J. Brennan to the Court shortly thereafter; Brennan was formally nominated to the Court and confirmed in 1957. The fact that Eisenhower put Brennan on the Court is inconsistent with any tradition of leaving a seat vacant.\n\nAnd in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Abe Fortas, who was already sitting as an Associate Justice, to succeed Chief Justice Earl Warren, but the Fortas nomination was the target of a bipartisan filibuster \u2013 principally in reaction to the Warren Court\u2019s liberalism and ethical questions about Fortas,", + " although objections were certainly also made that it was inappropriate to fill the seat in an election year. That filibuster prompted Homer Thornberry, whom Johnson nominated to succeed Fortas as an Associate Justice, to withdraw his name from consideration in October 1968, because there was no vacancy to fill. Moreover, the failure to confirm Fortas as the Chief Justice did not leave the Court short a Justice, because Chief Justice Earl Warren remained on the bench.\n\nTom Goldstein also contributed to this post.\n\nRecommended Citation: Amy Howe, Supreme Court vacancies in presidential election years, SCOTUSblog (Feb. 13, 2016, 11:", + "55 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2016/02/supreme-court-vacancies-in-presidential-election-years/ ", + " If you've ever believed that people can disagree passionately about politics and still respect and care for each other as friends, the friendship of Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a comfort and an inspiration.\n\nHe was the Supreme Court's most outspoken conservative; she is its most outspoken liberal. But their friendship became famous, not just because of its odd-couple unexpectedness but because their mutual respect and affection for each other was obviously genuine.\n\nThey and their families spent New Year's Eve together every year. They rode together on an elephant in India (Scalia joked that Ginsburg betrayed her feminism by sitting behind him), and Scalia watched Ginsburg go parasailing in the south of France (\"She's so light,", + " you would think she would never come down. I would not do that\").\n\nSo it's no surprise that of all the tributes to Justice Scalia, who died Saturday of an apparent heart attack at the age of 79, Justice Ginsburg's is uniquely moving. It's a tribute to Scalia as an interlocutor, a fellow opera lover \u2014 including a reference to the opera Scalia/Ginsburg: A (Gentle) Parody of Operatic Proportions, which debuted in 2015 \u2014 and a \"best buddy.\"\n\nToward the end of the opera Scalia/Ginsburg, tenor Scalia and soprano Ginsburg sing a duet:", + " 'We are different, we are one,' different in our interpretation of written texts, one in our reverence for the Constitution and the institution we serve. From our years together at the D.C. Circuit, we were best buddies. We disagreed now and then, but when I wrote for the Court and received a Scalia dissent, the opinion ultimately released was notably better than my initial circulation. Justice Scalia nailed all the weak spots\u2014the 'applesauce' and 'argle bargle'\u2014and gave me just what I needed to strengthen the majority opinion. He was a jurist of captivating brilliance and wit, with a rare talent to make even the most sober judge laugh.", + " The press referred to his 'energetic fervor,' 'astringent intellect,' 'peppery prose,' 'acumen,' and 'affability,' all apt descriptions. He was eminently quotable, his pungent opinions so clearly stated that his words never slipped from the reader\u2019s grasp. Justice Scalia once described as the peak of his days on the bench an evening at the Opera Ball when he joined two Washington National Opera tenors at the piano for a medley of songs. He called it the famous Three Tenors performance. He was, indeed, a magnificent performer. It was my great good fortune to have known him as working colleague and treasured friend.\n\nIt's easy to mourn the lack of civility in contemporary American politics;", + " politicians on both sides talk glowingly about the time when Ronald Reagan could invite Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill to the White House for a drink to work out a conflict. It's just as easy to say that civility is for people who don't have the courage of their convictions \u2014 that if people genuinely disagree about what is best for America, they shouldn't have to put that aside for the sake of small talk.\n\nWhat makes Ginsburg's statement remarkable is that it shows how superficial both sides of the civility argument are.\n\nThe respect that Ginsburg's statement shows for Scalia's intellect \u2014 that she could trust him to point out the flaws in her arguments \u2014 also reveals a respect for her own,", + " to know the difference between a genuine agreement of principle and an error that needed to be corrected. But more importantly, the statement shows that it's okay for people in politics to spend time cultivating other interests \u2014 like opera \u2014 and that those can be a genuine basis for friendship in their own right.\n\nArguably, that's easier for appointed judges than it is for elected officials. It's still rare. And it's still worth celebrating.\n\nIt's not just atypical in contemporary American politics for people to be both ideological adversaries and close personal friends. It's atypical for contemporary American political figures to even be close personal friends with each other. Justices Scalia and Ginsburg showed just how much everyone else was missing.", + " That won't be as significant to Scalia's legacy as his jurisprudence, but maybe it should.\n\nVIDEO: President Obama on the passing of Justice Scalia ", + " CLOSE From abortion services to undocumented immigrants, here are some of the cases that could be affected by Justice Scalia's absence. Video provided by Newsy Newslook\n\nSupreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's death will tilt the balance in the court's major cases this term. (Photo: Adrian Sainz, AP)\n\nWASHINGTON -- The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a major setback for the conservative legal movement, as will become clear in the months ahead.\n\nThis was to be the term conservatives roared back after one in which the court's liberal bloc won most of the important cases, such as same-sex marriage and Obamacare. On tap to be decided in the next four months are cases affecting abortion rights,", + " affirmative action, voting rights, the power of labor unions and President Obama's health care and immigration policies -- and conservatives stood at least a chance of winning them all.\n\nNot anymore. Scalia's untimely death Saturday at a Texas ranch leaves an empty seat on the Supreme Court -- almost surely for the remainder of the 2015 term, and most likely for the duration of Obama's presidency. While the White House and congressional Democrats would like to fill the seat, their chances of prevailing on those important cases and others improved markedly.\n\nThat's because the court is now divided evenly between liberals and conservatives -- in fact, tilted slightly to the left because Justice Anthony Kennedy often takes the liberal side.", + " Tie votes would uphold the lower court's ruling; only the abortion and immigration cases were decided in conservatives' favor at that level.\n\nHere's a look at the biggest cases pending before the court, their current status and potential outcome in the wake of Scalia's death:\n\nVoting rights (heard Dec. 8): The court is considering changing the way state and municipal voting districts are drawn by allowing them to be based on the number of eligible voters, rather than total population. That would render non-citizens invisible in the count, along with children, prisoners, some ex-felons and some people with intellectual disabilities. The result: more rural,", + " mostly white districts.\n\nDuring oral argument in December, it seemed the conservative justices might have five votes to move away from using total population. But they couldn't come up with a practical alternative, making it a long shot that the status quo -- using total population -- is reversed. For that reason, Scalia's absence may not affect the outcome.\n\nAffirmative action (heard Dec. 9): In a crucial test of university admissions programs that take race into consideration, the court's conservatives appeared ready in December to cut back on affirmative action. At the least, it seemed the University of Texas-Austin's program would be affected.\n\nScalia played a leading role during oral argument,", + " noting that some briefs submitted to the court suggested that African Americans may do better at \"less advanced\" or \"slower-track\" schools. \"\u00adI don't think it stands to reason that it's a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible,\" he said. Without his vote, the school's program still could be doomed because liberal Justice Elena Kagan is recused, setting up a possible 4-3 vote.\n\nLabor unions (heard Jan. 11): This is the case that conservatives seemed most assured of winning, until now. During oral argument, the conservatives sharply criticized the current system in which public employees in 23 states and the District of Columbia must pay for the cost of collective bargaining,", + " even if they disagree with union demands.\n\nWith Kennedy leading the way, the court appeared likely to strike down that requirement, which would reverse the lower court and deal a major blow to the financial clout of public employee unions such as the California Teachers Association. Now, a tie vote looms which would uphold the system.\n\nAbortion (to be heard March 2): Abortion clinics in Texas are challenging a state law, upheld in lower courts, that imposes tough new restrictions on doctors and facilities. The case has shaped up to be the biggest one affecting reproductive rights since 1992.\n\nNow, however, it appears that if supporters of abortion rights don't win outright with the support of Kennedy or another conservative justice,", + " a 4-4 tie upholding the Texas law would not set a new national precedent for federal courts to follow.\n\nContraception (to be heard March 23): Religious non-profits such as charities, schools and hospitals are seeking an exemption from the Affordable Care Act's mandate that employers pay for contraceptives as part of standard health insurance plans. They stood a good chance of winning with Scalia on the bench.\n\nNow, the most likely outcome is a 4-4 tie that would leave the so-called \"contraceptive mandate\" in place for those non-profits.\n\nImmigration (to be heard in April): President Obama already had a decent chance of reversing an appeals court ruling and winning about six months to begin implementing his immigration plan,", + " which would shield more than 4 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. But that was by no means a sure thing.\n\nWithout Scalia, the president still needs the vote of at least one conservative justice to win the case. A 4-4 tie would preserve the lower court's decision against the program, but without setting a national precedent.\n\nRead or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1TjrwWz ", + " When it comes to President Barack Obama picking a successor to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Republican presidential candidates are of two schools of thought: probably no, and hell no.\n\nSens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, the lone remaining members of the field who will actually get a vote on the question, planted the flag for the latter category on Sunday morning.\n\nStory Continued Below\n\n\"This should be a decision for the people. If the Democrats want to replace this nominee, they need to win this election,\u201d Cruz said on ABC's \u201cThis Week.\u201d\n\n\"By the way, the Senate's duty is to advise and consent,\" he said.", + " \"You know what? The Senate is advising right now. We're advising that a lame-duck president in an election year is not going to be able to tip the balance of the Supreme Court, that we're going to have an election.\"\n\nCruz said he\u2019d filibuster absolutely anyone Obama nominates. And Rubio took a similar stance.\n\n\"Here's the bottom line: I don't trust Barack Obama on the appointment of Supreme Court justices. We cannot afford to have Scalia replaced by someone like the nominees he's put there in the past,\" Rubio said on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press,\" referring to Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.\n\n\"We're going to have an election,", + " there's going to be a new president \u2014 I believe it's going to be me \u2014 and we're going to look for someone that most resembles Scalia to replace him,\u201d he said.\n\nBut while the senators slammed the door on an Obama nominee, the race's current and former governors appeared to leave the door open a crack.\n\nJeb Bush said that regardless of what his party said, Obama would nominate a replacement for Scalia \u2014 something the president said he would do in his statement on Scalia's passing Saturday night.\n\n\"I think President Obama is going to submit a nominee. And in all likelihood, this person will be out of the mainstream, and they'll be rejected by the Senate,\" Bush said on CNN's \u201cState of the Union.\" \"That's his prerogative.", + " He has every right to do it. And the Senate has every right to not confirm that person.\u201d\n\nAnd while the former Florida governor said the Senate should not confirm an Obama nominee who is \"out of the mainstream,\" he stopped short of staying that the Senate should block anyone who goes forward.\n\n\"But given his choices of Supreme Court justices in the past, the Senate of the United States should not confirm someone who's out of the mainstream,\" Bush said.\n\nOhio Gov. John Kasich, who struck a more conciliatory tone during the debate on Saturday, said with the current political climate it wouldn\u2019t be practical to try and push through a Supreme Court nominee.\n\n\"If I were president of the United States,", + " you know, and I could keep the Congress together, of course I would send somebody. But it probably would be a different situation,\u201d Kasich said on \u201cThis Week.\u201d\n\n\"I understand the president has prerogative here, the Senate has prerogative too. At a time when the country is so divided, it would just be great if the president didn't send someone forward,\" Kasich said on \"Meet the Press.\"\n\nThat governor-senator split appears minor, for now, but it could widen should Obama nominate a moderate or even slightly conservative justice \u2014 forcing the GOP to pick between a compromise outcome now or a big gamble on winning the White House in November.\n\nSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would block an Obama nominee,", + " a statement that Senate Democrats railed against Sunday morning. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, also criticized Republicans over potentially blocking a new nominee.\n\nDonald Trump on Sunday morning brushed past the question on whether his nominees would be conservative enough, instead blaming Chief Justice John Roberts' appointment on Cruz and Bush.\n\n\"Let me tell you about appointees: Justice John Roberts gave us Obamacare twice. He could have foiled it twice. He had two votes, went up shockingly, voted in favor of Obamacare. He got there because Ted Cruz pushed him like wild. And by the way, Jeb Bush pushed him through the brother,\u201d Trump said on \u201cThis Week.\"\n\n\u201dSo Cruz shouldn't be talking.", + " Because that was among the worst appointments I have ever seen. We have Obamacare because of Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, George Bush.\"\n\nTrump did the same on \u201cMeet the Press,\u201d where he brushed past questions on what his \u201clitmus test\u201d for nominees would be, saying he\u2019d like the nominee to be \u201cjust like Justice Scalia\u201d and turning back to his John Roberts criticism about how no nominee is a guarantee.\n\nBen Carson did not appear on any of the Sunday talk shows but said during the debate that no nominee should be put forth during Obama's presidency.\n\nFor Cruz and Rubio, the pledge to block anyone Obama chooses brought questions about a longstanding court vacancy and the power of a president to serve out his term,", + " but both had answers at the ready.\n\n\"We have an obligation to [fill the vacancy], but not now. This term of the Supreme Court, they just started it. But it's not all year long. The court can function with eight justices, it does it all the time, especially when justices have to recuse themselves,\u201d Rubio said. \"We're going to have an election in November where this vacancy is going to be an item of debate and voters are going to get to weigh in. So I just don't think it's wise.\"\n\nThough a presidential term is for four years, Rubio said a Supreme Court nomination is a different type of nomination because it\u2019s a lifetime appointment,", + " and thus it is acceptable for Scalia\u2019s seat to stay vacant for nearly a year.\n\n\u201cThis is a lifetime appointment, this is not a law you can reverse, this is not a policy you can undo. Once you name someone to the Supreme Court, they're going to be there until they die or leave, and that's a very serious thing. So the president can decide whatever he wants, but I'm just telling you, the Senate's not moving forward on it until we have a new president, and I agree with that,\u201d Rubio said in a separate Sunday morning appearance on CBS' \u201cFace the Nation.\"\n\nBoth Cruz and Rubio downplayed the significance of a potentially split court operating with just eight members for the next year at least.\n\nOn \u201cState of the Union,\u201d Rubio would not commit to D.C.", + " Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan as a possible pick even though he supported Srinivasan's nomination for the lower court.\n\n\"Well, there's a different criteria, obviously. It's a heightened level of scrutiny. They'll have to go through judiciary. I usually don't comment on nominees until they've gone through that process,\u201d Rubio said.\n\nBut he emphasized again that he wants no action on the Supreme court until after the 2016 election, no matter who Obama nominates.\n\n\u201cIrrespective of who the president nominates, the Senate is not moving forward on it. Mitch McConnell's already made that very clear. The next president will have the chance to appoint somebody.", + " And when I'm president, I'm going to look for someone like Justice Scalia.They're hard to find. These are the sorts of people I'd like to see on the Supreme Court,\u201d Rubio said.\n\nJon Prior contributed to this report. ", + " WASHINGTON \u2014 Justice Antonin Scalia\u2019s death will complicate the work of the Supreme Court\u2019s eight remaining justices for the rest of the court\u2019s term, probably change the outcomes of some major cases and, for the most part, amplify the power of its four-member liberal wing.\n\nIt takes five votes to accomplish most things at the Supreme Court, and until Saturday, that meant Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was in control when the court\u2019s four-member liberal and conservative blocs lined up against each other. But with three remaining conservatives, only the liberal side can command a majority if it attracts Justice Kennedy\u2019s vote. And if it does not, the result is a 4-to-", + "4 deadlock.\n\nIf that happens, the court can automatically affirm the decision under review without giving reasons and without setting a Supreme Court precedent. Or it can set the case down for re-argument in the term that starts in October in the hope that it will be decided by a full court.\n\n\u201cIt has been an extraordinarily long time since the Supreme Court has been forced to deal with a departure that occurs in the middle of the term, as the court does here with Justice Scalia\u2019s death,\u201d said Justin Driver, a law professor at the University of Chicago. \u201cThis event almost certainly throws many cases that had been tentatively decided by 5-4 margins into grave doubt,", + " and will likely require the justices to reassess many opinions.\u201d ", + " THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT FOR 'THIS WEEK' ON February 14, 2016 and it will be updated.\n\nANNOUNCER: Starting right now on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Battle for the bench: Justice Antonin Scalia, conservative legend, dies at 79. The fight to fill his seat already under way.\n\nBARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I plan to nominate a successor.\n\nDONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It's up to Mitch McConnell and everybody else to stop it. It's called delay, delay, delay.\n\nANNOUNCER:", + " As both sides dig in, will the presidential election become a referendum on the court?\n\nPlus, Trump targeted in the nastiest debate yet. The billionaire businessman under fire.\n\nJEB BUSH (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I am sick and tired of him going after my family.\n\nANNOUNCER: And, firing back.\n\nSEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You are...\n\nTRUMP: You're the single biggest liar.\n\nANNOUNCER: This morning, Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, all here live.\n\nFrom ABC News, it's THIS WEEK.", + " Here now, chief anchor George Stephanopoulos.\n\n(END VIDEOTAPE)\n\nGEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, HOST: The news that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died swept across the country Saturday afternoon.\n\nA towering figure, the court's longest serving justice, Scalia's powerful pen made him a pillar of the conservative movement, inspired a generation of legal thought.\n\nHis death leaves a divided court for a divided country, sets up an epic battle for a successor, and strikes right at the heart of this already chaotic presidential campaign.\n\nWe're going to hear from the candidates this morning, break down what Scalia's death means for the court and the country.", + " And we begin with ABC's senior justice correspondent Pierre Thomas. Good morning, Pierre.\n\nPIERRE THOMAS, ABC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, George. Flags here at the Supreme Court and across the nation at half staff as the court mourns the loss of Justice Scalia.\n\nA giant here in Washington, his death has enormous legal and political ramifications.\n\nJustice Scalia apparently died in his sleep in a quail hunting trip at a West Texas resort. His body was discovered after he failed to appear for a breakfast gathering.\n\nU.S. marshals came to the scene and the FBI is assisting, but Scalia was not known to have any health problems.", + " And law enforcement officials say there appears to be no foul play.\n\nThe longest serving justice on the court, Scalia was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1986.\n\nAn astute legal mind, he became a champion of conservative causes, respected even by adversaries.\n\nPresident Obama called Scalia's son to offer condolences and interrupted a trip to California to address the nation.\n\nOBAMA: He influenced a generation of judges, lawyers, and students, and profoundly shaped the legal landscape.\n\n(END VIDEOTAPE)\n\nTHOMAS: Scalia's body has arrived in El Paso. No word this morning on memorial services, but tributes will surely come as a colorful,", + " larger-than-life figure is gone. All of official Washington stunned -- George.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Pierre Thomas at the court. Thanks very much.\n\nWe have the battle now over who comes next. President Obama promised to nominate a successor. Senate Republicans say they're going to block his choice.\n\nSo much at stake. And Jon Karl joins us from the White House with more on that side of the story.\n\nGood morning, Jon.\n\nJON KARL, ABC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, George. The battle lines on this were drawn even before the Supreme Court officially confirmed that Scalia had died, setting up a titanic fight here in Washington and on the campaign trail.\n\n(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)\n\nKARL:", + " News of Justice Scalia's death hit Washington like a thunderbolt. And in an unprecedented move, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell immediately released a statement saying this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.\n\nBut when President Obama came before the cameras to mark Scalia's passing, he made it clear he would not be taking McConnell's advice.\n\nOBAMA: I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time.\n\nKARL: At the debate in South Carolina last night, the Republican candidates hoping to replace Obama called on congress to block the president.\n\nTRUMP: I think it's up to Mitch McConnell and everybody else to stop it.", + " It's called delay, delay, delay.\n\nCRUZ: We're not going to give up the U.S. Supreme Court for a generation by allowing Barack Obama to make one more liberal appointee.\n\nSEN. MARCO RUBIO (R-FL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Someone on this stage will get to choose the balance of the Supreme Court.\n\nGOV. JOHN KASICH (R-OH), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We ought to let the next president of the United States decide who is going to run that Supreme Court with a vote by the people of the United States of America.\n\n(END VIDEOTAPE)\n\nKARL:", + " None of that will deter President Obama from moving forward in nominating a replacement for Scalia. The short-list will likely include circuit court judges Sri Srinivasan and Jane Kelly and Merrick Garland with Sri Srinivasan almost certainly the frontrunner in that group, George. He's somebody that Republicans actually like. He was a clerk for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He served in the administration of George W. Bush and was confirmed 97-0 for his current post.\n\nBut of course that is a far cry from confirming him to replace Scalia.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Yeah, unlikely to make much difference in a future vote.\n\nMeantime,", + " Jon, this sets up the prospect -- you have a 4-4 lineup on the Supreme Court for maybe well over a year.\n\nKARL: Yeah, and that could mean a lot of tying votes on the Supreme Court, because nearly 30 percent of the decisions in their most recent term were 5-4. And in about a third of those, Scalia was the fifth justice in the majority.\n\nSo, you could have a situation where you have many tie votes. And in that case, the lower court's decision simply stands.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: A huge impact.\n\nOK, Jon Karl, thanks very much.\n\nNow to last night's GOP debate in South Carolina.\n\nIt started out with a moment of silence for Justice Scalia.", + " It quickly became the nastiest debate of this campaign.\n\nAnd ABC's Mary Bruce was there.\n\nMARY BRUCE, ABC NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): There are fireworks and then there's this...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: And I'll tell you...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: -- biggest liar. You probably are worse than Jeb Bush.\n\nCRUZ: That is ab...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: -- people...\n\nRUBIO: He's lying about all sorts of things but now he makes things up.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: -- that we don't even know who they are.\n\nUNIDENTIFIED MALE:", + " Let me finish, though.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nUNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is just nuts.\n\n(END VIDEO CLIP)\n\nBRUCE: With just one week until the South Carolina primary...\n\nCRUZ: God bless the great state of South Carolina.\n\nBRUCE: -- the Republican candidates ripped each other to shreds. The make or break state living up to its reputation for rough and tumble politics.\n\nDonald Trump's heatedly took on Jeb Bush.\n\nTRUMP: Jeb is so wrong.\n\n(BOOS)\n\nTRUMP: You know who that is?\n\nThat's Jeb's special interests and lobbyists talking.\n\nBRUCE: But Bush punched back,", + " seeming to get under Trump's skin.\n\nBUSH: This is the standard operating procedure, to disparage me.\n\nYou want to talk about weakness?\n\nIt's weak to disparage women.\n\nTRUMP: I don't do that.\n\nBUSH: It's weak to disparage Hispanics.\n\nBRUCE: And the blood fest got personal.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBUSH: -- sick and tired of him going after my family.\n\nBUSH: While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And I'm proud of what he did.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: The World Trade Center came down...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP:", + " -- during your brother's reign.\n\nBUSH: -- go after my mother.\n\nTRUMP: Remember that.\n\nHold on, let me finish.\n\n(BOOS)\n\nTRUMP: They lied.\n\nRUBIO: OK.\n\nTRUMP: They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none.\n\nBRUCE: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio sparred over immigration in English and Spanish.\n\nCRUZ: Marco went on Univision in Spanish and said he would not rescind President Obama's illegal executive amnesty on his first day in office.\n\nRUBIO: First of all...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO: -- I don't know how he knows what I said on Univision,", + " because he doesn't speak Spanish.\n\nAnd second of all...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nRUBIO: -- the other point that I would make...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: (SPEAKING IN SPANISH)\n\nEn espanol. Tu quieres.\n\n(END VIDEO TAPE)\n\nBRUCE: And, George, the candidates are pulling out all the stops here. Tomorrow, former President George W. Bush making his first appearance here on the campaign trail for his brother. But after last night's debate, Jeb Bush joked that Donald Trump is no longer invited. In fact, after the debate, they didn't even shake hands -- George.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS:", + " OK, Mary Bruce, thanks very much.\n\nLet's get to the candidates right now, starting with Senator Ted Cruz.\n\nHe joins us from South Carolina this morning.\n\nSenator Cruz, thank you for joining us this morning.\n\nLet's begin with that news about Justice Scalia.\n\nYou've said that President Obama should wait to name a successor, but Ronald Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy with 13 months left in his term. He was confirmed in February, 1988.\n\nPresident Obama has more than 10 months left in his term.\n\nWhy isn't it his right to nominate a justice and the Senate's responsibility to give that nominee an up or down vote?\n\nCRUZ:", + " George, the Senate has not confirmed a nominee that was named in the final year, an election year, in 80 years. This is a lame duck president. And, by the way, the only reason Anthony Kennedy was nominated that late is that Democrats in the Senate had gone after and defeated two previous nominees, Robert Bork, which set a new standard for partisan attacks on a nominee, and Doug Ginsburg.\n\nSo it was the Democrats that had dragged it out for many months to make it that late.\n\nAnd -- and right now, the court is exquisitely balanced. Justice Scalia, someone I've known for over 20 years,", + " who was an extraordinary man, a principled jurist, faithful to \"The Constitution,\" his impact on the court was incomparable. As Ronald Reagan was to the presidency, so Justice Scalia was to the court.\n\nAnd this is a 5-4 court. This next selection needs to be a referendum on the court. The people need to decide. And -- and I'm very glad that the Senate is agreeing with what I called for, that we should not allow a lame duck president to essentially capture the Supreme Court in the waning months of his presidency. This is a decision...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: But does -- does that mean...\n\nCRUZ:", + " -- for the people.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: -- does that mean that you're going to filibuster anyone -- anyone that President Obama nominates?\n\nCRUZ: Absolutely. This should be a decision for the people, George. We've got an election. And, you know, Democrats -- I cannot wait to stand on that stage with Hillary Clinton or with Bernie Sanders and take the case to the people, what vision of the Supreme Court do you want?\n\nLet the election decide it. If the Democrats want to replace this nominee, they need to win the election.\n\nBut you know what, I don't think the American people want a court that will strip our religious liberties.", + " I don't think the American people want a court that will mandate unlimited abortion on demand, partial birth abortion with taxpayer funding and no parental notification. And I don't think the American people want a court that will write the Second Amendment out of \"The Constitution.\"\n\nAll of those are 5-4 issues that are hanging in the balance.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: But -- but the people elected...\n\nCRUZ: And I'll tell you, you know, the consequence of...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: -- President Obama, didn't they?\n\nCRUZ: They did, but -- but that -- that was three years ago.", + " And elections have consequences. The people also gave us a Republican Senate this last election because they were fed up with Barack Obama's lawlessness.\n\nBut Justice Scalia's passing also has a profound impact on this primary. It underscores the stakes for the people of South Carolina. They're looking at the individuals on that stage.\n\nThey're asking, who can I trust?\n\nWho do I know will defend \"The Constitution\" and will defend \"The Bill of Rights?\"\n\nBecause the pattern we've seen, George -- and you're a veteran of these battles for many years. Democrats understand the stakes and they fight tooth and nail for left-wing judicial activists.\n\nFar too many Republicans don't care about the court,", + " don't invest political capital in it. And it's why so many Republican nominees have turned out to be disasters.\n\nAnd let me say something...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: One of them that...\n\nCRUZ: -- in particular to the veterans of the state of South Carolina.\n\nTo the veterans in South Carolina, your Second Amendment rights are hanging in the balance. Justice Scalia, one of his biggest opinions was the \"Heller\" decision. It was 5-4, upholding the individual right to keep and bear arms. If an additional liberal justice goes to the court, we're one justice away from the Second Amendment being written out.\n\nAnd if Donald Trump becomes president,", + " the Second Amendment will be written out of the Constitution because it is abundantly clear that Donald Trump is not a conservative. He will not invest the capital to confirm a conservative.\n\nAnd so the result would be the same --\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: He says he will.\n\nCRUZ: -- whether it's Hillary, Bernie or Donald Trump. The Second Amendment will go away.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: He says you're wrong. He says he will and he says your judgment should be questioned because you supported John Roberts.\n\nCRUZ: Listen, number one, I did not appoint John Roberts. George W.", + " Bush did.\n\nNow once the president made the appointment, I supported that nomination. That was a mistake.\n\nBut I would have -- I would have appointed Mike Luttig, my former boss, Scalia's very first law clerk. And more broadly, you've got to look at Donald Trump's history. This is a man who, for four decades, has supported liberal Democrats.\n\nDonald Trump supported Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan. Donald Trump gave money to Chuck Schumer, to Harry Reid, to Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump supported John Kerry over George W. Bush.\n\nNow, let me tell you, George, anyone that writes checks to Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid and Jimmy Carter and Hillary Clinton does not care about conservative justices on the court.\n\nDonald Trump himself -- you know,", + " the one person he has suggested that would make a good justice is his sister, who is a court of appeals judge appointed by Bill Clinton. She is a hardcore pro-abortion liberal judge. And he said she would make a terrific justice.\n\nSo the people of --\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: He has also said --\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: -- South Carolina need to know --\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: -- conflict of interest there --\n\nCRUZ: -- if you -- if you vote --\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: -- and he would not appoint her.\n\nCRUZ: -- it -- but it gives you an example of the type of people he would be looking to,", + " the type of people he would be looking to. Donald Trump is not a conservative. For his entire life, he has been, self-described, very, very pro-choice. He supported partial birth abortion.\n\nYou know, yesterday, he defended Planned Parenthood and federal taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood on the debate stage.\n\nGeorge, have you ever seen a Republican on a Republican debate stage defending taking federal taxpayer money and giving it to Planned Parenthood?\n\nHe said he thinks they do terrific things.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: It certainly has --\n\nCRUZ: I don't think Planned Parenthood does terrific things. And I don't think the conservatives of South Carolina do,", + " either.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: It certainly has been a long time. I have -- I have never seen you unload on Donald Trump like you just have in the last couple of minutes.\n\nIs that because you're concerned that, if he wins South Carolina, he can't be stopped?\n\nCRUZ: What I'm concerned about, George, is our country is in balance. I've devoted my entire life to fighting to defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Heller decision, I represented 31 states in Heller defending the Second Amendment. We won that case.\n\nYou know, we've talked about abortion restrictions. I represented a coalition of states defending the federal ban on partial birth abortion.", + " We won that case 5-4.\n\nI don't want to see our liberties taken away. You know, my daughters, Caroline and Catherine, are 7 and 5. I don't want to have to look at my daughters and say the freedoms that America has had for two centuries, you don't get because we didn't step up and pull it back.\n\nAnd Justice Scalia's passing, I think, really changes the entire contours of this race. The time for the circus and the reality show is over. This is a serious choice and we are talking about losing our basic liberty if we get this wrong.\n\nAnd it's way I have so much faith in the people of South Carolina that they value liberty,", + " they value the Constitution.\n\nAnd I'll tell you one final point, which is we're also choosing a commander-in-chief. This is a dangerous world and it doesn't make any sense to appoint someone -- to elect someone as commander in chief who doesn't understand the nature of our enemy.\n\nYou know, last night, Donald Trump defended his calling for George W. Bush to be impeached. That is not consistent with the Constitution and it -- and those are the views of the fever swamps of the Left. That's where Donald comes from is the fever --\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: That is --\n\nCRUZ: -- swamps of the Left.", + " He's supporting John Kerry and saying let's impeach George W. Bush. That is not a commander in chief fit to keep this country safe.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Cruz, you put a lot on the table there.\n\nThanks for joining us this morning.\n\nCRUZ: Thank you for having me.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Let's take that right to Donald Trump. He joins us now by phone.\n\nAnd, Mr. Trump, you just heard Senator Cruz right there. He says you\u2019re part of the fevered swamps of the Left.\n\nTRUMP: Well, that\u2019s absolutely false. And this country\u2019s made a lot of mistakes and the war in Iraq was one of them.", + " And a guy like Cruz wouldn\u2019t even understand what a mistake is.\n\nHe stands on the Senate floor; he\u2019s got no support from one senator. You look at his colleagues, he has absolutely no endorsements. He has no support. He\u2019s a lone wolf and he\u2019s going to get nothing done. He\u2019s not a leader.\n\nNever employed anybody, never created a job. This is the wrong guy, I will tell you. And he\u2019s a nasty guy, no matter how you figure it. He\u2019s a nasty guy. So -- and what he did to Ben Carson was disgraceful in Iowa, when he made the fraudulent voter violation manuscript,", + " where he sent it out to voters, was a fraud.\n\nYou know, he holds up the Bible and, believe me, he might hold up the Bible but this is not a man that, in my opinion, should be president. I think he\u2019s really done a great -- I think he\u2019s done a great disservice to himself and to the Republican Party.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: On that last point he raised, you did say back in October 2008 that impeaching President Bush would be a wonderful thing.\n\nDo you still believe that?\n\nTRUMP: I didn\u2019t endorse anything. I think he did a terrible thing when he went into Iraq and we can all be nice and we can be politically correct and we can say how wonderful -- and Jeb Bush,", + " his brother, took him five days before he even understood how to answer the question.\n\nAnd then his pollsters ultimately gave an answer five days late. He was mumbling back and forth, you remember that fiasco. He was gone by the time he started. When he announced, he was practically done. He couldn\u2019t even answer whether Iraq was a good thing or a bad thing. Ultimately, he determined that the Iraq War was a bad thing.\n\nWell, his brother\u2019s the one that got us into that war. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There were no anything. We got into a war, we\u2019ve destabilized the entire Middle East and,", + " by the way, Obama got us out of the war the wrong way, because the way he did it, by announcing a specific date and by not leaving people in, was, frankly, disgusting and very, very foolish.\n\nAnd I will tell you, you go back to 2003, 2004, I\u2019m the only one on the stage who said don\u2019t go into Iraq; you\u2019re going to destabilize the Middle East. I was against the war even though I\u2019m the most militaristic person there is.\n\nI said, don\u2019t go on the stage, don\u2019t go on the -- don\u2019t do this war. If you do this war,", + " you\u2019re going to destabilize the entire Middle East. That\u2019s exactly what happened. That\u2019s why we have the migration and all of the other problems that we have right now in the Middle East.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: But in 2008, you did say that impeachment would be a wonderful thing, on tape to CNN\u2019s Wolf Blitzer. Listen.\n\n(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)\n\nTRUMP: Just seemed like he as we said going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which, I personally, I think would\u2019ve been a wonderful thing.\n\nWOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST:", + " Impeaching him?\n\nTRUMP: Absolutely, for the war, for the war.\n\nBLITZER: Because of the conduct --\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: Well, he lied. He got us into the war with lies.\n\n(END VIDEO CLIP)\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: What evidence do you have that President Bush knowingly lied?\n\nAnd I\u2019ll ask the question again: do you still believe that impeachment would be a wonderful thing?\n\nTRUMP: I don\u2019t even think about it. It\u2019s past time. He was -- he made a horrible mistake; we all make mistakes. His was a beauty. His was about as big a mistake as you can think of.\n\nI see all the soldiers that died,", + " I see the wounded warriors all over, who I love, who I work with and, I\u2019ll tell you what, it was a horrible mistake. We spent $2 trillion on that war and we have nothing.\n\nAnd you know what\u2019s happening now?\n\nIran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world. And when we got out, I said, on your show, George and on many other shows, I said, keep the oil. Don\u2019t leave, keep the oil.\n\nWell, guess what?\n\nISIS has the oil and Iran will have the oil and that oil, the value and the tremendous wealth, fueled ISIS.\n\nThen I said recently,", + " bomb the oil -- not recently, over the last three years. Bomb the oil. Don\u2019t let them have the oil. But nobody wants to listen.\n\nWe have politicians, all talk, no action, and a guy like Ted Cruz would be an absolute disaster. And he\u2019s not a leader.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Let\u2019s turn to the Supreme Court right now. You also heard Senator Cruz right there say that you can\u2019t be trusted to make a Supreme Court pick, that you would pick liberals on the court. He cited your praise of your sister, saying she would be a phenomenal Supreme Court justice.\n\nYour response?\n\nTRUMP:", + " Well, look, just so you understand, I said it jokingly. My sister\u2019s a brilliant person, known as a brilliant person, but it\u2019s obviously a conflict. And I said, oh, how about my sister? Kiddingly. My sister, also she -- she also happens to have a little bit different views than me, but I said in that in a very joking matter, and it was all lots of fun and everything else. I would say total conflict of interest as far as my sister.\n\nSomebody like a Diane Sikes from Wisconsin I think would be very good. There\u2019s some great people out there. But my sister obviously would not be the right person;", + " it\u2019s a conflict of interest for me.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: How will you convince conservatives that your appointees will be conservative?\n\nTRUMP: Well, let me just tell you about appointees. Justice John Roberts gave us Obamacare twice. He could\u2019ve -- he could\u2019ve foiled, he could\u2019ve ended Obamacare twice. He had two votes, he went up shockingly, he voted in favor of Obamacare. He got there because Ted Cruz pushed him like wild. And by the way, Jeb Bush pushed him through the brother. They were close. And Jeb Bush and -- and Cruz pushed Justice John Roberts, that now we have Justice John Roberts.", + " What we happened is he, twice, could have Obamacare and he didn\u2019t do it. So Cruz shouldn\u2019t be talking, because that was among the worst appointments I\u2019ve ever seen.\n\nWe have Obamacare because of Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and George Bush.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Let me ask you a final question, the same question I asked Ted Cruz. They really seem to be piling on you last night. You heard those boos from the crowd as well. You think this is all happening because the other Republicans have figured out that if you win South Carolina, you may not be stopped?\n\nTRUMP: Well,", + " the reason it happens is because I\u2019m self-funding. I\u2019m putting up my own money. I\u2019ve built a tremendous business, I don\u2019t need anybody\u2019s money, and I\u2019m going to do what\u2019s right for the people of the country.\n\nIn that room were many people that I know very well. They\u2019re all lobbyists and they\u2019re special interests and they gave a lot of money to Jeb Bush. This guy\u2019s wasted $140 million running a failed campaign. I mean, the guy spent $43 million in New Hampshire and he came in fourth or fifth. I spent $3 million and I came in first by a lot.", + " I mean, this is the kind of a guy you want a president?\n\nSo between him and Cruz, I\u2019ll tell you what, the Republicans are in trouble and they will never beat Hillary Clinton. I\u2019m the only one that\u2019s going to beat Hillary Clinton. Believe me, they will never beat Hillary Clinton.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. Trump, thanks very much for your time this morning.\n\nTRUMP: OK, thank you very much.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: And we have much more ahead. Senator Marco Rubio and Governor John Kasich going to join us. The powerhouse roundtable as a well, and a look back at the legacy of Justice Scalia.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS:", + " Much more ahead on Justice Scalia and that gloves off GOP debate in South Carolina. Marco Rubio and John Kasich are next. Plus, our powerhouse roundtable.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: And we're back now with Senator Marco Rubio, coming off that debate last night in South Carolina.\n\nThanks for joining us this morning, Senator Rubio.\n\nAnd let's begin...\n\nRUBIO: Thanks, George.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS:...with that debate. Getting pretty nasty out there.\n\nYou think, as Governor Kasich suggest -- suggested, that you all might be hurting each other and helping the Democrats?\n\nRUBIO:", + " Well, sure. I said that before. I mean I -- I always try to avoid that sort of engagement. It got me into trouble a week ago, unfortunately. I had a bad moment because I chose not to go after Governor Christie and instead kind of respond by pivoting back to the central issues in this campaign.\n\nSo it's kind of a catch-22.\n\nBut in the end, I'm not running against any of these other Republicans, I'm running because I want to be president of the United States. And -- but if you're attacked, I think it's important to respond. And, uh, so if I'm attacked at a debate,", + " I'm going to respond. And last night, as you saw, an exchange with Ted Cruz, you know, there is a situation happening now where Ted is literally saying things that aren't true habitually now in this campaign on issue after issue.\n\nYou know, he's -- just in the last week, he hasn't told the truth about my position on Planned Parenthood, on marriage. He didn't tell the truth about his previous stance on immigration.\n\nSo these things have to be clarified and -- and they need to be addressed.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: He said earlier this morning that he would filibuster any choice that President Obama made.\n\nAre you taking the same position?\n\nRUBIO:", + " Yes, but he won't have to because, uh, Mitch McConnell has already made it very clear that we're not going to move forward until there is an election. And I think that's the right decision. The court can function with eight justices. In the last year, within the last few months of the president's term, we should not be appointing Supreme Court justices.\n\nNow, the president can go ahead and nominate whoever he wants, the Senate shouldn't move forward on it until after the election.\n\nWe're going to have an election...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: But so if you're...\n\nRUBIO:...in November.", + " One of the key -- go ahead.\n\nI'm sorry.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: So if you're elected president, will you promise not to make an appointment in your final year?\n\nRUBIO: Yes. Well, I'm not saying the president can't make an appointment. I'm saying we're not going to move forward on it in the Senate. And that has been the practice now...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: So you're saying he should?\n\nRUBIO:...for over 80 years.\n\nHe -- well, he's done. I'm not -- he has the legal right to do it,", + " but -- and -- and as president, I would recognize that precedent and the precedent that's been set over the last 80 years has been that in the last year of a president's term, and in a second term especially, there should not be Supreme Court nominees put into lifetime positions for a president that you're not going to be able to hold accountable at the ballot box. There's going to be an election in November. This is going to be an issue in the election. The voters are going to choose a new president.\n\nAnd that new president, who I believe will be me, should then fill that vacancy for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS:", + " We also just heard Donald Trump say he doesn't think about impeachment of George W. Bush anymore, but he's not backing off those comments he made last night that President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.\n\nGiven those statements, is -- is Donald Trump still a -- a nominee you could support if Republicans choose him for the nomination?\n\nRUBIO: Well, I would have hoped that Donald, last night, would have repudiated those comments and just said that's what he said then, he doesn't believe it anymore. I mean his unwillingness to walk away from that is disturbing.\n\nHe's not going to be the nominee.", + " I'm going to be the nominee, so we're not going to have to worry about that.\n\nBut it is a disturbing comment. I don't -- of course, I don't believe George W. Bush lied. I think George W. Bush acted based on the information provided to him, that, by the way, was also shown to Congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi and others, and they, too, agreed with that assessment.\n\nNow, it turned out not to be accurate, and that's unfortunate. That being the case, he didn't lie. A lie is when you know what's true and yet you say something different.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS:", + " I know you hope that you're going to defeat Donald Trump, but my question is very simple, will you support him if he's the nominee?\n\nRUBIO: I'm going to support the Republican nominee. And I think the Repub -- and I know the Republican nominee is going to be someone that holds views like mine. I -- I don't share all the views that Donald Trump has, and I think, ultimately, he won't be the nominee. But I'll support the Republican nominee, because the Republican nominee, no matter who it is on that stage, is still going to be a better choice than Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS:", + " Senator Marco Rubio, thanks for joining us this morning.\n\nRUBIO: Thanks, George.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Governor John Kasich joins us now. Thanks for joining us this morning, Governor Kasich.\n\nBoy, quite a night last night. It doesn't sound -- from the sound of that debate that anybody is going to take your suggestion to bring down all the negative ads.\n\nGOV. JOHN KASICH (R-OH), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You know what, George, it was like a demolition derby, but the good news is my car's still going around the circuit.\n\nYou know, I tell you what I found,", + " George. I had a rally at this barbecue joint out here. It was about 500 people, it was stunning. And people were just -- and they were coming up taking pictures, grabbing onto me, wanting me to sign things. They said please stay positive. Please stay positive.\n\nSo I kind of get my fuel from ideas. I don't get my fuel from the negative side.\n\nI don't disagree with Rubio. I mean if you're going to be attacked, you've got to defend yourself. You know, but I want to climb out of that as quickly as I can to tell people what I'm for rather than spend my time prolonging a back and forth in a debate like that.\n\nBut either way,", + " I think these debates are ridiculous. This is not a way to pick a president. If you really want to pick a president, come to a town hall. Watch an interaction between a candidate and the public for 30 minutes or 40 minutes.\n\nI mean this whole business of who's got the best sound bite, who has the most clever thing they said, I mean that's just silly, George. I don't think Harry Truman could become president through this process. But it's what we've got and we'll deal with it.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Well, let's talk about who you're for, then,", + " for the Supreme Court.\n\nWhat kind of justice would you appoint?\n\nAnd do you agree with -- with Senator Clinton and Donald Trump there on their pretty severe criticism of the chief justice, John Roberts?\n\nKASICH: No, I'm not here to criticize John Roberts. Looked, I've picked well over 100 judges to the court in Ohio. I've even picked an Ohio Supreme Court justice. She's turned out to be a great justice. I would look for a conservative, somebody who doesn't make law, but somebody who will interpret the law. And we'd pick somebody who's, you know, sort of above reproach,", + " you know, what's their record, what's their history?\n\nAnd that's how I've done it in my state. So, you know, this is not an unfamiliar process to me.\n\nSo it would obviously be somebody who, you know, is a constitutionalist and is not interested in making law.\n\nYou know, what I said about the president -- and look, he's going to send somebody. The Senate is going to do nothing, George. You know, my -- my sense is, you're going to have a president -- a presidential election here. People will, in a very unusual way, indirectly sort of pick the next judge of -- justice of the Supreme Court.", + " It's pretty interesting.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: It is pretty interesting, but this sounds like a new rule now, a rule that a president can't pick a Supreme Court justice in his or her final year?\n\nKASICH: Well, George, you know, I -- look, you know how polarized everything is. We've got to be real about things. And what I don't want to see is more fighting and more recrimination, which is exactly what we're going to see. Let's -- let's just face up to this.\n\nWe are very divided between President Obama and the Congress.\n\n(COUGHING)\n\nKASICH:", + " And it's -- it, you know, and -- and look, when you have that kind of division, it's really hard to get this done.\n\nIf I were president of the United States, you know, and I could keep the Congress together, of course I would send somebody. But it probably would be a different situation.\n\nBut right now, I mean just looking at it, it's one of the reasons I'm running for president. You know, they're Republicans and Democrats really, in most cases, before they're Americans. And but the divisions are real.\n\nSo let's just wait for an election, move beyond it and then whoever we pick as a justice and gets confirmed,", + " we'll have broad consensus across the country and can start the healing process.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: The divisions are pretty real inside your party from the look of that debate stage last night, as well.\n\nThis nomination fight is going to take a long time, isn't it?\n\nKASICH: Well, you know, I think it's going to take a long time, George. You know, my daughter Emma said to my wife, after we did so well in New Hampshire, well, we're -- I'm really happy about the -- about daddy doing so well, but when is he coming home?\n\nAnd I'm actually going to go home for Valentine's Day.\n\nBut it's going to take a long time.", + " I mean I'm headed to Michigan tomorrow. I -- I think we're going to -- I know we're going to be back here in South Carolina. We're, you know, preparing all across the country.\n\nSo I think it is going to take a long time, George. And -- and it's going to be interesting. And I hope we can raise it, raise the bar and have a little higher brow conversation about what we want to do.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Governor Kasich, thanks very much for your time this morning.\n\nKASICH: Thank you, George.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Up next,", + " we're going to hear from the Democrats, Hillary Clinton.\n\nBernie Sanders is going to join us, as well.\n\nPlus, Senator Chuck Schumer, the number two Democrat in the Senate, a member of the Judiciary Committee, and all the political fallout with our powerhouse roundtable.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\n(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)\n\nHILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It is outrageous that Republicans in the Senate and on the campaign trail have already pledged to block any replacement that President Obama nominates.\n\nBarack Obama is President of the United States until January 20th, 2017.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCLINTON:", + " That is a fact, my friends, whether the Republicans like it or not.\n\n(END VIDEO CLIP)\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Hillary Clinton weighing in on the battle to replace Justice Scalia. This as she writes into the top of the campaign agenda. And just after the news broke yesterday, my THIS WEEK colleague, Martha Raddatz, sat down with Bernie Sanders and started by asking him to respond to the Republican claim to block any nominee from President Obama.\n\n(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)\n\nSEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT), DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I don't think that Mitch McConnell has it right on this issue.", + " The constitution is pretty clear and that is it is the job of the President of the United States to appoint, nominate members to the Supreme Court and the Senate confirms.\n\nPresident Obama, in my view, should make that nomination. I hope he does it as soon as possible. And I hope that the Senate confirms and begins deliberations as soon as possible.\n\nMARTHA RADDATZ, ABC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Do you imagine that will happen?\n\nSANDERS: I surely hope so. I just don\u2019t think it looks good that, for very overtly political reasons, that the Republicans would deny this president the right to exercise his constitutional responsibility,", + " which is to appointment members to the Supreme Court.\n\nI don't think the public would look kindly on Republican actions to try to thwart what he is supposed to be able to do.\n\nRADDATZ: You've talked about Supreme Court nominees a bit on the campaign trail.\n\nWhat would you look for in a Supreme Court nominee?\n\nSANDERS: What I have talked about on the campaign trail is one litmus test -- not a great fan of litmus tests but there is one for me -- and that I think our campaign finance system today is so corrupt as a result of this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision of six years ago that I would never nominate anybody to the Supreme Court who is not prepared to overturn that disastrous decision,", + " which is allowing billionaires to buy elections and which is undermining American democracy.\n\n(END VIDEOTAPE)\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Thanks to Martha and Senator Sanders there. And let's get more on this now from the number two Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York, also member of the Judiciary Committee.\n\nSo let's look at the math right here. You heard Senator Cruz say he's going to filibuster. Mitch McConnell says it's not going to happen.\n\nYou only have 46 votes in the Senate so there's not going to be a nominee here.\n\nSEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK:", + " Well, the job, first and foremost, is for the president to nominate and for the Senate to hold hearings and go through the process. You know, the Constitution, Ted Cruz holds the Constitution, you know, when he walks through the halls of Congress. Let him show me the clause that says president's only president for three years.\n\nDoes this mean we don't hold hearings on anything?\n\nThe president shouldn't nominate Cabinet ministers?\n\nIt certainly might mean the Republicans shouldn't repeal Obamacare in the fourth year.\n\nAnd so our job is to go forward with the process and then we'll see what happens. That's what Democrats --\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nSCHUMER:", + " Well, no, I'm not sure that's true. You know, the kind of obstructionism that Mitch McConnell's talking about, he's harking back to his old days, you know, he recently he said, well, I want regular order.\n\nBut in 2010, right after the election or right during the election, he said, \"My number one job is to defeat Barack Obama,\" without even knowing what Barack Obama was going to propose. Here, he doesn\u2019t even know who the president's going to propose and he said, no, we're not having hearings; we're not going to go forward to lead the Supreme Court vacant at 300 days in a divided time.\n\nThis kind of obstructionism isn't going to last.", + " And you know, we Democrats didn't do this. When in the -- we nominated -- we voted 97-0 for Justice Kennedy in the last year of Reagan's term.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: After voting down Justice (INAUDIBLE) and Justice --\n\nSCHUMER: Yes. Well, but we had nominations. And that's the point here. The president's going to nominate. I believe that many of the mainstream Republicans, when the president nominates a mainstream nominee, will not want to follow Mitch McConnell over the cliff --\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: So that's what you think the president should do,", + " send someone who he thinks can credibly get Republican support rather than send someone who will send a powerful message about the direction he wants to take supporting (ph)?\n\nSCHUMER: I think he -- I think first the American people don't like this obstruction. When you go right off the bat and say, I don't care who he nominates, I am going to oppose him, that's not going to fly.\n\nA lot of the mainstream Republicans are going to say I may not follow this.\n\nBut second, I think the president, past is prologue, will nominate someone who is mainstream. Look --\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nSCHUMER:", + " -- nominees have -- no (INAUDIBLE).\n\nHis nominees in the past have gotten Republican votes.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: OK. Senator Schumer, thanks very much for joining us this morning.\n\nSCHUMER: Thank you.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: We'll be right back with the roundtable.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: And we have so much to talk about this morning. Let's do it. Let's bring it now Matt Dowd, our political analyst, along with Cokie Roberts and Bill Kristol, editor of \"The Weekly Standard.\"\n\nAnd, Matt,", + " let me begin with you.\n\nIn a campaign of surprises, this may be one of the biggest ones yet.\n\nMATTHEW DOWD, ABC NEWS SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. And we've talked now for almost 24 hours. It throws a huge wrench into the entire system, only in the system in Washington, D.C., where they're going to have to decide what they're going to do, but the entire presidential campaign.\n\nI actually think the Republicans have made a mistake in their reaction to this, the initial reaction to this.\n\nI think a better tack would have been, listen, the president has a constitutional duty to nominate somebody to the Supreme Court.", + " And the U.S. Senate has a constitutional duty to decide whether or not they approve that person.\n\nNow the Senate may not approve that person; they'll probably won't approve that person.. But they shouldn't actually say the president shouldn't nominate. I think their tact should be the president has a duty, he should nominate, and the Republicans have a duty to decide in the Senate what they want to do.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Bill Kristol, does Matt have a point there?\n\nBILL KRISTOL, \"THE WEEKLY STANDARD\": Not really. I mean, first of all, it's such terrible news about Nino Scalia,", + " who was such a giant of the Supreme Court and a conservative hero and -- and I knew him reasonably well. A wonderful man, really.\n\nNo, the Democrats destroyed Bob Bork's chances of being -- they defeated Bob Bork in a totally scurrilous campaign in 1987. When President Bush nominated Miguel Estrada for the DC Circuit Court early in his presidency, Democrats filibustered it and wouldn't let it come to a vote because they knew that he might be in line to be a Supreme Court nominee and he might be the first Hispanic put on the Supreme Court by President Bush.\n\nSo honestly, turnabout is fair play.", + " Maybe Mitch McConnell should have been more coy. But I give him credit for directness.\n\nPresident Obama is entitled to nominate whoever he wants. He's entitled to take his case to the public. Republicans in the Senate will have to be effective, I agree with that, on this. But they need to make the -- they need to explain why we do not want the Supreme Court going in the direction President Obama wants it going in.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: And Cokie, I mean the Senate debate is likely to be a bit of kabuki theater right now. Hard to imagine how the president...\n\nCOKIE ROBERTS,", + " ABC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Right.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: -- it's not impossible, but hard to imagine he's going to get someone. So meantime, this is going to make the Supreme Court right at the center of the presidential campaign and it could be one of the first times ever.\n\nROBERTS: Absolutely. It really raises the stakes in the presidential campaign, George, because it focuses the mind. People realize wait, we're voting for someone who could name a court justice that will be there for decades. Keep in mind, Gerald Ford was president of the United States for about two and a half years.", + " John Paul Stevens, his nominee, was on the Supreme Court for decades afterward.\n\nAntonin Scalia, a Reagan appointee.\n\nSo you have a very important message being sent to the voters that whomever you vote for this time, it will have an effect for many, many years to come. And I think...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: OK...\n\nROBERTS: -- that one of the effects of that will be that the question of electability becomes much more important j\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Let me...\n\nROBERTS: -- in the voter's mind.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: -- I want to -- I want to bring that to Matt...\n\nROBERTS:", + " I think then that has, of course, been Hillary Clinton's strong point in the -- in her debates, in her election so far (INAUDIBLE).\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Let me bring -- let me bring that to Matthew Dowd.\n\nSo Hillary -- so Cokie is suggesting this could help Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side.\n\nDo you agree with that?\n\nAnd what about on the Republican side?\n\nDoes this fall to any candidate's benefit?\n\nDOWD: Well, I think when these Supreme Court nominations, which I absolutely agree is going to be part of the conversation, it really is a -- a conversation that goes on with the very left and the very right.", + " Most of middle America is going to look at this and not get the whole nuance of who's more electable, who's not, what's happening. It's a very left and a very right, huge argument in the course of this.\n\nBut I have to say, on the electability concern, that if Hillary Clinton makes that, right now, Bernie Sanders is more electable than Hillary Clinton. She -- he has a higher favorability rating. He is more trusted. He just won the New Hampshire primary by 22 points. He won among younger voters. He won among women voters.\n\nI think in the course of time,", + " if Hillary Clinton keeps pursuing the electability argument on her side, then it's actually problematic against Bernie Sanders.\n\nI think it's going to effect the Republican side in this -- the course of this. The only time in that debate last night, George, as you know, where there seemed to be any agreement was -- was lauding Justice Scalia in the course of this and paying homage to him and saying that we're going to -- we want to put a -- a conservative on the court. That was the only consistency across that stage last night.\n\nAfter that, it devolved into something...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: It sure was.", + " And...\n\nDOWD: -- akin to a...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: And Bill Kristol...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: -- let me go to you.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Ted Cruz just said -- Ted Cruz said this is time for the circus, I think, is over right now.\n\nDoes it make the debate on the Republican side somewhat more serious, help any particular candidate?\n\nKRISTOL: Yes, look, there are two things a president does that he does uniquely. He nominates judges and is commander-in-chief. Health care, education policy,", + " tax policy, Congress plays a huge role.\n\nI think the president -- the presidential debate on the Republican side, the choice will now focus much more on who will put good judges on the Supreme Court, who has the knowledge and -- and the temperament and the -- and the background where voters can be confident that they'll get good conservative constitutional judges.\n\nAnd the commander-in-chief issue, which Donald Trump raised central -- squarely last night by saying that George Bush knowingly lied us into the war in Iraq. The Republican primary -- it's one thing to say the war was a mistake, knowingly lied us into the war in Iraq?\n\nROBERTS: Right.\n\nKRISTOL:", + " Are Republican primary voters going to accept this?\n\nI believe that Donald Trump's candidacy was dealt -- and I said this before and I've been wrong -- but I really do believe last night could be a moment where finally Republican voters say enough -- enough with the being in, you know, engaged. Trump's interesting. He's saying some things I like. He's sticking it to those politicians.\n\nAnd finally, maybe people will focus on can and should he be president of the United States?\n\nAnd I think Republican primary voters...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Doesn't...\n\nKRISTOL: -- will say no.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS:", + " Cokie, those...\n\nROBERTS: And...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: -- those predictions have imperiled people before...\n\nROBERTS: Right. And what you're seeing -- but it is true, what you're seeing here in South Carolina is an awful lot of ads against him. And that is something that has not been as prevalent before. And whether that makes a difference -- it's just next Saturday in that primary, we'll see.\n\nBut he -- last night's debate was really remarkable and it's a -- it's childishness, really. I mean it was basically everybody calling -- saying liar, liar, pants on fire.", + " And a -- and I'm not sure that after the entertainment value of that, that voters feel tremendously comfortable...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: You mean...\n\nROBERTS: -- seeing those candidates go after each other that way.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Meantime, Matthew Dowd, we are going to see President George W. Bush on the campaign trail tomorrow, really, for the first time.\n\nWhat difference does that make in South Carolina?\n\nDOWD: Well, he's very popular in South Carolina. He won the state after that big loss in 2000 in New Hampshire. He came back, won the state and carried it on.", + " He's very popular there.\n\nI don't know how much of that transfers to Jeb Bush. I think part of the problem is you can have a popular president, a former president. Bill Clinton went to New Hampshire, a very popular president. It didn't seem to help Hillary Clinton in the course of that race in New Hampshire.\n\nAnd so I don't know how much impact. It could have some impact on the margins, 1 or 2 or 3 percent, possibly.\n\nI think when we look at Donald Trump in South Carolina right now and Bill may be right, though he's predicted Trump's fall along the way in the course of this -- if Donald Trump,", + " after last night, wins South Carolina and all of the ads and he wins that South Carolina, after attacking Lindsey Graham and after he was attacking George W. Bush and actually saying George W. has lied about the war, if he wins South Carolina, how does one stop Donald Trump?\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: That is an excellent question.\n\nROBERTS: That is...\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Thanks to all of you.\n\nWe will come back, more...\n\nROBERTS: That is really the question.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: It -- it certainly is.\n\nWhen we come back, more on the life and legacy of Antonin Scalia after this from our ABC stations.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\n(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)\n\nANTONIN SCALIA,", + " SUPREME COURT JUSTICE: My \"Constitution\" is a very flexible \"Constitution.\"\n\nYou think the death penalty is a good idea, persuade your fellow citizens and adopt it.\n\nYou think it's a bad idea, persuade them the other way and eliminate it.\n\nI have my rules that -- that confine me. I know what I'm looking for. When I find it, the original meaning of \"The Constitution,\" I am handcuffed. If I believe that the First Amendment meant, when it was adopted, that you are entitled to burn the American flag, I have to come out that way, even though I don't like to come out that way.\n\nThough I'm a law and order type,", + " I cannot do all of the mean, conservative things I would love to do to this society. You've got me.\n\n(END VIDEO CLIP)\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Justice Scalia setting out his philosophy of the constitution right there.\n\nLet's talk to some guests now who know him well. Paul Clement, former solicitor general, also clerk for Justice Scalia; Kate Shaw, our Supreme Court analyst; Terry Moran, who has covered the Supreme Court for us as well.\n\nAnd Mr. Clement, let me begin with you. You clerked for Justice Scalia, you argued before him. How will you remember him?\n\nPAUL CLEMENT,", + " FORMER SOLICITOR GENERAL: Well, I'll remember him just like in that clip. I mean, he really believed in the constitution. He believed that the constitution had to be interpreted in a way that constrained the justices so they couldn't just impose their own personal policy preferences.\n\nI'll remember him from oral argument. He completely changed the way that the Supreme Court handled cases and handled oral arguments. Before he came to the court, it was quite common for advocates to make their argument and not get a single question from the justices, or at most maybe a handful. He got there. He started asking questions from day one. And even the colleagues who had been there awhile started saying,", + " well, we're not going to let this new guy ask all the questions. They got involved in it and it fundamentally changed the way that the court holds arguments. And it fundamentally changed the way that frankly the court approaches statutes of constitutionally law as well.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Let me just ask you quickly as well. You know, he has such a unique pen. What was it like to write a draft for him?\n\nCLEMENT: Well, we used to joke in the chambers that the only reason he asks for drafts from his law clerks is because he wasn't quite sure how to format a Word Perfect document on the computer.", + " Because that voice you see in those opinions, that is all him. And he just had a gift. And it's changed the way I think students in law school looked at the constitution and the court, because left or right most students, the first thing they do is pick up the Scalia decision before they even -- even if it's a dissent before they read the majority opinion. He's that -- he was that gifted a writer.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: That's where his impact is.\n\nLess impact in moving his justices behind the scenes.\n\nKATE SHAW, NBC SUPREME COURT ANALYST: Yeah. I think there's no question that he was the intellectual leader of the conservative wing of the court for essentially the whole time he sat on it.\n\nBut,", + " you're right, he wasn't always victorious in advancing his position. I don't know if it was the views he was espousing, which were extreme. I don't know if it was a question of sometimes abrasive style. So -- but he didn't always win in particular cases. And nonetheless he had a transformational effect on the law, just in terms of how the court approaches legal questions.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Terry Moran, his biggest victory?\n\nTERRY MORAN, NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Well, I would think his most memorable victory, and it's a piece with his whole judicial philosophy, is the great second amendment triumph in the Chicago gun rights case where Justice Scalia,", + " writing for a majority in the court, said the Second Amendment is an individual right, that well regulated militia clause, that doesn't interfere, he said, with the individual right to bear arms. And that was of in keeping with (inaudible) that the federal government's powers needed to be limited, needed to be checked, get back to the original intent.\n\nAnd you know, George, a lot of people in society have great big grand ideas. Very few of them make them as contagious as Antonin Scalia made his. Through his writing, through his personality, through the fights he picked, the fights he loved to pick, as Dahlia Lithwick,", + " one of our colleagues put it, he made the founders cool again. And in many ways, his influence goes outside of the law into a whole way of looking at the kind of country we are.\n\nSTEPHANOPOULOS: Well said. Thanks to all of you. That's all for us today. Thanks for sharing part of your Sunday with us. I'll see you tomorrow on GMA.\n\nEND ", + " In the cloistered chambers of the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia\u2019s days were highly regulated and predictable. He met with clerks, wrote opinions and appeared for arguments in the august courtroom on a schedule set months in advance.\n\nYet as details of Scalia\u2019s sudden death trickled in Sunday, it appeared that the hours afterward were anything but orderly. The man known for his elegant legal opinions and profound intellect was found dead in his room at a hunting resort by the resort\u2019s owner, who grew worried when Scalia didn\u2019t appear at breakfast Saturday morning.\n\nIt then took hours for authorities in remote West Texas to find a justice of the peace,", + " officials said Sunday. When they did, Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara pronounced Scalia dead of natural causes without seeing the body \u2014 which is permissible under Texas law \u2014 and without ordering an autopsy.\n\nAs official Washington tried to process what his demise means for politics and the law, some details of Scalia\u2019s final hours remained opaque. As late as Sunday afternoon, for example, there were conflicting reports about whether an autopsy should have been performed. A manager at the El Paso funeral home where Scalia\u2019s body was taken said that his family made it clear they did not want one.\n\nOne of two other officials who were called but couldn\u2019t get to Scalia\u2019s body in time said that she would have made a different decision on the autopsy.\n\nWashington Post reporter Robert Barnes explains where the Supreme Court stands after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and how the vacant seat will impact the presidential election.", + " (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)\n\n\u201cIf it had been me... I would want to know,\u201d Juanita Bishop, a justice of the peace in Presidio, Tex., said in an interview Sunday of the chaotic hours after Scalia\u2019s death at the Cibolo Creek Ranch, a luxury compound less than an hour from the Mexican border and about 40 miles south of Marfa.\n\nMeanwhile, Guevara acknowledged that she pronounced Scalia dead by phone, without seeing his body. Instead, she spoke to law enforcement officials at the scene \u2014 who assured her \u201cthere were no signs of foul play\u201d \u2014 and Scalia\u2019s physician in Washington,", + " who said that the 79-year-old justice suffered from a host of chronic conditions.\n\n\u201cHe was having health issues,\u2019\u2019 Guevara said, adding that she is awaiting a statement from Scalia\u2019s doctor that will be added to his death certificate when it is issued later this week.\n\nGuevara also rebutted a report by a Dallas TV station that quoted her as saying that Scalia had died of \u201cmyocardial infarction.\u201d In an interview with The Washington Post, she said she meant only that his heart had stopped.\n\n\u201cIt wasn\u2019t a heart attack,\u201d Guevara said. \u201cHe died of natural causes.\u201d\n\nIn a statement Sunday,", + " the U.S. Marshals Service, which provides security for Supreme Court justices, said that Scalia had declined a security detail while at the ranch, so marshals were not present when he died. \u201cDeputy U.S. Marshals from the Western District of Texas responded immediately upon notification of Justice Scalia\u2019s passing,\u201d the statement said.\n\nOne thing was clear: Scalia died in his element, doing what he loved, at a luxury resort that has played host to movie stars and European royalty, and is famous for bird hunts and bigger game such as bison and mountain lions.\n\n1 of 20 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad \u00d7 The life of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia View Photos Antonin Scalia,", + " the influential and most provocative member of the Supreme Court, has died. He was 79. Caption Antonin Scalia, the influential and most provocative member of the Supreme Court, has died. He was 79. Oct. 8, 2010 Justice Antonin Scalia at the Supreme Court. Larry Downing/Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.\n\n\u201cOther than being with his family or in church, there\u2019s no place he\u2019d rather be than on a hunt,\u201d said Houston lawyer Mark Lanier, who took Scalia hunting for wild boar, deer and even alligators. Lanier said he first learned of Scalia\u2019s love for hunting through former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O\u2019Connor.", + " \u201cHe\u2019ll do anything if you take him hunting,\u201d Lanier recalled O\u2019Connor saying.\n\nScalia had recently returned from a trip to Asia, where his last public event was a book signing in Hong Kong. John Poindexter, the Houston businessman who owns the Cibolo Creek Ranch, said Sunday that Scalia and a friend arrived Friday by chartered aircraft, traveling through Houston. At the ranch, Scalia joined about 35 other people invited by Poindexter, who declined to name the other guests.\n\nLater that day, Scalia went out with the group to hunt blue quail. But \u201che did not exert himself,\u201d Poindexter said.", + " \u201cHe got out of the hunting vehicle and walked around some.\u2019\u2019\n\nLaw enforcement officials said Scalia attended a private party that night with the other guests and left to go to bed early. But Poindexter said that didn\u2019t seem unusual: All of the guests were tired from traveling to the remote ranch, as well as the day\u2019s other activities. Everyone was in bed by 10 p.m., he said.\n\nScalia\u2019s behavior, Poindexter said, \u201cwas entirely natural and normal.\u2019\u2019\n\nThe next morning, Scalia did not show up for breakfast. Poindexter at first thought he might be sleeping late, but eventually he grew concerned.", + " Late Saturday morning, he and one other person knocked on the door to Scalia\u2019s room, an expansive suite called the \u201cEl Presidente.\u201d When there was no answer, they went inside.\n\n\u201cEverything was in perfect order. He was in his pajamas, peacefully, in bed,\u201d Poindexter said.\n\nEmergency personnel and officials from the U.S. Marshals Service were called to the scene, then two local judges who also serve as justices of the peace, Guevara said. Both were out of town, she said \u2014 not unusual in a remote region where municipalities are miles apart.\n\nGuevara also was out of town, but she said she agreed to declare Scalia dead based on the information from law enforcement officials and Scalia\u2019s doctor,", + " citing Texas laws that permit a justice of the peace to declare someone dead without seeing the body.\n\nOn Saturday evening, Scalia\u2019s body was loaded into a hearse and escorted to the Sunset Funeral Home in El Paso by a procession of about 20 law enforcement officers. It arrived there about 2:30 a.m. Sunday, according to funeral home manager Chris Lujan. The funeral home is about 31/ 2 hours from the ranch where Scalia died.\n\nAbout 3:30 a.m. Sunday, Scalia\u2019s family declined to have an autopsy performed, Lujan said, so the body was being prepared for Scalia\u2019s funeral and was expected to be transported to Washington on Monday.", + " Late Sunday, it was under guard by six law enforcement officials, including U.S. marshals and Texas state troopers, he said.\n\nFuneral arrangements for Scalia \u2014 a devoted Catholic who was given the last rites by a Catholic priest \u2014 were unclear Sunday.\n\nHorwitz and Markon reported from Washington. Lana Straub in Marfa, Tex., and Alice Crites and Robert Barnes in Washington contributed to this report.\n\nRead more:\n\nScalia\u2019s death upends court dynamics.\n\nThese are the top cases to be heard by an 8-member court.\n\nThe three types of people Obama could nominate.\n\nScalia: A brilliant mind, and a frequent critic of civil rights.\n" + ], + "length": 19398, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 53, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 June's issue of the Atlantic packages Jeffrey E. Stern's 9,000-word piece on Clayton Lockett's botched April 2014 execution in Oklahoma as the \"untold story\" of what happened. And while many of the details have surfaced elsewhere\u2014a September report by the Oklahoma Office of Public Safety, for instance, noted the 38-year-old had been hoarding the anti-anxiety med hydroxyzine, and Mother Jones framed it as evidence Lockett was trying to take his own life\u2014Stern gets deeper inside that cell and this story. From Stern's lead: \"Before a team of correctional officers came to get him at 5:06am, he fashioned a noose out of his sheets. He pulled the blade out of a safety razor and made half-inch-long cuts on his arms. He swallowed a handful of pills that he\u2019d been hoarding.\" From there, Stern presents an incredibly comprehensive and nuanced portrait of what preceded Lockett's death\u2014and of that death itself. He paints a picture of Stephanie Neiman, the bold 19-year-old Lockett shot before she was buried alive; charts the journey America's prisons have taken in the last two decades to secure lethal injection drugs; introduces the surprising people often responsible for choosing the drugs used; weaves in Katie Fretland, the young reporter who had been digging into Oklahoma's death penalty practices since 2012 and was present for Lockett's execution; shares details from Lockett's dark childhood; and relays in stomach-turning detail the dozen-plus attempts to get an IV into Lockett. And then there's what came next: \"He started writhing as if trying to free himself, to get up off the gurney. \u2026 Another witness saw Lockett open his eyes and look right at the doctor, like something out of a horror movie. \u2026 From the viewing area, Katie Fretland could see the doctor\u2019s face for the first time, and his expression was clear: Oh, f---.\" Read Stern's piece in full here.\n", + "docs": [ + "On the morning of his execution, Clayton Lockett hid under the covers. Before a team of correctional officers came to get him at 5:06 a.m., he fashioned a noose out of his sheets. He pulled the blade out of a safety razor and made half-inch-long cuts on his arms. He swallowed a handful of pills that he\u2019d been hoarding. And on April 29, 2014, when the team of officers knocked on the door of his cell in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, Clayton Lockett\u2014a 38-year-old convicted murderer\u2014pulled a blanket over his head and refused to get up.", + " The officers left and asked for permission to tase him. While they were gone, Lockett tried to jam the door. They came back, forced their way in, tased him, and dragged him out. Eleven hours later, at about 5:20 p.m., after a medical examination, X\u2011rays, eight hours in a holding cell, and a shower, Lockett was brought by a five-member strap-down team into the death chamber. It was a small, clinical-looking room with white walls and a polished floor that reflected the lights overhead. A gurney stood in the center of the room; above it hung a microphone for Lockett\u2019s final words.\n\nOne of the walls in the chamber had a pair of baseball-size holes through which IV lines could pass into the chemical room,", + " a small space where three executioners would administer the drugs that would kill him. The executioners had been driven to the prison earlier in the day, and had put on hoods as they approached. They would remain out of sight until after Lockett was dead. There had never been a question of Lockett\u2019s guilt. Fifteen years earlier, on June 3, 1999, he had stood in a ravine and aimed a 12-gauge shotgun at Stephanie Neiman, a 19-year-old who had graduated from high school two weeks earlier. Lockett and two accomplices had beaten one of Neiman\u2019s friends and raped another.", + " Lockett told Neiman multiple times that he would kill her if she didn\u2019t promise to keep quiet. He warned her one last time, but she insisted she would go to the police. He pulled the trigger. The shot sent her spinning to the ground. The gun jammed; he cleared it and fired at her again. Then one of Lockett\u2019s accomplices buried Neiman alive in a shallow grave, the dirt puffing up as she struggled to breathe, and they left her to die. Lockett was arrested three days later, a Sunday. Mark Gibson, the district attorney who would prosecute him, went to the jail that night because Lockett wanted to give a statement.", + " Lockett smoked a cigarette and showed no remorse as he confessed. Gibson thought he saw a twinkle in the young man\u2019s eye, as though he was relishing the attention, and came away believing that Lockett was pure evil.\n\nIn the execution chamber, Lockett was belted to the gurney. To his left, beige blinds covered the windows to the viewing area. Soon, shadows would be visible as the seats on the other side filled up. There was so much media interest in his execution that the prison had had to draw names to decide which reporters could attend. A clock on the wall read 5:", + "26. The execution was scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Lockett could expect to be dead within about 45 minutes. Since the mid-1990s, when lethal injection replaced electrocution as America\u2019s favored method of execution, states have found drug combinations that they trust to quickly and painlessly end a life. They often use three drugs. The first is an anesthetic, to render the prisoner unconscious. The second is a paralytic. The third, potassium chloride, stops the heart. What many people don\u2019t realize, however, is that choosing the specific drugs and doses involves as much guesswork as expertise.", + " In many cases, the person responsible for selecting the drugs has no medical training. Sometimes that person is a lawyer\u2014a state attorney general or an attorney for the prison. These officials base their confidence that a certain drug will work largely on the fact that it has seemed to work in the past. So naturally, they prefer not to experiment with new drugs. In recent years, however, they have been forced to do so.\n\nThe problems began at a pharmaceutical plant in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The Food and Drug Administration discovered that some of the drugs made there were contaminated and in April 2010 sent the manufacturer, Hospira, a warning letter.", + " Hospira stopped producing, among other drugs, a barbiturate called sodium thiopental. No other company was approved by the FDA to make sodium thiopental, which was the anesthetic of choice for almost all of the states that carried out executions. (The death penalty is legal in 32 states; 17 of them have performed an execution in the past five years.) With sodium thiopental suddenly unavailable, states scrambled to find alternatives. In June of that year, officials in Georgia discovered a work-around: a small-time businessman in London named Mehdi Alavi, who sold wholesale drugs through a company called Dream Pharma, would ship sodium thiopental to them.", + " Georgia bought some from him, and then Arkansas did too. With Hospira offline, Alavi had the U.S. execution market cornered. Arizona bought sodium thiopental from him in late September and used it the next month to execute a convicted murderer named Jeffrey Landrigan. California placed an order as well. Maya Foa, an anti-death-penalty advocate based in London, saw Dream Pharma mentioned in court documents related to Landrigan\u2019s execution and decided to pay a visit. At the company\u2019s address, she found a small building with peeling white paint and a placard that read Elgone Driving Academy. Inside she found two desks and,", + " in the back of the room, a single cabinet. That was it: Dream Pharma. Alavi imported execution drugs from elsewhere in Europe and shipped them to the United States, using that cupboard in a driving school as his base of operations. The judges seemed to be passing the buck back and forth while Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner waited to die. Reprieve, the human-rights organization where Foa worked, wrote to the British government, arguing that supplying drugs for executions violated British law, since the death penalty is illegal in Europe. The government balked. Stopping the shipment of a drug would hamper free trade and could be harmful to patients.", + " Foa responded that the \u201cpatient\u201d argument was erroneous\u2014there was no trade of sodium thiopental between the U.S. and the U.K. for medicinal purposes. It was all for executions. This time, the government agreed. England announced tighter export restrictions, which effectively banned the sale of the drug for executions. Foa then persuaded the European Commission to follow suit by amending its torture regulation. U.S. states trying to carry out the death penalty were now blocked from buying drugs not just from England, but from all of Europe.\n\nSo they looked even farther afield. In late 2010, a company in Mumbai,", + " Kayem Pharmaceuticals, received an e-mail from the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services. Officials there wanted an anesthetic that Kayem made mostly for clients in Angola: sodium thiopental. Kayem sold Nebraska 500 vials, enough for more than 80 executions. Soon after, Foa\u2019s boss wrote the company to explain how Nebraska planned to use its product. When South Dakota officials tried to place an order, Kayem jacked up the price 900 percent, to $20 a vial, hoping the cost would dissuade them. It didn\u2019t. South Dakota bought 500 vials. Kayem stopped selling the drug to the U.S.", + " immediately after that. Nebraska also turned to a middleman named Chris Harris, who contacted another company, called Naari, that made sodium thiopental in India. When Nebraska prison officials later announced that they\u2019d obtained sodium thiopental from Naari, the firm\u2019s CEO was livid. He wrote to the chief justice of the Nebraska supreme court saying he\u2019d been duped: Naari had supplied Harris with vials of the drug only because Harris had offered to get it registered for future sale in Zambia, where there is a huge need for cheap surgical drugs. The CEO wrote that Harris was \u201cnot authorised to sell the product\u201d to Nebraska and that Naari was \u201cdeeply opposed to the use of the medicines in executions.\u201d He demanded that the vials be returned.", + " They were not.\n\nIn Oklahoma, with sodium thiopental increasingly difficult to get and an execution scheduled for December 2010, officials decided they could no longer avoid finding a substitute. They settled on another powerful barbiturate that was more easily available: a short-term therapy for insomnia called pentobarbital, made in the U.S. by a Copenhagen-based company called Lundbeck. According to state officials, pentobarbital was ideal \u201cfor humane euthanasia in animals.\u201d Oklahoma used the new drug in the execution of John David Duty. It worked.\n\nOklahoma had found its solution just in time: the federal Drug Enforcement Administration was about to start raiding prisons.", + " Since Hospira had been the only FDA-approved supplier of sodium thiopental, states that had imported it had done so illegally. Prisons had become, in effect, drug smugglers, and while the FDA may have been willing to look the other way, the DEA was not. In March 2011, agents seized Georgia\u2019s supply of sodium thiopental. In April, they seized Tennessee\u2019s, Kentucky\u2019s, South Carolina\u2019s, and Alabama\u2019s.\n\nMeanwhile, as other states followed Oklahoma\u2019s lead and shifted to pentobarbital, pressure mounted on Lundbeck, the drug\u2019s manufacturer, to block prisons from buying it. Reprieve issued press releases,", + " the Danish media picked up the story, The Lancet published an open letter urging the company to stop supplying executions, and shareholders threatened to divest. Maya Foa knew that pharmaceutical companies like Lundbeck had no interest in supplying executions\u2014the fact that their drugs are used to kill people makes for terrible publicity. But what could Lundbeck do about it? Foa researched the American pharmaceutical industry and learned about controls that a manufacturer can put in place to restrict a drug\u2019s distribution if, for example, new side effects come to light or the company wants to prevent off-label uses. She met with Lundbeck\u2019s senior executives to present an idea: Why not put distribution controls on pentobarbital,", + " and prevent middlemen from selling it to prisons? \u201cWe can\u2019t do that,\u201d one of Lundbeck\u2019s communications officers told her. But as he began to explain his objections, the CEO interrupted. \u201cWhy not?\u201d The room fell silent. Seven months after pentobarbital was first used in an execution, Lundbeck instituted distribution controls. Departments of corrections could no longer get their second-choice anesthetic.\n\nAt 5:30, half an hour before Lockett\u2019s execution was to begin, a young reporter named Katie Fretland rode in a prison van with other witnesses. They were taken to the death-row law library to wait.", + " Fretland heard a low thrumming fill the halls, the sound of inmates banging on their cell doors in tribute to the condemned. Fretland had arrived in McAlester just that day, but Oklahoma was something of a second home to her. She\u2019d first come in 2012, a few years out of college, after landing a 14\u2011week temp job with the Associated Press. The AP had asked her to cover the execution of Timothy Stemple, a Tulsa man convicted of killing his wife. Fretland tried to find out where the state would get the execution drugs, but she quickly ran into a roadblock:", + " Oklahoma had passed a law less than a year earlier that made nearly every aspect of executions a state secret, including where officials obtained the drugs. Fretland decided to follow the money. She had a source who worked at the prison, and she asked him how the state\u2019s Department of Corrections would pay for the drugs. He said it would use petty cash. She couldn\u2019t believe it. Could the department do that\u2014use an account with no public oversight to buy execution drugs? She filed a series of records requests and kept asking questions. She found petty-cash purchases of pentobarbital totaling more than $50,000. Pentobarbital was by now no longer available from Lundbeck,", + " but Fretland learned that compounding pharmacies were copying execution drugs and selling them to prisons. Compounding pharmacies exist to fill niche needs\u2014for example, making a version of a drug for a patient who is allergic to an additive in the mass-market product. Part drug company, part pharmacy, they operate in a gray area with little oversight. (In April 2013, after a deadly meningitis outbreak was traced to a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts, FDA officials announced that they had inspected about 30 compounding pharmacies and found unsanitary conditions in all but one of them.)\n\nFretland kept filing records requests, and accumulated reams of documents.", + " Her AP job ended, but she couldn\u2019t leave the story alone. She crashed with friends while continuing to interview pharmacists and former wardens, trying to put together a picture of Oklahoma\u2019s frantic pursuit of execution drugs. She turned up e-mails from early 2011 in which state officials discussed how they should respond to their peers in Texas, who had asked for help addressing the drug shortage. An Oklahoma assistant attorney general wrote to a colleague, \u201cI propose we help if TX promises to take a dive in the [University of Oklahoma\u2013University of Texas football] game for the next 4 years.\u201d His colleague suggested that Texas should provide tickets for \u201cTeam Pentobarbital (you,", + " me, Martha, the Warden, Mike Oakley, plus anyone else we can think of who is deserving) to the 2011 OU\u2011Texas game plus an on-field presentation of a commemorative plaque at halftime recognizing Oklahoma\u2019s on-going contributions to propping up the Texas system of capital punishment.\u201d He added, \u201cAnd throw in lifetime passes for the North Dallas Tollway, Highway 121 and the Bush Turnpike. That would be a good deal.\u201d Fretland also learned that in some executions, the prisoner had died of an overdose of the first drug, the anesthetic, and that the executioners had then disposed of the other two drugs by injecting them into the corpse.", + " Georgia had used pentobarbital from an undisclosed source in a June 2011 execution, and Fretland found e-mails from the next month proving that Oklahoma officials knew that the inmate had remained conscious for longer than he was supposed to and may have experienced severe pain. But a month after that e-mail exchange, they spent $10,400 of petty cash to buy pentobarbital. They made another purchase a year later, this time spending $40,000. Also see: A Brief History of Executions\n\nby Matt Ford In March 2014, Fretland published her findings in The Colorado Independent. She editorialized just once.", + " \u201cBanter about exchanging lethal injection help for football tickets and other favors,\u201d she wrote, \u201craises questions about how seriously Oklahoma officials take the death penalty.\u201d\n\nA month later, Fretland came to McAlester to watch Clayton Lockett\u2019s execution. A little before 6, she and the other witnesses were taken down a long hallway. She turned a corner into the viewing area, where two tiered rows of metal folding chairs faced the death chamber. Fretland took her seat along with 11 other reporters, two of Lockett\u2019s lawyers, and an assortment of Oklahoma officials. Stephanie Neiman\u2019s family would sit in a separate room for the victim\u2019s relatives.", + " Blinds covered the windows to the death chamber, so Fretland couldn\u2019t see what was going on inside. She sat down, and waited.\n\nAbout two months earlier, Mike Oakley, the general counsel for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, had returned from vacation to find the department in a near-frenzy. Before he\u2019d left, the department had ordered pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy for the executions of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, a 46-year-old man convicted in 2003 of raping and killing his roommate\u2019s 11-month-old baby. But compounding pharmacies had come under pressure to stop selling drugs for executions,", + " and Oklahoma\u2019s supplier had backed out. With the executions scheduled for March 20 and March 27, one of Oakley\u2019s deputies began driving around the state, walking into pharmacies and asking for pentobarbital, without success.\n\nOakley didn\u2019t know why the task of finding drugs for executions fell largely to him: he had no medical training. But he wanted to help his colleagues\u2014especially the warden, whom he considered conscientious and hardworking\u2014because he knew how much strain carrying out a death sentence put on them. He had gone into corrections, 25 years earlier, because Oklahoma was doing interesting work in mediation between victims and offenders.", + " Now he was about to retire, and he found himself, as his swan song, developing a new execution cocktail. Oakley had to report on his progress to Robert Patton, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, first thing in the morning and again before he went home each day. The attorney general\u2019s office called Oakley multiple times a day, and Patton himself was getting pressure from the governor\u2019s office. Both the attorney general, Scott Pruitt, and Governor Mary Fallin had elections coming up, and there were rumors that a Tea Party candidate might outflank Fallin on the right. Oakley believed they were worried about looking soft on crime.", + " In mid-March, Pruitt had to make the embarrassing admission, as part of a brief to the state\u2019s court of criminal appeals, that Oklahoma didn\u2019t have all the necessary drugs, and Lockett\u2019s and Warner\u2019s executions had to be delayed. Fewer and fewer medical experts were willing to advise Oakley, even unofficially. But he had professional contacts he\u2019d met through the National Institute of Corrections, and he asked them for advice. He and members of the attorney general\u2019s staff also looked at expert testimony related to executions in Florida.\n\nIn October 2013, Florida had used a sedative called midazolam in the execution of William Happ.", + " Florida officials had determined that it was \u201cthe most humane and dignified way to do the procedure.\u201d Doctors sometimes administer midazolam during anesthesia, but usually just to relax the patient, and in combination with a drug that blocks pain. In a high enough dose, it should render the patient unconscious\u2014but some experts argue that, unlike sodium thiopental and pentobarbital, midazolam cannot produce the deep, coma-like state needed to guarantee he feels no pain. William Happ shook his head, blinked, and opened his mouth during his execution. Witnesses had no way of knowing whether he was in pain, but he appeared to remain conscious longer than offenders given sodium thiopental or pentobarbital.", + " Ohio used midazolam in the execution of Dennis McGuire a few months later, and witnesses reported that McGuire snorted, heaved, clenched one of his fists, and gasped for air. Oakley asked his counterpart in Ohio about the state\u2019s experience with midazolam. The media had exaggerated the problems, he was told. Yes, the new drug took a little longer to put a person to sleep, but it wasn\u2019t as bad as everyone was saying. Midazolam was also relatively easy to obtain: multiple U.S. companies made it. Oakley\u2019s wife had just had a kidney stone removed,", + " and one of the drugs she\u2019d been given was midazolam. Both Oakley and the attorney general\u2019s office recommended that the state use it.\n\n\n\nOn April 23, 2014, six days before Lockett\u2019s execution, Mike Oakley retired.\n\nApril 23 would, by coincidence, prove to be a decisive day for the Oklahoma judicial system, for Clayton Lockett, and for his legal team, including Dave Autry. Autry is a soft-spoken man of 56 with a ponytail that hangs halfway down his back. He seems to subsist on tobacco and caffeine\u201424-ounce mini-mart coffee cups and jumbo cans of Red Bull clutter his office.", + " Autry had represented Lockett for 11 years, since shortly after Lockett exhausted his state appeals. He felt just about ready, after nearly 30 years, to leave the high stakes and emotional toll of death-row work to younger lawyers. Clayton Lockett would be his second-to-last death-row client. As time winds down, a death-penalty lawyer has one goal: keep the client alive as long as possible. In October 2013, Autry\u2019s co-counsel, Dean Sanderford, and an attorney for Charles Warner had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review their cases, a last-chance effort to argue that constitutional errors had been made during trial or sentencing.", + " They knew the Court was unlikely to review either case. They also knew from experience that as soon as the Supreme Court declined to hear the cases, Oklahoma would set execution dates. The lawyers needed a plan they could put in motion the instant the Court decided. The simplest strategy would have been an Eighth Amendment challenge. But they couldn\u2019t make a convincing case that the drugs Oklahoma officials planned to use would lead to cruel and unusual punishment, because the state\u2019s secrecy law kept them from getting any information about where the drugs were coming from. In that lack of information, however, perhaps they could find an opportunity. The lawyers could argue that the secrecy law denied their clients \u201caccess to the courts\u201d and was therefore unconstitutional.", + " As they prepared to make this case, Oklahoma executed Michael Lee Wilson, a 38-year-old charged with beating a co-worker to death. After the pentobarbital was injected, Wilson said, \u201cI feel my whole body burning.\u201d\n\nIn January 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the cases. Lockett\u2019s and Warner\u2019s lawyers joined forces to challenge Oklahoma\u2019s secrecy law, and they requested a stay of execution for the prisoners until the challenge was decided. The case began ping-ponging around the Oklahoma justice system. A state judge in Oklahoma City, Patricia Parrish, heard the challenge but said she didn\u2019t have the authority to grant a stay,", + " so the legal team appealed to the Oklahoma supreme court. The supreme court transferred the stay request to the state\u2019s court of criminal appeals; the court of criminal appeals asked for supplemental briefs. By that point Lockett\u2019s execution was days away. In their supplemental brief, the lawyers for Lockett and Warner argued that any of these courts had the authority to grant a stay. The government filed an opposing brief arguing that none of the courts did. But it was in this brief, down on page eight, that Attorney General Pruitt made the stunning admission that the state did not have all the drugs it needed for the executions. Two days before Lockett was scheduled to die,", + " he and Warner got a one-month reprieve so that the state could find drugs. A minor victory. Lockett\u2019s execution was rescheduled for April 22, Warner\u2019s for April 29. The same day, Katie Fretland published her bombshell article exposing disturbing details about how the state handled executions. A week later, on March 26, Judge Parrish decided the challenge to the secrecy law in Lockett and Warner\u2019s favor. The law was indeed unconstitutional. \u201cI do not think this is even a close call,\u201d she said. She still believed she lacked the authority to grant a stay, but her ruling gave Lockett and Warner another chance:", + " their lawyers could now ask the state for information about the drugs, and perhaps find the basis for a cruel-and-unusual-punishment lawsuit.\n\nRight away, Oklahoma announced that it would appeal. Doing so put an automatic hold on Parrish\u2019s decision. By the time the appeal was resolved, Lockett and Warner would likely be dead. The case began ping-ponging again. The inmates\u2019 legal team went to the court of criminal appeals to ask for a stay, but the judges ruled that the case didn\u2019t belong in their court. The lawyers then turned to the Oklahoma supreme court, which told the court of criminal appeals that it did,", + " in fact, have jurisdiction. The court of criminal appeals disagreed and again denied the stay. To Autry and the other lawyers, the judges seemed to be passing the buck back and forth while Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner waited to die. Finally, on April 21, one day before Lockett\u2019s execution, a miracle: the Oklahoma supreme court, divided 5\u20134, granted a stay. The justices made clear that they intended to seriously contemplate the issues. The ruling seemed likely to put the executions off for a long time and give Lockett and Warner a chance of actually winning the case. Since the case challenged state law,", + " Oklahoma couldn\u2019t take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. No court in the country could overturn the ruling. Autry called Lockett\u2019s stepmother and drove out to Del City to give Lockett\u2019s favorite aunt the news in person. It was an emotional evening, one of the rare moments in a death-penalty case this far along when you get to celebrate. At the prison the next morning, Lockett was moved out of the isolation unit where the condemned spend their final days, and sent back to a regular cell.\n\nThat same day, a shocking reversal: Governor Mary Fallin stepped in. She issued an executive order saying she did not recognize the Oklahoma supreme court\u2019s authority to grant the stay.", + " \u201cThe execution for Clayton Derrell Lockett,\u201d she announced, \u201cis therefore scheduled for April 29, 2014\u201d\u2014just one week away, and the same night as Charles Warner\u2019s execution. Autry had never heard of a governor doing something like that. Was it even legal? Could a governor just do away with a ruling by the state supreme court? The next day things got even worse: a state representative filed articles of impeachment against the five justices who had voted for the stay. The Oklahoma supreme court bowed to the pressure. Two days after saying that it would need a long and proper debate in order to determine the constitutionality of the secrecy law,", + " the court issued a decision: the law was fine. The stay was lifted.\n\n\n\nThe national media went into a frenzy. It looked as though the state\u2019s judicial system had collapsed. \u201cExecution Case Roils Oklahoma Courts,\u201d The New York Times declared; other publications quoted the attorney general calling the events a \u201cconstitutional crisis.\u201d Reporters descended on McAlester. It seemed as though everyone with even a fleeting interest in the Oklahoma justice system had come to the penitentiary. Everyone except Governor Fallin. On the night of the executions, she was headed to the Chesapeake Energy Arena, to watch Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game Five of the NBA conference quarterfinals.\n\nAt 5:", + "27 p.m., a paramedic approached the gurney. Like the three executioners, she would remain anonymous. Before the blinds opened, she would retreat into the chemical room while a doctor and the prison\u2019s warden stayed with Lockett in the death chamber. But first she had a job to do: prepare the drugs and medical equipment, and get an IV into Lockett. (Those who participated in the execution either did not respond to requests for interviews or could not be reached. Court records provide a detailed account of what happened.) The paramedic later told investigators that she\u2019d felt incredible pressure since she\u2019d walked into the room an hour earlier.", + " She\u2019d never participated in an execution that used midazolam. She\u2019d never participated in two executions in one night\u2014not many people in the world had. And she knew the media were watching. To make matters worse, the equipment was all wrong: the saline was packed in bags instead of syringes, the drugs were in syringes that looked smaller than she was used to, and the tubing for the IV was the wrong kind. But she tried to focus on doing her job and getting everything set up on time. She would be paid $600 for the two executions. The paramedic stuck a needle into a vein in Lockett\u2019s left arm.", + " A few drops of blood moved up the catheter\u2014\u201cflashback.\u201d A good sign. It meant the needle was in the vein. But she\u2019d forgotten tape to hold the IV in place. She asked someone to bring it to her, but the IV slipped out before she could secure it. Lockett\u2019s arm started to bleed, so she put pressure on it and tried again. This time, she didn\u2019t get flashback. Then she tried a brachial vein, near Lockett\u2019s biceps. No luck there.\n\nBy now, she\u2019d tried to place an IV three times. She\u2019d been taught that if you can\u2019t find a vein after the third attempt,", + " you ask someone else to step in. So she asked the doctor to help. The doctor, Johnny Zellmer, was a last-minute substitute. (Zellmer, whose name was revealed in a lawsuit following the execution and in multiple press reports, has not denied his involvement. He did not respond to requests for comment.) He was a local family-medicine and emergency-room physician who\u2019d participated in just one previous execution. Zellmer had arguably violated his profession\u2019s oath to \u201cnever do harm\u201d the moment he stepped into the death chamber. Indeed, the American Medical Association\u2019s code of ethics states that physicians should not participate in executions,", + " even in a supervisory capacity. But Zellmer thought his job would be limited to checking the offender for consciousness and pronouncing the time of death. He wasn\u2019t expecting to actually do anything to Lockett. The paramedic\u2019s request for help put him in the position of no longer just observing the execution but actively facilitating it. She was clearly struggling, though. He scanned Lockett\u2019s body and didn\u2019t see any good veins. Then Lockett turned his head, and the paramedic saw a vein in his neck pop up. She pointed it out to Zellmer. \u201cGet me a needle for the jugular,\u201d he said.", + " This was an odd choice. IVs in the neck are painful, and also hard to place. On the arms and legs, you can use a tourniquet to bring the veins up. You cannot do that on the neck, because a tourniquet on the neck is effectively a noose, and while this was an execution, it was not a hanging.\n\nAs Zellmer tried to get the needle into the jugular, the paramedic stuck Lockett three more times on his right arm, failing each time. Zellmer got the needle into Lockett\u2019s neck and saw flashback, but then saw blood spread under the skin\u2014he thought the needle might have gone all the way through the vein.", + " Zellmer decided to try a subclavian line, in a vein running beneath Lockett\u2019s collarbone. The paramedic brought him a central-venous catheterization kit, and Zellmer numbed Lockett\u2019s chest with lidocaine. The paramedic tried two different veins on Lockett\u2019s right foot; both attempts failed. Zellmer kept trying to get the needle into Lockett\u2019s subclavian vein. He finally saw a little flashback, then lost the vein and couldn\u2019t get the needle back in. After repeatedly sticking Lockett\u2019s chest, he decided to try the femoral vein,", + " in Lockett\u2019s groin. The paramedic went to get a longer needle. As the warden, Anita Trammell, watched the doctor and the paramedic work on Lockett, she felt a sliver of pride for the inmate. He\u2019d now been stuck with needles more than a dozen times. She knew he was in pain, but she thought he was taking it like a man. Trammell tried to make conversation to help calm him. She knew he had been a drug user. \u201cWhat was your drug of choice?\u201d she asked him. \u201cIce.\u201d \u201cI thought that was a white man\u2019s drug,\u201d she said,", + " and he laughed. The paramedic came back and said she had no needles longer than an inch and a quarter. That presented a problem. The femoral vein lies deeper in the body than other veins, so they would ideally use a needle at least twice that length. There were longer needles inside a second central-venous catheterization kit, like the one they\u2019d just used on Lockett\u2019s chest, but neither Zellmer nor the paramedic thought of it. Zellmer asked for an IO-infusion needle. IO stands for \u201cintraosseous\u201d\u2014into the bone. It is, in effect, a power drill,", + " used to bore a hole through bone and into the marrow, and therefore doesn\u2019t require finding a vein.\n\nThe prison had no IO needle. Zellmer had only the absurdly short one-and-a-quarter-inch needle. \u201cWell,\u201d he told the paramedic, \u201cwe\u2019ll just have to make it work.\u201d Lockett\u2019s prison scrubs and underwear were cut away. Zellmer stuck the needle into Lockett\u2019s femoral vein and saw flashback on the first try. Finally, after almost an hour, they had an IV. Right away, the paramedic noticed a potential warning sign. Saline should have been flowing easily through the IV,", + " but it flowed only when she propped up the line. Instead of starting over, though, she taped the IV in place. Two IVs are typically used to administer the drugs, but with the execution running way behind schedule, the doctor and the paramedic decided they would proceed with just one. Warden Trammell asked Lockett whether he needed anything. \u201cI was gonna see if I could get my mouth wiped off,\u201d he said. She got a Kleenex and wiped it for him.\n\n\n\nFinally, a sheet was draped over Lockett, covering him up to his chest. The execution could begin.\n\nLockett\u2019s closest family members were about two hours away.", + " His stepmother, LaDonna Hollins, had made the drive to the prison countless times. During her final visit, she and Lockett had sat looking at each other and crying. \u201cI do not want you to be at the execution,\u201d she later recalled him saying, \u201cbecause I do not know the outcome. I do not think it\u2019s gonna be very good. Because the drugs that they use have not been tested.\u201d\n\nLockett knew that Michael Lee Wilson had said \u201cI feel my whole body burning\u201d when the state executed him earlier that year. Lockett was scared. \u201cDo me one favor,\u201d Hollins told him,", + " according to an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel. \u201cAs long as you can talk on that gurney: Talk. Let the world know how they are executing people here in Oklahoma.\u201d Lockett knew that another inmate had said \u201cI feel my whole body burning\u201d during his execution. He was scared. After that visit, she heard that the prison had refused Lockett\u2019s request for a last meal\u2014chateaubriand, fried shrimp, baked potato, garlic toast, and a whole Kentucky bourbon pie\u2014because it exceeded the $15 limit. Hollins called the prison and said she\u2019d pay for it,", + " or even drive the meal down herself, but she wasn\u2019t allowed to. She didn\u2019t think Lockett could be spared after what he\u2019d done, but she didn\u2019t think he should suffer anymore, either. So she did what she\u2019d always done: try, however she could, to offer him some small comfort. Lockett had first shown up on her doorstep in Southern California at the age of 3, crying and soaked in urine. His mother had put him on a bus all the way from Oklahoma to live with his father. There\u2019d been no notice. Hollins testified in court that when Lockett was a young child,", + " she saw his half brother, who was about five years older, lying on top of him, the two boys looking strange together. Then a call from the school. Lockett was in the infirmary. He\u2019d come in crying and complaining of pain around his anus. Another memory: Lockett following his father, John, from room to room as he got ready for work, and then following him out of the house, into the street. Lockett in tears, certain that his father would never return. Once, as a birthday present for his brother John Jr., the boys\u2019 mother agreed to talk with them on the phone.", + " Lockett waited for his turn with anticipation\u2014he was now 4, and hadn\u2019t heard his mother\u2019s voice since she had put him on the bus. But she took offense when John Jr. referred to Hollins as \u201cMama LaDonna,\u201d and hung up before Lockett got to talk with her. John Sr. disciplined Lockett and his other children with everything from belts to two-by-fours. Hollins tried to protect the boy, but she wasn\u2019t exempt from John Sr.\u2019s violent temper either; he broke her arm twice. John Sr. taught his children to steal\u2014groceries sometimes, televisions other times\u2014and punished them only for getting caught.", + " Hollins remembers John Sr. blowing marijuana smoke up Lockett\u2019s nose and sitting him down to watch porn when Lockett was a child. \u201cBoy,\u201d he said, \u201cyou need to tear that pussy up.\u201d That\u2019s what he told Lockett he was going to do to Hollins. By the time Lockett was in middle school, his father and Hollins had brought him back to Oklahoma. To his eighth-grade teacher\u2014a woman whose son, Mark Gibson, would later prosecute him\u2014he stood out as smart and likable. Lockett brightened around small children. He babysat younger family members, liked to cook for them,", + " and carried them around on his back. He had a girlfriend whose baby had Down syndrome, and he was the only person who could always make the little girl smile. But he also spent a lot of time trying to act tough, and racked up charges including burglary and intimidating a witness. At 16, he was sentenced as an adult and sent to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. With no one to protect him, he was raped almost immediately by three other inmates. When Lockett got out, at age 20, he wanted to be feared. He wanted everyone to know that if they crossed him, they\u2019d pay. So,", + " a few years later, when a guy named Bobby Bornt seemed to be holding out on a $40 debt for marijuana and a tattoo, Lockett got his cousin and a friend and a shotgun and went to see him. That same night, by terrible coincidence, Stephanie Neiman and a friend drove to Bornt\u2019s house in Neiman\u2019s new Chevy pickup truck, which had a Tasmanian Devil sticker and vanity plates that read Tazzz. Neiman was an only child whose parents had instilled in her a strong sense of right and wrong. She was admired by her classmates and by school administrators for her kindness and loyalty,", + " and because of what she had overcome\u2014she was considered \u201cintellectually challenged\u201d but had played saxophone in the school band and earned her diploma. Those who worked with her at the school believe she wasn\u2019t able to understand how serious the situation was that night, or what the consequences might be. Neiman and Bornt had known each other since they were young children; they\u2019d been in the same YMCA day care. When the girls arrived at Bornt\u2019s house, Lockett and the others were already there, attacking Bornt. Neiman reacted in a way that unsettled Lockett: she seemed unafraid.", + " He told her to hand over the keys to her truck. She said no\u2014the truck belonged to her. Lockett and his accomplices beat up Bornt, raped Neiman\u2019s friend, and bound all three victims. Then Lockett led the group into Bornt\u2019s and Neiman\u2019s trucks and out of town, north into Kay County, up on the border with Kansas. The men threatened to kill the three victims if they reported the night\u2019s crimes to the police. Bornt and Neiman\u2019s friend swore they wouldn\u2019t, and Lockett later let them go. But Neiman refused. Her parents had taught her to tell the truth.", + " So when Lockett asked whether she would go to the police, she said yes.\n\n\n\nLockett asked her a final time. Then he raised the gun and fired. Twenty-three minutes behind schedule, the blinds to the death chamber opened. Warden Trammell stood facing the witnesses. She asked Lockett whether he had any last words. \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cLet the execution begin.\u201d Just behind Lockett\u2019s head, in the chemical room, one of the three executioners pushed the plunger on a syringe full of midazolam. The sedative went into the tubing, traveling 132 inches through the hole in the wall,", + " into the death chamber, under the sheet, and into Clayton Lockett\u2019s groin. But not all of it went straight into his bloodstream. Somehow, the IV dislodged, and midazolam was pumped into Lockett\u2019s tissue instead of his vein. Some of the drug would make its way into his bloodstream, but the smaller dose would be less effective. Minutes passed. Lockett remained alert. He pursed his lips and blinked. He licked his lips. To Katie Fretland, he looked confused. Several more minutes passed. Lockett turned his head and looked toward the witnesses. He looked back up.", + " Finally, he closed his eyes. In the chemical room, the executioners counted time on a stopwatch. Five minutes after they pushed the midazolam into the line, they flipped a switch and a light bulb went on in the death chamber, signaling that it was time to check whether Lockett was unconscious. Zellmer got up and checked Lockett. He was still conscious. The light went off. Two minutes later, the light came on again\u2014a signal to check Lockett a second time. The doctor blew in Lockett\u2019s eyes, rubbed his sternum, and pinched him. This time, he determined that Lockett was unconscious.", + " The executioners injected a syringe full of vecuronium bromide, a paralytic, into the line. When properly administered, vecuronium bromide blocks the signals that the nervous system sends to the muscles, turning the body into a vehicle the brain no longer controls. It\u2019s as if the wire that connects them has been severed and signals can no longer pass\u2014including the signal that says breathe. An incompletely sedated person under a paralytic might look serene, because his face muscles are paralyzed. But he\u2019s suffocating: when he tries to expand his chest and draw breath, nothing happens. The Animal Welfare Act has banned the use of paralytics without anesthesia in the euthanasia of animals.", + " To anti-death-penalty advocates, the fact that these drugs are used in executions is revealing. If the sedative worked, why would you need to paralyze someone? They argue that the paralytic prevents us from seeing the offender\u2019s distress, so that the procedure appears clinical and painless\u2014even if it\u2019s not. One of Lockett\u2019s executioners would later recall noticing something strange: the plunger was hard to push. He had no way of knowing that he might be injecting fluid into tissue, though, so he simply pushed harder. He heard what sounded like a moan come from the chamber. Zellmer watched Lockett,", + " oblivious to the fact that, under the sheet, the IV was not in place. In the chemical room, the executioners administered the third drug, potassium chloride. At 6:36, Katie Fretland saw Lockett move. During Lockett\u2019s trial and his early years on death row, he showed no remorse. In his letters, he posed as a member of a far-reaching criminal network. \u201cIm an assassin\u2014point blank!\u201d he wrote to one friend. \u201cYou honestly think that my boys is gone let a nigga as valuable me go to the penn forever? Fucc No!\u201d He was a terror,", + " hiding homemade weapons in his cell and once throwing urine and excrement at a guard\u2014anything he could do to show his disdain for authority. But in letters to his father, now also in prison, Lockett still yearned for a bond. He told his father about a girlfriend on the outside. Dad I can send her to visit you, keep me informed on how you\u2019re doing \u2026 Dad it\u2019s a few people on my team that will be sending me money. I\u2019m not going to be needing all that, I just really want a tube and some canteen and Im cool. Dad, I know you aint got too many people in your corner so I know you\u2019ll need some money.", + " Give me a few months to get my stable in order and I can start sending you some ends through my girl. Gradually, the weight of his crime began to overwhelm him. He talked often with Autry, his lawyer, about what he\u2019d done to Neiman\u2019s parents, taking away their only child. A couple of years in, he tried to kill himself. After that, he took to all the prison self-improvement pastimes: reading, painting, philosophy. Autry lent him books, and Lockett became the most well-read client the attorney had ever had. Still, there was a hollowness to Lockett\u2019s new persona,", + " as though he had gone from posing as a gangbanger to posing as a self-educated prison sophisticate. When the time came for a clemency hearing before the pardon-and-parole board\u2014one of his last chances for survival\u2014Lockett declined to show up. Instead, he gave Autry a letter to read to Neiman\u2019s family. \u201cIt would be disingenuous of me to tell you that I woke up one day and suddenly felt remorse,\u201d he wrote. \u201cOr that I found some arcane bible verse that miraculously inspired me to change. The truth is not so simple as that.\u201d He told them that for him,", + " remorse had been slow, but debilitating. \u201cI want you to know that if by me relinquishing my life you find solace in my death & can one day find the strength to forgive me then I am okay with this.\u201d Right up to the very end, Lockett pretended he actually had some control. To Warden Trammell, it looked as though Lockett was trying to communicate something. He kicked his right leg. He began to breathe heavily. He clenched his teeth. He rolled his head. Then he tried to speak. My God, Trammell thought. He\u2019s coming out of this. Lockett lurched up against the restraints.", + " While the witnesses looked on, he started writhing as if trying to free himself, to get up off the gurney. He struggled violently, twisting his whole body. Autry, sitting in the viewing area, couldn\u2019t believe it; next to him, Dean Sanderford, Lockett\u2019s other lawyer, began to cry. Lockett got his whole head up off the gurney, as far as the restraints would let him go. He kept trying to speak but couldn\u2019t form the words, and he rolled his head back and forth. Zellmer watched the monitor. The potassium chloride was supposed to stop Lockett\u2019s heart immediately,", + " by disrupting the electrical charge that causes the heart muscles to contract. But although Lockett\u2019s heart was slowing, it kept beating. The normal resting heart rate for an adult is between 60 and 100 beats per minute. Lockett\u2019s dropped into the 20s. From the waves on the screen, it looked like his heart muscles were starting to fire erratically. The doctor thought Lockett might be starting to seize. But he still felt uncertain of his role, and hesitated to intervene. From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, \u201cHe\u2019s trying to get off the table!\u201d Finally Lockett managed to speak:", + " \u201cMan.\u201d Zellmer had seen enough. He came to the gurney and lifted the sheet. Underneath, he saw a protrusion almost the size of a tennis ball on Lockett\u2019s groin. From the viewing area, Katie Fretland could see the doctor\u2019s face for the first time, and his expression was clear: Oh, fuck. Another witness saw Lockett open his eyes and look right at the doctor, like something out of a horror movie. The warden glanced under the sheet and noticed what looked like blood and clear liquid pooled around Lockett\u2019s groin. She looked up and addressed the witnesses:", + " \u201cWe\u2019re going to lower the blinds, temporarily.\u201d From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, \u201cHe\u2019s trying to get off the table!\u201d She came into the death chamber as the doctor was trying to figure out how to finish the execution. \u201cI need to get another IV in the left femoral,\u201d Zellmer told her. She swabbed Lockett\u2019s groin with a sterile pad. \u201cTake deep breaths,\u201d the paramedic told Lockett, in case he could hear her, while Zellmer pushed the short needle back into Lockett\u2019s groin. Blood squirted all over Zellmer,", + " so much of it that it soaked his jacket. \u201cYou\u2019ve hit the artery,\u201d the paramedic said. \u201cIt\u2019ll be all right,\u201d Zellmer told her. \u201cWe\u2019ll go ahead and get the drugs.\u201d Did he intend to put drugs in an artery? The paramedic didn\u2019t want to countermand the doctor\u2019s authority, but that made no sense. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get the vein,\u201d she said. The doctor pulled out the needle. Lockett mumbled incoherently. His heart rate dropped into the teens as more of the potassium chloride that had been pumped into his groin seeped into his bloodstream.", + " Eventually, the doctor and the paramedic stopped what they were doing. The warden asked whether it would be possible to resuscitate Lockett. Zellmer said he could start CPR, but that in order to save him, they\u2019d have to take him to an emergency room. This further confused the paramedic. He\u2019s dying, she thought. Isn\u2019t that why we\u2019re here? Stephanie Neiman\u2019s family was in shock. After the blinds came down, prison staff took them to a rec room and tried to console them. While Neiman\u2019s mother, Susie, wept, someone from the state attorney general\u2019s office tried to explain what had happened,", + " something about Lockett\u2019s heart and a vein exploding. Susie said she wanted to go into the chamber and touch Lockett; otherwise she couldn\u2019t know for sure that her daughter\u2019s killer was dead. Fretland and the other reporters felt almost as stunned. In the viewing area, a black telephone she hadn\u2019t noticed before started ringing. Robert Patton, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections director, picked it up and left the room, pulling the phone cord out into the hall and closing the door behind him. Warden Trammell was calling from the death chamber. Patton asked her, \u201cHas enough drugs been administered to cause death?\u201d He heard Trammell repeat the question.", + " He heard the doctor say no. \u201cIs there another vein available, and if so do you have another set of chemicals back there?\u201d Again, Trammell repeated the question; again the doctor said no. \u201cI wanna be real clear with this, Warden, and I want you to ask the doctor specifically. Has enough drugs entered the inmate\u2019s system to cause death?\u201d A third time, he heard Trammell repeat the question. A third time, the answer was no. Patton hung up the phone and huddled in the hallway with the state secretary of safety and security and two members of the attorney general\u2019s office. Someone briefly floated the idea of using the drugs reserved for Charles Warner\u2019s execution.", + " Patton spoke on the phone with the governor\u2019s general counsel, Steve Mullins, in Oklahoma City. Mullins asked Patton, \u201cDo you want to stop the execution?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cYou have the authority to stop the execution,\u201d he told Patton. When they hung up, Mullins called the governor\u2014the basketball game was now an hour from tip-off\u2014to brief her. At 6:56, a call came in to the death chamber. Patton had instructions for the warden. He said something like \u201cstand down,\u201d which Trammell didn\u2019t quite understand. \u201cDo you mean to stop?\u201d Yes, he said, stop the execution.", + " Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways\n\nOn the morning of his execution, Clayton Lockett hid under the covers. Before a team of correctional officers came to get him at 5:06 a.m., he fashioned a noose out of his sheets. He pulled the blade out of a safety razor and made half-inch-long cuts on his arms. He swallowed a handful of pills that he\u2019d been hoarding. And on April 29, 2014, when the team of officers knocked on the door of his cell in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester,", + " Oklahoma, Clayton Lockett\u2014a 38-year-old convicted murderer\u2014pulled a blanket over his head and refused to get up. The officers left and asked for permission to tase him. While they were gone, Lockett tried to jam the door. They came back, forced their way in, tased him, and dragged him out. Eleven hours later, at about 5:20 p.m., after a medical examination, X\u2011rays, eight hours in a holding cell, and a shower, Lockett was brought by a five-member strap-down team into the death chamber. It was a small, clinical-looking room with white walls and a polished floor that reflected the lights overhead.", + " A gurney stood in the center of the room; above it hung a microphone for Lockett\u2019s final words.\n\nOne of the walls in the chamber had a pair of baseball-size holes through which IV lines could pass into the chemical room, a small space where three executioners would administer the drugs that would kill him. The executioners had been driven to the prison earlier in the day, and had put on hoods as they approached. They would remain out of sight until after Lockett was dead. There had never been a question of Lockett\u2019s guilt. Fifteen years earlier, on June 3, 1999,", + " he had stood in a ravine and aimed a 12-gauge shotgun at Stephanie Neiman, a 19-year-old who had graduated from high school two weeks earlier. Lockett and two accomplices had beaten one of Neiman\u2019s friends and raped another. Lockett told Neiman multiple times that he would kill her if she didn\u2019t promise to keep quiet. He warned her one last time, but she insisted she would go to the police. He pulled the trigger. The shot sent her spinning to the ground. The gun jammed; he cleared it and fired at her again. Then one of Lockett\u2019s accomplices buried Neiman alive in a shallow grave,", + " the dirt puffing up as she struggled to breathe, and they left her to die. Lockett was arrested three days later, a Sunday. Mark Gibson, the district attorney who would prosecute him, went to the jail that night because Lockett wanted to give a statement. Lockett smoked a cigarette and showed no remorse as he confessed. Gibson thought he saw a twinkle in the young man\u2019s eye, as though he was relishing the attention, and came away believing that Lockett was pure evil.\n\nIn the execution chamber, Lockett was belted to the gurney. To his left, beige blinds covered the windows to the viewing area.", + " Soon, shadows would be visible as the seats on the other side filled up. There was so much media interest in his execution that the prison had had to draw names to decide which reporters could attend. A clock on the wall read 5:26. The execution was scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Lockett could expect to be dead within about 45 minutes. Since the mid-1990s, when lethal injection replaced electrocution as America\u2019s favored method of execution, states have found drug combinations that they trust to quickly and painlessly end a life. They often use three drugs. The first is an anesthetic,", + " to render the prisoner unconscious. The second is a paralytic. The third, potassium chloride, stops the heart. What many people don\u2019t realize, however, is that choosing the specific drugs and doses involves as much guesswork as expertise. In many cases, the person responsible for selecting the drugs has no medical training. Sometimes that person is a lawyer\u2014a state attorney general or an attorney for the prison. These officials base their confidence that a certain drug will work largely on the fact that it has seemed to work in the past. So naturally, they prefer not to experiment with new drugs. In recent years, however, they have been forced to do so.\n\nThe problems began at a pharmaceutical plant in Rocky Mount,", + " North Carolina. The Food and Drug Administration discovered that some of the drugs made there were contaminated and in April 2010 sent the manufacturer, Hospira, a warning letter. Hospira stopped producing, among other drugs, a barbiturate called sodium thiopental. No other company was approved by the FDA to make sodium thiopental, which was the anesthetic of choice for almost all of the states that carried out executions. (The death penalty is legal in 32 states; 17 of them have performed an execution in the past five years.) With sodium thiopental suddenly unavailable, states scrambled to find alternatives. In June of that year,", + " officials in Georgia discovered a work-around: a small-time businessman in London named Mehdi Alavi, who sold wholesale drugs through a company called Dream Pharma, would ship sodium thiopental to them. Georgia bought some from him, and then Arkansas did too. With Hospira offline, Alavi had the U.S. execution market cornered. Arizona bought sodium thiopental from him in late September and used it the next month to execute a convicted murderer named Jeffrey Landrigan. California placed an order as well. Maya Foa, an anti-death-penalty advocate based in London, saw Dream Pharma mentioned in court documents related to Landrigan\u2019s execution and decided to pay a visit.", + " At the company\u2019s address, she found a small building with peeling white paint and a placard that read Elgone Driving Academy. Inside she found two desks and, in the back of the room, a single cabinet. That was it: Dream Pharma. Alavi imported execution drugs from elsewhere in Europe and shipped them to the United States, using that cupboard in a driving school as his base of operations. The judges seemed to be passing the buck back and forth while Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner waited to die. Reprieve, the human-rights organization where Foa worked, wrote to the British government, arguing that supplying drugs for executions violated British law,", + " since the death penalty is illegal in Europe. The government balked. Stopping the shipment of a drug would hamper free trade and could be harmful to patients. Foa responded that the \u201cpatient\u201d argument was erroneous\u2014there was no trade of sodium thiopental between the U.S. and the U.K. for medicinal purposes. It was all for executions. This time, the government agreed. England announced tighter export restrictions, which effectively banned the sale of the drug for executions. Foa then persuaded the European Commission to follow suit by amending its torture regulation. U.S. states trying to carry out the death penalty were now blocked from buying drugs not just from England,", + " but from all of Europe.\n\nSo they looked even farther afield. In late 2010, a company in Mumbai, Kayem Pharmaceuticals, received an e-mail from the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services. Officials there wanted an anesthetic that Kayem made mostly for clients in Angola: sodium thiopental. Kayem sold Nebraska 500 vials, enough for more than 80 executions. Soon after, Foa\u2019s boss wrote the company to explain how Nebraska planned to use its product. When South Dakota officials tried to place an order, Kayem jacked up the price 900 percent, to $20 a vial, hoping the cost would dissuade them.", + " It didn\u2019t. South Dakota bought 500 vials. Kayem stopped selling the drug to the U.S. immediately after that. Nebraska also turned to a middleman named Chris Harris, who contacted another company, called Naari, that made sodium thiopental in India. When Nebraska prison officials later announced that they\u2019d obtained sodium thiopental from Naari, the firm\u2019s CEO was livid. He wrote to the chief justice of the Nebraska supreme court saying he\u2019d been duped: Naari had supplied Harris with vials of the drug only because Harris had offered to get it registered for future sale in Zambia, where there is a huge need for cheap surgical drugs.", + " The CEO wrote that Harris was \u201cnot authorised to sell the product\u201d to Nebraska and that Naari was \u201cdeeply opposed to the use of the medicines in executions.\u201d He demanded that the vials be returned. They were not.\n\nIn Oklahoma, with sodium thiopental increasingly difficult to get and an execution scheduled for December 2010, officials decided they could no longer avoid finding a substitute. They settled on another powerful barbiturate that was more easily available: a short-term therapy for insomnia called pentobarbital, made in the U.S. by a Copenhagen-based company called Lundbeck. According to state officials, pentobarbital was ideal \u201cfor humane euthanasia in animals.\u201d Oklahoma used the new drug in the execution of John David Duty.", + " It worked.\n\nOklahoma had found its solution just in time: the federal Drug Enforcement Administration was about to start raiding prisons. Since Hospira had been the only FDA-approved supplier of sodium thiopental, states that had imported it had done so illegally. Prisons had become, in effect, drug smugglers, and while the FDA may have been willing to look the other way, the DEA was not. In March 2011, agents seized Georgia\u2019s supply of sodium thiopental. In April, they seized Tennessee\u2019s, Kentucky\u2019s, South Carolina\u2019s, and Alabama\u2019s. Meanwhile, as other states followed Oklahoma\u2019s lead and shifted to pentobarbital,", + " pressure mounted on Lundbeck, the drug\u2019s manufacturer, to block prisons from buying it. Reprieve issued press releases, the Danish media picked up the story, The Lancet published an open letter urging the company to stop supplying executions, and shareholders threatened to divest.\n\nMaya Foa knew that pharmaceutical companies like Lundbeck had no interest in supplying executions\u2014the fact that their drugs are used to kill people makes for terrible publicity. But what could Lundbeck do about it? Foa researched the American pharmaceutical industry and learned about controls that a manufacturer can put in place to restrict a drug\u2019s distribution if, for example, new side effects come to light or the company wants to prevent off-label uses.", + " She met with Lundbeck\u2019s senior executives to present an idea: Why not put distribution controls on pentobarbital, and prevent middlemen from selling it to prisons? \u201cWe can\u2019t do that,\u201d one of Lundbeck\u2019s communications officers told her. But as he began to explain his objections, the CEO interrupted. \u201cWhy not?\u201d The room fell silent. Seven months after pentobarbital was first used in an execution, Lundbeck instituted distribution controls. Departments of corrections could no longer get their second-choice anesthetic.\n\nAt 5:30, half an hour before Lockett\u2019s execution was to begin, a young reporter named Katie Fretland rode in a prison van with other witnesses.", + " They were taken to the death-row law library to wait. Fretland heard a low thrumming fill the halls, the sound of inmates banging on their cell doors in tribute to the condemned. Fretland had arrived in McAlester just that day, but Oklahoma was something of a second home to her. She\u2019d first come in 2012, a few years out of college, after landing a 14\u2011week temp job with the Associated Press. The AP had asked her to cover the execution of Timothy Stemple, a Tulsa man convicted of killing his wife. Fretland tried to find out where the state would get the execution drugs,", + " but she quickly ran into a roadblock: Oklahoma had passed a law less than a year earlier that made nearly every aspect of executions a state secret, including where officials obtained the drugs.\n\nFretland decided to follow the money. She had a source who worked at the prison, and she asked him how the state\u2019s Department of Corrections would pay for the drugs. He said it would use petty cash. She couldn\u2019t believe it. Could the department do that\u2014use an account with no public oversight to buy execution drugs? She filed a series of records requests and kept asking questions. She found petty-cash purchases of pentobarbital totaling more than $50,", + "000. Pentobarbital was by now no longer available from Lundbeck, but Fretland learned that compounding pharmacies were copying execution drugs and selling them to prisons. Compounding pharmacies exist to fill niche needs\u2014for example, making a version of a drug for a patient who is allergic to an additive in the mass-market product. Part drug company, part pharmacy, they operate in a gray area with little oversight. (In April 2013, after a deadly meningitis outbreak was traced to a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts, FDA officials announced that they had inspected about 30 compounding pharmacies and found unsanitary conditions in all but one of them.) Fretland kept filing records requests,", + " and accumulated reams of documents. Her AP job ended, but she couldn\u2019t leave the story alone. She crashed with friends while continuing to interview pharmacists and former wardens, trying to put together a picture of Oklahoma\u2019s frantic pursuit of execution drugs.\n\nShe turned up e-mails from early 2011 in which state officials discussed how they should respond to their peers in Texas, who had asked for help addressing the drug shortage. An Oklahoma assistant attorney general wrote to a colleague, \u201cI propose we help if TX promises to take a dive in the [University of Oklahoma\u2013University of Texas football] game for the next 4 years.\u201d His colleague suggested that Texas should provide tickets for \u201cTeam Pentobarbital (you,", + " me, Martha, the Warden, Mike Oakley, plus anyone else we can think of who is deserving) to the 2011 OU\u2011Texas game plus an on-field presentation of a commemorative plaque at halftime recognizing Oklahoma\u2019s on-going contributions to propping up the Texas system of capital punishment.\u201d He added, \u201cAnd throw in lifetime passes for the North Dallas Tollway, Highway 121 and the Bush Turnpike. That would be a good deal.\u201d Fretland also learned that in some executions, the prisoner had died of an overdose of the first drug, the anesthetic, and that the executioners had then disposed of the other two drugs by injecting them into the corpse.", + " Georgia had used pentobarbital from an undisclosed source in a June 2011 execution, and Fretland found e-mails from the next month proving that Oklahoma officials knew that the inmate had remained conscious for longer than he was supposed to and may have experienced severe pain. But a month after that e-mail exchange, they spent $10,400 of petty cash to buy pentobarbital. They made another purchase a year later, this time spending $40,000. Also see: A Brief History of Executions\n\nby Matt Ford In March 2014, Fretland published her findings in The Colorado Independent. She editorialized just once.", + " \u201cBanter about exchanging lethal injection help for football tickets and other favors,\u201d she wrote, \u201craises questions about how seriously Oklahoma officials take the death penalty.\u201d\n\nA month later, Fretland came to McAlester to watch Clayton Lockett\u2019s execution. A little before 6, she and the other witnesses were taken down a long hallway. She turned a corner into the viewing area, where two tiered rows of metal folding chairs faced the death chamber. Fretland took her seat along with 11 other reporters, two of Lockett\u2019s lawyers, and an assortment of Oklahoma officials. Stephanie Neiman\u2019s family would sit in a separate room for the victim\u2019s relatives.", + " Blinds covered the windows to the death chamber, so Fretland couldn\u2019t see what was going on inside. She sat down, and waited.\n\nAbout two months earlier, Mike Oakley, the general counsel for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, had returned from vacation to find the department in a near-frenzy. Before he\u2019d left, the department had ordered pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy for the executions of Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, a 46-year-old man convicted in 2003 of raping and killing his roommate\u2019s 11-month-old baby. But compounding pharmacies had come under pressure to stop selling drugs for executions,", + " and Oklahoma\u2019s supplier had backed out. With the executions scheduled for March 20 and March 27, one of Oakley\u2019s deputies began driving around the state, walking into pharmacies and asking for pentobarbital, without success. Oakley didn\u2019t know why the task of finding drugs for executions fell largely to him: he had no medical training. But he wanted to help his colleagues\u2014especially the warden, whom he considered conscientious and hardworking\u2014because he knew how much strain carrying out a death sentence put on them. He had gone into corrections, 25 years earlier, because Oklahoma was doing interesting work in mediation between victims and offenders.", + " Now he was about to retire, and he found himself, as his swan song, developing a new execution cocktail.\n\nOakley had to report on his progress to Robert Patton, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, first thing in the morning and again before he went home each day. The attorney general\u2019s office called Oakley multiple times a day, and Patton himself was getting pressure from the governor\u2019s office. Both the attorney general, Scott Pruitt, and Governor Mary Fallin had elections coming up, and there were rumors that a Tea Party candidate might outflank Fallin on the right. Oakley believed they were worried about looking soft on crime.", + " In mid-March, Pruitt had to make the embarrassing admission, as part of a brief to the state\u2019s court of criminal appeals, that Oklahoma didn\u2019t have all the necessary drugs, and Lockett\u2019s and Warner\u2019s executions had to be delayed. Fewer and fewer medical experts were willing to advise Oakley, even unofficially. But he had professional contacts he\u2019d met through the National Institute of Corrections, and he asked them for advice. He and members of the attorney general\u2019s staff also looked at expert testimony related to executions in Florida. In October 2013, Florida had used a sedative called midazolam in the execution of William Happ.", + " Florida officials had determined that it was \u201cthe most humane and dignified way to do the procedure.\u201d Doctors sometimes administer midazolam during anesthesia, but usually just to relax the patient, and in combination with a drug that blocks pain. In a high enough dose, it should render the patient unconscious\u2014but some experts argue that, unlike sodium thiopental and pentobarbital, midazolam cannot produce the deep, coma-like state needed to guarantee he feels no pain.\n\nWilliam Happ shook his head, blinked, and opened his mouth during his execution. Witnesses had no way of knowing whether he was in pain, but he appeared to remain conscious longer than offenders given sodium thiopental or pentobarbital.", + " Ohio used midazolam in the execution of Dennis McGuire a few months later, and witnesses reported that McGuire snorted, heaved, clenched one of his fists, and gasped for air. Oakley asked his counterpart in Ohio about the state\u2019s experience with midazolam. The media had exaggerated the problems, he was told. Yes, the new drug took a little longer to put a person to sleep, but it wasn\u2019t as bad as everyone was saying. Midazolam was also relatively easy to obtain: multiple U.S. companies made it. Oakley\u2019s wife had just had a kidney stone removed,", + " and one of the drugs she\u2019d been given was midazolam. Both Oakley and the attorney general\u2019s office recommended that the state use it.\n\n\n\nOn April 23, 2014, six days before Lockett\u2019s execution, Mike Oakley retired.\n\nApril 23 would, by coincidence, prove to be a decisive day for the Oklahoma judicial system, for Clayton Lockett, and for his legal team, including Dave Autry. Autry is a soft-spoken man of 56 with a ponytail that hangs halfway down his back. He seems to subsist on tobacco and caffeine\u201424-ounce mini-mart coffee cups and jumbo cans of Red Bull clutter his office.", + " Autry had represented Lockett for 11 years, since shortly after Lockett exhausted his state appeals. He felt just about ready, after nearly 30 years, to leave the high stakes and emotional toll of death-row work to younger lawyers. Clayton Lockett would be his second-to-last death-row client.\n\nAs time winds down, a death-penalty lawyer has one goal: keep the client alive as long as possible. In October 2013, Autry\u2019s co-counsel, Dean Sanderford, and an attorney for Charles Warner had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review their cases, a last-chance effort to argue that constitutional errors had been made during trial or sentencing.", + " They knew the Court was unlikely to review either case. They also knew from experience that as soon as the Supreme Court declined to hear the cases, Oklahoma would set execution dates. The lawyers needed a plan they could put in motion the instant the Court decided. The simplest strategy would have been an Eighth Amendment challenge. But they couldn\u2019t make a convincing case that the drugs Oklahoma officials planned to use would lead to cruel and unusual punishment, because the state\u2019s secrecy law kept them from getting any information about where the drugs were coming from. In that lack of information, however, perhaps they could find an opportunity. The lawyers could argue that the secrecy law denied their clients \u201caccess to the courts\u201d and was therefore unconstitutional.", + " As they prepared to make this case, Oklahoma executed Michael Lee Wilson, a 38-year-old charged with beating a co-worker to death. After the pentobarbital was injected, Wilson said, \u201cI feel my whole body burning.\u201d In January 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the cases. Lockett\u2019s and Warner\u2019s lawyers joined forces to challenge Oklahoma\u2019s secrecy law, and they requested a stay of execution for the prisoners until the challenge was decided.\n\nThe case began ping-ponging around the Oklahoma justice system. A state judge in Oklahoma City, Patricia Parrish, heard the challenge but said she didn\u2019t have the authority to grant a stay,", + " so the legal team appealed to the Oklahoma supreme court. The supreme court transferred the stay request to the state\u2019s court of criminal appeals; the court of criminal appeals asked for supplemental briefs. By that point Lockett\u2019s execution was days away. In their supplemental brief, the lawyers for Lockett and Warner argued that any of these courts had the authority to grant a stay. The government filed an opposing brief arguing that none of the courts did. But it was in this brief, down on page eight, that Attorney General Pruitt made the stunning admission that the state did not have all the drugs it needed for the executions. Two days before Lockett was scheduled to die,", + " he and Warner got a one-month reprieve so that the state could find drugs. A minor victory. Lockett\u2019s execution was rescheduled for April 22, Warner\u2019s for April 29. The same day, Katie Fretland published her bombshell article exposing disturbing details about how the state handled executions. A week later, on March 26, Judge Parrish decided the challenge to the secrecy law in Lockett and Warner\u2019s favor. The law was indeed unconstitutional. \u201cI do not think this is even a close call,\u201d she said. She still believed she lacked the authority to grant a stay, but her ruling gave Lockett and Warner another chance:", + " their lawyers could now ask the state for information about the drugs, and perhaps find the basis for a cruel-and-unusual-punishment lawsuit.\n\nRight away, Oklahoma announced that it would appeal. Doing so put an automatic hold on Parrish\u2019s decision. By the time the appeal was resolved, Lockett and Warner would likely be dead. The case began ping-ponging again. The inmates\u2019 legal team went to the court of criminal appeals to ask for a stay, but the judges ruled that the case didn\u2019t belong in their court. The lawyers then turned to the Oklahoma supreme court, which told the court of criminal appeals that it did,", + " in fact, have jurisdiction. The court of criminal appeals disagreed and again denied the stay. To Autry and the other lawyers, the judges seemed to be passing the buck back and forth while Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner waited to die. Finally, on April 21, one day before Lockett\u2019s execution, a miracle: the Oklahoma supreme court, divided 5\u20134, granted a stay. The justices made clear that they intended to seriously contemplate the issues. The ruling seemed likely to put the executions off for a long time and give Lockett and Warner a chance of actually winning the case. Since the case challenged state law,", + " Oklahoma couldn\u2019t take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. No court in the country could overturn the ruling. Autry called Lockett\u2019s stepmother and drove out to Del City to give Lockett\u2019s favorite aunt the news in person. It was an emotional evening, one of the rare moments in a death-penalty case this far along when you get to celebrate. At the prison the next morning, Lockett was moved out of the isolation unit where the condemned spend their final days, and sent back to a regular cell.\n\nThat same day, a shocking reversal: Governor Mary Fallin stepped in. She issued an executive order saying she did not recognize the Oklahoma supreme court\u2019s authority to grant the stay.", + " \u201cThe execution for Clayton Derrell Lockett,\u201d she announced, \u201cis therefore scheduled for April 29, 2014\u201d\u2014just one week away, and the same night as Charles Warner\u2019s execution. Autry had never heard of a governor doing something like that. Was it even legal? Could a governor just do away with a ruling by the state supreme court? The next day things got even worse: a state representative filed articles of impeachment against the five justices who had voted for the stay. The Oklahoma supreme court bowed to the pressure. Two days after saying that it would need a long and proper debate in order to determine the constitutionality of the secrecy law,", + " the court issued a decision: the law was fine. The stay was lifted.\n\n\n\nThe national media went into a frenzy. It looked as though the state\u2019s judicial system had collapsed. \u201cExecution Case Roils Oklahoma Courts,\u201d The New York Times declared; other publications quoted the attorney general calling the events a \u201cconstitutional crisis.\u201d Reporters descended on McAlester. It seemed as though everyone with even a fleeting interest in the Oklahoma justice system had come to the penitentiary. Everyone except Governor Fallin. On the night of the executions, she was headed to the Chesapeake Energy Arena, to watch Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game Five of the NBA conference quarterfinals.\n\nAt 5:", + "27 p.m., a paramedic approached the gurney. Like the three executioners, she would remain anonymous. Before the blinds opened, she would retreat into the chemical room while a doctor and the prison\u2019s warden stayed with Lockett in the death chamber. But first she had a job to do: prepare the drugs and medical equipment, and get an IV into Lockett. (Those who participated in the execution either did not respond to requests for interviews or could not be reached. Court records provide a detailed account of what happened.) The paramedic later told investigators that she\u2019d felt incredible pressure since she\u2019d walked into the room an hour earlier.", + " She\u2019d never participated in an execution that used midazolam. She\u2019d never participated in two executions in one night\u2014not many people in the world had. And she knew the media were watching. To make matters worse, the equipment was all wrong: the saline was packed in bags instead of syringes, the drugs were in syringes that looked smaller than she was used to, and the tubing for the IV was the wrong kind. But she tried to focus on doing her job and getting everything set up on time. She would be paid $600 for the two executions. The paramedic stuck a needle into a vein in Lockett\u2019s left arm.", + " A few drops of blood moved up the catheter\u2014\u201cflashback.\u201d A good sign. It meant the needle was in the vein. But she\u2019d forgotten tape to hold the IV in place. She asked someone to bring it to her, but the IV slipped out before she could secure it. Lockett\u2019s arm started to bleed, so she put pressure on it and tried again. This time, she didn\u2019t get flashback. Then she tried a brachial vein, near Lockett\u2019s biceps. No luck there.\n\nBy now, she\u2019d tried to place an IV three times. She\u2019d been taught that if you can\u2019t find a vein after the third attempt,", + " you ask someone else to step in. So she asked the doctor to help. The doctor, Johnny Zellmer, was a last-minute substitute. (Zellmer, whose name was revealed in a lawsuit following the execution and in multiple press reports, has not denied his involvement. He did not respond to requests for comment.) He was a local family-medicine and emergency-room physician who\u2019d participated in just one previous execution. Zellmer had arguably violated his profession\u2019s oath to \u201cnever do harm\u201d the moment he stepped into the death chamber. Indeed, the American Medical Association\u2019s code of ethics states that physicians should not participate in executions,", + " even in a supervisory capacity. But Zellmer thought his job would be limited to checking the offender for consciousness and pronouncing the time of death. He wasn\u2019t expecting to actually do anything to Lockett. The paramedic\u2019s request for help put him in the position of no longer just observing the execution but actively facilitating it. She was clearly struggling, though. He scanned Lockett\u2019s body and didn\u2019t see any good veins. Then Lockett turned his head, and the paramedic saw a vein in his neck pop up. She pointed it out to Zellmer. \u201cGet me a needle for the jugular,\u201d he said.", + " This was an odd choice. IVs in the neck are painful, and also hard to place. On the arms and legs, you can use a tourniquet to bring the veins up. You cannot do that on the neck, because a tourniquet on the neck is effectively a noose, and while this was an execution, it was not a hanging.\n\nAs Zellmer tried to get the needle into the jugular, the paramedic stuck Lockett three more times on his right arm, failing each time. Zellmer got the needle into Lockett\u2019s neck and saw flashback, but then saw blood spread under the skin\u2014he thought the needle might have gone all the way through the vein.", + " Zellmer decided to try a subclavian line, in a vein running beneath Lockett\u2019s collarbone. The paramedic brought him a central-venous catheterization kit, and Zellmer numbed Lockett\u2019s chest with lidocaine. The paramedic tried two different veins on Lockett\u2019s right foot; both attempts failed. Zellmer kept trying to get the needle into Lockett\u2019s subclavian vein. He finally saw a little flashback, then lost the vein and couldn\u2019t get the needle back in. After repeatedly sticking Lockett\u2019s chest, he decided to try the femoral vein,", + " in Lockett\u2019s groin. The paramedic went to get a longer needle. As the warden, Anita Trammell, watched the doctor and the paramedic work on Lockett, she felt a sliver of pride for the inmate. He\u2019d now been stuck with needles more than a dozen times. She knew he was in pain, but she thought he was taking it like a man. Trammell tried to make conversation to help calm him. She knew he had been a drug user. \u201cWhat was your drug of choice?\u201d she asked him. \u201cIce.\u201d \u201cI thought that was a white man\u2019s drug,\u201d she said,", + " and he laughed. The paramedic came back and said she had no needles longer than an inch and a quarter. That presented a problem. The femoral vein lies deeper in the body than other veins, so they would ideally use a needle at least twice that length. There were longer needles inside a second central-venous catheterization kit, like the one they\u2019d just used on Lockett\u2019s chest, but neither Zellmer nor the paramedic thought of it. Zellmer asked for an IO-infusion needle. IO stands for \u201cintraosseous\u201d\u2014into the bone. It is, in effect, a power drill,", + " used to bore a hole through bone and into the marrow, and therefore doesn\u2019t require finding a vein.\n\nThe prison had no IO needle. Zellmer had only the absurdly short one-and-a-quarter-inch needle. \u201cWell,\u201d he told the paramedic, \u201cwe\u2019ll just have to make it work.\u201d Lockett\u2019s prison scrubs and underwear were cut away. Zellmer stuck the needle into Lockett\u2019s femoral vein and saw flashback on the first try. Finally, after almost an hour, they had an IV. Right away, the paramedic noticed a potential warning sign. Saline should have been flowing easily through the IV,", + " but it flowed only when she propped up the line. Instead of starting over, though, she taped the IV in place. Two IVs are typically used to administer the drugs, but with the execution running way behind schedule, the doctor and the paramedic decided they would proceed with just one. Warden Trammell asked Lockett whether he needed anything. \u201cI was gonna see if I could get my mouth wiped off,\u201d he said. She got a Kleenex and wiped it for him.\n\n\n\nFinally, a sheet was draped over Lockett, covering him up to his chest. The execution could begin.\n\nLockett\u2019s closest family members were about two hours away.", + " His stepmother, LaDonna Hollins, had made the drive to the prison countless times. During her final visit, she and Lockett had sat looking at each other and crying. \u201cI do not want you to be at the execution,\u201d she later recalled him saying, \u201cbecause I do not know the outcome. I do not think it\u2019s gonna be very good. Because the drugs that they use have not been tested.\u201d\n\nLockett knew that Michael Lee Wilson had said \u201cI feel my whole body burning\u201d when the state executed him earlier that year. Lockett was scared. \u201cDo me one favor,\u201d Hollins told him,", + " according to an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel. \u201cAs long as you can talk on that gurney: Talk. Let the world know how they are executing people here in Oklahoma.\u201d Lockett knew that another inmate had said \u201cI feel my whole body burning\u201d during his execution. He was scared. After that visit, she heard that the prison had refused Lockett\u2019s request for a last meal\u2014chateaubriand, fried shrimp, baked potato, garlic toast, and a whole Kentucky bourbon pie\u2014because it exceeded the $15 limit. Hollins called the prison and said she\u2019d pay for it,", + " or even drive the meal down herself, but she wasn\u2019t allowed to. She didn\u2019t think Lockett could be spared after what he\u2019d done, but she didn\u2019t think he should suffer anymore, either. So she did what she\u2019d always done: try, however she could, to offer him some small comfort. Lockett had first shown up on her doorstep in Southern California at the age of 3, crying and soaked in urine. His mother had put him on a bus all the way from Oklahoma to live with his father. There\u2019d been no notice. Hollins testified in court that when Lockett was a young child,", + " she saw his half brother, who was about five years older, lying on top of him, the two boys looking strange together. Then a call from the school. Lockett was in the infirmary. He\u2019d come in crying and complaining of pain around his anus. Another memory: Lockett following his father, John, from room to room as he got ready for work, and then following him out of the house, into the street. Lockett in tears, certain that his father would never return. Once, as a birthday present for his brother John Jr., the boys\u2019 mother agreed to talk with them on the phone.", + " Lockett waited for his turn with anticipation\u2014he was now 4, and hadn\u2019t heard his mother\u2019s voice since she had put him on the bus. But she took offense when John Jr. referred to Hollins as \u201cMama LaDonna,\u201d and hung up before Lockett got to talk with her. John Sr. disciplined Lockett and his other children with everything from belts to two-by-fours. Hollins tried to protect the boy, but she wasn\u2019t exempt from John Sr.\u2019s violent temper either; he broke her arm twice. John Sr. taught his children to steal\u2014groceries sometimes, televisions other times\u2014and punished them only for getting caught.", + " Hollins remembers John Sr. blowing marijuana smoke up Lockett\u2019s nose and sitting him down to watch porn when Lockett was a child. \u201cBoy,\u201d he said, \u201cyou need to tear that pussy up.\u201d That\u2019s what he told Lockett he was going to do to Hollins. By the time Lockett was in middle school, his father and Hollins had brought him back to Oklahoma. To his eighth-grade teacher\u2014a woman whose son, Mark Gibson, would later prosecute him\u2014he stood out as smart and likable. Lockett brightened around small children. He babysat younger family members, liked to cook for them,", + " and carried them around on his back. He had a girlfriend whose baby had Down syndrome, and he was the only person who could always make the little girl smile. But he also spent a lot of time trying to act tough, and racked up charges including burglary and intimidating a witness. At 16, he was sentenced as an adult and sent to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. With no one to protect him, he was raped almost immediately by three other inmates. When Lockett got out, at age 20, he wanted to be feared. He wanted everyone to know that if they crossed him, they\u2019d pay. So,", + " a few years later, when a guy named Bobby Bornt seemed to be holding out on a $40 debt for marijuana and a tattoo, Lockett got his cousin and a friend and a shotgun and went to see him. That same night, by terrible coincidence, Stephanie Neiman and a friend drove to Bornt\u2019s house in Neiman\u2019s new Chevy pickup truck, which had a Tasmanian Devil sticker and vanity plates that read Tazzz. Neiman was an only child whose parents had instilled in her a strong sense of right and wrong. She was admired by her classmates and by school administrators for her kindness and loyalty,", + " and because of what she had overcome\u2014she was considered \u201cintellectually challenged\u201d but had played saxophone in the school band and earned her diploma. Those who worked with her at the school believe she wasn\u2019t able to understand how serious the situation was that night, or what the consequences might be. Neiman and Bornt had known each other since they were young children; they\u2019d been in the same YMCA day care. When the girls arrived at Bornt\u2019s house, Lockett and the others were already there, attacking Bornt. Neiman reacted in a way that unsettled Lockett: she seemed unafraid.", + " He told her to hand over the keys to her truck. She said no\u2014the truck belonged to her. Lockett and his accomplices beat up Bornt, raped Neiman\u2019s friend, and bound all three victims. Then Lockett led the group into Bornt\u2019s and Neiman\u2019s trucks and out of town, north into Kay County, up on the border with Kansas. The men threatened to kill the three victims if they reported the night\u2019s crimes to the police. Bornt and Neiman\u2019s friend swore they wouldn\u2019t, and Lockett later let them go. But Neiman refused. Her parents had taught her to tell the truth.", + " So when Lockett asked whether she would go to the police, she said yes.\n\n\n\nLockett asked her a final time. Then he raised the gun and fired. Twenty-three minutes behind schedule, the blinds to the death chamber opened. Warden Trammell stood facing the witnesses. She asked Lockett whether he had any last words. \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cLet the execution begin.\u201d Just behind Lockett\u2019s head, in the chemical room, one of the three executioners pushed the plunger on a syringe full of midazolam. The sedative went into the tubing, traveling 132 inches through the hole in the wall,", + " into the death chamber, under the sheet, and into Clayton Lockett\u2019s groin. But not all of it went straight into his bloodstream. Somehow, the IV dislodged, and midazolam was pumped into Lockett\u2019s tissue instead of his vein. Some of the drug would make its way into his bloodstream, but the smaller dose would be less effective. Minutes passed. Lockett remained alert. He pursed his lips and blinked. He licked his lips. To Katie Fretland, he looked confused. Several more minutes passed. Lockett turned his head and looked toward the witnesses. He looked back up.", + " Finally, he closed his eyes. In the chemical room, the executioners counted time on a stopwatch. Five minutes after they pushed the midazolam into the line, they flipped a switch and a light bulb went on in the death chamber, signaling that it was time to check whether Lockett was unconscious. Zellmer got up and checked Lockett. He was still conscious. The light went off. Two minutes later, the light came on again\u2014a signal to check Lockett a second time. The doctor blew in Lockett\u2019s eyes, rubbed his sternum, and pinched him. This time, he determined that Lockett was unconscious.", + " The executioners injected a syringe full of vecuronium bromide, a paralytic, into the line. When properly administered, vecuronium bromide blocks the signals that the nervous system sends to the muscles, turning the body into a vehicle the brain no longer controls. It\u2019s as if the wire that connects them has been severed and signals can no longer pass\u2014including the signal that says breathe. An incompletely sedated person under a paralytic might look serene, because his face muscles are paralyzed. But he\u2019s suffocating: when he tries to expand his chest and draw breath, nothing happens. The Animal Welfare Act has banned the use of paralytics without anesthesia in the euthanasia of animals.", + " To anti-death-penalty advocates, the fact that these drugs are used in executions is revealing. If the sedative worked, why would you need to paralyze someone? They argue that the paralytic prevents us from seeing the offender\u2019s distress, so that the procedure appears clinical and painless\u2014even if it\u2019s not. One of Lockett\u2019s executioners would later recall noticing something strange: the plunger was hard to push. He had no way of knowing that he might be injecting fluid into tissue, though, so he simply pushed harder. He heard what sounded like a moan come from the chamber. Zellmer watched Lockett,", + " oblivious to the fact that, under the sheet, the IV was not in place. In the chemical room, the executioners administered the third drug, potassium chloride. At 6:36, Katie Fretland saw Lockett move. During Lockett\u2019s trial and his early years on death row, he showed no remorse. In his letters, he posed as a member of a far-reaching criminal network. \u201cIm an assassin\u2014point blank!\u201d he wrote to one friend. \u201cYou honestly think that my boys is gone let a nigga as valuable me go to the penn forever? Fucc No!\u201d He was a terror,", + " hiding homemade weapons in his cell and once throwing urine and excrement at a guard\u2014anything he could do to show his disdain for authority. But in letters to his father, now also in prison, Lockett still yearned for a bond. He told his father about a girlfriend on the outside. Dad I can send her to visit you, keep me informed on how you\u2019re doing \u2026 Dad it\u2019s a few people on my team that will be sending me money. I\u2019m not going to be needing all that, I just really want a tube and some canteen and Im cool. Dad, I know you aint got too many people in your corner so I know you\u2019ll need some money.", + " Give me a few months to get my stable in order and I can start sending you some ends through my girl. Gradually, the weight of his crime began to overwhelm him. He talked often with Autry, his lawyer, about what he\u2019d done to Neiman\u2019s parents, taking away their only child. A couple of years in, he tried to kill himself. After that, he took to all the prison self-improvement pastimes: reading, painting, philosophy. Autry lent him books, and Lockett became the most well-read client the attorney had ever had. Still, there was a hollowness to Lockett\u2019s new persona,", + " as though he had gone from posing as a gangbanger to posing as a self-educated prison sophisticate. When the time came for a clemency hearing before the pardon-and-parole board\u2014one of his last chances for survival\u2014Lockett declined to show up. Instead, he gave Autry a letter to read to Neiman\u2019s family. \u201cIt would be disingenuous of me to tell you that I woke up one day and suddenly felt remorse,\u201d he wrote. \u201cOr that I found some arcane bible verse that miraculously inspired me to change. The truth is not so simple as that.\u201d He told them that for him,", + " remorse had been slow, but debilitating. \u201cI want you to know that if by me relinquishing my life you find solace in my death & can one day find the strength to forgive me then I am okay with this.\u201d Right up to the very end, Lockett pretended he actually had some control. To Warden Trammell, it looked as though Lockett was trying to communicate something. He kicked his right leg. He began to breathe heavily. He clenched his teeth. He rolled his head. Then he tried to speak. My God, Trammell thought. He\u2019s coming out of this. Lockett lurched up against the restraints.", + " While the witnesses looked on, he started writhing as if trying to free himself, to get up off the gurney. He struggled violently, twisting his whole body. Autry, sitting in the viewing area, couldn\u2019t believe it; next to him, Dean Sanderford, Lockett\u2019s other lawyer, began to cry. Lockett got his whole head up off the gurney, as far as the restraints would let him go. He kept trying to speak but couldn\u2019t form the words, and he rolled his head back and forth. Zellmer watched the monitor. The potassium chloride was supposed to stop Lockett\u2019s heart immediately,", + " by disrupting the electrical charge that causes the heart muscles to contract. But although Lockett\u2019s heart was slowing, it kept beating. The normal resting heart rate for an adult is between 60 and 100 beats per minute. Lockett\u2019s dropped into the 20s. From the waves on the screen, it looked like his heart muscles were starting to fire erratically. The doctor thought Lockett might be starting to seize. But he still felt uncertain of his role, and hesitated to intervene. From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, \u201cHe\u2019s trying to get off the table!\u201d Finally Lockett managed to speak:", + " \u201cMan.\u201d Zellmer had seen enough. He came to the gurney and lifted the sheet. Underneath, he saw a protrusion almost the size of a tennis ball on Lockett\u2019s groin. From the viewing area, Katie Fretland could see the doctor\u2019s face for the first time, and his expression was clear: Oh, fuck. Another witness saw Lockett open his eyes and look right at the doctor, like something out of a horror movie. The warden glanced under the sheet and noticed what looked like blood and clear liquid pooled around Lockett\u2019s groin. She looked up and addressed the witnesses:", + " \u201cWe\u2019re going to lower the blinds, temporarily.\u201d From the chemical room, the paramedic heard someone say, \u201cHe\u2019s trying to get off the table!\u201d She came into the death chamber as the doctor was trying to figure out how to finish the execution. \u201cI need to get another IV in the left femoral,\u201d Zellmer told her. She swabbed Lockett\u2019s groin with a sterile pad. \u201cTake deep breaths,\u201d the paramedic told Lockett, in case he could hear her, while Zellmer pushed the short needle back into Lockett\u2019s groin. Blood squirted all over Zellmer,", + " so much of it that it soaked his jacket. \u201cYou\u2019ve hit the artery,\u201d the paramedic said. \u201cIt\u2019ll be all right,\u201d Zellmer told her. \u201cWe\u2019ll go ahead and get the drugs.\u201d Did he intend to put drugs in an artery? The paramedic didn\u2019t want to countermand the doctor\u2019s authority, but that made no sense. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get the vein,\u201d she said. The doctor pulled out the needle. Lockett mumbled incoherently. His heart rate dropped into the teens as more of the potassium chloride that had been pumped into his groin seeped into his bloodstream.", + " Eventually, the doctor and the paramedic stopped what they were doing. The warden asked whether it would be possible to resuscitate Lockett. Zellmer said he could start CPR, but that in order to save him, they\u2019d have to take him to an emergency room. This further confused the paramedic. He\u2019s dying, she thought. Isn\u2019t that why we\u2019re here? Stephanie Neiman\u2019s family was in shock. After the blinds came down, prison staff took them to a rec room and tried to console them. While Neiman\u2019s mother, Susie, wept, someone from the state attorney general\u2019s office tried to explain what had happened,", + " something about Lockett\u2019s heart and a vein exploding. Susie said she wanted to go into the chamber and touch Lockett; otherwise she couldn\u2019t know for sure that her daughter\u2019s killer was dead. Fretland and the other reporters felt almost as stunned. In the viewing area, a black telephone she hadn\u2019t noticed before started ringing. Robert Patton, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections director, picked it up and left the room, pulling the phone cord out into the hall and closing the door behind him. Warden Trammell was calling from the death chamber. Patton asked her, \u201cHas enough drugs been administered to cause death?\u201d He heard Trammell repeat the question.", + " He heard the doctor say no. \u201cIs there another vein available, and if so do you have another set of chemicals back there?\u201d Again, Trammell repeated the question; again the doctor said no. \u201cI wanna be real clear with this, Warden, and I want you to ask the doctor specifically. Has enough drugs entered the inmate\u2019s system to cause death?\u201d A third time, he heard Trammell repeat the question. A third time, the answer was no. Patton hung up the phone and huddled in the hallway with the state secretary of safety and security and two members of the attorney general\u2019s office. Someone briefly floated the idea of using the drugs reserved for Charles Warner\u2019s execution.", + " Patton spoke on the phone with the governor\u2019s general counsel, Steve Mullins, in Oklahoma City. Mullins asked Patton, \u201cDo you want to stop the execution?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cYou have the authority to stop the execution,\u201d he told Patton. When they hung up, Mullins called the governor\u2014the basketball game was now an hour from tip-off\u2014to brief her. At 6:56, a call came in to the death chamber. Patton had instructions for the warden. He said something like \u201cstand down,\u201d which Trammell didn\u2019t quite understand. \u201cDo you mean to stop?\u201d Yes, he said, stop the execution.", + " Looking for news you can trust?\n\nSubscribe to our free newsletters.\n\n\n\n\n\nUS Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has famously referred to execution by lethal injection as an \u201cenviable\u2026quiet death.\u201d Clayton Lockett\u2019s death was anything but quiet.\n\nIn April, Lockett\u2019s execution in Oklahoma was badly botched and brought new scrutiny to the problems with lethal injection. The state\u2019s Republican governor, Mary Fallin, ordered the Oklahoma Office of Public Safety (OPS) to conduct an internal inquiry into the execution. A summary was released Thursday.\n\nThe investigation, conducted largely by a bunch of investigators working for the state highway patrol, didn\u2019t produce much new information.", + " The report mostly absolves the state of responsibility, even as it further documents the torture inflicted on Lockett before he died. It sheds no light on the effectiveness of the new, controversial, and experimental drugs used to kill Lockett\u2014drugs that had been predicted to cause a torturous death.\n\nBut buried in the report are some of the rarely seen minutiae involved in the machinery of death, the small absurdities of a government-sanctioned killing\u2014the pre-execution shower, the mental-health consultations, and suicide prevention efforts\u2014all directed at someone about to die. And inside the report is the story of a real dead man walking who clearly didn\u2019t view lethal injection as the enviable death Scalia thinks it is.\n\nBefore his execution,", + " Lockett had been one of two inmates challenging Oklahoma\u2019s law that shrouded the source of the state\u2019s lethal injection drugs in secrecy. He\u2019d been unable to obtain any information about where the drugs came from, whether they were legally obtained, or any other details about their purity or efficacy.\n\nAll of these issues were relevant because, thanks to a shortage of traditional execution drugs caused after pharmaceutical companies either stopped making or refused to export them, death penalty states have turned to a number of dubious means to find substitutes. Some have illegally imported them from questionable pharmacies abroad; others have turned to lightly regulated compounding pharmacies, some of which are known to have produced contaminated or irregular products.", + " And states have been experimenting with new drugs never used in executions before. That\u2019s what Oklahoma planned to do. Not only would it not disclose the source of the execution drugs, but it planned to use an untested drug cocktail on Lockett.\n\nDespite all of this, the state assured Lockett\u2019s lawyers that everything would be fine; his execution would not involve any undue suffering that might rise to the level of cruel and unusual punishment. It seems clear from the OPS report, though, that Lockett didn\u2019t believe them.\n\nThe report confirms earlier indications that Lockett was trying to find a way to kill himself before the state could.", + " According to the report, Lockett refused to cooperate with his executioners. At 5 a.m. on the day of his execution, correctional officers sought to take Lockett for X-rays at the health center. (Why X-rays are part of the execution protocol is not explained.)\n\nLockett refused to get out from under his blanket and offer up his hands to be restrained. Corrections personnel at that point noticed blood inside the cell. They sought permission to use a Taser to forcibly extract Lockett from his cell, where Lockett had blocked the door.\n\nWhen they finally got him out of his cell, prison staff discovered Lockett was suffering from self-inflicted wounds to his arms,", + " and they found razor blades from a prison-issued safety razor and a homemade rope inside his cell. The report offers other evidence that suggests Lockett was preparing for suicide: About six weeks before his execution, Lockett had been suspected of hoarding hydroxyzine, an anti-anxiety medication he\u2019d been prescribed. After he died, an autopsy showed potentially toxic levels of the drug in his system, suggesting he also attempted an overdose before he was executed.\n\nLockett was treated in the emergency room for the wounds on his arms. For much of the rest of the day, he seems to have been on suicide watch to prevent him from dying prematurely.", + " He refused every meal, and he also refused to talk to his lawyers. Toward the end of the day, a mental-health staff member met with him, and then near 5 p.m., officers put him in the shower\u2014hoping for a clean kill, if not a quiet one, perhaps.\n\nAt 5:22 p.m., the \u201cstrap-down team\u201d lashed Lockett to the gurney, where a doctor and paramedic would spend nearly an hour trying to stick a catheter in one of his veins. According to the new report, Lockett told the paramedic he\u2019d spent the past three days trying to dehydrate himself,", + " as dehydration can make it difficult for an IV to be inserted. An autopsy later showed that he failed in that regard.\n\nEven so, the medical team was utterly unable to figure out how to get the lethal drugs into Lockett. The description of the multiple attempts to insert an IV in one of Lockett\u2019s veins is enough to give any blood donor nightmares. A paramedic stuck a needle into Lockett\u2019s veins in his left arm three different times, three times in his right arm, and twice in his right foot. The doctor tried his jugular vein and then Lockett\u2019s subclavian vein in his chest.", + " All of it failed to produce a working IV line.\n\nFinally they cut open Lockett\u2019s underwear, sliced open his groin and put a catheter in the femoral vein, with a needle that was at least an inch too short to do the job properly. Missing from the report is any indication of what Lockett was doing during all this activity. The blinds to the execution chamber were closed for all of it, so there were no outside witnesses. There is apparently video of his Tasing, and his refusal of meals, but none of the execution. But the description of the multiple failed IV insertions, and the report\u2019s conclusion that the execution team lacked proper training to ensure a humane death,", + " suggest Lockett might have wished his suicide attempts had been successful.\n\nAt 6:23, the executioners started administering the sedative midazolam, a drug never used in Oklahoma before but one tied to botched executions in other states. After seven minutes, Lockett was declared unconscious and executioners administered a paralytic and potassium bromide to stop his heart.\n\nThat\u2019s when Lockett started to move and make sounds and officials realized something was wrong. The head of the prison system herself peeked under the sheet and, according to the new report, saw blood and fluid on Lockett\u2019s groin. The doctor observed that Lockett had a swelling \u201clarger than a golf ball,\u201d according to the report.", + " The catheter had either missed or punctured the vein and the drugs weren\u2019t flowing into his bloodstream. The doctor tried to stick another catheter in Lockett\u2019s other femoral vein but failed. Officials then tried to stop the execution, though they didn\u2019t start any lifesaving efforts. Lockett eventually died at 7:06 p.m., in then one of the longest executions in American history.\n\nLockett was a murderer. He abducted a 19-year-old girl, shot her, and then watched as his accomplice buried her alive. He knew he was going to die for his crimes. But it\u2019s clear he didn\u2019t want to die like this.\n" + ], + "length": 23702, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 54, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 In the new Atlantic cover story, one of the nation's most prominent black voices provides a lengthy assessment of the nation's first black president. The 17,000-word piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates makes clear that Coates considers Obama a man worthy of high esteem. After noting that Obama's rise to national prominence began with his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, Coates writes: \"Over the next 12 years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history.\" He adds that Obama was \"the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen,\" able to connect to black people while not alienating white people. That was due in part to his own upbringing with a Kansas-born white mother. Obama recalls that in the 2008 race, he gave himself maybe a 25% chance of winning\u2014but he never doubted his ability to win over white voters. Why? \"Obama was able to offer white America...something very few African Americans could\u2014trust,\" writes Coates. But he adds that Obama had something of a blind spot here as well. As he tells NPR, he thinks the president \"deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.\" In the Atlantic piece, he takes issue with Obama's \"overriding trust in color-blind policy and his embrace of 'personal responsibility' rhetoric when speaking to African-Americans,\" which Coates views as insensitive to the realities of many black youth. But the overall tone is deep respect for what Obama was able to accomplish despite overt obstructionism. His \"victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans,\" writes Coates. \"But there is nothing 'mere' about symbols.\" Click to read the full piece.\n", + "docs": [ + "\u201cThey\u2019re a rotten crowd,\u201d I shouted across the lawn. \u201cYou\u2019re worth the whole damn bunch put together.\u201d \u2014 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby I.\n\n\u201cLove Will Make You Do Wrong\u201d In the waning days of President Barack Obama\u2019s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages.", + " The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers\u2014the Gap Band\u2019s \u201cOutstanding\u201d\u2014was older than she was. \u201cThis is classic!\u201d he said. Then he flashed the smile that had launched America\u2019s first black presidency, and started dancing again. Three months still remained before Inauguration Day,", + " but staffers had already begun to count down the days. They did this with a mix of pride and longing\u2014like college seniors in early May. They had no sense of the world they were graduating into. None of us did. Chapters \u201cLove Will Make You Do Wrong\u201d He Walked on Ice but Never Fell \u201cI Decided to Become Part of That World\u201d \u201cYou Still Gotta Go Back to the Hood\u201d \"They Rode the Tiger\u201d \u201cWhen You Left, You Took All of Me With You\u201d The farewell party, presented by BET (Black Entertainment Television), was the last in a series of concerts the first couple had hosted at the White House.", + " Guests were asked to arrive at 5:30 p.m. By 6, two long lines stretched behind the Treasury Building, where the Secret Service was checking names. The people in these lines were, in the main, black, and their humor reflected it. The brisker queue was dubbed the \u201cgood-hair line\u201d by one guest, and there was laughter at the prospect of the Secret Service subjecting us all to a \u201cbrown-paper-bag test.\u201d This did not come to pass, but security was tight. Several guests were told to stand in a makeshift pen and wait to have their backgrounds checked a second time. Listen to the audio version of this article:", + " Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles. Dave Chappelle was there. He coolly explained the peril and promise of comedy in what was then still only a remotely potential Donald Trump presidency: \u201cI mean, we never had a guy have his own pussygate scandal.\u201d Everyone laughed. A few weeks later, he would be roundly criticized for telling a crowd at the Cutting Room, in New York, that he had voted for Clinton but did not feel good about it. \u201cShe\u2019s going to be on a coin someday,\u201d Chappelle said. \u201cAnd her behavior has not been coinworthy.\u201d But on this crisp October night,", + " everything felt inevitable and grand. There was a slight wind. It had been in the 80s for much of that week. Now, as the sun set, the season remembered its name. Women shivered in their cocktail dresses. Gentlemen chivalrously handed over their suit coats. But when Naomi Campbell strolled past the security pen in a sleeveless number, she seemed as invulnerable as ever.\n\nCellphones were confiscated to prevent surreptitious recordings from leaking out. (This effort was unsuccessful. The next day, a partygoer would tweet a video of the leader of the free world dancing to Drake\u2019s \u201cHotline Bling.\u201d)", + " After withstanding the barrage of security, guests were welcomed into the East Wing of the White House, and then ushered back out into the night, where they boarded a succession of orange-and-green trolleys. The singer and actress Janelle Mon\u00e1e, her famous and fantastic pompadour preceding her, stepped on board and joked with a companion about the historical import of \u201csitting in the back of the bus.\u201d She took a seat three rows from the front and hummed into the night. The trolley dropped the guests on the South Lawn, in front of a giant tent. The South Lawn\u2019s fountain was lit up with blue lights.", + " The White House proper loomed like a ghost in the distance. I heard the band, inside, beginning to play Al Green\u2019s \u201cLet\u2019s Stay Together.\u201d \u201cWell, you can tell what type of night this is,\u201d Obama said from the stage, opening the event. \u201cNot the usual ruffles and flourishes!\u201d The crowd roared. \u201cThis must be a BET event!\u201d The crowd roared louder still. A year-by-year catalogue of some of the magazine's most momentous work.\n\nRead more Obama placed the concert in the White House\u2019s musical tradition, noting that guests of the Kennedys had once done the twist at the residence\u2014\u201cthe twerking of their time,\u201d he said,", + " before adding, \u201cThere will be no twerking tonight. At least not by me.\u201d The Obamas are fervent and eclectic music fans. In the past eight years, they have hosted performances at the White House by everyone from Mavis Staples to Bob Dylan to Tony Bennett to the Blind Boys of Alabama. After the rapper Common was invited to perform in 2011, a small fracas ensued in the right-wing media. He performed anyway\u2014and was invited back again this glorious fall evening and almost stole the show. The crowd sang along to the hook for his hit ballad \u201cThe Light.\u201d And when he brought on the gospel singer Yolanda Adams to fill in for John Legend on the Oscar-winning song \u201cGlory,\u201d glee turned to rapture.", + " De La Soul was there. The hip-hop trio had come of age as boyish B-boys with Gumby-style high-top fades. Now they moved across the stage with a lovely mix of lethargy and grace, like your favorite uncle making his way down the Soul Train line, wary of throwing out a hip. I felt a sense of victory watching them rock the crowd, all while keeping it in the pocket. The victory belonged to hip-hop\u2014an art form birthed in the burning Bronx and now standing full grown, at the White House, unbroken and unedited. Usher led the crowd in a call-and-response: \u201cSay it loud,", + " I\u2019m black and I\u2019m proud.\u201d Jill Scott showed off her operatic chops. Bell Biv DeVoe, contemporaries of De La, made history with their performance by surely becoming the first group to suggest to a presidential audience that one should \u201cnever trust a big butt and a smile.\u201d\n\nThe ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine. The Obamas are social with Beyonc\u00e9 and Jay-Z. They hosted Chance the Rapper and Frank Ocean at a state dinner, and last year invited Swizz Beatz, Busta Rhymes, and Ludacris, among others, to discuss criminal-justice reform and other initiatives.", + " Obama once stood in the Rose Garden passing large flash cards to the Hamilton creator and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda, who then freestyled using each word on the cards. \u201cDrop the beat,\u201d Obama said, inaugurating the session. At 55, Obama is younger than pioneering hip-hop artists like Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc, and Kurtis Blow. If Obama\u2019s enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country\u2019s first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop\u2019s foundational generation. That night, the men were sharp in their gray or black suits and optional ties. Those who were not in suits had chosen to make a statement,", + " like the dark-skinned young man who strolled in, sockless, with blue jeans cuffed so as to accentuate his gorgeous black-suede loafers. Everything in his ensemble seemed to say, \u201cMy fellow Americans, do not try this at home.\u201d There were women in fur jackets and high heels; others with sculpted naturals, the sides shaved close, the tops blooming into curls; others still in gold bamboo earrings and long blond dreads. When the actor Jesse Williams took the stage, seemingly awed before such black excellence, before such black opulence, assembled just feet from where slaves had once toiled, he simply said,", + " \u201cLook where we are. Look where we are right now.\u201d Obama\u2019s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing \u201cmere\u201d about symbols. This would not happen again, and everyone knew it. It was not just that there might never be another African American president of the United States. It was the feeling that this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing. \u201cThere are no more,\u201d the comedian Sinbad joked back in 2010.", + " \u201cThere are no black men raised in Kansas and Hawaii. That\u2019s the last one. Y\u2019all better treat this one right. The next one gonna be from Cleveland. He gonna wear a perm. Then you gonna see what it\u2019s really like.\u201d Throughout their residency, the Obamas had refrained from showing America \u201cwhat it\u2019s really like,\u201d and had instead followed the first lady\u2019s motto, \u201cWhen they go low, we go high.\u201d This was the ideal\u2014black and graceful under fire\u2014saluted that evening. The president was lionized as \u201cour crown jewel.\u201d The first lady was praised as the woman \u201cwho put the O in Obama.\u201d\n\nBarack Obama\u2019s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans.", + " But there is nothing \u201cmere\u201d about symbols. The power embedded in the word nigger is also symbolic. Burning crosses do not literally raise the black poverty rate, and the Confederate flag does not directly expand the wealth gap. Related Stories 'The Filter... Is Powerful': Obama on Race, Media, and What It Took to Win\n\n\u2018Better Is Good\u2019: Obama on Reparations, Civil Rights, and the Art of the Possible\n\n'It\u2019s What We Do More Than What We Say': Obama on Race, Identity, and the Way Forward\n\n\u2018Surprised Like Everybody Else\u2019: Obama on the Election of Donald Trump Much as the unbroken ranks of 43 white male presidents communicated that the highest office of government in the country\u2014indeed,", + " the most powerful political offices in the world\u2014was off-limits to black individuals, the election of Barack Obama communicated that the prohibition had been lifted. It communicated much more. Before Obama triumphed in 2008, the most-famous depictions of black success tended to be entertainers or athletes. But Obama had shown that it was \u201cpossible to be smart and cool at the same damn time,\u201d as Jesse Williams put it at the BET party. Moreover, he had not embarrassed his people with a string of scandals. Against the specter of black pathology, against the narrow images of welfare moms and deadbeat dads, his time in the White House had been an eight-year showcase of a healthy and successful black family spanning three generations,", + " with two dogs to boot. In short, he became a symbol of black people\u2019s everyday, extraordinary Americanness. Whiteness in America is a different symbol\u2014a badge of advantage. In a country of professed meritocratic competition, this badge has long ensured an unerring privilege, represented in a 220-year monopoly on the highest office in the land. For some not-insubstantial sector of the country, the elevation of Barack Obama communicated that the power of the badge had diminished. For eight long years, the badge-holders watched him. They saw footage of the president throwing bounce passes and shooting jumpers. They saw him enter a locker room,", + " give a businesslike handshake to a white staffer, and then greet Kevin Durant with something more soulful. They saw his wife dancing with Jimmy Fallon and posing, resplendent, on the covers of magazines that had, only a decade earlier, been almost exclusively, if unofficially, reserved for ladies imbued with the great power of the badge.\n\nFor the preservation of the badge, insidious rumors were concocted to denigrate the first black White House. Obama gave free cellphones to disheveled welfare recipients. Obama went to Europe and complained that \u201cordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs.\u201d Obama had inscribed an Arabic saying on his wedding ring,", + " then stopped wearing the ring, in observance of Ramadan. He canceled the National Day of Prayer; refused to sign certificates for Eagle Scouts; faked his attendance at Columbia University; and used a teleprompter to address a group of elementary-school students. The badge-holders fumed. They wanted their country back. And, though no one at the farewell party knew it, in a couple of weeks they would have it. On this October night, though, the stage belonged to another America. At the end of the party, Obama looked out into the crowd, searching for Dave Chappelle. \u201cWhere\u2019s Dave?\u201d he cried.", + " And then, finding him, the president referenced Chappelle\u2019s legendary Brooklyn concert. \u201cYou got your block party. I got my block party.\u201d Then the band struck up Al Green\u2019s \u201cLove and Happiness\u201d\u2014the evening\u2019s theme. The president danced in a line next to Ronnie DeVoe. Together they mouthed the lyrics: \u201cMake you do right. Love will make you do wrong.\u201d Video: The Making of a Black President II.\n\nHe Walked on Ice but Never Fell Last spring, I went to the White House to meet the president for lunch. I arrived slightly early and sat in the waiting area. I was introduced to a deaf woman who worked as the president\u2019s receptionist,", + " a black woman who worked in the press office, a Muslim woman in a head scarf who worked on the National Security Council, and an Iranian American woman who worked as a personal aide to the president. This receiving party represented a healthy cross section of the people Donald Trump had been mocking, and would continue to spend his campaign mocking. At the time, the president seemed untroubled by Trump. When I told Obama that I thought Trump\u2019s candidacy was an explicit reaction to the fact of a black president, he said he could see that, but then enumerated other explanations. When assessing Trump\u2019s chances, he was direct: He couldn\u2019t win.", + " This assessment was born out of the president\u2019s innate optimism and unwavering faith in the ultimate wisdom of the American people\u2014the same traits that had propelled his unlikely five-year ascent from assemblyman in the Illinois state legislature to U.S. senator to leader of the free world. The speech that launched his rise, the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, emerged right from this logic. He addressed himself to his \u201cfellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, independents,\u201d all of whom, he insisted, were more united than they had been led to believe. America was home to devout worshippers and Little League coaches in blue states,", + " civil libertarians and \u201cgay friends\u201d in red states. The presumably white \u201ccounties around Chicago\u201d did not want their taxes burned on welfare, but they didn\u2019t want them wasted on a bloated Pentagon budget either. Inner-city black families, no matter their perils, understood \u201cthat government alone can\u2019t teach our kids to learn \u2026 that children can\u2019t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.\u201d Perceived differences were the work of \u201cspinmasters and negative-ad peddlers who embrace the politics of \u2018anything goes.\u2019 \u201d Real America had no use for such categorizations.", + " By Obama\u2019s lights, there was no liberal America, no conservative America, no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only \u201cthe United States of America.\u201d All these disparate strands of the American experience were bound together by a common hope: It\u2019s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill worker\u2019s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him,", + " too. This speech ran counter to the history of the people it sought to address. Some of those same immigrants had firebombed the homes of the children of those same slaves. That young naval lieutenant was an imperial agent for a failed, immoral war. American division was real. In 2004, John Kerry did not win a single southern state. But Obama appealed to a belief in innocence\u2014in particular a white innocence\u2014that ascribed the country\u2019s historical errors more to misunderstanding and the work of a small cabal than to any deliberate malevolence or widespread racism. America was good. America was great.\n\nOver the next 12 years,", + " I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal\u2014the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people. This was the core of his 2004 keynote, and it marked his historic race speech during the 2008 campaign at Philadelphia\u2019s National Constitution Center\u2014and blinded him to the appeal of Trump. (\u201cAs a general proposition, it\u2019s hard to run for president by telling people how terrible things are,\u201d Obama once said to me.) But if the president\u2019s inability to cement his legacy in the form of Hillary Clinton proved the limits of his optimism,", + " it also revealed the exceptional nature of his presidential victories. For eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell. Nothing in that time suggested that straight talk on the facts of racism in American life would have given him surer footing. I had met the president a few times before. In his second term, I\u2019d written articles criticizing him for his overriding trust in color-blind policy and his embrace of \u201cpersonal responsibility\u201d rhetoric when speaking to African Americans. I saw him as playing both sides. He would invoke his identity as a president of all people to decline to advocate for black policy\u2014and then invoke his black identity to lecture black people for continuing to \u201cmake bad choices.\u201d In response,", + " Obama had invited me, along with other journalists, to the White House for off-the-record conversations. I attempted to press my points in these sessions. My efforts were laughable and ineffective. I was always inappropriately dressed, and inappropriately calibrated in tone: In one instance, I was too deferential; in another, too bellicose. I was discombobulated by fear\u2014not by fear of the power of his office (though that is a fearsome and impressive thing) but by fear of his obvious brilliance. It is said that Obama speaks \u201cprofessorially,\u201d a fact that understates the quickness and agility of his mind.", + " These were not like press conferences\u2014the president would speak in depth and with great familiarity about a range of subjects. Once, I watched him effortlessly reply to queries covering everything from electoral politics to the American economy to environmental policy. And then he turned to me. I thought of George Foreman, who once booked an exhibition with multiple opponents in which he pounded five straight journeymen\u2014and I suddenly had some idea of how it felt to be the last of them. Last spring, we had a light lunch. We talked casually and candidly. He talked about the brilliance of LeBron James and Stephen Curry\u2014not as basketball talents but as grounded individuals.", + " I asked him whether he was angry at his father, who had abandoned him at a young age to move back to Kenya, and whether that motivated any of his rhetoric. He said it did not, and he credited the attitude of his mother and grandparents for this. Then it was my turn to be autobiographical. I told him that I had heard the kind of \u201cstraighten up\u201d talk he had been giving to black youth, for instance in his 2013 Morehouse commencement address, all my life. I told him that I thought it was not sensitive to the inner turmoil that can be obscured by the hardness kids often evince.", + " I told him I thought this because I had once been one of those kids. He seemed to concede this point, but I couldn\u2019t tell whether it mattered to him. Nonetheless, he agreed to a series of more formal conversations on this and other topics.\n\nThe improbability of a black president had once been so strong that its most vivid representations were comedic. Witness Dave Chappelle\u2019s profane Black Bush from the early 2000s (\u201cThis nigger very possibly has weapons of mass destruction! I can\u2019t sleep on that!\u201d) or Richard Pryor\u2019s black president in the 1970s promising black astronauts and black quarterbacks (\u201cEver since the Rams got rid of James Harris,", + " my jaw\u2019s been uptight!\u201d). In this model, so potent is the force of blackness that the presidency is forced to conform to it. But once the notion advanced out of comedy and into reality, the opposite proved to be true. Obama\u2019s 2004 keynote address conflated the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him. Obama\u2019s DNC speech is the key. It does not belong to the literature of \u201cthe struggle\u201d; it belongs to the literature of prospective presidents\u2014men (as it turns out) who speak not to gravity and reality, but to aspirations and dreams. When Lincoln invoked the dream of a nation \u201cconceived in liberty\u201d and pledged to the ideal that \u201call men are created equal,\u201d he erased the near-", + "extermination of one people and the enslavement of another. When Roosevelt told the country that \u201cthe only thing we have to fear is fear itself,\u201d he invoked the dream of American omnipotence and boundless capability. But black people, then living under a campaign of terror for more than half a century, had quite a bit to fear, and Roosevelt could not save them. The dream Ronald Reagan invoked in 1984\u2014that \u201cit\u2019s morning again in America\u201d\u2014meant nothing to the inner cities, besieged as they were by decades of redlining policies, not to mention crack and Saturday-night specials. Likewise, Obama\u2019s keynote address conflated the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him.", + " To reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased. That is the tradition to which the \u201cskinny kid with a funny name\u201d who would be president belonged. It is also the only tradition in existence that could have possibly put a black person in the White House.\n\nObama\u2019s embrace of white innocence was demonstrably necessary as a matter of political survival. Whenever he attempted to buck this directive, he was disciplined. His mild objection to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2009 contributed to his declining favorability numbers among whites\u2014still a majority of voters. His comments after the killing of Trayvon Martin\u2014\u201cIf I had a son,", + " he\u2019d look like Trayvon\u201d\u2014helped make that tragedy a rallying point for people who did not care about Martin\u2019s killer as much as they cared about finding ways to oppose the president. Michael Tesler, a political-science professor at UC Irvine, has studied the effect of Obama\u2019s race on the American electorate. \u201cNo other factor, in fact, came close to dividing the Democratic primary electorate as powerfully as their feelings about African Americans,\u201d he and his co-author, David O. Sears, concluded in their book, Obama\u2019s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America. \u201cThe impact of racial attitudes on individual vote decisions \u2026 was so strong that it appears to have even outstripped the substantive impact of racial attitudes on Jesse Jackson\u2019s more racially charged campaign for the nomination in 1988.\u201d When Tesler looked at the 2012 campaign in his second book,", + " Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era, very little had improved. Analyzing the extent to which racial attitudes affected people associated with Obama during the 2012 election, Tesler concluded that \u201cracial attitudes spilled over from Barack Obama into mass assessments of Mitt Romney, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Charlie Crist, and even the Obama family\u2019s dog Bo.\u201d\n\nYet despite this entrenched racial resentment, and in the face of complete resistance by congressional Republicans, overtly launched from the moment Obama arrived in the White House, the president accomplished major feats. He remade the nation\u2019s health-care system. He revitalized a Justice Department that vigorously investigated police brutality and discrimination,", + " and he began dismantling the private-prison system for federal inmates. Obama nominated the first Latina justice to the Supreme Court, gave presidential support to marriage equality, and ended the U.S. military\u2019s Don\u2019t Ask, Don\u2019t Tell policy, thus honoring the civil-rights tradition that had inspired him. And if his very existence inflamed America\u2019s racist conscience, it also expanded the country\u2019s anti-racist imagination. Millions of young people now know their only president to have been an African American. Writing for The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb once noted that \u201cuntil there was a black Presidency it was impossible to conceive of the limitations of one.\u201d This is just as true of the possibilities.", + " In 2014, the Obama administration committed itself to reversing the War on Drugs through the power of presidential commutation. The administration said that it could commute the sentences of as many as 10,000 prisoners. As of November, the president had commuted only 944 sentences. By any measure, Obama\u2019s effort fell woefully short, except for this small one: the measure of almost every other modern president who preceded him. Obama\u2019s 944 commutations are the most in nearly a century\u2014and more than the past 11 presidents\u2019 combined. Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception\u2014let alone his ascendancy to the presidency\u2014had long stood in force.", + " A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people. The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama\u2014a black man with deep roots in the white world\u2014was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave way to, unthinkable. III.\n\n\u201cI Decided to Become Part of That World\u201d When Barack Obama was 10, his father gave him a basketball, a gift that connected the two directly. Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii and raised by his mother, Ann Dunham, who was white, and her parents, Stanley and Madelyn.", + " They loved him ferociously, supported him emotionally, and encouraged him intellectually. They also told him he was black. Ann gave him books to read about famous black people. When Obama\u2019s mother had begun dating his father, the news had not been greeted with the threat of lynching (as it might have been in various parts of the continental United States), and Obama\u2019s grandparents always spoke positively of his father. This biography makes Obama nearly unique among black people of his era. In the president\u2019s memoir, Dreams From My Father, he says he was not an especially talented basketball player, but he played with a consuming passion. That passion was directed at something more than just the mastering of the pick-and-roll or the perfecting of his jump shot.", + " Obama came of age during the time of the University of Hawaii basketball team\u2019s \u201cFabulous Five\u201d\u2014a name given to its all-black starting five, two decades before it would be resurrected at the University of Michigan by the likes of Chris Webber and Jalen Rose. In his memoir, Obama writes that he would watch the University of Hawaii players laughing at \u201csome inside joke,\u201d winking \u201cat the girls on the sidelines,\u201d or \u201ccasually flipping lay-ups.\u201d What Obama saw in the Fabulous Five was not just game, but a culture he found attractive: By the time I reached high school, I was playing on Punahou\u2019s teams,", + " and could take my game to the university courts, where a handful of black men, mostly gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn\u2019t just have to do with the sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn\u2019t back it up. That you didn\u2019t let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions\u2014like hurt or fear\u2014you didn\u2019t want them to see. These are lessons, particularly the last one, that for black people apply as much on the street as they do on the court.", + " Basketball was a link for Obama, a medium for downloading black culture from the mainland that birthed the Fabulous Five. Assessing his own thought process at the time, Obama writes, \u201cI decided to become part of that world.\u201d This is one of the most incredible sentences ever written in the long, decorated history of black memoir, if only because very few black people have ever enjoyed enough power to write it. Historically, in black autobiography, to be remanded into the black race has meant exposure to a myriad of traumas, often commencing in childhood. Frederick Douglass is separated from his grandmother. The enslaved Harriet Ann Jacobs must constantly cope with the threat of rape before she escapes.", + " After telling his teacher he wants to be a lawyer, Malcolm X is told that the job isn\u2019t for \u201cniggers.\u201d Black culture often serves as the balm for such traumas, or even the means to resist them. Douglass finds the courage to face the \u201cslave-breaker\u201d Edward Covey after being given an allegedly enchanted root by \u201ca genuine African\u201d possessing powers from \u201cthe eastern nations.\u201d Malcolm X\u2019s dancing connects him to his \u201clong-suppressed African instincts.\u201d If black racial identity speaks to all the things done to people of recent African ancestry, black cultural identity was created in response to them. The division is not neat;", + " the two are linked, and it is incredibly hard to be a full participant in the world of cultural identity without experiencing the trauma of racial identity. Obama is somewhat different. He writes of bloodying the nose of a white kid who called him a \u201ccoon,\u201d and of chafing at racist remarks from a tennis coach, and of feeling offended after a white woman in his apartment building told the manager that he was following her. But the kinds of traumas that marked African Americans of his generation\u2014beatings at the hands of racist police, being herded into poor schools, grinding out a life in a tenement building\u2014were mostly abstract for him.", + " Moreover, the kind of spatial restriction that most black people feel at an early age\u2014having rocks thrown at you for being on the wrong side of the tracks, for instance\u2014was largely absent from his life. In its place, Obama was gifted with a well-stamped passport and admittance to elite private schools\u2014all of which spoke of other identities, other lives and other worlds where the color line was neither determinative nor especially relevant. Obama could have grown into a raceless cosmopolitan. Surely he would have lived in a world of problems, but problems not embodied by him. Instead, he decided to enter this world. \u201cI always felt as if being black was cool,\u201d Obama told me while traveling to a campaign event.", + " He was sitting on Air Force One, his tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up. \u201c[Being black] was not something to run away from but something to embrace. Why that is, I think, is complicated. Part of it is I think that my mother thought black folks were cool, and if your mother loves you and is praising you\u2014and says you look good, are smart\u2014as you are, then you don\u2019t kind of think in terms of How can I avoid this? You feel pretty good about it.\u201d The first white people Obama ever knew were decent in a way that few black people of that era experienced. As a child,", + " Obama\u2019s embrace of blackness was facilitated, not impeded, by white people. Obama\u2019s mother pointed him toward the history and culture of African Americans. Stanley, his grandfather, who came originally from Kansas, took him to basketball games at the University of Hawaii, as well as to black bars. Stanley introduced him to the black writer Frank Marshall Davis. The facilitation was as much indirect as direct. Obama recalls watching his grandfather at those black bars and understanding that \u201cmost of the people in the bar weren\u2019t there out of choice,\u201d and that \u201cour presence there felt forced.\u201d From his mother\u2019s life of extensive travel, he learned to value the significance of having a home.", + " That suspicion of rootlessness extends throughout Dreams From My Father. He describes integration as a \u201cone-way street\u201d on which black people are asked to abandon themselves to fully experience America\u2019s benefits. Confronted with a woman named Joyce, a mixed-race, green-eyed college classmate who insists that she is not \u201cblack\u201d but \u201cmultiracial,\u201d Obama is scornful. \u201cThat was the problem with people like Joyce,\u201d he writes. \u201cThey talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.\u201d Later in the memoir, Obama tells the story of falling in love with a white woman.", + " During a visit to her family\u2019s country house, he found himself in the library, which was filled with pictures of the woman\u2019s illustrious relations. But instead of being in awe, Obama realized that he and the woman lived in different worlds. \u201cAnd I knew that if we stayed together, I\u2019d eventually live in hers,\u201d he writes. \u201cBetween the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.\u201d\n\nAfter college, Obama found a home, as well as a sense of himself, working on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer. \u201cWhen I started doing that work, my story merges with a larger story.", + " That happens naturally for a John Lewis,\u201d he told me, referring to the civil-rights hero and Democratic congressman. \u201cThat happens more naturally for you. It was less obvious to me. How do I pull all these different strains together: Kenya and Hawaii and Kansas, and white and black and Asian\u2014how does that fit? And through action, through work, I suddenly see myself as part of the bigger process for, yes, delivering justice for the [African American community] and specifically the South Side community, the low-income people\u2014justice on behalf of the African American community. But also thereby promoting my ideas of justice and equality and empathy that my mother taught me were universal.", + " So I\u2019m in a position to understand those essential parts of me not as separate and apart from any particular community but connected to every community. And I can fit the African American struggle for freedom and justice in the context of the universal aspiration for freedom and justice.\u201d Throughout Obama\u2019s 2008 campaign and into his presidency, this attitude proved key to his deep support in the black community. African Americans, weary of high achievers who distanced themselves from their black roots, understood that Obama had paid a price for checking \u201cblack\u201d on his census form, and for living black, for hosting Common, for brushing dirt off his shoulder during the primaries,", + " for marrying a woman who looked like Michelle Obama. If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be. Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television. The South Side of Chicago, where Obama began his political career, is home to arguably the most prominent and storied black political establishment in the country. In addition to Oscar Stanton De Priest,", + " the first African American elected to Congress in the 20th century, the South Side produced the city\u2019s first black mayor, Harold Washington; Jesse Jackson, who twice ran for president; and Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman to win a Senate race. These victories helped give rise to Obama\u2019s own. Harold Washington served as an inspiration to Obama and looms heavily over the Chicago section of Dreams From My Father. Washington forged the kind of broad coalition that Obama would later assemble nationally. But Washington did this in the mid-1980s in segregated Chicago, and he had not had the luxury, as Obama did, of becoming black with minimal trauma.", + " \u201cThere was an edge to Harold that frightened some white voters,\u201d David Axelrod, who worked for both Washington and Obama, told me recently. Axelrod recalled sitting around a conference table with Washington after he had won the Democratic primary for his reelection in 1987, just as the mayor was about to hold a press conference. Washington asked what percentage of Chicago\u2019s white vote he\u2019d received. \u201cAnd someone said, \u2018Well, you got 21 percent. And that\u2019s really good because last time\u2019 \u201d\u2014in his successful 1983 mayoral campaign\u2014\u201c \u2018you only got 8,\u2019 \u201d Axelrod recalled. \u201cAnd he kind of smiled,", + " sadly, and said, \u2018You know, I probably spent 70 percent of my time in those white neighborhoods, and I think I\u2019ve been a good mayor for everybody, and I got 21 percent of the white vote and we think it\u2019s good.\u2019 And he just kind of shook his head and said, \u2018Ain\u2019t it a bitch to be a black man in the land of the free and the home of the brave?\u2019\n\n\u201cThat was Harold. He felt those things. He had fought in an all-black unit in World War II. He had come up in times\u2014and that and the sort of indignities of what you had to do to come up through the machine really seared him.\u201d During his 1983 mayoral campaign,", + " Washington was loudly booed outside a church in northwest Chicago by middle-class Poles, Italians, and Irish, who feared blacks would uproot them. \u201cIt was as vicious and ugly as anything you would have seen in the old South,\u201d Axelrod said. Obama\u2019s ties to the South Side tradition that Washington represented were complicated. Like Washington, Obama attempted to forge a coalition between black South Siders and the broader community. But Obama, despite his adherence to black cultural mores, was, with his roots in Kansas and Hawaii, his Ivy League pedigree, and his ties to the University of Chicago, still an exotic out-of-towner.", + " \u201cThey were a bit skeptical of him,\u201d says Salim Muwakkil, a journalist who has covered Obama since before his days in the Illinois state Senate. \u201cChicago is a very insular community, and he came from nowhere, seemingly.\u201d Obama compounded people\u2019s suspicions by refusing to humble himself and go along with the political currents of the South Side. \u201cA lot of the politicians, especially the black ones, were just leery of him,\u201d Kaye Wilson, the godmother to Obama\u2019s children and one of the president\u2019s earliest political supporters, told me recently. But even as many in the black political community were skeptical of Obama,", + " others encouraged him\u2014sometimes when they voted against him. When Obama lost the 2000 Democratic-primary race against Bobby Rush, the African American incumbent congressman representing Illinois\u2019 First Congressional District, the then-still-obscure future president experienced the defeat as having to do more with his age than his exoticism. \u201cI\u2019d go meet people and I\u2019d knock on doors and stuff, and some of the grandmothers who were the folks I\u2019d been organizing and working with doing community stuff, they weren\u2019t parroting back some notion of \u2018You\u2019re too Harvard,\u2019 or \u2018You\u2019re too Hyde Park,\u2019 or what have you,\u201d Obama told me.", + " \u201cThey\u2019d say, \u2018You\u2019re a wonderful young man, you\u2019re going to do great things. You just have to be patient.\u2019 So I didn\u2019t feel the loss as a rejection by black people. I felt the loss as \u2018politics anywhere is tough.\u2019 Politics in Chicago is especially tough. And being able to break through in the African American community is difficult because of the enormous loyalty that people feel towards anybody who has been around awhile.\u201d There was no one around to compete for loyalty when Obama ran for Senate in 2004, or for president in 2008. He was no longer competing against other African Americans; he was representing them.", + " \u201cHe had that hybridity which told the \u2018do-gooders\u2019\u2014in Chicago they call the reformers the do-gooders\u2014that he was acceptable,\u201d Muwakkil told me. Obama ran for the Senate two decades after the death of Harold Washington. Axelrod checked in on the precinct where Washington had been so loudly booed by white Chicagoans. \u201cObama carried, against seven candidates for the Senate, almost the entire northwest side and that precinct,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I told him, \u2018Harold\u2019s smiling down on us tonight.\u2019 \u201d Ian Allen Obama believes that his statewide victory for the Illinois Senate seat held particular portent for the events of 2008.", + " \u201cIllinois is the most demographically representative state in the country,\u201d he told me. \u201cIf you took all the percentages of black, white, Latino; rural, urban; agricultural, manufacturing\u2014[if] you took that cross section across the country and you shrank it, it would be Illinois.\u201d Illinois effectively allowed Obama to play a scrimmage before the big national game in 2008. \u201cWhen I ran for the Senate I had to go into southern Illinois, downstate Illinois, farming communities\u2014some with very tough racial histories, some areas where there just were no African Americans of any number,\u201d Obama told me. \u201cAnd when we won that race,", + " not just an African American from Chicago, but an African American with an exotic history and [the] name Barack Hussein Obama, [it showed that I] could connect with and appeal to a much broader audience.\u201d\n\nThe mix of Obama\u2019s \u201chybridity\u201d and the changing times allowed him to extend his appeal beyond the white ethnic corners of Chicago, past the downstate portions of Illinois, and out into the country at large. \u201cBen Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, from Nebraska, would only bring in one national Democrat to campaign for him,\u201d Obama recalls. \u201cAnd it was me. And so part of the reason I was willing to run [for president in 2008]", + " was that I had had two years in which we were generating enormous crowds all across the country\u2014and the majority of those crowds were not African American; and they were in pretty remote places, or unlikely places. They weren\u2019t just big cities or they weren\u2019t just liberal enclaves. So what that told me was, it was possible.\u201d What those crowds saw was a black candidate unlike any other before him. To simply point to Obama\u2019s white mother, or to his African father, or even to his rearing in Hawaii, is to miss the point. For most African Americans, white people exist either as a direct or an indirect force for bad in their lives.", + " Biraciality is no shield against this; often it just intensifies the problem. What proved key for Barack Obama was not that he was born to a black man and a white woman, but that his white family approved of the union, and approved of the child who came from it. They did this in 1961\u2014a time when sex between black men and white women, in large swaths of the country, was not just illegal but fraught with mortal danger. But that danger is not part of Obama\u2019s story. The first white people he ever knew, the ones who raised him, were decent in a way that very few black people of that era experienced.", + " He plopped down in a chair and said, \u201cI\u2019ve been in a lot of locker rooms. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever heard that one before.\u201d I asked Obama what he made of his grandparents\u2019 impressively civilized reception of his father. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t Harry Belafonte,\u201d Obama said laughingly of his father. \u201cThis was like an African African. And he was like a blue-black brother. Nilotic. And so, yeah, I will always give my grandparents credit for that. I\u2019m not saying they were happy about it. I\u2019m not saying that they were not, after the guy leaves, looking at each other like,", + " \u2018What the heck?\u2019 But whatever misgivings they had, they never expressed to me, never spilled over into how they interacted with me. \u201cNow, part of it, as I say in my book, was we were in this unique environment in Hawaii where I think it was much easier. I don\u2019t know if it would have been as easy for them if they were living in Chicago at the time, because the lines just weren\u2019t as sharply drawn in Hawaii as they were on the mainland.\u201d Obama\u2019s early positive interactions with his white family members gave him a fundamentally different outlook toward the wider world than most blacks of the 1960s had.", + " Obama told me he rarely had \u201cthe working assumption of discrimination, the working assumption that white people would not treat me right or give me an opportunity or judge me [other than] on the basis of merit.\u201d He continued, \u201cThe kind of working assumption\u201d that white people would discriminate against him or treat him poorly \u201cis less embedded in my psyche than it is, say, with Michelle.\u201d\n\nIn this, the first lady is more representative of black America than her husband is. African Americans typically raise their children to protect themselves against a presumed hostility from white teachers, white police officers, white supervisors, and white co-workers. The need for that defense is,", + " more often than not, reinforced either directly by actual encounters or indirectly by observing the vast differences between one\u2019s own experience and those across the color line. Marty Nesbitt, the president\u2019s longtime best friend, who, like Obama, had positive interactions with whites at a relatively early age, told me that when he and his wife went to buy their first car, she was insistent on buying from a black salesperson. \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018We\u2019ve got to find a salesman,\u2019 \u201d Nesbitt said. \u201cShe\u2019s like, \u2018No, no, no. We\u2019re waiting for the brother.\u2019 And I\u2019m like,", + " \u2018He\u2019s with a customer.\u2019 They were filling out documents and she was like, \u2018We\u2019re going to stay around.\u2019 And a white guy came up to us. \u2018Can I help you?\u2019 \u2018Nope.\u2019 \u201d Nesbitt was not out to condemn anyone with this story. He was asserting that \u201cthe willingness of African Americans [in Chicago] to help lift each other up is powerful.\u201d But that willingness to help is also a defense, produced by decades of discrimination. Obama sees race through a different lens, Kaye Wilson told me. \u201cIt\u2019s just very different from ours,\u201d she explained. \u201cHe\u2019s got buddies that are white,", + " and they\u2019re his buddies, and they love him. And I don\u2019t think they love him just because he\u2019s the president. They love him because they\u2019re his friends from Hawaii, some from college and all. \u201cSo I think he\u2019s got that, whereas I think growing up in the racist United States, we enter this thing with, you know, \u2018I\u2019m looking at you. I\u2019m not trusting you to be one hundred with me.\u2019 And I think he grew up in a way that he had to trust [white people]\u2014how can you live under the roof with people and think that they don\u2019t love you? He needs that frame of reference.", + " He needs that lens. If he didn\u2019t have it, it would be \u2026 a Jesse Jackson, you know? Or Al Sharpton. Different lens.\u201d That lens, born of literally relating to whites, allowed Obama to imagine that he could be the country\u2019s first black president. \u201cIf I walked into a room and it\u2019s a bunch of white farmers, trade unionists, middle age\u2014I\u2019m not walking in thinking, Man, I\u2019ve got to show them that I\u2019m normal,\u201d Obama explained. \u201cI walk in there, I think, with a set of assumptions: like, these people look just like my grandparents. And I see the same Jell\u2011O mold that my grandmother served,", + " and they\u2019ve got the same, you know, little stuff on their mantelpieces. And so I am maybe disarming them by just assuming that we\u2019re okay.\u201d What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could\u2014trust. The vast majority of us are, necessarily, too crippled by our defenses to ever consider such a proposition. But Obama, through a mixture of ancestral connections and distance from the poisons of Jim Crow, can credibly and sincerely trust the majority population of this country. That trust is reinforced, not contradicted, by his blackness. Obama isn\u2019t shuffling before white power (Herman Cain\u2019s \u201cshucky ducky\u201d act)", + " or flattering white ego (O. J. Simpson\u2019s listing not being seen as black as a great accomplishment). That, too, is defensive, and deep down, I suspect, white people know it. He stands firm in his own cultural traditions and says to the country something virtually no black person can, but every president must: \u201cI believe you.\u201d IV.\n\n\u201cYou Still Gotta Go Back to the Hood\u201d Just after Columbus Day, I accompanied the president and his formidable entourage on a visit to North Carolina A&T State University, in Greensboro. Four days earlier, The Washington Post had published an old audio clip that featured Donald Trump lamenting a failed sexual conquest and exhorting the virtues of sexual assault.", + " The next day, Trump claimed that this was \u201clocker room\u201d talk. As we flew to North Carolina, the president was in a state of bemused disbelief. He plopped down in a chair in the staff cabin of Air Force One and said, \u201cI\u2019ve been in a lot of locker rooms. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever heard that one before.\u201d He was casual and relaxed. A feeling of cautious inevitability emanated from his staff, and why not? Every day seemed to bring a new, more shocking revelation or piece of evidence showing Trump to be unfit for the presidency: He had lost nearly $1 billion in a single year.", + " He had likely not paid taxes in 18 years. He was running a \u201cuniversity,\u201d for which he was under formal legal investigation. He had trampled on his own campaign\u2019s messaging by engaging in a Twitter crusade against a former beauty-pageant contestant. He had been denounced by leadership in his own party, and the trickle of prominent Republicans\u2014both in and out of office\u2014who had publicly repudiated him threatened to become a geyser. At this moment, the idea that a campaign so saturated in open bigotry, misogyny, chaos, and possible corruption could win a national election was ludicrous. This was America. The president was going to North Carolina to keynote a campaign rally for Clinton,", + " but first he was scheduled for a conversation about My Brother\u2019s Keeper, his initiative on behalf of disadvantaged youth. Announcing My Brother\u2019s Keeper\u2014or MBK, as it\u2019s come to be called\u2014in 2014, the president had sought to avoid giving the program a partisan valence, noting that it was \u201cnot some big new government program.\u201d Instead, it would involve the government in concert with the nonprofit and business sectors to intervene in the lives of young men of color who were \u201cat risk.\u201d MBK serves as a kind of network for those elements of federal, state, and local government that might already have a presence in the lives of these young men.", + " It is a quintessentially Obama program\u2014conservative in scope, with impacts that are measurable.\n\n\u201cIt comes right out of his own life,\u201d Broderick Johnson, the Cabinet secretary and an assistant to the president, who heads MBK, told me recently. \u201cI have heard him say, \u2018I don\u2019t want us to have a bunch of forums on race.\u2019 He reminds people, \u2018Yeah, we can talk about this. But what are we going to do?\u2019 \u201d On this afternoon in North Carolina, what Obama did was sit with a group of young men who\u2019d turned their lives around in part because of MBK. They told stories of being in the street,", + " of choosing quick money over school, of their homes being shot up, and\u2014through the help of mentoring or job programs brokered by MBK\u2014transitioning into college or a job. Obama listened solemnly and empathetically to each of them. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t take that much,\u201d he told them. \u201cIt just takes someone laying hands on you and saying, \u2018Hey, man, you count.\u2019 \u201d When he asked the young men whether they had a message he should take back to policy makers in Washington, D.C., one observed that despite their best individual efforts, they still had to go back to the very same deprived neighborhoods that had been the sources of trouble for them.", + " \u201cIt\u2019s your environment,\u201d the young man said. \u201cYou can do what you want, but you still gotta go back to the hood.\u201d He was correct. The ghettos of America are the direct result of decades of public-policy decisions: the redlining of real-estate zoning maps, the expanded authority given to prosecutors, the increased funding given to prisons. And all of this was done on the backs of people still reeling from the 250-year legacy of slavery. The results of this negative investment are clear\u2014African Americans rank at the bottom of nearly every major socioeconomic measure in the country. Obama\u2019s formula for closing this chasm between black and white America,", + " like that of many progressive politicians today, proceeded from policy designed for all of America. Blacks disproportionately benefit from this effort, since they are disproportionately in need. The Affordable Care Act, which cut the uninsured rate in the black community by at least a third, was Obama\u2019s most prominent example. Its full benefit has yet to be felt by African Americans, because several states in the South have declined to expand Medicaid. But when the president and I were meeting, the ACA\u2019s advocates believed that pressure on state budgets would force expansion, and there was evidence to support this: Louisiana had expanded Medicaid earlier in 2016, and advocates were gearing up for wars to be waged in Georgia and Virginia.", + " Obama also emphasized the need for a strong Justice Department with a deep commitment to nondiscrimination. When Obama moved into the White House in 2009, the Justice Department\u2019s Civil Rights Division \u201cwas in shambles,\u201d former Attorney General Eric Holder told me recently. \u201cI mean, I had been there for 12 years as a line guy. I started out in \u201976, so I served under Republicans and Democrats. And what the [George W.] Bush administration, what the Bush DOJ did, was unlike anything that had ever happened before in terms of politicized hiring.\u201d The career civil servants below the political appointees, Holder said,", + " were not even invited to the meetings in which the key hiring and policy decisions were made. After Obama\u2019s inauguration, Holder told me, \u201cI remember going to tell all the folks at the Civil Rights Division, \u2018The Civil Rights Division is open for business again.\u2019 The president gave me additional funds to hire people.\u201d What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could\u2014trust. The political press developed a narrative that because Obama felt he had to modulate his rhetoric on race, Holder was the administration\u2019s true, and thus blacker, conscience. Holder is certainly blunter, and this worried some of the White House staff.", + " Early in Obama\u2019s first term, Holder gave a speech on race in which he said the United States had been a \u201cnation of cowards\u201d on the subject. But positioning the two men as opposites elides an important fact: Holder was appointed by the president, and went only as far as the president allowed. I asked Holder whether he had toned down his rhetoric after that controversial speech. \u201cNope,\u201d he said. Reflecting on his relationship with the president, Holder said, \u201cWe were also kind of different people, you know? He is the Zen guy. And I\u2019m kind of the hot-blooded West Indian. And I thought we made a good team,", + " but there\u2019s nothing that I ever did or said that I don\u2019t think he would have said, \u2018I support him 100 percent.\u2019 \u201cNow, the \u2018nation of cowards\u2019 speech, the president might have used a different phrase\u2014maybe, probably. But he and I share a worldview, you know? And when I hear people say, \u2018Well, you are blacker than him\u2019 or something like that, I think, What are you all talking about?\u201d For much of his presidency, a standard portion of Obama\u2019s speeches about race riffed on black people\u2019s need to turn off the television, stop eating junk food,", + " and stop blaming white people for their problems. Obama would deliver this lecture to any black audience, regardless of context. It was bizarre, for instance, to see the president warning young men who\u2019d just graduated from Morehouse College, one of the most storied black colleges in the country, about making \u201cexcuses\u201d and blaming whites.\n\nThis part of the Obama formula is the most troubling, and least thought-out. This judgment emerges from my own biography. I am the product of black parents who encouraged me to read, of black teachers who felt my work ethic did not match my potential, of black college professors who taught me intellectual rigor.", + " And they did this in a world that every day insulted their humanity. It was not so much that the black layabouts and deadbeats Obama invoked in his speeches were unrecognizable. I had seen those people too. But I\u2019d also seen the same among white people. If black men were overrepresented among drug dealers and absentee dads of the world, it was directly related to their being underrepresented among the Bernie Madoffs and Kenneth Lays of the world. Power was what mattered, and what characterized the differences between black and white America was not a difference in work ethic, but a system engineered to place one on top of the other.", + " The mark of that system is visible at every level of American society, regardless of the quality of one\u2019s choices. For instance, the unemployment rate among black college graduates (4.1 percent) is almost the same as the unemployment rate among white high-school graduates (4.6 percent). But that college degree is generally purchased at a higher price by blacks than by whites. According to research by the Brookings Institution, African Americans tend to carry more student debt four years after graduation ($53,000 versus $28,000) and suffer from a higher default rate on their loans (7.6 percent versus 2.4 percent) than white Americans.", + " This is both the result and the perpetuator of a sprawling wealth gap between the races. White households, on average, hold seven times as much wealth as black households\u2014a difference so large as to make comparing the \u201cblack middle class\u201d and \u201cwhite middle class\u201d meaningless; they\u2019re simply not comparable. According to Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University who studies economic mobility, black families making $100,000 a year or more live in more-disadvantaged neighborhoods than white families making less than $30,000. This gap didn\u2019t just appear by magic; it\u2019s the result of the government\u2019s effort over many decades to create a pigmentocracy\u2014one that will continue without explicit intervention.", + " Obama had been on the record as opposing reparations. But now, late in his presidency, he seemed more open to the idea\u2014in theory, at least, if not in practice. \u201cTheoretically, you can make obviously a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps,\u201d Obama said, referencing the gulf in education, wealth, and employment that separates black and white America. \u201cThat those were wrongs to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment,", + " even if it\u2019s not in the form of individual reparations checks but in the form of a Marshall Plan.\u201d\n\nThe political problems with turning the argument for reparations into reality are manifold, Obama said. \u201cIf you look at countries like South Africa, where you had a black majority, there have been efforts to tax and help that black majority, but it hasn\u2019t come in the form of a formal reparations program. You have countries like India that have tried to help untouchables, with essentially affirmative-action programs, but it hasn\u2019t fundamentally changed the structure of their societies. So the bottom line is that it\u2019s hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts.\u201d Obama went on to say that it would be better,", + " and more realistic, to get the country to rally behind a robust liberal agenda and build on the enormous progress that\u2019s been made toward getting white Americans to accept nondiscrimination as a basic operating premise. But the progress toward nondiscrimination did not appear overnight. It was achieved by people willing to make an unpopular argument and live on the frontier of public opinion. I asked him whether it wasn\u2019t\u2014despite the practical obstacles\u2014worth arguing that the state has a collective responsibility not only for its achievements but for its sins. \u201cI want my children\u2014I want Malia and Sasha\u2014to understand that they\u2019ve got responsibilities beyond just what they themselves have done,\u201d Obama said.", + " \u201cThat they have a responsibility to the larger community and the larger nation, that they should be sensitive to and extra thoughtful about the plight of people who have been oppressed in the past, are oppressed currently. So that\u2019s a wisdom that I want to transmit to my kids \u2026 But I would say that\u2019s a high level of enlightenment that you\u2019re looking to have from a majority of the society. And it may be something that future generations are more open to, but I am pretty confident that for the foreseeable future, using the argument of nondiscrimination, and \u2018Let\u2019s get it right for the kids who are here right now,\u2019 and giving them the best chance possible,", + " is going to be a more persuasive argument.\u201d\n\nObama is unfailingly optimistic about the empathy and capabilities of the American people. His job necessitates this: \u201cAt some level what the people want to feel is that the person leading them sees the best in them,\u201d he told me. But I found it interesting that that optimism does not extend to the possibility of the public\u2019s accepting wisdoms\u2014such as the moral logic of reparations\u2014that the president, by his own account, has accepted for himself and is willing to teach his children. Obama says he always tells his staff that \u201cbetter is good.\u201d The notion that a president would attempt to achieve change within the boundaries of the accepted consensus is appropriate.", + " But Obama is almost constitutionally skeptical of those who seek to achieve change outside that consensus.\n\nEarly in 2016, Obama invited a group of African American leaders to meet with him at the White House. When some of the activists affiliated with Black Lives Matter refused to attend, Obama began calling them out in speeches. \u201cYou can\u2019t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position,\u201d he said. \u201cThe value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved. You then have a responsibility to prepare an agenda that is achievable\u2014that can institutionalize the changes you seek\u2014and to engage the other side.\u201d Opal Tometi,", + " a Nigerian American community activist who is one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter, explained to me that the group has a more diffuse structure than most civil-rights organizations. One reason for this is to avoid the cult of personality that has plagued black organizations in the past. So the founders asked its membership in Chicago, the president\u2019s hometown, whether they should meet with Obama. \u201cThey felt\u2014and I think many of our members felt\u2014there wouldn\u2019t be the depth of discussion that they wanted to have,\u201d Tometi told me. \u201cAnd if there wasn\u2019t that space to have a real heart-to-heart, and if it was just surface level,", + " that it would be more of a disservice to the movement.\u201d\n\nTometi noted that some other activists allied with Black Lives Matter had been planning to attend the meeting, so they felt their views would be represented. Nevertheless, Black Lives Matter sees itself as engaged in a protest against the treatment of black people by the American state, and so Tometi and much of the group\u2019s leadership, concerned about being used for a photo op by the very body they were protesting, opted not to go. When I asked Obama about this perspective, he fluctuated between understanding where the activists were coming from and being hurt by such brush-offs. \u201cI think that where I\u2019ve gotten frustrated during the course of my presidency has never been because I was getting pushed too hard by activists to see the justness of a cause or the essence of an issue,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cI think where I got frustrated at times was the belief that the president can do anything if he just decides he wants to do it. And that sort of lack of awareness on the part of an activist about the constraints of our political system and the constraints on this office, I think, sometimes would leave me to mutter under my breath. Very rarely did I lose it publicly. Usually I\u2019d just smile.\u201d He laughed, then continued, \u201cThe reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, \u2018[Don\u2019t] you think if I could do it,", + " I [would] have just done it? Do you think that the only problem is that I don\u2019t care enough about the plight of poor people, or gay people?\u2019 \u201d I asked Obama whether he thought that perhaps protesters\u2019 distrust of the powers that be could ultimately be healthy. \u201cYes,\u201d he said. \u201cWhich is why I don\u2019t get too hurt. I mean, I think there is a benefit to wanting to hold power\u2019s feet to the fire until you actually see the goods. I get that. And I think it is important. And frankly, sometimes it\u2019s useful for activists just to be out there to keep you mindful and not get complacent,", + " even if ultimately you think some of their criticism is misguided.\u201d Obama himself was an activist and a community organizer, albeit for only two years\u2014but he is not, by temperament, a protester. He is a consensus-builder; consensus, he believes, ultimately drives what gets done. He understands the emotional power of protest, the need to vent before authority\u2014but that kind of approach does not come naturally to him. Regarding reparations, he said, \u201cSometimes I wonder how much of these debates have to do with the desire, the legitimate desire, for that history to be recognized. Because there is a psychic power to the recognition that is not satisfied with a universal program;", + " it\u2019s not satisfied by the Affordable Care Act, or an expansion of Pell Grants, or an expansion of the earned-income tax credit.\u201d These kinds of programs, effective and disproportionately beneficial to black people though they may be, don\u2019t \u201cspeak to the hurt, and the sense of injustice, and the self-doubt that arises out of the fact that [African Americans] are behind now, and it makes us sometimes feel as if there must be something wrong with us\u2014unless you\u2019re able to see the history and say, \u2018It\u2019s amazing we got this far given what we went through.\u2019 \u201cSo in part, I think the argument sometimes that I\u2019ve had with folks who are much more interested in sort of race-specific programs is less an argument about what is practically achievable and sometimes maybe more an argument of \u2018We want society to see what\u2019s happened and internalize it and answer it in demonstrable ways.\u2019 And those impulses I very much understand\u2014but my hope would be that as we\u2019re moving through the world right now,", + " we\u2019re able to get that psychological or emotional peace by seeing very concretely our kids doing better and being more hopeful and having greater opportunities.\u201d\n\nObama saw\u2014at least at that moment, before the election of Donald Trump\u2014a straight path to that world. \u201cJust play this out as a thought experiment,\u201d he said. \u201cImagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America\u2014but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America\u2014is getting a really good education. And they\u2019re graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are,", + " and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs that say that you\u2019re not going to be barred from school just because of how much money your parents have. \u201cSo now they\u2019re all graduating. And let\u2019s also say that the Justice Department and the courts are making sure, as I\u2019ve said in a speech before, that when Jamal sends his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 in, he\u2019s getting treated the same as when Johnny sends his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 in. Now, are we going to have suddenly the same number of CEOs, billionaires, etc., as the white community?", + " In 10 years? Probably not, maybe not even in 20 years. \u201cBut I guarantee you that we would be thriving, we would be succeeding. We wouldn\u2019t have huge numbers of young African American men in jail. We\u2019d have more family formation as college-graduated girls are meeting boys who are their peers, which then in turn means the next generation of kids are growing up that much better. And suddenly you\u2019ve got a whole generation that\u2019s in a position to start using the incredible creativity that we see in music, and sports, and frankly even on the streets, channeled into starting all kinds of businesses. I feel pretty good about our odds in that situation.\u201d The thought experiment doesn\u2019t hold up.", + " The programs Obama favored would advance white America too\u2014and without a specific commitment to equality, there is no guarantee that the programs would eschew discrimination. Obama\u2019s solution relies on a goodwill that his own personal history tells him exists in the larger country. My own history tells me something different. The large numbers of black men in jail, for instance, are not just the result of poor policy, but of not seeing those men as human. When President Obama and I had this conversation, the target he was aiming to reach seemed to me to be many generations away, and now\u2014as President-Elect Trump prepares for office\u2014seems even many more generations off.", + " Obama\u2019s accomplishments were real: a $1 billion settlement on behalf of black farmers, a Justice Department that exposed Ferguson\u2019s municipal plunder, the increased availability of Pell Grants (and their availability to some prisoners), and the slashing of the crack/cocaine disparity in sentencing guidelines, to name just a few. Obama was also the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. There was a feeling that he\u2019d erected a foundation upon which further progressive policy could be built. It\u2019s tempting to say that foundation is now endangered. The truth is, it was never safe. V.\n\n\u201cThey Rode the Tiger\u201d Obama\u2019s greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight.", + " Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition\u2019s resolve to destroy him. In some sense an Obama presidency could never have succeeded along the normal presidential lines; he needed a partner, or partners, in Congress who could put governance above party. But he struggled to win over even some of his own allies. Ben Nelson, the Democratic senator from Nebraska whom Obama helped elect, became an obstacle to health-care reform. Joe Lieberman, whom Obama saved from retribution at the hands of Senate Democrats after Lieberman campaigned for Obama\u2019s 2008 opponent,", + " John McCain, similarly obstructed Obamacare. Among Republicans, senators who had seemed amenable to Obama\u2019s agenda\u2014Chuck Grassley, Susan Collins, Richard Lugar, Olympia Snowe\u2014rebuffed him repeatedly. The obstruction grew out of narrow political incentives. \u201cIf Republicans didn\u2019t cooperate,\u201d Obama told me, \u201cand there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and they could win back the Senate and/or the House. That wasn\u2019t an inaccurate political calculation.\u201d Obama is not sure of the degree to which individual racism played into this calculation. \u201cI do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cAnd if you ask them, I\u2019m sure they would say, \u2018No, actually what you\u2019re experiencing is not because you\u2019re black, it\u2019s because you\u2019re a Democrat.\u2019 \u201d But personal animus is just one manifestation of racism; arguably the more profound animosity occurs at the level of interests. The most recent Congress boasted 138 members from the states that comprised the old Confederacy. Of the 101 Republicans in that group, 96 are white and one is black. Of the 37 Democrats, 18 are black and 15 are white. There are no white congressional Democrats in the Deep South. Exit polls in Mississippi in 2008 found that 96 percent of voters who described themselves as Republicans were white.", + " The Republican Party is not simply the party of whites, but the preferred party of whites who identify their interest as defending the historical privileges of whiteness. The researchers Josh Pasek, Jon A. Krosnick, and Trevor Tompson found that in 2012, 32 percent of Democrats held antiblack views, while 79 percent of Republicans did. These attitudes could even spill over to white Democratic politicians, because they are seen as representing the party of blacks. Studying the 2016 election, the political scientist Philip Klinkner found that the most predictive question for understanding whether a voter favored Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump was \u201cIs Barack Obama a Muslim?\u201d\n\nIn our conversations,", + " Obama said he didn\u2019t doubt that there was a sincerely nonracist states\u2019-rights contingent of the GOP. And yet he suspected that there might be more to it. \u201cA rudimentary knowledge of American history tells you that the relationship between the federal government and the states was very much mixed up with attitudes towards slavery, attitudes towards Jim Crow, attitudes towards antipoverty programs and who benefited and who didn\u2019t,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so I\u2019m careful not to attribute any particular resistance or slight or opposition to race. But what I do believe is that if somebody didn\u2019t have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government,", + " and didn\u2019t have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying certain communities, and didn\u2019t have a problem with the interstate highway system being built, and didn\u2019t have a problem with the GI Bill, and didn\u2019t have a problem with the [Federal Housing Administration] subsidizing the suburbanization of America, and that all helped you build wealth and create a middle class\u2014and then suddenly as soon as African Americans or Latinos are interested in availing themselves of those same mechanisms as ladders into the middle class, you now have a violent opposition to them\u2014then I think you at least have to ask yourself the question of how consistent you are,", + " and what\u2019s different, and what\u2019s changed.\u201d Racism greeted Obama in both his primary and general-election campaigns in 2008. Photos were circulated of him in Somali garb. Rush Limbaugh dubbed him \u201cBarack the Magic Negro.\u201d Roger Stone, who would go on to advise the Trump campaign, claimed that Michelle Obama could be heard on tape yelling \u201cWhitey.\u201d Detractors circulated emails claiming that the future first lady had written a racist senior thesis while at Princeton. A fifth of all West Virginia Democratic-primary voters in 2008 openly admitted that race had influenced their vote. Hillary Clinton trounced him 67 to 26 percent.", + " \u201cThey rode the tiger. And now the tiger is eating them,\u201d David Axelrod told me, speaking of the Republican Party. After Obama won the presidency in defiance of these racial headwinds, traffic to the white-supremacist website Stormfront increased sixfold. Before the election, in August, just before the Democratic National Convention, the FBI uncovered an assassination plot hatched by white supremacists in Denver. Mainstream conservative publications floated the notion that Obama\u2019s memoir was too \u201cstylish and penetrating\u201d to have been written by the candidate, and found a plausible ghostwriter in the radical (and white) former Weatherman Bill Ayers.", + " A Republican women\u2019s club in California dispensed \u201cObama Bucks\u201d featuring slices of watermelon, ribs, and fried chicken. At the Values Voter Summit that year, conventioneers hawked \u201cObama Waffles,\u201d a waffle mix whose box featured a bug-eyed caricature of the candidate. Fake hip-hop lyrics were scrawled on the side (\u201cBarry\u2019s Bling Bling Waffle Ring\u201d) and on the top, the same caricature was granted a turban and tagged with the instructions \u201cPoint box toward Mecca for tastier waffles.\u201d The display was denounced by the summit\u2019s sponsor, the Family Research Council. One would be forgiven for meeting this denunciation with guffaws:", + " The council\u2019s president, Tony Perkins, had once addressed the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens with a Confederate flag draped behind him. By 2015, Perkins had deemed the debate over Obama\u2019s birth certificate \u201clegitimate\u201d and was saying that it \u201cmakes sense\u201d to conclude that Obama was actually a Muslim. By then, birtherism\u2014inflamed in large part by a real-estate mogul and reality-TV star named Donald Trump\u2014had overtaken the Republican rank and file. In 2015, one poll found that 54 percent of GOP voters thought Obama was a Muslim. Only 29 percent believed he\u2019d been born in America.", + " Still, in 2008, Obama had been elected. His supporters rejoiced. As Jay-Z commemorated the occasion: My president is black, in fact he\u2019s half-white,\n\nSo even in a racist mind, he\u2019s half-right. Not quite. A month after Obama entered the White House, a CNBC personality named Rick Santelli took to the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and denounced the president\u2019s efforts to help homeowners endangered by the housing crisis. \u201cHow many of you people want to pay for your neighbor\u2019s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can\u2019t pay their bills?,\u201d Santelli asked the assembled traders.", + " He asserted that Obama should \u201creward people that could carry the water\u201d as opposed to those who \u201cdrink the water,\u201d and denounced those in danger of foreclosure as \u201closers.\u201d Race was implicit in Santelli\u2019s harangue\u2014the housing crisis and predatory lending had devastated black communities and expanded the wealth gap\u2014and it culminated with a call for a \u201cTea Party\u201d to resist the Obama presidency. In fact, right-wing ideologues had been planning just such a resistance for decades. They would eagerly answer Santelli\u2019s call. One of the intellectual forerunners of the Tea Party is said to be Ron Paul, the heterodox two-time Republican presidential candidate,", + " who opposed the war in Iraq and championed civil liberties. On other matters, Paul was more traditional. Throughout the \u201990s, he published a series of racist newsletters that referred to New York City as \u201cWelfaria,\u201d called Martin Luther King Jr. Day \u201cHate Whitey Day,\u201d and asserted that 95 percent of black males in Washington, D.C., were either \u201csemi-criminal or entirely criminal.\u201d Paul\u2019s apologists have claimed that he had no real connection to the newsletters, even though virtually all of them were published in his name (\u201cThe Ron Paul Survival Report,\u201d \u201cRon Paul Political Report,\u201d \u201cDr. Ron Paul\u2019s Freedom Report\u201d) and written in his voice.", + " Either way, the views of the newsletters have found their expression in his ideological comrades. Throughout Obama\u2019s first term, Tea Party activists voiced their complaints in racist terms. Activists brandished signs warning that Obama would implement \u201cwhite slavery,\u201d waved the Confederate flag, depicted Obama as a witch doctor, and issued calls for him to \u201cgo back to Kenya.\u201d Tea Party supporters wrote \u201csatirical\u201d letters in the name of \u201cWe Colored People\u201d and stoked the flames of birtherism. One of the Tea Party\u2019s most prominent sympathizers, the radio host Laura Ingraham, wrote a racist tract depicting Michelle Obama gorging herself on ribs,", + " while Glenn Beck said the president was a \u201cracist\u201d with a \u201cdeep-seated hatred for white people.\u201d The Tea Party\u2019s leading exponent, Andrew Breitbart, engineered the smearing of Shirley Sherrod, the U.S. Department of Agriculture\u2019s director of rural development for Georgia, publishing egregiously misleading videos that wrongly made her appear to be engaging in antiwhite racist invective, which led to her dismissal. (In a rare act of cowardice, the Obama administration cravenly submitted to this effort.)\n\nIn those rare moments when Obama made any sort of comment attacking racism, firestorms threatened to consume his governing agenda. When, in July 2009,", + " the president objected to the arrest of the eminent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. while he was trying to get into his own house, pointing out that the officer had \u201cacted stupidly,\u201d a third of whites said the remark made them feel less favorably toward the president, and nearly two-thirds claimed that Obama had \u201cacted stupidly\u201d by commenting. A chastened Obama then determined to make sure his public statements on race were no longer mere riffs but designed to have an achievable effect. This was smart, but still the invective came. During Obama\u2019s 2009 address on health care before a joint session of Congress, Joe Wilson,", + " a Republican congressman from South Carolina, incredibly, and in defiance of precedent and decorum, disrupted the proceedings by crying out \u201cYou lie!\u201d A Missouri congressman equated Obama with a monkey. A California GOP official took up the theme and emailed her friends an image depicting Obama as a chimp, with the accompanying text explaining, \u201cNow you know why [there\u2019s] no birth certificate!\u201d Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin assessed the president\u2019s foreign policy as a \u201cshuck and jive shtick.\u201d Newt Gingrich dubbed him the \u201cfood-stamp president.\u201d The rhetorical attacks on Obama were matched by a very real attack on his political base\u2014in 2011 and 2012,", + " 19 states enacted voting restrictions that made it harder for African Americans to vote. There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. Yet in 2012, as in 2008, Obama won anyway. Prior to the election, Obama, ever the optimist, had claimed that intransigent Republicans would decide to work with him to advance the country. No such collaboration was in the offing. Instead, legislation ground to a halt and familiar themes resurfaced. An Idaho GOP official posted a photo on Facebook depicting a trap waiting for Obama. The bait was a slice of watermelon. The caption read,", + " \u201cBreaking: The secret service just uncovered a plot to kidnap the president. More details as we get them \u2026\u201d In 2014, conservatives assembled in support of Cliven Bundy\u2019s armed protest against federal grazing fees. As reporters descended on the Bundy ranch in Nevada, Bundy offered his opinions on \u201cthe Negro.\u201d \u201cThey abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton,\u201d Bundy explained. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn\u2019t get no more freedom.", + " They got less freedom.\u201d That same year, in the wake of Michael Brown\u2019s death, the Justice Department opened an investigation into the police department in Ferguson, Missouri. It found a city that, through racial profiling, arbitrary fines, and wanton harassment, had exploited law enforcement for the purposes of municipal plunder. The plunder was sanctified by racist humor dispensed via internal emails among the police that later came to light. The president of the United States, who during his first year in office had reportedly received three times the number of death threats of any of his predecessors, was a repeat target. Much ink has been spilled in an attempt to understand the Tea Party protests,", + " and the 2016 presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, which ultimately emerged out of them. One theory popular among (primarily) white intellectuals of varying political persuasions held that this response was largely the discontented rumblings of a white working class threatened by the menace of globalization and crony capitalism. Dismissing these rumblings as racism was said to condescend to this proletariat, which had long suffered the slings and arrows of coastal elites, heartless technocrats, and reformist snobs. Racism was not something to be coolly and empirically assessed but a slander upon the working man. Deindustrialization, globalization,", + " and broad income inequality are real. And they have landed with at least as great a force upon black and Latino people in our country as upon white people. And yet these groups were strangely unrepresented in this new populism. Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto, political scientists at the University of Washington and UCLA, respectively, have found a relatively strong relationship between racism and Tea Party membership. \u201cWhites are less likely to be drawn to the Tea Party for material reasons, suggesting that, relative to other groups, it\u2019s really more about social prestige,\u201d they say. The notion that the Tea Party represented the righteous, if unfocused,", + " anger of an aggrieved class allowed everyone from leftists to neoliberals to white nationalists to avoid a horrifying and simple reality: A significant swath of this country did not like the fact that their president was black, and that swath was not composed of those most damaged by an unquestioned faith in the markets. Far better to imagine the grievance put upon the president as the ghost of shambling factories and defunct union halls, as opposed to what it really was\u2014a movement inaugurated by ardent and frightened white capitalists, raging from the commodities-trading floor of one of the great financial centers of the world.\n\nThat movement came into full bloom in the summer of 2015,", + " with the candidacy of Donald Trump, a man who\u2019d risen to political prominence by peddling the racist myth that the president was not American. It was birtherism\u2014not trade, not jobs, not isolationism\u2014that launched Trump\u2019s foray into electoral politics. Having risen unexpectedly on this basis into the stratosphere of Republican politics, Trump spent the campaign freely and liberally trafficking in misogyny, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. And on November 8, 2016, he won election to the presidency. Historians will spend the next century analyzing how a country with such allegedly grand democratic traditions was, so swiftly and so easily,", + " brought to the brink of fascism. But one needn\u2019t stretch too far to conclude that an eight-year campaign of consistent and open racism aimed at the leader of the free world helped clear the way. \u201cThey rode the tiger. And now the tiger is eating them,\u201d David Axelrod, speaking of the Republican Party, told me. That was in October. His words proved too optimistic. The tiger would devour us all. VI.\n\n\u201cWhen You Left, You Took All of Me With You\u201d One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled.", + " As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama\u2019s star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days,", + " which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded. I had been raised amid a people who wanted badly to believe in the possibility of a Barack Obama, even as their very lives argued against that possibility. So they would praise Martin Luther King Jr. in one breath and curse the white man, \u201cthe Great Deceiver,\u201d in the next. Then came Obama and the Obama family, and they were black and beautiful in all the ways we aspired to be, and all that love was showered upon them.", + " But as Obama\u2019s motorcade approached its destination\u2014Howard University, where he would give the commencement address\u2014the complexion of the crowd darkened, and I understood that the love was specific, that even if it allowed Barack Obama, even if it allowed the luckiest of us, to defy the boundaries, then the masses of us, in cities like this one, would still enjoy no such feat. These were our fitful, spasmodic years. We were launched into the Obama era with no notion of what to expect, if only because a black presidency had seemed such a dubious proposition. There was no preparation, because it would have meant preparing for the impossible.", + " There were few assessments of its potential import, because such assessments were regarded as speculative fiction. In retrospect it all makes sense, and one can see a jagged but real political lineage running through black Chicago. It originates in Oscar Stanton De Priest; continues through Congressman William Dawson, who, under Roosevelt, switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party; crescendos with the legendary Harold Washington; rises still with Jesse Jackson\u2019s 1988 victory in Michigan\u2019s Democratic caucuses; rises again with Carol Moseley Braun\u2019s triumph; and reaches its recent apex with the election of Barack Obama. If the lineage is apparent in hindsight, so are the limits of presidential power.", + " For a century after emancipation, quasi-slavery haunted the South. And more than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, schools throughout much of this country remain segregated. There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can\u2019t, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls.", + " The gate is open and yet so very far away.\n\nI felt a mix of pride and amazement walking onto Howard\u2019s campus that day. Howard alumni, of which I am one, are an obnoxious fraternity, known for yelling the school chant across city blocks, sneering at other historically black colleges and universities, and condescending to black graduates of predominantly white institutions. I like to think I am more reserved, but I felt an immense satisfaction in being in the library where I had once found my history, and now found myself with the first black president of the United States. It seemed providential that he would give the commencement address here in his last year.", + " The same pride I felt radiated out across the Yard, the large green patch in the main area of the campus where the ceremony would take place. When Obama walked out, the audience exploded, and when the time came for the color guard to present arms, a chant arose: \u201cO-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma! O-Ba-Ma!\u201d He gave a good speech that day, paying heed to Howard\u2019s rituals, calling out its famous alumni, shouting out the university\u2019s various dormitories, and urging young people to vote. (His usual riff on respectability politics was missing.) But I think he could have stood before that crowd,", + " smiled, and said \u201cGood luck,\u201d and they would have loved him anyway. He was their champion, and this was evident in the smallest of things. The national anthem was played first, but then came the black national anthem, \u201cLift Every Voice and Sing.\u201d As the lyrics rang out over the crowd, the students held up the black-power fist\u2014a symbol of defiance before power. And yet here, in the face of a black man in his last year in power, it scanned not as a protest, but as a salute.\n\nSix months later the awful price of a black presidency would be known to those students, even as the country seemed determined not to acknowledge it.", + " In the days after Donald Trump\u2019s victory, there would be an insistence that something as \u201csimple\u201d as racism could not explain it. As if enslavement had nothing to do with global economics, or as if lynchings said nothing about the idea of women as property. As though the past 400 years could be reduced to the irrational resentment of full lips. No. Racism is never simple. And there was nothing simple about what was coming, or about Obama, the man who had unwittingly summoned this future into being. I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible.", + " It was said that the Americans who\u2019d supported Trump were victims of liberal condescension. The word racist would be dismissed as a profane slur put upon the common man, as opposed to an accurate description of actual men. \u201cWe simply don\u2019t yet know how much racism or misogyny motivated Trump voters,\u201d David Brooks would write in The New York Times. \u201cIf you were stuck in a jobless town, watching your friends OD on opiates, scrambling every month to pay the electric bill, and then along came a guy who seemed able to fix your problems and hear your voice, maybe you would stomach some ugliness, too.\u201d This strikes me as perfectly logical.", + " Indeed, it could apply just as well to Louis Farrakhan\u2019s appeal to the black poor and working class. But whereas the followers of an Islamophobic white nationalist enjoy the sympathy that must always greet the salt of the earth, the followers of an anti-Semitic black nationalist endure the scorn that must ever greet the children of the enslaved. Much would be made of blue-collar voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan who\u2019d pulled the lever for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then for Trump in 2016. Surely these voters disproved racism as an explanatory force. It\u2019s still not clear how many individual voters actually flipped.", + " But the underlying presumption\u2014that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could be swapped in for each other\u2014exhibited a problem. Clinton was a candidate who\u2019d won one competitive political race in her life, whose political instincts were questioned by her own advisers, who took more than half a million dollars in speaking fees from an investment bank because it was \u201cwhat they offered,\u201d who proposed to bring back to the White House a former president dogged by allegations of rape and sexual harassment. Obama was a candidate who\u2019d become only the third black senator in the modern era; who\u2019d twice been elected president, each time flipping red and purple states; who\u2019d run one of the most scandal-free administrations in recent memory.", + " Imagine an African American facsimile of Hillary Clinton: She would never be the nominee of a major political party and likely would not be in national politics at all. Pointing to citizens who voted for both Obama and Trump does not disprove racism; it evinces it. To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster. In the week after the election, I was a mess. I had not seen my wife in two weeks. I was on deadline for this article. My son was struggling in school.", + " The house was in disarray. I played Marvin Gaye endlessly\u2014\u201cWhen you left, you took all of me with you.\u201d Friends began to darkly recall the ghosts of post-Reconstruction. The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with its history. I was shocked at my own shock. I had wanted Obama to be right. I still want Obama to be right. I still would like to fold myself into the dream. This will not be possible. By some cosmic coincidence, a week after the election I received a portion of my father\u2019s FBI fileI was made aware of the FBI file by the diligent work of researchers from the show Finding Your Roots.", + " I was taping an episode on my family the day of my last interview with the president.. My father had grown up poor in Philadelphia. His father was struck dead on the street. His grandfather was crushed to death in a meatpacking plant. He\u2019d served his country in Vietnam, gotten radicalized there, and joined the Black Panther Party, which brought him to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. A memo written to the FBI director was \u201csubmitted aimed at discrediting WILLIAM PAUL COATES, Acting Captain of the BPP, Baltimore.\u201d The memo proposed that a fake letter be sent to the Panthers\u2019 co-founder Huey P.", + " Newton. The fake letter accused my father of being an informant and concluded, \u201cI want somethin done with this bootlikin facist pig nigger and I want it done now.\u201d The words somethin done need little interpretation. The Panthers were eventually consumed by an internecine war instigated by the FBI, one in which being labeled a police informant was a death sentence. ", + " Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates: 'My President Was Black'\n\nRachel Martin talks to writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new piece in The Atlantic magazine: \"My President Was Black: A history of the first African American White House and of what came next.\"\n\nRACHEL MARTIN, HOST:\n\nAuthor Ta-Nehisi Coates was probably always planning on writing a big piece around this time of year, a big-picture philosophical analysis about what it meant for this country to be led by a black president for eight years and what that president's legacy would be. After the election of Donald Trump, that legacy was no longer secure and Ta-Nehisi Coates started thinking about the Obama years in a different way.", + " His new piece in The Atlantic is called \"My President Was Black: A History Of The First African-American White House And Of What Came Next.\" Coates told me that in some ways Barack Obama was naive about the role race would play in his presidency and the election of Donald Trump.\n\nTA-NEHISI COATES: I think President Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life. I want to be really, really clear about this. It doesn't mean that everyone or even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump are racist or white supremacists or anything like that. But what it means is that it's not a mistake that Trump began his campaign with birthersism (ph).\n\nThat's not an accident that he didn't begin with,", + " say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing (ph) the first African-American president of the United States. And from that, you know, went on to, you know, otherize Muslims, otherize Latinos, otherize women (laughter), you know, that he built out from that. And it can be true that a unique, you know, individual like Barack Obama can succeed in spite of that and still be the case that that force is quite, quite strong.\n\nMARTIN: Is his misreading, as you say, of the power of certain racist tendencies in our culture, how much of that had to do with who Barack Obama is at his core?", + " You say he is an unfailing optimist.\n\nCOATES: Yeah, I think there's a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that's not really it. What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black. He grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation.", + " He wasn't directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.\n\nAnd so that gave him a kind of optimism, an ability to see things, you know, and frankly, an ability to trust, you know, in his fellow, you know, white countrymen in a way that I, for instance, you know, and the vast majority of black people I know never really could. The same time I think that ultimately led him to underestimate some of the difficulties that he would face.\n\nMARTIN: Was the big achievement just winning the White House?\n\nCOATES: No. That was an achievement, but as an African-American,", + " I think the symbolism is in how he conducted himself. The symbolism was in - and this sounds really, really small, but it's actually big for African-Americans - the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.\n\nMARTIN: At the same time, you've been critical of the president.\n\nCOATES: I have, yes.\n\nMARTIN: In particular in how he has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.\n\nCOATES: Yeah, I think so. I think so. You know, part of that is ordinary African-Americans, you know,", + " you come out of your house and you see the conditions in your neighborhood and you see, you know, folks in your neighborhood doing certain things that, you know, are irresponsible. You know, the thing I always think about, you get up early in the morning to go to work and there's, you know, some dude outside drinking and you come home and the same dude is outside drinking hanging on the corner. And then this engenders a level of anger I think and, you know, and a level of shame, you know.\n\nMy mom used to tell me, you know - I can't use this phrase on the radio - but basically don't be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.", + " And I think the president adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House. And I think, like, there's a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.\n\nMARTIN: According to the most recent exit polling, 8 percent of African-Americans voted for Donald Trump. For those African-Americans who voted for Donald Trump, were they disavowing the presidency of Barack Obama and his legacy?\n\nCOATES: I don't know, but I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.", + " Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that's a statement.\n\nMARTIN: What was your most recent conversation with Barack Obama like?\n\nCOATES: It was a week after Donald Trump had won. And initially he was still optimistic. He felt that things would be OK ultimately. And I have to tell you, this is the area where, you know, I see, you know, some degree of contradiction. I mean, the president, you know, at one point when he was campaigning said (laughter) I believe that Donald Trump was not qualified to run a 7-Eleven.", + " I don't know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that he was sincere. It didn't feel like a line to me. You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that's, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.\n\nMARTIN: Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His cover story \"My President Was Black\" is out today. Ta-Nehisi, thanks so much.\n\nCOATES: Thanks so much for having me.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2016 NPR. All rights reserved.", + " Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.\n\nNPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR\u2019s programming is the audio record.\n" + ], + "length": 21892, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 55, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Who had the most influence on the world \"for good or ill\" in the last year? According to Time magazine, the honor goes to the \"Silence Breakers.\" The voices behind the #metoo movement took the 2017 honors, besting other shortlist contenders like Kim Jong Un, President Trump, Colin Kaepernick, and the Dreamers. Writes Time: \"The women and men who have broken their silence [on sexual assault and harassment] span all races, all income classes, all occupations, and virtually all corners of the globe. They might labor in California fields, or behind the front desk at New York City's regal Plaza Hotel, or in the European Parliament. They're part of a movement that has no formal name. But now they have a voice.\" A key passage from its lengthy piece: \"This reckoning appears to have sprung up overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries. Women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross boundaries but don't even seem to know that boundaries exist. They've had it with the fear of retaliation, of being blackballed, of being fired from a job they can't afford to lose. They've had it with the code of going along to get along. They've had it with men who use their power to take what they want from women. These silence breakers have started a revolution of refusal, gathering strength by the day, and in the past two months alone, their collective anger has spurred immediate and shocking results: nearly every day, CEOs have been fired, moguls toppled, icons disgraced. In some cases, criminal charges have been brought.\" Time writes that it spent six weeks interviewing dozens of people who have shared their own #MeToo stories; you can read some of them here.\n", + "docs": [ + "Movie stars are supposedly nothing like you and me. They're svelte, glamorous, self-\u00adpossessed. They wear dresses we can't afford and live in houses we can only dream of. Yet it turns out that\u2014in the most painful and personal ways\u2014movie stars are more like you and me than we ever knew.\n\nIn 1997, just before Ashley Judd's career took off, she was invited to a meeting with Harvey Weinstein, head of the starmaking studio Miramax, at a Beverly Hills hotel. Astounded and offended by Weinstein's attempt to coerce her into bed, Judd managed to escape. But instead of keeping quiet about the kind of encounter that could easily shame a woman into silence,", + " she began spreading the word.\n\n\"I started talking about Harvey the minute that it happened,\" Judd says in an interview with TIME. \"Literally, I exited that hotel room at the Peninsula Hotel in 1997 and came straight downstairs to the lobby, where my dad was waiting for me, because he happened to be in Los Angeles from Kentucky, visiting me on the set. And he could tell by my face\u2014to use his words\u2014that something devastating had happened to me. I told him. I told everyone.\"\n\nTIME\n\nShe recalls one screenwriter friend telling her that Weinstein's behavior was an open secret passed around on the whisper network that had been furrowing through Hollywood for years.", + " It allowed for people to warn others to some degree, but there was no route to stop the abuse. \"Were we supposed to call some fantasy attorney general of moviedom?\" Judd asks. \"There wasn't a place for us to report these experiences.\"\n\nFinally, in October\u2014when Judd went on the record about Weinstein's behavior in the New York Times, the first star to do so\u2014the world listened. (Weinstein said he \"never laid a glove\" on Judd and denies having had nonconsensual sex with other accusers.)\n\nWhen movie stars don't know where to go, what hope is there for the rest of us?", + " What hope is there for the janitor who's being harassed by a co-worker but remains silent out of fear she'll lose the job she needs to support her children? For the administrative assistant who repeatedly fends off a superior who won't take no for an answer? For the hotel housekeeper who never knows, as she goes about replacing towels and cleaning toilets, if a guest is going to corner her in a room she can't escape?\n\nLike the \"problem that has no name,\" the disquieting malaise of frustration and repression among postwar wives and homemakers identified by Betty Friedan more than 50 years ago, this moment is born of a very real and potent sense of unrest.", + " Yet it doesn't have a leader, or a single, unifying tenet. The hashtag #MeToo (swiftly adapted into #BalanceTonPorc, #YoTambien, #Ana_kaman and many others), which to date has provided an umbrella of solidarity for millions of people to come forward with their stories, is part of the picture, but not all of it.\n\nThis reckoning appears to have sprung up overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries. Women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross boundaries but don't even seem to know that boundaries exist. They've had it with the fear of retaliation,", + " of being blackballed, of being fired from a job they can't afford to lose. They've had it with the code of going along to get along. They've had it with men who use their power to take what they want from women. These silence breakers have started a revolution of refusal, gathering strength by the day, and in the past two months alone, their collective anger has spurred immediate and shocking results: nearly every day, CEOs have been fired, moguls toppled, icons disgraced. In some cases, criminal charges have been brought.\n\nEmboldened by Judd, Rose McGowan and a host of other prominent accusers,", + " women everywhere have begun to speak out about the inappropriate, abusive and in some cases illegal behavior they've faced. When multiple harassment claims bring down a charmer like former Today show host Matt Lauer, women who thought they had no recourse see a new, wide-open door. When a movie star says #MeToo, it becomes easier to believe the cook who's been quietly enduring for years.\n\n'WERE WE SUPPOSED TO CALL SOME FANTASY ATTORNEY GENERAL OF MOVIEDOM?' Ashley Judd 49 Actor More Judd says she was sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein when she was 29 years old. \u2018 We need to formalize the whisper network.", + " It's an ingenious way that we've tried to keep ourselves safe. All those voices can be amplified. That's my advice to women. That and if something feels wrong, it is wrong\u2014and it's wrong by my definition and not necessarily someone else's. \u2019 Weinstein said in a statement he 'never laid a glove' on Judd.\n\nThe women and men who have broken their silence span all races, all income classes, all occupations and virtually all corners of the globe. They might labor in California fields, or behind the front desk at New York City's regal Plaza Hotel, or in the European Parliament. They're part of a movement that has no formal name.", + " But now they have a voice.\n\nII\n\nIn a windowless room at a two-story soundstage in San Francisco's Mission District, a group of women from different worlds met for the first time. Judd, every bit the movie star in towering heels, leaned in to shake hands with Isabel Pascual, a woman from Mexico who works picking strawberries and asked to use a pseudonym to protect her family. Beside her, Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer, eight months pregnant, spoke softly with Adama Iwu, a corporate lobbyist in Sacramento. A young hospital worker who had flown in from Texas completed the circle. She too is a victim of sexual harassment but was there anonymously,", + " she said, as an act of solidarity to represent all those who could not speak out.\n\nFrom a distance, these women could not have looked more different. Their ages, their families, their religions and their ethnicities were all a world apart. Their incomes differed not by degree but by universe: Iwu pays more in rent each month than Pascual makes in two months.\n\nBut on that November morning, what separated them was less important than what brought them together: a shared experience. Over the course of six weeks, TIME interviewed dozens of people representing at least as many industries, all of whom had summoned extraordinary personal courage to speak out about sexual harassment at their jobs.", + " They often had eerily similar stories to share.\n\nIn almost every case, they described not only the vulgarity of the harassment itself\u2014years of lewd comments, forced kisses, opportunistic gropes\u2014but also the emotional and psychological fallout from those advances. Almost everybody described wrestling with a palpable sense of shame. Had she somehow asked for it? Could she have deflected it? Was she making a big deal out of nothing?\n\n\"I thought, What just happened? Why didn't I react?\" says the anonymous hospital worker who fears for her family's livelihood should her story come out in her small community. \"I kept thinking, Did I do something,", + " did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was O.K.?\" It's a poisonous, useless thought, she adds, but how do you avoid it? She remembers the shirt she was wearing that day. She can still feel the heat of her harasser's hands on her body.\n\nAlyssa Milano 44 Actor More Millions of people responded with the hashtag #MeToo when Milano urged them to post their experiences on Twitter. \u2018 It's affected me on a cellular level to hear all these stories. I don't know if I'll ever be the same. I have not stopped crying. I look at my daughter and think,", + " Please, let this be worth it. Please, let it be that my daughter never has to go through anything like this. \u2019 Tarana Burke 44 Activist More Burke, founder of a nonprofit that helps survivors of sexual violence, created the Me Too movement in 2006 to encourage young women to show solidarity with one another. It went viral this year after actor Alyssa Milano used the hashtag #MeToo. \u2018 Sexual harassment does bring shame. And I think it's really powerful that this transfer is happening, that these women are able not just to share their shame but to put the shame where it belongs: on the perpetrator. \u2019\n\nNearly all of the people TIME interviewed about their experiences expressed a crushing fear of what would happen to them personally,", + " to their families or to their jobs if they spoke up.\n\nFor some, the fear was born of a threat of physical violence. Pascual felt trapped and terrified when her harasser began to stalk her at home, but felt she was powerless to stop him. If she told anyone, the abuser warned her, he would come after her or her children.\n\nThose who are often most vulnerable in society\u2014immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income workers and LGBTQ people\u2014described many types of dread. If they raised their voices, would they be fired? Would their communities turn against them? Would they be killed?", + " According to a 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 47% of transgender people report being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, both in and out of the workplace.\n\n'HE SAID IF I EVER WRONGED HIM, HE WOULD HAVE ME KIDNAPPED, HAVE MY EYES GOUGED OUT WITH A BIC PEN AND THROW ME INTO THE HUDSON RIVER.' Selma Blair 45 Actor More After director James Toback denied accusations by dozens of women that he had sexually assaulted them, Blair spoke out about her encounter with him. \u2018 I decided to go on the record when I saw his denial.", + " He called the women liars. But their stories were so similar to mine, and they were such credible women. There was no agenda other than they wanted to share this story, be free of this story. And in a magazine interview, he called the people who said this about him 'c-nts' and 'c-cksuckers.' That was just wrong. And I wanted to give a face to these now more than 300 women who have come out. \u2019 Toback has denied all allegations of harassment.\n\nJuana Melara, who has worked as a hotel housekeeper for decades, says she and her fellow housekeepers didn't complain about guests who exposed themselves or masturbated in front of them for fear of losing the paycheck they needed to support their families.", + " Melara recalls \"feeling the pressure of someone's eyes\" on her as she cleaned a guest's room. When she turned around, she remembers, a man was standing in the doorway, blocked by the cleaning cart, with his erect penis exposed. She yelled at the top of her lungs and scared him into leaving, then locked the door behind him. \"Nothing happened to me that time, thank God,\" she recalls.\n\nWhile guests come and go, some employees must continue to work side by side with their harassers. Crystal Washington was thrilled when she was hired as a hospitality coordinator at the Plaza, a storied hotel whose allure is as strong for people who want to work there as it is for those who can afford a suite.", + " \"Walking in, it's breathtaking,\" she says.\n\nBut then, she says, a co-worker began making crude remarks to her like \"I can tell you had sex last night\" and groping her. One of those encounters was even caught on camera, but the management did not properly respond, her lawyers say.\n\nPlaza Hotel Plaintiffs More From left: Veronica Owusu, Gabrielle Eubank, Crystal Washington, Dana Lewis, Paige Rodriguez, Sergeline Bernadeau and Kristina Antonova filed a suit against New York City's Plaza Hotel for 'normalizing and trivializing sexual assault' among employees there. \u2018 'I am a single mother.", + " I have an 11-year-old daughter, and she's depending on me,' says Lewis, who still works at the hotel to make ends meet. 'My entire life revolves around her. I wasn't really left with the option of leaving. I'm not left with the option of giving up. I want to show her that it's O.K. to stand up for yourself. If you keep fighting, eventually you'll see the sun on the other side.' \u2019 Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, which owns the Plaza, said it takes remedial action against harassment when warranted.\n\nWashington has joined with six other female employees to file a sexual-harassment suit against the hotel.", + " But she cannot afford to leave the job and says she must force herself out of bed every day to face the man she's accused. \"It's a dream to be an employee there,\" Washington says. \"And then you find out what it really is, and it's a nightmare.\" (Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, which owns the Plaza, said in a statement to TIME that it takes remedial action against harassment when warranted.)\n\nOther women, like the actor Selma Blair, weathered excruciating threats. Blair says she arrived at a hotel restaurant for a meeting with the independent film director James Toback in 1999 only to be told that he would like to see her in his room.", + " There, she says, Toback told her that she had to learn to be more vulnerable in her craft and asked her to strip down. She took her top off. She says he then propositioned her for sex, and when she refused, he blocked the door and forced her to watch him masturbate against her leg. Afterward, she recalls him telling her that if she said anything, he would stab her eyes out with a Bic pen and throw her in the Hudson River.\n\nBlair says Toback lorded the encounter over her for decades. \"I had heard from others that he was slandering me, saying these sexual things about me,", + " and it just made me even more afraid of him,\" Blair says in an interview with TIME. \"I genuinely thought for almost 20 years, He's going to kill me.\" ( Toback has denied the allegations, saying he never met his accusers or doesn't remember them.)\n\nMany of the people who have come forward also mentioned a different fear, one less visceral but no less real, as a reason for not speaking out: if you do, your complaint becomes your identity. \"'Susan Fowler, the famous victim of sexual harassment,'\" says the woman whose blog post ultimately led Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to resign and the multibillion-dollar startup to oust at least 20 other employees.", + " \"Nobody wants to be the buzzkill,\" adds Lindsey Reynolds, one of the women who blew the whistle on a culture of harassment at the restaurant group run by the celebrity chef John Besh. (The Besh Group says it is implementing new policies to create a culture of respect. Besh apologized for \"unacceptable behavior\" and \"moral failings,\" and resigned from the company. )\n\nIwu, the lobbyist, says she considered the same risks after she was groped in front of several colleagues at an event. She was shocked when none of her male co-workers stepped in to stop the assault. The next week, she organized 147 women to sign an open letter exposing harassment in California government.", + " When she told people about the campaign, she says they were wary. \"Are you sure you want to do this?\" they warned her. \"Remember Anita Hill.\"\n\nSara Gelser 43 State Senator More After the Oregon state senator accused her fellow legislator Jeff Kruse of sexual harassment, the statehouse launched an investigation and stripped him of his committee assignments. \u2018 We can't pick and choose based on whose political beliefs we believe in. And that means we have to be willing to speak out when it's a member of our own party. \u2019 Kruse said in a statement that he never touched Gelser inappropriately. Anonymous 28 Hospital worker More The mother of two told the HR department at the hospital where she worked that an executive there repeatedly came on to her.", + " \u2018 I thought, What just happened? Why didn't I react? Why couldn't I force words out of my mouth? When I got home, I crumbled. I kept thinking, Did I do something, did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was O.K.? \u2019\n\nTaylor Swift says she was made to feel bad about the consequences that her harasser faced. After she complained about a Denver radio DJ named David Mueller, who reached under her skirt and grabbed her rear end, Mueller was fired. He sued Swift for millions in damages. She countersued for a symbolic $1 and then testified about the incident in August.", + " Mueller's lawyer asked her, on the witness stand, whether she felt bad that she'd gotten him fired.\n\n\"I'm not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault,\" she told the lawyer. \"I'm being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions. Not mine.\" (Mueller said he would appeal.)\n\nIn an interview with TIME, Swift says that moment on the stand fueled her indignation. \"I figured that if he would be brazen enough to assault me under these risky circumstances,\" she says, \"imagine what he might do to a vulnerable,", + " young artist if given the chance.\" Like the five women gathered at that echoing soundstage in San Francisco, and like all of the dozens, then hundreds, then millions of women who came forward with their own stories of harassment, she was done feeling intimidated. Actors and writers and journalists and dishwashers and fruit pickers alike: they'd had enough. What had manifested as shame exploded into outrage. Fear became fury.\n\n'WHEN I TESTIFIED, I HAD ALREADY HAD TO WATCH THIS MAN'S ATTORNEY BULLY, BADGER AND HARASS MY TEAM, INCLUDING MY MOTHER... I WAS ANGRY.' Taylor Swift 27 Singer-Songwriter More Radio DJ David Mueller groped Swift during a photo op in 2013.", + " She reported him to his radio station, KYGO, and he was terminated. He said her accusations were false and sued Swift. She countersued for $1 and won. \u2018 In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened. This man hadn't considered any formalities when he assaulted me... Why should I be polite? \u2019 Mueller's lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.\n\nThis was the great unleashing that turned the #MeToo hashtag into a rallying cry. The phrase was first used more than a decade ago by social activist Tarana Burke as part of her work building solidarity among young survivors of harassment and assault.", + " A friend of the actor Alyssa Milano sent her a screenshot of the phrase, and Milano, almost on a whim, tweeted it out on Oct. 15. \"If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted write'me too' as a reply to this tweet,\" she wrote, and then went to sleep. She woke up the next day to find that more than 30,000 people had used #MeToo. Milano burst into tears.\n\nAt first, those speaking out were mostly from the worlds of media and entertainment, but the hashtag quickly spread. \"We have to keep our focus on people of different class and race and gender,\" says Burke,", + " who has developed a friendship with Milano via text messages. By November, California farmworkers, Pascual among them, were marching on the streets of Hollywood to express their solidarity with the stars.\n\nWomen were no longer alone. \"There's something really empowering about standing up for what's right,\" says Fowler, who has grown comfortable with her new reputation as a whistle-blower. \"It's a badge of honor.\"\n\nSandra Pezqueda 37 Former Dishwasher More Pezqueda filed a suit alleging that her supervisor at the Terranea Resort, a luxury retreat in South California, pursued her for months. When she rebuffed him,", + " he changed her schedule and cut her hours. \u2018 Someone who is in the limelight is able to speak out more easily than people who are poor. The reality of being a woman is the same\u2014the difference is the risk each woman must take. \u2019 Attorneys for the staffing company that employed Pezqueda deny her allegations. Terranea Resort declined to comment except to say that the suit involves an outside agency. Blaise Godbe Lipman 28 Director More Lipman accused a former agent, Tyler Grasham, of sexually assaulting him when he was 18. Grasham has since been dismissed by his agency and is being investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department.", + " \u2018 I experienced a little bit of victim blaming, victim shaming\u2014people digging into my Instagram and pulling up sexy photos, as if that discredited me from speaking out against sexual violence. And gay men are often highly sexualized in the media, so coming out with a story of sexual assault, especially one that also involved alcohol and maybe drugs, there is an idea that 'Well, did you want it?.' \u2019 Grasham could not be reached for comment. Correction: The original version of this caption incorrectly said Tyler Grasham was Lipman\u2019s agent. Grasham never represented Lipman.\n\nIII\n\nDiscussions of sexual harassment in polite company tend to rely on euphemisms:", + " harassment becomes \"inappropriate behavior,\" assault becomes \u00ad\"misconduct,\" rape becomes \"abuse.\" We're accustomed to hearing those softened words, which downplay the pain of the experience. That's one of the reasons why the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced in October 2016 was such a jolt. The language used by the man who would become America's 45th President, captured on a 2005 recording, was, by any standard, vulgar. He didn't just say that he'd made a pass; he \"moved on her like a bitch.\" He didn't just talk about fondling women; he bragged that he could \"grab 'em by the pussy.\"\n\nThat Donald Trump could express himself that way and still be elected President is part of what stoked the rage that fueled the Women's March the day after his Inauguration.", + " It's why women seized on that crude word as the emblem of the protest that dwarfed Trump's Inauguration crowd size. \"All social movements have highly visible precipitating factors,\" says Aldon Morris, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. \"In this case, you had Harvey Weinstein, and before that you had Trump.\"\n\nMegyn Kelly, the NBC anchor who revealed in October that she had complained to Fox News executives about Bill O'Reilly's treatment of women, and who was a target of Trump's ire during the campaign, says the tape as well as the tenor of the election turned the political into the personal. \"I have real doubts about whether we'd be going through this if Hillary Clinton had won,", + " because I think that President Trump's election in many ways was a setback for women,\" says Kelly, who noted that not all women at the march were Clinton supporters. \"But the overall message to us was that we don't really matter.\"\n\n'WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. I DON'T HAVE TIME TO PLAY NICE.' Rose McGowan 44 Artist and Activist More McGowan reached a settlement with producer Harvey Weinstein in 1997 after accusing him of sexually assaulting her in a hotel room. McGowan's decision to speak to the press this year helped expose Weinstein as a serial harasser. \u2018 The number of people sharing their stories with me is so intense,", + " especially since all of this is incredibly triggering for me as well. People forget a lot that there's a human behind this, someone who is very hurt. But that's O.K. It fuels my fire. They really f-cked with the wrong person. \u2019 Weinstein has denied all allegations of non\u00adconsensual sex.\n\nSo it was not entirely surprising that 2017 began with women donning \"pussy hats\" and marching on the nation's capital in a show of unity and fury. What was startling was the size of the protest. It was one of the largest in U.S. history and spawned satellite marches in all 50 states and more than 50 other countries.\n\nSummer Zervos,", + " a former contestant on The Apprentice, was one of roughly 20 women to accuse the President of sexual harassment. She filed a defamation suit against Trump days before his Inauguration after he disputed her claims by calling her a liar. A New York judge is expected to decide soon if the President is immune to civil suits while in office. No matter the outcome, the allegations added fuel to a growing fire.\n\nBy February, the movement had made its way to the billionaire dream factories of Silicon Valley, when Fowler spoke out about her \"weird year\" as an engineer at Uber. \"I remember feeling powerless and like there was no one looking out for us because we had an admitted harasser in the White House,\" Fowler says.", + " \"I felt like I had to take action.\"\n\nBarely two months later, Fox News cut ties with O'Reilly after the New York Times reported that he and the company had spent $13 million to settle claims against him from five women. In October, the Times revealed a sixth settlement, bringing that total to more than $45 million. Wendy Walsh, a psychologist and former guest on the network, was one of the first women to share her story about the star anchor\u2014but she was initially reluctant to go on the record. \"I was afraid for my kids, I was afraid of the retaliation,\" she says. \"I know what men can do when they're angry.\"\n\nEventually she allowed her name to be used.", + " \"I felt it was my duty,\" Walsh says, \"as a mother of daughters, as an act of love for women everywhere and the women who are silenced, to be brave.\"\n\nThe downfall of O'Reilly, who has denied all allegations of harassment, would prove to be just the beginning of the reckoning in media and entertainment. In June, Bill Cosby was brought to trial on charges that he had drugged and sexually assaulted a woman named Andrea Constand, one of nearly 50 women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault over several decades. Although the case ended in a mistrial\u2014it is scheduled to be retried in April\u2014the fact that it happened at all signaled a shift in the culture,", + " a willingness to hold even beloved and powerful men accountable for past misdeeds.\n\nWendy Walsh 55 Former Fox News Contributor More After Walsh and other women accused Bill O'Reilly of sexual harassment, Fox News fired him. \u2018 In the early '90s, as a news anchor, I wore buttoned-up suits, skirts to my knees, sensible shoes. I dipped out of the industry. When I came back, I was put in a sausage dress. The hair got blonder and the cleavage got deeper and the heels higher. Fox had created a sort of Snapchat filter: any woman, even a woman with advanced degrees,", + " would be turned into what looked like an office sex toy. Part of what happened to the women at Fox News started in the makeup room. \u2019 O'Reilly has denied harassing colleagues. Lindsey Reynolds 32 Food-Blog Editor More When she quit her job as social-media manager at the restaurant group of celebrity chef John Besh, Reynolds sent an email to her bosses complaining about the company's culture of sexism. She later filed a complaint with the EEOC. Besh has since stepped down. \u2018 After I sent that email, I burst into tears and felt sick to my stomach and was shaking. I was nobody. I'm just a person from a small town in Texas.", + " I have no money, no power, no social standing. And they have more power and money than I will ever have. I felt extremely vulnerable and scared. Then I heard from women I had never met\u2014they worked as line cooks while I worked in corporate\u2014who had experienced the same toxic culture. \u2019 The company said it is working to enact policies to create a culture of safety and respect. Besh has apologized for 'unacceptable' behavior and'moral failings,' and resigned.\n\nComplaints at the University of Rochester helped expose harassment in academia. The chief executive of SoFi, the $4 billion lending firm, resigned following a lawsuit over claims of sexual harassment.", + " Then, in early October, the dam finally broke.\n\nOn Oct. 5, the New York Times published the first story to expose Weinstein, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood and a leading Democratic political fundraiser, as a serial sexual predator. The revelation was quickly followed by New Yorker investigations that widened Weinstein's list of accusers and showed the incredible lengths he went to cover his tracks. Weinstein denied the allegations, but the levers that he had long pulled to exert his influence suddenly were jammed. Fellow chieftains refused to defend him. Politicians who once courted him gave away his donations. His company's board fired him.\n\nWithin days,", + " the head of Amazon Studios, an influential art publisher and employees at the financial-services firm Fidelity had all left their jobs over harassment claims. By the end of the month, the list of the accused had grown to include political analyst Mark Halperin, a former TIME employee; opinion-shaping literary critic Leon Wieseltier; and numerous politicians and journalists. The Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey was scrubbed from a completed movie.\n\n'IT DOESN'T MATTER IF THEY CRITICIZE ME. I CAN SUPPORT OTHER PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING THROUGH THE SAME THING.' Isabel Pascual 42 Strawberry picker More In the wake of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein,", + " Pascual spoke out at a march in L.A. about being stalked and harassed in order to give voice to her fellow agricultural workers. \u2018 I was afraid. When the man was harassing me, he threatened to harm my children and me\u2014that's why I kept quiet. I felt desperate. I cried and cried. But, thank God, my friends in the fields support me. So I said, Enough. I lost the fear. It doesn't matter if they criticize me. I can support other people who are going through the same thing. \u2019 *Pascual's name was changed to protect her family.\n\nThe response to the Weinstein allegations has shaped the way people view women who come forward.", + " In a TIME/SurveyMonkey online poll of American adults conducted Nov. 28\u201330, 82% of respondents said women are more likely to speak out about harassment since the Weinstein allegations. Meanwhile, 85% say they believe the women making allegations of sexual harassment.\n\nThe movement\u2014and fallout\u2014quickly spread around the world. Michael Fallon, Britain's Defense Secretary, quit the Cabinet after journalist Jane Merrick revealed that he had \"lunged\" at her in 2003, when she was a 29-year-old reporter. In France, women took to the streets chanting not only \"Me too\" but also \"Balance ton porc,\" which translates roughly to \"Expose your pig,\" a hashtag conceived by French journalist Sandra Muller.", + " In the week after #MeToo first surfaced, versions of it swept through 85 countries, from India, where the struggle against harassment and assault had already become a national debate in recent years, to the Middle East, Asia and parts in between.\n\nLindsay Meyer 31 Entrepreneur More Meyer says that Justin Caldbeck, a venture capitalist who invested in her first company, harassed her. After six other women reported harassment by Caldbeck, he resigned from his firm. \u2018 I wanted it to stop. I wanted to be able to get back to running my company and not have the daily distraction of being constantly emailed, called, text-messaged.", + " That took a lot of energy to deal with and to process and to try to bury\u2014because I didn't want it to be a big deal. For so long, I went around harboring this ridiculous belief that because I was a nonwhite woman in my 20s that somehow it was expected that I would have to be treated this way. And now I see that that is so silly. I am a person with dignity. \u2019 Caldbeck apologized in a statement to the women he'made uncomfortable.' Juana Melara 52 Housekeeper More Hotel guests have propositioned and exposed themselves to Melara while she was working. \u2018 One time when I was cleaning,", + " a guest asked me if I knew how to massage. I said, 'No, I don't even do it to my husband.' The way he was looking at me wasn't friendly. I rushed to finish the room as fast as I could and get out of there. It's crazy that people think that if they pay for the room, they are paying for sexual service. \u2019 The hotel declined to comment.\n\n\"Suddenly,\" says Terry Reintke, a German member of the European Parliament, who discussed her own harassment in a speech on Oct. 25, \"friends from primary school or women that I know from completely different surroundings that would never call themselves feminists were starting to share their stories.\"\n\nBy November,", + " the spotlight was back on American politicians. A woman named Leigh Corfman told the Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Alabama Republican nominee for the Senate, abused her when she was 14 and he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. Nine women have come forward to describe inappropriate encounters with Roy Moore, including several who say he pursued them when they were teenagers. Moore has called the allegations \"false\" and \"malicious.\" \"Specifically, I do not know any of these women nor have I ever engaged in sexual misconduct with any woman,\" he said in late November.\n\n'I'M SURE THE ROAD WILL BE LONG AND DIFFICULT,", + " BUT IT WILL BE POSITIVE IN THE END.' Sandra Muller 46 Journalist More In France, Muller started the Twitter hashtag #BalanceTonPorc (Expose Your Pig), which helped inspire women to march in the streets to protest sexual harassment. \u2018 France is a country of love, but there is love and love, you know? There are ways to approach a woman, and if it's done with respect, it's O.K. Without respect, it's not good. Now if men want your love, they have to ask themselves how to be, how to approach a woman. They are scared. We must restart all relationships from the beginning.", + " We have to cleanse society to find a better way. I'm sure the road will be long and difficult, but it will be positive in the end. \u2019\n\nThe following week, radio host Leeann Tweeden wrote that Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken groped her on a USO tour in 2006, before he was in office. Several other women have since come forward with similar harassment allegations against Franken, who has called on the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate his own behavior. On Dec. 5, Michigan Democratic Representative John Conyers resigned amid allegations that he had made sexual advances toward the women on his staff. He has said that the allegations \"are not accurate;", + " they are not true.\"\n\nTexas Republican Representative Blake Farenthold has also found himself in the crosshairs after media reports that he used $84,000 in taxpayer dollars to settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit with a former aide in 2014. Farenthold denies that he engaged in any wrongdoing and has vowed to repay the settlement.\n\n'WHEN TRUMP WON THE ELECTION, I FELT A CRUSHING SENSE OF POWERLESSNESS. AND THEN I REALIZED THAT I HAD TO DO SOMETHING.' Susan Fowler 26 Former Uber Engineer More Fowler's February blog post about the harassment she experienced as an engineer at Uber went viral.", + " Uber then launched an investigation that led to the ousting of its CEO Travis Kalanick and more than 20 other employees. \u2018 When other women spoke out, they were retaliated against. So there were certain things that I thought I could avoid: 'I'm not going to sue, because they'll make me sign a non\u00addisclosure agreement. I'm not going to do press right afterward, because they'll say I'm doing it for attention. I can't have any emotion in my blog. I have to be very, very detached.' And I had to make sure that every single thing that I included in there had extensive physical documentation,", + " so it couldn't be 'he said, she said.' And that's what I did. \u2019\n\nThe accused were both Democrats and Republicans, but the consequences thus far have been limited\u2014and often filtered through a partisan lens. In politics, at least, what constitutes disqualifying behavior seemed to depend not on your actions but on the allegiance of your tribe. In the 1990s, feminists stood up for accused abuser Bill Clinton instead of his \u00adaccusers\u2014a move many are belatedly regretting as the national conversation prompts a re-evaluation of the claims against the former President. And despite the allegations against Moore, both \u00adPresident Trump and the Republican National Committee support him.\n\nThat political divide was revealed in the TIME/SurveyMonkey poll,", + " which found that Republicans were significantly more likely to excuse sexual misdeeds in their own party. The survey found that while a majority of Republicans and Democrats agree that a Democratic Congressman accused of sexual harassment should resign (71% and 74% respectively), when the accused offender was in the GOP, only 54% of Republicans would demand a resignation (compared to 82% of Democrats).\n\n'WHY ARE YOU QUESTIONING THE VICTIM HERE? LET'S FLIP IT. LET'S TALK ABOUT WHAT THE PREDATOR IS DOING.' Terry Crews 49 Actor More Crews is suing agent Adam Venit and William Morris Endeavor for sexual assault.", + " Crews says Venit groped him in front of his wife at an industry event. Venit was briefly suspended from the agency. \u2018 People were saying, 'You should have beaten him up.' I'm like, Why is nobody questioning him? Nobody questions the predator. You know why? Because they just expect it. And I expect it. And I just said, 'No more.' Why are you questioning the victim here? Let's flip it. Let's talk about what the predator is doing. \u2019 The agency said it had suspended and demoted Venit, who declined to comment.\n\nAs another election cycle approaches, Americans find themselves trying to weigh one ugly act against another in a painful calculus of transgression.", + " Is a grope caught on camera more disqualifying than a years-ago assault that was credibly reported? What are we willing to forgive or ignore or deny if the violator shares our politics?\n\nIV\n\nIt wasn't so long ago that the boss chasing his secretary around the desk was a comic trope, a staple from vaudeville to prime-time sitcoms. There wasn't even a name for sexual harassment until just over 40 years ago; the term was coined in 1975 by a group of women at Cornell University after an employee there, Carmita Wood, filed for unemployment benefits after she had resigned because a supervisor touched her.", + " The university denied her claim, arguing that she left the job for \"personal reasons.\"\n\nUniversity Professors More University of Rochester professors Celeste Kidd (right) and Jessica Cantlon (left), along with six current and former members of the brain and cognitive sciences department, filed complaints with the university and the EEOC, alleging harassment and retaliation. \u2018 'If they couldn't stop us from talking, they were going to stop every\u00adbody from listening,' says Cantlon. 'The administration went into our emails to try to find pieces of material that they could use to embarrass us or try to make other faculty members angry with us. But eight of us linked arms and continued to pursue the complaint.", + " I think working together was powerful. It was hard to silence all of us.' \u2019 The university has launched an investigation led by former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White.\n\nWood, joined by activists from the university's human-affairs program, formed a group called Working Women United that hosted an event for workers from various fields, from mail-room clerks and servers to factory workers and administrative assistants, to talk about their own harassment experiences.\n\nIt was a proto-version of the social-media explosion we're seeing today, encouraging unity and reminding women that they were not alone. But even as public awareness about the problem of sexual harassment began to grow, legal and policy protections were almost nonexistent.", + " In the 1970s, most businesses and institutions had no policies on sexual harassment whatsoever, and even egregious complaints were regularly dismissed.\n\n'I ALWAYS THOUGHT MAYBE THINGS COULD CHANGE FOR MY DAUGHTER. I NEVER THOUGHT THINGS COULD CHANGE FOR ME.' Megyn Kelly 47 Journalist More The host of NBC's Megyn Kelly Today and former Fox News anchor called out Bill O'Reilly for claiming that nobody at Fox News had complained about his behavior. She had. In 2016, Kelly revealed that she'd been sexually harassed by former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. \u2018 I always thought maybe things could change for my daughter.", + " I never thought things could change for me. Never. I believed the system was stacked against women, and the smart ones would understand how to navigate it... I'm starting to see it so differently. What if we did complain? What if we didn't whine, but insisted that those around us did better? \u2019 Ailes denied Kelly's claims of harassment before he died in May. O'Reilly said he didn't know of any complaint by Kelly.\n\nIn 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency tasked with enforcing civil rights laws in the workplace, issued guidelines declaring sexual harassment a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.", + " It was a victory, but with caveats: even after sexual harassment became explicitly illegal, it remained difficult to lodge a complaint that stuck\u2014in part because acts of harassment are often difficult to define. What separates an illegal act of sexual harassment from a merely annoying interaction between a boss and his subordinate? When does a boss stop just being a jerk and become a criminal? Because the Civil Rights Act offered no solid legal definition, interpretation has evolved slowly, shaped by judges and the EEOC over the past 37 years.\n\nIn 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate committee confirming Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, accusing him of sexual harassment and bringing national attention to the issue.", + " But, she says, \"The conversation was not about the problems in the workplace. It was about the fallout in politics.\"\n\nMore From left: Jane Merrick, journalist; Zelda Perkins, producer; Terry Reintke, Parliament member; Bex Bailey, charity worker. \u2018 Britain's Defense Secretary Michael Fallon quit his Cabinet position after Merrick said he 'lunged' at her when she was a young reporter: 'I think we're all part of this movement. On Twitter, there aren't any country borders, because it's such a powerful thing. There are millions of women who have experienced harassment and assault in every country.\u201d \u2019 Fallon said in a statement that he's 'behaved inappropriately in the past.' Kate Peters for TIME\n\nEven now,", + " the contours of what constitutes sexual harassment remain murky. Some of the recent stories clearly cross the line, like a boss exposing himself to a subordinate or requiring that his researcher sit on his lap. But others feel more ambiguous. Under what circumstances can you ask a colleague about their marriage? When is an invite to drinks alone a bridge too far?\n\nJonathan Segal, a partner at the Philadelphia law firm Duane Morris, who specializes in workplace training, says he hears that confusion in the conversations men are now having among themselves. \"It's more like, 'I wonder if I should tell someone they look nice, I wonder when it's O.K.", + " to give a hug, I wonder when I should be alone with someone in a room,'\" he says.\n\nAmanda Schmitt 30 Art curator More A publisher of Artforum, Knight Landesman, stepped down after Schmitt sued him for sexual harassment. \u2018 The harassment started when I was at the beginning of my career and had just moved to New York City. I was trying to figure out my place in the art world, my place in the city, my place as an adult in the workplace. The harassment began so early, and it was so accepted in the industry. When I finally spoke out publicly, I wondered why I hadn't sooner.", + " I was afraid that I didn't have the strength to make it stop. I don't feel that fear anymore. \u2019 Artforum's other publishers say they took swift action to support Schmitt. Landesman could not be reached for comment. Adama Iwu 40 Lobbyist More Iwu organized an open letter signed by 147 women calling out harassment in California's capital, which launched a state-senate investigation. \u2018 Young women told me about the same men who harassed me years ago. And all I did was participate in the whisper network: 'Here's what you can wear,' 'Here's where you can go,' 'Here's who to avoid.' But you have to address it head on and as a group.", + " It's hard to call 147 women liars. We can't all be crazy. We can't all be sluts. \u2019\n\nThis uncertainty can be corrosive. While everyone wants to smoke out the serial predators and rapists, there is a risk that the net may be cast too far. What happens when someone who makes a sexist joke winds up lumped into the same bucket as a boss who gropes an employee? Neither should be encouraged, but nor should they be equated.\n\nCompanies, meanwhile, are scrambling to keep up. Most large U.S.-based corporations now have fairly complete policies on sexual harassment, and many have anti\u2013sexual harassment training programs and claim to be \"zero-", + "\u00adtolerance workplaces.\" A 2016 EEOC report found that a company's willingness to protect so-called rainmakers\u2014high-performing men like Kalanick, Weinstein and O'Reilly\u2014to be one of the most pernicious reasons C-\u00adsuites and corporate boards overlooked harassment. It doesn't matter how good a company's policy is if its systems are ignored or don't work. \"So much harassment training is like an episode of The Office,\" says Victoria Lipnic, the acting chair of the EEOC.\n\nIn some instances, sexual-harassment training has even been shown to backfire. In a 2001 study,", + " Lisa Scherer, an associate professor of industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, found that while training increased knowledge about what constituted sexual harassment, it also sometimes had a corrosive effect on workplace culture. \"What was disturbing was that the males who had gone through training showed a backlash effect,\" she says. \"They said they were less willing to report sexual harassment than the males who had not gone through the training.\"\n\nEmployers are also girding for future allegations and lawsuits. The insurance company Nationwide reported a 15% increase in sales of employment practices liability insurances between 2016 and 2017. And Advisen,", + " which tracks insurance trends, says that EPLI insurance price has increased 30% since 2011, which indicates that more companies are reporting losses.\n\nCorporate boards, wary of alienating female employees and customers and of drawing bad press, have been among the quickest to make changes. Uber, for example, which built its reputation on a willingness to flout norms, used to be a guiding light for small startups. Now nobody is pitching their company as the next Uber, says Fowler. \"There's a shift to, 'We're not disrupting anymore. We're trying to build something that's good for consumers and treats employees fairly.'\" It's a start.\n\nState and local governments have also taken some concrete steps.", + " In October, the Chicago city council passed an ordinance\u00ad requiring hotels to provide panic buttons to employees who work alone in hotel rooms. In Springfield, Ill., lawmakers passed a measure that will allow an investigation into a backlog of sexual-\u00adharassment complaints in the statehouse. In Arizona, pending legislation would void nondisclosure agreements signed by victims of harassment to keep them silent.\n\n'I STAYED ANONYMOUS BECAUSE I LIVE IN A VERY SMALL COMMUNITY. AND THEY JUST THINK USUALLY THAT WE'RE LYING AND COMPLAINERS.' Anonymous 22 Former office assistant More After a co-worker allegedly began kissing and pressing himself on her,", + " this young Native American woman says she felt trapped. Her office had no HR department. She didn't feel her colleagues or family on her small, conservative reservation would believe her. So she quit her job. \u2018 On the reservation, we keep to ourselves and don't really put too much out there. I thought of all the other people that had no voice. They're scared to do something like this because their parents say, 'You're not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to speak up.' \u2019\n\nAt the federal level, the House and Senate have passed new rules requiring members of Congress and their staff to complete mandatory sexual-harassment training.", + " A handful of Senators have also introduced legislation to rein in what are known as mandatory arbitration agreements\u2014legal clauses that can appear in employee contracts that prevent workers from suing their employers in court for any reason, including sexual harassment. Some 60 million American workers are currently bound by them.\n\nV\n\nWe're still at the bomb-throwing point of this revolution, a reactive stage at which nuance can go into hiding. But while anger can start a revolution, in its most raw and feral form it can't negotiate the more delicate dance steps needed for true social change. Private conversations, which can't be legislated or enforced, are essential.\n\nNorms evolve,", + " and it's long past time for any culture to view harassment as acceptable. But there's a great deal at stake in how we assess these new boundaries\u2014for women and men together. We can and should police criminal acts and discourage inappropriate, destructive behavior.\n\nAt least we've started asking the right questions. Ones that seem alarmingly basic in hindsight: \"What if we did complain?\" proposes Megyn Kelly. \"What if we didn't whine, but we spoke our truth in our strongest voices and insisted that those around us did better? What if that worked to change reality right now?\" Kelly acknowledges that this still feels more like a promise than a certainty.", + " But for the moment, the world is listening.\n\n\u2014With reporting by Charlotte Alter and Susanna Schrobsdorff/New York, Sam Lansky/Los Angeles, Kate Samuelson/London, Maya Rhodan/Washington and Katy Steinmetz/San Francisco\n\nCorrection : The original version of this story misstated when the claims settled by Bill O\u2019Reilly and Fox News were first disclosed. The New York Times reported in April that Fox and O\u2019Reilly had settled five claims against him. O\u2019Reilly left the network later that month. ", + " Movie stars are supposedly nothing like you and me. They're svelte, glamorous, self-\u00adpossessed. They wear dresses we can't afford and live in houses we can only dream of. Yet it turns out that\u2014in the most painful and personal ways\u2014movie stars are more like you and me than we ever knew.\n\nIn 1997, just before Ashley Judd's career took off, she was invited to a meeting with Harvey Weinstein, head of the starmaking studio Miramax, at a Beverly Hills hotel. Astounded and offended by Weinstein's attempt to coerce her into bed, Judd managed to escape. But instead of keeping quiet about the kind of encounter that could easily shame a woman into silence,", + " she began spreading the word.\n\n\"I started talking about Harvey the minute that it happened,\" Judd says in an interview with TIME. \"Literally, I exited that hotel room at the Peninsula Hotel in 1997 and came straight downstairs to the lobby, where my dad was waiting for me, because he happened to be in Los Angeles from Kentucky, visiting me on the set. And he could tell by my face\u2014to use his words\u2014that something devastating had happened to me. I told him. I told everyone.\"\n\nTIME\n\nShe recalls one screenwriter friend telling her that Weinstein's behavior was an open secret passed around on the whisper network that had been furrowing through Hollywood for years.", + " It allowed for people to warn others to some degree, but there was no route to stop the abuse. \"Were we supposed to call some fantasy attorney general of moviedom?\" Judd asks. \"There wasn't a place for us to report these experiences.\"\n\nFinally, in October\u2014when Judd went on the record about Weinstein's behavior in the New York Times, the first star to do so\u2014the world listened. (Weinstein said he \"never laid a glove\" on Judd and denies having had nonconsensual sex with other accusers.)\n\nWhen movie stars don't know where to go, what hope is there for the rest of us?", + " What hope is there for the janitor who's being harassed by a co-worker but remains silent out of fear she'll lose the job she needs to support her children? For the administrative assistant who repeatedly fends off a superior who won't take no for an answer? For the hotel housekeeper who never knows, as she goes about replacing towels and cleaning toilets, if a guest is going to corner her in a room she can't escape?\n\nLike the \"problem that has no name,\" the disquieting malaise of frustration and repression among postwar wives and homemakers identified by Betty Friedan more than 50 years ago, this moment is born of a very real and potent sense of unrest.", + " Yet it doesn't have a leader, or a single, unifying tenet. The hashtag #MeToo (swiftly adapted into #BalanceTonPorc, #YoTambien, #Ana_kaman and many others), which to date has provided an umbrella of solidarity for millions of people to come forward with their stories, is part of the picture, but not all of it.\n\nThis reckoning appears to have sprung up overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries. Women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross boundaries but don't even seem to know that boundaries exist. They've had it with the fear of retaliation,", + " of being blackballed, of being fired from a job they can't afford to lose. They've had it with the code of going along to get along. They've had it with men who use their power to take what they want from women. These silence breakers have started a revolution of refusal, gathering strength by the day, and in the past two months alone, their collective anger has spurred immediate and shocking results: nearly every day, CEOs have been fired, moguls toppled, icons disgraced. In some cases, criminal charges have been brought.\n\nEmboldened by Judd, Rose McGowan and a host of other prominent accusers,", + " women everywhere have begun to speak out about the inappropriate, abusive and in some cases illegal behavior they've faced. When multiple harassment claims bring down a charmer like former Today show host Matt Lauer, women who thought they had no recourse see a new, wide-open door. When a movie star says #MeToo, it becomes easier to believe the cook who's been quietly enduring for years.\n\n'WERE WE SUPPOSED TO CALL SOME FANTASY ATTORNEY GENERAL OF MOVIEDOM?' Ashley Judd 49 Actor More Judd says she was sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein when she was 29 years old. \u2018 We need to formalize the whisper network.", + " It's an ingenious way that we've tried to keep ourselves safe. All those voices can be amplified. That's my advice to women. That and if something feels wrong, it is wrong\u2014and it's wrong by my definition and not necessarily someone else's. \u2019 Weinstein said in a statement he 'never laid a glove' on Judd.\n\nThe women and men who have broken their silence span all races, all income classes, all occupations and virtually all corners of the globe. They might labor in California fields, or behind the front desk at New York City's regal Plaza Hotel, or in the European Parliament. They're part of a movement that has no formal name.", + " But now they have a voice.\n\nII\n\nIn a windowless room at a two-story soundstage in San Francisco's Mission District, a group of women from different worlds met for the first time. Judd, every bit the movie star in towering heels, leaned in to shake hands with Isabel Pascual, a woman from Mexico who works picking strawberries and asked to use a pseudonym to protect her family. Beside her, Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer, eight months pregnant, spoke softly with Adama Iwu, a corporate lobbyist in Sacramento. A young hospital worker who had flown in from Texas completed the circle. She too is a victim of sexual harassment but was there anonymously,", + " she said, as an act of solidarity to represent all those who could not speak out.\n\nFrom a distance, these women could not have looked more different. Their ages, their families, their religions and their ethnicities were all a world apart. Their incomes differed not by degree but by universe: Iwu pays more in rent each month than Pascual makes in two months.\n\nBut on that November morning, what separated them was less important than what brought them together: a shared experience. Over the course of six weeks, TIME interviewed dozens of people representing at least as many industries, all of whom had summoned extraordinary personal courage to speak out about sexual harassment at their jobs.", + " They often had eerily similar stories to share.\n\nIn almost every case, they described not only the vulgarity of the harassment itself\u2014years of lewd comments, forced kisses, opportunistic gropes\u2014but also the emotional and psychological fallout from those advances. Almost everybody described wrestling with a palpable sense of shame. Had she somehow asked for it? Could she have deflected it? Was she making a big deal out of nothing?\n\n\"I thought, What just happened? Why didn't I react?\" says the anonymous hospital worker who fears for her family's livelihood should her story come out in her small community. \"I kept thinking, Did I do something,", + " did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was O.K.?\" It's a poisonous, useless thought, she adds, but how do you avoid it? She remembers the shirt she was wearing that day. She can still feel the heat of her harasser's hands on her body.\n\nAlyssa Milano 44 Actor More Millions of people responded with the hashtag #MeToo when Milano urged them to post their experiences on Twitter. \u2018 It's affected me on a cellular level to hear all these stories. I don't know if I'll ever be the same. I have not stopped crying. I look at my daughter and think,", + " Please, let this be worth it. Please, let it be that my daughter never has to go through anything like this. \u2019 Tarana Burke 44 Activist More Burke, founder of a nonprofit that helps survivors of sexual violence, created the Me Too movement in 2006 to encourage young women to show solidarity with one another. It went viral this year after actor Alyssa Milano used the hashtag #MeToo. \u2018 Sexual harassment does bring shame. And I think it's really powerful that this transfer is happening, that these women are able not just to share their shame but to put the shame where it belongs: on the perpetrator. \u2019\n\nNearly all of the people TIME interviewed about their experiences expressed a crushing fear of what would happen to them personally,", + " to their families or to their jobs if they spoke up.\n\nFor some, the fear was born of a threat of physical violence. Pascual felt trapped and terrified when her harasser began to stalk her at home, but felt she was powerless to stop him. If she told anyone, the abuser warned her, he would come after her or her children.\n\nThose who are often most vulnerable in society\u2014immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income workers and LGBTQ people\u2014described many types of dread. If they raised their voices, would they be fired? Would their communities turn against them? Would they be killed?", + " According to a 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 47% of transgender people report being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, both in and out of the workplace.\n\n'HE SAID IF I EVER WRONGED HIM, HE WOULD HAVE ME KIDNAPPED, HAVE MY EYES GOUGED OUT WITH A BIC PEN AND THROW ME INTO THE HUDSON RIVER.' Selma Blair 45 Actor More After director James Toback denied accusations by dozens of women that he had sexually assaulted them, Blair spoke out about her encounter with him. \u2018 I decided to go on the record when I saw his denial.", + " He called the women liars. But their stories were so similar to mine, and they were such credible women. There was no agenda other than they wanted to share this story, be free of this story. And in a magazine interview, he called the people who said this about him 'c-nts' and 'c-cksuckers.' That was just wrong. And I wanted to give a face to these now more than 300 women who have come out. \u2019 Toback has denied all allegations of harassment.\n\nJuana Melara, who has worked as a hotel housekeeper for decades, says she and her fellow housekeepers didn't complain about guests who exposed themselves or masturbated in front of them for fear of losing the paycheck they needed to support their families.", + " Melara recalls \"feeling the pressure of someone's eyes\" on her as she cleaned a guest's room. When she turned around, she remembers, a man was standing in the doorway, blocked by the cleaning cart, with his erect penis exposed. She yelled at the top of her lungs and scared him into leaving, then locked the door behind him. \"Nothing happened to me that time, thank God,\" she recalls.\n\nWhile guests come and go, some employees must continue to work side by side with their harassers. Crystal Washington was thrilled when she was hired as a hospitality coordinator at the Plaza, a storied hotel whose allure is as strong for people who want to work there as it is for those who can afford a suite.", + " \"Walking in, it's breathtaking,\" she says.\n\nBut then, she says, a co-worker began making crude remarks to her like \"I can tell you had sex last night\" and groping her. One of those encounters was even caught on camera, but the management did not properly respond, her lawyers say.\n\nPlaza Hotel Plaintiffs More From left: Veronica Owusu, Gabrielle Eubank, Crystal Washington, Dana Lewis, Paige Rodriguez, Sergeline Bernadeau and Kristina Antonova filed a suit against New York City's Plaza Hotel for 'normalizing and trivializing sexual assault' among employees there. \u2018 'I am a single mother.", + " I have an 11-year-old daughter, and she's depending on me,' says Lewis, who still works at the hotel to make ends meet. 'My entire life revolves around her. I wasn't really left with the option of leaving. I'm not left with the option of giving up. I want to show her that it's O.K. to stand up for yourself. If you keep fighting, eventually you'll see the sun on the other side.' \u2019 Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, which owns the Plaza, said it takes remedial action against harassment when warranted.\n\nWashington has joined with six other female employees to file a sexual-harassment suit against the hotel.", + " But she cannot afford to leave the job and says she must force herself out of bed every day to face the man she's accused. \"It's a dream to be an employee there,\" Washington says. \"And then you find out what it really is, and it's a nightmare.\" (Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, which owns the Plaza, said in a statement to TIME that it takes remedial action against harassment when warranted.)\n\nOther women, like the actor Selma Blair, weathered excruciating threats. Blair says she arrived at a hotel restaurant for a meeting with the independent film director James Toback in 1999 only to be told that he would like to see her in his room.", + " There, she says, Toback told her that she had to learn to be more vulnerable in her craft and asked her to strip down. She took her top off. She says he then propositioned her for sex, and when she refused, he blocked the door and forced her to watch him masturbate against her leg. Afterward, she recalls him telling her that if she said anything, he would stab her eyes out with a Bic pen and throw her in the Hudson River.\n\nBlair says Toback lorded the encounter over her for decades. \"I had heard from others that he was slandering me, saying these sexual things about me,", + " and it just made me even more afraid of him,\" Blair says in an interview with TIME. \"I genuinely thought for almost 20 years, He's going to kill me.\" ( Toback has denied the allegations, saying he never met his accusers or doesn't remember them.)\n\nMany of the people who have come forward also mentioned a different fear, one less visceral but no less real, as a reason for not speaking out: if you do, your complaint becomes your identity. \"'Susan Fowler, the famous victim of sexual harassment,'\" says the woman whose blog post ultimately led Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to resign and the multibillion-dollar startup to oust at least 20 other employees.", + " \"Nobody wants to be the buzzkill,\" adds Lindsey Reynolds, one of the women who blew the whistle on a culture of harassment at the restaurant group run by the celebrity chef John Besh. (The Besh Group says it is implementing new policies to create a culture of respect. Besh apologized for \"unacceptable behavior\" and \"moral failings,\" and resigned from the company. )\n\nIwu, the lobbyist, says she considered the same risks after she was groped in front of several colleagues at an event. She was shocked when none of her male co-workers stepped in to stop the assault. The next week, she organized 147 women to sign an open letter exposing harassment in California government.", + " When she told people about the campaign, she says they were wary. \"Are you sure you want to do this?\" they warned her. \"Remember Anita Hill.\"\n\nSara Gelser 43 State Senator More After the Oregon state senator accused her fellow legislator Jeff Kruse of sexual harassment, the statehouse launched an investigation and stripped him of his committee assignments. \u2018 We can't pick and choose based on whose political beliefs we believe in. And that means we have to be willing to speak out when it's a member of our own party. \u2019 Kruse said in a statement that he never touched Gelser inappropriately. Anonymous 28 Hospital worker More The mother of two told the HR department at the hospital where she worked that an executive there repeatedly came on to her.", + " \u2018 I thought, What just happened? Why didn't I react? Why couldn't I force words out of my mouth? When I got home, I crumbled. I kept thinking, Did I do something, did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was O.K.? \u2019\n\nTaylor Swift says she was made to feel bad about the consequences that her harasser faced. After she complained about a Denver radio DJ named David Mueller, who reached under her skirt and grabbed her rear end, Mueller was fired. He sued Swift for millions in damages. She countersued for a symbolic $1 and then testified about the incident in August.", + " Mueller's lawyer asked her, on the witness stand, whether she felt bad that she'd gotten him fired.\n\n\"I'm not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault,\" she told the lawyer. \"I'm being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions. Not mine.\" (Mueller said he would appeal.)\n\nIn an interview with TIME, Swift says that moment on the stand fueled her indignation. \"I figured that if he would be brazen enough to assault me under these risky circumstances,\" she says, \"imagine what he might do to a vulnerable,", + " young artist if given the chance.\" Like the five women gathered at that echoing soundstage in San Francisco, and like all of the dozens, then hundreds, then millions of women who came forward with their own stories of harassment, she was done feeling intimidated. Actors and writers and journalists and dishwashers and fruit pickers alike: they'd had enough. What had manifested as shame exploded into outrage. Fear became fury.\n\n'WHEN I TESTIFIED, I HAD ALREADY HAD TO WATCH THIS MAN'S ATTORNEY BULLY, BADGER AND HARASS MY TEAM, INCLUDING MY MOTHER... I WAS ANGRY.' Taylor Swift 27 Singer-Songwriter More Radio DJ David Mueller groped Swift during a photo op in 2013.", + " She reported him to his radio station, KYGO, and he was terminated. He said her accusations were false and sued Swift. She countersued for $1 and won. \u2018 In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened. This man hadn't considered any formalities when he assaulted me... Why should I be polite? \u2019 Mueller's lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.\n\nThis was the great unleashing that turned the #MeToo hashtag into a rallying cry. The phrase was first used more than a decade ago by social activist Tarana Burke as part of her work building solidarity among young survivors of harassment and assault.", + " A friend of the actor Alyssa Milano sent her a screenshot of the phrase, and Milano, almost on a whim, tweeted it out on Oct. 15. \"If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted write'me too' as a reply to this tweet,\" she wrote, and then went to sleep. She woke up the next day to find that more than 30,000 people had used #MeToo. Milano burst into tears.\n\nAt first, those speaking out were mostly from the worlds of media and entertainment, but the hashtag quickly spread. \"We have to keep our focus on people of different class and race and gender,\" says Burke,", + " who has developed a friendship with Milano via text messages. By November, California farmworkers, Pascual among them, were marching on the streets of Hollywood to express their solidarity with the stars.\n\nWomen were no longer alone. \"There's something really empowering about standing up for what's right,\" says Fowler, who has grown comfortable with her new reputation as a whistle-blower. \"It's a badge of honor.\"\n\nSandra Pezqueda 37 Former Dishwasher More Pezqueda filed a suit alleging that her supervisor at the Terranea Resort, a luxury retreat in South California, pursued her for months. When she rebuffed him,", + " he changed her schedule and cut her hours. \u2018 Someone who is in the limelight is able to speak out more easily than people who are poor. The reality of being a woman is the same\u2014the difference is the risk each woman must take. \u2019 Attorneys for the staffing company that employed Pezqueda deny her allegations. Terranea Resort declined to comment except to say that the suit involves an outside agency. Blaise Godbe Lipman 28 Director More Lipman accused a former agent, Tyler Grasham, of sexually assaulting him when he was 18. Grasham has since been dismissed by his agency and is being investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department.", + " \u2018 I experienced a little bit of victim blaming, victim shaming\u2014people digging into my Instagram and pulling up sexy photos, as if that discredited me from speaking out against sexual violence. And gay men are often highly sexualized in the media, so coming out with a story of sexual assault, especially one that also involved alcohol and maybe drugs, there is an idea that 'Well, did you want it?.' \u2019 Grasham could not be reached for comment. Correction: The original version of this caption incorrectly said Tyler Grasham was Lipman\u2019s agent. Grasham never represented Lipman.\n\nIII\n\nDiscussions of sexual harassment in polite company tend to rely on euphemisms:", + " harassment becomes \"inappropriate behavior,\" assault becomes \u00ad\"misconduct,\" rape becomes \"abuse.\" We're accustomed to hearing those softened words, which downplay the pain of the experience. That's one of the reasons why the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced in October 2016 was such a jolt. The language used by the man who would become America's 45th President, captured on a 2005 recording, was, by any standard, vulgar. He didn't just say that he'd made a pass; he \"moved on her like a bitch.\" He didn't just talk about fondling women; he bragged that he could \"grab 'em by the pussy.\"\n\nThat Donald Trump could express himself that way and still be elected President is part of what stoked the rage that fueled the Women's March the day after his Inauguration.", + " It's why women seized on that crude word as the emblem of the protest that dwarfed Trump's Inauguration crowd size. \"All social movements have highly visible precipitating factors,\" says Aldon Morris, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. \"In this case, you had Harvey Weinstein, and before that you had Trump.\"\n\nMegyn Kelly, the NBC anchor who revealed in October that she had complained to Fox News executives about Bill O'Reilly's treatment of women, and who was a target of Trump's ire during the campaign, says the tape as well as the tenor of the election turned the political into the personal. \"I have real doubts about whether we'd be going through this if Hillary Clinton had won,", + " because I think that President Trump's election in many ways was a setback for women,\" says Kelly, who noted that not all women at the march were Clinton supporters. \"But the overall message to us was that we don't really matter.\"\n\n'WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. I DON'T HAVE TIME TO PLAY NICE.' Rose McGowan 44 Artist and Activist More McGowan reached a settlement with producer Harvey Weinstein in 1997 after accusing him of sexually assaulting her in a hotel room. McGowan's decision to speak to the press this year helped expose Weinstein as a serial harasser. \u2018 The number of people sharing their stories with me is so intense,", + " especially since all of this is incredibly triggering for me as well. People forget a lot that there's a human behind this, someone who is very hurt. But that's O.K. It fuels my fire. They really f-cked with the wrong person. \u2019 Weinstein has denied all allegations of non\u00adconsensual sex.\n\nSo it was not entirely surprising that 2017 began with women donning \"pussy hats\" and marching on the nation's capital in a show of unity and fury. What was startling was the size of the protest. It was one of the largest in U.S. history and spawned satellite marches in all 50 states and more than 50 other countries.\n\nSummer Zervos,", + " a former contestant on The Apprentice, was one of roughly 20 women to accuse the President of sexual harassment. She filed a defamation suit against Trump days before his Inauguration after he disputed her claims by calling her a liar. A New York judge is expected to decide soon if the President is immune to civil suits while in office. No matter the outcome, the allegations added fuel to a growing fire.\n\nBy February, the movement had made its way to the billionaire dream factories of Silicon Valley, when Fowler spoke out about her \"weird year\" as an engineer at Uber. \"I remember feeling powerless and like there was no one looking out for us because we had an admitted harasser in the White House,\" Fowler says.", + " \"I felt like I had to take action.\"\n\nBarely two months later, Fox News cut ties with O'Reilly after the New York Times reported that he and the company had spent $13 million to settle claims against him from five women. In October, the Times revealed a sixth settlement, bringing that total to more than $45 million. Wendy Walsh, a psychologist and former guest on the network, was one of the first women to share her story about the star anchor\u2014but she was initially reluctant to go on the record. \"I was afraid for my kids, I was afraid of the retaliation,\" she says. \"I know what men can do when they're angry.\"\n\nEventually she allowed her name to be used.", + " \"I felt it was my duty,\" Walsh says, \"as a mother of daughters, as an act of love for women everywhere and the women who are silenced, to be brave.\"\n\nThe downfall of O'Reilly, who has denied all allegations of harassment, would prove to be just the beginning of the reckoning in media and entertainment. In June, Bill Cosby was brought to trial on charges that he had drugged and sexually assaulted a woman named Andrea Constand, one of nearly 50 women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault over several decades. Although the case ended in a mistrial\u2014it is scheduled to be retried in April\u2014the fact that it happened at all signaled a shift in the culture,", + " a willingness to hold even beloved and powerful men accountable for past misdeeds.\n\nWendy Walsh 55 Former Fox News Contributor More After Walsh and other women accused Bill O'Reilly of sexual harassment, Fox News fired him. \u2018 In the early '90s, as a news anchor, I wore buttoned-up suits, skirts to my knees, sensible shoes. I dipped out of the industry. When I came back, I was put in a sausage dress. The hair got blonder and the cleavage got deeper and the heels higher. Fox had created a sort of Snapchat filter: any woman, even a woman with advanced degrees,", + " would be turned into what looked like an office sex toy. Part of what happened to the women at Fox News started in the makeup room. \u2019 O'Reilly has denied harassing colleagues. Lindsey Reynolds 32 Food-Blog Editor More When she quit her job as social-media manager at the restaurant group of celebrity chef John Besh, Reynolds sent an email to her bosses complaining about the company's culture of sexism. She later filed a complaint with the EEOC. Besh has since stepped down. \u2018 After I sent that email, I burst into tears and felt sick to my stomach and was shaking. I was nobody. I'm just a person from a small town in Texas.", + " I have no money, no power, no social standing. And they have more power and money than I will ever have. I felt extremely vulnerable and scared. Then I heard from women I had never met\u2014they worked as line cooks while I worked in corporate\u2014who had experienced the same toxic culture. \u2019 The company said it is working to enact policies to create a culture of safety and respect. Besh has apologized for 'unacceptable' behavior and'moral failings,' and resigned.\n\nComplaints at the University of Rochester helped expose harassment in academia. The chief executive of SoFi, the $4 billion lending firm, resigned following a lawsuit over claims of sexual harassment.", + " Then, in early October, the dam finally broke.\n\nOn Oct. 5, the New York Times published the first story to expose Weinstein, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood and a leading Democratic political fundraiser, as a serial sexual predator. The revelation was quickly followed by New Yorker investigations that widened Weinstein's list of accusers and showed the incredible lengths he went to cover his tracks. Weinstein denied the allegations, but the levers that he had long pulled to exert his influence suddenly were jammed. Fellow chieftains refused to defend him. Politicians who once courted him gave away his donations. His company's board fired him.\n\nWithin days,", + " the head of Amazon Studios, an influential art publisher and employees at the financial-services firm Fidelity had all left their jobs over harassment claims. By the end of the month, the list of the accused had grown to include political analyst Mark Halperin, a former TIME employee; opinion-shaping literary critic Leon Wieseltier; and numerous politicians and journalists. The Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey was scrubbed from a completed movie.\n\n'IT DOESN'T MATTER IF THEY CRITICIZE ME. I CAN SUPPORT OTHER PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING THROUGH THE SAME THING.' Isabel Pascual 42 Strawberry picker More In the wake of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein,", + " Pascual spoke out at a march in L.A. about being stalked and harassed in order to give voice to her fellow agricultural workers. \u2018 I was afraid. When the man was harassing me, he threatened to harm my children and me\u2014that's why I kept quiet. I felt desperate. I cried and cried. But, thank God, my friends in the fields support me. So I said, Enough. I lost the fear. It doesn't matter if they criticize me. I can support other people who are going through the same thing. \u2019 *Pascual's name was changed to protect her family.\n\nThe response to the Weinstein allegations has shaped the way people view women who come forward.", + " In a TIME/SurveyMonkey online poll of American adults conducted Nov. 28\u201330, 82% of respondents said women are more likely to speak out about harassment since the Weinstein allegations. Meanwhile, 85% say they believe the women making allegations of sexual harassment.\n\nThe movement\u2014and fallout\u2014quickly spread around the world. Michael Fallon, Britain's Defense Secretary, quit the Cabinet after journalist Jane Merrick revealed that he had \"lunged\" at her in 2003, when she was a 29-year-old reporter. In France, women took to the streets chanting not only \"Me too\" but also \"Balance ton porc,\" which translates roughly to \"Expose your pig,\" a hashtag conceived by French journalist Sandra Muller.", + " In the week after #MeToo first surfaced, versions of it swept through 85 countries, from India, where the struggle against harassment and assault had already become a national debate in recent years, to the Middle East, Asia and parts in between.\n\nLindsay Meyer 31 Entrepreneur More Meyer says that Justin Caldbeck, a venture capitalist who invested in her first company, harassed her. After six other women reported harassment by Caldbeck, he resigned from his firm. \u2018 I wanted it to stop. I wanted to be able to get back to running my company and not have the daily distraction of being constantly emailed, called, text-messaged.", + " That took a lot of energy to deal with and to process and to try to bury\u2014because I didn't want it to be a big deal. For so long, I went around harboring this ridiculous belief that because I was a nonwhite woman in my 20s that somehow it was expected that I would have to be treated this way. And now I see that that is so silly. I am a person with dignity. \u2019 Caldbeck apologized in a statement to the women he'made uncomfortable.' Juana Melara 52 Housekeeper More Hotel guests have propositioned and exposed themselves to Melara while she was working. \u2018 One time when I was cleaning,", + " a guest asked me if I knew how to massage. I said, 'No, I don't even do it to my husband.' The way he was looking at me wasn't friendly. I rushed to finish the room as fast as I could and get out of there. It's crazy that people think that if they pay for the room, they are paying for sexual service. \u2019 The hotel declined to comment.\n\n\"Suddenly,\" says Terry Reintke, a German member of the European Parliament, who discussed her own harassment in a speech on Oct. 25, \"friends from primary school or women that I know from completely different surroundings that would never call themselves feminists were starting to share their stories.\"\n\nBy November,", + " the spotlight was back on American politicians. A woman named Leigh Corfman told the Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Alabama Republican nominee for the Senate, abused her when she was 14 and he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. Nine women have come forward to describe inappropriate encounters with Roy Moore, including several who say he pursued them when they were teenagers. Moore has called the allegations \"false\" and \"malicious.\" \"Specifically, I do not know any of these women nor have I ever engaged in sexual misconduct with any woman,\" he said in late November.\n\n'I'M SURE THE ROAD WILL BE LONG AND DIFFICULT,", + " BUT IT WILL BE POSITIVE IN THE END.' Sandra Muller 46 Journalist More In France, Muller started the Twitter hashtag #BalanceTonPorc (Expose Your Pig), which helped inspire women to march in the streets to protest sexual harassment. \u2018 France is a country of love, but there is love and love, you know? There are ways to approach a woman, and if it's done with respect, it's O.K. Without respect, it's not good. Now if men want your love, they have to ask themselves how to be, how to approach a woman. They are scared. We must restart all relationships from the beginning.", + " We have to cleanse society to find a better way. I'm sure the road will be long and difficult, but it will be positive in the end. \u2019\n\nThe following week, radio host Leeann Tweeden wrote that Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken groped her on a USO tour in 2006, before he was in office. Several other women have since come forward with similar harassment allegations against Franken, who has called on the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate his own behavior. On Dec. 5, Michigan Democratic Representative John Conyers resigned amid allegations that he had made sexual advances toward the women on his staff. He has said that the allegations \"are not accurate;", + " they are not true.\"\n\nTexas Republican Representative Blake Farenthold has also found himself in the crosshairs after media reports that he used $84,000 in taxpayer dollars to settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit with a former aide in 2014. Farenthold denies that he engaged in any wrongdoing and has vowed to repay the settlement.\n\n'WHEN TRUMP WON THE ELECTION, I FELT A CRUSHING SENSE OF POWERLESSNESS. AND THEN I REALIZED THAT I HAD TO DO SOMETHING.' Susan Fowler 26 Former Uber Engineer More Fowler's February blog post about the harassment she experienced as an engineer at Uber went viral.", + " Uber then launched an investigation that led to the ousting of its CEO Travis Kalanick and more than 20 other employees. \u2018 When other women spoke out, they were retaliated against. So there were certain things that I thought I could avoid: 'I'm not going to sue, because they'll make me sign a non\u00addisclosure agreement. I'm not going to do press right afterward, because they'll say I'm doing it for attention. I can't have any emotion in my blog. I have to be very, very detached.' And I had to make sure that every single thing that I included in there had extensive physical documentation,", + " so it couldn't be 'he said, she said.' And that's what I did. \u2019\n\nThe accused were both Democrats and Republicans, but the consequences thus far have been limited\u2014and often filtered through a partisan lens. In politics, at least, what constitutes disqualifying behavior seemed to depend not on your actions but on the allegiance of your tribe. In the 1990s, feminists stood up for accused abuser Bill Clinton instead of his \u00adaccusers\u2014a move many are belatedly regretting as the national conversation prompts a re-evaluation of the claims against the former President. And despite the allegations against Moore, both \u00adPresident Trump and the Republican National Committee support him.\n\nThat political divide was revealed in the TIME/SurveyMonkey poll,", + " which found that Republicans were significantly more likely to excuse sexual misdeeds in their own party. The survey found that while a majority of Republicans and Democrats agree that a Democratic Congressman accused of sexual harassment should resign (71% and 74% respectively), when the accused offender was in the GOP, only 54% of Republicans would demand a resignation (compared to 82% of Democrats).\n\n'WHY ARE YOU QUESTIONING THE VICTIM HERE? LET'S FLIP IT. LET'S TALK ABOUT WHAT THE PREDATOR IS DOING.' Terry Crews 49 Actor More Crews is suing agent Adam Venit and William Morris Endeavor for sexual assault.", + " Crews says Venit groped him in front of his wife at an industry event. Venit was briefly suspended from the agency. \u2018 People were saying, 'You should have beaten him up.' I'm like, Why is nobody questioning him? Nobody questions the predator. You know why? Because they just expect it. And I expect it. And I just said, 'No more.' Why are you questioning the victim here? Let's flip it. Let's talk about what the predator is doing. \u2019 The agency said it had suspended and demoted Venit, who declined to comment.\n\nAs another election cycle approaches, Americans find themselves trying to weigh one ugly act against another in a painful calculus of transgression.", + " Is a grope caught on camera more disqualifying than a years-ago assault that was credibly reported? What are we willing to forgive or ignore or deny if the violator shares our politics?\n\nIV\n\nIt wasn't so long ago that the boss chasing his secretary around the desk was a comic trope, a staple from vaudeville to prime-time sitcoms. There wasn't even a name for sexual harassment until just over 40 years ago; the term was coined in 1975 by a group of women at Cornell University after an employee there, Carmita Wood, filed for unemployment benefits after she had resigned because a supervisor touched her.", + " The university denied her claim, arguing that she left the job for \"personal reasons.\"\n\nUniversity Professors More University of Rochester professors Celeste Kidd (right) and Jessica Cantlon (left), along with six current and former members of the brain and cognitive sciences department, filed complaints with the university and the EEOC, alleging harassment and retaliation. \u2018 'If they couldn't stop us from talking, they were going to stop every\u00adbody from listening,' says Cantlon. 'The administration went into our emails to try to find pieces of material that they could use to embarrass us or try to make other faculty members angry with us. But eight of us linked arms and continued to pursue the complaint.", + " I think working together was powerful. It was hard to silence all of us.' \u2019 The university has launched an investigation led by former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White.\n\nWood, joined by activists from the university's human-affairs program, formed a group called Working Women United that hosted an event for workers from various fields, from mail-room clerks and servers to factory workers and administrative assistants, to talk about their own harassment experiences.\n\nIt was a proto-version of the social-media explosion we're seeing today, encouraging unity and reminding women that they were not alone. But even as public awareness about the problem of sexual harassment began to grow, legal and policy protections were almost nonexistent.", + " In the 1970s, most businesses and institutions had no policies on sexual harassment whatsoever, and even egregious complaints were regularly dismissed.\n\n'I ALWAYS THOUGHT MAYBE THINGS COULD CHANGE FOR MY DAUGHTER. I NEVER THOUGHT THINGS COULD CHANGE FOR ME.' Megyn Kelly 47 Journalist More The host of NBC's Megyn Kelly Today and former Fox News anchor called out Bill O'Reilly for claiming that nobody at Fox News had complained about his behavior. She had. In 2016, Kelly revealed that she'd been sexually harassed by former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. \u2018 I always thought maybe things could change for my daughter.", + " I never thought things could change for me. Never. I believed the system was stacked against women, and the smart ones would understand how to navigate it... I'm starting to see it so differently. What if we did complain? What if we didn't whine, but insisted that those around us did better? \u2019 Ailes denied Kelly's claims of harassment before he died in May. O'Reilly said he didn't know of any complaint by Kelly.\n\nIn 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency tasked with enforcing civil rights laws in the workplace, issued guidelines declaring sexual harassment a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.", + " It was a victory, but with caveats: even after sexual harassment became explicitly illegal, it remained difficult to lodge a complaint that stuck\u2014in part because acts of harassment are often difficult to define. What separates an illegal act of sexual harassment from a merely annoying interaction between a boss and his subordinate? When does a boss stop just being a jerk and become a criminal? Because the Civil Rights Act offered no solid legal definition, interpretation has evolved slowly, shaped by judges and the EEOC over the past 37 years.\n\nIn 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate committee confirming Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, accusing him of sexual harassment and bringing national attention to the issue.", + " But, she says, \"The conversation was not about the problems in the workplace. It was about the fallout in politics.\"\n\nMore From left: Jane Merrick, journalist; Zelda Perkins, producer; Terry Reintke, Parliament member; Bex Bailey, charity worker. \u2018 Britain's Defense Secretary Michael Fallon quit his Cabinet position after Merrick said he 'lunged' at her when she was a young reporter: 'I think we're all part of this movement. On Twitter, there aren't any country borders, because it's such a powerful thing. There are millions of women who have experienced harassment and assault in every country.\u201d \u2019 Fallon said in a statement that he's 'behaved inappropriately in the past.' Kate Peters for TIME\n\nEven now,", + " the contours of what constitutes sexual harassment remain murky. Some of the recent stories clearly cross the line, like a boss exposing himself to a subordinate or requiring that his researcher sit on his lap. But others feel more ambiguous. Under what circumstances can you ask a colleague about their marriage? When is an invite to drinks alone a bridge too far?\n\nJonathan Segal, a partner at the Philadelphia law firm Duane Morris, who specializes in workplace training, says he hears that confusion in the conversations men are now having among themselves. \"It's more like, 'I wonder if I should tell someone they look nice, I wonder when it's O.K.", + " to give a hug, I wonder when I should be alone with someone in a room,'\" he says.\n\nAmanda Schmitt 30 Art curator More A publisher of Artforum, Knight Landesman, stepped down after Schmitt sued him for sexual harassment. \u2018 The harassment started when I was at the beginning of my career and had just moved to New York City. I was trying to figure out my place in the art world, my place in the city, my place as an adult in the workplace. The harassment began so early, and it was so accepted in the industry. When I finally spoke out publicly, I wondered why I hadn't sooner.", + " I was afraid that I didn't have the strength to make it stop. I don't feel that fear anymore. \u2019 Artforum's other publishers say they took swift action to support Schmitt. Landesman could not be reached for comment. Adama Iwu 40 Lobbyist More Iwu organized an open letter signed by 147 women calling out harassment in California's capital, which launched a state-senate investigation. \u2018 Young women told me about the same men who harassed me years ago. And all I did was participate in the whisper network: 'Here's what you can wear,' 'Here's where you can go,' 'Here's who to avoid.' But you have to address it head on and as a group.", + " It's hard to call 147 women liars. We can't all be crazy. We can't all be sluts. \u2019\n\nThis uncertainty can be corrosive. While everyone wants to smoke out the serial predators and rapists, there is a risk that the net may be cast too far. What happens when someone who makes a sexist joke winds up lumped into the same bucket as a boss who gropes an employee? Neither should be encouraged, but nor should they be equated.\n\nCompanies, meanwhile, are scrambling to keep up. Most large U.S.-based corporations now have fairly complete policies on sexual harassment, and many have anti\u2013sexual harassment training programs and claim to be \"zero-", + "\u00adtolerance workplaces.\" A 2016 EEOC report found that a company's willingness to protect so-called rainmakers\u2014high-performing men like Kalanick, Weinstein and O'Reilly\u2014to be one of the most pernicious reasons C-\u00adsuites and corporate boards overlooked harassment. It doesn't matter how good a company's policy is if its systems are ignored or don't work. \"So much harassment training is like an episode of The Office,\" says Victoria Lipnic, the acting chair of the EEOC.\n\nIn some instances, sexual-harassment training has even been shown to backfire. In a 2001 study,", + " Lisa Scherer, an associate professor of industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, found that while training increased knowledge about what constituted sexual harassment, it also sometimes had a corrosive effect on workplace culture. \"What was disturbing was that the males who had gone through training showed a backlash effect,\" she says. \"They said they were less willing to report sexual harassment than the males who had not gone through the training.\"\n\nEmployers are also girding for future allegations and lawsuits. The insurance company Nationwide reported a 15% increase in sales of employment practices liability insurances between 2016 and 2017. And Advisen,", + " which tracks insurance trends, says that EPLI insurance price has increased 30% since 2011, which indicates that more companies are reporting losses.\n\nCorporate boards, wary of alienating female employees and customers and of drawing bad press, have been among the quickest to make changes. Uber, for example, which built its reputation on a willingness to flout norms, used to be a guiding light for small startups. Now nobody is pitching their company as the next Uber, says Fowler. \"There's a shift to, 'We're not disrupting anymore. We're trying to build something that's good for consumers and treats employees fairly.'\" It's a start.\n\nState and local governments have also taken some concrete steps.", + " In October, the Chicago city council passed an ordinance\u00ad requiring hotels to provide panic buttons to employees who work alone in hotel rooms. In Springfield, Ill., lawmakers passed a measure that will allow an investigation into a backlog of sexual-\u00adharassment complaints in the statehouse. In Arizona, pending legislation would void nondisclosure agreements signed by victims of harassment to keep them silent.\n\n'I STAYED ANONYMOUS BECAUSE I LIVE IN A VERY SMALL COMMUNITY. AND THEY JUST THINK USUALLY THAT WE'RE LYING AND COMPLAINERS.' Anonymous 22 Former office assistant More After a co-worker allegedly began kissing and pressing himself on her,", + " this young Native American woman says she felt trapped. Her office had no HR department. She didn't feel her colleagues or family on her small, conservative reservation would believe her. So she quit her job. \u2018 On the reservation, we keep to ourselves and don't really put too much out there. I thought of all the other people that had no voice. They're scared to do something like this because their parents say, 'You're not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to speak up.' \u2019\n\nAt the federal level, the House and Senate have passed new rules requiring members of Congress and their staff to complete mandatory sexual-harassment training.", + " A handful of Senators have also introduced legislation to rein in what are known as mandatory arbitration agreements\u2014legal clauses that can appear in employee contracts that prevent workers from suing their employers in court for any reason, including sexual harassment. Some 60 million American workers are currently bound by them.\n\nV\n\nWe're still at the bomb-throwing point of this revolution, a reactive stage at which nuance can go into hiding. But while anger can start a revolution, in its most raw and feral form it can't negotiate the more delicate dance steps needed for true social change. Private conversations, which can't be legislated or enforced, are essential.\n\nNorms evolve,", + " and it's long past time for any culture to view harassment as acceptable. But there's a great deal at stake in how we assess these new boundaries\u2014for women and men together. We can and should police criminal acts and discourage inappropriate, destructive behavior.\n\nAt least we've started asking the right questions. Ones that seem alarmingly basic in hindsight: \"What if we did complain?\" proposes Megyn Kelly. \"What if we didn't whine, but we spoke our truth in our strongest voices and insisted that those around us did better? What if that worked to change reality right now?\" Kelly acknowledges that this still feels more like a promise than a certainty.", + " But for the moment, the world is listening.\n\n\u2014With reporting by Charlotte Alter and Susanna Schrobsdorff/New York, Sam Lansky/Los Angeles, Kate Samuelson/London, Maya Rhodan/Washington and Katy Steinmetz/San Francisco\n\nCorrection : The original version of this story misstated when the claims settled by Bill O\u2019Reilly and Fox News were first disclosed. The New York Times reported in April that Fox and O\u2019Reilly had settled five claims against him. O\u2019Reilly left the network later that month.\n" + ], + "length": 21229, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 56, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 \"If you like to drink coffee, drink up! If you're not a coffee drinker, then you need to consider if you should start.\" That's the advice of a researcher at the University of Southern California, per a press release, following a pair of new studies suggesting coffee prolongs life. The first study of 186,000 people found those who drank a cup of coffee a day were 12% less likely to die from heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, and, kidney disease than those who avoided java, reports the Los Angeles Times. Those who drank two to three cups a day were 18% less likely to die of those causes, says Veronica Setiawan, lead author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. While the study backs up previous research, Setiawan notes it's one of the few that shows the association between coffee and a lower mortality risk applies to people of varying ethnicities (whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians) and \"gives stronger biological backing to the argument that coffee is good for you.\" A second study of 521,000 people from 10 European countries published Tuesday also found the top 25% of coffee drinkers had a reduced mortality risk of 12% for men and 7% for women. This suggests the manner in which coffee is prepared is not key to its benefits, a researcher tells CNN. Nor is caffeine believed to be a factor: The lower mortality risk was seen in both studies regardless of whether people drank regular or decaf coffee. (Now available: colorless coffee.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Marc J. Gunter, PhD (*); Neil Murphy, PhD (*); Amanda J. Cross, PhD; Laure Dossus, PhD; Laureen Dartois, PhD; Guy Fagherazzi, PhD; Rudolf Kaaks, PhD; Tilman K\u00fchn, PhD; Heiner Boeing, PhD; Krasimira Aleksandrova, PhD; Anne Tj\u00f8nneland, MD, PhD; Anja Olsen, PhD; Kim Overvad, MD, PhD; Sofus Christian Larsen, PhD; Maria Luisa Redondo Cornejo, PhD; Antonio Agudo, PhD; Mar\u00eda Jos\u00e9 S\u00e1nchez P\u00e9rez,", + " MD, PhD; Jone M. Altzibar, PhD; Carmen Navarro, MD, PhD; Eva Ardanaz, MD, PhD; Kay-Tee Khaw, MB BChir; Adam Butterworth, PhD; Kathryn E. Bradbury, PhD; Antonia Trichopoulou, MD, PhD; Pagona Lagiou, MD, PhD; Dimitrios Trichopoulos, MD, PhD (\u2020); Domenico Palli, MD; Sara Grioni, BSc; Paolo Vineis, MD, MPH; Salvatore Panico, MD, MSc; Rosario Tumino,", + " MD; Bas Bueno-de-Mesquita, MD, PhD; Peter Siersema, MD, PhD; Max Leenders, PhD; Joline W.J. Beulens, PhD; Cuno U. Uiterwaal, MD, PhD; Peter Wallstr\u00f6m, MD, PhD; Lena Maria Nilsson, PhD; Rikard Landberg, PhD; Elisabete Weiderpass, MD, PhD; Guri Skeie, PhD; Tonje Braaten, PhD; Paul Brennan, PhD; Idlir Licaj, PhD; David C. Muller, PhD; Rashmi Sinha,", + " PhD; Nick Wareham, PhD, MBBS; Elio Riboli, MD, ScM\n\nMarc J. Gunter, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate,", + " Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO,", + " Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway;", + " and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nNeil Murphy, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona,", + " Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori,", + " Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nAmanda J. Cross, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer,", + " Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa,", + " Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P.", + " Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nLaure Dossus, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom;", + " Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n,", + " Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa,", + " Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nLaureen Dartois, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif,", + " France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia,", + " Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment,", + " Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nGuy Fagherazzi, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke,", + " Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit,", + " Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital,", + " Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nRudolf Kaaks, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center,", + " Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom;", + " Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5,", + " Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nTilman K\u00fchn, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus,", + " Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece;", + " Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences,", + " Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nHeiner Boeing, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital,", + " Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,", + " Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8,", + " The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nKrasimira Aleksandrova, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark;", + " Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO,", + " Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway;", + " and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nAnne Tj\u00f8nneland, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology,", + " Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori,", + " Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nAnja Olsen, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer,", + " Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa,", + " Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P.", + " Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nKim Overvad, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom;", + " Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n,", + " Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa,", + " Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nSofus Christian Larsen, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif,", + " France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia,", + " Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment,", + " Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nMaria Luisa Redondo Cornejo, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg,", + " Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute,", + " Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven,", + " the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nAntonio Agudo, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke,", + " Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit,", + " Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital,", + " Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nMar\u00eda Jos\u00e9 S\u00e1nchez P\u00e9rez, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal,", + " Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom;", + " University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6,", + " Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nJone M. Altzibar, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center,", + " Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom;", + " Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5,", + " Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nCarmen Navarro, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University,", + " Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation,", + " Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences,", + " Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nEva Ardanaz, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital,", + " Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,", + " Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8,", + " The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nKay-Tee Khaw, MB BChir\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark;", + " Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO,", + " Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway;", + " and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nAdam Butterworth, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology,", + " Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori,", + " Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nKathryn E. Bradbury, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer,", + " Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa,", + " Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P.", + " Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nAntonia Trichopoulou, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London,", + " United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n,", + " Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa,", + " Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nPagona Lagiou, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy,", + " Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council,", + " Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment,", + " Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nDimitrios Trichopoulos, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg,", + " Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute,", + " Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven,", + " the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nDomenico Palli, MD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke,", + " Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit,", + " Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital,", + " Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nSara Grioni, BSc\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center,", + " Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom;", + " Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5,", + " Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nPaolo Vineis, MD, MPH\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus,", + " Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece;", + " Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences,", + " Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nSalvatore Panico, MD, MSc\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital,", + " Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,", + " Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8,", + " The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nRosario Tumino, MD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate,", + " Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO,", + " Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway;", + " and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nBas Bueno-de-Mesquita, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain;", + " Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy;", + " Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute,", + " Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nPeter Siersema, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona,", + " Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori,", + " Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nMax Leenders, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer,", + " Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa,", + " Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P.", + " Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nJoline W.J. Beulens, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London,", + " United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n,", + " Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa,", + " Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nCuno U. Uiterwaal, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy,", + " Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council,", + " Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment,", + " Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nPeter Wallstr\u00f6m, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany;", + " German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona,", + " Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre,", + " Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nLena Maria Nilsson, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke,", + " Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit,", + " Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital,", + " Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nRikard Landberg, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center,", + " Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom;", + " Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5,", + " Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nElisabete Weiderpass, MD, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University,", + " Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation,", + " Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences,", + " Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nGuri Skeie, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital,", + " Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,", + " Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8,", + " The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nTonje Braaten, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate,", + " Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO,", + " Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway;", + " and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nPaul Brennan, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona,", + " Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori,", + " Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nIdlir Licaj, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer,", + " Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa,", + " Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P.", + " Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nDavid C. Muller, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom;", + " Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n,", + " Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa,", + " Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nRashmi Sinha, PhD\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif,", + " France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany; German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia,", + " Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona, Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment,", + " Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nNick Wareham, PhD, MBBS\n\nFrom International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France; Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France; German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany;", + " German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Nuthetal, Germany; Danish Cancer Society Research Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital, Frederiksberg, Denmark; Public Health Directorate, Asturias, Spain; Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain; Andalusian School of Public Health, Granada, Spain; Public Health Division of Gipuzkoa, Basque Regional Health Department, San Sebasti\u00e1n, Spain; Murcia Regional Health Council, Murcia, Spain; Navarre Public Health Institute, Pamplona,", + " Spain; University of Cambridge and MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, United Kingdom; University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Hellenic Health Foundation, Athens, Greece; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Cancer Research and Prevention Institute\u2013ISPO, Florence, Italy; Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, Milan, Italy; Federico II University, Naples, Italy; \u201cCivic - M.P. Arezzo\u201d Hospital, ASP Ragusa, Ragusa, Italy; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands; University Medical Centre,", + " Utrecht, the Netherlands; Malm\u00f6 University Hospital, Malm\u00f6, Sweden; Ume\u00e5 University, Ume\u00e5, Sweden; Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden; University of Troms\u00f8, The Arctic University of Norway, Troms\u00f8, Norway; and National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.\n\nElio Riboli, MD, ScM ", + " Compared with the 16% of people who didn't drink coffee at all, those who downed two or more cups each day were about 18% less likely to have died during the study period. In addition, those who drank just one to six cups of coffee per week were 12% less likely to die. Both of these figures were calculated after taking into account known risk factors for early death, such as smoking (which is often paired with coffee drinking), diet and body mass index. ", + " Here's another reason to start the day with a cup of joe: Scientists have found that people who drink coffee appear to live longer.\n\nDrinking coffee was associated with a lower risk of death due to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and respiratory and kidney disease for African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and whites.\n\nPeople who consumed a cup of coffee a day were 12 percent less likely to die compared to those who didn't drink coffee. This association was even stronger for those who drank two to three cups a day -- 18 percent reduced chance of death.\n\nLower mortality was present regardless of whether people drank regular or decaffeinated coffee,", + " suggesting the association is not tied to caffeine, said Veronica W. Setiawan, lead author of the study and an associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.\n\n\"We cannot say drinking coffee will prolong your life, but we see an association,\" Setiawan said. \"If you like to drink coffee, drink up! If you're not a coffee drinker, then you need to consider if you should start.\"\n\nThe study, which will be published in the July 11 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, used data from the Multiethnic Cohort Study, a collaborative effort between the University of Hawaii Cancer Center and the Keck School of Medicine.\n\nThe ongoing Multiethnic Cohort Study has more than 215,", + "000 participants and bills itself as the most ethnically diverse study examining lifestyle risk factors that may lead to cancer.\n\n\"Until now, few data have been available on the association between coffee consumption and mortality in nonwhites in the United States and elsewhere,\" the study stated. \"Such investigations are important because lifestyle patterns and disease risks can vary substantially across racial and ethnic backgrounds, and findings in one group may not necessarily apply to others.\"\n\nSince the association was seen in four different ethnicities, Setiawan said it is safe to say the results apply to other groups.\n\n\"This study is the largest of its kind and includes minorities who have very different lifestyles,\" Setiawan said.", + " \"Seeing a similar pattern across different populations gives stronger biological backing to the argument that coffee is good for you whether you are white, African-American, Latino or Asian.\"\n\nBenefits of drinking coffee\n\nPrevious research by USC and others have indicated that drinking coffee is associated with reduced risk of several types of cancer, diabetes, liver disease, Parkinson's disease, Type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases.\n\nSetiawan, who drinks one to two cups of coffee daily, said any positive effects from drinking coffee are far-reaching because of the number of people who enjoy or rely on the beverage every day.\n\n\"Coffee contains a lot of antioxidants and phenolic compounds that play an important role in cancer prevention,\" Setiawan said.", + " \"Although this study does not show causation or point to what chemicals in coffee may have this 'elixir effect,' it is clear that coffee can be incorporated into a healthy diet and lifestyle.\"\n\nAbout 62 percent of Americans drink coffee daily, a 5 percent increase from 2016 numbers, reported the National Coffee Association.\n\nAs a research institution, USC has scientists from across disciplines working to find a cure for cancer and better ways for people to manage the disease.\n\nThe Keck School of Medicine and USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center manage a state-mandated database called the Los Angeles Cancer Surveillance Program, which provides scientists with essential statistics on cancer for a diverse population.\n\nResearchers from the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center have found that drinking coffee lowers the risk of colorectal cancer.\n\nBut drinking piping hot coffee or beverages probably causes cancer in the esophagus,", + " according to a World Health Organization panel of scientists that included Mariana Stern from the Keck School of Medicine.\n\nHearing from the WHO\n\nIn some respects, coffee is regaining its honor for wellness benefits. After 25 years of labeling coffee a carcinogen linked to bladder cancer, the World Health Organization last year announced that drinking coffee reduces the risk for liver and uterine cancer.\n\n\"Some people worry drinking coffee can be bad for you because it might increase the risk of heart disease, stunt growth or lead to stomach ulcers and heartburn,\" Setiawan said. \"But research on coffee have mostly shown no harm to people's health.\"\n\nCoffee by the numbers\n\nSetiawan and her colleagues examined the data of 185,", + "855 African-Americans (17 percent), Native Hawaiians (7 percent), Japanese-Americans (29 percent), Latinos (22 percent) and whites (25 percent) ages 45 to 75 at recruitment. Participants answered questionnaires about diet, lifestyle, and family and personal medical history.\n\nThey reported their coffee drinking habits when they entered the study and updated them about every five years, checking one of nine boxes that ranged from \"never or hardly ever\" to \"4 or more cups daily.\" They also reported whether they drank caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. The average follow-up period was 16 years.\n\nSixteen percent of participants reported that they did not drink coffee,", + " 31 percent drank one cup per day, 25 percent drank two to three cups per day and 7 percent drank four or more cups per day. The remaining 21 percent had irregular coffee consumption habits.\n\nOver the course of the study, 58,397 participants -- about 31 percent -- died. Cardiovascular disease (36 percent) and cancer (31 percent) were the leading killers.\n\nThe data was adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, smoking habits, education, preexisting disease, vigorous physical exercise and alcohol consumption.\n\nSetiawan's previous research found that coffee reduces the risk of liver cancer and chronic liver disease. She is currently examining how coffee is associated with the risk of developing specific cancers.\n\nResearchers from the University of Hawaii Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute contributed to this study.", + " The study used data from the Multiethnic Cohort Study, which is supported by a $19,008,359 grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health. ", + " (CNN) Greater consumption of coffee could lead to a longer life, according to two new studies published Monday.\n\nPeople who drank two to four cups a day had an 18% lower risk of death compared with people who did not drink coffee, according to the study. These findings are consistent with previous studies that had looked at majority white populations, said Veronica Wendy Setiawan, associate professor of preventative medicine at USC's Keck School of Medicine, who led the study on nonwhite populations.\n\n\"Given these very diverse populations, all these people have different lifestyles. They have very different dietary habits and different susceptibilities -- and we still find similar patterns,\" Setiawan said.\n\nThe new study shows that there is a stronger biological possibility for the relationship between coffee and longevity and found that mortality was inversely related to coffee consumption for heart disease,", + " cancer, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease.\n\nThe study on European countries revealed an inverse association between coffee and liver disease, suicide in men, cancer in women, digestive diseases and circulatory diseases. Those who drank three or more cups a day had a lower risk for all-cause death than people who did not drink coffee.\n\nBoth studies were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.\n\n\"We looked at multiple countries across Europe, where the way the population drinks coffee and prepares coffee is quite different,\" said Marc Gunter, reader in cancer epidemiology and prevention at Imperial College's School of Public Health in the UK, who co-authored the European study.\n\n\"The fact that we saw the same relationships in different countries is kind of the implication that its something about coffee rather than its something about the way that coffee is prepared or the way it's drunk,\" he said.\n\nThe biological benefits -- and caveats\n\nCoffee is a complex mixture of compounds,", + " some of which have been revealed in laboratories to have biological effects, Gunter said.\n\nStudies have shown that certain compounds have neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory properties that can help reduce risk for illnesses like Parkinson's disease.\n\nIn the European study, people who were drinking coffee tended to have lower levels of inflammation, healthier lipid profiles and better glucose control compared with those who weren't. It is still unclear which particular compounds provide health benefits, but Gunter said he would be interested in exploring this further.\n\nJUST WATCHED How to make the perfect cup of coffee Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH How to make the perfect cup of coffee 01:21\n\nBoth studies separated smokers from nonsmokers,", + " since smoking is known to reduce lifespan and is linked to various deceases. However, they found that coffee had inverse effects on mortality for smokers too.\n\n\"Smoking doesn't seem to blunt the effects of coffee,\" Gunter said. \"It didn't matter whether you smoked or not. There was still a potential beneficial affect of coffee on mortality.\"\n\nHowever, Dr. Alberto Ascherio, professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said people should be wary of this finding.\n\n\"Even if it was in some way true, it doesn't make sense to me, because by smoking, you increase your mortality several-fold.", + " Then, if you reduce it by 10% drinking coffee, give me a break,\" said Ascherio, who was not involved in the study.\n\n\"I think it's a dangerous proposition because it suggests that a smoker can counteract the effects of smoking by drinking coffee, which is borderline insane.\"\n\nThe studies complement work that has been done on coffee and mortality, he said, and it has been reasonably documented that coffee drinkers have a lower risk of death.\n\nWith all observations from previous studies, however, it's difficult to exclude the possibility that coffee drinkers are just healthier to begin with, Gunter said.\n\nPeople who avoid coffee, particularly in places like the US and Europe where drinking the beverage is very common,", + " may do so because they have health problems. Their higher mortality rate could be a result of them being less healthy to begin with.\n\nJoin the conversation See the latest news and share your comments with CNN Health on Facebook and Twitter.\n\n\"I think that the solid conclusion is that if you're a coffee drinker, keep drinking your coffee and be happy,\" Ascherio said. And if you're not? \"I think you can go on drinking your tea or water without a problem.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Gunter and Setiawan stand a bit more firmly on coffee as a health benefit.\n\n\"The takeaway message would be that drinking a couple cups of coffee a day doesn't do you any harm,", + " and actually, it might be doing you some good,\" he said.\n\n\"Moderate coffee consumption can be incorporated into a healthy diet and lifestyle,\" Setiawan said. \"This studies and the previous studies suggest that for a majority of people, there's no long term harm from drinking coffee.\"\n" + ], + "length": 20806, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 57, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 More than 25 years ago, Gary Hart's presidential campaign came to a screeching halt after a Miami Herald article investigating his supposed extramarital affairs and a photo of Hart with 29-year-old model Donna Rice sitting on his lap were published. Now, after years of speculation\u2014and refusal by the Herald political reporter to ID the caller who initially filled him in on the photo\u2014a Florida woman admits she's the one who phoned the Herald and also let the paper know that Rice was going to visit Hart in DC, the New York Times reports. Rice herself tells the Times that she thought former friend Dana Weems was somehow behind the leak, along with another pal, Lynn Armandt\u2014and when Times writer Matt Bai called Weems, she reportedly sighed, then replied, \"Yeah. That was me.\" (She also claims Armandt was standing next to her when she made the call, listening in.) The Herald story, photo, and ensuing scandal forced Hart to drop out of the running for the Democratic nomination (though the Washington Post disputes Bai's assertion that \"Hart was as close to a lock for the nomination\u2014and likely the presidency\u2014as any challenger of the modern era\"). Weems, who has health issues from multiple sclerosis and now sells raincoats online, says Hart was actually enchanted with her\u2014not Rice\u2014and that Rice pursued Hart because she wanted to be famous, while Hart's philandering behavior (especially the thought of him getting away with it and becoming president) made Weems \"sick to her stomach.\" She also tells the Times that she can't believe her secret has been safe all these years and that she was \"sorry to ruin [Hart's] life. I was young. I didn't know it would be that way.\" (Read the entire Times story here.)\n", + "docs": [ + "In the context of a fascinating, detailed account of the sex scandal that ended the presidential candidacy of Gary Hart, political journalist Matt Bai writes:\n\nBack then, Hart was as close to a lock for the nomination \u2014 and likely the presidency \u2014 as any challenger of the modern era. According to Gallup, Hart had a double-digit lead over the rest of the potential Democratic field among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. In a preview of the general election against the presumed Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush, Hart was polling over 50 percent among registered voters and beating Bush by 13 points, with only 11 percent saying they were undecided.", + " He would have been very hard to stop.\n\nThis is just wrong. Whoever won the Democratic nomination was highly unlikely to win the presidency, a topic that Gary King and I discuss in our epic-length 1993 paper, \u201cWhy Are American Presidential Election Campaign Polls So Variable When Votes Are So Predictable?\u201d You know who else was leading Bush in the polls by 13 points? Michael Dukakis, and you know what happened to him. When the election finally came around, Bush beat Dukakis by nearly eight percentage points. Would a switch from wimpy Dukakis to tough-guy Hart have led 8 percent of Bush\u2019s supporters to vote differently?", + " I don\u2019t think so, and I think it\u2019s fair to say that my view represents the overwhelming opinion of political scientists, following decades of research by Bob Erikson, Steven Rosenstone, Doug Hibbs and many others on the predictability of presidential elections.\n\nAs Jonathan Chait (a political reporter of the next generation after Bai, and more influenced by political science) wrote:\n\nParties and candidates will kill themselves to move the needle a percentage point or two in a presidential race. And again, the fundamentals determine the bigger picture, but within that big picture political tactics and candidate quality still matters around the margins.\n\nA percentage point, sure,", + " but overcoming an eight-point margin in the general election? I don\u2019t think so. As I wrote in my discussion with Chait, I\u2019m pretty sure that Mike Dukakis, David Mamet, Bill Clinton and the ghost of Lee Atwater will disagree with me on this one, but Dukakis actually performed just as well in 1988 as predicted based on the fundamentals. There is no evidence he was out-campaigned by Bush, nor is there evidence that Hart was so awesome that he could\u2019ve done so much better.\n\nLet me emphasize that although general elections for president are largely predictable and the evidence is that they are decided by partisan and economic conditions much more than by candidates,", + " the story is different for other sorts of elections. Here\u2019s something I wrote a few years ago on why are primaries so hard to predict.\n\nPolitical science and political reporting are complementary. The changing role of political media in the United States is an interesting and important topic, and it needs to be understood in the context of the immutable and anomalous details of particular examples, including the saga of Gary Hart. Hart\u2019s story is dramatic, and Bai may be correct that it forever changed American politics. But it almost certainly had no effect on the outcome of the 1988 presidential election. ", + " Back then, Hart was as close to a lock for the nomination \u2014 and likely the presidency \u2014 as any challenger of the modern era. According to Gallup, Hart had a double-digit lead over the rest of the potential Democratic field among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. In a preview of the general election against the presumed Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush, Hart was polling over 50 percent among registered voters and beating Bush by 13 points, with only 11 percent saying they were undecided. He would have been very hard to stop.\n\nHart was invariably described as a brilliant and serious man, perhaps the most visionary political mind of his generation,", + " an old-school statesman of the kind Washington had lost its capacity to produce.\n\n\u201cMust have been a hell of a backdrop,\u201d I said. Hart didn\u2019t respond, and after an awkward moment, I let it drop.\n\nAs anyone alive during the 1980s knows, Hart, the first serious presidential contender of the 1960s generation, was taken down and eternally humiliated by a scandal, a suspected affair with a beautiful blonde whose name, Donna Rice, had entered the cultural lexicon, along with the yacht \u2014 Monkey Business \u2014 near which she had been photographed on his lap. When they talked about him now in Washington,", + " Hart was invariably described as a brilliant and serious man, perhaps the most visionary political mind of his generation, an old-school statesman of the kind Washington had lost its capacity to produce. He warned of the rise of stateless terrorism and spoke of the need to convert the industrial economy into an information-and-technology-based one, at a time when few politicians in either party had given much thought to anything beyond communism and steel. But such recollections were generally punctuated by a smirk or a sad shake of the head. Hardly a modern scandal passed, whether it involved a politician or an athlete or an entertainer, that didn\u2019t evoke inevitable comparisons to Hart among reflective commentators.", + " In popular culture, Gary Hart would forever be that archetypal antihero of presidential politics: the iconic adulterer.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThe rest of the world was finished with Gary Hart, but I couldn\u2019t get his story out of my mind, which was why I ended up standing alongside him at Red Rocks on that summer day, like an archaeologist searching for shards of a lost political age. I had come to believe that we couldn\u2019t really understand the dispiriting state of our politics \u2014 and of our political journalism \u2014 without first understanding what transpired during that surreal and frenetic week in April nearly 30 years ago.\n\nThe Hart episode is almost universally remembered as a tale of classic hubris.", + " A Kennedy-like figure on a fast track to the presidency defies the media to find anything nonexemplary in his personal life, even as he carries on an affair with a woman half his age and poses for pictures with her, and naturally he gets caught and humiliated. How could he not have known this would happen? How could such a smart guy have been that stupid?\n\nOf course, you could reasonably have asked that same question of the three most important political figures of Hart\u2019s lifetime, all Democratic presidents thought of as towering successes. Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were adulterers, before and during their presidencies,", + " and we can safely assume they had plenty of company. In his 1978 memoir, Theodore White, the most prolific and influential chronicler of presidential politics in the last half of the 20th century, wrote that he was \u201creasonably sure\u201d that of all the candidates he had covered, only three \u2014 Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter \u2014 hadn\u2019t enjoyed the pleasure of \u201ccasual partners.\u201d He and his colleagues considered those affairs irrelevant.\n\nBy the late 1980s, however, a series of powerful, external forces in the society were colliding, creating a dangerous vortex on the edge of our politics. Hart didn\u2019t create that vortex.", + " He was, rather, the first to wander into its path.\n\nThe nation was still feeling the residual effects of Watergate, which 13 years earlier led to the first resignation of a sitting president. Richard Nixon \u2019s fall was shocking, not least because it was more personal than political, a result of instability and pettiness rather than pure ideology. And for this reason Watergate, along with the deception over what was really happening in Vietnam, had injected into presidential politics a new focus on private morality.\n\nSocial mores were changing, too. For most of the 20th century, adultery as a practice \u2014 at least for men \u2014 was rarely discussed but widely accepted.", + " Kennedy and Johnson governed during the era that \u201cMad Men\u201d would later portray, when the powerful man\u2019s meaningless tryst with a secretary was no less common than the three-martini lunch. Twenty years later, however, social forces unleashed by the tumult of the 1960s were rising up to contest this view. Feminism and the \u201cwomen\u2019s lib\u201d movement had transformed expectations for a woman\u2019s role in marriage, just as the civil rights movement had changed prevailing attitudes toward African-Americans.\n\nPhoto\n\nAs America continued to debate the Equal Rights Amendment for women into the 1980s, younger liberals \u2014 the same permissive generation that ushered in the sexual revolution and free love \u2014 were suddenly apt to see adultery as a kind of political betrayal,", + " and one that needed to be exposed. \u201cThis is the last time a candidate will be able to treat women as bimbos,\u201d is how the feminist Betty Friedan put it after Hart\u2019s withdrawal. (If only she\u2019d known.)\n\nPerhaps most salient, though, the nation\u2019s news media were changing in profound ways. When giants like White came up through the news business in the postwar years, the surest path to success was to gain the trust of politicians and infiltrate their world. Proximity to power and the information and insight derived from having it was the currency of the trade. By the 1980s, however,", + " Watergate and television had combined to awaken an entirely new kind of career ambition. If you were an aspiring journalist born in the 1950s, when the baby boom was in full swing, then you entered the business at almost exactly the moment when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post \u2014 portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the cinematic version of their first book, \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men\u201d \u2014 were becoming not just the most celebrated reporters of their day but very likely the wealthiest and most famous journalists in American history (with the possible exception of Walter Cronkite ). And what made Woodward and Bernstein so iconic wasn\u2019t proximity,", + " but scandal. They had actually managed to take down a mendacious American president, and in doing so they came to symbolize the hope and heroism of a new generation.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nIt would be hard to overstate the impact this had, especially on younger reporters. If you were one of the new breed of middle-class, Ivy League -educated baby boomers who had decided to change the world through journalism, then there was simply no one you could want to become more than Woodward or Bernstein, which is to say, there was no greater calling than to expose the lies of a politician, no matter how inconsequential those lies might turn out to be or in how dark a place they might be lurking.\n\nIt was around 8 p.m.", + " on Monday, April 27, 1987, when the phone rang on Tom Fiedler\u2019s desk at The Miami Herald. A woman he did not know was on the line. Ever since Hart\u2019s official announcement at Red Rocks two weeks before, reporters had been speculating among themselves about the state of Hart\u2019s marriage and rumors of affairs, and some of that speculation had begun to leak into the press. Fiedler, a prominent political reporter for The Herald, thought it beneath the media to traffic in such innuendo without any proof, and he published a front-page article that day saying as much. The woman on the phone had apparently just read it.\n\n\u201cYou know,", + " you said in the paper that there were rumors that Gary Hart is a womanizer,\u201d she told him. \u201cThose aren\u2019t rumors.\u201d And then a question: \u201cHow much do you guys pay for pictures?\u201d\n\nIn a subsequent conversation, the anonymous caller told Fiedler that a friend of hers had seen Hart aboard a chartered yacht at Turnberry Isle near Miami, and the two had started an affair on an overnight pleasure cruise to Bimini. Her friend had pictures of her and Hart on the boat that she had shown the caller. The caller never used the name Donna Rice, the 29-year-old commercial actress and pharmaceutical rep who would soon become the first woman dragged through the humiliation of a sex scandal during a presidential campaign.\n\nThe caller said there were phone calls between Hart and Rice.", + " Somehow, she knew they had been placed from phones in Georgia, Alabama and Kansas, and precisely when. She claimed that Hart had invited her friend to visit him in Washington, and her friend was going to stay with him that Friday night. \u201cMaybe you could fly to Washington and get the seat next to her,\u201d the anonymous caller suggested.\n\nFor decades after that call, just about everyone close to the events of that week, and everyone who wrote about them later, assumed that the caller was Lynn Armandt, the friend Rice brought along on the Monkey Business during the cruise to Bimini. This was a logical deduction, because Armandt would later profit from selling photos she took on that trip.", + " When I asked Fiedler about it last year, though, he told me that although he would continue to protect the identity of his source as he had for 26 years, he was willing to say flatly that it was not Armandt. Fiedler volunteered that he thought Rice knew who the tipster really was.\n\nThere\u2019s the narrative we think we know about the scandal, but in truth, the reporters who followed Hart weren\u2019t responding to his challenge.\n\nWhen I spoke to Rice a few months later, during the first of two long conversations, she told me that she had never figured out with any certainty who set all of this in motion in 1987.", + " But she had come to believe that Armandt was in cahoots with another friend of theirs in Miami \u2014 a woman named Dana Weems \u2014 who was on the boat for a party but didn\u2019t join them on the cruise to Bimini and thus escaped notice in contemporary accounts of the scandal. Rice had talked to Weems about her dalliance with Hart and showed her the photos from the cruise.\n\nDana Weems wasn\u2019t especially hard to find, it turned out. A clothing designer who did some costume work on movies in the early 1990s, she sold funky raincoats and gowns on a website called Raincoatsetc.com,", + " based in Hollywood, Fla. When she answered the phone after a couple of rings, I told her I was writing about Gary Hart and the events of 1987.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cOh, my God,\u201d she said. There followed a long pause.\n\n\u201cDid you make that call to The Herald?\u201d I asked her.\n\n\u201cYeah,\u201d Weems said with a sigh. \u201cThat was me.\u201d\n\nShe then proceeded to tell me her story, in a way that probably revealed more about her motives than she realized. In 1987, Armandt sold some of Weems\u2019s designs at her bikini boutique under a cabana on Turnberry Isle.", + " Like Rice, Weems had worked as a model, though she told me Rice wasn\u2019t nearly as successful as she was. Rice was an artificial beauty who was \u201cO.K. for commercials, I guess.\u201d\n\nWeems recalled going aboard Monkey Business on the last weekend of March for the same impromptu party at which Hart and his pal Billy Broadhurst, a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist, met up with Rice, but in her version of events, Hart was hitting on her, not on Rice, and he was soused and pathetic, and she wanted nothing to do with him, but still he followed her around the boat, hopelessly enthralled.", + "...\n\nBut Donna \u2014 she had no standards, Weems told me. Weems figured Donna wanted to be the next Marilyn Monroe, sleeping her way into the inner sanctum of the White House, and that\u2019s why she agreed to go on the cruise to Bimini. After that weekend, Donna wouldn\u2019t shut up about Hart or give the pictures a rest. It all made Weems sick to her stomach, especially this idea of Hart\u2019s getting away with it and becoming president. \u201cWhat an idiot you are!\u201d Weems said, as if talking to Hart through the years. \u201cYou\u2019re gonna want to run the country?", + " You moron!\u201d\n\nAnd so when Weems read Fiedler\u2019s story in The Herald, she decided to call him, while Armandt stood by, listening to every word. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize it was going to turn into this whole firecracker thing,\u201d she told me. It was Armandt\u2019s idea, Weems said, to try to get cash by selling the photos, and that\u2019s why she asked Fiedler if he might pay for them (though she couldn\u2019t actually remember much about that part of the conversation). Weems said she hadn\u2019t talked to either woman \u2014 Rice or Armandt \u2014 since shortly after the scandal.", + " She lived alone and used a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis. She was surprised her secret had lasted until now.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry to ruin his life,\u201d she told me, offhandedly, near the end of our conversation. \u201cI was young. I didn\u2019t know it would be that way.\u201d\n\n\u2018I\u2019m sorry to ruin his life,\u2019 Dana Weems told me, offhandedly, near the end of our conversation. \u2018I was young. I didn\u2019t know it would be that way.\u2019\n\nFiedler never had any doubt that Hart\u2019s marital infidelity, if it could be substantiated, was a story. Nor,", + " it seems, did anyone else at The Herald, where the question of newsworthiness was raised but quickly dispatched. In the reconstruction of how the story unfolded that Fiedler and his colleagues at the paper later published, there is no mention of any debate about whether a candidate\u2019s private life merited investigation.\n\nOn Friday, the day when Hart was supposed to meet with Rice at his Capitol Hill townhouse, The Herald dispatched Jim McGee, its top investigative reporter, to Washington. McGee, who at 34 could fairly be called one of the finest investigative reporters in all of American journalism, spent the flight to Washington stalking his fellow passengers,", + " walking up and down the aisle in search of women who looked as if they could plausibly be on their way to sleep with a presidential candidate. \u201cHe wondered how he would decide which woman to follow,\u201d The Herald\u2019s reporters later wrote, without a hint of realizing how creepy that sounded.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nOn the ground in Washington, McGee caught a taxi to Hart\u2019s home and took up a position on a park bench that afforded a clear view of the front door. It was 9:30 p.m. when he saw Hart leave the townhouse with a \u201cstunning\u201d blonde he recognized from the ticket counter in Miami.", + " Hart and the young woman promptly drove off, and McGee rushed to a pay phone across the street. He called his editors and Fiedler to ask for backup; the story was unfolding rapidly, and he needed more bodies to help with surveillance. McGee was still stationed on the street when, about two hours later, Hart and Rice returned from dinner and re-entered the townhouse. He never saw her leave and assumed she spent the night, although Hart\u2019s aides later said that Rice left through the rear door.\n\nFiedler awoke Saturday morning and hopped the first flight to Washington. He brought with him McGee\u2019s editor,", + " James Savage, and a photographer, Brian Smith. When you added in Doug Clifton, a reporter helping out the Washington bureau who had joined McGee for part of the stakeout Friday night, The Herald\u2019s undercover team now numbered five, along with at least two rental cars, on a block where maybe one or two residents could be spotted on the sidewalk at any given time in the afternoon. The odds of this kind of surveillance going undetected were not especially high.\n\nAbout 8:40 p.m. Saturday, Hart and Rice left the house and emerged into the adjacent alleyway, heading for the senator\u2019s car. The idea,", + " apparently, had been to meet Broadhurst and Armandt for dinner. It was then that Hart noticed things were amiss. The first reporter he spotted in the side alley was McGee, a 200-pound man who for some reason had decided to make himself inconspicuous by donning sunglasses and a hooded parka. At night. In May.\n\nMcGee, sensing he had been made, turned on his heels and ran, bumping into Fiedler, who, being the only reporter on the scene whom Hart actually knew from the campaign plane, had disguised himself in a tracksuit and was pretending to jog around every so often.", + " \u201cHe\u2019s right behind me,\u201d McGee whispered urgently. Fiedler immediately changed direction and jogged across the street, like a disoriented sprinter.\n\nAlarmed, Hart abandoned the dinner plan and led Rice back inside. He was certain he was being watched but mystified as to who might be watching. He peered out of his second-floor kitchen window and surveyed Sixth Street, S.E. Hart was by no means an expert in counterintelligence, but he had traveled behind the Iron Curtain, where Americans were routinely tracked by government agents, and he had spent considerable time in the protection of Secret Service agents who were always scanning the periphery for threats.", + " All of this was more than enough training for Hart to recognize the clownish stakeout that had all but taken over his street. He saw the five participants milling around, pretending to be strangers but then talking to one another, ducking into cars or \u2014 at least in Hart\u2019s telling, though The Herald team would dispute his account \u2014 disappearing behind the bushes. His bushes. He thought perhaps they were reporters, but how could he be sure? Maybe they worked for another campaign or for the Republicans.\n\nHart decided, at first anyway, to hunker down and wait. He called Broadhurst, at whose nearby townhouse Rice and Armandt were supposed to be staying that weekend,", + " and Broadhurst came over with Armandt and some barbecued chicken. After dinner, Hart instructed Broadhurst to gather up the women and leave via the back door. He would never see Donna Rice again.\n\nAt moments Hart thought that if he said just enough, then his tormentors would see the absurdity in what they were doing.\n\nLike a character in one of the spy novels he loved to read and write, Hart decided to outwit his surveillants and flush them into the open. It\u2019s not clear how he thought this was going to end, other than badly, but a cornered man does not think clearly. Hart put on a white sweatshirt and pulled the hood up over his thick hair.", + " At first, he got into his car and merged into Capitol Hill traffic. He expected to be followed, and he was \u2014 Smith, the photographer, was tailing close behind. Satisfied with this maneuver, Hart pulled over after a few blocks, emerged from the car and started walking back in the general direction of the townhouse. He detoured down a side street and walked twice around the block. Next Hart walked past the rental car in the front where McGee and Savage thought they were safely incognito.\n\nAccording to the writer Richard Ben Cramer, who chronicled these events in his classic campaign book, \u201cWhat It Takes,\u201d Hart made a show of writing down the license-", + "plate number in full view of the two reporters; The Herald didn\u2019t mention this detail, but it did report that Hart seemed \u201cagitated\u201d and appeared to yell over his shoulder at someone on the other side of the street as he walked away. Probably both accounts are true. In any event, McGee and Savage deduced from Hart\u2019s behavior that their undercover stakeout had been compromised. They could not write an article without at least trying to get his response. So after quickly conferring, they exited the car, followed Hart\u2019s path back up the alley alongside his row of townhouses and turned a corner. McGee, according to The Herald account,", + " \u201cflinched in surprise.\u201d There was Gary Hart, the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, leaning against a brick wall in his hoodie. He was waiting for them.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThere were no press aides or handlers, no security agents or protocols to be followed. There was no precedent for any reporter accosting a presidential candidate outside his home, demanding the details of what he was doing inside it. It was just Hart and his accusers, or at least two of them for the moment, facing off in an oil-stained alley, all of them trying to find their footing on the suddenly shifting ground of American politics.\n\nEight days later,", + " The Herald published a front-page reconstruction of the events leading up to and including that Saturday night. Written by McGee, Fiedler and Savage, the 7,000-plus-word article \u2014 Moby-Dick-like proportions by the standards of daily journalism \u2014 is remarkable reading. First, it\u2019s striking how much The Herald\u2019s account of its investigation consciously imitates, in its clinical voice and staccato cadence, Woodward and Bernstein\u2019s \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men.\u201d (\u201cMcGee rushed toward a pay telephone a block away to call editors in Miami. It was 9:33 p.m.\u201d) Clearly, the reporters and editors at The Herald thought themselves to be reconstructing a scandal of similar proportions,", + " the kind of thing that would lead to Pulitzers and movie deals. The solemn tone of the piece suggests that Fiedler and his colleagues imagined themselves to be the only ones standing between America and another menacing, immoral president; reading it, you might think Hart had been caught bludgeoning a beautiful young woman to death, rather than taking her to dinner.\n\nThe other fascinating thing about The Herald\u2019s reconstruction is that it captures, in agonizing detail, the very moment when the walls between the public and private lives of candidates, between politics and celebrity, came tumbling down forever. Even in the dispassionate tone of The Herald\u2019s narrative,", + " you can hear how chaotic and combative it was, how charged with emotion and pounding hearts.\n\n\u201cGood evening, senator,\u201d McGee began, recovering from his shock at seeing Hart standing in front of him. \u201cI\u2019m a reporter from The Miami Herald. We\u2019d like to talk to you.\u201d As The Herald relayed it: \u201cHart said nothing. He held his arms around his midsection and leaned forward slightly with his back against the brick wall.\u201d McGee said they wanted to ask him about the young woman staying in his house.\n\n\u201cNo one is staying in my house,\u201d Hart replied.\n\nHart may have surprised the reporters by choosing the time and place for their confrontation,", + " but it\u2019s not as if they weren\u2019t ready. They had conferred on a list of questions intended to back Hart up against a wall \u2014 which was now literally the situation. McGee reminded Hart that he and the woman had walked right past McGee earlier that evening on the way to his car. \u201cYou passed me on the street,\u201d McGee said.\n\n\u201cI may or may not have,\u201d Hart replied.\n\nMcGee asked him what his relationship was with the woman.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not involved in any relationship,\u201d Hart said carefully.\n\nPhoto\n\nSo why had they just seen Hart and the woman enter the townhouse together a few minutes earlier?\n\n\u201cThe obvious reason is I\u2019m being set up,\u201d Hart said,", + " his voice quivering.\n\nMcGee wanted to know if the woman was in Hart\u2019s house at that very moment. \u201cShe may or may not be,\u201d is how Hart answered, evading again. Savage then asked to meet her, and Hart said no.\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\nMcGee offered to explain the situation,", + " as if Hart had just woken up in a hospital or an asylum and might not have any idea what was happening. He said that the house had been under surveillance and that he had observed Hart with the woman the night before, in Hart\u2019s car. Where were they going?\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cI was on my way to take her to a place where she was staying,\u201d Hart said, referring to Broadhurst\u2019s townhouse nearby.\n\nSavage cut in and asked how long Hart had known the woman \u2014 \u201cseveral months\u201d was the response \u2014 and what her name was.\n\n\u201cI would suppose you would find that out,\u201d Hart said.\n\nHis voice was steadier now,", + " and the reporters noticed that his composure had returned. As would happen several times throughout the ordeal of the next week, and for long afterward, Hart was lurching between conflicting instincts. There were moments when he thought that if he said just enough, if he issued enough of a denial to explain himself, then his tormentors would see the absurdity in what they were doing. But then he would grow defiant. The hell with them, he would think. They were not entitled to know.\n\nFiedler made his way into the alley and joined his colleagues, making it three on one (or actually four on one, since Smith,", + " the photographer, was there, too). Looking back years later, Fiedler would recall Hart\u2019s besieged posture, the way he leaned back defensively, as if expecting to be punched.\n\nAs Fiedler watched, McGee hit Hart with questions about the phone calls he had made to Rice, which they knew about from the tipster (even though they still hadn\u2019t figured out her identity). Hart, whose suspicions about being set up must have now seemed well founded, didn\u2019t dare deny the calls, but he characterized them as \u201ccasual\u201d and \u201cpolitical\u201d and \u201cgeneral conversation.\u201d Then Fiedler jumped in. He asked Hart if he had taken this woman on a yachting trip in Florida.\n\nPhoto\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t remember,\u201d Hart said,", + " dubiously. You can imagine the vertigo he must have been experiencing as the details of his private life, things he had not disclosed even to his closest aides, just kept coming, one after the other. It probably dawned on him, right about then, that he should never have been in the alley, any more than he should have been on the yacht.\n\nFiedler reminded Hart that he had been at Red Rocks and had personally heard the speech. He quoted Hart\u2019s own words back to him, where Hart, alluding to the Iran -contra scandal rocking the Reagan administration, talked about running a campaign based on integrity and ethics and a higher standard.", + " If that were so, Fiedler wanted to know, then why was Fiedler having to stand in this alley, at this moment, doing something so beneath him? He pleaded with Hart to be more forthcoming.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve been very forthcoming,\u201d Hart said.\n\nWhen McGee pressed him again about the yacht and whether he was denying having met Rice there, Hart grew visibly irritated. \u201cI\u2019m not denying anything,\u201d he said. They were missing the point. He wasn\u2019t going to confirm or deny knowing Rice or having been on a chartered boat. Hart\u2019s stance was that none of it was anybody\u2019s business but his. When the reporters asked Hart to \u201cproduce\u201d the woman or this friend who was supposedly hosting her,", + " Hart said other people had a right to privacy, too.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t have to produce anyone,\u201d he told them.\n\nMcGee pulled out his last question, the one you save for the moment when there is nothing to be lost by asking it. He put the question point-blank to Hart: Had the senator had sex with the woman in the townhouse?\n\n\u201cThe answer is no,\u201d Hart said, more definitively than he had answered other questions. As Hart walked away, shaken and alone, and started back up the alley, Smith, the photographer, started clicking away. Hart whirled around.", + " This yielded the shots of him rumpled and recoiling, hiding in a hoodie like some perp who was about to have his head forcibly lowered into the back seat of a cruiser.\n\n\u201cWe don\u2019t need any of that,\u201d were Hart\u2019s parting words.\n\nThe next morning, on May 3, The Herald reporters published a front-page article about Hart\u2019s purported affair. At the end, they referred to a statement in which Hart challenged reporters interested in his personal life to follow him. Hart couldn\u2019t have known it at the time, but his words \u2014 \u201cfollow me around\u201d \u2014 would shadow him for the rest of his days. They would bury everything else he had ever said in public life.\n\nIn the history of Washington scandal,", + " only a few quotes \u2014 \u201cI am not a crook,\u201d \u201cI did not have sexual relations with that woman\u201d \u2014 have become as synonymous with a politician. In truth, though, Hart never issued any challenge to The Miami Herald\u2019s reporters, or to anybody else, really. The words were spoken weeks earlier to E. J. Dionne Jr., who was then the top political reporter for The New York Times and was writing a profile for this magazine. Dionne discussed a broad range of topics with Hart and then reluctantly turned to the rumors of affairs. Hart was exasperated and he finally told Dionne: \u201cFollow me around.", + " I don\u2019t care. I\u2019m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They\u2019d be very bored.\u201d\n\nHart said this in an annoyed and sarcastic sort of way, in an obvious attempt to make a point. He was \u201cserious\u201d about the sentiment, all right, but only to the extent that a man who had been twice separated from his wife and dated other women over the years \u2014 with the full knowledge of his friends in the press corps and without having seen a single word written about it at the time \u2014 could have been serious about such a thing. Hart might as well have been suggesting that Martians beam down and run his campaign,", + " for all the chance he thought there was that any reporter would actually resort to stalking him. Dionne certainly didn\u2019t take the comment literally, though he suspected others might. \u201cHe did not think of it as a challenge,\u201d Dionne would recall many years later. \u201cAnd at the time, I did not think of it as a challenge.\u201d\n\nPhoto\n\nAs it happened, Dionne\u2019s cover story was set to appear Sunday, May 3, the same day the Herald published its front-page expos\u00e9. No one at The Herald had a clue that Hart had issued any \u201cchallenge\u201d on the previous Monday when Fiedler heard from his anonymous tipster or when he continued to chase the story during the week.", + " All of this they did on their own, without any prodding from Hart.\n\nIn those days before the Internet, however, The Times circulated printed copies of its magazine to other news media a few days early, so editors and producers could pick out anything that might be newsworthy and publicize it in their own weekend editions or Sunday shows. When Fiedler boarded his flight to Washington Saturday morning, eager to join the stakeout, he brought with him the advance copy of Dionne\u2019s story, which had been sent to The Herald. Somewhere above the Atlantic seaboard, anyone sitting next to Fiedler would probably have seen him jolt upward in his seat as if suddenly receiving an electric shock.", + " There it was, staring up at him from the page \u2014 Hart explicitly inviting him and his colleagues to do exactly the kind of surveillance they had undertaken the night before.\n\nThe discovery of Hart\u2019s supposed challenge, which the Herald reporters took from the advance copy of The Times Magazine on Saturday night and inserted at the end of their Sunday blockbuster \u2014 so that the two articles, referring to the same quote, appeared on newsstands simultaneously \u2014 probably eased any reservations the editors in Miami might have had about pushing the story into print before they had a chance to identify Rice and try to talk to her. Soon enough, as The Herald would put it in their longer reconstruction a week later,", + " Gary Hart would be seen as \u201cthe gifted hero who had taunted the press to \u2018follow me around.\u2019 \u201d Everyone would know that Hart had goaded the press into hiding outside his townhouse and tracking his movements. Hart\u2019s quote appeared to justify The Herald\u2019s extraordinary investigation, and that\u2019s all that mattered.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThe difference here is far more than a technicality. Even when insiders and historians recall the Hart episode now, they recall it the same way: Hart issued his infamous challenge to reporters, telling them to follow him around if they didn\u2019t believe him, and then The Herald took him up on it.", + " Inexplicably, people believe, Hart set his own trap and then allowed himself to become ensnared in it. (When I spoke to Dana Weems, she repeatedly insisted to me that she had only called The Herald after reading Hart\u2019s \u201cfollow me around\u201d quote, which was obviously impossible.)\n\nAnd this version of events conveniently enabled The Herald\u2019s reporters and editors to completely sidestep some important and uncomfortable questions. As long as it was Hart, and not The Herald, who set the whole thing in motion, then it was he and not they who suddenly moved the boundaries between private and political lives. They never had to grapple with the complex issues of why Hart was subject to a kind of invasive,", + " personal scrutiny no major candidate before him had endured, or to consider where that shift in the political culture had led us. Hart had, after all, given the media no choice in the matter.\n\nI had a chance to talk to Fiedler about this over lunch one day in the spring of 2013. We ate at a French restaurant near the campus of Boston University, where Fiedler, who went on to run The Herald before his retirement, was now installed as dean of the College of Communication.\n\nFiedler explained to me that while he knew no political reporter had ever undertaken this kind of surveillance on a presidential candidate or written an article about a possible extramarital affair,", + " he had never doubted that Hart\u2019s liaison with Rice, if it could be proved, was a legitimate story. Fielder\u2019s view \u2014 a view shared by a lot of his younger colleagues and informed, no doubt, by the lingering ghosts of Nixon \u2014 was that it wasn\u2019t a reporter\u2019s job to decide which aspects of a candidate\u2019s character were germane to the campaign and which weren\u2019t. It was the job of reporters to vet potential presidents by offering up as detailed a dossier about that person as they could assemble, and it was the voters\u2019 job to rule on relevance, one way or the other.\n\nFiedler readily acknowledged that the order of events pertaining to the \u201cfollow me around\u201d quote had since become jumbled in the public mind,", + " and his expression was genuinely regretful. He mostly blamed the way the TV news programs that weekend juxtaposed The Herald\u2019s reporting with the quote from The Times Magazine, as if one had led to the other. That had really been the beginning of the myth, he said, and from that time on, people were confused about which came first \u2014 \u201cfollow me around\u201d or The Herald investigation. When I asked why he had never tried to correct the record, Fiedler shrugged sadly. \u201cI don\u2019t know what I would need to do,\u201d he said.\n\nIf Nixon\u2019s resignation created the character culture in American politics, then Hart\u2019s undoing marked the moment when political reporters ceased to care about almost anything else.\n\nThen I mentioned to Fiedler that I had done a web search on his name recently and been sent to his biographical page on the B.U.", + " website. And this is what it said: \u201cIn 1987, after presidential hopeful Gary Hart told journalists asking about marital infidelity to follow him around, Fiedler and other Herald reporters took him up on the challenge and exposed Hart\u2019s campaign-killing affair with a Miami model.\u201d Why did his own web page explicitly repeat something he knew to be untrue?\n\nFiedler recoiled in his seat and winced. He looked mortified. \u201cYou know what?\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t know that. Honestly. I\u2019m serious.\u201d He stared at me for another beat, stunned. \u201cWow.\u201d I knew he meant it.", + " I was surprised to find that for more than a year afterward \u2014 until just last month \u2014 Fiedler hadn\u2019t changed a word.\n\nIn the days after the Herald story, Hart continued on to New Hampshire, where photographers and political reporters, who until then had always observed some sense of decorum, shoved one another aside and leapt over shrubs in an effort to get near the wounded candidate. It was there, at a carnival-like news conference on Wednesday, May 6, that Paul Taylor, a star reporter for The Washington Post, publicly asked Hart the question that no presidential candidate in America to that point had ever been asked, let alone from one of the country\u2019s most admired newspapers:", + " \u201cHave you ever committed adultery?\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nHart stumbled to answer and ultimately said he shouldn\u2019t have to. What he didn\u2019t know then was that Taylor\u2019s colleagues at The Post \u2014 acting at the direction of the paper\u2019s legendary editor and Watergate hero, Ben Bradlee \u2014 were already unearthing evidence of a relationship with another woman. By Thursday, Hart was back in Colorado, news helicopters buzzing over his house like something out of Vietnam, and his campaign was through.\n\nThe most enduring image of that time, of course, is the infamous photo of Rice sitting on Hart\u2019s lap, which Armandt snapped on a crowded dock in Bimini during that overnight cruise and later sold to The National Enquirer.", + " In it, Rice is wearing a short white dress; Hart is wearing a \u201cMonkey Business crew\u201d T-shirt, along with a startled, crooked grin. Most people who lived through the event, and some who covered it, will tell you that the photo is what provided irrefutable evidence of the affair and drove Hart from the race. But the photo didn\u2019t surface until nearly three weeks after Hart suspended his candidacy. It was a final indignity, to be sure, but it had nothing to do with his decision to quit.\n\nIf Nixon\u2019s resignation created the character culture in American politics, then Hart\u2019s undoing marked the moment when political reporters ceased to care about almost anything else.", + " By the 1990s, the cardinal objective of all political journalism had shifted from a focus on agendas to a focus on narrow notions of character, from illuminating worldviews to exposing falsehoods. If post-Hart political journalism had a motto, it would be: \u201cWe know you\u2019re a fraud somehow. Our job is to prove it.\u201d\n\nAs an industry, we aspired chiefly to show politicians for the impossibly flawed human beings they are: a single-minded pursuit that reduced complex careers to isolated transgressions. As the former senator Bob Kerrey, who has acknowledged participating in an atrocity as a Navy Seal in Vietnam,", + " told me once, \u201cWe\u2019re not the worst thing we\u2019ve ever done in our lives, and there\u2019s a tendency to think that we are.\u201d That quote, I thought, should have been posted on the wall of every newsroom in the country, just to remind us that it was true.\n\nPredictably, politicians responded to all this with a determination to give us nothing that might aid in the hunt to expose them, even if it meant obscuring the convictions and contradictions that made them actual human beings. Each side retreated to its respective camp, where they strategized about how to outwit and outflank the other, occasionally to their own benefit but rarely to the voters\u2019. Maybe this made our media a sharper guardian of the public interest against liars and hypocrites.", + " But it also made it hard for any thoughtful politician to offer arguments that might be considered nuanced or controversial. It drove a lot of potential candidates with complex ideas away from the process, and it made it easier for a lot of candidates who knew nothing about policy to breeze into national office, because there was no expectation that a candidate was going to say anything of substance anyway.\n\nHart might as well have been suggesting that Martians beam down and run his campaign, for all the chance he thought there was that any reporter would actually resort to stalking him.\n\nGary Hart, meanwhile, has continued to try to influence the issues of the day. Now a robust 77,", + " he has written 15 books since 1987, including three novels, and now serves on voluntary commissions for the secretaries of state and defense. But he never said much publicly about the scandal or admitted to having an affair, and he never really recovered, politically or emotionally.\n\nA few years ago, during one of our many conversations in the upstairs, book-lined study in Hart\u2019s Colorado home, I asked him whether he ever felt a sense of relief at having not actually become president. This was what people said still \u2014 that he allowed himself to be caught because he was ambivalent about the job.\n\n\u201cIt was a huge disappointment,\u201d Hart said,", + " shaking his head. \u201cA huge disappointment.\u201d\n\nLee Hart, to whom he has now been married for more than a half century, had entered the study and was refilling our water glasses, and she overheard him.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s why he accepts every invitation where someone wants him to speak,\u201d she told me. \u201cEvery time he can make any kind of a contribution, he does it, because he thinks he\u2019s salving his conscience. Or salving his place after death or something.\u201d She appeared to try to stop herself from continuing, but couldn\u2019t quite do it. \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d she said.", + " \u201cIt\u2019s been very difficult.\u201d\n\n\u201cIs that why I give speeches?\u201d Hart said defensively.\n\n\u201cNo, no,\u201d Lee answered quickly. \u201cBut you do things when you\u2019re tired to the bone that you shouldn\u2019t be doing.\u201d\n\nI asked Hart what it was he might have to feel guilty about. It seemed we were veering close to the boundary beyond which he had always refused to travel.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t feel guilty,\u201d he said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have anything to do with salving my conscience.\u201d\n\n\u201cNo, I don\u2019t mean your conscience,\u201d Lee said.\n\nI asked Lee what she had meant to say.\n\n\u201cGary feels guilty,\u201d Lee said finally.", + " \u201cBecause he feels like he could have been a very good president.\u201d\n\n\u201cI wouldn\u2019t call it guilt,\u201d Hart said.\n\n\u201cNo. Well.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s not guilt, babe,\u201d he protested. \u201cIt\u2019s a sense of obligation.\u201d\n\n\u201cYeah, O.K.,\u201d Lee said, sounding relieved. \u201cThat\u2019s better. Perfect.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou don\u2019t have to be president to care about what you care about,\u201d Hart said.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s what he could have done for this country that I think bothers him to this very day,\u201d Lee said.\n\n\u201cWell, at the very least, George W. Bush wouldn\u2019t have been president,\u201d Hart said ruefully.", + " This sounded a little narcissistic, but it was, in fact, a hard premise to refute. Had Hart bested George H. W. Bush in 1988, as he was well on his way to doing, it\u2019s difficult to imagine that Bush\u2019s aimless eldest son would have somehow ascended from nowhere to become governor of Texas and then president within 12 years\u2019 time.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cAnd we wouldn\u2019t have invaded Iraq,\u201d Hart went on. \u201cAnd a lot of people would be alive who are dead.\u201d A brief silence surrounded us. Hart sighed loudly, as if literally deflating.", + " \u201cYou have to live with that, you know?\u201d ", + " This article was originally published on May 10, 1987.\n\n\"You know, you said in the paper that there were rumors that Gary Hart is a womanizer, \" the woman told Miami Herald Political Editor Tom Fiedler.\n\n\"Those aren't rumors. How much do you guys pay for pictures?\"\n\nGary Hart, 50, announced his quest for the presidency April 13 at the foot of the Rocky Mountains with a promise as lofty as the backdrop: \"All of us must try to hold ourselves to the very highest standards of integrity and ethics, and soundness of judgment...\"\n\nHe began as the front-runner with everything in his favor.", + " Polls showed him not only winning the Democratic nomination, but handily beating George Bush -- the GOP's early favorite -- in a theoretical matchup.\n\nThe former Colorado senator surrounded himself with the brightest minds in politics. He showed a new surefootedness, the product of having run the course once before, in 1984. The gold ring seemed within reach.\n\nAnd the voice on the telephone was offering evidence to The Herald that could undo it all.\n\nThe call was the beginning of one of the fastest, most shocking unravelings of a presidential campaign in American history. The saga has elements of a prime-time soap opera: the Marlboro-man handsome candidate,", + " the long-suffering wife, the lust for power, the blond poster model from Miami Vice, the overnight trip to Bimini -- capped by a weekend in Washington.\n\nThe story also epitomized the painful collision between a person's privacy and the voters' need to know. In following a tip, The Herald involved itself in a controversial stakeout. Later, while The Herald concentrated on reporting what it saw, Hart's followers focused on what the reporters might have missed. Even now, the newspaper concedes that the watch was not airtight (Story, Page 14A.).\n\nWhen the end to Hart's campaign came at noon Friday,", + " there remained the elements of Greek tragedy. The gifted hero who had taunted the press to \"follow me around... it will be boring\" was felledby hubris.\n\n\"Gary Hart is having an affair with a friend of mine, \" the caller said, leveling a charge that the pair has denied. \"We don't need another president who lies like that.\"\n\n1.\n\nRUMORS OF\n\nWOMANIZING\n\nThe story behind the story began two weeks before the call, on the day Hart formally announced that he was a candidate. A profile in Newsweek that week made passing reference to his troubled 28-year marriage to Lee and to rumors of infidelity.", + " A former adviser was quoted as saying that Hart could have a problem in this campaign \"if he can't keep his pants on.\"\n\nThe article triggered a barrage of similar stories in other newspapers. Suddenly, the candidate who promised to fashion a campaign on the power of his intellect was dealing with charges about the power of his libido.\n\nYet no article backed up the allegation with an accusation. \"It's hard to disprove rumors if you don't know where they come from, \" Hart complained to Fiedler, who has covered him since 1984.\n\nFiedler, 41, is a 16-year veteran journalist who first tasted national politics when assigned to cover part of the 1972 George Wallace campaign.", + " He dealt with both Hart's problem and the journalistic ethical questions it raised in a lengthy front- page article. On balance, the Monday, April 27, article was sympathetic to Hart's plight:\n\n\"If I was editing Newsweek, \" it quoted journalism professor Bruce Swain as saying, \"I might have put a reporter on (the womanizing rumors) for a week to see if we could either report it directly, or dispatch it.\"\n\nFiedler wrote: \"In a harsh light, the media reports themselves are rumor-mongering, pure and simple.\"\n\n2.\n\nTHE\n\nCALLER\n\nFiedler stayed later than normal that Monday wading through papers accumulated from a routine political reporting trip to several cities.", + " He was about to leave about 8 p.m. when his telephone rang.\n\nAt first the caller seemed to be taunting him, refusing to give her name but hinting that she had a secret she might let him share. The caller had read the article and seemed alternately outraged and amused by Hart's statements of being an innocent victim of rumors.\n\nShe had proof that Hart was having an affair, she said. Then, with a nervous laugh, she asked how much The Herald was willing to pay for a picture. To Fiedler, this was just another crank call he was in no mood to take.\n\nHe told her he resented her mocking tone.", + " If what she said was true, Fiedler said, then she had better pause and consider the gravity of her charge.\n\nShe asked whether Hart might win the nomination and the election. He told her about the polls. She asked whether she could stay anonymous. He said he saw no need to learn her name if she gave him information that he could confirm independently.\n\nFiedler told her to sleep on it and call him back if she wanted to proceed on that basis.\n\nOn Tuesday morning at 10:30, his telephone rang again. It was the caller. There was no jocularity. She was nervous but intent on helping.", + " She was a \"liberal Democrat, \" she said, but she couldn't tolerate someone who would say one thing publicly and do another privately. The nation had just seen that happen with President Reagan and the Iranian arms sales, she said.\n\nThe details of the alleged relationship emerged during that 90-minute call, terminated only because she had an appointment to keep. She placed Hart and an \"older man named Bill who said he was Hart's lawyer\" at a yacht party several weeks before.\n\nAs many as 50 people -- most of them involved in acting, modeling or the music business -- partied on the yacht, she said. \"They weren't the kind of people you would think a presidential candidate would want to be around,", + " \" the caller said, admitting that she was among them.\n\nHart was initially attracted to her, the caller said, but she rebuffed him, disgusted by his demeanor. Her friend, however, seemed fascinated by him.\n\n\"They spent a lot of time together that day, and when we left she gave him her phone number, \" the caller said.\n\nHart acted on the gesture. He called and invited the friend out on \"a cruise, \" she said. They went somewhere and stopped in a port overnight, but the caller didn't know where. She knew only that her friend was by then enthralled with Hart and in the weeks that followed eagerly displayed pictures of the pair together at that port.\n\nThese were the pictures she wanted to sell the night before,", + " she said. Fiedler still declined. \"Politicians have their pictures taken with strangers all the time, \" he said. \"It proves nothing.\"\n\nThen, the woman said, there were all the telephone calls. Hart called frequently from the campaign trail, saying each time where he was and where he was headed. The caller knew the places from which the calls came: Georgia, Alabama, Kansas. She knew the dates.\n\nIn the most recent calls, the woman said, Hart had invited her friend to spend the coming weekend with him at his townhouse in Washington. They were to meet Friday night.\n\nThe caller demanded to stay out of the story and continued to withhold her name.", + " But she was sure that if Fiedler would only meet her friend and chat for about 20 minutes, the friend would tell him everything about her fling with Hart. \"She's really outgoing, \" the caller said. \"Maybe you could fly to Washington on the plane and get the seat next to her?\"\n\nFine, Fiedler said. He asked for the flight information.\n\n\"I'll get it and call you back, \" she said. It was 12:15 p.m. Tuesday. She didn't call back.\n\n3.\n\nCHECKING\n\nIT OUT\n\nFiedler began checking the caller's information against Hart's schedule.", + " Every date and place squared. Hart, indeed, had stayed in Miami the weekend of the yacht party following a fund- raiser at the home of Miami lawyer Joel Karp.\n\nThe caller fixed the date of the yacht party by remembering she had attended the movie premier of Making Mr. Right on Miami Beach the night before.\n\nFiedler was impressed with the accuracy of much of what he had been given. But he knew it remained conceivable that a campaign dirty trickster could have gotten Hart's schedule and elaborately fabricated the story.\n\nThere remained three points that seemed wrong to him.\n\nFirst, the caller said Hart and her friend were to meet in Washington on Friday night and would be at Hart's townhouse.", + " The copy of Hart's schedule available to Fiedler showed that Hart was to be in Iowa on Friday and in Kentucky on Saturday for a Kentucky Derby party.\n\nSecond, Fiedler also thought Hart lived in Bethesda, Md., not in Washington.\n\nAnd third, he was baffled by the caller's description of \"Bill, \" the man with Hart. Normally, Hart travels with Bill Shore, a man in his mid-30s. The caller said this Bill was \"really old looking.\"\n\nNonetheless, Fiedler informed City Editor John Brecher and Investigations Editor James Savage of the call. He let his doubts go, expecting another call.\n\nBy Friday,", + " the continuing silence became tormenting. Fiedler was tethered to his phone, hoping it would ring. He decided to try to assuage his minor doubts. Fiedler telephoned Hart headquarters in Denver and asked for the candidate's weekend schedule, saying that he might want to go to the Kentucky event to cover Hart.\n\nThe Kentucky stop has been scrubbed, Hart's scheduler said. \"Where is he going to be this weekend?\" Fiedler asked.\n\n\"He's going to take some time off in Washington, \" came the reply.\n\n\"Where does he stay in Washington? Does he still have his house in Bethesda?\" Fiedler asked.\n\n\"No.", + " They've sold that. They have a townhouse on Capitol Hill.\"\n\nFiedler's mind pictured a slot machine with everything lining up. He rushed to pass the information on to Savage.\n\n4.\n\nGO OR\n\nNO GO?\n\nWhat Fiedler learned from the caller persuaded Savage, 47, that the tip was worth pursuing. But without a flight number -- indeed, without the address of Hart's townhouse -- it wasn't clear how to pursue it. There were five flights between Miami and Washington that Friday night. The woman was to be on one of them.\n\nBut which one? How do you spot her? The caller said she was blond,", + " in her late 20s, with a rich Southern drawl. She was an actress with an appearance on Miami Vice to her credit. That was not enough to go on. And even if she is seen on the plane, what then?\n\nSavage summoned investigative reporter Jim McGee, 34, into his office a few minutes before 5 p.m. that Friday. By then, Hart was in the air between Iowa to Washington. If the caller was right, the Miami woman would be leaving at any time to join him.\n\nMcGee asked Fiedler to describe the phone call again.\n\n\"Do you believe her?\" McGee asked.\n\n\"Yes,", + " \" Fiedler said.\n\nMcGee went back to Savage.\n\n\"It feels right, \" McGee said. \"I say let's do it.\"\n\nSavage said, \"Let's go.\"\n\nOf the five flights, only two were nonstop. McGee guessed that the woman would catch one of those, narrowing the odds. The first left Miami at 5:30; the next at 7:40. It was then 5 p.m.\n\nWith just a credit card and the clothes he wore, McGee ran out of the Herald building and, luckily, immediately saw an empty cab at the nearest intersection. \"If there had been two red lights,", + " he would have missed the plane, \" Savage said later.\n\nMeanwhile, Fiedler was coming up dry in finding Hart's address. His calls kept coming back, \"Bethesda.\" Then, as McGee raced to the airport, a Senate staff member called Fiedler on an unrelated matter.\n\n\"By the way, do you know where Gary Hart lives?\" Fiedler asked Ken Klein, press secretary to Sen. Bob Graham.\n\n\"Sure, \" Klein said. \"Buddy Shorestein (Graham's chief of staff) rents the basement apartment from him.\"\n\n5.\n\nFLIGHT TO\n\nWASHINGTON\n\nMcGee ran through Miami International Airport and reached the gate in time to hear the final boarding call for Eastern Flight 996.\n\nThat's when he first saw the woman with shoulder-length blond hair.", + " She was standing at the ticket counter, and she was stunning. Hanging from her arms was a bulky, distinctive purse, with shiny stripes across a dark background. She seemed to be in the company of another young woman, also blond, but not as attractive.\n\nOn the airplane, McGee sat in seat 19D. Across the aisle and a few rows ahead sat the blond woman with the purse. Farther forward, near the bulkhead, sat her friend from the counter. McGee noticed a third blond woman on the plane who was also attractive, but seemed younger.\n\nMcGee figured that either the woman with the purse or the younger woman was most likely to be an actress.", + " He wondered how he would decide which woman to follow.\n\nDuring the flight, McGee walked up the aisle twice, passing each woman slowly to fix her face in his mind. At one point, the woman with the purse rose from her seat and walked toward her friend near the bulkhead. They arranged to sit next to each other and for the rest of the flight talked animatedly.\n\nThe jet landed at 8:01 p.m. at Washington's National Airport. McGee caught up with the blond woman with the purse as she reached the baggage claim area. She was greeted by a woman friend, a brunet.\n\nThe younger blond was met by a young man in his 20s.", + " They joined in a passionate embrace.\n\nThere was no Gary Hart. No chauffeur. Nobody who looked like a campaign aide. McGee feared he had taken the wrong flight.\n\nHe walked to a pay telephone and dialed the Knight-Ridder Bureau in Washington. He was put through to News Editor Douglas Clifton, 44, who had just transferred to Washington from The Herald. Fiedler had given Clifton the Hart townhouse address, and Clifton relayed it to McGee. He told him he would help watch Hart's home. Clifton agreed to meet him later in the evening.\n\nMcGee took a cab from the airport and got out at Sixth and E,", + " SE. He walked around the block once and came up the back alley behind Hart's house.\n\nFrom what he could see, it would not be easy to remain undetected while watching Hart's house. It sat in the middle of a dense row of townhouses that sat back from a picturesque, but intimate, residential street. It was brightly lit by street lights. People walked their dogs at all hours. And there was a steady flow of car traffic.\n\nThere was a city park one block away with benches positioned so that McGee could see whether anyone came or went from the front of Hart's townhouse. Facing the park was a District of Columbia police station.\n\n6.\n\nTHE\n\nOBSERVATIONS\n\nAbout 9:", + "30 p.m., McGee was across the street and roughly six doors from Hart's home when he heard a sound. It might have been the front door opening.\n\nFrom Hart's townhouse emerged a trim, well-built man with black hair. He wore a white long-sleeve dress shirt and dark slacks. With him was a blond woman.\n\nMcGee could see the woman clearly. She had the same blond hair he had seen up close at the ticket counter in Miami. She was wearing the same clothes he had seen on the plane. She was carrying the same purse.\n\nThe man was Gary Hart.\n\nMcGee, who had never expected to see the woman from the plane again,", + " was stunned. He couldn't believe it was the same woman.\n\nThe anonymous tip was becoming a news story. And events were moving faster than anyone had anticipated.\n\nMcGee rushed toward a pay telephone a block away to call editors in Miami. It was 9:33 p.m.\n\nMcGee reached Executive Editor Heath Meriwether at home. The tip was checking out, McGee said. Was McGee sure? Yes, he said, he had just seen Hart with a woman who had flown from Miami on his flight. She fit the description given by the source. We need more reporters, McGee said; we need a photographer.\n\nMcGee called Savage,", + " who wasn't home, and Fiedler, who was dumbfounded by the news. Fiedler said he'd get on the next plane out. But there were no more flights to Washington that night. There would be no additional help until the next day.\n\nMcGee returned to Hart's street. Clifton, the Knight-Ridder news editor, arrived about 10 p.m. and took up a position in the rear.\n\nAn hour passed. McGee and Clifton conferred and decided that two men hanging around a neighborhood were too obvious. Clifton took a cab to National Airport to rent a car.\n\nMcGee called Savage,", + " who was arranging for photographer Brian Smith and Fiedler to join Savage on the first plane in the morning.\n\nAs he spoke on the telephone, McGee caught sight of something moving out of the corner of his eye. He glanced up the street, and the series of coincidences that drove the story continued.\n\nMcGee spotted Hart's car driving slowly through the intersection.\n\n\"I think I see them again, \" he told Savage. He hung up the phone and ran back to the street.\n\nMcGee slowed to a quick stroll as he approached Hart's house. It was 11:17 p.m.\n\nHart had parked his car around the corner and was walking toward the front door with the blond woman.", + " McGee, walking toward him but on the other side of the street, could distinctly see Hart and the blond woman. The same purse glinted under the street light.\n\nHart said later that the woman left in 15 to 20 minutes. McGee was alone outside. He did not see her leave from the front entrance. Clifton was returning from the airport with the rental car.\n\n7.\n\nTHE\n\nWATCH\n\nSaturday dawned as a bright spring day, warm with the scent of flowers in the air. The neighborhood around Hart's townhouse awoke early.\n\nIn the early hours, Clifton watched the front while McGee watched the back street.\n\nInvestigations Editor Savage,", + " photographer Smith and reporter Fiedler caught pre-dawn flights to Washington and discussed their objectives during the flight. Fiedler circled a passage in a New York Times Magazine article slated for Sunday publication and handed it to Savage.\n\n\"Follow me around, I don't care, \" Hart was quoted as saying. \"I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored.\"\n\nThey arrived in Washington at 10:05 a.m. and reached the street in front of Hart's townhouse about 11. Smith and Savage parked on opposite corners with a clear view of Hart's car,", + " but a partially obstructed view of the front door. Fiedler parked on the street behind the townhouse, where he could watch the alley entrance.\n\nThe reporters considered it crucial that at least one other staff member identify Hart and the woman to confirm what McGee had seen the night before.\n\nLater, Hart denounced the watch as \"spotty.\" McGee was alone while Clifton went for the car Friday night, no one was watching the townhouse from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m., the back entrance wasn't covered at all times, and the view of the front door was sometimes blocked.\n\nThe reporters never considered the stakeout airtight.", + " The words \"around the clock\" surveillance were struck from the story's initial draft.\n\n\"It's possible\" the woman could have slipped out of the house, Savage later told The New York Times.\n\nIn midafternoon, there was a flurry of activity outside the Hart townhouse involving a maroon sedan that double-parked in front. Smith hurriedly took up pursuit of the car.\n\nIt traveled a few blocks and parked in front of a church. A couple -- definitely not Hart and the blond woman -- got out. \"False alarm, \" Smith said.\n\n8.\n\nTHE\n\nDISCOVERY\n\nAt 8:40 p.m., the front of the townhouse was bathed in the orange glow of security lighting.", + " The back street remained dark, shaded by large trees. McGee strolled toward the rear alley driveway.\n\nHe stopped in his tracks as he saw Hart and the blond woman emerge from the alley that led to Hart's garage entrance. McGee turned on his heels, picked up his pace, walked past the alley and headed toward the corner where Hart's car was parked.\n\nAs he rounded the corner, Fiedler, who had changed into a running outfit, jogged by him. \"He's right behind me, \" McGee whispered hoarsely. Fiedler, who knows Hart from the campaign trail, crossed the street to the park to avoid recognition.\n\nHart's hands were thrust in his pockets,", + " and he looked rapidly about the neighborhood. The blond woman clutched his right arm as they walked.\n\nHart appeared on guard. He walked a few feet, stopped, then walked on. When he and the woman reached his car, instead of getting inside, they turned and retreated down the block and into the front entrance.\n\n\"He might have recognized me from last night, \" McGee told Savage.\n\nMinutes later, Hart emerged alone, strode directly to his car, got in and pulled into traffic. Smith, the photographer, followed Hart in his car.\n\nHart went only a few blocks more before parking and walking back toward his block,", + " although not directly. He walked down a side street, turned a corner and promptly sat down. Clifton, following about 50 feet behind him, turned the corner and encountered Hart looking directly at him. Clifton continued on.\n\nHart again circled the block, this time approaching his townhouse toward his front door. He walked directly past the car in which McGee and Savage sat. To them, he seemed agitated. He appeared to yell over his shoulder toward someone on the other side of the street.\n\nWhen Hart entered the alley behind his townhouse, Savage turned to McGee. \"I think we should talk to him right now.\" Hart clearly knew he was being watched.\n\n\"It's your call,", + " \" Savage said.\n\n\"Let's do it, \" said McGee.\n\n9.\n\nTHE\n\nCONFRONTATION\n\nMcGee and Savage walked up the dark alley following Hart. McGee turned the corner at the end of the alley and flinched in surprise. Gary Hart stood directly around the corner, leaning against a brick fence. Both men were startled.\n\n\"Good evening, Senator, \" McGee said. \"I'm a reporter from The Miami Herald. We'd like to talk to you.\" Savage introduced himself.\n\nHart said nothing. He held his arms around his midsection and leaned forward slightly with his back against the brick wall.", + " He was wearing a white sweater jacket and slacks.\n\nWe'd like to ask you about the young woman staying in your house, McGee said.\n\n\"No one is staying in my house, \" Hart said.\n\nWe saw a woman go in your house at 8:40 p.m. You passed me on the street here, McGee said.\n\n\"I may or may not have, \" Hart said.\n\nWhat is your relationship with the woman in your townhouse? McGee asked.\n\n\"I'm not involved in any relationship, \" Hart said.\n\nSo why did we just see her and you go back into the townhouse?\n\n\"The obvious reason is I'm being set up,", + " \" Hart said. His voice quivered.\n\nIs she in your house, Senator?\n\n\"She may or may not be\" Hart said.\n\nSavage asked whether they could go to his house to meet the young woman and continue the interview. Hart refused.\n\nIf she is not in your house, how did she leave? Is she staying with you?\n\n\"She's been here in Washington over the weekend, \" Hart said.\n\nSenator, let me explain, McGee said. We've had your house under surveillance since early last evening. I was standing near the front of your house last night at 9:30 p.m. I saw you come out of your house with a blond woman.", + " You got into your car, you drove up the street, you got stopped at the red light. I walked alongside your car.\n\nHart listened, occasionally nodding his head.\n\nSenator, where were you going?\n\n\"I was on my way to take her to a place where she was staying, \" Hart said.\n\nSavage cut in: How long have you known her?\n\n\"Several months, \" Hart said.\n\nWhat is her name?\n\n\"I would suppose you would find that out.\"\n\nMcGee: Senator, at 11:17 p.m. I was again directly across from the front of your house and I saw you come walking up the street with the blond woman.", + " You had parked your car at the corner and you walked up the street and entered your house.\n\n\"She came back to pick up some things that she had left, \" Hart said.\n\nHow long did she stay?\n\n\"Ten or 15 minutes, \" Hart said.\"\n\nHow did she leave? Savage asked.\n\n\"I don't remember.\"\n\nSenator, this is important. Can you remember how she left? Is it possible you called a cab for her? Savage asked.\n\n\"I don't remember\" Hart said.\n\nWho is this woman? McGee asked.\n\n\"She is a friend of a friend of mine, \" Hart said. \"... A guest of a friend of mine.\"\n\nMcGee said he didn't understand.", + " He went over the last observation again. Tell us again why they returned together.\n\n\"She left some things in the house, \" Hart said.\n\nSavage broke in: What is the nature of your relationship? \"I have no relationship with the woman, \" Hart said. \"She is not staying with me.\" It was, he said, \"nothing personal.\"\n\nHart seemed to gain composure as he spoke. Fiedler joined the interview.\n\n\"Hi, Tom, \" Hart said.\n\nWe know you made telephone calls to this woman from around the country, McGee said, from various campaign stops.\n\nWhat did you talk about?\n\n\"", + "Nothing, \" Hart said.\n\nWere they political? McGee asked.\n\n\"It was casual, political, \" Hart said. \"General conversation.\"\n\nSavage asked when he first met her.\n\n\"To my recollection I don't remember where I met her, \" Hart said.\n\nDid he know her occupation?\n\n\"I don't know that, either.\"\n\nFiedler said the reporters knew that he was with her on a yacht, a trip he took after a campaign stop in Gainesville.\n\n\"I don't remember, \" Hart said.\n\nYou have never been on that yacht then? McGee asked.\n\n\"I didn't say that, \" Hart said.\n\nDuring the next few minutes,", + " first Fiedler and then McGee reminded Hart of his challenge to the press to follow him around. They pointed out that after the Newsweek article he had said he could only respond to specifics, not rumors. The reporters were now asking about a specific incident. Fiedler, who had covered the opening of his campaign in Colorado, reminded him that he had promised to conduct his campaign on the highest moral plane.\n\nHe implored Hart to offer evidence that would clarify the situation. He said, \"You, of all people, know the sensitivity of this.\" And he told Hart that The Herald intended to publish an account of what the reporters had witnessed and what Hart had confirmed.", + " Please be forthcoming, Fiedler said.\n\n\"I've been very forthcoming, \" Hart said.\n\nWhat is your relationship with the blond woman?\n\n\"I have no personal relationship with the individual you are following, \" Hart said.\n\nAre you denying that you met her on the yacht? McGee asked.\n\n\"I'm not denying anything, \" Hart said heatedly.\n\nSavage asked Hart whether he would allow reporters to talk with the woman in his house. That would clear up the questions. Hart said he did not want to violate her privacy. How about the friend she is visiting? Savage asked. Same problem, Hart said.\n\nMcGee explained that if there was an innocent explanation,", + " produce the woman. Let us talk to her.\n\n\"I don't have to produce anyone, \" Hart said.\n\nMcGee had long ago learned to save the least pleasant question for last. Hart acted as if he were close to ending the interview.\n\nHave you had sex with the woman I saw with you on the street? McGee asked.\n\n\"The answer is no, \" Hart said. \"I'm not going to get into all that.\"\n\nHart abruptly terminated the interview by turning and walking back toward the entrance to his house.\n\n\"We don't need any of that, \" Hart said, starting up the alley to his house, as photographer Smith snapped several shots.\n\n10.\n\nPUBLISH OR\n\nHOLD BACK\n\nBy now it was after 10 p.m., fast approaching deadline for the bulk of The Herald's Sunday press run.", + " In the confrontation interview, Hart had confirmed the essential elements that the reporters felt were needed to confirm the personal relationship that the caller had said existed.\n\nHart had adamantly refused to allow the reporters to talk with the woman to support his claim that she was merely a \"friend of a friend.\" He said the woman was staying at a friend's house but refused to name that friend.\n\nFiedler, Savage and McGee went directly back to Fiedler's room at the Quality Inn and marshaled their notes to produce a story. At the hotel, McGee telephoned Meriwether in Miami and outlined what the reporters felt they could produce.", + " Meriwether drove to The Herald to oversee its publication.\n\nThe story was written by Fiedler as McGee transcribed notes from the Hart interview. Fiedler sat down at his portable computer terminal and typed a hard and blunt opening paragraph that Hart \"spent Friday night and most of Saturday\" with a young woman from Miami. The lead brought the newspaper intense criticism.\n\nWhile Fiedler and McGee wrote, Savage answered the phone. A man, identifying himself as Bill Broadhurst, demanded to speak with Fiedler. He said he could vouch for Hart.\n\nHe said the woman was his houseguest, not Hart's.\n\nThe situation was \"innocent,", + " \" he told Savage. The blond seen with Hart was in Washington to accompany a second Miami woman who was staying at Broadhurst's home while considering taking a job with him as a social director for his lobbying and entertaining operations.\n\nSavage ordered Broadhurst's version included in the story. Broadhurst refused to name the women.\n\nSavage attempted to get Broadhurst to provide details about the movements of Hart and his woman friend from Broadhurst's house to Hart's.\n\n\"You have now told me three times that the two women spent the night at your house. We'll include that in the story. Now I just want you to take me step by step through what happened since Friday,", + " \" Savage told Broadhurst.\n\nAgain, Broadhurst repeated that the woman had left Hart's house Friday night, had spent the night at his house with her friend. He declined to provide additional details; he wanted to talk to Fiedler.\n\nWhen Savage asked him to detail their movements Saturday, Broadhurst said he \"had not worn his watch Saturday\" and was therefore unable to provide any details of when he and the two women came to or left from Hart's townhouse.\n\nSavage asked Broadhurst to put the women on the phone. Broadhurst refused.\n\nSavage decided that the only thing Broadhurst was willing to provide for the story was the general statement that the two women had stayed with him.", + " He turned the phone over to Fiedler.\n\nBroadhurst, 48, a powerful lawyer with political connections in Louisiana and Washington, wanted to negotiate a delay in the story. Fiedler took the phone while the story was being edited. Broadhurst urged him to come over to his Capitol Hill townhouse to talk things out.\n\nThis conversation formed the basis of sharp disagreement. Broadhurst told Fiedler that, if he came right over, \"the girls\" would be there. Broadhurst claimed later that he offered to let the reporters interview the women.\n\nFiedler, however, felt Broadhurst's offer came with a huge escape clause -- the women might be there,", + " but they would refuse to answer questions. Broadhurst was evasive when asked about that point. He said he could not compel them to talk.\n\nFiedler told Broadhurst he would call him back later.\n\nIn Miami, Meriwether gave the go-ahead. \"The key was the interview with Hart and our entreaties to him to please let us talk to the woman or anyone else who could explain what we had seen.... (Hart) didn't need 24 hours to explain what we'd seen.\"\n\nMeanwhile, the lone unanswered doubt raised by Fiedler's original woman caller vanished with Broadhurst's call.", + " The lawyer known to friends as \"Billy B\" was the \"old-looking Bill\" who had been with Hart at the Miami yacht party.\n\n11.\n\nHART CAMPAIGN\n\nREACTS\n\nMinutes after the story cleared, Fiedler called Broadhurst and asked to come over to meet the houseguests. Broadhurst balked: \"Your story is already written. I don't see any point in that, \" he said. Besides, he added, the women now were asleep.\n\nHe offered instead to pick up the reporters and join them for dinner at an all-night restaurant. Broadhurst arrived minutes later. The four found their way to Washington's Chinatown.", + " Broadhurst conceded that he and Hart were with the two women on the yacht in Miami. He said it was a coincidence that Hart and the blond ended up together in Washington over the weekend, something Hart himself and she would contradict later.\n\nBut Broadhurst was clear on several points. The blond woman was invited to Washington for the weekend by his guest, a second woman who was interviewing for a job on his staff. Broadhurst, a man with an engaging Louisiana drawl, said he was unaware of the telephone calls Hart admitted making to the woman.\n\n\"God damn, \" he said, sitting back in his chair at the Chinese restaurant. \"I hear you.", + " I can only speak to you of her presence here in Washington.\"\n\nMost important, Broadhurst insisted that the blond woman seen entering the townhouse with Hart on Friday night had left minutes later with Broadhurst and the second woman through a garage that opened onto the rear alley behind Hart's townhouse. That was during the time Clifton was getting the rental car.\n\nBroadhurst said he came and went twice that night through the rear garage, which was operated by an electronic key he kept in his car.\n\n\"If you have access to a garage at the rear of Hart's house, how come we saw him driving around looking for a parking space on the street?", + " And why does he park his own car overnight on the street?\" Savage asked.\n\n\"I don't know, \" Broadhurst said.\n\nPossible comings and goings through the rear alley garage -- out of the sight of reporters for part of the time -- became central to the Hart campaign's attack against The Herald's story.\n\nWhile Herald reporters wrote a second-day story to fix the focus on the movements they saw, not those they might have missed, the Hart campaign pounded on movements they say they made and that went unobserved.\n\nThe reporters and Broadhurst talked until almost 5 a.m. before turning in. Instead of producing the women,", + " Broadhurst refused even to identify them. He said he would tell the women in the morning that The Herald wanted to talk to them.\n\nAt 11 a.m., McGee knocked on the front door of Broadhurst's townhouse. No one answered the knock. Hart's townhouse was similarly empty.\n\nMcGee spotted a Denver Post Washington bureau reporter knocking on Broadhurst's door. He provided the first indication of media attention to come. It built from skepticism and ambivalence -- The New York Times played its first account on Page 12 beneath the headline Hart and paper in dispute over article -- to a raging controversy, sweeping both Hart and The Herald before it.\n\n12.\n\nDONNA RICE\n\nEMERGES\n\nIn those first-day accounts,", + " she was merely the \"mysterious blond\" from Miami seen with the Democratic Party's leading contender. It was the Hart campaign that identified her as Donna Rice, 29, and revealed that Hart had previously met her at a New Year's Eve party that he attended with his wife.\n\nIn the confrontation interview, Hart had adamantly refused to divulge her name. As for his wife Lee knowing the blond, he had said: \"I don't know. She might.\"\n\nThe scramble was on to find her; some quickly did.\n\nThroughout Sunday, Herald reporters prepared a profile of a Miami actress named Donna Rice. But then they decided not to run the story in Monday's editions because they were not sure it was the same Donna Rice seen with Hart.\n\nBut the world couldn't wait.", + " The volatile elements of sex, power and politics exploded Monday. Suddenly, there were scores of pictures of a sultry-eyed Donna Rice: modeling swimsuits, posing in ads for hotels, standing in a redneck bar draped in a Confederate flag with a breast exposed.\n\nThe New York Post adorned its Tuesday cover with a suggestive photo of Rice and the screaming headline: I didn't sleep with Gary Hart. In The New York Daily News, she was in a swimsuit next to the words: \"Gary is not my lover.\"\n\nEven The New York Times bumped the story to the front page, albeit under the measured headline: \"An actress in turmoil.\" By now the Hart saga led the network evening news shows.", + " The Herald was bathed in the same fire. Its stakeout was the target of particular criticism. Hart remained behind tightly closed doors in Washington.\n\nThen appeared Donna Rice. And Bimini.\n\nWithin the protective care of lawyer Tom McAliley, a drawling good ol' boy who had known Hart since 1972, Rice agreed to meet the press. McAliley invited a hand-picked group of reporters to come to his office. She appeared wearing a navy blue dress and pumps and the look of a wronged Southern belle. She and \"Gary\" were just friends, Rice said. They had not made love; she preferred younger men.\n\nUnder McAliley's guidance,", + " she gave her account of how the two couples moved innocently back and forth between the Capitol Hill townhouses, unseen by reporters. And, like Broadhurst, she insisted that the Herald team missed them leaving from Hart's townhouse Saturday afternoon to take a drive in suburban Virginia.\n\nBut she also undermined the Hart defenses in other ways, large and small. Rice, for example, described phone calls in which Hart would unload his woes to her about the treatment he was facing on the \"womanizing\" issue.\n\nHart, who originally said the calls were about \"nothing, \" later said they talked about her joining his campaign as some kind of liaison with rock-music groups.\n\nAnd she provided fresh details of the yacht party at which she and Hart met.\n\n\"All right.", + " OK. Here we go, \" she said when asked about the meeting. \"I was at a party, at a resort here, and a number of people... decided to go aboard a boat that (belonged to) a friend of ours that was docked outside, having no idea it had been chartered, obviously. So we walked on the boat and, lo and behold, there were two gentlemen there who came to be known as Bill Broadhurst and Gary Hart.\"\n\nMostly, however, there was Bimini.\n\nThe voyage to Bimini exploded into the headlines like cymbals clashing. Rice volunteered that the same foursome -- Hart,", + " Broadhurst and Broadhurst's job seeker, Lynn Armandt -- had traveled there several weeks before and spent a night. They slept on separate boats, she said. She saw nothing unusual about such a trip with two married men and two single women.\n\nHart had called and invited her, Rice said, contradicting his later account. The yacht had had to stay overnight because the Customs office in Bimini had closed, both Rice and Hart said.\n\nIt was later learned that the yacht had routinely checked through Bahamian Customs on arrival and left the next day without checking out. \"Yachts need not clear out, \" said Garth Greene,", + " assistant comptroller with Bahamian Customs in Nassau.\n\nMeanwhile, Hart remained in seclusion in Washington. Lee Hart had not budged from Denver, unable to fly because of a sinus infection, aides said.\n\nThe following day, a noon news conference with Rice was abruptly canceled and she, too, went into hiding. The second woman, Lynn Armandt, has yet to meet with reporters, leaving one possibly important side of the story untold.\n\n13.\n\nHART\n\nCOUNTERATTACK\n\nBy late Monday, there were two stories: the story of Gary Hart struggling to save his candidacy, and the story of The Herald's handling of the story.", + " Herald Executive Editor Meriwether and Managing Editor Pete Weitzel spent Day Two of the Hart saga responding to questions about the Herald's story and its ethics. Television crews tramped in and out of the news room. Meriwether's day began with a radio interview at 7 a.m. and stretched through 11:30 p.m., when the nearly exhausted editor defended his decisions on ABC's Nightline. The Herald even invited readers to call in their comments as to whether too much fuss was being made over the story.\n\nBy a 2-1 margin, the readers said yes.\n\nBut somewhere in that period, the tide of the debate seemed to turn and run away from Gary Hart.\n\nThe media's feeding frenzy,", + " heightened by Rice's revelation of the Bimini trip and emerging inconsistencies between her account and that of Hart's campaign, backed the candidate into a corner. Other rumored liaisons emerged, most of them without substance.\n\nAt the same time, there was new support for the Herald account. The Washington Times reported that Donna Rice had a book from Hart that was inscribed, \"This is in lieu of flowers until we meet. Love, Gary.\"\n\nSince walking away from the Herald reporters in the alley Saturday night, Hart had sealed himself off, trying to save his wounded candidacy. But in an extraordinary and ironic coincidence, he was locked into delivering a speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association in New York on Tuesday.", + " It was here that Hart would make his stand.\n\nHis defense against the flood of allegations was to launch a bitter, frontal attack on the Herald reporters and the paper's first-day story.\n\nIn an angry voice, Hart declared: \"The story was written by reporters who, by their own admission, undertook a spotty surveillance, who reached inaccurate conclusions based on incomplete facts, who, after publishing a false story, now concede they may have gotten it wrong. And who, most outrageously, refused to interview the very people who could have given them the facts before filing their story.\"\n\nIt was a bold attempt to discredit the accuser. But the audience,", + " and the press, wasn't persuaded. In a short question- and-answer session, two publishers demanded more details of his yacht trip and his phone calls.\n\nHerald Publisher Richard G. Capen defended the \"essential correctness of our story\" and upbraided Hart. \"Clearly, at a minimum, there was an appearance of impropriety.\"\n\nOther reporters mobbed Fiedler, who had gone to cover the speech and found himself a part of that day's story. To Hart's main point -- that The Herald had refused to interview \"the very people who could have given them the facts\" -- Fiedler told of the entreaties to Hart on Saturday night for the opportunity to speak with his acquaintances.\n\nThe attack on The Herald was lost in the gathering media storm.", + " NBC gave Hart and Fiedler equal time in its report on the speech, then concluded by disclosing that the yacht on which Hart and Rice went to Bimini was called the Monkey Business.\n\nThe Hart campaign limped into New Hampshire the following day. The candidate was joined by Lee Hart for a brave attempt to press on in the face of adversity.\n\nBut the campaign was now trapped in a whirlpool of despair. At a 51-minute press conference at Dartmouth College on Wednesday -- ironically the site of his rise to prominence in the 1984 campaign -- Hart confronted the most hostile questioning of his career.\n\n\"Do you think adultery is immoral?\" one asked.\n\n\"Yes,", + " \" Hart said.\n\n\"Have you ever committed adultery?\" came the follow-up.\n\n\"I don't have to answer that question.\"\n\nHart now stood alone to face the hurricane. It was The Washington Post that administered the coup de grce to the Hart campaign, presenting the candidate with evidence of yet another extramarital relationship.\n\nA few hours later, Hart and his wife left New Hampshire to return to their home on Troublesome Gulch Road in Kittredge, Colo.\n\nCBS, meanwhile, aired a tourist's videotape that showed Hart on the Monkey Business with an unidentified blond woman, not Rice. The footage included the same woman strutting in a bikini before a crowd of wolf-whistlers during a \"hot bod\"", + " contest at a South Florida bar.\n\nPOSTSCRIPT\n\nAt noon Friday, Meriwether invited McGee, Savage and Fiedler into his office to watch live coverage of Hart's announcement. There was an uncomfortable silence as Hart aimed a final blast at the press for driving him from the race. Then he turned from the podium and left the room.\n\nThe Herald's switchboard was immediately flooded with calls. All were answered with a one-line reply from Meriwether.\n\n\"We take no joy in the announcement Mr. Hart made today.\" ", + " \u201cWe don\u2019t need any of that,\u201d were Hart\u2019s parting words.\n\nThe next morning, on May 3, The Herald reporters published a front-page article about Hart\u2019s purported affair. At the end, they referred to a statement in which Hart challenged reporters interested in his personal life to follow him. Hart couldn\u2019t have known it at the time, but his words \u2014 \u201cfollow me around\u201d \u2014 would shadow him for the rest of his days. They would bury everything else he had ever said in public life.\n\nIn the history of Washington scandal, only a few quotes \u2014 \u201cI am not a crook,\u201d \u201cI did not have sexual relations with that woman\u201d \u2014 have become as synonymous with a politician.", + " In truth, though, Hart never issued any challenge to The Miami Herald\u2019s reporters, or to anybody else, really. The words were spoken weeks earlier to E. J. Dionne Jr., who was then the top political reporter for The New York Times and was writing a profile for this magazine. Dionne discussed a broad range of topics with Hart and then reluctantly turned to the rumors of affairs. Hart was exasperated and he finally told Dionne: \u201cFollow me around. I don\u2019t care. I\u2019m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They\u2019d be very bored.\u201d\n\nHart said this in an annoyed and sarcastic sort of way,", + " in an obvious attempt to make a point. He was \u201cserious\u201d about the sentiment, all right, but only to the extent that a man who had been twice separated from his wife and dated other women over the years \u2014 with the full knowledge of his friends in the press corps and without having seen a single word written about it at the time \u2014 could have been serious about such a thing. Hart might as well have been suggesting that Martians beam down and run his campaign, for all the chance he thought there was that any reporter would actually resort to stalking him. Dionne certainly didn\u2019t take the comment literally, though he suspected others might.", + " \u201cHe did not think of it as a challenge,\u201d Dionne would recall many years later. \u201cAnd at the time, I did not think of it as a challenge.\u201d\n\nAs it happened, Dionne\u2019s cover story was set to appear Sunday, May 3, the same day the Herald published its front-page expos\u00e9. No one at The Herald had a clue that Hart had issued any \u201cchallenge\u201d on the previous Monday when Fiedler heard from his anonymous tipster or when he continued to chase the story during the week. All of this they did on their own, without any prodding from Hart.\n\nIn those days before the Internet,", + " however, The Times circulated printed copies of its magazine to other news media a few days early, so editors and producers could pick out anything that might be newsworthy and publicize it in their own weekend editions or Sunday shows. When Fiedler boarded his flight to Washington Saturday morning, eager to join the stakeout, he brought with him the advance copy of Dionne\u2019s story, which had been sent to The Herald. Somewhere above the Atlantic seaboard, anyone sitting next to Fiedler would probably have seen him jolt upward in his seat as if suddenly receiving an electric shock. There it was, staring up at him from the page \u2014 Hart explicitly inviting him and his colleagues to do exactly the kind of surveillance they had undertaken the night before.\n\nThe discovery of Hart\u2019s supposed challenge,", + " which the Herald reporters took from the advance copy of The Times Magazine on Saturday night and inserted at the end of their Sunday blockbuster \u2014 so that the two articles, referring to the same quote, appeared on newsstands simultaneously \u2014 probably eased any reservations the editors in Miami might have had about pushing the story into print before they had a chance to identify Rice and try to talk to her. Soon enough, as The Herald would put it in their longer reconstruction a week later, Gary Hart would be seen as \u201cthe gifted hero who had taunted the press to \u2018follow me around.\u2019 \u201d Everyone would know that Hart had goaded the press into hiding outside his townhouse and tracking his movements.", + " Hart\u2019s quote appeared to justify The Herald\u2019s extraordinary investigation, and that\u2019s all that mattered.\n" + ], + "length": 20328, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 58, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Stanley McChrystal's intimately familiar with the material he'll be covering in his Yale course. McChrystal's first case study will be \"the career of Stanley McChrystal,\" according to his syllabus, which you can see at Yale Daily News. The class's primary reading? A New York Times Magazine piece entitled, \"Stanley McChrystal's Long War.\" For some weird reason, \"The Renegade General\" didn't make the reading list. To be fair, McChrystal will also cover the decision to invade Iraq, and then range well outside his personal experience to discuss the Civil War and the German strategy in World War II. The university has also announced that while students may tell the media about their general impressions of the class, its specific content will be considered off the record.\n", + "docs": [ + "By Michael Hastings\n\nThis article appears in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.\n\n\n\n'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?\" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the H\u00f4tel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies \u2013 to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago,", + " the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.\n\n\"The dinner comes with the position, sir,\" says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.\n\nMcChrystal turns sharply in his chair.\n\n\"Hey, Charlie,\" he asks, \"does this come with the position?\"\n\nMcChrystal gives him the middle finger.\n\n[", + "asset]\n\nThe general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual \u2013 blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks \u2013 McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the \"most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine.\" The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too \"Gucci.\" He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer)", + " to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.\n\n\"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?\" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.\n\n\"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed,\" Flynn says.\n\nMcChrystal takes a final look around the suite.", + " At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.\n\n\"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,\" McChrystal says.\n\nHe pauses a beat.\n\n\"Unfortunately,\" he adds, \"no one in this room could do it.\"\n\nWith that, he's out the door.\n\n\"Who's he going to dinner with?\" I ask one of his aides.\n\n\"Some French minister,\" the aide tells me.", + " \"It's fucking gay.\"\n\nThe next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the \u00c9cole Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as \"shortsighted,\" saying it would lead to a state of \"Chaos-", + "istan.\" The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile\n\nNow, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. \"I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem,\" he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.\n\n\"", + "Are you asking about Vice President Biden?\" McChrystal says with a laugh. \"Who's that?\"\n\n\"Biden?\" suggests a top adviser. \"Did you say: Bite Me?\"\n\nWhen Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. \"I want the American people to understand,\" he announced in March 2009. \"We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.\" He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul,", + " the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan \u2013 then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan \u2013 and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.\n\nEven though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect.", + " The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked \"uncomfortable and intimidated\" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. \"It was a 10-minute photo op,\" says an adviser to McChrystal. \"Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war,", + " but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.\"\n\nFrom the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government \u2013 a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years,", + " if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his \"surge\" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed \"COINdinistas\" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.\n\nAs McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war,", + " he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the fuckers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops \u2013 swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half \u2013 we were in danger of \"mission failure.\" The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama,", + " opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass.\n\n[asset]\n\nLast fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. \"I found that time painful,\" McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. \"I was selling an unsellable position.\" For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics \u2013 a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks.", + " \"The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people,\" says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. \"The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.\n\nIn the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power;", + " Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words \"victory\" or \"win,\" Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.\n\nToday, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population,", + " whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year \u2013 a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja \u2013 continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a \"bleeding ulcer.\" In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history \u2013 and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into,", + " even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.\n\nEven those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. \"It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win,\" says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. \"This is going to end in an argument.\"\n\n[asset]\n\n\n\nThe night after his speech in Paris,", + " McChrystal and his staff head to Kitty O'Shea's, an Irish pub catering to tourists, around the corner from the hotel. His wife, Annie, has joined him for a rare visit: Since the Iraq War began in 2003, she has seen her husband less than 30 days a year. Though it is his and Annie's 33rd wedding anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle along for dinner and drinks at the \"least Gucci\" place his staff could find. His wife isn't surprised. \"He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was dressed in formalwear,\" she says with a laugh.\n\nThe general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers,", + " spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority. After arriving in Kabul last summer, Team America set about changing the culture of the International Security Assistance Force, as the NATO-led mission is known. (U.S.", + " soldiers had taken to deriding ISAF as short for \"I Suck at Fighting\" or \"In Sandals and Flip-Flops.\") McChrystal banned alcohol on base, kicked out Burger King and other symbols of American excess, expanded the morning briefing to include thousands of officers and refashioned the command center into a Situational Awareness Room, a free-flowing information hub modeled after Mayor Mike Bloomberg's offices in New York. He also set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each morning, and eating one meal a day. (In the month I spend around the general,", + " I witness him eating only once.) It's a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around him, a staple in almost every media profile, as if the ability to go without sleep and food translates into the possibility of a man single-handedly winning the war.\n\nBy midnight at Kitty O'Shea's, much of Team America is completely shitfaced. Two officers do an Irish jig mixed with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding dance, while McChrystal's top advisers lock arms and sing a slurred song of their own invention. \"Afghanistan!\" they bellow. \"Afghanistan!\" They call it their Afghanistan song.\n\nMcChrystal steps away from the circle,", + " observing his team. \"All these men,\" he tells me. \"I'd die for them. And they'd die for me.\"\n\nThe assembled men may look and sound like a bunch of combat veterans letting off steam, but in fact this tight-knit group represents the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan. While McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war, there is no equivalent position on the diplomatic or political side. Instead, an assortment of administration players compete over the Afghan portfolio: U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke,", + " National Security Advisor Jim Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not to mention 40 or so other coalition ambassadors and a host of talking heads who try to insert themselves into the mess, from John Kerry to John McCain. This diplomatic incoherence has effectively allowed McChrystal's team to call the shots and hampered efforts to build a stable and credible government in Afghanistan. \"It jeopardizes the mission,\" says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who supports McChrystal. \"The military cannot by itself create governance reform.\"\n\nPart of the problem is structural: The Defense Department budget exceeds $600 billion a year,", + " while the State Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the problem is personal: In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama's top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a \"clown\" who remains \"stuck in 1985.\" Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, \"turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it's not very helpful.\" Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal's inner circle.", + " \"Hillary had Stan's back during the strategic review,\" says an adviser. \"She said, 'If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.' \"\n\nMcChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. \"The Boss says he's like a wounded animal,\" says a member of the general's team. \"Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He's a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can't just have someone yanking on shit.\"\n\n[", + "asset]\n\nAt one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. \"Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke,\" he groans. \"I don't even want to open it.\" He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.\n\n\"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg,\" an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.\n\nBy far the most crucial \u2013 and strained \u2013 relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador. According to those close to the two men,", + " Eikenberry \u2013 a retired three-star general who served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2005 \u2013 can't stand that his former subordinate is now calling the shots. He's also furious that McChrystal, backed by NATO's allies, refused to put Eikenberry in the pivotal role of viceroy in Afghanistan, which would have made him the diplomatic equivalent of the general. The job instead went to British Ambassador Mark Sedwill \u2013 a move that effectively increased McChrystal's influence over diplomacy by shutting out a powerful rival. \"In reality, that position needs to be filled by an American for it to have weight,\" says a U.S.", + " official familiar with the negotiations.\n\nThe relationship was further strained in January, when a classified cable that Eikenberry wrote was leaked to The New York Times. The cable was as scathing as it was prescient. The ambassador offered a brutal critique of McChrystal's strategy, dismissed President Hamid Karzai as \"not an adequate strategic partner,\" and cast doubt on whether the counterinsurgency plan would be \"sufficient\" to deal with Al Qaeda. \"We will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves,\" Eikenberry warned, \"short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos.\"\n\nMcChrystal and his team were blindsided by the cable.", + " \"I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd never said anything like that to us before,\" says McChrystal, who adds that he felt \"betrayed\" by the leak. \"Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so.' \"\n\nThe most striking example of McChrystal's usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan. The doctrine of counterinsurgency requires a credible government,", + " and since Karzai is not considered credible by his own people, McChrystal has worked hard to make him so. Over the past few months, he has accompanied the president on more than 10 trips around the country, standing beside him at political meetings, or shuras, in Kandahar. In February, the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the president's palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military operation of the year. Karzai's staff, however, insisted that the president was sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of haggling,", + " McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan's defense minister, who persuaded Karzai's people to wake the president from his nap.\n\n[asset]\n\nThis is one of the central flaws with McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader we've backed \u2013 a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable. Even Team McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal partner. \"He's been locked up in his palace the past year,\" laments one of the general's top advisers. At times,", + " Karzai himself has actively undermined McChrystal's desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S. soldiers who had been wounded in Uruzgan province. \"General,\" he called out to McChrystal, \"I didn't even know we were fighting in Uruzgan!\"\n\nGrowing up as a military brat, McChrystal exhibited the mixture of brilliance and cockiness that would follow him throughout his career. His father fought in Korea and Vietnam, retiring as a two-star general, and his four brothers all joined the armed services. Moving around to different bases,", + " McChrystal took solace in baseball, a sport in which he made no pretense of hiding his superiority: In Little League, he would call out strikes to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle.\n\nMcChrystal entered West Point in 1972, when the U.S. military was close to its all-time low in popularity. His class was the last to graduate before the academy started to admit women. The \"Prison on the Hudson,\" as it was known then, was a potent mix of testosterone, hooliganism and reactionary patriotism. Cadets repeatedly trashed the mess hall in food fights, and birthdays were celebrated with a tradition called \"rat fucking,\" which often left the birthday boy outside in the snow or mud,", + " covered in shaving cream. \"It was pretty out of control,\" says Lt. Gen. David Barno, a classmate who went on to serve as the top commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. The class, filled with what Barno calls \"huge talent\" and \"wild-eyed teenagers with a strong sense of idealism,\" also produced Gen. Ray Odierno, the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.\n\nThe son of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of the campus dissidents \u2013 a dual role that taught him how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got.", + " He accumulated more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination \u2013 a record that his classmates boasted made him a \"century man.\" One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The troublemaking almost got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected to forced marches in the Area, a paved courtyard where unruly cadets were disciplined. \"I'd come visit, and I'd end up spending most of my time in the library, while Stan was in the Area,\" recalls Annie,", + " who began dating McChrystal in 1973.\n\nMcChrystal wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a serious underachievement for a man widely regarded as brilliant. His most compelling work was extracurricular: As managing editor of The Pointer, the West Point literary magazine, McChrystal wrote seven short stories that eerily foreshadow many of the issues he would confront in his career. In one tale, a fictional officer complains about the difficulty of training foreign troops to fight; in another, a 19-year-old soldier kills a boy he mistakes for a terrorist. In \"Brinkman's Note,\" a piece of suspense fiction,", + " the unnamed narrator appears to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the assassin, and he's able to infiltrate the White House: \"The President strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman's failure, I had succeeded.\"\n\n\n\nAfter graduation, 2nd Lt. Stanley McChrystal entered an Army that was all but broken in the wake of Vietnam. \"We really felt we were a peacetime generation,\" he recalls. \"There was the Gulf War,", + " but even that didn't feel like that big of a deal.\" So McChrystal spent his career where the action was: He enrolled in Special Forces school and became a regimental commander of the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1986. It was a dangerous position, even in peacetime \u2013 nearly two dozen Rangers were killed in training accidents during the Eighties. It was also an unorthodox career path: Most soldiers who want to climb the ranks to general don't go into the Rangers. Displaying a penchant for transforming systems he considers outdated, McChrystal set out to revolutionize the training regime for the Rangers. He introduced mixed martial arts,", + " required every soldier to qualify with night-vision goggles on the rifle range and forced troops to build up their endurance with weekly marches involving heavy backpacks.\n\nIn the late 1990s, McChrystal shrewdly improved his inside game, spending a year at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and then at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he co-authored a treatise on the merits and drawbacks of humanitarian interventionism. But as he moved up through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out.", + " Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far \u2013 especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th. \"He was very focused,\" says Annie. \"Even as a young officer he seemed to know what he wanted to do. I don't think his personality has changed in all these years.\"\n\nBy some accounts, McChrystal's career should have been over at least two times by now. As Pentagon spokesman during the invasion of Iraq, the general seemed more like a White House mouthpiece than an up-and-coming commander with a reputation for speaking his mind. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous \"stuff happens\"", + " remark during the looting of Baghdad, McChrystal backed him up. A few days later, he echoed the president's Mission Accomplished gaffe by insisting that major combat operations in Iraq were over. But it was during his next stint \u2013 overseeing the military's most elite units, including the Rangers, Navy Seals and Delta Force \u2013 that McChrystal took part in a cover-up that would have destroyed the career of a lesser man.\n\nAfter Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters.", + " He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough \u2013 a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. \"If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public,\" he wrote, it could cause \"public embarrassment\" for the president.\n\n\"The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions,\" wrote Tillman's mother,", + " Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the \"golden boy\" of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman's death, McChrystal was promoted to major general.\n\nTwo years later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a scandal involving detainee abuse and torture at Camp Nama in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar litany of abuse:", + " stress positions, being dragged naked through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined in the scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported seeing him inspect the prison multiple times. But the experience was so unsettling to McChrystal that he tried to prevent detainee operations from being placed under his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a \"political swamp,\" according to a U.S. official. In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan.\n\nThe media,", + " to a large extent, have also given McChrystal a pass on both controversies. Where Gen. Petraeus is kind of a dweeb, a teacher's pet with a Ranger's tab, McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a \"Jedi\" commander, as Newsweek called him. He didn't care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response. He gets briefings on his iPod and listens to books on tape. He carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars,", + " and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee. (\"There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.\") He went out on dozens of nighttime raids during his time in Iraq, unprecedented for a top commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with almost no entourage. \"The fucking lads love Stan McChrystal,\" says a British officer who serves in Kabul. \"You'd be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like 'Who the fuck is that?' And it's fucking Stan McChrystal.\"\n\nIt doesn't hurt that McChrystal was also extremely successful as head of the Joint Special Operations Command,", + " the elite forces that carry out the government's darkest ops. During the Iraq surge, his team killed and captured thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. \"JSOC was a killing machine,\" says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of operations. McChrystal was also open to new ways of killing. He systematically mapped out terrorist networks, targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down \u2013 often with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally shunned by the military. \"The Boss would find the 24-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some fucking brilliant degree from MIT,", + " sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors humming,\" says a Special Forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq and now serves on his staff in Kabul. \"He'd say, 'Hey \u2013 you fucking muscleheads couldn't find lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.' \"\n\nEven in his new role as America's leading evangelist for counterinsurgency, McChrystal retains the deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units in Afghanistan from four to 19. \"You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight,\" McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters.", + " Then he'll add, \"I'm going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.\" In fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 \u2013 a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S.", + " forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. \"We've shot an amazing number of people,\" McChrystal recently conceded.\n\nDespite the tragedies and miscues, McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in a war zone. It's \"insurgent math,\" as he calls it \u2013 for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies. He has ordered convoys to curtail their reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air power and severely limited night raids. He regularly apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are killed,", + " and berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths. \"For a while,\" says one U.S. official, \"the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in front of McChrystal after a 'civ cas' incident.\" The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: There's talk of creating a new medal for \"courageous restraint,\" a buzzword that's unlikely to gain much traction in the gung-ho culture of the U.S. military.\n\nBut however strategic they may be, McChrystal's new marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops.", + " Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. \"Bottom line?\" says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. \"I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.\"\n\nIn March, McChrystal traveled to Combat Outpost JFM \u2013 a small encampment on the outskirts of Kandahar \u2013 to confront such accusations from the troops directly. It was a typically bold move by the general. Only two days earlier, he had received an e-mail from Israel Arroyo,", + " a 25-year-old staff sergeant who asked McChrystal to go on a mission with his unit. \"I am writing because it was said you don't care about the troops and have made it harder to defend ourselves,\" Arroyo wrote.\n\nWithin hours, McChrystal responded personally: \"I'm saddened by the accusation that I don't care about soldiers, as it is something I suspect any soldier takes both personally and professionally \u2013 at least I do. But I know perceptions depend upon your perspective at the time, and I respect that every soldier's view is his own.\" Then he showed up at Arroyo's outpost and went on a foot patrol with the troops \u2013 not some bullshit photo-op stroll through a market,", + " but a real live operation in a dangerous war zone.\n\nSix weeks later, just before McChrystal returned from Paris, the general received another e-mail from Arroyo. A 23-year-old corporal named Michael Ingram \u2013 one of the soldiers McChrystal had gone on patrol with \u2013 had been killed by an IED a day earlier. It was the third man the 25-member platoon had lost in a year, and Arroyo was writing to see if the general would attend Ingram's memorial service. \"He started to look up to you,\" Arroyo wrote. McChrystal said he would try to make it down to pay his respects as soon as possible.\n\nThe night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt.", + " Arroyo's platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram's death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal's new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians,", + " the request had been denied. \"These were abandoned houses,\" fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks. \"Nobody was coming back to live in them.\"\n\nOne soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. \"Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force,\" the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that's like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won't have to make arrests. \"Does that make any fucking sense?\" asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. \"We should just drop a fucking bomb on this place.", + " You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?\"\n\nThe rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended \u2013 they've been distorted as they passed through the chain of command \u2013 but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. \"Fuck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fucking gun on,\" says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. \"I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army,", + " they're all fucked up \u2013 either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don't understand it themselves. But we're fucking losing this thing.\"\n\nMcChrystal and his team show up the next day. Underneath a tent, the general has a 45-minute discussion with some two dozen soldiers. The atmosphere is tense. \"I ask you what's going on in your world, and I think it's important for you all to understand the big picture as well,\" McChrystal begins. \"How's the company doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody? Anybody feel like you're losing?\" McChrystal says.\n\n\"", + "Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we're losing, sir,\" says Hicks.\n\nMcChrystal nods. \"Strength is leading when you just don't want to lead,\" he tells the men. \"You're leading by example. That's what we do. Particularly when it's really, really hard, and it hurts inside.\" Then he spends 20 minutes talking about counterinsurgency, diagramming his concepts and principles on a whiteboard. He makes COIN seem like common sense, but he's careful not to bullshit the men. \"We are knee-deep in the decisive year,\" he tells them. The Taliban,", + " he insists, no longer has the initiative \u2013 \"but I don't think we do, either.\" It's similar to the talk he gave in Paris, but it's not winning any hearts and minds among the soldiers. \"This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks,\" McChrystal tries to joke. \"But it doesn't get the same reception from infantry companies.\"\n\nDuring the question-and-answer period, the frustration boils over. The soldiers complain about not being allowed to use lethal force, about watching insurgents they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to be able to fight \u2013 like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal.", + " \"We aren't putting fear into the Taliban,\" one soldier says.\n\n\"Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing,\" McChrystal says, citing an oft-repeated maxim that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan. \"The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn't work.\"\n\n\"I'm not saying go out and kill everybody, sir,\" the soldier persists. \"You say we've stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don't believe that's true in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it's getting.\"\n\n\"I agree with you,\" McChrystal says.", + " \"In this area, we've not made progress, probably. You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I'm telling you is, fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe the population out here and resettle it?\"\n\nA soldier complains that under the rules, any insurgent who doesn't have a weapon is immediately assumed to be a civilian. \"That's the way this game is,\" McChrystal says. \"It's complex. I can't just decide: It's shirts and skins, and we'll kill all the shirts.\"\n\nAs the discussion ends, McChrystal seems to sense that he hasn't succeeded at easing the men's anger.", + " He makes one last-ditch effort to reach them, acknowledging the death of Cpl. Ingram. \"There's no way I can make that easier,\" he tells them. \"No way I can pretend it won't hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel that.... I will tell you, you're doing a great job. Don't let the frustration get to you.\" The session ends with no clapping, and no real resolution. McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren't buying it.\n\nWhen it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side.", + " The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan \u2013 and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. \"Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan,\" he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed,", + " after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. \"It's all very cynical, politically,\" says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. \"Afghanistan is not in our vital interest \u2013 there's nothing for us there.\"\n\nIn mid-May,", + " two weeks after visiting the troops in Kandahar, McChrystal travels to the White House for a high-level visit by Hamid Karzai. It is a triumphant moment for the general, one that demonstrates he is very much in command \u2013 both in Kabul and in Washington. In the East Room, which is packed with journalists and dignitaries, President Obama sings the praises of Karzai. The two leaders talk about how great their relationship is, about the pain they feel over civilian casualties. They mention the word \"progress\" 16 times in under an hour. But there is no mention of victory. Still,", + " the session represents the most forceful commitment that Obama has made to McChrystal's strategy in months. \"There is no denying the progress that the Afghan people have made in recent years \u2013 in education, in health care and economic development,\" the president says. \"As I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed \u2013 lights that would not have been visible just a few years earlier.\"\n\nIt is a disconcerting observation for Obama to make. During the worst years in Iraq, when the Bush administration had no real progress to point to, officials used to offer up the exact same evidence of success. \"It was one of our first impressions,\" one GOP official said in 2006,", + " after landing in Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. \"So many lights shining brightly.\" So it is to the language of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned \u2013 talk of progress, of city lights, of metrics like health care and education. Rhetoric that just a few years ago they would have mocked. \"They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory \u2013 because victory is not even defined or recognizable,\" says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. \"That's the game we're in right now.", + " What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn't get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future.\"\n\nBut facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply fucked up things are in Afghanistan. \"If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular,\" a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however,", + " doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further. \"There's a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here,\" a senior military official in Kabul tells me.\n\nBack in Afghanistan, less than a month after the White House meeting with Karzai and all the talk of \"progress,\" McChrystal is hit by the biggest blow to his vision of counterinsurgency. Since last year, the Pentagon had been planning to launch a major military operation this summer in Kandahar,", + " the country's second-largest city and the Taliban's original home base. It was supposed to be a decisive turning point in the war \u2013 the primary reason for the troop surge that McChrystal wrested from Obama late last year. But on June 10th, acknowledging that the military still needs to lay more groundwork, the general announced that he is postponing the offensive until the fall. Rather than one big battle, like Fallujah or Ramadi, U.S. troops will implement what McChrystal calls a \"rising tide of security.\" The Afghan police and army will enter Kandahar to attempt to seize control of neighborhoods,", + " while the U.S. pours $90 million of aid into the city to win over the civilian population.\n\nEven proponents of counterinsurgency are hard-pressed to explain the new plan. \"This isn't a classic operation,\" says a U.S. military official. \"It's not going to be Black Hawk Down. There aren't going to be doors kicked in.\" Other U.S. officials insist that doors are going to be kicked in, but that it's going to be a kinder, gentler offensive than the disaster in Marja. \"The Taliban have a jackboot on the city,\" says a military official. \"We have to remove them,", + " but we have to do it in a way that doesn't alienate the population.\" When Vice President Biden was briefed on the new plan in the Oval Office, insiders say he was shocked to see how much it mirrored the more gradual plan of counterterrorism that he advocated last fall. \"This looks like CT-plus!\" he said, according to U.S. officials familiar with the meeting.\n\nWhatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over \u2013 the Afghan people \u2013 do not want us there.", + " Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. \"Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem,\" says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. \"A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers\" \u2013 a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military:", + " perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word \"victory\" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.\n\nThis article appears in in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25. ", + " The entourage entered the bazaar. The Afghans sensed that an important American had arrived, and they began to gather in groups inside the stalls. Then the general stopped and turned.\n\n\u201cWhat do you need here?\u201d McChrystal asked.\n\nA translator turned the general\u2019s words into Pashto.\n\n\u201cWe need schools!\u201d one Afghan called back. \u201cSchools!\u201d\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re working on that,\u201d McChrystal said. \u201cThose things take time.\u201d\n\nMcChrystal walked some more, engaging another group of Afghans. He posed the same question.\n\n\u201cSecurity,\u201d a man said. \u201cWe need security. Security first, then the other things will be possible.\u201d\n\n\u201cThat is what we are trying to do,\u201d McChrystal said.", + " \u201cBut it\u2019s going to take time. Success takes time.\u201d\n\nThe questions kept coming, and the answer was the same. After a couple of hours, McChrystal put on his helmet and flak jacket, boarded the Black Hawk and flew to another town.\n\nSuccess takes time, but how much time does Stanley McChrystal have? The war in Afghanistan is now in its ninth year. The Taliban, measured by the number of their attacks, are stronger than at any time since the Americans toppled their government at the end of 2001. American soldiers and Marines are dying at a faster rate than ever before. Polls in the United States show that opposition to the war is growing steadily.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nWorse yet,", + " for all of America\u2019s time in Afghanistan \u2014 for all the money and all the blood \u2014 the lack of accomplishment is manifest wherever you go. In Garmsir, there is nothing remotely resembling a modern state that could take over if America and its NATO allies left. Tour the country with a general, and you will see very quickly how vast and forbidding this country is and how paltry the effort has been.\n\nAnd finally, there is the government in Kabul. President Hamid Karzai, once the darling of the West, rose to the top of nationwide elections in August on what appears to be a tide of fraud. The Americans and their NATO allies are confronting the possibility that the government they are supporting,", + " building and defending is a rotten shell.\n\nIn his initial assessment of the country, sent to President Obama early last month, McChrystal described an Afghanistan on the brink of collapse and an America at the edge of defeat. To reverse the course of the war, McChrystal presented President Obama with what could be the most momentous foreign-policy decision of his presidency: escalate or fail. McChrystal has reportedly asked for 40,000 additional American troops \u2014 there are 65,000 already here \u2014 and an accelerated effort to train Afghan troops and police and build an Afghan state. If President Obama can\u2019t bring himself to step up the fight,", + " McChrystal suggested, then he might as well give up.\n\n\u201cInadequate resources,\u201d McChrystal wrote, \u201cwill likely result in failure.\u201d\n\nThe magnitude of the choice presented by McChrystal, and now facing President Obama, is difficult to overstate. For what McChrystal is proposing is not a temporary, Iraq-style surge \u2014 a rapid influx of American troops followed by a withdrawal. McChrystal\u2019s plan is a blueprint for an extensive American commitment to build a modern state in Afghanistan, where one has never existed, and to bring order to a place famous for the empires it has exhausted. Even under the best of circumstances,", + " this effort would most likely last many more years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and entail the deaths of many more American women and men.\n\nAnd that\u2019s if it succeeds.\n\nA few days after McChrystal filed his report, I sat down with him in his headquarters in Kabul. He seemed upbeat and relaxed. The report was still secret \u2014 it hadn\u2019t yet leaked to the public. The ensuing furor was still to come, as was talk that McChrystal was considering resigning, which he was forced to publicly dispel. The atmosphere was not tense \u2014 not yet. Only urgent.\n\n\u201cI took this job because I was asked to take it,", + " and because it is very, very important,\u201d McChrystal told me. \u201cAdmiral Mullen\u201d \u2014 head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff \u2014 \u201cspecifically said to me: \u2018You go out, you decide what needs to be done, and you tell me whatever you need to do that. Don\u2019t constrain yourself because of politics. You tell me what you need.\u2019 \u201d\n\nI asked him about Obama.\n\n\u201cI didn\u2019t get any assurances from anyone that I would be given any amount of time,\u201d McChrystal said. \u201cI didn\u2019t get any assurances from anyone that I would be given any amount of resources. I didn\u2019t ask for any assurances.\u201d\n\nFor a moment,", + " McChrystal paused.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t feel like the lonely man in the arena,\u201d he said, \u201cwith all the pressure on my shoulders.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nII.\n\nTHE MARINES WERE walking along the sandy road when the Afghans lined up to watch the bomb.\n\nThe Marines, members of Echo Company of the Second Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, had plodded through a mile of sodden cornfields in the heat of Helmand Province and climbed a rock promontory to an observation post once manned by soldiers of the Soviet Union. They arrived in early July as part of the big push ordered by President Obama;", + " General McChrystal had visited their command post in Garmsir, 12 miles up the road, three days before.\n\nThe Marines had been in plain view for more than two hours. And when they moved down from the old Soviet lookout and walked up the dirt path that runs alongside the hamlet of Mian Poshteh, the Afghans started to come out.\n\nAt first, a lone man walked along the edge of one of Mian Poshteh\u2019s mud-brick houses. Then he stopped and turned and stood, watching. Then another man, this one in an irrigation ditch, stuck his head up over the ledge.", + " A pair of children stopped playing. They turned to watch.\n\n\u201cSomething\u2019s going down,\u201d Sgt. Jonathan Delgado said. He was 22 and from Kissimmee, Fla.\n\n\u201cWatch that guy,\u201d said Lance Cpl. Joshua Vance, pointing. He was also 22, from Raleigh, N.C.\n\nTwo more Afghans arrived. They stopped and stood and looked at a spot just ahead of the Marines. A man on a motorcycle drove past, driving slowly, turning his head. Then the bomb went off. It had been buried in the path itself, a few feet under the sand, a few feet in front of the Marines.\n\nThe blast from the bomb was sharp and deep,", + " and a dirty cloud shot up a hundred feet. Waves from the blast shot out, toward the village and toward us. Ten Marines at the front of the line disappeared.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re hit! We\u2019re hit!\u201d Delgado shouted, and everyone ran to the front.\n\nMarines began staggering out of the cloud. They were holding their ears and eyes.\n\n\u201cGod, I\u2019m still here,\u201d Cpl. Matt Kaiser said, rubbing his ears. Kaiser had been at the front, sweeping the ground with a mine detector. He was from Oak Harbor, Ohio. \u201cI\u2019m still here.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cNo one\u2019s hit,\u201d Delgado said.", + " \u201cJesus, no one\u2019s hit.\u201d\n\nThe rest of the young men staggered out of the cloud while the Marines trained their guns on Mian Poshteh.\n\nThe Afghans were gone.\n\n\u201cMy bell\u2019s rung pretty bad,\u201d Kaiser said. He was shaking his head and glancing up and down and half laughing.\n\nPhoto\n\nThe bomber had missed. The weapon had been what the Marines refer to as \u201ccommand-detonated,\u201d which meant that someone, probably in Mian Poshteh, had punched a trigger \u2014 on a wire leading to the bomb \u2014 when the Marines came up the path. The triggerman needed to remember precisely where he had buried his bomb.", + " Clearly, he had forgotten. If he had waited five more seconds, he would have killed several Marines.\n\nDelgado, Kaiser and the others gathered themselves and walked toward Mian Poshteh. On their radio, the Marines could hear voices coming from inside the village.\n\n\u201cIs everything ready?\u201d a voice said in Pashto.\n\n\u201cEverything is ready,\u201d another voice said. \u201cLet\u2019s see what they do.\u201d\n\nThe Marines stayed back. Earlier in the war, they would have gone into Mian Poshteh; they would have surrounded the village and kicked in doors until they found the bomber. Most likely they would have found him \u2014 and maybe along the way they would have killed some civilians and smashed up some homes.", + " And made a lot of enemies. The Marines are a very different force now, with very different goals. They walked to within 50 feet of Mian Poshteh, and Lt. Patrick Bragan shouted: \u201cSend us five men. Five men.\u201d\n\nMinutes passed, and five Afghans appeared. They were unarmed and ordinary looking.\n\n\u201cI have no idea who did that,\u201d an old man named Fazul Mohammed said.\n\n\u201cMaybe they came at night,\u201d a man named Assadullah said.\n\n\u201cI only heard the explosion,\u201d a man named Syed Wali said.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThe face of Lieutenant Bragan was pink from the heat and from pleading.\n\n\u201cAll you have to do is tell us,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cWe\u2019re here to help you.\u201d\n\nThe Marines gave up. Near sunset, they started back the way they came, through the head-high corn. Delgado turned to one of his buddies, Cpl. John Shymanik, 22.\n\n\u201cThey didn\u2019t get us today,\u201d Delgado said.\n\n\u201cThey\u2019re still trying, though,\u201d Shymanik said.\n\nIII.\n\nSTANLEY MCCHRYSTAL SAT at the head of a U-shaped bank of tables in a sealed room at Bagram Airfield, a main hub of the war. He was surrounded by five giant video screens. On each screen was another general \u2014 American,", + " German, Dutch, French, Italian \u2014 each commanding a different part of Afghanistan. It was McChrystal\u2019s morning briefing, known as the commander\u2019s update.\n\nOne by one, the generals scrolled through the events from the day before: a roadside bomb in Khost, small-arms fire in Ghazni, a British soldier killed in Helmand Province. Then one of the European generals started talking about an airstrike. A group of Taliban insurgents had attacked a coalition convoy, and the soldiers called for air support. A Hellfire missile, the European general said, obliterated an Afghan compound. The general \u2014 he cannot be named because of the confidentiality of the meeting \u2014 was moving on to the next topic when McChrystal stopped him.\n\n\u201cCan you come back to that,", + " please?\u201d McChrystal said.\n\nMcChrystal\u2019s voice is higher than you would expect for a four-star general.\n\n\u201cYes, sir,\u201d the European general said.\n\n\u201cWe just struck a compound,\u201d McChrystal said. \u201cI would like for you to explain to me the process you used to shoot a Hellfire missile into a compound that might have had civilians in it.\u201d\n\nThe European commander looked at an aide and muttered something. The killing of Afghan civilians, usually caused by inadvertent American and NATO airstrikes, has become the most sensitive issue between the Afghans and their Western guests. Each time civilians are killed, the Taliban launch a campaign of very public propaganda.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cWere there civilians in that compound?\u201d McChrystal asked.", + " He was leaning into the microphone on the table.\n\nThe commander started to talk, but McChrystal kept going.\n\n\u201cWho made that decision?\u201d McChrystal said.\n\nAn aide handed the European general a sheaf of papers.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry, but the system is not responsive enough for us to get that kind of information that quickly,\u201d the general said.\n\nMcChrystal\u2019s face began to tighten. Generals tend to treat one another with the utmost deference.\n\n\u201cWe bomb a compound, and I don\u2019t know about it until the next morning?\u201d McChrystal said. \u201cDon\u2019t just tell me, \u2018Yeah, it\u2019s O.K.\u2019 I want to know about it.", + " I\u2019m being a hard-ass about it.\u201d\n\nThe European general looked down at his papers.\n\n\u201cIt seems it was not a Hellfire missile but a 500-pound bomb,\u201d he said.\n\nMcChrystal took off his reading glasses and looked around the room \u2014 at the video screens and the other American officers.\n\n\u201cGentlemen, we need to understand the implications of what we are doing,\u201d he said. \u201cAir power contains the seeds of our own destruction. A guy with a long-barrel rifle runs into a compound, and we drop a 500-pound bomb on it? Civilian casualties are not just some reality with the Washington press.", + " They are a reality for the Afghan people. If we use airpower irresponsibly, we can lose this fight.\u201d\n\nIV.\n\nLATER THAT DAY, during a drive through Kabul, McChrystal told me that he had decided to drastically restrict the circumstances under which airstrikes would be permitted: for all practical purposes, he was banning bombs and missiles in populated areas unless his men were in danger of being overrun.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cEven if it means we are going to step away from a firefight and fight them another day, that\u2019s O.K.,\u201d McChrystal told me.\n\nMcChrystal\u2019s missive was the first in an array he has drafted aimed at radically transforming the way America and its allies wage war here.", + " In his first weeks on the job, McChrystal issued directives instructing his men on how to comport themselves with Afghans (\u201cThink of how you would expect a foreign army to operate in your neighborhood, among your families and your children, and act accordingly\u201d); how to fight (\u201cThink of counterinsurgency as an argument to win the support of the people\u201d); even how to drive (\u201cin ways that respect the safety and well-being of the Afghan people\u201d). At the heart of McChrystal\u2019s strategy are three principles: protect the Afghan people, build an Afghan state and make friends with whomever you can, including insurgents.", + " Killing the Taliban is now among the least important things that are expected of NATO soldiers.\n\n\u201cYou can kill Taliban forever,\u201d McChrystal said, \u201cbecause they are not a finite number.\u201d\n\nThat strategy is underscored by an extraordinary sense of urgency \u2014 that eight years into this war the margin for error for the Americans has shrunk to zero. \u201cIf every soldier is authorized to make one mistake,\u201d McChrystal said, \u201cthen we lose the war.\u201d\n\nWhile Afghanistan is not Iraq, McChrystal\u2019s plan does resemble in some ways that of General David H. Petraeus, who took command of American forces in Iraq in early 2007,", + " when the country was disintegrating in a civil war. For four years, the American military had tried to crush the Iraqi insurgency and got the opposite: the insurgency bloomed, and the country imploded.\n\nBy refocusing their efforts on protecting Iraqi civilians, American troops were able to cut off the insurgents from their base of support. Then the Americans struck peace deals with tens of thousands of former fighters \u2014 the phenomenon known as the Sunni Awakening \u2014 while at the same time fashioning a formidable Iraqi army. After a bloody first push, violence in Iraq dropped to its lowest levels since the war began.\n\n\u201cIt was all in,\u201d Petraeus told me about that time.\n\nAnd so if it was Petraeus who saved Iraq from cataclysm,", + " it now falls to McChrystal to save Afghanistan.\n\nPetraeus and McChrystal are in fact close \u2014 their bond solidified in the crucible of Iraq. Petraeus, now head of the U.S. military\u2019s Central Command, with overall responsibility for both Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed McChrystal for the job. \u201cHe was a key part of the team in Iraq,\u201d Petraeus told me.\n\nNow 55, Stanley McChrystal is the son of Herbert J. McChrystal Jr., an Army general who served in Germany during the American occupation and fought in Korea and Vietnam. Stanley McChrystal was the fourth child in a family of five boys and one girl;", + " all of them grew up to serve in the military or marry someone who did. \u201cMy dad was always the soldier I wanted to be,\u201d McChrystal said.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nHe graduated from West Point in 1976, at the Army\u2019s post-Vietnam nadir. Over the next 30 years, McChrystal ascended the ranks, mostly by way of the elite, secretive wing of Special Operations, in units like the Rangers. He served as a staff officer and an operations officer in the first gulf war and did stints at Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations (where he is remembered for running a dozen miles each morning to the council\u2019s offices on the Upper East Side).\n\nPhoto\n\nWith his long and gaunt face and his long and lean body,", + " McChrystal looks almost preternaturally alert \u2014 coiled, hungry. He pushes himself mercilessly, sleeping four or five hours a night, eating one meal a day. He runs eight miles at a clip, usually with an audiobook at his ears. \u201cI was the fastest runner at Fort Stewart, Ga., until he arrived,\u201d Petraeus told me recently. \u201cHe\u2019s a tremendous athlete.\u201d On a recent daylong helicopter trip touring bases around the country, McChrystal yawned throughout the day \u2014 the only evidence of his exhaustion. He drank regularly from a large mug of coffee, black.\n\nAs McChrystal drives himself,", + " he sometimes affords little tolerance to those who do not.\n\nV.\n\nMCCHRYSTAL WAS ONLY a month into his new job when he strode into the area inside NATO\u2019s International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Kabul known as Destille Gardens. A collection of one-story buildings with a courtyard and patio, it is the only thing at headquarters that resembles a lounge or a recreation area. Soldiers and Marines \u2014 most of them staff officers \u2014 would gather there for coffee and even, if they were European, a glass of beer or wine. It\u2019s a world away from Helmand Province.\n\nMcChrystal was coming for a haircut, and as he walked through the courtyard,", + " he passed a table of coalition officers chatting and drinking. According to several officers present, his face showed immediate disapproval, but no one noticed and he kept on going. Twenty minutes later, when McChrystal walked back across the courtyard, his hair freshly trimmed, the officers were still at their table. Some of them had dozed off. The general\u2019s mouth tightened. He walked over to their table.\n\nHe woke one officer and said: \u201cGood afternoon, I\u2019m Stan McChrystal. Is there a problem with your office space?\u201d\n\nHe turned and walked off. Six weeks later, McChrystal issued an order banning alcohol from I.S.A.F.", + " headquarters.\n\nYet for all his asceticism, McChrystal displays a subtlety that suggests a wider view of the world. \u201cIf you were to go into his house, he has this unreal library,\u201d Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, McChrystal\u2019s intelligence chief and longtime friend, told me this summer. \u201cYou can go over and touch a binding and ask him, \u2018What\u2019s that one about?\u2019 And he\u2019ll just start. His bad habit is wandering around old bookstores. He\u2019s not one of these guys that just reads military books. He reads about weird things too. He\u2019s reading a book about Shakespeare right now.\u201d\n\nAlso on his recent reading list this past summer:", + " \u201cVietnam: A History,\u201d Stanley Karnow\u2019s unsparing account of America\u2019s defeat.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nWhen McChrystal decided to come to Afghanistan, a lot of people signed up to come with him. \u201cI first worked for him in the gulf war, and General McChrystal was the sharpest, fastest staff officer I have ever come across \u2014 and I had been serving for 20 years at that point,\u201d said Graeme Lamb, a retired British general and former commander of the Special Air Service, Britain\u2019s equivalent of Delta Force. \u201cHe could take ideas, concepts, directions, and he could turn them into language,", + " into understanding, and pass it out at an electric rate.\u201d\n\nLamb was getting ready to retire earlier this year when McChrystal asked him to join his team. Lamb flew to Washington to talk it over, and the two men sealed the deal at a Mexican restaurant in Arlington, Va. \u201cI don\u2019t think there is a Brit that could have made the same call,\u201d Lamb told me.\n\nOne big question hovering over McChrystal is whether his experience in Iraq truly prepares him for the multiheaded challenge that faces him now. For nearly five years, McChrystal served as chief of the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military\u2019s commando units,", + " including the Army Delta Force and the Navy Seals. (Until recently, the Pentagon refused to acknowledge that the command even existed.)\n\nAs JSOC\u2019s commander, McChrystal spent no time trying to win over the Iraqis or training Iraqi forces or building the governing capacity of the Iraqi state. In Iraq (and, for about a third of his time, in Afghanistan), McChrystal\u2019s job, and that of the men under his command, was, almost exclusively, to kill and capture insurgents and terrorists.\n\nThe rescue of Iraq from the cataclysm that it had become by 2006 is an epic tale of grit and blood and luck.", + " By February of that year, Iraq had descended into a full-blown civil war, with a thousand civilians dying every month. Its central actors were the gunmen of Al Qaeda, who, with their suicide bombers, carried out large-scale massacres of Shiite civilians; and the Shiite militias, some of them in Iraqi uniforms, who retaliated by massacring thousands of young Sunni men.\n\nBreaking the cycle of attack and revenge was crucial to stopping the civil war, and it was here, McChrystal and his colleagues say, that JSOC played a critical role. In a series of operations that climaxed in 2006 and 2007,", + " McChrystal\u2019s commandos set out to destroy Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia.\n\n\u201cThe aim was to go after the middle of their network \u2014 in a regular army, their senior noncommissioned officers. We tried to cause the network to collapse,\u201d McChrystal told me. \u201cWe took it to an art form. It really became a machine.\u201d\n\nMcChrystal said that as early as the fall of 2006 \u2014 when Al Qaeda was at its murderous peak \u2014 it looked like the group was coming apart. \u201cWe sensed that Al Qaeda was going to implode,\u201d he said. \u201cWe could just feel it. We were watching it and feeling it and seeing it.\u201d In addition to driving the civil war,", + " Al Qaeda gunmen were seen as a main obstacle to Iraq\u2019s Sunnis\u2019 reconciling with the Americans and the Iraqi government. By degrading Al Qaeda, McChrystal and others say, they helped significantly reduce the civil war, and by so doing created a space that allowed a broader movement of reconciliation \u2014 the Sunni Awakening \u2014 to succeed.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cWhat General McChrystal was doing with the forces he had under command in Iraq was absolutely essential to setting the conditions that allowed the Awakening to move forward,\u201d Lamb, the former S.A.S. head, told me.\n\nThe most significant moment in McChrystal\u2019s tenure was on June 6,", + " 2006, when a crucial piece of information came across one of JSOC\u2019s video screens. For months, according to sources involved in the operation (though not McChrystal), McChrystal and his commandos had been hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Zarqawi, of course, was the man responsible for the murder of many hundreds of innocents in car bombings and suicide attacks. McChrystal was so desperate that he created a separate task force to get him. The task force narrowly missed Zarqawi several times; a few months before the June sighting,", + " the operator of a Predator drone, a pilotless airplane, had spotted Zarqawi in a taxicab in Anbar Province. He lost him \u2014 and Zarqawi jumped out \u2014 when the operator changed the focus on the Predator\u2019s camera lens.\n\nThis time, McChrystal believed, Zarqawi was in his sights. The tip was long in coming, a result of thousands of hours of intelligence work, but according to several sources, it boiled down to this: Under interrogation, an Iraqi insurgent who was a member of Zarqawi\u2019s inner circle pointed to an Iraqi named Abd al-Rahman, who, the insurgent said,", + " served as Zarqawi\u2019s spiritual adviser. Whenever Rahman was preparing to meet Zarqawi, the source told the Americans, he would send his wife and family out of Baghdad the day before.\n\nMcChrystal and his JSOC team watched Rahman for 17 consecutive days. Then, on June 6, 2006, it happened \u2014 Rahman\u2019s family was seen piling into a vehicle and leaving the city. The next day, a Predator drone followed Rahman himself as he made his way northeast out of Baghdad, to a small house in a palm grove near the village of Hibhib. Rahman went inside. McChrystal had a commando team on the ground,", + " 18 minutes away.\n\nAs McChrystal and his staff watched through the Predator camera, a man, dressed in black, walked from the house to the edge of the road. The man looked to his right, then to his left. It was Zarqawi. He walked back inside. They were sure it was him.\n\nAt an operations center, a senior Special Forces commander, realizing that time was short, ordered an airstrike. Two F-16\u2019s were dispatched; one of them was hooked up to a refueling plane; the second jet was told to go alone. A pair of 500-pound bombs killed Zarqawi.", + " McChrystal and his staff were waiting at JSOC\u2019s headquarters in Balad when the corpse came in.\n\nMcChrystal\u2019s tenure as JSOC\u2019s commander was not flawless. JSOC never got its most wanted quarry, neither Osama bin Laden nor Ayman al-Zawahiri. One of JSOC\u2019s units, Task Force 6-26, was cited for abusing detainees, many of them at a site known as Camp Nama, in Baghdad. McChrystal himself was not implicated, but at least 34 task-force members were disciplined. \u201cThere were cases where people made mistakes, and they were punished,\u201d McChrystal told me.", + " \u201cWhat we did was establish a policy and atmosphere that said that is not what you do. That is not acceptable.\u201d\n\nHe also signed off on the Silver Star recommendation for Cpl. Pat Tillman, the N.F.L. star and Army Ranger killed in Afghanistan in April 2004. The medal recommendation erroneously suggested that Tillman was killed by enemy fire; in fact he was killed accidentally by his own men, which McChrystal suspected at the time. The medal was awarded at a memorial service for Tillman, in which he was lionized as a man killed by the enemy.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nMcChrystal said he did indeed sign off on the recommendation for Tillman,", + " because he believed it was warranted. The award was for valor, and Tillman had been extraordinarily brave, regardless of who killed him. McChrystal said he never intended for Tillman\u2019s death to be exploited politically or to convey an incorrect impression about his death. \u201cI certainly regret the way this came out,\u201d McChrystal told me.\n\nAs for his current job, McChrystal said there are two lessons from Iraq that apply to Afghanistan. The first is that his role \u2014 killing insurgents \u2014 worked there only because it was part of a much larger effort to not only defeat the insurgency but also to build an Iraqi state that could stand on its own.", + " \u201cOurs was just a supporting effort,\u201d he said. The second lesson is perhaps more startling. It is that no situation, no matter how dire, is ever irredeemable \u2014 if you have the time, resources and the correct strategy. In the spring of 2006, Iraq seemed lost. The dead were piling up. The society was disintegrating. One possible conclusion was that it was time for the United States to cut its losses in a country that it never truly understood. But the American military believed it had found a strategy that worked, and it hung in there, and it finally turned the tide.\n\n\u201cOne of the big take-", + "aways from Iraq was that you have to not lose confidence in what you are doing,\u201d McChrystal said. \u201cWe were able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.\u201d\n\nVI.\n\nSHORTLY AFTER HIS ARRIVAL in Afghanistan in June 2009, McChrystal sat down with the commanders of the 82nd Airborne Division, which oversees a broad swath of eastern Afghanistan. The briefing, given by the 82nd\u2019s officers, was sophisticated but sobering: corruption in the Afghan government is pervasive, the officers said; the insurgency, supported from Pakistan, is resilient. Every valley and every village is different, each its own patchwork of ethnic groups and tribes,", + " each with its own history. The Americans are having to learn them all.\n\n\u201cThe environment is so complex that there is no overarching solution,\u201d Brig. Gen. William Fuller told McChrystal.\n\nWhen the briefing was finished, McChrystal looked around the room. \u201cGentlemen, I am coming into this job with 12 months to show demonstrable progress here \u2014 and 24 months to have a decisive impact,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s how long we have to convince the Taliban, the Afghan people and the American people that we\u2019re going to be successful. In 24 months, it has to be obvious that we have the clear upper hand and that things are moving in the right direction.", + " That\u2019s not a choice. That\u2019s a reality.\u201d\n\nIn a tour of bases around Afghanistan, McChrystal repeated this mantra to all his field commanders: Time is running out.\n\nYet even if McChrystal\u2019s plan succeeds, even if he can turn the Afghan venture around, neither he nor anyone else in the upper echelons of the military believes that the job \u2014 the one President Obama has given them to do \u2014 will be finished then.\n\nPhoto\n\n\u201cIt feels like Iraq in 2004,\u201d said Michael Flynn, McChrystal\u2019s deputy. \u201cPart of it is that the insurgency is stronger \u2014 we didn\u2019t realize how strong it was.", + " What we are trying to do is make sure everyone understands what it is we are facing \u2014 a much stronger insurgency, certainly much more capable. Their capacity to lay I.E.D.\u2019s on the battlefield, for instance \u2014 it\u2019s just stunning.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nI asked General Flynn to imagine the future here. \u201cWe are going to go in and ask for some resources,\u201d he told me. \u201cIf those resources are brought to bear in a timely manner, I believe that it\u2019s probably going to take us three years to really turn the insurgency to the point where it\u2019s waning instead of waxing. To do that we have to fix the Afghan security forces,", + " we have to build their capacity and capability, and we have to absolutely culturally change the way they operate. And then I think beyond those three years, we are looking at another two years when the government of Afghanistan and the security forces of Afghanistan begin to take a lot more personal responsibility. The challenge to us is: What can we do in 12 months? What should we expect? If people\u2019s expectations are that we are going to have the south turned around, for instance, it\u2019s not going to happen.\u201d\n\nThe strategy that McChrystal, Flynn and the other senior commanders want to employ in Afghanistan has two main prongs: one hard,", + " one soft.\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\nIn the military arena, McChrystal wants to put as many of his men as close to the Afghan people as he can.", + " That means closing some of the smaller bases in remote valleys and opening them in densely populated areas like the Helmand River valley. Here, at least, military force will play a central role, at least in the early phase of his strategy, as the Americans fight their way into areas they have not been in before.\n\n\u201cThe insurgency has to have access to the people,\u201d McChrystal told me. \u201cSo we literally want to go in there and squat among the people. We want to make the insurgents come to us. Make them be the aggressors. What I want to do is get on the inside, looking out \u2014 instead of being on the outside looking in.\u201d\n\n\u201cThere will be a lot of fighting,\u201d McChrystal added.", + " \u201cIf we do this right, the insurgents will have to fight us. They will have no choice.\u201d\n\nAnd that\u2019s the rub: the population-focused strategy requires more troops \u2014 as many as 40,000 more. This is the decision that confronts President Obama and his advisers now.\n\nThe other part of the military option is one with which McChrystal is familiar but does not completely control. It\u2019s his old portfolio \u2014 killing and capturing insurgents and terrorists. Much of that is being carried out in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda\u2019s leadership has gathered in havens just across the border from Afghanistan. Both bin Laden and Zawahiri are believed to be hiding there.\n\nIn Pakistan,", + " a C.I.A.-led program using Predator drones to hunt down and kill leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has proved remarkably successful, even if controversial inside Pakistan itself. To date, American officials say, they have killed 11 of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders, without having to launch large-scale military operations across the border.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nWith its 180 million people, several dozen nuclear warheads and havens for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Pakistan is one wild card in McChrystal\u2019s campaign. \u201cIf we are good here, it will have a good effect on Pakistan,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut if we fail here,", + " Pakistan will not be able to solve their problems \u2014 it would be like burning leaves on a windy day next door. And if Pakistan implodes, it will be very hard for us to succeed.\u201d\n\nThe softer side of McChrystal\u2019s strategy has two main thrusts: training Afghan soldiers and police and persuading insurgents to change sides. It is here where the best chances of long-term success in Afghanistan may lie.\n\nThe first of these is a vast, expensive and painstaking project. In the ninth year of the war, Afghan forces are neither large nor able enough to take over for NATO. The Afghan Army has about 85,000 soldiers,", + " and the police force has about 80,000 men. McChrystal wants to boost the size of the army to about 240,000 and the police to 160,000. \u201cI think we can do it,\u201d he told me.\n\nBut experience suggests that it won\u2019t be easy. In Iraq, the building of the security forces was fraught with disaster: in 2004 and 2005, Iraqi soldiers and the police disintegrated whenever they came under attack. In later years, Iraqi forces became more sectarian, with some Shiite-dominated units carrying out massacres of Sunni civilians. It was only much later \u2014 by early 2008 \u2014 that the Iraqi Army and the police began to show promise.\n\nAnd Iraq was an urban and literate society.", + " Afghanistan is neither. The Afghan police are widely seen as corrupt and complicit in the opium trade \u2014 the world\u2019s largest. And while many Afghan soldiers have shown themselves willing to fight, it usually falls to the Americans and their NATO allies to pay them, feed them and support them in the field.\n\nEarlier this year, Maj. Gen. Richard Formica, who oversees the training of the Afghan security forces, spoke to me about the difficulties of creating an army in a country where only one in four adults is literate. \u201cWhat percentage of police recruits can read?\u201d Formica asked when we met at his headquarters in Kabul. \u201cWhen I was down in Helmand,", + " where the Brits were training police officers, they said not only could none of them read but they didn\u2019t understand what a classroom was. How can you train officers if they can\u2019t write arrest reports?\u201d\n\nPerhaps McChrystal\u2019s most intriguing idea is his belief that he can persuade large numbers of Taliban to change sides. Coaxing insurgents back into the fold was, after all, one key to pulling Iraq back from the brink of apocalypse. Beginning in late 2006, tens of thousands of Sunni tribesmen, many of them former insurgents, agreed to stop fighting and to come onto the payroll, usually as policemen. Almost overnight, the Iraqi insurgency was reduced to Al Qaeda fanatics and a handful of others who could be targeted by McChrystal\u2019s commandos in JSOC.", + " This shaky \u2014 very shaky \u2014 arrangement is still keeping what peace there is in Iraq today.\n\nMcChrystal says he intends to begin a similar effort in Afghanistan. The idea, he said, would not be to try to flip the Taliban\u2019s leaders \u2014 that\u2019s not likely \u2014 but rather its foot soldiers. The premise of the program, McChrystal says, is that most of the Taliban\u2019s fighters are not especially committed ideologically and could be brought into society with promises of jobs and protection. \u201cI\u2019d like to go pretty high up,\u201d McChrystal said, referring to the Taliban\u2019s hierarchy. \u201cIt could be people who are commanders with significant numbers of troops.", + " I think they can be given the opportunity to come in.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nThe effort, McChrystal said, is based on his own reading of the Taliban and of Pashtun culture: most of the people fighting the United States, he argued, are motivated by local and personal grievances. They want more of a voice in local governance, for instance, or they want jobs. \u201cHistorically, the Pashtuns are very practical people,\u201d McChrystal told me. \u201cPashtun culture adjudicates disagreements in a way that mitigates blood feuds. The Pashtun people go out of their way not to do things that cause permanent feuds.", + " They have always been willing to change positions, change sides. I don\u2019t think much of the Taliban are ideologically driven; I think they are practically driven. I\u2019m not sure they wouldn\u2019t flip to our side.\u201d\n\nTo help him achieve this, McChrystal recruited his old friend Graeme Lamb, who played a similar role in Iraq. The trick in Iraq, Lamb said, was timing: by late 2006, many Iraqis, even the insurgents, had grown tired of fighting. \u201cWhat we did in Iraq in mid-2006 \u2014 had we tried to do it in mid-2004, it would have crashed and burned,\u201d Lamb told me.", + " \u201cBecause at the end of the day, people hadn\u2019t exercised their revenge. They hadn\u2019t stood at the edge of the abyss and looked into it.\u201d\n\nLamb said the time may have arrived for something similar in Afghanistan, if only because everyone is exhausted by so much war. \u201cNow is a good time,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause people are very serious on all sides.\u201d\n\nThe reconciliation plan might end up bringing into the fold some disreputable characters, but neither Lamb nor McChrystal has much of a problem with that. \u201cIn my view,\u201d McChrystal said of the insurgents, \u201ctheir past is not important. Some people say,", + " \u2018Well, they have blood on their hands.\u2019 I\u2019d say, \u2018So do a lot of people.\u2019 I think we focus on future behavior. They can enter the political process if they want to.\u201d\n\nThe notion that large groups of Taliban fighters could be persuaded to quit is not new. Previous efforts have ended in failure, often because neither the Americans nor their allies were able to protect people who changed sides.\n\nEarlier this year, for example, a local Taliban commander in Wardak Province named Abdul Jameel came forward with a group of fighters and declared that he wanted to quit. Wardak\u2019s governor, Halim Fidai, accepted his surrender and told him he was free to go home.", + " Two weeks later, Taliban gunmen entered Jameel\u2019s home and killed him, his wife, his uncle, his brother and his daughter.\n\n\u201cWe had nothing to offer him,\u201d Fidai told me.\n\nIn another case, Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand Province, told me that during a recent American military operation he got a telephone call from a Taliban commander. \u201cHe wanted to surrender,\u201d Mangal said. And then the military operation was over \u2014 and the American troops went back to their bases. \u201cHe never called back after that,\u201d Mangal said.\n\nWith more American troops, McChrystal told me, he would be better able to squeeze the insurgents into changing sides.", + " \u201cI think a lot of them need to be convinced that they are not going to be successful,\u201d he said.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nSo many things could scuttle McChrystal\u2019s plans: a Taliban more intractable than imagined, the fractured nature of Afghan society and, no matter what President Obama does, a lack of soldiers and time. But there is something even worse, over which neither McChrystal nor his civilian comrades in the American government exercise much control: the government of Hamid Karzai, already among the most corrupt in the world, appears to have secured its large victory in nationwide elections in August by orchestrating the stealing of votes.", + " A United Nations-backed group is trying to sort through the fraud allegations, and American diplomats are trying to broker some sort of power-sharing agreement with Karzai and his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah.\n\nBut increasingly, McChrystal, as well as President Obama and the American people, are being forced to confront the possibility that they will be stuck fighting and dying and paying for a government that is widely viewed as illegitimate.\n\nWhen I asked McChrystal about this, it was the one issue that he seemed not to have thought through. What if the Afghan people see their own government as illegitimate? How would you fight for something like that?\n\n\u201cThen we are going to have to avoid looking like we are part of the illegitimacy,\u201d the general said.", + " \u201cThat is the key thing.\u201d\n\nVII.\n\nA GROUP OF American Marines were bumping along a sandy road in their Humvee as the twilight turned to dark.\n\n\u201cOne guy lost his legs,\u201d Sgt. David Spaulding said, riding in the front passenger\u2019s seat. \u201cThey were walking in a field.\u201d\n\nPhoto\n\nThe Humvee bounced along some more.\n\n\u201cYou know the guy who got shot in the head?\u201d Lance Cpl. Jeremy Dones said, from a seat in the back. \u201cThey got him to Germany. His parents flew to Germany. They took him off life support.\u201d\n\nA moment passed.\n\n\u201cApparently a guy got blown to pieces,", + " and they can\u2019t find all of him,\u201d Spaulding said. \u201cThey don\u2019t know if they have all the pieces.\u201d\n\nThe men rode together in silence.\n\nMcChrystal\u2019s plans come to earth along the banks of the Helmand River, where members of the 2/8 Battalion are trying to retake a 20-mile stretch of orchards and villages around the city of Garmsir. The 2/8 Battalion, about 800 men, is part of the 10,000 Marines dispatched to Helmand by President Obama earlier this year.\n\nSince arriving in early July, the 2/8 has lost 13 men,", + " most to homemade bombs. About five times that number have been wounded. The Marines here fight nearly every day.\n\nYet for all their difficulties, the battalion\u2019s progress has been real. Garmsir, a district of about 90,000 people, boasts a functioning government with a governor and a local council. About 300 Afghan soldiers are deployed here, led by an Afghan colonel educated at the United States Army\u2019s school for its best junior officers. About 250 Afghan police officers are stationed at bridges and checkpoints. An array of public-works projects is under way.\n\nMost important, the town of Garmsir and the villages around it are quiet.", + " They are part of an area, roughly six miles wide and six miles long, that has been secured by the Marines along the east bank of the Helmand. They call the area \u201cthe snake\u2019s head\u201d for its oblong shape. Outside of Garmsir, the Taliban roam and attack. Inside, life for local Afghans is remarkably sane.\n\nGarmsir is a devastated and impoverished place; 30 years of war has seen to that. None of its roads are paved, leaving the farmers unable to sell their grapes and corn in markets outside of town. There are no cellphones, no electricity, no running water. Building a city here that could function on its own would take many years.", + " But in Garmsir\u2019s calm, the first hints of normal life are beginning to show.\n\nOne day in August, I tagged along with a group of Marines to the monthly meeting of Garmsir\u2019s district council. Our leader was Capt. Micah Caskey, a civil-affairs officer from Irmo, S.C. At 28, Caskey had already done two tours in the hardest years of the Iraq war. In 2007, he left the Marines to begin a dual graduate degree in law and business at the University of South Carolina. He spent the summer of 2008 studying law abroad. But he stayed in the Marine Reserve,", + " and a few months ago they called him back.\n\n\u201cI had a job all lined up for the summer,\u201d Caskey said. \u201cAnd now I\u2019m here for seven months. I can\u2019t tell you it was easy. Sometimes it really makes me wonder.\u201d\n\nGarmsir\u2019s governor, Abdullah Jan, arrived ahead of the meeting, and he and Caskey and a group of Marines sat in the courtyard of the district headquarters in a circle of plastic chairs. Governor Jan is the beneficiary of Afghanistan\u2019s strangely centralized political system; he was appointed by Helmand\u2019s governor, Mangal, who was directly appointed by Karzai.\n\nCaskey\u2019s experience in Iraq shows immediately.", + " He is unfailingly polite, even deferential, to Jan. And each time one of the councilmen enters, he stops the conversation and rises to shake his hand.\n\n\u201cPeace be upon you,\u201d Caskey said to Jan. \u201cIt\u2019s very nice to see you after so long.\u201d\n\nJan, who grew up in the district, told Caskey not to worry about local support for the Taliban \u2014 there wasn\u2019t any. But in the absence of a stable government, and with no guarantee of safety, ordinary Afghans were often forced to go along. \u201cI can assure you that the people of Garmsir appreciate what you are doing here,\u201d Jan said.", + " \u201cUnfortunately the people are held hostage by the Taliban.\u201d\n\nAn Afghan \u2014 one of Jan\u2019s assistants \u2014 arrived bearing a tray of tea and cakes while Jan talked.\n\n\u201cNinety percent of the local people support the government,\u201d Jan told Caskey. \u201cMaybe 10 percent really like the Taliban.\u201d\n\nThat seemed an overstatement; there were too many roadside bombs in the area \u2014 even inside the snake\u2019s head. But the point Jan was making seemed valid enough: once there is law and order, public opinion begins to change.\n\n\u201cYou guys,\u201d Jan said, looking at Caskey and the other Americans, \u201cyou come in, you help and then you leave.", + " The Afghan people are not 100 percent sure that you are going to stay. They are not sure they won\u2019t have their throats cut if they tell the Americans where a bomb is.\u201d\n\nThe council\u2019s meeting began with its 16 members taking their seats on the floor of a large, airy room. Caskey and the other Americans sat in the back. The agenda for the meeting was to decide on a list of development projects, which the Americans would pay for. As Caskey explained, the Americans didn\u2019t want to direct the projects \u2014 they wanted to strengthen the Afghan leaders by funneling the money through them.\n\n\u201cThe Americans are only going to pay for projects that we decide on,\u201d Jan announced.", + " \u201cIt\u2019s up to us.\u201d\n\nThe Afghans \u2014 all men \u2014 began to talk. Their first choice was unanimous: the main sluice gates that lead to the irrigation canals off the Helmand River, built by American aid workers in the 1950s, were badly in need of repair. Some of the fields were going dry.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s been 30 years since anyone did any work on that canal,\u201d Hajji Anwar, one of the councilmen, said.\n\nWith the meeting under way, Caskey and the other Americans got up to leave. \u201cI have one request,\u201d Caskey said to one mullah.", + " \u201cWould you be willing to record a message that we can play over the radio station saying that fighting the government violates the idea of jihad \u2014 that it\u2019s not jihad?\u201d\n\nJan thought for a second and nodded. Caskey and the other Marines strapped on their helmets.\n\n\u201cMay you have a son just like yourself,\u201d Jan told him.\n\nVIII.\n\nTHE ABANDONED ELEMENTARY school in Mian Poshteh that houses the 240 Marines of 2/8\u2019s Echo Company has no bedrooms, no beds, no electricity, no water. It\u2019s a vacant, dirty building filled with tired and dirty men. They sleep on the floor,", + " a dozen to a room, or they sleep in the dirt outside, shirtless in the heat. They fight every day. When the Marines don\u2019t attack the Taliban, the Taliban attack the Marines.\n\nNo Americans have ever come this far south before, at least not permanently. With fewer than 8,000 British troops covering all of Helmand, there never were enough to go around. Garmsir is 12 miles up a single dusty road, where Echo Company\u2019s supply convoys get bombed nearly every day.\n\nMian Poshteh is like Garmsir but worse. There is no government: no mayor, no city council,", + " no police. Thirty Afghan soldiers live here, only 10 of whom leave the base at any given time. As in Garmsir, the Marines in Mian Poshteh have come to build a government \u2014 but they have to defeat the Taliban first.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re not going to clear anything that we can\u2019t hold onto,\u201d said Capt. Eric Meador, Echo Company\u2019s commander.\n\nEven with 240 men, they can\u2019t hold onto much. By the time Echo Company and the rest of the 2/8 leave at the end of October, Meador said, he would like to control a perimeter that extends perhaps a mile and a half around his fort.", + " \u201cI\u2019d be doing pretty well,\u201d he said. To the south, there isn\u2019t another Marine base for miles.\n\nWhen you see a place like Mian Poshteh \u2014 wild, broken and isolated \u2014 it\u2019s not difficult to see why McChrystal believes he doesn\u2019t have enough troops to do what President Obama has asked him to.\n\nOne of Echo Company\u2019s typical days unfolded in late August, when the Marines set out on foot for a village named Tarakai. Led by a young lieutenant, Patrick Nevins, 24, from Chapel Hill, N.C., Echo Company\u2019s First Platoon walked through a vast field of shoulder-high corn.", + " The fields had been flooded recently, so they were filled with muck. The trek might have been easier had the Marines taken the farmers\u2019 raised footpaths, but the Taliban had taken to laying land mines in those, so the Marines waded straight into the field itself. The mud below was crisscrossed by gullies and rows of broken ground. The helmets of the Marines bobbed above the top of the corn.\n\nThe fields, deep and green, were eerily empty of other men.\n\n\u201cI guess all the farmers took the day off,\u201d Nevins said, hacking his way through the corn.\n\nHelmand\u2019s summers are long and merciless,", + " and on this day the temperature hovered around 120 degrees. Crossing the fields, with all the muck, it was hotter still. Nevins and his men tromped through the corn in full gear, including helmets and flak jackets. In the heat, my own boots fell apart.\n\nPhoto\n\nAs he walked, Nevins talked a little about himself. He seemed an unlikely presence in the fields of Helmand. His father is a cancer researcher at Duke University. \u201cMy dad is really good at what he does,\u201d Nevins said, hacking and pushing his way through the mud and corn. \u201cI guess I didn\u2019t want to compete with him.\u201d\n\nAn hour later,", + " Nevins\u2019s platoon popped out on the other side. Behind them were trails of toppled corn. \u201cSorry about your field,\u201d Nevins said to an Afghan man standing nearby.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s O.K.,\u201d he said.\n\nWe arrived at Tarakai. A group of Afghans lined up. They were talking about the Afghan presidential election, to be held only a few days later.\n\n\u201cWe can\u2019t vote,\u201d said Hakmatullah, who, like many Afghans, has only one name. \u201cEverybody knows it. We are farmers, and we cannot do a thing against the Taliban.\u201d\n\nThe others said much the same.", + " The Taliban had passed word that they would cut off the right index finger of anyone caught casting a ballot. Not that there was much chance of that: the area around Mian Poshteh was so anarchic that the Afghan government didn\u2019t send anyone to register voters. The closest polling place was in Garmsir.\n\nBut there was more to talk about. \u201cThe children are frightened,\u201d one of the men said.\n\nAnd so were the adults. The Taliban owned Tarakai; they taxed the corn and kept watch over the town.\n\n\u201cWhen you leave here, the Taliban will come at night and ask us why we were talking to you,\u201d a villager told Nevins.", + " \u201cIf we cooperate, they would kill us.\u201d\n\n\u201cThey will cut out our stomachs,\u201d another man said.\n\n\u201cIs there anything I can do for you?\u201d Nevins asked.\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t come close to our houses,\u201d the first villager said. \u201cDon\u2019t try to negotiate with us.\u201d\n\nNevins was polite but insistent. The Americans were here now, and they were going to stay. \u201cI will try to be respectful, and I will try to keep my distance,\u201d Nevins told the men. \u201cBut I have a job to do, and I need to be able to come by from time to time.\u201d\n\nAn old man with a long white beard stepped forward.", + " \u201cWe\u2019re afraid you\u2019re going to leave this place after a few months,\u201d the old man said. \u201cAnd the Taliban will take their revenge.\u201d\n\n\u201cI promise you,\u201d Lieutenant Nevins said, \u201cwe will be here when the weather gets cold, and when it gets hot again.\u201d\n\nNevins shook hands with the Afghans and said goodbye. Then he turned, and his men disappeared into the cornfield.\n\nIX.\n\nIN AMERICA, the chorus is insistent and growing: scale back the Afghan mission. It\u2019s too hard and too expensive, and we\u2019ve overstayed our welcome.\n\nGeorge F. Will, the columnist, recently said as much.", + " So did Rory Stewart, the British scholar-diplomat who has spent years in the region. Vice President Biden is said to favor such a choice.\n\nThe exact shape of a scaled-down commitment is not clear, but it goes something like this: American Special Forces units, aided by Predator drones, can keep Al Qaeda off-balance, while American soldiers stay on to train the Afghan Army and the police.\n\nIt\u2019s an attractive argument, of course: it offers the hope that the United States can achieve the same thing \u2014 American security \u2014 at a much-reduced cost. (The fate of the Afghan people themselves is basically left out of this equation.)\n\nLast month,", + " I visited Richard Haass, one of the idea\u2019s chief proponents, at his office in New York, where he is president of the Council on Foreign Relations. (Before that, through June 2003, Haass was director of policy planning at the State Department under President George W. Bush.)\n\nHaass is particularly persuasive, in part because he does not pretend to have easy answers. After eight years of mismanagement and neglect, Haass says, every choice the United States faces in Afghanistan is dreadful. The weight of the evidence, he says, suggests that curtailing our ambitions is the option least dreadful.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s not self-evident that doing more will accomplish more,\u201d Haass told me.", + " \u201cAnd I\u2019m skeptical about how central Afghanistan is anymore to the global effort against terror. I\u2019m not persuaded that you can transform the situation there.\u201d\n\nThe bulk of Al Qaeda\u2019s leadership, Haass pointed out, is now in Pakistan. That\u2019s where the United States should really be focused \u2014 in Pakistan, with a population six times larger than Afghanistan\u2019s and with at least 60 nuclear warheads. \u201cNo one wants Afghanistan to become a sponge that absorbs a disproportionate share of our country\u2019s resources,\u201d he said.\n\nGeneral McChrystal and most of the rest of the Pentagon say that Haass\u2019s argument is essentially an illusion. If the United States drew down substantially in Afghanistan,", + " they say, much of the country would quickly be overrun by the Taliban, rendering the other things \u2014 training and counterterrorism \u2014 impossible. Al Qaeda would return, possibly to the place it had before the 9/11 attacks, and Pakistan would be likely to follow.\n\nWhen I pitched McChrystal\u2019s counterargument to Haass, he said he was glad that he wasn\u2019t in Obama\u2019s shoes. \u201cLet\u2019s not kid ourselves,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to find some wonderful thing that\u2019s going to deliver large positive results at modest costs. It\u2019s not going to happen.\u201d\n\nHaass went on to say: \u201cI keep going back to Yogi Berra.", + " You know: \u2018When you reach a fork in the road, take it.\u2019 I bet there are days when Obama wakes up and sees the fork in the road and decides he\u2019s not going to take it. Because both choices are so bad.\u201d\n\nX.\n\nDURING HIS TRIP to Garmsir, Stanley McChrystal took a moment to meet with Abdullah Jan, the governor. The two sat down in the same council chambers where Jan had met with Captain Caskey.\n\n\u201cTell me how we can do better,\u201d McChrystal said.\n\nJan thought for a second, then offered an unusual answer.\n\n\u201cYou need to live in a building,", + " not a bunch of tents,\u201d he said.\n\nMcChrystal gave him a quizzical look.\n\n\u201cEveryone in Garmsir sees that you are living in tents, and they know that you are going to be leaving soon,\u201d Jan told McChrystal. \u201cYou need to build something permanent \u2014 a building. Because your job here is going to take years. Only then will people be persuaded that you are going to stay.\u201d\n\nMcChrystal nodded.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ll stay as long as we have to until our Afghan partners are completely secure,\u201d he said. \u201cEven if that means years.\u201d\n\nMcChrystal started to get up, but Jan wasn\u2019t finished yet.\n\n\u201cThe Afghan people are impatient,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cWe\u2019ve been waiting for 30 years! We don\u2019t want to wait any longer. We\u2019re impatient!\u201d\n\nMcChrystal held back a smile.\n\n\u201cBelieve me,\u201d he told Jan. \u201cI work for a lot of impatient people, too.\u201d ", + " Retired four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal has decided on a tentative syllabus for the graduate-level seminar he is teaching this semester.\n\nEric L. Robinson GRD '11, a research assistant for the course, sent out the following course outline Thursday afternoon to students enrolled in the class, \"Leadership in Operation\" (INRL 690). Note the Nov. 16 seminar theme, \"Communicating the Story \u2014 the Media Environment.\u201d\n\n7th September 2010: \u201cThe Importance of Leading Differently \u2013 The Changing Operating Environment\u201d\n\n14th September 2010: \u201cCase Study: The Changing Military 1972-", + "2010\u201d\n\n21st September 2010: \u201cRole of a Leader\u201d\n\n27th September 2010 (6-8pm): \u201cCoping With Failure\u201d\n\n28th September 2010 (Assignment 1 Due): \u201cBuilding Teams \u2013 What Makes Some Great\u201d\n\n5th October 2010: \u201cDriving Change and Operating Differently\u201d\n\n12th October 2010: \u201cNavigating Politics\u201d\n\n19th October 2010: \u201cMaking Difficult Decisions Pt. 1 \u2013 How We Decide\u201d\n\n26th October 2010 (Assignment 2 Due): \u201cMaking Difficult Decisions Pt. 2 \u2013 Dealing With Risk\u201d\n\n2nd November 2010:", + " \u201cLoyalty, Trust and Relationships\u201d\n\n9th November 2010: \u201cDealing With Cultural Differences\u201d\n\n16th November 2010: \u201cCommunicating the Story \u2013 the Media Environment\u201d\n\n30th November 2010 (Assignment 3 Due): \u201cThe Leader \u2013 the Personal Impact of Responsibility, Notoriety and Other Realities\u201d\n\n7th December 2010: \u201cThe Future Leader\u201d\n\nRobinson also included details about the first class:\n\n7th September 2010 - Seminar 1: The Importance of Leading Differently: The Changing Operating Environment Description: A description of how changes in our operating environment over the 34 years of my service have demanded changes in how organizations operate \u2013 and how leaders lead them.", + " For the military, focus often falls too narrowly - on technological advances in weaponry and armor. But like most organizations, truly significant changes in technology, politics, media, and society overall have driven change to almost every aspect of leading. Increasingly, the product of a failure to change - is failure. Historical Examples: Case Study 1: The career of Stanley McChrystal\n\nCase Study 3: The 2002-2003 decision to invade Iraq\n\nCase Study 3: The United States Civil War\n\nCase Study 4: German Grand Strategy of World War 2 Primary Reading Filkins, Dexter. Stanley McChrystal\u2019s Long War.", + " The New York Times Magazine.\n\n18th October 2009. P. 36. Supplemental Reading FM 6-22 Army Leadership, Chapter 10: Influences on Leadership (Operating Environment, Stress in Combat, Stress in Training, Dealing with the Stress of Change, Tools for Adaptability). Coutu, Diane L., \u201cHow Resilience Works,\u201d Harvard Business Review on Leading in Turbulent Times. Harvard Business School Press. 2003. Gehler, Christopher P. Agile Leaders, Agile Institutions: Educating Adaptive and Innovative Leaders for Today and Tomorrow. Strategy Research Project. Carlisle Barracks, PA:", + " U.S. Army War College, 2005. 26pp. http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA434868 Wong, Leonard. Developing Adaptive Leaders: The Crucible Experience of Operation Iraqi Free-dom. Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 2004. 23pp. http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA424850 Doyle, Michele Erina and Mark K. Smith, \u201cClassical Leadership: theories of leadership\u201d article (ILE materials) Reed, George E., \u201dWarrior Ethos\u201d (ILE materials)", + " Gardener, John. On Leadership. New York: Free Press. 1990., Chapters 1-3.\n\nRobinson also explained that while students enrolled in the class are free to talk with the media about their impressions of the class, the seminar itself will be off the record. The class meets on Tuesdays at 9:25 a.m., but the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs has yet to release the meeting location.\n" + ], + "length": 23820, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 59, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 \"It is not if, but when Houston\u2019s perfect storm will hit,\" ProPublica states in a massive report about Texas' hurricane preparedness\u2014or lack thereof\u2014published back in 2016. ProPublica warned of thousands dead, the loss of industries and shipping, and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses flooded. A Republican congressman said such a storm would \"kill America's economy.\" With Hurricane Harvey, it appears that perfect storm may be about to arrive. Experts hoped Hurricane Ike's near miss in 2008 would spur Texas to prepare for the inevitable. It didn't, and last year the state's land commissioner said the possibility of a major hurricane hitting without the necessary preparations having been made \"keeps me up at night.\" Here's what else you need to know about Hurricane Harvey: In its latest forecast, the AP reports Harvey will likely hit Texas twice\u2014once this weekend and again sometime next week\u2014making flooding worse in areas already expected to get up to 3 feet of rain in the next day or two. Harvey is President Trump's first natural disaster, but it will be handled by President Obama, at least figuratively, according to Quartz. Trump hasn't filled the top spot at NOAA or two of the three politically appointed positions at FEMA. The three roles are currently being staffed by Obama holdovers. CNET has video released from NASA showing the massive Hurricane Harvey as seen from the International Space Station. \"Here's a prayer for family, friends, and everyone,\" astronaut Jack Fischer says. \"Stay safe.\" Experts tell CNN gas prices could jump between five and 15 cents due to the hurricane. \"You're seeing prices move up because refiners have to take precautionary measures,\" one analyst says. Dozens of production platforms and at least one oil rig have been evacuated. The Times-Picayune reports a Louisiana coroner warns Hurricane Harvey could trigger PTSD in people who survived Hurricane Katrina 12 years ago. \"This is not to be taken lightly,\" Charles Preston says. \"You should believe the meteorologists.\" That's the message from FiveThirtyEight when it comes to the deadliness of Hurricane Harvey. The site notes that the ability to predict winds, flooding, and hurricane paths is better than ever. Finally, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wants undocumented immigrants to know that they won't need to show an ID in order to get into shelters, the Washington Post reports. \u201cWhat everyone is focused on right now is doing all we can to protect life,\" he says. The feds also say they don't plan to conduct \"non-criminal\" immigration checks at evacuation sites or shelters.\n", + "docs": [ + "Update (Aug. 26, 1 a.m.): Harvey made landfall late Friday evening between Port Aransas (just northeast of Corpus Christi) and Port O\u2019Connor, Texas, as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph. Wind speeds should decrease as Harvey encounters land, but the threat from the storm is far from over. Harvey is forecasted to come inland before hooking back toward the coast over the next few days. Through Wednesday, the area from Corpus Christi to the Texas-Louisiana border is expected to receive at least 15 inches of rain, and some spots may get 40 or more inches.", + " This stretch of coastline includes Houston, where over 20 inches of rain is anticipated.\n\nHurricane Harvey is slated to become the first major hurricane to hit the United States in over a decade early Saturday morning, when it is expected to make landfall near Corpus Christi. But although the country hasn\u2019t seen a storm like this in years, this one is likely to hit as forecasted and could be very deadly. In other words, you should believe the meteorologists.\n\nThe National Hurricane Center\u2019s forecast is staggering. Harvey could last through early Wednesday and beyond, as its current track has it coming inland and then looping back toward the coastline. Winds of greater than 39 miles per hour are possible from Brownsville,", + " at the southernmost tip of Texas, to the Houston area near the Louisiana border, a span of about 300 miles. And many areas within this cone are expected to face far worse winds, as the storm is forecasted to be a Category 3 hurricane (meaning sustained winds of 111 mph to 129 mph) when it makes landfall. Hurricane Katrina was also a Category 3 storm when it hit Louisiana in 2005.\n\nBut water, not wind, is responsible for most hurricane deaths. A storm surge (the leading cause of hurricane deaths) of 6 to 12 feet is possible along most of Texas\u2019s middle coast,", + " from an area south of Corpus Christi to Sargent, about 70 miles southwest of Houston. At least 15 and possibly more than 35 inches of rain (the second leading cause of hurricane deaths) is forecasted to fall from south of Corpus Christi all the way to coastal southwest Louisiana and as possibly as far inland as the San Antonio area.\n\nA 2016 investigative series by The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and Reveal detailed why a high storm surge and heavy rain may be particularly devastating along Texas\u2019s Gulf Coast. In recent years, intense, rare flooding has frequently hit areas outside of officially designated floodplains. The people who live in those areas aren\u2019t required to have flood insurance,", + " which can leave them in dire financial circumstances after the rains come. Even those who are covered buy their flood insurance from a federal program that\u2019s deeply in debt after decades of charging rates that don\u2019t reflect the true risk of flooding. Scientists believe that climate change, which is causing more frequent and more intense storms, has led to a growing risk of catastrophic flooding in the area, a risk further intensified by an increase in urban development, which has paved over prairie lands that were previously able to absorb some of the water.\n\nEven as flood risks have grown, our ability to predict them has improved. Because the storm is less than 24 hours from landfall,", + " the chance that it will wind up missing is minimal. Over the past 27 years, the average 24-hour Atlantic hurricane forecast went from being off by an average of 100 miles to being off by less than 50 miles. Harvey is expected to hit roughly in the middle of Texas\u2019s 350 miles of coastline \u2014 a swing of 50 miles north or south would change which areas were most affected but wouldn\u2019t spare the state entirely. Freeport and Galveston are about 50 miles apart, and both of these cities are already well within the heavy rain forecast.\n\nIt\u2019s also unlikely the wind and therefore the storm surge will not occur as expected.", + " Although wind forecasts have not gotten appreciably better since 1989, they\u2019re still pretty good in the 24 hours before a storm hits. The maximum sustained wind speed forecasts in the day before a storm have been off by an average of a little more than 10 mph over the past 27 years. If Harvey lands with a wind speed 10 mph lower than currently projected, it would still be a significant hurricane.\n\nHarvey\u2019s path would cause the most damage, both in human and economic terms, if it struck the city of Houston and its ports head on \u2014 that area is the most densely populated part of the Texas coastline,", + " and it is also home to a huge concentration of refineries and chemical plants. But there is little infrastructure in place to protect communities in that area. Harvey\u2019s expected path also crosses hundreds of colonias \u2014 unincorporated residential areas that often lack basic services such as drinkable water, roads and electricity. Both the colonias and the surrounding cities are home to hundreds of thousands of undocumented people, who may face questions about their immigration status at checkpoints along evacuation routes.\n\nNeighboring Louisiana is also preparing for dangerous floods. In New Orleans, a network of pumps is supposed to move water out of the city, but three of five turbines that power the pumps are reportedly not working,", + " and more than 10 percent of the pumps themselves are down for repairs. The city is developing emergency evacuation plans, and Louisiana\u2019s Governor John Bel Edwards has already declared a state of emergency.\n\nHistory suggests that Harvey will probably be costly and deadly. Hurricane Ike in 2008, for example, was similar to Harvey in both size and landfall location. Ike hit in the Galveston area (north of where Harvey is expected to land) with 110 mph winds, which is a bit slower than the ones Harvey is expected to generate. Ike produced less rainfall than what is expected with Harvey, but Ike\u2019s storm surge was greater than the one forecasted for this weekend\u2019s storm.", + " Although forecasters and officials knew Ike would be a major storm long before it hit (unlike Harvey, which dissipated and reformed, giving forecasters little time to predict its path), Ike was responsible for 74 deaths in the state of Texas alone. It also caused about $34 billion worth of damage in the state.\n\nIn terms of rainfall, Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 is perhaps most similar to Harvey\u2019s forecast. Like Harvey is expected to do, Allison came inland and then looped back toward the Texas coast. The storm dropped nearly 40 inches of rain on the hardest-hit areas in eastern Texas. It also caused 23 deaths and about $6 billion worth of property damage in Texas.\n\nTo find the last major hurricane that took roughly the same track as Harvey is expected to follow,", + " you have to go all the way back Hurricane Celia in 1970. Celia produced maximum sustained winds of 130 miles per hour at landfall and a storm surge of more than 9 feet. But while Harvey is expected to move slowly, which drives up rainfall totals, Celia was fast-moving and dropped only a little more than 7 inches of rain. Perhaps as a result, Celia was responsible for a comparatively low 11 deaths and about $3 billion in damages.\n\nChances are that Harvey will cause a lot more physical damage than Celia. Hopefully, though, people will take the forecasts seriously. That way,", + " even if property is lost, the loss of life will be kept to a minimum. ", + " Authorities on Friday sought to reassure undocumented immigrants seeking shelter during the storm.\n\nTexas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said people would not need to show identification in order to access shelters.\n\n\u201cThat will not be an issue,\u201d Abbott said during an interview on MSNBC, saying this was his understanding based on instructions from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. \u201cWhat everyone is focused on right now is doing all we can to protect life.\u201d\n\nTX Gov. Abbot: Undocumented immigrants will not have to show ID for Hurricane Harvey relief https://t.co/W9J83v8PlL \u2014 MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 25, 2017\n\nFederal officials also sought to dispel concerns that could potentially keep people from going to shelters.", + " In a joint statement, the Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies said they did not plan to conduct any \u201cnon-criminal\u201d immigration actions at places where people might seek shelter.\n\n\u201cRoutine non-criminal immigration enforcement operations will not be conducted at evacuation sites, or assistance centers such as shelters or food banks,\u201d the agencies said in a joint statement. \u201cThe laws will not be suspended, and we will be vigilant against any effort by criminals to exploit disruptions caused by the storm.\u201d\n\nThe agencies said their \u201chighest priorities are to promote life-saving and life-sustaining activities\u201d as well as to help people evacuate and recover.\n\nIn addition,", + " Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees held in Port Isabel Detention Center \u2014 a facility in Los Fresnos, Tex., not far from the Gulf of Mexico \u2014 would be temporarily moved to other facilities away from the storm\u2019s projected path. ", + " Carolyn Price empties a fridge on the lower level of her property in Matagorda, Texas before Hurricane Harvey makes landfall Friday, Aug. 25, 2017. Conditions were deteriorating along Texas's Gulf Coast... (Associated Press)\n\nCarolyn Price empties a fridge on the lower level of her property in Matagorda, Texas before Hurricane Harvey makes landfall Friday, Aug. 25, 2017. Conditions were deteriorating along Texas's Gulf Coast on Friday as Hurricane Harvey strengthened and slowly moved toward the state, with forecasters warning... (Associated Press)\n\nHOUSTON (AP) \u2014 The Latest on Hurricane Harvey as it takes aim at the Texas coast (all times local):\n\n11:", + "40 a.m.\n\nForecasters now say there's a good chance Hurricane Harvey may hit Texas twice, worsening projected flooding.\n\nThe National Hurricane Center's official five-day forecast Friday has Harvey slamming the central Texas coast, stalling and letting loose with lots of rain. Then forecasters project the weakened but still tropical storm is likely to go back into the Gulf of Mexico, gain some strength and hit Houston next week.\n\nJeff Masters, Weather Underground's meteorology director, said this could cause a collision of high water with nowhere to go. Harvey is projected to drop up to 3 feet (0.91 meter) of rain in some places over the next several days.\n\nBut a second landfall near Houston means more storm surge coming from the Gulf.", + " Storm surge is an abnormal rise of water above the normal tide, generated by a storm.\n\n___\n\n11:30 a.m.\n\nPresident Donald Trump says he's keeping a close watch on Hurricane Harvey.\n\nOn Twitter Friday, Trump said he \"Received a #HurricaneHarvey briefing this morning\" from top federal officials.\n\nIn another statement on Twitter, Trump said he had spoken with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards. He added: \"Closely monitoring #HurricaneHarvey developments & here to assist as needed.\"\n\nTrump tweeted Thursday, encouraging people to be prepared. Harvey is forecast to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday as a Category 3 storm.\n\n___\n\n11:", + "15 a.m.\n\nCorpus Christi officials say all flights out of the city's airport have been canceled as Hurricane Harvey approaches.\n\nThe city said in a news release late Friday morning that the airlines had canceled all flights out of Corpus Christi International Airport for the rest of the day.\n\nThe city said the airport isn't closed, but officials don't anticipate much activity over the weekend. Runways will be closed as conditions warrant. The hurricane is expected to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday morning.\n\nThe city says Southwest and United Airlines have no scheduled flights until Monday, while American Airlines hopes to resume service on Saturday.\n\n___\n\n10:45 a.m.\n\nTexas Gov.", + " Greg Abbott says there's still time for coastal residents in the path of Hurricane Harvey to get out of harm's way. But he says they must leave immediately.\n\nAbbott on Friday didn't second-guess local officials who have called for voluntary and not mandatory evacuations. He told The Weather Channel that mayors and local leaders \"know their terrain very well.\"\n\nAbbott has expressed concerns that not as many people are evacuating compared with previous storms as Harvey bears down on the state. Harvey is forecast to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday as a Category 3 storm.\n\nAbbott has activated about 700 members of the Texas National Guard in preparation for Harvey.", + " The storm is set to be the first hurricane to make landfall on the Texas coast since Hurricane Ike in 2008.\n\n___\n\n10:20 a.m.\n\nHurricane Harvey continues to swirl toward the middle Texas coast as it flirts with becoming a major Category 3 storm.\n\nThe National Hurricane Center's latest advisory as of 10 a.m. Friday places the storm about 115 miles (185 kilometers) southeast of Corpus Christi, moving 10 mph (17 kph) to the northwest. Sustained winds have been holding at 110 mph (177 kph).\n\nForecasters have said it will intensify and make landfall Friday evening or early Saturday as a likely Category 3 storm,", + " meaning sustained winds topping 115 mph (185.07 kph).\n\nOnce the storm makes landfall, gradual weakening is forecast but because so much of the storm remains over the warm Gulf of Mexico, which fuels Harvey, the hurricane center says the weakening could be slower than normal.\n\nThat also means the storm is likely to be a huge rainmaker. Predictions for a wide area of Texas from the coast and inland for rainfall measuring up to nearly 3 feet (0.91 meter) as the storm stalls and meanders well into next week.\n\n___\n\n10 a.m.\n\nAn emergency management official on the Texas coast says a primary concern as Harvey approaches is heavy rain that could leave many towns isolated for days as they're turned into \"essentially islands.\"\n\nHarvey is forecast to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday as a Category 3 storm.\n\nMelissa Munguia is deputy emergency management coordinator for Nueces (nyoo-", + "AY'-sis) County. She says there are vast flatlands just inland from the central Texas coast that are prone to flooding.\n\nThe approximately 20 inches (50 centimeters) of rain that Harvey may bring could leave towns in the area isolated well into next week.\n\nMunguia says that traffic backups were being seen Friday on heavily traveled roads such as Interstate 37 as people move inland to San Antonio and other locations.\n\n___\n\n7:45 a.m.\n\nThe National Hurricane Center warns that conditions are deteriorating as Hurricane Harvey strengthens and slowly moves toward the Texas coast.\n\nThe center says preparations for the storm \"should be rushed to completion\"", + " Friday morning along Texas' central Gulf Coast.\n\nThe center says the storm has maximum sustained winds of 110 mph (177 kph), just shy of the benchmark for a Category 3 storm. Forecasters say the storm is expected to reach that mark before making landfall late Friday or early Saturday.\n\nMillions of people are bracing for a prolonged battering that could swamp dozens of counties more than 100 miles (161 kilometers) inland.\n\nBrock Long is the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He tells \"Good Morning America\" that Harvey is a \"very serious\" threat and that the window for evacuating is quickly closing.\n\nLong says he expects extensive damage from significant rain over the next three days.\n\n___\n\n1:", + "30 a.m.\n\nTexas residents and officials are preparing for Hurricane Harvey, which the National Hurricane Center says has strengthened to a Category 2 storm.\n\nHarvey grew quickly Thursday from a tropical depression into a Category 1 hurricane. Early Friday, the center reported it's now at a Category 2.\n\nFueled by warm Gulf of Mexico waters, the storm is projected to become a major Category 3 hurricane. Forecasters are labeling it a \"life-threatening storm\" with landfall predicted late Friday or early Saturday between Port O'Connor and Matagorda Bay, a 30-mile (48-kilometer) stretch of coastline about 70 miles (110 kilometers)", + " northeast of Corpus Christi.\n\nTexas officials have been expressing concern that not as many people are evacuating compared with previous storms as Hurricane Harvey bears down on the state. ", + " Hell and High Water Preparing Houston for the Next Big Storm\n\nSee the interactive version.\n\nIt is not if, but when Houston\u2019s perfect storm will hit.\n\nThey called Ike \u201cthe monster hurricane.\u201d\n\nHundreds of miles wide. Winds at more than 100 mph. And \u2014 deadliest of all \u2014 the power to push a massive wall of water into the upper Texas coast, killing thousands and shutting down a major international port and industrial hub.\n\nThat was what scientists, public officials, economists and weather forecasters thought they were dealing with on Sept. 11, 2008, as Hurricane Ike barreled toward Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States and home to its largest refining and petrochemical complex.", + " And so at 8:19 p.m., the National Weather Service issued an unusually dire warning.\n\n\u201cALL NEIGHBORHOODS, AND POSSIBLY ENTIRE COASTAL COMMUNITIES, WILL BE INUNDATED,\u201d the alert read. \u201cPERSONS NOT HEEDING EVACUATION ORDERS IN SINGLE FAMILY ONE OR TWO STORY HOMES WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH.\u201d\n\nBut in the wee hours of Sept. 13, just 50 miles offshore, Ike shifted course. The wall of water the storm was projected to push into the Houston area was far smaller than predicted \u2014 though still large enough to cause $30 billion in damage and kill at least 74 people in Texas.", + " Ike remains the nation\u2019s third-costliest hurricane after Katrina and Superstorm Sandy.\n\nStill, scientists say, Houston\u2019s perfect storm is coming \u2014 and it\u2019s not a matter of if but when. The city has dodged it for decades, but the likelihood it will happen in any given year is nothing to scoff at; it\u2019s much higher than your chance of dying in a car crash or in a firearm assault, and 2,400 times as high as your chance of being struck by lightning.\n\nIf a storm hits the region in the right spot, \u201cit\u2019s going to kill America\u2019s economy,\u201d said Pete Olson, a Republican congressman from Sugar Land,", + " a Houston suburb.\n\nSuch a storm would devastate the Houston Ship Channel, shuttering one of the world\u2019s busiest shipping lanes. Flanked by 10 major refineries \u2014 including the nation\u2019s largest \u2014 and dozens of chemical manufacturing plants, the Ship Channel is a crucial transportation route for crude oil and other key products, such as plastics and pesticides. A shutdown could lead to a spike in gasoline prices and many consumer goods \u2014 everything from car tires to cell phone parts to prescription pills.\n\n\u201cIt would affect supply chains across the U.S., it would probably affect factories and plants in every major metropolitan area in the U.S.,\u201d said Patrick Jankowski,", + " vice president for research at the Greater Houston Partnership, Houston\u2019s chamber of commerce.\n\nHouston\u2019s perfect storm would virtually wipe out the Clear Lake area, home to some of the fastest-growing communities in the United States and to the Johnson Space Center, the headquarters for NASA\u2019s human spaceflight operation. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses there would be severely flooded.\n\nMany hoped Ike\u2019s near miss would spur action to protect the region. Scientists created elaborate computer models depicting what Ike could have been, as well as the damage that could be wrought by a variety of other potent hurricanes, showing \u2014 down to the specific neighborhood and industrial plant \u2014 how bad things could get.\n\nThey wanted the public to become better educated about the enormous danger they were facing;", + " a discussion could be had about smarter, more sustainable growth in a region with a skyrocketing population. After decades of inaction, they hoped that a plan to build a storm surge protection system could finally move forward.\n\nSeveral proposals have been discussed. One, dubbed the \u201cIke Dike,\u201d calls for massive floodgates at the entrance to Galveston Bay to block storm surge from entering the region. That has since evolved into a more expansive concept called the \u201ccoastal spine.\u201d Another proposal, called the \u201cmid-bay\u201d gate, would place a floodgate closer to Houston\u2019s industrial complex.\n\nBut none have gotten much past the talking stage.\n\nHopes for swift,", + " decisive action have foundered as scientists, local officials and politicians have argued and pointed fingers at one another. Only in the past two years have studies launched to determine how best to proceed.\n\nA devastating storm could hit the region long before any action is taken.\n\n\u201cThat keeps me up at night,\u201d said George P. Bush, the grandson and nephew of two U.S. presidents and Texas\u2019 land commissioner. As head of an agency charged with protecting the state\u2019s coast, he kickstarted one of the studies that will determine the risk the area faces and how to protect it.\n\nBut the process will take years. Bush said, \u201cYou and me may not even see the completion of this project in our lifetime.\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s already been eight years since Ike and Houston gets hit by a major storm every 15 years on average.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re sitting ducks.", + " We\u2019ve done nothing.\u201d said Phil Bedient, an engineering professor at Rice University and co-director of the Storm Surge Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center. \u201cWe\u2019ve done nothing to shore up the coastline, to add resiliency \u2026 to do anything.\u201d\n\nTo this day, some public officials seem content to play the odds and hope for the best.\n\nHouston\u2019s new mayor, former long\u00adtime state lawmaker Sylvester Turner, declined an interview request for this story. Turner\u2019s office released a statement from Dennis Storemski, the city\u2019s public safety and homeland security director.\n\n\u201cOnly a small portion of the city of Houston is at risk for major storm surge,\u201d it said.\n\nIn a second statement,", + " Storemski placed the onus primarily on the federal government to safeguard the Houston region from a monster hurricane. He said the city \u201clooks forward to working with the responsible federal agencies when a solution is identified and funded.\u201d\n\n\u201cUntil then, we continue to inform our residents of their risk and the steps they should take when a significant tropical cyclone causes storm surge in the [Ship] Channel, and evacuations become necessary,\u201d the statement said.\n\nThe pressure to act has only grown since Ike, as the risks in and around Houston have increased.\n\nThe petrochemical complex has expanded by tens of billions of dollars. About a million more people have moved into the region,", + " meaning there are more residents to protect and evacuate.\n\n\u201cPeople are rushing to the coast, and the seas are rising to meet them,\u201d said Bill Merrell, a marine scientist at Texas A&M University at Galveston.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re all at risk\u201d\n\nThe Houston Ship Channel and the energy-related businesses that line it are widely described as irreplaceable. The 52-mile waterway connects Houston\u2019s massive refining and petrochemical complex to the Gulf of Mexico.\n\nFor all its economic importance, though, the Ship Channel also is the perfect conduit to transport massive storm surge into an industrial area that also is densely populated.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re all at risk,", + " and we\u2019re seriously at risk,\u201d said Craig Beskid, executive director of the East Harris County Manufacturers Association, which represents ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and other major companies that operate 130 facilities in the area. \u201cNot only are the people here in this region at risk, but significant statewide economic assets and national assets are also at risk.\u201d\n\nHalf of the Ship Channel, which is 45 feet at its deepest, cuts through Galveston Bay, while the other half is landlocked, snaking inland at about 400 feet wide. Its slim and shallow nature would intensify the height and impact of potential storm surge.\n\nThe effect would be similar with Clear Lake,", + " another narrow channel jutting off the bay that is surrounded by affluent suburban communities.\n\nThe storm models that scientists have created show that Houston\u2019s perfect storm would push water up the Ship Channel, topping out at a height of more than 30 feet above sea level. The surge would be only slightly lower in Clear Lake.\n\nThat\u2019s higher than the highest storm surge ever recorded on the U.S. coast \u2014 27.8 feet during Hurricane Katrina. And it would be almost entirely unabated. Unlike New Orleans, whose levee system failed during that 2005 storm and was rebuilt after, Houston has no major levee system to begin with.", + " (A 15-foot earthen levee and flood wall surrounds one low-lying town on the Ship Channel, but that would be inadequate to protect against a worst-case storm.)\n\n\u201cYou\u2019re talking about major, major damage,\u201d said state Sen. Sylvia Garcia, a Houston Democrat. \u201cAnd it seems like every year they tell us that we\u2019re overdue for one.\u201d\n\nEach monster hurricane model that scientists provided to The Texas Tribune and ProPublica is slightly different. One model, nicknamed \u201cMighty Ike\u201d and developed by the SSPEED Center and the University of Texas at Austin, is based on Ike but increases its wind speeds to 125 mph.", + " Researchers also refer to that as \u201cp7+15.\u201d\n\nAnother storm, modeled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is physically smaller but has much higher wind speeds \u2014 145 mph. Still, neither the FEMA model nor Mighty Ike is classified as a Category 5 storm, which would have wind speeds of at least 157 mph.\n\nBoth would make landfall at a point near the western end of Galveston Island, where Ike was originally projected to come ashore.\n\nFor Houston, that\u2019s the worst place a hurricane could hit, positioning the counterclockwise-spinning storm to fling the most water into the Ship Channel and Clear Lake.\n\nThe scenarios are rare,", + " scientists say, but by no means impossible. Mighty Ike is considered a 350-year event, according to the SSPEED Center, and the FEMA model is what is referred to as a 500-year storm.\n\nSuch events have a small, but measurable, chance of occurring in any given year. For example, there is a 1-in\u2013500, or 0.2 percent, chance that a storm portrayed by the FEMA model will occur in the next hurricane season. Over the next 50 years, that translates to a likelihood of about 10 percent.\n\nScientists widely believe the method of calculating the probability of such storms may no longer be valid,", + " in part because of climate change. \u201c100-year\u201d events might occur as often as every few years, while \u201c500-year\u201d events could every few decades, climate scientists say.\n\nAs scary as the models are, they are based on current sea levels. That means such storms will be even more damaging in the future as sea levels continue to rise in the wake of climate change.\n\nEach model projects nothing short of catastrophe. Total damage could easily top $100 billion, scientists say. That is about how much damage Katrina inflicted on Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi a decade ago.\n\nGalveston Island and low-lying communities in the Houston metro area would be completely underwater hours before the hurricane even hit.\n\nOnce the storm makes landfall,", + " hurricane-force winds would meet rising waters to blow 25- to 35-foot storm surges up Clear Lake and the Houston Ship Channel.\n\nThe rushing water would be strong enough to knock homes and even sturdier commercial buildings off their foundations. The models incorporate base land elevation and even some small levees or barrier systems, though not whether structures are elevated on slabs or stilts. They show that many industrial areas along the Ship Channel would be inundated with enough water to cover a two- or even three-story building.\n\nFor more on how the models work, read our complete methodology. The communities and industrial plants around the Ship Channel and Clear Lake are typically elevated to only 10 to 20 feet above sea level,", + " said Bedient of Rice University.\n\nThat means for many who haven\u2019t evacuated, \u201cyou\u2019re seeing people scrambling for their lives off of that first floor into the second floor,\u201d Bedient said. \u201cAnd then when it\u2019s 20 feet high, you\u2019re going to see water in the second floor as well.\u201d\n\nSam Brody, a marine scientist at Texas A&M at Galveston who has studied the vulnerability of Clear Lake, says many people living there have no idea of the risk.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a great place to be,\u201d he said of the region. \u201cThe last thing you think about is 20 feet of water coming up here.\u201d\n\nAn economic and national security issue\n\nBeyond the pain a scenario like Mighty Ike would inflict locally,", + " a storm that cripples the region could also deeply damage the U.S. economy and even national security.\n\nThe 10 refineries that line the Ship Channel produce about 27 percent of the nation\u2019s gasoline and about 60 percent of its aviation fuel, according to local elected and economic development officials. The production percentage is by most accounts even higher for U.S. Department of Defense jet fuel. (Official production figures are proprietary.)\n\nIn 2008, Ike caused widespread power outages that shuttered refineries for several weeks and forced operators to close a vast network of pipelines that delivers gasoline made in Houston to almost every major market east of the Rocky Mountains.", + " Days after the storm hit, Houston Congressman Gene Green said concern over jet fuel was significant enough that a Continental Airlines executive and an Air Force general showed up to a local emergency response meeting to assess the situation.\n\n\u201cWe can\u2019t stand it when they shut down,\u201d Green, a Democrat, recalls the general telling him. \u201cWe need to see what we can do to help.\u201d\n\nThe airline executive, meanwhile, told him that commercial planes that usually gassed up in Houston were flying out with partially empty tanks.\n\nIf Houston\u2019s refineries closed, some experts envision something like $7\u00ad per\u00ad gallon gasoline across the country for an indefinite period of time \u2014 particularly in the southeast,", + " which is \u201chighly dependent\u201d on two pipelines fed by Gulf refineries, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.\n\n\u201cWe would definitely see the price of gasoline, aviation and diesel fuel skyrocket,\u201d not only domestically but probably globally, said Jankowski, of the Greater Houston Partnership.\n\nOther analysts are less concerned, saying that refineries elsewhere would meet demand.\n\n\u201cPrice spikes influenced by major storms/hurricanes tend to be shorter lived than most think,\u201d said Denton Cinquegrana, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service, in an email.\n\nStill, the Houston region\u2019s 150 or so chemical plants are even more central to U.S.", + " and global manufacturing than its refineries are to fuel production. They make up about 40 percent of the nation\u2019s capacity to produce basic chemicals and are major makers of plastics, specialty chemicals and agrochemicals, including fertilizers and pesticides.\n\nThey export tens of billions of dollars\u2019 worth of materials every year to countries such as China, which turn them into consumer goods \u2014 toys, tires, Tupperware, pharmaceuticals, iPhone parts, carpet, plumbing pipe, polyester fabric and all manners of car parts.\n\nA lot of those products are shipped back to U.S. ports, including the Port of Houston, the busiest container port on the Gulf and the sixth-busiest in the United States.\n\n\u201cThe phone I\u2019m holding in my hand is made of plastic,", + " which probably came out of one of the plants on the Ship Channel, and it was shipped to someplace overseas and then came back in the form of a molded phone and was installed in my office,\u201d Jankowski said.\n\nIn 2014, during a climate change workshop held in Houston, staff from the White House and the Federal Emergency Management Agency outlined the potential implications of a monster hurricane shuttering Houston\u2019s refining and petrochemical complex.\n\n\u201cAny disruption lasting longer than several days will negatively affect U.S. energy supplies. Any disruption lasting longer than several weeks will negatively affect the food security of the United States and our trading partners,\u201d according to a workshop handbook,", + " which envisioned a massive hurricane producing a 34-foot storm surge in the Ship Channel in 2044, when sea levels will be higher.\n\nFEMA declined to make someone available to further discuss the risks.\n\nAn analysis of the FEMA 500-year storm model by the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston shows that 52 facilities on the Houston Ship Channel, including two refineries, would flood by as much as 16 feet of water.\n\nFlooding is the most disruptive type of damage an industrial plant can experience from a hurricane. Salty ocean water swiftly corrodes critical metal and electrical components and contaminates nearby freshwater sources used for operations.", + " Even plants that aren\u2019t flooded would likely have to shut down because they depend on storm-vulnerable infrastructure \u2014 electric grids, pipelines, roads and rail lines.\n\nAfter a storm like Mighty Ike, the Ship Channel itself \u2014 a crucial lifeline for crude imports and chemical exports \u2014 would probably be littered with debris and toxins, officials say. It would have to be cleaned up before ships and tankers could move safely again.\n\nThe U.S. Coast Guard briefly shutters all or parts of the Ship Channel dozens of times a year, often because of fog, but the costs of doing so are enormous: More than $300 million per day, as of 2014.", + " (Experts say that number likely has fallen somewhat, along with the price of oil.)\n\nMost plants keep about a month\u2019s worth of inventory on hand, said Douglas Hales, a professor of operations and supply chain management at the University of Rhode Island. \u201cAs goods and supplies run out after about 30 days, you\u2019re going to start feeling it.\u201d\n\nAscend Performance Materials would burn through its inventory in two weeks, said Carole Wendt, its chief procurement officer. It is one of only two companies in the world capable of fully producing Nylon 66, a strong, heat-resistant plastic that goes into products such as tennis balls, airbags and cable ties.\n\nThat\u2019s even after the company pads its inventory,", + " which it does every hurricane season.\n\nA worst-case scenario storm is \u201ca really hard thing to plan for,\u201d Wendt said. \u201cIt\u2019s in our minds, it\u2019s important, but there\u2019s really there\u2019s no way to plan for it.\u201d\n\nHouston\u2019s refineries and chemical plants have taken measures to protect themselves from hurricanes since Ike and Katrina, constructing floodwalls and relocating and elevating certain buildings and sensitive infrastructure.\n\nThese steps will likely protect them from a weaker hurricane, but not the worst-case storms depicted in the SSPEED Center or FEMA models.\n\nProtecting against anything beyond a 100-year storm is uncommon in the United States but not in other parts of the world.", + " Systems in the Netherlands that inspired the \u201cIke Dike\u201d concept are built to protect against a 10,000-year storm.\n\nIndustry officials say building a system to guard against these types of events would be cost prohibitive, especially given their comparatively low likelihood. They say it\u2019s up to government to fund and execute such plans.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s really a political question and a question for the federal government and the state government to decide upon,\u201d said Beskid of the East Harris County Manufacturers Association.\n\nLast year, his group endorsed the \u201ccoastal spine\u201d concept. The Texas Chemical Council, which represents most of the chemical manufacturing plants in the Houston area,", + " has not endorsed a particular project but says it supports studying the issue.\n\n\u201cNothing\u2019s changed\u201d\n\nWith so much at stake, many public officials readily agree not nearly enough has been done to protect the Houston region from hurricane damage.\n\nAnd if anything is ever approved for construction, it\u2019s at least a decade away from breaking ground.\n\n\u201cHere we are \u2014 what is this, eight years after Ike? \u2014 and nothing\u2019s changed,\u201d said Annise Parker, who stepped down as Houston\u2019s mayor in January. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ve done enough, and I don\u2019t think we made enough progress.\u201d\n\nFor years, scientists bickered over the cost and feasibility of the \u201cIke Dike,\u201d a Dutch-inspired concept Merrell proposed in the months after Ike that has evolved into the \u201ccoastal spine.\u201d\n\nWith a pricetag of at least $8 billion,", + " the coastal spine would extend Galveston\u2019s century-\u00adold, 17-\u00adfoot seawall down the entire length of the island and along the peninsula to its north, Bolivar. It also would install floodgates at the entrance to Galveston Bay to block storm surge from entering.\n\nThe SSPEED Center has warmed to the coastal spine concept, but it\u2019s also proposed a few alternatives, most recently, a $2.8 billion barrier dubbed the \u201cmid-bay\u201d gate that would stretch across Galveston Bay. As tall as 25 feet, the gate would be constructed closer to Houston than Merrell\u2019s proposal.", + " The proposal also includes another levee to protect Galveston.\n\nLocal officials have blamed scientists for not working together on a single plan. Congressional representatives for the area say they have been waiting on the state to give them a proposal to champion.\n\n\u201cThese things come from our local government,\u201d said Green, the Houston congressman who represents part of the Port of Houston. \u201cI don\u2019t have the capability to say, \u2018This is what we need to do.\u2019\u201d\n\nAt a 2014 hearing in Galveston, members of the state\u2019s Joint Interim Committee to Study a Coastal Barrier System blasted the SSPEED Center and Texas A&M for failing to agree on what to build.\n\n\u201cHurricane Ike is now six years ago,", + " and we\u2019re still talking about trying to come up with consensus,\u201d said state Sen. Larry Taylor, a Republican who represents Galveston and suburban Houston, at the meeting. \u201cWe\u2019ve spun our wheels since 2008, and it\u2019s time to get moving.\u201d\n\nIt was the only time the committee, created by the Texas Legislature in 2013, has ever convened, although Taylor said he thinks that meeting was key to getting Merrell and the SSPEED Center to work together.\n\nToday, many coastal communities and industry groups have embraced the \u201ccoastal spine\u201d concept.\n\nStill, scientists and the business community fault state and federal elected officials for a lack of leadership in executing it or any other plan.\n\n\u201cI have begged some of our local officials to take this more seriously and take the lead,\u201d said Bob Mitchell,", + " president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, whose mission is to recruit businesses to the area and help them expand.\n\nSix county executives formed a coalition in 2010 to study the issue, but for years it had no funding to do so.\n\nParker, the former Houston mayor, said the number of jurisdictions involved has complicated things but that \u201cIt\u2019s absolutely going to take state leaders stepping up. No question in my mind.\u201d\n\nTaylor acknowledged that state lawmakers have dragged their feet on the issue, and said the congressional delegation isn\u2019t at fault because \u201cwe\u2019ve given them nothing to work with.\u201d But he also said there have been legitimate organizational obstacles.\n\n\u201cOf course I\u2019m frustrated it\u2019s taken this long,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cI think we all kind of picked it up a little late. It wasn\u2019t like we had a plan sitting on the books when Hurricane Ike hit. It\u2019s been a learning curve.\u201d\n\nState leaders had known the specifics of a worst-case hurricane years before Ike.\n\nIn the mid\u20132000s, then-Gov. Rick Perry\u2019s office asked researchers at the University of Texas at Austin\u2019s Center for Space Research to imagine monster storms pummeling the Texas Coast. They predicted that such a storm hitting the Houston area could cause $73 billion in damage and harm hundreds of industrial and commercial structures.\n\n\u201cVery likely, hundreds, perhaps even thousands would die,\u201d the Houston Chronicle wrote in 2005,", + " describing the scenario. The storm would also flood the homes of about 600,000 residents of Harris County, home to Houston, the newspaper said.\n\nAround the same time, Harris County hired a local firm to do similar work and engineers there reached much the same conclusions, the article noted.\n\nOfficials presented the research all across the state\u2019s coast in 2005. Soon after, hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast, prompting national discussions on storm preparedness and response. But all that work did not result in any concerted effort to build a storm surge barrier.\n\nInaction persisted even after Ike, some say.\n\n\u201cThere was not a whole lot of support from the state as far as seeking \u2014 or even expressing the importance of seeking \u2014 funds\u201d to study a solution,", + " said Sharon Tirpak, project manager for the Army Corps\u2019 Galveston District.\n\nA Perry spokesman insisted the state made strides to prepare for hurricanes under his leadership.\n\n\u201cOver Governor Perry\u2019s 14-year tenure, Texas enhanced and expanded its ability to respond to disasters across the state, with an emphasis on planning ahead and moving swiftly to save lives and protect as much property as possible,\u201d said spokesman Stan Gerdes.\n\nThe office of Texas\u2019 current governor, Greg Abbott, did not make him available for an interview.\n\nThe slow path forward\n\nAfter years of delay, officials say they\u2019re optimistic that a consensus plan to protect the region will emerge soon.\n\nSince 2014,", + " two studies have launched to determine how best to proceed, one led by the six-county coalition formed in 2010.\n\nThe local engineering firm the coalition hired with a $4 million state grant is examining the coastal spine, mid-bay gate and any other alternatives. The coalition is expected to make a final recommendation in June on how best to proceed.\n\nIt will then be up to someone else to do something with it.\n\n\u201cWe were never chartered to build anything or to lobby for anything \u2014 only to study and to make recommendations,\u201d said Galveston County Judge Mark Henry, the district\u2019s chairman.\n\nHe said the final proposal likely will incorporate some aspects of the coastal spine.\n\nBut the multibillion-dollar idea will need approval from the Army Corps,", + " which will borrow from the six-county district\u2019s work for its own study.\n\nFor years, the Army Corps didn\u2019t have the money to study protecting the Houston-Galveston region. But last year it finally found a willing state partner in the Texas General Land Office, which agreed to split the cost with the Army Corps for a $20 million study that will span the entire Texas coast.\n\n\u201cThe Texas coast powers the nation,\u201d Bush, the Texas land commissioner, said in a statement announcing the partnership. \"Its vulnerability should be considered a national security issue.\u201d\n\nBut the Army Corps has yet to secure its half of the funding for the study,", + " which will take five and a half years. Every year, it will have to ask Congress for a portion of that $10 million, and if Congress says no, the study could take longer.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a lot of money. It\u2019ll be competitive,\u201d said Olson, the Houston-area congressman. \u201cIt starts with the Corps doing their job.\u201d\n\nThe five-and-a-half year timeline is \u201cdisappointing,\u201d members of Texas\u2019 congressional delegation wrote in a November 2015 letter to the Army Corps and the White House.\n\n\u201cProgress on this study is long overdue,\u201d they wrote. \u201cThis effort is important, not just to our state but to the entire nation.\u201d\n\nEven if the Army Corps study gets done,", + " the agency will need a local partner to construct a project and pick up at least 35 percent of the tab under its normal rules.\n\nAssuming everything goes perfectly, the Army Corps will identify a \u201ctentatively selected plan\u201d in the next two years. It then would embark on the arduous process of getting Congress to fund the plan. If that pans out, construction wouldn\u2019t begin until about 2025. There\u2019s a 1 in 50 chance that a 500-year storm will happen before then.\n\nThose are a lot of ifs. Most projects carried out under the process that the Army Corps just started for Texas take years \u2014 even decades \u2014 to complete,", + " if they get done at all, said Col. Leonard Waterworth, the former head of the Galveston District of the Army Corps.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a system that doesn\u2019t work,\u201d said Waterworth, who now is coordinating storm surge protection research at Texas A&M.\n\nBush, the land commissioner who kickstarted the Army Corps study, said he\u2019s trying to \u201cmanage expectations,\u201d noting that \u201cwe\u2019ve got a long way to go.\u201d\n\nWhen a project is approved, Texas will need a political heavyweight to fight for billions of dollars from Congress to build it \u2014 probably a high-ranking federal lawmaker.\n\nBut no one seems willing to step up just yet.\n\nAsked if he had anyone in mind,", + " Bush responded, \u201cNot at this time.\u201d\n\nCongressman Randy Weber, a Republican whose coastal district spans Galveston and some Houston suburbs near the coast, said he\u2019s fully committed to securing funding for a project.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve been pushing as much as I can,\u201d Weber said. \u201cObviously, if we could get one of the senators to step up and champion it, it would go a great way.\u201d He specifically mentioned U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the second-highest-ranking Republican in the Senate.\n\nCornyn\u2019s office declined to make him available for an interview. A staffer in the office of U.S. senator and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz said only that he supports the Army Corps\u2019 study.\n\nThe Texas Tribune contacted every member of Texas\u2019 36-member U.S.", + " House delegation. Only four made time for interviews: Two Republicans, Olson and Weber, and two Democrats, Green and Eddie Bernice Johnson of Dallas.\n\nAsked if she thinks a storm surge barrier will be built, Johnson replied, \u201cThat\u2019s an interesting question, and much of it will depend on Mr. Weber\u2019s party.\u201d\n\nSome local officials remain skeptical.\n\nHarris County Judge Ed Emmett, a former state lawmaker who was widely praised for his leadership during Ike, says he is not convinced that anything should be built at all and is waiting to hear what the six-county district recommends.\n\n\u201cWhat level of protection do we want? What level of risk is acceptable?", + " That\u2019s going to be part of the decision,\u201d said Emmett, a Republican.\n\nMost think the best hope of getting something done may be a devastating storm, bringing national attention to the issue and galvanizing politicians at every level of government.\n\n\u201cWe will have a project six years after the next disaster,\u201d Waterworth predicted.\n\nThat is how long it took to rebuild the levees near New Orleans after Katrina. The devastation prompted Congress to abandon the normal rules and fast-track the project, with the federal government picking up the entire $14 billion tab.\n\nMerrell, too, predicted something will be built four years after the next hurricane.\n\n\u201cPeople who lose their relatives,", + " [their] property, and they\u2019re going to say, \u2018why did that have to happen?\u2019\u201d\n\n\u201cRight Up There with the BP Oil Spill\u201d\n\nDEER PARK \u2014 Thousands of cylindrical storage tanks line the sides of the narrow Houston Ship Channel. Some are as small as residential propane tanks, others as big as the average 2-story house.\n\nInside them sits one of the world\u2019s largest concentrations of oil, gases and chemicals \u2014 all key to fueling the American economy, but also, scientists fear, a disaster waiting to happen.\n\nHundreds of thousands of people live in industrial towns clustered around the Ship Channel, in the path of Houston\u2019s perfect storm.", + " And if flooding causes enough of what\u2019s inside the storage containers to leak at even one industrial facility nearby, scientists say, the damage could be far-reaching.\n\nA chemical release could fuel an explosion or fire, potentially imperiling industrial facilities and nearby homes and businesses. Nearly 300,000 people live in residential areas identified by one scientist as particularly at risk to a chemical or oil spill.\n\nAnd if hazardous material spills into the Ship Channel and ends up in Galveston Bay, it could harm one of the region\u2019s most productive estuaries and a national ecological treasure.\n\n\u201cIt will be an environmental disaster right up there with the BP oil spill,\u201d said Phil Bedient,", + " who co-directs the Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center at Rice University.\n\nWhat companies keep in many of the storage facilities on the Ship Channel and what measures they take to protect them is difficult to pin down, both for national security reasons and to maintain trade secrets. That leaves scientists and advocates unsure of the true risk. But virtually all would agree the government standards and regulations in place would not protect against major oil and chemical spills if a monster storm were to hit.\n\nIndustry groups said they take hurricanes seriously and don\u2019t deny they are at risk. They said that\u2019s why the region needs a coastal barrier system.\n\n\u201cHurricanes are devastating meteorological events,", + " and when they hit \u2026 they will cause massive impact all over the Gulf Coast,\u201d said Craig Beskid, executive director of the East Harris County Manufacturers Association, which represents ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and other major companies that operate 130 facilities in the area.\n\n\u201cOur facilities will be impacted. There will be severe impact to all of us because of that storm. We should be planning now to prevent those kinds of things,\u201d Beskid said.\n\nBut no plans are in place to build a coastal barrier. And the risk is only increasing as companies have invested tens of billions of dollars in building new plants or expanding existing ones in the area, capitalizing on the cheap and plentiful natural gas that\u2019s come with the shale boom.\n\nJames Stokes is the city manager for Deer Park,", + " a town near the Houston Ship Channel where more than 30,000 people live. He said he thought most people in town understood the risk posed by the more than 1,500 storage tanks there.\n\n\u201cThey see the tanks. They know that we\u2019re in a petrochemical complex environment here,\u201d Stokes said. \u201cI think everyone\u2019s aware that the tanks are there. That\u2019s not a surprise.\u201d\n\nJana Pellusch, a Deer Park resident who works at the Shell Oil Refinery, isn\u2019t so sure. The tanks are so ubiquitous in Deer Park that they\u2019ve become \u201cpart of the landscape,\u201d she said. Most people hardly notice them.\n\n\u201cAs a community,", + " it would be good if we could come together and have a discussion about this,\u201d she said.\n\nWith tanks, no guarantee\n\nNo single government agency keeps track of all the industrial storage tanks on the Houston Ship Channel, but tanks do show up on Google Earth as tiny dots. Scientists at the University of Houston examined aerial imagery and satellite data from 2008 to find more than 3,400 \u2014 a number that is likely higher today.\n\nUsually made of steel plates welded together, the structures may not appear vulnerable to severe weather. But many elsewhere on the Gulf Coast have been damaged during hurricanes in the past decade, causing major spills.\n\nHigh winds or rushing water can cause storage tanks to partially or completely collapse,", + " rupture, or lift up off their foundations and float \u2014 turning into battering rams that can cause more damage.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s not uncommon for tanks to fail like this in hurricanes,\u201d said Jamie Padgett, a scientist at Rice University who has studied the hardiness of storage tanks on the Ship Channel. \u201cIt\u2019s been sort of a repeated issue.\u201d\n\nOne of the most famous examples of a tank damaged in a hurricane happened in 2005 at the Murphy Oil Refinery in Meraux, La., when Hurricane Katrina hit.\n\nFloodwaters rushed into the refinery, overwhelming the earthen levees around a large oil tank and ripping it from its foundation.", + " The tank, which was wider than a football field, floated to the west and ruptured, eventually pouring out more than 1 million gallons of oil.\n\nThat oil traveled a mile through receding floodwaters to the densely populated town of Chalmette, about 10 miles from New Orleans. It contaminated more than 1,700 homes that were already devastated by flooding. Murphy Oil reached a $330 million settlement with home and business owners, but many say the area will never be the same.\n\nExperts say that Houston\u2019s perfect storm could cause a much bigger disaster on the Ship Channel.\n\nUsing a version of \u201cMighty Ike,\u201d the hurricane model developed at the SSPEED Center and the University of Texas at Austin,", + " University of Houston researchers found that thousands of storage tanks along the Ship Channel could be impacted by storm surge. A few hundred may be especially in danger because they are so close to the water and are at a low elevation.\n\n\u201cIt only takes one of those\u201d to leak and create a major problem, turning the Houston Ship Channel into \u201ca dead water body\u201d and impacting wildlife in Galveston Bay, said Hanadi Rifai, a scientist at the University of Houston who has led the research.\n\nThe situation would be similar in a hurricane scenario developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Both the FEMA model and Mighty Ike imagine a hurricane with wind speeds of at least 125 mph (a Category 3 storm). Each scenario would cause a storm surge of more than 25 to 30 feet above sea level on the Ship Channel.\n\nSuch storms are rare,", + " scientists say, but not impossible; there is a 9.5 percent to 13.3 percent chance that one of the two particular storms modeled will occur in the next 50 years.\n\nThe findings disturbed Pellusch, who has worked at Shell since 2004 maintaining the refinery\u2019s instrumentation. It\u2019s a job she loves.\n\n\u201cIt makes me look at everything differently, having to do with the petrochemical industry in this area,\u201d Pellusch said. \u201cThis is something people need to see.\u201d\n\nExperts want better protections\n\nMurphy Oil\u2019s tank wasn\u2019t the only one to fail in 2005, and it didn\u2019t even cause the largest spill;", + " tanks damaged during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused more than 8 million gallons of oil to spill in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, according to government estimates.\n\nSome tanks on the Houston Ship Channel were even damaged during Hurricane Ike in 2008, though the storm surge was far smaller than originally anticipated. About 15 feet of water covered the eastern part of \u2018Magellan Terminals Holdings\u2019 oil storage terminal in Galena Park, right on the Ship Channel, the company reported to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.\n\nThe storm surge and high winds caused damage to several tanks and a spill of nearly 1 million gallons of oil. Some was recovered,", + " but about 300,000 gallons were released into the Ship Channel and \u201clost at sea,\u201d Magellan reported. (The spill didn\u2019t appear to impact any homes or businesses in Galena Park.)\n\nAsked about its hurricane preparedness, Magellan spokesman Bruce Heine said that the company has a robust hurricane plan in place and follows all regulations. That also appears to have been true for Murphy Oil in Meraux (which has since been bought by Valero).\n\nWhen companies store oil in hurricane-prone areas, they have to write spill prevention plans and follow certain regulations. But none of those regulations address protecting specifically against storm surge, which scientists say is one of the gravest threats.", + " And no government standards exist in Texas for how to design the tanks to withstand storm surge from hurricanes.\n\nThe spill prevention rules simply ask companies to follow the standards developed by the American Petroleum Institute \u2014 standards that focus on withstanding high wind speeds, not surge, Padgett and other experts say.\n\nThe federal government requires oil tanks to have \u201csecondary containment,\u201d which usually means walls built around a tank. Those are usually not high enough to withstand surge in a storm like Mighty Ike, however. The 8-foot-high earthen walls around the Murphy Oil tank were easily overtopped during Katrina, according to the settlement agreement the company later reached with the community.\n\nIn general,", + " the rules \u201cmore or less just leave it to the owner\u2019s discretion as to how to consider any kind of surge or flood loads,\u201d Padgett said. \u201cIt pushes all of the onus onto the owner.\u201d\n\nWhile Padgett and other experts think the design standards for industrial storage tanks should include better protection from storm surge, some don\u2019t think it makes sense to require them to protect against every storm scenario.\n\n\u201cIf you get a direct hit, there\u2019s nothing you can do,\u201d said Marshall Mott-Smith, who once ran Florida\u2019s storage tank safety program and is now an industry consultant. \u201cYou wait till it\u2019s all over, you go pick up the pieces,", + " and you go pick up your tank \u2026 it would be cost-prohibitive to build tanks that withstand those forces.\u201d\n\nAfter the large tank spills during Katrina in 2005, a group of state and federal emergency officials looked for potential policy improvements. They released a fact sheet that advises companies to anchor tanks to the ground, replace oil or chemicals with water before a storm and keep tanks full enough so that they are too heavy to be moved by the force of rushing water. Those were just recommendations, however.\n\n\u201cYou can only plan so large,\u201d said Bryant Smalley, an emergency management official with the Environmental Protection Agency. \u201cFrom an engineering standpoint,", + " my question would be, what would it take to withstand a 25-foot storm surge down there?\u201d\n\nSmalley said the EPA could revisit one gap in the current rules on spill prevention: They apply to the storage of oil but not to other materials. The agency is now being sued over that and may reconsider, Smalley said.\n\nSome storage tanks on the Ship Channel that carry toxic and potentially deadly chemicals are regulated under Texas\u2019 air pollution programs, but no rules exist requiring them to protect against storm surge, experts say.\n\nSome states require companies to add protections to oil and chemical tanks to guard against spills in natural disasters. In California, storage tanks must be anchored to the ground to prevent damage during earthquakes.", + " But experts say Texas has no such laws for chemical storage tanks on the Ship Channel.\n\nCommunities in harm\u2019s way, with little information\n\nBased on Rifai\u2019s analysis, residential areas on the Ship Channel at risk of damage from a chemical or oil spill include Deer Park, Galena Park, Pasadena, Baytown, and parts of southeast Houston \u2014 where nearly 300,000 people live.\n\nThe exact risks they face in a hurricane scenario are unclear, Rifai said, because it\u2019s so hard to get specific information about what industrial facilities keep in their storage tanks and how well they\u2019re protected. Residents may not understand the importance of evacuating or realize the added risk of living near refineries and chemical plants.\n\n\u201cMy district is working-class,", + " Latino, and [has] many people in poverty,\u201d said state Sen. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, who represents many of the industrial towns along the Ship Channel, including parts of Galena Park and Pasadena. \u201cEven if we told them to move to safe harbor, they don\u2019t have the car or the way to get there.\u201d\n\nCompanies that store certain dangerous chemicals have to file \u201crisk management plans\u201d with the federal government that explain the most catastrophic accidents that could occur, but the plans do not require details about about vulnerability to flooding or high winds.\n\nFacilities that store significant amounts of oil near waterways also have to file special documents with the EPA that demonstrate how they would respond to a spill and how they\u2019re working to prevent one.\n\nThe Tribune and ProPublica requested those documents for more than 15 facilities on the Houston Ship Channel under the Freedom of Information Act.", + " But as of publication time, the EPA had not fulfilled the request.\n\nThe EPA said that while those documents are generally public, some individual companies said their plans had information relevant to national security, prompting the delayed response.\n\nThe Texas Tribune and ProPublica also contacted nearly two dozen facilities that store large amounts of oil and chemicals on the Ship Channel which could be inundated by at least several feet of storm surge if a major hurricane directly hit the area. One company, Chevron, offered specifics, saying its 40- to 50-foot-tall storage tanks in Galena Park were surrounded by containment berms roughly 8 feet high.\n\nVopak\u2019s bulk oil terminal in Deer Park has 243 storage tanks on the Ship Channel that can carry nearly 300 million gallons of oil,", + " according to the company\u2019s website. The worst-case-scenario models project that the area around terminal could be inundated by more than 12 feet of water.\n\nVopak\u2019s spokeswoman Liesbeth Lans said the bulk liquid storage company has calculated the amount of liquid necessary to prevent the tanks from floating. She added that the company has plans to fill empty tanks with water in a storm event. She did not specify what level of storm surge Vopak is prepared for.\n\n\u201cA great amount of this information is commercially sensitive,\u201d Lans wrote in an email. \u201cAs such, our preference is not to provide more specifics for the Vopak Terminal Deer Park.\u201d\n\nSeveral companies referred any questions about storm preparedness to the Texas Chemical Council,", + " which represents most of the 150 chemical manufacturing plants in the Houston area.\n\n\u201cChemical manufacturing plants along the Texas Gulf Coast are inherently designed and engineered to withstand hurricanes and other events, utilizing hardened equipment, as well as dikes and levees to provide added protection from storm water and containment in the event of a spill,\u201d the council wrote in a statement.\n\nHector Rivero, the council\u2019s president and CEO, argued that when it comes to the most serious risks posed by a hurricane, the focus should be on schools and neighborhoods. Industrial facilities have more means to protect themselves than most of the community, he said.\n\n\u201cThink about the thousands and thousands of cars that are now leaking gasoline and oil out because they\u2019re underwater,\u201d Rivero said.\n\nFor Pellusch,", + " though, the unique risks to the petrochemical industry on the Houston Ship Channel should be better understood.\n\nA common saying among workers is that the smell of petrochemicals and hydrocarbons that is ubiquitous along the Ship Channel is \u201cthe smell of money,\u201d she said.\n\n\u201cYou just brush it off like that,\u201d she said. \u201cI know people that work at these plants, and they make their living that way. So it\u2019s something that we accept. It\u2019s a big part of the economy.\u201d\n\nBut, she added: \u201cIt comes with hazards.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve Just Loaded Up the Gun\u201d\n\nNASSAU BAY \u2014 As Hurricane Ike barreled toward the Texas coast,", + " John Nugent thought he could ride it out. Then a friend in emergency management told him, \u201cyou need to leave, because your life is going to be in jeopardy.\u201d\n\nNugent lives just blocks from Clear Lake, a narrow body of water that feeds into Galveston Bay. And Ike was projected to cause a storm surge of 20 feet there, which would completely inundate Nugent\u2019s home and his neighbors\u2019 in the small city of Nassau Bay \u2014 as well as flood NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center nearby.\n\nNugent was lucky. Hurricane Ike turned at the last minute, and his home wasn\u2019t flooded.\n\nNot everyone was so fortunate.", + " Ike still sent a 10 to 12 foot surge of water into Nassau Bay, flooding hundreds of homes and causing tens of millions of dollars in damage. Many of the cities clustered around Clear Lake \u2014 some of the fastest-growing in the country \u2014 have not completely recovered.\n\nLocal officials say that when the next hurricane hits, the Clear Lake area will be prepared, citing stricter building codes and better education efforts put in place after Ike. But several experts have their doubts.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve learned a lot of lessons,\u201d said Sam Brody, a marine scientist at Texas A&M University at Galveston who is an expert in flood preparedness. \u201cBut in terms of exposures,", + " we\u2019ve just loaded up the gun. We\u2019ve filled the tinderbox for a much larger storm.\u201d\n\nBrody and other experts say the explosive economic and population growth that\u2019s happened since Hurricane Ike has made the region far more vulnerable to storms \u2014 and the general public has little idea of the risk.\n\n\u201cNot only are we not moving forward,\u201d Brody said, \u201cbut I think we\u2019re moving backwards.\u201d\n\nBuilding more in harm\u2019s way\n\nSince Clear Lake-area cities rebuilt after Ike, tens of thousands of people have moved to the region, buoyed by the growing health care, technology, and oil and gas industries.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a great place to live,", + " it\u2019s a great place to raise your kids, the educational opportunities are there and the jobs are there,\u201d said Bob Mitchell, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, which recruits businesses to the area and helps existing ones expand.\n\nEven Brody is glad he moved here after Hurricane Ike, at the request of Texas A&M.\n\nBut he also recognizes the irony of a flood risk expert moving to a flood-prone area. And for the past several years, he\u2019s watched wetlands and prairie around Clear Lake get paved over for new developments \u2014 some paid for with Ike recovery dollars \u2014 resulting in less land to absorb floodwaters.\n\n\u201cRecovery is hurting us for the long term,\u201d Brody said.\n\nJamie Galloway,", + " Nassau Bay\u2019s emergency management coordinator, said the region has worked hard to protect against flooding despite all the new development.\n\n\u201cYeah, we\u2019re more susceptible to potential flooding issues,\u201d he said, but there are also more retention ponds in the area to hold in extra water. One for Nassau Bay was just recently dredged to increase its capacity, Galloway noted.\n\nSome cities have also strengthened their building codes. In Nassau Bay, homes in the designated floodplain have to be raised 2 feet higher than the Federal Emergency Management Agency\u2019s flood insurance standards; in League City, they must be 18 inches higher.\n\nBut those standards are only for new or substantially renovated homes.", + " Cities have gotten some money from FEMA to raise older homes, but only a few dozen homeowners in Nassau Bay and League City will benefit from those grants.\n\nOfficials in Nassau Bay and League City estimated that at least several hundred homes in each city were built before the current elevation standards were put in place. In the Clear Lake area as a whole, the number is at least in the thousands.\n\nThe new building codes should be even stronger, said Robert Eldridge, chairman of the local emergency planning committee that represents some Clear Lake-area cities, including Nassau Bay and Seabrook.\n\n\u201cMy opinion is we build for now \u2014 we don\u2019t build for the future,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cLet\u2019s plan for 50 years from now \u2026 it\u2019s cheaper now to build it than it is to wait 20 years from now to redo this stuff.\u201d\n\nUnderstanding risk\n\nWhen Brody moved here after Hurricane Ike, he took flood risk seriously. He lives in a neighborhood that\u2019s been raised several feet above the ground and is much farther inland than other Clear Lake-area cities.\n\nBut his research shows that many of his neighbors aren\u2019t thinking about flood risk at all. In an academic survey of families in the Clear Lake area, Brody found that nearly half didn\u2019t know they lived in the 100-year floodplain. \u201cWe surveyed people who are living next to a creek and they have no idea,\u201d he said.\n\nThat was surprising to Nugent,", + " who has worked as a real estate agent in the area since 1975. He pointed out that those who live in a 100-year floodplain should know it because federal law requires them to have flood insurance.\n\nEven areas outside that floodplain in Clear Lake have consistently suffered major flood damage during storms. Homeowners living outside the 100-year floodplain have filed hundreds of millions of dollars\u2019 worth of insurance claims in the past 15 years, according to Brody\u2019s research.\n\nAnyone living outside the 100-year floodplain doesn\u2019t typically need insurance, so they may not realize their house could flood, Brody said.\n\n\u201cThink about the people coming here,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cThey haven\u2019t grown up with hurricanes. They\u2019re coming from places where the idea of catastrophic surge and flooding is the farthest from their mind, and when they do make that real estate transaction, at a personal level, that risk is often buried into the paperwork.\u201d\n\nNugent said he strongly urges everyone he sells a home to in Clear Lake to buy flood insurance, even if the law doesn\u2019t require them to have it. He thinks many people take his advice.\n\nPublic officials throughout the region said they\u2019ve gone to great lengths to educate people about the risk of flooding and hurricanes. They spoke of yearly community seminars, email alert systems,", + " local media partnerships and newsletters.\n\n\u201cFor new residents that are coming to Nassau Bay, we actually have on our website how we can prepare for an emergency,\u201d said Jason Reynolds, the city manager there, adding that a newsletter including information on hurricanes goes out to the entire town.\n\nSome efforts to educate people about storm surge have been met with resistance.\n\nAfter Ike, the state and FEMA jointly spent $56,000 to build hundreds of \u201cstorm surge markers\u201d \u2014 essentially, large poles that would show how high water could go in a strong hurricane \u2014 and install them in public places on the upper Texas coast.\n\nBut critics complained they were a scare tactic that was driving away businesses in a time of recession.", + " \u201cThis program was discontinued due to lack of community interest,\u201d said Texas\u2019 Department of Public Safety spokesman Tom Vinger.\n\nThe next big one\n\nUnder a worst-case scenario model known as \u201cMighty Ike,\u201d scientists predict portions of Clear Lake could rise by 25 feet or more above sea level. Another model projects surges that top 30 feet in some places.\n\nMost communities around Clear Lake sit somewhere between sea level and about 20 feet above sea level, on average, so a 25\u201330 foot surge would be devastating.\n\nThe area surrounding Nassau Bay Town Square, a commercial center which opened up after Ike, would reach about 6 feet of water,", + " according to the Mighty Ike storm simulation. The buildings there might remain standing, but they\u2019d be catastrophically damaged. Any cars still in the parking lot would turn into battering rams in the rushing water, causing even more destruction.\n\nA storm model from FEMA for what is considered to be a 500-year event also predicts the square would be under a few feet of water. Such a storm is rare, but by no means impossible; over the course of a 30-year mortgage, the chance it will occur is close to six percent.\n\nFred Griffin, the developer of Nassau Bay Town Square, said he was surprised to hear that figure,", + " pointing out that the 31-acre parcel he bought in 2007 didn\u2019t flood during Hurricane Ike.\n\nGriffin said the buildings in the square follow all flood planning regulations. \u201cSure, there\u2019s some risk, but [those moving to the area] don\u2019t seem to worry about it,\u201d he added.\n\nPublic officials in Clear Lake have taken a varied approach to addressing the risk of a storm like Mighty Ike. Ryan Edghill, emergency management coordinator for League City, said he\u2019s worked on emergency drills for storm surges as high as 26 feet above sea level.\n\nNassau Bay\u2019s city manager, Reynolds, was more skeptical of the scenario.", + " \u201cIs that like a doomsday calculation?\u201d he asked.\n\nGalloway, Nassau Bay\u2019s emergency manager, said the region works hard to educate people about hurricane risk. But many probably aren\u2019t aware of a Mighty Ike scenario \u201cbecause we\u2019ve had such an influx of population from folks from out of state,\u201d he said.\n\nIf a storm like that hits, it\u2019s not clear if everyone could evacuate soon enough. People could end up stranded on the road as the surge hits, and as the region\u2019s population has grown since Ike, the growth in road capacity hasn\u2019t caught up.\n\n\u201cThere are a lot of these neighborhoods [in Clear Lake]", + " where there\u2019s one way in, one way out,\u201d said Eldridge, of the local emergency planning committee. \u201cAnd they don\u2019t have a way to get out if a flood comes and then people are trapped.\u201d\n\nWaiting for disaster\n\nThe tendency of Clear Lake-area communities to flood, and the unique risk people there face of storm surge from nearby Galveston Bay, has been a topic of public interest and study for decades.\n\nAccording to many local area mayors and economic development advocates, the best way to protect the region is to build something originally dubbed the \u201cIke Dike\u201d and later the \u201ccoastal spine.\u201d\n\nThat proposal involves building a floodgate between Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico to stop storm surge from entering the bay.\n\nBut almost eight years after the concept was suggested,", + " no finalized proposal for a coastal spine exists. The delays have frustrated Mitchell, of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ll predict it right now: It will be built two years after the next hurricane hits,\u201d Mitchell said.\n\nDespite the lack of progress, Mitchell \u2014 whose own office is in Nassau Bay Town Square \u2014 doesn\u2019t think it makes sense to stop or curb development in Clear Lake now. Such storms are too rare to justify slowing growth, he said.\n\nBrody doesn\u2019t want to slow growth either. But building codes could be more strict, elevation requirements could be higher and other flood defenses such as drainage systems could be strengthened, he said.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re continuing to put more people in harm\u2019s way,\u201d Brody said.", + " \u201cAnd it makes sense, until some kind of disaster happens.\u201d\n\nGalveston: A Cautionary Tale\n\nBy most accounts, Houston exists as it does today because of a hurricane that hit nearby Galveston. And because of its location, Galveston will always bear the bigger brunt of a storm than its larger neighbor.\n\nIn the years leading up to 1900, Galveston was Texas\u2019 powerhouse maritime metropolis. The 27-mile-long barrier island \u2014 situated between Houston and the Gulf of Mexico \u2014 boasted the state\u2019s busiest seaport and had a population roughly equal to Houston\u2019s at the time. With more millionaires per capita than any place in the United States,", + " Galveston was alternately called the \u201cEllis Island of the West\u201d and the \u201cWall Street of the South.\u201d\n\nHouston, whose shipping lane was a narrow, muddy bayou, struggled to compete with Galveston\u2019s natural, deepwater and easy-to-access port.\n\nBut that September, a powerful hurricane engulfed the low-lying island, killing an estimated 6,000 people inside Galveston city limits and as many as 6,000 more outside it. The \u201cGreat Storm of 1900\u201d still is the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history and prompted the rapid construction of a 17-foot seawall along part of the island \u2014 considered a modern feat of engineering at the time.", + " (The initial 3.3-mile segment was completed less than four years after the storm hit.)\n\nUsing millions of pounds of landfill, crews also boosted the city\u2019s elevation by more than a dozen feet in some places \u2014 the Gulf-facing side in particular. Those measures have helped Galveston better cope in subsequent storms, although the island remains enormously vulnerable. When a hurricane hits the region, Galveston is the first point of contact for the storm surge coming in from the Gulf. It also gets hit by that storm surge again, from the backside, when that wall of water recedes from the mainland.\n\nIn the years that followed the 1900 storm,", + " Houston steadily stole Galveston\u2019s greatness.\n\nThe power shift was set in motion in large part by the efforts of a retired Houston congressman, Tom Ball, who helped persuade his former colleagues to split the cost of dredging the city\u2019s shallow shipping bayou to accommodate larger ships. The result was the Houston Ship Channel, a 52-mile maritime waterway that connects the Port of Houston to the Gulf. It was completed in 1914 during the iconic Texas oil boom.\n\nThe waterway sits behind Galveston, which offers some storm protection to ships, tankers, barges and the facilities they serve. Shipping experts describe the geography as a big advantage over other ports that sit directly on the coast.\n\nWith its own deepwater port,", + " Houston quickly gobbled up Galveston\u2019s shipping activity, and its population boomed. Today, the city has nearly 50 times more people than it did 100 years ago.\n\nMeanwhile, Galveston\u2019s population is scarcely larger than it was back then, with less than 50,000 full-time residents today.\n\nIn the century since the Great Storm, the island has been walloped by eight more hurricanes that have killed hundreds of people, forcing Galveston into an almost constant state of repairing and rebuilding. The last time was in 2008, when Hurricane Ike nearly destroyed the city all over again.\n\nOutsiders \u2014 even insiders \u2014 often talk about it as a city that shouldn\u2019t exist.", + " Of the 10 barrier islands and peninsulas on the Texas coast, it is the only one with a sizable population of permanent residents.\n\nMore than 23 percent of Galveston\u2019s residents live at or below the poverty line. That is notably higher than the state\u2019s overall poverty rate of 17.6 percent, though not much worse than Houston\u2019s (22.9 percent).\n\nWhile Galveston has slipped from prominence, it has become the state\u2019s go-to summer getaway spot, and tourism is key to its economy.\n\nWhile Houston, which sits about 50 miles inland, will never be as physically vulnerable to hurricanes as Galveston,", + " several scientists and public officials say Houston is more at risk because it has much more to lose.\n\nIn recent years, Houston has seen major growth in low-lying areas like Clear Lake. Those areas would be hit hard in a major storm, as would the city\u2019s industrial complex.\n\nAs officials mull whether to build something like a super seawall or gate system to protect the Houston region from storm surge, many have pointed to Galveston\u2019s demise as a reason to do so.\n\n\u201cWe saw what happened to Galveston at the turn of the century,\u201d said Janiece Longoria, the chairwoman of the Port of Houston Authority, on the fifth anniversary of Ike.", + " \u201cWe can\u2019t afford to gamble with the future in Houston.\u201d ", + " Hurricane Harvey is expected to make landfall on the upper Texas coast Friday night, bringing \u201clife-threatening and devastating\u201d flooding, according to US government warnings. Mandatory evacuation notices have already been issued to residents of several counties.\n\nUS president Donald Trump and vice president Mike Pence are warning Texans to be prepared. \u201cRemember to #planahead!\u201d Trump tweeted, with a video of him striding through the offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which handles the US\u2019s natural disasters, then seated at a long table talking to officials. Pence retweeted the message, adding that those in the path of the hurricane should check the National Weather Service\u2019s Twitter feed.\n\nThe Trump White House has not done much to prepare for the storm,", + " however. Two of the three politically appointed positions in the over-9,000-employee FEMA have yet to be filled by Trump appointees; the same goes with the top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors storms. Even the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, doesn\u2019t have a permanent secretary, after John F. Kelly left to become White House chief of staff on July 31.\n\nTrump did make nominees to the two empty top FEMA jobs, deputy administrator and deputy administrator for protection and national preparedness, on July 19. Presidential nominees need to be confirmed by the Senate, however, and that was just before the Senate\u2019s August recess.", + " Instead holdovers from Barack Obama\u2019s presidency, David Grant, and Kathleen Fox, are holding the jobs.\n\n\u201cFederal civilian employees with decades of experience are currently serving as acting in those positions,\u201d a FEMA spokesperson said. \u201cThroughout the transition to the new administration, FEMA has ensured that career civilian staff are in place in key positions throughout the agency.\u201d\n\nMany of these FEMA officials, who are crucial to responding to a hurricane, are \u201cacting\u201d officials. They include the heads of the \u201cOffice of Response and Recovery\u201d and of \u201cMission Support.\u201d In fact, all of officials below with an (A) after their name are \u201cacting\u201d officials.\n\nFEMA.org\n\nThe president has also not nominated anyone to run the 11,", + "000-employee National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that is in charge of the national weather service, and of monitoring how quickly storms like Harvey travel and where they are expected to make landfall.\n\nBecause there is no head of the NOAA to name permanent officials within it, all the top positions in the agency are filled by \u201cacting\u201d officials, including the nation\u2019s most important scientist during such storms: assistant secretary for environmental observation and prediction Stephen Volz. Volz joined NOAA in 2014.\n\nThere\u2019s no reason to believe an \u201cacting\u201d official would be any less expert at handling a disaster than a permanent one, but it is unclear whether these temporary managers have had the authority to make improvements or changes in the eight months since Trump took office.", + " The failure to fill top disaster preparedness jobs is part of the administration\u2019s overall whittling away at US government bureaucracy. Eight months after the inauguration, the Trump administration has yet to nominate people to fill 368 out of 591 total positions that require Senate approval, according to a Washington Post tally (paywall). Trump\u2019s proposed budget would also trim funding for both FEMA and NOAA.\n\nWhen asked about the administration\u2019s hurricane preparedness today, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said, \u201cI think we are in great shape, having general Kelly sitting next to the president throughout this process.\u201d\n\nRead next: Where and when Hurricane Harvey could strike this weekend\n\nThis article originally stated incorrectly that the Department of Homeland Security oversees both FEMA and NOAA.", + " NOAA is part of the Department of Commerce. ", + " With Hurricane Harvey bearing down on the Texas coast and threatening to bring heavy rain to southeast Louisiana, St. Tammany Parish Coroner Charles Preston warned the storm could trigger post traumatic stress disorder in some who survived Katrina 12 years ago.\n\n\"Not only for us but for our friends in the Baton Rouge area, who experienced catastrophic weather barely a year ago, a storm threat like this one can trigger PTSD and related feelings,\" Preston said in a news release. \"This is not to be taken lightly.\"\n\nThere are normal stressors associated with hurricane season and specific threats, Preston said. Making sure prescriptions are filled, cars have full gas tanks and other concerns can be stressful for anyone.", + " But for those with PTSD - much of which went undiagnosed and untreated after Katrina - the anxiety can be more dangerous, he said.\n\n\"Hyper vigilance, excessive fear or anxiety, denial, bursts of rage and even self-isolation can all be symptoms of PTSD. \"If you're feeling it, that's OK. It's normal.\"\n\nBut those affected should seek help from a trusted family member, a clergy person, a counselor, or a helpline such as 211 or free text service such as 741-741, Preston said.\n\n\"In no case should someone with these feelings or symptoms feel 'crazy' or alone.", + " It's normal, it's treatable, and it's OK to talk about it.\"\n\nHarvey is forecast to reach the Corpus Christi area of Texas on Friday night or Saturday morning before stalling, bringing as much as 35 inches of rain to the Lone Star State.\n\nThe New Orleans area could see 4 to 6 inches of rain through next week from the storm.\n\nWhile Hurricane Harvey probably won't have a severe impact on southeast Louisiana, extended news coverage of what it may do can trigger PTSD, Preston said.\n\nFor more information about hurricane-related PTSD, visit http://ptsdtreatmenthelp.com/ptsd-after-a-hurricane/. ", + " Gas prices are going to jump in some parts of the country as Tropical Storm Harvey slams the Texas coast.\n\nA gallon of gas is a penny more expensive than it was a day ago, but it may ultimately cost between five and 15 cents more, according to Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. Prices should be back down by next week.\n\n\"Spikes in pump prices due to the effects of hurricanes tend to be brief but dramatic,\" explained Jeanette Casselano, an AAA spokesperson.\n\nPlatforms and rigs were shut down in anticipation of the storm, which made landfall late Friday as a Category 4 storm but weakened mid-Saturday into a tropical storm.\n\n\"You're seeing prices move up because refiners have to take precautionary measures,\" Kloza said.\n\nRelated:", + " Tanker becomes first to cross Arctic without icebreaker\n\nAs of Saturday, personnel had been evacuated from from 39 production platforms and one oil rig, according to the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.\n\n\"Most of the increases, at least right now, would probably be in the South, the Southeast and the mid-Atlantic,\" said Patrick DeHaan, a senior petroleum analyst with GasBuddy.\n\nThe good news for drivers is that gas prices are currently low. On average across the country, gas cost $2.35 per gallon on Saturday, according to AAA.\n\nThat said, the situation on the ground is still developing,", + " and damage from the storm could be worse than expected, DeHaan said.\n\nAnd Harvey hit an area that's immensely important for U.S. oil production.\n\nThe Gulf Coast accounts for 17% of total U.S. crude oil production and 45% of total U.S. petroleum refining capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration.\n" + ], + "length": 17538, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 60, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 For 29 years, motel owner Gerald Foos watched hundreds, perhaps thousands, of guests having sex, going to the bathroom, and more at the Manor House Motel in Colorado. Now the story of the \"greatest voyeur in the world\" is out in the open, thanks to an article published in the New Yorker by journalist Gay Talese. The author says he first learned of Foos when the latter wrote him a letter in 1980. \"Sexually, I have witnessed, observed, and studied the best first hand, unrehearsed, non-laboratory sex between couples, and most other conceivable sex deviations during these past 15 years,\" it read. Foos\u2014who sold the motel in 1995\u2014wanted to be seen as a \"sex researcher and social observer,\" not a mere Peeping Tom and pervert, according to the Denver Post. To that end, Foos kept detailed notes of everything he witnessed through his fake ceiling vents. For example, in 1973 he catalogued 184 male orgasms and 33 female orgasms, and noted that white heterosexuals tended to have missionary sex and that only 3% of his guests failed to have sex. Talese even joined Foos in his attic \"laboratory\" on at least one occasion and found the man had an \"uncontrollable desire to peer into other people's lives.\" The statute of limitations has passed on any voyeur-related crimes, reports the Post, but Talese writes that Foos could face trouble over a 1977 murder he says he witnessed but never reported\u2014assuming it actually happened. Foos tells the Post that Talese's article could \"create a real situation.\" \"I don't know if I'm ready for anything, to be honest with you,\" he says. \"I'm just a poor soul.\" Foos maintains that no guests were ever harmed by his voyeurism as they never knew they were being watched. (One study finds that voyeurism isn't all that unusual.)\n", + "docs": [ + "I know a married man and father of two who bought a twenty-one-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur. With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring six by fourteen inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvred aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grilles but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades, while keeping an exhaustive written record of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught.\n\nI first became aware of this man after receiving a handwritten special-delivery letter,", + " without a signature, dated January 7, 1980, at my house in New York. It began:\n\nDear Mr. Talese: Since learning of your long awaited study of coast-to-coast sex in America, which will be included in your soon to be published book, \u201cThy Neighbor\u2019s Wife,\u201d I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.\n\nHe then described the motel he had owned for more than ten years.\n\nThe reason for purchasing this motel was to satisfy my voyeuristic tendencies and compelling interest in all phases of how people conduct their lives, both socially and sexually.", + "... I did this purely out of my unlimited curiosity about people and not as just a deranged voyeur.\n\nHe explained that he had \u201clogged an accurate record of the majority of the individuals that I watched\u201d\n\nand compiled interesting statistics on each, i.e., what was done; what was said; their individual characteristics; age & body type; part of the country from where they came; and their sexual behavior. These individuals were from every walk of life. The businessman who takes his secretary to a motel during the noon hour, which is generally classified as \u201chot sheet\u201d trade in the motel business. Married couples traveling from state to state,", + " either on business or vacation. Couples who aren\u2019t married, but live together. Wives who cheat on their husbands and visa versa. Lesbianism, of which I made a particular study.... Homosexuality, of which I had little interest, but still watched to determine motivation and procedure. The Seventies, later part, brought another sexual deviation forward, namely, group sex, which I took great interest in watching.... I have seen most human emotions in all their humor and tragedy carried to completion. Sexually, I have witnessed, observed and studied the best first hand, unrehearsed, non-laboratory sex between couples,", + " and most other conceivable sex deviations during these past 15 years. My main objective in wanting to provide you with this confidential information is the belief that it could be valuable to people in general and sex researchers in particular.\n\nHe went on to say that although he had been wanting to tell his story, he was \u201cnot talented enough\u201d as a writer and had \u201cfears of being discovered.\u201d He then invited me to correspond with him in care of a post-office box and suggested that I come to Colorado to inspect his motel operation:\n\nPresently I cannot reveal my identity because of my business interests, but [it] will be revealed when you can assure me that this information would be held in complete confidence.\n\nAfter reading this letter,", + " I put it aside for a few days, undecided on whether to respond. As a nonfiction writer who insists on using real names in articles and books, I knew that I could not accept his condition of anonymity. And I was deeply unsettled by the way he had violated his customers\u2019 trust and invaded their privacy. Could such a man be a reliable source? Still, as I reread the letter, I reflected that his \u201cresearch\u201d methods and motives bore some similarity to my own in \u201cThy Neighbor\u2019s Wife.\u201d I had, for example, kept notes while managing massage parlors in New York and while mingling with swingers at the Sandstone nudist commune in Southern California (one key difference:", + " the people I observed and reported on had given me their consent). Also, the opening line of my 1969 book about the Times, \u201cThe Kingdom and the Power,\u201d was: \u201cMost journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places.\u201d\n\nAs to whether my correspondent in Colorado was, in his own words, \u201ca deranged voyeur\u201d\u2014a version of Hitchcock\u2019s Norman Bates, or the murderous filmmaker in Michael Powell\u2019s \u201cPeeping Tom\u201d\u2014or instead a harmless, if odd, man of \u201cunlimited curiosity,\u201d or even a simple fabulist, I could know only if I accepted his invitation.", + " Since I was planning to be in Phoenix later in the month, I decided to send him a note, with my phone number, proposing that we meet during a stopover in Denver. He left a message on my answering machine a few days later, saying that he would meet me at the airport baggage claim.\n\nTwo weeks later, when I approached the luggage carrousel, I spotted a man holding out his hand and smiling. \u201cWelcome to Denver,\u201d he said, waving in his left hand the note I had mailed him. \u201cMy name is Gerald Foos.\u201d\n\nMy first impression was that this amiable stranger resembled many of the men I had flown with from Phoenix.", + " He seemed in no way peculiar. In his mid-forties, Foos was hazel-eyed, around six feet tall, and slightly overweight. He wore a tan jacket and an open-collared dress shirt that seemed a size small for his heavily muscled neck. He had neatly trimmed dark hair, and, behind horn-rimmed glasses, he projected a friendly expression befitting an innkeeper.\n\nAfter we had exchanged courtesies, I accepted his invitation to be a guest at his motel for a few days.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ll put you in one of the rooms that doesn\u2019t provide me with viewing privileges,\u201d he said,", + " with a lighthearted grin. He added that, later on, he would take me up to the special attic viewing platform, but only after his mother-in-law, Viola, who helped out in the motel office, had gone to bed. \u201cMy wife, Donna, and I have been careful never to let her in on our secret, and the same thing goes, of course, for our children,\u201d he said.\n\nHe removed from his pocket a folded piece of stationery and handed it to me. \u201cI hope you\u2019ll not mind reading and signing this,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019ll allow me to be completely frank with you,", + " and I\u2019ll have no problem showing you around the motel.\u201d\n\nIt was a typed document stating that I would not identify him by name, or publicly associate his motel with whatever information he shared with me, until he had granted me a waiver. I signed the paper. I had already decided that I would not write about Gerald Foos under these restrictions. I had come to Denver merely to meet this man and to satisfy my curiosity about him.\n\nAs Foos drove us to the motel, he took the opportunity to sketch out the story of his life for me. He explained that he had met Donna in high school in a farming town called Ault,", + " about sixty-five miles outside of Denver, and that the two had been married since 1960. His parents, hardworking German-Americans, had had a farm. He described them as kindhearted people who would do anything for him\u2014\u201cexcept discuss sex.\u201d Every morning, he said, his mother got dressed in her closet, and he never witnessed either of his parents exhibiting an interest in sex. He said, \u201cAnd so, being very curious about sex even as an early adolescent\u2014with all those farm animals around, how could you avoid thinking of sex?\u2014I looked beyond my home to learn what I could about people\u2019s private lives.\u201d\n\nHe did not have to look far,", + " he said, steering the car toward the suburb of Aurora, where his motel was situated. When he was a child, his mother\u2019s married sister, Katheryn, lived in the farmhouse next door. At the age of nine, he said, he started watching her. Aunt Katheryn was in her late twenties then. She often walked around nude in her bedroom at night with the shutters open, and he would peer in from below the windowsill\u2014\u201ca moth drawn to her flame\u201d\u2014for an hour or so every evening. He watched her for five or six years and never got caught. His aunt Katheryn liked to sit at her dressing table with no clothes on,", + " arranging her miniature porcelain dolls or her collection of \u201cvaluable thimbles.\u201d\n\n\u201cSometimes her husband was there, my uncle Charlie, usually deep in sleep,\u201d Foos said. \u201cHe drank a lot. Once, I did see them having sex, and it made me upset. I was jealous. She was mine, I thought.\u201d\n\nI listened without comment, although I was surprised by Gerald Foos\u2019s candor. I had known him for barely half an hour, and he was unburdening himself to me about his masturbatory fixations and the origins of his voyeurism. As a journalist, I do not recall meeting anyone who required less of me than he did.", + " He did all the talking while I sat and listened. The car was his confessional.\n\nHe told me that he was a virgin through high school. It was only after joining the Navy, serving in the Mediterranean and the Far East, and training as an underwater demolition specialist that he enlarged his knowledge of sex under the guidance of bar girls. But he also kept fantasizing about his Aunt Katheryn.\n\nWhen he returned from the service, he started dating\u2014and soon married\u2014Donna, who was a nurse at a hospital in Aurora. Foos found work as a field auditor for Conoco. He was miserably employed, sitting in a cubicle all day,", + " keeping records of the inventory levels of oil tanks. To escape this tedium, he said, he began to undertake what he called \u201cvoyeuristic excursions\u201d around Aurora after dark. Often on foot, although sometimes in a car, he would cruise through neighborhoods and spy on people who were casual about lowering their window shades. He made no secret of his voyeurism to Donna. \u201cEven before our marriage I told her that this gave me a feeling of power,\u201d he said. She seemed to understand. \u201cDonna and most nurses are very open-minded,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve seen it all\u2014death, disease, pain,", + " disorders of every kind\u2014and it takes a lot to shock a nurse.\u201d She even accompanied him sometimes on his voyeuristic excursions, and it was Donna, he said, who first encouraged him to make notes about what he saw.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re getting close to our motel,\u201d Foos said, as he drove along East Colfax Avenue, passing through a neighborhood of stores, a trailer park, fast-food outlets, and an auto-repair shop. He said he had chosen the single-story Manor House Motel as the site of his laboratory years earlier because it had a pitched roof\u2014high enough for him to walk upright across the attic floor\u2014which would make it possible for him to realize his dream of creating a viewing platform to peer into the guest rooms below.\n\nHe bought the property for a hundred and forty-five thousand dollars.", + " \u201cDonna wasn\u2019t happy about giving up our house and living in the manager\u2019s quarters of the motel,\u201d Foos said. \u201cBut I promised her that we\u2019d buy another house as soon as we could afford it.\u201d\n\nFoos pulled into the parking area of the Manor House Motel, a brick building painted green and white, with orange doors leading into each of its twenty-one guest rooms. He parked next to an adjacent building consisting of an office and the family quarters. Donna, a short blue-eyed blond woman wearing a nurse\u2019s uniform, greeted us in the office. She was heading to the hospital, to work a night shift.\n\nOn the way to my room,", + " Foos told me that their son was a freshman at the Colorado School of Mines, and that their daughter, who was born with a respiratory ailment, had to drop out of high school to be treated at a special clinic, where she lived. He opened the door to my room, switched on the air-conditioner, and put down my luggage, saying that he would collect me in an hour to go out to dinner. \u201cAfter that, we can come back and take a little tour of the attic,\u201d he said.\n\nAfter I unpacked, I began making notes of my impressions of Gerald Foos. My interest in him was not dependent on having access to his attic.", + " I was hoping to get his permission to read the hundreds of pages that he claimed to have written during the past fifteen years, with the result that he would one day allow me to write about him. I knew that he viewed himself as a sex researcher along the lines of Alfred Kinsey, and I assumed that his account centered on what excited him sexually, but it was possible that he noted things that existed beyond his desires. A voyeur is motivated by anticipation; he invests endless hours in the hope of seeing what he wishes to see. Yet for every erotic episode he witnesses he is also privy to hundreds of mundane moments representing the ordinary daily human routine\u2014people channel-surfing,", + " snoring, urinating, primping, and doing other things too tediously real for reality television.\n\nI was intrigued by the notion of the voyeur, in the course of his trespasses, inadvertently serving as a social historian. I had recently read a book called \u201cThe Other Victorians,\u201d by the literary critic Steven Marcus. One of the main characters is a wellborn nineteenth-century Englishman who overcompensated for his Victorian upbringing by having sexual experiences, including voyeuristic ones, with a vast number of women\u2014servants, prostitutes, other men\u2019s wives, and a marchioness. He wrote a voluminous memoir about his liaisons and escapades,", + " which he called \u201cMy Secret Life.\u201d He arranged for it to be privately\u2014and anonymously\u2014published on the Continent, and it gradually achieved notoriety as pirated editions circulated through the literary underground. In 1966, an American edition of the book was legally published for the first time, by Grove Press. Marcus considers it a trove of insights into the social history of the period.\n\n\u201cIn addition to presenting such facts,\u201d Marcus writes, \u201c \u2018My Secret Life\u2019 shows us that amid and underneath the world of Victorian England as we know it... a real, secret social life was being conducted, the secret life of sexuality.\u201d As the anonymous author wrote in his memoir,", + " \u201cMan cannot see too much of human nature.\u201d I hoped that Foos\u2019s manuscript, if I obtained permission to read it, would serve as a kind of sequel to \u201cMy Secret Life.\u201d\n\nFoos took me to a restaurant called the Black Angus Steakhouse. After ordering a margarita and a sirloin, he promised that he would mail me a photocopy of his manuscript. He said he would send it in installments, because he anticipated having to photocopy it in the public library, a few pages at a time, for the sake of privacy.\n\nI asked Foos if he ever felt guilty about spying on his guests.", + " While he admitted to constant fear of being found out, he was unwilling to concede that his activities in the attic brought harm to anyone. He said that he was indulging his curiosity within the boundaries of his own property, and, because his guests were unaware of his voyeurism, they were not affected by it. He reasoned, \u201cThere\u2019s no invasion of privacy if no one complains.\u201d Still, he took great pains to avoid discovery, and he worried that, were he caught, he could be charged with a crime.\n\nOver dinner, he described how it had taken him months to fashion his motel\u2019s viewing vents to \u201cfoolproof perfection.\u201d He\u2019d initially considered installing two-way mirrors in the ceilings,", + " but dismissed the idea as too incriminating if discovered. He then thought of installing the faux ventilators and hired a metalworker to fabricate a number of six-by-fourteen-inch louvred screens. Only Donna, who was in on the plan, could help Foos with the installation. She would stand on a chair in each of the designated rooms and reach up to fit a louvred screen into the opening in the ceiling that Foos had made with a power saw. As he lay prone in the attic, he secured the screen to the plywood floor and rafters with long flathead screws. He installed three layers of shag carpeting over a central strip of the attic floor;", + " the nails that kept the carpeting in place were rubber-tipped, to deaden any squeaks from footsteps.\n\nAfter the screens were in place, Foos asked Donna to visit each room, recline on a bed, and look up at a ventilator as he was staring down at her. \u201cCan you see me?\u201d he would call down. If she said yes, he used pliers to bend the louvres into an angle that would conceal his presence while maintaining a clear view of the bed and the bathroom door.\n\n\u201cThis trial-and-error process took us weeks,\u201d Foos continued. \u201cAnd it was exhausting\u2014with me constantly going up and down between the attic and rooms,", + " and my hands aching from all those adjustments with my pliers.\u201d\n\nFoos said he began watching guests during the winter of 1966. He was often excited and gratified by what he saw, but there were many times when what went on below was so boring that he nodded off, sleeping for hours on the shag carpeting, until Donna woke him up before she left for the hospital. Sometimes she brought him a snack (\u201cI\u2019m the only one getting room service at this motel,\u201d he told me, with a smile); at other times, if a particularly engaging erotic interlude was occurring in the room below, Donna would lie down next to him and watch.", + " Sometimes they would have sex up on the viewing platform.\n\n\u201cDonna was not a voyeur,\u201d he told me, \u201cbut, rather, the devoted wife of a voyeur. And, unlike me, she grew up having a free and healthy attitude about sex.\u201d He went on, \u201cThe attic was an extension of our bedroom.\u201d When Donna was not with him on the viewing platform, he said, he would either masturbate or memorize what he saw and re-create it with his wife.\n\nWhile driving us back to the Manor House, Foos continued to talk. He mentioned that an attractive young couple had been staying in Room 6 for the past few days and suggested that perhaps we would get a look at them tonight.", + " They were from Chicago and had come to Colorado to ski. Donna always registered the more youthful and attractive guests in one of the \u201cviewing rooms.\u201d The nine non-viewing rooms were saved for families or individuals or couples who were elderly or less physically appealing.\n\nAs we approached the motel, I began to feel uneasy. I noticed that the neon \u201c No Vacancy \u201d sign was on. \u201cThat\u2019s good for us,\u201d Foos said. \u201cIt means we can lock up for the night and not be bothered by late arrivals looking for rooms.\u201d If guests needed anything, a buzzer at the front desk would alert the proprietors, even in the attic,", + " so that if Foos was up there viewing he could climb down a ladder in the utility room and arrive at the desk in less than three minutes.\n\nIn the office, Donna\u2019s mother handed Foos some mail and briefed him on the maids\u2019 schedules. I waited on a sofa, under some framed posters of the Rocky Mountains and a couple of AAA plaques affirming the cleanliness of the Manor House Motel.\n\nFinally, after saying good night to his mother-in-law, Foos beckoned me to follow him across the parking lot to the utility room. Curtains were drawn across the windows that fronted each of the guest rooms.", + " I could hear the sounds of television coming from some of them, which I assumed did not bode well for the expectations of my host.\n\nAttached to one wall of the utility room was a wooden ladder painted blue. After acknowledging his finger-to-lip warning that we maintain silence, I climbed the ladder behind him. On a landing, he unlocked a door leading into the attic. After he had locked the door behind us, I saw, in the dim light, to my left and right, sloping wooden beams that supported the motel\u2019s pitched roof; in the middle of the narrow floor was a carpeted catwalk about three feet wide,", + " extending over the ceilings of the twenty-one guest rooms.\n\nCrouching on the catwalk behind Foos, so as to avoid hitting my head on a beam, I watched as he pointed down toward a vent in the floor. Light could be seen a few feet ahead of us. Light also came from a few other vents farther away, but from these I could hear the noise of televisions. The room below us was quiet\u2014except for a soft murmuring of voices and the vibrato of bed springs.\n\nI saw what Foos was doing, and I did the same: I got down on my knees and crawled toward the lighted louvres.", + " Then I stretched my neck in order to see as much as I could through the vent, nearly butting heads with Foos as I did so. Finally, I saw a naked couple spread out on the bed below, engaged in oral sex. Foos and I watched for several moments, and then Foos lifted his head and gave me a thumbs-up sign. He whispered that it was the skiing couple from Chicago.\n\nDespite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my necktie had slipped down through the slats of the louvred screen and was dangling into the motel room within a few yards of the woman\u2019s head.", + " I realized my carelessness only when Foos grabbed me by the neck and, with his free hand, pulled my tie up through the slats. The couple below saw none of this: the woman\u2019s back was to us, and the man had his eyes closed.\n\nFoos\u2019s expression, as he looked at me in silence, reflected considerable irritation. I felt embarrassed. What if my necktie had betrayed his hideaway? My next thought was: Why was I worried about protecting Gerald Foos? What was I doing up here, anyway? Had I become complicit in his strange and distasteful project? I followed him down the ladder into the parking area.\n\n\u201cYou must put away that tie,\u201d he said finally,", + " escorting me to my room. I nodded and wished him a good night.\n\nWhen I met Foos in the office the next morning, he bore no trace of irritation, and he did not comment on the fact that I was not wearing a necktie. \u201cSince we have some privacy here, I\u2019d like to give you a quick look at my manuscript,\u201d he said. He unlocked a desk drawer and removed a cardboard box containing a four-inch-thick stack of handwritten pages from yellow legal pads, the work of fifteen years. The penmanship was excellent. This was the manuscript he called \u201cThe Voyeur\u2019s Journal.\u201d\n\nHe explained that he kept small pads,", + " pencils, and a flashlight stashed in the attic. \u201cWhen I see or hear something that interests me, I\u2019ll scribble it down, and later, when I\u2019m alone down here, I\u2019ll expand on it.\u201d\n\nHe seemed desperate to share his findings. I wondered if voyeurs crave escape from their prolonged solitude by unburdening themselves to other people. Steven Marcus writes, of the Victorian adventurer in his book, \u201cHad he really wanted to keep his secret life a secret he would not have put pen to paper.... He asks whether all men feel and behave as he does, and concludes, \u2018I can never know this;", + " my experience if printed may enable others to compare as I cannot.\u2019 \u201d\n\nA week after I returned to New York, I received in the mail nineteen pages of \u201cThe Voyeur\u2019s Journal,\u201d dated 1966. The first entry begins:\n\nToday was the fulfillment and realization of a dream that has constantly occupied my mind and being. Today, I purchased the Manor House Motel and that dream has been consummated. Finally, I will be able to satisfy my constant yearning and uncontrollable desire to peer into other people\u2019s lives. My voyeuristic urges will now be placed into effect on a plane higher than anyone else has contemplated.\n\nHe described the painstaking effort of converting his attic into a viewing platform:\n\nNov.", + " 18, 1966\u2014Business has been great and I am missing observing several interesting guests, but patience has always been my watchword, and I must accomplish this task with the utmost of perfection and brilliance.\n\nHis notes become increasingly grandiose as he nears his goal. \u201cThese idiots working for this sheet metal shop are dumb as radishes,\u201d he writes. \u201c \u2018This vent will never function properly,\u2019 they say. If I told them what purpose it was going to serve they probably wouldn\u2019t comprehend.\u201d\n\nIf I had not seen the attic viewing platform with my own eyes, I would have found it hard to believe Foos\u2019s account.", + " Indeed, over the decades since we met, in 1980, I have noticed various inconsistencies in his story: for instance, the first entries in his \u201cVoyeur\u2019s Journal\u201d are dated 1966, but the deed of sale for the Manor House, which I obtained recently from the Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder\u2019s office, shows that he purchased the place in 1969. And there are other dates in his notes and journals that don\u2019t quite scan. I have no doubt that Foos was an epic voyeur, but he could sometimes be an inaccurate and unreliable narrator. I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts in his manuscript.\n\nAt times,", + " I could almost picture Foos rubbing his hands together, like a mad scientist in a B movie: \u201cI will have the finest laboratory in the world for observing people in their natural state, and then begin determining for myself exactly what goes on behind closed bedroom doors,\u201d he wrote.\n\nIn an entry dated November 24, 1966, he describes using the viewing platform for the first time:\n\nSubject #1: Mr. and Mrs. W of southern Colorado. Description: Approx. 35 year old male, in Denver on business. 5\u201910\u201d, 180 pounds, white collar, probably college educated. Wife 35 years old,", + " 5\u20194\u2033, 130 lbs, pleasing plump, dark hair, Italian extraction, educated, 37-28-37. Activity: Room #10 was rented to this couple at 7 p.m. by myself. He registered and I noticed he had class and would be a perfect subject to have the distinction of being #1. After registration, I immediately left for the observation walkway. It was tremendous seeing my first subjects, for the initial observation, enter the room. The subjects were represented to my vision, clearer than anticipated.... I had a feeling of tremendous power and exhilaration at my accomplishment.", + " I had accomplished what other men had only dreamed of doing and the thought of superiority and intelligence occupied my brain.... As I peered into the vent from my observation platform, I could see the entire motel room, and to my delight the bathroom was also viewable, together with the sink, commode, and bathtub.... I could see the subjects below me, and without question they were a perfect couple to be the first to perform on the stage that was created especially for them, and many others to follow, and I would be the audience. After going to the bathroom with the door closed, she sat in front of the mirror looking at her hair and remarked she was getting grey.", + " He was in an argumentative mood and appeared disagreeable with his assignment in Denver. The evening passed uneventful until 8:30 p.m. when she finally undressed revealing a beautiful body, slightly plump, but sexually attractive anyway. He appeared disinterested when she laid on the bed beside him, and he began smoking one cigarette after another and watching TV.... Finally after kissing and fondling her, he quickly gained an erection and entered her in the male superior position, with little or no foreplay, and orgasmed in approximately 5 minutes. She had no orgasm and went to the bathroom....", + " Conclusion: They are not a happy couple. He is too concerned about his position and doesn\u2019t have time for her. He is very ignorant of sexual procedure and foreplay despite his college education. This is a very undistinguished beginning for my observation laboratory.... I\u2019m certain things will improve.\n\nThings did not improve for Gerald Foos with regard to the second couple he observed. The man and woman were in their thirties, and they talked about money, drank bourbon, and went to bed with the covers pulled \u201cup to their noses.\u201d\n\nThe third couple, affluent-looking people in their early fifties, were more interesting.", + " They were in town to spend Thanksgiving with their son and their daughter-in-law, whom they had not met before and of whom they did not approve. Foos writes that he observed them discussing their son\u2019s marriage. He noted that the wife unhooked her bra by sliding the closure around to the front.\n\nShe removed her shoes and sprayed the interior of the shoes with some sort of deodorant.... After the bath, she spent 1 hour preparing her hair in rollers and primping in front of the mirror. This is a 50 year old woman! Imagine the hours she has wasted in her lifetime. By this time her husband is asleep and no sex transpired tonight.", + "... The next morning at 9 a.m., I observed her giving him oral sex to completion.\n\nAfter watching them for two more days, Foos summed up, \u201cConclusion: Educated, upper-middle-class older couple who enjoy a tremendous sex life.\u201d\n\nBetween Thanksgiving and January of his first year as a motel voyeur, Gerald Foos spent enough time in his attic to observe guests perform forty-six sex acts, at times alone, at times with a partner, and, on one occasion, with two partners. Each time, he summed up his observations in a formal conclusion.\n\nOne day in December, two neatly dressed men and a woman came in and requested a single room.", + " The more vocal of the two men, who had red hair, explained that his furnace at home had stopped working and that his wife was freezing. Later, Foos realized that when the man signed the register he had listed as his home address a regional vacuum-cleaner store.\n\nWithin minutes, Foos was in the attic and had positioned himself over their room. They were a \u201cvery polite, very organized couple with [a] male companion,\u201d he wrote. All three immediately disrobed. Then the husband snapped photographs as his wife and the other man had sex in various positions. Foos recorded the encounter in minute detail. When it was over,", + " he wrote, \u201cThey all three laid quiet on the bed and relaxed, discussing vacuum cleaner sales.\u201d (Foos also learned that the companion was a sales rep for the couple\u2019s firm.)\n\nThe trio represented the first group sex that Foos witnessed at the Manor House. Within a few years, however, he stopped regarding additional bed partners as a deviation; rather, he viewed them as posing a financial conundrum. Should he charge higher room rates for threesomes or foursomes than he did for couples?\n\nAs it was, extra charges were levied only on guests who checked in with pets; they were required to leave a fifteen-dollar refundable security deposit.", + " Foos liked to spy on guests with pets, but for different reasons than he spied on couples. When a couple from Atlanta arrived holding the leash of a large hound that they referred to as Roger, Foos went right to the attic.\n\nHe was disgusted to note that the couple bickered about money, with the wife complaining about having \u201cto stay in this dump.\u201d Foos was infuriated: the motel, he wrote, \u201cis not first-class, but it is clean, and has had guests from all walks of life.\u201d Foos watched with horror as the dog proceeded \u201cto do his duty in a large pile behind the chair.\u201d Roger\u2019s owners cleaned up the mess,", + " hoping that the chair would hide the soiled carpet.\n\nThe next morning, when the couple asked for their fifteen-dollar deposit, Foos shocked them by escorting them to their room, moving the chair, and pointing to the spot on the rug. (It seems not to have occurred to him that this action could have given him away. Also, he told me, dogs, unlike people, often seemed to be aware that someone was lurking above. When Foos was in the attic, dogs often pointed their snouts up toward the vents and barked.) Before the couple checked out, Foos returned to the platform to eavesdrop.", + " The woman said to her husband, \u201cHe\u2019s just a dumb-idiot manager who probably keeps all deposits for himself anyway and was just lucky in pointing out a particular spot on the carpet.\u201d Foos\u2019s darkly philosophical conclusion:\n\nMy observations indicate that the majority of vacationers spend their time in misery. They fight about money; where to visit.... All their aggressions somehow are immeasurably increased, and this is the time they discover they are not properly matched. Women especially have a difficult time adjusting to both the new surroundings and their husbands. Vacations produce all the anxieties within mankind to come forward during this time,", + " and to perpetuate the worst of emotions.... You can never really determine during their appearances in public that their private life is full of hell and unhappiness.... This is the \u201cplight of the human corpus,\u201d and I\u2019m sure provides the answer that if the misery of mankind were revealed all together spontaneously, mass genocide might correspondently follow.\n\nAs time went on, Foos became increasingly disenchanted with his guests, whose behavior prompted him to confront larger questions about the human condition as well as his own political convictions. Within walking distance of the Manor House Motel was the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, which,", + " during the sixties and seventies, served as a temporary home for injured Vietnam War veterans. Foos was only moderately against the war when he built his observation platform, but as the struggle continued he revised his opinion. In \u201cThe Voyeur\u2019s Journal,\u201d he wrote:\n\nChecked in this male who is in the Service and had apparently lost his leg in Vietnam. He rented a room for five days, and has received a pass from the Hospital to stay with his wife who has come from Michigan to visit him.\n\nHis artificial leg was attached just below the knee, the stub raw and sore. In the evening, Foos watched as the wife opened two bottles of cola,", + " and her husband made a toast:\n\n\u201cHere\u2019s to what makes the world go around!\u201d \u201cSex...?\u201d She smiled. \u201cNo! Money! It\u2019s the one thing people will do almost anything for. What do you think we are at war in Vietnam for. It is the god-damned money.\u201d\n\nA few years later, another wounded veteran\u2014this one a paraplegic\u2014checked in to the Manor House with his wife. Foos watched as the wife tried to help her husband out of his wheelchair and emptied his catheter bag. At one point, the husband asked her, \u201cWhy do you continue to love me when I\u2019m in this condition?\u201d The wife was affectionate and supportive,", + " and after observing the couple completing a successful sexual encounter, Foos wrote, \u201cI have had the opportunity to observe many of the deplorable and regrettable tragedies of the Vietnam War. This subject is lucky. He has a loving and understanding wife.\u201d\n\nAnother time, he rented two connecting rooms to a pilot, his girlfriend, and a male friend. Foos spied on them and heard the pilot bragging about once \u201cthrowing a Vietcong soldier out of his gun-ship.\u201d Foos wrote, \u201cThe subject makes me sick.\u201d The pilot also described \u201chis favorite sport, which is chasing and shooting coyotes from his aircraft.\u201d Later that night,", + " Foos saw the single friend masturbating as he listened, with his ear against the connecting door, to the pilot in bed with the girl. In his conclusion, Foos registered his distaste: \u201cTheir disregard for animals\u201d and the fate of the Vietcong soldier infuriated him, although he did add a self-serving note pointing out that the friend\u2019s lascivious eavesdropping \u201cmakes a truism out of my contention that all men are voyeurs to some degree.\u201d\n\nFoos liked to strike up casual conversations with his subjects after he\u2019d observed them. If he discovered that a guest lived in the Denver area, he would sometimes follow the person home after checkout.\n\nOne was a middle-aged woman who checked into the motel with a well-dressed younger man.", + " The woman mixed a drink, then removed her clothes. As the two entwined on the bed, the woman moaning frantically, the man abruptly stopped. \u201cI\u2019m having difficulty making my car payment,\u201d he told her. She reached for her purse and handed him a hundred-dollar bill. He then returned his attention to her prone body. After satisfying her, he rebuffed her offer to reciprocate, then relented. \u201cI need an extra fifty dollars to finish paying my bills,\u201d he said. She gave him the money, and several minutes later he left.\n\nWhen the woman drove off, Foos followed her in his car and saw her enter an apartment in a retirement complex.", + " He watched through her kitchen window. \u201cShe was in tears,\u201d he wrote. Foos walked around the complex and asked a neighbor about the woman. He learned that her husband had been killed in Vietnam and her son was away at college. In his conclusion, he wrote, \u201cThe tremendous sexual desire that some women of middle age express during these encounters is a definite tragedy.\u201d He added that he had seen the same gigolo in his motel with men.\n\nIn addition to collecting data on sexual styles and positions, foreplay, and pillow talk, Foos took an interest in his guests\u2019 bathroom habits. He had installed viewing grilles in several of the Manor House\u2019s bathrooms for this purpose.", + " One woman sat on the toilet \u201cside-saddle.\u201d A man sat on the toilet backward, facing the wall. Foos noted, \u201cEvery imaginable position or approach to the commode has been observed.\u201d More men than Foos could count urinated in the sink. He expressed anger at the toilet industry for its failure to address the challenges men have in directing their urine stream accurately. (\u201cIf I had my way, I\u2019d design a household toilet that was more like an upright urinal,\u201d he told me.)\n\nHe complained about the guests who smoked, not because it fouled the room but \u201cbecause the smoke rises and floods the vent,\u201d impeding his view.", + " He also made note of guests whose behavior he found weird or upsetting: the guy who secretly urinated in his date\u2019s bourbon; the obese fellow who checked in with a much younger man and then dressed him up in a furry costume with horns, saying, \u201cYou are heavenly; I have never seen a more beautiful sheep-boy.\u201d\n\nBut more often Foos found observing his guests depressing. They argued. They watched too much television. (This was especially irksome when the guests were attractive and could have spent their time having sex instead.) After watching one sexual encounter, which he regarded as typically unsatisfying for the woman, he wrote:\n\nThis is real life.", + "... These are real people! I\u2019m thoroughly disgusted that I alone must bear the burden of my observations. These subjects will never find happiness and divorce is inevitable. He doesn\u2019t know the first thing about sex or its application. The only thing he knows is penetration and thrusting, to orgasm, under the covers with the lights out. My voyeurism has contributed immensely to my becoming a futilitarian, and I hate this conditioning of my soul.... What is so distasteful is that the majority of subjects are in concert with these individuals in both design and plan. Many different approaches to life would be immediately implemented,", + " if our society would have the opportunity to be Voyeur for a Day.\n\nAs Gerald Foos reflected upon his \u201cburden\u201d as a committed voyeur, he saw himself as an entrapped figure. He had no control over what he saw and no escape from its influence.\n\nAs I read the sections of the journal he sent me, which covered the mid-nineteen-sixties through the mid-seventies, I noticed that his persona as a writer changed, gradually shifting from a first-person narrator into a character whom he wrote about in the third person. Sometimes he used the word \u201cI,\u201d and sometimes he\u2019d refer to himself as \u201cthe voyeur.\u201d\n\nThe entries become increasingly portentous,", + " and Foos starts to invest the omniscient Voyeur character with godlike qualities. He appears to be losing his grip on reality. But only once, while posted in the attic, did he actually speak through a vent to a person below. He was looking down on Room 6, where he saw a guest eating Kentucky Fried Chicken while sitting on the bed. Instead of using paper napkins, the man cleaned his hands on the bedsheets. He then wiped the grease off his beard and mouth with the bedspread. Without realizing what he was doing, Foos shouted, \u201cYou son of a bitch!\u201d\n\nThe subject stopped eating and looked around the room,", + " and then went to the window and looked out. Apparently he knew someone shouted S.O.B., but couldn\u2019t determine from which direction the insult came. He went to the window and looked out for the second time and pondered the situation for a few minutes, and then continued with his animalistic eating habits.\n\nFoos lost control on other occasions, each time risking exposure. One time he was watching a couple who were in town on a cattle-buying trip. After they ate McDonald\u2019s hamburgers (wiping their hands on their bluejeans) and watched a rerun of \u201cGunsmoke,\u201d they got into bed. Foos was eager to see the woman undressed,", + " but the man turned off the lights. \u201cI won\u2019t stand for this at all,\u201d Foos wrote in the journal. \u201cI return to the ground level and park my car directly in front of his unit, and turn the lights on bright.\u201d After going back to the attic, Foos was stymied once more.\n\nThe room is lit up real well, and he begins his animal-like thrusting under the covers. [After three minutes he] immediately withdraws and departs for the bathroom. I finally get to see her body when she un-covers to wipe the semen away on my bedspread.... She is very beautifully proportioned,", + " but probably equally stupid and dumb. He comes back from the bathroom and notes that the lights outside are still on. He says, \u201cI wonder what the situation is with this car with the lights on.\u201d\n\nThe journal entry ends with an existential rumination: Foos is sinking deeper into isolation and despair. The more I read, the more convinced I became that Foos\u2019s stilted metaphysics were his way of attempting to elevate his disturbing pastime into something of value.\n\nConclusion: I am still unable to determine what function I serve.... Apparently, I\u2019m delegated the responsibility of this heavy burden to be placed upon myself\u2014never being able to tell anyone!", + "... The depression builds, but I will continue onward with my research. I\u2019ve pondered on occasion that perhaps I don\u2019t exist, only represent a product of the subjects\u2019 dreams. No one would believe my accomplishments as a voyeur anyway, therefore, the dreamlike manifestation would explain my reality.\n\nFoos made it clear to me from the beginning that he regarded his voyeurism as serious research, undertaken, in some vague way, for the betterment of society. At the end of each year, he tallied his observations into an annual report, trying to identify significant social trends. In 1973, he noted that of the 296 sexual acts that he witnessed,", + " 195 involved white heterosexuals, who favored the missionary position. Over all, he counted 184 male orgasms and 33 female orgasms. The following year, there were 329 sexual activities that he believed warranted recording. He also broke people into categories according to their sex drive:\n\n\u201412% of all observable couples at the motel are highly sexed.\n\n\u201462% lead moderately active sexual lives.\n\n\u201422% are of low-drive sexually.\n\n\u20143% have no sex at all.\n\nIn 1973, he had observed only five instances of interracial sex; by 1980, he told me, the number was closer to twenty-five.", + " Foos viewed this as one of many examples in which his small motel reflected social changes throughout the nation.\n\nAnother of Foos\u2019s categories, and one of the largest, was \u201chonest but unhappy people.\u201d A great majority of these were out-of-town couples who, during their brief stays, filled his ears with complaints about their marriages. He constantly reminded himself how lucky he was to have Donna for a wife. She was an in-house nurse, a co-conspirator with regard to his prying, a trustworthy manager of their family finances, and a private secretary, who would take dictation in shorthand when Foos was too tired to write in his journal.\n\nAs the years passed,", + " he became more preoccupied with receiving recognition for what he viewed as his pioneering research. By necessity, he existed in the shadows, running his laboratory for the study of human behavior. He considered his work to be superior to that of the sexologists at the Kinsey Institute and the Masters & Johnson clinic. Much of the research at such places was obtained from volunteers. Because his subjects didn\u2019t know they were being watched, they yielded more accurate and, to his mind, more valuable information.\n\nIn the late seventies, two things happened that changed the nature of Foos\u2019s journal. He grew jaded about what he was seeing through the vents,", + " and he began to realize that it was impossible for him to get the scientific credit he felt he deserved. His writings began to reflect not only what he felt while watching other people but also how he felt about himself and his compulsion, beginning with his origins as a farm boy infatuated with his aunt Katheryn.\n\nHe started another, more biographical notebook, which he called \u201cThe Collector.\u201d In it he recounted the story he had told me the night I met him, in the car from the airport. But he wrote about himself in the third person, as if he were a character in a novel:\n\nThe youth moved silently through the night over the grass and across the barbed wire fence.", + "... Shutters folded back, unsuspecting, letting the northwest breeze play through the arrangement of the bedroom. The youth looked in, forgot about the cold and rain outside, forgot about essence, forgot about time.... While observing his aunt, she began to move toward her collectibles.\n\nThe closest he came to admitting his special interest in his aunt occurred one day, just before his tenth birthday, when he confessed to his mother that he was envious of his aunt\u2019s thimble and doll collection and wanted a collection of his own. His sensible mother suggested that he begin collecting baseball cards. This started him off on a lifelong hobby,", + " resulting in his amassing tens of thousands of sports cards by the time I met him, in 1980, when he was forty-five. But he always associated his collecting with his boyhood attraction to his aunt. He wrote, \u201cThe youth will confuse sexuality and the art of accumulating objects.... There was a direct association from his aunt being nude and his collecting.\u201d\n\nIn later years, he also collected stamps, coins, and vintage firearms, and as a boy he kept a stash of muskrat tails, a by-product of skinning the ones he and his father trapped\u2014one of his chores. (The collection was dispersed,", + " he says, when his parents complained of the \u201cspecial odor in my room.\u201d)\n\nGerald was the first of two children born to Natalie and Jake Foos; he was five years older than his brother, Jack. Gerald acknowledged that he was by nature a \u201cloner.\u201d When he was not busy with farm chores or spying on his aunt, he would often \u201clook up at the sky, and know there was something out there for me.\u201d His mother had encouraged him to get a library card, and he spent hours reading. He wrote, \u201cI was mesmerized by books, and what might be called \u2018the life of the mind,\u2019 and the life that was not manual labor or farming or housework,", + " but seemed in its specialness to transcend these activities.\u201d\n\nSome of Foos\u2019s reminiscences offer glimpses of what he would become: \u201cThe town was truly a rural paradise; even into the 1920s, some 2,000 farms averaging 80 acres each.\u201d He continued, describing his childhood:\n\nI am very curious about everything and everyone I see... and so I have felt invisible also, as a child feels himself invisible, beneath the radar of adult supervision. The consequence of so much unsupervised freedom was that I became precociously independent.\n\nFoos never got over his first love, a high-school cheerleader named Barbara White,", + " who, along with crowds of onlookers, cheered from the grandstands after he had hit a home run or scored a touchdown. This was in 1953, his senior year, and I saw clippings about him from the Greeley Daily Tribune, which regularly printed his picture and described his achievements. \u201cFoos made a beautiful run, escaping a couple of potential tacklers at the line of scrimmage and plowing on after being hit again at the 10,\u201d read one story. Barbara White broke up with Foos when she discovered that he had a foot fetish.\n\nFoos\u2019s stint in the service produced few insights in his notebook because,", + " as he claims, his most interesting Navy experiences were \u201ctop secret.\u201d\n\nYears after being discharged, after building the viewing platform in his motel, he felt at times as if he were still in the Navy, adrift on the sea, peering down through the vents the way he used to squint through binoculars on deck duty, keeping a lookout for objects of interest. Life in the attic was humdrum. His motel was a drydocked boat whose guests endlessly watched television, exchanged banalities, had sex mainly under the covers if they had sex at all\u2014and gave him so little to write about that sometimes he wrote nothing at all.\n\nHe also got bored with cataloguing his guests\u2019 dishonesty.", + " They sometimes tried to cheat him out of the room rent, and hardly a week passed without his witnessing instances of chicanery. One working-class couple asked him for a few days\u2019 grace period to pay their bill. Foos spied on them the next day and heard the husband tell the wife, \u201cThe dumb guy in the office thinks I have a check coming in from Chicago, and we will fool him the same way we did the motel in Omaha.\u201d Foos locked the people out of their room and kept their possessions until they paid him.\n\nConclusion: Thousands of unhappy, discontented people are moving to Colorado in order to fulfill that deep yearning in their soul,", + " hoping to improve their way of life, and arrive here without any money and discover only despair.... Society has taught us to lie, steal, and cheat, and deception is the paramount prerequisite in man\u2019s makeup.... As my observation of people approaches the fifth year, I am beginning to become pessimistic as to the direction our society is heading, and feel myself becoming more depressed as I determine the futility of it all.\n\nThese experiences prodded Foos to concoct an \u201chonesty test.\u201d He would leave a suitcase, secured with a cheap padlock, in the closet of a motel room. When a guest checked in,", + " he would say to Donna, in the guest\u2019s hearing, that someone had just called to report leaving behind a suitcase with a thousand dollars inside. Foos then watched from the attic as the new guest found the suitcase and deliberated over whether to break the lock and look inside or return the suitcase to the motel office.\n\nOut of fifteen guests who were subjected to the honesty test, including a minister, a lawyer, and an Army lieutenant colonel, only two returned the suitcase to the office with the padlock intact. The others all opened the suitcase and then tried to dispose of it in different ways. The minister pushed the suitcase out the bathroom window into the bushes.\n\nA few years after Foos started mailing me photocopies of his handwritten journal pages,", + " I received a large package from him containing a three-hundred-page typescript of his viewing logs through 1978. This included the material in the handwritten journals from his early years as his motel\u2019s voyeur, but a good portion of the manuscript was new to me. It continued in the same vein as the earlier entries\u2014a litany of undifferentiated sex acts and accounts of people squabbling. There was one entry from 1977, however, in which the Voyeur claimed to have seen, for the first time, more than he wished to see.\n\nWhat he saw was a murder. It occurred in Room 10.\n\nHe described the occupants as a young couple who had rented a room for several weeks.", + " The man, in his late twenties, was about a hundred and eighty pounds. The Voyeur deduced from his eavesdropping that he was a college dropout and a small-time drug dealer. The girl was blond, with a 34D bust. (Foos had gone into the room while the couple was out and checked her bra size, something he says he did often.) Foos devoted pages and pages to an approving account of the couple\u2019s vigorous sex life. The journal also described people coming to the door of Room 10 to buy drugs. This upset Foos, but he did not notify the police. In the past,", + " he had reported drug dealing in his motel when he saw it, but the police took no action, because he could not identify himself as an eyewitness to his complaints.\n\nOne afternoon, Foos saw the man in Room 10 sell drugs to a few young boys. This incensed him. He wrote in the journal, \u201cAfter the male subject left the room that afternoon, the voyeur entered his room.... The voyeur, without any guilt, silently flushed all the remaining drugs and marijuana down the toilet.\u201d He had flushed motel guests\u2019 drugs several times before, with no repercussions.\n\nThis time, the man in Room 10 accused his girlfriend of stealing the drugs.", + " The journal continues:\n\nAfter fighting and arguing for about one hour, the scene below the voyeur turned to violence. The male subject grabbed the female subject by the neck and strangled her until she fell unconscious to the floor. The male subject, then in a panic, picked up all his things and fled the vicinity of the motel. The voyeur... without doubt... could see the chest of the female subject moving, which indicated to the voyeur that she was still alive and therefore O.K. So, the voyeur was convinced in his own mind that the female subject had survived the strangulation assault and would be all right, and he swiftly departed the observation platform for the evening.\n\nFoos reasoned that he couldn\u2019t do anything anyway,", + " \u201cbecause at this moment in time he was only an observer and not a reporter, and really didn\u2019t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned.\u201d\n\nThe next morning, a maid ran into the motel office and said that a woman was dead in Room 10. Foos wrote that he immediately called the police. When officers arrived, he gave them the drug dealer\u2019s name, his description, and his license-plate number. He did not say that he had witnessed the murder.\n\nFoos wrote, \u201cThe voyeur had finally come to grips with his own morality and would have to forever suffer in silence, but he would never condemn his conduct or behavior in this situation.\u201d\n\nThe next day,", + " the police returned and told Foos that the drug dealer had been using a fake name and had been driving a stolen car.\n\nI came upon this account in Foos\u2019s typescript a few years after I\u2019d visited him in Aurora\u2014and nearly six years after the murder. I was shocked, and surprised that Foos had not mentioned the incident to me earlier. It almost seemed as if he regarded it as just another day in the attic. But, as I thought about it, his response\u2014the observation that he \u201creally didn\u2019t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned\u201d\u2014was consistent with his sense of himself as a fractured individual.", + " He was also desperately protective of his secret life in the attic. If the police had grilled him and decided that he knew more than he was telling, they might have obtained a search warrant, and the consequences could have been catastrophic.\n\nI called Foos right away to ask about the situation. I wanted to find out whether he realized that, in addition to witnessing a murder, he might have, in some way, caused it.\n\nHe was reluctant to say more than he had written in his journal, and he reminded me that I had signed a confidentiality agreement. I spent a few sleepless nights, asking myself whether I ought to turn Foos in.", + " But I reasoned that it was too late to save the drug dealer\u2019s girlfriend. Also, since I had kept the Voyeur\u2019s secret, I felt worrisomely like a co-conspirator.\n\nI filed away his notes on the murder along with all the other material he had mailed me. I now knew all that I wanted to know about the Voyeur.\n\nOver the next decades, I continued to get letters from Gerald Foos of Aurora, Colorado. He reported that, as far as he knew, investigators had failed to find the killer, but that the police had been summoned to the Manor House for other reasons. He told me that one guest had committed suicide,", + " shooting himself with a pistol. A five-hundred-pound man had suffered a fatal heart attack, and, because his bloated corpse could not fit through the door, firefighters had removed the room\u2019s picture window.\n\nIn addition to these bits of news were his ongoing complaints about the appalling examples of human behavior he\u2019d witnessed, including robbery, rape, and sexual exploitation. He had come to believe that the arrival of the birth-control pill, in the early sixties, which he\u2019d originally celebrated, encouraged many men to expect sex on demand: \u201cWomen had won the legal right to choose but had lost the right to choose the right moment.\u201d He felt that the war between the sexes had escalated and that sexual relations were getting worse,", + " not better. (Lesbians, whom Foos admired, were an exception.)\n\nAs his misanthropy deepened, the language he used about his motel clients sounded more and more like unintentional descriptions of his own conscience. He wrote that he felt \u201coverwhelmed by the fantasy, the play-acting, and the game-playing of the real world.\u201d He continued, \u201cPeople are basically dishonest and unclean; they cheat and lie and are motivated by self-interest.\u201d He claimed to have become extremely antisocial, and when he was not in the attic he avoided seeing his guests.\n\nIt occurred to me that Foos might be approaching something like a mental breakdown.", + " He reminded me of the psychotic anchorman in the 1976 film \u201cNetwork,\u201d who implodes, screaming, \u201cI\u2019m as mad as hell, and I\u2019m not going to take this anymore!\u201d I also thought of John Cheever\u2019s 1947 story \u201cThe Enormous Radio,\u201d in which a couple\u2019s marriage slowly suffers as their new radio mysteriously allows them to overhear the conversations and secrets of their neighbors; and of Nathanael West\u2019s 1933 novel, \u201cMiss Lonelyhearts,\u201d in which an advice columnist\u2019s life deteriorates as a result of his ongoing exposure to his readers\u2019 sad and empty lives.", + " Gerald Foos had literary and scientific pretensions, but he had no self-awareness. Here was a snooper in the attic claiming the moral high ground while passing judgment on unsuspecting people below.\n\nWhere was I in all this? I was the Voyeur\u2019s pen pal, his confessor, perhaps, or an adjunct to a secret life he chose not to keep completely secret. Several times over the years, it occurred to me that I would be wise to discontinue our correspondence. Foos was not a subject I could write about, despite my curiosity about how it would end. Would he get caught? If he did, what would be the trial strategy of his attorneys?", + " Was he na\u00efve enough to think that jurors would accept that his attic was a laboratory in quest of truth? Moreover, might I be subpoenaed to testify?\n\nStill, whenever an envelope from Foos arrived, I opened it. In March, 1985, after a long silence, he wrote to say that Donna had died. She had been in her mid-forties and suffered from lupus. There was a new woman in his life, a divorc\u00e9e named Anita Clark. He had met her one afternoon when she was pulling her two small children down East Colfax Avenue in a red wagon. Anita took over Donna\u2019s duties in the motel office.", + " Like Donna, she was happily complicit in Foos\u2019s secret life. She considered herself a full-fledged voyeur. From subsequent letters I learned that business was going so well that, in 1991, Foos bought a second motel down the street, called the Riviera. He installed four faux ventilators in the bedroom ceilings there, but the Manor House remained his observational headquarters.\n\nDespite this apparent success, Foos was still tormented. He wrote, \u201cVoyeurs are cripples whom most people think are flawed and imperfect and whom God has not blessed.\u201d\n\nI had not heard from Gerald Foos for a long time when,", + " in July, 2012, I read on the front page of the Times that a twenty-four-year-old man, the son of a nurse, had fatally shot twelve people and wounded dozens more in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theatre. After scanning the article and seeing that Foos\u2019s name was not listed among the victims, I called him. Bizarrely, he told me that he had once been inside the gunman\u2019s apartment: Foos\u2019s son had been an earlier tenant. \u201cAfter I moved my son into another neighborhood,\u201d he said, \u201cthis guy apparently replaced him, although we don\u2019t ever recall running into this guy whose picture is now all over the news.\u201d\n\nA few weeks later,", + " Gerald Foos resumed writing letters to me, and he used his familiar bombastic style in response to the movie-theatre shooting: \u201cHaven\u2019t the people of Aurora treated their fellow men with kindness and consideration, so that the sword of Damocles was lowered on us?\u201d\n\nHe had sold his two motels in 1995, when arthritis in his knees made it too painful for him to climb the ladder and crawl around the attic. First, he\u2019d removed the vents and patched up the holes in the ceilings. With the proceeds, he and Anita bought a ranch in the Rockies, splitting their time between it and a house on a golf course in Aurora.", + " He missed his motels, which he called \u201cthat protected space, that sacred ground,\u201d although he took comfort in the belief that the business was in decline. When he began, in the sixties, motels thrived because of the \u201ctryst trade\u201d; guests could walk directly from their cars to their rooms without having to interact with anyone in a lobby or elevator. Couples today, he said, seem less concerned with that kind of secrecy and discretion.\n\nHe wrote to me of missing the power he\u2019d felt as the Voyeur. He wrote about having dyed his hair and later feeling ashamed as he studied his reflection in the bathroom mirror:", + " dyeing his hair was a form of deception that challenged his self-perception as a truth-teller.\n\nSince we last communicated, Foos had a new hobby. He had become preoccupied with government and corporate surveillance. \u201cAlmost everything we do is on record,\u201d he told me over the phone.\n\nHe talked about how the private lives of public figures are exposed in the media almost every day, and about how even the head of the C.I.A., General David Petraeus, couldn\u2019t keep his sex life out of the headlines. He insisted that the media is in \u201cthe Peeping Tom business, but the biggest Peeping Tom of all is the U.S.", + " Government,\u201d which keeps an eye on our daily lives through its use of security cameras and its ability to track activity on the Internet, credit cards, bank records, cell phones, G.P.S., and airline ticketing, among other things.\n\nHe asked me, \u201cPerhaps you may be thinking, Why is this of interest to Gerald Foos? Because it is possible that someday the F.B.I. will show up and say, \u2018Gerald Foos, we have evidence that you\u2019ve been watching people from your observation platform. What are you, some kind of pervert?\u2019 And then Gerald Foos will respond: \u2018And what about you,", + " Big Brother? For years you\u2019ve been watching me everywhere I go.\u2019 \u201d\n\nDuring the spring of 2013, thirty-three years after I had met him, Foos called me to say that he was ready to go public with his story. Eighteen years had passed since he had sold his motels, and he believed that the statute of limitations would now protect him from invasion-of-privacy lawsuits that might be filed by any former guests. He was seventy-eight years old, he reminded me, and he felt that if he did not share his findings with the public now, he might not be around long enough to do so. He said he was dissolving the confidentiality agreement that I\u2019d signed in 1980 and gave me permission to write about him and to use all the material he had shown me over the decades.", + " (Later this year, I will publish a book about Foos, a large part of which consists of entries from \u201cThe Voyeur\u2019s Journal.\u201d For the use of his manuscript, he received a fee from the book publisher.)\n\nI flew to Denver and met Foos and Anita for breakfast at an airport hotel. He carried a cane, and his thinning gray hair was offset by a gray mustache and goatee. Tightly buttoned over his massive chest was a tweed jacket and, under it, an orange sports shirt. Anita was as he had described her in his letters: eighteen years younger than Gerald, she was a petite,", + " quiet woman with frizzy red hair.\n\nHe wanted to show me his collection of sports memorabilia\u2014tens of thousands of sports cards that Anita had organized in alphabetical order. He explained that one of the reasons he was now willing to reveal himself as a voyeur was that he hoped the media notoriety might draw attention to his collection, which he was eager to sell. He believed it was worth millions.\n\nI was more interested in discussing the murder that Foos claimed to have witnessed in Room 10 of the Manor House Motel in 1977. I had let Foos know that, without naming him as a witness, I intended to contact the Aurora Police Department to find out if it had uncovered any new information about the homicide.", + " Foos did not object, saying that he regretted his negligence in the matter. In going public with his story and confessing his failings, he hoped to achieve some sort of \u201credemption.\u201d\n\nDuring our breakfast, I showed Foos a letter from Paul O\u2019Keefe, then a lieutenant, now a division chief, of the Aurora Police Department, who wrote, \u201cUnfortunately, we can find no record of such an event.\u201d He had checked several cold-case databases and found nothing. Two coroner\u2019s offices had no information, either. In subsequent phone calls, two former officers said that it would not be impossible for there to be no remaining police records in a \u201cJane Doe\u201d case such as the one I described:", + " the identity of the victim was unknown, after all, and the crime took place before police departments kept electronic records.\n\nIt is also possible that Foos made an error in his recordkeeping, or transcribed the date of the murder inaccurately, as he copied the original journal entry into a different format. Over the years, as I burrowed deeper into Foos\u2019s story, I found various inconsistencies\u2014mostly about dates\u2014that called his reliability into question.\n\n\u201cIt seems as if that young woman just fell through the cracks,\u201d Foos said. I thought he might be relieved, but he told me that he had talked to a lawyer. In publicly admitting that he had witnessed a murder and had not acted to prevent it,", + " he said, \u201cI could be an accessory to a crime. I might be convicted of second-degree-murder charges.\u201d\n\nStill, Foos went on, after years of hiding, he was ready to come clean. \u201cLife comes with risks, but we can\u2019t be concerned with that,\u201d he said. \u201cWe just tell the truth.\u201d\n\nAfter the meal, we drove to the Fooses\u2019 house. \u201cI hope I\u2019m not described as just some pervert or Peeping Tom,\u201d he said. \u201cI think of myself as a pioneering sex researcher.\u201d I asked him if he ever considered filming or recording his guests.\n\n\u201cNo,\u201d he said,", + " explaining that to be caught with such equipment would have been incriminating, and using it would have been impractical.\n\nHe maintained that most men are natural voyeurs. \u201cBut most women prefer being watched to watching others,\u201d he said, \u201cwhich may partly explain why men spend fortunes on porn and women on cosmetics.\u201d\n\nLater, I asked Foos if he had heard of Erin Andrews, the television sportscaster who was secretly filmed coming out of the shower in her hotel room by a stalker who had altered the peephole in her door. The man, who then posted nude footage of Andrews on the Internet, was convicted of a felony and served twenty months in prison.", + " Andrews sued him and the hotel for seventy-five million dollars in damages to compensate for the \u201chorror, shame, and humiliation\u201d she suffered. Last month, a jury awarded her fifty-five million dollars.\n\nFoos had been following the case on the news. His take on it did not surprise me; it echoed the twisted justifications for his own behavior that he\u2019d offered over the years. \u201cWhile I\u2019ve said that most men are voyeurs, there are some voyeurs\u2014like this creep in the Andrews case\u2014who are beneath contempt,\u201d he told me. \u201cHe is a product of the new technology, exposing his prey on the Internet,", + " and doing something that has nothing in common with what I did. I exposed no one. What this guy did was ruthless and vengeful. If I were a member of the jury, I\u2019d unhesitatingly vote to convict.\u201d He insisted that he had little in common with Andrews\u2019s predator.\n\nI asked him why, since he had spent half his life invading other people\u2019s privacy, he was so critical of the government\u2019s intelligence-gathering in the interest of national security. He reiterated that his spying was \u201charmless,\u201d because guests were unaware of it and its purpose was never to entrap or expose anyone. He told me that he identified with Edward Snowden,", + " the former National Security Agency contractor who illegally released government documents alleging that, for example, U.S. intelligence agencies were tapping the cell phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.\n\n\u201cSnowden, in my opinion, is a whistle-blower,\u201d Foos said, adding that instead of being prosecuted Snowden should be praised \u201cfor exposing things that are wrong in our society.\u201d\n\nHe considers himself a whistle-blower, too, even though, so far, he hadn\u2019t revealed anything to anyone except his wives and me. Asked which \u201cthings that are wrong\u201d he wished to expose, he said, \u201cThat basically you can\u2019t trust people. Most of them lie and cheat and are deceptive.", + " What they reveal about themselves in private they try to hide in public. What they try to show you in public is not what they really are.\u201d\n\nWhile he was on the subject of morality, I brought the conversation around to the murder again.\n\n\u201cIf I\u2019d known that this particular lady was dying, I\u2019d have called an ambulance immediately,\u201d he said. He had subsequently thought about how he might have saved the woman without incriminating himself. \u201cI would have said, \u2018I was walking by the window and heard a scream\u2019\u2014or something like that.\u201d\n\nFoos recounted the night of the murder once more, filling in some details that were not in the journal I had read decades earlier:", + " When the maid found the body in Room 10, \u201cI thought, Oh, no,\u201d Foos said. He had Donna check that she was really dead. Then he called the police. As the coroner was loading the body into a van, Foos said, \u201cI was sick, telling myself, \u2018You know, I could be responsible for this.\u2019 \u201d Still, even after acknowledging his remorse over the woman\u2019s murder, he would not connect his behavior in the attic with serious wrongdoing.\n\nI remained perplexed about Gerald Foos\u2019s motives. How could he assume that going public with his sinister story would achieve anything positive? It could just as easily provide evidence leading to his arrest,", + " lawsuits, and widespread public outrage. Why did he crave the notoriety? Unlike the nineteenth-century adventurer in \u201cThe Other Victorians,\u201d who produced a lengthy confession\u2014\u201cMy Secret Life\u201d\u2014but then withheld his name from it, Foos wanted to send his manuscript out into the world, and he was willing to acknowledge his true identity, even with all the risks that entailed.\n\nIt occurred to me that Foos had something in common with another American who wanted the world to read what he had written: Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. In 1995, after he had already killed three people and injured twenty-three others with homemade bombs,", + " he promised \u201cto desist from terrorism\u201d if the Times or the Washington Post would publish his manifesto condemning industrial society. Kaczynski\u2019s wish was granted, but he was later discovered and arrested. His brother had recognized him by his writing style; the Unabomber was done in by his manuscript.\n\nThe people who bought Gerald Foos\u2019s motels in 1995 presumably never knew why some of the guest rooms had six-by-fourteen-inch plasterboard patches in the ceilings. In 2014, the Manor House was sold to a real-estate partnership headed by a local developer named Brooke Banbury. The day after the transaction,", + " the former owners promptly left, abandoning their personal belongings and the contents of the motel. Among the items found in the Manor House was a submachine gun with three loaded magazines and extra bullets.\n\nBanbury\u2019s wife had hoped to donate the motel\u2019s contents to a local welfare agency, but she couldn\u2019t find one willing to accept it all. So her husband hired a wrecking crew to demolish everything and haul it away. Within two weeks, all that was left of the Manor House Motel was a plot of flat land enclosed by a chain-link fence.\n\nThat is what Gerald and Anita Foos saw, four months later, when I paid a visit to the site with them.", + " They hadn\u2019t known that the motel was being razed, and there were tears in Anita\u2019s eyes as she parked their car near the fence.\n\n\u201cSeems that everything is gone,\u201d Foos said, opening the car door and, with the aid of his cane, stepping out. The couple walked arm in arm through the fence\u2019s open gate.\n\n\u201cI hope we can find something to take home,\u201d Foos said, walking slowly, with his head down, searching for a memento or two that might be added to his collections\u2014perhaps a doorknob or a room number. But the demolition crew had pulverized everything. Finally, Foos bent and picked up two chunks of green-painted stone that had lined the walkway along the parking area (he had painted the stones himself)", + " and a strip of electrical wiring from the red neon sign that had spelled out the motel\u2019s name.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s too bad we didn\u2019t get here earlier,\u201d he said. \u201cWe might have gotten a piece of that sign.\u201d\n\nThey walked slowly around the lot for fifteen minutes, keeping their heads down. It was a hot day, and Foos was perspiring.\n\n\u201cLet\u2019s go home,\u201d Anita said.\n\n\u201cYes,\u201d he agreed, turning toward the gate. \u201cI\u2019ve seen enough.\u201d \u2666 ", + " Gay Talese writes about a Colorado voyeur who took notes as he spied on hundreds of people having sex at his Aurora motel.\n\nGerald Foos once owned the Manor House Motel on Colfax Avenue in Aurora, where he outfitted more than a dozen rooms with fake ceiling vents so that he could watch people having sex.\n\nHe started in the mid-1960s and continued for decades, never getting caught.\n\nIn 1980, he wrote to veteran journalist Gay Talese, who was soon to publish \"Thy Neighbor's Wife,\" the landmark exploration of America's sexual revolution that swiftly became a bestseller. Foos said he had information that might be useful for the book,", + " or possibly a future book.\n\nNearly four decades later, The New Yorker magazine this week is publishing \"The Voyeur's Motel\" by Gay Talese, an extensive investigation into voyeurism \u2014 specifically, how Foos bought the motel to achieve his \"uncontrollable desire to peer into other people's lives,\" including their most private sexual moments, which he said both of his wives supported.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nOn July 12, Talese's book \"The Voyeur's Motel\" will be published by Grove Atlantic.\n\n\"It's my life \u2014 my secret life,\" said Foos, who lives in metro Denver with his second wife.\n\nHe's not sure what to expect when the story gets out,", + " and because he's under contract, he says he can't comment.\n\n(Provided by Grove Press)\n\n\"I think the book will create a real situation, let's put it that way,\" Foos told The Denver Post on Monday. \"I don't know if I'm ready for anything, to be honest with you. I'm just a poor soul.\"\n\nLynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for the Denver District Attorney's Office, said the statute of limitations has passed for any crimes that might be connected to his voyeurism.\n\nWhen Talese visited Denver in 2013, however, he was looking into details of a murder that Foos said he witnessed in one of his motel rooms in 1977 but never reported to authorities.\n\nNothing has been built where the Manor House Motel once stood on Colfax Avenue in Aurora,", + " April 06, 2016. Years ago, before the motel was torn down, there are reports of the owner watching his guests having sex. (RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)\n\n\"He thinks he's the greatest voyeur in the world,\" Talese said. \"He doesn't want to be seen as a Peeping Tom but as a voyeur \u2014 not as a pervert but an observer of human nature.\"\n\nTalese spent much time with Foos, making many trips to Colorado including a journey to Ault, where Foos grew up the child of German-American farmers and, at age 9, began peeking into his aunt's window,", + " a woman in her 20s who often walked around nude.\n\n\"I looked beyond my home to learn what I could about people's private lives,\" he told Talese.\n\nBut in some ways, Foos remains a mystery.\n\n\"He lied to me many times,\" Talese said. \"The question is, did he make up the murder. But why would he? If he gets into any trouble with the law, it would be associated with the murder.\"\n\n\"The Voyeur's Journal\"\n\nTalese said he first met Foos in the early 1980s, after receiving his letter. He visited him at his motel, where Foos soon invited the journalist to his observation \"laboratory\"", + " to check out an attractive young couple who'd come to Colorado on a ski trip.\n\nFoos and Talese crept up into the attic to spy through the fake vents.\n\n\"I saw a naked couple spread out on the bed below,\" Talese writes in the New Yorker story.\n\nThey were having sex. To get a better look, Talese leaned closer \u2014 and his necktie slipped through the louvered screen that shielded the spyhole, dangling \"within yards of the woman's head.\"\n\nFoos, irritated, yanked him back.\n\nBut the next morning, he acted as if Talese hadn't nearly blown his cover and eagerly shared his trove of yellow legal pads,", + " 15 years of detailed notes on what he'd observed behind closed doors in that Colfax motel.\n\nFoos called it \"The Voyeur's Journal.\"\n\nReading those accounts, Talese discovered that Foos also monitored motel guest's bathroom habits from viewing posts he'd installed in several bathrooms.\n\nAnd one year he created an annual report \"trying to identify significant social trends,\" Talese writes. \"In 1973, he noted that of the 296 sexual acts he'd witnessed, 195 involved white heterosexuals, who favored the missionary position. Over all, he counted 184 male orgasms and 33 female orgasms.\"\n\nHe also categorized people according to their sex drive,", + " observing that 62 percent led \"moderately active sexual lives\" while \"12 percent of all observable couples at the motel are highly sexed\" and 22 percent exhibited a low sex drive.\n\nThree percent had no sex.\n\nOver time, a relationship of trust developed between the voyeur and the journalist, and Foos mailed Talese 300 pages of typewritten manuscript of the logs through 1978.\n\nTalese was astonished to see that Foos described a murder he said he'd witnessed one night.\n\n\"The male subject grabbed the female subject by the neck and strangled her until she fell unconscious to the floor,\" writes Talese,", + " quoting from Foos' journal.\n\nThe next morning, Foos said, a motel maid found the woman dead in the room.\n\nFoos said he never reported to police what he witnessed, and Talese signed a confidentiality agreement to not reveal Foos' name.\n\nOver the years, they lost touch, but Talese reconnected with him in 2012 after the Aurora shooting.\n\nFoos, who'd sold his motel in 1995, soon began writing to Talese again, and by 2013, he told Talese he was ready to go public with his story.\n\nSo Talese got on a plane to Denver and immediately began digging into what he could find on that alleged murder.\n\nAurora police said they could find no record of the murder,", + " and coroner's offices had no record of it.\n\nWhat does exist, however, are the detailed journals of Foos' decades as a voyeur in the Manor House Motel in the years after America's sexual revolution transformed the nation's culture, back when Foos viewed himself as a sex researcher and social observer.\n\n\"Some of it is crazy,\" said Talese, \"and some of it is insightful.\"\n\nHe's still pondering Foos' true motive in revealing his secrets.\n\nOne reason could be money.\n\nFoos showed Talese his collection of sports memorabilia \u2014 thousands of sports cards \u2014 that Foos believes is worth millions of dollars.", + " He hopes publicity will help drum up sales.\n\nBut Talese draws parallels to the Unabomber and Watergate's Deep Throat, men who did not want to take secrets to their grave.\n\n\"In a way, it's like the guilt of indecent exposure,\" Talese said. \"He's hoping to come clean 30 years later and find redemption.\"\n\nColleen O'Connor: 303-954-1083, coconnor@denverpost.com or @coconnordp\n" + ], + "length": 17419, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 61, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Christie's auction house let a \"lost\" Leonardo Da Vinci portrait fly out the door for a mere $21,000, according to some art experts. The portrait was from a 500-year-old book about the duke of Milan and likely features an illegitimate daughter, according to Oxford art historian Martin Kemp. \"We knew it came from a book, you have the stitch holes and can see the knife cut. Finding it is a miracle in a way. I was amazed,\" said Kemp, who has studied the master's works for some 40 years. He has \"no doubt\" La Bella Princessa is a Da Vinci. Christie's obtained the portrait in 1998, and believed it was created by a 19th-century \"Nazarene\" German artist, although this was disproved later by carbon dating, reports MSNBC. The work was sold to an art dealer in 1998 for $21,000 and resold later to a collector for $19,000. If the work is by the master, it could be worth some $150 million, according to ART News. A growing number art historians believe the work is a Da Vinci, though several top experts disagree. A famed \"art detective\" claimed to have found Da Vinci's fingerprint on the work, but even such forensic proof can be faked, as shown recently in a scathing New Yorker article. The mystery endures.\n", + "docs": [ + "Christie's auction house may have sold a priceless piece of art by Leonardo da Vinci for a little more than $21,000, according to researchers who claim to have identified the origins of the hotly debated painting.\n\nThe painting appears to have come from a 500-year-old book containing the family history of the Duke of Milan. Art historian Martin Kemp, of the University of Oxford, believes the mystery painting, which appeared in 1998, is a portrait of the duke's daughter, created by da Vinci for her wedding book. [ See images of the portrait and book ]\n\n\"We knew it came from a book, you have the stitch holes and can see the knife cut.", + " Finding it is a miracle in a way. I was amazed,\" Kemp told LiveScience. \"When doing historical research on 500-year-old objects \u2026 you hardly get the circle completed in this way.\"\n\nIn 2010, Kemp first suggested that da Vinci painted the portrait, and since then, art historians have debated over both its origin and the painter. In fact, several art historians contacted by LiveScience said they wouldn't comment on the piece or didn't return emails. An earlier examination of the artwork by a gallery in Vienna led the director there to say it was not a da Vinci, and they are unswayed by the new evidence.\n\nFrom storage to source\n\nThe portrait was sent to Christie's in 1998,", + " with art historians there suggesting the piece came from 19th-century German artists called the Nazarenes, who mimicked the Renaissance style. (This was disproved after carbon dating estimated the portrait's creation between 1440 and 1650.) It was titled \"Head of a Young Girl in Profile to the Left in Renaissance Dress.\"\n\nKemp wasn't convinced and started looking into the painting's history. He first saw the portrait as an attachment to an email in 2008, and immediately recognized da Vinci's left-handed style. He went to see it in Zurich and his co-author, Pascal Cotte, engineer and founder of art analysis start-up Lumiere Technology,", + " examined it in Paris.\n\nKemp and Cotte then published \"La Bella Principessa: The Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci,\" (Hodder Hb, 2010) claiming the work might be a da Vinci, a claim that many respected historians have disagreed with, some vehemently. [ History's Most Overlooked Mysteries ]\n\nThe portrait is made on vellum, a specially prepared skin normally used for writing and printing. No work by da Vinci has been found on vellum before, though it was frequently used in books. Researchers believe the portrait came from a book, because three stitch holes are visible on the portrait's left margin.", + " It is also made of chalks and ink, not paint.\n\nA wedding gift\n\n\"The chance of identifying the vellum book it came from was pretty small, a needle in the haystack, one would say,\" Kemp told LiveScience. That was, until American art historian D. R. Edward Wright of the University of South Florida, suggested that Kemp look at a set of books titled the \"Sforziad.\"\n\nThere were at most four copies made, Kemp said. Aside from the copy in the National Library in Warsaw, there is a copy in London and one in Paris. Each book was custom-made and had different art and cover pages;", + " evidence that this portrait had been \"ripped\" out was only found in the Warsaw book. The image was probably removed during the 18th century when the book was rebound, Kemp said.\n\nDa Vinci was an artist in the duke's residence for several years between 1481 and 1499. He was the only left-handed artist in the court at that time, the researchers said.\n\nMatching page to book\n\nUpon examination, Kemp saw that the stitch holes from the page match up with the stitching on the book, but they aren't the only evidence Kemp puts forward. Because vellum is made from processed skins, each sheet has different qualities.", + " The thickness and composition of this sheet matches up perfectly with the vellum from the book, Kemp said. There are also cut marks on the edge of the book.\n\n\"It was apparent from the evidence we got about the vellum and the missing sheets, within reasonable margins of doubt, that's where it comes from,\" Kemp said. \"At 500 years old, you never have as much confirmation as you like, but this is as good as it gets.\"\n\nKemp and Cotte have published a short version of their examination of the book and the portrait's cut marks and binding, along with their analysis of the vellum online.", + " The painting has been renamed \"La Bella Principessa,\" though its true origins are still debated.\n\nStill up for debate?\n\nThe Albertina art gallery in Vienna decided not to exhibit the drawing, because when examined by their institution, \"no one is convinced that it is a Leonardo,\" art gallery director Klaus Albrecht Schr\u00f6der told ArtNEWS.\n\nLiveScience asked spokesperson Verena Dahlitz what the gallery thought of the new data; she replied in an email, \"We still believe that it is not an authentic drawing by Leonardo.\" When asked who could have painted it, if it had come from the Sforziad, she said:", + " \"We think that the drawing is from the 19th century.\"\n\nArt blogger Hasan Niyazi, on his blog The Three Pipe Problem, updated his article on the La Bella Principessa controversy in reaction to Kemp's find, writing that, in his opinion, \"Critics of the piece must now re-orient their approach \u2014 an argument that it is by a Leonardo contemporary may still arise from some. Although any allegation that it is a later piece is less likely to stand up against the body of evidence amassing for this work.\"\n\nMany of the historians contacted by LiveScience refused to comment on the piece. William Wallace, an art historian at Washington University in St.", + " Louis wouldn't comment on the piece, but said: \"I think because few, like me, wish to pronounce on an unlikely attribution, especially without having seen the original,\" Wallace told LiveScience in an email. \"Egos are easily bruised in a small field, and Kemp, after all, is a well-respected scholar.\"\n\nKemp will be publishing his findings in an updated edition of his book, \"Leonardo\" (Oxford University Press, 2011). A grant from National Geographic funded his search for the book, and the network will be producing a documentary on the search for the portrait's true origins to air in early 2012.\n\nYou can follow LiveScience staff writer Jennifer Welsh on Twitter @ microbelover.", + " Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook. ", + " Every few weeks, photographs of old paintings arrive at Martin Kemp\u2019s eighteenth-century house, outside Oxford, England. Many of the art works are so decayed that their once luminous colors have become washed out, their shiny coats of varnish darkened by grime and riddled with spidery cracks. Kemp scrutinizes each image with a magnifying glass, attempting to determine whether the owners have discovered what they claim to have found: a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci.\n\nKemp, a leading scholar of Leonardo, also authenticates works of art\u2014a rare, mysterious, and often bitterly contested skill. His opinions carry the weight of history;", + " they can help a painting become part of the world\u2019s cultural heritage and be exhibited in museums for centuries, or cause it to be tossed into the trash. His judgment can also transform a previously worthless object into something worth tens of millions of dollars. (His imprimatur is so valuable that he must guard against con men forging not only a work of art but also his signature.) To maintain independence, Kemp refuses to accept payment for his services. \u201cAs soon as you get entangled with any financial interest or advantage, there is a taint, like a tobacco company paying an expert to say cigarettes are not dangerous,\u201d he says.\n\nKemp,", + " who is in his sixties, is an emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University, and has spent more than four decades immersed in what he calls \u201cthe Leonardo business,\u201d publishing articles on nearly every aspect of the artist\u2019s life. (He even helped a daredevil design a working parachute, from linen and wooden poles, based on a Leonardo drawing.) Like many connoisseurs, Kemp has a formidable visual memory, and can summon into consciousness any of Leonardo\u2019s known works. When vetting a painting, he proceeds methodically, analyzing brushstrokes, composition, iconography, and pigments\u2014those elements which may reveal an artist\u2019s hidden identity.", + " But he also relies on a more primal force. \u201cThe initial thing is just that immediate reaction, as when we\u2019re recognizing the face of a friend in a crowd,\u201d he explains. \u201cYou can go on later and say, \u2018I recognize her face because the eyebrows are like this, and that is the right color of her hair,\u2019 but, in effect, we don\u2019t do that. It\u2019s the totality of the thing. It feels instantaneous.\u201d\n\nOther authenticators have also struggled to explain their evaluative process, their \u201ceye.\u201d Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who died in December, liked to speak of the \u201cineffable sense of connoisseurship.\u201d The art historian Bernard Berenson described his talent as a \u201csixth sense.\u201d \u201cIt is very largely a question of accumulated experience upon which your spirit sets unconsciously,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cWhen I see a picture, in most cases, I recognize it at once as being or not being by the master it is ascribed to; the rest is merely a question of how to fish out the evidence that will make the conviction as plain to others as it is to me.\u201d Berenson recalled that once, upon seeing a fake, he had felt an immediate discomfort in his stomach.\n\nIn March, 2008, Kemp checked his e-mail and saw another submission\u2014a digital image of a drawing on vellum, or fine parchment. Ever since Dan Brown published \u201cThe Da Vinci Code,\u201d five years earlier, Kemp had been flooded with works,", + " many of them purportedly embedded with cryptic symbols, and, after a lifetime of dismissing forgeries and copies and junk, he was instinctively wary. About thirteen inches long and nine inches wide, the picture showed the profile of a girl, on the cusp of womanhood, with pale skin and glowing brown hair pulled back in a long ponytail. Her left eye, the only one visible in the profile, had a lifelike translucency. Her upper lip pressed secretively against her lower one, and a red bodice peeked out from underneath a green dress. The artist had meticulously rendered the girl\u2019s features with pen and colored chalks (\u201cHer face is subtle to an inexpressible degree,\u201d Kemp later wrote), and Kemp felt a shiver of recognition.", + " He enlarged the image on his computer screen until it became a mosaic of pixels. He looked closely at the shading\u2014it seemed to have been drawn with a left hand, just as Leonardo had done.\n\nKemp tried to contain his excitement. A major work by Leonardo had not been discovered for more than a century. This drawing had no clear provenance\u2014a trail of invoices, catalogue listings, or other records that can allow a work to be traced back to an artist. Rather, the drawing seemed to have come, as Kemp later put it, \u201cfrom nowhere.\u201d In 1998, Kate Ganz, a prominent dealer, had paid a little less than twenty-two thousand dollars for the drawing,", + " at an auction at Christie\u2019s. (The auction house did not disclose the previous owner\u2019s identity, saying only that the picture had been the \u201cproperty of a lady.\u201d) At the time, the drawing was thought to have been executed in the nineteenth century, by a member of a German school of artists known for imitating Italian Renaissance painters. If the drawing was by Leonardo, it had slipped past some of the world\u2019s most respected connoisseurs and collectors\u2014people whose eyes are honed to look for fortune in addition to beauty. As Hugh Chapman, an assistant keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum,", + " later told the Times, \u201cThe market is a fairly efficient place. This would be an amazing miss.\u201d\n\nIn January, 2007, Ganz sold the drawing at her gallery in Manhattan for roughly what she had paid for it. As is common in the art world, the identity of the new owner was a secret. Officially, the purchasing agent was listed as Downey Holdings, a Panamanian business with an address in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, which is popular as a tax haven. The purchase was made under the guidance of Peter Silverman, a Canadian collector who has a reputation in the business (though he dislikes the term)", + " as a \u201cpicker\u201d\u2014someone who scours auction houses for undervalued works. Silverman told me that he had bought the drawing for a collector in Switzerland who is one of \u201cthe richest men in Europe.\u201d Many people in the art world have speculated that Silverman himself is the owner. He denied this, but added, \u201cEven if it were true, I wouldn\u2019t say.\u201d\n\nUpon seeing the drawing, Silverman thought that it had to be from the Renaissance, and before long, he said, he began to consider \u201cthe \u2018L\u2019-word\u201d\u2014 Leonardo. He submitted the drawing to tests that have become a standard part of the authentication process.", + " Many of the drawing\u2019s pigments were analyzed, and it was determined that none of them had been invented after Leonardo\u2019s time period. A sample of the parchment was sent to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, for radiocarbon dating. The parchment was dated between 1440 and 1650, making it conceivable that the drawing was by Leonardo, who was born in 1452 and died in 1519. After receiving these results, Silverman contacted Kemp and sent him the image.\n\nAs Kemp well understood, countless artists could have made the drawing in that two-hundred-and-ten-year span. And many modern forgers come out of the field of restoration,", + " where they learn not only how to copy an artist\u2019s style but also how to exploit historically appropriate materials: organic pigments, antique wooden frames infested with beetles, canvases blackened by centuries of smoke. In the nineteen-thirties, the notorious Dutch forger Han van Meegeren, who produced at least nine fake Vermeers, used a canvas from the seventeenth century that still had its original stretcher. (Like many forgers, Van Meegeren insisted that he was \u201cdriven by the psychological effect of disappointment in not being acknowledged by my fellow artists and critics.\u201d)\n\nFurther pitting the powers of perception against the powers of deception are genuinely old forgeries,", + " which would not be exposed by radiocarbon dating and pigment analysis. In Thomas Hoving\u2019s 1996 book, \u201cFalse Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes,\u201d he warned, \u201cIt\u2019s the Renaissance works of art faked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that are dangerous. These are nearly impossible to detect.\u201d Making matters even trickier, many Renaissance artists operated studios where apprentices contributed to their works. Scholars now generally believe that the \u201cMadonna Litta,\u201d which hangs in The Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, and had long been attributed to Leonardo, was painted, at least in part,", + " by an assistant named Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio. (The landscape shown through a windowpane is considered too prosaic to have been executed by Leonardo.)\n\nMartin Kemp made a habit of cataloguing the mistakes of Leonardo\u2019s imitators and forgers: an inadvertent right-handed brushstroke; a deadened effect from painting robotically; a failure to layer the paint so that light played subtly off it. The drawing of the girl betrayed none of these failings, and Kemp decided to examine the picture himself. After making arrangements with Silverman, he went to Switzerland. (It\u2019s a joke of the trade that all valuable art works end up in Switzerland,", + " Kemp said, but \u201cit\u2019s actually true.\u201d) The drawing was in a warehouse in Zurich, protected by armed guards and invisible alarm sensors, which was known as the Bunker.\n\nKemp was escorted into a large, pristine room, where the drawing of the girl was carefully removed from a box and placed, face up, on a table. He circled around it for hours, lighting the work from different angles and staring at it so closely that his nose nearly touched the parchment. Not only had the drawing apparently been done with left-handed strokes; the artist, like Leonardo, had relied on the palm of his hand as a way of softening the shading.", + " (An imprint was visible.) The figure\u2019s proportions adhered to geometrical precepts detailed in Leonardo\u2019s notebooks; for example, he had written, \u201cThe space from the chin to the base of the nose... is the third part of the face and equal to the length of the nose and to the forehead.\u201d And didn\u2019t the girl\u2019s radiant iris resemble the eyes in Leonardo\u2019s portrait \u201cLady with an Ermine\u201d? Still, Kemp remained cautious. The reputations of scholars have been ruined after their eye was shown to be fallible. Dr. Abraham Bredius, who in the thirties was considered the greatest authority on the Dutch Old Masters,", + " is now remembered best for having branded a van Meegeren forgery a Vermeer masterpiece.\n\nKemp returned to England, where for the next year he continued to interrogate the drawing. The hair style and the costume of the girl, he concluded, were similar to those worn in the Milanese court of the fourteen-nineties. The parchment had incisions suggesting that it had been removed from a bound codex; during the Renaissance, volumes of verse, compiled on sheets of vellum, were often dedicated to a princess upon her marriage or death. But, if this was the drawing\u2019s origin, who could the princess in the drawing be?", + " Sifting through members of the court, Kemp settled on the most likely suspect: Bianca Sforza, the Duke of Milan\u2019s illegitimate daughter. In 1496, at the age of thirteen, she was married to Galeazzo Sanseverino, and died of an abdominal illness only four months later. Sanseverino, as Kemp knew, was a patron of Leonardo. Each new piece of evidence appeared to cohere. Kemp named the portrait \u201cLa Bella Principessa\u201d\u2014\u201cThe Beautiful Princess\u201d\u2014and, as he looked at the drawing, he could no longer suppress the sensation that had seized him when he first saw the portrait.", + " In the fall of 2009, Kemp announced to colleagues and reporters that it was \u201cthe real thing\u201d: a Leonardo masterpiece.\n\nOther scholars and connoisseurs examined the drawing and agreed with Kemp. They included Nicholas Turner, the former curator of drawings at the Getty Museum, and Alessandro Vezzosi, the director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, outside Florence, who said that he didn\u2019t have \u201cany doubt\u201d that it was authentic. At first, there was little dissent. Generally, connoisseurs are reluctant to repudiate a piece publicly, for fear of being sued by the owners for \u201cproduct disparagement,\u201d or even for defamation.", + " The threat of litigation has often made the authentication industry a clandestine realm, with connoisseurs who refuse to communicate in writing and with confidential agreements that bind authenticators to silence.\n\nNevertheless, some critics spoke up. Among them was Thomas Hoving, who discussed the drawing with me a few weeks before he died, at the age of seventy-eight. A flamboyant and imperious figure, who once wrote that he needed \u201cgreat works of art for the uplift of my soul,\u201d Hoving became an emblem of the modern connoisseur. He considered himself that \u201crare breed of cat\u201d who could instantly detect a fake. And he told me he was sure that \u201cLa Bella Principessa\u201d was too \u201csweet\u201d to be a Leonardo.", + " \u201cHis subjects are tough as nails,\u201d he said.\n\nCarmen Bambach, the curator of drawings at the Met, was also unpersuaded. The greatest scholar of an artist is not necessarily considered the greatest connoisseur, and with a diverse oeuvre there can be different authorities for each medium. When it comes to Leonardo\u2019s drawings, Bambach\u2019s eye is perhaps the most respected. \u201cNot everyone\u2019s opinion carries the same weight,\u201d she told me. \u201cIt\u2019s like in medicine, where a heart specialist looks at the heart and another specialist looks at the kidneys.\u201d She added, \u201cWith Leonardo, you need the niche specialist.\u201d Bambach pointed out that there is no other example of Leonardo having drawn on vellum.", + " (Kemp concurred, but noted finding evidence that Leonardo had questioned Jean Perr\u00e9al, a painter in the French court, about the technique.) Moreover, according to Bambach, there was a more profound problem: after studying an image of the drawing\u2014the same costume, the same features, the same strokes that Kemp examined\u2014she had her own strong intuition. \u201cIt does not look like a Leonardo,\u201d she said.\n\nWhen such a schism emerges among the most respected connoisseurs, a painting is often cast into purgatory. But in January, 2009, Kemp turned to a Canadian forensic art expert named Peter Paul Biro,", + " who, during the past several years, has pioneered a radical new approach to authenticating pictures. He does not merely try to detect the artist\u2019s invisible hand; he scours a painting for the artist\u2019s fingerprints, impressed in the paint or on the canvas. Treating each painting as a crime scene, in which an artist has left behind traces of evidence, Biro has tried to render objective what has historically been subjective. In the process, he has shaken the priesthood of connoisseurship, raising questions about the nature of art, about the commodification of aesthetic beauty, and about the very legitimacy of the art world. Biro\u2019s research seems to confirm what many people have long suspected:", + " that the system of authenticating art works can be arbitrary and, at times, even a fraud.\n\n\u201cCome in, come in,\u201d Biro said, opening the door to his elegant three-story brick house, in Montreal. Biro, who is in his mid-fifties, has a fleshy pink face and a gourmand\u2019s stomach, and he wore black slacks, a black turtleneck, and black shoes\u2014his habitual raven-like outfit. A pair of glasses dangled from a string around his neck, and he had thick sideburns and whitening black hair that stood on end, as if he had been working late.", + " (\u201cFor me, this is not a nine-to-five job,\u201d he later said. \u201cI wake up in the middle of the night because something occurred to me. It\u2019s basically every waking hour.\u201d) In his arms, he cradled a miniature schnauzer. \u201cThis is Coco,\u201d he said, petting the dog to keep it from barking.\n\nHe led me past a room with a piano and shelves crowded with art books, and climbed a long wooden staircase that opened into a living room and dining area. Sunlight poured through tall windows and illuminated, on almost every wall, oil paintings of landscapes rendered with jabs of bold color.", + " The house had once been \u201ca wreck,\u201d Biro said, but he and his wife, Joanne, an accomplished mezzo-soprano, had spent the past two decades renovating it\u2014tearing up floorboards, knocking down interior walls, and installing ceramic tiles. With a work of art, Biro liked to say, you want to preserve everything; with a house, you feel compelled to transform it. \u201cSome people call it renovations,\u201d he told me, at one point. \u201cOthers call it a disease.\u201d\n\nBiro speaks English with an accent that seems to combine traces of French and Hungarian\u2014he was born in Budapest\u2014which contributes to an air of unplaceable refinement.", + " One person who knows Biro told me that he had a mystique of \u201croyalty.\u201d Though it was still early in the day, Biro reached into a long wooden rack filled with wine bottles and removed one. After examining the label, he poured himself some and offered me a glass. \u201cEvery drop is precious,\u201d he said, before finishing his glass and refilling it.\n\nEventually, with Coco and another dog, a Jack Russell terrier, trailing us, he took me outside to a small courtyard that led to his laboratory, which was in a separate building. The courtyard had a fountain and was filled with plants that camouflaged what was,", + " essentially, a vault. A pair of steel doors were bolted shut and there were two alarm systems, including one with motion sensors.\n\nHe unlocked the door to his workshop, revealing a large rectangular table with a movable microscope and a high-powered lamp. Stacks of paintings were propped against a wall. Biro was frequently presented with possible Pollocks and Raphaels and Picassos. When I visited him on another occasion, he had placed under the microscope a faded picture of Venice that was potentially by J. M. W. Turner. \u201cQuite worn, quite damaged, but it has all the hallmarks of what a Turner should be,\u201d Biro said.", + " In the lower right corner, pressed into the paint, he had found a fingerprint. \u201cYou can actually see it quite clearly,\u201d he said. I looked in the microscope and, sure enough, I could make out a smudged fingerprint: loops and whorls, a painting unto itself.\n\nBiro said that he was using a scalpel to scrape away a previous restorer\u2019s excessive overpainting, in an attempt to discern more of the fingerprint\u2019s characteristics. A lot of money lies in obtaining this kind of information, he explained, which is why he had to suspect everything, and everyone, of deception. (One of Biro\u2019s friends called him a \u201chuman lie detector.\u201d)\n\nTo my surprise,", + " Biro showed me another laboratory, in a locked basement. Here, he said, he kept his most revolutionary device: a multispectral-imaging camera, of his own design, which was mounted on a robotic arm and scanned a canvas from above. The device could take photographs of a painting at different wavelengths of light, from infrared to ultraviolet, allowing him to distinguish, without damaging the work, the kind of pigments an artist had used. (Previously, tiny samples of paint had to be extracted and submitted to chemical analysis.) The multispectral camera could also reveal whether an older painting was hidden beneath the surface, or whether a picture had been restored.", + " And if a fingerprint was present the camera could pick up extraordinary levels of detail. Biro once boasted that his invention surpassed \u201cany camera today\u201d and was \u201cthe only one of its kind in the world.\u201d\n\nAs we spoke, I noticed that hanging on the walls were more landscape paintings by the artist whose works were displayed throughout Biro\u2019s house. They gave the laboratory the feel of a shrine. Before Biro told me about his research into \u201cLa Bella Principessa,\u201d and what he described as startling findings, he shared with me the story of how he became the world\u2019s first authenticator of art works through fingerprinting\u2014a story that began,", + " curiously enough, with the very paintings I was staring at.\n\n\u201cThey were done by my father,\u201d Biro said of the paintings. \u201cI\u2019m surrounded by them.\u201d\n\nHis father, Geza, who died in 2008, at the age of eighty-nine, was a serious painter. According to Biro, he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, and was admired for his sweeping landscapes and allegorical street scenes. During the Second World War, he was drafted by the Hungarian Army, and was eventually captured by the Russians, who placed him in a prison camp. One day, while being transported in the back of a crowded Soviet truck,", + " he tumbled off the side, and his left arm\u2014like Leonardo, the one he painted with\u2014got caught under the wheel. The bones shattered like icicles. After the war, he was released, and he returned to Budapest, where, despite a series of operations, he remained handicapped. \u201cHe had to learn to paint with his right hand,\u201d Peter Paul\u2019s older brother, Laszlo, told me. \u201cIt really battered his self-confidence.\u201d Geza\u2019s work grew progressively darker. \u201cHe was very pessimistic,\u201d Laszlo says.\n\nAfter Geza got married and had two sons, he took a job as an art restorer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest.", + " For all their seeming kinship, a restorer is the antithesis of a painter: he is a conserver, not a creator. Like a mimic, he assumes another person\u2019s style, at the expense of his own identity. He must resist any urge to improve, to experiment, to show off; otherwise, he becomes a forger. Yet, unlike a great actor, he receives no glory for his feats of mimicry. If he has succeeded, he has burnished another artist\u2019s reputation, and vanished without the world ever knowing who he is, or what he has accomplished. The art historian Max J. Friedl\u00e4nder called the business of the restorer \u201cthe most thankless one imaginable.\u201d\n\nWhile Geza became a skilled restorer,", + " specializing in Baroque and Renaissance frescoes, he continued to pursue his own art. Some of his paintings were exhibited in Europe, Peter Paul said, and one hung at the Museum of Fine Arts. Yet Geza refused to conform to the Communists\u2019 ideological vision of art, and he found himself increasingly shunned. \u201cThe last straw for him was when he submitted his work for a salon,\u201d Peter Paul recalls. \u201cThe painting was rejected on the basis that it did not reflect Socialist optimism.\u201d In 1967, still struggling to manipulate his left arm, he received permission from the state to undergo surgery at a hospital in Vienna. After the operation,", + " he immigrated to Montreal, and a year later his family joined him.\n\nFinally, he was free to be an immortal striver. Geza went to Newfoundland and the Northwest Territories, painting the gorgeous frozen landscapes. In Montreal, he set up a small gallery to show his work. He garnered some critical support and his work occasionally sold at auction, but money was constantly short, and he found himself, for a few dollars, sketching people who wandered in off the street. In the seventies, Geza converted much of the gallery into the Center for Art Restoration, and devoted most of his days to relining other artists\u2019 canvases on vacuum hot tables,", + " retouching chipped paint, and removing smudges and dirt with chemical solvents that stung the eyes. Peter Paul and Laszlo, who were then teen-agers, served as his apprentices. Laszlo, who became a skilled painter, said of his father, \u201cHe was very demanding. He was trained to adhere to a strict ethical standard, and that was passed on to us.\u201d\n\nPeter Paul dropped out of college to work full-time with his father, immersing himself in the technical aspects of restoration. Then, in 1985, an event occurred, he says, that led to his scientific breakthrough.", + " A man walked into their workshop with an unframed picture that was so blackened with dirt that it was hard to make out much more than a faint rural landscape. When Peter Paul told him that it would cost at least two thousand dollars to restore it, the owner went pale, and offered to sell it for a few hundred. \u201cWe bought it with the idea that we would clean half of it, and leave the other half dirty and just hang it\u201d in the shop, Peter Paul recalls. It would be the perfect demonstration of their restoration prowess\u2014\u201ca kind of before and after.\u201d\n\nEventually, the Biros started to clean a small portion of it.", + " They had to purge not only the grime but also thick overpaint from a previous restoration, which resembled clotted blood. \u201cAs we got into it more and more, and the cleaned area became larger and larger, we realized there was a rainbow on the painting,\u201d Laszlo says. Radiant colors emerged: greens and yellows and blues. The picture showed sunlight filtering through a clearing sky, the rays spreading across a river valley with pale grass and delicate trees and a ruined stone church. The picture \u201creeked of a master\u2019s hand,\u201d Peter Paul says. The more he and his brother cleaned it, the more they became convinced that they were looking at a work by none other than J.", + " M. W. Turner.\n\nIf so, it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and possibly millions. The men spent months researching the painting, trying to make the case that it was consistent with Turner\u2019s work. After poring over topographical maps, they visited a valley in Millom, England, which they came to believe was the same setting as in the picture. Incredibly, as he and his brother stood there, Peter Paul recalls, the mist cleared and \u201cwe actually saw a rainbow.\u201d\n\nIn 1987, they took the painting to the Tate Gallery, in London, to show it to the world\u2019s leading Turner experts and connoisseurs.", + " The verdict was unanimous\u2014the painting was a tattered imitation. As Laszlo puts it, he and his brother were \u201cvery politely shown the door.\u201d They had been dismissed by what they perceived as an arrogant art establishment\u2014\u201can ivory tower,\u201d as Laszlo called it. There seemed to be no due process. \u201cThey just throw opinions around,\u201d Peter Paul said of some connoisseurs.\n\nBefore the Biros left the Tate, they say, they walked through a gallery that had several Turner paintings on display. Peter Paul paused in front of Turner\u2019s \u201cChichester Canal,\u201d peering at the pale-blue sky reflecting off the waterway,", + " which made it seem as if the earth had been turned upside down. In the foliage of several trees, he says, he noticed tiny swirls in the paint. He looked more closely. They were from a partial fingerprint. He felt a jolt: he had noticed partial fingerprints embedded in the potential Turner painting as well. In both pictures, he says, the ridges were deep enough in the original dried paint that they could not have been left by the hands of an owner or a restorer; rather, they were a by-product of Turner\u2019s technique of modelling paint with his fingertips. Indeed, Biro says, he subsequently found fingerprints in hundreds of Turner\u2019s works,", + " and wondered: Why not compare the fingerprint in an undisputed Turner painting like \u201cChichester Canal\u201d with the one in his own painting, and see if they matched?\n\nThe desire to transform the authentication process through science\u2014to supplant a subjective eye with objective tools\u2014was not new. During the late nineteenth century, the Italian art critic Giovanni Morelli, dismissing many traditional connoisseurs as \u201ccharlatans,\u201d proposed a new \u201cscientific\u201d method based on \u201cindisputable and practical facts.\u201d Rather than search a painting for its creator\u2019s intangible essence, he argued, connoisseurs should focus on minor details such as fingernails,", + " toes, and earlobes, which an artist tended to render almost unconsciously. \u201cJust as most men, both speakers and writers, make use of habitual modes of expression, favorite words or sayings, that they employ involuntarily, even inappropriately, so too every painter has his own peculiarities that escape him without his being aware,\u201d Morelli wrote. He believed that not only did an Old Master expose his identity with these \u201cmaterial trifles\u201d; forgers and imitators were also less likely to pay sufficient attention to them, and thus betray themselves. Morelli became known as the Sherlock Holmes of the art world.\n\nTo many connoisseurs,", + " however, the nature of art was antithetical to cold science. Worse, Morelli made his own share of false attributions, prompting one art historian to dismiss him as a \u201cquack doctor.\u201d\n\nIn the early twentieth century, as J. P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and other wealthy Americans bid up prices of Old Masters, the search for a foolproof system of connoisseurship intensified. At the same time, the flood of money into the art market led to widespread corruption, with dealers often paying off connoisseurs to validate paintings. In 1928, the art dealer Ren\u00e9 Gimpel complained,", + " \u201cThe American collector is prey to the greatest swindle the world has ever seen: the certified swindle.\u201d\n\nThe public has long been suspicious of connoisseurship. As John Brewer recounts in his recent book \u201cThe American Leonardo,\u201d about a Kansas City couple\u2019s battle, in the nineteen-twenties, to authenticate a potential Leonardo, this distrust had to do with more than the system\u2019s reliability; it also had to do with doubts about the authenticity of the art world itself, with its cult of prized artists, its exorbitant trafficking in aesthetic pleasure, and an \u00e9lite that seemed even more rarefied than most. In 1920,", + " the Kansas couple, Harry and Andr\u00e9e Hahn, sued the powerful art dealer Joseph Duveen for half a million dollars after he told a reporter that a portrait they owned could not possibly be a Leonardo. The Hahns argued that connoisseurs offered only \u201cair-spun abstractions and nebulous mumbo-jumbos,\u201d and that \u201csmart and tricky art dealers\u201d ran a \u201cracket.\u201d Even the judge in the case warned jurors to be wary of experts who relied on means \u201ctoo introspective and subjective.\u201d (Though none of the leading connoisseurs considered the painting a Leonardo, and later technical evaluations confirmed their judgment,", + " the trial ended in a hung jury, and Duveen paid the Hahns sixty thousand dollars to settle the case.)\n\nThe desire to \u201cscientificize\u201d connoisseurship was therefore as much about the desire to democratize it, to wrest it out of the hands of art experts. Before the Hahn trial, rumors surfaced that there was a thumbprint in the paint. One newspaper asked, \u201cWILL THUMBPRINT MADE 400 YEARS AGO PROVE PAINTING IS LEONARDO DA VINCI\u2019S ORIGINAL?\u201d But identifying the author of a painting through fingerprints still seemed far beyond the reach of science, and the process of authentication remained largely unchanged until Biro came up with his radical idea.\n\nAfter returning from London,", + " Biro studied books on fingerprinting and conferred with a retired fingerprint examiner. He learned the difference between a latent print\u2014which is transferred with sweat and often needs to be dusted or processed with chemical agents in order to be detected\u2014and a visible print, which is either impressed in a substance or left by touching a surface with something on one\u2019s fingertips, such as ink. He learned fingerprint patterns, including loops, whorls, and tented arches. And he learned how to tell whether two fingerprints had enough overlapping characteristics to be deemed a match. \u201cHe basically trained himself,\u201d Laszlo recalls. \u201cHe read and studied everything.\u201d\n\nBiro asked the conservation department at the Tate for images of \u201cChichester Canal\u201d that were sufficiently high in resolution to show the fingerprint.", + " For days, Biro says, he compared enhanced images of the fingerprint with the one on the rainbow painting; he felt certain that they came from the same person.\n\nYet the art establishment refused to recognize the painting based on his approach. (As Laszlo puts it, the art world is \u201cvery jealous and sinister.\u201d) In 1994, after years of frustration, the Biros took the painting to a Turner scholar, David Hill, at the University of Leeds. He thought that the composition and coloring strongly pointed to the hand of Turner, and he enlisted John Manners, a fingerprint examiner with the West Yorkshire Police, to verify Biro\u2019s conclusions.", + " \u201cNot my cup of tea, really,\u201d Manners said of the painting at the time. \u201cOf course, some Turner canvases are magnificent. Not this one, in my opinion.\u201d Still, he said, the fingerprints definitely matched: \u201cIt is a Turner.\u201d Hill called the fingerprints the \u201cclinching piece of evidence.\u201d\n\nThe story of the fingerprints circulated around the world\u2014\u201cBURIED TREASURE VERIFIED BY SCIENCE,\u201d the Toronto Globe and Mail declared\u2014and many Turner scholars relented on the question of attribution. \u201cIt was the pressure of the media,\u201d Biro said. \u201cThey were beginning to look foolish.\u201d In 1995,", + " the painting, called \u201cLandscape with a Rainbow,\u201d was sold as a Turner at the Phillips auction house in London. An undisclosed bidder bought it for more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars\u2014a sum that would have been even higher had the painting been in better condition. It was the first art work officially authenticated based on fingerprint identification. Biro asserted that he had uncovered the painting\u2019s \u201cforensic provenance,\u201d telling a reporter, \u201cThe science of fingerprint identification is a true science. There are no gray areas.\u201d Having developed what he advertised as a \u201crigorous methodology\u201d that followed \u201caccepted police standards,\u201d he began to devote part of the family business to authenticating works of art with fingerprints\u2014or,", + " as he liked to say, to \u201cplacing an artist at the scene of the creation of a work.\u201d\n\nIn 2000, Biro took on an even more spectacular case. A retired truck driver named Teri Horton hired Biro to examine a large drip canvas, painted in the kinetic style of Jackson Pollock, that she had bought for five dollars at a thrift shop in San Bernardino, California. After inspecting the work, Biro announced that he had found a partial fingerprint on the back of the canvas, and had matched it to a fingerprint on a paint can that is displayed in Pollock\u2019s old studio, in East Hampton.", + " Andr\u00e9 Turcotte, a retired fingerprint examiner with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, supported the results. But the International Foundation for Art Research, a nonprofit organization that is the primary authenticator of Pollock\u2019s works, balked, saying that Biro\u2019s method was not yet \u201cuniversally\u201d accepted. Biro, in a report on Horton\u2019s painting, wrote that he had been warned that \u201cscience prying into the closed world of connoisseurship is likely to make me many enemies.\u201d Horton, meanwhile, became a modern-day Harry and Andr\u00e9e Hahn, dismissing the method of traditional connoisseurs as \u201cbullshit,\u201d and the whole art world as a \u201cfraud.\u201d\n\nBiro told me that he maintains a firewall between his research and the sale of a painting,", + " and that he receives the same fee\u2014two thousand dollars a day\u2014regardless of the outcome of his investigation. \u201cIf I stopped being disinterested, my credibility will be gone,\u201d he said. But he felt \u201cmorally obliged\u201d to stand behind his findings.\n\nThe effort to authenticate the painting became a crusade. Horton went on \u201cThe Tonight Show with Jay Leno,\u201d and her struggle was valorized in a 2006 documentary called \u201cWho the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?\u201d In the film, Biro is depicted as a champion of science and of a woman with an eighth-grade education battling an autocratic establishment.", + " The main antagonist\u2014\u201cthe effete, nose-in-the-air art expert,\u201d as he later quipped of his role\u2014is Thomas Hoving. He is shown, in a suit and tie, sitting before Horton\u2019s picture and declaring, \u201cDead on arrival.\u201d Later, offering a rationale for his response, he noted that Horton\u2019s picture featured acrylic paint, which had not previously been documented in Pollock\u2019s drip paintings.\n\nBiro, undaunted, visited Pollock\u2019s old studio and extracted pigment samples from the floor, where the artist had once spread his canvases and applied paint. In a report, Biro wrote that he had used a \u201cmicrochemistry test\u201d\u2014a method of mixing a paint sample with other chemicals to analyze its characteristics.", + " \u201cThe very first sample of paint I tested,\u201d he said, \u201cturned out to be acrylic.\u201d He also revealed that gold paint from a matchstick embedded in the floor was the same as gold paint found in Horton\u2019s picture. Hoving remained unmoved. He dismissed the fingerprints, and said of Horton, \u201cShe knows nothing.... I\u2019m an expert, she\u2019s not.\u201d In reviews of the film, Hoving was denounced as a \u201cpompous fool\u201d and a \u201cvillain\u201d; Biro was called a \u201chero.\u201d\n\nBased on Biro\u2019s findings, Horton was offered two million dollars for her painting,", + " but she held out for more. Biro assured her that the art world could not continue to resist a forensic method that had been used to convict criminals for more than a century. And though many connoisseurs and collectors opposed his technique, more and more accepted it. He told me that he had authenticated two Picassos, half a dozen Turners, a Thomas Hart Benton, and close to a dozen other Pollocks. Several of the world\u2019s top connoisseurs sought Biro\u2019s expertise. Three years ago, two leading Pollock scholars, Claude Cernuschi and Ellen G. Landau, cited Biro\u2019s evaluation of a suspected Pollock,", + " saying, \u201cArtists\u2019 fingerprints do not show up just anywhere. Their presence cannot be dismissed or simply explained away.\u201d Around this time, Biro helped Martin Kemp attribute a painting, partly on the basis of fingerprints, to one of Leonardo\u2019s assistants. In an earlier e-mail to a client, Biro wrote, \u201cThe world is changing. Not as fast as one would hope but it is changing nevertheless.\u201d\n\nIn 2009, Biro and Nicholas Eastaugh, a scientist known for his expertise on pigments, formed a company, Art Access and Research, which analyzes and authenticates paintings. Biro is its director of forensic studies.", + " Clients include museums, private galleries, corporations, dealers, and major auction houses such as Sotheby\u2019s. Biro was also enlisted by the Pigmentum Project, which is affiliated with Oxford University. His work is published in museum catalogues and in scientific publications, including Antiquity and the official journal of the Royal Microscopical Society. In the media, he has become one of the most prominent art experts, featured in documentaries and news reports. (He was once mentioned in this magazine, in The Talk of the Town.) He even has a cameo\u2014as the man who \u201cpioneered the whole technique\u201d of fingerprint authentications\u2014in Peter Robinson\u2019s popular detective novel \u201cPlaying with Fire\u201d; the story is about a charming,", + " \u201cchameleonlike\u201d con man who runs an art-forgery ring. On his Web site, Biro notes that law enforcement has adopted his approach: \u201cMy analytical techniques were presented internally at a training course at the F.B.I. I am not permitted to go beyond that.\u201d\n\nBiro told me that the divide between connoisseurs and scientists was finally eroding. The best demonstration of this change, he added, was the fact that he had been commissioned to examine \u201cLa Bella Principessa\u201d and, possibly, help make one of the greatest discoveries in the history of art.\n\nDuring one of the visits I made to Biro\u2019s home,", + " he offered to share with me what he had learned about \u201cLa Bella Principessa.\u201d We were in the living room, and the sweet scent of his wife\u2019s French cooking kept wafting in from the kitchen. \u201cYou\u2019ve never tasted anything so good,\u201d Biro said. He went over to a varnished desk, where there was a computer, and clicked on an icon. An image of the drawing appeared on the screen. He zoomed in on the upper-left edge of the parchment, and pointed to a small mark on the surface: a fingerprint. It looked like little more than a smudge, and I squinted at the blurry lines.\n\nEven in a high-resolution photograph,", + " the fingerprint was unreadable; Biro called it \u201ccomplete visual confusion.\u201d Many fingerprint examiners, he said, would have been stymied. Then, as if he were lining up a row of mug shots, he called up a series of photographs from a multispectral-imaging camera. Because the images had been made with different wavelengths of light, none of them looked exactly the same. In some photographs, the texture of the parchment\u2014the background \u201cnoise,\u201d as Biro put it\u2014was pronounced. In others, the ridge patterns in the fingerprint were accentuated and the parchment all but faded away. From one photograph to the next,", + " Biro said, \u201cthe smudge becomes clearer.\u201d Still, it was not clear enough. His next step, he said, was \u201cproprietary.\u201d Using advanced image-processing software, he subtracted the background noise from each image, until only the clearest parts of the fingerprint remained. Finally, he said, clicking on another icon, \u201cYou get this.\u201d\n\nThe smudge had been transformed into a more legible print: now, at least, there were the outlines of ridges and bumps. When I asked Biro if he worried that his method might be flawed, he said that during nearly two decades of fingerprint examinations he had \u201cnot made one mistake.\u201d He added,", + " \u201cI take a long time and I don\u2019t allow myself to be rushed.\u201d\n\nBiro showed me another fingerprint, this one taken from Leonardo\u2019s \u201cSt. Jerome,\u201d which hangs in the Vatican. It was the clearest fingerprint from an undisputed work by Leonardo. On the computer screen, Biro moved the image of the \u201cSt. Jerome\u201d fingerprint alongside the one from \u201cLa Bella Principessa.\u201d \u201cSee that?\u201d he said, pointing to an elevated ridge, or \u201cisland,\u201d in each print. The island in \u201cLa Bella Principessa,\u201d he said, was identical in shape to the island from the \u201cSt. Jerome\u201d fingerprint.", + " He added that he had found seven other overlapping characteristics. The results, Biro said, indicated that the paintings had been touched by the same hand more than five hundred years ago, which pointed to one conclusion: \u201cLa Bella Principessa\u201d was a genuine Leonardo.\n\nFor a moment, Biro stared at the prints in silence, as if still awed by what he had found. The discovery, he said, was a \u201cvalidation\u201d of his life\u2019s work. After he first revealed his findings, last October, a prominent dealer estimated that the drawing could be worth a hundred and fifty million dollars. (The unnamed \u201clady\u201d who had sold it at Christie\u2019s for less than twenty-two thousand dollars came forward and identified herself as Jeanne Marchig,", + " a Swedish animal-rights activist. Citing, among other things, the fingerprint evidence, she sued the auction house for \u201cnegligence\u201d and \u201cbreach of warranty\u201d for failing to attribute the drawing correctly.)\n\nIn the wake of Biro\u2019s announcement, Peter Silverman, the Canadian who had helped acquire the drawing, told a reporter, \u201cThank God, we have the fingerprint, because there will still be those doubting Thomases out there, saying it couldn\u2019t possibly be.\u201d To object now, he said, would be to \u201cgo against science and say the Earth is not round.\u201d Biro, meanwhile, was lauded around the world.", + " As an Australian newspaper put it, \u201cART EXPERT CRACKS DA CODE.\u201d\n\nAnd so, with this final flourish, the glittering portrait of Peter Paul Biro was complete: he was the triumphant scientist who had transformed the art world. Like \u201cLa Bella Principessa,\u201d the image was romantic, almost idealized\u2014the version of Biro that was most appealing to the eye. But, somewhere along the way, I began to notice small, and then more glaring, imperfections in this picture.\n\nOne of the first cracks appeared when I examined the case of Alex Matter, a filmmaker whose parents had been close to Jackson Pollock.", + " In 2005, Matter announced that he had discovered a cache of art works in his late father\u2019s storage space, on Long Island. Ellen Landau, the art historian, said that she was \u201cabsolutely convinced\u201d that the paintings were by Pollock. Biro was sent a photograph of a fingerprint impressed on the front of one picture. He identified six characteristics that corresponded with the fingerprint on the paint can in Pollock\u2019s studio\u2014strong evidence that the work was by Pollock. But, as more and more connoisseurs weighed in, they noticed patterns that seemed at odds with Pollock\u2019s style. Meanwhile, in sixteen of twenty art works submitted for analysis,", + " forensic scientists discovered pigments that were not patented until after Pollock\u2019s death, in 1956. At a symposium three years ago, Pollock experts all but ruled out the pictures. Ronald D. Spencer, a lawyer who represents the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, told me, \u201cBiro can find all the fingerprints he wants. But, in terms of the marketplace, the Matter paintings are done. They are finished.\u201d\n\nWhen I first talked to Biro about Matter\u2019s cache, he had noted that no anachronistic pigments were found on the picture that he had authenticated, and he said that it was possible that Pollock had created only a few of the pictures,", + " or that he had simply touched one of them. After all, Pollock was a friend of Matter\u2019s parents.\n\nHis explanation seemed plausible, but I kept being troubled by other details relating to Biro\u2019s Pollock investigations. For instance, it was peculiar that even though there were no documented cases of acrylic being used in Pollock\u2019s pour paintings, Biro had easily found some on the floor of the Long Island studio\u2014indeed, in the very first sample he tested. I contacted a leading forensic scientist in the art world who teaches at the F.B.I. Academy, in Quantico, Virginia, and who has done research in the Pollock studio.", + " The scientist told me that he had spent hours combing the floor and had not found any acrylic. He added that a microchemistry test was not even considered suitable for identifying acrylic. As for the gold paint particles that Biro said he had uncovered on the studio floor and matched to the pigment in Teri Horton\u2019s painting, Helen Harrison, an art historian who is the director of the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center, which oversees Pollock\u2019s old studio, told me that she did not know of Pollock\u2019s having used gold in any of his pour paintings.\n\nReporters work, in many ways, like authenticators. We encounter people,", + " form intuitions about them, and then attempt to verify these impressions. I began to review Biro\u2019s story; I spoke again with people I had already interviewed, and tracked down other associates. A woman who had once known him well told me, \u201cLook deeper into his past. Look at his family business.\u201d As I probed further, I discovered an underpainting that I had never imagined.\n\nOne day, I visited the records office at the Palais de Justice, the provincial courthouse in downtown Montreal. The office was in a windowless, fluorescent-lit room, and, like a remnant of Soviet bureaucracy, it was filled with cardboard boxes and with clerks who were consumed with distinct,", + " but equally dismal, tasks. I asked a clerk if there were any case files connected to anyone with the surname Biro, and after a long wait I was handed a stack of mottled folders. During the eighties and early nineties, more than a dozen civil lawsuits had been filed against Peter Paul Biro, his brother, his father, or their art businesses. Many of them stemmed from unpaid creditors. An owner of a picture-frame company alleged that the Biros had issued checks that bounced and had operated \u201cunder the cover\u201d of defunct companies \u201cwith the clear aim of confusing their creditors.\u201d (The matter was settled out of court.) As I sifted through the files,", + " I found other cases that raised fundamental questions about Peter Paul Biro\u2019s work as a restorer and an art dealer.\n\nOn February 12, 1981, Sam and Syd Wise, brothers who were art collectors in Montreal, stopped by the Biros\u2019 gallery. Peter Paul Biro was present, along with his father, Geza. The restoration business was in the back of the gallery, and the Biros often wore white laboratory coats. Although Peter Paul was the youngest member of the family, people familiar with the company say that he often seemed to be the dominant figure. A lawyer who was involved in cases brought against the Biros said that Peter Paul was \u201cthe brains of the operation.\u201d\n\nThough the gallery was filled mostly with Geza\u2019s landscape paintings,", + " Peter Paul told the Wises that they had for sale an exemplary oil painting by Goodridge Roberts, the Canadian artist. The picture was signed and showed what appeared to be Georgian Bay, in Ontario, which Roberts had often rendered in his paintings. The Wises bought the picture for ninety-five hundred dollars. Soon afterward, Peter Paul informed the Wises that he had another landscape painting by Roberts, and the Wises, who had already sold the first picture to a local gallery, agreed to buy the second one, for seventy-five hundred dollars.\n\nIn 1983, Goodridge Roberts\u2019s widow, Joan, happened to visit the gallery where the Wises had sold the Georgian Bay painting.", + " She had been intimately involved in her husband\u2019s work, keeping a catalogue of his paintings, and she was immediately drawn to the picture. As she subsequently testified, it mimicked her husband\u2019s paintings, but the trees were \u201cfeeble imitations,\u201d the play of the colors was jarring, and the signature appeared oddly slanted. Moreover, she had never catalogued the work. She went up to the dealer and cried, \u201cThat\u2019s a fake.\u201d\n\nThe Wises, alerted to the allegation, rushed to see Peter Paul Biro. \u201cI indicated to him that it was very important for us to establish the authenticity,\u201d Syd Wise later testified.", + " Biro refused, multiple times, to divulge where he had obtained either of the paintings. According to the Wises, Biro insisted that the person who sold him the paintings was in Europe, and that it was impossible to contact him.\n\nSoon afterward, three of the world\u2019s most highly regarded experts on Roberts confirmed that they were fakes. As one of them later testified, usually \u201ca man who makes a forgery makes mistakes,\u201d and these had some obvious ones.\n\nCustomarily, art dealers are bound to stand behind what they sell, and the Wises refunded the gallery that had bought the Georgian Bay painting. But Peter Paul Biro insisted that the works were genuine\u2014and that,", + " in any case, the Wises had had an opportunity to investigate the paintings before buying them. He refused to reimburse the Wises, who ultimately sued. In an affidavit, the Wises said that Biro and his father had \u201cperpetrated a fraud, in that they knowingly sold... a forgery.\u201d The Wises were represented by G. George Sand, who handled many civil cases involving art. In 1984, during a sworn deposition, he questioned Peter Paul Biro. For the first time, Biro disclosed the name of the person who had sold him the Roberts paintings. \u201cGeorge Pap,\u201d Biro said,", + " adding, \u201cActually, the proper name is Zsolt Pap. Pap is the family name.\u201d\n\nSand pressed Biro about Pap\u2019s identity. Biro said that Pap was of Hungarian descent, and lived in Montreal. Sand seized upon this, asking, \u201cDid you tell Mr. Wise that this person was in Europe?\u201d\n\n\u201cNo,\u201d Biro said. (Later, at trial, he said that he had told the Wises that it was Pap\u2019s father who was in Europe.) When Biro was asked why he hadn\u2019t revealed Zsolt Pap\u2019s name to the Wises, he said, \u201cI didn\u2019t want to.\u201d\n\nSand sought proof of a financial transaction\u2014a check or a credit-card payment\u2014between Biro and Pap.", + " Biro, however, said that he had obtained them in exchange for two musical instruments: a Steinway piano and a cello.\n\nSand was incredulous: \u201cIs Mr. Pap a music dealer or is he an art dealer?\u201d After Biro could not recall where he had originally purchased the cello, Sand suddenly asked him, \u201cYou ever been convicted of a criminal offense, sir?\u201d\n\n\u201cNo.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou are certain of that?\u201d\n\n\u201cYes,\u201d Biro said.\n\nAsked whether anybody in his family had done work on the paintings, Biro said that his father had merely cleaned them. (Later, when Geza was asked if he had done anything more,", + " such as retouching, he said, \u201cNo, no.\u201d They were \u201cintact.\u201d)\n\nSand demanded that Biro provide an address for Pap, and Biro eventually did so. But Sand told me that he twice issued a subpoena to that location\u2014and that no Zsolt Pap ever showed up.\n\nMeanwhile, Sand had obtained a court order to seize various possessions at the Biros\u2019 gallery. Several paintings were confiscated, including one whose frame had a plaque engraved with the name John Constable, the English Romantic painter. When the case went to trial, Sand asked Biro if the Constable belonged to him, and Biro said that it was owned by a client and was being restored.", + " Given the value of Constable\u2019s work, Sand asked Biro if he had notified the owner that his painting had been seized. \u201cNo,\u201d Biro said. \u201cThe client lived in Florida and he moved, and we could not locate him.\u201d\n\n\u201cA Constable painting, sir, don\u2019t you agree with me, is a very expensive painting?\u201d Sand asked.\n\n\u201cExcept that this painting was not a Constable.\u201d\n\nBiro said that the painting had been bought at an auction, in Montreal, for five hundred dollars.\n\n\u201cYou are restoring something that was not a John Constable?\u201d\n\n\u201cSure.\u201d\n\n\u201cI see. Even though the name plaque said \u2018John Constable\u2019?\u201d\n\n\u201cSure.\u201d\n\nThroughout the trial,", + " the Biros and their attorneys maintained that the two paintings sold to the Wises were authentic, but to make their case they presented an art expert who was not a specialist on Roberts, or even on Canadian art. On September 3, 1986, the court found in favor of the Wises, and ordered Peter Paul and Geza Biro to pay them the seventeen thousand dollars they had spent on the pictures, as well as interest.\n\nAbout two years after the Wises\u2019 case, Sand was contacted by another former client of the Biros, an art-and-antique collector named Saul Hendler, who has since died.", + " According to court records and interviews with Sand and Hendler\u2019s wife, Marion, the Biros approached Hendler in 1983, saying that they had found a suspected Renoir, signed by the artist, which, if authenticated, was worth millions of dollars. The Biros asked Hendler to front them nine thousand dollars to buy the painting, a portrait of a nude woman; the Biros would then authenticate the work and sell it, sharing the profits. Hendler gave them the money. Not long afterward, Peter Paul Biro consulted a leading Renoir expert, who determined that the painting was a fake and that the signature was forged.", + " The Biros refunded Hendler half his money, and eventually agreed to give him the painting, which still had some value as a decorative piece.\n\nWhen Hendler picked up the picture, he thought that the composition looked vaguely different. He had previously made a photo transparency of the painting, and at home he compared it with the canvas he had just been handed. \u201cMy late husband was furious,\u201d Marion Hendler told me. \u201cThen I saw it, and I was horrified. It was clearly not the same painting.\u201d Had the Biros sold the original painting without telling Hendler?\n\nMarion and her husband went to the Center for Art Restoration,", + " and confronted Geza Biro. Marion recalls that Geza\u2014who often referred to himself with the honorific \u201cDoctor,\u201d though he lacked a Ph.D.\u2014was charming but also arrogant: \u201cIt was as if he was the great artiste, and whatever he said was true.\u201d One of Geza\u2019s sons, she said, inadvertently began to \u201cspill information,\u201d revealing that Geza liked to \u201ccopy a real artist\u2019s work.\u201d She added, \u201cThe whole thing suddenly came together: He\u2019s the one who does it. The father did this to our painting.\u201d\n\nHendler, unable to get back what he considered the original painting,", + " sued the Biros for the rest of the money he had paid. In a written response, the Biros called the allegations \u201cfalse and untrue and defamatory,\u201d adding that \u201cthe sole difference in the painting was the work which had been performed on the painting by the Defendants in lifting the paint in order to discover the original painting which had appeared on the canvas.\u201d During the trial, which took place in 1992, Sand called to the stand an art expert who testified that the painting was not the same as the one Hendler had bought. The court agreed, awarding Hendler several thousand dollars. But Marion asked me, \u201cWhat did we win?\u201d She went on,", + " \u201cWhere\u2019s that piece of art? We never got it back. He probably sold it for a lot of money and we got this piece of junk in return.\u201d\n\nLawsuits had piled up against Peter Paul Biro and his family business. In two instances, there were allegations that art works had vanished under mysterious circumstances while in the care of Peter Paul. In one of the cases, Serge Joyal, who is now a senator in Canada, told me that he left a nineteenth-century drawing with the Biros to be restored. Before he could pick it up, Peter Paul notified him that it had been stolen from his car and that there was no insurance.", + " Biro, however, never filed a police report, and Joyal says that Biro pleaded with him to wait before going to the authorities. During their conversations, Joyal says, Peter Paul acted evasive and suspicious, and Joyal became convinced that Biro was lying about the theft. As Joyal put it, \u201cThere was something fishy.\u201d Though Peter Paul said that there was nothing \u201csuspect\u201d about his behavior, and that he should not be held liable, the court awarded Joyal seven thousand dollars, plus interest.\n\nElizabeth Lipsz, a Montreal businesswoman who had once been close to Biro, and who won a lawsuit against him for unpaid loans,", + " described him to me as a \u201cclassic con man.\u201d Her lawyer told me that Biro \u201cwas so convincing. He was very suave, soft-spoken, but after a while you catch him in different lies and you realize that the guy is a phony.\u201d\n\nWithin Montreal\u2019s small art world, there were whispers about Peter Paul Biro and his father. But the lawsuits appear to have attracted virtually no public attention. In 1993, Peter Paul Biro filed for bankruptcy, and he never paid many of the judgments against him, including what he owed the Wises and Joyal. Lipsz\u2019s lawyer said of Biro,", + " \u201cHe oiled his way out of that whole thing.... He got away scot-free.\u201d\n\nWhen I met with Sand at his law office, in Montreal, he told me he was amazed that Biro\u2019s history had not tarnished his reputation and that he had reached such an exalted position. He said that, for years, he had read with curiosity about Biro\u2019s authenticating paintings using forensic science. He looked at me intently and asked, \u201cWhat\u2019s the deal with all those fingerprints?\u201d\n\nIn December, 2004, Ken Parker, a New York private investigator who had no experience with the art world,", + " went to Montreal and showed Peter Paul Biro a drip painting that he and his siblings had received from their father. Parker hoped that the work was a Pollock, and he had read about Biro\u2019s celebrated efforts on Teri Horton\u2019s behalf. Several weeks after Parker left his painting with Biro, he received an e-mail from him about fingerprints that he had found on the back of the painting. \u201cYou are so lucky,\u201d Biro wrote. \u201cI am able to confirm a match to a print that appears on a paint can in the Pollock-Krasner House. It is also the same print as the one on Teri Horton\u2019s painting.\u201d\n\nAccording to dozens of e-mails between Parker and Biro,", + " and tape-recorded conversations, Parker was thrilled by Biro\u2019s findings, but over time he and his wife, Kathy, grew concerned. As Biro held out the promise of authenticating their painting, and thus making them a fortune, he kept asking them for additional funds for his research. At one point, he requested several thousand dollars for a camera platform, offering, in return, to \u201cproduce an image of your Pollock that could not be made any other way.\u201d Then he wanted two thousand dollars to get his camera \u201cup to speed.\u201d Then came another request: \u201cCan you continue to pitch in smaller amounts? I am now quite certain that with $5,", + "000 I can have the unit up and running.\u201d Biro also stressed that in order to improve the painting\u2019s value he had to restore it perfectly. \u201cI don\u2019t want to see one rusty staple on it,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cI would be very happy if you sent me $5,000 as I have seriously underestimated this last phase of the work.\u201d Kathy Parker later recalled, \u201cEvery time we turned around, he was asking for more money.\u201d\n\nBiro soon asked Ken Parker\u2014whose late father and stepmother had won several million dollars from the New York Lotto\u2014to make a much larger investment. Biro was part of an effort to launch a venture named Provenance,", + " which would provide, as he put it, the \u201cclever strategy\u201d necessary to sell \u201corphaned\u201d paintings for tens of millions of dollars. According to a business prospectus, marked confidential, Provenance would acquire art works that had been forensically validated by Biro and several colleagues, and sell them in a gallery in New York City. The company chose a thumbprint for a logo. The driving force behind the venture was Tod Volpe, an art dealer who had once represented celebrities, including Jack Nicholson and Barbra Streisand. Biro, who had suggested that Volpe might serve as the Parkers\u2019 dealer,", + " described him, in an e-mail, as \u201cbrilliant, resourceful, and extremely well connected.\u201d Biro said that his brother, Laszlo\u2014whose \u201cknowledge was invaluable\u201d\u2014would also be a central part of the company. Once Provenance was established, Biro told the Parkers, \u201cthere really is nothing we can no[t] do.\u201d\n\nThe plan called for raising sixty-five million dollars from investors, part of which would go toward buying J. P. Morgan\u2019s old headquarters, on Wall Street, and turning it into a palatial arts complex anchored by a gallery. Surprisingly, at least five million dollars of investors\u2019 money would also go to purchasing Teri Horton\u2019s painting\u2014even though Biro had authenticated the work and Volpe had tried to sell it.", + " By capitalizing on the media interest surrounding the painting, the plan said, the work could be resold for between forty and sixty million dollars, maybe even a hundred million. Although Biro has always publicly maintained that he had no financial stake in Horton\u2019s painting, Horton sent an e-mail to the Parkers saying that after the sale of her painting Biro would \u201ccollect\u201d and that it would \u201cset him for life.\u201d\n\nThe business plan noted that Biro had access to \u201cmore than 20\u201d other valuable orphaned paintings, all of which could be sold at Provenance. Among them were paintings by artists with whom Biro and his family had long been closely associated,", + " including three by Turner and a landscape by Constable. The plan estimated that each year Provenance would accept anywhere from twenty to thirty new possible masterpieces for scientific evaluation, of which nearly half would be authenticated, creating staggering profits. (The forensic expert who works with the F.B.I. expressed surprise at this prediction, telling me that, in the overwhelming majority of cases involving disputed art, the work fails to be authenticated.)\n\nProvenance was cleverly tapping into the public\u2019s desire to crack open the art world, offering the tantalizing dream that anyone could find a Pollock or a Leonardo or a Turner languishing in a basement or a thrift shop.", + " The company combined the forensic triumphalism of \u201cC.S.I.\u201d with the lottery ethos of \u201cAntiques Roadshow.\u201d (An associate producer at \u201cRoadshow\u201d had already sent Biro an e-mail about possibly doing a segment on the Parkers\u2019 \u201cunbelievable discovery.\u201d)\n\nThe public\u2019s distrust of the cloistered art world helps to explain why a forger, or a swindler, is so often perceived as a romantic avenger, his deceptions exposing the deeper fraudulence of the establishment. When Han van Meegeren was tried for his Vermeer forgeries, in 1947, his lawyer insisted,", + " \u201cThe art world is reeling, and experts are beginning to doubt the very basis of artistic attribution. This was precisely what the defendant was trying to achieve.\u201d In fact, most art swindlers have no grand intellectual design; rather, they are, as Thomas Hoving once put it, \u201cmoney-grubbing confidence men, delighted to cobble up something that will get by in the rush for big profits.\u201d\n\nAccording to Parker, Volpe asked him for a \u201ccontribution\u201d of five million dollars toward launching Provenance. (In an e-mail, Volpe had assured the Parkers that \u201cwhen people lie it takes a part of their souls with them.\u201d)", + " Even if the Parkers didn\u2019t want to help open the gallery, Biro wrote to Ken Parker, he hoped that they would invest \u201cabout 1.5 to 2 million\u201d dollars for his research and equipment. \u201cI think you could really do something for art and science if you supported this (not to mention your painting),\u201d Biro said.\n\nKen Parker estimated that, by this point, he had given Biro between \u201cthirty-five and fifty thousand dollars.\u201d Kathy Parker later recalled, \u201cHe basically took our money and we thought he was real. He\u2019s got a great lab, has a great line...", + ". Then what would happen was that he\u2019d be away\u2014\u2018I\u2019m off to Paris with my wife for two weeks\u2019\u2014and he\u2019d give us some reason.\u201d She went on, \u201cHe came down to New York, he\u2019s staying in wonderful hotels, eating, drinking\u2014he loves to eat and drink.... And every time he wrote he\u2019s, like, \u2018I haven\u2019t gotten to your work because I had the flu.\u2019 \u201d\n\nBiro previously had been suspected of creating an investment scheme around a seemingly precious object, with the promise that it would eventually reap huge profits. In the late nineteen-nineties, he persuaded a Canadian financial adviser,", + " Richard Lafferty, who is now dead, to invest in a venture to authenticate and sell a work purportedly by Raphael\u2019s disciple Perino del Vaga. Three of Lafferty\u2019s colleagues confirm the story, as do letters, memorandums, and other documents.\n\nBiro claimed that he and his brother had found the circular painting, which looked like Raphael\u2019s \u201cMadonna della Sedia,\u201d at an antique store in Boston; Biro had purportedly found a fingerprint on it that matched a fingerprint on an undisputed work by Perino. What\u2019s more, he said, he and his brother had invented a unique ultrasound instrument\u2014they called it a Perinoscope\u2014and used it to detect a note hidden inside a secret compartment in the picture\u2019s frame.", + " The note was written in Italian and was dated April 5, 1520\u2014the day before Raphael died. The Old Master appeared to have dictated a message to Perino, just before his death. The note said, \u201cThese are the words of my master as he instructed me to say and to do. If my faithful Perino has finished my last Madonna he has now the greatest treasure of all in his hands.\u201d Raphael\u2019s signature appeared in partial form, suggesting that he had been too ill to finish writing his name.\n\nAccording to colleagues, Lafferty, who had once been a combative and astute financial analyst, was nearing the end of his life,", + " and had grown less mentally agile; bored and lonely, he was drawn to Biro. One colleague recalls that the painting, which Lafferty spoke of as the \u201choly grail,\u201d gave Lafferty \u201csomething to live for.\u201d In a 1999 letter, Lafferty wrote that he had already invested eight hundred thousand dollars in the project. Lafferty\u2019s accountant, Luc Desjardins, told me that altogether Lafferty spent well over a million dollars\u2014but the painting never sold. A research team at Harvard analyzed the secret message, and, according to Lafferty\u2019s summary of its findings, it had never seen \u201csixteenth-century ink act as it does on that particular document.\u201d Caroline Elam,", + " a leading scholar on the Renaissance, suggested that the work was \u201ca very skilled, elaborate and expert hoax.\u201d Lafferty\u2019s longtime business partner, Allan Aitken, told me that he believed that \u201cBiro was either a shyster or a con man, and had found in Lafferty an easy mark.\u201d\n\nBy the fall of 2005, Ken Parker had begun to look into the people behind Provenance. It turned out that Tod Volpe, in the nineties, had defrauded his art clients, including Jack Nicholson, of nearly two million dollars, and had served two years in prison. Parker discovered that one of Volpe\u2019s principal partners in Provenance was also an ex-con,", + " who had done time for tax evasion and for running a drug-smuggling operation in the United States. (Volpe told me, \u201cWe all have skeletons in our past.\u201d) Parker confronted Biro, who, in a subsequent e-mail, told Parker that he had \u201csevered all communication with Volpe.\u201d To avoid any potential conflict of interest, he said, he was rescinding any request for investment money: \u201cI must maintain absolute neutrality.\u201d\n\nBiro told me that his request for millions of dollars from the Parkers came after he had finished his authentication of their painting. But, according to e-mails at the time, the Parkers were still waiting for his final report.", + " And only months after rescinding his request for money he asked the Parkers to fund another new project: a privately endowed department for him and a colleague at Oxford University. \u201cNaturally it is 100% tax deductible,\u201d Biro wrote, in an e-mail. \u201cThose who support the foundation of a bold and new department for us at Oxford will have their name on a plaque or have the department named after them such as \u2018The Ken Parker Department for Forensic Art History.\u2019 Sounds cool?\u201d\n\nParker, meanwhile, launched an investigation into the provenance of his painting. He learned that his father had obtained the work from a couple named Thelma and Norman Grossman.", + " Parker tracked down the Grossmans. According to Thelma Grossman, she had bought the painting for a few hundred dollars from a young artist in Brooklyn who was skilled at imitating famous artists. As she put it, it is certain that the painting \u201cis not a Jackson Pollock.\u201d Later, Parker had a forensic scientist examine several paint samples. The test indicated the presence of acrylic emulsion\u2014the kind of paint that has not been documented in a Pollock painting.\n\nIn March, 2007, the Parkers\u2019 widening inquiry led them to a company called Global Fine Art Registry. One of the main services of the registry, which is based in Phoenix,", + " is to provide art works with a tag, rather like a Vehicle Identification Number, and catalogue them in a database, in order to create a record of their provenance. The founder of the company, Theresa Franks, although not well known in the art world, has cast herself as a crusader against fraud in a realm that she describes as the \u201clast wild frontier.\u201d Operating out of her home, she pursues her own investigations, hiring independent experts and posting reports on her Web site. (One of her recent campaigns was against a company named Park West Gallery, which, she alleged, was selling fake prints by Salvador Dali. The gallery\u2019s founder,", + " who called her attacks \u201ccyber-terrorism,\u201d sued for defamation. In April, a jury ruled unanimously in Franks\u2019s favor, and awarded her half a million dollars in a counterclaim.)\n\nFranks became particularly interested in Biro\u2019s methods after Frankie Brown, an artist in California, told her that he had seen a photograph of the Teri Horton painting, in People, and wondered if it might be his own work. Franks hired as an expert Tom Hanley, the chief of police in Middlebury, Vermont, who had more than two decades of experience as a fingerprint examiner. Hanley told me that he approached Biro, who had previously stated about Horton\u2019s painting,", + " \u201cMy work is (and has been) available for evaluation to qualified experts.\u201d Yet Biro declined to share his evidence, saying that Horton had objected to the idea.\n\nHanley was thus forced to rely on bits of information that Biro had posted on his Web site, several years earlier. The online report contains a photograph of the partial fingerprint that Biro said he had found on the back of Horton\u2019s painting. In Hanley\u2019s judgment, the impression lacked the kind of detail\u2014the clear ridges and furrows\u2014that is necessary to make a proper comparison.\n\nAfter Hanley revealed his findings to Franks, she raised questions on her Web site about the reliability of Biro\u2019s fingerprint methodology.", + " Biro then inserted a clarification to his online report. It said:\n\n\n\nFor security reasons, several images in this report are watermarked in a way that is not apparent to the observer. The fingerprint images have also been reduced in resolution so as to render them unusable except for illustration.\n\nI advise against evaluating the fingerprint images illustrated in this report as if they were the actual source material. Any attempt to do so is pointless.\n\n\n\n\n\nBiro told me that such secrecy protected the privacy of his clients and prevented anyone from misusing the fingerprint. To Hanley, this was baffling: what forensic scientist avoids peer review and even admits to doctoring evidence in order to prevent others from evaluating it?", + " \u201cIf what he found are truly fingerprints, why isn\u2019t he sharing?\u201d Franks asked me. In any case, Hanley, unable to examine Biro\u2019s evidence firsthand, had reached a dead end.\n\nThen Ken Parker told Hanley and Franks about his drama with Biro. Parker said that Hanley was welcome to examine his painting. For the first time, Hanley was able directly to observe Biro\u2019s fingerprint evidence. He noted several fingerprints on the back of the picture, including two on the wooden stretcher frame, which were black, as if they had been made with ink. Looking through a magnifying glass, Hanley focussed on the most legible fingerprint,", + " which appeared to be covered with a clear finishing coat, like a varnish. Parker said that before giving the painting to Biro he hadn\u2019t noticed a fingerprint on it. \u201cI don\u2019t know where it came from,\u201d he said. He said that Biro had told him he had used some sort of \u201cresin process\u201d to make it more visible. Hanley had never seen a print developed in this fashion. Based on the clarity of the impression, Hanley thought that the fingerprint had to be relatively new\u2014certainly not from half a century ago, when Pollock was alive.\n\nParker also retained the services of Lawrence Rooney,", + " a retired detective sergeant and latent-print examiner who had worked in the Suffolk County Police\u2019s identification unit, and who had more than two decades of experience as a fingerprint analyst. Rooney agreed that the fingerprint appeared too recent to have come from Pollock. He was also alarmed by the \u201cresin process,\u201d and, as he wrote in a report, the use of a \u201cliquid seal\u201d coating was \u201cbeyond all acceptable professional methods of latent print preservation and opens the door to many valid questions relating to the latent prints\u2019 origin of placement and development.\u201d\n\nHanley kept staring at the way the fingerprints rested on the surface of the wood, without the usual smudging or obliteration.", + " He noticed that they shared an eerily similar shape. And he began to wonder if he was seeing something virtually unheard of: forged fingerprints. In a 1903 Sherlock Holmes story, \u201cThe Adventure of the Norwood Builder,\u201d the detective discovers that a criminal has made a wax impression of a solicitor\u2019s fingerprint and then framed him by stamping the forged fingerprint at an apparent murder scene. \u201cIt was a masterpiece of villainy,\u201d Holmes says. The scheme became a common trope in detective fiction, but there are almost no documented cases of a criminal forging another person\u2019s fingerprint. In the nineteen-forties, a safe burglar named Nedelkoff set himself up as a fortune-teller in Eastern Europe,", + " and asked clients to press their hands into a soft clay tablet. Later, he poured liquid rubber into the clay impressions, creating soft casts of their fingertips. During his robberies, Nedelkoff pressed his former clients\u2019 fingerprints onto safes. (Eventually, his scheme was unravelled by police.)\n\nThere were only a few examiners with any expertise in forged and fabricated fingerprints, and Hanley recommended that Theresa Franks hire Pat A. Wertheim. A bespectacled man with gray hair and a thick mustache, Wertheim works in the crime lab of the Arizona Department of Public Safety, and is also a private consultant.", + " He teaches fingerprint analysis to law-enforcement officials around the world and has published numerous articles on the subject. Though forged fingerprints are rare, he says, a person with expertise could produce one with a rubber stamp, or even with an engraving made from a photograph of a fingerprint.\n\nOn October 27, 2007, Wertheim went with Hanley to the Parkers\u2019 house, on Long Island, to examine their painting. Looking at four fingerprints on the back of the stretcher frame and the canvas, Wertheim was struck by their extremely irregular shape\u2014the bulges and curves along their boundaries. Then he noticed something even more peculiar.", + " Each one of a person\u2019s ten fingers leaves a distinct impression, and the elasticity of skin makes it all but impossible to leave precisely the same fingerprint impression twice. Yet the two most visible fingerprints on the Parkers\u2019 painting, Wertheim says, were virtually exact overlays of each other: the same shape, the same pressure, the same ridge patterns. What\u2019s more, the visible parts of the two other fingerprints also lined up perfectly with these prints. In his more than three decades as an examiner, he had never seen a set of fingerprints like this.\n\nWhen Wertheim examined one of the prints closely, he could make out several bubble-like voids.", + " Although a person\u2019s sweat pores often leave voids in a fingerprint, Wertheim says that these voids were unusually big and elongated.\n\nWertheim had a hunch about what had caused the voids, and he went with Hanley to Pollock\u2019s old studio. Wertheim examined the fingerprint impression on the paint can. It matched the clearest fingerprints on the Parkers\u2019 painting, Wertheim says. Hanley then made a silicone cast from the impression on the paint can. Incredibly, Wertheim says, all four fingerprints on the Parkers\u2019 painting fit snugly within the boundaries of the cast impression.", + " As Wertheim suspected, the cast also produced similar voids\u2014they were caused from air bubbles that had formed in the rubber.\n\nAltogether, Wertheim says, he tallied eight characteristics that were inconsistent with normal fingerprints. In a final report, he concluded that all of them had been made by a cast from the fingerprint on the paint can. As he told me, the fingerprints \u201cscreamed forgery.\u201d\n\nWhen a forgery is exposed, people in the art world generally have the same reaction: how could anyone have ever been fooled by something so obviously phony, so artless? Few connoisseurs still think that Han van Meegeren\u2019s paintings look at all like Vermeers,", + " or even have any artistic value. Forgers usually succeed not because they are so talented but, rather, because they provide, at a moment in time, exactly what others desperately want to see. Conjurers as much as copyists, they fulfill a wish or a fantasy. And so the inconsistencies\u2014crooked signatures, uncharacteristic brushstrokes\u2014are ignored or explained away.\n\nIf a forgery\u2019s success were to depend on fake fingerprints, rather than on the sly imitation of a painter\u2019s style, it would represent a radical departure from the methods employed by art forgers over thousands of years. And yet such a forgery would perfectly reflect the contemporary faith in science to conquer every realm,", + " even one where beauty is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder.\n\nMany owners of faked art works are reluctant to bring charges that may demolish the value of their property\u2014one of the reasons that art crimes are often difficult to prosecute. Early on, Parker had told Franks that, if he became convinced that Biro had perpetrated a fraud, \u201cI fully intend to prosecute this guy.\u201d In April, 2008, when Franks informed Parker that Wertheim had concluded that the prints were forged, Parker told her that he had his own news about the painting: \u201cWe sold it about two weeks ago.\u201d He said that he had showed Biro\u2019s authentication report to the buyer.", + " Parker recently told me that a group of investors had bought the painting for a \u201csubstantial sum,\u201d though he still owned a share in it. He suggested that Thelma Grossman\u2019s story about buying the painting in Brooklyn might be \u201cmistaken,\u201d and he called Theresa Franks a publicity seeker, adding that he did not want to be part of a \u201cwitch hunt\u201d against Biro. He told me, \u201cI have no reason to believe it\u2019s not a Pollock.\u201d\n\nOn a recent summer day, I paid a final visit to Biro\u2019s home. Biro told me that Laszlo would be joining us, and he soon appeared\u2014a more compact and muscular version of his younger brother.", + " The three of us sat around a table on a balcony overlooking the courtyard. Biro had opened a bottle of a Hungarian white wine (\u201ca fantastic Tokaji\u201d), and he calmly sipped from his glass as I asked him about the allegations that had been made against them.\n\nPeter Paul said that the old lawsuits had involved relatively small amounts, and, as he later wrote in an e-mail, often stemmed from disgruntled \u201ctreasure seekers\u201d who \u201choped to turn a thousand into ten or even into millions and then turned on us and still make nasty comments because their greed did not turn to gold.\u201d He said that although Richard Lafferty,", + " the financial adviser, may have spent more than a million dollars on the purported painting by Raphael\u2019s disciple, not all the checks went to the Biros. Laszlo added that Lafferty had \u201cthe last word\u201d in what he spent. Peter Paul, who referred to the allegations by Lafferty\u2019s colleagues as \u201chearsay,\u201d told me that no scholar had questioned the authenticity of the picture or of the note tucked inside the frame. When I subsequently uncovered documents indicating otherwise, Peter Paul said, \u201cI don\u2019t recall anything of that nature.\u201d\n\nAt one point, I mentioned that a scientist deemed it incredible that Peter Paul had found acrylic on Pollock\u2019s studio floor with his \u201cvery first sample of paint.\u201d He said that he had been referring simply to his \u201cfirst visit\u201d to the studio.", + " I asked him why he had performed a microchemistry test, given that it is not an accepted method for detecting acrylic; he said that the test \u201cwas just one first step.\u201d He assured me that he had no financial stake in Horton\u2019s painting. (She had told me that she might \u201cgive him a gift,\u201d but she could not \u201clet that get out in the media that he has a percentage, when he does not.\u201d)\n\nI had heard that Biro had recently gone to New York and met with a Russian who was considering buying the Horton painting, for a few million dollars. It was true, Biro said, but he was no more than a facilitator between interested parties:", + " \u201cI connect them.\u201d He acknowledged that he had been involved with Tod Volpe and the plan to create Provenance, but he said, \u201cEventually, basically, I just turned my back on it, because it became far too commercial in its scope and I didn\u2019t see that the integrity of my work would be suitably protected.\u201d\n\nLaszlo added, \u201cIt would\u2019ve been just way too racy.\u201d\n\nI asked whether their father had forged the fake Goodridge Roberts landscape, or the painting given to Saul Hendler, or any other works of art. Laszlo stood up, circling the table, and for the first time Peter Paul became agitated.", + " \u201cIt\u2019s upsetting,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s pure fantasy.\u201d He went on, \u201cIt\u2019s so easy to make this kind of an accusation. Because somebody\u2019s a painter, therefore he can forge. It\u2019s like saying that if somebody is a surgeon he can kill, because he\u2019s got a sharp instrument in his hand.\u201d\n\nWe discussed \u201cLandscape with a Rainbow,\u201d the purported Turner painting that was Peter Paul Biro\u2019s first fingerprint-authentication case. There appeared to be notable discrepancies in the various statements that the family had made about the origins of the painting. Peter Paul Biro and Laszlo usually told the press, and had repeated to me,", + " that they were present when the purported owner had taken it to their shop to be restored. They told me that Laszlo had purchased it. Yet, during depositions for Peter Paul Biro\u2019s bankruptcy case, Laszlo said that his father had obtained the painting. When Laszlo was asked where Geza had acquired it, he said, \u201cI don\u2019t remember.\u201d Peter Paul Biro, at the same hearing, said, \u201cI don\u2019t specifically recall the circumstances.\u201d\n\nAfter I pointed out such inconsistencies, there was a silence. Laszlo stammered, \u201cWhat? No.\u201d\n\nPeter Paul finally spoke, insisting that he could not have said \u201csuch a thing,", + " because we knew where the painting came from.\u201d Aware that I don\u2019t speak French, he asked, \u201cAre these French documents?\u201d\n\n\u201cNo, they\u2019re English,\u201d I said.\n\nWhen I asked Biro about the allegedly forged fingerprints on the Parkers\u2019 painting, he peered intently at his glass of wine. I suddenly noticed how blue his eyes were. Calm again, he denied that he had ever forged a fingerprint. The \u201cresin process,\u201d he explained, was just a varnish applied to help the prints stand out. And he said of Pat Wertheim, the fingerprint expert, \u201cHe\u2019s wrong. He\u2019s presenting a theory and,", + " in his conclusion, he treats his theory as fact.... And the fact that he\u2019s producing this work for a do-it-yourself art-authentication Web site\u2014for me, that\u2019s quite tainted.\u201d In an earlier written statement rebutting the allegations, he noted that without his unparalleled equipment many fingerprint examiners could not attain reliable results: \u201cMy laboratory is... equipped with an imaging system capable of Gigabit resolution in hyperspectral imaging, surpassing any camera in existence today. The instrument was developed and built here in the lab and it is the only one of its kind in the world.\u201d Conventional fingerprint examiners, he told me,", + " lacked the training necessary to evaluate fingerprint impressions on art works: \u201cThis is not police work.\u201d Wertheim and Hanley expressed surprise to me that Biro, who had no formal training as a fingerprint examiner, somehow possessed unique skills. As Wertheim put it, \u201cSo Mr. Biro invented the concept, designed the camera, built it, and it is the only one in the world?\u201d\n\nBiro later noted that he had spent only a \u201cfew hours\u201d in Pollock\u2019s studio, in the \u201cpresence of staff,\u201d making it impossible for him to have made a rubber stamp. But when I asked Helen Harrison, who oversees the studio,", + " about this, she said, \u201cThat\u2019s not true.\u201d Her records show that he visited four times, once with Tod Volpe, and that he was \u201cthere for hours.\u201d She said that she did not watch over him all that time; indeed, in her absence he had removed, \u201cwithout authorization,\u201d a match from the floor, which he took to Montreal to analyze for possible paint particles. (When she saw him holding up the match in the documentary \u201cWho the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?,\u201d she demanded that he give it back, and he eventually returned it. Biro claimed to me that an assistant had given him permission to take it.)\n\nHe said Wertheim was wrong to think that the fingerprints on the Parkers\u2019 painting had to be forgeries simply because they were so similar.", + " Biro took my pen, wrote an \u201cX\u201d on his fingertip, and pressed it three times on my notepad. \u201cLook at this,\u201d he said, pointing to the faint \u201cX\u201ds. \u201cAll of them identical. It\u2019s as simple as that.\u201d I noted that Wertheim had told me he welcomed a second opinion from a qualified authority, such as the F.B.I. As I continued to question Biro about whether any fingerprint on the Parkers\u2019 painting was a forgery, he suddenly asked, \u201cWhat if maybe it is?\u201d Though he disagreed with Wertheim\u2019s analysis, his conclusion \u201ccould be right.\u201d Still,", + " Biro had said, this didn\u2019t mean that he was the culprit: \u201cWhy is everybody after me?\u201d\n\nIn the case of \u201cLa Bella Principessa,\u201d Biro did not handle the drawing, and was sent multispectral images from another laboratory, which he then developed and enhanced. Martin Kemp, the Leonardo scholar, told me, \u201cIn terms of what Biro did for us, I have absolutely no problems with any potential ethical issues.\u201d He emphasized that his opinion of the drawing did not depend on the fingerprint evidence: \u201cI\u2019m entirely confident that it is by Leonardo.\u201d\n\nA final verdict on whether \u201cLa Bella Principessa\u201d is genuine may not be reached for years,", + " but more and more connoisseurs have voiced doubts. Skeptics express surprise that there is no apparent historical record for the drawing, given that Leonardo was one of Italy\u2019s most famous painters during the Renaissance. They note that vellum lasts for centuries, and that it would be easy for a forger to obtain old sheets. Many of the critics share the view of the Met\u2019s Carmen Bambach: it just doesn\u2019t look like a Leonardo. ARTnews, which has reported on Wertheim\u2019s findings, recently interviewed Klaus Albrecht Schr\u00f6der, the director of the Albertina Museum, in Vienna. \u201cNo one is convinced it is a Leonardo,\u201d he said.", + " David Ekserdjian, an expert on sixteenth-century Italian drawings, wrote in The Burlington Magazine that he \u201cstrongly suspects\u201d it is a \u201ccounterfeit.\u201d Other art critics have suggested that Kemp has succumbed to a fantasy.\n\nIn March, \u201cLa Bella Principessa\u201d went on display at an exhibit in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Biro saw the drawing for the first time. The crowds were enormous. For several minutes, he stared at the portrait. \u201cIt was stunningly beautiful,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cI felt that Leonardo definitely had to have had a lot to do with the drawing.\u201d\n\nKemp recently published,", + " with a colleague, a book called \u201cLa Bella Principessa: The Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci,\u201d which contains a chapter by Biro, entitled \u201cFingerprint Examination.\u201d In the manner of a law-enforcement officer presenting forensic evidence in court, Biro arranges the images of the \u201cSt. Jerome\u201d and the \u201cPrincipessa\u201d fingerprints side by side, with arrows pinpointing what he identifies as eight overlapping characteristics between them. I asked Charles Parker\u2014a latent-fingerprint examiner with more than thirty years of experience in the field, who has helped to establish guidelines for fingerprint examiners in the United States\u2014to review the chapter.", + " He said that most of the arrows don\u2019t point to actual overlapping characteristics, just random details, and that, judging from the images presented, the partial fingerprint on \u201cLa Bella Principessa\u201d is too poorly detailed for an identification to be made. \u201cNo other examiner I know would sign off on it,\u201d he said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t even get it past the door.\u201d Wertheim agreed with this assessment, and suggested that Biro\u2019s approach was the equivalent of trying to identify a man based on seeing his ear poking out from behind a bush for a fraction of a second.\n\n\u201cThe fingerprint community can get quite dogmatic,\u201d Biro told me in another conversation.", + " \u201cThey don\u2019t like people who rock the boat, and I could be seen as a loose cannon to some, because I\u2019m questioning a lot of things.\u201d\n\nWhereas Biro had once spoken of the absolute objectivity and infallibility of fingerprint analysis, he now sounded more like a connoisseur than like a scientist. \u201cI\u2019m trying to define, for example, what is the point that something becomes a matter of interpretation,\u201d he said. \u201cIn other words, where is that line? O.K., on the one hand, fingerprint practitioners state that fingerprint identification is a science. I\u2019m more toward the other side, where I\u2019m convinced by my own personal experience that it is very much like connoisseurship,", + " because of... things I see they don\u2019t.\u201d\n\nIn law enforcement, a fingerprint examiner can issue only a positive or a negative identification, and is prohibited from speculating on probabilities. But Biro told me that he was now \u201cpushing into the gray areas.\u201d When he first revealed his findings on \u201cLa Bella Principessa,\u201d Biro did not use the term \u201cmatch,\u201d as is standard among law-enforcement analysts, and as he had done in his reports on the paintings owned by Horton and the Parkers; rather, he said that the fingerprint on \u201cLa Bella Principessa\u201d and the print on Leonardo\u2019s \u201cSt.", + " Jerome\u201d were \u201chighly comparable.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat does that mean?\u201d the forensic scientist who works with the F.B.I. asked me. \u201cHomo sapiens and bull mastiff\u2014are they \u2018highly comparable\u2019? Give me a break.\u201d\n\nBy the time that Biro took on \u201cLa Bella Principessa,\u201d his reputation had become so solid, and the public appetite for forensic solutions had become so strong, that he no longer seems to have worried about watermarking his evidence or presenting a perfect match. Many people, not just experts, can look at a painting and argue over what they see, but few individuals, inside or outside the art world,", + " can evaluate fingerprints. In that sense, Biro\u2019s authentications were far less democratic than traditional connoisseurship. Though he told me that he did not want to be \u201cjudge and jury,\u201d he had positioned himself as a singular authority.\n\nJeanne Marchig\u2019s lawsuit against Christie\u2019s may finally lead Biro\u2019s methods to be subjected to review by top fingerprint examiners. Biro emphasized to me that his findings in the case should not be \u201coverblown,\u201d and that he never meant for them to be conclusive: \u201cI see this as the beginning of a process. For me, this is not a closed case.\u201d\n\nI asked him whether he might have been wrong in suggesting that Leonardo had ever touched \u201cLa Bella Principessa.\u201d He looked up at the sky and said,", + " \u201cIt\u2019s possible. Yes.\u201d\n\nDuring one of my final visits, Biro led me through his lab, where a new stack of orphaned paintings awaited inspection. In an e-mail to me, he had written, \u201cI am busy as a bee, now working on several Michelangelo attributions as well as a new possible Leonardo. I guess when it rains it pours. Fingered another Turner, too.\u201d Some of his new research was to be featured in an upcoming documentary on PBS.\n\nI followed Biro into his basement laboratory, where his father\u2019s landscape paintings hung. I wondered what had consigned them to this fate\u2014hidden from the public,", + " seen only by an adoring son. They had, I thought, a certain anguished beauty, but they also seemed derivative. Perhaps Biro\u2019s father had lacked that divine spark of originality, or perhaps he had sacrificed it while inhabiting the skin of immortal artists. In a corner of the laboratory, propped near Biro\u2019s camera contraption, was Teri Horton\u2019s canvas, splashed with blue and red and white paint. As I looked at it, I thought of Thomas Hoving and what he had seen in that initial instant. Connoisseurship is rife with flaws. It is susceptible to error, arrogance,", + " even corruption. And yet there is something about that \u201cstrange breed of cat,\u201d as Hoving referred to the best connoisseurs, who could truly see with greater depth\u2014who, after decades of training and study and immersion in an artist\u2019s work, could experience a picture in a way that most of us can\u2019t. Connoisseurship is not merely the ability to discern whether an art work is authentic or fake; it is also the ability to recognize whether a work is a masterpiece. Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth about art is that such knowledge can never be truly democratic.\n\nBiro showed me the back of Horton\u2019s canvas and pointed to the fingerprint.", + " With growing excitement, he told me that he was pioneering a forensic method that would further revolutionize the process of authenticating art: DNA analysis. I learned that he had reported collecting several hairs on Horton\u2019s painting, which were the same brown color as Pollock\u2019s. He said that he had also removed hairs trapped in the dried paint on Pollock\u2019s studio floor and on other potential Pollock paintings. In an e-mail to a client, who paid him more than fifteen thousand dollars for DNA testing, Biro wrote, \u201cIf this keeps up I\u2019ll be reconstructing Pollock\u2019s toupee very soon.\u201d\n\nBiro was planning to use DNA analysis in a project that he said would rival that of \u201cLa Bella Principessa\u201d: the discovery,", + " in California, of a cache of more than fifty drip paintings possibly by Jackson Pollock. Biro, who had repeatedly examined the works, said that he had extracted a sample of hair that had been embedded in one of the pictures. With the help of the owners of the paintings, Biro had obtained a DNA sample from a living relative of Pollock.* Matching an artist\u2019s DNA on a painting, Biro told me, would finally remove any doubt from the authentication process. It would be, he said, a \u201choly grail.\u201d \u2666\n\n*Correction, August 13, 2010: The DNA sample was taken from Pollock\u2019s aunt,", + " not from a direct descendant, as originally stated. ", + " A fingerprint has intensified the debate about the origin of a mysterious drawing sold at auction for $21,850. Experts don't agree whether it's a 19th\u2013century German work or a genuine Leonardo worth $150 million.\n\nIs it a bargain Leonardo da Vinci picked up under the noses of connoisseurs or is it just an old German drawing?\n\nThat\u2019s the $150 million question that art scholars in Europe and the United States are asking about La Bella Principessa.\n\nThe drawing, depicting a young woman in profile, was bought by a dealer as \u201cGerman School, early 19th century\u201d at a Christie\u2019s auction in New York for $21,", + "850 in 1998 and resold for $19,000 in 2007 to a Canadian collector who says he bought it on behalf of a Swiss collector.\n\nThe debate has intensified in recent months with the disclosure of what has been described as Leonardo\u2019s fingerprint near the top of the drawing, revealed in new photographs taken by a high\u2013resolution multispectral camera.\n\nThe dispute over La Bella Principessa is the latest of the attribution battles that have been unfolding in the art world for more than 100 years. Some of the disputes have been conducted in what one writer said was \u201cgentlemanly but deadly earnest fashion.\u201d The antagonists in the Leonardo brouhaha have behaved in a similar fashion thus far,", + " although other attribution controversies have not been so gentlemanly.\n\nSo is the drawing really a Leonardo?\n\n\u201cI have no doubts at all,\u201d Martin Kemp, who is considered one of the world\u2019s most brilliant Leonardo specialists, told me recently in a telephone interview from his home in Woodstock, England. He is professor emeritus of art history at Oxford University and has spent more than 40 years studying Leonardo. Kemp, who gave the drawing its name, believes that the subject is probably Bianca Sforza\u2014the illegitimate daughter of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan\u2014who was born in 1483.\n\nI asked Klaus Albrecht Schr\u00f6der,", + " director of the Albertina in Vienna, about the rumors that he had been asked to exhibit the drawing. \u201cWe decided we would not show it because we are not convinced that it is an authentic drawing by Leonardo,\u201d he told me in a telephone interview. \u201cIt was examined by our own research center, our curators, our restoration department, and the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. No one is convinced that it is a Leonardo.\u201d\n\nOtto Naumann, a prominent New York dealer in Old Masters, valued the drawing at $150 million, \u201ccontingent upon uncontested attribution.\u201d\n\nAmong the scholars who agree with Kemp is Alessandro Vezzosi,", + " director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci in Vinci, Italy, Leonardo\u2019s birthplace. Vezzosi included the drawing as a Leonardo in a monograph he published in 2008. \u201cOf course there can be surprises,\u201d Vezzosi told Judith Harris, who writes for ARTnews in Italy. He said he is \u201cconvinced it can only be by Leonardo, on the basis of its quality, style, iconography, and its being the work of a person who is left\u2013handed,\u201d as was Leonardo.\n\nMina Gregori, professor emerita at the University of Florence and doyenne of Italian art historians,", + " told Harris that \u201cthe purity of the profile and the Florentine topology of the face\u201d had convinced her that the drawing was by Leonardo.\n\nCarlo Pedretti, Armand Hammer Professor Emeritus of Leonardo Studies at UCLA, wrote in an introduction to Vezzosi\u2019s book that the work constitutes \u201cthe most important discovery since the early nineteenth\u2013century re\u2013establishment of the Lady with the Ermine in Krakow as a genuine work by Leonardo.\u201d But he cautioned that \u201cthe insidious possibility of a fake must always be considered, bearing in mind the ability of an artist like Giuseppe Bossi (1777\u20131815), a noteworthy Leonardo scholar,", + " who assembled a distinguished collection of drawings by the artist, now in the Gallerie dell\u2019Accademia, Venice.\u201d Bossi\u2019s drawings were in the style of Leonardo\u2019s, and some were said to have passed as the master\u2019s, without Bossi\u2019s knowledge.\n\nI called several prominent scholars in addition to Schr\u00f6der to get their views. All spoke on condition of anonymity, and all agreed that the drawing was not the real thing. \u201cI\u2019m dubious,\u201d one said. \u201cIt has been reworked greatly. Be very skeptical.\u201d Another said he had seen the drawing a few years ago and didn\u2019t think it was a Leonardo.", + " A third also expressed doubts. \u201cI haven\u2019t seen the drawing, but on the basis of the photos, it didn\u2019t look like a Leonardo.\u201d He paused and added, \u201cMaybe it is.\u201d\n\nCarmen C. Bambach, curator of drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an expert on Leonardo and organized the exhibition \u201cLeonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman\u201d in 2003. She was quoted in the New York Times in 2008 as saying that, based on a photograph of the portrait, the \u201cwork does not seem to resemble the drawings and paintings by the great master.\u201d Bambach declined to make any further comment more recently.\n\nWhy do many scholars decline to be identified in attribution disputes?", + " \u201cScholars usually don\u2019t talk about other scholars,\u201d said William E. Wallace, Barbara Bryant Murphy Distinguished Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis and an authority on Michelangelo. \u201cIt\u2019s a small world. I\u2019m being approached all the time. I just don\u2019t want to get into the fray. Maybe we have fragile egos and we want people to be our friends. It\u2019s not fun to gather enemies.\u201d\n\nA Christie\u2019s spokesperson issued the following statement: \u201cWe are aware of the recent discussions surrounding the possible re\u2013attribution of this work which rely heavily on cutting\u2013edge scientific techniques which were not available to us at the time of the sale and which even today are new and unproven.", + " Until the debate has resolved itself and scholars are all in agreement we cannot comment on this particular work.\u201d\n\nKemp said he had been sent a digital image of the drawing about a year ago \u201cby someone acting for the owner. I thought it was likely to be one of the clever forgeries, but it did seem worth looking at the original. I did see it two or three months later in Zurich. When I saw it I thought, \u2018Wow, this may really be Leonardo.'\u201d But, he added, \u201ceven if you\u2019ve got a fingerprint or whatever, you still have to do that old\u2013fashioned thing\u2014to say this is good enough to be real.", + " It\u2019s a subjective judgment.\u201d\n\nHe said that the fingerprint on the drawing was compared with the prints on Leonardo\u2019s Saint Jerome, in the Vatican. \u201cThere you can see he used his hands dragging the paint around the underdrawing. That is a strong indication that it was Leonardo\u2019s fingerprints on the drawing and no one else\u2019s.\u201d\n\nIn an e\u2013mail, Kemp added, \u201cThe print evidence has been hugely overplayed by the press. It\u2019s only one supportive factor. If we didn\u2019t have it, the case would still be solid.\u201d\n\nLeonardo left fingerprints on other works, according to Kemp. His portrait of Ginevra de\u2019 Benci,", + " in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., for example, is \u201cplastered with prints. Every technical examination of a Leonardo pre\u20131500 to date shows use of his hands/fingers in painting. After that it becomes less obvious, but still occurs. The Saint Jerome prints are important because they are from an early unfinished painting and are part of the preliminary work, i.e. most likely to be Leonardo himself.\u201d\n\nKemp said the fingerprint was discovered by Pascal Cotte, chief technical officer and cofounder of Lumi\u00e9re Technology in Paris, which has developed a multispectral camera that produces images in extremely high resolution.", + " Kemp then asked Peter Paul Biro to examine the drawing. Biro is cofounder of Art Access and Research in Montreal, where he is director of forensic studies, and he specializes in examining fingerprints for attribution.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a complicated process,\u201d Biro, who said he had been trained as a conservator, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s not possible to be 100 percent sure. It\u2019s more a likelihood situation. The probability of those fingerprints being Leonardo\u2019s is very high. It took me roughly three months to arrive at the observation that the fingerprint on the drawing can be compared to the fingerprint on Saint Jerome.\u201d\n\nBiro said in an e\u2013mail that \u201cthere is another print on the drawing that was not possible to compare to anything I currently have in my database of da Vinci fingerprints.", + " However, it is important to note that this edge\u2013of\u2013hand print is consistent with his application of ridge impressions found elsewhere on other works by him.\u201d\n\nIn the last few years, Biro has attributed numerous paintings to Jackson Pollock on the basis of fingerprints he found on them, including a painting purchased for $5 in a thrift shop by retired Californian truck driver Teri Horton and a cache of 28 paintings said to have been discovered in a Long Island warehouse in 2002. All these attributions were controversial. Most scholars reject them, and other fingerprint experts have questioned Biro\u2019s competence.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s clearly business competition behind all this,\u201d Biro said.", + " \u201cThey are trying to smear my credibility.\u201d\n\nIn an e\u2013mail, Kemp wrote, \u201cPaul has been the very model of clarity and probity in his research, never claiming more than is justified.\u201d He said Biro had looked at the drawing \u201con his own account as an academic researcher rather than as commercial agent. He has received nothing from the owner for his work. I am backing him totally with respect to our project.\u201d\n\nKemp has coauthored a book (to be published by the London press Hodder & Stoughton in March) in which he states that \u201cby process of elimination,\u201d the woman in the drawing is probably the young Bianca Sforza.", + " He describes the portrait as exhibiting \u201cindescribable delicacy and refinement.\u201d\n\nIn the book, Kemp summarizes the reasons for his attribution to Leonardo. Among them are:\n\n\u201cThe drawing and hatching was carried out by a left\u2013handed artist, as we know Leonardo to have been.\u201d\n\nThe drawing shows strong stylistic parallels with Leonardo\u2019s Portrait of a Young Woman, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. \u201cLike other head studies by Leonardo,\u201d the drawing has \u201ccomparable delicate pentimenti to the profile.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe proportions of the head and face reflect the rules that Leonardo articulated in his notebooks.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe interlace or knotwork ornament in the costume and caul corresponds to patterns that Leonardo explored in other works and in the logo designs for his \u2018Academy.'\u201d\n\n\u201cThere have been some diplomatic re\u2013touchings over the years,", + " but the restoration has not affected the expression and physiognomy of the face to a significant degree, and has not seriously affected the overall impact of the portrait.\u201d\n\nA scholar of the Italian Renaissance who was asked to comment on the summary said, \u201cNot one point in the summary is proof of the authenticity of the drawing. Leonardo was already a mature artist when this was said to have been done. He\u2019s not going to be timid the way this drawing is. In the drawing the artist made a contour that outlines the profile. Leonardo would have built it up in light and shadow. The embroidery on her shoulder looks very mechanical. With Leonardo you would have seen the three\u2013dimensional quality of her shoulder.", + " Here it looks flat. It could have been made in the 19th century, not to deceive anyone but just as an exercise.\u201d\n\nAnother scholar said, \u201cIf I were thinking of producing a fake, I would use vellum. It\u2019s easier to get hold of than finding paper with the right watermark. As for fingerprints, if I leave a painting drying in my studio, anyone can pick it up and touch it. How can you say 500 years later that it\u2019s Leonardo\u2019s?\u201d\n\nThe drawing was Lot 402 in a Christie\u2019s sale of Old Master drawings in 1998 and was bought by Kate Ganz, a New York dealer whose parents,", + " the late Victor and Sally Ganz, were prominent collectors of 20th\u2013century art. The work was described in the catalogue as \u201cGerman School, early 19th century. The head of a young girl in profile to the left in Renaissance dress,\u201d executed in black, red, and white chalks with pen and ink on vellum, 13 by 9 inches in size. The estimate was $12,000\u2013 $16,000. The final price was $21,850, including the buyer\u2019s premium.\n\n\u201cThere are cases where everybody misses things,\u201d an art historian told me, \u201cbut it\u2019s a rare event.", + " Normally with a sleeper, one or two people will spot it, but for it to be in a sale at a major auction house where everybody\u2014collectors, dealers, curators, connoisseurs\u2014see it and miss it does surprise me.\u201d\n\nPeter Silverman, who describes himself as a collector of paintings, drawings, and sculpture, specializing in Old Masters, told me that he believes he was the underbidder at the auction in 1998. He said he was in New York in 2007 with \u201cmy friend, a wealthy Swiss collector,\u201d whom he declined to identify. The friend went to the Kate Ganz gallery,", + " saw the drawing, and did not think it was from the 19th century, Silverman said. He bought the drawing for his friend for $19,000, he said.\n\nI asked Silverman what he does for a living. \u201cI used to be in publishing\u2014books, language courses,\u201d he said. He was born in Montreal and now lives in Paris and other European cities, he said.\n\nTwo dealers told me that Silverman is also a \u201crunner\u201d and a \u201cpicker,\u201d which they defined as follows: \u201cA runner is someone who literally runs from gallery to gallery, picking up something for x and trying to get y for it.", + " A picker goes to every minor auction he can find and looks for discoveries, things that are underpriced.\u201d\n\n\u201cI disagree with that appellation,\u201d Silverman said. \u201cI\u2019ve made some of my best coups in major sales in front of everybody.\u201d He said he bought a Raphael about 20 years ago at a Paris auction that had been sold as 16th\u2013century Italian. \u201cI paid about $10,000 and sold it for more than six figures.\u201d\n\nHe said he took the drawing bought from Ganz to scholars, who told him it was a Leonardo, and to Lumi\u00e9re Technology. He emphasized that he is not the drawing\u2019s owner.", + " \u201cI make no secret of the fact that my reward will be not just in heaven if the owner decides to sell,\u201d he said. \u201cI also will reap all benefits of any Hollywood movie contract that may come along.\u201d\n\nThe drawing is scheduled to be featured in an exhibition called \u201cAnd There Was Light: The Masters of the Renaissance, Seen in a New Light,\u201d at the Eriksbergshallen, an exhibition hall, conference center, and hotel in G\u00fcteborg, Sweden, from March 20 to August 15.\n\nWill the world of scholarship reach agreement on La Bella Principessa in our time? \u201cIn general, scholars are trained to be skeptics,\u201d said Wallace,", + " the Michelangelo authority. \u201cPart of our business is to ask questions and raise doubts. Consensus is rarely arrived at, and often it takes a generation or more. Since the beginning of the last century, no single object newly attributed to Michelangelo has gained universal acceptance by scholars\u2014perhaps a drawing or two.\u201d\n\nAnother scholar said of La Bella Principessa, \u201cIt won\u2019t happen in our time.\u201d\n\nKemp, however, is optimistic. \u201cAt the international Leonardo conference in Florence and Vinci last October, I heard no dissent, only praise for it,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it will be almost totally accepted once the book is out in March.\u201d\n\nThe reattribution of paintings has been described as one of the light industries of the art world.", + " The most reattributed artist is probably Rembrandt. In the last 90 years, the number of Rembrandts has dropped by more than 400.\n\nFra Filippo Lippi\u2019s Portrait of a Woman and a Man at a Casement (ca. 1440\u201344), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the most reattributed paintings. At various times since 1883, the work has been attributed to Veneziano, Masaccio, Roselli, Uccello, Botticelli, and Piero della Francesca.\n\nThe late scholar Ulrich Middeldorf once explained in ARTnews why he was staying out of an attribution dispute.", + " When he attacked the attribution of a sculpture to Michelangelo, he said, he was nearly lynched. \u201cI walked away from that affair with a thoroughly blackened name,\u201d he said.\n\nI asked Wallace, \u201cSince there have been periods in art scholarship of expansion and periods of contraction, where are we now?\u201d\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re in an expansionist period,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of fun to discover Michelangelos and Leonardos. It also raises the prices.\u201d\n\nMilton Esterow is editor and publisher of ARTnews. Additional reporting by Judith Harris, Sylvia Hochfield, and Amanda Lynn Granek.\n" + ], + "length": 25942, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 62, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Joe Biden and Paul Ryan have wrapped up the sole vice-presidential debate of the campaign, a much more spirited affair than the first Obama-Romney showdown. Unlike that presidential debate, no clear winner is being anointed. Some highlights: Testy early: Ryan goes after Obama's response to the Libya attack in particular and foreign policy in general. Biden breaks in: \"With all due respect, that\u2019s a bunch of malarkey, because not a single thing he said was accurate.\" One of the things Ryan said: Obama's Mideast policy is \"making the world more chaotic and us less safe.\" Unemployment: Ryan points out that unemployment in Biden's hometown of Scranton is 10%, up from 8.5% since Obama took office. \u201cThat\u2019s how things are going all across America,\u201d Ryan said. \"That's not how things are going,\" Biden chimed in. Ryan's line \"might have been one of the most powerful punches he threw all night,\" writes Rosalind S. Helderman at the Washington Post. 47 percent: Obama didn't address the matter at his debate, but Biden did. \u201cThese people are my mom and dad,\u201d he said. \u201cThey pay more effective tax than Gov. Romney pays with his federal income tax.\u201d The Hill Laugh line: Referring to Romney's 47% remarks, Ryan said that as Biden well knows,\"sometimes the words don't come out of your mouth the right way.\" (But \"I always say what I mean,\" retorted Biden, who added that Romney's \"soliloquy\" on the 47% was no mere mistake.) Taxes: \u201cThere aren\u2019t enough rich people and small businesses to tax to pay for all their spending,\u201d Ryan said of his opponents. Addressing the camera, he said, \u201cWatch out middle class, the tax bill is coming to you.\u201d Biden, on the other hand, said the Ryan-Romney plan is the one that would hit ordinary Americans. \u201cThe middle class got knocked on their heels. The great recession crushed them. They need some help now.\u201d Ryan zings: \"I know you're under a lot of duress to make up for lost ground, but I think people would be better served if we don't interrupt each other,\" he said in a clear reference to Obama's debate performance. Moderator: Martha Raddatz of ABC is generally earning high praise for how she handled things. Huffington Post Full transcript: NPR has one from the Federal News Service here. A theme emerging: \"At the least, Paul Ryan has been able to get Joe Biden to react tonight. In the first half hour, we've seen the vice president, huff, fold his arms, declare Mr. Ryan is spewing 'malarkey' and that 'this is stuff!' The congressman has not shown the same emotion.\" Danny Yadron, Wall Street Journal \"As we pass the midway point, the debate has shaped up as a contest between an extraordinarily aggressive, frequently-interrupting Biden and a more restrained, even subdued Ryan. How that plays at home is anyone\u2019s guess\u2014but it\u2019s a real role reversal from last week\u2019s Obama\u2014Romney forum.\" Alexander Burns, Politico \"Biden has been an explosion of reactions all night: laughing, rolling his eyes, grimacing, sighing, furrowing his brow and practically bursting out of his skin to jump at every answer. The question is: How will it play?\" Michael D. Shear, New York Times So how did it play? Probably depends on your party, notes AP. GOP strategist Karen Hanretty likened Biden to the \"crazy uncle\" at Thanksgiving, while Sen. John Kerry tweeted that \"by the end of this, Ryan may vote for Joe.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "Transcript And Audio: Vice Presidential Debate\n\nEnlarge this image toggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Justin Sullivan/Getty Images\n\nTranscript of the Oct. 11 debate between Vice President Biden and his Republican challenger, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, moderated by Martha Raddatz of ABC News. Source: Federal News Service\n\nMARTHA RADDATZ: Good evening, and welcome to the first and only vice presidential debate of 2012, sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates. I'm Martha Raddatz of ABC News, and I am honored to moderate this debate between two men who have dedicated much of their lives to public service.\n\nTonight's debate is divided between domestic and foreign policy issues.\n\nAnd I'm going to move back and forth between foreign and domestic since that is what a vice president or president would have to do.\n\nWe will have nine different segments.", + " At the beginning of each segment, I will ask both candidates a question, and they will each have two minutes to answer. Then I will encourage a discussion between the candidates with follow-up questions. By coin toss, it has been determined that Vice President Biden will be first to answer the opening question.\n\nWe have a wonderful audience here at Centre College tonight. You will no doubt hear their enthusiasm at the end of the debate and right now as we welcome Vice President Biden and Congressman Paul Ryan. (Applause.)\n\nVery nice to see you. Very nice to see you.\n\nNPR Post-Debate Coverage Listen to NPR Analysis of the Debate Listen\n\nVICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN:", + " How you doing?\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Hey, you got your little wave to the families in. That's great.\n\nGood evening, gentlemen. It really is an honor to be here with both of you.\n\nI would like to begin with Libya on a rather somber note. One month ago tonight, on the anniversary of 9/11, Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other brave Americans were killed in a terrorist attack in Benghazi. The State Department has now made clear there were no protesters there. It was a pre-planned assault by heavily armed men. Wasn't this a massive intelligence failure, Vice President Biden?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " What it was, it was a tragedy, Martha. It \u2014 Chris Stevens was one of our best. We lost three other brave Americans.\n\nAnd I can make absolutely two commitments to you and all of the American people tonight: One, we will find and bring to justice the men who did this.\n\nAnd secondly, we will get to the bottom of it, and whatever \u2014 wherever the facts lead us, wherever they lead us, w will make clear to the American public, because whatever mistakes were made will not be made again.\n\nWhen you're looking at a president, Martha, it seems to me that you should take a look at his most important responsibility.", + " That's carrying forward the national security of the country. And the best way to do that is take a look at how he's handled he issues of the day.\n\nOn Iraq, the president said he would end the war. Governor Romney said that was a tragic mistake; we should have left \u2014 that he ended it \u2014 Governor Romney said that was a tragic mistake; we should have left 30,000 troops there.\n\nWith regard to Afghanistan, he said he will end the war in 2014. Governor Romney said we should not set a date, number one, and number two, with regard to 2014, it depends.\n\nWhen it came to Osama bin Laden,", + " the president, the first day in office \u2014 I was sitting with him in the Oval Office. He called in the CIA and signed an order saying, my highest priority is to get bin Laden.\n\nPrior to the election, prior to the \u2014 him being sworn in, Governor Romney was asked a question about how he would proceed. He said, I wouldn't move heaven and earth to get bin Laden. He didn't understand it was more than about taking a \u2014 a murderer off the battlefield; it was about restoring America's heart and letting terrorists around the world know if you do harm to America, we will track you to the gates of hell,", + " if need be.\n\nAnd lastly, the \u2014 the president of the United States has \u2014 has led with a steady hand and clear vision. Governor Romney, the opposite. The last thing we need now is another war.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan.\n\nREP. PAUL RYAN: (Sighs.) We mourn the loss of these four Americans who were murdered. When you take a look at what has happened just in the last few weeks, they sent the U.N. ambassador out to say that this was because of a protest and a YouTube video. It took the president two weeks to acknowledge that this was a terrorist attack.", + " He went to the U.N., and in his speech at the U.N. he said six times \u2014 he talked about the YouTube video.\n\nLook, if we are hit by terrorists, we're going to call it for what it is, a terrorist attack. Our ambassador in Paris has a Marine detachment guarding him. Shouldn't we have a Marine detachment guarding our ambassador in Benghazi, a place where we knew that there was an al-Qaida cell with arms? This is becoming more troubling by the day. They first blamed the YouTube video; now they're trying to blame the Romney-Ryan ticket for making this an issue.\n\nAnd with respect to Iraq,", + " we had the same position before the withdrawal, which was we agreed with the Obama administration: Let's have a Status of Forces Agreement to make sure that we secure our gains. The vice president was put in charge of those negotiations by President Obama, and they failed to get the agreement. We don't have a Status of Forces Agreement because they failed to get one. That's what we are talking about.\n\nAnd when it comes to our veterans, we owe them a great debt of gratitude for what they've done for us, including your son Beau. But we also want to make sure that we don't lose the things we fought so hard to get.\n\nAnd with respect to Afghanistan and the 2014 deadline,", + " we agree with a 2014 transition. But what we also want to do is make sure that we're not projecting weakness abroad, and that's what's happening here. This Benghazi issue would be a tragedy in and of itself. But unfortunately it's indicative of a broader problem, and that is what we are watching on our TV screens is the unraveling of the Obama foreign policy, which is making the world more \u2014 more chaotic and us less safe.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I just want to talk to you about right in the middle of the crisis. Governor Romney \u2014 and you're talking about this again tonight \u2014 talked about the weakness,", + " talked about apologies from the Obama administration. Was that really appropriate right in the middle of the crisis?\n\nREP. RYAN: On that same day, the Obama administration had the exact same position. Let's recall that they disavowed their own statement that they had put out earlier in the day in Cairo.\n\nSo we had the same position, but we will \u2014 it's never to early to speak out for our values. We should have spoken out right away when the Green Revolution was up and starting, when the mullahs in Iran were attacking their people. We should not have called Bashar Assad a reformer when he was turning his Russian-provided guns on his own people.", + " We should always stand up for peace, for democracy, for individual rights, and we should not be imposing these devastating defense cuts, because what that does when we equivocate on our values, when we show that we're cutting our own defense --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Am I going to get to say anything here?\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 it makes us more weak. It projects weakness, and when we look weak, our adversaries are much more willing to test us, they're more brazen in their attacks, and our allies are less willing to --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey.", + " In fact --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: And why is that so?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Because not a single thing he said is accurate. First of all --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Be specific.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I will be very specific. Number one, the \u2014 this lecture on embassy security \u2014 the congressman here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what we asked for, number one. So much for the embassy security piece.\n\nNumber two, Governor Romney, before he knew the facts, before he even knew that our ambassador was killed, he was out making a political statement which was panned by the media around the world.", + " And this talk about this \u2014 this weakness, I \u2014 I don't understand what my friend's talking about here.\n\nWe \u2014 this is a president who's gone out and done everything he has said he was going to do. This is the guy who's repaired our alliances so the rest of the world follows us again. This is the guy who brought the entire world, including Russia and China, to bring about the most devastating, most devastating \u2014 the most devastating efforts on Iran to make sure that they in fact stop with their \u2014 look, I \u2014 I \u2014 I just \u2014 I mean, these guys bet against America all the time.\n\nREP.", + " RYAN: I --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Can we talk about \u2014 let me go back to Libya.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Yeah, sure.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: What were you first told about the attack? Why were people talking about protests? When people in the consulate first saw armed men attacking with guns, there were no protesters. Why did that go on for weeks?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Because that's exactly what we were told --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: By who?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: \u2014 by the intelligence community. The intelligence community told us that.", + " As they learned more facts about exactly what happened, they changed their assessment. That's why there's also an investigation headed by Tom Pickering, a leading diplomat in the \u2014 from the Reagan years, who is doing an investigation as to whether or not there were any lapses, what the lapses were, so that they will never happen again. But --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: And they wanted more security there.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, we weren't told they wanted more security again. We did not know they wanted more security again. And by the way, at the time we were told exactly \u2014 we said exactly what the intelligence community told us that they knew.", + " That was the assessment. And as the intelligence community changed their view, we made it clear they changed their view. That's why I said, we will get to the bottom of this.\n\nYou know, usually when there's a crisis, we pull together. We pull together as a nation. But as I said, even before we knew what happened to the ambassador, the governor was holding a press conference \u2014 was holding a press conference. That's not presidential leadership.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Mr. Ryan, I want to ask you about \u2014 the Romney campaign talks a lot about no apologies. He has a book called No Apologies.", + " Should the U.S. have apologized for Americans burning Qurans in Afghanistan? Should the U.S. apologize for U.S. Marines urinating on Taliban corpses?\n\nREP. RYAN: Oh, gosh, yes. Urinating on Taliban corpses? What we should not apologize for --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Burning Qurans (immediately?)?\n\nREP. RYAN: What \u2014 what we should not be apologizing for are standing up for our values. What we should not be doing is saying to the Egyptian people, while Mubarak is cracking down on them, that he's a good guy and then the next week say he ought to go.", + " What we should not be doing is rejecting claims for \u2014 calls for more security in our barracks, in our Marine \u2014 we need Marines in Benghazi when the commander on the ground says we need more forces for security.\n\nThere were requests for extra security. Those requests were not honored.\n\nLook, this was the anniversary of 9/11. It was Libya, a country we knew we had al-Qaida cells there. As we know, al-Qaida and its affiliates are on the rise in northern Africa. And we did not give our ambassador in Benghazi a Marine detachment? Of course there is an investigation so we can make sure that this never happens again.", + " But when it comes to speaking up for our values, we should not apologize for those.\n\nHere is the problem. Look at all the various issues out there and that's unraveling before our eyes. The vice president talks about sanctions on Iran. They got \u2014 we've had four --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let's move to Iran. I'd actually like to move to Iran because there is really no bigger national security --\n\nREP. RYAN: Absolutely.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: \u2014 this country is facing. Both President Obama and Governor Romney have said they will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, even if that means military action.", + " Last week former Defense Secretary Bob Gates said a strike on Iran's facilities would not work and, quote, could prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations. Can the two of you be absolutely clear and specific to the American people how effective would a military strike be? Congressman Ryan.\n\nREP. RYAN: We cannot allow Iran to gain a nuclear weapons capability.\n\nNow, let's take a look at where we've gone \u2014 come from. When Barack Obama was elected, they had enough fissile material, nuclear material, to make one bomb. Now they have enough for five. They're racing toward a nuclear weapon. They're four years closer toward a nuclear weapons capability.", + " We've had four different sanctions at the U.N. on Iran, three from the Bush administration, one here. And the only reason we got it is because Russia watered it down and prevented the \u2014 the sanctions from hitting the central bank.\n\nMitt Romney proposed these sanctions in 2007. In Congress, I've been fighting for these sanctions since 2009. The administration was blocking us every step of the way.\n\nOnly because we had strong bipartisan support for these tough sanctions were we able to overrule their objections and put them in spite of the administration. Imagine what would have happened if we had these sanctions in place earlier. You think Iran's not brazen?", + " Look at what they're doing. They're stepping up their terrorist attacks. They tried a terrorist attack in the United States last year when they tried to blow up the Saudi ambassador at a restaurant in Washington, D.C.\n\nAnd talk about credibility. When this administration says that all options are on the table, they send out senior administration officials that send all these mixed signals.\n\nAnd so in order solve this peacefully, which is everybody's goal, you have to have the ayatollahs change their minds. Look at where they are. They're moving faster toward a nuclear weapon. It's because this administration has no credibility on this issue. It's because this administration watered down sanctions,", + " delayed sanctions, tried to stop us from putting the tough sanctions in place. Now we have them in place because of Congress. They say the military option's on the table but it's not being viewed as credible, and the key is to do this peacefully, is to make sure that we have credibility. Under a Romney administration, we will have credibility on this issue.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President Biden.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Incredible. (Chuckles.)\n\nLook, imagine had we let the Republican Congress work out the sanctions. You think there's any possibility the entire world would have joined us, Russia and China,", + " all of our allies? These are the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions, period, period.\n\nWhen Governor Romney's asked about it, he said, we got to keep these sanctions. When they said, well, you're talking about doing more, what are you \u2014 are you \u2014 you're going to go to war? Is that you want to do now?\n\nREP. RYAN: We want to prevent war!\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Inaudible) \u2014 and I \u2014 the interesting thing is, how they're going to prevent war. How are they going to prevent war if they say that there's nothing more that we \u2014 that they say we should do than what we've already done,", + " number one?\n\nAnd number two, with regard to the ability of the United States to take action militarily, it is \u2014 it is not in my purview to talk about classified information.\n\nBut we feel quite confident we could deal a serious blow to the Iranians. But number two, the Iranians are \u2014 the Israelis and the United States \u2014 our military and intelligence communities are absolutely the same exact place in terms of how close \u2014 how close the Iranians are to getting a nuclear weapon. They are a good way away. There is no difference between our view and theirs.\n\nWhen my friend talks about fissile material, they have to take this highly enriched uranium,", + " get it from 20 percent up. Then they have to be able to have something to put it in. There is no weapon that the Iranians have at this point. Both the Israelis and we know we'll know if they start the process of building a weapon. So all this bluster I keep hearing, all this loose talk \u2014 what are they talking about? Are you talking about to be more credible? What \u2014 what more can the president do? Stand before the United Nations, tell the whole world, directly communicate to the ayatollah: We will not let them acquire a nuclear weapon, period, unless he's talking about going to war.\n\nREP.", + " RYAN: Martha, let's just --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan.\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 let's look at this from the view of the ayatollahs. What do they see? They see this administration trying to water down sanctions in Congress for over two years. They're moving faster toward a nuclear weapon; they're spinning the centrifuges faster. They see us saying, when we come into the administration, when they're sworn in, we need more space with our ally Israel. They see President Obama in New York City the same day Bibi Netanyahu is, and he's \u2014 instead of meeting with him goes on a \u2014 on a daily talk show.", + " They see \u2014 when we say that these options are on the table, the secretary of defense walked them back. They are not changing their mind. That's what we have to do, is change their mind so they stop pursuing nuclear weapons, and they're going faster.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: How will you do it so quickly? Look, you both saw Benjamin Netanyahu hold up that picture of a bomb with the red line and talking about the red line being in spring.\n\nSo can you solve this \u2014 if the Romney-Ryan ticket is elected, can you solve this in two months before spring and avoid nuclear --\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " We \u2014 we can debate a timeline.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: (Inaudible.)\n\nREP. RYAN: We can debate the timeline, whether there's \u2014 it's that short a time or longer. I \u2014 I agree that it's probably longer. Number two, it's all about credibility.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: You don't agree with that bomb and what the Israelis --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: No, look \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nREP. RYAN: (Inaudible) \u2014 look, we \u2014 we both \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nMS. RADDATZ:", + " Vice President Biden.\n\nREP. RYAN: I don't want to go into classified stuff, but we both agree that to do this peacefully, you've got to get them to change their minds. They're not changing their minds, and look at what this administration does --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: But what do you do \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Let me tell you what the ayatollah sees.\n\nREP. RYAN: You have to have credibility.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: The ayatollah sees his economy being crippled. The ayatollah sees that there are 50 percent fewer exports of oil.", + " He sees the currency going into the tank. He sees the economy going into free fall, and he sees the world for the first time totally united in opposition to him getting a nuclear weapon.\n\nNow, with regard to Bibi, he's been my friend for 39 years. The president has met with Bibi a dozen times. He's spoken to Bibi Netanyahu as much as he's spoken to anybody. The idea that we're not \u2014 I was in a \u2014 just before he went to the U.N., I was in a conference call with the \u2014 with the president, with him talking to Bibi, for well over an hour in \u2014 in \u2014 in \u2014 in \u2014 in stark relief and detail about what was going on.", + " This is a bunch of stuff. Look, here's the deal --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: What does that mean, \"a bunch of stuff\"?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, it means it's simply inaccurate.\n\nREP. RYAN: It's Irish. (Chuckles.)\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: It is. (Laughter.) We Irish call it malarkey.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Thanks for the translation. OK.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: No, we Irish call it malarkey. (Laughter.) But last thing: the secretary of defense has made it absolutely clear.", + " He didn't walk anything back. We will not allow the Iranians to get a nuclear weapon. What Bibi held up there was when they get to the point where they can enrich uranium enough to put into a weapon, they don't have a weapon to put it into.\n\nLet's all calm down a little bit here. Iran is more isolated today than when we took office. It was on the ascendancy when we took office. It is totally isolated.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I don't know what world you guys are in.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan --\n\nREP.", + " RYAN: Thank \u2014 thank heavens we have these sanctions in place. It's in spite of their opposition.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.) Oh, God.\n\nREP. RYAN: They have given 20 waivers to this sanction. And all I have to point to are the results. They're four years closer toward a nuclear weapon. I think that case speaks for itself.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Can you tell the American people what's worse --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: By the way, they're \u2014 no, no, they are not four years closer to a nuclear weapon.\n\nMS.", + " RADDATZ: \u2014 another war in the Middle East or --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: They're \u2014 they're closer to being able to get enough fissile material to put in a weapon if they had a weapon. But --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: You're acting a little bit like they don't want one, though.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Oh, I didn't say \u2014 no, I'm not saying \u2014 (look?), facts matter, Martha. You're a foreign policy expert. Facts matter. All this loose talk about them \u2014 all they have to do is get to \u2014 enrich uranium in a certain amount and they have a weapon \u2014 not true.", + " Not true. They are more \u2014 and if we ever have to take action, unlike where we took office, we will have the world behind us, and that matters. That matters.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: What about Bob Gates' statement? Let me read that again: \"Could prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations.\"\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: He is right. It could prove catastrophic if we do \u2014 we do it with \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan?\n\nREP. RYAN: And what it does is it \u2014 and it undermines our credibility by backing up the point when we make it that all options are on the table.", + " That's the point. The ayatollahs see these kinds of statements, and they think, I'm going to get a nuclear weapon. When \u2014 when we see the kind of equivocation that took place because this administration wanted a precondition policy \u2014 so when the Green Revolution started up, they were silent for nine days. When they see us putting \u2014 when they see us putting daylight between ourselves and our allies in Israel, that gives them encouragement. When they see Russia watering down any further sanctions \u2014 and the only reason we got a U.N. sanction is because Russia watered it down and prevented these \u2014 (there?) from being sanctions in the first place.\n\nSo when they see this kind of activity,", + " they are encouraged to continue, and that's the problem.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Martha, let me tell you what Russia's \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: What \u2014 let me ask you what's worse: war in the Middle East, another war in the Middle East, or a nuclear-armed Iran?\n\nREP. RYAN: I'll tell you what's worse. I'll tell you what's worse.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Quickly.\n\nREP. RYAN: A nuclear-armed Iran, which triggers a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. This is the world's largest sponsor of \u2014 of terrorism.", + " They've dedicated themselves --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: That's the only thing my --\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 to wiping an entire country off the map. They call us the Great Satan. And if they get nuclear weapons, other people in the neighborhood will pursue their nuclear weapons as well.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President Biden.\n\nREP. RYAN: We can't live with that.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: War should always be the absolute last resort. That's why these crippling sanctions, what Bibi Netanyahu says we should continue \u2014 which, if I'm not mistaken, Governor Romney says we \u2014 we should continue.", + " If I \u2014 I may be mistaken; he changes his mind so often, I could be wrong. But the fact of the matter is, he says they're working. And the fact is that they are being crippled by them. And we've made it clear, big nations can't bluff. This president doesn't bluff.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Gentlemen, I want to bring the conversation to a different kind of national security issue, the state of our economy. The number one issue here at home is jobs. The percentage of unemployed just fell below 8 percent for the first time in 43 months. The Obama administration had projected that it would fall below 6 percent now after the addition of close to a trillion dollars in stimulus money.", + " So will both of you level with the American people? Can you get unemployment to under 6 percent, and how long will it take?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I don't know how long it will take.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President Biden.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: We can and we will get it under 6 percent.\n\nLet's look at the \u2014 let's take a look at the facts. Let's look at where we were when we came to office. The economy was in free fall. We had \u2014 the Great Recession hit. Nine million people lost their job, 1.", + "7 \u2014 $1.6 trillion in wealth lost in equity in your homes, in retirement accounts from the middle class.\n\nWe knew we had to act for the middle class. We immediately went out and rescued General Motors. We went ahead and made sure that we cut taxes for the middle class. And in addition to that, when that \u2014 and when that occurred, what did Romney do? Romney said, no, let Detroit go bankrupt. We moved in and helped people refinance their homes. Governor Romney said, no, let foreclosures hit the bottom.\n\nBut it shouldn't be surprising for a guy who says 47 percent of the American people are unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives.", + " My friend recently, in a speech in Washington, said 30% of the American people are takers. These people are my mom and dad, the people I grew up with, my neighbors. They pay more effective tax than Governor Romney pays in his federal income tax. They are elderly people who in fact are living off of Social Security. They are veterans and people fighting in Afghanistan right now who are, quote, not paying any taxes.\n\nI've had it up to here with this notion that 47 percent \u2014 it's about time they take some responsibility here. And instead of signing pledges to Grover Norquist not to ask the wealthiest among us to contribute to bring back the middle class,", + " they should be signing a pledge saying to the middle class, we're going to level the playing field. We're going to give you a fair shot again. We are going to not repeat the mistakes we made in the past by having a different set of rules for Wall Street and Main Street, making sure that we continue to hemorrhage these tax cuts for the superwealthy.\n\nThey're pushing the continuation of a tax cut that will give an additional $500 billion in tax cuts to 120,000 families. And they're holding hostage the middle-class tax cut because they say, we won't pass \u2014 we won't continue the middle-class tax cut unless you give the tax cut for the superwealthy.", + " It's about time they take some responsibility.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Mr. Ryan.\n\nREP. RYAN: Joe and I are from similar towns.\n\nHe's from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I'm from Janesville, Wisconsin. You know what the unemployment rate in Scranton is today?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I sure do.\n\nREP. RYAN: It's 10 percent.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Yeah.\n\nREP. RYAN: You know what it was the day you guys came in?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: No.\n\nREP. RYAN: Eight-point-five percent.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " Yeah.\n\nREP. RYAN: That's how it's going all around America.\n\nLook --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: You don't read the statistics. That's not \"how it's going.\" It's going down.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: (Inaudible) \u2014 two-minute answer, please.\n\nREP. RYAN: Look \u2014 (chuckles) \u2014 did they come in and inherit a tough situation? Absolutely.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.)\n\nREP. RYAN: But we're going in the wrong direction! Look at where we are. The economy is barely limping along.", + " It's growing at 1.3 percent. That's slower than it grew last year, and last year was slower than the year before. Job growth in September was slower than it was in August, and August was slower than it was in July. We're heading in the wrong direction.\n\nTwenty-three million Americans are struggling for work today. Fifteen percent of Americans are living in poverty today. This is not what a real recovery looks like. We need real reforms for a real recovery, and that's exactly what Mitt Romney and I are proposing. It's five-point plan. Get America energy-independent in North America by the end of the decade.", + " Help people who are hurting get the skills they need to get the jobs they want. Get this deficit and debt under control to prevent a debt crisis. Make trade work for America so we can make more things in America and sell them overseas and champion small businesses. Don't raise taxes on small businesses, because they're our job creators.\n\nHe talks about Detroit. Mitt Romney's a car guy. They keep misquoting him, but let me tell you about the Mitt Romney I know. This is a guy who \u2014 I was talking to a family in Northborough, Massachusetts the other day, Cheryl and Mark Nixon (sp). Their kids were hit in a car crash,", + " four of them \u2014 two of them, Rob (sp) and Reid (sp), were paralyzed. The Romneys didn't know them. They went to the same church. They never met before.\n\nMitt asked if he could come over on Christmas. He brought his boys, his wife and gifts. Later on he said, I know you're struggling, Mark (sp). Don't worry about their college; I'll pay for it.\n\nWhen Mark (sp) told me this story \u2014 because you know what, Mitt Romney doesn't tell these stories.\n\nThe Nixons told this story. When he told me this story, he said it wasn't the help \u2014 the cash help;", + " it's that he gave his time, and he has consistently. This is a man who gave 30 percent of his income to charity, more than the two of us combined. Mitt Romney's a good man. He cares about a hundred percent of Americans in this country.\n\nAnd with respect to that quote, I think the vice president very well knows that sometimes the words don't come out of your mouth the right way. (Laughter.)\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: But I always say what I mean.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: You --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: And so does Romney.\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " We want everybody to succeed. We want to get people out of poverty, in the middle class, on to lives of self-sufficiency. We believe in opportunity and upward mobility. That's what we're going to push for in a Romney administration.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Look --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I have a feeling you have a few things to say here. (Laughter.)\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.) The idea, if you heard that \u2014 that little soliloquy on 47 percent, and you think he just made a mistake,", + " then I think you're \u2014 I \u2014 I \u2014 I \u2014 I \u2014 I got a bridge to sell you.\n\nLook, I don't doubt his personal generosity, and I understand what it's like. When I was a little younger than the congressman, my wife was in an accident, killed my daughter and my wife, and my two sons survived. I have sat in the homes of many people who've gone through what I get through because the one thing you can give people solace is to know they know you've been through it, that they can make it. So I don't doubt his personal commitment to individuals.\n\nBut you know what,", + " I know he had no commitment to the automobile industry. He just let \u2014 he said, let it go bankrupt, period, let it drop out. All this talk \u2014 we saved a million jobs. Two hundred thousand people are working today. And I have never met two guys who are more down on America across the board. We're told everything is going bad. We have 5.2 million new jobs, private sector jobs. We need more, but 5.2 million \u2014 if they'd get out of the way, if they get out of the way and let us pass the tax cut for the middle class, make it permanent,", + " if they get out of the way and pass the \u2014 pass the jobs bill, if they get out of the way and let us allow 14 million people who are struggling to stay in their homes because their mortgages are upside-down, but they never missed a mortgage payment \u2014 just get out of the way.\n\nStop talking about how you care about people. Show me something. Show me a policy. Show me a policy where you take responsibility.\n\nAnd by the way, they talk about this Great Recession if it fell out of the sky, like, oh my goodness, where did it come from? It came from this man voting to put two wars in a credit card,", + " to at the same time put a prescription drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion- dollar tax cut for a \u2014 very wealthy. I was there. I voted against him. I said, no, we can't afford that. And now all of a sudden these guys are so seized with a concern about the debt that they created --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan.\n\nREP. RYAN: Let's not forget that they came in with one-party control. When Barack Obama was elected, his party controlled everything. They had the ability to do everything of their choosing, and look at where we are right now. They passed a stimulus,", + " the idea that we could borrow $831 billion, spend it on all these special interest groups and that it would work out just fine, that unemployment would never get to 8 percent. It went up above 8 percent for 43 months. They said that right now, if we just pass this stimulus, the economy would grow at 4 percent. It's growing at 1.3 (percent).\n\nMS. RADDATZ: When could you get it below 6 percent?\n\nREP. RYAN: That's what our entire premise of our pro-growth plan for a stronger middle class is all about: getting the economy growing at 4 percent,", + " creating 12 million jobs over the next four years. Look at just the $90 billion in stimulus, and \u2014 and the vice president was in charge of overseeing this, $90 billion in green pork to campaign contributors and special interest groups. There are just at the Department of Energy over 100 criminal investigations that have been launched into just how --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Martha --\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 stimulus \u2014 (inaudible) \u2014 are being spent --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Go ahead.\n\nGo ahead, Vice --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Martha, look. His colleague runs an investigative committee --\n\nREP.", + " RYAN: Crony capitalism \u2014 (inaudible).\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: \u2014 spent months and months and months going into this --\n\nREP. RYAN: This is the \u2014 this is the inspector general.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: \u2014 months and months. They found no evidence of cronyism. And I love my friend here. I \u2014 I'm not allowed to show letters, but go on our website: He sent me two letters saying, by the way, can you send me some stimulus money for companies here in the state of Wisconsin? We sent millions of dollars. You know why he said he needed --\n\nMS.", + " RADDATZ: You did ask for stimulus money, correct?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Sure he did. By the way \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nREP. RYAN: On two occasions, we \u2014 we \u2014 we advocated for constituents who were applying for grants.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.)\n\nREP. RYAN: That's what we do. We do that for all constituents who are \u2014 (inaudible) \u2014 for grants.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I love that. I love that. This is such a bad program, and he writes me a letter saying \u2014 writes the Department of Energy a letter saying,", + " the reason we need this stimulus \u2014 it will create growth and jobs. He \u2014 his words. And now he's sitting here looking at me \u2014 and by the way, that program \u2014 again, investigated \u2014 what the Congress said was, it was a model: less than four-tenths of 1 percent waste or fraud in the program. And all this talk about cronyism \u2014 they investigated, investigated; did not find one single piece of evidence. I wish he would just tell \u2014 be a little more candid.\n\nREP. RYAN: Was it a good idea to spend taxpayer dollars on electric cars in Finland or on windmills in China?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " Look --\n\nREP. RYAN: Was it a good idea to borrow all this money from countries like China --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.)\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 and spend it on all these various different interest groups?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Let me tell you it was a good idea. It was a good idea \u2014 Moody's and others said that this was exactly what we needed that stopped us from going off the cliff. It set the conditions to be able to grow again. We have \u2014 in fact, 4 percent of those green jobs didn't go under \u2014 or went \u2014 went \u2014 went under \u2014 didn't work.", + " It's a better batting average than investment bankers have. They have about a 40 percent \u2014 (inaudible) \u2014 loss.\n\nREP. RYAN: Where are the 5 million green jobs that were being promised --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I want to move on here to Medicare and entitlements. I think we've gone over this quite enough. And both --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: And by the way, any letter you send me I'll entertain.\n\nREP. RYAN: I appreciate that, Joe. (Laughter.)\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let's talk about Medicare and entitlements.\n\nBoth Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process.", + " Will benefits for Americans under these programs have to change for the programs to survive, Mr. Ryan?\n\nREP. RYAN: Absolutely. Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts.\n\nLook, when I look at these programs, we've all had tragedies in our lives. I think about what they've done for my own family. My mom and I had my grandmother move in with us who was facing Alzheimer's. Medicare was there for her, just like it's there for my mom right now who's a Florida senior. After my dad died, my mom and I got Social Security survivors benefits. Helped me pay for college.", + " It helped her go back to college in her 50s, where she started a small business because of the new skills she got. She paid all of her taxes on the promise that these programs would be there for her. We will honor this promise.\n\nAnd the best way to do it is reform it for my generation. You see, if you reform these programs for my generation, people 54 and below, you can guarantee they don't change for people in or near retirement, which is precisely what Mitt Romney and I are proposing.\n\nLook at what \u2014 look what \"Obamacare\" does. \"Obamacare\" takes $716 billion from Medicare to spend on \"Obamacare.\" Even their own chief actuary at Medicare backs this up.", + " He says you can't spend the same dollar twice. You can't claim that this money goes to Medicare and \"Obamacare.\"\n\nAnd then they put this new \"Obamacare\" board in charge of cutting Medicare each and every year in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors. This board, by the way, it's 15 people. The president's supposed to appoint them next year. And not one of them even has to have medical training.\n\nAnd Social Security, if we don't shore up Social Security, when we run out of the IOUs, when the program goes bankrupt, a 25 percent across-the-board benefit cut kicks in on current seniors in the middle of their retirement.", + " We're going to stop that from happening.\n\nThey haven't put a credible solution on the table. He'll tell you about vouchers. He'll say all these things to try and scare people.\n\nHere's what we're saying: Give younger people, when they become Medicare-eligible, guaranteed coverage options that you can't be denied, including traditional Medicare.\n\nChoose your plan, and then Medicare subsidizes your premiums, not as much for the wealthy people, more coverage for middle-income people and total out-of-pocket coverage for the poor and the sick. Choice and competition \u2014 we would rather have 50 million future seniors determine how their Medicare is delivered to them instead of 15 bureaucrats deciding what \u2014 if,", + " where, when they get it.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President Biden, two minutes.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: You know, I heard that death panel argument from Sarah Palin. It seems that every vice presidential debate, I hear this kind of stuff about panels. But let's talk about Medicare.\n\nWhat we did is we saved $716 billion and put it back \u2014 applied it to Medicare. We cut the cost of Medicare. We stopped overpaying insurance companies when doctors and hospitals \u2014 the AMA supported what we did. AARP endorsed what we did. And it extends the life of Medicare to 2024.", + " They want to wipe this all out. It also gave more benefits. Any senior out there, ask yourself: Do you have more benefits today? You do. If you're near the doughnut hole, you have $600 more to help your prescription drug costs. You get wellness visits without copays. They wipe all of this out, and Medicare goes \u2014 becomes insolvent in 2016, number one.\n\nNumber two, guaranteed benefit \u2014 it's a voucher. When they first proposed \u2014 when the congressman had his first voucher program, the CBO said it would cost $6,400 a year, Martha, more for every senior 55 and below when they got there.", + " He knew that, yet he got it \u2014 all the guys in Congress, and women in the Republican party to vote for it. Governor Romney, knowing that, said, I \u2014 I \u2014 I would sign it were I there. Who you believe, the AMA? Me? A guy who's fought his whole life for this? Or somebody who had actually put in motion a plan that knowingly cut \u2014 added $6,400 a year more to the cost of Medicare?\n\nNow they got a new plan. Trust me, it's not going to cost you any more. Folks, follow your instincts on this one.\n\nAnd with regard to Social Security,", + " we will not \u2014 we will not privatize it. If we had listened to Romney, to Governor Romney and the congressman during the Bush years, imagine where all those seniors would be now if their money had been in the market. Their ideas are old, and their ideas are bad, and they eliminate the guarantee of Medicare.\n\nREP. RYAN: Here's the problem. They got caught with their hands in the cookie jar turning Medicare into a piggy bank for \"Obamacare\". Their own actuary from the administration came to Congress and said one out of six hospitals and nursing homes are going to go out of business as a result of this.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " That's not what they said.\n\nREP. RYAN: Seven point four million seniors are projected to lose the current Medicare Advantage coverage they have. That's a $3,200 benefit cut.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: That didn't happen.\n\nREP. RYAN: What we're saying --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: More people signed up.\n\nREP. RYAN: These are from your own actuaries.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: More \u2014 more \u2014 more people signed up for Medicare Advantage after the change.\n\nREP. RYAN: What \u2014 what they're --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " No \u2014 nobody is getting shut down.\n\nREP. RYAN: Mr. Vice President, I know --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: No \u2014 no \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nREP. RYAN: Mr. Vice President, I know you're under a lot of duress \u2014 (laughter) \u2014 to make up for lost ground \u2014 (laughter) \u2014 but I think people would be better served if we don't keep interrupting each other.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, don't take all the four minutes, then.\n\nREP. RYAN: Now let me just \u2014 let me say this.", + " We are not \u2014 we are saying, don't change benefits for people 55 and above. They already organized their retirement around these promises.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: They already are --\n\nREP. RYAN: But you want to \u2014 (inaudible) \u2014 these programs for those of us --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let me ask you this: what is your specific plan for seniors who really can't afford to make up the difference in the value of what you call a premium support plan and others call a voucher?\n\nREP. RYAN: A hundred percent coverage for them.\n\nMS. RADDATZ:", + " And what --\n\nREP. RYAN: That's what we're saying.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: \u2014 what cost --\n\nREP. RYAN: So we're saying income-adjust --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: How do you make that up?\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 these premium support payments by taking down the subsidies for wealthy people. Look, this is a plan \u2014 by the way, that $6,400 number, it was misleading then. It's totally inaccurate now. This is a plan that's bipartisan. It's a plan I put together with a prominent Democrat senator from Oregon.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " There's not one Democrat who endorsed his --\n\nREP. RYAN: It's a plan --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: \u2014 not one Democrat who signed his plan.\n\nREP. RYAN: Our partner is a Democrat from Oregon.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: And he said he does no longer support (you for that?).\n\nREP. RYAN: We \u2014 we put it \u2014 we put it together with the former Clinton budget director.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Who disavows it. (Chuckles.)\n\nREP. RYAN: This idea \u2014 this idea came from the Clinton commission to save Medicare,", + " chaired by Senator John Breaux. Here's the point, Martha.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Which was rejected.\n\nREP. RYAN: If we don't \u2014 if we don't fix this problem pretty soon, then current seniors get cut! Here's the problem. Ten thousand people are retiring every single day in America today, and they will for 20 years. That's not a political thing. That's a math thing.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Martha, if we just did one thing, if we just \u2014 if they allow Medicare to bargain for the cost of drugs like Medicaid can, that would save $156 billion right off the bat.\n\nREP.", + " RYAN: And it would deny seniors choices.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: All \u2014 all \u2014 all --\n\nREP. RYAN: It \u2014 it has restricted (formula?) --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Seniors are not denied.\n\nREP. RYAN: Absolutely.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Sorry, they are not denied.\n\nLook, folks, and all you seniors out there, have you been denied choices? Have you lost Medicare Advantage or, if you have signed up --\n\nREP. RYAN: Because it's working well right now.\n\nVICE RESIDENT BIDEN: Because we changed the law!\n\nMS.", + " RADDATZ: Vice President Biden, let me ask you, if it could help solve the problem, why not very slowly raise the Medicare eligibility age by two years, as Congressman Ryan suggests?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Look, I was there when we did that with Social Security, in 1983. I was one of eight people sitting in the room that included Tip O'Neill negotiating with President Reagan. We all got together, and everybody said, as long as everybody's in the deal, everybody's in the deal, and everybody is making some sacrifice, we can find a way. We made the system solvent to 2033.\n\nWe will not,", + " though, be part of any voucher plan eliminating \u2014 the voucher says, Mom, when you're \u2014 when you're 65, go out there, shop for the best insurance you can get; you're out of Medicare. You can buy back in, if you want, with this voucher, which will not keep pace \u2014 will not keep pace with health care costs, because if it did keep pace with health care costs, there would be no savings. That's why they go the voucher \u2014 they \u2014 we will be no part of a voucher program or the privatization of Social Security.\n\nREP. RYAN: A voucher is you go to your mailbox,", + " get a check and buy something. Nobody's proposing that. Barack Obama, four years ago, running for president, said if you don't have any fresh ideas, use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don't have a good record to run on, paint your opponent as someone people should run from. Make a big election about small ideas.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: You were one of the few lawmakers to stand with President Bush when he was seeking to partially privatize Social Security.\n\nREP. RYAN: For younger people. What we said then and what I've always agreed is let younger Americans have a voluntary choice of making their money work faster for them within the Social Security system.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " You saw how well that worked.\n\nREP. RYAN: That's not what Mitt Romney's proposing. What we're saying is no changes for anybody 55 and above.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: What Mitt Romney is proposing --\n\nREP. RYAN: And then the kinds of the changes we're talking about for younger people like myself is don't increase the benefits for wealthy people as fast as everybody else --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Martha --\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 slowly raise the retirement age over time.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Martha --\n\nREP. RYAN: It wouldn't get to the age of 70 until the year 2103,", + " according to the actuaries.\n\nNow, here's the issue.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Quickly, Vice President.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Quickly, the bottom line here is that all the studies show that if we went with Social Security proposal made by Mitt Romney, if you're 40 \u2014 in your 40s now, you will pay $2,600 a year \u2014 you get $2,600 a year less in Social Security. If you're in your 20s now, you get $4,700 a year less. The idea of changing \u2014 and change being, in this case, to cut the benefits for people without taking other action you could do to make it work \u2014 is absolutely the wrong way.\n\nThese \u2014 look,", + " these guys haven't been big on Medicare from the beginning. Their party's not been big on Medicare from the beginning. And they've always been about Social Security as little as you can do. Look, folks, use your common sense. Who do you trust on this? A man who introduced a bill that would raise it $6,400 a year, knowing it and passing it, and Romney saying he'd sign it? Or me and the president?\n\nREP. RYAN: That statistic was completely misleading. But more importantly --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: That's \u2014 there are the facts, right?\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " \u2014 this is \u2014 this is what politicians do when they don't have a record to run on: try to scare people from voting for you. If you don't get ahead of this problem, it's going to \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Medicare beneficiaries have more benefits now \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nREP. RYAN: We are not going to run away \u2014 we are not going to run away --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: OK. We're going to \u2014 we're going to move on to a very simple question to you both.\n\nREP. RYAN: Medicare and Social Security did so much for my own family.", + " We are not going to jeopardize this program, but we have to save it for the next generation so it doesn't go bankrupt.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: You are jeopardizing the program. You're changing the program from a guaranteed benefit to a premium support. Whatever you call it, the bottom line is people are going to have to pay more money out of their pocket.\n\nREP. RYAN: The wealthy would.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: And the families I know and the families I come from \u2014 they don't have the money to pay more out of \u2014 (inaudible).\n\nMS. RADDATZ:", + " Gentlemen, gentlemen --\n\nREP. RYAN: That's why we're saying more for lower-income people and less for higher-income people.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I would like to move on to a very simple question for both of you. And something tells me --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.)\n\nMS. RADDATZ: \u2014 I won't get a very simple answer. But let me ask you this.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I gave you a simple answer: He's raising the cost of Medicare.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: OK, on to taxes. If your ticket is elected,", + " who will pay more in taxes? Who will pay less? And we're starting with Vice President Biden for two minutes.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: The middle class will pay less, and people making a million dollars or more will begin to contribute slightly more. Let me give you one concrete example: the continuation of the Bush tax cuts. We're arguing that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy should be allowed to expire. Of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, 800 million \u2014 billion dollars of that goes to people making a minimum of a million dollars. We see no justification in these economic times for those \u2014 and they're patriotic Americans.", + " They're \u2014 they're not asking for this continued tax cut; they're not suggesting it; but my friends are insisting on it. A hundred and twenty thousand families, by continuing that tax cut, will get an additional $500 billion in tax relief in the next 10 years, and their income is an average of $8 million.\n\nWe want to extend permanently the middle-class tax cut for \u2014 permanently from the Bush middle-class tax cut. These guys won't allow us to.\n\nYou what we're saying? We say let's have a vote. Let's have a vote on the middle-class tax cut, and let's have a vote on the upper tax cut.", + " Let's go ahead and vote on it. They're saying no. They're holding hostage the middle-class tax cut to the super wealthy.\n\nAnd on top of that, they got another tax cut coming that's $5 trillion that all of the studies point out will, in fact, give another $250 million dollar \u2014 yeah, $250,000 a year to those 120,000 families and raise taxes for people who are middle-income with a child by $2,000 a year. This is unconscionable. There is no need for this. The middle class got knocked on their heels. The Great Recession crushed them.", + " They need some help now. The last people who need help are 120,000 families for another \u2014 another $500 billion tax cut over the next 10 years.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman.\n\nREP. RYAN: Our entire premise of these tax reform plans is to grow the economy and create jobs. It's a plan that's estimated to create 7 million jobs.\n\nNow, we think that government taking 28 percent of a family and business' income is enough. President Obama thinks that the government ought to be able to take as much as 44.8 percent of a small business' income.\n\nLook,", + " if you taxed every person in successful small business making over $250,000 at a hundred percent, it'd only run the government for 98 days. If everybody who paid income taxes last year, including successful small businesses, doubled their income taxes this year, we'd still have a $300 billion deficit.\n\nYou see, there aren't enough rich people and small businesses to tax to pay for all their spending. And so the next time you hear them say, don't worry about it, we'll get a few wealthy people to pay their fair share, watch out, middle class. The tax bill is coming to you.\n\nThat's why we're saying we need fundamental tax reform.\n\nLet's take a look at it this way:", + " 8-out-of-10 businesses, they file their taxes as individuals, not as corporations. And where I come from, overseas, which is Lake Superior \u2014 (chuckles) \u2014 the Canadians \u2014 they drop their tax rates to 15 percent. The average tax rate on businesses in the industrialized world is 25 percent, and the president wants the top effective tax rate on successful small businesses to go above 40 percent. Two-thirds of our jobs come from small businesses. This one tax would actually tax about 53 percent of small-business income. It's expected that'd cost us 710,000 jobs. And you know what?", + " It doesn't even pay for 10 percent of their proposed deficit spending increases.\n\nWhat we are saying is lower tax rates across the board and close loopholes, primarily to the higher-income people. We have three bottom lines: Don't raise the deficit, don't raise taxes on the middle class and don't lower the share of income that is borne by the high-income earners. He \u2014 he'll keep saying this $5 trillion plan, I suppose --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.)\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 it's been discredited by six other studies, and even their own deputy campaign manager acknowledged that it wasn't correct.\n\nMS.", + " RADDATZ: Well, let's talk about this 20 percent.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well \u2014 (chuckles) --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: You have refused yet again to offer specifics on how you pay for that 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. Do you actually have the specifics, or are you still working on it, and that's why you won't tell voters?\n\nREP. RYAN: Different than this administration, we actually want to have big bipartisan agreements. You see, I understand the --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Do you have the specifics? Do you have the math?", + " Do you know exactly what you're doing?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: That'll be \u2014 that'd be a first for the Republican Congress.\n\nREP. RYAN: Look \u2014 look at what Mitt \u2014 look at what Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill did. They worked together out of a framework to lower tax rates and broaden the base, and they worked together to fix that. What we're saying is here's our framework: Lower tax rates 20 percent \u2014 we raise about $1.2 trillion through income taxes. We forgo about 1.1 trillion (dollars) in loopholes and deductions. And so what we're saying is deny those loopholes and deductions to higher-", + " income taxpayers so that more of their income is taxed, which has a broader base of taxation --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Can I translate?\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 so we can lower tax rates across the board.\n\nNow, here's why I'm saying this. What we're saying is here's a framework --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I hope I'm going to get time to respond to this.\n\nREP. RYAN: We want to work with Congress --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I \u2014 you'll get time.\n\nREP. RYAN: We want to work with Congress on how best to achieve this.", + " That means successful \u2014 look --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: No specifics, yeah.\n\nREP. RYAN: Mitt \u2014 what we're saying is \u2014 (laughter) \u2014 lower tax rates 20 percent, start with the wealthy, work with Congress to do it --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: And you guarantee this math will add up.\n\nREP. RYAN: Absolutely. Six studies have guaranteed \u2014 six studies have verified that this math adds up, but here's the other point --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President Biden --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Look --\n\nREP. RYAN: (Inaudible)", + " \u2014 one point \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President Biden.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Let me translate. Let me have a chance to translate.\n\nREP. RYAN: I'll come back in a second then, right?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: First of all, I was there when Ronald Reagan tax breaks \u2014 I mean, he gave specifics of what he was going to cut, no \u2014 number one, in terms of tax expenditures.\n\nNumber two, 97 percent of the small businesses of America pay less \u2014 make less than $250,000. Let me tell you who some of those other small businesses are:", + " hedge funds that make 6(00 million dollars), $800 million a year. That \u2014 that's what they count as small business because they're passthrough.\n\nLet's look at how sincere they are. Ronald \u2014 I mean, excuse me, Governor Romney, on \"60 Minutes,\" I guess it's about 10 days ago, was asked, Governor, you pay 14 percent on $20 million. Someone making $50,000 pays more than that. Do you think that's fair? He said, oh, yes, that's fair; that's fair.\n\nThis is \u2014 and they're going to talk \u2014 I mean,", + " you think these guys are going to go out there and cut those loopholes? The loophole \u2014 the biggest loophole they take advantage of is the carried interest loophole and \u2014 and capital gains loophole. They exempt that.\n\nNow, there's not enough \u2014 the reason why the AEI study, the American Enterprise Institute study, the Tax Policy Center study, the reason they all say it's going to \u2014 taxes will go up on the middle class, the only way you can find $5 trillion in loopholes is cut the mortgage deduction for middle-class people, cut the health care deduction for middle-class people, take away their ability to get a tax break to send their kids to college.", + " That's why they \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Is he wrong about that?\n\nREP. RYAN: He is wrong about that. There are \u2014 you can --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: How's that?\n\nREP. RYAN: You can cut tax rates by 20 percent and still preserve these important preferences for middle-class taxpayers --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Not mathematically possible.\n\nREP. RYAN: It is mathematically possible. It's been done before. It's precisely what we're proposing.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.) It has never been done before.\n\nREP.", + " RYAN: It's been done a couple of times, actually.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: It has never been done before.\n\nREP. RYAN: Jack Kennedy lowered tax rates, increased growth. Ronald Reagan --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Oh, now you're Jack Kennedy.\n\nREP. RYAN: Ronald Reagan \u2014 (laughter) \u2014 (chuckles) \u2014 Republicans and Democrats --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: This is amazing.\n\nREP. RYAN: Republicans and Democrats have worked together on this.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: That's right.\n\nREP. RYAN: I understand aren't used to doing bipartisan deals.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " But we told each other what we were going to do. When we did with Reagan, he said --\n\nREP. RYAN: Republicans and Democrats --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: \u2014 here \u2014 here are the things we're going to cut. This is what he said.\n\nREP. RYAN: We can agree on a framework; let's work together to fill in the details. That's exactly --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Fill in the details.\n\nREP. RYAN: That's how you get things done. You work with Congress --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Seriously?).\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " Look, let me say it this way. Mitt Romney was governor --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: That's coming from the Republican Congress working bipartisanly?\n\nREP. RYAN: Mitt \u2014 Mitt Romney --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Seven percent rating? Come on.\n\nREP. RYAN: Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, where 87 percent of the legislators he served with were Democrats. He didn't demonize them. He didn't demagogue them. He met with those party leaders every week.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.)\n\nREP. RYAN: He reached across the aisle.", + " He didn't compromise principles.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: And you (saw what happened?).\n\nREP. RYAN: He found common ground, and he balanced the budget.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (You saw what?) \u2014 if he did such a great job \u2014 if he did such a great job in Massachusetts --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President, what --\n\nREP. RYAN: He balanced the budget four times. He balanced the budget four times without raising taxes.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: \u2014 why isn't he even contesting Massachusetts?\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " (Inaudible.)\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President, what would you suggest \u2014 what would you suggest beyond raising taxes on the wealthy that would substantially reduce the long-term deficit?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Not \u2014 just let the taxes expire like they're supposed to on those millionaires. We don't \u2014 we can't afford $800 billion going to people making a minimum a million dollars. They do not need it, Martha. Those 120,000 families make $8 million a year. Middle-class people need the help. Why does my friend cut out the tuition tax credit for them? Why does he go out after the child \u2014 (inaudible)?\n\nMS.", + " RADDATZ: Can you declare anything off-limits --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Why do they do that?\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Can you declare anything off limits? Home mortgages deductions --\n\nREP. RYAN: Yeah. We're saying close loopholes on high-interest people--\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Home mortgage deductions --\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 for higher-income people. Here --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Can you guarantee that no one --\n\nREP. RYAN: This taxes --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: \u2014 making less than $100,000 will have a mortgage --\n\nREP.", + " RYAN: This --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: \u2014 their mortgage deduction impacted? Guarantee?\n\nREP. RYAN: This taxes a million small businesses.\n\nHe keeps trying to make you think that it's just some movie star or hedge fund guy or an actor--\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Ninety-seven percent of the small businesses make less than $250,000 a year --\n\nREP. RYAN: Joe --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: \u2014 would not be affected.\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 you know, it hits a million \u2014 this taxes a million people, a million small businesses --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " Doesn't tax 97 percent of the American businesses \u2014 small businesses --\n\nREP. RYAN: It \u2014 it taxes a million small businesses, who are our great job creators.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I wish I'd get it \u2014 the greatest job creators are the hedge fund guys.\n\nREP. RYAN: (Let's end?) --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: And you're going \u2014 and you're going to increase the defense budget.\n\nREP. RYAN: Think about it this way.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: And you're going to increase the defense budget.\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " No, we're just not going to cut the defense budget like they're \u2014 they're proposing --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: They're going to increase it $2 billion \u2014 $2 trillion.\n\nREP. RYAN: That's not accurate. We're talking about preventing --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: More than that. No \u2014 so no massive defense increase?\n\nREP. RYAN: No, we're saying is, don't \u2014 OK, you want to get into defense now?\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let \u2014 yes, I do. I do --\n\nREP. RYAN: All right.", + " So --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: \u2014 because that's another math question.\n\nREP. RYAN: Right. OK.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: How do you do that?\n\nREP. RYAN: So they proposed a $478 (sic) billion cut to defense to begin with. Now we have another $500 billion cut to defense that's lurking on the horizon. They insisted upon that cut being involved in the debt negotiations --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let --\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 and now we have a $1 trillion cut --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let's put the automatic defense cuts aside.", + " OK?\n\nREP. RYAN: Right. OK.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let's put those aside. No one wants that.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I'd like to go back to that.\n\nREP. RYAN: OK.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: But I want to know how you do the math and have this increase in defense spending?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Two trillion dollars.\n\nREP. RYAN: You don't cut defense by a trillion dollars. That's what we're talking about. The additional trillion --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: And what national security issues justify an increase?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " Who's cutting it by a trillion?\n\nREP. RYAN: We're going to cut 80,000 soldiers, 20,000 Marines, 120 cargo planes. We're going to push the Joint Strike Fighter out.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Drawing down in one war --\n\nREP. RYAN: We're cutting missile defense.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: \u2014 and one war \u2014 (inaudible ) --\n\nREP. RYAN: If these cuts go through, our Navy will be the small it is \u2014 it \u2014 the smallest it has been since before World War I. This invites weakness.\n\nLook,", + " do we believe in peace through strength? You bet we do. And that means you don't impose these devastating cuts on our military. So we're saying don't cut the military by a trillion dollars, not increase it by a trillion, don't cut it by a trillion dollars.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Quickly, Vice President Biden, on this, and I want to move on.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Look, we don't cut it. And I might add this so-called \u2014 I know we don't want to use the fancy word \"sequester,\" this automatic cut \u2014 that was part of a debt deal that they asked for.\n\nAnd let me tell you what my friend said at a press conference announcing his support of the deal.", + " He said \u2014 and I'm \u2014 we've been looking for this moment for a long time. (Inaudible) --\n\nREP. RYAN: Can I tell you what that meant?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Why --\n\nREP. RYAN: We've been looking for bipartisanship for a long time.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: And so the bipartisanship is what he voted for: the automatic cuts in defense if they didn't act. And beyond that, they asked for another \u2014 look, the military says, we need a smaller, leaner Army. We need more special forces.", + " We need \u2014 we don't need more M1 tanks. What we need is more UADs.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Some of the military \u2014 I know that's \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Not some of the military; that was the decision of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended to us and agreed to by the president. That's a fact.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Who answers to the civilian leaders.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: They made the recommendation first.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: OK. Let's move on to Afghanistan.\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " Can I get into that for a second?\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I'd like to move on to Afghanistan, please.\n\nREP. RYAN: OK.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: And that's one of the biggest expenditures this country has made, in dollars and, more importantly, in lives. We just passed the sad milestone of losing 2,000 U.S. troops there in this war. More than 50 of them were killed this year by the very Afghan forces we are trying to help. Now, we've reached the recruiting goal for Afghan forces. We've degraded al-Qaida. So tell me,", + " why not leave now? What more can we really accomplish? Is it worth more American lives?\n\nREP. RYAN: We don't want to lose the gains we've gotten. We want to make sure that the Taliban does not come back in and give al- Qaida a safe haven. We agree with the administration on their 2014 transition. Look, when I think about Afghanistan, I think about the incredible job that our troops have done. You've been there more than the two of us combined.\n\nFirst time I was there in 2002, it was amazing to me what they were facing. When I went to the Arghandab Valley in Kandahar before the surge,", + " I sat down with a young private in the 82nd from the Menominee Indian Reservation who would tell me what he did every day, and I was in awe. And to see what they had in front of them \u2014 and then to go back there in December, to go throughout Helmand with the Marines to see what they had accomplished \u2014 it's nothing short of amazing.\n\nWhat we don't want to do is lose the gains we've gotten.\n\nNow, we've disagreed from time to time on a few issues. We would have more likely taken into account the recommendations from our commanders, General Petraeus, Admiral Mullen, on troop levels throughout this year's fighting season.", + " We've been skeptical about negotiations with the Taliban, especially while they're shooting at us. But we want to see the 2014 transition be successful. And that means we want to make sure our commanders have what they need to make sure that it is successful so that this does not once again become a launching pad for terrorists.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President Biden.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Martha, let's keep our eye on the ball. The reason I've been in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq 20 times \u2014 I've been up in the Kunar \u2014 I've been throughout that whole country, mostly in a helicopter and sometimes in a vehicle.", + " The fact is we went there for one reason: to get those people who killed Americans, al-Qaida. We've decimated al-Qaida central. We have eliminated Osama bin Laden. That was our purpose. And in fact, in the meantime, what we said we would do, we would help train the Afghan military. It's their responsibility to take over their own security. That's why, with 49 of our allies in Afghanistan, we've agreed on a gradual drawdown so we're out of there by the year \u2014 in the year 2014.\n\nMy friend and the governor say it's based on conditions, which means it depends.", + " It does not depend for us. It is the responsibility of the Afghans to take care of their own security. We have trained over 315,000, mostly without incident. There have been more than two dozen cases of green on blue where Americans have been killed.\n\nIf we do \u2014 if the \u2014 if the measures the military has taken do not take hold, we will not go on joint patrols, we will not train in the field. We'll only train in the \u2014 in the Army bases that exist there.\n\nBut we are leaving. We are leaving in 2014, period, and in the process, we're going to be saving over the next 10 years another $800 billion.", + " We've been in this war for over a decade. The primary objective is almost completed. Now all we're doing is putting the Kabul government in a position to be able to maintain their own security. It's their responsibility, not America's.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: What conditions could justify staying, Congressman Ryan?\n\nREP. RYAN: We don't want to stay. We want \u2014 look, one of my best friends in Janesville, a reservist, is at a forward operating base in Eastern Afghanistan right now. Our wives are best friends, our daughters are best friends. I want \u2014 I want him and all of our troops to come home as soon and safely as possible.\n\nWe want to make sure that 2014 is successful.", + " That's why we want to make sure that we give our commanders what they say they need to make it successful. We don't want to extend beyond 2014. That's the point we're making.\n\nYou know, if it was just this, I feel like we would \u2014 we would be able to call this a success, but it's not. What we are witnessing as we turn on our television screens these days, is the absolute unraveling of the Obama foreign policy. Problems are growing at home, but jobs \u2014 problems are growing abroad, but jobs aren't growing here at home.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let me go back to this.", + " He says we're absolutely leaving in 2014. You're saying that's not an absolute, but you won't talk about what conditions would justify --\n\nREP. RYAN: Do you know why we say that? Do you know why we say that?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I'd like to know why.\n\nREP. RYAN: Because we don't want to broadcast to our enemies, put a date on your calendar, wait us out and then come back.\n\nWe want to make sure --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: But you agree with the timeline?\n\nREP. RYAN: We do \u2014 we do agree with the timeline in the transition,", + " but what we \u2014 what any administration will do in 2013 is assess the situation to see how best to complete this timeline. What we do not want to do --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: We will leave in 2014.\n\nREP. RYAN: What we do not want to do is give our allies reason to trust us less and our enemies more \u2014 we don't want to embolden our enemies to hold and wait out for us and then take over the --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Martha, that's a bizarre statement.\n\nREP. RYAN: That's why we want to make sure \u2014 no,", + " that's why we want to make sure that this \u2014 that --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: That's a bizarre statement, since 49 of our allies \u2014 hear me, 49 of our allies signed onto this position, 49.\n\nREP. RYAN: And we're reading that they want to pull out early.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Forty-nine. Forty-nine of our allies said out in 2014. It's the responsibility of the Afghans. We have other responsibilities --\n\nREP. RYAN: Which is \u2014 which is \u2014 which is what we agree with.\n\nMS. RADDATZ:", + " Do you \u2014 do you think that this timeline \u2014 but we have \u2014 we have soldiers and Marines --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Theirs are sufficient.?)\n\nMS. RADDATZ: We have Afghan forces murdering our forces over there. The Taliban is, do you think, taking advantage of this timeline?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, look, the Taliban \u2014 what we've found out \u2014 and we \u2014 you \u2014 you saw it in Iraq, Martha. Unless you set a timeline, Baghdad in the case of Iraq and \u2014 and Kabul in the case of Afghanistan will not step up. They're happy to let us continue to do the job \u2014 international security forces to do the job.", + " The only way they step up is say, fellas, we're leaving; we've trained you; step up. Step up.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: But let me \u2014 let me go back --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: That's the only way it works.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let me go back to the surge troops that we put in there. And you brought this up, Congressman Ryan. I have talked to a lot of troops. I've talked to senior officers who were concerned that the surge troops were pulled out during the fighting season, and some of them saw that as a political \u2014 as a political move.", + " So can you tell me, Vice President Biden, what was the military reason for bringing those surge troops home before the fighting season ended?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: The military reason was bringing \u2014 by the way, when the president announced the surge \u2014 you'll remember, Martha \u2014 he said, the surge will be out by the end of the summer. The military said, the surge will be out. Nothing political about this. Before the surge occurred \u2014 so you be a little straight with me here, too \u2014 before the surge occurred, we said, they'll be out by the end of the summer. That's what the military said.", + " The reason for that is --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Military follows orders. They \u2014 I mean, there \u2014 trust me, there are people --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Sure --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: \u2014 who were concerned about pulling out on the fighting season.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: But \u2014 there are people that were concerned, but not the Joint Chiefs. That was their recommendation in the Oval Office to the president of the United States of America. I sat there. I'm sure you'll find someone who disagrees with the Pentagon. I'm positive you'll find that within the military. But that's not the case here.\n\nAnd secondly,", + " the reason why the military said that is you cannot wait and have a cliff. It takes, you know, months and months and months to draw down forces. (Inaudible) \u2014 cannot wait --\n\nREP. RYAN: Let me bring some \u2014 let me try and illustrate the issue here, because I think this \u2014 it can get a little confusing. We've all met with General Allen and General Scaparotti in Afghanistan to talk about fighting seasons. Here's the way it works. The mountain passes fill in with snow. The Taliban and the terrorists and the Haqqani and the Quetta shura come over from Pakistan to fight our men and women.", + " When it fills in with snow, they can't do it. That's what we call fighting seasons. In the warm months fighting gets really high; in the winter it goes down.\n\nAnd so when Admiral Mullen and General Petraeus came to Congress and said, if you pull these people out before the fighting season is end, it puts people more at risk \u2014 that's the problem. Yes, we drew 22,000 troops down last month. But the remaining troops that are there, who still have the same mission to prosecute, counterinsurgency, are doing it with fewer people.\n\nThat makes them less safe.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " (Inaudible.)\n\nREP. RYAN: We're sending fewer people out in all these hot spots to do the same job that they were supposed to do a month ago --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Because we turned it over --\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 but we took 22,000 people out for them to do it.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: \u2014 we turned it over to the Afghan troops we trained. No one got pulled out that didn't get filled in by trained Afghan personnel. And he's \u2014 he's \u2014 he's conflating two issues. The fighting season that Petraeus was talking about and former \u2014 and Admiral Mullen was the fighting season this spring.", + " That's what he was talking about. We did not \u2014 we did not pull them out.\n\nREP. RYAN: The calendar works the same every year. (Chuckles.)\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: It does work the same every year. (Inaudible) \u2014 there --\n\nREP. RYAN: (Chuckles.) Spring, summer, fall \u2014 (chuckles) \u2014 it's warm or it's not. They're still fighting us, they're still coming over the passes, they'll \u2014 they're still coming in to Zabul or to Kunar, to all of these areas, but we are sending fewer people to the front to fight them.", + " And that is not safe.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: That's right, because that's the Afghan responsibility. We've trained them.\n\nREP. RYAN: Not in the East.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let's move \u2014 let's move to another war.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Not in the East? (Inaudible) --\n\nREP. RYAN: (Inaudible) \u2014 East, RC-East --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: RC-East, most dangerous place in the world.\n\nREP. RYAN: That's why \u2014 that's why we don't want to send fewer people to do the job.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " That's \u2014 that's why we should send Americans in to do the job instead of the \u2014 you'd rather Americans be going in and doing the job instead of \u2014 (inaudible) --\n\nREP. RYAN: No. We are already sending Americans to do the job --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: No --\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 but fewer of them. That's the whole point.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: That \u2014 that's right. We're sending in more Afghans to do the job, Afghans to do the job.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let's move to another war,", + " the civil war in Syria, where there are estimates that \u2014 estimates that more than 25,000, 30,000 people have now been killed. In March of last year, President Obama explained the military action taken in Libya by saying it was in the national interest to go in and prevent further massacres from occurring there. So why doesn't the same logic apply in Syria? Vice President Biden.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: It's a different country. It's a different country. It is five times as large geographically. It has one-fifth the population that is Libya, one-fifth the population, five times as large geographically.\n\nIt's in a part of the world where you're not going to see whatever would come from that war.", + " It's (seep?) into a regional war. You're in a country that is heavily populated in the midst of the most dangerous area in the world. And in fact, if, in fact, it blows up and the wrong people gain control, it's going to have impact on the entire region, causing potentially regional wars.\n\nWe are working hand in glove with the Turks, with the Jordanians, with the Saudis and with all the people in the region attempting to identify the people who deserve the help so that when Assad goes and he will go, there will be a legitimate government that follows on, not an al-Qaida-sponsored government that follows on.\n\nAnd all this loose talk of my friend,", + " Governor Romney, and the congressman about how we're going to do, we could do so much more in there, what more would they do other than put American boots on the ground? The last thing America needs is to get into another ground war in the Middle East requiring tens of thousands if not well over a hundred thousand American forces. That \u2014 they are the facts. They are the facts.\n\nNow, every time the governor is asked about this, he doesn't say any \u2014 he say \u2014 he goes up with a whole lot of verbiage, but when he gets pressed, he says, no, he would not do anything different then we are doing now.", + " Are they proposing putting American troops on the ground, putting American aircraft in their airspace? Is that what they're proposing? If they do, they should speak up and say so. But that's not what they're saying.\n\nWe are doing it exactly like we need to do to identify those forces who, in fact, will provide for a stable government and not cause a regional Sunni-Shia war when Bassad (ph) \u2014 when Bashir (sic; Bashar) Assad falls.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan.\n\nREP. RYAN: Nobody is proposing to send troops to Syria \u2014 American troops.\n\nNow let me say it this way.", + " How would we do things differently? We wouldn't refer Bashar Assad as a reformer when he's killing his own civilians with his Russian-provided weapons. We wouldn't be outsourcing our foreign policy to the United Nations, giving Vladimir Putin veto power over our efforts to try and deal with this issue. He's vetoed three of them. Hillary Clinton went to Russia to try and convince him not to do so; they thwarted her efforts. She said they were on the wrong side of history. She was right about that. This is just one more example of how the Russia reset's not working.\n\nAnd so where are we? After international pressure mounted,", + " then President Obama said Bashar Assad should go. It's been over a year. The man has slaughtered tens of thousands of his own people and more foreign fighters are spilling into this country. So the longer this has gone on, the more people \u2014 groups like al-Qaida are going in. We could have more easily identified the Free Syrian Army, the freedom fighters, working with our allies, the Turks, the Qataris, the Saudis, had we had a better plan in place to begin with, working through our allies. But no, we waited for Kofi Annan to try and come up with an agreement through the U.N.", + " That bought Bashar Assad time. We gave Russia veto power over our efforts through the U.N. and meanwhile about 30,000 Syrians are dead.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: What would my friend do differently? If you notice, he never answers the question.\n\nREP. RYAN: No, I would \u2014 I \u2014 we would not be going through the U.N. on all of these things --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Let \u2014 let \u2014 let me \u2014 you don't go through the U.N. We are in the process now and have been for months in making sure that help, humanitarian aid, as well as other aid and training,", + " is getting to those forces that we believe, the Turks believe, the Jordanians believe, the Saudis believe are the free forces inside of Syria.\n\nThat is under way. Our allies were all on the same page, NATO as well as our Arab allies, in terms of trying to get a settlement. That was their idea. We're the ones that said, enough.\n\nWith regard to the reset not working, the fact of the matter is that Russia has a different interest in Syria than we do, and that's not in our interest.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: What happens if Assad does not fall? Congressman Ryan, what happens to the region?", + " What happens if he hangs on? What happens if he does?\n\nREP. RYAN: Then Iran keeps their greatest ally in the region. He's a sponsor of terrorism. He'll probably continue slaughtering his people. We and the world community will lose our credibility on this. Look, he mentioned the reset.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: So what would Romney-Ryan do about that credibility?\n\nREP. RYAN: Well, we agree with the same red line, actually, they do on chemical weapons, but not putting American troops in, other than to secure those chemical weapons. They're right about that. But what we should have done earlier is work with those freedom fighters,", + " those dissidents in Syria. We should not have called Bashar Assad a reformer, and we should not have \u2014 we should not have waited to Russia to give us the green light --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: We didn't call Assad --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: What's your criteria for --\n\nREP. RYAN: We should not have waited for Russia to give us the green light at the U.N. to do something about it.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Russia --\n\nREP. RYAN: They're \u2014 they're still arming the man. Iran is flying flights over Iraq --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:", + " And the opposition is being armed --\n\nREP. RYAN: \u2014 to help \u2014 to help \u2014 to help Bashar Assad. And by the way, if we had the status of forces agreement that the vice president said he would bet his vice presidency on in Iraq, we probably would have been able to prevent that. But he failed to achieve that as well. Again --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let me ask you quickly, what's your criteria for intervention?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I don't \u2014 yeah.\n\nREP. RYAN: In Syria?\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Worldwide.\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " What is in the national interests of the American people.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: How about humanitarian interests?\n\nREP. RYAN: What is in the national security of the American people \u2014 it's got to be in the strategic national interests of our country.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: No humanitarian?\n\nREP. RYAN: Each situation will \u2014 will come up with its own set of circumstances. But putting American troops on the ground, that's got to be within the national security interests of the American people.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I want to \u2014 we're almost out of time here.\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " That means things like embargoes and sanctions and overflights \u2014 those are things that don't put American troops on the ground. But if you're talking about putting American troops on the ground, only in our national security interests.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I want to move on, and I want to return home for these last few questions. This debate is indeed historic. We have two Catholic candidates, first time on a stage such as this, and I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion. Please talk about how you came to that decision. Talk about how your religion played a part in that.", + " And please, this is such an emotional issue for so many --\n\nREP. RYAN: Sure.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: \u2014 people in this country. Please talk personally about this if you could. Congressman Ryan.\n\nREP. RYAN: I don't see how a person can separate their public life from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything we do. My faith informs me about how to take care of the vulnerable, about how to make sure that people have a chance in life.\n\nNow, you want to ask basically why I'm pro-life? It's not simply because of my Catholic faith.", + " That's a factor, of course, but it's also because of reason and science. You know, I think about 10 1/2 years ago, my wife Janna and I went to Mercy Hospital in Janesville where I was born for our seven-week ultrasound for our firstborn child, and we saw that heartbeat. Our little baby was in the shape of a bean, and to this day, we have nicknamed our firstborn child, Liza, \"Bean.\" (Chuckles.)\n\nNow, I believe that life begins at conception.\n\nThat's why \u2014 those are the reasons why I'm pro-life.\n\nNow, I understand this is a difficult issue.", + " And I respect people who don't agree with me on this. But the policy of a Romney administration will be to oppose abortion with the exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother.\n\nWhat troubles me more is how this administration has handled all of these issues. Look at what they're doing through \"Obamacare\" with respect to assaulting the religious liberties of this country. They're infringing upon our first freedom, the freedom of religion, by infringing on Catholic charities, Catholic churches, Catholic hospitals. Our church should not have to sue our federal government to maintain their religious \u2014 religious liberties.\n\nAnd with respect to abortion, the Democratic Party used to say they want it to be safe,", + " legal and rare. Now they support it without restriction and with taxpayer funding, taxpayer funding in \"Obamacare,\" taxpayer funding with foreign aid. The vice president himself went to China and said that he sympathized or wouldn't second- guess their one-child policy of forced abortions and sterilizations. That, to me, is pretty extreme.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President Biden.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: My religion defines who I am. And I've been a practicing Catholic my whole life. And it has particularly informed my social doctrine. Catholic social doctrine talks about taking care of those who \u2014 who can't take care of themselves,", + " people who need help.\n\nWith regard to \u2014 with regard to abortion, I accept my church's position on abortion as a \u2014 what we call de fide (doctrine?). Life begins at conception. That's the church's judgment. I accept it in my personal life.\n\nBut I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews and \u2014 I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the congressman.\n\nI \u2014 I do not believe that \u2014 that we have a right to tell other people that women, they \u2014 they can't control their body. It's a decision between them and their doctor, in my view.", + " And the Supreme Court \u2014 I'm not going to interfere with that.\n\nWith regard to the assault on the Catholic Church, let me make it absolutely clear. No religious institution, Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic Social Services, Georgetown Hospital, Mercy \u2014 any hospital \u2014 none has to either refer contraception. None has to pay for contraception. None has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact. That is a fact.\n\nNow, with regard to the way in which the \u2014 we differ, my friend says that he \u2014 well, I guess he accepts Governor Romney's position now, because in the past he has argued that there was \u2014 there's rape and forcible rape.", + " He's argued that, in the case of rape or incest, it was still \u2014 it would be a crime to engage in having an abortion. I just fundamentally disagree with my friend.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan.\n\nREP. RYAN: All I'm saying is if you believe that life begins at conception, that therefore doesn't change the definition of life. That's a principle. The policy of a Romney administration is to oppose abortion with exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. Now, I've got to take issue with the Catholic Church and religious liberty.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: You have,", + " on the issue of Catholic social doctrine, taken issue.\n\nREP. RYAN: If they \u2014 if they agree with you, then why would they keep \u2014 why would they keep suing you? It's a distinction without a difference.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Chuckles.)\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I want to go back to the abortion question here. If the Romney-Ryan ticket is elected, should those who believe that abortion should remain legal be worried?\n\nREP. RYAN: We don't think that unelected judges should make this decision; that people, through their elected representatives and reaching a consensus in society through the democratic process,", + " should make this determination.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: The court \u2014 the next president will get one or two Supreme Court nominees. That's how close Roe v. Wade is.\n\nJust ask yourself: With Robert Bork being the chief adviser on the court for \u2014 for Mr. Romney, who do you think he's likely to appoint? Do you think he's likely to appoint someone like Scalia or someone else on the court, far right, that would outlaw Planned \u2014 excuse me \u2014 outlaw abortion? I suspect that would happen.\n\nI guarantee you that will not happen. We picked two people. We picked people who are open-minded. They've been good justices.", + " So keep an eye on the Supreme Court --\n\nREP. RYAN: Was there a litmus test on them?\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: There was no litmus test. We picked people who had an open mind, did not come with an agenda.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I'm going to move on to this closing question because we are running out of time.\n\nIt's certainly known \u2014 you've said it here tonight \u2014 that the two of you respect our troops enormously. Your son has served, and perhaps someday your children will serve as well.\n\nI recently spoke to a highly decorated soldier who said that this presidential campaign has left him dismayed.", + " He told me, quote, \"The ads are so negative and they are all tearing down each other, rather than building up the country.\"\n\nWhat would you say to that American hero about this campaign? And at the end of the day, are you ever embarrassed by the tone?\n\nVice President Biden.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I would say to him the same thing I say to my son, who did serve year in Iraq: that we only have one truly sacred obligation as a government. That's to equip those we send into harm's way and care for those who come home.\n\nThat's the only sacred obligation we have.", + " Everything else falls behind that.\n\nI would also tell him that the fact that he, this decorated soldier you talked about, fought for his country \u2014 that that should be honored. He should not be thrown into a category of the 47 percent who don't pay their taxes while he was out there fighting and not having to pay taxes and somehow not taking responsibility.\n\nI would also tell him that there are things that have occurred in this campaign and occur in every campaign that I'm sure both of us regret anyone having said, particularly in these special new groups that can go out there, raise all the money they want, not have to identify themselves and say the most scurrilous things about the other candidate.", + " It's \u2014 it's \u2014 it's an abomination.\n\nBut the bottom line here is I'd ask that hero you reference to take a look at whether or not Governor Romney or President Obama has the conviction to help lift up the middle class, restore them to where they were before this Great Recession hit and they got wiped out or whether or not he's going to continue to focus on taking care of only the very wealthy, not asking them to make \u2014 pay any part of the deal to bring the \u2014 bring back the middle class, the economy of this country.\n\nI would ask him to take a look at whether the president of the United States has acted wisely in the use of force and whether or not the slipshod comments being made by my \u2014 my friend or by Governor Romney serve \u2014 serve our interests very well.", + " But there are things that have been said in campaigns that I \u2014 I find not very appealing.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan.\n\nREP. RYAN: First of all, I'd thank him to his service to our country.\n\nSecond of all, I'd say, we are not going to impose these devastating cuts on our military which compromises their mission and their safety.\n\nAnd then I would say, you have a president who ran for president four years ago promising hope and change who has now turned his campaign into attack, blame and defame. You see, if you don't have a good record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone to run from.", + " That was what President Obama said in 2008. It's what he's doing right now.\n\nLook at all the string of broken promises. If you like your health care plan you can keep it \u2014 try telling that to the 20 million people who are projected to lose their health insurance if \"Obamacare\" goes through or the seven point million \u2014 7.4 million seniors who are going to lose it.\n\nOr remember when he said this: I guarantee if you make less than $250,000, your taxes won't go up. Of the 21 tax increases in \"Obamacare,\" 12 of them hit the middle class.\n\nOr remember when he said,", + " health insurance premiums will go down, and $2,500 per family per year? They've gone up 3,000 (dollars), and they're expected to go up another 2,400 (dollars).\n\nOr remember when he said, I promise by the end of my first term, I'll cut the deficit in half in four years? We've had four budgets, four trillion-dollar deficits. A debt crisis is coming. We can't keep spending and borrowing like this. We can't just keep spending money we don't have.\n\nLeaders run to problems to fix problems. President Obama has not even put a credible plan on the table in any \u2014 any of his four years to deal with this debt crisis.", + " I passed two budgets to deal with this. Mitt Romney's put ideas on the table. We've got to tackle this debt crisis before it tackles us.\n\nThe president likes to say he has a plan. He gave a speech. We asked his budget office, can we see the plan? They sent us to this press secretary. He gave us a copy of the speech. We asked the Congressional Budget Office, tell us what President Obama's plan is to prevent a debt crisis. They said, it's a speech; we can't estimate speeches. You see? That's what we get in this administration: speeches. But we're not getting leadership.\n\nMitt Romney is uniquely qualified to fix these problems.", + " His lifetime of experience, his proven track record of bipartisanship \u2014 and what do we have from the president? He broke his big promise to bring people together to solve the country's biggest problems. And what I would tell him is we don't have to settle for this.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: (Inaudible.)\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I \u2014 I --\n\nREP. RYAN: We can do better than this.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I hope I'll get equal time.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I \u2014 you will get just a few minutes here, a few seconds,", + " really.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: The two budgets the congressman introduced have eviscerated all the things that the middle class cares about. It has knocked 19 \u2014 it will knock 19 million people off of Medicare. It will kick 200,000 children off of early education. It will eliminate the tax credit people have to be able to send their children to college. It cuts education by $450 billion. It \u2014 it \u2014 it does \u2014 it does virtually nothing, except continue to increase the tax cuts for the very wealthy.\n\nAnd, you know, we've had enough of this. My \u2014 the idea that these \u2014 so concerned about these deficits,", + " I pointed out, he voted to put two wars on a credit card. He did --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: We're \u2014 we're going to --\n\nREP. RYAN: He voted --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: We're going to the closing statements in a minute.\n\nREP. RYAN: But let me \u2014 just a second --\n\nMS. RADDATZ: I \u2014 you're going to have your closing --\n\nREP. RYAN: Not raising taxes is not cutting taxes. And by the way, our budget --\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: We have not raised --\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " \u2014 we increased spending by 3 percent a year instead of 4 1/2 percent like they proposed.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Let me \u2014 let me calm down things here --\n\nREP. RYAN: So not spending more money as much as they say is not a spending cut.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: \u2014 just for a minute. And I want to talk to you very briefly before we go to closing statements about your own personal character. If you are elected, what could you both give to this country as a man, as a human being that no one else could?\n\nREP. RYAN:", + " Honesty. No one else could? There are plenty of fine people who could lead this country. But what you need are people who, when they say they're going to do something, they go do it. What you need are when people see problems, they offer solutions to fix those problems. We're not getting that.\n\nLook, we can grow this economy faster. That's what our five-point plan for a stronger middle class is all about. It's about getting 12 million jobs, higher take-home pay; getting people out of poverty, into the middle class. That means going with proven pro-growth policies that we know work to get people back to work,", + " putting ideas on the table, working with Democrats \u2014 that actually works sometimes \u2014 and then getting things done.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Vice President, could we get to that \u2014 to that issue of what you could bring as a man, a human being? And I really am going to keep you to about 15 seconds here.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, he gets 40, I get 15, but that's OK. That's all right.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: He didn't have 40. He didn't have 40.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Now, let me tell you,", + " I \u2014 my \u2014 my record stands for itself. I never say anything I don't mean. Everybody knows whatever I say, I do. And my whole life has been devoted to leveling the playing field for middle-class people, giving them an even break, treating Main Street and Wall Street the same, holding the same responsibility. Look at my record. It's been all about the middle class. They're the people who grow this country. We think you grow this country from the middle out, not from the top down.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: OK. We now turn to the candidates for their closing statements. Thank you, gentlemen.", + " And that coin toss, again, has Vice President Biden starting with a closing statement.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, let \u2014 let \u2014 let me say at the outset that I want to thank you, Martha, for doing this, and Centre College. The fact is that we're in a situation where we inherited a god-awful circumstance. People are in real trouble. We acted to move to bring relief to the people who need the most help now.\n\nAnd \u2014 and in the process, we \u2014 in case you haven't noticed, we have strong disagreements. But I \u2014 you probably detected my frustration with their attitude about the \u2014 the American people.", + " My friend says that 30 percent of the American people are takers. They \u2014 Romney points out, 47 percent of the people won't take responsibility. He's talking about my mother and father. And he's talking about the places I grew up in, my neighbors in Scranton and Claymont.\n\nHe's talking about \u2014 he's talking about the people that have built this country. All they're looking for, Martha \u2014 all they're looking for is an even shot. When they've been given the shot, they've done it. They've done it. Whenever you level the playing field, they've been able to move.\n\nAnd they want a little bit of peace of mind.", + " And the president and I are not going to rest until that playing field is leveled, they in fact have a clear shot and they have peace of mind, until they can turn to their kid and say with a degree of confidence, honey, it's going to be OK. It's going to be OK. That's what this is all about.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: Congressman Ryan.\n\nREP. RYAN: I want to thank you as well, Martha, Danville, Kentucky, Centre College.\n\nAnd I want to thank you, Joe. It's been an honor to engage in this critical debate.\n\nWe face a very big choice.", + " What kind of country are we going to be? What kind of country are we going to give our kids? President Obama \u2014 he had his chance. He made his choices. His economic agenda, more spending, more borrowing, higher taxes, a government takeover of health care \u2014 it's not working. It's failed to create the jobs we need. Twenty-three million Americans are struggling for work today. Fifteen percent of Americans are in poverty.\n\nThis is not what a real recovery looks like. You deserve better. Mitt Romney and I want to earn your support. We're offering real reforms for a real recovery for every American. Mitt Romney,", + " his experience, his ideas, his solutions, is uniquely qualified to get this job done. At a time when we have a jobs crisis in America, wouldn't it be nice to have a job creator in the White House?\n\nThe choice is clear: a stagnant economy that promotes more government dependency, or a dynamic, growing economy that promotes opportunity and jobs. Mitt Romney and I will not duck the tough issues. We will not blame others for the next four years.\n\nWe will take responsibility. And we will not try to replace our founding principles; we will reapply our founding principles. The choice is clear, and the choice rests with you,", + " and we ask you for your vote. Thank you.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: And thank you both again. Thank you very much.\n\nVICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Thank you.\n\nMS. RADDATZ: This concludes the vice presidential debate. Please tune in next Tuesday for the second presidential debate at Hofstra University in New York.\n\nI'm Martha Raddatz of ABC News. I do hope all of you go to the polls. Have a good evening. (Applause.)\n\n\n\n", + " Vice President Joe Biden mockingly smiled, wagged his finger, and couldn't seem to stop interrupting Republican running mate Paul Ryan.\n\n\"With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey,\" Biden said at one point, during an exchange on foreign policy.\n\nDemocrats cheered his sharp tone in the only vice presidential debate. Republicans panned the vice president as disrespectful to his younger opponent.\n\nBiden's aggressive approach stood in stark contrast to President Barack Obama's listless _ and widely panned _ turn on the debate stage last week. Obama, to the dismay of his supporters, clenched his jaw, looked down at his notes,", + " and held back his criticism of Republican nominee Mitt Romney.\n\nWhile Biden went after him, Ryan settled on a smirk for much of the debate _ his first on the national stage. He sipped water and cleared his throat through many of Biden's answers.\n\nVoters watching at home were able to view Biden's smile and Ryan's smirk side-by-side, with most television networks broadcasting the debate on a split screen.\n\nEarly on in the wide-ranging debate on domestic and foreign policy issues, Biden leaned back his chair and gave a big grin, often audibly chuckling at Ryan. His laughter sparked a new Twitter handle called \"laughinjoebiden.\"\n\nBut as the 90-minute debate pressed on,", + " the vice president became increasingly agitated. He wagged his finger at moderator Martha Raddatz. His smile sometimes faded into a scowl.\n\nAnd walking a fine line between being aggressive and domineering, Biden started interrupting.\n\n\"Not mathematically possible,\" he interjected during a discussion on the budget.\n\nBut Biden didn't seem to like it much when Raddatz turned the tables on him, cutting him off during an exchange on unemployment. He spread his hands incredulously, leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed. By the end, Biden had turned serious as he talked about his Catholic faith and other issues.\n\nSo how did it play?", + " The early reviews appeared split by party.\n\nRepublican strategist Karen Hanretty wrote on Twitter that Ryan gave Biden the \"let the crazy uncle speak his mind at Thanksgiving dinner\" look.\n\nBut Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, also taking to Twitter, thought Biden was so convincing that \"by the end of this, Ryan may vote for Joe.\"\n\n___\n\nAssociated Press writer Beth Fouhy contributed to this report. ", + " Biden says Romney revealed true self with '47 percent' remarks\n\nBy Peter Schroeder -\n\nVice President Biden swung hard at Mitt Romney's secretly recorded remarks that 47 percent of Americans do not take personal responsibility for their lives.\n\nPresident Obama was criticized by Democrats for failing to mention the remarks, which Romney made at a private fundraiser earlier this year, in last week's presidential debates.\n\nBut Biden pounced Thursday night during his vice presidential debate with GOP running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), using the comments to paint Romney as a candidate more interested in helping the nation's wealthy than the middle class.\n\n\"It shouldn't be surprising for a guy who says 47 percent of the American people are unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives,\" he said.\n\n\"These people are my mom and dad,", + " the people who I grew up with, my neighbors,\" Biden added. \"They are elderly people... they are veterans and people fighting in Afghanistan.\"\n\nRomney later disowned the comments, calling them \"completely wrong.\" Ryan leapt to his defense during Thursday's debate.\n\n\"This is a man who gave 30 percent of his income to charity, more than the two of us combined,\" he told Biden. \"Mitt Romney's a good man. He cares about 100 percent in this country.\"\n\nBut Biden didn't let up. He said that if someone believes Romney did not really mean the remarks, \"I've got a bridge or something to sell you.\"\n\nBiden also jabbed at Republicans for signing the Americans for Tax Reform pledge to not approve higher taxes,", + " headed by Grover Norquist.\n\n\"Instead of signing pledges to Grover Norquist not to ask the wealthiest among us not to contribute to bring back the middle class, they should be signing a pledge saying to the middle class we're going to level the playing field,\" the vice president said.\n\n\"It's about time they took responsibility,\" he added.\n\nRyan closed the exchange with a parting jab at Biden's tendency to gaffe.\n\n\"I think the vice president very well knows that sometimes the words don't come out of your mouth the right way,\" he said.\n\nBiden responded that he usually means what he says \u2014 and said voters he believe Romney was stating his true beliefs in that candid \"47 percent\"", + " moment. ", + " Live Fact-Checking\n\nTimes reporters are evaluating the candidates' statements tonight. What have you heard from Mr. Biden or Mr. Ryan that deserves a second look?\n\nThank you for your submission. If it is approved, you will see it below.\n\nSubmit a comment or question\n\nLogin to submit your question ", + " The Republican National Committee is rolling out a plan to review what worked and what didn't for the party in the 2012 cycle, appointing five people at the top of a committee that will make recommendations on things like demographics, messaging and fundraising.\n\n\n\nThe Growth and Opportunity Project is going to be chaired by RNC committee member Henry Barbour, longtime Jeb Bush adviser and political operative Sally Bradshaw, former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, Puerto Rico RNC committee member Zori Fonalledas, and South Carolina RNC member Glenn McCall. Priebus, who is running for a second term, is holding a call with committee members to roll out the plan this afternoon.\n\n\n\nThe plan is to focus on:", + " campaign mechanics, fundraising, demographics, messaging, outside groups, campaign finance, the national primary process and, last but not least, what the successful Democratic efforts revealed about the way forward, and recommend plans for the way forward, sources familiar with the plan said.\n\n\n\nPriebus had told a large group of donors in New York last week that the review would be conducted outside the building and would not be led by RNC staff. But sources familiar with the project said that there are 2 RNC senior staffers, Ben Kay and Sara Armstrong, assigned to the project as support staff, saying the goal between them and the RNC members involved was to have,", + " as one source said, \"both inside and outside influence\" to bring in a several different points of view.\n\nStill, the source insisted that \"the GOP has problems but they are solvable. We have to look at what we are doing right and what we\u2019re doing wrong and lay out our vision and plans for Americans so everyone knows what we stand for. 2010 was the biggest mid-term win for one party since the 1938 election. Our ideas still resonate, but we need to examine what\u2019s working and what isn\u2019t. We have 30 Governors right now, but we want to listen and learn so we do better in presidential years as well.\"\n\n\n\nStill,", + " given the complaints about the party, the composition of the committee includes at least one Priebus ally - Barbour - and others with ties to Bush-world. It includes demographic diversity, but less so ideologically. Officials said the review will include a broad swath of people within the party, including donors and grassroots members, but it remains to be seen how conservative activists react.\n\nThe main focus of the review is inclusion of new voters for future victories, the sources said, calling the eight areas of review an initial start, with other areas getting talked about as time goes on. There will be \"informal discussions with small and large groups,\" and formal sit-downs and conference calls.", + " They will look to give Priebus a review in the coming months, the source said.\n\n\n\nThe RNC isn\u2019t the only group assessing how 2012 went so terribly wrong. The high command of American Crossroads, the most powerful of the GOP SuperPACs, met last week in Washington, Republican sources tell POLITICO. Heavyweight advisers Haley Barbour, Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove were all in town for the meeting, which featured a discussion of the campaign and the first extensive conversation about how the group should approach the 2014 mid-terms. The group is not expected to play a role in the two 2013 gubernatorial races,", + " deferring to the RGA, but is considering how to shape the next round of congressional elections. At the top of the agenda: influencing candidate selection in GOP primaries.\n\n\n\nBut before they turn completely to 2014, Crossroads is still diagnosing last month\u2019s results. The group digested a series of 2012 memos mixed brutal analysis with some self-reassurance. In the first category, pollster Glen Bolger bluntly warned in top paragraph of his memo that the GOP is in danger of becoming a party that can only win in non-presidential years when the composition of the electorate doesn\u2019t reflect the country. Pointing to Republican\u2019s difficulties with Hispanics,", + " Bolger, who is partners with Mitt Romney\u2019s 2012 pollster, wrote: \"the Republican Party is in danger of becoming the 'Win In Off Years Only Party' unless we make a full-throated improvement with Hispanic voters. And, we have to admit it is us, not them.\"\n\n\n\nYet even as they attempt to learn from what happened, Crossroads also is preparing to make clear to their donors that they weren\u2019t blind to the difficulties of Romney\u2019s winning the presidency. One of the internal memos prepared for the meeting detailed on a state-by-state basis the group\u2019s final polling in each state and the actual results.", + " Their surveys were closer to the outcome than Romney\u2019s internal data.\n\n\n\nLast week\u2019s pow-wow was something of a prelude before Crossroads comes up with their final report on 2012, which is expected to take place after the first of the year.\n\n* This post and its headline have been updated\n\n" + ], + "length": 26821, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 63, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The Cubs beat the Brewers 4-0 last night, gaining ground toward a wild-card spot in the National League playoffs, and if Chicago wins tonight, they may have a goat to thank. For 69 years, 11 months, and 17 days, the MLB team has labored under \"The Billy Goat Curse,\" which the superstitious believe has kept the Cubs from winning a title in Wrigley Field\u2014and that a group of competitive eaters hoped to break last night by devouring a 40-pound goat, NBC Chicago reports. The curse was supposedly cast during the 1945 World Series, when Billy Sianis, the owner of Billy Goat Tavern, is said to have shown up at the ballpark with his pet goat, Murphy. The goat wasn't allowed entry by Cubs owner PK Wrigley himself because it reeked, the Washington Post notes, and Sianis reportedly screamed in a rage outside the park: \"The Cubs ain't gonna win no more!\" The Cubs not only lost that World Series, but they haven't been back to the championships since, earning them the nickname the \"Lovable Losers.\" Past attempts to lift the curse have proven futile, the tavern's website notes. Per the Post, hot dog-eating champ Takeru Kobayashi joined four other competitive eaters at a Chicago restaurant last night to break the spell, and their alchemy involved chowing down on a cooked 40-pound goat in a chowdown one observer said transpired in \"about twelve minutes,\" adding, \"That was \u2026 disgusting.\" And if the Cubs don't make the playoffs? As the Post puts it, the goat gorging will just have been \"much ado about mutton.\" If they win the World Series, however, you could have a shot at an $85,000 DeLorean. (Read all about the curse here.)\n", + "docs": [ + "\n\nSam Sianis, owner of the Billy Goat Tavern and son of the man ejected from Wrigley Field in 1945, acknowledges the crowd along with his goat prior to a playoff game in 1984. (AP Photo)\n\nYou\u2019ve heard of the the Cubs\u2019 Curse of the Billy Goat, right? Just to recap, during the 1945 World Series, the owner of Chicago\u2019s Billy Goat Tavern owner was supposedly kicked out of Wrigley Field because of the smell of his pet goat, at which point he cursed the team to never win a title at that ballpark.\n\nSure enough, the Cubs haven\u2019t so much as been to the World Series since then,", + " and they haven\u2019t won a championship since 1908. However, with this year\u2019s team poised to make a postseason run, some Cubs fans did what they could Tuesday to lift the curse.\n\nThese weren\u2019t just ordinary fans, though \u2014 they were a group of competitive eaters, including Takeru Kobayashi, famous for dominating the July 4 Nathan\u2019s hot dog-eating contest from 2001 to 2006. And what did these eaters consume?\n\nWhy, a goat, of course.\n\nAbout to watch the Hot Dog Champion Kobayashi break the Billy Goat Curse. #legend pic.twitter.com/5lzaa3JAt9 \u2014 Joe Difino (@Joe_Difino8)", + " September 23, 2015\n\nFour guys are about to eat 40 pounds of goat. This is happening. pic.twitter.com/hRKTXCnXI5 \u2014 Matt Lindner (@mattlindner) September 23, 2015\n\nAnd this is what 40 pounds of cooked goat looks like. pic.twitter.com/RWh1GlYlkr \u2014 Matt Lindner (@mattlindner) September 23, 2015\n\nThe event took place at a Chicago restaurant owned by competitive eaters Pat \u201cDeep Dish\u201d Bertoletti and Tim Brown. They, along with Kobayashi,", + " Kevin \u201cL.A. Beast\u201d Strahle and Bob \u201cNotorious B.O.B.\u201d Shoudt, took down 40 pounds of cooked goat in mere minutes.\n\nKobayashi with the aftermath. 40 pounds if goat gone in about twelve minutes. That was\u2026disgusting. pic.twitter.com/ACnMgScwxT \u2014 Matt Lindner (@mattlindner) September 23, 2015\n\nOnly time will tell if the stunt was worth it. Of course, the Cubs first must reach the postseason, or else it was much ado about mutton.\n\nThe team, though, is very well-positioned to make the playoffs,", + " with a 10-game lead over its closest competitor (the Giants) for the second wild-card spot. The Cubs have made the postseason six times since 1945, most recently in 2008, but they have only won one playoff series, in 2003.\n\n(H/T The Score) ", + " Eduardo Perez and Keith Law discuss whether Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta can beat out Dodgers pitcher Zack Greinke for the NL Cy Young Award. (1:53)\n\nCHICAGO -- Jake Arrieta said he didn't feel sharp and that he was a little off Tuesday night.\n\nThe National League Cy Young Award candidate still tossed a three-hitter.\n\nArrieta became the first pitcher in the major leagues to reach 20 victories, Kris Bryant set the Cubs' rookie record for home runs and Chicago inched closer to a playoff berth with a 4-0 win over the Milwaukee Brewers.\n\nLooking loose after manager Joe Maddon entertained the team with a petting zoo in the outfield at Wrigley Field before the game,", + " Arrieta (20-6) struck out 11 for Chicago, whose magic number for making its first postseason in seven years dropped to three.\n\nEditor's Picks Rogers: Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta's historic season reaches 20 wins Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon opted to leave starter Jake Arrieta in for the ninth inning so he could make his 20th victory of the season a complete one.\n\nStats & Info: Arrieta rolls to 20th win of season Jake Arrieta became the first pitcher in the majors to 20 wins and continues his impressive dominance since the All-Star break.\n\nTuesday's Top 5:", + " Jake Arrieta is good In his past 18 starts, Jake Arrieta has had 18 quality starts and is 14-1 with a 0.94 ERA. 2 Related\n\nThe right-hander retired 14 in a row in one stretch in becoming the first Cubs pitcher to win 20 games since Jon Lieber in 2001.\n\n\"I've alluded to it before but it just means that I'm putting my team in positions to win ballgames,\" Arrieta said. \"At the end of the day, that's our goal, is to try and pile on as many as we can especially with where we're at in the season.\"\n\nBryant,", + " whose April 17 debut was one of the most anticipated in years, hit a two-run homer in the third off Tyler Cravy (0-8) to give Chicago a 2-0 lead. It was Bryant's 26th long ball, besting Billy Williams' mark set in 1961. Bryant added a run-scoring double in the eighth.\n\nHe also relished a curtain call after his third-inning drive.\n\n\"That was a special moment for me to get up on the steps and get that recognition,\" Bryant said. \"It was something I'll never forget.\"\n\nKyle Schwarber was credited with an RBI double in the fifth when shortstop Jean Segura couldn't catch his high popup to short right field,", + " allowing Dexter Fowler to score.\n\nBut Tuesday belonged to Arrieta, who added another accomplishment to a fine season that included a no-hitter Aug. 30 at the Los Angeles Dodgers.\n\n\"Jake is good,\" Maddon deadpanned as he began his postgame news conference. \"That was outstanding once again.\"\n\nBy beating Milwaukee, Arrieta became the first Chicago pitcher since Hall of Famer Fergie Jenkins in 1971 to win at least 20 games and strike out at least 200 in a season. He also lowered his ERA to 1.88, giving him a chance to become the Cubs' first qualifying starter with a sub-", + "2.00 ERA since Grover Cleveland Alexander had a 1.91 mark in 1920.\n\n\"He's got four good pitches.\" Brewers manager Craig Counsell said of Arrieta. \"How many guys have four good pitches?\"\n\nArrieta also lowered his ERA to 0.86 since the All-Star break, which would be a major league record, and he continued perhaps his best stretch of the season.\n\n\"It's hard to say otherwise,\" Arrieta said. \"It's been good. It's been consistent.\"\n\nCravy went four innings and allowed two runs and three hits for the Brewers, who lost their 10th in 11.\n\n\"At this point in the season,", + " he's pretty much going to capitalize on a miss every time,\" Cravy said. \"(Bryant) got me tonight.\"\n\nWALKING IT BACK\n\nOn Monday, Maddon blamed a Starlin Castro error on the field conditions caused by a recent AC/DC concert at Wrigley Field. A day later, Maddon backtracked.\n\n\"I have no problem with the concerts whatsoever,\" Maddon said. \"Big music fan.\"\n\nMaddon said it was \"an attempt at weak humor\" Monday.\n\n\"I was very flippant,\" Maddon said.\n\nTHE CHASE TO 100\n\nBryant had three RBIs to reach 98 on the season,", + " giving him a 98-95 lead on Anthony Rizzo.\n\nTRAINER'S ROOM\n\nBrewers: OF Ryan Braun (back) took batting practice but remained out of the lineup. Counsell didn't rule out Braun playing again this season.... C Jonathan Lucroy (concussion) is getting closer and could see time at first base, but he will not catch for the remainder of the season.... RHP Jimmy Nelson (head contusion) was placed on the 60-day disabled list, and RHP Michael Blazek (broken right hand) was transferred to the 60-day DL.\n\nCubs: INF Addison Russell didn't start but Maddon said it was to rest him.", + " He entered as a defensive replacement in the seventh.\n\nUP NEXT\n\nChicago RHP Kyle Hendricks (7-6, 4.22 ERA) faces Milwaukee RHP Zach Davies (1-2, 6.00). Hendricks has gone 3-0 with a 1.07 ERA in four starts against the Brewers. ", + " The big question as Major League Baseball starts up after the All-Star Game is: Can the Chicago Cubs win the World Series for the first time in 100 years? The Cubs will win if they can break the \"Curse of the Billy Goat.\" What's that? Let's take a look at some Chicago baseball history.\n\nIn the very early days of professional baseball, the Cubs were a dynasty. The team was led by such Hall of Fame stars as first baseman Frank Chance and pitcher Mordecai \"Three-Finger\" Brown (folks called him that because he lost part of his index finger in a farm accident). The Cubs won a record 116 games in 1906 (a record they share with the Seattle Mariners), and they won the World Series in 1907 and 1908.\n\nThe Cubs won the National League pennant and appeared in seven more World Series after that but never won the big prize again.", + " The last time the Cubs played in the World Series was 1945, the year of the curse.\n\nThe story is that there was a man, William Sianis, who owned a tavern in Chicago. Sianis was known as \"Billy Goat\" because he kept a goat named Murphy at his tavern. Sianis called his bar and restaurant Billy Goat Tavern.\n\nOn Oct. 6, 1945, with the Cubs leading the World Series two games to one, Sianis bought two tickets to Game 4 of the World Series. Sianis showed up at the ballpark with Murphy. The owners of the Cubs would not let Murphy into the game,", + " saying animals were not allowed in the ballpark and besides, the goat smelled. Sianis was angry and supposedly stood outside the park and yelled, \"The Cubs ain't gonna win no more!\"\n\nI don't believe in curses, but the Cubs lost the series in 1945, and though they have come close a few times, they have never returned to the World Series.\n\nSo can the Cubs break the curse? After all, the Red Sox broke the \"Curse of the Bambino,\" the supposed string of bad luck Boston had because it traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, when the Sox won the World Series in 2004 and 2007.\n\nSo far this season the Cubs have been terrific,", + " putting together the best record in the National League. The Cubs have a solid everyday lineup including all-stars Geovany Soto at catcher, Aramis Ramirez at third base and Kosuke Fukudome in the outfield. But most important, the Cubs have five very good starting pitchers. So the Cubs should hold off the St. Louis Cardinals and the Milwaukee Brewers and win the tough National League Central Division to make the playoffs.\n\nBut to win the World Series, even a good team needs to be a little lucky. And luck is something the Chicago Cubs have not had for a long, long time.\n\nFred Bowen writes KidsPost's sports opinion column and is an author of sports novels for kids.", + " \"Cubbies\" redirects here. For the minor league baseball team formerly known as the Rockford Cubbies, see Dayton Dragons\n\nThe Chicago Cubs are an American professional baseball team based in Chicago, Illinois. The Cubs compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (NL) Central division. The team plays its home games at Wrigley Field, located on the city's North Side. The Cubs are one of two major league teams in Chicago; the other, the Chicago White Sox, is a member of the American League (AL) Central division. The Cubs, first known as the White Stockings,", + " were a founding member of the NL in 1876, becoming the Chicago Cubs in 1903.[4]\n\nThe Cubs have appeared in a total of eleven World Series. The 1906 Cubs won 116 games, finishing 116\u201336 and posting a modern-era record winning percentage of.763, before losing the World Series to the Chicago White Sox (\"The Hitless Wonders\") by four games to two. The Cubs won back-to-back World Series championships in 1907 and 1908, becoming the first major league team to play in three consecutive World Series, and the first to win it twice. Most recently, the Cubs won the 2016 National League Championship Series and 2016 World Series,", + " which ended a 71-year National League pennant drought and a 108-year World Series championship drought,[5] both of which are record droughts in Major League Baseball.[6][7] The 108-year drought was also the longest such occurrence in all major North American sports. Since the start of divisional play in 1969, the Cubs have appeared in the postseason nine times through the 2017 season.[5][8]\n\nThe Cubs are known as \"the North Siders\", a reference to the location of Wrigley Field within the city of Chicago, and in contrast to the White Sox, whose home field (Guaranteed Rate Field)", + " is located on the South Side.\n\nThe Cubs have multiple rivalries. There is a divisional rivalry with the St. Louis Cardinals, a newer rivalry with the Milwaukee Brewers and an interleague rivalry with the Chicago White Sox.\n\nHistory\n\nEarly club history\n\n1876\u20131902: A National League\n\nThe 1876 White Stockings won the N.L. championship\n\nThe Cubs began playing in 1870 as the Chicago White Stockings, joining the National League (NL) in 1876 as a charter member. Owner William Hulbert signed multiple star players, such as pitcher Albert Spalding and infielders Ross Barnes,", + " Deacon White, and Adrian \"Cap\" Anson, to join the team prior to the N.L.'s first season. The White Stockings played their home games at West Side Grounds and quickly established themselves as one of the new league's top teams. Spalding won forty-seven games and Barnes led the league in hitting at.429 as Chicago won the first ever National League pennant, which at the time was the game's top prize.\n\nAfter back-to-back pennants in 1880 and 1881, Hulbert died, and Spalding, who had retired to start Spalding sporting goods, assumed ownership of the club.", + " The White Stockings, with Anson acting as player-manager, captured their third consecutive pennant in 1882, and Anson established himself as the game's first true superstar. In 1885 and '86, after winning N.L. pennants, the White Stockings met the champions of the short-lived American Association in that era's version of a World Series. Both seasons resulted in matchups with the St. Louis Brown Stockings, with the clubs tying in 1885 and with St. Louis winning in 1886. This was the genesis of what would eventually become one of the greatest rivalries in sports. In all,", + " the Anson-led Chicago Base Ball Club won six National League pennants between 1876 and 1886. As a result, Chicago's club nickname transitioned, and by 1890 they had become known as the Chicago Colts,[9] or sometimes \"Anson's Colts\", referring to Cap's influence within the club. Anson was the first player in history credited with collecting 3,000 career hits. After a disappointing record of 59\u201373 and a ninth-place finish in 1897, Anson was released by the Cubs as both a player and manager.[10] Due to Anson's absence from the club after 22 years,", + " local newspaper reporters started to refer to the Colts as the \"Orphans\".[10]\n\nAfter the 1900 season, the American Base-Ball League formed as a rival professional league, and incidentally the club's old White Stockings nickname (eventually shortened to White Sox) would be adopted by a new American League neighbor to the south.[11]\n\n1902\u20131920: A Cubs dynasty\n\nThe 1906 Cubs won a record 116 of 154 games. They then won back-to-back World Series titles in 1907\u201308\n\nIn 1902, Spalding, who by this time had revamped the roster to boast what would soon be one of the best teams of the early century,", + " sold the club to Jim Hart. The franchise was nicknamed the Cubs by the Chicago Daily News in 1902, although not officially becoming the Chicago Cubs until the 1907 season.[12] During this period, which has become known as baseball's dead-ball era, Cub infielders Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance were made famous as a double-play combination by Franklin P. Adams' poem Baseball's Sad Lexicon. The poem first appeared in the July 18, 1910 edition of the New York Evening Mail. Mordecai \"Three-Finger\" Brown, Jack Taylor, Ed Reulbach, Jack Pfiester,", + " and Orval Overall were several key pitchers for the Cubs during this time period. With Chance acting as player-manager from 1905 to 1912, the Cubs won four pennants and two World Series titles over a five-year span. Although they fell to the \"Hitless Wonders\" White Sox in the 1906 World Series, the Cubs recorded a record 116 victories and the best winning percentage (.763) in Major League history. With mostly the same roster, Chicago won back-to-back World Series championships in 1907 and 1908, becoming the first Major League club to play three times in the Fall Classic and the first to win it twice.", + " However, the Cubs would not win another World Series until 2016; this remains the longest championship drought in North American professional sports.\n\n1913 Chicago Cubs\n\nThe next season, veteran catcher Johnny Kling left the team to become a professional pocket billiards player. Some historians think Kling's absence was significant enough to prevent the Cubs from also winning a third straight title in 1909, as they finished 6 games out of first place.[13] When Kling returned the next year, the Cubs won the pennant again, but lost to the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1910 World Series.\n\nIn 1914, advertising executive Albert Lasker obtained a large block of the club's shares and before the 1916 season assumed majority ownership of the franchise.", + " Lasker brought in a wealthy partner, Charles Weeghman, the proprietor of a popular chain of lunch counters who had previously owned the Chicago Whales of the short-lived Federal League. As principal owners, the pair moved the club from the West Side Grounds to the much newer Weeghman Park, which had been constructed for the Whales only two years earlier, where they remain to this day. The Cubs responded by winning a pennant in the war-shortened season of 1918, where they played a part in another team's curse: the Boston Red Sox defeated Grover Cleveland Alexander's Cubs four games to two in the 1918 World Series,", + " Boston's last Series championship until 2004.\n\nBeginning in 1916, Bill Wrigley of chewing-gum fame acquired an increasing quantity of stock in the Cubs. By 1921 he was the majority owner, maintaining that status into the 1930s.\n\nMeanwhile, the year 1919 saw the start of the tenure of Bill Veeck, Sr. as team president. Veeck would hold that post throughout the 1920s and into the 30s. The management team of Wrigley and Veeck came to be known as the \"double-Bills.\"\n\nThe Wrigley years (1921\u20131945)\n\n1929\u20131938:", + " Every three years\n\nNear the end of the first decade of the double-Bills' guidance, the Cubs won the NL pennant in 1929 and then achieved the unusual feat of winning a pennant every three years, following up the 1929 flag with league titles in 1932, 1935, and 1938. Unfortunately, their success did not extend to the Fall Classic, as they fell to their AL rivals each time. The '32 series against the Yankees featured Babe Ruth's \"called shot\" at Wrigley Field in game three. There were some historic moments for the Cubs as well; In 1930,", + " Hack Wilson, one of the top home run hitters in the game, had one of the most impressive seasons in MLB history, hitting 56 home runs and establishing the current runs-batted-in record of 191. That 1930 club, which boasted six eventual hall of fame members (Wilson, Gabby Hartnett, Rogers Hornsby, George \"High Pockets\" Kelly, Kiki Cuyler and manager Joe McCarthy) established the current team batting average record of.309. In 1935 the Cubs claimed the pennant in thrilling fashion, winning a record 21 games in a row in September. The '38 club saw Dizzy Dean lead the team's pitching staff and provided a historic moment when they won a crucial late-season game at Wrigley Field over the Pittsburgh Pirates with a walk-off home run by Gabby Hartnett,", + " which became known in baseball lore as \"The Homer in the Gloamin'\".[15]\n\nAfter the \"double-Bills\" (Wrigley and Veeck) died in 1932 and 1933 respectively, P.K. Wrigley, son of Bill Wrigley, took over as majority owner. He was unable to extend his father's baseball success beyond 1938, and the Cubs slipped into years of mediocrity, although the Wrigley family would retain control of the team until 1981.[16]\n\n1945/The Curse of the Billy Goat\n\nThe Cubs enjoyed one more pennant at the close of World War II,", + " finishing 98\u201356. Due to the wartime travel restrictions, the first three games of the 1945 World Series were played in Detroit, where the Cubs won two games, including a one-hitter by Claude Passeau, and the final four were played at Wrigley. The Cubs lost the series, and did not return until the 2016 World Series. After losing the 1945 World Series to the Detroit Tigers, the Cubs finished with a respectable 82-71 record in the following year, but this was only good enough for third place.\n\nIn the following two decades, the Cubs played mostly forgettable baseball,", + " finishing among the worst teams in the National League on an almost annual basis. From 1947 to 1966, they only notched one winning season. Longtime infielder-manager Phil Cavarretta, who had been a key player during the 1945 season, was fired during spring training in 1954 after admitting the team was unlikely to finish above fifth place. Although shortstop Ernie Banks would become one of the star players in the league during the next decade, finding help for him proved a difficult task, as quality players such as Hank Sauer were few and far between. This, combined with poor ownership decisions such as the College of Coaches,", + " and the ill-fated trade of future Hall of Fame member Lou Brock to the Cardinals for pitcher Ernie Broglio (who won only seven games over the next three seasons), hampered on-field performance.\n\n1969: Fall of '69\n\nThe late-1960s brought hope of a renaissance, with third baseman Ron Santo, pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, and outfielder Billy Williams joining Banks. After losing a dismal 103 games in 1966, the Cubs brought home consecutive winning records in '67 and '68, marking the first time a Cub team had accomplished that feat in over two decades.\n\nIn 1969 the Cubs,", + " managed by Leo Durocher, built a substantial lead in the newly created National League Eastern Division by mid-August. Ken Holtzman pitched a no-hitter on August 19, and the division lead grew to 8 \u200b1\u2044 2 games over the St. Louis Cardinals and by 9 \u200b1\u2044 2 games over the New York Mets. After the game of September 2, the Cubs record was 84-52 with the Mets in second place at 77-55. But then a losing streak began just as a Mets winning streak was beginning. The Cubs lost the final game of a series at Cincinnati,", + " then came home to play the resurgent Pittsburgh Pirates (who would finish in third place). After losing the first two games by scores of 9-2 and 13-4, the Cubs led going into the ninth inning. A win would be a positive springboard since the Cubs were to play a crucial series with the Mets the next day. But Willie Stargell drilled a two-out, two-strike pitch from the Cubs' ace reliever, Phil Regan, onto Sheffield Avenue to tie the score in the top of the ninth. The Cubs would lose 7-5 in extra innings.[6] Burdened by a four-game losing streak,", + " the Cubs traveled to Shea Stadium for a short two-game set. The Mets won both games, and the Cubs left New York with a record of 84-58 just 1\u20442 game in front. More of the same followed in Philadelphia, as a 99 loss Phillies team nonetheless defeated the Cubs twice, to extend Chicago's losing streak to eight games. In a key play in the second game, on September 11, Cubs starter Dick Selma threw a surprise pickoff attempt to third baseman Ron Santo, who was nowhere near the bag or the ball. Selma's throwing error opened the gates to a Phillies rally. After that second Philly loss,", + " the Cubs were 84-60 and the Mets had pulled ahead at 85-57. The Mets would not look back. The Cubs' eight-game losing streak finally ended the next day in St. Louis, but the Mets were in the midst of a ten-game winning streak, and the Cubs, wilting from team fatigue, generally deteriorated in all phases of the game.[1] The Mets (who had lost a record 120 games 7 years earlier), would go on to win the World Series. The Cubs, despite a respectable 92-70 record, would be remembered for having lost a remarkable 17\u00bd games in the standings to the Mets in the last quarter of the season.\n\n1977\u20131979:", + " June Swoon\n\nFollowing the 1969 season, the club posted winning records for the next few seasons, but no playoff action. After the core players of those teams started to move on, the 70s got worse for the team, and they became known as \"the Loveable Losers.\" In 1977, the team found some life, but ultimately experienced one of its biggest collapses. The Cubs hit a high-water mark on June 28 at 47\u201322, boasting an \u200b8 1\u2044 2 game NL East lead, as they were led by Bobby Murcer (27 HR/89 RBI), and Rick Reuschel (20\u201310). However,", + " the Philadelphia Phillies cut the lead to two by the All-star break, as the Cubs sat 19 games over.500, but they swooned late in the season, going 20\u201340 after July 31. The Cubs finished in fourth place at 81\u201381, while Philadelphia surged, finishing with 101 wins. The following two seasons also saw the Cubs get off to a fast start, as the team rallied to over 10 games above.500 well into both seasons, only to again wear down and play poorly later on, and ultimately settling back to mediocrity. This trait became known as the \"June Swoon\". Again,", + " the Cubs' unusually high number of day games is often pointed to as one reason for the team's inconsistent late season play.\n\nWrigley died in 1977. The Wrigley family sold the team to the Chicago Tribune in 1981, ending a 65-year family relationship with the Cubs.\n\nTribune Company years (1981\u20132008)\n\n1984: Heartbreak\n\nRyne Sandberg set numerous league and club records in his career and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2005.\n\nAfter over a dozen more subpar seasons, in 1981 the Cubs hired GM Dallas Green from Philadelphia to turn around the franchise.", + " Green had managed the 1980 Phillies to the World Series title. One of his early GM moves brought in a young Phillies minor-league 3rd baseman named Ryne Sandberg, along with Larry Bowa for Iv\u00e1n DeJes\u00fas. The 1983 Cubs had finished 71\u201391 under Lee Elia, who was fired before the season ended by Green. Green continued the culture of change and overhauled the Cubs roster, front-office and coaching staff prior to 1984. Jim Frey was hired to manage the 1984 Cubs, with Don Zimmer coaching 3rd base and Billy Connors serving as pitching coach.\n\nGreen shored[", + "17] up the 1984 roster with a series of transactions. In December, 1983 Scott Sanderson was acquired from Montreal in a three-team deal with San Diego for Carmelo Mart\u00ednez. Pinch hitter Richie Hebner (.333 BA in 1984) was signed as a free-agent. In spring training, moves continued: LF Gary Matthews and CF Bobby Dernier came from Philadelphia on March 26, for Bill Campbell and a minor leaguer. Reliever Tim Stoddard (10\u20136 3.82, 7 saves) was acquired the same day for a minor leaguer; veteran pitcher Ferguson Jenkins was released.\n\nThe team's commitment to contend was complete when Green made a midseason deal on June 15 to shore up the starting rotation due to injuries to Rick Reuschel (5\u20135)", + " and Sanderson. The deal brought 1979 NL Rookie of the Year pitcher Rick Sutcliffe from the Cleveland Indians. Joe Carter (who was with the Triple-A Iowa Cubs at the time) and right fielder Mel Hall were sent to Cleveland for Sutcliffe and back-up catcher Ron Hassey (.333 with Cubs in 1984). Sutcliffe (5\u20135 with the Indians) immediately joined Sanderson (8\u20135 3.14), Eckersley (10\u20138 3.03), Steve Trout (13\u20137 3.41) and Dick Ruthven (6\u201310 5.04)", + " in the starting rotation. Sutcliffe proceeded to go 16\u20131 for Cubs and capture the Cy Young Award.[17]\n\nThe Cubs 1984 starting lineup was very strong.[17] It consisted of LF Matthews (.291 14\u201382 101 runs 17 SB), C Jody Davis (.256 19\u201394), RF Keith Moreland (.279 16\u201380), SS Larry Bowa (.223 10 SB), 1B Leon \"Bull\" Durham (.279 23\u201396 16SB), CF Dernier (.278 45 SB), 3B Ron Cey (.240 25\u201397), Closer Lee Smith(", + "9\u20137 3.65 33 saves) and 1984 NL MVP Ryne Sandberg (.314 19\u201384 114 runs, 19 triples,32 SB).[17]\n\nReserve players Hebner, Thad Bosley, Henry Cotto, Hassey and Dave Owen produced exciting moments. The bullpen depth of Rich Bordi, George Frazier, Warren Brusstar and Dickie Noles did their job in getting the game to Smith or Stoddard.\n\nAt the top of the order, Dernier and Sandberg were exciting, aptly coined \"the Daily Double\" by Harry Caray. With strong defense \u2013 Dernier CF and Sandberg 2B,", + " won the NL Gold Glove- solid pitching and clutch hitting, the Cubs were a well balanced team. Following the \"Daily Double\", Matthews, Durham, Cey, Moreland and Davis gave the Cubs an order with no gaps to pitch around. Sutcliffe anchored a strong top-to-bottom rotation, and Smith was one of the top closers in the game.\n\nThe shift in the Cubs' fortunes was characterized June 23 on the \"NBC Saturday Game of the Week\" contest against the St. Louis Cardinals; it has since been dubbed simply \"The Sandberg Game.\" With the nation watching and Wrigley Field packed, Sandberg emerged as a superstar with not one,", + " but two game-tying home runs against Cardinals closer Bruce Sutter. With his shots in the 9th and 10th innings Wrigley Field erupted and Sandberg set the stage for a comeback win that cemented the Cubs as the team to beat in the East. No one would catch them.\n\nIn early August the Cubs swept the Mets in a 4-game home series that further distanced them from the pack. An infamous Keith Moreland-Ed Lynch fight erupted after Lynch hit Moreland with a pitch, perhaps forgetting Moreland was once a linebacker at the University of Texas. It was the second game of a double header and the Cubs had won the first game in part due to a three run home run by Moreland.", + " After the bench-clearing fight the Cubs won the second game, and the sweep put the Cubs at 68\u201345.\n\nIn 1984, each league had two divisions, East and West. The divisional winners met in a best-of-5 series to advance to the World Series, in a \"2\u20133\" format, first two games were played at the home of the team who did not have home field advantage. Then the last three games were played at the home of the team, with home field advantage. Thus the first two games were played at Wrigley Field and the next three at the home of their opponents,", + " San Diego. A common and unfounded myth is that since Wrigley Field did not have lights at that time the National League decided to give the home field advantage to the winner of the NL West. In fact, home field advantage had rotated between the winners of the East and West since 1969 when the league expanded. In even numbered years, the NL West had home field advantage. In odd numbered years, the NL East had home field advantage. Since the NL East winners had had home field advantage in 1983, the NL West winners were entitled to it.\n\nThe confusion may stem from the fact that Major League Baseball did decide that,", + " should the Cubs make it to the World Series, the American League winner would have home field advantage unless the Cubs hosted home games at an alternate site since the Cubs home field of Wrigley Field did not yet have lights. Rumor was the Cubs could hold home games across town at Comiskey Park, home of the American League's Chicago White Sox. Rather than hold any games in the cross town rival Sox Park, the Cubs made arrangements with the August A. Busch, owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, to use Busch Stadium in St. Louis as the Cubs \"home field\" for the World Series. This was approved by Major League Baseball and would have enabled the Cubs to host games 1 and 2,", + " along with games 6 and 7 if necessary. At the time home field advantage was rotated between each league. Odd numbered years the AL had home field advantage. Even numbered years the NL had home field advantage. In the 1982 World Series the St. Louis Cardinals of the NL had home field advantage. In the 1983 World Series the Baltimore Orioles of the AL had home field advantage.\n\nIn the NLCS, the Cubs easily won the first two games at Wrigley Field against the San Diego Padres. The Padres were the winners of the Western Division with Steve Garvey, Tony Gwynn, Eric Show, Goose Gossage and Alan Wiggins.", + " With wins of 13\u20130 and 4\u20132, the Cubs needed to win only one game of the next three in San Diego to make it to the World Series. After being beaten in Game 3 7\u20131, the Cubs lost Game 4 when Smith, with the game tied 5\u20135, allowed a game-winning home run to Garvey in the bottom of the ninth inning. In Game 5 the Cubs took a 3\u20130 lead into the 6th inning, and a 3\u20132 lead into the seventh with Sutcliffe (who won the Cy Young Award that year) still on the mound.", + " Then, Leon Durham had a sharp grounder go under his glove. This critical error helped the Padres win the game 6\u20133, with a 4-run 7th inning and keep Chicago out of the 1984 World Series against the Detroit Tigers. The loss ended a spectacular season for the Cubs, one that brought alive a slumbering franchise and made the Cubs relevant for a whole new generation of Cubs fans.\n\nThe Padres would be defeated in 5 games by Sparky Anderson's Tigers in the World Series.\n\nShawon Dunston was the Cubs shortstop for 10 years.\n\nThe 1985 season brought high hopes.", + " The club started out well, going 35\u201319 through mid-June, but injuries to Sutcliffe and others in the pitching staff contributed to a 13-game losing streak that pushed the Cubs out of contention.\n\n1989: NL East division championship\n\nIn 1989, the first full season with night baseball at Wrigley Field, Don Zimmer's Cubs were led by a core group of veterans in Ryne Sandberg, Rick Sutcliffe and Andre Dawson, who were boosted by a crop of youngsters such as Mark Grace, Shawon Dunston, Greg Maddux, Rookie of the Year Jerome Walton, and Rookie of the Year Runner-Up Dwight Smith.", + " The Cubs won the NL East once again that season winning 93 games. This time the Cubs met the San Francisco Giants in the NLCS. After splitting the first two games at home, the Cubs headed to the Bay Area, where despite holding a lead at some point in each of the next three games, bullpen meltdowns and managerial blunders ultimately led to three straight losses. The Cubs couldn't overcome the efforts of Will Clark, whose home run off Maddux, just after a managerial visit to the mound, led Maddux to think Clark knew what pitch was coming. Afterward, Maddux would speak into his glove during any mound conversation,", + " beginning what is a norm today. Mark Grace was 11\u201317 in the series with 8 RBI. Eventually, the Giants lost to the \"Bash Brothers\" and the Oakland A's in the famous \"Earthquake Series.\"\n\n1998: Wild card race and home run chase\n\nSammy Sosa was the captain of the Chicago Cubs during his tenure with the team.\n\nThe 1998 season would begin on a somber note with the death of legendary broadcaster Harry Caray. After the retirement of Sandberg and the trade of Dunston, the Cubs had holes to fill, and the signing of Henry Rodr\u00edguez to bat cleanup provided protection for Sammy Sosa in the lineup,", + " as Rodriguez slugged 31 round-trippers in his first season in Chicago. Kevin Tapani led the club with a career high 19 wins while Rod Beck anchored a strong bullpen and Mark Grace turned in one of his best seasons. The Cubs were swamped by media attention in 1998, and the team's two biggest headliners were Sosa and rookie flamethrower Kerry Wood. Wood's signature performance was one-hitting the Houston Astros, a game in which he tied the major league record of 20 strikeouts in nine innings. His torrid strikeout numbers earned Wood the nickname \"Kid K,\" and ultimately earned him the 1998 NL Rookie of the Year award.", + " Sosa caught fire in June, hitting a major league record 20 home runs in the month, and his home run race with Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire transformed the pair into international superstars in a matter of weeks. McGwire finished the season with a new major league record of 70 home runs, but Sosa's.308 average and 66 homers earned him the National League MVP Award. After a down-to-the-wire Wild Card chase with the San Francisco Giants, Chicago and San Francisco ended the regular season tied, and thus squared off in a one-game playoff at Wrigley Field. Third baseman Gary Gaetti hit the eventual game winning homer in the playoff game.", + " The win propelled the Cubs into the postseason for the first time since 1989 with a 90\u201373 regular season record. Unfortunately, the bats went cold in October, as manager Jim Riggleman's club batted.183 and scored only four runs en route to being swept by Atlanta in the National League Division Series.[18] The home run chase between Sosa, McGwire and Ken Griffey, Jr. helped professional baseball to bring in a new crop of fans as well as bringing back some fans who had been disillusioned by the 1994 strike.[19] The Cubs retained many players who experienced career years in 1998,", + " but, after a fast start in 1999, they collapsed again (starting with being swept at the hands of the cross-town White Sox in mid-June) and finished in the bottom of the division for the next two seasons.\n\n2001: Playoff push\n\nDespite losing fan favorite Grace to free agency and the lack of production from newcomer Todd Hundley, skipper Don Baylor's Cubs put together a good season in 2001. The season started with Mack Newton being brought in to preach \"positive thinking.\" One of the biggest stories of the season transpired as the club made a midseason deal for Fred McGriff, which was drawn out for nearly a month as McGriff debated waiving his no-trade clause.[20]", + " The Cubs led the wild card race by 2.5 games in early September, but crumbled when Preston Wilson hit a three run walk off homer off of closer Tom \"Flash\" Gordon, which halted the team's momentum. The team was unable to make another serious charge, and finished at 88\u201374, five games behind both Houston and St. Louis, who tied for first. Sosa had perhaps his finest season and Jon Lieber led the staff with a 20-win season.[21]\n\n2003: Five more outs\n\nThe Cubs had high expectations in 2002, but the squad played poorly. On July 5,", + " 2002, the Cubs promoted assistant general manager and player personnel director Jim Hendry to the General Manager position. The club responded by hiring Dusty Baker and by making some major moves in 2003. Most notably, they traded with the Pittsburgh Pirates for outfielder Kenny Lofton and third baseman Aramis Ram\u00edrez, and rode dominant pitching, led by Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, as the Cubs led the division down the stretch.\n\nMark Prior, along with Kerry Wood, led the Cubs' rotation in 2003.\n\nChicago halted St. Louis' run to the playoffs by taking four of five games from the Cardinals at Wrigley Field in early September,", + " after which they won their first division title in 14 years. They then went on to defeat the Atlanta Braves in a dramatic five-game Division Series, the franchise's first postseason series win since beating the Detroit Tigers in the 1908 World Series.\n\nAfter losing an extra-inning game in Game 1, the Cubs rallied and took a three-games-to-one lead over the Wild Card Florida Marlins in the National League Championship Series. Florida shut the Cubs out in Game 5, but the Cubs returned home to Wrigley Field with young pitcher Mark Prior to lead the Cubs in Game 6 as they took a 3\u20130 lead into the 8th inning.", + " It was at this point when a now-infamous incident took place. Several spectators attempted to catch a foul ball off the bat of Luis Castillo. A Chicago Cubs fan by the name of Steve Bartman, of Northbrook, Illinois, reached for the ball and deflected it away from the glove of Mois\u00e9s Alou for the second out of the eighth inning. Alou reacted angrily toward the stands and after the game stated that he would have caught the ball.[22] Alou at one point recanted, saying he would not have been able to make the play, but later said this was just an attempt to make Bartman feel better and believing the whole incident should be forgotten.[22]", + " Interference was not called on the play, as the ball was ruled to be on the spectator side of the wall. Castillo was eventually walked by Prior. Two batters later, and to the chagrin of the packed stadium, Cubs shortstop Alex Gonzalez misplayed an inning-ending double play, loading the bases. The error would lead to eight Florida runs and a Marlin victory. Despite sending Kerry Wood to the mound and holding a lead twice, the Cubs ultimately dropped Game 7, and failed to reach the World Series.\n\nThe \"Steve Bartman incident\" was seen as the \"first domino\" in the turning point of the era,", + " and the Cubs did not win a playoff game for the next eleven seasons.[23]\n\n2004\u20132006\n\nIn 2004, the Cubs were a consensus pick by most media outlets to win the World Series. The offseason acquisition of Derek Lee (who was acquired in a trade with Florida for Hee-seop Choi) and the return of Greg Maddux only bolstered these expectations. Despite a mid-season deal for Nomar Garciaparra, misfortune struck the Cubs again. They led the Wild Card by 1.5 games over San Francisco and Houston on September 25. On that day, both teams lost, giving the Cubs a chance at increasing the lead to 2.", + "5 games with only eight games remaining in the season, but reliever LaTroy Hawkins blew a save to the Mets, and the Cubs lost the game in extra innings. The defeat seemingly deflated the team, as they proceeded to drop six of their last eight games as the Astros won the Wild Card.\n\nDempster emerged in 2004 and became the Cubs' regular closer.\n\nDespite the fact that the Cubs had won 89 games, this fallout was decidedly unlovable, as the Cubs traded superstar Sammy Sosa after he had left the season's final game early and then lied about it publicly. Already a controversial figure in the clubhouse after his corked-bat incident,[24]", + " Sammy's actions alienated much of his once strong fan base as well as the few teammates still on good terms with him, (many teammates grew tired of Sosa playing loud salsa music in the locker room) and possibly tarnished his place in Cubs' lore for years to come.[citation needed] The disappointing season also saw fans start to become frustrated with the constant injuries to ace pitchers Mark Prior and Kerry Wood. Additionally, the 2004 season led to the departure of popular commentator Steve Stone, who had become increasingly critical of management during broadcasts and was verbally attacked by reliever Kent Mercker.[25] Things were no better in 2005,", + " despite a career year from first baseman Derrek Lee and the emergence of closer Ryan Dempster. The club struggled and suffered more key injuries, only managing to win 79 games after being picked by many to be a serious contender for the N.L. pennant. In 2006, bottom fell out as the Cubs finished 66\u201396, last in the NL Central.\n\n2007\u20132008: Back to back division titles\n\nAlfonso Soriano signed with the club in 2007\n\nAfter finishing last in the NL Central with 66 wins in 2006, the Cubs re-tooled and went from \"worst to first\"", + " in 2007. In the offseason they signed Alfonso Soriano to a contract at eight years for $136 million,[26] and replaced manager Dusty Baker with fiery veteran manager Lou Piniella.[27] After a rough start, which included a brawl between Michael Barrett and Carlos Zambrano, the Cubs overcame the Milwaukee Brewers, who had led the division for most of the season. The Cubs traded Barrett to the Padres, and later acquired catcher Jason Kendall from Oakland. Kendall was highly successful with his management of the pitching rotation and helped at the plate as well. By September, Geovany Soto became the full-time starter behind the plate,", + " replacing the veteran Kendall. Winning streaks in June and July, coupled with a pair of dramatic, late-inning wins against the Reds, led to the Cubs ultimately clinching the NL Central with a record of 85\u201377. They met Arizona in the NLDS, but controversy followed as Piniella, in a move that has since come under scrutiny,[28] pulled Carlos Zambrano after the sixth inning of a pitcher's duel with D-Backs ace Brandon Webb, to \"....save Zambrano for (a potential) Game 4.\" The Cubs, however, were unable to come through, losing the first game and eventually stranding over 30 baserunners in a three-game Arizona sweep.[29]\n\nCarlos Zambrano warming up before a game.\n\nThe Tribune company,", + " in financial distress, was acquired by real-estate mogul Sam Zell in December 2007. This acquisition included the Cubs. However, Zell did not take an active part in running the baseball franchise, instead concentrating on putting together a deal to sell it.\n\nThe Cubs successfully defended their National League Central title in 2008, going to the postseason in consecutive years for the first time since 1906\u201308. The offseason was dominated by three months of unsuccessful trade talks with the Orioles involving 2B Brian Roberts, as well as the signing of Chunichi Dragons star Kosuke Fukudome.[30] The team recorded their 10,", + "000th win in April, while establishing an early division lead. Reed Johnson and Jim Edmonds were added early on and Rich Harden was acquired from the Oakland Athletics in early July.[31] The Cubs headed into the All-Star break with the N.L.'s best record, and tied the league record with eight representatives to the All-Star game, including catcher Geovany Soto, who was named Rookie of the Year. The Cubs took control of the division by sweeping a four-game series in Milwaukee. On September 14, in a game moved to Miller Park due to Hurricane Ike, Zambrano pitched a no-hitter against the Astros,", + " and six days later the team clinched by beating St. Louis at Wrigley. The club ended the season with a 97\u201364 record[32] and met Los Angeles in the NLDS. The heavily favored Cubs took an early lead in Game 1, but James Loney's grand slam off Ryan Dempster changed the series' momentum. Chicago committed numerous critical errors and were outscored 20\u20136 in a Dodger sweep, which provided yet another sudden ending.[33]\n\nThe Ricketts era (2009\u2013present)\n\nThe Ricketts family acquired a majority interest in the Cubs in 2009,", + " ending the Tribune years. Apparently handcuffed by the Tribune's bankruptcy and the sale of the club to the Ricketts siblings, led by chairman Thomas S. Ricketts, the Cubs' quest for a NL Central three-peat started with notice that there would be less invested into contracts than in previous years. Chicago engaged St. Louis in a see-saw battle for first place into August 2009, but the Cardinals played to a torrid 20\u20136 pace that month, designating their rivals to battle in the Wild Card race, from which they were eliminated in the season's final week. The Cubs were plagued by injuries in 2009,", + " and were only able to field their Opening Day starting lineup three times the entire season. Third baseman Aramis Ram\u00edrez injured his throwing shoulder in an early May game against the Milwaukee Brewers, sidelining him until early July and forcing journeyman players like Mike Fontenot and Aaron Miles into more prominent roles. Additionally, key players like Derrek Lee (who still managed to hit.306 with 35 HR and 111 RBI that season), Alfonso Soriano, and Geovany Soto also nursed nagging injuries. The Cubs posted a winning record (83\u201378) for the third consecutive season, the first time the club had done so since 1972,", + " and a new era of ownership under the Ricketts family was approved by MLB owners in early October.\n\n2010\u20132014: The decline and rebuild\n\nStarlin Castro during his 2010 rookie season.\n\nRookie Starlin Castro debuted in early May (2010) as the starting shortstop. However, the club played poorly in the early season, finding themselves 10 games under.500 at the end of June. In addition, long-time ace Carlos Zambrano was pulled from a game against the White Sox on June 25 after a tirade and shoving match with Derrek Lee, and was suspended indefinitely by Jim Hendry,", + " who called the conduct \"unacceptable.\" On August 22, Lou Piniella, who had already announced his retirement at the end of the season, announced that he would leave the Cubs prematurely to take care of his sick mother. Mike Quade took over as the interim manager for the final 37 games of the year. Despite being well out of playoff contention the Cubs went 24\u201313 under Quade, the best record in baseball during that 37 game stretch, earning Quade the manager position going forward on October 19.\n\nOn December 3, 2010, Cubs broadcaster and former third baseman, Ron Santo, died due to complications from bladder cancer and diabetes.", + " He spent 13 seasons as a player with the Cubs, and at the time of his death was regarded as one of the greatest players not in the Hall of Fame.[34] He was posthumously elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in 2012.\n\nDespite trading for pitcher Matt Garza and signing free-agent slugger Carlos Pe\u00f1a, the Cubs finished the 2011 season 20 games under.500 with a record of 71\u201391. Weeks after the season came to an end, the club was rejuvenated in the form of a new philosophy, as new owner Tom Ricketts signed Theo Epstein away from the Boston Red Sox,[35]", + " naming him club President and giving him a five-year contract worth over $18 million, and subsequently discharged manager Mike Quade. Epstein, a proponent of sabremetrics and one of the architects of the 2004 and 2007 World Series championships in Boston, brought along Jed Hoyer from the Padres to fill the role of GM and hired Dale Sveum as manager. Although the team had a dismal 2012 season, losing 101 games (the worst record since 1966), it was largely expected. The youth movement ushered in by Epstein and Hoyer began as longtime fan favorite Kerry Wood retired in May, followed by Ryan Dempster and Geovany Soto being traded to Texas at the All-Star break for a group of minor league prospects headlined by Christian Villanueva,", + " but also included little thought of Kyle Hendricks. The development of Castro, Anthony Rizzo, Darwin Barney, Brett Jackson and pitcher Jeff Samardzija, as well as the replenishing of the minor-league system with prospects such as Javier Baez, Albert Almora, and Jorge Soler became the primary focus of the season, a philosophy which the new management said would carry over at least through the 2013 season.\n\nOne of two Cubs building blocks, Anthony Rizzo, swinging in the box.\n\nThe 2013 season resulted in much as the same the year before. Shortly before the trade deadline, the Cubs traded Matt Garza to the Texas Rangers for Mike Olt,", + " Carl Edwards Jr, Neil Ramirez, and Justin Grimm.[36] Three days later, the Cubs sent Alfonso Soriano to the New York Yankees for minor leaguer Corey Black.[37] The mid season fire sale led to another last place finish in the NL Central, finishing with a record of 66-96. Although there was a five-game improvement in the record from the year before, Anthony Rizzo and Starlin Castro seemed to take steps backward in their development. On September 30, 2013, Theo Epstein made the decision to fire manager Dale Sveum after just two seasons at the helm of the Cubs.", + " The regression of several young players was thought to be the main focus point, as the front office said Sveum would not be judged based on wins and losses. In two seasons as skipper, Sveum finished with a record of 127\u2013197.[38]\n\nThe 2013 season was also notable as the Cubs drafted future Rookie of the Year and MVP Kris Bryant with the second overall selection.\n\nOn November 7, 2013, the Cubs hired San Diego Padres bench coach Rick Renteria to be the 53rd manager in team history.[39] The Cubs finished the 2014 season in last place with a 73-", + "89 record in Renter\u00eda's first and only season as manager.[40] Despite the poor record, the Cubs improved in many areas during 2014, including rebound years by Anthony Rizzo and Starlin Castro, ending the season with a winning record at home for the first time since 2009,[41] and compiling a 33\u201334 record after the All-Star Break. However, following unexpected availability of Joe Maddon, the Cubs relieved Renter\u00eda of his managerial duties on October 31, 2014. During the season, the Cubs drafted Kyle Schwarber with the fourth overall selection.\n\nHall of Famer Ernie Banks died of a heart attack on January 23,", + " 2015, shortly before his 84th birthday.[42] The 2015 uniform carried a commemorative #14 patch on both its home and away jerseys in his honor.\n\n2015-present: Championship run\n\nOn November 2, 2014, the Cubs announced that Joe Maddon had signed a five-year contract to be the 54th manager in team history.[43] On December 10, 2014, Maddon announced that the team had signed free agent Jon Lester to a six-year, $155 million contract. Many other trades and acquisitions occurred during the off season. The opening day lineup for the Cubs contained five new players including center fielder Dexter Fowler.", + " Rookies Kris Bryant and Addison Russell were in the starting lineup by mid-April, and rookie Kyle Schwarber was added in mid-June. On August 30, Jake Arrieta threw a no hitter against the Los Angeles Dodgers.[44] The Cubs finished the 2015 season in third place in the NL Central, with a record of 97\u201365, the third best record in the majors and earned a wild card berth. On October 7, in the 2015 National League Wild Card Game, Arrieta pitched a complete game shutout and the Cubs defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates 4\u20130.[45]\n\nThe Cubs defeated the Cardinals in the NLDS three-games-to-one,", + " qualifying for a return to the NLCS for the first time in 12 years, where they faced the New York Mets. This was the first time in franchise history that the Cubs had clinched a playoff series at Wrigley Field.[46] However, they were swept in four games by the Mets and were unable to make it to their first World Series since 1945.[47]\n\nBefore the season, in an effort to shore up their lineup, free agents Ben Zobrist, Jason Heyward and John Lackey were signed.[48] To make room for the Zobrist signing, Starlin Castro was traded to the Yankees for Adam Warren and Brendan Ryan,", + " the latter of whom was released a week later.[49]\n\n2016 Champions visit the White House in January 2017\n\n2016 Champions visit the White House in June 2017\n\nIn a season that included a no-hitter on April 21 by Jake Arrieta,[50] the Cubs finished with the best record in Major League Baseball and won their first National League Central title since the 2008 season, winning by 17.5 games. The team also reached the 100-win mark for the first time since 1935 and won 103 total games, the most wins for the franchise since 1910. The Cubs defeated the San Francisco Giants in the National League Division Series and returned to the National League Championship Series for the second year in a row,", + " where they defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games. This was their first NLCS win since the series was created in 1969. The win earned the Cubs their first World Series appearance since 1945 and a chance for their first World Series win since 1908. Coming back from a three-games-to-one deficit, the Cubs defeated the Cleveland Indians in seven games in the 2016 World Series, They were the first team to come back from a three-games-to-one deficit since the Kansas City Royals in 1985. On November 4, the city of Chicago held a victory parade and rally for the Cubs that began at Wrigley Field,", + " headed down Lake Shore Drive, and ended in Grant Park. The city estimated that over five million people attended the parade and rally, which made it one of the largest recorded gatherings in history.[51]\n\nIn an attempt to be the first team to repeat as World Series champions since the Yankees in 1998, 1999, and 2000, the Cubs struggled for most of the first half of the 2017 season, never moving more than four games over.500 and finishing the first half two games under.500. On July 15, the Cubs fell to a season-high 5.5 games out of first in the NL Central.", + " The Cubs struggled mainly due to their pitching as Jake Arrieta and Jon Lester struggled and no starting pitcher managed to win more than 14 games (four pitchers won 15 games or more for the Cubs in 2016). The Cub offense also struggled as Kyle Schwarber batted near.200 for most of the first half and was even sent to the minors. However, the Cubs recovered in the second half of the season to finish 22 games over.500 and win the NL Central by six games over the Milwaukee Brewers. The Cubs pulled out a five-game NLDS series win over the Washington Nationals to advance to the NLCS for the third consecutive year.", + " For the second consecutive year, they faced the Dodgers. This time, however, the Dodgers defeated the Cubs in five games.[52]\n\nPrior to the 2018 season, the Cubs made several key free agent signings to bolster their pitching staff. The team signed starting pitcher Yu Darvish to a six-year, $126 million contract and veteran closer Brandon Morrow to two-year, $21-million contract,[53][54] in addition to Tyler Chatwood and Steve Cishek.[55][56] However, the Cubs struggled to stay healthy throughout the season. Anthony Rizzo missed much of April due to a back injury,[57] and Bryant missed almost a month due to shoulder injury.[58]", + " However, Darvish, who only started eight games in 2018, was lost for the season due to elbow and triceps injuries.[59] Morrow also faced two injuries before the team ruled him out for the season in September.[60]\n\nThe team maintained first place in their division for much of the season. The injury-depleted only went 16\u201311 during September, which allowed the Milwaukee Brewers, to finish with the same record. The Brewers defeated the Cubs in a tie-breaker game to win the Central Division and secure the top-seed in the National League.[61] The Cubs subsequently lost to the Colorado Rockies in the 2018 National League Wild Card Game for their earliest playoff exit in three seasons.[62]\n\nBallpark\n\nWrigley Field and Wrigleyville\n\nThe Cubs have played their home games at Wrigley Field,", + " also known as \"The Friendly Confines\" since 1916. It was built in 1914 as Weeghman Park for the Chicago Whales, a Federal League baseball team. The Cubs also shared the park with the Chicago Bears of the NFL for 50 years. The ballpark includes a manual scoreboard, ivy-covered brick walls, and relatively small dimensions.\n\nLocated in Chicago's Lake View neighborhood, Wrigley Field sits on an irregular block bounded by Clark and Addison Streets and Waveland and Sheffield Avenues. The area surrounding the ballpark is typically referred to as Wrigleyville. There is a dense collection of sports bars and restaurants in the area,", + " most with baseball inspired themes, including Sluggers, Murphy's Bleachers and The Cubby Bear. Many of the apartment buildings surrounding Wrigley Field on Waveland and Sheffield Avenues have built bleachers on their rooftops for fans to view games and other sell space for advertisement. One building on Sheffield Avenue has a sign atop its roof which says \"Eamus Catuli!\" which is Latin for \"Let's Go Cubs!\" and another chronicles the time since the last Division title, pennant, and World Series championship. The 00 denotes the 2016 NL Central title, NL pennant, and the World Series championship.", + " On game days, many residents rent out their yards and driveways to people looking for parking spots. The uniqueness of the neighborhood itself has ingrained itself into the culture of the Chicago Cubs as well as the Wrigleyville neighborhood, and has led to being used for concerts and other sporting events, such as the 2010 NHL Winter Classic between the Chicago Blackhawks and Detroit Red Wings, as well as a 2010 NCAA men's football game between the Northwestern Wildcats and Illinois Fighting Illini.\n\nIn 2013, Tom Ricketts and team president Crane Kenney unveiled plans for a five-year, $575 million privately funded renovation of Wrigley Field.[63][64]", + " Called the 1060 Project, the proposed plans included vast improvements to the stadium's facade, infrastructure, restrooms, concourses, suites, press box, bullpens, and clubhouses, as well as a 6,000-square-foot (560 m2)t jumbotron to be added in the left field bleachers, batting tunnels, a 3,000-square-foot (280 m2) video board in right field, and, eventually, an adjacent hotel, plaza, and office-retail complex.[65] In previous years mostly all efforts to conduct any large-scale renovations to the field had been opposed by the city, former mayor Richard M.", + " Daley (a staunch White Sox fan), and especially the rooftop owners.\n\nMonths of negotiations between the team, a group of rooftop properties investors, local Alderman Tom Tunney, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel followed with the eventual endorsements of the city's Landmarks Commission, the Plan Commission and final approval by the Chicago City Council in July 2013.[66] The project began at the conclusion of the 2014 season.[67]\n\nBleacher Bums\n\nThe \"Bleacher Bums\" is a name given to fans, many of whom spend much of the day heckling, who sit in the bleacher section at Wrigley Field.", + " Initially, the group was called \"bums\" because it referred to a group of fans who were at most games, and since those games were all day game.[68] A Broadway play,[69] starring Joe Mantegna, Dennis Farina, Dennis Franz, and James Belushi ran for years and was based on a group of Cub fans who frequented the club's games. The group was started in 1967 by dedicated fans Ron Grousl, Tom Nall and \"mad bugler\" Mike Murphy, who was a sports radio host during mid days on Chicago-based WSCR AM 670 \"The Score\". Murphy alleges that Grousl started the Wrigley tradition of throwing back opposing teams'", + " home run balls.[70][71]\n\nCulture\n\nCubs Win Flag\n\nCubs Win Flag Cubs Lose Flag\n\nBeginning in the days of P.K. Wrigley and the 1937 bleacher/scoreboard reconstruction, and prior to modern media saturation, a flag with either a \"W\" or an \"L\" has flown from atop the scoreboard masthead, indicating the day's result(s) when baseball was played at Wrigley. In case of a split doubleheader, both the \"W\" and \"L\" flags are flown.\n\nPast Cubs media guides show that originally the flags were blue with a white \"W\"", + " and white with a blue \"L\". In 1978, consistent with the dominant colors of the flags, blue and white lights were mounted atop the scoreboard, denoting \"win\" and \"loss\" respectively for the benefit of nighttime passers-by.\n\nThe flags were replaced by 1990, the first year in which the Cubs media guide reports the switch to the now familiar colors of the flags: White with blue \"W\" and blue with white \"L\". In addition to needing to replace the worn-out flags, by then the retired numbers of Banks and Williams were flying on the foul poles, as white with blue numbers; so the \"good\"", + " flag was switched to match that scheme.\n\nThis long-established tradition has evolved to fans carrying the white-with-blue-W flags to both home and away games, and displaying them after a Cub win. The flags have become more and more popular each season since 1998, and are now even sold as T-shirts with the same layout. In 2009, the tradition spilled over to the NHL as Chicago Blackhawks fans adopted a red and black \"W\" flag of their own.\n\nDuring the early and mid-2000s, Chip Caray usually declared that a Cubs win at home meant it was \"White flag time at Wrigley!\" More recently,", + " the Cubs have promoted the phrase \"Fly the W!\" among fans and on social media. [72]\n\nMascots\n\nClark (left) with the Oriole Bird\n\nThe official Cubs team mascot is a young bear cub, named Clark, described by the team's press release as a young and friendly Cub. Clark made his debut at Advocate Health Care on January 13, 2014, the same day as the press release announcing his installation as the club's first ever official physical mascot.[73] The bear cub itself was used in the clubs since the early 1900s and was the inspiration of the Chicago Staleys changing their team's name to the Chicago Bears,", + " because the Cubs allowed the football team to play at Wrigley Field in the 1930s.\n\nThe Cubs had no official physical mascot prior to Clark, though a man in a 'polar bear' looking outfit, called \"The Bear-man\" (or Beeman), which was mildly popular with the fans, paraded the stands briefly in the early 1990s. There is no record of whether or not he was just a fan in a costume or employed by the club. Through the 2013 season, there were \"Cubbie-bear\" mascots outside of Wrigley on game day, but none were employed by the team.", + " They pose for pictures with fans for tips. The most notable of these was \"Billy Cub\" who worked outside of the stadium for over six years until July 2013, when the club asked him to stop. Billy Cub, who is played by fan John Paul Weier, had unsuccessfully petitioned the team to become the official mascot.[74]\n\nAnother unofficial but much more well-known mascot is Ronnie \"Woo Woo\" Wickers[75] who is a longtime fan and local celebrity in the Chicago area. He is known to Wrigley Field visitors for his idiosyncratic cheers at baseball games, generally punctuated with an exclamatory \"Woo!\"", + " (e.g., \"Cubs, woo! Cubs, woo! Big-Z, woo! Zambrano, woo! Cubs, woo!\") Longtime Cubs announcer Harry Caray dubbed Wickers \"Leather Lungs\" for his ability to shout for hours at a time.[76] He is not employed by the team, although the club has on two separate occasions allowed him into the broadcast booth and allow him some degree of freedom once he purchases or is given a ticket by fans to get into the games. He is largely allowed to roam the park and interact with fans by Wrigley Field security.\n\nMusic\n\nDuring the summer of 1969,", + " a Chicago studio group produced a single record called \"Hey Hey! Holy Mackerel! (The Cubs Song)\" whose title and lyrics incorporated the catch-phrases of the respective TV and radio announcers for the Cubs, Jack Brickhouse and Vince Lloyd. Several members of the Cubs recorded an album called Cub Power which contained a cover of the song. The song received a good deal of local airplay that summer, associating it very strongly with that bittersweet season. It was played much less frequently thereafter, although it remained an unofficial Cubs theme song for some years after.\n\nFor many years, Cubs radio broadcasts started with \"It's a Beautiful Day for a Ball Game\"", + " by the Harry Simeone Chorale. In 1979, Roger Bain released a 45 rpm record of his song \"Thanks Mr. Banks\", to honor \"Mr. Cub\" Ernie Banks.[77]\n\nThe song \"Go, Cubs, Go!\" by Steve Goodman was recorded early in the 1984 season, and was heard frequently during that season. Goodman died in September of that year, four days before the Cubs clinched the National League Eastern Division title, their first title in 39 years. Since 1984, the song started being played from time to time at Wrigley Field; since 2007,", + " the song has been played over the loudspeakers following each Cubs home victory.\n\nThe Mountain Goats recorded a song entitled \"Cubs in Five\" on its 1995 EP Nine Black Poppies which refers to the seeming impossibility of the Cubs winning a World Series in both its title and Chorus.\n\nIn 2007, Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder composed a song dedicated to the team called \"All the Way\". Vedder, a Chicago native, and lifelong Cubs fan, composed the song at the request of Ernie Banks. Pearl Jam has played this song live multiple times several of which occurring at Wrigley Field.[78][79]", + " Eddie Vedder has played this song live twice, at his solo shows at the Chicago Auditorium on August 21 and 22, 2008.\n\nAn album entitled Take Me Out to a Cubs Game was released in 2008. It is a collection of 17 songs and other recordings related to the team,[80] including Harry Caray's final performance of \"Take Me Out to the Ball Game\" on September 21, 1997, the Steve Goodman song mentioned above, and a newly recorded rendition of \"Talkin' Baseball\" (subtitled \"Baseball and the Cubs\") by Terry Cashman. The album was produced in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Cubs'", + " 1908 World Series victory and contains sounds and songs of the Cubs and Wrigley Field.[81][82]\n\nPopular culture\n\nThe 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off showed a game played by the Cubs when Ferris' principal goes to a bar looking for him.\n\nThe 1989 film Back to the Future Part II depicts the Chicago Cubs defeating a baseball team from Miami in the 2015 World Series, ending the longest championship drought in all four of the major North American professional sports leagues. In 2015, the Miami Marlins failed to make the playoffs but the Cubs were able to make it to the 2015 National League Wild Card round and move on to the 2015 National League Championship Series by October 21,", + " 2015, the date where protagonist Marty McFly traveled to the future in the film.[83] However, it was on October 21 that the Cubs were swept by the New York Mets in the NLCS.\n\nThe 1993 film Rookie of the Year, directed by Daniel Stern, centers on the Cubs as a team going nowhere into August when the team chances upon 12-year-old Cubs fan Henry Rowengartner (Thomas Ian Nicholas), whose right (throwing) arm tendons have healed tightly after a broken arm and granted him the ability to regularly pitch at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour (160 km/h). Following the Cubs'", + " win over the Cleveland Indians in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, Nicholas, in celebration, tweeted the final shot from the movie: Henry holding his fist up to the camera to show a Cubs World Series ring.[84]\n\nTinker to Evers to Chance\n\n\"Baseball's Sad Lexicon,\" also known as \"Tinker to Evers to Chance\" after its refrain, is a 1910 baseball poem by Franklin Pierce Adams. The poem is presented as a single, rueful stanza from the point of view of a New York Giants fan seeing the talented Chicago Cubs infield of shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers,", + " and first baseman Frank Chance complete a double play. The trio began playing together with the Cubs in 1902, and formed a double play combination that lasted through April 1912. The Cubs won the pennant four times between 1906 and 1910, often defeating the Giants en route to the World Series.\n\nJoe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance are the three Cubs described in the poem.\n\nThese are the saddest of possible words: \"Tinker to Evers to Chance.\" Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds, Tinker and Evers and Chance. Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,", + " Making a Giant hit into a double \u2013 Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble: \"Tinker to Evers to Chance.\"\n\nThe poem was first published in the New York Evening Mail on July 12, 1912. Popular among sportswriters, numerous additional verses were written. The poem gave Tinker, Evers, and Chance increased popularity and has been credited with their elections to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.\n\nPlayoffs/Championships\n\na Prior to 1969, divisions did not exist in MLB. The Chicago Cubs played in the National League East between 1969\u20131993 before moving to the newly created National League Central in 1994.\n\nPrior to 1969,", + " divisions did not exist in MLB. The Chicago Cubs played in the National League East between 1969\u20131993 before moving to the newly created National League Central in 1994. b Prior to 1995, only two divisions existed in each league. With the realignment into three divisions and the institution of the wild card in 1995, the Division Series was added. Division Series.\n\nPrior to 1995, only two divisions existed in each league. With the realignment into three divisions and the institution of the wild card in 1995, the Division Series was added.. c Prior to 1969, the National League champion was determined by the best win\u2013loss record at the end of the regular season.", + " See League Championship Series.\n\nPrior to 1969, the National League champion was determined by the best win\u2013loss record at the end of the regular season.. d None of the World Series contested before 1903 are recognized by MLB. See List of pre-World Series baseball champions.\n\nDistinctions\n\nThroughout the history of the Chicago Cubs' franchise, fifteen different Cubs pitchers have pitched no-hitters; however, no Cubs pitcher has thrown a perfect game.[85][86]\n\nForbes value rankings\n\nAs of 2017, the Chicago Cubs are ranked as the 18th most valuable sports team in the world, 14th in the United States,", + " fourth in MLB behind the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Boston Red Sox, and second in the city of Chicago behind the Bears.[87]\n\nYear World US MLB CHI Value Ref. 2010 46 37 5 2 $726,000,000 [88] 2011 42 34 4 2 $773,000,000 [89] 2012 36 29 4 2 $879,000,000 [90] 2013 31 25 4 2 $1,000,000,000 [91] 2014 21 16 4 2 $1,", + "200,000,000 [92] 2015 17 13 4 2 $1,800,000,000 [93] 2016 21 17 5 3 $2,200,000,000 [94] 2017 18 14 4 2 $2,680,000,000 [87]\n\nTeam\n\nCurrent roster\n\n\n\n\n\nRetired numbers\n\nThe Chicago Cubs retired numbers are commemorated on pinstriped flags flying from the foul poles at Wrigley Field, with the exception of Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers player whose number 42 was retired for all clubs.", + " The first retired number flag, Ernie Banks' number 14, was raised on the left field pole, and they have alternated since then. 14, 10 and 31 (Jenkins) fly on the left field pole; and 26, 23 and 31 (Maddux) fly on the right field pole.\n\nThere is also a movement to retire numbers for other players, most notably the uniform shirt of Gabby Hartnett. The Cubs first wore numbers on their shirts in 1932, and Hartnett wore #7 initially but switched to #9 for the next four seasons. From 1937 to 1940 he wore #2,", + " which is the number considered for retirement. Petitions have been sent in to the team for Cap Anson (shirt), Hack Wilson (shirt), Phil Cavarretta (3), Andre Dawson (8) and, as well as more recent departures Kerry Wood (34), Sammy Sosa (21), and Mark Grace (17).\n\n* Robinson's number was retired by all MLB clubs.\n\nHall of Famers\n\nMinor league affiliations\n\nBefore signing a developmental agreement with the Kane County Cougars in 2012, the Cubs had a Class A minor league affiliation on two occasions with the Peoria Chiefs (1985\u20131995 and 2004\u20132012). Ryne Sandberg managed the Chiefs from 2006 to 2010.", + " In the period between those associations with the Chiefs the club had affiliations with the Dayton Dragons and Lansing Lugnuts. The Lugnuts were often affectionately referred to by Chip Caray as \"Steve Stone's favorite team.\" The 2007 developmental contract with the Tennessee Smokies was preceded by Double A affiliations with the Orlando Cubs and West Tenn Diamond Jaxx. On September 16, 2014 the Cubs announced a move of their top Class A affiliate from Daytona in the Florida State League to Myrtle Beach in the Carolina League for the 2015 season.[95] Two days later, the Cubs signed a four-year player development contract with the South Bend Silver Hawks of the Midwest League,", + " ending their brief relationship with the Kane County Cougars and shortly thereafter renaming the Silver Hawks the South Bend Cubs.[96]\n\nSpring training history\n\nThe Chicago White Stockings, (today's Chicago Cubs), began spring training in Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1886. President Albert Spalding (founder of Spalding Sporting Goods) and player/manager Cap Anson brought their players to Hot Springs and played at the Hot Springs Baseball Grounds. The concept was for the players to have training and fitness before the start of the regular season, utilizing the bath houses of Hot Springs after practices.[97][98][99] After the White Stockings had a successful season in 1886,", + " winning the National League Pennant, other teams began bringing their players to Hot Springs for \"spring training\".[99][100] The Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Browns, New York Yankees, St. Louis Cardinals, Cleveland Spiders, Detroit Tigers, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds, New York Highlanders, Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Red Sox were among the early squads to arrive. Whittington Park (1894) and later Majestic Park (1909) and Fogel Field (1912) were all built in Hot Springs specifically to host Major League teams.[101]\n\nThe Cubs' current spring training facility is located in Sloan Park in Mesa,", + " Arizona, where they play in the Cactus League. The park seats 15,000, making it Major League baseball's largest spring training facility by capacity. The Cubs annually sell out most of their games both at home and on the road. Before Sloan Park opened in 2014, the team played games at HoHoKam Park \u2013 Dwight Patterson Field from 1979. \"HoHoKam\" is literally translated from Native American as \"those who vanished.\" The North Siders have called Mesa their spring home for most seasons since 1952.\n\nIn addition to Mesa, the club has held spring training in Hot Springs, Arkansas (1886,", + " 1896\u20131900), (1909\u20131910) New Orleans (1870, 1907, 1911\u20131912); Champaign, Illinois (1901\u201302, 1906); Los Angeles (1903\u201304, 1948\u20131949), Santa Monica, California (1905); French Lick, Indiana (1908, 1943\u20131945); Tampa, Florida (1913\u20131916); Pasadena, California (1917\u20131921); Santa Catalina Island, California (1922\u20131942, 1946\u20131947, 1950\u20131951); Rendezvous Park in Mesa (1952\u20131965); Blair Field in Long Beach,", + " California (1966); and Scottsdale, Arizona (1967\u20131978).\n\nThe curious location on Catalina Island stemmed from Cubs owner William Wrigley Jr.'s then-majority interest in the island in 1919. Wrigley constructed a ballpark on the island to house the Cubs in spring training: it was built to the same dimensions as Wrigley Field. The ballpark was called Wrigley Field of Avalon.[102] (The ballpark is long gone, but a clubhouse built by Wrigley to house the Cubs exists as the Catalina County Club.) However, by 1951 the team chose to leave Catalina Island and spring training was shifted to Mesa,", + " Arizona.[103] The Cubs' 30-year association with Catalina is chronicled in the book, The Cubs on Catalina, by Jim Vitti, which was named International 'Book of the Year' by The Sporting News. The Cubs left Catalina after some bad weather in 1951, choosing to move to Mesa, a city where the Wrigleys also had interests.[104] Today, there is an exhibit at the Catalina Museum dedicated to the Cubs' spring training on the island.[105][106]\n\nThe former location in Mesa is actually the second HoHoKam Park; the first was built in 1976 as the spring-training home of the Oakland Athletics who left the park in 1979.", + " Apart from HoHoKam Park and Sloan Park the Cubs also have another Mesa training facility called Fitch Park, this complex provides 25,000 square feet (2,300 m2) of team facilities, including major league clubhouse, four practice fields, one practice infield, enclosed batting tunnels, batting cages, a maintenance facility, and administrative offices for the Cubs.\n\nMedia\n\nRadio\n\nCubs radio rights are held by CBS Radio; its acquisition of the radio rights effective 2015 ended the team's 90-year association with 720 WGN. During the first season of the contract, Cubs games aired on WBBM, taking over as flagship of the Chicago Cubs Radio Network.", + " On November 11, 2015, CBS announced that the Cubs would move to WBBM's all-sports sister station, WSCR, beginning in the 2016 season. The move was enabled by WSCR's end of their rights agreement for the White Sox, who moved to WLS.[107][108][109]\n\nThe play-by-play voice of the Cubs is Pat Hughes, who has held the position since 1996, joined by Ron Coomer. Former Cubs third baseman and fan favorite Ron Santo had been Hughes' long-time partner until his death in 2010. Keith Moreland replaced Hall of Fame inductee Santo for three seasons,", + " followed by Coomer for the 2014 season.[110]\n\nThe club also produces its own print media; the Cubs' official magazine Vineline, which has 12 annual issues, is in its third decade, and spotlights players and events involving the club. The club also publishes a traditional media guide.\n\nTelevision\n\nAs of September 1, 2016, Cubs games air locally on the following outlets:\n\nNBC Sports Chicago, a cable network owned in part by NBCUniversal and the Ricketts family. It broadcasts all Cubs games not broadcast over-the-air, or nationally by Major League Baseball's television partners. [111]\n\nWGN-TV (channel 9.", + "1), a Tribune Media-owned over-the-air station that has aired Cubs telecasts since its inception in 1948; WGN-TV's Cubs telecasts are produced by the station's sports department, WGN Sports. In November 2013, the team exercised an option to terminate its existing deal with WGN-TV after the 2014 season, requesting a higher-valued contract lasting through the 2019 season (which would be aligned with the end of its contract with CSN Chicago). WGN-TV announced on January 7, 2015 that it would maintain broadcast rights to 45 Cubs games through the 2019 season within the Chicago market only.", + " [111] [112]\n\nWLS-TV (channel 7.1), an ABC owned-and-operated station. It was announced on December 12, 2014 that the station would acquire rights to 25 games per season through 2019.[113][114]\n\nPrior to September 1, 2016, when WGN-TV ended their CW affiliation to return to being an independent station, several games in the WGN package since 2015 were sub-licensed to Fox Television Stations-owned MyNetworkTV station WPWR-TV (channel 50.1), due to CW pre-emption limits which precluded airing on WGN-TV.", + " These games returned full-time to WGN-TV upon that date, when WPWR assumed the market's CW affiliation and WGN was no longer limited by a network. In previous years, the sublicensed games were carried by WCIU-TV (channel 26.1) under the branding of \"CubsNet\" and \"WGN Sports on The U\".[115]\n\nWGN's Cubs games formerly aired nationally on WGN America; however, prior to the 2015 season, the Cubs, as well as all other Chicago sports programming, was dropped from the channel as part of its re-positioning as a general entertainment cable channel.[116]", + " To compensate, all games carried by over-the-air channels are syndicated to a network of other television stations within the Cubs' region, which includes Illinois and parts of Indiana and Iowa.[114][117][118][119]\n\nAll of the team's current television contracts end after the 2019 season. On November 16, 2015 in an interview with WSCR radio, the Cubs' president of business operations Crane Kenney stated that the team was seeking to launch its own in-house regional sports network.[111][120][121] On December 18, 2018, it was reported by the Chicago Sun-Times that the team was preparing to launch its RSN,", + " \"Marquee\", in 2020, and that Sinclair Broadcast Group (which had previously attempted to purchase WGN's parent company Tribune Media, and runs the national sports network Stadium with the White Sox's investment arm Silver Chalice) was a frontrunner to serve as managing partner.[122]\n\nLen Kasper has been the Cubs' television play-by-play announcer since 2005 and was joined by Jim Deshaies in 2013. Bob Brenly (analyst, 2005\u201312), Chip Caray (play-by-play, 1998\u20132004), Steve Stone (analyst, 1983\u20132000,", + " 2003\u201304), Joe Carter (analyst for WGN-TV games, 2001\u201302) and Dave Otto (analyst for FSN Chicago games, 2001\u201302) also have spent time broadcasting from the Cubs booth since the death of Harry Caray in 1998.[123]\n\nFord C. Frick Award recipients\n\nSee also\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading ", + " The Cubs were born the Chicago White Stockings in 1876, one of eight inaugural teams. The team would go on to win the first National league Championship and would become one of sports first dynasties by winning six of the first eleven championship titles (1876, 1880-82, 1885-86). The modern day \u201cCubs\u201d would come into existence in 1903, and continue their success posting a record in wins in 1906 with 116 games won. This would also be their first pennant win as the \u201cCubs.\u201d The World Series title would be lost to their cross town rivals,", + " the White Sox.\n\nThe following year, after a repeat pennant, they would go on to win their first World Series title in 1907. They returned the following year to win their second (and last) World Series becoming the first team in baseball to win back to back World Series Titles.\n\nThe Cubs continued their success capturing pennants in 1910, 1918 and an astounding four pennants in a ten year span (1929, 1932, 1935, 1938). The Cubs would play in the World Series in each of those years. Their final pennant would come in 1945, the year the Cubs faced the Detroit Tigers and a local Chicago saloon owner named William \u201cBilly Goat\u201d Sianis with his goat,", + " Murphy.\n\nFrom 1876 to 1945, The Chicago Cubs were one of the most successful baseball teams in the country. They would post a 5475-4324 (.559) record, with 51 winning seasons, 16 first place finishes, and 16 pennants and World Series appearances. They would win two World Series titles and six Championship titles in that span. This would come to a screeching halt in game four of the 1945 World Series. 1945- \u201cWho Stinks Now?\u201d\n\nOctober 6th, a sad day in Cubs history. The Cubs entered game four of the World Series leading the Detroit Tigers 2 games to 1,", + " and needing to win only two of the next four games played at Wrigley Field. A local Greek, William \u201cBilly Goat\u201d Sianis, owner of the Billy Goat Tavern and a Cubs fan, bought two tickets to Game four. Hoping to bring his team good luck he took his pet goat, Murphy, with him to the game. At the entrance to the park, the Andy Fran ushers stopped Billy Goat from entering saying that no animals are allowed in the park. Billy Goat, frustrated, appealed to the owner of the Cubs, P.K. Wrigley. Wrigley replied, \u201cLet Billy in,", + " but not the goat.\u201d Billy Goat asked, \u201cWhy not the goat?\u201d Wrigley answered, \u201cBecause the goat stinks.\u201d According to legend, the goat and Billy were upset, so then Billy threw up his arms and exclaimed, \u201cThe Cubs ain\u2019t gonna win no more. The Cubs will never win a World Series so long as the goat is not allowed in Wrigley Field.\u201d The Cubs were officially cursed. Subsequently, the Cubs lost game four, and the remaining series getting swept at home and from the World Series. Billy Goat promptly sent a telegram to P.K. Wrigley, stating, \u201cWho stinks now?\u201d For the next twenty years,", + " throughout the remainder of Billy Goat\u2019s life the Cubs would finish each season at 5th place or lower, establishing a pattern that would reverse the Cubs luck and term the team \u201cThe Lovable Losers.\u201d The World Series would become a dream, and \u201cwait \u2019til next year\u201d would become the team\u2019s motto. From 1946 to 2003, the Cubs would post a 4250-4874 (.466) record, have only 15 winning seasons, finish in first place a mere 3 times, have no pennants, no World Series appearances let alone wins, with only four post season experiences (1984,", + " 1989, 1998, 2003) resulting in a complete reversal of their fortunes. The Cubs were and are a cursed franchise.\n\n1969- \u201cMiracle\u201d Mets or \u201cCursed\u201d Cubs\n\nIn 1969, a year before he passed away, \u201cBilly Goat\u201d Sianis finally felt satisfied and claimed the curse is lifted, but the goat still was bitter. The Cubs began the season winning and coasted throughout the season into mid-August with a commanding first place lead. By the end of the season a surging \u201cMiracle\u201d Mets overtook the struggling \u201cCursed\u201d Cubs to claim first place and knock the Cubs out of contention.", + " This would become a pattern over the years.\n\n1973- One limo, a red carpet, and a goat denied once again\n\nIn 1973, Billy Goat\u2019s nephew and new Billy Goat Tavern owner, Sam Sianis, with the help of Tribune columnist, Dave Condon, brought the goat to Wrigley in an attempt to lift the curse. The goat was escorted to Wrigley in a white limousine, and given a red carpet entrance to the park with a sign saying, \u201cAll is forgiven. Let me lead the Cubs to the pennant.\u201d The ushers at the entrance denied the goat \u201cSocrates,\u201d a descendant of Murphy,", + " yet again. The Cubs saw their mid-season first place lead whither away to another unsuccessful season.\n\n1984- Eight outs away\n\nThe Tribune Company, new owners of the Cubs, finally invited the goat to opening day at Wrigley Field in an attempt to lift the curse. Sam Sianis and his goat finally walked the grass of Wrigley Field, and in an effort to lift the curse Sam raised his hat and said, \u201cThe curse is lifted.\u201d The Cubs won and won and won their way to their first post season game and division title in almost forty years. They continued their winning taking the first two games of the National League Championship Series against the San Diego Padres.", + " They just needed to win one of the next three games at San Diego to finally reach the World Series. Sam and his goat waited for the call to go along with the team and ensure the victory, only to be left behind in Chicago.\n\nAfter losing games three and four in San Diego, the Cubs were leading the Padres 3-2 in the seventh inning, with only eight outs needed to win the game and the ace pitcher Rick Sutcliffe at the helm. An eerie chain of events would ensue. A routine ground ball was hit to first baseman, Leon Durham, which dribbled through his legs allowing the tying run to score.", + " An overworked Rick Sutcliffe, who dominated game one, yielded the remaining three runs. The Padres swept the Cubs in San Diego, and swept the Cubs out of the series. The Cubs were still cursed.\n\n1989- So Close, So Far\n\nHoping for a repeat of 1984, Sam Sianis and his goat again walked the field of Wrigley on opening day. The Cubs again won their way to first place and their second division title in five years. But the goat was left behind once again in the post season, where the Cubs lost to the San Francisco Giants four games to one.\n\n1994-", + " \u201cLet the Goat in!\u201d\n\nThe Cubs started the 1994 season horribly, losing twelve home games in a row. Their worst home start in history. In an effort to end this streak, Sam Sianis and his goat went to Wrigley Field only to be denied entrance yet again. Amidst the chant of \u201cLet the Goat in!\u201d amongst the Wrigley crowd, Hall of Famer, Ernie Banks helped by escorting Sam and his goat into Wrigley. The Cubs won the game 5-2, ending their worst home start ever. A lesson learned?\n\n1998- Bring in the Wild Card\n\nIn 1998,", + " the Cubs finished the season with 89 wins, tied with the San Francisco Giants for the Wild Card. During the Tiebreaking game on Sept. 28th, the Cubs brought in their Wild Card, Sam and his goat. The Cubs would go on to win the game 5-3 and went into the post season as a Wild Card. But once again Sam and his goat were left behind in Chicago, while the Cubs got swept in Atlanta, and swept out of the post season.\n\n2003- Five outs away\n\nThe Cubs ended the 2003 season in a tight race with the Houston Astros. When the goat was sent to Houston in an effort to reverse the curse,", + " Houston lost while the Cubs won their first division title in fourteen years. The Cubs were on a roll. They would go on to beat the Atlanta Braves, winning their first post season series in almost 100 years. In the National League Championship Series against the Florida Marlins, the Cubs took a quick 3 game lead needing only one more victory to go to the World Series for the first time in almost sixty years. In game six of the series, with the ace Mark Prior at the helm, the Cubs entered the eighth inning leading 3-0. Once again the goat was left behind, and an eerie chain of events would ensue.", + " With only five outs needed to secure a victory, a pop foul seemingly in play was interfered with by a fan taking away a sure out. That was followed by the next play, when a routine ground ball was hit to the sure handed Alex Gonzalez only to be bobbled, taking away an inning ending double play. Ace pitcher, Mark Prior, overworked, yielded the tying and leading runs, until the Marlins left the eighth leading 8-3. The Marlins ended up winning the game, then swept the Cubs at home and swept them out of the playoffs yet again.\n\nWhat does the future hold in store for the Cubs? Many attempts have been made to lift the curse,", + " yet the goat still has not seen his baseball game. One moment in time, one horrible mistake in game four of the 1945 World Series, has yielded years of pain and anguish for Cubs fans abroad. The Chicago Cubs prior to the curse were one of the best teams in baseball, and after the curse have become the \u201cLovable Losers.\u201d If the Cubs are ever again in a situation, where they are outs away from the World Series, will the goat get the call? For the sake of the Cubs, \u201cLET THE GOAT IN!\u201d\n\n2015 \u2013 Murphy\u2019s Law\n\nUnder new Manager Joe Maddon, the 2015 Cubs fielded a team of exciting young players.", + " They captured the Wild Card, won a single game playoff against the Pirates, and went on to beat the rival St. Louis Cardinals in the division series. Only the Mets stood between the Cubs and their first World Series appearance since 1945. However, their momentum came to a sudden halt when they ran into Daniel Murphy. He hit a home run in all four games of the series and the Cubs were once again swept out of the playoffs.\n\n2015 wasn\u2019t the first time \u201cMurphy\u201d played a role in Cubs\u2019 history: ", + " A pair of competitive eaters will test the power of their skills Tuesday night as they attempt to reverse the Cubs' \"billy goat curse\" by eating a whole goat.\n\nFamed Japanese competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi, who has won Nathan's Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest six times, and L.A. Beast, a competitive eater and YouTube star, plan to eat a 40-pound cooked goat in a single sitting at Lincoln Square's Taco In a Bag.\n\nKobayashi and L.A. Beast will be joined by Tim Brown and Patrick Bertoletti, the restaurant's co-owners, who have also indulged in competitive eating contests.\n\nThe hope is to reverse the 70-year \"billy goat curse\"", + " as the North Side team inches closer and closer to making the playoffs this year.\n\nThe goat-eating challenge begins at 7:30 p.m. at Taco In A Bag, located at 4603 N. Lincoln Ave. ", + " The Cubs were born the Chicago White Stockings in 1876, one of eight inaugural teams. The team would go on to win the first National league Championship and would become one of sports first dynasties by winning six of the first eleven championship titles (1876, 1880-82, 1885-86). The modern day \u201cCubs\u201d would come into existence in 1903, and continue their success posting a record in wins in 1906 with 116 games won. This would also be their first pennant win as the \u201cCubs.\u201d The World Series title would be lost to their cross town rivals,", + " the White Sox.\n\nThe following year, after a repeat pennant, they would go on to win their first World Series title in 1907. They returned the following year to win their second (and last) World Series becoming the first team in baseball to win back to back World Series Titles.\n\nThe Cubs continued their success capturing pennants in 1910, 1918 and an astounding four pennants in a ten year span (1929, 1932, 1935, 1938). The Cubs would play in the World Series in each of those years. Their final pennant would come in 1945, the year the Cubs faced the Detroit Tigers and a local Chicago saloon owner named William \u201cBilly Goat\u201d Sianis with his goat,", + " Murphy.\n\nFrom 1876 to 1945, The Chicago Cubs were one of the most successful baseball teams in the country. They would post a 5475-4324 (.559) record, with 51 winning seasons, 16 first place finishes, and 16 pennants and World Series appearances. They would win two World Series titles and six Championship titles in that span. This would come to a screeching halt in game four of the 1945 World Series. 1945- \u201cWho Stinks Now?\u201d\n\nOctober 6th, a sad day in Cubs history. The Cubs entered game four of the World Series leading the Detroit Tigers 2 games to 1,", + " and needing to win only two of the next four games played at Wrigley Field. A local Greek, William \u201cBilly Goat\u201d Sianis, owner of the Billy Goat Tavern and a Cubs fan, bought two tickets to Game four. Hoping to bring his team good luck he took his pet goat, Murphy, with him to the game. At the entrance to the park, the Andy Fran ushers stopped Billy Goat from entering saying that no animals are allowed in the park. Billy Goat, frustrated, appealed to the owner of the Cubs, P.K. Wrigley. Wrigley replied, \u201cLet Billy in,", + " but not the goat.\u201d Billy Goat asked, \u201cWhy not the goat?\u201d Wrigley answered, \u201cBecause the goat stinks.\u201d According to legend, the goat and Billy were upset, so then Billy threw up his arms and exclaimed, \u201cThe Cubs ain\u2019t gonna win no more. The Cubs will never win a World Series so long as the goat is not allowed in Wrigley Field.\u201d The Cubs were officially cursed. Subsequently, the Cubs lost game four, and the remaining series getting swept at home and from the World Series. Billy Goat promptly sent a telegram to P.K. Wrigley, stating, \u201cWho stinks now?\u201d For the next twenty years,", + " throughout the remainder of Billy Goat\u2019s life the Cubs would finish each season at 5th place or lower, establishing a pattern that would reverse the Cubs luck and term the team \u201cThe Lovable Losers.\u201d The World Series would become a dream, and \u201cwait \u2019til next year\u201d would become the team\u2019s motto. From 1946 to 2003, the Cubs would post a 4250-4874 (.466) record, have only 15 winning seasons, finish in first place a mere 3 times, have no pennants, no World Series appearances let alone wins, with only four post season experiences (1984,", + " 1989, 1998, 2003) resulting in a complete reversal of their fortunes. The Cubs were and are a cursed franchise.\n\n1969- \u201cMiracle\u201d Mets or \u201cCursed\u201d Cubs\n\nIn 1969, a year before he passed away, \u201cBilly Goat\u201d Sianis finally felt satisfied and claimed the curse is lifted, but the goat still was bitter. The Cubs began the season winning and coasted throughout the season into mid-August with a commanding first place lead. By the end of the season a surging \u201cMiracle\u201d Mets overtook the struggling \u201cCursed\u201d Cubs to claim first place and knock the Cubs out of contention.", + " This would become a pattern over the years.\n\n1973- One limo, a red carpet, and a goat denied once again\n\nIn 1973, Billy Goat\u2019s nephew and new Billy Goat Tavern owner, Sam Sianis, with the help of Tribune columnist, Dave Condon, brought the goat to Wrigley in an attempt to lift the curse. The goat was escorted to Wrigley in a white limousine, and given a red carpet entrance to the park with a sign saying, \u201cAll is forgiven. Let me lead the Cubs to the pennant.\u201d The ushers at the entrance denied the goat \u201cSocrates,\u201d a descendant of Murphy,", + " yet again. The Cubs saw their mid-season first place lead whither away to another unsuccessful season.\n\n1984- Eight outs away\n\nThe Tribune Company, new owners of the Cubs, finally invited the goat to opening day at Wrigley Field in an attempt to lift the curse. Sam Sianis and his goat finally walked the grass of Wrigley Field, and in an effort to lift the curse Sam raised his hat and said, \u201cThe curse is lifted.\u201d The Cubs won and won and won their way to their first post season game and division title in almost forty years. They continued their winning taking the first two games of the National League Championship Series against the San Diego Padres.", + " They just needed to win one of the next three games at San Diego to finally reach the World Series. Sam and his goat waited for the call to go along with the team and ensure the victory, only to be left behind in Chicago.\n\nAfter losing games three and four in San Diego, the Cubs were leading the Padres 3-2 in the seventh inning, with only eight outs needed to win the game and the ace pitcher Rick Sutcliffe at the helm. An eerie chain of events would ensue. A routine ground ball was hit to first baseman, Leon Durham, which dribbled through his legs allowing the tying run to score.", + " An overworked Rick Sutcliffe, who dominated game one, yielded the remaining three runs. The Padres swept the Cubs in San Diego, and swept the Cubs out of the series. The Cubs were still cursed.\n\n1989- So Close, So Far\n\nHoping for a repeat of 1984, Sam Sianis and his goat again walked the field of Wrigley on opening day. The Cubs again won their way to first place and their second division title in five years. But the goat was left behind once again in the post season, where the Cubs lost to the San Francisco Giants four games to one.\n\n1994-", + " \u201cLet the Goat in!\u201d\n\nThe Cubs started the 1994 season horribly, losing twelve home games in a row. Their worst home start in history. In an effort to end this streak, Sam Sianis and his goat went to Wrigley Field only to be denied entrance yet again. Amidst the chant of \u201cLet the Goat in!\u201d amongst the Wrigley crowd, Hall of Famer, Ernie Banks helped by escorting Sam and his goat into Wrigley. The Cubs won the game 5-2, ending their worst home start ever. A lesson learned?\n\n1998- Bring in the Wild Card\n\nIn 1998,", + " the Cubs finished the season with 89 wins, tied with the San Francisco Giants for the Wild Card. During the Tiebreaking game on Sept. 28th, the Cubs brought in their Wild Card, Sam and his goat. The Cubs would go on to win the game 5-3 and went into the post season as a Wild Card. But once again Sam and his goat were left behind in Chicago, while the Cubs got swept in Atlanta, and swept out of the post season.\n\n2003- Five outs away\n\nThe Cubs ended the 2003 season in a tight race with the Houston Astros. When the goat was sent to Houston in an effort to reverse the curse,", + " Houston lost while the Cubs won their first division title in fourteen years. The Cubs were on a roll. They would go on to beat the Atlanta Braves, winning their first post season series in almost 100 years. In the National League Championship Series against the Florida Marlins, the Cubs took a quick 3 game lead needing only one more victory to go to the World Series for the first time in almost sixty years. In game six of the series, with the ace Mark Prior at the helm, the Cubs entered the eighth inning leading 3-0. Once again the goat was left behind, and an eerie chain of events would ensue.", + " With only five outs needed to secure a victory, a pop foul seemingly in play was interfered with by a fan taking away a sure out. That was followed by the next play, when a routine ground ball was hit to the sure handed Alex Gonzalez only to be bobbled, taking away an inning ending double play. Ace pitcher, Mark Prior, overworked, yielded the tying and leading runs, until the Marlins left the eighth leading 8-3. The Marlins ended up winning the game, then swept the Cubs at home and swept them out of the playoffs yet again.\n\nWhat does the future hold in store for the Cubs? Many attempts have been made to lift the curse,", + " yet the goat still has not seen his baseball game. One moment in time, one horrible mistake in game four of the 1945 World Series, has yielded years of pain and anguish for Cubs fans abroad. The Chicago Cubs prior to the curse were one of the best teams in baseball, and after the curse have become the \u201cLovable Losers.\u201d If the Cubs are ever again in a situation, where they are outs away from the World Series, will the goat get the call? For the sake of the Cubs, \u201cLET THE GOAT IN!\u201d\n\n2015 \u2013 Murphy\u2019s Law\n\nUnder new Manager Joe Maddon, the 2015 Cubs fielded a team of exciting young players.", + " They captured the Wild Card, won a single game playoff against the Pirates, and went on to beat the rival St. Louis Cardinals in the division series. Only the Mets stood between the Cubs and their first World Series appearance since 1945. However, their momentum came to a sudden halt when they ran into Daniel Murphy. He hit a home run in all four games of the series and the Cubs were once again swept out of the playoffs.\n\n2015 wasn\u2019t the first time \u201cMurphy\u201d played a role in Cubs\u2019 history:\n" + ], + "length": 24224, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 64, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Pregnant at 33, New Jersey's Lauren Bloomstein was excited to soon welcome her first baby into the world. But in a joint effort by ProPublica and NPR, Nina Martin and Renee Montagne document how things went terribly wrong on Oct. 1, 2011\u2014the day Bloomstein's daughter, Hailey Anne, was born, and the day before Bloomstein died from childbirth complications. Adding an extra level of awful irony: Bloomstein was a neonatal intensive-care nurse, a fact looming over the equally shocking statistic that the US has the worst maternal mortality rate of all developed countries, with 60% of those deaths avoidable. The reasons behind this phenomenon are many, with Martin and Montagne listing lack of adequate health care, older moms with more complicated health histories, and neglected health issues unrelated to pregnancy as just a few of the factors that could contribute to a new mom or mom-to-be dying. The US infant mortality rate, however, hit a \"historic low\" in 2014, per the CDC\u2014meaning the medical community may have been lulled into complacency on the maternal care front while focusing attention on the babies. In Bloomstein's case, she'd developed preeclampsia, a dangerous form of hypertension that can prove fatal if not caught quickly. Her husband, Larry, watched in horror as her condition deteriorated, her elevated blood pressure eventually spurring brain hemorrhaging. She died 20 hours after Hailey's birth. Advocates nationwide are slowly working to remedy this upending of the birthing process, via initiatives that help medical staff better deal with such emergencies. Larry, meanwhile, has since remarried and is raising 5-year-old Hailey Anne with his new wife and younger daughter. His lawsuit against Lauren's OB-GYN, the medical center where she died, and five nurses is still pending. More here. (Texas has a disturbingly high maternal death rate.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Focus On Infants During Childbirth Leaves U.S. Moms In Danger\n\nEnlarge this image toggle caption Bryan Anselm for ProPublica Bryan Anselm for ProPublica\n\nAs a neonatal intensive care nurse, Lauren Bloomstein had been taking care of other people's babies for years. Finally, at 33, she was expecting one of her own. The prospect of becoming a mother made her giddy, her husband, Larry, recalled recently\u2014 \"the happiest and most alive I'd ever seen her.\"\n\nWhen Lauren was 13, her own mother had died of a massive heart attack. Lauren had lived with her older brother for a while,", + " then with a neighbor in Hazlet, N.J., who was like a surrogate mom, but in important ways she'd grown up mostly alone. The chance to create her own family, to be the mother she didn't have, touched a place deep inside her.\n\n\"All she wanted to do was be loved,\" said Frankie Hedges, who took Lauren in as a teenager and thought of her as her daughter. \"I think everybody loved her, but nobody loved her the way she wanted to be loved.\"\n\nOther than some nausea in her first trimester, the pregnancy went smoothly. Lauren was \"tired in the beginning, achy in the end,\" said Jackie Ennis,", + " her best friend since high school, who talked to her at least once a day. \"She gained what she's supposed to. She looked great, she felt good, she worked as much as she could\" \u2014 at least three, 12-hour shifts a week until late into her ninth month. Larry, a doctor, helped monitor her blood pressure at home, and all was normal.\n\nOn her days off she got organized, picking out strollers and car seats, stocking up on diapers and onesies. After one last pre-baby vacation to the Caribbean, she and Larry went hunting for their forever home, settling on a brick colonial with black shutters and a big yard in Moorestown,", + " N.J., not far from his new job as an orthopedic trauma surgeon in Camden. Lauren wanted the baby's gender to be a surprise, so when she set up the nursery she left the walls unpainted \u2014 she figured she'd have plenty of time to choose colors later. Despite all she knew about what could go wrong, she seemed untroubled by the normal expectant-mom anxieties. Her only real worry was going into labor prematurely. \"You have to stay in there at least until 32 weeks,\" she would tell her belly. \"I see how the babies do before 32. Just don't come out too soon.\"\n\nWhen she reached 39 weeks and six days \u2014 Friday,", + " Sept. 30, 2011 \u2014 Larry and Lauren drove to Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, the hospital where the two of them had met in 2004 and where she'd spent virtually her entire career. If anyone would watch out for her and her baby, Lauren figured, it would be the doctors and nurses she worked with on a daily basis. She was especially fond of her obstetrician/gynecologist, who had trained as a resident at Monmouth at the same time as Larry. Lauren wasn't having contractions, but she and the ob/gyn agreed to schedule an induction of labor \u2014 he was on call that weekend and would be sure to handle the delivery himself.\n\nInductions often go slowly,", + " and Lauren's labor stretched well into the next day. Ennis talked to her on the phone several times: \"She said she was feeling OK, she was just really uncomfortable.\" At one point, Lauren was overcome by a sudden, sharp pain in her back near her kidneys or liver, but the nurses bumped up her epidural and the stabbing stopped.\n\nInductions have been associated with higher cesarean-section rates, but Lauren progressed well enough to deliver vaginally. On Saturday, Oct. 1, at 6:49 p.m., 23 hours after she checked into the hospital, Hailey Anne Bloomstein was born, weighing 5 pounds,", + " 12 ounces. Larry and Lauren's family had been camped out in the waiting room; now they swarmed into the delivery area to ooh and aah, marveling at how Lauren seemed to glow.\n\nLarry floated around on his own cloud of euphoria, phone camera in hand. In one 35-second video, Lauren holds their daughter on her chest, stroking her cheek with a practiced touch. Hailey is bundled in hospital-issued pastels and flannel, unusually alert for a newborn; she studies her mother's face as if trying to make sense of a mystery that will never be solved. The delivery room staff bustles in the background in the low-key way of people who believe everything has gone exactly as it's supposed to.\n\nCourtesy of the Bloomstein Family/", + "ProPublica via YouTube\n\nThen Lauren looks directly at the camera, her eyes brimming.\n\nTwenty hours later, she was dead.\n\n\"We don't pay enough attention\"\n\n\n\nThe ability to protect the health of mothers and babies in childbirth is a basic measure of a society's development. Yet every year in the U.S., 700 to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, and some 65,000 nearly die \u2014 by many measures, the worst record in the developed world.\n\nAmerican women are more than three times as likely as Canadian women to die in the maternal period (defined by the Centers for Disease Control as the start of pregnancy to one year after delivery or termination), six times as likely to die as Scandinavians.", + " In every other wealthy country, and many less affluent ones, maternal mortality rates have been falling; in Great Britain, the journal Lancet recently noted, the rate has declined so dramatically that \"a man is more likely to die while his partner is pregnant than she is.\" But in the U.S., maternal deaths increased from 2000 to 2014. In a recent analysis by the CDC Foundation, nearly 60 percent of such deaths are preventable.\n\nHear more NPR coverage of U.S. maternal mortality Listen \u00b7 7:02 7:02\n\nWhile maternal mortality is significantly more common among African-Americans, low-income women and in rural areas,", + " pregnancy and childbirth complications kill women of every race and ethnicity, education and income level, in every part of the U.S. ProPublica and NPR spent the last several months scouring social media and other sources, ultimately identifying more than 450 expectant and new mothers who have died since 2011.\n\nThe list includes teachers, insurance brokers, homeless women, journalists, a spokeswoman for Yellowstone National Park, a co-founder of the YouTube channel WhatsUpMoms, and more than a dozen doctors and nurses like Lauren Bloomstein. They died from cardiomyopathy and other heart problems, massive hemorrhage, blood clots, infections and pregnancy-induced hypertension (preeclampsia)", + " as well as rarer causes. Many died days or weeks after leaving the hospital. Maternal mortality is commonplace enough that three new mothers who died, including Lauren, were cared for by the same ob/gyn.\n\nThe reasons for higher maternal mortality in the U.S. are manifold. New mothers are older than they used to be, with more complex medical histories. Half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned, so many women don't address chronic health issues beforehand. Greater prevalence of C-sections leads to more life-threatening complications. The fragmented health system makes it harder for new mothers, especially those without good insurance, to get the care they need.", + " Confusion about how to recognize worrisome symptoms and treat obstetric emergencies makes caregivers more prone to error.\n\nYet the worsening U.S. maternal mortality numbers contrast sharply with the impressive progress in saving babies' lives. Infant mortality has fallen to its lowest point in history, the CDC reports, reflecting 50 years of efforts by the public health community to prevent birth defects, reduce preterm birth, and improve outcomes for very premature infants. The number of babies who die annually in the U.S. \u2014 about 23,000 in 2014 \u2014 still greatly exceeds the number of expectant and new mothers who die, but the ratio is narrowing.\n\nThe divergent trends for mothers and babies highlight a theme that has emerged repeatedly in ProPublica's and NPR's reporting.", + " In recent decades, under the assumption that it had conquered maternal mortality, the American medical system has focused more on fetal and infant safety and survival than on the mother's health and well-being.\n\nAbout This Investigation Special Correspondent Renee Montagne, in her first project since hosting NPR's Morning Edition, teamed up with ProPublica's Nina Martin for a six-month long investigation on maternal mortality in the U.S. Among our key findings: More American women are dying of pregnancy-related complications than any other developed country. Only in the U.S. has the rate of women who die been rising.\n\nThere's a hodgepodge of hospital protocols for dealing with potentially fatal complications,", + " allowing for treatable complications to become lethal.\n\nHospitals \u2014 including those with intensive care units for newborns \u2014 can be woefully unprepared for a maternal emergency.\n\nFederal and state funding show only 6 percent of block grants for \"maternal and child health\" actually go to the health of mothers.\n\nIn the U.S, some doctors entering the growing specialty of maternal-fetal medicine were able to complete that training without ever spending time in a labor-delivery unit. Read more from Propublica.\n\n\"We worry a lot about vulnerable little babies,\" said Barbara Levy, vice president for health policy/advocacy at the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)", + " and a member of the Council on Patient Safety in Women's Health Care. Meanwhile, \"we don't pay enough attention to those things that can be catastrophic for women.\"\n\nAt the federally funded Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network, the preeminent obstetric research collaborative in the U.S., only four of the 34 initiatives listed in its online database primarily target mothers, versus 24 aimed at improving outcomes for infants (the remainder address both).\n\nUnder the Title V federal-state program supporting maternal and child health, states devoted about 6 percent of block grants in 2016 to programs for mothers, compared to 78 percent for infants and special-needs children.", + " The notion that babies deserve more care than mothers is similarly enshrined in the Medicaid program, which pays for about 45 percent of births. In many states, the program covers moms for 60 days postpartum, their infants for a full year. The bill to replace the Affordable Care Act, adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month, could gut Medicaid for mothers and babies alike.\n\nAt the provider level, advances in technology have widened the gap between maternal and fetal and infant care. \"People became really enchanted with the ability to do ultrasound, and then high-resolution ultrasound, to do invasive procedures, to stick needles in the amniotic cavity,\" said William Callaghan chief of the CDC's Maternal and Infant Health Branch.\n\nThe growing specialty of maternal-fetal medicine drifted so far toward care of the fetus that as recently as 2012,", + " young doctors who wanted to work in the field didn't have to spend time learning to care for birthing mothers. \"The training was quite variable across the U.S.,\" said Mary D'Alton, chair of ob/gyn at Columbia University Medical Center and author of papers on disparities in care for mothers and infants. \"There were some fellows that could finish their maternal-fetal medicine training without ever being in a labor and delivery unit.\"\n\nIn the last decade or so, at least 20 hospitals have established multidisciplinary fetal care centers for babies at high risk for a variety of problems. So far, only one hospital in the U.S.", + " \u2014 NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia \u2014 has a similar program for high-risk moms-to-be.\n\nIn regular maternity wards, too, babies are monitored more closely than mothers during and after birth, maternal health advocates told ProPublica and NPR. Newborns in the slightest danger are whisked off to neonatal intensive care units like the one Lauren Bloomstein worked at, staffed by highly trained specialists ready for the worst, while their mothers are tended by nurses and doctors who expect things to be fine and are often unprepared when they aren't.\n\nWhen women are discharged, they routinely receive information about how to breast-feed and what to do if their newborn is sick but not necessarily how to tell if they need medical attention themselves.", + " \"It was only when I had my own child that I realized, 'Oh my goodness. That was completely insufficient information,'\" said Elizabeth Howell, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.\n\n\"The way that we've been trained, we do not give women enough information for them to manage their health postpartum. The focus had always been on babies and not on mothers.\"\n\nIn 2009, the Joint Commission, which accredits 21,000 health care facilities in the U.S., adopted a series of perinatal \"core measures\" \u2014 national standards that have been shown to reduce complications and improve patient outcomes.", + " Four of the measures are aimed at making sure the baby is healthy. One \u2014 bringing down the C-section rate \u2014 addresses maternal health.\n\nMeanwhile, life-saving practices that have become widely accepted in other affluent countries \u2014 and in a few states, notably California \u2014 have yet to take hold in many American hospitals. Take the example of preeclampsia, a type of high blood pressure that occurs only in pregnancy or the postpartum period, and can lead to seizures and strokes. Around the world, it kills an estimated five women an hour. But in developed countries, it is highly treatable. The key is to act quickly.\n\nBy standardizing its approach,", + " Britain has reduced preeclampsia deaths to one in a million \u2014 a total of two deaths from 2012 to 2014. In the U.S., on the other hand, preeclampsia still accounts for about 8 percent of maternal deaths\u2014 50 to 70 women a year. Including Lauren Bloomstein.\n\n\"I cannot remember too many health care employees that I respect as much as Lauren\"\n\nWhen Lauren McCarthy Bloomstein was a teenager in the 1990s, a neighbor who worked for a New York publishing firm approached her about modeling for a series of books based on Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women.", + " Since her mother's death, Lauren had become solitary and shy; she loved to read, but she decided she wasn't interested. \"Are you kidding? Go do it!\" Frankie Hedges insisted. \"That would be fabulous!\"\n\nLauren relented, and the publisher cast her as the eldest March sister, Meg. She appeared on the covers of four books, looking very much the proper 19th-century young lady with her long brown hair parted neatly down the middle and a string of pearls around her neck. The determined expression on her face, though, was pure Lauren.\n\n\"She didn't want sympathy, she didn't want pity,\" Jackie Ennis said.", + " \"She wasn't one to talk much about her feelings [about] her mom. She looked at it as this is what she was dealt and she's gonna do everything in her power to become a productive person.\"\n\nIn high school, Lauren decided her path lay in nursing, and she chose a two-year program at Brookdale Community College. She worked at a doctor's office to earn money for tuition and lived in the garage apartment that Hedges and her husband had converted especially for her, often helping out with their young twin sons. Lauren \"wasn't a real mushy person,\" Hedges said. \"She wasn't the type to say things like 'I love you.", + " '\" But she clearly relished being part of a family again. \"You can't believe how happy she is,\" Ennis once told Hedges. \"We'll be out and she'll say, 'Oh, I have to go home for dinner!'\"\n\nAfter graduating in 2002, Lauren landed at Monmouth Medical Center, a sprawling red-brick complex a few minutes from the ocean that is part of the RWJBarnabas Health system and a teaching affiliate of Philadelphia's Drexel University College of Medicine. Her first job was in the medical surgical unit, where her clinical skills and work ethic soon won accolades.\n\n\"I cannot remember too many health care employees that I respect as much as Lauren,\" Diane Stanaway,", + " then Monmouth's clinical director of nursing, wrote in a 2005 commendation. \"What a dynamite young lady and nurse!\" When a top hospital executive needed surgery, Larry recalled, he paid Lauren the ultimate compliment, picking her as one of two private-duty nurses to help oversee his care.\n\nLarry Bloomstein, who joined the unit as an orthopedic surgical resident in 2004, was dazzled, too. He liked her independent streak \u2014 \"she didn't feel the need to rely on anyone else for anything\" \u2014 and her level-headedness. Even performing CPR on a dying patient, Lauren \"had a calmness about her,\" Larry said.\n\ntoggle caption Courtesy of the Bloomstein Family\n\nHe thought her tough upbringing \"gave her a sense of confidence.", + " She didn't seem to worry about small things.\" Lauren, meanwhile, told Ennis, \"I met this guy. He's a doctor, and he's very kind.\" Their first date was a Bruce Springsteen concert; five years later they married on Long Beach Island, on the Jersey shore.\n\nOne of Lauren's favorite books was Catcher in the Rye \u2014 \"she related to the Holden Caulfield character rescuing kids,\" Larry said. When a spot opened at Monmouth's elite neonatal intensive care unit in 2006, she jumped at it.\n\nThe hospital has the fifth-busiest maternity department in the state, delivering 5,", + "449 babies in 2016. Monmouth earned an \"A\" grade from Leapfrog, a nonprofit that promotes safety in health care, and met full safety standards in critical areas of maternity care, such as rates of C-sections and early elective deliveries, a hospital spokeswoman said. Its NICU, a Level III facility for high-risk newborns, is the oldest in New Jersey.\n\n\"With NICU nursing, it's one of those things either you get it or you don't,\" said Katy DiBernardo, a 20-year veteran of the unit. \"The babies are little, and a lot of people aren't used to seeing a teeny tiny baby.\" The NICU staff included nurses,", + " neonatologists, a respiratory therapist, and residents. Lauren, DiBernardo said, \"just clicked.\"\n\nOne of the things Lauren liked best about her work was the bonds she formed with babies' families. Nurses followed the same newborns throughout their stay, sometimes for weeks or months. She was a touchstone for parents \u2014 very good at \"calming people down who have a lot of anxiety,\" Larry said \u2014 and often stayed in contact long after the babies went home, meeting the moms for coffee and even babysitting on occasion.\n\nShe also cherished the deep friendships that a place like the NICU forged. The neonatal floor was like a world unto itself,", + " Lauren Byron, another long-time nurse there, explained: \"There's a lot of stress and pressure, and you are in life-and-death situations. You develop a very close relationship with some people.\"\n\nThe environment tended to attract very strong personalities. Lauren's nickname in the Bloomstein family football pool was \"The Feisty One,\" so she fit right in. But she could stand her ground without alienating anyone. \"She was one of those people that everyone liked,\" Byron said.\n\ntoggle caption Bryan Anselm for ProPublica\n\n\"We save more than we lose\"\n\nAnother person everyone liked was ob/gyn John Vaclavik.", + " He had come to Monmouth as a resident in 2004, around the same time as Larry, after earning his bachelor's from Loyola College in Baltimore and his medical degree at St. George's University on the island of Grenada. Medicine was the family profession: two uncles and two brothers also became doctors and his wife was a perinatal social worker at the hospital. Lauren and her colleagues thought he was \"very personable\" and \"a great guy,\" Larry said.\n\n\"She was good friends with my wife and she felt comfortable with me,\" Vaclavik would recall in a 2015 court deposition.\n\nAfter his residency,", + " Vaclavik joined Ocean Obstetric & Gynecologic Associates, a thriving practice that counted numerous medical professionals among its clients. Vaclavik was a \"laborist\" \u2014 part of a movement that aimed to reduce the number of C-sections, which tend to have more difficult recoveries and more complications than vaginal births. In a state with a C-section rate of 37 percent, Monmouth's rate in 2016 was just 21 percent.\n\nThe neonatal nurses had plenty of opportunity to observe Vaclavik and other ob/gyns in action \u2014 someone from NICU was called to attend every delivery that showed signs of being complicated or unusual as well as every C-section.", + " \"We always laughed, 'They'll call us for a hangnail,'\" DiBernardo said. Lauren was so impressed by Vaclavik that she not only chose him as her own doctor, she recommended him to her best friend. \"She kept saying, 'You have to go to this guy. He's a good doctor. Good doctor,'\" Ennis said.\n\nIn other ways, though, the NICU staff and the labor and delivery staff were very separate. The neonatal nurses were focused on their own fragile patients \u2014 the satisfaction that came from helping them grow strong enough to go home, the grief when that didn't happen.", + " Once Ennis asked Lauren, \"How do you deal with babies that don't make it? That's got to be so bad.\" Lauren replied, \"Yeah, but we save more than we lose.\"\n\nLoss was less common in labor and delivery, and when a new mother suffered life-threatening complications, the news did not always reach the NICU floor. Thus, when a 29-year-old special education teacher named Tara Hansen contracted a grisly infection a few days after giving birth to her first child in March 2011, the tragedy didn't register with Lauren, who was then three months pregnant herself.\n\nHansen lived in nearby Freehold,", + " N.J., with her husband, Ryan, her high school sweetheart. Her pregnancy, like Lauren's, had been textbook perfect and she delivered a healthy 9-pound son. But Hansen suffered tearing near her vagina during childbirth. She developed signs of infection but was discharged anyway, a lawsuit by her husband later alleged.\n\nHansen was soon readmitted to Monmouth with what the lawsuit called \"excruciating, severe pain beyond the capacity of a human being to endure.\" The diagnosis was necrotizing fasciitis, commonly known as flesh-eating bacteria; two days later Hansen was dead. One of Vaclavik's colleagues delivered Hansen's baby;", + " Vaclavik himself authorized her discharge. According to court documents, he said nurses failed to inform him about Hansen's symptoms and that if he'd known her vital signs weren't stable, he wouldn't have released her. The hospital and nurses eventually settled for $1.5 million. The suit against Vaclavik and his colleagues is pending.\n\n\n\nVaclavik did not respond to several interview requests from ProPublica and NPR, including an emailed list of questions. \"Due to the fact this matter is in litigation,\" his attorney responded, \"Dr. Vaclavik respectfully declines to comment.\"\n\n\n\nCiting patient privacy, Monmouth spokeswoman Elizabeth Brennan also declined to discuss specific cases.", + " \"We are saddened by the grief these families have experienced from their loss,\" she said in a statement.\n\n\"I don't feel good\"\n\nLarry Bloomstein's first inkling that something was seriously wrong with Lauren came about 90 minutes after she gave birth. He had accompanied Hailey up to the nursery to be weighed and measured and given the usual barrage of tests for newborns. Lauren hadn't eaten since breakfast, but he returned to find her dinner tray untouched. \"I don't feel good,\" she told him. She pointed to a spot above her abdomen and just below her sternum, close to where she'd felt the stabbing sensation during labor.", + " \"I've got pain that's coming back.\"\n\nLarry had been at Lauren's side much of the previous 24 hours. Conscious that his role was husband rather than doctor, he had tried not to overstep. Now, though, he pressed Vaclavik: What was the matter with his wife? \"He was like, 'I see this a lot. We do a lot of belly surgery. This is definitely reflux,'\" Larry recalled. According to Lauren's records, the ob/gyn ordered an antacid called Bicitra and an opioid painkiller called Dilaudid. Lauren vomited them up.\n\nLauren's pain was soon 10 on a scale of 10,", + " she told Larry and the nurses; so excruciating, the nurses noted, \"Patient [is] unable to stay still.\" Just as ominously, her blood pressure was spiking. An hour after Hailey's birth, the reading was 160/95; an hour after that, 169/108. At her final prenatal appointment, her reading had been just 118/69. Obstetrics wasn't Larry's specialty, but he knew enough to ask the nurse: Could this be preeclampsia?\n\nPreeclampsia, or pregnancy-related hypertension, is a little-understood condition that affects 3 percent to 5 percent of expectant or new mothers in the U.S., up to 200,", + "000 women a year. It can strike anyone out of the blue, though the risk is higher for African-Americans, women with pre-existing conditions such as obesity, diabetes or kidney disease, and mothers over the age of 40. It is most common during the second half of pregnancy, but can develop in the days or weeks after childbirth, and can become very dangerous very quickly. Because a traditional treatment for preeclampsia is to deliver as soon as possible, the babies are often premature and end up in NICUs like the one where Lauren worked.\n\nAs Larry suspected, Lauren's blood pressure readings were well past the danger point. What he didn't know was that they'd been abnormally high since she entered the hospital \u2014 147/", + "99, according to her admissions paperwork. During labor, she had 21 systolic readings at or above 140 and 13 diastolic readings at or above 90, her records indicated; for a stretch of almost eight hours, her blood pressure wasn't monitored at all, the New Jersey Department of Health later found. Over that same period, her baby's vital signs were being constantly watched, Larry said.\n\nIn his court deposition, Vaclavik described the 147/99 reading as \"elevated\" compared to her usual readings, but not abnormal. He \"would use 180 over 110 as a cutoff\"", + " to suspect preeclampsia, he said. Still, he acknowledged, Lauren's blood pressure \"might have been recommended to be monitored more closely, in retrospect.\"\n\nLeading medical organizations in the U.S. and the U.K. take a different view. They advise that increases to 140/90 for pregnant women with no previous history of high blood pressure signify preeclampsia. When systolic readings hit 160, treatment with anti-hypertensive drugs and magnesium sulfate to prevent seizures \"should be initiated ASAP,\" according to guidelines from the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health.\n\nWhen other symptoms, such as upper abdominal (epigastric)", + " pain, are present, the situation is considered even more urgent.\n\nThis basic approach isn't new: \"Core Curriculum for Maternal-Newborn Nursing,\" a widely used textbook, outlined it in 1997. Yet failure to diagnose preeclampsia, or to differentiate it from chronic high blood pressure, is all too common.\n\nCalifornia researchers who studied preeclampsia deaths over several years found one striking theme: \"Despite triggers that clearly indicated a serious deterioration in the patient's condition, health care providers failed to recognize and respond to these signs in a timely manner, leading to delays in diagnosis and treatment.\"\n\nPreeclampsia symptoms \u2014 swelling and rapid weight gain,", + " gastric discomfort and vomiting, headache and anxiety \u2014 are often mistaken for the normal irritations that crop up during pregnancy or after giving birth. \"We don't have a yes-no test for it,\" said Eleni Tsigas, executive director of the Preeclampsia Foundation. \"A lot of physicians don't necessarily see a lot of it.\"\n\nOutdated notions \u2014 for example, that delivering the baby cures the condition \u2014 unfamiliarity with best practices and lack of crisis preparation can further hinder the response.\n\nThe fact that Lauren gave birth over the weekend may also have worked against her. Hospitals may be staffed differently on weekends,", + " adding to the challenges of managing a crisis. A new Baylor College of Medicine analysis of 45 million pregnancies in the U.S. from 2004 to 2014 found mothers who deliver on Saturday or Sunday have nearly 50 percent higher mortality rates as well as more blood transfusions and more perineal tearing. The \"weekend effect\" has also been associated with higher fatality rates from heart attacks, strokes and head trauma.\n\nAccording to Lauren's records, Vaclavik did order a preeclampsia lab test around 8:40 p.m., but a nurse noted a half-hour later: \"No abnormal labs present.\" (According to Larry,", + " the results were borderline.) Larry began pushing to call in a specialist. Vaclavik attributed Lauren's pain to esophagitis, or inflammation of the esophagus, which had afflicted her before, he said in his deposition. Around 10 p.m., according to Lauren's medical records, he phoned the on-call gastroenterologist, who ordered an x-ray and additional tests, more Dilaudid and different antacids \u2014 Maalox and Protonix. Nothing helped.\n\nMeanwhile, Larry decided to reach out to his own colleagues in the trauma unit at Cooper University Hospital in Camden. In his training, perhaps the most important lesson he'd learned was to ask for help:", + " \"If there's a problem, I will immediately get another physician involved.\" By chance, the doctor on call happened to be a fairly new mother. As Larry described Lauren's symptoms, she interrupted him. \"You can stop talking. I know what this is.\" She said Lauren had HELLP syndrome, an acronym for the most severe variation of preeclampsia, characterized by hemolysis, or the breakdown of red blood cells; elevated liver enzymes; and low platelet count, a clotting deficiency that can lead to excessive bleeding and hemorrhagic stroke.\n\nLarry's colleague urged him to stop wasting time, he recalled. Lauren's very high blood pressure,", + " the vomiting, and the terrible pain radiating from her kidneys and liver were symptoms of rapid deterioration. \"Your wife's in a lot of danger,\" the trauma doctor said. (She didn't respond to ProPublica's and NPR's requests for comment.)\n\n\"It's never just one thing\"\n\nEarlier this year, an analysis by the CDC Foundation of maternal mortality data from four states identified more than 20 \"critical factors\" that contributed to pregnancy-related deaths. Among the ones involving providers: lack of standardized policies, inadequate clinical skills, failure to consult specialists and poor coordination of care. The average maternal death had 3.7 critical factors.\n\n\"It's never just one thing,\" said Roberta Gold,", + " a member of the Council on Patient Safety in Women's Health Care, whose daughter and unborn grandson died from a pregnancy-related blood clot in 2010. \"It's always a cascading combination of things. It's a slow-motion train wreck.\"\n\nThe last 16 hours of Lauren's life were consistent with that grim pattern. Distressed by what the trauma doctor had told him, Larry immediately went to Lauren's caregivers. But they insisted the tests didn't show preeclampsia, he said. Not long after, Larry's colleague called back to check on Lauren's condition. \"I don't believe those labs,\" he recalls her telling him.", + " \"They can't be right. I'm positive of my diagnosis. Do them again.'\"\n\nMeanwhile, Lauren's agony had become almost unendurable. The blood pressure cuff on her arm was adding to her discomfort, so around 10:30 p.m. her nurse decided to remove it \u2014 on the theory, Larry said, \"We know her blood pressure is high. There's no point to retaking it.\" According to Lauren's records, her blood pressure went unmonitored for another hour and 44 minutes.\n\nLarry had given up on getting a specialist to come to the hospital so late on a Saturday night, but he persuaded Vaclavik to call in a general surgical resident.", + " Around 11:55 p.m., according to the nurses' notes, Lauren begged, \"Do anything to stop this pain.\" Vaclavik prescribed morphine, to little effect.\n\nJust after midnight, her blood pressure about to peak at 197/117, Lauren began complaining of a headache. As Larry studied his wife's face, he realized something had changed. \"She suddenly looks really calm and comfortable, like she's trying to go to sleep.\" She gave Larry a little smile, but only the right side of her mouth moved.\n\nIn an instant, Larry's alarm turned to panic. He ordered Lauren, \"Lift your hands for me.\" Only her right arm fluttered.", + " He peeled off her blankets and scraped the soles of her feet with his fingernail, testing her so-called Babinski reflex; in an adult whose brain is working normally, the big toe automatically jerks downward. Lauren's right toe curled as it was supposed to. But her left toe stuck straight out, unmoving. As Larry was examining her, Lauren suddenly seemed to realize what was happening to her. \"She looked at me and said, 'I'm afraid,' and, 'I love you.' And I'm pretty sure in that moment she put the pieces together. That she had a conscious awareness of... that she was not going to make it.\"\n\nA CT scan soon confirmed the worst:", + " The escalating blood pressure had triggered bleeding in her brain. So-called hemorrhagic strokes tend to be deadlier than those caused by blood clots. Surgery can sometimes save the patient's life, but only if it is performed quickly.\n\n\n\nLarry was a realist; he knew that even the best-case scenario was devastating. Chances were that Lauren would be paralyzed or partially paralyzed. She'd never be the mother she had dreamed of being. She'd never be a nurse again. But at least there was a chance she would live. When the neurologist arrived, Larry asked, \"Is there hope here?\" As he recalls it, the neurologist responded,", + " \"That's why I'm here. There's hope.\"\n\nLarry began gathering Lauren's loved ones \u2014 his parents, her brother, Frankie Hedges and her husband Billy, Jackie Ennis. On the phone, he tried to play down the gravity of the situation, but everyone understood. When Larry's mother arrived, the hospital entrance was locked, and Larry and Vaclavik came to meet her. \"The obstetrician just said, 'She's going to be all right,'\" Linda Bloomstein said. \"And Larry was standing behind him, and I saw the tears coming down, and he was shaking his head, 'No.'\"\n\nAround 2 a.m., the neurosurgeon finally confirmed what the trauma doctor had said four hours before:", + " Lauren had HELLP syndrome. Then he delivered more bad news: Her blood platelets \u2014 essential to stopping the hemorrhage \u2014 were dangerously low. But, according to Larry, the hospital didn't have sufficient platelets on site, so her surgery would have to be delayed. Larry was dumbfounded. How could a regional medical center that delivered babies and performed all types of surgery not have platelets on hand for an emergency? Vaclavik called the Red Cross and other facilities, pleading with them to send any they had. \"In my understanding, there was a complete shortage of platelets in the state of New Jersey,\" he said in the deposition.", + " Hours passed before the needed platelets arrived.\n\nThe neuro team did another CT scan around 6 a.m. Larry couldn't bring himself to look at it, \"but from what they've told me, it was horrifically worse.\" While Lauren was in surgery, friends began dropping by, hoping to see her and the baby, not realizing what had happened since her cheerful texts the night before. Around 12:30 p.m., the neurosurgeon emerged and confirmed that brain activity had stopped. Lauren was on life support, with no chance of recovery.\n\nAll this time, Hailey had been in the newborn nursery, being tended by Lauren's stunned colleagues.", + " They brought her down to Lauren's room and Larry placed her gently into her mother's arms. After a few minutes, the nurses whisked the baby back up to the third floor to protect her from germs. A respiratory therapist carefully removed the breathing tube from Lauren's mouth. At 3:08 p.m., surrounded by her loved ones, she died.\n\nA private tragedy\n\nIn the U.S., unlike some other developed countries, maternal deaths are treated as a private tragedy rather than as a public health catastrophe. A death in childbirth may be mourned on Facebook or memorialized on GoFundMe, but it is rarely reported in the news.", + " Most obituaries, Lauren's included, don't mention how a mother died.\n\nLauren's passing was more public than most, eliciting an outpouring of grief. Hundreds of people attended her wake and funeral \u2014 doctors and nurses from the hospital, friends from around the country, families Lauren had taken care of. Vaclavik was there, utterly devastated, Larry's family said. The head of Monmouth's ob/gyn department paid his respects and, according to Larry, promised in a private conversation at the wake to conduct a full investigation.\n\ntoggle caption Courtesy of the Bloomstein Family\n\nIn the days after Lauren's death,", + " Larry couldn't dwell on the implications of what had happened. He had to find a burial plot, choose a casket, write a eulogy. He was too shattered to return to the Mooresville house, so he took Hailey to his parents' place, a one-bedroom apartment they were renting while they renovated their home, and slept with the baby in the living room for the first month.\n\nAfter the funeral, he turned all his attention to his daughter. He knew nothing about newborns, always imagining Lauren would teach him \u2014 \"What could be better than having your own NICU nurse to take care of your baby?\" he had thought.", + " He relied on his mother and sister and Lauren's friends to guide him. He took time off from his job at Cooper, figuring three months would be enough. But as his return date approached, he knew he wasn't ready. \"I don't think I can see a patient that's on a ventilator right now,\" he realized. \"Or even just a hospital bed.\" He didn't want to leave Hailey. So he quit.\n\nHe sold the house, though he couldn't bring himself to attend the closing \u2014 \"I couldn't stand handing those keys over to someone else.\" He took Hailey a couple of times to stay with his sister and her family in Texas,", + " where he didn't have to answer the constant questions. But traveling with his baby daughter was painful in its own way. People didn't know what to make of him. \"It's strange for people to see a father alone,\" he said.\n\nWherever he went, he felt disconnected from almost everything around him: \"You're walking around this world and all these people are around you, and they're going on with their lives and I just felt very, very isolated and very alone with that.\"\n\nBack in New Jersey, Larry found a job closer to his parents' place, performed one operation and tried to quit. His new employers, though,", + " persuaded him to stay. To avoid reliving the funeral, he returned to Texas for the first anniversary of Hailey's birth and Lauren's death in late September 2012. In one of his suitcases, he packed a giant cupcake mold Lauren had bought when they first married \u2014 she thought it would make a perfect first-birthday cake for the kids she yearned for. He baked the cake himself \u2014 chocolate, Lauren's favorite, covered with sprinkles.\n\n\"With our technology, every single time a woman dies, it's a medical error\"\n\nOther people in Lauren's and Larry's circle had been asking questions about her care since the night she died.", + " \"That was the first thing I literally said when I walked [into the hospital] \u2014 I said, 'How did this happen?'\" Jackie Ennis recalled. In the next week or two, she probed Larry again: \"'Did they do everything they could for her?'\" He said, 'No, there were warning signs for hours before.'\" Ennis was too upset to dig any deeper.\n\nAs Larry's numbness wore off, his orthopedist friends began pushing him as well. Larry was hesitant; despite the missteps he had witnessed, part of him wanted to believe that Lauren's death had been unavoidable. \"And my friends were like,", + " 'We can't accept that... With our technology, every single time a woman dies [in childbirth], it's a medical error.'\"\n\nLauren's death, Larry finally admitted to himself, could not be dismissed as either inevitable or a fluke. He had seen how Lauren's ob/gyn and nurses had failed to recognize a textbook case of one of the most common complications of pregnancy \u2014 not once, but repeatedly over two days. To Larry, the fact that someone with Lauren's advantages could die so needlessly was symptomatic of a bigger problem. By some measures, New Jersey had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S.", + " He wanted authorities to get to the root of it \u2014 to push the people and institutions that were at fault to change.\n\nThat's the approach in the United Kingdom, where maternal deaths are regarded as systems failures. A national committee of experts scrutinizes every death of a woman from pregnancy or childbirth complications, collecting medical records and assessments from caregivers, conducting rigorous analyses of the data, and publishing reports that help set policy for hospitals throughout the country. Coroners also sometimes hold public inquests, forcing hospitals and their staffs to answer for their mistakes. The U.K. process is largely responsible for the stunning reduction in preeclampsia deaths in Britain,", + " the committee noted its 2016 report \u2014 \"a clear success story\" that it hoped to repeat \"across other medical and mental health causes of maternal death.\"\n\nThe U.S. has no comparable federal effort. Instead, maternal mortality reviews are left up to states. As of this spring, 26 states (and one city, Philadelphia) had a well-established process in place; another five states had committees that were less than a year old. In almost every case, resources are tight, the reviews take years, and the findings get little attention. A bipartisan bill in Congress, the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act of 2017,", + " would authorize funding for states to establish review panels or improve their processes.\n\nNew Jersey's review team, the second-oldest in the U.S., includes ob/gyns, nurses, mental health specialists, medical examiners, even a nutritionist. Using vital records and other reports, they identify every woman in New Jersey who died within a year of pregnancy or childbirth, from any cause, then review medical and other records to determine whether the death was \"pregnancy-related\" or not. Every few years, the committee publishes a report, focusing on things like the race and age of the mothers who died, the causes of death,", + " and other demographic and health data. In the past, the findings have been used to promote policies to reduce postpartum depression.\n\nBut the New Jersey committee doesn't interview the relatives of the deceased, nor does it assess whether a death was preventable. Moreover, like every other state that conducts such reviews, New Jersey \"de-identifies\" the records \u2014 strips them of any information that might point to an individual hospital or a particular woman. Otherwise, the medical community and lawmakers would refuse to go along. The goal is to \"improve care for patients in general,\" said Joseph Apuzzio, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Rutgers-New Jersey Medical School who heads the committee.", + " This requires a process that is \"nonjudgmental\" and \"not punitive,\" he said. \"That's the best way to get a free discussion of all of the health care providers who are in the room.\"\n\nYet the result of de-identification, as Larry soon realized, is that the review is of little use in assigning responsibility for individual deaths, or evaluating whether some hospitals, doctors or nurses are more prone to error than others. To Larry, this seemed like a critical oversight \u2014 or perhaps, willful denial. In a preventable death or other medical error, he said, sometimes the who and the where are as important as the why.", + " \"Unless someone points the finger specifically,\" he said, \"I think the actual cause [of the problem] is lost.\"\n\n\"The facility is not in compliance\"\n\nSomeone eventually steered Larry toward the New Jersey Department of Health's licensing and inspection division, which oversees hospital and nursing-home safety. He filed a complaint against Monmouth Medical Center in 2012.\n\nThe DOH examined Lauren's records, interviewed her caregivers and scrutinized Monmouth's policies and practices. In December 2012 it issued a report that backed up everything Larry had seen first-hand. \"There is no record in the medical record that the Registered Nurse notified [the ob/gyn]", + " of the elevated blood pressures of patient prior to delivery,\" investigators found. And: \"There is no evidence in the medical record of further evaluation and surveillance of patient from [the ob/gyn] prior to delivery.\" And: \"There was no evidence in the medical record that the elevated blood pressures were addressed by [the ob/gyn] until after the Code Stroke was called.\"\n\nThe report faulted the hospital. \"The facility is not in compliance\" with New Jersey hospital licensing standards, it concluded. \"The facility failed to ensure that recommended obstetrics guidelines are adhered to by staff.\"\n\nTo address these criticisms, Monmouth Medical Center had implemented a plan of correction,", + " also contained in the report. The plan called for a mandatory educational program for all labor and delivery nurses about preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome; staff training in Advance Life Support Obstetrics and Critical Care Obstetrics; and more training on the use of evidence-based methods to assess patients and improve communications between caregivers.\n\nSome of the changes were strikingly basic: \"Staff nurses were educated regarding the necessity of reviewing, when available, or obtaining the patients [sic] prenatal records. Education identified that they must make a comparison of the prenatal blood pressure against the initial admission blood pressure.\" And: \"Repeat vital signs will be obtained every 4 hours at a minimum.\"\n\nAn important part of the plan of correction involved Vaclavik,", + " though neither he nor the nurses were identified by name. The head of Monmouth's ob/gyn department provided \"professional remediation for the identified physician,\" the Department of Health report said. In addition, there was \"monitoring of 100% of records for physician of record per month x 3 months.\" The monitoring focused on \"compliance of timely physician intervention for elevated blood pressures/pain assessment and management.\"\n\nThe department chairman, Robert Graebe, found Vaclavik's charts to be 100 percent compliant, Vaclavik said in the deposition. Graebe was asked in a March 2017 deposition if Vaclavik was in good standing at the hospital at the time of Lauren's treatment.", + " \"Was and is,\" Graebe replied.\n\nIn a separate note, the Department of Health told Larry that it forwarded his complaint to the Board of Medical Examiners and the New Jersey Board of Nursing. Neither agency has taken disciplinary action, according to their websites.\n\nLarry's copy of the DOH report arrived in the mail. He was gratified by the findings but dismayed that they weren't publicly posted. That meant hardly anyone would see them.\n\nA few months after the DOH weighed in, he sued Monmouth, Vaclavik and five nurses in Monmouth County Superior Court in Freehold, N.J. For a medical malpractice lawsuit to go forward in New Jersey,", + " an expert must certify that it has merit. Larry's passed muster with an ob-gyn. But beyond the taking of depositions, there's been little action in the case.\n\nCreating \"toolkits\"\n\nAs the maternal death rate has mounted around the U.S., a small cadre of reformers has mobilized. Some of the earliest and most important work has come in California, where more babies are born than in any other state \u2014500,000 a year, one-eighth of the U.S. total.\n\nModeled on the U.K. process, the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative is informed by the experiences of founder Elliott Main,", + " a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and the University of California-San Francisco, who for many years ran the ob/gyn department at a San Francisco hospital. \"One of my saddest moments as an obstetrician was a woman with severe preeclampsia that we thought we had done everything correct, who still had a major stroke and we could not save her,\" he said recently. That loss has weighed on him for 20 years. \"When you've had a maternal death, you remember it for the rest of your life. All the details.\"\n\nLaunched a decade ago, CMQCC aims to reduce not only mortality,", + " but also life-threatening complications and racial disparities in obstetric care. It began by analyzing maternal deaths in the state over several years; in almost every case, it discovered, there was \"at least some chance to alter the outcome.\" The most preventable deaths were from hemorrhage (70 percent) and preeclampsia (60 percent).\n\nMain and his colleagues then began creating a series of \"toolkits\" to help doctors and nurses improve their handling of emergencies. The first one, targeting obstetric bleeding, recommended things like \"hemorrhage carts\" for storing medications and supplies, crisis protocols for massive transfusions, and regular training and drills.", + " Instead of the common practice of \"eye-balling\" blood loss, which often leads to underestimating the seriousness of a hemorrhage and delaying treatment, nurses learned to collect and weigh postpartum blood to get precise measurements.\n\nHospitals that adopted the toolkit saw a 21 percent decrease in near deaths from maternal bleeding in the first year; hospitals that didn't use the protocol had a 1.2 percent reduction. By 2013, according to Main, maternal deaths in California fell to around 7 per 100,000 births, similar to the numbers in Canada, France and the Netherlands \u2014 a dramatic counter to the trends in other parts of the U.S.\n\n\"", + "Prevention isn't a magic pill,\" Main said. \"It's actually teamwork [and having] a structured, organized, standardized approach\" to care.\n\nCMQCC's preeclampsia toolkit, launched in 2014, emphasized the kind of practices that might have saved Lauren Bloomstein: careful monitoring of blood pressure and early and aggressive treatment with magnesium sulfate and anti-hypertensive medications. Data on its effectiveness hasn't been published.\n\nThe collaborative's work has inspired ACOG and advocates in a few states to create their own initiatives. Much of the funding has come from a 10-year, $500 million maternal health initiative by Merck,", + " the pharmaceutical giant. Originally intended to focus on less developed countries, Merck for Mothers decided it couldn't ignore the growing problem in the U.S. The U.S. maternal mortality rate is \"unacceptable,\" said executive director Mary-Ann Etiebet. Making pregnancy and childbirth safer \"will not only save women's lives but will improve and strengthen our health systems... for all.\"\n\nBut the really hard work is only beginning. According to the Institute of Medicine, it takes an average of 17 years for a new medical protocol to be widely adopted. Even in California, half of the 250 hospitals that deliver babies still aren't using the toolkits,", + " said Main, who largely blames inertia.\n\nIn New York State, some hospitals have questioned the need for what they call \"cookbook medicine,\" said Columbia's D'Alton. Her response: \"Variability is the enemy of safety. Rather than have 10 different approaches to obstetric hemorrhage or treatment of hypertension, choose one or two and make it consistent... When we do things in a standardized way, we have better outcomes.\"\n\nOne big hurdle: training. Another: money. Smaller providers, in particular, may not see the point. \"It's very hard to get a hospital to provide resources to change something that they don't see as a problem,\" ACOG's Barbara Levy said.", + " \"If they haven't had a maternal death because they only deliver 500 babies a year, how many years is it going to be before they see a severe problem? It may be 10 years.\"\n\nIn New Jersey, providers don't need as much convincing, thanks to a recent project to reduce postpartum blood loss led by the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses. A number of hospitals saw improvements; at one, the average length of a hemorrhage-related ICU stay plunged from 8 days to 1.5 days. But only 31 of the state's 52 birthing hospitals participated in the effort,", + " in part \u2014 perhaps \u2014 because nurses led it, said Robyn D'Oria, executive director of the Central Jersey Family Health Consortium and member of the state's maternal mortality committee. \"I remember having a conversation with [someone from] a hospital that I would describe as progressive and she said to me, 'I cannot get past some of the physicians not wanting to buy into this.'\"\n\nSo New Jersey hospitals are about to try again, this time adopting mini-toolkits created by the ACOG-led Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health for hemorrhage and preeclampsia. \"We're at the very beginning\" of a roll-out that is likely to take at least two years,", + " D'Oria said. Among those helping create momentum has been Ryan Hansen, the husband of the teacher who died at Monmouth Medical Center a few months before Lauren Bloomstein.\n\ntoggle caption Bryan Anselm for ProPublica\n\nStill, as hospitals begin to revamp, mothers in the state continue to perish. One was Ashley Heaney Butler. A Rutgers University graduate, she lived in Bayville, where she decorated the walls of her house with anchors, reflecting her passion for the ocean. She worked for the state Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services as a counselor, and served as president of the New Jersey Rehabilitation Association. Her husband Joseph was a firefighter.", + " She gave birth at Monmouth last September to a healthy boy and died a couple of weeks later at the age of 31, never leaving the hospital. It turned out that she had developed an infection late in her pregnancy, possibly related to a prior gastric bypass surgery. She was under the care of several doctors, including Vaclavik.\n\n\"She didn't get what she deserved\"\n\nThe sudden death of a new mother is tragic to everyone around her. \"When you take that one death and what that does, not only to the husband, but to the family and to the community, the impact that it has in the hospital, on the staff,", + " on everybody that's cared for her, on all the people who knew them, it has ripple effects for generations to come,\" Robyn D'Oria said.\n\nJackie Ennis felt Lauren's loss as an absence of phone calls. She and Lauren had been closer than many sisters, talking several times a day. Sometimes Lauren called just to say she was really tired and would talk later; she'd even called Ennis from Hawaii on her honeymoon. The night Lauren died, Ennis knew something was wrong because she hadn't heard from her best friend. \"It took me a really long time not to get the phone calls,\" she said.", + " \"I still have trouble with that.\"\n\nDuring Lauren's pregnancy, Frankie Hedges had thought of herself as Hailey's other grandmother. She and Lauren had made a lot of plans. Lauren's death meant the loss of their shared dreams for an entire extended family. \"I just feel she didn't get what she deserved,\" Hedges said.\n\nVaclavik's obstetric practice is \"larger\" than in 2011, and he continues to have admitting privileges at Monmouth and two other hospitals, he said in his deposition. \"I will never forget\" Lauren's death, he said. \"... I probably suffer some post traumatic stress from this.\"\n\nHailey is 5 years old,", + " with Lauren's brown hair and clear green eyes. She feels her mother's presence everywhere, thanks to Larry and his new wife Carolyn, whom he married in 2014. They met when she was a surgical tech at one of the hospitals he worked at after Lauren died. Photos and drawings of Lauren occupy the mantle of their home in Holmdel, the bookcase in the dining room, and the walls of the upstairs hallway. Larry and Carolyn and their other family members talk about Lauren freely, and even Larry's younger daughter, 2-year-old Aria, calls her \"Mommy Lauren.\"\n\nOn birthdays and holidays, Larry takes the girls to the cemetery.", + " He designed the gravestone \u2014 his handprint and Lauren's reaching away from each other, newborn Hailey's linking them forever. Larry has done his best to keep Lauren's extended family together \u2014 Ennis and Hedges and their families are included in every important celebration.\n\nLarry still has the video of Lauren and Hailey on his phone. \"By far the hardest thing for me to accept is [what happened] from Lauren's perspective,\" he said one recent evening, hitting the play button and seeing her alive once more. \"I can't, I literally can't accept it. The amount of pain she must have experienced in that exact moment when she finally had this little girl... I can accept the amount of pain I have been dealt,\" he went on,", + " watching Lauren stroke Hailey's cheek. \"But [her pain] is the one thing I just can't accept. I can't understand, I can't fathom it.\"\n\n\n\nNPR's Bo Erickson, and ProPublica's research editor Derek Kravitz and engagement reporter Adriana Gallardo contributed to this report.\n\n", + " NCHS Data Brief No. 229, December 2015\n\nPDF Version (711 KB)\n\nSherry L. Murphy, B.S.; Kenneth D. Kochanek, M.A.; Jiaquan Xu, M.D.; and Elizabeth Arias, Ph.D.\n\nKey findings\n\nData from the National Vital Statistics System, Mortality\n\nLife expectancy for the U.S. population in 2014 was unchanged from 2013 at 78.8 years.\n\nThe age-adjusted death rate decreased 1.0% to 724.6 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 2014 from 731.9 in 2013.\n\nThe 10 leading causes of death in 2014 remained the same as in 2013.", + " Age-adjusted death rates significantly decreased for 5 leading causes and significantly increased for 4 leading causes.\n\nThe infant mortality rate decreased 2.3% to a historic low of 582.1 infant deaths per 100,000 live births. The 10 leading causes of infant death in 2014 remained the same as in 2013.\n\nThis report presents 2014 U.S. final mortality data on deaths and death rates by demographic and medical characteristics. These data provide information on mortality patterns among U.S. residents by such variables as sex, race and ethnicity, and cause of death. Information on mortality patterns is key to understanding changes in the health and well-being of the U.S.", + " population. Life expectancy estimates, age-adjusted death rates by race and ethnicity and sex, the 10 leading causes of death, and the 10 leading causes of infant death were analyzed by comparing 2014 final data with 2013 final data (1).\n\nKeywords: life expectancy, leading cause, death rates, National Vital Statistics System\n\nHow long can we expect to live?\n\nLife expectancy at birth represents the average number of years that a group of infants would live if the group was to experience, throughout life, the age-specific death rates present in the year of birth. In 2014, life expectancy at birth was 78.", + "8 years for the total U.S. population\u201481.2 years for females and 76.4 years for males (Figure 1), the same as in 2013. Life expectancy for females was consistently higher than life expectancy for males. In 2014, the difference in life expectancy between females and males was 4.8 years, the same as in 2013.\n\nFigure 1. Life expectancy at selected ages, by sex: United States, 2013 and 2014\n\nSOURCE: CDC/NCHS, National Vital Statistics System, Mortality.\n\nLife expectancy at age 65 for the total population was 19.", + "3 years, the same as in 2013. Life expectancy at age 65 was 20.5 years for females, unchanged from 2013, and 18.0 years for males, a 0.1-year increase from 2013. The difference in life expectancy at age 65 between females and males decreased 0.1 year, to 2.5 years in 2014 from 2.6 years in 2013.\n\nWhich population groups experienced reductions in mortality?\n\nThe age-adjusted death rate for the total population decreased 1.0% to a record low of 724.6 deaths per 100,", + "000 standard population in 2014 from 731.9 in 2013. Age-adjusted death rates decreased significantly in 2014 from 2013 for non-Hispanic black males (2.1%), non-Hispanic black females (1.3%), non-Hispanic white males (0.5%), non-Hispanic white females (0.7%), Hispanic males (2.0%), and Hispanic females (2.5%) (Figure 2).\n\nFigure 2. Age-adjusted death rates for selected populations: United States, 2013 and 2014\n\nSOURCE: CDC/NCHS, National Vital Statistics System,", + " Mortality.\n\nWhat are the leading causes of death?\n\nIn 2014, the 10 leading causes of death\u2014heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, unintentional injuries, stroke, Alzheimer\u2019s disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease, and suicide\u2014remained the same as in 2013 (Figure 3). The 10 leading causes accounted for 73.8% of all deaths in the United States in 2014.\n\nFrom 2013 to 2014, age-adjusted death rates significantly decreased for 5 of the 10 leading causes of death and significantly increased for 4 leading causes.", + " The rate decreased by 1.6% for heart disease, 1.2% for cancer, 3.8% for chronic lower respiratory diseases, 1.4% for diabetes, and 5.0% for influenza and pneumonia. The rate increased by 2.8% for unintentional injuries, 0.8% for stroke, 8.1% for Alzheimer\u2019s disease, and 3.2% for suicide. The rate for kidney disease in 2014 remained the same as in 2013.\n\nFigure 3. Age-adjusted death rates for the 10 leading causes of death: United States,", + " 2013 and 2014\n\nNOTES: A total of 2,626,418 resident deaths were registered in the United States in 2014. The 10 leading causes accounted for 73.8% of all deaths in the United States in 2014. Access data table for Figure 3 [PDF - 514 KB]. Causes of death are ranked according to number of deaths.\n\nSOURCE: CDC/NCHS, National Vital Statistics System, Mortality.\n\nWhat are the leading causes of infant death?\n\nThe infant mortality rate (IMR)\u2014the ratio of infant deaths to live births in a given year\u2014is generally considered a good indicator of the overall health of a population.", + " IMR declined 2.3% to a record low 582.1 infant deaths per 100,000 live births in 2014 from 596.1 in 2013.\n\nThe 10 leading causes of infant death in 2014 accounted for 69.1% of all infant deaths in the United States (Figure 4). The leading causes remained the same as in 2013. For Respiratory distress of newborn, IMR decreased 13.5% to 11.5 infant deaths per 100,000 live births in 2014 from 13.3 in 2013 (Figure 4). Mortality rates for other leading causes of infant death did not change significantly.\n\nFigure 4.", + " Infant mortality rates for the 10 leading causes of infant death: United States, 2013 and 2014\n\nNOTES: A total of 23,215 deaths occurred in children under age 1 year in the United States in 2014, with an infant mortality rate of 582.1 infant deaths per 100,000 live births. The 10 leading causes of infant death in 2014 accounted for 69.1% of all infant deaths in the United States. Access data table for Figure 4 [PDF - 514 KB]. Causes of death are ranked according to number of deaths.\n\nSOURCE: CDC/NCHS,", + " National Vital Statistics System, Mortality.\n\nSummary\n\nFrom 2013 to 2014, the age-adjusted death rate for the total population declined 1.0%, and life expectancy at birth remained unchanged at 78.8 years. In 2014, a total of 2,626,418 resident deaths were registered in the United States. The age-adjusted death rate declined for each major race and ethnicity group by sex. Significant decreases in mortality in 2014 compared with 2013 are consistent with long-term trends (1). Although year-to-year changes are usually relatively small, the age-adjusted death rate in the United States decreased 16.", + "6% between 2000 (869.0) and 2014 (724.6) (1).\n\nThe leading causes of death in 2014 remained the same as in 2013. Mortality significantly decreased for five leading causes and increased for four. Life expectancy at birth remained unchanged at 78.8 years as decreases in mortality for heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, diabetes, and influenza and pneumonia were offset somewhat by increases in mortality from unintentional injuries, stroke, Alzheimer\u2019s disease, and suicide.\n\nIn 2014, a total of 23,215 deaths occurred in children aged under 1 year,", + " which was 225 fewer infant deaths than in 2013. IMR decreased 2.3% to a historic low. The leading causes of infant death were the same in 2014 as in 2013. The only significant change among leading causes of infant death was a 13.5% decrease in IMR for Respiratory distress of newborn.\n\nDefinitions\n\nDeath rates: For 2014, death rates are based on population estimates for July 1, 2014, that are consistent with the April 1, 2010, census. These population estimates (as well as population figures for the 2010 census)", + " are available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention\u2019s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) website (2). Age-adjusted death rates remove potential bias that can occur when populations being compared have different age structures. NCHS uses the direct method of standardization; see Technical Notes in \u201cDeaths: Final Data for 2012\u201d (3) for more information.\n\nCause of death: Based on medical information\u2014including injury diagnoses and external causes of injury\u2014that is entered on death certificates filed in the United States. This information is classified and coded in accordance with the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision (ICD\u201310)", + " (4).\n\nLife expectancy: The expected average number of years of life remaining at a given age. It is denoted by e x, which means the average number of subsequent years of life for someone now aged x. Life expectancy estimates for 2014 are based on a methodology first implemented with 2008 final mortality data (5).\n\nLeading causes of death: Ranked according to the number of deaths assigned to rankable causes (6).\n\nInfant mortality rate (IMR): Computed by dividing the number of infant deaths in a calendar year by the number of live births registered for that same time period. IMR is the most widely used index for measuring the risk of dying during the first year of life.\n\nData source and methods\n\nThe data shown in this report reflect information collected by NCHS for 2013 and 2014 from death certificates filed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and compiled into national data known as the National Vital Statistics System.", + " Death rates shown in this report are calculated based on postcensal population estimates as of July 1, 2013 and 2014, which are consistent with the April 1, 2010, census.\n\nAbout the authors\n\nSherry L. Murphy, Kenneth D. Kochanek, Jiaquan Xu, and Elizabeth Arias are with CDC\u2019s National Center for Health Statistics, Division of Vital Statistics..\n\nReferences\n\nSuggested citation\n\nMurphy SL, Kochanek KD, Xu JQ, Arias E. Mortality in the United States, 2014. NCHS data brief, no 229.", + " Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2015.\n\nCopyright information\n\nAll material appearing in this report is in the public domain and may be reproduced or copied without permission; citation as to source, however, is appreciated.\n\nNational Center for Health Statistics\n\nCharles J. Rothwell, M.S., M.B.A., Director\n\nNathaniel Schenker, Ph.D., Deputy Director\n\nJennifer H. Madans, Ph.D., Associate Director for Science\n\nDivision of Vital Statistics\n\nDelton Atkinson, M.P.H., M.P.H., P.M.P., Director\n\nHanyu Ni, Ph.D., M.P.H., Associate Director for Science ", + " As a neonatal intensive care nurse, Lauren Bloomstein had been taking care of other people\u2019s babies for years. Finally, at 33, she was expecting one of her own. The prospect of becoming a mother made her giddy, her husband Larry recalled recently \u2014 \u201cthe happiest and most alive I\u2019d ever seen her.\u201d When Lauren was 13, her own mother had died of a massive heart attack. Lauren had lived with her older brother for a while, then with a neighbor in Hazlet, New Jersey, who was like a surrogate mom, but in important ways she\u2019d grown up mostly alone. The chance to create her own family,", + " to be the mother she didn\u2019t have, touched a place deep inside her. \u201cAll she wanted to do was be loved,\u201d said Frankie Hedges, who took Lauren in as a teenager and thought of her as her daughter. \u201cI think everybody loved her, but nobody loved her the way she wanted to be loved.\u201d\n\nHelp Us Investigate Pregnancy Complications in the U.S. ProPublica and NPR need your help understanding why so many American women die and nearly die because of pregnancy and childbirth. Share your story. Email Updates Sign up to get ProPublica\u2019s major investigations delivered to your inbox.\n\nOther than some nausea in her first trimester,", + " the pregnancy went smoothly. Lauren was \u201ctired in the beginning, achy in the end,\u201d said Jackie Ennis, her best friend since high school, who talked to her at least once a day. \u201cShe gained what she\u2019s supposed to. She looked great, she felt good, she worked as much as she could\u201d \u2014 at least three 12-hour shifts a week until late into her ninth month. Larry, a doctor, helped monitor her blood pressure at home, and all was normal.\n\nOn her days off she got organized, picking out strollers and car seats, stocking up on diapers and onesies. After one last pre-baby vacation to the Caribbean,", + " she and Larry went hunting for their forever home, settling on a brick colonial with black shutters and a big yard in Moorestown, not far from his new job as an orthopedic trauma surgeon in Camden. Lauren wanted the baby\u2019s gender to be a surprise, so when she set up the nursery she left the walls unpainted \u2014 she figured she\u2019d have plenty of time to choose colors later. Despite all she knew about what could go wrong, she seemed untroubled by the normal expectant-mom anxieties. Her only real worry was going into labor prematurely. \u201cYou have to stay in there at least until 32 weeks,\u201d she would tell her belly.", + " \u201cI see how the babies do before 32. Just don\u2019t come out too soon.\u201d\n\nWhen she reached 39 weeks and six days \u2014 Friday, Sept. 30, 2011 \u2014 Larry and Lauren drove to Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, the hospital where the two of them had met in 2004 and where she\u2019d spent virtually her entire career. If anyone would watch out for her and her baby, Lauren figured, it would be the doctors and nurses she worked with on a daily basis. She was especially fond of her obstetrician-gynecologist, who had trained as a resident at Monmouth at the same time as Larry.", + " Lauren wasn\u2019t having contractions, but she and the OB-GYN agreed to schedule an induction of labor \u2014 he was on call that weekend and would be sure to handle the delivery himself.\n\nInductions often go slowly, and Lauren\u2019s labor stretched well into the next day. Ennis talked to her on the phone several times: \u201cShe said she was feeling okay, she was just really uncomfortable.\u201d At one point, Lauren was overcome by a sudden, sharp pain in her back near her kidneys or liver, but the nurses bumped up her epidural and the stabbing stopped.\n\nInductions have been associated with higher cesarean-section rates, but Lauren progressed well enough to deliver vaginally.", + " On Saturday, Oct. 1, at 6:49 p.m., 23 hours after she checked into the hospital, Hailey Anne Bloomstein was born, weighing 5 pounds, 12 ounces. Larry and Lauren\u2019s family had been camped out in the waiting room; now they swarmed into the delivery area to ooh and aah, marveling at how Lauren seemed to glow.\n\nLarry floated around on his own cloud of euphoria, phone camera in hand. In one 35-second video, Lauren holds their daughter on her chest, stroking her cheek with a practiced touch. Hailey is bundled in hospital-", + "issued pastels and flannel, unusually alert for a newborn; she studies her mother\u2019s face as if trying to make sense of a mystery that will never be solved. The delivery room staff bustles in the background in the low-key way of people who believe everything has gone exactly as it\u2019s supposed to.\n\nThen Lauren looks directly at the camera, her eyes brimming.\n\nTwenty hours later, she was dead.\n\nThe ability to protect the health of mothers and babies in childbirth is a basic measure of a society\u2019s development. Yet every year in the U.S., 700 to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, and some 65,", + "000 nearly die \u2014 by many measures, the worst record in the developed world.\n\nAmerican women are more than three times as likely as Canadian women to die in the maternal period (defined by the Centers for Disease Control as the start of pregnancy to one year after delivery or termination), six times as likely to die as Scandinavians. In every other wealthy country, and many less affluent ones, maternal mortality rates have been falling; in Great Britain, the journal Lancet recently noted, the rate has declined so dramatically that \u201ca man is more likely to die while his partner is pregnant than she is.\u201d But in the U.S., maternal deaths increased from 2000 to 2014.", + " In a recent analysis by the CDC Foundation, nearly 60 percent of such deaths were preventable.\n\nWhile maternal mortality is significantly more common among African Americans, low-income women and in rural areas, pregnancy and childbirth complications kill women of every race and ethnicity, education and income level, in every part of the U.S. ProPublica and NPR spent the last several months scouring social media and other sources, ultimately identifying more than 450 expectant and new mothers who have died since 2011. The list includes teachers, insurance brokers, homeless women, journalists, a spokeswoman for Yellowstone National Park, a co-founder of the YouTube channel WhatsUpMoms,", + " and more than a dozen doctors and nurses like Lauren Bloomstein. They died from cardiomyopathy and other heart problems, massive hemorrhage, blood clots, infections and pregnancy-induced hypertension (preeclampsia) as well as rarer causes. Many died days or weeks after leaving the hospital. Maternal mortality is commonplace enough that three new mothers who died, including Lauren, were cared for by the same OB-GYN.\n\nThe reasons for higher maternal mortality in the U.S. are manifold. New mothers are older than they used to be, with more complex medical histories. Half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned,", + " so many women don\u2019t address chronic health issues beforehand. Greater prevalence of C-sections leads to more life-threatening complications. The fragmented health system makes it harder for new mothers, especially those without good insurance, to get the care they need. Confusion about how to recognize worrisome symptoms and treat obstetric emergencies makes caregivers more prone to error.\n\nMaternal Mortality Is Rising in the U.S. As It Declines Elsewhere Maternal Mortality Is Rising in the U.S. As It Declines Elsewhere 1990 0 5 10 15 20 25 2000 2015 U.K. (9.", + "2) Portugal (9) Germany (9) France (7.8) Canada (7.3) Netherlands (6.7) Spain (5.6) Australia (5.5) Ireland (4.7) Sweden (4.4) Italy (4.2) Denmark (4.2) Finland (3.8) U.S.A. (26.4) Per 100,000 live births. Source: \u201cGlobal, regional, and national levels of maternal mortality, 1990\u20132015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015,\u201d The Lancet. Note:", + " Only data for 1990, 2000 and 2015 was made available in the journal.\n\nYet the worsening U.S. maternal mortality numbers contrast sharply with the impressive progress in saving babies\u2019 lives. Infant mortality has fallen to its lowest point in history, the CDC reports, reflecting 50 years of efforts by the public health community to prevent birth defects, reduce preterm birth and improve outcomes for very premature infants. The number of babies who die annually in the U.S. \u2014 about 23,000 in 2014 \u2014 still greatly exceeds the number of expectant and new mothers who die, but the ratio is narrowing.\n\nThe divergent trends for mothers and babies highlight a theme that has emerged repeatedly in ProPublica\u2019s and NPR\u2019s reporting.", + " In recent decades, under the assumption that it had conquered maternal mortality, the American medical system has focused more on fetal and infant safety and survival than on the mother\u2019s health and well-being.\n\n\u201cWe worry a lot about vulnerable little babies,\u201d said Barbara Levy, vice president for health policy/advocacy at the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and a member of the Council on Patient Safety in Women\u2019s Health Care. Meanwhile, \u201cwe don\u2019t pay enough attention to those things that can be catastrophic for women.\u201d\n\nAt the federally funded Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network, the preeminent obstetric research collaborative in the U.S., only four of the 34 initiatives listed in its online database primarily target mothers,", + " versus 24 aimed at improving outcomes for infants (the remainder address both). Under the Title V federal-state program supporting maternal and child health, states devoted about 6 percent of block grants in 2016 to programs for mothers, compared to 78 percent for infants and special-needs children. The notion that babies deserve more care than mothers is similarly enshrined in the Medicaid program, which pays for about 45 percent of births. In many states, the program covers moms for 60 days postpartum, their infants for a full year. The bill to replace the Affordable Care Act, adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month,", + " could gut Medicaid for mothers and babies alike.\n\nAt the provider level, advances in technology have widened the gap between maternal and fetal and infant care. \u201cPeople became really enchanted with the ability to do ultrasound, and then high-resolution ultrasound, to do invasive procedures, to stick needles in the amniotic cavity,\u201d said William Callaghan, chief of the CDC\u2019s Maternal and Infant Health Branch.\n\nThe growing specialty of maternal-fetal medicine drifted so far toward care of the fetus that as recently as 2012, young doctors who wanted to work in the field didn\u2019t have to spend time learning to care for birthing mothers. \u201cThe training was quite variable across the U.S.", + ",\u201d said Mary D\u2019Alton, chair of OB-GYN at Columbia University Medical Center and author of papers on disparities in care for mothers and infants. \u201cThere were some fellows that could finish their maternal-fetal medicine training without ever being in a labor and delivery unit.\u201d\n\nIn the last decade or so, at least 20 hospitals have established multidisciplinary fetal care centers for babies at high risk for a variety of problems. So far, only one hospital in the U.S. \u2014 NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia \u2014 has a similar program for high-risk moms-to-be.\n\nIn regular maternity wards, too, babies are monitored more closely than mothers during and after birth,", + " maternal health advocates told ProPublica and NPR. Newborns in the slightest danger are whisked off to neonatal intensive care units like the one Lauren Bloomstein worked at, staffed by highly trained specialists ready for the worst, while their mothers are tended by nurses and doctors who expect things to be fine and are often unprepared when they aren\u2019t.\n\nWhen women are discharged, they routinely receive information about how to breastfeed and what to do if their newborn is sick but not necessarily how to tell if they need medical attention themselves. \u201cIt was only when I had my own child that I realized, \u2018Oh my goodness. That was completely insufficient information,\u2019\u201d said Elizabeth Howell,", + " professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. \u201cThe way that we\u2019ve been trained, we do not give women enough information for them to manage their health postpartum. The focus had always been on babies and not on mothers.\u201d\n\nIn 2009, the Joint Commission, which accredits 21,000 health care facilities in the U.S., adopted a series of perinatal \u201ccore measures\u201d \u2014 national standards that have been shown to reduce complications and improve patient outcomes. Four of the measures are aimed at making sure the baby is healthy. One \u2014 bringing down the C-section rate \u2014 addresses maternal health.\n\nMeanwhile,", + " life-saving practices that have become widely accepted in other affluent countries \u2014 and in a few states, notably California \u2014 have yet to take hold in many American hospitals. Take the example of preeclampsia, a type of high blood pressure that only occurs in pregnancy or the postpartum period, and can lead to seizures and strokes. Around the world, it kills an estimated five women an hour. But in developed countries, it is highly treatable. The key is to act quickly.\n\nBy standardizing its approach, Britain has reduced preeclampsia deaths to one in a million \u2014 a total of two deaths from 2012 to 2014.", + " In the U.S., on the other hand, preeclampsia still accounts for about 8 percent of maternal deaths \u2014 50 to 70 women a year. Including Lauren Bloomstein.\n\nWhen Lauren McCarthy Bloomstein was a teenager in the 1990s, a neighbor who worked for a New York publishing firm approached her about modeling for a series of books based on Louisa May Alcott\u2019s classic \u201cLittle Women.\u201d Since her mother\u2019s death, Lauren had become solitary and shy; she loved to read, but she decided she wasn\u2019t interested. \u201cAre you kidding? Go do it!\u201d Frankie Hedges insisted. \u201cThat would be fabulous!\u201d Lauren relented,", + " and the publisher cast her as the eldest March sister, Meg. She appeared on the covers of four books, looking very much the proper 19th-century young lady with her long brown hair parted neatly down the middle and a string of pearls around her neck. The determined expression on her face, though, was pure Lauren. \u201cShe didn\u2019t want sympathy, she didn\u2019t want pity,\u201d Jackie Ennis said. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t one to talk much about her feelings [about] her mom. She looked at it as this is what she was dealt and she\u2019s gonna do everything in her power to become a productive person.\u201d\n\nIn high school,", + " Lauren decided her path lay in nursing, and she chose a two-year program at Brookdale Community College. She worked at a doctor\u2019s office to earn money for tuition and lived in the garage apartment that Hedges and her husband had converted especially for her, often helping out with their young twin sons. Lauren \u201cwasn\u2019t a real mushy person,\u201d Hedges said. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t the type to say things like \u2018I love you. \u2019\u201d But she clearly relished being part of a family again. \u201cYou can\u2019t believe how happy she is,\u201d Ennis once told Hedges. \u201cWe\u2019ll be out and she\u2019ll say,", + " \u2018Oh, I have to go home for dinner!\u2019\u201d\n\nAfter graduating in 2002, Lauren landed at Monmouth Medical Center, a sprawling red-brick complex a few minutes from the ocean that is part of the RWJBarnabas Health system and a teaching affiliate of Philadelphia\u2019s Drexel University College of Medicine. Her first job was in the medical surgical unit, where her clinical skills and work ethic soon won accolades. \u201cI cannot remember too many healthcare employees that I respect as much as Lauren,\u201d Diane Stanaway, then Monmouth\u2019s clinical director of nursing, wrote in a 2005 commendation. \u201cWhat a dynamite young lady and nurse!\u201d When a top hospital executive needed surgery,", + " Larry recalled, he paid Lauren the ultimate compliment, picking her as one of two private-duty nurses to help oversee his care.\n\nLarry Bloomstein, who joined the unit as an orthopedic surgical resident in 2004, was dazzled, too. He liked her independent streak \u2014 \u201cShe didn\u2019t feel the need to rely on anyone else for anything\u201d \u2014 and her levelheadedness. Even performing CPR on a dying patient, Lauren \u201chad a calmness about her,\u201d Larry said. He thought her tough upbringing \u201cgave her a sense of confidence. She didn\u2019t seem to worry about small things.\u201d Lauren, meanwhile, told Ennis,", + " \u201cI met this guy. He\u2019s a doctor, and he\u2019s very kind.\u201d Their first date was a Bruce Springsteen concert; five years later they married on Long Beach Island, on the Jersey shore.\n\nLarry and Lauren Bloomstein met at the hospital in 2004. He liked that she was feisty and independent yet had \u201ca calmness about her.\u201d She told her best friend he was \u201cvery kind.\u201d They married five years later. (Courtesy of Larry Bloomstein)\n\nOne of Lauren\u2019s favorite books was \u201cThe Catcher in the Rye\u201d \u2014 \u201cshe related to the Holden Caulfield character rescuing kids,\u201d Larry said.", + " When a spot opened at Monmouth\u2019s elite neonatal intensive care unit in 2006, she jumped at it.\n\nThe hospital has the fifth-busiest maternity department in the state, delivering 5,449 babies in 2016. Monmouth earned an \u201cA\u201d grade from Leapfrog, a nonprofit that promotes safety in health care, and met full safety standards in critical areas of maternity care, such as rates of C-sections, and early elective deliveries, a hospital spokeswoman said. Its NICU, a Level III facility for high-risk newborns, is the oldest in New Jersey.\n\n\u201cWith NICU nursing, it\u2019s one of those things either you get it or you don\u2019t,\u201d said Katy DiBernardo,", + " a 20-year veteran of the unit. \u201cThe babies are little, and a lot of people aren\u2019t used to seeing a teeny tiny baby.\u201d The NICU staff included nurses, neonatologists, a respiratory therapist and residents. Lauren, DiBernardo said, \u201cjust clicked.\u201d\n\nOne of the things Lauren liked best about her work was the bonds she formed with babies\u2019 families. Nurses followed the same newborns throughout their stay, sometimes for weeks or months. She was a touchstone for parents \u2014 very good at \u201ccalming people down who have a lot of anxiety,\u201d Larry said \u2014 and often stayed in contact long after the babies went home,", + " meeting the moms for coffee and even babysitting on occasion.\n\nShe also cherished the deep friendships that a place like the NICU forged. The neonatal floor was like a world unto itself, Lauren Byron, another longtime nurse there, explained: \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of stress and pressure, and you are in life-and-death situations. You develop a very close relationship with some people.\u201d The environment tended to attract very strong personalities. Lauren\u2019s nickname in the Bloomstein family football pool was \u201cThe Feisty One,\u201d so she fit right in. But she could stand her ground without alienating anyone. \u201cShe was one of those people that everyone liked,\u201d Byron said.\n\nAnother person everyone liked was OB-GYN John Vaclavik.", + " He had come to Monmouth as a resident in 2004, around the same time as Larry, after earning his bachelor\u2019s from Loyola College in Baltimore and his medical degree at St. George\u2019s University on the island of Grenada. Medicine was the family profession: Two uncles and two brothers also became doctors and his wife was a perinatal social worker at the hospital. Lauren and her colleagues thought he was \u201cvery personable\u201d and \u201ca great guy,\u201d Larry said.\n\n\u201cShe was good friends with my wife and she felt comfortable with me,\u201d Vaclavik would recall in a 2015 court deposition.\n\nAfter his residency,", + " Vaclavik joined Ocean Obstetric & Gynecologic Associates, a thriving practice that counted numerous medical professionals among its clients. Vaclavik was a \u201claborist\u201d \u2014 part of a movement that aimed to reduce the number of C-sections, which tend to have more difficult recoveries and more complications than vaginal births. In a state with a C-section rate of 37 percent, Monmouth\u2019s rate in 2016 was just 21 percent.\n\nThe neonatal nurses had plenty of opportunity to observe Vaclavik and other OB-GYNs in action \u2014 someone from NICU was called to attend every delivery that showed signs of being complicated or unusual as well as every C-section.", + " \u201cWe always laughed, \u2018They\u2019ll call us for a hangnail,\u2019\u201d DiBernardo said. Lauren was so impressed by Vaclavik that she not only chose him as her own doctor, she recommended him to her best friend. \u201cShe kept saying, \u2018You have to go to this guy. He\u2019s a good doctor. Good doctor,\u2019\u201d Ennis said.\n\nIn other ways, though, the NICU staff and the labor and delivery staff were very separate. The neonatal nurses were focused on their own fragile patients \u2014 the satisfaction that came from helping them grow strong enough to go home, the grief when that didn\u2019t happen.", + " Once Ennis asked Lauren, \u201cHow do you deal with babies that don\u2019t make it? That\u2019s got to be so bad.\u201d Lauren replied, \u201cYeah, but we save more than we lose.\u201d\n\nLoss was less common in labor and delivery, and when a new mother suffered life-threatening complications, the news did not always reach the NICU floor. Thus, when a 29-year-old special education teacher named Tara Hansen contracted a grisly infection a few days after giving birth to her first child in March 2011, the tragedy didn\u2019t register with Lauren, who was then three months pregnant herself.\n\nHansen lived in nearby Freehold,", + " New Jersey, with her husband, Ryan, her high school sweetheart. Her pregnancy, like Lauren\u2019s, had been textbook perfect, and she delivered a healthy 9-pound son. But Hansen suffered tearing near her vagina during childbirth. She developed signs of infection but was discharged anyway, a lawsuit by her husband later alleged.\n\nHansen was soon readmitted to Monmouth with what the lawsuit called \u201cexcruciating, severe pain beyond the capacity of a human being to endure.\u201d The diagnosis was necrotizing fasciitis, commonly known as flesh-eating bacteria; two days later Hansen was dead. One of Vaclavik\u2019s colleagues delivered Hansen\u2019s baby;", + " Vaclavik himself authorized her discharge. According to court documents, he said nurses failed to inform him about Hansen\u2019s symptoms and that if he\u2019d known her vital signs weren\u2019t stable, he wouldn\u2019t have released her. The hospital and nurses eventually settled for $1.5 million. The suit against Vaclavik and his colleagues is pending.\n\nVaclavik did not respond to several interview requests from ProPublica and NPR, including an emailed list of questions. \u201cDue to the fact this matter is in litigation,\u201d his attorney responded, \u201cDr. Vaclavik respectfully declines to comment.\u201d\n\nCiting patient privacy, Monmouth spokeswoman Elizabeth Brennan also declined to discuss specific cases.", + " \u201cWe are saddened by the grief these families have experienced from their loss,\u201d she said in a statement.\n\nMonmouth Medical Center delivered 5,449 babies in 2016. Lauren Bloomstein was a nurse in its neonatal intensive care unit. (Bryan Anselm for ProPublica)\n\nLarry Bloomstein\u2019s first inkling that something was seriously wrong with Lauren came about 90 minutes after she gave birth. He had accompanied Hailey up to the nursery to be weighed and measured and given the usual barrage of tests for newborns. Lauren hadn\u2019t eaten since breakfast, but he returned to find her dinner tray untouched. \u201cI don\u2019t feel good,\u201d she told him.", + " She pointed to a spot above her abdomen and just below her sternum, close to where she\u2019d felt the stabbing sensation during labor. \u201cI\u2019ve got pain that\u2019s coming back.\u201d\n\nLarry had been at Lauren\u2019s side much of the previous 24 hours. Conscious that his role was husband rather than doctor, he had tried not to overstep. Now, though, he pressed Vaclavik: What was the matter with his wife? \u201cHe was like, \u2018I see this a lot. We do a lot of belly surgery. This is definitely reflux,\u2019\u201d Larry recalled. According to Lauren\u2019s records, the OB-GYN ordered an antacid called Bicitra and an opioid painkiller called Dilaudid.", + " Lauren vomited them up.\n\nLauren\u2019s pain was soon 10 on a scale of 10, she told Larry and the nurses; so excruciating, the nurses noted, \u201cPatient [is] unable to stay still.\u201d Just as ominously, her blood pressure was spiking. An hour after Hailey\u2019s birth, the reading was 160/95; an hour after that, 169/108. At her final prenatal appointment, her reading had been just 118/69. Obstetrics wasn\u2019t Larry\u2019s specialty, but he knew enough to ask the nurse: Could this be preeclampsia?\n\nPreeclampsia,", + " or pregnancy-related hypertension, is a little-understood condition that affects 3 percent to 5 percent of expectant or new mothers in the U.S., up to 200,000 women a year. It can strike anyone out of the blue, though the risk is higher for African Americans, women with pre-existing conditions such as obesity, diabetes or kidney disease, and mothers over the age of 40. It is most common during the second half of pregnancy, but can develop in the days or weeks after childbirth, and can become very dangerous very quickly. Because a traditional treatment for preeclampsia is to deliver as soon as possible,", + " the babies are often premature and end up in NICUs like the one where Lauren worked.\n\nAs Larry suspected, Lauren\u2019s blood pressure readings were well past the danger point. What he didn\u2019t know was that they\u2019d been abnormally high since she entered the hospital\u2014 147/99, according to her admissions paperwork. During labor, she had 21 systolic readings at or above 140 and 13 diastolic readings at or above 90, her records indicated; for a stretch of almost eight hours, her blood pressure wasn\u2019t monitored at all, the New Jersey Department of Health later found. Over that same period, their baby\u2019s vital signs were being constantly watched,", + " Larry said.\n\nIn his deposition, Vaclavik described the 147/99 reading as \u201celevated\u201d compared to her usual readings, but not abnormal. He \u201cwould use 180 over 110 as a cutoff\u201d to suspect preeclampsia, he said. Still, he acknowledged, Lauren\u2019s blood pressure \u201cmight have been recommended to be monitored more closely, in retrospect.\u201d\n\nLeading medical organizations in the U.S. and the U.K. take a different view. They advise that increases to 140/90 for pregnant women with no previous history of high blood pressure signify preeclampsia. When systolic readings hit 160,", + " treatment with anti-hypertensive drugs and magnesium sulfate to prevent seizures \u201cshould be initiated ASAP,\u201d according to guidelines from the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health. When other symptoms, such as upper abdominal (epigastric) pain, are present, the situation is considered even more urgent.\n\nThis basic approach isn\u2019t new: \u201cCore Curriculum for Maternal-Newborn Nursing,\u201d a widely-used textbook, outlined it in 1997. Yet failure to diagnose preeclampsia, or to differentiate it from chronic high blood pressure, is all too common.\n\nCalifornia researchers who studied preeclampsia deaths over several years found one striking theme:", + " \u201cDespite triggers that clearly indicated a serious deterioration in the patient\u2019s condition, health care providers failed to recognize and respond to these signs in a timely manner, leading to delays in diagnosis and treatment.\u201d Preeclampsia symptoms \u2014 swelling and rapid weight gain, gastric discomfort and vomiting, headache and anxiety \u2014 are often mistaken for the normal irritations that crop up during pregnancy or after giving birth. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a yes-no test for it,\u201d said Eleni Tsigas, executive director of the Preeclampsia Foundation. \u201cA lot of physicians don\u2019t necessarily see a lot of it.\u201d Outdated notions \u2014 for example,", + " that delivering the baby cures the condition \u2014 unfamiliarity with best practices and lack of crisis preparation can further hinder the response.\n\nThe fact that Lauren gave birth over the weekend may also have worked against her. Hospitals may be staffed differently on weekends, adding to the challenges of managing a crisis. A new Baylor College of Medicine analysis of 45 million pregnancies in the U.S. from 2004 to 2014 found mothers who deliver on Saturday or Sunday have nearly 50 percent higher mortality rates as well as more blood transfusions and more perineal tearing. The \u201cweekend effect\u201d has also been associated with higher fatality rates from heart attacks,", + " strokes and head trauma.\n\nAccording to Lauren\u2019s records, Vaclavik did order a preeclampsia lab test around 8:40 p.m., but a nurse noted a half-hour later: \u201cNo abnormal labs present.\u201d (According to Larry, the results were borderline.) Larry began pushing to call in a specialist. Vaclavik attributed Lauren\u2019s pain to esophagitis, or inflammation of the esophagus, which had afflicted her before, he said in his deposition. Around 10 p.m., according to Lauren\u2019s medical records, he phoned the on-call gastroenterologist, who ordered an X-ray and additional tests,", + " more Dilaudid and different antacids \u2014 Maalox and Protonix. Nothing helped.\n\nMeanwhile, Larry decided to reach out to his own colleagues in the trauma unit at Cooper University Hospital in Camden. In his training, perhaps the most important lesson he\u2019d learned was to ask for help: \u201cIf there\u2019s a problem, I will immediately get another physician involved.\u201d By chance, the doctor on call happened to be a fairly new mother. As Larry described Lauren\u2019s symptoms, she interrupted him. \u201cYou can stop talking. I know what this is.\u201d She said Lauren had HELLP syndrome, an acronym for the most severe variation of preeclampsia,", + " characterized by hemolysis, or the breakdown of red blood cells; elevated liver enzymes; and low platelet count, a clotting deficiency that can lead to excessive bleeding and hemorrhagic stroke.\n\nLarry\u2019s colleague urged him to stop wasting time, he recalled. Lauren\u2019s very high blood pressure, the vomiting, and the terrible pain radiating from her kidneys and liver were symptoms of rapid deterioration. \u201cYour wife\u2019s in a lot of danger,\u201d the trauma doctor said. (She didn\u2019t respond to ProPublica\u2019s and NPR\u2019s requests for comment.)\n\nEarlier this year, an analysis by the CDC Foundation of maternal mortality data from four states identified more than 20 \u201ccritical factors\u201d that contributed to pregnancy-related deaths.", + " Among the ones involving providers: lack of standardized policies, inadequate clinical skills, failure to consult specialists and poor coordination of care. The average maternal death had 3.7 critical factors.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s never just one thing,\u201d said Roberta Gold, a member of the Council on Patient Safety in Women\u2019s Health Care, whose daughter and unborn grandson died from a pregnancy-related blood clot in 2010. \u201cIt\u2019s always a cascading combination of things. It\u2019s a slow-motion train wreck.\u201d\n\nThe last 16 hours of Lauren\u2019s life were consistent with that grim pattern. Distressed by what the trauma doctor had told him, Larry immediately went to Lauren\u2019s caregivers.", + " But they insisted the tests didn\u2019t show preeclampsia, he said. Not long after, Larry\u2019s colleague called back to check on Lauren\u2019s condition. \u201cI don\u2019t believe those labs,\u201d he recalls her telling him. \u201cThey can\u2019t be right. I\u2019m positive of my diagnosis. Do them again.\u2019\u201d\n\nMeanwhile, Lauren\u2019s agony had become almost unendurable. The blood pressure cuff on her arm was adding to her discomfort, so around 10:30 p.m. her nurse decided to remove it \u2014 on the theory, Larry said, \u201cWe know her blood pressure is high. There\u2019s no point to retaking it.\u201d According to Lauren\u2019s records,", + " her blood pressure went unmonitored for another hour and 44 minutes.\n\nLarry had given up on getting a specialist to come to the hospital so late on a Saturday night, but he persuaded Vaclavik to call in a general surgical resident. Around 11:55 p.m., according to the nurses\u2019 notes, Lauren begged, \u201cDo anything to stop this pain.\u201d Vaclavik prescribed morphine, to little effect.\n\nJust after midnight, her blood pressure about to peak at 197/117, Lauren began complaining of a headache. As Larry studied his wife\u2019s face, he realized something had changed. \u201cShe suddenly looks really calm and comfortable,", + " like she\u2019s trying to go to sleep.\u201d She gave Larry a little smile, but only the right side of her mouth moved.\n\nIn an instant, Larry\u2019s alarm turned to panic. He ordered Lauren, \u201cLift your hands for me.\u201d Only her right arm fluttered. He peeled off her blankets and scraped the soles of her feet with his fingernail, testing her so-called Babinski reflex; in an adult whose brain is working normally, the big toe automatically jerks downward. Lauren\u2019s right toe curled as it was supposed to. But her left toe stuck straight out, unmoving. As Larry was examining her, Lauren suddenly seemed to realize what was happening to her.", + " \u201cShe looked at me and said, \u2018I\u2019m afraid,\u2019 and, \u2018I love you.\u2019 And I\u2019m pretty sure in that moment she put the pieces together. That she had a conscious awareness of \u2026 that she was not going to make it.\u201d\n\nA CT scan soon confirmed the worst: The escalating blood pressure had triggered bleeding in her brain. So-called hemorrhagic strokes tend to be deadlier than those caused by blood clots. Surgery can sometimes save the patient\u2019s life, but only if it is performed quickly.\n\nLarry was a realist; he knew that even the best-case scenario was devastating. Chances were that Lauren would be paralyzed or partially paralyzed.", + " She\u2019d never be the mother she had dreamed of being. She\u2019d never be a nurse again. But at least there was a chance she would live. When the neurologist arrived, Larry asked, \u201cIs there hope here?\u201d As he recalls it, the neurologist responded, \u201cThat\u2019s why I\u2019m here. There\u2019s hope.\u201d\n\nLarry began gathering Lauren\u2019s loved ones \u2014 his parents, her brother, Frankie Hedges and her husband Billy, Jackie Ennis. On the phone, he tried to play down the gravity of the situation, but everyone understood. When Larry\u2019s mother arrived, the hospital entrance was locked, and Larry and Vaclavik came to meet her.", + " \u201cThe obstetrician just said, \u2018She\u2019s going to be all right,\u2019\u201d Linda Bloomstein said. \u201cAnd Larry was standing behind him, and I saw the tears coming down, and he was shaking his head, \u2018No.\u2019\u201d\n\nAround 2 a.m., the neurosurgeon finally confirmed what the trauma doctor had said four hours before: Lauren had HELLP syndrome. Then he delivered more bad news: Her blood platelets \u2014 essential to stopping the hemorrhage \u2014 were dangerously low. But, according to Larry, the hospital didn\u2019t have sufficient platelets on site, so her surgery would have to be delayed. Larry was dumbfounded.", + " How could a regional medical center that delivered babies and performed all types of surgery not have platelets on hand for an emergency? Vaclavik called the Red Cross and other facilities, pleading with them to send any they had. \u201cIn my understanding, there was a complete shortage of platelets in the state of New Jersey,\u201d he said in the deposition. Hours passed before the needed platelets arrived.\n\nThe neuro team did another CT scan around 6 a.m. Larry couldn\u2019t bring himself to look at it, \u201cbut from what they\u2019ve told me, it was horrifically worse.\u201d While Lauren was in surgery, friends began dropping by,", + " hoping to see her and the baby, not realizing what had happened since her cheerful texts the night before. Around 12:30 p.m., the neurosurgeon emerged and confirmed that brain activity had stopped. Lauren was on life support, with no chance of recovery.\n\nAll this time, Hailey had been in the newborn nursery, being tended by Lauren\u2019s stunned colleagues. They brought her down to Lauren\u2019s room and Larry placed her gently into her mother\u2019s arms. After a few minutes, the nurses whisked the baby back up to the third floor to protect her from germs. A respiratory therapist carefully removed the breathing tube from Lauren\u2019s mouth.", + " At 3:08 p.m., surrounded by her loved ones, she died.\n\nLarry Bloomstein leaves the hospital with Hailey after Lauren\u2019s death. Too shattered to return home, he slept with the baby in his parents\u2019 living room for the first month. (Courtesy of Larry Bloomstein)\n\nIn the U.S., unlike some other developed countries, maternal deaths are treated as a private tragedy rather than as a public health catastrophe. A death in childbirth may be mourned on Facebook or memorialized on GoFundMe, but it is rarely reported in the news. Most obituaries, Lauren\u2019s included, don\u2019t mention how a mother died.\n\nLauren\u2019s passing was more public than most,", + " eliciting an outpouring of grief. Hundreds of people attended her wake and funeral \u2014 doctors and nurses from the hospital, friends from around the country, families Lauren had taken care of. Vaclavik was there, utterly devastated, Larry\u2019s family said. The head of Monmouth\u2019s OB-GYN department paid his respects and, according to Larry, promised in a private conversation at the wake to conduct a full investigation.\n\nIn the days after Lauren\u2019s death, Larry couldn\u2019t dwell on the implications of what had happened. He had to find a burial plot, choose a casket, write a eulogy. He was too shattered to return to the Mooresville house,", + " so he took Hailey to his parents\u2019 place, a one-bedroom apartment they were renting while they renovated their home, and slept with the baby in the living room for the first month.\n\nAfter the funeral, he turned all his attention to his daughter. He knew nothing about newborns, always imagining Lauren would teach him \u2014 \u201cWhat could be better than having your own NICU nurse to take care of your baby?\u201d he had thought. He relied on his mother and sister and Lauren\u2019s friends to guide him. He took time off from his job at Cooper, figuring three months would be enough. But as his return date approached, he knew he wasn\u2019t ready.", + " \u201cI don\u2019t think I can see a patient that\u2019s on a ventilator right now,\u201d he realized. \u201cOr even just a hospital bed.\u201d He didn\u2019t want to leave Hailey. So he quit.\n\nHe sold the house, though he couldn\u2019t bring himself to attend the closing \u2014 \u201cI couldn\u2019t stand handing those keys over to someone else.\u201d He took Hailey a couple of times to stay with his sister and her family in Texas, where he didn\u2019t have to answer the constant questions. But traveling with his baby daughter was painful in its own way. People didn\u2019t know what to make of him. \u201cIt\u2019s strange for people to see a father alone.\u201d Wherever he went,", + " he felt disconnected from almost everything around him. \u201cYou\u2019re walking around this world and all these people are around you, and they\u2019re going on with their lives and I just felt very, very isolated and very alone with that.\u201d\n\nBack in New Jersey, Larry found a job closer to his parents\u2019 place, performed one operation and tried to quit. His new employers, though, persuaded him to stay. To avoid reliving the funeral, he returned to Texas for the first anniversary of Hailey\u2019s birth and Lauren\u2019s death in late September 2012. In one of his suitcases, he packed a giant cupcake mold Lauren had bought when they first married \u2014 she thought it would make a perfect first-birthday cake for the kids she yearned for.", + " He baked the cake himself \u2014 chocolate, Lauren\u2019s favorite, covered with sprinkles.\n\nOther people in Lauren\u2019s and Larry\u2019s circle had been asking questions about her care since the night she died. \u201cThat was the first thing I literally said when I walked [into the hospital] \u2014 I said, \u2018How did this happen?\u2019\u201d Jackie Ennis recalled. In the next week or two, she probed Larry again: \u201c\u2018Did they do everything they could for her?\u2019 He said, \u2018No, there were warning signs for hours before.\u2019\u201d Ennis was too upset to dig any deeper.\n\nAs Larry\u2019s numbness wore off,", + " his orthopedist friends began pushing him as well. Larry was hesitant; despite the missteps he had witnessed, part of him wanted to believe that Lauren\u2019s death had been unavoidable. \u201cAnd my friends were like, \u2018We can\u2019t accept that. \u2026 With our technology, every single time a woman dies [in childbirth], it\u2019s a medical error.\u2019\u201d\n\nLauren\u2019s death, Larry finally admitted to himself, could not be dismissed as either inevitable or a fluke. He had seen how Lauren\u2019s OB-GYN and nurses had failed to recognize a textbook case of one of the most common complications of pregnancy \u2014 not once, but repeatedly over two days.", + " To Larry, the fact that someone with Lauren\u2019s advantages could die so needlessly was symptomatic of a bigger problem. By some measures, New Jersey had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S. He wanted authorities to get to the root of it \u2014 to push the people and institutions that were at fault to change.\n\nThat\u2019s the approach in the United Kingdom, where maternal deaths are regarded as systems failures. A national committee of experts scrutinizes every death of a woman from pregnancy or childbirth complications, collecting medical records and assessments from caregivers, conducting rigorous analyses of the data and publishing reports that help set policy for hospitals throughout the country.", + " Coroners also sometimes hold public inquests, forcing hospitals and their staffs to answer for their mistakes. The U.K. process is largely responsible for the stunning reduction in preeclampsia deaths in Britain, the committee noted its 2016 report \u2014 \u201ca clear success story\u201d that it hoped to repeat \u201cacross other medical and mental health causes of maternal death.\u201d\n\nThe U.S. has no comparable federal effort. Instead, maternal mortality reviews are left up to states. As of this spring, 26 states (and one city, Philadelphia) had a well-established process in place; another five states had committees that were less than a year old.", + " In almost every case, resources are tight, the reviews take years and the findings get little attention. A bipartisan bill in Congress, the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act of 2017, would authorize funding for states to establish review panels or improve their processes.\n\nNew Jersey\u2019s review team, the second-oldest in the U.S., includes OB-GYNs, nurses, mental health specialists, medical examiners, even a nutritionist. Using vital records and other reports, they identify every woman in New Jersey who died within a year of pregnancy or childbirth, from any cause, then review medical and other records to determine whether the death was \u201cpregnancy-related\u201d or not.", + " Every few years, the committee publishes a report, focusing on things like the race and age of the mothers who died, the causes of death, and other demographic and health data. In the past, the findings have been used to promote policies to reduce postpartum depression.\n\nBut the New Jersey committee doesn\u2019t interview the relatives of the deceased, nor does it assess whether a death was preventable. Moreover, like every other state that conducts such reviews, New Jersey \u201cde-identifies\u201d the records \u2014 strips them of any information that might point to an individual hospital or a particular woman. Otherwise, the medical community and lawmakers would refuse to go along.", + " The goal is to \u201cimprove care for patients in general,\u201d said Joseph Apuzzio, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Rutgers-New Jersey Medical School who heads the committee. This requires a process that is \u201cnonjudgmental\u201d and \u201cnot punitive,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the best way to get a free discussion of all of the health care providers who are in the room.\u201d\n\nYet the result of de-identification, as Larry soon realized, is that the review is of little use in assigning responsibility for individual deaths, or evaluating whether some hospitals, doctors or nurses are more prone to error than others. To Larry,", + " this seemed like a critical oversight \u2014 or perhaps, willful denial. In a preventable death or other medical error, he said, sometimes the who and the where are as important as the why. \u201cUnless someone points the finger specifically,\u201d he said, \u201cI think the actual cause [of the problem] is lost.\u201d\n\nSomeone eventually steered Larry toward the New Jersey Department of Health\u2019s licensing and inspection division, which oversees hospital and nursing home safety. He filed a complaint against Monmouth Medical Center in 2012.\n\nThe DOH examined Lauren\u2019s records, interviewed her caregivers and scrutinized Monmouth\u2019s policies and practices. In December 2012 it issued a report that backed up everything Larry had seen firsthand.", + " \u201cThere is no record in the medical record that the Registered Nurse notified [the ob/gyn] of the elevated blood pressures of patient prior to delivery,\u201d investigators found. And: \u201cThere is no evidence in the medical record of further evaluation and surveillance of patient from [the ob/gyn] prior to delivery.\u201d And: \u201cThere was no evidence in the medical record that the elevated blood pressures were addressed by [the ob/gyn] until after the Code Stroke was called.\u201d\n\nThe report faulted the hospital. \u201cThe facility is not in compliance\u201d with New Jersey hospital licensing standards, it concluded. \u201cThe facility failed to ensure that recommended obstetrics guidelines are adhered to by staff.\u201d\n\nTo address these criticisms,", + " Monmouth Medical Center had implemented a plan of correction, also contained in the report. The plan called for a mandatory educational program for all labor and delivery nurses about preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome; staff training in Advance Life Support Obstetrics and Critical Care Obstetrics; and more training on the use of evidence-based methods to assess patients and improve communications between caregivers.\n\nSome of the changes were strikingly basic: \u201cStaff nurses were educated regarding the necessity of reviewing, when available, or obtaining the patients [sic] prenatal records. Education identified that they must make a comparison of the prenatal blood pressure against the initial admission blood pressure.\u201d And:", + " \u201cRepeat vital signs will be obtained every 4 hours at a minimum.\u201d\n\nAn important part of the plan of correction involved Vaclavik, though neither he nor the nurses were identified by name. The head of Monmouth\u2019s OB-GYN department provided \u201cprofessional remediation for the identified physician,\u201d the Department of Health report said. In addition, there was \u201cmonitoring of 100% of records for physician of record per month x 3 months.\u201d The monitoring focused on \u201ccompliance of timely physician intervention for elevated blood pressures/pain assessment and management.\u201d\n\nThe department chairman, Robert Graebe, found Vaclavik\u2019s charts to be 100 percent compliant,", + " Vaclavik said in the deposition. Graebe was asked in a March 2017 deposition if Vaclavik was in good standing at the hospital at the time of Lauren\u2019s treatment. \u201cWas and is,\u201d Graebe replied.\n\nIn a separate note, the Department of Health told Larry that it forwarded his complaint to the Board of Medical Examiners and the New Jersey Board of Nursing. Neither agency has taken disciplinary action, according to their websites.\n\n[UPDATE: In a letter dated June 22, 2017, the State Board of Medical Examiners notified Larry that it had found no basis under its existing governing laws to discipline Vaclavik.", + " Despite a full inquiry, the board was \"unable to find undisputed facts to establish \u2026 sufficient proof to sustain a formal disciplinary action,\" executive director William V. Roeder wrote.]\n\nLarry\u2019s copy of the DOH report arrived in the mail. He was gratified by the findings but dismayed that they weren\u2019t publicly posted. That meant hardly anyone would see them.\n\nA few months after the DOH weighed in, he sued Monmouth, Vaclavik and five nurses in Monmouth County Superior Court in Freehold, New Jersey. For a medical malpractice lawsuit to go forward in New Jersey, an expert must certify that it has merit.", + " Larry\u2019s passed muster with an OB-GYN. But beyond the taking of depositions, there\u2019s been little action in the case.\n\nAs the maternal death rate has mounted around the U.S., a small cadre of reformers has mobilized. Some of the earliest and most important work has come in California, where more babies are born than in any other state \u2014 500,000 a year, one-eighth of the U.S. total.\n\nModeled on the U.K. process, the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative is informed by the experiences of founder Elliott Main, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford and the University of California-San Francisco,", + " who for many years ran the OB-GYN department at a San Francisco hospital. \u201cOne of my saddest moments as an obstetrician was a woman with severe preeclampsia that we thought we had done everything correct, who still had a major stroke and we could not save her,\u201d he said recently. That loss has weighed on him for 20 years. \u201cWhen you\u2019ve had a maternal death, you remember it for the rest of your life. All the details.\u201d\n\nLaunched a decade ago, CMQCC aims to reduce not only mortality, but also life-threatening complications and racial disparities in obstetric care. It began by analyzing maternal deaths in the state over several years;", + " in almost every case, it discovered, there was \u201cat least some chance to alter the outcome.\u201d The most preventable deaths were from hemorrhage (70 percent) and preeclampsia (60 percent).\n\nSeven Causes Account For Most Pregnancy-Related Deaths Seven Causes Account For Most Pregnancy-Related Deaths 7.6% 8.9% 9.5% 9.5% 11.4% 12.7% 12.7% Preeclampsia & Eclampsia Mental Health Conditions Embolism Infection Cardiomyopathy Cardiovascular & Coronary Conditions Hemorrhage Source:", + " \u201cReport from Maternal Mortality Review Committees: A View Into Their Critical Role,\u201d February 2017\n\nMain and his colleagues then began creating a series of \u201ctoolkits\u201d to help doctors and nurses improve their handling of emergencies. The first one, targeting obstetric bleeding, recommended things like \u201chemorrhage carts\u201d for storing medications and supplies, crisis protocols for massive transfusions, and regular training and drills. Instead of the common practice of \u201ceye-balling\u201d blood loss, which often leads to underestimating the seriousness of a hemorrhage and delaying treatment, nurses learned to collect and weigh postpartum blood to get precise measurements.", + " Hospitals that adopted the toolkit saw a 21 percent decrease in near deaths from maternal bleeding in the first year; hospitals that didn\u2019t use the protocol had a 1.2 percent reduction. By 2013, according to Main, maternal deaths in California fell to around 7 per 100,000 births, similar to the numbers in Canada, France and the Netherlands \u2014 a dramatic counter to the trends in other parts of the U.S.\n\n\u201cPrevention isn\u2019t a magic pill,\u201d Main said. \u201cIt\u2019s actually teamwork [and having] a structured, organized, standardized approach\u201d to care.\n\nCMQCC\u2019s preeclampsia toolkit,", + " launched in 2014, emphasized the kind of practices that might have saved Lauren Bloomstein: careful monitoring of blood pressure and early and aggressive treatment with magnesium sulfate and anti-hypertensive medications. Data on its effectiveness hasn\u2019t been published.\n\nThe collaborative\u2019s work has inspired ACOG and advocates in a few states to create their own initiatives. Much of the funding has come from a 10-year, $500 million maternal health initiative by Merck, the pharmaceutical giant. Originally intended to focus on less developed countries, Merck for Mothers decided it couldn\u2019t ignore the growing problem in the U.S. The U.S. maternal mortality rate is \u201cunacceptable,\u201d said Executive Director Mary-", + "Ann Etiebet. Making pregnancy and childbirth safer \u201cwill not only save women\u2019s lives but will improve and strengthen our health systems \u2026 for all.\u201d\n\nBut the really hard work is only beginning. According to the Institute of Medicine, it takes an average of 17 years for a new medical protocol to be widely adopted. Even in California, half of the 250 hospitals that deliver babies still aren\u2019t using the toolkits, said Main, who largely blames inertia.\n\nIn New York state, some hospitals have questioned the need for what they call \u201ccookbook medicine,\u201d said Columbia\u2019s Mary D\u2019Alton. Her response: \u201cVariability is the enemy of safety.", + " Rather than have 10 different approaches to obstetric hemorrhage or treatment of hypertension, choose one or two and make it consistent. \u2026 When we do things in a standardized way, we have better outcomes.\u201d\n\nOne big hurdle: training. Another: money. Smaller providers, in particular, may not see the point. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to get a hospital to provide resources to change something that they don\u2019t see as a problem,\u201d ACOG\u2019s Barbara Levy said. \u201cIf they haven\u2019t had a maternal death because they only deliver 500 babies a year, how many years is it going to be before they see a severe problem?", + " It may be 10 years.\u201d\n\nIn New Jersey, providers don\u2019t need as much convincing, thanks to a recent project to reduce postpartum blood loss led by the Association of Women\u2019s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses. A number of hospitals saw improvements; at one, the average length of a hemorrhage-related ICU stay plunged from 8 days to 1.5 days. But only 31 of the state\u2019s 52 birthing hospitals participated in the effort, in part \u2014 perhaps \u2014 because nurses led it, said Robyn D\u2019Oria, executive director of the Central Jersey Family Health Consortium and a member of the state\u2019s maternal mortality committee.", + " \u201cI remember having a conversation with [someone from] a hospital that I would describe as progressive and she said to me, \u2018I cannot get past some of the physicians not wanting to buy into this.\u2019\u201d\n\nSo New Jersey hospitals are about to try again, this time adopting mini-toolkits created by the ACOG-led Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health for hemorrhage and preeclampsia. \u201cWe\u2019re at the very beginning\u201d of a rollout that is likely to take at least two years, D\u2019Oria said. Among those helping to create momentum has been Ryan Hansen, the husband of the teacher who died at Monmouth Medical Center a few months before Lauren Bloomstein.\n\nStill,", + " as hospitals begin to revamp, mothers in the state continue to perish. One was Ashley Heaney Butler. A Rutgers University graduate, she lived in Bayville, where she decorated the walls of her house with anchors, reflecting her passion for the ocean. She worked for the state Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services as a counselor, and served as president of the New Jersey Rehabilitation Association. Her husband Joseph was a firefighter. She gave birth at Monmouth last September to a healthy boy and died a couple of weeks later at the age of 31, never leaving the hospital. It turned out that she had developed an infection late in her pregnancy,", + " possibly related to a prior gastric bypass surgery. She was under the care of several doctors, including Vaclavik.\n\nHailey Anne Bloomstein, now 5 years old, has her mother\u2019s brown hair and green eyes. (Bryan Anselm for ProPublica)\n\nThe death of a new mother is not like any other sudden death. It blasts a hole in the universe. \u201cWhen you take that one death and what that does, not only to the husband, but to the family and to the community, the impact that it has in the hospital, on the staff, on everybody that\u2019s cared for her, on all the people who knew them,", + " it has ripple effects for generations to come,\u201d Robyn D\u2019Oria said.\n\nJackie Ennis felt Lauren\u2019s loss as an absence of phone calls. She and Lauren had been closer than many sisters, talking several times a day. Sometimes Lauren called just to say she was really tired and would talk later; she\u2019d even called Ennis from Hawaii on her honeymoon. The night Lauren died, Ennis knew something was wrong because she hadn\u2019t heard from her best friend. \u201cIt took me a really long time not to get the phone calls,\u201d she said. \u201cI still have trouble with that.\u201d\n\nDuring Lauren\u2019s pregnancy, Frankie Hedges had thought of herself as Hailey\u2019s other grandmother.", + " She and Lauren had made a lot of plans. Lauren\u2019s death meant the loss of their shared dreams for an entire extended family. \u201cI just feel she didn\u2019t get what she deserved,\u201d Hedges said.\n\nVaclavik\u2019s obstetric practice is \u201clarger\u201d than in 2011, and he continues to have admitting privileges at Monmouth and two other hospitals, he said in his deposition. \u201cI will never forget\u201d Lauren\u2019s death, he said. \u201c\u2026 I probably suffer some post-traumatic stress from this.\u201d\n\nHailey is five years old, with Lauren\u2019s brown hair and clear green eyes. She feels her mother\u2019s presence everywhere,", + " thanks to Larry and his new wife Carolyn, whom he married in 2014. They met when she was a surgical tech at one of the hospitals he worked at after Lauren died. Photos and drawings of Lauren occupy the mantle of their home in Holmdel, the bookcase in the dining room and the walls of the upstairs hallway. Larry and Carolyn and their other family members talk about Lauren freely, and even Larry\u2019s younger daughter, 2-year-old Aria, calls her \u201cMommy Lauren.\u201d On birthdays and holidays, Larry takes the girls to the cemetery. He designed the gravestone \u2014 his handprint and Lauren\u2019s reaching away from each other,", + " newborn Hailey\u2019s linking them forever. Larry has done his best to keep Lauren\u2019s extended family together \u2014 Ennis and Hedges and their families are included in every important celebration.\n\nLarry still has the video of Lauren and Hailey on his phone. \u201cBy far the hardest thing for me to accept is [what happened] from Lauren\u2019s perspective,\u201d he said one recent evening, hitting the play button and seeing her alive once more. \u201cI can\u2019t, I literally can\u2019t accept it. The amount of pain she must have experienced in that exact moment when she finally had this little girl. \u2026 I can accept the amount of pain I have been dealt,\u201d he went on,", + " watching Lauren stroke Hailey\u2019s cheek. \u201cBut [her pain] is the one thing I just can\u2019t accept. I can\u2019t understand, I can\u2019t fathom it.\u201d\n\nUpdate, July 28, 2017: This story has been updated to indicate that the State Board of Medical Examiners declined to discipline ob/gyn John Vaclavik for his care of Lauren Bloomstein.\n\nDo you know someone who died or nearly died in childbirth? Please tell us your story. If you want to reach out to us directly, email us at [email protected].\n" + ], + "length": 27308, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 65, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Some potentially great news for women at high risk for breast cancer: The drug exemestane cut the risk of getting the disease by 65% in a three-year study, reports the Washington Post. The drug, also known by the brand name Aromasin, is currently used to help prevent recurrences of breast cancer. But the findings suggest that women at higher risk because of family history or other reasons could take the drug to stop breast cancer from occurring altogether, notes the New York Times. The side effects were minimal. \u201cThis is a major step forward,\u201d says an expert at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who was not involved in the research. Others cautioned that a three-year study is too short to draw long-term conclusions about the practice of giving healthy women\u2014they're just at risk, not diagnosed\u2014a drug for years on end. Aromasin costs $300 to $400 a month, but Pfizer's patent expired in April, and the price is expected to come down significantly, notes the Los Angeles Times. Read the study in the New England Journal of Medicine, which posted an accompanying editorial.\n", + "docs": [ + "This article has no abstract; the first 100 words appear below.\n\nA 1992 editorial in the Journal foreshadowed a role for the selective estrogen-receptor modulator (SERM) tamoxifen in breast-cancer chemoprevention because of its efficacy in the treatment of early-stage estrogen-receptor\u2013positive breast cancer, as well as its favorable toxicity profile. 1 Nearly 20 years and four randomized clinical trials later, we know that 5 years of treatment with tamoxifen reduces the diagnosis of breast cancer in women at high risk for the disease by about 50%. 2 Its sister drug, raloxifene,", + " is nearly as effective, reducing this risk by about 38%. The benefits of SERMs endure after 5 years, and serious side effects, such...\n\nDisclosure forms provided by the authors are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.\n\nThis article (10.1056/NEJMe1106052) was published on June 4, 2011, at NEJM.org. ", + " A drug already used to treat breast cancer can reduce the risk of tumors in high- and moderate-risk post-menopausal women by 65% over a three-year period, researchers reported Saturday.Two other drugs are already approved for reducing the risk of breast tumors in healthy women: Generic tamoxifen reduces the risk by 50% over a five-year period and raloxifene (Evista) reduces the risk by 38% over a similar period.But both drugs are associated with an increased risk of potentially fatal uterine cancer and blood clots. Fewer than 4% of the 2 million women who might benefit from the drugs actually use them.Exemestane,", + " sold under the brand name Aromasin, provides an even greater reduction in breast cancer risk and does not appear to have those potentially lethal side effects, a team headed by Dr. Paul E. Goss of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center reported at a Chicago meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and online in the New England Journal of Medicine.Some experts predict that the number of women taking prophylactic therapy should increase significantly, particularly since the drug is already on the market for fighting breast cancer and physicians can prescribe it for any purpose they choose.\"Breast cancer is the second-most-common cause of death from cancer in women and one of the most feared diagnoses for women in the United States,\" Dr.", + " Nancy E. Davidson and Dr. Thomas W. Kensler of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute wrote in an editorial accompanying the report. \"We have the knowledge and tools to reduce its incidence today. We have run out of excuses. What are we waiting for?\"But Dr. Joanne Mortimer, director of the Women's Cancers Program at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, noted that even though all three drugs have been shown to reduce the risk of breast cancer, there is as of yet no evidence that they reduce the risk of dying. That is why \"most patients opt not to take them,\" she said.Many studies have shown that estrogen produced by the body promotes breast tumors.", + " Tamoxifen and raloxifene are so-called anti-estrogens that bind to receptors on the surface of breast tissue cells, preventing estrogen from binding. Exemestane, manufactured by Pfizer Inc., is one of a family of drugs called aromatase inhibitors, which block production of estrogen by the body.The new study, conducted by Canada's NCIC Clinical Trials Group with partial support from Pfizer, involved 4,560 women from Canada, the U.S., France and Spain with a median age of 62.5 years. The women were all post-menopausal and had at least one other risk factor for breast cancer,", + " such as a benign growth of breast tissues. Half were given exemestane for three years and half a placebo After three years, researchers observed 11 invasive breast cancers in the women receiving exemestane, compared with 32 in the group receiving the placebo. There were also significantly fewer precancerous lesions in the group receiving the drug.\"In order to know if it will decrease mortality, that will take years and years and years,\" said Dr. Cathie Chung, a medical oncologist at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica. But because so many women fear breast cancer, if researchers can produce a significant reduction in incidence, \"that by itself is a significant endpoint,\" she said.The primary side effects among the women in the study were hot flashes,", + " fatigue, sweating, insomnia and bone stiffness, which were all slightly more common in the group receiving the drug. More serious side effects, such as bone fractures and non-breast cancers, were equal in both groups.Women interested in the preventive treatment may be put off by the drug's price, which has been about $300 to $400 per month for Aromasin. But Pfizer's patent on the drug expired April 1, and experts predict that the price will drop significantly. ", + " CHICAGO \u2014 A drug now used to prevent recurrences of breast cancer can also reduce the risk of it occurring in the first place, providing a new option for women at high risk of getting the disease, researchers reported here on Saturday.\n\nTwo drugs, tamoxifen and raloxifene, are already approved to prevent breast cancer but both are rarely used for that purpose, in part because they can have serious side effects like blood clots. The researchers said the new option, exemestane, does not have those side effects and might be more acceptable.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s a very safe therapy that looks highly effective in preventing breast cancer,\u201d Dr.", + " Paul E. Goss, professor of medicine at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, said at a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. He was the lead investigator in the study, which was presented at the conference and published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.\n\nExemestane, also known by the brand name Aromasin, is one of a class of compounds known as aromatase inhibitors. These drugs stop the production of estrogen, which fuels tumor growth. They have proven superior to tamoxifen in preventing recurrence of cancer after a breast tumor is removed.\n\nSo researchers have long suspected that aromatase inhibitors would also reduce the risk of an initial occurrence of breast cancer,", + " though this is the first big randomized study to demonstrate that.\n\nThe trial involved 4,560 post-menopausal women in the United States, Canada, France and Spain who were considered to be at a higher than normal risk of developing breast cancer either because of being over at least 60 or other factors. After a follow-up of about three years, 11 women getting the drug had developed invasive breast cancer compared with 32 of the women receiving a placebo. That is a reduction in risk of 65 percent.\n\nBut in absolute terms, 1.4 percent of women in the placebo group developed cancer compared with about one-half of 1 percent of women taking the drug.\n\nAbout 94 women would have to be treated for three years to prevent one case of breast cancer,", + " Dr. Goss said. In the trial, exemestane side effects were acceptable, he said. But women who took exemestane had more hot flashes and arthritis than those who had the placebo.\n\nStill, whether exemestane will catch on where the other drugs have not remains to be seen.\n\nSome doctors and patient advocates said that aromatase inhibitors had known side effects like bone pain and joint pain that caused many women who already had had cancer to stop taking them. For healthy women, that would be an even harder sell.\n\n\u201cPeople are going to think very, very hard about it before they are going to take an aromatase inhibitor in this setting,\u201d said Dr.", + " Eric Winer, a breast cancer specialist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He noted the study was not designed to show whether women who took exemestane lived longer.\n\nDiana Zuckerman, president of the Cancer Prevention and Treatment Fund, a patient education group, said that the results were promising but that women in the study were followed for only three years, too short a period to judge long-term effects from taking the drug.\n\nDr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy medical director of the American Cancer Society, said the drugs would be more accepted if there were a way to better predict who was truly at risk of getting breast cancer.\n\nAnother factor working against broad use is that aromatase inhibitors are now prescribed by oncologists.", + " But for prevention, \u201cThey would have to be prescribed by gynecologists and family doctors,\u201d said Dr. George W. Sledge Jr., a breast cancer specialist at Indiana University. \u201cThese doctors are not comfortable with these drugs.\u201d\n\nPatent protection on the drug expired in April. Generic versions will mean lower prices.\n\nBut generic competition also means that Pfizer, which sells Aromasin, has little incentive to seek regulatory approval for the drug for preventing breast cancer. The drug could still be available to women off label, but insurers might be reluctant to pay.\n\nPfizer declined to comment on whether it would seek such approval. Pfizer helped pay for the study,", + " and Dr. Goss has received honorariums from the company.\n\nTwo other studies presented at the conference show that the widely used cancer drug Avastin is effective in delaying the progression of ovarian cancer. But both studies so far have narrowly missed showing that the drug can prolong lives, the ultimate test of a cancer drug. That threatens to embroil the use of Avastin for ovarian cancer in a debate similar to the one surrounding its use in breast cancer.\n\nThe drug\u2019s manufacturer, Roche, has filed for approval in Europe to market the drug as a treatment for ovarian cancer. But its American subsidiary, Genentech, is still in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration about whether there is enough evidence for an approval.", + " One question is whether it will be necessary to show that the drug prolongs lives, said Dr. Sandra Horning, who runs cancer clinical trials for Genentech. The F.D.A. is now moving to revoke the approval of Avastin for use in treating breast cancer in part because the drug has not prolonged lives in clinical trials. The F.D.A. will hold a hearing on this issue soon.\n\nOne study presented here involved 484 women whose ovarian cancer had recurred after an initial drug treatment. All received two standard drugs, and half of them also received Avastin.\n\nThe median time that women lived before their cancer worsened was 12.", + "4 months for those who got Avastin compared with 8.4 months for those who received only the two other drugs.\n\nAfter two years, more women given Avastin were alive, but the difference was not quite statistically significant. Too few women had died to draw conclusions.\n\n\u201cIt really is not appropriate statistically to say we really know anything about overall survival here,\u201d said Dr. Carol Aghajanian of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the lead investigator. The trial was sponsored by Genentech.\n\nThe other trial, partly paid for by Roche, involved adding Avastin to the standard drugs used as initial therapy.", + " There were 178 deaths in the Avastin arm and 200 among those who got the standard drugs, a finding that narrowly missed statistical significance. However, in a subset of patients considered to be at higher risk of recurrence, there was a statistically significant improvement in survival. ", + " 1 Balkees Abderrahman, V. Craig Jordan.. 2018. Steroid Receptors in Breast Cancer. The Breast, 272-281.e2.\n\n\n\n2 Kari B. Wisinski, Amye J. Tevaarwerk, Ruth M. O'Regan.. 2018. Endocrine Therapy for Breast Cancer. The Breast, 907-923.e6.\n\n\n\n3 Sasha E. Stanton, Erik Ramos, Mary L. Disis.. 2018. Immunologic Approaches to Breast Cancer Therapy. The Breast, 924-933.e4.\n\n\n\n4 Therese B. Bevers,", + " Parijatham S. Thomas.. 2018. Clinical Management of the Patient at Increased or High Risk. The Breast, 1004-1010.e2.\n\n\n\n5 Kristine E. Calhoun, Benjamin O. Anderson.. 2018. Lobular Carcinoma in Situ of the Breast. The Breast, 553-561.e2.\n\n\n\n6 Victor G. Vogel.. 2018. Primary Prevention of Breast Cancer. The Breast, 219-236.e3.\n\n\n\n7 Maureen O'Donnell, Jennifer Axilbund, David M. Euhus.. 2018.", + " Breast Cancer Genetics. The Breast, 237-249.e5.\n\n\n\n8 Craig A. Vargo, Leslie A. Ray, Herbert B. Newton.. 2018. Neurological Complications of Chemotherapy. Cancer Neurology in Clinical Practice, 275-310.\n\n\n\n9 Vandna Shah, Salpie Nowinski, Dina Levi, Irek Shinomiya, Narda Kebaier Ep Chaabouni, Cheryl Gillett, Anita Grigoriadis, Trevor A. Graham, Rebecca Roylance, Michael A. Simpson, Sarah E. Pinder, Elinor J. Sawyer.. (2017)", + " PIK3CA mutations are common in lobular carcinoma in situ, but are not a biomarker of progression. Breast Cancer Research 19:1.\n\n\n\n10 Katherine D. Crew, Kathy S. Albain, Dawn L. Hershman, Joseph M. Unger, Shelly S. Lo.. (2017) How do we increase uptake of tamoxifen and other anti-estrogens for breast cancer prevention?. npj Breast Cancer 3:1.\n\n\n\n11 Brett Fleisher, Ashley N. Brown, Sihem Ait-Oudhia.. (2017) Application of pharmacometrics and quantitative systems pharmacology to cancer therapy:", + " The example of luminal a breast cancer. Pharmacological Research 124, 20-33.\n\n\n\n12 Jennifer M. Racz, Jodi M. Carter, Amy C. Degnim.. (2017) Lobular Neoplasia and Atypical Ductal Hyperplasia on Core Biopsy: Current Surgical Management Recommendations. Annals of Surgical Oncology 24:10, 2848-2854.\n\n\n\n13 Y.C. Lee, R.L. Milne, S. Lheureux, M. Friedlander, S.A. McLachlan, K.L. Martin, M.Q. Bernardini, C.", + " Smith, S. Picken, S. Nesci, J.L. Hopper, K.A. Phillips.. (2017) Risk of uterine cancer for BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers. European Journal of Cancer 84, 114-120.\n\n\n\n14 J. A. Bennett, W. Mansouri, Q. Lin, P. Feustel, T. T. Andersen.. (2017) Pharmacodynamic and Pharmacokinetic Properties of AFPep, a Novel Peptide for the Treatment of Breast Cancer. International Journal of Peptide Research and Therapeutics 182.\n\n\n\n15 Stephanie M.", + " Wong, Tari King, Jean-Francois Boileau, William T. Barry, Mehra Golshan.. (2017) Population-Based Analysis of Breast Cancer Incidence and Survival Outcomes in Women Diagnosed with Lobular Carcinoma In Situ. Annals of Surgical Oncology 24:9, 2509-2517.\n\n\n\n16 Ze-Ming Xie, Jian Sun, Zhe-Yu Hu, Yao-Pan Wu, Peng Liu, Jun Tang, Xiang-Sheng Xiao, Wei-Dong Wei, Xi Wang, Xiao-Ming Xie, Ming-Tian Yang.. (2017)", + " Survival outcomes of patients with lobular carcinoma in situ who underwent bilateral mastectomy or partial mastectomy. European Journal of Cancer 82, 6-15.\n\n\n\n17 (2017) Practice Bulletin No 182. Obstetrics & Gynecology 130:3, e110-e126.\n\n\n\n18 Gabriella Rondanina, Matteo Puntoni, Aliana Guerrieri-Gonzaga, Domenico Marra, Bernardo Bonanni, Andrea DeCensi.. (2017) Worry and risk perception of breast cancer in a prevention trial of low dose tamoxifen in midlife postmenopausal hormone users.", + " The Breast 34, 108-114.\n\n\n\n19 Jack Cuzick.. (2017) Preventive therapy for cancer. The Lancet Oncology 18:8, e472-e482.\n\n\n\n20 Mangesh A. Thorat, Jack Cuzick.. (2017) Preventing invasive breast cancer using endocrine therapy. The Breast 34, S47-S54.\n\n\n\n21 Mary Linton Peters, Judy E. Garber, Nadine Tung.. (2017) Managing hereditary breast cancer risk in women with and without ovarian cancer. Gynecologic Oncology 146:1, 205-", + "214.\n\n\n\n22 Hyo Jin Son, Se Hee Han, Ji Ae Lee, Eun Jung Shin, Onyou Hwang.. (2017) Potential repositioning of exemestane as a neuroprotective agent for Parkinson\u2019s disease. Free Radical Research 51:6, 633-645.\n\n\n\n23 Suman K. Samanta, Anuradha Sehrawat, Su-Hyeong Kim, Eun-Ryeong Hahm, Yongli Shuai, Ruchi Roy, Subrata K. Pore, Krishna B. Singh, Susan M. Christner, Jan H. Beumer,", + " Nancy E. Davidson, Shivendra V. Singh.. (2017) Disease Subtype\u2013Independent Biomarkers of Breast Cancer Chemoprevention by the Ayurvedic Medicine Phytochemical Withaferin A. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 109:6, djw293.\n\n\n\n24 F. T. Kolligs, C. P. Pox.. (2017) Chemopr\u00e4vention \u2013 Was ist gesichert?. Der Onkologe 23:6, 415-421.\n\n\n\n25 Amity Peterson, Zuping Xia, Gang Chen, Philip Lazarus.. (2017) In vitro metabolism of exemestane by hepatic cytochrome P450s:", + " impact of nonsynonymous polymorphisms on formation of the active metabolite 17 \u03b2 -dihydroexemestane. Pharmacology Research & Perspectives 5:3, e00314.\n\n\n\n26 Hazel B. Nichols, Til St\u00fcrmer, Valerie S. Lee, Chelsea Anderson, Jean S. Lee, Janise M. Roh, Kala Visvanathan, Hyman Muss, Lawrence H. Kushi.. (2017) Breast Cancer Chemoprevention in an Integrated Health Care Setting. JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics:1, 1-12.\n\n\n\n27 Alvaro Pe?a, Sejal S.", + " Shah, Robert T. Fazzio, Tanya L. Hoskin, Rushin D. Brahmbhatt, Tina J. Hieken, James W. Jakub, Judy C. Boughey, Daniel W. Visscher, Amy C. Degnim.. (2017) Multivariate model to identify women at low risk of cancer upgrade after a core needle biopsy diagnosis of atypical ductal hyperplasia. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 19.\n\n\n\n28 Laura H. Rosenberger, Ryan Weber, Daniel Sjoberg, Andrew J. Vickers, Debra A. Mangino, Monica Morrow,", + " Melissa L. Pilewskie.. (2017) Impact of self-reported data on the acquisition of multi-generational family history and lifestyle factors among women seen in a high-risk breast screening program: a focus on modifiable risk factors and genetic referral. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 162:2, 275-282.\n\n\n\n29 Marie E. Wood, Brian L. Sprague, Andrew Oustimov, Marie B. Synnstvedt, Melissa Cuke, Emily F. Conant, Despina Kontos.. (2017) Aspirin use is associated with lower mammographic density in a large screening cohort.", + " Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 162:3, 419-425.\n\n\n\n30 Anita R. Skandarajah, Susan Thomas, Kylie Shackleton, Laura Chin-Lenn, Geoffrey J. Lindeman, G. Bruce Mann.. (2017) Patient and medical barriers preclude uptake of tamoxifen preventative therapy in women with a strong family history. The Breast 32, 93-97.\n\n\n\n31 D.B.Y. Fontein, A. Charehbili, J.W.R. Nortier, H. Putter, E. Meershoek-Klein Kranenbarg, J.R.", + " Kroep, S.C. Linn, C.J.H. van de Velde.. (2017) Specific adverse events are associated with response to exemestane therapy in postmenopausal breast cancer patients: Results from the TEAMIIA study (BOOG2006-04). European Journal of Surgical Oncology (EJSO) 43:4, 619-624.\n\n\n\n32 Maria da Concei??o Barros-Oliveira, Danylo Rafhael Costa-Silva, Danielle Benigno de Andrade, Umbelina Soares Borges, Cl?citon Braga Tavares,", + " Rafael Soares Borges, Jana?na de Moraes Silva, Benedito Borges da Silva.. (2017) Use of anastrozole in the chemoprevention and treatment of breast cancer: A literature review. Revista da Associa??o M?dica Brasileira 63:4, 371-378.\n\n\n\n33 Rowan T. Chlebowski.. (2017) Improving Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Versus Implementing Breast Cancer Prevention. Journal of Clinical Oncology 35:7, 702-704.\n\n\n\n34 Jo Marsden.. (2017) Breast cancer chemoprevention:", + " A service in need of menopause specialist support. Post Reproductive Health 23:1, 15-21.\n\n\n\n35 William N. William, Waun Ki Hong, Scott M. Lippman.. 2017. Chemoprevention of Cancer. Holland-Frei Cancer Medicine, 1-6.\n\n\n\n36 Olivia Meggetto, Elizabeth Maunsell, Rowan Chlebowski, Paul Goss, Dongsheng Tu, Harriet Richardson.. (2017) Factors Associated With Early Discontinuation of Study Treatment in the Mammary Prevention.3 Breast Cancer Chemoprevention Trial. Journal of Clinical Oncology 35:", + "6, 629-635.\n\n\n\n37 Kelly K. Hunt, David M. Euhus, Judy C. Boughey, Anees B. Chagpar, Sheldon M. Feldman, Nora M. Hansen, Swati A. Kulkarni, David R. McCready, Eleftherios P. Mamounas, Lee G. Wilke, Kimberly J. Van Zee, Monica Morrow.. (2017) Society of Surgical Oncology Breast Disease Working Group Statement on Prophylactic (Risk-Reducing) Mastectomy. Annals of Surgical Oncology 24:2, 375-", + "397.\n\n\n\n38 Savitri Krishnamurthy, Therese Bevers, Henry M. Kuerer, Benjamin Smith, Wei Tse Yang.. (2017) Paradigm Shifts in Breast Care Delivery: Impact of Imaging in a Multidisciplinary Environment. American Journal of Roentgenology 208:2, 248-255.\n\n\n\n39 Jennifer Foglietta, Alessandro Inno, Francesca de Iuliis, Valentina Sini, Simona Duranti, Monica Turazza, Luigi Tarantini, Stefania Gori.. (2017) Cardiotoxicity of Aromatase Inhibitors in Breast Cancer Patients.", + " Clinical Breast Cancer 17:1, 11-17.\n\n\n\n40 Galina Sukhodolskaya, Victoria Fokina, Andrei Shutov, Vera Nikolayeva, Tatiana Savinova, Yuri Grishin, Alexey Kazantsev, Nikolay Lukashev, Marina Donova.. (2017) Bioconversion of 6-( N- methyl- N- phenyl)aminomethyl androstane steroids by Nocardioides simplex. Steroids 118, 9-16.\n\n\n\n41 Stephanie M. Wong, Natasha K. Stout, Rinaa S. Punglia,", + " Ipshita Prakash, Yasuaki Sagara, Mehra Golshan.. (2017) Breast cancer prevention strategies in lobular carcinoma in situ: A decision analysis. Cancer 42.\n\n\n\n42 Adrienne E. Borrie, Richard B. Kim.. (2017) Molecular basis of aromatase inhibitor associated arthralgia: known and potential candidate genes and associated biomarkers. Expert Opinion on Drug Metabolism & Toxicology 13:2, 149-156.\n\n\n\n43 Elad Ziv, Jeffrey A. Tice, Brian Sprague, Celine M. Vachon, Steven R.", + " Cummings, Karla Kerlikowske, Jeffrey S Chang.. (2017) Using Breast Cancer Risk Associated Polymorphisms to Identify Women for Breast Cancer Chemoprevention. PLOS ONE 12:1, e0168601.\n\n\n\n44 Rhiana S. Menen, Nivetha Ganesan, Therese Bevers, Jun Ying, Robin Coyne, Deanna Lane, Constance Albarracin, Isabelle Bedrosian.. (2017) Long-Term Safety of Observation in Selected Women Following Core Biopsy Diagnosis of Atypical Ductal Hyperplasia. Annals of Surgical Oncology 24:", + "1, 70-76.\n\n\n\n45 Christina V. Oleson.. 2017. Bone Disorders in Cancer. Osteoporosis Rehabilitation, 349-389.\n\n\n\n46 Summya Rashid.. 2017. Cancer Chemoprevention: Hurdles and Future Prospects and Considerations. Cancer and Chemoprevention: An Overview, 157-161.\n\n\n\n47 Summya Rashid.. 2017. Clinical Trials of Chemoprevention. Cancer and Chemoprevention: An Overview, 163-167.\n\n\n\n48 Chelsea Anderson, Aaron N. Winn, Stacie B. Dusetzina,", + " Hazel B. Nichols.. (2017) Endocrine Therapy Initiation among Older Women with Ductal Carcinoma In Situ. Journal of Cancer Epidemiology 2017, 1-6.\n\n\n\n49 Randi Ryan, Ossama Tawfik, Roy A. Jensen, Shrikant Anant.. 2017. Current Approaches to Diagnosis and Treatment of Ductal Carcinoma In Situ and Future Directions. Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science.\n\n\n\n50 Barbara K. Dunn, Barnett S. Kramer.. (2016) Cancer Prevention: Lessons Learned and Future Directions. Trends in Cancer 2:", + "12, 713-722.\n\n\n\n51 Rossella Graffeo, Luca Livraghi, Olivia Pagani, Aron Goldhirsch, Ann H. Partridge, Judy E. Garber.. (2016) Time to incorporate germline multigene panel testing into breast and ovarian cancer patient care. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 160:3, 393-410.\n\n\n\n52 Helena Sackey, Miao Hui, Kamila Czene, Helena Verkooijen, Gustaf Edgren, Jan Frisell, Mikael Hartman.. (2016) The impact of in situ breast cancer and family history on risk of subsequent breast cancer events and mortality - a population-based study from Sweden.", + " Breast Cancer Research 18:1.\n\n\n\n53 Anuradha Sehrawat, Ruchi Roy, Subrata K. Pore, Eun-Ryeong Hahm, Suman K. Samanta, Krishna B. Singh, Su-Hyeong Kim, Kamayani Singh, Shivendra V. Singh.. (2016) Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Cancer Chemoprevention by Phytochemicals from Dietary and Medicinal Plants. Seminars in Cancer Biology.\n\n\n\n54 Alyssa D. Throckmorton, Deborah J. Rhodes, Kevin S. Hughes, Amy C. Degnim, Diana Dickson-Witmer.", + ". (2016) Dense Breasts: What Do Our Patients Need to Be Told and Why?. Annals of Surgical Oncology 23:10, 3119-3127.\n\n\n\n55 Amy C. Degnim, William D. Dupont, Derek C. Radisky, Robert A. Vierkant, Ryan D. Frank, Marlene H. Frost, Stacey J. Winham, Melinda E. Sanders, Jeffrey R. Smith, David L. Page, Tanya L. Hoskin, Celine M. Vachon, Karthik Ghosh, Tina J. Hieken, Lori A.", + " Denison, Jodi M. Carter, Lynn C. Hartmann, Daniel W. Visscher.. (2016) Extent of atypical hyperplasia stratifies breast cancer risk in 2 independent cohorts of women. Cancer 122:19, 2971-2978.\n\n\n\n56 Ismail Jatoi, John R Benson.. (2016) Management of women with a hereditary predisposition for breast cancer. Future Oncology 12:19, 2277-2288.\n\n\n\n57 Ana Filipa Sobral, Cristina Amaral, Georgina Correia-da-Silva, Nat\u00e9rcia Teixeira.", + ". (2016) Unravelling exemestane: From biology to clinical prospects. The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 163, 1-11.\n\n\n\n58 Ivana \u0160estak, Jack Cuzick.. (2016) Endometrial cancer risk in postmenopausal breast cancer patients treated with tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors. Expert Review of Endocrinology & Metabolism 11:5, 425-432.\n\n\n\n59 Susan Hum, Melinda Wu, Sandhya Pruthi, Ruth Heisey.. (2016) Physician and Patient Barriers to Breast Cancer Preventive Therapy.", + " Current Breast Cancer Reports 8:3, 158-164.\n\n\n\n60 Ludivine Dion, Adela\u00efde Racin, Susie Brousse, Fran\u00e7oise Beltjens, Aur\u00e9lie Cauchois, Jean Lev\u00eaque, Charles Coutant, Vincent Lavou\u00e9.. (2016) Atypical epithelial hyperplasia of the breast: state of the art. Expert Review of Anticancer Therapy 16:9, 943-953.\n\n\n\n61 Victor G. Vogel.. (2016) Update on Breast Cancer Risk Reduction Therapy. Current Breast Cancer Reports 8:3,", + " 175-182.\n\n\n\n62 Giorgio Secreto, Sabina Sieri, Claudia Agnoli, Sara Grioni, Paola Muti, Barnett Zumoff, Milena Sant, Elisabetta Meneghini, Vittorio Krogh.. (2016) A novel approach to breast cancer prevention: reducing excessive ovarian androgen production in elderly women. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 158:3, 553-561.\n\n\n\n63 Amity Platt, Zuping Xia, Ying Liu, Gang Chen, Philip Lazarus.. (2016) Impact of nonsynonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms on in-vitro metabolism of exemestane by hepatic cytosolic reductases.", + " Pharmacogenetics and Genomics 26:8, 370-380.\n\n\n\n64 Frederick L. Moffat, Danny Yakoub.. (2016) Bilateral mastectomy and the retreat from breast-conserving surgery. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 159:1, 15-30.\n\n\n\n65 Chlebowski, Rowan T., Budoff, Matthew J.,.. (2016) Changing Adjuvant Breast-Cancer Therapy with a Signal for Prevention. New England Journal of Medicine 375:3, 274-275.\n\n\n\n66 Banu K. Arun, Yun Gong, Diane Liu, Jennifer K. Litton,", + " Angelica M. Gutierrez-Barrera, J. Jack Lee, Lana Vornik, Nuhad K. Ibrahim, Terri Cornelison, Gabriel N. Hortobagyi, Brandy M. Heckman-Stoddard, Kimberly B. Koenig, Ricardo R. Alvarez, James L. Murray, Vicente Valero, Scott M. Lippman, Powel Brown, Nour Sneige.. (2016) Phase I biomarker modulation study of atorvastatin in women at increased risk for breast cancer. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 158:1, 67-77.\n\n\n\n67 Dimitrios Mantas,", + " J. D. Kostakis, C. Markopoulos.. (2016) Aromatase inhibitors: A comprehensive review in mechanisms of action, side effects and treatment in postmenopausal early breast cancer patients. Hellenic Journal of Surgery 88:4, 245-251.\n\n\n\n68 Su-Hyeong Kim, Catherine H. Kaschula, Nolan Priedigkeit, Adrian V. Lee, Shivendra V. Singh.. (2016) Forkhead Box Q1 Is a Novel Target of Breast Cancer Stem Cell Inhibition by Diallyl Trisulfide. Journal of Biological Chemistry 291:", + "26, 13495-13508.\n\n\n\n69 (2016) Risk-Reducing Surgery in Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer. New England Journal of Medicine 374:24, 2403-2404.\n\n\n\n70 Susanne Sch\u00fcler-Toprak, Stephan Seitz, Olaf Ortmann.. (2016) Endocrine interventions in women with BRCA1/2 mutations. Der Gyn\u00e4kologe 49:5, 348-356.\n\n\n\n71 Naruto Taira, Masami Arai, Masahiko Ikeda, Motoki Iwasaki, Hitoshi Okamura, Kiyoshi Takamatsu,", + " Tsunehisa Nomura, Seiichiro Yamamoto, Yoshinori Ito, Hirofumi Mukai.. (2016) The Japanese Breast Cancer Society clinical practice guidelines for epidemiology and prevention of breast cancer, 2015 edition. Breast Cancer 23:3, 343-356.\n\n\n\n72 Arvind Krishnamurthy, Viveka Soundara, Vijayalakshmi Ramshankar.. (2016) Preventive and Risk Reduction Strategies for Women at High Risk of Developing Breast Cancer: a Review. Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 17:3, 895-904.\n\n\n\n73 Stephanie R.", + " Land, Farzana L. Walcott, Qing Liu, D. Lawrence Wickerham, Joseph P. Costantino, Patricia A. Ganz.. (2016) Symptoms and QOL as Predictors of Chemoprevention Adherence in NRG Oncology/NSABP Trial P-1. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 108:4, djv365.\n\n\n\n74 P. Butow, K. A. Phillips.. (2016) Medication to reduce breast cancer risk: why is uptake low?. Annals of Oncology 27:4, 553-554.\n\n\n\n75 Aaron Dush,", + " Abby Williams, Neha Mangini, Kendra Klaczak.. (2016) Initiation of exemestane in two warfarin-treated patients leading to elevation and variability of INR. Journal of Oncology Pharmacy Practice 22:2, 371-373.\n\n\n\n76 Amy G. Groom, Tallal Younis.. (2016) Endocrine therapy for breast cancer prevention in high-risk women: clinical and economic considerations. Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research 16:2, 245-255.\n\n\n\n77 Daniel F. Argolo, Clifford A. Hudis, Neil M. Iyengar.", + ". (2016) Obesity and Cancer\u2014Opportunities to Break the Link. Current Breast Cancer Reports 8:1, 22-31.\n\n\n\n78 Donna B. Jeffe, Maria P\u00e9rez, Emily F. Cole, Ying Liu, Mario Schootman.. (2016) The Effects of Surgery Type and Chemotherapy on Early-Stage Breast Cancer Patients\u2019 Quality of Life Over 2-Year Follow-up. Annals of Surgical Oncology 23:3, 735-743.\n\n\n\n79 Gian Marco Rosa, Lorenzo Gigli, Maria Isabella Tagliasacchi, Cecilia Di Iorio, Federico Carbone,", + " Alessio Nencioni, Fabrizio Montecucco, Claudio Brunelli.. (2016) Update on cardiotoxicity of anti-cancer treatments. European Journal of Clinical Investigation 46:3, 264-284.\n\n\n\n80 Supriya Mallick, Rony Benson, P. K. Julka.. (2016) Breast cancer prevention with anti-estrogens: review of the current evidence and future directions. Breast Cancer 23:2, 170-177.\n\n\n\n81 Claire S\u00e9n\u00e9chal, Fabien Reyal, Nasrine Callet, Pascale This, Catherine Nogu\u00e8s,", + " Dominique Stoppa-Lyonnet, Emmanuelle Fourme.. (2016) Que penser de l\u2019hormonopr\u00e9vention du cancer du sein chez les femmes porteuses d\u2019une mutation d\u00e9l\u00e9t\u00e8re BRCA1/BRCA2?. Bulletin du Cancer 103:3, 273-281.\n\n\n\n82 Anosheh Afghahi, Melinda L. Telli, Allison W. Kurian.. (2016) Genetics of triple-negative breast cancer: Implications for patient care. Current Problems in Cancer 40:2-4, 130-140.\n\n\n\n83 Robert H. Shoemaker,", + " Chen S. Suen, Cathy A. Holmes, Judith R. Fay, Vernon E. Steele.. (2016) The National Cancer Institute\u2019s PREVENT Cancer Preclinical Drug Development Program: overview, current projects, animal models, agent development strategies, and molecular targets. Seminars in Oncology 43:1, 189-197.\n\n\n\n84 Matteo Lazzeroni, Andrea DeCensi.. (2016) Alternate dosing schedules for cancer chemopreventive agents. Seminars in Oncology 43:1, 116-122.\n\n\n\n85 Oukseub Lee, Seema A. Khan.", + ". (2016) Novel routes for administering chemoprevention: local transdermal therapy to the breasts. Seminars in Oncology 43:1, 107-115.\n\n\n\n86 Francesco Spagnolo, Ivana Sestak, Anthony Howell, John F. Forbes, Jack Cuzick.. (2016) Anastrozole-Induced Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: Results From the International Breast Cancer Intervention Study II Prevention Trial. Journal of Clinical Oncology 34:2, 139-143.\n\n\n\n87 Andrea Manni, Karam El-Bayoumy, Christine G. Skibinski, Henry J.", + " Thompson, Julia Santucci-Pereira, Lucas Tadeu Bidinotto, Jose Russo.. 2016. The Role of Omega-3 Fatty Acids in Breast Cancer Prevention. Trends in Breast Cancer Prevention, 51-81.\n\n\n\n88 Anna Maria Storniolo, Jill Kremer.. 2016. Breast Cancer Prevention in Summary. Breast Cancer Prevention and Treatment, 91-98.\n\n\n\n89 Rashmi K. Murthy, Vicente Valero, Thomas A. Buchholz.. 2016. Overview. Clinical Radiation Oncology, 1284-1302.e3.\n\n\n\n90 Saranya Chumsri,", + " Stephen Yu, Amanda Schech, Gauri Sabnis, Angela Brodie.. 2016. Aromatase Inhibitors for Breast Cancer Prevention. Trends in Breast Cancer Prevention, 103-111.\n\n\n\n91 Freya R. Schnabel, Sarah Pivo, Jennifer Chun, Shira Schwartz, Ana Paula Refinetti, Deborah Axelrod, Amber Guth.. (2016) Breast Cancer Profile among Patients with a History of Chemoprevention. International Journal of Breast Cancer 2016, 1-5.\n\n\n\n92 Helena Hwang, Sunati Sahoo.. 2016. Atypical Lobular Hyperplasia and Lobular Carcinoma In Situ.", + " A Comprehensive Guide to Core Needle Biopsies of the Breast, 561-593.\n\n\n\n93 Kandice K. Ludwig.. 2016. Proliferative Breast Disease. Breast Cancer Prevention and Treatment, 59-79.\n\n\n\n94 Alexandra McCarthy, Tina Skinner, Michael Fenech, Shelley Keating.. 2016. Prevention of Chronic Conditions and Cancer. Cancer and Chronic Conditions, 203-239.\n\n\n\n95 Emily J. Guerard, Madhuri V. Vithala, Hyman B. Muss.. 2016. Breast Cancer in the Older Adult. Management of Breast Diseases, 519-", + "528.\n\n\n\n96 Sarah Colonna, Amanda Gammon.. 2016. Management of the Patient with a Genetic Predisposition for Breast Cancer. Management of Breast Diseases, 575-592.\n\n\n\n97 Marsha Camilla Lynch, Jean H. Lee, David A. Mankoff.. 2016. Diagnostic Applications of Nuclear Medicine: Breast Cancer. Nuclear Oncology, 1-25.\n\n\n\n98 J. Michael Dixon, David Cameron.. 2016. Treatment of Screen-Detected Breast Cancer: Can We Avoid or Minimize Overtreatment?. Breast Cancer Screening, 375-401.\n\n\n\n99 R. T.", + " Chlebowski, R. Haque, H. Hedlin, N. Col, E. Paskett, J. E. Manson, J. T. Kubo, K. C. Johnson, J. Wactawski-Wende, K. Pan, G. Anderson.. (2015) Benefit/risk for adjuvant breast cancer therapy with tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitor use by age, and race/ethnicity. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 154:3, 609-616.\n\n\n\n100 Victor G Vogel.. (2015) Ongoing data from the breast cancer prevention trials:", + " opportunity for breast cancer risk reduction. BMC Medicine 13:1.\n\n\n\n101 Oukseub Lee, David Ivancic, Subhashini Allu, Ali Shidfar, Kara Kenney, Irene Helenowski, Megan E. Sullivan, Miguel Muzzio, Denise Scholtens, Robert T. Chatterton, Kevin P. Bethke, Nora M. Hansen, Seema A. Khan.. (2015) Local transdermal therapy to the breast for breast cancer prevention and DCIS therapy: preclinical and clinical evaluation. Cancer Chemotherapy and Pharmacology 76:6, 1235-1246.\n\n\n\n102 S\u00f8ren Friis,", + " Ausrele Kesminiene, Carolina Espina, Anssi Auvinen, Kurt Straif, Joachim Sch\u00fcz.. (2015) European Code against Cancer 4th Edition: Medical exposures, including hormone therapy, and cancer. Cancer Epidemiology 39, S107-S119.\n\n\n\n103 Willemijn AM. van Gemert, Albertine J. Schuit, Job van der Palen, Anne M. May, Jolein A. Iestra, Harriet Wittink, Petra H. Peeters, Evelyn M. Monninkhof.. (2015) Effect of weight loss, with or without exercise,", + " on body composition and sex hormones in postmenopausal women: the SHAPE-2 trial. Breast Cancer Research 17:1.\n\n\n\n104 D. Gareth Evans, Anthony Howell.. 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(2015) Chemoprevention or mastectomy for women at high risk of developing breast cancer. Maturitas 82:3, 271-273.\n\n\n\n108 Jack Cuzick, Ivana Sestak, Mangesh A. Thorat.. (2015) Impact of preventive therapy on the risk of breast cancer among women with benign breast disease.", + " The Breast 24, S51-S55.\n\n\n\n109 A. Couillet, O. Tredan, N. Oussaid, P. Saltel.. (2015) Prevalence of depressive syndrome in patients with breast cancer treated with or without aromatase inhibitors. Oncologie 17:11-12, 587-594.\n\n\n\n110 Elizabeth M. Ward, Carol E. DeSantis, Chun Chieh Lin, Joan L. Kramer, Ahmedin Jemal, Betsy Kohler, Otis W. Brawley, Ted Gansler.. (2015) Cancer statistics: Breast cancer in situ.", + " CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 65:6, 481-495.\n\n\n\n111 J. Cuzick.. (2015) Statistical controversies in clinical research: long-term follow-up of clinical trials in cancer. Annals of Oncology, mdv392.\n\n\n\n112 Meghan R. Flanagan, Mara H. Rendi, Vijayakrishna K. Gadi, Kristine E. 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Essentials of Medical Biochemistry, 589-606.\n\n\n\n159 Javier Freire, Lucia Garc\u00eda-Berbel, Pilar Garc\u00eda-Berbel, Saray Pereda, Ainara Azueta, Pilar Garc\u00eda-Arranz, Ana De Juan, Alfonso Vega, \u00c1ngela Hens, Ana Enguita, Pedro Mu\u00f1oz-Cacho, Javier G\u00f3mez-Rom\u00e1n.. (2015) Collagen Type XI Alpha 1 Expression in Intraductal Papillomas Predicts Malignant Recurrence. BioMed Research International 2015,", + " 1-5.\n\n\n\n160 Andrea Manni, Karam El-Bayoumy, Christine G. Skibinski, Henry J. Thompson, Julia Santucci-Pereira, Lucas Tadeu Bidinotto, Jose Russo.. (2015) Combination of Antiestrogens and Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Breast Cancer Prevention. BioMed Research International 2015, 1-10.\n\n\n\n161 Sarah A. Dabydeen, Keunsoo Kang, Edgar S. D\u00edaz-Cruz, Ahmad Alamri, Margaret L. Axelrod, Kerrie B. Bouker, Rawan Al-Kharboosh,", + " Robert Clarke, Lothar Hennighausen, Priscilla A. Furth.. 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Garc\u00eda-Palomo, J. Garc\u00eda-Mata, S. Antol\u00edn, L. Garc\u00eda-Est\u00e9vez, Y. Fern\u00e1ndez.. (2014) Breast cancer management in the elderly. Clinical and Translational Oncology 16:4, 351-361.\n\n\n\n204 C. Antoine, L. Ameye, M. Paesmans, S. Rozenberg.. (2014) Systematic review about breast cancer incidence in relation to hormone replacement therapy use. Climacteric 17:2, 116-132.\n\n\n\n205 Todd P.", + " Knutson, Carol A. Lange.. (2014) Tracking progesterone receptor-mediated actions in breast cancer. Pharmacology & Therapeutics 142:1, 114-125.\n\n\n\n206 \u00c1ngel Guerrero, Joaqu\u00edn Gavil\u00e1, Miguel A. Climent, Vicente Guillem, Amparo Ru\u00edz.. (2014) 36th annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. Resumen de lo m\u00e1s destacado. Revista de Senolog\u00eda y Patolog\u00eda Mamaria 27:2, 87-93.\n\n\n\n207 Lonzetta Neal, Nicole P. Sandhu, Tina J.", + " Hieken, Katrina N. Glazebrook, Maire Brid Mac Bride, Christina A. Dilaveri, Dietlind L. 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(2013) Lung cancer chemoprevention: difficulties, promise and potential agents?. Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs 22:1, 35-47.\n\n\n\n279 Petra den Hollander, Powel H.", + " Brown.. (2013) Advances in Targeted Therapy for the Prevention of Breast Cancer. Breast Diseases: A Year Book Quarterly 24:4, 309-314.\n\n\n\n280 Suman Sood, Barbara A Konkle.. 2013. Thrombotic Risk of Contraceptives and Other Hormonal Therapies. Consultative Hemostasis and Thrombosis, 603-615.\n\n\n\n281 Elisabetta Razzaboni, Angela Toss, Laura Cortesi, Isabella Marchi, Federica Sebastiani, Elisabetta De Matteis, Massimo Federico.. (2013)", + " Acceptability and Adherence in a Chemoprevention Trial among Women at Increased Risk for Breast Cancer Attending the Modena Familial Breast and Ovarian Cancer Center (Italy). The Breast Journal 19:1, 10-21.\n\n\n\n282 Katherine D. Crew.. (2013) Vitamin D: Are We Ready to Supplement for Breast Cancer Prevention and Treatment?. ISRN Oncology 2013, 1-22.\n\n\n\n283 Cynthia A. Stuenkel, Bruce Ettinger.. 2013. Osteoporosis. Osteoporosis, 1535-1550.\n\n\n\n284 Philipp Y. Maximov,", + " Russell E. McDaniel, V. Craig Jordan.. 2013. The Legacy of Tamoxifen. Tamoxifen, 165-178.\n\n\n\n285 Ivana Sestak, Jack Cuzick.. (2012) Preventive Therapy for Breast Cancer. Current Oncology Reports 14:6, 568-573.\n\n\n\n286 Elena Brachtel.. (2012) Molecular Pathology of the Breast. Surgical Pathology Clinics 5:4, 793-819.\n\n\n\n287 Hasan Mukhtar.. (2012) Chemoprevention: Making it a success story for controlling human cancer. Cancer Letters 326:", + "2, 123-127.\n\n\n\n288 M. Fralick, N. Bouganim, R. Kremer, N. Kekre, S. Robertson, L. Vandermeer, I. Kuchuk, J. Li, M. Murshed, M. Clemons.. (2012) Histomorphometric and microarchitectural analyses using the 2mm bone marrow trephine in metastatic breast cancer patients\u2013preliminary results. Journal of Bone Oncology 1:3, 69-73.\n\n\n\n289 Suzanne B. Coopey, Emanuele Mazzola, Julliette M.", + " Buckley, John Sharko, Ahmet K. Belli, Elizabeth M. H. Kim, Fernanda Polubriaginof, Giovanni Parmigiani, Judy E. Garber, Barbara L. Smith, Michele A. Gadd, Michelle C. Specht, Anthony J. Guidi, Constance A. Roche, Kevin S. Hughes.. (2012) The role of chemoprevention in modifying the risk of breast cancer in women with atypical breast lesions. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 136:3, 627-633.\n\n\n\n290 Rakhshanda Layeequr Rahman, Sandhya Pruthi.", + ". (2012) Chemoprevention of Breast Cancer: The Paradox of Evidence versus Advocacy Inaction. Cancers 4:4, 1146-1160.\n\n\n\n291 Asad Umar, Barbara K. Dunn, Peter Greenwald.. (2012) Future directions in cancer prevention. Nature Reviews Cancer 12:12, 835-848.\n\n\n\n292 D\u00e9lio Marques Conde, L\u00facia Costa-Paiva, Edson Zangiacomi Martinez, Aar\u00e3o Mendes Pinto-Neto.. (2012) Bone mineral density in postmenopausal women with and without breast cancer.", + " Revista da Associa\u00e7\u00e3o M\u00e9dica Brasileira 58:6, 673-678.\n\n\n\n293 Julia A Files, Daniela L Stan, Summer V Allen, Sandhya Pruthi.. (2012) Chemoprevention of breast cancer. Women's Health 8:6, 635-646.\n\n\n\n294 Edith Caroline Smith.. (2012) An Overview of Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer Syndrome. Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health 57:6, 577-584.\n\n\n\n295 L. P. Stabile, M. E. Rothstein, D. E.", + " Cunningham, S. R. Land, S. Dacic, P. Keohavong, J. M. Siegfried.. (2012) Prevention of tobacco carcinogen-induced lung cancer in female mice using antiestrogens. Carcinogenesis 33:11, 2181-2189.\n\n\n\n296 D\u00e9lio Marques Conde, L\u00facia Costa-Paiva, Edson Zangiacomi Martinez, Aar\u00e3o Mendes Pinto-Neto.. (2012) Bone mineral density in postmenopausal women with and without breast cancer. Revista da Associa\u00e7\u00e3o M\u00e9dica Brasileira (English Edition)", + " 58:6, 673-678.\n\n\n\n297 Julia A Files, Daniela L Stan, Summer V Allen, Sandhya Pruthi.. (2012) Chemoprevention of Breast Cancer. Women's Health 8:6, 635-646.\n\n\n\n298 Priscilla A. Furth.. (2012) Cancer prevention as biomodulation: targeting the initiating stimulus and secondary adaptations. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1271:1, 1-9.\n\n\n\n299 Sandhya Pruthi, John B. Bundrick, Scott C. Litin.. (2012)", + " Clinical Pearls in Breast Disease. Mayo Clinic Proceedings 87:10, 1015-1020.\n\n\n\n300 S. V. Singh, K. Singh.. (2012) Cancer chemoprevention with dietary isothiocyanates mature for clinical translational research. Carcinogenesis 33:10, 1833-1842.\n\n\n\n301 Matteo Lazzeroni, Davide Serrano, Barbara K Dunn, Brandy M Heckman-Stoddard, Oukseub Lee, Seema Khan, Andrea Decensi.. (2012) Oral low dose and topical tamoxifen for breast cancer prevention:", + " modern approaches for an old drug. Breast Cancer Research 14:5.\n\n\n\n302 Laura Reimers, Katherine D. Crew.. (2012) Tamoxifen versus Raloxifene versus Exemestane for Chemoprevention. Current Breast Cancer Reports 4:3, 207-215.\n\n\n\n303 Pascale This, Anne de la Rochefordi\u00e8re, Alexia Savignoni, Marie Christine Falcou, Anne Tardivon, Fabienne Thibault, S\u00e9verine Alran, Virgine Fourchotte, Alfred Fitoussi, Benoit Couturaud, Sylvie Dolbeault,", + " Remy J. Salmon, Brigitte Sigal-Zafrani, Bernard Asselain, Dominique Stoppa-Lyonnet.. (2012) Breast and ovarian cancer risk management in a French cohort of 158 women carrying a BRCA1 or BRCA2 germline mutation: patient choices and outcome. Familial Cancer 11:3, 473-482.\n\n\n\n304 S. V. Singh, S.-H. Kim, A. Sehrawat, J. A. Arlotti, E.-R. Hahm, K. Sakao, J. H. Beumer, R.", + " C. Jankowitz, K. Chandra-Kuntal, J. Lee, A. A. Powolny, R. Dhir.. (2012) Biomarkers of Phenethyl Isothiocyanate-Mediated Mammary Cancer Chemoprevention in a Clinically Relevant Mouse Model. JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 104:16, 1228-1239.\n\n\n\n305 Monte Malach, William J. Baumol.. (2012) Opportunities for Cost Reduction of Medical Care: Part 3. Journal of Community Health 37:4, 888-896.\n\n\n\n306 Yanin Ch\u00e1varri-Guerra,", + " Cynthia Villarreal-Garza, Pedro ER Liedke, Felicia Knaul, Alejandro Mohar, Dianne M Finkelstein, Paul E Goss.. (2012) Breast cancer in Mexico: a growing challenge to health and the health system. The Lancet Oncology 13:8, e335-e343.\n\n\n\n307 F Lalloo, D G Evans.. (2012) Familial Breast Cancer. Clinical Genetics 82:2, 105-114.\n\n\n\n308 Caroline Antoine, Lieveke Ameye, Marianne Paesmans, Serge Rozenberg.. (2012)", + " Update of the evolution of breast cancer incidence in relation to hormone replacement therapy use in Belgium. Maturitas 72:4, 317-323.\n\n\n\n309 I. Bozovic-Spasojevic, E. Azambuja, Worta McCaskill-Stevens, P. Dinh, F. Cardoso.. (2012) Chemoprevention for breast cancer. Cancer Treatment Reviews 38:5, 329-339.\n\n\n\n310 J. Michael Dixon, E. Jane Macaskill.. (2012) Endocrine Therapy in DCIS: How Do We Proceed?. The Breast Journal 18:", + "4, 295-298.\n\n\n\n311 Anthony Howell, Dafydd Gareth Evans.. (2012) Detection and management of women at increased risk of breast cancer. Clinical Practice 9:4, 391-401.\n\n\n\n312 Rowan T. Chlebowski, Nananda Col.. (2012) Postmenopausal Women with DCIS Post-Mastectomy: A Potential Role for Aromatase Inhibitors. The Breast Journal 18:4, 299-302.\n\n\n\n313 Erika A. Waters, Timothy S. McNeel, Worta McCaskill Stevens, Andrew N. Freedman.", + ". (2012) Use of tamoxifen and raloxifene for breast cancer chemoprevention in 2010. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 134:2, 875-880.\n\n\n\n314 Kristin L. Campbell, Karen E. Foster-Schubert, Catherine M. Alfano, Chia-Chi Wang, Ching-Yun Wang, Catherine R. Duggan, Caitlin Mason, Ikuyo Imayama, Angela Kong, Liren Xiao, Carolyn E. Bain, George L. Blackburn, Frank Z. Stanczyk, Anne McTiernan.. (2012)", + " Reduced-Calorie Dietary Weight Loss, Exercise, and Sex Hormones in Postmenopausal Women: Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Clinical Oncology 30:19, 2314-2326.\n\n\n\n315 Chirag Shah, Sameer Berry, Nayana Dekhne, Thomas Lanni, Heather Lowry, Frank Vicini.. (2012) Implementation and Outcomes of a Multidisciplinary High-Risk Breast Cancer Program: The William Beaumont Hospital Experience. Clinical Breast Cancer 12:3, 215-218.\n\n\n\n316 A. Lesur, C. Barlier.. (2012) Arthralgies,", + " effets secondaires des inhibiteurs de l\u2019aromatase: fr\u00e9quence, signification et cons\u00e9quences. Oncologie 14:6-7, 365-373.\n\n\n\n317 Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, Sonia Servitja, M. Kassim Javaid, Laia Garrig\u00f3s, Nigel K. Arden, Cyrus Cooper, Joan Albanell, Ignasi Tusquets, Adolfo Diez-Perez, Xavier Nogues.. (2012) Vitamin D threshold to prevent aromatase inhibitor-related bone loss: the B-ABLE prospective cohort study. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 133:", + "3, 1159-1167.\n\n\n\n318 Anne Vincent-Salomon, David Hajage, Alexandre Rouquette, Aur\u00e9lie C\u00e9denot, Nad\u00e8ge Gruel, S\u00e9verine Alran, Xavier Sastre-Garau, Brigitte Sigal-Zafrani, Alain Fourquet, Youlia Kirova.. (2012) High Ki67 expression is a risk marker of invasive relapse for classical lobular carcinoma in situ patients. The Breast 21:3, 380-383.\n\n\n\n319 Todd P Knutson, Andrea R Daniel, Danhua Fan, Kevin AT Silverstein,", + " Kyle R Covington, Suzanne AW Fuqua, Carol A Lange.. (2012) Phosphorylated and sumoylation-deficient progesterone receptors drive proliferative gene signatures during breast cancer progression. Breast Cancer Research 14:3.\n\n\n\n320 Barbara K. Dunn, Esther Akpa.. (2012) Biomarkers as Surrogate Endpoints in Cancer Trials. Seminars in Oncology Nursing 28:2, 99-108.\n\n\n\n321 Garnet L Anderson, Rowan T Chlebowski, Aaron K Aragaki, Lewis H Kuller, JoAnn E Manson, Margery Gass,", + " Elizabeth Bluhm, Stephanie Connelly, F Allan Hubbell, Dorothy Lane, Lisa Martin, Judith Ockene, Thomas Rohan, Robert Schenken, Jean Wactawski-Wende.. (2012) Conjugated equine oestrogen and breast cancer incidence and mortality in postmenopausal women with hysterectomy: extended follow-up of the Women's Health Initiative randomised placebo-controlled trial. The Lancet Oncology 13:5, 476-486.\n\n\n\n322 Judith J. Smith, Barbara K. Dunn.. (2012) Biomarkers as Molecular Targets of Drug Interventions. Seminars in Oncology Nursing 28:", + "2, 109-115.\n\n\n\n323 Jennifer Keating Litton, Therese B. Bevers, Banu K. Arun.. (2012) Exemestane in the prevention setting. Therapeutic Advances in Medical Oncology 4:3, 107-112.\n\n\n\n324 Monica Morrow.. (2012) Refining the Use of Endocrine Therapy for Ductal Carcinoma in Situ. Journal of Clinical Oncology 30:12, 1249-1251.\n\n\n\n325 Kerri M. Winters-Stone, Anna L. Schwartz, Sandra C. Hayes, Carol J. Fabian,", + " Kristin L. Campbell.. (2012) A prospective model of care for breast cancer rehabilitation: Bone health and arthralgias. Cancer 118:S8, 2288-2299.\n\n\n\n326 R. T. Chlebowski, G. L. Anderson.. (2012) Changing Concepts: Menopausal Hormone Therapy and Breast Cancer. JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 104:7, 517-527.\n\n\n\n327 A. Howell, S. Astley, J. Warwick, P. Stavrinos, S. Sahin, S. Ingham, H.", + " McBurney, B. Eckersley, M. Harvie, M. Wilson, U. Beetles, R. Warren, A. Hufton, J. Sergeant, W. Newman, I. Buchan, J. Cuzick, D. G. Evans.. (2012) Prevention of breast cancer in the context of a national breast screening programme. Journal of Internal Medicine 271:4, 321-330.\n\n\n\n328 Pedro ER Liedke, Paul E Goss.. (2012) Aromatase inhibitors and musculoskeletal adverse events. The Lancet Oncology 13:", + "4, 333-334.\n\n\n\n329 N. Lynn Henry, Faouzi Azzouz, Zereunesay Desta, Lang Li, Anne T. Nguyen, Suzanne Lemler, Jill Hayden, Karineh Tarpinian, Elizabeth Yakim, David A. Flockhart, Vered Stearns, Daniel F. Hayes, Anna Maria Storniolo.. (2012) Predictors of Aromatase Inhibitor Discontinuation as a Result of Treatment-Emergent Symptoms in Early-Stage Breast Cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology 30:9, 936-942.\n\n\n\n330 Angela M Cheung,", + " Lianne Tile, Savannah Cardew, Sandhya Pruthi, John Robbins, George Tomlinson, Moira K Kapral, Sundeep Khosla, Sharmila Majumdar, Marta Erlandson, Judy Scher, Hanxian Hu, Alice Demaras, Lavina Lickley, Louise Bordeleau, Christine Elser, James Ingle, Harriet Richardson, Paul E Goss.. (2012) Bone density and structure in healthy postmenopausal women treated with exemestane for the primary prevention of breast cancer: a nested substudy of the MAP.3 randomised controlled trial.", + " The Lancet Oncology 13:3, 275-284.\n\n\n\n331 Waseem Khaliq, Kala Visvanathan.. (2012) Breast Cancer Chemoprevention: Current Approachesand Future Directions. Current Obstetrics and Gynecology Reports 1:1, 33-41.\n\n\n\n332 Jane A Cauley.. (2012) Bone loss associated with prevention of breast cancer. The Lancet Oncology 13:3, 221-222.\n\n\n\n333, Pascal Pujol, Christine Lasset, Pascaline Berthet, Catherine Dugast, Suzette Delaloge,", + " Jean-Pierre Fricker, Isabelle Tennevet, Nathalie Chabbert-Buffet, Pascale This, Karen Baudry, Jerome Lemonnier, Lise Roca, Sylvie Mijonnet, Paul Gesta, Jean Chiesa, Helene Dreyfus, Philippe Vennin, Capucine Delnatte, Yves Jean Bignon, Alain Lortholary, Fabienne Prieur, Laurence Gladieff, Anne Lesur, Krishna B. Clough, Catherine Nogues, Anne-Laure Martin.. (2012) Uptake of a randomized breast cancer prevention trial comparing letrozole to placebo in BRCA1/", + "2 mutations carriers: the LIBER trial. Familial Cancer 11:1, 77-84.\n\n\n\n334 Emmanuel M Gabriel, Ismail Jatoi.. (2012) Breast cancer chemoprevention. Expert Review of Anticancer Therapy 12:2, 223-228.\n\n\n\n335 Sarah Hoffe, Lodovico Balducci.. (2012) Cancer and Age: General Considerations. Clinics in Geriatric Medicine 28:1, 1-18.\n\n\n\n336 Jennifer Keating Litton, Banu K Arun, Powel H Brown, Gabriel N Hortobagyi.. (2012)", + " Aromatase inhibitors and breast cancer prevention. Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy 13:3, 325-331.\n\n\n\n337 (2012) Exemestane Reduces Breast Cancer Risk in High-Risk Postmenopausal Women. Journal of the National Medical Association 104:1-2, 118.\n\n\n\n338 Roni T. Falk, Elisabet Gentzschein, Frank Z. Stanczyk, Montserrat Garcia-Closas, Jonine D. Figueroa, Olga B. Ioffe, Jolanta Lissowska, Louise A. Brinton, Mark E. Sherman.", + ". (2012) Sex steroid hormone levels in breast adipose tissue and serum in postmenopausal women. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 131:1, 287-294.\n\n\n\n339 Matteo Lazzeroni, Davide Serrano.. (2012) Potential Use of Vaccines in the Primary Prevention of Breast Cancer in High-Risk Patients. Breast Care 7:4, 281-287.\n\n\n\n340 Dong Hoon Suh, Kidong Kim, Jae Weon Kim.. (2012) Major clinical research advances in gynecologic cancer in 2011. Journal of Gynecologic Oncology 23:", + "1, 53.\n\n\n\n341 Rachel C. Jankowitz, Nancy E. Davidson.. (2012) Breast Cancer Primary Prevention: \u2018SERM-Mounting\u2019 Existing Obstacles and Future Directions. Breast Diseases: A Year Book Quarterly 23:1, 19-23.\n\n\n\n342 J.K. Litton.. (2012) Exemestane for Breast-Cancer Prevention in Postmenopausal Women. Breast Diseases: A Year Book Quarterly 23:3, 226-227.\n\n\n\n343 Christina M. Laukaitis.. (2012) Genetics for the General Internist. The American Journal of Medicine 125:", + "1, 7-13.\n\n\n\n344 Akm Hossain, Jame Abraham.. 2011. Aromatase Inhibitors for Breast Cancer. Pharmaceutical Sciences Encyclopedia.\n\n\n\n345 G. Rennert.. (2011) Bisphosphonates: Beyond Prevention of Bone Metastases. JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 103:23, 1728-1729.\n\n\n\n346 Ifeyinwa Obiorah, V. Craig Jordan.. (2011) Progress in endocrine approaches to the treatment and prevention of breast cancer. Maturitas 70:4, 315-321.\n\n\n\n347 Xiangwei Wu,", + " Scott M. Lippman.. (2011) An intermittent approach for cancer chemoprevention. Nature Reviews Cancer.\n\n\n\n348 (2011) Exemestane for Breast-Cancer Prevention. New England Journal of Medicine 365:11, 1056-1058.\n\n\n\n349 S. Puhalla, R. C. Jankowitz, N. E. Davidson.. (2011) Adjuvant Endocrine Therapy for Breast Cancer: Don't Ditch the Switch!. JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 103:17, 1280-1282.\n\n\n\n350 Michael Batalo, Govardhanan Nagaiah,", + " Jame Abraham.. (2011) Cognitive dysfunction in postmenopausal breast cancer patients on aromatase inhibitors. Expert Review of Anticancer Therapy 11:8, 1277-1282.\n\n\n\n351 Xiangwei Wu, Sherri Patterson, Ernest Hawk.. (2011) Chemoprevention \u2013 History and general principles. Best Practice & Research Clinical Gastroenterology 25:4-5, 445-459.\n\n\n\n352 Lisa Hutchinson.. (2011) Prevention: MAPping out breast cancer chemoprevention. Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology 8:8, 445-445.\n\n\n\n353 Jame Abraham.", + ". (2011) Exemestane for postmenopausal women at increased risk of breast cancer. Community Oncology 8:7, 301-303.\n\n\n\n354 D. Lawrence Wickerham.. (2011) An aromatase inhibitor for breast cancer prevention: a promising option with barriers to resolve. Community Oncology 8:7, 304-305.\n\n" + ], + "length": 26262, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 66, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Don't expect a sugarcoated perspective on race in America if you pick up Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book. Due out tomorrow, the senior editor for the Atlantic pens Between the World and Me as a letter to his 14-year-old son, and it's a bleak but honest take that Benjamin Wallace-Wells, writing for the Daily Intelligencer, says reveals Coates' \"hard truths.\" \"Here is what I would like for you to know,\" Coates writes. \"In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body\u2014it is heritage.\" It's exactly that focus on the destruction of the body\u2014one unmitigated by Christianity's optimism\u2014that makes up a major theme and what \"gives Coates' writing urgency,\" Wallace-Wells writes: For Coates, an atheist who here borrows from the feminist lexicon, \"indignity is always physical.\" Coates himself writes, \"Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.\" Coates also addresses public policy affecting people not only by class, but by race (he even took on President Obama on this topic), as well as the Obama/MLK concepts of \"hope\" and \"dreams\"\u2014concepts that Coates believes, per Wallace-Wells, \"gave white liberals a pass.\" Coates also isn't terribly optimistic the race problem here will ever disappear, writing, \"Chaos is what we have. \u2026 If to the end of its existence America harbors white supremacy, I don't know how remarkable that would be.\" Coates' truths are receiving acclaim: As the Intelligencer notes, AO Scott tweeted recently that the book is \"essential, like water or air.\" And novelist Toni Morrison gave Coates perhaps the greatest compliment of all: \"I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.\" (Read an excerpt from Coates' book in the Atlantic, as well as the full piece in the Daily Intelligencer.)\n", + "docs": [ + "The Hard\n\nTruths of\n\nTa-Nehisi\n\nCoates After the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hopes of Barack Obama.\n\nPhotographs by Lyle Ashton Harris\n\nLate this spring, the publisher Spiegel & Grau sent out advance copies of a new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a slim volume of 176 pages called Between the World and Me. \u201cHere is what I would like for you to know,\u201d Coates writes in the book, addressed to his 14-year-old son. \u201cIn America, it is traditional to destroy the black body \u2014 it is heritage.\u201d\n\nThe only endorsement he had wanted was the novelist Toni Morrison\u2019s.", + " Neither he nor his editor, Christopher Jackson, knew Morrison, but they managed to get the galleys into her hands. Weeks later, Morrison\u2019s assistant sent Jackson an email with her reaction: \u201cI\u2019ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died,\u201d Morrison had written. \u201cClearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.\u201d Baldwin died 28 years ago. Jackson forwarded the note to Coates, who sent back a one-word email: \u201cMan.\u201d\n\nRelated Stories Ta-Nehisi Coates Unpacks the Way Comics Have Conquered the World\n\nMorrison\u2019s words were an anointing.", + " They were also a weight. On the subject of black America, Baldwin had once been a compass \u2014 \u201cJimmy\u2019s spirit,\u201d the poet Amiri Baraka had said, eulogizing him, \u201cis the only truth which keeps us sane.\u201d On the last Friday in June, the day after Morrison\u2019s endorsement was made public and then washed over Twitter, Coates sat down with me at a Morningside Heights bar and after some consideration ordered an IPA. At six-foot-four, he towers over nearly everyone he meets, and to close the physical distance he tends to turtle his neck down, making himself smaller: \u201cA public persona but not a public person,\u201d explained his father,", + " Paul Coates. Ta-Nehisi said he thought \u00adMorrison\u2019s praise was essentially literary, about the echo of Baldwin\u2019s direct and exhortative prose in his own. The week before, The New \u00adYorker\u2019s David Remnick had called the forthcoming book \u201cextraordinary,\u201d and A. O. Scott of the New York Times would soon go further, calling it \u201cessential, like water or air.\u201d The figure of the lonely radical writer is a common one. A writer who radicalizes the Establishment is more rare. \u201cWhen people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I\u2019m always surprised,\u201d Coates said.", + " \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s my low expectations for white people or what.\u201d\n\nIt had been nine days since the young white supremacist Dylann Roof had massacred nine black churchgoers in Charleston, and Coates, whose great theme is the intractability of racial history, had helped to orient the debate, to concentrate attention on the campaign against the Confederate flag: Even casual tweets he sent out were retweeted hundreds of times. The television behind the bar was tuned to President Obama\u2019s eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, which was just about to start. The broadcast was muted, but Coates noticed the tableau:", + " \u201cThere\u2019s a sister over here to the left, she\u2019s natural, no perm, and a very black dude, and then an African-American president.\u201d Coates imagined how this would appear to a 4-year-old white boy: \u201cThat\u2019s the world as he knows it,\u201d Coates said. \u201cSo all these people saying that symbols don\u2019t mean anything \u2014 that\u2019s bullshit. They mean a lot.\u201d Coates has often been a critic of the president from the left \u2014 of his instinct to submerge race in talk of class, of his moralizing to black audiences. \u201cI\u2019m going to make a prediction,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cHe\u2019s going to say something incredible.\u201d\n\nWhen Obama began his first campaign for the presidency, Coates was all but anonymous, a journalist in his early 30s who had worked mostly at alt-weeklies and mostly for short stints. But in 2008, he was hired by The Atlantic \u2014 to write longer pieces, then to blog \u2014 and eventually his commentary formed a counterpoint to the White House line. Against the optimism of the Obama ascendancy, Coates offered a bleaker view: that no postracial era was imminent, that white supremacy has been a condition of the United States since its inception and that it might always be.", + " \u201c \u2018White America\u2019 is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies,\u201d Coates writes to his son. While the president talked about the velocity of our escape from history, Coates insisted that the country was still stuck in its vise. Last year, he wrote an Atlantic cover story titled \u201cThe Case for Reparations,\u201d probably the most discussed magazine piece of the Obama era, which detailed the persistence of structural racism \u2014 racism by government policy \u2014 into the present day. When Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and then Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Walter Scott in South Carolina,", + " it was Coates who seemed to most adeptly digest the central paradox of the time: how, within an increasingly progressive era, a country led by a black president could still act with such racial brutality. In late December, when Funny or Die published a fake text-message chain between the president and his daughters, it had its fictional, radicalized Malia Obama coolly insisting, \u201cI wish Ta-Nehisi Coates was my dad.\u201d\n\nThe sudden shift after the massacre, in which southern politicians turned against the Confederate flag, filled Coates with both awe and perplexity. \u201cI mean, I tweeted this out, but I didn\u2019t expect it to happen:", + " \u2018You talk about how this makes you feel. Then take down the damn flag,\u2019 \u201d Coates said. \u201cAnd hell, they did it! It turns out that was actually what was in motion.\u201d He shook his head. \u201cShit!\u201d\n\nThat Sunday, the Times would give Coates a small role in focusing attention on the flag. More essential, the paper reported, were the public gestures of forgiveness that family members of the victims had offered to Roof. \u201cI will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you,\u201d the daughter of a slain 70-year-old woman told her mother\u2019s murderer at his hearing.", + " These gestures had moved conservative Christians in a very religious state. Coates believes in the power of social structures, not in the politics of emotion. The consensus account \u2014 in which Strom Thurmond\u2019s son State Senator Paul Thurmond looked into the eyes of black fellow citizens at a church service after the massacre and decided that he could no longer defend the flag \u2014 reeked of myth. Even the public forgiving, so soon after the slaughter, seemed unreal. \u201cIs that real?\u201d Coates said, watching the service. \u201cI question the realness of that.\u201d\n\nCoates is not a Christian. The heavy force in Between the World and Me \u2014 what makes it both unique and bleak \u2014 is his atheism.", + " It gives Coates\u2019s writing urgency. To consider the African-American experience without the language of souls and destiny is to strip it of euphemism, and to make the security of African-American bodies even more crucial. It also isolates him from the main black political tradition. \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world \u2014 about whose side God is on,\u201d he said. \u201cWell, I didn\u2019t have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.\u201d\n\nCoates was still wondering about the Charleston family members, Christians forgiving. He splayed his fingers over his brow and covered his eyes, so that as he talked he could not see.", + " \u201cIs it aspirational?\u201d he wondered. \u201cLike, I say, \u2018I forgive you\u2019 because I think I\u2019m supposed to?\u201d\n\nOn the mute television, something was happening. The ministers were standing up and smiling. To their left, the first African-American president of the United States had lifted his head. He was singing \u201cAmazing Grace.\u201d\n\nCoates with his father on their Park Heights stoop. Photo: Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates\n\nThe first time Coates met the president, at an off-the-record White House conversation with liberal opinion writers in 2013, he left disappointed in himself. \u201cEveryone was too deferential,", + " and I was too deferential, too,\u201d he said. The second time, a few months later, he was determined to do better. Coates had been reading Baldwin\u2019s 1963 book, The Fire Next Time, and as he left his home in Harlem for the train station, his wife, Kenyatta Matthews, said to him, \u201cWhat would Baldwin do?\u201d On the train to D.C., Coates thought about the off-the-record 1963 meeting that Baldwin had brokered between Robert Kennedy and leading black activists, at which Kennedy felt the full force of black anger. (\u201cThey seemed possessed,\u201d Kennedy would later say.) Coates arrived at the White House late and,", + " because he had not prepared for rain, wet. He was not wearing a suit but a blazer and jeans. The president was going around the room answering questions on a wide range of topics, handling each expertly, in Coates\u2019s view.\n\n\u201cAnd the race aspect is not gone from this,\u201d Coates said. \u201cTo see a black dude in a room of the smartest white people and just be the smartest dude in the room \u2014 it just puts into context all the stuff about \u2018Let me see his grades.\u2019 \u201d\n\nOccupying Coates\u2019s mind were the racial dimensions of universal health care. It had become apparent, as reporters dug through Census data,", + " that as Republican governors opted out of the federal government\u2019s expansion of Medicaid, blacks and Hispanics would be disproportionately left out because of where they lived. Coates wanted the president to take more targeted action to counter this \u2014 to make the policy acknowledge race and not just class. Obama said that progressives were doing the best they could. At a certain moment, Coates became self-conscious. \u201cThis dispute happens, and all the other journalists are saying, \u2018Oh my God, the two black dudes are fighting.\u2019 \u201d\n\nAs the meeting ended, Obama pulled Coates aside. On his blog, the writer had criticized the president for suggesting, during a speech on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington,", + " that many African-Americans had \u201clost our way\u201d and calling for more personal responsibility. The president told Coates he had been unfair. As he was walking away, Obama turned back and said, \u201cDon\u2019t despair.\u201d\n\nCoates took the long walk back to Union Station and found himself thinking about Baldwin. The warm optimism of the early civil-rights movement (the insistence that the universe has a moral arc, the sense of destiny in the lyrics to \u201cWe Shall Overcome\u201d) echoed in Obama, but Baldwin had not shared \u201call of this sentiment and melodrama; he was just so cold,\u201d said Coates. \u201cBaldwin was saying,", + " \u2018You should be aware that failure is a distinct possibility.\u2019 That was so freeing.\u201d Coates called Christopher Jackson and asked him why no one wrote like Baldwin anymore, and the editor suggested that he try. The book Coates eventually wrote wasn\u2019t exactly that, though it borrowed its form from The Fire Next Time, part of which is addressed to his nephew. But it argued that what the president had called despair was actually the product of experience.\n\nCoates was born in 1975 and grew up in Northwest Baltimore, in a sprawling family infused with black political consciousness. Paul Coates, who had briefly been a Black Panther and became a radical librarian and independent publisher,", + " had seven children with four different women. Ta-Nehisi\u2019s mother, Cheryl, a schoolteacher, was the last. Northwest Baltimore was sharply segregated \u2014 it basically still is \u2014 and so though Coates did not grow up poor, he did grow up in proximity to violence. \u201cTo be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world,\u201d Coates writes in Between the World and Me. \u201cThe nakedness is not an error, nor the import of deviant culture. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of \u00adpolicy.\u201d Coates\u2019s first book, The Beautiful Struggle, published in 2008,", + " was a memoir of growing up in this environment as a spacey, conscious kid, head deep in comic books, Malcolm X\u2019s \u201cThe Ballot or the Bullet\u201d speech on his Walkman. The book did not register widely, but the crime novelist Walter Mosley called Coates \u201cthe young James Joyce of the hip-hop generation.\u201d\n\nIn one way, at least, Coates earned that praise: He could express very deeply the dimensions of fear. He writes of the kids gathered around Mondawmin Mall, across the street from his house, in puffy \u201980s Starter jackets: \u201cI think back on those boys now and all I see is fear,", + " and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered \u2019round their grandfathers.\u201d In this environment, the Black History Month \u00adinvocations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the early civil-rights leaders seemed especially discordant: Nonviolence seemed like an impossible standard. Violence was a product of fear; it was also a tool against it. \u201cMy father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.\u201d\n\nCoates arrived at Howard University in 1993,", + " when he was 17 years old, as Afrocentrism was just beginning to lose strength as an intellectual force, a shift that complicated Coates\u2019s own nationalism, in particular his veneration for Malcolm X. Coates was writing poetry then, and the effort pushed him into a circle of older black writers. They often told him how much more he had to learn. One mentor, the poet Joel Dias-Porter, quit his job and moved into a homeless shelter for two years so that he could spend each day at the Library of Congress, working through an impossibly long list of books he felt compelled to read. Coates developed a similar ritual \u2014 sitting down each morning at the Howard University library and requesting three books at a time,", + " battling with the histories of nationalism and integration in his mind.\n\nThe happiest sections of Coates\u2019s new book are set at Howard: It is where he met his wife and where he found a \u201cbase, even in these modern times, a port in the storm.\u201d In the book he calls Howard \u201cMecca.\u201d Eventually he dropped out to work as a journalist, first at the Washington City Paper and then at some other alt-weeklies, where he usually was assigned to the race beat, to write about black experience, and though this was in some ways diminishing it also gave him an angle on the world. When Coates was 24,", + " he and Matthews had a son, Samori \u2014 whom they named after a West African military leader who routed the French colonists \u2014 and moved to Brooklyn. Coates\u2019s personality, built for West Baltimore, was at times an ungainly fit in his new world: He writes of feeling himself swelling toward physical fights, of being conscious of his race, of not feeling comfortable. They did not have much money. For a while, Coates mainly stayed home with Samori. An essay of his from the period is titled \u201cConfessions of a Black Mr. Mom.\u201d\n\nThe fear that gives life to Between the World and Me is the fear of a parent for his child.", + " Though the book went through many revisions, Coates said he was always sure that he would end it by describing his meeting with a woman named Mabel Jones, whose son, Prince, had been a friend of his at Howard and who was later killed by a police officer who tracked him from Maryland to Virginia in a case of mistaken identity \u2014 he had committed no crime. Mabel Jones was a sharecropper\u2019s daughter who worked to become a radiologist, then sent her children to private schools and made sure to give them things like \u201cjaunts off to Europe.\u201d For Coates, Mabel Jones became not just an emblem of dignity,", + " of \u201call of the odd poise and direction that the great American injury demands of you,\u201d but also a signal of the impossibility of escaping the tragedies of race, even for well-off blacks. Her son was killed, and the police officer who shot him, a black man himself, was allowed to return to the force. Jones\u2019s death so alienated Coates that when he watched 9/11, slightly stoned, on the roof of his Brooklyn building, he recalls that he felt nothing at all. \u201cYou must always remember,\u201d Coates writes to Samori, \u201cthat the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs,", + " the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.\u201d\n\nCoates with his son, Samori, in the summer of 2001. Photo: Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates\n\nCoates has borrowed this language from feminist writing. For him, it contained a basic truth, that indignity is always physical. The vulnerability of African-American bodies has become a main theme of the racial protests over the past year under slogans like \u201cI Can\u2019t Breathe.\u201d \u201cSell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed,\u201d Coates writes. \u201cTurn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed.", + " The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.\u201d\n\nCoates\u2019s first piece for The Atlantic was an essay criticizing Bill Cosby, who was then still an icon, for tearing into black audiences about values and responsibility. Soon, the magazine gave him his own blog. The form (intimate, open-ended, inquiring) suited him, and eventually he took up the personal project that had lapsed once he\u2019d left Howard, a study of history. Reading new books, trading notes with his commenters, Coates sharpened his sense of the historical weight of white supremacy: The Civil War was fought over slavery and nothing else;", + " the American Dream could not be separated from slavery because \u201cslavery was the dream.\u201d At the time, most young journalists were leaning on social science for authority \u2014 history had a human warmth. Coates noticed the good people on the wrong side of history, suggesting that individual virtue was a weak counter\u00adweight to the pathologies of states. Had he been alive and had means, he tweeted, \u201cI would have owned slaves too.\u201d\n\nA community grew in his comments section, but it was a community of a particular type: liberal, wide-eyed, pining for moral authority \u2014 and redemption. \u201cCoates\u2019s creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins,\u201d the left-wing critic Fredrik deBoer sardonically described it.", + " Last week on Twitter, a woman asked Coates about the pronunciation of his first name: \u201cI\u2019m really curious what the etymology is that makes the \u2018hi\u2019 a \u2018hah\u2019 sound?\u201d Coates replied, \u201cIt\u2019s an ancient, arcane dialect which we like to call \u2018hood.\u2019 \u201d One irony of Coates\u2019s war on white innocence is that he has arrayed against it an army of white innocents.\n\nIn the fall of 2012, Coates told his editor at The Atlantic, Scott Stossel, that he wanted to make a case for racial reparations in the magazine. The case was formless then,", + " but over the following months it took shape as an account of the experience of housing discrimination in Chicago and the way government policy deliberately fenced blacks into particular neighborhoods and denied them the benefits that went to whites nearby.\n\nCoates\u2019s hero was a 91-year-old man named Clyde Ross, who had left the segregated Mississippi Delta, where his family had been unable to keep white people from simply taking their possessions, and come north, only to be trapped by redlining and predatory banking into a home loan that he had no hope of repaying. Ross became an activist, but in Coates\u2019s alchemy, he became a symbol of the presence of history,", + " a physical reminder that these crimes did not happen so long ago. The great theme of the piece is plunder (the word appears 14 times) \u2014 of what was taken from African-Americans specifically because they were black and not because they were poor, and specifically because of government policy, and recently. Reparations were morally necessary, Coates argued, because the harm was so tangible. He wrote, \u201cPlunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient.\u201d The essay had a moral consequence too, to refocus the idea of reparations. Coates\u2019s reparations weren\u2019t about the country cleansing itself of original sin. They were restitution to be paid for property that continues to be taken.\n\nThat article appeared two months before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson.", + " Coates\u2019s view of the world was growing starker. \u201cIt\u2019s only in the last 18 months that he\u2019s said he\u2019s a nonbeliever,\u201d said Jelani Cobb, a close friend of Coates\u2019s since Howard and a historian at the University of Connecticut. If you did not believe in the soul, then police killings took on especially high stakes because the body was all you had. Coates said he would not have written Between the World and Me in 2008. His view was less bleak then, less concretized by history. \u201cI have become radicalized,\u201d he said.\n\nCoates\u2019s quarrel isn\u2019t really with Obama,", + " in the end, or with civil-rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. It is instead with the metaphors through which they made a compromise with the country \u2014 Obama as the embodiment of hope and King the embodiment of dreams. These formulations gave white liberals a pass. Coates plays with both these words in his book, reconsidering them, twisting them around. In the very first scene, he disdains white Americans\u2019 \u201creveling in a specious hope\u201d; later, he urges his son to accept \u201cthe preferences of the universe itself,\u201d among them the preference for \u201cstruggle over hope.\u201d The Dream became a controlling metaphor for white innocence.", + " \u201cThat what your ancestors did doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d Coates explained. \u201cThat you went out to the suburbs, and the houses grew from nothing and it\u2019s not contaminated by anything. The idea that you\u2019re entitled to it, and people who don\u2019t have it are either pathological or lower than you. That nothing\u2019s wrong.\u201d\n\nPart of what distinguishes Coates is that he is not interested in uplift. Obama\u2019s insight into his own biography was that it revealed American progress. Coates saw far more stasis running in the background of his own life. When he spoke in Charleston, Obama took his metaphor from \u201cAmazing Grace.\u201d Through God\u2019s grace,", + " the president said, Americans could now see the legacy of brutality that the Confederate flag embodied clearly. Coates\u2019s writing takes an almost opposite position: that religion is blindness, and that if you strip away the talk of hope and dreams and faith and progress, what you see are enduring structures of white supremacy and no great reason to conclude that the future will be better than the past.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s the thing that linked Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,\u201d Coates said. \u201cPeople say Malcolm was a pessimist. He was a pessimist about America. But he was actually very optimistic. Malcolm very much believed in the dream of nationalism. He believed we could do it.", + " And Martin believed in the dream of integration. He believed that black people could be successful if they did x, y, and z.\u201d Coates did not share that optimism: African-Americans are a minority in America, and he sees limits to what they can control. \u201cI suspect they were both wrong. I suspect that it\u2019s not up to us.\u201d\n\nCoates with his son, Samori, in the summer of 2013. Photo: Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates\n\nThe Monday after the president\u2019s eulogy in Charleston, Coates flew to Colorado for the Aspen Ideas Festival. Private jets were scattered over the tarmac,", + " each sleek and bony as a fish skeleton. Aspen is a junket to end all junkets. Tickets cost up to $9,000; there are pop-up planetariums; at sponsor dinners, Atlantic writers sometimes stand up from their tables, forks clinking against glasses, and discourse for three minutes about, say, mass incarceration. The speakers are ideologically promiscuous. The collision of real intellectuals and real money is surreal.\n\nThe Atlantic invited Coates to the festival for the first time in 2008, when he was still a freelancer. He found it disorienting. At The Atlantic\u2019s Publisher\u2019s Dinner, he wound up talking with a very wealthy man who had made his money in department stores,", + " who was telling a story about lending Peter Jennings his yacht. Coates liked him. \u201cHe was talking about how that morning he had gone out and taken his dog up into the mountains and seen a moose. And I was like, \u2018Damn, that\u2019s your life?\u2019 Not in a mad way, I just did not know that this was what people did.\u201d\n\nCoates is more comfortable here now. That afternoon, he was wearing a red T-shirt that said MAKE CORNBREAD NOT WAR, which everyone complimented. He still notices the wealth, but it does not especially faze him; he has a theory about the ideological profile of the attendees (split between Republicans and Democrats,", + " but with very few real conservatives); he knows which barbecue places are actually good and which restaurants will overcharge you. It was sunny and immaculate and the crowd was diverse in a way that made you, or at least me, think warmly about America. Soon Coates would walk toward a shuttle into Aspen for dinner, shortening his steps to keep behind the penguinlike form of Bill Kristol, also waiting for a ride. Coates gestured. \u201cIt would be very easy to come here and then complain about people making me have all these dinners and lunches with sponsors and how I\u2019d much rather be out there standing with the people on 125th and Lenox,\u201d Coates said.", + " \u201cBut truthfully I\u2019m very happy to be here. It\u2019s very nice.\u201d\n\nThe next morning, Coates debated Mitch Landrieu, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, on the sources of American violence. The exchange was moderated by Coates\u2019s friend and colleague Jeffrey Goldberg. The mayor \u2014 shaven-headed, coachlike \u2014 had made crime in black neighborhoods a political focus. It was an issue on which he was accustomed to being the good guy. The search engine Bing had sponsored an app that allowed audience members to rate the speakers in real time. Landrieu said he hoped they liked him. Coates said, a little masochistically,", + " he hoped they hated him.\n\nLandrieu seemed mindful of all the ways a well-meaning white liberal in a situation like this might embarrass himself. He knew all the statistics about the scale of murders in African-American communities and mentioned them; he stated the problem in a way that focused on blacks as victims of violence rather than perpetrators; he told the audience that he had recently personally apologized for slavery; he said the core issue was \u201ca pattern of behavior that has developed amongst young African-American men since 1980.\u201d Coates asked if the change in 1980 wasn\u2019t simply the increased prevalence of handguns. Landrieu said that was part of it.", + " Then he talked about personal responsibility. \u201cIf you knocked me off the chair last week, that\u2019s on you, but if you come back and I\u2019m still on the floor this week, that\u2019s on me.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt is my fault if I knocked you off the chair,\u201d Coates said.\n\n\u201cI didn\u2019t say it wasn\u2019t,\u201d said the mayor.\n\n\u201cNo, it\u2019s never not my fault that I knocked you off the chair.\u201d\n\nLandrieu started to talk about \u201cblack-on-black crime,\u201d then retreated, saying he might be using the wrong words. Coates said the term didn\u2019t offend him: \u201cI think it\u2019s actually inaccurate.\u201d The plain fact,", + " he said, was that when black people killed one another, the victims were their neighbors. They didn\u2019t kill their neighbors because they were black. Inner-city violence, he said, had everything to do with the legacy of structural neglect in the inner city and nothing at all to do with culture. Even from the cheap seats, it was clear that Landrieu was struggling, that there was some turn in the politics of race that he had not fully comprehended, some way in which the old Clintonite phrasings were failing. In their place was a more radical language, of structuralism and supremacy. Now that language has a place in Aspen.\n\nCoates\u2019s book is,", + " he said, \u201coddly conservative\u201d in its sense of the futility of individuals confronting the structure of white supremacy, in its pessimism about what can be changed. Goldberg asked what he would do if he were in Landrieu\u2019s position \u2014 surely there was something, \u201cI don\u2019t know what I\u2019d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I\u2019d do if I was king.\u201d He\u2019d let criminals out of prison, he said. \u201cAnd, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.\u201d Goldberg asked what he meant by \u201cviolent.\u201d \u201cGun crime, too,\u201d Coates said.\n\nThere is a radical-chic crowd assembling around Coates.", + " The oddity is that there is no obvious opposing force. Conservatives have not focused on him; the old anti-structuralist wing of liberalism has faded. In Aspen, even people who actually disagreed with him seemed to want to believe they did not. A woman in a nautical top (\u201cTa-Nehisi, I think you\u2019re the greatest,\u201d she began) asked Coates whether, in addition to structural solutions, black icons ought to do more to condemn crime. She mentioned \u201cOprah, Jay Z, whoever the kids relate to.\u201d Coates patiently brought up the Charleston families forgiving the man who murdered their loved ones. \u201cThere\u2019s no lack of effort on behalf of black people,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cI think black folks are doing just fine.\u201d\n\nLate one evening at Aspen, Coates was in a lounge with some of the conference\u2019s other speakers. Things were a little bit boozy. Melody Barnes, formerly the president\u2019s domestic-policy adviser, sailed by. Goldberg monologued jokes from a couch. Everyone in the room was almost exactly equally famous \u2014 just a little bit famous \u2014 but somehow the evening seemed to hinge on when NPR\u2019s Michele Norris would arrive. A friend of Coates\u2019s was back from a conference-sponsored tour of a marijuana-grow operation, a little high and with product in her backpack. Coates inquired with interest about how she had procured it.", + " The friend said that Coates had it all wrong, that this was Colorado in 2015 and no evasions were required, that all you had to do was go down to the store.\n\nProgress was in the air \u2014 days after the Confederate flag had fallen and gay marriage had been legalized across the country, here we were in a place where you could buy marijuana by walking into a store. The changes seemed to speak to the great question of the late Obama era: Would the half-century-long era of increasing prosperity and expanding human freedom prove to be an aberration or a new, permanent state? To Coates, the long arc of history was simply too strong,", + " too rooted in human nature. From Baldwin\u2019s writing, he had concluded that though struggle was essential, progress was not ordained. If white supremacy were ever eradicated, Coates said, he suspected it would simply be because the country had found \u201ca new peon class,\u201d someone else to kick around.\n\n\u201cChaos is what we have,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is what I believe. If to the end of its existence America harbors white supremacy, I don\u2019t know how remarkable that would be. France has dealt with anti-Semitism since its inception.\u201d America was built by humans, he said. \u201cThese things tend to have flaws.\u201d\n\nWhat a strange,", + " dark, beguiling place America is. It killed Prince Jones. It reveres Ta-Nehisi Coates.\n\nCoates said he would not have written Between the World and Me in 2008.\u201cI have become radicalized.\u201d Photo: Lyle Ashton Harris\n\nCoates is leaving the country. In a few weeks, he\u2019ll move to Paris with his wife and son for a year. Part of the attraction is simple pleasure. Part of it is the intellectual project of viewing state supremacy and race in another place, to discern whether America is truly exceptional or not. Part of it is the welcome exchange of one social mask for another:", + " Because his French is not so smooth yet, he says, he is seen first as American in Paris rather than as black, and this is a relief.\n\nLately Coates has been putting himself through rituals of self-improvement: He has been learning to swim, and he has been learning French \u2014 conjugating verbs, aligning tenses. One Friday morning at the end of June, his instructor at the Berlitz school in Rockefeller Center asked him about the upcoming trip. In French, Coates said, \u201cMy wife tells me that when I am in France I am a different person.\u201d Madame Danielle expressed surprise. \u201cA different person,\u201d he insisted.", + " \u201cVery extroverted. Very nice. Just different.\u201d\n\nParis carries with it reminders of the black intellectuals who moved there before: Richard Wright, and especially Baldwin. \u201cI think my exile saved my life,\u201d Baldwin wrote in Esquire in 1961, \u201cfor it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he\u2019s able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.\u201d To be clear, he added: \u201cWhen I say \u2018vision\u2019 I do not mean \u2018dream.\u2019 \u201d\n\nCoates\u2019s vision is already clear.", + " In the chapter of his book set in Paris, Coates finds himself ruminating on the old Baltimore codes that took him too long to shake. \u201cWhat I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible,\u201d Coates writes to his son, about the allure of Paris. \u201cI wanted you to see different people living by different rules.\u201d Travel is an ordinary, bourgeois desire for one\u2019s children: \u201cI want him to see more than I saw,\u201d Coates said. It is also the instinct of a survivor, who realizes his home is fundamentally inhospitable: to keep an eye on the exits,", + " and to map out the routes of escape.\n\n*This article appears in the July 13, 2015 issue of New York Magazine. ", + " Tweet with a location\n\nYou can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ", + " The Hard\n\nTruths of\n\nTa-Nehisi\n\nCoates After the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hopes of Barack Obama.\n\nPhotographs by Lyle Ashton Harris\n\nLate this spring, the publisher Spiegel & Grau sent out advance copies of a new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a slim volume of 176 pages called Between the World and Me. \u201cHere is what I would like for you to know,\u201d Coates writes in the book, addressed to his 14-year-old son. \u201cIn America, it is traditional to destroy the black body \u2014 it is heritage.\u201d\n\nThe only endorsement he had wanted was the novelist Toni Morrison\u2019s.", + " Neither he nor his editor, Christopher Jackson, knew Morrison, but they managed to get the galleys into her hands. Weeks later, Morrison\u2019s assistant sent Jackson an email with her reaction: \u201cI\u2019ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died,\u201d Morrison had written. \u201cClearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.\u201d Baldwin died 28 years ago. Jackson forwarded the note to Coates, who sent back a one-word email: \u201cMan.\u201d\n\nRelated Stories Ta-Nehisi Coates Unpacks the Way Comics Have Conquered the World\n\nMorrison\u2019s words were an anointing.", + " They were also a weight. On the subject of black America, Baldwin had once been a compass \u2014 \u201cJimmy\u2019s spirit,\u201d the poet Amiri Baraka had said, eulogizing him, \u201cis the only truth which keeps us sane.\u201d On the last Friday in June, the day after Morrison\u2019s endorsement was made public and then washed over Twitter, Coates sat down with me at a Morningside Heights bar and after some consideration ordered an IPA. At six-foot-four, he towers over nearly everyone he meets, and to close the physical distance he tends to turtle his neck down, making himself smaller: \u201cA public persona but not a public person,\u201d explained his father,", + " Paul Coates. Ta-Nehisi said he thought \u00adMorrison\u2019s praise was essentially literary, about the echo of Baldwin\u2019s direct and exhortative prose in his own. The week before, The New \u00adYorker\u2019s David Remnick had called the forthcoming book \u201cextraordinary,\u201d and A. O. Scott of the New York Times would soon go further, calling it \u201cessential, like water or air.\u201d The figure of the lonely radical writer is a common one. A writer who radicalizes the Establishment is more rare. \u201cWhen people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I\u2019m always surprised,\u201d Coates said.", + " \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s my low expectations for white people or what.\u201d\n\nIt had been nine days since the young white supremacist Dylann Roof had massacred nine black churchgoers in Charleston, and Coates, whose great theme is the intractability of racial history, had helped to orient the debate, to concentrate attention on the campaign against the Confederate flag: Even casual tweets he sent out were retweeted hundreds of times. The television behind the bar was tuned to President Obama\u2019s eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, which was just about to start. The broadcast was muted, but Coates noticed the tableau:", + " \u201cThere\u2019s a sister over here to the left, she\u2019s natural, no perm, and a very black dude, and then an African-American president.\u201d Coates imagined how this would appear to a 4-year-old white boy: \u201cThat\u2019s the world as he knows it,\u201d Coates said. \u201cSo all these people saying that symbols don\u2019t mean anything \u2014 that\u2019s bullshit. They mean a lot.\u201d Coates has often been a critic of the president from the left \u2014 of his instinct to submerge race in talk of class, of his moralizing to black audiences. \u201cI\u2019m going to make a prediction,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cHe\u2019s going to say something incredible.\u201d\n\nWhen Obama began his first campaign for the presidency, Coates was all but anonymous, a journalist in his early 30s who had worked mostly at alt-weeklies and mostly for short stints. But in 2008, he was hired by The Atlantic \u2014 to write longer pieces, then to blog \u2014 and eventually his commentary formed a counterpoint to the White House line. Against the optimism of the Obama ascendancy, Coates offered a bleaker view: that no postracial era was imminent, that white supremacy has been a condition of the United States since its inception and that it might always be.", + " \u201c \u2018White America\u2019 is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies,\u201d Coates writes to his son. While the president talked about the velocity of our escape from history, Coates insisted that the country was still stuck in its vise. Last year, he wrote an Atlantic cover story titled \u201cThe Case for Reparations,\u201d probably the most discussed magazine piece of the Obama era, which detailed the persistence of structural racism \u2014 racism by government policy \u2014 into the present day. When Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and then Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Walter Scott in South Carolina,", + " it was Coates who seemed to most adeptly digest the central paradox of the time: how, within an increasingly progressive era, a country led by a black president could still act with such racial brutality. In late December, when Funny or Die published a fake text-message chain between the president and his daughters, it had its fictional, radicalized Malia Obama coolly insisting, \u201cI wish Ta-Nehisi Coates was my dad.\u201d\n\nThe sudden shift after the massacre, in which southern politicians turned against the Confederate flag, filled Coates with both awe and perplexity. \u201cI mean, I tweeted this out, but I didn\u2019t expect it to happen:", + " \u2018You talk about how this makes you feel. Then take down the damn flag,\u2019 \u201d Coates said. \u201cAnd hell, they did it! It turns out that was actually what was in motion.\u201d He shook his head. \u201cShit!\u201d\n\nThat Sunday, the Times would give Coates a small role in focusing attention on the flag. More essential, the paper reported, were the public gestures of forgiveness that family members of the victims had offered to Roof. \u201cI will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you,\u201d the daughter of a slain 70-year-old woman told her mother\u2019s murderer at his hearing.", + " These gestures had moved conservative Christians in a very religious state. Coates believes in the power of social structures, not in the politics of emotion. The consensus account \u2014 in which Strom Thurmond\u2019s son State Senator Paul Thurmond looked into the eyes of black fellow citizens at a church service after the massacre and decided that he could no longer defend the flag \u2014 reeked of myth. Even the public forgiving, so soon after the slaughter, seemed unreal. \u201cIs that real?\u201d Coates said, watching the service. \u201cI question the realness of that.\u201d\n\nCoates is not a Christian. The heavy force in Between the World and Me \u2014 what makes it both unique and bleak \u2014 is his atheism.", + " It gives Coates\u2019s writing urgency. To consider the African-American experience without the language of souls and destiny is to strip it of euphemism, and to make the security of African-American bodies even more crucial. It also isolates him from the main black political tradition. \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world \u2014 about whose side God is on,\u201d he said. \u201cWell, I didn\u2019t have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.\u201d\n\nCoates was still wondering about the Charleston family members, Christians forgiving. He splayed his fingers over his brow and covered his eyes, so that as he talked he could not see.", + " \u201cIs it aspirational?\u201d he wondered. \u201cLike, I say, \u2018I forgive you\u2019 because I think I\u2019m supposed to?\u201d\n\nOn the mute television, something was happening. The ministers were standing up and smiling. To their left, the first African-American president of the United States had lifted his head. He was singing \u201cAmazing Grace.\u201d\n\nCoates with his father on their Park Heights stoop. Photo: Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates\n\nThe first time Coates met the president, at an off-the-record White House conversation with liberal opinion writers in 2013, he left disappointed in himself. \u201cEveryone was too deferential,", + " and I was too deferential, too,\u201d he said. The second time, a few months later, he was determined to do better. Coates had been reading Baldwin\u2019s 1963 book, The Fire Next Time, and as he left his home in Harlem for the train station, his wife, Kenyatta Matthews, said to him, \u201cWhat would Baldwin do?\u201d On the train to D.C., Coates thought about the off-the-record 1963 meeting that Baldwin had brokered between Robert Kennedy and leading black activists, at which Kennedy felt the full force of black anger. (\u201cThey seemed possessed,\u201d Kennedy would later say.) Coates arrived at the White House late and,", + " because he had not prepared for rain, wet. He was not wearing a suit but a blazer and jeans. The president was going around the room answering questions on a wide range of topics, handling each expertly, in Coates\u2019s view.\n\n\u201cAnd the race aspect is not gone from this,\u201d Coates said. \u201cTo see a black dude in a room of the smartest white people and just be the smartest dude in the room \u2014 it just puts into context all the stuff about \u2018Let me see his grades.\u2019 \u201d\n\nOccupying Coates\u2019s mind were the racial dimensions of universal health care. It had become apparent, as reporters dug through Census data,", + " that as Republican governors opted out of the federal government\u2019s expansion of Medicaid, blacks and Hispanics would be disproportionately left out because of where they lived. Coates wanted the president to take more targeted action to counter this \u2014 to make the policy acknowledge race and not just class. Obama said that progressives were doing the best they could. At a certain moment, Coates became self-conscious. \u201cThis dispute happens, and all the other journalists are saying, \u2018Oh my God, the two black dudes are fighting.\u2019 \u201d\n\nAs the meeting ended, Obama pulled Coates aside. On his blog, the writer had criticized the president for suggesting, during a speech on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington,", + " that many African-Americans had \u201clost our way\u201d and calling for more personal responsibility. The president told Coates he had been unfair. As he was walking away, Obama turned back and said, \u201cDon\u2019t despair.\u201d\n\nCoates took the long walk back to Union Station and found himself thinking about Baldwin. The warm optimism of the early civil-rights movement (the insistence that the universe has a moral arc, the sense of destiny in the lyrics to \u201cWe Shall Overcome\u201d) echoed in Obama, but Baldwin had not shared \u201call of this sentiment and melodrama; he was just so cold,\u201d said Coates. \u201cBaldwin was saying,", + " \u2018You should be aware that failure is a distinct possibility.\u2019 That was so freeing.\u201d Coates called Christopher Jackson and asked him why no one wrote like Baldwin anymore, and the editor suggested that he try. The book Coates eventually wrote wasn\u2019t exactly that, though it borrowed its form from The Fire Next Time, part of which is addressed to his nephew. But it argued that what the president had called despair was actually the product of experience.\n\nCoates was born in 1975 and grew up in Northwest Baltimore, in a sprawling family infused with black political consciousness. Paul Coates, who had briefly been a Black Panther and became a radical librarian and independent publisher,", + " had seven children with four different women. Ta-Nehisi\u2019s mother, Cheryl, a schoolteacher, was the last. Northwest Baltimore was sharply segregated \u2014 it basically still is \u2014 and so though Coates did not grow up poor, he did grow up in proximity to violence. \u201cTo be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world,\u201d Coates writes in Between the World and Me. \u201cThe nakedness is not an error, nor the import of deviant culture. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of \u00adpolicy.\u201d Coates\u2019s first book, The Beautiful Struggle, published in 2008,", + " was a memoir of growing up in this environment as a spacey, conscious kid, head deep in comic books, Malcolm X\u2019s \u201cThe Ballot or the Bullet\u201d speech on his Walkman. The book did not register widely, but the crime novelist Walter Mosley called Coates \u201cthe young James Joyce of the hip-hop generation.\u201d\n\nIn one way, at least, Coates earned that praise: He could express very deeply the dimensions of fear. He writes of the kids gathered around Mondawmin Mall, across the street from his house, in puffy \u201980s Starter jackets: \u201cI think back on those boys now and all I see is fear,", + " and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered \u2019round their grandfathers.\u201d In this environment, the Black History Month \u00adinvocations of Martin Luther King Jr. and the early civil-rights leaders seemed especially discordant: Nonviolence seemed like an impossible standard. Violence was a product of fear; it was also a tool against it. \u201cMy father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.\u201d\n\nCoates arrived at Howard University in 1993,", + " when he was 17 years old, as Afrocentrism was just beginning to lose strength as an intellectual force, a shift that complicated Coates\u2019s own nationalism, in particular his veneration for Malcolm X. Coates was writing poetry then, and the effort pushed him into a circle of older black writers. They often told him how much more he had to learn. One mentor, the poet Joel Dias-Porter, quit his job and moved into a homeless shelter for two years so that he could spend each day at the Library of Congress, working through an impossibly long list of books he felt compelled to read. Coates developed a similar ritual \u2014 sitting down each morning at the Howard University library and requesting three books at a time,", + " battling with the histories of nationalism and integration in his mind.\n\nThe happiest sections of Coates\u2019s new book are set at Howard: It is where he met his wife and where he found a \u201cbase, even in these modern times, a port in the storm.\u201d In the book he calls Howard \u201cMecca.\u201d Eventually he dropped out to work as a journalist, first at the Washington City Paper and then at some other alt-weeklies, where he usually was assigned to the race beat, to write about black experience, and though this was in some ways diminishing it also gave him an angle on the world. When Coates was 24,", + " he and Matthews had a son, Samori \u2014 whom they named after a West African military leader who routed the French colonists \u2014 and moved to Brooklyn. Coates\u2019s personality, built for West Baltimore, was at times an ungainly fit in his new world: He writes of feeling himself swelling toward physical fights, of being conscious of his race, of not feeling comfortable. They did not have much money. For a while, Coates mainly stayed home with Samori. An essay of his from the period is titled \u201cConfessions of a Black Mr. Mom.\u201d\n\nThe fear that gives life to Between the World and Me is the fear of a parent for his child.", + " Though the book went through many revisions, Coates said he was always sure that he would end it by describing his meeting with a woman named Mabel Jones, whose son, Prince, had been a friend of his at Howard and who was later killed by a police officer who tracked him from Maryland to Virginia in a case of mistaken identity \u2014 he had committed no crime. Mabel Jones was a sharecropper\u2019s daughter who worked to become a radiologist, then sent her children to private schools and made sure to give them things like \u201cjaunts off to Europe.\u201d For Coates, Mabel Jones became not just an emblem of dignity,", + " of \u201call of the odd poise and direction that the great American injury demands of you,\u201d but also a signal of the impossibility of escaping the tragedies of race, even for well-off blacks. Her son was killed, and the police officer who shot him, a black man himself, was allowed to return to the force. Jones\u2019s death so alienated Coates that when he watched 9/11, slightly stoned, on the roof of his Brooklyn building, he recalls that he felt nothing at all. \u201cYou must always remember,\u201d Coates writes to Samori, \u201cthat the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs,", + " the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.\u201d\n\nCoates with his son, Samori, in the summer of 2001. Photo: Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates\n\nCoates has borrowed this language from feminist writing. For him, it contained a basic truth, that indignity is always physical. The vulnerability of African-American bodies has become a main theme of the racial protests over the past year under slogans like \u201cI Can\u2019t Breathe.\u201d \u201cSell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed,\u201d Coates writes. \u201cTurn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed.", + " The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.\u201d\n\nCoates\u2019s first piece for The Atlantic was an essay criticizing Bill Cosby, who was then still an icon, for tearing into black audiences about values and responsibility. Soon, the magazine gave him his own blog. The form (intimate, open-ended, inquiring) suited him, and eventually he took up the personal project that had lapsed once he\u2019d left Howard, a study of history. Reading new books, trading notes with his commenters, Coates sharpened his sense of the historical weight of white supremacy: The Civil War was fought over slavery and nothing else;", + " the American Dream could not be separated from slavery because \u201cslavery was the dream.\u201d At the time, most young journalists were leaning on social science for authority \u2014 history had a human warmth. Coates noticed the good people on the wrong side of history, suggesting that individual virtue was a weak counter\u00adweight to the pathologies of states. Had he been alive and had means, he tweeted, \u201cI would have owned slaves too.\u201d\n\nA community grew in his comments section, but it was a community of a particular type: liberal, wide-eyed, pining for moral authority \u2014 and redemption. \u201cCoates\u2019s creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins,\u201d the left-wing critic Fredrik deBoer sardonically described it.", + " Last week on Twitter, a woman asked Coates about the pronunciation of his first name: \u201cI\u2019m really curious what the etymology is that makes the \u2018hi\u2019 a \u2018hah\u2019 sound?\u201d Coates replied, \u201cIt\u2019s an ancient, arcane dialect which we like to call \u2018hood.\u2019 \u201d One irony of Coates\u2019s war on white innocence is that he has arrayed against it an army of white innocents.\n\nIn the fall of 2012, Coates told his editor at The Atlantic, Scott Stossel, that he wanted to make a case for racial reparations in the magazine. The case was formless then,", + " but over the following months it took shape as an account of the experience of housing discrimination in Chicago and the way government policy deliberately fenced blacks into particular neighborhoods and denied them the benefits that went to whites nearby.\n\nCoates\u2019s hero was a 91-year-old man named Clyde Ross, who had left the segregated Mississippi Delta, where his family had been unable to keep white people from simply taking their possessions, and come north, only to be trapped by redlining and predatory banking into a home loan that he had no hope of repaying. Ross became an activist, but in Coates\u2019s alchemy, he became a symbol of the presence of history,", + " a physical reminder that these crimes did not happen so long ago. The great theme of the piece is plunder (the word appears 14 times) \u2014 of what was taken from African-Americans specifically because they were black and not because they were poor, and specifically because of government policy, and recently. Reparations were morally necessary, Coates argued, because the harm was so tangible. He wrote, \u201cPlunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient.\u201d The essay had a moral consequence too, to refocus the idea of reparations. Coates\u2019s reparations weren\u2019t about the country cleansing itself of original sin. They were restitution to be paid for property that continues to be taken.\n\nThat article appeared two months before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson.", + " Coates\u2019s view of the world was growing starker. \u201cIt\u2019s only in the last 18 months that he\u2019s said he\u2019s a nonbeliever,\u201d said Jelani Cobb, a close friend of Coates\u2019s since Howard and a historian at the University of Connecticut. If you did not believe in the soul, then police killings took on especially high stakes because the body was all you had. Coates said he would not have written Between the World and Me in 2008. His view was less bleak then, less concretized by history. \u201cI have become radicalized,\u201d he said.\n\nCoates\u2019s quarrel isn\u2019t really with Obama,", + " in the end, or with civil-rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. It is instead with the metaphors through which they made a compromise with the country \u2014 Obama as the embodiment of hope and King the embodiment of dreams. These formulations gave white liberals a pass. Coates plays with both these words in his book, reconsidering them, twisting them around. In the very first scene, he disdains white Americans\u2019 \u201creveling in a specious hope\u201d; later, he urges his son to accept \u201cthe preferences of the universe itself,\u201d among them the preference for \u201cstruggle over hope.\u201d The Dream became a controlling metaphor for white innocence.", + " \u201cThat what your ancestors did doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d Coates explained. \u201cThat you went out to the suburbs, and the houses grew from nothing and it\u2019s not contaminated by anything. The idea that you\u2019re entitled to it, and people who don\u2019t have it are either pathological or lower than you. That nothing\u2019s wrong.\u201d\n\nPart of what distinguishes Coates is that he is not interested in uplift. Obama\u2019s insight into his own biography was that it revealed American progress. Coates saw far more stasis running in the background of his own life. When he spoke in Charleston, Obama took his metaphor from \u201cAmazing Grace.\u201d Through God\u2019s grace,", + " the president said, Americans could now see the legacy of brutality that the Confederate flag embodied clearly. Coates\u2019s writing takes an almost opposite position: that religion is blindness, and that if you strip away the talk of hope and dreams and faith and progress, what you see are enduring structures of white supremacy and no great reason to conclude that the future will be better than the past.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s the thing that linked Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,\u201d Coates said. \u201cPeople say Malcolm was a pessimist. He was a pessimist about America. But he was actually very optimistic. Malcolm very much believed in the dream of nationalism. He believed we could do it.", + " And Martin believed in the dream of integration. He believed that black people could be successful if they did x, y, and z.\u201d Coates did not share that optimism: African-Americans are a minority in America, and he sees limits to what they can control. \u201cI suspect they were both wrong. I suspect that it\u2019s not up to us.\u201d\n\nCoates with his son, Samori, in the summer of 2013. Photo: Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates\n\nThe Monday after the president\u2019s eulogy in Charleston, Coates flew to Colorado for the Aspen Ideas Festival. Private jets were scattered over the tarmac,", + " each sleek and bony as a fish skeleton. Aspen is a junket to end all junkets. Tickets cost up to $9,000; there are pop-up planetariums; at sponsor dinners, Atlantic writers sometimes stand up from their tables, forks clinking against glasses, and discourse for three minutes about, say, mass incarceration. The speakers are ideologically promiscuous. The collision of real intellectuals and real money is surreal.\n\nThe Atlantic invited Coates to the festival for the first time in 2008, when he was still a freelancer. He found it disorienting. At The Atlantic\u2019s Publisher\u2019s Dinner, he wound up talking with a very wealthy man who had made his money in department stores,", + " who was telling a story about lending Peter Jennings his yacht. Coates liked him. \u201cHe was talking about how that morning he had gone out and taken his dog up into the mountains and seen a moose. And I was like, \u2018Damn, that\u2019s your life?\u2019 Not in a mad way, I just did not know that this was what people did.\u201d\n\nCoates is more comfortable here now. That afternoon, he was wearing a red T-shirt that said MAKE CORNBREAD NOT WAR, which everyone complimented. He still notices the wealth, but it does not especially faze him; he has a theory about the ideological profile of the attendees (split between Republicans and Democrats,", + " but with very few real conservatives); he knows which barbecue places are actually good and which restaurants will overcharge you. It was sunny and immaculate and the crowd was diverse in a way that made you, or at least me, think warmly about America. Soon Coates would walk toward a shuttle into Aspen for dinner, shortening his steps to keep behind the penguinlike form of Bill Kristol, also waiting for a ride. Coates gestured. \u201cIt would be very easy to come here and then complain about people making me have all these dinners and lunches with sponsors and how I\u2019d much rather be out there standing with the people on 125th and Lenox,\u201d Coates said.", + " \u201cBut truthfully I\u2019m very happy to be here. It\u2019s very nice.\u201d\n\nThe next morning, Coates debated Mitch Landrieu, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, on the sources of American violence. The exchange was moderated by Coates\u2019s friend and colleague Jeffrey Goldberg. The mayor \u2014 shaven-headed, coachlike \u2014 had made crime in black neighborhoods a political focus. It was an issue on which he was accustomed to being the good guy. The search engine Bing had sponsored an app that allowed audience members to rate the speakers in real time. Landrieu said he hoped they liked him. Coates said, a little masochistically,", + " he hoped they hated him.\n\nLandrieu seemed mindful of all the ways a well-meaning white liberal in a situation like this might embarrass himself. He knew all the statistics about the scale of murders in African-American communities and mentioned them; he stated the problem in a way that focused on blacks as victims of violence rather than perpetrators; he told the audience that he had recently personally apologized for slavery; he said the core issue was \u201ca pattern of behavior that has developed amongst young African-American men since 1980.\u201d Coates asked if the change in 1980 wasn\u2019t simply the increased prevalence of handguns. Landrieu said that was part of it.", + " Then he talked about personal responsibility. \u201cIf you knocked me off the chair last week, that\u2019s on you, but if you come back and I\u2019m still on the floor this week, that\u2019s on me.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt is my fault if I knocked you off the chair,\u201d Coates said.\n\n\u201cI didn\u2019t say it wasn\u2019t,\u201d said the mayor.\n\n\u201cNo, it\u2019s never not my fault that I knocked you off the chair.\u201d\n\nLandrieu started to talk about \u201cblack-on-black crime,\u201d then retreated, saying he might be using the wrong words. Coates said the term didn\u2019t offend him: \u201cI think it\u2019s actually inaccurate.\u201d The plain fact,", + " he said, was that when black people killed one another, the victims were their neighbors. They didn\u2019t kill their neighbors because they were black. Inner-city violence, he said, had everything to do with the legacy of structural neglect in the inner city and nothing at all to do with culture. Even from the cheap seats, it was clear that Landrieu was struggling, that there was some turn in the politics of race that he had not fully comprehended, some way in which the old Clintonite phrasings were failing. In their place was a more radical language, of structuralism and supremacy. Now that language has a place in Aspen.\n\nCoates\u2019s book is,", + " he said, \u201coddly conservative\u201d in its sense of the futility of individuals confronting the structure of white supremacy, in its pessimism about what can be changed. Goldberg asked what he would do if he were in Landrieu\u2019s position \u2014 surely there was something, \u201cI don\u2019t know what I\u2019d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I\u2019d do if I was king.\u201d He\u2019d let criminals out of prison, he said. \u201cAnd, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.\u201d Goldberg asked what he meant by \u201cviolent.\u201d \u201cGun crime, too,\u201d Coates said.\n\nThere is a radical-chic crowd assembling around Coates.", + " The oddity is that there is no obvious opposing force. Conservatives have not focused on him; the old anti-structuralist wing of liberalism has faded. In Aspen, even people who actually disagreed with him seemed to want to believe they did not. A woman in a nautical top (\u201cTa-Nehisi, I think you\u2019re the greatest,\u201d she began) asked Coates whether, in addition to structural solutions, black icons ought to do more to condemn crime. She mentioned \u201cOprah, Jay Z, whoever the kids relate to.\u201d Coates patiently brought up the Charleston families forgiving the man who murdered their loved ones. \u201cThere\u2019s no lack of effort on behalf of black people,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cI think black folks are doing just fine.\u201d\n\nLate one evening at Aspen, Coates was in a lounge with some of the conference\u2019s other speakers. Things were a little bit boozy. Melody Barnes, formerly the president\u2019s domestic-policy adviser, sailed by. Goldberg monologued jokes from a couch. Everyone in the room was almost exactly equally famous \u2014 just a little bit famous \u2014 but somehow the evening seemed to hinge on when NPR\u2019s Michele Norris would arrive. A friend of Coates\u2019s was back from a conference-sponsored tour of a marijuana-grow operation, a little high and with product in her backpack. Coates inquired with interest about how she had procured it.", + " The friend said that Coates had it all wrong, that this was Colorado in 2015 and no evasions were required, that all you had to do was go down to the store.\n\nProgress was in the air \u2014 days after the Confederate flag had fallen and gay marriage had been legalized across the country, here we were in a place where you could buy marijuana by walking into a store. The changes seemed to speak to the great question of the late Obama era: Would the half-century-long era of increasing prosperity and expanding human freedom prove to be an aberration or a new, permanent state? To Coates, the long arc of history was simply too strong,", + " too rooted in human nature. From Baldwin\u2019s writing, he had concluded that though struggle was essential, progress was not ordained. If white supremacy were ever eradicated, Coates said, he suspected it would simply be because the country had found \u201ca new peon class,\u201d someone else to kick around.\n\n\u201cChaos is what we have,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is what I believe. If to the end of its existence America harbors white supremacy, I don\u2019t know how remarkable that would be. France has dealt with anti-Semitism since its inception.\u201d America was built by humans, he said. \u201cThese things tend to have flaws.\u201d\n\nWhat a strange,", + " dark, beguiling place America is. It killed Prince Jones. It reveres Ta-Nehisi Coates.\n\nCoates said he would not have written Between the World and Me in 2008.\u201cI have become radicalized.\u201d Photo: Lyle Ashton Harris\n\nCoates is leaving the country. In a few weeks, he\u2019ll move to Paris with his wife and son for a year. Part of the attraction is simple pleasure. Part of it is the intellectual project of viewing state supremacy and race in another place, to discern whether America is truly exceptional or not. Part of it is the welcome exchange of one social mask for another:", + " Because his French is not so smooth yet, he says, he is seen first as American in Paris rather than as black, and this is a relief.\n\nLately Coates has been putting himself through rituals of self-improvement: He has been learning to swim, and he has been learning French \u2014 conjugating verbs, aligning tenses. One Friday morning at the end of June, his instructor at the Berlitz school in Rockefeller Center asked him about the upcoming trip. In French, Coates said, \u201cMy wife tells me that when I am in France I am a different person.\u201d Madame Danielle expressed surprise. \u201cA different person,\u201d he insisted.", + " \u201cVery extroverted. Very nice. Just different.\u201d\n\nParis carries with it reminders of the black intellectuals who moved there before: Richard Wright, and especially Baldwin. \u201cI think my exile saved my life,\u201d Baldwin wrote in Esquire in 1961, \u201cfor it inexorably confirmed something which Americans appear to have great difficulty accepting. Which is, simply, this: a man is not a man until he\u2019s able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.\u201d To be clear, he added: \u201cWhen I say \u2018vision\u2019 I do not mean \u2018dream.\u2019 \u201d\n\nCoates\u2019s vision is already clear.", + " In the chapter of his book set in Paris, Coates finds himself ruminating on the old Baltimore codes that took him too long to shake. \u201cWhat I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible,\u201d Coates writes to his son, about the allure of Paris. \u201cI wanted you to see different people living by different rules.\u201d Travel is an ordinary, bourgeois desire for one\u2019s children: \u201cI want him to see more than I saw,\u201d Coates said. It is also the instinct of a survivor, who realizes his home is fundamentally inhospitable: to keep an eye on the exits,", + " and to map out the routes of escape.\n\n*This article appears in the July 13, 2015 issue of New York Magazine. ", + " And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. \u2014James Baldwin Son, Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the Far West Side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.", + " The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America\u2019s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history. This article is adapted from Coates\u2019s forthcoming book.", + " There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon. Democracy is a forgiving God and America\u2019s heresies\u2014torture, theft, enslavement\u2014are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure \u201cthat government of the people,", + " by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,\u201d he was not merely being aspirational. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant \u201cgovernment of the people\u201d but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term people to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice-", + "cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land. That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of a 12-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about \u201chope.\u201d And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while.", + " It was a calm late-November day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations,", + " and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you. This is your country, this is your world, this is your body,", + " and you must find some way to live within the all of it. That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, \u201cI\u2019ve got to go,\u201d and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn\u2019t hug you,", + " and I didn\u2019t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I write you in your 15th year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help,", + " that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed.", + " The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. Responses to Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me\n\nRead More There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing\u2014race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy\u2014serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains,", + " blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life. I have sought the answer through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth,", + " in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.\n\nEduardo Munoz / Reuters\n\nAnd yet I am still afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me.", + " The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered \u2019round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched,", + " then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.\n\nI felt the fear in the visits to my Nana\u2019s home in Philadelphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father\u2019s father was dead and that my Uncle Oscar was dead and that my Uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural.", + " And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around.", + " And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear. When I was 6, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done\u2014he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad\u2019s voice\u2014\u201cEither I can beat him, or the police.\u201d Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn\u2019t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire,", + " and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age.\n\nTo be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now,", + " in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can protect you only with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or succeeded at something much darker. I remember being 11 years old, standing out in the parking lot in front of the 7-Eleven, watching a crew of older boys standing near the street. I stood there, marveling at the older boys\u2019 beautiful sense of fashion.", + " They all wore ski jackets, the kind that mothers put on layaway in September, then piled up overtime hours so as to have the thing wrapped and ready for Christmas. A light-skinned boy with a long head and small eyes was scowling at another boy, who was standing close to me. It was just before three in the afternoon. I was in sixth grade. School had just let out, and it was not yet the fighting weather of early spring. What was the exact problem here? Who could know? The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a gun. I recall it in the slowest motion,", + " as though in a dream. There the boy stood, with the gun brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then untucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging rage that could, in an instant, erase my body. That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children\u2014fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not understand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body in his small hands.", + " Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets. I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television in my living room.", + " In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice-cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and endless lawns. Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr.", + " Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.\n\nAdrees Latif / Reuters\n\nBefore I could escape,", + " I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with whom I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled,", + " whom or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not\u2014all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.\n\nThe culture of the streets was essential\u2014there was no alternative. I could not retreat into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before their God. \u201cThe meek shall inherit the earth\u201d meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction,", + " bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box. That was the message of the small-eyed boy, untucking the piece\u2014a child bearing the power to body and banish other children to memory. Fear ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the world out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed into our television sets. Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the civil-rights movement.", + " Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, \u201cYeah, nigger, what\u2019s up now?\u201d I judged them against the country I knew,", + " which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?\n\nSome things were clear to me: The violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of the streets were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical,", + " but was of a piece and by design. But what exactly was the design? And why? I must know. I must get out... but into what? I saw the design in those in the boys on the corner, in \u201cthe babies having babies.\u201d The design explained everything, from our cracked-out fathers to HIV to the bleached skin of Michael Jackson. I felt this but I could not explain it. This was two years before the Million Man March. Almost every day I played Ice Cube\u2019s album Death Certificate: \u201cLet me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black nation.\u201d I was haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Malcolm.", + " I was haunted because I believed that we had left ourselves back there, and now in the crack era all we had was a great fear. Perhaps I must go back. That was what I heard in the rapper\u2019s call to \u201ckeep it real.\u201d Perhaps we should return to ourselves, to our own primordial streets, to our own ruggedness, to our own rude hair. Perhaps we should return to Mecca. My only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University. This Mecca, My Mecca\u2014The Mecca\u2014is a machine, crafted to capture and concentrate the dark energy of all African peoples and inject it directly into the student body.", + " The Mecca derives its power from the heritage of Howard University, which in Jim Crow days enjoyed a near-monopoly on black talent. And whereas most other historically black schools were scattered like forts in the great wilderness of the old Confederacy, Howard was in Washington, D.C.\u2014Chocolate City\u2014and thus in proximity to both federal power and black power. I first witnessed this power out on the Yard, that communal green space in the center of the campus where the students gathered and I saw everything I knew of my black self multiplied out into seemingly endless variations. There were the scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business suits giving dap to bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers and tan Timbs.", + " There were the high-yellow progeny of A.M.E. preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set. There were California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long skirt. There were Ponzi schemers and Christian cultists, Tabernacle fanatics and mathematical geniuses. It was like listening to a hundred different renditions of \u201cRedemption Song,\u201d each in a different color and key. And overlaying all of this was the history of Howard itself. I knew that I was literally walking in the footsteps of all the Toni Morrisons and Zora Neale Hurstons, of all the Sterling Browns and Kenneth Clarks,", + " who\u2019d come before.\n\nThe Mecca\u2014the vastness of black people across space-time\u2014could be experienced in a 20-minute walk across campus. I saw this vastness in the students chopping it up in front of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall, where Muhammad Ali had addressed their fathers and mothers in defiance of the Vietnam War. I saw its epic sweep in the students next to Ira Aldridge Theater, where Donny Hathaway had once sung, where Donald Byrd had once assembled his flock. The students came out with their saxophones, trumpets, and drums, played \u201cMy Favorite Things\u201d or \u201cSomeday My Prince Will Come.\u201d Some of the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain Locke Hall,", + " in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, clapping, stepping. Some of them came up from Tubman Quadrangle with their roommates and rope for double Dutch. Some of them came down from Drew Hall, with their caps cocked and their backpacks slung through one arm, then fell into gorgeous ciphers of beatbox and rhyme. Some of the girls sat by the flagpole with bell hooks and Sonia Sanchez in their straw totes. Some of the boys, with their new Yoruba names, beseeched these girls by citing Frantz Fanon. Some of them studied Russian. Some of them worked in bone labs.", + " They were Panamanian. They were Bajan. And some of them were from places I had never heard of. But all of them were hot and incredible, exotic even, though we hailed from the same tribe.\n\nEric Thayer / Reuters\n\nNow, the heirs of slaveholders could never directly acknowledge our beauty or reckon with its power. And so the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, on television shows, or in the textbooks I\u2019d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house.", + " They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental \u201cfirsts\u201d\u2014first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor\u2014always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can\u2019t remember where I read it, or when\u2014only that I was already at Howard. \u201cWho is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,\u201d Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was \u201cwhite,\u201d I understood him to say,", + " and so Tolstoy \u201cmattered,\u201d like everything else that was white \u201cmattered.\u201d And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?\n\nAnd so I came to Howard toting a new and different history,", + " myth really, which inverted all the stories of the people who believed themselves to be white. I majored in history with all the motives of a man looking to fill a trophy case. They had heroes, so we must have heroes too. But my history professors thought nothing of telling me that my search for myth was doomed, that the stories I wanted to tell myself could not be matched to truths. Indeed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weaponized history. Their method was rough and direct. Did black skin really convey nobility? Always? Yes. What about the blacks who\u2019d practiced slavery for millennia and sold slaves across the Sahara and then across the sea?", + " Victims of a trick. Would those be the same black kings who birthed all of civilization? Were they then both deposed masters of the galaxy and gullible puppets all at once? And what did I mean by \u201cblack\u201d? You know, black. Did I think this a timeless category stretching into the deep past? Yes? Could it be supposed that simply because color was important to me, it had always been so? This heap of realizations was a weight. I found them physically painful and exhausting. True, I was coming to enjoy the dizziness, the vertigo that must come with any odyssey. But in those early moments,", + " the unceasing contradictions sent me into a gloom. There was nothing holy or particular in my skin; I was black because of history and heritage. There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. Black blood wasn\u2019t black; black skin wasn\u2019t even black. And now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again\u2014fear that \u201cthey,\u201d the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.", + " They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. But not all of us. It must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow\u2019s quip. \u201cTolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,\u201d wrote Wiley. \u201cUnless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.\u201d And there it was. I had accepted Bellow\u2019s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be,", + " not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else\u2019s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.\n\nAnd still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe\u2014on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party. I remember those days like an OutKast song,", + " painted in lust and joy. The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. \u201cWhite America\u201d is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, \u201cwhite people\u201d would cease to exist for want of reasons. There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes,", + " as there have been for all of history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been \u201cblack,\u201d and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.\n\nAnd what did that mean for the Dreamers I\u2019d seen as a child?", + " Could I ever want to get into the world they made? No. I was born among a people, Samori, and in that realization I knew that I was out of something. It was the psychosis of questioning myself, of constantly wondering if I could measure up. But the whole theory was wrong, their whole notion of race was wrong. And apprehending that, I felt my first measure of freedom. This realization was important but intellectual. It could not save my body. Indeed, it made me understand what the loss of all our black bodies really meant. No one of us were \u201cblack people.\u201d We were individuals, a one of one,", + " and when we died there was nothing. Always remember that Trayvon Martin was a boy, that Tamir Rice was a particular boy, that Jordan Davis was a boy, like you. When you hear these names think of all the wealth poured into them. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the day care, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains.", + " Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.\n\nLucy Nicholson / Reuters\n\nI remember that summer that you may well remember when I loaded you and your cousin Christopher into the back seat of a rented car and pushed out to see what remained of Petersburg,", + " Shirley Plantation, and the Wilderness. I was obsessed with the Civil War because six hundred thousand people had died in it. And yet it had been glossed over in my education, and in popular culture, representations of the war and its reasons seemed obscured. And yet I knew that in 1859 we were enslaved and in 1865 we were not, and what happened to us in those years struck me as having some amount of import. But whenever I visited any of the battlefields, I felt like I was greeted as if I were a nosy accountant conducting an audit and someone was trying to hide the books.\n\nI don\u2019t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy,", + " not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity.", + " But robbery is what this is, what it always was. At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth $4 billion, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies\u2014cotton\u2014was America\u2019s primary export. The richest men in America lived in the Mississippi River Valley, and they made their riches off our stolen bodies. Our bodies were held in bondage by the early presidents. Our bodies were traded from the White House by James K. Polk. Our bodies built the Capitol and the National Mall. The first shot of the Civil War was fired in South Carolina,", + " where our bodies constituted the majority of human bodies in the state. Here is the motive for the great war. It\u2019s not a secret. But we can do better and find the bandit confessing his crime. \u201cOur position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,\u201d declared Mississippi as it left the Union, \u201cthe greatest material interest of the world.\u201d\n\nBut American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and \u00e9lan.", + " This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories. John Carter flees the broken Confederacy for Mars. We are not supposed to ask what, precisely, he was running from. I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as \u201cjust some good ole boys, never meanin\u2019 no harm\u201d\u2014a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one.", + " But what one \u201cmeans\u201d is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black. Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body\u2014it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor\u2014it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest.", + " And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this. I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible\u2014that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden.", + " And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.\n\nIt had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman \u201cchear\u2019d... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.\u201d It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation.", + " The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization. \u201cThe two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,\u201d said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. \u201cAnd all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.\u201d And there it is\u2014the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality.", + " And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below. The terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. You and I, my son, are that \u201cbelow.\u201d That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard,", + " how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.\n\nLucy Nicholson / Reuters\n\nBut still you must struggle. The Struggle is in your name, Samori\u2014you were named for Samori Tour\u00e9,", + " who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body. He died in captivity, but the profits of that struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so often true, escapes our grasp.\n\nI think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else\u2019s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies\u2019 number,", + " strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could\u2014and must\u2014fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name\u2014that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point.", + " Perhaps struggle is all we have. That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream,", + " who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. \u201cSlavery\u201d is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more.", + " She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world\u2014which is really the only world she can ever know\u2014ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains\u2014whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.\n\nYou must struggle to truly remember this past. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law,", + " toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance\u2014no matter how improved\u2014as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no natural promise is unbreakable,", + " least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies,", + " which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful\u2014the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.\n\nPerhaps you remember that time we went to see Howl\u2019s Moving Castle on the Upper West Side. You were almost 5 years old. The theater was crowded, and when we came out we rode a set of escalators down to the ground floor.", + " As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A white woman pushed you and said, \u201cCome on!\u201d Many things now happened at once. There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger puts a hand on the body of their child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body. And more: There was my sense that this woman was pulling rank. I knew, for instance, that she would not have pushed a black child out on my part of Flatbush, because she would be afraid there and would sense, if not know, that there would be a penalty for such an action.", + " But I was not out on my part of Flatbush. And I was not in West Baltimore. I forgot all of that. I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body of my son. I turned and spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history. She shrank back, shocked. A white man standing nearby spoke up in her defense. I experienced this as his attempt to rescue the damsel from the beast. He had made no such attempt on behalf of my son. And he was now supported by other white people in the assembling crowd. The man came closer.", + " He grew louder. I pushed him away. He said, \u201cI could have you arrested!\u201d I did not care. I told him this, and the desire to do much more was hot in my throat. This desire was only controllable because I remembered someone standing off to the side there, bearing witness to more fury than he had ever seen from me\u2014you.\n\nI came home shook. It was a mix of shame for having gone back to the law of the streets, and rage\u2014\u201cI could have you arrested!\u201d Which is to say: \u201cI could take your body.\u201d\n\nSait Serkan / Reuters\n\nI have told this story many times,", + " not out of bravado, but out of a need for absolution. But more than any shame I felt, my greatest regret was that in seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you. \u201cI could have you arrested,\u201d he said. Which is to say: \u201cOne of your son\u2019s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.\u201d I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file.", + " Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes. But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people whom you shouldn\u2019t. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson\u2014not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body\u2019s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined\u2014with Eric Garner\u2019s anger, with Trayvon Martin\u2019s mythical words (\u201cYou are gonna die tonight\u201d), with Sean Bell\u2019s mistake of running with the wrong crowd,", + " with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.\n" + ], + "length": 24457, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 67, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A man accused of kicking a seagull that tried to eat his cheeseburger at a New Hampshire beach has been fined $124. Police investigated the report from a bystander at Hampton Beach earlier this summer, the AP reports. Per NH1, Nate Rancloes says he'd just returned from getting a cheeseburger and fries and was sitting on the sand when seagulls got to the burger. He says he spun around with his leg to shoo one away but struck the bird; he says it was a simple mistake and \"a one in a million bad luck kick.\" A witness backed up his story that the kick was accidental. \"There was no culpable mental state that occurred,\" New Hampshire Fish and Game Lt. Mike Eastman said. \"He didn't stomp on it. He hit the ... bird with his foot.\" But because seagulls are protected under federal law, the agency still hit Rancloes with the fine. Meanwhile, Rancloes, a Purple Heart recipient, tells NH1 he had to leave the beach with his 11-year-old daughter because people were yelling at him. He also notes a fellow beachgoer who posted about the incident on Facebook hadn't even witnessed what happened. \"There is an atrocious story on social media that I intentionally hurt the seagull,\" he says. \"It is illegal and immoral to injure a seagull. If I intentionally hurt the seagull in front of hundreds of witnesses, I would perhaps be the dumbest criminal ever.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "HAMPTON, N.H. (AP) \u2014 A man accused of kicking a seagull that tried to eat his cheeseburger at a New Hampshire beach has been fined $124.\n\nPolice investigated the report from a bystander at Hampton Beach earlier this summer.\n\nNH1 reports the man Nate Rancloes, said he had just returned from getting a cheeseburger and fries and was sitting on the sand. He said seagulls got to the burger, and he spun around with his leg to shoo one away, but struck the bird. He said it was a simple mistake.\n\nA witness said it appeared the bird's leg was injured and that it struggled to fly away.\n\nNew Hampshire Fish and Game Lt.", + " Adam Cheeney says seagulls are protected under federal law. ", + " Alphabetical Listing - Taxonomic Listing\n\nAlphabetical Listing\n\nSpecies are listed alphabetically by common (English) group names, with the scientific name of each species following the common name.\n\nList of Protected Species November 2013 (282.4KB)\n\nACCENTOR, Siberian, Prunella montanella\n\nAKEKEE, Loxops caeruleirostris\n\nAKEPA, Loxops coccineus\n\nAKIALOA, Greater, Hemignathus ellisianus\n\nAKIAPOLAAU, Hemignathus munroi\n\nAKIKIKI, Oreomystis bairdi\n\nAKOHEKOHE,", + " Palmeria dolei\n\nALAUAHIO, Maui, Paroreomyza montana\n\nOahu, Paroreomyza maculata\n\nALBATROSS, Black-browed, Thalassarche melanophris\n\nBlack-footed, Phoebastria nigripes\n\nLaysan, Phoebastria immutabilis\n\nLight-mantled, Phoebetria palpebrata\n\nShort-tailed, Phoebastria albatrus\n\nShy, Thalassarche cauta\n\nWandering, Diomedea exulans\n\nYellow-nosed,", + " Thalassarche chlororhynchos\n\nAMAKIHI, Hawaii, Hemignathus virens\n\nKauai, Hemignathus kauaiensis\n\nOahu, Hemignathus flavus\n\nANHINGA, Anhinga anhinga\n\nANI, Groove-billed, Crotophaga sulcirostris\n\nSmooth-billed, Crotophaga ani\n\nANIANIAU, Magumma parva\n\nAPAPANE, Himatione sanguinea\n\nAUKLET, Cassin\u2019s, Ptychoramphus aleuticus\n\nCrested,", + " Aethia cristatella\n\nLeast, Aethia pusilla\n\nParakeet, Aethia psittacula\n\nRhinoceros, Cerorhinca monocerata\n\nWhiskered, Aethia pygmaea\n\nAVOCET, American, Recurvirostra americana\n\nBEAN-GOOSE, Taiga, Anser fabalis\n\nTundra, Anser serrirostris\n\nBEARDLESS-TYRANNULET, Northern, Camptostoma imberbe\n\nBECARD, Rose-throated, Pachyramphus aglaiae\n\nBITTERN,", + " American, Botaurus lentiginosus\n\nBlack, Ixobrychus flavicollis\n\nLeast, Ixobrychus exilis\n\nSchrenck\u2019s, Ixobrychus eurhythmus\n\nYellow, Ixobrychus sinensis\n\nBLACK-HAWK, Common, Buteogallus anthracinus\n\nBLACKBIRD, Brewer\u2019s, Euphagus cyanocephalus\n\nRed-winged, Agelaius phoeniceus\n\nRusty, Euphagus carolinus\n\nTawny-shouldered, Agelaius humeralis\n\nTricolored,", + " Agelaius tricolor\n\nYellow-headed, Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus\n\nYellow-shouldered, Agelaius xanthomus\n\nBLUEBIRD, Eastern, Sialia sialis\n\nMountain, Sialia currucoides\n\nWestern, Sialia mexicana\n\nBLUETAIL, Red-flanked, Tarsiger cyanurus\n\nBLUETHROAT, Luscinia svecica\n\nBOBOLINK, Dolichonyx oryzivorus\n\nBOOBY, Blue-footed, Sula nebouxii\n\nBrown, Sula leucogaster\n\nMasked,", + " Sula dactylatra\n\nRed-footed, Sula sula\n\nBRAMBLING, Fringilla montifringilla\n\nBRANT, Branta bernicla\n\nBUFFLEHEAD, Bucephala albeola\n\nBULLFINCH, Eurasian, Pyrrhula pyrrhula\n\nPuerto Rican, Loxigilla portoricensis\n\nBUNTING, Blue, Cyanocompsa parellina\n\nGray, Emberiza variabilis\n\nIndigo, Passerina cyanea\n\nLittle, Emberiza pusilla\n\nLark, Calamospiza melanocorys\n\nLazuli,", + " Passerina amoena\n\nMcKay\u2019s, Plectrophenax hyperboreus\n\nPainted, Passerina ciris\n\nPallas\u2019s, Emberiza pallasi\n\nPine, Emberiza leucocephalos\n\nReed, Emberiza schoeniclus\n\nRustic, Emberiza rustica\n\nSnow, Plectrophenax nivalis\n\nVaried, Passerina versicolor\n\nYellow-breasted, Emberiza aureola\n\nYellow-browed, Emberiza chrysophrys\n\nYellow-throated, Emberiza elegans\n\nBUSHTIT, Psaltriparus minimus\n\nCANVASBACK,", + " Aythya valisineria\n\nCARACARA, Crested, Caracara cheriway\n\nCARDINAL, Northern, Cardinalis cardinalis\n\nCARIB, Green-throated, Eulampis holosericeus\n\nPurple-throated, Eulampis jugularis\n\nCATBIRD, Black, Melanoptila glabrirostris\n\nGray, Dumetella carolinensis\n\nCHAFFINCH, Common, Fringilla coelebs\n\nCHAT, Yellow-breasted, Icteria virens\n\nCHICKADEE, Black-capped, Poecile atricapillus\n\nBoreal,", + " Poecile hudsonicus\n\nCarolina, Poecile carolinensis\n\nChestnut-backed, Poecile rufescens\n\nGray-headed, Poecile cinctus\n\nMexican, Poecile sclateri\n\nMountain, Poecile gambeli\n\nCHUCK-WILL\u2019S-WIDOW, Caprimulgus carolinensis\n\nCONDOR, California, Gymnogyps californianus\n\nCOOT, American, Fulica americana\n\nCaribbean, Fulica caribaea\n\nEurasian, Fulica atra\n\nHawaiian, Fulica alai\n\nCORMORANT,", + " Brandt\u2019s, Phalacrocorax penicillatus\n\nDouble-crested, Phalacrocorax auritus\n\nGreat, Phalacrocorax carbo\n\nLittle Pied, Phalacrocorax melanoleucos\n\nNeotropic, Phalacrocorax brasilianus\n\nPelagic, Phalacrocorax pelagicus\n\nRed-faced, Phalacrocorax urile\n\nCOWBIRD, Bronzed, Molothrus aeneus\n\nBrown-headed, Molothrus ater\n\nShiny, Molothrus bonariensis\n\nCRAKE, Corn, Crex crex\n\nPaint-billed,", + " Neocrex erythrops\n\nSpotless, Porzana tabuensis\n\nYellow-breasted, Porzana flaviventer\n\nCRANE, Common, Grus grus\n\nSandhill, Grus canadensis\n\nWhooping, Grus americana\n\nCREEPER, Brown, Certhia americana\n\nHawaii, Oreomystis mana\n\nCROSSBILL, Red, Loxia curvirostra\n\nWhite-winged, Loxia leucoptera\n\nCROW, American, Corvus brachyrhynchos\n\nFish, Corvus ossifragus\n\nHawaiian,", + " Corvus hawaiiensis\n\nMariana, Corvus kubaryi\n\nNorthwestern, Corvus caurinus\n\nTamaulipas, Corvus imparatus\n\nWhite-necked, Corvus leucognaphalus\n\nCUCKOO, Black-billed, Coccyzus erythropthalmus\n\nCommon, Cuculus canorus\n\nMangrove, Coccyzus minor\n\nOriental, Cuculus optatus\n\nYellow-billed, Coccyzus americanus\n\nCURLEW, Bristle-thighed, Numenius tahitiensis\n\nEskimo,", + " Numenius borealis\n\nEurasian, Numenius arquata\n\nFar Eastern, Numenius madagascariensis\n\nLittle, Numenius minutus\n\nLong-billed, Numenius americanus\n\nDICKCISSEL, Spiza americana\n\nDIPPER, American, Cinclus mexicanus\n\nDOTTEREL, Eurasian, Charadrius morinellus\n\nDOVE, Inca, Columbina inca\n\nMourning, Zenaida macroura\n\nWhite-tipped, Leptotila verreauxi\n\nWhite-winged, Zenaida asiatica\n\nZenaida,", + " Zenaida aurita\n\nDOVEKIE, Alle alle\n\nDOWITCHER, Long-billed, Limnodromus scolopaceus\n\nShort-billed, Limnodromus griseus\n\nDUCK, American Black, Anas rubripes\n\nEastern Spot-billed, Anas zonorhyncha\n\nFalcated, Anas falcata\n\nHarlequin, Histrionicus histrionicus\n\nHawaiian, Anas wyvilliana\n\nLaysan, Anas laysanensis\n\nLong-tailed, Clangula hyemalis\n\nMasked, Nomonyx dominicus\n\nMottled,", + " Anas fulvigula\n\nMuscovy, Cairina moschata\n\nPacific Black, Anas superciliosa\n\nRing-necked, Aythya collaris\n\nRuddy, Oxyura jamaicensis\n\nTufted, Aythya fuligula\n\nWood, Aix sponsa\n\nDUNLIN, Calidris alpina\n\nEAGLE, Bald, Haliaeetus leucocephalus\n\nGolden, Aquila chrysaetos\n\nWhite-tailed, Haliaeetus albicilla\n\nEGRET, Cattle, Bubulcus ibis\n\nChinese, Egretta eulophotes\n\nGreat,", + " Ardea alba\n\nIntermediate, Mesophoyx intermedia\n\nLittle, Egretta garzetta\n\nReddish, Egretta rufescens\n\nSnowy, Egretta thula\n\nEIDER, Common, Somateria mollissima\n\nKing, Somateria spectabilis\n\nSpectacled, Somateria fischeri\n\nSteller\u2019s, Polysticta stelleri\n\nELAENIA, Caribbean, Elaenia martinica\n\nGreenish, Myiopagis viridicata\n\nWhite-crested, Elaenia albiceps\n\nEMERALD, Puerto Rican,", + " Chlorostilbon maugaeus\n\nEUPHONIA, Antillean, Euphonia musica\n\nFALCON, Aplomado, Falco femoralis\n\nPeregrine, Falco peregrinus\n\nPrairie, Falco mexicanus\n\nRed-footed, Flaco vespertinus\n\nFIELDFARE, Turdus pilaris\n\nFINCH, Cassin\u2019s, Carpodacus cassinii\n\nHouse, Carpodacus mexicanus\n\nLaysan, Telespiza cantans\n\nNihoa, Telespiza ultima\n\nPurple,", + " Carpodacus purpureus\n\nFLAMINGO, American, Phoenicopterus ruber\n\nFLICKER, Gilded, Colaptes chrysoides\n\nNorthern, Colaptes auratus\n\nFLYCATCHER, Acadian, Empidonax virescens\n\nAlder, Empidonax alnorum\n\nAsh-throated, Myiarchus cinerascens\n\nAsian Brown, Muscicapa dauurica\n\nBrown-crested, Myiarchus tyrannulus\n\nBuff-breasted, Empidonax fulvifrons\n\nCordilleran, Empidonax occidentalis\n\nCrowned Slaty,", + " Empidonomus aurantioatrocristatus\n\nDark-sided, Muscicapa sibirica\n\nDusky, Empidonax oberholseri\n\nDusky-capped, Myiarchus tuberculifer\n\nFork-tailed, Tyrannus savana\n\nGray, Empidonax wrightii\n\nGray-streaked, Muscicapa griseisticta\n\nGreat Crested, Myiarchus crinitus\n\nHammond\u2019s, Empidonax hammondii\n\nLa Sagra\u2019s, Myiarchus sagrae\n\nLeast, Empidonax minimus\n\nMugimaki,", + " Ficedula mugimaki\n\nNarcissus, Ficedula narcissina\n\nNutting\u2019s, Myiarchus nuttingi\n\nOlive-sided, Contopus cooperi\n\nPacific-slope, Empidonax difficilis\n\nPiratic, Legatus leucophalus\n\nPuerto Rican, Myiarchus antillarum\n\nScissor-tailed, Tyrannus forficatus\n\nSocial, Myiozetetes similis\n\nSpotted, Muscicapa striata\n\nSulphur-bellied, Myiodynastes luteiventris\n\nTaiga, Ficedula albicilla\n\nTufted,", + " Mitrephanes phaeocercus\n\nVariegated, Empidonomus varius\n\nVermilion, Pyrocephalus rubinus\n\nWillow, Empidonax traillii\n\nYellow-bellied, Empidonax flaviventris\n\nFOREST-FALCON, Collared, Micrastur semitorquatus\n\nFRIGATEBIRD, Great, Fregata minor\n\nLesser, Fregata ariel\n\nMagnificent, Fregata magnificens\n\nFROG-HAWK, Gray, Accipiter soloensis\n\nFRUIT-DOVE, Crimson-crowned,", + " Ptilinopus porphyraceus\n\nMany-colored, Ptilinopus perousii\n\nMariana, Ptilinopus roseicapilla\n\nFULMAR, Northern, Fulmarus glacialis\n\nGADWALL, Anas strepera\n\nGALLINULE, Azure, Porphyrio flavirostris\n\nPurple, Porphyrio martinica\n\nGANNET, Northern, Morus bassanus\n\nGARGANEY, Anas querquedula\n\nGNATCATCHER, Black-capped, Polioptila nigriceps\n\nBlack-tailed, Polioptila melanura\n\nBlue-gray,", + " Polioptila caerulea\n\nCalifornia, Polioptila californica\n\nGODWIT, Bar-tailed, Limosa lapponica\n\nBlack-tailed, Limosa limosa\n\nHudsonian, Limosa haemastica\n\nMarbled, Limosa fedoa\n\nGOLDEN-PLOVER, American, Pluvialis dominica\n\nEuropean, Pluvialis apricaria\n\nPacific, Pluvialis fulva\n\nGOLDENEYE, Barrow\u2019s, Bucephala islandica\n\nCommon, Bucephala clangula\n\nGOLDFINCH, American, Spinus tristis\n\nLawrence\u2019s,", + " Spinus lawrencei\n\nLesser, Spinus psaltria\n\nGOOSE, Barnacle, Branta leucopsis\n\nCanada, Branta canadensis (including Cackling Goose, Branta hutchinsii)\n\nEmperor, Chen canagica\n\nGreater White-fronted, Anser albifrons\n\nHawaiian, Branta sandvicensis\n\nLesser White-fronted, Anser erythropus\n\nRoss\u2019s, Chen rossii\n\nSnow, Chen caerulescens\n\nGOSHAWK, Northern, Accipiter gentilis\n\nGRACKLE, Boat-tailed,", + " Quiscalus major\n\nCommon, Quiscalus quiscula\n\nGreat-tailed, Quiscalus mexicanus\n\nGreater Antillean, Quiscalus niger\n\nGRASSHOPPER-WARBLER, Middendorff\u2019s, Locustella ochotensis\n\nGRASSQUIT, Black-faced, Tiaris bicolor\n\nYellow-faced, Tiaris olivaceus\n\nGREBE, Clark\u2019s, Aechmophorus clarkii\n\nEared, Podiceps nigricollis\n\nHorned, Podiceps auritus\n\nLeast, Tachybaptus dominicus\n\nPied-billed,", + " Podilymbus podiceps\n\nRed-necked, Podiceps grisegena\n\nWestern, Aechmophorus occidentalis\n\nGREENFINCH, Oriental, Chloris sinica\n\nGREENSHANK, Common, Tringa nebularia\n\nNordmann\u2019s, Tringa guttifer\n\nGROSBEAK, Black-headed, Pheucticus melanocephalus\n\nBlue, Passerina caerulea\n\nCrimson-collared, Rhodothraupis celaeno\n\nEvening, Coccothraustes vespertinus\n\nPine, Pinicola enucleator\n\nRose-breasted,", + " Pheucticus ludovicianus\n\nYellow, Pheucticus chrysopeplus\n\nGROUND-DOVE, Common, Columbina passerina\n\nFriendly, Gallicolumba stairi\n\nRuddy, Columbina talpacoti\n\nWhite-throated, Gallicolumba xanthonura\n\nGUILLEMOT, Black, Cepphus grylle\n\nPigeon, Cepphus columba\n\nGULL, Belcher\u2019s, Larus belcheri\n\nBlack-headed, Chroicocephalus ridibundus\n\nBlack-tailed, Larus crassirostris\n\nBonaparte\u2019s,", + " Chroicocephalus philadelphia\n\nCalifornia, Larus californicus\n\nFranklin\u2019s, Leucophaeus pipixcan\n\nGlaucous, Larus hyperboreus\n\nGlaucous-winged, Larus glaucescens\n\nGray-hooded, Chroicocephalus cirrocephalus\n\nGreat Black-backed, Larus marinus\n\nHeermann\u2019s, Larus heermanni\n\nHerring, Larus argentatus\n\nIceland, Larus glaucoides\n\nIvory, Pagophila eburnea\n\nKelp, Larus dominicanus\n\nLaughing,", + " Leucophaeus atricilla\n\nLesser Black-backed, Larus fuscus\n\nLittle, Hydrocoloeus minutus\n\nMew, Larus canus\n\nRing-billed, Larus delawarensis\n\nRoss\u2019s, Rhodostethia rosea\n\nSabine\u2019s, Xema sabini\n\nSlaty-backed, Larus schistisagus\n\nSwallow-tailed, Creagrus furcatus\n\nThayer\u2019s, Larus thayeri\n\nWestern, Larus occidentalis\n\nYellow-footed, Larus livens\n\nYellow-legged, Larus michahellis\n\nGYRFALCON,", + " Falco rusticolus\n\nHARRIER, Northern, Circus cyaneus\n\nHAWFINCH, Coccothraustes coccothraustes\n\nHAWK, Broad-winged, Buteo platypterus\n\nCooper\u2019s, Accipiter cooperii\n\nCrane, Geranospiza caerulescens\n\nFerruginous, Buteo regalis\n\nGray, Buteo nitidus\n\nHarris\u2019s, Parabuteo unicinctus\n\nHawaiian, Buteo solitarius\n\nRed-shouldered, Buteo lineatus\n\nRed-tailed,", + " Buteo jamaicensis\n\nRoadside, Buteo magnirostris\n\nRough-legged, Buteo lagopus\n\nSharp-shinned, Accipiter striatus\n\nShort-tailed, Buteo brachyurus\n\nSwainson\u2019s, Buteo swainsoni\n\nWhite-tailed, Buteo albicaudatus\n\nZone-tailed, Buteo albonotatus\n\nHAWK-CUCKOO, Hodgson\u2019s, Cuculus fugax\n\nHAWK-OWL, Brown, Ninox scutulata\n\nHERON, Gray, Ardea cinerea\n\nGreat Blue,", + " Ardea herodias\n\nGreen, Butorides virescens\n\nLittle Blue, Egretta caerulea\n\nTricolored, Egretta tricolor\n\nHOBBY, Eurasian, Falco subbuteo\n\nHOOPOE, Eurasian, Upupa epops\n\nHOUSE-MARTIN, Common, Delichon urbicum\n\nHUMMINGBIRD, Allen\u2019s, Selasphorus sasin\n\nAnna\u2019s, Calypte anna\n\nAntillean Crested, Orthorhyncus cristatus\n\nBerylline, Amazilia beryllina\n\nBlack-chinned,", + " Archilochus alexandri\n\nBlue-throated, Lampornis clemenciae\n\nBroad-billed, Cynanthus latirostris\n\nBroad-tailed, Selasphorus platycercus\n\nBuff-bellied, Amazilia yucatanensis\n\nBumblebee, Atthis heloisa\n\nCalliope, Stellula calliope\n\nCinnamon, Amazilia rutila\n\nCosta\u2019s, Calypte costae\n\nLucifer, Calothorax lucifer\n\nMagnificent, Eugenes fulgens\n\nRuby-throated, Archilochus colubris\n\nRufous,", + " Selasphorus rufus\n\nViolet-crowned, Amazilia violiceps\n\nWhite-eared, Hylocharis leucotis\n\nXantus\u2019s, Hylocharis xantusii\n\nIBIS, Glossy, Plegadis falcinellus\n\nScarlet, Eudocimus ruber\n\nWhite, Eudocimus albus\n\nWhite-faced, Plegadis chihi\n\nIIWI, Vestiaria coccinea\n\nIMPERIAL-PIGEON, Pacific, Ducula pacifica\n\nJABIRU, Jabiru mycteria\n\nJACANA,", + " Northern, Jacana spinosa\n\nJAEGER, Long-tailed, Stercorarius longicaudus\n\nParasitic, Stercorarius parasiticus\n\nPomarine, Stercorarius pomarinus\n\nJAY, Blue, Cyanocitta cristata\n\nBrown, Psilorhinus morio\n\nGray, Perisoreus canadensis\n\nGreen, Cyanocorax yncas\n\nMexican, Aphelocoma ultramarina\n\nPinyon, Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus\n\nSteller\u2019s, Cyanocitta stelleri\n\nJUNCO, Dark-eyed, Junco hyemalis\n\nYellow-eyed,", + " Junco phaeonotus\n\nKAKAWAHIE, Paroreomyza flammea\n\nKAMAO, Myadestes myadestinus\n\nKESTREL, American, Falco sparverius\n\nEurasian, Falco tinnunculus\n\nKILLDEER, Charadrius vociferus\n\nKINGBIRD, Cassin\u2019s, Tyrannus vociferans\n\nCouch\u2019s, Tyrannus couchii\n\nEastern, Tyrannus tyrannus\n\nGray, Tyrannus dominicensis\n\nLoggerhead, Tyrannus caudifasciatus\n\nThick-billed,", + " Tyrannus crassirostris\n\nTropical, Tyrannus melancholicus\n\nWestern, Tyrannus verticalis\n\nKINGFISHER, Belted, Megaceryle alcyon\n\nCollared, Todirhamphus chloris\n\nGreen, Chloroceryle americana\n\nMicronesian, Todirhamphus cinnamominus\n\nRinged, Megaceryle torquata\n\nKINGLET, Golden-crowned, Regulus satrapa\n\nRuby-crowned, Regulus calendula\n\nKISKADEE, Great, Pitangus sulphuratus\n\nKITE,", + " Black, Milvus migrans\n\nHook-billed, Chondrohierax uncinatus\n\nMississippi, Ictinia mississippiensis\n\nSnail, Rostrhamus sociabilis\n\nSwallow-tailed, Elanoides forficatus\n\nWhite-tailed, Elanus leucurus\n\nKITTIWAKE, Black-legged, Rissa tridactyla\n\nRed-legged, Rissa brevirostris\n\nKNOT, Great, Calidris tenuirostris\n\nRed, Calidris canutus\n\nLAPWING, Northern, Vanellus vanellus\n\nLARK,", + " Horned, Eremophila alpestris\n\nSky, Alauda arvensis\n\nLEAF-WARBLER, Pallas\u2019s, Phylloscopus proregulus\n\nLIMPKIN, Aramus guarauna\n\nLIZARD-CUCKOO, Puerto Rican, Coccyzus vieilloti\n\nLONGSPUR, Chestnut-collared, Calcarius ornatus\n\nLapland, Calcarius lapponicus\n\nMcCown\u2019s, Rhynchophanes mccownii\n\nSmith\u2019s, Calcarius pictus\n\nLOON, Arctic, Gavia arctica\n\nCommon, Gavia immer\n\nPacific,", + " Gavia pacifica\n\nRed-throated, Gavia stellata\n\nYellow-billed, Gavia adamsii\n\nMAGPIE, Black-billed, Pica hudsonia\n\nYellow-billed, Pica nuttalli\n\nMALLARD, Anas platyrhynchos\n\nMANGO, Antillean, Anthracothorax dominicus\n\nGreen, Anthracothorax viridis\n\nGreen-breasted, Anthracothorax prevostii\n\nMARTIN, Brown-chested, Progne tapera\n\nCaribbean, Progne dominicensis\n\nCuban, Progne cryptoleuca\n\nGray-breasted,", + " Progne chalybea\n\nPurple, Progne subis\n\nSouthern, Progne elegans\n\nMEADOWLARK, Eastern, Sturnella magna\n\nWestern, Sturnella neglecta\n\nMERGANSER, Common, Mergus merganser\n\nHooded, Lophodytes cucullatus\n\nRed-breasted, Mergus serrator\n\nMERLIN, Falco columbarius\n\nMILLERBIRD, Acrocephalus familiaris\n\nMOCKINGBIRD, Bahama, Mimus gundlachii\n\nBlue, Melanotis caerulescens\n\nNorthern, Mimus polyglottos\n\nMOORHEN,", + " Common, Gallinula chloropus\n\nMURRE, Common, Uria aalge\n\nThick-billed, Uria lomvia\n\nMURRELET, Ancient, Synthliboramphus antiquus\n\nCraveri\u2019s, Synthliboramphus craveri\n\nKittlitz\u2019s, Brachyramphus brevirostris\n\nLong-billed, Brachyramphus perdix\n\nMarbled, Brachyramphus marmoratus\n\nXantus\u2019s, Synthliboramphus hypoleucus\n\nNEEDLETAIL, White-throated,", + " Hirundapus caudacutus\n\nNIGHT-HERON, Black-crowned, Nycticorax nycticorax\n\nJapanese, Gorsachius goisagi\n\nMalayan, Gorsachius melanolophus\n\nYellow-crowned, Nyctanassa violacea\n\nNIGHTHAWK, Antillean, Chordeiles gundlachii\n\nCommon, Chordeiles minor\n\nLesser, Chordeiles acutipennis\n\nNIGHTINGALE-THRUSH, Black-headed, Catharus mexicanus\n\nOrange-billed, Catharus aurantiirostris\n\nNIGHTJAR,", + " Buff-collared, Caprimulgus ridgwayi\n\nGray, Caprimulgus indicus\n\nPuerto Rican, Caprimulgus noctitherus\n\nNODDY, Black, Anous minutus\n\nBlue-gray, Procelsterna cerulea\n\nBrown, Anous stolidus\n\nNUKUPUU, Hemignathus lucidus\n\nNUTCRACKER, Clark\u2019s, Nucifraga columbiana\n\nNUTHATCH, Brown-headed, Sitta pusilla\n\nPygmy, Sitta pygmaea\n\nRed-breasted, Sitta canadensis\n\nWhite-breasted,", + " Sitta carolinensis\n\nOLOMAO, Myadestes lanaiensis\n\nOMAO, Myadestes obscurus\n\nORIOLE, Altamira, Icterus gularis\n\nAudubon\u2019s, Icterus graduacauda\n\nBaltimore, Icterus galbula\n\nBlack-vented, Icterus wagleri\n\nBullock\u2019s, Icterus bullockii\n\nHooded, Icterus cucullatus\n\nOrchard, Icterus spurius\n\nPuerto Rican, Icterus portoricensis\n\nScott\u2019s, Icterus parisorum\n\nStreak-backed,", + " Icterus pustulatus\n\nOSPREY, Pandion haliaetus\n\nOU, Psittirostra psittacea\n\nOVENBIRD, Seiurus aurocapilla\n\nOWL, Barn, Tyto alba\n\nBarred, Strix varia\n\nBoreal, Aegolius funereus\n\nBurrowing, Athene cunicularia\n\nElf, Micrathene whitneyi\n\nFlammulated, Otus flammeolus\n\nGreat Gray, Strix nebulosa\n\nGreat Horned, Bubo virginianus\n\nLong-eared, Asio otus\n\nMottled,", + " Ciccaba virgata\n\nNorthern Hawk, Surnia ulula\n\nNorthern Saw-whet, Aegolius acadicus\n\nShort-eared, Asio flammeus\n\nSnowy, Bubo scandiacus\n\nSpotted, Strix occidentalis\n\nStygian, Asio stygius\n\nOYSTERCATCHER, American, Haematopus palliatus\n\nBlack, Haematopus bachmani\n\nEurasian, Haematopus ostralegus\n\nPALILA, Loxioides bailleui\n\nPALM-SWIFT, Antillean, Tachornis phoenicobia\n\nPARROTBILL,", + " Maui, Pseudonestor xanthophrys\n\nPARULA, Northern, Parula americana\n\nTropical, Parula pitiayumi\n\nPAURAQUE, Common, Nyctidromus albicollis\n\nPELICAN, American White, Pelecanus erythrorhynchos\n\nBrown, Pelecanus occidentalis\n\nPETREL, Bermuda, Pterodroma cahow\n\nBlack-capped, Pterodroma hasitata\n\nBlack-winged, Pterodroma nigripennis\n\nBonin, Pterodroma hypoleuca\n\nBulwer\u2019s,", + " Bulweria bulwerii\n\nCook\u2019s, Pterodroma cookii\n\nGould\u2019s, Pterodroma leucoptera\n\nGreat-winged, Pterodroma macroptera\n\nHawaiian, Pterodroma sandwichensis\n\nHerald, Pterodroma arminjoniana\n\nJouanin\u2019s, Bulweria fallax\n\nJuan Fernandez, Pterodroma externa\n\nKermadec, Pterodroma neglecta\n\nMottled, Pterodroma inexpectata\n\nMurphy\u2019s, Pterodroma ultima\n\nParkinson\u2019s, Procellaria parkinsoni\n\nPhoenix,", + " Pterodroma alba\n\nStejneger\u2019s, Pterodroma longirostris\n\nTahiti, Pterodroma rostrata\n\nWhite-necked, Pterodroma cervicalis\n\nPEWEE, Cuban, Contopus caribaeus\n\nGreater, Contopus pertinax\n\nHispaniolan, Contopus hispaniolensis\n\nLesser Antillean, Contopus latirostris\n\nPHAINOPEPLA, Phainopepla nitens\n\nPHALAROPE, Red, Phalaropus fulicarius\n\nRed-necked, Phalaropus lobatus\n\nWilson\u2019s,", + " Phalaropus tricolor\n\nPHOEBE, Black, Sayornis nigricans\n\nEastern, Sayornis phoebe\n\nSay\u2019s, Sayornis saya\n\nPIGEON, Band-tailed, Patagioenas fasciata\n\nPlain, Patagioenas inornata\n\nRed-billed, Patagioenas flavirostris\n\nScaly-naped, Patagioenas squamosa\n\nWhite-crowned, Patagioenas leucocephala\n\nPINTAIL, Northern, Anas acuta\n\nWhite-cheeked, Anas bahamensis\n\nPIPIT, American,", + " Anthus rubescens\n\nOlive-backed, Anthus hodgsoni\n\nPechora, Anthus gustavi\n\nRed-throated, Anthus cervinus\n\nSprague\u2019s, Anthus spragueii\n\nTree, Anthus trivialis\n\nPLOVER, Black-bellied, Pluvialis squatarola\n\nCollared, Charadrius collaris\n\nCommon Ringed, Charadrius hiaticula\n\nLittle Ringed, Charadrius dubius\n\nMountain, Charadrius montanus\n\nPiping, Charadrius melodus\n\nSemipalmated, Charadrius semipalmatus\n\nSnowy,", + " Charadrius alexandrinus\n\nWilson\u2019s, Charadrius wilsonia\n\nPOCHARD, Baer\u2019s, Aythya baeri\n\nCommon, Aythya ferina\n\nPOND-HERON, Chinese, Ardeola bacchus\n\nPOORWILL, Common, Phalaenoptilus nuttallii\n\nPOO-ULI, Melamprosops phaeosoma\n\nPUAIOHI, Myadestes palmeri\n\nPUFFIN, Atlantic, Fratercula arctica\n\nHorned, Fratercula corniculata\n\nTufted,", + " Fratercula cirrhata\n\nPYGMY-OWL, Ferruginous, Glaucidium brasilianum\n\nNorthern, Glaucidium gnoma\n\nPYRRHULOXIA, Cardinalis sinuatus\n\nQUAIL-DOVE, Bridled, Geotrygon mystacea\n\nKey West, Geotrygon chrysia\n\nRuddy, Geotrygon montana\n\nQUETZEL, Eared, Euptilotis neoxenus\n\nRAIL, Black, Laterallus jamaicensis\n\nBuff-banded, Gallirallus philippensis\n\nClapper,", + " Rallus longirostris\n\nGuam, Gallirallus owstoni\n\nKing, Rallus elegans\n\nSpotted, Pardirallus maculatus\n\nVirginia, Rallus limicola\n\nYellow, Coturnicops noveboracensis\n\nRAVEN, Chihuahuan, Corvus cryptoleucus\n\nCommon, Corvus corax\n\nRAZORBILL, Alca torda\n\nREDHEAD, Aythya americana\n\nREDPOLL, Common, Acanthis flammea\n\nHoary, Acanthis hornemanni\n\nREDSHANK,", + " Spotted, Tringa erythropus\n\nREDSTART, American, Setophaga ruticilla\n\nPainted, Myioborus pictus\n\nSlate-throated, Myioborus miniatus\n\nREED-WARBLER, Nightingale, Acrocephalus luscinia\n\nREEF-EGRET, Pacific, Egretta sacra\n\nREEF-HERON, Western, Egretta gularis\n\nROADRUNNER, Greater, Geococcyx californianus\n\nROBIN, American, Turdus migratorius\n\nRufous-backed, Turdus rufopalliatus\n\nRufous-tailed,", + " Luscinia sibilans\n\nSiberian Blue, Luscinia cyane\n\nROCK-THRUSH, Blue, Monticola solitarius\n\nROSEFINCH, Common, Carpodacus erythrinus\n\nROSY-FINCH, Black, Leucosticte atrata\n\nBrown-capped, Leucosticte australis\n\nGray-crowned, Leucosticte tephrocotis\n\nRUBYTHROAT, Siberian, Luscinia calliope\n\nRUFF, Philomachus pugnax\n\nSANDERLING, Calidris alba\n\nSANDPIPER,", + " Baird\u2019s, Calidris bairdii\n\nBroad-billed, Limicola falcinellus\n\nBuff-breasted, Tryngites subruficollis\n\nCommon, Actitis hypoleucos\n\nCurlew, Calidris ferruginea\n\nGreen, Tringa ochropus\n\nLeast, Calidris minutilla\n\nMarsh, Tringa stagnatilis\n\nPectoral, Calidris melanotos\n\nPurple, Calidris maritima\n\nRock, Calidris ptilocnemis\n\nSemipalmated, Calidris pusilla\n\nSharp-tailed,", + " Calidris acuminata\n\nSolitary, Tringa solitaria\n\nSpoon-billed, Eurynorhynchus pygmeus\n\nSpotted, Actitis macularius\n\nStilt, Calidris himantopus\n\nTerek, Xenus cinereus\n\nUpland, Bartramia longicauda\n\nWestern, Calidris mauri\n\nWhite-rumped, Calidris fuscicollis\n\nWood, Tringa glareola\n\nSAND-PLOVER, Greater, Charadrius leschenaultii\n\nLesser, Charadrius mongolus\n\nSAPSUCKER,", + " Red-breasted, Sphyrapicus ruber\n\nRed-naped, Sphyrapicus nuchalis\n\nWilliamson\u2019s, Sphyrapicus thyroideus\n\nYellow-bellied, Sphyrapicus varius\n\nSCAUP, Greater, Aythya marila\n\nLesser, Aythya affinis\n\nSCOPS-OWL, Oriental, Otus sunia\n\nSCOTER, Black, Melanitta americana\n\nSurf, Melanitta perspicillata\n\nWhite-winged, Melanitta fusca\n\nSCREECH-OWL, Eastern, Megascops asio\n\nPuerto Rican,", + " Megascops nudipes\n\nWestern, Megascops kennicottii\n\nWhiskered, Megascops trichopsis\n\nSCRUB-JAY, Florida, Aphelocoma coerulescens\n\nIsland, Aphelocoma insularis\n\nWestern, Aphelocoma californica\n\nSEA-EAGLE, Steller\u2019s, Haliaeetus pelagicus\n\nSEEDEATER, White-collared, Sporophila torqueola\n\nSHEARWATER, Audubon\u2019s, Puffinus lherminieri\n\nBlack-vented, Puffinus opisthomelas\n\nBuller\u2019s,", + " Puffinus bulleri\n\nCape Verde, Calonectris edwardsii\n\nChristmas, Puffinus nativitatis\n\nCory\u2019s, Calonectris diomedea\n\nFlesh-footed, Puffinus carneipes\n\nGreat, Puffinus gravis\n\nLittle, Puffinus assimilis\n\nManx, Puffinus puffinus\n\nPink-footed, Puffinus creatopus\n\nShort-tailed, Puffinus tenuirostris\n\nSooty, Puffinus griseus\n\nStreaked, Calonectris leucomelas\n\nTownsend\u2019s, Puffinus auricularis\n\nWedge-tailed,", + " Puffinus pacificus\n\nSHOVELER, Northern, Anas clypeata\n\nSHRIKE, Brown, Lanius cristatus\n\nLoggerhead, Lanius ludovicianus\n\nNorthern, Lanius excubitor\n\nSILKY-FLYCATCHER, Gray, Ptilogonys cinereus\n\nSISKIN, Eurasian, Spinus spinus\n\nPine, Spinus pinus\n\nSKIMMER, Black, Rynchops niger\n\nSKUA, Great, Stercorarius skua\n\nSouth Polar, Stercorarius maccormicki\n\nSMEW,", + " Mergellus albellus\n\nSNIPE, Common, Gallinago gallinago\n\nJack, Lymnocryptes minimus\n\nPin-tailed, Gallinago stenura\n\nSwinhoe\u2019s, Gallinago megala\n\nWilson\u2019s, Gallinago delicata\n\nSOLITAIRE, Townsend\u2019s, Myadestes townsendi\n\nSORA, Porzana carolina\n\nSPARROW, American Tree, Spizella arborea\n\nBachman\u2019s, Peucaea aestivalis\n\nBaird\u2019s, Ammodramus bairdii\n\nBlack-chinned,", + " Spizella atrogularis\n\nBlack-throated, Amphispiza bilineata\n\nBotteri\u2019s, Peucaea botterii\n\nBrewer\u2019s, Spizella breweri\n\nCassin\u2019s, Peucaea cassinii\n\nChipping, Spizella passerina\n\nClay-colored, Spizella pallida\n\nField, Spizella pusilla\n\nFive-striped, Amphispiza quinquestriata\n\nFox, Passerella iliaca\n\nGolden-crowned, Zonotrichia atricapilla\n\nGrasshopper, Ammodramus savannarum\n\nHarris\u2019s,", + " Zonotrichia querula\n\nHenslow\u2019s, Ammodramus henslowii\n\nLark, Chondestes grammacus\n\nLe Conte\u2019s, Ammodramus leconteii\n\nLincoln\u2019s, Melospiza lincolnii\n\nNelson\u2019s, Ammodramus nelsoni\n\nOlive, Arremonops rufivirgatus\n\nRufous-crowned, Aimophila ruficeps\n\nRufous-winged, Peucaea carpalis\n\nSage, Amphispiza belli\n\nSaltmarsh, Ammodramus caudacutus\n\nSavannah,", + " Passerculus sandwichensis\n\nSeaside, Ammodramus maritimus\n\nSong, Melospiza melodia\n\nSwamp, Melospiza georgiana\n\nVesper, Pooecetes gramineus\n\nWhite-crowned, Zonotrichia leucophrys\n\nWhite-throated, Zonotrichia albicollis\n\nWorthen\u2019s, Spizella wortheni\n\nSPARROWHAWK, Japanese, Accipiter gularis\n\nSPINDALIS, Puerto Rican, Spindalis portoricensis\n\nWestern, Spindalis zena\n\nSPOONBILL,", + " Roseate, Platalea ajaja\n\nSTARLING, Chestnut-cheeked, Sturnus philippensis\n\nWhite-cheeked, Sturnus cineraceus\n\nSTARTHROAT, Plain-capped, Heliomaster constantii\n\nSTILT, Black-necked, Himantopus mexicanus\n\nBlack-winged, Himantopus himantopus\n\nSTINT, Little, Calidris minuta\n\nLong-toed, Calidris subminuta\n\nRed-necked, Calidris ruficollis\n\nTemminck\u2019s, Calidris temminckii\n\nSTONECHAT,", + " Saxicola torquatus\n\nSTORK, Wood, Mycteria americana\n\nSTORM-PETREL, Ashy, Oceanodroma homochroa\n\nBand-rumped, Oceanodroma castro\n\nBlack, Oceanodroma melania\n\nBlack-bellied, Fregetta tropica\n\nFork-tailed, Oceanodroma furcata\n\nLeach\u2019s, Oceanodroma leucorhoa\n\nLeast, Oceanodroma microsoma\n\nMatsudaira\u2019s, Oceanodroma matsudairae\n\nPolynesian, Nesofregetta fuliginosa\n\nRinged, Oceanodroma hornbyi\n\nSwinhoe\u2019s,", + " Oceanodroma monorhis\n\nTristram\u2019s, Oceanodroma tristrami\n\nWedge-rumped, Oceanodroma tethys\n\nWhite-faced, Pelagodroma marina\n\nWhite-bellied, Fregetta grallaria\n\nWilson\u2019s, Oceanites oceanicus\n\nSURFBIRD, Aphriza virgata\n\nSWALLOW, Bahama, Tachycineta cyaneoviridis\n\nBank, Riparia riparia\n\nBarn, Hirundo rustica\n\nCave, Petrochelidon fulva\n\nCliff, Petrochelidon pyrrhonota\n\nMangrove,", + " Tachycineta albilinea\n\nNorthern Rough-winged, Stelgidopteryx serripennis\n\nTree, Tachycineta bicolor\n\nViolet-green, Tachycineta thalassina\n\nSWAMPHEN, Purple, Porphyrio porphyrio\n\nSWAN, Trumpeter, Cygnus buccinator\n\nTundra, Cygnus columbianus\n\nWhooper, Cygnus cygnus\n\nSWIFT, Alpine, Apus melba\n\nBlack, Cypseloides niger\n\nChimney, Chaetura pelagica\n\nCommon, Apus apus\n\nFork-tailed,", + " Apus pacificus\n\nShort-tailed, Chaetura brachyura\n\nVaux\u2019s, Chaetura vauxi\n\nWhite-collared, Streptoprocne zonaris\n\nWhite-throated, Aeronautes saxatalis\n\nSWIFTLET, Mariana, Aerodramus bartschi\n\nWhite-rumped, Aerodramus spodiopygius\n\nTANAGER, Flame-colored, Piranga bidentata\n\nHepatic, Piranga flava\n\nPuerto Rican, Nesospingus speculiferus\n\nScarlet, Piranga olivacea\n\nSummer,", + " Piranga rubra\n\nWestern, Piranga ludoviciana\n\nTATTLER, Gray-tailed, Tringa brevipes\n\nWandering, Tringa incana\n\nTEAL, Baikal, Anas formosa\n\nBlue-winged, Anas discors\n\nCinnamon, Anas cyanoptera\n\nGreen-winged, Anas crecca\n\nTERN, Aleutian, Onychoprion aleuticus\n\nArctic, Sterna paradisaea\n\nBlack, Chlidonias niger\n\nBlack-naped, Sterna sumatrana\n\nBridled, Onychoprion anaethetus\n\nCaspian,", + " Hydroprogne caspia\n\nCommon, Sterna hirundo\n\nElegant, Thalasseus elegans\n\nForster\u2019s, Sterna forsteri\n\nGray-backed, Onychoprion lunatus\n\nGreat Crested, Thalasseus bergii\n\nGull-billed, Gelochelidon nilotica\n\nLarge-billed, Phaetusa simplex\n\nLeast, Sternula antillarum\n\nLittle, Sternula albifrons\n\nRoseate, Sterna dougallii\n\nRoyal, Thalesseus maximus\n\nSandwich, Thalesseus sandvicensis\n\nSooty,", + " Onychoprion fuscatus\n\nWhiskered, Chlidonias hybrida\n\nWhite, Gygis alba\n\nWhite-winged, Chlidonias leucopterus\n\nTHRASHER, Bendire\u2019s, Toxostoma bendirei\n\nBrown, Toxostoma rufum\n\nCalifornia, Toxostoma redivivum\n\nCrissal, Toxostoma crissale\n\nCurve-billed, Toxostoma curvirostre\n\nLe Conte\u2019s, Toxostoma lecontei\n\nLong-billed, Toxostoma longirostre\n\nPearly-eyed,", + " Margarops fuscatus\n\nSage, Oreoscoptes montanus\n\nTHRUSH, Aztec, Ridgwayia pinicola\n\nBicknell\u2019s, Catharus bicknelli\n\nClay-colored, Turdus grayi\n\nDusky, Turdus naumanni\n\nEyebrowed, Turdus obscurus\n\nGray-cheeked, Catharus minimus\n\nHermit, Catharus guttatus\n\nRed-legged, Turdus plumbeus\n\nSwainson\u2019s, Catharus ustulatus\n\nVaried, Ixoreus naevius\n\nWhite-throated,", + " Turdus assimilis\n\nWood, Hylocichla mustelina\n\nTITMOUSE, Black-crested, Baeolophus atricristatus\n\nBridled, Baeolophus wollweberi\n\nJuniper, Baeolophus ridgwayi\n\nOak, Baeolophus inornatus\n\nTufted, Baeolophus bicolor\n\nTITYRA, Masked, Tityra semifasciata\n\nTOWHEE, Abert\u2019s, Melozone aberti\n\nCalifornia, Melozone crissalis\n\nCanyon,", + " Melozone fusca\n\nEastern, Pipilo erythrophthalmus\n\nGreen-tailed, Pipilo chlorurus\n\nSpotted, Pipilo maculatus\n\nTROGON, Elegant, Trogon elegans\n\nTROPICBIRD, Red-billed, Phaethon aethereus\n\nRed-tailed, Phaethon rubricauda\n\nWhite-tailed, Phaethon lepturus\n\nTURNSTONE, Black, Arenaria melanocephala\n\nRuddy, Arenaria interpres\n\nTURTLE-DOVE, Oriental, Streptopelia orientalis\n\nVEERY, Catharus fuscescens\n\nVERDIN,", + " Auriparus flaviceps\n\nVIOLETEAR, Green, Colibri thalassinus\n\nVIREO, Bell\u2019s, Vireo bellii\n\nBlack-capped, Vireo atricapilla\n\nBlack-whiskered, Vireo altiloquus\n\nBlue-headed, Vireo solitarius\n\nCassin\u2019s, Vireo cassinii\n\nGray, Vireo vicinior\n\nHutton\u2019s, Vireo huttoni\n\nPhiladelphia, Vireo philadelphicus\n\nPlumbeous, Vireo plumbeus\n\nPuerto Rican, Vireo latimeri\n\nRed-eyed,", + " Vireo olivaceus\n\nThick-billed, Vireo crassirostris\n\nWarbling, Vireo gilvus\n\nWhite-eyed, Vireo griseus\n\nYellow-green, Vireo flavoviridis\n\nYellow-throated, Vireo flavifrons\n\nYucatan, Vireo magister\n\nVULTURE, Black, Coragyps atratus\n\nTurkey, Cathartes aura\n\nWAGTAIL, Citrine, Motacilla citreola\n\nEastern Yellow, Motacilla tschutschensis\n\nGray, Motacilla cinerea\n\nWhite,", + " Motacilla alba\n\nWARBLER, Adelaide\u2019s, Dendroica adelaidae\n\nArctic, Phylloscopus borealis\n\nBachman\u2019s, Vermivora bachmanii\n\nBay-breasted, Dendroica castanea\n\nBlack-and-white, Mniotilta varia\n\nBlack-throated Blue, Dendroica caerulescens\n\nBlack-throated Gray, Dendroica nigrescens\n\nBlack-throated Green, Dendroica virens\n\nBlackburnian, Dendroica fusca\n\nBlackpoll, Dendroica striata\n\nBlue-winged,", + " Vermivora cyanoptera\n\nCanada, Wilsonia canadensis\n\nCape May, Dendroica tigrina\n\nCerulean, Dendroica cerulea\n\nChestnut-sided, Dendroica pensylvanica\n\nColima, Oreothlypis crissalis\n\nConnecticut, Oporornis agilis\n\nCrescent-chested, Oreothlypis superciliosa\n\nDusky, Phylloscopus fuscatus\n\nElfin-woods, Dendroica angelae\n\nFan-tailed, Euthlypis lachrymosa\n\nGolden-cheeked,", + " Dendroica chrysoparia\n\nGolden-crowned, Basileuterus culicivorus\n\nGolden-winged, Vermivora chrysoptera\n\nGrace\u2019s, Dendroica graciae\n\nHermit, Dendroica occidentalis\n\nHooded, Wilsonia citrina\n\nKentucky, Oporornis formosus\n\nKirtland\u2019s, Dendroica kirtlandii\n\nLanceolated, Locustella lanceolata\n\nLucy\u2019s, Oreothlypis luciae\n\nMacGillivray\u2019s, Oporornis tolmiei\n\nMagnolia,", + " Dendroica magnolia\n\nMourning, Oporornis philadelphia\n\nNashville, Oreothlypis ruficapilla\n\nOlive, Peucedramus taeniatus\n\nOrange-crowned, Oreothlypis celata\n\nPalm, Dendroica palmarum\n\nPine, Dendroica pinus\n\nPrairie, Dendroica discolor\n\nProthonotary, Protonotaria citrea\n\nRed-faced, Cardellina rubrifrons\n\nRufous-capped, Basileuterus rufifrons\n\nSedge, Acrocephalus schoenobaenus\n\nSwainson\u2019s,", + " Limnothlypis swainsonii\n\nTennessee, Oreothlypis peregrina\n\nTownsend\u2019s, Dendroica townsendi\n\nVirginia\u2019s, Oreothlypis virginiae\n\nWillow, Phylloscopus trochilus\n\nWilson\u2019s, Wilsonia pusilla\n\nWood, Phylloscopus sibilatrix\n\nWorm-eating, Helmitheros vermivorum\n\nYellow, Dendroica petechia\n\nYellow-browed, Phylloscopus inornatus\n\nYellow-rumped, Dendroica coronata\n\nYellow-throated, Dendroica dominica\n\nWATERTHRUSH,", + " Louisiana, Parkesia motacilla\n\nNorthern, Parkesia noveboracensis\n\nWAXWING, Bohemian, Bombycilla garrulus\n\nCedar, Bombycilla cedrorum\n\nWHEATEAR, Northern, Oenanthe oenanthe\n\nWHIMBREL, Numenius phaeopus\n\nWHIP-POOR-WILL, Eastern, Caprimulgus vociferus\n\nMexican, Caprimulgus arizonae\n\nWHISTLING-DUCK, Black-bellied, Dendrocygna autumnalis\n\nFulvous, Dendrocygna bicolor\n\nWest Indian,", + " Dendrocygna arborea\n\nWHITETHROAT, Lesser, Sylvia curruca\n\nWIGEON, American, Anas americana\n\nEurasian, Anas penelope\n\nWILLET, Tringa semipalmata\n\nWOOD-PEWEE, Eastern, Contopus virens\n\nWestern, Contopus sordidulus\n\nWOODCOCK, American, Scolopax minor\n\nEurasian, Scolopax rusticola\n\nWOODPECKER, Acorn, Melanerpes formicivorus\n\nAmerican Three-toed, Picoides dorsalis\n\nArizona,", + " Picoides arizonae\n\nBlack-backed, Picoides arcticus\n\nDowny, Picoides pubescens\n\nGila, Melanerpes uropygialis\n\nGolden-fronted, Melanerpes aurifrons\n\nGreat Spotted, Dendrocopos major\n\nHairy, Picoides villosus\n\nIvory-billed, Campephilus principalis\n\nLadder-backed, Picoides scalaris\n\nLewis\u2019s, Melanerpes lewis\n\nNuttall\u2019s, Picoides nuttallii\n\nPileated, Dryocopus pileatus\n\nPuerto Rican,", + " Melanerpes portoricensis\n\nRed-bellied, Melanerpes carolinus\n\nRed-cockaded, Picoides borealis\n\nRed-headed, Melanerpes erythrocephalus\n\nWhite-headed, Picoides albolarvatus\n\nWOODSTAR, Bahama, Calliphlox evelynae\n\nWREN, Bewick\u2019s Thryomanes bewickii\n\nCactus, Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus\n\nCanyon, Catherpes mexicanus\n\nCarolina, Thryothorus ludovicianus\n\nHouse, Troglodytes aedon\n\nMarsh,", + " Cistothorus palustris\n\nPacific, Troglodytes pacificus\n\nRock, Salpinctes obsoletus\n\nSedge, Cistothorus platensis\n\nSinaloa, Thryothorus sinaloa\n\nWinter, Troglodytes hiemalis\n\nWRENTIT, Chamaea fasciata\n\nWRYNECK, Eurasian, Jynx torquilla\n\nYELLOWLEGS, Greater, Tringa melanoleuca\n\nLesser, Tringa flavipes\n\nYELLOWTHROAT, Common, Geothlypis trichas\n\nGray-crowned,", + " Geothlypis poliocephala\n\nTaxonomic Listing\n\nSpecies are listed in phylogenetic sequence by scientific name, with the common (English) name following the scientific name. We also list the higher-level taxonomic categories of Order, Family, and Subfamily.\n\nOrder ANSERIFORMES\n\nFamily ANATIDAE\n\nSubfamily DENDROCYGNINAE\n\nDendrocygna autumnalis, Black-bellied Whistling-Duck\n\nDendrocygna arborea, West Indian Whistling-Duck\n\nDendrocygna bicolor, Fulvous Whistling-Duck\n\nSubfamily ANSERINAE\n\nAnser fabalis,", + " Taiga Bean-Goose\n\nAnser serrirostris, Tundra Bean-Goose\n\nAnser albifrons, Greater White-fronted Goose\n\nAnser erythropus, Lesser White-fronted Goose\n\nChen canagica, Emperor Goose\n\nChen caerulescens, Snow Goose\n\nChen rossii, Ross\u2019s Goose\n\nBranta bernicla, Brant\n\nBranta leucopsis, Barnacle Goose\n\nBranta canadensis, Canada Goose(including Branta hutchinsii, Cackling Goose)\n\nBranta sandvicensis, Hawaiian Goose\n\nCygnus buccinator,", + " Trumpeter Swan\n\nCygnus columbianus, Tundra Swan\n\nCygnus cygnus, Whooper Swan\n\nSubfamily ANATINAE\n\nCairina moschata, Muscovy Duck\n\nAix sponsa, Wood Duck\n\nAnas strepera, Gadwall\n\nAnas falcata, Falcated Duck\n\nAnas penelope, Eurasian Wigeon\n\nAnas americana, American Wigeon\n\nAnas rubripes, American Black Duck\n\nAnas platyrhynchos, Mallard\n\nAnas fulvigula, Mottled Duck\n\nAnas wyvilliana,", + " Hawaiian Duck\n\nAnas laysanensis, Laysan Duck\n\nAnas zonorhyncha, Eastern Spot-billed Duck\n\nAnas superciliosa, Pacific Black Duck\n\nAnas discors, Blue-winged Teal\n\nAnas cyanoptera, Cinnamon Teal\n\nAnas clypeata, Northern Shoveler\n\nAnas bahamensis, White-cheeked Pintail\n\nAnas acuta, Northern Pintail\n\nAnas querquedula, Garganey\n\nAnas formosa, Baikal Teal\n\nAnas crecca, Green-winged Teal\n\nAythya valisineria,", + " Canvasback\n\nAythya americana, Redhead\n\nAythya ferina, Common Pochard\n\nAythya baeri, Baer\u2019s Pochard\n\nAythya collaris, Ring-necked Duck\n\nAythya fuligula, Tufted Duck\n\nAythya marila, Greater Scaup\n\nAythya affinis, Lesser Scaup\n\nPolysticta stelleri, Steller\u2019s Eider\n\nSomateria fischeri, Spectacled Eider\n\nSomateria spectabilis, King Eider\n\nSomateria mollissima, Common Eider\n\nHistrionicus histrionicus,", + " Harlequin Duck\n\nMelanitta perspicillata, Surf Scoter\n\nMelanitta fusca, White-winged Scoter\n\nMelanitta americana, Black Scoter\n\nClangula hyemalis, Long-tailed Duck\n\nBucephala albeola, Bufflehead\n\nBucephala clangula, Common Goldeneye\n\nBucephala islandica, Barrow\u2019s Goldeneye\n\nMergellus albellus, Smew\n\nLophodytes cucullatus, Hooded Merganser\n\nMergus merganser, Common Merganser\n\nMergus serrator,", + " Red-breasted Merganser\n\nNomonyx dominicus, Masked Duck\n\nOxyura jamaicensis, Ruddy Duck\n\nOrder GAVIIFORMES\n\nFamily GAVIIDAE\n\nGavia stellata, Red-throated Loon\n\nGavia arctica, Arctic Loon\n\nGavia pacifica, Pacific Loon\n\nGavia immer, Common Loon\n\nGavia adamsii, Yellow-billed Loon\n\nOrder PODICIPEDIFORMES\n\nFamily PODICIPEDIDAE\n\nTachybaptus dominicus, Least Grebe\n\nPodilymbus podiceps,", + " Pied-billed Grebe\n\nPodiceps auritus, Horned Grebe\n\nPodiceps grisegena, Red-necked Grebe\n\nPodiceps nigricollis, Eared Grebe\n\nAechmophorus occidentalis, Western Grebe\n\nAechmophorus clarkii, Clark\u2019s Grebe\n\nOrder PHOENICOPTERIFORMES\n\nFamily PHOENICOPTERIDAE\n\nPhoenicopterus ruber, American Flamingo\n\nOrder PROCELLARIIFORMES\n\nFamily DIOMEDEIDAE\n\nThalassarche chlororhynchos, Yellow-nosed Albatross\n\nThalassarche cauta,", + " Shy Albatross\n\nThalassarche melanophris, Black-browed Albatross\n\nPhoebetria palpebrata, Light-mantled Albatross\n\nDiomedea exulans, Wandering Albatross\n\nPhoebastria immutabilis, Laysan Albatross\n\nPhoebastria nigripes, Black-footed Albatross\n\nPhoebastria albatrus, Short-tailed Albatross\n\nFamily PROCELLARIIDAE\n\nFulmarus glacialis, Northern Fulmar\n\nPterodroma macroptera,", + " Great-winged Petrel\n\nPterodroma neglecta, Kermadec Petrel\n\nPterodroma arminjoniana, Herald Petrel\n\nPterodroma ultima, Murphy\u2019s Petrel\n\nPterodroma inexpectata, Mottled Petrel\n\nPterodroma cahow, Bermuda Petrel\n\nPterodroma hasitata, Black-capped Petrel\n\nPterodroma externa, Juan Fernandez Petrel\n\nPterodroma sandwichensis, Hawaiian Petrel\n\nPterodroma cervicalis, White-necked Petrel\n\nPterodroma hypoleuca,", + " Bonin Petrel\n\nPterodroma nigripennis, Black-winged Petrel\n\nPterodroma cookii, Cook\u2019s Petrel\n\nPterodroma longirostris, Stejneger\u2019s Petrel\n\nPterodroma alba, Phoenix Petrel\n\nPterodroma leucoptera, Gould\u2019s Petrel\n\nPterodroma rostrata, Tahiti Petrel\n\nBulweria bulwerii, Bulwer\u2019s Petrel\n\nBulweria fallax, Jouanin\u2019s Petrel\n\nProcellaria parkinsoni, Parkinson\u2019s Petrel\n\nCalonectris leucomelas,", + " Streaked Shearwater\n\nCalonectris diomedea, Cory\u2019s Shearwater\n\nCalonectris edwardsii, Cape Verde Shearwater\n\nPuffinus creatopus, Pink-footed Shearwater\n\nPuffinus carneipes, Flesh-footed Shearwater\n\nPuffinus gravis, Great Shearwater\n\nPuffinus pacificus, Wedge-tailed Shearwater\n\nPuffinus bulleri, Buller\u2019s Shearwater\n\nPuffinus griseus, Sooty Shearwater\n\nPuffinus tenuirostris, Short-tailed Shearwater\n\nPuffinus nativitatis,", + " Christmas Shearwater\n\nPuffinus puffinus, Manx Shearwater\n\nPuffinus auricularis, Townsend\u2019s Shearwater\n\nPuffinus opisthomelas, Black-vented Shearwater\n\nPuffinus lherminieri, Audubon\u2019s Shearwater\n\nPuffinus assimilis, Little Shearwater\n\nFamily HYDROBATIDAE\n\nOceanites oceanicus, Wilson\u2019s Storm-Petrel\n\nPelagodroma marina, White-faced Storm-Petrel\n\nFregetta tropica, Black-bellied Storm-Petrel\n\nFregetta grallaria, White-bellied Storm-Petrel\n\nNesofregetta fuliginosa,", + " Polynesian Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma furcata, Fork-tailed Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma hornbyi, Ringed Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma monorhis, Swinhoe\u2019s Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma leucorhoa, Leach\u2019s Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma homochroa, Ashy Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma castro, Band-rumped Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma tethys, Wedge-rumped Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma matsudairae, Matsudaira\u2019s Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma melania,", + " Black Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma tristrami, Tristram\u2019s Storm-Petrel\n\nOceanodroma microsoma, Least Storm-Petrel\n\nOrder PHAETHONTIFORMES\n\nFamily PHAETHONTIDAE\n\nPhaethon lepturus, White-tailed Tropicbird\n\nPhaethon aethereus, Red-billed Tropicbird\n\nPhaethon rubricauda, Red-tailed Tropicbird\n\nOrder CICONIIFORMES\n\nFamily CICONIIDAE\n\nJabiru mycteria, Jabiru\n\nMycteria americana,", + " Wood Stork\n\nOrder SULIFORMES\n\nFamily FREGATIDAE\n\nFregata magnificens, Magnificent Frigatebird\n\nFregata minor, Great Frigatebird\n\nFregata ariel, Lesser Frigatebird\n\nFamily SULIDAE\n\nSula dactylatra, Masked Booby\n\nSula nebouxii, Blue-footed Booby\n\nSula leucogaster, Brown Booby\n\nSula sula, Red-footed Booby\n\nMorus bassanus, Northern Gannet\n\nFamily PHALACROCORACIDAE\n\nPhalacrocorax penicillatus,", + " Brandt\u2019s Cormorant\n\nPhalacrocorax brasilianus, Neotropic Cormorant\n\nPhalacrocorax auritus, Double-crested Cormorant\n\nPhalacrocorax carbo, Great Cormorant\n\nPhalacrocorax urile, Red-faced Cormorant\n\nPhalacrocorax pelagicus, Pelagic Cormorant\n\nPhalacrocorax melanoleucos, Little Pied Cormorant\n\nFamily ANHINGIDAE\n\nAnhinga anhinga, Anhinga\n\nOrder PELECANIFORMES\n\nFamily PELECANIDAE\n\nPelecanus erythrorhynchos,", + " American White Pelican\n\nPelecanus occidentalis, Brown Pelican\n\nFamily ARDEIDAE\n\nBotaurus lentiginosus, American Bittern\n\nIxobrychus sinensis, Yellow Bittern\n\nIxobrychus exilis, Least Bittern\n\nIxobrychus eurhythmus, Schrenck\u2019s Bittern\n\nIxobrychus flavicollis, Black Bittern\n\nArdea herodias, Great Blue Heron\n\nArdea cinerea, Gray Heron\n\nArdea alba, Great Egret\n\nMesophoyx intermedia, Intermediate Egret\n\nEgretta eulophotes,", + " Chinese Egret\n\nEgretta garzetta, Little Egret\n\nEgretta sacra, Pacific Reef-Egret\n\nEgretta gularis, Western Reef-Heron\n\nEgretta thula, Snowy Egret\n\nEgretta caerulea, Little Blue Heron\n\nEgretta tricolor, Tricolored Heron\n\nEgretta rufescens, Reddish Egret\n\nBubulcus ibis, Cattle Egret\n\nArdeola bacchus, Chinese Pond-Heron\n\nButorides virescens, Green Heron\n\nNycticorax nycticorax,", + " Black-crowned Night-Heron\n\nNyctanassa violacea, Yellow-crowned Night-Heron\n\nGorsachius goisagi, Japanese Night-Heron\n\nGorsachius melanolophus, Malayan Night-Heron\n\nFamily THRESKIORNITHIDAE\n\nSubfamily THRESKIORNITHINAE\n\nEudocimus albus, White Ibis\n\nEudocimus ruber, Scarlet Ibis\n\nPlegadis falcinellus, Glossy Ibis\n\nPlegadis chihi, White-faced Ibis\n\nSubfamily PLATALEINAE\n\nPlatalea ajaja,", + " Roseate Spoonbill\n\nOrder ACCIPITRIFORMES\n\nFamily CATHARTIDAE\n\nCoragyps atratus, Black Vulture\n\nCathartes aura, Turkey Vulture\n\nGymnogyps californianus, California Condor\n\nFamily PANDIONIDAE\n\nPandion haliaetus, Osprey\n\nFamily ACCIPITRIDAE\n\nChondrohierax uncinatus, Hook-billed Kite\n\nElanoides forficatus, Swallow-tailed Kite\n\nElanus leucurus, White-tailed Kite\n\nRostrhamus sociabilis,", + " Snail Kite\n\nIctinia mississippiensis, Mississippi Kite\n\nMilvus migrans, Black Kite\n\nHaliaeetus leucocephalus, Bald Eagle\n\nHaliaeetus albicilla, White-tailed Eagle\n\nHaliaeetus pelagicus, Steller\u2019s Sea-Eagle\n\nCircus cyaneus, Northern Harrier\n\nAccipiter soloensis, Gray Frog-Hawk\n\nAccipiter gularis, Japanese Sparrowhawk\n\nAccipiter striatus, Sharp-shinned Hawk\n\nAccipiter cooperii, Cooper\u2019s Hawk\n\nAccipiter gentilis, Northern Goshawk\n\nGeranospiza caerulescens,", + " Crane Hawk\n\nButeogallus anthracinus, Common Black-Hawk\n\nParabuteo unicinctus, Harris\u2019s Hawk\n\nButeo magnirostris, Roadside Hawk\n\nButeo lineatus, Red-shouldered Hawk\n\nButeo platypterus, Broad-winged Hawk\n\nButeo nitidus, Gray Hawk\n\nButeo brachyurus, Short-tailed Hawk\n\nButeo swainsoni, Swainson\u2019s Hawk\n\nButeo albicaudatus, White-tailed Hawk\n\nButeo albonotatus, Zone-tailed Hawk\n\nButeo solitarius,", + " Hawaiian Hawk\n\nButeo jamaicensis, Red-tailed Hawk\n\nButeo regalis, Ferruginous Hawk\n\nButeo lagopus, Rough-legged Hawk\n\nAquila chrysaetos, Golden Eagle\n\nOrder FALCONIFORMES\n\nFamily FALCONIDAE\n\nSubfamily MICRASTURINAE\n\nMicrastur semitorquatus, Collared Forest-Falcon\n\nSubfamily CARACARINAE\n\nCaracara cheriway, Crested Caracara\n\nSubfamily FALCONINAE\n\nFalco tinnunculus, Eurasian Kestrel\n\nFalco sparverius,", + " American Kestrel\n\nFalco vespertinus, Red-footed Falcon\n\nFalco columbarius, Merlin\n\nFalco subbuteo, Eurasian Hobby\n\nFalco femoralis, Aplomado Falcon\n\nFalco rusticolus, Gyrfalcon\n\nFalco peregrinus, Peregrine Falcon\n\nFalco mexicanus, Prairie Falcon\n\nOrder GRUIFORMES\n\nFamily RALLIDAE\n\nCoturnicops noveboracensis, Yellow Rail\n\nLaterallus jamaicensis, Black Rail\n\nGallirallus philippensis, Buff-banded Rail\n\nGallirallus owstoni,", + " Guam Rail\n\nCrex crex, Corn Crake\n\nRallus longirostris, Clapper Rail\n\nRallus elegans, King Rail\n\nRallus limicola, Virginia Rail\n\nPorzana carolina, Sora\n\nPorzana tabuensis, Spotless Crake\n\nPorzana flaviventer, Yellow-breasted Crake\n\nNeocrex erythrops, Paint-billed Crake\n\nPardirallus maculatus, Spotted Rail\n\nPorphyrio porphyrio, Purple Swamphen\n\nPorphyrio martinica, Purple Gallinule\n\nPorphyrio flavirostris,", + " Azure Gallinule\n\nGallinula chloropus, Common Moorhen\n\nFulica atra, Eurasian Coot\n\nFulica alai, Hawaiian Coot\n\nFulica americana, American Coot\n\nFulica caribaea, Caribbean Coot\n\nFamily ARAMIDAE\n\nAramus guarauna, Limpkin\n\nFamily GRUIDAE\n\nGrus canadensis, Sandhill Crane\n\nGrus grus, Common Crane\n\nGrus americana, Whooping Crane\n\nOrder CHARADRIIFORMES\n\nFamily CHARADRIIDAE\n\nSubfamily VANELLINAE\n\nVanellus vanellus,", + " Northern Lapwing\n\nSubfamily CHARADRIINAE\n\nPluvialis squatarola, Black-bellied Plover\n\nPluvialis apricaria, European Golden-Plover\n\nPluvialis dominica, American Golden-Plover\n\nPluvialis fulva, Pacific Golden-Plover\n\nCharadrius mongolus, Lesser Sand-Plover\n\nCharadrius leschenaultii, Greater Sand-Plover\n\nCharadrius collaris, Collared Plover\n\nCharadrius alexandrinus, Snowy Plover\n\nCharadrius wilsonia, Wilson\u2019s Plover\n\nCharadrius hiaticula,", + " Common Ringed Plover\n\nCharadrius semipalmatus, Semipalmated Plover\n\nCharadrius melodus, Piping Plover\n\nCharadrius dubius, Little Ringed Plover\n\nCharadrius vociferus, Killdeer\n\nCharadrius montanus, Mountain Plover\n\nCharadrius morinellus, Eurasian Dotterel\n\nFamily HAEMATOPODIDAE\n\nHaematopus ostralegus, Eurasian Oystercatcher\n\nHaematopus palliatus, American Oystercatcher\n\nHaematopus bachmani, Black Oystercatcher\n\nFamily RECURVIROSTRIDAE\n\nHimantopus himantopus,", + " Black-winged Stilt\n\nHimantopus mexicanus, Black-necked Stilt\n\nRecurvirostra americana, American Avocet\n\nFamily JACANIDAE\n\nJacana spinosa, Northern Jacana\n\nFamily SCOLOPACIDAE\n\nSubfamily SCOLOPACINAE\n\nXenus cinereus, Terek Sandpiper\n\nActitis hypoleucos, Common Sandpiper\n\nActitis macularius, Spotted Sandpiper\n\nTringa ochropus, Green Sandpiper\n\nTringa solitaria, Solitary Sandpiper\n\nTringa brevipes,", + " Gray-tailed Tattler\n\nTringa incana, Wandering Tattler\n\nTringa erythropus, Spotted Redshank\n\nTringa melanoleuca, Greater Yellowlegs\n\nTringa nebularia, Common Greenshank\n\nTringa guttifer, Nordmann\u2019s Greenshank\n\nTringa semipalmata, Willet\n\nTringa flavipes, Lesser Yellowlegs\n\nTringa stagnatilis, Marsh Sandpiper\n\nTringa glareola, Wood Sandpiper\n\nBartramia longicauda, Upland Sandpiper\n\nNumenius minutus,", + " Little Curlew\n\nNumenius borealis, Eskimo Curlew\n\nNumenius phaeopus, Whimbrel\n\nNumenius tahitiensis, Bristle-thighed Curlew\n\nNumenius madagascariensis, Far Eastern Curlew\n\nNumenius arquata, Eurasian Curlew\n\nNumenius americanus, Long-billed Curlew\n\nLimosa limosa, Black-tailed Godwit\n\nLimosa haemastica, Hudsonian Godwit\n\nLimosa lapponica, Bar-tailed Godwit\n\nLimosa fedoa, Marbled Godwit\n\nArenaria interpres,", + " Ruddy Turnstone\n\nArenaria melanocephala, Black Turnstone\n\nAphriza virgata, Surfbird\n\nCalidris tenuirostris, Great Knot\n\nCalidris canutus, Red Knot\n\nCalidris alba, Sanderling\n\nCalidris pusilla, Semipalmated Sandpiper\n\nCalidris mauri, Western Sandpiper\n\nCalidris ruficollis, Red-necked Stint\n\nCalidris minuta, Little Stint\n\nCalidris temminckii, Temminck\u2019s Stint\n\nCalidris subminuta,", + " Long-toed Stint\n\nCalidris minutilla, Least Sandpiper\n\nCalidris fuscicollis, White-rumped Sandpiper\n\nCalidris bairdii, Baird\u2019s Sandpiper\n\nCalidris melanotos, Pectoral Sandpiper\n\nCalidris acuminata, Sharp-tailed Sandpiper\n\nCalidris maritima, Purple Sandpiper\n\nCalidris ptilocnemis, Rock Sandpiper\n\nCalidris alpina, Dunlin\n\nCalidris ferruginea, Curlew Sandpiper\n\nCalidris himantopus,", + " Stilt Sandpiper\n\nEurynorhynchus pygmeus, Spoon-billed Sandpiper\n\nLimicola falcinellus, Broad-billed Sandpiper\n\nTryngites subruficollis, Buff-breasted Sandpiper\n\nPhilomachus pugnax, Ruff\n\nLimnodromus griseus, Short-billed Dowitcher\n\nLimnodromus scolopaceus, Long-billed Dowitcher\n\nLymnocryptes minimus, Jack Snipe\n\nGallinago delicata, Wilson\u2019s Snipe\n\nGallinago gallinago,", + " Common Snipe\n\nGallinago stenura, Pin-tailed Snipe\n\nGallinago megala, Swinhoe\u2019s Snipe\n\nScolopax rusticola, Eurasian Woodcock\n\nScolopax minor, American Woodcock\n\nSubfamily PHALAROPODINAE\n\nPhalaropus tricolor, Wilson\u2019s Phalarope\n\nPhalaropus lobatus, Red-necked Phalarope\n\nPhalaropus fulicarius, Red Phalarope\n\nFamily LARIDAE\n\nSubfamily LARINAE\n\nCreagrus furcatus, Swallow-tailed Gull\n\nRissa tridactyla,", + " Black-legged Kittiwake\n\nRissa brevirostris, Red-legged Kittiwake\n\nPagophila eburnea, Ivory Gull\n\nXema sabini, Sabine\u2019s Gull\n\nChroicocephalus philadelphia, Bonaparte\u2019s Gull\n\nChroicocephalus cirrocephalus, Gray-hooded Gull\n\nChroicocephalus ridibundus, Black-headed Gull\n\nHydrocoloeus minutus, Little Gull\n\nRhodostethia rosea, Ross\u2019s Gull\n\nLeucophaeus atricilla, Laughing Gull\n\nLeucophaeus pipixcan,", + " Franklin\u2019s Gull\n\nLarus belcheri, Belcher\u2019s Gull\n\nLarus crassirostris, Black-tailed Gull\n\nLarus heermanni, Heermann\u2019s Gull\n\nLarus canus, Mew Gull\n\nLarus delawarensis, Ring-billed Gull\n\nLarus occidentalis, Western Gull\n\nLarus livens, Yellow-footed Gull\n\nLarus californicus, California Gull\n\nLarus argentatus, Herring Gull\n\nLarus michahellis, Yellow-legged Gull\n\nLarus thayeri, Thayer\u2019s Gull\n\nLarus glaucoides,", + " Iceland Gull\n\nLarus fuscus, Lesser Black-backed Gull\n\nLarus schistisagus, Slaty-backed Gull\n\nLarus glaucescens, Glaucous-winged Gull\n\nLarus hyperboreus, Glaucous Gull\n\nLarus marinus, Great Black-backed Gull\n\nLarus dominicanus, Kelp Gull\n\nSubfamily STERNINAE\n\nAnous stolidus, Brown Noddy\n\nAnous minutus, Black Noddy\n\nProcelsterna cerulea, Blue-gray Noddy\n\nGygis alba,", + " White Tern\n\nOnychoprion fuscatus, Sooty Tern\n\nOnychoprion lunatus, Gray-backed Tern\n\nOnychoprion anaethetus, Bridled Tern\n\nOnychoprion aleuticus, Aleutian Tern\n\nSternula albifrons, Little Tern\n\nSternula antillarum, Least Tern\n\nPhaetusa simplex, Large-billed Tern\n\nGelochelidon nilotica, Gull-billed Tern\n\nHydroprogne caspia, Caspian Tern\n\nChlidonias niger,", + " Black Tern\n\nChlidonias leucopterus, White-winged Tern\n\nChlidonias hybridus, Whiskered Tern\n\nSterna dougallii, Roseate Tern\n\nSterna sumatrana, Black-naped Tern\n\nSterna hirundo, Common Tern\n\nSterna paradisaea, Arctic Tern\n\nSterna forsteri, Forster\u2019s Tern\n\nThalasseus maximus, Royal Tern\n\nThalasseus bergii, Great Crested Tern\n\nThalasseus sandvicensis, Sandwich Tern\n\nThalasseus elegans,", + " Elegant Tern\n\nSubfamily RYNCHOPINAE\n\nRynchops niger, Black Skimmer\n\nFamily STERCORARIIDAE\n\nStercorarius skua, Great Skua\n\nStercorarius maccormicki, South Polar Skua\n\nStercorarius pomarinus, Pomarine Jaeger\n\nStercorarius parasiticus, Parasitic Jaeger\n\nStercorarius longicaudus, Long-tailed Jaeger\n\nFamily ALCIDAE\n\nAlle alle, Dovekie\n\nUria aalge, Common Murre\n\nUria lomvia, Thick-billed Murre\n\nAlca torda,", + " Razorbill\n\nCepphus grylle, Black Guillemot\n\nCepphus columba, Pigeon Guillemot\n\nBrachyramphus perdix, Long-billed Murrelet\n\nBrachyramphus marmoratus, Marbled Murrelet\n\nBrachyramphus brevirostris, Kittlitz\u2019s Murrelet\n\nSynthliboramphus hypoleucus, Xantus\u2019s Murrelet\n\nSynthliboramphus craveri, Craveri\u2019s Murrelet\n\nSynthliboramphus antiquus, Ancient Murrelet\n\nPtychoramphus aleuticus,", + " Cassin\u2019s Auklet\n\nAethia psittacula, Parakeet Auklet\n\nAethia pusilla, Least Auklet\n\nAethia pygmaea, Whiskered Auklet\n\nAethia cristatella, Crested Auklet\n\nCerorhinca monocerata, Rhinoceros Auklet\n\nFratercula arctica, Atlantic Puffin\n\nFratercula corniculata, Horned Puffin\n\nFratercula cirrhata, Tufted Puffin\n\nOrder COLUMBIFORMES\n\nFamily COLUMBIDAE\n\nPatagioenas squamosa,", + " Scaly-naped Pigeon\n\nPatagioenas leucocephala, White-crowned Pigeon\n\nPatagioenas flavirostris, Red-billed Pigeon\n\nPatagioenas inornata, Plain Pigeon\n\nPatagioenas fasciata, Band-tailed Pigeon\n\nStreptopelia orientalis, Oriental Turtle-Dove\n\nZenaida asiatica, White-winged Dove\n\nZenaida aurita, Zenaida Dove\n\nZenaida macroura, Mourning Dove\n\nColumbina inca, Inca Dove\n\nColumbina passerina,", + " Common Ground-Dove\n\nColumbina talpacoti, Ruddy Ground-Dove\n\nLeptotila verreauxi, White-tipped Dove\n\nGeotrygon chrysia, Key West Quail-Dove\n\nGeotrygon mystacea, Bridled Quail-Dove\n\nGeotrygon montana, Ruddy Quail-Dove\n\nGallicolumba xanthonura, White-throated Ground-Dove\n\nGallicolumba stairi, Friendly Ground-Dove\n\nPtilinopus perousii, Many-colored Fruit-Dove\n\nPtilinopus porphyraceus,", + " Crimson-crowned Fruit-Dove\n\nPtilinopus roseicapilla, Mariana Fruit-Dove\n\nDucula pacifica, Pacific Imperial-Pigeon\n\nOrder CUCULIFORMES\n\nFamily CUCULIDAE\n\nSubfamily CUCULINAE\n\nCuculus fugax, Hodgson\u2019s Hawk-Cuckoo\n\nCuculus canorus, Common Cuckoo\n\nCuculus optatus, Oriental Cuckoo\n\nCoccyzus americanus, Yellow-billed Cuckoo\n\nCoccyzus minor, Mangrove Cuckoo\n\nCoccyzus erythropthalmus,", + " Black-billed Cuckoo\n\nCoccyzus vieilloti, Puerto Rican Lizard-Cuckoo\n\nSubfamily NEOMORPHINAE\n\nGeococcyx californianus, Greater Roadrunner\n\nSubfamily CROTOPHAGINAE\n\nCrotophaga ani, Smooth-billed Ani\n\nCrotophaga sulcirostris, Groove-billed Ani\n\nOrder STRIGIFORMES\n\nFamily TYTONIDAE\n\nTyto alba, Barn Owl\n\nFamily STRIGIDAE\n\nOtus flammeolus, Flammulated Owl\n\nOtus sunia,", + " Oriental Scops-Owl\n\nMegascops kennicottii, Western Screech-Owl\n\nMegascops asio, Eastern Screech-Owl\n\nMegascops trichopsis, Whiskered Screech-Owl\n\nMegascops nudipes, Puerto Rican Screech-Owl\n\nBubo virginianus, Great Horned Owl\n\nBubo scandiacus, Snowy Owl\n\nSurnia ulula, Northern Hawk Owl\n\nGlaucidium gnoma, Northern Pygmy-Owl\n\nGlaucidium brasilianum, Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl\n\nMicrathene whitneyi,", + " Elf Owl\n\nAthene cunicularia, Burrowing Owl\n\nCiccaba virgata, Mottled Owl\n\nStrix occidentalis, Spotted Owl\n\nStrix varia, Barred Owl\n\nStrix nebulosa, Great Gray Owl\n\nAsio otus, Long-eared Owl\n\nAsio stygius, Stygian Owl\n\nAsio flammeus, Short-eared Owl\n\nAegolius funereus, Boreal Owl\n\nAegolius acadicus, Northern Saw-whet Owl\n\nNinox scutulata, Brown Hawk-Owl\n\nOrder CAPRIMULGIFORMES\n\nFamily CAPRIMULGIDAE\n\nSubfamily CHORDEILINAE\n\nChordeiles acutipennis,", + " Lesser Nighthawk\n\nChordeiles minor, Common Nighthawk\n\nChordeiles gundlachii, Antillean Nighthawk\n\nSubfamily CAPRIMULGINAE\n\nNyctidromus albicollis, Common Pauraque\n\nPhalaenoptilus nuttallii, Common Poorwill\n\nCaprimulgus carolinensis, Chuck-will\u2019s-widow\n\nCaprimulgus ridgwayi, Buff-collared Nightjar\n\nCaprimulgus vociferus, Eastern Whip-poor-will\n\nCaprimulgus arizonae, Mexican Whip-poor-will\n\nCaprimulgus noctitherus,", + " Puerto Rican Nightjar\n\nCaprimulgus indicus, Gray Nightjar\n\nOrder APODIFORMES\n\nFamily APODIDAE\n\nSubfamily CYPSELOIDINAE\n\nCypseloides niger, Black Swift\n\nStreptoprocne zonaris, White-collared Swift\n\nSubfamily CHAETURINAE\n\nChaetura pelagica, Chimney Swift\n\nChaetura vauxi, Vaux\u2019s Swift\n\nChaetura brachyura, Short-tailed Swift\n\nHirundapus caudacutus, White-throated Needletail\n\nAerodramus spodiopygius,", + " White-rumped Swiftlet\n\nAerodramus bartschi, Mariana Swiftlet\n\nSubfamily APODINAE\n\nApus apus, Common Swift\n\nApus pacificus, Fork-tailed Swift\n\nApus melba, Alpine Swift\n\nAeronautes saxatalis, White-throated Swift\n\nTachornis phoenicobia, Antillean Palm-Swift\n\nFamily TROCHILIDAE\n\nSubfamily TROCHILINAE\n\nColibri thalassinus, Green Violetear\n\nAnthracothorax prevostii, Green-breasted Mango\n\nAnthracothorax dominicus,", + " Antillean Mango\n\nAnthracothorax viridis, Green Mango\n\nEulampis jugularis, Purple-throated Carib\n\nEulampis holosericeus, Green-throated Carib\n\nOrthorhyncus cristatus, Antillean Crested Hummingbird\n\nChlorostilbon maugaeus, Puerto Rican Emerald\n\nCynanthus latirostris, Broad-billed Hummingbird\n\nHylocharis leucotis, White-eared Hummingbird\n\nHylocharis xantusii, Xantus\u2019s Hummingbird\n\nAmazilia beryllina,", + " Berylline Hummingbird\n\nAmazilia yucatanensis, Buff-bellied Hummingbird\n\nAmazilia rutila, Cinnamon Hummingbird\n\nAmazilia violiceps, Violet-crowned Hummingbird\n\nLampornis clemenciae, Blue-throated Hummingbird\n\nEugenes fulgens, Magnificent Hummingbird\n\nHeliomaster constantii, Plain-capped Starthroat\n\nCalliphlox evelynae, Bahama Woodstar\n\nCalothorax lucifer, Lucifer Hummingbird\n\nArchilochus colubris, Ruby-throated Hummingbird\n\nArchilochus alexandri,", + " Black-chinned Hummingbird\n\nCalypte anna, Anna\u2019s Hummingbird\n\nCalypte costae, Costa\u2019s Hummingbird\n\nStellula calliope, Calliope Hummingbird\n\nAtthis heloisa, Bumblebee Hummingbird\n\nSelasphorus platycercus, Broad-tailed Hummingbird\n\nSelasphorus rufus, Rufous Hummingbird\n\nSelasphorus sasin, Allen\u2019s Hummingbird\n\nOrder TROGONIFORMES\n\nFamily TROGONIDAE\n\nSubfamily TROGONINAE\n\nTrogon elegans,", + " Elegant Trogon\n\nEuptilotis neoxenus, Eared Quetzel\n\nOrder UPUPIFORMES\n\nFamily UPUPIDAE\n\nUpupa epops, Eurasian Hoopoe\n\nOrder CORACIIFORMES\n\nFamily ALCEDINIDAE\n\nSubfamily HALCYONINAE\n\nTodirhamphus cinnamominus, Micronesian Kingfisher\n\nTodirhamphus chloris, Collared Kingfisher\n\nSubfamily CERYLINAE\n\nMegaceryle torquata, Ringed Kingfisher\n\nMegaceryle alcyon, Belted Kingfisher\n\nChloroceryle americana,", + " Green Kingfisher\n\nOrder PICIFORMES\n\nFamily PICIDAE\n\nSubfamily JYNGINAE\n\nJynx torquilla, Eurasian Wryneck\n\nSubfamily PICINAE\n\nMelanerpes lewis, Lewis\u2019s Woodpecker\n\nMelanerpes portoricensis, Puerto Rican Woodpecker\n\nMelanerpes erythrocephalus, Red-headed Woodpecker\n\nMelanerpes formicivorus, Acorn Woodpecker\n\nMelanerpes uropygialis, Gila Woodpecker\n\nMelanerpes aurifrons, Golden-fronted Woodpecker\n\nMelanerpes carolinus,", + " Red-bellied Woodpecker\n\nSphyrapicus thyroideus, Williamson\u2019s Sapsucker\n\nSphyrapicus varius, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker\n\nSphyrapicus nuchalis, Red-naped Sapsucker\n\nSphyrapicus ruber, Red-breasted Sapsucker\n\nDendrocopos major, Great Spotted Woodpecker\n\nPicoides scalaris, Ladder-backed Woodpecker\n\nPicoides nuttallii, Nuttall\u2019s Woodpecker\n\nPicoides pubescens, Downy Woodpecker\n\nPicoides villosus,", + " Hairy Woodpecker\n\nPicoides arizonae, Arizona Woodpecker\n\nPicoides borealis, Red-cockaded Woodpecker\n\nPicoides albolarvatus, White-headed Woodpecker\n\nPicoides dorsalis, American Three-toed Woodpecker\n\nPicoides arcticus, Black-backed Woodpecker\n\nColaptes auratus, Northern Flicker\n\nColaptes chrysoides, Gilded Flicker\n\nDryocopus pileatus, Pileated Woodpecker\n\nCampephilus principalis, Ivory-billed Woodpecker\n\nOrder PASSERIFORMES\n\nFamily TYRANNIDAE\n\nSubfamily ELAENIINAE\n\nCamptostoma imberbe,", + " Northern Beardless-Tyrannulet\n\nMyiopagis viridicata, Greenish Elaenia\n\nElaenia martinica, Caribbean Elaenia\n\nElaenia albiceps, White-crested Eleania\n\nSubfamily FLUVICOLINAE\n\nMitrephanes phaeocercus, Tufted Flycatcher\n\nContopus cooperi, Olive-sided Flycatcher\n\nContopus pertinax, Greater Pewee\n\nContopus sordidulus, Western Wood-Pewee\n\nContopus virens, Eastern Wood-Pewee\n\nContopus caribaeus, Cuban Pewee\n\nContopus hispaniolensis,", + " Hispaniolan Pewee\n\nContopus latirostris, Lesser Antillean Pewee\n\nEmpidonax flaviventris, Yellow-bellied Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonax virescens, Acadian Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonax alnorum, Alder Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonax traillii, Willow Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonax minimus, Least Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonax hammondii, Hammond\u2019s Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonax wrightii, Gray Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonax oberholseri, Dusky Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonax difficilis,", + " Pacific-slope Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonax occidentalis, Cordilleran Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonax fulvifrons, Buff-breasted Flycatcher\n\nSayornis nigricans, Black Phoebe\n\nSayornis phoebe, Eastern Phoebe\n\nSayornis saya, Say\u2019s Phoebe\n\nPyrocephalus rubinus, Vermilion Flycatcher\n\nSubfamily TYRANNINAE\n\nMyiarchus tuberculifer, Dusky-capped Flycatcher\n\nMyiarchus cinerascens, Ash-throated Flycatcher\n\nMyiarchus nuttingi,", + " Nutting\u2019s Flycatcher\n\nMyiarchus crinitus, Great Crested Flycatcher\n\nMyiarchus tyrannulus, Brown-crested Flycatcher\n\nMyiarchus sagrae, La Sagra\u2019s Flycatcher\n\nMyiarchus antillarum, Puerto Rican Flycatcher\n\nPitangus sulphuratus, Great Kiskadee\n\nMyiozetetes similis, Social Flycatcher\n\nMyiodynastes luteiventris, Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher\n\nLegatus leucophalus, Piratic Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonomus varius,", + " Variegated Flycatcher\n\nEmpidonomus aurantioatrocristatus, Crowned Slaty Flycatcher\n\nTyrannus melancholicus, Tropical Kingbird\n\nTyrannus couchii, Couch\u2019s Kingbird\n\nTyrannus vociferans, Cassin\u2019s Kingbird\n\nTyrannus crassirostris, Thick-billed Kingbird\n\nTyrannus verticalis, Western Kingbird\n\nTyrannus tyrannus, Eastern Kingbird\n\nTyrannus dominicensis, Gray Kingbird\n\nTyrannus caudifasciatus, Loggerhead Kingbird\n\nTyrannus forficatus,", + " Scissor-tailed Flycatcher\n\nTyrannus savana, Fork-tailed Flycatcher\n\nPachyramphus aglaiae, Rose-throated Becard\n\nTityra semifasciata, Masked Tityra\n\nFamily LANIIDAE\n\nLanius cristatus, Brown Shrike\n\nLanius ludovicianus, Loggerhead Shrike\n\nLanius excubitor, Northern Shrike\n\nFamily VIREONIDAE\n\nVireo griseus, White-eyed Vireo\n\nVireo crassirostris, Thick-billed Vireo\n\nVireo latimeri,", + " Puerto Rican Vireo\n\nVireo bellii, Bell\u2019s Vireo\n\nVireo atricapilla, Black-capped Vireo\n\nVireo vicinior, Gray Vireo\n\nVireo flavifrons, Yellow-throated Vireo\n\nVireo plumbeus, Plumbeous Vireo\n\nVireo cassinii, Cassin\u2019s Vireo\n\nVireo solitarius, Blue-headed Vireo\n\nVireo huttoni, Hutton\u2019s Vireo\n\nVireo gilvus, Warbling Vireo\n\nVireo philadelphicus,", + " Philadelphia Vireo\n\nVireo olivaceus, Red-eyed Vireo\n\nVireo flavoviridis, Yellow-green Vireo\n\nVireo altiloquus, Black-whiskered Vireo\n\nVireo magister, Yucatan Vireo\n\nFamily CORVIDAE\n\nPerisoreus canadensis, Gray Jay\n\nPsilorhinus morio, Brown Jay\n\nCyanocorax yncas, Green Jay\n\nGymnorhinus cyanocephalus, Pinyon Jay\n\nCyanocitta stelleri, Steller\u2019s Jay\n\nCyanocitta cristata,", + " Blue Jay\n\nAphelocoma coerulescens, Florida Scrub-Jay\n\nAphelocoma insularis, Island Scrub-Jay\n\nAphelocoma californica, Western Scrub-Jay\n\nAphelocoma ultramarina, Mexican Jay\n\nNucifraga columbiana, Clark\u2019s Nutcracker\n\nPica hudsonia, Black-billed Magpie\n\nPica nuttalli, Yellow-billed Magpie\n\nCorvus kubaryi, Mariana Crow\n\nCorvus brachyrhynchos, American Crow\n\nCorvus caurinus,", + " Northwestern Crow\n\nCorvus leucognaphalus, White-necked Crow\n\nCorvus imparatus, Tamaulipas Crow\n\nCorvus ossifragus, Fish Crow\n\nCorvus hawaiiensis, Hawaiian Crow\n\nCorvus cryptoleucus, Chihuahuan Raven\n\nCorvus corax, Common Raven\n\nFamily ALAUDIDAE\n\nAlauda arvensis, Sky Lark\n\nEremophila alpestris, Horned Lark\n\nFamily HIRUNDINIDAE\n\nSubfamily HIRUNDININAE\n\nProgne subis, Purple Martin\n\nProgne cryptoleuca,", + " Cuban Martin\n\nProgne dominicensis, Caribbean Martin\n\nProgne chalybea, Gray-breasted Martin\n\nProgne elegans, Southern Martin\n\nProgne tapera, Brown-chested Martin\n\nTachycineta bicolor, Tree Swallow\n\nTachycineta albilinea, Mangrove Swallow\n\nTachycineta thalassina, Violet-green Swallow\n\nTachycineta cyaneoviridis, Bahama Swallow\n\nStelgidopteryx serripennis, Northern Rough-winged Swallow\n\nRiparia riparia, Bank Swallow\n\nPetrochelidon pyrrhonota,", + " Cliff Swallow\n\nPetrochelidon fulva, Cave Swallow\n\nHirundo rustica, Barn Swallow\n\nDelichon urbicum, Common House-Martin\n\nFamily PARIDAE\n\nPoecile carolinensis, Carolina Chickadee\n\nPoecile atricapillus, Black-capped Chickadee\n\nPoecile gambeli, Mountain Chickadee\n\nPoecile sclateri, Mexican Chickadee\n\nPoecile rufescens, Chestnut-backed Chickadee\n\nPoecile hudsonicus, Boreal Chickadee\n\nPoecile cinctus, Gray-headed Chickadee\n\nBaeolophus wollweberi,", + " Bridled Titmouse\n\nBaeolophus inornatus, Oak Titmouse\n\nBaeolophus ridgwayi, Juniper Titmouse\n\nBaeolophus bicolor, Tufted Titmouse\n\nBaeolophus atricristatus, Black-crested Titmouse\n\nFamily REMIZIDAE\n\nAuriparus flaviceps, Verdin\n\nFamily AEGITHALIDAE\n\nPsaltriparus minimus, Bushtit\n\nFamily SITTIDAE\n\nSubfamily SITTINAE\n\nSitta canadensis, Red-breasted Nuthatch\n\nSitta carolinensis,", + " White-breasted Nuthatch\n\nSitta pygmaea, Pygmy Nuthatch\n\nSitta pusilla, Brown-headed Nuthatch\n\nFamily CERTHIIDAE\n\nSubfamily CERTHIINAE\n\nCerthia americana, Brown Creeper\n\nFamily TROGLODYTIDAE\n\nCampylorhynchus brunneicapillus, Cactus Wren\n\nSalpinctes obsoletus, Rock Wren\n\nCatherpes mexicanus, Canyon Wren\n\nThryothorus sinaloa, Sinaloa Wren\n\nThryothorus ludovicianus,", + " Carolina Wren\n\nThryomanes bewickii, Bewick\u2019s Wren\n\nTroglodytes aedon, House Wren\n\nTroglodytes pacificus, Pacific Wren\n\nTroglodytes hiemalis, Winter Wren\n\nCistothorus platensis, Sedge Wren\n\nCistothorus palustris, Marsh Wren\n\nFamily POLIOPTILIDAE\n\nPolioptila caerulea, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher\n\nPolioptila californica, California Gnatcatcher\n\nPolioptila melanura, Black-tailed Gnatcatcher\n\nPolioptila nigriceps,", + " Black-capped Gnatcatcher\n\nFamily CINCLIDAE\n\nCinclus mexicanus, American Dipper\n\nFamily REGULIDAE\n\nRegulus satrapa, Golden-crowned Kinglet\n\nRegulus calendula, Ruby-crowned Kinglet\n\nFamily PHYLLOSCOPIDAE\n\nPhylloscopus trochilus, Willow Warbler\n\nPhylloscopus sibilatrix, Wood Warbler\n\nPhylloscopus fuscatus, Dusky Warbler\n\nPhylloscopus proregulus,Pallas\u2019s Leaf-Warbler\n\nPhylloscopus inornatus,", + " Yellow-browed Warbler\n\nPhylloscopus borealis, Arctic Warbler\n\nFamily SYLVIIDAE\n\nSylvia curruca, Lesser Whitethroat\n\nChamaea fasciata, Wrentit\n\nFamily ACROCEPHALIDAE\n\nAcrocephalus luscinia, Nightingale Reed-Warbler\n\nAcrocephalus familiaris, Millerbird\n\nAcrocephalus schoenobaenus, Sedge Warbler\n\nFamily MEGALURIDAE\n\nLocustella ochotensis, Middendorff\u2019s Grasshopper-Warbler\n\nLocustella lanceolata,", + " Lanceolated Warbler\n\nFamily MUSCICAPIDAE\n\nFicedula narcissina, Narcissus Flycatcher\n\nFicedula mugimaki, Mugimaki Flycatcher\n\nFicedula albicilla, Taiga Flycatcher\n\nMuscicapa sibirica, Dark-sided Flycatcher\n\nMuscicapa griseisticta, Gray-streaked Flycatcher\n\nMuscicapa dauurica, Asian Brown Flycatcher\n\nMuscicapa striata, Spotted Flycatcher\n\nFamily TURDIDAE\n\nMonticola solitarius, Blue Rock-Thrush\n\nLuscinia sibilans,", + " Rufous-tailed Robin\n\nLuscinia calliope, Siberian Rubythroat\n\nLuscinia svecica, Bluethroat\n\nLuscinia cyane, Siberian Blue Robin\n\nTarsiger cyanurus, Red-flanked Bluetail\n\nOenanthe oenanthe, Northern Wheatear\n\nSaxicola torquatus, Stonechat\n\nSialia sialis, Eastern Bluebird\n\nSialia mexicana, Western Bluebird\n\nSialia currucoides, Mountain Bluebird\n\nMyadestes townsendi, Townsend\u2019s Solitaire\n\nMyadestes myadestinus,", + " Kamao\n\nMyadestes lanaiensis, Olomao\n\nMyadestes obscurus, Omao\n\nMyadestes palmeri, Puaiohi\n\nCatharus aurantiirostris, Orange-billed Nightingale-Thrush\n\nCatharus mexicanus, Black-headed Nightingale-Thrush\n\nCatharus fuscescens, Veery\n\nCatharus minimus, Gray-cheeked Thrush\n\nCatharus bicknelli, Bicknell\u2019s Thrush\n\nCatharus ustulatus, Swainson\u2019s Thrush\n\nCatharus guttatus,", + " Hermit Thrush\n\nHylocichla mustelina, Wood Thrush\n\nTurdus obscurus, Eyebrowed Thrush\n\nTurdus naumanni, Dusky Thrush\n\nTurdus pilaris, Fieldfare\n\nTurdus grayi, Clay-colored Thrush\n\nTurdus assimilis, White-throated Thrush\n\nTurdus rufopalliatus, Rufous-backed Robin\n\nTurdus migratorius, American Robin\n\nTurdus plumbeus, Red-legged Thrush\n\nIxoreus naevius, Varied Thrush\n\nRidgwayia pinicola,", + " Aztec Thrush\n\nFamily MIMIDAE\n\nDumetella carolinensis, Gray Catbird\n\nMelanoptila glabrirostris, Black Catbird\n\nMimus polyglottos, Northern Mockingbird\n\nMimus gundlachii, Bahama Mockingbird\n\nOreoscoptes montanus, Sage Thrasher\n\nToxostoma rufum, Brown Thrasher\n\nToxostoma longirostre, Long-billed Thrasher\n\nToxostoma bendirei, Bendire\u2019s Thrasher\n\nToxostoma curvirostre, Curve-billed Thrasher\n\nToxostoma redivivum,", + " California Thrasher\n\nToxostoma crissale, Crissal Thrasher\n\nToxostoma lecontei, Le Conte\u2019s Thrasher\n\nMelanotis caerulescens, Blue Mockingbird\n\nMargarops fuscatus, Pearly-eyed Thrasher\n\nFamily STURNIDAE\n\nSturnus philippensis, Chestnut-cheeked Starling\n\nSturnus cineraceus, White-cheeked Starling\n\nFamily PRUNELLIDAE\n\nPrunella montanella, Siberian Accentor\n\nFamily MOTACILLIDAE\n\nMotacilla tschutschensis,", + " Eastern Yellow Wagtail\n\nMotacilla citreola, Citrine Wagtail\n\nMotacilla cinerea, Gray Wagtail\n\nMotacilla alba, White Wagtail\n\nAnthus trivialis, Tree Pipit\n\nAnthus hodgsoni, Olive-backed Pipit\n\nAnthus gustavi, Pechora Pipit\n\nAnthus cervinus, Red-throated Pipit\n\nAnthus rubescens, American Pipit\n\nAnthus spragueii, Sprague\u2019s Pipit\n\nFamily BOMBYCILLIDAE\n\nBombycilla garrulus, Bohemian Waxwing\n\nBombycilla cedrorum,", + " Cedar Waxwing\n\nFamily PTILOGONATIDAE\n\nPtilogonys cinereus, Gray Silky-flycatcher\n\nPhainopepla nitens, Phainopepla\n\nFamily PEUCEDRAMIDAE\n\nPeucedramus taeniatus, Olive Warbler\n\nFamily CALCARIIDAE\n\nCalcarius lapponicus, Lapland Longspur\n\nCalcarius ornatus, Chestnut-collared Longspur\n\nCalcarius pictus, Smith\u2019s Longspur\n\nRhynchophanes mccownii, McCown\u2019s Longspur\n\nPlectrophenax nivalis, Snow Bunting\n\nPlectrophenax hyperboreus,", + " McKay\u2019s Bunting\n\nFamily PARULIDAE\n\nVermivora bachmanii, Bachman\u2019s Warbler\n\nVermivora cyanoptera, Blue-winged Warbler\n\nVermivora chrysoptera, Golden-winged Warbler\n\nOreothlypis peregrina, Tennessee Warbler\n\nOreothlypis celata, Orange-crowned Warbler\n\nOreothlypis ruficapilla, Nashville Warbler\n\nOreothlypis virginiae, Virginia\u2019s Warbler\n\nOreothlypis crissalis, Colima Warbler\n\nOreothlypis luciae,", + " Lucy\u2019s Warbler\n\nOreothlypis superciliosa, Crescent-chested Warbler\n\nParula americana, Northern Parula\n\nParula pitiayumi, Tropical Parula\n\nDendroica petechia, Yellow Warbler\n\nDendroica pensylvanica, Chestnut-sided Warbler\n\nDendroica magnolia, Magnolia Warbler\n\nDendroica tigrina, Cape May Warbler\n\nDendroica caerulescens, Black-throated Blue Warbler\n\nDendroica coronata, Yellow-rumped Warbler\n\nDendroica nigrescens,", + " Black-throated Gray Warbler\n\nDendroica chrysoparia, Golden-cheeked Warbler\n\nDendroica virens, Black-throated Green Warbler\n\nDendroica townsendi, Townsend\u2019s Warbler\n\nDendroica occidentalis, Hermit Warbler\n\nDendroica fusca, Blackburnian Warbler\n\nDendroica dominica, Yellow-throated Warbler\n\nDendroica graciae, Grace\u2019s Warbler\n\nDendroica adelaidae, Adelaide\u2019s Warbler\n\nDendroica pinus, Pine Warbler\n\nDendroica kirtlandii,", + " Kirtland\u2019s Warbler\n\nDendroica discolor, Prairie Warbler\n\nDendroica palmarum, Palm Warbler\n\nDendroica castanea, Bay-breasted Warbler\n\nDendroica striata, Blackpoll Warbler\n\nDendroica cerulea, Cerulean Warbler\n\nDendroica angelae, Elfin-woods Warbler\n\nMniotilta varia, Black-and-white Warbler\n\nSetophaga ruticilla, American Redstart\n\nProtonotaria citrea, Prothonotary Warbler\n\nHelmitheros vermivorum,", + " Worm-eating Warbler\n\nLimnothlypis swainsonii, Swainson\u2019s Warbler\n\nSeiurus aurocapilla, Ovenbird\n\nParkesia noveboracensis, Northern Waterthrush\n\nParkesia motacilla, Louisiana Waterthrush\n\nOporornis formosus, Kentucky Warbler\n\nOporornis agilis, Connecticut Warbler\n\nOporornis philadelphia, Mourning Warbler\n\nOporornis tolmiei, MacGillivray\u2019s Warbler\n\nGeothlypis trichas, Common Yellowthroat\n\nGeothlypis poliocephala,", + " Gray-crowned Yellowthroat\n\nWilsonia citrina, Hooded Warbler\n\nWilsonia pusilla, Wilson\u2019s Warbler\n\nWilsonia canadensis, Canada Warbler\n\nCardellina rubrifrons, Red-faced Warbler\n\nMyioborus pictus, Painted Redstart\n\nMyioborus miniatus, Slate-throated Redstart\n\nEuthlypis lachrymosa, Fan-tailed Warbler\n\nBasileuterus culicivorus, Golden-crowned Warbler\n\nBasileuterus rufifrons, Rufous-capped Warbler\n\nIcteria virens, Yellow-breasted Chat\n\nFamily THRAUPIDAE\n\nNesospingus speculiferus,", + " Puerto Rican Tanager\n\nSpindalis zena, Western Spindalis\n\nSpindalis portoricensis, Puerto Rican Spindalis\n\nFamily EMBERIZIDAE\n\nSporophila torqueola, White-collared Seedeater\n\nTiaris olivaceus, Yellow-faced Grassquit\n\nTiaris bicolor, Black-faced Grassquit\n\nLoxigilla portoricensis, Puerto Rican Bullfinch\n\nArremonops rufivirgatus, Olive Sparrow\n\nPipilo chlorurus, Green-tailed Towhee\n\nPipilo maculatus, Spotted Towhee\n\nPipilo erythrophthalmus,", + " Eastern Towhee\n\nAimophila ruficeps, Rufous-crowned Sparrow\n\nMelozone fusca, Canyon Towhee\n\nMelozone crissalis, California Towhee\n\nMelozone aberti, Abert\u2019s Towhee\n\nPeucaea carpalis, Rufous-winged Sparrow\n\nPeucaea botterii, Botteri\u2019s Sparrow\n\nPeucaea cassinii, Cassin\u2019s Sparrow\n\nPeucaea aestivalis, Bachman\u2019s Sparrow\n\nSpizella arborea, American Tree Sparrow\n\nSpizella passerina, Chipping Sparrow\n\nSpizella pallida,", + " Clay-colored Sparrow\n\nSpizella breweri, Brewer\u2019s Sparrow\n\nSpizella pusilla, Field Sparrow\n\nSpizella wortheni, Worthen\u2019s Sparrow\n\nSpizella atrogularis, Black-chinned Sparrow\n\nPooecetes gramineus, Vesper Sparrow\n\nChondestes grammacus, Lark Sparrow\n\nAmphispiza quinquestriata, Five-striped Sparrow\n\nAmphispiza bilineata, Black-throated Sparrow\n\nAmphispiza belli, Sage Sparrow\n\nCalamospiza melanocorys, Lark Bunting\n\nPasserculus sandwichensis,", + " Savannah Sparrow\n\nAmmodramus savannarum, Grasshopper Sparrow\n\nAmmodramus bairdii, Baird\u2019s Sparrow\n\nAmmodramus henslowii, Henslow\u2019s Sparrow\n\nAmmodramus leconteii, Le Conte\u2019s Sparrow\n\nAmmodramus nelsoni, Nelson\u2019s Sparrow\n\nAmmodramus caudacutus, Saltmarsh Sparrow\n\nAmmodramus maritimus, Seaside Sparrow\n\nPasserella iliaca, Fox Sparrow\n\nMelospiza melodia, Song Sparrow\n\nMelospiza lincolnii,", + " Lincoln\u2019s Sparrow\n\nMelospiza georgiana, Swamp Sparrow\n\nZonotrichia albicollis, White-throated Sparrow\n\nZonotrichia querula, Harris\u2019s Sparrow\n\nZonotrichia leucophrys, White-crowned Sparrow\n\nZonotrichia atricapilla, Golden-crowned Sparrow\n\nJunco hyemalis, Dark-eyed Junco\n\nJunco phaeonotus, Yellow-eyed Junco\n\nEmberiza leucocephalos, Pine Bunting\n\nEmberiza chrysophrys, Yellow-browed Bunting\n\nEmberiza pusilla,", + " Little Bunting\n\nEmberiza rustica, Rustic Bunting\n\nEmberiza elegans, Yellow-throated Bunting\n\nEmberiza aureola, Yellow-breasted Bunting\n\nEmberiza variabilis, Gray Bunting\n\nEmberiza pallasi, Pallas\u2019s Bunting\n\nEmberiza schoeniclus, Reed Bunting\n\nFamily CARDINALIDAE\n\nPiranga flava, Hepatic Tanager\n\nPiranga rubra, Summer Tanager\n\nPiranga olivacea, Scarlet Tanager\n\nPiranga ludoviciana, Western Tanager\n\nPiranga bidentata,", + " Flame-colored Tanager\n\nRhodothraupis celaeno, Crimson-collared Grosbeak\n\nCardinalis cardinalis, Northern Cardinal\n\nCardinalis sinuatus, Pyrrhuloxia\n\nPheucticus chrysopeplus, Yellow Grosbeak\n\nPheucticus ludovicianus, Rose-breasted Grosbeak\n\nPheucticus melanocephalus, Black-headed Grosbeak\n\nCyanocompsa parellina, Blue Bunting\n\nPasserina caerulea, Blue Grosbeak\n\nPasserina amoena, Lazuli Bunting\n\nPasserina cyanea,", + " Indigo Bunting\n\nPasserina versicolor, Varied Bunting\n\nPasserina ciris, Painted Bunting\n\nSpiza americana, Dickcissel\n\nFamily ICTERIDAE\n\nDolichonyx oryzivorus, Bobolink\n\nAgelaius phoeniceus, Red-winged Blackbird\n\nAgelaius tricolor, Tricolored Blackbird\n\nAgelaius humeralis, Tawny-shouldered Blackbird\n\nAgelaius xanthomus, Yellow-shouldered Blackbird\n\nSturnella magna, Eastern Meadowlark\n\nSturnella neglecta,", + " Western Meadowlark\n\nXanthocephalus xanthocephalus, Yellow-headed Blackbird\n\nEuphagus carolinus, Rusty Blackbird\n\nEuphagus cyanocephalus, Brewer\u2019s Blackbird\n\nQuiscalus quiscula, Common Grackle\n\nQuiscalus major, Boat-tailed Grackle\n\nQuiscalus mexicanus, Great-tailed Grackle\n\nQuiscalus niger, Greater Antillean Grackle\n\nMolothrus bonariensis, Shiny Cowbird\n\nMolothrus aeneus, Bronzed Cowbird\n\nMolothrus ater,", + " Brown-headed Cowbird\n\nIcterus portoricensis, Puerto Rican Oriole\n\nIcterus wagleri, Black-vented Oriole\n\nIcterus spurius, Orchard Oriole\n\nIcterus cucullatus, Hooded Oriole\n\nIcterus pustulatus, Streak-backed Oriole\n\nIcterus bullockii, Bullock\u2019s Oriole\n\nIcterus gularis, Altamira Oriole\n\nIcterus graduacauda, Audubon\u2019s Oriole\n\nIcterus galbula, Baltimore Oriole\n\nIcterus parisorum, Scott\u2019s Oriole\n\nFamily FRINGILLIDAE\n\nSubfamily FRINGILLINAE\n\nFringilla coelebs,", + " Common Chaffinch\n\nFringilla montifringilla, Brambling\n\nSubfamily EUPHONIINAE\n\nEuphonia musica, Antillean Euphonia\n\nSubfamily CARDUELINAE\n\nLeucosticte tephrocotis, Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch\n\nLeucosticte atrata, Black Rosy-Finch\n\nLeucosticte australis, Brown-capped Rosy-Finch\n\nPinicola enucleator, Pine Grosbeak\n\nCarpodacus erythrinus, Common Rosefinch\n\nCarpodacus purpureus,", + " Purple Finch\n\nCarpodacus cassinii, Cassin\u2019s Finch\n\nCarpodacus mexicanus, House Finch\n\nLoxia curvirostra, Red Crossbill\n\nLoxia leucoptera, White-winged Crossbill\n\nAcanthis flammea, Common Redpoll\n\nAcanthis hornemanni, Hoary Redpoll\n\nSpinus spinus, Eurasian Siskin\n\nSpinus pinus, Pine Siskin\n\nSpinus psaltria, Lesser Goldfinch\n\nSpinus lawrencei, Lawrence\u2019s Goldfinch\n\nSpinus tristis, American Goldfinch\n\nChloris sinica,", + " Oriental Greenfinch\n\nPyrrhula pyrrhula, Eurasian Bullfinch\n\nCoccothraustes vespertinus, Evening Grosbeak\n\nCoccothraustes coccothraustes, Hawfinch\n\nSubfamily DREPANIDINAE\n\nTelespiza cantans, Laysan Finch\n\nTelespiza ultima, Nihoa Finch\n\nPsittirostra psittacea, Ou\n\nLoxioides bailleui, Palila\n\nPseudonestor xanthophrys, Maui Parrotbill\n\nHemignathus virens,", + " Hawaii Amakihi\n\nHemignathus flavus, Oahu Amakihi\n\nHemignathus kauaiensis, Kauai Amakihi\n\nHemignathus ellisianus, Greater Akialoa\n\nHemignathus lucidus, Nukupuu\n\nHemignathus munroi, Akiapolaau\n\nMagumma parva, Anianiau\n\nOreomystis bairdi, Akikiki\n\nOreomystis mana, Hawaii Creeper\n\nParoreomyza maculata, Oahu Alauahio\n\nParoreomyza flammea,", + " Kakawahie\n\nParoreomyza montana, Maui Alauahio\n\nLoxops caeruleirostris, Akekee\n\nLoxops coccineus, Akepa\n\nVestiaria coccinea, Iiwi\n\nPalmeria dolei, Akohekohe\n\nHimatione sanguinea, Apapane\n\nMelamprosops phaeosoma, Poo-uli ", + " Who We Are\n" + ], + "length": 26825, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 68, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Catherine Halsey, a character in the video game Halo, is a scientist and atheist who considers herself smarter than her parents. The same can be said of Patricia Dickson, a UCLA associate professor of pediatrics\u2014and she claims that's no coincidence. Dickson, who had a romantically tinged friendship with Halo creator Jason Jones when they were both students at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, tells the Los Angeles Times she's the inspiration behind Halsey and other aspects of the game. Her reasoning: She says she once told Jones she felt like the character Halsey in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, as well as gave him the idea for an alien invasion triggered by religion. Jones denies her claim, but Dickson insists that some similarities are too exact to be accidental. In her college dorm, for example, was a snow globe and a Matterhorn-shaped piggy bank; the Halsey character has a snow globe of the Matterhorn. That leaves Dickson convinced she was Jones' muse, though she says she wants nothing from him. Rather, she says she's speaking out to lend credence to the idea of repressed memories. For 23 years, Dickson says she repressed various conversations with Jones, including one in 1992 in which Jones allegedly told her she inspired two of his video game characters. It was during that conversation that Dickson says she realized Jones was only using her. \"I shut down at that point and had a panic attack,\" she says. She notes the memories only resurfaced through therapy last year.\n", + "docs": [ + "A brief friendship that began with an online chat and an awkward date may have inspired one of the world\u2019s best-selling video games.\n\nFor two decades, UCLA associate professor of pediatrics Patricia Dickson remembered nothing of her college flirtation with Jason Jones, who went on to create the sci-fi shooter \"Halo.\" But as memories Dickson said had been repressed flowed back in recent years, she has come to believe central ideas and characters in the entertainment franchise, including Dr. Catherine Halsey and the artificially intelligent assistant Cortana, reflect her preferences and personality.\n\nJones acknowledges his long-in-the-past relationship with Dickson, but denies her assertion that she served as his muse.", + " Through a spokesperson for Santa Monica\u2019s Activision Publishing, to which Jones reports, the media-shy video game luminary declined to comment further.\n\nThat leaves fans of the 16-year-old line of games, books and videos to decide whether to take Dickson, 44, at her word and where to fit her account in \u201cHalo\u201d lore. She says she's not seeking anything from Jones, who most recently has worked on the game \u201cDestiny.\u201d But in telling her story publicly for the first time, she wants to call attention to dissociative amnesia, a disorder she says erased specific memories and left her feeling unfulfilled after a falling-out with Jones.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s people who think repressed memories aren\u2019t a real thing,\u201d Dickson said.", + " \u201cI have a real concrete example, and I feel like I should say something.\u201d\n\nDickson and Jones both had just been dumped when the University of Chicago students connected online in January 1992. They bonded over their shared interest in Greek mythology. Her username was Ariadne, the overseer of the Labyrinth who helped Theseus defeat Minotaur; he had been working on the Macintosh computer game \u201cMinotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete.\u201d\n\nFrom left, Alex Seropian and Jason Jones, the founders of video game maker Bungie. Microsoft acquired the company in 2000. (Microsoft)\n\nJones,", + " a 20-year-old junior, asked Dickson, an 18-year-old freshman, on a date to the on-campus theater, where they saw the art house flick \u201cMy Own Private Idaho.\u201d Dickson saw potential for more dates; Jones wanted friendship.\n\nThey kept hanging out. When she told him she had been sexually abused as a child, Jones replied that he wanted to hurt the guy. She saw Jones as a protector, even if he wasn\u2019t her boyfriend.\n\nHe read her journal and probed with increasingly deeper questions.\n\n\u201cHe wanted to know everything about me,\u201d Dickson said.\n\nA friend even warned her that Jones might simply be using her for ideas.", + " But she kept going along.\n\nThose conversations must have been pivotal for him, she surmises. She can list things she said and things she showed him that appear in the \"Halo\u201d universe. Many aren\u2019t unique, yet taken together, she sees a pattern.\n\nA display for \"Halo 5: Guardians\" at a video game convention in Los Angeles. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)\n\nThough Dickson has never played \u201cHalo,\u201d she gleaned information watching YouTube gameplay clips and reading four associated novels. Jones and colleagues provided a few seeds for the books. (Lead author Eric Nylund said the attributes of the Halsey character were \u201cmade up.\u201d)\n\nIn college,", + " Dickson thought Jones was doing homework when he revealed alien drawings one day and asked her to explain why the creatures would attack Earth. He regarded her reply of \u201cfood\u201d unsatisfactory.\n\n\u201c\u2018I need something. Come on Patti,\u2019\u201d she recalls him saying. \u201cThe only thing I could think of was a teacher in my school said organized religion was the reason for bad things in the world, so I said organized religion.\u201d\n\nHe hugged her. In the game, a religiously driven band of extraterrestrials wipes through humanity.\n\nHalsey serves as engineer for the human fighters in the game. Her name \u2014 found in Ayn Rand \u2019s \u201cThe Fountainhead\u201d \u2014 perhaps came into \u201cHalo\u201d because Jones borrowed her copy of the book.", + " Dickson says she later told Jones, as he began to fawn over another student, that she felt like Halsey, a jilted lover in the book. Halsey's physical features and scientific pursuits fit with the dreams she remembers sharing with Jones.\n\nThe connections went on:\n\nHer: Messy dorm desk with cold cups of coffee. Halsey: Days-old coffee on a desk scattered with papers.\n\nHer: Snow globe of New York City on the desk and a Matterhorn-shaped piggy bank on a friend\u2019s desk. Halsey: A snow globe of the Matterhorn.\n\nHer: Gave him a Rachmaninoff classical music tape.", + " Halsey: Listens to the same concerto.\n\nHer: Favorite numbers were 7 and 11. Halsey: Assists the main character, Master Chief John 11-7. (Jones said 7-11 reminds too much of the store, Dickson recalled.)\n\nHer: Favorite goddess is Athena, born from the head of Zeus. Halsey: Gives birth from her brain to Cortana.\n\nHer: Atheist raised in private school who considered herself more intelligent than her parents. Halsey: Atheist, went to elite academy and smarter than her parents.\n\nDickson forgot about the late-night chats in the dorm that spring for 23 years.\n\nBy the fall of 1992,", + " they had grown estranged as Jones showed romantic interest in a different woman. Their last connection came in the quad. It was there, in a conversation he started with \u201cYou look good,\u201d that she now remembers Jones saying that he shaped two key video game characters in her image.\n\n\u201cI felt used,\u201d she said. \u201cI said stop talking about the video game \u2014 I want to hear about whether you want to date me. I was totally confused.\u201d\n\nDickson remembers him pleading with her to stay with him, that he needed his muse.\n\n\u201cHe was willing to \u2014 I don\u2019t know what \u2014 to get me to help him with his game,\u201d she said.", + " \u201cI shut down at that point and had a panic attack. I just left.\u201d\n\nHe was someone she saw as a hero; someone she expected to stand up for her. She felt used.\n\nThe end of their friendship was so traumatic to her that she said she compartmentalized it \u2014 forgetting all those details until she returned to campus in 2015.\n\nHer grandfather had died that spring and her passion for science had fizzled. All this sat on her mind. But passing her old dorm, she felt compelled to Google \u201cHalo\u201d as soon as she got home.\n\nAn attendee wears the helmet of Master Chief from the \"Halo\"", + " franchise during a Microsoft at the Galen Center in Los Angeles in June. ( Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images)\n\nIt\u2019s not as if she didn\u2019t know \u201cHalo\u201d was a big game, or that she forgot knowing its creator. Around 2004, she congratulated Jones on his success in a letter.\n\nBut her apparent ties to the game didn\u2019t surface in her thoughts until going through therapy last year.\n\nShe learned that the psychological toll from childhood abuse had gone unhealed. Suffering betrayal and severely adverse childhood experiences are associated with unrealized gaps in memory, said Dr. Richard J. Loewenstein,", + " medical director at Sheppard Pratt Health System and clinical professor at University of Maryland. He hasn\u2019t worked with Dickson.\n\n\u201cWhen you\u2019re missing these important memories, it takes away your sense of self,\u201d he said. \u201cIt causes people to feel they are governed by things inside them that they are not in touch with. It may affect their relationships or cause addictions.\u201d\n\nSplitting with Jones, Dickson says, triggered indefinite amnesia of key personal events, which is an issue common among soldiers and others thrust into stressful situations.\n\n\u201cThe therapy is helping me push through emotions instead of pushing them aside,\u201d Dickson said. \u201cBeing able to share my story is a way to put the pieces back together.\u201d\n\nShe contacted old acquaintances from college,", + " including Emese Kalnoki, who gave credence to her story. Kalnoki said she would often hang with cowboy-boot-wearing Jones and other \u201cnerdy friends\u201d at Garbage Pizza. And she recalls Jones dedicating a game to her and Dickson.\n\nJones hasn\u2019t replied to two additional letters that Dickson mailed to Jones\u2019 office in the last 18 months. But in hindsight she says she harbors no ill will.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t think that he treated with me anything other than complete respect,\u201d said Dickson, who researches rare diseases as chief of medical genetics at Harbor-UCLA\u2019s pediatrics department. \u201cIt\u2019s a beautiful idea that \u2018Halo\u2019 happened because a boy wanted to protect a girl.\u201d\n\nSupport our journalism Already a subscriber?", + " Thank you for your support. If you are not, please consider subscribing today. Get full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks.\n\nparesh.dave@latimes.com / PGP\n\nTwitter: @peard33\n\nALSO\n\nSanta Monica couple fights Snapchat over 'geofilter' trademark\n\nVideo-game-loving millennials, theme parks are making these attractions just for you\n\nHistorical accuracy, not a diversity push, brought 'Battlefield' playable female characters ", + " From Halopedia, the Halo wiki\n\n\"For a long time I had thought that we had to sacrifice a few for the good of the entire human race. I have killed and maimed and caused a great deal of suffering to many people\u2014all in the name of self-preservation. But now I'm not sure that philosophy has worked out too well. I should have been trying to save every single human life\u2014no matter what it cost.\" \u2014 Catherine Halsey to John-117 regarding her changed views.[5]\n\nCatherine Elizabeth Halsey, MD, PhD, (Civilian Consultant 409871, phonetically identified as \"Charlie Hotel\"),[", + "6] is a key scientific adviser of the Office of Naval Intelligence, best known for her work with the SPARTAN-II program, developing and creating smart AIs, and for overseeing the development of the MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor. She served as a scientific adviser for ONI from 2515 to 2522, when she was made chief scientist,[7] a position she held until the end of the Human-Covenant War.[8]\n\nHalsey held considerable authority within ONI, despite being a civilian, and commanded respect from important military figures.[9] Though generally well-regarded among her peers, she endured intense personal guilt for condemning the Spartans to the life of a super soldier.", + " After the Covenant War, Dr. Halsey was stripped of her position, incarcerated, and treated as a war criminal by the UNSC at large, which led to her apparent defection to Jul 'Mdama's splinter Covenant faction.[10] After almost a year among the enemy, she was recaptured by the UNSC and commissioned to work on urgent scientific matters, particularly concerning the rise of the Guardians.[11]\n\nBiography [ edit ]\n\nEarly life and education [ edit ]\n\n\"The Office of Naval Intelligence had apparently had their eye on me for years and knew that the only way to convince me to join them was to get me to convince me.", + " It worked. I joined.\" \u2014 Catherine Halsey recalls her recruitment by ONI in her journal.[12]\n\n[13] This self-portrait was sketched by Halsey at the age of eighteen, just a few months after she began her work on Reach.\n\nCatherine Elizabeth Halsey was born on March 19, 2492 within the colony of Endymion's coastal city of Port Vernon.[1] While an impressionable young child her father recited to her every adventurous tale of L. Frank Baum's Oz[14] As an adolescent she was smarter than her parents and was continually reading, learning, and talking,", + " being eager to share her knowledge with anyone who would listen.[15] At a young age, she was sent to the elite academy Endymion Gifted, where she continued to defy educatory standards. She was eventually afforded a trip to Circumstance in 2501 from the Dean of Biological Science at Koletre-Browning University, who completely funded her education until the completion of her second doctoral thesis sometime after her fifteenth birthday in 2507.[1] While working on that second thesis, Halsey learned various line commands, long discarded and forgotten due to their archaic nature, with which she could interact with computer programs.[16]\n\nIn 2507,", + " while still a doctoral candidate, Halsey met Doctor Elias Carver at an academic social mixer and couldn't resist correcting his obsolete algorithm implementation when she heard him describing the matrix mechanics of the socio-economic and politico-economic vectors of human expansion.[12] She outlined a corrective matrix calculation to him which revised his dimensional parameters so that the sixteen dimensions were used rather than seven. Doctor Carver did not appreciate being challenged by someone he saw as a young upstart, but her words seemingly caused Captain Michael Stanforth of the United Nations Space Command's Office of Naval Intelligence to take note of her. Three weeks later, a grant she had proposed for using artificial intelligences to control N-dimensional matrices was green-lit by the UNSC,", + " with its funding contingent on the successful testing of a model of its choosing. Naturally, it was Carver's model which she was directed to test. Halsey knew his flawed model would produce flawed results, so she ran her sixteen dimensional variant as a control in addition to his seven-dimensional version. Carver's model predicted a breakdown of social order in the Outer Colonies within twenty years unless strict governmental control was established, reinforced by an immediate and permanent military presence. Catherine ran more then fourteen hundred simulations during this time, varying every parameter, and even in the best-case scenario it was clear to her that the Outer Colonies at large would rebel against the Unified Earth Government soon.", + " She determined that at a minimum, the resulting conflict would lead to thirty years of war and the deaths of five billion people. The maximum effect was unbounded and could involve interminable war and a new dark age for humanity. Halsey took her findings to Stanforth only to learn that ONI had already reached the same conclusion. The agency had been keeping an eye on her for years and it had been decided that in order to recruit her, she would need to convince herself that working with the agency was necessary to save the human race.[12] Ysionris Jeromi, who considered Halsey his star pupil at the time,", + " discouraged her from working with ONI.[17] Halsey, however, had no problem admitting that ONI's tactic had worked on her.[12] She allowed herself to be recruited in 2508 and in early 2510 she was brought to the Inner Colony of Reach and contracted to work as a civilian consultant on a number of classified projects.[1][13][18]\n\nSpartan origins [ edit ]\n\n\"There is an ancient saying, \"The beginning of wisdom is ignorance.\" So where do we begin to create the ultimate warrior? With innocence.\" \u2014 Halsey, writing in her journal, appropriates a quote of Benjamin Franklin's for her own ends.[19]\n\n[", + "1] At just twenty-two or twenty-three years old, Halsey became the youngest scientific advisor in ONI's history in 2515.\n\nAfter arriving at Reach Halsey spent few months were spent setting up the new laboratory afforded to her.For weeks prior to August 8, 2510 she found it impossible to concentrate due to the confluence of new insurgent reports, new ideas, and the constant supervision of ONI. At one point during this time she stopped at a local shop while coming from the main base where she was stationed and purchased a cup of coffee and a journal in which she could record her thoughts and research notes without having to fear them being read by anyone in ONI.", + " By August 8, the day on which she recorded her first entry in this journal, she had begun to undertake a project she had been simultaneously dreading, desiring, and being inspired by. By this point Catherine had already designed a number of intrusion algorithms that could be employed to bypass artificial intelligence -enhanced data recording and storage systems.By December 4 of that year Halsey's new lab was still unstaffed apart from herself and racks of A.I. matrices and optical routers were yet to be removed from their sealed crates.While sitting in the lab on this date Halsey endeavored to create her second entry in her journal,", + " recalling the series of events which had led her Reach and to be working for ONI. She ended the entry by asking how many lives would need to be spent to save all humanity and whether any price was too high to pay in order to ensure its security, resuming her work thereafter.On February 15, 2511, Doctor Halsey in her journal went over details of the ORION Project and recorded ways in which she believed its successor could improve on what it had accomplished.ORION had been designed to create a nontraditional force of soldiers in order to remove the budding dissident leadership in the Outer Colonies without massive carnage,", + " and to this end volunteers were recruited from the UNSC's Special Forces. Based on the failures documented surrounding the genetic augmentation and immunosuppressant administration provided to ORION candidates, Halsey determined that the most suitable candidates fur a future generation of augmented warriors would need to be prepubescent and possess more malleable and robust DNA structures and repair enzymes. In order to locate individuals with the improbable genetic criteria required, she calculated that thirty-nine billion DNA records would need to be screened. Halsey realized the Colonial Administration Authority's Outer Colony vaccination program possessed the largest DNA database at that time and resolved to recalibrate her selection criteria to find markers which would expedite the sifting process.", + " Additionally, she recognized that in order to mitigate the posttraumatic stress disorder and sympathy for the insurgents exhibited by many from ORION, total indoctrination would be required. She was opposed to the sort of brainwashing several of her counterparts in the intelligence community had suggested, noting instead that the mission of \" Generation-II ORION \" demanded at least a decade of training, persuasion and acclimation. Above all, she wrote, absolute control must be maintained over those chosen. It was clear to Halsey, based on these parameters, that children were ideal for this project. The ethical and moral implications of such an idea forced her to take extra time to think about this,", + " however.Just over a week later, on February 23, Halsey read the news about a nuclear terror attack at the Haven arcology on Mamore which left two million dead and millions more expected to die from the fallout.It was reported that the Freedom and Liberation Party was claiming responsibility and upon learning this Halsey became even more convinced than she already had been that sheto stop the violence in the Outer Colonies from escalating further.\n\nOn July 30, 2511 Halsey received test results for a new polymerized lithium niobocene.[22] The material had been developed for discharging the vast amount of static energy that plagued ships in slipstream space but Halsey was interested in its potential applications as a sheath or suit of artificial muscle for a Gen-II ORION soldier.", + " Though manufacturing an entire suit with it was cost-prohibitive at that point, Halsey mentioned in her journal on this date that Stanforth, now a vice admiral and the head of ONI Section Three, had assured her this would be addressed in the \"production phase\" of the project.[22][23] Given the scope, Halsey remained doubtful.[22] Additionally, although she believed there was a way to couple the polymerized lithium niobocene to a wearer's nerve inductions to increase reaction time and had created notes on the subject and stored them within the A.I. Jorjet, she had yet to solve the matter of the energy required for such a design.", + " She'd concluded a small nuclear or fusion reactor would need to be attached to the suit, which would be unwieldy, dangerous, and expensive.[22] On September 8, 2511 Halsey recorded in her journal that she had recently finalized the control parameters for a Fast Fourier transform X-ray 3D scan for mapping a brain's ionic density patterns that indicate individual links.[24] This meant that a deep stimulating scan could then cultivate growth linkages in a cloned brain, thereby allowing memories to be transferred for the first time. Complete human clones could feasibly now be produced that were indistinguishable from the individual they were based on.", + " The potential application of this breakthrough for ORION-II was obvious, and Halsey was of the mind that stealing children away and replacing them with clones would mean there would be no going back. By the time she updated her journal with this, she had already informed the vice admiral that they were ready to initiate the next phase of the project: candidate procurement. She had done this knowing that only a small fraction of the clones they produced could be expected to live a normal lifespan due to the amount of DNA base-pair errors rapid flash cloning of large volumes of tissue produced.[24]\n\nBy June 19, 2513, Doctor Halsey had settled on a new name for the project.[19]", + " Stanforth had seemed to hint that rechristening the project would serve to distance it from the failures of ORION. After having D\u00e9j\u00e0 and Jorjet give her a refresher on military history which produced a number of contenders, she decided \"SPARTAN\" best represented the project's aims. In order to honor the sacrifices made by the men and women of the original ORION effort, however, she opted to call the project \"SPARTAN-II\", preserving its status as the second iteration of that first effort.[19] In 2515, Halsey was officially named a scientific advisor for ONI.[1]\n\nCatherine Halsey:", + " \"We screen these subjects for certain genetic markers. Strength, agility, even predispositions for aggression and intellect. But we couldn\u2019t remote test for everything. We don\u2019t test for luck.\" Jacob Keyes: \"Luck? You believe in luck, Doctor?\" Catherine Halsey: \"Of course not. But we have one hundred and fifty test subjects to consider, and facilities and funding for only half that number. It\u2019s a simple mathematical elimination, Lieutenant. That child was one of the lucky ones\u2014either that or he is extraordinarily fast. Either way, he\u2019s in.\" \u2014 Doctor Halsey defends her peculiar means of testing John.[25]\n\nBy July 21,", + " 2517, Halsey had been provided with her own team, to which she delegated much of the responsibly for screening Outer Colonies candidates for SPARTAN-II.[26] She did this so it might be completed within a reasonable time frame and so that she could personally focus on processing those from a single region of space: Sector 4.[26] The children from this sector which met the criteria Halsey had identified in her original study had files assembled personally by her.[25] In total, one hundred and fifty subjects were to be considered. The Spartan-II program had only been granted facilities and funding for half that number,", + " however, so only seventy-five would ultimately be selected.[25] And even then, an ONI representative reminded Halsey that not all would make it through the augmentation procedures when the time came for that.[27] Vice Admiral Stanforth had agreed to lend Halsey a diplomatic shuttle called the Han, provided that she agreed to at least one naval officer accompanying her.[23] Halsey was given free reign to choose her attach\u00e9 and after reading through the file of one Lieutenant Junior Grade Jacob Keyes, she requested him based on his demonstrated ability to keep a secret. Keyes was then, without any explanation provided to him as to why,", + " assigned to pilot the Han, protect the doctor, and otherwise stay out of her way.[26][23] On July 21 Halsey wrote in her journal that she was considering recommending him for permanent reassignment to her staff.[26] The Han also came with its own dedicated artificial intelligence by the name of Toran.[26]\n\nHalsey was awakened from cryostasis alongside Keyes shortly after 0430 hours on August 17 while the Han was still in slipspace but set to emerge soon in the Eridanus system.[23] Giving not so much as an acknowledgement that they were both naked, Halsey simply climbed out of her tube and told the lieutenant to get cleaned up and dressed as she headed for the showers herself,", + " making it clear to Keyes that she was in charge. Halsey was already strapped into the navigator's couch and on the bridge and tapping in commands across four keypads when he joined her soon thereafter. The doctor welcomed him and asked that he be seated at the communication station to monitor channels when they reentered normal space. She then had Toran provide her with astronavigation maps of the system and asked if any planets between their current position and Eridanus II could be used to pick up a gravitational boost to let them arrive sooner. Additionally, in rapid succession she had the A.I. begin to play Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto Number Three,", + " begin a preburn warmup cycle for their fusion engines, and halt the rotation of the shuttle's central carousel section to conserve power. Toran obliged with each request and informed her they they would exiting slipspace in about five minutes, give or take three minutes. From the way Keyes was glancing at her, Halsey could tell he was impressed at her ability to put Toran through his paces so rigorously, so she asked if he had a question for her. In response he composed himself before inquiring as to the exactly what they were doing. Halsey told him that they were on a reconnaissance mission of sorts,", + " as they were heading to Eridanus II in order to observe a child whom she hoped would only be the first of many. She suggsted the junior lieutenant should just think of it as a UNSC-funded psychological study and then sternly told him that was exactly what he was to say it was to anyone who asked. The Han soon decelerated as it dropped out of slipspace near a gas giant and then began a hard burn, accelerating for sixty-seven seconds before arcing away from the planet. As soon as the boost was complete Toran informed the two humans that their ETA was forty-three minutes and three seconds. At this,", + " Halsey unlocked her harness and floated free. Just before they had dropped into normal space, Keyes had started to ask her if she knew how dangerous the Eridanus system was then and now she finally answered him in the affirmative. After stretching and strapping herself back into her couch, she reminded her escort that he was supposed to be monitoring their comms for that very reason. Catherine spent the next thirty minutes with her back to Keyes while she read over reports on her navigation screens. The Keyes eventually spoke up to candidly ask why he was there, and Halsey told him the truth about why she had selected him for the job.", + " She also assured him that though he may have rather been on the UNSC Magellan then, which now-rescinded orders had previously had him rotating to, the child they were traveling to observe could make all the difference for the ongoing struggle against the Insurrection. Once Toran announced they were approaching Eridanus II Halsey had him plot an atmospheric vector for the Luxor spaceport and ordered Keyes to make ready to land.[23]\n\nHalsey and Keyes made their way onto the campus of Elysium City's Primary Education Facility Number 119 under the guise of parents inspecting the school for their little girl.[25]", + " By 1130 hours they were watching children at play from the semi-shade of a canvas awning. Halsey, wearing a sundress and straw hat, urged the lieutenant to appear more relaxed and even tried to help by slipping her arm through his, but her efforts were in vain. It was Keyes, however, who first identified their subject, a six-year-old boy named John, after Halsey showed an image to him. John was atop a grassy hill at the end of the school's playground, engaged in a particularly vicious game of king of the hill. Halsey's first instinct was to point her data pad at the boy to record the incident for later study.", + " After glancing around to see that the only other adult present was marching an injured girl toward the nurse's office Halsey ordered Keyes to stay back and keep watch while she walked over to get a closer look at their boy. She stopped at four meters from the base of the hill and asked to speak with John, whom the other boys assumed must be in trouble. She led him to the edge of a nearby sandpit and asked his name, which he freely offered before holding out his hand to be shook. She asked what he was had been doing and John answered that he had been winning. Seeing that the boy was fond of games,", + " she produced a quarter and told him that if he could guess which side of the coin would be facing upwards when it landed after being flipped, he could keep it. She let it go but before it could hit the ground John snatched it out of the air and confidently declared \"Eagle!\" referring to the side of the quarter which was, indeed, facing up when he opened his hand. Assured he could keep the coin for himself, he asked if they could play again but Halsey told him that had been the only one she had. She told him he ought to go back to his friends and returned to the lieutenant, asking to make sure he had recorded the interaction.", + " He had, and after reviewing the footage Halsey sent it to Toran on the Han. She explained to Keyes that the one thing they couldn't test their candidates for remotely was luck, further clarifying that she meant her test as a simple way to eliminate half of the qualified children due to the budgetary constraints of the program. She remarked that John whether John was lucky or just extraordinarily fast, he had made the cut. Keyes still did not fully understand her interest in the child and said as much, to which she replied that she hoped he never would fully understand their purpose there.[25]\n\nAfter similar visits to multiple other children in Sector Four,", + " The Han took them to Dwarka, a harsh world still in the process of being terraformed.[28] The child to be considered there was an orphan by the name of Soren. The report Halsey had previously read indicated the boy had survived on his own for around three months following the deaths of his mother and stepfather. Halsey left Keyes aboard the Han and approached Soren alone at the place he was being cared for by this point. She asked him his name, but admitted she already knew what it was and only wanted to see if he'd be willing to tell her. He had not been, evidently being deeply distrustful of the doctor.", + " A pair of glasses Halsey wore allowed her to review holographic files on the lenses as she spoke to the boy, and as a result of his circumstances she chose to pursue a different strategy. She was as honest with him insofar as she told him she'd come to see him because she wanted to make him stronger, faster, and smarter than he could ever hope to be without her help. She also made sure he understood that if he chose to accept her offer, he would be faced with the hardest experiences he had yet\u2015even harder than what had happened after his parents died. Faced with the choice of leaving with Doctor Halsey or being placed in a foster home,", + " he quickly agreed to go with her. Halsey was able to convince the authorities that she was adopting the boy and bring him aboard the Han. There she showed Keyes the footage she'd recorded of their conversation. The lieutenant was uneasy with her decision to take then child then. Halsey was sure that Soren would be a good fit, however, and defended his acquisition by pointing out at least he had been warned concerning what lay ahead.[28]\n\nDr. Halsey looks over the profiles of the abducted children.\n\nHalsey and Keyes had returned to Reach by September 10 and it is on this date that Halsey told D\u00e9j\u00e0 to let others know she had settled on the final seventy-five subjects.[29]", + " Halsey was stationed in low Reach orbit when she gave final approval to kidnap the seventy-four which still remained to be acquired. Halsey later recorded a private spoken journal entry, using RED encryption and her private key, in which she voiced how regrettable she felt what she was doing was. She had planned to keep the recording private but changed her mind and just had D\u00e9j\u00e0 erase it entirely once she had finished.[29] On September 17 Halsey, writing in her journal, expressed that every child had exceeded the selection criteria and her own expectations.[30] She was particularly impressed by two: Number 058, a girl named Linda who had engineered her own intelligence network at school to spy on her teachers,", + " John (Number 117), who had won king of the hill forty-five times in the two weeks before their meeting. Halsey noted that Number 095, a boy by the name of Caleb, had never been located. Later that day Halsey added an addendum to her journal entry after Retrieval team Gamma reported that Number 087, a girl named Kelly, had remarkably eluded capture for six hours before coming forward on her own, having believed her capture attempt to be an elaborate game for her upcoming birthday. Gamma's report caused Halsey to ensure new retrieval protocols were implemented to prevent similar mistakes in the future.[30]", + " The next day, September 17, Catherine and Jacob Keyes finally parted company after months together. Halsey felt he was beginning to suspect there was more to their incursions than mere field observations so she requested that he be reassigned to the Magellan with a commission to full lieutenant both for his own protection and the protection of the program.[31][27] Once all the children had been collected D\u00e9j\u00e0 undertook a psychological evaluation of each and provided the results and her recommendations to Doctor Halsey.[27]\n\nBy 2300 hours on September 23 Halsey was standing on a platform at the center of an amphitheater far beneath the FLEETCOM military complex where her facilities were located.[27]", + " When D\u00e9j\u00e0 asked if she was ready to speak to the abducted children she told the A.I. she almost was but wished for her to summon Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez, the drill instructor who would be overseeing the trainees' physical training and hand-to-hand combat, to join her first. She directed Mendez to join her on the platform once he entered. D\u00e9j\u00e0 asked the doctor for her thoughts on the candidates' psychological evaluations and Halsey, while thanking her for their thoroughness, informed her she was forgoing her recommendation to lie to the children. Halsey argued that though the truth had its own risks, lying to the children about the circumstances of their kidnappings or even inducing memory loss could jeopardize the program's goals.", + " Before D\u00e9j\u00e0 could offer a response Halsey clicked her microphone and gave the command to bring the abductees in. Once all seventy-five were seated, she explained that per Naval Code 45812, they were thereby conscripted into SPARTAN-II. She said that they were to be the UEG's protectors and promised that here they would become the best they could be. She also informed them that they could not return to their homes or families. She closed by telling them to rest then, since their training would begin the next day. Halsey then instructed CPO Mendez to escort the trainees to their barracks to be fed and put to bed,", + " also advising that they be kept plenty busy the following day in order to keep them from thinking about what had just been done to them.[27] Before all the children could file out of the amphitheater one boy asked Halsey if they were there to stop everyone from fighting and killing each other.[27][32] Before the day was done Halsey noted in her journal that the first phase of the program's indoctrination was under way and that her team of ONI child psychologists was assuring her the children wouldn't even remember their names or families after just six months under Mendez' tutelage. Even so, she also wrote that she was working with D\u00e9j\u00e0 to continue indoctrination protocols and the candidates'", + " education.[32] On the fifth day of training, the children were given haircuts.[33] Halsey took note in her journal that Kelly-087 had clawed at and disarmed the master sergeant barber of his clippers before needing to be pinned down by three other attendants.[33]\n\nThis section needs expansion. You can help Halopedia by.\n\nThe'recruited' children were replaced with flash clones, all of whom died due to various neurological and physiological diseases that were the natural side effects of making an entire human flash clone. In the early stages of the program, Halsey attempted to cover up the program's use of flash clones,", + " both by withholding information from Admiral Margaret Parangosky and by using one of her AIs to cover fiscal evidence;[34][note 1] Parangosky eventually discovered the cloning scheme, which would contribute to Halsey's arrest by ONI decades later.[note 2]\n\nWith the assistance of Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez and the AI D\u00e9j\u00e0, she proceeded to train the Spartans. She supervised their augmentation procedures, combat training, and education, and studied the effects of the Spartan lifestyle on the children. She kept in close contact with them all throughout their lifetimes, from her base under Reach. To the minor annoyance of the Spartans,", + " Dr. Halsey was capable of identifying them even underneath heavy combat gear or their MJOLNIR armor, and used their first names to prove this time and again.\n\nMJOLNIR [ edit ]\n\nThis section needs expansion. You can help Halopedia by.\n\nAlpha Corvi II [ edit ]\n\nMain article: Battle of Alpha Corvi II\n\nCatherine Halsey: \"UNSC Command is pleased... But they still don't trust the Spartan-II project.\" Linda-058: \"So we noticed.\" Catherine Halsey: \"There is concern that your presence will negatively influence marine battle readiness. Luckily for you, Alpha Corvi II provides another chance for you to prove yourselves.\" \u2014 Doctor Halsey provides motivation for John,", + " Fred, Kelly, and Linda.[35]\n\n[36][37] Blue Team's actions on Alpha Corvi II were still not enough to endear Halsey's Spartans to the rest of the UNSC which knew about them, but they had more success in that regard a few months later\n\nOn December 3, 2525, Halsey met with Blue Team within the ready room assigned to it on the Persian Gate while still en route to the Alpha Corvi system.[35] She stated that seeing as they had had the past two days to get used to the idea, in their gut, that a Spartan fall in battle,", + " it was now time to put their grief aside. She told them that though they should honor that emotion, it would only be a hindrance to the upcoming fight they were sure to be sorely needed for. Lieutenant Commander Yao entered then and took it upon herself to brief the team on the Covenant's present attack on Alpha Corvi II. She explained the role Blue Team was to play in the defense of Jamshid, the planet's largest city, but then left the remainder of the briefing to Halsey. Once Yao had left, Halsey encouraged the four teens by letting them know the Mjolnir armor had performed better than had been hoped for during the engagement at Chi Ceti IV and that much of that had been due to their operating skills.", + " And though she could say that UNSC Command was pleased, she reminded them that the Spartan-II project still wasn't trusted and that there was especially concern that their presence could negatively influence marine battle readiness. Luckily for them, she offered, Alpha Corvi II just provided another chance for them to prove themselves. Once an A.I. aboard the Persian Gate named Nora provided Doctor Halsey with updated medical scans for each member of Blue Team, she confirmed with John that he was well enough to fight. She also asked whether he would tell her if he wasn't to which he simply said that she'd find out if that ever happened. Taking her leave,", + " she instructed the Spartans to suit up as they'd be exiting slipspace within thirty minutes. She later rejoined them after they'd arrived at the colony to see them off. During the Spartans' insertion via D77-TC Pelican, she remained in contact with them and let them know that while their first priorities were the neutralization of the enemy and the defense of Black Reef, a mining settlement they'd ben redirected to after the Persian Gate was contacted by the ground, she also wanted them to try to find out why the aliens were targeting it specifically. She asked that they pay attention to the enemies' tactics, unit composition,", + " weapons. As the craft drew near its landing zone, she closed by telling the four of them not to expect any help from marines on the ground, as Command didn't want the two groups interacting.[35]\n\nOver the course of the engagement that ensued on the surface, Blue Team followed a group of Covenant within the mines beneath Black Reef and contact was eventually lost with them.[38] Yao was anxious to know what the Spartans were doing and was also overly concerned that they wouldn't be able to escape back to the surface, seeing as the mine entrance they'd entered through had been blown up. Halsey confidently asserted, however,", + " that they were just following their orders and that their resourcefulness should not be underestimated. As the fighting wore on, both planetside and in orbit, the probabilities of both tactical victory and survival of the UNSC fleet began to decrease sharply. At the recommendation of Nora, Yao ordered a general evacuation order for all UNSC personnel on the surface and also ordered for Blue Team to be located so they could provide extraction coordinates. Halsey asked that one Pelican be set aside specifically for her Spartans but Yao just told her to ask again once they reestablished comm contact.[38] Blue Team was able to exit the mine by moving underwater toward the shore of the island Black Reef sat on.[36]", + " Yao, worried, inquired as to whether Mjolnir was designed for submarine operations, to which Halsey admitted it wasn't but surmised that her Spartans must be improvising. The Pelican Tango 807 collected the team and ferried it back to the Persian Gate and Halsey met the four of them as they exited. John was incensed that members of the United Rebel Front who had aided them against the Covenant were being left behind to die, but Halsey tried to make him understand that every fight will always involve some collateral damage and that the most important thing was that he got his team out.", + " She then pushed to find out if he had been able to ascertain what the Covenant had been looking for in the mines. The Persian Gate jumped from the system a short time later, leaving Alpha Corvi II to the aliens.[36]\n\nSILENT STORM [ edit ]\n\nThis section needs expansion. You can help Halopedia by.\n\nONI career [ edit ]\n\nDespite ONI's intentions to continue with the SPARTAN-II program, Dr. Halsey began having difficulty finding a suitably large number of candidates that fit her genetic and age profiles. Additionally, most of her budget was now being used to maintain the MJOLNIR armor in service.", + " Eventually, ONI discontinued the SPARTAN-II program, reassigned most of its personnel to other projects (such as the SPARTAN-III program, held secret from Halsey), relocated Halsey from her former workplace at Camp Hathcock to CASTLE Base,[39] and cut off her access to classified material. However, following the onset of the Human-Covenant War, her Spartans would prove themselves to be the most effective weapon the UNSC had against the Covenant. ONI's reticence vanished, her budget mushroomed overnight, and she was offered a corner office in Olympic Tower in New Alexandria. However,", + " Halsey decided to remain in CASTLE as a means of revenge against ONI, which would now have to spend half the day going through security checks.[40] Halsey was stationed primarily on the planet Reach throughout her decades of work for ONI. By 2551, she lived in the community of Csongr\u00e1d, near CASTLE Base.[41]\n\nAfter seven years spent as a scientific advisor, Halsey was made ONI's chief scientist on June 5, 2522.[1][42] Aside from her continued work on the SPARTAN-II and MJOLNIR projects, Halsey made huge contributions to many other ONI Section III projects,", + " including the creation and deployment of AI constructs. She supervised the creation of the template for third-generation smart AIs,[16] the first ones of which became operational in 2521.[39] For these AIs, she created a new series of intrusion routines known as the Illegal Entry Protocols and Counter-Illegal Entry Protocols, later nicknamed, (much to Halsey's chagrin), \"PIEs\" and \"C-PIEs\", respectively, after misspellings of their acronyms. These protocols were created in response to the UNSC's standardization of their computer systems which had left them vulnerable to attack by the conversely diverse insurgent software.", + " As an unplanned side effect, the protocols also enabled the AIs to defend UNSC operating systems from attack. Later, during the Human-Covenant War, the protocols were used to reverse-engineer Covenant technology, namely the Jackal shield gauntlet. These all proved to be important developments for the UNSC, and to the continued survival of mankind. During her career, she often clashed with Dr. Forester in regard to her theories on Slipstream space and AIs.[39]\n\nThroughout the decades, Halsey conducted significant research into new ways to extend the life of smart AI and expand their processing capabilities. She privately experimented on a smart AI \"triumvirate\", a set of three AI constructs arranged in parallel,", + " which could divide their algorithms and decide matters by majority vote. In 2547, after thoroughly researching the subject, she stole the decommissioned Slipspace drive of the UNSC Tripping Light, and conducted an experiment on building an abstract fractal in the eleven-dimensional spacetime of slipspace, in an attempt to create a virtually infinite processing matrix for AIs to inhabit. Though the test was ultimately a failure, the AI collective known as the Assembly saw the potential in the concept of residing permanently in the alternate space-time.[39][43] Halsey also designed the most recent model of AI matrix compiler used in the scanning of human brains to create smart AIs.", + " This particular compiler was still in use by 2557.[44]\n\nAfter first contact with the Covenant, Dr. Halsey accessed LCDR al-Cygni's ONI sloop Walk of Shame's data archive. During Dr. Halsey's investigation, she began researching the last conversations of the AI Mack, and his choice of misspelled Shakespeare during his last days of rampancy.[45]\n\nCapture and rescue [ edit ]\n\nIn 2544, Halsey was present on the colony world of Miridem when the Covenant attacked the planet. Spartan Sheila-065 was killed while securing Halsey's escape.", + " However, her evacuation transport was seized by the Covenant after she had already been cryonically frozen and she was taken aboard Resplendent Fervor, the flagship of the Covenant fleet.[46] A team of Spartan-IIs, consisting of John-117, Kelly-087, Fred-104, Solomon-069, and Arthur-079 were sent to rescue her with OF92 Booster Frames. Knowing Halsey's value to both the UNSC and the Covenant, Fleet Master Luro 'Taralumee planted decoys in several of the fleet's battlecruisers.\n\nWhile Solomon and Arthur were killed on the way, the remaining Spartans eventually found their way aboard Resplendent Fervor.", + " The Spartans fought through large numbers of Covenant forces, though Fred and Kelly were separated during the fight. John soon reached Halsey and rescued her from her cryotube, but the two were immediately stopped by Major Thel 'Lodamee. Halsey watched as John engaged the Elite in an energy sword duel. However, Fleet Master 'Taralumee detached the section of the ship they were in, retrieving 'Lodamee mid-fight via gravity lift, and jumped into Slipspace. Halsey and John entered an escape pod and were soon rescued, along with Fred and Kelly, by the stealth ship that had deployed the Spartans.", + " Aboard the stealth ship, Halsey comforted John as he swore not to lose another Spartan.\n\nSlipspace and A.I. research [ edit ]\n\nOn September 3, 2547 Halsey noted in her journal that following her inquiries regarding the assumptions of the mu-tensor calculation in Doctor Canterfeld's latest paper in I.C. Physical Review, Canterfeld had finally asked her for help with the areas of his research that were continuing to elude him.[47] He had responded to her inquiring by declaring that Shaw-Fujikawa space is \"literally slippery\" and then proceeding to explain why his assumptions were valid.", + " Halsey was glad to help him, as she could see that his theories about slipstream anomalies could lead to a number of innovations, such as those which would result in faster ships and more accurate jumps. Catherine was convinced that humanity needed such advantages to counter the Covenant's superior technologies, noting at the same time that she was starting to doubt the idea that their enemy possessed superior intelligence. In addition to the benefits aiding Canterfeld could bring to the war effort, Halsey also wondered if his contacts and support in the United Nations could effect a transfer for her. She chronicled her thoughts on the matter, questioning whether being permitted to devote herself to \"pure\"", + " research would cause her to lose sight of how many were depending on her. She concluded, that with so many trails of her studies converging at that moment she could not leave, even if she did view her work as a sort of burden, purgatory, or dharma, in spite of Admiral Stanforth's assertions regarding her \"destiny\". In the end, she wrote, it may be all that remains to her, having given up a normal life, her family, her Spartans, and even the \"illuminated entities\" which she said she had come to understand. She was certain she wouldn't be able to make Canterfeld understand why she had to refuse him,", + " sho she decided to just send him a note the following day.[47]\n\nThis section needs expansion. You can help Halopedia by.\n\nFall of Reach [ edit ]\n\nMain article: Fall of Reach\n\n\"We knew this day would come. They have found our fortress among the stars. The Covenant are on Reach. They will burn this planet, kill millions, and when Reach falls\u2014and fall it will\u2014there will be nothing left to stand between them and Earth. Yet, even in our darkest hour, hope remains. Now, who will protect it? Show me NOBLE Team.\" \u2014 Catherine Halsey during her discussion with Cortana about the plans for her safe delivery.\n\nIn 2552,", + " Halsey was researching various Forerunner discoveries made on Reach, including an excavation for an underground Forerunner facility beneath ONI's SWORD Base and artifacts discovered in Visegr\u00e1d by Professor Laszlo Sorvad, a civilian xenoarchaeologist in the employ of ONI, although her permanent private office remained in CASTLE Base.[40]\n\nDuring the opening stages of the Fall of Reach on July 26, 2552, Halsey was working on the excavation site beneath SWORD Base, when the facility came under attack by a Covenant corvette. After the destruction of the corvette, she called NOBLE Team to her laboratory for debriefing,", + " where she learned of the death of Professor Sorvad at the hands of a Sangheili Zealot survey team. After arguing with Carter-A259 over Noble's failure to apprehend the Elites' leader and Kat-B320's attempted access of restricted files, she learned of the nature of Sorvad's \"latchkey\" discovery, a way to decipher data found in the Forerunner complex beneath Sword Base. After dismissing NOBLE Team, she began the decryption process of the \"latchkey\" data in the Forerunner complex.\n\nOn August 3, Halsey split up Cortana, assigning her \"copy\"", + " to work on the decryption of the Forerunner data in the underground facility below Sword Base, while her other half would prepare for the Spartans' mission; Operation: RED FLAG. When the UNSC Iroquois arrived at Reach from Sigma Octanus on August 12, Halsey visited the ship. During her visit, Captain Keyes came to see her, and they discussed their daughter Miranda, the Keyes Loop, the Spartans and Operation RED FLAG. Later in the day, she visited Camp Hathcock to see John-117 after his debriefing. She was evidently working underneath SWORD Base when the facility was bombarded by the Covenant on August 14,[48]", + " although she survived the assault and later checked in her office in CASTLE Base to discuss the specifics of RED FLAG with Cortana on August 25.[40] Two days later, she met most of the remaining Spartan-IIs at the Reach FLEETCOM Military Complex in the briefing for RED FLAG.[39]\n\nHalsey hands Cortana's fragment to SPARTAN-B312.\n\nOn August 29, she was present in the first test of \"smart\" AI integration with MJOLNIR Mark V armor. Although John-117 and Cortana were nearly killed as a result of Colonel Ackerson's involvement, the test was ultimately successful.", + " After the test, Halsey sent an official protest, backed by Vice Admiral Michael Stanforth, to UNSC Burden of Proof, suggesting that Ackerson may have suffered a mental breakdown and recommended that he be taken into custody.[39] Later that day, Halsey returned to her work in the SWORD Base excavation and had NOBLE Team sent to SWORD Base with a pretext of orders to destroy the facility.[49]\n\nOnce NOBLE Team had arrived at SWORD, Halsey revealed Noble's true orders to them: to transport a package containing \"mankind's best chance for survival\" to the Halcyon-class cruiser Pillar of Autumn,", + " holding position in the Aszod ship breaking yards. After Noble's successful defense of her lab while she made the final preparations, she entrusted SPARTAN-B312 with the package: a fragment of the AI Cortana now uploaded with the information from the Forerunner facility, secured in an armored matrix. Once she made certain that Noble Six would deliver Cortana to the Autumn, she left for CASTLE Base under the escort of Jun-A266 while the remaining NOBLE Team members delivered Cortana's fragment to the Autumn.[49][39]\n\nRefuge under CASTLE Base [ edit ]\n\nAfter arriving at ONI's CASTLE Base,", + " Halsey volunteered to remain behind to ensure that all UNSC technology was secured from possible capture.[50] She initiated Operation: WHITE GLOVE, destroying several AIs to keep the Covenant from accessing UNSC databases. With expectations that the Covenant would glass the planet and knowledge that even if they didn't, she would be facing an entire army of Covenant ground forces, it was clearly an offer of sacrifice.\n\nHowever, this changed when Spartans Fred-104, Kelly-087, Vinh-030, Isaac-039, and Will-043 appeared at the entrance to CASTLE Base. With the firepower to potentially fight their way out,", + " the possibility of surviving CASTLE Base's destruction became available. She gave emergency aid to the Spartans for their injuries, but a data anomaly detected by her accompanying AI, Cortana's \"older sister\" Kalmiya, attracted Dr. Halsey's attention.\n\nThe data had been accessed by Araqiel, an AI that worked for Colonel Ackerson, one of Dr. Halsey's main competitors within ONI. After tracing the data access, Dr. Halsey stumbled across the AI, left behind by its master. Alerted by Halsey's intrusion, Araqiel began to threaten her; he went as far as telling her he would pressurize the room,", + " or fill it with narcozine gas if she did not cease. Instead, however, she typed in archaic line commands to access Araqiel's code directory and personal fail-safe, which she used to shut him down.[51] With Araqiel terminated, Halsey proceeded to read through Ackerson's files and discovered a number of things including the location of Onyx, evidence of the SPARTAN-III program and a map of the mining tunnels CASTLE base had been built upon. The latter particularly interested the Doctor as the file had been classified at X-Ray level, making the file abnormally important for ancient maps.", + " From this, she deduced that there was something of importance under the mountain.\n\nAssuming that at the very least these maps provided a backdoor, she chose to move the Spartans out of the base and into the mineshafts. She then triggered CASTLE Base's self-destruct mechanism and activated the fail-safe on Kalmiya, erasing her to prevent her from falling into Covenant hands. With the Spartans in tow, they moved into the mineshafts.\n\nOver the course of the next five days, the Spartans and Dr. Halsey searched the mines, looking for either an exit or what Dr. Halsey would dub \"the most important discovery of the millennium\". On the fifth day,", + " Fred discovered an entrance into a large Forerunner structure, and within, a spacetime-warping crystal. However, the acquiring of the crystal sent a spike of neutrino radiation, attracting the attention of the Covenant. Their location was now threatened by Covenant forces.\n\nFollowing a Covenant attack, Halsey and her team retreated into a hallway and sealed off the entrance, losing contact with Isaac and Vinh in the process. However, they quickly discovered that the hallway was a dead end. It is presumed that Halsey and the surviving Spartans remained stranded at this location for some time.\n\nEscape from Reach [ edit ]\n\nDr. Halsey's ONI memorial plaque.\n\nMain article:", + " Raid on Reach\n\n\"I'm tired of sacrificing others for the 'greater good'. It never stops, Cortana... and we're running out of people to sacrifice.\" \u2014 Halsey to Cortana before her departure to Onyx.[52]\n\nDays later, a group of Spartans, including John-117, rescued Dr. Halsey and the remaining Spartans and evacuated them from the Forerunner complex on Reach to the captured UNSC Gettysburg-Ascendant Justice. After escaping Reach, the group fled to the rebel base Eridanus Secundus in the Eridanus system's asteroid belt, where the Spartan's first mission had been in.", + " During the voyage, she successfully resuscitated the clinically dead Linda-058.[53]\n\nUnbeknown to the rest of the group, however, Halsey had her own agenda in mind. Examining Ackerson's files in CASTLE Base, she had concluded that the colonel had been conducting his own Spartan project which had been kept secret from her. Overcome by her guilt over the Spartan-II program and believing the war could not be won, she was determined to prevent any more Spartans from dying by taking all of them to safety.[54] Using coordinates from Ackerson's files, she planned to go to the classified planet Onyx and divert the remaining Spartan-IIs there under the guise of recovering Forerunner technology.", + " She sedated Kelly-087 and brought her aboard the rebel governor's spacecraft Beatrice, which she then stole and took into Slipspace. When asked by Admiral Whitcomb as to the reasons for her actions, she gave a simple UNSC code Three-Nine-Two, which meant that she was on a high priority mission.[55]\n\nBefore leaving, Dr. Halsey saw the necessity of destroying the Forerunner artifact, as it would emit a radiation flare alerting the Covenant to their presence each time they jumped into Slipspace and thus prevent the rest of the group from making it to Earth. She entrusted the Forerunner crystal to Corporal Locklear,", + " telling him to keep it safe, hidden, and to do whatever it took to keep it from falling into enemy hands. Soon after, the Corporal destroyed the crystal (just as Halsey had intended), although he died in the ensuing explosion. The Covenant later recovered a few fragments.[56]\n\nIn the aftermath of the battle, she was presumed dead by the Office of Naval Intelligence and honored, with other personnel, on a plaque at ONI Alpha Site. Some in ONI knew she had survived, though, and Director Parangosky later maintained this false declaration of death to be able to keep Halsey hidden from the public.\n\nOnyx [ edit ]\n\nMain article:", + " Onyx Conflict\n\nHalsey and Mendez inside Shield World 006.\n\nDr. Halsey and Kelly eventually arrived at Onyx, where they reunited with SCPO Mendez and eventually the remaining Spartan-IIs and the Spartan-IIIs, under attack by Onyx Sentinels. Contacting the ONI AI Endless Summer, she utilized Onyx's slipspace COM launcher and Cortana's slipspace transmission from Installation 05 as a carrier wave to send a message to Earth, in which she requested Lord Hood to send more Spartans to secure Forerunner technology on Onyx. She helped decipher the mystery of the planet.", + " Her relative expertise with Forerunner technology was vital to the survival of the UNSC forces on the planet, as she was able to interpret Forerunner glyphs when navigating the facility, guiding the Spartans to a map room, where Onyx was revealed to be a wholly artificial construct. She also learned how to employ the local translocation grid, allowing the humans to move across the megastructure while evading the Covenant forces that pursued them.\n\nHalsey gradually brought the group closer to the core of Onyx. At first, she tried to maintain secrecy about her intentions out of habit, until Kurt Ambrose confronted her about it. She admitted that she was not actually looking for Forerunner technology or weapons,", + " but rather the secret Forerunner shield world, which she believed to be equivalent to a bomb shelter, and would be capable of keeping the remaining Spartans safe to evade all current war and let them live to fight another day.[57] After the Spartans made a standoff against the Covenant in Onyx's core room antechamber she, along with Mendez, Blue Team, and the Spartan-III survivors, retreated inside the shield world known to the Forerunners as Shield World 006, which she correctly deduced to be a \"micro\" Dyson sphere, enclosed outside normal space-time within a slipspace bubble.[58]\n\nDr.", + " Halsey, Chief Mendez and the surviving Spartans explored the Dyson sphere for some time, coming across several Forerunner structures and a hangar full of Forerunner vessels. Halsey recognized the potential of scavenging the technology in these ships and using it to improve the precision of human slipspace drives, among many other advances that could be gleaned from artifacts across the shield world.[59]\n\nArrested [ edit ]\n\n\"My Spartans are humanity's next step \u2013 our destiny as a species. Do not underestimate them. But most of all, do not underestimate... him.\" \u2014 Halsey to her interrogator after her arrest.\n\nHalsey was interrogated many times after the war.\n\nHalsey and the others were eventually rescued from the shield world,", + " but Halsey was immediately arrested by Captain Serin Osman under CINCONI Admiral Margaret Parangosky's orders, for \"committing acts likely to aid the enemy\" by stealing the Beatrice, kidnapping Kelly-087 and telling Lord Hood to send more Spartans to Onyx\u2014all with the sole intention of hiding in the shield world until the war was over. Even though Halsey had provided the UNSC with new Forerunner technology as promised, the circumstances conveniently allowed Parangosky to finally carry out her personal vendetta against Halsey. Consequently, in March 2553, Parangosky detained Halsey on the newly established Ivanoff Station,", + " in orbit around Installation 03, and personally interrogated her, accusing Halsey of not informing her of the use of flash clones at the onset of the SPARTAN-II program.[note 2] As far as the public is concerned, Halsey was killed during the Fall of Reach until Parangosky,[60] (or her successor, Admiral Osman), decides otherwise.\n\nFollowing this she was treated as a war criminal and interrogated by many ONI personnel, as well as one mysterious individual who knew of the SPARTAN-II program but did not seem to be a Naval Intelligence operative.[61] Halsey told him the details of their creation just as she had told many before him,", + " responding to his accusations about the project's immorality. According to her, her actions were justified by the Covenant War, since without the Spartans' involvement it could have never been won. While the interrogator belittled the importance of the Spartan-IIs, going so far as to claim that they accomplished their victories because they lacked basic humanity, Halsey retained her confidence in their abilities, stating that her Spartans were \"humanity's next step\" and \"our destiny as a species\". To prove this, she predicted John-117, whom she firmly believed was alive, would return.[61]\n\nIn March 2553,", + " she was released from Ivanoff Station and was stationed aboard the UNSC Infinity, working on incorporating the newly discovered Forerunner technology to the ship,[62] including a working Forerunner slipspace drive discovered by the REAP-X department. After the Infinity participated in the Blooding Years, Dr. Halsey was approached by Black-Box, who requested her assistance in reintegrating a damaged fragment of himself into his core matrix. However, Halsey stated that she was unable to help him.[63] Halsey was returned to Ivanoff at the first opportunity by order of Admiral Parangosky. She was working on the station on December 15,", + " 2554, when the ONI scientists, whom she considered unqualified for their job, recovered the Forerunner device known as the Composer on Installation 03. Dr. Halsey was fascinated by the similarities between the artifact and the AI matrix compiler used by the UNSC to create smart AIs, particularly because the compiler was of her own design.[44]\n\nReturn to Infinity [ edit ]\n\n\"Life is too short. I will never learn all that exists in our own tiny galaxy, let alone the rest of the universe. And I so desperately want to know everything. But the UNSC acts like children at play in a sandbox.", + " Mistaking its edges for the limits of the world.\" \u2014 Catherine Halsey to Captain Thomas Lasky regarding her subterfuge.\n\nHalsey examines the recovered Forerunner artifact.\n\nHalsey was later returned aboard the Infinity during the ship's second expedition to the Forerunner shield world Requiem in 2558 as her unique expertise was required to study a mysterious Forerunner artifact. Parangosky sent Halsey a note in which she asked for her aid in the matter, appealing to her on a professional level to protect Infinity and its crew despite her less than ideal conditions.[64]\n\nMany of the crew had mixed feelings about bringing her aboard,", + " Sarah Palmer suspicious of her and feeling she might try to sabotage the ship, Thomas Lasky sharing her worries but feeling there was no choice. Halsey was unimpressed by the Spartan-IVs assigned to guard her, wryly questioning their competence and general attitude. Upon arriving on the Infinity aboard the prowler UNSC Aladdin, she demanded she be uncuffed before examining the artifact. With a few gestures from her, the artifact began reacting to her, she translating its actions as signs that she should examine the ship's engines. Upon doing so, her conclusion was that the artifact was \"communicating\" with multiple parts of the ship and transmitting to Requiem.", + " Some time later, she analyzed a Forerunner beam tower encountered by Fireteam Crimson in the location codenamed Two Giants.[65]\n\nHalsey discovering John-117 is alive.\n\nSometime later, she was escorted by Gabriel Thorne who volunteered to be her security while she continued her research on the Forerunner artifact. As Thorne questioned her about the SPARTAN-II program, she was contacted by an unknown person about the Prometheans.[66] When Fireteam Majestic brought back the \"Didact's Gift\", Halsey noted its design resembled an AI matrix. Upon activating it, it caused the screens in the lab to show memories of New Phoenix,", + " with one of those memories being the Forerunner artifact. Speculating that she had misinterpreted the translocation artifact's true nature, she proceeded to further examine it. Again, she was contacted by the unknown person through her data pad, who, unbeknownst to her, was Jul 'Mdama. Suspicious of who Halsey was communicating with, Sarah Palmer confiscated her data pad, and gave it to Lasky, who then ordered Halsey to be taken into custody.[67]\n\nAfter a short interrogation, Halsey was returned to her prison cell.[68] When Roland entered the cell to ask her questions,", + " Halsey took her chance and overrode Roland's protocol, allowing her to control him. Using his authority to be escorted to Lasky's office, Halsey accessed the data onboard Infinity to find out what had been kept from her about the Librarian, eventually finding that they had kept secret the return of John-117. Infuriated, Halsey contacted 'Mdama, informing that she had deduced he was her helper so that their alliance could free the Librarian. However, Roland was able to restore himself to his normal state and cut off the connection, and Halsey was promptly arrested. When Halsey was brought to Lasky,", + " she slapped the captain lividly, scolding him for not telling her John-117 was alive. The two were interrupted, however, when Promethean forces gained access to the interior of Infinity. Fending off the Prometheans with his Marines, Captain Lasky picked up Halsey and attempted to escort her to safety.[69]\n\nCapture and defection [ edit ]\n\nHalsey: \"The UNSC just tried to execute me. So you'll need to offer something other than idle threats if you want me to help you.\" Jul 'Mdama: \"What is it you desire?\" Halsey: \"That's easy,", + " Jul. I want revenge.\" \u2014 Halsey and 'Mdama make a deal aboard his flagship.\n\nLate in the attack, Halsey was kidnapped by a Promethean Knight and teleported to Requiem. When Admiral Serin Osman was informed of this abduction, she chose to finally enact Parangosky's wishes and ordered for Halsey's immediate termination. While Captain Lasky protested against this, instead sending Fireteam Majestic to rescue Halsey, Commander Palmer departed to carry out Osman's order.[70]\n\nDr. Halsey meets the Librarian, and learns of the Forerunner artifacts all over the galaxy.\n\nHalsey was then taken to the Librarian's Rest,", + " where Jul 'Mdama had her disable the shield previously erected during Doctor Glassman's attempts to access the shrine. As the shield deactivated, she quickly entered the beam of light being produced by the shrine, to 'Mdama's great anger.[70] There, she met the Librarian and was given the Janus Key, which gave the location of every Forerunner artifact in the galaxy. After taking the key, Halsey was returned to the shrine, where 'Mdama acquired one half of the artifact. The intervention of Palmer and Fireteam Majestic forced 'Mdama to retreat from the site with Halsey, but not before she threw the key's other half to Thorne.", + " During the firefight, however, Palmer managed to shoot Halsey in the shoulder.[71]\n\nHalsey fell unconscious due to her wound and was transported to a Covenant ship, where her left arm was amputated. Later, aboard the Song of Retribution, 'Mdama told Halsey that he should have killed her for betraying him, but Halsey replied that the UNSC had tried to kill her as well. She agreed to help the Covenant, ambiguously claiming that she wanted revenge.[72]\n\nThe Janus Key [ edit ]\n\nSarah Palmer: \"You're a traitor and a war criminal. That's all there is to it.\" Catherine Halsey:", + " \"It's awfully convenient for you to think of me that way\u2014isn't it, Palmer? You can't be that naive. You really think I could have pulled off everything I've been accused of without the full support of ONI? Of the entire UNSC? Consider the resources. The budgets. You think those decisions were made unilaterally? Whether it was a signed form or a wink\u2014they approved it all.\" \u2014 Halsey states ONI's hypocrisy\n\nHalsey and 'Mdama plot against the UNSC.\n\nBy March 2558, the UNSC Vociferous was put in charge of finding Halsey and 'Mdama.[73]", + " At some point on Requiem, Jul's forces had recovered a Forerunner artifact that would be able to communicate with the Forerunner-derived engine systems of Infinity, and therefore the artifact would be able to blockade the engines of Infinity and allow Jul to steal the other half of the Janus Key. On July 15, 2558, Halsey made a personal journal entry on her views of the Forerunners and recent events.[74] The next day, Jul's forces attacked Oban, a human colony in the midst of settlement, as advocated by Halsey. She believed that a bold move was the only way to attract Infinity.", + " After the attack failed, 'Mdama's lieutenants called for Halsey's head, however Jul seemingly defended her actions. After Infinity attempted to enter slipspace for Galileo II base, 'Mdama's Forerunner artifact forcefully brought it back into normal space and trapped the vessel in an uncharted system. Aboard a CCS-class battlecruiser, Halsey informed Jul that they did not need to attack the ship, as the crew of Infinity would now be willing to hand over the other half of the Janus Key directly.[74]\n\nAt Halsey's suggestion, 'Mdama had a fake Forerunner artifact placed in a Forerunner structure on the nearby Aktis IV.", + " As per Halsey's plan, Dr. Glassman and the Spartan-IVs of Infinity discovered the artifact and believed that it was related to the Janus Key. Halsey and Jul watched Glassman's investigation from Song of Retribution and Halsey revealed that she knew Jul's public persona was a mere fa\u00e7ade when 'Mdama expressed mock abhorrence at creating a copy of a \"holy\" Forerunner object. Meanwhile, Glassman requested for Infinity to deliver their half of the Janus Key to him on the planet's surface for further analysis. Anticipating this, Halsey ensured that 'Mdama had troops ready to ambush the UNSC convoy carrying their half of the Key.", + " Much to both Halsey's and 'Mdama's surprise, the Pelican carrying the half was shot down before he could give an order. In the confusion, the rest of the Covenant ambush group began the attack. Halsey insisted on personally searching the crash-site, but 'Mdama decided to scourge the crash-site himself, and he ordered Halsey to remain aboard his carrier. Unbeknownst to him, rebel Sali 'Nyon was responsible for shooting down the Pelican and he claimed half of the Janus Key for himself.[75]\n\nCovenant leader Jul 'Mdama and Doctor Catherine Halsey collaborate to find the Absolute Record.\n\nSome time after 'Mdama had left for the planet,", + " Halsey contacted him from the Song of Retribution and urged him to focus on the acquisition of the Janus Key rather than the rebellion among his ranks. In response to the developing situation, Jul fulfilled Halsey's earlier request and allowed her to take a Phantom to the surface of Aktis IV.[76] Halsey and a convoy of Phantoms traveled to an island on Aktis IV to meet a defector from 'Nyon's forces. After the defector reluctantly gave the half of the Janus Key he had stolen from 'Nyon's base to Halsey, the doctor and her Sangheili escorts prepared to return to Song of Retribution.", + " After Jul had most of Halsey's convoy depart to battle UNSC forces elsewhere on the island, Halsey and the remaining Covenant forces were ambushed by Spartans Palmer, Thorne, and Ray. Palmer pursued Halsey and her guard into the jungle, while the other Spartans eliminated the surviving Covenant forces. After killing her guard, Palmer captured Halsey and led her through the jungle. The two began to argue, with Palmer accusing her of being a traitor and war criminal, and Halsey calling Palmer out for acting as Admiral Osman's puppet and stating that ONI turned her into a convenient scapegoat.", + " As Palmer's judgement became momentarily clouded, Halsey ran off into the jungle. Palmer attempted to pursue, but she was injured and knocked into a crevice by a nearby Harvester. Halsey contacted 'Mdama and he had a Phantom return her to his flagship.[77]\n\nShortly after, Jul's forces fled the system with both halves of the Janus Key. Halsey and Jul used the combined Janus Key to project a holographic map, which revealed the approximate location of the Absolute Record.[77] Hiding within the Urs system, Halsey worked on finding the coordinates of the Absolute Record, on September 15,", + " 2558 pinpointed its exact location. Two days later, as the fleet prepared to depart for the Absolute Record, a Phantom carrying Spartans Palmer, Thorne, Holly Tanaka, Dr. Glassman, and Ayit 'Sevi\u2014a mercenary within 'Mdama's ranks working for ONI\u2014boarded Breath of Annihilation, intent on revealing the location of the Absolute Record to the UNSC.\n\nThe Absolute Record [ edit ]\n\nJul 'Mdama: \"What do you expect to find in there, Halsey?\" Dr. Halsey: \"Exactly what the Librarian promised... a new future.\" \u2014 Dr.", + " Halsey entering the Absolute Record\n\nHalsey, the other humans, and 'Mdama are left stranded on small platforms.\n\nThe fleet arrived at an apparently artificial gas giant with a slipspace portal leading to the Absolute Record. Before the fleet could press forward, slipspace ruptures materialized around the fleet, destroying at least two ships and damaging Breath of Annihilation.[78] Furious at the damage done to his fleet, 'Mdama blamed Halsey for the loss and threw her across Song of Retribution's bridge. While Halsey and 'Mdama argued about the situation, she reminded him that once they reached the Absolute Record,", + " they will discover technology beyond their comprehension that will more than compensate for the ships that were destroyed. Halsey further exaggerated that once he was in control of the Absolute Record's \"treasures\", 'Mdama would be seen as a god. Thus 'Mdama decided to travel to the Absolute Record, with only Retribution entering the portal while the rest made repairs. As Halsey and 'Mdama prepared to enter the portal, they learned of rumors of the Spartans attacking personnel of Breath of Annihilation. Halsey dismissed 'Mdama's fears and stated that the Spartans could not stop them from reaching the Absolute Record,", + " though she was unaware that Palmer, Tanaka, and Glassman had boarded Retribution.\n\nThe carrier traveled through the portal and arrived into the Record, where Halsey, along with the other humans who had infiltrated the carrier, were detected by a Contender-class custodian.[79] After Retribution was forcefully brought through a portal to a large chamber, Halsey, 'Mdama, and a contingent of Zealots traveled to a lower platform, where Halsey addressed the ancilla and told it that she was selected by the Librarian and her possession of the Janus Key was proof. However, the AI was skeptical of her claims,", + " claiming Halsey could've obtained the Key by force and especially pondering why the other humans felt the need to conceal themselves. The AI had its Sentinels bring the other humans down to the platform, and stated its intent to let each human have a chance to account for its presence at the installation, despite Halsey's assertions that there was nothing to discuss as she had the Janus Key. As she continued to argue with the AI and Glassman, an impatient Zealot attacked a Sentinel, leading to a conflict on the platform. Frustrated, the AI removed the flooring from under the feet of the Sangheili,", + " with Tanaka, Palmer, and Glassman remaining on one platform and Halsey standing on another, 'Mdama managing to grab its edge just in time.[80]\n\nIn order to decide who would be the legitimate steward of the Absolute Record, the AI decided on a direct examination. It had both factions isolated and gave them a hypothetical scenario, in which a sapient species (represented by Yonhet) turned out to have bodies conducive to a Flood vaccine. Abducting and harvesting live beings would give a thirty-five percent chance of Flood-immune material, but receiving dead bodies from the beings would give them a thirty-three percent chance.", + " Despite Jul's advice, Halsey chose live capture while Glassman chose the peaceful option, and the ancilla commended both. It then asked if their opponents in this test should be kept confined or immediately killed, but instead of answering, Halsey hacked the ancilla and shut it down, taking control of the Record for herself.[81]\n\nDr. Halsey ambushed by Sarah Palmer.\n\nIn the Record, Halsey followed a hologram of the Librarian directing her to dormant design seeds scattered across the galaxy, which she could choose to activate the next step of their plans for human evolution. While she listened, Jul 'Mdama outside expressed his growing impatience with Halsey,", + " and told his warriors in secret to restrain her once she left so to remind her who was in charge. Unfortunately for him, Halsey overheard Jul through the Record's systems and decided now was the time to sever their partnership, giving the order for the installation's Sentinels to attack Jul and his men.[82]\n\nWhile Halsey made preparations, Palmer, Tanaka, and Glassman came in contact with a Sentinel containing the backup memory of the Record's ancilla. With their aid, the AI regained control of the facility and barred Halsey from controlling it further. Over Halsey's protests, the custodian admitted that Halsey had nearly passed its test and would've been given the Record if she hadn't been so impatient to steal it.", + " The custodian thus took the Janus Key and began pulling the Record back into slipspace. Shortly afterward, Halsey was recovered by Jul's forces and brought back aboard the Song of Retribution, unaware that she had tried to betray them and under the impression that the ancilla had sent the Sentinels.[83]\n\nReturn to the UNSC [ edit ]\n\n\"Cortana is built from a matrix of my own mind. The Domain gives her incredible power...Spartan Locke!...Stop her. But please. Bring John home to me.\" \u2014 Dr. Halsey pleading Jameson Locke\n\nHalsey, Palmer,", + " Roland, and Lasky discuss Cortana and the Master Chief.\n\nIn September 2558, Dr. Halsey contacted the UNSC claiming to have information on a series of recent attacks on human colonies by mysterious Forerunner entities. In response, the UNSC deployed Spartan-IV Fireteam Osiris to retrieve Halsey from the custody of Jul 'Mdama on Kamchatka.[84] Osiris arrived, killed 'Mdama, and rescued Halsey, bringing her back to the UNSC Infinity alive.[85] Halsey was distressed to see that the UNSC took so long to retrieve her, having dire news for them:", + " Cortana was alive, active in the Domain network, and was responsible for the awakening of the Guardians.[86]\n\nAfter a following Guardian incident on Meridian, Halsey traveled to Sanghelios with Infinity's crew in anticipation of another Guardian awakening there. She was accompanied by Sarah Palmer, no longer in heavy animosity for her, but encountered plenty of friction from the Swords of Sanghelios, who stubbornly insisted they could take on the Guardian themselves. Regardless, Halsey devised a plan to take brief command of the Guardian, by using a Constructor Sentinel to interface with the Guardian so she could delay Cortana's control of it,", + " lessen the damage at its point of exit, and slow it down so Osiris could board and follow the Guardian.[87] Finding the Guardian at Sunaion, Halsey's plan worked and Osiris successfully accompanied the Guardian to Genesis. Before they left, Halsey begged Jameson Locke, leader of Osiris, to do their utmost to stop Cortana but to bring back John safely.[88] True to their word, Osiris managed to rescue the Master Chief and Blue Team after they were imprisoned on Genesis. Halsey and Palmer returned to camp at Sanghelios with Thel 'Vadam and the Swords, where Osiris returned and landed with her old Spartans aboard with them.[89]\n\nInterrogation [ edit ]\n\n\"Epicetus [sic]", + " once said: \"What harm is it, while kissing your child, to say: Tomorrow you will die?\" Cortana is the answer to that question.\" \u2014 Halsey quoting Epictetus to 92738-61842-LC to explain about Cortana's motivations.\n\nBy 2559, Halsey was still on the Infinity, but locked-up and working in a workspace she considered \"subhuman\". On January 24, 2559, Halsey was visited by the Spartan 92738-61842-LC, who was investigating about Cortana and the possible cause of her actions at the end of 2558.", + " LC asked her how Cortana was created, with Halsey answering the Spartan's question. During the interrogation, Halsey revealed that the status of the other brains she cloned was something classified to the Spartan, and theorized that Cortana's objective was survive for all eternity. After the interrogation, Halsey told the Spartan about the last thing Cortana said to her, not knowing its meaning.[90]\n\nEulogy for Noble Six [ edit ]\n\n\"Because of you, we found Halo, unlocked its secrets, shattered our enemy's resolve. Our victory\u2014your victory\u2014was so close... I wish you could have lived to see it.", + " But you belong to Reach. Your body, your armor\u2014all burned and turned to glass. Everything...except your courage. That, you gave to us. And with it, we can rebuild.\" \u2014 Dr. Halsey, commemorating Noble Six's actions that led Reach's recolonization.\n\nOn July 7, 2589, Halsey gave a eulogy for SPARTAN-B312, in which she commended the Spartan's courage and sacrifice. She noted that Noble Six's choice to remain behind in Aszod allowed humanity to discover the Halos, ultimately leading to victory against the Covenant.[91]\n\nPersonality and traits [ edit ]\n\n\"If people would just share things with me,", + " I could solve all the world's problems.\" \u2014 Dr. Halsey musing to herself over the UNSC withholding data from her.[69]\n\nImmensely intelligent, reclusive and somewhat self-centered, Halsey is almost entirely devoted to her work and the pursuit of knowledge to advance humankind. She has little regard for rules, authority or bureaucracy, in most cases viewing them as little more than obstacles to her work. While her singleminded dedication and seemingly detached personality have led to many perceiving her as devoid of morals or emotions, she has nonetheless shown to care about the few people close to her and has been deeply affected on a personal level by the moral implications of her work.\n\nHalsey tends to be professional and authoritative when speaking to people,", + " which she rarely does outside of meetings and briefings. She has little patience for extraneous detail, wanting the important facts out of them and then concluding their meeting.[92] Considered extremely difficult to read,[93] she rarely voices her current emotions, and often observes people while speaking to them to discern hidden details. Having grown accustomed to keeping secrets, she may appear enigmatic and manipulative at times; while she despises efforts to withhold information from herself, she has a tendency of laying her own plans in advance and only divulging information when it becomes relevant.[57] She prefers to work with her authority unchallenged, and does not appreciate being bogged down by having to explain herself,", + " especially in a hurry. On Onyx, this led to a conflict between her and Kurt Ambrose, who eventually confronted the doctor over her self-assumed leadership and instead asserted his own command over the mission, much to Halsey's dismay; despite this, she remained confident in Kurt's leadership ability.[94] When necessary, however, Halsey has been very verbose about describing the subject at hand, namely if attempting to convince someone of its importance.[49] Outside of professional contexts, her persona has been considered charming and likable by some.[95]\n\nAbove most of her compatriots in terms of both intelligence and knowledge,", + " Halsey prefers to perform her most important work personally, rarely entrusting particularly significant scientific tasks to others. She often assumes a certain ownership over her work, most prominently seen with her referring to the Spartan-IIs as \"her\" Spartans and reacting negatively to others co-opting her work. Halsey is keen to note any flaws she finds in her colleagues' work, and quick to point out when she considers someone unqualified.[39][44] However, she also has an eye for talent and will give credit for any accomplishments she sees as remarkable.[39] It is not uncommon for her to have respect for someone and yet also dislike them,", + " as shown in the cases of her student Ellen Anders[96] and the Spartan-III Kat-B320.[97] Halsey is an atheist, lacking belief in the existence of any god.[98]\n\nHalsey's intelligence is unquestionable but her judgment is not always correct. Although bearing the guilt of the Spartan program, her sense of right and wrong has differed greatly. When sure it will produce results, Halsey is not above breaking the law to achieve her goals, such as cloning herself to produce Cortana, using a stolen Slipspace engine for her fractal AI experiment, and kidnapping Kelly and fleeing to Onyx.", + " \"The ends justify the means\" appears to be her ideology, as an interrogator after she was arrested accused her of. To soothe her conscience, she often deliberately reduces the wording of harsh consequences, such as telling John that the augmentations was just his next mission, or Soren-066 that the pain from his botched surgery would eventually go away.[99]\n\nA family tree drawn by Halsey, of all the people whose lives she affected.\n\nDr. Halsey is not keen on losing, as seen when she kept losing at a game of Twenty Questions with her Spartans and soon quit playing.[100] She was also resentful of attempts to keep information from her,", + " demanding to know everything the UNSC could provide to keep them from deceiving her. Any attempts to keep her in the dark would eventually fail once she'd begin hacking, since Halsey often programmed backdoors into everything she designed.[101][69] According to Black-Box, Halsey was not too different from an AI, being fueled by a desire to know everything she could.[102] She is easily absorbed by her work and the acquisition of knowledge to the point of ignoring more pressing matters; on Onyx, she requested the rest of the group to leave her behind in the world's map room in order to learn more until being snapped out of her reverie by a Covenant attack.[103]\n\nHalsey has a notable fondness for classical music,", + " especially Debussy. When getting to work, Halsey has a habit of issuing a series of commands to AIs in a rapid sequence (often ending with her requesting the AI to play one of her preferred pieces of classical music), which has on some occasions given less sophisticated AIs a pause to process the information.[104][9][105] She has a bad habit of keeping a messy office and drinking cold coffee, tending to prepare the drink and then become distracted by work, only remembering it hours, sometimes days, later.[106][107] She preferred darker coffees than those grown on Reach.[108] On January 9,", + " 2535 she met with Chief Petty Officer J. G. Jimes in order to procure quality Beniese coffee.[109]\n\nAn ONI-commissioned psychological evaluation conducted by B.M. Parkes in 2551 largely correlated with observed aspects of Halsey's personality, demonstrating exceedingly high cognitive performance (which was noted to possibly obfuscate the rest of the results) but a markedly low score in teamwork and an uncommonly high \"liability\" index, 64% higher than the average ONI rating due to her demonstrated disregard for authority. The analysts suggested that she be placed under closer surveillance, with two or three handlers accompanying her at all times at both of her primary working sites on Reach.[41]\n\nSPARTAN-II program and guilt [ edit ]\n\nHalsey battled guilt over the SPARTAN-II project.", + " She knew that moral lines had been crossed to save humanity.\n\n\"Spartans never die? If only that were true.\" \u2014 Catherine Halsey, reflecting her guilt over the SPARTAN-II program.[110]\n\nDr. Halsey carried extraordinary guilt because of the SPARTAN-II project, in the feeling that she had exploited the children and destroyed their lives. Although she continued to support the Spartans and gained monumental prestige for her efforts, she also felt responsible for each one who died. She could never bring herself to justify the Spartans' exploitation as a necessary sacrifice.[111][112]\n\nHer involvement with the SPARTAN-II program,", + " then codenamed \"ORION Project Generation II\", was born out of her own initiative, although ONI had long intended to recruit her for the task. Improving upon Dr. Elias Carver's projections for predicted colonial aggression, she privately ran over 1,400 simulations with varied parameters, always coming to the conclusion that the Outer Colonies would go into all-out war against the Inner Colonies and Earth within a short span of time. If the UNSC did not act, this would mean a minimum of thirty years of open war and billions of casualties, while the worst-case scenario was indefinite conflict and the potential collapse of human civilization.", + " Viewing it as her personal responsibility to prevent this scenario from coming to pass, she presented her results to Vice Admiral Stanforth, then-head of ONI Section III, only to find that the UNSC had already come to the same conclusions with their own projections. As it turned out, ONI had been monitoring her for years, but they had waited for her to come up with the numbers on her own, knowing that she could not be convinced to work for them otherwise. Although she was distrustful of ONI, she agreed to work for them on the program out of her personal commitment to humanity's cause.[12] The nuclear bombing of the Haven arcology by the Freedom and Liberation Party further reinforced her determination.[113]\n\nAt the conceptual phase of the SPARTAN-II project,", + " Halsey evidently failed to fully understand its moral implications; she was constantly revolted upon seeing her work in practice, and the notion of \"sacrificing the few to save the many\" rarely worked to soothe her conscience.[114][115] While she attempted to maintain a professional distance to the SPARTAN-II candidates, she could never bring herself to view them as mere test subjects and always addressed them by their first names.[116] She held considerable respect for the Spartans and easily recognized them through subtle habits in their postures even with their armor on, which seemed to greatly annoy them.[117] In turn, the Spartans greatly respected Dr.", + " Halsey, (with one stating that he had been \"All hers half [his] life\"),[118] and would follow her orders and suggestions in the absence of those from a superior officer.[119] The doctor is also privy to many of the recruits' secrets, having taught several to them as children, such as the Oly Oly Oxen Free security tune.[120] Despite her admiration of the Spartans, Halsey always kept these feelings to herself so as to not make them feel excluded due to the special treatment they get from most other humans.[9]\n\n\"Your mother is gone. Everything you know is gone.", + " Now get up. There are things you have to do.\"\n\nDue to her burdened conscience, Halsey was consistently at odds with ONI Section Three over the course of the SPARTAN-II program. She was irritated by the aloof demeanor exhibited by most ONI personnel toward the moral considerations of the program as well as their constant underestimation of the Spartan candidates, whom she always held in high regard.[121][122] ONI also had little patience for hesitation or delays in what they viewed as their prize project, and often compelled Halsey to implement easier and more straightforward\u2014and often also more unethical\u2014solutions, while Halsey tried to do her best to ensure the safety of the candidates,[123]", + " despite knowing that she could not save them all. When an ONI representative labeled the Spartan washouts as \"acceptable losses\", Halsey did not view any of them as acceptable.[124] Even at the onset of the augmentation procedures, which she knew would kill or cripple a large portion of the candidates, she was considering that they should take more time to test the chemicals before applying them. However, D\u00e9j\u00e0 pointed out that if she proceeded too slowly and ONI detected a delay, they might replace Halsey with someone less concerned with ethics\u2014and most likely someone less qualified as well, prompting Halsey to stay on board with the project for the sake of the candidates'", + " safety.[125] After a number of the SPARTAN-II candidates \"washed out\" in the augmentations, Halsey had their bodies frozen in cryostasis with no autopsies performed, hoping to find solutions to resuscitate them in time. She guessed that the ONI personnel reporting on the project's progress to the upper echelons of ONI would respond to her apparent unwillingness to let go with their characteristic detachment.[122]\n\nBy the time she was rescued from Reach by Ascendant Justice, she simply wanted to save as many lives as she could, believing that the war was not one that the UNSC could possibly win.", + " She knew that \"her own\" Spartans, the Spartan-IIs, could not be persuaded to turn from the war. However, she believed the Spartan-IIIs may not yet have been fully determined to win the war and she set out to try and weaken their resolve to fight.[126] Although she was worried about Ackerson co-opting her work on the Spartan augmentations potentially ending in disaster,[39] Halsey respected the Spartan-IIIs themselves and felt responsible for them.[127] She believed that the Spartan-IVs were incapable of being true Spartans due to their nature as adult volunteers and perceived lack of professionalism. Nonetheless,", + " she did imply that some, (namely Gabriel Thorne), came closer to her ideals than others.[66]\n\nReputation [ edit ]\n\nHalsey and her rival, Colonel James Ackerson.\n\nSarah Palmer: \"This armor \u2014 this job \u2014 has been soiled because of you!\" Catherine Halsey: \"Soiled? I'm the only reason that armor even exists! You can't have it both ways, Commander. Unless, of course, you find the perfect scapegoat. Then spend years rewriting history. Which brings us full circle, back to your master, Osman.\" \u2014 Catherine Halsey argues with Sarah Palmer about how ONI has blamed all their war crimes on her.\n\nHalsey's projects and the results they yielded gained her widespread acclaim and sympathies among many high-ranking members of the UNSC military,", + " such as Admiral Stanforth, her most powerful ally within ONI, and Fleet Admiral Hood, who deeply respected Halsey and her Spartans who had saved his own life twice, to the extent that he verbally rebuked Colonel Ackerson for detracting the Spartan-IIs.[128] However, she also garnered a number of competitors and opponents over the decades. The most notable of her rivals was Colonel Ackerson, who constantly tried to spy on her and co-opted her work while attempting to sabotage the SPARTAN-II program. Her former student Ellen Anders also resented Halsey, saying \"She hated me and I hated her.\"[129]", + " ONI Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Margaret Parangosky, was resentful of Halsey, perceiving the doctor's aversion for control and her general lack of loyalty to ONI as a threat. The Admiral only tolerated Halsey because she was so crucial to the war effort,[130] but had her detained immediately after the end of the war. Parangosky's antipathy for Halsey was passed on to Serin Osman, a Spartan-II washout whom the Admiral specifically indoctrinated and groomed to become her successor to secure her personal legacy within ONI, and ultimately culminated in Osman ordering Halsey's assassination after the Covenant abducted the doctor during the Second Battle of Requiem.", + " Parangosky's, and later Osman's, AI attach\u00e9 Black-Box also had an intense dislike of Halsey. This was, at least partly, passed on from his brain donor, Dr. Graham Alban, who worked with Halsey on the SPARTAN-II program and eventually committed suicide over his guilt. Both Alban and BB doubted the sincerity of Halsey's doubts about the ethics of her work and viewed her as genuinely amoral.[131]\n\nMany of those unfamiliar with the internal dynamics of ONI and the SPARTAN-II program have come to interpret Halsey and her work in a highly negative light.", + " Despite the predominant role of ONI and the UNSC Naval leadership in the conception and execution of the SPARTAN-II program, Dr. Halsey is often perceived as the sole individual responsible, due to her conspicuous position as the project head.[132] Taking advantage of this, ONI prefers to attribute some of the more controversial aspects of the project to their alleged lack of sufficient oversight.[133] Black-Box even privately acknowledges to Serin Osman that the main reason for Halsey's fall from grace is to conceal or minimize the responsibility of the many others who participated in the project.[134] Although she was responsible for much of the program's scientific basis and harbored no illusions otherwise,", + " Halsey was under ONI's constant supervision and was even repeatedly pressured by Section III to use more inhumane means for faster results.[123] Many have also interpreted her primary motivation as a supposed perverse scientific curiosity, ignoring\u2014or unaware of\u2014her sincere determination to prevent further excessive bloodshed in the Insurrection and her initial naivet\u00e9 in failing to grasp the full moral ramifications of her work until witnessing it in practice.[12][114][113]\n\nInfinity. Two Marines escort a handcuffed Halsey aboard UNSC\n\nSuch views often have their basis on information provided by the Office of Naval Intelligence, which has frequently used highly selective or outright false information to shift the blame for some of ONI's more questionable decisions (that she could be reasonably connected to)", + " on Halsey alone. While she was publicly declared to have died on Reach,[60] she would be branded as a dangerous war criminal in the eyes of any UNSC personnel she would come in contact with, such as the crew of the UNSC Infinity. This campaign was headed by Admiral Parangosky, who had sought to place the doctor under tighter control for decades; Parangosky's policies were carried on to her heir, Serin Osman, seemingly unchanged.[135][136] Musa-096 also demonstrated resentment toward Halsey due to the questionable ethics of the SPARTAN-II program.[137] While working with Kilo-Five,", + " Naomi-010 also adopted a less sympathetic view of Halsey. Some of the Spartan-IVs have also accepted this perspective on Halsey, particularly Sarah Palmer, who regards the doctor with a particular contempt (though this may be due to Halsey's own open disdain for the SPARTAN-IV program); Gabriel Thorne, on the other hand, was less quick to judge Halsey and sought to uncover the reasons behind her decisions rather than condemning her based on the official story alone.[66]\n\nCPO Franklin Mendez, the chief instructor for the Spartan-IIs and later the Spartan-IIIs, was on amicable terms with Halsey at the time of their involvement with the SPARTAN-II program.", + " After being reunited with Halsey on Onyx, however, Mendez began to reflect on his own past and, still in denial about his own major part in ONI's morally questionable projects, he quickly became disillusioned with the doctor. The two clashed verbally several times while trapped in the shield world, with Mendez attempting to project his own guilt on Halsey by delivering lengthy harangues impugning her perceived faults and her work on the SPARTAN-II project.[138]\n\nThe Assembly took note of Halsey's work early on and concluded that she would be instrumental in initiating the course of events leading up to their own elusive goals.", + " Additionally, they speculated that her supposed ruthlessness may have been the result of an undiagnosed or deliberately obfuscated chemical imbalance.[139]\n\nPersonal life and relationships [ edit ]\n\nHalsey is a generally asocial person, extremely devoted to her work and personal goals, and rarely partakes in any social activities, apart from her occasional attendance in academic and military social gatherings despite her dislike of such events.[95][12] Though she had distanced herself from most of her friends from her youth, she would often browse through casualty lists within the UNSC subnet, finding the majority of them dead by the final years of the war.[140]", + " She remained rather indifferent to her parents' deaths when Endymion was glassed, as she had not seen them in years and had grown aloof from them.[141] She prefers the company of AIs and admires their complexity in comparison to humans despite being angered at being mentally defeated by them.[111]\n\nNevertheless, she remained particularly close to a few people, even if she rarely saw them. When listing her most important relationships and connections in her journal, she mentioned \"the Vice Admiral\", Mendez, her Spartans, Aliz\u00e9e, Kalmiya and Jorjet, as well as Jacob and Miranda Keyes.[39]\n\nJacob Keyes [ edit ]\n\nJacob Keyes accompanies Dr.", + " Halsey.\n\nDuring her survey travels for the SPARTAN-II candidates, Halsey was required to be supervised by a military official, an order she resented. She ended up choosing then-Lieutenant, Junior Grade Jacob Keyes. Halsey had examined his files and found he had refused to testify against one of his instructors despite the teacher's error causing the deaths of 14 students. From this Halsey deduced that Keyes could be trusted to keep a secret, a useful trait in her unethical mission. The two were initially aloof to each other aboard the Han, especially since Keyes did not initially know the purpose of their mission.", + " He eventually realized it, though, and discussed with Halsey about the implications of her project and her decision to tell the child Soren the truth.[note 3] By the time they parted after two months working together, Keyes and Halsey were on much more amicable terms, to the point that Halsey began sketching him frequently in her journal and even referred to him as \"my lieutenant\". For his safety and in thanks, Keyes was reassigned but given a full lieutenant commission, at Halsey's request.\n\nIn November 2524 the two were reunited while attending a conference at the University of Calippus,", + " and the two conceived a child, Miranda. While she initially raised her daughter on Reach for several years, Halsey's work impeded her from being able to care for Miranda, and Jacob ended up raising her instead. The two did not see each other again until August 12, 2552, a moment that Halsey had both hoped for but dreaded. Keyes still remained a gentleman to her, and they spoke at length on the topics of Miranda, the Spartans, and his \"Keyes Loop\", and his assigning to RED FLAG, also at Halsey's request. It was the last time the two saw each other before Keyes's death at Installation 04.\n\nMiranda Keyes [ edit ]\n\nHalsey's sketches of a young Miranda.\n\nIn 2525,", + " Catherine gave birth to Miranda Halsey and raised her for a few years until July 12, 2531 when Miranda's father agreed to take her in, raising her on Luna. Halsey would later have a falling-out with Miranda, who would later change her legal name to her father's and refuse to speak to Halsey for several years. Nonetheless, Halsey cared for her daughter and attempted to dissuade her from following her father's footsteps and joining the military, to no avail. Hoping to keep Miranda safe, Halsey used her influence within the UNSC to have her assigned to a remote post aboard the science vessel UNSC Hilbert;", + " however, Miranda and the Hilbert would play a crucial role in battle, and she was subsequently assigned to various front-line posts. Though Miranda eventually invited Halsey to her promotion ceremony in 2550, Halsey chose not to attend.[39] Perhaps out of denial of her absence from Miranda's life, Halsey rarely referred to her daughter by name in her journal, or would mention Miranda while avoiding the detail that they were related. However, Miranda still remained on her mind during their estrangement, and Halsey kept a memento of Miranda's victory and promotion at the Battle of Gamma Pavonis VII. She also had a photo of Miranda in her office under CASTLE Base.\n\nAfter her arrest by ONI in 2553,", + " Halsey was informed that Miranda Keyes was dead, having been killed by the Prophet of Truth at the Battle of the Citadel. Black-Box later oversaw Halsey crying and whispering her daughter's name.[142]\n\nJohn, at 14 years of age, having his original Mjolnir helmet put on by Dr. Halsey.\n\n\"This boy could be more useful to the UNSC than a fleet of destroyers, a thousand Junior Grade Lieutenants -- or even me. In the end, the child may be the only thing that makes any difference.\" \u2014 Halsey speaking to Lt. Jr.", + " Grade Jacob Keyes, referring to John-117.\n\nHalsey had a unique relationship with John-117, compared to the other Spartans. John was the first subject for the Spartan program that she observed, and during then she noted his determination, physical skill, and luck in answering correctly. Halsey told Cortana she considers him the luckiest and best of the Spartans and apparently also finds him attractive on a subconscious level, given her embarrassed reaction to Cortana's comments.[143] The doctor was responsible for John's first promotion to Squad Leader as a result of her acknowledging his leadership skills and suggesting it to Mendez.", + " She also had John's full trust, him always doing his best to never undermine her authority.\n\nAfter escaping from Reach, Halsey decided to test her favorite Spartan's sense of ethics by handing over two sets of data: one concerning Avery Johnson and how his Boren's Syndrome supposedly made him immune to the Flood, and the other omitting those details. She ensured that John knew that if the first set was handed over to ONI, Johnson would likely be killed and dissected in order to find a cure to the Flood infection. She estimated that there is a billion to one shot that they could have replicated Johnson's condition, but conversely ONI would do it to save humanity from a greater foe.[144]", + " At first, John chose to sacrifice Johnson in order to try and save millions of people out of his duty to protect all of humanity. However, he later reconsidered and eventually destroyed the Johnson data due in part to the sacrifice of Vice Admiral Danforth Whitcomb and Lieutenant Elias Haverson, believing that one man could make a difference as opposed to sacrificing him for the greater good.[145] John's faith in him was fully realized a mere two months later, when Johnson became key in forming an alliance between humans and Sangheili following the Great Schism and outbreak of the Flood in November 2552.\n\nLater, despite John going MIA after the events on Installation 08,", + " Halsey was sure that he was still alive,[61] and was furious when she found out that the Infinity's crew had kept the news of his return secret from her.[69] John restored her faith that humanity could win against impossible odds, since he had brought about the end of the Human-Covenant war despite her belief in its latter months that it was unwinnable.\n\nCortana [ edit ]\n\nHalsey facing Cortana, her literal brainchild.\n\nCortana was an AI created by Halsey herself, and unique that she was \"born\" from a cloned brain rather than that of a deceased donor. Halsey considered her to be much like herself when she was just out of college,", + " \"so wonderful and naive and eager to learn\"[39] and constantly eager to state her knowledge to anyone listening.[146] Her appearance also reminded Halsey a little bit of Miranda. Like all her AIs, Halsey implanted a viral termination code in Cortana, but she suspected, and seemed amused by, the possibility that Cortana had already discovered it and removed it.\n\nHalsey would treat Cortana as an equal, especially in the missions regarding her, letting Cortana chose who would be her couriers. For Operation: RED FLAG, Cortana chose the Pillar of Autumn and John-117 to escort her.", + " When her fragment had to be delivered to Aszod, Cortana chose SPARTAN-B312 of NOBLE Team to be the one to defend her. Halsey agreed with each of her choices, and wondered if her preferences were what subconsciously influenced Cortana, or if it were simply that \"great minds do think alike.\"\n\nJul 'Mdama [ edit ]\n\nCovenant leader Jul 'Mdama and Doctor Catherine Halsey.\n\n\"This human is more trouble than she is worth.\" \u2014 Jul 'Mdama, remarking on Halsey's lack of apparent progress deciphering the signals between Cortana and the Guardians.[147]\n\nWhile Halsey colluded voluntarily with 'Mdama's schemes to acquire the other half of the Janus Key,", + " she was only ever using him for his resources, hoping to claim the Librarian's \"gift\" for herself. She offered strategic advice, recommending the colony of Oban as a target, and encouraged Jul to drop his show of piety between the two of them[148], and was even trusted enough by Jul to go out into the field with a Zealot escort during the battle of Aktis IV.[149] Nevertheless, when both the Covenant and the UNSC finally reached the Absolute Record, Halsey was quick to turn on 'Mdama, turning the Installation's Sentinels on him and his men.[150] While Jul recovered Halsey from the Installation as they escaped its self-destruction,", + " not realising her betrayal, the Covenant leader began to realise that was \"more trouble than she is worth.\"[151] During the Covenant's occupation of Kamchatka, Halsey finally took the final step in dissolving their alliance, calling in a Spartan team to extract her in exchange for crucial information on the Guardians. This resulted in 'Mdama's death before her, an event that went unremarked upon by Halsey.[152]\n\nSkills and abilities [ edit ]\n\nWith an IQ of roughly 200,[1] Halsey is one of the most intelligent humans alive in the 26th century.[153] She is also a noted polymath,", + " her expertise and knowledge making her a professional in multiple fields. She has formal degrees as a medical doctor and computer scientist,[16][7] and she has demonstrated remarkable skill in AI development, quantum theory and slipspace-related phenomena, the engineering of military equipment such as power armor and related technologies, as well as xenoarchaeological research into Forerunner technology and the translation of Forerunner symbols. Because of her extensive contributions to AI development, Halsey is capable of holding her own against smart AIs,[69][16] using her expertise to exploit secret programming backdoors or philosophical puzzles to control or manipulate constructs as advanced as fifth-generation smart AI.[154]", + " She types at a rate of 140 words per minute.[155] Her skills as an artist, as demonstrated by the plethora of drawings in her journal, have also been noted.[156] Catherine Halsey was also able to perfectly understand Jul 'Mdama, indicating that she has some knowledge of the Sangheili language.[70]\n\nAccording to the Librarian, a geas she planted into the human genome 100,000 years earlier encouraged the development of many of the technologies Halsey created in order to prepare humanity for a major threat they would be forced to confront as Reclaimers.[157] The Librarian's stored essence on Requiem placed a particular responsibility on Halsey,", + " giving her the Janus Key to advance humanity.[71]\n\nAttire and personal effects [ edit ]\n\nHalsey wearing a parka in her SWORD Base archaeological dig.\n\nBecause she is most often occupied with her work, Halsey typically wears a lab coat. On Reach she was often seen wearing a skirt although she has later shown to don the standard ONI scientist utility clothes with a blue tunic and pants under her lab coat. When outdoors in Reach's Highlands and in her SWORD base archaeological site she often wore a heavy parka because of the cold.[39][49] She has a set of antique[158] bifocal[", + "159] glasses which feature a variety of functions, including a heads-up display, a retinal and brain pattern scanner,[160] as well as automatic polarization.[93] The frames contain tiny projectors which can beam classified data directly onto her retina.[161] However, she seems to have largely abandoned her use of the glasses in the post-war era.[note 4]\n\nShe typically carries a personal laptop on her as well as a purse, the latter containing a data pad, a pocket archive, a change of clothes, self-amalgamating tape, a pocket saw, a solar power pack, medications, a folding knife, her mother's antique Patek Philippe luxury watch,", + " as well as coffee for \"emergencies\".[162] Halsey had several personal AIs, including Jerrod, who could run on her laptop, and Kalmiya, who served as her assistant on Reach.[163] Halsey had a snowglobe on her desk in her CASTLE Base office, containing a three-centimeter-tall representation of the Matterhorn being scaled by a tiny Swiss climber.[164]\n\nHalsey kept a journal with her ever since she was eighteen, purchased from a shop on Reach. She used the journal as a medium through which to express her thoughts and concerns, draw sketches,", + " and map out important research notes for approximately forty-two years. It was not Halsey's only journal, since she had a second one for note-taking and also had an encrypted audio journal on her computer, though she sometimes erased its entries soon after recording them.[165] Halsey frequently left her first journal lying around buried under papers, and procrastinated on adding some security measures to it to prevent it from being stolen.[166] This absent-mindedness eventually backfired on her when she forgot the journal during her escape from SWORD Base. The journal was later recovered by ONI in 2553, and used as evidence to condemn her.\n\nProduction notes [ edit ]\n\nCheck out our collection of quotes related to Catherine Halsey in its quotes page.", + " Browse more images in this article's gallery page.\n\nGallery [ edit ]\n\nList of appearances [ edit ]\n\nNotes [ edit ]\n\n^ Halsey's attempt to hide the cloning aspect of the program would have had to have occurred in its conceptual phase, as it would have been impossible to cover up when the cloning was put into practice; even if Halsey did manage to hide the data involving the funding, numerous ONI operatives and scientists were involved in the replacement operation and Halsey was not in a position to keep them from relaying the information to Parangosky. In addition, with ONI constantly monitoring the progress of the program,", + " Halsey would have had no way to keep such a large-scale operation secret in the long term. ^ a b This seems to exhibit a double standard on Parangosky's part, as she had authorized the deaths of hundreds of children through the SPARTAN-III program. However, Parangosky viewed the Spartan-IIIs as a necessary sacrifice, whereas the use of flash clones was not strictly necessary and caused excessive trauma to the already beleaguered parents of the SPARTAN-II candidates. Though she was angered by Halsey's refusal to admit the use of flash clones, her true quarrel with the doctor was based on her motivation for using the clones.", + " While Halsey insisted that the flash clone project was meant to ease the parents' suffering and stifle suspicion, Parangosky was adamant that it was intended, (perhaps subconsciously), to ease Halsey's guilt and comfort her ego. ^ Pariah, Keyes knew the reason behind Dr. Halsey's observation mission. However, Halo: The Fall of Reach and Halsey's journal clearly indicate that Keyes was unaware of the mission's true nature, though it is implied that he later found out as he told an adult John-117 that they had met before. In, Keyes knew the reason behind Dr.", + " Halsey's observation mission. However,and Halsey's journal clearly indicate that Keyes was unaware of the mission's true nature, though it is implied that he later found out as he told an adult John-117 that they had met before. ^ Homecoming is so far the only piece of visual media to include them. Although Halsey is described as wearing glasses throughout Eric Nylund's novels,is so far the only piece of visual media to include them.\n" + ], + "length": 26032, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 69, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A group known for fighting for the separation of church and state has won a victory against Brewster County, Texas, reaching a settlement that has county cops agreeing to remove decals with crosses on them from police cars, Reuters reports. In response to a suit filed this year by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Brewster officials now say they won't allow the stickers\u2014depicting foot-high blue Latin crosses, per the Austin American-Statesman\u2014on the vehicles, citing a recently approved county policy that bans \"political, religious, commercial or personal\" symbols or messages from appearing on any county property. Also per the settlement, the county will fork over $22,000 and change in legal and court fees to the FFRF. The high-profile hubbub started late in 2015 when the office for Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson requested the OK for the cross decals in the rear windows of his deputies' patrol vehicles, noting the stickers would provide \"God's protection.\" But the FFRF said such an action would be unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment's prohibition against government favoring one religion over another. One person who had stood behind Brewster's men and women in blue: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who wrote before the complaint was filed that \"in addition to its religious significance, the cross has a long history in America and elsewhere as a symbol of service and sacrifice.\" Reuters didn't have a comment yet from Abbott, but the co-president of the FFRF says the whole deal \"was totally avoidable. This was such an egregious and obvious violation.\" Also profiting from the settlement: two Brewster County atheists who had joined the lawsuit. They each received $1. (Tennessee lawmakers wanted the Bible as their state book.)\n", + "docs": [ + "New county policy bans political, religious, commercial and personal symbols and messages on county vehicles.\n\nTwo atheists who live in county are awarded $1 apiece.\n\nBrewster County agrees to pay legal fees and court costs for Freedom From Religion Foundation.\n\nDespite support from Gov. Greg Abbott, officials in Brewster County have agreed to ban the display of Christian crosses on sheriff\u2019s vehicles to settle a lawsuit from the national Freedom From Religion Foundation.\n\nUnder the settlement, approved last week by county commissioners, Brewster County agreed to pay the foundation $21,970 in legal fees and $400 for court costs.\n\nTwo atheist residents of Brewster County who joined the foundation\u2019s lawsuit,", + " Kevin Price and Jesse Castillo, also were awarded $1 each \u201cfor past constitutional violations,\u201d the consent decree said.\n\nREAD: Gov. Greg Abbott supports crosses on Brewster County patrol vehicles.\n\nGreg Hudson, an Austin lawyer representing Brewster County and Sheriff Ronny Dodson, said the settlement reflected a county policy approved by the Commissioners Court in March that banned political, religious, commercial and personal symbols and messages from county vehicles. The ban was approved about three weeks after the foundation filed its lawsuit in Alpine\u2019s federal court.\n\n+ The Brewster County sheriff\u2019s office has removed decals depicting the Christian cross from its patrol vehicles. \u00d7\n\nThe decals,", + " foot-high depictions of a Latin cross with a thin blue line, were removed from the department\u2019s vehicles.\n\n\u201cIt was just a business decision. There was no reason to fight anything,\u201d Hudson said. \u201cI think the county\u2019s position is, let\u2019s save this fight for another day; we\u2019ve taken care of this issue internally.\u201d\n\nThe settlement resolved \u201cclaimed constitutional violations\u201d but specified that the county was making no admission of liability.\n\nIn its lawsuit, the foundation argued that the crosses represent a government endorsement of Christianity in violation of the First Amendment\u2019s prohibition on government actions that improperly favor one religion.\n\nDistrict Attorney Rod Ponton, whose West Texas district includes Brewster County,", + " in December asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to issue a formal opinion approving of the display, writing that he believed the \u201ccross is a symbol of protection and comfort\u201d for officers.\n\nAbbott followed with a memo to Paxton that said the crosses do not favor one religion.\n\n\u201cThe Brewster County deputies\u2019 crosses neither establish a religion nor threaten any person\u2019s ability to worship God, or decline to worship God, in his own way, \u201d Abbott said. \u201cThe symbol of the cross appropriately conveys the solemn respect all Texans should have for the courage and sacrifice of our peace officers.\u201d\n\nPaxton, a Christian who has made it a priority to protect religious practice,", + " was blocked from issuing his opinion when the foundation sued Brewster County in early March. His office does not offer legal opinions involving pending litigation. ", + " Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ", + " AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A rural Texas county has reached a deal to remove cross image decals from their police cars and ban \u201cpolitical, religious, commercial or personal\u201d phrases or signs on county-owned property, a group that challenged the county said on Monday.\n\nThe Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), a nationwide group that promotes the separation of church and state, and two of its members sued this year to remove the decals they said amounted to unconstitutional local government promotion of Christianity.\n\nThe Brewster County Clerk\u2019s office said its Commissioners\u2019 Court had agreed to the settlement.\n\nTexas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, had stood behind the sheriff\u2019s department for displaying a cross with a horizontal thin blue line on their patrol vehicles.", + " Abbott said the cross is part of U.S. historical practices.\n\n\u201cIn addition to its religious significance, the cross has a long history in America and elsewhere as a symbol of service and sacrifice,\u201d Abbott wrote before the lawsuit. He added, in his opinion, the display does not violate U.S. constitutional provisions preventing the establishment of religion.\n\nAbbott\u2019s office was not immediately available for comment.\n\nAt the end of last year, the Brewster County sheriff asked state officials if his deputies in the sprawling and sparsely populated west Texas county could keep the cross decals displayed on the rear windows of their patrol vehicles.\n\nBrewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson wanted the crosses for \u201cGod\u2019s protection over his deputies,\u201d his office said in December.\n\nFFRF said it reached the deal with the county a few days ago that included having the county pay it about $20,", + "000 in legal and court fees. Dodson did not respond to a request to comment.\n\n\u201cThis was totally avoidable. This was such an egregious and obvious violation,\u201d Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF, said in a phone interview. ", + " Frequently Asked Questions \u2013 Religion\n\nThe First Amendment says nothing about \u2018separation of church and state\u2019 or a \u2018wall of separation between church and state.\u2019 Where did this idea come from? Is it really part of the law?\n\nAlthough the words \u2018separation of church and state\u2019 do not appear in the First Amendment, the establishment clause was intended to separate church from state. When the First Amendment was adopted in 1791, the establishment clause applied only to the federal government, prohibiting the federal government from any involvement in religion. By 1833, all states had disestablished religion from government, providing protections for religious liberty in state constitutions.", + " In the 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court applied the establishment clause to the states through the 14th Amendment. Today, the establishment clause prohibits all levels of government from either advancing or inhibiting religion.\n\nThe establishment clause separates church from state, but not religion from politics or public life. Individual citizens are free to bring their religious convictions into the public arena. But the government is prohibited from favoring one religious view over another or even favoring religion over non-religion.\n\nOur nation\u2019s founders disagreed about the exact meaning of \u201cno establishment\u201d under the First Amendment; the argument continues to this day. But there was and is widespread agreement that preventing government from interfering with religion is an essential principle of religious liberty.", + " All of the Framers understood that \u201cno establishment\u201d meant no national church and no government involvement in religion. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison believed that without separating church from state, there could be no real religious freedom.\n\nThe first use of the \u201cwall of separation\u201d metaphor was by Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island in 1635. He said an authentic Christian church would be possible only if there was \u201ca wall or hedge of separation\u201d between the \u201cwilderness of the world\u201d and \u201cthe garden of the church.\u201d Any government involvement in the church, he believed, corrupts the church.\n\nThen in 1802, Thomas Jefferson,", + " in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, wrote: \u201cI contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should \u2018make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,\u2019 thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.\u201d\n\nThe Supreme Court has cited Jefferson\u2019s letter in key cases, beginning with a polygamy case in the 19th century. In the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education, the Court cited a direct link between Jefferson\u2019s \u201cwall of separation\u201d concept and the First Amendment\u2019s establishment clause.\n\nIs it constitutional to teach about religion in a public school?\n\nYes.", + " In the 1960s school-prayer cases that prompted rulings against state-sponsored school prayer and devotional Bible reading, the U.S. Supreme Court indicated that public school education may include teaching about religion. In Abington v. Schempp, Associate Justice Tom Clark wrote for the Court:\n\n\u201c[I]t might well be said that one\u2019s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion,", + " when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.\u201d\n\nWhat general principles should public schools and religious communities follow when entering into a cooperative arrangement?\n\nIn these guidelines, a \u201ccooperative arrangement\u201d is defined as a shared participation in specific programs and activities in accordance with a written agreement. Before entering into a cooperative arrangement, public schools and religious communities should understand and accept the following principles:\n\n1. Under the First Amendment, public schools must be neutral concerning religion in all of their activities. School officials must take the necessary steps to ensure that any cooperative activities that take place are wholly secular. Persons invited to address students during the school day shall be advised of this requirement and must agree to abide by it before being allowed access to students.\n\n2.", + " Students have the right to engage in, or decline to engage in, religious activities at their own initiative, so long as they do not interfere with the rights of others. School districts are urged to adopt policies that reflect recent consensus statements on current law concerning religion in public schools. \u201cReligion in the Public Schools: A Joint Statement of Current Law,\u201d the U.S. Department of Education\u2019s guidelines on \u201cReligious Expression in Public Schools,\u201d and other consensus guidelines are available: Write to the First Amendment Center Online to request copies.\n\n3. Cooperative programs between religious institutions and the public schools are permissible only if:\n\nParticipation in programs is not limited to religious groups.", + " That is, schools must be open to participation by all responsible community groups. Qualifications should not be established which have the practical effect of including only religious groups. Eligibility shall be stated in writing.\n\nA student\u2019s grades, class ranking or participation in any school program will not be affected by his or her willingness to participate or not participate in a cooperative program with a religious institution.\n\nStudent participation in any cooperative program may not be conditioned on membership in any religious group, acceptance or rejection of any religious belief, or participation (or refusal to participate) in any religious activity.\n\nWhat is the \u2018Lemon test\u2019 for religious mottos and displays in public settings?\n\nIn its 1971 decision Lemon v.", + " Kurtzman, the Supreme Court set forth a three-pronged inquiry commonly known as the Lemon test. To pass this test, thereby allowing the display or motto to remain, the government conduct (1) must have a secular purpose, (2) must have a principal or primary effect that does not advance or inhibit religion, and (3) cannot foster an excessive government entanglement with religion.\n\nAren\u2019t the Ten Commandments posted in the U.S. Supreme Court chamber?\n\nNo, but multiple pieces of artwork in the Supreme Court building, including the courtroom, show the historical significance of the Ten Commandments in a context that puts it on par with other influential laws from numerous cultural backgrounds.", + " None of those artworks includes the actual text of the Ten Commandments, although four commandments are partly visible in Hebrew letters in one image. It is perhaps notable that those specific commandments, Nos. 6 to 10, are totally secular in nature, unlike the first few commandments, which are explicitly sectarian.\n\nCourtroom friezes portray Moses as one of 18 historic lawgivers. He is given equal prominence with lawgivers from a variety of religious backgrounds, including Islam, Confucianism, sun worship, and both Egyptian and Greco-Roman paganism. While Moses is shown holding the tables of the Ten Commandments,", + " Muhammad is shown holding the Quran, the primary source of Islamic law, and the first pharaoh, Menes, is shown holding the ankh, an Egyptian mythological symbol representing eternal life. Other figures are shown holding secular legal documents. England\u2019s 12th-century King John is shown holding the Magna Carta, which he signed, while the Dutch legal scholar and statesman Hugo Grotius is shown holding his 1625 book, Concerning the Law of War and Peace, one of the first books on international law.\n\nThe frieze also includes Greco-Roman-style allegorical figures, including Equity, Philosophy, Right of Man,", + " Liberty and Peace. To see an actual image of this frieze, visit this page on the Supreme Court\u2019s Web site.\n\nA separate frieze at the Supreme Court shows a single tablet containing the Roman numerals 1 to 10, but no text. The Ten Commandments are usually portrayed as being on two tablets of stone; so the single tablet with Roman numerals does not necessarily represent the Ten Commandments, and has been interpreted to represent ancient laws generally. The bottom of one door to the courtroom has a carving of two tablets with the Roman numerals 1 to 10, but no text.\n\nSculptures above the east entrance to the Supreme Court building again portray Moses (holding blank tablets)", + " as one of three major Eastern lawgivers, the others being Confucius and Solon, portrayed with numerous other allegorical figures and the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare. Moses is at the center of this group, above the words \u201cJustice the Guardian of Liberty,\u201d but according to a description of the East Pediment on the Supreme Court\u2019s Web site, this art pays tribute to great civilizations and their laws, without specific mention of the Ten Commandments.\n\nOther prominent art at the main entrance to the Supreme Court building includes no biblical references, and shows only the secular history of law. Images from that entrance and other parts of the Supreme Court building are online here.\n\nThus,", + " the context of the portrayals of the Ten Commandments in Supreme Court art is arguably consistent with the Court\u2019s treatment of Nativity scenes on public property in Lynch v. Donnelly (1984). Under that precedent, a predominantly religious display on public property violates the First Amendment principle against the state establishing religion, but a display that combines religious and secular elements to present a secular message is often allowable.\n\nHow should the Bible be included in the history curriculum?\n\nThe study of history offers a number of opportunities to study about the Bible. When studying the origins of Judaism, for example, students may learn different theories of how the Bible came to be.", + " In a study of the history of the ancient world, students may learn how the content of the Bible sheds light on the history and beliefs of Jews and Christians \u2014 adherents of the religions that affirm the Bible as scripture. A study of the Reformation might include a discussion of how Protestants and Catholics differ in their interpretation and use of the Bible.\n\nIn U.S. history, there are natural opportunities for students to learn about the role of religion and the Bible in American life and society. For example, many historical documents \u2014 including many presidential addresses and congressional debates \u2014 contain biblical references. Throughout American history, the Bible has been invoked on various sides of many public-policy debates and in conjunction with social movements such as abolition,", + " temperance and the civil rights movement. A government or civics course may include some discussion of the biblical sources for parts of our legal system.\n\nLearning about the history of the Bible, as well as the role of the Bible in history, are appropriate topics in a variety of courses in the social studies.\n\nWhat are the academic aims of a literature elective in Bible?\n\nA literature elective in the Bible would focus on the Bible as a literary text. This might include the Bible as literature and the Bible in literature. A primary goal of the course would be basic biblical literacy \u2014 a grasp of the language, major narratives, symbols and characters of the Bible.", + " The course might also explore the influence of the Bible in classic and contemporary poems, plays and novels.\n\nOf course, the Bible is not simply literature \u2014 for a number of religious traditions it is scripture. A \u201cBible Literature\u201d course, therefore, could also include some discussion of how various religious traditions understand the text. This would require that literature teachers be adequately prepared to address in an academic and objective manner the relevant, major religious readings of the text.\n\nHow should the Bible be included in the literature curriculum?\n\nAcademic study of the Bible in a public secondary school may appropriately take place in literature courses. Students might study the Bible as literature.", + " They would examine the Bible as they would other literature in terms of aesthetic categories, as an anthology of narratives and poetry, exploring its language, symbolism and motifs. Students might also study the Bible in literature, the ways in which later writers have used Bible literature, language and symbols. Much drama, poetry and fiction contains material from the Bible.\n\nHow should teachers of a Bible elective be selected and what preparation will they require?\n\nTeaching about the Bible, either in literature and history courses or in Bible electives, requires considerable preparation. School districts and universities should offer in-service workshops and summer institutes for teachers who are teaching about the Bible in literature and history courses.\n\nWhen selecting teachers to teach Bible electives,", + " school districts should look for teachers who have some background in the academic study of religion. Unless they have already received academic preparation, teachers selected to teach a course about the Bible should receive substantive in-service training from qualified scholars before being permitted to teach such courses. Electives in biblical studies should only be offered if there are teachers academically competent to teach them.\n\nFor the future, we recommend changes in teacher education to help ensure that study about religion, including the Bible, is done well in public schools. Literature and history teachers should be encouraged, as part of their certification, to take at least one course in religious studies that prepares them to teach about religions in their subject.", + " Teachers who wish to teach a Bible elective should have taken college-level courses in biblical studies. Eventually, religious studies should become a certifiable field, requiring at least an undergraduate minor. State departments of education will need to set certification requirements, review curricula, and adopt appropriate academic standards for electives in religious studies.\n\nWhich interpretation of the Bible should be used?\n\nThe Bible is interpreted in many different ways, religious and secular. For example: In Judaism, the Hebrew Bible is typically read through the eyes of various rabbinic commentators. For Roman Catholics, the authoritative interpretation of the church is crucial for understanding the Bible. Some Christians and Jews use the findings of modern secular scholarship to interpret the Bible,", + " while others reject some or all of modern scholarship.\n\nBecause there are many ways to interpret the Bible \u2014 religious and secular \u2014 public school teachers should expose students to a variety of interpretations. Teachers should allow students to encounter the text directly (like any primary source), and then draw on the resources of different religious and secular interpretative traditions for understanding it. To do this effectively requires the use of secondary sources that provide a discussion of the various religious and secular approaches to the Bible.\n\nWhich version of the Bible should be used?\n\nSelecting a Bible for use in literature, history or elective Bible courses is important, since there is no single Bible. There is a Jewish Bible (the Hebrew Scriptures,", + " or Tanakh), and there are various Christian Bibles \u2014 such as Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox \u2014 some with additional books, arranged in a different order. These differences are significant. For example, Judaism does not include the Christian New Testament in its Bible, and the Catholic Old Testament has 46 books while the Protestant has 39. There are also various English translations within each of these traditions.\n\nTo adopt any particular Bible \u2014 or translation \u2014 is likely to suggest to students that it is normative, the best Bible. One solution is to use a biblical sourcebook that includes the key texts of each of the major Bibles or an anthology of various translations.\n\nAt the outset and at crucial points in the course,", + " teachers should remind students about the differences between the various Bibles and discuss some of the major views concerning authorship and compilation of the books of the Bible. Students should also understand the differences in translations, read from several translations, and reflect on the significance of these differences for the various traditions.\n\nHow do schools resolve the tension between freedom of speech and the need for discipline and control?\n\nPreserving the speech rights of students and maintaining the integrity of public education are not mutually exclusive. Schools should model First Amendment principles by encouraging and supporting the rights of students to express their ideas in writings. On the other hand, students should not expect to have unfettered access to their classmates and should be prepared to abide by reasonable time,", + " place and manner restrictions.\n\nSchools must continue to maintain order, discipline and the educational mission of the school as they seek to accommodate the rights of the students. As a result, the free-speech rights of students are not co-extensive with the rights of adults. Hate speech and sexually explicit speech, though protected for adults, are probably not protected in a public school.\n\nWhat do the courts say about the Bible in the public-school curriculum?\n\nThe Supreme Court has held that public schools may teach students about the Bible as long as such teaching is \u201cpresented objectively as part of a secular program of education.\u201d The cases are Abington School Dist.", + " v. Schempp (1963) and Stone v. Graham (1980).\n\nThe Court has also held, in McCollum v. Board of Education in 1948, that religious groups may not teach religious courses on school premises during the school day.\n\nGuidelines produced by the U.S. Department of Education in 1995, \u201cReligious Expression in Public Schools,\u201d reiterate that public schools \u201cmay not provide religious instruction, but they may teach about religion, including the Bible or other scripture\u201d (emphasis in original Aug. 10, 1995, letter by Sec. Richard Riley). In keeping with the First Amendment\u2019s mandate of government neutrality toward religion,", + " any study of religion in a public school must be educational, not devotional. This principle holds true whether teaching about the Bible occurs in literature, history or any other class and whether the course is required or an elective.\n\nA relatively small number of lower court decisions have dealt directly with the constitutionality of Bible classes in public schools. 1 These rulings show that the constitutionality of such classes is highly dependent on such factors as how the class is taught, who teaches it, and which instructional materials and lessons are used.\n\nHow the class is taught: Any class about the Bible must be taught in an objective, academic manner. 2 The class should neither promote nor disparage religion,", + " nor should it be taught from a particular sectarian point of view. 3\n\nWho teaches the class: A superintendent or school board should select teachers for a class about the Bible in the same manner all other teachers are selected. 4 School districts should not delegate the employment of such teachers to an outside committee that selects teachers based upon their religious beliefs or perspectives. 5 Teachers should be selected based upon their academic qualifications, rather than their religious beliefs or nonbeliefs. 6 Teachers should not be disqualified, however, simply because they have received religious training. 7\n\nFunding for an elective course in religion may be provided by outside sources as long as the funds are contributed with \u201cno strings attached.\u201d 8\n\nWhich instructional materials are used:", + " Decisions concerning instructional materials, including which translation of the Bible may be used, should remain under the control of the board of education. 9 The Bible may be used as a primary text, although it probably should not be the only text for a course. 10 Schools should avoid the use of instructional materials and lessons that are of a devotional nature, such as those used in a Sunday school. Supernatural occurrences and divine action described in the Bible may not be taught as historical fact in a public school. 11 The historicity of many persons and events described in the Bible may or may not be confirmed by evidence outside of biblical literature.\n\nNotes\n\n1 See Hall v.", + " Board of Commissioners of Conecuh County, 656 F.2d 999 (5th Cir. 1981); Gibson v. Lee County School Board, 1 F. Supp.2d 1426 (M.D. Fla. 1998); Chandler v. James, 985 F. Supp. 1062 (M.D. Ala. 1997); Herdahl v. Pontotoc County School District, 933 F. Supp. 582 (N.D. Miss. 1996); Doe v. Human, 725 F. Supp. 1503 (W.D.", + " Ark. 1989), aff\u2019d without opinion, 923 F.2d 857 (8th Cir. 1990), cert. denied, 499 U.S. 922 (1991); Crockett v. Sorenson, 568 F. Supp. 1422 (W.D. Va. 1983); Wiley v. Franklin, 468 F. Supp. 133 (E.D. Tenn. 1979), supp. op., 474 F. Supp. 525 (E.D. Tenn. 1979), supp. op., 497 F. Supp.", + " 390 (E.D. Tenn. 1980); Vaughn v. Reed, 313 F. Supp. 431 (W.D. Va. 1970). Compare Malnak v. Yogi, 592 F.2d 197 (3d Cir. 1979) (holding unconstitutional a school course in which students participated in transcendental meditation ceremonies).\n\n2 Schempp, 374 U.S. at 225; Graham, 449 U.S. at 42; Hall, 656 F.2d at 1002; Gibson, 1 F. Supp. 2d at 1432;", + " Chandler, 985 F. Supp. at 1063; Herdahl, 933 F. Supp. at 592; Human, 725 F. Supp. at 1508; Crockett, 568 F. Supp. at 1427; Wiley, 497 F. Supp. at 392, 394; Vaughn, 313 F. Supp. at 433; Malnak v. Yogi, 592 F.2d 197 (3d Cir. 1979) (holding unconstitutional a school course in which students participated in transcendental meditation ceremonies).\n\n3 Wiley,", + " 497 F. Supp. at 394. See also Gibson, 1 F. Supp.2d at 1433-34; Herdahl, 933 F. Supp. at 595.\n\n4 Crockett, 568 F. Supp. at 1431. See also Gibson, 1 F. Supp.2d at 1433; Vaughn, 313 F. Supp. at 434.\n\n5 Herdahl, 933 F. Supp. at 593-594; Wiley, 468 F. Supp. at 152.\n\n6 Wiley, 468 F.", + " Supp. at 152.\n\n7 Wiley, 497 F. Supp. at 393.\n\n8 Crockett, 568 F. Supp. at 1431. See also Gibson, 1 F. Supp.2d at 1433; Herdahl, 933 F. Supp. at 598-599.\n\n9 Crockett, 568 F. Supp. at 1431. See also Gibson, 1 F. Supp.2d at 1433.\n\n10 Herdahl, 933 F. Supp. at 595 & n.9, 600.", + " See also Hall, 656 F.2d at 1002-1003; Wiley, 468 F. Supp. at 151; Chandler, 985 F. Supp. at 1063.\n\n11 Gibson, 1 F. Supp.2d at 1434; Herdahl, 933 F. Supp. at 596, 600; Wiley, 474 F. Supp. at 531.\n\nWhat is the difference between teaching about the Bible and religious indoctrination?\n\nIf teachers are to understand clearly how to teach about the Bible \u2014 and to feel safe doing so \u2014 then local school boards should adopt policies on the role of study about religion in the curriculum.", + " The policy should reflect constitutional principles and current law, and should be developed with the full involvement of parents and other community members. Parents need to be assured that the goals of the school in teaching about religion, including teaching about the Bible, are academic and not devotional, and that academic teaching about the Bible is not intended to either undermine or reinforce the beliefs of those who accept the Bible as sacred scripture or of those who do not. Faith formation is the responsibility of parents and religious communities, not the public schools.\n\nIn recent years, a consensus has emerged among many religious and educational groups about the appropriate role for religion in the public school curriculum.", + " In 1989, a coalition of 17 religious and educational organizations issued the following statements to distinguish between teaching about religion in public schools and religious indoctrination:\n\nThe school\u2019s approach to religion is academic, not devotional.\n\nThe school may strive for student awareness of religions, but should not press for student acceptance of any religion.\n\nThe school may sponsor study about religion, but may not sponsor the practice of religion.\n\nThe school may expose students to a diversity of religious views, but may not impose, discourage, or encourage any particular view.\n\nThe school may educate about all religions, but may not promote or denigrate any religion.\n\nThe school may inform the student about various beliefs,", + " but should not seek to conform him or her to any particular belief. (This consensus statement, as well as extensive guidelines and resources for teaching about religion in public schools, can be found in Finding Common Ground: A First Amendment Guide to Religion and Public Education, by Charles C. Haynes and Oliver Thomas. Finding Common Ground is available at www.ASCD.org or from www.Amazon.com.)\n\nWhen teaching about the Bible in a public school, teachers must understand the important distinction between advocacy, indoctrination, proselytizing, and the practice of religion \u2014 which is unconstitutional \u2014 and teaching about religion that is objective, nonjudgmental,", + " academic, neutral, balanced and fair \u2014 which is constitutional.\n\nHave there been any rulings yet on RLUIPA\u2019s constitutionality?\n\nYes. So far, two federal district courts have considered the act\u2019s land-use provisions. (Additional courts have considered RLUIPA\u2019s institutionalized-persons provisions.) Both in Freedom Baptist Church v. Township of Middletown and Charles v. Verhagen, the courts found RLUIPA to be a constitutional exercise of congressional power. A number of other cases are currently pending, and it is likely that several will produce rulings from the various federal appellate courts. Once a case with convenient facts reaches the appropriate stage,", + " the Supreme Court will almost certainly take the opportunity to rule definitively on RLUIPA\u2019s constitutionality.\n\nA public employee wishes to convert a fellow employee to his religion. Does he have a First Amendment right to proselytize?\n\nIndividuals do not forfeit First Amendment protections when they accept public-sector employment. Public employees also can speak about religious matters in the workplace to a certain degree, particularly if the speech is not communicated to the general public. However, the employer has a right to ensure that the employee\u2019s religious speech does not disrupt office work or otherwise become distracting to other employees to the extent that it hinders productivity. Furthermore,", + " no employee has the right to engage in religious harassment or create a hostile work environment. If the fellow employee tells his religious-minded co-worker to stop proselytizing, the co-worker should desist from further conversations on the subject.\n\n\n\n\n\nMy faith forbids me to work on Sundays, but my workplace is open and I\u2019m expected to be there. What are my rights?\n\nThe free-exercise clause of the First Amendment says the government may not prevent individuals from freely practicing their religious faith. Also, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the major federal anti-discrimination law that covers virtually all public and private employers with 15 or more full-time employees,", + " generally prohibits an employer from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin or religion. Under Title VII, an employer must \u201creasonably accommodate\u201d an employee\u2019s religious practice unless doing so would create an \u201cundue hardship on the conduct of the employer\u2019s business.\u201d\n\nCongress didn\u2019t define \u201creasonably accommodate\u201d and \u201cundue hardship,\u201d so that was left to the courts. In the 1977 ruling Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, the Supreme Court said requiring an employer \u201cto bear more than a de minimis (minimal) cost\u201d to accommodate an employee\u2019s religious practice is an undue hardship.", + " In 1986, the Court ruled that an employer meets its obligation to reasonably accommodate an employee\u2019s religious practice when it demonstrates that it has offered a reasonable alternative to work requirements interfering with faith. See Ansonia Board of Education v. Philbrook.\n\nDo students have the right to form religious or political clubs below the secondary level?\n\nProbably not, but current law is unclear on this point. Although the Equal Access Act does not apply to public schools below the secondary level, some courts have held that the free-speech clause protects the right of middle school or elementary school students to form religious or political clubs on an equal footing with other student-initiated clubs.", + " When the EAA was debated in Congress, many lawmakers expressed doubt that young children could form religious clubs that would be truly initiated and led by students. In addition, younger students are more likely to view religious clubs meeting at the school as \u201cschool sponsored.\u201d For these and other reasons, Congress declined to apply equal access below the secondary level.\n\nMay administrators permit students to form religious or political clubs in middle schools, even if the law does not require that such clubs be allowed? Again, current law is unclear on this point. If school officials decide to allow middle school students to form religious or political clubs, then at the very least the school should have in place a clear policy and ground rules for the clubs,", + " consistent with the EAA, and explain that the student clubs are not school-sponsored (see Good News Club v. School Dist. of Ladue, 8th Cir. 1994).\n\nMay religious leaders or other outside adults attend the meetings of student clubs?\n\nYes, if the students invite these visitors and if the school does not have a policy barring all guest speakers or outside adults from extracurricular club meetings. However, the Equal Access Act states that the nonschool persons \u201cmay not direct, conduct, control, or regularly attend activities of student groups.\u201d\n\nMay students form religious or political clubs in secondary public schools?\n\nYes, if the school allows other extracurricular (noncurriculum-related)", + " groups. Although schools do not have to open or maintain a limited open forum, once they do, they may not discriminate against a student group because of the content of its speech.\n\nThe Equal Access Act (EAA), passed by Congress in 1984 and upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1990, makes it \u201cunlawful for any public secondary school that receives federal funds and which has a limited open forum to deny equal access or a fair opportunity to, or discriminate against, any students who wish to conduct a meeting within that limited open forum on the basis of the religious, political, philosophical, or other content of the speech at such meetings.\u201d\n\nThe EAA covers student-initiated and student-led clubs in secondary schools with a limited open forum.", + " According to the act, \u201cnon-school persons may not direct, conduct, or regularly attend activities of student groups.\u201d\n\nA \u201climited open forum\u201d is created whenever a public secondary school provides an opportunity for one or more \u201cnoncurriculum related groups\u201d to meet on school premises during noninstructional time. The forum created is said to be \u201climited\u201d because only the school\u2019s students can take advantage of it.\n\nAt my children\u2019s school around Christmas, outside speakers have come in to teach about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. Does the school have to give equal time to another speaker who might want to discuss why Christians celebrate Christmas?\n\nThe school probably does not have to give equal time for other outside speakers.", + " But if the school is bringing speakers in to discuss holidays in December, it makes educational sense to include Christmas. All outside speakers should follow First Amendment guidelines for teaching about the holidays.\n\nWhat should schools do in December?\n\nDecisions about what to do in December should begin with the understanding that public schools may not sponsor religious devotions or celebrations; study about religious holidays does not extend to religious worship or practice.\n\nDoes this mean that all seasonal activities must be banned from the schools? Probably not, and in any event, such an effort would be unrealistic. The resolution would seem to lie in devising holiday programs that serve an educational purpose for all students \u2014 programs that make no students feel excluded or forcibly identified with a religion not their own.\n\nHoliday concerts in December may appropriately include music related to Christmas,", + " Hanukkah, and other religious traditions, but religious music should not dominate. Any dramatic productions should emphasize the cultural aspects of the holidays. Conversely, Nativity pageants or plays portraying the Hanukkah miracle would not be appropriate in the public school setting.\n\nTeachers may also teach about religious holidays in the classroom, but they must be alert to the distinction between teaching about such holidays, which is permissible, and celebrating them, which is not. Guest speakers also can help teachers present the appropriate information, but only if they understand their role as informational, not devotional, in nature.\n\nIn short, while recognizing the holiday season, none of the school activities in December should have the purpose,", + " or effect, of promoting or inhibiting religion.\n\nMay a teacher refuse to teach certain materials in class if she feels the curriculum infringes on her personal beliefs?\n\nGenerally, teachers must instruct their students in accordance with the established curriculum. For example, the 9th Circuit ruled in 1994 against a high school biology teacher who had challenged his school district\u2019s requirement that he teach evolution, as well as its order barring him from discussing his religious beliefs with students. In the words of the court, \u201c[a] school district\u2019s restriction on [a] teacher\u2019s right of free speech in prohibiting [the] teacher from talking with students about religion during the school day,", + " including times when he was not actually teaching class, [is] justified by the school district\u2019s interest in avoiding [an] Establishment Clause violation.\u201d (Peloza v. Capistrano Unified School Dist., 9th Cir. 1994)\n\nMore recently, a state appeals court ruled again that a high school teacher did not have a First Amendment right to refuse to teach evolution in a high school biology class (LeVake v. Independent School Dist. No. 656, Minn. App. 2001). The teacher had argued that the school district had reassigned him to another school and another course because it wanted to silence his criticism of evolution as a viable scientific theory.", + " The state appeals court rejected that argument, pointing out that the teacher could not override the established curriculum.\n\nOther courts have similarly found that teachers do not have a First Amendment right to trump school district decisions regarding the curriculum (Clark v. Holmes, 7th Cir. 1972, Webster v. New Lenox School Dist. No. 122, 7th Cir. 1990). One court wrote: \u201cthe First Amendment has never required school districts to abdicate control over public school curricula to the unfettered discretion of individual teachers.\u201d (Kirkland v. Northside Independent School Dist., 5th Cir.", + " 1989)\n\nMore recently, the 4th Circuit ruled that a teacher had \u201cno First Amendment right to insist on the makeup of the curriculum.\u201d (Boring v. Buncombe County Bd. of Education, 1998)\n\n\n\n\n\nMay states be required to grant exemptions for business owners whose Sabbath requires them to close their business on another day?\n\nNo. In Braunfeld v. Brown (1961) the Supreme Court held that observance of a Sabbath was an individual\u2019s choice, and that a person was not discriminated against or disadvantaged by the state for its decision to require the closing of businesses on a day other than that individual\u2019s Sabbath.", + " States may choose to allow exemptions for certain individuals, but they may not be required to do so.\n\nMay teachers wear religious jewelry in the classroom?\n\nMost experts agree that teachers are permitted to wear unobtrusive jewelry, such as a cross or a Star of David. But they should not wear clothing with a proselytizing message (e.g., a \u201cJesus Saves\u201d T-shirt).\n\nMay teachers and administrators pray or otherwise express their faith while at school?\n\nAs employees of the government, public school teachers and administrators are subject to the establishment clause and thus required to be neutral concerning religion while carrying out their duties. That means, for example,", + " that school officials do not have the right to pray with or in the presence of students during the school day.\n\nOf course, teachers and administrators \u2014 like students \u2014 bring their faith with them through the schoolhouse door each morning. Because of the First Amendment, however, school officials who wish to pray or engage in other religious activities \u2014 unless they are silent \u2014 should do so outside the presence of students.\n\nIf a group of teachers wishes to meet for prayer or scriptural study in the faculty lounge during free time in the school day or before or after school, most legal experts see no constitutional reason why they should not be permitted to do so, as long as the activity is outside the presence of students and does not interfere with their duties or the rights of other teachers.\n\nWhen not on duty,", + " of course, educators are free like all other citizens to practice their faith. But school officials must refrain from using their position in the public school to promote their outside religious activities.\n\nThe U.S. Department of Education put it this way in its 2003 guidelines on prayer in public schools:\n\n\u201cWhen acting in their official capacities as representatives of the state, teachers, school administrators, and other school employees are prohibited by the Establishment Clause from encouraging or discouraging prayer, and from actively participating in such activity with students. Teachers may, however, take part in religious activities where the overall context makes clear that they are not participating in their official capacities. Before school or during lunch,", + " for example, teachers may meet with other teachers for prayer or Bible study to the same extent that they may engage in other conversation or nonreligious activities. Similarly, teachers may participate in their personal capacities in privately sponsored baccalaureate ceremonies.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\nAre state holidays constitutional when they are directly tied to some religious observance?\n\nThe Supreme Court has declined to address this issue, though the lower courts strongly favor the constitutionality of such holidays. The 9th Circuit in 1991 upheld legislation making Good Friday a state holiday in Cammack v. Waihee, reasoning that the absence of a major traditional holiday in the spring created a state interest in decreeing one,", + " and that it made sense for the legislature to select a day that would already be used by the majority of citizens as a holiday. This decision set the stage for the 4th and 6th Circuits to issue similar rulings. The 7th Circuit disagreed in Metzl v. Leininger (1994), holding that because Good Friday is an exclusively Christian holiday that has in no way been secularized, as have Christmas and Easter, its elevation to the status of a state holiday was unconstitutional because it sent a message of endorsement to the public, even if the practical result was neither to advance nor inhibit religion. The holding in Metzl did allow for a finding of constitutionality,", + " however, if the legislature would merely make the effort to advance a secular reasoning for the case.\n\nHas the Supreme Court defined \u2018religion\u2019?\n\nAlthough it has attempted to create standards to differentiate religious beliefs and actions from similar nonreligious beliefs, the Supreme Court has never articulated a formal definition for religion. Given the diversity of Americans\u2019 religious experience since the Constitution was created, a single comprehensive definition has proved elusive.\n\nIn 1890, the Supreme Court in Davis v. Beason expressed religion in traditional theistic terms: \u201c[T]he term \u2018religion\u2019 has reference to one\u2019s views of his relations to his Creator, and to the obligations they impose of reverence for his being and character,", + " and of obedience to his will.\u201d\n\nIn the 1960s, the Court expanded its view of religion. In its 1961 decision Torcaso v. Watkins, the Court stated that the establishment clause prevents government from aiding \u201cthose religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.\u201d In a footnote the Court clarified that this principle extended to \u201creligions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God \u2026 Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.\u201d\n\nIn its 1965 ruling United States v. Seeger,", + " the Court sought to resolve disagreement between federal circuit courts over interpretation of the Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1948. The case involved denial of conscientious objector status to individuals who based their objections to war on sources other than a supreme being, as specifically required by the statute. The Court interpreted the statute as questioning \u201c[w]hether a given belief that is sincere and meaningful occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God of one who clearly qualifies for the exemption. Where such beliefs have parallel positions in the lives of their respective holders we cannot say that one is \u2018in relation to a Supreme Being\u2019 and the other is not.\u201d\n\nWelsh v.", + " United States represented another conscientious-objector case under the same statute. The Court in this 1970 decision went one step further and essentially merged religion with deeply and sincerely held moral and ethical beliefs. The Court suggested individuals could be denied exemption only if \u201cthose beliefs are not deeply held and those whose objection to war does not rest at all upon moral, ethical, or religious principle but instead rests solely upon consideration of policy, pragmatism, or expediency.\u201d\n\nFollowing the expansive view of religion expressed in Seeger and Welsh, the Court in its 1972 ruling involving the Amish and compulsory school attendance suggested a shift back, to a more exclusive definition.", + " The majority opinion in Wisconsin v. Yoder indicated that the free-exercise clause applied only to \u201ca \u2018religious\u2019 belief or practice,\u201d and \u201cthe very concept of ordered liberty precludes allowing every person to make his own standards on matters of conduct in which society as a whole has important interests.\u201d\n\nThe Court in its 1981 decision Thomas v. Review Board further expressed its reluctance to protect philosophical values. The Indiana Supreme Court had ruled that a decision by a Jehovah\u2019s Witness to quit his job after he was transferred to a weapons-making facility was a \u201cpersonal philosophical choice rather than a religious choice\u201d and did not \u201crise to the level of a first amendment claim.\u201d In overturning the Indiana decision,", + " Chief Justice Warren Burger cautiously stated, \u201c[o]nly beliefs rooted in religion are given special protection to the exercise of religion.\u201d The Court found the worker\u2019s actions to be motivated by his religious beliefs.\n\nFew have been satisfied by the Court\u2019s attempts to define religion. Many of the Court\u2019s definitions use the word \u201creligion\u201d to describe religion itself. In other cases, the Court\u2019s explanations seem to provide little useful guidance.\n\nWhat about distribution of fliers from religious groups about events or programs for youth?\n\nAlthough outside groups generally have no right to distribute religious materials on campus, flyers from religious groups may be another matter. If a school allows outside groups such as the Girl Scouts to send flyers home with students about programs for youth,", + " some courts have ruled that schools may not deny that privilege to a religious group. *\n\n\n\n\n\n* See Hills v. Scottsdale S.D. County Pub. Schools, 9th Cir. 2003; Rusk v. Crestview Local School Dist., 6th Cir. 2004; Child Evangelism Fellowship v. Mont. Co. Public Schools, 4th Cir. 2004.\n\nMay public schools and religious communities enter into cooperative agreements to help students with such programs as tutoring?\n\nYes, but only if appropriate constitutional safeguards are in place. Remember, public schools must remain neutral among religions and between religion and nonreligion.", + " For that reason, religious groups must refrain from proselytizing students during any cooperative programs with public schools. Participation or nonparticipation by students in such cooperative programs should not affect the student\u2019s academic ranking or ability to participate in other school activities. In addition, cooperative programs may not be limited to religious groups, but must be open to all responsible community groups.\n\nFor more detailed guidelines, see \u201cPublic Schools and Religious Communities: A First Amendment Guide\u201d published by the American Jewish Congress, Christian Legal Society, and First Amendment Center and co-signed by 12 additional educational and religious organizations (1999).\n\nMay public school facilities be used by outside community groups during nonschool hours?\n\nGenerally,", + " yes. Although schools are not required to open their facilities to any community group, when they do, all groups \u2014 including those with a religious viewpoint \u2014 must be treated the same (see Good News Club v. Milford Central School Dist., 2001). In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that schools may not discriminate on the basis of religious viewpoint when making their facilities available to community groups during nonschool hours (see Lamb\u2019s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School Dist., 1993).\n\nSchools may, of course, impose reasonable, content-neutral restrictions on the use of their facilities. For example, schools may decide when meetings may be held,", + " how long they may last, whether they may continue during weeks or months when school is not in session, what maintenance fee must be paid, and what insurance might be required.\n\nSome content-based restrictions may also be allowed. For example, schools may probably exclude for-profit, commercial businesses even though community nonprofits are allowed to use school facilities after hours. They may also limit the use of the facilities to such things as \u201ceducational purposes,\u201d but such distinctions may prove difficult to administer, as many groups may claim to meet the stipulated purpose.\n\nSchools should be aware that the imposition of content-based restrictions could raise difficult constitutional questions. For example,", + " the Supreme Court has held in Good News v. Milford that in the case of the Good News Club, a content-based restriction excluding religious worship and instruction amounted to impermissible viewpoint discrimination. School districts should be especially mindful to consult with legal counsel if they decide to draft content-based restrictions.\n\nDo religious institutions have a free-exercise right to tax exemptions?\n\nThe Supreme Court has been clear that the simple act of taxation is not in and of itself a violation of either the First Amendment\u2019s free-exercise or establishment clauses. This does not mean, however, that it is impossible for a tax to violate either or both of the First Amendment\u2019s religion clauses.", + " If a tax were targeted in discriminatory ways or became so oppressive that it substantially constrained a religious group\u2019s ability to function, then it could possibly violate the free-exercise clause. Likewise, the administrative details of enforcing a taxation scheme could become so intricate and require so much interaction between the state and a religious organization that a court would find sufficient entanglement to violate the establishment clause, as interpreted through the Lemon test.\n\nCan the government ever interfere with someone\u2019s religious practices?\n\nUnder current constitutional law, the government can impose restrictions on a religious belief or practice as long as the law in question applies to everyone and does not target a specific religion or religious practice.\n\nMay a teacher wear religious garb to school provided the teacher does not proselytize to the students?\n\nProbably not.", + " It is likely that many courts would allow a school to prohibit teachers\u2019 religious garb in order to maintain religious neutrality. The courts may view such garb as creating a potential establishment-clause problem, particularly at the elementary school level.\n\nPennsylvania and Oregon have laws that prohibit teachers from wearing religious clothing to schools. Both laws have been upheld in court challenges brought under the First Amendment and Title VII, the major anti-discrimination employment law. The courts reasoned that the statutes furthered the states\u2019 goal of ensuring neutrality with respect to religion in the schools.\n\nIn the Pennsylvania case, U.S. v. Board of Education, the 3rd Circuit rejected the Title VII religious-discrimination claim of a Muslim teacher who was prevented from wearing her religious clothing to school.", + " The school acted pursuant to a state law, called the \u201cGarb Statute,\u201d which provided: \u201c[N]o teacher in any public school shall wear in said school or while engaged in the performance of his duty as such teacher any dress, mark, emblem or insignia indicating the fact that such teacher is a member or adherent of any religious order, sect or denomination.\u201d\n\nThe teacher and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission contended that the school should have allowed the teacher to wear her head scarf and long, loose dress as a \u201creasonable accommodation\u201d of her religious faith. The appeals court disagreed, determining that \u201cthe preservation of religious neutrality is a compelling state interest.\u201d\n\nIn its 1986 decision Cooper v.", + " Eugene School District, the Oregon Supreme Court rejected the free-exercise challenge of a Sikh teacher suspended for wearing religious clothing \u2014 a white turban and white clothes \u2014 to her special education classes. The Oregon high court upheld the state law, which provided: \u201cNo teacher in any public school shall wear any religious dress while engaged in the performance of duties as a teacher.\u201d The court wrote that \u201cthe aim of maintaining the religious neutrality of the public schools furthers a constitutional obligation beyond an ordinary policy preference of the legislature.\u201d\n\nThe First Amendment Center\u2019s A Teacher\u2019s Guide to Religion in the Public Schools provides that \u201cteachers are permitted to wear non-obtrusive jewelry,", + " such as a cross or Star of David. But teachers should not wear clothing with a proselytizing message (e.g. a \u2018Jesus Saves\u2019 T-shirt).\u201d\n\nIs it legal for students to pray in public schools?\n\nYes. Contrary to popular myth, the Supreme Court has never outlawed \u201cprayer in schools.\u201d Students are free to pray alone or in groups, as long as such prayers are not disruptive and do not infringe upon the rights of others. But this right \u201cto engage in voluntary prayer does not include the right to have a captive audience listen or to compel other students to participate.\u201d (This is the language supported by a broad range of civil liberties and religious groups in a joint statement of current law.)\n\nWhat the Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down are state-sponsored or state-", + "organized prayers in public schools.\n\nThe Supreme Court has made clear that prayers organized or sponsored by a public school \u2014 even when delivered by a student \u2014 violate the First Amendment, whether in a classroom, over the public address system, at a graduation exercise, or even at a high school football game. (Engel v. Vitale, 1962; School Dist. of Abington Township v. Schempp, 1963; Lee v. Weisman, 1992; Santa Fe Independent School. Dist. v. Doe, 2000)\n\nWhat is a \u2018noncurriculum-related student group\u2019 under the Equal Access Act?\n\nIn the 1990 Supreme Court case of Westside Community Board of Education v.", + " Mergens, the Court interpreted a \u201cnoncurriculum related student group\u201d to mean \u201cany student group [or club] that does not directly relate to the body of courses offered by the school.\u201d\n\nAccording to the Court, a student group directly relates to a school\u2019s curriculum only if (1) the subject matter of the group is actually taught, or will soon be taught, in a regularly offered course; (2) the subject matter of the group concerns the body of courses as a whole; or (3) participation in the group is required for a particular course or results in academic credit.\n\nAs examples, the Court identified three groups that were noncurriculum-related at the Westside schools:", + " (1) a scuba club, (2) a chess club, and (3) a service club. The Court found these groups to be noncurriculum-related because they did not meet the criteria set forth above. Conversely, the French club was found to be curriculum-related since the school regularly offered French classes.\n\nSubject to review by the courts, local school authorities must determine whether a student group is curriculum related or not. Schools may not, however, substitute their own definition of \u201cnoncurriculum related\u201d for the definition provided by the Court.\n\nIf the school violates the EAA, an aggrieved person may bring suit in U.S.", + " district court to compel the school to observe the law. Although violations of equal access will not result in the loss of federal funds, the school could be liable for damages and the attorney\u2019s fees of a student group that successfully challenges a denial to meet under the act.\n\nMay students share their religious faith in public schools?\n\nYes. Students are free to share their faith with their peers, as long as the activity is not disruptive and does not infringe upon the rights of others.\n\nSchool officials possess substantial discretion to impose rules of order and other pedagogical restrictions on student activities. But they may not structure or administer such rules to discriminate against religious activity or speech.\n\nThis means that students have the same right to engage in individual or group prayer and religious discussion during the school day as they do to engage in other comparable activities.", + " For example, students may read their Bibles or other scriptures, say grace before meals, and pray before tests. Generally, students may share their faith or pray in a nondisruptive manner when not engaged in school activities or instruction, subject to the rules that normally pertain in the applicable setting. Specifically, students in informal settings, such as cafeterias and hallways, may pray and discuss their religious views with each other, subject to the same rules of order as applied to other student activities and speech. Students may also speak to and attempt to persuade their peers about religious topics just as they do with regard to political topics. School officials,", + " however, should intercede if a student\u2019s speech begins to constitute harassment of a student or group of students.\n\nStudents may also participate in before- or after-school events with religious content, such as \u201cSee You at the Pole\u201d gatherings, on the same terms as they may participate in other noncurriculum activities on school premises. School officials may neither discourage nor encourage participation in such an event. Keep in mind, however, that the right to engage in voluntary prayer or religious discussion free from discrimination does not necessarily include the right to preach to a \u201ccaptive audience,\u201d like an assembly, or to compel other students to participate. To that end,", + " teachers and school administrators should work to ensure that no student is in any way coerced \u2014 either psychologically or physically \u2014 to participate in a religious activity (see Lee v. Weisman, 1992).\n\n\n\n\n\nMay students express their beliefs about religion in classroom assignments or at school-sponsored events?\n\nYes, within limits. Generally, if it is relevant to the subject under consideration and meets the requirements of the assignment, students should be allowed to express their religious or nonreligious views during a class discussion, as part of a written assignment, or as part of an art activity.\n\nThis does not mean, however, that students have the right to compel a captive audience to participate in prayer or listen to a proselytizing sermon.", + " School officials should allow students to express their views about religion, but should draw the line when students wish to invite others to participate in religious practices or want to give a speech that is primarily proselytizing. There is no bright legal line that can be drawn between permissible and impermissible student religious expression in a classroom assignment or at a school-sponsored event. In recent lower court decisions, judges have deferred to the judgment of educators to determine where to draw the line. (C.H. v. Olivia, 2nd Cir. 2000)\n\nIs it constitutional for a public school to require a \u2018moment of silence\u2019?\n\nYes, if,", + " and only if, the moment of silence is genuinely neutral. A neutral moment of silence that does not encourage prayer over any other quiet, contemplative activity will not be struck down, even though some students may choose to use the time for prayer. (See Bown v. Gwinnett County School Dist., 11th Cir. 1997)\n\nIf a moment of silence is used to promote prayer, it will be struck down by the courts. In Wallace v. Jaffree (1985) the Supreme Court struck down an Alabama \u201cmoment of silence\u201d law because it was enacted for the express purpose of promoting prayer in public schools.", + " At the same time, however, the Court indicated that a moment of silence would be constitutional if it is genuinely neutral. Many states and local school districts currently have moment-of-silence policies in place.\n\nMay a school board limit school activities on certain nights to accommodate a particular religious group?\n\nNo, not unless the school has a legitimate civil or secular purpose for limiting activities; it may not curtain programs only to accommodate a particular religious group. Though the U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled directly on this issue, causing some ambiguity, the Court has heard many cases concerning the First Amendment\u2019s establishment clause. From one of those cases came the Lemon test used by the courts to determine if a law runs contrary to the establishment clause.", + " The secular-purpose standard mentioned above is one part of this test, which the Court developed in 1971 in deciding the case Lemon v. Kurtzman. The Lemon test has three parts; first, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; third, the statute must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion. So, for example, if school officials could show that there would be little or no participation in a school activity on a given night due to some religious observance or activity, causing the school to waste school funds, they would probably withstand a constitutional challenge.\n\n\n\n\n\nWhat about the power of schools to control student speech in the classroom?\n\nSchools have great latitude to control the speech that occurs in a classroom and,", + " in that setting, can probably prohibit the distribution of student publications altogether. Similarly, schools may impose any reasonable constraint on student speech in a school-sponsored publication such as the school newspaper.\n\nMay the government constitutionally place conditions on religious tax exemptions?\n\nYes. The Internal Revenue Service requires that 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations (a category that includes tax-exempt religious organizations) refrain from partisan politicking if they are to receive tax-exempt status. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held in Branch Ministries v. Rossotti (2000) that a religious institution had no affirmative right to a tax exemption and that the IRS was justified in conditioning a church\u2019s tax-exempt status on its willingness to abstain from political advocacy.", + " In 1992, the church took out a newspaper ad to ask Christians to vote against then-governor Bill Clinton because of his political stances, also including a request for donations to the ministry. The court determined that this sort of political advocacy was not central to the church\u2019s religious practice, and therefore restraining from such speech was not a burden on its free-exercise rights.\n\nThe government may also condition tax exemptions on compliance with government policies. In the Supreme Court\u2019s 1983 decision in Bob Jones University v. United States, the university\u2019s tax-exempt status was revoked because the school enforced racially discriminatory policies. Questions remain as to whether legislatures or administrative agencies can condition exemptions on an organization\u2019s promise not to discriminate on the basis of religion or sexual orientation,", + " aspects of which might legitimately relate to the organization\u2019s religious beliefs.\n\nAre religious organizations allowed to lobby for or against legislation?\n\nThey may engage in lobbying activities as long as the lobbying does not form a \u201csubstantial part\u201d of their activities. According to the IRS, lobbying is \u201cattempting to influence legislation\u201d and \u201can organization will be regarded as attempting to influence legislation if it contacts, or urges the public to contact, members or employees of a legislative body for the purpose of proposing, supporting, or opposing legislation, or if the organization advocates the adoption or rejection of legislation.\u201d The IRS says it \u201cconsiders a variety of factors, including the time devoted (by both compensated and volunteer workers)", + " and the expenditures devoted by the organization to the activity, when determining whether the lobbying activity is substantial.\u201d According to the courts, devoting 5% of an organization\u2019s time and effort to political activity is not considered substantial within the meaning of the IRS Code. See Seasongood v. Commissioner.\n\nMay a non-custodial parent be told not to expose a child to a religion other than the religion practiced by the custodial parent?\n\nThe U.S. Supreme Court, in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, stated that \u201cin general it is appropriate for the federal courts to leave delicate issues of domestic relations to the state courts.\u201d Consequently,", + " the question at hand has not been dealt with by the Supreme Court or the federal district courts.\n\nThe state courts that have handled this issue, for the most part, have not restricted the non-custodial parents from exposing their children to a different religion. The courts will generally steer clear of this issue \u201cexcept where there is a clear and affirmative showing that the conflicting religious beliefs affect the general welfare of the child\u201d (Munoz v. Munoz, 489 P.2d 1133, 1135 (WA., 1971)).\n\nThe ambiguous language from this Washington state case, one of the first to address this issue,", + " has caused other states to interpret what \u201caffects the general welfare of the child\u201d in many different ways. When determining custody, the courts look at and weigh many different factors to determine what is in the child\u2019s best interest. Examples of these factors can include the emotional ties between the parent and the child, the physical and mental health of the parents and/or the ability of the parents to provide for the child\u2019s material needs. Religion may be one of the factors considered, but is generally only considered if it has, or will have, a clear and substantial bearing on the welfare of the child. As various courts have stated, a showing of substantial harm must be demonstrated before a non-custodial parent\u2019s right to expose the child to his or her religion will be restricted.\n\nState courts have struggled to define what constitutes substantial harm.", + " Very few have found demonstrated substantial harm in the cases they have heard. What courts have said, as in Khalsa v. Khalsa, 107 N.M. 31, 36 (Ct. App. 1988), is that \u201ca custodial parent\u2019s general testimony that the child is upset or confused because of the non-custodial parent\u2019s religious practice is insufficient to demonstrate harm [See Felton v. Felton, 383 Mass. 232 (1981); Munoz v. Munoz]. Further, general testimony that the child is upset because the parents practice conflicting religious beliefs is likewise insufficient.\u201d Thus a very strong showing of harm must be presented.\n\nAn example of this is the case of LeDoux v.", + " LeDoux, 234 Neb. 479 (Neb. 1990) in which the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld a trial court\u2019s decree ordering the father, a Jehovah\u2019s Witness, \u201cto refrain from exposing or permitting any other person to expose his minor children to any religious practices or teachings inconsistent with the Catholic religion.\u201d When they married and had their children, the LeDouxs were both Catholics. At the time of the divorce Edward Ledoux was a Jehovah\u2019s Witness and insisted that the children be involved in his religious activities. The mother, Diane LeDoux, presented testimony from a clinical psychologist who testified that one of the children was under serious stress and was having a maladjustment problem.", + " The psychologist indicated \u201cthat conflicts in the Catholic and Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses religions were an obvious contributing factor to the stress felt\u201d by the child.\n\nAfter weighing all the evidence, \u201cthe trial court concluded that exposing the minor children to more than one religious practice would have a deleterious effect upon the minor children,\u201d and the Nebraska Supreme Court agreed. (Other examples: Funk v. Ossman, 150 Ariz. 578 (Ct. App. 1986), Kendall v. Kendall, 426 Mass. 238 (1997).)\n\nBecause a parent\u2019s constitutional right to practice his or her religion freely could potentially be restricted,", + " a showing of substantial harm to the minor children is required. Substantial harm is a high standard and \u201crequires a clear showing that a parent\u2019s religious practices have been or are likely to be harmful to the child\u201d (Kirchner v. Caughey, 326 Md. 567, 576 (Ct. App. 1992)).\n\nMay my state pass a voucher program in which some vouchers are used at religious schools?\n\nIn 2002 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that, under certain conditions, communities may create a voucher program for use at a variety of schools without violating the U.S.", + " Constitution, even if some of the vouchers are redeemed at religious schools.\n\nCiting precedent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist\u2019s plurality opinion looked first at the purpose of a voucher program: It must exist for a valid secular purpose and not to promote any particular religion, he wrote.\n\nThe Court\u2019s analysis then focused on whether a voucher program advances religion. The justices agreed that a neutral benefit program could be constitutional, even if religious institutions received some of the funds. Arguments occurred over the specifics of what constitutes a neutral program, and whether the funds could go directly to a religious group or if they must pass first through a private individual who would decide how to allocate the resources.\n\nIn both the plurality and concurring opinions,", + " a majority of the Court focused primarily on whether or not a government benefit program was neutral on its face in matters of religion. In his plurality opinion in Zelman, Rehnquist said:\n\n\u201c[Previous cases] make clear that where a government aid program is neutral with respect to religion, and provides assistance directly to a broad class of citizens who, in turn, direct government aid to religious schools wholly as a result of their own genuine and independent private choice, the program is not readily subject to challenge under the Establishment Clause.\u201d\n\nWhat does all of this mean? The Court indicates that communities must consider several factors when creating a voucher program:\n\n1.", + " Is the proposed voucher program neutral with respect to religion? If the plan favors one religion over another, or non-religion over religion, then it will violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment.\n\n2. Will the vouchers be made available to students based on religiously neutral criteria? That would mean deciding who gets a voucher must be based on such non-religious bases as financial need or attendance at poorly performing school, etc. Also, the schools that are allowed or not allowed to receive vouchers must similarly be appraised on the basis of secular criteria, such as academic performance and ability to adhere to safety codes.\n\n3. The voucher must be awarded to an individual,", + " not the religious institution, and the individual must, through private choice, make the decision as to where the voucher is to go. The government cannot influence this decision. This is necessary to demonstrate the government voucher is going to benefit the individual \u2014 as opposed to benefiting religion. This last element was by far the most contentious issue for the justices in the Zelman decision.\n\nWhile all of the above material focuses on whether a voucher program is legal under the federal establishment clause, states must also look at their state constitutions. Most states have their own constitutional prohibitions against providing public funds to religious entities. These restrictions are often more restrictive than the U.S.", + " Constitution.\n\nThis issue has come to the forefront in Colorado, where, in May 2003, a group of taxpayers sued the state over a newly implemented voucher program. Many of the arguments are based on Colorado\u2019s constitutional prohibitions against allowing public money to go to religious entities.\n\nOther issues are also involved, many revolving around policy questions and political realities.\n\nDoes the Supreme Court\u2019s holding in Marsh mean that any plan for providing a legislature with a chaplain paid with public funds will be constitutional?\n\nNot necessarily. The Court\u2019s holding was based on the fact that Nebraska\u2019s practice did not seem likely to lead to an \u201cestablishment of religion.\u201d Given a different set of facts,", + " a majority of the justices might well have discerned such an unconstitutional establishment. For instance, courts are stricter in their application of the establishment clause when it comes to public schools, or other arenas where the government has the opportunity to influence a captive audience of impressionable youngsters. What seems clear from Marsh is that the Court is willing to defer to traditional practices that bear a religious element as long as they do not appear to coerce the unwilling or the highly impressionable into some form of religious participation or belief. The Marsh reliance on tradition and a failure to prove any establishing tendency could make a huge difference if the Supreme Court decides to hear a challenge to the constitutionality of the national motto (\u201cIn God We Trust\u201d), or the wording of the Pledge of Allegiance.\n\nMay students distribute religious literature in a public school?\n\nCourt decisions on the issue generally fall into two categories.\n\nMost courts hold that although schools may place some restrictions on distribution of religious materials by students,", + " they may not ban them altogether. The courts base their decisions on the landmark case of Tinker v. Des Moines School District, which upheld the right of students to wear black armbands protesting the Vietnam War, even in a public school. Included in this right of free speech is not only the right to speak for oneself but also to distribute the writings (i.e., speech) of others. Thus, courts have generally upheld the rights of students to distribute non-school religious literature subject to the school\u2019s right to suppress such materials if they create substantial disruption, harm the rights of other students or infringe upon other compelling interests of the school.", + " Again, the Mergens decision makes clear that the fear of a First Amendment violation is not sufficient justification to suppress a student distribution of material that happens to be religious. Some states, such as California, have incorporated the majority view into their own state education codes.\n\nA minority of decisions hold that schools can prohibit the distribution of any material that is not sponsored by the school. Of course, the ban must be applied even-handedly to all students. A school could not, for example, allow the distribution of political literature while barring religious publications. This is particularly evident in light of the Supreme Court\u2019s 1990 decision in Westside Community Board of Education v.", + " Mergens, upholding the federal Equal Access Act. Under this minority view, however, a blanket prohibition on all student distributions would be permissible.\n\nDoes the First Amendment apply to public schools?\n\nYes. The First Amendment applies to all levels of government, including public schools. Although the courts have permitted school officials to limit the rights of students under some circumstances, the courts have also recognized that students \u2014 like all citizens \u2014 are guaranteed the rights protected by the First Amendment.\n\nEarlier in our history, however, the First Amendment did not apply to the states \u2014 and thus not to public schools. When adopted in 1791, the First Amendment applied only to Congress and the federal government (\u201cCongress shall make no law \u2026\u201d). This meant that when public schools were founded in the mid-", + "19th century, students could not make First Amendment claims against the actions of school officials.\n\nThe restrictions on student speech lasted into the 20th century. In 1908, for example, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that school officials could suspend two students for writing a poem ridiculing their teachers that was published in a local newspaper. The Wisconsin court reasoned, \u201csuch power is essential to the preservation of order, decency, decorum, and good government in the public schools.\u201d And in 1915, the California Court of Appeals ruled that school officials could suspend a student for criticizing and \u201cslamming\u201d school officials in a student assembly speech.\n\nIn fact,", + " despite the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868, which provides that \u201cno state shall \u2026 deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law,\u201d it was not until 1925, by way of the Supreme Court case of Gitlow v. New York, that the Supreme Court held that the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment is one of the \u201cliberties\u201d incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.\n\nIn subsequent cases, the Court has applied all of the freedoms of the First Amendment to the states \u2014 and thus to public schools \u2014 through the 14th Amendment.", + " But not until 1943, in the flag-salute case of West Virginia v. Barnette, did the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly extend First Amendment protection to students attending public schools.\n\nThe Barnette case began when several students who were Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses refused to salute the flag for religious reasons. School officials punished the students and their parents. The students then sued, claiming a violation of their First Amendment rights.\n\nAt the time that the students sued, Supreme Court precedent painted a bleak picture for their chances. Just a few years earlier, the Court had ruled in favor of a similar compulsory flag-salute law in Minersville School District v.", + " Gobitis. As the Court stated in that ruling, \u201cnational unity is the basis of national security.\u201d\n\nHowever, the high court reversed itself in Barnette, holding that the free-speech and free exercise of religion provisions of the First Amendment guarantee the right of students to be excused from the flag salute on grounds of conscience.\n\nWriting for the majority, Justice Robert Jackson said that the Supreme Court must ensure \u201cscrupulous protection of constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.\u201d The Court then warned of the dangers of coercion by government in oft-cited,", + " eloquent language:\n\n\u201cIf there is any fixed star in our Constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\nThe First Amendment says that the government may not \u2018establish\u2019 religion. What does that mean in a public school?\n\nThe meaning of the establishment clause, often referred to as the \u201cseparation of church and state,\u201d has been much debated throughout our history. Does it require, as described in Thomas Jefferson\u2019s famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists,", + " a high \u201cwall of separation\u201d? Or may government support religion as long as no one religion is favored over others? How can school officials determine when they are violating the establishment clause?\n\nIn the last several decades, the Supreme Court has crafted several tests to determine when state action becomes \u201cestablishment\u201d of religion. No one test is currently favored by a majority of the Court. Nevertheless, no matter what test is used, it is fair to say that the Court has been stricter about applying the establishment clause in public schools than in other government settings. For example, the Court has upheld legislative prayer (Marsh v. Chambers, 1983), but struck down teacher-led prayer in public schools (Engel v.", + " Vitale, 1962). The Court applies the establishment clause more rigorously in public schools, mostly for two reasons: (1) students are impressionable young people, and (2) they are a \u201ccaptive audience\u201d required by the state to attend school.\n\nWhen applying the establishment clause to public schools, the Court often emphasizes the importance of \u201cneutrality\u201d by school officials toward religion. This means that public schools may neither inculcate nor inhibit religion. They also may not prefer one religion over another \u2014 or religion over nonreligion.\n\nIf school officials are supposed to be \u2018neutral\u2019 toward religion under the establishment clause,", + " does that mean they should keep religion out of public schools?\n\nNo. By \u201cneutrality\u201d the Supreme Court does not mean hostility to religion. Nor does it mean ignoring religion. Neutrality means protecting the religious-liberty rights of all students while simultaneously rejecting school endorsement or promotion of religion.\n\nIn 1995, 24 major religious and educational organizations defined religious liberty in public schools this way:\n\nPublic schools may not inculcate nor inhibit religion. They must be places where religion and religious conviction are treated with fairness and respect.\n\n\n\n\n\nPublic schools uphold the First Amendment when they protect the religious-liberty rights of students of all faiths or none.", + " Schools demonstrate fairness when they ensure that the curriculum includes study about religion as an important part of a complete education.\n\nDoes the establishment clause apply to students in a public school?\n\nThe establishment clause speaks to what government may or may not do. It does not apply to the private speech of students. School officials should keep in mind the distinction between government (in this case \u201cschool\u201d) speech endorsing religion \u2014 which the establishment clause prohibits \u2014 and private (in this case \u201cstudent\u201d) speech endorsing religion, which the free-speech and free-exercise clauses protect.\n\nStudent religious expression may, however, raise establishment clause concerns when such expression takes place before a captive audience in a classroom or at a school-sponsored event.", + " Students have the right to pray alone or in groups or to discuss their faith with classmates, as long as they aren\u2019t disruptive or coercive. And they may express their religious views in class assignments or discussions, as long as it is relevant to the subject under consideration and meets the requirements of the assignment. But students don\u2019t have a right to force a captive audience to participate in religious exercises.\n\nIt isn\u2019t entirely clear under current law where teachers and administrators may draw a line limiting student religious expression before a captive audience in a classroom or school-sponsored event. In several recent cases, lower courts have deferred to the judgment of educators about when to limit the religious expression of students in a classroom or school setting.", + " A general guide might be to allow students to express their religious views in a classroom or at a school event as long as they don\u2019t ask the audience to participate in a religious activity, use the opportunity to deliver a proselytizing sermon, or give the impression that their views are supported by or endorsed by the school.\n\n\n\n\n\nHow can school officials tell when a planned school action or activity might violate the establishment clause?\n\nHere are some questions that teachers and administrators should ask themselves when planning activities that may involve religious content (e.g., a holiday assembly in December):\n\nDo I have a distinct educational or civic purpose in mind? If so, what is it?", + " (It may not be the purpose of the public school to promote or denigrate religion.)\n\n\n\nHave I done what I can to ensure that this activity is not designed in any way to either promote or inhibit religion?\n\n\n\nDoes this activity serve the educational mission of the school or the academic goals of the course?\n\n\n\nHave I done what I can to ensure that no student or parent may be made to feel like an outsider, and not a full member of the community, by this activity?\n\n\n\nIf I am teaching about religion, am I balanced, accurate, and academic in my approach?\n\nWhat does \u2018free exercise\u2019 of religion mean under the First Amendment?\n\nThe free-exercise clause of the First Amendment states that the government \u201cshall make no law \u2026 prohibiting the free exercise of religion.\u201d Although the text sounds absolute,", + " \u201cno law\u201d does not always mean \u201cno law.\u201d The Supreme Court has had to place some limits on the freedom to practice religion. To take an easy example cited by the Court in one of its landmark \u201cfree-exercise\u201d cases (Reynolds v. U.S., 1878), the First Amendment would not protect the practice of human sacrifice even if some religion required it. In other words, while the freedom to believe is absolute, the freedom to act on those beliefs is not.\n\nBut where may government draw the line on the practice of religion? The courts have struggled with the answer to that question for much of our history.", + " Over time, the Supreme Court developed a test to help judges determine the limits of free exercise. First fully articulated in the 1963 case of Sherbert v. Verner, this test is sometimes referred to as the Sherbert or \u201ccompelling interest\u201d test. The test has four parts: two that apply to any person who claims that his freedom of religion has been violated, and two that apply to the government agency accused of violating those rights.\n\nFor the individual, the court must determine\n\nwhether the person has a claim involving a sincere religious belief, and\n\nwhether the government action places a substantial burden on the person\u2019s ability to act on that belief.\n\nIf these two elements are established,", + " then the government must prove\n\nthat it is acting in furtherance of a \u201ccompelling state interest,\u201d and\n\nthat it has pursued that interest in the manner least restrictive, or least burdensome, to religion.\n\nThe Supreme Court, however, curtailed the application of the Sherbert test in the 1990 case of Employment Division v. Smith. In that case, the Court held that a burden on free exercise no longer had to be justified by a compelling state interest if the burden was an unintended result of laws that are generally applicable.\n\nAfter Smith, only laws (or government actions) that (1) were intended to prohibit the free exercise of religion,", + " or (2) violated other constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech, were subject to the compelling-interest test. For example, a state could not pass a law stating that Native Americans are prohibited from using peyote, but it could accomplish the same result by prohibiting the use of peyote by everyone.\n\nIn the wake of Smith, many religious and civil liberties groups have worked to restore the Sherbert test \u2014 or compelling-interest test \u2014 through legislation. These efforts have been successful in some states. In other states, the courts have ruled that the compelling-interest test is applicable to religious claims by virtue of the state\u2019s own constitution. In many states,", + " however, the level of protection for free-exercise claims is uncertain.\n\n\n\n\n\nHow should school officials determine when they must accommodate a religious-liberty claim under the free-exercise clause?\n\nThe application of the \u201ccompelling interest\u201d test, established by the Supreme Court in 1963 in Sherbert v. Verner, was sharply curtailed by the 1990 Supreme Court decision Employment Division v. Smith. But some states \u2014 such as Florida, Texas and Connecticut \u2014 have passed laws requiring the use of a compelling-interest test in free-exercise cases. Moreover, since most cases involving public schools involve more than one constitutional right (e.g., the religion claim can be linked with a parental right or free-speech claim), some might argue that the compelling-interest test must be used even under Smith.\n\nRegardless of how this is eventually settled in the courts,", + " public schools fulfill the spirit of the First Amendment when they use the Sherbert test to accommodate the religious claims of students and parents where feasible.\n\nMay a religious group that receives funds to administer a homeless shelter discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion or adherence to religious doctrines?\n\nYes. According to the White House, faith-based organizations that receive federal funds may discriminate in employment based on religion.\n\nCharitable-choice provisions found in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWOR) contain no prohibitions against religious discrimination in employment by religious service providers. Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964, otherwise known as Title VII,", + " prohibits employment discrimination based on religion, it contains an exception for religious institutions. Writing for the Center for Public Justice, Carl Esbeck of the Christian Legal Society explained that such exemptions are necessary if faith-based organizations (FBOs) are to successfully participate in social service programs. According to Esbeck, \u201c[p]rotecting the autonomy of FBOs was done to enable them to succeed at what they do so well, namely help the poor and needy, and to get FBOs to participate in government programs, something FBOs are far less likely to do if they face compromising regulation.\u201d\n\nYet disagreement continues over both the constitutionality of such exemptions and the civic wisdom of such policies.", + " This is easily seen in recent legislative battles between House and Senate bills over the CARE legislation, a bill broadening access to government funding of FBOs. The House passed the original version, supported by the White House, with an exemption allowing FBOs to discriminate in employment based on religion. The Senate version contained no such exemptions, or even any expansion of access, but instead provided greater tax breaks for charitable donations. Several lawsuits have also been filed over charitable choice and the employment-discrimination exemptions.\n\nWhile most agree that FBOs currently may discriminate on the basis of religion, the White House Web site provides the following caveat:\n\n\u201c[C]", + "ertain Federal laws and regulations, as well as State and local laws, may place conditions on the receipt of government funds. For example, some employment laws may prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion. Or a State or local law may prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or require certain organizations to provide benefits to employees\u2019 unmarried domestic partners. Some of these laws may exempt religious organizations, while others may not. Organizations with further questions about this issue may wish to consult a lawyer to find out about the specific requirements that apply to your organization and any rights you may have under the Constitution or Federal laws.\u201d\n\nCan federally funded senior centers include religious activities as part of their programs or services?\n\nNot as part of their federally funded programs.", + " According to Title 45, Part 87, Section 2, Subsection C of the Code of Federal Regulations, \u201corganizations that receive direct financial assistance from the [federal government] may not engage in inherently religious activities, such as worship, religious instruction, or proselytization, as part of the programs or services funded with direct financial assistance from the [government].\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\nHow, if at all, can federally funded senior centers provide religious activities to those who want to participate?\n\nTitle 45, Part 87, Section 2, Subsection C of the Code of Federal Regulations states that \u201cif an organization conducts such activities,", + " the activities must be offered separately, in time or location, from the programs or services funded with direct financial assistance from the [government], and participation must be voluntary for beneficiaries of the programs or services funded with such assistance.\u201d\n\nCan federally funded senior centers use religious beliefs to discriminate in deciding to whom to provide services?\n\nNo. Title 45, Part 87, Section 2, Subsection E of the Code of Federal Regulations says that \u201can organization that participates in programs funded by direct financial assistance from the [government] shall not, in providing services, discriminate against a program beneficiary or prospective program beneficiary on the basis of religion or religious belief.\u201d\n\nMay public schools offer a history course that focuses on the Bible?\n\nAn elective history course that focuses on the Bible is a difficult undertaking for public schools because of the complex scholarly and religious debates about the historicity of the Bible.", + " Such a course would need to include non-biblical sources from a variety of scholarly perspectives. Students would study archeological findings and other historical evidence in order to understand the history and cultures of the ancient world. Teachers who may be assigned to teach a history course focused on the Bible need a great deal of preparation and sophistication.\n\nUnless schools are prepared to design a course that meets the above requirements, they will face legal and educational challenges. In view of these requirements, most public schools that have offered a Bible elective have found it safer and more age-appropriate to use the Bible literature approach discussed earlier in this guide.\n\nSchools must keep in mind that the Bible is seen by millions of Jews and Christians as scripture.", + " For adherents of these faiths, the Bible makes sense of events in terms of God\u2019s purposes and actions. This means that the Bible may not be treated as a history textbook by public school teachers but must be studied by examining a variety of perspectives \u2014 religious and non-religious \u2014 on the meaning and significance of the biblical account.\n\nAs we have already noted, sorting out what is historical in the Bible is complicated and potentially controversial. Teachers who teach a history course focused on the Bible need to be sensitive to the differences between conventional secular history and the varieties of sacred history. Students must learn something about the contending ways of assessing the historicity of the Bible.", + " They cannot be uncritically taught to accept the Bible as literally true, as history. Nor should they be uncritically taught to accept as historical only what secular historians find verifiable in the Bible.\n\nSometimes, in an attempt to make study about the Bible more \u201cacceptable\u201d in public schools, educators are willing to jettison accounts of miraculous events. But this too is problematic, for it radically distorts the meaning of the Bible. For those who accept the Bible as scripture, God is at work in history, and there is a religious meaning in the patterns of history. A Bible elective in a public school may examine all parts of the Bible,", + " as long as the teacher understands how to teach about the religious content of the Bible from a variety of perspectives.\n\nWhat about the study of other religious traditions?\n\nGiven the importance and influence of religion, public schools should include study about religion in some depth on the secondary level. As already suggested, such study may include study about the Bible, where appropriate, in history and literature courses as well as in elective courses that deal with the Bible.\n\nHowever, a course that includes study about the Bible and its influence will not educate students about religion generally. Just as there is more to history than American history, so there is more to religion than the Bible,", + " Judaism and Christianity.\n\nPublic schools should also include study about other religious faiths in the core curriculum and offer electives in world religions. Because religion plays a significant role in history and society, study about religion is essential to understanding both the nation and the world. Moreover, knowledge of the roles of religion in the past and present promotes crosscultural understanding in our increasingly diverse society.\n\nSome school districts require that high schools offering a Bible elective also offer an elective in world religions. There is considerable merit in this approach. This gives students an opportunity to learn about a variety of religions and conveys to students from faiths other than the biblical traditions that their religions are also worthy of study.", + " It is important for public schools to convey the message that the curriculum is designed to offer a good education, and not to prefer any religious faith or group.\n\nHow should study about the Bible be handled in elementary education?\n\nThe study of family, community, various cultures, the nation and other themes and topics important in elementary education may involve some discussion of religion. Elementary students are introduced to the basic ideas and practices of the world\u2019s major religions in a number of textbooks and curriculums used in public schools. These discussions of religion focus on the generally agreed-upon meanings of religious faiths \u2014 the core beliefs and symbols, as well as important figures and events.", + " Such discussions may include an introduction to biblical literature as students learn something about the various biblical faiths.\n\nThis early exposure to study about religion builds a foundation for later, more complex discussions in secondary school literature and history courses. Such teaching is introductory in nature; elementary education is not the place for in-depth treatment of religion. Stories drawn from various religious faiths may be included among the wide variety of stories read by students. But the material selected must always be presented in the context of learning about religion.\n\nOne court has permitted elective Bible courses at the elementary level (in Wiley v. Franklin, 468 F. Supp. 133 (E.D.", + " Tenn. 1979)). But if such instruction is undertaken, it must be done academically and objectively by a qualified teacher. Children would need to understand that they are studying about what the people of a particular religious tradition believe and practice. Devotional books intended for faith formation or religious education may not be used in a public school classroom.\n\nAs in secondary schools, a balanced and fair curriculum in the elementary grades would not limit study about religion to Judaism and Christianity, but would include a variety of the world\u2019s major religious faiths.\n\n\n\n\n\nDo schools that permit the distribution of student religious literature give up all control over how it is done?\n\nNo.", + " Just because schools may not prohibit the distribution of all student materials does not mean that schools have no control over what may be distributed on school premises. On the contrary, courts have repeatedly held that schools may place reasonable \u201ctime, place and manner\u201d restrictions on all student materials distributed on campus. Thus, schools may specify when the distribution can occur (e.g., lunch hour or before or after classes begin), where it can occur (e.g., outside the school office) and how it can occur (e.g., from fixed locations as opposed to roving distribution). One recent decision upheld a policy confining the distribution of student literature to a table placed in a location designated by the principal and to the sidewalks adjacent to school property.", + " Of course, any such restriction must be reasonable.\n\nIt is also likely that schools may insist on screening all student materials prior to distribution to ensure their appropriateness for a public school. Any such screening policy should provide for a speedy decision, a statement of reasons for rejecting the literature and a prompt appeals process. Because the speech rights of students are not coextensive with those of adults, schools may prohibit the distribution of some types of student literature altogether. Included in this category would be:\n\nMaterials that would be likely to cause substantial disruption of the operation of the school. Literature that uses fighting words or other inflammatory language about students or groups of students would be an example of this type of material.", + " Student speech may not be prohibited simply because it is considered offensive by some (see Saxe v. State College Area School Dist., 3rd Cir. 2001).\n\nMaterial that violates the rights of others. Included in this category would be literature that is libelous, invades the privacy of others or infringes on a copyright.\n\nMaterials that are obscene, lewd or sexually explicit.\n\nCommercial materials that advertise products unsuitable for minors.\n\nMaterials that students would reasonably believe to be sponsored or endorsed by the school. One recent example of this category of speech was a religious newspaper that was formatted to look like the school newspaper.\n\nThough schools have considerable latitude in prohibiting the distribution of materials that conflict with their educational mission,", + " schools generally may not ban materials solely on the basis of content. Similarly, schools should not allow a heckler\u2019s veto by prohibiting the distribution of only those materials that are unpopular or controversial. If Christian students are allowed to distribute their newsletters, then Buddhists, Muslims and even Wiccans must be given the same privilege.\n\nHow should religious holidays be treated in the classroom?\n\nTeachers must be alert to the distinction between teaching about religious holidays, which is permissible, and celebrating religious holidays, which is not. Recognition of and information about holidays may focus on how and when they are celebrated, their origins, histories and generally agreed-upon meanings. If the approach is objective and sensitive,", + " neither promoting nor inhibiting religion, this study can foster understanding and mutual respect for differences in belief. Teachers may not, however, use the study of religious holidays as an opportunity to proselytize or otherwise inject their personal religious beliefs into the discussion.\n\nThe use of religious symbols is permissible as a teaching aid or resource, provided they are used only as examples of cultural or religious heritage. Religious symbols may be displayed only on a temporary basis as part of the academic lesson being studied. Students may choose to create artwork with religious symbols, but teachers should not assign or suggest such creations.\n\nGuest speakers also can help teachers present the appropriate information, but only if they understand their role as informational,", + " not devotional, in nature.\n\nIn addition, the use of art, drama, music, or literature with religious themes is permissible if it serves a sound educational goal in the curriculum. Such themes should be included on the basis of their academic or aesthetic value, and not as a vehicle for promoting religious beliefs. For example, sacred music may be sung or played as part of the academic study of music. School concerts that present a variety of selections may include religious music. Concerts should, however, avoid programs dominated by religious music, especially when these coincide with a particular religious holiday.\n\n\n\n\n\nHow should religious objections to holidays be handled?\n\nStudents from certain religious traditions may ask to be excused from classroom discussions or activities related to particular holidays.", + " For example, holidays such as Halloween and Valentine\u2019s Day, which are considered by many people to be secular, are viewed by others as having religious overtones.\n\nExcusal requests may be especially common in the elementary grades, where holidays are often marked by parties and similar nonacademic activities. Such requests should be routinely granted in the interest of creating good policy and upholding the religious-liberty principles of the First Amendment.\n\nIn addition, some parents and students may make requests for excusals from discussions of certain holidays, even when these holidays are treated from an academic perspective. If these requests are focused on a limited, specific discussion, administrators should grant such requests,", + " in order to strike a balance between the student\u2019s religious freedom and the school\u2019s interest in providing a well-rounded education.\n\nAdministrators and teachers should understand, however, that a policy or practice of excusing students from a specific activity or discussion may not be used as a rationale for school sponsorship of religious celebration or worship for the remaining students.\n\nMay students be absent for religious holidays?\n\nSchools should have policies concerning absences that take into account the religious needs and requirements of students. Students should be allowed a reasonable number of excused absences, without penalties, to observe religious holidays within their traditions. Students may be asked to complete makeup assignments or tests in conjunction with such absences.\n\n\n\n\n\nDoes the First Amendment require that \u2018equal time\u2019 be given to all faiths in the public school curriculum?\n\nNo.", + " The grade level of the students and the academic requirements of the course should determine which religions to study and how much to discuss about religion.\n\nIn the elementary grades, the study of family, community, culture, history, literature, the nation, and other themes and topics should naturally involve some discussion of religion. Elementary students are introduced to the basic ideas and practices of the world\u2019s major religions by focusing on the generally agreed-upon meanings of religious faiths \u2014 the core beliefs and symbols as well as important figures and events. Stories drawn from various faiths may be included among the wide variety of stories read by students, but the material selected must always be presented in the context of learning about religion.", + " On the secondary level, the social studies, literature, and the arts offer opportunities for the inclusion of study about religions, their ideas, and practices. The academic needs of the course should determine which religions are studied and how much time is required to provide an adequate understanding of the concepts and practices under consideration.\n\nIn a U.S. history course, for example, some faith communities may be given more time than others simply because of their predominant influence on the development of the nation. In world history, a variety of faiths must be studied, based on the regions of the world, in order to understand the various civilizations and cultures that have shaped history and society.\n\nFair and balanced study about religion on the secondary level includes critical thinking about historical events involving religious traditions.", + " Religious beliefs have been at the heart of some of the best and worst developments in human history. The full historical record, and various interpretations of it, should be available for analysis and discussion. Using primary sources whenever possible allows students to work directly with the historical record.\n\nOf course, fairness and balance in U.S. or world history and literature is difficult to achieve, given the brief treatment of religious ideas and events in most textbooks and the limited time available in the course syllabus. Teachers will need scholarly supplemental resources that enable them to cover the required material within the allotted time, while enriching the discussion with study of religion. In fact, some schools now offer electives in religious studies to provide additional opportunities for students to study about the major faith communities in greater depth.\n\nOverall,", + " the curriculum should include all major voices, and many minor ones, in an effort to provide the best possible education.\n\nMay religious scriptures be used in a public school classroom?\n\nStudy of history or literature would be incomplete without exposure to the scriptures of the world\u2019s major religious traditions. Some knowledge of biblical literature, for example, is necessary to comprehend much in the history, law, art and literature of Western civilization, just as exposure to the Quran is important for understanding Islamic civilization. In this sense, the classical religious texts are part of our study of history and culture.\n\nAt the same time, students need to recognize that, while scriptures tell us much about the history and cultures of humankind,", + " they are considered sacred accounts by adherents to their respective traditions. Religious documents give students of history the opportunity to examine directly how religious traditions understand divine revelation and human values.\n\nIn a history class, selections from these accounts should always be treated with respect and used only in the appropriate historical and cultural context. Alert students to the fact that there are a variety of interpretations of scripture within each religious tradition.\n\nMay teachers use role-playing or simulations to teach about religion?\n\nRecreating religious practices or ceremonies through role-playing activities should not take place in a public school classroom for three reasons:\n\n1. Such reenactments run the risk of blurring the distinction between teaching about religion (which is constitutional)", + " and school-sponsored practice of religion (which is unconstitutional).\n\n2. Role-playing religious practices or rituals may violate the religious liberty, or freedom of conscience, of the students in the classroom. Even if the students are all volunteers, many parents don\u2019t want their children participating in a religious activity of a faith not their own. The fact that the exercise is \u201cacting\u201d doesn\u2019t prevent potential problems.\n\n3. Simulations or role-playing, no matter how carefully planned or well-intentioned, risk trivializing, caricaturing or oversimplifying the religious tradition that is being studied. Teachers should use audiovisual resources and primary sources to introduce students to the ceremonies and rituals of the world\u2019s religions.\n\nIs it legal to invite guest speakers to help teach about religion?\n\nYes,", + " if the school district policy allows guest speakers in the classroom.\n\nIf a guest speaker is invited, care should be taken to find someone with the academic background necessary for an objective and scholarly discussion of the historical period and the religion under consideration. Faculty from local colleges and universities often make excellent guest speakers, or they can recommend others who might be appropriate for working with students in a public school setting. Religious leaders in the community may also be a resource. Remember, however, that they have commitments to their own faith. Above all else, be certain that any guest speaker understands the First Amendment guidelines for teaching about religion in public education and is clear about the academic nature of the assignment.\n\nHow should teachers respond if students ask them about their religious beliefs?\n\nSome teachers prefer not to answer the question,", + " believing that it is inappropriate for a teacher to inject personal beliefs into the classroom. Other teachers may choose to answer the question directly and succinctly in the interest of an open and honest classroom environment.\n\nBefore answering the question, however, teachers should consider the age of the students. Middle and high school students may be able to distinguish between a personal conviction and the official position of the school; very young children may not. In any case, the teacher may answer at most with a brief statement of personal belief \u2014 but may not turn the question into an opportunity to proselytize for or against religion. Teachers may neither reward nor punish students because they agree or disagree with the religious views of the teacher.\n\nMay religious leaders provide crisis counseling to students in public schools?\n\nIn times of sudden crisis (e.g., violent or accidental death of students or teachers), schools may call on a wide range of qualified counselors,", + " including religious leaders, to assist school-employed counselors in helping children cope with the crisis at hand. Of course, religious leaders may not be the only grief counselors invited on campus during a crisis. Religious leaders may not otherwise be given routine access to students during the school day. Even when counseling to deal with a sudden crisis, religious leaders should remember that a public school is not a place for proselytizing or other overt religious activity.\n\nTo the extent that schools cooperate with adults who are important in a student\u2019s life (parents or other relatives, guardians, foster parents, social workers or neighbors) to help the child deal with school work, behavioral problems,", + " or other issues, schools may also cooperate with an adult acknowledged by a student as his or her religious leader. However, a school may not in any way compel or coerce a student to speak to representatives of religious institutions.\n\nDo outside groups have the right to distribute material on campus?\n\nGenerally no. Adults from outside the school do not have an automatic right to distribute materials to students in a public school. May school officials allow them to do so? Although this area of the law is somewhat unclear, it is fair to say that schools should exercise great caution before giving an outside group access to students during the school day. Giving some groups access opens the door to others.", + " Moreover, if a religious group is allowed to actively distribute religious literature to students on campus, that activity is likely to violate the establishment clause.\n\nAt least one lower court has upheld \u201cpassive\u201d distribution of materials in a secondary school by religious and other community groups. Note that in this case the group left materials for students to browse through and take only if they wished. Also, a wide variety of community groups were given similar privileges, and the school posted a disclaimer explaining that the school did not endorse these materials. Under those conditions, this court allowed passive distribution, but only in the secondary-school setting (see Peck v. Upshur County,", + " 4th Cir. 1998, although other federal courts have rejected this distinction).\n\nSchools may announce community events or meetings of groups \u2014 including religious groups \u2014 that work with students. All of these groups should be treated in the same way. The school should make clear that it does not sponsor these community groups (see Child Evangelism Fellowship v. Stafford Township, 3rd Cir. 2004).\n\nMay public schools cooperate with mentoring programs run by religious institutions?\n\nPublic schools may cooperate with mentoring projects run by religious institutions provided that:\n\nOther community organizations are given an equal opportunity and are subject to the same secular selection criteria to operate such programs in partnership with the schools.\n\nReferrals are made without regard to a student\u2019s religious beliefs or lack of them.\n\nParticipation in the program is not conditioned on mandatory participation,", + " or refusal to participate, in religious programs operated by a religious institution.\n\nAt no time do school officials encourage or discourage student participation in the religious programs of religious institutions.\n\nMay religious institutions provide \u2018safe shelter\u2019 opportunities to students?\n\nIn order to provide for the safety of students traveling to and from schools, the school district may ask local institutions (e.g., businesses, firehouses, religious institutions) to serve as temporary shelters for students who seek to avoid danger or threatening situations. The school shall provide signs indicating that the place is a shelter available for students.\n\nMay schools use facilities owned by religious institutions?\n\nPublic schools may arrange to use the facilities of private landholders,", + " including churches, temples, mosques or other religious institutions. Of course, all such facilities must meet applicable health and safety codes. But if the arrangement involves the use of sanctuaries, playgrounds, libraries or other facilities owned by religious groups, then the following First Amendment guidelines must be followed:\n\n1. The schools must have a secular educational purpose for seeking to use the facilities, such as after-school recreation, extended day care, homework study hall, etc.\n\n2. Where schools lease space from religious institutions for use as regular public school classrooms, the leased space is in effect a public school facility. Religious symbols or messages may not be displayed in the leased areas.\n\n3.", + " Cooperative programs using the facilities of religious institutions must not afford an actual opportunity for proselytizing by clergy, school employees, or adult volunteers of any school children during the school-affiliated program. (Of course, the law is not violated if a cooperative program\u2019s use of a religious facility coincidentally results in a student gaining an interest in attending worship services there. But the law prohibits clergy from leading devotions as part of the school program.)\n\n4. As stated above, religious symbols and messages may not be displayed in space leased from religious institutions for use as public-school classrooms. The rules are somewhat different for cooperative programs. A room bedecked with scriptural injunctions about repentance and salvation would not be appropriate for cooperative programs;", + " a room with religious symbols or icons might well be.\n\n5. School officials may neither select nor reject the use of a private religious facility based on the popularity or unpopularity of its religious teachings. Religion-neutral criteria should be employed, e.g., proximity to the schools in question; suitability of the facility for the intended use; health and safety; comparative expenses (if any); accessibility for parent pickup or busing.\n\n6. The school\u2019s arrangement for use of a private religious facility should not involve or necessitate an ongoing administrative entanglement between the school district and the religious institution, in which one party ends up exerting influence over the content,", + " scheduling or staffing of the other\u2019s activities.\n\nMay states choose only certain types of businesses to be closed on Sundays?\n\nYes. Where the state determines that a day of rest would be desirable in some kinds of businesses and not in others, they are permitted to restrict only those that they deem to be necessary. Likewise, the state may decide to forbid or limit the sale of certain items (such as alcohol) on any given day, so long as the decision is justified by some secular purpose instead of a religious one. In a 1999 decision, Harris County, Texas v. CarMax Auto Superstores, Inc., the 5th U.S.", + " Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Texas law that forbade car dealerships from being open on consecutive Saturdays and Sundays. Effectively this forced the business owners to choose one day or the other as a day of rest for their employees, though it did not dictate any particular preference as to which one should be adopted. The court denied that the law unfairly discriminated against car dealers or established any sort of preference for religion as opposed to no religion.\n\nMay a student pray at graduation exercises or at other school-sponsored events?\n\nThis is one of the most confusing and controversial areas of the current school-prayer debate. While the courts have not clarified all of the issues,", + " some are clearer than others.\n\nFor instance, inviting outside adults to lead prayers at graduation ceremonies is clearly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court resolved this issue in the 1992 case Lee v. Weisman, which began when prayers were delivered by clergy at a middle school\u2019s commencement exercises in Providence, Rhode Island. The school designed the program, provided for the invocation, selected the clergy, and even supplied guidelines for the prayer.\n\nTherefore, the Supreme Court held that the practice violated the First Amendment\u2019s prohibition against laws \u201crespecting an establishment of religion.\u201d The majority based its decision on the fact that (1) it is not the business of schools to sponsor or organize religious activities,", + " and (2) students who might have objected to the prayer were subtly coerced to participate. This psychological coercion was not resolved by the fact that attendance at the graduation was \u201cvoluntary.\u201d In the Court\u2019s view, few students would want to miss the culminating event of their academic career.\n\nA murkier issue is student-initiated, student-led prayer at school-sponsored events. On one side of the debate are those who believe that student religious speech at graduation ceremonies or other school-sponsored events violates the establishment clause. They are bolstered by the 2000 Supreme Court case Santa Fe v. Doe, which involved the traditional practice of student-led prayers over the public-address system before high school football games.\n\nAccording to the district,", + " students would vote each year on whether they would have prayers at home football games. If they decided to do so, they would then select a student to deliver the prayers. To ensure fairness, the school district said it required these prayers to be \u201cnon-sectarian [and] non-proselytizing.\u201d\n\nA 6-to-3 majority of the Supreme Court still found the Santa Fe policy to be unconstitutional. The majority opinion first pointed out that constitutional rights are not subject to a vote. To the contrary, the judges said the purpose of the Bill of Rights was to place some rights beyond the reach of political majorities. Thus,", + " the Constitution protects a person\u2019s right to freedom of speech, press, or religion even if no one else agrees with the ideas a person professes.\n\nIn addition, the Court found that having a student, as opposed to an adult, lead the prayer did not solve the constitutional dilemma. A football game is still a school-sponsored event, they held, and the school was still coercing the students, however subtly, to participate in a religious exercise.\n\nFinally, the Court ruled that the requirement that the prayer be \u201cnon-sectarian\u201d and \u201cnon-proselytizing\u201d not only failed to solve the problems addressed in Lee v.", + " Weisman, it may have aggravated them. In other words, while some might like the idea of an inclusive, nonsectarian \u201ccivil\u201d religion, others might not. To some people, the idea of nonsectarian prayer is offensive, as though a prayer were being addressed \u201cto whom it may concern.\u201d Moreover, the Supreme Court made clear in Lee v. Weisman that even nondenominational prayers or generic religiosity may not be established by the government at graduation exercises.\n\nAnother thorny part of this issue is determining whether a particular prayer tends to proselytize. Such determinations entangle school officials in religious matters in unconstitutional ways.", + " In fact, one Texas school district was sued for discriminating against those who wished to offer more-sectarian prayers at graduation exercises.\n\nOn the other side of this debate are those who contend that not allowing students to express themselves religiously at school events violates the students\u2019 free exercise of religion and free speech.\n\nCase law indicates, however, that this may be true only in instances involving strictly student speech, and not when a student is conveying a message controlled or endorsed by the school. As the 11th Circuit case of Adler v. Duval County (2001) suggests, it would seem possible for a school to provide a forum for student speech within a graduation ceremony when prayer or religious speech might occur.\n\nFor example,", + " a school might allow the valedictorian or class president an opportunity to speak during the ceremony. If such a student chose to express a religious viewpoint, it seems unlikely it would be found unconstitutional unless the school had suggested or otherwise encouraged the religious speech. (See Doe v. Madison School Dist., 9th Cir. 1998.) In effect, this means that in order to distance itself from the student\u2019s remarks, the school must create a limited open forum for student speech in the graduation program.\n\nAgain, there is a risk for school officials in this approach. By creating a limited open forum for student speech, the school may have to accept almost anything the student wishes to say.", + " Although the school would not be required to allow speech that was profane, sexually explicit, defamatory, or disruptive, the speech could include political or religious views offensive to many, as well as speech critical of school officials.\n\nIf school officials feel a solemnizing event needs to occur at a graduation exercise, a neutral moment of silence might be the best option. This way, everyone could pray, meditate, or silently reflect on the previous year\u2019s efforts in her own way.\n\nMay teachers or other school employees participate in student religious clubs?\n\nNo. The Equal Access Act states that \u201cemployees or agents of the school or government are present at religious meetings only in a nonparticipatory capacity.\u201d\n\nFor insurance purposes,", + " or because of state law or local school policy, teachers or other school employees are commonly required to be present during student meetings. But if the student club is religious in nature, school employees may be present as monitors only. Such custodial supervision does not constitute sponsorship or endorsement of the group by the school.\n\nIf the Supreme Court struck down Congress\u2019 attempt to protect religious liberties in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, why wouldn\u2019t it just do the same thing with RLUIPA?\n\nCongress has different constitutional sources for its authority. If the Supreme Court denies it the power to create a law under one source, Congress may still be able to accomplish its goal using a different source.", + " Congress justified its passage of RFRA under a section of the 14th Amendment that gives it the power to pass laws deemed necessary to protect the liberties ensured by that amendment, which would include the First Amendment\u2019s guarantee of \u201cfree exercise of religion.\u201d The Court held that under that section Congress was only permitted to develop laws that would enforce the standard of protection deemed necessary by the Court itself, as opposed to the stricter general standard embodied in RFRA.\n\nRLUIPA\u2019s justification was rooted in Congress\u2019 power to regulate matters touching on interstate commerce. The Supreme Court has only rarely overturned congressional acts based on the interstate-commerce clause, so it is possible (though far from a certainty)", + " that the Court would find a sufficient tie to interstate commerce to justify Congress in creating RLUIPA. It is important to note that even if the Court finds that Congress acted from the proper source of authority, the act might still be found to violate the establishment clause and therefore be unconstitutional.\n\n\n\n\n\nDo cities have the right to restrict the number of churches?\n\nCities have the right to zone specific areas for religious purposes, but they do not have the right to restrict the number of churches or religious institutions within their boundaries. Under RLUIPA, religious institutions are given some protection against zoning laws. Though the act does not completely exempt churches from zoning laws, officials must have a compelling interest in restricting a church or other religious institution from being built in a specific area.\n\nSome fear that allowing an overabundance of religious institutions in a city will damage the economy because religious organizations are exempt from property taxes.", + " Chris Hoene, a research manager for the National League of Cities, said some cities had become inventive in devising ways to collect money from churches. For example, some cities have begun to tax religious organizations\u2019 profit-generating enterprises, including publishing and gift-shop sales.\n\nMay noncurriculum-related student groups use school media to advertise their meetings?\n\nYes. A student group may use school media \u2014 such as the public-address system, school paper, and school bulletin board \u2014 as long as other noncurriculum-related student groups are allowed to do so. Any policy concerning the use of school media must be applied to all noncurriculum-related student groups in a nondiscriminatory manner.", + " Schools, however, may issue disclaimers indicating that extracurricular student groups are not school-sponsored or endorsed.\n\n\n\n\n\nWhat control does the school retain over student meetings in a limited open forum?\n\nThe Equal Access Act does not take away a school\u2019s authority to establish reasonable time, place, and manner regulations for a limited open forum. For example, a school may establish for its student clubs a reasonable meeting time on any one school day, a combination of days, or all school days. It may assign the rooms in which student groups can meet. It may enforce order and discipline during the meetings. The key, however, is that the school\u2019s time,", + " place, and manner regulations must be uniform, nondiscriminatory, and neutral in viewpoint.\n\nMay the school exclude any student extracurricular group?\n\nYes. According to guidelines endorsed by a broad coalition of educational and religious liberty organizations, \u201cstudent groups that are unlawful, or that materially and substantially interfere with the orderly conduct of educational activities, may be excluded. However, a student group cannot be denied equal access simply because its ideas are unpopular. Freedom of speech includes the ideas the majority may find repugnant.\u201d *\n\nMost schools require students to submit a statement outlining the purpose and nature of the proposed club. School officials do not have to allow meetings of groups that advocate violence or hate or engage in illegal activity.", + " This does not mean, however, that schools may bar students from forming clubs to discuss controversial social and legal issues such as abortion or sexual orientation. Again, student-initiated clubs in a limited open forum may not be barred on the basis of the viewpoint of their speech. Some schools require parental permission for students to join an extracurricular club. Although this step is not required by the Equal Access Act, it has enabled schools to keep the forum open in communities where student clubs have sparked controversy.\n\n* \u201cThe Equal Access Act: Questions and Answers,\u201d found in Haynes & Thomas, Finding Common Ground (2001).\n\nWhat may a school do to make it clear that it is not promoting,", + " endorsing or otherwise sponsoring noncurriculum-related student groups?\n\nA school may issue a disclaimer that plainly states that in affording such student groups an opportunity to meet, it is merely making its facilities available, nothing more.\n\nAre religious displays on public property \u2014 such as Ten Commandments in historical-documents exhibits \u2014 legal?\n\nThe question of whether a religious display on government property is constitutional requires a multi-step analysis. First, one should ask, who is funding and erecting the display? If a private group wants to place a religious monument on public property, then a free-expression analysis should be conducted, looking into such things as the type of forum in question.", + " If, as in this case, a government entity is attempting to post a religious document, then a separate line of questions must be raised.\n\nReligious displays on public property can be legal, but they must pass constitutional muster by not violating the First Amendment\u2019s establishment clause, which requires government \u201cneutrality\u201d towards religion. In deciding whether or not particular religious displays violate the establishment clause, courts look to two Supreme Court tests, the Lemon test and the endorsement test.\n\nThe Lemon test poses three questions: 1) Did the state actor have a secular purpose in posting the documents; 2) was the primary effect of the action to advance or promote religion;", + " and 3) was there excessive entanglement between government and religion in the given activity? The government conduct must survive all three of these prongs if the action is to survive constitutional muster.\n\nA more recent test that has gained popularity in the courts is the endorsement test. Justice Sandra Day O\u2019Connor first outlined this test in her concurring opinion in the 1983 decision Lynch v. Donnelly, which involved a city-owned holiday display containing religious elements in a Pawtucket, R.I., park. This approach examines the following questions: Did the state actor subjectively intend to promote religion through its actions, and would the reasonable observer interpret the actions of the state as an endorsement of religion?\n\nThe elements of both tests should be examined before a government representative posts any religious documents or engages in other forms of religious expression.\n\nTwo cases decided in June 2005 by the U.S.", + " Supreme Court illustrate how even the high court can reach very different conclusions in ruling on seemingly similar religious-display cases. Both McCreary County v. ACLU and Van Orden v. Perry involved displays of the Ten Commandments on public property. In writing for the 5-4 majority in McCreary, Justice David Souter used the Lemon test and determined that the Ten Commandments displays in the two Kentucky courthouses conveyed a religious message to the public, failing to satisfy the first prong of the Lemon test that the display must have a secular purpose. Therefore, the Court majority found the displays in McCreary were unconstitutional.\n\nIn Van Orden,", + " which was decided on the same day as McCreary, the high court ruled that a Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds was constitutional. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in writing the plurality opinion for the Court, was quick in dismissing the Lemon test as the appropriate way to evaluate the case. (The vote was 4-1-4.) Instead, Rehnquist focused on the nature and setting of the monument. The monument was part of a larger display containing 17 monuments and 21 historical markers celebrating the \u201cpeople, ideals, and events that compose Texan identity.\u201d In determining that the monument was of a secular purpose,", + " and therefore constitutional, Justice Stephen Breyer in his concurring opinion noted that because the monument had been on display for 40 years before being challenged, it \u201csuggests more strongly than can any set of formulaic tests that few individuals, whatever their system of beliefs, are likely to have understood the monument amounting, in any significantly detrimental way, to a government effort to favor a particular religious sect.\u201d\n\nLater that same year, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held in ACLU v. Mercer County that another Kentucky County courthouse Ten Commandments display was constitutional. In this case, a Mercer County resident had requested permission to hang a display titled \u201cFoundations of American Law and Government\u201d in the courthouse.", + " The display included the Ten Commandments, Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence, Magna Carta, Star-Spangled Banner, Bill of Rights and other historical documents. The 6th Circuit affirmed the lower court\u2019s ruling that because the Ten Commandments was part of an exhibit and was not, in any way, more prominently displayed than any of the other documents, the display had a secular purpose in educating the public rather than endorsing religion.\n\nAre religious holiday displays on public property constitutional?\n\nIt depends. Determining the constitutionality of religious holiday displays requires an analysis that is heavily \u201cfact-driven,\u201d meaning the slightest change in facts could completely change whether or not a holiday display is constitutional.", + " Three U.S. Supreme Court cases deal specifically with this question. In Lynch v. Donnelly (1984) the Court held that a city-sponsored cr\u00e8che in a public park did not violate the establishment clause because the display included other \u201csecular\u201d symbols, such as a teddy bear, dancing elephant, Christmas tree, and Santa Claus house. In Allegheny v. ACLU (1989) the Court found that a Nativity scene in a county courthouse accompanied by a banner that read \u201cGloria in Excelsis Deo\u201d (\u201cGlory to God in the Highest\u201d), was unconstitutional because it was \u201cindisputably religious,\u201d rather than secular,", + " in nature. In 1995 in Capitol Square Review & Advisory Board v. Pinette the Court held that a private group of individuals (in this case the Ku Klux Klan) could erect a cross in the Ohio statehouse plaza during the holiday season. In reaching its decision, the Court heavily relied on the fact that the KKK had requested permission to display the cross in the same manner as any other private group was required to do, that the public park had often times been open to the public for various religious activities, and that the KKK expressly disclaimed any government endorsement of the cross with written language on the cross.\n\nDespite the Supreme Court\u2019s providing these baseline principles in religious holiday display cases,", + " courts around the country have a difficult time in their application. For example, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that a holiday display in a government building violated the establishment clause because the display lacked sufficient secular content. (Amancio v. Town of Somerset, 28 F. Supp. 2d 677 (D. Mass. 1998).) Included in the display was a Nativity scene, Christmas tree and Santa Claus. Contrast that decision with a ruling out of the 8th Circuit in which it was held that a holiday display that contained candy canes, Christmas tree, snowman,", + " wrapped gifts and a cr\u00e8che was constitutional. (ACLU v. City of Florissant, 186 F.3d 1095 (8th Cir. 1999).) The 1st Circuit and 8th Circuit clearly are split, illustrated by these two decisions, in how to interpret Lynch and Allegheny.\n\nSome circuits, however, have applied the trio of cases with great consistency. For example, the 3rd Circuit has held that a display depicting a Hanukkah menorah, Christmas trees, Kwanzaa candles, a sled and Frosty the Snowman, among other things, was constitutional.", + " (ACLU v. Schundler, 168 F.3d 92 (1999).) This court adhered strictly to the decisions in Lynch and Donnelly in reaching its decision. The 2nd Circuit also reached a similar decision in a holiday display case that included a cr\u00e8che, Christmas tree, Hanukkah menorah, and a posted sign that stated that the display was privately sponsored. (Elewski v. City of Syracuse, 123 F. 3d 51 (2nd Cir. 1997).)\n\nHow can an individual ensure that a religious holiday display that she erects is constitutional?", + " First of all, any holiday display erected on private property is immune from any constitutional challenges. Secondly, if an individual or group of individuals decide to set up a holiday display on public property (i.e. parks, courthouses, town halls, etc) he should petition the appropriate authorities for authorization to erect such a display. If the site has been home to a variety of religious displays in the past, it is likely permission will be granted.\n\nIf a prisoner who practiced the Sikh religion asked to wear a kirpan (small dagger), saying he needed to wear the kirpan to express his religious faith, must prison officials grant the request?\n\nNo,", + " it is likely that prison officials could refuse this request, even if motivated by sincere religious belief, because of legitimate safety concerns. The courts grant a good deal of discretion to prison officials when it comes to safety considerations. Safety is a paramount concern in prisons and is termed a legitimate penological interest.\n\nShould society care about inmates\u2019 religious rights?\n\nWhatever legal standard is used to resolve inmate freedom-of-religion lawsuits, some in society ask: \u201cWho cares?\u201d Many people believe that inmates forfeited their rights when they committed their crimes. But others believe society should try to encourage inmates to practice their religious faith.\n\n\u201cLet\u2019s face it. Most inmates do get out of prison at some point,\u201d says David Fahti,", + " a prison expert. \u201cAnd the single best predictor of whether an inmate will do OK when they reenter society is whether they maintain community ties when they are in prison.\n\n\u201cThere are many reasons why we should recognize the religious rights of inmates,\u201d Fahti says. \u201cOur country was founded on principles of religious freedom. Many people came to this country to flee religious persecution in other countries. As long as a prisoner\u2019s practice of religion does not interfere with prison security, there is simply no reason to deny an inmate\u2019s religious rights.\n\nAdds Keith Defasio, a prisoners\u2019-rights advocate, \u201cEven though inmates are incarcerated for crimes, they should still be entitled to their constitutional dignities.", + " Where are we as a democracy if we can give and take away constitutional rights?\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\nHas the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of religious exemptions to state-compelled vaccination?\n\nNo Supreme Court ruling explicitly establishes a position on religious exemptions to state-compelled vaccination. However, it is clear from the Court\u2019s establishment-clause rulings that it is unlikely for all such exemptions to be found in violation of the First Amendment. What is less clear is whether or not the Court would find the free-exercise clause to mandate the inclusion of religious exemptions. For this reason, the status of religious exemptions to state-compelled vaccinations is still very much unclear. What the Court has found,", + " however, is that a state has the authority to require its citizens to receive certain inoculations. This authority was established in 1905 in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, where the Court ruled that Massachusetts had the authority to require its citizens to be inoculated against smallpox.\n\nWhich states require immunizations for public schoolchildren, and which offer religious exemptions?\n\nAll states currently require children to follow at least some form of standardized immunization schedule in order to be enrolled in public school. Vaccinations often required by this schedule include those against diphtheria, whooping cough, and the measles. Of the 50 states, all offer some exemptions for religious opposition to vaccination except Mississippi and West Virginia.\n\nHow are exemption requests evaluated?\n\nStates generally apply one of three standards for evaluating religious-exemption requests.\n\n1.", + " Parents requesting the exemption must be a member of a recognized religious organization that is opposed to vaccination.\n\n2. Parents must demonstrate a sincere and genuinely held religious belief that opposes one or all vaccinations.\n\n3. Parents must simply sign a statement confirming that they are religiously opposed to vaccination and would like an exemption.\n\nAre religious exemptions the only way to opt out of mandatory vaccination?\n\nNo, all states include a medical exemption in their vaccination policy, and almost half of the states offer philosophical exemptions in addition to their medical and religious accommodations.\n" + ], + "length": 28226, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 70, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Leonard Cohen is 82 now, and fans will not be thrilled to learn in a lengthy New Yorker profile that he's almost certainly done touring\u2014his body just isn't up to the rigors. But he's still making music, and an album out this month is classic Cohen in that it's \"obsessed with mortality, God-infused, yet funny,\" writes David Remnick. The profile is much larger in scope, however, tracing the arc of the Canadian-born Cohen's life, including his time with muse Marianne Ihlen. And it includes a rare treat: the normally reticent Bob Dylan going into depth on why his friend Cohen is so brilliant. \u201cWhen people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius,\" says Dylan. \"Even the counterpoint lines\u2014they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs,\" he adds. \"As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music.\" Dylan, in fact, was one of the first to recognize the brilliance of Cohen's much-covered Hallelujah, the piece notes. As for Cohen, he lives in LA now, with money trouble involving a shady business manager now behind him, and he considers himself \"extremely blessed.\" He's free to focus on music and writing, though he doesn't expect to finish all the songs in his head. \"At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order,\" he says. \"Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.\" (Click for the full piece, in which Remnick recounts getting lectured at length by Cohen over a mixup on a meeting time.)\n", + "docs": [ + "When Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960, long before he played the festival at the Isle of Wight in front of six hundred thousand people. In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene. Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry.", + " Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher, he said that he was out to reach \u201cinner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.\u201d Cohen was growing weary of London\u2019s rising damp and its gray skies. An English dentist had just yanked one of his wisdom teeth. After weeks of cold and rain, he wandered into a bank and asked the teller about his deep suntan. The teller said that he had just returned from a trip to Greece.", + " Cohen bought an airline ticket. Not long afterward, he alighted in Athens, visited the Acropolis, made his way to the port of Piraeus, boarded a ferry, and disembarked at the island of Hydra. With the chill barely out of his bones, Cohen took in the horseshoe-shaped harbor and the people drinking cold glasses of retsina and eating grilled fish in the caf\u00e9s by the water; he looked up at the pines and the cypress trees and the whitewashed houses that crept up the hillsides. There was something mythical and primitive about Hydra. Cars were forbidden. Mules humped water up the long stairways to the houses.", + " There was only intermittent electricity. Cohen rented a place for fourteen dollars a month. Eventually, he bought a whitewashed house of his own, for fifteen hundred dollars, thanks to an inheritance from his grandmother. Hydra promised the life Cohen had craved: spare rooms, the empty page, eros after dark. He collected a few paraffin lamps and some used furniture: a Russian wrought-iron bed, a writing table, chairs like \u201cthe chairs that van Gogh painted.\u201d During the day, he worked on a sexy, phantasmagoric novel called \u201cThe Favorite Game\u201d and the poems in a collection titled \u201cFlowers for Hitler.\u201d He alternated between extreme discipline and the varieties of abandon.", + " There were days of fasting to concentrate the mind. There were drugs to expand it: pot, speed, acid. \u201cI took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God,\u201d he said years later. \u201cGenerally, I ended up with a bad hangover.\u201d Here and there, Cohen caught glimpses of a beautiful Norwegian woman. Her name was Marianne Ihlen, and she had grown up in the countryside near Oslo. Her grandmother used to tell her, \u201cYou are going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold.\u201d She thought she already had: Axel Jensen, a novelist from home,", + " who wrote in the tradition of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. She had married Jensen, and they had a son, little Axel. Jensen was not a constant husband, however, and, by the time their child was four months old, Jensen was, as Marianne put it, \u201cover the hills again\u201d with another woman. One spring day, Ihlen was with her infant son in a grocery store and caf\u00e9. \u201cI was standing in the shop with my basket waiting to pick up bottled water and milk,\u201d she recalled decades later, on a Norwegian radio program. \u201cHe is standing in the doorway with the sun behind him.\u201d Cohen asked her to join him and his friends outside.", + " He was wearing khaki pants, sneakers, a shirt with rolled sleeves, and a cap. The way Marianne remembered it, he seemed to radiate \u201cenormous compassion for me and my child.\u201d She was taken with him. \u201cI felt it throughout my body,\u201d she said. \u201cA lightness had come over me.\u201d Cohen had known some success with women. He would know a great deal more. For a troubadour of sadness\u2014\u201cthe godfather of gloom,\u201d he was later called\u2014Cohen found frequent respite in the arms of others. As a young man, he had a kind of Michael Corleone Before the Fall look,", + " sloe-eyed, dark, a little hunched, but high courtesy and verbal fluency were his charm. When he was thirteen, he read a book on hypnotism. He tried out his new discipline on the family housekeeper, and she took off her clothes. Not everyone over the years was quite as bewitched. Nico spurned him, and Joni Mitchell, who had once been his lover, remained a friend but dismissed him as a \u201cboudoir poet.\u201d But these were the exceptions. Leonard began spending more and more time with Marianne. They went to the beach, made love, kept house. Once, when they were apart\u2014Marianne and Axel in Norway,", + " Cohen in Montreal scraping up some money\u2014he sent her a telegram: \u201cHave house all I need is my woman and her son. Love, Leonard.\u201d There were times of separation, times of argument and jealousy. When Marianne drank, she could go into a dark rage. And there were infidelities on both sides. (\u201cGood gracious. All the girls were panting for him,\u201d Marianne recalled. \u201cI would dare go as far as to say that I was on the verge of killing myself due to it.\u201d) In the mid-sixties, as Cohen started to record his songs and win worldly success, Marianne became known to his fans as that antique figure\u2014the muse.", + " A memorable photograph of her, dressed only in a towel, and sitting at the desk in the house on Hydra, appeared on the back of Cohen\u2019s second album, \u201cSongs from a Room.\u201d But, after they\u2019d been together for eight years, the relationship came apart, little by little\u2014\u201clike falling ashes,\u201d as Cohen put it. \u201cLess bromance, more broductivity.\u201d Cohen was spending more time away from Hydra pursuing his career. Marianne and Axel stayed on awhile on Hydra, then left for Norway. Eventually, Marianne married again. But life had its burdens, particularly for Axel, who has had persistent health problems.", + " What Cohen\u2019s fans knew of Marianne was her beauty and what it had inspired: \u201cBird on the Wire,\u201d \u201cHey, That\u2019s No Way to Say Goodbye,\u201d and, most of all, \u201cSo Long, Marianne.\u201d She and Cohen stayed in touch. When he toured in Scandinavia, she visited him backstage. They exchanged letters and e-mails. When they spoke to journalists and to friends of their love affair, it was always in the fondest terms. In late July this year, Cohen received an e-mail from Jan Christian Mollestad, a close friend of Marianne\u2019s, saying that she was suffering from cancer.", + " In their last communication, Marianne had told Cohen that she had sold her beach house to help insure that Axel would be taken care of, but she never mentioned that she was sick. Now, it appeared, she had only a few days left. Cohen wrote back immediately: Well Marianne, it\u2019s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I\u2019ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don\u2019t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that.", + " But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road. Two days later, Cohen got an e-mail from Norway: Dear Leonard Marianne slept slowly out of this life yesterday evening. Totally at ease, surrounded by close friends. Your letter came when she still could talk and laugh in full consciousness. When we read it aloud, she smiled as only Marianne can. She lifted her hand, when you said you were right behind, close enough to reach her. It gave her deep peace of mind that you knew her condition. And your blessing for the journey gave her extra strength.", + "... In her last hour I held her hand and hummed \u201cBird on the Wire,\u201d while she was breathing so lightly. And when we left the room, after her soul had flown out of the window for new adventures, we kissed her head and whispered your everlasting words. So long, Marianne...\n\nLeonard Cohen lives on the second floor of a modest house in Mid-Wilshire, a diverse, unglamorous precinct of Los Angeles. He is eighty-two. Between 2008 and 2013, he was on tour more or less continuously. It is highly unlikely that his health will permit such rigors ever again.", + " Cohen has an album coming out in October\u2014obsessed with mortality, God-infused, yet funny, called \u201cYou Want It Darker\u201d\u2014but friends and musical associates say they\u2019d be surprised to see him onstage again except in a limited way: a single performance, perhaps, or a short residency at one venue. When I e-mailed ahead to ask Cohen out for dinner, he said that he was more or less \u201cconfined to barracks.\u201d Not long ago, one of Cohen\u2019s most frequent visitors, and an old friend of mine\u2014Robert Faggen, a professor of literature\u2014brought me by the house. Faggen met Cohen twenty years ago in a grocery store,", + " at the foot of Mt. Baldy, the highest of the San Gabriel Mountains, an hour and a half east of Los Angeles. They were both living near the top of the mountain: Bob in a cabin where he wrote about Frost and Melville and drove down the road to teach his classes at Claremont McKenna College; Cohen in a small Zen Buddhist monastery, where he was an ordained monk. As Faggen was shopping for cold cuts, he heard a familiar basso voice across the store; he looked down the aisle and saw a small, trim man, his head shaved, talking intently with a clerk about varieties of potato salad.", + " Faggen\u2019s musical expertise runs more to Mahler\u2019s lieder than to popular song. But he is an admirer of Cohen\u2019s work and introduced himself. They have been close friends ever since. Cohen greeted us. He sat in a large blue medical chair, the better to ease the pain from compression fractures in his back. He is now very thin, but he is still handsome, with a full head of gray-white hair and razory dark eyes. He wore a well-tailored midnight-blue suit\u2014even in the sixties he wore suits\u2014and a stickpin through his collar. He extended a hand like a courtly retired capo.", + " \u201cHello, friends,\u201d he said. \u201cPlease, please, sit right there.\u201d The depth of his voice makes Tom Waits sound like Eddie Kendricks. And then, like my mother, he offered what could only have been the complete catalogue of his larder: water, juice, wine, a piece of chicken, a slice of cake, \u201cmaybe something else.\u201d In the hours we spent together, he offered many refreshments, and, always, kindly. \u201cWould you like some slices of cheese and olives?\u201d is not an offer you are likely to get from Axl Rose. \u201cSome vodka? A glass of milk?", + " Schnapps?\u201d And, as with my mother, it is best, sometimes, to say yes. One day, we had cheeseburgers-with-everything ordered from a Fatburger down the street and, on another, thick slices of gefilte fish with horseradish. Marianne\u2019s death was only a few weeks in the past, and Cohen was still amazed at the way his letter\u2014an e-mail to a dying friend\u2014had gone viral, at least in the Cohen-ardent universe. He hadn\u2019t set out to be public about his feelings, but when one of Marianne\u2019s closest friends, in Oslo, asked to release the note,", + " he didn\u2019t object. \u201cAnd since there\u2019s a song attached to it, and there\u2019s a story...\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just a sweet story. So in that sense I\u2019m not displeased.\u201d Like anyone of his age, Cohen counts the losses as a matter of routine. He seemed not so much devastated by Marianne\u2019s death as overtaken by the memory of their time together. \u201cThere would be a gardenia on my desk perfuming the whole room,\u201d he said. \u201cThere would be a little sandwich at noon. Sweetness, sweetness everywhere.\u201d Cohen\u2019s songs are death-haunted, but then they have been since his earliest verses.", + " A half century ago, a record executive said, \u201cTurn around, kid. Aren\u2019t you a little old for this?\u201d But, despite his diminished health, Cohen remains as clear-minded and hardworking as ever, soldierly in his habits. He gets up well before dawn and writes. In the small, spare living room where we sat, there were a couple of acoustic guitars leaning against the wall, a keyboard synthesizer, two laptops, a sophisticated microphone for voice recording. Working with an old collaborator, Pat Leonard, and his son, Adam, who has the producer\u2019s credit, Cohen did much of his work for \u201cYou Want It Darker\u201d in the living room,", + " e-mailing recorded files to his partners for additional refinements. Age and the end of age provide a useful, if not entirely desired, air of quiet. \u201cIn a certain sense, this particular predicament is filled with many fewer distractions than other times in my life and actually enables me to work with a little more concentration and continuity than when I had duties of making a living, being a husband, being a father,\u201d he said. \u201cThose distractions are radically diminished at this point. The only thing that mitigates against full production is just the condition of my body. \u201cFor some odd reason,\u201d he went on, \u201cI have all my marbles,", + " so far. I have many resources, some cultivated on a personal level, but circumstantial, too: my daughter and her children live downstairs, and my son lives two blocks down the street. So I am extremely blessed. I have an assistant who is devoted and skillful. I have a friend like Bob and another friend or two who make my life very rich. So in a certain sense I\u2019ve never had it better.... At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It\u2019s a clich\u00e9, but it\u2019s underestimated as an analgesic on all levels.", + " Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.\u201d\n\nCohen came of age after the war. His Montreal, however, was nothing like Philip Roth\u2019s Newark or Alfred Kazin\u2019s Brownsville. He was brought up in Westmount, a predominantly Anglophone neighborhood, where the city\u2019s well-to-do Jews lived. The men in his family, particularly on his father\u2019s side, were the \u201cdons\u201d of Jewish Montreal. His grandfather, Cohen told me, \u201cwas probably the most significant Jew in Canada,\u201d the founder of a range of Jewish institutions;", + " in the wake of anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian imperium, he saw to it that countless refugees made it to Canada. Nathan Cohen, Leonard\u2019s father, ran Freedman Company, the family clothing business. His mother, Masha, came from a family of more recent immigrants. She was loving, depressive, \u201cChekhovian\u201d in her emotional range, according to Leonard: \u201cShe laughed and wept deeply.\u201d Masha\u2019s father, Solomon Klonitzki-Kline, was a distinguished Talmudic scholar from Lithuania who completed a \u201cLexicon of Hebrew Homonyms.\u201d Leonard went to fine schools, including McGill and,", + " for a while, Columbia. He never resented the family\u2019s comforts. \u201cI have a deep tribal sense,\u201d he said. \u201cI grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people, they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion.\u201d When Leonard was nine, his father died; this moment, a primal wound, was when he first used language as a kind of sacrament. \u201cI have some memories of him,\u201d Cohen said, and recounted the story of his father\u2019s funeral, which was held at their house. \u201cWe came down the stairs,", + " and the coffin was in the living room.\u201d Contrary to Jewish custom, the funeral workers had left the coffin open. It was winter, and Cohen thought of the gravediggers: it would be difficult to break the frozen ground. He watched his father lowered into the earth. \u201cThen I came back to the house and I went to his closet and I found a premade bow tie. I don\u2019t know why I did this, I can\u2019t even own it now, but I cut one of the wings of the bow tie off and I wrote something on a piece of paper\u2014I think it was some kind of farewell to my father\u2014and I buried it in a little hole in the back yard.", + " And I put that curious note in there.... It was just some attraction to a ritual response to an impossible event.\u201d Cohen\u2019s uncles made sure that Masha and her two children, Leonard and his sister, Esther, did not suffer any financial decline after her husband\u2019s death. Leonard studied; he worked in an uncle\u2019s foundry, W. R. Cuthbert & Company, pouring metal for sinks and piping, and at the clothing factory, where he picked up a useful skill for his career as a touring musician: he learned to fold suits so they didn\u2019t wrinkle. But, as he wrote in a journal,", + " he always imagined himself as a writer, \u201craincoated, battered hat pulled low above intense eyes, a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard, followed by the sympathy of countless audiences... loved by two or three beautiful women who could never have him.\u201d And yet a rock-and-roll life was far from his mind. He set out to be an author. As Sylvie Simmons makes plain in her excellent biography \u201cI\u2019m Your Man,\u201d Cohen\u2019s apprenticeship was in letters. As a teen-ager, his idols were Yeats and Lorca (he named his daughter after Lorca). At McGill,", + " he read Tolstoy, Proust, Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, and he fell in with a circle of poets, particularly Irving Layton. Cohen, who published his first poem, \u201cSatan in Westmount,\u201d when he was nineteen, once said of Layton, \u201cI taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever.\u201d Cohen has never stopped writing verse; the poem \u201cSteer Your Way\u201d was published in this magazine in June. Cohen was also taken with music. As a kid, he had learned the songs in the old lefty folk compendium \u201cThe People\u2019s Song Book,\u201d listened to Hank Williams and other country singers on the radio,", + " and, at sixteen, dressed in his father\u2019s old su\u00e8de jacket, he played in a country-music combo called the Buckskin Boys. He took some informal guitar lessons in his twenties from a Spaniard he met next to a local tennis court. After a few weeks, he picked up a flamenco chord progression. When the man failed to appear for their fourth lesson, Cohen called his landlady and learned that the man had killed himself. In a speech many years later, in Asturias, Cohen said, \u201cI knew nothing about the man, why he came to Montreal... why he appeared at that tennis court,", + " why he took his life.... It was those six chords, it was that guitar pattern, that has been the basis of all my songs, and all my music.\u201d 8 Marianne Ihlen at the port of Hydra, Greece, in 1962. Ihlen was known to Leonard Cohen\u2019s fans as that antique figure\u2014the muse. Photograph from \u201cSo Long, Marianne: A Love Story,\u201d by Kari Hesthamar / Courtesy ECW Press Cohen loved the masters of the blues\u2014Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Bessie Smith\u2014and the French storyteller-singers like \u00c9dith Piaf and Jacques Brel.", + " He put coins in the jukebox to listen to \u201cThe Great Pretender,\u201d \u201cTennessee Waltz,\u201d and anything by Ray Charles. And yet when the Beatles came along he was indifferent. \u201cI\u2019m interested in things that contribute to my survival,\u201d he said. \u201cI had girlfriends who really irritated me by their devotion to the Beatles. I didn\u2019t begrudge them their interest, and there were songs like \u2018Hey Jude\u2019 that I could appreciate. But they didn\u2019t seem to be essential to the kind of nourishment that I craved.\u201d\n\nThe same set of ears that first tuned in to Bob Dylan, in 1961,", + " discovered Leonard Cohen, in 1966. This was John Hammond, a patrician related to the Vanderbilts, and by far the most perceptive scout and producer in the business. He was instrumental in the first recordings of Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Benny Goodman, Aretha Franklin, and Billie Holiday. Tipped off by friends who were following the folk scene downtown, Hammond called Cohen and asked if he would play for him. Cohen was thirty-two, a published poet and novelist, but, though a year older than Elvis Presley, a musical novice. He had turned to songwriting largely because he wasn\u2019t making a living as a writer.", + " He was staying on the fourth floor of the Chelsea Hotel, on West Twenty-third Street, and filled notebooks during the day. At night, he sang his songs in clubs and met people on the scene: Patti Smith, Lou Reed (who admired Cohen\u2019s novel \u201cBeautiful Losers\u201d), Jimi Hendrix (who jammed with him on, of all things, \u201cSuzanne\u201d), and, if just for a night, Janis Joplin (\u201cgiving me head on the unmade bed / while the limousines wait in the street\u201d). After taking Cohen to lunch one day, Hammond suggested that they go to Cohen\u2019s room,", + " and, sitting on his bed, Cohen played \u201cSuzanne,\u201d \u201cHey, That\u2019s No Way to Say Goodbye,\u201d \u201cThe Stranger Song,\u201d and a few others. When Cohen finished, Hammond grinned and said, \u201cYou\u2019ve got it.\u201d A few months after his audition, Cohen put on a suit and went to the Columbia recording studios in midtown to begin work on his first album. Hammond was encouraging after every take. And after one he said, \u201cWatch out, Dylan!\u201d Cohen\u2019s links to Dylan were obvious\u2014Jewish, literary, a penchant for Biblical imagery, Hammond\u2019s tutelage\u2014but the work was divergent.", + " Dylan, even on his earliest records, was moving toward more surrealist, free-associative language and the furious abandon of rock and roll. Cohen\u2019s lyrics were no less imaginative or charged, no less ironic or self-investigating, but he was clearer, more economical and formal, more liturgical. Over the decades, Dylan and Cohen saw each other from time to time. In the early eighties, Cohen went to see Dylan perform in Paris, and the next morning in a caf\u00e9 they talked about their latest work. Dylan was especially interested in \u201cHallelujah.\u201d Even before three hundred other performers made \u201cHallelujah\u201d famous with their cover versions,", + " long before the song was included on the soundtrack for \u201cShrek\u201d and as a staple on \u201cAmerican Idol,\u201d Dylan recognized the beauty of its marriage of the sacred and the profane. He asked Cohen how long it took him to write. \u201cTwo years,\u201d Cohen lied. Actually, \u201cHallelujah\u201d had taken him five years. He drafted dozens of verses and then it was years more before he settled on a final version. In several writing sessions, he found himself in his underwear, banging his head against a hotel-room floor. Cohen told Dylan, \u201cI really like \u2018I and I,\u2019 \u201d a song that appeared on Dylan\u2019s album \u201cInfidels.\u201d \u201cHow long did it take you to write that?\u201d \u201cAbout fifteen minutes,\u201d Dylan said.", + " When I asked Cohen about that exchange, he said, \u201cThat\u2019s just the way the cards are dealt.\u201d As for Dylan\u2019s comment that Cohen\u2019s songs at the time were \u201clike prayers,\u201d Cohen seemed dismissive of any attempt to plumb the mysteries of creation. \u201cI have no idea what I am doing,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to describe. As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one\u2019s life or one\u2019s work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now.\u201d Although Cohen was steeped more in the country tradition,", + " he was swept up when he heard Dylan\u2019s \u201cBringing It All Back Home\u201d and \u201cHighway 61 Revisited.\u201d One afternoon, years later, when the two had become friendly, Dylan called him in Los Angeles and said he wanted to show him a piece of property he\u2019d bought. Dylan did the driving. \u201cOne of his songs came on the radio,\u201d Cohen recalled. \u201cI think it was \u2018Just Like a Woman\u2019 or something like that. It came to the bridge of the song, and he said, \u2018A lot of eighteen-wheelers crossed that bridge.\u2019 Meaning it was a powerful bridge.\u201d Dylan went on driving.", + " After a while, he told Cohen that a famous songwriter of the day had told him, \u201cO.K., Bob, you\u2019re Number 1, but I\u2019m Number 2.\u201d Cohen smiled. \u201cThen Dylan says to me, \u2018As far as I\u2019m concerned, Leonard, you\u2019re Number 1. I\u2019m Number Zero.\u2019 Meaning, as I understood it at the time\u2014and I was not ready to dispute it\u2014that his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.\u201d Dylan, who is seventy-five, doesn\u2019t often play the role of music critic, but he proved eager to discuss Leonard Cohen. I put a series of questions to him about Number 1,", + " and he answered in a detailed, critical way\u2014nothing cryptic or elusive. \u201cWhen people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius,\u201d Dylan said. \u201cEven the counterpoint lines\u2014they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs. As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music. Even the simplest song, like \u2018The Law,\u2019 which is structured on two fundamental chords, has counterpoint lines that are essential, and anybody who even thinks about doing this song and loves the lyrics would have to build around the counterpoint lines.", + " \u201cYou\u2019ve been traded to Carthage for two third-round picks and a hippopotamus.\u201d \u201cHis gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres,\u201d Dylan went on. \u201cIn the song \u2018Sisters of Mercy,\u2019 for instance, the verses are four elemental lines which change and move at predictable intervals... but the tune is anything but predictable. The song just comes in and states a fact. And after that anything can happen and it does, and Leonard allows it to happen. His tone is far from condescending or mocking. He is a tough-minded lover who doesn\u2019t recognize the brush-off. Leonard\u2019s always above it all.", + " \u2018Sisters of Mercy\u2019 is verse after verse of four distinctive lines, in perfect meter, with no chorus, quivering with drama. The first line begins in a minor key. The second line goes from minor to major and steps up, and changes melody and variation. The third line steps up even higher than that to a different degree, and then the fourth line comes back to the beginning. This is a deceptively unusual musical theme, with or without lyrics. But it\u2019s so subtle a listener doesn\u2019t realize he\u2019s been taken on a musical journey and dropped off somewhere, with or without lyrics.\u201d In the late eighties,", + " Dylan performed \u201cHallelujah\u201d on the road as a roughshod blues with a sly, ascending chorus. His version sounds less like the prettified Jeff Buckley version than like a work by John Lee Hooker. \u201cThat song \u2018Hallelujah\u2019 has resonance for me,\u201d Dylan said. \u201cThere again, it\u2019s a beautifully constructed melody that steps up, evolves, and slips back, all in quick time. But this song has a connective chorus, which when it comes in has a power all of its own. The \u2018secret chord\u2019 and the point-blank I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself aspect of the song has plenty of resonance for me.\u201d I asked Dylan whether he preferred Cohen\u2019s later work,", + " so colored with intimations of the end. \u201cI like all of Leonard\u2019s songs, early or late,\u201d he said. \u201c \u2018Going Home,\u2019 \u2018Show Me the Place,\u2019 \u2018The Darkness.\u2019 These are all great songs, deep and truthful as ever and multidimensional, surprisingly melodic, and they make you think and feel. I like some of his later songs even better than his early ones. Yet there\u2019s a simplicity to his early ones that I like, too.\u201d Dylan defended Cohen against the familiar critical reproach that his is music to slit your wrists by. He compared him to the Russian Jewish immigrant who wrote \u201cEaster Parade.\u201d \u201cI see no disenchantment in Leonard\u2019s lyrics at all,\u201d Dylan said.", + " \u201cThere\u2019s always a direct sentiment, as if he\u2019s holding a conversation and telling you something, him doing all the talking, but the listener keeps listening. He\u2019s very much a descendant of Irving Berlin, maybe the only songwriter in modern history that Leonard can be directly related to. Berlin\u2019s songs did the same thing. Berlin was also connected to some kind of celestial sphere. And, like Leonard, he probably had no classical-music training, either. Both of them just hear melodies that most of us can only strive for. Berlin\u2019s lyrics also fell into place and consisted of half lines, full lines at surprising intervals, using simple elongated words.", + " Both Leonard and Berlin are incredibly crafty. Leonard particularly uses chord progressions that seem classical in shape. He is a much more savvy musician than you\u2019d think.\u201d\n\nCohen has always found performing unnerving. His first major attempt came in 1967, when Judy Collins asked him to play at Town Hall, in New York, at an anti-Vietnam War benefit. The idea was that he would make his stage d\u00e9but by singing \u201cSuzanne,\u201d an early song of his that Collins had turned into a hit after he sang it to her on the telephone. \u201cI can\u2019t do it, Judy,\u201d he told her. \u201cI would die from embarrassment.\u201d As Collins writes in her memoir,", + " she finally cajoled him into it, but that night, from the wings, she could see that Cohen, \u201chis legs shaking inside his trousers,\u201d was in trouble. He got halfway through the first verse and then stopped and mumbled an apology. \u201cI can\u2019t go on,\u201d he said and walked off into the wings. Out of sight, Cohen rested his head on Collins\u2019s shoulder as she tried to get him to respond to the encouraging shouts from the crowd. \u201cI can\u2019t do it,\u201d he said. \u201cI can\u2019t go back.\u201d \u201cBut you will,\u201d she said, and, finally, he acceded. He went out,", + " with the crowd cheering, and finished singing \u201cSuzanne.\u201d Since then, Cohen has played thousands of concerts all over the world, but it did not become second nature until he was in his seventies. He was never one of those musicians who talk about feeling most alive and at home onstage. Although he has had many successful performance strategies\u2014wry self-abnegation, drugs, drink\u2014the act of giving concerts often made him feel like \u201csome parrot chained to his stand.\u201d He is also a perfectionist; a classic like \u201cFamous Blue Raincoat\u201d still feels \u201cunfinished\u201d to him. \u201cIt stems from the fact that you are not as good as you want to be\u2014that\u2019s really what nervousness is,\u201d Cohen told me.", + " \u201cThat first time I went out with Judy Collins, it wasn\u2019t to be the last time I felt this.\u201d In 1972, Cohen, now accompanied by a full complement of musicians and singers, arrived in Jerusalem at the end of a long tour. Just to be in that city was, for Cohen, a charged situation. (The following year, during the war with Egypt, Cohen showed up in Israel, hoping to replace someone who had been drafted. \u201cI am committed to the survival of the Jewish people,\u201d he told an interviewer at the time. He ended up performing, often many times a day, for the troops on the front.) Out onstage,", + " Cohen started singing \u201cBird on the Wire.\u201d He stopped after the audience greeted the opening chords and phrase with applause. \u201cI really enjoy your recognizing these songs,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019m scared enough as it is out here, and I think something is wrong every time you begin to applaud. So if you do recognize this song, would you just wave your hands?\u201d He fumbled again, and what at first had seemed like performative charm now appeared to signal genuine anxiety. \u201cI hope you bear with me,\u201d he said. \u201cThese songs become meditations for me and sometimes, you know, I just don\u2019t get high on it and I feel that I\u2019m cheating you.", + " I\u2019ll try it again. If it doesn\u2019t work, I\u2019ll stop in the middle. There\u2019s no reason why we should mutilate a song just to save face.\u201d Cohen began singing \u201cOne of Us Cannot Be Wrong.\u201d \u201cI lit a thin green candle...\u201d He stopped again, laughing, unnerved. More fumbling, more deflective jokes. \u201cI have my rights up here, too, you know,\u201d he said, still smiling. \u201cI can sit around and talk if I want to.\u201d \u201cI wish I\u2019d never bought Harold that 3-D printer.\u201d By then, it was apparent that there was a problem.", + " \u201cLook, if it doesn\u2019t get any better, we\u2019ll just end the concert and I\u2019ll refund your money,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cI really feel that we\u2019re cheating you tonight. Some nights, one is raised off the ground, and some nights you just can\u2019t get off the ground. And there\u2019s no point in lying about it. And tonight we just haven\u2019t been getting off the ground, and it says in the Kabbalah...\u201d The Jerusalem audience laughed at the mention of the Jewish mystical text. \u201cIt says in the Kabbalah that if you can\u2019t get off the ground you should stay on the ground!", + " No, it says in the Kabbalah that, unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne, and somehow the male and female parts of me refuse to encounter one another tonight\u2014and God does not sit on his throne. And this is a terrible thing to have happen in Jerusalem. So, listen, we\u2019re going to leave the stage now and try to profoundly meditate in the dressing room to get ourselves back into shape.\u201d I recalled this incident to Cohen\u2014it\u2019s captured on a documentary film that floats around the Internet\u2014and he remembered it well. \u201cIt was at the end of the tour,\u201d he told me.", + " \u201cI thought I was doing very poorly. I went back to the dressing room, and I found some acid in my guitar case.\u201d He took the acid. Meanwhile, out in the hall, the audience started singing to Cohen as if to inspire him and call him back. The song was a traditional one, \u201cHevenu Shalom Aleichem,\u201d \u201cWe Have Brought Peace Upon You.\u201d \u201cHow sweet can an audience possibly be?\u201d Cohen recalled. \u201cSo I go out on the stage with the band... and I started singing \u2018So Long, Marianne.\u2019 And I see Marianne straight in front of me and I started crying.", + " I turned around and the band was crying, too. And then it turned into something in retrospect quite comic: the entire audience turned into one Jew! And this Jew was saying, \u2018What else can you show me, kid? I\u2019ve seen a lot of things, and this don\u2019t move the dial!\u2019 And this was the entire skeptical side of our tradition, not just writ large but manifested as an actual gigantic being! Judging me hardly begins to describe the operation. It was a sense of invalidation and irrelevance that I felt was authentic, because those feelings have always circulated around my psyche: Where do you get to stand up and speak?", + " For what and whom? And how deep is your experience? How significant is anything you have to say?... I think it really invited me to deepen my practice. Dig in deeper, whatever it was, take it more seriously.\u201d Back inside the dressing room, Cohen wept fiercely. \u201cI can\u2019t make it, man,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t like it. Period. So I\u2019m splitting.\u201d He went out one last time to speak to the audience. \u201cListen, people, my band and I are all crying backstage. We\u2019re too broken up to go on. But I just want to tell you, thank you and good night.\u201d The next year,", + " he told the press, half-seriously, that the \u201crock life\u201d was overwhelming him. \u201cI don\u2019t find myself leading a life that has many good moments in it,\u201d he told a reporter for Melody Maker. \u201cSo I\u2019ve decided to screw it. And go.\u201d\n\nFor many years, Cohen was more revered than bought. Although his albums generally sold well enough, they did not move on the scale of big rock acts. In the early eighties, when he presented his record company with \u201cVarious Positions\u201d\u2014a magnificent album that included \u201cHallelujah,\u201d \u201cDance Me to the End of Love,\u201d and \u201cIf It Be Your Will\u201d\u2014Walter Yetnikoff,", + " the head of CBS Records, argued with him about the mix. \u201cLook, Leonard,\u201d he said, \u201cwe know you\u2019re great, but we don\u2019t know if you\u2019re any good.\u201d Eventually, Cohen learned that CBS had decided not to release the album in the U.S. Years later, accepting an award, he thanked his record company by saying, \u201cI have always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work.\u201d Suzanne Vega, a singer-songwriter who is in her late fifties, sometimes tells a funny story onstage about Cohen\u2019s secret-handshake appeal. When she was eighteen, she was teaching dance and folksinging at a summer camp in the Adirondacks.", + " One night, she met a handsome young man, a counsellor from another camp up the road. He was from Liverpool. And his opening line was \u201cDo you like Leonard Cohen?\u201d This was nearly four decades ago, and, in Vega\u2019s memory, admirers of Leonard Cohen in those days were a kind of \u201csecret society.\u201d What\u2019s more, there was a particular way to answer the young man\u2019s semi-innocent question: \u201cYes, I love Leonard Cohen\u2014but only in certain moods.\u201d Otherwise, your new friend might think you were a depressive. But because the young man was English, and not given to the \u201cfake cheer\u201d of Americans,", + " he replied, \u201cI love Leonard Cohen all the time.\u201d The result, she says, was an affair that lasted for the rest of the summer. In the years to come, Cohen\u2019s songs were fundamental to Vega\u2019s own sense of lyrical precision and possibility. \u201cIt was the way he wrote about complicated things,\u201d Vega told me recently. \u201cIt was very intimate and personal. Dylan took you to the far ends of the expanding universe, eight minutes of \u2018one hand waving free,\u2019 and I loved that, but it didn\u2019t sound like anything I did or was likely to do\u2014it wasn\u2019t very earthly. Leonard\u2019s songs were a combination of very real details and a sense of mystery,", + " like prayers or spells.\u201d And there was the other thing, too. Once, after Cohen and Vega became friendly, he called and asked her to visit him at his hotel. They met out by the pool. He asked if she wanted to hear his latest song. \u201cAnd as I listened to him recite this song\u2014it was a long one\u2014I watched as one woman after another, all in bikinis, arranged themselves on beach chairs behind Leonard,\u201d Vega recalled. \u201cAfter he finished reciting, I said to Leonard, \u2018Have you noticed these women in bikinis arranging themselves here?\u2019 And completely deadpan, without glancing around, Leonard said,", + " \u2018It works every time.\u2019 \u201d A world of such allurements had costs as well as rewards. In the seventies, Cohen had two children, Lorca and Adam, with his common-law wife, Suzanne Elrod. That relationship fizzled when the decade did. Touring had its charms, but it, too, wore down his spirits. After a tour in 1993, Cohen felt utterly depleted. \u201cI was drinking at least three bottles of Ch\u00e2teau Latour before performances,\u201d he said, allowing that he always poured a glass for others. \u201cThe wine bill was enormous. Even then, I think, Ch\u00e2teau Latour was over three hundred bucks a bottle.", + " But it went so beautifully with the music! I don\u2019t know why. When I tried to drink it when there wasn\u2019t a performance coming, it meant nothing! I might as well have been drinking Wild Duck or whatever they call it. I mean, it had no significance.\u201d At the same time, a long relationship with the actress Rebecca De Mornay was beginning to come undone. \u201cShe got wise to me,\u201d Cohen has said. \u201cFinally she saw I was a guy who just couldn\u2019t come across. In the sense of being a husband and having more children and the rest.\u201d De Mornay, who remains friends with Cohen,", + " told the biographer Sylvie Simmons that he was \u201chaving all these relationships with women and not really committing... and having this long relationship to his career and yet feeling like it\u2019s the last thing he wants to be doing.\u201d\n\nSince his days davening next to his uncles in his grandfather\u2019s synagogue, Cohen has been a spiritual seeker. \u201cAnything, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, LSD, I\u2019m for anything that works,\u201d he once said. In the late sixties, when he was living in New York, he studied briefly at a Scientology center and emerged with a certificate that declared him \u201cGrade IV Release.\u201d In recent years,", + " he spent many Shabbat mornings and Monday evenings at Ohr HaTorah, a synagogue on Venice Boulevard, talking about Kabbalistic texts with the rabbi there, Mordecai Finley. Sometimes, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Finley, who says that he considers Cohen \u201ca great liturgical writer,\u201d read from the pulpit passages from \u201cBook of Mercy,\u201d a 1984 collection of Cohen\u2019s that is steeped in the Psalms. \u201cI participated in all these investigations that engaged the imagination of my generation at that time,\u201d Cohen has said. \u201cI even danced and sang with the Hare Krishnas\u2014no robe,", + " I didn\u2019t join them, but I was trying everything.\u201d To this day, Cohen reads deeply in a multivolume edition of the Zohar, the principal text of Jewish mysticism; the Hebrew Bible; and Buddhist texts. In our conversations, he mentioned the Gnostic Gospels, Lurianic Kabbalah, books of Hindu philosophy, Carl Jung\u2019s \u201cAnswer to Job,\u201d and Gershom Scholem\u2019s biography of Sabbatai Sevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah of the seventeenth century. Cohen is also very much at home in the spiritual reaches of the Internet, and he listens to the lectures of Yakov Leib HaKohain,", + " a Kabbalist who has converted, serially, to Islam, Catholicism, and Hinduism, and lives in the San Bernardino mountains with two pit bulls and four cats. For forty years, Cohen was associated with a Japanese Zen master named Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. (\u201cRoshi\u201d is an honorific for a venerated teacher, and Cohen always refers to him that way.) Roshi, who died two years ago at the age of a hundred and seven, arrived in Los Angeles in 1962 but never quite learned the language of his adoptive home. Through his translators, though, he adapted traditional Japanese koans for his American students:", + " \u201cHow do you realize Buddha nature while driving a car?\u201d Roshi was short, stout, a drinker of sake and expensive Scotch. \u201cI came to have a good time,\u201d he once said of his sojourn in the States. \u201cI want Americans to learn how to truly laugh.\u201d Until the early nineties, Cohen used to study with Roshi at the Zen Center, on Mt. Baldy, for periods of learning and meditation that stretched over two or three months a year. He considered Roshi a close friend, a spiritual master, and a deep influence on his work. And so, not long after getting home from the Ch\u00e2teau Latour tour,", + " in 1993, Cohen went up to Mt. Baldy. This time, he stayed for nearly six years. \u201cNobody goes into a Zen monastery as a tourist,\u201d Cohen told me. \u201cThere are people who do, but they leave in ten minutes because the life is very rigorous. You are getting up at two-thirty in the morning; the camp wakes up at three, but you have to light fires in the zendo. The cabins are only heated a few hours a day. There\u2019s snow coming in under the badly carpentered doors. You\u2019re shovelling snow half the day. And the other half of the day you\u2019re sitting in the zendo.", + " So in a certain sense you toughen up. Whether it has a spiritual aspect is debatable. It helps you endure, and it makes whining the least appropriate response to suffering. Just on that level it\u2019s very valuable.\u201d Cohen lived in a tiny cabin that he outfitted with a coffeemaker, a menorah, a keyboard, and a laptop. Like the other adepts, he cleaned toilets. He had the honor of cooking for Roshi and eventually lived in a cabin that was linked to his teacher\u2019s by a covered walkway. For many hours a day, he sat in half lotus, meditating. If he,", + " or anyone else, nodded off during meditation or lost the proper position, one of the monks would come by and rap him smartly on the shoulder with a wooden stick. \u201cPeople have the idea that a monastery is a place of serenity and contemplation,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cIt isn\u2019t that at all. It\u2019s a hospital, and a lot of the people who end up there can barely walk or speak. So a lot of the activity there is to get people to learn how to walk and speak and breathe and prepare their own meals or shovel their own paths in the winter.\u201d Allen Ginsberg once asked Cohen how he could reconcile his Judaism with Zen.", + " Cohen said that he wasn\u2019t looking for a new religion, that he was well satisfied with the religion he had. Zen made no mention of God; it demanded no scriptural devotion. For him, Zen was a discipline rather than a religion, a practice of investigation. \u201cI put on those robes because that was Roshi\u2019s school and that was the uniform,\u201d he said. Had Roshi been a professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg, Cohen says, he would have learned German and moved to Heidelberg. Roshi, toward the end of his life, was accused of sexual misconduct. He was never charged with any crime,", + " but some former students, writing in Internet chat rooms and in letters to Roshi himself, said that he had sexually groped or coerced many Buddhist students and nuns. An independent Buddhist panel determined that the behavior had been going on since the seventies, and that those \u201cwho chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished,\u201d according to the Times. One morning, Bob Faggen drove me up the mountain to the Zen Center. A former Boy Scout camp, the center comprises a series of rough-hewn cabins surrounded by pines and cedars. It was striking how few people were around.", + " One monk told me that Roshi had left no successor and that the center had not yet recovered from the scandal. Cohen, for his part, took pains to explain Roshi\u2019s transgressions without excusing them. \u201cRoshi,\u201d he said, \u201cwas a very naughty guy.\u201d In 1996, Cohen became a monk, but that did not safeguard him from depression, a lifelong nemesis; two years later, it overwhelmed him. \u201cI\u2019ve dealt with depression ever since my adolescence,\u201d he said. \u201cMoving into some periods, which were debilitating, when I found it hard to get off the couch, to periods when I was fully operative but the background noise of anguish still prevailed.\u201d Cohen tried antidepressants.", + " He tried throwing them out. Nothing worked. Finally, he told Roshi he was \u201cgoing down the mountain.\u201d In a collection of poems called \u201cBook of Longing,\u201d he wrote: I left my robes hanging on a peg in the old cabin where I had sat so long and slept so little. I finally understood I had no gift for Spiritual Matters. In fact, Cohen was hardly done with his searching. Just a week after returning home, he boarded a flight to Mumbai to study with another spiritual guide. He took a room in a modest hotel and went to daily satsangs, spiritual discussions, at the apartment of Ramesh Balsekar,", + " a former president of the Bank of India and a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu discipline. Cohen read Balsekar\u2019s book \u201cConsciousness Speaks,\u201d which teaches a single universal consciousness, no \u201cyou\u201d or \u201cme,\u201d and denies a sense of individual free will, any sense that any one person is a \u201cdoer.\u201d Cohen spent nearly a year in Mumbai, calling on Balsekar in the mornings, and spending the rest of the day swimming, writing, and wandering the city. For reasons that he now says are \u201cimpossible to penetrate,\u201d his depression lifted. He was ready to come home.", + " The story, and the way Cohen tells it now, full of uncertainty and modesty, reminded me of the chorus of \u201cAnthem,\u201d a song that took him ten years to write and that he recorded just before he first headed up the mountain: Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That\u2019s how the light gets in. Even if he was now freed of depression, the next crisis was not far off. Aside from a few indulgences, Cohen was not obsessed with luxury. \u201cMy project has been completely different than my contemporaries\u2019,\u201d he says. His circle in Montreal valued modesty.", + " \u201cThe minimum environment that would enable you to do your work with the least distraction and the most aesthetic deliverance came from a modest surrounding. A palace, a yacht would be an enormous distraction from the project. My fantasies went the other way. The way I lived on Mt. Baldy was perfect for me. I liked the communal life, I liked living in a little shack.\u201d And yet he had made a considerable fortune from album sales, concerts, and the publishing rights to his songs. \u201cHallelujah\u201d was recorded so often and so widely that Cohen jokingly called a moratorium on it. He certainly had enough money to feel secure about his two children and their mother,", + " and a few other dependents. Before he left on his spiritual adventures, Cohen had ceded nearly absolute control of his financial affairs to Kelley Lynch, his business manager for seventeen years and, at one time, briefly, his lover. In 2004, however, he discovered that his accounts had been emptied. Millions of dollars were gone. Cohen fired Lynch and sued her. The court ruled in Cohen\u2019s favor, awarding him more than five million dollars. In Los Angeles County Superior Court, Cohen testified that Lynch had been so outraged by the suit that she started calling him twenty, thirty times a day and inundating him with e-mails,", + " some directly threatening, eventually ignoring a restraining order. \u201cIt makes me feel very conscious about my surroundings,\u201d Cohen said, according to the Guardian\u2019s account of the trial. \u201cEvery time I see a car slow down, I get worried.\u201d Lynch was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and five years\u2019 probation. After thanking the judge and his attorney in his usual high style, Cohen turned to his antagonist. \u201cIt is my prayer,\u201d Cohen told the court, \u201cthat Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform.\u201d Cohen has never managed to collect the awarded damages,", + " and, because the situation is still a matter of litigation, he does not like to talk about it. But one result was plain: he would need to return to the stage. Even a Zen monk has to earn some coin.\n\nThere is something irresistible about Cohen\u2019s charm. For proof, take a look at a YouTube clip called \u201cWhy It\u2019s Good to Be Leonard Cohen\u201d: a filmmaker follows Cohen backstage as a beautiful German-accented actress tries to coax him, in front of a full dressing room, to \u201cgo somewhere\u201d with her as he wryly rebuffs her. He is no less charming with men. So it was more than a little surprising when Faggen and I returned to the house one afternoon thinking that we were on time and were informed,", + " in the sternest terms imaginable, that we were not. In fact, Cohen, wearing a dark suit and a fedora, settled into his medical chair and gave us the most forbidding talking-to I have experienced since grade school. I\u2019m one of those tiresome people who are rarely, if ever, late; who show up, old-mannishly, for flights much too early. But there had apparently been a misunderstanding about the time of our visit, and a text to him and his assistant seemed to have gone unseen. Every effort to apologize or explain, mine and Faggen\u2019s, was dismissed as \u201cnot the point.\u201d Cohen reminded us of his poor health.", + " This was an abuse of his time. A violation. Even \u201ca form of elder abuse.\u201d More apologies, more rebuffs. This wasn\u2019t about anger or apology, he went on. He felt no rage, no, but we had to understand that we were not \u201cdoers,\u201d none of us have free will.... And so on. I recognized the language of his teacher in Mumbai. But that didn\u2019t make it sting any less. The lecture\u2014steely, ominous, high-flown\u2014went on quite a long time. I felt humiliated, but also defensive. In the dynamic of people getting something off their chest,", + " the speaker feels cleansed, the listener accused and miserable. Finally, Cohen eased into other matters. And the subject that he was happiest to talk about was the tour that began as a means of restoring what had been stolen from him. In 2007, he started conceiving a tour with a full band: three backup singers, two guitarists, drummer, keyboard player, bassist, and saxophonist (later replaced by a violinist). He rehearsed the band for three months. \u201cFirst, we find the bedbugs, Ma\u2019am, then we drive tiny stakes through their wee black hearts.\u201d \u201cI hadn\u2019t played any of these songs for fifteen years,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cMy voice had changed. My range had changed. I didn\u2019t know what to do. There was no way I could transpose the positions that I knew.\u201d Instead, Cohen tuned the strings on his guitar down two whole steps, so, for instance, the low E was now a low C. Cohen had always had a deep, intimate voice, but now, with age, and after countless cigarettes, it is a fantastical growl, confiding, lordly. In concert, he always got a knowing laugh with this line from \u201cTower of Song\u201d: \u201cI was born like this, I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.\u201d Neil Larsen,", + " who played keyboards in Cohen\u2019s band, said that the preparation was meticulous. \u201cWe rehearsed very close to the way you would record,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe did one song over and over and made adjustments. He was locking the lyrics into his memory, too. Usually it takes a while before a tour jells. Not this one. We went out ready.\u201d The tour started in Canada, and then went everywhere during the next five years\u2014three hundred and eighty shows, from New York to Nice, Moscow to Sydney. Cohen began every performance saying that he and the band would give \u201ceverything we\u2019ve got,\u201d and they did.", + " \u201cI think he was competing with Springsteen,\u201d Sharon Robinson, a singer and frequent co-writer, joked about the length of the shows. \u201cThey were close to four hours some nights.\u201d Cohen was in his mid-seventies by this time, and his manager did everything possible for the performer to marshal his energies. It was a first-class operation: a private plane, where Cohen could write and sleep; good hotels, where he could read and compose on a keyboard; a car to take him to the hotel the minute he stepped off the stage. Some of the most memorable musical performances Cohen had ever seen were by Alberta Hunter, the blues singer,", + " who had a long residency in the late seventies at the Cookery, in the Village. Hunter had retired from music for decades and worked as a nurse, and then made a comeback in the last six years of her life. Leonard Cohen was following suit: an elderly man, full of sap, singing his heart out for hours, several nights a week. \u201cEverybody was rehearsed not only in the notes but also in something unspoken,\u201d Cohen recalled. \u201cYou could feel it in the dressing room as you moved closer to the concert, you could feel the sense of commitment, tangible in the room.\u201d This time, there was no warmup with Ch\u00e2teau Latour.", + " \u201cI didn\u2019t drink at all. Occasionally, I\u2019d have half a Guinness with Neil Larsen, but I had no interest in alcohol.\u201d The show that I saw, at Radio City, was among the most moving performances I\u2019ve ever experienced. Here was Cohen, an old master of his art, serving up the thick cream of his catalogue with a soulful corps of exacting musicians. Time and again, he would enact the song as well as sing it, taking one knee in gratitude to the object of affection, taking both knees to emphasize his devotion, to the audience, to the musicians, to the song. The tour not only restored Cohen\u2019s finances (and then some); it also brought a sense of satisfaction rarely associated with him.", + " \u201cOne time I asked him on the bus, \u2018Are you enjoying this?\u2019 And he would never really own up to enjoying it,\u201d Sharon Robinson recalled. \u201cBut after we finished I was at his house one day, and he admitted to me that there was something extremely fulfilling about that tour, something that brought his career full circle that he hadn\u2019t expected.\u201d In 2009, Cohen gave his first performance in Israel since 1985, at a stadium in Ramat Gan, donating the proceeds to Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations. He had wanted to perform in Ramallah, in the West Bank, too, but Palestinian groups decided that this was politically untenable.", + " And yet he persisted, dedicating the concert to the cause of \u201creconciliation, tolerance, and peace,\u201d and the song \u201cAnthem\u201d to the bereaved. At the end of the show, Cohen raised his hands, rabbinically, and recited in Hebrew the birkat kohanim, the priestly blessing, over the crowd. \u201cIt\u2019s not self-consciously religious,\u201d Cohen told me. \u201cI know that it\u2019s been described that way, and I am happy with that. It\u2019s part of the intentional fallacy. But when I see James Brown it has a religious feel. Anything deep does.\u201d When I asked him if he intended his performances to reflect a kind of devotion,", + " he hesitated before he answered. \u201cDoes artistic dedication begin to touch on religious devotion?\u201d he said. \u201cI start with artistic dedication. I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on to the other human receptors. But I dare not begin from the other side. It\u2019s like pronouncing the holy name\u2014you don\u2019t do it. But if you are lucky, and you are graced, and the audience is in a particular salutary condition, then these deeper responses will be produced.\u201d The final night of the tour happened to be in Auckland, in late December, 2013, and the last songs were exit songs:", + " the prayerful \u201cIf It Be Your Will,\u201d and then \u201cClosing Time,\u201d \u201cI Tried to Leave You,\u201d and, finally, a cover of the Drifters song \u201cSave the Last Dance for Me.\u201d The musicians all knew this was not only the last night of a long voyage but, for Cohen, perhaps the last voyage. \u201cEverybody knows that everything has to end some time,\u201d Sharon Robinson told me. \u201cSo, as we left, there was the thought: This is it.\u201d ", + " When Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960, long before he played the festival at the Isle of Wight in front of six hundred thousand people. In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene. Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry.", + " Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher, he said that he was out to reach \u201cinner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.\u201d Cohen was growing weary of London\u2019s rising damp and its gray skies. An English dentist had just yanked one of his wisdom teeth. After weeks of cold and rain, he wandered into a bank and asked the teller about his deep suntan. The teller said that he had just returned from a trip to Greece.", + " Cohen bought an airline ticket. Not long afterward, he alighted in Athens, visited the Acropolis, made his way to the port of Piraeus, boarded a ferry, and disembarked at the island of Hydra. With the chill barely out of his bones, Cohen took in the horseshoe-shaped harbor and the people drinking cold glasses of retsina and eating grilled fish in the caf\u00e9s by the water; he looked up at the pines and the cypress trees and the whitewashed houses that crept up the hillsides. There was something mythical and primitive about Hydra. Cars were forbidden. Mules humped water up the long stairways to the houses.", + " There was only intermittent electricity. Cohen rented a place for fourteen dollars a month. Eventually, he bought a whitewashed house of his own, for fifteen hundred dollars, thanks to an inheritance from his grandmother. Hydra promised the life Cohen had craved: spare rooms, the empty page, eros after dark. He collected a few paraffin lamps and some used furniture: a Russian wrought-iron bed, a writing table, chairs like \u201cthe chairs that van Gogh painted.\u201d During the day, he worked on a sexy, phantasmagoric novel called \u201cThe Favorite Game\u201d and the poems in a collection titled \u201cFlowers for Hitler.\u201d He alternated between extreme discipline and the varieties of abandon.", + " There were days of fasting to concentrate the mind. There were drugs to expand it: pot, speed, acid. \u201cI took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God,\u201d he said years later. \u201cGenerally, I ended up with a bad hangover.\u201d Here and there, Cohen caught glimpses of a beautiful Norwegian woman. Her name was Marianne Ihlen, and she had grown up in the countryside near Oslo. Her grandmother used to tell her, \u201cYou are going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold.\u201d She thought she already had: Axel Jensen, a novelist from home,", + " who wrote in the tradition of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. She had married Jensen, and they had a son, little Axel. Jensen was not a constant husband, however, and, by the time their child was four months old, Jensen was, as Marianne put it, \u201cover the hills again\u201d with another woman. One spring day, Ihlen was with her infant son in a grocery store and caf\u00e9. \u201cI was standing in the shop with my basket waiting to pick up bottled water and milk,\u201d she recalled decades later, on a Norwegian radio program. \u201cHe is standing in the doorway with the sun behind him.\u201d Cohen asked her to join him and his friends outside.", + " He was wearing khaki pants, sneakers, a shirt with rolled sleeves, and a cap. The way Marianne remembered it, he seemed to radiate \u201cenormous compassion for me and my child.\u201d She was taken with him. \u201cI felt it throughout my body,\u201d she said. \u201cA lightness had come over me.\u201d Cohen had known some success with women. He would know a great deal more. For a troubadour of sadness\u2014\u201cthe godfather of gloom,\u201d he was later called\u2014Cohen found frequent respite in the arms of others. As a young man, he had a kind of Michael Corleone Before the Fall look,", + " sloe-eyed, dark, a little hunched, but high courtesy and verbal fluency were his charm. When he was thirteen, he read a book on hypnotism. He tried out his new discipline on the family housekeeper, and she took off her clothes. Not everyone over the years was quite as bewitched. Nico spurned him, and Joni Mitchell, who had once been his lover, remained a friend but dismissed him as a \u201cboudoir poet.\u201d But these were the exceptions. Leonard began spending more and more time with Marianne. They went to the beach, made love, kept house. Once, when they were apart\u2014Marianne and Axel in Norway,", + " Cohen in Montreal scraping up some money\u2014he sent her a telegram: \u201cHave house all I need is my woman and her son. Love, Leonard.\u201d There were times of separation, times of argument and jealousy. When Marianne drank, she could go into a dark rage. And there were infidelities on both sides. (\u201cGood gracious. All the girls were panting for him,\u201d Marianne recalled. \u201cI would dare go as far as to say that I was on the verge of killing myself due to it.\u201d) In the mid-sixties, as Cohen started to record his songs and win worldly success, Marianne became known to his fans as that antique figure\u2014the muse.", + " A memorable photograph of her, dressed only in a towel, and sitting at the desk in the house on Hydra, appeared on the back of Cohen\u2019s second album, \u201cSongs from a Room.\u201d But, after they\u2019d been together for eight years, the relationship came apart, little by little\u2014\u201clike falling ashes,\u201d as Cohen put it. \u201cLess bromance, more broductivity.\u201d Cohen was spending more time away from Hydra pursuing his career. Marianne and Axel stayed on awhile on Hydra, then left for Norway. Eventually, Marianne married again. But life had its burdens, particularly for Axel, who has had persistent health problems.", + " What Cohen\u2019s fans knew of Marianne was her beauty and what it had inspired: \u201cBird on the Wire,\u201d \u201cHey, That\u2019s No Way to Say Goodbye,\u201d and, most of all, \u201cSo Long, Marianne.\u201d She and Cohen stayed in touch. When he toured in Scandinavia, she visited him backstage. They exchanged letters and e-mails. When they spoke to journalists and to friends of their love affair, it was always in the fondest terms. In late July this year, Cohen received an e-mail from Jan Christian Mollestad, a close friend of Marianne\u2019s, saying that she was suffering from cancer.", + " In their last communication, Marianne had told Cohen that she had sold her beach house to help insure that Axel would be taken care of, but she never mentioned that she was sick. Now, it appeared, she had only a few days left. Cohen wrote back immediately: Well Marianne, it\u2019s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I\u2019ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don\u2019t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that.", + " But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road. Two days later, Cohen got an e-mail from Norway: Dear Leonard Marianne slept slowly out of this life yesterday evening. Totally at ease, surrounded by close friends. Your letter came when she still could talk and laugh in full consciousness. When we read it aloud, she smiled as only Marianne can. She lifted her hand, when you said you were right behind, close enough to reach her. It gave her deep peace of mind that you knew her condition. And your blessing for the journey gave her extra strength.", + "... In her last hour I held her hand and hummed \u201cBird on the Wire,\u201d while she was breathing so lightly. And when we left the room, after her soul had flown out of the window for new adventures, we kissed her head and whispered your everlasting words. So long, Marianne...\n\nLeonard Cohen lives on the second floor of a modest house in Mid-Wilshire, a diverse, unglamorous precinct of Los Angeles. He is eighty-two. Between 2008 and 2013, he was on tour more or less continuously. It is highly unlikely that his health will permit such rigors ever again.", + " Cohen has an album coming out in October\u2014obsessed with mortality, God-infused, yet funny, called \u201cYou Want It Darker\u201d\u2014but friends and musical associates say they\u2019d be surprised to see him onstage again except in a limited way: a single performance, perhaps, or a short residency at one venue. When I e-mailed ahead to ask Cohen out for dinner, he said that he was more or less \u201cconfined to barracks.\u201d Not long ago, one of Cohen\u2019s most frequent visitors, and an old friend of mine\u2014Robert Faggen, a professor of literature\u2014brought me by the house. Faggen met Cohen twenty years ago in a grocery store,", + " at the foot of Mt. Baldy, the highest of the San Gabriel Mountains, an hour and a half east of Los Angeles. They were both living near the top of the mountain: Bob in a cabin where he wrote about Frost and Melville and drove down the road to teach his classes at Claremont McKenna College; Cohen in a small Zen Buddhist monastery, where he was an ordained monk. As Faggen was shopping for cold cuts, he heard a familiar basso voice across the store; he looked down the aisle and saw a small, trim man, his head shaved, talking intently with a clerk about varieties of potato salad.", + " Faggen\u2019s musical expertise runs more to Mahler\u2019s lieder than to popular song. But he is an admirer of Cohen\u2019s work and introduced himself. They have been close friends ever since. Cohen greeted us. He sat in a large blue medical chair, the better to ease the pain from compression fractures in his back. He is now very thin, but he is still handsome, with a full head of gray-white hair and razory dark eyes. He wore a well-tailored midnight-blue suit\u2014even in the sixties he wore suits\u2014and a stickpin through his collar. He extended a hand like a courtly retired capo.", + " \u201cHello, friends,\u201d he said. \u201cPlease, please, sit right there.\u201d The depth of his voice makes Tom Waits sound like Eddie Kendricks. And then, like my mother, he offered what could only have been the complete catalogue of his larder: water, juice, wine, a piece of chicken, a slice of cake, \u201cmaybe something else.\u201d In the hours we spent together, he offered many refreshments, and, always, kindly. \u201cWould you like some slices of cheese and olives?\u201d is not an offer you are likely to get from Axl Rose. \u201cSome vodka? A glass of milk?", + " Schnapps?\u201d And, as with my mother, it is best, sometimes, to say yes. One day, we had cheeseburgers-with-everything ordered from a Fatburger down the street and, on another, thick slices of gefilte fish with horseradish. Marianne\u2019s death was only a few weeks in the past, and Cohen was still amazed at the way his letter\u2014an e-mail to a dying friend\u2014had gone viral, at least in the Cohen-ardent universe. He hadn\u2019t set out to be public about his feelings, but when one of Marianne\u2019s closest friends, in Oslo, asked to release the note,", + " he didn\u2019t object. \u201cAnd since there\u2019s a song attached to it, and there\u2019s a story...\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just a sweet story. So in that sense I\u2019m not displeased.\u201d Like anyone of his age, Cohen counts the losses as a matter of routine. He seemed not so much devastated by Marianne\u2019s death as overtaken by the memory of their time together. \u201cThere would be a gardenia on my desk perfuming the whole room,\u201d he said. \u201cThere would be a little sandwich at noon. Sweetness, sweetness everywhere.\u201d Cohen\u2019s songs are death-haunted, but then they have been since his earliest verses.", + " A half century ago, a record executive said, \u201cTurn around, kid. Aren\u2019t you a little old for this?\u201d But, despite his diminished health, Cohen remains as clear-minded and hardworking as ever, soldierly in his habits. He gets up well before dawn and writes. In the small, spare living room where we sat, there were a couple of acoustic guitars leaning against the wall, a keyboard synthesizer, two laptops, a sophisticated microphone for voice recording. Working with an old collaborator, Pat Leonard, and his son, Adam, who has the producer\u2019s credit, Cohen did much of his work for \u201cYou Want It Darker\u201d in the living room,", + " e-mailing recorded files to his partners for additional refinements. Age and the end of age provide a useful, if not entirely desired, air of quiet. \u201cIn a certain sense, this particular predicament is filled with many fewer distractions than other times in my life and actually enables me to work with a little more concentration and continuity than when I had duties of making a living, being a husband, being a father,\u201d he said. \u201cThose distractions are radically diminished at this point. The only thing that mitigates against full production is just the condition of my body. \u201cFor some odd reason,\u201d he went on, \u201cI have all my marbles,", + " so far. I have many resources, some cultivated on a personal level, but circumstantial, too: my daughter and her children live downstairs, and my son lives two blocks down the street. So I am extremely blessed. I have an assistant who is devoted and skillful. I have a friend like Bob and another friend or two who make my life very rich. So in a certain sense I\u2019ve never had it better.... At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It\u2019s a clich\u00e9, but it\u2019s underestimated as an analgesic on all levels.", + " Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.\u201d\n\nCohen came of age after the war. His Montreal, however, was nothing like Philip Roth\u2019s Newark or Alfred Kazin\u2019s Brownsville. He was brought up in Westmount, a predominantly Anglophone neighborhood, where the city\u2019s well-to-do Jews lived. The men in his family, particularly on his father\u2019s side, were the \u201cdons\u201d of Jewish Montreal. His grandfather, Cohen told me, \u201cwas probably the most significant Jew in Canada,\u201d the founder of a range of Jewish institutions;", + " in the wake of anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian imperium, he saw to it that countless refugees made it to Canada. Nathan Cohen, Leonard\u2019s father, ran Freedman Company, the family clothing business. His mother, Masha, came from a family of more recent immigrants. She was loving, depressive, \u201cChekhovian\u201d in her emotional range, according to Leonard: \u201cShe laughed and wept deeply.\u201d Masha\u2019s father, Solomon Klonitzki-Kline, was a distinguished Talmudic scholar from Lithuania who completed a \u201cLexicon of Hebrew Homonyms.\u201d Leonard went to fine schools, including McGill and,", + " for a while, Columbia. He never resented the family\u2019s comforts. \u201cI have a deep tribal sense,\u201d he said. \u201cI grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people, they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion.\u201d When Leonard was nine, his father died; this moment, a primal wound, was when he first used language as a kind of sacrament. \u201cI have some memories of him,\u201d Cohen said, and recounted the story of his father\u2019s funeral, which was held at their house. \u201cWe came down the stairs,", + " and the coffin was in the living room.\u201d Contrary to Jewish custom, the funeral workers had left the coffin open. It was winter, and Cohen thought of the gravediggers: it would be difficult to break the frozen ground. He watched his father lowered into the earth. \u201cThen I came back to the house and I went to his closet and I found a premade bow tie. I don\u2019t know why I did this, I can\u2019t even own it now, but I cut one of the wings of the bow tie off and I wrote something on a piece of paper\u2014I think it was some kind of farewell to my father\u2014and I buried it in a little hole in the back yard.", + " And I put that curious note in there.... It was just some attraction to a ritual response to an impossible event.\u201d Cohen\u2019s uncles made sure that Masha and her two children, Leonard and his sister, Esther, did not suffer any financial decline after her husband\u2019s death. Leonard studied; he worked in an uncle\u2019s foundry, W. R. Cuthbert & Company, pouring metal for sinks and piping, and at the clothing factory, where he picked up a useful skill for his career as a touring musician: he learned to fold suits so they didn\u2019t wrinkle. But, as he wrote in a journal,", + " he always imagined himself as a writer, \u201craincoated, battered hat pulled low above intense eyes, a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard, followed by the sympathy of countless audiences... loved by two or three beautiful women who could never have him.\u201d And yet a rock-and-roll life was far from his mind. He set out to be an author. As Sylvie Simmons makes plain in her excellent biography \u201cI\u2019m Your Man,\u201d Cohen\u2019s apprenticeship was in letters. As a teen-ager, his idols were Yeats and Lorca (he named his daughter after Lorca). At McGill,", + " he read Tolstoy, Proust, Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, and he fell in with a circle of poets, particularly Irving Layton. Cohen, who published his first poem, \u201cSatan in Westmount,\u201d when he was nineteen, once said of Layton, \u201cI taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever.\u201d Cohen has never stopped writing verse; the poem \u201cSteer Your Way\u201d was published in this magazine in June. Cohen was also taken with music. As a kid, he had learned the songs in the old lefty folk compendium \u201cThe People\u2019s Song Book,\u201d listened to Hank Williams and other country singers on the radio,", + " and, at sixteen, dressed in his father\u2019s old su\u00e8de jacket, he played in a country-music combo called the Buckskin Boys. He took some informal guitar lessons in his twenties from a Spaniard he met next to a local tennis court. After a few weeks, he picked up a flamenco chord progression. When the man failed to appear for their fourth lesson, Cohen called his landlady and learned that the man had killed himself. In a speech many years later, in Asturias, Cohen said, \u201cI knew nothing about the man, why he came to Montreal... why he appeared at that tennis court,", + " why he took his life.... It was those six chords, it was that guitar pattern, that has been the basis of all my songs, and all my music.\u201d 8 Marianne Ihlen at the port of Hydra, Greece, in 1962. Ihlen was known to Leonard Cohen\u2019s fans as that antique figure\u2014the muse. Photograph from \u201cSo Long, Marianne: A Love Story,\u201d by Kari Hesthamar / Courtesy ECW Press Cohen loved the masters of the blues\u2014Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Bessie Smith\u2014and the French storyteller-singers like \u00c9dith Piaf and Jacques Brel.", + " He put coins in the jukebox to listen to \u201cThe Great Pretender,\u201d \u201cTennessee Waltz,\u201d and anything by Ray Charles. And yet when the Beatles came along he was indifferent. \u201cI\u2019m interested in things that contribute to my survival,\u201d he said. \u201cI had girlfriends who really irritated me by their devotion to the Beatles. I didn\u2019t begrudge them their interest, and there were songs like \u2018Hey Jude\u2019 that I could appreciate. But they didn\u2019t seem to be essential to the kind of nourishment that I craved.\u201d\n\nThe same set of ears that first tuned in to Bob Dylan, in 1961,", + " discovered Leonard Cohen, in 1966. This was John Hammond, a patrician related to the Vanderbilts, and by far the most perceptive scout and producer in the business. He was instrumental in the first recordings of Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Benny Goodman, Aretha Franklin, and Billie Holiday. Tipped off by friends who were following the folk scene downtown, Hammond called Cohen and asked if he would play for him. Cohen was thirty-two, a published poet and novelist, but, though a year older than Elvis Presley, a musical novice. He had turned to songwriting largely because he wasn\u2019t making a living as a writer.", + " He was staying on the fourth floor of the Chelsea Hotel, on West Twenty-third Street, and filled notebooks during the day. At night, he sang his songs in clubs and met people on the scene: Patti Smith, Lou Reed (who admired Cohen\u2019s novel \u201cBeautiful Losers\u201d), Jimi Hendrix (who jammed with him on, of all things, \u201cSuzanne\u201d), and, if just for a night, Janis Joplin (\u201cgiving me head on the unmade bed / while the limousines wait in the street\u201d). After taking Cohen to lunch one day, Hammond suggested that they go to Cohen\u2019s room,", + " and, sitting on his bed, Cohen played \u201cSuzanne,\u201d \u201cHey, That\u2019s No Way to Say Goodbye,\u201d \u201cThe Stranger Song,\u201d and a few others. When Cohen finished, Hammond grinned and said, \u201cYou\u2019ve got it.\u201d A few months after his audition, Cohen put on a suit and went to the Columbia recording studios in midtown to begin work on his first album. Hammond was encouraging after every take. And after one he said, \u201cWatch out, Dylan!\u201d Cohen\u2019s links to Dylan were obvious\u2014Jewish, literary, a penchant for Biblical imagery, Hammond\u2019s tutelage\u2014but the work was divergent.", + " Dylan, even on his earliest records, was moving toward more surrealist, free-associative language and the furious abandon of rock and roll. Cohen\u2019s lyrics were no less imaginative or charged, no less ironic or self-investigating, but he was clearer, more economical and formal, more liturgical. Over the decades, Dylan and Cohen saw each other from time to time. In the early eighties, Cohen went to see Dylan perform in Paris, and the next morning in a caf\u00e9 they talked about their latest work. Dylan was especially interested in \u201cHallelujah.\u201d Even before three hundred other performers made \u201cHallelujah\u201d famous with their cover versions,", + " long before the song was included on the soundtrack for \u201cShrek\u201d and as a staple on \u201cAmerican Idol,\u201d Dylan recognized the beauty of its marriage of the sacred and the profane. He asked Cohen how long it took him to write. \u201cTwo years,\u201d Cohen lied. Actually, \u201cHallelujah\u201d had taken him five years. He drafted dozens of verses and then it was years more before he settled on a final version. In several writing sessions, he found himself in his underwear, banging his head against a hotel-room floor. Cohen told Dylan, \u201cI really like \u2018I and I,\u2019 \u201d a song that appeared on Dylan\u2019s album \u201cInfidels.\u201d \u201cHow long did it take you to write that?\u201d \u201cAbout fifteen minutes,\u201d Dylan said.", + " When I asked Cohen about that exchange, he said, \u201cThat\u2019s just the way the cards are dealt.\u201d As for Dylan\u2019s comment that Cohen\u2019s songs at the time were \u201clike prayers,\u201d Cohen seemed dismissive of any attempt to plumb the mysteries of creation. \u201cI have no idea what I am doing,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to describe. As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one\u2019s life or one\u2019s work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now.\u201d Although Cohen was steeped more in the country tradition,", + " he was swept up when he heard Dylan\u2019s \u201cBringing It All Back Home\u201d and \u201cHighway 61 Revisited.\u201d One afternoon, years later, when the two had become friendly, Dylan called him in Los Angeles and said he wanted to show him a piece of property he\u2019d bought. Dylan did the driving. \u201cOne of his songs came on the radio,\u201d Cohen recalled. \u201cI think it was \u2018Just Like a Woman\u2019 or something like that. It came to the bridge of the song, and he said, \u2018A lot of eighteen-wheelers crossed that bridge.\u2019 Meaning it was a powerful bridge.\u201d Dylan went on driving.", + " After a while, he told Cohen that a famous songwriter of the day had told him, \u201cO.K., Bob, you\u2019re Number 1, but I\u2019m Number 2.\u201d Cohen smiled. \u201cThen Dylan says to me, \u2018As far as I\u2019m concerned, Leonard, you\u2019re Number 1. I\u2019m Number Zero.\u2019 Meaning, as I understood it at the time\u2014and I was not ready to dispute it\u2014that his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.\u201d Dylan, who is seventy-five, doesn\u2019t often play the role of music critic, but he proved eager to discuss Leonard Cohen. I put a series of questions to him about Number 1,", + " and he answered in a detailed, critical way\u2014nothing cryptic or elusive. \u201cWhen people talk about Leonard, they fail to mention his melodies, which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius,\u201d Dylan said. \u201cEven the counterpoint lines\u2014they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs. As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music. Even the simplest song, like \u2018The Law,\u2019 which is structured on two fundamental chords, has counterpoint lines that are essential, and anybody who even thinks about doing this song and loves the lyrics would have to build around the counterpoint lines.", + " \u201cYou\u2019ve been traded to Carthage for two third-round picks and a hippopotamus.\u201d \u201cHis gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres,\u201d Dylan went on. \u201cIn the song \u2018Sisters of Mercy,\u2019 for instance, the verses are four elemental lines which change and move at predictable intervals... but the tune is anything but predictable. The song just comes in and states a fact. And after that anything can happen and it does, and Leonard allows it to happen. His tone is far from condescending or mocking. He is a tough-minded lover who doesn\u2019t recognize the brush-off. Leonard\u2019s always above it all.", + " \u2018Sisters of Mercy\u2019 is verse after verse of four distinctive lines, in perfect meter, with no chorus, quivering with drama. The first line begins in a minor key. The second line goes from minor to major and steps up, and changes melody and variation. The third line steps up even higher than that to a different degree, and then the fourth line comes back to the beginning. This is a deceptively unusual musical theme, with or without lyrics. But it\u2019s so subtle a listener doesn\u2019t realize he\u2019s been taken on a musical journey and dropped off somewhere, with or without lyrics.\u201d In the late eighties,", + " Dylan performed \u201cHallelujah\u201d on the road as a roughshod blues with a sly, ascending chorus. His version sounds less like the prettified Jeff Buckley version than like a work by John Lee Hooker. \u201cThat song \u2018Hallelujah\u2019 has resonance for me,\u201d Dylan said. \u201cThere again, it\u2019s a beautifully constructed melody that steps up, evolves, and slips back, all in quick time. But this song has a connective chorus, which when it comes in has a power all of its own. The \u2018secret chord\u2019 and the point-blank I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself aspect of the song has plenty of resonance for me.\u201d I asked Dylan whether he preferred Cohen\u2019s later work,", + " so colored with intimations of the end. \u201cI like all of Leonard\u2019s songs, early or late,\u201d he said. \u201c \u2018Going Home,\u2019 \u2018Show Me the Place,\u2019 \u2018The Darkness.\u2019 These are all great songs, deep and truthful as ever and multidimensional, surprisingly melodic, and they make you think and feel. I like some of his later songs even better than his early ones. Yet there\u2019s a simplicity to his early ones that I like, too.\u201d Dylan defended Cohen against the familiar critical reproach that his is music to slit your wrists by. He compared him to the Russian Jewish immigrant who wrote \u201cEaster Parade.\u201d \u201cI see no disenchantment in Leonard\u2019s lyrics at all,\u201d Dylan said.", + " \u201cThere\u2019s always a direct sentiment, as if he\u2019s holding a conversation and telling you something, him doing all the talking, but the listener keeps listening. He\u2019s very much a descendant of Irving Berlin, maybe the only songwriter in modern history that Leonard can be directly related to. Berlin\u2019s songs did the same thing. Berlin was also connected to some kind of celestial sphere. And, like Leonard, he probably had no classical-music training, either. Both of them just hear melodies that most of us can only strive for. Berlin\u2019s lyrics also fell into place and consisted of half lines, full lines at surprising intervals, using simple elongated words.", + " Both Leonard and Berlin are incredibly crafty. Leonard particularly uses chord progressions that seem classical in shape. He is a much more savvy musician than you\u2019d think.\u201d\n\nCohen has always found performing unnerving. His first major attempt came in 1967, when Judy Collins asked him to play at Town Hall, in New York, at an anti-Vietnam War benefit. The idea was that he would make his stage d\u00e9but by singing \u201cSuzanne,\u201d an early song of his that Collins had turned into a hit after he sang it to her on the telephone. \u201cI can\u2019t do it, Judy,\u201d he told her. \u201cI would die from embarrassment.\u201d As Collins writes in her memoir,", + " she finally cajoled him into it, but that night, from the wings, she could see that Cohen, \u201chis legs shaking inside his trousers,\u201d was in trouble. He got halfway through the first verse and then stopped and mumbled an apology. \u201cI can\u2019t go on,\u201d he said and walked off into the wings. Out of sight, Cohen rested his head on Collins\u2019s shoulder as she tried to get him to respond to the encouraging shouts from the crowd. \u201cI can\u2019t do it,\u201d he said. \u201cI can\u2019t go back.\u201d \u201cBut you will,\u201d she said, and, finally, he acceded. He went out,", + " with the crowd cheering, and finished singing \u201cSuzanne.\u201d Since then, Cohen has played thousands of concerts all over the world, but it did not become second nature until he was in his seventies. He was never one of those musicians who talk about feeling most alive and at home onstage. Although he has had many successful performance strategies\u2014wry self-abnegation, drugs, drink\u2014the act of giving concerts often made him feel like \u201csome parrot chained to his stand.\u201d He is also a perfectionist; a classic like \u201cFamous Blue Raincoat\u201d still feels \u201cunfinished\u201d to him. \u201cIt stems from the fact that you are not as good as you want to be\u2014that\u2019s really what nervousness is,\u201d Cohen told me.", + " \u201cThat first time I went out with Judy Collins, it wasn\u2019t to be the last time I felt this.\u201d In 1972, Cohen, now accompanied by a full complement of musicians and singers, arrived in Jerusalem at the end of a long tour. Just to be in that city was, for Cohen, a charged situation. (The following year, during the war with Egypt, Cohen showed up in Israel, hoping to replace someone who had been drafted. \u201cI am committed to the survival of the Jewish people,\u201d he told an interviewer at the time. He ended up performing, often many times a day, for the troops on the front.) Out onstage,", + " Cohen started singing \u201cBird on the Wire.\u201d He stopped after the audience greeted the opening chords and phrase with applause. \u201cI really enjoy your recognizing these songs,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019m scared enough as it is out here, and I think something is wrong every time you begin to applaud. So if you do recognize this song, would you just wave your hands?\u201d He fumbled again, and what at first had seemed like performative charm now appeared to signal genuine anxiety. \u201cI hope you bear with me,\u201d he said. \u201cThese songs become meditations for me and sometimes, you know, I just don\u2019t get high on it and I feel that I\u2019m cheating you.", + " I\u2019ll try it again. If it doesn\u2019t work, I\u2019ll stop in the middle. There\u2019s no reason why we should mutilate a song just to save face.\u201d Cohen began singing \u201cOne of Us Cannot Be Wrong.\u201d \u201cI lit a thin green candle...\u201d He stopped again, laughing, unnerved. More fumbling, more deflective jokes. \u201cI have my rights up here, too, you know,\u201d he said, still smiling. \u201cI can sit around and talk if I want to.\u201d \u201cI wish I\u2019d never bought Harold that 3-D printer.\u201d By then, it was apparent that there was a problem.", + " \u201cLook, if it doesn\u2019t get any better, we\u2019ll just end the concert and I\u2019ll refund your money,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cI really feel that we\u2019re cheating you tonight. Some nights, one is raised off the ground, and some nights you just can\u2019t get off the ground. And there\u2019s no point in lying about it. And tonight we just haven\u2019t been getting off the ground, and it says in the Kabbalah...\u201d The Jerusalem audience laughed at the mention of the Jewish mystical text. \u201cIt says in the Kabbalah that if you can\u2019t get off the ground you should stay on the ground!", + " No, it says in the Kabbalah that, unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne, and somehow the male and female parts of me refuse to encounter one another tonight\u2014and God does not sit on his throne. And this is a terrible thing to have happen in Jerusalem. So, listen, we\u2019re going to leave the stage now and try to profoundly meditate in the dressing room to get ourselves back into shape.\u201d I recalled this incident to Cohen\u2014it\u2019s captured on a documentary film that floats around the Internet\u2014and he remembered it well. \u201cIt was at the end of the tour,\u201d he told me.", + " \u201cI thought I was doing very poorly. I went back to the dressing room, and I found some acid in my guitar case.\u201d He took the acid. Meanwhile, out in the hall, the audience started singing to Cohen as if to inspire him and call him back. The song was a traditional one, \u201cHevenu Shalom Aleichem,\u201d \u201cWe Have Brought Peace Upon You.\u201d \u201cHow sweet can an audience possibly be?\u201d Cohen recalled. \u201cSo I go out on the stage with the band... and I started singing \u2018So Long, Marianne.\u2019 And I see Marianne straight in front of me and I started crying.", + " I turned around and the band was crying, too. And then it turned into something in retrospect quite comic: the entire audience turned into one Jew! And this Jew was saying, \u2018What else can you show me, kid? I\u2019ve seen a lot of things, and this don\u2019t move the dial!\u2019 And this was the entire skeptical side of our tradition, not just writ large but manifested as an actual gigantic being! Judging me hardly begins to describe the operation. It was a sense of invalidation and irrelevance that I felt was authentic, because those feelings have always circulated around my psyche: Where do you get to stand up and speak?", + " For what and whom? And how deep is your experience? How significant is anything you have to say?... I think it really invited me to deepen my practice. Dig in deeper, whatever it was, take it more seriously.\u201d Back inside the dressing room, Cohen wept fiercely. \u201cI can\u2019t make it, man,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t like it. Period. So I\u2019m splitting.\u201d He went out one last time to speak to the audience. \u201cListen, people, my band and I are all crying backstage. We\u2019re too broken up to go on. But I just want to tell you, thank you and good night.\u201d The next year,", + " he told the press, half-seriously, that the \u201crock life\u201d was overwhelming him. \u201cI don\u2019t find myself leading a life that has many good moments in it,\u201d he told a reporter for Melody Maker. \u201cSo I\u2019ve decided to screw it. And go.\u201d\n\nFor many years, Cohen was more revered than bought. Although his albums generally sold well enough, they did not move on the scale of big rock acts. In the early eighties, when he presented his record company with \u201cVarious Positions\u201d\u2014a magnificent album that included \u201cHallelujah,\u201d \u201cDance Me to the End of Love,\u201d and \u201cIf It Be Your Will\u201d\u2014Walter Yetnikoff,", + " the head of CBS Records, argued with him about the mix. \u201cLook, Leonard,\u201d he said, \u201cwe know you\u2019re great, but we don\u2019t know if you\u2019re any good.\u201d Eventually, Cohen learned that CBS had decided not to release the album in the U.S. Years later, accepting an award, he thanked his record company by saying, \u201cI have always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work.\u201d Suzanne Vega, a singer-songwriter who is in her late fifties, sometimes tells a funny story onstage about Cohen\u2019s secret-handshake appeal. When she was eighteen, she was teaching dance and folksinging at a summer camp in the Adirondacks.", + " One night, she met a handsome young man, a counsellor from another camp up the road. He was from Liverpool. And his opening line was \u201cDo you like Leonard Cohen?\u201d This was nearly four decades ago, and, in Vega\u2019s memory, admirers of Leonard Cohen in those days were a kind of \u201csecret society.\u201d What\u2019s more, there was a particular way to answer the young man\u2019s semi-innocent question: \u201cYes, I love Leonard Cohen\u2014but only in certain moods.\u201d Otherwise, your new friend might think you were a depressive. But because the young man was English, and not given to the \u201cfake cheer\u201d of Americans,", + " he replied, \u201cI love Leonard Cohen all the time.\u201d The result, she says, was an affair that lasted for the rest of the summer. In the years to come, Cohen\u2019s songs were fundamental to Vega\u2019s own sense of lyrical precision and possibility. \u201cIt was the way he wrote about complicated things,\u201d Vega told me recently. \u201cIt was very intimate and personal. Dylan took you to the far ends of the expanding universe, eight minutes of \u2018one hand waving free,\u2019 and I loved that, but it didn\u2019t sound like anything I did or was likely to do\u2014it wasn\u2019t very earthly. Leonard\u2019s songs were a combination of very real details and a sense of mystery,", + " like prayers or spells.\u201d And there was the other thing, too. Once, after Cohen and Vega became friendly, he called and asked her to visit him at his hotel. They met out by the pool. He asked if she wanted to hear his latest song. \u201cAnd as I listened to him recite this song\u2014it was a long one\u2014I watched as one woman after another, all in bikinis, arranged themselves on beach chairs behind Leonard,\u201d Vega recalled. \u201cAfter he finished reciting, I said to Leonard, \u2018Have you noticed these women in bikinis arranging themselves here?\u2019 And completely deadpan, without glancing around, Leonard said,", + " \u2018It works every time.\u2019 \u201d A world of such allurements had costs as well as rewards. In the seventies, Cohen had two children, Lorca and Adam, with his common-law wife, Suzanne Elrod. That relationship fizzled when the decade did. Touring had its charms, but it, too, wore down his spirits. After a tour in 1993, Cohen felt utterly depleted. \u201cI was drinking at least three bottles of Ch\u00e2teau Latour before performances,\u201d he said, allowing that he always poured a glass for others. \u201cThe wine bill was enormous. Even then, I think, Ch\u00e2teau Latour was over three hundred bucks a bottle.", + " But it went so beautifully with the music! I don\u2019t know why. When I tried to drink it when there wasn\u2019t a performance coming, it meant nothing! I might as well have been drinking Wild Duck or whatever they call it. I mean, it had no significance.\u201d At the same time, a long relationship with the actress Rebecca De Mornay was beginning to come undone. \u201cShe got wise to me,\u201d Cohen has said. \u201cFinally she saw I was a guy who just couldn\u2019t come across. In the sense of being a husband and having more children and the rest.\u201d De Mornay, who remains friends with Cohen,", + " told the biographer Sylvie Simmons that he was \u201chaving all these relationships with women and not really committing... and having this long relationship to his career and yet feeling like it\u2019s the last thing he wants to be doing.\u201d\n\nSince his days davening next to his uncles in his grandfather\u2019s synagogue, Cohen has been a spiritual seeker. \u201cAnything, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, LSD, I\u2019m for anything that works,\u201d he once said. In the late sixties, when he was living in New York, he studied briefly at a Scientology center and emerged with a certificate that declared him \u201cGrade IV Release.\u201d In recent years,", + " he spent many Shabbat mornings and Monday evenings at Ohr HaTorah, a synagogue on Venice Boulevard, talking about Kabbalistic texts with the rabbi there, Mordecai Finley. Sometimes, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Finley, who says that he considers Cohen \u201ca great liturgical writer,\u201d read from the pulpit passages from \u201cBook of Mercy,\u201d a 1984 collection of Cohen\u2019s that is steeped in the Psalms. \u201cI participated in all these investigations that engaged the imagination of my generation at that time,\u201d Cohen has said. \u201cI even danced and sang with the Hare Krishnas\u2014no robe,", + " I didn\u2019t join them, but I was trying everything.\u201d To this day, Cohen reads deeply in a multivolume edition of the Zohar, the principal text of Jewish mysticism; the Hebrew Bible; and Buddhist texts. In our conversations, he mentioned the Gnostic Gospels, Lurianic Kabbalah, books of Hindu philosophy, Carl Jung\u2019s \u201cAnswer to Job,\u201d and Gershom Scholem\u2019s biography of Sabbatai Sevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah of the seventeenth century. Cohen is also very much at home in the spiritual reaches of the Internet, and he listens to the lectures of Yakov Leib HaKohain,", + " a Kabbalist who has converted, serially, to Islam, Catholicism, and Hinduism, and lives in the San Bernardino mountains with two pit bulls and four cats. For forty years, Cohen was associated with a Japanese Zen master named Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi. (\u201cRoshi\u201d is an honorific for a venerated teacher, and Cohen always refers to him that way.) Roshi, who died two years ago at the age of a hundred and seven, arrived in Los Angeles in 1962 but never quite learned the language of his adoptive home. Through his translators, though, he adapted traditional Japanese koans for his American students:", + " \u201cHow do you realize Buddha nature while driving a car?\u201d Roshi was short, stout, a drinker of sake and expensive Scotch. \u201cI came to have a good time,\u201d he once said of his sojourn in the States. \u201cI want Americans to learn how to truly laugh.\u201d Until the early nineties, Cohen used to study with Roshi at the Zen Center, on Mt. Baldy, for periods of learning and meditation that stretched over two or three months a year. He considered Roshi a close friend, a spiritual master, and a deep influence on his work. And so, not long after getting home from the Ch\u00e2teau Latour tour,", + " in 1993, Cohen went up to Mt. Baldy. This time, he stayed for nearly six years. \u201cNobody goes into a Zen monastery as a tourist,\u201d Cohen told me. \u201cThere are people who do, but they leave in ten minutes because the life is very rigorous. You are getting up at two-thirty in the morning; the camp wakes up at three, but you have to light fires in the zendo. The cabins are only heated a few hours a day. There\u2019s snow coming in under the badly carpentered doors. You\u2019re shovelling snow half the day. And the other half of the day you\u2019re sitting in the zendo.", + " So in a certain sense you toughen up. Whether it has a spiritual aspect is debatable. It helps you endure, and it makes whining the least appropriate response to suffering. Just on that level it\u2019s very valuable.\u201d Cohen lived in a tiny cabin that he outfitted with a coffeemaker, a menorah, a keyboard, and a laptop. Like the other adepts, he cleaned toilets. He had the honor of cooking for Roshi and eventually lived in a cabin that was linked to his teacher\u2019s by a covered walkway. For many hours a day, he sat in half lotus, meditating. If he,", + " or anyone else, nodded off during meditation or lost the proper position, one of the monks would come by and rap him smartly on the shoulder with a wooden stick. \u201cPeople have the idea that a monastery is a place of serenity and contemplation,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cIt isn\u2019t that at all. It\u2019s a hospital, and a lot of the people who end up there can barely walk or speak. So a lot of the activity there is to get people to learn how to walk and speak and breathe and prepare their own meals or shovel their own paths in the winter.\u201d Allen Ginsberg once asked Cohen how he could reconcile his Judaism with Zen.", + " Cohen said that he wasn\u2019t looking for a new religion, that he was well satisfied with the religion he had. Zen made no mention of God; it demanded no scriptural devotion. For him, Zen was a discipline rather than a religion, a practice of investigation. \u201cI put on those robes because that was Roshi\u2019s school and that was the uniform,\u201d he said. Had Roshi been a professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg, Cohen says, he would have learned German and moved to Heidelberg. Roshi, toward the end of his life, was accused of sexual misconduct. He was never charged with any crime,", + " but some former students, writing in Internet chat rooms and in letters to Roshi himself, said that he had sexually groped or coerced many Buddhist students and nuns. An independent Buddhist panel determined that the behavior had been going on since the seventies, and that those \u201cwho chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished,\u201d according to the Times. One morning, Bob Faggen drove me up the mountain to the Zen Center. A former Boy Scout camp, the center comprises a series of rough-hewn cabins surrounded by pines and cedars. It was striking how few people were around.", + " One monk told me that Roshi had left no successor and that the center had not yet recovered from the scandal. Cohen, for his part, took pains to explain Roshi\u2019s transgressions without excusing them. \u201cRoshi,\u201d he said, \u201cwas a very naughty guy.\u201d In 1996, Cohen became a monk, but that did not safeguard him from depression, a lifelong nemesis; two years later, it overwhelmed him. \u201cI\u2019ve dealt with depression ever since my adolescence,\u201d he said. \u201cMoving into some periods, which were debilitating, when I found it hard to get off the couch, to periods when I was fully operative but the background noise of anguish still prevailed.\u201d Cohen tried antidepressants.", + " He tried throwing them out. Nothing worked. Finally, he told Roshi he was \u201cgoing down the mountain.\u201d In a collection of poems called \u201cBook of Longing,\u201d he wrote: I left my robes hanging on a peg in the old cabin where I had sat so long and slept so little. I finally understood I had no gift for Spiritual Matters. In fact, Cohen was hardly done with his searching. Just a week after returning home, he boarded a flight to Mumbai to study with another spiritual guide. He took a room in a modest hotel and went to daily satsangs, spiritual discussions, at the apartment of Ramesh Balsekar,", + " a former president of the Bank of India and a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu discipline. Cohen read Balsekar\u2019s book \u201cConsciousness Speaks,\u201d which teaches a single universal consciousness, no \u201cyou\u201d or \u201cme,\u201d and denies a sense of individual free will, any sense that any one person is a \u201cdoer.\u201d Cohen spent nearly a year in Mumbai, calling on Balsekar in the mornings, and spending the rest of the day swimming, writing, and wandering the city. For reasons that he now says are \u201cimpossible to penetrate,\u201d his depression lifted. He was ready to come home.", + " The story, and the way Cohen tells it now, full of uncertainty and modesty, reminded me of the chorus of \u201cAnthem,\u201d a song that took him ten years to write and that he recorded just before he first headed up the mountain: Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That\u2019s how the light gets in. Even if he was now freed of depression, the next crisis was not far off. Aside from a few indulgences, Cohen was not obsessed with luxury. \u201cMy project has been completely different than my contemporaries\u2019,\u201d he says. His circle in Montreal valued modesty.", + " \u201cThe minimum environment that would enable you to do your work with the least distraction and the most aesthetic deliverance came from a modest surrounding. A palace, a yacht would be an enormous distraction from the project. My fantasies went the other way. The way I lived on Mt. Baldy was perfect for me. I liked the communal life, I liked living in a little shack.\u201d And yet he had made a considerable fortune from album sales, concerts, and the publishing rights to his songs. \u201cHallelujah\u201d was recorded so often and so widely that Cohen jokingly called a moratorium on it. He certainly had enough money to feel secure about his two children and their mother,", + " and a few other dependents. Before he left on his spiritual adventures, Cohen had ceded nearly absolute control of his financial affairs to Kelley Lynch, his business manager for seventeen years and, at one time, briefly, his lover. In 2004, however, he discovered that his accounts had been emptied. Millions of dollars were gone. Cohen fired Lynch and sued her. The court ruled in Cohen\u2019s favor, awarding him more than five million dollars. In Los Angeles County Superior Court, Cohen testified that Lynch had been so outraged by the suit that she started calling him twenty, thirty times a day and inundating him with e-mails,", + " some directly threatening, eventually ignoring a restraining order. \u201cIt makes me feel very conscious about my surroundings,\u201d Cohen said, according to the Guardian\u2019s account of the trial. \u201cEvery time I see a car slow down, I get worried.\u201d Lynch was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and five years\u2019 probation. After thanking the judge and his attorney in his usual high style, Cohen turned to his antagonist. \u201cIt is my prayer,\u201d Cohen told the court, \u201cthat Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform.\u201d Cohen has never managed to collect the awarded damages,", + " and, because the situation is still a matter of litigation, he does not like to talk about it. But one result was plain: he would need to return to the stage. Even a Zen monk has to earn some coin.\n\nThere is something irresistible about Cohen\u2019s charm. For proof, take a look at a YouTube clip called \u201cWhy It\u2019s Good to Be Leonard Cohen\u201d: a filmmaker follows Cohen backstage as a beautiful German-accented actress tries to coax him, in front of a full dressing room, to \u201cgo somewhere\u201d with her as he wryly rebuffs her. He is no less charming with men. So it was more than a little surprising when Faggen and I returned to the house one afternoon thinking that we were on time and were informed,", + " in the sternest terms imaginable, that we were not. In fact, Cohen, wearing a dark suit and a fedora, settled into his medical chair and gave us the most forbidding talking-to I have experienced since grade school. I\u2019m one of those tiresome people who are rarely, if ever, late; who show up, old-mannishly, for flights much too early. But there had apparently been a misunderstanding about the time of our visit, and a text to him and his assistant seemed to have gone unseen. Every effort to apologize or explain, mine and Faggen\u2019s, was dismissed as \u201cnot the point.\u201d Cohen reminded us of his poor health.", + " This was an abuse of his time. A violation. Even \u201ca form of elder abuse.\u201d More apologies, more rebuffs. This wasn\u2019t about anger or apology, he went on. He felt no rage, no, but we had to understand that we were not \u201cdoers,\u201d none of us have free will.... And so on. I recognized the language of his teacher in Mumbai. But that didn\u2019t make it sting any less. The lecture\u2014steely, ominous, high-flown\u2014went on quite a long time. I felt humiliated, but also defensive. In the dynamic of people getting something off their chest,", + " the speaker feels cleansed, the listener accused and miserable. Finally, Cohen eased into other matters. And the subject that he was happiest to talk about was the tour that began as a means of restoring what had been stolen from him. In 2007, he started conceiving a tour with a full band: three backup singers, two guitarists, drummer, keyboard player, bassist, and saxophonist (later replaced by a violinist). He rehearsed the band for three months. \u201cFirst, we find the bedbugs, Ma\u2019am, then we drive tiny stakes through their wee black hearts.\u201d \u201cI hadn\u2019t played any of these songs for fifteen years,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cMy voice had changed. My range had changed. I didn\u2019t know what to do. There was no way I could transpose the positions that I knew.\u201d Instead, Cohen tuned the strings on his guitar down two whole steps, so, for instance, the low E was now a low C. Cohen had always had a deep, intimate voice, but now, with age, and after countless cigarettes, it is a fantastical growl, confiding, lordly. In concert, he always got a knowing laugh with this line from \u201cTower of Song\u201d: \u201cI was born like this, I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.\u201d Neil Larsen,", + " who played keyboards in Cohen\u2019s band, said that the preparation was meticulous. \u201cWe rehearsed very close to the way you would record,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe did one song over and over and made adjustments. He was locking the lyrics into his memory, too. Usually it takes a while before a tour jells. Not this one. We went out ready.\u201d The tour started in Canada, and then went everywhere during the next five years\u2014three hundred and eighty shows, from New York to Nice, Moscow to Sydney. Cohen began every performance saying that he and the band would give \u201ceverything we\u2019ve got,\u201d and they did.", + " \u201cI think he was competing with Springsteen,\u201d Sharon Robinson, a singer and frequent co-writer, joked about the length of the shows. \u201cThey were close to four hours some nights.\u201d Cohen was in his mid-seventies by this time, and his manager did everything possible for the performer to marshal his energies. It was a first-class operation: a private plane, where Cohen could write and sleep; good hotels, where he could read and compose on a keyboard; a car to take him to the hotel the minute he stepped off the stage. Some of the most memorable musical performances Cohen had ever seen were by Alberta Hunter, the blues singer,", + " who had a long residency in the late seventies at the Cookery, in the Village. Hunter had retired from music for decades and worked as a nurse, and then made a comeback in the last six years of her life. Leonard Cohen was following suit: an elderly man, full of sap, singing his heart out for hours, several nights a week. \u201cEverybody was rehearsed not only in the notes but also in something unspoken,\u201d Cohen recalled. \u201cYou could feel it in the dressing room as you moved closer to the concert, you could feel the sense of commitment, tangible in the room.\u201d This time, there was no warmup with Ch\u00e2teau Latour.", + " \u201cI didn\u2019t drink at all. Occasionally, I\u2019d have half a Guinness with Neil Larsen, but I had no interest in alcohol.\u201d The show that I saw, at Radio City, was among the most moving performances I\u2019ve ever experienced. Here was Cohen, an old master of his art, serving up the thick cream of his catalogue with a soulful corps of exacting musicians. Time and again, he would enact the song as well as sing it, taking one knee in gratitude to the object of affection, taking both knees to emphasize his devotion, to the audience, to the musicians, to the song. The tour not only restored Cohen\u2019s finances (and then some); it also brought a sense of satisfaction rarely associated with him.", + " \u201cOne time I asked him on the bus, \u2018Are you enjoying this?\u2019 And he would never really own up to enjoying it,\u201d Sharon Robinson recalled. \u201cBut after we finished I was at his house one day, and he admitted to me that there was something extremely fulfilling about that tour, something that brought his career full circle that he hadn\u2019t expected.\u201d In 2009, Cohen gave his first performance in Israel since 1985, at a stadium in Ramat Gan, donating the proceeds to Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations. He had wanted to perform in Ramallah, in the West Bank, too, but Palestinian groups decided that this was politically untenable.", + " And yet he persisted, dedicating the concert to the cause of \u201creconciliation, tolerance, and peace,\u201d and the song \u201cAnthem\u201d to the bereaved. At the end of the show, Cohen raised his hands, rabbinically, and recited in Hebrew the birkat kohanim, the priestly blessing, over the crowd. \u201cIt\u2019s not self-consciously religious,\u201d Cohen told me. \u201cI know that it\u2019s been described that way, and I am happy with that. It\u2019s part of the intentional fallacy. But when I see James Brown it has a religious feel. Anything deep does.\u201d When I asked him if he intended his performances to reflect a kind of devotion,", + " he hesitated before he answered. \u201cDoes artistic dedication begin to touch on religious devotion?\u201d he said. \u201cI start with artistic dedication. I know that if the spirit is on you it will touch on to the other human receptors. But I dare not begin from the other side. It\u2019s like pronouncing the holy name\u2014you don\u2019t do it. But if you are lucky, and you are graced, and the audience is in a particular salutary condition, then these deeper responses will be produced.\u201d The final night of the tour happened to be in Auckland, in late December, 2013, and the last songs were exit songs:", + " the prayerful \u201cIf It Be Your Will,\u201d and then \u201cClosing Time,\u201d \u201cI Tried to Leave You,\u201d and, finally, a cover of the Drifters song \u201cSave the Last Dance for Me.\u201d The musicians all knew this was not only the last night of a long voyage but, for Cohen, perhaps the last voyage. \u201cEverybody knows that everything has to end some time,\u201d Sharon Robinson told me. \u201cSo, as we left, there was the thought: This is it.\u201d\n" + ], + "length": 25931, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 71, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The blaze that ripped through a converted warehouse in Oakland, Calif., during a party on Friday has now been confirmed as America's deadliest fire in more than a decade\u2014and authorities say more than half the wreckage of the \"Ghost Ship\" warehouse hasn't been searched yet. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced Sunday that a criminal investigation team is now looking into the disaster, ABC7 reports. The AP reports that the warehouse, which wasn't licensed for residential or entertainment use, was already being investigated for alleged code violations. In other developments: Those confirmed dead include many young artists and musicians, with the youngest victims aged 17 and the oldest in their 30s, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. In a tragic coincidence, one victim is the son of a deputy for the Alameda County Sheriff's Office, which has been tasked with removing bodies from the scene. The San Jose Mercury News reports that Derick Ion Almena, the man who created the \"Ghost Ship\" artists' collective\u2014and allegedly ignored warnings about fire safety\u2014is being called \"selfish and careless\" in the wake of the disaster. He caused outrage after the fire when he failed to mention the victims in a Facebook post, lamenting instead that \"everything I worked so hard for is gone.\" Almena lived in the warehouse with his wife and children, but they were not present during the fire. Visitors and former residents describe the warehouse as a \"cluttered deathtrap\" that had been carved into many artists' studios, with only a rickety staircase made partly of pallets connecting the second floor, where many died, with the first floor, the AP reports. Associates say Almena leased the warehouse and rented out RVs and other spaces to artists. Events like Friday's party were held to help raise rent money. Oakland Fire Battalion Chief Melinda Drayton warns that the search and recovery process could take a long time, CNN reports. Firefighters are removing debris \"literally bucket by bucket in a methodical, thoughtful, mindful, and compassionate way,\" she said Sunday. The fire was among the deadliest building fires in the US in the last 50 years, reports NBC News, which lists the worst 10 from that period. The Oakland fire is the seventh on a list that includes 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing. Another Mercury News story looks at how rising rents elsewhere created a thriving artistic community in Oakland's warehouses, which could now be forced out. \"The city's gonna paint us as some ugly, crusty, punk kids that are up to no good,\" says Katelyn Charvoz, 25. \"If they buy up all the warehouses on every street and kick everyone out, it will just hurt the arts community here.\" Survivor Chris Nechodom tells the San Francisco Chronicle that there were scenes of horror and panic as the fire spread from the back of the warehouse and started \"swooping down\" from the ceiling. \"We all start shuffling to the front\u2014we're getting low. We get to the front and there's a few people yelling and screaming, so I start helping, yelling and screaming like, 'This is where the front entrance is! Follow our boys\u2014come here, come here!'\" he says. Nechodom says that before long, smoke forced him out of the building. Within minutes, he says, a \"big bellow of black smoke kind of came out of every window and it blew out of the door.\" Few survivors emerged after that, he says. The AP reports that teams including the Oakland Raiders, the Oakland A's, and the Golden State Warriors are donating money to help families affected by the disaster. \"We're all with you out there. We're all devastated today,\" Golden State head coach Steve Kerr said before the team hosted the Phoenix Suns on Saturday.\n", + "docs": [ + "OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) \u2014 As investigators searched for signs of a crime in the fire that killed at least 33 in an Oakland warehouse during a late-night dance party, survivors and teary-eyed friends of those who perished viewed the charred building from a distance, placed flowers on several small memorials and embraced each other to mourn their losses.\n\nBouquets of sunflowers, single white roses, lilies and carnations were stuck in chain-link fences, votive candles burned on sidewalks and post-it notes paid tribute to the missing and the dead in the most lethal building fire in the U.S. in more than a decade.\n\nKai Thomas and a group of red-eyed classmates from an arts high school in San Francisco pressed against police tape Sunday near the street corner where the \"Ghost Ship,\" a warehouse converted to artist studios and illegal living spaces,", + " rapidly went up in flames late Friday, taking the life of a friend.\n\nThree of the boys had been in the cramped and dark building, Thomas said, but one got separated from them 30 seconds before someone yelled, \"Fire.\"\n\n\"It was just really smoky and hard to see,\" said Thomas, a high school junior who wasn't there, but recounted what he had been told by two others who didn't want to speak. \"They jumped off the second-floor balcony and ran out.\"\n\nThe boys waited for their 17-year-old friend for more than three hours, but he never emerged.\n\nThey wouldn't give his name, but the victims included a 17-year-old,", + " as well as people from Europe and Asia and some over 30, said Alameda County Sheriff's Sgt. Ray Kelly said. Officials had identified eight of the dead \u2014 at least seven of them using fingerprints, but told family members of the missing that they may need to use DNA for more difficult identifications.\n\n\"When we started this investigation, if you had told us that you would have 33 victims, we wouldn't have believed you,\" Kelly said. \"I don't know how many people are left in there.\"\n\nLists of the missing circulated and many of those who had been unable to reach friends in the past two days had given up hope when authorities said people either escaped without injury or died inside.\n\nJesse James Alexander,", + " a DJ, who wasn't at the party, showed up at the scene of the fire Sunday to remember three friends who were killed, though he didn't want to give their names.\n\nOthers were still holding out hope. Yuri Kundin said outside a sheriff's office where friends and family gathered for word of their loved ones that he was hoping for good news about his friends, Alex Ghassan and Hanna Henriikka Ruax, who was from Finland.\n\nOne of the many post-it notes left on a sidewalk around the corner from the remains of the warehouse said, \"Praying for you.... Hope you're still here.\"\n\nFirefighters had searched less than half the building and expected more casualties as they worked around the clock to remove debris bucket by bucket.\n\nThe district attorney's sent a team to search for signs of a crime in the warehouse that was already under investigation by the city for possible code violations.", + " The space was only permitted as a warehouse and neighbors had complained of trash piling up and people were illegally living there.\n\nAuthorities would not answer questions about the couple that operated the Satya Yuga collective, who were identified as Derick Ion Almena and Micah Allison and were believed to have been out of the building at the time of the blaze.\n\nThe couple had a troubled relationship, said Michael Allison of Portland, Oregon, the father of Micah. He and other family members persuaded his daughter to go to a drug rehabilitation center in 2015, but Almena talked his way into the clinic and convinced Micah to leave with him,", + " Michael Allison said.\n\nThe family's three children had lice and needed new clothes, prompting family to call child-protective services, said Michael Allison, who wept as he talked. But Almena and his partner eventually were able to win custody of the children back and cut off all communication with Michael Allison, the father said.\n\n\"Whenever I could, I would to talk to (Micah) to get away from him because I knew he was dangerous from day one,\" he said. \"All of that has now been proven.\"\n\nA man identified as Derick Ion posted a Facebook message early Saturday, saying, \"Everything I worked so hard for is gone.", + " Blessed that my children and Micah were at a hotel safe and sound.\" He drew rebukes online from others who said he was warned the building was unsafe.\n\nAlmena did not immediately respond to emails or phone numbers associated with him. No one answered a call to a number for Micah Allison.\n\nThe building had been carved into artist studios and visitors and former denizens said it was a cluttered death trap, piled with scrap wood, a mess of snaking electric cords and only two exits.\n\nAlmena had leased the space from its owner and then rented five recreational vehicles and other nooks on the ground floor as living spaces,", + " said Danielle Boudreaux, a former friend of Almena and Allison. They held regular concerts and dance parties, like the one Friday, to make money, Boudreaux said.\n\nShelley Mack was drawn there by the promise of living among artists and paying a reasonable rent in an area where the tech boom has created a housing shortage and exorbitant leases. She after a few months two years ago when the place failed to live up to its promises.\n\n\"Some people were happy to have a roof over their head even though there was no heat or no place to eat or that it was filthy and infested,\" Mack said.", + " \"You just get sucked in because it seems like it's this nice place and this artistic community and they talk a good game. There are people there that wanted to be there and believed in it. And I think I did too for a little bit. And then I afterward, I was like, um no.\"\n\n___\n\nAssociated Press writers Ellen Knickmeyer, Olga Rodriguez, Tim Reiterman and Sudhin Thanawala in San Francisco, and Jonathan J. Cooper, Terry Chea and Janie Har in Oakland contributed to this report. ", + " OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) \u2014 The Latest on a deadly fire in a converted warehouse in Oakland, California (all times local):\n\n9 p.m.\n\nThe NBA Golden State Warriors say the team is donating $50,000 to help families affected by the deadly warehouse fire in Oakland. The team says the money will go to the Unity Council in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, a nonprofit that assists members of the community.\n\nBefore the Warriors hosted the Phoenix Suns Saturday night, Golden State head coach Steve Kerr said \"We're all with you out there. We're all devastated today.\" A moment of silence was observed.\n\nThe NFL Oakland Raiders say they've joined forces with the Major League Baseball's Oakland A's to aid those affected by the fire.", + " The Raiders have pledged to match up to $30,000 in contributions through a YouCaring.com page set up by the A's.\n\n___\n\n6:30 p.m.\n\nAuthorities say nine bodies have been recovered from the wreckage of a warehouse gutted by a fire during an electronic music party Friday night in Oakland, California.\n\nAlameda County Sheriff's Sgt. Ray Kelly said Saturday the bodies have been taken to the coroner's office to be identified.\n\nKelly says there are more bodies trapped in the debris that are hard to reach and need to be \"cut from the wreckage.\"\n\nHe says excavators, a crane and dumpster trucks are being brought in to help in the recovery and the building is being flooded with light to allow crews to work through the night.\n\nKelly says crews will have to move very slowly as they pull out debris and look for more victims.\n\nHe says at least two dozen people remain missing.\n\n___\n\n3:", + "35 p.m.\n\nThe city of Oakland started investigating nearly three weeks ago whether people were illegally living in a warehouse destroyed by a fire late Friday night. At least nine people died.\n\nDarin Ranelletti, of the City of Oakland Planning Department, says the city had received reports of people living illegally in the building, which was only permitted as a warehouse. They opened an investigation on Nov. 13. He says an investigator went to the premises on Nov. 17 but could not gain access to the inside of the building\n\nRanelletti says they had not yet confirmed people were living inside. Photos posted online of the warehouse - called the \"Oakland Ghost Ship\"", + " - showed pictures of a bohemian, loft-like interior made of wood and cluttered with beds, rugs, old sofas, pianos, paintings, turntables, statues and other items.\n\nNeighbors had complained of trash piling up outside the property and concerns the garbage posed a danger, according to the city's Planning and Building Department website.\n\n___\n\n12:50 p.m.\n\nCalifornia Gov. Jerry Brown has issued a statement of condolences after a deadly fire in Oakland, California, left at least nine people dead.\n\nBrown says in a statement that he and his wife, Anne, were saddened to hear about the deadly blaze.\n\nIn the statement Saturday he said:", + " \"Our thoughts are with the entire city in this difficult time and we extend our condolences to the family and friends of those lost.\"\n\nOakland Mayor Libby Schaaf issued a separate statement calling the fire \"an immense tragedy.\"\n\nAuthorities say they fear up to 40 people might have died in the fire at a warehouse converted into artist studios that was hosting an electronic dance party.\n\nRescue crews were combing through wreckage and still trying to access parts of the warehouse mid-day Saturday.\n\n___\n\n12:25 p.m.\n\nAuthorities say arson investigators and other fire experts will comb through the wreckage of a deadly fire in Oakland, California, but the burn site is not considered a crime scene.\n\nAlameda County Sheriff's Sgt.", + " Ray Kelly says Saturday that fire investigations must start out looking at worst-case scenarios.\n\nThe blaze broke out about 11:30 p.m. Friday, and officials have confirmed nine deaths. They fear up to 40 more could have died. Authorities are working to verify who was in the building when the blaze broke out.\n\nTerry Ewing says his girlfriend was at the party and is missing. He went to a sheriff's office building Saturday to await information. He says he didn't know about the party and that he learned of the fire from friends who came to his house.\n\n___\n\n11:50 a.m.\n\nThe sheriff's office serving Oakland,", + " California, says it appears people inside a converted warehouse that went up in flames either escaped unscathed or were trapped inside.\n\nAlameda County Sheriff's Sgt. Ray Kelly says Saturday there are no reported injuries from a deadly fire that broke out during a rave in a gritty section of Oakland.\n\nAuthorities have confirmed nine people died in the blaze but fear up to 40 more could have perished. It broke out about 11:30 p.m. Friday.\n\nOakland Fire Chief Teresa Deloach Reed says the warehouse had been partitioned into several artist studios and was packed with furniture, mannequins and other objects. The chief says the building didn't have a clear exit path and that the only way out of the second floor was a makeshift stairwell.\n\nThe building was still smoldering at midday Saturday.\n\n___\n\n10:", + "45 a.m.\n\nAuthorities in the San Francisco Bay Area say they are prepared to deal with up to 40 deaths after a fire broke out at a warehouse party in Oakland, California.\n\nAlameda County Sheriff's Sgt. Ray Kelly says Saturday that nine people are confirmed dead, and that he expects that number to rise.\n\nOakland Fire Chief Teresa Deloach Reed says some people escaped and that between 50 and 100 people were at the warehouse at the time of the fire.\n\nThe warehouse had been partitioned into several artist studios and was packed with furniture, mannequins, lamps, and other objects. Deloche-Reed says the building didn't have a clear exit path and that the only way out of the second floor was a makeshift stairwell made of pallets.\n\nFire officials say the building was not equipped with sprinklers.\n\nKelly says firefighters are still extinguishing hotspots from the blaze that sparked around 11:", + "30 p.m. Friday. The cause is unclear.\n\n___\n\n9:55 a.m.\n\nA San Francisco Bay Area fire chief says the converted warehouse where a fire killed at least nine people was extremely cluttered and would have been difficult to escape in an emergency.\n\nOakland Fire Chief Teresa Deloach Reed says the building was packed with furniture, mannequins and statues and that it did not have a clear entry or exit path.\n\nDeloach Reed says the only way out of the second floor was a makeshift stairwell made of pallets. She says the roof collapsed and there is a lot of debris that will have to be painstakingly removed.\n\nThe building was partitioned into artist studios.\n\nAlameda County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt.", + " J.D. Nelson says officials with the coroner's office haven't recovered any bodies from because the building is still deemed unsafe.\n\nThe cause of the fire is still unclear.\n\n___\n\n9:05 a.m.\n\nA San Francisco Bay Area fire chief now says up to 25 people are unaccounted for after a fire in Oakland, California, that killed at least nine people Friday night.\n\nOakland Fire Chief Teresa Deloach Reed tells reporters Saturday morning that the site of the fire is a former warehouse that was subdivided into artist studios. Deloche-Reed says the roof collapsed and that fire investigators will have to search through debris to find any remaining bodies.\n\nAuthorities are working to verify who was in the building when the blaze broke out around 11:", + "30 p.m.\n\nThe chief says it's unclear what started the fire, but that there did not appear to be sprinklers in the building.\n\nAuthorities told KTVU-TV about 50 people were in the building when the fire started. It happened during a party.\n\n___\n\n7:35 a.m.\n\nFire officials say at least nine people died in a blaze that broke out during a party in a warehouse late Friday night in the San Francisco Bay Area.\n\nOakland Fire Chief Teresa Deloach Reed says at least another 13 people are unaccounted for as of Saturday morning.\n\nDeloach Reed says the fire department still must do a thorough search of the building.\n\nThe fire started about 11:", + "30 p.m. Friday. It tore through the building during an event featuring musician Golden Donna's 100% Silk West Coast tour, the East Bay Times reports.\n\nAuthorities told KTVU-TV about 50 people were in the building, which houses a group of artists and their studios.\n\n___\n\n5:58 a.m.\n\nSan Francisco Bay Area authorities say a fire has broken out at an Oakland warehouse where people were having a party, and police say there are \"casualties.\"\n\nOakland police Officer G. Plasencia says the fire department responded about 11:30 p.m. Friday and that firefighters were still on the scene early Saturday morning.", + " Oakland firefighters tweeted video of the fire erupting through the roof.\n\nAuthorities told KTVU-TV about 50 people were inside the building, which houses a group of artists and their studios.\n\nPlasencia said he had no further description of the casualties and referred an Associated Press reporter to the coroner's office. The office said the coroners were also at the scene Saturday morning and unavailable for comment. The fire department also had no immediate details. ", + " The blaze in an Oakland, California, warehouse that functioned as an unsanctioned residence and event space is one of the deadliest building fires in the United States in the last 50 years. Although the fire's current death toll of 36 puts it seventh on the list, the number of victims is expected to grow \u2014 likely pushing it higher.\n\nBelow are the 10 deadliest building fires of the past 50 years.\n\n1. World Trade Center, New York City: Sept. 11, 2001 \u2014 2,753 Killed\n\nPeople walk in the street where the World Trade Center buildings collapsed in September 2001.", + " Mario Tama / Getty Images\n\nA day that will live in infamy. The World Trade Center was the worst terrorist attack in United States history. The crashing of two jetliners into the World Trade Center Buildings, perpetrated by the terrorist group al-Qaeda, killed 2,753 people in New York City. Though the initial impact of the plane and building collapse killed many, the fires were deadly as well and continued for 99 days after 9/11. Tens of thousands of people have developed illnesses, some of them terminal, because of exposure to toxins and poisons from the site. The attack led to the war in Afghanistan,", + " which has continued for 15 years.\n\n2. Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City: April 19, 1995 \u2014 168 Killed\n\nThe north side of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City shows the devastation caused by a car bomb that detonated on April 19, 1995. Bob Daemmrich / AFP/Getty Images file\n\nMore than 20 years ago, a truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people \u2014 including children. Now known as the Oklahoma City Bombing, it was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil until 9/", + "11 and the worst act of domestic terrorism in the country's history. Many died from the ensuing fire and from smoke inhalation \u2014 almost 40 percent of the victims who died or were injured suffered from the latter, according to the Oklahoma Department of Health. Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government militant, set off the explosives and was put to death by lethal injection in 2001. His co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, is serving multiple life sentences in a Colorado federal penitentiary.\n\n3. Beverly Hills Supper Club, South Gate, Kentucky: May 28, 1977 \u2014 165 Killed\n\nThe Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate,", + " Kentucky., lies in rubble May 29, 1977, after a fire killed more than 200 people. AP\n\nMore than 3,000 people were at the Beverly Hills Supper Club when a fire started in the \"Zebra room,\" according to the Center for Fire Research, a department of the National Bureau of Standards. Most were able to escape, but 165 were killed inside the club. The fire fed through an interior corridor and spread throughout the club. At the time, it was the deadliest fire in more than 30 years.\n\nRelated: Former Occupant of Warehouse Said Building Was 'Sketchy' and 'Unsafe'\n\n4.", + " The Station Nightclub, West Warwick, Rhode Island: Feb. 20, 2003 \u2014 100 Killed\n\nA firefighter grieves at the scene of a deadly fire at The Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, in February 2003. Elise Amendola / AP\n\nThe Station nightclub blaze \u2014 the fourth-deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history, according to the National Fire Protection Association \u2014 killed 100 people and led the NFPA to create code provisions for sprinklers and crowd management in similar venues. Hundreds of people had gone to the nightclub to see the band Great White, whose pyrotechnics display caused the inferno that engulfed the club in less than six minutes.", + " The band's manager and the nightclub owner were sentenced to 15 years in prison, although both were granted parole in 2008, The Associated Press reported.\n\n5. Happy Land Social Club, Bronx, New York: March 25, 1990 \u2014 87 Killed\n\nAn arson fire at the Happy Land social club killed 87 people in 1990 in the Bronx, AP\n\nA spurned boyfriend, unemployed Cuban refugee Julio Gonzalez, set the Happy Land social club in the Bronx ablaze after getting into an argument with his girlfriend, who worked there, according to NBC New York. He was kicked out of the club and returned after 3 a.m.", + " with gasoline and matches. He lit the guest exit on fire and pulled the metal front gate closed. Eighty-seven people died within minutes. It was the deadliest blaze in the city's history since the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire in 1911, exactly 79 years earlier.\n\n6. MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas: Nov. 21, 1980 \u2014 84 Killed\n\nA fire at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas killed at least 80 people in November 1980. AP\n\nThe MGM Grand Hotel and Casino fire, which is considered the second deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history, killed 84 people and injured more than 700 others.", + " According to the Clark County Fire Department's report, the source was an electrical fire in the Deli restaurant. Within six minutes of its discovery, the fire had started to spread at 15 to 19 feet per second because of a \"flashover\" that quickly ate plastic ornamental fixtures, wall coverings, furniture and other combustibles.\n\n7. 'The Ghost Ship,' Oakland, California: Dec. 3, 2016 \u2014 36 Killed (number expected to grow)\n\nFirefighters battle a fire in Oakland, California, that killed at least 30 people Saturday. David Butow/Redux / Redux Pictures\n\nThe death toll of the warehouse fire in Oakland has climbed to at least 36 people,", + " with more missing and expected to be added to the list. It is the deadliest fire in Oakland history. The interior of the building, known as \"The Ghost Ship,\" was filled with combustible wooden objects and didn't have a sprinkler system. Many people were trapped on the second floor during a party, as the staircase \u2014 which was built of wooden pallets \u2014 was quickly swallowed by the fire. People were illegally living in the unsanctioned art collective, as well.\n\n8. UpStairs Lounge, New Orleans: June 24, 1973 \u2014 32 Killed\n\nA fire at the UpStairs bar in New Orleans killed 32 people in June 1973.", + " AP file\n\nAn unknown arsonist set fire to a New Orleans gay bar in 1972, killing 32 people. It was considered the deadliest attack on an LGBT space until the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, this year. The arsonist doused the stairwell into the bar with lighter fluid and threw a lighted torch to ignite the fire. The entire bar was alight in minutes. Many people died because the building didn't follow proper fire safety measures and the only emergency exit wasn't clearly marked, according to New Orleans Historical, a history project created by the University of New Orleans and Tulane University.\n\nPHOTOS:", + " Oakland Warehouse Fire Kills Several at Dance Party\n\n9. Imperial Foods Chicken Processing Plant, Hamlet, North Carolina: Sept. 3, 1991 \u2014 25 Killed\n\nA blocked door contributed to the number of deaths in the Imperial chicken plant fire, which killed 25 people in Hamlet, North Carolina, in 1991. U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration\n\nAccording to report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the fire at the Imperial Foods Chicken Processing Plant killed 25 people and injured 54 others in September 1991. The conveyor of a hydraulic line on one of the plant's cookers burst, which ejected hydraulic fluid that burst into flames because of the plumes of heating gas expelled by a cooking vat.", + " This created a fireball, and spread smoke rapidly, confusing those people inside. Many of the exit doors were locked, causing many people to hide in a cooler or to seek other exits. The toxic gas killed many of those trying to escape.\n\n10. House fire in Charleston, West Virginia: March 24, 2012 \u2014 Killed 9\n\nAuthorities and investigators at the scene of a house fire that killed nine people in Charleston, West Virginia, in March 2012. AP - file\n\nA house fire in Charleston, West Virginia, left nine dead \u2014 seven of them were children between the ages of one and eight. The home had only one smoke alarm that was not properly installed,", + " according to NBC affiliate WSAZ. All were sleeping at the time of the early morning fire and likely died from smoke inhalation. Fire officials were never able to determine the cause of the blaze, but they did not believe it was suspicious. ", + " EMBED More News Videos SUNDAY 3PM NEWS CONFERENCE: Oakland officials said the death toll in the Ghost Ship warehouse fire has now climbed to 33.\n\nA hotline has been put in place for those who cannot locate loved ones.\n\nDuring a press conference Sunday, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff announced the city's district attorney activated a criminal investigation team to look into the Ghost Ship fire that killed at least 33 people.Officials say that number is expected to rise, with only 35-40 percent of the building search complete so far. \"We have another 60 plus percent to search and we're finding mobile homes, or trailers where people may have been living inside,", + " those trailers will need to be searched, we don't even know if there's people inside of those,\" Kelly said.Seven different families have been notified that their loved ones have been positively identified. An Alameda County Sheriff's Office captain asked families during a press conference to save items for possible DNA identification. \"Any family members or friends of the victims, if you can preserve any DNA type of equipment like combs, brushes and secure them in a brown paper bag,\" Alameda County Sheriff's Office Capt. Melanie Ditzenberger said.Officials announced there were teenagers among the death toll. \"We have now started to recover and identify the victims who are minors.", + " We do have some children in the ages of 17 years old, possibly younger,\" Alameda County Sheriff's Office Sgt. Ray Kelly said.On Sunday afternoon, the Alameda County Sheriff's Office confirmed that one of their deputies lost a son in the fire. \"This tragedy hit very close to home for our agency. One of our deputies that we work with lost his son in this fire,\" Kelly said.At this time many people are stopping by the scene to drop off flowers for the victims.to donate and help the the families of the victims. The Warriors, Raiders, and Athletics are also teaming up to match donations.to check Facebook's Safety Check page.for all ABC7 News stories,", + " videos, and photos from the Ghost Ship warehouse fire. ", + " Photo: Darin Marshall Image 1 of / 60 Caption Close\n\nImage 1 of 60 Fire crews battle a blaze in a warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship on Friday, Dec. 2 at 1305 31st Ave. near International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood. The day after the blaze, 9 people were dead and dozens were missing. less Fire crews battle a blaze in a warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship on Friday, Dec. 2 at 1305 31st Ave. near International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood. The day after the blaze, 9 people were... more Photo:", + " Darin Marshall\n\nImage 2 of 60 An Alameda County Sheriff, center, escorts a woman carrying flowers at the site of a warehouse fire Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) An Alameda County Sheriff, center, escorts a woman carrying flowers at the site of a warehouse fire Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP\n\nImage 3 of 60 Buy photo A recovery crew takes down a parapet on the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland,", + " Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music dance party Friday night. less A recovery crew takes down a parapet on the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 4 of 60 Buy photo Pairs of shoes dangle from overhead wires in front of the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif.", + " on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music dance party Friday night. less Pairs of shoes dangle from overhead wires in front of the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 5 of 60 Buy photo Firefighters use heavy equipment to remove debris that was burned inside the Ghost Ship warehouse as recovery efforts came to a close following the fire that claimed 36 lives in Oakland,", + " Calif., on Tuesday, December 6, 2016. less Firefighters use heavy equipment to remove debris that was burned inside the Ghost Ship warehouse as recovery efforts came to a close following the fire that claimed 36 lives in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday,... more Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 6 of 60 Buy photo Mourners bow their heads while watching the recovery operation at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music dance party Friday night.", + " less Mourners bow their heads while watching the recovery operation at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 7 of 60 Buy photo Recovery efforts continue at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music dance party Friday night. less Recovery efforts continue at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland,", + " Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 8 of 60 Buy photo The recovery operation continues at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music dance party Friday night. less The recovery operation continues at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic... more Photo:", + " Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 9 of 60 Buy photo Participants hold their candles aloft during a vigil at Lake Merritt as recovery efforts continue following the Ghost Ship fire that has so far claimed 36 lives in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, December 5, 2016. Participants hold their candles aloft during a vigil at Lake Merritt as recovery efforts continue following the Ghost Ship fire that has so far claimed 36 lives in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, December 5, 2016. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 10 of 60 Judy Hough,", + " left, and her husband Brian, center, hold a picture of their son Travis, who died in a warehouse fire, during a vigil at Lake Merritt on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. Family members and friends are being notified as firefighters continue a painstaking search for victims of the Oakland warehouse fire. less Judy Hough, left, and her husband Brian, center, hold a picture of their son Travis, who died in a warehouse fire, during a vigil at Lake Merritt on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. Family members and... more Photo:", + " Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP\n\nImage 11 of 60 Two people embrace at a vigil for the victims of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a musical event late Friday night. less Two people embrace at a vigil for the victims of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a musical event... more Photo: Elijah Nouvelage, Getty Images\n\nImage 12 of 60 Buy photo The Grand Lake Theater has updated its marquee with a message mourning the victims of the fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse,", + " and especifically Nicole R. Siegrist, 29, who went by the name Denalda Nicole Renae, who is still considered missing, as recovery efforts continue in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, December 5, 2016. less The Grand Lake Theater has updated its marquee with a message mourning the victims of the fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse, and especifically Nicole R. Siegrist, 29, who went by the name Denalda Nicole Renae,... more Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 13 of 60 This photo provided by the City of Oakland shows inside the burned warehouse after the deadly fire that broke out on Dec.", + " 2, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The death toll in the fire climbed Monday, Dec. 5, with more bodies still feared buried in the blackened ruins, and families anxiously awaited word of their missing loved ones. less This photo provided by the City of Oakland shows inside the burned warehouse after the deadly fire that broke out on Dec. 2, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The death toll in the fire climbed Monday, Dec. 5, with more... more Photo: City Of Oakland\n\nImage 14 of 60 Buy photo Oakland Fire Department inspection crews meet as the assess the structural integrity of the building as recovery efforts continue following the Ghost Ship fire that has so far claimed 36 lives in Oakland,", + " Calif., on Monday, December 5, 2016. less Oakland Fire Department inspection crews meet as the assess the structural integrity of the building as recovery efforts continue following the Ghost Ship fire that has so far claimed 36 lives in Oakland,... more Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 15 of 60 Firefighters sift through debris inside the warehouse that burned in Oakland, Calif., Dec. 5, 2016. The inferno killed at least 36 people and is regarded as one of the worst structure fires in the United States in over a decade. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times)", + " less Firefighters sift through debris inside the warehouse that burned in Oakland, Calif., Dec. 5, 2016. The inferno killed at least 36 people and is regarded as one of the worst structure fires in the United States... more Photo: JIM WILSON, NYT\n\nImage 16 of 60 Workers are seen cleaning debris from the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland. Workers are seen cleaning debris from the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland.", + " Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 17 of 60 Buy photo Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley during an afternoon press conference at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley during an afternoon press conference at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 18 of 60 Oakland fire captain Chris Foley wipes his brow at the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a musical event late Friday night. less Oakland fire captain Chris Foley wipes his brow at the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a... more Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 19 of 60 Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern discusses the search and recovery efforts for victims at a media event near the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland less Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern discusses the search and recovery efforts for victims at a media event near the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5,", + "... more Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 20 of 60 \"Hot spot\" photos released by the Alameda County Sheriff's office show the recovery effort with in the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. \"Hot spot\" photos released by the Alameda County Sheriff's office show the recovery effort with in the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Photo: Alameda County Sheriff's Office\n\nImage 21 of 60 Students greet each other before going to class at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, in San Francisco,", + " California, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Students greet each other before going to class at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, in San Francisco, California, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle\n\nImage 22 of 60 Student Gabriel Bibliowicz,18, shows a photo of friend Draven McGill, 17, who was killed in the Ghostship fire in San Francisco, California, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Student Gabriel Bibliowicz,18, shows a photo of friend Draven McGill,", + " 17, who was killed in the Ghostship fire in San Francisco, California, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle\n\nImage 23 of 60 Buy photo Flowers are stuck into a street sign at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Flowers are stuck into a street sign at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 24 of 60 Buy photo Onlookers are seen reflected in a picture of one of the victims of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire,", + " in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Onlookers are seen reflected in a picture of one of the victims of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire, in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 25 of 60 Buy photo Robert Lewis of Oakland pushes his daughter Sophie Lewis, 3, in a shopping cart past a memorial for victims of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire, in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Robert Lewis of Oakland pushes his daughter Sophie Lewis, 3, in a shopping cart past a memorial for victims of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire,", + " in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 26 of 60 People gather near a warehouse after it was destroyed by a fire, December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. Up to 40 people were feared dead in a huge fire that tore through a rave party in a warehouse in Oakland, near San Francisco, as the authorities warned of a prolonged search and recovery effort. less People gather near a warehouse after it was destroyed by a fire, December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. Up to 40 people were feared dead in a huge fire that tore through a rave party in a warehouse in... more Photo:", + " AFP/AFP/Getty Images\n\nImage 27 of 60 Jenny Yang, right, kneels while she performs a recorded homage from her iphone at the scene of the Oakland warehouse fire on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. Though many of the victims' names have not been released, Yang believes she lost seven friends who were involved in the creation of the event where the fire broke out. The fire, at an artist's warehouse known as the \"Ghost Ship,\" began late on the evening of December 2nd, with 33 confirmed dead so far. less Jenny Yang, right, kneels while she performs a recorded homage from her iphone at the scene of the Oakland warehouse fire on December 4,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. Though many of the victims' names have not... more Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 28 of 60 Flowers, candles and notes left for victims of the Oakland warehouse fire are seen on the corner of 12th Street and 31st Avenue on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire, at an artist's warehouse known as the \"Ghost Ship,\" began late on the evening of December 2nd, with 33 confirmed dead so far. less Flowers, candles and notes left for victims of the Oakland warehouse fire are seen on the corner of 12th Street and 31st Avenue on December 4,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire, at an artist's warehouse... more Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 29 of 60 Emergency personnel stage in front of the site of a warehouse fire that started Friday night and killed dozens, Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The death toll was expected to rise, as crews using buckets and shovels slowly made their way through the building, finding victims where they least expected them, Alameda County Sheriff's Sgt. Ray Kelly said. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) less Emergency personnel stage in front of the site of a warehouse fire that started Friday night and killed dozens,", + " Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The death toll was expected to rise, as crews using... more Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez, Associated Press\n\nImage 30 of 60 Trevor Hardee,, 19, left, hug, Jesse James Alexander, 24, of San Francisco, right, near the site of the warehouse fire in Oakland, CA December 4, 2016. Jesse believes he lost three friends in the fire. A fire broke out during a party Friday night at a two-story warehouse and artists' studio in Oakland, killing at least nine people and leaving about two dozen missing.", + " less Trevor Hardee,, 19, left, hug, Jesse James Alexander, 24, of San Francisco, right, near the site of the warehouse fire in Oakland, CA December 4, 2016. Jesse believes he lost three friends in the fire. A fire... more Photo: Francine Orr/LA Times Via Getty Images\n\nImage 31 of 60 Nikki Kelber (far) and Carmen Brito (near), two residents of the warehouse that caught fire on December 2nd, look at the remnants of their former home on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The two artists lived in the building with 22-", + "24 other artists. \"I woke up to my room filled with smoke...I looked ut and there was a wall of fire...this happened so fast\" Brito said. The fire, at an artist's warehouse known as the \"Ghost Ship,\" has claimed 33 confirmed dead so far. less Nikki Kelber (far) and Carmen Brito (near), two residents of the warehouse that caught fire on December 2nd, look at the remnants of their former home on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The two artists... more Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 32 of 60 The Ghost Ship warehouse,", + " site of a fire that killed at least 30 people, is pictured on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The Ghost Ship warehouse, site of a fire that killed at least 30 people, is pictured on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 33 of 60 The Ghost Ship warehouse, site of a fire that killed at least 30 people, is pictured on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The Ghost Ship warehouse, site of a fire that killed at least 30 people,", + " is pictured on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 34 of 60 Alameda County Sherrif's Sgt. Ray Kelly gives a press conference at the scene of the Oakland warehouse fire on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire, at an artist's warehouse known as the \"Ghost Ship,\" began late on the evening of December 2nd, with 33 confirmed dead so far. less Alameda County Sherrif's Sgt. Ray Kelly gives a press conference at the scene of the Oakland warehouse fire on December 4,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire, at an artist's warehouse known as the \"Ghost... more Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 35 of 60 An onlooker holds flowers at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California An onlooker holds flowers at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 36 of 60 A firefighter wipes his brow on the scene of a warehouse fire that has claimed dozens of lives on December 4,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a musical event late Friday night. A firefighter wipes his brow on the scene of a warehouse fire that has claimed dozens of lives on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a musical event late Friday night. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 37 of 60 Elijah Hope kneels at the scene of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire at sunrise on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland. Hope, who lives nearby, said he was \"saying goodbye to the souls.\" Elijah Hope kneels at the scene of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire at sunrise on Sunday,", + " Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland. Hope, who lives nearby, said he was \"saying goodbye to the souls.\" Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 38 of 60 Buy photo People look on at the media and police presence from behind a barricade at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland, CA, on Sunday, December 4, 2016. People look on at the media and police presence from behind a barricade at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland, CA, on Sunday, December 4, 2016. Photo:", + " Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 39 of 60 A man walks into the Sheriff's office in Oakland, Calif. on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016. The office is providing information to those who may have lost a loved one in the Ghost Ship fire. A man walks into the Sheriff's office in Oakland, Calif. on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016. The office is providing information to those who may have lost a loved one in the Ghost Ship fire. Photo: James Tensuan, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 40 of 60 Friends of a person who died in the fire place flowers near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3,", + " 2016 in Oakland. Friends of a person who died in the fire place flowers near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland. Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 41 of 60 Mourners attend a vigil at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on Saturday night following the deadly warehouse fire in the city on Saturday morning, December 3, 2016 in Oakland, Calif. Mourners attend a vigil at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on Saturday night following the deadly warehouse fire in the city on Saturday morning, December 3,", + " 2016 in Oakland, Calif. Photo: Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 42 of 60 Genevieve Griesau, who has loved ones still unaccounted for, can't hold back her emotions at the vigil at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on Saturday night following the deadly warehouse fire in the city on Dec. 3, 2016 in Oakland. less Genevieve Griesau, who has loved ones still unaccounted for, can't hold back her emotions at the vigil at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on Saturday night following the deadly warehouse fire in the city on... more Photo:", + " Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 43 of 60 Jenny Yang (center) and others at Eli's Mile High Club bar try to find more information about their friends, on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016, who attended a warehouse party in Oakland, Calif., that caught on fire. Jenny Yang (center) and others at Eli's Mile High Club bar try to find more information about their friends, on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016, who attended a warehouse party in Oakland, Calif., that caught on fire. Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle\n\nImage 44 of 60 A man collapses on the ground while speaking with emergency personnel at the scene of a fire that killed at least nine people in Oakland on Saturday,", + " Dec. 3, 2016. A man collapses on the ground while speaking with emergency personnel at the scene of a fire that killed at least nine people in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 45 of 60 Firefighters work at the scene following an overnight fire that claimed the lives of at least 30 people at a warehouse in the Fruitvale neighborhood on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. The warehouse was hosting an electronic music party. less Firefighters work at the scene following an overnight fire that claimed the lives of at least 30 people at a warehouse in the Fruitvale neighborhood on December 3,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. The warehouse was... more Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 46 of 60 Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Photo: Max Bouvatte, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 47 of 60 Fire crews battle a blaze in a warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship on Friday,", + " Dec. 2 at 1305 31st Ave. near International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Fire crews battle a blaze in a warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship on Friday, Dec. 2 at 1305 31st Ave. near International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Photo: Darin Marshall\n\nImage 48 of 60 Fire crews battle a blaze in a warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship on Friday, Dec. 2 at 1305 31st Ave. near International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Fire crews battle a blaze in a warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship on Friday,", + " Dec. 2 at 1305 31st Ave. near International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Photo: Darin Marshall\n\nImage 49 of 60 Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. less Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3,", + " 2016. Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3,... more Photo: Max Bouvatte, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 50 of 60 A firefighter picks up debris at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland. A firefighter picks up debris at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland. Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 51 of 60 Firefighters close a door leading into a building that was the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3,", + " 2016 in Oakland. Firefighters close a door leading into a building that was the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland. Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 52 of 60 A man is overcome with emotion while speaking with emergency personnel at the scene of a fire that killed at least nine people in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. A man is overcome with emotion while speaking with emergency personnel at the scene of a fire that killed at least nine people in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3,", + " 2016. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 53 of 60 Firefighters work on the scene following an overnight fire that claimed the lives of at least 30 people at a warehouse in the Fruitvale neighborhood on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. The warehouse was hosting an electronic music party. less Firefighters work on the scene following an overnight fire that claimed the lives of at least 30 people at a warehouse in the Fruitvale neighborhood on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. The warehouse was... more Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 54 of 60 Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf speaks during a press conference at the scene of a fatal fire in Oakland,", + " Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf speaks during a press conference at the scene of a fatal fire in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 55 of 60 Oakland Fire Chief Fire Teresa Deloach Reed covers her face during a press conference at the scene of a fatal fire in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Oakland Fire Chief Fire Teresa Deloach Reed covers her face during a press conference at the scene of a fatal fire in Oakland,", + " Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 56 of 60 A law enforcement officer removes police line tape from a post near some flowers at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. \"You are my family, love you!\" is written on the bouquet. less A law enforcement officer removes police line tape from a post near some flowers at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. \"You are my... more Photo:", + " Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 57 of 60 Buy photo Kim Gregory and her husband David Gregory, Sr. (left) wait for updates at an Alameda County Sheriff's office on the fate of their daughter Michela Gregory in Oakland, Calif. on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Michela was later identified as one of the dead. less Kim Gregory and her husband David Gregory, Sr. (left) wait for updates at an Alameda County Sheriff's office on the fate of their daughter Michela Gregory in Oakland, Calif. on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016.", + " Michela... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 58 of 60 Buy photo Daniel Vega (back to camera) gathers with friends and family to wait for any word about his younger brother and his girlfriend at an Alameda County Sheriff's office, who are still missing after at least 30 people died and several others still unaccounted for in an overnight in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. less Daniel Vega (back to camera) gathers with friends and family to wait for any word about his younger brother and his girlfriend at an Alameda County Sheriff's office, who are still missing after at least 30... more Photo:", + " Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 59 of 60 Buy photo Two women walk down East 12th Street outside of an Alameda County Sheriff's office while they await word on missing friends or family members in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016 after at least 30 people died in an overnight fire. less Two women walk down East 12th Street outside of an Alameda County Sheriff's office while they await word on missing friends or family members in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016 after at least 30 people died... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo ", + " Find the latest updates on the death toll, criminal and fire cause investigation and profiles of the victims here.\n\nOAKLAND \u2014 Five months before Friday\u2019s raging fire killed at least 33 people at the \u201cGhost Ship\u201d warehouse, the architect of the cluttered artists\u2019 cooperative took to Facebook in a 1,000-word rant claiming he was \u201cthe thriller love child of Manson, Pol Pot and Hitler.\u201d\n\nThere was little sense to the bizarre writing of Derick Ion Almena, 46, known as a passionate artist from Los Angeles devoted to an alternative way of life who led the Oakland arts collective and commune with a distorted sense of reality.", + " But he ended his writing with incredibly haunting words: \u201cI can proverbally (sic) get away with murder.\u201d\n\nThe warehouse had been rented for a dance party, Almena apparently wasn\u2019t at the property Friday night, and no one has accused him of directly causing the fire. He does not own the structure. Police won\u2019t say if they have questioned him \u2014 or anyone \u2014 but District Attorney Nancy O\u2019Malley has opened a criminal investigation into the blaze at the facility, which wasn\u2019t permitted for parties or residential living.\n\nAlmena\u2019s name came up in discussions before the probe was announced, a law enforcement source close to the investigation told the Bay Area News Group.", + " Attention has focused on the man behind the \u201cGhost Ship,\u201d whom former residents and frequent visitors say was cavalier about safety hazards at the warehouse that many labeled a death trap.\n\n\u201cThey said they would fix things, and then they would collect money. They never would use the money to fix things\u201d \u2013 Shelley Mack, who lived at the warehouse in 2014-15.\n\nAlmena is no stranger to law enforcement. In January 2015, he pleaded no contest in Alameda County to a misdemeanor charge of receiving stolen property after negotiating a plea deal that saved him from facing a felony. He is on probation until 2019.", + " Online records show his criminal history also includes an unspecified arrest in Los Angeles County. Efforts to reach Almena \u2014 whom people had identified Saturday as Derick Alemany \u2014 at addresses affiliated with him in Oakland have been unsuccessful.\n\nPublic outrage\n\nShortly after the blaze, he became a central figure of public outrage about the fire when he failed to mention the victims in a post on Facebook, lamenting his own loss: \u201cEverything I worked so hard for is gone.\u201d\n\nA disturbing picture of Almena quickly emerged on social media and in interviews with people who know him; many skewered him as selfish and careless and for next-level narcissism,", + " but some celebrated his unyielding quirky vibe. A deeper look into Almena\u2019s past shows a man who sought to desperately defy convention in his art, work and life.\n\n\u201cThis is NOT a nite club,\u201d he wrote in a 2012 Facebook post about an event he promoted at Cloud 9 in Berkeley. \u201cYou will not be asked to leave at 2 am. You will not be subjected to plastic falsely proud deejays subjecting you to manufactured soul-less beats. You will be in the house of a living temple. Surrounded by magnificent Alters, Antique furniture, Balinese beds, Persian rugs, organic food and drink.\u201d\n\nA former neighbor from when Almena lived in the Oakland hills in the earlier part of the decade said he elicited suspicion from many in the calm hillside neighborhood.\n\nWATCH:", + " @MLauer and @TamronHall's full interview with Oakland warehouse manager Derick Almena https://t.co/LKvdwfWqvl \u2014 TODAY (@TODAYshow) December 6, 2016\n\nJurgen Braunngardt, the neighbor, said cars came and went from Almena\u2019s home frequently at night, fueling suspicions. Almena was eccentric, the neighbor said, describing him as having \u201ca way about him like he was founding a new religion. \u2026 I felt sorry about his wife and the people around him. It\u2019s a tragedy.\u201d\n\nAlmena and his wife, Micah Allison,", + " and their three young children eventually moved into the Ghost Ship but were not there Friday night. The warehouse had been rented out for an underground dance party, as it often has been, and the couple spent the night at a hotel.\n\nDanielle Boudreaux, a former friend of the couple, told the Associated Press she had a falling out with Almena when she persuaded Allison\u2019s parents and sister about a year ago that the warehouse was a dangerous place for the couple\u2019s three children to live.\n\n\u201cOh my God, the children,\u201d Allison\u2019s relative Claudette Selvin, of Gardena, said Sunday upon hearing about the fire but learning the children were safe.\n\nAlmena\u2019s Facebook posts,", + " under the account Derick Ion, hinted at what some described as his growing instability. Others say drug use was widespread at the warehouse.\n\n\u201cAddictions never admitted armed me as revolutionary,\u201d he wrote. \u201c\u2026 as long as i seek help and healing, have current registration, pay my insurance, piss in a cup twice weekly \u2026 i can proverbally (sic) get away with murder.\u201d\n\nThe couple didn\u2019t own the Ghost Ship; they leased it from an Oakland landlord and lived at the warehouse, welcoming others to live and work in the building for $300 to $600 a month, according to interviews with former tenants.\n\nLife in the Ghost Ship\n\nShelley Mack lived at the warehouse for a few months in 2014-", + "15 and described Almena as gypsy-like, often spinning tales and writing poetry. But Mack said she was alarmed by the hazardous living conditions, questionable electrical hookups, artists using butane torches and by the propane tanks used to heat the showers upstairs.\n\n\u201cHe knew all of it,\u201d Mack said. \u201cWe argued a lot. They said they would fix things, and then they would collect money. They never would use the money to fix things.\u201d\n\nOakland building inspectors were familiar with the property and had visited the site just last month after a complaint, but they couldn\u2019t get inside.\n\nAlmena had converted the two-story space into a Burning Man-style arts collective and commune in Oakland\u2019s Fruitvale district,", + " cluttered with Persian rugs, dozens of pianos and a gangplank-style staircase to the second floor, where many of the victims of Friday\u2019s fire were trapped.\n\nNikki Kelber, 44, a jewelry maker who lived in the Ghost Ship and narrowly escaped the fire with her cat, said Almena is being unfairly blamed for the fire.\n\n\u201cTheir sole purpose was to create a space where artists could survive and thrive,\u201d she said. \u201cTo point fingers at them is unfair. They are not bad people by any stretch of the imagination.\u201d\n\nWhile Almena\u2019s building was known as the Ghost Ship, he had named the arts collective Satya Yuga,", + " which in Hinduism refers to an initial golden age marked by knowledge, meditation, repentance and good deeds.\n\nOne poster on Facebook described how the \u201cinside of the warehouse looked like his mind \u2026 beautifully exotic and creative, but with sharp edges, dangerous corners, hazardous materials and twisting turning darkness.\u201d\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve had years of being in community and hearing people have dangerous encounters with him. \u2026 All the Balinese art that\u2019s inside is his. Same for the antiques. Same for the wooden boards and nails jutting out at all angles. Same for the mushroom infested furniture,\u201d the Facebook poster said. \u201cIt\u2019s his design. There wasn\u2019t any interest in making the space be safe for people.", + " And since so many people didn\u2019t want to deal with him due to the trauma they went through, they stayed away.\u201d\n\nAlexander Dore, another former resident, fondly described the warehouse on Facebook as \u201ca collective, a commune, a temple, a home, a place to run free stoned naked without fear, it was a sacred space that wasn\u2019t owned by the government.\u201d\n\nBut now, Dore wrote, it is a \u201cmausoleum for the dead.\u201d\n\nStaff writer Julia Prodis Sulek and Aaron R. Davis contributed to this report. ", + " Photo: NICK OTTO, AFP/Getty Images Image 1 of / 60 Caption Close\n\nImage 1 of 60 Alameda County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Ray Kelly addresses the media December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The death toll from a fire at a California warehouse where a rave party had been taking place rose to 30 on Sunday, authorities said. \"We have confirmed that the count of the deceased at 30. That is an astronomical number,\" Kelly of the Alameda County Sheriff's Department told reporters. / AFP PHOTO / Nick OttoNICK OTTO/AFP/Getty Images less Alameda County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt.", + " Ray Kelly addresses the media December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The death toll from a fire at a California warehouse where a rave party had been taking... more Photo: NICK OTTO, AFP/Getty Images\n\nImage 2 of 60 An Alameda County Sheriff, center, escorts a woman carrying flowers at the site of a warehouse fire Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) An Alameda County Sheriff, center, escorts a woman carrying flowers at the site of a warehouse fire Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016,", + " in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP\n\nImage 3 of 60 Buy photo A recovery crew takes down a parapet on the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music dance party Friday night. less A recovery crew takes down a parapet on the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an... more Photo:", + " Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 4 of 60 Buy photo Pairs of shoes dangle from overhead wires in front of the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music dance party Friday night. less Pairs of shoes dangle from overhead wires in front of the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building... more Photo: Paul Chinn,", + " The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 5 of 60 Buy photo Firefighters use heavy equipment to remove debris that was burned inside the Ghost Ship warehouse as recovery efforts came to a close following the fire that claimed 36 lives in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, December 6, 2016. less Firefighters use heavy equipment to remove debris that was burned inside the Ghost Ship warehouse as recovery efforts came to a close following the fire that claimed 36 lives in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday,... more Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 6 of 60 Buy photo Mourners bow their heads while watching the recovery operation at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland,", + " Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music dance party Friday night. less Mourners bow their heads while watching the recovery operation at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 7 of 60 Buy photo Recovery efforts continue at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6,", + " 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music dance party Friday night. less Recovery efforts continue at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 8 of 60 Buy photo The recovery operation continues at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic music dance party Friday night.", + " less The recovery operation continues at the Ghost Ship artist collective warehouse in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 where at least 36 people died after a fire engulfed the building during an electronic... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 9 of 60 Buy photo Participants hold their candles aloft during a vigil at Lake Merritt as recovery efforts continue following the Ghost Ship fire that has so far claimed 36 lives in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, December 5, 2016. Participants hold their candles aloft during a vigil at Lake Merritt as recovery efforts continue following the Ghost Ship fire that has so far claimed 36 lives in Oakland,", + " Calif., on Monday, December 5, 2016. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 10 of 60 Judy Hough, left, and her husband Brian, center, hold a picture of their son Travis, who died in a warehouse fire, during a vigil at Lake Merritt on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. Family members and friends are being notified as firefighters continue a painstaking search for victims of the Oakland warehouse fire. less Judy Hough, left, and her husband Brian, center, hold a picture of their son Travis, who died in a warehouse fire,", + " during a vigil at Lake Merritt on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. Family members and... more Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP\n\nImage 11 of 60 Two people embrace at a vigil for the victims of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a musical event late Friday night. less Two people embrace at a vigil for the victims of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland, California.", + " The fire took place during a musical event... more Photo: Elijah Nouvelage, Getty Images\n\nImage 12 of 60 Buy photo The Grand Lake Theater has updated its marquee with a message mourning the victims of the fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse, and especifically Nicole R. Siegrist, 29, who went by the name Denalda Nicole Renae, who is still considered missing, as recovery efforts continue in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, December 5, 2016. less The Grand Lake Theater has updated its marquee with a message mourning the victims of the fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse, and especifically Nicole R.", + " Siegrist, 29, who went by the name Denalda Nicole Renae,... more Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 13 of 60 This photo provided by the City of Oakland shows inside the burned warehouse after the deadly fire that broke out on Dec. 2, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The death toll in the fire climbed Monday, Dec. 5, with more bodies still feared buried in the blackened ruins, and families anxiously awaited word of their missing loved ones. less This photo provided by the City of Oakland shows inside the burned warehouse after the deadly fire that broke out on Dec.", + " 2, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The death toll in the fire climbed Monday, Dec. 5, with more... more Photo: City Of Oakland\n\nImage 14 of 60 Buy photo Oakland Fire Department inspection crews meet as the assess the structural integrity of the building as recovery efforts continue following the Ghost Ship fire that has so far claimed 36 lives in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, December 5, 2016. less Oakland Fire Department inspection crews meet as the assess the structural integrity of the building as recovery efforts continue following the Ghost Ship fire that has so far claimed 36 lives in Oakland,... more Photo:", + " Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 15 of 60 Firefighters sift through debris inside the warehouse that burned in Oakland, Calif., Dec. 5, 2016. The inferno killed at least 36 people and is regarded as one of the worst structure fires in the United States in over a decade. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times) less Firefighters sift through debris inside the warehouse that burned in Oakland, Calif., Dec. 5, 2016. The inferno killed at least 36 people and is regarded as one of the worst structure fires in the United States... more Photo:", + " JIM WILSON, NYT\n\nImage 16 of 60 Workers are seen cleaning debris from the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland. Workers are seen cleaning debris from the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 17 of 60 Buy photo Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley during an afternoon press conference at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland on Monday, December 5,", + " 2016. Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley during an afternoon press conference at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 18 of 60 Oakland fire captain Chris Foley wipes his brow at the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a musical event late Friday night. less Oakland fire captain Chris Foley wipes his brow at the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a... more Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 19 of 60 Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern discusses the search and recovery efforts for victims at a media event near the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5, 2016 in Oakland less Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern discusses the search and recovery efforts for victims at a media event near the site of a warehouse fire that has claimed the lives of at least thirty-six people on December 5,... more Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 20 of 60 \"Hot spot\"", + " photos released by the Alameda County Sheriff's office show the recovery effort with in the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. \"Hot spot\" photos released by the Alameda County Sheriff's office show the recovery effort with in the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Photo: Alameda County Sheriff's Office\n\nImage 21 of 60 Students greet each other before going to class at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, in San Francisco, California, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Students greet each other before going to class at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts,", + " in San Francisco, California, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle\n\nImage 22 of 60 Student Gabriel Bibliowicz,18, shows a photo of friend Draven McGill, 17, who was killed in the Ghostship fire in San Francisco, California, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Student Gabriel Bibliowicz,18, shows a photo of friend Draven McGill, 17, who was killed in the Ghostship fire in San Francisco, California, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2016. Photo:", + " Gabrielle Lurie, The Chronicle\n\nImage 23 of 60 Buy photo Flowers are stuck into a street sign at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Flowers are stuck into a street sign at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 24 of 60 Buy photo Onlookers are seen reflected in a picture of one of the victims of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire, in Oakland on Monday, December 5,", + " 2016. Onlookers are seen reflected in a picture of one of the victims of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire, in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 25 of 60 Buy photo Robert Lewis of Oakland pushes his daughter Sophie Lewis, 3, in a shopping cart past a memorial for victims of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire, in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Robert Lewis of Oakland pushes his daughter Sophie Lewis, 3, in a shopping cart past a memorial for victims of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire,", + " in Oakland on Monday, December 5, 2016. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 26 of 60 People gather near a warehouse after it was destroyed by a fire, December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. Up to 40 people were feared dead in a huge fire that tore through a rave party in a warehouse in Oakland, near San Francisco, as the authorities warned of a prolonged search and recovery effort. less People gather near a warehouse after it was destroyed by a fire, December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. Up to 40 people were feared dead in a huge fire that tore through a rave party in a warehouse in... more Photo:", + " AFP/AFP/Getty Images\n\nImage 27 of 60 Jenny Yang, right, kneels while she performs a recorded homage from her iphone at the scene of the Oakland warehouse fire on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. Though many of the victims' names have not been released, Yang believes she lost seven friends who were involved in the creation of the event where the fire broke out. The fire, at an artist's warehouse known as the \"Ghost Ship,\" began late on the evening of December 2nd, with 33 confirmed dead so far. less Jenny Yang, right, kneels while she performs a recorded homage from her iphone at the scene of the Oakland warehouse fire on December 4,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. Though many of the victims' names have not... more Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 28 of 60 Flowers, candles and notes left for victims of the Oakland warehouse fire are seen on the corner of 12th Street and 31st Avenue on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire, at an artist's warehouse known as the \"Ghost Ship,\" began late on the evening of December 2nd, with 33 confirmed dead so far. less Flowers, candles and notes left for victims of the Oakland warehouse fire are seen on the corner of 12th Street and 31st Avenue on December 4,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire, at an artist's warehouse... more Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 29 of 60 Emergency personnel stage in front of the site of a warehouse fire that started Friday night and killed dozens, Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The death toll was expected to rise, as crews using buckets and shovels slowly made their way through the building, finding victims where they least expected them, Alameda County Sheriff's Sgt. Ray Kelly said. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) less Emergency personnel stage in front of the site of a warehouse fire that started Friday night and killed dozens,", + " Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The death toll was expected to rise, as crews using... more Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez, Associated Press\n\nImage 30 of 60 Trevor Hardee,, 19, left, hug, Jesse James Alexander, 24, of San Francisco, right, near the site of the warehouse fire in Oakland, CA December 4, 2016. Jesse believes he lost three friends in the fire. A fire broke out during a party Friday night at a two-story warehouse and artists' studio in Oakland, killing at least nine people and leaving about two dozen missing.", + " less Trevor Hardee,, 19, left, hug, Jesse James Alexander, 24, of San Francisco, right, near the site of the warehouse fire in Oakland, CA December 4, 2016. Jesse believes he lost three friends in the fire. A fire... more Photo: Francine Orr/LA Times Via Getty Images\n\nImage 31 of 60 Nikki Kelber (far) and Carmen Brito (near), two residents of the warehouse that caught fire on December 2nd, look at the remnants of their former home on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The two artists lived in the building with 22-", + "24 other artists. \"I woke up to my room filled with smoke...I looked ut and there was a wall of fire...this happened so fast\" Brito said. The fire, at an artist's warehouse known as the \"Ghost Ship,\" has claimed 33 confirmed dead so far. less Nikki Kelber (far) and Carmen Brito (near), two residents of the warehouse that caught fire on December 2nd, look at the remnants of their former home on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The two artists... more Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 32 of 60 The Ghost Ship warehouse,", + " site of a fire that killed at least 30 people, is pictured on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The Ghost Ship warehouse, site of a fire that killed at least 30 people, is pictured on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 33 of 60 The Ghost Ship warehouse, site of a fire that killed at least 30 people, is pictured on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. The Ghost Ship warehouse, site of a fire that killed at least 30 people,", + " is pictured on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 34 of 60 Alameda County Sherrif's Sgt. Ray Kelly gives a press conference at the scene of the Oakland warehouse fire on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire, at an artist's warehouse known as the \"Ghost Ship,\" began late on the evening of December 2nd, with 33 confirmed dead so far. less Alameda County Sherrif's Sgt. Ray Kelly gives a press conference at the scene of the Oakland warehouse fire on December 4,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire, at an artist's warehouse known as the \"Ghost... more Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 35 of 60 An onlooker holds flowers at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California An onlooker holds flowers at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 36 of 60 A firefighter wipes his brow on the scene of a warehouse fire that has claimed dozens of lives on December 4,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a musical event late Friday night. A firefighter wipes his brow on the scene of a warehouse fire that has claimed dozens of lives on December 4, 2016 in Oakland, California. The fire took place during a musical event late Friday night. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 37 of 60 Elijah Hope kneels at the scene of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire at sunrise on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland. Hope, who lives nearby, said he was \"saying goodbye to the souls.\" Elijah Hope kneels at the scene of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire at sunrise on Sunday,", + " Dec. 4, 2016, in Oakland. Hope, who lives nearby, said he was \"saying goodbye to the souls.\" Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 38 of 60 Buy photo People look on at the media and police presence from behind a barricade at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland, CA, on Sunday, December 4, 2016. People look on at the media and police presence from behind a barricade at the scene of the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland, CA, on Sunday, December 4, 2016. Photo:", + " Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 39 of 60 A man walks into the Sheriff's office in Oakland, Calif. on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016. The office is providing information to those who may have lost a loved one in the Ghost Ship fire. A man walks into the Sheriff's office in Oakland, Calif. on Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016. The office is providing information to those who may have lost a loved one in the Ghost Ship fire. Photo: James Tensuan, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 40 of 60 Friends of a person who died in the fire place flowers near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3,", + " 2016 in Oakland. Friends of a person who died in the fire place flowers near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland. Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 41 of 60 Mourners attend a vigil at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on Saturday night following the deadly warehouse fire in the city on Saturday morning, December 3, 2016 in Oakland, Calif. Mourners attend a vigil at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on Saturday night following the deadly warehouse fire in the city on Saturday morning, December 3,", + " 2016 in Oakland, Calif. Photo: Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 42 of 60 Genevieve Griesau, who has loved ones still unaccounted for, can't hold back her emotions at the vigil at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on Saturday night following the deadly warehouse fire in the city on Dec. 3, 2016 in Oakland. less Genevieve Griesau, who has loved ones still unaccounted for, can't hold back her emotions at the vigil at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on Saturday night following the deadly warehouse fire in the city on... more Photo:", + " Amy Osborne, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 43 of 60 Jenny Yang (center) and others at Eli's Mile High Club bar try to find more information about their friends, on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016, who attended a warehouse party in Oakland, Calif., that caught on fire. Jenny Yang (center) and others at Eli's Mile High Club bar try to find more information about their friends, on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016, who attended a warehouse party in Oakland, Calif., that caught on fire. Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle\n\nImage 44 of 60 A man collapses on the ground while speaking with emergency personnel at the scene of a fire that killed at least nine people in Oakland on Saturday,", + " Dec. 3, 2016. A man collapses on the ground while speaking with emergency personnel at the scene of a fire that killed at least nine people in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 45 of 60 Firefighters work at the scene following an overnight fire that claimed the lives of at least 30 people at a warehouse in the Fruitvale neighborhood on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. The warehouse was hosting an electronic music party. less Firefighters work at the scene following an overnight fire that claimed the lives of at least 30 people at a warehouse in the Fruitvale neighborhood on December 3,", + " 2016 in Oakland, California. The warehouse was... more Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 46 of 60 Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Photo: Max Bouvatte, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 47 of 60 Fire crews battle a blaze in a warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship on Friday,", + " Dec. 2 at 1305 31st Ave. near International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Fire crews battle a blaze in a warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship on Friday, Dec. 2 at 1305 31st Ave. near International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Photo: Darin Marshall\n\nImage 48 of 60 Fire crews battle a blaze in a warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship on Friday, Dec. 2 at 1305 31st Ave. near International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Fire crews battle a blaze in a warehouse known as the Oakland Ghost Ship on Friday,", + " Dec. 2 at 1305 31st Ave. near International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Photo: Darin Marshall\n\nImage 49 of 60 Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. less Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3,", + " 2016. Firefighters work at the scene of a fatal fire on 31st Ave. in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3,... more Photo: Max Bouvatte, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 50 of 60 A firefighter picks up debris at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland. A firefighter picks up debris at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland. Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 51 of 60 Firefighters close a door leading into a building that was the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3,", + " 2016 in Oakland. Firefighters close a door leading into a building that was the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland. Photo: Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 52 of 60 A man is overcome with emotion while speaking with emergency personnel at the scene of a fire that killed at least nine people in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. A man is overcome with emotion while speaking with emergency personnel at the scene of a fire that killed at least nine people in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3,", + " 2016. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 53 of 60 Firefighters work on the scene following an overnight fire that claimed the lives of at least 30 people at a warehouse in the Fruitvale neighborhood on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. The warehouse was hosting an electronic music party. less Firefighters work on the scene following an overnight fire that claimed the lives of at least 30 people at a warehouse in the Fruitvale neighborhood on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. The warehouse was... more Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images\n\nImage 54 of 60 Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf speaks during a press conference at the scene of a fatal fire in Oakland,", + " Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf speaks during a press conference at the scene of a fatal fire in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 55 of 60 Oakland Fire Chief Fire Teresa Deloach Reed covers her face during a press conference at the scene of a fatal fire in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Oakland Fire Chief Fire Teresa Deloach Reed covers her face during a press conference at the scene of a fatal fire in Oakland,", + " Calif., on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 56 of 60 A law enforcement officer removes police line tape from a post near some flowers at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. \"You are my family, love you!\" is written on the bouquet. less A law enforcement officer removes police line tape from a post near some flowers at the scene of a fire near 31st Avenue and International Boulevard on December 3, 2016 in Oakland, California. \"You are my... more Photo:", + " Pete Kiehart, Special To The Chronicle\n\nImage 57 of 60 Buy photo Kim Gregory and her husband David Gregory, Sr. (left) wait for updates at an Alameda County Sheriff's office on the fate of their daughter Michela Gregory in Oakland, Calif. on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. Michela was later identified as one of the dead. less Kim Gregory and her husband David Gregory, Sr. (left) wait for updates at an Alameda County Sheriff's office on the fate of their daughter Michela Gregory in Oakland, Calif. on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016.", + " Michela... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 58 of 60 Buy photo Daniel Vega (back to camera) gathers with friends and family to wait for any word about his younger brother and his girlfriend at an Alameda County Sheriff's office, who are still missing after at least 30 people died and several others still unaccounted for in an overnight in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016. less Daniel Vega (back to camera) gathers with friends and family to wait for any word about his younger brother and his girlfriend at an Alameda County Sheriff's office, who are still missing after at least 30... more Photo:", + " Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo\n\nImage 59 of 60 Buy photo Two women walk down East 12th Street outside of an Alameda County Sheriff's office while they await word on missing friends or family members in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016 after at least 30 people died in an overnight fire. less Two women walk down East 12th Street outside of an Alameda County Sheriff's office while they await word on missing friends or family members in Oakland on Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016 after at least 30 people died... more Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy this photo ", + " Oakland, California (CNN) The search for answers continued Tuesday in Oakland as city, state and federal agencies sifted through wreckage in one of the city's deadliest building fires on record.\n\nBucket by bucket, investigators painstakingly removed debris from inside the warehouse-turned-art-space, narrowing the fire's origin to the rear of the building, Oakland Fire Deputy Director Darin White said. By Monday afternoon, about 70% of the building had been cleared.\n\nIn another area of the property, the sheriff''s coroner began autopsies on the 36 bodies so far discovered, Alameda County Sheriff Gregory J. Ahern said.\n\nA criminal investigation team from the Alameda County District Attorney's Office is on site,", + " working alongside law enforcement, the Oakland Fire Department and federal investigators to ascertain criminal liability, and, if so, who could be responsible, District Attorney Nancy O'Malley said.\n\n\"It is not clear right now and is too early to speculate,\" she said of the circumstances of the fire that broke out late Friday. \"We will leave no stone unturned.\"\n\nMeanwhile, questions remain about leaseholder Derick Ion Almena, the man behind the arts collective known as the Ghost Ship, and what, if anything, could have been done to prevent the tragedy. Almena, who is believed to have been away from the site when the fire broke out,", + " has not responded to CNN's requests for comment, but spoke to CNN affiliate KGO\n\n\"They're my children. They're my friends, they're my family, they're my loves, they're my future,\" Almena told the station, referring to the Ghost Ship residents. \"What else do I have to say?\"\n\nDeath toll keeps climbing\n\nIn the wake of the tragedy, a fence and sidewalk near the site became a memorial, with loved ones and others leaving flowers, candles, photographs and messages.\n\nAt least 36 people are confirmed dead, including teenagers, a deputy's son, and three people from outside the US, in the blaze,", + " which gutted the converted warehouse during an electronic dance party Friday night. Twenty-two victims have been positively identified and their families have been notified. An additional 10 victims have been tentatively identified and three victims need scientific identification, the city said in a statement.\n\nMost of the bodies were found in the center of the building, Oakland Fire Battalion Chief Melinda Drayton said.\n\nThe fire spread so quickly that resident Jose Avalos had no time to help, he told CNN. He was in his loft when he heard someone call for an extinguisher. Before he could get down to offer support, he heard someone say, \"Fire! Everyone get out!\"\n\nHe grabbed his dogs and rushed to the front door where he fell into others trying to escape,", + " he said.\n\n\"By the time I was through the front doors, I could just see the flames coming and then they just engulfed the front archway of my studio,\" he said. \"I looked back and I just saw smoke everywhere. I couldn't really see anything. Got out of the building and I just saw smoke and then flames coming out the doors and the windows.\"\n\nOne of deadliest fires ever in Oakland\n\nIt could take weeks to identify victims through DNA and dental records, Alameda County Sheriff's Office Sgt. Ray Kelly said. Officials have asked victims' families to preserve their loved ones' personal belongings, including hairbrushes and toothbrushes,", + " that could contain DNA samples. Kelly added that officials were also working with the transgender community to identify some of the victims.\n\nDrayton, a 19-year veteran, called it one of the deadliest fires in the city's history, including a 1991 fire in Oakland Hills that killed 25 people.\n\nSouthern California artist Anneke Hiatt, who has been monitoring the situation because she had friends there, said she is starting to lose hope.\n\n\"It just doesn't seem that that's a fire that's survivable, so the reality, I think for a lot of us, is beginning to set in,\" she said.\n\n'I had to let him go'\n\nPhotos:", + " Oakland warehouse party fire A fire breaks out Friday night, December 2, during a party at a two-story warehouse and artists' studio in Oakland, California. Initial reports indicate dozens of people were in the building when the deadly blaze started, the Oakland fire chief says. Hide Caption 1 of 7 Photos: Oakland warehouse party fire The scene as firefighters battle the blaze from video footage by @Oaklandfirelive early Saturday, December 3. Hide Caption 2 of 7 Photos: Oakland warehouse party fire Firefighters begin to assess the scene of the warehouse fire on December 3. Hide Caption 3 of 7 Photos: Oakland warehouse party fire Firefighters have not been able to search the entire building,", + " the fire chief says. Hide Caption 4 of 7 Photos: Oakland warehouse party fire Crew will remove debris and make sure the warehouse is safe for searching. Hide Caption 5 of 7 Photos: Oakland warehouse party fire Firefighters clear an entry to the smoldering warehouse. Hide Caption 6 of 7 Photos: Oakland warehouse party fire Officials will begin investigating to determine the cause of the fire. The Alameda County Sheriff's Coroner's Bureau and the Arson Task Force were called to the scene. Hide Caption 7 of 7\n\nFor filmmaker and photographer Bob Mul\u00e9, the warehouse was both his home and his community.", + " The 27-year-old stopped to listen to some music Friday night before heading downstairs to work on a painting. He smelled smoke from his studio.\n\nAs Mul\u00e9 rushed to save his camera and laptop, he spotted a heavy-set artist who called out for help.\n\n\"I broke my ankle. I need you to pull me out,\" a distraught Mul\u00e9 recalled the artist saying. \"The fire was just getting too hot and the smoke was just getting too bad and I had to leave him there.\"\n\nA haven for artists\n\nThe interior of The Ghost Ship, the warehouse that caught fire on Friday, December 2.\n\nTo the artists who lived and worked there,", + " the Ghost Ship was a coveted haven in the Bay Area's gentrifying landscape of skyrocketing rents and disappearing artist spaces. Residents estimate 20 to 25 artists lived there.\n\nPhotos posted online show an interior containing drums, keyboards, guitars, clocks, ornate beds, plush sofas, mirrored dressers, tables, benches and artifacts. Exotic lamps hung from the ceiling, and paintings adorned the walls.\n\n\"It was not a bunch of irresponsible people looking for a drug thrill,\" Swan Vega, a 33-year-old resident, told CNN. \"It was a known community house, a place for the creative class to support each other, gain momentum,", + " hash out projects, and just be joyous. And this is the most tragic outcome.\n\nDarin Ranelletti, Oakland's interim director of planning and building, said the city approved permits for the building to be used only as a warehouse, not for residences. City officials also had not signed off on a special permit for the event, Ranelletti said.\n\nIn addition, firefighters found no evidence of sprinklers in the warehouse.\n\nVega, who said \"nobody should've been living there,\" called for more affording housing for artists in the Bay Area.\n\n\"We need housing,\" she said. \"We need help.\"\n\nPast concerns\n\nLast month,", + " the warehouse's owners had received notification of city code violations for hazardous trash and debris, property records show.\n\nFormer California State Chief Fire Marshal James McMullen said it was his understanding that the owner of the space had been approached about illegal occupancy and trash and debris strewn \"around in the way of forming a fire hazard.\"\n\nJUST WATCHED Before and after the fatal Ghost Ship fire Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Before and after the fatal Ghost Ship fire 00:49\n\nShelley Mack, a jewelry maker who lived at the Ghost Ship until February 2015, said she paid $700 to move in and another $700 for improvements that never came.", + " The sole bathroom for residents was in bad repair, a transformer blew a couple of weeks after she moved in and fires were sparked by faulty electrical cords, she said. The space had intermittent power and heat when she lived there, she said.\n\n\"Not long after I moved in, I found out we had to hide our things when the owner came by because it's not slated as a live/work place and we all lived there,\" she said. \"I expected it to be shut down a long time ago.\"\n\nMack claimed police were well aware people were living in the warehouse because they were called there weekly. She called police herself three times in one week,", + " and other government agencies, including Child Protective Services, paid visits to the warehouse, she said.\n\nCity Councilman Noel Gallo lives a block from the Ghost Ship and told CNN he was aware people were living there. After hearing Mack's allegations, he said, \"It's really inexcusable in terms of our response.\"\n\nGallo knew the owner and the manager of the space and said \"we've had a good number of conversations regarding the upkeep of the property on the street level/sidewalk level, as well as on the inside.\"\n\nDrayton, the fire battalion chief, told reporters Monday that if Oakland police had been called to the warehouse,", + " they might have captured footage that could be useful to the investigation.\n\n\"We're looking at everything from our body-worn camera footage, how many calls we at the Oakland Police Department have gone to, what types of calls, documentation when working with our planning and building department,\" she said. \"We have a lot of moving parts.\"\n\nCNN has reached out to the property owners for comment. ", + " OAKLAND \u2014 Chris Dunn stood on International Boulevard on Sunday, across from the charred artist warehouse where dozens of people perished in a deadly fire Friday night, and shared a fear that is on the minds of many in this city\u2019s celebrated arts community.\n\nAs they grieved for friends killed in the inferno at the Ghost Ship warehouse on 31st Avenue, artists, musicians and partygoers from east to west Oakland couldn\u2019t help but worry about a backlash of building inspections at other warehouse collectives.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s going to be a draconian overreaction to shut everything down,\u201d said Dunn, 42, who has attended events at the collective in the Fruitvale neighborhood.", + " \u201cThat would only add to the tragedy.\u201d\n\n\u201cPeople are getting worried (the fire) is gonna be used against us,\u201d said Katelyn Charvoz, of West Oakland. The 25-year-old said she\u2019s been involved in the music/party scene since she was about 15. \u201cThe city\u2019s gonna paint us as some ugly, crusty, punk kids that are up to no good. If they buy up all the warehouses on every street and kick everyone out, it will just hurt the arts community here.\u201d\n\nThe tragic warehouse fire is roiling an already simmering tension between official Oakland and a vibrant, free-wheeling arts community that has given life to many of its former industrial neighborhoods in recent years.", + " Already, rising rents were threatening to dislodge some of these artistic centers; now concerns about lack of proper permitting and unsafe conditions, like what existed at the Ghost Ship, could add to the pressure.\n\nAs far back as the 1980s, artists\u2019 live and work spaces have been hives of creativity inside converted industrial buildings left empty after many of Oakland\u2019s blue-collar manufacturing companies closed. Large, open and dirt-cheap, the vacant buildings of West Oakland and East Oakland were attractive to artists and developers desperate for tenants.\n\nRelated Articles State supreme court allows Ghost Ship lawsuit against Oakland to proceed\n\nGhost Ship fire attorney says \u2018mob hysteria\u2019 swayed judge to toss plea deal They became homes to punks,", + " sculptors, musicians, Burning Man artists, people in construction \u2014 makers of things responsible for creating the First Friday festival and putting Oakland on the international art scene map. Parties are a constant theme, and some raise money to pay rent like the Ghost Ship event Friday night.\n\nA lot has changed since the first and second wave of artists came to Oakland. A round of development ushered in during the Mayor Jerry Brown era converted some of those former manufacturing sites into gleaming new condos. This time around, rents are skyrocketing, and landlords are finding ways to evict or push out artists for a new wave of tech and wealthier residents willing to pay more.\n\nMayors from Brown to Libby Schaaf have embraced Oakland\u2019s thriving underground art scene and its more recent transformation to a global happening place that has garnered the East Bay city international attention and helped make it a tourist destination.\n\nSchaaf often arrives at parades and other events in a fire-breathing art car in the shape of a large snail,", + " fabricated by Burning Man artist Jon Sarriugarte, and has attended events in converted arts spaces around town. She has pledged to do all she can to preserve and promote the arts and spaces for artists in Oakland.\n\nSo Friday\u2019s tragedy has put city officials in a bind: Red-tagging unsafe or unpermitted buildings used by artists will likely reduce an already scarce supply of affordable space. But ignoring code violations puts residents at risk.\n\nIn January, Oakland city building inspectors deemed 1919 Market St., a large, two-story warehouse hub in West Oakland unsafe because of illegal construction and ordered the metal and wood workers to leave. In May,", + " residents at Ghost Town Gallery on San Pablo Avenue, a 12-year-old warehouse shared mostly by musicians, were evicted. The landlord claimed the construction done inside by tenants was unsafe, but after doing some minor renovations, the place is advertising for new tenants \u2014 at a much loftier price.\n\nAn ad on Craigslist last month listed the rent as three times what the Ghost Town Gallery residents paid and boasted of having space for a yoga studio.\n\n\u201cThey don\u2019t want you to have affordable rent,\u201d said Damon Gallagher, who was the master tenant at Ghost Town and has since left Oakland. \u201cThere was blood dripping out of their mouths, dollar signs in their eyes.\u201d\n\nThe 1919 Market evictions had artists who live in warehouses around the city worried that their buildings were next.", + " Now they wonder if that was one reason why no one at Ghost Ship answered the door when city inspectors showed up Nov. 17.\n\n\u201cWho is going to want to call inspectors and risk losing their space?\u201d Dunn wondered.\n\nOn Sunday Schaaf was asked how the city will balance the need for artists\u2019 safety with making sure they aren\u2019t forced out. She pledged her support for the artists, and said, ironically, that on Tuesday the city will announce a significant philanthropic grant to address recent displacement of Oakland artists, an event scheduled before Friday\u2019s horrific fire.\n\n\u201cThe issue of creating safe, vibrant spaces for Oakland\u2019s artist community is a priority not just of me as mayor but of this community,\u201d Schaaf said.", + " \u201cThis is work that\u2019s been going on for a long time and we\u2019re going to stay focused on accomplishing that in a way that makes sense both for Oakland and also for all the different stakeholders involved.\u201d\n\nSarriugarte, 53, an artist, blacksmith and longtime part of Oakland\u2019s vibrant arts community as well as the Burning Man crowd, wants to make sure artists using warehouses are not painted with a broad brush.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a new generation of warehouse dwelling that\u2019s different than what we did when we were younger,\u201d Sarriugarte said. \u201cWe were a more independent group and we used very large spaces with very few people.", + " Now you see more communal living, not a very big space with a lot of people in it.\n\n\u201cBut if we start sending in all the city agencies going after each space, it will be the demise of underground spaces, which have been a very important incubator for all the beautiful stuff that happens here,\u201d he said.\n\nIn Oakland, there\u2019s a range of communities using converted warehouses, groups that often overlap. Some are organized, permitted artist collectives engaging in legal warehouse use for work spaces, gallery shows and events. At Vulcan, an East Oakland warehouse with just under 60 units, fire sprinklers were installed earlier this year and fire paths are clearly marked,", + " said resident Darin Marshall, 47.\n\nThen there are the so-called DIY collectives \u2013 the underground arts scene, often operating in illegal live/work situations like Ghost Ship. And there\u2019s also the underground music scene, holding parties and electronic music shows in some of these spaces that are not permitted or up to code.\n\n\u201cIn 2010, 2012, there were a lot more underground performance spaces and venues,\u201d said Marshall Brooks, 31, a West Oakland resident and party thrower. \u201cIt used to be we could do it in places where it\u2019s not so dangerous. We didn\u2019t have to use places where red flags abound.", + " But now everybody gets kicked out of warehouses and they turn them into condos.\u201d\n\nAlready, some in the \u201cBurning Man hierarchy\u201d are talking about how to facilitate improvements to some of the illegal warehouse set-ups without getting the city involved, Sarriugarte said.\n\nTo this end, Michael Snook, founder of the NIMBY collective in East Oakland, reached out to artists on Facebook Sunday. NIMBY started in a West Oakland warehouse in 2004 and was forced to move after an untended candle sparked a smoky fire in 2008 and inspectors shut it down for lack of permits and sprinklers. The city helped the group relocate to a new space in East Oakland,", + " but it took months and a $30,000 permitting nightmare before they could rest easy.\n\n\u201cIf anyone lives in a live work space and would like it inspected without worry of all hell breaking loose, contact me,\u201d Snook wrote on Facebook. \u201cI can hook you up with a private professional that knows all the rules but doesn\u2019t work for the city of Oakland. There is a fee and all I ask is you do what he says. Please.\u201d\n" + ], + "length": 24317, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 72, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Doug Bock Clark begins a lengthy piece for GQ on the fate of Otto Warmbier with a bold assertion: That what happened to the 21-year-old American college student \"is even more shocking than anyone knew\" and that he had the \"untold story.\" So does he? The piece, the result of six months of reporting, is indeed incredibly detailed and filled with one major previously unreported nugget. He gives a timeline of the intense efforts made to free Warmbier, from meetings with the \"New York Channel\" (North Korea's reps at United Nations headquarters) to a proposal to have then-president-elect Trump pick Warmbier up in his plane. After learning in June 2017 Warmbier was unconscious, North Korea was \"unilaterally informed\" that a US plane would arrive to collect him. \"Intense negotiations\" followed on the ground, and Michael Flueckiger, the medical director for Phoenix Air, whose Gulfstream G-III jet was being used in the mission, was finally allowed to see Warmbier. He knew immediately that \"the Otto of old was already gone,\" though he noted the hospital care had been of quality (Warmbier had no bedsores, for instance, which is difficult in the case of a comatose patient). Flueckiger tells Clark that the hospital staff told him Warmbier had been admitted unresponsive the morning after he was sentenced to 15 years, a timeline detail that hadn't been made public. But only two weeks prior, Warmbier appeared on TV and seemed healthy. The narrow window between the two suggests to Clark that the theory that Warmbier was continually beaten doesn't hold up, and he provides other evidence in support of that. So what happened? Clark presents one theory: that it was a suicide attempt gone wrong. Read his full piece here.\n", + "docs": [ + "ITAR-TASS News Agency / Alamy Stock Photo Best of GQ The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage President Trump hailed him as a catalyst of the summit with Kim Jong-Un. But what happened to Warmbier\u2014the American college student who was sent home brain-damaged from North Korea\u2014is even more shocking than anyone knew.\n\n1. Homecoming\n\nOn a humid morning in June 2017, in a suburb outside Cincinnati, Fred and Cindy Warmbier waited in agony. They had not spoken to their son Otto for a year and a half, since he had been arrested during a budget tour of North Korea.", + " One of their last glimpses of him had been from a televised news conference in Pyongyang, during which their boy\u2014a sweet, brainy 21-year-old scholarship student at the University of Virginia\u2014confessed to undermining the regime at the behest of the unlikely triumvirate of an Ohio church, a university secret society, and the American government by stealing a propaganda poster. He sobbed to his captors, \u201cI have made the single worst decision of my life. But I am only human.\u2026 I beg that you find it in your hearts to give me forgiveness and allow me to return home to my family.\u201d Despite his pleas, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor and vanished into the dictatorship's prison system.\n\nFred and Cindy had so despaired during their long vigil that at one point they allegedly told friends that Otto had probably been killed.", + " On her son's 22nd birthday, Cindy lit Chinese-style lanterns and let the winter winds loft the flame-buoyed balloons toward North Korea, dreaming they might bear her message to her son. \u201cI love you, Otto,\u201d she said, then sang \u201cHappy Birthday.\u201d\n\nBut on that June morning, the Warmbiers were anticipating news of a secret State Department mission to free Otto. Upon learning that Otto was apparently unconscious, President Trump had directed an American team to fly into North Korea, and now progress of the mission was being monitored at the highest level of the government. No assurances had been made that the young man would actually be released,", + " and so the officials were on tenterhooks as well. According to an official, at 8:35 A.M., Secretary of State Rex Tillerson telephoned the president to announce that Otto was airborne. The president reportedly signed off by saying, \u201cTake care of Otto.\u201d Then Rob Portman, the Ohio senator who helped oversee efforts to repatriate Otto, called to inform the Warmbiers that the air ambulance had just entered Japanese airspace: Otto would be home that night.\n\nStill, Cindy knew her son was not through danger yet. In advance of the rescue, Portman had informed her that Otto had been unconscious for months,", + " according to the North Koreans, though no one knew the exact extent of the injury. \u201cCan you tell me how Otto's brain is functioning?\u201d she asked.\n\nPortman answered that Otto appeared to have severe brain damage.\n\nCindy told news outlets that she imagined that might mean Otto was asleep or in a medically induced coma. The Warmbiers were optimistic, up-by-their-bootstraps patriots, and they hoped that with American health care and their love, their son might again become the vivacious person he'd been when he left.\n\nNow Portman and his staff scrambled to prepare the homecoming, rerouting the plane from Cincinnati's international airport to a smaller municipal one,", + " which would be more private. As the sun went down, a crowd waved handmade signs welcoming Otto home, and TV crews pushed their cameras against the bars of the perimeter fence. The sleek luxury plane taxied to some hangars, where the Warmbiers waited nearby.\n\nHalfway up the airplane's stairs, over the whine of the still-cycling engines, Fred later said, he heard a guttural \u201cinhuman\u201d howling and wondered what it was. But when he stepped into the cabin cluttered with medical equipment, he found its source: Otto, strapped to a stretcher, jerking violently against his restraints and wailing.\n\nCindy was prepared for her son to be changed,", + " but she had not expected this. Otto's arms and legs were \u201ctotally deformed,\u201d according to his parents. His wavy brown locks had been buzzed off. A feeding tube infiltrated his nostrils. \u201cIt looked like someone had taken a pair of pliers and re-arranged his bottom teeth,\u201d as Fred would say. According to Cindy, Otto's sister fled the plane, screaming, and Cindy ran after her.\n\nFred approached his son and hugged him. Otto's eyes remained wide open and blank. Fred told Otto that he had missed him and was overjoyed to have him home. But Otto's alien keening only continued,", + " impossible to comfort.\n\nIt was only later that a member of Otto\u2019s tour group would wonder about \u201cthe two-hour window that none of us can account for [Otto].\u201d\n\nBy the time paramedics carried Otto out of the plane by his legs and armpits and loaded him into an ambulance, Cindy had recovered somewhat. She forced herself to join him in the emergency vehicle, though seeing him in such torment had almost made her pass out.\n\nAt the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, the family camped at Otto's bedside while speculation blazed around the world about what had rendered him vegetative. But Otto would never recover to tell his side of the story.", + " And despite exhaustive examinations by doctors, no definitive medical evidence explaining how his injury came to be would ever emerge.\n\nInstead, in the vacuum of fact, North Korea and the U.S. competed to provide a story. North Korea blamed Otto's condition on a combination of botulism and an unexpected reaction to a sleeping pill, an explanation that many American doctors said was unlikely. A senior American official asserted that, according to intelligence reports, Otto had been repeatedly beaten. Fred and Cindy declared on TV that their son had been physically tortured, in order to spotlight the dictatorship's evil. The president pushed this narrative. Meanwhile, the American military made preparations for a possible conflict.", + " Otto became a symbol used to build \u201ca case for war on emotional grounds,\u201d the New York Times editorial board wrote.\n\nAs the Trump administration and North Korea spun Otto's story for their own ends, I spent six months reporting\u2014from Washington, D.C., to Seoul\u2014trying to figure out what had actually happened to him. What made an American college student go to Pyongyang? What kind of nightmare did he endure while in captivity? How did his brain damage occur? And how did his eventual death help push America closer toward war with North Korea and then, in a surprising reversal, help lead to Trump's peace summit with Kim Jong-un? The story I uncovered was stranger and sadder than anyone had known.", + " In fact, I discovered that the manner of Otto's injury was not as black-and-white as people were encouraged to believe. But before he became a rallying cry in the administration's campaign against North Korea, he was just a kid. His name was Otto Warmbier.\n\n2. All-American\n\nIn a white two-story home flying the Stars and Stripes, Otto grew up the eldest child of a Republican family. He was one of those special young people we praise as all-American. At a top-ranked Ohio high school, he boasted the second-best grades. He was also a math whiz and a gifted soccer player and swimmer.", + " And as if it weren't enough that he was prom king, his peers also anointed him with the plastic crown at homecoming.\n\nBut despite running in the \u201cpopular circle given his athletic prowess, classic good looks and unending charisma,\u201d a classmate later wrote in a local newspaper, he \u201cstill felt like everyone's friend.\u201d Though his family was well-off, he had a passion for \u201cmemorabilia investing,\u201d as he called thrift-store shopping, and sometimes dressed in secondhand Hawaiian shirts. When the time came for him to give a speech at his high school graduation, instead of orating grandiosely, he admitted to struggling to find words.", + " He took as his theme a quote from The Office: \u201cI wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days,\u201d he told his peers, \u201cbefore you've actually left them.\u201d\n\nOf course, Otto's best days seemed ahead: He attended the University of Virginia with a scholarship, intent on becoming a banker. A meticulous planner, he filled a calendar hung on his dorm wall with handwritten commitments: from assignments to dates to bringing differently abled friends to basketball games. He joined a fraternity known for its \u201ckind of nerdy dudes,\u201d and one of his college friends said that academics and family always took precedence over everything else,", + " from partying to tailgating at football games. When he won a finance internship the fall of his junior year, there was no disputing that he was a man fully in charge of his destiny.\n\nKnowing that he would soon be laboring over spreadsheets, he decided he wanted an adventure over his winter break. He had long been curious about other cultures and had previously visited intrepid destinations like Cuba. And since he would already be traveling to Hong Kong to study abroad, he decided he wanted to witness the world's most repressive nation: North Korea. Even though the state imprisons and sometimes executes citizens trying to flee it, it permits thousands of foreigners to visit every year on tightly controlled tours\u2014one of the few ways its sanction-", + "crippled economy makes cash. If Otto had Googled \u201ctour North Korea,\u201d the top link would have been for the company he chose, Young Pioneer Tours, an operator specializing in budget excursions to \u201cdestinations your mother would rather you stay away from.\u201d The trips have a reputation of being like spring break in a geopolitical hot spot. After putting down a deposit for a $1,200 five-day, four-night \u201cNew Year's Party Tour,\u201d Otto learned from the confirmation e-mail that his visa would be arranged by the company and presented to him when he met the tour group at the Beijing airport. The State Department had an advisory in place against traveling to North Korea,", + " where he'd be beyond the American government's power to directly help him. Otto's parents weren't thrilled by the trip, but as his mother later explained, \u201cWhy would you say no to a kid like this?\u201d\n\nSo, shortly after Christmas 2015, Otto met the other Young Pioneers in China and boarded an old Soviet jet to Pyongyang. In North Korea's capital, border police confiscated cameras and flicked through each file on smartphones to make sure no outsider was smuggling in subversive materials. Then Otto stepped through passport control\u2014and just like that, left the free world.\n\n3. The Happiest Nation\n\nEarly on in Pyongyang,", + " Otto and the other Young Pioneers were led aboard the U.S.S. Pueblo, an American Navy spy ship that had been seized by the North Koreans in 1968 and today serves as an odd tourist attraction. While they toured the ship, the Young Pioneers were regaled by a North Korean who told the foreign visitors about capturing the ship from the \u201cimperial enemy.\u201d The 82 American sailors captured on the Pueblo were beaten and starved for 11 months before finally being released. For Otto, the story made clear what he had perhaps overlooked before: that he was in enemy territory. Even though the Korean War had stalemated in 1953,", + " the lack of a peace agreement meant that the North was technically still at war with the South and its ally, the U.S. Stepping from the boat, Otto \u201cwas a little bit shocked,\u201d said Danny Gratton, an impish British 40-something greeting-card salesman who was his roommate for the tour.\n\nBut Gratton and the other tourists, a mix of Canadians, Australians, Europeans, and at least one other American, helped Otto laugh off that dark knowledge, nicknaming him \u201cImperial Enemy\u201d\u2014as in, \u201cHey, Imperial Enemy, want another beer?\u201d Soon enough Otto was having fun again, for even though propaganda billboards showed North Korean missiles blasting the White House,", + " the tour felt more like a bizarre charade than a visit to a hostile nation. The Young Pioneers visited the 70-foot bronze statues of the first two generations of the country's dictators, and they could never be sure if the citizens they saw spontaneously hailing the Great Leader were sincere or put up to it. Of course, everyone knew that outside the stage-managed capital lay starving villages and concentration camps. But Otto succeeded in bridging the cultural divide, laughing and throwing snowballs with North Korean children.\n\nOn New Year's Eve, the Young Pioneers went drinking at a fancy bar, though according to Gratton,", + " no one got belligerently drunk, as some reports would later suggest. After the bar, Gratton says, they celebrated the final hours of New Year's Eve with thousands of North Koreans in Pyongyang's main square. The group then returned to their hotel, known as the \u201cAlcatraz of Fun\u201d because of its island location. To keep foreigners entertained, the 47-story tower is furnished with five restaurants (one of which revolves), a bar, a sauna, a massage parlor, and its own bowling alley. Some Young Pioneers headed to the bar. Gratton went bowling, and lost track of Otto. It was only later that he would wonder about \u201cthe two-hour window that none of us can account for [Otto].\u201d\n\nNorth Korea would later release grainy CCTV camera footage of an unidentifiable figure removing a framed propaganda poster from a wall in a restricted area of the hotel,", + " claiming it was Otto. During the televised confession, Otto would read from a handwritten script that he had put on his \u201cquietest boots, the best for sneaking\u201d and attempted the theft at the prompting of a local Methodist church, a university secret society, and the American administration, \u201cto harm the work ethic and motivation of the Korean people\u201d and bring home a \u201ctrophy.\u201d Many of the confession's details didn't square\u2014for one, Otto was Jewish, not affiliated with a Methodist church\u2014making experts suspect the words weren't originally Otto's. Whatever happened during those lost hours, when Gratton returned to his and Otto's room,", + " around 4:30 A.M. on January 1, Otto was already snoozing.\n\nThe following morning at the airport, the two tired friends were the last Young Pioneers to present their passports, side by side at a single desk. After an uncomfortably long time, Gratton noticed that the officers were intently scrutinizing the documents. Then two soldiers marched up, and one tapped Otto on the shoulder. Gratton thought the authorities just wanted to give the Imperial Enemy a hard time, and jested, \u201cWell, that's the last we'll ever see of you.\u201d\n\nOtto laughed, and then let himself be led away from Gratton through a wooden door beside the check-in area.", + " Otto's control of his carefully planned life had just been wrenched from him.\n\n4. The Back Channel\n\nWhen Robert King went to work at the State Department on January 2, 2016, during the Obama administration, he was expecting a boring day churning through e-mails accumulated over the holidays. Instead, a red-alert situation confronted him. King's first thought was Oh no, not another American. During his seven years as the special envoy for North Korean human-rights issues, King had helped oversee the safe release of more than a dozen imprisoned Americans, so he knew what would happen. First, Otto would be forced to confess to undermining the regime,", + " and tapes of that speech would be used as domestic propaganda to convince North Koreans that America sought to destroy them. Next, Otto was likely to be imprisoned and his freedom used as a bargaining chip by the North Koreans to extract a visit from a high-level American dignitary or concessions in nuclear or sanctions negotiations.\n\nIn meetings with the family, King warned the Warmbiers to expect \u201ca marathon, not a sprint.\u201d He also recommended they keep quiet to avoid antagonizing the unpredictable regime. He could offer them few reassurances, explaining, \u201cWe weren't 100 percent sure where [Otto] was or what had happened to him,\u201d as America has scant intelligence assets in North Korea.", + " The Warmbiers grew frustrated that the world's most powerful nation could not take more direct, immediate action to help their son.\n\nBut King had no leverage over Pyongyang. He couldn't even directly interface with North Korean officials because the two countries have never had a formal diplomatic relationship. In fact, the Swedish ambassador stands in as Washington's liaison for American citizens in Pyongyang. All King could do was wait for weeks while the Swedes' e-mails and calls were stonewalled.\n\nBut even if the official State Department response was stymied, that didn't mean that a back channel couldn't be employed. Shortly after Otto was arrested,", + " Ohio governor John Kasich connected the Warmbiers with Bill Richardson, the affable former governor of New Mexico and ambassador to the United Nations, who was leading a foundation that specializes in under-the-radar \u201cfringe diplomacy\u201d to release hostages from hostile regimes or criminal organizations. Richardson had previously helped free several Americans from North Korea and consequently had a strong relationship with what is commonly called the New York Channel, the North Korean representatives at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, who often serve as unofficial go-betweens for Washington and Pyongyang.\n\nEvery few weeks from February 2016 to August 2016, Richardson or Mickey Bergman, his senior adviser,", + " traveled to the city to meet the New York Channel. In restaurants, hotel lobbies, and coffee shops near the United Nations, they would hold polite negotiations with the regime's representatives. But shortly after Otto's conviction in Pyongyang, Richardson sensed that the previously communicative foreign ministry was having its information cut off by Kim Jong-un's obstinate inner circle\u2014a transition, his team would later realize, that probably dated from Otto's injury. \u201cThey made it clear they could only convey our offers,\u201d Richardson recalled. \u201cThey were not decision makers at all.\u201d\n\nTo get real answers, someone would have to go to Pyongyang. So with the Obama White House's blessing,", + " Richardson and Bergman negotiated a visit by promising to discuss private humanitarian aid for North Korean flood victims along with Otto's release. Bergman, a former Israeli paratrooper with a therapist's sensitive demeanor, was chosen as the emissary, as Richardson would draw too much attention.\n\nIn September, Bergman achieved what he described as the first face-to-face meeting between American and North Korean representatives in Pyongyang in nearly two years. Diplomatic missions to North Korea are different from those to other countries, in which meetings take place across oak tables. In Pyongyang, rather, Bergman was squired around for four days to many of the same sites that Otto had touristed\u2014from the U.S.S.", + " Pueblo to restaurants. But as he chatted with his guides, he knew his informal offers were being conveyed up the chain. By the time Bergman sat down with a vice minister on his last day, he was expecting a positive outcome because of the excitement of his minders. But Bergman was told he wouldn't even get to see Otto. Still, afterward, his handlers reminded him, \u201cIt takes 100 hacks to take down a tree.\u201d\n\nBergman said he hoped he would not have to travel to Pyongyang 99 more times.\n\nBergman left with the impression that the North Koreans were considering ways that Otto could be released,", + " but first they wanted to see what happened with the climaxing 2016 presidential campaign.\n\nWhen Trump won, Bergman and Richardson recognized a golden opportunity to free Otto \u00e0 la the release of American hostages in Iran at the beginning of Ronald Reagan's inaugural presidential term. The two fringe diplomats put together a photo-op-worthy proposal for the Trump plane to pick Otto up in advance of the inauguration, before bureaucracy hemmed in the new president. They didn't receive a no from North Korea, which they knew from past diplomacy with them was often a signal of positive interest. \u201cThe challenge that we had was that we could not get Donald Trump,\u201d Bergman said.", + " \u201cWe tried to go through Giuliani, Pence, Ivanka. Nothing during the transition. I'm assuming they were in chaos over there. I don't think it ever crossed his desk, because I think he would have actually liked it.\u201d\n\n5. \u201cI Was Completely Shocked\u201d\n\nAfter the election, as Robert King transitioned into retirement, Otto's case was taken up by the newly appointed U.S. special representative for North Korea policy, Joseph Yun. When Yun came in, Pyongyang was still refusing to speak to the Obama administration, but shortly after the day of Trump's inauguration, the mild-mannered but steely former ambassador established contact with the New York Channel about releasing Otto.", + " By February 2017, a delegation of North Koreans was set to visit the States, but then Kim Jong-un orchestrated the assassination of his half brother with a chemical weapon in an international airport, which drew condemnation from America, scuttling the talks.\n\n\u201cListening to [Trump] deliberate on this,\u201d said a State Department official, \u201che sounded to me a lot more like a dad.\u201d\n\nBy April, however, relations had thawed to the point that Yun was able to persuade Secretary Tillerson to let him discuss freeing Otto face-to-face with senior North Korean officials, as long as no broader diplomacy was done. So Yun traveled to Norway to meet several high-level North Korean officials on the sidelines of secret nuclear negotiations,", + " conducted by retired diplomats to get around the lack of official contact. Yun and the North Koreans agreed that the Swedish ambassador could visit Otto and the three other Americans who were detained in North Korea. In the end, the proxy was reportedly allowed to see only one detainee\u2014but not Otto.\n\nYun continued to demand access to Otto, and one day in early June he was surprised by a call urgently requesting him to meet with the New York Channel. In Manhattan, the North Koreans informed Yun that Otto was unconscious. \u201cI was completely shocked,\u201d Yun said. He argued that given the young man's health, Pyongyang had to free him promptly on humanitarian grounds.", + " \u201cI came back immediately, and I told Secretary Tillerson,\u201d Yun said. \u201cAnd we determined at the time that we needed to get him and the other prisoners out as soon as possible, and I should contact Pyongyang and say I wanted to come right away.\u201d\n\nWhen Trump learned of Otto's condition, he doubled down on the order for Yun to rush to Pyongyang and bring Otto home. The North Koreans were unilaterally informed that an American plane would soon land in Pyongyang and that United States diplomats and doctors would get off. \u201cThe president was very invested in bringing Otto home,\u201d said a State Department official who was involved in the case and who was not authorized to speak on the record.", + " \u201cListening to him deliberate on this, he sounded to me a lot more like a dad.\u201d But, the official said, \u201cwe were very scared,\u201d for though the North Koreans eventually said the plane would be able to land, no one knew what kind of welcome the Americans would receive on the ground. Yun explained, \u201cThe North Koreans said we could send a delegation to see Otto, but that we would have to discuss some of the conditions of getting him out once we got there.\u201d And so Yun raced to assemble a diplomatic and medical team to save Otto.\n\n6. The Rescue\n\nMichael Flueckiger was used to calmly fixing horrifying situations,", + " having previously saved countless patients from gunshot wounds and car crashes during 31 years as a trauma-center doctor. He was also no stranger to dangerous overseas situations, for in his current position as medical director for an elite air-ambulance service, Phoenix Air, he had evacuated Americans stricken with Ebola from Africa. When his boss called to ask if he would help rescue Otto from North Korea, he briefly hesitated from fear, but he decided he couldn't ask any of his employees to go in his stead. Once committed, the challenge-seeking, mountain-biking 67-year-old began excitedly awaiting the mission.\n\nThe final go-ahead from the State Department arrived during an inconspicuous Friday lunch.", + " Phoenix Air immediately rerouted its best aircraft\u2014a luxury Gulfstream G-III jet upgraded into a flying E.R.\u2014from Senegal to its headquarters, outside Atlanta, where Flueckiger and his team got it loaded and airborne again in less than two hours on Saturday. Then they picked up Yun and two other members of the State Department in Washington, D.C., and flew to Japan. There they off-loaded everyone but Yun, one other diplomat, and Flueckiger\u2014for only those three had been authorized to enter North Korea. The next day, as the Gulfstream rocketed toward the edge of North Korean airspace, all the Japanese air-", + "traffic controllers could do was aim the plane at Pyongyang and tell the pilot to proceed straight for 20 miles, as there is no official flight path between the countries. Then the radio chatter faded out, and only static filled the airwaves for ten minutes. Finally, a voice speaking perfect English guided the plane's landing in Pyongyang. A busload of soldiers escorted the Americans off the tarmac, and the aircraft returned to Japan.\n\nThe Americans were chauffeured through the farmland outside Pyongyang to an opulent guesthouse complete with marble staircases, chandeliers, and a full staff, even though they appeared to be the only guests.", + " That day, Yun engaged in several rounds of intense negotiations with North Korean officials, trying to win Otto's freedom. However, Yun kept butting his head against the North Koreans' argument: Otto committed this crime, so why should he escape due process? In North Korea, disrespecting one of the ubiquitous propaganda posters is actually a serious breach of the law. The research organization Database Center for North Korean Human Rights confirmed a case of a factory janitor being prosecuted for bumping such a picture off the wall so that it fell and broke. As Andrei Lankov, director of the Korea Risk Group, said, if a North Korean did what Otto did,", + " \u201cthey would be dead or definitely tortured.\u201d\n\nFinally, Yun persuaded the North Koreans to let him see Otto. Flueckiger and Yun were shuttled to Friendship Hospital, a private facility that often treats foreign diplomats living in Pyongyang. In an isolated second-floor ICU room, Flueckiger was presented with a pale, inert man with a feeding tube threaded through his nostrils. Could this really be Otto? Flueckiger wondered, for the body looked so different from the pictures he had seen of the homecoming king.\n\nFlueckiger clapped beside Otto's ear. No meaningful response. Sadness flooded him. He had two children and struggled to imagine one in such a state.", + " Yun, too, couldn't help but think of his own son, around Otto's age, and about how the Warmbiers would feel when they saw their boy.\n\nTwo North Korean doctors explained that Otto had arrived at the hospital this way more than a year before and showed as proof thick handwritten charts and several brain scans that revealed Otto had suffered extensive brain damage. Flueckiger spent about an hour examining Otto, but the truth had been evident at first sight: The Otto of old was already gone. Though he had obviously improved since coming into the hospital (he had a tracheotomy scar where machines had once breathed for him), he was in a state of unresponsive wakefulness,", + " meaning he still possessed basic reflexes but no longer showed signs of awareness.\n\nThe North Koreans asked Flueckiger to sign a report testifying that Otto had been well cared for in the hospital. \u201cI would have been willing to fudge that report if I thought it would get Otto released,\u201d Flueckiger said. \u201cBut as it turned out,\u201d despite the most basic facilities (the room's sink did not even work), \u201che got good care, and I didn't have to lie.\u201d Otto was well nourished and had no bedsores, an accomplishment even Western hospitals struggle to achieve with comatose patients. But the North Koreans were still not ready to release Otto.\n\nNegotiations continued into the night.", + " Then, the next morning, Flueckiger and Yun were driven to a hotel in downtown Pyongyang, where the three other American prisoners were marched into a conference room one by one. The three Korean-Americans, all detained on charges of espionage or \u201chostile acts against the state,\u201d had had almost no contact with the outside world since being arrested, and they all cried as they dictated messages for their families to Yun. After only 15 minutes, though, each prisoner was escorted away. \u201cI was, frankly, disappointed we didn't get the others out,\u201d Yun said. \u201cIt was very hard to leave them behind.\u201d\n\nEarly in Trump's presidency,", + " Fred appeared on Fox News, reportedly because he knew that the president obsessively watched the network, to complain that the State Department wasn't doing enough for his son. \u201cPresident Trump, I ask you: Bring my son home,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can make a difference here.\u201d\n\nOnce they got back to the guesthouse, Yun found himself once more arguing with North Korean officials for Otto's freedom. Then Yun played his last card: \u201cI called my guys to bring the plane from Japan. I told the North Koreans we would leave with or without Otto. I felt there was no point in dragging on. I was 90 percent sure they would release him,", + " and that this call would bring an action forcing them to do so.\u201d\n\nShortly before the plane was to land, a North Korean official announced to Yun that they had decided to release Otto. The Americans returned to the hospital, and a North Korean judge in a black suit commuted Otto's sentence. Then the U.S. motorcade and the ambulance raced directly to the airport, through open security gates, and onto the tarmac where the Gulfstream waited. When the plane cleared North Korean airspace, the celebration was muted. The team knew they would soon have to face the heartbreak of turning Otto over to his parents. In the meantime, Flueckiger cradled Otto,", + " changed his diaper, and whispered to him that he was free, like a father soothing his baby.\n\n7. The Crusade for Otto\n\nTwo days after the return, Fred Warmbier took the stage at Otto's high school. He was draped in the linen blazer that his son had worn during his forced confession. Tears spangled his eyes as he said to the assembled reporters, \u201cOtto, I love you, and I'm so crazy about you, and I'm so glad you're home.\u201d He blamed the Obama administration for failing to win Otto's release sooner, and thanked Trump. When asked about his son's health,", + " he said grimly, \u201cWe're trying to make him comfortable.\u201d Sometimes he slipped into the past tense when talking about him.\n\nFrom the start, Fred had striven relentlessly for Otto's freedom with the same streetwise entrepreneurism he had used to eventually build a major metal-finishing business after going to work straight out of high school. He traveled to Washington more than a dozen times in 2016 to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry and other high-level politicians. But after a fruitless year of bowing to the Obama administration's admonitions to work behind the scenes, he decided that \u201cthe era of strategic patience for the Warmbier family [was]", + " over.\u201d Early in Trump's presidency, Fred appeared on Fox News, reportedly because he knew that the president obsessively watched the network, to complain that the State Department wasn't doing enough for his son. \u201cPresident Trump, I ask you: Bring my son home,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can make a difference here.\u201d Soon the administration had raised Otto's case into a signature issue.\n\nWhen Otto was returned in a vegetative state, Fred refocused his zeal on getting justice for him. To Fred, the evidence of torture seemed clear. The once vital young man was severely brain-damaged. His formerly straight teeth were misaligned, and a large scar marred his foot.", + " Doctors detected no signs of botulism, North Korea's explanation. And The New York Times had written that the government had \u201cobtained intelligence reports in recent weeks indicating that Mr. Warmbier had been repeatedly beaten while in North Korean custody,\u201d citing an anonymous senior American official.\n\nWithin 48 hours of his return, Otto had a fever that had risen to 104 degrees. After doctors confirmed to Fred and Cindy that their son would never be cognizant again, they directed that his feeding tube be removed. They lived at his bedside until, six days after returning home, Otto died.\n\nHundreds of people lined the streets to witness Otto's hearse,", + " and many made the W hand gesture representing his high school. Wearing an American-flag tie, Fred watched his son \u201ccomplete his journey home\u201d with a haggard stare.\n\nAfter a mourning period, Fred and Cindy appeared on Fox & Friends in September 2017, once more reportedly seeking to catch the president's eye, and called the North Koreans \u201cterrorists\u201d who had \u201cintentionally injured\u201d Otto. Fred graphically described damage to Otto's teeth and foot as the result of torture and demanded that the administration punish the dictatorship. Shortly afterward, the president showed his approval by tweeting \u201cgreat interview\u201d and noting that Otto was \u201ctortured beyond belief by North Korea.\u201d To lobby for the United States to take legal action against North Korea,", + " Fred hired the lawyer who represents Vice President Mike Pence in the special counsel's Russia investigation. In early November, Congress backed banking restrictions against North Korea that were named for Otto. And later that month, Trump designated North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, which would allow harsher future sanctions, stating, \u201cAs we take this action today, our thoughts turn to Otto Warmbier.\u201d\n\n\u201cBeing imprisoned was lonely, isolating, and frustrating,\u201d Kenneth Bae, an American who\u2019d been detained in North Korea, told me. \u201cI was on trial for all of America.\u201d\n\nAround the same time as Otto's death, U.S.", + " hostilities with North Korea were growing heated. This was the period of \u201cfire and fury,\u201d and of Trump and Kim comparing who had the \u201cbigger & more powerful\u201d nuclear buttons. Behind the scenes in Washington, dovish diplomats, like Joseph Yun, were replaced by hawks, like John Bolton, one of the architects of the Iraq war. The likelihood of conflict grew so real that an American diplomat warned a Seoul-dwelling friend in confidence to move his assets out of South Korea.\n\nOn TV and social media, and in official speeches, Republican officials cited Otto's death as a reason Kim Jong-un needed to be confronted. When making a case for a forceful response against North Korea to the South Korean National Assembly,", + " in November 2017, Trump said their common enemy had \u201ctortured Otto Warmbier, ultimately leading to that fine young man's death.\u201d In his January 2018 State of the Union address, Trump pledged to keep \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d on North Korea and to \u201chonor Otto's memory with total American resolve,\u201d while the Warmbiers wept in the gallery. Meanwhile, Fred and Cindy traveled the country reinforcing the narrative that Otto was tortured. As Cindy told the United Nations in New York City, \u201cI can't let Otto die in vain.\u201d In April 2018, the Warmbiers, seeking damages,", + " filed a lawsuit alleging that North Korea \u201cbrutally tortured and murdered\u201d their son.\n\nDespite how Trump and his administration boosted the narrative that Otto was physically tortured, however, the evidence was not clear-cut. The day after the Warmbiers went on national television to declare that Otto had been \u201csystematically tortured and intentionally injured,\u201d a coroner who had examined Otto, Dr. Lakshmi Kode Sammarco, unexpectedly called a press conference. She explained that she hadn't previously done so out of respect for the Warmbiers. But her findings, and those of the doctors who had attended Otto, contradicted the Warmbiers'", + " assertions.\n\nFred had described Otto's teeth as having been \u201cre-arranged\u201d with pliers, but Sammarco reiterated that the postmortem exam found that \u201cthe teeth [were] natural and in good repair.\u201d She discovered no significant scars, dismissing the one on his foot as not definitively indicative of anything. Other signs of physical trauma were also lacking. Both sides of Otto's brain had suffered simultaneously, meaning it had been starved of oxygen. (Blows to the head would have likely resulted in asymmetrical, rather than universal, damage.) Though the Warmbiers declined a surgical autopsy, non-invasive scans found no hairline bone fractures or other evidence of prior trauma.", + " \u201cHis body was in excellent condition,\u201d Sammarco said. \u201cI'm sure he had to have round-the-clock care to be able to maintain the skin in the condition it was in.\u201d When asked about the Warmbiers' claims, Sammarco answered, \u201cThey're grieving parents. I can't really make comments on what they said or their perceptions. But here in this office, we depend on science for our conclusions.\u201d Three other individuals who had close contact with Otto on his return also did not notice any physical signs consistent with torture.\n\nThe origin of Otto's injury remained a mystery. \u201cWe're never going to know,\u201d Sammarco said,", + " \u201cunless the people who were there at the time it happened would come forward and say, \u2018This is what happened.\u2019 \u201d\n\n8. The Probable\n\nDiscovering the truth of events that happen in North Korea is a task that even American intelligence agencies struggle with. But Otto's experience after his arrest is not a black hole, as it has often been portrayed. Through intelligence sources, government officials, and senior-level North Korean defectors, and drawing on the experiences of the 15 other Americans who since 1996 have been imprisoned in North Korea\u2014some in the same places as Otto\u2014it is possible to describe Otto's probable day-to-day life there.\n\nWithin the electrified fences of many of North Korea's notorious prison camps dwell up to 120,", + "000 souls, condemned for infractions as minor as watching banned South Korean soap operas. The human-rights abuses within have been extensively documented, creating a compelling case that they are among the worst places in the world. The lucky survive on starvation rations while enduring routine beatings and dangerous enforced labor, like coal mining. The unlucky are tortured to death. In Seoul, one North Korean, who had endured three years at a low-level camp for trying to flee the country, wept as she told me: \u201cNorth Korean prisons are actually hell. We had less rights than a dog. They often beat us, and we were so hungry we would catch mice in our cells to eat.\u201d She saw six to eight fellow prisoners die every day.\n\n\u201cI don't believe Otto was physically tortured,\u201d Andrei Lankov,", + " said in his office in Seoul. \u201cThe campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea's cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.\u201d\n\nBut American detainees escape that fate. When Otto finally opened his eyes again, he likely found himself at a guesthouse, which is where the State Department believed he was probably kept. At least five previous American detainees have been imprisoned in a two-story building with a green-tiled roof in a gated alleyway behind a restaurant in downtown Pyongyang, which is run by the State Security Department, the North Korean secret police. (Others have been kept at a different guesthouse, and at least three have stayed at a hotel.) The most used guesthouse is luxurious by local standards\u2014detainees can hear guards using its karaoke machine into the wee hours\u2014but Otto would have likely found its two-room suites roughly equivalent to those in a basic hotel.", + " And no matter how nice his suite, it was also a cell, for he would have been allowed out only for an occasional escorted walk.\n\nFor the next two months, until his forced confession, Otto would probably have been relentlessly interrogated; American missionary Kenneth Bae said he was questioned up to 15 hours a day. The goal wasn't to extract the truth but to construct the fabulation that Otto read off handwritten notes at his news conference. In the past, North Korea has spun false confessions from small truths, and in this case they may have construed a conspiracy from a souvenir propaganda poster that Otto had bought, according to Danny Gratton,", + " Otto's tour roommate. No previous American detainee has accused North Korea of using physical force to extract a confession, but if Otto protested his innocence, he probably received a warning similar to the one given to Ohioan Jeffrey Fowle, who was detained two years before him: \u201cIf you don't start cooperating, things are going to become less pleasant.\u201d As the journalist Laura Ling wrote of her five months in detention, \u201cI told [the prosecutor] what he wanted to hear\u2014and kept telling him until he was satisfied.\u201d\n\nEver since the sailors of the U.S.S. Pueblo were beaten in 1968, there have been no clear-cut cases of North Korea physically torturing American prisoners.", + " When Ling and fellow journalist Euna Lee sneaked over the North Korean border, Ling was struck as soldiers detained them. But once their nationalities were established, they were sent to the green-roofed guesthouse. American media, including The New York Times, have widely repeated the claims that missionary Robert Park was physically tortured, but Park himself has reportedly said that the story that he was stripped naked by female guards and clubbed in the genitals was fabricated by a journalist. On the contrary, the North Koreans have carefully tended to the health of Americans they have captured, caring for them, if needed, in the Friendship Hospital where Otto was kept;", + " 85-year-old detainee Merrill Newman was reportedly visited by a doctor and nurse four times a day. As a high-level North Korean defector who now works for a South Korean intelligence agency said, \u201cNorth Korea treats its foreign prisoners especially well. They know someday they will have to send them back.\u201d\n\nBut that doesn't mean that North Korea doesn't psychologically torture detained Americans\u2014in fact, it has always tried to bludgeon them into mental submission. Bae, Ling, and other prisoners were repeatedly told that their government had \u201cforgotten\u201d them and were given so little hope that they only learned of their impending freedom an hour before being released.", + " When I met former detainee Bae in the Seoul office of his NGO dedicated to helping North Korean defectors, he told me, \u201cBeing imprisoned was lonely, isolating, and frustrating. I was on trial for all of America, so I had to accept that I had no control and there was no way I could get out of the impending punishment.\u201d While some previous detainees were allowed letters from home, it seems that North Korea denied Otto any contact with the outside world. His only break from the interrogations was likely watching North Korean propaganda films. The psychic trauma of all this has sent previous detainees into crushing depressions, and even driven some to attempt suicide.\n\nIn the footage of his news-conference confession,", + " Otto looked physically healthy, but as he sobbed for his freedom, he was obviously in extreme mental distress. Two weeks later, in mid-March, as Otto was filmed after being sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, his body still looked whole, but his expression was vacant and he had to be supported by two guards as he was dragged out of the courthouse\u2014as if the life had drained out of him.\n\nUntil now, the next assumption about Otto's fate was that he had suffered severe brain damage by \u201cApril,\u201d as the first brain scan sent back with his body was time-stamped. Speculation suggested that the tragedy might have occurred at a special labor camp for foreigners,", + " where at least three Americans have performed their hard-labor sentences. There they were forced to plant soybeans or make bricks while living in spartan conditions, though, as Bae wrote, \u201cCompared to the average North Korean serving time in a labor camp, I was in a four-star resort.\u201d Certainly, it would have been more likely for any type of tragedy\u2014over-exertion under a furnace sun, a work accident, or even directed beatings\u2014to occur in that barbed-wire-enclosed valley a few miles outside Pyongyang. But Otto almost certainly never made it to the labor camp.\n\n\u201cThe staff at Friendship Hospital said they received Otto the morning after the trial and that when he came in he was unresponsive,\u201d Dr.", + " Flueckiger told me. \u201cThey had to resuscitate him, then give him oxygen and put him on a ventilator, or he would die.\u201d As Yun, the negotiator who helped free Otto, said, \u201cThe doctors were clear that he had been brought to the hospital within a day of his trial, and that he had been in that same room until I saw him.\u201d\n\n9. The Improbable\n\nThe previously unreported detail of when Otto was admitted to the Friendship Hospital changes the narrative of what could have happened to him. If Otto was \u201crepeatedly beaten,\u201d as the intel reports suggested, it would logically have been during the two to six weeks between his sentencing,", + " when videos of him showed no signs of physical damage, and \u201cApril,\u201d as the North Korean brain scan was dated. But Otto was apparently unconscious by the next morning. The coroner found no evidence of bludgeoning on Otto's body. And when one takes into account that the entire sourced public case that Otto was beaten derives from that single anonymous official who spoke to The New York Times, the theory begins to crack.\n\nIt is for this paucity of evidence that, though the public discourse about Otto's death has long been dominated by talk of beatings, there have been doubts among North Korea experts that the intelligence reports were correct.", + " Of the dozen experts I spoke to, only a single one thought there was even a remote likelihood that he had been beaten. \u201cI don't believe Otto was physically tortured,\u201d Andrei Lankov said in his office in Seoul. \u201cThe campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea's cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.\u201d\n\nMany experts pointed out that though North Korea is often portrayed as irrational, the Kim family had to be \u201cboth brutal and smart,\u201d as Lankov said, to maintain its relative power on the world stage, especially for such a small, impoverished country. What incentive would they have to lose a valuable bargaining chip,", + " especially when they had never been so thoughtless before? To these experts, it made much more sense that Otto was treated like all other detained Americans and that an unexpected catastrophe occurred. But despite the experts' doubts, none of them could disprove the intelligence reports indicating that Otto had been beaten.\n\nHowever, a senior-level American official who reviewed the reports told me, \u201cIn general, the intel reports were wrong, as the medical examinations have shown. They were apparently not even correct about where Otto was or when he was beaten, for God's sake. Likely, the reports were just hearsay. Someone heard third- or fourth-hand that Otto was sick,", + " and that person decided he was beaten. The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically. Never.\u201d The official said he did not know of the Trump administration having other sources of information about Otto being beaten.\n\nIn the end, however, despite all the mystery still surrounding Otto, it is essential to remember two facts that endure as unyielding as gravestones: Otto's death and the grief of those he left behind.\n\nAnother senior government official told me, \u201cI can tell you that I've been in a lot of classified meetings about Otto, before and after his return. Beforehand, I heard some reporting that he was beaten,", + " but it wasn't from State or Intel, who never corroborated that, before or after the fact. But it's possible that there was intel I did not see.\u201d\n\nA congressional staffer familiar with the intelligence reports said, \u201cBefore we had Otto back in the United States, we just didn't know what was going on there. In the end, there was no definitive evidence whether or not he was beaten.\u201d The staffer claimed that the government never got further intelligence reports indicating Otto was beaten.\n\nThree days after the Times published its claims, The Washington Post also cited an anonymous senior American official rejecting reports that Otto had been beaten in custody. South Korean intelligence,", + " generally considered the spy agency with the best sources in North Korea, found no confirmation that Otto was beaten.\n\nBut if Otto was almost certainly not \u201crepeatedly beaten,\u201d then what put him in a state of non-responsive wakefulness? And why would the Trump administration allow these unverified rumors to flourish?\n\n10. A Theory\n\nWithout knowing about the revised time line of Otto's injury, experts I spoke to overwhelmingly identified some kind of accident\u2014for example, an allergic reaction\u2014as the most likely cause for Otto's unconsciousness. The likelihood that his brain damage happened immediately after the sentencing, however, raises the possibility that he may have attempted suicide.\n\nImagine what Otto must have been feeling after hearing that he would spend the next 15 years laboring in what he probably imagined to be a gulag.", + " After two months of being constantly reminded that the American government couldn't help him, he probably felt that his family, his beautiful girlfriend (who called him her \u201csoul mate\u201d), and his Wall Street future were all lost. What else could he look forward to but physical and mental suffering?\n\nAt least two Americans imprisoned in North Korea have attempted suicide. After failing to cut his wrists, Aijalon Gomes chewed open a thermometer and drank its mercury, later explaining that he had given up on America's ability to free him. Despite eventually having his release won by Jimmy Carter, Gomes was unable to escape his post-traumatic stress disorder,", + " and seven years later burned himself to death. An American official said that Evan Hunziker tried to kill himself while being held, and less than a month after returning home, he shattered his own skull with a bullet in a run-down hotel. Robert Park reportedly tried to take his own life on returning.\n\nEven if North Korea didn't beat Otto, that doesn't mean that he wasn't tortured, as the mental suffering the regime inflicted on him constitutes torture under the U.N. definition. As Tom\u00e1s Ojea Quintana, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights for North Korea, said, \u201cOtto's rights were violated on every level.\u201d\n\n11.", + " The Unknown\n\nThe first that Governor Richardson, the back-channel negotiator, heard of Otto's injury was upon the young man's release, and he was furious at having been deceived by Pyongyang. But a North Korean ambassador soon contacted Richardson to explain that he had not meant to lead him astray in negotiations and that he too had been kept in the dark. \u201cI believed him,\u201d Richardson told me. \u201cIn the 15 years I've been negotiating with him, he's always been honest.\u201d Senator Portman and sources working inside North Korea at the time also stressed that the foreign ministry didn't know. The minister who was responsible for Otto was demoted and eventually disappeared,", + " according to Michael Madden, a North Korea analyst who tracks its leadership. Even the guards on whose watch Otto was injured were likely sent to prison. All of which means that the full truth of what transpired is likely hoarded only by Kim Jong-un and his most trusted lieutenants, and that it may never get out.\n\nFor all the unknowns, one certainty is that the Trump administration allowed the narrative that Otto was repeatedly beaten to spread, long after it was clear those intelligence reports were almost certainly wrong. That the reports suggested that he was beaten repeatedly when there was not time for that showed they were unreliable. The lack of physical evidence of beatings was widely publicized.", + " The administration was informed of the correct time line, and it was well known among government officials who worked on the case. And both the senior-level American officials and the congressional staffer confirmed that the government never shared with them definitive evidence that Otto was beaten.\n\nNow, that's not to fault the Trump administration for applying maximum pressure on North Korea for an American citizen ending up brain-damaged in its custody: Such behavior warrants punishment. Nor is it to imply that the senior government official lied to The New York Times about the intelligence reports, as some analysts suggested to me; that person seems to have correctly described them. But if the maverick boldness that the administration displayed in rescuing Otto represents the best of Trumpism,", + " what followed once it was clear the reports were flawed encapsulates its troubling disregard for facts when a dubious narrative supports its interests.\n\nIt's impossible to say whether or not Trump had seen or parsed the nuances of the intelligence reports before he tweeted about Fred Warmbier's Fox interview, supporting that Otto had been physically tortured. Or when he declared, before the South Korean National Assembly, that Otto had been \u201ctortured.\u201d Perhaps those were just two more of the 3,001 false or misleading claims he advanced in his first 466 days in office, according to The Washington Post's Fact Checker database. Or maybe it was a conscious strategy.", + " Whatever it was, the misrepresentation helped push the U.S. closer to war with North Korea than it had ever been. Though soon, of course, the administration would choose a different path.\n\n12. The Use of Stories\n\nWhen Fred hugged Otto that first night in the air ambulance, he felt that he couldn't get through to him and that his son was \u201cvery uncomfortable\u2014almost anguished.\u201d But \u201cwithin a day, the countenance of his face changed,\u201d the Warmbiers said. Though there was no way that Otto could communicate with them, they wrote, \u201che was home, and we believe he could sense that.\u201d Otto,", + " they said, was finally \u201cat peace.\u201d\n\nWe tell stories so that we can make sense of irresolvable unknowns and then act. While no one can prove what happened to Otto in those final few hours, as Trump encouraged the narrative that Otto was beaten and the White House allowed speculation about possible beatings to spread, the administration gave people license to indulge their worst fears about Otto's fate and act accordingly.\n\nIn doing so, the Trump administration may have fostered misperceptions in the Warmbier family itself. During the year after highlighting the story that Otto was physically tortured, Trump praised Fred and Cindy as \u201cgood friends\u201d and invited them to high-profile events.", + " But Fred indicated on national television in September 2017 that he had no more knowledge of his son's case than that put out by the news media. In the lawsuit the Warmbiers filed in April against North Korea for Otto's death, they continued to assert evidence that he was repeatedly beaten. If they entertain the belief that their son's last conscious moments were spent in fear and physical agony as he was assaulted, that may be the result of the administration's unwillingness to acknowledge a different version of events, one that the facts support. But whatever they believe, what is clear is that they are loving parents, dealing with an unimaginably tragic loss,", + " who have been striving to honor Otto's legacy.\n\nWhen presented with the findings of this article, the Trump administration declined to comment.\n\nUpon learning that this article did not support claims that Otto was beaten, and included the theory that he may have attempted suicide\u2014a possibility that the family, through their lawyer, dismissed categorically\u2014the Warmbiers withdrew a statement that they had previously provided. Ultimately, they declined to comment for this story.\n\nIn the absence of proof, we all have to choose what we want to believe about Otto's tragedy. And in this political age, where truth seems enslaved to the agendas of the powerful, it is important to consider what story we believe and why.", + " After all, the stories we tell ourselves and others shape our own fates, and those of nations, the world, and other people's children.\n\nIn the end, however, despite all the mystery still surrounding Otto, it is essential to remember two facts that endure as unyielding as gravestones: Otto's death and the grief of those he left behind.\n\n13. The Summit\n\nFred Warmbier came face-to-face with those responsible for Otto's death at the Winter Olympics in South Korea. Since the beginning of 2018, North Korea, hamstrung by sanctions and spooked by full-on preparations for war in Otto's name,", + " had been trying to reset relations with the outside world. The centerpiece of this diplomacy was a \u201ccharm offensive\u201d at the February Games\u2014deploying squads of cherubic cheerleaders singing folk songs about re-unification, and Kim Jong-un's smiley sister shaking hands with world leaders. The North Koreans even reportedly reached out to ask if Vice President Pence wanted to meet her, while warning him not to highlight Otto's story. Instead, Pence invited Fred Warmbier to sit with him in the VIP box at the opening ceremony, not ten feet from Kim's sister. Fred barely even looked at her as he sat in grieving dignity, his sorrow rebuking her serene ambassadorial smirk.\n\nEDITOR\u2019S PICK\n\nIn March,", + " two top-level South Korean officials traveled to Pyongyang, where they feasted and drank traditional Korean liquor for four hours with Kim Jong-un, after which they were given a special message to deliver to Trump. The South Koreans rushed to Washington. On hearing the offer, and before consulting any of his advisers, the president accepted. Then one of the South Koreans informed the world from the White House driveway that the two leaders would try to resolve their nations' never-ended war in person.\n\nFrom that point on, the White House no longer focused on Otto's tragedy. In fact, it swung so far in the opposite direction that civil-rights groups complained about human-rights issues not being on the agenda for the summit in Singapore.", + " When the three remaining American detainees were released in May, Trump welcomed them home by saying, \u201cWe want to thank Kim Jong-un, who really was excellent to these three incredible people.\u201d\n\nThe story of Otto being brutally beaten had outlived its usefulness.\n\nIn early June, Trump and Kim shook hands in front of the red, white, and blue of both nations' flags. In a private meeting, Trump showed Kim a Hollywood-trailer-like video that laid out the choice between economic prosperity, if he gave up his nukes, or war. Then they signed a largely symbolic document after North Korea promised to denuclearize and America swore to not invade,", + " though there were no enforcement mechanisms in the document.\n\nAt Trump's post-summit news conference, the first question a reporter asked was why the president had been praising Kim, as the dictator had been responsible for Otto's death.\n\n\u201cOtto Warmbier is a very special person,\u201d Trump answered. \u201cI think, without Otto, this would not have happened.\u201d Then he said twice, as if it was doubly true or he was trying to convince himself: \u201cOtto did not die in vain.\u201d\n\nDoug Bock Clark wrote about the assassination of Kim Jong-un's brother in the October 2017 issue. His first book, \u2018The Last Whalers,\u2019 comes out next year.\n\nThis story originally appeared in the August 2018 issue with the title \"American Hostage:", + " The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier.\" ", + " ITAR-TASS News Agency / Alamy Stock Photo Best of GQ The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage President Trump hailed him as a catalyst of the summit with Kim Jong-Un. But what happened to Warmbier\u2014the American college student who was sent home brain-damaged from North Korea\u2014is even more shocking than anyone knew.\n\n1. Homecoming\n\nOn a humid morning in June 2017, in a suburb outside Cincinnati, Fred and Cindy Warmbier waited in agony. They had not spoken to their son Otto for a year and a half, since he had been arrested during a budget tour of North Korea.", + " One of their last glimpses of him had been from a televised news conference in Pyongyang, during which their boy\u2014a sweet, brainy 21-year-old scholarship student at the University of Virginia\u2014confessed to undermining the regime at the behest of the unlikely triumvirate of an Ohio church, a university secret society, and the American government by stealing a propaganda poster. He sobbed to his captors, \u201cI have made the single worst decision of my life. But I am only human.\u2026 I beg that you find it in your hearts to give me forgiveness and allow me to return home to my family.\u201d Despite his pleas, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor and vanished into the dictatorship's prison system.\n\nFred and Cindy had so despaired during their long vigil that at one point they allegedly told friends that Otto had probably been killed.", + " On her son's 22nd birthday, Cindy lit Chinese-style lanterns and let the winter winds loft the flame-buoyed balloons toward North Korea, dreaming they might bear her message to her son. \u201cI love you, Otto,\u201d she said, then sang \u201cHappy Birthday.\u201d\n\nBut on that June morning, the Warmbiers were anticipating news of a secret State Department mission to free Otto. Upon learning that Otto was apparently unconscious, President Trump had directed an American team to fly into North Korea, and now progress of the mission was being monitored at the highest level of the government. No assurances had been made that the young man would actually be released,", + " and so the officials were on tenterhooks as well. According to an official, at 8:35 A.M., Secretary of State Rex Tillerson telephoned the president to announce that Otto was airborne. The president reportedly signed off by saying, \u201cTake care of Otto.\u201d Then Rob Portman, the Ohio senator who helped oversee efforts to repatriate Otto, called to inform the Warmbiers that the air ambulance had just entered Japanese airspace: Otto would be home that night.\n\nStill, Cindy knew her son was not through danger yet. In advance of the rescue, Portman had informed her that Otto had been unconscious for months,", + " according to the North Koreans, though no one knew the exact extent of the injury. \u201cCan you tell me how Otto's brain is functioning?\u201d she asked.\n\nPortman answered that Otto appeared to have severe brain damage.\n\nCindy told news outlets that she imagined that might mean Otto was asleep or in a medically induced coma. The Warmbiers were optimistic, up-by-their-bootstraps patriots, and they hoped that with American health care and their love, their son might again become the vivacious person he'd been when he left.\n\nNow Portman and his staff scrambled to prepare the homecoming, rerouting the plane from Cincinnati's international airport to a smaller municipal one,", + " which would be more private. As the sun went down, a crowd waved handmade signs welcoming Otto home, and TV crews pushed their cameras against the bars of the perimeter fence. The sleek luxury plane taxied to some hangars, where the Warmbiers waited nearby.\n\nHalfway up the airplane's stairs, over the whine of the still-cycling engines, Fred later said, he heard a guttural \u201cinhuman\u201d howling and wondered what it was. But when he stepped into the cabin cluttered with medical equipment, he found its source: Otto, strapped to a stretcher, jerking violently against his restraints and wailing.\n\nCindy was prepared for her son to be changed,", + " but she had not expected this. Otto's arms and legs were \u201ctotally deformed,\u201d according to his parents. His wavy brown locks had been buzzed off. A feeding tube infiltrated his nostrils. \u201cIt looked like someone had taken a pair of pliers and re-arranged his bottom teeth,\u201d as Fred would say. According to Cindy, Otto's sister fled the plane, screaming, and Cindy ran after her.\n\nFred approached his son and hugged him. Otto's eyes remained wide open and blank. Fred told Otto that he had missed him and was overjoyed to have him home. But Otto's alien keening only continued,", + " impossible to comfort.\n\nIt was only later that a member of Otto\u2019s tour group would wonder about \u201cthe two-hour window that none of us can account for [Otto].\u201d\n\nBy the time paramedics carried Otto out of the plane by his legs and armpits and loaded him into an ambulance, Cindy had recovered somewhat. She forced herself to join him in the emergency vehicle, though seeing him in such torment had almost made her pass out.\n\nAt the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, the family camped at Otto's bedside while speculation blazed around the world about what had rendered him vegetative. But Otto would never recover to tell his side of the story.", + " And despite exhaustive examinations by doctors, no definitive medical evidence explaining how his injury came to be would ever emerge.\n\nInstead, in the vacuum of fact, North Korea and the U.S. competed to provide a story. North Korea blamed Otto's condition on a combination of botulism and an unexpected reaction to a sleeping pill, an explanation that many American doctors said was unlikely. A senior American official asserted that, according to intelligence reports, Otto had been repeatedly beaten. Fred and Cindy declared on TV that their son had been physically tortured, in order to spotlight the dictatorship's evil. The president pushed this narrative. Meanwhile, the American military made preparations for a possible conflict.", + " Otto became a symbol used to build \u201ca case for war on emotional grounds,\u201d the New York Times editorial board wrote.\n\nAs the Trump administration and North Korea spun Otto's story for their own ends, I spent six months reporting\u2014from Washington, D.C., to Seoul\u2014trying to figure out what had actually happened to him. What made an American college student go to Pyongyang? What kind of nightmare did he endure while in captivity? How did his brain damage occur? And how did his eventual death help push America closer toward war with North Korea and then, in a surprising reversal, help lead to Trump's peace summit with Kim Jong-un? The story I uncovered was stranger and sadder than anyone had known.", + " In fact, I discovered that the manner of Otto's injury was not as black-and-white as people were encouraged to believe. But before he became a rallying cry in the administration's campaign against North Korea, he was just a kid. His name was Otto Warmbier.\n\n2. All-American\n\nIn a white two-story home flying the Stars and Stripes, Otto grew up the eldest child of a Republican family. He was one of those special young people we praise as all-American. At a top-ranked Ohio high school, he boasted the second-best grades. He was also a math whiz and a gifted soccer player and swimmer.", + " And as if it weren't enough that he was prom king, his peers also anointed him with the plastic crown at homecoming.\n\nBut despite running in the \u201cpopular circle given his athletic prowess, classic good looks and unending charisma,\u201d a classmate later wrote in a local newspaper, he \u201cstill felt like everyone's friend.\u201d Though his family was well-off, he had a passion for \u201cmemorabilia investing,\u201d as he called thrift-store shopping, and sometimes dressed in secondhand Hawaiian shirts. When the time came for him to give a speech at his high school graduation, instead of orating grandiosely, he admitted to struggling to find words.", + " He took as his theme a quote from The Office: \u201cI wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days,\u201d he told his peers, \u201cbefore you've actually left them.\u201d\n\nOf course, Otto's best days seemed ahead: He attended the University of Virginia with a scholarship, intent on becoming a banker. A meticulous planner, he filled a calendar hung on his dorm wall with handwritten commitments: from assignments to dates to bringing differently abled friends to basketball games. He joined a fraternity known for its \u201ckind of nerdy dudes,\u201d and one of his college friends said that academics and family always took precedence over everything else,", + " from partying to tailgating at football games. When he won a finance internship the fall of his junior year, there was no disputing that he was a man fully in charge of his destiny.\n\nKnowing that he would soon be laboring over spreadsheets, he decided he wanted an adventure over his winter break. He had long been curious about other cultures and had previously visited intrepid destinations like Cuba. And since he would already be traveling to Hong Kong to study abroad, he decided he wanted to witness the world's most repressive nation: North Korea. Even though the state imprisons and sometimes executes citizens trying to flee it, it permits thousands of foreigners to visit every year on tightly controlled tours\u2014one of the few ways its sanction-", + "crippled economy makes cash. If Otto had Googled \u201ctour North Korea,\u201d the top link would have been for the company he chose, Young Pioneer Tours, an operator specializing in budget excursions to \u201cdestinations your mother would rather you stay away from.\u201d The trips have a reputation of being like spring break in a geopolitical hot spot. After putting down a deposit for a $1,200 five-day, four-night \u201cNew Year's Party Tour,\u201d Otto learned from the confirmation e-mail that his visa would be arranged by the company and presented to him when he met the tour group at the Beijing airport. The State Department had an advisory in place against traveling to North Korea,", + " where he'd be beyond the American government's power to directly help him. Otto's parents weren't thrilled by the trip, but as his mother later explained, \u201cWhy would you say no to a kid like this?\u201d\n\nSo, shortly after Christmas 2015, Otto met the other Young Pioneers in China and boarded an old Soviet jet to Pyongyang. In North Korea's capital, border police confiscated cameras and flicked through each file on smartphones to make sure no outsider was smuggling in subversive materials. Then Otto stepped through passport control\u2014and just like that, left the free world.\n\n3. The Happiest Nation\n\nEarly on in Pyongyang,", + " Otto and the other Young Pioneers were led aboard the U.S.S. Pueblo, an American Navy spy ship that had been seized by the North Koreans in 1968 and today serves as an odd tourist attraction. While they toured the ship, the Young Pioneers were regaled by a North Korean who told the foreign visitors about capturing the ship from the \u201cimperial enemy.\u201d The 82 American sailors captured on the Pueblo were beaten and starved for 11 months before finally being released. For Otto, the story made clear what he had perhaps overlooked before: that he was in enemy territory. Even though the Korean War had stalemated in 1953,", + " the lack of a peace agreement meant that the North was technically still at war with the South and its ally, the U.S. Stepping from the boat, Otto \u201cwas a little bit shocked,\u201d said Danny Gratton, an impish British 40-something greeting-card salesman who was his roommate for the tour.\n\nBut Gratton and the other tourists, a mix of Canadians, Australians, Europeans, and at least one other American, helped Otto laugh off that dark knowledge, nicknaming him \u201cImperial Enemy\u201d\u2014as in, \u201cHey, Imperial Enemy, want another beer?\u201d Soon enough Otto was having fun again, for even though propaganda billboards showed North Korean missiles blasting the White House,", + " the tour felt more like a bizarre charade than a visit to a hostile nation. The Young Pioneers visited the 70-foot bronze statues of the first two generations of the country's dictators, and they could never be sure if the citizens they saw spontaneously hailing the Great Leader were sincere or put up to it. Of course, everyone knew that outside the stage-managed capital lay starving villages and concentration camps. But Otto succeeded in bridging the cultural divide, laughing and throwing snowballs with North Korean children.\n\nOn New Year's Eve, the Young Pioneers went drinking at a fancy bar, though according to Gratton,", + " no one got belligerently drunk, as some reports would later suggest. After the bar, Gratton says, they celebrated the final hours of New Year's Eve with thousands of North Koreans in Pyongyang's main square. The group then returned to their hotel, known as the \u201cAlcatraz of Fun\u201d because of its island location. To keep foreigners entertained, the 47-story tower is furnished with five restaurants (one of which revolves), a bar, a sauna, a massage parlor, and its own bowling alley. Some Young Pioneers headed to the bar. Gratton went bowling, and lost track of Otto. It was only later that he would wonder about \u201cthe two-hour window that none of us can account for [Otto].\u201d\n\nNorth Korea would later release grainy CCTV camera footage of an unidentifiable figure removing a framed propaganda poster from a wall in a restricted area of the hotel,", + " claiming it was Otto. During the televised confession, Otto would read from a handwritten script that he had put on his \u201cquietest boots, the best for sneaking\u201d and attempted the theft at the prompting of a local Methodist church, a university secret society, and the American administration, \u201cto harm the work ethic and motivation of the Korean people\u201d and bring home a \u201ctrophy.\u201d Many of the confession's details didn't square\u2014for one, Otto was Jewish, not affiliated with a Methodist church\u2014making experts suspect the words weren't originally Otto's. Whatever happened during those lost hours, when Gratton returned to his and Otto's room,", + " around 4:30 A.M. on January 1, Otto was already snoozing.\n\nThe following morning at the airport, the two tired friends were the last Young Pioneers to present their passports, side by side at a single desk. After an uncomfortably long time, Gratton noticed that the officers were intently scrutinizing the documents. Then two soldiers marched up, and one tapped Otto on the shoulder. Gratton thought the authorities just wanted to give the Imperial Enemy a hard time, and jested, \u201cWell, that's the last we'll ever see of you.\u201d\n\nOtto laughed, and then let himself be led away from Gratton through a wooden door beside the check-in area.", + " Otto's control of his carefully planned life had just been wrenched from him.\n\n4. The Back Channel\n\nWhen Robert King went to work at the State Department on January 2, 2016, during the Obama administration, he was expecting a boring day churning through e-mails accumulated over the holidays. Instead, a red-alert situation confronted him. King's first thought was Oh no, not another American. During his seven years as the special envoy for North Korean human-rights issues, King had helped oversee the safe release of more than a dozen imprisoned Americans, so he knew what would happen. First, Otto would be forced to confess to undermining the regime,", + " and tapes of that speech would be used as domestic propaganda to convince North Koreans that America sought to destroy them. Next, Otto was likely to be imprisoned and his freedom used as a bargaining chip by the North Koreans to extract a visit from a high-level American dignitary or concessions in nuclear or sanctions negotiations.\n\nIn meetings with the family, King warned the Warmbiers to expect \u201ca marathon, not a sprint.\u201d He also recommended they keep quiet to avoid antagonizing the unpredictable regime. He could offer them few reassurances, explaining, \u201cWe weren't 100 percent sure where [Otto] was or what had happened to him,\u201d as America has scant intelligence assets in North Korea.", + " The Warmbiers grew frustrated that the world's most powerful nation could not take more direct, immediate action to help their son.\n\nBut King had no leverage over Pyongyang. He couldn't even directly interface with North Korean officials because the two countries have never had a formal diplomatic relationship. In fact, the Swedish ambassador stands in as Washington's liaison for American citizens in Pyongyang. All King could do was wait for weeks while the Swedes' e-mails and calls were stonewalled.\n\nBut even if the official State Department response was stymied, that didn't mean that a back channel couldn't be employed. Shortly after Otto was arrested,", + " Ohio governor John Kasich connected the Warmbiers with Bill Richardson, the affable former governor of New Mexico and ambassador to the United Nations, who was leading a foundation that specializes in under-the-radar \u201cfringe diplomacy\u201d to release hostages from hostile regimes or criminal organizations. Richardson had previously helped free several Americans from North Korea and consequently had a strong relationship with what is commonly called the New York Channel, the North Korean representatives at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, who often serve as unofficial go-betweens for Washington and Pyongyang.\n\nEvery few weeks from February 2016 to August 2016, Richardson or Mickey Bergman, his senior adviser,", + " traveled to the city to meet the New York Channel. In restaurants, hotel lobbies, and coffee shops near the United Nations, they would hold polite negotiations with the regime's representatives. But shortly after Otto's conviction in Pyongyang, Richardson sensed that the previously communicative foreign ministry was having its information cut off by Kim Jong-un's obstinate inner circle\u2014a transition, his team would later realize, that probably dated from Otto's injury. \u201cThey made it clear they could only convey our offers,\u201d Richardson recalled. \u201cThey were not decision makers at all.\u201d\n\nTo get real answers, someone would have to go to Pyongyang. So with the Obama White House's blessing,", + " Richardson and Bergman negotiated a visit by promising to discuss private humanitarian aid for North Korean flood victims along with Otto's release. Bergman, a former Israeli paratrooper with a therapist's sensitive demeanor, was chosen as the emissary, as Richardson would draw too much attention.\n\nIn September, Bergman achieved what he described as the first face-to-face meeting between American and North Korean representatives in Pyongyang in nearly two years. Diplomatic missions to North Korea are different from those to other countries, in which meetings take place across oak tables. In Pyongyang, rather, Bergman was squired around for four days to many of the same sites that Otto had touristed\u2014from the U.S.S.", + " Pueblo to restaurants. But as he chatted with his guides, he knew his informal offers were being conveyed up the chain. By the time Bergman sat down with a vice minister on his last day, he was expecting a positive outcome because of the excitement of his minders. But Bergman was told he wouldn't even get to see Otto. Still, afterward, his handlers reminded him, \u201cIt takes 100 hacks to take down a tree.\u201d\n\nBergman said he hoped he would not have to travel to Pyongyang 99 more times.\n\nBergman left with the impression that the North Koreans were considering ways that Otto could be released,", + " but first they wanted to see what happened with the climaxing 2016 presidential campaign.\n\nWhen Trump won, Bergman and Richardson recognized a golden opportunity to free Otto \u00e0 la the release of American hostages in Iran at the beginning of Ronald Reagan's inaugural presidential term. The two fringe diplomats put together a photo-op-worthy proposal for the Trump plane to pick Otto up in advance of the inauguration, before bureaucracy hemmed in the new president. They didn't receive a no from North Korea, which they knew from past diplomacy with them was often a signal of positive interest. \u201cThe challenge that we had was that we could not get Donald Trump,\u201d Bergman said.", + " \u201cWe tried to go through Giuliani, Pence, Ivanka. Nothing during the transition. I'm assuming they were in chaos over there. I don't think it ever crossed his desk, because I think he would have actually liked it.\u201d\n\n5. \u201cI Was Completely Shocked\u201d\n\nAfter the election, as Robert King transitioned into retirement, Otto's case was taken up by the newly appointed U.S. special representative for North Korea policy, Joseph Yun. When Yun came in, Pyongyang was still refusing to speak to the Obama administration, but shortly after the day of Trump's inauguration, the mild-mannered but steely former ambassador established contact with the New York Channel about releasing Otto.", + " By February 2017, a delegation of North Koreans was set to visit the States, but then Kim Jong-un orchestrated the assassination of his half brother with a chemical weapon in an international airport, which drew condemnation from America, scuttling the talks.\n\n\u201cListening to [Trump] deliberate on this,\u201d said a State Department official, \u201che sounded to me a lot more like a dad.\u201d\n\nBy April, however, relations had thawed to the point that Yun was able to persuade Secretary Tillerson to let him discuss freeing Otto face-to-face with senior North Korean officials, as long as no broader diplomacy was done. So Yun traveled to Norway to meet several high-level North Korean officials on the sidelines of secret nuclear negotiations,", + " conducted by retired diplomats to get around the lack of official contact. Yun and the North Koreans agreed that the Swedish ambassador could visit Otto and the three other Americans who were detained in North Korea. In the end, the proxy was reportedly allowed to see only one detainee\u2014but not Otto.\n\nYun continued to demand access to Otto, and one day in early June he was surprised by a call urgently requesting him to meet with the New York Channel. In Manhattan, the North Koreans informed Yun that Otto was unconscious. \u201cI was completely shocked,\u201d Yun said. He argued that given the young man's health, Pyongyang had to free him promptly on humanitarian grounds.", + " \u201cI came back immediately, and I told Secretary Tillerson,\u201d Yun said. \u201cAnd we determined at the time that we needed to get him and the other prisoners out as soon as possible, and I should contact Pyongyang and say I wanted to come right away.\u201d\n\nWhen Trump learned of Otto's condition, he doubled down on the order for Yun to rush to Pyongyang and bring Otto home. The North Koreans were unilaterally informed that an American plane would soon land in Pyongyang and that United States diplomats and doctors would get off. \u201cThe president was very invested in bringing Otto home,\u201d said a State Department official who was involved in the case and who was not authorized to speak on the record.", + " \u201cListening to him deliberate on this, he sounded to me a lot more like a dad.\u201d But, the official said, \u201cwe were very scared,\u201d for though the North Koreans eventually said the plane would be able to land, no one knew what kind of welcome the Americans would receive on the ground. Yun explained, \u201cThe North Koreans said we could send a delegation to see Otto, but that we would have to discuss some of the conditions of getting him out once we got there.\u201d And so Yun raced to assemble a diplomatic and medical team to save Otto.\n\n6. The Rescue\n\nMichael Flueckiger was used to calmly fixing horrifying situations,", + " having previously saved countless patients from gunshot wounds and car crashes during 31 years as a trauma-center doctor. He was also no stranger to dangerous overseas situations, for in his current position as medical director for an elite air-ambulance service, Phoenix Air, he had evacuated Americans stricken with Ebola from Africa. When his boss called to ask if he would help rescue Otto from North Korea, he briefly hesitated from fear, but he decided he couldn't ask any of his employees to go in his stead. Once committed, the challenge-seeking, mountain-biking 67-year-old began excitedly awaiting the mission.\n\nThe final go-ahead from the State Department arrived during an inconspicuous Friday lunch.", + " Phoenix Air immediately rerouted its best aircraft\u2014a luxury Gulfstream G-III jet upgraded into a flying E.R.\u2014from Senegal to its headquarters, outside Atlanta, where Flueckiger and his team got it loaded and airborne again in less than two hours on Saturday. Then they picked up Yun and two other members of the State Department in Washington, D.C., and flew to Japan. There they off-loaded everyone but Yun, one other diplomat, and Flueckiger\u2014for only those three had been authorized to enter North Korea. The next day, as the Gulfstream rocketed toward the edge of North Korean airspace, all the Japanese air-", + "traffic controllers could do was aim the plane at Pyongyang and tell the pilot to proceed straight for 20 miles, as there is no official flight path between the countries. Then the radio chatter faded out, and only static filled the airwaves for ten minutes. Finally, a voice speaking perfect English guided the plane's landing in Pyongyang. A busload of soldiers escorted the Americans off the tarmac, and the aircraft returned to Japan.\n\nThe Americans were chauffeured through the farmland outside Pyongyang to an opulent guesthouse complete with marble staircases, chandeliers, and a full staff, even though they appeared to be the only guests.", + " That day, Yun engaged in several rounds of intense negotiations with North Korean officials, trying to win Otto's freedom. However, Yun kept butting his head against the North Koreans' argument: Otto committed this crime, so why should he escape due process? In North Korea, disrespecting one of the ubiquitous propaganda posters is actually a serious breach of the law. The research organization Database Center for North Korean Human Rights confirmed a case of a factory janitor being prosecuted for bumping such a picture off the wall so that it fell and broke. As Andrei Lankov, director of the Korea Risk Group, said, if a North Korean did what Otto did,", + " \u201cthey would be dead or definitely tortured.\u201d\n\nFinally, Yun persuaded the North Koreans to let him see Otto. Flueckiger and Yun were shuttled to Friendship Hospital, a private facility that often treats foreign diplomats living in Pyongyang. In an isolated second-floor ICU room, Flueckiger was presented with a pale, inert man with a feeding tube threaded through his nostrils. Could this really be Otto? Flueckiger wondered, for the body looked so different from the pictures he had seen of the homecoming king.\n\nFlueckiger clapped beside Otto's ear. No meaningful response. Sadness flooded him. He had two children and struggled to imagine one in such a state.", + " Yun, too, couldn't help but think of his own son, around Otto's age, and about how the Warmbiers would feel when they saw their boy.\n\nTwo North Korean doctors explained that Otto had arrived at the hospital this way more than a year before and showed as proof thick handwritten charts and several brain scans that revealed Otto had suffered extensive brain damage. Flueckiger spent about an hour examining Otto, but the truth had been evident at first sight: The Otto of old was already gone. Though he had obviously improved since coming into the hospital (he had a tracheotomy scar where machines had once breathed for him), he was in a state of unresponsive wakefulness,", + " meaning he still possessed basic reflexes but no longer showed signs of awareness.\n\nThe North Koreans asked Flueckiger to sign a report testifying that Otto had been well cared for in the hospital. \u201cI would have been willing to fudge that report if I thought it would get Otto released,\u201d Flueckiger said. \u201cBut as it turned out,\u201d despite the most basic facilities (the room's sink did not even work), \u201che got good care, and I didn't have to lie.\u201d Otto was well nourished and had no bedsores, an accomplishment even Western hospitals struggle to achieve with comatose patients. But the North Koreans were still not ready to release Otto.\n\nNegotiations continued into the night.", + " Then, the next morning, Flueckiger and Yun were driven to a hotel in downtown Pyongyang, where the three other American prisoners were marched into a conference room one by one. The three Korean-Americans, all detained on charges of espionage or \u201chostile acts against the state,\u201d had had almost no contact with the outside world since being arrested, and they all cried as they dictated messages for their families to Yun. After only 15 minutes, though, each prisoner was escorted away. \u201cI was, frankly, disappointed we didn't get the others out,\u201d Yun said. \u201cIt was very hard to leave them behind.\u201d\n\nEarly in Trump's presidency,", + " Fred appeared on Fox News, reportedly because he knew that the president obsessively watched the network, to complain that the State Department wasn't doing enough for his son. \u201cPresident Trump, I ask you: Bring my son home,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can make a difference here.\u201d\n\nOnce they got back to the guesthouse, Yun found himself once more arguing with North Korean officials for Otto's freedom. Then Yun played his last card: \u201cI called my guys to bring the plane from Japan. I told the North Koreans we would leave with or without Otto. I felt there was no point in dragging on. I was 90 percent sure they would release him,", + " and that this call would bring an action forcing them to do so.\u201d\n\nShortly before the plane was to land, a North Korean official announced to Yun that they had decided to release Otto. The Americans returned to the hospital, and a North Korean judge in a black suit commuted Otto's sentence. Then the U.S. motorcade and the ambulance raced directly to the airport, through open security gates, and onto the tarmac where the Gulfstream waited. When the plane cleared North Korean airspace, the celebration was muted. The team knew they would soon have to face the heartbreak of turning Otto over to his parents. In the meantime, Flueckiger cradled Otto,", + " changed his diaper, and whispered to him that he was free, like a father soothing his baby.\n\n7. The Crusade for Otto\n\nTwo days after the return, Fred Warmbier took the stage at Otto's high school. He was draped in the linen blazer that his son had worn during his forced confession. Tears spangled his eyes as he said to the assembled reporters, \u201cOtto, I love you, and I'm so crazy about you, and I'm so glad you're home.\u201d He blamed the Obama administration for failing to win Otto's release sooner, and thanked Trump. When asked about his son's health,", + " he said grimly, \u201cWe're trying to make him comfortable.\u201d Sometimes he slipped into the past tense when talking about him.\n\nFrom the start, Fred had striven relentlessly for Otto's freedom with the same streetwise entrepreneurism he had used to eventually build a major metal-finishing business after going to work straight out of high school. He traveled to Washington more than a dozen times in 2016 to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry and other high-level politicians. But after a fruitless year of bowing to the Obama administration's admonitions to work behind the scenes, he decided that \u201cthe era of strategic patience for the Warmbier family [was]", + " over.\u201d Early in Trump's presidency, Fred appeared on Fox News, reportedly because he knew that the president obsessively watched the network, to complain that the State Department wasn't doing enough for his son. \u201cPresident Trump, I ask you: Bring my son home,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can make a difference here.\u201d Soon the administration had raised Otto's case into a signature issue.\n\nWhen Otto was returned in a vegetative state, Fred refocused his zeal on getting justice for him. To Fred, the evidence of torture seemed clear. The once vital young man was severely brain-damaged. His formerly straight teeth were misaligned, and a large scar marred his foot.", + " Doctors detected no signs of botulism, North Korea's explanation. And The New York Times had written that the government had \u201cobtained intelligence reports in recent weeks indicating that Mr. Warmbier had been repeatedly beaten while in North Korean custody,\u201d citing an anonymous senior American official.\n\nWithin 48 hours of his return, Otto had a fever that had risen to 104 degrees. After doctors confirmed to Fred and Cindy that their son would never be cognizant again, they directed that his feeding tube be removed. They lived at his bedside until, six days after returning home, Otto died.\n\nHundreds of people lined the streets to witness Otto's hearse,", + " and many made the W hand gesture representing his high school. Wearing an American-flag tie, Fred watched his son \u201ccomplete his journey home\u201d with a haggard stare.\n\nAfter a mourning period, Fred and Cindy appeared on Fox & Friends in September 2017, once more reportedly seeking to catch the president's eye, and called the North Koreans \u201cterrorists\u201d who had \u201cintentionally injured\u201d Otto. Fred graphically described damage to Otto's teeth and foot as the result of torture and demanded that the administration punish the dictatorship. Shortly afterward, the president showed his approval by tweeting \u201cgreat interview\u201d and noting that Otto was \u201ctortured beyond belief by North Korea.\u201d To lobby for the United States to take legal action against North Korea,", + " Fred hired the lawyer who represents Vice President Mike Pence in the special counsel's Russia investigation. In early November, Congress backed banking restrictions against North Korea that were named for Otto. And later that month, Trump designated North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, which would allow harsher future sanctions, stating, \u201cAs we take this action today, our thoughts turn to Otto Warmbier.\u201d\n\n\u201cBeing imprisoned was lonely, isolating, and frustrating,\u201d Kenneth Bae, an American who\u2019d been detained in North Korea, told me. \u201cI was on trial for all of America.\u201d\n\nAround the same time as Otto's death, U.S.", + " hostilities with North Korea were growing heated. This was the period of \u201cfire and fury,\u201d and of Trump and Kim comparing who had the \u201cbigger & more powerful\u201d nuclear buttons. Behind the scenes in Washington, dovish diplomats, like Joseph Yun, were replaced by hawks, like John Bolton, one of the architects of the Iraq war. The likelihood of conflict grew so real that an American diplomat warned a Seoul-dwelling friend in confidence to move his assets out of South Korea.\n\nOn TV and social media, and in official speeches, Republican officials cited Otto's death as a reason Kim Jong-un needed to be confronted. When making a case for a forceful response against North Korea to the South Korean National Assembly,", + " in November 2017, Trump said their common enemy had \u201ctortured Otto Warmbier, ultimately leading to that fine young man's death.\u201d In his January 2018 State of the Union address, Trump pledged to keep \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d on North Korea and to \u201chonor Otto's memory with total American resolve,\u201d while the Warmbiers wept in the gallery. Meanwhile, Fred and Cindy traveled the country reinforcing the narrative that Otto was tortured. As Cindy told the United Nations in New York City, \u201cI can't let Otto die in vain.\u201d In April 2018, the Warmbiers, seeking damages,", + " filed a lawsuit alleging that North Korea \u201cbrutally tortured and murdered\u201d their son.\n\nDespite how Trump and his administration boosted the narrative that Otto was physically tortured, however, the evidence was not clear-cut. The day after the Warmbiers went on national television to declare that Otto had been \u201csystematically tortured and intentionally injured,\u201d a coroner who had examined Otto, Dr. Lakshmi Kode Sammarco, unexpectedly called a press conference. She explained that she hadn't previously done so out of respect for the Warmbiers. But her findings, and those of the doctors who had attended Otto, contradicted the Warmbiers'", + " assertions.\n\nFred had described Otto's teeth as having been \u201cre-arranged\u201d with pliers, but Sammarco reiterated that the postmortem exam found that \u201cthe teeth [were] natural and in good repair.\u201d She discovered no significant scars, dismissing the one on his foot as not definitively indicative of anything. Other signs of physical trauma were also lacking. Both sides of Otto's brain had suffered simultaneously, meaning it had been starved of oxygen. (Blows to the head would have likely resulted in asymmetrical, rather than universal, damage.) Though the Warmbiers declined a surgical autopsy, non-invasive scans found no hairline bone fractures or other evidence of prior trauma.", + " \u201cHis body was in excellent condition,\u201d Sammarco said. \u201cI'm sure he had to have round-the-clock care to be able to maintain the skin in the condition it was in.\u201d When asked about the Warmbiers' claims, Sammarco answered, \u201cThey're grieving parents. I can't really make comments on what they said or their perceptions. But here in this office, we depend on science for our conclusions.\u201d Three other individuals who had close contact with Otto on his return also did not notice any physical signs consistent with torture.\n\nThe origin of Otto's injury remained a mystery. \u201cWe're never going to know,\u201d Sammarco said,", + " \u201cunless the people who were there at the time it happened would come forward and say, \u2018This is what happened.\u2019 \u201d\n\n8. The Probable\n\nDiscovering the truth of events that happen in North Korea is a task that even American intelligence agencies struggle with. But Otto's experience after his arrest is not a black hole, as it has often been portrayed. Through intelligence sources, government officials, and senior-level North Korean defectors, and drawing on the experiences of the 15 other Americans who since 1996 have been imprisoned in North Korea\u2014some in the same places as Otto\u2014it is possible to describe Otto's probable day-to-day life there.\n\nWithin the electrified fences of many of North Korea's notorious prison camps dwell up to 120,", + "000 souls, condemned for infractions as minor as watching banned South Korean soap operas. The human-rights abuses within have been extensively documented, creating a compelling case that they are among the worst places in the world. The lucky survive on starvation rations while enduring routine beatings and dangerous enforced labor, like coal mining. The unlucky are tortured to death. In Seoul, one North Korean, who had endured three years at a low-level camp for trying to flee the country, wept as she told me: \u201cNorth Korean prisons are actually hell. We had less rights than a dog. They often beat us, and we were so hungry we would catch mice in our cells to eat.\u201d She saw six to eight fellow prisoners die every day.\n\n\u201cI don't believe Otto was physically tortured,\u201d Andrei Lankov,", + " said in his office in Seoul. \u201cThe campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea's cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.\u201d\n\nBut American detainees escape that fate. When Otto finally opened his eyes again, he likely found himself at a guesthouse, which is where the State Department believed he was probably kept. At least five previous American detainees have been imprisoned in a two-story building with a green-tiled roof in a gated alleyway behind a restaurant in downtown Pyongyang, which is run by the State Security Department, the North Korean secret police. (Others have been kept at a different guesthouse, and at least three have stayed at a hotel.) The most used guesthouse is luxurious by local standards\u2014detainees can hear guards using its karaoke machine into the wee hours\u2014but Otto would have likely found its two-room suites roughly equivalent to those in a basic hotel.", + " And no matter how nice his suite, it was also a cell, for he would have been allowed out only for an occasional escorted walk.\n\nFor the next two months, until his forced confession, Otto would probably have been relentlessly interrogated; American missionary Kenneth Bae said he was questioned up to 15 hours a day. The goal wasn't to extract the truth but to construct the fabulation that Otto read off handwritten notes at his news conference. In the past, North Korea has spun false confessions from small truths, and in this case they may have construed a conspiracy from a souvenir propaganda poster that Otto had bought, according to Danny Gratton,", + " Otto's tour roommate. No previous American detainee has accused North Korea of using physical force to extract a confession, but if Otto protested his innocence, he probably received a warning similar to the one given to Ohioan Jeffrey Fowle, who was detained two years before him: \u201cIf you don't start cooperating, things are going to become less pleasant.\u201d As the journalist Laura Ling wrote of her five months in detention, \u201cI told [the prosecutor] what he wanted to hear\u2014and kept telling him until he was satisfied.\u201d\n\nEver since the sailors of the U.S.S. Pueblo were beaten in 1968, there have been no clear-cut cases of North Korea physically torturing American prisoners.", + " When Ling and fellow journalist Euna Lee sneaked over the North Korean border, Ling was struck as soldiers detained them. But once their nationalities were established, they were sent to the green-roofed guesthouse. American media, including The New York Times, have widely repeated the claims that missionary Robert Park was physically tortured, but Park himself has reportedly said that the story that he was stripped naked by female guards and clubbed in the genitals was fabricated by a journalist. On the contrary, the North Koreans have carefully tended to the health of Americans they have captured, caring for them, if needed, in the Friendship Hospital where Otto was kept;", + " 85-year-old detainee Merrill Newman was reportedly visited by a doctor and nurse four times a day. As a high-level North Korean defector who now works for a South Korean intelligence agency said, \u201cNorth Korea treats its foreign prisoners especially well. They know someday they will have to send them back.\u201d\n\nBut that doesn't mean that North Korea doesn't psychologically torture detained Americans\u2014in fact, it has always tried to bludgeon them into mental submission. Bae, Ling, and other prisoners were repeatedly told that their government had \u201cforgotten\u201d them and were given so little hope that they only learned of their impending freedom an hour before being released.", + " When I met former detainee Bae in the Seoul office of his NGO dedicated to helping North Korean defectors, he told me, \u201cBeing imprisoned was lonely, isolating, and frustrating. I was on trial for all of America, so I had to accept that I had no control and there was no way I could get out of the impending punishment.\u201d While some previous detainees were allowed letters from home, it seems that North Korea denied Otto any contact with the outside world. His only break from the interrogations was likely watching North Korean propaganda films. The psychic trauma of all this has sent previous detainees into crushing depressions, and even driven some to attempt suicide.\n\nIn the footage of his news-conference confession,", + " Otto looked physically healthy, but as he sobbed for his freedom, he was obviously in extreme mental distress. Two weeks later, in mid-March, as Otto was filmed after being sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, his body still looked whole, but his expression was vacant and he had to be supported by two guards as he was dragged out of the courthouse\u2014as if the life had drained out of him.\n\nUntil now, the next assumption about Otto's fate was that he had suffered severe brain damage by \u201cApril,\u201d as the first brain scan sent back with his body was time-stamped. Speculation suggested that the tragedy might have occurred at a special labor camp for foreigners,", + " where at least three Americans have performed their hard-labor sentences. There they were forced to plant soybeans or make bricks while living in spartan conditions, though, as Bae wrote, \u201cCompared to the average North Korean serving time in a labor camp, I was in a four-star resort.\u201d Certainly, it would have been more likely for any type of tragedy\u2014over-exertion under a furnace sun, a work accident, or even directed beatings\u2014to occur in that barbed-wire-enclosed valley a few miles outside Pyongyang. But Otto almost certainly never made it to the labor camp.\n\n\u201cThe staff at Friendship Hospital said they received Otto the morning after the trial and that when he came in he was unresponsive,\u201d Dr.", + " Flueckiger told me. \u201cThey had to resuscitate him, then give him oxygen and put him on a ventilator, or he would die.\u201d As Yun, the negotiator who helped free Otto, said, \u201cThe doctors were clear that he had been brought to the hospital within a day of his trial, and that he had been in that same room until I saw him.\u201d\n\n9. The Improbable\n\nThe previously unreported detail of when Otto was admitted to the Friendship Hospital changes the narrative of what could have happened to him. If Otto was \u201crepeatedly beaten,\u201d as the intel reports suggested, it would logically have been during the two to six weeks between his sentencing,", + " when videos of him showed no signs of physical damage, and \u201cApril,\u201d as the North Korean brain scan was dated. But Otto was apparently unconscious by the next morning. The coroner found no evidence of bludgeoning on Otto's body. And when one takes into account that the entire sourced public case that Otto was beaten derives from that single anonymous official who spoke to The New York Times, the theory begins to crack.\n\nIt is for this paucity of evidence that, though the public discourse about Otto's death has long been dominated by talk of beatings, there have been doubts among North Korea experts that the intelligence reports were correct.", + " Of the dozen experts I spoke to, only a single one thought there was even a remote likelihood that he had been beaten. \u201cI don't believe Otto was physically tortured,\u201d Andrei Lankov said in his office in Seoul. \u201cThe campaign to make Otto a symbol of North Korea's cruelty was psychological preparation to justify military operations.\u201d\n\nMany experts pointed out that though North Korea is often portrayed as irrational, the Kim family had to be \u201cboth brutal and smart,\u201d as Lankov said, to maintain its relative power on the world stage, especially for such a small, impoverished country. What incentive would they have to lose a valuable bargaining chip,", + " especially when they had never been so thoughtless before? To these experts, it made much more sense that Otto was treated like all other detained Americans and that an unexpected catastrophe occurred. But despite the experts' doubts, none of them could disprove the intelligence reports indicating that Otto had been beaten.\n\nHowever, a senior-level American official who reviewed the reports told me, \u201cIn general, the intel reports were wrong, as the medical examinations have shown. They were apparently not even correct about where Otto was or when he was beaten, for God's sake. Likely, the reports were just hearsay. Someone heard third- or fourth-hand that Otto was sick,", + " and that person decided he was beaten. The North Koreans have never tortured a white guy physically. Never.\u201d The official said he did not know of the Trump administration having other sources of information about Otto being beaten.\n\nIn the end, however, despite all the mystery still surrounding Otto, it is essential to remember two facts that endure as unyielding as gravestones: Otto's death and the grief of those he left behind.\n\nAnother senior government official told me, \u201cI can tell you that I've been in a lot of classified meetings about Otto, before and after his return. Beforehand, I heard some reporting that he was beaten,", + " but it wasn't from State or Intel, who never corroborated that, before or after the fact. But it's possible that there was intel I did not see.\u201d\n\nA congressional staffer familiar with the intelligence reports said, \u201cBefore we had Otto back in the United States, we just didn't know what was going on there. In the end, there was no definitive evidence whether or not he was beaten.\u201d The staffer claimed that the government never got further intelligence reports indicating Otto was beaten.\n\nThree days after the Times published its claims, The Washington Post also cited an anonymous senior American official rejecting reports that Otto had been beaten in custody. South Korean intelligence,", + " generally considered the spy agency with the best sources in North Korea, found no confirmation that Otto was beaten.\n\nBut if Otto was almost certainly not \u201crepeatedly beaten,\u201d then what put him in a state of non-responsive wakefulness? And why would the Trump administration allow these unverified rumors to flourish?\n\n10. A Theory\n\nWithout knowing about the revised time line of Otto's injury, experts I spoke to overwhelmingly identified some kind of accident\u2014for example, an allergic reaction\u2014as the most likely cause for Otto's unconsciousness. The likelihood that his brain damage happened immediately after the sentencing, however, raises the possibility that he may have attempted suicide.\n\nImagine what Otto must have been feeling after hearing that he would spend the next 15 years laboring in what he probably imagined to be a gulag.", + " After two months of being constantly reminded that the American government couldn't help him, he probably felt that his family, his beautiful girlfriend (who called him her \u201csoul mate\u201d), and his Wall Street future were all lost. What else could he look forward to but physical and mental suffering?\n\nAt least two Americans imprisoned in North Korea have attempted suicide. After failing to cut his wrists, Aijalon Gomes chewed open a thermometer and drank its mercury, later explaining that he had given up on America's ability to free him. Despite eventually having his release won by Jimmy Carter, Gomes was unable to escape his post-traumatic stress disorder,", + " and seven years later burned himself to death. An American official said that Evan Hunziker tried to kill himself while being held, and less than a month after returning home, he shattered his own skull with a bullet in a run-down hotel. Robert Park reportedly tried to take his own life on returning.\n\nEven if North Korea didn't beat Otto, that doesn't mean that he wasn't tortured, as the mental suffering the regime inflicted on him constitutes torture under the U.N. definition. As Tom\u00e1s Ojea Quintana, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights for North Korea, said, \u201cOtto's rights were violated on every level.\u201d\n\n11.", + " The Unknown\n\nThe first that Governor Richardson, the back-channel negotiator, heard of Otto's injury was upon the young man's release, and he was furious at having been deceived by Pyongyang. But a North Korean ambassador soon contacted Richardson to explain that he had not meant to lead him astray in negotiations and that he too had been kept in the dark. \u201cI believed him,\u201d Richardson told me. \u201cIn the 15 years I've been negotiating with him, he's always been honest.\u201d Senator Portman and sources working inside North Korea at the time also stressed that the foreign ministry didn't know. The minister who was responsible for Otto was demoted and eventually disappeared,", + " according to Michael Madden, a North Korea analyst who tracks its leadership. Even the guards on whose watch Otto was injured were likely sent to prison. All of which means that the full truth of what transpired is likely hoarded only by Kim Jong-un and his most trusted lieutenants, and that it may never get out.\n\nFor all the unknowns, one certainty is that the Trump administration allowed the narrative that Otto was repeatedly beaten to spread, long after it was clear those intelligence reports were almost certainly wrong. That the reports suggested that he was beaten repeatedly when there was not time for that showed they were unreliable. The lack of physical evidence of beatings was widely publicized.", + " The administration was informed of the correct time line, and it was well known among government officials who worked on the case. And both the senior-level American officials and the congressional staffer confirmed that the government never shared with them definitive evidence that Otto was beaten.\n\nNow, that's not to fault the Trump administration for applying maximum pressure on North Korea for an American citizen ending up brain-damaged in its custody: Such behavior warrants punishment. Nor is it to imply that the senior government official lied to The New York Times about the intelligence reports, as some analysts suggested to me; that person seems to have correctly described them. But if the maverick boldness that the administration displayed in rescuing Otto represents the best of Trumpism,", + " what followed once it was clear the reports were flawed encapsulates its troubling disregard for facts when a dubious narrative supports its interests.\n\nIt's impossible to say whether or not Trump had seen or parsed the nuances of the intelligence reports before he tweeted about Fred Warmbier's Fox interview, supporting that Otto had been physically tortured. Or when he declared, before the South Korean National Assembly, that Otto had been \u201ctortured.\u201d Perhaps those were just two more of the 3,001 false or misleading claims he advanced in his first 466 days in office, according to The Washington Post's Fact Checker database. Or maybe it was a conscious strategy.", + " Whatever it was, the misrepresentation helped push the U.S. closer to war with North Korea than it had ever been. Though soon, of course, the administration would choose a different path.\n\n12. The Use of Stories\n\nWhen Fred hugged Otto that first night in the air ambulance, he felt that he couldn't get through to him and that his son was \u201cvery uncomfortable\u2014almost anguished.\u201d But \u201cwithin a day, the countenance of his face changed,\u201d the Warmbiers said. Though there was no way that Otto could communicate with them, they wrote, \u201che was home, and we believe he could sense that.\u201d Otto,", + " they said, was finally \u201cat peace.\u201d\n\nWe tell stories so that we can make sense of irresolvable unknowns and then act. While no one can prove what happened to Otto in those final few hours, as Trump encouraged the narrative that Otto was beaten and the White House allowed speculation about possible beatings to spread, the administration gave people license to indulge their worst fears about Otto's fate and act accordingly.\n\nIn doing so, the Trump administration may have fostered misperceptions in the Warmbier family itself. During the year after highlighting the story that Otto was physically tortured, Trump praised Fred and Cindy as \u201cgood friends\u201d and invited them to high-profile events.", + " But Fred indicated on national television in September 2017 that he had no more knowledge of his son's case than that put out by the news media. In the lawsuit the Warmbiers filed in April against North Korea for Otto's death, they continued to assert evidence that he was repeatedly beaten. If they entertain the belief that their son's last conscious moments were spent in fear and physical agony as he was assaulted, that may be the result of the administration's unwillingness to acknowledge a different version of events, one that the facts support. But whatever they believe, what is clear is that they are loving parents, dealing with an unimaginably tragic loss,", + " who have been striving to honor Otto's legacy.\n\nWhen presented with the findings of this article, the Trump administration declined to comment.\n\nUpon learning that this article did not support claims that Otto was beaten, and included the theory that he may have attempted suicide\u2014a possibility that the family, through their lawyer, dismissed categorically\u2014the Warmbiers withdrew a statement that they had previously provided. Ultimately, they declined to comment for this story.\n\nIn the absence of proof, we all have to choose what we want to believe about Otto's tragedy. And in this political age, where truth seems enslaved to the agendas of the powerful, it is important to consider what story we believe and why.", + " After all, the stories we tell ourselves and others shape our own fates, and those of nations, the world, and other people's children.\n\nIn the end, however, despite all the mystery still surrounding Otto, it is essential to remember two facts that endure as unyielding as gravestones: Otto's death and the grief of those he left behind.\n\n13. The Summit\n\nFred Warmbier came face-to-face with those responsible for Otto's death at the Winter Olympics in South Korea. Since the beginning of 2018, North Korea, hamstrung by sanctions and spooked by full-on preparations for war in Otto's name,", + " had been trying to reset relations with the outside world. The centerpiece of this diplomacy was a \u201ccharm offensive\u201d at the February Games\u2014deploying squads of cherubic cheerleaders singing folk songs about re-unification, and Kim Jong-un's smiley sister shaking hands with world leaders. The North Koreans even reportedly reached out to ask if Vice President Pence wanted to meet her, while warning him not to highlight Otto's story. Instead, Pence invited Fred Warmbier to sit with him in the VIP box at the opening ceremony, not ten feet from Kim's sister. Fred barely even looked at her as he sat in grieving dignity, his sorrow rebuking her serene ambassadorial smirk.\n\nEDITOR\u2019S PICK\n\nIn March,", + " two top-level South Korean officials traveled to Pyongyang, where they feasted and drank traditional Korean liquor for four hours with Kim Jong-un, after which they were given a special message to deliver to Trump. The South Koreans rushed to Washington. On hearing the offer, and before consulting any of his advisers, the president accepted. Then one of the South Koreans informed the world from the White House driveway that the two leaders would try to resolve their nations' never-ended war in person.\n\nFrom that point on, the White House no longer focused on Otto's tragedy. In fact, it swung so far in the opposite direction that civil-rights groups complained about human-rights issues not being on the agenda for the summit in Singapore.", + " When the three remaining American detainees were released in May, Trump welcomed them home by saying, \u201cWe want to thank Kim Jong-un, who really was excellent to these three incredible people.\u201d\n\nThe story of Otto being brutally beaten had outlived its usefulness.\n\nIn early June, Trump and Kim shook hands in front of the red, white, and blue of both nations' flags. In a private meeting, Trump showed Kim a Hollywood-trailer-like video that laid out the choice between economic prosperity, if he gave up his nukes, or war. Then they signed a largely symbolic document after North Korea promised to denuclearize and America swore to not invade,", + " though there were no enforcement mechanisms in the document.\n\nAt Trump's post-summit news conference, the first question a reporter asked was why the president had been praising Kim, as the dictator had been responsible for Otto's death.\n\n\u201cOtto Warmbier is a very special person,\u201d Trump answered. \u201cI think, without Otto, this would not have happened.\u201d Then he said twice, as if it was doubly true or he was trying to convince himself: \u201cOtto did not die in vain.\u201d\n\nDoug Bock Clark wrote about the assassination of Kim Jong-un's brother in the October 2017 issue. His first book, \u2018The Last Whalers,\u2019 comes out next year.\n\nThis story originally appeared in the August 2018 issue with the title \"American Hostage:", + " The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier.\"\n" + ], + "length": 24497, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 73, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A Donald Trump rally in Albany on Monday night involved a raucous crowd of more than 10,000, a lot of talk about \"New York values,\" and at least one fight. Trump stopped speaking as protesters were ejected, saying \"Send him back home to mom\" in one case, the Albany Times Union reports. In another incident, a Trump supporter confronted a protester and shoved him in the face more than once before security took the protester away. \"I'll snatch anybody up if they yell in my face over anything,\" the Trump fan told reporters after the rally. \"I have my personal rights and my personal space.\" The protester has not been identified and police told NBC that no arrests were made at the rally. At the rally, Trump slammed the \"rigged, disgusting, dirty\" system in places like Colorado, where Ted Cruz won all the delegates over the weekend after, as Reuters puts it, outmaneuvering Trump \"in a series of state meetings.\" It's a \"crooked, crooked system\" that leaves real voters without a voice, Trump said. He also attacked Cruz for his \"New York values\" comments earlier this year. \"Nobody has values like us and the country loves New York,\" Trump said. Cruz, meanwhile, was campaigning in California, where he accused Trump of \"whining\" about the GOP contest being rigged, the AP reports. \"As we know in the state of California, whine is something best served with cheese,\" Cruz told supporters in San Diego. (Two of Trump's children have discovered that they can't vote in New York's April 19 primary.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has a selfie taken with supporters after speaking at a rally in Irvine, Calif., on Monday, April 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Nick Ut) (Associated Press)\n\nRepublican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has a selfie taken with supporters after speaking at a rally in Irvine, Calif., on Monday, April 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Nick Ut) (Associated Press)\n\nWASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 The Latest on campaign 2016 (all times Eastern Daylight Time):\n\n10:30 p.m.\n\nRepublican Ted Cruz is calling out chief rival Donald Trump for \"whining.\"\n\nThe Texas senator is seizing on Trump's complaints that the GOP nomination is \"rigged.\" Cruz went after the GOP front-runner while campaigning in San Diego Monday evening.\n\nCruz says,", + " \"As we know in the state of California, whine is something best served with cheese.\"\n\nAddressing Trump directly, Cruz says: \"Donald, it ain't stealing when the voters vote against you. It is the voters reclaiming this country and reclaiming sanity.\"\n\nCruz campaigned in California as most of other candidates in both parties focused on New York ahead of that state's April 19 primary.\n\nCalifornia doesn't hold its presidential primaries until June 7, but the state offers more delegates than any other.\n\n__\n\n8:30 p.m.\n\nDonald Trump's rally in Albany, New York, was interrupted several times by protesters.\n\nThe Republican front-runner spoke to approximately 10,", + "000 people at a downtown arena Monday night but had to stop five times due to demonstrators.\n\nTrump mocked the interrupters, telling one of them to \"go home to mom.\" He said another \"stands there smiling because he knows nobody's gonna touch him. He's protected.\"\n\nTrump implored his security team and supporters to not harm the protesters, though one of the demonstrators appeared to get in a brief shoving match with a Trump backer as he was being removed.\n\nTrump has kicked off his blitz through his native New York with a series of large, boisterous rallies. The state's primary is being held April 19.\n\n__\n\n8:", + "20 p.m.\n\nVermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is rallying more than 11,000 supporters in Buffalo, urging them to help create a large turnout in next week's New York presidential primary.\n\nSanders drew a crowd of more than 8,000 people inside the University of Buffalo's Alumni Arena and another 3,000 outside. He says voters in New York \"have the possibility of making American history\" in his bid against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.\n\nSanders says a large voter turnout will help him win the state, but warns that if there is a low turnout, \"we lose.\"\n\nSanders trails Clinton among pledged delegates and is hoping a victory in New York will propel his campaign forward in contests later this month and into the spring.\n\n__\n\n7:", + "35 p.m.\n\nDonald Trump is angrily denouncing what he calls a \"rigged system\" that is allowing his Republican rivals to siphon off some of the delegates he believes should be rightfully his.\n\nTrump is telling an audience in Albany, New York, that he is \"millions of votes ahead\" of Ted Cruz but is upset that the Texas senator swept all 34 of Colorado's delegates without a traditional primary vote.\n\nThe Cruz team outmaneuvered the Trump campaign at a series of recent state meetings to select national convention delegates, narrowing the path for Trump to clinch the nomination before the party convention this summer.\n\nTrump is also complaining about Louisiana,", + " where he won the primary but got fewer delegates than Cruz, \"who got his ass kicked.\"\n\n__\n\n7:20 p.m.\n\nDonald Trump is beginning his rally in Albany, New York, with a stinging attack of Ted Cruz's criticism of \"New York values.\"\n\nTrump says Cruz \"does not like the people of New York\" and had \"scorn on his face\" when he derided the state's liberal politics during a Republican debate earlier this year.\n\nTrump says the state's actual values were on display when it bounced back after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.\n\nOfficials at Albany's Times Union Center say approximately 10,", + "000 people are in the arena to listen to Trump Monday night. New York's primary is April 19 and the Trump campaign is aiming to win most of his native state's 95 delegates.\n\n__\n\n6:42 p.m.\n\nBernie Sanders is dropping by a Buffalo union hall to address workers who plan to strike against Verizon on Wednesday morning.\n\nThe Democratic presidential candidate tells members of the Communications Workers of America Local 1122 that they are showing \"enormous courage\" by demonstrating for job security and better pensions.\n\nSanders says the union members are standing up to \"the outrageous greed of Verizon and corporate America.\" The CWA endorsed Sanders in December.\n\nHe's holding a Buffalo rally on Monday night ahead of next week's New York primary.\n\n___\n\n5:", + "05 p.m.\n\nDemocratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is reiterating her promise to release transcripts of her paid speeches to Wall Street banks but only when other candidates agree to do the same.\n\nSpeaking to the New York Daily News editorial board on Saturday, Clinton said that she \"had reason to believe\" that Donald Trump had given speeches for \"rather considerable amounts.\"\n\nBefore the interview concluded, Clinton also took pains to criticize a plan that would cut federal counterterrorism funding for New York City.\n\n___\n\n5:05 p.m.\n\nHillary Clinton is acknowledging some of the consequences of the 1994 crime bill during a newspaper editorial board interview, saying that the legislation led to \"over criminalization\"", + " of non-violent offenders.\n\nSpeaking to the New York Daily News editorial board on Saturday, Clinton praised parts of the bill, which was a key achievement of her husband's administration. Clinton noted that the bill came at a time of high crime rates and included an assault weapons ban, put more police on the street and sought to prevent violence against women.\n\nBut she also agreed with critics who say the bill contributed to high levels of incarceration for non-violent crimes, like drug offenses.\n\nClinton acknowledged there was \"a real problem,\" but added that there were \"some positive changes that came out.\"\n\nShe urged for constant evaluation.\n\n___\n\n3:35 p.m.\n\nBernie Sanders is pointing to the Justice Department's roughly $5 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs over the sale of mortgage-backed securities,", + " saying it's a system that must be changed.\n\nDuring a rally in Albany, New York, the Democratic presidential candidate read part of an Associated Press story about the settlement resolving state and federal probes into the sale of shoddy mortgages in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.\n\nSanders said instead of the term \"shoddy,\" he said, \"the real word is illegal.\" He said \"this is the system that we are living in and this is the system that we have to change.\"\n\nThe Vermont senator is competing against Hillary Clinton in next week's New York presidential primary.\n\n___\n\n2:35 p.m.\n\nHillary Clinton is hitting rival Bernie Sanders on his gun control record,", + " saying he's failed to take a strong stand against stopping the spread of firearms.\n\nSanders has cited his background as a senator from Vermont as the reason for some of his votes against gun control measures, saying that rural states have a different relationship to guns.\n\nMost of the guns used in killings in New York, she tells an audience in Long Island, come from out of state. The highest per capita number of guns used in New York crime comes from Vermont, she said, prompting an audible gasp from the crowd.\n\nClinton said: \"This not, oh I live in a rural state we don't have any of those problems. You know what,", + " it's easy to cross borders.\"\n\nShe added that people who are \"dangerously mentally ill, they cross borders too and sometimes they do it to get the guns they use.\"\n\n___\n\n2:15 p.m.\n\nTed Cruz is spending his day campaigning in southern California, a state that holds presidential primaries for both parties on June 7, the last day of primary voting.\n\nThe Texas senator's appearance Monday was a reminder that regardless of what happens in New York's April 19 elections, the presidential nomination on the Republican side \u2014 if not for both parties \u2014 won't be decided for another two months.\n\nCruz was scheduled to appear at a rally in Orange County,", + " a Republican stronghold south of Los Angeles, before an evening appearance in San Diego.\n\nThe Texas senator has cast himself as more electable than Republican rival Donald Trump, in part because of organizational advantages in the complicated and tedious process of collecting delegates heading into the summer national convention.\n\n___\n\n1:40 p.m.\n\nVice President Joe Biden says Bernie Sanders wasn't being sexist when he said Hillary Clinton wasn't qualified to be president.\n\nBiden defended both Sanders and Clinton in an interview with the website Mic. He says they're both \"totally qualified.\"\n\nSanders last week questioned Clinton's qualifications in light of donations a super PAC supporting her has received.", + " Biden says that kind of attack is simply what campaigns do. He said Sanders never said Clinton wasn't qualified because she's a woman.\n\nBiden also said that Clinton isn't being held to a higher standard because of her gender. He says the U.S. is ready for a female president and that he wants to see one.\n\nBut Biden affirmed that he and President Barack Obama won't endorse either candidate in the Democratic primary. He says the party should decide its candidate.\n\n___\n\n1:02 p.m.\n\nHillary Clinton is casting rival Bernie Sanders as unprepared for the White House, saying the Democratic primary candidate \"has had trouble answering questions.\"\n\nClinton says she's looking forward to a debate in Brooklyn later this week,", + " saying Sanders has struggled to detail his foreign policy positions and plans to regulate Wall Street.\n\nShe adds: \"Sen. Sanders couldn't even answer questions about whatever his plan is.\"\n\nClinton also says the more aggressive tone taken by her opponent and his supporters reflects \"a growing level of anxiety\" in his campaign.\n\nThe former New York senator spoke to reporters at an Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens. She is in the midst of a campaign swing through New York City and the Long Island suburbs ahead of the April 19 primary.\n\n___\n\n12:40 p.m.\n\nHillary Clinton says Republican front-runner Donald Trump doesn't respect the diversity of his home city.\n\nClinton is mingling with southeast Asian community officials at an Indian buffet restaurant in Jackson Heights,", + " Queens, the home borough of the GOP front-runner.\n\nThe Democratic presidential candidate notes that Trump is from the area, \"yet he seems not to respect diversity.\" She promises to continue speaking out against him saying \"his words are hurting our country\"\n\nClinton, who was joined by Rep. Joe Crowley, is in the midst of a campaign swing through the city and Long Island suburbs ahead of the April 19 primary. Her campaign is counting on a strong showing from minority voters to beat rival Bernie Sanders.\n\n___\n\n11:05 a.m.\n\nA swing through upstate New York is providing Bernie Sanders with a fresh opportunity to contrast himself with Hillary Clinton on fracking \u2014 an oil and gas drilling method that's been banned in the state.\n\nIn a lengthy riff at a rally in Binghamton,", + " New York, Monday, Sanders hit Clinton for promoting fracking as secretary of state and only offering conditional opposition to the practice.\n\nSanders said eliminating the practice is critical in fighting climate change, one of his top issues. He said doing so requires \"bold leadership.\" He also said that Clinton has not \"led the opposition\" against fossil fuels but rather came on board at the end.\n\nEarly in the event, Sanders' crowd booed loudly when he said Clinton's name.\n\n___\n\n10:40 a.m.\n\nWisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is claiming to be thrifty in an email asking supporters to help him pay off more than $1 million in presidential campaign debt.\n\nWalker said in the fundraising plea sent Sunday that \"If there is one thing the American people learned about me during our presidential campaign,", + " it is that I am thrifty.\"\n\nWalker spent more than $90,000 a day on his 70-day run for president.\n\nWalker said in the email he's thrifty because he likes to use coupons and shop sales racks.\n\nThe email says anyone who donates $45 will receive a Walker presidential campaign T-shirt. But due to a lack of resources, size and color requests won't be honored.\n\nWalker says the shirts can be framed or made into a pillow or bag.\n\n___\n\n10:00 a.m.\n\nRepublican front-runner Donald Trump says his children will not be able to vote for him in the upcoming New York presidential primary because they didn't register in time.\n\nIn an interview on Fox News Monday,", + " Trump said his children, Eric and Ivanka, \"feel very, very guilty\" not to have registered, saying that they were \"unaware of the rules.\"\n\nTrump didn't provide further details on their failure to register, saying, simple, \"it's fine.\"\n\n___\n\n3:30 a.m.\n\nRepublican presidential candidate Donald Trump is blasting the way the country chooses presidential party nominees as \"corrupt\" and \"crooked.\"\n\nHis harsh criticism comes as Trump grapples with the potential of a brokered convention that he risks losing.\n\nSpeaking to thousands packed in a frigid airport hangar in western New York on Sunday, Trump ripped the byzantine fight over delegates at the heart of his party's nominating process.", + " He argued anew that the person who wins the most votes in the primary process should automatically be the GOP nominee.\n\nThe billionaire businessman, who has been leading throughout the GOP race, charged that \"what they're trying to do is subvert the movement with crooked shenanigans.\"\n\nHe's coming to terms with the political reality of chasing delegates ahead of the nominating convention. ", + " WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump lashed out at what he called the party\u2019s \u201crigged\u201d delegate selection rules on Monday after rival Ted Cruz swept all of Colorado\u2019s 34 delegates over the weekend.\n\nThe New York billionaire, who has been outmaneuvered by Cruz in a series of recent state meetings to select national convention delegates, said the process was set up to protect party insiders and shut out insurgent candidates.\n\n\u201cThe system is rigged, it\u2019s crooked,\u201d Trump said on Fox News on Monday, alleging the Colorado convention results showed voters were being denied a voice in the process.\n\n\u201cThere was no voting.", + " I didn\u2019t go out there to make a speech or anything, there\u2019s no voting,\u201d Trump said. \u201cThe people out there are going crazy, in the Denver area and Colorado itself, and they\u2019re going absolutely crazy because they weren\u2019t given a vote. This was given by politicians - it\u2019s a crooked deal.\u201d\n\nTrump has 743 bound delegates to 545 for Cruz, according to an Associated Press count, in the battle for the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination on the first ballot and avoid a messy floor fight at the Republican National Convention from July 18-21.\n\nBut both are at risk of not acquiring enough delegates for a first-ballot victory,", + " leaving many free to switch their votes on later ballots.\n\nThat has set off a fierce scramble by Republican candidates to get their supporters chosen as convention delegates and brought new scrutiny to the selection rules, which vary by state.\n\nTrump, who has brought in veteran strategist Paul Manafort to lead his delegate-gathering efforts, complained about Cruz\u2019s recent success at local and state party meetings where activists pick the actual delegates who will attend the national convention.\n\nTrump accused Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, of trying to steal delegates in South Carolina. Trump won the state primary in February, but Cruz supporters got four of the first six delegate slots filled at congressional district meetings on Saturday,", + " according to local media.\n\nCruz also succeeded at getting more of his supporters chosen as delegates in Iowa, where he won the caucuses in January, and at last week\u2019s state convention in North Dakota.\n\n\u201cYOU CAN BUY ALL THESE VOTES\u201d\n\n\u201cNow they\u2019re trying to pick off those delegates one by one,\u201d Trump said. \u201cThat\u2019s not the way democracy is supposed to work. They offer them trips, they offer them all sorts of things and you\u2019re allowed to do that. You can buy all these votes.\u201d\n\nU.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at an airplane hanger in Rochester, New York April 10,", + " 2016 REUTERS/Carlo Allegri\n\nTrump distributed a video of what he said was a Colorado voter setting his Republican Party registration on fire in protest of the process. \u201cGreat people being disenfranchised by politicians,\u201d Trump said on Twitter, adding the Republican Party was \u201cin trouble.\u201d\n\nGuy Short, a Cruz backer in Colorado who was elected as a Republican national convention delegate for the sixth time, disputed Trump\u2019s allegations.\n\n\u201cDonald Trump is a liar,\u201d Short told Reuters in an email. \u201cNobody was offered anything. In fact, I spent thousands of dollars of my own money campaigning to become a delegate because it\u2019s that important to make sure Donald Trump is NOT our nominee.\u201d\n\nRepublican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer told Fox News the process for choosing delegates had been set by states for more than a year and was no secret.\n\n\u201cNot understanding that is one thing,", + " but it\u2019s hardly rigged when it\u2019s done right out in the open,\u201d he said.\n\nCruz campaign spokeswoman Alice Stewart said Trump was insulting the process to distract from his losses. \u201cHe has a pattern of whining when he isn\u2019t winning,\u201d she said in a statement.\n\nTrump\u2019s organizational troubles even extend to two of his children. Eric Trump, 32, and Ivanka Trump, 34, missed the deadline for registering as Republicans to vote in next week\u2019s New York primary. State records show both are registered voters who are not enrolled in a party, ABC News reported.\n\nSlideshow (11 Images)\n\nFor already registered voters, any request to switch party affiliation must have been made by early October.", + " The deadline for new voter registrations was March 25.\n\nTrump was the target on Monday of a new ad by the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, that listed Trump\u2019s comments on women, Mexican immigrants and Muslims.\n\nBoth Clinton and rival Bernie Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, have tried to position themselves as the Democrat most capable of defeating Trump.\n\n\u201cDonald Trump says we can solve America\u2019s problems by turning against each other,\u201d Clinton\u2019s ad said. \u201cIt\u2019s wrong and it goes against everything New York and America stand for.\u201d ", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Image 1 of / 325 Caption Close\n\nImage 1 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 2 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 3 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 4 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 5 of 325\n\nImage 6 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y.", + " (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 7 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 8 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 9 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 10 of 325\n\nImage 11 of 325\n\nImage 12 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren, Albany Times Union Buy this photo\n\nImage 13 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren, Albany Times Union Buy this photo\n\nImage 14 of 325 Buy photo American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 15 of 325\n\nImage 16 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives the thumbs up after he addresses a crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives the thumbs up after he addresses a crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren, Albany Times Union Buy this photo\n\nImage 17 of 325 Buy photo Conservative radio talk show host sMelody Burns gets the crowd going during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Conservative radio talk show host sMelody Burns gets the crowd going during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 18 of 325 Buy photo Jennifer Crisafulli-Oberting speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. Jennifer was fired by Donald Trump on the television show \"The Apprentice.\" (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " less Jennifer Crisafulli-Oberting speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. Jennifer was fired by Donald Trump on... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 19 of 325 Buy photo American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 20 of 325\n\nImage 21 of 325 Buy photo A man takes a video of a man wearing a LGBT for Trump shirt before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less A man takes a video of a man wearing a LGBT for Trump shirt before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 22 of 325 Buy photo Renee Marshall of Pittsfield waits for a rally to start for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Renee Marshall of Pittsfield waits for a rally to start for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y.", + " (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 23 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump\u0092s motorcade heads to Albany after landing at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump\u0092s motorcade heads to Albany after landing at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Photo: Will Waldron Buy this photo\n\nImage 24 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald J.", + " Trump lands at Albany International Airport in a Cessna Citation X on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump lands at Albany International Airport in a Cessna Citation X on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Photo: Will Waldron Buy this photo\n\nImage 25 of 325\n\nImage 26 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump yells \"get him out\" as a protester is escorted out during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump yells \"get him out\" as a protester is escorted out during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times... more Photo: Lori Van Buren, Albany Times Union Buy this photo\n\nImage 27 of 325 Buy photo Progressive radio personality Jim Hightower, left, introduces Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, during a rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016,", + " at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) less Progressive radio personality Jim Hightower, left, introduces Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, during a rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y.... more Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 28 of 325 Buy photo Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, right, poses for a picture as he ends his rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)", + " Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, right, poses for a picture as he ends his rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 29 of 325 Buy photo Supporters of Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, chant his name during a rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Supporters of Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, chant his name during a rally on Tuesday,", + " April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 30 of 325\n\nImage 31 of 325 Buy photo Supporters of Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, cheer him on during a rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Supporters of Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, cheer him on during a rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 32 of 325 Buy photo Alyssa Ballard of Schenectady shows her support for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, during a rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) less Alyssa Ballard of Schenectady shows her support for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, during a rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y.", + " (Cindy... more Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 33 of 325 Buy photo Serena LaFave, 17, of Guilderland shows her support for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, during a rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) less Serena LaFave, 17, of Guilderland shows her support for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, during a rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Cindy... more Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 34 of 325 Buy photo Supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, wait for the rally to begin on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, wait for the rally to begin on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 35 of 325\n\nImage 36 of 325 Buy photo Supporters for Bernie Sanders,", + " candidate for the Democratic nomination, pass the time with a game of Hacky Sack as they wait for the rally to begin on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) less Supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, pass the time with a game of Hacky Sack as they wait for the rally to begin on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in... more Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 37 of 325 Buy photo Abigail Ritter of Guilderland,", + " right, holds her 19-month-old son Isaac Otter in a Bern Baby Bern sack as she waits for the Bernie Sanders rally to begin on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) less Abigail Ritter of Guilderland, right, holds her 19-month-old son Isaac Otter in a Bern Baby Bern sack as she waits for the Bernie Sanders rally to begin on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue... more Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 38 of 325 Buy photo Supporters for Bernie Sanders,", + " candidate for the Democratic nomination, catch the spirit as they rally to begin on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) less Supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, catch the spirit as they rally to begin on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times... more Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 39 of 325 Buy photo Mary Matthews of Cohoes wears her red, white and blue as she waits for the rally to begin on Tuesday,", + " April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Mary Matthews of Cohoes wears her red, white and blue as she waits for the rally to begin on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 40 of 325\n\nImage 41 of 325 Buy photo Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders addresses his supporters on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders addresses his supporters on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 42 of 325 Buy photo Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, address the overflow supporters outside on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, address the overflow supporters outside on Tuesday, April 11,", + " 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 43 of 325 Buy photo Supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, in the overflow area outside cheer on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) less Supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, in the overflow area outside cheer on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y.", + " (Cindy Schultz / Times... more Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 44 of 325 Buy photo Supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, in the overflow area outside cheer on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) less Supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, in the overflow area outside cheer on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times... more Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 45 of 325\n\nImage 46 of 325 Buy photo Supporters for Bernie Sanders,", + " candidate for the Democratic nomination, in the overflow area outside cheer on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) less Supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, in the overflow area outside cheer on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times... more Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 47 of 325 Buy photo Joanne Kathleen Farrell of Rensselaer, center, leads fellow supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination,", + " in a chant as they wait to enter the rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) less Joanne Kathleen Farrell of Rensselaer, center, leads fellow supporters for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, in a chant as they wait to enter the rally on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the... more Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 48 of 325 Buy photo Vendors hawk campaign buttons for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, on Tuesday, April 11,", + " 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Vendors hawk campaign buttons for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 49 of 325 Buy photo A supporter for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, wears her campaign buttons on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)", + " A supporter for Bernie Sanders, candidate for the Democratic nomination, wears her campaign buttons on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 50 of 325\n\nImage 51 of 325 Buy photo Mitchum White of Troy holds a sign while talking on his cell phone before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Mitchum White of Troy holds a sign while talking on his cell phone before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 52 of 325 Buy photo Phillip Gannon charges his phone near the bathrooms before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Phillip Gannon charges his phone near the bathrooms before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times... more Photo:", + " Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 53 of 325 Buy photo Men hand out posters to supporters before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Men hand out posters to supporters before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 54 of 325 Buy photo American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino is seen before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino is seen before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 55 of 325\n\nImage 56 of 325 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally at the Times Union Center in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally at the Times Union Center in Albany on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016.\n\nImage 57 of 325 Buy photo Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 58 of 325 Buy photo A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 59 of 325 Buy photo Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 60 of 325\n\nImage 61 of 325 Buy photo Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 62 of 325 Buy photo A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 63 of 325 Two Bethlehem High School seniors, both 18, say they are supporting Donald Trump. (Lindsay Ellis/Times Union) Two Bethlehem High School seniors, both 18, say they are supporting Donald Trump. (Lindsay Ellis/Times Union)\n\nImage 64 of 325 Buy photo People wait in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally with republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) People wait in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally with republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 65 of 325\n\nImage 66 of 325 Buy photo Vendors sell t-shirts outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Vendors sell t-shirts outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 67 of 325 Buy photo Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 68 of 325 Buy photo People wait in line before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) People wait in line before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 69 of 325 Buy photo Kailee Quinlivan of Ballston Spa wears a Donald Trump pin while waiting in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Kailee Quinlivan of Ballston Spa wears a Donald Trump pin while waiting in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y.... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 70 of 325\n\nImage 71 of 325 Buy photo The Albany Police mounted unit joins heavy security for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) The Albany Police mounted unit joins heavy security for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11,", + " 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 72 of 325 Buy photo A large crowd of supporters queue up for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) A large crowd of supporters queue up for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 73 of 325 Buy photo A vendor sells t-shirts outside the Times Union Center before a rally with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) A vendor sells t-shirts outside the Times Union Center before a rally with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 74 of 325 Buy photo Peter Potter of Delmar holds a book he hopes to get autographed as he waits in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Peter Potter of Delmar holds a book he hopes to get autographed as he waits in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 75 of 325\n\nImage 76 of 325 Buy photo Vendors sell books, t-shirts and pins outside the Times Union Center before a rally with republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Vendors sell books, t-shirts and pins outside the Times Union Center before a rally with republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 77 of 325 Buy photo Jeffrey Tew speaks of the U.S. Constitution to supporters queued up for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Jeffrey Tew speaks of the U.S. Constitution to supporters queued up for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11,", + " 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 78 of 325 Buy photo Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo:", + " Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 79 of 325 Buy photo Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 80 of 325\n\nImage 81 of 325 Buy photo People wait in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) People wait in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 82 of 325 Buy photo Patrick Rawlins, 11, of Hudson Falls poses for a photo next to police horses outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Patrick Rawlins, 11, of Hudson Falls poses for a photo next to police horses outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 83 of 325 Buy photo Diane DeJean of Missouri sells t-shirts and pins to people waiting in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " less Diane DeJean of Missouri sells t-shirts and pins to people waiting in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 84 of 325 Buy photo A Donald Trump supporter drives his car outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less A Donald Trump supporter drives his car outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 85 of 325\n\nImage 86 of 325 Buy photo,Jeffrey Tew, of Greenfield Center wore Continental Army outfit to Donald Trump's Albany rally. He spoke about the loss of American jobs and China. (Robert Gavin / Times Union),Jeffrey Tew, of Greenfield Center wore Continental Army outfit to Donald Trump's Albany rally. He spoke about the loss of American jobs and China. (Robert Gavin / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 87 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate John R.", + " Kasich moves to a meeting with the Senate GOP members after meeting the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) less Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich moves to a meeting with the Senate GOP members after meeting the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11, 2016 in... more Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 88 of 325\n\nImage 89 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich meets the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11,", + " 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich meets the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 90 of 325\n\nImage 91 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich meets the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union)", + " Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich meets the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 92 of 325 A protester from Women Against War carries a sign outside the rally for Gov. John Kasich at La Salle Institute in North Greenbush on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Paul Buckowski/Times Union) A protester from Women Against War carries a sign outside the rally for Gov. John Kasich at La Salle Institute in North Greenbush on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016. (Paul Buckowski/Times Union)\n\nImage 93 of 325 Buy photo Bernie Sanders supporters await the arrival of their presidential candidate at the Washington Avenue Armory on Monday. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Bernie Sanders supporters await the arrival of their presidential candidate at the Washington Avenue Armory on Monday. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 94 of 325 Buy photo Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders addresses his enthusiastic supporters on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)", + " Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders addresses his enthusiastic supporters on Tuesday, April 11, 2016, at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz Buy this photo\n\nImage 95 of 325\n\nImage 96 of 325 Buy photo Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders pauses to take a sip of water at his speech in Albany's Washington Avenue Armory on Monday. (Matt Hamilton / Times Union) Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders pauses to take a sip of water at his speech in Albany's Washington Avenue Armory on Monday. (Matt Hamilton / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 97 of 325 Buy photo Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks to his enthusiastic supporters in Albany's Washington Avenue Armory on Monday.", + " (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks to his enthusiastic supporters in Albany's Washington Avenue Armory on Monday. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 98 of 325 Buy photo Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, left, exits his plane on Monday, April 11, 2016, at Albany International Airport in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, left, exits his plane on Monday, April 11, 2016, at Albany International Airport in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union)", + " Photo: Will Waldron Buy this photo\n\nImage 99 of 325 Buy photo Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders\u0092 motorcade heads to Albany after landing at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders\u0092 motorcade heads to Albany after landing at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Photo: Will Waldron Buy this photo\n\nImage 100 of 325\n\nImage 101 of 325 Buy photo Tim Lighthall of Fort Plain and Peter Bakley of Troy wait in the cold outside the Times Union Center in Albany for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's speech Monday night.", + " (Robert Gavin / Times Union) less Tim Lighthall of Fort Plain and Peter Bakley of Troy wait in the cold outside the Times Union Center in Albany for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's speech Monday night. (Robert Gavin / Times... more Buy this photo\n\nImage 102 of 325 Buy photo Michael Dzieniszewski,48, of Jefferson, waits to see Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union) Michael Dzieniszewski,48, of Jefferson, waits to see Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union)", + " Buy this photo\n\nImage 103 of 325 Buy photo Supporters picnic with pizza as they wait in line for presidential candidate Donald Trump's Monday night rally inside the Times Union Center. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Supporters picnic with pizza as they wait in line for presidential candidate Donald Trump's Monday night rally inside the Times Union Center. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 104 of 325 Angela Veeder, 18, chants \"Feel The Bern\" steps away from the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016. Seeing Sen. Bernie Sanders, she said,", + " \"is, like, bigger than seeing Beyonce.\" (Lindsay Ellis/Times Union) less Angela Veeder, 18, chants \"Feel The Bern\" steps away from the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016. Seeing Sen. Bernie Sanders, she said, \"is, like, bigger than seeing Beyonce.\" (Lindsay... more\n\nImage 105 of 325\n\nImage 106 of 325 James Richards, 27, has sold Bernie Sanders gear for six months. \"So far, this is the biggest rally I've been to in New York for Bernie\" he said on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016, in Albany, N.Y. (Lindsay Ellis/Times Union) less James Richards, 27, has sold Bernie Sanders gear for six months. \"So far, this is the biggest rally I've been to in New York for Bernie\" he said on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Albany, N.Y. (Lindsay Ellis/Times... more\n\nImage 107 of 325 Buy photo Cider Bellys is distributing free \"Cider Bernie\" doughnuts outside the Armory where a large line of supporters had already formed by 8 a.m. (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union)", + " Cider Bellys is distributing free \"Cider Bernie\" doughnuts outside the Armory where a large line of supporters had already formed by 8 a.m. (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 108 of 325 A vender sells buttons for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Monday morning outside the Washington Ave. Armory. (Cindy Schultz/Times Union) A vender sells buttons for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Monday morning outside the Washington Ave. Armory. (Cindy Schultz/Times Union)\n\nImage 109 of 325 La Salle Institute in North Greenbush is set up for Gov.", + " John Kasich's rally on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Kenneth C. Crowe II/Times Union) La Salle Institute in North Greenbush is set up for Gov. John Kasich's rally on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Kenneth C. Crowe II/Times Union)\n\nImage 110 of 325\n\nImage 111 of 325 Buy photo People gather Monday for presidential canddiate John Kasich at La Salle Institute in Troy. (Kenneth C. Crowe II / Times Union) People gather Monday for presidential canddiate John Kasich at La Salle Institute in Troy.", + " (Kenneth C. Crowe II / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 112 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate John Kasich's advance team prepares for his arrival at La Salle Institute in Troy. The Ohio governor was expected to speak at the school at 2:30 p.m. Monday. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) less Republican presidential candidate John Kasich's advance team prepares for his arrival at La Salle Institute in Troy. The Ohio governor was expected to speak at the school at 2:30 p.m. Monday. (Skip Dickstein /... more Buy this photo\n\nImage 113 of 325 Monika Kirner-Ludwig of Albany,", + " left, said she was surprised by the crowd size and age composition at a Bernie Sanders rally in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Lindsay Ellis/Times Union) Monika Kirner-Ludwig of Albany, left, said she was surprised by the crowd size and age composition at a Bernie Sanders rally in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Lindsay Ellis/Times Union)\n\nImage 114 of 325 Gov. John Kasich's tour bus drives to a private event at the Fort Orange Club in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Cindy Schultz/Times Union)", + " Gov. John Kasich's tour bus drives to a private event at the Fort Orange Club in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Cindy Schultz/Times Union)\n\nImage 115 of 325\n\nImage 116 of 325 Gov. John Kasich's campaign bus passes a group of Sen. Bernie Sanders' supporters outside the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Lindsay Ellis/Times Union) Gov. John Kasich's campaign bus passes a group of Sen. Bernie Sanders' supporters outside the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016.", + " (Lindsay Ellis/Times Union)\n\nImage 117 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 118 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 119 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 120 of 325\n\nImage 121 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016?", + " Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 122 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 123 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 124 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 125 of 325\n\nImage 126 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 127 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 128 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 129 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 130 of 325\n\nImage 131 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 132 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 133 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 134 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 135 of 325\n\nImage 136 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 137 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 138 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 139 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the Bernie Sanders rally at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Caitlin Jansson Buy this photo\n\nImage 140 of 325\n\nImage 141 of 325 Outside the Bernie rally at the Armory in Albany.", + " Outside the Bernie rally at the Armory in Albany.\n\nImage 142 of 325 Outside the Bernie rally at the Armory in Albany. Outside the Bernie rally at the Armory in Albany.\n\nImage 143 of 325 Outside the Bernie rally at the Armory in Albany. Outside the Bernie rally at the Armory in Albany.\n\nImage 144 of 325 Outside the Bernie rally at the Armory in Albany. Outside the Bernie rally at the Armory in Albany.\n\nImage 145 of 325\n\nImage 146 of 325 Buy photo Bernie Sanders supporters wrap around a city block in Albany Monday's rally at the Washington Avenue Armory.", + " (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Bernie Sanders supporters wrap around a city block in Albany Monday's rally at the Washington Avenue Armory. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 147 of 325 Buy photo Bernie Sanders supporters lined up early at the Washington Avenue Armory Monday morning. The senator and presidential candidate from Vermont was scheduled to give a speech at the armory later in the day. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) less Bernie Sanders supporters lined up early at the Washington Avenue Armory Monday morning. The senator and presidential candidate from Vermont was scheduled to give a speech at the armory later in the day.", + " (Skip... more Buy this photo\n\nImage 148 of 325 Buy photo The first people at the rally for Bernie Sanders were Alan Martell, 44, of Bethlehem and his children. They arrived at 5 a.m. (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union) The first people at the rally for Bernie Sanders were Alan Martell, 44, of Bethlehem and his children. They arrived at 5 a.m. (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 149 of 325 Buy photo \"I wouldn't vote for Hillary for anything in the world,\" says Krista Marshall, 45, left,", + " who lives in Putney, Vt. (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union) \"I wouldn't vote for Hillary for anything in the world,\" says Krista Marshall, 45, left, who lives in Putney, Vt. (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 150 of 325\n\nImage 151 of 325 Buy photo Bernie Sanders supporters wrap around a city block in Albany Monday's rally at the Washington Avenue Armory. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Bernie Sanders supporters wrap around a city block in Albany Monday's rally at the Washington Avenue Armory. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union)", + " Buy this photo\n\nImage 152 of 325 Buy photo Bernie Sanders supporters wrap around a city block in Albany Monday's rally at the Washington Avenue Armory. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Bernie Sanders supporters wrap around a city block in Albany Monday's rally at the Washington Avenue Armory. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 153 of 325 Buy photo Stephen Tirpak arrived at 7:30 a.m. to see Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. Tirpak appeared to be the first Trump supporter to arrive. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Stephen Tirpak arrived at 7:", + "30 a.m. to see Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. Tirpak appeared to be the first Trump supporter to arrive. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 154 of 325 Buy photo Parking restriction signs were up on South Pearl Street in Albany Monday morning as the city prepared for 7 p.m. appearance of presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Parking restriction signs were up on South Pearl Street in Albany Monday morning as the city prepared for 7 p.m. appearance of presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 155 of 325\n\nImage 156 of 325 Buy photo The staff at the Times Union Center got to work early Monday in anticipation of Republican candidate Donald Trump's appearance at 7 p.m.", + " (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) The staff at the Times Union Center got to work early Monday in anticipation of Republican candidate Donald Trump's appearance at 7 p.m. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 157 of 325 Buy photo South Pearl Street was closed in front of the Times Union Center Monday in anticipation of Republican candidate Donald Trump's appearance at 7 p.m. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) South Pearl Street was closed in front of the Times Union Center Monday in anticipation of Republican candidate Donald Trump's appearance at 7 p.m. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 158 of 325 Stephen Tirpak arrived at 7:", + "30 a.m. to see Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. Tirpak appeared to be the first Trump supporter to arrive. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Stephen Tirpak arrived at 7:30 a.m. to see Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. Tirpak appeared to be the first Trump supporter to arrive. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union)\n\nImage 159 of 325 Buy photo Caleb Frezza, 12, of Glenmont raises his hand to ask a question of Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016,", + " in Troy, N.Y. Frezza was not called on by the Governor but said that he wanted to ask him how he would be better than President Obama. Frezza said that he sees things like the Affordable Care Act actually hurting a lot of people and wanted to know how Governor Kasich would do better for everyone. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) less Caleb Frezza, 12, of Glenmont raises his hand to ask a question of Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y.... more Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 160 of 325\n\nImage 161 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 162 of 325 Buy photo Capital Region residents listen as Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich addresses them at LaSalle Institute during a town hall meeting on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)", + " less Capital Region residents listen as Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich addresses them at LaSalle Institute during a town hall meeting on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul... more Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 163 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 164 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich listens to a question from Mark Haft of Colonie during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. Haft's question had to do with the Affordable Care Act, which Haft said works out well for him. Haft said he asked the question because he does not want to loose the Affordable Care Act unless Governor Kasich had something better.", + " Haft said he was Ok with the Governor's answer, \"I could vote for him\" Haft said. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) less Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich listens to a question from Mark Haft of Colonie during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. Haft's question... more Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 165 of 325\n\nImage 166 of 325 Buy photo People wait in line to enter LaSalle Institute before the start of a town hall meeting with Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) less People wait in line to enter LaSalle Institute before the start of a town hall meeting with Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski /... more Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 167 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich meets the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union)", + " Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich meets the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 168 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich meets the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich meets the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11,", + " 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 169 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich meets the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Republican presidential candidate John R. Kasich meets the media at the Million Dollar Staircase in the State Capitol building Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 170 of 325\n\nImage 171 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 172 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)", + " Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 173 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 174 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union)", + " Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 175 of 325\n\nImage 176 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich talks to Capital Region residents during a town hall meeting at LaSalle Institute on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 177 of 325 Buy photo Capital Region residents listen as Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich addresses them at LaSalle Institute during a town hall meeting on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union) less Capital Region residents listen as Republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich addresses them at LaSalle Institute during a town hall meeting on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Troy, N.Y. (Paul... more Photo: PAUL BUCKOWSKI Buy this photo\n\nImage 178 of 325 Buy photo North Greenbush police gather at La Salle Institute in North Greenbush ahead of Republican presidential candidate John Kasich's 2:30 p.m. campaign appearance. Kasich is expected to appear at 5:", + "30 p.m. at the Saratoga Springs Civic Center. (Kenneth C. Crowe II / Times Union) less North Greenbush police gather at La Salle Institute in North Greenbush ahead of Republican presidential candidate John Kasich's 2:30 p.m. campaign appearance. Kasich is expected to appear at 5:30 p.m. at the... more Buy this photo\n\nImage 179 of 325 Buy photo North Greenbush police gather at La Salle Institute in North Greenbush ahead of Republican presidential candidate John Kasich's 2:30 p.m. campaign appearance. Kasich is expected to appear at 5:", + "30 p.m. at the Saratoga Springs Civic Center. (Kenneth C. Crowe II / Times Union) less North Greenbush police gather at La Salle Institute in North Greenbush ahead of Republican presidential candidate John Kasich's 2:30 p.m. campaign appearance. Kasich is expected to appear at 5:30 p.m. at the... more Buy this photo\n\nImage 180 of 325\n\nImage 181 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Photo: Ben Crawley Buy this photo\n\nImage 182 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Ben Crawley Buy this photo\n\nImage 183 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Photo: Ben Crawley Buy this photo\n\nImage 184 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Ben Crawley Buy this photo\n\nImage 185 of 325\n\nImage 186 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Photo: Ben Crawley Buy this photo\n\nImage 187 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Ben Crawley Buy this photo\n\nImage 188 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Photo: Ben Crawley Buy this photo\n\nImage 189 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 190 of 325\n\nImage 191 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 192 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Photo: Ben Crawley Buy this photo\n\nImage 193 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Photo: Ben Crawley Buy this photo\n\nImage 194 of 325 Buy photo Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday, April 11, 2016? Were you Seen at the John Kasich rally at LaSalle Institute in Troy on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016? Photo: Ben Crawley Buy this photo\n\nImage 195 of 325\n\nImage 196 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 197 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 198 of 325 Buy photo Supporters hold up an American flag as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " less Supporters hold up an American flag as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren /... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 199 of 325 Buy photo Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 200 of 325\n\nImage 201 of 325 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally at JetSmart Aviation Services on Sunday, April 10, 2016, in Rochester, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll) ORG XMIT: NYMG142 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally at JetSmart Aviation Services on Sunday, April 10, 2016, in Rochester, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)", + " ORG XMIT: NYMG142 Photo: Mike Groll\n\nImage 202 of 325 Buy photo Carols Solomonoff rom Delmar waited on line for Trump's rally. \"Up here, you have seen so far the result of bad trade deals.\" (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union) Carols Solomonoff rom Delmar waited on line for Trump's rally. \"Up here, you have seen so far the result of bad trade deals.\" (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 203 of 325 In this April 4, 2016, photo, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Milwaukee Theatre in Milwaukee.", + " When Trump strode onstage for his final rally before the Wisconsin primary, he found an unfamiliar sight: hundreds of empty seats. The election eve rally, which featured the Republican front-runner\u0092s wife\u0092s much-touted return to the campaign trail, was intended as a capstone of Trump\u0092s three-day blitz through the state. A big-enough win the next day could have put Trump on a path to clinch the number of delegates needed to win the nomination ahead of this summer\u0092s Republican National Convention. Instead, the half-empty room was an ominous harbinger of Trump\u0092s fate the next day: he lost to rival Ted Cruz by 13 percentage points.", + " (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File) ORG XMIT: WX103 less In this April 4, 2016, photo, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Milwaukee Theatre in Milwaukee. When Trump strode onstage for his final rally before the... more Photo: Charles Rex Arbogast\n\nImage 204 of 325 Buy photo Tim Lighthall of Fort Plain and Peter Bakley of Troy wait in the cold outside the Times Union Center in Albany for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's speech Monday night. (Robert Gavin / Times Union) less Tim Lighthall of Fort Plain and Peter Bakley of Troy wait in the cold outside the Times Union Center in Albany for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's speech Monday night.", + " (Robert Gavin / Times... more Buy this photo\n\nImage 205 of 325\n\nImage 206 of 325 South Pearl St. near the Times Union Center is closed Monday morning ahead of tonight\u0092s rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) South Pearl St. near the Times Union Center is closed Monday morning ahead of tonight\u0092s rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union)\n\nImage 207 of 325 South Pearl St. near the Times Union Center is closed Monday morning ahead of tonight\u0092s rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.", + " (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) South Pearl St. near the Times Union Center is closed Monday morning ahead of tonight\u0092s rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union)\n\nImage 208 of 325 Buy photo Stephen Tirpak arrived at 7:30 a.m. to see Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. Tirpak appeared to be the first Trump supporter to arrive. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Stephen Tirpak arrived at 7:30 a.m. to see Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. Tirpak appeared to be the first Trump supporter to arrive. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union)", + " Buy this photo\n\nImage 209 of 325 Buy photo Parking restriction signs were up on South Pearl Street in Albany Monday morning as the city prepared for 7 p.m. appearance of presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Parking restriction signs were up on South Pearl Street in Albany Monday morning as the city prepared for 7 p.m. appearance of presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 210 of 325\n\nImage 211 of 325 Buy photo The staff at the Times Union Center got to work early Monday in anticipation of Republican candidate Donald Trump's appearance at 7 p.m.", + " (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) The staff at the Times Union Center got to work early Monday in anticipation of Republican candidate Donald Trump's appearance at 7 p.m. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 212 of 325 Buy photo South Pearl Street was closed in front of the Times Union Center Monday in anticipation of Republican candidate Donald Trump's appearance at 7 p.m. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) South Pearl Street was closed in front of the Times Union Center Monday in anticipation of Republican candidate Donald Trump's appearance at 7 p.m. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 213 of 325 Stephen Tirpak arrived at 7:", + "30 a.m. to see Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. Tirpak appeared to be the first Trump supporter to arrive. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Stephen Tirpak arrived at 7:30 a.m. to see Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. Tirpak appeared to be the first Trump supporter to arrive. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union)\n\nImage 214 of 325 Buy photo South Pearl Street is closed down for a Trump rally later in the day at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) South Pearl Street is closed down for a Trump rally later in the day at the Times Union Center Monday April 11,", + " 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 215 of 325\n\nImage 216 of 325 Buy photo South Pearl Street is closed down for a Trump rally later in the day at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) South Pearl Street is closed down for a Trump rally later in the day at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 217 of 325 Buy photo South Pearl Street is closed down for a Trump rally later in the day at the Times Union Center Monday April 11,", + " 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) South Pearl Street is closed down for a Trump rally later in the day at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 218 of 325 One of the first people in line for Donald Trump's rally on Monday, April 11, 2016, at the Times Union Center said he wants his Trump University CDs signed. (Times Union) One of the first people in line for Donald Trump's rally on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016, at the Times Union Center said he wants his Trump University CDs signed. (Times Union)\n\nImage 219 of 325 Buy photo Supporters picnic with pizza as they wait in line for presidential candidate Donald Trump's Monday night rally inside the Times Union Center. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Supporters picnic with pizza as they wait in line for presidential candidate Donald Trump's Monday night rally inside the Times Union Center. (Danielle Ferrari / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 220 of 325\n\nImage 221 of 325 Buy photo Michael Dzieniszewski,48, of Jefferson,", + " waits to see Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union) Michael Dzieniszewski,48, of Jefferson, waits to see Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center. (Lindsay Ellis / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 222 of 325 Buy photo,Jeffrey Tew, of Greenfield Center wore Continental Army outfit to Donald Trump's Albany rally. He spoke about the loss of American jobs and China. (Robert Gavin / Times Union),Jeffrey Tew, of Greenfield Center wore Continental Army outfit to Donald Trump's Albany rally.", + " He spoke about the loss of American jobs and China. (Robert Gavin / Times Union) Buy this photo\n\nImage 223 of 325 Buy photo A Donald Trump supporter drives his car outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less A Donald Trump supporter drives his car outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 224 of 325 Buy photo Kailee Quinlivan of Ballston Spa wears a Donald Trump pin while waiting in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Kailee Quinlivan of Ballston Spa wears a Donald Trump pin while waiting in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y.... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 225 of 325\n\nImage 226 of 325 Buy photo People wait in line before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) People wait in line before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 227 of 325 Buy photo Diane DeJean of Missouri sells t-shirts and pins to people waiting in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " less Diane DeJean of Missouri sells t-shirts and pins to people waiting in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 228 of 325 Buy photo Patrick Rawlins, 11, of Hudson Falls poses for a photo next to police horses outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Patrick Rawlins, 11,", + " of Hudson Falls poses for a photo next to police horses outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 229 of 325 Buy photo Betty Flood, left, buys a t-shirt outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Betty Flood, left, buys a t-shirt outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 230 of 325\n\nImage 231 of 325 Buy photo People wait in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) People wait in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 232 of 325 Buy photo Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 233 of 325 Buy photo Vendors sell t-shirts outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Vendors sell t-shirts outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 234 of 325 Buy photo Jeffrey Tew speaks of the U.S. Constitution to supporters queued up for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union)", + " Jeffrey Tew speaks of the U.S. Constitution to supporters queued up for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 235 of 325\n\nImage 236 of 325 Buy photo A large crowd of supporters queue up for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) A large crowd of supporters queue up for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11,", + " 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 237 of 325 Buy photo The Albany Police mounted unit joins heavy security for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) The Albany Police mounted unit joins heavy security for a Trump rally at the Times Union Center Monday April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: SKIP DICKSTEIN Buy this photo\n\nImage 238 of 325 Buy photo People wait in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally with republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) People wait in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally with republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 239 of 325 Buy photo Vendors sell books, t-shirts and pins outside the Times Union Center before a rally with republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Vendors sell books, t-shirts and pins outside the Times Union Center before a rally with republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 240 of 325\n\nImage 241 of 325 Buy photo Peter Potter of Delmar holds a book he hopes to get autographed as he waits in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " less Peter Potter of Delmar holds a book he hopes to get autographed as he waits in line outside the Times Union Center before a rally with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 242 of 325 Buy photo A vendor sells t-shirts outside the Times Union Center before a rally with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) A vendor sells t-shirts outside the Times Union Center before a rally with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 243 of 325 Buy photo Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 244 of 325 Buy photo Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Pins and t-shirts were ubiquitous outside the Times Union Center before a rally for republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 245 of 325\n\nImage 246 of 325 Buy photo A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 247 of 325 Buy photo A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 248 of 325 Buy photo A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 249 of 325 Buy photo A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) A line of people surround the buildings near the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 250 of 325\n\nImage 251 of 325 Buy photo Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 252 of 325 Buy photo Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 253 of 325 Buy photo Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Protesters hold signs and chant outside the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 254 of 325 Buy photo Posters are seen on the seats behind the podium at the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Posters are seen on the seats behind the podium at the Times Union Center where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a rally Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 255 of 325\n\nImage 256 of 325 Buy photo Former New York Congressman John Sweeney is seen before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Former New York Congressman John Sweeney is seen before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 257 of 325 Buy photo American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino is seen before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino is seen before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van... more Photo:", + " Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 258 of 325 Buy photo Men hand out posters to supporters before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Men hand out posters to supporters before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 259 of 325 Buy photo Phillip Gannon charges his phone near the bathrooms before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Phillip Gannon charges his phone near the bathrooms before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 260 of 325\n\nImage 261 of 325 Buy photo Mitchum White of Troy holds a sign while talking on his cell phone before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Mitchum White of Troy holds a sign while talking on his cell phone before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 262 of 325 Buy photo Renee Marshall of Pittsfield waits for a rally to start for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Renee Marshall of Pittsfield waits for a rally to start for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 263 of 325 Buy photo A man takes a video of a man wearing a LGBT for Trump shirt before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " less A man takes a video of a man wearing a LGBT for Trump shirt before a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 264 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump lands at Albany International Airport in a Cessna Citation X on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump lands at Albany International Airport in a Cessna Citation X on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Photo: Will Waldron Buy this photo\n\nImage 265 of 325\n\nImage 266 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump arrives at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump arrives at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Photo: Will Waldron Buy this photo\n\nImage 267 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald J.", + " Trump\u0092s motorcade heads to Albany after landing at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump\u0092s motorcade heads to Albany after landing at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Photo: Will Waldron Buy this photo\n\nImage 268 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump\u0092s motorcade heads to Albany after landing at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11,", + " 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump\u0092s motorcade heads to Albany after landing at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Photo: Will Waldron Buy this photo\n\nImage 269 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump\u0092s motorcade heads to Albany after landing at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald J.", + " Trump\u0092s motorcade heads to Albany after landing at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in Colonie, N.Y. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Photo: Will Waldron Buy this photo\n\nImage 270 of 325\n\nImage 271 of 325 Buy photo American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 272 of 325 Donald Trump arrived at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in a Cessna Citation X. (Will Waldron/Times Union) Donald Trump arrived at Albany International Airport on Monday, April 11, 2016, in a Cessna Citation X. (Will Waldron/Times Union)\n\nImage 273 of 325 Buy photo Jennifer Crisafulli-Oberting speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. Jennifer was fired by Donald Trump on the television show \"The Apprentice.\" (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Jennifer Crisafulli-Oberting speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. Jennifer was fired by Donald Trump on... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 274 of 325 Buy photo Conservative radio talk show host sMelody Burns gets the crowd going during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Conservative radio talk show host sMelody Burns gets the crowd going during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 275 of 325\n\nImage 276 of 325 Buy photo American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less American businessman and political activist Carl Paladino speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 277 of 325 Not supporting Trump for president -- but not entirely serious with his choice of shirt, either -- is Jim Washburn, 39, of Cohoes outside the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Lindsay Ellis/Times Union)", + " less Not supporting Trump for president -- but not entirely serious with his choice of shirt, either -- is Jim Washburn, 39, of Cohoes outside the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Lindsay Ellis/Times... more\n\nImage 278 of 325 Ashlee Jackson, 25, Waterford, a Trump fan for the last 10 years, said \"I want him to show us the way he's going to fix America\" outside the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Lindsay Ellis/Times Union) less Ashlee Jackson, 25,", + " Waterford, a Trump fan for the last 10 years, said \"I want him to show us the way he's going to fix America\" outside the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016. (Lindsay Ellis/Times... more\n\nImage 279 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany,", + " N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 280 of 325\n\nImage 281 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 282 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 283 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump yells \"get him out\" as a protester is escorted out during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " less Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump yells \"get him out\" as a protester is escorted out during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 284 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump yells \"get him out\" as a protester is escorted out during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump yells \"get him out\"", + " as a protester is escorted out during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 285 of 325\n\nImage 286 of 325 Buy photo Ryan Basile, 14, of Slingerlands uses binoculars to see Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump address the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Ryan Basile,", + " 14, of Slingerlands uses binoculars to see Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump address the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 287 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 288 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives the thumbs up after he addresses a crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives the thumbs up after he addresses a crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 289 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 290 of 325\n\nImage 291 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 292 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 293 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 294 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 295 of 325\n\nImage 296 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 297 of 325 Buy photo Members of the Secret Service show concern as a woman hugs Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as he interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less Members of the Secret Service show concern as a woman hugs Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as he interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 298 of 325 Buy photo People take photos with their phones as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " less People take photos with their phones as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren /... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 299 of 325 Buy photo People take photos with their phones as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) less People take photos with their phones as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren /... more Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 300 of 325\n\nImage 301 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives to speak in front of a crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives to speak in front of a crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y.", + " (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 302 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 303 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 304 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 305 of 325\n\nImage 306 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 307 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 308 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 309 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 310 of 325\n\nImage 311 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y.", + " (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 312 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 313 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 314 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 315 of 325\n\nImage 316 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 317 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 318 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 319 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 320 of 325\n\nImage 321 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 322 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday,", + " April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 323 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)", + " Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interacts with the crowd at the end of a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n\nImage 324 of 325 Buy photo Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11, 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd during a rally at the Times Union Center on Monday, April 11,", + " 2016 in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union) Photo: Lori Van Buren Buy this photo\n" + ], + "length": 31004, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 74, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 One of the hacking community's biggest names has died in San Francisco, reports Reuters. Barnaby Jack, thought to be in his mid-30s, was known as a \"white hat hacker\" because he focused on exposing security flaws in banking and medical devices that needed fixing, notes CRN. And he was about to demonstrate his biggest discovery yet\u2014that he could hack into implanted heart devices from afar. \"I'm sure there could be lethal consequences,\" he told Reuters in advance of this weekend's Black Hat convention in Vegas. It's not clear how Jack died. He had previously shown that insulin pumps were vulnerable to hacks, but his most attention-getting stunt occurred at the Vegas convention of 2010 when he caused two ATM machines on stage to spit out cash. He called it \"Jackpotting,\" notes the Chicago Tribune. He worked for Internet security firm IOActive, which tweeted, \"Lost but never forgotten our beloved pirate, Barnaby Jack has passed.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "Briefings\n\nKeynotes\n\nPresented by Gen. Alexander\n\nPresented by Brian Muirhead\n\nBriefings\n\nA Practical Attack against MDM Solutions Spyphones are surveillance tools surreptitiously planted on a users handheld device. While malicious mobile applications mainly phone fraud applications distributed through common application channels - target the typical consumer, spyphones are nation states tool of attacks. Why? Once installed, the software stealthy gathers information such as text messages (SMS), geo-location information, emails and even surround-recordings. How are these mobile cyber-espionage attacks carried out? In this engaging session, we present a novel proof-of-concept attack technique which bypass traditional mobile malware detection measures-", + " and even circumvent common Mobile Device Management (MDM) features, such as encryption.\n\nA Tale of One Software Bypass of Windows 8 Secure Boot Windows 8 Secure Boot based on UEFI 2.3.1 Secure Boot is an important step towards securing platforms from malware compromising boot sequence before the OS. However, there are certain mistakes platform vendors shouldn't make which can completely undermine protections offered by Secure Boot. We will demonstrate an example of full software bypass of Windows 8 Secure Boot due to such mistakes on some of the latest platforms and explain how those mistakes can be avoided.\n\nAbove My Pay Grade: Cyber Response at the National Level Incident response is usually a deeply technical forensic investigation and mitigation for an individual organization.", + " But for incidents that are not merely cyber crime but truly national security events, such as large-scale disruptive attacks that could be acts of war by another nation, the process is completely dissimilar, needing a different kind of thinking. This talk will discuss exactly how, detailing the flow of national security incident response in the United States using the scenario of a major attack on the finance sector. The response starts at individual banks and exchanges, through the public-private sector information sharing processes (like FS-ISAC). Treasury handles the financial side of the crisis while DHS tackles the technical. If needed, the incident can be escalated to the military and president especially if the incident becomes especially disruptive or destructive.", + " The talk examines this flow and the actions and decisions within the national security apparatus, concluding with the pros and cons of this approach and comparing it to the process in other key countries.\n\nPresented by Jason Healey\n\nAndroid: one root to own them all This presentation is a case study showcasing the technical details of Android security bug 8219321, disclosed to Google in February 2013. The vulnerability involves discrepancies in how Android applications are cryptographically verified & installed, allowing for APK code modification without breaking the cryptographic signature; that in turn is a simple step away from system access & control. The vulnerability affects a wide number of Android devices,", + " across generations & architectures, with little to no modifications of the exploit. The presentation will review how the vulnerability was located, how an exploit was created, and why the exploit works, giving you insight into the vulnerability problem and the exploitation process. Working PoCs for major Android device vendors will be made available to coincide with the presentation.\n\nPresented by Jeff Forristal\n\nBinaryPig - Scalable Malware Analytics in Hadoop Over the past 2.5 years Endgame received 20M samples of malware equating to roughly 9.5 TB of binary data. In this, we\u2019re not alone. McAfee reports that it currently receives roughly 100,", + "000 malware samples per day and received roughly 10M samples in the last quarter of 2012 [1]. Its total corpus is estimated to be about 100M samples. VirusTotal receives between 300k and 600k unique files per day, and of those roughly one-third to half are positively identified as malware [2]. This huge volume of malware offers both challenges and opportunities for security research especially applied machine learning. Endgame performs static analysis on malware in order to extract feature sets used for performing large-scale machine learning. Since malware research has traditionally been the domain of reverse engineers, most existing malware analysis tools were designed to process single binaries or multiple binaries on a single computer and are unprepared to confront terabytes of malware simultaneously.", + " There is no easy way for security researchers to apply static analysis techniques at scale; companies and individuals that want to pursue this path are forced to create their own solutions. Our early attempts to process this data did not scale well with the increasing flood of samples. As the size of our malware collection increased, the system became unwieldy and hard to manage, especially in the face of hardware failures. Over the past two years we refined this system into a dedicated framework based on Hadoop so that our large-scale studies are easier to perform and are more repeatable over an expanding dataset. To address this problem, we will present our open framework, BinaryPig,", + " as well as some example uses of this technology to perform a multiyear, multi-terabyte, multimillion-sample malware census. This framework is built over Apache Hadoop, Apache Pig, and Python. It addresses many issues of scalable malware processing, including dealing with increasingly large data sizes, improving workflow development speed, and enabling parallel processing of binary files with most pre-existing tools. It is also modular and extensible, in the hope that it will aid security researchers and academics in handling ever-larger amounts of malware. In addition, we will demonstrate the results of our exploration and the techniques used to derive these results. The framework, analysis modules,", + " and some example applications will be released as open source (Apache 2.0 License) at Blackhat. http://www.darkreading.com/identityandaccessmanagement/167901114/security/attacksbrea ches/240006702/mcafeecloseto100knewmalwaresamplesperdayinq2.html https://www.virustotal.com/en/statistics/ as of 4/9/2013\n\nBIOS Security In 2011 the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) released a draft of special publication 800-155. This document provides a more detailed description than the Trusted Platform Module (TPM)", + " PC client specification for content that should be measured in the BIOS to provide an adequate Static Root of Trust for Measurement (SRTM). To justify the importance of 800-155, in this talk we look at the implementation of the SRTM from a vendor's pre-800-155 laptop. We discuss how the BIOS and thus SRTM can be manipulated either due to a configuration that does not enable signed BIOS updates, or via an exploit we discovered that allows for BIOS reflash even in the presence of a signed update requirement. We also show how a 51 byte patch to the SRTM can cause it to provide a forged measurement to the TPM indicating that the BIOS is pristine.", + " If a TPM Quote is used to query the boot state of the system, this TPM-signed falsification will then serve as the root of misplaced trust. We also show how reflashing the BIOS may not necessarily remove this trust-subverting malware. To fix the un-trustworthy SRTM we apply an academic technique whereby the BIOS software indicates its integrity through a timing side-channel.\n\nBlack-Box Assessment of Pseudorandom Algorithms Last year at Black Hat, Argyros and Kiayias devastated all things pseudorandom in open-source PHP applications. This year, we're bringing PRNG attacks to the masses. We'll point out flaws in many of the most common non-cryptographic pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs)", + " and examine how to identify a PRNG based on a black-box analysis of application output. In many cases, most or all of the PRNG's internal state can be recovered, enabling determination of past output and prediction of future output. We'll present algorithms that run many orders of magnitude faster than a brute-force search, including reversing and seeking the PRNG stream in constant time. Finally, of course, we'll demonstrate everything and give away our tool so that you can perform the attacks during your own assessments.\n\nBlackBerryOS 10 from a security perspective BlackBerry prides itself with being a strong contender in the field of secure mobile platforms. While traditionally BlackBerryOS was based on a proprietary RTOS with a JVM propped on top,", + " the architecture was completely overhauled with BlackBerryOS 10. Now the base operating system is the formerly off-the-shelf RTOS QNX, which doesn't exactly have an excellent security track record. Moreover, for the first time in BBOS history, native code applications are allowed on the platform. This talk will present an analysis of the attack surface of BBOS 10, considering both ways to escalate privileges locally and routes for remote entry. Moreover, since exploitation is only half the work of offense, we'll show ways for rootkits to persist on the device. Last but not least we will settle whether BlackBerry Balance really holds what it promises:", + " are mobile devices really ready to securely separate crucial business data from Angry Birds?\n\nPresented by Ralf-Philipp Weinmann\n\nBluetooth Smart: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and The Fix! Bluetooth Smart, AKA Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE), is a new modulation mode and link-layer packet format defined in Bluetooth 4.0. A new class of low-power devices and high-end smartphones are already on the market using this protocol. Applications include everything from fitness devices to wireless door locks. The Good: Bluetooth Smart is well-designed and good at what it does. We explain its workings from the PHY layer (raw RF)", + " all the way to the application layer. The Bad: Bluetooth Smart's key exchange is weak. We will perform a live demonstration of sniffing and recovering encryption keys using open source tools we developed. The Ugly: A passive eavesdropper can decrypt all communications with a sniffed encryption key using our tools. The Fix: We implement Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman to exchange a key in-band. This backward-compatible fix renders the protocol secure against passive eavesdroppers.\n\nPresented by Mike Ryan\n\nBochspwn: Identifying 0-days via System-wide Memory Access Pattern Analysis Throughout the last two decades, the field of automated vulnerability discovery has evolved into the advanced state we have today:", + " effective dynamic analysis is achieved with a plethora of complex, privately developed fuzzers dedicated to specific products, file formats or protocols, with source code and binary-level static analysis slowly catching up, yet already proving useful in specific scenarios. Due to market demand and general ease of access, the efforts have been primarily focused around client software, effectively limiting kernel code coverage to a few generic syscall and IOCTL fuzzers. Considering the current impact of ring-0 security on the overall system security posture and number of kernel-specific bug classes, we would like to propose a novel, dynamic approach to locating subtle kernel security flaws that would likely otherwise remain unnoticed for years. The presentation will introduce the concept of identifying vulnerabilities in operating systems\u2019 kernels by employing dynamic CPU-level instrumentation over a live system session,", + " on the example of using memory access patterns to extract information about potential race conditions in interacting with user-mode memory. We will discuss several different ways to implement the idea, with special emphasis on the \u201cBochspwn\u201d project we developed last year and successfully used to discover around 50 local elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in the Windows kernel so far, with many of them already addressed in the ms13-016, ms13-017, ms13-031 and ms13-036 security bulletins. The tool itself will be open-sourced during the conference, thus allowing a wider audience to test and further develop the approach.\n\nBugalyze.com - Detecting Bugs Using Decompilation and Data Flow Analysis Bugwise is a free online web service at www.bugalyze.com to perform static analysis of binary executables to detect software bugs and vulnerabilities.", + " It detects bugs using a combination of decompilation to recover high level information, and data flow analysis to discover issues such as use-after-frees and double frees. Bugwise has been developed over the past several years and is implemented as a series of modules in a greater system that performs other binary analysis tasks such as malware detection. This entire system consists of more than 100,000 lines of C++ code and a scalable load balanced multi-node Amazon EC2 cluster. In this talk, I will explain how Bugwise works. The system is still in the development stage but has successfully found a number of real bugs and vulnerabilities in Debian Linux.", + " This includes double free, use-after-free, and over 50 getenv(,strcpy) bugs statically found from scanning the entire Debian repository.\n\nPresented by Silvio Cesare\n\nBuying into the Bias: Why Vulnerability Statistics Suck Academic researchers, journalists, security vendors, software vendors, and other enterprising... uh... enterprises often analyze vulnerability statistics using large repositories of vulnerability data, such as CVE, OSVDB, and others. These stats are claimed to demonstrate trends in disclosure, such as the number or type of vulnerabilities, or their relative severity. Worse, they are often (mis)used to compare competing products to assess which one offers the best security.", + " Most of these statistical analyses are faulty or just pure hogwash. They use the easily-available, but drastically misunderstood data to craft irrelevant questions based on wild assumptions, while never figuring out (or even asking us about) the limitations of the data. This leads to a wide variety of bias that typically goes unchallenged, that ultimately forms statistics that make headlines and, far worse, are used for budget and spending. As maintainers of two well-known vulnerability information repositories, we're sick of hearing about sloppy research after it's been released, and we're not going to take it any more. We will give concrete examples of the misuses and abuses of vulnerability statistics over the years,", + " revealing which studies do it right (rather, the least wrong), and how to judge future claims so that you can make better decisions based on these \"studies.\" We will cover all the kinds of documented and undocumented bias that can exist in a vulnerability data source; how variations in counting hurt comparative analyses; and all the ways that vulnerability information is observed, cataloged, and annotated. Steve will provide vendor-neutral, friendly, supportive suggestions to the industry. Jericho will do no such thing.\n\nCombating the Insider Threat at the FBI: Real World Lessons Learned What do T.S. Eliot, Puxatony Phil, eugenics,", + " DLP, crowdsourcing, black swans, and narcissism have in common? They are all key concepts for an effective insider threat program. Come hear how the FBI uses a surprising variety of methods to combat insiders. In this session the FBI will provide five key lessons learned about effective detection and deterrence techniques used in the FBI's insider threat program developed over the last decade. The talk will provide insight on how our nation's premier law enforcement agency is detecting and deterring insider threat using a variety of techniques and technologies. This session will provide unique lessons learned from building a real world, operational insider threat monitoring and response program.\n\nPresented by Patrick Reidy\n\nCompromising Industrial Facilities From 40 Miles Away The evolution of wireless technologies has allowed industrial automation and control systems (IACS)", + " to become strategic assets for companies that rely on processing plants and facilities in industries such as energy production, oil, gas, water, utilities, refining, and petrochemical distribution and processing. Effective wireless sensor networks have enabled these companies to reduce implementation, maintenance, and equipment costs and enhance personal safety by enabling new topologies for remote monitoring and administration in hazardous locations. However, the manner in which sensor networks handle and control cryptographic keys is very different from the way in which they are handled in traditional business networks. Sensor networks involve large numbers of sensor nodes with limited hardware capabilities, so the distribution and revocation of keys is not a trivial task.", + " In this presentation, we review the most commonly implemented key distribution schemes, their weaknesses, and how vendors can more effectively align their designs with key distribution solutions. We also demonstrate some attacks that exploit key distribution vulnerabilities, which we recently discovered in every wireless device developed over the past few years by three leading industrial wireless automation solution providers. These devices are widely used by many energy, oil, water, nuclear, natural gas, and refined petroleum companies. An untrusted user or group within a 40-mile range could read from and inject data into these devices using radio frequency (RF) transceivers. A remotely and wirelessly exploitable memory corruption bug could disable all the sensor nodes and forever shut down an entire facility.", + " When sensors and transmitters are attacked, remote sensor measurements on which critical decisions are made can be modified. This can lead to unexpected, harmful, and dangerous consequences.\n\nCreepyDOL: Cheap, Distributed Stalking Are you a person with a few hundred dollars and an insatiable curiosity about your neighbors, who is fed up with the hard work of tracking your target's every move in person? Good news! You, too, can learn the intimate secrets and continuous physical location of an entire city from the comfort of your desk! CreepyDOL is a distributed sensing and data mining system combining very-low-cost sensors, open-source software,", + " and a focus on user experience to provide personnel identification, tracking, and analysis without sending any data to the targets. In other words, it takes you from hand-crafted, artisan skeeviness to big-box commodity creepiness, and enables government-level total awareness for about $500 of off-the-shelf hardware.\n\nPresented by Brendan O'Connor\n\nDefending Networks with Incomplete Information: A Machine Learning Approach Let's face it: we may win some battles, but we are losing the war pretty badly. Regardless of the advances in malware and targeted attacks detection technologies, our top security practitioners can only do so much in a 24-hour day;", + " even less, if you let them eat and sleep. On the other hand, there is a severe shortage of capable people to do \"simple\" security monitoring effectively, let alone complex incident detection and response. Enter the use of Machine Learning as a way to automatically prioritize and classify potential events and attacks as something could potentially be blocked automatically, is clearly benign, or is really worth the time of your analyst. On this presentation we will present publicly for the first time an actual implementation of those concepts, in the form of a free-to-use web service. It leverages OSINT and knowledge about the spatial distribution of the Internet to generate a fluid and constantly updated classifier that pinpoints areas of interest on submitted network traffic logs.\n\nPresented by Alexandre Pinto\n\nDissecting CSRF Attacks & Countermeasures Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)", + " remains a significant threat to web apps and user data. Current countermeasures like request nonces can be cumbersome to deploy correctly and difficult to apply to a site retroactively. Detecting these vulns with automated tools can be equally difficult to do accurately. The presentation starts with a demonstration of how to model attacks to validate whether different kinds of countermeasures are implemented correctly. It includes a tool and code to show how to detect these vulns with few false positives. Then we explore how CSRF could be prevented at the HTTP layer by proposing a new header-based policy, similar to the intent of Content Security Policy. This new policy introduces a concept called Storage Origin Security (SOS)", + " for cookies and session objects that foils many kinds of CSRF attacks without burdening the site with HTML modifications. The solution focuses on simplicity to make it easier to retrofit on current apps, but requires browsers to support a new client-side security control. We show how this trade-off could be a quicker way to improving security on the web.\n\nEnd-to-End Analysis of a Domain Generating Algorithm Malware Family Select malware families have used Domain Generating Algorithms (DGAs) over the past few years in an effort to evade traditional domain blacklists, allow for fast-flux domain registration and usage, and evade analysts\u2019 abilities to predict attackers\u2019 control servers.", + " While novel work has been done by both private industry and academia with respect to detecting DGA-related network traffic, this presentation demonstrates end-to-end analysis of a DGA malware family, from binary deobfuscation to DGA analysis, to sinkholing, to domain registrant research, to attribution of the malware\u2019s author and accomplices. The malware family discussed in this presentation has thousands of active variants currently running on the Internet and has managed to stay off of the radar of all antivirus firms. This presentation will bring to light how this malware is tied to an underground campaign that has been active for at least the past six years.\n\nPresented by Jason Geffner\n\nEnergy Fraud and Orchestrated Blackouts:", + " Issues with Wireless Metering Protocols (wM-Bus) Government requirements, new business cases, and consumer behavioral changes drive energy market players to improve the overall management of energy infrastructures. While the energy infrastructure is steadily maintained and improved, some significant changes have been introduced to the power grids of late. Actually, the significance of the changes could be compared to the early days of the Internet where computers started to become largely interconnected. Naturally, questions arise whether a grid composed of so many interacting components can still meet today's requirements for reliability, availability, and privacy. Nations absolutely recognize the criticality of the energy infrastructure for their economic and political stability.", + " Therefore, various initiatives to ensure reliability and availability of their energy infrastructures are being driven at nation as well as at nation union levels. In order to contribute to the evaluation of national cyber security risks, the author decided to conduct a security analysis in the field of smart energy. Utilities have started to introduce new field device technology - smart meters. As the name implies, smart meters do support many more use cases than any old conventional electricity meter did. Not only does the new generation of meters support fine granular remote data reading, but it also facilitates remote load control or remote software updates. Hence, to build a secure advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), communication protocols must support bi-directional data transmission and protect meter data and control commands in transit.", + " Therefore, analysis of smart metering protocols is of great interest. The work presented has analyzed the security of the Meter Bus (M-Bus) as specified within the relevant standards. The M-Bus is very popular in remote meter reading and has its roots in the heat metering industries. It has continuously been adopted to fit more complex applications during the past twenty years. According to a workshop note, an estimated 15 million devices were relying on the wireless version of M-Bus in 2010. It was analyzed whether smart meters using wireless M-Bus do fit the overall security and reliability needs of the grid or whether such devices might threaten the infrastructure.", + " The M-Bus standard has been analyzed whether it provides effective security mechanisms. It can be stated that wireless M-Bus seems to be robust against deduction of consumption behaviour from the wireless network traffic. For this reason, it is considered privacy-preserving against network traffic analysis. Unfortunately, vulnerabilities have been identified that render that fact obsolete. The findings are mainly related to confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. Consequently, smart meters relying on wireless M-Bus and supporting remote disconnects are prone to become subject to an orchestrated remote disconnect which poses a severe risk to the grid. Further issues may lead to zero consumption detection, disclosure of consumption values, and disclosure of encryption keys.", + " Following that, the availability and reliability of the smart grid or at least parts of it may not be guaranteed.\n\nPresented by Cyrill Brunschwiler\n\nExploiting Network Surveillance Cameras Like a Hollywood Hacker This talk will examine 0-day vulnerabilities that can be trivially exploited by remote attackers to gain administrative and root-level access to consumer and enterprise network surveillance cameras manufactured by D-Link, Trendnet, Cisco, IQInvision, Alinking and 3SVision. Thousands of these cameras are Internet accessible, and known to be deployed in homes, businesses, hotels, casinos, banks and prisons, as well as military and industrial facilities.", + " Additionally, a proof-of-concept attack will be demonstrated in which a remote attacker can leverage the described vulnerabilities to freeze and modify legitimate video streams from these cameras, in true Hollywood fashion.\n\nPresented by Craig Heffner\n\nEvading deep inspection for fun and shell Whether you have a Next Generation Firewall, an IPS, IDS, or a BDS, the security provided by these devices depends on their capability to perform robust TCP/IP reassembly. If this fails, the device can be bypassed. We researched the TCP/IP reassembly capabilities of security boxes and found that their detection can be evaded or pierced through with evasions that apply to the IP & TCP layers.", + " The TCP reassembly capabilities of most security boxes are still poor. Instead of doing proper TCP reassembly, many of the analyzed boxes try to prevent attacks by anomaly detection, for example, by blocking small TCP segments. However, blocking small segments leads to false positives, so this kind of blocking strategy cannot be applied to real traffic without the false positive risk. We also found evasions that allowed the attack to succeed without any logs in the security box, even if all signatures were set to block.\n\nThe Factoring Dead: Preparing for the Cryptopocalypse The last several years has seen an explosion of practical exploitation of widespread cryptographic weaknesses, such as BEAST,", + " CRIME, Lucky 13 and the RC4 bias vulnerabilities. The invention of these techniques requires a lot of hard work, deep knowledge and the ability to generate a pithy acronym, but rarely involves the use of a completely unknown weakness. Cryptography researchers have known about the existence of compression oracles, RC4 biases and problems with CBC mode for years, but the general information security community has been unaware of these dangers until fully working exploits were demonstrated. In this talk, the speakers will explain the latest breakthroughs in the academic crypto community and look ahead at what practical issues could arise for popular cryptosystems. Specifically, we will focus on the latest breakthroughs in discrete mathematics and their potential ability to undermine our trust in the most basic asymmetric primitives,", + " including RSA. We will explain the basic theories behind RSA and the state-of-the-art in large numbering factoring, and how several recent papers may point the way to massive improvements in this area. The talk will then switch to the practical aspects of the doomsday scenario, and will answer the question \"What happens the day after RSA is broken?\" We will point out the many obvious and hidden uses of RSA and related algorithms and outline how software engineers and security teams can operate in a post-RSA world. We will also discuss the results of our survey of popular products and software, and point out the ways in which individuals can prepare for the zombi^", + "H^H^H crypto apocalypse.\n\nFact and Fiction: Defending your Medical Devices In the past 18 months we have seen a dramatic increase in research and presentations on the security of medical devices. While this brought much needed attention to the issue, it has also uncovered a great deal of misinformation. This talk is going to tackle those confusing and controversial topics. What\u2019s the reality of patching a medical device? Is it safe to run anti-virus protection on them? You\u2019ll find out in this talk. This presentation will outline a framework on how vendors, buyers, and administrators of medical devices can bring substantive changes in the security of these devices.", + " This talk will also have the unique element of discussing a medical device software bug that InGuardians uncovered. This bug will be discussed in detail and replicated live on stage. InGuardians has worked closely with the FDA on properly documenting and submitting this through their tracking system. This will be covered in full detail so other researchers will know how to properly disclose bugs and vulnerabilities.\n\nPresented by Jay Radcliffe\n\nFully Arbitrary 802.3 Packet Injection: Maximizing the Ethernet Attack Surface It is generally assumed that crafting arbitrary, and sniffing, Fast Ethernet packets can be performed with standard Network Interface Cards (NIC) and generally available packet injection software.", + " However, full control of frame values such as the Frame Check Sequence (FCS) or Start-of-Frame delimiter (SFD) have historically required the use of dedicated and costly hardware. Our presentation will dissect Fast Ethernet layer 1 & 2 presenting novel attack techniques supported by an affordable hardware setup with customized firmware which will be publicly released. This research expands the ability to test and analyse the full attack surface of networked embedded systems, with particular attention on automation, automotive and avionics industries. Application of attacks against NICs with hard and soft Media Access Control (MAC) on industrial embedded systems will be explored. We will illustrate how specific frame manipulations can trigger SFD parsing anomalies and Ethernet Packet-In-Packet injection.", + " These results are analyzed in relation to their security relevance and scenarios of application. Finally, conditions for a successful remote Ethernet Packet-In-Packet injection will be discussed and demonstrated for what is believed to be the first time in public.\n\nFunderbolt: Adventures in Thunderbolt DMA Attacks Intel's Thunderbolt allows for high-speed data transfers for a variety of peripherals including high-resolution high-bandwidth graphics displays, all using the same physical connection. This convenience comes at a bit of a cost: an external port into your computer's bus and possibly memory! Thunderbolt ports appear on high-end laptops like the MacBook Pro, but also increasingly on PC hardware, and on newer desktop and server motherboards.", + " This proprietary technology is undocumented but problems with it could potentially undermine the privacy and security of users. This talk chronicles process of exploring these risks through a practical exercise in reverse engineering. Experience the tribulations with reversing Thunderbolt chips, understand the attack strategies for exploiting DMA and see the pitfalls one encounters along the way, while gaining a deeper understanding of the risks of this new feature.\n\nPresented by Russ Sevinsky\n\nHacking like in the Movies: Visualizing Page Tables for Local Exploitation A shiny and sparkling way to break user-space ASLR, kernel ASLR and even find driver bugs! Understanding how a specific Operating System organizes its Page Tables allow you to find your own ASLR bypasses and even driver vulnerabilities.", + " We will drop one 0day Android ASLR bypass as an example; you can then break all your other expensive toys yourself. Page Tables are the data structures that map between the virtual address space your programs see to the actual physical addresses identifying locations on your physical RAM chips. We will visualize these data structures for: Windows 8 on x86_64\n\nWindows 8 RT on ARMv7\n\nLinux 3.8 on x86_64\n\nLinux 3.4 on ARMv7 alias Android 4.2\n\nXNU on x86_64 alias OS X\n\nXNU on ARMv7 alias iOS Besides showing pretty pictures,", + " we will actually explain what they show and how to interpret commonalities and differences across the same kernel on different architectures. By comparing the page table state on the same architecture across different runs, we will identify static physical mappings created by drivers, which can be useful for DMA attacks (think FireWire or Thunderbolt forensics). Static virtual mappings are even more interesting and can be used for (K)ASLR bypasses. To make a final point, that this is not only nice to look at, we will show how we found a mitigated Android <= 4.0.x generic user-space ASLR bypass. For those interested in actually owning targets,", + " we will show an Android 4.2.2 generic user-space ASLR bypass that also affects other latest Linux/ARM kernels.\n\nHacking, Surveilling, and Deceiving victims on Smart TV Smart TVs sold over 80,000,000 units around the world in 2012. This next generation \"smart\" platform is becoming more and more popular. On the other hand, we hardly see security research on Smart TVs. This presentation will cover vulnerabilities we've found on the platform. You can imagine that Smart TVs have almost the exact same attack vectors that PC and Smart Phones have. Also, Smart TVs have interesting new attack surface such as the remote controller.", + " We'll talk about attack points for Smart TV platform and cover security bugs we discovered. This talk will mostly focus on what attackers can do on a hacked Smart TV. For example, expensive Smart TVs have many hardware devices like a Camera or Mic which, if remotely controlled, means bad guys can spy remotely without you knowing. Even more, it is possible to make Smart TVs monitor you 24/7 even though users turn off their TV, meaning #1984 could be done. In addition, we'll point out a difference of viewpoint on leaked information type among PC, Smart Phone and Smart TV. Lastly, we'll give demo of live remote surveillance cam,", + " which is sent to attacker's server at this talk. This talk is an extended version of one, which I gave at CANSECWEST. It will demonstrate a spoofed news story on a hacked Smart TV and possibly TVshing (Smart TV edition of phishing.)\n\nPresented by SeungJin 'Beist' Lee\n\nHiding @ Depth - Exploring, Subverting and Breaking NAND Flash memory In the world of digital storage, gone are the days of spinning platters and magnetic residue. These technologies have been replaced with electron trapping, small voltage monitoring and a lot of magic. These NAND devices are ubiquitous across our culture; from smart phones to laptops to USB memory sticks to GPS navigation devices.", + " We carry many of these devices in our pockets daily without considering the security implications. The NAND-Xplore project is an attempt to explain how NAND Flash storage functions and to expose logical weaknesses in the hardware and implementation architectures. The project also showcases how the vulnerable underpinnings of NAND hardware can be subverted to hide and persist files on mobile devices. The project will release two open source POC tools for Android, one to inject and hide files on raw NAND based devices and another to find those files. The tools will showcase how advanced malware or other offensive tools could be using NAND to hide peristent files on your devices and how you would go about discovering them.", + " The project also considers how typical forensic software interacts with NAND devices and how those tools can be subverted. Lastly, the talk will cover how remote NAND manipulation can brick devices beyond repair, from Smartphones to SCADA, and how this vulnerability cannot realistically be patched or fixed (Hint: your current tools probably don't work as well as you would like to believe).\n\nPresented by Josh'm0nk' Thomas\n\nHome Invasion v2.0 - Attacking Network-Controlled Hardware A growing trend in electronics is to have them integrate with your home network in order to provide potentially useful features like automatic updates or to extend the usefulness of existing technologies such as door locks you can open and close from anywhere in the world.", + " What this means for us as security professionals or even just as people living in a world of network-connected devices is that being compromised poses greater risk than before. Once upon a time, a compromise only meant your data was out of your control. Today, it can enable control over the physical world resulting in discomfort, covert audio/video surveillance, physical access or even personal harm. If your door lock or space heater are compromised, you're going to have a very bad day. This talk will discuss the potential risks posed by network-attached devices and even demonstrate new attacks against products on the market today.\n\nHoney, I\u2019m home!! - Hacking Z-Wave Home Automation Systems Home automation systems provide a centralized control and monitoring function for heating,", + " ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting and physical security systems. The central control panel and various household devices such as security sensors and alarm systems are connected with each other to form a mesh network over wireless or wired communication links and act as a \u201csmart home\u201d. As you arrive home, the system can automatically open the garage door, unlock the front door and disable the alarm, light the downstairs, and turn on the TV. According to a study by the consulting firm AMA Research, in 2011, the UK home automation market was worth around \u00a365 million with 12% increase on the previous year. The total number of home automation system installations in the UK is estimated to be 189000 by now.", + " The home automation market in the US was worth approximately $3.2 billion in 2010 and is expected to exceed $5.5 billion in 2016. Zigbee and Z-wave wireless communication protocols are the most common used RF technology in home automation systems. Zigbee is based on an open specification (IEEE 802.15.4) and has been the subject of several academic and practical security researches. Z-wave is a proprietary wireless protocol that works in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical radio band (ISM). It transmits on the 868.42 MHz (Europe) and 908.42MHz (United States)", + " frequencies designed for low-bandwidth data communications in embedded devices such as security sensors, alarms and home automation control panels. Unlike Zigbee, no public security research on Z-Wave protocol was available before our work. Z-wave protocol was only mentioned once during a DefCon 2011 talk when the presenter pointed the possibility of capturing the AES key exchange phase without a demonstration. The Z-Wave protocol is gaining momentum against the Zigbee protocol with regards to home automation. This is partly due to a faster, and somewhat simpler, development process. Another benefit is that it is less subjected to signal interference compared to the Zigbee protocol, which operates on the widely populated 2.", + "4 GHz band shared by both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices. Z-wave chips have 128-bit AES crypto engines, which are used by access control systems, such as door locks, for authenticated packet encryption. An open source implementation of the Z-wave protocol stack, openzwave, is available but it does not support the encryption part as of yet. Our talk will show how the Z-Wave protocol can be subjected to attacks.\n\nHot Knives Through Butter: Bypassing Automated Analysis Systems Diamonds are girl\u2019s best friend, prime numbers are mathematician\u2019s best friend and automated analysis systems (AAS) are AV researcher\u2019s best friend. Unfortunately,", + " this fact is known by malware authors and hence techniques to evade automated analysis system are not only becoming an integral part of APT, but also many infamous malwares have resurrected and are using techniques to bypass the automated analysis system to stay under the radar. The infamous Khelios botnet was claimed to be dead in 2011 and got resurrected. To evade the automated analysis system one of the sample aka Trojan Nap found in 2013, was employing SleepEx() API with a 10 minutes time out. Since automated analysis systems are set to execute a sample within a given time frame,which is in seconds, by employing an extended sleep call,", + " it could prevent an AAS from capturing its behavior. The sample also made a call to the undocumented API NtDelayExecution() for performing an extended sleep calls. As per the report from Mandiant, infamous RAT Poison IVY has extensively been used in the targeted attacks and appeared to have been abandoned in 2008. Trojan UpClicker, reported in December 2012, a wrapper around Poison IVY, employs SetWindowsHookEX() API to hide its malicious activity. By sending 0EH as parameter to the function, the malicious code only gets activated when the left mouse button is clicked and released. Since in AAS there is no human interaction,", + " the code remains dormant bypassing the AAS. PushDo, yet another infamous malware, checks the build number of windows OS. Once it has determined the build number of windows OS. It finds a pointer to PspCreateProcessNotify() API routine to deregister all the callbacks. Once the callbacks have been deregistered, the malware can create or delete processes, bypassing process monitoring module of AAS. Trojan Hastati was designed to wipe out all the hard drives of a computer in Korea. It used GetLocalTime() API to activate itself on March 20th 2013 at 2:00 P.M. If the sample is executed in an AAS before the 20th March 2013,", + " it will not get executed and evades AAS. UpClicker, PushDo, Hastati, Nap are some of the resurrected advanced malware and/or APT which are using anti evasion techniques to evade detections from AAS. In first part of the presentation we provide an exhaustive list of techniques, API\u2019s and the code segments from the APT and active malware, which are being used to bypass the AAS. We will also have live demonstration of some of the anti-analysis techniques, which have emerged in the recent past. In the next part of the presentation we provide an in-depth, technical analysis of the Automated Analysis System technologies available today focusing on computer security aspect.", + " It will provide a comparison framework for different technologies that is consistent, measurable, and understandable by both IT administrators and security specialists. In addition we also explore each of the major commercially available automated analysis system flavors and evaluate their ability to stand against these evasions. We will present an architectural decomposition of automated analysis systems to highlight its advantages and limitations, and historical view on how fast Anti-AAS techniques have been evolved so rapidly recently. This will kick start the conversation on how new vectors that are likely to be used by sophisticated malware to actively target AAS in the future.\n\nHOW CVSS is DOSsing YOUR PATCHING POLICY (and wasting your money)", + " CVSS score is widely used as the standard-de-facto risk metric for vulnerabilities, to the point that the US Government itself encourages organizations in using it to prioritize vulnerability patching. We tackle this approach by testing the CVSS score in terms of its efficacy as a \"risk score\" and \"prioritization metric.\" We test the CVSS against real attack data and as a result, we show that the overall picture is not satisfactory: the (lower-bound) over-investment by using CVSS to choose what vulnerabilities to patch can as high as 300% of an optimal one. We extend the analysis making sure to obtain statistically significant results.", + " However, we present our results at a practical level, focusing on the question: \"does it make sense for you to use CVSS to prioritize your vulnerabilities?\"\n\nHow to Build a SpyPhone Learn how to build an Android SpyPhone service that can be injected into any application. The presentation will feature a live demonstration of how phones can be tracked and operated from a Web based command and control server and a demonstration of how to inject the SpyPhone service into any Android application. The presentation will also cover the APIs used to track the phone's location, intercept phone calls and SMS messages, extract e-mail and contact lists, and activate the camera and microphone without being detected.\n\nPresented by Kevin McNamee\n\nHow to Grow a TREE (Taint-enabled Reverse Engineering Environment)", + " From CBASS (Cross-platform Binary Automated Symbolic-execution System) Binary analysis techniques from academic research have been introduced into the reverse engineering community as well as research labs that are equipped with lots of computing power. Some program analyses using these techniques have even begun to show up in hacker conferences. But significant limitations remain: No practical toolset delivers analyses of binary programs across multiple platforms (like x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC etc.);\n\nNo practical toolset scales to real-world large programs and automates all aspects of highly sophisticated tasks like vulnerability analysis and exploit generation;\n\nNo practical toolset runs on a typical engineer\u2019s laptop or integrates seamlessly with any popular reverse engineering environment.", + " Interested reverse engineers must switch back and forth between their familiar tool environment and some Dynamic Binary Instrumentation (DBI) environment (like PIN) or full system emulator (like QEMU). In this talk, we will present our solution to these limitations. We will explain the Cross-platform Binary Automated Symbolic-execution System (CBASS) that we developed and demonstrate one of its interactive applications: an IDA based Taint-enabled Reverse Engineering Environment (TREE). TREE can deliver program analysis techniques (taint analysis, dynamic slicing, symbolic execution and constraint solving) into the reverse engineer\u2019s hands now. Binary analysis and its security applications have been extensively researched,", + " mainly in the context of a single instruction set architecture (predominantly x86) and popular desktop operating systems (Linux or Windows). CBASS performs its binary analysis on a common Intermediate Representation (IR) rather than on the native Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) of any program. This thin layer allows our powerful analysis tools to work on cross-platform binary applications. While CBASS supports both automated and interactive security applications, TREE supports a subset of these capabilities but from with an IDA Pro plug-in. TREE provides useful interactive visualizations of the results of on-demand binary analysis. Symbolic execution and concolic execution (concrete-symbolic execution)", + " are fundamental techniques used in binary analysis; but they are plagued by the exponential path explosion problem. Solving this problem requires vigorous path pruning algorithms and highly parallel computing infrastructure (like clouds). Neither of these is typically available to a reverse engineer. TREE solves this problem by helping the reverse engineer prioritize path execution through an interactive and intuitive visual representation of the results of on-demand analysis of what inputs and instruction sequences led to the crash site or other suspicious path, leverage path constraints and SMT solver to negate tainted branch condition for a new, unexplored path. The details of the taint analysis, dynamic slicing and path constraint solving mechanisms are transparent to reverse engineer.", + " Utilizing the existing IDA Pro debugging infrastructure, TREE can automate trace generation from diversified target platforms, including kernel mode tracing for Windows. To our surprise, despite the fact that IDA Pro debugging API has been around for a long time, there has been no serious effort to automate trace collection for extensible binary analysis, particularly for kernel mode tracing. Our work has directly contributed to two bug fixes in the latest IDA Pro patches (IDA 6.4.130206). Our presentation will feature several case studies of using TREE to analyze real world vulnerabilities.\n\nHunting the Shadows: In Depth Analysis of Escalated APT Attacks APT attacks are a new emerging threat and have made headlines in recent years.", + " However, we have yet to see full-scale assessment of targeted attack operations. Taiwan has been a long term target for these cyber-attacks due to its highly developed network infrastructure and sensitive political position. We had a unique chance to monitor, detect, investigate, and mitigate a large number of attacks on government and private sector companies. This presentation will introduce our results of a joint research between Xecure-Lab and Academia Sinica on targeted attack operations across the Taiwan Strait. We have developed a fully automated system, XecScan 2.0 (http://scan.xecure-lab.com) equipped with unique dynamic (sandbox) and static malicious software forensics technology to analyze nature and behavior of malicious binaries and document exploits.", + " The system performs real-time APT classification and associates the analyzed content with existing knowledge base. In our experiments, the XecScan system has analyzed and successfully identified more than 12,000 APT emails, which include APT Malware and Document Exploits. With this presentation we will also analyze and group the samples from the recent Mandiant APT1(61398) Report and will compare the relationships between APT1 samples to the samples discovered in Taiwan and discuss the history behind APT1 Hacker activities. During this presentation we will release a free, publicly accessible portal to our collaborative APT classification platform and access to the XecScan 2.", + "0 APIs.\n\nI Can Hear You Now: Traffic Interception and Remote Mobile Phone Cloning with a Compromised CDMA Femtocell I have a box on my desk that your CDMA cell phone will automatically connect to while you send and receive phone calls, text messages, emails, and browse the Internet. I own this box. I watch all the traffic that crosses it and you don't even know you're connected to me. Welcome to the New World, where I, not them, own the towers. Oh, and thanks for giving me the box... for free. This box is a femtocell, a low-power cellular base station given or sold to subscribers by mobile network operators.", + " It works just like a small cell tower, using a home Internet connection to interface with the provider network. When in range, a mobile phone will connect to a femtocell as if it were a standard cell tower and send all its traffic through it without any indication to the user. The state-of-the-art authentication protecting cell phone networks can be an imposing target. However, with the rising popularity of femtocells there is more than one way to attack a cellular network. Inside, they run Linux, and they can be hacked. During this talk, we will demonstrate how we've used a femtocell for traffic interception of voice/SMS/data,", + " active network attacks, and explain how we were able to clone a mobile device without physical access.\n\nImplantable Medical Devices: Hacking Humans In 2006 approximately 350,000 pacemakers and 173,000 ICD's (Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators) were implanted in the US alone. 2006 was an important year, as that's when the FDA began approving fully wireless based devices. Today there are well over 3 million pacemakers and over 1.7 million ICD's in use. This talk will focus on the security of wireless implantable medical devices. I will discuss how these devices operate and communicate and the security shortcomings of the current protocols.", + " Our internal research software will be revealed that utilizes a common bedside transmitter to scan for, and interrogate individual medical implants. I will also discuss ideas manufacturers can implement to improve the security of these devices.\n\nPresented by Barnaby Jack\n\nIs that a government in your network or are you just happy to see me? Defense and military network operations center around the age-old game: establishing long-term footholds deep inside a network. In this talk, we will discuss specific techniques and tactics observed while providing defensive incident response services to organizations compromised by foreign intelligence and defense agencies. The discussion will also incorporate the release and open-sourcing of several private projects used to identify pass-the-hash/", + "impersonation attacks, including: a set of network monitoring daemons known as breachbox, part of which was funded by DARPA's Cyber Fast Track program; and an open-source tool and blueprint to help trojanize your own network to monitor and detect adversarial activity.\n\nPresented by Eric Fiterman\n\nJava Every-Days: Exploiting Software Running on 3 Billion Devices Over the last three years, Oracle Java has become the exploit author's best friend, and why not? Java has a rich attack surface, broad install base, and runs on multiple platforms allowing attackers to maximize their return-on-investment. The increased focus on uncovering weaknesses in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE)", + " shifted research beyond classic memory corruption issues into abuses of the reflection API that allow for remote code execution. This talk focuses on the vulnerability trends in Java over the last three years and intersects public vulnerability data with Java vulnerabilities submitted to the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) program. We begin by reviewing Java's architecture and patch statistics to identify a set of vulnerable Java components. We then highlight the top five vulnerability types seen in ZDI researcher submissions that impact these JRE components and emphasize their recent historical significance. The presentation continues with an in-depth look at specific weaknesses in several Java sub-components, including vulnerability details and examples of how the vulnerabilities manifest and what vulnerability researchers should look for when auditing the component.", + " Finally, we discuss how attackers typically leverage weaknesses in Java. We focus on specific vulnerability types attackers and exploit kits authors are using and what they are doing beyond the vulnerability itself to compromise machines. We conclude with details on the vulnerabilities that were used in this year's Pwn2Own competition and review steps Oracle has taken to address recent issues uncovered in Java.\n\nJavascript Static Security Analysis made easy with JSPrime Today, more and more developers are switching to JavaScript as their first choice of language. The reason is simple JavaScript has now been started to be accepted as the mainstream programming for applications, be it on the web or on the mobile; be it on client-side,", + " be it on the server side. JavaScript flexibility and its loose typing is friendly to developers to create rich applications at an unbelievable speed. Major advancements in the performance of JavaScript interpreters, in recent days, have almost eliminated the question of scalability and throughput from many organizations. So the point is JavaScript is now a really important and powerful language we have today and it's usage growing everyday. From client-side code in web applications it grew to server-side through Node.JS and it's now supported as proper language to write applications on major mobile operating system platforms like Windows 8 apps and the upcoming Firefox OS apps. But the problem is, many developers practice in-", + "secure coding which leads to many clients side attacks, out of which DOM XSS is the most infamous. We tried to understand the root cause of this problem and figured out is that there are not enough practically usable tools that can solve real-world problems. Hence as our first attempt towards solving this problem, we want to talk about JSPrime: A javascript static analysis tool for the rest of us. It's a very light-weight and very easy to use point-and-click tool! The static analysis tool is based on the very popular Esprima ECMAScript parser by Aria Hidayat. I would like to highlight some of the interesting features of the tool below:", + " JS Library Aware Source & Sinks\n\nMost dynamic or static analyzers are developed to support native/pure JavaScript which actually is a problem for most developers since the introductions and wide-adoption for JavaScript frameworks/libraries like jQuery, YUI etc. Since these scanners are designed to support pure JavaScript, they fail at understanding the context of the development due to the usage of libraries and produce many false-positives and false-negatives. To solve this we have identified the dangerous user input sources and code execution sink functions for jQuery and YUI, for the initial release and we shall talk about how users can easily extend it for other frameworks.\n\nVariable & Function Tracing\n\nThis feature is a part of our code flow analysis algorithm\n\nVariable & Function Scope Aware analysis\n\nThis feature is a part of our code flow analysis algorithm\n\nKnown filter function aware\n\nOOP & Protoype Compliant\n\nMinimum False Positive alerts\n\nSupports minified javascript\n\nBlazing fast performance\n\nPoint and Click :-) (my personal favorite)", + " Upcoming features: Automatic code de-obfuscation & decompression through Hybrid Analysis (Ra.2 improvisation; http://code.google.com/ra2-dom-xss-scanner)\n\nECMAScript family support (ActionScript 3, Node.JS, WinJS)\n\nJust-In-Time Code Reuse: The more things change, the more they stay the same Fine-grained address space layout randomization (ASLR) has recently been proposed as a method of efficiently mitigating runtime attacks. In this presentation, we introduce the design and implementation of a framework based on a novel attack strategy, dubbed just-in-time code reuse, which both undermines the benefits of fine-grained ASLR and greatly enhances the ease of exploit development on today's platforms that combine standard ASLR and DEP (e.g.", + " Windows 8). Specifically, we derail the assumptions embodied in fine-grained ASLR by exploiting the ability to repeatedly abuse a memory disclosure to map an application's memory layout on-the-fly, dynamically discover API functions and gadgets, and JIT-compile a target program using those gadgets-- all within a script environment at the time an exploit is launched. We demonstrate the power of our framework by using it in conjunction with a real-world exploit against Internet Explorer, show its effectiveness in Windows 8, and also provide extensive evaluations that demonstrate the practicality of just-in-time code reuse attacks. Our findings suggest that fine-grained ASLR may not be as promising as first thought.\n\nKickaaS Defense with Cloud and Software Defined Security While everyone else is busy spreading uneducated FUD on the supposed insecurity of cloud computing,", + " the reality is cloud computing, and it's foundational technologies, bring tools to the table security pros previously could only dream of. Virtualization, segregation, and isolation are now defaults, not hard-to-achieve end states. Security is decoupled and abstracted from infrastructure, enabling levels of granularity and control nearly impossible with traditional architectures. APIs bind it all together, powering insanely effective security automation and intelligence. This session will present practical techniques to leverage cloud computing and API-driven Software Defined Security to build stronger, more resilient, and more responsive defenses than aren't even close to possible with traditional infrastructure. We'll show what works today, including technical demonstrations,", + " and tell you what to expect once security vendors wake up and really start riding the wave.\n\nPresented by Rich Mogull\n\nLawful Access Panel Protecting yourself, your network and your users when the FBI or NSA knocks: When you get a National Security Letter, no one can hear you scream. Being served with a search warrant for a criminal investigation can be scary enough, but national security investigations can be downright Kafkaesque. You probably won't be allowed to tell anyone about it. And they may ask for more than just user data, such as for backdoor access or to install special monitoring hardware or software deep inside your network. This panel will bring together a range of expertise on the perils of secret \"lawful intercepts\"", + " in today's networks. We'll discuss the technical risks of surveillance architectures, the legal and technical defenses against over-broad or invasive searches, and actual experiences fighting against secret surveillance orders.\n\nLegal Aspects of Full Spectrum Computer Network (Active) Defense Full spectrum computer network (active) defense mean more than simply \u201chacking back.\u201d We\u2019ve seen a lot of this issue lately. Orin Kerr and Stewart Baker had a lengthy debate about it online. New companies with some high visibility players claim they are providing \u201cactive defense\u201d services to their clients. But all-in-all, what does this really mean? And why is it that when you go to your attorneys,", + " they say a flat out, \u201cNo.\u201d This presentation examines the entire legal regime surrounding full spectrum computer network (active) defense. It delves into those areas that are easily legal and looks at the controversial issues surrounding others. As such we will discuss technology and sensors (ECPA and the service provider exception); information control and management (DRM); and, \u201cactive defense\u201d focusing on \u2013 honeypot, beacons, deception (say hello to my little friend the Security and Exchange Commission); open source business intelligence gathering (CFAA, economic espionage; theft of trade secrets); trace back and retrieval of stolen data (CFAA). Past presentations have shown much of what is taken away is audience driven in response to their questions and the subsequent discussion.", + " And, as always, I try to impress upon computer security professionals the importance of working closely with their legal counsel early and often, and of course \u201cClark\u2019s Law\u201d - explain the technical aspects of computer security to your attorneys at a third grade level so they can understand it and then turn around and explain it to a judge or jury at a first grade level.\n\nPresented by Robert Clark\n\nLegal Considerations for Cellular Research The security of mobile communications is becoming increasingly critical, prompting security researchers to focus their attention on vulnerabilities in cellular systems. Researchers need to fully understand the legal ramifications of interacting with specialized hardware, cellular communications, and the restrictions imposed by service providers.", + " This briefing will provide a legal overview of what a researcher should keep in mind when investigating mobile communications, technologies, and networks. We will cover legal issues raised by end user license agreements, jailrooting or rooting devices, and intercepting communications.\n\nLessons from Surviving a 300Gbps Denial of Service Attack On Saturday, March 23, 2013, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Spamhaus that had been growing for weeks culminated with over 300 Gigabits per second of attack traffic targeting the anti-spam organization's network. At that point it became the largest such attack ever reported in history \u2014 at least 4x the size of the attacks that crippled US banks just a few months earlier.", + " The attackers launched the full range DDoS methods at Spamhaus \u2014 simultaneously targeting Layer 3, Layer 4, and Layer 7. Spamhaus has given us permission to tell the full, behind-the-scenes story of what happened, show how the attacks were launched, outline the techniques the attackers used, and detail how Spamhaus.com was able to stay online throughout. While the Spamhaus story has a happy ending, the massive DDoS exposed key vulnerabilities throughout the Internet that we will need address if the network is to survive the next, inevitably larger, attack.\n\nPresented by Matthew Prince\n\nLet's get physical: Breaking home security systems and bypassing buildings controls 36 million home & office security systems reside in the U.S., and they are all vulnerable.", + " This is not your grandpa\u2019s talk on physical security; this talk is about bypassing home and office digital physical security systems, from simple door sensors to intercepting signals and even the keypad before it can alert the authorities. All the methods presented are for covert entry and leave no physical sign of entry or compromise. If you are interested in bettering your skills as a pen tester or just want to know how break into an office like a Hollywood spy this is the talk for you. Come join us to see live demos of what the security companies never want you to see.\n\nMactans: Injecting Malware into iOS Devices via Malicious Chargers Apple iOS devices are considered by many to be more secure than other mobile offerings.", + " In evaluating this belief, we investigated the extent to which security threats were considered when performing everyday activities such as charging a device. The results were alarming: despite the plethora of defense mechanisms in iOS, we successfully injected arbitrary software into current-generation Apple devices running the latest operating system (OS) software. All users are affected, as our approach requires neither a jailbroken device nor user interaction. In this presentation, we demonstrate how an iOS device can be compromised within one minute of being plugged into a malicious charger. We first examine Apple\u2019s existing security mechanisms to protect against arbitrary software installation, then describe how USB capabilities can be leveraged to bypass these defense mechanisms.", + " To ensure persistence of the resulting infection, we show how an attacker can hide their software in the same way Apple hides its own built-in applications. To demonstrate practical application of these vulnerabilities, we built a proof of concept malicious charger, called Mactans, using a BeagleBoard. This hardware was selected to demonstrate the ease with which innocent-looking, malicious USB chargers can be constructed. While Mactans was built with limited amount of time and a small budget, we also briefly consider what more motivated, well-funded adversaries could accomplish. Finally, we recommend ways in which users can protect themselves and suggest security features Apple could implement to make the attacks we describe substantially more difficult to pull off.\n\nMainframes:", + " The Past Will Come Back to Haunt You From governments to military, airlines to banks, the mainframe is alive and well and touches you in everything you do. The security community that's tasked with reviewing the security on mainframes, though, actually knows very little about these beasts. Be it a lack of access by the security community or the false notion that mainframes are dead, there is a distinct gap between the IT security world and the mainframe world. Mainframes in the IT security community are talked about in whispered hushed tones in the back alleys. Neither knowing if they're as secure as IBM (and mainframers)", + " claim or if they're ripe with configuration problems ready to be exploited. This talk will remove some of the mystery surrounding the mainframe, breaking down that 'legacy wall.' Discussing how security is implemented on the mainframe (including where to find configuration files), how to access it, simple networking and configuration commands, file structure etc. will be presented at this session.\n\nPresented by Philip Young\n\nMaltego Tungsten as a collaborative attack platform Maltego has always been a strong favorite for pre-attack intelligence gathering - be that for social engineering, doxing or for infrastructure mapping. Indeed it's earned its rightful place in the Kali Linux top 10 tools.", + " For as long as we can remember we at Paterva were annoyed that Maltego lacked the ability to share intelligence effectively. Up to now the only way to share graphs was to send the actual files around. This is all about to change - with Maltego Tungsten. The Tungsten release (at BlackHat) allows multiple users to share graphs in real time. This creates interesting opportunities and new workflows - suddenly we can have a team of analysts and/or pen testers working together in real time and on the same goal. Be it profiling (or 'doxing') a human target or attacking a network - with real time graph sharing we now have a platform where information can be safely (and anonymously)", + " shared as it happens. The other lacking aspect of Maltego was real bite. In the past we purposely stayed away from all out attack - concentrating rather on info gathering. In this talk we'll also show how to integrate Maltego with industry standard attack tools. This will range from infrastructure attacks, web platform attack and remote Trojans to social engineering as well as denial of service. Combine human intelligence, machines (introduced in Radium release) and real time collaboration with these powerful transforms and wait... oh noes...we've created a monster!!\n\nMillion Browser Botnet Online advertising networks can be a web hacker\u2019s best friend.", + " For mere pennies per thousand impressions (that means browsers) there are service providers who allow you to broadly distribute arbitrary javascript -- even malicious javascript! You are SUPPOSED to use this \u201cfeature\u201d to show ads, to track users, and get clicks, but that doesn\u2019t mean you have to abide. Absolutely nothing prevents spending $10, $100, or more to create a massive javascript-driven browser botnet instantly. The real-world power is spooky cool. We know, because we tested it\u2026 in-the-wild. With a few lines of HTML5 and javascript code we\u2019ll demonstrate just how you can easily commandeer browsers to perform DDoS attacks,", + " participate in email spam campaigns, crack hashes and even help brute-force passwords. Put simply, instruct browsers to make HTTP requests they didn\u2019t intend, even something as well-known as Cross-Site Request Forgery. With CSRF, no zero-days or malware is required. Oh, and there is no patch. The Web is supposed to work this way. Also nice, when the user leaves the page, our code vanishes. No traces. No tracks. Before leveraging advertising networks, the reason this attack scenario didn\u2019t worry many people is because it has always been difficult to scale up, which is to say, simultaneously control enough browsers (aka botnets)", + " to reach critical mass. Previously, web hackers tried poisoning search engine results, phishing users via email, link spamming Facebook, Twitter and instant messages, Cross-Site Scripting attacks, publishing rigged open proxies, and malicious browser plugins. While all useful methods in certain scenarios, they lack simplicity, invisibility, and most importantly -- scale. That\u2019s what we want! At a moment\u2019s notice, we will show how it is possible to run javascript on an impressively large number of browsers all at once and no one will be the wiser. Today this is possible, and practical.\n\nMultiplexed Wired Attack Surfaces Manufacturers of mobile devices often multiplex several wired interfaces onto a single connector.", + " Some of these interfaces, probably intended for test and development, are still enabled when the devices ship. We'll show you how you can get a shell on a popular mobile phone via its USB port without using a USB connection and we will release an open source tool for exploring multiplexed wired interfaces.\n\nOptiROP: hunting for ROP gadgets in style Return-Oriented-Programming (ROP) is the fundamental technique to bypass the widely-used DEP-based exploitation mitigation. Unfortunately, available tools that can help to find ROP gadgets mainly rely on syntactic searching. This method proves to be in inefficient, time-consuming and makes the process of developing ROP-based shellcode pretty frustrated for exploitation writers.", + " This research attempts to solve the problem by introducing a tool named OptiROP that lets exploitation writers search for ROP gadgets with semantic queries. OptiROP supports input binary of all executable formats (PE/ELF/Mach-O) on x86 & x86_64 architectures. Combining sophisticated techniques such as code normalization, code optimization, code slicing, SMT solver, parallel processing and some heuristic searching methods, OptiROP is able to discover desired gadgets very quickly, with much less efforts. Our tool also provides the detail semantic meaning of each gadget found, so users can easily decide how to chain their gadgets for the final shellcode.", + " In case where no suitable gadget is found, OptiROP tries to pick and chain available gadgets to create a sequence of gadgets satisfying the input requirements. This significantly eases the hard job of shellcode writers, so they can focus their time on other tedious parts of the exploitation process. Our talk will entertain the audience with some live demo, so they can see how OptiROP generates gadgets in reality.\n\nPresented by Nguyen Anh Quynh\n\nOut of Control: Demonstrating SCADA device exploitation America\u2019s next great oil and gas boom is here: the United States is on track to become the world\u2019s top oil producer by 2020.", + " New wells require new pipelines to distribute their bounty. These oil and gas pipelines crisscross the country carrying volatile fluids through densely populated areas. What runs these pipelines? How are they controlled? What happens when the process goes out of control?\n\nThe Outer Limits: Hacking the Samsung Smart TV There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission. \"Smart\" TVs are becoming more and more common. Samsung and other vendors such as Sony and LG have sold more than a hundred million Smart TVs in the last few years. During this talk, Aaron Grattafiori and Josh Yavor will discuss the Samsung SmartTV design,", + " attack surfaces and overall insecurity of the platform. A short discussion of the current application stack, TV operating system and other details will be provided to help set the stage for details of significant flaws found within the Samsung SmartTV application architecture, APIs and current applications. A number of vulnerabilities will be explored and demonstrated which allow malicious developers or remotely hijacked applications (such as the web browser or social media applications) to take complete control of the TV, steal accounts stored within it and install a userland rootkit. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities also provides the ability for an attacker to use the front-facing video camera or built-in microphone for spying and surveillance as well as facilitate access to local network for continued exploitation.", + " This talk will also discuss methods to bypass what (meager) security protections exist and put forth several worst case scenarios (TV worm anyone?). Concluding this talk, Aaron and Josh will discuss what has been fixed by Samsung and discuss what overall weaknesses should be avoided by future \"Smart\" platforms. Video demos of exploits and userland rootkits will be provided.\n\nOwning the Routing Table - Part II The holy grail of routing attacks is owning the routing table of a router. In this work we present a powerful OSPF attack that exploit a newly discovered ambiguity of the OSPF protocol -- the most popular routing protocol inside autonomous systems (AS). The attack allows an attacker who gained control over just a single router in an AS to control the routing tables of all other routers in that AS.", + " The attack may be utilized to induce black holes, network cuts or longer routes in order to facilitate DoS of the routing domain or to gain access to information flows which otherwise the attacker had no access to. The attack can also be used to easily DoS a victim router using a single packet. A multi-vendor effort is now under way to fix this vulnerability which currently inflict many of today's OSPF routers. This work is a sequel to the work \"Owning the Routing Table\" we presented at Black Hat USA 2011. This is a joint work with Eitan Menahem, Yuval Elovici and Ariel Waizel of Telekom Innovation Laboratories at Ben Gurion University.\n\nPresented by Gabi Nakibly\n\nPass the Hash and Other Credential Theft and Reuse:", + " Mitigating the risk of Lateral Movement and Privilege Escalation Pass the Hash (PtH) has become one of the most widespread attacks affecting our customers and many of our customers have made it their top priority to address these attacks. In response, Microsoft has assembled a workgroup to investigate effective and practical mitigations that could be used now as well as future platform modifications. This presentation will cover the problem of credential theft and re-use, focusing on Pass-the-Hash attacks as an example, and discuss Microsoft\u2019s recommended mitigations. The presenters are members of the workgroup: Patrick Jungles of the Trustworthy Computing group and Mark Simos of the Cybersecurity Services team.\n\nPass-The-", + "Hash 2: The Admin's Revenge Some vulnerabilities just can't be patched. Pass-The-Hash attacks against Windows enterprises are still successful and are more popular than ever. Since the PTH-Suite was released at Black Hat last year, Microsoft published their guide for mitigating the attack. Skip and Chris will cover some of the shortcomings in their strategies and offer practical ways to detect and potentially prevent hashes from being passed on your network. Learn how to stop an attacker's lateral movement in your enterprise.\n\nPixel Perfect Timing Attacks with HTML5 Maybe you\u2019ve heard it before - HTML 5 and related technologies bring a whole slew of new features to web browsers,", + " some of which can be a threat to security and privacy. But subtle interactions between the less explored corners of new browser features can have some unexpected and dangerous side effects. In this presentation, I\u2019ll introduce a number of new techniques that use JavaScript-based timing attacks to extract sensitive data from your browser. In my talk I will demonstrate cross-browser vulnerabilities against Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox that can be used to access your browsing history and read data from websites you\u2019re logged into. I\u2019ll also take a look at the difficulties involved in fixing these types of vulnerabilities.\n\nPresented by Paul Stone\n\nPost Exploitation Operations with Cloud Synchronization Services Cloud backup solutions,", + " such as Dropbox, provide a convenient way for users to synchronize files between user devices. These services are particularly attractive to users, who always want the most current version of critical files on every device. Many of these applications \u201cinstall\u201d into the user\u2019s profile directory and the synchronization processes are placed in the user\u2019s registry hive (HKCU). Users without administrative privileges can use these applications without so much as popping a UAC dialog. This freedom makes illicit installations of these applications all the more likely. Cloud backup providers are marketing directly to corporate executives offering services that will \u201cincrease employee productivity\u201d or \u201cprovide virtual teaming opportunities.\u201d Offers such as these make it more likely than ever that any given corporate environment has some cloud backup solutions installed.", + " We released the DropSmack tool at Blackhat EU. This showed enterprise defenders the risks posed by cloud synchronization software and gave pen testers a new toy to play with (you can bet that pen testers weren\u2019t the only ones who noticed). In response to feedback from the original presentation, DropSmack has been improved to deal with some of the unique operational challenges posed by synchronization environments. In particular, we added the ability to work with more synchronization services automatically. In this talk, we\u2019ll demonstrate how DropSmack v2 works and explain how to deploy it in an operational environment. We\u2019ll look at some of the countermeasures to these attacks,", + " including the encryption of synchronized files by third party software. Additionally, we\u2019ll investigate the potential of using so-called \u201cnext generation firewalls\u201d to defeat DropSmack. You\u2019ll also learn about the issues of credential storage in the context of cloud synchronization services. Several synchronization applications also use insecure authentication methods. We\u2019ll highlight these applications so you know what works, what doesn\u2019t, and what you should run (not walk) away from. You\u2019ll learn about post-exploitation activities you can accomplish when your freshly compromised target is running a cloud synchronization product. Finally, we\u2019ll demonstrate the steps you need to follow to steal credentials for the products that store them.", + " Why would you want to steal stored credentials for a cloud synchronization service you ask? After all, any files that have been synchronized to the cloud must already on the machine you just compromised, right? Not necessarily. You\u2019ll learn a variety of nasty things you can do with the cloud synchronization service portals that you may never have considered.,/ If you\u2019re a network defender, you\u2019ll leave this talk with a new appreciation of the risks posed by cloud synchronization services (and a nauseous feeling if you have them in your environment). If you are a penetration tester, you\u2019ll leave with a new bag of tricks. Either way, a fun time is sure to be had by all.\n\nPresented by Jacob Williams\n\nPower Analysis Attacks for Cheapskates Power analysis attacks present a devious method of cracking cryptographic systems.", + " But looking at papers published in this field show that often the equipment used is fairly expensive: the typical oscilloscope used often has at least a 1 GSPS sampling rate, and then various probes and amplifiers also add to this cost. What is a poor researcher to do without such tools? This presentation will give a detailed description of how to setup a power analysis lab for a few hundred dollars, one that provides sufficient performance to attack real devices. It's based on some open-source hardware & software I developed, and is small enough to fit in your pocket. This will be demonstrated live against a microcontroller implementing AES, with details provided so attendees can duplicate the demonstration.", + " This includes an open-hardware design for the capture board, open-source Python tools for doing the capture, and open-source example attacks. Underlying theory behind side-channel attacks will be presented, giving attendees a complete picture of how such attacks work.\n\nPresented by Colin O'Flynn\n\nPredicting Susceptibility to Social Bots on Twitter Are some Twitter users more naturally predisposed to interacting with social bots and can social bot creators exploit this knowledge to increase the odds of getting a response? Social bots are growing more intelligent, moving beyond simple reposts of boilerplate ad content to attempt to engage with users and then exploit this trust to promote a product or agenda.", + " While much research has focused on how to identify such bots in the process of spam detection, less research has looked at the other side of the question\u2014detecting users likely to be fooled by bots. This talk provides a summary of research and developments in the social bots arms race before sharing results of our experiment examining user susceptibility. We find that a users\u2019 Klout score, friends count, and followers count are most predictive of whether a user will interact with a bot, and that the Random Forest algorithm produces the best classifier, when used in conjunction with appropriate feature ranking algorithms. With this knowledge, social bot creators could significantly reduce the chance of targeting users who are unlikely to interact.", + " Users displaying higher levels of extraversion were more likely to interact with our social bots. This may have implications for eLearning based awareness training as users higher in extraversion have been shown to perform better when they have great control of the learning environment. Overall, these results show promise for helping understand which users are most vulnerable to social bots.\n\nPress ROOT to continue: Detecting OSX and Windows bootkits with RDFU UEFI has recently become a very public target for rootkits and malware. Last year at Black Hat 2012, Snare\u2019s insightful talk highlighted the real and very significant potential for developing UEFI rootkits that are very difficult,", + " if not impossible, to detect and/or eradicate. Since then, a couple of practical bootkits have appeared. To combat this new threat, we developed a Rootkit Detection Framework for UEFI (\u201cRDFU\u201d) that incorporates a unified set of tools that address this problem across a wide spectrum of UEFI implementations. We will demonstrate a sample bootkit for Apple OSX that was designed specifically for testing purposes. As a UEFI driver, it infects the OSX kernel utilizing a UEFI \u201crootkit\u201d technique. The entire infection process executes in memory (by the UEFI driver itself). Therefore, the bootkit does not need to install any OSX kernel extension modules.", + " The bootkit demonstrates the following functionality: Sniffing FileVault passwords (sniffing keys while booting)\n\nPrivilege escalation (to root)\n\nHiding PIDs, files, and directories with selected patterns Rootkit Detection Framework for UEFI was developed under DARPA CFT. Following this talk, we will publicly release the RDFU open source code along with whitepapers that outline a possible use case for this technology.\n\nRevealing Embedded Fingerprints: Deriving intelligence from USB stack interactions Embedded systems are everywhere, from TVs to aircraft, printers to weapons control systems. As a security researcher when you are faced with one of these \u201cblack boxes\u201d to test,", + " sometime in-situ, it is difficult to know where to start. However, if there is a USB port on the device there is useful information that can be gained. This talk is about using techniques to analyze USB stack interactions to provide information such as the OS running on the embedded device, the USB drivers installed and devices supported. The talk will also cover some of the more significant challenges faced by researchers attempting to exploit USB vulnerabilities using a Windows 8 USB bug recently discovered by the presenter (MS13-027) as an example.\n\nPresented by Andy Davis\n\nRFID Hacking: Live Free or RFID Hard Have you ever attended an RFID hacking presentation and walked away with more questions than answers?", + " This talk will finally provide practical guidance on how RFID proximity badge systems work. We\u2019ll cover what you\u2019ll need to build out your own RFID physical penetration toolkit, and how to easily use an Arduino microcontroller to weaponize commercial RFID badge readers \u2013 turning them into custom, long range RFID hacking tools. This presentation will NOT weigh you down with theoretical details, discussions of radio frequencies and modulation schemes, or talk of inductive coupling. It WILL serve as a practical guide for penetration testers to understand the attack tools and techniques available to them for stealing and using RFID proximity badge information to gain unauthorized access to buildings and other secure areas. Schematics and Arduino code will be released,", + " and 100 lucky audience members will receive a custom PCB they can insert into almost any commercial RFID reader to steal badge info and conveniently save it to a text file on a microSD card for later use (such as badge cloning). This solution will allow you to read cards from up to 3 feet away, a significant improvement over the few centimeter range of common RFID hacking tools. Some of the topics we will explore are: Overview of best RFID hacking tools available to get for your toolkit\n\nStealing RFID proximity badge info from unsuspecting passers-by\n\nReplaying RFID badge info and creating fake cloned cards\n\nBrute-forcing higher privileged badge numbers to gain data center access\n\nAttacking badge readers and controllers directly\n\nPlanting PwnPlugs,", + " Raspberry Pis, and similar devices as physical backdoors to maintain internal network access\n\nCreating custom RFID hacking tools using the Arduino\n\nDefending yourself from RFID hacking threats This DEMO-rich presentation will benefit both newcomers and seasoned professionals of the physical penetration testing field.\n\nPresented by Fran Brown\n\nRooting SIM cards SIM cards are among the most widely-deployed computing platforms with over 7 billion cards in active use. Little is known about their security beyond manufacturer claims. Besides SIM cards\u2019 main purpose of identifying subscribers, most of them provide programmable Java runtimes. Based on this flexibility, SIM cards are poised to become an easily extensible trust anchor for otherwise untrusted smartphones,", + " embedded devices, and cars. The protection pretense of SIM cards is based on the understanding that they have never been exploited. This talk ends this myth of unbreakable SIM cards and illustrates that the cards -- like any other computing system -- are plagued by implementation and configuration bugs.\n\nPresented by Karsten Nohl\n\nThe SCADA That Didn't Cry Wolf- Who's Really Attacking Your ICS Devices- Part Deux! These attackers had a plan, they acted upon their plan, and they were successful. In my first presentation, given at Black Hat EU in 2013, I covered a robust ICS honeynet that I developed,", + " and who was really attacking them. In this talk, I cover many of the same concepts, but I go several steps further- profiling the attackers that exploited my ICS honeynet. This talk will profile, provide intelligence, and list actors that attacked my ICS honeypot environment. This talk will also feature a demo of the attackers in progress, exfiltrating perceived sensitive data. In addition, I will discuss in greater detail how I geo-located these individuals, and tracked their movements, operations, and attacks. Some of the findings are truly surprising and substantial, and my not be what you think they are. This talk will release brand new statistics and attack details seen nowhere else in the ICS community.\n\nPresented by Kyle Wilhoit\n\nSmashing The Font Scaler Engine in Windows Kernel The Font Scaler Engine is widely used to scale the outline font definition such as TrueType/OpenType font for a glyph to a specific point size and converts the outline into a bitmap at a particular resolution.", + " The revolution of font in computer that is mainly used for stylist purposes had make many users ignored its security issues. In fact, the Font Scaler engine could cause many security impacts especially in Windows kernel mode. In this talk, the basic structure of the Font Scaler engine will be discussed. This includes the conversion of an outline into a bitmap, the mathematical description of each glyph in an outline font, a set of instruction in each glyph that instruct the Font Scaler Engine to modify the shape of the glyph, and the instruction interpreter etc. Next, we introduce our smart font fuzzing method for identifying the new vulnerabilities of the Font Scaler engine.", + " The different of dumb fuzzing and vulnerable functions will be explained and we will prove that the dumb fuzzing technique is not a good option for Windows Font Fuzzing. Lastly, we focus on the attack vector that could be used to launch the attacks remotely and locally. A demonstration of the new TrueType font vulnerabilities and the attack vector on Windows 8 and Windows 7 will be shown.\n\nSPY-JACKING THE BOOTERS It's become commonplace for security reporters and providers of security technologies to find themselves targets of hackers' wrath, especially when they put criminal activity under the spotlight. Earlier this year, Brian Krebs had done some work to expose a \"booter\"", + " service. Like other public security figures, he found himself the target of repeated DDoS attacks. In Brian's case, this culminated in a \"SWATting\" attack -- a surprise visit by dozens of heavily armed police at his front door. Research on \"booter\" services reveals a relatively unsophisticated, but high-profit criminal community of DDoS-for-hire web sites that are capable of considerable impact. They operate under legal auspices, leveraging legitimate DDoS protection services. Anyone with an axe to grind and a small amount of money can hire one of these services to have virtually any person or web site knocked off the Internet.", + " As an indicator of how mainstream these services have become, most of them accept payment via Paypal. This talk will delve into the recent proliferation of these malicious commercial DDoS services, and reveal what's been learned about their surreptitious functioning, exposing the proprietors behind these illicit services, and what is known about their targets and their thousands of paying customers. Emphasis will be placed on detailing the vulnerabilities present in most booter sites, and the lessons we can draw about how targets of these attacks can defend themselves.\n\nSSL, gone in 30 seconds - a BREACH beyond CRIME In this hands-on talk, we will introduce new targeted techniques and research that allows an attacker to reliably retrieve encrypted secrets (session identifiers,", + " CSRF tokens, OAuth tokens, email addresses, ViewState hidden fields, etc.) from an HTTPS channel. We will demonstrate this new browser vector is real and practical by executing a PoC against a major enterprise product in under 30 seconds. We will describe the algorithm behind the attack, how the usage of basic statistical analysis can be applied to extract data from dynamic pages, as well as practical mitigations you can implement today. We will also describe the posture of different SaaS vendors vis-\u00e0-vis this attack. Finally, to provide the community with ability to build on our research, determine levels of exposure, and deploy appropriate protection, we will release the BREACH tool.\n\nStepping P3wns:", + " Adventures in full-spectrum embedded exploitation (and defense!) Our presentation focuses on two live demonstrations of exploitation and defense of a wide array of ubiquitous networked embedded devices like printers, phones and routers. The first demonstration will feature a proof-of-concept embedded worm capable of stealthy, autonomous polyspecies propagation. This PoC worm will feature at least one* 0-day vulnerability on Cisco IP phones as well as several embedded device vulnerabilities previously disclosed by the authors. We will demonstrate how an attacker can gain stealthy and persistent access to the victim network via multiple remote initial attack vectors against routers and printers. Once inside, we will show how the attacker can use other embedded devices as stepping-stones to compromise significant portions of the victim network without ever needing to compromise the general-purpose computers residing on the network.", + " Our PoC worm is capable of network reconnaissance, manual full-mesh propagation between IP phones, network printers and common networking equipment. Finally, we will demonstrate fully autonomous reconnaissance and exploitation of all embedded devices on the demo network. The second demonstration showcases host-based embedded defense techniques, called Symbiotes, developed by the authors at Columbia University under support from DARPA\u2019s Cyber Fast Track and CRASH programs, as well as IARPA\u2019s STONESOUP and DHS\u2019s S&T Research programs. The Symbiote, is an OS and vendor agnostic host-based defense designed specifically for proprietary embedded systems. We will demonstrate the automated injection of Software Symbiotes into each vulnerable embedded device presented during the first demonstration.", + " We then repeat all attack scenarios presented in the first demo against Symbiote defended devices to demonstrate real-time detection, alerting and mitigation of all malicious embedded implants used by our PoC worm. Lastly, we demonstrate the scalability and integration of Symbiote detection and alerting mechanisms into existing enterprise endpoint protection systems like Symantec End Point. Over the past two years we have discovered vulnerabilities in and and developed exploits for several embedded system. 2011 had not only the version agnostic Cisco IOS rootkit (\u201cKilling the Myth of Cisco IOS Diversity\u201d, Black Hat USA), but also the HP RFU vulnerability (\u201cPrint Me if You Dare\u201d, 28C3). In 2012 we presented the Cisco IP phone kernel vulnerability (\u201cHacking Cisco Phones\u201d, 29C3)", + ". While each exploit focused on one device, we posited polyspecies malware propagation in which a device of one type could be used to exploit a device of a completely different type. In this presentation, we demonstrate an HP printer being used to exploit two different Cisco IP phones (which includes a yet-to-be-disclosed privilege escalation exploit in the 8900/9900 series). We may throw in a fourth yet-to-be-named device just for good measure. We then take the same devices on the same network and install host-based defense to detect or prevent the same exploits.\n\nTeridian SoC Exploitation: Exploration of harvard architecture smart grid systems The Teridian 8051 based chips are found in a variety of places in daily life,", + " from the smart energy grid to smart cards and pin-pads. While the most prominent placement in the US is currently the metrology and power measurement side of a smart meters, the 8051 core is ubiquitous in embedded devices. They are additionally found in power distribution automation (the backend power shoveling inside your utility) and home automation (monitoring energy usage and changing configuration of appliances and similar in the home). The Teridian System-on-a-Chip platform wraps a complete system around a modified 8051 core, with additional features for chip security to block debug functionality and external access to memory. Additionally, the Harvard architecture design sets relatively rigid barriers between code and data (as opposed to x86/", + "64), which presents an unintentional security barrier, somewhat similar to robust hardware DEP on x86/64 platforms. In this talk, we will quickly cover architecture and system overviews, then dive into exploitation scenarios with techniques to attack Harvard architecture systems and code security implementations. End state results include pathways to gain coveted binary images of firmware and resident code execution.\n\nTLS'secrets' SSL and TLS have become the de-facto standards for transport-layer encryption. In recent years, many vulnerabilities have been uncovered in both the standards, their implementation and the way people configure and use them. This talk is exploring in details a lesser-known and much less talked about part of the standard which breaks some of the security properties one would expect.", + " A tool allowing for forensic recovery of plaintext (even when PFS ciphers are in use) will be released.\n\nPresented by Florent 'NextGen$' Daigniere\n\nTown Hall Meeting: CFAA Reform Strategy Aaron Swartz, a brilliant computer programmer and activist, committed suicide in January. At the time of his passing, Aaron was facing criminal charges carrying the possibility of decades in prison based on his use of the MIT campus network to download millions of journal articles from a database of academic scholarship. Aaron's death has prompted a vigorous public debate about the factors that contributed to his tragedy, including the many problems with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,", + " including its vague language and harsh penalty scheme. The information security community has an important role to play in educating and persuading lawmakers to reform this dangerous law. In this town hall meeting, join activists involved in CFAA reform efforts to discuss how you can get involved in the public debate around CFAA reform and strategize about how to have the most impact.\n\nPresented by Kurt Opsahl\n\nUART THOU MAD? Despite the fact that UART has been around FOREVER and is actually frequently used by vulnerability researchers in the hardware space, it has not been discussed as a dedicated topic on its own. This talk is intended to fill that gap.", + " We will provide an overview of what UART is, the tools that exist to work with it and provide examples of why a security researcher should care. We will also explore why UART is a powerful friend for anyone who likes to repurpose hardware. We will also provide BKMs for companies building products that include UART to decrease the likelihood it will be used against them.\n\nUniversal DDoS Mitigation Bypass Today's commercial DDoS mitigation technologies employ many different techniques for identifying DDoS traffics and blocking these threats. Common techniques range from basic malformed traffic check, to traffic profiling and rate limiting, to traffic source verification and so on, with captive redirection utilizing Javascript-", + " or CAPTCHA-based authentications being the most effective by far. However, in our research weaknesses were found in each and every such technique. We rolled all our exploits into a PoC attack tool, giving it near-perfect DDoS mitigation bypass capability against all existing commercial DDoS mitigation solutions. The ramification is huge because for vast majority of web sites, these mitigation solutions stand as their last line of defense, having this last line breached can expose these web sites' backend to devastating damages. We have surveyed extensively the entire range of DDoS mitigation technologies available on the market today, uncovering the countermeasure techniques they employ,", + " how they work and how to defeat each of them. Essentially bypass is achieved through emulating legit traffic characteristics. Afterwards our attack tool is introduced to demonstrate how all these exploits can be brought together to execute a \"combo attack\" to bypass all layers of protection in order to gain access to the backend. To coincide with the publication of this talk, our highly effective _attack_tool_will_be_made_freely_available_. The effectiveness of this tool is illustrated via testing results against specific DDoS mitigation products and popular web sites known to be protected by specific technologies. To conclude our research, a next-gen mitigation technique is also proposed as a countermeasure against our attack methodology.\n\nUSING ONLINE ACTIVITY AS DIGITAL FINGERPRINTS TO CREATE A BETTER SPEAR PHISHER Every day we produce tons of digital breadcrumbs through our activities in online services \u2013 from social networks,", + " photo sharing, mailing lists, online forums and blogs to more specialized tools, such as commits to open source projects, music listening services and travel schedules. These have long been known to provide useful information when profiling a target for social engineering purposes, especially due to the frantic pace and often uncensored way at which we generate such content. Our talk takes a tool-oriented approach to these profiling activities. By using data mining techniques combined with natural language processing, we can determine patterns in the way a user interacts with other users, his usual choice of vocabulary and phrasing, the friends/colleagues he most frequently communicates with as well as the topics discussed with them.", + " By consuming publicly available data, using both official APIs and scraping web pages, our profile can be used to validate how close forged content is to actual target-generated data. We will discuss the indexing of unstructured content, including issues such as the legal and technical implications of using official APIs versus scraping, how to build user relationship graphs and how to add temporal references to the collected data. We will also release a tool that automates the data mining and natural language processing (NLP) of unstructured information available on public data sources, as well as comparing user created content against a generated profile using various criteria, including: Network of friends/colleagues;\n\nFrequency of communication with friends/", + "colleagues;\n\nShared interests between target and friends/colleagues;\n\nHobbies and personal activities;\n\nUpcoming and past trips;\n\nFrequency of use of verbs;\n\nFrequency of use of adjectives;\n\nFrequency of use of nouns;\n\nAverage number of words per sentence or paragraph.\n\n\n\nVirtual Deobfuscator - a DARPA Cyber Fast Track funded effort While there has been a lot research done on automatically reverse engineering of virtualization obfuscators, there has been no approach that did not require a lot of man-hours identifying the bytecode (static approaches) or a complete recreation of the bytecode back to original source form (dynamic approaches). The tool I created,", + " Virtual Deobfuscator, will require no static man-hours reversing for the bytecode location or how the VM interpreter works, and will recreate instructions nearly equivalent to the original instructions.\n\nPresented by Jason Raber\n\nWhat's on the Wire? Physical Layer Tapping with Project Daisho We believe that flaws in network protocols will not be discovered unless physical layer communication tapping solutions are made available to security researchers. In order to have confidence in our communication media we need the ability to monitor and modify the packets transferred on the wire. 802.11 network monitoring allowed the flaws in WEP and WPA to be exposed, Bluetooth Low Energy monitoring has shown problems in the key exchange protocol,", + " but we are often more trusting of wired connections. Project Daisho is an attempt to fix that trust by allowing researchers to investigate wired protocols using existing software tools wherever possible. Daisho is an open source, extensible, modular network tap for wired communication media such as gigabit Ethernet, HDMI connections, and USB 3.0 connections. All aspects of the project are open source, including the hardware designs, software and FPGA cores. The project is producing the first open source USB 3.0 FPGA core.\n\nWhat Security Researchers Need to Know About Anti-Hacking Law The federal anti-hacking law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,", + " is infamous for its broad language and tough penalties, and has been used in recent years to bring heavy-handed charges against targets like Andrew Auernheimer (aka Weev) and Aaron Swartz. This presentation will explain why the CFAA is such a dangerous tool in the hands of overzealous prosecutors. I'll survey some of the legal precedents most relevant to the infosec community, including cases on port scanning, violating website terms of use, and designing tools capable of bypassing technical access controls. I'll also explain the prosecution against Weev in depth and discuss its greater implications for security researchers. Finally, I'll discuss what security professionals can learn from these cases to reduce the potential for legal trouble.\n\nPresented by Marcia Hofmann\n\nWith BIGDATA comes BIG responsibility:", + " Practical exploiting of MDX injections Let\u2019s take a look into the place where critical data is stored for further analytics afterwards. It\u2019s Business Warehouse (BW) and Big Data. Classic online transaction processing systems (OLTP) are not quite suitable to process big data, so they were replaced by OLAP with its multi-dimensional structures. This technology is present in almost all Business Intelligence applications including key vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. All the critical corporate data in one place, well\u2026 isn\u2019t it a sweet target for an attacker? The OLAP technology has brought a lot of new terms and concepts into the world: OLAP cube,", + " measures, dimensions, XMLA, and the MDX language, which is used for requests to multi-dimensional data structures. In today\u2019s Business Intelligence (BI) marketplace, most OLAP servers and almost all BI clients talk in MDX. This talk will describe in detail all the entities of this technology and especially the MDX request language. The talk will also feature an overview of possible MDX-related attacks as well as an overview of code injection, data retrieval and update vectors. Moreover, I will show some examples of the systems that can be exploited by MDX-related vulnerabilities, their system-related differences, post-exploitation vectors, and a cheat-sheet with a tool for simplifying MDX Injections.\n\n') UNION SELECT `This_Talk`", + " AS ('New Optimization and Obfuscation Techniques\u2019)%00 This talk will present some of the newest and most advanced optimization and obfuscation techniques available in the field of SQL Injections. These techniques can be used to bypass web application firewalls and intrusion detection systems at an alarming speed. This talk will also demonstrate these techniques on both open-source and commercial firewalls and present the ALPHA version of a framework called Leapfrog which Roberto is developing; Leapfrog is designed to assist security professionals, IT administrators, firewall vendors and companies in testing their firewall rules and implementation to determine if they are an adequate enough defense measure to stop a real cyber-attack.", + " Many of the techniques that will be presented were created by Roberto Salgado and are currently some of the fastest methods of extracting information from a database through SQL Injections. Roberto will demonstrate how to reduce the amount of time it takes to exploit a SQL Injection by over a third of the time it would normally take. He will also demonstrate why firewalls and intrusion detection systems are not the ultimate solution to security and why other measurements should also be implemented.\n\nPresented by Roberto Salgado\n\nWorkshops\n\nDo-It-Yourself Cellular IDS For less than $500, you can build your own cellular intrusion detection system to detect malicious activity through your own local femtocell.", + " Our team will show how we leveraged root access on a femtocell, reverse engineered the activation process, and turned it into a proof-of-concept cellular network intrusion monitoring system. We leveraged commercial Home Node-Bs (\"femtocells\") to create a 3G cellular network sniffer without needing to reimplement the UMTS or CDMA2000 protocol stacks. Inside a Faraday cage, we connected smartphones to modified femtocells running Linux distributions and redirected traffic to a Snort instance. Then we captured traffic from infected phones and showed how Snort was able to detect and alert upon malicious traffic. We also wrote our own CDMA protocol dissector in order to better analyze CDMA traffic.\n\nEmbedded Devices Security and Firmware Reverse Engineering Embedded devices have become the \"usual presence\"", + " in the network of (m)any household(s), SOHO, enterprise or critical infrastructure. The preached Internet of Things promises to \"gazillion\"uple their number and heterogeneity in the next few years. However, embedded devices are becoming lately the \"usual suspects\" in security breaches and security advisories and thus become the \"Achilles' heel\" of one's overall infrastructure security. An important aspect is that embedded devices run on what's commonly known as firmwares. To understand how to secure embedded devices, one needs to understand their firmware and how it works. This workshop aims at presenting a quick-start at how to inspect firmwares and a hands-on presentation with exercises on real firmwares from a security analysis standpoint.\n\nJTAGulator:", + " Assisted discovery of on-chip debug interfaces On-chip debug (OCD) interfaces can provide chip-level control of a target device and are a primary vector used by hackers to extract program code or data, modify memory contents, or affect device operation on-the-fly. Depending on the complexity of the target device, manually locating available OCD connections can be a difficult and time consuming task, sometimes requiring physical destruction or modification of the device. In this session, Joe will introduce the JTAGulator, an open source hardware tool that assists in identifying OCD connections from test points, vias, or component pads. He will discuss traditional hardware reverse engineering methods and prior art in this field,", + " how OCD interfaces work, and how JTAGulator can simplify the task of discovering such interfaces.\n\nPresented by Joe Grand\n\nMethodologies for Hacking Embedded Security Appliances Security appliances, for everything from firewalls to encrypted SAN devices are a dime a dozen these days. Vendors are throwing jargon into everything they possibly can to make the consumer believe they have the top-of-line device, with every possible feature a person could want. Everyone has heard the sales pitches, but does anyone really take the time to verify the claims, or understand how those devices function? We\u2019ll go in-depth on the methods we use in breaking down hardened security appliances for analysis,", + " using real world examples where possible. We hope to point out possible failure points within the construction of a security device, so as to better educate purchasers and producers on why products fail. We\u2019ll analyze methods of key management, cryptographic implementation, system recovery, tamper detection, interfaces, and much more.\n\nMo Malware Mo Problems - Cuckoo Sandbox to the rescue Cuckoo Sandbox is a widely used open-source project for automated dynamic malware analysis. It takes malicious documents or URLs as input and provides both high-level overview reports as well as detailed API call traces of the activities observed inside a virtual machine. The project was founded by Claudio Guarnieri and is mainly developed by four developers in their free time and during weekends.", + " Cuckoo Sandbox distinguishes from other solutions thanks to its modular design and flexible customization features. Because of this unique emphasis several large IT corporations and security companies run Cuckoo Sandbox to analyze malware samples on a daily basis and it\u2019s often placed alongside with traditional perimeter security products as an added weapon to incident response and security teams\u2019 arsenals. Being open-source, it also empowers independent and academic security researchers to use a full-fledged malware analysis sandbox freely. For the latest available version we saw more than 8000 downloads and a few hundred constantly running deployments with enabled update-checks. This community also contributes to the project in various forms such as setup instructions,", + " code contributions, behavioral signatures, feature requests and usability feedback and is actively engaged in conversations over mailing lists and IRC. The development team already presented about the project and conducted trainings on several occasions. However due to a wealth of new features and increased development effort, the project is growing and becoming more stable and capable in the recent times. For this reason we want to host a workshop that we designed from scratch with a completely new approach. It will showcase the tool, contain several challenging hands-on exercises with interesting malware samples and explain customization possibilities again with examples that attendees can try. Additionally in this presentation we cover our new VM-introspection based analysis module for the first time.", + " We intend to release it as an alternative to our userland hooking based approach in order to evade malware trying to detect us. So in the future, users can use several analysis methods and compare results to pinpoint evasion techniques. The audience can interact and participate to the workshop with just a web browser and an SSH client.\n\nNetwork Forensics: Sudden Death Workshop Test your Network Forensics-fu in this deadly workshop. Participants will receive a brand new release of the Network Forensics workstation and packet captures containing VoIP, streaming video, IRC traffic, proprietary protocols, TLS-encrypted traffic, Android application traffic, and more. Wireshark won't save you in this battle royale!", + " Competitors will have to: Reverse engineer a proprietary protocol to uncover a secret document\n\nManually extract a streaming video from a VLC session\n\nCarve a telephone call out of SIP traffic\n\nCrack TLS-encrypted Facebook traffic from a mobile phone session to capture the suspect's location\n\nBeat every other network forensic expert to the solution The fastest network forensics expert wins! Rounds are timed, and the first person to solve each round wins a prize. Solutions will be reviewed during the workshop. You get to keep the evidence and Network Forensic workstation image.\n\nPDF Attack: A Journey from the Exploit Kit to the shellcode PDF Attack:", + " A journey from the Exploit Kit to the shellcode is a workshop to show how to analyze obfuscated Javascript code from an Exploit Kit page, extract the exploits used, and analyze them. Nowadays it is possible to use automated tools to extract URLs and binaries but it is also important to know how to do it manually to not to miss a detail. We will focus on PDF documents mostly, starting from a simple Javascript Hello World document and ending with a real file used by a fresh Exploit Kit. This workshop will also include exercises to modify malicious PDF files and obfuscate them to try to bypass AV software; very useful in pentesting.", + " The latest version of peepdf (included in REMnux, BackTrack and Kali Linux) will be used to accomplish these tasks, so this presentation covers the latest tricks used by cybercriminals like using new filters and encryption to make analysis more difficult.\n\nPresented by Jose Miguel Esparza\n\nPractical Pentesting of ERPs and Business Applications Today, the whole business of a company depends on enterprise business applications. They are big systems that store and process all the critical data of companies. Any information an attacker might want, be it a cybercriminal, industrial spy or competitor, is stored here. This information can include financial,", + " customer or public relations, intellectual property, personally identifiable information, and more. Industrial espionage, sabotage and fraud or insider embezzlement may be very effective if targeted at the victim\u2019s business application and cause significant damage to the business. There are many types of those applications: ERPs, CRMs, SRMs, ESBs. Unfortunately, there is still very little information about the security of those systems, especially how to pentest them. During our work on OWASP-EAS subproject, we gathered top 10 critical areas (similar to most of the business applications), so we will present a solid approach for pentesting those types of systems.", + " We will look at 3 different systems from top business application vendors: SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, and show how to pentest them using our cheatsheets that will be released for BlackHat as well as a free tool: ERPScan Pentesting Tool.\n\nTurbo Talks\n\nAbusing Web APIs Through Scripted Android Applications This will be a presentation focused on abusing web application APIs through the use of associated Android apps. We'll demonstrate using the JVM based scripting language JRuby to load, modify, and run code from targeted APKs in an easily scriptable way. We'll leverage this to demonstrate attacks against web APIs that have reduced their security requirements in order to allow for a more frictionless mobile experience,", + " such as removing the need for captchas, email validation, and other usage restrictions. Building on that, we'll show code building on the existing testing framework of Burp suite and its Ruby interface Buby to make requests to APIs using the functionality we've exposed through the scripting to find differing responses to similar requests, and identifying potential weak points. We'll conclude with several case studies of popular apps demonstrating private key retrieval, arbitrary unlimited account creation on a social network, and locating and using custom cryptographic routines in our own scripts without the need to understand their implementation.\n\nPresented by Daniel Peck\n\nBeyond the Application: Cellular Privacy Regulation Space Aggressive data collection practices by cell providers have sparked new FCC interest in closing regulatory gaps in consumer privacy protection.", + " Tensions exist between consumers and carriers, as well as between regulatory agencies. This talk will explore the current landscape from a technical as well as regulatory perspective and examine how it may change in the near future.\n\nPresented by Christie Dudley\n\nBig Data for Web Application Security The security posture of an application is directly proportional to the amount of information that is known about the application. Although the advantages of analytics from a data science perspective are well known and well documented, the advantages of analytics from a web application security perspective are neither well known nor well documented. How can we, as web application security practitioners, take advantage of big data stacks to improve the security posture of our applications?", + " This talk will dive into the ways that big data analytics can be taken advantage of to create effective defenses for web applications today. We'll outline the fundamental problems that can and should be solved with big data and outline the classes of security mechanisms that simply, based on their nature, cannot be solved with big data. Once an understanding of the domain is established, we'll explore several specific examples that outline how one security team uses big data every day to solve hard, interesting problems and create a safer experience for its users.\n\nClickjacking Revisited: A Perceptual View of UI Security We revisit UI security attacks (such as clickjacking)", + " from a perceptual perspective and argue that limitations of human perception make UI security difficult to achieve. We develop five novel attacks that go beyond current UI security defenses. Our attacks are powerful with a 100% success rate in one case. However, they only scratch the surface of possible perceptual attacks on UI security. We discuss possible defenses against our perceptual attacks and find that possible defenses either have an unacceptable usability cost or do not provide a comprehensive defense. Finally, we posit that a number of attacks are possible with a more comprehensive study of human perception.\n\nPresented by Devdatta Akhawe\n\nCMX: IEEE Clean File Metadata Exchange False positives are a huge problem in the security space.", + " Organizations can spend more time and engineering on reducing FPs than on detecting new malware. Whitelists can help, but there are difficulties with these. Many organizations will not permit the exchange of files for copyright reasons. 3rd party developers must deal with multiple security vendors to get their software whitelisted. CMX is a system being operated by IEEE. 3rd party software developers can submit metadata for their applications to a single portal. Security vendor subscribers can then pull -- in realtime -- all the metadata being pushed into the system. Since only metadata is being exchanged, there are no copyright problems. This system will greatly simplify the maintenance of global whitelists.\n\nCrowdSource:", + " An Open Source, Crowd Trained Machine Learning Model for Malware Capability Detection Due to the exploding number of unique malware binaries on the Internet and the slow process required for manually analyzing these binaries, security practitioners today have only limited visibility into the functionality implemented by the global population of malware. To date little work has been focused explicitly on quickly and automatically detecting the broad range of high level malware functionality such as the ability of malware to take screenshots, communicate via IRC, or surreptitiously operate users\u2019 webcams. To address this gap, we debut CrowdSource, an open source machine learning based reverse engineering tool. CrowdSource approaches the problem of malware capability identification in a novel way,", + " by training a malware capability detection engine on millions of technical documents from the web. Our intuition for this approach is that malware reverse engineers already rely heavily on the web \u201ccrowd\u201d (performing web searches to discover the purpose of obscure function calls and byte strings, for example), so automated approaches, using the tools of machine learning, should also take advantage of this rich and as of yet untapped data source. As a novel malware capability detection approach, CrowdSource does the following: Generates a list of detected software capabilities for novel malware samples (such as the ability of malware to communicate via a particular protocol, perform a given data exfiltration activity,", + " or load a device driver); Provides traceable output for capability detections by including \u201ccitations\u201d to the web technical documents that detections are based on; Provides probabilistic malware capability detections when appropriate: e.g., system output may read, \u201cgiven the following web documents as evidence, it is 80% likely the sample uses IRC as a C2 channel, and 70% likely that it also encrypts this traffic.\u201d CrowdSource is funded under the DARPA Cyber Fast Track initiative, is being developed by the machine learning and malware analysis group at Invincea Labs and is scheduled for beta, open source release to the security community this October.", + " In this presentation we will give complete details on our algorithm for CrowdSource as it stands, including compelling results that demonstrate that CrowdSource can already rapidly reverse engineer a variety of currently active malware variants.\n\nPresented by Joshua Saxe\n\nDenial of Service as a Service - asymmetrical warfare at its finest Imagine being DDOS'd repeatedly with up to 10Gbps of traffic on a daily basis. Your logs are useless (when your systems are even able to collect data). How do you stop the attacks? Crippling Distributed Denial of Service \u201cAs a Service\u201d or DDoSaaS (tm) attacks can be done with $200 lifetime memberships against the largest organizations around - and almost impossible to stop.", + " Asymmetrical warfare at its finest. The presentation will focus on an investigation that was done in 2013 regarding a large DDOS attack against a regional ISP in Quebec, Canada. The DDOS attack affected tens of thousand of citizens including municipal 911 services (don't ask) to chicken farmers. We'll talk about the investigative techniques (including social engineering) that were used to track down the suspect and the eventual arrest.\n\nPresented by Robert Masse\n\nDenying service to DDOS protection services In this age of cheap and easy DDOS attacks, DDOS protection services promise to go between your server and the Internet to protect you from attackers.", + " Cloud based DDOS protection suffers from several fundamental flaws that will be demonstrated in this talk. This was originally discovered in the process of investigating malicious websites protected by Cloudflare- but the issue also affects a number of other cloud based services including other cloud based anti-DDOS and WAF providers. We have developed a tool \u2013 called No Cloud Allowed \u2013 that will exploit this new cloud security bypass method and unmask a properly configured DDOS protected website. This talk will also discuss other unmasking methods and provide you with an arsenal to audit your cloud based DDOS or WAF protection.\n\nPresented by Allison Nixon\n\nDetecting Vulnerabilities in Virtual Devices Using Conformance Testing -- \"Turning Old Hardware into Gold\"", + " Virtual devices are key building blocks of virtual machines. Any flaws or vulnerabilities in a virtual device directly threaten the security of the whole virtual machine. In this talk, we will present our experience detecting bugs in virtual devices by comparing a virtual device to its physical counterpart. Since the device drivers in a guest operating system assume the virtual devices behave the same as the physical devices, any diverging behavior could potentially cause problems for the device drivers and threaten the security of the guest operating system and the virtual machine platform. We compared the QEMU/KVM virtual implementations of the e1000 and eepro100 to their physical counterparts and found multiple bugs in each,", + " one of which was confirmed to affect guest OS security, leading to CVE-2012-6075. Our talk will cover the basic idea of using virtual and physical device comparison for fuzzing virtual devices, and additionally describe the observability of each device type, methods for capturing device events and states, and methods for comparing between them with only partial state information. We will explain each of these steps using the real examples that led to our discovery of bugs in the e1000 and eepro100 virtual devices. We expect this talk to attract a traditional OS security audience as well as people interested in new testing methods for cloud environments.\n\nMalicious File for Exploiting Forensic Software Commercial forensic software such as EnCase,", + " FTK and X-Ways Forensics adopts the same library component for viewing file content. If the library component is exploitable, lots of forensic investigators are exposed to risks like malware infection and freeze of the software by checking crafted malicious files. This presentation introduces anti-forensic techniques exploiting vulnerabilities of the component embedded in forensic software. Specifically, I show one malicious file can trigger arbitrary code execution on multiple forensic software products. The exploitation has great impact on forensic investigation because most forensic software includes it. The presentation is made up as follows. First, I explain the file viewer component in forensic software and how to fuzz it with a custom script of forensic software,", + " MiniFuzz and a kernel driver for anti-debugging. Next, I describe two vulnerabilities (heap overflow and infinite loop DoS) detected by the fuzzer then demonstrate arbitrary code execution and hang-up of forensic software process using malicious files. I also fill in the gaps on some tricks for exploiting heap overflow (e.g., overwriting function pointers, finding the condition of heap spraying with bitmap images). Finally, I refer to countermeasures.\n\nMobile Malware: Why the traditional AV paradigm is doomed and how to use physics to detect undesirable routines The traditional Anti-Virus paradigm focuses on signature-based and behavioral detection. These require substantial processing, which hurts the limited power resources of handsets.", + " Also, carriers are reluctant and slow to deliver Firmware Over The Air (FOTA) patches, due to the rigorous testing they need to subject updates to, and the costs of over-the-air updates. A move to cloud-based screening fails to recognize that not all threats will be propagated over the backbone, may obfuscate themselves in transit; or fight back (as rootkits do) to evade reporting or use of techniques such as the \"Google kill switch\". Hardware vendors are evaluating security solutions with hardware support, such as TrustZone, but while this reduces the vulnerabilities, it still exposes an attack surface. Software-based attestation has been proposed by several research groups,", + " based on various techniques that rely on the physics of the device (such as the speed of the bus, etc) to detect undesirable routines. These techniques typically require some hardware support on the devices, though, such as a trustworthy authentication (of the device to an external verifier) and a timer that cannot be manipulated by malware.\n\nNew Trends in FastFlux Networks Fast-flux networks has been adopted by attackers for many years. Existing works only focus on characteristics such as the fast changing rate of the IP addresses (e.g. A record) and the name server addresses (NS records); the single flux/double flux structure etc. In this work,", + " we track and analyze over 200 fast-flux domains and we discovered that the features of the fast-flux networks have shifted. More specifically, we discovered that the change rate of the IP addresses and name server addresses are slower than before, in some cases even slower than some benign applications that leverage fast-flux alike techniques. We also discovered that IP addresses and name servers are shared among different families of fast-flux domains indicating that there is a well-established under-ground economic model for the use of fast-flux network. Moreover, we also noticed that instead of single or double flux, current fast-flux domains exhibits \u201cn-levels\u201d of flux behavior,", + " i.e., there appears to be \u201cn\u201d levels of name servers in the DNS system for fast-flux domains. Finally, we also studied the benign applications that look alike fast-flux domains but not. In light of these new characteristics, we proposed several new detection approaches that capture the discoveries about the new features of fast-flux domains.\n\nOPSEC failures of spies The CIA is no more technologically sophisticated than your average American, and as a result, has suffered serious and embarrassing operational failures. This is a rare peek inside the CIA's intelligence gathering operations and the stunning lack of expertise they can bring to the job. In 2005,", + " news organizations around the world reported that an Italian court had signed arrest warrants for 26 Americans in connection with an extraordinary rendition of a Muslim cleric. At the heart of the case was the stunning lack of OPSEC the team of spies used while they surveilled and then snatched their target off the streets of Milan. The incident, known as the Italian Job inside the CIA, became an international scandal and caused global outrage. What very few people ever understood was that the CIA's top spies were laughably uneducated about cell phone technology and ignorant of the electronic fingerprints left behind. The story would be startling, though old, if not for the fact that eight years after the debacle in Milan,", + " history repeated itself. In 2011, an entire CIA network of Lebanese informants was busted by Hezbollah. The reason: cell phone OPSEC failures. After receiving a warning from Mossad, who had lost their network a year earlier the same way, the CIA dismissed Hezbollah's ability to run analytic software on raw cell phone traffic. But they did. And with a little effort, the CIA's network of spies, as well as their own officers, were identified one by one. This is the true story of American Intelligence's Keystone Kops.\n\nPresented by Matthew Cole\n\nPassword Hashing: the Future is Now Passwords are hashed everywhere:", + " operating systems, smartphones, web services, disk encryption tools, SSH private keys, etc. Hashing passwords mitigates the impact of a compromised database by forcing attackers to bruteforce passwords. Bruteforce is easier when the hash function is not \"salted\", fast to evaluate, and easy to implement as multiple parallel instances on GPUs or multi-core systems. However existing solutions are not satisfactory, and the huge majority of systems rely on weak hashes (eg. leaks from Sony, LinkedIn, or more recently Evernote). After a brief introduction of the problem and previous solution attempts, this talk presents a roadmap towards new improved hashing methods, as desired by a number of parties (from industry and standardization organizations). First,", + " we'll enumerate the technical challenges for software and security engineers as well as cryptographers and attackers, discussion questions like: why, counter-intuitively, parallelism is desirable? How can complexity theory benefit password hashing? How to define a metric that encompasses performance on GPUs and ASICs? Should hashing be performed by the client, server, or both? What about DoS induced by slow hashing? etc. Then we'll describe the initiative that motivated this talk: the Password Hashing Competition (PHC), a project similar to the pure-cryptography competitions AES, eSTREAM, or SHA-3, but focused on the password hashing problem: the PHC gathers the leading experts from the password cracking scene as well as cryptographers and software engineers from academia,", + " industry, as well as NIST, to develop the hashing methods of the future.\n\nPresented by Jean-Philippe Aumasson\n\nShattering Illusions in Lock-Free Worlds: Compiler/Hardware Behaviors in OSes and VMs Memory access operations in OSes, VMs or traditional applications from different threads and processes can lead to various security issues depending on the compiler/hardware - especially in non-blocking code. Compilers/hardware pretend to provide sequential order execution, and this illusion does hold for single-threaded code. However, they are not aware of which memory locations are shared and developers oftentimes make the wrong assumptions about memory models.", + " It can be subtle to protect these memory sections from aggressive read/write re-ordering and various optimizations depending on the compiler on x86, x86-64 or the loosely ordered IA64, ARM CPUs as well as GPUs - and it can easily lead to \"losing the illusion\" of sequential consistency. I will discuss common issues depending on the hardware and compiler used, mostly related to loosely ordered hardware and the C/C++11 memory models, but will also compare how they hold in higher level languages. Developers will better understand how these issues can be mitigated and researchers will be able to find them more easily.\n\nPresented by Marc Blanchou\n\nTOR... ALL-THE-", + "THINGS! The global Tor network and its routing protocols provide an excellent framework for online anonymity. However, the selection of Tor-friendly software for Windows currently sucks. Want to anonymously browse the web? You\u2019re stuck with Firefox, and don\u2019t even think about trying to anonymously use Flash. Want to dynamically analyze malware without letting the C2 server know your home IP address? You\u2019re outta luck. Want to anonymously use any program that doesn\u2019t natively support SOCKS or HTTP proxying? Not gonna happen. While some solutions currently exist for generically rerouting traffic through Tor, these solutions either don\u2019t support Windows or require an additional network gateway device.", + " This talk presents a new tool to securely, anonymously, and transparently route all TCP/IP and DNS traffic through Tor, regardless of the client software, and without relying on VPNs or additional hardware or virtual machines. Black Hat 2013 will mark the release of this new Tor tool -- Tortilla!\n\nPresented by Jason Geffner\n\nTruncating TLS Connections to Violate Beliefs in Web Applications We identify logical web application flaws which can be exploited by TLS truncation attacks to desynchronize the user- and server-perspective of an application's state. It follows immediately that servers may make false assumptions about users, hence, the flaw constitutes a security vulnerability.", + " Moreover, in the context of authentication systems, we exploit the vulnerability to launch the following practical attacks: we exploit the Helios electronic voting system to cast votes on behalf of honest voters, take full control of Microsoft Live accounts, and gain temporary access to Google accounts.\n\nUntwining Twine Over 14 years ago, Kevin Ashton was the first to coin the term \"internet of things,\" and pointed out that data on the Internet is mostly created by humans. Things have changed considerably since 1999 - Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5 is no longer on the radio, many appliances ship with embedded systems that can be remotely monitored,", + " and the smart home is something we're all excited for and terrified of. Twine is a consumer device that provides remote environmental monitoring through a variety of sensors, such as moisture, temperature, vibration, etc... We will discuss our analysis of Twine, and will lead you through the steps taken to understand what's going on under the hood of a \"black box\" device. The audience will be introduced to the challenges faced, and to the different approaches that can be leveraged to understand (and exploit!) embedded devices (the fridge that tweets and similar devices). Topics include: capturing traffic on a non-proxy aware device, obtaining and reverse engineering the firmware,", + " analyzing opaque binary traffic, emulating a Twine device and gaining console access via the debug serial port. ", + " Security researcher Barnaby Jack on Wednesday showed how easy it can be to trigger a waterfall of cash from a standard bank ATM using readily-available software applications.\n\nIn a presentation at the Black Hat USA 2010 conference in Las Vegas, Jack, director of research at IOActive, a Seattle-based security consulting company, used software to trick two standard ATMs into spitting out wads of cash while displaying \"jackpot\" on the screens.\n\nAccording to a Wednesday report from Venturebeat, Jack was able to hack two ATMs built around the Windows CE operating system and either ARM or XScale processors.\n\nHe did so by using a common universal key and a USB stick to load a rootkit software application,", + " along with another program to take over the ATMs. Jack claims to have hacked at least four different ATM machines, a couple of which have since been patched, VentureBeat said.\n\nJack also disclosed a couple of easy countermeasures to his hack, including physical locks with unique keys on the ATMs to stop thieves from easily accessing the machines. Vendors should also use a trusted software environment to prevent software hacks, VentureBeat said.\n\nIn Jack's description of his presentation on the Black Hat 2010 Website, he says he was originally scheduled to give his ATM hacking demo last year, but the talk was pulled at the last minute \"due to circumstances beyond my control.\"\n\nJack also notes that most ATM attacks depend on external devices to skim data from customers'", + " ATM cards, or on physically removing the ATMs to steal the cash, and that attacking the ATM software is rare.\n\nHowever, Jack noted that this scenario was featured in one of Hollywood's most famous films.\n\n\"I've always liked the scene in Terminator 2 where John Connor walks up to an ATM, interfaces his Atari to the card reader and retrieves cash from the machine. I think I've got that kid beat,\" he wrote. ", + " BOSTON Barnaby Jack, a celebrated computer hacker who forced bank ATMs to spit out cash and sparked safety improvements in medical devices, died in San Francisco, a week before he was due to make a high-profile presentation at a hacking conference.\n\nThe New Zealand-born Jack, 35, was found dead on Thursday evening by \"a loved one\" at an apartment in San Francisco's Nob Hill neighborhood, according to a police spokesman. He would not say what caused Jack's death but said police had ruled out foul play.\n\nThe San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office said it was conducting an autopsy, although it could be a month before the cause of death is determined.\n\nJack was one of the world's most prominent \"white hat\"", + " hackers - those who use their technical skills to find security holes before criminals can exploit them.\n\nHis genius was finding bugs in the tiny computers embedded in equipment, such as medical devices and cash machines. He often received standing ovations at conferences for his creativity and showmanship while his research forced equipment makers to fix bugs in their software.\n\nJack had planned to demonstrate his techniques to hack into pacemakers and implanted defibrillators at the Black Hat hackers convention in Las Vegas next Thursday. He told Reuters last week that he could kill a man from 30 feet away by attacking an implanted heart device.\n\n\"He was passionate about finding security bugs before the bad guys,\" said long-time security industry executive Stuart McClure,", + " who gave Jack one of his first jobs and also had worked with him at Intel Inc's McAfee, the computer security company.\n\n\"He was one of those people who was put on this earth to find vulnerabilities that can be exploited in a malicious way to hurt people,\" McClure said.\n\nJack became one of the world's most famous hackers after a 2010 demonstration of \"Jackpotting\" - getting ATMs to spew out bills. (reut.rs/gIGXVq) A clip of his presentation has been viewed more than 2.6 million times on YouTube.\n\nTwo years ago, Jack turned his attention to medical devices,", + " while working on a team at McAfee that engineered methods for attacking insulin pumps. Their research prompted medical device maker Medtronic Inc to revamp the way it designs its products. (reut.rs/sM9mTE)\n\nThe U.S. government also noticed Jack's work.\n\n\"The work that Barnaby Jack and others have done to highlight some of these vulnerabilities has contributed importantly to progress in the field,\" said William Maisel, deputy director for science at the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Devices and Radiological Health.\n\nJack's passion for hacking sometimes got him into trouble.\n\nIn 2012, he connected his laptop to a gold bullion dispensing machine at a casino in Abu Dhabi,", + " according to fellow hacker Tiffany Strauchs Rad. She said Jack had permission from a hotel manager to hack the machine but security intervened.\n\nIt turned out the hotel did not actually own the gold machine and the American Embassy had to be called in to help resolve the misunderstanding, Rad said.\n\n\"He would hack everything he touched, she said.\n\n\"BELOVED PIRATE\"\n\nJack's most recent employer, the cyber security consulting firm IOActive Inc, said on its Twitter account: \"Lost but never forgotten our beloved pirate, Barnaby Jack has passed.\"\n\nJack had been scheduled to present his research on heart devices at Black Hat on August 1.", + " Last week, Jack told Reuters he had devised a way to hack into a wireless communications system that linked implanted pacemakers and defibrillators with bedside monitors that gather information about their operations.\n\n\"I'm sure there could be lethal consequences,\" Jack said in a phone interview.\n\nHe declined to name the manufacturer of the device but said he was working with that company to figure out how to prevent malicious attacks on heart patients.\n\nJack's sudden death drew responses from the hacking community reminiscent of those that followed the suicide of hacker activist Aaron Swartz in January.\n\nDan Kaminsky, a well-known hacker, described the death as a tragedy. \"Barnaby was one of the most creative,", + " energetic, diverse researchers in our field,\" he said.\n\n\"You'll be missed, bro,\" tweeted another well-known hacker Dino Dai Zovi.\n\nJack's sister, Amberleigh Jack, who lives in New Zealand, told Reuters her brother was 35 years old. She declined to comment further, saying she needed time to grieve.\n\nBlack Hat said that it will not replace Jack's session at the conference, saying the hour would be left vacant for conference attendees to commemorate his life and work.\n\n(Reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Tiffany Wu, Vicki Allen and Bill Trott) ", + " Well-known hacker Barnaby Jack has died in San Francisco, a week before he was due to show off techniques for attacking implanted heart devices that he said could kill a man from 30 feet away.\n\nThe San Francisco Medical Examiner's office said he died in the city on Thursday. It gave no details.\n\nJack, a security expert, became one of the most famous hackers on the planet after a 2010 demonstration in which he forced ATMs to spit out cash, dubbed \"Jackpotting.\"\n\nAccording to the Black Hat website, Jack was to present Aug. 3-4 on \"Hacking Humans.\"\n\n\"I will discuss how these devices operate and communicate and the security shortcomings of the current protocols.", + " Our internal research software will be revealed that utilizes a common bedside transmitter to scan for, and interrogate individual medical implants,\" according to promotional material for the event.\n\nThe hacking community expressed shock as the news of his death spread via Twitter early on Friday.\n\n\"Wow... Speechless,\" Tweeted mobile phone hacker Tyler Shields.\n\nJack's most recent employer, the cyber security consulting firm IOActive Inc, said in a Tweet: \"Lost but never forgotten our beloved pirate, Barnaby Jack has passed.\"\n\nJack's genius was finding bugs in the tiny computers that are embedded in equipment such as medical devices and banking machines. He received standing ovations at hacking conventions for his creativity and showmanship.\n\n\"You grimy bastard.", + " I was just talking up about your awesome work last night,\" Tweeted Dino Dai Zovi, a hacker known for his skill at finding bugs in Apple products. \"You'll be missed, bro.\"\n\nFriends and fans alike Tweeted memorials to Jack's Twitter handle, @barnaby_jack.\n\nDan Kaminsky, an expert in Internet security, Tweeted that he had hoped the news of Jack's death was a prank: \"God, the stories. Nobody caused such hilarious trouble like @barnaby_jack.\"\n\nWhile Jack's attacks on ATMs brought him the most attention, his work on medical devices may have a much broader impact.\n\nTwo years ago,", + " while working at McAfee, he engineered methods for attacking insulin pumps that prompted medical device maker Medtronic Inc to bring in outside security firms and revamp the way it designs its products.\n\nHe followed that up with the work on heart devices that he was due to present at Black Hat next week -- his first presentation at the annual convention since 2010. This year's Black Hat conference starts tomorrow in Las Vegas.\n\nJack told Reuters in an interview last week that he had devised a way to attack heart patients by hacking into a wireless communications system that links implanted pacemakers and defibrillators with bedside monitors that gather information about their operations.\n\n\"I'm sure there could be lethal consequences,\" he said.\n\nReuters ", + " Barnaby Jack, a prominent white hat hacker and embedded systems expert with a penchant for pulling off spectacular hacks of devices at conferences globally, has died just days before a scheduled presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.\n\nJack most recently was the director of embedded security research at IOActive. He had worked in the security industry for more than a decade, serving in various roles at McAfee, Juniper Networks, eEye digital Security and FoundStone.\n\nReached by phone, IOActive's Gunter Ollmann said he was unprepared to speak publicly about the researcher. A message on Twitter from IOActive praised Jack for his research over the last decade.\n\n[", + "Related: Black Hat 2013: 5 Cool Hacking Tools To Check Out]\n\n\"Lost but never forgotten our beloved pirate, Barnaby Jack has passed. He was a master hacker and dear friend. Here's to you Barnes!,\" the IOActive message read.\n\nJack was scheduled to give a presentation on the security of wireless implantable medical devices at Black Hat 2013. The demonstration was to show how a bedside transmitter could scan and disrupt the processes of implanted heart devices. Reuters reported that the San Francisco Medical Examiner's office confirmed his death in the city Thursday. It did not elaborate on the cause of death.\n\nThe embedded systems expert took the stage at Black Hat in 2010,", + " providing a stunning performance when he exploited weaknesses in widely used models of ATMs, causing them to spit out money on stage at the hacking conference. He also exposed a bogus ATM machine a year earlier at a Las Vegas hotel hosting the DefCon 17 conference.\n\nJack later turned his focus to hacking automobile systems and electronic medical devices, showing how small systems and components that run critical processes can be used by an attacker to cause serious damage or death.\n\nAt Hacker Halted conference in Miami in 2011, Jack showed how he could use a transmitter to interrupt medical insulin pumps. The tiny transmitter had a 300-foot radius and could control just about any embedded medical device,", + " Jack said.\n\nHD Moore, chief research officer at Rapid7 and chief architect of the Metasploit penetration testing framework, said Jack's work had a significant impact, forcing manufacturers to take action.\n\n\"He was one of those rare folks who does a great job with research and working with vendors to get weaknesses fixed,\" Moore said. \"He was willing to go all out on his research the way other folks weren't.\"\n\nJoshua Drake, a senior research scientist at Accuvant, said he remembers spending a lot of time with Jack at Black Hat Abu Dhabi in 2010. \"He's a really fun-loving guy and liked to have a good time and a really sweet guy all around,\" Drake said.\n\nDrake called Jack's research \"noble,\" saying that he chose to go after difficult projects because the outcome could have a major impact on security and safety.", + " Working with embedded systems can be difficult because it's about pulling apart the firmware and digging into closed systems where there isn't much documentation or publicly available source code, Drake said.\n\n\"He realized that medical devices could be an area where he could help improve the situation because people's lives are at stake,\" Drake said.\n\nPUBLISHED JULY 26, 2013\n" + ], + "length": 29615, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 75, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Albert Woodfox, the last of the famous \"Angola Three,\" was released from prison last February after pleading no contest to manslaughter in the 1972 killing of prison guard Brent Miller. In a piece for the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv offers some insight into the \"reserved\" and \"humble\" 69-year-old now trying to adapt to the outside world since his release, after more than 40 years behind bars, most of it spent in solitary confinement. \"I get apprehensive when somebody asks me ... 'What does it feel like to be free?'\" he says. His typical reply: \"Ask me in 20 years.\" Aviv dives into the details leading up to his imprisonment, including a rough childhood growing up in New Orleans, as well as his involvement with the Black Panthers in NYC and then in Louisiana's Angola Prison, where he was sent in the mid-'60s after being convicted for armed robbery. It was after Miller's murder and Woodfox's conviction for it when he became intimately acquainted with Closed Cell Restricted, or CCR\u2014the unit where the 6-by-9-foot cells he'd call home for the next 40-plus years were located. Despite being described as a \"model prisoner,\" Woodfox remained in solitary. He didn't see outside light for more than five years in CCR; he was permitted to walk outside of his cell for an hour a day. (A small outdoor exercise area was added to CCR in 1978.) \"Woodfox often woke up gasping,\" Aviv writes. \"He felt that the walls of the cell were squeezing him to death.\" When Woodfox was transferred to a different prison in 2008, he was once more placed in solitary\u2014making his 2016 release a huge adjustment. Once out, he found a usual day of \"moving from the kitchen to the bathroom to the living room\" took \"more steps than his entire exercise regimen in prison,\" Aviv notes. Since then Woodfox has found his \"street legs,\" and he's now an advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement. \"It's the same old America,\" he notes. Yet on nights when he can't sleep, Woodfox resorts to an old pacing routine he used in solitary to calm himself. \"The only thing I can do is walk it off. \u2026 And I move on,\" he says. (Woodfox's extraordinary tale of a life spent in isolation here.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Last summer, five months after being released from prison, Albert Woodfox went to Harlem. It was there, in 1969, during his last week of freedom, that he met members of the Black Panther Party for the first time. He had been mesmerized by the way they talked and moved. \u201cI had always sensed, even among the most confident black people, that their fear was right there at the top, ready to overwhelm them,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt was the first time I\u2019d ever seen black folk who were not afraid.\u201d Woodfox had intended to go to a meeting of the New York chapter of the Party that week,", + " but he was arrested for a robbery before he could. Instead, he founded a chapter of the Party at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, in Angola, where he was held in solitary confinement for more than forty years\u2014longer than any prisoner in American history. He and two other Black Panthers, who were in solitary confinement for a total of more than a hundred years, became known as the Angola 3. Woodfox, who is sixty-nine, strolled along Malcolm X Boulevard with three former Panthers: his best friend, Robert King, one of the Angola 3, as well as Atno Smith and B. J.", + " Johnson, members of local chapters of the Party. He had never met Smith or Johnson before, and the conversation was halting and restrained; they spoke of gentrification, Jackie Wilson, and the type of diabetes they had. Woodfox is reserved, humble, and temperamentally averse to drama. When he talked about himself, his tone became flat. He was scheduled to speak at a panel on solitary confinement the next day, and he felt exhausted by the prospect. \u201cI get apprehensive when somebody asks me something I can\u2019t answer, like \u2018What does it feel like to be free?\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cHow do you want me to know how it feels to be free?\u201d He\u2019d developed a stock answer to the question:", + " \u201cAsk me in twenty years.\u201d They reached the Apollo Theatre, and Johnson told the others to stand under the marquee for a photograph. They all looked soberly at the camera and raised their arms in a black-power salute. There were pouches under Woodfox\u2019s eyes, and a thick crease between his eyebrows. His Afro was straggly and gray. On Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, they browsed souvenirs, T-shirts, and jewelry arrayed on tables along the sidewalk. \u201cBlack Lives Matter!\u201d one vender shouted. \u201cWe got the shirts\u2014ten dollars!\u201d Woodfox walked by, paused,", + " then turned around. \u201cGive me one of those,\u201d he said. He handed the man a ten-dollar bill. \u201cI\u2019ll wear it tomorrow,\u201d he told the others. Suddenly, the men\u2019s mood became lighter. Now they all wanted to buy something. Johnson sampled musks and decided on a three-dollar glassine of \u201cBleue Nile,\u201d while King and Smith contemplated buying their own \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d shirts. Then Johnson led the men four blocks south, to the original headquarters of the New York City chapter of the Party, now a bodega called Jenny\u2019s Food Corp. Several elderly men sat smoking at a card table in front of the shop.", + " \u201cWe\u2019ve got original Panthers here,\u201d Johnson told the men at the card table. \u201cOriginals?\u201d one man said, putting out his cigarette and standing up. \u201cAll right, all right,\u201d Woodfox said, deflecting attention. \u201cCan I take a picture?\u201d another man asked. The four Panthers posed in front of the store, next to a sandwich board advertising hot oatmeal. Woodfox held his new T-shirt in a plastic bag and raised his other fist. The men from the card table stood behind him, clenching their fists. \u201cThis is Brother Albert Woodfox,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cLongest man in solitary confinement in the history of America!\u201d One of the men said that he\u2019d been in solitary,", + " too. \u201cI thought I was in the box a long time,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019ll just put my troubles in my pocket.\u201d \u201cLook, one day in the box is enough,\u201d King said.\n\nWhen Woodfox was a child in New Orleans, he made money by stealing flowers from gravestones and selling them to mourners. The oldest of six siblings, he grew up in the Trem\u00e9, one of the first neighborhoods in the South to house freed slaves. He remembers standing at a bus stop with his mother when he was twelve and trying to figure out why, when a police car passed, she pulled him behind her,", + " as if to hide him. \u201cShe was so scared of white folks,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all knew they had absolute power over us.\u201d In 1962, when Woodfox was fifteen, he was arrested for a car-parking scheme: he and his friends charged drivers to protect their cars. Two years later, he went to jail for riding in a stolen car. That year, he got his girlfriend pregnant. He paid little attention to his newborn daughter, Brenda. He took pride in being a good crook. \u201cThey used to call me Fox,\u201d he said. \u201cYou didn\u2019t mess with Fox.\u201d When Woodfox was eighteen,", + " he was arrested for robbing a bar and sentenced to fifty years in prison. After the sentencing, he overpowered two sheriff\u2019s deputies in the basement of the courthouse and fled to Manhattan. He had been in the city for only a few days\u2014he had just met Panthers in Harlem, and was angling to date some of the female Party members, who seemed more self-possessed than any women he\u2019d ever met\u2014when a bookie accused him of trying to rob him. \u201cI remember thinking, What\u2019s wrong with you\u2014you can\u2019t stay out of jail,\u201d he said. \u201cI thought it was just me, that something was wrong with me.\u201d Woodfox said that his tattoo was done by Charles Neville,", + " of the Neville Brothers, while he was being held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Houston, Texas; October, 2016. Photograph by Mark Hartman for The New Yorker Photograph by Mark Hartman for The New Yorker He was extradited to New Orleans and placed on the Panther Tier at the Orleans Parish Prison. Eighteen members of the Black Panther Party, waiting to be tried for shoot-outs with the police, held classes on politics, economics, sociology, and the history of slavery. Steel plates had been affixed to their windows so that they couldn\u2019t communicate with prisoners on other tiers. Malik Rahim, the defense minister of the New Orleans chapter of the Party,", + " told me, \u201cThey thought they were separating us, but everywhere we went that infectious disease called organizing was taking hold.\u201d They ripped apart Frantz Fanon\u2019s \u201cThe Wretched of the Earth\u201d and divided it into sections, so that each inmate could study a chapter and teach the others what he\u2019d learned. Formed a year after the assassination of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party was disillusioned by the incremental approach of the civil-rights movement. Huey Newton, the Party\u2019s co-founder, said that black people were tired of singing \u201cWe Shall Overcome.\u201d He said, \u201cThe only way you\u2019re going to overcome is to apply righteous power.\u201d The Panthers saw a direct link between the country\u2019s armed interventions abroad\u2014in Vietnam,", + " Latin America, and Africa\u2014and what Eldridge Cleaver, a Party leader, called the \u201cbondage of the Negro at home.\u201d Black people, he said, lived in a \u201ccolony in the mother country,\u201d shunted into inferior housing, jobs, and schools. The Panthers followed the police, whom they saw as occupying troops, through the ghetto. If an officer questioned a black person, the Panthers got out of their car and monitored the encounter, drawing loaded guns. J. Edgar Hoover called the group \u201cthe greatest threat to the internal security of the country,\u201d and, as part of his COINTELPRO program, ordered the F.B.I.", + " to disrupt and discredit its activities. But much of the Party\u2019s work was focussed on providing community services in neighborhoods that had been neglected by the government. Under the slogan \u201cSurvival Pending Revolution,\u201d the Panthers established screening centers for sickle-cell anemia, provided pest control and trash disposal, and gave free breakfasts to children, who ate while learning black history. The first goal on the Panthers\u2019 ten-point program was: \u201cWe want the power to determine the destiny of our black community.\u201d Woodfox said that the Party \u201chelped bring out who I really was.\u201d He felt giddy when he used the language that the Panthers taught him for articulating his discontent.", + " He realized that he\u2019d been part of the lumpenproletariat, a term that Marx coined to describe \u201cthieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the crumbs of society.\u201d By the time of Woodfox\u2019s trial, in 1971, he believed that it had been his moral right to flee. On the morning of his trial, he and three other Panthers who had been placed in a holding pen under the courthouse sang, \u201cPick up the gun / put the pigs on the run / there aren\u2019t enough pigs / in this whole wide world / to stop the Black Panther Party!\u201d Officers beat them and sprayed them with mace.", + " When Woodfox was called into the courtroom, his face was bruised and burning. His ankles and wrists were chained to a steel belt around his waist. He turned toward the spectators in the courtroom and shook his chains. \u201cI want all of you to see what these racist, fascist pigs have done to me,\u201d he said.\n\nWoodfox was sent to Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the country. The penitentiary, situated on eighteen thousand acres of farmland and bordered on three sides by the Mississippi River, is a former cotton plantation and slave-breeding business. It was named for the African country, the source of its slaves.", + " After the Civil War, a former Confederate general acquired the plantation and leased state convicts\u2014most of them black, including children as young as seven\u2014to work at Angola, easing the labor shortage brought by Emancipation. The state purchased the plantation in 1901, but convicts still slept in former slave cabins and worked seven days a week, cultivating sugarcane and cotton. When Woodfox arrived, black and white inmates lived separately, in cinder-block compounds, and the cafeteria was divided by a wooden partition, to keep the races apart. Every guard at Angola was white. Woodfox and two other inmates he\u2019d met at the Orleans Parish Prison requested permission from the Panthers\u2019 Central Committee,", + " in Oakland, to establish a chapter of the Party at Angola\u2014the only recognized chapter founded on prison grounds. The new Panthers encouraged the other prisoners, who cut crops for two cents an hour, to work more slowly. Woodfox said, \u201cIt was this macho thing where the guys would deliberately work at a fast pace to show off how masculine they were, and we\u2019d explain to them that all they\u2019re going to do is take you to another field.\u201d A few times a week, a group of nearly fifty men pretended to play football while discussing how to conduct themselves as revolutionaries. Woodfox, who now described himself as a \u201cdialectical materialist,\u201d summarized what he\u2019d learned from the Party\u2019s list of some thirty required books,", + " by writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Michael Harrington, and Marcus Garvey. Prisoners who knew Woodfox from New Orleans, where he\u2019d earned a reputation as a hustler, at first thought that he was operating some sort of scam. Angola was known as the most dangerous prison in the South. According to the editor of the prison\u2019s newspaper, the Angolite, a quarter of the inmates lived in \u201cbondage\u201d: raped, sold, and traded, they generated income for their owners as well as for prison guards, who were paid to look the other way. The Panthers organized an Anti-Rape Squad,", + " which escorted new prisoners to their dorms. \u201cWe would let them know who we were and that we were there to protect them,\u201d Ronald Ailsworth, a member of the squad, told me. They armed themselves with bats and knives, which they fashioned out of farm equipment, and used mail-order catalogues and dinner trays as shields. Woodfox was inspired by the 1971 uprising at Attica, and felt connected to a movement of prisoners, many of them Panthers, calling for reform. The McKay Commission, which investigated the situation at Attica, reported that \u201cmany inmates came to believe they were \u2018political prisoners,\u2019 even though they had been convicted of crimes having no political motive or significance.", + " They claimed that responsibility for their actions belonged not to them but to society, which had failed to provide adequate housing, equal educational opportunities, and equal opportunities in American life.\u201d For years Woodfox had imagined that the Panthers existed on an otherworldly plane, free of fears and flaws, and he was surprised to see that they could pass as ordinary human beings. \u201cI\u2019m realizing how normal they are,\u201d he said. \u201cMade extraordinary by circumstances.\u201d Houston, Texas; October, 2016. Photograph by Mark Hartman for The New Yorker Photograph by Mark Hartman for The New Yorker Woodfox took a similar view. In an interview with the Angolite,", + " he said, \u201cI\u2019ve always considered myself a political prisoner. Not in the sense that I\u2019m here for a political crime, but in the sense that I\u2019m here because of a political system that has failed me terribly as an individual and citizen in this country.\u201d\n\nOn April 17, 1972, Brent Miller, a twenty-three-year-old guard at Angola who had just been married, was stabbed thirty-two times in a black dorm. He and his bride, Teenie, had grown up on the grounds of the prison, in a settlement for three hundred families who worked at Angola. Miller\u2019s father supervised the hog farm; his brother guarded the front gate;", + " and his father-in-law ran the sugar mill. C. Murray Henderson, the warden, described the Millers as \u201cone of my favorite families on Angola; they were a close-knit family, the boys made music together, they had a good band and played for dances.\u201d Friends of the Millers came to the prison armed with shotguns and baseball bats, to assist with the investigation. Woodfox was the first prisoner to be interrogated. Warden Henderson, who described Woodfox as a \u201chard-core Black Panther racist,\u201d assumed that the murder was a political act. \u201cYou had a group of Black Panthers inside who felt that they had to do something to get attention,", + " and they decided to kill a white person,\u201d he said later. Woodfox said that the sheriff of St. Francisville, the town closest to Angola, pointed a gun at his forehead and told him, \u201cYou Black Panthers need to bring y\u2019all ass down to St. Francisville. We\u2019ll show you something.\u201d Miller\u2019s body had been found near the bed of Hezekiah Brown, a black inmate who had been sentenced to death for rape. Brown initially said that he knew nothing about the murder. Four days later, Warden Henderson promised Brown a pardon if he would \u201ccrack the case.\u201d Brown named four prison activists from New Orleans:", + " Woodfox, Herman Wallace\u2014a charismatic and scholarly thirty-year-old who had co-founded the New Orleans chapter of the Party\u2014Chester Jackson, and Gilbert Montague. Brown said that he had been drinking coffee with Miller when the four Panthers ran into the dorm, pulled Miller onto Brown\u2019s bed, and stabbed him. (The prison\u2019s chief security officer later confided to the warden\u2019s wife that Brown was \u201cone you could put words in his mouth.\u201d) The four suspects and some twenty other black men, all known as militants, were transferred by van to Angola\u2019s extended lockdown unit, called Closed Cell Restricted. According to the Black Panther,", + " the Party newspaper, the men were dragged into the hallway at night and two rows of guards attacked them with baseball bats, pick handles, and iron pipes. An inmate told the paper that those \u201cwho weren\u2019t beaten nearly to death were made to sit while 2, 3, or 4 pigs cut their hair in all directions.\u201d\n\nTwo weeks after Miller\u2019s death, the four men were charged with murder. There was an abundance of physical evidence at the crime scene, none of which linked them to the killing. A bloody fingerprint near Miller\u2019s body did not match any of theirs. In preparation for trial, the New Orleans chapter of the Panthers formed a support group,", + " the Angola Brothers Committee. The treasurer was an F.B.I. informant, Jill Schafer, who, along with her husband, Harry, received nine thousand dollars a year to infiltrate radical organizations, as part of the COINTELPRO project. By instigating rifts among members, Schafer sabotaged the committee\u2019s efforts to raise money for a defense lawyer. At Woodfox\u2019s trial, all the jurors were white. The prosecutor, John Sinquefield, referred to them as \u201ccommon, ordinary everyday folk like us.\u201d Although two inmates had testified that they were eating breakfast with Woodfox at the time of the crime, the jury deliberated for less than an hour before finding him guilty.", + " A year later, Wallace was also convicted by an all-white jury. (Jackson became a witness for the prosecution, and Montague was acquitted, because prison records showed that he was in the infirmary at the time of the murder.) After the trials, the warden secured Hezekiah Brown\u2019s pardon and release, using prison funds to pay for his campaign for clemency. Woodfox and Wallace, sentenced to life without parole, were returned to Closed Cell Restricted and placed in six-by-nine-foot cells. For more than five years, they never went outside.\n\nWoodfox allowed himself to cry only when everyone else on the tier was asleep.", + " His youngest brother, Michael, who visited the prison every month, said that Woodfox no longer permitted himself the pleasure of reminiscing about their childhood. Handcuffed and shackled, he spoke through a heavy wire-mesh screen. \u201cHe can\u2019t allow the pain to be expressed,\u201d Michael told me. \u201cHe feels he has to be a conqueror, a leader, a demonstration for other men. He doesn\u2019t want people to know he has weaknesses.\u201d Woodfox and Wallace soon became close with another Panther, Robert King, who was also in C.C.R. and had been convicted of killing an inmate. They believed that he,", + " too, had been framed because of his connection to the Party. The three men had all been raised by single women in New Orleans; had met their fathers only a few times, or not at all; had dropped out of school, because they didn\u2019t see the point of it; had been arrested for petty crimes\u2014both Wallace and Woodfox were picked up for violations of Jim Crow laws, like standing too close to a building without the owner\u2019s permission\u2014and had been sent to Angola for robberies. They were all introduced to the Party in jail and saw its teachings as a revelation. Until then, King said, \u201cI had the attitude that life had nothing more to offer me,", + " nor could life get anything from me, for I had nothing. I felt I had done it all and, should I perish the next morning, so be it.\u201d Woodfox said, \u201cOur instincts and thoughts were so closely aligned it was frightening.\u201d \u201cLook alive, Proust, you\u2019re next.\u201d In C.C.R., they were permitted to leave their cells for an hour a day to walk along the tier alone. During their free hour, Woodfox, King, and Wallace held classes for the other inmates, passing out carbon-copied math and grammar lessons. Woodfox gave them twenty-four hours to study lists of words\u2014\u201ccapitalism,\u201d \u201cimperialism,\u201d \u201cfeudalism,\u201d \u201ctotalitarianism,\u201d \u201cbourgeoisie\u201d\u2014and the following day he quizzed them.", + " Gary Tyler, an African-American inmate in C.C.R., said that the teachings made him consider himself a political prisoner. At seventeen, Tyler was sentenced to death, after a jury convicted him of shooting a white classmate who had been protesting the desegregation of his school. (A federal judge called his 1975 trial \u201cfundamentally unfair\u201d; all the eyewitnesses eventually recanted.) Woodfox, Wallace, and King gave Tyler reading lessons and lent him radical newspapers, like Fight Back! Newspaper of the Revolutionary Brigade, and Final Call, founded by Louis Farrakhan. \u201cThese guys were able to break down the politics surrounding my situation\u2014the educational structure of the schools,", + " why the black schools were poorly financed,\u201d Tyler told me. \u201cI used to get mad at them sometimes, because they acted like they were my dads. They left me no room to be a risk-taker.\u201d Kenny Whitmore, another inmate in C.C.R., said that Woodfox \u201cshould have been a professor.\u201d Woodfox told Whitmore to stop reading his \u201ctrash-ass pimp books,\u201d urban crime novels that degraded black women, and to try \u201cNative Son,\u201d by Richard Wright. Whitmore told me, \u201cMan, I kept on reading and reading. Then I looked in the mirror and saw Bigger Thomas. I was coming to terms with who I was as a person,", + " with my blackness, with being at the bottom of the world.\u201d After reading a history of chattel slavery, Woodfox told the inmates in C.C.R. that Southern plantation owners used to inspect the rectums of the slaves they intended to buy at auction. Woodfox said that the process resembled what they endured whenever they left the cell block: they were forced to strip, raise their genitals while lifting each foot, and bend over and spread their buttocks while coughing. Woodfox, Wallace, and King circulated a letter to all the inmates on one tier, describing a plan for resistance. On the chosen day, nearly all the inmates began refusing the strip search.", + " A few were beaten so badly by guards that they had to be hospitalized.\n\nThe three men worked to curtail their desires. None of them drank coffee or tea or smoked. \u201cIf I feel a habit is developing, or even a disorder of any kind, I counsel myself in spirit,\u201d Wallace told a psychologist. \u201cThe more food you eat, the more your body craves food,\u201d he wrote to a friend. \u201cIt\u2019s the same for sleep\u2014most of it is mental.\u201d He didn\u2019t like being dependent on security guards to turn the light on every morning, so he kept it on all the time and covered it with a legal pad when he slept,", + " which he did for fewer than three hours each night. In 1978, when the prison opened a small outdoor exercise cage in C.C.R.\u2014inmates could go outside for a few hours a week\u2014the three men ran barefoot outside, even when frost covered the ground. \u201cWe had to make ourselves think that ordinary things didn\u2019t apply to us,\u201d Woodfox told me. \u201cWe wanted the security people to think that they were dealing with superhumans.\u201d It was also a coping strategy. \u201cBefore I let them take something from me, I deny it from myself,\u201d he said. Woodfox spent several hours a day writing letters to pen pals,", + " many of whom were also known as political prisoners, like Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal. He said he was \u201cpositive that the people\u2014our brothers and sisters outside\u2014would rise up and organize for us.\u201d But the Party had splintered\u2014Huey Newton envisaged a party devoted to community service, while Eldridge Cleaver advocated urban guerrilla warfare. By 1982, the Party had collapsed. The plight of the Angola 3 was forgotten. Yet the three men, who communicated with one another by sending written and oral messages, passed from one cell to the next, continued identifying as Panthers.", + " Wallace described the principles of the Party as \u201cindelible mental protection,\u201d the \u201ckey to the mental stability of every one of us.\u201d The men were repeatedly singled out as important enough to take revenge on, a fact that helped them preserve their self-esteem. A security officer acknowledged in an interview with Warden Henderson\u2019s wife, Anne Butler, who wrote books on regional folklore, that at one point he gathered a \u201cgood crowd\u201d of officers at C.C.R., armed with pistols and a gas-grenade launcher. He said, \u201cEverybody\u2019d done went to arguing about who was gonna get Woodfox and Wallace.\u201d\n\nFor twenty years,", + " Woodfox had no lawyer. He, Wallace, and King taught themselves criminal and civil law. In 1991, King wrote a brief for Woodfox, arguing that he had been unconstitutionally indicted, because his grand jury, like every grand jury in the history of St. Francisville, excluded women. A judge agreed, and overturned Woodfox\u2019s conviction. Before he could be released, however, the state indicted him again. One of the grand jurors was Anne Butler. She had devoted part of a book to the case, describing how the Angola Panthers left \u201ctheir own bloody mark on history.\u201d She said that she asked to be excused from the jury but that the D.A.", + " insisted she serve. (Later, after an argument, the warden shot her five times, almost killing her, and was sentenced to fifty years in prison.) The trial was held in Amite City, a town where many Angola guards lived. Woodfox\u2019s lawyer, a public defender who drank heavily during lunch breaks, did not ask the state to test the bloody fingerprint, and he didn\u2019t discover Hezekiah Brown\u2019s special treatment. Instead, the focus of the trial was Woodfox\u2019s militance, though his views had softened. When the prosecutor, Julie Cullen, asked Woodfox if he still felt that he had the right to escape from the courthouse,", + " he said no. \u201cI was afraid,\u201d he said. \u201cI was a young man. I was afraid.\u201d Cullen asserted that Woodfox\u2019s political views were \u201cdiametrically opposed\u201d to Martin Luther King, Jr.,\u2019s nonviolent approach. \u201cNo, they were not,\u201d Woodfox said. \u201cJust to be clear, this is just a spaceman and a spacewoman on a spacewalk. This isn\u2019t a spacedate.\u201d \u201cAll of this talking about revolution and bloodshed, death, sacrifices,\u201d she said, referring to a letter he\u2019d written in 1973. \u201cYou\u2019re not an advocate of any of that?", + " You\u2019re a victim of all of that?\u201d \u201cWell, I think I was a victim of racism in this country,\u201d he said. \u201cYes\u2014from the day I was born.\u201d When Cullen asked Woodfox if he was still politically active, he said that he tried to teach inmates on his tier to have \u201cpride, self-respect, a sense of self-worth, and to see that the way to change things is to first change themselves.\u201d \u201cIs that a yes or a no?\u201d Cullen interrupted. \u201cThat is a yes,\u201d Woodfox said. He was convicted and again sentenced to life without parole. \u201cSome may view that victory as a sign to end my existence,\u201d he wrote to a friend.\n\nDuring his trial and the two years leading up to it,", + " Woodfox was in the general population at a county jail in Amite City, where he was never disciplined for breaking a rule. When he returned to Angola, a social worker noted that there were \u201cno indications of behavioral problems about this inmate reported by security.\u201d Nevertheless, he was placed in solitary confinement. Social workers, who occasionally circulated on the tier, described Woodfox as \u201crespectful,\u201d \u201cpositive,\u201d \u201cco\u00f6perative,\u201d and \u201cneat.\u201d King was characterized as \u201cfriendly,\u201d \u201ccalm,\u201d and \u201cpolite.\u201d When Wallace complained that he had been in solitary confinement for nearly three decades, a social worker noted that he \u201cdid not appear depressed\u201d and that his attitude was \u201cappropriate to situation.\u201d Every ninety days,", + " a Lockdown Review Board set up a table at the end of the hallway on Woodfox\u2019s tier. Shackled and handcuffed, he stood at the table for a brief conference with two board members. They had his disciplinary record, but they rarely looked at it. He often informed the officers that he hadn\u2019t had a rule violation for years. Once, a sympathetic board member told him, \u201cHey, this comes from higher up. We can\u2019t release you, and you know that.\u201d Prisoners in C.C.R. who had killed inmates or tried to escape\u2014one had kidnapped the warden at knifepoint\u2014were eventually released.", + " But Woodfox, Wallace, and King remained. The Lockdown Review Summaries for the three men always provided the same explanation for their confinement: \u201cNature of Original Reason for Lockdown.\u201d Burl Cain, who was the warden from 1995 until last year, acknowledged in a deposition that Woodfox appeared to be a \u201cmodel prisoner.\u201d But, Cain said, \u201cI still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism.\u201d He didn\u2019t like that Woodfox \u201chung with the past,\u201d he said. An assistant warden, Cathy Fontenot, said that the three men had to be kept in lockdown because \u201cthey have tremendous influence with the inmate population.\u201d Gary Tyler,", + " who was eventually released from C.C.R. and placed in Angola\u2019s general population, told me, \u201cAs time went on, it became utterly impossible for me to even reach these guys. The warden kind of built a wall around them. They were considered the pariahs of the prison.\u201d\n\nWoodfox often woke up gasping. He felt that the walls of the cell were squeezing him to death, a sensation that he began to experience the day after his mother\u2019s funeral, in 1994. He had planned to go to the burial\u2014prisoners at Angola are permitted to attend the funerals of immediate family\u2014but at the last minute his request was denied.", + " For three years, he slept sitting up, because he felt less panicked when he was vertical. \u201cIt takes so much out of you just to try to make these walls, you know, go back to the normal place they belong,\u201d he told a psychologist. \u201cSomeday I\u2019m not going to be able to deal with it. I\u2019m not going to be able to pull those walls apart.\u201d In 2000, the three men filed a lawsuit, arguing that twenty-eight years of solitary confinement constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The groundwork for the case was done by a law student, Scott Fleming, who began studying the court records in 1999,", + " after receiving a letter from Wallace, who wrote to any lawyer or activist whose address he could find. Fleming knew the neighbor of the daughter of Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, and after learning of the case Roddick visited Woodfox in prison. She decided to pay for lawyers for the three men. George Kendall, one of their new lawyers, said he thought that \u201cpart of this case is going to be figuring out how to hold these guys together mentally.\u201d But their resilience became as much an object of psychological scrutiny as their suffering. Stuart Grassian, a psychologist hired for the lawsuits who studies the effects of solitary confinement,", + " wrote, \u201cI have never encountered any situation nearly as profound or extreme as that of the three plaintiffs in this case.\u201d Even the state\u2019s psychologist, Joel Dvoskin, seemed impressed by the men\u2019s endurance. He wrote that Woodfox \u201cmaintains a demeanor of quiet dignity, he asserts his rights in a similarly dignified way.\u201d When Dvoskin asked Woodfox if he would ever take medication for his anxiety, Woodfox replied that he would control the problem through \u201cconcentration and will power.\u201d He told another psychologist, Craig Haney, that he was afraid of how well he\u2019d been \u201cadapting to the painfulness.\u201d \u201cThere is a part of me that is gone,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cI had to sacrifice that part in order to survive.\u201d Woodfox felt that his strength was his ability to hide \u201cwhat\u2019s going on deep inside of me,\u201d and the conversations with the psychologists left him unhinged. At the end of the interview with Grassian, he said, \u201cWhen you leave, I have just minutes to erect all these layers, put all these defenses back. It is the most painful, agonizing thing I could imagine.\u201d He steadied himself with a rigid routine that required at least two hours of daily reading. He decided, after a romantic relationship in the nineties that developed through letters, not to become involved with another woman as long as he was in prison.", + " \u201cFrom my reading, I knew that revolutionaries had to purge themselves of being chauvinistic,\u201d he said. Rebecca Hensley, a professor of sociology at Southeastern Louisiana University, who corresponded with Woodfox for many years, said that when she expressed romantic feelings for him he gently declined. He told her to read a book called \u201cThe Prisoner\u2019s Wife,\u201d about the pain of prison relationships.\n\nIn 2001, King\u2019s conviction was overturned, after the state\u2019s two witnesses admitted that they had lied, and recanted their testimony. King was told that if he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge he would be released immediately.", + " \u201cKing was real reluctant to leave us,\u201d Woodfox told me. \u201cIt was the comradeship, the love between us. He felt he would leave us shorthanded.\u201d A sinewy fifty-nine-year-old, King walked from C.C.R. into Angola\u2019s parking lot. He moved into a small apartment in New Orleans with a former Panther, Marion Brown, and rarely left. He couldn\u2019t sleep for more than an hour at a time. Brown said that King was \u201cfilled with fear, suspicion, conspiracy.\u201d If she moved a piece of furniture, he assumed that someone had broken in. Prisoners from Angola often called King collect,", + " and, though he had no income, he never refused the charges. Grassian, who met King when he was free, observed that he \u201csomehow seems to feel that neither he nor Marion can lead any semblance of a normal life until he gains his friends\u2019 release. He devotes almost all his concentration and energy to talking about, or thinking about, his two friends who remain at Angola.\u201d Not long after he was freed, King returned to Angola to visit Roy Hollingsworth, an inmate in C.C.R. who credits the Angola 3 for his moral awakening. Hollingsworth said that, years before, he was about to rape a young inmate and smash his head when King called out from another cell and asked him to reflect on what he was about to do.", + " When King got to C.C.R., five security officers approached him and terminated the visit. He was told never to return. In a deposition, Warden Cain said he expected that King would resume his \u201crevolutionary stuff\u201d if Woodfox and Wallace were ever released. \u201cHe is only waiting, in my opinion, for them to get out so they can reunite,\u201d he said. \u201cSo they can pick up where they left off.\u201d\n\nIn 2008, John Conyers, the chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana state representative, learned about Woodfox and Wallace\u2019s decades of confinement and visited them at C.C.R.", + " After the meeting, Richmond told the press that a \u201cmassive amount of evidence\u201d showed that Woodfox and Wallace were innocent. Brent Miller\u2019s widow, Teenie Rogers, had also begun to question the state\u2019s evidence, after a young investigator on the case, Billie Mizell, befriended her and made charts mapping inconsistencies in the state\u2019s testimony. Rogers wrote Richmond a letter saying that she was \u201cshocked to find out that no real attempt was made to find out who the fingerprint did belong to, which should have been a very simple thing to do.\u201d The state met doubts about the case with unusual vigor. After the case received national media attention,", + " on NPR and in Mother Jones, the public-information office for the Louisiana Department of Corrections set up a Google Alert and notified Angola\u2019s administration when the men were in the news. Louisiana\u2019s attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, who was elected in 2008, said of Woodfox, \u201cI oppose letting him out with every fibre of my being.\u201d He had been friends since first grade with the original prosecutor in the case, John Sinquefield, whom he promoted to the second-highest position in his office. Caldwell requested the recordings of nearly seven hundred phone calls made by Wallace and Woodfox, including conversations with their lawyers. Warden Cain said in a deposition,", + " \u201cWe were kind of curious to see just how far they would go... to see what rules they would break.\u201d Investigators listened to all the calls, and found that, in an interview with a project called Prison Radio, Woodfox had stated that he continued to live by the principles of the Black Panther Party. As punishment, Woodfox was prevented from going outside. Soon afterward, Warden Cain decided that he no longer wanted Woodfox and Wallace at his prison. \u201cI got tired of the Angola 3,\u201d he said. The men were transferred to new prisons, at opposite ends of the state. They remained in solitary confinement.", + " Woodfox wrote to a friend, \u201cI would go insane if I for a second allowed an emotional connection to take place with what is my reality!\u201d When the psychologist Craig Haney visited the two men at their new prisons, he was shocked to see how much they had aged. \u201cThe separation was devastating,\u201d Haney told me. \u201cThey had a powerful connection to each other that had sustained them.\u201d Woodfox told Haney that he had \u201clost interest in everything.\u201d He was again subject to strip searches up to six times a day. The men in the cells on either side of him were mentally ill and screamed for much of the day.", + " He felt overwhelmed by the sour smell of their breath. At Angola, Woodfox and Wallace had seen themselves as \u201cvillage elders,\u201d but at the new prisons the other inmates treated them like ordinary criminals. Wallace told Haney that he felt as if he were reaching his \u201cend point.\u201d His voice cracked, and he seemed hesitant and slow. He thought that there was something wrong with his heart. Crying, he said, \u201cI can\u2019t stand up to it.\u201d\n\nWallace lost fifty pounds. He complained of stomach pain, which the prison doctors diagnosed as a fungus. \u201cNo palpable masses\u2014exam limited by prison room chair,\u201d one doctor wrote in June,", + " 2013. Five days later, a doctor hired by Wallace\u2019s lawyers found an eight-centimetre bulge in his abdomen. He received a diagnosis of liver cancer. Wallace told Haney, \u201cThe majority of my life I have been treated like an animal, so I guess I will die like an animal.\u201d The cancer swiftly spread to his bones and his brain. In letters, Wallace referred to himself as a \u201csoldier\u201d and drew ornate pictures of panthers. He liked to use the term \u201cW.W.T.P.D.\u201d\u2014What would the Panthers do? A friend, Angela Allen-Bell, didn\u2019t understand his devotion.", + " \u201cYou have given your whole life to the Party,\u201d she told him. \u201cWhy aren\u2019t they here for you now when you are sick and need help?\u201d She said that he told her, \u201cI didn\u2019t join the people\u2014I joined the Party. The Party transformed my mind, and that\u2019s all it owes to me.\u201d Another friend, Jackie Sumell, said that Wallace\u2019s and Woodfox\u2019s commitment to the Party reminded her of the \u201cJapanese fighter pilots that they found on some of the Philippine Islands thirty years after the war, still fighting.\u201d In September, 2013, Wallace gave a deposition in his civil suit from a bed in the prison\u2019s infirmary.", + " He hadn\u2019t eaten for several days, and was being given heavy doses of the opiate fentanyl. The state\u2019s lawyer requested that the deposition be adjourned, because Wallace was vomiting, but Wallace told him, \u201cCome on. Come on with your questions.\u201d He was capable of saying only a few words at a time. He said that being in solitary confinement for forty-one years had reduced him to a \u201cstate of being where I can barely collect my own thoughts.\u201d He pursed his lips and appeared to be holding back tears. \u201cIt\u2019s like a killing machine,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re on your deathbed, is that your understanding?\u201d one of his lawyers asked him.", + " \u201cYes,\u201d he replied. \u201cAre you able to say with a clean conscience, as you prepare to meet your maker, that you did not murder Brent Miller?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d Five days later, a federal judge responded to Wallace\u2019s habeas petition, which had been lingering in the courts for years. The judge overturned his conviction, ordering that he be released. At dusk, Wallace was loaded into an ambulance and taken to New Orleans, to stay with a friend who lived half a block from where he\u2019d been raised. Family and friends, some of whom he hadn\u2019t seen for forty years, gathered around his bed. One friend read him the last chapter of Eldridge Cleaver\u2019s \u201cSoul on Ice.\u201d Another held flowers to his nose.", + " On Wallace\u2019s second day of freedom, the state impanelled a grand jury, which reindicted him for Miller\u2019s murder. Wallace was never told. He died the next day. He asked that his funeral program begin with a quote by Frantz Fanon: \u201cIf death is the realm of freedom, then through death I escape to freedom.\u201d Woodfox couldn\u2019t accept that Wallace, whom he described as \u201cthe other part of my heart,\u201d had become an \u201cancestor,\u201d the term Panthers used to describe the dead. \u201cWe always believed that we would survive anything,\u201d he said. He could no longer avoid the thought that a similar fate awaited him.", + " He said, \u201cAll these years and years of study and discipline and carrying myself a certain way, in order to die in prison.\u201d\n\nA year after Wallace\u2019s death, Woodfox\u2019s conviction was overturned again, because of racial discrimination in the selection of the grand jury. The state issued a new arrest warrant and, in February, 2015, convened a grand jury to indict Woodfox for the third time. Deidre Howard, a sixty-one-year-old dental hygienist from St. Francisville, was the forewoman. She said that the prosecutor explained that the case had to be \u201crun back through\u201d because of a technicality.", + " \u201cThey told us we just needed to dot the \u2018i\u2019s and cross the \u2018t\u2019s,\u201d she said. The coroner in the case had been Howard\u2019s doctor; the district attorney worked down the street from her and had lent her a tent for her outdoor Bible meetings. Warden Henderson had been her neighbor. Howard felt that she owed it to the Miller family, who owned a restaurant where she sometimes ate, to keep Woodfox locked up. According to Howard, the prosecutor emphasized to the jury that the Black Panther Party was devoted to \u201craping and robbing.\u201d She signed the indictment. \u201cThere really wasn\u2019t anything to deliberate,\u201d she told me.", + " As she lay in bed that night, Howard realized that she had determined a man\u2019s life with less consideration than she devoted to buying a new refrigerator. She could barely remember his name. The day after the indictment, Woodfox was transferred to West Feliciana Parish Detention Center, which is three blocks from Howard\u2019s house. One evening, as she was getting ready for bed, she heard the siren of an ambulance. From her bedroom window, she saw the ambulance heading toward the jail. She had read in the newspaper that Woodfox had renal problems, diabetes, hepatitis C, and cardiovascular disease. Still wearing her pajamas, she got into her car and followed the ambulance to the hospital.", + " She tried to see if the man being unloaded from the gurney was Woodfox, but she couldn\u2019t get a view of his face. Three months later, she sent a letter to a judge who had presided over previous hearings. \u201cI have made a terrible mistake,\u201d she wrote. She also wrote to the judge who had overseen her grand jury, telling him that after researching the case she understood that crucial facts had been withheld from her. \u201cI feel violated and taken advantage of,\u201d she said. In another letter, she begged Buddy Caldwell to stop the prosecution. When she received no replies, she mailed a letter to the governor,", + " Bobby Jindal, whom she had voted for. \u201cThis is the worst human tragedy I have ever seen,\u201d she wrote. In April, 2015, she and her twin sister, Donna, drove to a prayer vigil for Woodfox at a church in Baton Rouge, to mark his fortieth year in solitary confinement. They remained in their car, and, as Woodfox\u2019s brother and other supporters arrived, they leaned down, so that no one would see their faces.\n\nIn late 2015, Buddy Caldwell was voted out of office, and Deidre Howard sent the new attorney general, Jeff Landry, more than a hundred pages of letters that she had written to attorneys and judges involved in the case.", + " \u201cJury service has been a devastating experience,\u201d she wrote. Although people had been protesting the case for years, it was the first time that anyone from St. Francisville had seemed bothered. Landry offered to end the prosecution if Woodfox pleaded no-contest to manslaughter. For years, Woodfox had fantasized about walking out of court after being acquitted by a jury, but his lawyers urged him to avoid a trial. Despite requests that the location be changed, the case would be heard in West Feliciana, a parish in which the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, during a Senate bid in 1990, had received seventy-five per cent of the white vote.", + " As Woodfox was contemplating the offer, Woodfox\u2019s fifty-two-year-old daughter, Brenda, ran into one of Woodfox\u2019s childhood friends in New Orleans. Woodfox hadn\u2019t seen her in nearly twenty years. The friend took a photograph of Brenda and sent it to Woodfox, to confirm that the woman was his daughter. Then Brenda visited him at the jail, bringing her son and her two grandchildren. \u201cUp until that point, there was this constant internal battle going on,\u201d Woodfox told me. \u201cI\u2019ve always preached to other men, \u2018You have to be willing to sacrifice everything, even your life.\u2019 If I took the plea deal,", + " would I be a hypocrite?\u201d Woodfox\u2019s brother Michael told him about a conversation he\u2019d had with Brenda. \u201cShe was crying and said she didn\u2019t have a daddy,\u201d Woodfox said. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you the depths of pain I experienced from hearing that.\u201d He decided that a plea deal could be justified. Woodfox had a week to prepare for his release. For years he had created imaginary budgets, determining how much he could pay for food, given the rent and his monthly utilities. He had spent four decades, he said, living \u201cin the abstract.\u201d He told himself, \u201cI can handle this\u2014I just need to see it coming.\u201d He revisited lists that he\u2019d made,", + " edited over the course of decades, of what to do when he was free: visit his mother\u2019s and his sister\u2019s gravesites, learn how to drive again, go to Yosemite National Park, \u201cbe patient.\u201d On February 19, 2016, his sixty-ninth birthday, Woodfox packed his belongings into garbage bags and put about a hundred letters in a cardboard box. He put on black slacks and a black bomber jacket that a freed Angola prisoner had sent him. Not until he was outside did he believe that he was actually going to be freed. It was a warm, clear, sunny day. He squinted and held the hem of his jacket.", + " When he reached the front gate, he raised his fist and gave a closed-lip smile to a small crowd of supporters. Michael led him to his car, a blue Corvette. Woodfox shuffled when he walked, as if shackles still connected his feet. Biting his lip and crying, Michael helped his brother into the passenger seat and showed him how to fasten the seat belt.\n\nThat night, Woodfox and Robert King went to a party in Woodfox\u2019s honor at the Ash\u00e9 Cultural Arts Center, in New Orleans. People kept tapping Woodfox\u2019s shoulder, an experience he found frightening. He was used to guarding the front of his cell without having to worry about \u201cthe damage someone can do from behind,\u201d he said.", + " King sensed Woodfox\u2019s discomfort and moved closer to him, guiding him through the room. Woodfox kept his eyes on the floor. His expression seemed frozen in an apologetic smile. At the party were people he hadn\u2019t seen for forty years. He thought that they would still see him as a \u201cpetty criminal who victimized my own neighborhood,\u201d he said. Most of his supporters in recent years had been white, and he worried that the black community would find him inauthentic. Toward the end of the evening, an old friend invited him onto a stage and handed him a microphone. Woodfox pulled up his pants,", + " which were too loose, and held the zipper of his jacket. \u201cI\u2019m kind of new at this,\u201d he said. \u201cI hope you understand that I have been through a terrible ordeal. I need a little time to get my footing so I won\u2019t make a fool of myself.\u201d The friend handed the microphone to Robert King, who shrugged. He has a leisurely, meandering way of speaking. \u201cAnyway,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat can I say?\u201d He pointed to Woodfox. \u201cThis is your night, bro.\u201d \u201cWhatever is my night is your night,\u201d Woodfox said quietly, looking at his sneakers. The d.j.", + " played Stevie Wonder\u2019s \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d for Woodfox, who nodded and gave the black-power salute.\n\nWoodfox had intended to spend a month camping in the woods, gazing at the sky\u2014a cleansing ritual. After years of being forced to listen to men talking to themselves, he was desperate to be alone on his own terms. Once he was released, though, he felt that this would be an indulgence. He spent his first month at the house of a friend in New Orleans, hosting visitors. Most nights, he sat in a pink armchair wearing his prison-issue gray sweatpants and a pair of Crocs that his brother had bought for him.", + " He found it a \u201cstrain to stay within the social dialogue,\u201d he said. He often warned new acquaintances, \u201cI\u2019m not good at, as they say, \u2018chitchat.\u2019 \u201d He worried that his family would feel that he had abandoned them, but his daughter, Brenda, became a regular visitor. She exuded an aura of patient competence, seeming content to sit silently on the couch, observing her father with others. She often brought her boisterous grandchildren. Her ten-year-old granddaughter, Michaela, liked to dance to pop songs on Woodfox\u2019s new iPhone, a gift from a detective who worked on his case.", + " Woodfox nodded to the beat and occasionally said, \u201cHehe.\u201d \u201cYour great-grandpa is a quiet soul,\u201d Brenda told Michaela. \u201cQuiet but deadly. Don\u2019t mistake his quietness for weakness.\u201d Woodfox discovered that a typical day in the house\u2014moving from the kitchen to the bathroom to the living room\u2014entailed more steps than his entire exercise regimen in prison. He felt overwhelmed by options. \u201cI have to submit to the process of developing a new technique to fill the hours,\u201d he told me, three weeks after he was released. \u201cI\u2019m trying to strike the right balance with being free.\u201d He walked slowly,", + " with such intense concentration that he didn\u2019t notice when someone called his name. His footing was unsure. \u201cHe seemed very nervous, very insecure,\u201d his friend Allen-Bell told me. \u201cI\u2019d never seen that Albert before.\u201d Theresa Shoatz, the daughter of Russell (Maroon) Shoatz, a Black Panther who was in solitary confinement for twenty-eight years in Pennsylvania, said that Woodfox appeared \u201cdocile and withdrawn. He didn\u2019t look you in the eye. He just held his head down and said, \u2018Thanks for your support.\u2019 I didn\u2019t see much happiness on his face.\u201d \u201cCan\u2019t you keep your parenting to yourselves?\u201d Years before,", + " Woodfox had said that if he was ever released he would \u201cunleash the little man inside of me and let it jump up and down.\u201d But he didn\u2019t feel that sense of abandon. He felt ashamed that he\u2019d pleaded guilty to anything. \u201cI\u2019ve learned to live with it, but I still haven\u2019t come to terms with it,\u201d he told me. \u201cI still regret it. I don\u2019t care how you look at it: I was not standing for what I believed in. I truly feel that.\u201d After a month in New Orleans, Woodfox moved into a spare bedroom in Michael\u2019s home, in Houston. Above his bed,", + " he taped a picture of Wallace and him at Angola, and placed a few Panther buttons on the dresser. \u201cI don\u2019t like an over-cluttered room,\u201d he said. Michael said that sometimes he\u2019d pass Woodfox\u2019s bedroom and see him lying in bed awake, his arms folded across his chest. Michael urged Woodfox, \u201cYou have to tell your mind, \u2018I am free. I don\u2019t have to just sit there.\u2019 \u201d\n\nWoodfox discovered that he felt more comfortable in social settings if King was by his side. At a family reunion in a suburb of New Orleans, his relatives congregated in his cousin\u2019s kitchen while he and King sat at a card table in the garage.", + " Woodfox kept his back against the garage door and picked at a small bowl of egg salad. He almost never finished a meal. He sometimes went all day without eating before realizing that there was a reason he felt so depleted. King assured Woodfox that he was also a sensitive eater. \u201cI gotta eat in increments,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I eat a whole plate, I lose my appetite.\u201d \u201cYeah, I\u2019m a nibbler,\u201d Woodfox said. Woodfox\u2019s cousin had invited several supporters\u2014Woodfox and King called them their \u201cAngola 3 family\u201d\u2014including Deidre Howard. She and her twin sister, Donna,", + " sat in the garage with him and King. They were dressed identically: black platform sandals, ruffled collared shirts, gold pendant earrings, and their hair in a French ponytail with the same type of barrette. Woodfox asked Deidre if people in St. Francisville still thought that he was guilty. She swiftly changed the subject. \u201cI did not have the heart to tell him that our community still sees him as a murderer,\u201d she said later.\n\nTwo months after Woodfox\u2019s release, he and King settled their civil suit with the state. The agreement requires that Louisiana\u2019s Department of Corrections review its system for placing inmates in solitary confinement,", + " and consider the status of segregated prisoners in a more meaningful way. With a modest sum from the settlement, Woodfox and King, who had moved to Austin after his home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, decided to buy houses in New Orleans. Woodfox looked at ten houses before choosing one in East New Orleans, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, for less than seventy thousand dollars. He wasn\u2019t entirely sure why he liked the house\u2014the interior was dark, and he wished it had a larger back yard. Allen-Bell researched the frequency of 911 calls in the neighborhood and tried to dissuade him. \u201cIt\u2019s not a place where you are going to feel comfortable walking on the street,\u201d she told him on the phone.", + " \u201cI don\u2019t care if there are nine hundred 911 calls,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m buying the house.\u201d \u201cWhy?\u201d she asked him. \u201cWhy?\u201d he said. \u201cBecause I want it, that\u2019s why.\u201d She told him that the 911 calls were for serious matters: armed robbery, kidnapping, rape. \u201cSo?\u201d Woodfox said. A few days after the phone call, Woodfox finalized the purchase. Brenda drove him to the real-estate agent\u2019s office, in a high-rise, to sign the paperwork. She had begun taking him to all his appointments. He liked to tell people, \u201cI\u2019m a dad now.\u201d They were two hours late for their appointment with the agent,", + " a chirpy blond woman. \u201cWe got caught up in traffic,\u201d Woodfox told her casually. The process required two witnesses, and the agent asked me to be the first one. Although Brenda was sitting beside me, the agent asked another white woman who was working behind the desk to be the second. Woodfox signed the papers, and then we did, too. Later, I asked Woodfox if he thought it was strange that the agent had ignored Brenda. He said that he figured it was a mistake, and not worth dwelling on. \u201cI don\u2019t spend a lot of time looking for racism,\u201d he told me. \u201cLook,", + " if it really manifests, then I will give the person a tongue-lashing. I think I\u2019ve developed a pretty good vocabulary to do that, a pretty good philosophy.\u201d A few weeks earlier, a cabdriver had demanded that he and King pay for their ride before they reached their destination. Insulted, Woodfox said that his first instinct was to get out of the car; instead, he and King handed over the cash and at the end of the ride gave the driver a large tip\u2014\u201cguilt money,\u201d they called it. Woodfox didn\u2019t have the keys to his house yet, but he wanted to show it to Brenda.", + " We parked in front of the house, a brick ranch with bars on the front windows, a screened-in patio, and a lawn with six squat palm trees and some spindly shrubs. A chain-link fence surrounded the property. Woodfox mentioned a few things that he appreciated about the neighborhood\u2014most of the lawns were mowed\u2014but he admitted that none of that really mattered. \u201cTo be honest,\u201d he said, \u201cI just wanted a house close to my family.\u201d Brenda realized that chocolate had melted over her car\u2019s center console. She and Woodfox spent the next ten minutes wiping it up with tissues, at which point they were ready to leave.", + " \u201cBye-bye house,\u201d Woodfox said.\n\nBy summer, Woodfox felt that he was getting his \u201cstreet legs,\u201d as he called them. A sly sense of humor surfaced. But he was also increasingly exhausted. He spoke at panels about prisoners\u2019 rights in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Baton Rouge. \u201cI feel an obligation, because when I was in the position of the guys in prison I used to wonder why nobody spoke for us,\u201d he told me. His friend Kenny Whitmore, who is still at Angola, told me that when Woodfox was freed \u201che took a part of me with him.\u201d Whitmore said,", + " \u201cThat old man is going full speed ahead.\u201d \u201cNo need to push, Mother\u2014I\u2019m going.\u201d In early August, Woodfox flew to New York City to receive an award from the National Lawyers Guild, an association of progressive lawyers and activists, at the organization\u2019s annual conference. He wore a gray blazer over a T-shirt that said \u201cI Am Herman Wallace.\u201d At the podium, he announced that he wanted to honor \u201cmy comrade and good friend.\u201d He extended his palm toward King, who was in the third row of the auditorium, but became too choked up to say his name. Woodfox pressed his lips together and paused,", + " regaining his composure. \u201cI hope that my being here tonight is a testament to the strength and determination of the human spirit,\u201d he said. After the speech, Woodfox and King headed to a lounge on the second floor of the law school, where people were selling buttons, T-shirts, and posters that said \u201cFree All the Angola 3.\u201d Woodfox signed a dozen posters, writing in steady, capital letters, \u201c I AM FREE! ALBERT WOODFOX.\u201d People kept approaching him to ask if they could take selfies. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing to be in the room with you,\u201d one person told him. \u201cTalk about moving and inspiring!\u201d another said.", + " \u201cO.K.,\u201d Woodfox said in response to most compliments. A woman who had recently been released from prison tried to commiserate. \u201cIt\u2019s scary getting out,\u201d she told Woodfox. She wore anti-embolism stockings and carried a plastic bag containing dozens of tubes of toothpaste. \u201cI just bought a house in New Orleans,\u201d he told her. Then he seemed to feel guilty for making it sound too easy. \u201cI\u2019m trying not to get too frustrated,\u201d he added. He pointed to King: \u201cFortunately, I have him as an example.\u201d Although he\u2019d been too nervous to sleep the night before,", + " Woodfox stayed out until 2 A.M., going to bars with lawyers and activists. He had a workmanlike approach to socializing. He didn\u2019t drink, and he never seemed to judge people. The most skeptical thing I\u2019d ever heard him say was that someone was \u201cquirky.\u201d He had a hard time saying no to anyone. Although he hoped to eventually have a romantic relationship, he didn\u2019t feel that he could devote time to it. \u201cI mean, I\u2019m open to a relationship,\u201d he told me, \u201cbut right now that\u2019s not my primary thing. I know the interest in me and what I went through is going to die,", + " so I\u2019m trying to get as much done while people are still interested enough.\u201d Two days after the speech, Woodfox, King, and I had breakfast at their hotel, in Greenwich Village. At the conference, Woodfox had felt himself being turned into a mythological figure, a process that he found uncomfortable. \u201cAll these people who have been involved in social struggle for so long want to shake my hand,\u201d he told me. \u201cI don\u2019t have an emotional connection as to what the big deal is. Sometimes I just don\u2019t think that, you know, surviving solitary confinement for forty-one years is a big deal.\u201d I asked if that was a coping mechanism,", + " and he said, \u201cPretty much everything I did for the last forty-four years was some sort of coping mechanism.\u201d He said that, in the early two-thousands, inmates at Angola began telling him, \u201cThanks for not letting them break you.\u201d It was the first time he grasped that, by staying sane, he had done something unusual. King, who was eating a piece of toast with jelly, recalled one of the first protests in C.C.R., when the Panthers persuaded inmates to refuse the strip search. After a few days, King had realized that inmates were being beaten so badly that they could die, and he wrote a letter to Woodfox recommending that they end the protest.", + " \u201cIt is the man who creates the principles,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe principles shouldn\u2019t kill the man.\u201d King took a bite of his toast. He seemed to be contemplating the decision for the first time in many years. \u201cIn the final analysis, I think we made the right decision,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was the right decision,\u201d Woodfox said. \u201cI mean, I could have given my life and been beaten to death,\u201d King said. \u201cThe legacy I would have left is that no one would know why I was killed.\u201d He leaned back in his chair, smiling. \u201cI\u2019m so glad that decision was made.", + " I\u2019m so glad that decision was made.\u201d ", + " Last summer, five months after being released from prison, Albert Woodfox went to Harlem. It was there, in 1969, during his last week of freedom, that he met members of the Black Panther Party for the first time. He had been mesmerized by the way they talked and moved. \u201cI had always sensed, even among the most confident black people, that their fear was right there at the top, ready to overwhelm them,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt was the first time I\u2019d ever seen black folk who were not afraid.\u201d Woodfox had intended to go to a meeting of the New York chapter of the Party that week,", + " but he was arrested for a robbery before he could. Instead, he founded a chapter of the Party at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, in Angola, where he was held in solitary confinement for more than forty years\u2014longer than any prisoner in American history. He and two other Black Panthers, who were in solitary confinement for a total of more than a hundred years, became known as the Angola 3. Woodfox, who is sixty-nine, strolled along Malcolm X Boulevard with three former Panthers: his best friend, Robert King, one of the Angola 3, as well as Atno Smith and B. J.", + " Johnson, members of local chapters of the Party. He had never met Smith or Johnson before, and the conversation was halting and restrained; they spoke of gentrification, Jackie Wilson, and the type of diabetes they had. Woodfox is reserved, humble, and temperamentally averse to drama. When he talked about himself, his tone became flat. He was scheduled to speak at a panel on solitary confinement the next day, and he felt exhausted by the prospect. \u201cI get apprehensive when somebody asks me something I can\u2019t answer, like \u2018What does it feel like to be free?\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cHow do you want me to know how it feels to be free?\u201d He\u2019d developed a stock answer to the question:", + " \u201cAsk me in twenty years.\u201d They reached the Apollo Theatre, and Johnson told the others to stand under the marquee for a photograph. They all looked soberly at the camera and raised their arms in a black-power salute. There were pouches under Woodfox\u2019s eyes, and a thick crease between his eyebrows. His Afro was straggly and gray. On Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, they browsed souvenirs, T-shirts, and jewelry arrayed on tables along the sidewalk. \u201cBlack Lives Matter!\u201d one vender shouted. \u201cWe got the shirts\u2014ten dollars!\u201d Woodfox walked by, paused,", + " then turned around. \u201cGive me one of those,\u201d he said. He handed the man a ten-dollar bill. \u201cI\u2019ll wear it tomorrow,\u201d he told the others. Suddenly, the men\u2019s mood became lighter. Now they all wanted to buy something. Johnson sampled musks and decided on a three-dollar glassine of \u201cBleue Nile,\u201d while King and Smith contemplated buying their own \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d shirts. Then Johnson led the men four blocks south, to the original headquarters of the New York City chapter of the Party, now a bodega called Jenny\u2019s Food Corp. Several elderly men sat smoking at a card table in front of the shop.", + " \u201cWe\u2019ve got original Panthers here,\u201d Johnson told the men at the card table. \u201cOriginals?\u201d one man said, putting out his cigarette and standing up. \u201cAll right, all right,\u201d Woodfox said, deflecting attention. \u201cCan I take a picture?\u201d another man asked. The four Panthers posed in front of the store, next to a sandwich board advertising hot oatmeal. Woodfox held his new T-shirt in a plastic bag and raised his other fist. The men from the card table stood behind him, clenching their fists. \u201cThis is Brother Albert Woodfox,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cLongest man in solitary confinement in the history of America!\u201d One of the men said that he\u2019d been in solitary,", + " too. \u201cI thought I was in the box a long time,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019ll just put my troubles in my pocket.\u201d \u201cLook, one day in the box is enough,\u201d King said.\n\nWhen Woodfox was a child in New Orleans, he made money by stealing flowers from gravestones and selling them to mourners. The oldest of six siblings, he grew up in the Trem\u00e9, one of the first neighborhoods in the South to house freed slaves. He remembers standing at a bus stop with his mother when he was twelve and trying to figure out why, when a police car passed, she pulled him behind her,", + " as if to hide him. \u201cShe was so scared of white folks,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all knew they had absolute power over us.\u201d In 1962, when Woodfox was fifteen, he was arrested for a car-parking scheme: he and his friends charged drivers to protect their cars. Two years later, he went to jail for riding in a stolen car. That year, he got his girlfriend pregnant. He paid little attention to his newborn daughter, Brenda. He took pride in being a good crook. \u201cThey used to call me Fox,\u201d he said. \u201cYou didn\u2019t mess with Fox.\u201d When Woodfox was eighteen,", + " he was arrested for robbing a bar and sentenced to fifty years in prison. After the sentencing, he overpowered two sheriff\u2019s deputies in the basement of the courthouse and fled to Manhattan. He had been in the city for only a few days\u2014he had just met Panthers in Harlem, and was angling to date some of the female Party members, who seemed more self-possessed than any women he\u2019d ever met\u2014when a bookie accused him of trying to rob him. \u201cI remember thinking, What\u2019s wrong with you\u2014you can\u2019t stay out of jail,\u201d he said. \u201cI thought it was just me, that something was wrong with me.\u201d Woodfox said that his tattoo was done by Charles Neville,", + " of the Neville Brothers, while he was being held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Houston, Texas; October, 2016. Photograph by Mark Hartman for The New Yorker He was extradited to New Orleans and placed on the Panther Tier at the Orleans Parish Prison. Eighteen members of the Black Panther Party, waiting to be tried for shoot-outs with the police, held classes on politics, economics, sociology, and the history of slavery. Steel plates had been affixed to their windows so that they couldn\u2019t communicate with prisoners on other tiers. Malik Rahim, the defense minister of the New Orleans chapter of the Party,", + " told me, \u201cThey thought they were separating us, but everywhere we went that infectious disease called organizing was taking hold.\u201d They ripped apart Frantz Fanon\u2019s \u201cThe Wretched of the Earth\u201d and divided it into sections, so that each inmate could study a chapter and teach the others what he\u2019d learned. Formed a year after the assassination of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party was disillusioned by the incremental approach of the civil-rights movement. Huey Newton, the Party\u2019s co-founder, said that black people were tired of singing \u201cWe Shall Overcome.\u201d He said, \u201cThe only way you\u2019re going to overcome is to apply righteous power.\u201d The Panthers saw a direct link between the country\u2019s armed interventions abroad\u2014in Vietnam,", + " Latin America, and Africa\u2014and what Eldridge Cleaver, a Party leader, called the \u201cbondage of the Negro at home.\u201d Black people, he said, lived in a \u201ccolony in the mother country,\u201d shunted into inferior housing, jobs, and schools. The Panthers followed the police, whom they saw as occupying troops, through the ghetto. If an officer questioned a black person, the Panthers got out of their car and monitored the encounter, drawing loaded guns. J. Edgar Hoover called the group \u201cthe greatest threat to the internal security of the country,\u201d and, as part of his COINTELPRO program, ordered the F.B.I.", + " to disrupt and discredit its activities. But much of the Party\u2019s work was focussed on providing community services in neighborhoods that had been neglected by the government. Under the slogan \u201cSurvival Pending Revolution,\u201d the Panthers established screening centers for sickle-cell anemia, provided pest control and trash disposal, and gave free breakfasts to children, who ate while learning black history. The first goal on the Panthers\u2019 ten-point program was: \u201cWe want the power to determine the destiny of our black community.\u201d Woodfox said that the Party \u201chelped bring out who I really was.\u201d He felt giddy when he used the language that the Panthers taught him for articulating his discontent.", + " He realized that he\u2019d been part of the lumpenproletariat, a term that Marx coined to describe \u201cthieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the crumbs of society.\u201d By the time of Woodfox\u2019s trial, in 1971, he believed that it had been his moral right to flee. On the morning of his trial, he and three other Panthers who had been placed in a holding pen under the courthouse sang, \u201cPick up the gun / put the pigs on the run / there aren\u2019t enough pigs / in this whole wide world / to stop the Black Panther Party!\u201d Officers beat them and sprayed them with mace.", + " When Woodfox was called into the courtroom, his face was bruised and burning. His ankles and wrists were chained to a steel belt around his waist. He turned toward the spectators in the courtroom and shook his chains. \u201cI want all of you to see what these racist, fascist pigs have done to me,\u201d he said.\n\nWoodfox was sent to Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the country. The penitentiary, situated on eighteen thousand acres of farmland and bordered on three sides by the Mississippi River, is a former cotton plantation and slave-breeding business. It was named for the African country, the source of its slaves.", + " After the Civil War, a former Confederate general acquired the plantation and leased state convicts\u2014most of them black, including children as young as seven\u2014to work at Angola, easing the labor shortage brought by Emancipation. The state purchased the plantation in 1901, but convicts still slept in former slave cabins and worked seven days a week, cultivating sugarcane and cotton. When Woodfox arrived, black and white inmates lived separately, in cinder-block compounds, and the cafeteria was divided by a wooden partition, to keep the races apart. Every guard at Angola was white. Woodfox and two other inmates he\u2019d met at the Orleans Parish Prison requested permission from the Panthers\u2019 Central Committee,", + " in Oakland, to establish a chapter of the Party at Angola\u2014the only recognized chapter founded on prison grounds. The new Panthers encouraged the other prisoners, who cut crops for two cents an hour, to work more slowly. Woodfox said, \u201cIt was this macho thing where the guys would deliberately work at a fast pace to show off how masculine they were, and we\u2019d explain to them that all they\u2019re going to do is take you to another field.\u201d A few times a week, a group of nearly fifty men pretended to play football while discussing how to conduct themselves as revolutionaries. Woodfox, who now described himself as a \u201cdialectical materialist,\u201d summarized what he\u2019d learned from the Party\u2019s list of some thirty required books,", + " by writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Michael Harrington, and Marcus Garvey. Prisoners who knew Woodfox from New Orleans, where he\u2019d earned a reputation as a hustler, at first thought that he was operating some sort of scam. Angola was known as the most dangerous prison in the South. According to the editor of the prison\u2019s newspaper, the Angolite, a quarter of the inmates lived in \u201cbondage\u201d: raped, sold, and traded, they generated income for their owners as well as for prison guards, who were paid to look the other way. The Panthers organized an Anti-Rape Squad,", + " which escorted new prisoners to their dorms. \u201cWe would let them know who we were and that we were there to protect them,\u201d Ronald Ailsworth, a member of the squad, told me. They armed themselves with bats and knives, which they fashioned out of farm equipment, and used mail-order catalogues and dinner trays as shields. Woodfox was inspired by the 1971 uprising at Attica, and felt connected to a movement of prisoners, many of them Panthers, calling for reform. The McKay Commission, which investigated the situation at Attica, reported that \u201cmany inmates came to believe they were \u2018political prisoners,\u2019 even though they had been convicted of crimes having no political motive or significance.", + " They claimed that responsibility for their actions belonged not to them but to society, which had failed to provide adequate housing, equal educational opportunities, and equal opportunities in American life.\u201d For years Woodfox had imagined that the Panthers existed on an otherworldly plane, free of fears and flaws, and he was surprised to see that they could pass as ordinary human beings. \u201cI\u2019m realizing how normal they are,\u201d he said. \u201cMade extraordinary by circumstances.\u201d Houston, Texas; October, 2016. Photograph by Mark Hartman for The New Yorker Woodfox took a similar view. In an interview with the Angolite, he said, \u201cI\u2019ve always considered myself a political prisoner.", + " Not in the sense that I\u2019m here for a political crime, but in the sense that I\u2019m here because of a political system that has failed me terribly as an individual and citizen in this country.\u201d\n\nOn April 17, 1972, Brent Miller, a twenty-three-year-old guard at Angola who had just been married, was stabbed thirty-two times in a black dorm. He and his bride, Teenie, had grown up on the grounds of the prison, in a settlement for three hundred families who worked at Angola. Miller\u2019s father supervised the hog farm; his brother guarded the front gate; and his father-in-law ran the sugar mill.", + " C. Murray Henderson, the warden, described the Millers as \u201cone of my favorite families on Angola; they were a close-knit family, the boys made music together, they had a good band and played for dances.\u201d Friends of the Millers came to the prison armed with shotguns and baseball bats, to assist with the investigation. Woodfox was the first prisoner to be interrogated. Warden Henderson, who described Woodfox as a \u201chard-core Black Panther racist,\u201d assumed that the murder was a political act. \u201cYou had a group of Black Panthers inside who felt that they had to do something to get attention, and they decided to kill a white person,\u201d he said later.", + " Woodfox said that the sheriff of St. Francisville, the town closest to Angola, pointed a gun at his forehead and told him, \u201cYou Black Panthers need to bring y\u2019all ass down to St. Francisville. We\u2019ll show you something.\u201d Miller\u2019s body had been found near the bed of Hezekiah Brown, a black inmate who had been sentenced to death for rape. Brown initially said that he knew nothing about the murder. Four days later, Warden Henderson promised Brown a pardon if he would \u201ccrack the case.\u201d Brown named four prison activists from New Orleans: Woodfox, Herman Wallace\u2014a charismatic and scholarly thirty-year-old who had co-founded the New Orleans chapter of the Party\u2014Chester Jackson,", + " and Gilbert Montague. Brown said that he had been drinking coffee with Miller when the four Panthers ran into the dorm, pulled Miller onto Brown\u2019s bed, and stabbed him. (The prison\u2019s chief security officer later confided to the warden\u2019s wife that Brown was \u201cone you could put words in his mouth.\u201d) The four suspects and some twenty other black men, all known as militants, were transferred by van to Angola\u2019s extended lockdown unit, called Closed Cell Restricted. According to the Black Panther, the Party newspaper, the men were dragged into the hallway at night and two rows of guards attacked them with baseball bats, pick handles,", + " and iron pipes. An inmate told the paper that those \u201cwho weren\u2019t beaten nearly to death were made to sit while 2, 3, or 4 pigs cut their hair in all directions.\u201d\n\nTwo weeks after Miller\u2019s death, the four men were charged with murder. There was an abundance of physical evidence at the crime scene, none of which linked them to the killing. A bloody fingerprint near Miller\u2019s body did not match any of theirs. In preparation for trial, the New Orleans chapter of the Panthers formed a support group, the Angola Brothers Committee. The treasurer was an F.B.I. informant, Jill Schafer, who,", + " along with her husband, Harry, received nine thousand dollars a year to infiltrate radical organizations, as part of the COINTELPRO project. By instigating rifts among members, Schafer sabotaged the committee\u2019s efforts to raise money for a defense lawyer. At Woodfox\u2019s trial, all the jurors were white. The prosecutor, John Sinquefield, referred to them as \u201ccommon, ordinary everyday folk like us.\u201d Although two inmates had testified that they were eating breakfast with Woodfox at the time of the crime, the jury deliberated for less than an hour before finding him guilty. A year later, Wallace was also convicted by an all-white jury.", + " (Jackson became a witness for the prosecution, and Montague was acquitted, because prison records showed that he was in the infirmary at the time of the murder.) After the trials, the warden secured Hezekiah Brown\u2019s pardon and release, using prison funds to pay for his campaign for clemency. Woodfox and Wallace, sentenced to life without parole, were returned to Closed Cell Restricted and placed in six-by-nine-foot cells. For more than five years, they never went outside.\n\nWoodfox allowed himself to cry only when everyone else on the tier was asleep. His youngest brother, Michael, who visited the prison every month,", + " said that Woodfox no longer permitted himself the pleasure of reminiscing about their childhood. Handcuffed and shackled, he spoke through a heavy wire-mesh screen. \u201cHe can\u2019t allow the pain to be expressed,\u201d Michael told me. \u201cHe feels he has to be a conqueror, a leader, a demonstration for other men. He doesn\u2019t want people to know he has weaknesses.\u201d Woodfox and Wallace soon became close with another Panther, Robert King, who was also in C.C.R. and had been convicted of killing an inmate. They believed that he, too, had been framed because of his connection to the Party.", + " The three men had all been raised by single women in New Orleans; had met their fathers only a few times, or not at all; had dropped out of school, because they didn\u2019t see the point of it; had been arrested for petty crimes\u2014both Wallace and Woodfox were picked up for violations of Jim Crow laws, like standing too close to a building without the owner\u2019s permission\u2014and had been sent to Angola for robberies. They were all introduced to the Party in jail and saw its teachings as a revelation. Until then, King said, \u201cI had the attitude that life had nothing more to offer me, nor could life get anything from me,", + " for I had nothing. I felt I had done it all and, should I perish the next morning, so be it.\u201d Woodfox said, \u201cOur instincts and thoughts were so closely aligned it was frightening.\u201d \u201cLook alive, Proust, you\u2019re next.\u201d In C.C.R., they were permitted to leave their cells for an hour a day to walk along the tier alone. During their free hour, Woodfox, King, and Wallace held classes for the other inmates, passing out carbon-copied math and grammar lessons. Woodfox gave them twenty-four hours to study lists of words\u2014\u201ccapitalism,\u201d \u201cimperialism,\u201d \u201cfeudalism,\u201d \u201ctotalitarianism,\u201d \u201cbourgeoisie\u201d\u2014and the following day he quizzed them.", + " Gary Tyler, an African-American inmate in C.C.R., said that the teachings made him consider himself a political prisoner. At seventeen, Tyler was sentenced to death, after a jury convicted him of shooting a white classmate who had been protesting the desegregation of his school. (A federal judge called his 1975 trial \u201cfundamentally unfair\u201d; all the eyewitnesses eventually recanted.) Woodfox, Wallace, and King gave Tyler reading lessons and lent him radical newspapers, like Fight Back! Newspaper of the Revolutionary Brigade, and Final Call, founded by Louis Farrakhan. \u201cThese guys were able to break down the politics surrounding my situation\u2014the educational structure of the schools,", + " why the black schools were poorly financed,\u201d Tyler told me. \u201cI used to get mad at them sometimes, because they acted like they were my dads. They left me no room to be a risk-taker.\u201d Kenny Whitmore, another inmate in C.C.R., said that Woodfox \u201cshould have been a professor.\u201d Woodfox told Whitmore to stop reading his \u201ctrash-ass pimp books,\u201d urban crime novels that degraded black women, and to try \u201cNative Son,\u201d by Richard Wright. Whitmore told me, \u201cMan, I kept on reading and reading. Then I looked in the mirror and saw Bigger Thomas. I was coming to terms with who I was as a person,", + " with my blackness, with being at the bottom of the world.\u201d After reading a history of chattel slavery, Woodfox told the inmates in C.C.R. that Southern plantation owners used to inspect the rectums of the slaves they intended to buy at auction. Woodfox said that the process resembled what they endured whenever they left the cell block: they were forced to strip, raise their genitals while lifting each foot, and bend over and spread their buttocks while coughing. Woodfox, Wallace, and King circulated a letter to all the inmates on one tier, describing a plan for resistance. On the chosen day, nearly all the inmates began refusing the strip search.", + " A few were beaten so badly by guards that they had to be hospitalized.\n\nThe three men worked to curtail their desires. None of them drank coffee or tea or smoked. \u201cIf I feel a habit is developing, or even a disorder of any kind, I counsel myself in spirit,\u201d Wallace told a psychologist. \u201cThe more food you eat, the more your body craves food,\u201d he wrote to a friend. \u201cIt\u2019s the same for sleep\u2014most of it is mental.\u201d He didn\u2019t like being dependent on security guards to turn the light on every morning, so he kept it on all the time and covered it with a legal pad when he slept,", + " which he did for fewer than three hours each night. In 1978, when the prison opened a small outdoor exercise cage in C.C.R.\u2014inmates could go outside for a few hours a week\u2014the three men ran barefoot outside, even when frost covered the ground. \u201cWe had to make ourselves think that ordinary things didn\u2019t apply to us,\u201d Woodfox told me. \u201cWe wanted the security people to think that they were dealing with superhumans.\u201d It was also a coping strategy. \u201cBefore I let them take something from me, I deny it from myself,\u201d he said. Woodfox spent several hours a day writing letters to pen pals,", + " many of whom were also known as political prisoners, like Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal. He said he was \u201cpositive that the people\u2014our brothers and sisters outside\u2014would rise up and organize for us.\u201d But the Party had splintered\u2014Huey Newton envisaged a party devoted to community service, while Eldridge Cleaver advocated urban guerrilla warfare. By 1982, the Party had collapsed. The plight of the Angola 3 was forgotten. Yet the three men, who communicated with one another by sending written and oral messages, passed from one cell to the next, continued identifying as Panthers.", + " Wallace described the principles of the Party as \u201cindelible mental protection,\u201d the \u201ckey to the mental stability of every one of us.\u201d The men were repeatedly singled out as important enough to take revenge on, a fact that helped them preserve their self-esteem. A security officer acknowledged in an interview with Warden Henderson\u2019s wife, Anne Butler, who wrote books on regional folklore, that at one point he gathered a \u201cgood crowd\u201d of officers at C.C.R., armed with pistols and a gas-grenade launcher. He said, \u201cEverybody\u2019d done went to arguing about who was gonna get Woodfox and Wallace.\u201d\n\nFor twenty years,", + " Woodfox had no lawyer. He, Wallace, and King taught themselves criminal and civil law. In 1991, King wrote a brief for Woodfox, arguing that he had been unconstitutionally indicted, because his grand jury, like every grand jury in the history of St. Francisville, excluded women. A judge agreed, and overturned Woodfox\u2019s conviction. Before he could be released, however, the state indicted him again. One of the grand jurors was Anne Butler. She had devoted part of a book to the case, describing how the Angola Panthers left \u201ctheir own bloody mark on history.\u201d She said that she asked to be excused from the jury but that the D.A.", + " insisted she serve. (Later, after an argument, the warden shot her five times, almost killing her, and was sentenced to fifty years in prison.) The trial was held in Amite City, a town where many Angola guards lived. Woodfox\u2019s lawyer, a public defender who drank heavily during lunch breaks, did not ask the state to test the bloody fingerprint, and he didn\u2019t discover Hezekiah Brown\u2019s special treatment. Instead, the focus of the trial was Woodfox\u2019s militance, though his views had softened. When the prosecutor, Julie Cullen, asked Woodfox if he still felt that he had the right to escape from the courthouse,", + " he said no. \u201cI was afraid,\u201d he said. \u201cI was a young man. I was afraid.\u201d Cullen asserted that Woodfox\u2019s political views were \u201cdiametrically opposed\u201d to Martin Luther King, Jr.,\u2019s nonviolent approach. \u201cNo, they were not,\u201d Woodfox said. \u201cJust to be clear, this is just a spaceman and a spacewoman on a spacewalk. This isn\u2019t a spacedate.\u201d \u201cAll of this talking about revolution and bloodshed, death, sacrifices,\u201d she said, referring to a letter he\u2019d written in 1973. \u201cYou\u2019re not an advocate of any of that?", + " You\u2019re a victim of all of that?\u201d \u201cWell, I think I was a victim of racism in this country,\u201d he said. \u201cYes\u2014from the day I was born.\u201d When Cullen asked Woodfox if he was still politically active, he said that he tried to teach inmates on his tier to have \u201cpride, self-respect, a sense of self-worth, and to see that the way to change things is to first change themselves.\u201d \u201cIs that a yes or a no?\u201d Cullen interrupted. \u201cThat is a yes,\u201d Woodfox said. He was convicted and again sentenced to life without parole. \u201cSome may view that victory as a sign to end my existence,\u201d he wrote to a friend.\n\nDuring his trial and the two years leading up to it,", + " Woodfox was in the general population at a county jail in Amite City, where he was never disciplined for breaking a rule. When he returned to Angola, a social worker noted that there were \u201cno indications of behavioral problems about this inmate reported by security.\u201d Nevertheless, he was placed in solitary confinement. Social workers, who occasionally circulated on the tier, described Woodfox as \u201crespectful,\u201d \u201cpositive,\u201d \u201cco\u00f6perative,\u201d and \u201cneat.\u201d King was characterized as \u201cfriendly,\u201d \u201ccalm,\u201d and \u201cpolite.\u201d When Wallace complained that he had been in solitary confinement for nearly three decades, a social worker noted that he \u201cdid not appear depressed\u201d and that his attitude was \u201cappropriate to situation.\u201d Every ninety days,", + " a Lockdown Review Board set up a table at the end of the hallway on Woodfox\u2019s tier. Shackled and handcuffed, he stood at the table for a brief conference with two board members. They had his disciplinary record, but they rarely looked at it. He often informed the officers that he hadn\u2019t had a rule violation for years. Once, a sympathetic board member told him, \u201cHey, this comes from higher up. We can\u2019t release you, and you know that.\u201d Prisoners in C.C.R. who had killed inmates or tried to escape\u2014one had kidnapped the warden at knifepoint\u2014were eventually released.", + " But Woodfox, Wallace, and King remained. The Lockdown Review Summaries for the three men always provided the same explanation for their confinement: \u201cNature of Original Reason for Lockdown.\u201d Burl Cain, who was the warden from 1995 until last year, acknowledged in a deposition that Woodfox appeared to be a \u201cmodel prisoner.\u201d But, Cain said, \u201cI still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism.\u201d He didn\u2019t like that Woodfox \u201chung with the past,\u201d he said. An assistant warden, Cathy Fontenot, said that the three men had to be kept in lockdown because \u201cthey have tremendous influence with the inmate population.\u201d Gary Tyler,", + " who was eventually released from C.C.R. and placed in Angola\u2019s general population, told me, \u201cAs time went on, it became utterly impossible for me to even reach these guys. The warden kind of built a wall around them. They were considered the pariahs of the prison.\u201d\n\nWoodfox often woke up gasping. He felt that the walls of the cell were squeezing him to death, a sensation that he began to experience the day after his mother\u2019s funeral, in 1994. He had planned to go to the burial\u2014prisoners at Angola are permitted to attend the funerals of immediate family\u2014but at the last minute his request was denied.", + " For three years, he slept sitting up, because he felt less panicked when he was vertical. \u201cIt takes so much out of you just to try to make these walls, you know, go back to the normal place they belong,\u201d he told a psychologist. \u201cSomeday I\u2019m not going to be able to deal with it. I\u2019m not going to be able to pull those walls apart.\u201d In 2000, the three men filed a lawsuit, arguing that twenty-eight years of solitary confinement constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The groundwork for the case was done by a law student, Scott Fleming, who began studying the court records in 1999,", + " after receiving a letter from Wallace, who wrote to any lawyer or activist whose address he could find. Fleming knew the neighbor of the daughter of Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, and after learning of the case Roddick visited Woodfox in prison. She decided to pay for lawyers for the three men. George Kendall, one of their new lawyers, said he thought that \u201cpart of this case is going to be figuring out how to hold these guys together mentally.\u201d But their resilience became as much an object of psychological scrutiny as their suffering. Stuart Grassian, a psychologist hired for the lawsuits who studies the effects of solitary confinement,", + " wrote, \u201cI have never encountered any situation nearly as profound or extreme as that of the three plaintiffs in this case.\u201d Even the state\u2019s psychologist, Joel Dvoskin, seemed impressed by the men\u2019s endurance. He wrote that Woodfox \u201cmaintains a demeanor of quiet dignity, he asserts his rights in a similarly dignified way.\u201d When Dvoskin asked Woodfox if he would ever take medication for his anxiety, Woodfox replied that he would control the problem through \u201cconcentration and will power.\u201d He told another psychologist, Craig Haney, that he was afraid of how well he\u2019d been \u201cadapting to the painfulness.\u201d \u201cThere is a part of me that is gone,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cI had to sacrifice that part in order to survive.\u201d Woodfox felt that his strength was his ability to hide \u201cwhat\u2019s going on deep inside of me,\u201d and the conversations with the psychologists left him unhinged. At the end of the interview with Grassian, he said, \u201cWhen you leave, I have just minutes to erect all these layers, put all these defenses back. It is the most painful, agonizing thing I could imagine.\u201d He steadied himself with a rigid routine that required at least two hours of daily reading. He decided, after a romantic relationship in the nineties that developed through letters, not to become involved with another woman as long as he was in prison.", + " \u201cFrom my reading, I knew that revolutionaries had to purge themselves of being chauvinistic,\u201d he said. Rebecca Hensley, a professor of sociology at Southeastern Louisiana University, who corresponded with Woodfox for many years, said that when she expressed romantic feelings for him he gently declined. He told her to read a book called \u201cThe Prisoner\u2019s Wife,\u201d about the pain of prison relationships.\n\nIn 2001, King\u2019s conviction was overturned, after the state\u2019s two witnesses admitted that they had lied, and recanted their testimony. King was told that if he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge he would be released immediately.", + " \u201cKing was real reluctant to leave us,\u201d Woodfox told me. \u201cIt was the comradeship, the love between us. He felt he would leave us shorthanded.\u201d A sinewy fifty-nine-year-old, King walked from C.C.R. into Angola\u2019s parking lot. He moved into a small apartment in New Orleans with a former Panther, Marion Brown, and rarely left. He couldn\u2019t sleep for more than an hour at a time. Brown said that King was \u201cfilled with fear, suspicion, conspiracy.\u201d If she moved a piece of furniture, he assumed that someone had broken in. Prisoners from Angola often called King collect,", + " and, though he had no income, he never refused the charges. Grassian, who met King when he was free, observed that he \u201csomehow seems to feel that neither he nor Marion can lead any semblance of a normal life until he gains his friends\u2019 release. He devotes almost all his concentration and energy to talking about, or thinking about, his two friends who remain at Angola.\u201d Not long after he was freed, King returned to Angola to visit Roy Hollingsworth, an inmate in C.C.R. who credits the Angola 3 for his moral awakening. Hollingsworth said that, years before, he was about to rape a young inmate and smash his head when King called out from another cell and asked him to reflect on what he was about to do.", + " When King got to C.C.R., five security officers approached him and terminated the visit. He was told never to return. In a deposition, Warden Cain said he expected that King would resume his \u201crevolutionary stuff\u201d if Woodfox and Wallace were ever released. \u201cHe is only waiting, in my opinion, for them to get out so they can reunite,\u201d he said. \u201cSo they can pick up where they left off.\u201d\n\nIn 2008, John Conyers, the chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana state representative, learned about Woodfox and Wallace\u2019s decades of confinement and visited them at C.C.R.", + " After the meeting, Richmond told the press that a \u201cmassive amount of evidence\u201d showed that Woodfox and Wallace were innocent. Brent Miller\u2019s widow, Teenie Rogers, had also begun to question the state\u2019s evidence, after a young investigator on the case, Billie Mizell, befriended her and made charts mapping inconsistencies in the state\u2019s testimony. Rogers wrote Richmond a letter saying that she was \u201cshocked to find out that no real attempt was made to find out who the fingerprint did belong to, which should have been a very simple thing to do.\u201d The state met doubts about the case with unusual vigor. After the case received national media attention,", + " on NPR and in Mother Jones, the public-information office for the Louisiana Department of Corrections set up a Google Alert and notified Angola\u2019s administration when the men were in the news. Louisiana\u2019s attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, who was elected in 2008, said of Woodfox, \u201cI oppose letting him out with every fibre of my being.\u201d He had been friends since first grade with the original prosecutor in the case, John Sinquefield, whom he promoted to the second-highest position in his office. Caldwell requested the recordings of nearly seven hundred phone calls made by Wallace and Woodfox, including conversations with their lawyers. Warden Cain said in a deposition,", + " \u201cWe were kind of curious to see just how far they would go... to see what rules they would break.\u201d Investigators listened to all the calls, and found that, in an interview with a project called Prison Radio, Woodfox had stated that he continued to live by the principles of the Black Panther Party. As punishment, Woodfox was prevented from going outside. Soon afterward, Warden Cain decided that he no longer wanted Woodfox and Wallace at his prison. \u201cI got tired of the Angola 3,\u201d he said. The men were transferred to new prisons, at opposite ends of the state. They remained in solitary confinement.", + " Woodfox wrote to a friend, \u201cI would go insane if I for a second allowed an emotional connection to take place with what is my reality!\u201d When the psychologist Craig Haney visited the two men at their new prisons, he was shocked to see how much they had aged. \u201cThe separation was devastating,\u201d Haney told me. \u201cThey had a powerful connection to each other that had sustained them.\u201d Woodfox told Haney that he had \u201clost interest in everything.\u201d He was again subject to strip searches up to six times a day. The men in the cells on either side of him were mentally ill and screamed for much of the day.", + " He felt overwhelmed by the sour smell of their breath. At Angola, Woodfox and Wallace had seen themselves as \u201cvillage elders,\u201d but at the new prisons the other inmates treated them like ordinary criminals. Wallace told Haney that he felt as if he were reaching his \u201cend point.\u201d His voice cracked, and he seemed hesitant and slow. He thought that there was something wrong with his heart. Crying, he said, \u201cI can\u2019t stand up to it.\u201d\n\nWallace lost fifty pounds. He complained of stomach pain, which the prison doctors diagnosed as a fungus. \u201cNo palpable masses\u2014exam limited by prison room chair,\u201d one doctor wrote in June,", + " 2013. Five days later, a doctor hired by Wallace\u2019s lawyers found an eight-centimetre bulge in his abdomen. He received a diagnosis of liver cancer. Wallace told Haney, \u201cThe majority of my life I have been treated like an animal, so I guess I will die like an animal.\u201d The cancer swiftly spread to his bones and his brain. In letters, Wallace referred to himself as a \u201csoldier\u201d and drew ornate pictures of panthers. He liked to use the term \u201cW.W.T.P.D.\u201d\u2014What would the Panthers do? A friend, Angela Allen-Bell, didn\u2019t understand his devotion.", + " \u201cYou have given your whole life to the Party,\u201d she told him. \u201cWhy aren\u2019t they here for you now when you are sick and need help?\u201d She said that he told her, \u201cI didn\u2019t join the people\u2014I joined the Party. The Party transformed my mind, and that\u2019s all it owes to me.\u201d Another friend, Jackie Sumell, said that Wallace\u2019s and Woodfox\u2019s commitment to the Party reminded her of the \u201cJapanese fighter pilots that they found on some of the Philippine Islands thirty years after the war, still fighting.\u201d In September, 2013, Wallace gave a deposition in his civil suit from a bed in the prison\u2019s infirmary.", + " He hadn\u2019t eaten for several days, and was being given heavy doses of the opiate fentanyl. The state\u2019s lawyer requested that the deposition be adjourned, because Wallace was vomiting, but Wallace told him, \u201cCome on. Come on with your questions.\u201d He was capable of saying only a few words at a time. He said that being in solitary confinement for forty-one years had reduced him to a \u201cstate of being where I can barely collect my own thoughts.\u201d He pursed his lips and appeared to be holding back tears. \u201cIt\u2019s like a killing machine,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re on your deathbed, is that your understanding?\u201d one of his lawyers asked him.", + " \u201cYes,\u201d he replied. \u201cAre you able to say with a clean conscience, as you prepare to meet your maker, that you did not murder Brent Miller?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d Five days later, a federal judge responded to Wallace\u2019s habeas petition, which had been lingering in the courts for years. The judge overturned his conviction, ordering that he be released. At dusk, Wallace was loaded into an ambulance and taken to New Orleans, to stay with a friend who lived half a block from where he\u2019d been raised. Family and friends, some of whom he hadn\u2019t seen for forty years, gathered around his bed. One friend read him the last chapter of Eldridge Cleaver\u2019s \u201cSoul on Ice.\u201d Another held flowers to his nose.", + " On Wallace\u2019s second day of freedom, the state impanelled a grand jury, which reindicted him for Miller\u2019s murder. Wallace was never told. He died the next day. He asked that his funeral program begin with a quote by Frantz Fanon: \u201cIf death is the realm of freedom, then through death I escape to freedom.\u201d Woodfox couldn\u2019t accept that Wallace, whom he described as \u201cthe other part of my heart,\u201d had become an \u201cancestor,\u201d the term Panthers used to describe the dead. \u201cWe always believed that we would survive anything,\u201d he said. He could no longer avoid the thought that a similar fate awaited him.", + " He said, \u201cAll these years and years of study and discipline and carrying myself a certain way, in order to die in prison.\u201d\n\nA year after Wallace\u2019s death, Woodfox\u2019s conviction was overturned again, because of racial discrimination in the selection of the grand jury. The state issued a new arrest warrant and, in February, 2015, convened a grand jury to indict Woodfox for the third time. Deidre Howard, a sixty-one-year-old dental hygienist from St. Francisville, was the forewoman. She said that the prosecutor explained that the case had to be \u201crun back through\u201d because of a technicality.", + " \u201cThey told us we just needed to dot the \u2018i\u2019s and cross the \u2018t\u2019s,\u201d she said. The coroner in the case had been Howard\u2019s doctor; the district attorney worked down the street from her and had lent her a tent for her outdoor Bible meetings. Warden Henderson had been her neighbor. Howard felt that she owed it to the Miller family, who owned a restaurant where she sometimes ate, to keep Woodfox locked up. According to Howard, the prosecutor emphasized to the jury that the Black Panther Party was devoted to \u201craping and robbing.\u201d She signed the indictment. \u201cThere really wasn\u2019t anything to deliberate,\u201d she told me.", + " As she lay in bed that night, Howard realized that she had determined a man\u2019s life with less consideration than she devoted to buying a new refrigerator. She could barely remember his name. The day after the indictment, Woodfox was transferred to West Feliciana Parish Detention Center, which is three blocks from Howard\u2019s house. One evening, as she was getting ready for bed, she heard the siren of an ambulance. From her bedroom window, she saw the ambulance heading toward the jail. She had read in the newspaper that Woodfox had renal problems, diabetes, hepatitis C, and cardiovascular disease. Still wearing her pajamas, she got into her car and followed the ambulance to the hospital.", + " She tried to see if the man being unloaded from the gurney was Woodfox, but she couldn\u2019t get a view of his face. Three months later, she sent a letter to a judge who had presided over previous hearings. \u201cI have made a terrible mistake,\u201d she wrote. She also wrote to the judge who had overseen her grand jury, telling him that after researching the case she understood that crucial facts had been withheld from her. \u201cI feel violated and taken advantage of,\u201d she said. In another letter, she begged Buddy Caldwell to stop the prosecution. When she received no replies, she mailed a letter to the governor,", + " Bobby Jindal, whom she had voted for. \u201cThis is the worst human tragedy I have ever seen,\u201d she wrote. In April, 2015, she and her twin sister, Donna, drove to a prayer vigil for Woodfox at a church in Baton Rouge, to mark his fortieth year in solitary confinement. They remained in their car, and, as Woodfox\u2019s brother and other supporters arrived, they leaned down, so that no one would see their faces. -=-=-=- In late 2015, Buddy Caldwell was voted out of office, and Deidre Howard sent the new attorney general, Jeff Landry,", + " more than a hundred pages of letters that she had written to attorneys and judges involved in the case. \u201cJury service has been a devastating experience,\u201d she wrote. Although people had been protesting the case for years, it was the first time that anyone from St. Francisville had seemed bothered. Landry offered to end the prosecution if Woodfox pleaded no-contest to manslaughter. For years, Woodfox had fantasized about walking out of court after being acquitted by a jury, but his lawyers urged him to avoid a trial. Despite requests that the location be changed, the case would be heard in West Feliciana, a parish in which the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke,", + " during a Senate bid in 1990, had received seventy-five per cent of the white vote. As Woodfox was contemplating the offer, Woodfox\u2019s fifty-two-year-old daughter, Brenda, ran into one of Woodfox\u2019s childhood friends in New Orleans. Woodfox hadn\u2019t seen her in nearly twenty years. The friend took a photograph of Brenda and sent it to Woodfox, to confirm that the woman was his daughter. Then Brenda visited him at the jail, bringing her son and her two grandchildren. \u201cUp until that point, there was this constant internal battle going on,\u201d Woodfox told me. \u201cI\u2019ve always preached to other men,", + " \u2018You have to be willing to sacrifice everything, even your life.\u2019 If I took the plea deal, would I be a hypocrite?\u201d Woodfox\u2019s brother Michael told him about a conversation he\u2019d had with Brenda. \u201cShe was crying and said she didn\u2019t have a daddy,\u201d Woodfox said. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you the depths of pain I experienced from hearing that.\u201d He decided that a plea deal could be justified. Woodfox had a week to prepare for his release. For years he had created imaginary budgets, determining how much he could pay for food, given the rent and his monthly utilities. He had spent four decades,", + " he said, living \u201cin the abstract.\u201d He told himself, \u201cI can handle this\u2014I just need to see it coming.\u201d He revisited lists that he\u2019d made, edited over the course of decades, of what to do when he was free: visit his mother\u2019s and his sister\u2019s gravesites, learn how to drive again, go to Yosemite National Park, \u201cbe patient.\u201d On February 19, 2016, his sixty-ninth birthday, Woodfox packed his belongings into garbage bags and put about a hundred letters in a cardboard box. He put on black slacks and a black bomber jacket that a freed Angola prisoner had sent him.", + " Not until he was outside did he believe that he was actually going to be freed. It was a warm, clear, sunny day. He squinted and held the hem of his jacket. When he reached the front gate, he raised his fist and gave a closed-lip smile to a small crowd of supporters. Michael led him to his car, a blue Corvette. Woodfox shuffled when he walked, as if shackles still connected his feet. Biting his lip and crying, Michael helped his brother into the passenger seat and showed him how to fasten the seat belt.\n\nThat night, Woodfox and Robert King went to a party in Woodfox\u2019s honor at the Ash\u00e9 Cultural Arts Center,", + " in New Orleans. People kept tapping Woodfox\u2019s shoulder, an experience he found frightening. He was used to guarding the front of his cell without having to worry about \u201cthe damage someone can do from behind,\u201d he said. King sensed Woodfox\u2019s discomfort and moved closer to him, guiding him through the room. Woodfox kept his eyes on the floor. His expression seemed frozen in an apologetic smile. At the party were people he hadn\u2019t seen for forty years. He thought that they would still see him as a \u201cpetty criminal who victimized my own neighborhood,\u201d he said. Most of his supporters in recent years had been white,", + " and he worried that the black community would find him inauthentic. Toward the end of the evening, an old friend invited him onto a stage and handed him a microphone. Woodfox pulled up his pants, which were too loose, and held the zipper of his jacket. \u201cI\u2019m kind of new at this,\u201d he said. \u201cI hope you understand that I have been through a terrible ordeal. I need a little time to get my footing so I won\u2019t make a fool of myself.\u201d The friend handed the microphone to Robert King, who shrugged. He has a leisurely, meandering way of speaking. \u201cAnyway,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cWhat can I say?\u201d He pointed to Woodfox. \u201cThis is your night, bro.\u201d \u201cWhatever is my night is your night,\u201d Woodfox said quietly, looking at his sneakers. The d.j. played Stevie Wonder\u2019s \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d for Woodfox, who nodded and gave the black-power salute.\n\nWoodfox had intended to spend a month camping in the woods, gazing at the sky\u2014a cleansing ritual. After years of being forced to listen to men talking to themselves, he was desperate to be alone on his own terms. Once he was released, though, he felt that this would be an indulgence. He spent his first month at the house of a friend in New Orleans,", + " hosting visitors. Most nights, he sat in a pink armchair wearing his prison-issue gray sweatpants and a pair of Crocs that his brother had bought for him. He found it a \u201cstrain to stay within the social dialogue,\u201d he said. He often warned new acquaintances, \u201cI\u2019m not good at, as they say, \u2018chitchat.\u2019 \u201d He worried that his family would feel that he had abandoned them, but his daughter, Brenda, became a regular visitor. She exuded an aura of patient competence, seeming content to sit silently on the couch, observing her father with others. She often brought her boisterous grandchildren.", + " Her ten-year-old granddaughter, Michaela, liked to dance to pop songs on Woodfox\u2019s new iPhone, a gift from a detective who worked on his case. Woodfox nodded to the beat and occasionally said, \u201cHehe.\u201d \u201cYour great-grandpa is a quiet soul,\u201d Brenda told Michaela. \u201cQuiet but deadly. Don\u2019t mistake his quietness for weakness.\u201d Woodfox discovered that a typical day in the house\u2014moving from the kitchen to the bathroom to the living room\u2014entailed more steps than his entire exercise regimen in prison. He felt overwhelmed by options. \u201cI have to submit to the process of developing a new technique to fill the hours,\u201d he told me,", + " three weeks after he was released. \u201cI\u2019m trying to strike the right balance with being free.\u201d He walked slowly, with such intense concentration that he didn\u2019t notice when someone called his name. His footing was unsure. \u201cHe seemed very nervous, very insecure,\u201d his friend Allen-Bell told me. \u201cI\u2019d never seen that Albert before.\u201d Theresa Shoatz, the daughter of Russell (Maroon) Shoatz, a Black Panther who was in solitary confinement for twenty-eight years in Pennsylvania, said that Woodfox appeared \u201cdocile and withdrawn. He didn\u2019t look you in the eye. He just held his head down and said,", + " \u2018Thanks for your support.\u2019 I didn\u2019t see much happiness on his face.\u201d \u201cCan\u2019t you keep your parenting to yourselves?\u201d Years before, Woodfox had said that if he was ever released he would \u201cunleash the little man inside of me and let it jump up and down.\u201d But he didn\u2019t feel that sense of abandon. He felt ashamed that he\u2019d pleaded guilty to anything. \u201cI\u2019ve learned to live with it, but I still haven\u2019t come to terms with it,\u201d he told me. \u201cI still regret it. I don\u2019t care how you look at it: I was not standing for what I believed in.", + " I truly feel that.\u201d After a month in New Orleans, Woodfox moved into a spare bedroom in Michael\u2019s home, in Houston. Above his bed, he taped a picture of Wallace and him at Angola, and placed a few Panther buttons on the dresser. \u201cI don\u2019t like an over-cluttered room,\u201d he said. Michael said that sometimes he\u2019d pass Woodfox\u2019s bedroom and see him lying in bed awake, his arms folded across his chest. Michael urged Woodfox, \u201cYou have to tell your mind, \u2018I am free. I don\u2019t have to just sit there.\u2019 \u201d\n\nWoodfox discovered that he felt more comfortable in social settings if King was by his side.", + " At a family reunion in a suburb of New Orleans, his relatives congregated in his cousin\u2019s kitchen while he and King sat at a card table in the garage. Woodfox kept his back against the garage door and picked at a small bowl of egg salad. He almost never finished a meal. He sometimes went all day without eating before realizing that there was a reason he felt so depleted. King assured Woodfox that he was also a sensitive eater. \u201cI gotta eat in increments,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I eat a whole plate, I lose my appetite.\u201d \u201cYeah, I\u2019m a nibbler,\u201d Woodfox said. Woodfox\u2019s cousin had invited several supporters\u2014Woodfox and King called them their \u201cAngola 3 family\u201d\u2014including Deidre Howard.", + " She and her twin sister, Donna, sat in the garage with him and King. They were dressed identically: black platform sandals, ruffled collared shirts, gold pendant earrings, and their hair in a French ponytail with the same type of barrette. Woodfox asked Deidre if people in St. Francisville still thought that he was guilty. She swiftly changed the subject. \u201cI did not have the heart to tell him that our community still sees him as a murderer,\u201d she said later.\n\nTwo months after Woodfox\u2019s release, he and King settled their civil suit with the state. The agreement requires that Louisiana\u2019s Department of Corrections review its system for placing inmates in solitary confinement,", + " and consider the status of segregated prisoners in a more meaningful way. With a modest sum from the settlement, Woodfox and King, who had moved to Austin after his home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, decided to buy houses in New Orleans. Woodfox looked at ten houses before choosing one in East New Orleans, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, for less than seventy thousand dollars. He wasn\u2019t entirely sure why he liked the house\u2014the interior was dark, and he wished it had a larger back yard. Allen-Bell researched the frequency of 911 calls in the neighborhood and tried to dissuade him. \u201cIt\u2019s not a place where you are going to feel comfortable walking on the street,\u201d she told him on the phone.", + " \u201cI don\u2019t care if there are nine hundred 911 calls,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m buying the house.\u201d \u201cWhy?\u201d she asked him. \u201cWhy?\u201d he said. \u201cBecause I want it, that\u2019s why.\u201d She told him that the 911 calls were for serious matters: armed robbery, kidnapping, rape. \u201cSo?\u201d Woodfox said. A few days after the phone call, Woodfox finalized the purchase. Brenda drove him to the real-estate agent\u2019s office, in a high-rise, to sign the paperwork. She had begun taking him to all his appointments. He liked to tell people, \u201cI\u2019m a dad now.\u201d They were two hours late for their appointment with the agent,", + " a chirpy blond woman. \u201cWe got caught up in traffic,\u201d Woodfox told her casually. The process required two witnesses, and the agent asked me to be the first one. Although Brenda was sitting beside me, the agent asked another white woman who was working behind the desk to be the second. Woodfox signed the papers, and then we did, too. Later, I asked Woodfox if he thought it was strange that the agent had ignored Brenda. He said that he figured it was a mistake, and not worth dwelling on. \u201cI don\u2019t spend a lot of time looking for racism,\u201d he told me. \u201cLook,", + " if it really manifests, then I will give the person a tongue-lashing. I think I\u2019ve developed a pretty good vocabulary to do that, a pretty good philosophy.\u201d A few weeks earlier, a cabdriver had demanded that he and King pay for their ride before they reached their destination. Insulted, Woodfox said that his first instinct was to get out of the car; instead, he and King handed over the cash and at the end of the ride gave the driver a large tip\u2014\u201cguilt money,\u201d they called it. Woodfox didn\u2019t have the keys to his house yet, but he wanted to show it to Brenda.", + " We parked in front of the house, a brick ranch with bars on the front windows, a screened-in patio, and a lawn with six squat palm trees and some spindly shrubs. A chain-link fence surrounded the property. Woodfox mentioned a few things that he appreciated about the neighborhood\u2014most of the lawns were mowed\u2014but he admitted that none of that really mattered. \u201cTo be honest,\u201d he said, \u201cI just wanted a house close to my family.\u201d Brenda realized that chocolate had melted over her car\u2019s center console. She and Woodfox spent the next ten minutes wiping it up with tissues, at which point they were ready to leave.", + " \u201cBye-bye house,\u201d Woodfox said.\n\nBy summer, Woodfox felt that he was getting his \u201cstreet legs,\u201d as he called them. A sly sense of humor surfaced. But he was also increasingly exhausted. He spoke at panels about prisoners\u2019 rights in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Baton Rouge. \u201cI feel an obligation, because when I was in the position of the guys in prison I used to wonder why nobody spoke for us,\u201d he told me. His friend Kenny Whitmore, who is still at Angola, told me that when Woodfox was freed \u201che took a part of me with him.\u201d Whitmore said,", + " \u201cThat old man is going full speed ahead.\u201d \u201cNo need to push, Mother\u2014I\u2019m going.\u201d In early August, Woodfox flew to New York City to receive an award from the National Lawyers Guild, an association of progressive lawyers and activists, at the organization\u2019s annual conference. He wore a gray blazer over a T-shirt that said \u201cI Am Herman Wallace.\u201d At the podium, he announced that he wanted to honor \u201cmy comrade and good friend.\u201d He extended his palm toward King, who was in the third row of the auditorium, but became too choked up to say his name. Woodfox pressed his lips together and paused,", + " regaining his composure. \u201cI hope that my being here tonight is a testament to the strength and determination of the human spirit,\u201d he said. After the speech, Woodfox and King headed to a lounge on the second floor of the law school, where people were selling buttons, T-shirts, and posters that said \u201cFree All the Angola 3.\u201d Woodfox signed a dozen posters, writing in steady, capital letters, \u201cI AM FREE! ALBERT WOODFOX.\u201d People kept approaching him to ask if they could take selfies. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing to be in the room with you,\u201d one person told him. \u201cTalk about moving and inspiring!\u201d another said.", + " \u201cO.K.,\u201d Woodfox said in response to most compliments. A woman who had recently been released from prison tried to commiserate. \u201cIt\u2019s scary getting out,\u201d she told Woodfox. She wore anti-embolism stockings and carried a plastic bag containing dozens of tubes of toothpaste. \u201cI just bought a house in New Orleans,\u201d he told her. Then he seemed to feel guilty for making it sound too easy. \u201cI\u2019m trying not to get too frustrated,\u201d he added. He pointed to King: \u201cFortunately, I have him as an example.\u201d Although he\u2019d been too nervous to sleep the night before,", + " Woodfox stayed out until 2 A.M., going to bars with lawyers and activists. He had a workmanlike approach to socializing. He didn\u2019t drink, and he never seemed to judge people. The most skeptical thing I\u2019d ever heard him say was that someone was \u201cquirky.\u201d He had a hard time saying no to anyone. Although he hoped to eventually have a romantic relationship, he didn\u2019t feel that he could devote time to it. \u201cI mean, I\u2019m open to a relationship,\u201d he told me, \u201cbut right now that\u2019s not my primary thing. I know the interest in me and what I went through is going to die,", + " so I\u2019m trying to get as much done while people are still interested enough.\u201d Two days after the speech, Woodfox, King, and I had breakfast at their hotel, in Greenwich Village. At the conference, Woodfox had felt himself being turned into a mythological figure, a process that he found uncomfortable. \u201cAll these people who have been involved in social struggle for so long want to shake my hand,\u201d he told me. \u201cI don\u2019t have an emotional connection as to what the big deal is. Sometimes I just don\u2019t think that, you know, surviving solitary confinement for forty-one years is a big deal.\u201d I asked if that was a coping mechanism,", + " and he said, \u201cPretty much everything I did for the last forty-four years was some sort of coping mechanism.\u201d He said that, in the early two-thousands, inmates at Angola began telling him, \u201cThanks for not letting them break you.\u201d It was the first time he grasped that, by staying sane, he had done something unusual. King, who was eating a piece of toast with jelly, recalled one of the first protests in C.C.R., when the Panthers persuaded inmates to refuse the strip search. After a few days, King had realized that inmates were being beaten so badly that they could die, and he wrote a letter to Woodfox recommending that they end the protest.", + " \u201cIt is the man who creates the principles,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe principles shouldn\u2019t kill the man.\u201d King took a bite of his toast. He seemed to be contemplating the decision for the first time in many years. \u201cIn the final analysis, I think we made the right decision,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was the right decision,\u201d Woodfox said. \u201cI mean, I could have given my life and been beaten to death,\u201d King said. \u201cThe legacy I would have left is that no one would know why I was killed.\u201d He leaned back in his chair, smiling. \u201cI\u2019m so glad that decision was made.", + " I\u2019m so glad that decision was made.\u201d\n" + ], + "length": 26362, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 76, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Germany signaled that it may give Greece some much-needed breathing room in its bailout timetable today, as European leaders cheered the victory of Greece's pro-bailout leaders this weekend. \"We're ready to talk about the time frame as we can't ignore the lost weeks and we don't want people to suffer because of that,\" says Germany's foreign minister. Reuters notes that Greece's bailout amount would have to rise should the country be given an extra year to hit its targets. But controversy continues as world leaders meet at a euro-focused G20 summit in Mexico. Greek leaders are working to organize a coalition government, which the radical SYRIZA party says it won't join\u2014though it acknowledges the \"country must have a government tonight,\" according to the Telegraph's live blog. Meanwhile, despite the Greek election, Spain and Italy continue to struggle, with borrowing costs climbing for both countries, Reuters notes.\n", + "docs": [ + "Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.\n\nPolitical and business leaders from the world's top economic powers start a two day meeting in Mexico on Monday.\n\nThe summit comes at a crucial time for the global economy, as Michelle Fleury reports from Los Cabos in Mexico. ", + " 21.03 Europe may agree to relax the conditions of Greece's austerity measures, but there will be no major alterations to existing agreement, Eurogroup head Jean-Claude Juncker has said.\n\nIt would send the wrong signal if we made concessions without good reason.\n\n20.43 Leaders of the world's emerging economies are willing to stump up more cash to prevent future crisies, but only in return for more clout at the negotiating table. In a statement released by India, the so-called BRICS of Brazil, China, Russia, India and South Africa said they had:\n\nagreed to increase resources available with the International Monetary Fund [to]", + " promote adequate burden sharing amongst IMF creditors. These new contributions are being made in anticipation that all the reforms agreed upon in 2010 will be fully implemented in a timely manner, including a comprehensive reform of voting power and reform of quota shares.\n\nBrazilian president Dilma Roussef, Russian president Vladimir Putin, Indian PM Manmohan Singh, Chinese president Hu Jintao and South African president Jacob Zuma pose for group photo in Mexico on Monday (Photo: AFP)\n\n20.08 Don't expect any solutions from the international junketing in Mexico, writes Jeremy Warner:\n\nFew G20 meetings are anything other than a waste of space, but this one more so than most,", + " for the latest slowdown in the world economy is something that can only be convincingly dealt with by Europe. And as we already know, Europe is seemingly quite incapable of sorting out the hopeless muddle it has inflicted on itself.\n\nAngela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has welcomed the outcome of the Greek election, but it must have been through gritted teeth. In fact, New Democracy's narrow victory is the worst possible outcome for Berlin. What a relief that Greece has voted to remain in the euro, German policymakers profess in public. Not, they mutter as an aside.\n\nThere's virtually no politician in Greece who thinks the austerity of the bailout programme a price worth paying for membership of the euro;", + " they all want to renegotiate the terms to some degree.\n\nThe choice made by Greeks was therefore not one of in or out of the euro, but between the outright confrontation pledged by the radical left and the guerrilla warfare of renegotiation promised by the New Democracy leader, Antonis Samaras. This is scarcely going to help matters from a German perspective.\n\n19.36 A pro-bail-out coalition government in Greece will be formed by tomorrow, according to sources cited by Reuters.\n\nA senior official with the conservative New Democracy party told the newswire that the country would also ask Europe to spread its \u20ac11.7bn austerity drive over four years instead of the current two.\n\n19.", + "13 Here's another chance to watch David Cameron talking about his sympathy for German concerns over Greece:\n\n19.01 Mr Barroso has also insisted that Europe did not come to the G20 summit in Mexico to \"receive lessons\" on how to handle the economy. When asked by a Canadian journalist \"why should North Americans risk their assets to help Europe?\" He replied:\n\nFrankly, we are not coming here to receive lessons in terms of democracy or in terms of how to handle the economy.\n\nBy the way this crisis was not originated in Europe [...] Seeing as you mention North America, this crisis originated in North America and much of our financial sector was contaminated by,", + " how can I put it, unorthodox practices, from some sectors of the financial market.\n\nOh dear...\n\n18.37 A little more on what Jose Barroso, the European Union president, had to say earlier. He said that a mission from Greece's international lenders will be sent to Athens as soon as a government is formed there to assess how the bailout programme targets can be achieved. He added that Greece had made impressive budget savings, but failed to deliver needed structural reforms such as privatising state assets.\n\n18.27 The prime minister urged the European Central Bank and the eurozone's strongest economies to do more to deal with the region's financial crisis.", + " The two options are to \u201ctry to force down wages and prices at the periphery as fast as they can, or the core of the euro zone has to do more to support the periphery through greater burden sharing,\u201d he said.\n\n18.22 Speaking about the regulation of the banks, David Cameron said that Britain had taken steps to clean up its banks, as a \"vital part of clearing up the mess inherited\". He added that the UK had one of largest financial services sector in the world and wanted to make it \"one of the safest\".\n\n18.09 David Cameron has also lambasted protectionism, saying there is \"worrying evidence\"", + " of countries putting up trade barriers. He said that keeping trade rules fair was \"absolutely vital\". He also called on business to tackle poverty by campaigning on issues of trade and openness.\n\n18.03 David Cameron is now addressing business leaders at the G20 summit. He says they have taken steps to make Britain one of the best places in the world to start and grow a business.\n\nHe is advertising Britain's business opportunities, saying the country has some \"huge underlying strengths\", including some of the best universities in the world.\n\nThe prime minister has also outlined five key threats to the global economy, including the \"muddle-headed\" thinking that over-indebted countries can spend their way out of trouble.\n\nHe said that \"bold action\"", + " was necessary to get finances back under control, adding there was an \"unequivocal message that deficit reduction and growth are not alternatives, achieving the first is vital to achieving the second\".\n\nSpeaking about the eurozone, he said that political parties who say they want Greece to stay in the euro need to act accordingly and cannot afford to waste any time.\n\nHe added that Britain did not join the eurozone because it did not want to give up sovereignty. But, he added that the eurozone's actions have a \"direct impact on our economic fortunes\".\n\n17.45 Speaking at the G20 in Mexico, David Cameron has responded to Angela Merkel's comments that she does not want to see any loosening of Greece's agreed pledges to reform.", + " He said he could quite understand German concerns that tax payers have been asked to put a lot of money into Greece and want \"Greece to stick to its side of bargain\". \"But the truth is everyone in the Eurozone has to take difficult decisions to make the system work properly and ease crisis,\" he added.\n\nAsked whether he could see the crisis going on for years, he said \"I very much hope that won't be the case\". He added that if decisive, clear action is taken, we can see the crisis ease. \"[The] alternatives are not good,\" he said.\n\n17.35 Reuters has some further detail on what Herman Van Rompuy has been saying.", + " He has apparently said that the eurozone is confident that the new Greek government will take ownership of the EU/IMF bailout programme; and that the first priority is to work on integrated bank supervision in the eurozone.\n\n17.28 Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, has been speaking too:\n\nTwitter: Richard Blackden - Von Rumpuy says the public, investors + govts need to know that the euro project \"knows its destination and that we know how to get there.\"\n\n17.25 A little more detail on what Jose Barroso has been saying at this afternoon's press conference. The EC president has said that he wants a financial transaction tax globally;", + " that Europe must work towards a banking union; and that Greece must implement necessary reforms.\n\n17.22 Richard Blackden, the Telegraph's US Business Editor, has tweeted on the press conference with Jose Barroso, president of the European Commission:\n\nTwitter: Richard Blackden - Jose Barroso: eurobonds will not be a \"licence to spend\" money, though EU president says they will be considered #G20\n\n17.15 President Barack Obama, who is due to meet Angela Merkel later today, also had this to say on the Greek election:\n\nI think the election in Greece yesterday indicates a positive prospect for not only them forming a government,", + " but also them working constructively with their international partners in order that they can continue on the path of reform and do so in a way that also offers the prospects for the Greek people to succeed and prosper.\n\n17.10 Standard & Poor's has issued its verdict on the Greek election, saying that it will have no immediate effect on Greece's ratings. But, the agency did add that while the short-term risk of Greece leaving the eurozone may have lessened, it still sees at least a one-in-three chance of its exit in the medium-to-long term.\n\n17.03 Evangelos Venizelos, the leader of Greece's Socialist Pasok party,", + " has said that the country must have a coalition by the end of tomorrow at the latest. Speaking in Athens, Venizelos said that a message of unity must be sent to the Greek people and a message of credibility sent abroad. He described comments from radical leftist leader, Alexander Tsipras, who today refused to join a coalition with the conservatives, as disappointing.\n\nHe said efforts should continue to form a government with the widest possible participation, suggesting that Antonis Samaras, the New Democracy leader, use his mandate to call a meeting of party leaders under President Karolos Papoulias tomorrow.\n\n16.51 At the close in London,", + " the FTSE 100 has managed to sneak up 0.2pc. But Spain's IBEX has tumbled 3pc and Italy's MIB is sharply lower, down 2.9pc.\n\n16.41 Austerity, schmausterity. Here's where Angela Merkel and Barack Obama are having their G20 chinwag later on today. It's the Esperanza resort and if you fancy a night in a beachfront luxury suite, it will set you back $3,500.\n\n16.21 The might of Merkel: traders and market watchers point out that Spanish stocks and the euro have hit their lows of the day as the German chancellor says Greece has to stick to the terms agreed.\n\n16.", + "12 Some flashes coming through from Reuters on comments from Angela Merkel. She says:\n\n- Expects a common position of Europeans on sustainable growth\n\n- Does not see any reason to speak about a new aid package for Greece on top of the two already agreed\n\n- New Greek government has to fulfull the commitments Greece has made to its international lenders\n\n- Expects quick formation of new, stable government in Greece\n\n- Cannot accept any loosening on agreed reform pledges in Greece after election\n\n16.09 As we head towards the bell in London, Ishaq Siddiqi, market strategist at ETX, had this to say on the day's movements:\n\nAlthough markets earlier in the morning cheered the pro-bailout Greek election win over the weekend,", + " worries about the implementation on a workable plan with a coalition government that can agree on reforms and austerity is eating away at the market confidence at the moment. Though a global crisis has been averted for now, Greece\u2019s underlying economic problems will continue to rattle market sentiment in the near term. There remains a long hard road full of speed bumps for Greece, and signs of collective political efforts will be the key to building optimism over the country\u2019s future.\n\nAs such, nerves will continue to build ahead of the key Eurogroup meeting at the end of June, where policy makers will be under pressure to work on solutions to tame the contagion of the debt crisis spreading to the core and work with Greece on measures to stimulate economic growth.\n\n15.", + "41 European Central Bank Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny: \"Policymakers must avoid repeating \"single-minded\" focus on austerity that helped bring Nazis to power in 1930s German economic crisis.\"\n\n15.29 Ed Conway from Sky at the G20:\n\nTwitter: Ed Conway - Widespread derision from other G20 media that UK doesn't have its own governmental jet. \"You mean Cameron flew with Virgin?!\"\n\nMeanwhile the G20 draft communique has been leaked, according to Reuters. It states that \"Euro area countries agree to take all necessary measures to safeguard region\u2019s integrity and stability. The eurozone is urged to find ways to break feedback loop between banks and sovereigns,", + " and the eurozone to work closely with Greek government to ensure Greece remains on reform path and inside eurozone.\"\n\nTop priority for G20 remains \"strong, sustainable and balanced growth\" that reduces unemployment.\n\n15.19 Fitch has released a report entitled Greece and Europe: Back from the Brink, Crisis Unresolved.\n\nThe narrow victory of New Democracy in the Greek parliamentary elections means the near-term risk of a Greek disorderly debt default and exit from the euro has fallen. A new government that is supportive of the EU-IMF programme is likely to be in place prior to the EU Leaders Summit on June 28-29.\n\nConsequently,", + " Fitch will not place all eurozone sovereigns on Rating Watch Negative as it had indicated would be the case if a Greek euro exit were a probable near-term event.\n\nThe crisis in Greece and the eurozone remains intense. Fiscal austerity and painful structural reform combined with a strong parliamentary opposition led by Sryzia means that the new Greek government is likely to be fragile.\n\nThe pace of economic contraction is almost certainly accelerating. The country's liquidity position is fast deteriorating, underscoring the urgency of forming a new government and the resumption of disbursements under the EU-IMF programme. It will be challenging to significantly ease the austerity programme without receiving additional funds,", + " although there is some room for manoeuvre on the financing profile of the existing programme.\n\nWhile the risks from Greece have fallen for now, the severity of the systemic crisis engulfing the eurozone is unlikely to diminish until European leaders articulate a credible roadmap that would complete monetary union with much greater fiscal and financial integration.\n\nDownward pressure on the sovereign credit profile and ratings of eurozone sovereign governments will intensify so long as a credible path to closer union and a more coherent and united policy response are absent. This includes further boosting the financial backstops against contagion.\n\n15.12 Italian PM Mario Monti says markets have not been convinced by Greek election.\n\nBit late isn't he?\n\n15.", + "07 Richard Blackden, the Telegraph's US Business Editor, is at the G20 Summit in Mexico:\n\nGerman chancellor Angela Merkel will be making her first statement on the Greek elections at about 4pm UK time. The ranks of the German press are waiting to be ferried to her hotel in the Mexcian resort of Los Cabos for the statement. Merkel - who is the pivotal figure at this summit - then has meetings with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Chinese President Hu Jintao and US President Barack Obama.\n\n15.02 US homebuilder sentiment up from 28 to 29. Highest since April 2007.\n\n14.", + "55 European Central Bank Executive Board member Joerg Asmussen says ECB cannot be lender of last resort for governments. Greek election result means yes to reforms, but painful way ahead for Greek government.\n\n14.49 PIMCO founder Bill Gross:\n\nTwitter: PIMCO - Gross: Investors! Wake up and smell the ouzo! Elections which ratify more and more debt cannot cure a debt crisis.\n\n14.43 Citigroup chief Vikram Pandit says Greek elections positive for keeping euro together. Emerging markets are still growing but not immune to European impact.\n\nMeanwhile, Citigroup chief economist Willem Buiter believes Spain and Italy will both need bailouts:\n\nI still think there will be a program in place that partially funds the sovereign... The domestic authorities [could continue to]", + " lean on the domestic banks... to purchase sovereign bonds at yields lower than they would accept normally... Its' even possible that, if all else fails, the ECB might reopen its least favorite tool at the moment - the SMP programme [of sovereign bond purchases on the secondary market]. [The ECB] could basically focus SMP purchases in limited amounts around the time of sovereign auctions, [effectively rendering them] back-to-back primary market purchases, of course leaning on domestic banks.\n\n14.33 Daniel Hannan MEP:\n\nTwitter: Daniel Hannan - Spanish govt borrows at 7% to shore up banks that borrow from the ECB at 1%", + " to lend to Spanish govt at 7% so that it can, er, bail them out.\n\n14.31 US markets have opened. Dow down 0.3pc, Nasdaq down 0.5pc, S&P 500 down 0.3pc.\n\n14.25 White House says there won't be any big euro solution coming out of the G20 in Mexico: \"That would happen in Brussels [EU summit on June 28-29], not Los Cabos.\"\n\n14.20 Reuters is reporting that the EU is readying a plan for a 10 to 15-year bond.\n\n14.14 Spanish 10-year yield intra-day high today is 7.", + "28pc, Irish intra-day low 7.34pc.\n\nMeanwhile, the yield on the German one-year note has fallen to -0.004pc.\n\n14.07 Quick update on the markets:\n\nFTSE 100 flat\n\nCAC -0.9pc\n\nDAX +0.1pc\n\nIBEX -2.5pc\n\nMIB -2.7pc\n\nNicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy:\n\nThere's no such thing as a \"market-friendly\" Greek election result. There are only varying degrees of market unfriendliness. Yesterday's result is less market-unfriendly for the simple reason that Syriza did not come out on top.", + " Yet even if New Democracy is able to form a coalition government with Pasok and Democratic Left, its mandate for reform will be weak and it will still face considerable social and parliamentary resistance.\n\n14.03 Leader of the New Democracy conservative party Antonis Samaras (right) greets the head of Greece's radical left-wing Syriza party Alexis Tsipras earlier today.\n\n13.58 However, European Union competition chief Joaquin Almunia believes Spain has no need for a full-blown state bailout in addition to a rescue loan for its distressed banks.\n\nI sincerely do not expect it nor do I believe it. The doors to the markets are open to it and I am sure will carry on being so.\n\n13.", + "53 The Telegraph's Jeremy Warner:\n\nTwitter: jeremy warner - Second Spanish sovereign bailout now inevitable: Spanish spreads now higher than Ireland's. It's all over bar the shouting\n\nDow Jones-WSJ sources say extending Greek budget goals to 2016 would cost creditors \u20ac16bn.\n\n13.51 Michael Hewson of CMC Markets warns investor highs after Greek election result have worn off.\n\n13.44 Greek archaeology students hit by state funding cuts are making an online appeal for donations to join excavations in Iraqi Kurdistan, the state-run Athens News Agency has said.\n\nIn a posting on donation website indiegogo.com, the group of Athens University students have asked for help to cover the \u20ac500 plane fare.\n\n\"", + "Without wishing to sound like a cliche, everyone knows that times are tough right now,\" the students said in their posting. \"The university cannot cover the cost of our airplane tickets. So please donate and send us there.\"\n\n13.12 Spain is to sell \u20ac2bn to \u20ac3bn of 12 to 18-month bonds on tomorrow and \u20ac1bn to \u20ac2bn of unspecified bonds on Thursday.\n\n10-year bond yields now at 7.225pc, up more than 30 basis points today.\n\nMike Lenhoff, chief strategist at Brewin Dolphin: \"You might have thought that the risk of a Grexit and contagion has diminished but,", + " judging by their action, the markets are not for buying it \u2013 just yet.\"\n\n13.10 Is the Ireland move the first step to changing Greece's bailout terms? Surely you couldn't change one without changing them all.\n\n13.04 BREAKING NEWS...\n\nIrish state broadcaster RTE claims that the Troika is considering changing the terms of the Irish bailout to extend repayment schedule from 15 years to 30 years.\n\n13.02 It might be doom and gloom in Europe but at least people at the G20 in Mexico are having \"fun\":\n\nHere are members of Oxfam wearing masks depicting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, US President Barack Obama and Brazilian President Dilma Roussef.\n\nThose Oxfam guys really know how to make the most of being in Mexico.\n\n12.", + "53 European Central Bank Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny says a eurozone meltdown was only avoided by ECB action. \"We have been very close to meltdown,\" he said.\n\n12.48 Samaras now speaking: \"We must have a government of national salvation and I want many parties to join. Tsipras won't join. Greece keeps to commitments. Greece needs to have a government soon.\"\n\nSamaras wants to renegotiate bailout agreement\n\n12.40 The boss of De La Rue has pulled out of the G20 Summit at the last minute due to \"personal reasons\".\n\nMaybe he needs to print some foreign money?\n\n12.", + "30 Meeting between New Democracy leader Samaras and Syriza leader Tsipras is over.\n\nTsipras: \"I will not join a coalition government. I told Samaras that it would be a catastrophe to continue with cuts to wages and pensions. Democracy must resist violent acts [two hand grenades were thrown at Skai TV building yesterday]. We have very difficult moments until June 28 [EU leaders' summit]. We now have better [bailout] negotiation opportunities. Greece must take advantage of this. We respect the election result.\n\n\"A government must be formed based on New Democracy because that is what the people wanted - but they will be judged by the people.", + " Country must have a government tonight. We will be a powerful opposition, we will control government. Role of opposition is to be critical and responsible. Whoever takes the responsibility to form a government, takes the responsibility to negotiate [bailout]. We will not use mandate if Samaras fails to form a coalition government.\n\n12.26 Economic and Social Research Institute says Irish economy will grow 2.2pc in 2013.\n\n12.19 RBS says ECB action won't prevent a full bailout of Spain.\n\n12.16 Olli Rehn, EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs, says financial union will be a core part of rebuilt eurozone.\n\nMeanhwhile,", + " Portuguese Economy Minister Alvaro Santos Pereira says his country has liquidity problems.\n\n12.13 David Cameron, in Mexico for the G20 Summit, has commented on the Greek election:\n\nThe outcome of the Greek election looks clear in terms of a commitment to stay in the eurozone and to accept the terms of the memorandum. But I think those parties that want that to happen can't afford to delay and position themselves. If you are a Greek political party and want to stay in the eurozone and accept the consequences that follow you have got to get on with it and help form a government. A delay could be very dangerous.\n\n12.09 Time for an update on the markets:\n\nFTSE 100 +0.", + "4pc\n\nCAC +0.2pc\n\nDAX +0.7pc\n\nIBEX -1.5pc\n\nMIB -1.5pc\n\nGlenn Uniacke, senior trader at the foreign exchange specialists Moneycorp, said:\n\nCompared with the 'blink and you'll miss it' rally that followed the Spanish bailout, this rally is more worthy of the name. The markets' sense of relief is real, and profound, but doomed to be short.\n\n\"Desperately uncompetitive and with scant prospects for growth, Greece's economy remains just as much of a trainwreck as before. The long-running Greek tragedy has merely reached the interval.\n\n\"The new government in Athens should expect no more than the briefest of breathing spaces,", + " while the markets' attention returns to Spain.\n\n12.03 Samaras and Tsipras have arrived at Parliament for talks.\n\n12.01 Here's EC President Jose Manuel Barroso and EC President Herman Van Rompuy at the G20 speaking about the Greek elections:\n\nThe International Chamber of Commerce expects the summit to look at trade and investment, especially resisting protectionism.\n\n11.54 Open Europe has updated EU countries' exposure to Greece - it's now \u20ac552bn, with the UK holding \u20ac13.5bn:\n\nEven with adjustments to the bailout programme, it still looks virtually impossible for the country to meet the various austerity targets.", + " Missed targets will continue to be a source of disagreement and controversy, particularly inside Germany, while the continued EU/ECB/IMF Troika presence on the ground in Greece means that any delays will come to light quickly. Therefore, Greece\u2019s future in the eurozone remains uncertain. For the single currency as a whole, should a compromise be possible in Greece, the focus of attention will shift back to Spain \u2013 whose banks remain a major liability for the euro.\n\n11.50 The BBC's Nick Robinson has tweeted that David Cameron's plane has just landed in Los Cabos, Mexico.\n\nThe PM is attending the G20.\n\n11.", + "43 Andrew Lilico, an economist with Europe Economics, has written a blog for the Telegraph on what happens next in Greece:\n\nThe authorities are running out of hope and bereft of ideas. Every plan involves getting the Germans to pay everyone else's debts. The sheer lack of imagination, the stubborn refusal to engage with or propose any option other than more and more and more bailouts until the thing goes pop, suggests that ultimate disorderly collapse is now more likely than not.\n\nThat path would destroy the euro \u2013 the French would have to withdraw because they can't afford it and the Germans would withdraw because tomorrow's Germans wouldn't be prepared to do it.", + " There is, however, still a way out. Each country, each bank, each corporation, each household must be responsible for its own debts. If, at the last, we can still remember this fundamental principle, we can still escape.\n\n11.36 BREAKING NEWS...\n\nFitch revises India down to negative from stable.\n\n11.34 Spanish Budget Minister Cristobal Montoro says the ECB should respond with \"firmness\" to market pressures (i.e ECB should prop up Spanish bond market). Adds that markets show doubts remain over Spanish recovery. He says Greece has voted for the euro and that Spain is at a critical moment.\n\n11.", + "31 Former head of the Cypriot central bank Athanasios Orphanides says the Greek election result \"not the end of the crisis\".\n\n11.28 Vince Cable has said today is \"more challenging\" that the 1930s Depression, and called for housebuilding stimulus.\n\nOn monetary policy:\n\nThe right way to understand loose monetary policy is in terms of expectations: of whether future money demand will be growing fast enough to make borrowing to invest or spend worthwhile. It is not enough just to look at the base rate. Quantitative Easing can sound like a powerful instrument \u2013 but if it does not succeed in making people expect rising money spending in the economy,", + " it is likely to be far less effective than leaving gold proved in the 1930s...\n\nFirst, all aspects of monetary and financial policy should be focused on ensuring that the advantages of loose monetary policy are felt everywhere, not just in low government borrowing rates. This encompasses monetary policy, liquidity policy, credit easing and banking policy to ensure that financial institutions perform the role played by building societies and banks in the 1930s but not currently being pursued by damaged and ultra-conservative banks.\n\nSecond, the public sector balance sheet has to be used to leverage in private capital, particularly in housing. Demand has to be created, it does not emerge simultaneously.", + " There is scope here to both create demand and solve a pressing supply need at the same time. Innovative approaches to public policy - making the most of the fact that our resolute action has given us a strong balance sheet - are the key to unlock this potential.\n\n11.25 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on the Greek agony:\n\nYear after year of \"internal devaluation\" will drive unemployment to catastrophic levels before it breaks the back of the labour movement sufficiently to clear the way for drastic pay cuts. It is basically a Fascist policy. Mussolini pulled it of in 1928 under the Lira Forte policy, but he had coercive advantages.\n\nThe electoral settlement is not decisive enough to lance the boil either way so there will no recovery of investment or hope of return no normal life.", + " Even big companies have lost access to routine trade credit. The pro-Memorandum chorus say Greece would face chaos if it left the euro. What do they think it is now?\n\nThe agony will drag on until some dramatic event intrudes.\n\n11.20 Spanish 10-year bond yields have hit 7.118pc, big jump today.\n\nIt's probably at least partly fuelled by this:\n\nNicholas Spiro at Spiro Sovereign Strategy:\n\nSpain's debt market is teetering on the edge of collapse, auguring badly for this week's auctions. By admitting that it is no longer capable of propping up its banks,", + " the Rajoy government has sent a message to the markets that the sovereign is in need of external support too. In the realm of investor perceptions, Spain has crossed the Rubicon from solvency to insolvency. The markets are treating Spain's bank-focused bail-out as a pregnancy: there's no such thing as a partial one.\n\n11.15 German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle:\n\nI am very relieved by the results of the Greek elections. It's a vote for Europe. What's imperative is that a government is quickly formed that is capable of acting... it's about more than fiscal discipline, it's about growth and competitiveness.", + " The result of the Greek elections is that there are no concessions because what has been agreed is now what we will implement. There can be no substantial changes to the agreement.\n\n11.04 Robert Peston at the BBC:\n\nTwitter: Robert Peston - Spanish debt fall is market agreeing with Osborne that Greek crisis might have sparked proper eurozone reform - solution delayed, at best\n\n11.01 The Bundesbank has warned of greater uncertainty over German growth outlook, \"weaker\" Q2.\n\n10.56 A photographer tries to get an exclusive photo of Samaras as he leaves the presidential mansion:\n\nSamaras: \"I will try to form a government with pro-European parties.We have to make the necessary amendments to the programme so that our people will get out of unemployment and out of the hardships that Greek households are going through.", + " The new government has to be decisive on the issue of social cohesion. National understanding is imperative.\"\n\nPresident Papoulias: \"The country cannot stay without a government for even one hour.\"\n\n10.54 The Telegraph's Louise Armitstead on the market turmoil this morning:\n\nWhat\u2019s up with the markets? Angela Merkel got what she wanted from the Greek electorate, didn\u2019t she? A win for New Democracy, the mainstream, conservative and pro-bail-out party. Actually plenty of traders were gunning for a Syriza victory, hoping that Alexis Tsipras would stick to his word and tear up the \u20ac130bn bail-out agreement today.\n\nOdd for capitalists,", + " perhaps, but their biggest wish at the moment is for the crisis to be brought to a head, even if that\u2019s armaggedon.\n\nNew Democracy is a victory for the on-going fudge: Merkel & Co can pretend that it\u2019s fine to keep supporting Greece, there\u2019s no need to discuss a euro break-up.\n\nBut for traders, that\u2019s completely wrong. Athens is going to breach the terms of its bail-out agreement, regardless of who\u2019s in power. At the very least, Greece needs an extension - of perhaps two years - to meet its fiscal targets. And that requires funding. So Germany still has to decide whether to cough up for a third Greek bail-out (the second,", + " worth \u20ac130bn, was only signed in March) or break-up the eurozone. Brussels\u2019 refusal to face facts is almost more alarming that the facts themeselves. If she insists on putting her head in the sand over Greece, what does that mean for the far bigger problems of Spain and Italy? If you\u2019re a trader, there\u2019s only one thing to do: run.\n\n10.47 The German government has said the Troika will go to Athens to check on current status. Germany says now is not the time to be giving discounts to Greece.\n\n10.33 New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras will meet PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos at 4pm.", + " Reuters is reporting that there is the potential for the Democratic Left to form a coalition with New Democracy and PASOK, giving them a 178 majority.\n\nSamaras tells President: \"National consensus will bring us all together.\"\n\n10.30 Nigel Farage, UKIP leader:\n\nGreek election solves nothing, though a referendum on their currency might. Greeks should be given a clear choice to stay in the euro or leave.\n\n10.27 New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras has arrived to meet Greek President in order to receive exploratory mandate.\n\n10.21 Alex Banbury of Hamilton Capital has put together a list of countries' denials of contagion:\n\n\"", + "Spain is not Greece\" - Elena Salgado, Spanish Finance minister, February 2010.\n\n\"Portugal is not Greece\" - The Economist, April 2010.\n\n\"Greece is not Ireland\" - George Papaconstantinou, Greek Finance minister, November 2010.\n\n\"Spain is neither Ireland nor Portugal\" - Elena Salgado, Spanish Finance minister, November 2010.\n\n\"Ireland is not in \u2018Greek Territory\u2019\" - Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan. November 2010.\n\n\"Neither Spain nor Portugal is Ireland\" - Angel Gurria, Secretary-general OECD, November 2010.\n\n\"Italy is not Spain\u201d - Ed Parker,", + " Fitch MD, June 12, 2012\n\n\"Spain is not Uganda\" - Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy, June 2012\n\n\"Uganda does not want to be Spain\" - Ugandan foreign minister, June 13, 2012\n\n10.14 Robert Peston, business editor at the BBC, has suggested that the Greek exit from the euro might simply be delayed:\n\nWhat Greece needs is equity, not credit... And there is a fear that debt forgiveness for Greece would be the thin end of a very thick wedge, such that Ireland - for example - might argue that if Greece were getting what would in effect be a large transfer from the rest of the eurozone,", + " it would like a bit of that too, thank you very much.\n\nAll of which suggests that the eurozone will continue to expect Greece to honour all its massive debts.\n\nBut even before the latest worsening in the eurozone's more general crisis, the IMF was projecting that Greece's economy would shrink by 4.7pc this year and stagnate in 2013. Unless there is some kind of miraculous recovery, the question will continue to loom large for Greek people and leaders whether they should try to escape a crushing debt burden by leaving the eurozone.\n\n10.12 Reuters is reporting that New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras will meet Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras at midday (UK time).\n\n10.", + "06 El Confidencial is reporting that Spanish banks need to increase provisioning for bad residential mortgages to almost \u20ac150bn.\n\n10.03 Quick update on the markets:\n\nFTSE 100 -0.1pc\n\nCAC -0.1pc\n\nDAX +0.4pc\n\nIBEX -1.9pc\n\nMIB -1.6pc\n\nETX Capital's senior trader Markus Huber said:\n\nIn the past, it seems like that as soon as one issue has been resolved or rather, as soon as there is less uncertainty regarding one main issue affecting markets, attention quickly turns to next one, similar to the situation after the Spanish banking rescue last week where focus shifted onto Italy and Italian banks.\n\n\"", + "Although the problems Italy is facing in the form of high debt levels and slow growth are well known, for the focus to fully shift on Italy, something else will be needed for example that implementing of urgent financial reforms is being delayed or that the budget deficit due to a bigger contraction in growth has to be revised upwards similar like seen in Spain.\"\n\n09.59 Panagiotis Pikrammenos, Prime Minister of caretaker government in Greece, arrives at Presidential mansion to resign. President tells him that he must remain in his position until a government is formed.\n\n09.52 Spain is saying it is doubtful that bad bank loans hit record high of 8.", + "72% in April.\n\n09.37 Bank of Ireland says ECB will apply 5.5pc discount to refinancing of Irish government bonds.\n\n09.30 Alex Spillius, the Telegraph's Greek correspondent, on the elections:\n\nNew Democracy leader Antonis Samaras is determined to form a government today, his aides tell the Greek papers. As soon as he receives the mandate from the president he will begin negotiations with Pasok and the Democratic Left. Reports said he wouldn\u2019t insist on being prime minister, but few analysts him expect not to fulfill that role.\n\nTogether the three parties would have 179 seats in the 300 seat parliament,", + " a credible number to start a coalition with. The 17 votes of the Democratic Left would be important for anti-bailout credibility, as the party opposed the memorandum of understanding with the EU and IMF.\n\nHere is the final division in the 300-seat chamber: New Democracy 129 (including a bonus 50 for winning), Syriza 71, Pasok 33, Independent Greeks 20, Golden Dawn 18, Democratic Left 17, Communist Party of Greece 12.\n\n09.22 Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt (below) says eurobonds are a \"very bad idea\" and the EU deposit guarantee scheme is the \"wrong way\".\n\n09.", + "10 Italian PM Mario Monti calls PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos to discuss Greek election.\n\nMonti arrives at the G20 celebrating the Greek vote. \"This allows us to have a more serene vision for the future of the European Union and for the eurozone,\" he said.\n\nItalian MIB and Spanish IBEX now down more than 1pc. Euro turns negative against dollar, falls to $1.2628.\n\n09.05 BREAKING NEWS...\n\nSpanish 10-year bond yields hit 7.1pc (euro-era high), spread to bunds at 555 basis points. Italian yields pass 6pc.\n\nSpanish banks'", + " bad loans ratio rises to 8.72pc in April from 8.37pc in March (highest since April 1994). Lending declines 3.5pc in April from last year, deposits fall 5.39pc. Mortgage default ratio was 3.01pc in March, up from 2.74pc in December.\n\n08.53 Citigroup says the probability of a Greek exit from the eurozone over the next 12-18 months remains unchanged at between 50pc and 75pc.\n\nChris Beauchamp at IG Index:\n\nTwitter: Chris Beauchamp - So glad that Greece is now fixed.", + " Oh, what's that - it isn't? Ah, in that case I suppose we're almost exactly where we were last Friday...\n\n08.51 Bojan Pancevski, Sunday Times EU correspondent:\n\nTwitter: Bojan Pancevski - And Ilias Kasidiaris, the fascist Golden Dawn spokesman who assaulted two female rivals on live TV, voted into Greek parliament #Greece2012\n\nIn case you missed the attack, here it is again:\n\n08.44 Spanish 10-year bond yields hit 6.96pc, reversing earlier rally. Italy at 5.958pc.\n\n08.38 EU will go ahead with Iran oil embargo in July.\n\n08.", + "23 London Mayor Boris Johnson has warned European leaders against \u201cdither\u201d in his Telegraph column today:\n\nBy any standards we are seeing a whole nation undergo a protracted economic and political humiliation; and whatever the result of yesterday\u2019s election, we seem determined to make matters worse. There is no plan for Greece to leave the euro, or none that I can discover. No European leader dares suggest that this might be possible, since that would be to profane the religion of Ever Closer Union. Instead we are all meant to be conniving in a plan to create a fiscal union which (if it were to mean anything) would mean undermining the fundamentals of Western democracy...\n\nAnd now look at what is being proposed in Greece.", + " For the sake of bubble-gumming the euro together, we are willing to slaughter democracy in the very place where it was born. What is the point of a Greek elector voting for an economic programme, if that programme is decided in Brussels or \u2013 in reality \u2013 in Germany? What is the meaning of Greek freedom, the freedom Byron fought for, if Greece is returned to a kind of Ottoman dependency, but with the Sublime Porte now based in Berlin?\n\nIt won\u2019t work. If things go on as they are, we will see more misery, more resentment, and an ever greater chance that the whole damn kebab van will go up in flames.", + " Greece will one day be free again \u2013 in the sense that I still think it marginally more likely than not that whoever takes charge in Athens will eventually find a way to restore competitiveness through devaluation and leaving the euro \u2013 for this simple reason: that market confidence in Greek membership is like a burst paper bag of rice \u2013 hard to restore.\n\nWithout a resolution, without clarity, I am afraid the suffering will go on. The best way forward would be an orderly bisection into an old eurozone and a New Eurozone for the periphery. With every month of dither, we delay the prospect of a global recovery; while the approved solution \u2013 fiscal and political union \u2013 will consign the continent to a democratic dark ages.\n\n08.", + "17 The Telegraph's US Business Editor Richard Blackden is at the G20 in Mexico:\n\nThe momentus nature of the decisions now facing countries in the euro will dominate this G20 summit. Cameron, Obama and others will urge German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande to take decisive action. But behind the exhortations, there will surely be a weary acknowledgement by governments in the UK and the US that this is a crisis that may not be solved in the next two to three years, let alone a matter of months.\n\nAnd in different ways it is shaping the domestic agendas of both leaders. Alongside the Bank of England, the UK government last week introduced a fresh set of measures to encourage bank lending as fears about the headwinds from Europe intensified.\n\nWhile for Obama,", + " Europe's debt crisis has a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, it increases the political pressure to address America's own debt. But at the same time, it eases the pressure coming from financial markets to do so because no one wants America sliding back into recession.\n\n08.03 Finland's Parliament will vote on the ESM on Thursday.\n\n08.00 European markets are open:\n\nFTSE 100 +1.4pc (banking shares leading the way)\n\nCAC +1.1pc\n\nDAX +1.3pc\n\nIBEX +1.7pc (Spanish banks rise strongly)\n\nMIB +1pc\n\nGreek stock market is up 3.", + "2pc.\n\n07.59 New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras is to meet the Greek president at 10.30am (UK time).\n\n07.52 Following his election win last night, Antonis Samaras says the Greek people are \"staying with the euro\" (video).\n\nStephen Pope, managing partner at Spotlight Ideas, said:\n\nWe will see in the course of the next hours/days if the Pasok leader, Evangelos Venizelos will stick to his demand that the 2nd placed party Syriza join the coalition...but that has to be seen as unlikely. Mr Venizelos is a poltician and he will covet a cabinet post and enjoy the opportunity to court the press.\n\nSo what has actually changed?", + " Frankly...nothing. For in power we are likely to see the same group of leaders that signed up to the February deal. If it is too tough now, why did they accept it in February?\n\n07.44 Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Commerzbank, says he still sees a Greek exit from the euro.\n\n07.42 A look at a possible Greek parliament:\n\nInteresting to note that more than 37pc of Greek people did not vote yesterday.\n\n07.34 In the bond markets this morning, Spanish and Italian 10-year yields have fallen seven basis points. Italy now at 5.827pc, Spain still very high at 6.", + "729pc. Greek yields have fallen 138 basis points to 25.38pc.\n\n07.28 France has sent European leaders a proposal for a \u20ac120bn (\u00a397bn) \u201cgrowth pact\u201d. The Telegraph's Bruno Waterfield reveals what is wrong with the plan:\n\nTwitter: Bruno Waterfield - #eurozone: 1) #Hollande's \u20ac120bn only \u20ac10.2 billion in new money - less than a tenth real cash, an easy \"victory\" at #euco next week\n\nTwitter: Bruno Waterfield - #eurozone: 2) #Hollande's \u20ac120bn,", + " \u20ac10bn new EIB cash is magicked/leveraged into 60bn - so half of total is bankers maths\n\nTwitter: Bruno Waterfield - #eurozone: 3) #Hollande's \u20ac120bn, pilot \"project bonds\" more magic bankers maths, \u20ac230m EU budget funding is magicked/leveraged to \u20ac4.5bn\n\nTwitter: Bruno Waterfield - #eurozone: 4) #Hollande's \u20ac120bn, \u20ac55bn of unspent regional funds - but EC claims EU needs a 7% 2013 budget rise for regional fund shortfall\n\nTwitter:", + " Bruno Waterfield - #eurozone: 5) #Hollande's \u20ac120bn, new money \u20ac10bn for EIB + 230m for project bonds = \u20ac10.2bn or just 0.08% EU GDP spending increase\n\n07.22 EC spokesman says Commission sees positive market reaction for Spain and Italy after Greek election.\n\n07.17 The Nikkei has closed up 1.8pc as investors cheered a weekend election victory for Greece's two main pro-bailout parties, easing fears Athens may drop out of the eurozone.\n\n07.12 The White House has released a statement on the Greek election:\n\nWe congratulate the Greek people on conducting their election in this difficult time.", + " We hope this election will lead quickly to the formation of a new government that can make timely progress on the economic challenges facing the Greek people. As President Obama and other world leaders have said, we believe that it is in all our interests for Greece to remain in the euro area while respecting its commitment to reform. Going forward, we will engage Greece in the spirit of partnership that has guided our alliance and the friendship between our people.\n\n06.57 Mark Lowen, BBC Athens correspondent:\n\nTwitter: Mark Lowen - Wrangling starts.NewDemocracy will want DemLeft in coalition,but that party tells me condition is \"gradual disengagement\"", + " from bailout terms\n\n06.50 Want to hear what key financial leaders had to say about today's G20 Summit? Well, we've put together a round-up of the best quotes.\n\nRobert Zoellick, World Bank president:\n\nEverybody knows that this meeting is coming at an absolutely critical time. We're waiting for Europe to tell us what it is going to do. Markets can manage and hedge risks that they are generally aware of. The danger we're creating is that the pattern of policymaking is increasing uncertainty.\n\n06.38 The Financial Times has published an interesting opinion piece by Wolfgang Munchau on the continuing woes of the eurozone.\n\nIn the case of Greece,", + " the best moment to default would not be now, but next year. The country stills runs a primary deficit - before the payment of interest. A default would make more sense for Spain, but not quite yet. It would be easiest for Italy. It has a large pile of debt, but a low deficit. With an interest rate of more than 6pc and a loss of competitiveness, Italy cannot simultaneously remain solvent and inside the eurozone.\n\n06.24 Germany's deputy finance minister Steffen Kampeter has echoed Chancellor Angela Merkel by saying that his country expects the new Greek government to honour its commitments to the bailout deal. He says the Troika must first check the situation in Greece as further aid hinges on reforms.", + " However, it is clear Greece must not be pushed too much on these reforms.\n\n06.20 World leaders are in Mexico today and tomorrow for the G20 Summit. The event is sure to be overshadowed by the Greek election yesterday and continuing concerns over the financial health of Spain and Italy. World leaders are set to boost the $430bn (\u00a3273.6bn) fund being used as a firewall to support struggling eurozone economies.\n\n06.00 ROUND-UP...\n\nNew Democracy has won a closely-fought Greek election with anti-bailout pary Syriza. With almost all votes counted, New Democracy controlled 129 seats in the 300-seat parliament and the socialist Pasok party - a likely coalition candidate - secured 33 seats,", + " enough for a workable majority.\n\nSyriza came second, electing 71 deputies. Its leader Alexis Tsipras has ruled out joining a coalition, arguing that the harsh conditions for the bailout deal should be scrapped altogether.\n\nAntonis Samaras (centre), arrived to vote at a polling station in his hometown of Pylos\n\nTalks on forming a government are expected to start today, with head of state Carolos Papoulias set to task New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras with piecing together a coalition.\n\nHowever, some investors are far from confident that the crisis is over.\n\nNeil MacKinnon, global macro strategist at the investment bank VTB Capital,", + " said: \"I think investors should treat any sort of knee-jerk rally with caution.\"\n\n\"How long is it going to take for people to worry about Spain again?\" wondered Peter Schiff of the brokerage Euro Pacific Capital.\n\n\"This crisis is not over,\" said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo. \"The crisis will wax and wane for years. Maybe it will wane for the time being.\"\n\n05.52 European markets are expected to open strongly at 8am today. The FTSE 100 is predicted to open up 1.2pc, the CAC 1.7pc and the DAX 2.2pc.\n\n05.", + "46 China, Japan and Australia have all called for Greece to quickly form a government.\n\n\"The Greek parties must work together to form a new government quickly and convince the Greek voters of the need for painful austerity,\" China's official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary. \"They must understand a Greek exit from the eurozone is out of the question,\" it added, adding that ditching the euro would open a \"Pandora's box\", leading to \"years of painful economic and social adjustments\".\n\nJapanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said: \"Our country hopes that a stable government will be launched early and make progress towards stabilising markets... We hope that European countries will urgently take measures to strengthen its financial sector.\"\n\nAustralian Treasurer Wayne Swan said:", + " \"It is important that Greece's political parties quickly undertake coalition discussions and form a stable government... I accept that there will be continuing volatility from Europe for some time yet, but I do not accept that the pace and scale of action to address it has been adequate.\"\n\n05.42 Asian markets have surged this morning and the euro has risen after Greek pro-austerity parties won enough votes to form a government, but optimism it will stay in the eurozone was tempered with warnings that the future remains uncertain.\n\nTokyo stocks jumped 1.89pc, Hong Kong surged 1.55pc by the break, Sydney was 1.90pc higher,", + " Seoul climbed 2.01pc and Shanghai added 0.69pc.\n\nThe election news boosted the euro, which surged to morning highs of $1.2727 before easing slightly to $1.2701.\n\n04.45 For those who are waking up to news of anti-austerity party Syriza's defeat in the Greek elections, here is an overview of the result which has caused a gains in the Asian markets this morning.\n\n04.18 The New York Times has written an interesting piece, looking at Greece as a victim of the euro rather than the villain. Paul Krugman writes in an op-ed:\n\nEver since Greece hit the skids,", + " we\u2019ve heard a lot about what\u2019s wrong with everything Greek. Some of the accusations are true, some are false \u2014 but all of them are beside the point. Yes, there are big failings in Greece\u2019s economy, its politics and no doubt its society. But those failings aren\u2019t what caused the crisis that is tearing Greece apart, and threatens to spread across Europe.\n\nNo, the origins of this disaster lie farther north, in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin, where officials created a deeply \u2014 perhaps fatally \u2014 flawed monetary system, then compounded the problems of that system by substituting moralizing for analysis. And the solution to the crisis,", + " if there is one, will have to come from the same places.\n\n03.25 Oil prices have advanced in Asian trade, mirroring the gains in broader asset markets.\n\nNew York's main contract, light sweet crude for July delivery advanced 90 cents to $84.93 a barrel and Brent North Sea crude for August delivery surged $1.48 to $99.09 in morning trade.\n\n02.45 EU leaders heading to Monday's G20 summit in Mexico have agreed on a message to reassure financial markets. After talks with his British, French, German, Italian counterparts and top European Union officials, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told reporters in Los Cabos:\n\nI think that what we are going to transmit is a message of confidence in the euro.", + " Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told reporters in Los Cabos, after talks with his British, French, German, Italian counterparts and top European Union officials.\n\n02.30 Hong Kong stocks have risen, with the benchmark index headed for its biggest two-day gain in six months.\n\nThe Hang Seng Index climbed 1.6 percent to 19,548.40 as of the 9:39 am in Hong Kong. The gauge was headed for a two-day gain of 5.8 percent, the biggest since Dec 2. All but one of the 49 companies on the gauge advanced, with volume 56 percent above the 30-day average.", + " The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index of mainland stocks rose 1.8 percent to 9,921.37.\n\n01.34 Market watch -Tokyo stocks have jumped more than two percent. The Nikkei 225 index was trading 2.23 percent higher - 190.77 points - at 8,760.09 in the first minutes of trading.\n\nThe results in Greece also sent the euro higher in early Asian trade. The single currency was buying $1.2715 and 100.75 yen, up from $1.2644 and 99.47 yen in New York trade on Friday.\n\n00.", + "30 Market watch -The Australian and New Zealand dollars have risen following the result in Greece. Both currencies strengthened - the Australia dollar climbed 0.6 per cent to a one-month high of $1.0115 and the New Zealand dollar hit its strongest point in six weeks, up 0.5 per cent to $0.7918 having earlier peaked at $0.7937.\n\nMike Jones, a Wellington-based currency strategist at Bank of New Zealand Ltd, said:\n\nThe easing of fears for a Greek euro exit have spurred a relief rally across global markets. Markets seem to have got the result they wanted from the elections over the weekend.", + " In the short term, risk currencies such as the kiwi and Aussie are biased to strengthen.\n\n23.12 German Chancellor Angela Merkel has telephoned Antonis Samaras to congratulate him on his victory, saying that she was confident Athens would abide by its bailout pledges.\n\n\"She stated that she would work on the basis that Greece will meet its European commitments,\" said a government statement recounting the conversation.\n\n23.05 An update from Alex Spillius in Greece, who says negotiations are already underway in Athens:\n\nGreek TV reports that Greek PM-in-waiting Antonis Samaras has already begun late night coalition talks with potential partners, while Francois Hollande has called Pasok leader and fellow socialist Evangelos Venizelos to discuss the results,", + " suggesting the Frenchman wants to know what concessions the new likely Greek coalition will seek from Europe.\n\n22.51 And another update on the Greek count, which has processed 91.41pc of votes: New Democracy is at 29.83pc, Syriza 26.78pc and Pasok 12.4pc.\n\n22.51 The Eurogroup has issued a statement on the Greek elections, which it says \"should allow for the formation of a government that will carry the support of the electorate to bring Greece back on a path of sustainable growth\".\n\nThe Eurogroup acknowledges the considerable efforts already made by the Greek citizens and is convinced that continued fiscal and structural reforms are Greece\u2019s best guarantee to overcome the current economic and social challenges and for a more prosperous future of Greece in the euro area.\n\nThe Eurogroup reiterates its commitment to assist Greece in its adjustment effort in order to address the many challenges the economy is facing.\n\nThe Eurogroup therefore looks forward to the swift formation of a new Greek government that will take ownership of the adjustment programme to which Greece and the Eurogroup earlier this year committed themselves.\n\nThe Eurogroup expects the Troika institutions to return to Athens as soon as a new government is in place to exchange views with the new government on the way forward and prepare the first review under the second adjustment programme.\n\n22.", + "40 We have another update on the Greek election count, although the exact figures will alter nothing about the political stalemate that needs to be untangled in the morning. After taking into account 88pc of the votes, New Democracy has 29.93pc, Syriza 26.7pc and Pasok 12.43pc.\n\n22.25 Former Chancellor Lord Lamont has spoken to Sky News, claiming that markets will likely be relieved initially that what some saw as the worst scenario - a Syriza win - has been avoided. But \"very few people believe that greece is in a tenable position for the long term\", he warned:\n\nI don't think there will be very much movement on the part of the eurozone,", + " after all this is the second bailout. People are not going to start proposing revising the terms in any substantive way. I don't expect the eurozone to change its position significantly.\n\nI think tonight's election result means that there won't be immediate contagion from Greece. I don't want to sound too gloomy, but one has to be realistic about this, there is a very serious situation in Spain already.\n\n22.21 Tomorrow's front pages are starting to emerge. The FT has gone with the headline: \"Samaras leads in Greece poll\", which will likely change for the final edition, while The Daily Telegraph has opted for:", + " \"Greek vote leaves euro in balance\".\n\n22.11 We have a graphic, due to appear in tomorrow morning's paper, showing the difference in results six weeks ago and today. Syriza has seen its vote rise from 16.8pc to 27.1pc - so it's understandable that they see it as a victory of sorts.\n\n22.09 Herman Van Rompuy and Jos\u00e9 Manuel Barroso have issued a joint statement on the Greek election:\n\nThe Greek people have spoken. We fully respect its democratic choice. We are hopeful that the election results will allow a government to be formed quickly. Today, we salute the courage and resilience of the Greek citizens,", + " fully aware of the sacrifices which are demanded from them to redress the Greek economy and build new, sustainable growth for the country.\n\nWe will continue to stand by Greece as a member of the EU family and of the Euro area. We look forward to work with the new government and to support the continued efforts of Greece to put its economy on a sustainable path.\n\nThe second economic adjustment programme agreed between Greece and the Eurogroup is the basis upon which to build to foster growth, prosperity and jobs for the Greek people. We stand ready to continue assisting Greece in achieving these goals.\n\n21.52 The White House has congratulated Greece on its election and urged it to quickly form a government.", + " Spokesman Jay Carney said:\n\nAs President (Barack) Obama and other world leaders have said, we believe that it is in all our interests for Greece to remain in the euro area while respecting its commitment to reform. We congratulate the Greek people on conducting their election in this difficult time. We hope this election will lead quickly to the formation of a new government that can make timely progress on the economic challenges facing the Greek people.\n\nBack in Europe, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that the outcome shows that Greeks are in favour of the deep economic and fiscal reforms.\n\n21.50 Alexis Tsipras has given another speech this evening,", + " very optimistic in tone, almost sounding like a victory rally at times.\n\nDemocracy will return to the country where it was born.\n\n21.43 French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has welcomed the victory of his Socialist Party in legislative elections, saying: \"The goal is to shift Europe towards growth and protect the euro zone from speculation. The task before us is immense\".\n\n21.13 Reacting to the French and Greek electoral results, Pierre Moscovici, the French finance minister said: \"Europe's future is at stake in the coming weeks.\"\n\nEuropeans must accompany the Greeks towards growth. It requires discipline but it also requires hope.\n\nMr Moscovici also said that France's state finance commitments would be \"respected without a politics of austerity\".\n\n21.", + "05 Simon Smith, chief economist at FxPro, comments on tonight's result:\n\nThe fact that New Democracy came ahead of Syriza, who were looking to drastically re-negotiate the current bailout with the troika, means that markets are likely to breathe a collective sigh of relief, although it could well be brief. Given what is at stake, all parties are likely to negotiate in great detail in order to secure their mandate for a coalition.\n\n21.01 Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for South East England and a Telegraph blogger, asks how much longer the inaction in Greece can go on for.\n\nNo one wanted this outcome.", + " Greece has repeated itself, only more emphatically, declining to give any party a majority. If no coalition is possible, what then? A third election? A fourth? Or will ND struggle on with a minority administration, unable to make any of the promised budgetary reductions?\n\nGreece is in denial. It rejects austerity, but insists on keeping the euro. All the main parties duly parroted what the voters wanted to hear, making for a fantasy election, a make-believe election, a fingers-in-my-ears-I-can't-hear-you election. The only list which was honest about the necessary cuts \u2013 a coalition of three liberal parties \u2013 failed to gain a single seat.\n\n20.", + "45 The head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, says the Spanish bailout was a wasted opportunity, which is worrying, because nobody in Europe can afford to waste \u20ac100bn at the moment:\n\nLook, everyone knows this meeting is coming at an absolutely critical time - and we're waiting for Europe to tell us what it is going to do.\n\nMarkets can manage risks that they're well aware of. The danger we're creating is that the pattern of policy-making is increasing uncertainty and making markets more nervous, which has a negative feedback.\n\nTo take your Spanish example... The execution was extremely poor. So they took a very big bullet and they wasted it.\n\n20.", + "34 And now Alexis Tsipras, leader of Syriza, is making his concession speech:\n\nWe are proud that we lifted this weight and we carried this responsibility. We are happy for the tolerance and the support of such a large portion of the country that multiplied our participation in just a month and a half.\n\nI did call Mr Samaras a little while ago and I congratulated him for his success. He has the possibility of forming a government on the basis of his mandate.\n\nWe will be present in the developments from the position of the opposition. We will not sacrifice our position. The rejection of the bailout is a popular mandate. From Monday we will continue in our struggle.\n\n20.", + "25 An update now on the official count in Greece, based on 49.3pc of votes: New Democracy has 30.3pc, Syriza has 26.3pc and Pasok trails with 12.7pc.\n\n20.20 Antonis Samaras, leader of New Democracy, has offered a coalition deal to any parties that will continue to abide by the bailout agreement. His party didn't offer \"populist promises\", and still won the backing of the Greek people, he says:\n\nThe Greek people have voted today for the European direction of the country and for us to remain in the euro, and it voted for those policies which will bring jobs... we will not have new adventures.", + " We will not doubt the position of Greece in Europe. We will not be reigned by fear, and espcially the sacrifices the Greek people have made will be realised significantly.\n\nWe do invite all of those political parties that do take into account all of these objectives to participate in a coalition of national unity. We do not have any time to waste.. the country must be governed. New Democracy was is, is and will continue to be a strength of responsibility.\n\n20.17 Samaras is about to give a speech in Athens. But the microphone is broken so we're waiting...\n\n20.11 Alexis Tsipras, leader of Syriza,", + " has telephoned Antonis Samaras, leader of New Democracy leader, to congratulate him on his victory. Unofficial and official polls suggest that New Democracy will take the lead, and Tsipras has conceded.\n\n20.04 Syriza has said tonight's result is a victory of sorts as it will allow the party to play the role of a strong opposition. But it has also ruled out the prospect of joining a coalition (it was itself a coalition until a few weeks ago, when it registered as a single party to be eligible for the 50-seat bonus should it win the election).\n\nPasok has already said that it won't join a coalition unless Syriza is involved.", + " So a lengthy period of talks and negotiation looks set to start. New Democracy, if they win, as looks likely, will have three days to attempt to form a government.\n\n19.33 Official exit numbers are in, and New Democracy are on course to win. The numbers: ND 29.5pc, Syriza 27.1pc, Pasok 12.3pc, Independent Greeks 7.6pc, Golden Dawn 7pc, Democratic Left 6.2pc, Communist Party of Greece 4.5pc. These are numbers from Singular Logic, commissioned for the job by the Greek government.\n\n19.", + "30 Reports suggest that Pasok will be unwilling to join a coalition that doesn't involve Syriza.\n\nTwitter: zerohedge - Pasok's Diamantopoulou announces it would not join coalition government with ND if Syriza is not in\n\n19.17 German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle says Germany could be flexible on the timing of the reforms that Greece has to make as part of its bailout package - but not the meat of the deal:\n\nThere can't be substantial changes in the engagements. But I can imagine we discuss again a delay.\n\n19.05 It's become a sideshow to the Greek election,", + " but France's Socialists have won control of parliament. That gives Francois Hollande a convincing majority with which he can push through his tax-and-spend agenda.\n\nThe Socialists' bloc obtained between 312 and 326 seats - an absolute majority in the 577-seat National Assembly.\n\n19.02 AFP reports that Germany is ready to discuss giving Greece more time to carry out reform.\n\n19.01 This tweet sums up the Greek election polls pretty well. The only certainty is that it will be close.\n\nTwitter: Yannis Koutsomitis - My prediction: ND wins by \u00b12%. #Greece #Greece2012 #ekloges\n\n18.", + "54 Some official figures are starting to emerge from the Greek Interior Ministry. With 15pc of the votes counted, New Democracy has 31.1pc, while Syriza has 25.4pc. But it should be noted that these are rural votes, and the electorate in Athens will bring the average back towards the left. Meanwhile, an unofficial poll suggests that a New Democracy/Pasok coalition would have a majority of 159 seats.\n\n18.44 Alex Spillius in Athens reports:\n\nGreek state TV estimates that on those exit numbers New Democracy and Pasok could form a coalition. The 300 seats would be distributed thus:\n\nNew Democracy 127 (including the bonus 50 for winning), Syriza 72,", + " Pasok 32, Independent Greeks 21, Golden Dawn 19, Democratic Left 16, Communist Party of Greece 13.\n\n18.37 Despite that last update, the full, unofficial exit polls are in, and we could be heading for a very narrow New Democracy win in Greece.\n\nNew Democracy has between 28.6pc and 30pc, and radical left group Syriza has between 27.5pc and 28.4pc. We've got an updated chart below.\n\nThe official exit poll comes at 9.30pm local time, 7.30pm in London, but it could be the early hours before we have a final result.\n\nInteractive chart:", + " Full unofficial Greek exit poll\n\n18.36 Skai TV in Greece is predicting that Syriza will edge just ahead to take 28pc of votes, while New Democracy will trail slightly with 27.5pc. But the winning party gets 50 bonus seats, so Syriza would end up with 124 and New Democracy just 73.\n\n18.29 Meanwhile, in France, AFP reports the Socialists have won an absolute parliamentary majority. More on that soon.\n\n18.24 Ed Conway reports that there's no G20 response on the way following the Greek election. The question now is how markets will react to yet more uncertainty while politicians scrabble to form a coalition.\n\nTwitter:", + " Ed Conway - G20 officials say there's currently no plan for grand response to Greek elections & crisis. But cld be action if market chaos ensues on mon\n\n18.14 Greek economist Yanis Varufakis is speaking on Sky News now, and says that the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party winning seats today is the \"serpents egg hatching again in Europe as the result of a depression\".\n\nWithin a year we don't know if the eurozone will still exist. Look at Spain.\n\n\n\nGolden Dawn leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos\n\n18.00 A quick chart showing the first exit poll, which includes 80pc of voters.", + " The blue bar represents the lower end of the estimate and the red the upper. We'll have the full unofficial exit poll data in around 15 minutes, then the official poll at 7.30pm.\n\nInteractive chart: First Greek exit poll\n\n17.52 The exit poll we already have from Greece is based on just 80pc of voters. Very soon we'll have data from the remaining fifth, which will help clear up the final result.\n\nTwitter: Nick Malkoutzis - First exit polls based on 80% of info collected. Second in around an hour will have 100% of data. #Greece 2012\n\n17.", + "43 This is the crowd at the Syriza campaign kiosk in Athens as the first exit poll results were announced on TV. The mood looks good, as well it should: they won just 17pc of the vote six weeks ago, and now look likely to almost double that.\n\n17.38 The BBC's Tim Weber suggests Greece needs a change of electorate, not elected.\n\nTwitter: Tim Weber - Greece votes for yet more stalemate. Maybe Greek politicians need to dissolve the people & vote in a new electorate (apols to Brecht)\n\n17.34 Channel 4's Faisal Islam tweets that the late rush of voters could have worked in Syriza's favour:\n\nTwitter:", + " Faisal Islam - Skai TV show 30pc of late deciders falling for Tsipras versus 25pc for Samaras\n\n17.19 As we mentioned earlier, the party that gains the most votes in Greece will win an extra 50 seats. So while the election looks far too close to call at the moment, the party which eventually ends up ahead will be bumped even further forward automatically. Despite this, there could still be trouble forming a majority, leading to yet more uncertainty over the country's future. We'll bring you more news as it comes in.\n\nTwitter: Robert Nisbet - Roughly, a single party would need between 36 and 38 percent to have an overall majority.", + " Exit polls show ND and Syriza well below that.\n\n17.08 We have more detail on the first exit poll from Alex Spillius in Greece:\n\nFirst exit polls from Greek state TV show it is neck and neck. With 75pc of polling stations accounted for, New Democracy is forecast to win between 27.5pc and 30.5pc, and Syriza 27pc to 30pc. In other words, this a cliffhanger that could drag into the wee hours.\n\nPasok is third with between 10pc and 12pc, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn will definitely sit in parliament for the first time with 6pc-", + "7.5pc. Democratic Left of Fotis Kouvelis is on 5.5pc-6.5pc and the Communist Party vote has sunk even further to 5pc-6pc.\n\n17.02 The first exit poll is out, and it's far too close to call, with New Democracy ahead of anti-austerity Syriza by just half a percent:\n\nNew Democracy 27.5pc to 30.5pc\n\nSyriza 27pc to 30pc\n\nTwitter: Louise Armitstead - BREAKING New Democracy has got it by a whisker - 27.5pc vs Syriza\u2019s 27pc.", + " Half a % between them; too tight to trust the exit polls.\n\n17.01 And that's it: polls are closed in Greece.\n\nTwitter: Angela Merkel (not) - * Fastens seat belt *\n\n16.59 Over in the French elections, voter turnout at 5pm local time (3pm GMT) fell to 46.16pc, from 49.58pc at the previous election in 2007, according to Interior Ministry data. The turnout dropped more than two percentage points from last week\u2019s first-round level. The last polling station closes at 8pm local time tonight in France\u2019s largest cities including Paris and Lyon.\n\n16.", + "57 One man and his dog cast their vote earlier today in Greece. We're now in the final few minutes of voting and await the first exit poll.\n\n16.45 Greek state-run NET TV is reporting an abstention rate higher than in the May 6 poll. Remember that voting is officially mandatory in Greece, although no longer enforced. The first exit polls will be out in 15 minutes - giving us a hint of what to expect from the final count.\n\n16.38 Mehran Khalili, a photojournalist from Greece, writes on his Twitter profile: \"I live in a beautiful country that's having a tough time.\" He's currently in a polling station in Corinth and says that voter numbers have picked up in the last hour before closing.", + " There are just 22 minutes left to vote for the people of Greece...\n\nTwitter: Mehran Khalili - Voting really picking up here in Corinth. Ppl of all ages. Queues spilling onto pavement. #rbnews #Greece2012\n\n16.31 Channel 4's Jon Snow is in Athens covering the election and was strolling through the city last night, when the national team was expected to have been beaten by Russia in the Euro 2012 football tournament. He writes:\n\nInstead their team beat Putin\u2019s boys. Uncertainty turned very fast to celebration and then soured to name calling as it dawned upon them that the Euro Championships in Ukraine could contort in such a way that Greece would play who but even mightier Germany.", + " Germany, God of the other Euro - the cash, the curse, the undoing of Greece\u2019s traditional modes of wayward governance and corruption. The chanting was amongst the most obscene I\u2019ve ever heard. In short, Angela Merkel was being invited to put the entire Euro crisis up her posterior.\n\n16.21 Europe's leaders are doing too little, too late, says World Bank chief Robert Zoellick. Speaking in the latest issue of Der Spiegel he said:\n\nEuropean politicians always act a day late and promise one euro too little. Then, when it gets tight, they add new liquidity. It's no longer so much about which model the Europeans choose.", + " They should just decide on one. Quickly.\n\n\n\nWorld Bank chief Robert Zoellick\n\n16.14 We're expecting exit polls from Greece very soon, but indidications so far point towards a photo finish - we may not have a clear resolution. And if there's one thing that markets don't like, it's uncertainty.\n\nTwitter: Megan Greene - I imagine exit polls won't be definitive in Greece given how close ND and Syriza have been in opinion polls.\n\nTwitter: Megan Greene - The markets are going to be very disappointed when we don't have much more clarity on Greece despite the elections having come and gone.\n\n15.46 Just 74 minutes until Greek polls close,", + " and I'm handing over the live blog to Matthew Sparkes.\n\n15.45 Tourism is a huge money generator in Greece, but this could come under huge pressure if the country left the euro, according to Andrew Dunn, founder of luxury travel company Scott Dunn:\n\nGreece\u2019s exit from the euro would usher in a difficult time for the country\u2019s tourism industry. With the return of the Drachma would come the likelihood of hyperinflation and loss of guest confidence in the destination. Uncertainty about the Greek economy had already impacted our guests\u2019 bookings for the country, and I fear things would get worse before they improved. A family holiday is sacrosanct to most people,", + " so travellers would not want to gamble with their precious time in the sun. Greece\u2019s loss would be the gain of destinations such as Italy and Portugal, which are already firm favourites with our guests.\n\n\"Greek hoteliers would be caught between a rock and a hard place: they would face currency devaluation and probable inflation at home, but have to continue dealing in euros with international tour operators and travel firms, who would prefer the safety of Europe\u2019s main currency. Currency losses could compound an already parlous position for many Greek holiday businesses.\n\n15.40 Bradley Davis, from the Wall Street Journal, is in Greece:\n\nTwitter: Bradley Davis - 53-", + "yr-old Syriza voter, general store owner to WSJ: \"I can't accept blackmail from abroad..What gives them the right to terrify the Greeks?\"\n\n15.35 National parliaments should provide democratic oversight if Europe adopts more integrated economic governance, France's prime minister has said, warning that the European Central Bank should not dictate countries' policies.\n\n\"If we are going to work more closely together on what is called economic governance, there also has to be democratic control, which in my view cannot be confined to the European Parliament alone,\" Jean-Marc Ayrault said.\n\n\"There has to be a role for national parliaments:", + " Europe remains and will remain a federation of nation states.\"\n\n15.30 Bruno Waterfield in Brussels:\n\nAfter euro bonds there's now talk of eurobills, with shorter maturities and issued in smaller amounts.\n\nAccording to Der Spiegel, the \"eurobonds-lite\" plan means crisis hit countries would be allowed new financing via a scheme of eurobills, with issuance limited to a fixed percentage of economic output.\n\nThose who do not comply with stringent rules and conditions for issuing the bills, likely to be linked to EU intrusion on tax revenue policy, will be banned from trading in them the following year.\n\nThe proposals to be discussed at a Brussels summit on June 28 are seen as being in line with the EU treaty,", + " and the German constitution, because they will be so limited in amount and duration for exceptional circumstances.\n\n15.25 Henry Samuel, the Telegraph's French correspondent: \"Voter turnout for French parliament election 21.41pc at midday, slightly down on 2007 but not bad given it's the fourth election in two months.\"\n\n15.19 Eurogroup head Jean-Claude Juncker has reportedly told Austrian newspaper Kurier that there is no room for renegotiating the substance of the Greek bailout package.\n\n15.04 Two hours until polling stations close in Greece.\n\n15.02 The EU-Mexico summit is ready to begin. It is taking place on the margins of the G20 Summit,", + " which starts tomorrow:\n\nTwitter: Herman Van Rompuy - About to start #EU #Mexico Summit in Los #Cabos\n\nAnd Van Rompuy has tweeted this picture of him and EC President Jose Manuel Barroso.\n\n14.54 Robert Nisbet from Sky has quoted the head of the Bar Association in Athens as saying the constitutionality of this election could be challenged as share of MPs is based on 2001 census. The 2011 census was carried out but the results are still being \"analysed\" and applied by government ministry.\n\n14.43 More from Labour MP Peter Hain:\n\nTwitter: Peter Hain - Critics on greek election in denial.", + " Syriza wants stay in EU and Euro but knows right wing austerity will encourage fascism not stability\n\n14.38 Remember that woman who interrupted a live Sky News report earlier? (see 12.01) Here's the video:\n\n14.33 In Greece, the threshold a party has to cross to enter parliament is 3pc of the popular vote. The electoral system is a so-called \u201creinforced proportional representation\u201d system.\n\nThe \u201creinforced\u201d bit means that the party with the most votes automatically gets a bonus of 50 seats.\n\nIn practical terms, the party with the most votes needs to get between 36.", + "4pc and 42.69pc of the popular vote to control an absolute majority in parliament on its own, something that is looking unlikely today.\n\n14.06 Nathalie, a freelance journalist in Greece, has tweeted:\n\nTwitter: Nathalie - Disillusioned worker at soup kitchen on \u20ac150/month wont vote. \"what change will it bring?\" #Abstention #greece2012 #ekloges12\n\nInterestingly, voting in Greece is mandatory, according to the constitution, although sanctions are no longer imposed on those who abstain.\n\n14.04 Syriza has asked the Interior Ministry to keep the polls open for an additional two hours on the islands of Lesvos and Hios,", + " as high winds and a ferry crash on Saturday have meant that many constituents met with delays in trying to reach the islands.\n\n13.51 Quick word on Germany, where activists calling for a tax on financial transactions have erected a wall of sandbags outside the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.\n\nThe anti-globalization group Attac said that about 200 people participated in Sunday's action, with the wall meant to symbolize a rampart against financial speculation.\n\nCarrying placards with slogans such as \"Stem Speculation\" and \"Financial transaction tax now\", they built the wall of sandbags around the statues of a bull and a bear - symbols of optimistic and pessimistic markets - that stand in front of the exchange building.\n\n13.", + "44 Google's Greek homepage features an election doodle today:\n\n13.40 Morgan Stanley has said a joint central bank statement declaring a readiness to act on the eurozone crisis could come before markets open tomorrow.\n\n13.35 The Telegraph's Alex Spillius is at a polling station in northern Athens.\n\nTurnout looks as high as last time.\n\nBoth New Democracy and Syriza volunteers are confident about increasing their share of the vote as pro and anti-bailout sentiment consolidates around each party. Even Syriza supporters think ND will win.\n\nPeople wait to cast their vote at a polling station in Athens\n\nYiorgos Vrassidis,", + " 55, said he wasn\u2019t a big fan of Syriza but voted for them as \u201can expression of anger\u201d. \u201cI hope they can lighten the pressure of the memorandum a little but it feels there is no light at the end of the tunnel for not only Greeks but all of southern Europe.\u201d\n\nThere are a lot of different opinions among Athens voters today, as you would expect with 21 parties running. But one common thread is that no one expects the coalition government that will be formed in the next couple of days to last long. I just met a man named Theodore Bouzas whom I interviewed at the same polling station last month.", + " \"I hope I don't see you again soon,\" he said, without much confidence.\n\n13.34 We are hearing reports that a second hand grenade HAS been found at Skai TV. Specailist military unit on the way to the scene.\n\n13.31 David Song, currency analyst at DailyFX, on rates:\n\nBeyond the Greek elections, the conference [G20 meet on Monday and Tuesday] in Mexico may prop up the single currency as the G20 plans to tackle the heightening risk for contagion, but the meeting may do little to restore investor confidence should the group struggle to meet on common ground. Meanwhile, European Central Bank board member Ewald Nowotny continued to voice his support for a zero-interest rate policy in order to combat the downside risks for the region,", + " but went onto say that it is too early to speculate on a third Long-Term Refinancing Operation, according to an interview with a German newspaper.\n\nIndeed, it seems as though the Governing Council is leaning towards a rate cut amid the heightening risk for a prolonged recession, but the ECB may have little choice but to implement a range of tools to shore up the ailing economy amid the ongoing turmoil in the financial system.\n\n13.26 Here's that Radio Four interview with Tony Blair on the eurozone (see 12.45pm):\n\nHe also confirmed he'd have taken the EU Presidency had it been offered to him and wouldn't rule out taking it in the future.\n\n13.", + "24 Just a reminder. The results of exit surveys in Greece are expected at the close of polling stations at 5pm (UK time), and the first official projections were expected at around 7.30pm (UK time).\n\n12.55 Athens Chamber of Commerce talking to Sky News: \"This is not a Greek crisis, it never was - it's a pan-European crisis. If Germany believes in a European vision, she should start behaving more as a European Germany and less as a Germanic Europe.\"\n\n12.52 Alexis Tsipras, leader of Greece's Syriza party, arrives to cast his vote at a polling station in Athens this morning.\n\nFollowed (from left)", + " by leader of Socialist party PASOK Evangelos Venizelos, leader of the right-wing LAOS party George Karatzaferis and leader of the conservative New Democracy party Antonis Samaras.\n\n12.45 Tony Blair has told BBC Radio 4 that \"for the single currency to survive, Germany has got to come fully behind it... There is an urgent need to recapitalise the banks... the difficulties are not confined to Spain.\"\n\n12.41 Skai TV has said there is no second grenade.\n\n12.30 In today's French elections, voter turnout has fallen to a record low of 21.41pc, the Interior Ministry said.", + " That compares with 22.89pc at the previous election in 2007. The ministry will provide an update on voter participation at 5pm.\n\n12.20 A policeman with a sniffer dog enters the courtyard of Skai TV in Greece after reports of a second suspected hand grenade.\n\nPolice set up a cordon around Skai TV\n\nReporter for Skai claiming that an anonymous caller said \"they should search well for another hand grenade\".\n\n12.01 A Greek citizen has burst in on a live Sky News interview yelling \"Merkel is a female Hitler, she is trying to destroy all of Europe but we will win\". The woman has to be dragged away.\n\n12.", + "00 Joseph Weisenthal, deputy editor of Business Insider, has taken a photo of the Greek police carrying riot shields:\n\n11.54 Former Chancellor Lord Lawson has described the euro crisis as a \"Doomsday machine\".\n\n11.46 BREAKING NEWS...\n\nSky News is reporting that a suspected hand grenade has been thrown outside Greek TV station Skai, but did not explode.\n\nA police official said: \"According to the guard of the station it was thrown by two persons riding a motorbike, it did not go off. It is not known if it is a real grenade or a fake but no one is going near.\"\n\nBomb disposal experts are on their way to the scene.\n\n11.", + "45 The Telegraph's Bruno Waterfield says EU finance ministers are to hold a teleconference when Greek exit polls come out tonight (5pm UK time) - if Syriza leading then \"proxy drachma\" and capital control plans are ready.\n\n11.38 Damian Mac Con Uladh, journalist with Athens News:\n\nTwitter: Damian Mac Con Uladh - Polling station, Corinth: #GoldenDawn muscle men in quasi-uniform at school gates. Intimidation in itself. Next to melon seller. #greece2012\n\n11.32 We've got a great video of several youngsters who are desperate to beat Germany - and Angela Merkel - in the quarter finals of Euro 2012.\n\n11.", + "04 Fiona Govan, the Telegraph's Spanish correspondent, has looked at the government's handling of the crisis there:\n\nSpain's right-leaning El Mundo newspaper this morning publishes a poll that provides a good indication of how Spaniards feel about their government\u2019s handling of the economic crisis. The ruling conservative Popular Party has been in power since December but already their popularity has dropped 5.5pc, according to the recent poll by Sigma Dos.\n\nThat\u2019s not to say the Socialists, in power for seven years and widely blamed for mishandling the economy when crisis began in 2008, are winning back support - it\u2019s the smaller parties like the left coalition Izquierda Unida who are seeing the biggest rise.\n\nInterestingly an overwhelming 92pc of those asked said they want a parliamentary commission into the Bankia debacle,", + " something that the government itself has so far rejected.\n\nReports suggest that stricken Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has ruled out raising VAT for the time being. That news may come as a relief to Spaniards already complaining of a hike in everyday prices and bills while wages are static or even cut but it defies recommendations by the IMF for the nation.\n\n11.00 Business Insider is in an Athenian polling station:\n\n10.53 Enrico Letta, deputy leader of the Democratic Party in Italy, has told Sky News: \"We dont want Greece out of the euro, we want Greece inside of the euro... The European problem is a political one,", + " not a financial one. We need to take steps towards a more integrated Europe, if not then the euro will collapse\"\n\nOn contagion from Greece spreading to Italy: \"I share the [contagion] fear of Mr Monti, we are supporting him and his government.\n\nGrowth for us is main problem in the last decade, two points of growth for one decade - too low\"\n\nOn Germany's stance: \"The main argument is the future and strength of euro and EU is in their own interests. Germany without a large euro and EU will not be able to be the strongest country as Germany is today... They profited very much from the euro.\n\nPoints out that on June 22 in Rome,", + " Mario Monti will be hosting a summit with Hollande, Rajoy and Merkel - the four main economies in the euro area - it will be the first time they will meet to try to find solutions before European Council; it will be a very important step.\n\n10.52 Economist Nouriel Roubini:\n\nTwitter: Nouriel Roubini - EZ loss of market access & bailout domino: Greece, Ireland, Portugal. Soon Cyprus. Next Spain. Then Italy if Spain goes. Finally France...?\n\n10.34 Former Greek PM George Papandreou told the Andrew Marr Show that Greece leaving the euro would be \"catastrophic\"", + " for the country and warned there will be a \u201crun\u201d on the banks.\n\n\"Leaving the euro would be catastrophic for Greece.There would be a bank run...we are still a high import country, we depend on oil, for example. Also we will have deep cuts and at the same time there will be most likely a cut in our GDP growth by 20pc, so this will be a major catastrophe that will have not only social but political consequences, which I believe will make it much more difficult for Greece to reform.\"\n\n10.31 Former Greek finance minister Yiannos Papantoniou says today's election is a \"referendum about the euro\". Greeks understand they are voting to stay in or out of the euro,", + " he said on the Sky's Murnaghan show.\n\n\"New context is being shaped in Europe to loosen up the austerity stance. Greece can achieve honourable compromise.\"\n\n10.30 The Telegraph's Bruno Waterfield from Brussels on this \"Greekend\":\n\nThere\u2019s trouble on the home front, too, for Angela Merkel. The German Chancellor is facing call from within her own coalition for a referendum in Germany as the price for any further eurozone bailouts.\n\nHorst Seehofer, the head of Bavaria\u2019s Christian Democrats, told Spiegel magazine that he would demand during elections next year that Germany\u2019s constitution needed to be changed to allow popular votes to ratify major EU decisions.\n\n\u201cIf the extent of Germany's financial commitment is widened,", + " then we should ask people for their opinion. The referendum in Ireland has shown that people can handle European issues responsibly. Those who wish Europe well must not be afraid of the population,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cWe should change the constitution so that referendums will in future be made mandatory in three cases: if additional powers are transferred to Brussels; if the EU wants to include new members, and if new aid programmes in the euro crisis are launched.\u201d\n\n10.27 Great look at the Greek parties' different programmes can be found on the Ekathimerini website.\n\n10.22 Gerard Lyons, chief economist at Standard Chartered, has told Sky News that the euro has been driven by poilitics,", + " and the economics underpinning it are poor. The euro has to be a political union to survive. He adds that Greece is only 2pc of the euro economy, the country needs growth to make changes and Germany should help Greece. Lyons says Greece lost the confidence of the markets some time ago. Markets less focused on the Greek economy and more on the issue of contagion.\n\nHe continues: \"Greece needs to make changes and collect taxes. Germany does not want to give it a free rise. But key issue is Greece needs growth. The key is Germany and the ECB have the ability to pull Greece and the euro back from the brink.", + " But Germany is prepared to let Greece go. Italy is in a very different and better position to Greece. It has large domestic savings and northern Italy is a dynamic economy. Europe needs a two-speed euro - hard euro for the north, soft for the south. France is politically in the north, economically in the south.\n\n10.08 Lizzy Davies from The Guardian is in Greece for the elections as well:\n\nTwitter: lizzy davies - Lovely encounter with well-dressed neo-nazis in exarchia. One a civil engineer, one an accountant. Kasidiaris is their 'best boy' #scary\n\nAnd Labour MP Peter Hain as tweeted:\n\nTwitter:", + " Peter Hain - I'd be voting for Syriza in Greece today. Got to stop this devastating austerity programme sweeping Europe and UK.\n\nFaisal Islam at Channel Four News:\n\nTwitter: Faisal Islam - My exit poll of one Athenian mum. She wanted to vote Syriza, but admitted that \"fear won\" and she voted ND instead. Lots of undecided here\n\n10.04 Yiannis Mouzakis at Thompson-Reuters: \"Athens polling station, quite busy, majority young crowd.\"\n\n09.54 Just a little ironic piece of history. The Greeks are voting 49 years to the day since East Germans revolted against socialist-imposed austerity.\n\n09.", + "51 Faisal Islam, economics editor at Channel Four News, is in Greece and getting a bit cocky:\n\nTwitter: Faisal Islam - Just walked down the stairs with Tsipras... He smirked when I pointed at him saying: \"mrs Merkel doesn't want Greeks to vote for this man\"\n\n09.46 Mark Lowen, BBC Athens correspondent:\n\nTwitter: Mark Lowen - 1st guy I speak to at polling stn says voting #GoldenDawn as \"immigration is main issue- all immigrants out\". Surely more pressing matters?\n\nWe have a great video that revals voters in Greece believe the election result is too close to call.\n\n09.", + "44 France began voting in a parliamentary run-off on Sunday morning that is expected to hand President Francois Hollande's Socialist party a majority and bolster his position in legislative battles over eurozone crisis policy.\n\nOpinion polls and projections from last Sunday's first-round vote suggest the Socialist bloc could achieve the 289 seats needed for a majority in the 577-member National Assembly even without adding seats from its Green Party allies.\n\nAdded to its control of the Senate and the presidency, that would give the Socialist Party more power than it has ever held and should leave Hollande's largely social democratic and pro-Europe cabinet broadly intact.\n\nThe possible entry of Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front into parliament for the first time since the mid-", + "1980s with up to three seats would be uncomfortable but would not pose any threat to Hollande's power to govern.\n\n09.37 Alex Spillius in Greece:\n\nBoth Antonis Samaras, leader of New Democracy, and Alexis Tsipras, Syriza leader, have voted.\n\nTheir quotes and demeanour demonstrated that the young Syriza leader has rocketed to prominence. Surrounded by cameras at an Athens polling station, he said: \"We have beaten fear. Today we are opening the gates to hope and a better tomorrow, with our people united, dignified and an equal partner in a Europe which is changing. We are optimistic the future belongs to the bearers of hope.\"\n\nSamaras voted in Pilos,", + " his small home town in the Peleponnese. All he said was: \"Today the Greek people are speaking and tomorrow a new era is beginning for Greece.\"\n\nSaving his best for strong-arming Angela Merkel, we can only presume.\n\n09.30 Joseph Weisenthal, deputy editor of Business Insider, is in Greece and has tweeted that little media crews are everywhere:\n\n09.20 Here's Alexis Tsipras casting his vote amid a media scrum:\n\n09.17 Former Greek PM Kostas Karamanlis has voted. But what is strange is that he licked the voting envelope four times when they are self-sealing.\n\n09.", + "15 Robert Nisbet, Sky News Europe Correspondent:\n\nTwitter: Robert Nisbet - Police confirm to #skynews that KKE communist party's twitter feed has been hacked. Tweets were urging supporters to vote for rival Syriza\n\n09.13 France wants the European Union to agree before the end of 2012 on growth-boosting measures worth \u20ac120bn, the weekly Journal du Dimanche has said, citing a proposal circulated by France ahead of an end-June summit.\n\nThe \u20ac120bn is to come from a combination of short-term growth instruments such as project bonds, reallocated EU structural funds and fresh investment capital from the European Investment Bank.\n\nHollande said the measures should be enlarged upon before the end of 2012 with the creation of a financial transaction tax and measures to create jobs,", + " especially for young people.\n\n\n\nFrench President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel\n\n\n\n09.06 Syriza's Alexis Tsipras is voting. A supporter shouts: \"Nothing the same from now on. The time has come for the people to speak.\"\n\nThere is a key difference in this election. The Greek constitution says that if elections are held within 18 months of the previous ones, the voting method changes. Voters this time around will not be able to pick candidates from their party of choice by putting a cross next to their names. Instead, they will only vote for their party of choice. The parties have allocated the places to their candidates hierarchically,", + " putting the candidates they prefer at the top of their so-called \u201clist\u201d. The candidates elected from each party will be determined as a function of what share of the vote their party gets, in the order they were ranked by their leaders. Ballots where voters have put a cross next to candidates\u2019 names will be considered invalid.\n\n09.05 Joseph Weisenthal, deputy editor of Business Insider:\n\nTwitter: Joseph Weisenthal - The gossip I've heard is that all of the \"secret polls\" have trended slightly towards Samaras. But big block still undecided. #Greece2012\n\nTwitter: Joseph Weisenthal - And undecideds thought to lean slightly towards Tsipras.", + " #Greece2012\n\n09.03 After his side beat Russia to advance in Euro 2012, Greek national football manager Fernando Santos was asked how much modern European civilisation has strayed away from its ancient Greek roots.\n\nHe replied: \"We are inspired by Greek history, not Merkel.\"\n\n08.54 Alex Spillius, our diplomatic correspondent reporting from Greece, says the country has at last found some euro-joy, though unfortunately it was limited to the sporting arena. Its football team last night unexpectedly and improbably advanced to the knock-out stages of Euro 2012, beating Russia 1-0.\n\nIts next match will probably be against Germany,", + " a fixture that so rich in symbolism it hardly needs mentioning.\n\nToday\u2019s election could of course determine if Greece is later knocked out of the single currency.\n\nPolls opened at 7am and close at 7pm (5pm BST). Unofficial exit polls will follow shortly afterwards, with official exit polls at 9.30pm. So by this evening we should know if the next government will be led by centre-Right New Democracy or the radical Leftist coalition Syriza.\n\n08.48 Antonis Samaras, leader of Greece's main conservative party New Democracy, says a \"new era\" is starting in the country.\n\n08.", + "35 Economist Nouriel Roubini:\n\nTwitter: Nouriel Roubini - Regardless of Greece elections, if spread remain elevated & rising in Spain and Italy, both may lose market access & need a full bailout\n\n08.32 Meanwhile, Greece has appealed to the EU for help... with a fire.\n\nA major fire south of the Greek capital raged for the second day on Sunday, as gale-force winds were rekindling the flames and three new fronts broke out.\n\nLocal officials said several homes had been burned, while three firefighters were injured in the blaze on Saturday.\n\nMore than 250 firefighters and soldiers using more than 60 vehicles were battling the flames in a sparsely populated area south of Athens,", + " along with four water-dropping planes and a helicopter, the fire department said. Another 45 firefighters and 15 vehicles were being sent from other areas.\n\nGreece appealed to the European Union for help. Italy was sending another two water-dropping planes on Sunday morning, Citizens' Protection Minister Eleftherios Economou said. Athens was also awaiting a response from France and Croatia.\n\n08.28 The Telegraph's Alex Spillius, who is reporting from Greece says some headlines from this morning's newspapers in Athens show that the Greeks are not underestimating the significance of today's vote.\n\nTo Vima's front page declares: \"The salvation election:", + " Greeks are voting with an exit from the euro a distinct possibility\"\n\nKathemirini says: \"With baited breath, the eyes of the whole planet are turned Greece\"\n\nReal News, a Sunday-only paper, has a poorly sourced report from Brussels claiming that senior EU officials have already agreed ways to ease the terms of Greece's bailout. It reads like a bit of a New Democracy wish-list, but could be true in part. Things like extending the memorandum by a year or two and raising the lowest pension rates - which were slashed - will be on the table.\n\n08.23 Commenting on the elections in Greece, Tristan Cooper,", + " Sovereign Debt Analyst at Fidelity Worldwide Investment, said:\n\nViews on the Greek election depend on whether you are playing the short or the long game in the eurozone crisis. A short-term player favours an New Democracy (ND) win as it reduces the chances of an immediate breakdown with the Troika. A long-term player will worry that an ND victory would take the pressure off and lead to continued policy drift at the European level. Although a Syriza win may be more scary for markets and would raise the spectre of a euro exit, it would hold policy-makers\u2019 feet to the fire and would improve the prospects for an eventual fiscal union.\n\n\"", + "Whoever wins, the March Troika program will have to be revisited as it is already off-track. The Greek economy contracted by 6.2pc in Q1 and youth unemployment topped 50pc. Indeed, European leaders indicated today that they would offer program concessions to an ND-led government. Further comfort was provided by the ECB and other central banks, which have pledged to cushion shocks emanating from Greece with extra liquidity.\u201d\n\n08.13 Meanwhile, French voters are choosing a new parliament today that will determine how far Socialist President Francois Hollande can go with his push for government-sponsored stimulus around Europe.\n\n08.08 Voting is already under way in Greece,", + " in an election that could ultimately decide if the country remains in the euro.\n\n\n\nNew Democracy leader Antonis Samaras, left, and Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras\n\nNew Democracy, led by Antonis Samaras, and anti-bailout party Syriza, led by Alexis Tsipras, are the frontrunners, but polls suggest the result is too close to call.\n\n08.00 Good morning and welcome to a special Live Blog on the Greek elections.\n\nDebt crisis live: archive ", + " * Germany says timeframe flexible if Greece sticks to programme\n\n* EU/IMF want to see serious reform implementation first\n\n* G20 to urge euro zone to break government/banks \"doom loop\"\n\n* Market rally limited as euro zone doubts linger\n\n* Italy, Spain bond yields continue to rise\n\nBy Stephen Brown and Dina Kyriakidou\n\nBERLIN/ATHENS, June 18 (Reuters) - Euro zone paymaster Germany, relieved at a narrow election victory for Greece's pro-bailout parties, signalled on Monday it may be willing to grant Athens more time to meet its fiscal targets to avert a catastrophic euro exit.\n\nBut financial markets'", + " relief that the 17-nation European currency area had avoided plunging deeper into crisis was quickly overtaken by concern about unresolved problems in Greece, the lack of a comprehensive plan for the euro zone as a whole and weakness in the world economy.\n\nAs leaders of the G20 major global economies began a summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, a G20 source told Reuters their draft communique would say that Europe will take \"all necessary policy measures\" to ensure that the euro zone is stable and intact. It also urged the Europeans to find ways to break the dangerous \"feedback loop\" between indebted governments and weak banks.\n\nGerman Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said the substance of Greece's austerity and economic reform programme,", + " agreed in exchange for a second EU/IMF rescue, was non-negotiable, but the timing of its deficit reduction goals might be adjusted.\n\n\"We're ready to talk about the timeframe as we can't ignore the lost weeks and we don't want people to suffer because of that,\" Westerwelle said in a radio interview.\n\nGovernment officials said his comments did not reflect Berlin's official position, and a government spokesman said now was not the time to give Greece \"a discount\".\n\nHowever, Deputy Finance Minister Steffen Kampeter, who is closer to Chancellor Angela Merkel and normally a stickler for strict adherence to fiscal orthodoxy, told ARD television:", + " \"It is clear to us that Greece should not be over-strained.\"\n\nAustrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said Greece needed both a sustainable course of fiscal consolidation and a return to economic growth after four years of recession.\n\n\"The conditions that were negotiated have to be observed but we also need to give the Greeks room to breathe,\" Faymann said in a statement. Under the current rules, Athens must cut its budget deficit to below 3 percent of Greek GDP in 2014.\n\nThe hints at leniency should help Greek conservative leader Antonis Samaras, whose New Democracy party narrowly beat the radical leftist anti-austerity SYRIZA movement in Sunday's election,", + " to form a mainstream coalition with the PASOK Socialists.\n\nHe will face fierce pressure from European and International Monetary Fund lenders to start implementing seriously an economic reform programme agreed earlier this year, which has largely remained a dead letter so far.\n\nEuropean Central Bank executive board member Joerg Asmussen noted that giving Greece more time to meet its fiscal targets would require additional European funding for Athens, and the current situation should be reassessed first.\n\n\"I can only generally point out that if one is pressing to shift fiscal targets, one should be so honest to also say that as long as a country is running a primary deficit, extending the fiscal targets will automatically mean that there will be an additional external financing need,\" Asmussen said.\n\nTRUST BUST\n\nWith trust in Greek politicians at a low ebb,", + " a senior EU official said the new government would find a 100-day action plan on its desk including privatisations, axing public sector jobs and closing loss-making enterprises to prove it was serious.\n\n\"There will be a very clear 100-day plan for a new government. If it's not implemented in full then the game is over,\" the German EU official told Reuters before the election.\n\nProcedurally, the next step after the formation of a government will be for the \"troika\" of European Commission, IMF and ECB inspectors to return to Athens to review Greek implementation of the bailout agreement. They are almost certain to say it has again veered off track.\n\nThe euro and shares rallied briefly after the Greek vote but fell back by mid-afternoon on Monday and there was no let-up for the borrowing costs of euro zone strugglers Spain and Italy.\n\nThe Italian and Spanish prime ministers,", + " Mario Monti and Mariano Rajoy, in Mexico for a G20 summit, both welcomed the Greek election result as good news for the euro zone.\n\nBut Spanish and Italian 10-year government bond yields continued to rise, with Madrid's hitting a fresh euro era record of 7.15 percent, close to levels that drove Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek international rescues.\n\nAnalysts at Citi said the election had changed nothing fundamental and they still forecast a 50 to 75 percent likelihood of Greece leaving the euro within 12 to 18 months. But Fitch Ratings said it now saw a lower risk of a disorderly Greek debt default and exit from the euro area.\n\nOthers said that regardless of whether Greece stays or goes,", + " the main issues driving markets are whether the world's central banks will do more to revive global growth, and whether euro zone leaders can sketch out a roadmap for closer fiscal and banking union at a summit next week to convince investors that the euro will survive.\n\n\"It remains vital that euro zone governments take profound steps forward in terms of fiscal union and restoring confidence in the banking sector,\" said Nick Kounis of Dutch bank ABN AMRO. \"Judging by past form, European politicians tend to take their foot off the gas when the pressure is off.\"\n\nAUSTERITY ISN'T WORKING\n\nSamaras has promised to renegotiate elements of the 130 billion euro ($165 billion)", + " bailout programme to soften the economic impact.\n\nGiving Athens an additional year to achieve its deficit reduction goals would mean increasing the size of the euro zone's bailout, raising the commitment by countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Finland where voters are deeply reluctant to approve further funding.\n\nGreece is in the fifth year of a crippling recession that has driven unemployment to a record 22 percent - including one in two young people - and caused widespread hardship.\n\nAlthough sufficient voters cast their ballots out of fear of a disastrous euro exit to give mainstream parties a working majority, a majority angry over austerity and corruption voted for a range of anti-bailout groups.\n\nThat raises the prospect of a renewal of violent street protests if a Samaras-led administration moves ahead with the unpopular cuts and closures demanded by international lenders.\n\nThere is little sign so far that austerity is working in Greece.", + " Public wage, pension and spending cuts have exacerbated economic contraction, shrinking state revenue, while bureaucracy, corruption and a lack of confidence have held back private sector investment.\n\nMany citizens in a fractured society have responded by refusing to pay bills and taxes out of disgust with their political leaders and fury at seeing the rich evading tax and parking money abroad.\n\nEven if the economy began to recover, economists argue the demands being made of Greece to reduce its public debt to a sustainable trajectory are unrealistic.\n\nIf the \"troika\" finds that Greece is off course, pressure among non-European states for the IMF to pull out of the programme is bound to rise, diplomats said.", + " The euro zone may end up carrying the whole cost of the bailout, which in turn could fuel public opposition in northern European creditor countries, they said. ", + " MILAN/MADRID (Reuters) - Spain called on Monday for the European Central Bank to step in to fight financial market pressure after any hopes that the Greek election result might ease the strain on vulnerable Spanish and Italian debt were dashed.\n\nThe cost of borrowing rose for both Spain and Italy, the two big euro zone economies under fire for poor finances, widening the gap between what they have to pay and what Germany pays.\n\nThe yield on Spain's 10-year bond went above the 7 percent widely viewed as unsustainable. Italy's was just above 6 percent.\n\n\"The financial markets... aren't relaxing their pressure on Spain. Doubts continue regarding the construction of Europe,", + " about the present and the future of the euro,\" Treasury Minister Cristobal Montoro told the Spanish Senate during a budget hearing.\n\n\"The ECB must respond firmly, with reliability, to these market pressures that are still trying to derail the joint euro project.\"\n\nWithin a few hours of the election result - a narrow win for Greek parties committed to the terms of a European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout - financial markets reacted as if nothing had changed.\n\nThe response underlined the essential problem facing the euro zone; short-term improvements to the climate do not address the root problem that finances are perilously tight in the middle of an economic downturn.\n\n\"While Greek euro exit fears have... eased,", + " this (election) outcome does little to alleviate the weak fundamentals that currently weigh on Spain and Italy,\" Michala Marcussen, an economist at Societe Generale, said in a research note.\n\nEven so, a meltdown at the prospect of a Greek government pledged to reneging on its commitments and possibly forcing Greece out of the euro zone was averted, so leaders of Italy and Spain welcomed the narrow victory for Greek mainstream parties.\n\n\"This allows us to have a more serene vision for the future of the European Union and for the euro zone,\" Italian Prime Minster Mario Monti told reporters in Mexico upon arriving for a G-20 summit.\n\nAlso speaking before the same meeting,", + " Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy greeted the election outcome as \"good news for Greece, very good news for the European Union, for the euro and also for Spain\".\n\nRajoy, like Montoro on Monday, has repeatedly called for the ECB to act to defend the euro zone, implicitly wanting it to resume a massive bond-buying programme that held down yields of government debt in recent months. The ECB is reluctant to fire up the programme again.\n\nCOMPREHENSIVE SOLUTION\n\nFor Italy and Spain, the bond market reaction to the Greek vote suggested that the euro zone crisis needs a comprehensive solution before markets can start to build confidence.\n\nThe share and currency markets were also underwhelmed by the Greek results.", + " After an initial spike, Europe's top shares and the euro were flat within a couple of hours of opening on Monday.\n\nSceptics don't have to look far to see why: Spanish banks' bad loans rose to the highest percentage of their outstanding portfolios since April 1994, according to the Bank of Spain.\n\nAn audit later this week is expected to show Spanish banks needing between 60 billion and 70 billion euros (47.90- 56.2 billion pounds) in capital.\n\nThere were mixed signals from Germany about whether it would tolerate a slight easing of demands on Greece.\n\nIt is also unclear how deep the divisions will be between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande over easing back on austerity programmes in favour of growth.", + " These questions are the kind that keep markets on edge and drive investors away from what they see as riskier assets.\n\n\"Our concern remains that little will be delivered in terms of additional risk-sharing measures, leaving markets, and as such the economies, vulnerable to renewed stress,\" said Marcussen of Societe General.\n\n(Written by Jeremy Gaunt; Editing by Peter Graff)\n" + ], + "length": 24533, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 77, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The interactive map of gun-owning homes published by Westchester's Journal News inspired more than outrage: Now a Connecticut lawyer has published the home addresses and phone numbers of the Journal News' publisher and 50 employees on his blog, reports Tech Crunch. \u201cI don\u2019t know whether the Journal\u2019s publisher Janet Hasson is a permit holder herself, but here\u2019s how to find her to ask,\u201d writes blogger Christopher Fountain, who added a Google Maps shot of Hasson's house, complete with interior shots via Zillow. Another enterprising blogger even took that data and made another interactive map of his own. \"Ironically, the promise of open data was supposed to lead to open-minded discussion,\" notes Tech Crunch's Gregory Ferenstein, but it \"appears that transparency lends itself equally to being both a tool of democracy or a partisan weapon.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "White Plains newspaper The Journal- News, a Gannett publication, has published the full name and address of every licensed pistol permit holder in three New York counties. I don\u2019t know whether the Journal\u2019s publisher Janet Hasson is a permit holder herself, but here\u2019s how to find her to ask:\n\n(UPDATE: Uh oh \u2013 InstaPundit\u2019s linked here. Hundreds of thousands of readers; Janet, you have a great Christmas Eve)\n\nJanet Hasson, 3 Gate House Lane, Mamaroneck, NY 10534.\n\nPhone number:\n\n(914) 694-5204\n\nHere\u2019s a photo showing her Mamaroneck house \u2013 interior shots are on Zillow:\n\nUPDATE:", + " From reader RJS: Gannett\u2019s CEO-\n\nGracia C Martore\n\n728 Springvale Rd\n\nGreat Falls, VA 22066\n\n(703) 759-5954\n\nThe reporter on the story is\n\nDwight R Worley\n\n23006 139 Ave\n\nSpringfield Gardens, NY 11413 (718) 527-0832\n\nUPDATE: Intrepid readers have come up with all sorts of contacts for these people:\n\nEDITOR:\n\nMiss Royle\u2019s married name is Lambert. She lives in White Plains and here is her Facebook page complete with pictures of her and her kids. Hello Sanctimony.\n\nhttp://www.facebook.com/CynDeeRoyle\n\nCynthia R Lambert\n\n17 Mcbride Ave\n\nWhite Plains,", + " NY 10603 (914) 948-9388\n\nWork: 914-694-5001\n\ncroyle@lohud.com\n\nhttps://twitter.com/croyle1\n\nhttps://www.facebook.com/cyndee.royle.7\n\nhttps://www.facebook.com/CynDeeRoyle\n\nDrives a red convertible:http://s13.postimage.org/k8ffnxuo7/cyndee_royle_aka_cynthia_lambert_red_convertible.jpg\n\nFamily photo: http://s7.postimage.org/dkqtytvyj/cyndee_royle_aka_cynthia_lambert_fb_alt_private.jpg\n\nPublisher,", + " Janet Hasson,\n\n3 Gate House Lane, Mamaroneck NY, 10543\n\n(914) 694-5204\n\nReporter, Dwight R. Worley, 23006 139 Ave\n\nSpringfield Gardens, NY 11413\n\n(718) 527-0832\n\nThe \u201cVisual Editor\u201d responsible for the map itself is:\n\nRobert F. Rodriguez\n\nStephanie Azzarone\n\nHome (212) 222-4566\n\n420 Riverside Dr, Apt 7A\n\nNew York, NY 10025-7748\n\nPublisher: Janet Hasson (@janhasson on twitter)", + " 3 Gate House Rd, Mamaroneck, NY 10534\n\nGANNET CEO:\n\nGracia C Martore 728 Springvale Rd Great Falls, VA 22066 (703) 759-5954\n\nJanet Hasson herself is married with one child, and her personal interests, as culled from her credit card records, are noted below: ", + " The map indicates the addresses of all Journal News Employees in the New York Tri-State area. Each dot represents an individual Journal News employee -- a reporter, editor or staffer. The data does not include freelancers \u2014 reporters or photographers \u2014 which can be hired without being an employee. Being included in this map does not mean the individual at a specific location is a responsible reporter or editor, just that they are a reporter or editor.\n\nData for all categories is included, but certain information is not available on an individual basis.\n\nTo create the map, Talk of the Sound submitted Google searches for the names and addresses of all Journal News employees in the New York Tri-State area.", + " By state law, the information is public record.\n\nReaders are still putting together records and could not immediately provide some data. The map will be updated when that data is released.\n\nUPDATE: The Journal News has removed their gun map. Before you ask. \"No, we are not taking down our map\".\n\nMy Washington Examiner Op-Ed is now up: Why I will not be taking down my map of Journal News employees\n\nView Journal News Employees in a larger map\n\nWelcome Instapundit readers! Thanks Glenn.\n\nWelcome For What It's Worth readers. Thanks Chris.\n\nWelcome Gateway Pundit readers. Thanks Jim.\n\nWelcome Newsbusters readers.", + " Thanks Tom.\n\nWelcome Atlantic Wire and Yahoo! readers. Thanks J.K.\n\nWelcome readers of The Blaze. Thanks Liz.\n\nAl Tompkins of the Poynter Institute has a thoughtful article on the journalistic considerations behind the Journal News decision to publish their map. I find myself entirely in agreement with his views on this issue.\n\nThe problem is not that the Gannett-owned Journal News was too aggressive. The problem is that the paper was not aggressive enough in its reporting to justify invading the privacy of people who legally own handguns in two counties it serves.\n\nGOING GLOBAL: El Pais, the largest-circulated daily in Spain, has linked this article.", + " Politiken, one of Denmark's leading papers, has linked this article. The Daily Mail, the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper, linked this article. Toronto Sun, one of Canada's largest papers, has linked this article. Lenta.ru, one of the most popular Russian language online resources, has linked this article.\n\nMy map is a \"rather sad-looking Google map\" according to Rebecca at The Gothamist.\n\nThe links and traffic coming into the site are now in hyperdrive so I can no longer update every single link. Let me just give a general shout out to: Newser, Wizbang Blog, Politico,", + " The Jawa Report, American Thinker, The New York Observer, Mediaite, The Village Voice, Gawker, Huffington Post, Live Leak, GOPUSA, San Francisco Chronicle, Reddit, I Own The World, Breitbart Big Journalism, World News Daily, New York Magazine, Yahoo! News, The Wrap, Free Republic, Lucianne, Ann Coulter, BizzyBlog, BizPacReview, Opposing Views, The Hartford Courant.\n\nI appeared on the The Ben Ferguson Show on WBAP in Dallas, TX Thursday morning (with Guest Host Steve Malzberg).\n\nOn 12/28, I appeared on the nationally syndicated Bill Bennett's Morning:", + " Bill Bennet Radio Show Cox 2012 1228 (.mp3)\n\nOn 12/28, I appeared on the Schnitt Show on 12/28. His show is syndicated on about 50 stations nationwide. Guest hosting is my pal Pat Campbell of the The Pat Campbell Show weekday mornings on 1170 KFAQ in Tulsa, OK: Schnitt Show Cox 2012 1228 (.mp3)\n\nTalk of the Sound readers and other bloggers are involved in a sort of a crowd-sourcing on gather home addresses and other contact information for Journal News employees. Based on reader submissions and this site in particular I have created a list of names and information sought.", + " I then mapped what I had (above). I will add what more I get from readers and my own poking around. If you see some public data that matches, send me a link to [email protected] and I will add it as quick as I can. Be advised that the Journal News has been in downsizing mode for the past several years. I have to wonder if all these names are current employees but we will treat them as such until we learn otherwise. The map was begun with 11 names.\n\nHelp fill in the blanks below.\n\n** = loaded into Google map\n\nUPDATE 12/27 11:30 AM: With the assistance of readers JK,", + " SS, BW, AH and others, the following entries have been updated and added to the map. More are on the way.\n\nAdded Info: Janet Hasson, Ed Forbes.\n\nNew Entry: Thane Grauel, Elizabeth Ganga, Rick Carpiniello, Liz Anderson (Elizabeth Anderson Steinke), Nicole Futterman. The map now has 16 names.\n\nYou will note that one Journal News employee, Ian Thane Grauel, has recently removed his LinkedIn profile and Twitter account. Also, that Cyndee has removed her Facebook page and hidden her tweets. I have received requested to remove the names of former Journal News employees and freelancers from this list and will continue to do so if those people make such a request.\n\nUPDATE 12/", + "27 6:30 PM:\n\nUpdated the database for Stacy A. Anderson, Jane Lerner, Steve Lieberman and Herb Pinder but still no home address information so still not on the map. The database and map has been updated for Janet Hasson. New to the map are Robert Brum, Anjanette Rieger Delgado, Randi Weiner, James Kwasnik, Tania Savayan, Phil Reisman. The map now has 22 names.\n\nLiz Anderson removed photos of her children from her Facebook page. She has also changed her Twitter account from @lizsteinke to @lizscribe.\n\nUPDATE 12/", + "28 1:30 PM:\n\nReaders have provided enough information to put Alex Weisler, Hema Easley, Frank A. Becerra, Jr and Jonathon Bandler on the map which now has 26 names. Make that 27 names, I just added Steve Lieberman after reader SM showed I needed to edit Nancy Cutler and Lieberman. I removed Nicole Futterman, Dan Donovan, Jamie O'Grady and Howard Megdal as I am informed they are not full-time employees. I removed Rebecca Baker because she no longer works at the paper. I am finding that the Journal News has a lot of people listed on its web site as working for them who do not seem to actually work for them.\n\nToday,", + " based on popular demand, I made the following FOIL request to the County Clerk's in Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam counties.\n\nDear Mr. Clerk, This is a public records request. I would like to obtain a copy of the FOIL request made by the Journal News on through which they obtained information on pistol permit, any follow up communications with them regarding that request as well as any documents they obtained under FOIL. If they filed any sort of litigation to obtain additional information (e.g. an Article 78, etc.) I would like to obtain that as well. If this is a matter of forwarding some emails I would consider that an acceptable fill of my request.", + " Where possible I would like records in electronic format. If possible, I would like the electronic documents converted into standard Microsoft Office format (Word, Excel, etc.). I would like all communications including the delivery of documents to take place via email as much as is possible based on the nature of the available records.. I would like the Records Access Officer to certify that the records are genuine. If the documents only exist in paper form I am willing to pay. If the cost of converting the documents to a standard electronic format or making photos copies exceeds $20.00 I would like prior notification of the estimated cost to comply with this records request. Sincerely,", + " Robert Cox\n\nManaging Editor\n\nTalk of the Sound\n\nUPDATE: 12/30 8:30 AM\n\nI was interviewed for this article below but none of my answers were included. The writer, Ms. O'Donnell failed to mention in her email to me or in the article itself that she was, up until recently, a long-time employee of the Journal News.\n\nReuters: New York newspaper to list more gun permit holders after uproar by Noreen O'Donnell.\n\nWhile she did not include my explanation as to why I created the map, she did manage to find a journalism professor to call me \"childish and petulant\".\n\nSome critics retaliated by posting reporters'", + " and editors' addresses and other personal information online.\n\nHoward Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, called the critics' response childish and petulant.\n\n\"It doesn't move the issue of gun control to the level of intelligent public discussion,\" he said. \"Instead, it transforms what should be a rational public debate on a contentious issue into ugly gutter fighting.\"\n\nDraw your own conclusions about Ms. O'Donnell and Professor Good or why she gives him four paragraphs to criticize my actions and I get none to explain my actions.\n\nHere is my Q&A with the reporter that got left on the cutting-room floor.\n\nQ.", + " What was your general reaction to the article and the map. A. Given the nature of my hyper-local site, I monitor lohud.com 24/7 so I saw the story as it was published to the web. I could not believe what I was seeing -- what I perceived to be a transparent attempt to intimidate and ostracize law-abiding citizens by using the Newtown murders as a pre-text to advance an anti-gun agenda and draw traffic to the site. You worked there so you know about their cost-cutting, outsourcing and pay-wall approach and how desperate things have become at the paper. At best, this map reeked of a stunt to drive traffic at the expense of private citizens who had done nothing that warranted having their privacy violated.", + " In fact, I will not be surprised if there is a class-action lawsuit on privacy grounds. I can only laugh when the publisher claims the map is \"journalism\". The map is more like voyeurism than journalism with the Journal News acting as a digital \"Peeping Tom\", peering into the bedrooms of thousands of people just because they can. } The result is a map that is a bizarre form of \"gun porn\". The thought occurred to me to make a contra-Google Map the instant I saw the article. I was hesitant to do so because I am a First Amendment advocate and generally want to be supportive of newspapers and those who work there.", + " I know plenty of people who work at Gannett, the Freedom Forum and the Newseum. I have spoken on panels at many of their events with people like Gene Policinski, Ken Paulson, John Seigenthaler and many others. I had the honor of being part of one of the inaugural exhibits at the Newseum for being the first blogger formerly credentialed as a blogger to cover a federal trial (Scooter Libby). I knew that creating such a contra-map was a serious, highly provocative move and would likely cause a number of the people referenced above to be very unhappy with me/ I mulled this over for two days.", + " In the meantime my readers had taken it upon themselves to collect information about reporters and editors. They were also linking to Chris Fountain up in Greenwich, CT who is the one who really got the ball rolling. After being on the fence for a couple of days I decided to organize the efforts of my readers, create a crowd-sourcing project and start to build the contra-map. Q. Why did you decide to make the reporters' and editors' information public on the web. I trust you are aware that unlike most states, New York (and California) requires that a pistol permit holder to register EVERY handgun they own not just get the license.", + " The initial Journal News FOIL request sought this information. I expect that the Journal News will ultimately prevail and get this information and update their map and make it searchable by weapon type. I would oppose that as I do the current iteration of the map. I did not want to merely respond but discourage further development of their map or at least give them pause. I wanted a direct and proportionate response in the spirit of \"do unto others as you would have them do unto you\". I could not think of anything more direct and proportionate than flipping the script by using public records to map the folks at the Journal News the way they mapped my friends and neighbors.", + " I hope they now realize that in the age of social media and blogs, the people known formerly as the audience, can throw a counterpunch from time to time. My map was my counterpunch.\n\nUPDATE: 12/30 8:45 AM\n\nPer my FOIL request (above) to the Putnam County Clerk, I obtain a copy of the email sent by the Journal News reporter who wrote the map story. From this it is clear the Journal News sought (and continues to seek) not to create just a map of \"pistol permit holders\" but a map of every gun registered in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties.", + " The have requested information on every type of weapon including \"manufacturer, type of weapon, caliber, serial number and model\".\n\nPutnam-JN Pistol FOIL.pdf\n\nFOIL REQUEST Worley, Dwight [[email protected]]\n\nMr. Bartolotti,\n\nSent: Monday, December 17, 2012 2:26 PM\n\nTo: Michael Bartolotti Under the provisions of the New York Freedom of Information Law, Article 6 of the Public Officers Law, I hereby request records or portions thereof pertaining to Putnam County\u2019s pistol permit database. I am requesting the names, complete addresses, the type of permits issued (carry concealed/", + "possess on\n\npremises/possess carry during employment), and the type of weapons possessed, including the weapon's\n\nmanufacturer, type of weapon, caliber, serial number and model, for all permit holders in your database. Also, please provide a complete record layout and data dictionary for your pistol permits database. I would like all of the records in electronic format, such as a database, spreadsheet, plain text file or other digital format. I have been instructed instructed by you that state penal law prohibits the disclosure of the types of weapons possessed by permit holders even though such information is collected by the county. If it is determined that that category of information cannot be released please process my request,", + " excluding the protected information, without delay. In your response, please indicate the specific sections of the law that expressly prohibit the disclosure of the protected information. As you know, all government records and data are presumed public unless there is a specific provision of law barring their release. So while the law expressly says names and addresses of permit holders are to be made public, if the law does not specifically bar the release of the types of permits issued and types of weapons possessed, that information can and should be released. In that case, I would expect that information to be included. As Robert Freeman, executive director of the New York State Committee on Open Government,", + " has said in\n\nseveral opinions regarding the disclosure of pistol permit data beyond names and addresses, \u201cthe only instance in which records must be withheld would involve the case in which a statute prohibits disclosure. Again, as I interpret \u00a7400.00 of the Penal Law, there is nothing in that statute that precludes the custodian of the records at issue from disclosing the records.\u201d If there are any fees for copying the records requested, please inform me before filling the request or please supply the records without informing me if the fees are not in excess of $25. This request is in relation to a news event. Because of the timely nature of this request,", + " I ask that it be expedited. Also, because of time constraints, I ask that if there are any concerns or questions regarding this request that I be contacted by telephone at 914\u2010629\u20101060 or by email at [email protected]. As you know, the Freedom of Information Law requires that an agency respond to a request within five business days of receipt of a request. Therefore, I would appreciate a response as soon as possible and look forward to hearing from you shortly. If for any reason any portion of my request is denied, please inform me of the reasons for the denial in writing and provide the name and address of the person or body to whom an appeal should be directed.", + " Thank you for your prompt attention. Dwight R. Worley | Reporter/Data Analyst\n\n1133 Westchester Avenue, Suite N110\n\nWhite Plains, NY 10604\n\nVoice: 914.629.1060 | Fax: 914.694.5018\n\nE-mail: [email protected] | Web: lohud.com\n\nTwitter: twitter.com/lohud | Facebook: facebook.com/lohud\n\nFoursquare: foursquare.com/lohud | tumblr: lohud.tumblr.com\n\nMichael C. Bartolotti, First Deputy County Clerk of the Putnam Count Clerk's Office, responded to Worley on December 21st.\n\nPutnam-Pistol List FOIL 1.pdf\n\nDwight R.", + " Worley\n\nJournal News Media Group\n\n1133 Westchester Avenue Suite N110\n\nWhite Plains, NY 10604 RE: FOIL request Dear Mr. Worley: This office is in receipt of your electronic mail message dated December 17th, 2012 in which you request certain information in electronic format for all pistol permit files maintained by this office. This request is quite involved and will yield voluminous results. Further, certain information requested may be withheld due to operation of law. This office is currently working with its IT provider to compile the requested information. Upon a complete compilation of the information suitable for dissemination we will provide you with an estimate of cost as well as instructions on how to complete your request.", + " I hope that you can work with this office by illustrating patience and if you have any questions please contact this office. Thank you very much. Sincerely Michael C. Bartolotti\n\nFor those not familiar with the Freedom of Information Law in New York State, as a general summary, an agency has 5 business days to acknowledge receipt of a request for information and 22 business days after that to deny, fulfill or partially deny/partially fulfill a records request. After the 22 days the agency must provide the records or explain why they need more time and then provide a date certain when the records will be available. As a practical matter,", + " a public records officer can keep a request pending for 27 business days and the requestor has no grounds to appeal or challenge the agency. Agencies can also charge for records based on a scale described in the statute.\n\nIn this case, the Clerk got the request on Monday December 17th. The Clerk then waited until the last day of the week, Friday December 21st before acknowledging receipt and has still not provided the records. Adding in three holidays -- Christmas, New Year's Day and Martin Luther King Day -- the clerk does not have to deliver the records until January 25th, 2013.\n\nThe Clerk's in Rockland County and Westchester County had the same option and chose to expedite the request.", + " Readers can draw their own conclusions as to why 2 clerks turned over the requested records a month earlier than required and 1 clerk has still not turned over the requested records.\n\nI hope to have a copy of communications between the Journal News and the other two clerks soon.\n\nUPDATE: 12/30 9:22 AM\n\nThis is interesting, from the Christian Science Monitor\n\nIn an online survey, the Journal News finds overwhelming support \u2013 89-11 percent \u2013 for the proposal to keep gun ownership private.\n\nUPDATE: 12/30 9:24 AM\n\nWe made Wikipedia.\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journal_News#", + "Controversy\n\nUPDATE: 12/30 9:30 AM\n\nThe Westchester County Firearm Owners Association is an organization whose members were most directly targeted by the Journal News. They view the map as an attempt by the paper to \"intimidate and bully lawful gun-owning citizens\".\n\nIn response, the WCFOA has compiled a list of Journal News Advertisers.\n\ngannett_advertisers_12-28-2012_c.pdf\n\nThere has been a great deal of interest from readers in such a list so, with permission, we reprint that list below. The list is based on online resources and volunteers reviewing the print editions of the paper to identify advertisers.", + " According to the WCFOA, the focus was on consumer-oriented advertiser so not every advertised was included in this list.\n\nThe WCFOA is encouraging its members and supporters to write a short letter which starts by \"quickly outlining the irresponsible Journal News act of publishing the names and addresses of pistol license holders (and a Google Map with directions and family members names)\". The want the letters to state \"you will no longer patronize any advertiser who uses Gannett unless and until that advertiser withholds further ads until Gannett takes down the pistol license page and ceases attacking lawful firearm ownership.\"\n\nMAJOR AND NATIONAL ADVERTISERS\n\nAARON'S\n\naarons.com\n\n1-", + "877-607-9999\n\n1-800-950-7368\n\nGaret Hayes\n\nSenior Vice President\n\nHope-Beckham, Inc.\n\nOffice: 404.604.2602\n\nMobile: 770.403.8720\n\n[email protected]\n\nAce Hardware\n\nacehardware.com\n\n2200 Kensington Court\n\nOak Brook, IL 60523\n\nU.S.A\n\n1-866-290-5334\n\n1.630.990.6600\n\nALDI Grocery\n\naldi.us\n\nAldi Inc.\n\n1200 N Kirk Rd, Batavia, IL 60510-1443, United States\n\nPhone:", + " (630) 879-8100\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-630-879-8100\n\nBabies 'R Us\n\nbabiesrus.com\n\nBabies R Us Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nToys R Us, Inc.\n\n1 Geoffrey Way\n\nWayne, NJ 07470-2030 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-973-617-3500\n\nFax: 973-617-4006\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-888-222-9787\n\nBest Buy\n\nbestbuy.com\n\nBest Buy Corporate Office Headquarters in the USA:\n\n7601 Penn Avenue South\n\nRichfield, MN 55423\n\nCorporate Phone Number:", + " 1-612-291-1000\n\nCorporate Fax Number: 1-612-292-4001\n\nCorporate Email: [email protected]\n\nthe email [email protected] does not work. Please publish the below instead. Thanks.\n\nSusan Busch, Senior Director, Public Relations (612) 291-6114 or [email protected]\n\nLisa Hawks, Director, Public Relations (612) 291-6150 or [email protected]\n\nor [email protected]\n\nBloomingdales Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nBloomingdale's, Inc. a division of Macy's\n\n1000 3rd Ave.\n\nNew York, New York 10022 USA\n\nWebsite:", + " http://www.bloomingdales.com/\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-212-705-2000\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-800-777-0000\n\nCVS Stores's Corporate Office Headquarters in the USA:\n\nCVS Caremark\n\nOne CVS Drive\n\nWoonsocket, RI 02895\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-401-765-1500\n\nCorporate Fax Number: 1-401-762-2137\n\nCorporate Email: [email protected]\n\nDick's Sporting Goods Corporate Office Headquarters\n\n300 Industry Drive RIDC Park West\n\nPittsburgh, PA 15275 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number:", + " 1-724-273-3400\n\nFax Number: n/a\n\nCustomer Service Phone Number: 1-877-846-9997\n\nGNC Corporate Office Headquarters\n\n300 Sixth Avenue\n\nPittsburgh, PA 15222 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-412-288-4600\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-877-462-4700\n\nOffice Depot Corporate Office Headquarters\n\n6600 North Military Trail\n\nBoca Raton, Florida 33449\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-561-438-4800\n\nCorporate Fax Number: 1-561-438-4400\n\nCorporate Email:", + " [email protected]\n\nIKEA America USA\n\n420 Alan Wood Rd.\n\nConshohocken, PA 19428 USA\n\nIkea USA Corporate Phone Number: 1-610-834-0180\n\nCustomer Service Number USA: 1-800-434-4532\n\nJoAnn Fabrics Corporate Office Headquarters\n\n5555 Darrow Rd.\n\nHudson, Ohio 44236 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-330-656-2600\n\nFax Number: 1-330-463-6675\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-888-739-4120\n\nK Mart Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nSears,", + " Roebuck and Company (kmart.com)\n\n3333 Beverly Road\n\nHoffman Estates, Illinois 60179 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-847-286-2500\n\nCorporate Fax Number: 1-847-286-8351\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-866-562-7848\n\nKohl's Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nN56 W17000 Ridgewood Drive\n\nMenomonee Falls, WI 53051 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-262-703-7000\n\nFax Number: 1-262-703-6143\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-", + "866-887-8884\n\nLowes Corporate Office Headquarters in the USA:\n\n1000 Lowe's Blvd.\n\nMooresville, NC 28117\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-704-758-1000\n\nCorporate Fax Number: 1-336-658-4766\n\nCorporate Email: [email protected]\n\nMacy's\n\nMacys Corporate Office Headquarters HQ:\n\n7 West Seventh Street\n\nCincinnati, OH 45202\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-513-579-7000\n\nMichaels Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nMichaels Stores, Inc.\n\n8000 Bent Branch Dr.\n\nIrving, TX 75063 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number:", + " 1-972-409-1300\n\nFax Number: 1-972-409-1556\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-800-642-4235\n\nNaturalizer Shoes\n\n712 Lexington Ave\n\nNew York, NY 10022\n\n(212) 759-3094\n\nOffice Depot Corporate Office Headquarters\n\n6600 North Military Trail\n\nBoca Raton, Florida 33449\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-561-438-4800\n\nCorporate Fax Number: 1-561-438-4400\n\nCorporate Email: [email protected]\n\nOfficeMax Corporate Office Headquarters\n\n263 Shuman Boulevard\n\nNaperville,", + " IL 60563\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-630-438-7800\n\nPetco Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nPetco Animal Supplies Stores, Inc.\n\n9125 Rehco Rd.\n\nSan Diego, California 92121 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-858-453-7845\n\nFax Number: 1-858-784-3489\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-888-824-7257\n\nPetSmart Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nPetSmart, Inc.\n\n19601 North 27th Avenue\n\nPhoenix, AZ 85027 United States\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-623-580-", + "6100\n\nFax: 1-623-395-6517\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-888-839-9638\n\nProctor & Gamble\n\nProcter and Gamble Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nOne Procter & Gamble Plaza\n\nCincinnati, OH 45202 United States\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-513-983-1100\n\nFax: 1-513-983-4381\n\nCustomer Service Number: Product Specific\n\nEmail: Online Only\n\nRadio Shack Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nRadioShack Corporation\n\n300 RadioShack Circle, Mail Stop CF3-201\n\nFort Worth, TX 76102-", + "1964 United States\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-817-415-3011\n\nFax Number: 1-817-415-2647\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-800-843-7422\n\nSears Corporate Office Headquarters in the USA:\n\nAddress: 3333 Beverly Road\n\nHoffman Estates, Illinois 60179 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-847-286-2500\n\nCorporate Fax Number: 1-847-286-8351\n\nCorporate Email: [email protected]\n\nSleepy's\n\nsleepys.com\n\nMattress Giant Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nMattress Firm Holding Corp.\n\n5815 Gulf Freeway\n\nHouston,", + " TX 77023 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-713-923-1090\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-866-942-3551\n\nStaples Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nFive Hundred Staples Drive\n\nFramingham, MA 01702 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-508-253-5000\n\nFax Number: 1-508-253-8989\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-800-333-3330\n\nTarget Corporate Office Headquarters HQ in the USA:\n\n1000 Nicollet Mall\n\nMinneapolis, MN 55403 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-612-", + "304-6073\n\nCorporate Fax Number: 1-612-761-5555\n\nCorporate Email: Online only at http://www.target.com/\n\nToys R Us Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nToys R Us, Inc.\n\n1 Geoffrey Way\n\nWayne, NJ 07470-2030 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-973-617-3500\n\nFax: 973-617-4006\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-800-869-7787\n\nEmail: Online Only\n\nTrue Value Corporate Office Headquarters\n\nTrue Value Company\n\n8600 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.\n\nChicago, IL 60631-", + "3505 USA\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-773-695-5000\n\nCustomer Service Number: 1-773-695-5000\n\nVerizon\n\nVerizon Corporate Office Headquarters\n\n140 West Street\n\nNew York, NY 10007\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-212-395-1000\n\nCorporate Fax Number: 1-212-571-1897\n\nWalmart Corporate Office Headquarters in the USA\n\n702 SW 8th Street\n\nBentonville, Arkansas 72716-8611\n\nCorporate Phone Number: 1-800-925-6278 or 1-479-273-", + "4000\n\nCorporate Fax Number: 1-479-277-1830\n\nCorporate Email: [email protected]\n\nWalgreen Company Corporate Office\n\n106 Wilmot Road, MS 1640\n\nDeerfield, IL 60015\n\n1-847-940-2500\n\nOnline Inquiries:\n\n1-877-250-5823\n\nStore Inquiries:\n\n1-800-WALGREENS\n\n1-800-925-4733\n\nwalgreens.com\n\nLOCAL ADVERTISERS:\n\nAcorn Starlifts\n\nacornstarlifts.com\n\nUS Corporate office\n\nAcorn Stairlifts Inc.\n\n7335 Lake Ellenor Drive\n\nOrlando Florida 32809\n\nUSA\n\nGeneral Enquiries:", + " 888-212-8995\n\n1-877-281-5259\n\nAcura of Ramsey\n\nwww.AcuraOfRamsey.com\n\n65 Route 17 South\n\nRamsey, NJ\n\n1-201-934-8200\n\nArroway Chevrolet\n\nwww.ArrowayChevy.com\n\nRoute 117\n\nMt. Kisco, NY\n\n1-888-277-6929\n\nBatteries & Bulbs Plus\n\n300 Tarrytown Road\n\nWhite Plains, NY\n\n1-914-997-9400\n\nBig Dee Volvo\n\nwww.BigDeeVolvo.com\n\n262 East Main Street\n\nElmsford,", + " NY\n\n1-866-395-6386\n\nBill Kolb Jr. Subaru\n\nwww.BKCars.com\n\nRoute 30\n\nOrangeburg, NY\n\n1-866-414-0814\n\nBrewster Honda\n\nbrewsterhonda.com\n\n899 Route 22\n\nBrewster, NY\n\n1-845-278-4100\n\nCroton Auto Park\n\nRoute 9A & 129\n\nCroton-On-Hudson, NY\n\n1-914-271-5100\n\nCurry Honda\n\ncurryhonda.com\n\n3845 Crompond Road\n\nYorktown Heights, NY\n\n1-866-", + "486-9463\n\nCurry Hyundai\n\nwww.curryhyundai.com\n\n3040 East Main Street\n\nCortlandt Manor, NY\n\n1-866-429-7471\n\nCurry Nissan\n\nwww.CurryNissan.com\n\n3495 Crompond Road\n\nYorktown Heights, NY\n\n1-877-876-5324\n\nCurry Subaru\n\nwww.CurrySubaru.com\n\n3040 East Main Street\n\nCortlandt Manor, NY\n\n1-866-489-2664\n\nCurry Toyota\n\nCurryToyota.com\n\n3026 East Main Street\n\nCortlandt Manor, NY\n\n1-", + "888-886-0695\n\nDCH Paramus Honda\n\nwww.DCHParamusHonda.com\n\n120 Route 4 East\n\nParamus, NJ\n\n1-877-606-1414\n\nDCH Toyota Scion City\n\ndchtoyotacity.com\n\n1305 E. Boston Post Road\n\nMamaroneck, NY 10543\n\n1-888-460-7112\n\nEmpire City Casino at Yonkers Raceway\n\nwww.empirecitycasino.com\n\n810 Yonkers Avenue\n\nYonkers, NY 10704\n\n1-914-968-4200\n\nFirst Street\n\nwww.jitterbugdirect.com\n\n1998 Ruffin Mill Road\n\nColonial Heights,", + " VA\n\n1-877-665-3312\n\nHonda of New Rochelle\n\nwww.HondaOfNewRochelle.com\n\n25 East Main Street\n\nNew Rochelle, NY\n\n1-800-639-8294\n\nFirst Street\n\njitterbugdirect.com\n\n1998 Ruffin Mill Road\n\nColonial Heights, VA\n\n1-877-665-3312\n\nHyundai of White Plains\n\nhyundaiofwhiteplains.com\n\n130 Westchester Avenue\n\nWhite Plains, NY\n\n1-800-730-7903\n\nJennifer Convertibles\n\njenniferconvertibles.com\n\n2373 Central Avenue\n\nYonkers,", + " NY\n\n1-914-779-0214\n\nJennifer Convertibles\n\nwww.jenniferconvertibles.com\n\n2373 Central Avenue\n\nYonkers, NY\n\n1-914-779-0214\n\nJim Harte Nissan\n\nwww.JimHarteNissan.com\n\n283 North Bedford Road\n\nMt. Kisco, NY\n\n1-877-661-4901\n\nKIA of West Nyack\n\nwww.KiaOfWestNyack.com\n\n250 Route 303 North\n\nWest Nyack, NY\n\n1-845-353-1919\n\nLiberty Hyundai\n\nwww.LibertyHyundai.com\n\n305 Route 17 North\n\nMahwah,", + " NJ\n\n1-201-529-2400\n\nMt. Kisco Honda\n\nmtkiscohonda.com\n\nRoute 117\n\nBedford Hills, NY\n\n1-914-666-0030\n\nNew Country Audi of Greenwich\n\nwww.NewCountryAudi.com\n\n181 West Putnam Avenue\n\nGreenwich, NY\n\n1-203-661-1800\n\nNew Rochelle Chevrolet\n\nwww.newrochellechevyny.com\n\n291 Main Street\n\nNew Rochelle, NY\n\n1-800-750-2651\n\nNew Rochelle Hyundai\n\nwww.HyundaiOfNewRoc.com\n\n125 East Main Street\n\nNew Rochelle,", + " NY\n\n1-914-654-8300\n\nNew Rochelle Toyota\n\nnewrochelletoyota.com\n\n47 Cedar Street\n\nNew Rochelle, NY\n\n1-888-498-4843\n\nNissan City\n\nwww.nissancity.com\n\n225 Boston Post Road\n\nPort Chester, NY\n\n1-866-589-2356\n\nP.C. Richard & Son, LLC\n\npcrichardc.om\n\n150 Price Pkwy. Farmingdale,\n\nNew York 11735 USA\n\n1-866-419-4096\n\nRockland Nissan\n\nwww.RocklandNissan.com\n\n608 Route 303 South\n\nBlauvelt,", + " NY\n\n1-888-614-8898\n\nRye Ford\n\nryeford.com\n\n1151 Boston Post Road\n\nRye, NY\n\n1-914-967-6300\n\nSchultz Ford-Lincoln\n\n877shultz.com\n\n80 Route 304\n\nNanuet, NY\n\n1-845-624-3600\n\nStickley Audi & Company\n\nstickleyaudi.com\n\n207 W. 25th Street\n\nManhattan, NY\n\n1-212-337-0700\n\nTarrytown Honda\n\ntarrytownhonda.com\n\n480 S. Broadway\n\nTarrytown, NY\n\n1-", + "888-408-0673\n\nVarmax Liquor Pantry\n\nvarmax.com\n\n19 Putnam Avenue\n\nPort Chester, NY 10573\n\n1-914-937-4930\n\nWestchester Subaru\n\nwww.westchestersubaru.com\n\n258 East Main Street\n\nElmsford, NY\n\n1-888-747-8929\n\nWestchester Toyota\n\nwww.westchestertoyota.com\n\n2167 Central Park Avenue\n\nYonkers, NY 10710\n\n1-888-560-6662\n\nSales: 888-224-4595\n\nFax: 914-779-7623\n\nWhite Plains Dodge Chrysler Jeep\n\nwww.WhitePlainsChrysler.com\n\n70 Westchester Avenue\n\nWhite Plains,", + " NY\n\n1-800-679-0328\n\nWhite Plains Buick GMC\n\nwww.WhitePlainsBuickGMC.com\n\n358 Central Avenue\n\nWhite Plains, NY\n\n1-800-799-6795\n\nWhite Plains Honda\n\nwhiteplainshonda.com\n\n344 Central Avenue\n\nWhite Plains, NY 10606\n\n1-877-553-9292\n\nWorld Wide BMW\n\nworldwidebmw.com\n\n125 E. Route 59\n\nSpring Valley, NY\n\n1-800-635-2697\n\nUPDATED 12/30 5:45 PM\n\nStacy A. Anderson and Yaron Weitzman were removed as they no longer work at the Journal News.", + " Nancy Cutler, Elizabeth Ganga, Thane Grauel were on the map and updated. Scott Faubel is not on the map but was updated.\n\nNew to the map are Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, Terence Corcoran, Jon Campbell, George Troyano, Brian Tumulty, Greg Shillinglaw, YS------, Shawn Cohen, Jane Lerner, Herb Pinder, Marcela Rojas, Eileen Zaccagnino, Mary Dolan, Theresa Juva-Brown, Laura Incalcaterra, and Colin Gustafson.\n\nThere are 92 names on the list. That gets up to 42 names on the map.", + " So we are just short of half at this point although may me understanting things as some of the 92 may no longer work at the Journal News or work as freelancers. We are only interested in full-time employees.\n\nThe list is now color-coded. Employees in GREEN are on the map but may be missing some information which is indicated in RED. Employees in ALL RED are not on the map because we do not have home address information.\n\nThere have been hundreds of emails with lots of suggestions but there are a few folks that have been working these names very hard over the past couple days and I want to acknowledge them by initials -- JK,", + " PT, BM, BG, SM, CB, MR, GA, JD, SK, BW, SS, RH, GB,\n\nUPDATED 12/31 4:45 PM\n\nRemoved Robert Marchant, he no longer works at the Journal News\n\nAdd to the map are Vincent Mercogliano, Carrie Yale, Heather Salerno, Mauro Ferrotta, Scott Faubel, John Czarnecki, Terence Corcoran, Colin Gustafson, Ned Rauch, Marcela Rojas, Matthew Brown, Gary McGriff, Akiko Matsuda, Linda Lombroso, Betsy Lombardi, Elaine Kirsch,", + " Robert Brum.\n\nThat makes it 57 of 91 or 63%.\n\nWe have 34 names left to either clear (are not full-time employees) or get on the map. They are Chris Brown, Albert Conte, Ed Cummins, Wilfred David, Mike Dougherty, Ricky Flores, Ernie Garcia, Tessa Garcia, Tim Henderson, Lee Higgins, Brian Howard, Liz Johnson, Chad Jennings, Peter Kramer, Rich Liebson, Cara Matthews, Sean Mayer, Joe McDonald, Caryn McBride, Mike Meaney, Jill Mercadante, Kathy Moore, Mareesa Nicosia, Cathey O\u2019Donnell,", + " James O'Rourke, Leah Rae, Ben Rubin, Khurram Saeed, Erik Shilling, Joe Spector, Gary Stern, Alex Taylor, and Chris Vaughan.\n\nAs noted above, names below in GREEN are on the map but may be missing a single item (marked in RED). Names in red are the ones not yet on the map.\n\nUPDATED 1/1 6:30 PM\n\nLiz Johnson, Mike Meaney, Wilfred David, Cara Matthews were added to the map. YS------ was edited because we got an exact address. Chris Brown was removed because he is a freelancer.\n\nThat makes it 61 of 90 or 68%.\n\nUPDATED 1/", + "2 2:30 PM\n\nThe following were added to the map: Caryn McBride, Mareesa Nicosia, Leah Rae, Erik Shilling, Ed Cummins and Rich Liebson. Ben Rubin was removed because he does not work there anymore.\n\nThat gets us to 77 out of 89 or 75%.\n\nWe have 12 names left to either clear (are not full-time employees) or get on the map. They are Albert Conte, Mike Dougherty, Ricky Flores, Ernie Garcia, Tessa Garcia, Tim Henderson, Lee Higgins, Brian Howard, Chad Jennings, Peter Kramer, Sean Mayer, Joe McDonald,", + " Jill Mercadante, Kathy Moore, Cathey O\u2019Donnell, James O'Rourke, Khurram Saeed, Joe Spector, Gary Stern, Alex Taylor, and Chris Vaughan.\n\nUPDATED 1/2 6:30 PM\n\nThe following were added to the map: Jill Mercadante, Chris Vaughan, Tim Henderson, Tessa Garcia.\n\nCathey O\u2019Donnell was removed because she does not work there anymore.\n\nWow! That gets us to 71 of 83 or 86%\n\nWe have 12 names left to either clear (are not full-time employees) or get on the map. They are Albert Conte,", + " Mike Dougherty, Ricky Flores, Ernie Garcia, Lee Higgins, Brian Howard, Chad Jennings, Peter Kramer, Sean Mayer, Joe McDonald, Kathy Moore, James O'Rourke, Khurram Saeed, Joe Spector, Gary Stern, and Alex Taylor.\n\nADDED: Sean Mayer, Joseph Spector, Gary Stern\n\nREMOVED: Joe McDonald (no longer works at Journal News.\n\nThat gets us to 74 of 82 or 90%. We have 8 names left.\n\nSMALL FAVOR TO MY TEAM: While I have this crack team of researches hard at work I will take everything you can find on these two individuals James Vincent Bonanno and his son,", + " Vince James Bonanno. You can certainly appreciate that given my willingness to take on causes like this Journal News map I have made more than my share of The Bonannos are currently suing me for defamation in New York State Supreme Court because I accurately reported on their various misdeeds. They both work for the local school district.\n\nThis is the father\u2026\n\nJames Vincent Bonanno\n\n24 Ronalds Avenue\n\nNew Rochelle, NY\n\nNot sure where the son lives\u2026\n\nVince James Bonanno (\"Little Jimmy\")\n\nAny information you can pull on them will be appreciated. Little Jimmy, a heroin addict who is in the Westchester County Methadone Program has at least one prior arrest that I know of,", + " not sure about the father. I believe the father is also involved in various side-businesses.\n\nJOURNAL NEWS REPORTERS/EDITORS/STAFF\n\n**The Journal News/LoHud.com**\n\nMain Office:\n\nThe Journal News\n\n1133 Westchester Avenue\n\nSuite N110\n\nWhite Plains, NY 10604\n\nMain phone number: 914-694-9300\n\nReport breaking news: 914-694-5077\n\n**The Journal News/LoHud.com**\n\nMount Kisco Bureau\n\nThe Journal News\n\n1133 Westchester Avenue\n\n185 Kisco Avenue\n\nMount Kisco, NY 10549\n\nMain phone number:", + " 914-666-6579\n\nThe Mt. Kisco office of The Journal News covers news and newsmakers in northern Westchester and Putnam. It is staffed editorially with advertising. Breaking news, features and editorials.\n\n**Liz Anderson (Elizabeth Anderson Steinke)**\n\nWestchester/Putnam Local News Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n226 Read Avenue\n\nTuckahoe, NY 10707\n\nHome Phone: 914-779-2081\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8538\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/lizsteinke,", + " https://twitter.com/lizsteinkelizscribe\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/lizsteinke\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/2429594937/al4lffav3ybii4f0df34.png\n\n**Jonathan Bandler**\n\nInvestigations Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n600 Columbus Ave #3H\n\nNew York, NY 10024\n\n212-579-7348\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/jonbandler\n\nFB: http://www.facebook.com/jon.bandler\n\nLinkedIN:", + " http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jon-bandler/12/586/851\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1764573322/.jpg\n\n**Frank A. Becerra, Jr.**\n\nPhotographer\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n20 Ernest Road\n\nBrewster, NY 10509-4336\n\n845-278-1933\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/frank.becerra.37\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/frank-becerra/17/b00/4a0\n\nImage File:", + " http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/fbecerra.jpg\n\n**Matthew Brown**\n\nPhotographer\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n90 Wood Street\n\nMahopac, NY 10541-4904\n\n914-769-5845\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/MattBrownLoHud\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/mbrown.jpg\n\nMatthew Brown joined The Journal News in March 1994. He covers a variety of assignments as a Visual Journalist for The Journal News and LoHud.com.", + " For the past year, he has been able to bring his cameras into the schools, covering visual stories of interest to the communities in White Plains, Valhalla, Elmsford and Greenburgh School districts. Prior to that, he could be seen on the sidelines covering major and local sporting events or behind the scenes covering local news in the tri-county coverage area of The Journal News. Prior to coming to work for the Journal News, he worked as a Sports Picture Editor for the Providence (R.I.) Journal and as a Boston-based freelance photojournalist for the Associated Press wire service.\n\n**Robert Brum**\n\nNorthern Westchester News Manager\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n11 Deer Tree Ln Unit 1102\n\nBriarcliff Manor, NY 10510-1752\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-666-6579\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertbrum\n\nImage File: http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrink_200_200/p/1/000/024/2b2/399d064...\n\n**Jon Campbell**\n\nState Government Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n150 State Street Albany,", + " NY 12207\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:518-436-9781\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/JonCampbellGAN\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/jon.campbell.184?ref=ts&fref=ts\n\nLinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/pub/jon-campbell/13/20b/424/\n\nImage File: http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/media/p/1/000/095/3dd/018d1df.jpg\n\n**Rick Carpiniello**\n\nRangers Beat Writer\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n25 Parry Road\n\nStamford,", + " CT 06907\n\n203-979-1226\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/RangersReport, https://twitter.com/CarpRick\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1423479317/carp.jpg\n\n**Peter Carr**\n\nPhotographer\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/peter.carr.5496\n\nLinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/pub/peter-carr/25/364/", + "795\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/pcarr.jpg\n\n**Shawn Cohen**\n\nWestchester County Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n5800 Arlington Ave, Apt 20V Bronx, NY 10471-1422\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5046\n\nWork Email: [email protected], [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/spccohen\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/shawn.cohen.37\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/2321165831/a89l10n9fkakp0ii7dbi_big...\n\nAlbert Conte\n\nPhoto Reprints\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8401\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/albert-conte/24/120/418\n\nImage File:\n\n**Terence Corcoran**\n\nNorthern Westchester and Putnam County\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n20 Park South Dr\n\nRye, NY 10580\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/corcoranterence\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/terence.corcoran.", + "3\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/terence-corcoran/20/802/67\n\nImage File: https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-ash3/c76.0.453.453/s160...\n\n**Karen Croke**\n\nLoHud Weekend\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n15 Grove Street\n\nPleasantville, NY 10570-2103\n\n914-769-9234\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8267\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/KarenCroke https://twitter.com/livinghereNY\n\nFB:", + " https://www.facebook.com/karen.croke.12#!/kcroke1\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/karen-croke/a/1a1/71b\n\nImage File: https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/c59.59.732.732/s16...\n\n**Ed Cummins**\n\nNews Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n21 Harrison Street\n\nCroton, NY 10520-2132\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/ed.cummins.54\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/", + "ed-cummins/16/413/5a5\n\nImage File: http://www.newrochelletalk.com/files/EdCummins.jpg\n\n**Nancy Cutler**\n\nOpinion Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n81 Elysian Avenue\n\nNyack, NY 10960\n\n845-353-4647\n\nWork Phone: 845-578-2403\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/nancyrockland\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.cutler.16\n\nLinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/pub/nancy-cutler/10/", + "412/44\n\nImage File: http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1307085494/nancyhedshottjndc5-5bhwwlg...\n\n**John Czarnecki**\n\nHome Delivery Operations Manager\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n31 Midland Ave Apt\n\nWhite Plains, NY 10606-2824\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8540\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/pub/john-czarnecki/3/a24/755\n\nImage File:\n\n**Wilfred David**\n\nReporter\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n32 Undercliff Street Apt 2\n\nYonkers, NY 10705-1433\n\n914-965-1695\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/will-david/1b/27/809\n\nImage File:\n\nWill covers police news in New Rochelle, Scarsdale, Eastchester, Bronxville, Tuckahoe, Mount Vernon and Yonkers.\n\n**Anjanette Rieger Delgado**\n\nInteractivity Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n7 Sunset Trail New Fairfield,", + " CT 06812\n\n203-746-6429\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5072\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/anjdelgado\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/anjanette.delgado\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: http://www.gannett.com/assets/pdf/5Z170359212.JPG\n\n**Mary Dolan**\n\nDeputy Managing Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n70 Morningside Drive\n\nCroton, NY 10520-2807\n\n914-271-7929\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5230\n\nWork Email:", + " [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/featuresed\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/pub/mary-dolan/62/645/397 (REMOVED)\n\nImage File: http://www.gannett.com/assets/pdf/5Z170361212.JPG\n\nMike Dougherty\n\nSports Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/hoopsmbd\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\n**Hema Easley**\n\nClarkstown Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n18 Bianca Boulevard\n\nChester,", + " NY 10918\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/EasleyH\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/hema-easley/23/690/26\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/heasley.jpg\n\n**Scott Faubel**\n\nWhite Plains News Manager\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n20 Bursley Place\n\nWhite Plains, NY 10605\n\n914-289-0497\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8569\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB:", + " https://www.facebook.com/#!/d.scott.faubel\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/d-scott-faubel/18/4b6/25b\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/sfaubel.jpg\n\nD. Scott Faubel is The Journal News/LoHud.com\u2019s assistant local editor for central Westchester. He has been with the organization nearly 30 years, working in many of the communities it covers on the east side of the Hudson River. He grew up in Westchester and Putnam counties and now lives in White Plains.\n\n**Mauro Ferrotta**\n\nSingle Copy Manager\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n19 Mayflower Avenue\n\nDover Plains, NY 12522-5610\n\n845-298-9037\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5233\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB: http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash3/c0.5.180.180/s160x160/5408_...\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mauro-ferrotta/1b/499/79b\n\nImage File: http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash3/c0.5.", + "180.180/s160x160/5408_...\n\n**Jorge Fitz-Gibbon**\n\nInvestigations Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n53B Van Cortlandt Avenue\n\nOssining, NY 10562-3308\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5016\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/jfitzgibbon\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/jorge.fitzgibbon?fref=ts\n\nLinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/pub/jorge-fitz-gibbon/4/9ab/80a/\n\nImage File:http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/", + "677617775/Picture_1_reasonably_small.png\n\n**Ed Forbes**\n\nDigital Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n67 Grandview Drive\n\nMount Kisco, NY 10549\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8488\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/edforbes\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/ed.forbes\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/edforbes\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1985407680/FORBES_ED_MUG_TWITTER.jpg\n\nRicky Flores\n\nPhotographer\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone: 914-500-8523\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/Ricky_Flores\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/Flores.photography\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\n**Elizabeth Ganga**\n\nReporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n29 Vollmer Avenue\n\nNorwalk, CT 06851\n\nHome Phone: 203-847-2215\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/eganga\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/", + "#!/elizabeth.ganga.5, https://www.facebook.com/#!/elizabeth.ganga.5.5 (REMOVED)\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/elizabethganga.jpg\n\nElizabeth Ganga covers the towns of North Castle and North Salem along with the North Salem and Byram Hills school districts. She has worked for The Journal News/LoHud.com since 2000.\n\nErnie Garcia\n\nSmall Business/Consumer News Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8290\n\nWork Email:", + " [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/YonkersReporter\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/#!/ernie.garcia.777158\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/271089_107153612714282_37636...\n\nTessa Garcia\n\nDirector, Marketing and Client Solutions\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n4 Echo Lane\n\nWarwick, NY 10990-2707\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5188\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:", + " http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tessa-garcia/9/928/291/\n\nImage File:\n\n**Thane Grauel (Ian Thane Grauel)**\n\nLocal Editor Rockland/Digital Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n29 Vollmer Avenue\n\nNorwalk CT 06851\n\nHome Phone: 203-847-2215\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/thaneg (REMOVED)\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/#!/thaneg\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/thane-grauel/9/35/957 (REMOVED)\n\nImage File:", + " https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_images/2516613099/2oen7uzstpecbyeh...\n\n**Colin Gustafson**\n\nReporter for Yonkers and Mount Vernon\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n327 Henry Street Apt 1F\n\nBrooklyn, NY 11201-6757\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5077\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/GustafsonC\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/colin.gustafson.9\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/", + "colin-gustafson/54/2b3/195\n\nImage File: https://profile-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ash3/c127.37.466.466/s160x160/64...\n\nColin grew up in Washington, D.C., went to college in St. Paul, Minn., and now lives in Queens. Before joining The Journal News, he worked as an education reporter for Greenwich Time, a daily newspaper in Connecticut. Before that, he was a contributor to the business desk at the New York Sun and an assistant managing editor at the weekly Queens Chronicle.\n\n**Seth Harrison**\n\nPhotographer\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n107 Valleyview Rd\n\nIrvington, NY 10533\n\n(914) 231-5411\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/seth.harrison.391\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\nSeth Harrison has been a staff photographer at The Journal News since 1987. In that time, he has covered 9/11, elections in Israel, national political conventions, several World Series, and all facets of local news. Covering national and international events is exciting, however Harrison gains tremendous satisfaction telling the stories close to home.", + " \"The mother who has dedicated her life to helping to find a cure for the rare and fatal disease that afflicts her son, the story of troubled children housed in residential treatment centers, or the scores of young Mormon's who come to this area every year to try to spread their faith, are the types of stories that allow me to step in to the lives of our neighbors and offer a glimpse of lives that, while unfolding right around the corner, are very different from our own.\" Harrison has a bachelor's degree in photojournalism from Rochester Institute of Technology. A lower Westchester resident, he was born in Brooklyn, and grew up in Yonkers and Hastings-on-Hudson.", + " He is married with three daughters.\n\n**Janet Hasson**\n\nPublisher\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n3 Gate House Lane\n\nMamaroneck, NY 10543\n\nHome Phone: (914) 694-5204\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/janet-hasson/6/316/254\n\nZillow: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/17-Mcbride-Ave-White-Plains-NY-10603/3...\n\nImage File: http://www.westchestermagazine.com/images/", + "2011/BLOGS/June/914INC/Blog_Ja...\n\n**Tim Henderson**\n\nData Analyst\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n111 W Washington Avenue\n\nPearl River, NY 10965-2112\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/timhendo\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/henderson.tim\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tim-henderson/4/264/429\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/2797748958/0aa24ccd8e093b25a31ee47b...\n\nLee Higgins\n\nBreaking News Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8570\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/LeeHiggins\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\nBrian Howard\n\nSocial Media Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-666-6177\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/TheBrianHoward\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/howard.brian#!/HowardBrianJ\n\nLinkedIN: linkd.in/UbA6UX\n\nImage File:\n\n**Laura Incalcaterra**\n\nReporter for Rockland Government/", + "Politics, Environment, Development and Housing\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n78 Regina Road\n\nAirmont, NY 10952\n\n845-356-9215\n\nWork Phone: 845-578-2486\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/LauraLoHud (REMOVED)\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/lincalcaterra.jpg\n\nLaura Incalcaterra covers the environment, open space and zoning and planning issues for The Journal News. A Boston College graduate, Laura grew up in Rockland, attended East Ramapo schools and has worked for The Journal News since 1993.", + " Laura has written features and covered North Rockland, crime, government and a host of other issues.\n\n**Liz Johnson**\n\nFood Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n4A Ross Avenue #A\n\nNyack, NY 10960-4309\n\n845-353-3351\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5075\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/small_bites\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/sourcherryfarm\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lizzyj\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1129012341/lizjohnson09_bigger.JPG\n\n**Theresa Juva-Brown**\n\nTransportation Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n21302 75th Avenue Apt #4D\n\nOakland Gardens, NY 11364-3348\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-393-0863\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/TJuva\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/theresa.juvabrown\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/2982488616/4c8bab6336fcbd5ee6f04c5286...\n\nChad Jennings\n\nLoHud Yankees Beat Writer\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter:", + " https://twitter.com/LoHudYankees\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\n**Elaine Kirsch**\n\nDirector/Circulation Operations\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n22 Marget Ann Lane\n\nSuffern, NY 10901-3313\n\n845-358-0787\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8511\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/elaine-kirsch/b/a97/373\n\nImage File:\n\nPeter Kramer\n\nTheater\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter:", + " https://twitter.com/PeterKramer\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\n**James Kwasnik**\n\nOnline Director\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHarrison, NY 10528\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5172\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/schmooze\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/jameskwasnik\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jameskwasnik\n\nImage File: http://m3.licdn.com/mpr/pub/image-TILqHxAbKWWrsOcvmD0IrKIY5ROiFWz6TIEQ0Y...\n\n**Cynthia R.", + " Lambert**\n\nEditor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n17 McBride Ave\n\nWhite Plains, NY 10603\n\n(914) 948-9388\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/croyle1\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/cyndeeroyle?trk=pub-pbmap\n\nImage File: http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/media/p/1/000/105/184/21649c2.jpg\n\n**Jane Lerner**\n\nReporter for Health and Hospitals\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n1 Tilda Lane\n\nNew City,", + " NY 10956\n\n845-634-3512\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-9300\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/JaneLernerNY\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/jane.lerner1 (REMOVED)\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jane-lerner/10/317/260/\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/jlerner.jpg\n\nJane Lerner covers the health and hospitals beat for The Journal News in Rockland. She has worked for The Journal News since 1991, first in Westchester,", + " then in Rockland. She has a master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, where she completed a concentration in health and science writing. She lives in Rockland with her husband and two children.\n\n**Steve Lieberman**\n\nPolice and Courts Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n81 Elysian Avenue\n\nNyack, NY 10960\n\n845-353-4647\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/LoHudLegal\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/steve.lieberman.7\n\nLinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/pub/", + "steve-lieberman/17/796/547\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/slieberman.jpg\n\nSteve Lieberman joined The Journal News as an editor in February 1984 and became a reporter during the spring of 1986. He has covered police, courts and legal issues for more than a decade, after reporting on county, town, village and state governments and general issues. He received more than a dozen state awards for writing and reporting. Born and raised in The Bronx, he has lived in Rockland since 1988.\n\nRich Liebson\n\nReporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n2 Greenacres Way\n\nWhite Plains,", + " NY 10606-3122\n\n914-686-8940\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/RichLiebson\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rich-liebson/a/1a0/404\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/rliebson.jpg\n\nRich Liebson grew up on military bases in the U.S. and Germany as the son of an Air Force master sergeant. After serving four years in the U.S. Army he was hired as a part-time reporter in 1983 and promoted to full-time in 1985.", + " He's had a number of beats over the years including education, municipal government and public safety. He's also been a columnist and city editor for central Westchester. Rich lives in White Plains.\n\n**Betsy Lombardi**\n\nUniversal Desk Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n59 Tamarack Road\n\nRye Brook, NY 10573-2138\n\n914-937-2389\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/betsylombardi (REMOVED)\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/elizabeth-lombardi/39/136/760\n\nImage File:", + " http://www.scrapgirls.com/AboutUs/Bio_BetsyLombardi.jpg\n\n**Linda Lombroso**\n\nFeatures Writer\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n237 Broadfield Rd\n\nNew Rochelle, NY 10804-2409\n\n914-654-0527\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/LindaLombroso\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/lindalombroso\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: http://lohudblogs.com/mugs/llombroso.jpg\n\n**Akiko Matsuda**\n\nReporter for Haverstraw and Stony Point\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n4329 Broadway Apt 5B\n\nNew York, NY 10033-2404\n\nNEW YORK COUNTY\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/LoHudAkiko\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/akiko-matsuda/10/54a/13\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/amatsuda.jpg\n\nAkiko Matsuda has been a reporter with The Journal News since August 2005, covering the communities of North Rockland \u2014 Haverstraw town and village,", + " Pomona, West Haverstraw, Stony Point. Before that, she covered local governments in upstate New York and Connecticut. A Japanese native, she was a reporter and news anchor for a TV station in Sapporo, covering various beats, including courts, politics and the environment.\n\n**Cara Matthews**\n\nStatehouse Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n12 Hamilton Avenue Apt A\n\nNorwalk, CT 06854-3510\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/GannettAlbany\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/cara.matthews.", + "54\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/cara-matthews/35/139/336\n\nImage File: https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-ash4/c0.13.80.80/208440...\n\n**Sean Mayer**\n\nSports and Operations Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n5 Edward Place\n\nMonroe, NY 10950\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8527\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/scoopmayer35\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/sean.mayer\n\nLinkedIN:", + " http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sean-mayer/6/b13/b58\n\nImage: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/2685229598/12c5242e36d86a0613d86367...\n\n**Caryn McBride**\n\nREMOVED BY REQUEST -- No Longer Employed by Journal News\n\n**Gary McGriff**\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n14 Ball Pond Road\n\nNew Fairfield, CT 06812-4920\n\n203-312-0805\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/gary.mcgriff\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:", + " https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/c113.33.414.414/s1...\n\n**Mike Meaney**\n\nMorning Breaking News\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n118 Frank Ave\n\nMamaroneck, NY 10543-2808\n\n914-381-4245\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8565\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/michael.meaney.125\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelmeaney/\n\nImage File: https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-", + "ak-ash4/c0.54.180.180/s160...\n\n**Vincent Mercogliano**\n\nHigh School Sports Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n475 Wilmot Road New Rochelle, NY 10804-1019\n\n914-637-9367\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/vzmercogliano\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentmercogliano\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1607948970/mecropped3_bigger.jpg\n\n**Jill Mercadante**\n\nMultimedia/", + "Marketing Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n222 Sackett Street #2F\n\nBrooklyn, NY 11231\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/tumbling_after\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/jill.mercadante\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jill-mercadante/13/642/5a0\n\nImage File: http://media-cache-ec2.pinterest.com/avatars/tumblingafter_1329768787_60...\n\nKathy Moore (Kathy Moore O'Connor)\n\nLocal Content Editor\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n11 Woodland Drive\n\nBrewster, NY 10509-2523\n\n845-278-0144, 845-279-2666\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-3523\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kathy-moore-o-connor/59/679/160\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/kmoore.jpg\n\nKathy Moore is the local editor for northern Westchester and Putnam counties. She began working at The Journal News in 1985 and covered towns,", + " schools, Mount Vernon City Hall, Putnam County government and general assignment before becoming a bureau chief and then an editor overseeing the northern reaches of our coverage area. She works with a terrific staff in the paper\u2019s Mount Kisco office whose writing and reporting fuels The Journal News, Lohud.com, the Northern Westchester and Yorktown/Cortlandt Express and their corresponding community blogs.\n\n**Barbara L Nackman**\n\nReporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n279 Farrington Avenue\n\nTarrytown, NY 10591\n\n(914) 332-5185\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\nA municipal reporter for The Journal News since 1997,", + " Barbara Livingston Nackman has covered local governments, events and breaking news from many communities. She began her journalism career by writing for bookselling and library publications. She reported on Putnam County communities for 10 years before getting her latest assignment, keeping track of Briarcliff Manor and Somers.\n\n**Mareesa Nicosia**\n\nRamapo Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n104 Gordon Ave\n\nSleepy Hollow, NY 10591-1910\n\n585-402-6535, 607-437-1895\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/Mareesanicosia\n\nFB:", + " http://www.facebook.com/mareesa.nicosia?fref=ts\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mareesa-nicosia/5/a99/18\n\nImage File: http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrink_80_80/p/4/000/169/36f/0528346.jpg\n\nCathey O\u2019Donnell\n\nReporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-3596\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/catheyodonnell\n\nFB:", + " https://www.facebook.com/cathey.odonnell.7\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\nJames O'Rourke\n\nWestchester and Rockland County Night Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/NightWriter_TJN\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\n**Herb Pinder**\n\nOpinion Page Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n66 W 89th St Apt# 2R\n\nNew York, NY 10024-2045\n\n212-769-1945\n\nWork Phone: 914-", + "694-5031\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/herbpinderNY\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/herb-pinder/15/935/462\n\nImage File: http://m3.licdn.com/mpr/pub/image-0WglTCMcAxljLDuquqGUlnKTF-i6J-tzpBsblk...\n\n**Leah Rae**\n\nReporter for Port Chester, Rye Brook and Rye City\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n13 N Cottenet St\n\nIrvington, NY 10533-1508\n\n914-", + "591-0319\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/LeahRaeNY\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/leah.rae.33\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.http://www.linkedin.com/in/leahrae?trk=pub-pbmap\n\nImage File: http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrink_200_200/p/2/000/104/03d/26e3243...\n\nLeah Rae covers the Port Chester-Rye Brook beat for The Journal News. She\u2019s written about Westchester's immigrant population since joining the paper in 1994,", + " and reported from two immigrant \u201chometowns\u201d in Ecuador and Guatemala. Leah studied at the University of Toronto and worked at her hometown paper, The Buffalo News, before migrating downstate. She writes the Beyond Borders blog at immigration.lohudblogs.com and contributes to the Sound Shore blog at soundshore.lohudblogs.com.\n\n**Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy**\n\nReporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n306 Quaker Rd\n\nChappaqua, NY 10514\n\n(914) 238-4607\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/SwapnaVenugopal\n\nFB:", + " https://www.facebook.com/swapna.venugopal.14\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\nSwapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, a staff writer for The Journal News/LoHud.com, covers several communities in Westchester County and writes about everything from local politics to schools to development issues. She joined the paper in October 2006 and expanded her byline to include Ramaswamy -- reportedly the longest byline ever. Previously, Swapna worked as a municipal reporter for the Home News Tribune in New Jersey and interned at the New York Daily News as a general assignment reporter. She earned a master's degree in journalism from New York University,", + " where she was associate features editor of NYU's daily newspaper, The Washington Square News.\n\n**Ned P. Rauch**\n\nReporter for Harrison and Mt. Vernon\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n922 Lorimer Street Apt 2\n\nBrooklyn, NY 11222-3178\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/NPRauch\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/ned.rauch\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/c90.0.540.", + "540/s160...\n\n**Phil Reisman**\n\nColumnist\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n73 Rossmore Avenue\n\nBronxville, NY 10708\n\n914-337-6522\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5008\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/philreisman\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/phil.reisman\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/phil-reisman/6/237/377\n\nImage File: https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_images/305269697/phil.jpg\n\n**Michael J Risinit**\n\nReporter\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n42 Robinson Lane\n\nWappingers Falls, NY 12590\n\n845-454-2278\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/mikerisinit\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/michael.risinit/info\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\nMike Risinit covers politics, the environment and other issues touching on northern Westchester. He has been a reporter at The Journal News since 1998.\n\n**Robert F. Rodriguez**\n\nVisual Editor\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n420 Riverside Dr, Apt 7A\n\nNew York, NY 10025-", + "7748\n\n212-222-4566\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1522994678\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\n**Marcela Rojas**\n\nReporter for Somers, Ossining and Peekskill\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n43 Mitchell Place Apt\n\nWhite Plains, NY 10601-4337\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone: 845-228-2271\n\nWork Email:[email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/MRO3\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/marcela-rojas/", + "45/416/2ab/\n\nImage File: http://lohudblogs.com/mugs/mrojas.jpg\n\nKhurram Saeed\n\nReporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter: [email protected]\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: http://www.lohudblogs.com/mugs/ksaeed.jpg\n\nKhurram Saeed has been reporting for The Journal News since 2000. He writes about transportation issues in Rockland and has a weekly column called Getting There, which appears Wednesdays. Raised in Chestnut Ridge,", + " Saeed previously worked at a newspaper in Washington and at magazines in Canada. Reach him at [email protected] or 845-578-2412.\n\n**Heather Salerno**\n\nFeature Writer\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n103 Cambridge Ave\n\nGarden City, NY 11530-4101\n\nHome Phone: 516-739-9709\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/heather_salerno\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/heather.salerno.7\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersalerno\n\nImage File:", + " http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrink_200_200/p/4/000/158/2d4/2cab4b8...\n\n**Tania Savayan**\n\nPhotographer\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n7562 Kessel Street Forest Hills, NY 11375-6846\n\n718-793-5642\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/TaniaSavayan\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/tania.savayan\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tania-savayan/", + "3/984/687?_mSplash=1\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1748955967/398693_10150433665426992...\n\n**Erik Shilling**\n\nCourts Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n157 Newell St Fl 3\n\nBrooklyn, NY 11222-3036\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/ErikShilling\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1599921084/profile_reasonably_small.jpg\n\n**Greg Shillinglaw**\n\nReporter for Greenburgh and Mount Pleasant\n\nMultimedia Journalist at The Journal News\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n80 Greenway Drive Irvington, NY 10533-1844\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/gshilly\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/gshillinglaw?ref=ts&fref=ts\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/greg-shillinglaw/2a/706/6b5/\n\nImage File: http://www.thenewshouse.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/profile-norma...\n\n**Joseph Spector**\n\nStatehouse Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n20 Greenock Road\n\nDelmar,", + " NY 12054-3510\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/GannettAlbany\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/2349711046/4otq43a5rnjei3lyr911_big...\n\nYS [Removed upon request, no longer works at the Journal News]\n\nDigital Editor/Nights\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nGary Stern\n\nEducation Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n165 Orchard Street White Plains, NY 10604-1407\n\n914-", + "948-8996\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/faithbeat\n\nFB: http://www.facebook.com/gary.stern.5095?fref=ts\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/303469987/16Gary_Stern_bigger.jpg\n\nAlex Taylor\n\nReporter for Orangetown, Pearl River and Colleges\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nHome Address:\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/alextailored\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\n**George Troyano**\n\nVice President Sales & Marketing\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n2 Rams Gate Court\n\nMedford, NJ 08055-9704\n\n609-953-2745\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5157\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:https://twitter.com/GTmedford\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/george.troyano\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/george-troyano/33/4bb/a84\n\nImage File: http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash3/c0.34.180.180/s160x160/3695...\n\n**Brian Tumulty**\n\nDC Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/", + "LoHud.com\n\n5589 Cedar Break Drive\n\nCentreville, VA 20120-3329\n\n703-830-0926\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:[email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/NYinDc\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/brian.tumulty?ref=ts&fref=ts\n\nLinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/pub/brian-tumulty/4a/879/2b1\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/899919514/brian_bigger.JPG\n\n**Ken Valenti**\n\nReporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n2221 Palmer Ave Apt#", + " 2P\n\nNew Rochelle, NY 10801-3064\n\n914-498-9289\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/lohudgoing, https://twitter.com/NewRoKen\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/ken.valenti, https://www.facebook.com/ken.valenti.1\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ken-valenti/a/677/59\n\nImage File: http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrink_200_200/p/3/000/01e/266/", + "3646910...\n\n**Chris Vaughan**\n\nCommunity Web Producer\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\nStreet Address:\n\nTarrytown, NY\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisLLVaughan\n\nFB: http://www.facebook.com/christopher.vaughan2?fref=ts\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1752407565/Picture_5_reasonably_small...\n\n**Randi Weiner (Randi W. Gormley)**\n\nReporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n843 Mill Plain Road\n\nFairfield,", + " CT 06824\n\n203-254-3285\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email:\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/randi.weiner.92\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc6/c0.40.180.180/s160x160/2263...\n\n**Alex Weisler**\n\nReporter for Mount Kisco, New Castle and North Castle\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n5 Wheatstone Road\n\nNew City, NY 10956-2515\n\n845-639-0868\n\nWork Phone: 914-666-6482\n\nWork Email:", + " [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/alexweisler\n\nFB: http://www.facebook.com/weisler.alex\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexweisler\n\nImage File: http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrink_200_200/p/4/000/177/110/1935719...\n\n**David McKay Wilson**\n\nColumnist\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n104 Topland Rd\n\nMahopac, New York 10541\n\nHome Phone:\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/davidmckay415\n\nFB:", + " https://www.facebook.com/davidmckaywilson\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File:\n\n**Dwight R Worley**\n\nEducation Reporter\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n230-6 139th Avenue\n\nQueens, NY 11413\n\n718-527-0832\n\nWork Phone:\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter: https://twitter.com/dwightworley\n\nFB:\n\nLinkedIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dwightworley\n\nImage File: http://lohudblogs.com/mugs/dworley.jpg\n\nDwight R. Worley is an education/urban affairs reporter covering central Westchester schools for The Journal News,", + " The White Plains Express and LoHud.com. He also serves as a database reporter for the publications, using computer-assisted reporting techniques to develop a wide range of stories about diversity, race, immigration and how changing demographics have impacted the Lower Hudson Valley. He joined The Journal News in 1999 as a business reporter.\n\n**Carrie Yale**\n\nVisuals Director\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n10 Meadowbrook Court Apt 1B\n\nBrewster, NY 10509-3616\n\n914-948-6312\n\nWork Phone: 914-694-5092\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:", + " https://twitter.com/carrieyale\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/carrie.yale.7\n\nLinkedIN:\n\nImage File: https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1777110797/me1_bigger.jpg\n\n**Eileen Zaccagnino**\n\nOnline Ad Director\n\nThe Journal News/LoHud.com\n\n6 Birch Road\n\nSouth Salem, NY 10590-2314\n\n914-533-5278\n\nWork Phone: 914-696-8463\n\nWork Email: [email protected]\n\nTwitter:\n\nFB: https://www.facebook.com/eileen.zaccagnino?fref=ts\n\nLinkedIN:", + " http://www.linkedin.com/in/eileenzaccagnino/\n\nImage File: http://m.c.lnkd.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrink_200_200/p/2/000/1a8/256/15d4520...\n\nUPDATE 12/31 2:20 PM I am in receipt of all communications between the Journal News and the Westchester County Clerk including the entire list of \"pistol permits\" (i.e., license holders) for Westchester County. My next project, once I complete the map, is to run all Journal News employees living in Westchester against the list I just got.\n\nUPDATE 1/", + "1 6:30 PM\n\nLet me set to rest the speculation that the Journal News exempted their own employees from their map. YS [removed] is a photographer and editor at the Journal News. He resides in [removed]. He is in the Westchester County list provided to the Journal News and he is a dot in the map so we can at least put to rest any conspiracy theories in this regard.\n\n[removed]\n\nJournal News Hypocrisy\n\nMost of the readers of this article are not from the area and may have never heard of the Journal News until this week. Many of speculated on the motives behind their pistol LICENSE map.", + " If you want just a few of very real examples of hypocrisy from the Journal News you can look at the following three exclusive stories than we have run over the past three months that the Journal News did not bother to report at all.\n\nNew Rochelle Police Confiscate Loaded.9mm Semi-Automatic Carbine from Monroe College Basketball Player, Former Coach of the Year Fired\n\nBy any measure, this is a major story -- a member of the NJCAA National Championship women's basketball team delivers a savage beating to a teammate. While the victim of the assault is in the hospital she receives a text message from her assailant threatening to kill her,", + " and her mother with a gun she keeps at an apartment on campus. School officials recovered a loaded.9mm Semi-Automatic Carbine. Before the District Attorney could bring charges the player fled the state. The player was kicked off the team, the other player suspended and the coach fired because he knew of the gun and failed to report it to school officials or the police.\n\nThe Journal News did not cover this story at all. Monroe College is a major advertiser in Westchester County.\n\nNew Rochelle Suspends Three Following Gun to Head Incident on Bee-Line School Bus\n\nThree students leave a school bus an enter a middle school with a gun after terrorizing a 6th grader on the bus by placing her in a headlock,", + " holding the gun to her head and threatening her. The Journal News does not report on this incident.\n\nNew Rochelle Barnard School Principal Waits Hours to Notify Police of Intruder; Parents Told Man In Building Was Outside\n\nIn this case, a man was in the building for hours, he was found hiding in a closet in a second floor classroom by a teaching assistant. Even then, the building principal waited 45 minutes to call police and then lied about the entire incident to parents. The Journal News did not cover this story.\n\nNew Rochelle Board President Says District in \"Full Compliance\" with School Safety Laws\n\nFour days after the Newtown Shooting,", + " the local school board President and Superintendent make false claims that the district is in full compliance with New York State school safety laws. By statute the district must review and update plans for the district and each school in the district once a year. 10 of 11 schools have not been updated since 2001. The 11th was updated in 2006. The Journal News does not even cover the board meeting let along report this.\n\nUPDATE: 1/2 9:15 AM: I appeared this morning on the Pat Campbell Show in Tulsa, OK to discuss the latest on the Journal News gun owner map: Pat Campbell Show 1-", + "2-13\n\nUPDATE: 1/2 12:10 PM: My FOIL request to the Westchester County Clerk resulted in my receiving the communications between the clerk's office and Journal News reporter Dwight Worley. It was a jumbled mess of documents which I cut, paste and re-ordered in chronological order so readers can follow the discussion between Deputy Clerk John J. Allen and Worley (link below).\n\nCommunications Between Westchester County Clerk & Journal News for FOIL Pistol Licenses December 2012\n\nI am requesting the names, complete addresses, the type of permits issued (carry concealed/possess on\n\npremises/", + "possess carry during employment), and the type of weapons possessed, including the weapon's\n\nmanufacturer, type of weapon, caliber, serial number and model, for all permit holders in your database.\n\nAlso, please provide a complete record layout and data dictionary for your pistol permits database.\n\nThere is a brief sidebar after Worley appeals the partial denial of the paper's request to County Executive Rob Astorino on December 17th and County Attorney Robert F. Meehan responds for Astorino on December 20th to deny the appeal. The Westchester County Clerk Tim Idoni is a Democrat from New Rochelle (where we operate)", + " and Astorino is a Republican. If you are wondering how divided government works in Westchester read how the Democrats in the County Legislature literally turned out the lights in the chamber when they did not get their way on the 2013 budget.\n\nThis stands in stark contrast to the decided lack of cooperation in Putnam County, north of Westchester.\n\nNew York County denies request for names of gun permit holders\n\nAuthorities in a suburban county north of New York City said on Tuesday they will refuse to release names of local gun permit holders to a newspaper that has been publishing the identities of thousands of license-holding residents. Putnam County Clerk Dennis Sant said he would defy a request for information about pistol permit holders from the White Plains,", + " New York-based Journal News, which has come under criticism for publishing thousands of such identities already.\n\nUPDATE 1/2 2:50 PM: I have been advised that the phone listing for Robert Brum in Pomona is incorrect. Please disregard 845-354-0243. That is the number for an older woman who was assigned that number after Robert Brum moved.\n\nUPDATE 1/3 8:30 AM: Newspaper threatened with \u2018suspicious white powder\u2019 after publishing gun owners\u2019 names\n\nThe suspicious package turned out to be a non-event but I was surprised to see this...\n\nThe article mentions Christopher Fountain who put up a lot of detail about the publisher,", + " Janet Hasson and a few other Journal News employees. I am not sure how many, maybe 5 or 6 names. New York State Rifle and Pistol Association President Tom King is quoted saying \u201cI\u2019m sure that the blogger will take down the list as soon as the gun names come down.\u201d\n\nMeanwhile, we have now crowd-sourced 73 of 82 (89%) Journal News employees and mapped each one. We are in the process of clearing the list and I expect we will be at 100% shortly.\n\nI would tell Mr. King a thing or three: (1) the Journal News intends to EXPAND their map to include Putnam County not take it down;", + " (2) the Journal News was never just seeking names and addresses -- their Freedom of Information Request is for \"names, complete addresses, the type of permits issued (carry concealed/possess on premises/possess carry during employment), and the type of weapons possessed, including the weapon's manufacturer, type of weapon, caliber, serial number and model, for all permit holders in your database; (3) (1) I have no intention of taking down my list or map regardless of what the Journal News does or what he says.\n\nUPDATE 1/3 1:15 PM: If my actions are going to be disapproved of by anyone I would prefer that it be Jack Shafer:", + " Let\u2019s not go crazy over publishing gun lists\n\nUndeterred by the fact that the handgun data was, by state law, a matter of the public record, aggrieved gun owners retaliated. A crowdsourced map of the home addresses of Journal News employees \u2014 including their home and work phone numbers when found \u2014 went up. The site also listed the names and addresses of the paper\u2019s local and national advertisers, suggesting Journal News readers write letters threatening to boycott their goods and services unless the Journal News took its map down. The New York State & Pistol Association urged a boycott of all Gannett enterprises, asserting that the map had \u201cput in harm\u2019s way tens of thousands of lawful license holders.\u201d [read entire article]\n\nI met Jack in 2004 at a conference at Harvard.", + " He wrote the PressBox column for Slate/Washington Post for years and I have emailed him from time to time. Between Jack Shafer and Jim Romensko you get about all you need in terms of media criticism. Jim was, for many years at Poynter. Jack writes today \"Exactly how publishing public-record data constitutes privacy invasion is a topic worthy of a Poynter Institute seminar.\" Ironically, I was part of a Poynter conference on Online Journalism Ethics. I am pretty sure my map would have flunked the ethics test in that room back in 2006. The question then might be if my map flunks then what about the Journal News map?", + " Having been part of this discussion in the past, I can tell you that some of the opinion would be driven by the idea that journalists are like members of a holy order on a divine mission. Not everyone at Poynter would take the side of the Journal News but I suspect they would also be against my map.\n\nI can tell you one other thing -- the melodrama that has ensued with the armed guards and the envelopes of talcum powder is the sort of thing that validates the self-image of journalists that what they do is important (and thus justifies the low wages they are paid).\n\nUPDATE: 1/9 9:", + "00 AM - I was away this weekend and so not entirely top of this story. I was in Miami for the BCS Championship Game to see my Irish get stomped by Alabama :-(. I am back in New York.\n\nOn my way to the airport, I received an email from WPIX 11's Erica Pitzi requesting an interview. Many of the questions were to the effect of whether I felt I was to blame for people who were making death threats to Journal News employees or whether I would take my map down after a New York Times article reported on threats against Journal News employees. (My answer? \"No\"). Having viewed what aired,", + " the piece struck me as fairer than I expected.\n\nWPIX ARTICLE/VIDEO: Death threats, reporters\u2019 families targeted over controversial gun-owner map\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t think my map is particularly fair to the Journal News employees, many of them have nothing to do with the story, but that\u2019s in the same spirit of the Journal News map which is equally unfair,\u201d Cox told PIX 11 News over the phone from Florida.\n\nIn The New York Times article, Journal News Publisher Janet Hasson seeks to shift the issue away from Newtown, away from their map of gun owners, away from the entire issue of gun control and convert the issue into a First Amendment issue.\n\n\"As journalists,", + " we are prepared for criticism,\" Hasson told The Times. \"But in the U.S., journalists should not be threatened.\"\n\nActually, in the U.S., no one should be threatened. In fact, there are laws against threatening people with bodily harm and the apply to everyone, not just journalists. As I told WPIX, an appropriate response is to boycott or picket or otherwise express disapproval. Physically threatening someone is never the right thing to do.\n\nEDITORS NOTE:Speaking of getting paid. We are a small operation and the server costs alone for Talk of the Sound are almost $400 per month. If you would like to help defray that cost consider a contribution ($10,", + " $25, or any amount). You can also support Talk of the Sound by doing your holiday shopping through this link: Amazon.com. We would also like you to Follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook. You can read our other articles here.\n\nMATCHING DONATION CHALLENGE -- $1,000\n\nA previous donor to the site has made a very generous offer to match any donations to the site made by Wednesday 1/9 up to a maximum of $1,000. If you were thinking of making a donation to the site now is the time.\n\nRob is doing a great job. I will match any donation until 9 Jan up to a cumulative of $1k.", + " As stated my total matching donation will be $1,000.00. Support Rob so he can continue to support the 2nd amendment: The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights that protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess and carry firearms. DAM\n\nClick to Donate\n\nUPDATE: The Journal News has removed their gun map. Before you ask. \"No,", + " we are not taking down our map\".\n\nHere is the official statement from Janet Hasson:\n\nWith the passage this week of the NYSAFE gun law, which allows permit holders to request their names and addresses be removed from the public record, we decided to remove the gun permit data from lohud.com at 5 pm today. While the new law does not require us to remove the data, we believe that doing so complies with its spirit. For the past four weeks, there has been vigorous debate over our publication of the permit data, which has been viewed nearly 1.2 million times by readers. One of our core missions as a newspaper is to empower our readers with as much information as possible on the critical issues they face,", + " and guns have certainly become a top issue since the massacre in nearby Newtown, Conn. Sharing as much public information as possible provides our readers with the ability to contribute to the discussion, in any way they wish, on how to make their communities safer. We remain committed to our mission of providing the critical public service of championing free speech and open records.\n\nSelf-serving claptrap from a woman who thought she could pick a fight at a time and place of her choosing, declare the rules for the fight and call the fight when she had enough.\n\nSorry, Janet. It doesn't work that way. Our map of your employees stays.\n\nUPDATE:", + " Just taped a radio interview with Gary Baumgarten of 1010 WINS-NY. Let me know if you hear it air. Teaser: he asked me if this was a victory, my answer \"yes!\"\n\nWINS 1010 has published a story with the audio clip here.\n\nUPDATE 1/21: My Washington Examiner Op-Ed is now up: Why I will not be taking down my map of Journal News employees\n\nUPDATE 1/23: I was on the Pat Campbell Show this morning, live on KFAQ 1170 Tulsa.\n\nListen here.\n\nI also joined Pat, filling in, on the Schnitt Show this afternoon.\n\nListen here.", + " A week after the Newtown massacre, The Journal News published an interactive Google Map with the names and addresses of gun permit owners in select New York cities. The bold move has escalated into a transparency arms race, after a Connecticut lawyer posted the phone number and addresses of the Journal\u2018s staff, including a Google Maps satellite Image of the Publisher\u2019s home. \u201cI don\u2019t know whether the Journal\u2019s publisher Janet Hasson is a permit holder herself, but here\u2019s how to find her to ask,\u201d read Christopher Fountain\u2019s blog post. The double irony here is that open data was heralded as a tool of enlightened civic dialog, and has been co-opted for fierce partisanship,", + " bordering on public endangerment.\n\nThe Journal\u2018s original publication of the map sparked nationwide outrage and thousands of angry comments. Gun permit holding is public information in New York, and can be acquired through a mere request via the Freedom of Information Act. But, coming on the heels of the Newtown shooting, the publication had a clear provocative intent. \u201cNew York residents have the right to own guns with a permit and they also have a right to access public information,\u201d said a defiant Hasson.\n\nGiven that the Bushmaster.223-caliber rifle used in the school shooting was reportedly legally registered with the killer\u2019s mother, the Google Map sparked a debate about whether gun owners should be labeled like other potential menaces to society,", + " \u201cThe implications are mind-boggling,\u201d said Marine Scott F. Williams to The Journal News, \u201cIt\u2019s as if gun owners are sex offenders (and) to own a handgun risks exposure as if one is a sex offender. It\u2019s, in my mind, crazy.\u201d\n\nBlogger Christopher Fountain took the debate into his own hands, publishing the personal information of The Journals\u2018 staff. \u201cHundreds of thousands of readers; Janet, you have a great Christmas Eve,\u201d he wrote, after a popular political outlet, Instapundit, linked to his post.\n\nIronically, the promise of open data was supposed to lead to open-minded discussion.", + " \u201cIf the broad light of day could be let in upon men\u2019s actions, it would purify them as the sun disinfects,\u201d reads the often-cited quote from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who stands a champion to modern-day nonprofits fighting for greater access to health, legislative, and administrative government data.\n\nOpen data advocates have struggled to get media attention for their utopian vision of automated government services. This latest use of open data via Google Maps, both to publish gun permit ownership and journalists\u2019 geolocation data, seems to have hit the media sweet spot, as it plays into our debased partisan interests. It appears that transparency lends itself equally to being both a tool of democracy or a partisan weapon.\n" + ], + "length": 24837, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 78, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Many Americans love using gun ranges, and thousands have gotten sick because of it. In an ongoing investigation called \"Loaded with Lead,\" the Seattle Times reports that \"reckless\" range owners often fail to clean and ventilate shooting areas plagued by lead dust and vapor. The result: a legacy of Americans sickened with lead poisoning, including family members contaminated by lead that shooters tracked home (in fact, national statistics show that lead poisoning from shooting guns is the main cause of lead poisoning off the job). Ensuing health issues include nausea, fatigue, mental problems, and damaged organs. One range master says his teeth fell out, and a New Hampshire police sergeant died from lead absorbed at a firing range. \"I'm beat, I'm going to bed. Goodnight,\" he told his wife one day, and was dead in bed the next morning. Warnings about poisoning at indoor gun ranges date back to the 1960s, yet state and federal regulators rarely test police ranges. When they did in Baltimore and Washington state, and found them dangerous, cleaning policies weren't fully overhauled. Other gun-range users have suffered, too\u2014like the 20 youths in a Washington state gun club who tested positive for lead exposure (and children are more vulnerable due to their developing brains, NBC News notes). Now police in Kirkland, Wash., say they have a solution: a $1.3 million gun range that uses lead-free ammunition. \"The big elephant in the room is probably the cost, because it does cost more,\" says a Kirkland sergeant of copper ammunition. \"But in the long run, it ends up paying for itself.\" Delve into the Times' probe, which is in four parts (one, two, three, and four.)\n", + "docs": [ + "It was one of the most important weeks in Amy Crawford\u2019s law-enforcement career.\n\nLike tens of thousands of other police officers, Crawford had to become an expert at shooting a gun. Her job as a Kirkland corrections officer \u2014 and even her life \u2014 depended on it.\n\nOn her fifth day of training at Issaquah\u2019s indoor police shooting range, she passed the firearms tests. But she felt sick and had no idea why.\n\nLike so many other officers across the country, Crawford had gotten lead poisoning from shooting in an unsafe gun range.\n\nThe Seattle Times\u2019 ongoing investigation \u201cLoaded with Lead\u201d has found that city, county and federal police agencies across the country have put their officers in harm\u2019s way by failing to clean their indoor ranges,", + " replace dilapidated ventilation and educate their employees about the risks of lead.\n\nIn hazy, dirty gun ranges, officers fired lead-based ammunition, unknowingly spreading lead vapor and dust, which they then inhaled, ingested or absorbed through skin contact.\n\nIn Largo, Fla., a range master at the police shooting range says lead exposure caused his teeth to fall out and he now suffers from neuropathy. In Londonderry, N.H., a 35-year-old police sergeant died of lead poisoning just days after training his fellow officers at a private indoor-gun range.\n\nCases like these have spanned decades, despite a litany of reports and warnings about the dangers of lead in police gun ranges.\n\nIn the Seattle area,", + " Issaquah, Kirkland and Bellevue police departments have violated workplace-safety laws about lead, all saying they were unaware of some of the rules. Even so, the state had warned Issaquah about lead problems in the past. As of this month, the city still hasn\u2019t fixed the ventilation.\n\nLead contamination at police-operated ranges has gone unchecked for years because federal and state regulators rarely scrutinize them, The Times has found. Inspectors usually only show up after someone files a complaint, or after it\u2019s too late \u2014 when a blood test shows an employee already has lead poisoning.\n\n\u201cIt was totally preventable,\u201d Crawford,", + " 40, said about her lead-poisoning case and others she\u2019s heard about. \u201cThat\u2019s the worst part of all.\u201d\n\nLaw enforcement\u2019s long history with lead For more than a half-century, studies showed officers were overexposed and even poisoned by lead contamination at law-enforcement gun ranges. Despite these cases and overwhelming evidence of the dangers of lead, police departments have continued to put officers in harm\u2019s way. 1962 \u2014 Michigan Michigan Department of Health alerts the public that indoor ranges can be a health hazard, stating \u201cmany lead poisoning cases have been reported among police and range personnel traceable to improper range ventilation.\u201d 1973 \u2014 Kansas Two Kansas City police officers suffered severe lead poisoning after working several months at the indoor-gun range in the basement of City Hall.", + " Both retired on disability because of the lead. 1975 \u2014 Nationwide National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health studied nine law-enforcement indoor-firing ranges and determined all had inadequate ventilation and several had heavy lead contamination on surfaces because of poor cleaning habits. 1989 \u2014 Colorado During three months of firearms instruction at an indoor-firing range, the blood lead levels of 17 trainees rose from a mean of 6.5 micrograms per deciliter before training to 50.4 post training. Organ damage can occur at 10 micrograms. 2012 \u2014 Massachusetts Several employees at the Newton Police Department had elevated levels of lead in their blood because the shooting range was poorly ventilated and not cleaned.", + " 2013 \u2014 Connecticut Wilton Police Department closed its basement indoor-shooting range after an inspection determined it violated four lead standards. Lead contamination spread to a nearby office and an emergency-operations command area. Sources: Michigan Department of Health, interviews, OSHA database, NIOSH, Massachusetts Department of Labor Standards, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Wilton Bulletin and the Kansas City Star\u200b Read more \u25be\n\nRecord number of violations\n\nJust last year, a concerned police-firearms instructor complained to Maryland state safety officials about lead hazards at Baltimore County\u2019s gun range \u2014 where more than 1,900 county officers train and requalify \u2014 to prove their proficiency with a service firearm.\n\nIn February 2014,", + " after officials with Maryland Occupational Safety and Health (MOSH) inspected the gun range, they found 27 violations, 16 related to lead. It was the first safety inspection of Baltimore County\u2019s nearly half-century-old facility, they said.\n\nBaltimore County police set a record \u2014 the most lead violations for a law-enforcement agency in the past decade, according to a Times analysis of available federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration records.\n\nMaryland inspectors found problems with poor ventilation and inadequate cleaning at the Lutherville range. And in talking to several Baltimore County firearms instructors, inspectors learned that the lead problems were getting worse.\n\nThe instructors revealed they had been tested a few times for lead levels in their blood,", + " and the most recent results were getting higher, records show. One instructor had an elevated lead level of at least 25 micrograms per deciliter, a MOSH supervisor said.\n\nOrgan damage and other health problems can occur at a level as low as 10 micrograms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead exposure is particularly dangerous because damage can occur even though symptoms may not appear.\n\nWhile instructors and SWAT teams spend the most time in a range, other officers are required to qualify up to four times annually and to practice as needed.\n\nBaltimore County\u2019s most dangerous problem was the toxic air that instructors inhaled while working in the range.\n\nThey were exposed to air that had lead concentrations up to three times higher than the allowable limit,", + " MOSH documents show. The ventilation and air quality were so awful that the instructors, by law, should have been wearing respirators, protective coveralls and bootees while training.\n\nPolice administrators had no idea of the problems until the state inspection, said spokeswoman Elise Armacost.\n\n\u201cA lot of these were a result of sloppy housekeeping, not wiping surfaces properly,\u201d she said. \u201cThe larger issue was ventilation, and that\u2019s not a minor issue.\u201d\n\nMore than a year after the inspection, the range still isn\u2019t in compliance.\n\nArmacost said the county will spend $500,000 to replace the ventilation system and abate the lead contamination by the end of the summer.", + " Currently, police are advised to use the outdoor range but still are allowed to shoot for short periods of time in the indoor range, Armacost said.\n\nCole Weston, president of Baltimore County Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge No. 4, said: \u201cThe job of law enforcement is difficult enough with calls for service. The hazards aren\u2019t supposed to be in the training location where you are trying to be proficient in doing the job out on the street.\u201d\n\nWashington Department of Labor & Industries\n\nPoisoned in Issaquah\n\nIssaquah, Kirkland and Bellevue police departments have violated workplace safety laws about lead, all saying they were unaware of some of the rules.", + " The state had warned Issaquah about lead problems in the past. The city still hasn\u2019t fixed the ventilation.\n\nTwo of the most important ways to prevent lead poisoning is to educate shooting instructors and trainees about lead hazards and to properly ventilate the range. In the case of three Kirkland correctional officers, they got neither.\n\nIn 2007 the Kirkland police\u2019s Corrections Department decided its officers needed to carry firearms. Without a shooting range, Kirkland used the Issaquah police indoor-firing range that March to train and qualify the officers.\n\nTwo Kirkland firearms instructors conducted a five-day training and qualification course for Crawford and two other corrections officers.", + " After a day in the classroom, they spent the next four days firing.45-caliber handguns in the range.\n\nCrawford, who had been a corrections officer for two years, said there was little discussion about the risks of lead exposure and how to avoid it.\n\nOn the final day, as they started qualifications testing \u2014 timed and untimed drills of shooting at targets from different distances \u2014 the range became cloudy.\n\nKirkland Police Sgt. Nathan Rich, a SWAT member and one of the firearms instructors, had tried to turn on the ventilation, which would move the lead-contaminated air away from shooters. But it didn\u2019t operate.\n\nDespite no air flow and a noticeable haze in the range,", + " Rich ordered Crawford and her colleagues to continue firing because he said he wanted to avoid rescheduling the qualifications.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a paramilitary environment,\u201d Crawford said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got rank and file, you follow orders and you trust them.\u201d\n\nThey all coughed but continued firing up to 1,000 rounds over five hours, not realizing they were inhaling dangerous amounts of lead. \u201cYou literally couldn\u2019t see one arm\u2019s length in front of you,\u201d she said.\n\nCrawford went home feeling nauseated and weak, with a headache and a sweet metallic taste in her mouth. The two other corrections officers complained of similar flu-like symptoms \u2014 classic signs of lead exposure.\n\nAfter one complained to Kirkland police,", + " they were sent to have their blood tested for lead.\n\nThe two instructors and three corrections officers all had elevated levels of lead in their blood, according to records from Washington Labor and Industries (L&I), which enforces workplace-safety rules. Their results ranged from 25 to 33 micrograms of lead per deciliter \u2014 more than 20 times the average adult level of 1.2.\n\nIn as little as a few days, officers in a poorly ventilated range can develop lead levels that can cause fatigue and miscarriages as well as permanent damage to the brain and kidneys.\n\nCrawford recalled having the highest reading, 33.\n\n\u201cI was scared \u2014 I didn\u2019t know the ramifications,\u201d said Crawford,", + " who now works for a biometrics company. \u201cI didn\u2019t know if it was going to have an effect on my ability to have kids.\u201d\n\nRich said he received little training about the dangers of lead when he became a firearms instructor in 2001.\n\n\u201cI felt bad for the officers that I got them sick,\u201d he said. He is concerned his decision to keep shooting that day may later have repercussions on their health.\n\nOne reason he moved to the patrol division was to reduce the amount of time he was exposed to lead in the range.\n\n\u201cAs we get older, we may have some neurological-function issues, some organ issues that you can\u2019t predict and see right away,\u201d Rich said.\n\nWashington Department of Labor & Industries\n\nIssaquah chief resists\n\nThe police shooting range where the Kirkland officers were overexposed is tucked under Issaquah\u2019s redbrick City Hall.\n\nBecause of the Kirkland case,", + " L&I inspected the Issaquah range in 2007 and issued two lead-related citations.\n\nThen in 2008 and 2009, Issaquah requested help from L&I through \u201cconsultations.\u201d The state uses this voluntary process as an informal, private way to get employers into compliance with state safety regulations.\n\nAfter one of the consultations, L&I told Issaquah police they must conduct lead training and minimize surface contamination.\n\nBut in April 2014, an L&I inspection showed contamination on classroom tables, the floor and a carpeted area outside the range, which had lead concentrations 22 times higher than what\u2019s acceptable.\n\nAir flow in some of the firing lanes was too turbulent,", + " swirling dirty air back on shooters.\n\nNine law-enforcement agencies, as well as the public and members of two private firearms academies, shot in the range, unaware of the hazardous conditions.\n\n\u201cSgt. (Paul) Fairbanks stated that the officer\u2019s primary duty is to protect the citizens and that the range duties (i.e. cleaning) were additional tasks they tried to fit in their schedule,\u201d an industrial hygienist wrote after talking to the part-time range master.\n\n\u201cThe job of law enforcement is difficult enough with calls for service. The hazards aren\u2019t supposed to be in the training location where you are trying to be proficient in doing the job out on the street.\u201d Cole Weston,", + " president of Baltimore County Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge No. 4\n\nWhen L&I confronted the department over the violations, some Issaquah police officials were uncooperative.\n\nIn June, they refused to allow the hygienist to collect samples and take airflow readings and photos while police sorted the spent lead from the berm for recycling. When a hygienist wanted to interview several officers, Police Chief Scott Behrbaum refused.\n\n\u201cAt this time none of the employees that I have spoken to have indicated the need to speak with you, nor [are they] having any concerns,\u201d Behrbaum said in an Aug.", + " 8 email to an L&I hygienist. \u201cAs a result I am not going to schedule any interviews.\u201d\n\nAfter L&I threatened to use subpoenas to compel private interviews with employees, the chief relented.\n\nL&I issued 15 citations, nine related to lead. The city of Issaquah appealed some of them as well as the $3,000 fine, saying it would rather use the money to fix the problems than pay the state. A hearing officer concluded all the violations had occurred, but lowered the total fine to $2,700.\n\nIssaquah corrected nearly all of the violations. It hasn\u2019t fixed the ventilation,", + " but Fairbanks said it doesn\u2019t pose a significant health risk.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not taking any of this lightly,\u201d Fairbanks said. \u201cI\u2019m very concerned about my officers\u2019 safety and that doesn\u2019t mean just on the street, but also when they are training.\u201d\n\nDecades of warnings\n\nWell before the government banned lead-based household paint in 1978, medical journals and state health publications dating to the early 1960s warned that police officers were suffering from lead poisoning due to working in gun ranges.\n\nBut police departments often ignored those warnings and rarely passed them down to the rank and file.\n\nTwo Kansas City, Kan., police officers suffered severe lead poisoning in 1973 after working several months in a new indoor-gun range in the basement of City Hall.", + " A faulty ventilation system recirculated airborne lead.\n\nThe city settled lawsuits brought by the two, paying $100,000 each to the officers. They said they had to retire on disability because of the lead exposure, according to The Kansas City Star.\n\nThe National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) studied nine indoor law-enforcement gun ranges and found many deficiencies, in particular \u201chealth hazards in the forms of lead poisoning due to improper ventilation control,\u201d a 1975 report said.\n\nNIOSH also wrote a technical manual about reducing lead hazards for law-enforcement officials to follow.\n\nDespite the research and warnings, some departments didn\u2019t take lead hazards seriously.\n\nIn Florida,", + " Edmund Danielewicz went to work in 1980 at the Largo Police Department\u2019s indoor range, which had a history of employees getting lead poisoning from faulty ventilation. After a year there, he lost 45 pounds, his teeth and eventually most of the feeling in his legs, he said. The physician for the city told him he had lead poisoning and to drink orange juice and water to feel better, he recalled.\n\nBy 1981 Danielewicz claimed the shooting range poisoned him. But the department denied it and fired him, he said. After a legal battle, he said he settled for $100,000.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s disheartening,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cThey should have known better.\u201d\n\nAram Boghosian / Special to The Seattle Times\n\nA young sergeant gone\n\nFor Pat Kelly, that sunny Sunday morning was like any other at their Londonderry, N.H., home. She awoke to 21-month-old son David crawling into his parents\u2019 bed and wanting to play with his father. But when he didn\u2019t respond to the boy\u2019s giggles, she leaned closer to her husband \u2014 and discovered his body was cold.\n\nThomas Kelly, a 35-year-old police sergeant, was dead.\n\nHis death on Sept. 17, 1989, stunned officers at the Derry Police Department,", + " where he\u2019d worked for more than nine years. Pat was devastated: She was six weeks pregnant, had a toddler, her mother was dying of cancer, and the love of her life had suddenly and mysteriously died.\n\nDerry Police Chief Ed Garone said as a sergeant and training supervisor, Kelly, was a natural leader, teacher and visionary. Garone approved Kelly\u2019s request to train all the officers who had been using revolvers to shoot new semiautomatic handguns.\n\n\u201cIt was frankly a morale booster, increasing the safety of the officers and the greater protection for our citizens,\u201d Garone said.\n\nWithout an indoor police range, Kelly looked for nearby ranges where the 45 officers could train and qualify over that one week in September.", + " He found Chester Rod and Gun Club, just 10 miles down the road. Kelly had assurances from the private club that the ventilation worked properly and the range was safe, Garone recalled.\n\nBut Kelly had unknowingly stepped into a death chamber.\n\nAram Boghosian / Special to The Seattle Times\n\nEach day, he stood beside officers as they fired hundreds of rounds of ammunition at the targets. But the ventilation system failed to keep up, and smoke laced with lead lingered in the air, officers said.\n\n\u201cIt got so thick that you got to the point where you just could not see,\u201d said Barry Charewicz, a Derry officer at the time.\n\nDan Pelletier,", + " then a Derry detective and firearms instructor, said, \u201cI had that metallic, leady taste in the back of my mouth, and at the end of the day I\u2019d have a pretty good headache too.\u201d A blood test showed he had an elevated lead level.\n\nUnlike other officers who would train and leave, Kelly was in the range almost the entire time as police fired 24,300 rounds of ammunition that week.\n\nDuring breaks and each night, Kelly swept the floor with a dry broom, picked up spent casings and put them in buckets. Sometimes he wore a paper mask to avoid breathing the dust in the air, but he was unaware it contained potentially lethal amounts of lead,", + " Pelletier said.\n\nThe day after certifying all the officers, Kelly came home after a long shift and told Pat: \u201cI\u2019m beat, I\u2019m going to bed. Goodnight.\u201d Those were his last words.\n\nAbout a month after Kelly\u2019s death, an autopsy revealed he had died from acute respiratory failure and severe pulmonary edema due to prolonged exposure to toxic heavy metals and gases at a firing range. Tests showed he had dangerously high concentrations of lead in his blood at 48 micrograms per deciliter.\n\nAram Boghosian / Special to The Seattle Times\n\nPat still misses the smell of leather and the feel of the bulletproof vest under her husband\u2019s stiffly pressed uniform when she hugged him.\n\nShe occasionally shows his uniform,", + " badge (No. 3) and gun belt to their 24-year-old daughter, Laura, when she\u2019s curious about the father she never met.\n\nPat sued the Chester Rod and Gun Club and settled for an undisclosed amount years ago.\n\nEveryone realizes his death was preventable.\n\n\u201cIf I were to do it again, I would have daily air monitoring done and certified by a third party,\u201d Garone said. His officers now shoot at their outdoor range.\n\nCharewicz blames the club for Kelly\u2019s death. The nearby Sandown Police Department has been shooting there since 2011. Kevin Williams, president of the club, didn\u2019t return calls for comment.\n\nToday at the Derry Police Department,", + " a training room is named in Kelly\u2019s honor and a painting of him, smiling in uniform, hangs on a wall. But outside of New Hampshire, few have ever heard of Kelly\u2019s death and its cause.\n\n\u201cI want people to take it seriously that you can have a loved one die from this,\u201d Pat Kelly said.\n\nAram Boghosian / Special to The Seattle Times\n\nLead exposure continues\n\nTwo decades after Kelly\u2019s death, inspections and evaluations show police across the country are still ignorant of workplace-safety laws and lack fundamental training. Currently, there are more than 1.1 million federal, state and local law-enforcement workers in the U.S., according the Bureau of Justice Statistics.\n\nIn Bellevue,", + " the Police Department shut down its range for two years because of its inadequate ventilation system.\n\nA year after it reopened with a new system in 2012, L&I found contaminated surfaces and inadequate training during an inspection. It issued nine citations, six related to lead.\n\nIn South Central Washington, the Kennewick Police Department doesn\u2019t educate its officers at all about lead hazards.\n\n\u201cWe do not provide training on lead exposure,\u201d Kennewick spokeswoman Evelyn Lusignan said. \u201cWe are not required to. For that type of outdoor-firing range we don\u2019t have the exposure risk.\u201d\n\nBut Washington Administrative Code says, \u201cEach employer who has a workplace in which there is a potential exposure to airborne lead at any level shall inform employees\u201d and train them about lead.", + " This includes all indoor and outdoor ranges.\n\nWhile the risk of lead exposure is greatly reduced when officers shoot outdoors, it\u2019s not eliminated.\n\nOfficers can track lead home on their clothing and shoes, contaminating their homes and putting their children at risk.\n\nAfter evaluating the Lima, Ohio, Police Department\u2019s indoor-gun range in 2012, NIOSH told the police chief to shut it down until a faulty ventilation system was fixed. It had pumped lead vapor and dust into its garage and a maintenance office where an employee breathed in contaminated air and suffered lead poisoning.\n\nNIOSH evaluates work conditions at the request of a concerned employee or employer, but cannot force a company or government agency to abide by its recommendations.\n\nLima Police Chief Kevin Martin didn\u2019t follow NIOSH\u2019s advice.", + " He bought a new vacuum cleaner and better filters, he said.\n\nWhen asked why he didn\u2019t close the range, Martin replied:\n\n\u201cQuite honestly, we have to qualify to continue to function as police officers. And another location \u2014 nothing is available to us.\u201d ", + " Julia Levine asked a seemingly impertinent question while learning to shoot rifles in Vermont last fall: Were the bullets made of lead?\n\nLevine, 30, of Stowe, was starting a family and her companion at the all-female retreat, \u201cDoe Camp,\u201d was pregnant. High exposure to lead can put a woman at risk for miscarriage or birth defects.\n\n\u201cAt first, he was very dismissive when I asked him his opinion on lead,\u201d she said of the instructor. \u201cHe was one of those down-home Vermonters who have been shooting with lead from the beginning of time. But that\u2019s not what the science says.\u201d\n\nLead poisoning,", + " which can cause serious neurological problems and even death, is most often associated with peeling paint chips in old houses, not recreational shooting. But with more women and youth joining the 40 million Americans who enjoy gun sports, experts say the use of lead ammunition can pose deadly risks.\n\n\u201cUnfortunately, a lot of operators are unaware that overexposure to lead is a real issue.\"\n\nIn 2010, 20 children and teens at a Vancouver, Washington, indoor shooting club tested positive for lead poisoning, according to a recent year-long investigation by The Seattle Times. A study in Alaska revealed that the single largest source of lead exposure in children aged 6 to 17 was firing ranges.\n\nLead dust can enter the body in two ways,", + " inhalation and ingestion. Unsafe exposure can cause nausea and fatigue, organ damage and mental impairment.\n\nChildren are the most vulnerable to the effects of lead because their brains are still developing, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Negative health effects can be lifelong.\n\nYet many firing ranges host birthday parties and other events where youngsters can ingest lead after touching contaminated surfaces.\n\n\u201cI am familiar with at least one case where children were allowed to play in the earth backstop with their Tonka trucks while the range was closed,\u201d said Jack J. Giordano, a shooting range safety and health specialist based in Scottsdale, Arizona.\n\n\u201cUnfortunately, a lot of operators are unaware that overexposure to lead is a real issue,\u201d he told NBC News.\n\nPlay Facebook\n\nTwitter\n\nEmbed Nine-Year-", + "Old Accidentally Kills Instructor With Uzi 2:31 autoplay autoplay Copy this code to your website or blog\n\nWhen a gun is fired, the base of a lead bullet can become airborne as microscopic particulate. The bullet fragments further when it hits a target or backstop. That entire area can be contaminated.\n\n\u201cPolice officers bring their kids to the shooting range to practice pitch for the baseball team and set up a ball catching net on the pistol range,\u201d said Giordano.\n\n\u201cWhen handling ammunition,\u201d he said, \u201cparents need to be aware kids shouldn\u2019t be eating or putting things in their mouth or drinking or eating on the range itself.\u201d\n\nFederal regulations require operators to keep the range properly maintained;", + " workers must be trained and provided with protective equipment.\n\n\u201cParents need to be aware kids shouldn\u2019t be eating or putting things in their mouth or drinking or eating on the range itself.\u201d\n\nThe dangers of lead poisoning are most acute at poorly ventilated indoor ranges.\n\nAccording to the CDC, thousands of Americans are exposed to lead at the nation\u2019s 16,000 to 18,000 indoor firing ranges, despite health outreach efforts.\n\nA recent CDC report found that between 2002 and 2012, a total of 2,056 Americans in \u201cpolice protection\u201d and 2,673 likely involved in \u201ctarget shooting\u201d had elevated blood lead levels.\n\nThe CDC blamed indoor ranges for failing to monitor for personal exposure and \u201cdry sweeping\u201d lead-containing dust.\n\nWorkers are at greatest risk for chronic lead exposure when the ranges are not properly ventilated or cleaned.", + " One Kentucky firearms instructor told the Seattle Times she had such dangerous levels of lead in her blood that she was not allowed to breast-feed her newborn.\n\nNo levels of lead are safe for children, according to the CDC. In adults, 10 micrograms per deciliter of lead in the blood is considered elevated and potentially harmful. At 25 micrograms, serious health problems can occur; at 100, there can be severe brain and kidney damage.\n\nNRA-certified shooting instructor Larry Hamel says he modifies procedures to keep people safe from lead. Jack Rowell\n\nThat\u2019s what worried Julia Levine at the shooting range in Vermont, but both she and her pregnant friend went on to have healthy babies.\n\nLevine said that despite her initial concerns,", + " the shooting experience was positive. \u201cThere is definitely a feeling of power and accomplishment in it,\u201d she said.\n\nHer instructor, NRA-certified Larry Hamel, said that he switched to copper-jacketed bullets, which encapsulate the lead.\n\nHamel, president of the Lamoille Valley Fish & Game Club, said he also monitored carefully where the two women stood on the range.\n\n\u201cWhy take a chance? We err on the side of caution,\u201d he told NBC News. \u201cWe have learned a lot about lead in the past couple of years. We pay attention and take it to heart. Lead sickens people.\u201d ", + " In a cramped hotel room on Christmas Eve, a pale and hollow-eyed man embraced his two children and whispered they\u2019d be OK.\n\nDespite his assurances, Manny Romo, a 34-year-old ironworker, wasn\u2019t so certain about the future. Will I die? he wondered. Who will take care of my family?\n\nAn invisible assailant had invaded the bodies of Romo and his two kids, attacking their bones, brains and nerves.\n\nThey were contaminated with lead. And it came from an unexpected place.\n\nIn fall 2012, Romo had inhaled lead while helping erect a second story on Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns and Bellevue Indoor Range.", + " He was never warned about lead hazards from spent ammunition at the worksite and unknowingly tracked the poison home to his children.\n\nShortly before Christmas 2012, the Romo family evacuated their Auburn home, fearing for their safety and leaving behind contaminated furniture and toys.\n\nRomo was one of 46 people contaminated by lead during the Wade\u2019s renovation \u2014 the worst known case of occupational lead exposure at an American shooting range, according to public-health officials.\n\nMarcus Yam / The Seattle Times\n\nOver the past decade, thousands of workers and shooters across America have been exposed to unsafe levels of lead at gun ranges, inhaling lead dust or absorbing it by contact with lead-covered surfaces.\n\nThe 2012 contamination was the latest of several lead-poisoning cases at the Bellevue gun range,", + " where owner Wade Gaughran has repeatedly put his workers in danger and the public at risk, a Seattle Times investigation has found.\n\nThe construction company and subcontractors during the 2012 project also did little to protect their workers or educate them about potential hazards at the shooting range.\n\nState workplace-safety officials, whose mission is to protect workers, also failed to act quickly after being alerted to the widespread lead exposure there.\n\nWade\u2019s offers a stark example of a little-known national problem that impacts workers and the growing ranks of recreational shooters: Owners have been running dirty ranges for years yet face little or no scrutiny from state and federal safety-and-health regulators.\n\nOver the past decade,", + " thousands of workers and shooters across America have been exposed to unsafe levels of lead at gun ranges, inhaling lead dust or absorbing it by contact with lead-covered surfaces, The Times has found.\n\nRange owners who don\u2019t properly clean or ventilate shooting ranges are the primary culprits. Sometimes, owners know about the risks, but simply ignore them. Others are ignorant of the health hazards posed by lead \u2014 a debilitating toxin that can even cause death.\n\nSince the 2012 case, Gaughran has hired a health-and-safety firm to control lead exposures. Managers are trained and oversee a new lead-compliance program.\n\nL&I officials said based on their latest monitoring last year,", + " the gun range is safe for workers and the public.\n\nGaughran also said he has invested $2 million on a custom-built ventilation system and new bullet traps.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s nobody in the state that\u2019s as clean as we are,\u201d he told The Times this month. \u201cNobody.\u201d\n\nSeattle Times, 1997\n\n\u201cA dust storm\u201d\n\nGuns were just a weekend hobby for Gaughran until he saw how much money could be made from them. While selling insurance in the late 1980s, Gaughran went to the Puyallup Gun Show for fun on weekends.\n\n\u201cI see all the business going down \u2014 literally millions of dollars are changing hands,\u201d he said,", + " \u201cand I just started buying a few guns.\u201d\n\nSoon, Gaughran ditched his \u201csuit-and-tie\u201d job and opened a small gun shop in Bellevue. Eventually, he purchased land on Bel-Red Road where he envisioned building a bigger shop with a shooting range.\n\nGoogle\n\nHe finally opened Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns in 1996, building it over the years into one of the largest gun stores and indoor firing ranges in the state.\n\nBut in summer 2008, Gaughran had a problem. He hadn\u2019t kept up with the tons of spent ammunition that filled his shooting range. Shooters had fired so many bullets into a sand-", + "berm backstop at the end of the shooting lanes that it caused the back wall to split.\n\n\u201cWe were breaking out the back wall of the building\u201d with a half-million pounds of sand and lead pushing against it, Gaughran recalled.\n\n\u201cIt looked like a fat girl wearing stretch pants, right?\u2026 And I\u2019m like, we need to do something or that wall is going to end up on Bel-Red Road.\u201d\n\nThe sand berm was so packed with spent ammo that incoming bullets occasionally struck metal and ricocheted back toward shooters, or escaped the building, two workers have said.\n\nListen to interview Wade Gaughran explains how tons of lead cracked an outside range wall.\n\nThat summer,", + " William Sweat, of Kirkland, was waiting at a bus stop outside the gun range on Bel-Red Road when he heard gunfire and something whiz by his head. \u201cI don\u2019t know how the hell this shrapnel was coming out of the building \u2026 but it damn near hit me in the head,\u201d he said.\n\nSweat showed \u201ca mangled-up bullet\u201d that escaped the range to a man working inside Wade\u2019s who told Sweat he was the owner. After the man dismissed his complaint, Sweat called 911. An officer responded and reported he found no holes in exterior walls and closed the case. Gaughran denied it happened.\n\nTo solve his problem with the berm \u2014 and to cash in on the lucrative scrap metal inside it \u2014 Gaughran offered cash,", + " guns or store credit to employees to help remove the sand berm and sift out the tons of spent lead, which was worth up to 70 cents a pound.\n\nGun salesman Roberto Sanchez and range safety officer Sean Eals agreed to the extra duty. But they knew little about the dangers of lead removal and said they were given no training.\n\nGaughran gave them gloves, protective coveralls and paper dust masks, but they recall he didn\u2019t initially supply them with respirators required for such work.\n\nMarcus Yam / The Seattle Times Doctor\u2019s warning After removing the sand berm at Wade\u2019s in 2008, Roberto Sanchez fell ill.", + " His blood lead level was the highest state officials had seen for a gun-range worker. His doctor sent a letter to a Wade\u2019s manager on Aug. 28, 2008, that said Sanchez \u201cshould be temporarily removed from the firing range.\u201d Read the doctor\u2019s letter\n\nFollowing their regular shifts, the two men and others worked through hot August nights, mining lead in the hours before the gun range reopened in the morning.\n\nSanchez used a forklift to break up compacted sand into chunks, then Eals scooped them up with a Bobcat and dumped them into a screening machine that sifted out the lead. The workers then hauled out the metal and dumped it in a large,", + " open container in the parking lot.\n\nFor weeks, as they removed 350,000 pounds of lead, Sanchez said he and the others worked inside \u201ca dust storm.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe were just breathing the dust the whole time,\u201d said Sanchez, an Army veteran who served during Operation Desert Storm. \u201cIt was soaking through our clothes.\u201d\n\nDuring cigarette breaks, Eals recalled, workers shook off the lead from their bodies. \u201cYou could just feel the heaviness of it in your hair \u2014 or in your nose or eyes,\u201d said Eals, who grew increasingly agitated as if he\u2019d been drinking coffee all day.\n\nSome workers spontaneously vomited. Sanchez\u2019s joints and muscles ached,", + " he felt dizzy and drained, and his head throbbed.\n\nOne morning, Sanchez woke up hardly able to move, with pain shooting through his lower back. \u201cIt felt like somebody was stabbing me in the kidneys,\u201d he said.\n\nHe crept out of bed to his car and drove to the urgent-care unit at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Seattle. A doctor there took blood tests, and later told Sanchez the amount of lead in his blood was off the scale.\n\nThe tests showed he had 83.5 micrograms of lead per deciliter \u2014 70 times the blood-lead amount of an average person, 1.2 micrograms.\n\nHealth problems can occur at 10 micrograms per deciliter,", + " according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Lead is particularly dangerous because at lower levels symptoms usually don\u2019t appear, even as it damages a person\u2019s body.\n\nThe VA reported Sanchez\u2019s dangerously high test result to the state\u2019s Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance (ABLES) program. Supervised by Washington\u2019s Department of Labor and Industries (L&I), the program collects and tracks data on lead exposure. When workers\u2019 blood-lead levels are high, ABLES officials can alert L&I\u2019s enforcement arm so it can inspect workplaces for safety and health violations.\n\nThe lead level in Sanchez\u2019s blood was the highest reported for a shooting-range worker in Washington recorded by the ABLES program.\n\nWorkers overexposed to lead at Washington shooting ranges Over the past 10 years,", + " at least 89 workers at Washington shooting ranges had blood-lead levels that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers harmful. Explore test results at the shooting ranges. 10 micrograms per deciliter: CDC considers this level elevated for the public and it may be harmful.\n\nCDC considers this level elevated for the public and it may be harmful. 25 micrograms per deciliter: A worker has been overexposed to lead and serious health problems can occur.\n\nA worker has been overexposed to lead and serious health problems can occur. 60 micrograms per deciliter: Employee must be removed from work area until lead level decreases.\n\nEmployee must be removed from work area until lead level decreases.", + " 100 micrograms per deciliter: Severe brain and kidney damage can occur. Sources: state Department of Labor and Industries; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Occupational Safety & Health Administration; Environmental Protection Agency Thomas Wilburn / The Seattle Times\n\nSanchez's doctor and L&I officials notified Gaughran\u2019s business that Sanchez shouldn\u2019t perform work that would expose him to lead. State and federal standards require a \u201cmedical removal\u201d of any worker whose blood-lead level exceeds 60.\n\nSanchez\u2019s doctor also advised him to start emergency chelation therapy \u2014 a risky procedure that involves taking medications to help flush heavy metals from the body.\n\nAfter Sanchez,", + " five other employees got tested and found high lead levels in their blood. All tested above 34, including Eals, at 62. Both Sanchez and Eals were put in jobs in the gun retail area.\n\nBut other than interviewing employees by phone and exchanging information with Gaughran, blood-surveillance officials didn\u2019t alert L&I\u2019s enforcement arm to investigate Wade\u2019s shooting range, which could have led to citations and fines.\n\nA Times analysis found that of the gun ranges not inspected from 2004 through May 2013, ABLES received 40 blood tests of employees with high lead levels.\n\nTodd Schoonover, research manager of ABLES,", + " refused to be interviewed by The Times to explain his decisions; L&I officials said protocols for making referrals are complex and no blood-lead test at any level requires an inspection.\n\nTwo years later\n\nAt Wade\u2019s shooting range in Bellevue, L&I; inspectors determined that lead dust blew unfiltered through the building\u2019s exhaust fans and onto workers across the rooftop.\n\nIn a September 2008 email to L&I officials, Gaughran said he was changing workplace practices and dealing with his range\u2019s lead problems.\n\n\u201cWe understand the seriousness of the issue and will address anything and everything needed,\u201d he wrote.\n\nBut Gaughran didn\u2019t keep his promise.", + " Two years later, in mid-2010, six workers at Gaughran\u2019s range tested at 25 micrograms or higher for lead in their blood, including one result of 41. The overexposed employees\u2019 duties included helping shooters in the range, dry-sweeping the floor and working the retail area.\n\nAfter getting high blood-lead test results for the employees, Schoonover identified the cluster as \u201ca critical situation.\u201d\n\nHe informed a colleague on June 30 the cluster \u201cimplies that the facility is likely deficient in basically everything.\u201d Schoonover\u2019s email said he already referred the case to inspectors, noting Wade\u2019s had never been inspected.\n\nRecords show the gun range had workers with lead levels as high as 42 in 1996.\n\nWhen L&", + "I receives a referral about a serious hazard, regulations say it must inspect as soon as possible but no later than 15 working days.\n\nBut L&I officials couldn\u2019t explain why six weeks had passed before a state industrial hygienist opened an inspection at Wade\u2019s on Aug. 13, 2010. She eventually found seven violations, including two serious ones. L&I issued a $350 fine.\n\nAbout six months later, a manager at Gaughran\u2019s range told L&I in writing the violations had been fixed.\n\nBuilding the business\n\nBy 2011, Gaughran had decided to expand his business by adding a second story to his popular gun store and range.\n\nHis architect,", + " in a March 2011 building permit for the city of Bellevue, answered \u201cNONE\u201d to describe potential environmental health hazards during the project. During the construction, he said, special filters would be installed to remove lead and gunshot residue from the air.\n\nGaughran selected S.D. Deacon, a general contractor with offices in Bellevue, Portland and several California cities, for the $2.6 million project. Unlike another bidder, S.D. Deacon promised to mostly keep the firing range open to the public while it built the second story, renovated the range, installed a ventilation system and built a new bullet-trap system.\n\nBut S.D.", + " Deacon wouldn\u2019t take on one part of the job \u2014 removing the tall sand berm contaminated with tons of lead.\n\nOnce again, Gaughran hired his own employees in the fall of 2012 to mine the sand pile. He would later say it was at least the 15th time workers had mined the lead. As in the past, Wade\u2019s workers received little or no training and wore scant protective gear, records show.\n\nBy sunrise, when workers left their overnight shifts, lead particles painted their faces and lead dust coated their lungs. After several weeks, the workers had removed about 100,000 pounds of recyclable lead.", + " Another 578 tons of lead-contaminated sand filled 30 semi-trucks, which hauled it to the Doe Run recycling center in Boss, Mo.\n\nMark Harrison / The Seattle Times, 2012\n\n\u201cSeverely contaminated\u201d\n\nDuring the early stages of construction in fall 2012, Leonard Guthrie, S.D. Deacon\u2019s superintendent in charge of the construction, believed that lead just wasn\u2019t a problem.\n\nHe\u2019d seen children in the shooting range and observed Wade\u2019s employees cleaning it without full protective equipment.\n\nGuthrie would later tell a state investigator that when he pressed Gaughran about lead, the gun-range owner swore at him and told him to shut up.", + " After a while Guthrie stopped asking about lead hazards.\n\nGaughran recently said he repeatedly told Guthrie and others they had to protect workers because \u201canything that looks gray is lead.\u201d\n\nOn Sept. 10, 2012, an environmental company hired by S.D. Deacon sent an alarming report to the contractor.\n\n\u201cI was sleeping with it, eating with it, living with it. Lead was my life at that point and I had no idea.\u201d Manny Romo, ironworker exposed to lead while remodeling Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns and Bellevue Indoor Range\n\nMed-Tox Northwest tested the gun range and found it \u201cseverely contaminated\u201d with lead,", + " at 435 times the guidelines for surfaces. Even the ceiling\u2019s fiberglass insulation was loaded with lead. But Guthrie and other managers didn\u2019t halt the project.\n\nMed-Tox Northwest created a lead-compliance program for S.D. Deacon and its subcontractors that included training, respirators, employee blood-lead tests, daily air-quality monitoring, and a decontamination room.\n\nUnder this plan, Wade\u2019s firing range would only be open to the public if its air had fewer than 30 micrograms of lead per cubic meter of air averaged over an 8-hour period. That standard is the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration\u2019s (OSHA)", + " exposure level that triggers extra protections for employees.\n\nTo save money, S.D. Deacon officials would later say, the company decided to implement the entire lead program itself, even though it had no experience in lead abatement.\n\nS.D. Deacon safety manager Glen Kuntz \u201cskimmed\u201d Med-Tox\u2019s contamination report and proposed compliance program, he later told an L&I investigator.\n\nHe purchased a \u201cnegative air machine\u201d to push the lead-contaminated dust out of the range as well as equipment for a decontamination room. But S.D. Deacon employees never set it up and Kuntz returned the equipment.\n\nThe S.D.", + " Deacon team also did not test the air to determine if the range was safe enough to be open to the public, as Med-Tox Northwest had recommended.\n\nS.D. Deacon officials later told L&I that they had provided some protective gear to workers, but some refused to wear it.\n\nSeveral workers \u2014 including Romo, who worked for subcontractor Brooks Steel \u2014 said lead wasn\u2019t discussed during weekly safety meetings.\n\nAs Romo and others demolished parts of the shooting range, they had no idea lead polluted it.\n\nWade\u2019s Eastside Guns\n\nDirty work\n\nIn mid-September 2012, Wade\u2019s workers tore down ceiling insulation at night with long pike poles.", + " The air was so thick with lead dust that they couldn\u2019t see in front of them, one Wade\u2019s worker said.\n\nIt clung to their lungs and skin. Over several long nights, they stuffed 200 garbage bags full of lead-laced insulation.\n\nOne night, Wade\u2019s employees made a short video of the insulation removal, documenting their lack of protection and expressing fear of lead contamination.\n\nSoon workers complained of tremors, severe headaches, fatigue, irritability, stomach cramps and loss of appetite. One of them went to the doctor and discovered his blood-lead level had reached 48. A few days later, his high test results were reported to the state\u2019s blood-", + "lead surveillance program. By then, one worker was vomiting.\n\nDepartment of Labor and Industries\n\nOfficials find lead on roof L&I; inspectors noted a 24-foot-wide circle of lead residue around exhaust vents on the roof of Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns. A \u201cbulk sample\u201d collected near one exhaust vent showed the material was 40 percent lead. Read the document Department of Labor and Industries Tests confirm contamination Lead tests at Wade\u2019s detect the presence of lead. Swabs that turn pink or red show a hazardous level of lead. Health agency alerted Telephone message: L&I; compliance manager Venetia Runnion informs Public Health \u2014 Seattle & King County of lead exposure at Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns,", + " three weeks after a bricklayer first told L&I; that the general public was being exposed there. Listen to voicemail L&I; asks Wade\u2019s to close temporarily L&I; compliance manager Venetia Runnion in an email to Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns: \u201cWe strongly urge you to close the range now and leave it closed until the new ventilation system is installed, the range itself is thoroughly cleaned by a lead abatement contractor, and surface wipe and air samples indicate that there is no lead present in the facility.\u201d Read the email\n\nSpitting out lead\n\nIn early November 2012, bricklayer George Dunn worked next to a large exhaust fan on the roof of the Bellevue shooting range when he heard a noise that startled him.\n\nFirst,", + " he said, he heard the \u201cpop, pop, pop\u201d of gunfire, followed immediately by the \u201cping\u201d of metal spiraling through the fan next to him. Bullet fragments rattled inside the vent and then spewed out, with no filters catching them.\n\n\u201cIt was spitting all the lead chips out and exposing everyone, blowing all over,\u201d he would later say.\n\nA bricklayer for 25 years, Dunn had worked for about three weeks with a crew building the second story. Dunn and other crew members repeatedly had been told their work on the roof didn\u2019t pose any health risks, and he said S.D. Deacon, the contractor supervising the job,", + " hadn\u2019t issued any special protective gear.\n\nBut when co-workers started acting edgy \u2014 and he started feeling strange himself \u2014 Dunn began having doubts.\n\n\u201cMy nose, chest, eyes, lips were all burning,\u201d Dunn recalled. \u201cAnd I had these side aches. My wife said something was wrong with me, because I just kept walking around holding my kidneys all the time.\u201d\n\nHe noticed a 20-foot wide circle of thick, gray dust around the fans.\n\nDunn had had enough. \u201cI just said, \u2018The hell with it. I quit.\u2019\u201d\n\nThe next day, Nov. 8, 2012, Dunn called L&", + "I about the unsafe workplace.\n\nDunn, who never got his blood tested, asked an L&I official about the health risks of lead exposure and explained how lead dust spewed onto workers and others at the range.\n\n\u201cI told her that there was a bus stop right there on the street down below the vent,\u201d Dunn said. \u201cAnd [lead] is blowing all down on the pedestrians down there.\u201d\n\nThe official told Dunn that L& I already knew about the lead problem there. A couple of weeks earlier, the agency had received blood results for two workers there who had elevated lead levels.\n\nShe recommended that Dunn drink orange juice to help reduce any lead absorption,", + " he recalled. L&I didn\u2019t contact public-health officials until more than three weeks later.\n\nOn Nov. 13, near the end of the 15 business-day deadline to open an inspection, L&I officials showed up at Wade\u2019s. \u201cTiming was very quick that we got out there,\u201d said Venetia Runnion, an L&I manager on the inspection team.\n\nInspectors interviewed workers, tested the air and swabbed surfaces for lead over several weeks before ultimately determining what Dunn had told them was true.\n\nDuring the visit, Gaughran was cooperative, Runnion said.\n\nIn all, inspectors would find 18 violations,", + " mostly related to poor ventilation, lack of training, and high lead levels on surfaces and in the air.\n\nMeanwhile, L&I notified S.D. Deacon on Nov. 15 that its whole crew should get blood tests to find out if they\u2019d been overexposed to lead.\n\nTwenty-six of them turned out to have high lead levels.\n\nS.D. Deacon\u2019s foreman had the highest at 153 micrograms, more than 127 times average.\n\nConcerned about the rash of lead cases at Wade\u2019s, Runnion noted in an email to colleagues and to Gaughran and his managers that the public was still shooting there,", + " despite its toxic condition.\n\nIn one of the shooting bays, customers would be exposed to the maximum allowable 8-hour airborne standard for workers in just 49 minutes.\n\nL&I had the power to shut down the poisoned shooting range until Gaughran had it decontaminated. The agency had considered taking this drastic step \u2014 an \u201corder and notice of immediate restraint\u201d \u2014 against another dirty gun range once before, but did not do so.\n\nOn Nov. 30, Runnion urged \u2014 but did not order \u2014 Gaughran to close the range immediately, writing, \u201cThank you in advance for choosing to do the right thing to control this health hazard in a timely manner.\u201d\n\nStill,", + " Gaughran kept it open.\n\nMarcus Yam / The Seattle Times\n\nChildren overexposed\n\nFor several months in fall 2012, Manny Romo tracked poison into his car and then into his home on his heavy, lead-caked work boots and clothes.\n\n\u201cI was sleeping with it, eating with it, living with it,\u201d he said. \u201cLead was my life at that point and I had no idea.\u201d\n\nAs his 5-year-old daughter, Serenity, played on the floor, she got lead on her skin, clothing and toys. His 13-year-old son, Devin, absorbed lead that had settled on furniture and tools.\n\nSerenity started vomiting.", + " Her blood-lead level was above what the CDC considers high for children. Teachers complained Devin was in a stupor and his grades were slipping. He too had been contaminated.\n\nObstacle: Public records withheld The Seattle Times had to overcome two significant obstacles to obtain the public records it sought to tell the story of lead poisoning at Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns in Bellevue: \u2022 The state Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) improperly delayed releasing the records for several months. \u2022 Wade\u2019s and construction contractor S.D. Deacon sued The Times and L&I to halt release of the records, claiming they contained proprietary information. A King County Superior Court judge eventually tossed out the lawsuits against The Times and fined the state $502,", + "827 for violating public-records law and for not following her order for immediate release of all of the inspection files. The judge also ordered the state to pay $43,682 to cover the newspaper\u2019s attorneys\u2019 fees and costs. L&I\u2019s misconduct \u201chit The Times in its operational heart\u201d by delaying reporting on \u201ca significant story and of major public interest for our community,\u201d judge Catherine Shaffer said in a decision last fall. She said she set a high penalty \u201cto deter future misconduct by the agency.\u201d The Times\u2019 pursuit of these documents had begun in January 2013, when it asked L&I for records about the agency\u2019s lead-poisoning inquiry into the Bellevue range.", + " In reply, L&I cited an exemption to the state Public Records Act for ongoing investigations but failed to provide further explanation, as required. By early May 2013, L&I had cited Wade\u2019s for serious violations and closed the investigation. In June, it cited S.D. Deacon, which was building a second story at the gun range. But it wasn\u2019t until July 25 that L&I informed Wade\u2019s and the contractors that inspection files would be released to The Times on Aug. 9 \u2014 unless they obtained a temporary restraining order from a judge to halt disclosure. Wade\u2019s and S.D. Deacon sued to stop the release but never obtained a restraining order.", + " The Times countersued the two companies and L&I. At a Sept. 12, 2013, hearing, Shaffer determined that the files, which totaled several thousand pages, had been illegally withheld. She ordered L&I to disclose them immediately. Even so, it took the agency eight more days to make all the records public. L&I has appealed the judge\u2019s order to the state Supreme Court, which hasn\u2019t decided whether to take the case. Read more \u25be\n\nRomo felt numbness and tingling in his feet and hands. His stomach ached and he couldn\u2019t concentrate. His blood test on Nov.", + " 20 revealed a 73, one of the highest of anyone exposed at Wade\u2019s. As required, his employer removed him from the job.\n\nHis wife, Katrina, tested at normal levels.\n\nRomo and his family evacuated their Auburn apartment about a week before Christmas.\n\nAfter tests showed the family\u2019s apartment contaminated with lead, Romo compiled a 28-page list of possessions that were taken from them. It included a hand-knit blanket from Romo\u2019s grandmother, Serenity\u2019s books and Devin\u2019s Star Wars collection.\n\nOn Christmas Day, the Romo family moved back into their decontaminated, nearly empty apartment. After two months,", + " they moved out again because Serenity\u2019s blood levels hadn\u2019t dropped.\n\nAbatement crews removed lead from several other workers\u2019 homes and cars, and even had to decontaminate 10 rooms at a Bellevue hotel where workers stayed during the construction.\n\nAn urgent message\n\nAfter L&I alerted Public Health \u2014 Seattle & King County about several workers poisoned at Wade\u2019s, Dr. David Fleming raised concerns.\n\n\u201cYikes, these are very high and non-tolerable levels,\u201d Fleming, then-director of the agency wrote on Dec. 4, 2012. \u201cWe need to move on this.\u201d\n\nL&I feared Wade\u2019s customers who used the range,", + " which was open off and on for the past four months, had been contaminated.\n\nL&I officials wanted Public Health to halt the shooting range renovation and close the facility to shooters, the health agency\u2019s emails show.\n\nFleming\u2019s office quickly responded, asking Gaughran to provide a list of active shooters so it could notify them about the lead problems and recommend blood tests.\n\nGaughran didn\u2019t provide names, saying he had no frequent shooters at the range.\n\nOn Dec. 10, Public Health officials asked Gaughran to voluntarily close his range so that lead could be safely removed from the building.\n\nBut Gaughran became \u201ccombative\u201d about any hint of closing,", + " Public Health emails show. \u201cJust because there is lead on the floor, benches or shooting partition does not mean the customers or employees are getting lead into their bodies,\u201d he responded to the agency the same day.\n\nWith no blood tests of customers, health officials lacked proof that any member of the public was overexposed to lead. However, numerous cases across the country illustrate that shooting enthusiasts have suffered lead poisoning at gun ranges.\n\nBehind the scenes, a King County public-health official drafted a health order that showed the agency had the authority to shut down the range. When officials said they would visit to get more evidence of contamination, Gaughran closed the range the next day,", + " Dec. 11.\n\nWithin days, Gaughran laid off some employees and fired several others, including at least two men who had lead poisoning.\n\nThey contend that Gaughran fired them because they had had their blood tested for lead and questioned the range\u2019s safety.\n\nGaughran had promised to give a gun or a $450 gift certificate at the gun shop as a bonus to workers who helped remove insulation and lead from the berm. But he refused to give the bonus to two of the men, they said.\n\nHis reason? They threatened \u201cto rat on us if \u2026 they didn\u2019t get their pistols,\u201d Gaughran told The Times in an email.", + " \u201cThe whole thing is BULLSHIT.\u201d\n\nHe said he fired some employees because they weren\u2019t reliable. Employees were trained and educated about lead hazards, Gaughran said, and any workers who claimed they became sick were simply careless or later motivated by money.\n\nHe hired an environmental cleanup company and reopened parts of the range four days later, contrary to Public Health\u2019s request.\n\nAn eye on customers\n\nAt Public Health \u2014 Seattle & King County, officials like Director of Environmental Health Ngozi Oleru were flummoxed as they tried to deal with Wade\u2019s as a potential public-health threat.\n\nWhile laws protect workers from airborne lead,", + " no regulations are in place to shield the public while indoors. Could the county test customers for lead, and if results were bad, close the firing range? That situation had never been tackled before.\n\nWith little help from Gaughran, the county sought advice from Mary Jean Brown, a scientist with the CDC. According to the county, Brown replied that it lacked air-monitoring evidence showing customers were at significant risk and to not worry the public about it.\n\nBrown declined to comment.\n\nMark Harrison / The Seattle Times, 2013 Two workers speak out Ironworkers Chris Seavoy, left, and Joe Schmidt are among several construction workers who filed lawsuits against Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns and contractor S.D.", + " Deacon, saying they developed lead poisoning from remodeling the shooting range. Schmidt had tremors, headaches and fatigue. \u201cWe started realizing this is lead, this isn\u2019t dirt,\u201d he told The Seattle Times in 2013. \u201cYou look like the Tin Man when you get it on you.\u201d\n\nSo Public Health officials sought proof, asking Gaughran for shooters who would volunteer for a lead-air exposure evaluation after a new ventilation system had been installed and the building remediated. If these customers had breathing exposures higher than what OSHA allowed for workers, then Gaughran would have to close his business again, Oleru warned.\n\nAt that point the public had little knowledge lead was a problem at the range other than notices taped on a door to the shooting range.\n\nDuring Ladies Night on Dec.", + " 18, six men volunteered to be monitored while shooting. Three of them had \u201cpersonal breathing zones\u201d of lead higher than what OSHA allowed for workers.\n\nWhen Public Health shared the alarming results with the CDC, Oleru realized she had a problem. Unlike for workers, there are no state or federal standards for safe levels of indoor airborne lead for the general public.\n\n\u201cThe science is not available,\u201d she told The Times.\n\nThat made it difficult to conclude whether Wade\u2019s had harmed shooters and what to enforce, she said. \u201cWhat\u2019s the hammer we have?\u201d the frustrated Oleru asked.\n\nThe public only discovered the lead problem when two employees of Brooks Steel,", + " a subcontractor on the project, told their stories of becoming ill to The Times and other local news outlets.\n\nOleru said her agency asked but never did receive further air-quality tests from Wade\u2019s. But by the spring L&I had indicated the range had passed tests showing it was safe for workers and ultimately the public.\n\nMark Harrison / The Seattle Times\n\nContamination in soil Washington\u2019s Department of Ecology continues to list Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns as a contaminated site after tests showed lead levels above standards in soil near the building. In 2013, 20 cubic yards of lead-contaminated soil were transported to a hazardous-waste facility.", + " Owner Wade Gaughran has not yet provided the state with documentation showing the area has been fully remediated. Read the document\n\nLingering effects\n\n\u201cLead poisoning is no joke,\u201d Roberto Sanchez said.\n\nMore than six years after his poisoning at Wade\u2019s, Sanchez, 44, says his hands shake, his equilibrium is off and he suffers dizzy spells. The dull, biting pain that permeates his joints and muscles and fluctuates from annoying to unbearable is the worst.\n\n\u201cNobody should have to go through pain for the rest of their life,\u201d said Sanchez, who quit Wade\u2019s in 2011.\n\nHe tried several medications for the nerve damage,", + " but they either made him suicidal or didn\u2019t work. He recently started acupuncture.\n\nSanchez now owns his own gun shop in Monroe. When he shoots, which is rare, he does so outdoors.\n\nSanchez said he\u2019s angry at Gaughran for his disregard of employees. \u201cYou figure after the first time people got sick, it would have stopped,\u201d he said.\n\nLast year, L&I at first decided to deal a heavy blow to Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns, issuing two \u201cwillful\u201d violations \u2014 the most severe class of penalties.\n\nBut an agency lawyer overruled that choice. She said there was no proof Gaughran was aware of L&", + "I\u2019s 2010 inspection and citations, even though David Geisert, a range manager from 2010, told The Times he had discussed the lead problems at length with Gaughran and another manager. L&I inspectors never tried to interview Geisert.\n\nL&I\u2019s own records also show Gaughran exchanged emails with state officials after Sanchez\u2019s poisoning in 2008, vowing even then to solve lead problems.\n\nContractors at Wade\u2019s Three companies working on the Wade\u2019s addition were cited for workplace violations. Company Violations Penalty S.D. Deacon 8 $10,750 Mechanical & Control Services 5 $2,", + "550 Advanced Masonry Services 3 $0 Source: state Department of Labor and Industries\n\nFor the 2012 mass exposure, Wade\u2019s was originally fined $23,480, but after an informal appeal, the parties settled for $17,920.\n\nThe case alarmed health director Fleming enough that he asked Gov. Jay Inslee and L&I to strengthen the lead standards.\n\n\u201cWashington State\u2019s current standards put workers and their families at risk,\u201d he wrote in his petition, suggesting workers should be removed from the workplace when tests show exposure at much lower levels of lead.\n\nL&I denied the petition, stating it would wait to see what happens in California,", + " where officials are considering a similar proposal.\n\nThe construction project at Wade\u2019s still haunts S.D. Deacon\u2019s safety manager, Glen Kuntz. Had managers simply hired an outside environmental consultant to routinely test for lead, Kuntz said, he would have known about the dangers and prevented much of the exposure.\n\nHow to protect yourself \u2022 If you believe you\u2019ve been overexposed to lead, see a medical provider to have your blood tested for lead. \u2022 To determine whether surfaces you come into contact with have lead contamination, use instant lead-check swabs, which turn red if lead is present. Test kits are available at hardware stores.", + " \u2022 Use special hand soap or wipes, such as D-Lead brand, which remove lead and heavy metals from the skin. \u2022 To talk to a specialist about lead safety, call 1-800-424-LEAD (5323), and press option 1 then 9. National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week, Oct. 19-25:\n\nFor more information on the hazards of lead and lead-based products, go to epa.gov/lead.\n\n\u201cI totally blew it. \u2026 This is the biggest failure of anything I\u2019ve done with my life,\u201d he told L&I investigators. \u201cIt\u2019s about these guys going home to their families safe and not being crippled up or broken.\u201d\n\nMore than 10 workers sued Gaughran and S.D.", + " Deacon. They settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount in June.\n\nAn S.D. Deacon executive declined an interview, citing ongoing litigation.\n\nDuring an appeal of his fines and violations in July 2013, Gaughran told an L&I hearing officer he remained bitter about the experience.\n\n\u201cI deal with you, I deal with the Department of Revenue, I deal with the IRS, I deal with the ATF and I deal with FBI and 17 other smaller governments,\u201d Gaughran told the hearing officer. \u201cEvery single government regulatory agency comes to me and says, \u2018I\u2019m the most important person in the world and you have to follow all my regulations.\u2019 \u2026 I got to tell you when I hear that speech,", + " I\u2019m thinking how do I get out of business? \u2026 Why am I making money for everybody in the world and setting myself up for prosecution on every front?\u201d\n\nFor ironworker Manny Romo, who unknowingly contaminated his children, his primary concern is the possible long-term health effects on them. He and two other workers are now suing Wade\u2019s and S.D. Deacon.\n\nGaughran \u201chasn\u2019t learned his lesson,\u201d Romo said. \u201cWhat\u2019s it going to take \u2014 a death?\u201d\n\nChristine Willmsen: cwillmsen@seattletimes.com or 206-464-3261. On Twitter @christinesea.\n\nLewis Kamb:", + " lkamb@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2932. On Twitter @LewisKamb. Staff reporter Justin Mayo and former Times reporter Keith Ervin contributed to this report. ", + " Lead poisoning is a major threat at America\u2019s shooting ranges, perpetuated by owners who\u2019ve repeatedly violated laws even after workers have fallen painfully ill.\n\nA confused 38-year-old father in Kentucky rarely crawled out of bed.\n\nA conservation volunteer in Iowa lost feeling in his hands and feet.\n\nA 5-year-old girl in South King County doubled over in pain and vomited.\n\nThe cause of their suffering: lead poisoning. The source: dirty gun ranges.\n\nIndoor and outdoor, public and private, gun ranges dot the national landscape like bullet holes riddling a paper target, as the popularity of shooting has rocketed to new heights with an estimated 40 million recreational shooters annually.\n\nBut a hidden risk lies within almost all of America\u2019s estimated 10,", + "000 gun ranges. When shooters fire guns with lead-based ammunition, they spread lead vapor and dust, insidious toxins.\n\nThousands of people, including workers, shooters and their family members, have been contaminated at shooting ranges due to poor ventilation and contact with lead-coated surfaces, a Seattle Times investigation has found.\n\nWashington Department of Labor and Industries\n\nThose most at risk are employees who work around firearms, unknowingly inhaling lead-tinged dust and fumes as they instruct customers and clean shooting ranges of spent ammunition. Lead exposure can cause an array of health problems \u2014 from nausea and fatigue to organ damage, mental impairment and even death.\n\nEven those who\u2019ve never stepped inside a gun range have become sick.", + " Employees have carried lead residue into their homes on their skin, clothes, shoes and work gear, inadvertently contaminating family members, including children, who are the most vulnerable to lead\u2019s debilitating health effects.\n\nFor the public, shooting firearms is the most common way of getting lead poisoning outside of work, according to national statistics.\n\nThrough documents, interviews and a first-of-its-kind analysis of occupational lead-monitoring data, The Times has found reckless shooting-range owners who\u2019ve repeatedly violated workplace-safety laws with no regard for workers who became sick. Other owners and operators were ignorant of the dangers posed by lead.\n\nBy law, owners are responsible for protecting employees from lead-polluted workplaces by following rules and regulations on air quality,", + " surface contamination, safety gear and various other standards. Yet state and federal regulators are doing little to make certain gun ranges put such protections in place.\n\nFew commercial shooting ranges are inspected Scroll over the states to discover more about inspections, lead-related violations and fines between 2004 and 2013. Sources: Occupational Safety and Health Administration; state Department of Labor and Industries. Data include failure-to-abate violations and penalties. Penalty amounts as of September. Range-inspection data (PDF) Download inspection data (CSV) Garland Potts / The Seattle Times\n\nThe nation has an estimated 6,000 commercial indoor and outdoor gun ranges, but only 201 have been inspected in the past decade,", + " according to a Times analysis of federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) records. Of those inspected, 86 percent violated at least one lead-related standard, the analysis found.\n\nLead exposure can cause a range of health problems \u2014 from nausea and fatigue to organ damage, mental impairment and death.\n\nPlaces like Manchester Firing Line Range in New Hampshire, Target World in Ohio, Top Brass Sports in Tennessee and the Sharp Shooter in Texas each had more than 20 lead-related violations.\n\nOf the 10 commercial ranges inspected in Washington, nine had at least one lead violation.\n\nOSHA typically doesn\u2019t examine a gun range unless it receives a blood-test report that shows an employee already has been overexposed to lead or unless someone complains.", + " In states such as Washington and California, authorities knew about workers with severe lead poisoning, but failed to inspect the shooting ranges that employed them.\n\nIn 14 states, federal and state occupational agencies didn\u2019t inspect a single commercial gun range from 2004 to 2013, an analysis of OSHA records found.\n\nWhen caught, gun-range owners face few consequences for failing to protect their workers. Fines are reduced. And owners are allowed to keep ranges open while appealing their cases, which can take several years and put employees and customers at continued risk.\n\nWashington state and federal workplace regulators have the power to temporarily close a lead-polluted shooting range to protect workers from exposure to high amounts of lead,", + " but have never done so.\n\nSeveral thousand other indoor and outdoor gun ranges in America \u2014 most of them casually operated by volunteer-led clubs and sports organizations with little knowledge of lead safety \u2014 don\u2019t even have to follow OSHA regulations. They aren\u2019t subject to any scrutiny because they have no employees.\n\nPublicly, the National Rifle Association (NRA) dismisses contentions by health officials that lead is a widespread health and safety problem at shooting ranges. \u201cThe issue of lead problems for indoor ranges is extremely rare,\u201d said Susan Recce, an NRA official. To their members, the lobbying group encourages owners to clean up their ranges to avoid inviting government scrutiny.\n\nBut research by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health,", + " which analyzes occupational hazards for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), shows lead is a hidden danger.\n\nWatch how lead escapes a semi-automatic pistol Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times\n\nLead exposure at gun ranges is \u201ca serious problem and we think it could be quite widespread,\u201d said Dr. Elana Page, medical officer for NIOSH.\n\nThe risk isn\u2019t limited to range employees, Page added.\n\n\u201cSome firing ranges cater to children, they have birthday parties and special events,\u201d she said. \u201cI think it\u2019s really important that people are aware they can have significant exposure at a firing range, even for members of the general public.\u201d\n\nThe problem of lead exposure need not be part of the debate raging over gun rights in America,", + " said Kentucky firearms instructor Colleene Barnett, who suffered from lead poisoning.\n\n\u201cWe need people to educate folks,\u201d she said. \u201cThe last thing you need is to stop shooting \u2014 and for people to hold lead against shooting as a sport.\u201d\n\nMarcus Yam / The Seattle Times\n\nA heavy diagnosis\n\n\u201cEducate yourself and know the risks \u2014 it\u2019s not just bullets you need to watch out for.\u201d James Maddox, former gun-range manager in Kentucky\n\nJames Maddox, a former gun-range manager in Kentucky, talks about himself as two different men: the jovial, hardworking man before lead poisoning, and the reclusive, weakened man after.\n\n\u201cI wish I could just show you guys the type of person I was,\u201d he said,", + " with tears streaming down his face.\n\nFor about a year starting in 2006, Maddox and his wife worked at Bluegrass Indoor Range in Louisville.\n\nLike many shooting-range workers, Maddox knew little about lead and its damaging capabilities. Daily, he inhaled airborne lead while managing the range and gun shop. Nightly, he swept up casings from spent ammunition in the 12 firing lanes, pushing a broom and kicking up more lead dust. The toxin landed on his skin and sank into his pores. Every breath pushed the poison further into his lungs, blood and bones.\n\nHe complained to owner Winfield Underwood that catch bins at the end of shooting lanes were overflowing with spent lead bullets,", + " the ventilation system didn\u2019t work and workers needed protective gear. Inspectors later discovered the air vents didn\u2019t even have filters.\n\n\u201cIt was just circulating the lead air,\u201d said Maddox, who earned $9 an hour.\n\nKentucky Labor Cabinet\n\nAfter working at the Louisville range about six months, Maddox, a hefty 38-year-old man, dropped 180 pounds. He also lost sensation in his fingers and toes. His head throbbed, his thinking slowed and he couldn\u2019t remember birthdays. He had no sex drive.\n\n\u201cIt just feels like someone unplugged me from the wall and I just lost all my power,\u201d he said.\n\nHis doctor\u2019s diagnosis:", + " lead poisoning from the gun range.\n\nA February 2007 blood test showed he had a dangerous level of lead with 68 micrograms per deciliter \u2014 more than 56 times the average adult level of 1.2. \u201cYour organs could start shutting down,\u201d he recalled his doctor telling him.\n\nThe CDC states lead causes health problems like organ damage at as low as 10 micrograms, though symptoms rarely appear.\n\nBut OSHA\u2019s 36-year-old regulations say employees can have up to six times that amount of lead in their blood before being removed from the work area. The Times found many employees who\u2019d already suffered significant health problems before reaching that threshold.\n\nDespite the CDC\u2019s concern,", + " OSHA has yet to adopt more stringent lead regulations to protect workers.\n\n\u201cOSHA recognizes that exposure to lead is a significant hazard and that our lead standard is outdated,\u201d said David Michaels, an assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Labor. Changing the standard, he added, is highly complex and can take more than seven years.\n\nJames Maddox\n\nMaddox, who spent several weeks in bed, returned to work after he assumed Underwood had fixed the lead problems. But when Maddox found not much had changed, he started to alert pregnant women and kids they shouldn\u2019t enter the range because of lead exposure.\n\nMaddox\u2019s wife,", + " who worked throughout the business, also developed elevated levels of lead. They both had enough and quit.\n\n\u201cYou claimed to care so much for me and my family and you did NOTHING to protect us from this or even try to resolve any further exposure or supply us with the proper safety equipment,\u201d Maddox wrote in his April 2007 resignation letter.\n\nHe has advice for range workers: \u201cEducate yourself and know the risks \u2014 it\u2019s not just bullets you need to watch out for.\u201d\n\nUnderwood, of Lexington, couldn\u2019t be reached for comment.\n\nKentucky Labor Cabinet, the state\u2019s workplace-safety agency, inspected Underwood\u2019s range several times and determined that he had overexposed his employees to lead on a daily basis.", + " The agency hit him with dozens of violations and $461,400 in fines, the highest total amount imposed against a U.S. gun range in the past decade.\n\nBut in a later settlement with Underwood, the Kentucky Labor Cabinet lowered the fine to $7,200 because of \u201cfinancial hardship.\u201d\n\nAs with other industries, OSHA and state occupational agencies often reduce fines for gun-range owners, sometimes because they are cooperative or they show an inability to pay. Nationally, the agencies initially fined gun ranges a total of almost $2 million for violations in the past decade, but reduced it to less than half that amount. For ranges that were fined,", + " OSHA reduced the amounts in two out of every three inspections, a Times analysis found.\n\nIn the Bluegrass case, Underwood paid the fine in 2012. But he didn\u2019t fix all the lead violations, which dated to 2007. Under federal and state law, he didn\u2019t have to because he filed an appeal.\n\nKentucky Labor Cabinet\n\nEven though blood tests and sampling of air and surfaces show dire hazards and widespread lead contamination, shooting ranges can avoid costly cleanups and paying fines until the administrative appeal is resolved.\n\nDuring 2010 congressional testimony, Michaels said the appeal process is flawed, pointing to 33 cases in which workers in various industries died while employers contested violations and fines.\n\n\u201cThe only situation worse than a worker being injured or killed on the job by a senseless and preventable hazard is having a second worker felled by the same hazard,\u201d Michaels said.\n\nSen.", + " Patty Murray, D-Wash., and other lawmakers proposed bills in 2013 to require abatement of serious hazards during an appeal, but the bills are languishing in committees.\n\nEvan Satterwhite, director of Kentucky\u2019s occupational safety and health compliance at the time, said \u201cit\u2019s not something we like,\u201d but he could do little while Underwood\u2019s appeal dragged on.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re all for the Second Amendment, but he was deceiving employees while exposing them to an unhealthy chemical,\u201d Satterwhite said.\n\nMarcus Yam / The Seattle Times\n\nTrouble from the start in Kent\n\nOf the nation\u2019s estimated 6,000 commercial gun ranges,", + " only 201 have been inspected in the past decade. Of those inspected, 86 percent violated at least one lead-related standard.\n\nFrom the moment the doors opened at the new Champion Arms indoor shooting range in Kent, in October 2005, co-owner Steve Wangsness knew airborne lead was going to be a problem, Washington state records show.\n\nThe ventilation system specifically designed for the custom-built, 10-lane range was supposed to push air containing lead dust and bullet fragments away from shooters. Filtered vents at the back of the range were then expected to suck the bad air out of the building.\n\nBut the exhaust system didn\u2019t work.", + " Instead, it blew toxic dust clouds back on unwitting shooters \u2014 and into the retail areas of the business, where workers spent most of their day.\n\nMark Harrison / The Seattle Times\n\n\u201cThis system was so screwed up, it\u2019s remarkable they could have gotten the doors actually locked at night,\u201d Cheryl Christian, a state Labor and Industries expert on lead issues, would later remark. \"\u2026It would have been a wind tunnel out the front door in the wrong direction.\u201d\n\nWangsness and co-owner Maria Geiss sparred with the building\u2019s landlord over the faulty system, eventually filing a lawsuit. Still, they kept Champion Arms open for business, exposing their employees,", + " customers and an on-site resident to the dirty gun range.\n\nIn December 2005, an unpaid gunsmith and maintenance worker living at the range got his blood checked and found high levels of lead. Triggered by a complaint, an L&I inspector showed up in July 2006 to investigate.\n\nAir sampling showed Champion Arms workers were being exposed to airborne lead above safe standards. Using testing wipes that measure lead on surfaces, the inspector also found lead dust more than 115 times the recommended amounts on a soft-drink machine. Lead also contaminated the employee conference table and the floor of a shooting booth.\n\nLead dangers in Champion Arms Champion Arms indoor shooting range was described as the worst gun range for lead exposure that Washington\u2019s Department of Labor and Industries had ever seen.", + " The Kent gun range garnered dozens of violations for lead exposure and other safety problems during inspections in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2013. Descriptions are based on the 2006 inspection. The permissible level of airborne lead for an employee over an 8-hour period is 50 micrograms per cubic meter (mcg/m3). The acceptable level of lead on surfaces in the workplace is 200 micrograms per square-foot (mcg/foot2). Source: Washington Labor and Industries. This illustration is based on the current layout of Champion Arms. Some features may have changed since 2006. Thomas Wilburn and Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times\n\nChildren poisoned when parents track lead home Toxic lead isn\u2019t always confined within the cinder-block walls of America\u2019s shooting ranges,", + " and sometimes its victims are those most vulnerable to its hazards. Children who\u2019ve never set foot inside a gun range have been poisoned by lead tracked home by parents and others who worked or shot there. Health officials have documented such \u201ctake home\u201d cases from Alaska to New Hampshire. Here in Auburn, for example, a subcontractor who worked on construction at Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns, a shooting range, unknowingly contaminated his 5-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son. A trail of lead coated his vehicle, work clothes and home. At least one child of another laborer on the same 2012 construction project at Wade\u2019s also suffered lead exposure,", + " health officials found. In all, blood levels for the three exposed children ranged from 6 to 11 micrograms per deciliter. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sets a reference level of 5 micrograms per deciliter to identify children with elevated blood-lead levels. Although it\u2019s toxic to everyone, lead poses the greatest risk to unborn babies and children. \u201cNo safe blood-lead level in children has been identified,\u201d according to the CDC. \u201cEven low levels of lead in blood have been shown to affect IQ, ability to pay attention and academic achievement. And effects of lead exposure cannot be corrected.\u201d Lead-based paint in old homes is still the most common way children get overexposed to lead.", + " In California, one of the worst \u201ctake home\u201d cases took place about a decade ago, when a worker helping to dismantle a gun range showed high levels of lead in his blood. State health officials tracked the exposure to four more workers who not only had lead poisoning but had also contaminated their homes and families. In all, one spouse and nine children \u2014 ages 18 months to 12 years \u2014 had lead levels in their blood that ranged from 13 to 36. \u201cThe youngest child had the highest\u201d blood-lead level, health officials later reported. In 2011, a range worker overexposed to lead at the Bullet Hole near Omaha,", + " Neb., tracked it home and contaminated his 1-year-old. Blood tests showed the baby had 20 micrograms per deciliter of lead \u2014 a level that can cause brain and nerve damage in children. Health officials found severe contamination on the baby\u2019s car seat and on the man\u2019s work shoes. OSHA has inspected the range twice, found nine violations and fined it a total of $8,123. Owner Wes Ewasiuk had no comment. Joseph Graziano, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University who has studied lead exposure, said children with lead poisoning suffer in two ways: \u201cThey are paying a price in terms of their childhood development and their motor functions,", + " and we\u2019ve learned over time that children who had lead exposure early pay a price later in life \u2026 with chronic kidney disease.\u201d Read more \u25be\n\nL&I learned the range\u2019s owners had no training about safe range operations. One of the owners even used a leaf blower to clean up, and the range employed a pregnant worker. Women can have miscarriages when overexposed to lead.\n\nThe inspector cited Champion Arms for 15 violations, 13 of them deemed serious, meaning they posed a substantial probability of death or serious physical harm to workers. Fearing Champion Arms would put workers and the public at risk if it stayed open,", + " officials with L&I\u2019s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) debated whether to shut it down. They could issue an \u201corder and notice of immediate restraint\u201d that forces a business to close until it fixes its problems.\n\nDOSH has issued more than 150 such orders since September 2004, though never for a gun range.\n\n\u201cThis is the worse (sic) indoor firing range DOSH has investigated certainly recently and potentially ever,\u201d Christian wrote later in an email to a state lawyer.\n\nBut L&I management decided not to close it and couldn\u2019t explain why.\n\n\u201cAs a public range with the potential for underage kids using it in addition to adults,", + " in retrospect I wonder at that decision,\u201d Christian\u2019s email said.\n\nIn all, Champion\u2019s violations could have resulted in fines up to $31,500. But L&I fined it only $11,200, cutting the owners a break in part for being cooperative.\n\nBut the owners stopped the clock when they contested the violations to the state Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals, as is their right. Meanwhile, the range stayed open to the public.\n\nFinally, in October 2007, Champion Arms agreed to the state\u2019s violations and penalties. The range was placed on a six-month payment plan for the fines and promised to fix any outstanding violations in 15 days.\n\nL&", + "I allows businesses to essentially police themselves by submitting an \u201cEmployer Certification of Hazards Corrected\u201d form.\n\nSeveral months after the settlement, Geiss declared in writing that all violations had been fixed. By then, the range already had missed payments.\n\nBut L&I didn\u2019t immediately check on whether the range had corrected its problems. In May 2008, inspectors received a report that another Champion Arms employee\u2019s blood had tested high for lead. Only then did L&I follow up to see if the range really had fixed the hazards.\n\nInspectors were afraid to return to Champion Arms. \u201cI have a concern about entering this location,\u201d a supervisor said by email.", + " \u201cThere is no evidence that the ventilation system has been fixed.\u201d\n\nLater that month, inspectors again found rampant violations, including problems uncorrected since the 2006 inspection. Lead dust still contaminated the range\u2019s air; table and counter tops still remained coated in lead; and employees still lacked the required protective gear.\n\nIn cases in which an employer knowingly files false information about correcting workplace violations, L&I can pursue criminal penalties. Despite finding that seven of the violations Geiss claimed to have fixed were still uncorrected, L&I issued only more civil penalties.\n\nL&I cited Champion Arms for 15 violations in November 2008,", + " including six \u201cFailure to Abate Serious\u201d citations, and fined it $42,400.\n\nOnce again, Champion filed an appeal in December 2008, halting the state\u2019s orders to fix the problems and pay the fines.\n\nDuring the year it took to resolve the appeal, the business kept operating. On Dec. 31, 2009, an industrial appeals judge affirmed all 15 violations and the original $42,400 fine against the shooting range.\n\nAgain, a gun-range manager guaranteed in November 2010 that Champion Arms had finally corrected all outstanding violations. But a few weeks later, after that same manager had been fired,", + " he complained to L&I that Champion still was exposing its employees to lead at unsafe levels. L&I later issued $10,600 in fines and 10 more violations.\n\nAfter its fourth inspection of Champion Arms in October 2013, L&I cited it for four more violations, including failing to fully institute a lead-training program for employees \u2014 one of the most basic precautions on the books.\n\nThrough a manager, Geiss declined to comment. Wangsness died earlier this year.\n\nIn 2012, Washington became only the second state to require employers to correct serious workplace hazards during an appeal. L&I pointed to Champion Arms as an example when it asked lawmakers for the change.\n\nWashington\u2019s shooting ranges The vast majority of ranges have never been inspected,", + " because their non-commercial status puts them outside of L&I; jurisdiction. Of the 10 commercial ranges inspected by the state between 2004 and June 2014, nine had at least one lead-related violation. Click on the dots to learn about the state\u2019s gun ranges, and range inspections between 2004 and June 2014. Inspected by L&I;\n\nInspected by L&I; Subject to inspection by L&I;\n\nSubject to inspection by L&I; Clubs, nonprofits and other ranges that might not be subject to inspection Sources: Occupational Health and Safety Administration; state Department of Labor and Industries; state Department of Fish and Wildlife;", + " Seattle Times research Thomas Wilburn / The Seattle Times\n\nLack of scrutiny\n\nFrom 2004 through May 2013, Washington state\u2019s lead-monitoring system received notice of 59 workers with high lead levels working at nine gun ranges. Of the nine, the state inspected four.\n\nSix years ago, federal OSHA set a new bar for workplace regulators to inspect a business if an employee had elevated blood-lead levels of 25 micrograms or higher. The national emphasis program specifically included shooting ranges.\n\nSeveral states, including North Carolina, Kentucky and Alaska, adopted the program. But Alaska workplace-safety officials didn\u2019t implement it.\n\nAt least four range workers in that state tested above 25 micrograms.", + " But public-health officials didn\u2019t share those test results with regulators because they weren\u2019t aware of the program.\n\n\u201cBut now that you mention it,\u201d public-health manager Ali Hamade told The Times, \u201cit\u2019s not a bad idea.\u201d\n\nSome states, like Washington, didn\u2019t know about OSHA\u2019s lead-emphasis program.\n\nIn an interview last month, Anne Soiza, L&I\u2019s top official for the agency\u2019s compliance division, expressed ignorance when asked about OSHA\u2019s ongoing program.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t know what the directive says,\u201d said Soiza, adding she \u201cwasn\u2019t here\u201d when OSHA sent it out.\n\nL&I has collected thousands of blood test results for lead through its Washington State Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance program.\n\nIt received notice of 59 employees at nine gun ranges who had lead levels of 25 micrograms or higher in their blood from 2004 through May 2013,", + " according to a Times analysis of a previously unreleased L&I blood-test database. The tally is likely an undercount because workers weren\u2019t required to identify their employer.\n\nOf those nine ranges, L&I inspected four over that time.\n\nL&I has no requirement to alert inspectors of high blood-lead tests, regardless of the level.\n\nThe effects of lead poisoning\n\nThe officials said referrals to inspect were made case by case, based on various guidelines.\n\nBut blood-lead monitoring officials failed at least once to follow agency guidelines about when to refer \u201ccritical situations\u201d to inspectors. In a 2008 case, two employees at a Bellevue gun range had lead levels so high they were removed from work,", + " as required.\n\nTodd Schoonover, L&I\u2019s manager of the blood-monitoring system, declined to comment on his group\u2019s referral decisions.\n\nThe state\u2019s lack of scrutiny helped set the stage for what public-health officials now say is the country\u2019s largest reported occupational lead exposure at an indoor gun range.\n\nDuring the 2008 lead-exposure case, six employees at Wade\u2019s Eastside Guns and Bellevue Indoor Range showed lead poisoning in tests sent to the blood-monitoring program, but results weren\u2019t passed on to L&I inspectors. The agency didn\u2019t inspect Wade\u2019s until 2010, after another cluster of workers tested high for lead.\n\nIn 2012,", + " 46 construction and range workers were overexposed to lead during a project to add a second floor to the gun range. As a result of this case, L&I for the first time has started to compile a list of gun ranges in the state and to inspect more of them.\n\nOfficials also said the agency will review workers\u2019 blood-lead levels at 25 micrograms, to determine if L&I will investigate.\n\nKentucky Labor Cabinet\n\nLead-free bullets offer solution, but face industry pushback Health experts say there\u2019s one surefire way to prevent lead poisoning at shooting ranges: Get the lead out. \u201cAs long as they\u2019re still using lead bullets,", + " they\u2019re creating a hazard,\u201d said Dr. James Dahlgren, a Los Angeles-based physician who has treated and studied toxic chemical exposures since 1971. In recent years, manufacturers have marketed lead-free ammunition made with copper or copper alloys for hunting and target shooting. But ammo made of lead \u2014 a dense, malleable and relatively cheap metal \u2014 remains commonly used. And the leading shooting organization persistently fights proposals to ban it, contending efforts to do so amount to backdoor gun control. Health officials in several states have alerted the public and workers about the risks of lead at shooting ranges, but an official for the National Rifle Association recently told The Seattle Times such contamination cases are isolated.", + " \u201cIn terms of lead being some kind of significant problem or a problem affecting a good majority of ranges, I\u2019m not aware of it,\u201d said Susan Recce, the NRA\u2019s director of conservation, wildlife and natural resources. The toxic hazards of lead have been known and debated for centuries, though reducing widespread use of the remarkably practical but deadly metal historically has been slow to occur. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began phasing lead out of gasoline in the 1970s, and it banned the manufacture and use of lead in paint in 1978. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service\u2019s ban on using lead shot for hunting waterfowl took effect nationwide in 1991.", + " Last year, after decades of controversy, California became the first state to pass a law prohibiting lead in hunting ammunition, after studies concluded endangered condors were dying from lead poisoning after consuming bullet fragments in carrion felled by hunters. The NRA has remained a vocal opponent to California\u2019s restrictions on hunting ammo. It has also challenged suggestions that lead should be eliminated from ammunition used in recreational shooting, contending that\u2019s unnecessary. But for decades, the NRA has invested heavily in protecting and expanding gun ranges by seeking to improve their overall operations and combating lead problems. The group has drafted its \u201cRange Source Book,\u201d a 627-page document that details proper construction and maintenance for safe gun ranges,", + " including lead management. The NRA also holds annual conferences for range owners and provides a national network of technical advisers to assist them, and it offers grants to help fund shooting ranges. Recce noted lead ammunition consistently provides better affordability, shooting accuracy and stopping power than its lead-free alternatives. She added that good housekeeping and proper ventilation offer \u201ca simple solution\u201d for dealing with lead exposure issues in ranges. About 350 range operators attended the National Shooting Sports Foundation\u2019s lead-management and OSHA-compliance workshops in the past year. The trade group for the firearm industry also started a program in 2013 that conducts mock audits similar to OSHA\u2019s at shooting ranges and recommends changes.", + " About 40 ranges have paid $2,500 for the program. David Dorman, a professor of toxicology at North Carolina State University who studied lead exposures, said more public awareness is the key to changing shooters\u2019 perceptions. They will start to protect themselves much like wearing earplugs to prevent hearing loss in firing ranges. \u201cIt took a while, now you don\u2019t go to a range without seeing people wearing ear protection,\u201d he said. Read more \u25be\n\nLax regulation\n\nFederal OSHA officials can\u2019t say how many gun ranges have been inspected nationwide, because they can\u2019t track them. Ranges have registered themselves under such business categories as \u201call other amusement and recreational industries,\u201d which include bowling alleys and soccer clubs,", + " and \u201csporting goods stores.\u201d One range claimed to be a shoe store, another a locksmith.\n\nOSHA handles workplace oversight for most states, but 21 states enforce their own occupational safety and health programs that typically mirror federal regulations. Yet whether under OSHA\u2019s or state jurisdiction, regulation of gun ranges is lax.\n\nAlaska, Iowa and Louisiana are among 14 states that have not inspected a commercial gun range in the past 10 years.\n\nEven when OSHA, the nation\u2019s largest workplace-safety enforcer, does take strong action, it sometimes has few consequences.\n\nIn 2012, OSHA touted a crackdown at Illinois Gun Works,", + " a firing range in Elmwood Park, a Chicago suburb. After federal inspectors found air inside the range contaminated with lead at 12 times allowable levels, the agency cited the range with 27 serious violations and hit it with $111,000 in fines. OSHA then hyped its enforcement in a widely distributed news release.\n\nBut since then, Illinois Gun Works has neither paid a dime nor fixed a single violation. Range owner Don Mastrianni, 59, a retired Chicago garbage collector, said he opted against making costly corrections after he learned his landlord was planning to demolish the building that housed his range.\n\nInstead, Mastrianni kept the range operating for months before it was torn down in 2013 to make way for a new McDonald\u2019s restaurant.", + " Salvagers took no special precautions when hauling off the lead-caked debris.\n\nOSHA has since sent the case to collections, but Mastrianni told The Times in March he had no plans to pay. He had kept active the defunct range\u2019s business registration, believing that protected him from personal liability.\n\n\u201cThey can\u2019t come after me, they have to go after Illinois Gun Works,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if Illinois Gun Works don\u2019t exist, what are they going to do, go after McDonald\u2019s? I wish them luck.\u201d He died from a heart attack in April.\n\nAnother problem is many government agencies collect data from blood tests for lead,", + " but don\u2019t share it with occupational regulators.\n\nUntil recently, Iowa Department of Public Health wasn\u2019t allowed to notify state occupational inspectors of gun ranges suspected of overexposing workers. That meant no inspection and no corrective action.\n\n\u201cIt bothered me,\u201d said Kathy Leinenkugel, the coordinator for the Occupational Health and Safety Surveillance Program in Iowa. She also faced political pressure over gun ranges.\n\n\u201cIf we say to private clubs and retail [gun ranges] you need to make sure you follow OSHA, the pushback is the government is trying to take our guns away,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m not anti-gun. I want them to do it safely.\u201d\n\nCalifornia\u2019s lead problems\n\nCalifornia is viewed as a leader in fighting lead exposure.", + " Even so, reported contaminations at its gun ranges have increased, though severe poisonings have dropped.\n\nIn 1986, California lawmakers passed a bill that created one of the nation\u2019s first statewide blood-lead registries to track exposures at gun ranges and other workplaces.\n\nFive years later, they established a lead-poisoning prevention program within the state\u2019s Department of Public Health. The program educates problem shooting-range owners and managers about lead safety. But case workers have no enforcement authority and typically don\u2019t conduct on-site investigations, working instead by phone and email.\n\nThey rarely refer range owners to California-OSHA for enforcement. When they do,", + " it\u2019s for particularly egregious cases. Cal-OSHA inspected 19 commercial indoor shooting ranges from 2004 to 2013, and fined them nearly $70,000.\n\nBut enforcement doesn\u2019t always mean compliance. Repeat violators remain a problem, records show. And most California ranges have never been inspected.\n\n\u201cOverexposure to lead continues to be a serious occupational-health problem in California\u201d gun ranges, Dr. Barbara Materna, occupational-health chief of the California Department of Public Health, said in an email.\n\nWhen The Times asked the health department for public records of gun ranges with lead problems, it refused to provide company names,", + " or even the city where they did business, citing privacy concerns.\n\nVulnerable volunteers\n\nThousands of other gun ranges \u2014 those run by volunteers or that are members-only clubs \u2014 simply aren\u2019t monitored for lead problems. With no employees, these ranges are not subject to OSHA inspections and operators often are unaware of the dangers of lead contamination.\n\nBob Godlove and his wife traveled the Midwest, shooting in gun competitions. It was a bond that made their marriage stronger. But their passion for shooting turned toxic.\n\nAs president of the Linn County Izaak Walton League in Iowa for more than 15 years, Godlove volunteered 20 hours a week,", + " cleaning the gun range and managing the facility. The conservation organization, with chapters across the United States, has as its motto \u201cdefenders of soil, air, woods, waters and wildlife.\u201d\n\nFor years, Godlove knew he had chronic lead exposure, with blood-lead levels around 40 micrograms per deciliter. His wife never got above 20. But he thought nothing of test results because they were below 60, the OSHA standard that requires removal from work. The CDC says any lead level over 10 is a health risk.\n\nIn 2008, Godlove said, he felt tingling in his hands and feet,", + " often lost his balance, and developed a temper. His lead level had shot up to 67 and lead attacked other parts of his body.\n\nFormer worker James Maddox, 46 Louisville, Ky. The former shooting-range manager at Bluegrass Indoor Range says his lead poisoning in 2007 nearly destroyed his life and family. Lead effects: Fatigue, weight loss, tingling fingers and toes, no sex drive Volunteer Bob Godlove, 65 Cedar Rapids, Iowa As president of Linn County Izaak Walton League, he got lead poisoning from volunteering at the shooting range. He took costly chelation pills for two years to remove the heavy metal from his system.", + " Lead effects: Numbness in hands and feet, angry outbursts, loss of balance Gun-range owner Don Mastrianni, 59 Elmwood Park, Ill. The owner of the since-defunct Illinois Gun Works refused to fix lead problems in his gun range after OSHA cited him for violations and fined him $111,000 in 2012. He vowed to never pay the fine, and died in April 2014. Lead effects: Several workers were exposed to 12 times the permissible level of lead in the air. Gun-range owner Maria Geiss, 67 Kent, Wash. The owner of Champion Arms, an indoor shooting range in Kent that had ventilation problems,", + " kept the doors open during appeals. A state lead expert called it the worst firing range ever inspected in Washington. Lead effects: Range workers and the public repeatedly have been overexposed to unsafe lead levels over the years.\n\nWhen he told fellow league members he\u2019d suffered lead poisoning, the culture he\u2019d been a part of for decades smacked him right across the face.\n\nFellow competitive shooters were adamant lead wasn\u2019t a problem. Many volunteers at the league didn\u2019t feel any urgency despite at least one other person having elevated lead. They didn\u2019t feel sick and no one had died, they told Godlove.\n\n\u201cI was unwilling to put it under the rug,", + " and lots of people wanted me to,\u201d Godlove said.\n\nOthers feared the range would close if people knew it was possibly contaminated.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a pervasive problem across the country \u2014 the lack of awareness and a belief that people and governments are trying to infringe on a gun owner\u2019s rights and ability to shoot,\u201d he said.\n\nHe upgraded the range ventilation system and posted lead-warning signs. He talks about personal hygiene with new members and in the basic firearms classes he teaches.\n\nFor more than two years, Godlove had to take chelation pills costing as much as $3,800 a month to rid his body of lead. But it was too late.", + " It already had attacked his nervous system.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s insidious,\u201d he said.\n\nWith up to half of the feeling lost in his hands, Godlove has trouble picking up coins and paperwork.\n\nHe also can\u2019t pull a trigger and fire accurately anymore. So he quit competitive shooting.\n\nChristine Willmsen: cwillmsen@seattletimes.com or 206-464-3261. On Twitter @christinesea.\n\nLewis Kamb: lkamb@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2932. On Twitter @LewisKamb. ", + " The youngsters knew their sport could be dangerous, even deadly.\n\nBut for the junior team at the Vancouver (Wash.) Rifle and Pistol Club, the peril that emerged from their sport didn\u2019t come from a stray bullet.\n\nIt came from lead.\n\nIn 2010, blood tests revealed that 20 youths had been overexposed to the poisonous metal after shooting in the club\u2019s dirty, poorly ventilated range.\n\n\u201cIt was devastating,\u201d said Marc Ueltschi, the junior team coach and a club member. \u201cIt scared the life out of me. No one knew anything about lead poisoning and what to fix.\u201d\n\nVancouver Rifle is just one of several private gun clubs across the United States that have posed health hazards in a sport with growing numbers of youths and women.\n\nWhile those most likely to be poisoned by lead in gun ranges are the workers themselves,", + " The Seattle Times has found dozens of avid shooters overexposed in such states as Washington, Massachusetts and Alaska.\n\nThe most vulnerable are children learning to shoot and compete in clubs operated by volunteers who may have little knowledge of the risks of firing lead ammunition. Gunfire can put lead residue in the air, and on the skin and nearby surfaces.\n\nClubs like Vancouver Rifle are membership-based organizations. With no paid employees, they aren\u2019t governed by workplace-safety laws and aren\u2019t subject to inspections that would identify deficiencies.\n\nIn this unregulated world of shooting, it\u2019s nearly impossible to determine how many of the thousands of volunteer-based ranges are contaminated.\n\nWhile lead poisoning among casual shooters is rare,", + " the risk increases the more they shoot, particularly if it\u2019s in poorly ventilated and maintained ranges.\n\nMarcus Yam / The Seattle Times\n\n\u201cWe weren\u2019t very cautious\u201d\n\nWhile shooting at the Vancouver club, the children inhaled lead, ate lead and absorbed lead through skin contact from the dirty surfaces.\n\nCordelia Schadler started shooting in seventh grade at the Vancouver club. She and her two younger brothers practiced there with other kids aged 10 to 19 and participated in local, state and national marksmen competitions.\n\nWhen blood-test reports revealed that the three Schadlers had elevated levels of lead in 2010, it surprised club members.\n\nTheir levels ranged from 12 to 17 micrograms per deciliter \u2014 much higher than the threshold of 5 that health officials now say can cause health problems for kids.\n\nNo level of lead is safe for children,", + " according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and even low levels of lead can decrease IQ, slow development and cause kidney damage.\n\n\u201cWe weren\u2019t very cautious,\u201d Schadler, 18, recalled. \u201cWe would get lead on our hands and eat finger food.\u201d\n\nMarcus Yam / The Seattle Times\n\nIn March 2010, after receiving the test results, Clark County Public Health Director Dr. Alan Melnick launched an investigation.\n\nParents, volunteers and children soon discovered their club was contaminated with lead.\n\nThe club, formed in 1958, holds competitions like Bullseye Pistol and Cowboy Action and teaches firearms courses. The 250-member club has a junior team and also allows the JROTC,", + " the Young Marines and Boy Scouts of America to shoot there.\n\nAn examination of the range revealed lead nestled in the carpet, chairs and a couch. Surface tests showed dangerous amounts of lead stuck to counters, a soda machine and the refrigerator, Clark County public records show.\n\nThe floor was 993 times higher than a federal housing guideline for allowable lead on surfaces.\n\nVentilation failed to move the airborne lead particles downrange away from shooters; volunteers rarely cleaned the 12 shooting lanes, according to records and interviews.\n\nEven worse, children inhaled lead, ate lead and absorbed lead through skin contact with dirty surfaces.\n\nMelnick urged that the junior team and the club members be tested for lead.", + " The results: 20 of 32 children had elevated blood-lead levels. One 14-year-old shooter had 20 micrograms.\n\nVancouver Rifle and Pistol Club\n\nWhile none of the shooters showed signs of being affected by the lead, Melnick said damage might not be noticed for many years.\n\n\u201cI think this is a silent killer,\u201d Melnick said. \u201cThere\u2019s skepticism because there are no symptoms at this level; the cognitive changes can be fairly subtle.\u201d\n\nEven coach Ueltschi\u2019s son, Kyle, had an elevated level of lead.\n\n\u201cHe\u2019d get off practice, he\u2019d go home and eat,\u201d Marc Ueltschi said.", + " \u201cHe was ingesting it.\u201d\n\nIn April 2010, Melnick recommended kids not shoot at the range until it was fixed. Leaders of the club agreed, but if children had parental approval, they could shoot there.\n\nMelnick surveyed shooters, discovering those spending more time in the club had higher lead in their system. He also found that several of them may have had additional sources of contamination because they used their home or garage as a shooting range and made their own ammunition.\n\nIndoor ranges with inadequate ventilation pose the highest hazard to shooters. But even outdoor ranges can overexpose competitive shooters, depending on the wind direction, frequency of shooting and cleanliness of the area.\n\nSome of the damaging effects of lead exposure The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states no level of lead is safe in children.", + " Often symptoms of lead exposure may not appear, but damage can still occur. In rare cases, lead poisoning can cause a coma, seizure or death. Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times Sources: Public Health \u2014 Seattle and King County; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; National Institutes of Health\n\nAlaska teams exposed\n\nEight years earlier, a similar spate of lead exposures rocked the remote Tok School in interior Alaska, revealing a widespread problem for school rifle teams using poorly maintained ranges.\n\nMarcus Yam / The Seattle Times\n\nAfter the Tok team\u2019s coach tested high for lead in 2002, public-health investigators soon learned student shooters practiced three to four times a week at a range inside their K-", + "12 school\u2019s multipurpose building. It also housed a hockey rink, was ventilated only by a utility fan and had carpeting loaded with lead dust.\n\nOfficials then tested the team\u2019s seven members, aged 15 to 17, and found all had high lead levels, ranging from 21 to 31 micrograms per deciliter. The average is 1.2 micrograms for adults.\n\nThe Tok overexposures prompted a review of several other ranges used by school rifle teams in Alaska. Investigators soon found lead exposure in members of four other teams, including 10 students on Fairbanks\u2019 Lathrop High School shooting squad.\n\nLathrop\u2019s students often helped dry sweep the volunteer-run Tanana Valley Sportsmen\u2019s Association shooting range,", + " kicking up dust in the poorly ventilated facility.\n\nSeveral other teams practiced at filthy ranges, including a school-operated range in a room also used for meetings, lunches, physical education and wrestling practice.\n\nIn all, investigators found significant lead exposure in 21 student shooters, several coaches and others.\n\nHow shooters can reduce lead exposure \u2022 Shoot only jacketed or lead-free ammo. \u2022 Avoid ranges that are dirty. Ask range management about facility\u2019s ventilation system and housekeeping practices. Consider shooting at outdoor ranges, which have less lead exposure. \u2022 Don\u2019t eat, drink or smoke while shooting to prevent ingesting lead dust. \u2022 Check surfaces for contamination with lead-check swabs,", + " available at hardware stores. \u2022 After shooting, wash face, hands and forearms at the range with cold water, preferably with D-Lead or other soap designed to remove heavy metals. \u2022 Keep gear, shoes and clothes worn at the range in a plastic bag or bin when leaving range. Wash lead-contaminated shoes and clothing separately from other clothes. \u2022 Wear gloves and eye protection when cleaning guns and rifles. \u2022 Have a doctor check the lead levels in your blood to see if treatment for lead exposure is needed. \u2022 To talk to a specialist about lead safety, call 1-800-424-LEAD (5323), and press option 1 then 9.", + " Graphics by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times Sources: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; California Department of Health; New York Department of Health\n\nWhen investigators looked at two other shooting teams that used a properly cleaned and ventilated commercial range, not a single member tested high for lead.\n\nThe lack of regulation at volunteer-run ranges contributed to the overexposures, investigators concluded. They recommended local health officials identify unregulated ranges in their areas and encourage owners to get them assessed and to address potential lead problems.\n\nThe investigation spurred case studies still used by public-health officials nationwide. But the problems identified are still repeated \u2014 even in Alaska.\n\nIn 2007,", + " health investigators trying to figure out why a 1-year-old had elevated blood-lead levels learned the baby\u2019s brother was on the rifle team at Delta High, near Fairbanks. After tests revealed lead poisoning in the brother, officials theorized he unknowingly contaminated the baby by tracking lead home from shooting practice.\n\n\u201cWe thought, \u2018Wow, we should check the whole team,\u2019\u201d said Lori Verbrugge, then a state public-health program manager who helped conduct the investigation.\n\nInvestigators soon found four other team members with high lead levels. Officials recommended the community range hire a consultant to assess its operations, and proposed to the Alaska School Activities Association (ASAA)", + " to \u201cmake blood testing a standard practice for all kids that participate in this sport,\u201d Verbrugge said.\n\nPJ Ford Slack, then-superintendent of the Delta Greely School District, noted that the ASAA, which oversees Alaska\u2019s interscholastic sports programs, had adopted strict rules for some sports over the years. But when it came to regulating rifle teams, the association balked, she said.\n\n\u201cThey have a concussion policy, so why not one for lead poisoning?\u201d Ford Slack asked. \u201cBut Alaska is a hunting state. Guns are part of the culture here and this became a political thing.\u201d\n\nGary Matthews, then the ASAA\u2019s executive director,", + " said his group\u2019s board of directors adopted voluntary \u201chealth considerations\u201d for school shooting sports to avoid lead exposure. But representatives of schools with rifle teams largely opposed mandatory blood tests as too expensive and invasive, he said.\n\nFord Slack, whose husband later coached the Delta team, noted the squad improved its shooting hygiene and the community range also changed protocols.\n\nIn recent years, several shooting teams in Alaska have switched from small-bore firearms to air rifles, which can reduce lead exposure risks.\n\nStill, firing ranges remain Alaska\u2019s No. 1 source for lead exposure in children aged 6 to 17, the latest state study shows.\n\nTeens test high for lead\n\nZachary Comeau / Milford Daily News\n\nJust a few months ago outside Boston,", + " three teenagers on a competitive shooting team tested high for lead.\n\nThe team practiced at the Hopedale Pistol and Rifle Club, an institution for more than half a century in the town of 5,900.\n\nTheir elevated blood-lead levels triggered a visit from the local health department. Some parents with kids on the team were disturbed to learn that shooters had been overexposed. Other club members were irate that the matter wasn\u2019t handled in-house first, said Hopedale health agent Lenny Izzo.\n\nThe members-only club agreed to have the state\u2019s Department of Labor and Standards examine its brick building, which housed a clubhouse, eight shooting lanes and a \u201creloading\u201d room with melting pots and molds for making bullets.\n\nAn inspector detected poor ventilation and extremely high amounts of lead on surfaces in the lanes and clubhouse.\n\nThe club recently closed,", + " hired an abatement company to clean the property and remains shuttered.\n\nHad it not voluntarily closed, Izzo said, Hopedale\u2019s health board would have forced it to close.\n\nMarcus Yam / The Seattle Times\n\nKentucky instructor says \u2018I was clueless\u2019 about lead danger PARIS, Ky. \u2014 Forty-year-old Colleene Barnett learned the hard way. First as an avid shooter, then as a firearms instructor, she never gave a thought to lead. She spent 30 to 35 hours a week in Smokin\u2019 Guns, an old bowling alley converted into a poorly ventilated indoor shooting range in this small city northeast of Lexington.", + " She taught concealed-carry classes and defensive handgun training for women, hovering inches away from her students as they fired off round after round. Between classes, she ate right in the range. \u201cI was totally clueless about protecting myself,\u201d she said. Her clothes, car and home became contaminated with lead. Her hands tingled and she felt fatigued. Barnett blamed her autoimmune disease for feeling sick, so she was shocked when a physician told her she had dangerous levels of lead in her blood in 2012. Lead, not her disease, was causing most of her health problems. Barnett stopped going to Smokin\u2019 Guns, and her blood-", + "lead levels slowly started to go down. What disappointed Barnett most was that she couldn\u2019t breast-feed her adopted newborn. Her physician told her she could pass lead to her daughter through the milk. For women of childbearing age, high lead levels can be dangerous, causing miscarriages and birth defects. Physicians advise pregnant women to stay away from shooting ranges. Barnett wishes someone had told her the do\u2019s and don\u2019ts of lead and shooting ranges. She also wants to spread the word about lead risks to the growing ranks of women who have taken up shooting for protection or sport. \u201cI\u2019m preaching it and I\u2019m on the soap box,\u201d she said.", + " The number of women owning a handgun has increased, according to polling by Gallup. And of the new target shooters, 37 percent are female, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun-industry group. Barnett is on a mission to educate new shooters about lead hazards. She believes everyone needs to be accountable \u2014 from the gun-range owners and employees to shooters and the public. She suggests shooters ask a range about its cleanliness and ventilation, and adopt a personal-hygiene regimen. People routinely put on sunscreen for protection when going to the beach, she pointed out. Likewise, shooters always should use special lead-removal soaps or wipes to clean their hands and face after shooting.", + " Read more \u25be\n\nHow to help prevent cross-contamination\n\nPricey protection\n\nIn another case, a dirty Wisconsin gun range, open to the public, operated for years in the basement of a middle school.\n\nAt the Sheboygan Rifle and Pistol Club, an hour north of Milwaukee, rifle-club members and city residents took safety classes and shot in the basement range after children were dismissed for the day from Urban Middle School.\n\nIn 2007, parents who were worried that students and staff could be at risk pressured the Sheboygan School District to test the range.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s an important tradition here in Wisconsin \u2014 shooting,\u201d said Lisa Janairo,", + " one of the parents. \u201cWe believed they were taking no measures to protect shooters and the students, staff and teachers.\u201d\n\nTests by an environmental company showed shooters tracked lead into the school\u2019s hallway but it posed little risk to students and staff.\n\nBut inside the range, a certified industrial hygienist said in a report, ventilation failed to protect shooters and lead on a trophy table was 105 times the standard used by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.\n\nThe rifle club cleaned the range and changed practices but couldn\u2019t afford the $50,000 upgrade to the range\u2019s ventilation system and decided to close.\n\nIn North Carolina, school officials evacuated and closed the Hemlock Building at the Asheville-Bumcombe Technical Community College in 2011 after tests found high lead levels linked to an indoor firing range used by law-enforcement students.\n\nLead from the ground-floor gun range had spread to all three floors through a ventilation system and by people tracking it.\n\nThe college has since dismantled the range and cleaned up the building.\n\nEarlier this year in Helena,", + " Mont., officials shut down one of the state\u2019s largest middle schools for about a week after finding lead contamination in the building from a sealed-off, basement gun range that had operated decades earlier.\n\nNo one at C.R. Anderson Middle School tested high for blood-lead levels. In all, the district had to spend about $130,000 addressing the issue.\n\nClean bill of health\n\nChildren lug heavy rifle bags, bigger than they are, past the display case of trophies and the deer mounted on the wall at the Vancouver club.\n\nAt the start of practice, young shooters assemble their small-bore rifles, some costing as much as $2,", + "000. They put on shooting garb \u2014 heavy pants, strapped-jackets and flat-soled shoes.\n\nOn the range floor, Thomas Kuzis, 14, of Vancouver, lies on a mat in prone position, looks through his rifle sight and steadies his body. He slowly exhales and fires at the target 50 feet away.\n\n\u201cLine cold \u2014 targets!\u201d Ueltschi shouts, the command to stop firing, secure their weapons, then retrieve their targets at the end of the lanes.\n\nA dozen rifle-team members including Kuzis gather their paper targets and then hand them to their coach.\n\n\u201cConsistency \u2014 this is what we wanted to see,\u201d Ueltschi tells Kuzis,", + " and pats him on the back.\n\nKuzis smiles, proud of his improvement.\n\nHe and the other members practice twice a week and will shoot in up to 23 competitions this year.\n\nDoris Kuzis said she makes sure her son doesn\u2019t eat or drink while shooting, keeps his shooting clothes in the gun bag and always washes his hands.\n\nBut at a practice earlier this year, some team members left practice without washing their hands and face.\n\nAsked about it, Ueltschi said kids must be frequently reminded how to avoid lead.\n\nA National Rifle Association grant had helped pay for upgrades to the ventilation and the building. Those improvements,", + " combined with good housekeeping and personal hygiene, have lowered the lead levels of the team members, he said.\n\nIn January 2011, the county gave it a clean bill of health.\n\nUeltschi is thankful Clark County Public Health intervened.\n\n\u201cWe saw everything that we were doing wrong, why it was wrong, what we needed to do and we did it,\u201d he said. \u201cNot only did it protect kids, it also saved the club from having to permanently close.\u201d\n\nStill, there are some ranges the coach won\u2019t step into because they are so contaminated.\n\nUeltschi said the shooting public \u2014 especially the children just starting in the sport \u2014 need to be informed about the dangers of lead.\n\nChristine Willmsen:", + " cwillmsen@seattletimes.com or 206-464-3261. On Twitter @christinesea.\n\nLewis Kamb: lkamb@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2932. On Twitter @LewisKamb. ", + " Persons using assistive technology might not be able to fully access information in this file. For assistance, please send e-mail to: mmwrq@cdc.gov. Type 508 Accommodation and the title of the report in the subject line of e-mail.\n\nAdult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance --- United States, 2008--2009\n\nLead exposure can result in acute or chronic adverse effects in multiple organ systems, ranging from subclinical changes in function to symptomatic, life-threatening toxicity. Despite improvements in public health policies and substantial reductions in blood lead levels (BLLs) in adults, lead exposure remains an important health problem worldwide.", + " Approximately 95% of all elevated BLLs reported among adults in the United States are work-related (1), and recent research has raised concerns regarding the toxicity of BLLs as low as 5 \u00b5g/dL (2,3). CDC's state-based Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance (ABLES) program tracks laboratory-reported elevated BLLs. To update rate trends and identify industry subsectors and nonoccupational activities with high lead exposures, CDC collected and analyzed 2008--2009 data from 40 state ABLES programs. The results of that analysis indicated that a decline in the prevalence of elevated BLLs (\u226525 \u00b5g/dL)", + " was extended, from 14.0 per 100,000 employed adults in 1994 to 6.3 in 2009. Industry subsectors with the highest numbers of lead-exposed workers were battery manufacturing, secondary smelting and refining of nonferrous metals, and painting and paper hanging. The most common nonoccupational exposures to lead were shooting firearms; remodeling, renovating, or painting; retained bullets (gunshot wounds); and lead casting. The findings underscore the need for government agencies, employers, public health professionals, health-care providers, and worker-affiliated organizations to increase interventions to prevent workplace lead exposure,", + " and the importance of conducting lead exposure surveillance to assess the effectiveness of these interventions.\n\nState ABLES programs 1) collect data on adult BLLs from laboratories and physicians through mandatory reporting requirements; 2) assign unique identifiers to each adult to account for multiple BLL records; 3) follow-up on adults with BLLs \u226525 \u00b5g/dL with laboratories, health-care providers, employers, or workers to ensure completeness of information (e.g., the industry where the adult is employed and whether the exposure source is occupational, nonoccupational, or both); and 4) code the industry where the adult worked using the 1987 Standard Industrial Classification (SIC)", + " or the 2002 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The requirement for laboratories and health-care providers to notify state authorities about BLLs varies among ABLES states, ranging from the reporting of all BLLs to only BLLs \u226540 \u00b5g/dL.* Most ABLES states submit data on all BLLs to CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), including records from adults whose BLLs fall below the state reporting requirement.\n\nAdults were defined as persons aged \u226516 years. For adults with more than one BLL record in a given year, only the highest BLL was included. Elevated BLLs were defined as blood lead concentrations \u226525\u00b5g/dL.", + " Prevalence numerators were either \"state residents\" (adults residing in the reporting state) or \"state residents and nonresidents\" (all adults reported by a state) with elevated BLLs (a distinction in the data since 2002); both employed and unemployed persons were included in the numerators. Denominators were the annual employed population aged \u226516 years for the period 2008--2009, as obtained from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (4). To calculate annual state prevalences, the numbers of adults with elevated BLLs from each of the 40 states reporting\u2020 were divided by the state's annual employed population and expressed as a rate per 100,", + "000 employed adults. The combined state numerators and denominators for each year were then used to calculate national (40-state) prevalence rates for 2008--2009. The percentage of adults with BLL \u226540 \u00b5g/dL among adults with BLL \u226525\u00b5g/dL in each industry subsector was used to identify industry subsectors with the highest lead exposures. Additional information regarding interpretation of specific state ABLES data, definitions, and rate calculations is available at the ABLES program website (5).\n\nA total of 40 states submitted data in both 2008 and 2009. Overall, the prevalence of elevated BLLs (\u226525 \u00b5g/dL)", + " among state residents and nonresidents declined from 14.0 adults per 100,000 employed adults in 1994 (4) to 7.4 in 2008 and 6.3 in 2009. Rates were slightly lower (7.1 and 6.1 respectively) when only state resident adults were included (Figure 1). The number of states with high prevalence of elevated BLLs (i.e., \u226520 adults per 100,000 employed adults) decreased from six of 17 states in 1994 to three of 40 states in 2009 (Figure 2). ABLES states reported 9,", + "325 and 7,674 state resident adults with elevated BLLs in 2008 and 2009, respectively. State resident prevalence of elevated BLLs for 2008 ranged from 0.5 per 100,000 employed adults (Hawaii) to 37.6 (Pennsylvania); and for 2009, from 0.3 (Hawaii) to 32.0 (Pennsylvania). Prevalence of state resident and nonresident adults with BLLs \u226540 \u00b5g/dL declined from 3.5 in 1994 to 1.2 in 2008 and 0.9 in 2009.", + " In 2008, these rates ranged from 0.2 (Arizona) to 6.5 (Pennsylvania) and in 2009, from zero (Alaska and Wyoming) to 4.2 (Pennsylvania).\n\nThirty-seven states in 2008 and 38 states in 2009 submitted data on industry and exposure source (8,450 and 7,112 state resident adults with elevated BLLs, respectively).\u00a7 Among all reported cases of elevated BLLs, exposures at work accounted for 6,081 (71.9%) in 2008 and 4,998 (70.1%) in 2009 (Table). Among only those cases with known exposure type (i.e., occupational or nonoccupational), occupational exposures accounted for 94.", + "8% of cases in 2008 and 93.8% in 2009. The greatest proportions of adults with elevated BLLs were employed in three main industry sectors: manufacturing (72.1% in 2008 and 72.3% in 2009), construction (13.2% in 2008 and 14.4% in 2009), and mining (6.6% in 2008 and 5.1% in 2009). Industry subsectors with the highest numbers of workers with elevated BLLs were manufacturing of storage batteries, secondary smelting and refining of nonferrous metals,", + " and painting and paper hanging (Table). Industry subsectors with the greatest proportions of adults with BLLs \u226540 \u00b5g/dL among adults with BLLs \u226525 \u00b5g/dL were painting and paper hanging; bridge, tunnel, and elevated highway construction; copper foundries; special trade contractors; and heavy construction industries (Table). Nonoccupational exposures accounted for 337 (4.0%) and 328 (4.6%) of all adult cases in 2008 and 2009, respectively. The most common nonoccupational exposures were from shooting firearms; remodeling, renovating, or painting; retained bullets; and lead casting (Table).\n\nReported by\n\nWalter A.", + " Alarcon, MD, Janet R. Graydon, Geoffrey M. Calvert, MD, Div of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations, and Field Studies, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, CDC. Corresponding contributor: Walter A. Alarcon, CDC, walarcon@cdc.gov, 513-841-4451.\n\nEditorial Note\n\nJob activities known to involve the use or disturbance of lead include the following: handling of lead-containing powders, liquids, or pastes; production of dust or fumes by melting, burning, cutting, drilling, machining, sanding, scraping, grinding, polishing, etching,", + " blasting, torching, or welding lead-containing solids; and dry sweeping of lead-containing dust and debris (3). Since 1994, ABLES surveillance results indicate an overall decreasing trend in the prevalence of elevated BLLs in U.S. adults and a decrease in the number of states with the highest rates (i.e., \u226520 adults per 100,000). This decrease, in part, might be attributable to a decline in the number of manufacturing jobs with potential for lead exposure over time and prevention measures that have been enacted since the early 1990s, including 1) improved interventions by state ABLES programs,\u00b6 worker-affiliated organizations,", + " and federal programs such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) National Emphasis Program to reduce lead exposure** and 2) measures implemented by industry (e.g., engineering and work practice controls,\u2020\u2020 and respiratory protection). However, the decrease in rates also might reflect low employer compliance with testing and reporting requirements (6).\n\nABLES data also underscore that elevated BLLs among adults are almost exclusively an occupational health problem in the United States. Those states with higher rates of elevated BLLs might represent 1) states where higher proportions of workers are employed in high-risk industries (e.g., lead-related manufacturing, construction activities involving lead paint exposure,", + " and lead mining), 2) states where workers in high-risk areas are less likely to be protected by engineering and workplace controls, or 3) states where greater compliance with testing requirements by employers and reporting requirements by laboratories result in larger numbers of reported cases of elevated BLLs. Similar to findings in previous years, the 2008--2009 data indicate that five industry subsectors accounted for approximately 65% and 14 subsectors accounted for approximately 80% of adults with elevated BLLs who were exposed at work. Higher lead exposures likely are present in those industries with the greatest proportions of elevated BLLs \u226540 \u00b5g/dL.\n\nABLES data are used to track Healthy People 2020 objective OSH-", + "7, to reduce the prevalence of persons who have elevated BLLs from work exposures (7). The Healthy People 2020 target incorporates the new \u226510 \u00b5g/dL operational definition for elevated BLLs established by ABLES consistent with guidance from the Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (8).\n\nThe findings in this report are subject to at least four limitations. First, the number of adults with elevated BLLs reported to ABLES likely is underreported because some employers might not provide BLL testing to all lead-exposed workers as required by OSHA regulations and because some laboratories might not report all tests as required by state regulations (9). Second,", + " because denominators are the numbers of employed persons, aged \u226516 years, unemployed adults who might be at risk for lead exposure, although included in the numerator, are not included in the denominator. Third, although state ABLES programs ascertain the work-relatedness of a lead exposure by following up with laboratories, physicians, employers, or workers, the possibility of misclassification of occupational versus nonoccupational cases cannot be excluded. Finally, analyzing lead exposures using a threshold of 25 \u00b5g/dL likely underestimates harmful occupational lead exposure because lead-related toxicity can occur at levels as low as 5 \u00b5g/dL and the Healthy People 2020 target is set at 10 \u00b5g/dL\n\nProgress toward meeting the Healthy People 2020 target for reducing the prevalence of adults with BLLS \u226510 \u00b5g/dL from workplace lead exposures can be aided by improving 1)", + " worker protection programs developed and maintained by employers\u00a7\u00a7; 2) government activities such as ABLES programs, which can effectively intervene to prevent lead exposures and the OSHA National Emphasis Program to reduce lead exposure; 3) research and interventions by stakeholder organizations; and 4) education of the public regarding preventing nonoccupational exposures. Emphasis should be placed on those industries identified in this report with the highest numbers of workers with elevated BLLs: manufacturing of storage batteries, secondary smelting and refining of nonferrous metals, painting and paper hanging, and bridge, tunnel, and elevated highway construction.\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nABLES program coordinators in 40 states who contributed data in 2008 and 2009.\n\nReferences\n\nCDC.", + " Adult blood lead epidemiology and surveillance---United States, 2003--2004. MMWR 2006;55:876--9. Kosnett MJ, Wedeen, RP, Rothenberg SJ, et al. Recommendations for medical management of adult lead exposure. Environ Health Perspect 2007;115:463--71. Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics. Medical management guidelines for lead-exposed adults. Washington, DC: Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics; 2007. Available at http://www.aoec.org/documents/positions/mmg_final.pdf. Accessed June 27, 2011.", + " Bureau of Labor Statistics. Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS). Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics; 2011. Available at http://www.bls.gov/data. Accessed March 1, 2011. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology & Surveillance (ABLES). Atlanta, GA: US Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/ables/ables.html. Accessed June 27, 2011. Tak S, Roscoe RJ, Alarcon W,", + " et al. Characteristics of US workers whose blood lead levels trigger the medical removal protection provision, and conformity with biological monitoring requirements, 2003--2005. Am J Ind Med 2008;51:691--700. US Department of Health and Human Services. Healthy people 2020: occupational safety and health. OSH-7: reduce the proportion of persons who have elevated blood lead concentrations from work exposures. Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services; 2011. Available at http://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topicsobjectives2020/objectiveslist.aspx?topicid=30. Accessed June 27,", + " 2011. National Center for Health Statistics. Health Indicators Warehouse: elevated blood led rates in adults. Hyattsville, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, National Center for Health Statistics. Available at http://www.healthindicators.gov/Indicators/Elevated-blood-lead-rates-in-adults_1300/National_0/Profile. Accessed June 27, 2011. Whittaker SG. Lead exposure in radiator repair workers: a survey of Washington State radiator repair shops and review of occupational lead exposure registry data. J Occup Environ Med 2003;45:724--33.\n\nWhat is already known on this topic?", + " Lead exposure among adults remains almost exclusively an occupational health problem in the United States, although the health effects from lead exposure are well characterized and controls to reduce lead exposure for workers exist. What this report adds? During 2008--2009, the prevalence of U.S. adults with blood lead levels (BLLs) \u226525 \u00b5g/dL continued to decrease, to 6.3 per 100,000 employed adults in 2009 from 14.0 in 1994. The highest prevalences of elevated BLLs continue to be found among workers in the manufacturing, construction, and mining industries. What are the implications for public health practice?", + " Measures to improve lead exposure surveillance and preventive interventions focused in the manufacturing, construction, and mining industries should be implemented by government agencies, employers, and worker-affiliated organizations.\n\nFIGURE 1. Prevalence rates* of adults with elevated blood lead levels (BLLs) --- Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance program, United States, 1994--2009 Alternate Text: The figure above shows prevalence rates of adults with elevated blood lead levels (BLLs) in the United States during 1994-2009, according to the Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance program.\n\nFIGURE 2. Prevalence rates*", + " of adults with elevated blood lead levels (\u226525 \u00b5g/dL), among adults residing in the reporting state --- Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance (ABLES) program, United States, 2009\u2020 Alternate Text: The figure above shows prevalence rates of adults with elevated blood lead levels (\u226525 \u03bcg/dL), among adults residing in the reporting state in the United States in 2009, according to the Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance (ABLES) program. The number of states with high prevalence of elevated BLLs (i.e., \u226520 adults per 100,000 employed adults) decreased from six of 17 states in 1994 to three of 40 states in 2009.", + " \u201cLoaded with Lead,\u201d an ongoing, yearlong investigation into lead hazards at shooting ranges nationwide, is based on tens of thousands of pages of public records and scores of interviews. Among the interviews were those with range employees and owners, public-health and workplace-safety officials, regulators, shooters, construction workers, family members, and medical and firearms experts.\n\nReporters gathered several thousand enforcement records from Washington\u2019s Department of Labor and Industries and from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to build custom inspection databases. After analysis, these data sets provided key findings. The national database of 201 commercial shooting ranges that had been inspected details more than 1,", + "900 violations between 2004 and 2013. Because the violations were identified by regulation code, The Times consulted hundreds of federal and state occupational-safety standards to determine which violations were lead-related.\n\nReporters filed scores of public-records requests with public agencies in numerous states, including Washington, California, Alaska, Kentucky, Iowa, Florida and Illinois. Among the documents: workplace inspection files (including correspondence, emails, handwritten notes, photos, audio and videos); court files; police reports; and property records. They also obtained federal records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from several regional and state OSHA offices.\n\nCredits\n\nReporters:", + " Christine Willmsen, Lewis Kamb\n\nDatabase reporter: Justin Mayo\n\nPhotographers: Marcus Yam, Mark Harrison\n\nDeveloper: Thomas Wilburn\n\nGraphic artists: Mark Nowlin, Garland Potts\n\nVideo editor: Danny Gawlowski\n\nProject editor: James Neff\n\nCopy editor: Laura Gordon\n\nPhoto editor: Fred Nelson\n\nPrint designer: Bob Warcup\n\nProducer/web designer: Katrina Barlow\n\nResearchers: Gene Balk, Miyoko Wolf\n\nReporting intern: Caitlin Cruz\n\nAdditional reporting: Keith Ervin\n" + ], + "length": 29526, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 79, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 A look at some of the lines generating buzz from each of the seven candidates in the prime-time Republican debate, via the Washington Post: Ted Cruz: \"Since September the constitution hasn\u2019t changed, but the poll numbers have. I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling \u2026 but the facts of the law here are clear.\" (On his eligibility to be president.) Cruz also said, \u201cWell, Maria, thank you for passing on that hit piece on the front page of the New York Times,\" when asked about this loan story. \"You know the nice thing about the mainstream media, they don\u2019t hide their views.\" Donald Trump: \"We rebuilt downtown Manhattan ... everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement Ted made.\" After Cruz slammed \"New York values\" and said, \"Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.\" Jeb Bush: \"If she gets elected, her first 100 days, instead of setting an agenda, she might be going back and forth between the White House and the courthouse. We need to stop that.\" Referring to Hillary Clinton. Chris Christie: \"You already had your chance, Marco, you blew it.\" (After Rubio talked of other things when asked about entitlements.) Rubio responded, \"I'll answer the entitlement question if you'll answer the Common Core question.\" Christie also said, \u201cI watched story time with Barack Obama [at the State of the Union], and I got to tell you, it sounded like everything in the world was going amazing.\u201d Marco Rubio: He said any \"radical jihadist terrorists\" captured alive would get \"a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay Cuba, and we are going to find out everything they know.\" Ben Carson: \"If my mother were secretary of the Treasury, we would not be in a deficit situation.\" John Kasich: \"So look, in foreign policy\u2014in foreign policy, it's strength, but you've got to be cool. You've got to have a clear vision of where you want to go. And I'm going to tell you, that it\u2014I'm going to suggest to you here tonight, that you can't do on the job training.\" Rubio vs. Cruz: \"I saw you on the Senate floor flip your vote on crop insurance,\" Rubio said of Cruz, per Politico. \"That is not consistent conservatism.\" Cruz responded, \"I appreciate you dumping your oppo research folder,\" and Rubio said, \"No, it\u2019s your record.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "Here are the key moments from the debate that brought Republican presidential candidates head-to-head in North Charleston, S.C. on Jan. 14. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)\n\nSeven candidates participated in Thursday's 2016 presidential debate in North Charleston, S.C.: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), Ohio Gov. John Kasich and New Jersey governor Chris Christie.\n\nThe complete transcript is posted below. Washington Post reporters and readers using Genius have annotated it, and will continue to do so following the debate.\n\nTo see an annotation, click or tap the highlighted part of the transcript;", + " if you would like to leave your own annotations, make sure you have a Genius account. Post staff annotations will appear by default; others are in a menu that you can see in the upper right when you click or tap on an annotation.\n\nThe debate began after moderators Neil Cavuto and Maria Bartiromo introduced the candidates.\n\nBARTIROMO: So let's get started. Candidates, jobs and growth -- two of the biggest issues facing the country right now. In his State of the Union address earlier this week, the president said, quote, \"we have the strongest, most durable economy in the world.\"\n\nAnd according to our Facebook research,", + " jobs is one of the biggest issues resonating across the country, including here in South Carolina. The president is touting 14 million new jobs and an unemployment rate cut in half.\n\nThe president said that anyone who claims America's economy is in decline is peddling fiction. Senator Cruz, what do you see that he doesn't?\n\nCRUZ: Well, Maria, thank you for that question, and let me say thank you to the state of South Carolina for welcoming us.\n\nLet me start -- I want to get to the substance of the question on jobs, but I want to start with something. Today, many of us picked up our newspapers,", + " and we were horrified to see the sight of 10 American sailors on their knees, with their hands on their heads.\n\nIn that State of the Union, President Obama didn't so much as mention the 10 sailors that had been captured by Iran. President Obama's preparing to send $100 billion or more to the Ayatollah Khamenei. And I'll tell you, it was heartbreaking.\n\nBut the good news is the next commander-in-chief is standing on this stage.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ: And I give you my word, if I am elected president, no service man or service woman will be forced to be on their knees,", + " and any nation that captures our fighting men will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nNow, on to your substantive question. The president tried to paint a rosy picture of jobs. And you know, he's right. If you're a Washington lobbyist, if you make your money in and around Washington, things are doing great. The millionaires and billionaires are doing great under Obama. But we have the lowest percentage of Americans working today of any year since 1977. Median wages have stagnated. And the Obama-Clinton economy has left behind the working men and women of this country.\n\nThe reason all of us are here is we believe we should be fighting for the working men and women of this country,", + " and not Washington, D.C.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, sir.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Governor Kasich, we are not even two weeks into this stock trading year, but (inaudible) investors already lost $1.6 trillion in market value. That makes it the worst start to a new year ever. Many worry that things will get even worse, and that banks and financial stocks are particularly vulnerable.\n\nNow, if this escalates, like it did back when Barack Obama first assumed the presidency, what actions would you take if this same thing happens all over again just as, in this example,", + " you are taking over the presidency?\n\nKASICH: Look, it takes three things basically to grow jobs. And I've done it when I was in Washington when we had a balanced budget; had four years of balanced budgets; paid down a half-trillion of debt. And our economy was growing like crazy. It's the same thing that I did in Ohio. It's a simple formula: common sense regulations, which is why I think we should freeze all federal regulations for one year, except for health and safety. It requires tax cuts, because that sends a message to the job creators that things are headed the right way. And if you tax cuts -- if you cut taxes for corporations,", + " and you cut taxes for individuals, you're going to make things move, particularly the corporate tax, which is the highest, of course, in the -- in the world.\n\nBut in addition to that, we have to have fiscal discipline. We have to show that we can march to a balanced budget. And when you do that, when you're in a position of managing regulations; when you reduce taxes; and when you have fiscal discipline, you see the job creators begin to get very comfortable with the fact that they can invest.\n\nRight now, you don't have the -- you have taxes that are too high. You have regulations -- I mean,", + " come on, they're affecting everybody here, particularly our small businesses. They are -- they're in a position where they're smothering people. And I mean, are you kidding me? We're nowhere close to a balanced budget or fiscal discipline.\n\nThose three things put together are going to give confidence to job creators and you will begin to see wages rise. You will begin to see jobs created in a robust economy. And how do I know it? Because I've done it. I did it as the chairman of the Budget Committee, working with Senator Domenici. And I've done it in the state of Ohio as the chief executive.\n\nOur wages are growing faster than the national average.", + " We're running surpluses. And we can take that message and that formula to Washington to lift every single American to a better life.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: We know that recent global events have many people worried -- Iran detaining American sailors, forcing them to apologize; North Korea and its nuclear ambitions; an aggressive China; and a Middle East that continues to deteriorate, not to mention ISIS is getting stronger.\n\nGovernor Christie, sometimes it seems the world is on fire. Where and when should a president use military action to restore order?\n\nCHRISTIE: Well, Maria, I'm glad to have heard from you in the summary of that question about what's going on in the world.", + " Because Tuesday night, I watched story time with Barack Obama. And I've got to tell you, it sounded like everything in the world was going amazing, you know?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThe fact is, there's a number of things that the next president is going to have to do to clean up this mess. The first thing is we have to strengthen our alliances around the world. And the best way to do that is to start talking to our allies again and having them be able to count on our word.\n\nCHRISTIE: Lots of people will say lots of different things about me in this campaign and others, but the one thing they've never said about me is that I'm misunderstood.", + " And so when we talk to our allies and we give them our word, in a Christie administration, they know we're going to keep it.\n\nNext, we have to talk to our adversaries, and we have to make sure they understand the limits of our patience. And this president, given what Ted said right at the beginning, he's absolutely right. It's a -- it's absolutely disgraceful that Secretary Kerry and others said in their response to what's going on in Iran that this was a good thing; it showed how the relationship was getting better.\n\nThe president doesn't understand -- and by the way, neither does Secretary Clinton -- and here's my warning to everybody out in the audience tonight.", + " If you're worried about the world being on fire, you're worried about how we're going to use our military, you're worried about strengthening our military and you're worried most of all about keeping your homes and your families safe and secure, you cannot give Hillary Clinton a third term of Barack Obama's leadership.\n\nI will not do that. If I'm the nominee, she won't get within 10 miles of the White House.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Just to be clear Governor, where and when would you use military action?\n\nCHRISTIE: Military action, Maria, would be used when it was absolutely necessary to protect American lives and protect American interests around the world.", + " We are not the world's policeman, but we need to stand up and be ready.\n\nAnd the problem, Maria, is that the military is not ready, either. We need to rebuild our military, and this president has let it diminish to a point where tinpot dictators like the mullahs in Iran are taking our Navy ships. It is disgraceful, and in a Christie administration, they would know much, much better than to do that.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Governor Bush, the president just told the nation two nights ago that America is back and that the idea that our enemies are getting stronger or that this country is getting weaker,", + " well, it's just rhetoric and hot air. Now other Democrats go even further, sir, saying Republicans even suggesting such comments actually embolden our enemies. I guess they would include you. What do you say?\n\nBUSH: Well first of all, the idea that somehow we're better off today than the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated president of the United States is totally an alternative universe. The simple fact is that the world has been torn asunder.\n\nThink about it. With grandiose language, the president talks about red lines and nothing to follow it up; talks about ISIS being the JV team, they form a caliphate the size of Indiana with 35 (thousand)", + " to 40,000 battle-tested terrorists. He's missing the whole point, that America's leadership in the world is required for peace and stability.\n\nIn the crowd today is Major General James Livingston, who's the co-chairman of my campaign here in South Carolina, a Medal of Honor recipient.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nI've learned from him that what we need to achieve is peace through strength, which means we need to rebuild the military. In this administration, every weapon system has been gutted, in this administration, the force levels are going down to a level where we can't even project force. Our friends no longer think we have their back and our enemies no longer fear us,", + " and we're in a much difficult -- we're in a much different position than we should be.\n\nAnd for the life of me, I have no understanding why the president thinks that everything is going well. Terrorism is on the run, China, Russia is advancing their agenda at warp speed, and we pull back.\n\nAs president of the United States, I will be a commander in chief that will have the back of the military. We will rebuild the military to make sure that it is a solid force, not to be the world's policeman, but to make sure that in a peaceful world, people know that the United States is there to take care of our own national interests and take care of our allies.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO:", + " So I take it from that you do not agree with the president.\n\nBUSH: No. And worse -- worse yet, to be honest with you, Hillary Clinton would be a national security disaster.\n\nThink about it. She wants to continue down the path of Iran, Benghazi, the Russian reset, Dodd-Frank, all the things that have -- that have gone wrong in this country, she would be a national security mess. And that is wrong.\n\nAnd you know what? Here's the problem. If she gets elected, she's under investigation with the FBI right now. If she gets elected, her first 100 days, instead of setting an agenda,", + " she might be going back and forth between the White House and the courthouse. We need to stop that. (LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Senator Rubio, the president says that ISIS doesn't threaten our national existence like a Germany or a Japan back in World War II, that the terror group is nothing more than twisted souls plotting attacks in their garages.\n\nBut House Homeland Security Committee recently said that over 1,000 ongoing investigations of homegrown extremism in 50 states. So how do you define the threat? Germany then or dangerous nut cases now?\n\nRUBIO: Yeah, I would go, first of all,", + " one step further in this description of Hillary Clinton. She wouldn't just be a disaster, Hillary Clinton is disqualified from being commander in chief of the United States.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSomeone who cannot handle intelligence information appropriately cannot be commander in chief and someone who lies to the families of those four victims in Benghazi can never be president of the United States. Ever.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nOn the issue of Barack Obama, Barack Obama does not believe that America is a great global power. Barack Obama believes that America is a arrogant global power that needs to be cut down to size. And that's how you get a foreign policy where we cut deals with our enemies like Iran and we betray our allies like Israel and we gut our military and we go around the world like he has done on 10 separate occasions and apologized for America.\n\nHe doesn't understand the threat in ISIS.", + " He consistently underestimates it but I do not. There is a war against ISIS, not just against ISIS but against radical jihadists terrorists, and it is a war that they win or we win.\n\nWhen I'm president of the United States, we are going to win this war on ISIS. The most powerful intelligence agency in the world is going to tell us where we are, the most powerful military in the world is going to destroy them. And if we capture any of them alive, they are getting a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and we are going to find out everything they know.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO:", + " Thank you, Senator.\n\nBARTIROMO: Dr. Carson, the president says he does not want to treat ISIS as a foreign army, but ISIS is neither a country nor a government. How do you attack a network that does not respect national borders?\n\nCARSON: Well, I'm very happy to get a question this early on. I was going to ask you to wake me up when that time came.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nYou know, I find it really quite fascinating some of the president's proclamations. The fact of the matter is he doesn't realize that we now live in the 21st century,", + " and that war is very different than it used to be before. Not armies massively marching on each other and air forces, but now we have dirty bombs and we have cyber attacks and we have people who will be attacking our electrical grid. And, you know, we have a whole variety of things that they can do and they can do these things simultaneously. And we have enemies who are obtaining nuclear weapons that they can explode in our exoatmosphere and destroy our electric grid.\n\nI mean, just think about a scenario like that. They explode the bomb, we have an electromagnetic pulse. They hit us with a cyberattack simultaneously and dirty bombs.", + " Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue at that point? He needs to recognize that those kinds of things are in fact an existential threat to us.\n\nBut here's the real key. We have the world's best military, even though he's done everything he can to diminish it. And the fact of the matter is if we give them a mission and we don't tie their hands behind their back, they can get it accomplished.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Mr. Trump, at the State of the Union, the president pointed to a guest who was a Syrian refugee you might recall whose wife and daughter and other family members were killed in an air attack.", + " Now he fled that country seeking asylum here, ultimately ended up in Detroit where he's now trying to start a new life.\n\nThe president says that that doctor is the real face of these refugees and not the one that you and some of your colleagues on this stage are painting; that you prefer the face of fear and terror and that you would refuse to let in anyone into this country seeking legitimate asylum. How do you answer that?\n\nTRUMP: It's not fear and terror, it's reality. You just have to look today at Indonesia, bombings all over.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nYou look at California, you look, frankly, at Paris where there's a -- the strictest no-gun policy of any city anywhere in the world,", + " and you see what happens: 130 people dead with many to follow. They're very, very badly wounded. They will -- some will follow. And you look around, and you see what's happening, and this is not the case when he introduced the doctor -- very nice, everything perfect but that is not representative of what you have in that line of migration.\n\nThat could be the great Trojan Horse. It could be people that are going to do great, great destruction. When I look at the migration, I looked at the line, I said it actually on your show recently, where are the women? It looked like very few women.", + " Very few children. Strong, powerful men, young and people are looking at that and they're saying what's going on?\n\nTRUMP: You look at the kind of damage that two people that two people that got married, they were radicalized -- they got married, they killed 15 people in actually 15 -- going to be probably 16 but you look at that and you take a look -- a good strong look and that's what we have. We are nineteen trillion dollars -- our country's a mess and we can't let all these people come into our country and break our borders. We can't do it.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO:", + " Senator Cruz, the New York Times is reporting that you failed to properly disclose a million dollars in loans from Goldman Sachs and CitiBank. During your senate race, your campaign said, \"it was inadvertent.\" A million dollars is inadvertent?\n\nCRUZ: Well Maria, thank you for passing on that hit piece in the front page of the New York Times. You know the nice thing about the mainstream media, they don't hide their views. The New York Times a few weeks back had a columnist who wrote a column saying, \"Anybody But Cruz.\" Had that actually -- that same columnist wrote a column comparing me to an evil demonic spirit from the move,", + " \"It Follows\" that jumps apparently from body to body possessing people.\n\nSo you know the New York Times and I don't have exactly have the warmest of relationships. Now in terms of their really stunning hit piece, what they mentioned is when I was running for senate -- unlike Hillary Clinton, I don't have masses of money in the bank, hundreds of millions of dollars. When I was running for senate just about every lobbyist, just about all of the establishment opposed me in the senate race in Texas and my opponent in that race was worth over 200 million dollars. He put a 25 million dollar check up from his own pocket to fund that campaign and my wife Heidi and I,", + " we ended up investing everything we owned.\n\nWe took a loan against our assets to invest it in that campaign to defend ourselves against those attacks. And the entire New York times attack -- is that I disclosed that loan on one filing with the United States Senate, that was a public filing. But it was not on a second filing with FDIC and yes, I made a paperwork error disclosing it on one piece of paper instead of the other. But if that's the best the New York Times has got, they better go back to the well.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nCAVUTO: All right.", + " Welcome back to the Republican presidential debate, right here in North Charleston, South Carolina. Let's get right back to the questions. And I'll start with you, Senator Cruz.\n\nNow you are, of course, a strict constitutionalist -- no one would doubt that. And as you know, the U.S. Constitution says only natural-born citizens are eligible for the office of president of the United States. Stop me if you've heard this before. Now, you were born...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n... you were born in Canada to an American mother. So you were and are considered an American citizen. But that fellow next to you,", + " Donald Trump -- and others -- have said that being born in Canada means you are not natural-born, and that has raised questions about your eligibility.\n\nDo you want to try to close this topic once and for all tonight?\n\nCRUZ: Well, Neil, I'm glad we're focusing on the important topics of the evening.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nYou know, back in September, my friend Donald said that he had had his lawyers look at this from every which way, and there was no issue there. There was nothing to this birther issue.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nNow, since September, the Constitution hasn't changed.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBut the poll numbers have.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd I recognize -- I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa.", + " But the facts and the law here are really quite clear. Under longstanding U.S. law, the child of a U.S. citizen born abroad is a natural-born citizen.\n\nIf a soldier has a child abroad, that child is a natural-born citizen. That's why John McCain, even though he was born in Panama, was eligible to run for president.\n\nIf an American missionary has a child abroad, that child is a natural-born citizen. That's why George Romney, Mitt's dad, was eligible to run for president, even though he was born in Mexico.\n\nAt the end of the day, the legal issue is quite straightforward, but I would note that the birther theories that Donald has been relying on -- some of the more extreme ones insist that you must not only be born on U.S.", + " soil, but have two parents born on U.S. soil.\n\nUnder that theory, not only would I be disqualified, Marco Rubio would be disqualified, Bobby Jindal would be disqualified and, interestingly enough, Donald J. Trump would be disqualified.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(UNKNOWN): Not me.\n\nCRUZ: Because -- because Donald's mother was born in Scotland. She was naturalized. Now, Donald...\n\nTRUMP: But I was born here.\n\nCRUZ:... on the issue -- on the issue of citizenship, Donald...\n\nTRUMP: (inaudible). Big difference.\n\nCRUZ:... on the issue of citizenship,", + " Donald, I'm not going to use your mother's birth against you.\n\nTRUMP: OK, good. Because it wouldn't work.\n\nCRUZ: You're an American, as is everybody else on this stage, and I would suggest we focus on who's best prepared to be commander- in-chief, because that's the most important question facing the country.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Mr. Trump...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCAVUTO:... that you raised it because of his rising poll numbers.\n\nTRUMP:... first of all, let me just tell you something -- and you know, because you just saw the numbers yourself -- NBC Wall Street Journal just came out with a poll -- headline:", + " Trump way up, Cruz going down. I mean, so don't -- so you can't -- you can't...\n\n(BOOING)\n\n... they don't like the Wall Street Journal. They don't like NBC, but I like the poll.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nAnd frankly, it just came out, and in Iowa now, as you know, Ted, in the last three polls, I'm beating you. So -- you know, you shouldn't misrepresent how well you're doing with the polls.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nYou don't have to say that. In fact, I was all for you until you started doing that,", + " because that's a misrepresentation, number one.\n\nTRUMP: Number two, this isn't me saying it. I don't care. I think I'm going to win fair and square (inaudible) to win this way. Thank you.\n\nLawrence Tribe and (inaudible) from Harvard -- of Harvard, said that there is a serious question as to whether or not Ted can do this. OK? There are other attorneys that feel, and very, very fine constitutional attorneys, that feel that because he was not born on the land, he cannot run for office.\n\nHere's the problem. We're running. We're running.", + " He does great. I win. I choose him as my vice presidential candidate, and the Democrats sue because we can't take him along for the ride. I don't like that. OK?\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nThe fact is -- and if for some reason he beats the rest of the field, he beats the rest of the field (inaudible). See, they don't like that. They don't like that.\n\n(AUDIENCE BOOING)\n\nNo, they don't like he beats the rest of the field, because they want me.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBut -- if for some reason, Neil, he beats the rest of the field,", + " I already know the Democrats are going to be bringing a suit. You have a big lawsuit over your head while you're running. And if you become the nominee, who the hell knows if you can even serve in office? So you should go out, get a declaratory judgment, let the courts decide. And you shouldn't have mentioned the polls because I would have been much...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCAVUTO: Why are you saying this now -- right now? Why are you raising this issue now?\n\nTRUMP: Because now he's going a little bit better. No, I didn't care (inaudible). It's true.", + " No, it's true. Hey look, he never had a chance. Now, he's doing better. He's got probably a four or five percent chance.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Neil...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: The fact is, there is a big overhang. There's a big question mark on your head. And you can't do that to the party. You really can't. You can't do that to the party. You have to have certainty. Even if it was a one percent chance, and it's far greater than one percent because (inaudible).\n\nI mean,", + " you have great constitutional lawyers that say you can't run. If there was a -- and you know I'm not bringing a suit. I promise. But the Democrats are going to bring a lawsuit, and you have to have certainty. You can't have a question. I can agree with you or not, but you can't have a question over your head.\n\nCAVUTO: Senator, do you want to respond?\n\nCRUZ: Well, listen, I've spent my entire life defending the Constitution before the U.S. Supreme Court. And I'll tell you, I'm not going to be taking legal advice from Donald Trump.\n\nTRUMP:", + " You don't have to. Take it from Lawrence Tribe.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: Take it from your professors...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: The chances of any litigation proceeding and succeeding on this are zero. And Mr. Trump is very focused...\n\nTRUMP: He's wrong. He's wrong.\n\nCRUZ:... on Larry Tribe. Let me tell you who Larry Tribe is. He's a left-wing judicial activist, Harvard Law professor who was Al Gore's lawyer in Bush versus Gore. He's a major Hillary Clinton supporter. And there's a reason why Hillary's supporters are echoing Donald's attacks on me,", + " because Hillary...\n\nTRUMP: He is not the only one.\n\nCRUZ:... wants to face Donald Trump in the general election.\n\nTRUMP: There are many lawyers.\n\nCRUZ: And I'll tell you what, Donald, you -- you very kindly just a moment ago offered me the V.P. slot.\n\n(LAUGHTER) I'll tell you what. If this all works out, I'm happy to consider naming you as V.P. So if you happen to be right, you could get the top job at the end of the day.\n\nTRUMP: No -- no...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n... I think if it doesn't...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nI like that.", + " I like it. I'd consider it. But I think I'll go back to building buildings if it doesn't work out.\n\nCRUZ: Actually, I'd love to get you to build a wall.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: I have a feeling it's going to work out, actually.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO: Let me (inaudible). I was invoked in that question, so let me just say -- in that answer -- let me say, the real question here, I hate to interrupt this episode of Court TV.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBut the real -- but I think we have to get back to what this election has to be about.", + " OK? Listen, we -- this is the greatest country in the history of mankind. But in 2008, we elected a president that didn't want to fix America. He wants to change America. We elected a president that doesn't believe in the Constitution. He undermines it. We elected a president that is weakening America on the global stage. We elected a president that doesn't believe in the free enterprise system.\n\nThis election has to be about reversing all of that damage. That's why I'm running for office because when I become president of the United States, on my first day in office we are going to repeal every single one of his unconstitutional executive orders.", + " When I'm president of the United States we are getting rid of Obamacare and we are rebuilding our military. And when I'm president, we're not just going to have a president that gives a State of the Union and says America is the greatest country in the world. When I'm president, we're going to have a president that acts like it.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, senator.\n\nBARTIROMO: Mr. Trump, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in her response to the State of the Union address\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARITROMO: appeared to choose sides within the party, saying Republicans should resist,", + " quote, \"the siren call of the angriest voices\". She confirmed, she was referring to you among others. Was she out of line? And, how would a President Trump unite the party?\n\nTRUMP: Okay. First of all, Nikki this afternoon said I'm a friend of hers. Actually a close friend. And wherever you are sitting Nikki, I'm a friend. We're friends. That's good.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBut she did say there was anger. And I could say, oh, I'm not angry. I'm very angry because our country is being run horribly and I will gladly accept the mantle of anger.", + " Our military is a disaster.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Our healthcare is a horror show. Obamacare, we're going to repeal it and replace it. We have no borders. Our vets are being treated horribly. Illegal immigration is beyond belief. Our country is being run by incompetent people. And yes, I am angry.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: And I won't be angry when we fix it, but until we fix it, I'm very, very angry. And I say that to Nikki. So when Nikki said that, I wasn't offended. She said the truth.\n\nOne of your colleagues interviewed me. And said,", + " well, she said you were angry and I said to myself, huh, she's right. I'm not fighting that. I didn't find it offensive at all. I'm angry because our country is a mess.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARITROMO: But what are you going to do about it?\n\nCAVUTO: Marco Rubio. I'm sorry, it's the time constraints. You and Governor Christie have been exchanging some fairly nasty words of late, and I will allow the governor to respond as well.\n\nThe governor went so far to say, you won't be able to slime your way to the White House. He's referring to a series of ads done by a PAC,", + " speaking on your behalf, that say quote,\"One high tax, Common Core, liberal, energy-loving, Obamacare, Medicaid-expanding president is enough. You think you went too far on that and do you want to apologize to the governor?\n\nRUBIO: You know, as I said already twice in this debate, we have a very serious problem in this country.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: We have a president of the United States that is undermining this country's security and expanding the role of...\n\nCAVUTO: That is not my question.\n\nRUBIO: Well, I am going to answer your question, Neil.", + " He is -- this president is undermining the constitutional basis of this government. This president is undermining our military. He is undermining our standing in the world. I like Chris Christie, but we can not afford to have a president of the United States that supports Common Core.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: We can not afford to have a president of the United States that supports gun control. This president, this president is more interested in funding -- less interested in funding the military, than he is in funding planned -- he's more interested in funding Planned Parenthood than he is in funding the military.\n\nChris Christie wrote a check to Planned Parenthood. All I'm saying is our next president has to be someone that undoes the damage Barack Obama has done to this country.", + " It can not be someone that agrees with his agenda.\n\nBecause the damage he has done to America is extraordinary. Let me tell you, if we don't get this election right, there may be no turning back for America. We're on the verge of being the first generation of Americans that leave our children worse off than ourselves.\n\nSo I just truly, with all my heart belief, I like everybody on the stage. No one is a socialist. No one here is under FBI investigation. So we have a good group of people.\n\nCAVUTO: Is he a liberal?\n\nRUBIO: Our next president...\n\nCAVUTO: Is he a liberal?\n\nRUBIO:", + " Unfortunately, Governor Christie has endorsed many of the ideas that Barack Obama supports, whether it is Common Core or gun control or the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor or the donation he made to Planned Parenthood. Our next president, and our Republican nominee can not be someone who supports those positions.\n\nCAVUTO: Governor?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCHRISTIE: I stood on the stage and watched Marco in rather indignantly, look at Governor Bush and say, someone told you that because we're running for the same office, that criticizing me will get you to that office.\n\nIt appears that the same someone who has been whispering in old Marco's ear too.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nSo the indignation that you carry on,", + " some of the stuff, you have to also own then. So let's set the facts straight. First of all, I didn't support Sonia Sotomayor. Secondly, I never wrote a check to Planned Parenthood.\n\nThird, if you look at my record as governor of New Jersey, I have vetoed a 50-caliber rifle ban. I have vetoed a reduction this clip size. I vetoed a statewide I.D. system for gun owners and I pardoned, six out-of-state folks who came through our state and were arrested for owning a gun legally in another state so they never have to face charges.\n\nAnd on Common Core,", + " Common Core has been eliminated in New Jersey. So listen, this is the difference between being a governor and a senator. See when you're a senator, what you get to do is just talk and talk and talk. And you talk so much that nobody can ever keep up with what you're saying is accurate or not.\n\nWhen you're a governor, you're held accountable for everything you do. And the people of New Jersey, I've seen it.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCHRISTIE: And the last piece is this. I like Marco too, and two years ago, he called me a conservative reformer that New Jersey needed.", + " That was before he was running against me. Now that he is, he's changed his tune.\n\nI'm never going to change my tune. I like Marco Rubio. He's a good guy, a smart guy, and he would be a heck of a lot better president than Hillary Rodham Clinton would ever be.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBUSH: Neil, my name was mentioned here. Neil, my name was mentioned as well.\n\nHere's the deal, Chris is totally right. He's been a good governor, and he's a heck of a lot better than his predecessor that would have bankrupted New Jersey.\n\nEverybody on this stage is better than Hillary Clinton.", + " And I think the focus ought to be on making sure that we leave this nomination process, as wild and woolly as it's going to be -- this is not being bad.\n\nThese attack ads are going to be part of life. Everybody just needs to get used to it. Everybody's record's going to be scrutinized, and at the end of the day we need to unite behind the winner so we can defeat Hillary Clinton, because she is a disaster.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nOur country rise up again, but we need to have a compelling conservative agenda that we present to the American people in a way that doesn't disparage people,", + " that unites us around our common purpose.\n\nAnd so everybody needs to discount some of the things you're going to hear in these ads, and discount the -- the back-and-forth here, because every person here is better than Hillary Clinton.\n\nCARSON: Neil, I was mentioned too.\n\nCAVUTO: You were?\n\nCARSON: Yeah, he said everybody. (LAUGHTER)\n\nAnd -- and I just want to take this opportunity to say, you know, in the 2012 election, you know, we -- and when I say we, Republicans -- tore themselves apart.\n\nYou know, we have to stop this because,", + " you know, if we manage to damage ourselves, and we lose the next election, and a progressive gets in there and they get two or three Supreme Court picks, this nation is over as we know it. And we got to look at the big picture here.\n\nBARTIROMO: Governor Kasich...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... Governor Kasich, Hillary Clinton is getting some serious competition from Senator Bernie Sanders. He's now at 41 percent in the latest CBS/New York Times poll. Vice President Biden sang his praises, saying Bernie is speaking to a yearning that is deep and real, and he has credibility on it.\n\nSo what does it say about our country that a candidate who is a self-", + "avowed socialist and who doesn't think a 90 percent tax rate is too high could be the Democratic nominee?\n\nKASICH: Well, if that's the case, we're going to win every state, if Bernie Sanders is the nominee. That's not even an issue. But look...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... and I know Bernie, and I can promise you he's not going to be president of the United States. So here's this -- the situation, I think, Maria.\n\nAnd this is what we have to -- I -- I've got to tell you, when wages don't rise -- and they haven't for a lot of families for a number of years -- it's very,", + " very difficult for them.\n\nPart of the reason why it hasn't risen because sometimes we're not giving people the skills they need. Sometimes it's because the Federal Reserve kept interest rates so low that the wealthy were able to invest in -- in strong assets like the stock market when everybody else was left behind.\n\nPeople are upset about it. I'll tell you what else they're upset about: you're 50 or 51 years old, and some kid walks in and tells you you're out of work, and you don't know where to go and where to turn. Do we have answer for that? We do. There are ways to retrain the 50 and 51-year-olds,", + " because they've got great value.\n\nI'll tell you what else people are concerned about. Their kids come out of college, they have high debt and they can't get a good job. We got to do a lot about the high cost of high -- higher education, but we've got to make sure we're training people for jobs that exist, that are good jobs that can pay.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nLet me tell you that, in this country -- in this country, people are concerned about their economic future. They're very concerned about it. And they wonder whether somebody is getting something to -- keeping them from getting it.\n\nThat's not the America that I've ever known.", + " My father used to say, \"Johnny, we never -- we don't hate the rich. We just want to be the rich.\" And we just got to make sure that every American has the tools, in K-through-12 and in vocational education, in higher education.\n\nAnd we got to fight like crazy so people can think the American dream still exists, because it does, with rising wages, with full employment and with everybody in America -- and I mean everybody in America -- having an opportunity to realize the American dream of having a better life than their mother and their father.\n\nI'm president -- look, I've done it once. I've done it once in Washington,", + " with great jobs and lower taxes. The economy was really booming.\n\nAnd now in Ohio, with the same formula, wages higher than the -- than the national average. A growth of 385,000 jobs.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nIt's not that hard. Just know where you want to go, stick to your guts. Get it done, because our -- our children and grandchildren are counting on us to get it done. And, folks, we will. You count on it.\n\nBARTIROMO: Dr. Carson, one of the other candidates on this stage has brought Bill Clinton's past indiscretions. Is that a legitimate topic in this election?", + " And what do you think of the notion that Hillary Clinton is an enabler of sexual misconduct?\n\nCARSON: Well, there's not question that we should be able to look at past president whether they're married to somebody who's running for president or not in terms of their past behavior and what it means. But you know, here's the real issue, is this America anymore? Do we still have standards? Do we still have values and principles?\n\nYou know, you look at what's going on, you see all the divisiveness and the hatred that goes on in our society. You know, we have a war on virtual everything -- race wars,", + " gender wars, income wars, religious wars, age wars. Every war you can imaging, we have people at each other's throat and our strength is actually in our unity.\n\nYou know, you go to the internet, you start reading an article and you go to the comments section -- you cannot go five comments down before people are calling each all manner of names. Where did that spirit come from in America? It did not come from our Judeo-Christian roots, I can tell you that. And wherever it came from we need to start once again recognizing that there is such a thing as right and wrong. And let's not let the secular progressives drive that out of us.\n\nThe majority of people in American actually have values and principles and they believe in the very things that made America great.", + " They've been beaten into submission. It's time for us to stand up for what we believe in.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Well, we are not done. Coming up, one of the top things people are talking about on Facebook, guns. And you can join us live us on this stage in the conversation during this commercial break right from home. You can go to Facebook.com/(inaudible). We will be streaming live and talking about how we think the debate is going so far.\n\nCAVUTO: We're back in a moment in Charleston, South Carolina.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO:", + " Welcome back to the Republican presidential debates, right here in North Charleston. Let's get right back to the questions.\n\nGovernor Bush, gun rights, one of the top issues seen on Facebook with close to 3 million people talking about it in the past month. Right here in Charleston, Dylann Roof, who has been accused of killing nine people in a nearby church, reportedly had not passed his background check when he got his gun. What is the harm in tightening standards for not only who buys guns, but those who sell them?\n\nBUSH: First of all, I'd like to recognize Governor Haley for her incredible leadership in the aftermath of the --\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBUSH:", + " The Emanuel AME church killings. And I also want to recognize the people in that church that showed the grace of God and the grace of forgiveness and the mercy that they showed.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBUSH: I don't know if any of us could have done what they did, one after another, within 48 hours of that tragedy taking place. Look, here's the deal, in this particular case, the FBI made a mistake. The law itself requires a background check, but that didn't fulfill their part of the bargain within the time that they were supposed to do.\n\nWe don't need to add new rules, we need to make sure the FBI does its job.", + " Because that person should not have gotten a gun, should not -- would not have passed a background check. The first impulse of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is to take rights away from law- abiding citizens.\n\nThat's what they do, whether it's the San Bernardino attack or if it's these tragedies that take place, I think we need to focus on what the bigger issue is. It isn't law-abiding gun owners.\n\nLook, I have an A plus rating in the NRA and we also have a reduction in gun violence because in Florida, if you commit a crime with a gun, you're going away. You're going away for a long,", + " long while.\n\nAnd that's what we should focus on is the violence in our communities. Target the efforts for people that are committing crimes with guns, and if you do that, and get it right, you're going to be much better off than creating a political argument where there's a big divide.\n\nThe other issue is mental health. That's a serious issue that we could work on. Republicans and Democrats alike believe this.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBUSH: The president's first impulse is do this by executive order, power he doesn't have. Why not go to Congress and in a bipartisan way, begin to deal with the process of mental health issues so that people that are spiraling out of control because of mental health challenges don't have access to guns.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO:", + " Thank you, sir.\n\nMr. Trump, are there any circumstances that you think we should be limiting gun sales of any kind in America?\n\nTRUMP: No. I am a 2nd amendment person. If we had guns in California on the other side where the bullets went in the different direction, you wouldn't have 14 or 15 people dead right now.\n\nIf even in Paris, if they had guns on the other side, going in the opposite direction, you wouldn't have 130 people plus dead. So the answer is no and what Jeb said is absolutely correct.\n\nWe have a huge mental health problem in this country.", + " We're closing hospitals, we're closing wards, we're closing so many because the states want to save money. We have to get back into looking at what's causing it. The guns don't pull the trigger. It's the people that pull the trigger and we have to find out what is going on.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: We have to protect our 2nd amendment and you cannot do this and certainly what Barack Obama was doing with the executive order. He doesn't want to get people together, the old-fashioned way, where you get Congress. You get the Congress, you get the Senate, you get together,", + " you do legislation. He just writes out an executive order. Not supposed to happen that way.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you sir.\n\nXXX where you get Congress.\n\nTRUMP: You get the Congress. You get the Senate. You get together. You do legislation. He just writes out an order, executive order. It's not supposed to happen that way.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, sir.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Senator Rubio, you said that President Obama wants to take people's guns away. Yet under his presidency, gun sales have more than doubled.", + " That doesn't sound like a White House unfriendly to gun owners.\n\nRUBIO: That sounds like people are afraid the president's going to take their guns away.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nLook, the Second Amendment is not an option. It is not a suggestion. It is a constitutional right of every American to be able to protect themselves and their families. I am convinced that if this president could confiscate every gun in America, he would. I am convinced that this president, if he could get rid of the Second Amendment, he would. I am convinced because I see how he works with his attorney general, not to defend the Second Amendment,", + " but to figure out ways to undermine it.\n\nI have seen him appoint people to our courts not to defend the Second Amendment, but to figure out ways to undermine it.\n\nHere's my second problem. None of these instances that the president points to as the reason why he's doing these things would have been preventive. You know why? Because criminals don't buy their guns from a gun show. They don't buy their guns from a collector. And they don't buy their guns from a gun store. They get -- they steal them. They get them on the black market.\n\nAnd let me tell you, ISIS and terrorists do not get their guns from a gun show.", + " These...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... his answer -- you name it. If there's an act of violence in America, his immediate answer before he even knows the facts is gun control. Here's a fact. We are in a war against ISIS. They are trying to attack us here in America. They attacked us in Philadelphia last week. They attacked us in San Bernardino two weeks ago. And the last line standing between them and our families might be us and a gun.\n\nWhen I'm president of the United States, we are defending the Second Amendment, not undermining it the way Barack Obama does.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO:", + " But what fact can you point to, Senator -- what fact can you point to that the president would take away everyone's gun? You don't think that's (inaudible)?\n\nRUBIO: About every two weeks, he holds a press conference talking about how he can't wait to restrict people's access to guns. He has never defended...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO: I'll give you a fact. Well, let me tell you this. Do you remember when he ran for president of the United States, and he was a candidate, and he went and said, \"These Americans with traditional values, they are bitter people,", + " and they cling to their guns and to their religion.\" That tells you right away where he was headed on all of this.\n\nThis president every chance he has ever gotten has tried to undermine the Second Amendment.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHe doesn't meet -- here's the difference. When he meets with the attorney general in the White House, it's not \"how can we protect the Second Amendment rights of Americans.\" It's \"give me options on how I can make it harder for law-abiding people to buy guns.\" That will never happen when I am president of the United States.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Governor Christie, you,", + " too, have criticized the president's recent executive action on gun control, saying it's unconstitutional, another step to bypass Congress. But hasn't your own position on guns evolved, sir? The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports that you signed several laws to regulate the possession of firearms, and that you argued back in August 2013, and I quote, \"These common sense measures will strengthen New Jersey's already tough gun laws.\"\n\nSo isn't that kind of what the president wants to do now?\n\nCHRISTIE: No, absolutely not. The president wants to do things without working with his Congress, without working with the legislature, and without getting the consent of the American people.", + " And the fact is that that's not a democracy. That's a dictatorship. And we need to very, very concerned about that.\n\nSee, here's the thing. I don't think the founders put the Second Amendment as number two by accident. I don't think they dropped all the amendments into a hat and picked them out of a hat. I think they made the Second Amendment the second amendment because they thought it was just that important.\n\nThe fact is in New Jersey, what we have done is to make it easier now to get a conceal and carry permit. We have made it easier to do that, not harder. And the way we've done it properly through regulatory action,", + " not buy signing unconstitutional executive orders. This guy is a petulant child. That's what he is. I mean, you know...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... the fact is, Neil, let's think about -- let's think about -- and I want to maybe -- I hope the president is watching tonight, because here's what I'd like to tell him.\n\nMr. President, we're not against you. We're against your policies. When you became president, you had a Democratic Congress and a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate. You had only 21 Republican governors in this country. And now after seven years of your policies, we have the biggest majority we've had since the 1920s in the House;", + " a Republican majority in the Senate; and 31 out of 50 Republican governors.\n\nThe American people have rejected your agenda and now you're trying to go around it. That's not right. It's not constitutional. And we are going to kick your rear end out of the White House come this fall.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: So what is the answer, Senator Cruz, to stop mass shootings and violent crime, up in 30 cities across the country?\n\nCRUZ: The answer is simple. Your prosecute criminals. You target the bad guys. You know, a minute ago, Neil asked: What has President Obama do -- done to illustrate that he wants to go after guns?\n\nWell,", + " he appointed Eric Holder as attorney general. Eric Holder said he viewed his mission as brainwashing the American people against guns. He appointed Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, someone who has been a radical against the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.\n\nHe launched Fast and Furious, illegally selling guns to Mexican drug lords that were then used to shoot law enforcement officials. And I'll tell you what Hillary Clinton has said: Hillary Clinton says she agrees with the dissenters -- the Supreme Court dissenters in the Heller case.\n\nThere were four dissenters, and they said that they believe the Second Amendment protects no individual right to keep and bear arms whatsoever,", + " which means, if their view prevailed and the next president's going to get one, two, three, maybe four Supreme Court justices, the court will rule that not a single person in this room has any right under the Second Amendment and the government could confiscate your guns.\n\nAnd I'll note that California senator -- Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said, if she could say to Mr. America and Mrs. America, \"give me your guns, I'm rounding them up,\" she would.\n\nAnd let me make a final point on this. Listen, in any Republican primary, everyone is going to say they support the Second Amendment. Unless you are clinically insane...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n... that's what you say in a primary.", + " But the voters are savvier than that. They recognize that people's actions don't always match their words. I've got a proven record fighting to defend the Second Amendment.\n\nThere's a reason Gun Owners of America has endorsed me in this race. There's a reason the NRA gave me their Carter Knight Freedom Fund award...\n\n(BELL RINGS)... and there's a reason, when Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer came after our right to keep and bear arms, that I led the opposition, along with millions of Americans -- we defeated that gun control legislation.\n\nAnd I would note the other individuals on this stage were nowhere to be found in that fight.\n\nBARTIROMO:", + " Senator...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... let me follow up and switch gears.\n\nSenator Cruz, you suggested Mr. Trump, quote, \"embodies New York values.\" Could you explain what you mean by that?\n\nCRUZ: You know, I think most people know exactly what New York values are.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBARTIROMO: I am from New York. I don't.\n\nCRUZ: What -- what -- you're from New York? So you might not.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBut I promise you, in the state of South Carolina, they do.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd listen, there are many,", + " many wonderful, wonderful working men and women in the state of New York. But everyone understands that the values in New York City are socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro- gay-marriage, focus around money and the media.\n\nAnd -- and I would note indeed, the reason I said that is I was asked -- my friend Donald has taken to it as (ph) advance playing Bruce Springsteen's \"Born in the USA\", and I was asked what I thought of that.\n\nAnd I said, \"well, if he wanted to play a song, maybe he could play, 'New York, New York'?\" And -- and -- you know,", + " the concept of New York values is not that complicated to figure out.\n\nNot too many years ago, Donald did a long interview with Tim Russert. And in that interview, he explained his views on a whole host of issues that were very, very different from the views he's describing now.\n\nAnd his explanation -- he said, \"look, I'm from New York, that's what we believe in New York. Those aren't Iowa values, but this is what we believe in New York.\" And so that was his explanation.\n\nAnd -- and I guess I can -- can frame it another way. Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.", + " I'm just saying.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBARTIROMO: Are you sure about that?\n\nCAVUTO: Maria...\n\nTRUMP: So conservatives actually do come out of Manhattan, including William F. Buckley and others, just so you understand.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd just so -- if I could, because he insulted a lot of people. I've had more calls on that statement that Ted made -- New York is a great place. It's got great people, it's got loving people, wonderful people.\n\nWhen the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully,", + " more humanely than New York. You had two one hundred...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... you had two 110-story buildings come crashing down. I saw them come down. Thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup, probably in the history of doing this, and in construction. I was down there, and I've never seen anything like it.\n\nAnd the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death, and even the smell of death -- nobody understood it. And it was with us for months, the smell, the air.\n\nTRUMP: And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan,", + " and everybody in the world watched and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Governor bush, for the third time in as many months, the Iranians have provoked us, detaining us, as we've been discussing, with these 10 Navy sailors Tehran had said strayed into their waters. The sailors were released, but only after shown on video apologizing for the incident. This occurring only weeks after Iran fired multiple rockets within 1,500 yards of a U.S. aircraft carrier and then continued to test medium range missiles.\n\nNow you've claimed that such actions indicate Tehran has little to fear from a President Obama.", + " I wonder, sir, what would change if they continued doing this sort of thing under a President Jeb Bush?\n\nBUSH: Well, first of all, under President Jeb Bush, we would restore the strength of the military. Last week, Secretary Carter announced that the Navy's going to be cut again. It's now half the size of what it was prior to Operation Desert Storm.\n\nThe deployments are too high for the military personnel. We don't have procurement being done for refreshing the equipment. The B-52 is still operational as the long range bomber; it was inaugurated in the age of Harry Truman. The planes are older than the pilots.", + " We're gutting our military, and so the Iranians and the Chinese and the Russians and many other countries look at the United States not as serious as we once were.\n\nWe have to eliminate the sequester, rebuild our military in a way that makes it clear that we're back in the game.\n\nSecondly, as it relates to Iran, we need to confront their ambitions across the board. We should reimpose sanctions, they've already violated sanctions after this agreement was signed by testing medium-range missiles.\n\nThirdly, we need to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to send a serious signal that we're back in the game with Israel --\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... and sign an agreement that makes sure that the world knows that they will have technological superiority.\n\nWe need to get back in the game as it relates to our Arab nations.", + " The rest of the world is moving away from us towards other alliances because we are weak. This president and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton all have made it harder for the next president to act, but he must act to confront the ambitions of Iran. We can get back in the game to restore order and security for our own country.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Thank you, Governor. Governor Kasich, while everyone has been focusing on Iran's provocations, I'm wondering what you make of what Saudi Arabia has been doing and its recent moves in the region, including its execution of a well-known Shi'ite cleric and its move to dramatically increase oil production,", + " some say in an effort to drive down oil prices and force a lot of U.S. oil producers out of business.\n\nSure enough, oil prices have tumbled. One brokerage house is predicting a third or more of American oil producers and those heavily invested in fracking will go bankrupt, and soon Saudi Arabia and OPEC will be back in the driver's seat.\n\nU.S. energy player Harold Hamrie similarly told me with friends like these, who needs enemies? Do you agree?\n\nKASICH: Well, let me -- let me first of all talk a little bit about my experience. I served on the Defense Committee for 18 years,", + " and by the way, one of the members of that committee was Senator Strom Thurmond from South Carolina. Let em also tell you...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... that after the 9/11 attacks, Secretary Rumsfeld invited me to the Pentagon with a meeting of the former secretaries of Defense. And in that meeting, I suggested we had a problem with technology, and that I wanted to take people from Silicon Valley into the Pentagon to solve our most significant problems. So I not only had the opportunity to go through the Cold War struggles in Central America, and even after 9/11 to be involved.\n\nWith Saudi Arabia and oil production,", + " first of all, it's so critical for us to be energy independent, and we're getting there because of fracking and we ought to explore because, see, energy independence gives us leverage and flexibility, and secondly, if you want to bring jobs back to the United States of America in industry, low prices make the difference.\n\nWe're seeing it in my state and we'll see it in this country. And that's why we must make sure we continue to frack.\n\nIn terms of Saudi Arabia, look, my biggest problem with them is they're funding radical clerics through their madrasses. That is a bad deal and an evil situation,", + " and presidents have looked the other way. And I was going to tell you, whether I'm president or not, we better make it clear to the Saudis that we're going to support you, we're in relation with you just like we were in the first Gulf War, but you've got to knock off the funding and teaching of radical clerics who are the very people who try to destroy us and will turn around and destroy them.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nKASICH: So look, in foreign policy -- in foreign policy, it's strength, but you've got to be cool. You've got to have a clear vision of where you want to go.", + " And I'm going to tell you, that it -- I'm going to suggest to you here tonight, that you can't do on the job training.\n\nI've seen so much of it - a Soviet Union, the coming down of a wall, the issues that we saw around the world in Central America, the potential spread of communism, and 9/11 and Gulf War. You see what the Saudi's -- deliver them a strong message but at the end of the day we have to keep our cool because most of the time they're going right with us. And they must be part of our coalition to destroy ISIS and I believe we can get that done.\n\nThank you.\n\nCAVUTO:", + " Thank you John.\n\nBARTIROMO: There's much more ahead including the fight against ISIS. More from Charleston, South Carolina when we come right back.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nBARTIROMO: We welcome back to the Republican Presidential Debate, right back to the questions.\n\nCandidates, the man who made fighting ISIS the cornerstone of his campaign, South Carolina Senator, Lindsey Graham is out the race but he joins us tonight in the audience.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHe says, \"the air-strike now in their 16th month have been ineffective.\" Dr. Carson...\n\nCARSON: Wait a minute, who in their 16th month?\n\nBARTIROMO:", + " The air-strikes.\n\nCARSON: OK.\n\nBARTIROMO: Now in their 16th month are ineffective. Dr. Carson, do you think Senator Graham is right in wanting to send 20,000 troops -- ground troops to Iraq and Syria to take out ISIS?\n\nCARSON: Well, there's no question that ISIS is a very serious problem, and I don't believe that this administration recognizes how serious it is.\n\nI think we need to do a lot more than we're doing. Recognize that the caliphate is what gives them the legitimacy to go out on a jihadist mission, so we need to take that away from them.\n\nThe way to take that away from them is to talk to our military officials and ask them,", + " \"what do you need in order to accomplish this goal?\"\n\nOur decision is, then, do we give them what we need. I say, yes, not only do we give them what they need, but we don't tie their hands behind their backs so that they can go ahead and get the job done.\n\nIn addition to that...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... in addition to that, we go ahead and we take the oil from them, their source of revenue. You know, some of these -- these engagement rules that the administration has -- \"we're not going to bomb a tanker that's coming out of there because there might be a person in it\"", + " -- give me a break.\n\nJust tell them that, you put people in there, we're going to bomb them. So don't put people in there if you don't want them bombed. You know, that's so simple.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd then we need to shut down -- we need to shut down their mechanisms of funding and attack their command-and-control centers. Why should we let their people be sitting there smoking their cigars, sitting in their comfortable chairs in Raqqa?\n\nWe know (ph) to go ahead and shut off the supply routes, and send in our special ops at 2:00 a.m. and attack them everywhere they go.", + " They should be running all the time, then they won't have time to plan attacks against us.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, sir. Senator Graham has also said that the U.S. will find Arab support for its coalition if it removes Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And I quote, \"The now king of Saudi Arabia told us, 'you can have our army, you just got to deal with Assad.'\n\n\"The emir of Qatar said, 'I'll pay for the operation, but they are not going to fight ISIS and let Damascus fall into the hands of the Iranians. Assad has to go.'\"\n\nGovernor Christie,", + " how important is it to remove Assad from power and how would you do it?\n\nCHRISTIE: Maria, you look at what this president and his secretary of state, Secretary of State Clinton, has done to get us in this spot. You think about it -- this is the president who said, along with his secretary of state -- drew a red line in Syria, said, if Assad uses chemical weapons against his people, that we're going to attack.\n\nHe used chemical weapons, he's killed, now, over a quarter of a million of his own people, and this president has done nothing. In fact, he's done worse than nothing.\n\nThis president -- and,", + " by the way, Secretary Clinton, who called Assad a reformer -- she called Assad a reformer. Now, the fact is, what this president has done is invited Russia to play an even bigger role, bring in Vladimir Putin to negotiate getting those chemical weapons back from Assad, yet what do we have today?\n\nWe have the Russians and the Iranians working together, not to fight ISIS, but to prop up Assad. The fact of the matter is we're not going to have peace -- we are not going to have peace in Syria. We're not going to be able to rebuild it unless we put a no-fly zone there, make it safe for those folks so we don't have to be talking about Syrian refugees anymore.\n\nThe Syrians should stay in Syria.", + " They shouldn't be going to Europe. And here's the last piece...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... you're not going to have peace in Syria with Assad in charge. You're simply not. And so Senator Graham is right about this.\n\nAnd if we want to try to rebuild the coalition, as Governor Kasich was saying before, then what we better do is to get to the Arab countries that believe that ISIS is a threat, not only to them, but to us and to world peace, and bring them together.\n\nAnd believe me, Assad is not worth it. And if you're going to leave this to Hillary Clinton, the person who gave us this foreign policy,", + " the architect of it, and you're going to give her another four years, that's why I'm speaking out as strongly as I am about that.\n\nHillary Clinton cannot be president. It will lead to even greater war in this world. And remember this, after Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have had nearly 8 years, we have fewer democracies in the world than we had when they started.\n\nThat makes the world less peaceful, less safe. In my administration, we will help to make sure we bring people together in the Middle East, and we will fight ISIS and defeat them.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, sir.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMr.", + " Trump -- Mr. Trump, your comments about banning Muslims from entering the country created a firestorm. According to Facebook, it was the most-talked-about moment online of your entire campaign, with more than 10 million people talking about the issue.\n\nIs there anything you've heard that makes you want to rethink this position?\n\nTRUMP: No.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nNo.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nLook, we have to stop with political correctness. We have to get down to creating a country that's not going to have the kind of problems that we've had with people flying planes into the World Trade Centers, with the -- with the shootings in California,", + " with all the problems all over the world.\n\nTRUMP: I just left Indonesia -- bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb.\n\nWe have to find out what's going on. I said temporarily. I didn't say permanently. I said temporarily. And I have many great Muslim friends. And some of them, I will say, not all, have called me and said, \"Donald, thank you very much; you're exposing an unbelievable problem and we have to get to the bottom of it.\"\n\nAnd unlike President Obama, where he refuses even to use the term of what's going on, he can't use the term for whatever reason.", + " And if you can't use the term, you're never going to solve the problem. My Muslim friends, some, said, \"thank you very much; we'll get to the bottom of it.\"\n\nBut we have a serious problem. And we can't be the stupid country any more. We're laughed at all over the world.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBUSH: Donald, Donald -- can I -- I hope you reconsider this, because this policy is a policy that makes it impossible to build the coalition necessary to take out ISIS. The Kurds are our strongest allies. They're Muslim. You're not going to even allow them to come to our country?\n\nThe other Arab countries have a role to play in this.", + " We cannot be the world's policeman. We can't do this unilaterally. We have to do this in unison with the Arab world. And sending that signal makes it impossible for us to be serious about taking out ISIS and restoring democracy in Syria.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSo I hope you'll reconsider. I hope you'll reconsider. The better way of dealing with this -- the better way of dealing with this is recognizing that there are people in, you know, the -- Islamic terrorists inside, embedded in refugee populations.\n\nWhat we ought to do is tighten up our efforts to deal with the entry visa program so that a citizen from Europe,", + " it's harder if they've been traveling to Syria or traveling to these other places where there is Islamic terrorism, make it harder -- make the screening take place.\n\nWe don't have to have refugees come to our country, but all Muslims, seriously? What kind of signal does that send to the rest of the world that the United States is a serious player in creating peace and security?\n\nCAVUTO: But you said -- you said that he made those comments and they represented him being unhinged after he made them.\n\nBUSH: Yeah, they are unhinged.\n\nCAVUTO: Well -- well, after he made them...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... his poll numbers went up eight points in South Carolina.", + " Now -- now, wait...\n\nTRUMP: Eleven points, to be exact.\n\nCAVUTO: Are you -- are you saying -- are you saying that all those people who agree with Mr. Trump are unhinged?\n\nBUSH: No, not at all, absolutely not. I can see why people are angry and scared, because this president has created a condition where our national security has weakened dramatically. I totally get that. But we're running for the presidency of the United States here. This isn't -- this isn't, you know, a different kind of job. You have to lead. You cannot make rash statements and expect the rest of the world to respond as though,", + " well, it's just politics.\n\nEvery time we send signals like this, we send a signal of weakness, not strength. And so it was (inaudible) his statement, which is why I'm asking him to consider changing his views.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: I want security for this country. OK?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nI want security. I'm tired of seeing what's going on, between the border where the people flow over; people come in; they live; they shoot. I want security for this country. We have a serious problem with, as you know, with radical Islam. We have a tremendous problem.", + " It's not only a problem here. It's a problem all over the world.\n\nI want to find out why those two young people -- those two horrible young people in California when they shot the 14 people, killed them -- people they knew, people that held the wedding reception for them. I want to find out -- many people saw pipe bombs and all sorts of things all over their apartment. Why weren't they vigilant? Why didn't they call? Why didn't they call the police?\n\nAnd by the way, the police are the most mistreated people in this country. I will tell you that.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThe most mistreated people.", + " In fact, we need to -- wait a minute -- we need vigilance. We have to find out -- many people knew about what was going on. Why didn't they turn those two people in so that you wouldn't have had all the death?\n\nThere's something going on and it's bad. And I'm saying we have to get to the bottom of it. That's all I'm saying. We need security.\n\nBARTIROMO: We -- we want to hear from all of you on this. According to Pew Research, the U.S. admits more than 100,000 Muslim immigrants every single year on a permanent lifetime basis.", + " I want to ask the rest of you to comment on this. Do you agree that we should pause Muslim immigration until we get a better handle on our homeland security situation, as Mr. Trump has said?\n\nBeginning with you, Governor Kasich.\n\nKASICH: I -- I've been for pausing on admitting the Syrian refugees. And the reasons why I've done is I don't believe we have a good process of being able to vet them. But you know, we don't want to put everybody in the same category.\n\nKASICH: And I'll go back to something that had been mentioned just a few minutes ago. If we're going to have a coalition,", + " we're going to have to have a coalition not just of people in the western part of the world, our European allies, but we need the Saudis, we need the Egyptians, we need the Jordanians, we need the Gulf states. We need Jordan.\n\nWe need all of them to be part of exactly what the first George Bush put together in the first Gulf War.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nIt was a coalition made up of Arabs and Americans and westerners and we're going to need it again. And if we try to put everybody in the same -- call everybody the same thing, we can't do it. And that's just not acceptable.\n\nBut I think a pause on Syrian refugees has been exactly right for all the governors that have called for it,", + " and also, of course, for me as the governor of Ohio.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, sir, we want to hear from the rest of you,\n\nGovernor Christie, your take.\n\nCHRISTIE: Now Maria, listen. I said right from the beginning that we should take no Syrian refugees of any kind. And the reason I said that is because the FBI director told the American people, told Congress, that he could not guarantee he could vet them and it would be safe. That's the end of the conversation.\n\nI can tell you, after spending seven years as a former federal prosecutor, right after 9/", + "11, dealing with this issue. Here's the way you need to deal with it. You can't just ban all Muslims. You have to ban radical Islamic jihadists. You have to ban the people who are trying to hurt us.\n\nThe only way to figure that out is to go back to getting the intelligence community the funding and the tools that it needs to be able to keep America safe.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nAnd this summer, we didn't do that. We took it away from the NSA, it was a bad decision by the president. Bad by those in the Senate who voted for it and if I'm president, we'll make our intelligence community strong,", + " and won't have to keep everybody out, we're just going to keep the bad folk out and make sure they don't harm us.\n\nBARTIROMO: Senator Rubio, where do you stand?\n\nRUBIO: Well, first of all, let's understand why we are even having this debate and why Donald tapped in to some of that anger that's out there about this whole issue. Because this president has consistently underestimated the threat of ISIS.\n\nIf you listen to the State of the Union the other night, he described them as a bunch of guys with long beards on the back of a pickup truck. They are much more than that.", + " This is a group of people that enslaves women and sells them, sells them as brides.\n\nThis is a group of people that burns people in cages, that is conducting genocide against Christians and Yazidis and others in the region. This is not some small scale group.\n\nThey are radicalizing people in the United States, they are conducting attacks around the world. So you know what needs to happen, it's a very simple equation, and it's going to happen when I'm president. If we do not know who you are, and we do not know why you are coming when I am president, you are not getting into the United States of America.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO:", + " Senator Cruz, where do you stand? Senator Cruz?\n\nCRUZ: You know I understand why Donald made the comments he did and I understand why Americans are feeling frustrated and scared and angry when we have a president who refuses to acknowledge the threat we face and even worse, who acts as an apologist for radical Islamic terrorism.\n\nI think what we need is a commander in chief who is focused like a laser on keeping this country safe and on defeating radical Islamic terrorism. What should we do? First, we should pass the Expatriate Terrorist Act, legislation I've introduced that says if an American goes and joins ISIS and wages jihad against America,", + " that you forfeit your citizenship and you can not come in on a passport.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ: And secondly, we should pass the legislation that I've introduced...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... that suspends all refugees from nations that ISIS or Al Qaida controls significant territory. Just last week, we see saw two Iraqi refugees vetted using the same process the president says will work, that were arrested for being alleged ISIS terrorists.\n\nIf I'm elected president, we will not let in refugees from countries controlled by ISIS or Al Qaida. When it comes to ISIS, we will not weaken them, we will not degrade them,", + " we will utterly and completely destroy ISIS\n\n(APPLAUSE).\n\nBARTIROMO: Dr. Carson, where do you stand? Do you agree with Mr. Trump?\n\nCARSON: Well, first of all, recognize it is a substantial problem. But like all of our problems, there isn't a single one that can't be solved with common sense if you remove the ego and the politics. And clearly, what we need to do is get a group of experts together, including people from other countries, some of our friends from Israel, who have had experience screening these people and come up with new guidelines for immigration, and for visas,", + " for people who are coming into this country.\n\nThat is the thing that obviously makes sense, we can do that. And as far as the Syrians are concerned, Al-Hasakah province, perfect place. They have infrastructure. All we need to do is protect them, they will be in their own country.\n\nAnd that is what they told me when I was in Jordan in November. Let's listen to them and let's not listen to our politicians.\n\nBARTIROMO: So, to be clear, the both of you do not agree with Mr. Trump?\n\nBUSH: So, are we going to ban Muslims from India,", + " from Indonesia, from countries that are strong allies -- that we need to build better relationships with? Of course not. What we need to do is destroy ISIS.\n\nI laid out a plan at the Citadel to do just that and it starts with creating a \"No Fly Zone\" and \"Safe Zones\" to make sure refugees are there. We need to lead a force, a Sunni led force inside of Syria. We need to embed with -- with the Iraqi military. We need to arm the Kurds the directly. We need to re-establish the relationships with the Sunnis.\n\nWe need the lawyers(ph) off the back of the war fighters. That's how you solve the problem.", + " You don't solve it by big talk where you're banning all Muslims and making it harder for us to build the kind of coalition for us to be successful.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you governor.\n\nCAVUTO: Mr. Trump, sometimes maybe in the heat of the campaign, you say things and you have to dial them back. Last week, the New York Times editorial board quoted as saying that you would oppose, \"up to 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods.\"\n\nTRUMP: That's wrong. They were wrong. It's the New York Times, they are always wrong.\n\nCAVUTO: Well...\n\nTRUMP:", + " They were wrong.\n\nCAVUTO: You never said because they provided that...\n\nTRUMP: No, I said, \" I would use -- \" they were asking me what to do about North Korea. China, they don't like to tell us but they have total control -- just about, of North Korea. They can solve the problem of North Korea if they wanted to but they taunt us.\n\nThey say, \" well, we don't really have control.\" Without China, North Korea doesn't even eat. China is ripping us on trade. They're devaluing their currency and they're killing our companies. Thousands of thousands -- you look at the number of companies and the number in terms of manufacturing of plans that we've lost -- 50,", + "000 because of China.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCAVUTO: So they've never said to put a tariff on their... TRUMP: We've lost anywhere between four and seven million jobs because of China. What I said then was, \"we have very unfair trade with China. We're going to have a trade deficit of 505 billion dollars this year with China.\" A lot of that is because they devalue their currency.\n\nWhat I said to the New York Times, is that, \"we have great power, economic power over China and if we wanted to use that and the amount -- where the 45 percent comes in,", + " that would be the amount they saw their devaluations that we should get.\" That we should get.\n\nWhat I'm saying is this, I'm saying that we do it but if they don't start treating us fairly and stop devaluing and let their currency rise so that our companies can compete and we don't lose all of these millions of jobs that we're losing, I would certainly start taxing goods that come in from China. Who the hell has to lose 505 billion dollars a year?\n\nCAVUTO: I'm sorry, you lost me.\n\nTRUMP: It's not that complicated actually.\n\nCAVUTO: Then I apologize.", + " Then I want to understand, if you don't want a 45 percent tariff, say that wasn't the figure, would you be open -- are you open to slapping a higher tariff on Chinese goods of any sort to go back at them?\n\nTRUMP: OK, just so you understand -- I know so much about trading about with China. Carl Icon today as you know endorsed. Many businessmen want to endorse me.\n\nCAVUTO: I know...\n\nTRUMP: Carl said, \"no, no -- \" but he's somebody -- these are the kind of people that we should use to negotiate and not the China people that we have who are political hacks who don't know what they're doing and we have problems like this.", + " If these are the kinds of people -- we should use our best and our finest.\n\nNow, on that tariff -- here's what I'm saying, China -- they send their goods and we don't tax it -- they do whatever they want to do. They do whatever what they do, OK. When we do business with China, they tax us. You don't know it, they tax us.\n\nI have many friends that deal with China. They can't -- when they order the product and when they finally get the product it is taxed. If you looking at what happened with Boeing and if you look at what happened with so many companies that deal -- so we don't have an equal playing field.", + " I'm saying, absolutely, we don't have to continue to lose 505 billion dollars as a trade deficit for the privilege of dealing with China.\n\nI'm a free trader. I believe in it but we have to be smart and we have to use smart people to negotiate. I have the largest bank in the world as a tenant of mine. I sell tens' of millions of (inaudible).\n\nI love China. I love the Chinese people but they laugh themselves, they can't believe how stupid the American leadership is.\n\nCAVUTO: So you're open to a tariff?\n\nTRUMP: I'm totally open to a tariff.", + " If they don't treat us fairly, hey, their whole trade is tariffed. You can't deal in China without tariffs. They do it to us, we don't it. It's not fair trade.\n\nKASICH: Neil, Neil -- can I say one thing about this. I'm a free trader. I support NAFTA. I believe in the PTT because it's important those countries in Asia are interfacing against China. And we do need China -- Donald's right about North Korea.\n\nI mean the fact is, is that they need to put the pressure on and frankly we need to intercepts ships coming out of North Korea so they don't proliferate all these dangerous materials.", + " But what he's touching -- talking about, I think has got merit. And I'll allow putting that tariff or whatever he's saying here...\n\nTRUMP: I'm happy to have him tonight...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nKASICH: For too long -- no, for too long, what happens is somebody dumps their product in our country and take our people's jobs, and then we go to an international court and it takes them like a year or two to figure out whether they were cheating us. And guess what? The worker's out of a job.\n\nSo when they -- be found against that country that's selling products in here lower than the cost of what it takes to produce them,", + " then what do we tell the worker? Oh, well, you know, it just didn't work out for you.\n\nI think we should be for free trade but I think fair trade. And when countries violate trade agreements or dump product in this country, we need -- we need to stand up against those countries that do that without making them into an enemy.\n\nAnd I want to just suggest to you. How do I know this? Because so many people in my family worked in steel mills, and they didn't work with a white collar, they worked in a blue collar. And the fact is those jobs are critical, they're hard working members of the middle class and they need to be paid attention to because they're Americans and they carry the load.", + " So let's demand open trade but fair trade in this country. That's what I think we need to do.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: All right.\n\nRUBIO: But on this point, if I may add something on this point. We are all frustrated with what China is doing. I think we need to be very careful with tariffs, and here's why.\n\nChina doesn't pay the tariff, the buyer pays the tariff. If you send a tie or a shirt made in China into the United States and an American goes to buy it at the store and there's a tariff on it, it gets passed on in the price to price to the consumer.\n\nSo I think the better approach,", + " the best thing we can do to protect ourselves against China economically is to make our economy stronger, which means reversing course from all the damage Barack Obama is doing to this economy.\n\nIt begins with tax reform. Let's not have the most expensive business tax rate in the world. Let's allow companies to immediately expense.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nIt continues with regulatory reform. Regulations in this country are out of control, especially the Employment Prevention Agency, the EPA, and all of the rules they continue to impose on our economy and hurting us.\n\nHow about Obamacare, a certified job killer? It needs to be repealed and replaced. And we need to bring our debt under control,", + " make our economy stronger. That is the way to deal with China at the end of the day.\n\nTRUMP: Neil, the problem...\n\nBARTIROMO: We're getting...\n\nTRUMP:... with what Marco is saying is that it takes too long, they're sucking us dry and it takes too long. It would just -- you absolutely have to get involved with China, they are taking so much of what we have in terms of jobs in terms of money. We just can't do it any longer.\n\nCAVUTO: He is right. If you put a tariff on a good, it's Americans who pay.\n\nBUSH:", + " Absolutely.\n\nTRUMP: You looking at me?\n\nBUSH: Yeah.\n\nBARTIROMO: Prices go higher for...\n\nTRUMP: Can I tell you what? It will never happen because they'll let their currency go up. They're never going to let it happen.\n\nJapan, the same thing. They are devaluing -- it's so impossible for -- you look at Caterpillar Tractor and what's happening with Caterpillar and Kamatsu (ph). Kamatsu (ph) is a tractor company in Japan. Friends of mine are ordering Kamatsu (ph) tractors now because they've de-valued the yen to such an extent that you can't buy a Caterpillar tractor.", + " And we're letting them get away with it and we can't let them get away with it.\n\nAnd that's why we have to use Carl (ph) and we have to use our great businesspeople and not political hacks to negotiate with these guys.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBUSH: Here's -- apart from the -- apart from the higher prices on consumers and people are living paycheck to paycheck, apart from that, there will be retaliation.\n\nBARTIROMO: Yeah.\n\nBUSH: So they soybean sales from Iowa, entire soybean production goes -- the equivalent of it goes to China. Or how about Boeing right here within a mile?", + " Do you think that the Chinese, if they had a 45 percent tariff imposed on all their imports wouldn't retaliate and start buying Airbus? Of course, they would. This would be devastating for the economy. We need someone with a steady hand being president of the United States.\n\nBARTIROMO: Real quick, Senator -- go ahead, Senator Cruz.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd then we have to get to tax reform.\n\nTRUMP: And we don't need a weak person being president of the United State, OK? Because that's what we'd get if it were Jeb -- I tell you what, we don't need that.\n\nAUDIENCE:", + " Boo.\n\nTRUMP: We don't need that. That's essentially what we have now, and we don't need that. And that's why we're in the trouble that we're in now. And by the way, Jeb you mentioned Boeing, take a look. They order planes, they make Boeing build their plant in China. They don't want them made here. They want those planes made in China.\n\nBUSH: They're a mile away from here.\n\nTRUMP: That's not the way the game is supposed to be played.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, Governor Bush. Thank you, Mr. Trump.", + " Very briefly.\n\nBUSH: My name was mentioned. My name was mentioned here. The simple fact is that the plane that's being build here is being sold to China. You can -- if you -- you flew in with your 767, didn't you? Right there, right next to the plant.\n\nTRUMP: No, the new planes. I'm not talking about now, I'm talking about in the future they're building massive plants in China because China does not want Boeing building their planes here, they want them built in China, because China happens to be smart the way they do it, not the way we do it.\n\nBARTIROMO:", + " Thank you, Mr. Trump.\n\nBUSH: When you head back to airport tonight, go check and see what the...\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, Mr. Trmup. Thank you, Governor.\n\nTRUMP: I'll check for you.\n\nBUSH: Check it out.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBARTIROMO: Senator briefly.\n\nCRUZ: Thanks for coming back to me, Maria. Both Donald and Jeb have good points, and there is a middle ground. Donald is right that China is running over President Obama like he is a child, President Obama is not protecting American workers and we are getting hammered.\n\nCRUZ:", + " You know, I sat down with the senior leadership of John Deere. They discussed how -- how hard it is to sell tractors in China, because all the regulatory barriers. They're protectionist.\n\nBut Jeb is also right that, if we just impose a tariff, they'll put reciprocal tariffs, which will hurt Iowa farmers and South Carolina producers and 20 percent of the American jobs that depend on exports.\n\nSo the way you do it is you pass a tax plan like the tax plan I've introduced: a simple flat tax, 10 percent for individuals, and a 16 percent business flat tax, you abolish the IRS...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... and here's the critical point,", + " Maria -- the business flat tax enables us to abolish the corporate income tax, the death tax, the Obamacare taxes, the payroll taxes, and they're border-adjustable, so every export pays no taxes whatsoever.\n\nIt's tax-free -- a huge advantage for our farmers and ranchers and manufacturers -- and every import pays the 16 percent business flat tax. It's like a tariff, but here's the difference: if we impose a tariff, China responds.\n\nThe business flat tax, they already impose their taxes on us, so there's no reciprocal...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... tariffs that come against us. It puts us on a level,", + " even playing field, which brings jobs here at home...\n\n(UNKNOWN): Maria...\n\nCRUZ:... and as president, I'm going to fight for the working men and women.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBARTIROMO: We've got to get to tax reform, gentlemen. We've got to get to tax reform, and we've got to get to the...\n\n(UNKNOWN): Yeah, but I want to talk about taxes.\n\nBARTIROMO:... we've got to get to the national debt as well. Coming up next, the growing national debt, the war on crime, tax reform. More from North Charleston,", + " South Carolina, when we come right back.\n\nCOMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nBARTIROMO: Welcome back to the Republican presidential debate here in North Charleston. Right back to the questions.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nGovernor Christie, we have spoken much about cutting spending, given the $19 trillion debt. But according to one report, America needs $3.6 trillion in infrastructure spending by 2020.\n\nHere in South Carolina, 11 percent of bridges are considered structurally deficient, costing drivers a billion dollars a year in auto repairs. What is your plan to fix the ailing roads and bridges without breaking the bank?\n\nCHRISTIE:", + " Well, I'm glad you asked that, Maria. Here's -- here's our plan. We've all been talking about tax reforms tonight, and paying for infrastructure is caught right up in tax reform.\n\nIf you reform the corporate tax system in this country, which, as was mentioned before, is the highest rate in the world -- and we double tax, as you know.\n\nAnd what that's led to over $2 trillion of American companies' monies that are being kept offshore, because they don't want to pay the second tax. And who can blame them? They pay tax once overseas. They don't want to pay 35 percent tax on the way back.\n\nSo beside reforming that tax code,", + " bringing it down to 25 percent and eliminating those special-interest loopholes that the lobbyists and the lawyers and the accountants have given -- bring that rate down to 25 percent, but also, a one-time repatriation of that money.\n\nBring the money -- the $2 trillion -- back to the United States. We'll tax it, that one time, at 8.75 percent, because 35 percent of zero is zero, but 8.75 percent of $2 trillion is a lot of money. And I would then dedicate that money to rebuilding infrastructure here in this country.\n\nIt would not necessitate us raising any taxes.", + " It would bring the money back into the United States to help build jobs by American companies and get our economy moving again, and growing as a higher rate, and it would rebuild those roads and bridges and tunnels that you were talking about. And -- and -- and the last piece of this, Maria, is this. You know, the fact is that this president has penalized corporations in America. He's penalized -- and doesn't understand. In fact, what that hurts is hurt hardworking taxpayers.\n\nYou've seen middle-class wages go backwards $3,700 during the Obama administration. That's wrong for hardworking taxpayers in this country.", + " We'd rebuild infrastructure that would also create jobs in this country, and we'd work with the states to do it the right way, to do it more efficiently and more effectively.\n\nAnd remember this -- I'm credible on this for this reason: Americans for Tax Reform says that I've vetoed more tax increases than any governor in American history. We don't need to raise taxes to get this done.\n\nWe need to make the government run smarter and better, and reform this corporate tax system, bring that money back to the United States to build jobs and rebuild our infrastructure, and we need to use it also to protect our grid from terrorists.\n\nAll of those things are important,", + " and all those things would happen in a Christie administration.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, sir. Dr. Carson...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... it is true U.S. companies have $2 trillion in cash sitting overseas right now. That could be used for investment and jobs in America.\n\nAlso, several companies right now are pursuing mergers to move their corporate headquarters abroad, and take advantage of much lower taxes. What will you do to stop the flow of companies building cash away from America, and those leaving America altogether?\n\nCARSON: Well, I would suggest a fair tax system, and that's what we have proposed. A flat tax for everybody -- no exemptions,", + " no deductions, no shelters, because some people have a better capability of taking advantage of those than others.\n\nYou know, and then the other thing we have to do is stop spending so much money. You know, I -- my -- my mother taught me this. You know, she only had a third-grade education, but -- you know, she knew how to stretch a dollar.\n\nI mean, she would drive a car until it wouldn't make a sound, and then gather up all her coins and buy a new car. In fact, if my mother were secretary of treasury, we would not be in a deficit situation. But...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n... you know,", + " the -- the -- the fact of the matter is -- you know, if we fix the taxation system, make it absolutely fair, and get rid of the incredible regulations -- because every regulation is a tax, it's a -- on goods and services. And it's the most regressive tax there is.\n\nYou know, when you go into the store and buy a box of laundry detergent, and the price has up -- you know, 50 cents because of regulations, a poor person notices that. A rich person does not. Middle class may notice it when they get to the cash register.\n\nAnd everything is costing more money, and we are killing our -- our -- our people like this.", + " And Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton will say it's those evil rich people.\n\nIt's not the evil rich people. It's the evil government that is -- that is putting all these regulations on us so that we can't survive.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, sir.\n\nSenator Rubio...\n\nTRUMP: Maria -- Maria, what you were talking about just now is called corporate inversion. It's one of the biggest problems our country has. Right now, corporations, by the thousands, are thinking of leaving our country with the jobs -- leave them behind.\n\nTRUMP: They're leaving because of taxes, but they are also leaving because they can't get their money back and everybody agrees,", + " Democrats and Republicans, that is should come back in. But they can't get along. They can't even make a deal.\n\nHere is the case, they both agree, they can't make a deal. We have to do something. Corporate inversion is one of the biggest problems we have. So many companies are going to leave our country.\n\nBARTIROMO: Which is why we raised it.\n\nSenator Rubio?\n\nThank you, Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: Thank you.\n\nBARTIROMO: One of the biggest fiscal challenges is our entitlement programs, particularly Social Security and Medicare. What policies will you put forward to make sure these programs are more financially secure?\n\nRUBIO:", + " Well, first let me address the tax issue because it's related to the entitlement issue and I want to thank you for holding a substantive debates where we can have debates about these key issues on taxes.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: Here is the one thing I'm not going to do. I'm not going to have something that Ted described in his tax plan. It's called the value added tax. And it's a tax you find in many companies in Europe.\n\nWhere basically, businesses now will have to pay a tax, both on the money they make, but they also have to pay taxes on the money that they pay their employees.\n\nAnd that's why they have it in Europe,", + " because it is a way to blindfolded the people, that's what Ronald Reagan said. Ronald Regan opposed the value tax because he said it was a way to blindfold the people, so the true cost of government was not there there for them.\n\nNow, you can support one now that's very low. But what is to prevent a future liberal president or a liberal Congress from coming back and not just raising the income tax, but also raising that VAT tax, and that vat tax is really bad for seniors. Because seniors, if they are retired, are no longer earning an income from a job. And therefore, they don't get the income tax break,", + " but their prices are going to be higher, because the vat tax is embedded in both the prices that business that are charging and in the wages they pay their employees.\n\nWhen I am president of the United States, I'm going to side with Ronald Regan on this and not Nancy Pelosi and we are not having a vat tax.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you senator.\n\nCRUZ: Maria, I assume that I can respond to that.\n\nBARTIROMO: Senator Cruz, yes. You were meant to. Yes, of course.\n\nCRUZ: Well, Marco has been floating this attack for a few weeks now,", + " but the problem is, the business flat tax in my proposal is not a vat. A vat is imposed as a sales tax when you buy a good.\n\nThis is a business flat tax. It is imposed on business and a critical piece that Marco seems to be missing is that this 16 percent business flat tax enables us to eliminate the corporate income tax. It goes away. It enables us to eliminate the death tax.\n\nIf you're a farmer, if you're a rancher, if you are small business owner, the death tax is gone. We eliminate the payroll tax, we eliminate the Obamacare taxes. And listen, there is a real difference between Marco's tax plan and mine.\n\nMine gives every American a simple,", + " flat tax of 10 percent. Marco's top tax rate is 35 percent. My tax plan enables you to fill out your taxes on a postcard so we can abolish the IRS. Marco leaves the IRS code in with all of the complexity. We need to break the Washington cartel, and the only way to do it is to end all the subsidies and all...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... the mandates and have a simple flat tax. The final observation, invoked Ronald Reagan. I would note that Art Laffer, Ronald Reagan's chief economic adviser, has written publicly, that my simple flat tax is the best tax plan of any of the individuals on this stage cause it produces economic growth,", + " it raises wages and it helps everyone from the very poorest to the very richest.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you senator.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: But that's not an accurate description of the plan. Because, first of all, you may rename the IRS but you are not going to abolishes the IRS, because there has to be some agency that's going to collect your vat tax. Someone's going to be collecting this tax.\n\nIn fact, Ronald Reagan's treasury, when Ronald Reagan's treasury looked at the vat tax, you know what they found? That they were going to have to hire 20,000 new IRS agencies to collect it.\n\nThe second point,", + " it does not eliminate the corporate tax or the payroll tax. Businesses will now have to pay 16 percent on the money they make. They will also have to pay 16 percent on the money they pay their employees.\n\nSo there are people watching tonight in business. If you are now hit on a 60 percent tax on both your income and on the wages you pay your employees, where are you going to get that money from? You're going to get it by paying your employees less and charging your customers more, that is a tax, the difference is, you don't see it on the bill.\n\nAnd that's why Ronald Reagan said that it was a blindfold.", + " You blindfold the American people so that they cannot see the true cost of government. Now 16 percent is what the rate Ted wants it at. But what happens if, God forbid, the next Barack Obama takes over, and the next Nancy Pelosi, and the next Harry Reid...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nand they decide, we're going to raise it to 30 percent, plus we're going to raise the income tax to 30 percent. Now, you've got Europe.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you senator. I have to get to a question for Mr. Trump.\n\nCRUZ: Maria...\n\nBARTIROMO:", + " Yes.\n\nCRUZ: Maria, I'd just like to say...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCHRISTIE: Maria, I'd like to interrupt this debate on the floor of the Senate to actually answer the question you asked, which was on entitlements. Do you remember that, everybody? This was a question on entitlements.\n\nAnd the reason -- and the reason...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCHRISTIE:... no, you already had your chance, Marco, and you blew it. Here's the thing.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCHRISTIE: The fact is, the reason why...\n\nRUBIO: If you'll answer the (inaudible)", + " core question.\n\nCHRISTIE:... the fact is -- the fact is the reason why that no one wants to answer entitlements up here is because it's hard. It's a hard problem. And I'm the only one up on this stage who back in April put forward a detailed entitlement reform plan that will save over $1 trillion, save Social Security, save Medicare, and avoid this -- avoid what Hillary Rodham Clinton will do to you.\n\nBecause what she will do is come in and she will raise Social Security taxes. Bernie Sanders has already said it. And she is just one or two more poll drops down from even moving further left than she's moved already to get to the left of Bernie on this.\n\nWe have seniors out there who are scared to death because this Congress -- this one that we have right now,", + " just stole $150 billion from the Social Security retirement fund to give it to the Social Security disability fund. A Republican Congress did that.\n\nAnd the fact is it was wrong. And they consorted with Barack Obama to steal from Social Security. We need to reform Social Security. Mine is the only plan that saves over $1 trillion and that's why I'm answering your question.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, Governor. Thank you, Governor.\n\n(APPLAUSE) CARSON: Can I just add one very quick thing? And I just want to say, you know, last week we released our tax plan. And multiple reputable journals,", + " including The Wall Street Journal, said ours is the best. Just want to get that out there, just saying.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, Dr. Carson.\n\nComing up, how would the candidates protect America, and another terror attack, if we were to see it. But first, you can join us live on stage during the commercial break right from home. Go to facebook.com/foxbusiness. We'll be streaming live and answering your questions during this break next.\n\nMore from South Carolina coming up. Stay with us.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nBARTIROMO: Mr. Trump, your net worth is in the multi-billions of dollars and have an ongoing thriving hotel and real estate business.", + " Are you planning on putting your assets in a blind trust should you become president? With such vast wealth, how difficult will it be for you to disentangle yourself from your business and your money and prioritize America's interest first?\n\nTRUMP: Well, it's an interesting question because I'm very proud of my company. As you too know, I know I built a very great company. But if I become president, I couldn't care less about my company. It's peanuts.\n\nI want to use that same up here, whatever it may be to make America rich again and to make America great again. I have Ivanka, and Eric and Don sitting there.", + " Run the company kids, have a good time. I'm going to do it for America.\n\nSo I would -- I would be willing to do that.\n\nBARTIROMO: So you'll put your assets in a blind trust?\n\nTRUMP: I would put it in a blind trust. Well, I don't know if it's a blind trust if Ivanka, Don and Eric run it. If that's a blind trust, I don't know. But I would probably have my children run it with my executives and I wouldn't ever be involved because I wouldn't care about anything but our country, anything.\n\nBARTIROMO:", + " Thank you sir.\n\nTRUMP: Thank you.\n\nCAVUTO: Governor Christie, going back to your U.S. Attorney days, you had been praised by both parties as certainly a tough law and order guy. So I wonder what you make of recent statistics that showed violent crimes that have been spiking sometimes by double digit ratings in 30 cities across the country. Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn said, \"most local law enforcement officials feel abandoned by Washington.\" Former NYC Police Chief Ray Kelly, says that, \"police are being less proactive because they're being overly scrutinized and second guessed and they're afraid of being sued or thrown in jail.\"\n\nWhat would you do as president to address this?\n\nCHRISTIE:", + " Well, first off, let's face it, the FBI director James Comey was a friend of mine who I worked with as U.S. Attorney of New Jersey. He was the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan. He said, \"there's a chill wind blowing through law enforcement in this country.\" Here's why, the president of the United States and both his attorney's general, they give the benefit of the doubt to the criminal, not to the police officers.\n\nThat's the truth of the matter and you see it every time with this president. Every time he's got a chance, going all the way back to -- remember that Great Beer Summit he had after he messed up that time.", + " This is a guy who just believes that law enforcement are the bad guys.\n\nNow, I for seven years was the U.S. Attorney of New Jersey. I worked hard with not only federal agents but with police officers and here's the problem, sanctuary cities is part of the problem in this country. That's where crime is happening in these cities where they don't enforce the immigration laws. And this president turns his back -- this president doesn't enforce the marijuana laws in this country because he doesn't agree with them.\n\nAnd he allows states to go ahead and do whatever they want on a substance that's illegal. This president allows lawlessness throughout this country.", + " Here's what I would do Neil, I would appoint an Attorney General and I would have one very brief conversation with that Attorney General. I'd say, \"General, enforce the law against everyone justly, fairly, and aggressively. Make our streets safe again. Make our police officers proud of what they do but more important than that, let them know how proud we are of them.\"\n\nWe do that, this country would be safe and secure again not only from criminals but from the terrorist who threaten us as well. I'm the only person on this stage who's done that and we will get it done as President of the United States.\n\nCAVUTO:", + " Thank you governor.\n\nGovernor Kasich, as someone has to deal with controversial police shootings in your own state, what do you make of Chicago's move recently to sort of retrain police? Maybe make them not so quick to use their guns?\n\nKASICH: Well, I created a task force well over a year ago and the purpose was to bring law enforcement, community people, clergy and the person that I named as one of the co-chair was a lady by the name of Nina Turner, a former State Senator, a liberal Democrat. She actually ran against one of my friends and our head of public safety.\n\nKASICH: And they say down as a group trying to make sure that we can begin to heal some of these problems that we see between community and police.\n\nKASICH:", + " And they came back with 23 recommendations. One of them is a statewide use of deadly force. And it is now being put into place everyplace across the state of Ohio. Secondly, a policy on recruiting and hiring, and then more resources for -- for training.\n\nBut let me also tell you, one of the issues has got to be the integration of both community and police. Community has to understand that that police officer wants to get home at night, and not -- not to lose their life. Their family is waiting for them.\n\nAt the same time, law enforcement understands there are people in the community who not only think that the system doesn't work for them,", + " but works against them.\n\nSee, in Ohio, we've had some controversial decisions. But the leaders have come forward to realize that protest is fine, but violence is wrong. And it has been a remarkable situation in our state. And as president of the United States, it's all about communication, folks. It's all about getting people to listen to one another's problems.\n\nAnd when you do that, you will be amazed at how much progress you can make, and how much healing we can have. Because, folks, at the end of the day, the country needs healed. I've heard a lot of hot rhetoric here tonight,", + " but I've got to tell you, as somebody that actually passed a budget; that paid down a half-a-trillion dollars of our national debt, you can't do it alone. You've got to bring people together. You've got to give people hope.\n\nAnd together, we can solve these problems that hurt us and heal America. And that is what's so critical for our neighborhoods, our families, our children, and our grandchildren.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Thank you, Governor.\n\nBARTIROMO: Senator Rubio?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nUnder current law, the U.S. is on track to issue more new permanent immigrants on green cards over the next five years than the entire population of South Carolina.", + " The CBO says your 2013 immigration bill would have increased green cardholders by another 10 million over 10 years.\n\nWhy are you so interested in opening up borders to foreigners when American workers have a hard enough time finding work?\n\nRUBIO: Well, first of all, this is an issue that's been debated now for 30 years. And for 30 years, the issue of immigration has been about someone who's in this country, maybe they're here illegally, but they're looking for a job. This issue is not about that anymore.\n\nFirst and foremost, this issue has to be now more than anything else about keeping America safe.", + " And here's why. There is a radical jihadist group that is manipulating our immigration system. And not just green cards. They're looking -- they're recruiting people that enter this country as doctors and engineers and even fiances. They understand the vulnerabilities we have on the southern border.\n\nThey're looking -- they're looking to manipulate our -- the visa waiver countries to get people into the United States. So our number one priority must now become ensuring that ISIS cannot get killers into the United States. So whether it's green cards or any other form of entry into America, when I'm president if we do not know who you are or why you are coming,", + " you are not going to get into the United States of America.\n\nBARTIROMO: So your thinking has changed?\n\nRUBIO: The issue is a dramatically different issue than it was 24 months ago. Twenty-four months ago, 36 months ago, you did not have a group of radical crazies named ISIS who were burning people in cages and recruiting people to enter our country legally. They have a sophisticated understanding of our legal immigration system and we now have an obligation to ensure that they are not able to use that system against us.\n\nThe entire system of legal immigration must now be reexamined for security first and foremost,", + " with an eye on ISIS. Because they're recruiting people to enter this country as engineers, posing as doctors, posing as refugees. We know this for a fact. They've contacted the trafficking networks in the Western Hemisphere to get people in through the southern border. And they got a killer in San Bernardino in posing as a fiance.\n\nThis issue now has to be about stopping ISIS entering the United States, and when I'm president we will.\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, Senator.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ: But Maria, radical Islamic terrorism was not invented 24 months ago; 24 months ago, we had Al Qaida.", + " We had Boko Haram. We had Hamas. We had Hezbollah. We had Iran putting operatives in South America and Central America. It's the reason why I stood with Jeff Sessions and Steve King and led the fight to stop the Gang of Eight amnesty bill, because it was clear then, like it's clear now, that border security is national security.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Thank you, Senator.\n\nCRUZ: It is also the case that that Rubio-Schumer amnesty bill, one of the things it did is it expanded Barack Obama's power to let in Syrian refugees. It enabled him -- the president to certify them en masse without mandating meaningful background checks.\n\nI think that's a mistake.", + " That's why I've been leading the fight to stop it. And I would note the Senate just a few weeks ago voted to suspend refugees from Middle Eastern countries. I voted yes to suspend that. Marco voted on the other side. So you don't get to say we need to secure the borders, and at the same time try to give Barack Obama more authority to allow Middle Eastern refugees coming in, when the head of the FBI tells us they cannot vet them to determine if they are ISIS terrorists.\n\nRUBIO: Maria, let me clear something up here. This is an interesting point when you talk about immigration.\n\nRUBIO:", + " Ted Cruz, you used to say you supported doubling the number of green cards, now you say that you're against it. You used to support a 500 percent increase in the number of guest workers, now you say that you're against it. You used to support legalizing people that were here illegally, now you say you're against it. You used to say that you were in favor of birthright citizenship, now you say that you are against it.\n\nAnd by the way, it's not just on immigration, you used to support TPA, now you say you're against it. I saw you on the Senate floor flip your vote on crop insurance because they told you it would help you in Iowa,", + " and last week, we all saw you flip your vote on ethanol in Iowa for the same reason.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThat is not consistent conservatism, that is political calculation. When I am president, I will work consistently every single day to keep this country safe, not call Edward Snowden, as you did, a great public servant. Edward Snowden is a traitor. And if I am president and we get our hands on him, he is standing trial for treason.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd one more point, one more point. Every single time that there has been a Defense bill in the Senate, three people team up to vote against it.", + " Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. In fact, the only budget you have ever voted for, Ted, in your entire time in the Senate is a budget from Rand Paul that brags about how it cuts defense.\n\nHere's the bottom line, and I'll close with this. If I'm president of the United States and Congress tries to cut the military, I will veto that in a millisecond.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBUSH: There's -- look, there's --\n\nCAVUTO: Gentlemen, gentlemen --\n\nCRUZ: I'm going to get a response to that, Neil. There's no way he launches 11 attack --\n\nCAVUTO:", + " Very quick, very quick. CRUZ: I'm going to -- he had no fewer than 11 attacks there. I appreciate your dumping your (inaudible) research folder on the debate stage.\n\nRUBIO: No, it's your record.\n\nCRUZL But I will say --\n\nCAVUTO: Do you think they like each other?\n\nCRUZ: -- at least half of the things Marco said are flat-out false. They're absolutely false.\n\nAUDIENCE: Boo.\n\nCRUZ: So let's start -- let's start with immigration. Let's start with immigration and have a little bit of clarity. Marco stood with Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama on amnesty.", + " I stood with Jeff Sessions and Steve King. Marco stood today, standing on this stage Marco supports legalization and citizenship for 12 million illegals. I opposed and oppose legalization and citizenship.\n\nAnd by the way, the attack he keeps throwing out on the military budget, Marco knows full well I voted for his amendment to increase military spending to $697 billion. What he said, and he said it in the last debate, it's simply not true. And as president, I will rebuild the military and keep this country safe.\n\nCAVUTO: All right, gentlemen, we've got to stop. I know you are very passionate about that.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nGovernor Bush,", + " fears have gripped this country obviously, and you touched on it earlier since the San Bernardino attacks. Since our last debate, the national conversation has changed, according to Facebook data as well.\n\nNow this first graphic shows the issues that were most talked about right before those attacks and now after: the issues of Islam, homeland security and ISIS now loom very large. The FBI says Islamic radicals are using social media to communicate and that it needs better access to communication. Now the CEO of Apple, Governor, Tim Cook said unless served with a warrant private communication is private, period. Do you agree, or would you try to convince him otherwise?\n\nBUSH:", + " I would try to convince him otherwise, but this last back and forth between two senators -- back bench senators, you know, explains why we have the mess in Washington, D.C. We need a president that will fix our immigration laws and stick with it, not bend with the wind.\n\nThe simple fact is one of the ways, Maria, to solve the problem you described is narrow the number of people coming by family petitioning to what every other country has so that we have the best and the brightest that come to our country. We need to control the border, we need to do all of this in a comprehensive way, not just going back and forth and talking about stuff --\n\nCAVUTO:", + " Would you answer this question?\n\nBUSH: Oh, I'll talk about that, too. But you haven't asked me a question in a while, Neil, so I thought I'd get that off my chest if you don't mind.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nCAVUTO: Fair enough. So Tim Cook -- so Tim Cook says he's going to keep it private.\n\nBUSH: I got that. And the problem today is there's no confidence in Washington, D.C. There needs to be more than one meeting, there needs to complete dialogue with the large technology companies. They understand that there's a national security risk.", + " We ought to give them a little bit of a liability release so that they share data amongst themselves and share data with the federal government, they're not fearful of a lawsuit.\n\nWe need to make sure that we keep the country safe. This is the first priority. The cybersecurity challenges that we face, this administration failed us completely, completely. Not just the hacking of OPM, but that is -- that is just shameful. 23 million files in the hands of the Chinese? So it's not just the government -- the private sector companies, it's also our own government that needs to raise the level of our game.\n\nWe should put the NSA in charge of the civilian side of this as well.", + " That expertise needs to spread all across the government and there needs to be much more cooperation with our private sector.\n\nCAVUTO: But if Tim cook is telling you no, Mr. President.\n\nBUSH: You've got to keep asking. You've got to keep asking because this is a hugely important issue. If you can encrypt messages, ISIS can, over these platforms, and we have no ability to have a cooperative relationship --\n\nCAVUTO: Do you ask or do you order?\n\nBUSH: Well, if the law would change, yeah. But I think there has to be recognition that if we -- if we are too punitive,", + " then you'll go to other -- other technology companies outside the United States. And what we want to do is to control this.\n\nWe also want to dominate this from a commercial side. So there's a lot of balanced interests. But the president leads in this regard. That's what we need. We need leadership, someone who has a backbone and sticks with things, rather than just talks about them as though anything matters when you're talking about amendments that don't even actually are part of a bill that ever passed.\n\nCAVUTO: Governor, thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: When we come right back,", + " closing statements. Stay with us.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nBARTIROMO: Welcome back.\n\nCandidates, it is time for your closing statements. You get 60 seconds each.\n\nGovernor John Kasich, we begin with you.\n\nKASICH: You know, in our country, there are a lot of people who feel as though they just don't have the power. You know, they feel like if they don't have a lobbyist, if they're not wealthy, that somehow they don't get to play.\n\nBut all of my career, you know, having been raised in -- by a mailman father whose father was a coal miner,", + " who died of black lung and was losing his eyesight; or a mother whose mother could barely speak English. You see, all of my career, I've fought about giving voice to the people that I grew up with and voice to the people that elected me.\n\nWhether it's welfare reform and getting something back for the hard-earned taxpayers; whether it's engaging in Pentagon reform and taking on the big contractors that were charging thousands of dollars for hammers and screw drivers and ripping us off; or whether it's taking on the special interests in the nursing home industry in Ohio, so that mom and dad can have the ability to stay in their own home,", + " rather than being forced into a nursing home.\n\nKASICH: Look, that's who I stand up for. That's who's in my mind\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nAnd if you really want to believe that you can get your voice back, I will tell you, as I have all my career, I will continue to fight for you, because you're the ones that built this country, and will carry it into the future. Thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Governor Bush?\n\nBUSH: Who can you count on to keep us safer, stronger and freer? Results count, and as governor, I pushed Florida up to the top in terms of jobs,", + " income and small business growth.\n\nDetailed plans count, and I believe that the plan I've laid out to destroy ISIS before the tragedies of San Bernardino and Paris are the right ones.\n\nCredibility counts. There'll be people here that will talk about what they're going to do. I've done it. I ask for your support to build, together, a safer and stronger America.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Governor Chris Christie?\n\nCHRISTIE: Maria, Neil, thank you for a great debate tonight.\n\nWhen I think about the folks who are out there at home tonight watching, and I think about what they had to watch this week -- the spectacle they had to watch on the floor of the House of Representatives,", + " with the president of the United States, who talked a fantasy land about the way they're feeling.\n\nThey know that this country is not respected around the world anymore. They know that this country is pushing the middle class, the hardworking taxpayers, backwards, and they saw a president who doesn't understand their pain, and doesn't have any plan for getting away from it.\n\nI love this country. It's the most exceptional country the world has ever known. We need someone to fight for the people. We need a fighter for this country again.\n\nI've lived my whole life fighting -- fighting for things that I believe in, fighting for justice and to protect people from crime and terrorism,", + " fighting to stand up for folks who have not had enough and need an opportunity to get more, and to stand up and fight against the special interests.\n\nBut here's the best way that we're going to make America much more exceptional: it is to make sure we put someone on that stage in September who will fight Hillary Clinton and make sure she never, ever gets in the White House again.\n\nI am the man who can bring us together to do that, and I ask for your vote.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Dr. Ben Carson?\n\nCARSON: You know, in recent travels around this country, I've encountered so many Americans who are discouraged and angry as they watch our freedom,", + " our security and the American dream slipping away under an unresponsive government that is populated by bureaucrats and special interest groups.\n\nWe're not going to solve this problem with traditional politics. The only way we're going to solve this problem is with we, the people. And I ask you to join me in truth and honesty and integrity. Bencarson.com -- we will heal, inspire and revive America for our children.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Senator Marco Rubio?\n\nRUBIO: You know, 200 years ago, America was founded on this powerful principle that our rights don't come from government. Our rights come from God.\n\nThat's why we embraced free enterprise,", + " and it made us the most prosperous people in the history of the world. That's why we embraced individual liberty, and we became the freest people ever, and the result was the American miracle.\n\nBut now as I travel the country, people say what I feel. This country is changing. It feels different. We feel like we're being left behind and left out.\n\nAnd the reason is simple: because in 2008, we elected as president someone who wasn't interested in fixing America. We elected someone as president who wants to change America, who wants to make it more like the rest of the world.\n\nAnd so he undermines the Constitution,", + " and he undermines free enterprise by expanding government, and he betrays our allies and cuts deals with our enemies and guts our military. And that's why 2016 is a turning point in our history. If we elect Hillary Clinton, the next four years will be worse than the last eight, and our children will be the first Americans ever to inherit a diminished country.\n\nBut if we elect the right person -- if you elect me -- we will turn this country around, we will reclaim the American dream and this nation will be stronger and greater than it has ever been.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCAVUTO: Senator Ted Cruz?\n\nCRUZ:", + " \"13 Hours\" -- tomorrow morning, a new movie will debut about the incredible bravery of the men fighting for their lives in Benghazi and the politicians that abandoned them. I want to speak to all our fighting men and women.\n\nI want to speak to all the moms and dads whose sons and daughters are fighting for this country, and the incredible sense of betrayal when you have a commander-in-chief who will not even speak the name of our enemy, radical Islamic terrorism, when you have a commander-in- chief who sends $150 billion to the Ayatollah Khamenei, who's responsible for murdering hundreds of our servicemen and women.\n\nI want to speak to all of those maddened by political correctness,", + " where Hillary Clinton apologizes for saying all lives matter. This will end. It will end on January 2017.\n\nCRUZ: And if I am elected president, to every soldier and sailor and airman and marine, and to every police officer and firefighter and first responder who risk their lives to keep us safe, I will have your back.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Mr. Donald Trump?\n\nTRUMP: I stood yesterday with 75 construction workers. They're tough, they're strong, they're great people. Half of them had tears pouring down their face. They were watching the humiliation of our young ten sailors,", + " sitting on the floor with their knees in a begging position, their hands up.\n\nAnd Iranian wise guys having guns to their heads. It was a terrible sight. A terrible sight. And the only reason we got them back is because we owed them with a stupid deal, $150 billion. If I'm president, there won't be stupid deals anymore.\n\nWe will make America great again. We will win on everything we do. Thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBARTIROMO: Candidates, thank you.\n\nCAVUTO: Gentlemen, thank you all. All of you. That wraps up our debate. We went a little bit over here.", + " But we wanted to make sure everyone was able to say their due. He's upset. All right. Thank you for joining us. Much more to come in the Spin Room ahead. ", + " The 12 biggest moments of the GOP debate\n\nA smaller cast featured harder hits Thursday, as seven top-polling Republican presidential candidates sought to leave a lasting impression with 18 days until voting begins in Iowa. Here are the most memorable moments:\n\n1. Citizenship melee\n\nStory Continued Below\n\nTed Cruz unloaded on Donald Trump with his most forceful salvo yet, rejecting any suggestion that he's ineligible to be president because he was born on Canadian soil to an American mother. Cruz noted that many people supporting Trump's theory also believe that citizenship requires two American parents born on American soil.\n\n\"Since September the constitution hasn\u2019t changed, but the poll numbers have,\" Cruz said.", + " \"I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling \u2026 but the facts of the law here are clear.\"\n\nHe added that if Trump's backers are right, Trump himself wouldn't be eligible because his mother was born in Scotland. \"On the issue of citizenship, Donald, I\u2019m not going to use your mother\u2019s birth against you,\" he said.\n\n2. New York values\n\nCruz elaborated on his recent Trump dig, accusing the mogul of having \"New York values.\" He said he meant that New Yorkers tend to value \"money and media\" and are socially liberal on issues from abortion to same-sex marriage. Riffing on Trump's dig at him -- that not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba -- he charged,", + " \"Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.\"\n\nTrump delivered a somber and indignant reply, reminding the audience that New York was watched by the world as it responded to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.\n\n\"We rebuilt downtown Manhattan... everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers,\" he said. \"And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement Ted made.\"\n\n3.Trump-Cruz or Cruz-Trump\n\nThe brawl over citizenship also led to an unusual exchange in which Trump and Cruz each appeared, sarcastically, to offer each other the vice presidential slot on their ticket. Trump,", + " playing out a hypothetical, said that he might consider choosing Cruz as his running mate but that Cruz might be sued by Democrats over his citizenship.\n\n\"I choose him as my vice presidential candidate, and the Democrats sue because we can\u2019t take him along for the ride,\" he said. \"I don\u2019t like that.\"\n\nCruz replied with a joke \u2014 when he's the nominee, Trump can be his vice presidential pick, and if his citizenship theory is right, Trump will become president.\n\n\"Donald, you \u2014 you very kindly just a moment ago offered me the V.P. slot,\" he said. \"I'll tell you what. If this all works out,", + " I'm happy to consider naming you as V.P. So if you happen to be right, you could get the top job at the end of the day.\"\n\n4. Cruz takes on the Times\n\nTed Cruz was practically salivating when moderator Maria Bartiromo asked him to respond to The New York Times report that nicked him for failing to disclose a $1 million loan from Goldman Sachs while running for Senate in 2012. Cruz quickly labeled the story a \"hit piece\" and thrashed the paper -- already a low-hanging conservative foil.\n\nCruz pointed out that he's been the subject of Times columnist Frank Bruni's ire.\n\n\"That same columnist wrote a column comparing me to an evil demonic spirit from the movie 'It Follows,'\" Cruz said.", + " \"The New York Times and I don\u2019t really have the warmest of relationships.\"\n\nCruz said the undisclosed loan was a \"paperwork error.\" \"If that's the best hit the New York Times has got, they better go back to the well,\" he said.\n\n5. Senate squabble\n\nSen. Marco Rubio and Cruz locked horns late in the debate over immigration, with Rubio accusing Cruz of repeatedly changing positions for political expedience, and he didn't stop at immigration issues.\n\n\"I saw you on the Senate floor flip your vote on crop insurance,\" he said. \"That is not consistent conservatism\"\n\nCruz retorted, \"I appreciate you dumping your oppo research folder,\" to which Rubio shot back,", + " \"No, it\u2019s your record.\"\n\n6. \"I hope you'll reconsider\"\n\nJeb Bush jumped in after Trump defended his plan to ban Muslim immigration into the United States, pleading with the GOP poll leader to change his views.\n\n\"I hope you reconsider this because this policy is a policy that makes it impossible to build the coalition necessary to take out ISIS,\" Bush said. \"The Kurds are our strongest ally, they\u2019re Muslim.\"\n\n\"All Muslims? Seriously?\" he asked.\n\nTrump countered that he's simply seeking security.\n\n\"I want security for this country,\" he said. \"We have a serious problem with, as you know, radical Islam.\"\n\n7.", + " Christie intervenes in Rubio-Cruz tussle\n\nRubio and Cruz criticized each other in harsh terms over their competing tax plans, a wonky clash that centered on their interpretation of value-added taxes on business.\n\n\"I\u2019m going to side with Ronald Reagan on this and not Nancy Pelosi,\" Rubio charged.\n\nCruz countered that Reagan economist Art Laffer backed his plan. After Rubio countered again, suggesting Cruz's plan to abolish the IRS would fail, Chris Christie jumped in to remind viewers that the two senators were initially asked to talk about entitlement programs. Rubio said he'd get to entitlements, but Christie cut him off.\n\n\"You already had your chance,", + " Marco, you blew it,\" he said.\n\n8. Trump talks trade and tariffs\n\nDonald Trump, facing questions for telling The New York Times that he'd consider a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods, lashed out at the paper, following Ted Cruz's smackdown of the Times earlier.\n\n\"It\u2019s the New York Times, they\u2019re always wrong,\" he said.\n\nTrump said he's \"open to a tariff\" but only mentioned 45 percent to suggest what the rate would have to be to offset China's currency devaluation.\n\n\"If they don\u2019t start treating us fairly and stop devaluing and let their currency rise so our companies can compete,\" he said,", + " \"I would certainly start taxing goods coming in from China.\"\n\n9. Christie hurls insults at Obama\n\nNew Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has long aimed memorably nasty barbs at the president, and he continued Thursday, calling him a \"petulant child\" for pursuing executive actions to implement his favored policies. But he ratcheted up the schoolyard language in the debate.\n\n\"We are going to kick your rear end out of the white house come this fall,\" Christie said after pointing out that Democrats have been routed from governorships and lost their majorities in Congress throughout Obama's tenure.\n\n10. Trump: My kids will run my company\n\nTrump talked logistics for transferring control of his company to his kids if he takes the White House.\n\n\"If I'm elected president,", + " I couldn't care less about my company, \" he said.\n\n\u201cI have Ivanka and Eric and Don sitting there,\u201d he said, gesturing toward his kids in the debate audience. \u201cRun the company kids. Have a good time. I\u2019m gonna do it for America.\u201d\n\nTrump initially suggested the arrangement would constitute a \"blind trust,\" but then noted that might not be the case because they're his children.\n\n11. Carson gets apocalyptic\n\nBen Carson criticized Barack Obama for being naive on foreign policy, but in doing so outlined a terrifying scenario in which a nuclear blast takes out America's electric grid while they're also using dirty bombs to attack and using cyber attacks to take down American computer systems.\n\n\"I mean,", + " just think about a scenario like that. They explode the bomb, we have an electromagnetic pulse. They hit us with a cyberattack simultaneously and dirty bombs,\" he said. \"Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue at that point? He needs to recognize that those kinds of things are in fact an existential threat to us.\"\n\n12. One-way ticket to Guantanamo\n\nMarco Rubio hinted that he'd get pretty aggressive with terrorists caught by the United States. Describing a muscular approach to taking on \"radical jihadist terrorists,\" Rubio said he had a plan for those caught on the battlefield: \"A one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay Cuba, and we are going to find out anything they know.\"\n\n\"It is a war that either they win or we win,\" he said.\n\n\n\nAuthors:\n" + ], + "length": 31047, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 80, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Mark Zuckerberg has found himself mired in a new controversy, this time stemming from comments he made about Holocaust deniers who post on Facebook. In an interview with Kara Swisher of recode, Zuckerberg was discussing the kinds of things Facebook does and does not take down, and he said that posts denying that the Holocaust took place would generally be allowed to stay up, though they'd get downgraded in the news feed. The backlash came swiftly, prompting Zuckerberg to clarify what he meant. The details: Original comments: In the interview\u2014you can read the full transcript here\u2014Zuckerberg notes that he's Jewish and finds Holocaust denials \"deeply offensive.\" But, he adds, \"At the end of the day, I don\u2019t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don\u2019t think that they\u2019re intentionally getting it wrong...\" Further explaining: Swisher interjects to say that Holocaust deniers might indeed be intentionally lying, and Zuckerberg elaborates: \"It\u2019s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent.\" He again says some people just \"get things wrong,\" and \"I just don\u2019t think that it is the right thing to say, 'We\u2019re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.' What we will do is we\u2019ll say, 'OK, you have your page, and if you\u2019re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.'\"\n", + "docs": [ + "Yesterday, I motored my Ford Fiesta down to Facebook\u2019s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., to interview CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg.\n\nI had not done a formal interview with Zuckerberg since he appeared at our D: All Things Digital conference in 2010, when the company was in its early days. Now, Zuckerberg was ensconced in a massive building with a garden on the roof, part of an even larger campus that sprawled all over and was still growing.\n\nAlso growing? Increased scrutiny and criticism of the social network Zuckerberg had built into a behemoth.\n\nIt\u2019s well deserved given the sloppy way the company has handled a range of issues of late,", + " including not monitoring how user data was abused by Cambridge Analytica, not stopping the Russians from manipulating the platform in the 2016 elections and allowing false news from suspect publishers like Infowars to be distributed on the platform.\n\nThe controversies have landed Zuckerberg and Facebook in hearings here and in Europe and have tarnished his nerd-god image.\n\nIn this 90-minute interview we talked about a range of things, from news to data to privacy to China to his political ambitions. As you will hear, Zuckerberg can cling closely to talking points, but he also did reveal more than he has about this annus horribilis for him and, well,", + " the rest of us.\n\nWhile many are justifiably angry at him and at Facebook, I decided to not strafe the billionaire entrepreneur. I tried instead to engage him in a conversation about how he has mishandled his growing power and responsibility and what he planned to do about it.\n\nI think the interview gives a picture of an earnest and canny tech leader who is also grappling with the darker side of his creation. At one point, I asked him who was to blame and who should pay the price for the Cambridge Analytica controversy and he rightly named himself, as the person who invented Facebook. \u201cDo you want me to fire myself on this podcast?\u201d Zuckerberg joked.", + " Spoiler alert: He did not.\n\nUnfortunately, we did not get to every topic. We did not touch on the important issues of diversity, tech addiction and other issues that I hope to get to discuss with him in our next interview.\n\nYou can listen to our entire conversation right now in the audio player below. If you prefer to listen on your phone, Recode Decode is available wherever you listen to podcasts \u2014 including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts and Overcast.\n\nWhat follows is a condensed, lightly edited version of the conversation. You can read a full transcript of the interview here.\n\nKara Swisher: I\u2019m gonna start off with the news of the day.", + " You saw the Putin/Trump press conference, essentially.\n\nI saw the news about it.\n\nTell me what you think about his idea that there is no evidence that the Russians used social media and did different things during the election.\n\nWell, the evidence that we\u2019ve seen is quite clear, that the Russians did try to interfere with the election.\n\nWe\u2019ve tried to cooperate with the government and the different investigations that are going on \u2014 they obviously have much more context than this. But what we saw, before the election, was this Russian hacking group, part of Russian military intelligence, that I guess our government calls APT28. They were trying to do more traditional methods of hacking:", + " Phishing people\u2019s accounts, just getting access to people\u2019s accounts that way.\n\nWe identified this, actually, in the middle of 2015 and notified the FBI. When we saw similar activity through the campaign in 2016, that they were trying to phish people\u2019s accounts in both the DNC and RNC, we notified some of the people over there as well, [who] we thought were at risk.\n\nWe, around the time of the election, had given this context to the FBI. They\u2019ve clearly gone much further now, at this point, in terms of putting the whole story together. You could see that in the indictments that Mueller just issued over the last week or so.", + " That\u2019s the part that I actually think we got, and were on top of.\n\nNow, there\u2019s a whole other area of election interference that we were slower to identify. That\u2019s around the coordinated information operations that they were trying to run, and that was a different group. Instead of APT28, that was this group, IRA, the Internet Research Agency, which basically was just setting up a network of fake accounts, in order to spread divisive information.\n\nDisinformation.\n\nYeah. Misinformation. Divisive information.\n\nOnce we became aware of this \u2014 which we think we were too slow to being on top of that, but once we became aware of this \u2014 we developed this whole roadmap and set of techniques to go and handle that type of security threat in addition to the type of phishing and more traditional cyber attacks that we had seen before.", + " That takes us through all the elections that we have seen since then. There\u2019s the French presidential election, the German election, the Alabama special election, the Mexican election recently, and there were elections all around the world.\n\nNow the playbook is: We build AI tools to go find these fake accounts, find coordinated networks of inauthentic activity and take them down; we make it much harder for anyone to advertise in ways that they shouldn\u2019t be. A lot of tools around ad transparency, to make it so that anyone who is advertising, especially around political issue ads, will have a lot of the information, a very high standard of transparency.", + " Higher than what you have in TV or print, or other kinds of ads there.\n\nWhat took you so long? I think, as you know, many people feel disappointed with Facebook\u2019s behavior and the slowness, given the power that you have, or the power over the market you have. I don\u2019t wanna say what\u2019s your excuse, but that\u2019s kind of the question. What was the problem?\n\nWe just weren\u2019t looking for these kind of information operations. We have a big security operation. We were focused on traditional types of hacking. We found that and notified both the government and the people who were at risk, but there\u2019s no doubt we were too slow to identify this new kind of attack,", + " which was a coordinated online information operation.\n\nYou can bet that that\u2019s now a big focus of the security effort that we have here. We\u2019re very focused on making sure that we get this right, not just broadly, but in all the elections that are coming up. 2018 is an incredibly important election year, not just with the important midterms here in the U.S., but you just had the Mexican elections. You have Brazil. You have India coming up at the beginning of next year. There\u2019s an assortment of elections around the EU. We\u2019re very serious about this. We know that we need to get this right. We take that responsibility very seriously.\n\nI know you say that,", + " but I do wanna get at, do you reflect on what it was within \u2018cause you\u2019re the leader here, you\u2019re the head of this, that you didn\u2019t see it? That you don\u2019t see that side of humanity? Or, that you don\u2019t understand your responsibility?\n\nIn retrospect, I do think it\u2019s fair to say that we were overly idealistic and focused on more of the good parts of what connecting people and giving people a voice can bring. I think now we understand that, given where we are, both the centrality of Facebook, but also, frankly, we\u2019re a profitable enough company to have 20,", + "000 people go work on reviewing content, so I think that means that we have a responsibility to go do that. That\u2019s a different position than we were in five or six years ago, or even when we went public and were a meaningfully smaller company at that point.\n\nI do think it\u2019s fair to say that we were probably\u2026 we were too focused on just the positives and not focused enough on some of the negatives. That said, I don\u2019t want to leave the impression that we didn\u2019t care about security or didn\u2019t have thousands of people working on it before then. This was a new thing.\n\nI think we have a lot of responsibility.", + " The community, more than two billion people use our products, and we get that with that, a lot of people are using that for a lot of good, but we also have a responsibility to mitigate the darker things that people are gonna try to do.\n\nWhen we first met many years ago, one of the things that you did tell me that was striking was you called Facebook a utility. Do you remember that?\n\nYeah, I called it that for a while.\n\nAt the time you meant it was a useful system. What do you call Facebook now?\n\nI think that that is still a good description. In general, we\u2019re a social network.", + " I prefer that because I think it is focused on the people part of it \u2014 as opposed to some people call it social media, which I think focuses more on the content. For me, it\u2019s always been about the people, and the reason why I called it a utility was because a lot of people used to think of it as a fad. What I was trying to communicate was, no, building a network and building relationships is one of the most core things that people do, and that is an enduring utility that people need, that is not a fad. The company shouldn\u2019t be run to try to build something that is cool,", + " it should be run to build something that is useful and enduring. And I still believe that.\n\nWhen I think about what social networking should be... now you\u2019ve mapped out all of the people who a person cares about. What are all the useful things that you can do for people on top of that? So I think about things like Marketplace, that we\u2019re doing, that now people can have trust through their network and can basically go and buy and sell things more easily than they would be able to on other services.\n\nOther examples are things like Safety Check. There are disasters that happen \u2014 Hurricane Harvey came up, and you had people self-", + "organizing through the community and getting in boats and driving around rescuing people coordinated ad hoc through this network. That\u2019s not a media function. That\u2019s a social network of people coming together ad hoc to provide safety infrastructure that the world needs, so that\u2019s kind of more how I think about what we\u2019re doing.\n\nLet\u2019s talk about news.\n\nThis has been, everyday seems to be a new thing of people asking you to make determinations about what news is. The power you have over distribution is very clear \u2014 to publishers, to citizens and everyone else. How do you look at your role? Right now as we\u2019re doing this interview,", + " there\u2019s a Congressional hearing going on. In that case, conservatives think that you don\u2019t give a voice to conservatives.\n\nYesterday, I wrote a story, which I think you read, about other publications think you give too much voice to those. \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t have InfoWars on here.\u201d Let\u2019s talk about InfoWars. Let\u2019s use them as the example. Make the case for keeping them, and make the case for not allowing them to be distributed by you.\n\nThere are really two core principles at play here. There\u2019s giving people a voice, so that people can express their opinions. Then, there\u2019s keeping the community safe,", + " which I think is really important. We\u2019re not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things. Within this, those principles have real trade-offs and real tug on each other. In this case, we feel like our responsibility is to prevent hoaxes from going viral and being widely distributed.\n\nThe approach that we\u2019ve taken to false news is not to say, you can\u2019t say something wrong on the internet. I think that that would be too extreme. Everyone gets things wrong, and if we were taking down people\u2019s accounts when they got a few things wrong, then that would be a hard world for giving people a voice and saying that you care about that.", + " But at the same time, I think that we have a responsibility to, when you look at\u2026 if you look at the top hundred things that are going viral or getting distribution on Facebook within any given day, I do think we have a responsibility to make sure that those aren\u2019t hoaxes and blatant misinformation.\n\nThat\u2019s the approach that we\u2019ve taken. We look at the things that are getting the most distribution. If people have flag them as potential hoaxes, we send those to fact-checkers who are all well reputable and have followed standard principles for fact checking, and if those fact checkers say that it is provably false, then we will significantly reduce the distribution of that content,", + " and if someone-\n\nSo, you move them down the line rather than get rid of them?\n\nYeah, in News Feed.\n\nWhy don\u2019t you wanna just say \u201cget off our platform?\u201d\n\nLook, as abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.\n\nLet me give you an example of where we would take it down. In Myanmar or Sri Lanka, where there\u2019s a history of sectarian violence, similar to the tradition in the U.S. where you can\u2019t go into a movie theater and yell \u201cFire!\u201d because that creates an imminent harm.\n\nThe principles that we have on what we remove from the service are:", + " If it\u2019s going to result in real harm, real physical harm, or if you\u2019re attacking individuals, then that content shouldn\u2019t be on the platform. There\u2019s a lot of categories of that that we can get into, but then there\u2019s broad debate.\n\nOkay. \u201cSandy Hook didn\u2019t happen\u201d is not a debate. It is false. You can\u2019t just take that down?\n\nI agree that it is false.\n\nI also think that going to someone who is a victim of Sandy Hook and telling them, \u201cHey, no, you\u2019re a liar\u201d \u2014 that is harassment, and we actually will take that down. But overall,", + " let\u2019s take this whole closer to home...\n\nI\u2019m Jewish, and there\u2019s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened.\n\nI find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don\u2019t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don\u2019t think that they\u2019re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think-\n\nIn the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.\n\nIt\u2019s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly.", + " I\u2019m sure you do. I\u2019m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don\u2019t think that it is the right thing to say, \u201cWe\u2019re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.\u201d (Update: Mark has clarified these remarks here: \u201cI personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn\u2019t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.\u201d)\n\nWhat we will do is we\u2019ll say, \u201cOkay, you have your page, and if you\u2019re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page,", + " even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.\u201d But that doesn\u2019t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed. I think we, actually, to the contrary-\n\nSo you move them down? Versus, in Myanmar, where you remove it?\n\nYes.\n\nCan I ask you that, specifically about Myanmar? How did you feel about those killings and the blame that some people put on Facebook? Do you feel responsible for those deaths?\n\nI think that we have a responsibility to be doing more there.\n\nI want to know how you felt.\n\nYes, I think that there\u2019s a terrible situation where there\u2019s underlying sectarian violence and intention.", + " It is clearly the responsibility of all of the players who were involved there. So, the government, civil society, the different folks who were involved, and I think that we have an important role, given the platform, that we play, so we need to make sure that we do what we need to. We\u2019ve significantly ramped up the investment in people who speak Burmese. It\u2019s often hard, from where we sit, to identify who are the figures who are promoting hate and what is going to... which is the content that is going to incite violence? So it\u2019s important that we build relationships with civil society and folks there who can help us identify that.\n\nI want make sure that our products are used for good.", + " At the end of the day, other people blaming us or not is actually not the thing that matters to me. It\u2019s not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.\n\nLet me give you another example. When Live came up, one of the terrible use cases where people were using... There were a small number of uses of this, but people were using it to... show themselves [doing] self-harm, or there were even a few cases of suicide.", + " We looked at this, we\u2019re like, \u201cThis is terrible. This is not what we want the product to be. This is terrible, and if this is happening and we can help prevent it, then we have a responsibility to.\u201d\n\nSo, what did we do? We took the time to build AI tools and to hire a team of 3,000 people to be able to respond to those live videos within 10 minutes. Most content on Facebook, we try to get to within hours or within a day, if it comes up, and obviously, if someone\u2019s gonna harm themselves, you don\u2019t have a day or hours.", + " You have to get to that quickly. With all the millions of videos that are posted, we had to build this combination of an AI system that could flag content that our reviewers should look at, and then hire a specific team trained and dedicated to that, so that way they could review all the things very quickly and have a very low latency.\n\nIn the last six months, we\u2019ve been able to help first responders get to more than a thousand people who needed help quickly because of that effort.\n\nI want to finish up on news by talking about sort of what\u2019s going on today with conservatives versus liberals. Why won\u2019t you make choices there,", + " or do you feel like you just don\u2019t want to make any, in terms of media and what should be... How do you respond when conservatives say, \u201cYou don\u2019t have enough conservative stuff on the platform?\u201d You guys have responded and some people think you over-responded. How do you think you\u2019ve done?\n\nWell, I think it gets back to the core principles: Giving people a voice on the one hand, and keeping the community and people safe on the other hand. Our bias tends to be to want to give people a voice and let people express a wide range of opinions. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a liberal or conservative thing;", + " those are the words in the U.S.\n\nWhat are your political leanings? Do you have them?\n\nI care about specific issues very deeply and I\u2019m not sure that aligns with any kind of specific thing. So I mean, I\u2019m very outspoken on immigration reform. In 2013, I helped start with a number of entrepreneurs FWD.us, which is a group working on immigration reform that I think recognizes that we need to secure the border and enforce laws, but that also understands that the benefits of immigration, both to the country and the economy and as a humane civil rights issue for the 11 million people who are undocumented here,", + " is incredibly important. I mean, I\u2019ve-\n\nHow did you feel about the border separations as a citizen?\n\nIt was terrible. Terrible.\n\nWhat did you do? Did you do anything besides donate money or stuff like...\n\nYeah, well I mean, the good news here is because we\u2019ve been working on FWD for so long, it has established a lot of the infrastructure that now... When a crisis comes up, you can\u2019t just spin this stuff up immediately. So they\u2019re in there and they\u2019re able to help out.\n\nBut I mean, talking about social utility, one of the really proud moments recently of working at this company was the fact that a couple of people could-\n\nThe Willners.", + " I had them on the podcast. Yeah, they\u2019re great.\n\n... start a fundraiser to raise $1500, enough to bail one person out, and they ended up raising more than $20 million. And this thing just went viral, and I think it\u2019s a great example of when you give people a voice what positive things can happen, both substantively in terms of the fundraiser and just the widespread show of support, I think, is also really meaningful. And I think a combination of that and a number of other things like that may have been what led the administration to backtrack on the policy there.\n\nYeah, possibly. Possibly.\n\nSo let\u2019s get into the idea of privacy and data.", + " How do you assess your performance in front of Congress? It was a low bar, Mark; they didn\u2019t do a very good job. That\u2019s my opinion.\n\nYou thought I didn\u2019t do a very good job?\n\nI thought you did, but I only thought it\u2019s because they did such a bad job.\n\nWell look, I think a lot of people think about this from a gamesmanship perspective of like, someone\u2019s winning and someone\u2019s losing.\n\nI\u2019m there as a witness who hopefully understands some relevant context on an issue of importance to the nation, and I view my responsibility as making sure that they can get as much information as they need to in order to inform what they need to go do.\n\nLike you saw with the Mueller indictments recently,", + " I think some of that context probably initially came from us, but then they had to go build on that for years in terms of putting together the whole story and do very significant work on top of that. But if we can help out in ways like that, then I feel good about our contribution.\n\nOkay. Back to the hearings, one of the things I think... I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s a win/lose thing; I think they did not press you very hard on certain issues.\n\nOne is what you guys do with the data; one was the part related to Cambridge Analytica, which is what happened there, which I think is still... You\u2019re still investigating,", + " it\u2019s still being investigated by authorities in how it happened. And in that case, your defense was, \u201cWe didn\u2019t see it, but once we saw it, we did something about it.\u201d\n\nWhat I would\u2019ve asked is, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you see it?\u201d What\u2019s the problem in that with this data that you did not see it being misused? Because I was at your 2009 or 2008... I remember when you were talking about this idea.\n\nYeah, so the principles at play here are, on the one hand, you want people to have control over their information and be able to bring it out of Facebook to other different apps,", + " because we\u2019re not going to build all of the social experiences and it should be easy for people to use their data anywhere. But on the other hand, if they have that information in Facebook and the developer has some relationship with us, then we also have a responsibility to protect people and keep people safe.\n\nAnd what happened here was a developer built a quiz app, and then they turned around and sold the data that people gave them to someone else. And that is clearly against all of the policies that we have. I mean, that\u2019s terrible, right? We don\u2019t sell data, we don\u2019t allow anyone to sell data. Because it was on their servers,", + " we don\u2019t necessarily see that transaction or whatever they\u2019re doing.\n\nBut you have, in the past, caught people doing this and been much more rigorous in that.\n\nWe do a number of things. One is, we do ongoing audits and we have built technical systems to see if a developer is requesting information in weird ways. We do spot checks where we can audit developers\u2019 servers. But a lot of the stuff comes from flags that either people in the community or law enforcement or different folks send us, and that was actually similar here too. I think it was The Guardian who initially pointed out to us, \u201cHey, we think that this developer,", + " Alexander Kogan, has sold information.\u201d And when we learned about that, we immediately shut down the app, took away his profile, and demanded certification that the data was deleted.\n\nNow the thing that I think, in retrospect, that we really messed up here is that we believed the certification. Now normally, I don\u2019t know about you, but when someone writes a legal certification, my inclination is to believe that. But in retrospect, I think it\u2019s very clear...\n\nNo.\n\nYou don\u2019t?\n\nNo, I don\u2019t believe anybody.\n\nAll right, well that\u2019s...\n\nThere\u2019s an expression in journalism, \u201cIf your mother says she loves you,", + " check it.\u201d But go ahead.\n\nAll right, that\u2019s fair. I tend to have more faith in the rule of law, but-\n\nAnd I think the links between Peter [Thiel] on your board and [Steve] Bannon and... It creates a really bad situation for you all, or suspect. It at least leads to people wondering what was happening there. Easily.\n\nAll right. Well I don\u2019t think that there\u2019s any suggestion that that stuff was connected here, but I do think-\n\nNo, but I\u2019m just saying. It just creates a, \u201cWhat the heck was going on here?\u201d\n\nYeah. I think in retrospect... You know,", + " we didn\u2019t know what Cambridge Analytica was there, it didn\u2019t strike us as a sketchy thing. We just had no history with them. Knowing what I know now, we obviously would not have just taken their certification at its word and would\u2019ve gone in and done an audit then.\n\nNow our policy is, we are not just going to take developers at their word when they say that they aren\u2019t misusing information; we\u2019re going to go and audit every single developer who had a large amount of access to people\u2019s information before we significantly lock down the amount of access that developers could get starting back in 2014.\n\nShould someone have been fired for this?\n\nYou know-\n\nI asked Sheryl this,", + " so I\u2019m just curious what you think.\n\nWell, I think it\u2019s a big issue. But look, I designed the platform, so if someone\u2019s going to get fired for this, it should be me. And I think that the important thing going forward is to make sure that we get this right. In this case, the most important steps, in terms of, to prevent this from happening again, we\u2019d already taken in 2014 when we had changed dramatically the way that the platform worked.\n\nBut overall, I mean, this is an important situation, and I think again it\u2019s... This to me is an example of,", + " you get judged by how you deal with an issue when it comes up. And I think on this one, we\u2019ve done the right things, and many of them I think we\u2019d actually done years ago to prevent this kind of situation from happening again.\n\nBut to be clear, you\u2019re not gonna fire yourself right now? Is that right?\n\nNot on this podcast right now.\n\nOkay, all right. Well that would be fantastic. I mean, I think you\u2019ll do okay.\n\nSo let\u2019s get to the privacy and data part of it. One of the things you kept saying in Congress, which really drove me crazy because you said it like... I counted it.\n\nDo you really want me to fire myself right now?\n\nSure.", + " It\u2019s fine.\n\nJust for the news?\n\nYeah, why not? Whatever, Mark. Whatever works for you. No.\n\nI think we should do what\u2019s gonna be right for the community.\n\nAll right, okay. All right. Well I\u2019ll get to regulation in a second, but two more sections and then you\u2019ll be out of here.\n\nOne is, you kept saying, \u201cSenator, we don\u2019t sell your data. Senator, we don\u2019t sell your data.\u201d You kind of sell people\u2019s data in a different way by marrying it with other data, you sell insights into that data, you sell... Your whole business is predicated on using data to make money.", + " Why did you keep saying that? I mean technically, you\u2019re correct, but...\n\nWell I think facts do matter.\n\nYes, I know, but you don\u2019t technically sell your data, but you use their data to sell advertising. So you are in essence... What are you doing with people\u2019s data? How would you describe it?\n\nWell look, it bothers me when reputable news outlets make claims like saying that we sell data because it is just-\n\nLike to Procter & Gamble. You don\u2019t-\n\nIt\u2019s just not true.\n\nRight, okay.\n\nWe don\u2019t sell data. Now, I understand what you\u2019re saying, that the business model works basically in two ways;", + " one is people have attention from being on the service, which is no different from the ads you\u2019ll run during this podcast or traditional TV ads for the last 50 years. But there is an element of targeting which is that, because we understand what you\u2019re interested in, we can show you more relevant ads to you. And people, overall, people want to know that their information is secure, and that if they give it to you, they want you to use it to make their experience good, but they don\u2019t want you to give it to other people.\n\nSo while it may seem like a small difference to you, this distinction on \u201cselling data,\u201d I actually think to people it\u2019s like the whole game,", + " right? So we don\u2019t sell data, we don\u2019t give the data to anyone else, but overwhelmingly people do tell us that if they\u2019re going to see ads on Facebook, they want the ads to be relevant; they don\u2019t want bad ads.\n\nDo you think people understand how much information you have on them? It\u2019s a different factor that ever before in history, how much information you know about people.\n\nMaybe. Although I think most people actually, on a service like Facebook or Instagram, probably have a greater awareness of the information that\u2019s there than on a lot of other services, because in our case, you actually put it there,", + " right? You told us that you like that thing, or you posted that photo, or said that. So I actually think people generally have an awareness and feel like, \u201cWow, these networks have a lot of information.\u201d\n\nThe areas that I would actually worry about more for consumers are places where they don\u2019t realize that services are collecting a lot of information about them, but actually are. So that\u2019s a whole different thing.\n\nRegulation, how much do you think is coming from if the Democrats get back in power? They\u2019ve gotten rather hostile towards you and Google, it seems.\n\nWell, I think you\u2019re too focused on the U.S.\n\nOkay,", + " across the world. Do you see regulation being \u2026 Obviously, Europe is a place where there\u2019s much more regulation happening and more activity. Do you see it-\n\nThe area that I think is most likely is content. So the U.S. has a very rich tradition of free speech; it is written into the Constitution, free speech, so here, we have a very strong allergic reaction to trying to regulate that. But in almost every other country in the world, while people generally want as much expression as possible, there\u2019s some notion that something else might be more important than speech; so preventing hate or-\n\nIn Germany or wherever.\n\n... terrorism or just different things.", + " So you\u2019re already starting to see this; I mean, there was the hate speech law in Germany. I think that there will be additional laws creating responsibility for social networking, and social companies, and Internet companies overall to be more proactive in policing terrorism, or bullying, or hate speech, or different kinds of content.\n\nAnd overall, I think that there are good and bad ways to do that, but my general take is that a lot of that stuff can be pretty reasonable. I mean, I think we\u2019re not kids in a dorm room anymore, right?\n\nWe\u2019re at a point now where we\u2019ve built AI tools to detect when terrorists are trying to spread content,", + " and 99 percent of the terrorist content that we take down, our systems flag before any human sees them or flags them for us. And we can afford, at this point, to have 20,000 people reviewing the content.\n\nSo I think the point where you have that kind of AI technology and you have the resources to be able to employ people to do that kind of content review, I kinda think you have a responsibility to do it.\n\nOkay. So you can handle regulation. What about the call... There\u2019s been some calls to break up some companies like Facebook or Amazon that become too big. Are you in fear of that in any way?\n\nYou know,", + " I think that there\u2019s... It\u2019s a very interesting debate overall. If you actually get down to why we\u2019re big, it\u2019s not... In the traditional sense, we\u2019re not big because we\u2019re so big in the United States, although we are and a lot of people use our products here. If we weren\u2019t an international company, if you said, \u201cOkay, you have to shut down all of your services outside of the U.S.,\u201d we actually would not be very profitable at all; we actually would probably be unprofitable.\n\nSo I think you have this question from a policy perspective, which is, do we want American companies to be exporting across the world?", + " We grew up here, I think we share a lot of values that I think people hold very dear here, and I think it\u2019s generally very good that we\u2019re doing this, both for security reasons and from a values perspective.\n\nBecause I think that the alternative, frankly, is going to be the Chinese companies. If we adopt a stance which is that, \u201cOkay, we\u2019re gonna, as a country, decide that we wanna clip the wings of these companies and make it so that it\u2019s harder for them to operate in different places, where they have to be smaller,\u201d then there are plenty of other companies out that are willing and able to take the place of the work that we\u2019re doing.\n\nSpecifically the Chinese companies.\n\nYeah.", + " And they do not share the values that we have. I think you can bet that if the government hears word that it\u2019s election interference or terrorism, I don\u2019t think Chinese companies are going to wanna cooperate as much and try to aid the national interest there.\n\nWhat is your situation in China now?\n\nI mean, we\u2019re blocked.\n\nAnd are you working on moving Facebook products in there?\n\nOver the long term. I think it\u2019s hard to have a mission of wanting to bring the whole world closer together and leave out the biggest country.\n\nWhat will that take?\n\nI don\u2019t know.\n\nWhere are you with China?\n\nI mean, we\u2019re,", + " I think, a long time away from doing anything.\n\nAt some point, I think that we need to figure it out, but we need to figure out a solution that is in line with our principles and what we want to do, and in line with the laws there, or else it\u2019s not going to happen. Right now, there isn\u2019t an intersection.\n\nAll right. I wanna finish up just talking about you. This is an issue I\u2019ve talked about a lot is Silicon Valley responsibility, and taking responsibility. And taking responsibility of your dark things, and not being quite as optimistic, and a lot of people here have a problem with looking at that.", + " How do you look at your responsibility, as a leader? As a leader of a massive company with enormous power? Do you think you grok that at this point? Sometimes I don\u2019t think you do. I really don\u2019t.\n\nWell, I think we have a responsibility to build the things that give people a voice and help people connect and help people build community, which ultimately is the unique thing that we do in the world. That, I think is one important piece of it.\n\nBut then on the other hand, I think we also have a responsibility to recognize that the tools won\u2019t always be used for good things and we need to be there and be ready to mitigate all the negative uses,", + " so whether that\u2019s terrorism, or people thinking about self-harm or suicide who we need to go make sure they get help quickly, or bullying, or election interference, or fake news.\n\nThe list goes on, and there\u2019s a lot of these things. There are very specific pieces of work that we have to do on each. I mean, just take terrorism for example. We have a team of more than 200 people working on counterterrorism. I mean, that\u2019s pretty intense. That\u2019s not like what people think about what Facebook is.\n\nNo, I\u2019m sure when you were an engineer you weren\u2019t thinking this was your...\n\nI do think that there will be things that we get wrong in the future,", + " too, but I think to say that we don\u2019t care about what\u2019s going on, or mitigating any of the downsides of what people do, I don\u2019t think is right. I think to say that that is the only thing that we should be focused on, I think also is not quite right because I think that what most people out there want is the ability to stay connected with the people that they love, and to be able to join communities because that\u2019s an important part of people\u2019s lives. If we\u2019re not making progress on that and advancing the ball forward there too, then I also don\u2019t think we\u2019re doing our job.\n\nWhat about the image of Facebook?", + " It\u2019s not great right now. Would you agree with that?\n\nIt\u2019s not as good as it\u2019s been.\n\nYeah. How does that feel personally?\n\nI mean, personally, my take on this is that for the last 10 or 15 years, we have gotten mostly glowing and adoring attention from people, and if people wanna focus on some real issues for a couple of years, I\u2019m fine with it.\n\nFrankly, I think that the news industry is critically important because it points out things and surfaces truths that can often be uncomfortable. I think that that\u2019s working, and the spotlight has been pointed on things that we have a responsibility to do better,", + " and I accept that.\n\nWhile it may not be the most fun period of running the company, I think we take the responsibility really seriously and get that in the grand scheme of things, I don\u2019t think people are being unfair to us. I think people have been very positive and are focused on all the good that come with the technology for a long period of time. To have a period where people focus on some of the negative uses, to make sure that we fully understand that, I think is completely reasonable.\n\nIf there\u2019s going to be a period of two years where we frankly didn\u2019t handle a bunch of things as well as we should\u2019ve and need to get back on top of it,", + " then I mean, you\u2019re not going to cry about that. You\u2019re gonna do what you need to make it good.\n\nWhat\u2019s your goal this year? You have these goals. This year is fix Facebook. You did the Visit Every Cow In America Tour last year. What is your personal goal this year? Away from fixing Facebook?\n\nI mean, I think that the feeling this year is that... I\u2019ve done these personal challenges because I think running a company can be an all-consuming thing. I think in order to have a broader perspective, you wanna do things outside of that too. Whether that\u2019s running, or learning Mandarin, or visiting different places,", + " or coding an AI to run my home, I think that those are all good things.\n\nBut this year, I think we have a number of issues that we need to deal with and it didn\u2019t feel right to me to focus on something else outside. I think that this is, and interesting enough, this is an important challenge that I think we need to dedicate every fiber of what we\u2019re doing to making sure that we get this right.\n\nHow long does that last?\n\nI think it\u2019ll take about three years to fully retool everything at Facebook to be on top of all the content issues and security issues. But the good news is we\u2019re about a year and a half in.", + " I do think that by the end of this year, we\u2019ll have significantly turned the corner on a lot of these issues. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re gonna be as good as we would like to next year, either, but I think it\u2019ll be close.\n\nDo you have any political goals? I know people thought when you did your grand tour of the United States that was what you were doing with your team of videographers, et cetera.\n\nI mean, I care about helping to address these problems of social cohesion and understanding what economic problems people think exist. I tend to think that we all get support from three basic places:", + " Our friends and family, the communities we\u2019re a part of, and then, ultimately, the government with its safety net. I think as a society, we spend the vast majority of our time talking about what the government should do in the political debates.\n\nI think we spend not enough time talking about how important community is. So you go around... I mean I saw, sit with ministers in places, and they talk about not just the religious role that they play as a religious organization, but as a community organization. One minister told me that he knew that when a factory closed down in town, he was gonna be seeing more couples for couples counseling a few weeks later because of the tension.", + " All right. That\u2019s a real piece of social infrastructure that needs to exist.\n\nIf people aren\u2019t a part of those kind of organizations, then there\u2019s a core need that people have that is not being fulfilled.\n\nI sat down with kids in Chicago, a school where a lot of kids were in gangs. I mean, they told me the reason why people were in gangs is not because they wanted to be in a gang, they understood that it was dangerous, but because they needed a sense of community, and in a dangerous environment, they wanted to know that someone was looking after them.\n\nWho do you look up to? Do you look up to other internet people?", + " Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or is it there\u2019s like an ultra male competition between and among you? Who was your mentor, would you say?\n\nWell, I think that there are a couple. Bill Gates has always been a mentor and inspiration for me even before I knew him. Just growing up, I admired how Microsoft was mission-focused. It was a company that had a clear social goal, or that it wanted to make... They thought that computers were gonna be valuable, and having that become ubiquitous. It was like an Apollo-like goal to me that always struck me as really nice.\n\nThen, I think his second act of going and being one of the world\u2019s best philanthropists has absolutely influenced me.", + " Not only to try to follow in his footsteps and do something hopefully one day that will be as impactful as what he has done, but his lesson there that you have to start early to practice. Like anything that you want to get good at, you don\u2019t just show up and effectively and efficiently give money away. The notion that if I want be really good at this 10 or 15 years from now, then Priscilla and I really need to be starting to work on this now. He has had, he and Melinda, and Melinda has increasingly really been a role model for us as well, just have really deeply influenced the way that I think about both work and philanthropy.\n\nBut one of the things that I\u2019d say that I\u2019m really lucky is that a lot of the people who I look up to the most,", + " I get to work with every day. I mean, I think Sheryl is amazing. A lot of what I know about business and building organizations and leadership come from working with her. A lot of the other folks who I get to work with every day, Chris Cox is just an amazing person. I always tell people that you should only hire people to be on your team if you would work for them. But in an alternate universe, I would be honored to work for any of these people. I think that that is, I don\u2019t know, that is greater gift than having some external mentors who I get to talk to once a quarter.\n\nOkay.", + " My very last question. Very briefly, what do you think the most exciting product area is right now? Let\u2019s finish up on that.\n\nLonger term, as a technologist, one of things that just excites me is there are always new computing platforms. Every 10 or 15 years a new one comes along. They\u2019re always more native, they capture your human experience more. Immersively, you share more naturally what you\u2019re experiencing. I just think that VR and AR are going to be a really big deal.\n\nYou can just see this trajectory from early internet, when the technology and connections were slow, most of the internet was text.", + " Text is great, but it can be sometimes hard to capture what\u2019s going on. Then, we all got phones with cameras on them and the internet got good enough to be primarily images. Now the networks are getting good enough that it\u2019s primarily video. At each step along the way, we\u2019re able to capture the human experience with greater fidelity and richness, and I think that that\u2019s great.\n\nNow, I do think that we\u2019re gonna move towards this world where eventually you\u2019ll be able to capture a whole experience that you\u2019re in and be able to send that to someone. I think that that\u2019s just gonna be an amazing technology for perspective taking and putting yourself in other people\u2019s shoes,", + " for being able to feeling like you\u2019re really physically there with someone even when you\u2019re not. One of the criticisms of technology today is you\u2019re sitting and looking at your phone, and we could be sitting together but we\u2019re actually fragmented.\n\nNo, I agree with you on VR. I\u2019ve just been doing some recent VR stuff that\u2019s really promising.\n\nYeah. I mean, there\u2019s a few technology leaps that still need to be made, but the initial use is amazing. I just think that\u2019s a really important technology.\n\nI\u2019m not sure you an give people empathy though. You can see people, the world through people\u2019s eyes,", + " but you can\u2019t understand their experience, necessarily.\n\nYes. Although, I think there\u2019s also an economic... We\u2019ve talked a lot about the social aspects of all of this, but I think one of the biggest issues economically today is that opportunity isn\u2019t evenly distributed. You get all these people have to move to cities, and then the cities get to be way too expensive, and if you have a technology like VR where you can be present anywhere but live where you choose to, then I think that that can be really profound.\n\nThere\u2019re really only a few solutions to this. Historically, cities have grown to be bigger by building better physical infrastructure.", + " There\u2019ll be some amount of that. I mean, I think things like hyperloops and things like that can extend the suburbs, could be quite interesting, but I have to believe that, we\u2019re here in 2018, it\u2019s much cheaper and easier to move bits around than it is atoms. It strikes me that something like VR or AR, or even video conferencing on the path to that, has to be a more likely part of the solution than just building a ton of physical infrastructure.\n\nAll right. Now you have one chance. What would you like to say to your giant nation state of Facebook right now? What is the one thing?", + " Like, \u201cI\u2019m sorry for this-\u201d\n\nWell, we\u2019ve talking about this for a while.\n\nI know. but what\u2019s the one thing they\u2019re getting wrong about you right now? I\u2019m gonna give you a nice out.\n\nThat\u2019s tough. It\u2019s always hard to say what is the one thing. I don\u2019t know. I think that the main thing that I\u2019ve tried to internalize this year is we get that there\u2019s a big responsibility and a lot of things that we need to do better than we are. We are working on it, and I think a lot of them, we\u2019re doing better already, and for the rest,", + " we\u2019re committed to getting to where we need to be for the community. At the same time, we also feel a responsibility to keep on moving forward on giving people tools to share their experience and connect and come together in new ways. Ultimately, that\u2019s the unique thing that Facebook was put on this Earth to do. I think if we don\u2019t push forward on that, we will be missing our responsibility for advancing the ball there. That\u2019s what I care about, and we\u2019re just very serious about making sure that we do both of those things. ", + " On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Kara to talk about Cambridge Analytica, why Infowars is still on Facebook and the danger of over-regulation, among many other topics.\n\nYou can listen to our entire conversation right now in the audio player below. If you prefer to listen on your phone, Recode Decode is available wherever you listen to podcasts \u2014 including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts and Overcast.\n\nBelow is the full transcript of the conversation. You can read a more condensed, lightly edited version here.\n\nKara Swisher: Mark, thank you so much for talking to me.\n\nMark Zuckerberg:", + " Happy to do it.\n\nThis is our first interview in years, right? We\u2019ve seen each other.\n\nYeah. Happy to do it.\n\nNo problem. I\u2019m gonna start off with the news of the day. You saw the Putin/Trump press conference, essentially.\n\nI saw the news about it.\n\nYou saw the news about it. Tell me what you think about his idea that there is no evidence that the Russians used social media, and did different things during the election.\n\nWell the evidence that we\u2019ve seen is quite clear, that the Russians did try to interfere with the election. What we saw-\n\nThis is on Facebook?\n\nYes.", + " All of what we saw is on Facebook. Then we\u2019ve tried to cooperate with the government and the different investigations that are going on. They obviously have much more context than this. But what we saw, before the election, was this Russian hacking group, part of Russian military intelligence, that I guess our government calls APT28. They were trying to do more traditional methods of hacking: Phishing people\u2019s accounts, just getting access to people\u2019s accounts that way.\n\nWe identified this, actually, in the middle of 2015 and notified the FBI. When we saw similar activity through the campaign in 2016, that they were trying to phish people\u2019s accounts in both the DNC and RNC,", + " we notified some of the people over there as well, [who] we thought were at risk. Later we also identified that they had set up a fake account and fake pages under the banner of, connected to this thing, DCLeaks, in order to seed stolen information that they had gotten to journalists.\n\nWe, around the time of the election, had given this context to the FBI. They\u2019ve clearly gone much further now, at this point, in terms of putting the whole story together. You could see that in the indictments that Mueller just issued over the last week or so. That\u2019s the part that I actually think we got,", + " and were on top of.\n\nNow, there\u2019s a whole other area of election interference that we were slower to identify. That\u2019s around the coordinated information operations that they were trying to run, and that was a different group. Instead of APT28, that was this group, IRA, the Internet Research Agency, which basically was just setting up a network of fake accounts, in order to spread divisive information.\n\nDisinformation.\n\nYeah. Misinformation. Divisive information.\n\nUsing advertising content in a variety of ways.\n\nYeah. Well both advertising and organic \u2014 so setting up pages and using the free products.\n\nOnce we became aware of this,", + " which we think we were too slow to being on top of that, but once we became aware of this, we developed this whole roadmap and set of techniques to go and handle that type of security threat in addition to the type of phishing and more traditional cyber attacks that we had seen before. That takes us through all the elections that we have seen since then. There\u2019s the French presidential election, the German election, the Alabama special election, the Mexican election recently, and there were elections all around the world.\n\nNow the playbook is, we build AI tools to go find these fake accounts, find coordinated networks of inauthentic activity and take them down;", + " we make it much harder for anyone to advertise in ways that they shouldn\u2019t be. A lot of tools around ad transparency, to make it so that anyone who is advertising, especially around political issue ads, will have a lot of the information, a very high standard of transparency. Higher than what you have in TV or print, or other kinds of ads there. And in the U.S., we\u2019re also even going so far as verifying the identify and location of every single advertiser-\n\nPurchaser.\n\nWho wants to run a political or issue ad, which, for a lot of folks, legitimate folks, has slowed down the process of buying ads,", + " which I think can have its own costs for discourse, but we just think is the right precaution to be taking on this.\n\nAnd yeah, that\u2019s probably a longer answer to what your were going for.\n\nNo, no. That\u2019s all right. So, you believe it\u2019s the Russian government, from where you\u2019re sitting, was using or misusing Facebook? You believe it was the Russian government? Unlike Trump, you believe it was the Russian government?\n\nThe information that we have on who these groups are largely comes from the U.S. government and U.S intelligence.\n\nSo you believe U.S. intelligence?\n\nWe have no reason not to.", + " Certainly, we\u2019ve seen the activity from APT28. That name comes from U.S. intelligence. Advanced Persistent Threat 28 from Russia, and the IRA. These are real things. These aren\u2019t things that someone made up. We saw this activity. We went out, we traced IRA activity, not only through what they\u2019ve tried to do in the U.S., but we\u2019ve traced that activity back to trying to manipulate culture and news in Russia itself, including taking down there, pages that are connected to sanctioned Russian news organizations that the government, Russcom, has said are real news organizations there, but what we\u2019ve detected through our systems are actually essentially the same thing as the IRA.", + " All the people who are running them are the same.\n\nThese things are real, and we\u2019ve been aggressively pursuing them for the last couple of years. This is now just part of the ongoing playbook that we have for preventing these kind of disinformation campaigns.\n\nWhat took you so long? I think, as you know, many people feel disappointed with Facebook\u2019s behavior and the slowness, given the power that you have, or the power over the market you have. I don\u2019t wanna say what\u2019s your excuse, but that\u2019s kind of the question. What was the problem?\n\nWe just weren\u2019t looking for these kind of information operations.", + " We have a big security operation. We were focused on traditional types of hacking. We found that and notified both the government and the people who were at risk, but there\u2019s no doubt we were too slow to identify this new kind of attack, which was a coordinated online information operation.\n\nYou can bet that that\u2019s now a big focus of the security effort that we have here. We\u2019re very focused on making sure that we get this right, not just broadly, but in all the elections that are coming up. 2018 is an incredibly important election year, not just with the important midterms here in the U.S., but you just had the Mexican elections.", + " You have Brazil. You have India coming up at the beginning of next year. There\u2019s an assortment of elections around the EU. We\u2019re very serious about this. We know that we need to get this right. We take that responsibility very seriously.\n\nI know you say that, but I do wanna get at, do you reflect on what it was within \u2018cause you\u2019re the leader here, you\u2019re the head of this, that you didn\u2019t see it? That you don\u2019t see that side of humanity? Or, that you don\u2019t understand your responsibility?\n\nI\u2019m not sure. I think\u2026 In retrospect, I do think it\u2019s fair to say that we were overly idealistic and focused on more of the good parts of what connecting people and giving people a voice can bring.", + " I think now we understand that, given where we are, both the centrality of Facebook, but also, frankly, we\u2019re a profitable enough company to have 20,000 people go work on reviewing content, so I think that means that we have a responsibility to go do that. That\u2019s a different position than we were in five or six years ago, or even when we went public and were a meaningfully smaller company at that point.\n\nI do think it\u2019s fair to say that we were probably\u2026 we were too focused on just the positives and not focused enough on some of the negatives. That said, I don\u2019t wanna leave the impression that we didn\u2019t care about security or didn\u2019t have thousands of people working on it before then.\n\nNo,", + " I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the case.\n\nIt\u2019s not like... I think that these are different kinds of threats that people widely didn\u2019t anticipate, and that isn\u2019t an excuse. I think it\u2019s our job to anticipate this stuff on our platform and to make sure that people can\u2019t use it for negative... This was a new thing. I think we understand that we were slow to it and need to do a better job both on this specific type of threat, defending against nation-states, which is not really a top-line thing that was a major focus before, even though there were some parts of the program that were doing that. I also think that we know that there are gonna be new threats in the future that we haven\u2019t seen yet and that security is an arms race.", + " It\u2019s our responsibility to be as ahead of that as possible.\n\nSome people feel you are a nation-state in a lot of ways.\n\nWe\u2019re not. We\u2019re a company.\n\nYou know that. You know people think of you in a powerful manner, I guess.\n\nI think we have a lot of responsibility. The community, more than two billion people use our products, and we get that with that, a lot of people are using that for a lot of good, but we also have a responsibility to mitigate the darker things that people are gonna try to do.\n\nWhat does that responsibility feel like? Do you think you have understood it?", + " There\u2019s a lot of ways... Someone was saying to me, you can\u2019t just pass power along. You have an enormous amount of power. Do you understand that? Do you think about that? Or, you don\u2019t think you have?\n\nI think we have a big responsibility, but I\u2019m not sure what you mean by \u201cpass power along,\u201d but I actually think one of the things that we should be trying to do is figure out how to empower and build other institutions around us that are important and can help figure out these new issues on the internet.\n\nLike what?\n\nOne example, recently, is probably fact-checking. I don\u2019t think that we should be in the business of having people at Facebook who are deciding what is true and what isn\u2019t.\n\nWe\u2019re gonna get into that in a second.\n\nBut I think that... But someone has to have the job of doing that.", + " Society needs people who can be trusted, who can say, to vet things fairly, and say \u201cthis is provably false.\u201d I think that there\u2019s a role to help build an ecosystem and support that ecosystem. News, I think, is another topic that I\u2019m sure we\u2019ll get into.\n\nYeah, we\u2019re gonna get into it in just a second. Before we get to that, but we are going to, the idea of other institutions, that\u2019s a really interesting idea.\n\nWhen we first met, if you remember. Do you remember it, when we first met?\n\nI remember we went on a walk.\n\nWe went on a walk.\n\nI don\u2019t know if that was the first time.\n\nI think it was.", + " Owen Van Natta introduced us. Two things you did is you said, \u201cI hear you think I\u2019m an asshole,\u201d because I had just joked to Owen about it.\n\nAnd I said, \u201cI don\u2019t know you well enough to know if you\u2019re an asshole or not, yet, but I will soon.\u201d\n\nOne of the things that you did tell me that was striking was you called Facebook a utility. Do you remember that?\n\nYeah, I called it that for a while.\n\nFor a while?\n\nYeah.\n\nAt the time you meant it was a useful system. It was, in contrast to other internet companies at the time, much more entertaining or various things like that were in ascendance at the time.", + " What do you call Facebook now?\n\nI think that that is still a good description. In general, we\u2019re a social network. I prefer that because I think it is focused on the people part of it as opposed to some people call it social media, which I think focuses more on the content. For me, it\u2019s always been about the people, and the reason why I called it a utility was because a lot of people used to think of it as a fad. What I was trying to communicate was, no, building a network and building relationships is one of the most core things that people do, and that is an enduring utility that people need,", + " that is not a fad. The company shouldn\u2019t be run to try to build something that is cool, it should be run to build something that is useful and enduring. And I still believe that.\n\nI think that there\u2019s this notion today that a lot of the main uses of social networks are for sharing content. That obviously has a big impact on giving people a voice, and there are safety and security implications. There are media implications of that. When I think about what social networking should be... now you\u2019ve mapped out all of the people who a person cares about. What are all the useful things that you can do for people on top of that?", + " So I think about things like Marketplace, that we\u2019re doing, that now people can have trust through their network and can basically go and buy and sell things more easily than they would be able to on other services.\n\nYour choices are basically, you can use Amazon, which is a central service. You can use eBay, which is a community, because they have their broad reputation system, or you can trust people through the network. A lot of people choose to do that because they know people in common, and that feels better. It\u2019s a better experience for them, so that is a really important example.\n\nOther examples are things like Safety Check.", + " There are disasters that happen \u2014 Hurricane Harvey came up, and you had people self-organizing through the community and getting in boats and driving around rescuing people coordinated ad hoc through this network. That\u2019s not a media function. That\u2019s a social network of people coming together ad hoc to provide safety infrastructure that the world needs, so that\u2019s kind of more how I think about what we\u2019re doing. My hope would be-\n\nYou\u2019re talking about a city then.\n\nI\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s a city. It\u2019s social infrastructure, to be sure, but my hope is that if you fast forward five or 10 years, more of what people think about social networking will not only be the aspects around people sharing content,", + " but also people coming together in these different ways.\n\nLet\u2019s talk about news. Let\u2019s talk about news.\n\nSure.\n\nThis has been, everyday seems to be a new thing of people asking you to make determinations about what news is. The power you have over distribution is very clear \u2014 to publishers, to citizens and everyone else. How do you look at your role, \u2018cause you\u2019re kind of an accidental publisher, in a lot of ways? Content, there was all kinds of content, but right now you\u2019re being asked, right now as we\u2019re doing this interview, there\u2019s a Congressional hearing going on. In that case,", + " conservatives think that you\u2019re not, you don\u2019t give a voice to conservatives. Yesterday, I wrote a story, which I think you read, about other publications think you give too much voice to those. \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t have InfoWars on here.\u201d Let\u2019s talk about InfoWars. Let\u2019s use them as the example.\n\nSure.\n\nMake the case for keeping them, and make the case for not allowing them to be distributed by you.\n\nThere are really two core principles at play here. There\u2019s giving people a voice, so that people can express their opinions. Then, there\u2019s keeping the community safe, which I think is really important.", + " We\u2019re not gonna let people plan violence or attack each other or do bad things. Within this, those principles have real trade-offs and real tug on each other. In this case, we feel like our responsibility is to prevent hoaxes from going viral and being widely distributed.\n\nOkay.\n\nThe approach that we\u2019ve taken to false news is not to say, you can\u2019t say something wrong on the internet. I think that that would be too extreme. Everyone gets things wrong, and if we were taking down people\u2019s accounts when they got a few things wrong, then that would be a hard world for giving people a voice and saying that you care about that.", + " But at the same time, I think that we have a responsibility to, when you look at\u2026 if you look at the top hundred things that are going viral or getting distribution on Facebook within any given day, I do think we have a responsibility to make sure that those aren\u2019t hoaxes and blatant misinformation.\n\nThat\u2019s the approach that we\u2019ve taken. We look at the things that are getting the most distribution. If people have flag them as potential hoaxes, we send those to fact-checkers who are all well reputable and have followed standard principles for fact checking, and if those fact checkers say that it is provably false, then we will significantly reduce the distribution of that content,", + " and if someone-\n\nSo, you move them down the line rather than get rid of them?\n\nYeah, in News Feed.\n\nWhy don\u2019t you wanna just say \u201cget off our platform?\u201d\n\nLook, as abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.\n\nEven if it\u2019s a hoax.\n\nYeah. I mean, at some level, it\u2019s hard to always have a clear line between... I\u2019m not defending any specific content here. I think a lot of the content that\u2019s at play is terrible. I think when you get into discussions around free speech,", + " you\u2019re often talking at the margins of content that is terrible and what should... but defending people\u2019s right to say things even if they can be bad. Sorry, I lost my train of thought here. Where-\n\nThere\u2019s a difference between offensive and hoaxes.\n\nOh yeah. Yes.\n\nInfoWars. I want you to make a case for taking InfoWars off. If you were on the other side of it.\n\nI think if you were trying to argue on the side of basically the core principle of keeping the community safe, I think you would try to argue that the content is somehow attacking people or is creating an unsafe environment. Now,", + " let me give you-\n\nIs false.\n\nLet me give you an example of where we would take it down. In Myanmar or Sri Lanka, where there\u2019s a history of sectarian violence, similar to the tradition in the U.S. where you can\u2019t go into a movie theater and yell \u201cFire!\u201d because that creates an imminent harm. There are definitely examples of people sharing images that are taken out of context that are false, that are specifically used to induce people to violence in those ares where there\u2019s-\n\nAnd violence has resulted.\n\nYes. We are moving towards the policy of misinformation that is aimed at or going to induce violence, we are going to take down because that\u2019s basically... The principles that we have on what we remove from the service are,", + " if it\u2019s going to result in real harm, real physical harm, or if you\u2019re attacking individuals, then that content shouldn\u2019t be on the platform. There\u2019s a lot of categories of that that we can get into, but then there\u2019s broad debate.\n\nOkay. \u201cSandy Hook didn\u2019t happen\u201d is not a debate. It is false. You can\u2019t just take that down?\n\nI agree that it is false.\n\nOkay.\n\nI also think that going to someone who is a victim of Sandy Hook and telling them, \u201cHey, no, you\u2019re a liar\u201d \u2014 that is harassment, and we actually will take that down.", + " But overall, let\u2019s take this whole closer to home...\n\nOkay.\n\nI\u2019m Jewish, and there\u2019s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened.\n\nYes, there\u2019s a lot.\n\nI find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don\u2019t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don\u2019t think that they\u2019re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think-\n\nIn the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.\n\nIt\u2019s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are,", + " I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I\u2019m sure you do. I\u2019m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don\u2019t think that it is the right thing to say, \u201cWe\u2019re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.\u201d (Update: Mark has clarified these remarks here: \u201cI personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn\u2019t intend to defend the intent of people who deny that.\u201d)\n\nWhat we will do is we\u2019ll say, \u201cOkay, you have your page, and if you\u2019re not trying to organize harm against someone,", + " or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.\u201d But that doesn\u2019t mean that we have a responsibility to make it widely distributed in News Feed. I think we, actually, to the contrary-\n\nSo you move them down? Versus, in Myanmar, where you remove it?\n\nYes.\n\nCan I ask you that, specifically about Myanmar? How did you feel about those killings and the blame that some people put on Facebook? Do you feel responsible for those deaths?\n\nI think that we have a responsibility to be doing more there.\n\nI wanna know how you felt.\n\nYes,", + " I think that there\u2019s a terrible situation where there\u2019s underlying sectarian violence and intention. It is clearly the responsibility of all of the players who were involved there. So, the government, civil society, the different folks who were involved, and I think that we have an important role, given the platform, that we play, so we need to make sure that we do what we need to. We\u2019ve significantly ramped up the investment in people who speak Burmese. It\u2019s often hard, from where we sit, to identify who are the figures who are promoting hate and what is going to... which is the content that is going to incite violence?", + " So it\u2019s important that we build relationships with civil society and folks there who can help us identify that.\n\nBut it\u2019s not just Myanmar. It\u2019s also Sri Lanka. We have a whole effort that is a product and business initiative that is focused on these countries that have these crises that are on an ongoing basis.\n\nAgain, I wanna know how you feel. How did you feel when that started to happen? And the blame was shifted a little bit to Facebook and how Facebook was used as a tool by these people?\n\nLook, I wanna make sure that our products are used for good. At the end of the day, other people blaming us or not is actually not the thing that matters to me.", + " What matters to me is how are people using our services, and are we acting as the force for good that I know we can and have a responsibility to [be]. It\u2019s not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad. When you hear that new bad things are happening-\n\nWhat kind of responsibility do you feel? I\u2019m just really... I\u2019d feel sick to my stomach. I\u2019ll tell you. That would be my first... I feel sick.", + " \u201cPeople died, possibly because of something I invented.\u201d You could do sort of the old, \u201cFacebook doesn\u2019t kill people, people kill people\u201d kind of argument. What does that make you feel like? What do you do when you see that? What do you do yourself? What\u2019s your emotion?\n\nI mean, my emotion is feeling a deep sense of responsibility to try to fix the problem. I don\u2019t know that\u2019s a... That\u2019s the most productive stance.\n\nTo do something.\n\nLook, you can either look at this and say, \u201cWe should have predicted all of these issues ahead of time,\u201d and some people think that.", + " I tend to think that it is very difficult to predict every single thing. Now, some of these things I think we could have done better on, but I think you\u2019re building something from scratch. There are going to be \u2014\n\nConsequences.\n\n\u2014 challenges that come up that are things that we did not foresee. If we foresaw this, I think we might have missed something else. Now, that doesn\u2019t make it okay, but what I think it means is that our primary responsibility, I don\u2019t believe, is to foresee every problem before it happens as much as it is to, when we become aware of something to do everything we can to address it.\n\nImmediately.\n\nLet me give you another example.", + " When Live came up, one of the terrible use cases where people were using... There were a small number of uses of this, but people were using it to-\n\nBeating up.\n\nShow themselves self-harm or there were even a few cases of suicide. We looked at this, we\u2019re like, \u201cThis is terrible. This is not what we want the product to be. This is terrible, and if this is happening and we can help prevent it, then we have a responsibility to.\u201d So, what did we do? We took the time to build AI tools and to hire a team of 3,000 people to be able to respond to those live videos within 10 minutes.", + " Most content on Facebook, we try to get to within hours or within a day, if it comes up, and obviously, if someone\u2019s gonna harm themselves, you don\u2019t have a day or hours. You have to get to that quickly. With all the millions of videos that are posted, we had to build this combination of an AI system that could flag content that our reviewers should look at, and then hire a specific team trained and dedicated to that, so that way they could review all the things very quickly and have a very low latency.\n\nIn the last six months, we\u2019ve been able to help first responders get to more than a thousand people who needed help quickly because of that effort.\n\nSo,", + " not anticipating it before, did you not see that that would be a thing? I got into a lively debate with your product managers about it before it was... because you all showed the press before it [launched]. They seemed genuinely surprised when I said, \u201cWhat about murder, what about bullying, what about suicide, what about self-harm, what about this?\u201d They seemed less oriented to that than towards the positivity of what could happen on the platform.\n\nI think some of the cases we were ready for, and some we weren\u2019t. Bullying, I think-\n\nObvious.\n\n\u2014 is something we\u2019ve worked on for a while and have ongoing,", + " good collaborations with law enforcement and community groups around the world. There\u2019s always more to do there, but that\u2019s an area where I\u2019m generally proud of the work that we\u2019ve done. Look, I think on any of these given things, someone will have thought of it in advance, but I think that we should be judged by when we become aware of an issue-\n\nHow quickly you respond.\n\nHow do we respond, and do we get it right, and is it a repeat thing? The thing that I\u2026 In running a company, if you wanna be innovative and advance things forward, I think you have to be willing to get some things wrong,", + " but I don\u2019t think it is acceptable to get the same things wrong over and over again.\n\nAbsolutely, but you\u2019re coming from a different case. When you get things wrong, I don\u2019t wanna say people die, but people suffer. People can suffer in a different way than if I get something wrong or other people do. I mean, the vast amount of responsibility that you have is, I think...\n\nYeah, I would just say that on the flip side, that if we don\u2019t move forward, a lot of good that should happen won\u2019t happen, either. And it\u2019s hard to know what the moral equivalence of those things is,", + " because a lot of the good is diffuse and not things that get in the news, but I can\u2019t tell you how many times I walk down the street in some city and people come up and say that they got married because of Facebook, they point to their kids and they\u2019re like, \u201cI have this kid because of Facebook.\u201d People have stories about how the communities that they form on Facebook are the most meaningful thing in their life, that got them out of bad situations that they were in, and I think if you don\u2019t move forward, you lose all that stuff, too.\n\nSo I mean, these are hard trade-offs. And certainly I don\u2019t think that... You know,", + " we retired \u201cMove fast and break things\u201d many years ago because we didn\u2019t think that that was serving the community as well as it had originally. But I do think that there is a benefit and virtue to continue making progress, and I think with progress means that you get some things wrong. And I think that what our responsibility to do is accept when we get things wrong and not be in denial about it, which sometimes we can be too slow on, but in general I think, if we mess something up, we better damn well make sure we don\u2019t make that same mistake again if it\u2019s a serious thing. So, across elections and all this different stuff,", + " yeah, we need to make sure that we\u2019re on top of these issues.\n\nDo you regret the \u201cmove fast and break things\u201d [motto]? Because a lot of... I mean, I make the joke, \u201cYou broke enough things, now fix them,\u201d kind of idea. Do you regret that motto?\n\nI mean, I think it is certainly used today as a symbol... It\u2019s used in a way that isn\u2019t what I meant. And so the notion up-front was not about social impact; it was about writing code in this service, and the idea is that by moving faster, we can serve more people with something that a lot of people really wanted.", + " And I kind of...\n\nActually, you know, so at CZI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we\u2019ve kind of adapted that value. Instead of \u201cmove fast,\u201d we call it \u201clearn fast.\u201d And that\u2019s really the spirit of it more, I think, is that, the idea is, you can either try to get everything right up-front, which I think has a high cost to making progress and serving people, or you can believe that we\u2019re not gonna get everything right up-front, but by moving forward we will learn more. And that will make it so that the second and third version of what we do is better.\n\nAnd I really believe that that is the right way to run a company;", + " I think companies need to be learning organisms. More than any specific product strategy that we have, our strategy as a company is to learn as quickly as we can how to serve our community, and I think you only do that by being out in the world, by talking to people, by running experiments, and by trying out things that you\u2019re not sure are gonna be good to see how people use them. I think that that is our responsibility, is to learn as quickly as we can as an organization.\n\nSo if it\u2019s \u201clearn fast,\u201d what\u2019s the second thing? What do you do with things?\n\nWhat do you mean?\n\n\u201dLearn fast\u201d rather than \u201cmove fast.\u201d What happens to \u201cbreak things?\u201d\n\nWell the value was always move fast.", + " It wasn\u2019t-\n\nWhat happens to the break part?\n\nWell, the point there was, I think values are only worth what you\u2019re willing to give up for them. So, a lot of companies have values that are \u201cbe nice.\u201d it\u2019s like, \u201cOkay, well fine, be nice.\u201d That\u2019s good, you should, but the real question is like what are you willing to give up?\n\nSo I don\u2019t think you can just tell a company \u201cmove fast\u201d; the question is, \u201cWhat are you willing to tolerate?\u201d And what we were willing to tolerate early on was more bugs in the product. Not having the product do something completely different,", + " but like if there were a few errors in the code and it wasn\u2019t fully polished, we generally thought that learning quicker and serving people who wanted the product was more important than having it be completely bug-free.\n\nWhat we realized was we were getting to a point that we were accumulating so many bugs that having to go back and fix all the bugs after the fact of having launched them was actually net slowing us down and making it so it actually became not an effective way to move forward. So we changed the motto to what is now the much less sexy version of \u201cMove fast with stable infrastructure,\u201d where the current strategy for moving fast is to invest disproportionately in infrastructure and abstractions that any given engineer could either go work at a start-up,", + " or their own company, or they can come here and I think be much more productive because they\u2019re building on top of all these great systems that have been built.\n\nBut either way, I don\u2019t think you can just say, \u201cMove fast\u201d; the question is, \u201cWhat are you willing to give up?\u201d And in our case now, what we\u2019re willing to give up is a meaningful portion of our engineering team working on great infrastructure and abstractions to help everyone else move forward when those people could otherwise be working on serving people directly. I still think that that\u2019s the right strategy because I think learning fast is the core of what we need to be doing.\n\nSo I want to finish up on news by talking about sort of what\u2019s going on today with conservatives versus liberals.", + " Why won\u2019t you make choices there, or do you feel like you just don\u2019t want to make any, in terms of media and what should be... How do you respond when conservatives say, \u201cYou don\u2019t have enough conservative stuff on the platform?\u201d You guys have responded and some people think you over-responded. How do you think you\u2019ve done?\n\nSorry, I didn\u2019t really understand that.\n\nHow do you feel with the allegations from conservatives that there\u2019s not enough conservative... That conservative voices are... I hear it all the time from conservatives.\n\nYeah.\n\nThey get shadowed either on Twitter or on Facebook, or that you\u2019re out to not allow conservative voices to speak up.", + " And on the other side, others think that you\u2019re bending over backwards to serve a conservative constituency.\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nI don\u2019t think you can win any way, but...\n\nWell, I think it gets back to the core principles here. So it\u2019s actually the same core principles we discussed before: Giving people a voice on the one hand, and keeping the community and people safe on the other hand. And I think that there are... Our bias tends to be to want to give people a voice and let people express a wide range of opinions. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a liberal or conservative thing; those are the words in the U.S.", + " It\u2019s-\n\nSilicon Valley issues...\n\nYeah, but I mean, we think that that is a virtue. Interestingly, I think for most of the history of the company, I think a lot of people agreed that that was a virtue. I think recently, a lot of people may be just more focused on some of the negatives that can come with people widely having a voice, but I think that\u2019s become a more unpopular belief in the last few years, that giving people a voice is good. But we still believe it. I think that you see a lot of good around the world come from that, and I think that we will eventually come around to that as well in the US broadly.\n\nWhat is your political leanings?", + " Do you have them?\n\nI care about specific issues very deeply and I\u2019m not sure that aligns with any kind of specific thing. So I mean, I\u2019m very outspoken on immigration reform. In 2013, I helped start with a number of entrepreneurs FWD.us, which is a group working on immigration reform that I think recognizes that we need to secure the border and enforce laws, but that also understands that the benefits of immigration, both to the country and the economy and as a humane civil rights issue for the 11 million people who are undocumented here, is incredibly important. I mean, I\u2019ve-\n\nHow did you feel about the border separations as a citizen?\n\nIt was terrible.", + " Terrible.\n\nWhat did you do? Did you do anything besides donate money or stuff like...\n\nYeah, well I mean, the good news here is because we\u2019ve been working on FWD for so long, it has established a lot of the infrastructure that now... When a crisis comes up, you can\u2019t just spin this stuff up immediately. So they\u2019re in there and they\u2019re able to help out.\n\nBut I mean, talking about social utility, one of the really proud moments recently of working at this company was the fact that a couple of people could-\n\nThe Willners. I had them on the podcast. Yeah, they\u2019re great.\n\n... start a fundraiser to raise $1500,", + " enough to bail one person out, and they ended up raising more than $20 million. And this thing just went viral, and I think it\u2019s a great example of when you give people a voice what positive things can happen, both substantively in terms of the fundraiser and just the widespread show of support, I think, is also really meaningful. And I think a combination of that and a number of other things like that may have been what led the administration to backtrack on the policy there.\n\nYeah, possibly. Possibly.\n\nSo let\u2019s get into the idea of privacy and data. How do you assess your performance in front of Congress? It was a low bar,", + " Mark; they didn\u2019t do a very good job. That\u2019s my opinion.\n\nYou thought I didn\u2019t do a very good job?\n\nI thought you did, but I only thought it\u2019s because they did such a bad job.\n\nWell look, I think a lot of people-\n\nYou did fine.\n\n\u2014 think about this from a gamesmanship perspective of like, someone\u2019s winning and someone\u2019s losing.\n\nRight. Well, it is politics.\n\nI try not to... Yeah, okay, and maybe I\u2019m too idealistic still.\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nBut I tend to come at this from the perspective of, we have a duty to the country to provide as much context as we can about the set of issues that we see.", + " And in general, I was impressed at how many of the people there both, I think, had a handle on a lot of the issues and I think genuinely were trying to understand them. And some of the questions I thought were really hard and pointed.\n\nWhich one? Which one?\n\nOn the second day, I thought Congressman Kennedy\u2019s questions-\n\nSecond day was better, yeah.\n\nI mean, he asked them respectfully, but they were very hard questions around who owns the data and how is it gonna be used? And to me, that just got to the heart of why processes like that are important.\n\nSo I didn\u2019t feel like my responsibility there was to show up and \u201cwin.\u201d I was trying to-\n\nOh,", + " I wasn\u2019t thinking it was a winning thing. I thought the questions were not very illuminating. That\u2019s all.\n\nI\u2019m there as a witness who hopefully understands some relevant context on an issue of importance to the nation, and I view my responsibility as making sure that they can get as much information as they need to in order to inform what they need to go do. Because now, whether it\u2019s the cooperation that we have with the Mueller investigation, or areas like this, where there\u2019s hearings about election interference, or the data privacy issues, these are broader issues and we\u2019re a player in them, but there\u2019s a much bigger picture here as well,", + " and we don\u2019t have the full context of that.\n\nSo I think to the extent that we... Our responsibility is to do everything we can to prevent these issues on our surface and to make sure that the people whose job it is to have the full context across everything, have whatever information we can provide. Like you saw with the Mueller indictments recently, I think some of that context probably initially came from us, but then they had to go build on that for years in terms of putting together the whole story and do very significant work on top of that. But if we can help out in ways like that, then I feel good about our contribution.\n\nBut have you given them full activity of the Russians on your platform?", + " Have you given the investigation full access to that data?\n\nI\u2019m not sure what that means. In general, I think the way this works is they ask a set of questions, and we go and do investigations, and turn up whatever we find.\n\nOkay. Back to the hearings, one of the things I think... I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s a win/lose thing; I think they did not press you very hard on certain issues. One of them that you kept saying... Two areas: One is what you guys do with the data; one was the part related to Cambridge Analytica, which is what happened there, which I think is still... You\u2019re still investigating,", + " it\u2019s still being investigated by authorities in how it happened. And in that case, your defense was, \u201cWe didn\u2019t see it, but once we saw it, we did something about it.\u201d What I would\u2019ve asked is, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you see it?\u201d What\u2019s the problem in that with this data that you did not see it being misused? Because I was at your 2009 or 2008... I remember when you were talking about this idea.\n\nYeah, so the principles at play here are, on the one hand, you want people to have control over their information and be able to-\n\nRemove it.\n\n... bring it out of Facebook-\n\nRight.", + " Data portability.\n\n... to other different apps, because we\u2019re not gonna build all of the social experiences and it should be easy for people to use their data anywhere. But on the other hand, if they have that information in Facebook and the developer has some relationship with us, then we also have a responsibility to protect people and keep people safe. And what happened here was a developer built a quiz app, and then they turned around and sold the data that people gave them to someone else. And that is clearly against all of the policies that we have. I mean, that\u2019s terrible, right? We don\u2019t sell data, we don\u2019t allow anyone to sell data.", + " Because it was on their servers, we don\u2019t necessarily see that transaction or whatever they\u2019re doing.\n\nBut you have, in the past, caught people doing this and been much more rigorous in that.\n\nWell we find... So we do a number of things. One is, we do ongoing audits and we have built technical systems to see if a developer is requesting information in weird ways. We do spot checks where we can audit developers\u2019 servers. But a lot of the stuff comes from flags that either people in the community or law enforcement or different folks send us, and that was actually similar here too. I think it was The Guardian who initially pointed out to us,", + " \u201cHey, we think that this developer, Alexander Kogan, has sold information.\u201d And when we learned about that, we immediately shut down the app, took away his profile, and demanded certification that the data was deleted.\n\nNow the thing that I think, in retrospect, that we really messed up here is that we believed the certification. Now normally, I don\u2019t know about you, but when someone writes a legal certification, my inclination is to believe that. But in retrospect, I think it\u2019s very clear...\n\nNo.\n\nYou don\u2019t?\n\nNo, I don\u2019t believe anybody.\n\nAll right, well that\u2019s...\n\nThere\u2019s an expression in journalism,", + " \u201cIf your mother says she loves you, check it.\u201d But go ahead.\n\nAll right, that\u2019s fair. I tend to have more faith in the rule of law, but-\n\nAnd I think the links between Peter [Thiel] on your board and [Steve] Bannon and... It creates a really bad situation for you all, or suspect. It at least leads to people wondering what was happening there. Easily.\n\nAll right. Well I don\u2019t think that there\u2019s any suggestion that that stuff was connected here, but I do think-\n\nNo, but I\u2019m just saying. It just creates a, \u201cWhat the heck was going on here?\u201d\n\nYeah.", + " I think in retrospect... You know, we didn\u2019t know what Cambridge Analytica was there, it didn\u2019t strike us as a sketchy thing. We just had no history with them. Knowing what I know now, we obviously would not have just taken their certification at its word and would\u2019ve gone in and done an audit then.\n\nAll right. Should still-\n\nSo now we\u2019re basically doing this. Now our policy is, we are not just going to take developers at their word when they say that they aren\u2019t misusing information; we\u2019re going to go and audit every single developer who had a large amount of access to people\u2019s information before we significantly lock down the amount of access that developers could get starting back in 2014.\n\nShould someone have been fired for this?\n\nYou know-\n\nI asked Sheryl this,", + " so I\u2019m just curious what you think.\n\nWell, I think it\u2019s a big issue. But look, I designed the platform, so if someone\u2019s going to get fired for this, it should be me. And I think that the important thing going forward is to make sure that we get this right. In this case, the most important steps, in terms of, to prevent this from happening again, we\u2019d already taken in 2014 when we had changed dramatically the way that the platform worked.\n\nBut overall, I mean, this is an important situation, and I think again it\u2019s... This to me is an example of,", + " you get judged by how you deal with an issue when it comes up. And I think on this one, we\u2019ve done the right things, and many of them I think we\u2019d actually done years ago to prevent this kind of situation from happening again.\n\nBut to be clear, you\u2019re not gonna fire yourself right now? Is that right?\n\nNot on this podcast right now.\n\nOkay, all right. Well that would be fantastic. I mean, I think you\u2019ll do okay.\n\nSo let\u2019s get to the privacy and data part of it. One of the things you kept saying in Congress, which really drove me crazy because you said it like... I counted it.\n\nDo you really want me to fire myself right now?\n\nSure.", + " It\u2019s fine.\n\nJust for the news?\n\nYeah, why not? Whatever, Mark. Whatever works for you. No.\n\nI think we should do what\u2019s gonna be right for the community.\n\nAll right, okay. All right. Well I\u2019ll get to regulation in a second, but two more sections and then you\u2019ll be out of here. One is, you kept saying, \u201cSenator, we don\u2019t sell your data. Senator, we don\u2019t sell your data.\u201d You kind of sell people\u2019s data in a different way by marrying it with other data, you sell insights into that data, you sell... Your whole business is predicated on using data to make money.", + " Why did you keep saying that? I mean technically, you\u2019re correct, but...\n\nWell I think facts do matter.\n\nYes, I know, but you don\u2019t technically sell your data, but you use their data to sell advertising. So you are in essence... What are you doing with people\u2019s data? How would you describe it?\n\nWell look, it bothers me when reputable news outlets make claims like saying that we sell data because it is just-\n\nLike to Procter & Gamble. You don\u2019t-\n\nIt\u2019s just not true.\n\nRight, okay.\n\nWe don\u2019t sell data. Now, I understand what you\u2019re saying, that the business model works basically in two ways;", + " one is people have attention from being on the service, which is no different from the ads you\u2019ll run during this podcast or traditional TV ads for the last 50 years. But there is an element of targeting which is that, because we understand what you\u2019re interested in, we can show you more relevant ads to you. And people, overall, people want to know that their information is secure, and that if they give it to you, they want you to use it to make their experience good, but they don\u2019t want you to give it to other people.\n\nSo while it may seem like a small difference to you, this distinction on \u201cselling data,\u201d I actually think to people it\u2019s like the whole game,", + " right? So we don\u2019t sell data, we don\u2019t give the data to anyone else, but overwhelmingly people do tell us that if they\u2019re going to see ads on Facebook, they want the ads to be relevant; they don\u2019t want bad ads. So they want us to use what they\u2019re browsing on Facebook, and what they\u2019ve clicked on, and what they\u2019ve told us that they like in order to show them more relevant ads.\n\nDo they still know enough about what they\u2019re opting into? Someone recently called you to me a \u201cgreedy information hoarder\u201d; essentially that you hoard this information and-\n\nWell let me give you one example that I think is interesting.\n\n... spit it back at people.\n\nDuring the GDPR flows,", + " and rolling that out, one of the specific things that we needed to do was get specific opt-in permission from people to use information from the websites that they used and apps in order to help target ads. And the vast, vast majority of people chose explicitly to opt into that, which goes in line with everything that I\u2019ve seen on the research from what people want, which is that when faced with the decision of do you want more relevant ads or less relevant ads if you\u2019re gonna see ads, people want better ads. Not everyone; I mean, some percent of people said no, but the overwhelming majority of people say yes. And I think that\u2019s just an important thing to internalize on this.\n\nRight.", + " Do you think people understand how much information you have on them? It\u2019s a different factor that ever before in history, how much information you know about people.\n\nMaybe. Although I think most people actually, on a service like Facebook or Instagram, probably have a greater awareness of the information that\u2019s there than on a lot of other services, because in our case, you actually put it there, right? You told us that you like that thing, or you posted that photo, or said that. So I actually think people generally have an awareness and feel like, \u201cWow, these networks have a lot of information.\u201d\n\nThe areas that I would actually worry about more for consumers are places where they don\u2019t realize that services are collecting a lot of information about them,", + " but actually are. So that\u2019s a whole different thing.\n\nLike who? Who?\n\nWell, a lot of other folks online.\n\nSuch as?\n\nI mean, there\u2019s the whole industry of data brokers, for example, who we\u2019ve recently-\n\nWho you used to-\n\n... made the decision that we-\n\nBut you used to.\n\n... don\u2019t want to be in business there.\n\nRight.\n\nI mean, we never were a data broker, but we used to let advertisers-\n\nYeah, marry them. Marry the data.\n\n... use data brokers. And we decided no, we think that this is not a good thing, so we\u2019re gonna cut that out.\n\nWhy did that happen?", + " Why did you suddenly come to that realization?\n\nWell I think around the time of the Cambridge Analytica issue, we realized that we needed to do a full audit, not just of that specific issue, but across all the platform, like everything that was going on. Where was data coming into the system, where might people\u2019s data be going out, and every case of that, do people understand what is going on? And we just made a series of decisions that were like \u201cNo, we think that given how we view our responsibility and where the world is, this is no longer the right thing. We should not do this, we should not do this,", + " this we should change or communicate differently.\u201d And we did a series of actions around that, and this was one of them.\n\nOkay. So let me finish up about you, but I do want to ask one more thing in this area: Regulation, how much do you think is coming from if the Democrats get back in power? They\u2019ve gotten rather hostile towards you and Google, it seems.\n\nWell, I think you\u2019re too focused on the U.S.\n\nOkay, across the world. Do you see regulation being \u2026 Obviously, Europe is a place where there\u2019s much more regulation happening and more activity. Do you see it-\n\nYeah, so there\u2019s lots of different areas for this.", + " The area that I think is most likely is content. So the U.S. has a very rich tradition of free speech; it is written into the Constitution, free speech, so here, we have a very strong allergic reaction to trying to regulate that. But in almost every other country in the world, while people generally want as much expression as possible, there\u2019s some notion that something else might be more important than speech; so preventing hate or-\n\nIn Germany or wherever.\n\n... terrorism or just different things. So you\u2019re already starting to see this; I mean, there was the hate speech law in Germany. I think that there will be additional laws creating responsibility for social networking,", + " and social companies, and Internet companies overall to be more proactive in policing terrorism, or bullying, or hate speech, or different kinds of content.\n\nAnd overall, I think that there are good and bad ways to do that, but my general take is that a lot of that stuff can be pretty reasonable. I mean, I think we\u2019re not kids in a dorm room anymore, right?\n\nNo. That\u2019s so long ago, Mark.\n\nWhen we were... No, I mean, but back then, if someone had said, you need to make sure that you\u2019re gonna give people a voice, but you need to make sure that it\u2019s not used to spread hate speech,", + " the best you could do is get the community to flag things for you and hope to review them yourself. But now we\u2019re a big company, AI technology has advanced significantly. We\u2019re at a point now where we\u2019ve built AI tools to detect when terrorists are trying to spread content, and 99 percent of the terrorist content that we take down, our systems flag before any human sees them or flags them for us. And we can afford, at this point, to have 20,000 people reviewing the content.\n\nSo I think the point where you have that kind of AI technology and you have the resources to be able to employ people to do that kind of content review,", + " I kinda think you have a responsibility to do it.\n\nOkay. So you can handle regulation. What about the call... There\u2019s been some calls to break up some companies like Facebook or Amazon that become too big. Are you in fear of that in any way?\n\nYou know, I think that there\u2019s... It\u2019s a very interesting debate overall. If you actually get down to why we\u2019re big, it\u2019s not... In the traditional sense, we\u2019re not big because we\u2019re so big in the United States, although we are and a lot of people use our products here. If we weren\u2019t an international company, if you said,", + " \u201cOkay, you have to shut down all of your services outside of the U.S.,\u201d we actually would not be very profitable at all; we actually would probably be unprofitable.\n\nSo the reason why we are a successful and large company is because we have built something here that can now serve billions of people around the world as well, which is actually where all the margin comes from, in terms of... I mean, we have the cost structure that we have, and then that\u2019s where the business comes from and... Don\u2019t get me wrong, there\u2019s a lot of revenue in the United States as well, but that would barely cover the cost of the company.\n\nSo I think you have this question from a policy perspective,", + " which is, do we want American companies to be exporting across the world? We grew up here, I think we share a lot of values that I think people hold very dear here, and I think it\u2019s generally very good that we\u2019re doing this, both for security reasons and from a values perspective. Because I think that the alternative, frankly, is going to be the Chinese companies. If we adopt a stance which is that, \u201cOkay, we\u2019re gonna, as a country, decide that we wanna clip the wings of these companies and make it so that it\u2019s harder for them to operate in different places, where they have to be smaller,", + " then there are plenty of other companies out that are willing and able to take the place of the work that we\u2019re doing.\u201d\n\nSpecifically the Chinese companies.\n\nYeah. And they do not share the values that we have. I think you can bet that if the government hears word that it\u2019s election interference or terrorism, I don\u2019t think Chinese companies are going to wanna cooperate as much and try to aid the national interest there.\n\nWhat is your situation in China now?\n\nI mean, we\u2019re blocked.\n\nAnd are you working on moving Facebook products in there?\n\nOver the long term. I think it\u2019s hard to have a mission of wanting to bring the whole world closer together and leave out the biggest country.\n\nWhat will that take?\n\nI don\u2019t know.", + " I mean, I think that that\u2019s...\n\nYou went. You jogged in Tiananmen Square. What else could you do?\n\nActually, I thought that that was interesting that that got so much pickup.\n\nOh, come on. I\u2019m right on that one. You can\u2019t jog in Tiananmen Square, Mark! You can\u2019t. It looks like you\u2019re cooperating with the Chinese government. We\u2019re gonna argue about that forever.\n\nFine. Well, that year, I posted photos of me running everywhere, including Delhi, which has worse air-\n\nIt\u2019s Tiananmen Square.\n\nWhich has worse air quality.\n\nI know you were 12,", + " but there was a guy with a tank and a briefcase in that square when you were 12, and it was problematic.\n\nOkay. Well, I\u2019m not gonna defend that.\n\nWhere are you with China?\n\nI mean, we\u2019re, I think, a long time away from doing anything.\n\nOkay.\n\nI mean, at some point, I think that we need to figure it out, but we need to figure out a solution that is in line with our principles and what we wanna do, and in line with the laws there, or else it\u2019s not gonna happen. Right now, there isn\u2019t an intersection.\n\nAll right. I wanna finish up just talking about you.", + " We just have a few more minutes. This is an issue I\u2019ve talked about a lot is Silicon Valley responsibility, and taking responsibility. And taking responsibility of your dark things, and not being quite as optimistic, and a lot of people here have a problem with looking at that. How do you look at your responsibility, as a leader? As a leader of a massive company with enormous power? Do you think you grok that at this point? Sometimes I don\u2019t think you do. I really don\u2019t.\n\nWell, I think we have a responsibility to build the things that give people a voice and help people connect and help people build community,", + " which ultimately is the unique thing that we do in the world. That, I think is one important piece of it. But then on the other hand, I think we also have a responsibility to recognize that the tools won\u2019t always be used for good things and we need to be there and be ready to mitigate all the negative uses, so whether that\u2019s terrorism, or people thinking about self-harm or suicide who we need to go make sure they get help quickly, or bullying, or election interference, or fake news. The list goes on, and there\u2019s a lot of these things. There are very specific pieces of work that we have to do on each.", + " I mean, just take terrorism for example. We have a team of more than 200 people working on counterterrorism. I mean, that\u2019s pretty intense. That\u2019s not like what people think about what Facebook is.\n\nNo, I\u2019m sure when you were an engineer you weren\u2019t thinking this was your...\n\nLook, I do think that there will be things that we get wrong in the future, too, but I think to say that we don\u2019t care about what\u2019s going on, or mitigating any of the downsides of what people do, I don\u2019t think is right. I think to say that that is the only thing that we should be focused on,", + " I think also is not quite right because I think that what most people out there want is the ability to stay connected with the people that they love, and to be able to join communities because that\u2019s an important part of people\u2019s lives. If we\u2019re not making progress on that and advancing the ball forward there too, then I also don\u2019t think we\u2019re doing our job.\n\nWhat about the image of Facebook? It\u2019s not great right now. Would you agree with that?\n\nIt\u2019s not as good as it\u2019s been.\n\nYeah. How does that feel personally?\n\nI mean, personally, my take on this is that for the last 10 or 15 years,", + " we have gotten mostly glowing and adoring attention from people, and if people wanna focus on some real issues for a couple of years, I\u2019m fine with it. Frankly, I think that the news industry is critically important because it points out things and surfaces truths that can often be uncomfortable. I think that that\u2019s working, and the spotlight has been pointed on things that we have a responsibility to do better, and I accept that. While it may not be the most fun period of running the company, I think we take the responsibility really seriously and get that in the grand scheme of things, I don\u2019t think people are being unfair to us.", + " I think people have been very positive and are focused on all the good that come with the technology for a long period of time. To have a period where people focus on some of the negative uses, to make sure that we fully understand that, I think is completely reasonable.\n\nWhat about you personally? How does that feel? Because it\u2019s directed at you.\n\nYeah. I mean, I think that that is my personal take. I think it\u2019s...\n\n\u201dIt\u2019s okay. Mark is okay.\u201d You accept the responsibility of the criticism is what you\u2019re saying.\n\nYeah. I also just think you need to put all this in perspective. If you look at what people have said about Facebook and how much they love the brand and the products,", + " over a 10-year period, I mean, most of the coverage and what people say is super-positive. If there\u2019s gonna be a period of two years where we frankly didn\u2019t handle a bunch of things as well as we should\u2019ve and need to get back on top of it, then I mean, you\u2019re not gonna cry about that. You\u2019re gonna do what you need to make it good.\n\nWhat do you do to not cry about it?\n\nWhat do you mean?\n\nWell, if I got this much criticism, I think I\u2019d feel a lot of pressure. I\u2019d feel a lot of pressure.\n\nWell, feeling pressure is different from being sad.\n\nYeah.\n\nI think that-\n\nOh,", + " I don\u2019t think you should be sad, necessarily. I think you\u2019ve got a pretty good life.\n\nWe sit down and say, \u201cAll right. We have to go do this.\u201d\n\nWell, you might be more self-reflective. Most people in Silicon Valley aren\u2019t self reflective. Like you might go, \u201cWhat did I do? What have I done? And what should I do better in the future?\u201d I think that would be an adult response.\n\nAt an institutional level I think making sure that we put appropriate focus on these things is really important.\n\nWhat\u2019s your goal this year? You have these goals. This year is fix Facebook.", + " You did the Visit Every Cow In America Tour last year. What is your personal goal this year? Away from fixing Facebook?\n\nI mean, I think that the feeling this year is that... I\u2019ve done these personal challenges because I think running a company can be an all-consuming thing. I think in order to have a broader perspective, you wanna do things outside of that too. Whether that\u2019s running, or learning Mandarin, or visiting different places, or coding an AI to run my home, I think that those are all good things. This year, I just think that we are so-\n\nI missed the AI to run your home, but okay.", + " All right.\n\nWhat\u2019s up?\n\nI missed the AI running your home, but go ahead. All right.\n\nWhat do you mean?\n\nI missed that goal.\n\nJarvis!\n\nJarvis, oh yeah.\n\nYeah, you got that.\n\nOh, yeah. I forgot.\n\nThat was fun. But this year, I think we have a number of issues that we need to deal with and it didn\u2019t feel right to me to focus on something else outside. I think that this is, and interesting enough, this is an important challenge that I think we need to dedicate every fiber of what we\u2019re doing to making sure that we get this right.\n\nHow long does that last?\n\nWhat?", + " This focus?\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nI think it\u2019ll take about three years to fully retool everything at Facebook to be on top of all the content issues and security issues. But the good news is we\u2019re about a year and a half in. I do think that by the end of this year, we\u2019ll have significantly turned the corner on a lot of these issues. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re gonna be as good as we would like to next year, either, but I think it\u2019ll be close. Then, my hope is that by the end of 2019, a lot of the systems will be much more operational and dialed in,", + " which doesn\u2019t mean that aren\u2019t gonna be errors. There\u2019re always gonna be errors that people say, \u201cHey, you enforced against this content incorrectly.\u201d But I think part of that means having mature systems, like building an appeal process so that way, it\u2019s not just some representative somewhere around the world of Facebook who makes a decision on your content, but you can appeal that, and maybe even appeal it independently over time to some other body. But by the end of 2019, I would hope to have all of that in place.\n\nThen have some other goal. Do you have any political goals? I know people thought when you did your grand tour of the United States that was what you were doing with your team of videographers,", + " et cetera. You had a lot of photographers, Mark, they were lovely photos. I went across the United States and I had no photographers with me.\n\nWell, we have what? We have one photographer at Facebook?\n\nThey were nice photos!\n\nYes. Okay.\n\nAll right.\n\nAnyhow.\n\nYou might imagine why people would wonder if you were doing that.\n\nI understand. I mean, I care about helping to address these problems of social cohesion and understanding what economic problems people think exist. I tend to think that we all get support from three basic places: Our friends and family, the communities we\u2019re a part of, and then,", + " ultimately, the government with its safety net. I think as a society, we spend the vast majority of our time talking about what the government should do in the political debates.\n\nI think we spend not enough time talking about how important community is. So you go around... I mean I saw, sit with ministers in places, and they talk about not just the religious role that they play as a religious organization, but as a community organization. One minister told me that he knew that when a factory closed down in town, he was gonna be seeing more couples for couples counseling a few weeks later because of the tension. All right. That\u2019s a real piece of social infrastructure that needs to exist.\n\nIf people aren\u2019t a part of those kind of organizations,", + " then there\u2019s a core need that people have that is not being fulfilled.\n\nYou go to military bases and you meet the spouses of people who get deployed in different places, and they told me that the core part of their social infrastructure are these Facebook groups where every time they get deployed, they go join the group of military families around that base and figure out what school they should send their kid to, what services locally they should use. That is like how they got rooted and how they get established in the community. It\u2019s not just a group that\u2019s online. It spans online and offline, meeting real people.\n\nI sat down with kids in Chicago,", + " a school where a lot of kids were in gangs. I mean, they told me the reason why people were in gangs is not because they wanted to be in a gang, they understood that it was dangerous, but because they needed a sense of community, and in a dangerous environment, they wanted to know that someone was looking after them.\n\nMy takeaway here is that there is a real issue, which is that people need community support, but if you look at the sociology and the history here, community membership has actually been on the decline, and it\u2019s been fragmenting for 40 or 50 years, well predating the internet. Since the \u201870s,", + " there are now 25% or 30% of people who are no longer members of groups, whether religious organizations, or local organizations, or volunteer organizations, that they once were. That strikes me as a real crisis. It\u2019s not just American, I think it\u2019s around the world as well. That\u2019s why we changed our mission last year, to not just be about friends and family, which is always gonna be a core part of the Facebook experience.\n\nAnd community, I get it.\n\nBut to now be about helping people connect and join those kind of meaningful communities, like military spouses, or the group for you have a new kid and you join a group for new fathers,", + " or new mothers, that ends up being a really core of your social support network. Or you, God forbid, come down with a rare disease and you need to have a support group of people who have that but there are no other people around you who have that. There are about 200 million people on Facebook who are a part of what they call these meaningful communities. For whom upon joining them, that becomes the defining aspect of their Facebook and internet experience and one of the most important parts of their real world support structure.\n\nSome people might say the uses of the internet and mobile phones is the reason people are feeling this way too.\n\nWell,", + " hold on, hold on, because-\n\nThe solution to Facebook might not be more Facebook, but go ahead.\n\nLook, I think that this problem clearly predates the internet, let alone Facebook.\n\nLoneliness, yes. The human condition.\n\nWell, and the decline of community. I think that putting that all on the internet seems unlikely.\n\nI get that. I get that.\n\nI think it\u2019s clear that not all the uses are gonna be good. I mean, I\u2019m not trying to say that it\u2019s all good, but I think that it can largely be good.\n\nLet me hurry up here. Community is needed. Does that mean you don\u2019t wanna run or do you wanna be Oprah?", + " What is your goal?\n\nOh, sorry. I didn\u2019t realize we were still on that.\n\nYes. You didn\u2019t answer it, but well done.\n\nNo, look. I mean, we have a five year goal of helping a billion people join communities that are meaningful like that.\n\nOkay. At Facebook.\n\nIf we do that, then I think that we will have played a role in reversing this many decades-long trend of people not being parts of communities.\n\nOf these three groups.\n\nI happen to think that we as a society do not spend enough time thinking about communities and the importance of them.\n\nVersus government.\n\nGovernments are extremely important,", + " there are things that only government can do. Safety net is extremely important, but I mean, that\u2019s not me. That\u2019s not the thing that I\u2019m here to do. I can help build communities and connect people. I do think that that\u2019s an area where I have unique insights and abilities that I can help people do. That\u2019s what I care about, but I think that that\u2019s really important.\n\nTwo more quick questions before I know I have to go. One is, who do you look up to? Do you look up to other internet people? Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or is it there\u2019s like an ultra male competition between and among you?", + " Who was your mentor, would you say?\n\nWell, I think that there are a couple. Bill Gates has always been a mentor and inspiration for me even before I knew him. Just growing up, I admired how Microsoft was mission-focused. It was a company that had a clear social goal, or that it wanted to make... They thought that computers were gonna be valuable, and having that become ubiquitous. It was like an Apollo-like goal to me that always struck me as really nice. Then, I think his second act of going and-\n\nDoing the philanthropy.\n\n\u2014 being one of the world\u2019s best philanthropists has absolutely influenced me.", + " Not only to try to follow in his footsteps and do something hopefully one day that will be as impactful as what he has done, but his lesson there that you have to start early to practice. Like anything that you wanna get good at, you don\u2019t just show up and effectively and efficiently give money away. The notion that if I wanna be really good at this 10 or 15 years from now, then Priscilla and I really need to be starting to work on this now. He has had, he and Melinda, and Melinda has increasingly really been a role model for us as well, just have really deeply influenced the way that I think about both work and philanthropy.\n\nBut one of the things that I\u2019d say that I\u2019m really lucky is that a lot of the people who I look up to the most,", + " I get to work with every day. I mean, I think Sheryl is amazing. A lot of what I know about business and building organizations and leadership come from working with her. A lot of the other folks who I get to work with every day, Chris Cox is just an amazing person. I always tell people that you should only hire people to be on your team if you would work for them. It\u2019s not that I\u2019m looking to swap my role, but I think that in an-\n\nWell, you fired yourself earlier, but go ahead.\n\nBut in an alternate universe, I would be honored to work for any of these people.", + " I think that that is, I don\u2019t know, that is greater gift than having some external mentors who I get to talk to once a quarter.\n\nRight, right. Okay. My very last question. We didn\u2019t get to talk about products. What is your-\n\nWe did. We talked about community.\n\nA little bit. Yeah, community. Community.\n\nI got that in there to your-\n\nI know you did. But of the products, of the many products that- And we didn\u2019t get to talk about diversity, we didn\u2019t talk tech addiction, there\u2019s all kinds of stuff we could talk about. But of the-\n\nDo you want me to go longer?\n\nNo.", + " Yeah, sure if you want! I\u2019m good! Rachael says no. But very briefly, what do you think the most exciting product area is right now? Let\u2019s finish up on that.\n\nWell, I think the time frame matters. I\u2019m very excited about this social mission of helping a billion people-\n\nJoin communities.\n\n... be a part of meaningful communities, that is a very important social need. I think we\u2019re well set up to do it, and I\u2019m very excited about the team that\u2019s doing that.\n\nLonger term, as a technologist, one of things that just excites me is there are always new computing platforms.", + " Every 10 or 15 years a new one comes along. They\u2019re always more native, they capture your human experience more. Immersively, you share more naturally what you\u2019re experiencing. I just think that VR and AR are going to be a really big deal. You can just see this trajectory from early internet, when the technology and connections were slow, most of the internet was text. Text is great, but it can be sometimes hard to capture what\u2019s going on. Then, we all got phones with cameras on them and the internet got good enough to be primarily images. Now the networks are getting good enough that it\u2019s primarily video.", + " At each step along the way, we\u2019re able to capture the human experience with greater fidelity and richness, and I think that that\u2019s great.\n\nNow, I do think that we\u2019re gonna move towards this world where eventually you\u2019ll be able to capture a whole experience that you\u2019re in and be able to send that to someone. I think that that\u2019s just gonna be an amazing technology for perspective taking and putting yourself in other people\u2019s shoes, for being able to feeling like you\u2019re really physically there with someone even when you\u2019re not. One of the criticisms of technology today is you\u2019re sitting and looking at your phone, and we could be sitting together but we\u2019re actually fragmented.\n\nNo,", + " I agree with you on VR. I\u2019ve just been doing some recent VR stuff that\u2019s really promising.\n\nYeah. I mean, there\u2019s a few technology leaps that still need to be made, but the initial use is amazing. I just think that\u2019s a really important technology.\n\nI\u2019m not sure you an give people empathy though. You can see people, the world through people\u2019s eyes, but you can\u2019t understand their experience, necessarily.\n\nYes. Although, I think there\u2019s also an economic... We\u2019ve talked a lot about the social aspects of all of this, but I think one of the biggest issues economically today is that opportunity isn\u2019t evenly distributed.", + " You get all these people have to move to cities, and then the cities get to be way too expensive, and if you have a technology like VR where you can be present anywhere but live where you choose to, then I think that that can be really profound.\n\nThere\u2019re really only a few solutions to this. Historically, cities have grown to be bigger by building better physical infrastructure. There\u2019ll be some amount of that. I mean, I think things like hyperloops and things like that can extend the suburbs, could be quite interesting, but I have to believe that, we\u2019re here in 2018, it\u2019s much cheaper and easier to move bits around than it is atoms.", + " It strikes me that something like VR or AR, or even video conferencing on the path to that, has to be a more likely part of the solution.\n\nI would agree.\n\nThan just building a ton of physical infrastructure. We\u2019ll do both, but that ends up being just critically important. We didn\u2019t touch on that so much today in this. But one of the areas that we\u2019re really focused on is economic empowerment. One of the things that we\u2019re most proud of is that there\u2019re 80 million small businesses who use our tools. When you poll them, the majority of them say that they\u2019re growing jobs, creating jobs and growing faster because of using our tools.", + " The vast majority of them aren\u2019t even paying. We\u2019ve got 6 million advertisers and 80 million small businesses. That\u2019s an area where that\u2019s really the foundation of the economy. If we can help grow that, then that will also make communities stronger and will end up being just a really important part of how I think the country and the world holds together and moves forward over the next 10 or 15 or 20 years.\n\nAll right. Now you have one chance. What would you like to say to your giant nation state of Facebook right now? What is the one thing? Like, \u201cI\u2019m sorry for this-", + "\u201d\n\nWell, we\u2019ve talking about this for a while.\n\nI know. but what\u2019s the one thing they\u2019re getting wrong about you right now? I\u2019m gonna give you a nice out.\n\nThat\u2019s tough. It\u2019s always hard to say what is the one thing. I don\u2019t know. I think that the main thing that I\u2019ve tried to internalize this year is we get that there\u2019s a big responsibility and a lot of things that we need to do better than we are. We are working on it, and I think a lot of them, we\u2019re doing better already, and for the rest, we\u2019re committed to getting to where we need to be for the community.", + " At the same time, we also feel a responsibility to keep on moving forward on giving people tools to share their experience and connect and come together in new ways. Ultimately, that\u2019s the unique thing that Facebook was put on this Earth to do. I think if we don\u2019t push forward on that, we will be missing our responsibility for advancing the ball there. That\u2019s what I care about, and we\u2019re just very serious about making sure that we do both of those things.\n\nAll right, Mark. I really appreciate it, we talked about a lot of things. We didn\u2019t get through everything, but I do appreciate it.\n\nWell,", + " save it, we\u2019ll do it again.\n\nWe\u2019ll do it, yeah. Next time.\n\nWe\u2019ll do it again soon.\n\nOh, we got a lot of stuff. Thank you so much, and we will talk again soon.\n\nGreat.\n" + ], + "length": 27207, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 81, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Scientists who discovered that old men really do have big ears, that playing the didgeridoo helps relieve sleep apnea, and that handling crocodiles can influence gambling decisions are among this year's recipients of the Ig Nobel, the prize for absurd scientific achievement. The 27th annual awards were announced Thursday at Harvard University. \"It's a strange honor to have, but I am thrilled,\" Dr. James Heathcote tells the AP. A British physician, Heathcote won the Ig Nobel for anatomy for his big-ear research, which found that men's ears grow about 0.08 inches per decade after age 30. Among the other winners, who each received $10 trillion cash prizes in virtually worthless Zimbabwean money: Dr. Milo Puhan's Ig Nobel peace prize-winning discovery is a godsend for anyone who lives with an unbearably loud snorer. He found that playing the didgeridoo\u2014that tubular Australian aboriginal instrument that emits a deep, rhythmic drone\u2014helps relieve sleep apnea. The economics prize went to Australian researchers Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer, who found that if you want to limit your gambling losses, don't have a close encounter with a crocodile before hitting the casino. They plunked a 3-foot saltwater crocodile in the arms of people about to gamble, and found that they went on to bet higher amounts. The medicine prize went to French researchers Jean-Pierre Royet, David Meunier, Nicolas Torquet, Anne-Marie Mouly and Tao Jiang, who used advanced brain-scanning technology to measure the extent to which some people are disgusted by cheese. The nutrition prize went Brazilian researchers Enrico Bernard and his team for the first scientific report of human blood in the diet of the hairy-legged vampire bat. They discovered that bats were expanding their diet in an area where humans were encroaching on their territory. The physics prize went to Frenchman Marc-Antoine Fardin, who, inspired by Internet photos of cats in strange places, investigated the question; \"Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?\" The biology prize went to Japanese-Brazilian-Swiss team Kazunori Yoshizawa, Yoshitaka Kamimura, Rodrigo Ferreira, and Charles Lienhard for their discovery of cave insects with male vaginas and female penises. (Last year's winners included a man who wore prosthetic extensions to spend several days living incognito among a herd of wild goats.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Winners of the Ig\u00ae Nobel Prize\n\nFor achievements that first make people LAUGH\n\nthen make them THINK\n\nThe 2018 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2018 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at the 28th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, on Thursday, September 13, 2018, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE [USA] \u2014 Marc Mitchell and David Wartinger, for using roller coaster rides to try to hasten the passage of kidney stones.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Validation of a Functional Pyelocalyceal Renal Model for the Evaluation of Renal Calculi Passage While Riding a Roller Coaster,\" Marc A.", + " Mitchell, David D. Wartinger, The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, vol. 116, October 2016, pp. 647-652.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dave Wartinger\n\nANTHROPOLOGY PRIZE [SWEDEN, ROMANIA, DENMARK, THE NETHERLANDS, GERMANY, UK, INDONESIA, ITALY] \u2014 Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, and Elainie Madsen, for collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often,", + " and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Spontaneous Cross-Species Imitation in Interaction Between Chimpanzees and Zoo Visitors,\" Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, and Elainie Madsen, Primates, vol. 59, no. 1, January 2018, pp 19\u201329.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE [SWEDEN, COLOMBIA, GERMANY, FRANCE, SWITZERLAND]", + " \u2014 Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Erika Wallin, Erik Hedenstrom, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Marie Bengtsson, Volker Jorger, and Peter Witzgall, for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence of a single fly in a glass of wine.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Scent of the Fly,\" Paul G. Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Erika A. Wallin, Erik Hedenstrom, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Marie Bengtsson, Volker Jorger, and Peter Witzgall,", + " bioRxiv, no. 20637, 2017.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Peter Witzgall\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE [PORTUGAL] \u2014 Paula Rom\u00e3o, Ad\u00edlia Alarc\u00e3o and the late C\u00e9sar Viana, for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Human Saliva as a Cleaning Agent for Dirty Surfaces,\" by Paula M. S. Rom\u00e3o, Ad\u00edlia M. Alarc\u00e3o and C\u00e9sar A.N.", + " Viana, Studies in Conservation, vol. 35, 1990, pp. 153-155.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video.\n\nMEDICAL EDUCATION PRIZE [JAPAN] \u2014 Akira Horiuchi, for the medical report \"Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned From Self-Colonoscopy.\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned From Self-Colonoscopy by Using a Small-Caliber, Variable-Stiffness Colonoscope,\" Akira Horiuchi and Yoshiko Nakayama, Gastrointestinal Endoscopy,", + " vol. 63, No. 1, 2006, pp. 119-20.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Akira Horiuchi\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE [AUSTRALIA, EL SALVADOR, UK] \u2014 Thea Blackler, Rafael Gomez, Vesna Popovic and M. Helen Thompson, for documenting that most people who use complicated products do not read the instruction manual.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products,\" Alethea L. Blackler, Rafael Gomez, Vesna Popovic and M.", + " Helen Thompson, Interacting With Computers, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 27-46.\n\nWHO PLANS TO ATTEND THE CEREMONY: Thea Blackler\n\nNUTRITION PRIZE [ZIMBABWE, TANZANIA, UK] \u2014 James Cole, for calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat diets.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Assessing the Calorific Significance of Episodes of Human Cannibalism in the Paleolithic,\" James Cole, Scientific Reports,", + " vol. 7, no. 44707, April 7, 2017.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: James Cole\n\nPEACE PRIZE [SPAIN, COLOMBIA] \u2014 Francisco Alonso, Cristina Esteban, Andrea Serge, Maria-Luisa Ballestar, Jaime Sanmart\u00edn, Constanza Calatayud, and Beatriz Alamar, for measuring the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Shouting and Cursing While Driving: Frequency, Reasons, Perceived Risk and Punishment,\" Francisco Alonso, Cristina Esteban,", + " Andrea Serge and Maria-Luisa Ballestar, Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 1, no. 12017, pp. 1-7.\n\nREFERENCE: \"La Justicia en el Tr\u00e1fico: Conocimiento y Valoraci\u00f3n de la Poblaci\u00f3n Espa\u00f1ola\" [\"Justice in Traffic: Knowledge and Valuation of the Spanish Population\")], F. Alonso, J. Sanmart\u00edn, C. Calatayud, C. Esteban, B. Alamar, and M. L. Ballestar, Cuadernos de Reflexi\u00f3n Attitudes, 2005.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Francisco Alonso\n\nREPRODUCTIVE MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, JAPAN, SAUDI ARABIA, EGYPT, INDIA, BANGLADESH] \u2014 John Barry, Bruce Blank, and Michel Boileau, for using postage stamps to test whether the male sexual organ is functioning properly\u2014as described in their study \"Nocturnal Penile Tumescence Monitoring With Stamps.\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"Nocturnal Penile Tumescence Monitoring With Stamps,\" John M. Barry, Bruce Blank, Michael Boileau, Urology, vol. 15, 1980, pp.", + " 171-172.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: John M. Barry, Bruce Blank, Michel Boileau\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE [CANADA, CHINA, SINGAPORE, USA] \u2014 Lindie Hanyu Liang, Douglas Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D. Lance Ferris, and Lisa Keeping, for investigating whether it is effective for employees to use Voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Righting a Wrong: Retaliation on a Voodoo Doll Symbolizing an Abusive Supervisor Restores Justice,\" Lindie Hanyu Liang,", + " Douglas J. Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D. Lance Ferris, and Lisa M. Keeping, The Leadership Quarterly, February 2018.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Hanyu Liang, Douglas J. Brown, Huiwen Lian, D. Lance Ferris, and Lisa M. Keeping\n\nThe 2017 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2017 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 14, 2017 at the 27th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast.\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE [FRANCE,", + " SINGAPORE, USA] \u2014 Marc-Antoine Fardin, for using fluid dynamics to probe the question \"Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"On the Rheology of Cats,\" Marc-Antoine Fardin, Rheology Bulletin, vol. 83, 2, July 2014, pp. 16-17 and 30.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Marc-Antoine Fardin\n\nPEACE PRIZE [SWITZERLAND, CANADA, THE NETHERLANDS, USA] \u2014 Milo Puhan, Alex Suarez, Christian Lo Cascio,", + " Alfred Zahn, Markus Heitz, and Otto Braendli, for demonstrating that regular playing of a didgeridoo is an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea and snoring.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Didgeridoo Playing as Alternative Treatment for Obstructive Sleep Apnoea Syndrome: Randomised Controlled Trial,\" Milo A. Puhan, Alex Suarez, Christian Lo Cascio, Alfred Zahn, Markus Heitz and Otto Braendli, BMJ, vol. 332 December 2006.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Milo Puhan, Christian Lo Cascio, Markus Heitz, Alex Suarez.", + " NOTE: Alex Suarez was the first patient, and was the inspiration for the study.\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE [AUSTRALIA, USA] \u2014 Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer, for their experiments to see how contact with a live crocodile affects a person's willingness to gamble.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Never Smile at a Crocodile: Betting on Electronic Gaming Machines is Intensified by Reptile-Induced Arousal,\" Matthew J. Rockloff and Nancy Greer, Journal of Gambling Studies, vol. 26, no. 4, December 2010, pp. 571-81.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer\n\nANATOMY PRIZE [UK] \u2014 James Heathcote, for his medical research study \"Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?\" James A. Heathcote, British Medical Journal, vol. 311, 1995, p. 1668.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: James Heathcote\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE [JAPAN, BRAZIL, SWITZERLAND] \u2014 Kazunori Yoshizawa, Rodrigo Ferreira, Yoshitaka Kamimura, and Charles Lienhard,", + " for their discovery of a female penis, and a male vagina, in a cave insect.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Female Penis, Male Vagina and Their Correlated Evolution in a Cave Insect,\" Kazunori Yoshizawa, Rodrigo L. Ferreira, Yoshitaka Kamimura, Charles Lienhard, Current Biology, vol. 24, no. 9, 2014, pp. 1006-1010.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: They delivered a short video acceptance speech, filmed in a cave.\n\nFLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] \u2014 Jiwon Han,", + " for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee. REFERENCE: \"A Study on the Coffee Spilling Phenomena in the Low Impulse Regime,\" Jiwon Han, Achievements in the Life Sciences, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016, pp. 87-101.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Jiwon (\"Jesse\") Han\n\nNOTE: Jiwon Han was a high school student when he wrote the paper, at Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, Gangwon-do,", + " Republic of Korea.\n\nNUTRITION PRIZE [BRAZIL, CANADA, SPAIN] \u2014 Fernanda Ito, Enrico Bernard, and Rodrigo Torres, for the first scientific report of human blood in the diet of the hairy-legged vampire bat\n\nREFERENCE: \"What is for Dinner? First Report of Human Blood in the Diet of the Hairy-Legged Vampire Bat Diphylla ecaudata,\" Fernanda Ito, Enrico Bernard, and Rodrigo A. Torres, Acta Chiropterologica, vol. 18, no. 2, December 2016, pp. 509-", + "515.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK] \u2014 Jean-Pierre Royet, David Meunier, Nicolas Torquet, Anne-Marie Mouly, and Tao Jiang, for using advanced brain-scanning technology to measure the extent to which some people are disgusted by cheese.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Neural Bases of Disgust for Cheese: An fMRI Study,\" Jean-Pierre Royet, David Meunier, Nicolas Torquet, Anne-Marie Mouly and Tao Jiang, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol.", + " 10, October 2016, article 511.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video.\n\nCOGNITION PRIZE [ITALY, SPAIN, UK] \u2014 Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari, Maria Antonietta Stazi, and Salvatore Maria Aglioti, for demonstrating that many identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Is That Me or My Twin? Lack of Self-Face Recognition Advantage in Identical Twins,\" Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari, Maria Antonietta Stazi, Salvatore Maria Aglioti,", + " PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 4, 2015: e0120900.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari\n\nOBSTETRICS PRIZE \u2014 [SPAIN] \u2014 Marisa L\u00f3pez-Teij\u00f3n, \u00c1lex Garc\u00eda-Faura, Alberto Prats-Galino, and Luis Pallar\u00e9s Aniorte, for showing that a developing human fetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother's vagina than to music that is played electromechanically on the mother's belly.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Fetal Facial Expression in Response to Intravaginal Music Emission,\" Marisa L\u00f3pez-", + "Teij\u00f3n, \u00c1lex Garc\u00eda-Faura, and Alberto Prats-Galino, Ultrasound, November 2015, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 216\u2013223.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Fetal Acoustic Stimulation Device,\" patent ES2546919B1, granted September 29, 2015 to Luis y Pallar\u00e9s Aniorte and Maria Luisa L\u00f3pez-Teij\u00f3n P\u00e9rez.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Marisa L\u00f3pez-Teij\u00f3n, \u00c1lex Garc\u00eda-Faura, Alberto Prats-Galino, and Luis Pallar\u00e9s Aniorte\n\nNOTE:", + " They also offer a product based on this research The product is named \"Babypod\".\n\nThe 2016 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 22, 2016 at the 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast.\n\nREPRODUCTION PRIZE [EGYPT] \u2014 The late Ahmed Shafik, for studying the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats, and for conducting similar tests with human males.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Effect of Different Types of Textiles on Sexual Activity.", + " Experimental study,\" Ahmed Shafik, European Urology, vol. 24, no. 3, 1993, pp. 375-80.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Contraceptive Efficacy of Polyester-Induced Azoospermia in Normal Men,\" Ahmed Shafik, Contraception, vol. 45, 1992, pp. 439-451.\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE [NEW ZEALAND, UK] \u2014 Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Brand Personality of Rocks:", + " A Critical Evaluation of a Brand Personality Scale,\" Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes,and Shelagh Ferguson, Marketing Theory, vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 451-475.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Mark Avis and Sarah Forbes\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE [HUNGARY, SPAIN, SWEDEN, SWITZERLAND] \u2014 G\u00e1bor Horv\u00e1th, Mikl\u00f3s Blah\u00f3, Gy\u00f6rgy Kriska, Ram\u00f3n Heged\u00fcs, Bal\u00e1zs Gerics, R\u00f3bert Farkas, Susanne \u00c5kesson,", + " P\u00e9ter Malik, and Hansruedi Wildermuth, for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.\n\nREFERENCE: \"An Unexpected Advantage of Whiteness in Horses: The Most Horsefly-Proof Horse Has a Depolarizing White Coat,\" G\u00e1bor Horv\u00e1th, Mikl\u00f3s Blah\u00f3, Gy\u00f6rgy Kriska, Ram\u00f3n Heged\u00fcs, Bal\u00e1zs Gerics, R\u00f3bert Farkas and Susanne \u00c5kesson, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 277 no. 1688,", + " pp. June 2010, pp. 1643-1650.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Ecological Traps for Dragonflies in a Cemetery: The Attraction of Sympetrum species (Odonata: Libellulidae) by Horizontally Polarizing Black Grave-Stones,\" G\u00e1bor Horv\u00e1th, P\u00e9ter Malik, Gy\u00f6rgy Kriska, Hansruedi Wildermuth, Freshwater Biology, vol. 52, vol. 9, September 2007, pp. 1700\u20139.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Susanne \u00c5kesson\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE [GERMANY]", + " \u2014 Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.\n\nREFERENCE: \"EPA, California Notify Volkswagen of Clean Air Act Violations\", U.S. Environmental Protection Agency news release, September 18, 2015.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE [GERMANY] \u2014 Christoph Helmchen, Carina Palzer, Thomas M\u00fcnte, Silke Anders, and Andreas Sprenger, for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Itch Relief by Mirror Scratching. A Psychophysical Study,\" Christoph Helmchen, Carina Palzer, Thomas F. M\u00fcnte, Silke Anders, Andreas Sprenger, PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no 12, December 26, 2013, e82756.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Andreas Sprenger\n\nPSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [BELGIUM, THE NETHERLANDS, GERMANY, CANADA, USA] \u2014 Evelyne Debey, Maarten De Schryver, Gordon Logan, Kristina Suchotzki, and Bruno Verschuere,", + " for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers.\n\nREFERENCE: \"From Junior to Senior Pinocchio: A Cross-Sectional Lifespan Investigation of Deception,\" Evelyne Debey, Maarten De Schryver, Gordon D. Logan, Kristina Suchotzki, and Bruno Verschuere, Acta Psychologica, vol. 160, 2015, pp. 58-68.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Bruno Verschuere\n\nPEACE PRIZE [CANADA, USA] \u2014 Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne,", + " Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang for their scholarly study called \"On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit\".\n\nREFERENCE: \"On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit,\" Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang, Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549\u2013563.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Gordon Pennycook, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE [UK]", + " \u2014 Awarded jointly to: Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.\n\nREFERENCE: GoatMan; How I Took a Holiday from Being Human, Thomas Thwaites, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1616894054.\n\nREFERENCE: Being a Beast, by Charles Foster, Profile Books, 2016,", + " ISBN 978-1781255346.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Charles Foster, Thomas Thwaites. [NOTE: Thomas Thwaites's goat suit was kindly released for Ig Nobel purposes from the exhibition 'Platform - Body/Space' at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and will be back on display at the museum from 4 October 2016 till 8 January 2017.]\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE [SWEDEN] \u2014 Fredrik Sj\u00f6berg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " The Fly Trap is the first volume of Fredrik Sj\u00f6berg's autobiographical trilogy, En flugsamlares v\u00e4g (\"The Path of a Fly Collector\"), and the first to be published in English. Pantheon Books, 2015, ISBN 978-1101870150.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Fredrik Sj\u00f6berg\n\nPERCEPTION PRIZE [JAPAN] \u2014 Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Perceived size and Perceived Distance of Targets Viewed From Between the Legs:", + " Evidence for Proprioceptive Theory,\" Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, Vision Research, vol. 46, no. 23, November 2006, pp. 3961\u201376.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Atsuki Higashiyama\n\nThe 2015 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2015 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 17th, 2015 at the 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast.\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE \u2014 Callum Ormonde and Colin Raston [AUSTRALIA], and Tom Yuan,", + " Stephan Kudlacek, Sameeran Kunche, Joshua N. Smith, William A. Brown, Kaitlin Pugliese, Tivoli Olsen, Mariam Iftikhar, Gregory Weiss [USA], for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Shear-Stress-Mediated Refolding of Proteins from Aggregates and Inclusion Bodies,\" Tom Z. Yuan, Callum F. G. Ormonde, Stephan T. Kudlacek, Sameeran Kunche, Joshua N. Smith, William A. Brown, Kaitlin M.", + " Pugliese, Tivoli J. Olsen, Mariam Iftikhar, Colin L. Raston, Gregory A. Weiss, ChemBioChem, vol. 16, no. 3, February 9, 2015, pp. 393\u2013396.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Callum Ormonde, Tivoli Olsen, Colin Raston, Greg Weis\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE \u2014 Patricia Yang [USA and TAIWAN], David Hu [USA and TAIWAN], and Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo [USA], for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds).\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Duration of Urination Does Not Change With Body Size,\" Patricia J. Yang, Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo, and David L. Hu, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111 no. 33, August 19, 2014, pp. 11932\u201311937.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Patricia Yang, David Hu, Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE \u2014 Mark Dingemanse [THE NETHERLANDS, USA], Francisco Torreira [SPAIN, THE NETHERLANDS, BELGIUM, USA, CANADA], and Nick J.", + " Enfield [AUSTRALIA, THE NETHERLANDS], for discovering that the word \"huh?\" (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language \u2014 and for not being completely sure why.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Is 'Huh?' a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items,\" Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, and Nick J. Enfield, PLOS ONE, 2013. [a video accompanies the paper.]\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The authors were unable to attend the ceremony; they sent a video acceptance speech. They received their prize at a special event (The European Ig Nobel Show)", + " in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on October 3.\n\nMANAGEMENT PRIZE \u2014 Gennaro Bernile [ITALY, SINGAPORE, USA], Vineet Bhagwat [USA, INDIA], and P. Raghavendra Rau [UK, INDIA, FRANCE, LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY, JAPAN], for discovering that many business leaders developed during childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and wildfires) that \u2014 for them \u2014 had no dire personal consequences.\n\nREFERENCE: \"What Doesn't Kill You Will Only Make You More Risk-Loving:", + " Early-Life Disasters and CEO Behavior,\" Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, and P. Raghavendra Rau, accepted for publication in the Journal of Finance, 2015.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Gennaro Bernile and P. Raghavendra Rau\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE \u2014 The Bangkok Metropolitan Police [THAILAND], for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes.\n\nREFERENCE: Numerous news reports.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE \u2014 Awarded jointly to two groups: Hajime Kimata [JAPAN, CHINA]; and to Jaroslava Durdiakov\u00e1 [SLOVAKIA,", + " US, UK], Peter Celec [SLOVAKIA, GERMANY], Nat\u00e1lia Kamodyov\u00e1, Tatiana Sedl\u00e1\u010dkov\u00e1, Gabriela Repisk\u00e1, Barbara Svie\u017een\u00e1, and Gabriel Min\u00e1rik [SLOVAKIA], for experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities).\n\nREFERENCE: \"Kissing Reduces Allergic Skin Wheal Responses and Plasma Neurotrophin Levels,\" Hajime Kimata, Physiology and Behavior, vol. 80, nos. 2-3, November 2003, pp. 395-", + "8.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Reduction of Allergic Skin Weal Responses by Sexual Intercourse in Allergic Patients,\" Hajime Kimata, Sexual and Relationship Therapy, vol 19, no. 2, May 2004, pp. 151-4.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Kissing Selectively Decreases Allergen-Specific IgE Production in Atopic Patients,\" Hajime Kimata, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, vol. 60, 2006, pp. 545\u2013 547.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Prevalence and Persistence of Male DNA Identified in Mixed Saliva Samples After Intense Kissing,\" Nat\u00e1lia Kamodyov\u00e1,", + " Jaroslava Durdiakov\u00e1, Peter Celec, Tatiana Sedl\u00e1\u010dkov\u00e1, Gabriela Repisk\u00e1, Barbara Svie\u017een\u00e1, and Gabriel Min\u00e1rik, Forensic Science International Genetics, vol. 7, no. 1, January 2013, pp. 124\u20138.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Jaroslava Durdiakov\u00e1 and Peter Celec will be at the ceremony. Hajime Kimata will be at the Ig Informal Lectures, on Saturday, Sept 19 (a prior commmitment prevented him from attending the Thursday ceremony); he sent a video acceptence speech which was played at the Thursday night ceremony.\n\nMATHEMATICS PRIZE \u2014 Elisabeth Oberzaucher [AUSTRIA,", + " GERMANY, UK] and Karl Grammer [AUSTRIA, GERMANY], for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Case of Moulay Ismael-Fact or Fancy?\" Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer, PLOS ONE, vol. 9, no. 2, 2014, e85292.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Elisabeth Oberzaucher\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE \u2014 Bruno Grossi,", + " Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. V\u00e1squez [CHILE], Jos\u00e9 Iriarte-D\u00edaz [CHILE, USA], for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Walking Like Dinosaurs: Chickens with Artificial Tails Provide Clues about Non-Avian Theropod Locomotion,\" Bruno Grossi, Jos\u00e9 Iriarte-D\u00edaz, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. V\u00e1squez, PLoS ONE,", + " vol. 9, no. 2, 2014, e88458. [NOTE: The paper is accompanied by a video.>\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Bruno Grossi, Jos\u00e9 Iriarte-D\u00edaz, Omar Larach, Rodrigo A. V\u00e1squez\n\nDIAGNOSTIC MEDICINE PRIZE \u2014 Diallah Karim [CANADA, UK], Anthony Harnden [NEW ZEALAND, UK, US], Nigel D'Souza [BAHRAIN, BELGIUM, DUBAI, INDIA, SOUTH AFRICA, US, UK], Andrew Huang [CHINA,", + " UK], Abdel Kader Allouni [SYRIA, UK], Helen Ashdown [UK], Richard J. Stevens [UK], and Simon Kreckler [UK], for determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain evident when the patient is driven over speed bumps.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Pain Over Speed Bumps in Diagnosis of Acute Appendicitis: Diagnostic Accuracy Study,\" Helen F. Ashdown, Nigel D'Souza, Diallah Karim, Richard J. Stevens, Andrew Huang, and Anthony Harnden, BMJ, vol. 345, 2012, e8012.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Diallah Karim, Anthony Harnden, Helen Ashdown, Nigel D'Souza, Abdel Kader Allouni\n\nPHYSIOLOGY and ENTOMOLOGY PRIZE \u2014 Awarded jointly to two individuals: Justin Schmidt [USA, CANADA], for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith [PANAMA, US, UK, THE NETHERLANDS], for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull,", + " middle toe tip, and upper arm). and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).\n\nREFERENCE: \"Hemolytic Activities of Stinging Insect Venoms,\" Justin O. Schmidt, Murray S. Blum, and William L. Overal, Archives of Insect Biochemistry and Physiology, vol. 1, no. 2, 1983, pp. 155-160.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Honey Bee Sting Pain Index by Body Location,\" Michael L. Smith, PeerJ, 2014, 2:e338.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Justin Schmidt and Michael Smith\n\nThe 2014 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2014 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 18th, 2014 at the 24th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live.\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE [JAPAN]: Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Frictional Coefficient under Banana Skin,\" Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, Tribology Online 7, no. 3, 2012, pp. 147-151.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Kiyoshi Mabuchi\n\nNEUROSCIENCE PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA]: Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Seeing Jesus in Toast: Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Face Pareidolia,\" Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, Kang Lee, Cortex, vol. 53, April 2014, Pages 60\u201377. The authors are at School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Xidian University, the Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, and the University of Toronto, Canada.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Kang Lee\n\nPSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [UK, FINLAND, AUSTRALIA, USA]: Peter K.", + " Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Creatures of the Night: Chronotypes and the Dark Triad Traits,\" Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 55, no. 5, 2013, pp. 538-541.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Peter Jonason\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC,", + " JAPAN, USA, INDIA]: Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havl\u00ed\u010dek and Jitka Hanu\u0161ova-Lindova, and to David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried, for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat.\n\nREFERENCE: \" Changes in personality profile of young women with latent toxoplasmosis,\" Jaroslav Flegr and Jan Havlicek, Folia Parasitologica, vol. 46, 1999, pp. 22-28.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Decreased level of psychobiological factor novelty seeking and lower intelligence in men latently infected with the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii Dopamine,", + " a missing link between schizophrenia and toxoplasmosis?\" Jaroslav Flegr, Marek Preiss, Ji\u0159\u0131\u0301 Klose, Jan Havl\u0131\u0301\u010dek, Martina Vit\u00e1kov\u00e1, and Petr Kodym, Biological Psychology, vol. 63, 2003, pp. 253\u2013268.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Describing the Relationship between Cat Bites and Human Depression Using Data from an Electronic Health Record,\" David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried, PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 8, 2013, e70585. WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Jaroslav Flegr, David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC, GERMANY, ZAMBIA]: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nov\u00e1kov\u00e1, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladim\u00edr Hanzal, Milo\u0161 Je\u017eek, Tom\u00e1\u0161 Ku\u0161ta, Veronika N\u011bmcov\u00e1, Jana Ad\u00e1mkov\u00e1, Kate\u0159ina Benediktov\u00e1, Jaroslav \u010cerven\u00fd and Hynek Burda, for carefully documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth's north-south geomagnetic field lines.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth's magnetic field,\" Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nov\u00e1kov\u00e1, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladim\u00edr Hanzal, Milo\u0161 Je\u017eek, Tom\u00e1\u0161 Ku\u0161ta, Veronika N\u011bmcov\u00e1, Jana Ad\u00e1mkov\u00e1, Kate\u0159ina Benediktov\u00e1, Jaroslav \u010cerven\u00fd and Hynek Burda, Frontiers in Zoology, 10:80, 27 December 27, 2013.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nov\u00e1kov\u00e1, Pascal Malkemper,", + " Sabine Begall, Veronika N\u011bmcov\u00e1, Hynek Burda\n\nART PRIZE [ITALY]: Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot [in the hand] by a powerful laser beam.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Aesthetic value of paintings affects pain thresholds,\" Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 17, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1152-1162.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Marina de Tommaso\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE [ITALY]: ISTAT \u2014 the Italian government's National Institute of Statistics, for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and all other unlawful financial transactions between willing participants.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Cambia il Sistema europeo dei conti nazionali e regionali - Sec2010\", ISTAT, 2014.\n\nREFERENCE: \"European System of National and Regional Accounts (ESA 2010),\" Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2013.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE [USA,", + " INDIA]: Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for treating \"uncontrollable\" nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Nasal Packing With Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient with Glanzmann Thrombasthenia,\" Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, vol. 120, no.", + " 11, November 2011, pp. 732-36.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Sonal Saraiya\n\nARCTIC SCIENCE PRIZE [NORWAY, GERMANY, USA, CANADA]: Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftest\u00f8l, for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Response Behaviors of Svalbard Reindeer towards Humans and Humans Disguised as Polar Bears on Edge\u00f8ya,\" Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftest\u00f8l, Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research,", + " vol. 44, no. 4, 2012, pp. 483-9.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Eigil Reimers, Sindre Eftest\u00f8l\n\nNUTRITION PRIZE [SPAIN]: Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofr\u00e9, Bel\u00e9n Mart\u00edn, Teresa Aymerich, and Margarita Garriga, for their study titled \"Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages.\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages,\" Raquel Rubio,", + " Anna Jofr\u00e9, Bel\u00e9n Mart\u00edn, Teresa Aymerich, Margarita Garriga, Food Microbiology, vol. 38, 2014, pp. 303-311.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners were unable to attend the ceremony; they delivered their acceptance speech via video.\n\nThe 2013 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2013 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 12th, 2013 at the 23rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE:", + " Masateru Uchiyama [JAPAN], Xiangyuan Jin [CHINA, JAPAN], Qi Zhang [JAPAN], Toshihito Hirai [JAPAN], Atsushi Amano [JAPAN], Hisashi Bashuda [JAPAN] and Masanori Niimi [JAPAN, UK], for assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients who are mice.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells,\" Masateru Uchiyama,", + " Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi, Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, vol. 7, no. 26, epub. March 23, 2012.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Masanori Niimi\n\nPSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Laurent B\u00e8gue [FRANCE], Brad Bushman [USA, UK, the NETHERLANDS, POLAND], Oulmann Zerhouni [FRANCE], Baptiste Subra [FRANCE], and Medhi Ourabah [FRANCE], for confirming,", + " by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive.\n\nREFERENCE: \"'Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder': People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive,\" Laurent B\u00e8gue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, Medhi Ourabah, British Journal of Psychology, epub May 15, 2012.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Brad Bushman, Laurent B\u00e8gue, Medhi Ourabah\n\nJOINT PRIZE IN BIOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY: Marie Dacke [SWEDEN,", + " AUSTRALIA], Emily Baird [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA, GERMANY], Marcus Byrne [SOUTH AFRICA, UK], Clarke Scholtz [SOUTH AFRICA], and Eric J. Warrant [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA, GERMANY], for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation,\" Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Clarke H. Scholtz, Eric J. Warrant, Current Biology,", + " epub January 24, 2013.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Eric Warrant\n\nSAFETY ENGINEERING PRIZE: The late Gustano Pizzo [USA], for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers \u2014 the system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane's specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. US Patent #3811643, Gustano A.", + " Pizzo, \"anti hijacking system for aircraft\", May 21, 1972.\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: Alberto Minetti [ITALY, UK, DENMARK, SWITZERLAND], Yuri Ivanenko [ITALY, RUSSIA, FRANCE], Germana Cappellini [ITALY], Nadia Dominici [ITALY, SWITZERLAND, THE NETHERLANDS], and Francesco Lacquaniti [ITALY], for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond \u2014 if those people and that pond were on the moon.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Humans Running in Place on Water at Simulated Reduced Gravity,\" Alberto E.", + " Minetti, Yuri P. Ivanenko, Germana Cappellini, Nadia Dominici, Francesco Lacquaniti, PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 7, 2012, e37300.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Alberto Minetti and Yuri Ivanenko\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Shinsuke Imai [JAPAN], Nobuaki Tsuge [JAPAN], Muneaki Tomotake [JAPAN], Yoshiaki Nagatome [JAPAN], H. Sawada [JAPAN],Toshiyuki Nagata [JAPAN,", + " GERMANY], and Hidehiko Kumagai [JAPAN], for discovering that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is even more complicated than scientists previously realized.\n\nREFERENCE: \"An Onion Enzyme that Makes the Eyes Water,\" S. Imai, N. Tsuge, M. Tomotake, Y. Nagatome, H. Sawada, T. Nagata and H. Kumagai, Nature, vol. 419, no. 6908, October 2002, p. 685.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: All the co-authors.\n\nARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE:", + " Brian Crandall [USA] and Peter Stahl [CANADA, USA], for parboiling a dead shrew, and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days \u2014 all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system, and which bones would not.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton,\" Peter W. Stahl and Brian D. Crandall, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 22, November 1995, pp. 789\u201397.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Brian Crandall\n\nPEACE PRIZE:", + " Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.\n\nPROBABILITY PRIZE: Bert Tolkamp [UK, the NETHERLANDS], Marie Haskell [UK], Fritha Langford [UK, CANADA], David Roberts [UK], and Colin Morgan [UK], for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?\" Bert J. Tolkamp, Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, Colin A. Morgan, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 124, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 1\u201310.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Bert Tolkamp\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Kasian Bhanganada, Tu Chayavatana, Chumporn Pongnumkul, Anunt Tonmukayakul, Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn,", + " Krit Komaratal, and Henry Wilde, for the medical techniques described in their report \"Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam\" \u2014 techniques which they recommend, except in cases where the amputated penis had been partially eaten by a duck. [THAILAND]\n\nREFERENCE: \"Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam,\" by Kasian Bhanganada, Tu Chayavatana, Chumporn Pongnumkul, Anunt Tonmukayakul, Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn, Krit Komaratal,", + " and Henry Wilde, American Journal of Surgery, 1983, no. 146, pp. 376-382.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Nobel laureate Eric Maskin read aloud the acceptance speech sent by the winners.\n\nThe 2012 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2012 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 20th, 2012 at the 22rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan [THE NETHERLANDS]", + " and Tulio Guadalupe [PERU, RUSSIA, and THE NETHERLANDS] for their study \"Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation,\" Anita Eerland, Tulio M. Guadalupe and Rolf A. Zwaan, Psychological Science, vol. 22 no. 12, December 2011, pp. 1511-14.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Tulio Guadalupe.", + " [NOTE: Two days after the ceremony, Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan married each other, in the Netherlands.]\n\nPEACE PRIZE: The SKN Company [RUSSIA], for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Igor Petrov\n\nACOUSTICS PRIZE: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating the SpeechJammer \u2014 a machine that disrupts a person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.\n\nREFERENCE: \"SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback\", Kazutaka Kurihara,", + " Koji Tsukada, arxiv.org/abs/1202.6106. February 28, 2012.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada\n\nNEUROSCIENCE PRIZE: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere \u2014 even in a dead salmon.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction,\" Craig M.", + " Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, poster, 15th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, San Francisco, CA, June 2009.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Multiple Comparisons Correction,\" Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-", + "5.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Johan Pettersson [SWEDEN and RWANDA]. for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Andersl\u00f6v, Sweden, people's hair turned green.\n\nATTENDING THE THE CEREMONY: Johan Pettersson\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies,\" US Government General Accountability Office report GAO-", + "12-480R, May 10, 2012.\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: Joseph Keller [USA], and Raymond Goldstein [USA and UK], Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball [UK], for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Shape of a Ponytail and the Statistical Physics of Hair Fiber Bundles.\" Raymond E. Goldstein, Patrick B. Warren, and Robin C. Ball, Physical Review Letters, vol. 198, no. 7, 2012.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Ponytail Motion,\" Joseph B. Keller, SIAM [Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics]", + " Journal of Applied Mathematics, vol. 70, no. 7, 2010, pp. 2667\u201372.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren, Robin Ball\n\nFLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE: Rouslan Krechetnikov [USA, RUSSIA, CANADA] and Hans Mayer [USA] for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Walking With Coffee: Why Does It Spill?\" Hans C. Mayer and Rouslan Krechetnikov,", + " Physical Review E, vol. 85, 2012.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Rouslan Krechetnikov\n\nANATOMY PRIZE: Frans de Waal [The Netherlands and USA] and Jennifer Pokorny [USA] for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception\" Frans B.M. de Waal and Jennifer J. Pokorny, Advanced Science Letters, vol. 1, 99\u2013103, 2008.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY:", + " Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Colonic Gas Explosion During Therapeutic Colonoscopy with Electrocautery,\" Spiros D Ladas, George Karamanolis, Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, World Journal of Gastroenterology, vol. 13, no. 40, October 2007, pp. 5295\u20138.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Argon Plasma Coagulation in the Treatment of Hemorrhagic Radiation Proctitis is Efficient But Requires a Perfect Colonic Cleansing to Be Safe,\" E.", + " Ben-Soussan, M. Antonietti, G. Savoye, S. Herve, P. Ducrott\u00e9, and E. Lerebours, European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, vol. 16, no. 12, December 2004, pp 1315-8.\n\nATTENDING THE THE CEREMONY: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan\n\nSPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: We are now, in 2012, correcting an error we made in the year 1999, when we failed to include one winner's name. We now correct that, awarding a share of the 1999 physics prize to Joseph Keller.", + " Professor Keller is also a co-winner of the 2012 Ig Nobel physics prize, making him a two-time Ig Nobel winner.\n\nThe corrected citation is:1999 PHYSICS PRIZE: Len Fisher [UK and Australia] for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit, and Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck [UK and Belgium] and Joseph Keller [USA], for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Physics Takes the Biscuit\", Len Fisher, Nature, vol. 397, no. 6719, February 11, 1999, p. 469.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Pouring Flows,\" Jean-Marc Vanden\u2010Broeck and Joseph B. Keller, Physics of Fluids, vol. 29, no. 12, 1986, pp. 3958-61.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Pouring Flows With Separation,\" Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck and Joseph B. Keller, Physics of Fluids A: Fluid Dynamics, vol. 1, no. 1, 1989, pp. 156-158.\n\nThe 2011 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 29th,", + " 2011 at the 21rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nPHYSIOLOGY PRIZE:Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of THE NETHERLANDS, HUNGARY, and AUSTRIA), Isabella Mandl (of AUSTRIA) and Ludwig Huber (of AUSTRIA) for their study \"No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.\"\n\nREFERENCE: 'No Evidence Of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise Geochelone carbonaria,\" Anna Wilkinson,", + " Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl, Ludwig Huber, Current Zoology, vol. 57, no. 4, 2011. pp. 477-84.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Ludwig Huber\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency,", + " and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.\n\nREFERENCE: US patent application 2010/0308995 A1; filing date: Feb 5, 2009. Product info [from Seems, Inc.].\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Makoto Imai, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE: Mirjam Tuk (of THE NETHERLANDS and the UK), Debra Trampe (of THE NETHERLANDS) and Luk Warlop (of BELGIUM). and jointly to Matthew Lewis,", + " Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (of the USA), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (of AUSTRALIA) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things \u2014 but worse decisions about other kinds of things\u201a when they have a strong urge to urinate.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains,\" Mirjam A. Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 5, May 2011, pp. 627-", + "633.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults,\" Matthew S. Lewis, Peter J. Snyder, Robert H. Pietrzak, David Darby, Robert A. Feldman, Paul T. Maruff, Neurology and Urodynamics, vol. 30, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 183-7.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Mirjam Tuk, Luk Warlop, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, David Darby\n\nPSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo,", + " NORWAY, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Is a Sigh 'Just a Sigh'? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task,\" Karl Halvor Teigen, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 49, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49\u201357.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Karl Halvor Teigen\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important,", + " using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.\n\nREFERENCE: \"How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done,\" John Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 1996. Later republished elsewhere under the title \"Structured Procrastination.\"\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Colleague Deborah Wilkes accepted the prize on behalf of Professor Perry.\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne (of CANADA and AUSTRALIA and the UK and the USA) and David Rentz (of AUSTRALIA and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females (Coleoptera),\" D.T. Gwynne, and D.C.F. Rentz, Journal of the Australian Entomological Society, vol. 22,, no. 1, 1983, pp. 79-80\n\nREFERENCE: \"Beetles on the Bottle,\" D.T. Gwynne and D.C.F. Rentz, Antenna: Proceedings (A) of the Royal Entomological Society London, vol. 8, no. 3, 1984, pp. 116-", + "7.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru (of FRANCE), and Herman Kingma (of THE NETHERLANDS), for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Dizziness in Discus Throwers is Related to Motion Sickness Generated While Spinning,\" Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma, Acta Oto-laryngologica,", + " vol. 120, no. 3, March 2000, pp. 390\u20135.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: The winners accepted via recorded video.\n\nMATHEMATICS PRIZE: Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6,", + " 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.\n\nPEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.\n\nREFERENCE: VIDEO and OFFICIAL CITY INFO\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Arturas Zuokas\n\nPUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face,", + " blinding him.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Attentional Demand of Automobile Driving,\" John W. Senders, et al., Highway Research Record, vol. 195, 1967, pp. 15-33. VIDEO\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: John Senders\n\nThe 2010 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2010 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 30th, 2000 at the 20th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nENGINEERING PRIZE:", + " Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.\n\nREFERENCE: \"A Novel Non-Invasive Tool for Disease Surveillance of Free-Ranging Whales and Its Relevance to Conservation Programs,\" Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin and Diane Gendron, Animal Conservation, vol. 13, no. 2, April 2010,", + " pp. 217-25.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin, Diane Gendron\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Rollercoaster Asthma: When Positive Emotional Stress Interferes with Dyspnea Perception,\" Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest, Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol.", + " 45, 2006, pp. 977\u201387.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest\n\nTRANSPORTATION PLANNING PRIZE: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design,\" Atsushi Tero,", + " Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Dan P. Bebber, Mark D. Fricker, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Science, Vol. 327. no. 5964, January 22, 2010, pp. 439-42. [VIDEO]\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Kentaro Ito, Atsushi Tero, Mark Fricker, Dan Bebber [NOTE: THE FOLLOWING ARE CO-WINNERS BOTH THIS YEAR AND IN 2008 when they were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for demonstrating that slime molds can solve puzzles:", + " Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero]\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Preventing Winter Falls: A Randomised Controlled Trial of a Novel Intervention,\" Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest, New Zealand Medical Journal. vol. 122, no, 1298, July 3, 2009,", + " pp. 31-8.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Lianne Parkin\n\nPEACE PRIZE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Swearing as a Response to Pain,\" Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston, Neuroreport, vol. 20, no. 12, 2009, pp. 1056-60.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Richard Stephens\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office,", + " Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men,\" Manuel S. Barbeito, Charles T. Mathews, and Larry A. Taylor, Applied Microbiology, vol. 15, no. 4, July 1967, pp. 899\u2013906.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Manuel S. Barbeito was unable to travel, due to health reasons. A representative read his acceptance speech for him.\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE: The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG,", + " Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money \u2014 ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP [British Petroleum], for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Review of Deep Oil Spill Modeling Activity Supported by the Deep Spill JIP and Offshore Operator\u2019s Committee. Final Report,\" Eric Adams and Scott Socolofsky,", + " 2005.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Eric Adams, Scott Socolofsky, and Stephen Masutani\n\nMANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \u201cThe Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,\u201d Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp.", + " 467-72.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo.\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE: Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time,\" Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou,", + " Shuyi Zhang and Libiao Zhang, PLoS ONE, vol. 4, no. 10, e7595.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Gareth Jones\n\nThe 2009 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2009 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 1st, 2009 at the 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nVETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne,", + " UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production,\" Catherine Bertenshaw [Douglas] and Peter Rowlinson, Anthrozoos, vol. 22, no. 1, March 2009, pp. 59-69. DOI: 10.2752/175303708X390473.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Peter Rowlinson. Catherine Douglas was unable to travel because she recently gave birth; she sent a photo of herself,", + " her new daughter dressed in a cow suit, and a cow.\n\nPEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining \u2014 by experiment \u2014 whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?\" Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P.", + " Kneubuehl, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, vol. 16, no. 3, April 2009, pp. 138-42. DOI:10.1016/j.jflm.2008.07.013.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Stephan Bolliger\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks \u2014 Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland \u2014 for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa \u2014 and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " Report of the Special Investigation Commission, issued April 12, 2010.\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Ap\u00e1tiga, and Victor M. Casta\u00f1o of Universidad Nacional Aut\u00f3noma de M\u00e9xico, for creating diamonds from liquid \u2014 specifically from tequila.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila,\" Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M. Castano, 2008, arXiv:0806.1485. Also published as Reviews on Advanced Materials Science, vol. 22, no. 1, 2009, pp. 134-8.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Javier Morales and Miguel Ap\u00e1tiga\n\n\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand \u2014 but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand \u2014 every day for more than sixty (60) years.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?\", Donald L. Unger, Arthritis and Rheumatism, vol. 41, no. 5, 1998, pp. 949-50.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Donald Unger\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins,\" Katherine K. Whitcome, Liza J. Shapiro & Daniel E. Lieberman, Nature, vol. 450, 1075-1078 (December 13, 2007). DOI:10.1038/nature06342.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Katherine Whitcome and Daniel Lieberman\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country \u2014 Prawo Jazdy \u2014 whose name in Polish means \"Driving License\".\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: [Karolina Lewestam, a Polish citizen and holder of a Polish driver's license, speaking on behalf of all her fellow Polish licensed drivers, expressed her good wishes to the Irish police service.]\n\n\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago,", + " Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: U.S. patent # 7255627, granted August 14, 2007 for a \u201cGarment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks.\u201d\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Elena Bodnar.\n\nMATHEMATICS PRIZE: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe\u2019s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers \u2014 from very small to very big \u2014 by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01)", + " to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Zimbabwe's Casino Economy \u2014 Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges, Gideon Gono, ZPH Publishers, Harare, 2008, ISBN 978-079-743-679-4.\n\n\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Microbial Treatment of Kitchen Refuse With Enzyme-", + "Producing Thermophilic Bacteria From Giant Panda Feces,\" Fumiaki Taguchia, Song Guofua, and Zhang Guanglei, Seibutsu-kogaku Kaishi, vol. 79, no 12, 2001, pp. 463-9. [and abstracted in Journal of Bioscience and Bioengineering, vol. 92, no. 6, 2001, p. 602.]\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Microbial Treatment of Food-Production Waste with Thermopile Enzyme-Producing Bacterial Flora from a Giant Panda\" [in Japanese], Fumiaki Taguchi,", + " Song Guofu, Yasunori Sugai, Hiroyasu Kudo and Akira Koikeda, Journal of the Japan Society of Waste Management Experts, vol. 14, no. 2, 2003, pp., 76-82.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Fumiaki Taguchi\n\nThe 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 2nd, 2008 at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nNUTRITION PRIZE.", + " Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness ofPotato Chips,\" Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence,Journal of Sensory Studies, vol. 19, October 2004, pp. 347-63.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Massimiliano Zampini.", + " unable to attend the ceremony, was presented with the prize at a special ceremony, later in the month, at the Genoa Science Festival.\n\nPEACE PRIZE. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Dignity of Living Beings With Regard to Plants. Moral Consideration of Plants for Their Own Sake\"\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Urs Thurnherr, member of the committee.\n\nARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and Jos\u00e9 Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de S\u00e3o Paulo,", + " Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach,\" Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and Jos\u00e9 Carlos Marcelino, Geoarchaeology, vol. 18, no. 4, April 2003, pp. 433-60.\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse,", + " France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis (Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835),\" M.C. Cadiergues, C. Joubert, and M. Franc, Veterinary Parasitology, vol. 92, no. 3, October 1, 2000, pp. 239-", + "41.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Marie-Christine Cadiergues and Christel Joubert, unable to attend the ceremony, were presented with the prize at a special ceremony, later in the month, at the Genoa Science Festival.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE. Dan Ariely of Duke University (USA), Rebecca L. Waber of MIT (USA), Baba Shiv of Stanford University (USA), and Ziv Carmon of INSEAD (Singapore) for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine..\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy,\" Rebecca L.", + " Waber; Baba Shiv; Ziv Carmon; Dan Ariely, Journal of the American Medical Association, March 5, 2008; 299: 1016-1017.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dan Ariely\n\nCOGNITIVE SCIENCE PRIZE. Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University, Japan, Hiroyasu Yamada of Nagoya, Japan, Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University, Atsushi Tero of Presto JST, Akio Ishiguro of Tohoku University, and \u00c1got\u00e1 T\u00f3th of the University of Szeged,", + " Hungary, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Intelligence: Maze-Solving by an Amoeboid Organism,\" Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, and \u00c1gota T\u00f3th, Nature, vol. 407, September 2000, p. 470. [VIDEO]\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?\" Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan, Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 28, 2007, pp. 375-81.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Geoffrey Miller and Brent Jordan\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String,\" Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 42, October 16, 2007, pp. 16432-7.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dorian Raymer\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide,", + " and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Effect of 'Coke' on Sperm Motility,\" Sharee A. Umpierre, Joseph A. Hill, and Deborah J. Anderson, New England Journal of Medicine, 1985, vol. 313, no. 21, p. 1351.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Spermicidal Potency of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola,\" C.Y. Hong, C.C.", + " Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang, Human Toxicology, vol. 6, no. 5, September 1987, pp. 395-6. [NOTE: THE JOURNAL LATER CHANGED ITS NAME. NOW CALLED \"Human & experimental toxicology\"]\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Deborah Anderson, and C.Y. Hong's daughter Wan Hong\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE. David Sims of Cass Business School. London, UK, for his lovingly written study \"You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations,\" David Sims, Organization Studies, vol. 26, no. 11, 2005, pp. 1625-40.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: David Sims\n\nAt the 2007 ceremony, Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Dan Meyer punctuates his and Brian Witcombe's joint one-minute-long acceptance speech. Meyer and Dr. Witcombe (who is not visible in this photo, having stepped back to give his colleague breathing room) were honored for studying the medical side-effects of sword-swallowing. Nobel Laureates William Lipscomb,", + " Robert Laughlin and Dudley Herschbach can be seen here analyzing Mr. Meyer's speech. Photo Credit: Alexey Eliseev.\n\nThe 2007 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 4th, 2007 at the 17th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report \"Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects,\" Brian Witcombeand Dan Meyer, British Medical Journal, December 23, 2006, vol. 333, pp. 1285-7.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.\n\n\n\nREFERENCES: \"Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension,\" E. Cerda, K. Ravi-Chandar, L. Mahadevan,", + " Nature, vol. 419, October 10, 2002, pp. 579-80.\n\n\"Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling,\" E. Cerda and L. Mahadevan, Physical Review Letters, fol. 90, no. 7, February 21, 2003, pp. 074302/1-4.\n\n\"Elements of Draping,\" E. Cerda, L. Mahadevan and J. Passini, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 7, 2004, pp. 1806-10.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca's sister Mariela.\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.\n\n\n\nREFERENCES: \"Huis, Bed en Beestjes\" [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde,", + " vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31.\n\n\"Het Stof, de Mijten en het Bed\" [Dust, Mites and Bedding]. J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk Vakblad voor Biologen, vol. 53, no. 2, 1973, pp. 22-5.\n\n\"Autotrophic Organisms in Mattress Dust in the Netherlands,\" B. van de Lustgraaf, J.H.H.M. Klerkx, J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Acta Botanica Neerlandica,", + " vol. 27, no. 2, 1978, pp 125-8.\n\n\"A Bed Ecosystem,\" J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Lecture Abstracts -- 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from Livestock Excrement Using Subcritical Water Reaction,\" Mayu Yamamoto, International Journal of Chemical Engineering, 2008.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Mayu Yamamoto\n\nPRESS NOTE: Toscanini's Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called \"Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist.\"\n\nLINGUISTICS PRIZE: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and N\u00faria Sebasti\u00e1n-Gall\u00e9s,", + " of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats,\" Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and N\u00faria Sebasti\u00e1n-Gall\u00e9s, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners could not travel to the ceremony, so they instead delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE:", + " Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word \"the\" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index Entries,\" Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp. 119-22.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Glenda Browne\n\nPEACE PRIZE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called \"gay bomb\"", + " -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals,\" Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.\n\nNUTRITION PRIZE: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake,\" Brian Wansink, James E. Painter and Jill North,", + " Obesity Research, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 93-100.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink Bantom Books, 2006, ISBN 0553804340.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Brian Wansink.\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: U.S. patent #6,219,", + "959, granted on April 24, 2001, for a \"net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately.\"\n\nNOTE: The Ig Nobel Board of Governors attempted repeatedly to find Mr. Hsieh, but he seemed to have vanished mysteriously. Some days after the ceremony came news that he is alive and well.\n\nAVIATION PRIZE: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Sildenafil Accelerates Reentrainment of Circadian Rhythms After Advancing Light Schedules,\" Patricia V.", + " Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 23, June 5 2007, pp. 9834-9.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Diego A. Golombek\n\nThe 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2006 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 5th, 2006 at the 16th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nORNITHOLOGY:", + " Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Cure for a Headache,\" Ivan R Schwab, British Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 86, 2002, p. 843.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Woodpeckers and Head Injury,\" Philip R.A. May, JoaquinM. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7957, February28,", + " 1976, pp. 454-5.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Woodpeckers and Head Injury,\" Philip R.A. May, JoaquinM. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7973, June 19,1976, pp. 1347-8.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Ivan Schwab\n\nNUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Dung Preference of the Dung Beetle Scarabaeus cristatus Fab (Coleoptera-Scarabaeidae) from Kuwait,\" Wasmia Al-Houty and Faten Al-Musalam, Journal of Arid Environments, vol. 35, no. 3, 1997, pp. 511-6.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Faten Al-Musalam\n\nPEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant -- a device that makes annoying high-pitched noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults;", + " and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but probably not to their teachers.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: http://www.compoundsecurity.co.uk\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Howard Stapleton planned to attend, but his plans were interrupted by a family medical situation.\n\nACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University), Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University) and James Hillenbrand (of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University) for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound,\" D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand, Perception and Psychophysics, vol. 39,1986, pp. 77-80.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Lynn Halpern and Randolph Blake\n\nMATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Blink-Free Photos, Guaranteed,\" Velocity,", + " June 2006,\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes\n\nLITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report \"Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,\" Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 20, no. 2, March 2006, pp. 139-56.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY:", + " Daniel Oppenheimer\n\nMEDICINE: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report \"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage\"; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled \"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage,\" Francis M. Fesmire, Annals of Emergency Medicine,", + " vol. 17, no. 8, August 1988 p. 872.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage,\"\n\nMajed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven, Journal of Internal Medicine, vol. 227, no. 2, February 1990, pp. 145-6. They are at the Department of Internal Medicine, Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Hiccups and Digital Rectal Massage,\" M. Odeh and A. Oliven, Archives of Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery,", + " vol. 119, 1993, p. 1383.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Francis Fesmire\n\nPHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Universit\u00e9 Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half,\" Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch, Physical Review Letters, vol. 95, no.", + " 9, August 26, 2005, pp. 95505-1 to 95505-1.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Video and other details at \n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch\n\nCHEMISTRY: Antonio Mulet, Jos\u00e9 Javier Benedito and Jos\u00e9 Bon of the University of Valencia, Spain, and Carmen Rossell\u00f3 of the University of Illes Balears, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, for their study \"Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature,\" Antonio Mulet, Jos\u00e9 Javier Benedito, Jos\u00e9 Bon, and Carmen Rossell\u00f3, Journal of Food Science, vol. 64, no. 6, 1999, pp. 1038-41.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: The winners delivered their acceptance speech via video recording.\n\nBIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency,", + " in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"On Human Odour, Malaria Mosquitoes, and Limburger Cheese,\" Bart. G.J. Knols, The Lancet, vol. 348, November 9, 1996, p. 1322.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \u201cBehavioural and electrophysiological responses of the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae (Diptera:", + " Culicidae) to Limburger cheese volatiles,\u201d Bulletin of Entomological Research, B.G.J. Knols, J.J.A. van Loon, A. Cork, R.D. Robinson, et al., vol. 87, 1997, pp. 151-159.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Limburger Cheese as an Attractant for the Malaria Mosquito Anopheles gambiae s.s.,\" B.G,J. Knols and R. De Jong, Parasitology Today, yd. 12, no. 4, 1996, pp. 159-61.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Selection of Biting Sites on Man by Two Malaria Mosquito Species,\" R. De Jong and B.G.J. Knols, Experientia, vol. 51, 1995, pp. 80\u201384.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Bart Knols\n\nThe 2005 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 6th, 2005 at the 15th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nAGRICULTURAL HISTORY:", + " James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, \"The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley\u2019s Exploding Trousers. \"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers: Reflections on an Aspect of Technological Change in New Zealand Dairy-Farming between the World Wars,\" James Watson, Agricultural History, vol. 78, no. 3, Summer 2004, pp. 346-60.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: James Watson\n\nPHYSICS: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland,", + " Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Pitch Drop Experiment,\" R. Edgeworth, B.J. Dalton and T. Parnell, European Journal of Physics, 1984, pp. 198-200.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Mainstone\n\nMEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles -- artificial replacement testicles for dogs,", + " which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.\n\n\n\nREFERENCES: US Patent #5868140, and the book Going Going NUTS!, by Gregg A. Miller, PublishAmerica, 2004, ISBN 1413753167.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: The winner was unable to travel, and delivered his acceptance speech via video.\n\nLITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha,", + " Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.\n\nPEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie \"Star Wars.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Orthopteran DCMD Neuron: A Reevaluation of Responses to Moving Objects. I. Selective Responses to Approaching Objects,\" F.C.", + " Rind and P.J. Simmons, Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 68, no. 5, November 1992, pp. 1654-66.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Claire Rind\n\nECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Gauri Nanda\n\nCHEMISTRY: Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin,", + " for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water?\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Will Humans Swim Faster or Slower in Syrup?\" American Institute of Chemical Engineers Journal, Brian Gettelfinger and E. L. Cussler, vol. 50, no. 11, October 2004, pp. 2646-7.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Brian Gettelfinger and Edward Cussler\n\nBIOLOGY: Benjamin Smith of the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Toronto, Canada and the Firmenich perfume company,", + " Geneva, Switzerland, and ChemComm Enterprises, Archamps, France; Craig Williams of James Cook University and the University of South Australia; Michael Tyler of the University of Adelaide; Brian Williams of the University of Adelaide; and Yoji Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"A Survey of Frog Odorous Secretions, Their Possible Functions and Phylogenetic Significance,\" Benjamin P.C. Smith, Craig R. Williams, Michael J. Tyler, and Brian D. Williams, Applied Herpetology,", + " vol. 2, no. 1-2, February 1, 2004, pp. 47-82.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Chemical and Olfactory Characterization of Odorous Compounds and Their Precursors in the Parotoid Gland Secretion of the Green Tree Frog, Litoria caerulea,\" Benjamin P.C. Smith, Michael J. Tyler, Brian D. Williams, and Yoji Hayasaka, Journal of Chemical Ecology, vol. 29, no. 9, September 2003.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Ben Smith and Craig Williams\n\nNUTRITION:", + " Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats of Tokyo, Japan, for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting).[See the movie \"The Invention of Dr. Nakamats\", 2009]\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats\n\nFLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu, Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Lor\u00e1nd E\u00f6tv\u00f6s University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin,", + " as detailed in their report \"Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation.\"\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED IN: Polar Biology, vol. 27, 2003, pp. 56-8.\n\n\n\nACCEPTING: The winners were unable to attend the ceremony because they could not obtain United States visas to visit the United States. Dr. Meyer-Rochow sent an acceptance speech via video.\n\nThe 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2004 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 30th, 2004 at the 14th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.", + " The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nMEDICINE: Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published report \"The Effect of Country Music on Suicide.\"\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED IN: Social Forces, vol. 71, no. 1, September 1992, pp. 211-8.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: James Gundlach.\n\nPHYSICS: Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory,", + " for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping,\" Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael T. Turvey, Biological Cybernetics, vol. 90, no. 3, March 2004, pp. 176-90.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael Turvey.\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH: Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"If You Drop It, Should You Eat It? Scientists Weigh In on the 5-Second Rule,\" ACES College News, September 2, 2003.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Jillian Clarke\n\nCHEMISTRY: The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain, for using advanced technology to convert ordinary tap water into Dasani, a transparent form of water, which for precautionary reasons has been made unavailable to consumers.\n\nENGINEERING: Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida, USA, for patenting the combover (U.S.", + " Patent #4,022,227).\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Donald Smith's son, Scott Jackson Smith, and daughter, Heather Smith.\n\nLITERATURE: The American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Pamela Chestek, the daughter of ANRL director Helen Fisher.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY: Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something,", + " it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Gorillas in Our Midst,\" Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, vol. 28, Perception, 1999, pages 1059-74.\n\n\n\nDEMO: \n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.\n\nECONOMICS: The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India.\n\nPEACE: Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo,", + " Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Daisuke Inoue.\n\nBIOLOGY: Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Sounds Produced by Herring (Clupea harengus)", + " Bubble Release,\" Magnus Wahlberg and H\u00e5kan Westerberg, Aquatic Living Resources, vol. 16, 2003, pp. 271-5.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Pacific and Atlantic Herring Produce Burst Pulse Sounds,\" Ben Wilson, Robert S. Batty and Lawrence M. Dill, Biology Letters, vol. 271, 2003, pp. S95-S97.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Lawrence Dill, Robert Batty, Magnus Whalberg, Hakan Westerberg.\n\n\n\nThe 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2003 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night,", + " September NNth, 2003 at the 13th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nENGINEERING: The late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols, for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law, the basic engineering principle that \"If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it \"(or, in other words: \"If anything can go wrong, it will\").\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"The Fastest Man on Earth,\" Nick T. Spark, Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 9, no. 5, Sept/Oct 2003.] VIDEO\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: (1) Author Nick T. Spark, on behalf of John Paul Stapp's widow, Lilly. (2) Edward Murphy's Edward A. Murphy III, on behalf of his late father. (3) George Nichols, via audio tape.\n\nPHYSICS: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia,", + " for their irresistible report \"An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.\"\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED IN: Applied Ergonomics, vol. 33, no. 6, November 2002, pp. 523-31.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Culvenor.\n\nMEDICINE: Eleanor Maguire, David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner, Richard Frackowiak, and Christopher Frith of University College London, for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens.\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED IN:", + " \"Navigation-Related Structural Change In the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,\" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97, no. 8, April 11, 2000, pp. 4398-403. Also see their subsequent publications.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Eleanor Maguire.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY: Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli of the University of Rome, and Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, for their discerning report \"Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities.\"\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol.", + " 385, February 1997, p. 493.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Philip Zimbardo.\n\nCHEMISTRY: Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University, for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that fails to attract pigeons.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Yukio Hirose.\n\nLITERATURE: John Trinkaus, of the Zicklin School of Business, New York City, for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him\n\n(such as:", + " What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front; What percentage of pedestrians wear sport shoes that are white rather than some other color; What percentage of swimmers swim laps in the shallow end of a pool rather than the deep end; What percentage of automobile drivers almost, but not completely, come to a stop at one particular stop-sign; What percentage of commuters carry attach\u00e9 cases; What percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket's express checkout lane; and What percentage of students dislike the taste of Brussels sprouts.)\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: 86 of Professor Trinkaus's publications are listed in \"Trinkaus -- An Informal Look,\" Annals of Improbable Research,", + " vol. 9, no. 3, May/Jun 2003.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Trinkaus.\n\nECONOMICS: Karl Schw\u00e4rzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: and and \n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Karl Schw\u00e4rzler.\n\nINTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH:", + " Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist of Stockholm University, for their inevitable report \"Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans.\"\n\n\n\n[PUBLISHED IN: Human Nature, vol. 13, no. 3, 2002, pp. 383-9.]\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: All three co-authors.\n\nPEACE: Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives;", + " and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Lal Bihari overcame the handicap of being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian government so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize. However, the U.S. government refused to allow him into the country. His friend Madhu Kapoor therefore came to the Ig Nobel Ceremony and accepted the Prize on behalf of Lal Bihari. Several weeks later, the Prize was presented to Lal Bihari himself in a special ceremony in India. [NOTE: Filmmaker Satish Kaushik will be making a film about the life (and death and life)", + " of Lal Bihari.]\n\nBIOLOGY: C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.\n\n\n\n[REFERENCE: \"The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)\" C.W. Moeliker, Deinsea, vol. 8, 2001, pp. 243-7.]\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Kees Moeliker.\n\nThe 2002 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2002 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night,", + " October 3rd, 2002 at the 12th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nBIOLOGY: N. Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, Phil Bowers, and D. Charles Deeming of the United Kingdom, for their report \"Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain.\"\n\n[REFERENCE: \"Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches (Struthio camelus) Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain,\" Norma E.", + " Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, P. Bowers, D.C. Deeming, British Poultry Science, vol. 39, no. 4, September 1998, pp. 477-481.]\n\nPHYSICS: Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay.\n\n[REFERENCE: \"Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth,\" Arnd Leike, European Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26.]\n\nINTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH:", + " Karl Kruszelnicki of The University of Sydney, for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint -- who gets it, when, what color, and how much.\n\nCHEMISTRY: Theodore Gray (USA and Switzerland), for gathering many elements of the periodic table, and assembling them into the form of a four-legged periodic table table.\n\nMATHEMATICS: K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report \"Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants.\" [REFERENCE: \"Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants (Elephas maximus indicus),\" K.P.", + " Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan, Veterinary Research Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, 1990, pp. 5-17.]\n\nLITERATURE: Vicki Silvers Gier and David S. Kreiner of Central Missouri State University, for their colorful report \"The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension.\" [ PUBLISHED IN: Reading Research and Instruction, vol. 36, no. 3, 1997, pp. 217-23.]\n\nPEACE: Keita Sato, President of Takara Co., Dr. Matsumi Suzuki,", + " President of Japan Acoustic Lab, and Dr. Norio Kogure, Executive Director, Kogure Veterinary Hospital, for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device.\n\nHYGIENE: Eduardo Segura, of Lavakan de Aste, in Tarragona, Spain, for inventing a washing machine for cats and dogs.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Station for Preparing Cleaning Disinfecting Delousing and Hydromassaging Animals,\" US patent 7011044B2.\n\nECONOMICS: The executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron,", + " Lernaut & Hauspie [Belgium], Adelphia, Bank of Commerce and Credit International [Pakistan], Cendant, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynegy, Gazprom [Russia], Global Crossing, HIH Insurance [Australia], Informix, Kmart, Maxwell Communications [UK], McKessonHBOC, Merrill Lynch, Merck, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Reliant Resources, Rent-Way, Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Tyco, Waste Management, WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen, for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world. [NOTE:", + " all companies are U.S.-based unless otherwise noted.]\n\nMEDICINE: Chris McManus of University College London, for his excruciatingly balanced report, \"Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture.\" [PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 259, February 5, 1976, p. 426.]\n\nThe 2001 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2001 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 4th, 2001 at the 11th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live.", + " You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nMEDICINE: Peter Barss of McGill University, for his impactful medical report \"InjuriesDue to Falling Coconuts.\"\n\n[PUBLISHED IN: The Journal of Trauma, vol. 24, no. 11, 1984, pp. 990-1.]\n\nPHYSICS: David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts for his partial solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards.\n\nBIOLOGY: Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape.\n\nECONOMICS:", + " Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia [and who has since moved to Columbia University], for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax.\n\n[REFERENCE:\"Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity,\" National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, March 2001.]\n\nLITERATURE: John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY:", + " Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential research report \"An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children.\"\n\n[PUBLISHED IN: Child Development, vol. 46, no. 1, March 1975, pp. 53-61.]\n\nASTROPHYSICS: Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell.\n\n[REFERENCE: The March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the \"Jack Van Impe Presents\"", + " program. (at about the 12 minute mark).]\n\nPEACE: Viliumas Malinauskus of Grutas, Lithuania, for creating the amusement park known as \"Stalin World.\"\n\nTECHNOLOGY: Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012. [NOTE: Several years after this prize was awarded, the patent office quietly revoked Mr. Keogh's patent.]\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH: Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences,", + " Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents.\n\n[REFERENCE: \"A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample,\" Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 62, no. 6, June 2001, pp. 426-31.]\n\nThe 2000 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2000 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 5th, 2000 at the 10th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY:", + " David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois, for their modest report, \"Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.\" [Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no. 6, December 1999, pp. 1121-34.]\n\nLITERATURE: Jasmuheen (formerly known as Ellen Greve) of Australia, first lady of Breatharianism, for her book \"Living on Light,\" which explains that although some people do eat food,", + " they don't ever really need to.\n\nBIOLOGY: Richard Wassersug of Dalhousie University, for his first-hand report, \"On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica.\" [Published in The American Midland Naturalist, vol. 86, no. 1, July 1971, pp. 101-9.]\n\nPHYSICS: Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University (UK), for using magnets to levitate a frog. [REFERENCE: \"Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons\"", + " by M.V. Berry and A.K. Geim, European Journal of Physics, v. 18, 1997, p. 307-13.]\n\n[REFERENCE: VIDEO]\n\nNOTE: Ten years later, in 2010, Andre Geim won a Nobel Prize in physics (for research on another subject).\n\nCHEMISTRY: Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi, and Giovanni B. Cassano of the University of Pisa, and Hagop S. Akiskal of the University of California (San Diego), for their discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.", + " [REFERENCE: \"Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love,\" Marazziti D, Akiskal HS, Rossi A, Cassano GB, Psychological Medicine, 1999 May;29(3):741-5.]\n\nECONOMICS: The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, for bringing efficiency and steady growth to the mass-marriage industry, with, according to his reports, a 36-couple wedding in 1960, a 430-couple wedding in 1968, an 1800-couple wedding in 1975, a 6000-couple wedding in 1982, a 30,", + "000-couple wedding in 1992, a 360,000-couple wedding in 1995, and a 36,000,000-couple wedding in 1997.\n\nMEDICINE: Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, and Eduard Mooyaart of Groningen, The Netherlands, and Ida Sabelis of Amsterdam, for their illuminating report, \"Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal.\" [Published in British Medical Journal, vol. 319, 1999, pp 1596-1600.]\n\nCOMPUTER SCIENCE:", + " Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard.\n\nPEACE: The British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout \"Bang!\"\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH: Jonathan Wyatt, Gordon McNaughton, and William Tullett of Glasgow, for their alarming report, \"The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow.\" [Published in the Scottish Medical Journal, vol. 38, 1993, p. 185.]\n\n\n\nThe 1999 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 1999 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night,", + " September 30th, 1999 at the 9th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nSOCIOLOGY: Steve Penfold, of York University in Toronto, for doing his PhD thesis on the sociology of Canadian donut shops.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The social life of donuts: Commodity and community in postwar Canada,\" Steven Penfold, York University Ph.D. thesis, 2002.\n\nPHYSICS: Len Fisher [UK and Australia] for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit, and Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the [UK and Belgium], and Joseph Keller [USA]", + " for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Physics Takes the Biscuit\", Len Fisher, Nature, 397, no. 6719, February 11, 1999, p. 469.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Pouring Flows,\" Jean-Marc Vanden\u2010Broeck and Joseph B. Keller, Physics of Fluids vol. 29, no. 12, 1986, pp. 3958-61.\n\nLITERATURE: The British Standards Institution for its six-page specification (BS-6008) of the proper way to make a cup of tea.\n\nSCIENCE EDUCATION:", + " The Kansas State Board of Education and the Colorado State Board of Education, for mandating that children should not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution any more than they believe in Newton's theory of gravitation, Faraday's and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Pasteur's theory that germs cause disease.\n\nMEDICINE: Dr. Arvid Vatle of Stord, Norway, for carefully collecting, classifying, and contemplating which kinds of containers his patients chose when submitting urine samples. (REFERENCE: \"Unyttig om urinpr\u00f8ver,\" Arvid Vatle, Tidsskift for Den norske laegeforening [The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association], no.", + " 8, March 20, 1999, p. 1178.)\n\nCHEMISTRY: Takeshi Makino, president of The Safety Detective Agency in Osaka, Japan, for his involvement with S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.\n\nBIOLOGY: Dr. Paul Bosland, director of The Chile Pepper Institute, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, for breeding a spiceless jalapeno chile pepper.\n\nENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION: Hyuk-ho Kwon of Kolon Company of Seoul, Korea, for inventing the self-perfuming business suit.\n\nPEACE:", + " Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower. (Patent WO/1999/032331, \"A Security System for a Vehicle\")\n\nMANAGED HEALTH CARE: The late George and Charlotte Blonsky of New York City and San Jose, California, for inventing a device (US Patent #3,216,423) to aid women in giving birth \u2014 the woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.\n\n\n\nThe 1998 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 1998 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at the 8th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony,", + " at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live.\n\nSAFETY ENGINEERING: Troy Hurtubise, of North Bay, Ontario, for developing, and personally testing a suit of armor that is impervious to grizzly bears. [REFERENCE: \"Project Grizzly\", produced by the \"National Film Board of Canada. ALSO: Bear Man: The Troy Hurtubise Saga, by Troy Hurtubise, Raven House Publishing, Westbrook, ME, USA, 2011.]\n\nBIOLOGY: Peter Fong of Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac.\n\n[", + "REFERENCE: \"Induction and Potentiation of Parturition in Fingernail Clams (Sphaerium striatinum) by Selective Serotonin Re- Uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs),\" Peter F. Fong, Peter T. Huminski, and Lynette M. D'urso, \"Journal of Experimental Zoology, vol. 280, 1998, pp. 260-64.]\n\nPEACE: Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, for their aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs.\n\nCHEMISTRY:", + " Jacques Benveniste of France, for his homeopathic discovery that not only does water have memory, but that the information can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet.\n\n[NOTE: Benveniste also won the 1991 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize.]\n\n\n\n[REFERENCE:\"Transatlantic Transfer of Digitized Antigen Signal by Telephone Link,\" J. Benveniste, P. Jurgens, W. Hsueh and J. Aissa, \"Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology - Program and abstracts of papers to be presented during scientific sessions AAAAI/AAI.CIS Joint Meeting February 21-26,", + " 1997\"]\n\nSCIENCE EDUCATION: Dolores Krieger, Professor Emerita, New York University, for demonstrating the merits of therapeutic touch, a method by which nurses manipulate the energy fields of ailing patients by carefully avoiding physical contact with those patients.\n\n'REFERENCE: \"The Therapeutic Touch,\" Dolores Krieger, Erik Peper, and Sonia Ancoli, The American Journal of Nursing, vol. 79, no. 4, 1979, pp. 660-662.]\n\nSTATISTICS: Jerald Bain of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski of the University of Alberta for their carefully measured report,", + " \"The Relationships Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size.\"\n\n[REFERENCE: \"Annals of Sex Research,\" vol. 6, no. 3, 1993, pp. 231-5.\n\nPHYSICS. Deepak Chopra of The Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.\n\n\n\n[REFERENCE: Deepak Chopra's books \"Quantum Healing,\" \"Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,\" etc.]\n\nECONOMICS. Richard Seed of Chicago for his efforts to stoke up the world economy by cloning himself and other human beings.\n\nMEDICINE:", + " To Patient Y and to his doctors, Caroline Mills, Meirion Llewelyn, David Kelly, and Peter Holt, of Royal Gwent Hospital, in Newport, Wales, for the cautionary medical report, \"A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled Putrid for 5 Years.\" [Published in \"The Lancet,\" vol. 348, November 9, 1996, p. 1282.]\n\nLITERATURE: Dr. Mara Sidoli of Washington, DC, for her illuminating report, \"Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread.\"\n\n\n\n[REFERENCE: \"Journal of Analytical Psychology,\" vol.", + " 41, no. 2, 1996, pp. 165-78.]\n\n\n\nThe 1997 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 1997 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at the 7th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live.\n\nBIOLOGY: T. Yagyu, J. Wackermann, T. Kinoshita, T. Hirota, K. Kochi, I. Kondakor, Thomas K\u00f6nig, and D. Lehmann, from the University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland, from Kansai Medical University in Osaka,", + " Japan, and from Neuroscience Technology Research in Prague, Czech Republic, for measuring people's brainwave patterns while they chewed different flavors of gum. [Published as \"Chewing gum flavor affects measures of global complexity of multichannel EEG,\" T. Yagyu, et al., Neuropsychobiology, vol. 35, 1997, pp. 46-50.]\n\nENTOMOLOGY: Mark Hostetler of the University of Florida, for his scholarly book, \"That Gunk on Your Car,\" which identifies the insect splats that appear on automobile windows. [The book is\n\npublished by Ten Speed Press.]\n\nASTRONOMY:", + " Richard Hoagland of New Jersey, for identifying artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the moon. [REFERENCE: \"The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever,\" by Richard C. Hoagland, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA,1996.]\n\nCOMMUNICATIONS: Sanford Wallace, president of Cyber Promotions of Philadelphia -- neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night have stayed this self-appointed courier from delivering electronic junk mail to all the world.\n\nPHYSICS: John Bockris of Texas A&M University,", + " for his wide-ranging achievements in cold fusion, in the transmutation of base elements into gold, and in the electrochemical incineration of domestic rubbish.\n\nLITERATURE: Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg of Israel, and Michael Drosnin of the United States, for their hairsplitting statistical discovery that the bible contains a secret, hidden code.[REFERENCE: Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg,'s original research was published as\"Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis,\" \"Statistical Science,\" Vol. 9, No. 3, 1994,", + " pp. 429-38. Drosnin's popular book, \"The Bible Code,\" was published by Simon & Schuster.]\n\nMEDICINE: Carl J. Charnetski and Francis X. Brennan, Jr. of Wilkes University, and James F. Harrison of Muzak Ltd. in Seattle, Washington, for their discovery that listening to elevator Muzak stimulates immunoblobulin A (IgA) production, and thus may help prevent the common cold.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Effect of music and auditory stimuli on secretory immunoglobulin A (IgA),\" Carl J. Charnetski, Francis X.", + " Brennan, Jr. and James F. Harrison, Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 87, 1998, pp. 1163-70.\n\nECONOMICS: Akihiro Yokoi of Wiz Company in Chiba, Japan and Aki Maita of Bandai Company in Tokyo, the father and mother of Tamagotchi, for diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets.\n\nPEACE: Harold Hillman of the University of Surrey, England for his lovingly rendered and ultimately peaceful report \"The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods.\" [Published in Perception 1993,", + " vol 22, pp. 745-53.]\n\nMETEOROLOGY: Bernard Vonnegut of the State University of Albany, for his revealing report, \"Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed.\" [Published in \"Weatherwise,\" October 1975, p. 217.]\n\n\n\nThe 1996 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 1996 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 3rd, 1996 at the 6th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch archived video on C-SPAN.\n\nBIOLOGY:", + " Anders Barheim and Hogne Sandvik of the University of Bergen, Norway, for their tasty and tasteful report, \"Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"British Medical Journal,\" vol. 309, Dec 24-31, 1994, p. 1689.\n\nMEDICINE: James Johnston of R.J. Reynolds, Joseph Taddeo of U.S. Tobacco, Andrew Tisch of Lorillard, William Campbell of Philip Morris, Edward A. Horrigan of Liggett Group, Donald S. Johnston of American Tobacco Company, and the late Thomas E.", + " Sandefur, Jr., chairman of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. for their unshakable discovery, as testified to the U.S. Congress, that nicotine is not addictive.\n\nPHYSICS: Robert Matthews of Aston University, England, for his studies of Murphy's Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast often falls on the buttered side.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Tumbling toast, Murphy's Law and the fundamental constants,\" \"European Journal of Physics,\" vol.16, no.4, July 18, 1995, p. 172-6.\n\nPEACE: Jacques Chirac, President of France, for commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific.\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH:", + " Ellen Kleist of Nuuk, Greenland and Harald Moi of Oslo, Norway, for their cautionary medical report \"Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Genitourinary Medicine,\" vol. 69, no. 4, Aug. 1993, p. 322.\n\nCHEMISTRY: George Goble of Purdue University, for his blistering world record time for igniting a barbeque grill-three seconds, using charcoal and liquid oxygen.\n\nBIODIVERSITY: Chonosuke Okamura of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan, for discovering the fossils of dinosaurs,", + " horses, dragons, princesses, and more than 1000 other extinct \"mini-species,\" each of which is less than 1/100 of an inch in length.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: the series \"Reports of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory,\" published by the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan during the 1970's and 1980's.\n\nLITERATURE: The editors of the journal Social Text, for eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: The paper was \"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,\" Alan Sokal,", + " Social Text, Spring/Summer 1996, pp. 217-252.\n\nECONOMICS: Dr. Robert J. Genco of the University of Buffalo for his discovery that \"financial strain is a risk indicator for destructive periodontal disease.\n\n\n\nREFERENCES: (published after winning the prize): \"Models to Evaluate the Role of Stress in Periodontal Disease,\" Robert J. Genco, et al., Annals of Periodontology, vol. 3, no. 1, July 1998, pp. 288-302. \"Relationship of Stress, Distress, and Inadequate Coping Behaviors to Periodontal Disease,\" Robert J.", + " Genco, et al., Journal of Periodontology, vol. 70, 1999, pp. 711-23.\n\nART: Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for his ornamentally evolutionary invention, the plastic pink flamingo.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Pink Flamingos: Splendor on the Grass\"\n\n\n\nThe 1995 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 1995 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 6th, 1995 at the 5th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nNUTRITION:", + " John Martinez of J. Martinez & Company in Atlanta, Georgia, for educating the world about Luak Coffee, the world's most expensive coffee, which is made from coffee beans ingested and excreted by the luak (aka, the palm civet), a bobcat-like animal native to Indonesia.\n\nPHYSICS: D.M.R. Georget, R. Parker, and A.C. Smith, of the Institute of Food Research, Norwich, England, for their rigorous analysis of soggy breakfast cereal, published in the report entitled \"A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " Powder Technology, November, 1994, vol. 81, no. 2, pp. 189-96.\n\nECONOMICS: Awarded jointly to Nick Leeson and his superiors at Barings Bank and to Robert Citron of Orange County, California, for using the calculus of derivatives to demonstrate that every financial institution has its limits.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Barings Lost : Nick Leeson and the Collapse of Barings Plc,\" and \"Big Bets Gone Bad\"\n\nMEDICINE: Marcia E. Buebel, David S. Shannahoff-Khalsa, and Michael R. Boyle, for their invigorating study entitled \"The Effects of Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing on Cognition.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " International Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 57, 1991, pp. 239-249.\n\nLITERATURE: David B. Busch and James R. Starling, of Madison Wisconsin, for their deeply penetrating research report, \"Rectal foreign bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature.\" The citations include reports of, among other items: seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire spring; a snuff box; an oil can with potato stopper; eleven different forms of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs; a jeweler's saw; a frozen pig's tail;", + " a tin cup; a beer glass; and one patient's remarkable ensemble collection consisting of spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch and a magazine.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Surgery, September 1986, pp. 512-519.\n\nPEACE: The Taiwan National Parliament, for demonstrating that politicians gain more by punching, kicking and gouging each other than by waging war against other nations.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY: Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita, of Keio University, for their success in training pigeons to discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Pigeons' Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and Picasso,\"Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, vol. 63, 1995, pp. 165-174.\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH: Martha Kold Bakkevig of Sintef Unimed in Trondheim, Norway, and Ruth Nielsen of the Technical University of Denmark, for their exhaustive study, \"Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Ergonomics, vol 37, no. 8, Aug. 1994, pp. 1375-89.\n\nDENTISTRY: Robert H.", + " Beaumont, of Shoreview, Minnesota, for his incisive study \"Patient Preference for Waxed or Unwaxed Dental Floss.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Journal of Periodontology, vol. 61, no. 2, Feb. 1990, pp. 123-5.]\n\nCHEMISTRY: Bijan Pakzad of Beverly Hills, for creating DNA Cologne and DNA PERFUME, neither of which contain deoxyribonucleic acid, and both of which come in a triple helix bottle.\n\n\n\nThe 1994 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nBIOLOGY: W. Brian Sweeney, Brian Krafte-Jacobs,", + " Jeffrey W. Britton, and Wayne Hansen, for their breakthrough study, \"The Constipated Serviceman: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops,\" and especially for their numerical analysis of bowel movement frequency. [Published in \"Military Medicine,\" vol. 158, August, 1993, pp. 346-348.]\n\nPEACE: John Hagelin of Maharishi University and The Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, promulgator of peaceful thoughts, for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C.\n\n[REFERENCE: \"Interim Report:", + " Results of the National Demonstration Project to Reduce Violent Crime and Improve Governmental Effectiveness In Washington, D.C., June 7 to July 30, 1993, Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, Fairfield, Iowa\"]\n\nMEDICINE: This prize is awarded in two parts. First, to Patient X, formerly of the US Marine Corps, valiant victim of a venomous bite from his pet rattlesnake, for his determined use of electroshock therapy -- at his own insistence, automobile sparkplug wires were attached to his lip, and the car engine revved to 3000 rpm for five minutes.", + " Second, to Dr. Richard C. Dart of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center and Dr. Richard A. Gustafson of The University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, for their well-grounded medical report: \"Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation.\" [Published in Annals of Emergency Medicine, vol. 20, no. 6, June 1991, pp. 659-61.]\n\nENTOMOLOGY: Robert A. Lopez of Westport, NY, valiant veterinarian and friend of all creatures great and small, for his series of experiments in obtaining ear mites from cats, inserting them into his own ear,", + " and carefully observing and analyzing the results. [Published as \"Of Mites and Man,\" The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, vol. 203, no. 5, Sept. 1, 1993, pp. 606-7.]\n\nPSYCHOLOGY: Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, practitioner of the psychology of negative reinforcement, for his thirty-year study of the effects of punishing three million citizens of Singapore whenever they spat, chewed gum, or fed pigeons.\n\nLITERATURE: L. Ron Hubbard, ardent author of science fiction and founding father of Scientology, for his crackling Good Book,", + " \"Dianetics,\" which is highly profitable to mankind or to a portion thereof.\n\nCHEMISTRY: Texas State Senator Bob Glasgow, wise writer of logical legislation, for sponsoring the 1989 drug control law which make it illegal to purchase beakers, flasks, test tubes, or other laboratory glassware without a permit.\n\nECONOMICS: Jan Pablo Davila of Chile, tireless trader of financial futures and former employee of the state-owned Codelco Company, for instructing his computer to \"buy\" when he meant \"sell,\" and subsequently attempting to recoup his losses by making increasingly unprofitable trades that ultimately lost.", + "5 percent of Chile's gross national product. Davila's relentless achievement inspired\\ his countrymen to coin a new verb: \" davilar,\" meaning, \"to botch things up royally.\"\n\nMATHEMATICS: The Southern Baptist Church of Alabama, mathematical measurers of morality, for their county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama citizens will go to Hell if they don't repent.\n\n[Click here for additional details.]\n\n\n\nThe 1993 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nPSYCHOLOGY: John Mack of Harvard Medical School and David Jacobs of Temple University, mental visionaries, for their leaping conclusion that people who believe they were kidnapped by aliens from outer space,", + " probably were \u2014 and especially for their conclusion \"the focus of the abduction is the production of children. [REFERENCE: \"Secret Life : Firsthand, Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions\"]\n\nCONSUMER ENGINEERING: Ron Popeil, incessant inventor and perpetual pitchman of late night television, for redefining the industrial revolution with such devices as the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, Mr. Microphone, and the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler. [REFERENCE: \"The Salesman of the Century : Inventing, Marketing, and Selling on TV: How I Did It and How You Can Too!", + "\"]\n\nBIOLOGY: Paul Williams Jr. of the Oregon State Health Division and Kenneth W. Newell of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, bold biological detectives, for their pioneering study, \"Salmonella Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs.\" [Published in American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health, vol. 60, no. 5, May 1970, pp. 926-9.]\n\nECONOMICS: Ravi Batra of Southern Methodist University, shrewd economist and best-selling author of \"The Great Depression of 1990\" ($17.95) and \"Surviving the Great Depression of 1990\"", + " ($18.95), for selling enough copies of his books to single-handedly prevent worldwide economic collapse.\n\nPEACE: The Pepsi-Cola Company of the Phillipines, suppliers of sugary hopes and dreams, for sponsoring a contest to create a millionaire, and then announcing the wrong winning number, thereby inciting and uniting 800,000 riotously expectant winners, and bringing many warring factions together for the first time in their nation's history.\n\nVISIONARY TECHNOLOGY: Presented jointly to Jay Schiffman of Farmington Hills, Michigan, crack inventor of AutoVision, an image projection device that makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same time,", + " and to the Michigan state legislature, for making it legal to do so. REFERENCE: US patent #5061996A.\n\nCHEMISTRY: James Campbell and Gaines Campbell of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, dedicated deliverers of fragrance, for inventing scent strips, the odious method by which perfume is applied to magazine pages.\n\nLITERATURE: Eric Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong, and their 972 co-authors, for publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages. [The study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine,", + " vol. 329, no. 10, September 2, 1993, pp. 673-82. The authors are from the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.]\n\n[Click here for additional details.]\n\nMATHEMATICS: Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina, farsighted and faithful seer of statistics, for calculating the exact odds (710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1) that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist.", + " [REFERENCE: \"Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?\"]\n\nPHYSICS: Louis Kervran of France, ardent admirer of alchemy, for his conclusion that the calcium in chickens' eggshells is created by a process of cold fusion. REFERENCE: \"Biological Transmutations and their applications in: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Ecology, Medicine, Nutrition, Agronomy, Geology\"]\n\nMEDICINE: James F. Nolan, Thomas J. Stillwell, and John P. Sands, Jr., medical men of mercy, for their painstaking research report, \"Acute Management of the Zipper-", + "Entrapped Penis.\" [Published in Journal of Emergency Medicine, vol. 8, no. 3, May/June 1990, pp. 305-7.]\n\n\n\nThe 1992 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nMEDICINE: F. Kanda, E. Yagi, M. Fukuda, K. Nakajima, T. Ohta and O. Nakata of the Shisedo Research Center in Yokohama, for their pioneering research study \"Elucidation of Chemical Compounds Responsible for Foot Malodour,\" especially for their conclusion that people who think they have foot odor do, and those who don't,", + " don't. [Published in British Journal of Dermatology, vol. 122, no. 6,\n\nJune 1990, pp. 771-6.]\n\nARCHEOLOGY: Eclaireurs de France, the Protestant youth group whose name means\"those who show the way,\" fresh-scrubbed removers of grafitti, for erasing the ancient paintings from the walls of the Meyrieres Cave near the French village of Bruniquel.\n\nECONOMICS: The investors of Lloyds of London, heirs to 300 years of dull prudent management, for their bold attempt to insure disaster by refusing to pay for their company's losses.\n\nBIOLOGY:", + " Dr. Cecil Jacobson, relentlessly generous sperm donor, and prolific patriarch of sperm banking, for devising a simple, single-handed method of quality control. [REFERENCE: \"The\n\nBabymaker : Fertility Fraud and the Fall of Dr. Cecil Jacobson\"]\n\nCHEMISTRY: Ivette Bassa, constructor of colorful colloids, for her role in the crowning achievement of twentieth century chemistry, the synthesis of bright blue Jell-O.\n\nPHYSICS: David Chorley and Doug Bower, lions of low-energy physics, for their circular contributions to field theory based on the geometrical destruction of English crops.\n\nPEACE:", + " Daryl Gates, former Police Chief of the City of Los Angeles, for his uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together.\n\nNUTRITION: The utilizers of Spam, courageous consumers of canned comestibles, for 54 years of undiscriminating digestion.\n\nLITERATURE: Yuri Struchkov, unstoppable author from the Institute of Organoelemental Compounds in Moscow, for the 948 scientific papers he is credited with publishing between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days.\n\nART: Presented jointly to Jim Knowlton, modern Renaissance man, for his classic anatomy poster \"Penises of the Animal Kingdom,\" and to the U.S.", + " National Endowment for the Arts for encouraging Mr. Knowlton to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book.\n\nThe 1991 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nCHEMISTRY: Jacques Benveniste, prolific proseletizer and dedicated correspondent of \"Nature,\" for his persistent discovery that water, H2O, is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating to his satisfaction that water is able to remember events long after all trace of those events has vanished.\n\nMEDICINE: Alan Kligerman, deviser of digestive deliverance, vanquisher of vapor, and inventor of Beano, for his pioneering work with anti-gas liquids that prevent bloat,", + " gassiness, discomfort and embarassment.\n\nEDUCATION: J. Danforth Quayle, consumer of time and occupier of space, for demonstrating,better than anyone else, the need for science education.\n\nBIOLOGY: Robert Klark Graham, selector of seeds and prophet of propagation, for his pioneering development of the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that accepts donations only from Nobellians and Olympians.\n\nECONOMICS: Michael Milken, titan of Wall Street and father of the junk bond, to whom the world is indebted.\n\nLITERATURE: Erich von Daniken, visionary raconteur and author of \"Chariots of the Gods,\" for explaining how human civilization was influenced by ancient astronauts from outer space.\n\nPEACE:", + " Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and first champion of the Star Wars weapons system, for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.\n\nDid They Really Do These Things?\n\nAre these things real? Yes, indeed. You can look it up. That's why we give you the references.\n\nThe only exceptions came in 1991, the very first year of the ceremony, and 1994. In 1991, three additional Prizes were given for apocryphal achievements. In 1994, one prize was based on what turned out to be erroneous press accounts. Those four apocryphal achievements are not included in the list on this page.", + " ALL the other Prizes, in all years, were awarded for genuine achievements.\n\nFor extensive background info and additional reference for many of the past winners, see the books Marc Abrahams has written about Ig Nobel Prizes. ", + " Marc-Antoine Fardin, left, accepts his Ig Nobel Physics Prize from Nobel laureate Eric Maskin during ceremonies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., Thursday, Sept. 14, 2017. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer) (Associated Press)\n\nBOSTON (AP) \u2014 Scientists who discovered that old men really do have big ears, that playing the didgeridoo helps relieve sleep apnea and that handling crocodiles can influence gambling decisions are among this year's recipients of the Ig Nobel, the prize for absurd scientific achievement.\n\nThe 27th annual awards were announced Thursday at Harvard University. The ceremony featured a traditional barrage of paper airplanes,", + " a world premiere opera and real Nobel laureates handing out the 10 prizes.\n\n\"It's a strange honor to have, but I am thrilled,\" Dr. James Heathcote told The Associated Press. A British physician, Heathcote won the Ig Nobel for anatomy for his big-ear research.\n\nThe awards are sponsored by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.\n\nThis year's winners \u2014 who each received $10 trillion cash prizes in virtually worthless Zimbabwean money \u2014 also included scientists who used fluid dynamics to determine whether cats are solid or liquid;", + " researchers who tried to figure out why some people are disgusted by cheese; and psychologists who found that many identical twins cannot tell themselves apart in visual images.\n\nHeathcote, whose study on ear size was published in the prestigious British Medical Journal in 1995, was inspired when he and several other general practitioners were discussing how they could do more research.\n\nWhen he asked why old men have such big ears, half his colleagues agreed with his observation; the others scoffed.\n\nFor his study, Heathcote measured the ear length of more than 200 patients and discovered not only that old men have big ears but that ears grow about 2 millimeters (0.", + "08 inches) per decade after age 30. Women's ears grow with age, too, but their ears are smaller to start with, and men's big ears may be more noticeable because they tend to have less hair, he found.\n\n\"There's something magical about measuring the ears,\" he said.\n\nDr. Milo Puhan's Ig Nobel peace prize-winning discovery is a godsend for anyone who lives with an unbearably loud snorer. He found that playing the didgeridoo \u2014 that tubular Australian aboriginal instrument that emits a deep, rhythmic drone \u2014 helps relieve sleep apnea.\n\nPuhan, director of the Institute for Epidemiology,", + " Biostatistics and Prevention at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, studied didgeridoo playing after a patient with mild sleep apnea became convinced that it helped him.\n\nPuhan recruited volunteers who learned to play a roughly 4-foot-long (130 centimeter) plastic didgeridoo.\n\n\"Regular playing of a didgeridoo reduces daytime sleepiness and snoring in people with moderate obstructive sleep apnea syndrome and also improves the sleep quality of partners,\" his study concluded.\n\nWhy does it work? Puhan figures playing the didgeridoo helps people learn circular breathing (the technique of blowing out through the mouth while simultaneously inhaling through the nose)", + " and strengthens the throat muscles used in breathing.\n\nThe economics prize went to a pair of Australians who found that if you want to limit your gambling losses, don't have a close encounter with a crocodile before hitting the casino.\n\nMatthew Rockloff, head of the Population Research Laboratory at Central Queensland University in Bundaberg, and research assistant Nancy Greer, plunked a 1-meter (3-foot) saltwater crocodile \u2014 its mouth safely taped \u2014 into the arms of people about to gamble and watched what happened.\n\nThe excitement caused by handling a dangerous reptile caused people with pre-existing problems to \"gamble higher amounts, which over the long term will lead to greater gambling losses,\" Rockloff said in an email.\n\nLike many projects that earn Ig Nobels,", + " what seems silly on the surface can have a valid application.\n\n\"This was the first study to examine the emotional impact of excitement on gambling choices, which has obvious benefits toward addressing a very serious behavioral and mental health problem,\" he said.\n\nRockloff felt so fortunate when he learned of his Ig Nobel, he was tempted to press his own luck.\n\n\"I had to stop myself from trying to capitalize on that luck with a slot machine,\" he said.\n" + ], + "length": 36231, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 82, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Fifteen years ago on a clear autumn morning, Americans watched as planes turned into weapons, buildings came crashing down, and a national innocence was shattered. A look around the landscape as America pays tribute to the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks: Speaking at the Pentagon ceremony, President Obama paid tribute Sunday morning to the \"3,000 beautiful lives\" lost that Tuesday morning. ABC News reports. When the planes hit, White House aides decided the safest place for President Bush was the sky and hustled him to Air Force One, where he spent the next chaotic eight hours. Politico tells the story in a piece headlined \"We're the Only Plane in the Sky.\" With a fourth plane missing, Vice President Dick Cheney authorized the Air Force to shoot down United Flight 93. USA Today explores that, and other forgotten tidbits from the tragedy. \"I\u2019m not drawn to want to figure out who he is,\" AP photographer Richard Drew says of his iconic \"Falling Man\" photo. He gives the Daily Beast the backstory on one of the most haunting images of 9/11. The Washington Post explores ground zero, and \"the tension between remembering and moving on.\" The AP tells the story of 9/11 victims' relative who say they were moved by their loss to do good. Over at the New York Daily News, Gersh Luntzman laments the loss of the twin towers, and says the city's skyline hasn't recovered its swagger.\n", + "docs": [ + "President Barack Obama bows as a moment of silence is observed during a memorial ceremony at the Pentagon in Washington to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Sunday, Sept.... (Associated Press)\n\nNEW YORK (AP) \u2014 The Latest on commemorations marking the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks (all times local):\n\n12:35 p.m.\n\nSome family members reciting the names of loved ones killed on 9/11 have spoken about how their losses have inspired them to do good for others.\n\nJerry D'Amadeo was 10 years old when he lost his father, Vincent Gerard D'", + "Amadeo. He was the opening speaker. He said he worked this summer with children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 26 children and adults were massacred in 2012.\n\nHe said, \"Sometimes the bad things in our lives put us on the path to where we should be going.\"\n\nRyan Van Riper said he planned to honor his slain grandmother, Barbara Shaw, by serving the country.\n\n___\n\n11:30 a.m.\n\nHillary Clinton's campaign says the Democratic presidential nominee left the 9/11 anniversary ceremony in New York early after feeling \"overheated.\"\n\nThe campaign says she's \"feeling much better.\"\n\nClinton spokesman Nick Merrill says in a statement Sunday that the former secretary of state attended the morning ceremony for 90 minutes \"to pay her respects and greet some of the families of the fallen.\n\nHe adds,", + " \"During the ceremony, she felt overheated so departed to go to her daughter's apartment, and is feeling much better.\"\n\nThe statement offered no additional details.\n\nRepublican presidential nominee Donald Trump also departed the ceremony before its conclusion.\n\n___\n\n10:25 a.m.\n\nPresident Barack Obama says the nation will never forget the lives of those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.\n\nObama said at a Pentagon memorial service that he is inspired by the resilience of the victims' families.\n\nHe quoted Scripture: \"Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the table of your heart.\"\n\nObama also praised America's diversity and urged Americans not to let their enemies divide them.", + " He called the day \"difficult\" but one that \"reveals the love and faithfulness in your hearts and in the heart of our nation.\"\n\n___\n\n10:08 a.m.\n\nHundreds are gathering for the 9/11 anniversary observance in Pennsylvania where one of the planes hijacked by terrorists crashed in a field 15 years ago.\n\nThey gathered at Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville as ceremonies were also taking place Sunday in New York and at the Pentagon. Forty passengers and crew members died in the Pennsylvania crash.\n\nFor the first time, the Shanksville ceremony is being held outside the visitor center that opened last year rather than at the granite mall that runs along the crash site.", + " The names of the victims will be read and bells ring in their memory.\n\nThe United Airlines flight was heading from Newark, New Jersey to San Francisco when it crashed after passengers and crew members fought the terrorists for control of the plane.\n\n___\n\nThis story has been corrected to show Pennsylvania center opened last year, not this year.\n\n___\n\n9:22 a.m.\n\nThe government's homeland security secretary says the United States is safer now than it was in 2001 against what he calls \"another 9/11-style attack.\"\n\nBut Jeh (jay) Johnson \u2014 making the rounds of the Sunday news shows \u2014 says the country is \"challenged when it comes to the prospects of the lone-wolf actor,", + " the homegrown violent extremists.\"\n\nHe tells NBC's \"Meet the Press\" that requires \"a new, whole of government response and public participation and vigilance.\"\n\n___\n\n8:55 a.m.\n\nHillary Clinton and Donald Trump are attending the Sept. 11 remembrance ceremony in New York.\n\nThe presidential candidates greeted supporters on Sunday as they entered the downtown Manhattan memorial. They're not expected to make public remarks at the event, and both have promised to suspend campaign activities to mark the 15th anniversary of the attacks.\n\nClinton \u2014 a former New York senator \u2014 has frequently highlighted her efforts, including in a campaign ad released Friday, to aid those affected by the World Trade Center collapse.\n\nTrump \u2014 a New York real estate mogul \u2014 has said he donated construction equipment to the recovery effort and gave $100,", + "000 to the memorial after touring it for the first time earlier this year.\n\n___\n\n8:46 a.m.\n\nThe commemoration of the 15th anniversary of 9/11 has begun at ground zero.\n\nSunday's ceremony began with a moment of silence and tolling bells at 8:46 a.m., the time when a terrorist-piloted plane slammed into the World Trade Center's north tower.\n\nAfter the silent period, victims' relatives began reading the names of the nearly 3,000 people killed when four hijacked aircraft hit the trade center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. It was the deadliest terror attack on American soil.\n\nPresident Barack Obama will speak at an observance at the Pentagon.", + " Hundreds of people also are expected at a ceremony at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.\n\nDemocratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican rival Donald Trump are attending the anniversary ceremony at the World Trade Center.\n\n___\n\n8:20 a.m.\n\nFamily members of those lost on Sept. 11 are arriving at ground zero for the ceremony marking the 15th anniversary of the attacks.\n\nSome are going into National September 11 Museum, which is open only to victims' families until Sunday afternoon, when the public will be allowed to enter.\n\nAbout an hour before the official commemoration start, police officers in uniform and bagpipers rehearsed part of the ceremony involving a display of the US flag.\n\nAs it has every year,", + " the remembrance will mainly focus on the reading of the names of those killed in the attacks. It will also include moments of silence and the tolling of bells.\n\nOther ceremonies are being held at the Pentagon and at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.\n\n___\n\n12:20 a.m.\n\nRelatives and loved ones of 9/11 victims will convene Sunday to mark the 15th anniversary of the terror attacks.\n\nOrganizers have planned some additional music and readings to mark the milestone anniversary at ground zero.\n\nBut they are keeping traditions that have made the ceremony a constant in how America remembers Sept. 11, even as ground zero and the nation changes.\n\nThe customs include moments of silence and tolling bells,", + " an apolitical atmosphere and the reading of the nearly 3,000 names of those killed in New York, at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.\n\nPresident Barack Obama will speak at an observance at the Pentagon. Hundreds of people also are expected at a ceremony at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville. ", + " Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001. But for a tiny handful of people, those memories touch American presidential history. Shortly after the attacks began, the most powerful man in the world, who had been informed of the World Trade Center explosions in a Florida classroom, was escorted to a runway and sent to the safest place his handlers could think of: the open sky.\n\nFor the next eight hours, with American airspace completely cleared of jets, a single blue-and-white Boeing 747, tail number 29000\u2014filled with about 65 passengers, crew and press, and the 43rd president,", + " George W. Bush, as well as 70 box lunches and 25 pounds of bananas\u2014traversed the eastern United States. On board, President Bush and his aides argued about two competing interests\u2014the need to return to Washington and reassure a nation and the competing need to protect the commander in chief. All the while, he and his staff grappled with the aftermath of the worst attack on American soil in their lifetimes, making crucial decisions with only flickering information about the attacks unfolding below. Bush struggled even to contact his family and to reach Vice President Dick Cheney in the White House bunker.\n\nStory Continued Below\n\nThe story of those remarkable hours\u2014and the thoughts and emotions of those aboard\u2014isolated eight miles above America,", + " escorted by three F-16 fighters, flying just below the speed of sound, has never been comprehensively told.\n\nThis oral history, based on more than 40 hours of original interviews with more than two dozen of the passengers, crew and press aboard\u2014including many who have never spoken publicly about what they witnessed that day\u2014traces the story of how an untested president, a sidearm-carrying general, top aides, the Secret Service and the Cipro-wielding White House physician, as well as five reporters, four radio operators, three pilots, two congressmen and a stenographer responded to 9/11.\n\n\n\n\n\nPrologue\n\nAndy Card,", + " chief of staff, White House: We woke up in Sarasota, Florida, at the Colony Resort. There was a terrible stench in the air\u2014the red tide had killed a lot of fish that had washed up on the shore. I remember being struck by that smell coming from Air Force One the night before. We\u2019d gone off to dinner in Tampa. It was unusual for President Bush to stay out late like that, but it was a relaxing evening.\n\nAri Fleischer, press secretary, White House: The day couldn\u2019t have begun any better or more beautifully.\n\nGordon Johndroe, assistant press secretary, White House: The day starts off very normally\u2014the president went for a run,", + " and I took the [press] pool out with the president. I remember I got stung by a bee, and I asked Dr. Tubb if he had something he could give me for the swelling. He said, \u201cYeah, we\u2019ll get you something when we get to the airplane.\u201d Needless to say, I promptly forgot about it that day.\n\nSonya Ross, reporter, Associated Press: This was a garden variety trip. It was low-ranking staff and a lot of the top journalists didn\u2019t come. It was a scrub trip.\n\nMike Morell, presidential briefer, Central Intelligence Agency: I walked into his suite [for the president\u2019s morning intelligence briefing]; he was surrounded by breakfast foods and he hadn\u2019t touched any of it.", + " He asked me if I\u2019d gone to the beach the night before, and I told him I\u2019d just gone right to bed. The second intifada was well underway then, and the briefings at that time were very heavy on Israeli-Palestinian stuff. A good bit of the briefing that morning was about Israeli matters. There was one thing that caught his attention, and he picked up the phone to call Condi [Rice] to ask her to follow up on it. There was nothing in the briefing about terrorism. It was very routine\u2014just him, me, Andy Card and Deb Loewer from the Situation Room.\n\nAndy Card:", + " The president was in a great mood. He had that George W. Bush strut that morning.\n\nB. Alexander \u201cSandy\u201d Kress, senior education adviser, White House: The whole point of the trip was education. He was pushing No Child Left Behind as Congress was coming back to Washington. [Secretary of Education] Rod Paige and I briefed him ahead of his remarks to the press. It was a beautiful day\u2014we were in his suite. He was in a really good mood. We were out of the Oval and he was relaxed. Those were probably the last carefree moments he had in his term.\n\nAndy Card: I remember literally telling him,", + " \u201cIt should be an easy day.\u201d Those were the words. \u201cIt should be an easy day.\u201d\n\n\n\nI. Emma Booker Elementary School, Sarasota, Fla.\n\nAri Fleischer: Back in 2001, no one had iPhones or BlackBerrys. I had this high-tech pager on my belt\u2014it was two-way, in that you could send back one of like 14 preprogrammed responses. For the day, it was pretty fancy-fancy stuff. As we were driving to the first stop for the day, I got a page from Brian Bravo, who put together the White House news clips.\n\nBrian Bravo, press assistant,", + " White House: My job was to just scour the news\u2014TV, the AP wire, Bloomberg. I just spent my time at the desk [in the White House], feeding the news all day to the White House staff. I actually had a buddy in New York who called me. He worked in a tall office tower and had seen the first plane hit. It was word-of-mouth intel, but then I started to see TV starting to cover it. To get to the pagers they used back then on the road, I\u2019d have to parse any story down to a few short words. I just said, \u201cA plane has hit the World Trade Center.\u201d At that point,", + " no one knew what it meant.\n\nAri Fleischer: I got out [of the motorcade] thinking this must\u2019ve been some kind of terrible accident.\n\nBrian Montgomery, director of advance, White House: When the motorcade arrives, I get out and I was running towards the limo\u2014I always run towards the limo\u2014and Mark Rosenker, the head of the White House Military Officer, says to me, \u201cDr. Rice needs to talk to the president.\u201d\n\nAri Fleischer: Karl Rove told [the president] first.\n\nKarl Rove, senior adviser, White House: We were standing outside the elementary school.", + " My phone rang. It was my assistant Susan Ralston, saying that a plane had hit the World Trade Center\u2014it wasn\u2019t clear whether it was private, commercial, prop, or jet. That\u2019s all she had. The boss was about two feet away. He was shaking hands. I told him the same thing. He arched his eyebrows like, \u201cGet more.\u201d\n\nDave Wilkinson, assistant agent-in-charge, U.S. Secret Service: Eddie Marinzel and I were the two lead agents with the president that day. The head of the detail was back in Washington. We heard, \u201cThere\u2019s an incident in New York.\u201d\n\nBrian Montgomery:", + " There was this group of students, all young ladies in uniforms and teachers, all oblivious to all of this. They had no idea what was going on. The president was very gracious and greeted them, and then said, \u201cI need to go take an important telephone call.\u201d He went into the holding room and went directly to the STU-III [the secure telephone].\n\nAri Fleischer: There\u2019s always a secure telephone waiting for the president, but in the nine months he\u2019d been president, I don\u2019t think we\u2019d ever used one before an event like that. Condi was holding for him.\n\nAndy Card: We were standing at the door to the classroom,", + " when a staffer came up and said, simply, \u201cSir, it appears that a twin-engine prop plane crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.\u201d We all said something like what a tragedy. I remember I was thinking about the passengers\u2014how much they must\u2019ve worried as they realized what was about to happen. It was only a nanosecond, and then the principal opened the door and the president went into the classroom to meet the students.\n\nBrian Montgomery: We\u2019re trying to get a TV for the hold room\u2014all we could find was this massive 30-inch TV on a cart with rabbit ears.\n\nNew Window \u2018The Safest and Most Dangerous Place in the World at the Exact Same Time\u2019: Click to view gallery.", + " | George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum\n\nDave Wilkinson: We take everything extremely seriously, anything that could affect the presidency. We began speaking to experts back at the White House. No one knew anything. We\u2019re asking ourselves, \u201cIs there any direction of interest towards the president?\u201d That\u2019s the phrase, \u201cdirection of interest.\u201d Or is this just an attack on New York?\n\nSandy Kress: I was back in the media room. There was some buzz about the first plane, people were watching it on a TV. Then there was a stampede across the media room as they saw the second plane hit.\n\nRep. Adam Putnam (R-", + "Florida): I was brand new. I was a freshman [congressman]. We\u2019d gone into the media center, when the main event was going to be, while we wait for the president and the children to read together in the other room. We were clustered around the TV and watched the second plane hit.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark, superintendent of communications, Air Force One: From all indications, it was going to be a simple trip. I had breakfast with one of the navigators, and we were talking about how we were having breakfast in Florida and we\u2019re going to be back in time for lunch.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman,", + " presidential pilot, Air Force One: We were all getting ready, based on the estimated departure time. All of us had already shown up at the plane.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: There were two TV tuners, worldwide television tuners [at my workspace on Air Force One]. They were like old-school rabbit ears\u2014UHF and VHF frequencies. We didn\u2019t have the ability to tune into CNN, Fox, or anything else. It was the Today Show, the strongest signal that day, and they\u2019re showing pictures [of the Towers], smoke billowing out. I saw the second airplane strike. I said, \u201cOh shit.\u201d I just dropped everything and ran downstairs to get Colonel Tillman:", + " \u201cYou\u2019ve got to come see this.\u201d\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: It didn\u2019t make any sense. It\u2019s a clear-and-a-million day.\n\nPresident George W. Bush participates in a reading demonstration the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. | George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum\n\nStaff Sgt. William \u201cBuzz\u201d Buzinski, security, Air Force One: Our job is to protect the asset [Air Force One]. The Secret Service is principal protection. We\u2019re asset protection. We protect the plane 24 hours a day,", + " even after the president has left. One of the advance [Secret Service] agents had told us about the first plane. Then about 17 minutes later, I see the same guy sprinting across the tarmac. He said, \u201cAnother plane hit the towers.\u201d I knew instantly it was terrorism. We started to increase security around the plane\u2014made it a tighter bubble.\n\nStaff Sgt. Paul Germain, airborne communications system operator, Air Force One: We thought it was weird even just when the first plane hit. People who know airplanes, that\u2019s some real stuff right there. Big airplanes just don\u2019t hit little buildings. Then, as soon as that second plane hit,", + " that switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: Everything started coming alive. We were hooked into the PEOC [the White House bunker] and the JOC [Joint Operations Center], for the Secret Service. They\u2019re all in the link now.\n\nAndy Card: Another plane hit the other Tower. My mind flashed to three initials: UBL. Usama bin Laden. Then I was thinking that we had White House people there\u2014my deputy, Joe Hagin, and a team were in New York preparing for the U.N. General Assembly. I was thinking that Joe was probably at the World Trade Center,", + " that\u2019s where the Secret Service office was, in the basement.\n\nMike Morell: I was really worried that someone was going to fly a plane into that school. This event had been on schedule for weeks, anyone could have known about it. Eddie [Marinzel, the lead Secret Service agent] wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as possible.\n\nRep. Adam Putnam: There\u2019s some debate within the staff that I can hear about how the president needs to address the nation. They\u2019re saying, \u201cWe can\u2019t do it here. You can\u2019t do it in front of fifth-graders.\u201d The Secret Service is saying,", + " \u201cYou\u2019re doing it here or you\u2019re not doing at all. We\u2019re not taking the time to do it somewhere else. We need to get him secure.\u201d\n\nDave Wilkinson: We\u2019re talking to folks back at the White House, we\u2019re beginning to get the motorcade up and running, getting the motorcycle cops back, we\u2019re ready to evacuate at a moment\u2019s notice. All of a sudden it hits me: The president\u2019s the only one who doesn\u2019t know that this plane has hit the second building. It was a discomfort to all of us that the president didn\u2019t know. The event was dragging on, and that\u2019s when Andy Card came out.\n\nAndy Card:", + " A thousand times a day, a chief of staff has to ask \u201cDoes the president need to know?\u201d This was an easy test to pass. As strange as it sounds, as I was standing there waiting to talk to the president, I was reflecting on another time that I\u2019d had to be the calm one: I\u2019d been acting chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush when he threw up on the Japanese prime minister. I was all business in that moment. He\u2019d refused to get in the ambulance\u2014he didn\u2019t want anyone to see the president get in the ambulance\u2014and in the limo, he\u2019s still sick and he\u2019s getting sick on me.", + " In the hotel, I take out my laminated \u201cin case of emergency\u201d card. I went down my checklist. I was telling people, \u201cHe\u2019s not dying, he\u2019s still the president.\u201d My job that day was to be calm, cool, and collected. Not the same magnitude, of course, but I knew my job on 9/11 was to be calm, cool, and collected.\n\nAt left, George W. Bush calls New York Governor George Pataki, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Vice President Dick Cheney shortly after he learns of the September 11 attacks from Emma E. Booker Elementary School. White House Chief of Staff Andy Card talks on a cell phone.", + " At right, Bush watches TV news coverage of New York. | George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum\n\nKarl Rove: I remember [Andy Card] pausing at the door, before he went in, it seemed like forever, but it was probably just a couple heartbeats. I never understood why, but he told me, years later, that he needed to spend a moment formulating the words he wanted to use.\n\nAndy Card: When I was standing at the classroom door, I knew I was delivering a message that no president would want to hear. I knew that my message would define the moment. I decided to pass on two facts and an editorial comment.", + " I didn\u2019t want to invite a conversation because the president was sitting in front of the classroom. I entered the room and Ann Compton, of ABC, in the press pool, gestured, \u201cWhat\u2019s up?\u201d I gestured back to her, two planes crashing. She gestured \u201cWhat?\u201d Then the teacher asked the students to take out their books, so I took that opportunity to approach the president. I whispered in his ear, \u201cA second plane hit the second Tower. America is under attack.\u201d I took a couple steps back so he couldn\u2019t ask any questions. The students were completely focused on their books. I remember thinking what a bizarre stage we\u2019re standing on.", + " I was pleased with how the president reacted\u2014he didn\u2019t do anything to create fear.\n\nEllen Eckert, stenographer, White House: There are six stenographers who work for the [White House] press office. One of us always travels with the president. I always said I typed fast for a living all over the world. [That morning] was uneventful until Andy walked in.\n\nAri Fleischer: For Andy to interrupt a presidential event, [we knew] it had to be of monumental consequence. You just didn\u2019t do that.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: Everything started lighting up. We saw Andy Card whisper in the president\u2019s ear.", + " We still didn\u2019t know what the hell was going on. We\u2019re just monitoring the Secret Service and staff radio channels. It was chaos. What\u2019s next? All of a sudden, other reports start coming in\u2014explosion at the White House, car bomb at the State Department. We\u2019re under attack. I was 35 years old. My military career and my perspective is, I\u2019m thinking Cold War, the big bad Soviet bear. This was an extensive attack. Could this be a nation-state?\n\nGordon Johndroe: Having been in that room\u2014and it wasn\u2019t an issue until the Michael Moore documentary [Fahrenheit 9/", + "11]\u2014it would have been odd if he\u2019d jumped up and ran from the room. It didn\u2019t seem like an eternity in the room. He finished the book and went back into the hold room.\n\nKarl Rove: When the president walked back into the staff hold, he said, \u201cWe\u2019re at war\u2014give me the FBI director and the vice president.\u201d\n\nThe Friday Cover Sign up for POLITICO Magazine\u2019s email of the week\u2019s best, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.\n\nEllen Eckert:", + " As we\u2019re walking out of the classroom, everyone\u2019s pager started going off.\n\nRep. Adam Putnam: Matt Kirk, our White House liaison, says to [Rep. Dan Miller (R-Fla.), the other congressman traveling with the presidential party, and me], \u201cWe might be the only plane back to D.C. today.\u201d He tells us that if we want a ride, we need to not have anyone notice us. If anyone notices us, they won\u2019t let us back on board. We need to be inconspicuous quickly, so we went and just got in our vehicle in the motorcade. You could see the windows and hatches of the motorcade open up,", + " the visible expression of the armaments that are always around the president.\n\nKarl Rove: Eddie Marinzel [from the Secret Service] came up to the president, he was sitting in one of those tiny elementary school chairs, and Eddie said, \u201cWe need to get you to Air Force One and get you airborne.\u201d They\u2019d determined this might be an effort to decapitate the government.\n\nDave Wilkinson: We ended up with a compromise\u2014Andy Card said we have a whole auditorium full, waiting for the next event. There was no imminent threat there in Sarasota, so we agreed [the president could give a statement before we left.]\n\nBrian Montgomery:", + " It was the fear of the unknown. We didn\u2019t know if someone had put a biological agent or chemical agent at the school. He went to the auditorium. I remember looking at the students when he said, \u201cAmerica is under attack,\u201d and these girls, their faces were saying, \u201cWhat\u2019s he\u2019s telling us?\u201d\n\nAndy Card: He gave a very brief statement, he started off and I cringed right away. He said, \u201cI\u2019m going back to Washington, D.C.\u201d And I thought, you don\u2019t know that. We don\u2019t know that. We don\u2019t know where we\u2019re going.\n\nGordon Johndroe:", + " I told the press we\u2019d be leaving right for the motorcade. We have this joke, mostly with the photographers\u2014no running. No running to catch the president. This time, I told them, \u201cGuys, we\u2019re going to have to run. We\u2019re going to have to run to the motorcade.\u201d Going down the highway, our 15-passenger van was barely keeping up.\n\nDave Wilkinson: The motorcade left there and in a very aggressive fashion we got to the aircraft. Intelligence information is always sketchy. When we\u2019re riding is the first time that we hear that\u2019s there\u2019s something vague about a threat to the president.", + " That ratcheted things up.\n\nRep. Adam Putnam: On the motorcade back, there are all these protesters\u2014it was still all about the recount\u2014signs like, \u201cShrub stole the election.\u201d\n\nAndy Card: In the limo, we\u2019re both on our cellphones\u2014he\u2019s frustrated because he can\u2019t reach Don Rumsfeld. It was a very fast limo ride. We didn\u2019t know that the Pentagon had just been attacked, so that\u2019s why we couldn\u2019t get Rumsfeld.\n\nDave Wilkinson: We asked for double-motorcade blocks at the intersection. Double and triple blocks. Not just motorcycle officers standing there with their arms up,", + " but vehicles actually blocking the road. Now we\u2019re worried about a car bomb. The whole way back, we were using the limos as a shell game, to keep the president safe. At the airport, we\u2019re no longer worried about the president waving to people. No handshakes, no hugs goodbye, it\u2019s out of the motorcade, up the stairs, we just don\u2019t know what the hell is going on.\n\nMike Morell: When we got back to the plane, it was ringed by security and Secret Service with automatic weapons. I\u2019d never seen anything like that before. They re-searched everyone before we could reboard,", + " not just the press. They searched Andy Card\u2019s briefcase, he was standing right in front of me in line. They went through my briefcase, which was filled with all these classified materials, but I wasn\u2019t going to object that day.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: As the motorcade\u2019s coming in, I\u2019ve got the 3 and 4 engines were already running.\n\nAndy Card: When the limo door opened, I was struck that the engines on Air Force One were running. That\u2019s normally a protocol no-no.\n\nBuzz Buzinski: You never lose the excitement of seeing the motorcade. I\u2019m on the back stairs watching as they pull up.", + " I was wondering, \u201cWhat\u2019s the president thinking? What\u2019s Andy Card thinking? What are they doing to make it happen?\u201d You could feel it. You could feel the tension. We\u2019d been attacked on our soil. You could see it on their face\u2014Andy Card, Ari Fleischer, the president.\n\nSonya Ross: They brought out the bomb-sniffing dogs. They were drooling all [over] the luggage. I had dog spittle all over my bags.\n\nBuzz Buzinski: Everyone other than the president and his senior staff enter through the back stairs, so about 80 percent of the passengers came past us.", + " You could see fear and shock. People couldn\u2019t believe what they had just seen. They didn\u2019t know what to do.\n\nSandy Kress: Getting on the plane was different than it ever had been. There was a lot of attention to our credentials, who we were. We had to show ID and our badge, not just the badge. And this even though the crew knew most of us.\n\nEric Draper, presidential photographer, White House: The Secret Service wanted to get him on the plane as quickly as possible. I figured that I\u2019ve got to stick like glue to the president. Obviously, I know it\u2019s going to be a big day.", + " My goal was to find him as quickly as possible on board, but Andy Card said at the top of the stairs, \u201cTake the batteries out of your cellphone. We don\u2019t want to be tracked.\u201d That brought me up. \u201cAre we a target?\u201d I wasn\u2019t thinking of that.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: President Bush comes up the stairs in Sarasota, now you watch him come up the stairs every day, that famous Texas swagger. He was focused that day. No swagger. He was just trucking up the stairs. He was a man on a mission. As soon as the passengers are on board, I fire [engines]", + " 1 and 2.\n\nAndy Card: We\u2019re starting to roll almost before the president gets into the suite.\n\nRep. Adam Putnam: There was one van, maybe a press van, that was parked too close to the plane\u2019s wing. I remember a Secret Service agent running down the aisle; they opened the back stairs, he ran down to move the truck. He never made it back on board. They didn\u2019t wait for him.\n\nGordon Johndroe: We took off and it was something out of [the movie] Independence Day. That thing took off like a rocket. The lamps are shaking they\u2019d fired up the engines so much.\n\nKarl Rove:", + " [Col. Tillman] stood that thing on its tail\u2014just nose up, tail down, like we were on a roller coaster.\n\nEllen Eckert: We were climbing so high and so fast I started to wonder if we\u2019d need oxygen masks.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: It was the uncertainty. As we\u2019re taking off, you\u2019re still getting all this misinformation. Your head was spinning, trying to figure out what had actually happened. The only thing we knew for sure, because we\u2019d seen it with our own eyes, was that the World Trade Center had been hit.\n\nAboard Air Force One, en route to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.", + " Pictured from left are: Andy Card; Ari Fleischer, Press Secretary; Blake Gottesman, Personal Aide to the President; Karl Rove, Senior Adviser; Deborah Loewer, Director of White House Situation Room, and Dan Bartlett, Deputy Assistant to the President. | U.S. National Archives\n\nCol. Dr. Richard Tubb, presidential physician, White House Medical Unit: The people who are the permanent, apolitical staff\u2014the medical unit, the flight crew, the military aide\u2014they were all well-versed in their emergency action plans, irrespective of who the president was, but they\u2014we\u2014didn\u2019t have the relationship yet with the political staff.", + " That trust was still coming. It\u2019s a very different worldview for each side. It\u2019s only time over time that you build those relationships, and there hadn\u2019t been that much time. It\u2019s hard enough for any administration\u2014but that particular transition was so abbreviated and ugly as the 2000 campaign was\u2014it was even harder. Those guys were still trying to put their government together. Everyone was excited because they were just coming back from the summer vacation and felt that they were going to hit their stride.\n\nAndy Card: I really think President Bush\u2014I know President Bush took office on January 20, 2001\u2014but the responsibility of being president became a reality when I whispered in his ear.", + " I honestly believe as he contemplated what I said, I took an oath. Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. It\u2019s not cutting taxes, it\u2019s not No Child Left Behind, it\u2019s not immigration, it\u2019s the oath. When you pick a president, you want to pick a president who can handle the unexpected. This was the unexpected. That\u2019s what the president was wrestling with that day. He recognized the cold reality of his responsibilities.\n\nEric Draper: Soon after we got on board, I see [the president] pop out of the cabin, he\u2019s heading down the aisle. He says, \u201cOK boys, this is what they pay us for.\u201d I\u2019ll never forget that.\n\nAndy Card:", + " Even before we left the school, there was angst from the Secret Service that we don\u2019t know what\u2019s out there. As we were boarding the plane, someone had picked a reference to \u201cAngel.\u201d That\u2019s the code name for Air Force One. Is someone sitting around with a Stinger missile? Was someone waiting for us at Andrews? Mark [Tillman] was reluctant to fly us back to Washington.\n\nKaren Hughes, communications director, White House: September 10th was my anniversary, so I had stayed back in Washington. I was scheduled to do a Habitat for Humanity event with [Secretary of Housing and Urban Development] Mel Martinez that required us to wear blue jeans.", + " President Bush didn\u2019t allow blue jeans in the West Wing, so I\u2019d just planned to spend the morning at home. When the attacks began, the vice president sent a military driver to pick me up and bring me to the White House, because D.C.\u2019s streets were so clogged.\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg, F-16 pilot, call-sign \u201cHooter,\u201d 111th Fighter Squadron, Houston: I had just gotten off alert at Ellington Field [in Houston], normally we pull 24-hour alerts, mostly for drug interdiction. I\u2019d just gotten back into bed and was watching TV and saw the reports of a plane hitting the tower.", + " Being an airline pilot, an air defense pilot, and the operations officer for the 111th, this was something that intrigued me. I wanted to stay up to see what happened. Then when that second plane hit, it eliminated any doubt. I had to get back to work.\n\n\n\n\n\nII. Airborne, Somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico\n\nThe president\u2019s private cabin and office, the \u201cairborne Oval Office,\u201d sit at the front of Air Force One on the main deck; stairs lead up to the flight deck and communications suite. Other cabins house the White House Medical Unit, staff, guests, security, the press and crew.\n\nCol.", + " Mark Tillman: The initial conversation was that we\u2019d take him to an Air Force base, no less than an hour away from Washington. Maybe let\u2019s go ahead and try to get him to Camp David. That all changed when we heard there was a plane headed towards Camp David.\n\nI made the takeoff, climbed out, probably 25,000 to 30,000\u2014I gave it to the backup pilot. I had three pilots on board that day. I said just keep flying towards Washington.\n\nAri Fleischer: As we were flying out of Sarasota, we were able to get some TV reception. They broke for commercial.", + " I couldn\u2019t believe it. A hair-loss commercial comes on. I remember thinking, in the middle of all this, I\u2019m watching this commercial for hair loss.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: Jacksonville Center [Air Traffic Control] was warning us about an unidentified plane in the area. I said let\u2019s change direction and see if it follows. It didn\u2019t.\n\nAndy Card: Blake Gottesman was my personal aide, but he was filling in that day as the president\u2019s aide. I said, \u201cBlake, it\u2019s your job to make sure that people don\u2019t come up to the suite.\u201d No one comes up unless the president calls for them.\n\nAri Fleischer:", + " We got a report there are six aircraft still flying in the U.S. that aren\u2019t responding and could still be hijacked. We\u2019re thinking that there are still six missiles still in the sky. We\u2019re getting a report that a plane \u201cwas down near Camp David.\u201d\n\nKarl Rove: Andy and I are there with the president. The president gets this call from Cheney\u2014we didn\u2019t know who it was at the time, we just knew the phone rang. He said \u201cyes,\u201d then there was a pause as he listened. Then another \u201cyes.\u201d You had an unreal sense of time that whole day. I don\u2019t know whether it was 10 seconds or two minutes.", + " Then he said, \u201cYou have my authorization.\u201d Then he listens for a while longer. He closes off the conversation. He turns to us and says that he\u2019s just authorized the shoot-down of hijacked airliners.\n\nI\u2019d never heard the word \u2018decapitation attack\u2019 before.\u201d\n\nAndy Card: The president is sitting at his desk, and I\u2019m sitting directly in front of him. I witness the president authorize the Air National Guard to shoot down the hijacked airliners. The conversation was sobering to hear. What struck me was as soon as he hung up the phone, he said, \u201cI was an Air National Guard pilot\u2014I\u2019d be one of the people getting this order.", + " I can\u2019t imagine getting this order.\u201d There was a greater degree of reality than many other presidents would have experienced.\n\nKarl Rove: He was so even-handed. He was just so naturally calm during the day.\n\nDave Wilkinson: We didn\u2019t expect the breakdown of communications. Every kind of communication that day was challenged. Even the president talking to the Situation Room was challenged. The communications network did not hold up.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: All the comms that we would normally have, some of them are no longer available. We\u2019ve got multiple systems\u2014commercial and terrestrial systems\u2014and they\u2019re all jammed. I started to have tunnel vision:", + " What the hell is going on? Did someone sabotage our comms? It wasn\u2019t until later I realized all the commercial systems were all just saturated. It was all the same systems the airplane pilots were using at the same time, talking to their dispatchers. We as Air Force One didn\u2019t have any higher priority than American This or United That.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: We started having to use the military satellites, which we would only use in time of war.\n\nAri Fleischer: I\u2019d never heard the word \"decapitation attack\" before, but people like Andy, who had been there during the Cold War and had the training,", + " he knew what was going on. The training and the thinking of the military and the Secret Service is just so profoundly different, but that was the psychology and mood that took hold aboard Air Force One. There are still missiles out there and the Secret Service says to the president, \u201cWe don\u2019t think it\u2019s safe for you to return to Washington.\u201d\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg: It was very somber [at the air base]. We got these cryptic messages from Southeast Air Defense Sector. We knew we\u2019re on the hook now\u2014it might not be for Air Force One, but for anything. Houston\u2019s the fifth-largest metro region,", + " it\u2019s got all this oil and gas infrastructure. I asked maintenance to put live missiles and arm up the guns. Two heat-seeking missiles and rounds from a 20-mm gun isn\u2019t a lot to take on a hijacked plane, but it was the best we could do.\n\nAndy Card: Then we hear that Flight 93\u2019s gone down. We\u2019re all wondering, Did we do that? It wasn\u2019t a big deal on the plane. It lingered deepest in the president\u2019s conscience. Most people on the plane hadn\u2019t been privy to that conversation.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: All of us thought, we assumed we shot it down.\n\nMaster Sgt.", + " Dana Lark: All the folks were coming up to the communications deck with various requests, a Secret Service agent comes up and says, \u201cThe president wants to know the status of the first family.\u201d He had this look on his face. I have to tell him I don\u2019t have a way to find out. I can\u2019t fathom what that was like for the president.\n\nDave Wilkinson: Once we heard a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, that\u2019s when we said, \u201cWell, we\u2019re not going to go back to Washington.\u201d It\u2019s all about that \u201cdirection of interest.\u201d At the start, the threat\u2019s right now in New York.", + " Then the plane hit the Pentagon, and it was about our seats of government. Hearing all of this, we\u2019re thinking that the further we\u2019re away from Washington, the safer we are.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: We get this report that there\u2019s a call saying \u201cAngel was next.\u201d No one really knows now where the comment came from\u2014it got mistranslated or garbled amid the White House, the Situation Room, the radio operators. \u201cAngel\u201d was our code name. The fact that they knew about \u201cangel,\u201d well, you had to be in the inner circle. That was a big deal to me. It was time to hunker down and get some good weaponry.\n\nMaj.", + " Scott Crogg: We dispatched two fighters to go protect Air Force One.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: Now our security\u2019s tremendous, but we had press on board, there were press that weren\u2019t part of our regular traveling party. We put a cop at the base of the stairs. No one was allowed upstairs. That was something we\u2019d never done before.\n\nBuzz Buzinski: Will Chandler [the lead Air Force security officer] was summoned to the front. Then he stayed up there, providing security at the cockpit stairs. That got us thinking: Is there an insider threat? [Colonel Tillman\u2019s] putting someone at the flight deck.", + " You just don\u2019t know who\u2019s who.\n\nStaff Sgt. Paul Germain: Colonel Tillman says at that point, \u201cLet\u2019s just go cruise around the Gulf for a little bit.\u201d That was our Pearl Harbor. You train for nuclear war, then you get into something like that. All the money they pumped into us for training, that worked. We could read each other\u2019s minds.\n\nBuzz Buzinski: Will [Chandler] told us, \u201cGuys, this is our time. 100 percent security, all of the time. We gotta get the president back.\u201d\n\nDave Wilkinson: Colonel Tillman took us to a height where if an aircraft was coming towards us,", + " we\u2019d know it was no mistake. Talking to him, I was confident we were safer in the air than we were anywhere on the ground.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: I took us up to 45,000 feet. That\u2019s about as high as a 747 can go. I figured I wanted to be above all the other air traffic, especially since everyone was descending to land.\n\nAnn Compton, reporter, ABC News: We were standing in the press cabin. A lot of people were too nervous to sit down. A Secret Service agent was in the aisle and he pointed at the monitor and said, \u201cLook down there,", + " Ann, we\u2019re at 45,000 feet and we have no place to go.\u201d\n\nKarl Rove: There was acrimony. President Bush doesn\u2019t raise his voice. He doesn\u2019t pound the desk. But as we made it across the Florida peninsula, they [Andy Card and Tom Gould] kept raising objections [about returning to Washington]. At one point, Cheney and Rumsfeld called [and advised against returning to Washington].\n\nAri Fleischer: Andy took the side of the Secret Service. Looking back, it\u2019s pretty obvious that you don\u2019t put Air Force One down at a known, predictable location when the attack\u2019s still unfolding.", + " You preserve the office of the president. It was pretty straightforward.\n\nDave Wilkinson: He fought with us tooth and nail all day to go back to Washington. We basically refused to take him back. The way we look at is that by federal law, the Secret Service has to protect the president. The wishes of that person that day are secondary to what the law expects of us. Theoretically it\u2019s not his call, it\u2019s our call.\n\nEric Draper: As a group, you had Tom Gould, Andy Card, and a couple Secret Service guys saying you couldn\u2019t return to Washington. He was visibly frustrated and very angry. I was just a few feet away,", + " and it felt like he was looking through me. It was really intense. He just turned away in anger.\n\nKarl Rove: Gould came in and said, \u201cMr. President, we don\u2019t have a full fuel load. We\u2019ve got too many extraneous people on board. We can\u2019t loiter over Washington if we need to.\u201d He suggested, let\u2019s get to a military base, drop off the unessential personnel, fill up with fuel, and reassess. The president got the argument, but he wasn\u2019t happy about it.\n\nAri Fleischer: We didn\u2019t have satellite TV on the plane. The news would frustratingly come in and go out.", + " So I was not aware of the punishing coverage that the president was receiving for not returning to Washington. The anchors were all asking, \u201cWhere\u2019s Bush?\u201d They instantly criticized him.\n\nSonya Ross: We didn\u2019t know where we were going, but they must\u2019ve been circling, because we kept watching the local feed of a Florida station going in and out. That was our tiny window into the outside world.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: We had limited communications, that\u2019s for sure, but the president and Air Force One were never without secure communications. We just had two lines\u2014one for the president and one for the mil aide.", + " We were never out of touch entirely. All the other staff or the other Secret Service agent, we just couldn\u2019t provide them the calls they needed. There were a couple times when the vice president wasn\u2019t available, but we never lost communications with the ground.\n\nAndy Card: One of the president\u2019s first thoughts, from Sarasota to Barksdale, was Vladimir Putin.\n\nAmerica could have had no better ally on 9/11 than Russia and Putin.\u201d\n\nGordon Johndroe: [Putin] was important\u2014all these military systems were all put in place for nuclear alerts. If we went on alert, we needed Putin to know that we weren\u2019t readying an attack on Russia.", + " He was great\u2014he said immediately that Russia wouldn\u2019t respond, Russia would stand down, that he understood we were under attack and needed to be on alert.\n\nAri Fleischer: Putin was fantastic that day. He was a different Vladimir Putin in 2001. America could have had no better ally on September 11th than Russia and Putin.\n\nEllen Eckert: We were watching that second plane hit on a replay. It wasn\u2019t hitting me yet what had happened, until I saw that second plane hit. I remember thinking \u201cHoly mother of God.\u201d I was sitting back with the press corps and they said, \u201cGo find out what\u2019s happening.\u201d I\u2019m like,", + " \u201cOh, right, they\u2019re going to tell the steno what\u2019s happening.\u201d Ari came back to the press cabin, and said, \u201cPlease don\u2019t call anybody, please don\u2019t tell anyone where we are for national safety, keep our location secure.\u201d Everyone said, \u201cAbsolutely, how\u2019s the president?\u201d Everyone was really obedient.\n\nSonya Ross: Khue Bui [one of the photographers] was crouched in front of me and we were talking about our families, people we knew in New York. Ann [Compton of ABC News] and I were trying to come up with timelines\u2014what time was it when Andy Card came in and whispered to the president.", + " Ann\u2019s time and my time were about two minutes apart. We were listening through headsets to the television, but we weren\u2019t really paying attention. Then I heard the reporter say, \u201cThe tower\u2019s collapsing.\u201d I looked at the TV and had a completely shocked reaction. I heard Khue\u2019s camera snap.\n\nEric Draper: We were in the president\u2019s office when the Towers fell. You knew that there\u2019d be a loss of life in a catastrophic way. The room was really silent. Andy Card, Ari, and Dan Bartlett were there. There\u2019s an image of the president, with his hands on his hips, just watching.", + " Dan had a friend who worked in the Towers. He was very emotional. Everyone peeled off one by one and the president just stood there, alone, watching the cloud expand.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: There were times when the emotion would just well up. Just that sick feeling, that sorrow. It was the overwhelming stress, like when a friend or family member is dying. That\u2019s the closest thing I can explain what it felt like that day.\n\nAndy Card: I asked the military aides, \u201cWhere are we going?\u201d I want options. I want a long runway, a secure place, good communications. They came back and said Barksdale AFB.", + " I said, \u201cDon\u2019t tell anyone we\u2019re coming.\u201d\n\nDave Wilkinson: Colonel Tillman said, \u201cWhat about Barksdale?\u201d It was about 45 minutes away. We discussed it, it\u2019s the perfect compromise\u2014it\u2019s close and it\u2019s secure and we can let off a lot of passengers there. We needed somewhere that had armored vehicles.\n\nBush confers with, from left, Karl Rove, Andy Card, Dan Bartlett and Ari Fleischer, prior to delivering remarks at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. | U.S. National Archives\n\nAndy Card: I went into the president\u2019s cabin and told the president,", + " \u201cWe\u2019re going Barksdale.\u201d And he said, \u201cNo, we\u2019re going back to the White House.\u201d He was pretty hot with me. \u201cI\u2019m making the decision, we\u2019re going back to Washington, D.C.\u201d He\u2019s firm as can be. I just kept saying, \u201cI don\u2019t think you want to make that decision right now.\u201d He went back and forth. It wasn\u2019t one conversation, it was five, six, seven conversations. He was really frustrated with me.\n\nEric Draper: I remember following the president and Andy Card into the nose of the plane, the president\u2019s cabin. They\u2019re in a very heated discussion over returning to Washington.", + " They\u2019re arguing, but also having the president take telephone calls at the same time. They\u2019re watching the live news coverage. It was controlled chaos.\n\nAndy Card: We were all thinking about the very credible idea that there was more to come. Is there a plane heading to Los Angeles? A plane headed for Chicago? Something on the train? Is there a truck bomb heading across the George Washington Bridge? We had lots of angst over the White House itself. We even had the fog of war trying to figure what was going on in the White House. There\u2019s a fire in the Eisenhower Office Building\u2014well there was, but it was just in a garbage can.\n\nCol.", + " Mark Tillman: We asked for the fighter support. We heard, \u201cYou have fast movers at your 7 o\u2019clock.\u201d They were supersonic, F-16s from the president\u2019s guard unit. They led us into Barksdale.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: We\u2019re flying around, all we still have is local TV. The only benefit was that anything broadcasting was broadcasting the attack. Whatever I locked into, it\u2019d only be good until we flew out of range. We were trying to understand from those pictures like anyone else. It was a whole paradigm shift from what I\u2019d thought about conflict and war growing up.", + " It was a new age.\n\nSandy Kress: There was a lot of discussion about who did it. There was nothing anybody knew. But it was lots of talk\u2014and some fear. I remember the plane banking back across the Gulf. We knew there was a change of plans and direction, but something was diverting the plane.\n\nRep. Adam Putnam: [Rep. Dan Miller and I] went up to the president\u2019s cabin and he gave us a briefing. He told us that \u201cOne way or another\u201d all but a couple planes were accounted for. That was his phrase \u201cone way or another.\u201d He told us Air Force One was headed to Barksdale and was going to drop us off there.", + " When we left the cabin, I turned to Dan and said, \u201cDidn\u2019t you think that was an odd phrase?\u201d He didn\u2019t notice it. I said \u201c\u2018One way or another,\u2019 that sounds like that there\u2019s more to it than that.\u201d I said, \u201cDo you think there\u2019s any way we shot them down?\u201d We were left hanging.\n\nLt. Gen. Tom Keck, commander, Barksdale Air Force Base, Shreveport, La.: I was the commander of the 8th Air Force. We were in the midst of this big annual exercise called GLOBAL GUARDIAN. They loaded all the bombers,", + " put the submarines out to sea, put the ICBMs at nearly 100 percent. It was routine, you did it every year.\n\nA captain tapped me on the shoulder and said, \u201cSir, we just had an aircraft hit the World Trade Center.\u201d I started to correct him, saying, \u201cWhen you have an exercise input you have to start by saying, \u2018I have an exercise input.\u2019 That way it doesn\u2019t get confused with the real world.\u201d Then he just pointed me to the TV screens in the command center. You could see smoke pouring out of the building. Like everyone else in aviation that day, I thought, \u201cHow in a clear-and-a-million day could someone hit the World Trade Center?\u201d\n\nKaren Hughes:", + " Since I was home, I saw quite a bit of TV coverage just like the American people were seeing it, and I realized that it looked like the American government was faltering. I was on the phone with my chief of staff at the White House when she was told to evacuate. I could actually see the Pentagon burning. But I knew that lots of government was functioning\u2014planes were being grounded, emergency plans were being implemented. I thought someone should be telling the American people that, so I wanted to talk to the president.\n\nWhen I called the operator to try reach Air Force One, the operator came back on the line and said, \u201cMa\u2019am,", + " we can\u2019t reach Air Force One.\u201d Mary Matalin had passed along that there was a threat against the plane. It was just chilling. For a split second, I was so worried.\n\nGordon Johndroe: I was sitting across the table from Mike Morell in the staff cabin. I asked, \u201cMike, is something else going to happen?\u201d And he said, \u201cYes.\u201d That was a real gut punch. We were going to be attacked all day long. There were so many rumors\u2014the State Department, the Mall, the White House.\n\nBrian Montgomery: I asked [Mike Morell] who he thought this was.", + " He said \u201cUBL.\u201d No hesitation. \u201cWho\u2019s UBL?\u201d Those of us not up on the lingo of Langley, we had no idea.\n\nMike Morell: The president called me into his cabin. It was packed with people. The Democratic Front for Liberation of Palestine had issued a claim of responsibility for the attack. The president asked me, \u201cWhat do you know about these guys?\u201d I explained that they had a long history of terrorism, but this group doesn\u2019t have the capability to do this. Guaranteed.\n\nAs I was leaving, he said to me, \u201cMichael, one more thing. Call George Tenet and tell him that if he finds out anything about who did it,", + " I want to be the first to know. Got that?\u201d I said, \u201cYes sir.\u201d\n\nSonya Ross: I got the first readout [report] from Ari. The answers we were getting there were pretty incomplete. Ari and his team were giving us the best answers they could. I was nervous. I was thinking\u2014it seems really morbid\u2014but I was thinking, \u201cWhat if they come after the president? We all turn into \u2018and 12 others.\u2019 No one knows your name if you go down with the president. But Eric Washington, he was the CBS sound guy, he had his seat reclined, his feet up.", + " He said, \u201cWhat are you worried about? You\u2019re on the safest plane in the world.\u201d\n\nAir Force One was the safest and most dangerous place in the world at the same exact time.\u201d\n\nGordon Johndroe: [Air Force One] was the safest and most dangerous place in the world at the exact same time.\n\nKaren Hughes: When I finally did reach Air Force One and spoke with the president, the first thing he said to me was \u201cDon\u2019t you think I need to come back?\u201d He was just champing at the bit to come back. I told him, \u2018Yes, as soon as you can.\u2019 Everyone has different roles and I wasn\u2019t thinking about the national security side\u2014I was just thinking about it from a PR perspective.\n\nAndy Card:", + " Mark [Tillman] said, \u201cI don\u2019t care what he says, I\u2019m in charge of the plane.\u201d\n\nDave Wilkinson: The president once told me that the biggest piece of advice he\u2019d gotten from his mother when he became president was always do what the Secret Service says. I reminded him of that several times that day. The president and I knew each other very well\u2014we\u2019d spent a lot of hours at his ranch\u2014and kind of tongue-in-cheek several times that day, I said, \u201cRemember what your mother said.\u201d\n\nAri Fleischer: One of the recurring themes of September 11th is how much of the initial reporting was wrong.", + " I keep that in mind every day now as I watch President Obama and world events. In normal situations, there are many ranks and many filters in government, so that only that which is proven and vital reaches the president. All of that broke down on 9/11. No one in the security apparatus wanted to be negligent in not passing things along. The media was part of that too. All those filters broke down.\n\nAndy Card: The fog of war is real. You can be in a car accident and everyone in the car crash has a different perspective. Take that and multiple that a million times. The first estimates of the casualties were so way off.", + " 10,000 people in New York, 1,000 people at the Pentagon.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: There were so many people coming up to the upper deck, because we weren\u2019t picking up the phones downstairs. It got too crowded. Finally, someone came up and told everyone to get out. The only member of the staff that was up with us was Harriet Miers\u2014she was sitting at one of the CSO seats, with a legal pad taking historical record.\n\nAndy Card: The president\u2019s wondering about his wife, his kids, his parents. Then he\u2019s wondering, is there another city? What\u2019s next?", + " And we\u2019re all thinking, we can\u2019t do anything about it. We\u2019re in a plane, eight miles high in the sky.\n\nDave Wilkinson: We called Mark Rosenker up to the front of the plane and told him to get us on the phone with the commander at Barksdale. He gave us full assurance that the base would be locked down.\n\nAndy Card: I was comforted to find Barksdale was already on alert. It was going to be secure. No random terrorist would have mapped that Barksdale was where the president was going to go. We didn\u2019t have to ring some bell and everyone would run out of the firehouse.", + " Everyone was already out.\n\nLt. Gen. Tom Keck: We were already in a practice THREATCON Delta, the highest threat condition. I said lock her down for real. My deputy came in, Lt. Colonel Paul Tibbets\u2014his grandfather was the pilot who flew the Enola Gay [which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima]. He told me that at THREATCON Delta, general officers have to wear sidearms. I tried to refuse, but he insisted. So I was wearing my sidearm, which I never do.\n\nWe got this radio request\u2014Code Alpha\u2014a high priority incoming aircraft. It wanted 150,", + "000 pounds of gas, 40 gallons of coffee, 70 box lunches, and 25 pounds of bananas. It wouldn\u2019t identify itself. It was clearly a big plane. It didn\u2019t take us long to figure out that the Code Alpha was Air Force One.\n\nAnn Compton: We were landing going into Barksdale, Ari came back to the press cabin and said, \u201cThis is off the record, but the president is being evacuated.\u201d I said, \u201cYou can\u2019t put that off the record. That\u2019s a historic and chilling fact. That has to be on the record.\u201d It was a stunning statement, about the president trying to hold the country together but facing a mortal enemy.", + " The president cannot be found because of his own safety. That sent chills down my spine.\n\n\n\n\n\nIII. Barksdale Air Force Base, Shreveport, La.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: Going into Barksdale, there\u2019s this plane that appears. The initial fighters were with us. I still remember the F-16s starting in on this guy. Bearing, range, altitude, distance. You see the F-16 rolls off, they ask, \u201cHey, who has shoot-down authority?\u201d I say, \u201cYou do.\u201d That was a big moment. It turned out just to be a crop duster, some civilian flyer who didn\u2019t get the word.\n\nGordon Johndroe:", + " You cannot hide a blue-and-white 747 that says \u201cUnited States of America\u201d across the top. You can\u2019t move it secretly through the daylight. Where does local TV go when there\u2019s a national emergency? They go out to their local military base. We\u2019re watching ourselves land on local television. The announcer\u2019s saying, \u201cIt appears Air Force One is landing. We don\u2019t have any specific information whether the president was on board, but Air Force One was last seen leaving Sarasota.\u201d The pool is looking at me like, \u201cWe can\u2019t report this?\u201d\n\nBrian Montgomery: As soon as we landed, Mark Rosenker [director of the White House Military Office]", + " and I went off the back stairs. There\u2019s this guy who looks like General Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove, big guy, all decked out in a bomber jacket. He was straight out of central casting. We said, \u201cWhat do you need?\u201d He said, \u201cSee those planes? Every one is loaded with nukes\u2014tell me where you want \u2019em.\u201d We look over and there are just rows of B-52s, wingtip to wingtip. I joked, \u201cGosh, don\u2019t tell [the president!].\u201d\n\nWe got this radio request\u2014Code Alpha\u2014a high priority incoming aircraft.", + " It wanted 150,000 pounds of gas, 40 gallons of coffee, 70 box lunches and 25 pounds of bananas. It wouldn\u2019t identify itself.\u201d\n\nBuzz Buzinski: Barksdale was going through a nuclear surety inspection. They already had these cops in flak jackets and M-16s. They were all locked and loaded. It\u2019s pretty no-joke when you\u2019re assigned to a nuclear base already. But you still knew that this was going to be different. As soon as we landed, they surrounded the aircraft.\n\nCapt. Cindy Wright, presidential nurse, White House Medical Unit: I remember just how different it was,", + " landing at Barksdale. Everything just had changed in an instant. We\u2019d got off the plane and we were at war.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: When we landed there, looking out towards the flight line, it looked like a war game. You had guys in flak jackets, weapons, heavy equipment and vehicles, guns mounted on top. All facing away from the aircraft.\n\nDave Wilkinson: My biggest concern was the Humvees. Would they be there? We had guys from our local field office rushing over, but they didn\u2019t get there until after. When I saw the four or five Humvees pull up,", + " I had a real sense of relief. One of the other agents raised the concern that the Air Force wanted to drive the president\u2014we [the Secret Service] are normally the only people who drive the president. I said, \u201cThat\u2019s the least of our concerns. If the general\u2019s signing off on the guy driving, that\u2019s fine with me. Let\u2019s just let him drive the vehicle.\u201d\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: We let the president out through the bottom stairs, because you want that low vantage point in case there\u2019s a sniper.\n\nAri Fleischer: Normally, there\u2019s a whole infrastructure that flies ahead of the president.", + " It\u2019s an armed city, full of Secret Service agents and armored vehicles. But on that day, even the Secret Service is down to just the essential crew aboard the plane. All that was waiting for him in Barksdale was this uparmored Humvee, with room for a standing gunner. The regular Air Force driver, he was nervous and just driving as fast as could be. The president told him to slow down. The president said later he most felt in danger [on 9/11] right there on the runway.\n\nAndy Card: The guy was driving really fast, and in a Humvee the center of gravity isn\u2019t as low as you think.", + " The president said, \u201cSlow down, son, there are no terrorists on this base! You don\u2019t have to kill me now!\u201d\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: I went down to the tarmac to see about having the plane refueled. We could carry 14 hours of fuel. I wanted 14 hours of fuel. I was worried that they weren\u2019t going to have enough fuel trucks, but it turned out we\u2019d happened to park over a hot refueling tank they used for bombers. This civilian is arguing with our crew, \u201cThe fuel pits are only authorized for use in time of war.\u201d This Air Force master sergeant\u2014God bless him\u2014overhears this and roars,", + " \u201cWe are at war!\u201d He whips out his knife and starts cutting open the cover. That defines to me what the day was like.\n\nLt. Gen. Tom Keck: [The president] had landed already and I was on my way to meet him. He was on his way to the conference center. I gave a sharp salute, and his first words to me were, \u201cI guess I put you on the map.\u201d He was really disarming that way. He told me he needed a secure phone to call Governor Pataki, so I took him to my office. As he started making calls, he stopped for a second:", + " \u201cTell me where I am?\u201d I said, \u201cYou\u2019re on the east side of the Red River in Bossier City, Barksdale Air Force base, near Shreveport, Louisiana.\u201d\n\nBrian Montgomery: Once the president got into that private office, Andy Card came out and said this is an opportunity to call your loved ones, but don\u2019t tell them where you are.\n\nRep. Adam Putnam: We get to Barksdale, keep in mind that we haven\u2019t really had good TV images. We were all overwhelmed with emotion, because we were all catching up to where everyone else had had a couple hours to process. I called my wife and said,", + " \u201cI\u2019m safe. I can\u2019t tell you where I am.\u201d And she said, \u201cOh, I thought you were in Barksdale? That\u2019s what I saw on TV.\u201d\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg: The horn went off again [at Ellington Field in Houston] and [F-16 pilot Shane Brotherton and I] launched. There was so little information, you had to do things on faith. When we launched, we didn\u2019t even know what the mission was. We were told, \"You need to intercept the Angel flight.\" Well, we had no idea what that meant. We\u2019d never heard Air Force One called that before.\n\nLt.", + " Gen. Tom Keck: Andy Card and Karl Rove came into my office with him.\n\nKarl Rove: This is the first point where he gets fully briefed. All three strikes are over, so we know the extent of the damage. His first instinct was to bring together the leaders of government, but everyone had dispersed. It\u2019s just amazing how technology has changed. At the time, the only way to get everyone together was to go to Offutt Air Force Base, the nearest facility that had multiple-site video teleconferencing. Now the president travels with a black Halliburton case that has a screen that can do it through any broadband outlet.", + " It\u2019s amazing.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: I went into the base situation room. I told them I needed to get this guy underground. Where were all the places that I could do that? Offutt was the best choice.\n\nLt. Gen. Tom Keck: People forget how much confusion there was that day about what was actually going on. We\u2019d never been attacked like that before, at least since Pearl Harbor. Intel [officers] were coming in all the time. One said that there was a high-speed object moving towards his Texas ranch [in Crawford]. I saw him start thinking about who was at the ranch. It turned out to be a false report.\n\nMaj.", + " Scott Crogg: I was thinking\u2014I\u2019ve done these Combat Air Patrols over southern Iraq for hundreds of hours, enforcing the no-fly zone, and now I\u2019m doing it over the United States. It was really strange. No one else was airborne. It just felt so serious. We had all this resolve that day.\n\nEllen Eckert: To wait for the president, they took us to the Officers\u2019 Club. I was basically the only person on the trip who smoked cigarettes\u2014or so I thought. While we\u2019re standing there, all of a sudden everyone\u2019s asking for a cigarette. \u201cWait, you don\u2019t smoke?\u201d Everyone was so whipped up.\n\nLt.", + " Gen. Tom Keck: Everyone was busy doing their own thing. The president was looking over the remarks he wanted to give the country. He asked the room, \u201cI use the word \u2018resolve\u2019 twice in here\u2014do I want to do that?\u201d No one was answering him, so I said, \u201cI think Americans probably want to hear that.\u201d\n\nBrian Montgomery: We got with someone from the base, and found this rec room or something like that with a bunch of memorabilia on the walls. Gordon and I started rearranging everything\u2014got some flags, found a podium. We knew this was important. Everyone wanted to see the president.\n\nGordon Johndroe:", + " Barksdale was a blur. It was really chaotic. No one really remembers the president\u2019s statement there. It was bad lighting, bad setting, but it was important to have him say something to the nation. That statement is lost to history.\n\nSonya Ross: I dictated a brief report to my colleague Sandra Sobieraj [back in Washington], and then I left my phone on, so she could hear the president\u2019s brief statement. The statement was supposed to be embargoed until we left, so I was trying to curl the phone up under my notebook, so no one would notice it was still on. It gave us a brief head start,", + " because the wire [services], we always need to be first. He said, \u201cOur military at home and around the world is on high alert status. And we have taken the necessary security precautions to continue the functions of your government.\u201d He reiterated that it was a terrorist attack and urged people to be calm. It was very general.\n\nEllen Eckert: I\u2019d never seen the president look so stern. I was lying on the ground at the president\u2019s feet. We didn\u2019t know if the [TV news] feed was working, it was so iffy, so I was there lying down with my mic above my head in case no one else was recording his remarks.\n\nAndy Card:", + " We didn\u2019t want attention to where we were until we left. We videotaped the statement, so that it went out as we left.\n\nLt. Gen. Tom Keck: After the press conference, he came back to my office. He hadn\u2019t seen video of the Towers come down yet. He was sitting on my couch and watched the Towers fall. He turned to me, just because I was there, and said, \u201cI don\u2019t know who this is, but we\u2019re gonna find out, and we\u2019re going to go after them, we\u2019re not just going to slap them on the wrist.\u201d I said, \u201cWe\u2019re with you.\u201d I knew he meant every word.\n\nAri Fleischer:", + " Andy Card made the decision to chop down the number of passengers. We didn\u2019t know where we were going. We had no infrastructure. We had no motorcade. Anybody non-essential had to be left behind, that included all the congressmen, which they weren\u2019t pleased with. Several White House staffers had to get off. Andy asked if we could take the press down to three. I thought five was the absolute minimum.\n\nSandy Kress: Most of us had stayed on the plane in Barksdale. We were sitting on the runway for a good bit. We were thinking, \u201cIs this a broader attack? Was someone out there looking for us?\u201d It was towards the end of the stop in Barksdale that Brian [Montgomery]", + " came through and told us that we were all staying behind in Louisiana. We understood that the president was continuing on, but that he was not going back to D.C. Our role had been to help him with that trip, and that was over. It made sense.\n\nRep. Adam Putnam: As we\u2019re just waiting on board, supply trucks come up and start unloading food\u2014tray after tray of meat, loaf after loaf of bread, just hundreds of gallons of water. We realize they\u2019re equipping that plane to be in the air for days. It was really unnerving.\n\nGordon Johndroe: We thought at that point that we were not going to Washington for several days.", + " We needed to shrink down our footprint. We didn\u2019t know how many people could be fed, watered, clothed, and supported wherever we were going. It was difficult telling half the press pool that they weren\u2019t coming with us. It was half \"We\u2019re missing the story of our lifetimes,\" and then their personal reaction: \"You\u2019re leaving us in Louisiana and the airspace was shut down.\"\n\nSonya Ross: They herded us out to a blue school bus. Some of us had rumors that they\u2019d shrink the pool. I was thinking I had to fight to get a spot. I didn\u2019t want to have to explain to my boss that I got left behind.", + " I was just going to do my best to get on the plane. Gordon came on the bus. He read off who was going to come with them: AP reporter, AP photographer, TV camera, TV sound, and radio. Everyone else, he said, was going to be left behind. At that point, Judy Keen, the newspaper reporter from USA Today, and Jay Carney, the magazine pooler, they raised a stink. I just scooped up my stuff and ran.\n\nLt. Gen. Tom Keck: In the conference room, waiting for the transportation to be squared away, we were sitting around the table,", + " wondering what brought the Towers down. At that point, no one understood that steel melted at such-and-such a temperature. We just couldn\u2019t believe the towers had come down. When it came time to take the president back [to Air Force One], they brought up this Humvee with a.50-cal machine gun mounted on top. I don\u2019t know if he was fearing a Governor Dukakis moment in that tank, but he wanted to ride in a different vehicle. He pointed to our supervisor of flying vehicle. It was a white minivan, which we called \u201cSoccer Mom,\u201d so we drove him out in a minivan.\n\nKarl Rove:", + " As we\u2019re driving back out, [the president] says to me something like, \u201cI know this is a dodge, just they\u2019re going to try to keep me away, but I\u2019m going to let them have this one [and go to Offutt] and then we\u2019re going home. \u201c\n\nLt. Gen. Tom Keck: [As the president\u2019s heading up the stairs] I said to him, \u201cThese troops are trained, ready, and they\u2019ll do whatever you want them to.\u201d He said to me, \u201cI know.\u201d We traded salutes. He was on the ground an hour and 53 minutes.\n\nBuzz Buzinski:", + " I saw [the president] walk up the front stairs. You could see how mad he was. You could tell how much emotion he had, the anger inside. As soon as he got on board, it was all business.\n\nSandy Kress: They sent the vice president\u2019s plane down for us, and we eventually boarded it to go back to D.C.\n\nSonya Ross: As we left, they didn\u2019t know how long we\u2019d be gone. They told us that they\u2019d arrange accommodations if we had to be gone a day or two. I told my bureau chief, \u201cI don\u2019t know where we\u2019re going and I don\u2019t know how long I\u2019ll be gone.\u201d\n\nEllen Eckert:", + " Ari told me I was off the plane. The press were not happy, but I was fine\u2014I was thinking, I\u2019m safe here in Louisiana. But then the plane\u2019s fired up, it\u2019s loud, we\u2019re all standing nearby, and Gordon came back to the back stairs, he yells, \u201cEllen, Ari says get on the plane! He\u2019s changed his mind!\u201d That\u2019s not what I want to do\u2014but then I thought I\u2019m ashamed of myself. Everyone else was getting on that plane. I was the last one on board.\n\n\n\n\n\nIV. Airborne, Somewhere Over the Plains\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg:", + " We watched Air Force One come up, but we still don\u2019t really know anything. It\u2019s pretty impressive, seeing Air Force One come up in the air.\n\nLt. Gen. Tom Keck: As he takes off, two F-16s pulled up on his wing. That made me think that we were finally getting our act together. I forgot I ever said this, but Kurt Bedke, one of the other officers, told me later that as we watched them fly away I said to him, \u201cDo you feel like you\u2019re in a Tom Clancy novel?\u201d\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg: We just started following [Air Force One]", + " north. At some point, I was expecting them to turn east and head to Washington. The longer we\u2019re heading north, the more realize something\u2019s still unsettled. They still don\u2019t feel safe returning to Washington. We only had maps for Texas and Louisiana that day on board. There was no idea that we\u2019d go any further than that. I asked for a tanker to come meet up, and after I hook up, I asked him for every radio channel between here and Canada.\n\nAndy Card: We could finally get some television coverage. You could see the buildings on fire. You saw the replay of the collapse. There were lots of tears.", + " There were lots of quiet moments staring at a TV screen. No conversation. There were prayers. And the fear. It wasn\u2019t even a roller coaster, because we were just in the pits. Oh my god, that\u2019s terrible. And that\u2019s worse. And that\u2019s even worse. All the time, we\u2019re being handed notes, taking telephone calls, giving orders.\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg: It was an eerie silence on the radio. There\u2019s just no one in the air. We\u2019re just talking among ourselves [the fighter pilots] on our radios. \u201cI wonder if we\u2019re going to Canada?\u201d A lot of,", + " \u201cMan, this is fucked up.\u201d I\u2019m also talking the guys through what happens if we have to shoot someone down. The world\u2019s watching, let\u2019s be by the book and let\u2019s do everything we can to protect the president. You\u2019re going to do everything you can to avoid it, but, as a last resort, if a plane\u2019s going to try to hit Air Force One, I need you guys to think about it. I\u2019m saying, \u201cWe\u2019re going to do our best to get them to say \u2018you\u2019re approved\u2019 over the radio.\u201d\n\nYou\u2019re going to have think about how you\u2019re saving lives by taking lives.", + " You have to think through that the missiles might not do the job. You may have to employ the gun. Typically our gun sight doesn\u2019t account for a plane that big. We know this would be a plum target, but we also figure no one would expect Air Force One right now to be flying north over Kansas.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: The whole day was eerie. There were no radio calls. Controllers were telling us about suspicious planes\u2014I had no idea there were so many crop dusters in America.\n\nEric Draper: Everyone was starving for information. We couldn\u2019t hear anything unless the plane was flying over a major city.\n\nAri Fleischer:", + " There was no live television. It put us in a very different spot than most Americans that day. People around the world were just riveted to their television sets. We had it intermittently on Air Force One. We had it in Barksdale at the base commander\u2019s office. But there\u2019s no email on Air Force One back then. When you\u2019re in the air, you\u2019re cut off. It was absolutely stunning, standing next to the president as he was talking to the vice president then holding the phone off his ear because it cut off.\n\nEllen Eckert: The plane is like the Twilight Zone. It\u2019s really eerie.", + " There\u2019s just no one on board anymore. The staff cabin is empty, the guest cabin is empty. That\u2019s when it was really coming apart for me. I saw one of the agents was standing in the hallway, and I went up to him, \"So this is the safest place to be? This is Air Force One, right?\" He said, \"Well, listen, don\u2019t mention this, but we might as well have a big red X on the bottom of this plane. We\u2019re the only plane in the sky.\" That was scary. I went into the bathroom and used one of those Air Force One notepads to write a letter to my family\u2014six siblings and two parents.", + " They\u2019re never going to see this, it\u2019s going to burn up in a fiery inferno. One of the flight attendants opened the door and comforted me and gave me a washcloth to wipe. \u201cWe\u2019ve got this. We\u2019re all together.\u201d\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: [As we flew to Offutt] some of the commercial systems finally began to become available. One of the phones actually rang, I picked it up, it was my chief: \u201cHow are things going?\u201d \u201cWell, chief, we\u2019re a little busy.\u201d None of the crew were allowed to make calls to our families. Everyone was just locked in.", + " It probably actually helped a lot of us get through the day.\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg: Fifteen minutes after we tanked up, we saw Air Force One start to descend. I did the math and figured out they were probably headed to Offutt. Well, now we had a full tank of gas. You can\u2019t land like that in a small plane, so we were doing afterburner 360s at 7,000-feet to burn off enough gas to land our planes.\n\nMike Morell: On the way from Barksdale to Offutt, the president asked to see me alone\u2014it was just me,", + " him, and Andy Card. He asked me, \u201cMichael, who did this?\u201d I explained that I didn\u2019t have any actual intelligence, so what you\u2019re going to get is my best guess. He was really focused and said, \u201cI understand, get on with it.\u201d\n\nI said that there were two countries capable of carrying out an attack like this, Iran and Iraq. But I believed both would have everything to lose and nothing to gain from the attack. When all was said and done, the trail would lead to UBL. I told him \u201cI\u2019d bet my children\u2019s future on that.\u201d\n\nHe asked when we\u2019d know.", + " I walked him through recent cases\u2014in the [1998] East Africa [Embassy] bombings, it had been a couple days, the [2001] USS Cole [bombing] had taken a couple months, the [1996] Khobar Towers [bombing] it had taken over a year. It may be quick or it may be a long while. The whole time, I didn\u2019t realize the CIA had already figured it out.\n\nWhen I finished, he didn\u2019t say anything, we just sat there. It felt like three, four, five minutes. It was getting awkward. I finally said, \u201cIs there anything else,", + " Mr. President?\u201d He said, \u201cNo, Michael, thank you.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\nV. Offutt Air Force Base\n\nBuzz Buzinski: Landing at Offutt was probably the one funny moment of the day. I\u2019m a big guy\u20146-foot-4, 270\u2014but Will [Chandler\u2019s] also a huge guy, he\u2019s a 6-3, 250. We always said he\u2019s got hands the size of a TV screen. Well, we\u2019re the first two off the plane. The rear stairs are always down first, you get off and guide the front stairs in. When we get off, underneath the jet are five or six maintainers,", + " who were trying to plug the plane into ground power. No one told us they\u2019d be there\u2014all we see are this group of five guys. Chandler yells: \u201cClear the area!\u201d He just let out this bellow. Well, it was like cats scattering\u2014they dropped radios, dropped the cable. They\u2019re panicked\u2014there\u2019s this big guy coming at them. It was hysterical. I just laughed.\n\nAdm. Richard Mies, commander, U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offut Air Force Base, Omaha, Nebraska: Without knowing whether he was coming to Omaha, we\u2019d taken the initiative to start preparing,", + " working with the 55th Wing, which runs Offutt. We\u2019d started to evacuate the main quarters that could be used for VIPs, and install some of the protection there that\u2019d be needed in case he needed to spend the night.\n\nWe didn\u2019t know that he was coming to Offutt until about 15 minutes before. There wasn\u2019t much communication with Air Force One at all. There wasn\u2019t going to be any pomp and circumstance. I had my driver and a Secret Service agent who we had, and the three of us went out to the runway to greet Air Force One. It was just a plain Chrysler.\n\nDave Wilkinson:", + " By the time we got to STRATCOM, there were like 15 to 20 planes still unaccounted for [nationwide]. People will say it was only six, but there were a lot more than that. For everything we knew, they were all hijacked. But, even as we landed, they started to kick them off quickly.\n\nAdm. Richard Mies: I decided to bring the president down into the command center via the fire escape entrance. That was the most expedient option. I\u2019d never used it before. It was there for emergencies. I had them open it from the inside.\n\nBrian Montgomery: There were a lot of airmen in battle gear lining the route to the bunker.", + " We pull up to this five-story office building, and instead of walking in the front door, the admiral says, \u201cNo, we\u2019re going in there.\u201d We head into this concrete building, just a door. We went down and down and down, pretty far underground.\n\nAt left, President George W. Bush arrives Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. At right, Bush, Admiral Richard Mies, left, and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card conduct a video teleconference at the base. | Courtesy of the George W. Bush Presidential Library\n\nGordon Johndroe:", + " The president went into the bunker. It was chilling. I\u2019m watching [the president] with the press from the motorcade and they go into this building and they\u2019re gone. When we got to Omaha, we were tired. Our energy, the stress had ebbed and flowed. A sadness kicked in when we got to Omaha. We didn\u2019t really have time to reflect before then.\n\nEllen Eckert: When he went into the bunker, wow. That\u2019s still a scene in the movie in my head all these years later. Clearly the only way to go was down. We just stood outside, waiting. We smoked a million cigarettes,", + " all my new chain-smoking friends.\n\nEric Draper: I finally had a chance to call my wife, I said, \u201cHoney, I\u2019m going to be home a little late tonight.\u201d I could hear her laugh through the phone, even as she was crying. She said, \u201cI saw you with the president, so I knew you were OK.\u201d\n\nAdm. Richard Mies: We went directly into the command center. That really caught his attention. All these soldiers, they\u2019re all in battle dress. CNN was prominently displayed\u2014a lot of footage of the two towers. We had four to six TV screens, all energized.", + " I sat him down where I normally sit, and walked him through what he was seeing, so he had an awareness.\n\nAndy Card: It\u2019s right out of a TV movie set\u2014all these flat-screen TVs, all these military people, you can hear the fog of war, all these communications from the FAA and the military. But it\u2019s tough for the military folks\u2014they all want to stand and show respect to the commander in chief, but you can tell they want to sit and do their jobs. Everyone is schizophrenic, half-sitting and half standing, everyone\u2019s moving around. After a few minutes, the president turned to me, \u201cI want to get out of here,", + " I\u2019m making it hard for these people to do their job.\u201d\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg: All the rules that fighter pilots spend their lives living by were now out the window. When we landed [at Offut] we got more gas and picked up maps for the rest of the country. There are always maps and approaches for the country in base operations, but all the maps always say, \"Do not remove from base operations.\" We just took all of them and stuffed them in our bag.\n\nColonel Tillman walked into base operations and we finally started to get some information. The president was actually an alumni of our unit in Houston.", + " Colonel Tillman told us, \u201che feels comfortable with you guys and wants you to continue us.\u201d We told him we\u2019d sit back about five miles\u2014you don\u2019t get that close to something that valuable, for all sorts of reasons\u2014but if something happened, we can eat up that range real quick.\n\nAdm. Richard Mies: The VTC was just the three of us, the operator, and his military aide. There were just five of us at most. There was no real audience. We listened as everyone reported in. Richard Clarke [of the National Security Council], [Transportation Secretary] Norm Mineta, [Deputy Secretary of State]", + " Richard Armitage, [National Security Adviser] Condi [Rice], [CIA Director] George Tenet. Most of the initial conversation in the VTC was focused on who did this. There was a lot of speculation. It was too early to make definitive. Then we were talking about: How do we restore some sense of normalcy quickly, both for New York and for the country? And then how does the president get back to Washington?\n\nMike Morell: When Tenet explained that he had evidence pointing to Al Qaeda, the president turned around and looked at me\u2014his look clearly said, \u201cWhat the fuck happened here?\u201d You were supposed to tell me first.", + " I tried to explain with my look that I was sorry\u2014I didn\u2019t know how my message had gotten lost. I went to a nearby office and called Tenet\u2019s assistant, angry. I felt like I\u2019d let the president down.\n\nAndy Card: When George Tenet said it was Al Qaeda, it wasn\u2019t like dawn breaking over Marblehead. We all suspected that it was Al Qaeda. I\u2019d thought that since the classroom door. It wasn\u2019t that dramatic of a moment actually. It was just a confirmation. Think of what it would\u2019ve happened if he\u2019d told us that it was Russia, China, or another nation-state? Or an American splinter group?\n\nDave Wilkinson:", + " We felt like we were probably pretty safe and it could be prudent to go back. Everyone went around the room [on the video conference], the vice president kicked it off, and everyone said their piece. Finally, the president said to Brian [Stafford], my boss [the Secret Service director], \u201cBrian, Dave and Eddie are just doing their job and telling me I can\u2019t go back to D.C., but I think it\u2019s time for me to come back.\u201d Brian did a good job\u2014he explained [to the president] that it was a heightened security environment, and we\u2019re were going to relocate you and move you if the slightest thing comes up.\n\nBrian Montgomery:", + " Once we got to Offutt, you would have had to tie him down to keep there overnight.\n\nJulie Ziegenhorn, public affairs officer, Offutt Air Force Base: We were working at our desks and all of a sudden, there was the President striding down the hallway. He walked right out the front door, waving to us. He shouted, \u201cThanks for all you\u2019re doing!\u201d\n\nGordon Johndroe: We\u2019re there with the pool and our Secret Service agent says, \u201cOh my gosh, we\u2019ve got to go right now. The president\u2019s leaving.\u201d Ann [Compton] was on with Peter Jennings.", + " I didn\u2019t want to panic her or the nation by making it seem like we were leaving abruptly, but we needed to leave. I mouthed, \u201cWe have to go.\u201d She was on the radio and she said, \u201cI\u2019m told we\u2019re leaving. I don\u2019t know where we\u2019re going.\u201d Peter Jennings said, \u201cGodspeed, Annie.\u201d\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: We thought he was going to be there for a while. I was in base operations and someone came in and said, \u201cI think the president\u2019s headed back to the plane.\u201d I said, \u201cNah.\u201d He said, \u201cNo, I\u2019m pretty sure I just saw him drive by.\u201d I started to race back to the plane.", + " He\u2019d already gotten there. He\u2019s waiting at the top of the stairs and told me, \u201cTillman, we got to get back home. Let\u2019s get back home.\u201d\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg: No one told us that Air Force One was leaving, so we\u2019re like, \u201cOh shit, are they starting up?\u201d We\u2019re racing to get our planes in the air, but it takes some time. We met the minimum safety requirements and hit the air. A 747 configured like that, gosh, that\u2019s a fast airplane. We didn\u2019t want to go supersonic, it\u2019d burn up too much fuel,", + " so we talked to them, and we had to reel them in.\n\n\n\n\n\nVI. Airborne, En route to Andrews Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: I\u2019m doing.94 Mach. The fighters only have so much gas. We went as fast as we could across the United States. F-16s were coming out of D.C. to meet us, everyone was joining up with us. We had F-15s with us too.\n\nMike Morell: On the flight to Andrews, I finally got this packet full of all the intelligence CIA had. It included the talking points that George Tenet had used to brief the president,", + " but there was still a lot he hadn\u2019t been able to say. I shared all those details with the president. The second half of the packet was a set of intelligence passed to us by a European ally explaining that it had detected signs that Al Qaeda was planning a second wave. When I was showing that to the president, I could tell from his reaction, it struck him: \u201cGosh, this could happen again.\u201d This isn\u2019t over.\n\nAndy Card: When he talked to his dad, his dad reinforced George W. Bush\u2019s desire to get back to Washington. That made me feel a little guilty, but by then we were on our way back.\n\nEric Draper:", + " I asked Andy Card at one point, \u201cWho did this?\u201d \u201cAl Qaeda.\u201d I\u2019d never heard of Al Qaeda before.\n\nAndy Card: By the time we\u2019re coming from STRATCOM, it was kind of skeleton crew aboard. The closer we got to Washington, the more the president wandered.\n\nBrian Montgomery: I found the president at the front of the staff cabin at one point. I just said, \u201cWe\u2019re going to hit \u2019em hard, right, when this is all over?\u201d He just said, \u201cYes, yes, we are.\u201d I knew that look in his eyes. He was mad.\n\nEllen Eckert:", + " The president came back to the press cabin, I asked him if he was doing OK, and he said yes. I asked, \u201cHave you spoken to Mrs. Bush?\u201d He said, \u201cYes, she\u2019s fine.\u201d He patted me on the back, twice. Then Doug Mills [the AP photographer] said, \u201cKeep your spirits up.\u201d\n\nThe president said, \u201cWe won\u2019t let a thug bring this country down.\u201d\n\nSonya Ross: I was typing away [in the press cabin], working on my notes [when the president came in], and I don\u2019t think he saw me at first. I started typing that quote down,", + " and he heard me typing and turned to me: \u201cHey, off the record!\u201d He didn\u2019t say anything else.\n\nEllen Eckert: He gave Sonya the stink eye.\n\nGordon Johndroe: There was one time when President Bush slipped back there\u2014I was in the staff cabin with Andy Card and don\u2019t know how he got back there\u2014and he came in and said, \u201cI just spoke with the press.\u201d He saw my face and said quickly, \u201cDon\u2019t worry, it\u2019s OK. It was off the record.\u201d He was trying to be a very calm and comforting presence to everyone.\n\nThe president is consoled by presidential nurse Cindy Wright,", + " of the White House Medical Unit, aboard Air Force One. | Eric Draper/George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum\n\nEric Draper: Everyone was trying to take it all in. I took this picture of Cindy Wright, a White House nurse, rubbing the president\u2019s back. At another moment, the president had his arm around Harriet Miers as they walked down the plane.\n\nCapt. Cindy Wright: What\u2019s funny about that picture is I don\u2019t really remember being compassionate or ministering to him\u2014I do remember that he came in to check on me and the team. It was amazing to me that he was walking through the plane checking on us.", + " I was in the medical compartment. It was still fairly new in the administration, so we knew each other from talking and being at the ranch, but that was the first time we hugged\u2014I\u2019m a big hugger, and he is too.\n\nAnn Compton: We were finally able to say on the record\u2014I called my bureau and told them\u2014that the president was heading back to Washington and would address the nation from the Oval Office.\n\nSonya Ross: I had started on the White House beat on September 11th, six years earlier. I said to Ari at some point, \u201cThis is my White House anniversary.\u201d He laughed, \u201cSome anniversary party you threw.\u201d\n\nCol.", + " Dr. Richard Tubb: The thing at that moment I was most worried about was a biologic [attack]. In the unlikely but high-risk scenario, I thought there was little harm to be prophylaxing the staff with antibiotics. It seemed like almost science fiction. I gave everyone on the plane a week of Cipro. I hoped by the time they ran out, we\u2019d have figured out the fog of war and know whether we needed to continue measures.\n\nBrian Montgomery: I noticed that Dr. Tubb was walking and talking to each person. He\u2019d lean over and whisper to each person, pat them on the shoulder, and he\u2019d hand over a little envelope,", + " like what the military uses to put pills in. He got to me and said, \u201cMonty\u201d\u2014that was my nickname\u2014\u201chow do you feel?\u201d I said, \u201cOther than the obvious, physically, I feel fine.\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t feel disoriented?\u201d \u201cNope.\u201d Then he said, \u201cHave you ever heard of Cipro? We don\u2019t know what might\u2019ve been in that school, so we\u2019re just being careful.\u201d I asked him, \u201cWhat\u2019s it used for?\u201d He told me, \u201cIn case it\u2019s anthrax.\u201d\n\nCol. Dr. Richard Tubb: It was scary later realizing later that fall anthrax wasn\u2019t as unimaginable as we\u2019d thought.", + " That was a turning point for our society. I was suddenly real pleased with how we\u2019d reacted on the plane.\n\nAt left, Marine One prepares to land on the South Lawn of the White House. At right, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice waits at the South Portico for Bush to return. | U.S. National Archives\n\nMike Morell: It was about an hour from touching down, pretty late in the day, a lot of people were asleep, and the lights on Air Force One were turned down. The president came back into the staff compartment. I was the only one awake. I said, \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d \u201cI\u2019m just fine,", + " thanks for asking.\u201d One of the things that struck me, he transformed right before my eyes from a president who was struggling a bit with the direction of his administration on September 10th, to a wartime president, just in a matter of hours. I could already see this new confidence and power in him.\n\nGordon Johndroe: I don\u2019t really remember eating, but the stewards put out some sandwiches and chips. The Air Force bills you for your meals aboard Air Force One, through the White House Military Office. I remember a couple days later getting a bill for $9.18. The bill said for meals on September 11th between Sarasota-Barksdale,", + " Barksdale-Offutt, Offutt-Washington.\n\nMaster Sgt. Dana Lark: I\u2019ve never felt more fatigued. I can\u2019t remember anything as physical as that day. It just sucked everything out of you.\n\nMike Morell: The president\u2019s mil aide [Tom Gould] was looking out the window on the left side of the plane, he motioned me over. \u201cLook.\u201d There was a fighter jet on the wingtip. He told me there was another one on the other side of the plane. In the distance, you could see the still-burning Pentagon. Throughout the day, all this is happening and you don\u2019t really have the chance to feel the emotion.", + " But that got me. Tears filled my eyes for the first time that day.\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg: It was really a shock, but I remember thinking that the hole in the building, relative to the whole size of the Pentagon, is relatively small. It was symbolic. It\u2019s a painful wound, but we\u2019re big enough to absorb it.\n\nAndy Card : We kneeled on the benches to look outside, you could see the fighter jets came up pretty close to Air Force One. You just don\u2019t see that on Air Force One.\n\nKarl Rove: I watched the fighters and I realized this was no ceremonial escort\u2014this was the last line of defense in case there was a MANPAD [surface-to-air missile]", + " on the approach to Washington. They were going to put themselves between Air Force One and whatever the threat was.\n\nCol. Dr. Richard Tubb: As we\u2019re coming in on final [approach], Dan Bartlett comes into my office and says, \u201cThanks, I took all those pills. Anything else I need?\u201d I said, \u201cWhat?! Absolutely not! That was supposed to be a week\u2019s worth!\u201d I\u2019m flipping through the Physician\u2019s Desk Reference, that huge book, trying to figure out what the toxic level of Cipro is.\n\nBrian Montgomery: [Dan] was real worried for a moment. After all that happened that day,", + " Dan was going to die from Cipro poisoning.\n\nCol. Dr. Richard Tubb: I looked into it and told him, \u201cListen, you\u2019re going to be fine. You might want to take an antacid.\u201d\n\nCol. Mark Tillman: It was a long day. As we\u2019re landing, I\u2019m thinking, all I\u2019ve got to do is get him on the ground, then I can hand him off to the Marines. I\u2019m watching the fighters scream by underneath, doing suppression, trying to figure out if there was anything waiting for us. The landing itself, after everything, was entirely normal.\n\nGeorge W. Bush meets with his National Security Council in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center of the White House after addressing the nation.", + " | U.S. National Archives\n\nMaj. Scott Crogg: We\u2019d landed right behind Air Force One, so we saluted as Marine One took off. We knew the president was heading to the White House.\n\nAri Fleischer: There are several different routes that Marine One can take back, we took the most scenic, directly over the Capitol, down the Mall, at the Washington Monument, you bank right.\n\nAndy Card: We only flew at tree-top level, zig-zagging, to make it harder for a missile to hit us. We were really low to the water on the Potomac.\n\nAri Fleischer:", + " Out of the front left of the chopper, the president had a clear view of the Pentagon. The president said to nobody and everybody, \u201cThe mightiest building in the world is on fire. This is the face of war in the 21st century.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\nEpilogue\n\nMike Morell: [In 2011], the very first telephone call that President [Barack] Obama made after we were sure we\u2019d killed Osama bin Laden was to President [George W.] Bush. President Obama knew that I\u2019d been with him on 9/11, and so he asked me to fly down to Dallas after the raid to brief President Bush personally.", + " I went down about two weeks later and walked President Bush through every aspect of the raid. I thought I could see in his face some sense of closure.\n\n(Note: All titles and military ranks are presented as people were on September 11, 2001, and interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.)\n\nJournalist Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is the author of The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War, and a former editor of POLITICO Magazine. His next book, Raven Rock, about the U.S. government\u2019s Doomsday plans, will be published in May 2017. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.", + " The terrorists won (aesthetically, at least).\n\nAs we mourn the losses of 15 years ago this Sept. 11, it certainly doesn\u2019t help that New York\u2019s iconic Lower Manhattan skyline is a generic disappointment.\n\nJust look at the picture on top of this page. If you glanced quickly, you\u2019d think you were looking at the skyline of Boston or Detroit.\n\nOr Toronto. It\u2019s ironic that for the past 20 years, film producers have been shooting in that Canadian town to save money on \u201cNew York\u201d scenes \u2014 but given what Ground Zero looks like today, don\u2019t be surprised if the same filmmakers start shooting in Lower Manhattan when they want to simulate Toronto.\n\nThe post-", + "9/11 rebuilding effort failed to create something truly monumental.\n\nLet\u2019s be clear-eyed: It\u2019s not that New Yorkers loved the Twin Towers. Most of us hated the paired plinths from the moment they were completed in 1973. But the same could be said of Parisiens and the Eiffel Tower when it was erected in 1889 \u2014 but like our World Trade Center, it eventually became an indelible symbol of the city that once scorned it.\n\nNew York\u2019s Twin Towers inspired awe. The replacement building, One World Trade Center, inspires aw.\n\nThe Twin Towers were unmistakably New York. (ED BAILEY/AP)\n\nJohn McGuire said he absolutely refused to remove the Twin Towers from his logo.", + " (Gotham Seafood)\n\nThere\u2019s 15 years worth of blame to go around for the colossal failure of imagination represented by the untwinned tower. Many blame the dullards at the Port Authority, which owns the land where the towers fell. Others blame Larry Silverstein, who controlled the lease and sought the fastest solution to the problem of his lost rent. Cost-cutting developer Douglas Durst, brought in later to trim the budget, also deserves some scorn. The one good idea architect Daniel Libeskind\u2019s initial master plan was the off-center spire that would mirror Lady Liberty\u2019s torch. But the engineers said it would have cost too much to have the spire in the corner of the tower,", + " so that was that.\n\nAll that was left of Libeskind\u2019s plan was the kitschy idea of having the building rise 1,776 feet (remind me again why Libeskind wanted America\u2019s battle for freedom from despotic England to be linked to Osama bin Laden\u2019s stated battle for freedom from allegedly despotic America?).\n\nStill, the bulk of the blame remains with David Childs, a truly great architect who nonetheless couldn\u2019t solve the difficult problem of making New York\u2019s skyline great again while dealing with clients who wanted to fill the sky with millions of square feet of profit-making space at the lowest possible price. Every time he was sent back to his drawing board,", + " he drew something that bored.\n\nChilds, who declined to comment for this piece, admitted he limited his own ambitions at the site.\n\n\u201cThe most iconic buildings \u2026 shouldn\u2019t be fussy,\u201d he said at a 2015 forum at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. \u201cThe idea was that anybody visiting downtown New York on their spring break could go back to their ninth-grade class and draw that building very simply \u2014 like the Washington Monument.\u201d\n\nBy that logic, if I can play \u201cChopsticks\u201d on the piano, I must be a regular Mozart.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m just an old-school guy and to me they\u2019ll just always be there,\u201d said Joseph Zingale,", + " owner of New York City Beauty Supply, explaining why he keeps the Twin Towers in his logo. (Empire Beauty Supplies)\n\nReal New Yorkers, of course, don\u2019t buy into this Childs ploy. They know that without a true New York icon downtown, Manhattan has lost a bit of its swagger. That\u2019s why so many companies still have the Twin Towers in their logos. It\u2019s not just a tribute. It\u2019s \u201cdefiance,\u201d as John McGuire, owner of Gotham Seafood, told me.\n\nMcGuire\u2019s fish market has featured the Twin Towers in his logo since 1988. A few years ago, the company bought new trucks and McGuire\u2019s then-partner suggested a new logo to reflect the actual skyline.", + " But McGuire wouldn\u2019t do it.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m a New Yorker,\u201d he said. \u201cI lived on Warren Street, three blocks away, on 9/11. We were volunteering and donating ice for weeks. Take the Twin Towers off our trucks? I said, \u2018Absolutely not.\u2019\u201d\n\nThe old World Trade Center just had that New York swagger. \u201cYou want the tallest building in the world? We\u2019ll build TWO!\u201d (bluebird13/Getty Images/iStockphoto)\n\nThe partner is long gone. The Towers remain, just as they do in logos for companies like City Merchandise and New York City Beauty Supply, whose owner Joseph Zingale told me \u201cthose towers will always be there\u201d in his heart.\n\nNostalgia,", + " of course, is the least natural of New York instincts. The only constant in New York life, after all, is change. For more than 300 years, this city has paved over cemeteries to make a quick buck or cut short a funeral to rush crosstown to sign a contract. So unlike McGuire and Zingale, many business owners with Twin Tower iconography have abandoned the long lost buildings.\n\nBut in their own small way, those companies are also paying tribute to all we\u2019ve lost by reverting to New York\u2019s greatest self-preservation instinct: moving on.\n\nI called Neighborhood Construction Corp. in the Bronx and asked why the company kept the Twin Towers in his logo.", + " The harried man who answered the phone had the perfect response.\n\n\u201cWe love those buildings,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I\u2019m really busy on a job right now and can\u2019t talk to you.\u201d\n\nSpoken like a true New Yorker.\n\nSign up for BREAKING NEWS Emails privacy policy Thanks for subscribing! ", + " CLOSE The NYPD marked the 15th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks with a parade to honor the 23 officers it lost on Sept. 11, 2001. Police departments from around the United States and Canada joined the march around lower Manhattan.(Sept. 9) AP\n\nUnited Flight 175 on the verge of striking the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. (Photo: Carmen Taylor, AP)\n\nThis story originally published in September of 2016.\n\nWASHINGTON \u2014 Monday marks the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that killed 2,", + "977 people in New York, the Pentagon and in a field in rural Pennsylvania. The attacks and the reaction to them have shaped U.S. policy for more than 15 years, leaving a nation that is far more vigilant and jittery about terrorism. Yet for all of the talk about 9/11, many elements of the attacks and the actions leading up to them have receded from the public memory. Here are 10 things you may have forgotten about 9/11:\n\n1. We don't know how the hijackers got into the cockpits of some of the planes\n\nThe comprehensive report of the commission created to investigate the attacks,", + " which was published in 2004, said no one could determine how the hijackers were able to get into the cockpits of the four commercial airliners they hijacked. A flight attendant on American Flight 11 \"speculated that they had 'jammed their way' in,\" the 9/11 report said. \"Perhaps the terrorists stabbed the flight attendants to get a cockpit key, to force one of them to open the cockpit door, or to lure the captain or first officer out of the cockpit.\" Once the hijackers gained control of American 11, they guided it toward New York's World Trade Center towers, where it stuck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:", + "46 a.m. All 81 passengers, including the five hijackers, and nine crew members died in the crash, along with an unknown number of people in the tower.\n\n2. Passengers and crew aboard the planes provided critical information\n\nThose aboard the four hijacked flights \u2014 American 11, United 175, American 77 and United 93 \u2014 called family and friends from their cellphones or used the aircrafts' radio communications to report the hijackings. That alerted authorities to the hijackings and enabled them to understand why they could not track the planes after their navigation systems were turned off.\n\nThe Pentagon following the crash of American 77 on Sept.", + " 11, 2001. (Photo: ROB CURTIS, XXX ARMY TIMES)\n\nAmerican 77, which departed Washington's Dulles airport, was hijacked near Indianapolis and then turned back toward Washington. Its destination: the Pentagon. Passenger Barbara Olson, the wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, called her husband to report \"that the flight had been hijacked, and the hijackers had knives and box cutters.\" American 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., killing all 64 people on board, including the five hijackers. Information gathered from the calls from flight attendants and passengers enabled investigators to piece together the events on board each plane and how the hijackings occurred.\n\n3.", + " Light passenger loads made it easier for the hijackers to maneuver\n\nAmerican 11, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, had 81 passengers on board out of a possible 158, according to the 9/11 report and aircraft data.\n\nUnited 175, which also left Boston for Los Angeles, had 56 passengers out of a possible 168. That was a \"load factor\" of 33%, considerably lower than the 49% average for that flight, a federal investigation showed.\n\nAmerican 77, headed to Los Angeles from Washington, had 58 passengers out of a capacity of 176, the 9/11 report and other reports said.\n\nUnited 93,", + " bound from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco, had only 37 passengers for a 20% load factor, which was far below the normal 52%.\n\n4. Missing hijacker made it easier for United 93 passengers to storm the cockpit\n\nThis is the only one of the four hijacked flights that did not strike its intended target, the U.S. Capitol. Some of that is because it was the only one that had four hijackers instead of the five that took down American 11, American 77 and United 175. \u201cThe operative likely intended to round out the team for this flight, Mohamed al Kahtani,", + " had been refused entry by a suspicious immigration inspector at Florida\u2019s Orlando International Airport in August,\u201d the 9/11 report said. As the passengers were just seconds away from getting into the cockpit, the hijacker at the controls crashed the plane in an empty field in Shanksville, Pa., just 20 minutes flying time from Washington.\n\n5. The World Trade Center had been targeted before\n\nNew York\u2019s World Trade Center held an iconic status for terrorists even before 9/11. Shortly after noon on Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb planted in a van parked in the center\u2019s underground parking garage exploded, killing six people and wounding more than 1,", + "000, the 9/11 report said. \u201cThe bombing signaled a new terrorist challenge, one whose rage and malice had no limit,\u201d the 9/11 report said. \u201cRamzi Yousef, the Sunni extremist who planted the bomb, said later that he had hoped to kill 250,000 people.\u201d\n\n6. Vice President Cheney ordered United 93 to be shot down\n\nVice President Dick Cheney in 2004. (Photo: RON EDMONDS, AP)\n\nBefore the passengers forced the crash of United 93, then-vice president Dick Cheney gave the approval for the plane to be shot down before it could reach Washington,", + " the 9/11 report said.\n\n\u201cThe Vice President authorized fighter aircraft to engage the aircraft,\u201d the report said.\n\nHowever, the report added, the Air Force fighters that were airborne at the time probably would not have found and reached United 93 in time. Military \u201cofficials have maintained consistently that had the passengers not caused United 93 to crash, the military would have prevented it from reaching Washington, D.C.,\u201d the 9/11 report said. \u201cThat conclusion is based on a version of events that we now know is incorrect.\u201d\n\n7. Earlier plots also targeted commercial aircraft\n\nRamzi Yousef, who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,", + " had planned a massive attack on 12 U.S. airliners over the Pacific in 1995, the 9/11 report said. Yousef worked with his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to devise the plot, the report said. Mohammed later became one of the masterminds of 9/11. Yousef was arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan, on Feb. 7, 1995, after an accomplice turned him in, the report said. The Manila plot was never carried out.\n\n8. The U.S. worked on multiple attempts to kill Osama bin Laden before 9/11\n\nThe CIA and other agencies developed a plan to capture bin Laden in early 1998,", + " the report said. That was delayed and then revived, but it was hampered by concerns from military officials about relying on Afghan tribal leaders. Then-national security adviser Sandy Berger was concerned about what would be done with bin Laden if he was captured and whether the evidence against him could lead to a criminal conviction in a U.S. court. After the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed on Oct. 8, 1998, President Bill Clinton authorized cruise missile strikes against bin Laden\u2019s compound in Afghanistan. He survived but was later killed by a Navy SEAL team in May 2011.\n\n9. The CIA warned President Clinton about hijackings in 1998\n\nIn the Dec.", + " 4, 1998, President\u2019s Daily Brief from the CIA, the agency told Clinton that \u201cBin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.\u201d The plan, the agency said, was to hijack the planes to gain the release of Yousef and other terrorists, the 9/11 report said.\n\nOsama bin Laden (Photo: Uncredited, AP)\n\nBut the agency had no firm information, and the hijackings did not take place. Throughout December 1998, U.S. officials tracked bin Laden around the region and tried to develop a plan to attack him with cruise missiles.\n\n10.", + " Saudi Arabia had multiple ties to the hijackers\n\nWhen the 9/11 report was released in 2004, 28 pages of material remained classified and the subject of intense speculation about their contents. Those pages, which were released in July, showed multiple links to associates of Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar, the former longtime ambassador to the United States. The documents, as USA TODAY reported in July, \"show possible conduits of money from the Saudi royal family to Saudis living in the United States and two of the hijackers in San Diego. The documents also indicate substantial support to California mosques with a high degree of radical Islamist sentiment.\" The pages were not released,", + " because the details contained in them had not been confirmed or shown to be relevant to the 9/11 attacks. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.\n\nOther stories you'll want to read:\n\n1,113 families still have no real confirmation of 9/11 deaths\n\n15 years after Sept. 11, the questions that still remain in our minds\n\nThe touching stories behind 9/11 tattoos\n\nNewly published notes recount 9/11 aboard Air Force One: 'We're at war'\n\nClinton, Trump pay tribute to victims of 9/11\n\nObama praises diversity at Pentagon 9/11 tribute\n\nSkip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT.", + " 11 9/11 victims honored in NYC | 1:26 Thousands of 9/11 victims' relatives, survivors, rescuers and others have gathered at the World Trade Center to remember the deadliest terror attack ever on American soil. (Sept. 11) AP 1 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Walking tour of Ground Zero | 4:21 A video walkthrough of the 9/11 Memorial site in New York City. USA TODAY 2 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Trump holds National Moment of Silence for 9/", + "11 | 2:16 President Donald Trump lead a national moment of silence on the 16th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. He was joined by first lady Melania Trump and White House staff to mark the moment when the 1st plane hit the World Trade Center. (Sept. 11) AP 3 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Wall Street observes moment of silence for 9/11 | 1:03 Wall Street observed a moment of silence for the victims of 9/11. The Sept. 11 terror attacks killed nearly 3,", + "000 people when four hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field in 2001. (Sept. 11) AP 4 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 How a small town became an unlikely hero of 9/11 | 3:33 Nearly 7,000 air passengers were suddenly rerouted to Gander, Newfoundland, moments after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Here's how the small town stepped up in a big way. USA TODAY 5 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT.", + " 11 Permanent Reminders: 9/11 memorial tattoos | 1:08 Fifteen years after 9/11, we spoke to dozens of people who chose to memorialize the event on their skin. Here's a look at some of their stories. 6 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Video: World Trade Center Observatory - 102 floors up | 1:04 The observatory on the 102nd floor of One World Trade Center, along with the 9/11 Memorial, have made the World Trade Center site one of the most popular tourist sites in New York City.", + " Video by Seth Harrison/The Journal News 7 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Similar photos of One World Trade approaching 9/11 captured a year apart | 0:30 For the second straight year, a stunning photo of One World Trade was captured the Thursday before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. USA TODAY 8 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Service dog helps 9/11 hero cope with PTSD | 1:52 Retired Port Authority police sergeant Dennis Frederick depends on his service dog to help fight PTSD.", + " 9 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 A 9/11 survivor stays alive by not listening to others | 1:44 Evelyn Lugo, a 9/11 survivor, explains why her \"never forget\" tattoo gives her strength 10 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Lost colleagues and friends remembered in 9/11 tattoos | 0:59 On 9/11 Steven Waldron was an off duty police officer who responded when people were in need. It took him fifteen years to finally get his memorial tattoo.", + " 11 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Never forget: Here's why memorial tattoos are important | 0:52 Grief expert Susan Salluce talks about the importance of memorializing people and moments through tattoos. 12 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 15 years later, 9/11 tattoos remain strong | 1:05 Brian Branco wants you to remember his friends. Of of the five people he was with on September 11, 2001, only he and another colleague got out.", + " The other three he has memorialized on his arm. 13 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Permanent reminder: A touching story behind 9/11 ink | 1:13 Max Giaccone lost his father on September 11, 2001, when he was ten. A portrait of the two of them sits on his back. He says tattoos are a way to carry his father with him every day. 14 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Deaf children sign the 9/11 story | 1:", + "19 Deaf school children in Texas use sign language to paint a powerful portrait of what happened on Sept. 11. 15 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Daily remembrance: White roses honor birthdays of 9/11 victims | 1:17 Every morning before the National September 11 Memorial & Museum opens to the public, a volunteer places a white rose for every victim who would have celebrated a birthday that day. Danielle Parhizkaran, The Bergen Record 16 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Video:", + " 9/11 Anniversary: Glenn Guzi's decision to skip work | 3:46 Peekskill's Glenn Guzi, program director for the World Trade Center at the Port Authority of NY and NJ, reflects on the last 15 years, Aug. 30, 2016 in Manhattan. Video by Tania Savayan/The Journal News 17 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Never forget: 9/11 tattoos pay tribute | 2:00 Hear the incredibly touching stories behind these 9/11 tattoos 18 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT.", + " 11 Video: Welles Crowther, the Man in the Red Bandanna | 2:47 Remembering Welles Remy Crowther of Upper Nyack, the Man in the Red Bandanna, 15 years after Sept. 11. Peter Carr/The Journal News 19 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 15 years after 9/11, unwelcome spotlight returns to Islam | 1:40 James Sues, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the difficulties facing Muslim-American 15 years after 9/11. Video by Chris Pedota,", + " NorthJersey.com 20 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 9/11 Museum's Flag Exhibit | 2:51 Shirley Dreifus, original owner of the famous Ground Zero flag, talks about its importance after it went missing for 15 years. 21 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 Video: Sites, sounds of National Sept. 11 Memorial | 2:11 The reflecting pools provide the backdrop for a solemn experience for those visiting the National Sept. 11 Memorial at the World Trade Center.", + " Video by Seth Harrison/The Journal News 22 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 15 years after 9/11, U.S. struggles to unite | 3:20 After Sept. 11, signs of unity seemed to well up everywhere in America, but 15 years later, many whose lives changed after the attacks wonder where that unity has gone. (Sept. 6) AP 23 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 9/11 museum unveils special exhibition for 15th anniversary | 1:", + "08 New York's 9/11 Museum unveils its first ever special exhibition. 'Rendering the Unthinkable' brings together artworks inspired by the attacks of 11 September 2001, the 15th anniversary of which falls this month. It is the first time the museum has put together an exhibition outside of its permanent collection. Video provided by AFP Newslook 24 of 25 Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE REMEMBERING SEPT. 11 NYPD mark 9/11 anniversary with parade | 1:03 The NYPD marked the 15th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks with a parade to honor the 23 officers it lost on Sept.", + " 11, 2001. Police departments from around the United States and Canada joined the march around lower Manhattan.(Sept. 9) AP 25 of 25 Last VideoNext Video 9/11 victims honored in NYC\n\nWalking tour of Ground Zero\n\nTrump holds National Moment of Silence for 9/11\n\nWall Street observes moment of silence for 9/11\n\nHow a small town became an unlikely hero of 9/11\n\nPermanent Reminders: 9/11 memorial tattoos\n\nVideo: World Trade Center Observatory - 102 floors up\n\nSimilar photos of One World Trade approaching 9/11 captured a year apart\n\nService dog helps 9/", + "11 hero cope with PTSD\n\nA 9/11 survivor stays alive by not listening to others\n\nLost colleagues and friends remembered in 9/11 tattoos\n\nNever forget: Here's why memorial tattoos are important\n\n15 years later, 9/11 tattoos remain strong\n\nPermanent reminder: A touching story behind 9/11 ink\n\nDeaf children sign the 9/11 story\n\nDaily remembrance: White roses honor birthdays of 9/11 victims\n\nVideo: 9/11 Anniversary: Glenn Guzi's decision to skip work\n\nNever forget: 9/11 tattoos pay tribute\n\nVideo: Welles Crowther,", + " the Man in the Red Bandanna\n\n15 years after 9/11, unwelcome spotlight returns to Islam\n\n9/11 Museum's Flag Exhibit\n\nVideo: Sites, sounds of National Sept. 11 Memorial\n\n15 years after 9/11, U.S. struggles to unite\n\n9/11 museum unveils special exhibition for 15th anniversary\n\nNYPD mark 9/11 anniversary with parade\n\nRead or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2cNyZPf ", + " \u201cI had been two weeks at the U.S. Open tennis tournament out in Queens and it finished on a Sunday, so I had Monday off and then Tuesday morning was my first day covering fashion week. It was my first show and I was covering a maternity fashion show by Liz Lange at Bryant Park. I was doing hair and makeup feature photos and it was interesting to see that they were using pregnant models. I got those backstage pictures out of the way and then went to the end of the runway to stake out my real estate for the fashion show. I was talking to a CNN cameraman who was shooting the fashion show and all of a sudden,", + " he puts his finger to his ear and says, \u2018There\u2019s been an explosion at the world trade center\u2026 an airplane has hit the World Trade Center.\u2019 Then, I got a call from my editor that said, \u2018Bag the fashion show. You have to go.\u2019 I took the 3 train down to Chambers Street to the World Trade Center. It was just before 9 a.m.\n\n\u201cWhen I came up the steps of the subway station I looked up and saw that both of the towers were on fire. I only knew of one airplane. I immediately started photographing people. I photographed one guy who was walking towards me with his head bleeding because I think it had been hit by debris.", + " Already, some police had taped off the debris that had been blown over, cars had windows knocked out, and I slowly made my way over to the west side of the building by the West Side Highway because the wind was blowing west-to-east and I didn\u2019t want the smoke obscuring my view. I ended up at the northwest corner of West and Vesey Street\u2014where the Goldman Sachs building is now\u2014where the ambulances were congregating. I had a perfect view of both buildings and figured that was where I could cover the assignment. I had a Nikon DCS-620, which was one of their early models\u2014a hybrid Kodak-Nikon camera\u2014and I was using a 70-", + "200mm zoom lens. And I did my assignment.\n\n\u201cMyself as a photojournalist I\u2019m like a first responder, as all journalists are in that situation, so we run to something instead of away from it when something happens. When I\u2019m there I get in a zone and do my job and capture what\u2019s there. I don\u2019t really think about if I\u2019m scared or not. You want to make sure you don\u2019t miss that photograph. You get in a mindset. You have to commit to journalism, remember what your job is, and not get emotionally involved. The camera is like a filter for me, too. It\u2019s not like I\u2019m experiencing it,", + " I\u2019m seeing it through my camera. I have to remain emotionally uninvolved.\n\nRichard Drew / AP Photo\n\n\u201cI was standing next to a New York City police officer and a woman who was an EMT. We were looking up at the building and I was photographing it, and the police officer said, \u2018I was here when the second plane hit. It was a big f\u2014king airplane, like a 737 or something.\u2019 That was the first time I heard of a second plane, and then he said he heard the Pentagon may have also gotten hit. I was like, \u2018Whoa.\u2019 The EMT then pointed up and said,", + " \u2018Oh my god, look!\u2019 And that\u2019s when we noticed people coming down from the building. We don\u2019t know whether they were overcome by smoke. I was photographing several people coming down from the building and I have a sequence of photographs of this guy coming down. The camera captured the photograph in a sequence, since it had a motor drive on it, so the camera captured a moment. If the camera functioned a fraction of a second earlier, I wouldn\u2019t have had that picture. It was the camera that captured the photograph, not my eye and quick finger. Can you imagine how fast people fall? They\u2019re falling really fast,", + " and while you\u2019re photographing this you have to pan with them so I picked this guy up in my viewfinder, put my finger on the button, and kept taking pictures while he was falling. I had to time my vertical motion of the camera to his descent.\n\n\u201cAfter the first building fell, I went down to North End Avenue where people were leaving the area and they were all covered in soot, so I was photographing them. There was a ranking police officer wearing a white shirt saying, \u2018We have to get everybody back now because the other building is in jeopardy.\u2019 I didn\u2019t want to leave the area. I tried to hide myself in a little traffic median in the street in some bushes and get out of his view so he wouldn\u2019t see me.", + " I took off the 70-200mm and put on a smaller lens\u2014a 35-70mm lens\u2014and put my camera up to take pictures of the North Tower. I picked up my camera and just as I started to do that, the top of the building exploded and mushroomed out from the North Tower. All that debris started coming towards me so I said to myself, \u2018I think it\u2019s time to go.\u2019 I made my way up North End and ran into Stuyvesant High School. At the time, the building was still full of students because they hadn\u2019t evacuated everybody. I was looking at my images in the lobby and a student over my shoulder said,", + " \u2018What\u2019s that?\u2019 And I said, \u201cThat\u2019s the second building coming down.\u2019\n\n\u201cI had to walk all the way back to the AP office in Rockefeller Center because there was no public transportation. I remember walking by St. Vincent\u2019s Hospital at the emergency room entrance and all these people were waiting for the injured to show up. Then I made my way up 6th Avenue and got up to 14th Street and someone asked, \u2018Where were you?\u2019 because I was covered in dust, and I said, \u2018I was at the World Trade Center.\u2019\n\n\u201cI never counted how many people I photographed falling from the building that day.", + " I think there were seven or eight photos in the \u2018Falling Man\u2019 sequence. He was wearing a white tunic and you can see he\u2019s wearing an orange T-shirt under it. I\u2019m not drawn to want to figure out who he is. If people are drawn to want to investigate who it is, that\u2019s okay. For me, it was never a priority.\n\nIt\u2019s not a part of this man\u2019s death, it\u2019s a part of his life.\n\n\u201cI think people are drawn to it and I guess repulsed by it in that they feel it could be them in that situation. For me, it\u2019s a very quiet moment.", + " It\u2019s not a violent picture in any way. I think some people are turned off by this picture because it could be their fate. But it\u2019s not a part of this man\u2019s death, it\u2019s a part of his life. It\u2019s also very symmetrical, and I trust that to the camera. It bisects the north and south tower and he\u2019s almost like an arrow, in a way. ", + "\n\nCards, patches and mementos of those killed at Ground Zero are are viewed during a preview of the National September 11 Memorial Museum on May 14, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)\n\nIn the frequently contentious debate over Ground Zero, the Vesey Street stairs generated an especially heated conflict.\n\nFor hundreds of workers who managed to escape the World Trade Center complex on Sept. 11, 2001, the two flights of stairs were a cherished symbol. The stairs had led them from the site\u2019s elevated plaza, away from the collapsing buildings and falling debris, to the relative safety of the streets beyond.", + " In the words of one survivor, \u201cThey were the path to freedom.\u201d\n\nFor preservationists, the stairs were also important artifacts: the last above-ground remnants of the World Trade Center. \u201c[They] will be the most dramatic original piece of the site that will have meaning to generations to come,\u201d Richard Moe, then president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said in 2006, when the group petitioned for the stairs to be kept in place.\n\nYet for developers and some neighborhood groups, the stairs were an eyesore \u2014 damaged not in the attack but in the subsequent cleanup \u2014 that were impeding construction of a planned commercial tower and,", + " with it, the revitalization of Lower Manhattan. \u201cTo the extent that this is going to delay rebuilding the World Trade Center site, I think New Yorkers have had enough,\u201d John Dellaportas, chairman of the West Street Coalition, a neighborhood group, said five years after the attack.\n\nOnly after months of fighting did officials, preservationists and survivors reach an agreement. The 38 steps of the \u201csurvivors\u2019 stairs \u201d were separated from the concrete structure supporting them and moved to the underground National September 11 Memorial Museum. Meanwhile, 2 World Trade Center was allowed to go forward unencumbered by emotion-laden symbolism.", + " Today it is a skyscraper in progress, and the developer is looking for an anchor tenant. (News Corp. and 21st Century Fox had signed a lease but pulled out in January.)\n\n[Tim Gunn: Designers refuse to make clothes to fit American women. It\u2019s a disgrace.]\n\nAgain and again during the past 15 years, the same questions have arisen at Ground Zero: How do you resolve the tension between a mandate to remember and a mandate to revive? How do you memorialize, while at the same time creating a space where people want to work and live and visit?\n\nThose twin mandates have compelled continuous accommodation. As a result,", + " the memorial at the Trade Center site is distinctly different from those commemorating the losses at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa., where remembrance is the sole focus. And the revitalization of Lower Manhattan is different than any development project the city, and quite possibly the country, has ever seen.\n\nGov. George Pataki helped determine the contours of the New York memorial with his unexpected declaration, in June 2002, that \u201cwe will never build where the towers stood.\u201d\n\nPataki also strongly endorsed the commercial mandate to rebuild 10 million square feet of office space and replace the high-grossing retail mall at the original World Trade Center.", + " The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, as owner of the land, and Larry Silverstein and his investment partnership, as holders of a 99-year lease on the site, were insistent on the full restoration of lost office space. The Lower Manhattan business community wanted the same.\n\nBut exactly where commercial development should take place, and what should be considered hallowed ground, proved difficult to settle. Even once the idea took hold that the footprints of the twin towers should be preserved, there was disagreement on how to define the footprints and what preserving them meant.\n\nFor example, the first set of plans prepared by the Port Authority proposed putting bus garages (necessary to accommodate the millions of people expected to visit the memorial each year)", + " underground in the vicinity of where the towers used to be. But that proved to be untenable. Although the towers had been built on a concrete slab, many family members objected to any non-memorial construction below ground level, all the way down to bedrock. The distinction between the symbolic and the literal did not hold meaning, especially for families who never received the remains of those they lost on 9/11. (Some 1,115 victims were never found, and a repository containing 7,930 unidentified bone fragments and other remains is maintained by the city\u2019s chief medical examiner within the 9/11 museum.) Ultimately,", + " officials expanded the area for rebuilding by acquiring two blocks south of the Trade Center. This accommodated the Port Authority\u2019s infrastructure and satisfied family members.\n\nA jury selected the memorial design by architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker for its \u201cpowerful, yet simple articulation of the footprints of the Twin Towers.\u201d Opened to the public on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, the memorial features two voids that borrow their dimensions from the destroyed towers. Each void is framed by walls of water that cascade into pools 30 feet below street level, vanishing into nowhere, seemingly never to fill up. Bronze panels contain the names of those killed on Sept.", + " 11, 2001, and in the first World Trade Center attack, on Feb. 26, 1993. The starkness is softened by a grove of 400 swamp white oak trees. The companion museum, completed in 2014, is beneath the memorial plaza.\n\n[How the careless errors of credit reporting agencies are ruining people\u2019s lives]\n\nThe commitment to the towers\u2019 footprints presented planners with another sensitive issue: how to balance retail and reverence. Shops could not be too close to the footprints, too close to commemoration. The original master plan separated them by siting the memorial 30 feet below ground and incorporating buffer elements:", + " cultural buildings on the north and east sides. However, when the memorial was elevated to ground level, these elements disappeared. Today, the pavilion entrance to the museum, situated between the two pools, helps in the separation. But at ground level, the visual connection between remembrance and commerce remains. Below ground, these two abut, but none of the commercial spaces have access to or visibility from the museum.\n\nThe tension inherent in the dual mandate flared once again with the opening of the museum\u2019s gift shop, which the father of one victim called \u201ccrass commercialism on a literally sacred site.\u201d\n\nAnother issue that has exposed tensions is culture.", + " With the idea that Ground Zero should be a \u201cliving memorial,\u201d planners intended spaces for the arts to help infuse the redevelopment with energy and life. But a small subset of 9/11 family members resisted anything that might interfere with the memorialization of their loved ones. The arts spaces were competition \u2014 for public attention, donations, size and pride of place at Ground Zero. And so the families sought to disrupt the planned selection of cultural groups and successfully petitioned to reduce the scale of cultural buildings.\n\nThe victims\u2019 families, with their unassailable emotional claim, commanded singular standing whenever they put forth deeply felt desires for specific forms of remembrance or objections to specific plans for Ground Zero.", + " They were a political constituency, and it was very hard for any politician to push against their opposition. But once most issues relating to remembrance were settled, and the focus shifted to commercial arrangements, the power of the activist families dissipated.\n\nSince 2011, a new place has been materializing, a place that balances remembrance of the past with optimism for the future. The many goals officials and development executives set out to achieve have been cohering. One World Trade Center anchors the skyline of Lower Manhattan, and two other commercial towers have been attracting tenants. The World Trade Center transportation hub, with its distinctive, avian-like Oculus structure,", + " is now populated with retail stores. The eight-acre memorial quadrant, with its 400 trees, is becoming more of a park day by day \u2014 New Yorkers who are used to small, tight spaces are reveling in its openness. The business community downtown has been cheering the long-sought-after growth that promises to accompany the thousands of new office workers, tourists and residents.\n\n[How the government could resist President Trump\u2019s orders]\n\nRebuilding Ground Zero, \u201ca place made sacred through tragic loss,\u201d as the memorial\u2019s president has said, has been a perilous but essential ambition. Remembrance without rebuilding would have constituted only partial healing of the wound to New York and the nation left by the 9/", + "11 attacks. Only the dual achievement would constitute success in the eyes of New Yorkers, the nation and the world.\n\nThat New York succeeded by the 15th anniversary of 9/11, despite a process beset by passionate controversies, political disputes, personal animosities, sensitive preservation issues, broken deadlines, intense debates about developer subsidies and quarrelsome cost overruns, has surprised many who doubted that the years of chaos could yield anything of lasting value.\n\nIt is no longer Ground Zero, though the moniker for the Trade Center site is hard to let go. ", + " President Obama delivered remarks outside the Pentagon today to memorialize the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling gatherers that the \"3,000 beautiful lives\" lost that day will never be forgotten.\n\nInterested in September 11th? Add September 11th as an interest to stay up to date on the latest September 11th news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Add Interest\n\n\"We wonder how their lives might have unfolded -- how their dreams might have taken shape,\" Obama said during his last time overseeing an anniversary of Sept. 11 as president.\n\nTo the survivors of 9/11 and the families of victims,", + " Obama said: \"Even as you've mourned, you've summoned the strength to carry on.\"\n\n\"You've done your best to be a good neighbor, and a good friend, and a good citizen,\" he added. \"You remind us there's nothing that Americans can't overcome.\"\n\nObama said that 15 years after the attacks, the threat of terrorism has evolved. The president then mentioned the \"unspeakable violence\" that has occurred in Boston, San Bernardino and Orlando. Groups like ISIS know \"they'll never be able to defeat a nation as strong as America,\" so they hope to spark fear and change the way Americans live, the president said.\n\n\"We know that our diversity,", + " our patchwork heritage, is not a weakness,\" the president said. \"This is the America that was attacked that September morning. This is the America that we must remain true to.\"\n\nAfter his speech, \"America the Beautiful\" was played on wind instruments.\n\nPrior to the ceremony at the Pentagon, Obama privately observed a moment of silence inside the White House residence to mark the occasion, as flags across the nation fly at half-staff in remembrance of the victims of 9/11.\n\nDefense Secretary Ash Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford attended the ceremony at the Pentagon, where more than 180 people were killed after al-Qaeda terrorists crashed a jetliner into the building during the string of attacks.\n\nMary Altaffer/AP Photo\n\nIn New York,", + " victims' relatives and others convened Sunday on the memorial plaza for one of the constants in how America remembers 9/11 after 15 years -- the anniversary ceremony itself.\n\nOrganizers planned some additional music and readings to mark the milestone year. But they kept close to what are now traditions: moments of silence and tolling bells, an apolitical atmosphere and the hours-long reading of the names of the dead.\n\nPresidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump could be seen in the crowd as the reading of the names took place. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand, New Jersey Gov.", + " Chris Christie, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Former New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, and Rep. Peter King were also in attendance.\n\nGround Zero has become a rebuilt World Trade Center, a place forever marked but greatly changed since Sept. 11, 2001. The nation around it is different, too.\n\n\"This idea of physical transformation is so real here,\" Sept. 11 memorial President Joe Daniels said.\n\nBut on this Sept. 11 itself, \"bringing the focus back to why we did all this -- which is to honor those that were lost -- is something very intentional.\"\n\nThe simple, reverential observance may be the norm now,", + " but city officials fielded about 4,500 suggestions -- including a Broadway parade honoring rescue workers and a one-minute blackout of all of Manhattan -- while planning the first ceremony in 2002.\n\nFormer president Bill Clinton tweeted that \"defeating terrorism and embracing our common humanity\" is the \"best\" way to honor the lives lost.\n\nAs we reflect on the lives we lost 15 years ago in NY, VA & PA, we honor them best by defeating terrorism and embracing our common humanity. \u2014 Bill Clinton (@billclinton) September 11, 2016\n\nThe 15th anniversary arrives in a country caught up in a combustible political campaign and keenly focused on political,", + " economic and social fissures.\n\nBut the nation tries to put partisan politics on hold on the anniversary. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican rival Donald Trump attended the anniversary ceremony at the World Trade Center. Neither candidate is expected to make public remarks. Politicians may attend, but haven't been allowed to read names or deliver remarks since 2011. Clinton and Trump are following a custom of halting television ads that day.\n\nHundreds of people also are expected at a ceremony at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville.\n\nFinancial and other hurdles delayed the redevelopment of the Trade Center site early on, but now the 9/11 museum,", + " three of four currently planned skyscrapers, an architecturally progressive transportation hub and shopping concourse and other features stand at the site. A design for a long-stalled, $250 million performing arts center was unveiled Thursday.\n\nAround the World Trade Center, lower Manhattan now has dozens of new hotels and eateries, 60,000 more residents and ever-more visitors than before 9/11.\n\nMeanwhile, the crowd has thinned somewhat at the anniversary ceremony in recent years, though over 1,000 survivors, recovery workers, victims' relatives and dignitaries attended last year. But there's been no sustained talk of curtailing the ceremony.\n\nOrganizers evaluate every year whether to make changes,", + " Daniels said, \"and every time the answer, thus far, has been it's so special for family members, and it's important for the nation.\"\n\nJennifer Peltz of The Associated Press contributed to this report.\n" + ], + "length": 32839, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 83, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 China promised years ago to reform its legal system so suspects wouldn't be abused in custody, but according to a Human Rights Watch report out today authorities are flouting the rules and continuing their brutal methods, the AP reports. \"Police are torturing criminal suspects to get them to confess to crimes, and courts are convicting people who confessed under torture,\" the HRW report says, per Reuters. The ominous 145-page \"Tiger Chairs and Cell Bosses\" was based on interviews with 48 ex-detainees (mostly accused of theft, selling drugs, or robbery), their families, lawyers, judges, and at least one former cop, Al Jazeera notes. The allegations are horrific: beatings, electrocution with batons, sleep and water deprivation, even spraying suspects \"with chili oil in sensitive areas,\" the Guardian notes. \"They handcuffed me and then hung the handcuffs on the windows,\" says a former detainee who spoke with HRW, per Reuters. \"I was hung like a dog.\" China has notoriously used torture to elicit confessions, and legal reforms (the Criminal Procedure Law was most recently revamped in 2012) mandate that all suspect interviews be taped and ban evidence obtained through torture, Al Jazeera notes; the country's public security minister said in 2013 that coerced confessions plummeted 87% in 2012 from 2011. But HRW tells Al Jazeera it can't confirm that stat and adds that the report may not even cover the worst of it. \"We have to take into account that the torture of political criminal suspects often is worse, and the report doesn't cover Tibet and Xinjiang,\" a human rights researcher tells Reuters. (China promised to stop using organs from executed prisoners last year.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Human Rights Watch report says detainees electrocuted, shackled to chairs, starved and deprived of sleep to elicit confessions\n\nTorture is still routine in Chinese jails, with police flouting regulations and courts ignoring rules designed to exclude evidence and confessions obtained by mistreatment, a report by Human Rights Watch has warned.\n\n\n\nDetainees, their relatives and lawyers said abuse included prisoners being beaten and electrocuted with batons, deprived of sleep, shackled in painful positions and hung from their wrists.\n\nSome have been sprayed with chilli oil in sensitive areas, deprived of sleep and water, starved and frozen.\n\n\n\nThe study,", + " Tiger Chairs and Cell Bosses: Police Torture of Criminal Suspects in China, is based on hundreds of newly published court verdicts from around the country, and interviews with nearly 50 people on all sides of the justice system \u2013 those jailed, their relatives and lawyers, prosecutors and other officials.\n\n\n\nHuman Rights Watch also interviewed families of four people who died in detention. The police said all deaths were due to natural causes, despite evidence of neglect and mistreatment. Relatives were blocked in efforts to see full videos of their detention or commission independent autopsies.\n\n\n\n\u201cTorture to extract confession has become an unspoken rule, it is very common,\u201d one former police officer from northern Heilongjiang province told Human Rights Watch in February 2014.\n\nThe report also included several accounts of mistreatment,", + " including shackling to the \u2018tiger chairs\u2019 of the title, which are used to keep detainees immobile for days at a time.\n\n\n\n\u201cI sat on an iron chair all day, morning and night, my hands and legs were buckled,\u201d one woman held this way for weeks told the group.\n\n\u201cDuring the day I could nap on the chair, but when the cadres came, they scolded the police for letting me doze off\u2026 I sat until my buttocks bled.\u201d\n\n\n\nAfter several high profile cases of police brutality in 2009 and 2010, China promised reforms to reduce miscarriages of justice and torture.\n\nThese include videotaping some interrogations,", + " banning the use of brutal inmates as \u201ccell bosses\u201d to control other detainees through violence and a new rule banning evidence obtained through torture.\n\n\n\nThe government claims the reforms led to a significant drop in the use of forced confessions in 2012.\n\nAbuse in pre-trial detention centres did fall, Human Rights Watch said, but police appeared to have responded to new rules by shifting torture to other areas with less strict monitoring including police stations, hostels and drug rehabilitation centres they control.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe period between when suspects are apprehended and when they are taken to a detention centre is a period with high incidence of torture,\u201d the report quoted procurator Wu Yanwu saying in article posted on a Beijing legal affairs website.\n\n\n\nPolice have also learned to administer beatings and other torture in ways that left few or no marks but still caused significant suffering,", + " the report said, and there was little sign of courts excluding evidence obtained by torture or holding abusive officials to account.\n\n\n\n\u201cDespite several years of reform, police are torturing criminal suspects to get them to confess to crimes and courts are convicting people who confessed under torture,\u201d said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.\n\n\u201cUnless and until suspects have lawyers at interrogations and other basic protections and until police are held accountable for abuse, these new measures are unlikely to eliminate routine torture.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn a national database which is not an exhaustive list of cases, or definitive record of torture allegations, Human Rights Watch found over 430 cases in which defendants said they had been mistreated.\n\nThe judge threw out evidence in only 23 cases and none of the trials ended in acquittal.", + " There was only one prosecution of police officers for using torture and none served prison time.\n\n\n\nMost of the torture cases uncovered by Human Rights Watch were of suspects charged with theft, robbery and drug sales, but several lawyers said abuse was particularly common and severe for people caught up in high-profile murder and corruption trial-linked cases.\n\n\n\n\u201cThese crimes have been specifically targeted for crackdowns by the central government in recent years because they tend to attract widespread public condemnation and attention,\u201d the report said.\n\n\n\n\u201cLawyers we interviewed said that in these \u2018major cases\u2019, there is political pressure coming from the top to solve them, thus further weakening any procedural protections \u2013 however limited \u2013 that otherwise might exist in Chinese criminal law for the defendants.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe UN will review China\u2019s progress on eliminating torture later this year,", + " and Human Rights Watch called on Beijing to make \u201cfundamental reforms\u201d to the Chinese system, including cutting the length of time suspects can be held before seeing a judge \u2013 currently over a month \u2013 and setting up an independent commission to investigate allegations of police abuse.\n\n\n\nIt warned unless the government is willing to give more power to defence lawyers and independent monitors, \u201cthe elimination of routine torture and ill-treatment is unlikely\u201d.\n\n", + " BEIJING Six years after China took steps to crack down on torture by police, detainees continue to be beaten, hanged by their wrists and shackled to iron chairs, New York-based Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday.\n\nThe report comes six months before China is due to face scrutiny by a U.N. panel against torture and following a pledge by President Xi Jinping to boost the rule of law.\n\nThe ruling Communist Party is looking to quell public discontent over several high-profile miscarriages of justice, with China's top court unveiling legal reforms in February to halt the use of torture to gain evidence.\n\n\"Police are torturing criminal suspects to get them to confess to crimes and courts are convicting people who confessed under torture,\" Human Rights Watch said in its report,", + " however.\n\nThe rights group cited former detainees as saying they were physically and psychologically tortured during police interrogations, including being beaten with electric batons, sprayed with chilli oil and deprived of sleep.\n\nThe Ministry of Public Security, which runs the police force, did not respond to requests for comment.\n\nChinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said that Chinese law clearly bans torture and forced confessions, and that those who employ it are punished.\n\nThe report was based on interviews last year with 48 recent detainees, members of their families, lawyers, former officials and an analysis of court verdicts in China.\n\n\"They handcuffed me and then hung the handcuffs on the windows,\" a former detainee based in the central province of Hunan told Human Rights Watch.", + " \"I was hung like a dog.\"\n\nThe report focused only on suspects of non-political crimes, such as robbery and organized crime, said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch.\n\n\"We have to take into account that the torture of political criminal suspects often is worse and the report doesn't cover Tibet and Xinjiang,\" Wang told Reuters, referring to troubled western regions that China keeps on a tight rein.\n\nPolice have got round government measures introduced since 2009 to curb abuses by interrogating detainees outside official detention centers or adopting methods that leave no visible injuries, the group said.\n\nChina's criminal justice system gives the police excessive powers over the judiciary,", + " hindering any efforts at accountability, the rights group said.\n\nPolice may subject detainees to 37 days of interrogation incommunicado before prosecutors have to approve their arrests, it added. Lawyers are not allowed access during interrogations.\n\n(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee; Editing by Clarence Fernandez) ", + " The following Chinese and English texts were retrieved from the website of the Office of the High Commissioner, United Nations Human Rights, on November 22, 2016.\n\nCriminal Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China\n\n(Adopted at the Second Session of the Fifth National People's Congress on July 1, 1979, and amended for the first time in according with the Decision on Amending the Criminal Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China adopted at the Fourth Session of the Eighth National People's Congress on March 17, 1996, and amended for the second time in according with the Decision on Amending the Criminal Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China adopted at the Fifth Session of the 11th National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China on March 14,", + " 2012)\n\nContents\n\nPart One: General Provisions\n\nChapter I: Aim and Basic Principles\n\nChapter II: Jurisdiction\n\nChapter III: Withdrawal\n\nChapter IV: Defence and Representation\n\nChapter V: Evidence\n\nChapter VI: Compulsory Measures\n\nChapter VII: Incidental Civil Actions\n\nChapter VIII: Time Periods and Service\n\nChapter IX: Other Provisions\n\nPart Two: Filing a Case, Investigation, and Initiation of Public Prosecution\n\nChapter I: Filing a Case\n\nChapter II: Investigation\n\nSection 1: General Provisions\n\nSection 2: Interrogation of the Criminal Suspect\n\nSection 3:", + " Questioning of the Witnesses\n\nSection 4: Inquest and Examination\n\nSection 5: Search\n\nSection 6: Seal-up and Seizure of Material Evidence and Documentary Evidence\n\nSection 7: Expert Evaluation\n\nSection 8: Technical Investigation Measures\n\nSection 9: Wanted Orders\n\nSection 10: Conclusion of Investigation\n\nSection 11: Investigation of Cases Directly Accepted by the People's Procuratorates\n\nChapter III: Initiation of Public Prosecution\n\nPart Three: Trial\n\nChapter I: Trial Organizations\n\nChapter II: Procedure of First Instance\n\nSection 1: Cases of Public Prosecution\n\nSection 2:", + " Cases of Private Prosecution\n\nSection 3: Summary Procedure\n\nChapter III: Procedure of Second Instance\n\nChapter IV: Procedure for Review of Death Sentences\n\nChapter V: Procedure for Trial Supervision\n\nPart Four: Execution\n\nPart Five: Special Procedures\n\nChapter 1 Procedures for Criminal Cases Committed by Minors\n\nChapter 2 Procedures for Reconciliation Between Parties Concerned in Cases of Public Prosecution\n\nChapter 3 Procedures for Confiscating Illegal Gains in Cases Where the Criminal Suspect or Defendant Has Absconded or Died\n\nChapter 4 Procedures for Compulsory Medical Treatment for Mentally Ill Persons who Are not Held Criminal Responsible\n\nSupplementary Provisions\n\nPart One:", + " General Provisions\n\nChapter I: Aim and Basic Principles\n\nArticle 1 This Law is enacted in accordance with the Constitution and for the purpose of ensuring correct enforcement of the Criminal Law, punishing crimes, protecting the people, safeguarding State and public security and maintaining socialist public order.\n\nArticle 2 The purposes of the Criminal Procedure Law of the People\u2019s Republic of China are as follows: to ensure that the facts of crimes are ascertained in an accurate and timely manner, that the law is correctly applied, that criminals are punished and innocent people are protected from criminal prosecution, and that citizens are educated to abide by the law and vigorously fight against criminal acts,", + " so as to maintain the socialist legal system, respect and protect human rights, safeguard citizens\u2019 personal rights, property rights, democratic rights and other rights, and ensure the smooth progress of the socialist cause.\n\nArticle 3 The public security organs shall be responsible for investigation, detention, execution of arrests and preliminary inquiry in criminal cases. The People's Procuratorates shall be responsible for procuratorial work, authorizing approval of arrests, conducting investigation and initiating public prosecution of cases directly accepted by the procuratorial organs. The People's Courts shall be responsible for adjudication. Except as otherwise provided by law, no other organs, organizations or individuals shall have the authority to exercise such powers.\n\nIn conducting criminal proceedings,", + " the People's Courts, the People's Procuratorates and the public security organs must strictly observe this Law and any relevant stipulations of other laws.\n\nArticle 4 State security organs shall, in accordance with law, handle cases of crimes that endanger State security, performing the same functions and powers as the public security organs.\n\nArticle 5 The People's Courts shall exercise judicial power independently in accordance with law and the People's Procuratorates shall exercise procuratorial power independently in accordance with law, and they shall be free from interference by any administrative organ, public organization or individual.\n\nArticle 6 In conducting criminal proceedings, the People's Courts,", + " the People's Procuratorates and the public security organs must rely on the masses, base themselves on facts and take law as the criterion. The law applies equally to all citizens and no privilege whatsoever is permissible before law.\n\nArticle 7 In conducting criminal proceedings, the People's Courts, the People's Procuratorates and the public security organs shall divide responsibilities, coordinate their efforts and check each other to ensure the correct and effective enforcement of law.\n\nArticle 8 The People's Procuratorates shall, in accordance with law, exercise legal supervision over criminal proceedings.\n\nArticle 9 Citizens of all nationalities shall have the right to use their native spoken and written languages in court proceedings.", + " The People's Courts, the People's Procuratorates and the public security organs shall provide translations for any party to the court proceedings who is not familiar with the spoken or written language commonly used in the locality.\n\nWhere people of a minority nationality live in a concentrated community or where a number of nationalities live together in one area, court hearings shall be conducted in the spoken language commonly used in the locality, and judgments, notices and other documents shall be issued in the written language commonly used in the locality.\n\nArticle 10 In trying cases, the People's Courts shall apply the system whereby the second instance is final.\n\nArticle 11 Cases in the People's Courts shall be heard in public,", + " unless otherwise provided by this Law. A defendant shall have the right to defence, and the People's Courts shall have the duty to guarantee his defence.\n\nArticle 12 No person shall be found guilty without being judged as such by a People's Court according to law.\n\nArticle 13 In trying cases, the People's Courts shall apply the system of people's assessors taking part in trials in accordance with this Law.\n\nArticle 14 People\u2019s courts, people\u2019s procuratorates and public security organs shall safeguard the right of defense and other litigation rights to which criminal suspects, defendants and other participants in litigation proceedings are entitled.\n\nParticipants in proceedings shall have the right to file charges against judges,", + " procurators and investigators whose acts infringe on their citizen's procedural rights or subject their persons to indignities.\n\nArticle 15 In any of the following circumstances, no criminal responsibility shall be investigated; if investigation has already been undertaken, the case shall be dismissed, or prosecution shall not be initiated, or the handling shall be terminated, or innocence shall be declared:\n\n(1) if an act is obviously minor, causing no serious harm, and is therefore not deemed a crime;\n\n(2) if the limitation period for criminal prosecution has expired;\n\n(3) if an exemption of criminal punishment has been granted in a special amnesty decree;\n\n(4)", + " if the crime is to be handled only upon complaint according to the Criminal Law, but there has been no complaint or the complaint has been withdrawn;\n\n(5) if the criminal suspect or defendant is deceased; or\n\n(6) if other laws provide an exemption from investigation of criminal responsibility.\n\nArticle 16 Provisions of this Law shall apply to foreigners who commit crimes for which criminal responsibility should be investigated.\n\nIf foreigners with diplomatic privileges and immunities commit crimes for which criminal responsibility should be investigated, those cases shall be resolved through diplomatic channels.\n\nArticle 17 In accordance with the international treaties which the People's Republic of China has concluded or acceded to or on the principle of reciprocity,", + " the judicial organs of China and that of other countries may request judicial assistance from each other in criminal affairs.\n\nChapter II: Jurisdiction\n\nArticle 18 Investigation in criminal cases shall be conducted by the public security organs, except as otherwise provided by law.\n\nCrimes of embezzlement and bribery, crimes of dereliction of duty committed by State functionaries, and crimes involving violations of a citizen's personal rights such as illegal detention, extortion of confessions by torture, retaliation, frame-up and illegal search and crimes involving infringement of a citizen's democratic rights -- committed by State functionaries by taking advantage of their functions and powers -- shall be placed on file for investigation by the People's Procuratorates.", + " If cases involving other grave crimes committed by State functionaries by taking advantage of their functions and powers need be handled directly by the People's Procuratorates, they may be placed on file for investigation by the People's Procuratorates upon decision by the People's Procuratorates at or above the provincial level.\n\nCases of private prosecution shall be handled directly by the People's Courts.\n\nArticle 19 The Primary People's Courts shall have jurisdiction as courts of first instance over ordinary criminal cases; however, those cases which fall under the jurisdiction of the People's Courts at higher levels as stipulated by this Law shall be exceptions.\n\nArticle 20 Intermediate people's courts shall have the jurisdiction as courts of first instance over the following criminal cases:\n\n(", + "1) Cases endangering State security or involving terrorist activities; and\n\n(2) Cases of crimes punishable by life imprisonment or capital punishment.\n\nArticle 21 The Higher People's Courts shall have jurisdiction as courts of first instance over major criminal cases that pertain to an entire province(or autonomous region, or municipality directly under the Central Government).\n\nArticle 22 The Supreme People's Court shall have jurisdiction as the court of first instance over major criminal cases that pertain to the whole nation.\n\nArticle 23 When necessary, People's Courts at higher levels may try criminal cases over which People's Courts at lower levels have jurisdiction as courts of first instance; If a People's Court at a lower level considers the circumstances of a criminal case in the first instance to be major or complex and to necessitate a trial by a People's Court at a higher level,", + " it may request that the case be transferred to the People's Court at the next higher level for trial.\n\nArticle 24 A criminal case shall be under the jurisdiction of the People's Court in the place where the crime was committed. If it is more appropriate for the case to be tried by the People's Court in the place where the defendant resides, then that court may have jurisdiction over the case.\n\nArticle 25 When two or more People's Courts at the same level have jurisdiction over a case, it shall be tried by the People's Court that first accepted it. When necessary the case may be transferred for trial to the People's Court in the principal place where the crime was committed.\n\nArticle 26 A People's Court at a higher level may instruct a People's Court at a lower level to try a case over which jurisdiction is unclear and may also instruct a People's Court at a lower level to transfer the case to another People's Court for trial.\n\nArticle 27 The jurisdiction over cases in special People's Courts shall be stipulated separately.\n\nChapter III:", + " Withdrawal\n\nArticle 28 In any of the following situations, a member of the judicial, procuratorial or investigatory personnel shall voluntarily withdraw, and the parties to the case and their legal representatives shall have the right to demand his withdrawal:\n\n(1) if he is a party or a close relative of a party to the case;\n\n(2) if he or a close relative of his has an interest in the case;\n\n(3) if he has served as a witness, expert witness, defender or agent ad litem in the current case ; or\n\n(4) if he has any other relations with a party to the case that could affect the impartial handling of the case.\n\nArticle 29 Judges,", + " procurators or investigators shall not accept invitations to dinner or presents from the parties to a case or the persons entrusted by the parties and shall not in violation of regulations meet with the parties to a case or the persons entrusted by the parties.\n\nAny judge, procurator or investigator who violates the provisions in the preceding paragraph shall be investigated for legal responsibility. The parties to the case and their legal representatives shall have the right to request him to withdraw.\n\nArticle 30 The withdrawal of a judge, procurator and investigator shall be determined respectively by the president of the court, the chief procurator, and the head of a public security organ; the withdrawal of the president of the court shall be determined by the court's judicial committee;", + " and the withdrawal of the chief procurator or the head of a public security organ shall be determined by the procuratorial committee of the People's Procuratorate at the corresponding level.\n\nAn investigator may not suspend investigation of a case before a decision is made on his withdrawal.\n\nIf a decision has been made to reject his application for withdrawal, the party or his legal representative may apply for reconsideration once.\n\nArticle 31 Provisions on withdrawal set forth in this Chapter shall apply equally to court clerks, interpreters and expert witnesses.\n\nThe defender or the agent ad litem of a case may request for withdrawal or apply for reconsideration pursuant to provisions of this Chapter.\n\nChapter IV:", + " Defence and Representation\n\nArticle 32 In addition to exercising the right to defend himself, a criminal suspect or a defendant may entrust one or two persons as his defenders. The following persons may be entrusted as defenders:\n\n(1) lawyers;\n\n(2) persons recommended by a public organization or the unit to which the criminal suspect or the defendant belongs; and\n\n(3) guardians or relatives and friends of the criminal suspect or the defendant.\n\nPersons who are under criminal punishment or whose personal freedom is deprived of or restricted according to law shall not serve as defenders.\n\nArticle 33 A criminal suspect shall be entitled to entrust a defender after he/she is interrogated for the first time by an investigating organ or as of the date on which compulsive measures are taken,", + " provided that during investigation, the criminal suspect may only entrust a lawyer as his/her defender. Defendants of cases shall be entitled to entrust defenders at any time.\n\nAn investigating organ shall, during the first interrogation of a criminal suspect or the imposition of compulsory measures thereon, inform the criminal suspect of his/her right to entrust a defender. A people\u2019s procuratorate shall, within three days upon the receipt of the materials of a case transferred for examination before prosecution, inform the criminal suspect of his/her right to entrust a defender. A people\u2019s court shall, within three days upon the acceptance of a case, inform the defendant of his/her right to entrust a defender.", + " Where a criminal suspect or defendant requests for the entrustment of a defender during his/her detention, the people\u2019s court, the people\u2019s procuratorate and the public security organ concerned shall communicate the request in a timely manner.\n\nA criminal suspect or defendant under detention may have his/her guardian or close relative to entrust a defender on his/her behalf.\n\nA defender, after accepting the entrustment by a criminal suspect or defendant, shall inform the case handling organ of the entrustment in a timely manner\n\nArticle 34 A criminal suspect or defendant who has not entrusted a defender due to financial difficulties or other reasons, the criminal suspect or defendant himself/herself or his/her close relatives may file an application with a legal aid agency which may designate a lawyer as his/her defender where the application satisfies the conditions for legal aid services.\n\nWith respect to a criminal suspect or defendant who is vision,", + " hearing or speech impaired, or who is a mentally challenged person but has not lost entirely the ability of recognition or the ability to control his/her conducts, if such person has not entrusted anyone to be his/her defender, the people\u2019s court, the people\u2019s procuratorate and the public security organ concerned shall inform a legal aid agency to designate a lawyer as his/her defender.\n\nWhere a criminal suspect or defendant committing a crime punishable by life imprisonment or capital punishment has not entrusted a defender, the people\u2019s court, the people\u2019s procuratorate and the public security organ concerned shall inform a legal aid agency to designate a lawyer as his/her defender.\n\nArticle 35 The responsibilities of a defender shall be to present,", + " in accordance with facts and the law, materials and opinions proving that the criminal suspect or defendant is innocent or the crime involved is a petty offense, or the criminal suspect or defendant is eligible need for a mitigated punishment or exemption from the criminal liability, so as to safeguard the litigation rights and other legitimate rights and interests of the criminal suspect or defendant.\n\nArticle 36 During the investigation period, a defense lawyer may provide a criminal suspect with legal aid, file petitions and complaints on the suspect's behalf, apply for alteration of the compulsory measures, find out from the investigating organ the offense of which the criminal suspect is convicted and the information pertaining to the case,", + " and offer his/her opinions.\n\nArticle 37 Defense lawyers may have meeting and correspondence with criminal suspects or defendants who are under detention. Other defenders, subject to the permission of people\u2019s courts and people\u2019s procuratorates, may also meet and correspond with criminal suspects or defendants who are under detention.\n\nWhere a defense lawyer requests for a meeting with a criminal suspect or defendant under detention on the strength of the lawyer\u2019s practicing certificate, and the certification documents and letter of authorization issued by his/her law firm, or an official legal aid document, the detention house concerned shall arrange the meeting in a timely manner, no later than 48 hours after receiving the request.\n\nDuring the investigation period for crimes endangering State security,", + " involving terrorist activities or involving significant amount of bribes, defense lawyers shall obtain the approval of investigating organs before they meet with the criminal suspects. The investigating organs shall inform the detention houses of information relating to the aforesaid cases in advance.\n\nA defense lawyer shall be entitled to inquire about the case and provide legal advice during the meeting with a criminal suspect or defendant under detention and may, from the date on which the case is transferred for examination before prosecution, verify relevant evidence with the criminal suspect or defendant. The meeting between the defense lawyer and the criminal suspect or defendant shall not be monitored.\n\nWith respect to circumstances where defense lawyers meet and correspond with criminal suspects or defendants who are under residential surveillance,", + " provisions of Paragraphs 1, 3 and 4 of this Article shall apply.\n\nArticle 38 A defense lawyer may, from the date on which the relevant people\u2019s procuratorate begins to examine the case for prosecution, consult, excerpt and reproduce the case file materials. Other defenders, with permission of the people\u2019s procuratorate or people\u2019s court, may also consult, excerpt and reproduce the above-mentioned materials.\n\nArticle 39 Where a defender is of the opinion that the relevant public security organ or people\u2019s procuratorate fails to submit certain evidence gathered during the investigation period or period for examination before prosecution while such evidence can prove that the criminal suspect or defendant is innocent or the crime involved is a petty offense,", + " the defender shall be entitled to apply with the people\u2019s procuratorate or the people\u2019s court concerned to obtain such evidence.\n\nArticle 40 Where a defender has gathered evidence showing that the criminal suspect concerned was not at the scene of the crime, has not reached the age for assuming the criminal liability, or is a mentally challenged person who is not required by law to assume the criminal liability, the defender shall inform the relevant public organ and people's procuratorate of such evidence in a timely manner.\n\nArticle 41 Defence lawyers may, with the consent of the witnesses or other units and individuals concerned, collect information pertaining to the current case from them and they may also apply to the People's Procuratorate or the People's Court for the collection and obtaining of evidence,", + " or request the People's Court to inform the witnesses to appear in court and give testimony.\n\nWith permission of the People's Procuratorate or the People's Court and with the consent of the victim, his close relatives or the witnesses provided by the victim, defence lawyers may collect information pertaining to the current case from them.\n\nArticle 42 No defense lawyer or any other person may help a criminal suspect or defendant conceal, destroy or fabricate evidence or collude with a criminal suspect or defendant to make confessions tally, or intimidate or induce witnesses to give false testimony or conduct other acts interfering with the proceedings of judicial organs.\n\nAny violation of the preceding paragraph shall be subject to the legal liability in accordance with the law.", + " Any alleged crime committed by a defender in this regard shall be handled by an investigating organ other than the investigating organ handling the case undertaken by the defender. Where the defender is a lawyer, the law firm for which the defender is working or the lawyer\u2019s association of which the defender is a member shall be notified of relevant information in a timely manner.\n\nArticle 43 During a trial, the defendant may refuse to have his defender continue to defend him and may entrust his defence to another defender.\n\nArticle 44 A victim in a case of public prosecution, his legal representatives or close relatives, and a party in an incidental civil action and his legal representatives shall,", + " from the date on which the case is transferred for examination before prosecution, have the right to entrust agents ad litem. A private prosecutor in a case of private prosecution and his legal representatives, and a party in an incidental civil action and his legal representatives shall have the right to entrust agents ad litem at any time.\n\nThe People's Procuratorate shall, within three days from the date of receiving the file record of a case transferred for examination before prosecution, notify the victim and his legal representatives or close relatives and the party in an incidental civil action and his legal representatives that they have the right to entrust agents ad litem.", + " The People's Court shall, within three days from the date of accepting a case of private prosecution, notify the private prosecutor and his legal representatives and the party in an incidental civil action and his legal representatives that they have the right to entrust agents ad litem.\n\nArticle 45 With regard to entrusting of agents ad litem, the provisions of Article 32 of this Law shall be applied mutatis mutandis.\n\nArticle 46 Defense lawyers shall be entitled to keep confidential the information about their clients that comes into their knowledge during their practices, provided that they shall promptly inform judicial organs of the information that comes to their knowledge during their practices,", + " indicating that their clients or other persons are to commit or are committing crimes endangering State security or public security or crimes seriously threatening others\u2019 personal safety.\n\nArticle 47 A defender or agent ad litem shall be entitled to file a petition or bring a complaint to the people\u2019s procuratorate at the same or the next higher level if he/she is of the opinion that the relevant public security organ, people\u2019s procuratorate, people\u2019s court or its staff members have hindered his/her lawful exercise of the litigation rights. The said people\u2019s procuratorate shall review the petition or complaint in a timely manner, and notify relevant organs to make correction if the authenticity of petition or complaint is confirmed.\n\nChapter V:", + " Evidence\n\nArticle 48 All materials that prove the facts of a case shall be evidence.\n\nEvidence shall include:\n\n(1) Physical evidence;\n\n(2) Documentary evidence;\n\n(3) Testimony of witnesses;\n\n(4) Statements of victims;\n\n(5) Statements and exculpations of criminal suspects or defendants;\n\n(6) Expert opinions;\n\n(7) Records of crime scene investigation, examination, identification and investigative experiments; and\n\n(8) Audio-visual materials, and electronic data.\n\nThe authenticity of evidence shall be confirmed before it can be admitted as the basis for making a decision on a verdict.\n\nArticle 49 For cases of public prosecution,", + " people\u2019s procuratorates shall bear the burden of proof to prove that the defendants are guilty, while for cases of private prosecution, private prosecutors shall bear the burden of proof to prove that the defendants are guilty.\n\nArticle 50 Judges, procuratorial personnel and investigators shall adhere to statutory procedures when gathering and obtaining evidence that may prove whether criminal suspects or defendants are guilty or innocent, or whether cases involve serious criminal offenses or not. They are strictly prohibited from extorting confessions by torture, collecting evidence through threats, enticement, deception or other unlawful means, or forcing anyone to provide evidence proving his/her own guilt. They shall ensure that all citizens who are involved in a case or who have information about the circumstances of a case can furnish all available evidence in an objective manner and,", + " except under special circumstances, may ask such citizens to provide assistance in investigation.\n\nArticle 51 The public security organ's requests for approval of arrest, the People's Procuratorate's bills of prosecution and the People's Court's written judgments must be faithful to the facts. The responsibility of anyone who intentionally conceals the facts shall be investigated.\n\nArticle 52 The People's Courts, the People's Procuratorates and the public security organs shall have the authority to collect or obtain evidence from the units and individuals concerned. The units and individuals concerned shall provide truthful evidence.\n\nThe physical evidence, documentary evidence, audio-visual materials, electronic data and other evidence gathered by administrative organs during administrative law enforcement and case investigation and handling may be used as evidence in criminal cases.\n\nEvidence involving State secretes,", + " trade secretes or personal privacy shall be kept confidential.\n\nAnyone that falsifies, conceals or destroys evidence, regardless of which side of a case he belongs to, must be investigated under law.\n\nArticle 53 All cases shall be judged according to the principles that emphasis shall be laid on evidence, investigation and research, while credence shall not be readily given to oral statements. A defendant cannot be found guilty and sentenced to criminal punishments if there is no evidence other than his/her own statement. On the other hand, a defendant may be found guilty and sentenced to criminal punishments even without his/her own statements, as long as there is sufficient and concrete evidence.\n\nEvidence shall be deemed to be sufficient and concrete if the following conditions are satisfied:\n\n(", + "1) There is evidence for each fact that serves as the basis for conviction and sentencing;\n\n(2) The authenticity of evidence used for deciding the case has all been confirmed in accordance with statutory procedures; and\n\n(3) Based on the comprehensive assessment of all evidence for the case, the ascertained facts have been proved beyond reasonable doubt.\n\nArticle 54 Confessions extorted from a criminal suspect or defendant by illegal means such as torture, testimony of witnesses and statements of victims collected by violent means, threat or other unlawful means shall be excluded. Physical evidence or documentary evidence that is not collected according to statutory procedures and is therefore likely to materially damage judicial justice shall be subject to correction or reasonable explanations,", + " and shall be excluded if correction or reasonable explanations are not made.\n\nEvidence that shall be excluded as found during investigation, examination before prosecution and trial shall be excluded in accordance with the law, and shall not serve as the basis for making prosecution opinions, prosecution decisions and judgments.\n\nArticle 55 Where a people\u2019s procuratorate receives any reports, accusations or tip-offs on any circumstances involving unlawful gathering of evidence by investigators, or discovers that any investigator involves such conduct, the people's Procuratorate shall carry out investigation and verification thereof. If said conduct constitutes a crime, the persons concerned shall be subject to the criminal liability in accordance with the law.\n\nArticle 56 During a court hearing,", + " where a judge is of the opinion that evidence may have been gathered by unlawful means as stipulated in Article 54 herein, a court investigation shall be launched as to the legality of the evidence gathering means.\n\nThe party concerned, his/her defender and the agent ad litem shall be entitled to apply with the relevant people\u2019s court for exclusion of the evidence gathered by unlawful means in accordance with the law. Those who apply for exclusion of the evidence gathered by unlawful means shall provide relevant clues or materials.\n\nArticle 57 A people\u2019s procuratorate shall bear the burden of proof as to the legality of the evidence gathering means during the court investigation thereof.\n\nWhere there exists no evidentiary support for the legality of the evidence gathering means,", + " the people\u2019s procuratorate may request the people\u2019s court concerned to notify relevant investigators or other personnel to appear before the courtroom to make explanations. The people's court may, at its own discretion, notify relevant investigators or other personnel to appear before the courtroom to give explanations. Relevant investigators or other personnel may also take the initiative to request an appearance before the courtroom for an explanation. Relevant personnel shall also appear before courtroom if so notified by the people\u2019s court.\n\nArticle 58 Evidence shall be excluded if court investigation has confirmed or is unable to rule out that there have been circumstances of gathering evidence by illegal means as set forth in Article 54 herein.\n\nArticle 59 The testimony of a witness shall be admitted as the basis for making a decision on a verdict only after the witness has been questioned and cross-examined in the courtroom by both sides,", + " that is, the public prosecutor and the victim, as well as the defendant and the defender. If a court finds through investigation that a witness has intentionally given false testimony or concealed criminal evidence, it shall handle the matter in accordance with the law.\n\nArticle 60 All those who have information about a case shall have the duty to testify.\n\nPhysically or mentally handicapped persons or minors who cannot distinguish right from wrong or cannot properly express themselves shall not be qualified as witnesses.\n\nArticle 61 The People's Courts, the People's Procuratorates and the public security organs shall insure the safety of witnesses and their close relatives.\n\nAnyone who intimidates,", + " humiliates, beats or retaliates against a witness or his close relatives, if his act constitutes a crime, shall be investigated for criminal responsibility according to law; if the case is not serious enough for criminal punishment, he shall be punished for violation of public security in accordance with law.\n\nArticle 62 With regard to crimes endangering State security, those involving terrorist activities, organized crimes committed by groups in the nature of criminal syndicates, drug-related crimes and the like, if the personal safety of the witnesses, experts or victims or their close relatives is threatened due to their testimony in lawsuits, the people\u2019s courts, people\u2019s procuratorates and public security organs shall adopt one or more of the following protective measures:\n\n(", + "1) Keeping confidential the real names, addresses, employers and other personal information of the aforesaid persons;\n\n(2) Adopting measures to avoid the actual appearance or true voice of those who appear in courtrooms for testimony;\n\n(3) Prohibiting certain persons from having contact with the witnesses, experts, victims and their close relatives;\n\n(4) Adopting special measures to protect the personal and residential security of the aforesaid persons; and/or\n\n(5) Other necessary protective measures.\n\nA witness, expert or victim who is of the opinion that his/her personal security or the personal security of his/her close relatives is in danger due to his/her testimony in lawsuits may apply for protection with a people\u2019s court,", + " people\u2019s procuratorate or public security organ.\n\nRelevant entities and individuals shall provide cooperation when people\u2019s courts, people\u2019s procuratorates or public security organs take protective measures pursuant to the law.\n\nArticle 63 A witness shall be entitled to allowance for his/her performance of the obligation of giving testimony in terms of transportation, accommodation and catering expenses incurred thereby. The allowance granted to witnesses for giving testimony shall be included into the business expenses of judicial organs and be guaranteed by the public finance of people\u2019s governments at the same level.\n\nWhere the witness is an employee of an entity, the entity shall not deduct his/her salary, bonus and other benefits directly or in a disguised form.\n\nChapter VI:", + " Compulsory Measures\n\nArticle 64 The People's Courts, the People's Procuratorates and the public security organs may, according to the circumstances of a case, issue a warrant to compel the appearance of the criminal suspect or defendant, order him to be released on bail pending trial or subject him to residential surveillance.\n\nArticle 65 A people\u2019s court, people\u2019s procuratorate and public security organ may allow a criminal suspect or defendant under any of the following conditions to be released on bail pending trial:\n\n(1) The criminal suspect or defendant commits a crime punishable by public surveillance, criminal detention or supplementary punishments separately meted out;\n\n(", + "2) The criminal suspect or defendant commits a crime punishable by fixed-term imprisonment or severer punishments, but would not pose a threat to the society if he/she is released on bail pending trial;\n\n(3) Where the criminal suspect or defendant is suffering from a serious illness and cannot take care of him/herself, or is during pregnancy and breastfeeding period, thus would not pose a threat to the society if he/she is released on bail pending trial; or\n\n(4) His/her case has not been concluded upon expiry of the detention period, and therefore he/she needs to be released on bail pending trial.\n\nRelease on bail pending trial shall be executed by public security organs.\n\nArticle 66 If the People's Courts,", + " the People's Procuratorates or the public security organs decide to allow a criminal suspect or defendant to be released on bail pending trial, they shall order the criminal suspect or defendant to provide a guarantor or pay guaranty money.\n\nArticle 67 A guarantor must be a person who meets the following conditions:\n\n(1) to be not involved in the current case;\n\n(2) to be able to perform a guarantor's duties;\n\n(3) to be entitled to political rights and not subjected to restriction of personal freedom; and\n\n(4) to have a fixed domicile and steady income.\n\nArticle 68 A guarantor shall perform the following obligations:\n\n(", + "1) To ensure that the person under his/her guarantee observes provisions of Article 69 herein; and\n\n(2) To promptly report to the executing organ in case of discovering that the person under his/her guarantee might commit or has already committed acts in violation of Article 69 herein.\n\nWhere the guarantor fails to perform the aforesaid obligations when the person under his/her guarantee has committed an act that violates of Article 69 herein, he/she shall be fined; and the guarantor shall be subject to the criminal liability in accordance with the law if his/her act constitutes a criminal offense.\n\nArticle 69 A criminal suspect or defendant who is released on bail pending trial shall abide by the following provisions:\n\n(", + "1) Not to leave the city or county where he/she resides without the permission of the executing organ;\n\n(2) To report any change of the address, employer and contact information to the executing organ within 24 hours of the change;\n\n(3) To appear before a court on time when summoned;\n\n(4) Not to interfere, in any form, with the witnesses who give testimony; and\n\n(5) Not to destroy or falsify evidence or collude with others to make confessions tally.\n\nA people\u2019s court, people\u2019s procuratorate and public security organ may, depending on the circumstances of a case, order the criminal suspect or defendant who has been released on bail pending trial to abide by one or more of the following provisions:\n\n(", + "1) Not to enter certain d places;\n\n(2) Not to meet or correspond with certain persons;\n\n(3) Not to engage in certain activities; and/or\n\n(4) To surrender his/her passport and other travel documents, and driver's license to the executing organ.\n\nWhere a criminal suspect or defendant who has been released on bail pending trial violates provisions of the preceding two paragraphs, part or all of the bail bond paid shall be forfeited, and depending on the specific circumstances, the criminal suspect or defendant shall be ordered to write a recognizance of repentance, pay bail bond again or provide a guarantor, or be placed under residential surveillance and be arrested.\n\nIn case that a criminal suspect or defendant violates provisions in respect of release on bail pending trial,", + " he/she may be held in custody before being arrested according to relevant provisions.\n\nArticle 70 When the organ rendering the release on bail pending trial determines the amount of the bail bond to be paid, the requirements for ensuring the normal proceedings of litigation activities, whether the person released on bail is a serious danger to the society, the circumstances and nature of the case, the severity of the possible punishments and the economic conditions of the person on bail, shall be taken into account.\n\nThe person who provides the bail bond shall pay the money to a special account in a bank designated by the execution organ.\n\nArticle 71 Where a criminal suspect or defendant does not violate any provisions of Article 69 herein during the period when he/she is released on bail,", + " he/she shall collect the returned bond from the relevant bank upon expiry of the bail period by presenting the notice on the termination of release on bail pending trial or other relevant legal instruments.\n\nArticle 72 A people\u2019s court, people\u2019s procuratorate and public security organ may place under residential surveillance a criminal suspect or defendant who satisfies the conditions for arrest and is under any of the following circumstances:\n\n(1) He/she is seriously ill and cannot take care of him/herself;\n\n(2) She is in pregnancy or breastfeeding period;\n\n(3) He/she is the only person supporting someone who cannot take care of his/her;\n\n(4)", + " Residential surveillance is more appropriate considering the special circumstances of the case or the need for case handling; or\n\n(5) His/her case has not been concluded upon expiry of the detention period, and therefore residential surveillance is necessary.\n\nWhere a criminal suspect or defendant satisfies the conditions for release on bail pending trial, but is unable to provide a guarantor or pay the bail bond, he/she may be placed under residential surveillance.\n\nResidential surveillance shall be executed by public security organs.\n\nArticle 73 Residential surveillance shall be enforced at the domicile of a criminal suspect or defendant or at a designated place of residence if he/she has no fixed domicile. Where,", + " for a crime suspected to endanger State security, crime involving terrorist activities and a crime involving significant amount of bribes, residential surveillance at the domicile of the criminal suspect or defendant may impede the investigation, it may, upon approval by the people\u2019s procuratorate or the public security organ at the next higher level, be enforced at a designated place of residence, provided that residential surveillance is not enforced in a detention house or a special venue for case investigation.\n\nWhere a criminal suspect or defendant is placed under residential surveillance at a designated place of residence, his/her family shall be informed of the information related thereto within 24 hours upon enforcement of residential surveillance,", + " unless notification cannot be processed.\n\nWhere criminal suspects and defendants under residential surveillance entrust defenders, Article 33 of this Law shall apply.\n\nPeople\u2019s procuratorates shall exercise supervision over the legality of the decision and enforcement of residential surveillance at designated places of residence.\n\nArticle 74 The period of residential surveillance at designated places of residence shall be deducted from the term of penalty. For criminals sentenced to public surveillance, each day of residential surveillance shall be counted as one day of the term of penalty; for criminals sentenced to criminal detention or fixed-term imprisonment, two days of residential surveillance shall be counted as one day of the term of penalty.\n\nArticle 75 A criminal suspect or defendant under residential surveillance shall abide by the following provisions:\n\n(", + "1) Not to leave the domicile or place of residence under residential surveillance without the permission of the executing organ;\n\n(2) Not to meet or correspond with any one without the permission of the executing organ;\n\n(3) To appear before a court in time when summoned;\n\n(4) Not to interfere, in any form, with the witnesses who give testimony;\n\n(5) Not to destroy or falsify evidence or collude with others to make confessions tally; and\n\n(6) To surrender his/her passport and other travel documents, identity certificate and driver's license to the executing organ for safekeeping.\n\nA criminal suspect or defendant placed under residential surveillance may be arrested if he/she commits grave violations of the preceding paragraph,", + " and may be held in custody prior to arrest if an arrest is necessary.\n\nArticle 76 An executing organ may monitor a criminal suspect or defendant placed under surveillance with respect to his/her compliance with residential surveillance provisions by means of electronic monitoring, ad hoc inspection, etc. During the investigation period, the correspondence of the criminal suspect under residential surveillance may be monitored.\n\nArticle 77 The period granted by a People's Court, People's Procuratorate or public security organ to a criminal suspect or defendant for awaiting trial after obtaining a guarantor shall not exceed twelve months; the period for residential surveillance shall not exceed six months.\n\nDuring the period when the criminal suspect or defendant who is released on bail pending trial or when he is under residential surveillance,", + " investigation, prosecution and handling of the case shall not be suspended. If it is discovered that the criminal suspect or the defendant should not be investigated for criminal responsibility or when the period for releasing on bail pending trial or the period of residential surveillance has expired, such period shall be terminated without delay. The person who is released on bail pending trial or who is under residential surveillance and the units concerned shall be notified of the termination immediately.\n\nArticle 78 Arrests of criminal suspects or defendants shall be subject to approval by a People's Procuratorate or decision by a People's Court and shall be executed by a public security organ.\n\nArticle 79 Where there is evidence to support the facts of a crime and the criminal suspect or defendant has committed the crime punishable by fixed-term imprisonment or severer punishments,", + " and where it will not effectively prevent the following dangers to the society caused by the concerned criminal suspect or defendant if he/she is released on bail pending trial, the criminal suspect or defendant shall be arrested in accordance with the law:\n\n(1) The criminal suspect or defendant may commit a new crime;\n\n(2) There is a real risk that the criminal suspect or defendant may endanger State security, public security or public order;\n\n(3) The criminal suspect or defendant may destroy or falsify evidence, interfere with the witnesses who give testimony or collude with others to make confessions tally;\n\n(4) The criminal suspect or defendant may retaliate against the victims,", + " informants or accusers; or\n\n(5) The criminal suspect or defendant tries to commit suicide or escape.\n\nWhere there is evidence to support the facts of a crime and the criminal suspect or defendant has committed a crime that is punishable by a fixed-term imprisonment of ten years or severer punishments, or where there is evidence to support the facts of a crime, and the criminal suspect or defendant has committed a crime that is punishable by fixed-term imprisonment or severer punishments, but has intentionally committed a prior crime or has an unknown identity, the criminal suspect or defendant shall be arrested in accordance with the law.\n\nA criminal suspect or defendant who is released on bail pending trial or is placed under residential surveillance may be arrested if he/she commits grave violations of the provisions with respect to release on bail pending trial or residential surveillance.\n\nArticle 80 Public security organs may initially detain an active criminal or a major suspect under any of the following conditions:\n\n(", + "1) if he is preparing to commit a crime, is in the process of committing a crime or is discovered immediately after committing a crime;\n\n(2) if he is identified as having committed a crime by a victim or an eyewitness;\n\n(3) if criminal evidence is found on his body or at his residence;\n\n(4) if he attempts to commit suicide or escape after committing a crime, or he is a fugitive;\n\n(5) if there is likelihood of his destroying or falsifying evidence or tallying confessions;\n\n(6) if he does not tell his true name and address and his identity is unknown; and\n\n(7)", + " if he is strongly suspected of committing crimes from one place to another, repeatedly, or in a gang.\n\nArticle 81 When a public security organ is to detain or arrest a person in another place, it shall inform the public security organ in the place where the person to be detained or arrested stays, and the public security organ there shall cooperate in the action.\n\nArticle 82 The persons listed below may be seized outright by any citizen and delivered to a public security organ, a People's Procuratorate or a People's Court for handling:\n\n(1) any person who is committing a crime or is discovered immediately after committing a crime;\n\n(", + "2) any person who is wanted for arrest;\n\n(3) any person who has escaped from prison; and\n\n(4) any person who is being pursued for arrest.\n\nArticle 83 When detaining a person, a public security organ must produce a detention warrant.\n\nAfter being taken into custody, a detainee shall be immediately transferred to a detention house for detention within 24 hours. The family of the detainee shall be notified of the detention within 24 hours after the detention, unless the notification cannot be processed or where the detainee is involved in crimes endangering State security or crimes of terrorist activities, and such notification may hinder the investigation.", + " The family of the detainee shall be notified of relevant information immediately after the circumstances impeding investigation has been eliminated.\n\nArticle 84 A public security organ shall interrogate a person held in custody within 24 hours after being taken into custody. Once it is discovered that custody shall not have been imposed, the public security organ shall immediately release the person, and issue a release certificate.\n\nArticle 85 When a public security organ wishes to arrest a criminal suspect, it shall submit a written request for approval of arrest together with the case file and evidence to the People's Procuratorate at the same level for examination and approval. When necessary, the People's Procuratorate may send procurators to participate in the public security organ's discussion of a major case.\n\nArticle 86 A people\u2019s procuratorate may interrogate a criminal suspect when examining and approving the arrest thereof,", + " and it shall interrogate the criminal suspect under any of the following circumstances:\n\n(1) Where there are doubts over whether the criminal suspect satisfies the conditions for arrest;\n\n(2) Where the criminal suspect applies to make a statement in front of procuratorial personnel; or\n\n(3) Where investigation activities might have involved major violations of laws.\n\nThe people\u2019s procuratorate may question witnesses and other litigation participants, and listen to opinions of defense lawyers during the course of examining and approving the arrest. It shall hear the opinions of the defense lawyers if they have so requested.\n\nArticle 87 The chief procurator shall make the decision on a People's Procuratorate's examination and approval of the arrest of a criminal suspect.", + " Major cases shall be submitted to the procuratorial committee for discussion and decision.\n\nArticle 88 After a People's Procuratorate has examined a case with respect to which a public security organ has submitted a request for approval of arrest, it shall decide according to the circumstances of the case either to approve the arrest or disapprove the arrest. If it decides to approve the arrest, the public security organ shall execute it immediately and inform the People's Procuratorate of the result without delay. If the People's Procuratorate disapproves the arrest, it shall give its reasons therefor; and if it deems a supplementary investigation necessary,", + " it shall at the same time notify the public security organ of the need.\n\nArticle 89 If the public security organ deems it necessary to arrest a detainee, it shall, within three days after the detention, submit a request to the People's Procuratorate for examination and approval. Under special circumstances, the time limit for submitting a request for examination and approval may be extended by one to four days.\n\nAs to the arrest of a major suspect involved in crimes committed from one place to another, repeatedly, or in a gang, the time limit for submitting a request for examination and approval may be extended to 30 days.\n\nThe People's Procuratorate shall decide either to approve or disapprove the arrest within seven days from the date of receiving the written request for approval of arrest submitted by a public security organ.\n\nIf the People's Procuratorate disapproves the arrest,", + " the public security organ shall, upon receiving notification, immediately release the detainee and inform the People's Procuratorate of the result without delay. If further investigation is necessary, and if the released person meets the conditions for releasing on bail pending trial or for residential surveillance, he shall be allowed to be released on bail pending trial or subjected to residential surveillance according to law.\n\nArticle 90 If the public security organ considers the People's Procuratorate's decision to disapprove an arrest to be incorrect, it may request a reconsideration but must immediately release the detainee. If the public security organ's opinion is not accepted, it may request a review by the People's Procuratorate at the next higher level.", + " The People's Procuratorate at the higher level shall immediately review the matter, decide whether or not to make a change and notify the People's Procuratorate at the lower level and the public security organ to implement its decision.\n\nArticle 91 When making an arrest, a public security organ must produce an arrest warrant.\n\nUpon arrest, an arrested person shall be immediately transferred to a detention house for custody. The family of the arrested person shall be notified within 24 hours after the arrest, unless the notification cannot be processed.\n\nArticle 92 Interrogation must be conducted within 24 hours after the arrest, by a People's Court or People's Procuratorate with respect to a person it has decided to arrest,", + " and by a public security organ with respect to a person it has arrested with the approval of the People's Procuratorate. If it is found that the person should not have been arrested, he must be immediately released and issued a release certificate.\n\nArticle 93 After a criminal suspect or defendant is arrested, the relevant people\u2019s procuratorate shall still examine the necessity for detention. Where the criminal suspect or defendant no longer needs to be put under detention, the people\u2019s procuratorate shall suggest the release thereof or change of compulsory measures. Relevant organs shall notify the people\u2019s procuratorate of the handling of the case within ten days.\n\nArticle 94 If a People's Court,", + " a People's Procuratorate or a public security organ finds that the compulsory measures adopted against a criminal suspect or defendant are inappropriate, such measures shall be cancelled or modified without delay. If a public security organ releases a person arrested or substitute the measure of arrest with a different measure, it shall notify the People's Procuratorate that approved the arrest.\n\nArticle 95 A criminal suspect or defendant and his/her statutory representative, close relatives or defender shall be entitled to apply for change of the compulsory measures. The people\u2019s court, people\u2019s procuratorate and public security organ concerned shall make a decision within three days upon receipt of the application,", + " and shall inform the applicant of the reasons for disapproval of such changes.\n\nArticle 96 If a case involving a criminal suspect or defendant under detention cannot be closed within the time limits stipulated herein for keeping the criminal suspect or defendant under custody for investigation, for conducting examination before prosecution, or for the proceedings of first or second instance, the criminal suspect or defendant shall be released. Where further investigation, verification or trial is necessary, the criminal suspect or defendant may be posted on bail with restricted freedom pending trial or be placed under residential surveillance.\n\nArticle 97 A people\u2019s court, people\u2019s procuratorate, or public security organ shall, upon expiry of the statutory time period for compulsory measures imposed on a criminal suspect or defendant,", + " release the criminal suspect or the defendant release, release him/her from bail with restricted freedom pending trial or residential surveillance, or change the compulsory measures in accordance with the law. The criminal suspect or defendant, and his or her statutory representative, close relatives or defenders shall be entitled to request the people\u2019s court, people\u2019s procuratorate or public security organ to terminate the compulsory measures upon expiry of the statutory time period thereof.\n\nArticle 98 If in the process of examining and approving arrests, a People's Procuratorate discovers illegalities in the investigatory activities of a public security organ, it shall notify the public security organ to make corrections,", + " and the public security organ shall notify the People's Procuratorate of the corrections it has made.\n\nChapter VII: Incidental Civil Actions\n\nArticle 99 A victim who suffers from property losses due to the defendant\u2019s criminal offenses shall be entitled to bring an incidental civil action during criminal proceedings. Where the victim has died or lost his/her capacity for civil conduct, his/her statutory representative or close relative shall be entitled to bring an incidental civil action.\n\nIn the event of losses of State property or collectively-owned property, a people\u2019s procuratorate may bring an incidental civil action when initiating a public prosecution.\n\nArticle 100 When necessary, a people\u2019s court may take preservation measures to seal up,", + " seize or freeze a defendant\u2019s property. The plaintiff to an incidental civil action or a people\u2019s procuratorate may request the people\u2019s court to take preservation measures. The people\u2019s court shall comply with the Civil Procedure Law when taking preservation measures.\n\nArticle 101 A people's court, in hearing an incidental civil case, may conduct mediation or make a ruling or judgment according to property losses.\n\nArticle 102 An incidental civil action shall be heard together with the criminal case. Only for the purpose of preventing excessive delay in a trial of the criminal case may the same judicial organization, after completing the trial of the criminal case, continue to hear the incidental civil action.\n\nChapter VIII:", + " Time Periods and Service\n\nArticle 103 Time periods shall be calculated by the hour, the day and the month.\n\nThe hour and day from which a time period begins shall not be counted as within the time period.\n\nA legally prescribed time period shall not include travelling time. Appeals or other documents that have been mailed before the expiration of the time period shall not be regarded as overdue.\n\nIf the last day of a statutory time period falls on a public holiday, the day immediately following the public holiday shall be regarded as the expiry date of the time period. However, the time limit for holding a criminal suspect, defendant or criminal under custody shall expire on the last day of the time period,", + " and shall not be extended due to the public holiday.\n\nArticle 104 When a party cannot meet a deadline due to irresistible causes or for other legitimate reasons, he may, within five days after the obstacle is removed, apply to continue the proceedings that should have been completed before the expiration of the time period.\n\nA People's Court shall decide whether or not to approve the application described in the preceding paragraph.\n\nArticle 105 Summons, notices and other court documents shall be delivered to the addressee himself; if the addressee is absent, the documents may be received on his behalf by an adult member of his family or a responsible person of his unit.\n\nIf the addressee or a recipient on his behalf refuses to accept the documents or refuses to sign and affix his seal to the receipt,", + " the person serving the documents may ask the addressee's neighbours or other witnesses to the scene, explain the situation to them, leave the documents at the addressee's residence, record on the service certificate the particulars of the refusal and the date of service and sign his name to it; the service shall thus be deemed to have been completed.\n\nChapter IX: Other Provisions\n\nArticle 106 For the purpose of this law, the definitions of the following terms are:\n\n(1) Investigation means the specialized investigatory work and related compulsory measures carried out according to law by the public security organs and People's Procuratorates in the process of handling cases.\n\n(", + "2) Parties means victims, private prosecutors, criminal suspects, defendants and the plaintiffs and defendants in incidental civil actions.\n\n(3) Legal representatives means the parents, foster parents or guardians of a person being represented and representatives of the State organ or public organization responsible for that person's protection;\n\n(4) Participants in the proceedings means the parties, legal representatives, agents ad litem, defenders, witnesses, expert witnesses and interpreters;\n\n(5) agents ad litem means persons entrusted by victims in cases of public prosecution and their legal representatives or close relatives and by private prosecutors in cases of private prosecution and their legal representatives to participate in legal proceedings on their behalf,", + " and persons entrusted by parties in incidental civil actions and their legal representatives to participate in legal proceedings on their behalf.\n\n(6) Close relatives means a person's husband or wife, father, mother, sons, daughters, and brothers and sisters born of the same parents.\n\nPart Two: Filing a Case, Investigation, and Initiation of Public Prosecution\n\nChapter I: Filing a Case\n\nArticle 107 The public security organs or the People's Procuratorates shall, upon discovering facts of crimes or criminal suspects, file the cases for investigation within the scope of their jurisdiction.\n\nArticle 108 Any unit or individual, upon discovering facts of a crime or a criminal suspect,", + " shall have the right and duty to report the case or provide information to a public security organ, a People's Procuratorate or a People's Court.\n\nWhen his personal or property rights are infringed upon, the victim shall have the right to report to a public security organ, a People's Procuratorate or a People's Court about the facts of the crime or bring a complaint to it against the criminal suspect.\n\nThe public security organ, the People's Procuratorate or the People's Court shall accept all reports, complaints and information. If a case does not fall under its jurisdiction, it shall refer the case to the competent organ and notify the person who made the report,", + " lodged the complaint or provided the information. If the case does not fall under its jurisdiction but calls for emergency measures, it shall take emergency measures before referring the case to the competent organ.\n\nWhere an offender delivers himself up to a public security organ, a People's Procuratorate or a People's Court, the provisions of the third paragraph shall apply.\n\nArticle 109 Reports, complaints and information may be filed in writing or orally. The officer receiving an oral report, complaint or information shall make a written record of it, which, after being read to the reporter, complainant or informant and found free of error, shall be signed or sealed by him or her.\n\nThe officer receiving the complaint or information shall clearly explain to the complainant or the informant the legal responsibility that shall be incurred for making a false accusation.", + " However, a complaint or information that does not accord with the facts, or even a mistaken complaint shall be strictly distinguished from a false accusation, as long as no fabrication of facts or falsification of evidence is involved.\n\nThe public security organs, the People's Procuratorates and the People's Courts shall insure the safety of reporters, complainants and informants as well as their near relatives. If the reporters, complainants or informants wish not to make their names and acts of reporting, complaining or informing known to the public, these shall be kept confidential for them.\n\nArticle 110 A People's Court, People's Procuratorate or public security organ shall,", + " within the scope of its jurisdiction, promptly examine the materials provided by a reporter, complainant or informant and the confession of an offender who has voluntarily surrendered. If it believes that there are facts of a crime and criminal responsibility should be investigated, it shall file a case. If it believes that there are no facts of a crime or that the facts are obviously incidental and do not require investigation of criminal responsibility, it shall not file a case and shall notify the complainant of the reason. If the complainant does not agree with the decision, he may ask for reconsideration.\n\nArticle 111 Where a People's Procuratorate considers that a case should be filed for investigation by a public security organ but the latter has not done so,", + " or where a victim considers that a case should be filed for investigation by a public security organ but the latter has not done so and the victim has brought the matter to a People's Procuratorate, the People's Procuratorate shall request the public security organ to state the reasons for not filing the case. If the People's Procuratorate considers that the reasons for not filing the case given by the public security organ are untenable, it shall notify the public security organ to file the case, and upon receiving the notification, the public security organ shall file the case.\n\nArticle 112 As to a case of private prosecution,", + " the victim shall have the right to bring a suit directly to a People's Court. If the victim is dead or has lost his ability of conduct, his legal representatives and near relatives shall have the right to bring a suit to a People's Court. The People's Court shall accept it according to law.\n\nChapter II: Investigation\n\nSection 1: General Provisions\n\nArticle 113 With respect to a criminal case which has been filed, the public security organ shall carry out investigation, collecting and obtaining evidence to prove the criminal suspect guilty or innocent or to prove the crime to be minor or grave. Active criminals or major suspects may be detained first according to law,", + " and criminal suspects who meet the conditions for arrest shall be arrested according to law.\n\nArticle 114 After investigation, the public security organ shall start preliminary inquiry into a case for which there is evidence that supports the facts of the crime, in order to verify the evidence which has been collected and obtained.\n\nArticle 115 The party concerned, his/her defender, the agent ad litem or an interested party shall be entitled to file a petition or complaint to a judicial organ if he/she is of the opinion the judicial organ or its staff members have any of the following acts:\n\n(1) To fail to order release from, or termination of, or alteration to,", + " a compulsory measure upon expiry of the statutory time period;\n\n(2) To fail to return the bond for bail with restricted freedom pending trial that shall be returned;\n\n(3) To seal up, seize or freeze property irrelevant to the case at hand;\n\n(4) To fail to terminate the sealing, seizure and freeze of property as required; or\n\n(5) To embezzle, misappropriate, privately divide, replace, or use in violation of relevant provisions the property that has been sealed up, seized or frozen.\n\nThe organ that has accepted the petition or complaint shall handle the petition or complaint in a timely manner. The party lodging the petition or compliant may appeal to the people\u2019s procuratorate at the same level if he/she has objections to the handling results.", + " For a case accepted directly by a people\u2019s procuratorate, the party concerned may appeal to the people\u2019s procuratorate at the next higher level. The people\u2019s procuratorate shall review the appeal in a timely manner and shall notify the relevant organ to make correction if the appeal is found to be true.\n\nSection 2: Interrogation of the Criminal Suspect\n\nArticle 116 Interrogation of a criminal suspect must be conducted by the investigators of a People's Procuratorate or public security organ. During an interrogation, there must be no fewer than two investigators participating.\n\nInvestigators shall interrogate a criminal suspect who has been transferred to a detention house for custody in the detention house.\n\nArticle 117 A criminal suspect who does not need to be arrested or held in custody may be summoned to a designated location of the city or county where he/she lives or to his/her domicile for interrogation,", + " provided that the supporting documents issued by the relevant people\u2019s procuratorate or public security organ are furnished. A criminal suspect found at the scene may be orally summoned by a law enforcement officer by presenting his/her work certificate, provided that the oral summon shall be noted in the written records of interrogation.\n\nSummons or compelled appearance in court shall not last longer than 12 hours. For complicated cases of grave circumstances where detention or arrest is necessary, summons or compelled appearance in court shall not last longer than 24 hours.\n\nA criminal suspect shall not be detained under the disguise of successive summons or compelled appearance. A criminal suspect shall be guaranteed with necessary food and rest when he/she is summonsed or compelled to appear before investigators.\n\nArticle 118 When interrogating a criminal suspect,", + " the investigators shall first ask the criminal suspect whether or not he has committed any criminal act, and let him state the circumstances of his guilt or explain his innocence; then they may ask him questions. The criminal suspect shall answer the investigators' questions truthfully, but he shall have the right to refuse to answer any questions that are irrelevant to the case.\n\nWhen interrogating criminal suspects, investigators shall inform the criminal suspect of the legal provisions allowing for leniency for those who truthfully confess their crimes.\n\nArticle 119 During the interrogation of a criminal suspect who is deaf or mute, an officer who has a good command of sign language shall participate,", + " and such circumstances shall be noted in the record.\n\nArticle 120 The record of an interrogation shall be shown to the criminal suspect for checking; if the criminal suspect cannot read, the record shall be read to him. If there are omissions or errors in the record, the criminal suspect may make additions or corrections. When the criminal suspect acknowledges that the record is free from error, he shall sign or affix his seal to it. The investigators shall also sign the record. If the criminal suspect requests to write a personal statement, he shall be permitted to do so. When necessary, the investigators may also ask the criminal suspect to write a personal statement.\n\nArticle 121 Investigators,", + " when interrogating a criminal suspect, may record or videotape the interrogation process, and shall do so where the criminal suspect is involved in a crime punishable by life imprisonment or capital punishment or in a otherwise major criminal case.\n\nRecording or videotaping shall run throughout the interrogation process for the purpose of completeness.\n\nSection 3: Questioning of the Witnesses\n\nArticle 122 Investigators may question a witness at the scene, his/her employer\u2019s premises, his/her domicile or a location designated by the witness. Where necessary, the witness may be notified to provide testimony at a people\u2019s procuratorate or a public security organ. Where the witness is questioned at the scene,", + " the investigators shall present their work certificates; and where the witness is questioned at his/her employer\u2019s premises, his/her domicile or a location designated by the witness, the investigators shall present the supporting documents issued by the people\u2019s procuratorate or the public security organ.\n\nWitnesses shall be questioned individually.\n\nArticle 123 When a witness is questioned, he shall be instructed to provide evidence and give testimony truthfully and shall be informed of the legal responsibility that shall be incurred for intentionally giving false testimony or concealing criminal evidence.\n\nArticle 124 The provisions of Article 120 of this Law shall also apply to the questioning of witnesses.\n\nArticle 125 The provisions of all articles in this Section shall apply to the questioning of victims.\n\nSection 4:", + " Inquest and Examination\n\nArticle 126 Investigators shall conduct an inquest or examination of the sites, objects, people and corpses relevant to a crime. When necessary, experts may be assigned or invited to conduct an inquest or examination under the direction of the investigators.\n\nArticle 127 Each and every unit and individual shall have the duty to preserve the scene of a crime and to immediately notify a public security organ to send officers to hold an inquest.\n\nArticle 128 To conduct an inquest or examination, the investigators must have papers issued by a People's Procuratorate or a public security organ.\n\nArticle 129 If the cause of a death is unclear,", + " a public security organ shall have the power to order an autopsy and shall notify the family members of the deceased to be present.\n\nArticle 130 To ascertain certain features, conditions of injuries, or physical conditions of a victim or a criminal suspect, a physical examination may be conducted, and fingerprints, blood, urine and other biological samples may be collected.\n\nIf a criminal suspect refuses to be examined, the investigators, when they deem it necessary, may conduct a compulsory examination.\n\nExamination of the persons of women shall be conducted by female officers or doctors.\n\nArticle 131 A record shall be made of the circumstances of an inquest or examination, and it shall be signed or sealed by the participants in the inquest or examination and the eyewitnesses.\n\nArticle 132 If,", + " in reviewing a case, a People's Procuratorate deems it necessary to repeat an inquest or examination that has been done by a public security organ, it may ask the latter to conduct another inquest or examination and may send procurators to participate in it.\n\nArticle 133 To ascertain the circumstances of a case, where necessary, investigative experiments may be conducted with the approval of the person in charge of a public security organ.\n\nInformation on an investigative experiment shall be recorded in writing and be signed or stamped by the participants.\n\nIn conducting investigative experiments, it shall be forbidden to take any action which is hazardous, humiliating to anyone, or offensive to public morals.\n\nSection 5:", + " Search\n\nArticle 134 In order to collect criminal evidence and track down an offender, investigators may search the person, belongings and residence of the criminal suspect and anyone who might be hiding a criminal or criminal evidence, as well as other relevant places.\n\nArticle 135 Any entity or individual shall have the obligation to submit the physical evidence, documentary evidence, audio-visual materials and other evidence that may serve as the evidence of guilt or evidence of innocence for a criminal suspect as required by a people\u2019s procuratorate or public security organ.\n\nArticle 136 When a search is to be conducted, a search warrant must be shown to the person to be searched.\n\nIf an emergency occurs when an arrest or detention is being made,", + " a search may be conducted without a search warrant.\n\nArticle 137 During a search, the person to be searched or his family members, neighbours or other eyewitnesses shall be present at the scene.\n\nSearches of the persons of women shall be conducted by female officers.\n\nArticle 138 A record shall be made of the circumstances of a search, and it shall be signed or sealed by the investigators and the person searched or his family members, neighbours or other eyewitnesses. If the person searched or his family members have become fugitives or refuse to sign or affix their seals to the record, this shall be noted in the record.\n\nSection 6:", + " Seal up, Seizure of Material Evidence and Documentary Evidence\n\nArticle 139 All property and documents found during investigation that may prove a criminal suspect's guilt or innocence shall be sealed up or seized. Property and documents irrelevant to the case shall not be sealed up or seized.\n\nThe property and documents sealed up or seized shall be properly preserved or sealed for safekeeping, and may not be used, replaced or damaged.\n\nArticle 140 The property or documents sealed up or seized shall be clearly accounted for in the presence of the witness and the holder of the such property and documents. A list shall be made in duplicate at the scene and be signed or sealed by the investigators,", + " witness and the said holder, with one copy given to the holder and the other attached to the archives for future reference.\n\nArticle 141 If the investigators deem it necessary to seize the mail or telegrams of a criminal suspect, they may, upon approval of a public security organ or a People's Procuratorate, notify the post and telecommunications offices to check and hand over the relevant mail and telegrams for seizure.\n\nWhen it becomes unnecessary to continue a seizure, the post and telecommunications offices shall be immediately notified.\n\nArticle 142 When required by investigation, a people\u2019s procuratorate or public security organ may access or freeze a criminal suspect\u2019s deposits,", + " remittance, bonds, stocks, shares of funds or other property in accordance with applicable provisions, in which case the relevant entities and individuals shall provide cooperation.\n\nA criminal suspect\u2019s deposits, remittance, bonds, stocks, shares of funds or other property may not be repeatedly frozen.\n\nArticle 143 The property, documents, mails or telegraphs sealed up or seized or the deposits, remittance, bonds, stocks or shares of funds frozen shall be freed and returned within three days after they are found to be irrelevant to the case upon investigation.\n\nSection 7: Expert Appraisal\n\nArticle 144 When certain special problems relating to a case need to be solved in order to clarify the circumstances of the case,", + " experts shall be assigned or invited to give their appraisal.\n\nArticle 145 After appraisal, an expert shall give appraisal opinions in writing and affix his/her signature thereto.\n\nThe expert shall be subject to legal liability if he/she intentionally gives a false appraisal opinion.\n\nArticle 146 The investigation organ shall notify the criminal suspect and the victim of the opinions of the expert verification which will be used as evidence in his case. A supplementary expert verification or another expert verification may be conducted upon application submitted by the criminal suspect or the victim.\n\nArticle 147 The period during which the mental illness of a criminal suspect is under verification shall not be included in the period of time for handling the case.\n\nSection 8:", + " Technical Investigation Measures\n\nArticle 148 After putting a case on file, a public security organ may, based on the needs for criminal investigation, and after going through stringent approval procedures, employ technical investigation measures if the case involves crimes endangering State security, crimes of terrorist activities, organized crimes committed by groups in the nature of criminal syndicates, major drug-related crimes or other crimes seriously endangering the society.\n\nWith respect to a major corruption or bribery case, or a case involving a major crime of gravely impairment of the personal right of citizens by abuse of power, after placing the case on file, a people\u2019s procuratorate may, based on the needs for criminal investigation and after going through stringent approval procedures,", + " employ technical investigation measures and task relevant bodies with the implementation of such measures pursuant to applicable provisions.\n\nIn pursuit of a fugitive criminal suspect or a fugitive defendant who is on the wanted list or whose arrest has been approved or decided, necessary technical investigation measures may be taken upon approval.\n\nArticle 149 A decision on approval of the types of technical investigation measures to be adopted and the parties to which such measures apply shall be made based on the needs for criminal investigation. The decision on approval shall be valid for three months from the date on which it is issued. The technical investigation measures shall be promptly terminated where they are no longer necessary. With respect to difficult and complex cases,", + " if the technical investigation measures are still required upon expiry of the time limit, their term of validity may be extended upon approval, subject to a maximum of three months per extension.\n\nArticle 150 Technical investigation measures shall be carried out in strict accordance with the approved types, applicable parties and time limits.\n\nInvestigators shall keep confidential the State secretes, trade secrets and personal privacy that come to their knowledge during investigation with technical investigation measures, and shall promptly destroy the information and materials that are obtained with technical investigation measures and are irrelevant to the cases.\n\nMaterials obtained by technical investigation measures shall only be used for the investigation, prosecution and trial of criminal cases, and shall not be used for any other purposes.\n\nRelevant entities and individuals shall cooperate with public security organs in their adoption of technical investigation measures in accordance with the law,", + " and shall keep confidential relevant information.\n\nArticle 151 To ascertain the circumstances of a case, where necessary and subject to the approval of the person in charge of a public security organ, relevant personnel may be assigned to conduct an undercover investigation, provided that measures adopted in the secrete investigation shall not induce others to commit crimes and shall not endanger public security or seriously threaten others\u2019 personal safety.\n\nWith respect to criminal activities involving the delivery of drugs, contraband goods or property, a public security organ may, as may be necessary for criminal investigation, implement controlled delivery in accordance with relevant provisions.\n\nArticle 152 Materials collected by investigation means in accordance with the provisions of this section may be used as evidence in criminal proceedings.", + " Where the use of such evidence may threaten the personal safety of relevant personnel or result in other serious consequences, protective measures shall be adopted to avoid the exposure of the applied technical measures and the true identity of such personnel, and when necessary, judges may verify the evidence outside courtrooms.\n\nSection 9: Wanted Orders\n\nArticle 153 If a criminal suspect who should be arrested is a fugitive, a public security organ may issue a wanted order and take effective measures to pursue him for arrest and bring him to justice.\n\nPublic security organs at any level may directly issue wanted orders within the areas under their jurisdiction; they shall request a higher-level organ with the proper authority to issue such orders for areas beyond their jurisdiction.\n\nSection 10:", + " Conclusion of Investigation\n\nArticle 154 The time limit for holding a criminal suspect in custody during investigation after arrest shall not exceed two months. If the case is complex and cannot be concluded within the time limit, an extension of one month may be allowed with the approval of the People's Procuratorate at the next higher level.\n\nArticle 155 If due to special reasons, it is not appropriate to hand over a particularly grave and complex case for trial even within a relatively long period of time, the Supreme People's Procuratorate shall submit a report to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress for approval of postponing the hearing of the case.\n\nArticle 156 With respect to the following cases,", + " if investigation cannot be concluded within the time limit specified in Article 154 of this Law, an extension of two months may be allowed upon approval or decision by the People's Procuratorate of a province, autonomous region or municipality directly under the Central Government:\n\n(1) grave and complex cases in outlying areas where traffic is most inconvenient;\n\n(2) grave cases that involve criminal gangs;\n\n(3) grave and complex cases that involve people who commit crimes from one place to another; and\n\n(4) grave and complex cases that involve various quarters and for which it is difficult to obtain evidence.\n\nArticle 157 If in the case of a criminal suspect who may be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of ten years at least,", + " investigation of the case can still not be concluded upon expiration of the extended time limit as provided in Article 156 of this Law, another extension of two months may be allowed upon approval or decision by the People's Procuratorate of a province, autonomous region or municipality directly under the Central Government.\n\nArticle 158 If, during the period of investigation, a criminal suspect is found to have committed other major crimes, the time limit for holding the criminal suspect in custody for investigation shall be re-calculated as of the date of discovery of such other crimes in accordance with Article 154 herein.\n\nThe identity of a criminal suspect shall be investigated if his/her identity is unknown due to his/her refusal to give a true name or address,", + " in which case the time limit for holding the criminal suspect in custody for investigation shall be calculated as of the date when his/her identity is ascertained, provided that the investigation of his/her criminal acts and the collection of evidence shall not be suspended. Where the identity of a criminal suspect is genuinely unable to be ascertained but the facts of the crimes are clear and the evidence is sufficient and concrete, prosecution and trial may be conducted under the name provided by the criminal suspect.\n\nArticle 159 An investigating organ shall listen to the opinions of a defense lawyer prior to closing the investigation of a case if so requested by the defense lawyer, and record the opinions in case files.", + " The written opinions of the defense lawyer shall be attached to the case file.\n\nArticle 160 A case whose investigation is closed by a public security organ shall have clear facts of crimes and sufficient and concrete evidence. The public security organ shall prepare written prosecution opinions, and submit the same together with the case files and evidence to the people\u2019s procuratorate at the same level for examination and decision, and shall at the same time inform the criminal suspect and his/her defense lawyer of the transfer of the case.\n\nArticle 161 If it is discovered during investigation that a criminal suspect's criminal responsibility should not have been investigated, the case shall be dismissed; if the criminal suspect is under arrest,", + " he shall be released immediately and issued a release certificate, and the People's Procuratorate which originally approved the arrest shall be notified.\n\nSection 11: Investigation of Cases Directly Accepted by the People's Procuratorates\n\nArticle 162 Investigation of cases directly accepted by the People's Procuratorates shall be governed by the provisions of this Chapter.\n\nArticle 163 If a case directly accepted by a People's Procuratorate conforms with the conditions provided in Article 79 and in sub-paragraph(4)or sub-paragraph(5)of Article 80 of this Law, thus arrest or detention of the criminal suspect is necessitated,", + " the decision thereon shall be made by the People's Procuratorate and executed by a public security organ.\n\nArticle 164 A people\u2019s procuratorate shall interrogate a detainee in a case directly accepted by it within 24 hours after the detention. If it is found that the person should not have been detained, the people\u2019s procuratorate shall immediately release the person and issue a release certificate.\n\nArticle 165 Where a people\u2019s procuratorate deems it necessary to arrest a detainee in a case directly accepted by it, it shall make a decision thereon within 14 days. The period to make a decision on arrest may,", + " under exceptional circumstances, be extended by one to three days. Where arrest is not necessary, the detainee shall be promptly released. Where further investigation is required and the detainee satisfies the conditions for bail with restricted freedom pending trial or residential surveillance, the detainee shall be posted on bail with restricted freedom pending trial or be placed under residential surveillance in accordance with the law.\n\nArticle 166 After a People's Procuratorate has concluded its investigation of a case, it shall make a decision to initiate public prosecution, not to initiate a prosecution or to dismiss the case.\n\nChapter III: Initiation of Public Prosecution\n\nArticle 167 All cases requiring initiation of a public prosecution shall be examined for decision by the People's Procuratorates.\n\nArticle 168 In examining a case,", + " a People's Procuratorate shall ascertain:\n\n(1) whether the facts and circumstances of the crime are clear, whether the evidence is reliable and sufficient and whether the charge and the nature of the crime has been correctly determined;\n\n(2) whether there are any crimes that have been omitted or other persons whose criminal responsibility should be investigated;\n\n(3) whether it is a case in which criminal responsibility should not be investigated;\n\n(4) whether the case has an incidental civil action; and\n\n(5) whether the investigation of the case is being lawfully conducted.\n\nArticle 169 A People's Procuratorate shall make a decision within one month on a case that a public security organ has transferred to it with a recommendation to initiate a prosecution;", + " an extension of a half month may be allowed for major or complex cases.\n\nIf jurisdiction over a case to be examined and prosecuted by a People's Procuratorate is altered, the time limit for examination and prosecution shall be calculated from the date on which another People's Procuratorate receives the case after the alteration.\n\nArticle 170 When examining a case, a people\u2019s procuratorate shall interrogate the criminal suspect, consult the defender, the victim and his/her agent ad litem, and record their opinions in writing. Any written opinion of the defender, the victim and his/her agent ad litem shall be attached to the case files.\n\nArticle 171 When examining a case,", + " a people\u2019s procuratorate may request the relevant public security organ to provide the evidence materials needed for court trial proceedings, and may request the public security organ to explain the legality of evidence gathering if it is of the opinion that the evidence may have been gathered by unlawful means as stipulated in Article 54 herein.\n\nexamining a case that requires supplementary investigation, the People's Procuratorate may remand the case to a public security organ for supplementary investigation or conduct the investigation itself.\n\nIn cases where supplementary investigation is to be conducted, it shall be completed within one month. Supplementary investigation may be conducted twice at most. When supplementary investigation is completed and the case is transferred to the People's Procuratorate,", + " the time limit for examination and prosecution shall be recalculated by the People's Procuratorate.\n\nA people\u2019s procuratorate shall make a decision on non-prosecution of a case for which a second supplementary investigation has been conducted, if it is of the opinion that there is still not sufficient evidence and that the case fails to meet the requirements for prosecution.\n\nArticle 172 When a people\u2019s procuratorate is of the opinion that the facts of a crime committed by a criminal suspect have been ascertained, the evidence is concrete and sufficient, and the suspect shall be subject to the criminal liability in accordance with the law, it shall make a decision on prosecution,", + " initiate a public prosecution in a people\u2019s court in accordance with the provisions on trial jurisdiction, and transfer relevant case materials and evidence to the people\u2019s court.\n\nArticle 173 A people\u2019s procuratorate shall make a decision on non-prosecution of a case if there is no fact pointing to the crime that has allegedly been committed by the criminal suspect or there is any of the circumstances set forth in Article 15 herein.\n\nWith respect to a case that is minor and the offender need not be given criminal punishment or need be exempted from it according to the Criminal Law, the People's Procuratorate may decide not to initiate a prosecution.\n\nWhere a people\u2019s procuratorate has decided not to prosecute a case,", + " it shall take measures to free up the property sealed up, seized or frozen during investigation. Where administrative punishments, administrative sanctions or confiscation of illegal gains shall be imposed on the person spared from prosecution, the people\u2019s procuratorate shall issue procuratorial opinions and transfer the case to relevant authorities for handling. Such relevant authorities shall promptly notify the people\u2019s procuratorate of the handling results.\n\nArticle 174 A decision not to initiate a prosecution shall be announced publicly, and the decision shall, in written form, be delivered to the person who is not to be prosecuted and his unit. If the said person is in custody, he shall be released immediately.\n\nArticle 175 With respect to a case transferred by a public security organ for prosecution,", + " if the People's Procuratorate decides not to initiate a prosecution, it shall deliver the decision in writing to the public security organ. If the public security organ considers that the decision not to initiate a prosecution is wrong, it may demand reconsideration, and if the demand is rejected, it may submit the matter to the People's Procuratorate at the next higher level for review.\n\nArticle 176 If the People's Procuratorate decides not to initiate a prosecution with respect to a case that involves a victim, it shall send the decision in writing to the victim. If the victim refuses to accept the decision, he may,", + " within seven days after receiving the written decision, present a petition to the People's Procuratorate at the next higher level and request the latter to initiate a public prosecution. The People's Procuratorate shall notify the victim of its decision made after reexamination. If the People's Procuratorate upholds the decision not to initiate a prosecution, the victim may bring a lawsuit to a People's Court. The victim may also bring a lawsuit directly to a People's Court without presenting a petition first. After the People's Court has accepted the case, the People's Procuratorate shall transfer the relevant case file to the People's Court.\n\nArticle 177 If the person against whom a People's Procuratorate decides,", + " in accordance with the provisions of the second paragraph of Article 173 of this Law, not to initiate a prosecution still refuses to accept the decision, he may present a petition to the People's Procuratorate within seven days after receiving the written decision. The People's Procuratorate shall make a decision to conduct a reexamination, notify the person against whom no prosecution is to be initiated and at the same time send a copy of the decision to the public security organ.\n\nPart Three: Trial\n\nChapter I: Trial Organizations\n\nArticle 178 Trials of cases of first instance in the Primary and Intermediate People's Courts shall be conducted by a collegial panel composed of three judges or of judges and people's assessors totaling three.", + " However, cases in which summary procedure is applied in the Primary People's Courts may be tried by a single judge alone.\n\nTrials of cases of first instance in the Higher People's Courts or the Supreme People's Court shall be conducted by a collegial panel composed of three to seven judges or of judges and people's assessors totaling three to seven.\n\nWhen performing their functions in the People's Courts, the people's assessors shall enjoy equal rights with the judges.\n\nTrials of appealed and protested cases in the People's Courts shall be conducted by a collegial panel composed of three to five judges.\n\nThe members of a collegial panel shall be odd in number.\n\nThe president of the People's Court or the chief judge of a division shall designate one judge to be the presiding judge of the collegial panel.If the president of the court or the chief judge of a division participates in a trial,", + " he himself shall serve as the presiding judge.\n\nArticle 179 If opinions differ when a collegial panel conducts its deliberations, a decision shall be made in accordance with the opinions of the majority, but the opinions of the minority shall be entered in the records. The records of the deliberations shall be signed by the members of the collegial panel.\n\nArticle 180 After the hearings and deliberations, the collegial panel shall render a judgment. With respect to a difficult, complex or major case, on which the collegial panel considers it difficult to make a decision, the collegial panel shall refer the case to the president of the court for him to decide whether to submit the case to the judicial committee for discussion and decision.", + " The collegial panel shall execute the decision of the judicial committee.\n\nChapter II: Procedure of First Instance\n\nSection 1: Cases of Public Prosecution\n\nArticle 181 After a people\u2019s court has examined a case for which public prosecution has been initiated, it shall decide to commence court sessions to try the case if the indictment contains clear facts of the crime charged.\n\nArticle 182 After having decided to commence court sessions to try a case, a people\u2019s court shall determine the members of the collegial panel, and serve on the defendant and his/her defender the duplicate of the indictment of the people\u2019s procuratorate no later than ten days before the commencement of a court session.\n\nBefore the commencement of a court session,", + " judges may convene a meeting with the public prosecutor, the party concerned and his/her defender and agent ad litem to deliberate and consult their opinions on withdrawal, the list of witnesses, exclusion of illegal evidence and other trial-relevant issues.\n\nOnce the date for a court session is determined, the people\u2019s court shall notify the people\u2019s procuratorate of the time and place of the court session, summon the party concerned, inform the defender, agent ad litem, witnesses, experts and court interpreters, and serve the summons and notices three days before the commencement of the court session. If a case is to be tried in an open court session,", + " the name of the defendant, the causes of action and the time and location of the court session shall be announced publicly three days before the scheduled open court session.\n\nThe circumstances of the above-mentioned proceedings shall be recorded in writing, and be signed by the judges and the court clerk.\n\nArticle 183 A people\u2019s court shall try cases of first instance in open court sessions, except for the cases involving State secrets or personal privacy. Cases involving trade secrets may be tried in closed court sessions if the parties concerned so applies.\n\nFor cases not tried in open court sessions, the reasons for non-public trial shall be announced in court.\n\nArticle 184 When a case of public prosecution is being tried in a people's court,", + " the relevant people\u2019s procuratorate shall send its personnel to appear before the court to support the public prosecution.\n\nArticle 185 When a court session opens, the presiding judge shall ascertain if all the parties have appeared in court and announce the subject matter of the case. He shall announce the roll, naming the members of the collegial panel, the court clerk, the public prosecutor, the defender, agent ad litem, the expert witnesses and the interpreter; he shall inform the parties of their right to apply for withdrawal of any member of the collegial panel, the court clerk, the public prosecutor, any expert witnesses or the interpreter; and he shall inform the defendant of his right to defence.\n\nArticle 186 After the public prosecutor has read out the bill of prosecution in court,", + " the defendant and the victim may present statements regarding the crime accused in the bill of prosecution, and the public prosecutor may interrogate the defendant.\n\nThe victim, the plaintiff and defender in an incidental civil action and the agents ad litem may, with the permission of the presiding judge, put questions to the defendant.\n\nThe judges may interrogate the defendant.\n\nArticle 187 A witness shall appear before a people\u2019s court to give testimony where the public prosecutor, the party concerned or the defender or agent ad litem has objections to the testimony of a witness, and the testimony of the witness has material impact on case conviction and sentencing, and the people\u2019s court deems it necessary to ask the witness to appear before the court.\n\nWhere a member of the people\u2019s police appears before a court as a witness to give testimony of a crime witnessed when performing official duties,", + " the preceding Paragraph shall apply.\n\nWhere the public procurator, the party concerned or the defender or agent ad litem has objections to the appraisal results, and the people\u2019s court deems it necessary for the expert concerned to appear before the court, the expert shall appear before the court to give testimony. Where the expert refuses to appear before the court to give testimony upon receipt of the notice of the people\u2019s court, the appraisal results shall not be taken as the basis for deciding the case.\n\nArticle 188 Where a witness, without good reasons, fails to appear before a people\u2019s court to give testimony upon receipt of the notice of the people\u2019s court,", + " the people\u2019s court may compel the witness to appear, unless the witness is the spouse, parent or child of the defendant.\n\nWhere a witness, without justifiable reasons, refuses to appear before the people\u2019s court or refuses to testify when in court, the witness shall be admonished, and in the case of grave circumstances, the witness may be detained for not more than ten days with the approval of the president of the people\u2019s court. The punished person may apply to the people\u2019s court at the next higher level for reconsideration if he/she has objections to the detention decision. Detention shall not be suspended during the reconsideration period.\n\nArticle 189 Before a witness gives testimony,", + " the judges shall instruct him to give testimony truthfully and explain to him the legal responsibility that shall be incurred for intentionally giving false testimony or concealing criminal evidence. The public prosecutor, the parties, the defenders and agents ad litem, with the permission of the presiding judge, may question the witnesses and expert witnesses. If the presiding judge considers any questioning irrelevant to the case, he shall put a stop to it.\n\nThe judges may question the witnesses and expert witnesses.\n\nArticle 190 The public prosecutor and the defenders shall show the material evidence to the court for the parties to identify; the records of testimony of witnesses who are not present in court,", + " the opinions of expert witnesses who are not present in court, the records of inquests and other documents serving as evidence shall be read out in court. The judges shall heed the opinions of the public prosecutor, the parties, the defenders and the agents ad litem.\n\nArticle 191 During a court hearing, if the collegial panel has doubts about the evidence, it may announce an adjournment, in order to carry out investigation to verify the evidence.\n\nWhen carrying out investigation to verify evidence, the People's Court may conduct inquest, examination, seal-up, seizure, expert evaluation, as well as inquiry and freeze.\n\nArticle 192 During a court hearing,", + " the parties, the defenders and agents ad litem shall have the right to request new witnesses to be summoned, new material evidence to be obtained, a new expert evaluation to be made, and another inquest to be held.\n\nThe public prosecutor, the party concerned, the defender and the agent ad litem may apply to the relevant people\u2019s court for notifying persons with specific expertise to appear before the court to present their views on the appraisal opinions made by the expert concerned.\n\nThe court shall make a decision whether to grant the above-mentioned requests.\n\nThe appearance of persons with specific expertise before people\u2019s court as specified in Paragraph 2 shall be governed by the provisions applicable to experts.\n\nArticle 193 During court proceedings,", + " all facts and evidence relating to case conviction and sentencing shall be investigated and debated.\n\nWith the permission of the presiding judge, the public prosecutor, the party concerned, the defender and the agent ad litem may express their views on the evidence and the circumstances of the case and may debate with each other.\n\nAfter the presiding judge has declared the conclusion of the debate, the defendant shall be entitled to make a final statement.\n\nArticle 194 If any participant in the proceedings of a trial or by-stander violates the order of the courtroom, the presiding judge shall warn him to desist. If any person fails to obey, he may forcibly be taken out of the courtroom.", + " If the violation is serious, the person shall be fined not more than 1,000 Yuan or detained not more than 15 days. The fine or detention shall be subject to approval of the president of the court. If the person under punishment is not satisfied with the decision on the fine or detention, he may apply to the People's Court at the next higher level for reconsideration. However, the execution of the fine or detention shall not be suspended during the period of reconsideration.\n\nWhoever assembles a crowd to make an uproar or charges into the courtroom, or humiliates, slanders, intimidates or beats up judicial officers or participants in the proceedings,", + " thereby seriously disturbing the order of the courtroom, which constitutes a crime, shall be investigated for criminal responsibility according to law.\n\nArticle 195 After a defendant makes his final statement, the presiding judge shall announce an adjournment and the collegial panel shall conduct its deliberations and, on the basis of the established facts and evidence and in accordance with the provisions of relevant laws, render one of the following judgments:\n\n(1) If the facts of a case are clear, the evidence is reliable and sufficient, and the defendant is found guilty in accordance with law, he shall be pronounced guilty accordingly;\n\n(2) If the defendant is found innocent in accordance with law,", + " he shall be pronounced innocent accordingly;\n\n(3) If the evidence is insufficient and thus the defendant cannot be found guilty, he shall be pronounced innocent accordingly on account of the fact that the evidence is insufficient and the accusation unfounded.\n\nArticle 196 In all cases, judgments shall be pronounced publicly.\n\nWhere the judgment is pronounced in court, the relevant people\u2019s court shall serve the written judgment on the parties concerned and the people\u2019s procuratorate that has initiated the public prosecution within five days. Where the judgment is to be pronounced at a fixed future date, the people\u2019s court shall serve the written judgment on the parties concerned and the people\u2019s procuratorate that has initiated the public prosecution immediately after the announcement of the judgment.", + " The written judgment shall also be served on the defender and the agent ad litem.\n\nArticle 197 A written judgment shall bear the signatures of the judges and the court clerk, and shall specify the time limit and the court for appeal.\n\nArticle 198 A hearing may be postponed if during a trial one of the following situations affecting the conduct of the trial occurs:\n\n(1) if it is necessary to summon new witnesses, obtain new material evidence, make a new expert evaluation or hold another inquest;\n\n(2) if the procurators find that a case for which public prosecution has been initiated requires supplementary investigation, and they make a proposal to that effect;", + " or\n\n(3) if the trial cannot proceed because of application for the withdrawal of a judicial officer.\n\nArticle 199 If the hearings of a case is postponed in accordance with the provisions of sub-paragraph(2)in Article 198 of this Law, the People's Procuratorate shall complete the supplementary investigation within one month.\n\nArticle 200 During trial proceedings, trial of a case may be suspended where the case cannot be tried further for a relatively long period of time due to any of the following circumstances:\n\n(1) The defendant is seriously ill, therefore unable to appear before the court;\n\n(2) The defendant has escaped;\n\n(", + "3) The private prosecutor is unable to appear before the court due to serious illness, but has failed to entrust an agent ad litem to appear before the court; or\n\n(4) Force majeure.\n\nThe trial shall resume once the causes for suspension have lapsed. The duration of suspension shall not be included in the time limit for trial.\n\nArticle 201 The court clerk shall make a written record of the entire court proceedings, which shall be examined by the presiding judge and then signed by him and the court clerk.\n\nThat portion of the courtroom record comprising the testimony of witnesses shall be read out in court or given to the witnesses to read.", + " After the witnesses acknowledge that the record is free of error, they shall sign or affix their seals to it.\n\nThe courtroom record shall be given to the parties to read or shall be read out to them. If a party considers that there are omissions or errors in the record, he may request additions or corrections to be made. After the parties acknowledge that the record is free of error, they shall sign or affix their seals to it.\n\nArticle 202 A people's court shall pronounce the judgment on a case of public prosecution within two months or, not later than three months, upon acceptance thereof. For a case involving the crime punishable by capital punishment or an incidental civil case under any of the circumstances as specified in Article 156 herein,", + " the period may be extended for three months upon approval of a people\u2019s court at the next higher level. If the period needs to be further extended under special circumstances, an application shall be made to the Supreme People\u2019s Court for approval.\n\nIf jurisdiction of a People's Court over a case is altered, the time limit for handling the case shall be calculated from the date on which another People's Court receives the case after the alteration.\n\nAs to a case for which a People's Procuratorate has to conduct supplementary investigation, the People's Court shall start to calculate anew the time lime for handling the case after the supplementary investigation has been completed and the case has been transferred to it.\n\nArticle 203 If a People's Procuratorate discovers that in handling a case a People's Court has violated the litigation procedure prescribed by law,", + " it shall have the power to suggest to the People's Court that it should set it right.\n\nSection 2: Cases of Private Prosecution\n\nArticle 204 Cases of private prosecution include the following:\n\n(1) cases to be handled only upon complaint;\n\n(2) cases for which the victims have evidence to prove that those are minor criminal cases; and\n\n(3) cases for which the victims have evidence to prove that the defendants should be investigated for criminal responsibility according to law because their acts have infringed upon the victims' personal or property rights, whereas, the public security organs or the People's Procuratorates do not investigate the criminal responsibility of the accused.\n\nArticle 205 After examining a case of private prosecution,", + " the People's Court shall handle it in one of the following manners in light of the different situations:\n\n(1) If the facts of the crime are clear and the evidence is sufficient, the case shall be tried at a court session; or\n\n(2) In a case of private prosecution for which criminal evidence is lacking, if the private prosecutor cannot present supplementary evidence, the court shall persuade him to withdraw his prosecution or order its rejection.\n\nIf a private prosecutor, having been served twice with a summons according to law, refuses to appear in court without justifiable reasons, or if he withdraws from a court session without permission of the court,", + " the case may be considered withdrawn by him.\n\nIf during the trial of a case the judges have doubts about the evidence and consider it necessary to conduct investigation to verify the evidence, the provisions of Article 158 of this Law shall apply.\n\nArticle 206 A people\u2019s court may mediate cases of private prosecution. A private prosecutor may settle with the defendant or withdraw the private prosecution on his/her own before the announcement of the judgment. However, mediation is not applicable to cases as specified in Item (3) of Article 204 herein.\n\nThe time limit for a people\u2019s court to try a case of private prosecution shall be governed by Paragraph 1 and Paragraph 2 of Article 202 herein if the defendant has been detained.", + " Where the defendant has not been detained, the judgment of a case of private prosecution shall be pronounced within six months upon acceptance of the case.\n\nArticle 207 In the process of the proceedings, the defendant in a case of private prosecution may raise a counterclaim against the private prosecutor. The provisions governing private prosecutions shall apply to counterclaims.\n\nSection 3: Summary Procedure\n\nArticle 208 A case under the jurisdiction of a primary-level people\u2019s court may be tried according to summary procedures if it satisfies all of the following conditions:\n\n(1) The facts of a case are clear and the evidence is concrete and sufficient;\n\n(2) The defendant pleads guilty to his/her crime,", + " and has no objection on facts of the crime charged; and\n\n(3) The defendant has no objection on the application of the summary procedures.\n\nA people\u2019s procuratorate may suggest a people\u2019s court to adopt summary procedures when initiating a public prosecution.\n\nArticle 209 Summary procedures are not applicable under any of the following circumstances:\n\n(1) Where the defendant is visual, hearing or speech impaired, or is a mentally challenged person who has not lost all the capacity to discern or control his/her own behaviors;\n\n(2) Where the case has a major social impact;\n\n(3) Where some of the co-defendants in a case of joint crimes do not plead guilty or have objection on the application of summary procedures;", + " or\n\n(4) Where there are other circumstances under which summary procedures are not appropriate.\n\nArticle 210 As regards a case to which summary procedures apply and in which the defendant is punishable by fixed-term imprisonment of not more than three years, a people\u2019s court may form a collegial panel or have a single judge to try the case; where the defendant is punishable by fixed-term imprisonment of over three years, the people\u2019s court shall form a collegial panel to try the case.\n\nFor a case of public prosecution that is tried according to summary procedures, the relevant people\u2019s procuratorate shall send its personnel to appear before the court.\n\nArticle 211 For a case tried according to summary procedures,", + " the judge shall question the defendant on his/her opinions on the facts of the crime charged, inform the defendant of the legal provisions on the application of summary procedures, and confirm whether the defendant agrees to the application of summary procedures.\n\nArticle 212 For a case tried according to summary procedures, the defendant and his/her defender may, with the permission of the judges, debate with the public prosecutor, or the private prosecutor and his/her agent ad litem.\n\nArticle 213 Cases tried according to summary procedures shall not be subject to the procedural provisions of Section 1 of this Chapter on service periods, interrogating defendants, questioning witnesses and experts, producing evidence,", + " and court debates, provided that people\u2019s courts shall hear the final statements of the defendants before pronouncing judgments.\n\nArticle 214 A people's court shall close a case tried according to summary procedures within 20 days upon acceptance thereof. If the defendant is punishable by fixed-term imprisonment of over three years, the time limit may be extended to one and a half month.\n\nArticle 215 If in the course of trying a case the People's Court discovers that the summary procedure is not appropriate for the case, it shall try it anew in accordance with the provisions in Section 1 or Section 2 of this Chapter.\n\nChapter III: Procedure of Second Instance\n\nArticle 216 If the defendant,", + " private prosecutor or their legal representatives refuse to accept a judgment or order of first instance made by a local People's Court at any level, they shall have the right to appeal in writing or orally to the People's Court at the next higher level. Defenders or near relatives of the defendant may, with the consent of the defendant, file appeals.\n\nA party to an incidental civil action or his legal representative may file an appeal against that part of a judgment or order of first instance made by a local People's Court at any level that deals with the incidental civil action.\n\nA defendant shall not be deprived on any pretext of his right to appeal.\n\nArticle 217 If a local People's Procuratorate at any level considers that there is some definite error in a judgment or order of first instance made by a People's Court at the same level,", + " it shall present a protest to the People's Court at the next higher level.\n\nArticle 218 If the victim or his legal representative refuses to accept a judgment of first instance made by a local People's Court at any level, he shall, within five days from the date of receiving the written judgment, have the right to request the People's Procuratorate to present a protest. The People's Procuratorate shall, within five days from the date of receiving the request made by the victim or his legal representative, decide whether to present the protest or not and give him a reply.\n\nArticle 219 The time limit for an appeal or a protest against a judgment shall be 10 days and the time limit for an appeal or a protest against an order shall be five days;", + " the time limit shall be counted from the day after the written judgment or order is received.\n\nArticle 220 If a defendant, private prosecutor, or a plaintiff or defendant in an incidental civil action files an appeal through the People's Court which originally tried the case, the People's Court shall within three days transfer the petition of appeal together with the case file and the evidence to the People's Court at the next higher level; at the same time it shall deliver duplicates of the petition of appeal to the People's Procuratorate at the same level and to the other party.\n\nIf a defendant, private prosecutor, or a plaintiff or defendant in an incidental civil action files an appeal directly to the People's Court of second instance,", + " the People's Court shall within three days transfer the petition of appeal to the People's Court which originally tried the case for delivery to the People's Procuratorate at the same level and to the other party.\n\nArticle 221 If a local People's Procuratorate protests against a judgment or order of first instance made by the People's Court at the same level, it shall present a written protest through the People's Court which originally tried the case and send a copy of the written protest to the People's Procuratorate at the next higher level. The People's Court which originally tried the case shall transfer the written protest together with the case file and evidence to the People's Court at the next higher level and shall deliver duplicates of the written protest to the parties.\n\nIf the People's Procuratorate at the next higher level considers the protest inappropriate,", + " it may withdraw the protest from the People's Court at the same level and notify the People's Procuratorate at the next lower level.\n\nArticle 222 A People's Court of second instance shall conduct a complete review of the facts determined and the application of law in the judgment of first instance and shall not be limited by the scope of appeal or protest.\n\nIf an appeal is filed by only some of the defendants in a case of joint crime, the case shall still be reviewed and handled as a whole.\n\nArticle 223 A people\u2019s court of second instance shall form a collegial panel and commence court sessions to try a case that falls under any of the following categories:\n\n(", + "1) A case of appeal in which, the defendant, private prosecutor and his/her agent ad litem have objections on the facts or evidence ascertained in the first instance and the objections may affect case conviction and sentencing;\n\n(2) A case of appeal in which the defendant is sentenced to capital punishment;\n\n(3) A case protested by a people\u2019s procuratorate; or\n\n(4) A case that falls under other circumstances that require a trial in court sessions.\n\nThe people\u2019s court of second instance shall interrogate the defendant and consult other parties concerned, defenders and agents ad litem when it decides not to hold a court session to try a case.\n\nWhen a People's Court of second instance opens a court session to hear a case of appeal or protest,", + " it may do so in the place where the case occurred or in the place where the People's Court which originally tried the case is located.\n\nArticle 224 With respect to a case protested by a people\u2019s procuratorate or a case of public prosecution tried by a people\u2019s court of second instance in a court session, the people\u2019s procuratorate at the same level shall send its personnel to attend the court session. The people\u2019s court of second instance shall, after having determined to commence a court session for trial of the case, notify the people\u2019s procuratorate to examine the case files, and the latter shall finish the examination within one month.", + " The time for the people\u2019s procuratorate to examine the case files is not included in the time limit for trial.\n\nArticle 225 After hearing a case of appeal or protest against a judgment of first instance, the People's Court of second instance shall handle it in one of the following manners in light of the different situations:\n\n(1) if the original judgment was correct in the determination of facts and the application of law and appropriate in the meting out of punishment, the People's Court shall order rejection of the appeal or protest and affirm the original judgment.\n\n(2) if the original judgment contained no error in the determination of facts but the application of law was incorrect or the punishment was inappropriately meted out,", + " the People's Court shall revise the judgment.\n\n(3) if the facts in the original judgment were unclear or the evidence insufficient, the People's Court may revise the judgment after ascertaining the facts, or it may rescind the original judgment and remand the case to the People's Court which originally tried it for retrial.\n\nAfter the original people\u2019s court has rendered a judgment on a case remanded for retrial in accordance with Item (3) of the preceding paragraph, if the defendant lodges an appeal or the people\u2019s procuratorate lodges a protest, the people\u2019s court of second instance shall make a judgment or ruling pursuant to the law,", + " and shall not remand the case to the original people\u2019s court for a new trial.\n\nArticle 226 When trying an appeal case filed by the defendant or his/her statutory representative, defender or close relative, a people\u2019s court of second instance shall not aggravate the punishments on the defendant. Where a case is remanded to the original people\u2019s court for new trial by the people\u2019s court of second instance, unless there are new facts of the crime and the people\u2019s procuratorate has initiated supplementary prosecution, the original people\u2019s court shall not aggravate the punishments on the defendant.\n\nThe restriction laid down in the preceding paragraph shall not apply to cases protested by a People's Procuratorate or cases appealed by private prosecutors.\n\nArticle 227 If a People's Court of second instance discovers that when hearing a case,", + " a People's Court of first instance violates the litigation procedures prescribed by law in one of the following ways, it shall rule to rescind the original judgment and remand the case to the People's Court which originally tried it for retrial:\n\n(1) violating the provisions of this Law regarding trial in public;\n\n(2) violating the withdrawal system;\n\n(3) depriving the parties of their litigation rights prescribed by law or restricting, such rights, which may hamper impartiality of a trial;\n\n(4) unlawful formation of a judicial organization; or\n\n(5) other violations against the litigation procedures prescribed by law which may hamper impartiality of a trial.\n\nArticle 228 The People's Court which originally tried a case shall form a new collegial panel for the case remanded to it for retrial,", + " in accordance with the procedure of first instance. With respect to the judgment rendered after the retrial, an appeal or protest may be lodged in accordance with the provisions of Article 216, 217 or 218 of this Law.\n\nArticle 229 After a People's Court of second instance has reviewed an appeal or protest against an order of first instance, it shall order rejection of the appeal or protest or rescind or revise the original order respectively with reference to the provisions of Article 225,227 or 228 of this Law.\n\nArticle 230 The People's Court which originally tried a case shall calculate the time limit anew for the trial of the case remanded to it by the People's Court of second instance from the date of receiving the case remanded.\n\nArticle 231 A People's Court of second instance shall try cases of appeal or protest with reference to the procedure of first instance,", + " in addition to applying the provisions in this Chapter.\n\nArticle 232 A people\u2019s court of second instance shall close the trial of a case of appeal or protest within two months upon acceptance of the case. For a case in which the defendant commits a crime punishable by capital punishment or an incidental civil case that is under any of the circumstances as listed in Article 156 herein, the time limit may be extended by two months upon approval or decision by a high people\u2019s court at the level of province, autonomous region or municipality directly under the Central Government. Where further extension is needed under special circumstances, an application shall be submitted to the Supreme People\u2019s Court for approval.\n\nSupreme People\u2019s Court shall decide the time limit for trial of the cases of appeal or protest accepted thereby.\n\nArticle 233 All judgments and orders of second instance and all judgments and orders of the Supreme People's Court are final.\n\nArticle 234 A public security organ,", + " people\u2019s procuratorate and people\u2019s court shall properly keep the property and the fruits accrued therefrom of the criminal suspects and defendants that have been sealed up, seized or frozen for future verification, and shall prepare a list of the property and the accrued fruits, and transfer the same with the cases. No entity or individual may misappropriate or dispose of the property or accrued fruit by itself. The legitimate property of a victim shall be promptly returned to the victim. The contraband goods and other goods not suitable for long-term storage shall be disposed of in accordance with applicable State provisions.\n\nAny tangible objects used as evidence shall be transferred together with a case.", + " In the case of a tangible object that is not suitable for transfer, its list, photograph or other evidence document shall be transferred together with the case.\n\nThe judgment rendered by a people\u2019s court shall deal with the disposal of the property and the accrued fruits that have been sealed up, seized or frozen.\n\nAfter the judgment rendered by a people\u2019s court takes effect, the relevant organ shall dispose of the property and the accrued fruits that have been sealed up, seized or frozen in accordance with the judgment. All such property and accrued fruits shall be turned over the State treasury, except for those returned to the victim in accordance with the law.\n\nA judicial officer who embezzles,", + " misappropriates or disposes, without authorization, of the property and the accrued fruits that have been sealed up, seized or frozen shall be subject to criminal liabilities in accordance with the law. If no crime is constituted, the judicial officer shall be given disciplinary sanctions.\n\nChapter IV: Procedure for Review of Death Sentences\n\nArticle 235 Death sentences shall be subject to approval by the Supreme People's Court.\n\nArticle 236 A case of first instance where an Intermediate People's Court has imposed a death sentence and the defendant does not appeal shall be reviewed by a Higher People's Court and submitted to the Supreme People's Court for approval. If the Higher People's Court does not agree with the death sentence,", + " it may bring the case up for trial or remand the case for retrial.\n\nCases of first instance where a Higher People's Court has imposed a death sentence and the defendant does not appeal, and cases of second instance where a death sentence has been imposed shall all be submitted to the Supreme People's Court for approval.\n\nArticle 237 A case where an Intermediate People's Court has imposed a death sentence with a two-year suspension of execution, shall be subject to approval by a Higher People's Court.\n\nArticle 238 Reviews by the Supreme People's Court of cases involving death sentences and reviews by a Higher People's Court of cases involving death sentences with a suspension of execution shall be conducted by collegial panels each composed of three judges.\n\nArticle 239 The Supreme People\u2019s Court shall make a ruling on approval or non-", + "approval of the death penalty sentence when reviewing a case involving death penalty sentence. If the Supreme People\u2019s Court disapproves the capital punishment sentence, it may remand the case for retrial or revise the sentence.\n\nArticle 240 In reviewing a case involving capital punishment sentence, the Supreme People\u2019s Court shall interrogate the defendant, and consult the defense lawyer if so requested by the defense lawyer.\n\nThe Supreme People\u2019s Procuratorate may submit its opinions to the Supreme People's Court when the latter reviews a case involving capital punishment sentence. The Supreme People\u2019s Court shall notify the review results of the case to the Supreme People\u2019s Procuratorate.\n\nChapter V:", + " Procedure for Trial Supervision\n\nArticle 241 A party or his legal representative or his close relative may present a petition to a People's Court or a People's Procuratorate regarding a legally effective judgment or order, however, execution of the judgment or order shall not be suspended.\n\nArticle 242 Where the petition lodged by the party concerned or his/her statutory representative or close relatives falls under any of the following circumstances, a people\u2019s court shall retry the case:\n\n(1) Where there is new evidence to prove the errors in the facts ascertained in the original judgment or ruling, which may affect case conviction and sentencing;\n\n(2)", + " Where the evidence that serves as the basis for conviction and sentencing is unreliable and insufficient, or shall be excluded in accordance with the law, or where the main evidence establishing the facts of the case contradict with each other;\n\n(3) Where the original judgment or ruling is erroneous in the application of law;\n\n(4) Where the case is tried in violation of statutory proceedings, which may affect the impartiality of the trial; or\n\n(5) Where the judge committed bribery and corruption, practiced favoritism for personal gains or bended the law in the trial of the case.\n\nArticle 243 If the president of a People's Court at any level finds some definite error in a legally effective judgment or order of his court as to the determination of facts or application of law,", + " he shall refer the matter to the judicial committee for handling.\n\nIf the Supreme People's Court finds some definite error in a legally effective judgment or order of a People's Court at any lower level, or if a People's Court at a higher level finds some definite error in a legally effective judgment or order of a People's Court at a lower level, it shall have the power to bring the case up for trial itself or may direct a People's Court at a lower level to conduct a retrial.\n\nIf the Supreme People's Procuratorate finds some definite error in a legally effective judgment or order of a People's Court at any level,", + " or if a People's Procuratorate at a higher level finds some definite error in a legally effective judgment or order of a People's Court at a lower level, it shall have the power to present a protest to the People's Court at the same level against the judgment or order in accordance with the procedure for trial supervision.\n\nWith respect to a case protested by a People's Procuratorate, the People's Court that has accepted the protest shall form a collegial panel for retrial; if the facts, on the basis of which the original judgment was made, are not clear or the evidence is not sufficient, it may direct the People's Court at the lower level to try the case again.\n\nArticle 244 Where a higher-level people\u2019s court orders an inferior people\u2019s court to retry a case,", + " an inferior people\u2019s court other than the original people\u2019s court shall be ordered to conduct the retrial. Where it is more appropriate for the original people\u2019s court to conduct the retrial, the original people\u2019s court may be ordered to retry the case.\n\nArticle 245 Where a case shall be retried according to the trial supervision procedures by the original people\u2019s court, a new collegial panel shall be formed to conduct the retrial. In the event of first-instance cases, the retrial shall be conducted in accordance with first instance procedures, and the judgment or ruling rendered can be appealed or protested against. In the event of second\u2013instance cases or cases brought before higher-level people\u2019s courts for trial,", + " the retrial shall be conducted in accordance with the second instance procedures, and the judgment or ruling rendered shall be the judgment or ruling of final instance.\n\nFor cases retried by a people\u2019s court in court sessions, the people\u2019s procuratorate at the same level shall send its personnel to attend the court sessions.\n\nArticle 246 Where it is necessary to take compulsory measures against the defendant to a case that a people's court has decided to retry, the people's court shall make a decision on the compulsory measures in accordance with the law. Where it is necessary to take compulsory measures against the defendant to a retrial case against which the people's procuratorate has lodged a protest,", + " the people's procuratorate shall make a decision on the compulsory measures in accordance with the law.\n\nWhen trying cases in accordance with the trial supervision procedures, a people\u2019s court may decide to suspend the execution of the original judgments or rulings.\n\nArticle 247 With respect to a case retried by a People's Court in accordance with the procedure for trial supervision, it shall conclude the trial within three months from the day on which it makes the decision to bring the case up for trial itself or on which the decision is made for it to retry the case. If it is necessary to extend the time limit, the period shall not exceed six months.\n\nThe provisions of the preceding paragraph shall apply to the time limit for the trial of a protested case that is accepted by a People's Court and is to be tried by it in accordance with the procedure for trial supervision.", + " Where it is necessary to direct a People's Court at a lower level to try a protested case again, a decision to such an effect shall be made within one month from the day on which the protested case is accepted; the provisions of the preceding paragraph shall apply to the time limit for the trial of the case by the People's Court at the lower level.\n\nPart Four: Execution\n\nArticle 248 Judgments and orders shall be executed after they become legally effective.\n\nThe following judgments and orders are legally effective:\n\n(1) judgments and orders against which no appeal or protest has been filed within the legally prescribed time limit;\n\n(2) judgments and orders of final instance;", + " and\n\n(3) judgments of the death penalty approved by the Supreme People's Court and judgments of the death penalty with a two-year suspension of execution approved by a Higher People's Court.\n\nArticle 249 If a defendant in custody is given the verdict of not guilty or exempted from criminal punishment by a People's Court of first instance, he shall be released immediately after the judgment is pronounced.\n\nArticle 250 When a judgment of the death penalty with immediate execution is pronounced or approved by the Supreme People's Court, the President of the Supreme People's Court shall sign and issue an order to execute the death sentence.\n\nIf a criminal sentenced to death with a two-year suspension of execution commits no intentional offense during the period of suspension of the sentence and his punishment should therefore be commuted according to law on expiration of such period,", + " the executing organ shall submit a written recommendation to a Higher People's Court for an order; if there is verified evidence that the criminal has committed intentional offense and his death sentence should therefore be executed, the Higher People's Court shall submit the matter to the Supreme People's Court for examination and approval.\n\nArticle 251 After receiving an order from the Supreme People's Court to execute a death sentence, the People's Court at a lower level shall cause the sentence to be executed within seven days. However, under one of the following conditions the People's Court at a lower level shall suspend execution and immediately submit a report to the Supreme People's Court for an order:\n\n(", + "1) If it is discovered before the execution of the sentence that the judgment may contain an error;\n\n(2) If, before the execution of the sentence, the criminal exposes major criminal facts or renders other significantly meritorious service, thus the sentence may need to be revised; or\n\n(3) If the criminal is pregnant.\n\nIf the reason given in sub-paragraph(1)or(2)of the preceding paragraph which caused the suspension of the sentence has disappeared, the sentence may be executed only after a report is submitted to the President of the Supreme People's Court for him to sign and issue another order for execution of the death sentence.", + " If execution is suspended for the reason given in sub-paragraph(3)of the preceding paragraph, a request shall be submitted to the Supreme People's Court for it to alter the sentence according to law.\n\nArticle 252 Before a People's Court causes a death sentence to be executed, it shall notify the People's Procuratorate at the same level to send an officer to supervise the execution.\n\nA death sentence shall be executed by such means as shooting or injection.\n\nA death sentence may be executed on the execution ground or in a designated place of custody.\n\nThe judicial officer directing the execution shall verify the identity of the criminal, ask him if he has any last words or letters and then deliver him to the executioner for execution of the death sentence.", + " If it is discovered before the execution that there may be an error, the execution shall be suspended and a report submitted to the Supreme People's Court for an order.\n\nExecutions of death sentences shall be announced but shall not be held in public.\n\nAfter a death sentence is executed, the court clerk on the scene shall prepare a written record of it. The People's Court that caused the death sentence to be executed shall submit a report on the execution to the Supreme People's Court.\n\nAfter a death sentence is executed, the People's Court that caused the death sentence to be executed shall notify the family members of the criminal.\n\nArticle 253 Where a criminal is handed over to the relevant authorities to serve his/her sentence,", + " the people\u2019s court that hands over the criminal shall serve the relevant legal documents on the relevant public security organ, prison or any other enforcement organ within ten days after the effective date of the judgment.\n\nA criminal sentenced to capital punishment with a two-year reprieve, or life imprisonment or fixed-term imprisonment shall, in accordance with the law, be handed over by a public security organ to a prison for execution of criminal punishments. As to a criminal sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment, if the remaining term of sentence is not more than three months before he/she is handed over for serving his/her sentence, the criminal shall serve his/her sentence in a detention house instead.", + " As to a criminal sentenced to criminal detention, the criminal shall serve his/her sentence under the supervision of the relevant public security organ.\n\nAs to a juvenile delinquent, his criminal punishment shall be executed in a reformatory for juvenile delinquents.\n\nAn executing organ shall take a criminal into custody without delay and notify the family members of the criminal.\n\nA criminal sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment or criminal detention, upon completion of execution of the sentence, shall be issued a certificate of release by the executing organ.\n\nArticle 254 A criminal sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment or criminal detention may be permitted to temporarily serve his/her sentence outside prison under any of the following circumstances:\n\n(", + "1) Where the criminal is seriously ill and needs to be released on bail for medical treatment;\n\n(2) Where the criminal is in pregnancy or breast-feeding period; or\n\n(3) Where the criminal is unable to take care of himself/herself in everyday life, and his/her temporary service of sentence outside prison will not endanger public security.\n\nIf a criminal sentenced to life imprisonment is under the circumstance provided for in Item (2) of the preceding Paragraph, she may be permitted to temporarily serve her sentence outside prison.\n\nA criminal shall not be released on bail for medical treatment if such release may endanger public security or if the criminal may injure or mutilate him/herself.\n\nIf a criminal is indeed seriously ill and must be released on bail for medical treatment,", + " a hospital designated by a people\u2019s government at the provincial level shall conduct a diagnosis and issue supporting documents.\n\na criminal begins to serve his/her sentence, the decision on temporary service of sentence outside prison shall be made by the people\u2019s court that shall hand the criminal over for the service of his/her sentence. After the criminal has been handed over to the relevant authority to serve his/her sentence, the prison or detention house concerned shall put forward written opinions on temporary service of sentence outside prison and report the same to a prison administrative organ at or above the provincial level or a public security organ at or above the level of cities with districts for approval.\n\nArticle 255 A prison or detention house that puts forward the written opinions on temporary service of sentence outside prison shall copy the duplicate of the written opinions to the people\u2019s procuratorate.", + " The people\u2019s procuratorate may submit written opinions to the deciding or approving authority.\n\nArticle 256 The organ that decides or approves the temporary service of sentence outside prison shall copy the decision on temporary service of sentence outside prison to the people\u2019s procuratorate concerned. Where the people\u2019s procuratorate deems temporary service of sentence outside prison as inappropriate, it shall, within one month from the receipt of the notice, send its written opinions to the organ that has decided or approved the temporary service of sentence outside prison. Upon receipt of the written opinions of the people\u2019s procuratorate, the said organ shall promptly re-examine the decision.\n\nArticle 257 Where a criminal who has obtained the permission for temporarily serving his/her sentence outside prison involves any of the following circumstance,", + " he/she shall be promptly committed to prison:\n\n(1) Where the criminal is found to have failed to satisfy the conditions for temporary service of sentence outside prison;\n\n(2) Where the criminal has committed grave violation of the provisions on the supervision and administration over the temporary service of sentence outside prison; or\n\n(3) Where the circumstances under which the criminal is permitted to temporarily serve his/her sentence outside prison no longer exist, and the criminal\u2019s term of sentence has not expired.\n\nWhere a criminal who has been permitted by a people\u2019s court to temporarily serve his/her sentence outside prison shall be committed to prison, the people\u2019s court shall make a decision thereon,", + " and serve relevant legal documents on the public security organ, prison or other executing organs concerned.\n\nWhere a criminal who does not satisfy the conditions for temporary service of sentence outside prison gets the permission for to do so through bribery or other unlawful means, the period of service of sentence outside prison shall not be included in the execution term of the sentence. Where a criminal escapes during the temporary service of sentence outside prison, the duration of the escape shall not be included in the execution term of the sentence.\n\nWhere a criminal dies during the temporary service of sentence outside prison, the executing organ shall inform the prison or detention house of the same in a timely manner.\n\nArticle 258 Where a criminal is sentenced to public surveillance,", + " gets suspended sentence, is on parole or temporarily serves his/her sentence outside prison, the criminal shall, in accordance with the law, be subject to community correction carried out by a community correction organization.\n\nArticle 259 The deprivation of political rights of a criminal shall be enforced by a public security organ. Upon expiry of the execution period, the executing organ concerned shall inform in writing the criminal and his/her employer or the basic-level organization in the place where the criminal resides.\n\nArticle 260 If a criminal sentenced to a fine fails to pay the fine within the time limit, the People's Court shall compel him to pay. If he has true difficulty in paying because he has suffered an irresistible disaster,", + " an order may be made to reduce the fine or exempt him from payment.\n\nArticle 261 All judgments on confiscation of property, whether imposed as a supplementary punishment or independently, shall be executed by the People's Courts; when necessary, the People's Courts may execute such judgments jointly with the public security organs.\n\nArticle 262 If a criminal commits a crime again while serving his sentence, or if a criminal act that is discovered was not known at the time of judgment, he shall be transferred by the executing organ to a People's Procuratorate for handling.\n\na criminal sentenced to public surveillance, criminal detention, fixed-term imprisonment or life imprisonment shall have his/her sentence commuted or be granted parole due to true repentance or meritorious service during the execution of the sentence,", + " the executing organ shall submit a written proposal to the relevant people\u2019s court for decision and approval, and shall copy the duplicate of the proposal to the relevant people\u2019s procuratorate. The people\u2019s procuratorate may put forward written opinions to the people\u2019s court.\n\nArticle 263 If a People's Procuratorate considers that the order on commutation of sentence or on parole made by a People's Court is improper, it shall, within 20 days from the date of receiving a copy of the written order, submit a written recommendation to the People's Court for correction. The People's Court shall, within one month from the date of receiving the recommendation,", + " form a new collegial panel to handle the case and render a final order.\n\nArticle 264 If, during execution of a criminal punishment, the prison or any other executing organ believes that there is an error in the judgment or the criminal lodges a petition, it shall refer the matter to the People's Procuratorate or the People's Court that pronounced the original judgment for handling.\n\nArticle 265 The People's Procuratorates shall supervise the execution of criminal punishments by executing organs to see if the execution conforms to law. If they discover any illegalities, they shall notify the executing organs to correct them.\n\nPart V: Special Procedures.\n\nChapter 1:", + " Procedures for Criminal Cases Committed by Minors\n\nArticle 266 Minors who have committed crimes shall be educated, reformed and rehabilitated by upholding the principles of adopting education as primary means and using punishments as ancillary means.\n\nPeople\u2019s courts, people's procuratorates and public security organs shall ensure the litigation rights of minors when handling criminal cases committed by minors, ensure the availability of legal assistance for minors, and assign judges, procuratorial personnel and investigators who are familiar with the physical and mental characteristics of minors to undertake the cases.\n\nArticle 267 Where a minor criminal suspect or defendant has not entrusted a defender, the people's court,", + " people's procuratorate or public security organ concerned shall notify a legal aid agency to assign a lawyer as the defender of the minor.\n\nArticle 268 In handling criminal cases committed by minors, a public security organ, people\u2019s procuratorate and people\u2019s court may investigate into the growing up experience, reasons for committing crimes and education and guardianship conditions of the minor criminal suspects or defendants depending on the circumstances.\n\nArticle 269 The application of arrest to minor criminal suspects and defendants shall be strictly restricted. Where a people\u2019s procuratorate reviews and approves the arrest of a minor criminal suspect or defendant, and the relevant people\u2019s court decides to make the arrest,", + " the minor criminal suspect or defendant shall be interrogated and the opinions of the defense lawyer shall be heard.\n\nMinors who are held in custody or arrested or who are serving sentences shall be held under detention, managed and educated separately from adults.\n\nArticle 270 For a criminal case committed by a minor, the statutory representative of the minor criminal suspect or defendant shall be informed to attend the interrogation and trial. Where the statutory representative cannot be reached or is unable to be present, or is an accomplice him/herself, other adult relatives of the minor criminal suspect or defendant, or representatives from his/her school or employer, the basic-level organization in his/her domicile or the minor protection organization may be informed to attend the interrogation and trial,", + " and relevant information shall be recorded in writing. The statutory representative that shows up may perform the litigation rights of the minor criminal suspect or defendant on his/her behalf.\n\nThe statutory representative or other persons present may offer their opinions if they think the personnel handling the case have prejudiced the legitimate rights and interests of the minor during interrogation or trial. The interrogation records and court records shall be given or read to the statutory representative or other persons present.\n\nFemale staff members shall be present during the interrogation of a female minor criminal suspect.\n\nIn the trial of a criminal case committed by a minor, his/her statutory representative may make additional statements after the minor defendant has made final statements.\n\nParagraph 1,", + " Paragraph 2 and Paragraph 3 shall apply where minor victims or witnesses are questioned.\n\nArticle 271 A people\u2019s procuratorate may make a conditional non-prosecution decision on a minor who is suspected of crimes provided for in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 or Chapter 6 under the Special Provisions of the Criminal Law if he/she is punishable, which are punishable by fixed-term imprisonment of no longer than one year, and the conditions for prosecution are satisfied, but he/she has shown repentance over the crimes. The people\u2019s procuratorate shall consult the public security organ and the victim before make a conditional non-prosecution decision.\n\nWhere a public security organ requires a conditional non-prosecution decision to be reconsidered or reviewed or where the victim concerned lodges a petition against the said decision,", + " the provisions of Article 175 and Article 176 herein shall apply.\n\nWhere the minor criminal suspect and his/her statutory representative raise objections to the conditional non-prosecution decision rendered by a people\u2019s procuratorate, the people\u2019s procuratorate shall decide to prosecute the case.\n\nArticle 272 During the probation period imposed by conditional non-prosecution, the people\u2019s procuratorate concerned shall supervise and inspect the minor criminal suspect who is conditionally exempted from prosecution. The guardian of the minor criminal suspect shall reinforce the disciplines against the suspect, and cooperate with the people\u2019s procuratorate in supervision and inspection.\n\nThe probation period for conditional non-prosecution shall be no less than six months but no more than one year,", + " commencing from the date when the people\u2019s procuratorate makes the conditional non-prosecution decision.\n\nA minor criminal suspect who is conditionally exempted from prosecution shall:\n\n(1) Abide by laws and regulations, and accept supervision;\n\n(2) Report his/her activities as required by the supervising organ;\n\n(3) Obtain the approval of the supervising organ before leaving the city or county in which he/she resides or before moving to another place of residence; and\n\n(4) Accept education and correction as required by the supervising organ.\n\nArticle 273 A people\u2019s procuratorate shall revoke the conditional non-prosecution decision and initiate public prosecution if the relevant minor criminal suspect is found to be under any of the following circumstances during the probation period:\n\n(", + "1) The minor criminal suspect has committed new crimes or needs to be prosecuted for crimes committed before the conditional non-prosecution decision was made; or\n\n(2) The minor criminal suspect has committed grave violations of public security provisions or the provisions on supervision and administration made by the supervising organ relating to conditional non-prosecution.\n\nThe people\u2019s procuratorate shall make a non-prosecution decision upon expiry of the probation period expires if the relevant minor criminal suspect involves none of the aforesaid circumstances during the probation period.\n\nArticle 274 A case in which the defendant is under the age of 18 at the time of trial shall be tried in closed court sessions,", + " provided that, with the consent of the minor defendant and his/her statutory representative, the school the minor defendant attends and the minor protection organization may assign representatives to attend the trial.\n\nArticle 275 Where a criminal who is under the age of 18 at the time of committing the crime has been sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of no longer than five years, the criminal records concerned shall be sealed off.\n\nNo sealed criminal record may be provided for any entity or individual, except where it is required by judicial organs for case handling or is accessed by a relevant organization in accordance with State provisions. The organization that accesses the sealed criminal record in accordance with the law shall keep confidential the information therein.\n\nArticle 276 Unless otherwise prescribed in this Chapter,", + " criminal cases committed by minors shall be handled pursuant to other provisions herein.\n\nChapter 2: Procedures for Reconciliation Between Parties Concerned in Cases of Public Prosecution\n\nArticle 277 With respect to the following cases of public prosecution, the parties thereto may reach reconciliation agreements if the criminal suspects or defendants have showed true repentance and obtained the forgiveness of the victims by means of compensation and apologies and the victims have voluntarily accepted reconciliation:\n\n(1) Cases involving crimes prescribed under Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 of the Special Provisions of the Criminal Law that arise out of private disputes, which are punishable by fixed-term imprisonment of no longer than three;", + " and\n\n(2) Cases of crimes of negligence which are punishable by a fixed-term imprisonment of no longer than seven years, except for crimes of malfeasance.\n\nThe procedures stipulated under this Chapter shall not apply to any criminal suspect or defendant who has committed intentional crimes over the past five years.\n\nArticle 278 Where the parties to a criminal case reach reconciliation, the public security organ, people\u2019s procuratorate and people\u2019s court concerned shall consult the parties concerned and other relevant persons, review the voluntariness and legitimacy of the reconciliation, and organize the preparation of the reconciliation agreement.\n\nArticle 279 With respect to a case where a reconciliation agreement has been reached,", + " the public security organ concerned may advise the people\u2019s procuratorate to seek for lenient punishment. The people\u2019s procuratorate may, in turn, advise the people\u2019s court concerned to mete out lenient punishment. The people\u2019s procuratorate may decide not to prosecute the case if the circumstances of the crime are minor and is not punishable by criminal punishment. The people\u2019s court may impose lenient punishment on the defendant in accordance with the law.\n\nChapter 3: Procedures for Confiscating Illegal Gains in Cases Where the Criminal Suspect or Defendant Has Absconded or Died\n\nArticle 128 A people\u2019s procuratorate may apply with a people\u2019s court for confiscation of illegal gains in a case of grave crimes such as corruption,", + " bribery or terrorist activities where the criminal suspects or defendants have absconded and have not been found one year after the public arrest warrants were issued, or where the criminal suspects or defendants have died, and the illegal gains and other property involved in the case shall be confiscated pursuant to the Criminal Law.\n\nWhere a public security organ is of the opinion that any of the circumstances as specified in the preceding paragraph exists, it shall prepare the letter of opinions on confiscation of illegal gains, and refer the cases to the people\u2019s procuratorate.\n\nAn application for confiscation of illegal gains shall contain the relevant evidence materials concerning the facts of the crime and the illegal gains,", + " and shall specify the types, amounts and locations of the property, and whether the property has been sealed up, seized and frozen.\n\nWhere necessary, a people\u2019s court may seal up, seize and freeze the property for which an application for confiscation has been made.\n\nArticle 281 An application for confiscation of illegal gains shall be heard by the collegial panel formed by the intermediate people\u2019s court in the place where the crime takes place or in the domicile of the criminal suspect or defendant.\n\nA people\u2019s court shall issue an announcement after accepting an application for confiscation of illegal gains. The announcement shall be valid for six months. The close relatives and other interested parties of the criminal suspect or defendant concerned shall be entitled to apply to attend the litigation proceedings,", + " or entrust agents ad litem to attend the proceedings.\n\nThe people\u2019s court shall hear the application for confiscation of illegal gains upon expiry of the announcement period. Where an interested party attends the proceedings, the people\u2019s court shall hear the application in court sessions.\n\nArticle 282 A people\u2019s court shall, after investigation and hearing, make a ruling to confiscate the property that is found to be illegal gains or other property involved in the case, exclusive of the property that shall be returned to the victim in accordance with the law. Where the property shall not be confiscated, the people\u2019s court shall make a ruling to dismiss the application, and free the property from being sealed up,", + " seized or frozen.\n\nThe close relatives and other interested persons of the criminal suspect or defendant concerned, or the people\u2019s procuratorate may appeal or protest against the ruling made by the people\u2019s court pursuant to the preceding paragraph.\n\nArticle 283 A people\u2019s court shall terminate the trial of a case if the criminal suspect or defendant at large surrenders him/herself voluntarily or is captured during court proceedings.\n\nProperty that has been mistakenly confiscated shall be returned or repaid to the criminal suspect or defendant concerned.\n\nChapter 4: Procedures for Compulsory Medical Treatment for Mentally Ill Persons who Are not Held Criminal Responsible\n\nArticle 284 A mentally ill person who has endangered public security or seriously endangered the personal security of citizens by committing acts of violence,", + " but who is not criminally liable upon expert evaluation according to statutory procedures may be placed under compulsory medical treatment if he/she is likely to continue to pose a threat to the society.\n\nArticle 285 People\u2019s courts shall decide on the compulsory medical treatment of persons with mental illness in accordance with the provisions of this Chapter.\n\nWhere a public security organ discovers that a mentally ill person satisfies the conditions for the compulsory medical treatment, it shall issue the letter of opinions on compulsory medical treatment, and refer the case to the relevant people\u2019s procuratorate. Where the people\u2019s procuratorate finds that a mentally ill person referred thereto by the public security organ satisfies the conditions for compulsory medical treatment,", + " or finds the said circumstance during the examination before prosecution, the people's procuratorate shall apply with the relevant people\u2019s court for compulsory medical treatment. Where the people\u2019s court finds in the trial of the case that the defendant satisfies the conditions for compulsory medical treatment, it may make a decision on compulsory medical treatment.\n\nWith respect to a mentally ill person who has committed acts of violence, the relevant public security organ may take protective and temporary restraining measures thereon before the people's court renders a decision on compulsory medical treatment.\n\nArticle 286 A people\u2019s court shall form a collegial panel to hear an application for compulsory medical treatment upon the acceptance thereof.\n\nThe people\u2019s court shall inform the statutory representative of the respondent or the defendant to attend the hearing of an application for compulsory medical treatment.", + " Where the respondent or the defendant has not entrusted an agent ad litem, the people\u2019s court shall inform a legal aid agency to designate a lawyer to provide him/her with legal services.\n\nArticle 287 Where a people\u2019s court, upon hearing, is of the opinion that the respondent or the defendant satisfies the conditions for compulsory medical treatment, it shall make a decision on compulsory medical treatment within one month.\n\nThe person against whom the decision on compulsory medical treatment is made, or the victim and his/her statutory representative or close relatives who raise objections to the decision on compulsory medical treatment may apply for reconsideration with the people\u2019s court at the next higher level.\n\nArticle 288 An institution providing compulsory medical treatment shall conduct regular diagnosis and assessment of the person receiving such treatment.", + " If the person no longer poses threats to the personal security of others, and needs no further compulsory medical treatment, the said institution shall propose to lift the compulsory medical treatment on a timely basis and submit the proposal to the people\u2019s court that has made the decision on compulsory medical treatment for approval.\n\nThe person receiving compulsory medical treatment and his/her close relatives shall be entitled to apply for termination of compulsory medical treatment.\n\nArticle 289 People\u2019s procuratorates shall supervise the decision and implementation of compulsory medical treatment.\n\nSupplementary Provisions\n\nArticle 290 The security departments of the Army shall exercise the power of investigation with respect to criminal offences that have occurred in the Army.\n\nCrimes committed by criminals in prison shall be investigated by the prison.\n\nThe handling of criminal cases by the security departments of the Army and by prisons shall be governed by the relevant provisions of this Law.\n\n", + " BEIJING (AP) \u2014 Police abuse of criminal suspects to extract confessions in China is a serious problem despite measures to reform the legal system, such as moves to exclude evidence obtained through torture, Human Rights Watch said in a report Wednesday.\n\nFILE - In this Dec. 15, 2014 photo, the brother of Huugjilt, a wrongly executed man, holds his grieving mother during a visit to Huugjilt's tomb in Hohhot in northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous... (Associated Press)\n\nIn this Dec. 15, 2014 photo, paper sacrifices burn at the grave of Huugjilt,", + " a wrongly executed man, in Hohhot in northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Huugjilt, who was 18 when he was convicted... (Associated Press)\n\nIn this Dec. 16, 2014 photo, brothers of Huugjilt, a wrongly executed man, hold a photo of him, at rear, while his parents, in front, hold a family photo in Hohhot in northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous... (Associated Press)\n\nThe report says that police have found ways around the rules by torturing detainees outside of official detention facilities, using methods that leave no visible injuries and taping confessions later.\n\nChina's legal system still relies heavily on confessions to produce convictions in nearly every case,", + " partly because of often inadequate manpower to properly investigate crimes.\n\nForeign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters Wednesday that Chinese law prohibits torture during interrogations and anyone found responsible would be punished. \"China is now stepping up efforts to improve the guarantee of human rights in the legal system... so the public sees fairness and justice in each case,\" she told reporters.\n\nPresident Xi Jinping has made a priority of reducing wrongful convictions and reforming the justice system to restore public confidence in the ruling Communist Party, but has declined to consider loosening the party's control over the judiciary.\n\nLast year, a teenager from Inner Mongolia who was convicted of rape and murder and executed 18 years ago was exonerated posthumously.", + " The police officer who oversaw the original case has been charged with using torture to coerce a confession.\n\nMeasures put into place before Xi became president require interrogations to be videotaped and ban the use of evidence directly obtained through torture. Those are positive steps, but not enough, Human Rights Watch said.\n\nIn China, suspects have no right to have a lawyer present during interrogations and judges rarely question police conduct and often ignore clear evidence of mistreatment, the report said.\n\n\"The confession is still highly valued, a confession is obtained in almost every case; there is nothing that really holds a police officer accountable for torture or coercion,\" said Maya Wang,", + " Hong Kong-based Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch.\n\nIn the report, former detainees, mostly suspected of theft, selling drugs or robbery, described abuse during police interrogations, including sleep deprivation, being beaten with batons and being hung up by the wrists.\n\nThe Ministry of Public Security didn't immediately respond to a faxed request for comment.\n\nHuman Rights Watch looked at 432 court verdicts from across China that addressed claims of torture by detainees. They were among 158,000 verdicts published online from the first four months of 2014. The defendants were convicted in all 432 cases, even in the 23 cases in which judges excluded confessions due to concerns over police torture.\n\nChina's Public Security Minister Guo Shengkun was quoted as saying in June 2013 that coerced confessions had dropped 87 percent in 2012 compared to the year earlier.", + " Human Rights Watch said it did not have enough access to confirm or refute that figure.\n\n___\n\nOnline:\n\nhttp://www.hrw.org/node/134845 ", + " This 145-page report is based on Human Rights Watch analysis of hundreds of newly published court verdicts from across the country and interviews with 48 recent detainees, family members, lawyers, and former officials. Human Rights Watch found that police torture and ill-treatment of suspects in pretrial detention in China remains a serious problem. Among the findings are that detainees have been forced to spend days shackled to \u201ctiger chairs,\u201d hung by the wrists, and treated abusively by \u201ccell bosses\u201d \u2013 fellow detainees who oversee cells for the police.\n" + ], + "length": 33869, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 84, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 In Saudi Arabia, women are hamstrung from doing certain tasks many of us take for granted\u2014including marrying and vacationing abroad\u2014without permission from their male guardians. Now, more than 14,000 Saudi women are trying to change that with a petition to the government that they hope will put an end to the conservative Islamic kingdom's guardianship system, the BBC reports. Women currently need an OK from a husband, father, brother, son, or other male family member to do not only the previously listed activities, but also more routine things such as renting an apartment, getting a passport, accessing health care\u2014sometimes even taking a class or getting a job. \"Women should be treated as [full citizens],\" activist Aziza Al-Yousef, who's been in the equal-rights fight for 10 years, tells the Guardian. The movement to dump guardianship picked up steam in July after a Human Rights Watch report came out on the system and the hashtag #IAmMyOwnGuardian started proliferating on social media. Not all women are against guardianship, with a female columnist for the Arab News saying that while reform to the system is needed, how well the system works depends on each family's dynamic, and that women who live under such systems aren't necessarily \"brainwashed.\" Still, an HRW researcher calls the drive to nix guardianship \"incredible and unprecedented.\" \"[The women have] made undeniably clear they won't stand to be treated as second-class citizens any longer,\" she tells the BBC. (An unveiled anchorwoman caused a hubbub.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Protest movement seeks to end Saudi Arabia law requiring women have permission of a male guardian to travel, marry or do other fundamental tasks\n\nThousands of Saudis have signed an online petition calling for the government to abolish the country\u2019s guardianship system, which prevents women from engaging in fundamental tasks without the permission of a male relative.\n\n\u201cWomen should be treated as a full citizen,\u201d said activist Aziza Al-Yousef who, along with other activists, has been fighting against the guardianship system for a decade.\n\n\u201cThis is not only a women\u2019s issue, this is also putting pressure on normal men... this is not an issue for women only,\u201d she told the Guardian.\n\nSaudi Arabian divorced women and widows to get greater legal powers Read more\n\nUnder Saudi law,", + " women require the permission of a male guardian to travel, marry, or exit prison and it may be needed to be granted employment or access to healthcare.\n\nA guardian is typically a woman\u2019s father or her husband if she is married; a widow may have to seek permission from her son if she has no other men of age in her life.\n\nBut in recent years, a growing protest movement has sought to end the system. Yousef and other prominent activists started holding workshops and performing studies on the religious validity of the guardianship system five years ago. The campaign picked up steam this summer after Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a blistering report on the system.\n\nThe report gave birth to a hashtag #IAmMyOwnGuardian,", + " which spread awareness on the issue.\n\nHala Aldosari, researcher in women\u2019s health, who wrote the petition and worked on the HRW report, said the hashtag gained support among women of all ages and backgrounds.\n\nOn the two days leading up to the petition, an estimated 2,500 women sent direct telegrams to the Saudi King\u2019s office imploring him to end the guardianship system. The petition racked up 14,682 signatures after promoting it on Twitter, Aldosari said.\n\nSaudi Arabia\u2019s government agreed to abolish the guardianship system twice \u2013 in 2009 and 2013 \u2013 after a review by the United Nation\u2019s Human Rights Council.", + " It instituted some reforms by, for instance, making it easier for women to work, appointing women to the King\u2019s advisory board, and allowing women to vote and run as candidates in municipal elections. However, these reforms had limitations and stopped short of providing women basic rights.\n\nEarlier this year, the government outlined its Vision 2030, an economic plan to reduce the country\u2019s dependency on oil, which called for more involvement of women in the labor market. However, the guardianship system runs counter to that, as some employers require women to submit permission from their guardians. Engaging Saudi women in the economy is vital as they currently outnumber men in higher education and will be key to weaning the country off oil.\n\nAccording to Hamid M Khan,", + " deputy director of The Rule of Law Collaborative at the University of South Carolina, many members of the Saudi royal family are open to the idea of reform but senior clerics in the country \u2013 whose approval would likely be needed to deconstruct the system \u2013 are averse to change.\n\n\u201cMany in the royal family \u2013 not all but there is a significant number in the royal family \u2013 actually view this is as a bit exhausting,\u201d Khan said.\n\nAccording to Khan, the law stems from an understanding of the Qu\u2019ran which dictates classes of males which one is forbidden to marry. Some Islamic jurisprudence scholars have made the case that any woman should be accompanied by a guardian when in the presence of any man not on that list.\n\n\u201cThis notion of guardianship is not necessarily embedded in the Qur\u2019an but it\u2019s based upon the jurist view that there are certain patriarchal understandings about the necessity of guarding a woman from these men,\u201d Khan explained.", + " Beyond laws dictating marriage contracts, no other Muslim majority country employs guardianship laws similar to Saudi Arabia\u2019s.\n\nYousef said some prominent Saudi clerics have also signed the petition, to indicate their belief that the system is not derived from Islamic law. Aldosari said that many more clerics came out after the 26 October 2013 movement, where Saudi women pushed for the right to drive.\n\n\u201cThey all declared that this is not religion, this is all government rules and it should be changed,\u201d Yousef said. ", + " Image copyright FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP Image caption Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women are banned from driving\n\nA petition signed by more than 14,000 Saudi women calling for an end to the country's male guardianship system is being handed to the government.\n\nWomen must have the consent of a male guardian to travel abroad, and often need permission to work or study.\n\nSupport for the first large-scale campaign on the issue grew online in response to a trending Twitter hashtag.\n\nActivist Aziza Al-Yousef told the BBC she felt \"very proud\" of the campaign, but now needed a response.\n\nIn the deeply conservative Islamic kingdom,", + " a woman must have permission from her father, brother or other male relative - in the case of a widow, sometimes her son - to obtain a passport, marry or leave the country.\n\nMany workplaces and universities also demand a guardian's consent for female employees and students, although it is not legally required.\n\nImage copyright Ms Saffaa Image caption Twitter user 'Ms Saffaa' tweeted this artwork backing the campaign\n\nRenting a flat, undergoing hospital treatment or filing a legal claim often also require a male guardian's permission, and there is very little recourse for women whose guardians abuse them or severely limit their freedom.\n\nHow much do you know about life as a woman in Saudi Arabia?\n\nWATCH:", + " Are Saudi women really that oppressed?\n\nThe 'Rosa Parks' of Saudi Arabia\n\n'Flabbergasted'\n\nIn July, an Arabic Twitter hashtag which translates as \"Saudi women want to abolish the guardianship system\" went viral after a Human Rights Watch report was published on the issue. Saudi women tweeted comments, videos and artwork calling for change. Bracelets saying \"I Am My Own Guardian\" appeared.\n\nThe women counted on the petition all gave their full names, though more signed anonymously. Hundreds of women - one estimate suggests as many as 2,500 - bombarded the Saudi King's office over the weekend with telegrams containing personal messages backing the campaign.\n\nHuman Rights Watch researcher Kristine Beckerle,", + " who worked on the report, described the response as \"incredible and unprecedented\".\n\n\"I was flabbergasted - not only by the scale, but the creativity with which they've been doing it,\" she said. \"They've made undeniably clear they won't stand to be treated as second-class citizens any longer, and it's high time their government listened.\"\n\nImage copyright Aziza al-Youssef Image caption Bracelets were made to back the campaign - which gained the support of some men\n\nHowever, there has been opposition from some Saudi women, with an alternative Arabic hashtag, which translates as #TheGuardianshipIsForHerNotAgainstHer,", + " gaining some traction, and opinion articles, like this one on the Gulf News website, arguing that the system should be reformed and applied better.\n\nMs Yousef, who was stopped by police in 2013 for breaking the country's ban on women driving, said she did not expect any negative consequences from the petition: \"I'm not worried, I'm not doing anything wrong,\" she said.\n\nShe and another activist took the petition to the Royal Court in person on Monday, but were advised to send it by mail.\n\nShe said a key demand is that an age between 18 and 21 be designated, above which a woman be \"treated like an adult\".\n\n\"In every aspect,", + " the important issue is to treat a woman as a full citizen,\" she said.\n\nShe and other activists first raised the issue five years ago. \"We never had a problem with campaigning, but the problem is there is no answer. But we always hope - without hope, you cannot work,\" she said.\n\nThere has been no official response to the petition yet. ", + " Summary We all have to live in the borders of the boxes our dads or husbands draw for us. \u2014Zahra, 25-year-old Saudi woman, April 7, 2016 It can mess with your head and the way you look at yourself. How do you respect yourself or how [can] your family respect you, if he is your legal guardian? \u2014Hayat, 44-year-old former school principal, December 7, 2015 In Saudi Arabia, a woman\u2019s life is controlled by a man from birth until death. Every Saudi woman must have a male guardian, normally a father or husband, but in some cases a brother or even a son,", + " who has the power to make a range of critical decisions on her behalf. As dozens of Saudi women told Human Rights Watch, the male guardianship system is the most significant impediment to realizing women\u2019s rights in the country, effectively rendering adult women legal minors who cannot make key decisions for themselves. Rania, a 34-year-old Saudi woman, said, \u201cWe are entrusted with raising the next generation but you can\u2019t trust us with ourselves. It doesn\u2019t make any sense.\u201d Every Saudi woman, regardless of her economic or social class, is adversely affected by guardianship policies. Trapped with Abuse - End Male Guardianship in Saudi Arabia Adult women from Saudi Arabia must obtain permission from a male guardian to travel abroad,", + " marry, or be released from prison, and may be required to provide guardian consent to work or get health care. Adult women must obtain permission from a male guardian to travel, marry, or exit prison. They may be required to provide guardian consent in order to work or access healthcare. Women regularly face difficulty conducting a range of transactions without a male relative, from renting an apartment to filing legal claims. The impact these restrictive policies have on a woman\u2019s ability to pursue a career or make life decisions varies, but is largely dependent on the good will of her male guardian. In some cases, men use the authority that the male guardianship system grants them to extort female dependents.", + " Guardians have conditioned their consent for women to work or to travel on her paying him large sums of money. No Freedom to Travel - End Male Guardianship in Saudi Arabia Women in Saudi Arabia face formal and informal barriers when attempting to make decisions or take action without the presence or consent of a male relative. Women\u2019s rights activists in Saudi Arabia have repeatedly called on the government to abolish the male guardianship system, which the government agreed to do in 2009 and again in 2013 after its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the United Nations Human Rights Council. Following both hearings, Saudi Arabia took limited steps to reform certain aspects of the guardianship system.", + " But, these changes remain insufficient, incomplete, and ineffective; today, the guardianship system remains mostly intact. Imprisoned - End Male Guardianship in Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia\u2019s male guardianship system remains the most significant impediment to women\u2019s rights in the country despite limited reforms over the last decade. Until the guardianship system is removed entirely, Saudi Arabia will remain in violation of its human rights obligations and unable to realize its Vision 2030, the country\u2019s \u201cvision for the future,\u201d that declares women\u2014half of the country\u2019s population\u2014to be a \u201cgreat asset\u201d whose talents will be developed for the good of the country\u2019s society and economy.", + " Reforms Saudi Arabia has made a series of limited changes over the last 10 years to ease restrictions on women. Notable examples include allowing women to participate in the country\u2019s limited political space, actively encouraging women to enter the labor market, and taking steps to better respond to domestic violence. For example, in 2013, then-King Abdullahappointed 30 women to the Shura Council, his highest advisory body. On December 12, 2015, authorities allowed women to participate in municipal council elections, with women voting and running as candidates for the first time in the country\u2019s history. The elections were a significant, symbolic victory for women,", + " particularly as many women had campaigned for this right for more than a decade. In recent years, Saudi Arabia has also issued a range of decisions significantly increasing women\u2019s access to the labor market, as part of a broader economic reform program aimed at decreasing the country\u2019s reliance on oil. These include removing language in the labor law that previously restricted women\u2019s work to certain fields \u201csuitable to their nature,\u201d and no longer requiring that woman have guardian permission to work. Authorities have provided incentives to employers to hire women and earmark certain positions for women and provided thousands of scholarships for women to study in universities abroad. Saudi Arabia has also taken steps to better respond to violence against women and to provide women with better access to government services.", + " In 2013, it passed a law criminalizing domestic abuse and, in 2016, established a center specifically tasked with receiving and responding to reports of family violence. Saudi Arabia has also worked to improve women\u2019s access to government services, including enabling women to secure their own ID cards; issuing to divorced and widowed women family cards, which specify familial relationships and are required to conduct a number of bureaucratic tasks; and removing requirements that a woman bring a male relative to identify them in court. Limitations of Reforms While the reforms are a step in the right direction, they remain partial and incomplete. The male guardianship system remains largely in place,", + " hindering and in some cases nullifying the efficacy of these reforms. As Hayat, 44, said, \u201cI don\u2019t believe we can change this in small steps. It is what is happening right now. We need a very brave call from the government to remove this [guardianship] and make it equal.\u201d While women now serve on the Shura Council and on municipal councils, these victories remain limited and authorities continue to curb women\u2019s ability to participate in public life. Women made up less than 10 percent of the final list of registered voters for the December 15, 2015 elections. Many women faced barriers linked to the guardianship system when registering to vote,", + " such as a requirement to prove residency in their voting district\u2014a difficult or impossible task for many women whose names are not generally listed on housing deeds or rental agreements\u2014or a requirement to present a family card, often held by a male guardian. In the end, only 21 women were elected to the municipal councils out of 2,106 contested seats. Municipal councils themselves have limited authority and, in January 2016, the government decreed council meetings would be sex segregated\u2014women councilors must participate via video link. Following the announcement, a woman councilor stepped down. The guardianship system also impacts women\u2019s ability to seek work inside Saudi Arabia and to pursue opportunities abroad that might advance their careers.", + " Specifically, women may not apply for a passport without male guardian approval and require permission to travel outside the country. Women also cannot study abroad on a government scholarship without guardian approval and, while not always enforced, officially require a male relative to accompany them throughout the course of their studies. Zahra, 25, whose father refused to allow her to study abroad, said, \u201cWhenever someone tells me, \u2018You should have a five-year plan,\u2019 I say I can\u2019t. I\u2019ll have a five-year plan and then my dad would disagree. Why have a plan?\u201d If the Saudi government intends to end discrimination against women as it has promised and to further the reforms it has already begun to undertake,", + " it cannot allow restrictions inherent within the guardianship system to continue. For example, the government does not require guardian permission for women to work, but does not penalize employers who do require this permission. The government does encourage employers to hire women, but requires employers to establish separate office spaces for men and women and to enforce a strict dress code on women, policies which create disincentives to hiring women. The need for substantial, systemic reform is perhaps starkest with regard to the state\u2019s response to violence against women. Saudi Arabia has taken steps to better respond to abuse, but has done so within the framework of guardianship. The guardianship system allows men to control many aspects of women\u2019s lives and makes it difficult for survivors of family violence to avail themselves of protection or redress mechanisms.", + " The extreme difficulty of transferring male guardianship from one male to another and the severe inequality in divorce rules make it difficult for women to escape abuse. Men remain women\u2019s guardians, with all the associated levers of control, during court proceedings, and until a divorce is finalized. There is deeply entrenched discrimination within the legal system, and courts recognize legal claims brought by guardians against female dependents that restrict women\u2019s movement or enforce a guardian\u2019s authority over them. Women who have escaped abuse in shelters may, and in prisons do, require a male relative to agree to their release before they may exit state facilities. Dr. Heba, a women\u2019s rights activist,", + " explained, \u201cThe [authorities] keep a woman in jail\u2026 until her legal guardian comes and gets her, even if he is the one who put her in jail.\u201d Failing to abolish these and other tools available to male guardians to control and extort female dependents will guarantee that women continue to face tremendous obstacles when trying to seek help or flee abuse by violent guardians or simply to pursue paths different than the ones their guardians have determined best. The Time is Now Saudi officials often argue that the failure to end discrimination against women is not due to state policy, but due to difficulties in implementation, and that the country must move slowly as the government\u2019s hands are tied by a conservative culture and a powerful clerical establishment\u2019s interpretation of Islamic law.", + " Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told the Economist that women\u2019s travel was not entirely restricted, and pointed to social and religious criteria to explain the restrictions that he believed existed. When asked why women\u2019s labor force participation was so low, he said, \u201cThe culture of women in Saudi Arabia. The woman herself.\u201d Saudi Arabia\u2019s imposition of the guardianship system is grounded in the most restrictive interpretation of an ambiguous Quranic verse\u2014an interpretation challenged by dozens of Saudi women, including professors and Islamic feminists, who spoke to Human Rights Watch. Religious scholars also challenge the interpretation, including a former Saudi judge who told Human Rights Watch that the country\u2019s imposition of guardianship is not required by Sharia and the former head of the religious police,", + " also a respected religious scholar, who said Saudi Arabia\u2019s ban on women driving is not mandated by Islamic law in 2013. The state clearly and directly enforces guardianship requirements in certain areas, including restricting women\u2019s ability to travel and requiring guardian consent for a woman to marry. In other areas, there appear to be no written legal provisions or official decrees explicitly mandating a guardian\u2019s consent or presence, but public officials and private businesses ask women for either without fear of sanction. Saudi Arabia, which acceded to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 2000,", + " is legally obligated to end discrimination against women without delay, including by abolishing the male guardianship system. As long as it fails to take steps to eliminate the discriminatory practices of male guardianship and sex segregation, the government is undermining the ability of women to enjoy even the most basic rights. In April 2016, Saudi Arabia announced Vision 2030, which declares that the government will \u201ccontinue to develop [women\u2019s] talents, invest in their productive capabilities and enable them to strengthen their future and contribute to the development of our society and economy.\u201d The government cannot achieve this vision if it does not abolish the male guardianship system, which severely restricts women\u2019s ability to participate meaningfully in Saudi society and its economy.", + " In discussing the role of women in Saudi Arabia and the pace of change, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in his Economist interview, \u201cIt just takes time.\u201d That time is now.\n\nRecommendations Immediate Recommendations Ministry of Interior : Abolish ministerial regulations requiring a guardian to apply for or renew a woman\u2019s passport, and for guardian permission for a woman to travel abroad. Issue family cards to all women. Eliminate any restrictions on female driving, ensuring that women are afforded the same opportunities to drive and acquire a driver\u2019s license as men. Issue clear and explicit directives allowing women to be released from prisons and juvenile detention centers without being released to a male guardian.\n\n:", + " Ministry of Labor and Social Development : Issue clear and explicit directives to all shelters stating that women may leave the shelter independently without the permission of a male guardian and without a requirement that she be released to a male relative. Propose amendments to the Protection from Abuse Law, including to article 1, explicitly stating that no family member has the authority to \u201cdiscipline\u201d female dependents using violence, that \u201cdiscipline\u201d is not a legal defense in cases involving family violence, immediately rescinding guardianship from those accused of abuse, immediately rescinding guardianship from those who refuse to agree to a woman\u2019s release from prison or her request to leave a shelter,", + " and amending articles in the law that appear to prioritize family reconciliation over protection of the woman or limit shelter options to cases determined to be sufficiently severe by the ministry. Issue clear and explicit directives to all places of employment prohibiting employers from requesting guardian permission from women to work and imposing penalties on any employers that do so. Abolish fines and regulations that discriminate between men and women, including those requiring employers to maintain separate office spaces for women and imposing strict dress code requirements specifically on women.\n\n: Ministry of Education : Issue and impose sanctions on educational institutions that delay, hinder, or prevent paramedic access to women\u2019s university campuses and schools. Issue a directive clearly stating that women may study abroad on government scholarships without a male guardian\u2019s permission or accompanied by a male relative.\n\n:", + " Ministry of Health: Issue clear and explicit directives to all hospitals and clinics prohibiting all staff from requesting guardian permission to allow an adult woman to be admitted or receive care of any kind, and establish penalties for institutions that continue to require guardian permission.\n\nGeneral Recommendations King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Sa\u2019ud: Issue clear and explicit directives to the religious police stating they do not have the authority to impose sex segregation. Issue clear and explicit directives to the Ministries of Health, Education, Interior, Justice, and Labor and Social Development prohibiting staff from requesting a guardian\u2019s presence or permission to allow a woman access to any government service. Promulgate by royal decree a prohibition on any form of discrimination against women in practice,", + " policy or regulation and the dismantling of the legal guardianship system for adult women, guaranteeing that women are considered to have reached full legal capacity at 18 years of age. Task the Social Affairs, Family and Youth Committee in the Shura Council with monitoring the implementation of CEDAW and Saudi laws, royal decrees, and ministerial decisions that advance women\u2019s rights, including decisions that limit a guardian\u2019s authority. Require an annual report on progress be delivered to the king and made public. Lift reservations made upon acceding to CEDAW, which violate the object and purpose of the treaty, and sign and ratify the Optional Protocol to CEDAW.\n\nMinistry of Interior : Establish separate units within police stations focused on domestic violence and ensure that all police stations employ female officers.", + " Issue guidelines to police on how to deal with domestic violence cases, including penalties for officers who do not allow women to file a complaint, refuse to enter a residence without male approval when abuse is reported, fail to refer cases to the Ministry of Labor and Social Development, or who share case details with a guardian in a manner that violates privacy or may expose a woman to violence. Support proposed amendments to the Civil Status Law to allow women to obtain all forms of identification available to men and to register themselves, their marital status, and births and deaths of family members with Civil Status offices.\n\n: Ministry of Justice: Ensure women are afforded the same rights as men to file a case and testify in court on all matters,", + " and enforce penalties for court officers who fail to accept a woman\u2019s identification card and allow her to access court without a male relative identifying her. Undertake a thorough review and issue guidance to judges prohibiting them from enforcing a guardian\u2019s authority over a woman through the legal system. Abolish the right to file legal claims against women based on \u2018 uquq (parental disobedience), inqiyad (submission to a guardian\u2019s authority), or leaving the marital or guardian\u2019s home. Remove these claims from the ministry\u2019s electronic complaint system. Issue a directive to the Board of Grievances to hear cases of discrimination against women by state bodies or officials.", + " Support a new family law code that ensures men and women have equal rights in family matters, including establishing 18 as the minimum age of marriage, ensuring all adults have the right to freely enter into marriage, that which parent a child should live with is determined on the basis of the best interests of the child in line with international standards, and that during a marriage and following divorce, parents have equal rights to open bank accounts, enroll in school, make health decisions or travel with children.\n\n\n\nMethodology This report is based on interviews conducted with 61 Saudi individuals, including 54 women and seven men. A Human Rights Watch researcher conducted eight interviews in person with individuals based outside Saudi Arabia and 43 interviews by phone,", + " Skype, or other electronic communication between September 2015 and June 2016. Interviews included Saudi women from a range of professional and socioeconomic backgrounds. Most individuals were from Jeddah or Riyadh, but some individuals were from the Eastern Province (Dammam, Al-Khobar, Qatif, and Dhahran), central Saudi Arabia (Riyadh, Al-Kharj and Shaqra), southern Saudi Arabia (al-Abha), and the Hijaz (Jeddah and Mecca). Three individuals from the Shia minority community and one LGBT woman were interviewed. Human Rights Watch developed recommendations following discussions with 12 Saudi women\u2019s rights activists.", + " The report also includes research from Human Rights Watch press releases published between 2010 and 2015. Human Rights Watch published another report on the male guardianship system in Saudi Arabia in 2008. All participants were informed of the purpose of the interview, the ways in which the data would be used and given assurances of anonymity. This report uses pseudonyms for all interviewees and withholds other identifying information to protect their privacy and their security. Saudi terrorism regulations criminalize harming the reputation of Saudi Arabia, and the government has imprisoned human rights activists who have shared information with foreign organizations. None of the interviewees received monetary or other incentives for speaking with Human Rights Watch.", + " All interviews were conducted in English or Arabic. Human Rights Watch was unable to conduct fact-finding inside Saudi Arabia for this report, despite sending official visa requests to the Saudi government in October 2015. The government has not issued official visas to Human Rights Watch staff since 2008. In May 2016, Human Rights Watch sent letters to the Ministries of Health, Interior, Justice, Labor and Social Development, and Education requesting meetings to discuss the report findings prior to publication. Human Rights Watch received no response.\n\nI. The Religious Establishment The role and rights of women in Saudi Arabia are disproportionately affected by the views of the Wahhabi religious establishment,", + " which largely opposes the empowerment of women and follows what is often considered the most restrictive interpretation of Islam. Originating, developing, and spreading from Najd in central Arabia, it does not\u2014according to numerous scholars\u2014reflect the true diversity of views within the country regarding the role of women or the state\u2019s role in enforcing Islamic law. Saudi Arabia applies this interpretation of Sharia as the law of the land, elevates the Quran and the Prophet\u2019s traditions to the status of a constitution, and has institutionalized the religious establishment and its perceptions of women into governance structures.[4] The religious establishment largely controls education, the all-male judiciary, and policing of \u201cpublic morality\u201d through the religious police,", + " or the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, informally known as the Hai\u2019a.[5] The Council of Senior Religious Scholars, the highest religious body that acts as a forum for regular consultation with the king, who created the council in 1971, has consistently promoted opinions that restrict women\u2019s rights.[6] The General Presidency for Scholarly Research and \u2018Ifta, the official institution entrusted with issuing Islamic legal opinions, has also consistently limited women\u2019s ability to make independent decisions in its fatwas. The General Presidency\u2019s website lists dozens of fatwas on women, many of which reinforce men\u2019s authority over women and restrict their ability to move,", + " work, and study. For example, the General Presidency stated that women cannot serve in leadership positions over men because of their \u201cdeficient reasoning and rationality, in addition to their passion that prevails over their thinking.\u201d In another ruling, it stated, \u201cA woman should not leave her house, except with her husband\u2019s permission.\u201d If he does, \u201cShe should go out unadorned so that she does not attract men\u2019s attention.\u2026 Her husband can prevent her from going out if she insists on displaying her beauty.\u201d Islamic scholars who support the imposition of male guardianship do so based on an ambiguous verse in the Quran. The verse states,", + " \u201cMen are the protectors and maintainers of women, because God has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means\u201d (Quran 4:34).[10] Other Islamic legal experts have argued that male guardianship as interpreted by Saudi Arabia misinterprets fundamental Quranic precepts and that male scholars have elevated guardianship over Quranic concepts like equality and respect between the sexes. Professors, Islamic feminists and a former Saudi judge also told Human Rights Watch that the way in which Saudi Arabia imposes guardianship over women is not required by Islamic law. Sura, 62,", + " a retired university lecturer, said: \u201cWe are living in a male society; that is for sure. Religion is being interpreted through a male perspective for the sake of the man.\u201d[12] The former judge explained: According to the Sharia, there is no need for any guardian [for women], except when she travels in a risky situation.\u2026 All the Sharia schools consider that women after adulthood \u2026 should be considered as an independent human being\u2026. royal orders and ministry orders talking about the permission of the guardian against the women \u2026 aren\u2019t rooted in Sharia law. The state itself has actively imposed restrictions on women or failed to take measures to halt discriminatory cultural or social practices.", + " As Madawi Al-Rasheed, a prominent Saudi academic, said: \u201cThe interaction between the state, religious nationalism, and social and cultural forms of patriarchy\u201d has led to the continued restriction of women\u2019s rights in Saudi Arabia. Respected Saudi commentators and prominent women\u2019s rights activists have argued and continue to argue forcefully that women in Saudi Arabia are not only ready for the guardianship system to be reformed and ultimately abolished, but that these reforms are necessary in order to provide women the respect, and the rights, that they deserve.\n\nII. The Male Guardianship System My son is my guardian, believe it or not, and this is really humiliating... My own son,", + " the one I delivered, the one I raised, he is my guardian. \u2014Sura, 62, retired university lecturer, December 14, 2015 Every Saudi woman, regardless of her age, is under the authority of a male relative, her wali al-amr, or legal guardian. A woman\u2019s legal guardian has the authority to make a range of critical decisions on her behalf. A woman\u2019s other male relatives are also granted authority over her, although to a lesser extent than her legal guardian. A mahram, a male relative who it would be unacceptable to marry, has the authority to accompany a woman on a government scholarship abroad or to receive her when she leaves a domestic violence shelter.", + " Courts or other government services may ask a woman to be accompanied by a mu\u2019arif, a male relative who can verify a woman\u2019s identity while she is wearing a face veil. In practice, individuals and government officials may ask women to be accompanied by a male relative in order for her to conduct a range of important tasks, from co-signing a lease to filing a police complaint. A woman\u2019s legal guardian can also serve as a mahram or mu\u2019arif. In this report, the terms \u201cmale guardianship system\u201d and \u201cguardianship rules\u201d refer to the panoply of formal and informal barriers women in Saudi Arabia face when attempting to make decisions or take action without the presence or consent of a male relative.", + " Many aspects of the guardianship system are not codified in law but stem from informal practice\u2014both by private actors and government officials. As such, women\u2019s experience of guardianship restrictions varies widely based on a range of factors such as socioeconomic status, education level, and place of residence. Zeina, a Saudi businesswoman in her 40s, told Human Rights Watch that women's experience with guardianship is closely related to social class. In her experience, wealthier families, including male guardians, tend to be more open to women working and traveling, whereas families in lower socioeconomic classes are generally more conservative. Wealthier women, she explained,", + " can also afford to pay some of the costs associated with women\u2019s rights restrictions, like male driver\u2019s fees. As she said, \u201cAs you go up the social ladder it becomes easy; as you go down it becomes almost impossible.\u201d A woman\u2019s experience in Saudi Arabia remains dependent on the good will of her male guardian. Dozens of women told Human Rights Watch they were fortunate to have supportive male guardians who allowed them to work, study, travel and marry, but said that they should not require permission to make these choices in the first place. Dr. Zahra, who treats domestic violence cases in the hospital where she works, said that her husband had always been kind to her but \u201cin the back of [your]", + " brain, [you know], if he wants to be mean, he could be mean. And the law would protect him. I don\u2019t want to live my life with this in the back of my mind... I want my rights.\u201d Transferring Guardianship Initially, a woman is under the legal guardianship of her father. When she marries, her husband becomes her new guardian. When a guardian dies or a woman divorces, a new guardian is appointed, generally, the next oldest mahram. Guardianship authority may revert to a woman\u2019s younger brother or son if she does not have older male relatives. As Mara explained, \u201cI am divorced,", + " so I resort back to my brothers. It happens immediately. If there is a father, I go back to my father. It is like I am property.\u201d Women may transfer legal guardianship to another male relative, but it is an extremely difficult legal process. Four activists told Human Rights Watch that it is very difficult to transfer guardianship outside of cases of severe abuse or if a woman can otherwise prove the guardian is incapable, for example due to old age. Even then, it can only be done through a court order and can be difficult to establish the requisite level of proof. Aisha, a woman\u2019s rights activist, said she was aware of some cases where women successfully transferred guardianship,", + " but that many women were unsuccessful. \u201cAs Long As He is Not Beating You, He Can Do Whatever He Wants\u201d Zahra, 25, told Human Rights Watch that her father beat her and her sister when they were children. When Zahra was 12, her father beat her so severely that she temporarily lost her vision. She thought she was going blind. Zahra\u2019s mother took her to the hospital. The doctor told her she was lucky the damage was not permanent. Zahra\u2019s parents divorced. The girls lived with their mother, but their father remained their legal guardian and threatened to force them to live with him if they disobeyed him.", + " In 2011, the government awarded Zahra\u2019s sister a scholarship to study abroad, but Zahra\u2019s father refused to let her go. Zahra also wanted to pursue a master\u2019s degree abroad in a field not available in Saudi Arabia. Her father refused. She said, \u201cI am lost in my career because that was my goal. Whenever someone tells me, \u2018You should have a five-year plan,\u2019 I say I can\u2019t. I\u2019ll have a five-year plan and then my dad would disagree. Why have a plan?\u201d Zahra and her sister sought help from a charity, but the organization told them that denial of travel or education abroad was not a sufficient basis to transfer guardianship.", + " According to Zahra, she and her sister told the charity that their father physically abused them when they were children, but the organization said it could not intervene unless the physical abuse was ongoing. Zahra\u2019s sister, who was one of the top students in her university, fell into depression, pulled out of school and remained at home for a year. In 2015, Zahra, who now needed to travel for work, called five lawyers to ask for help transferring guardianship away from her father. Each lawyer told her that denial of travel or forcing her to quit her job was not a sufficient basis for transferring guardianship. According to Zahra,", + " the lawyers told her, \u201cAs long as he is not beating you, he can do whatever he wants.\u201d When asked if she felt being unable to travel held her back in her career, Zahra said, \u201cDefinitely.\u201dHer father remains her guardian. Human Rights Watch spoke with women who said their friends or family members sought to marry to escape strict, conservative, or abusive fathers and brothers. Tala, in her late 20s, told Human Rights Watch: The guardianship system is always a nightmare. I don\u2019t want to get married because I don\u2019t want a stranger to control me\u2026 Basically, it is slavery. My sister married this guy to get away from my brother\u2026 If I have to go back to Saudi,", + " I am going to be just like the other Saudi girls and get married to get away from my brother.\u201d International Law and Guardianship The practice of male guardianship in its many forms impairs and in some cases nullifies women\u2019s exercise of a host of human rights, violating the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which Saudi Arabia ratified in 2000, and other human rights conventions. CEDAW obliges Saudi Arabia \u201cto pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating discrimination against women.\u201d Numerous other treaties and treaty bodies acknowledge women\u2019s equal right to men to travel,", + " work, study, access health care, and marry without discrimination. CEDAW explicitly acknowledges social and cultural norms as the source of many women\u2019s rights abuses and obliges governments to take appropriate measures to address such abuses. In 2008, the UN Committee on Discrimination Against Women expressed concern that the concept of male guardianship over women in Saudi Arabia \u201cseverely limits women\u2019s exercise of their rights under the Convention\u201d and called on Saudi Arabia to \u201ctake immediate steps to end the practice of male guardianship over women.\u201d Saudi Arabia has failed both to end state practice premised on the inferiority of women and to take sufficient measures to tackle discriminatory customary practices.", + " The UN Committee on Discrimination Against Women and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have called on states to pursue targeted policies \u201cof an immediate nature\u201d to combat traditional harmful practices and noted that they \u201ccannot justify any delay on any grounds, including cultural and religious grounds.\u201d Moreover, the committees noted that states are: [O]bliged to take all appropriate measures\u2026. to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices that are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women.", + " In 2009 and again in 2013, Saudi Arabia agreed to abolish the male guardianship system and all discrimination against women following its universal periodic review at the UN Human Rights Council. Since making these promises, Saudi Arabia has taken steps to lessen guardians\u2019 control over women, including, for example by no longer requiring women to provide guardian permission to work or to bring a male relative to identify them in court, but has failed to abolish the system or adequately combat deeply entrenched discrimination, failing in its duty \u201cto pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating discrimination against women.\u201d\n\nIII. Restricting Freedom of Movement It is very hard to say you live,", + " you just survive... The simple freedom of opening your door and going out for a walk\u2026 I have to call a driver to get my coffee. What if I want to walk in peace and get my coffee and come back? \u2014Rania, 34-year-old Saudi woman, November 17, 2015 No country restricts the movement of its female population more than Saudi Arabia. Women cannot apply for a passport or travel outside the country without guardian approval and women are barred from driving. In practice, some women are prevented from leaving their homes without their guardian\u2019s permission and guardians can bring legal claims requesting that judges order a female dependent to return to the family home.", + " Restrictions imposed on women\u2019s freedom of movement violate article 15(4) of CEDAW. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also provides: \u201cEveryone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state\u2026 [and] to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.\u201d These restrictions also inhibit the effectiveness of other reforms Saudi Arabia has undertaken, such as in the labor sector, by making it more difficult for enterprising women to attend business conferences or pursue academic studies outside the country, or to travel to and from work inside the country. As Maysa, a Saudi woman who struggled to convince her father to allow her to work and study abroad,", + " said \u201cFreedom of movement \u2026 is one of the basic human rights and that is what I really want to change.\u201d The ability to control a woman\u2019s movement is a powerful tool for male guardians to exploit female dependents. Guardians have conditioned consent for a woman to travel on payment of money or dropping a court case against them. Restrictions on Travel Abroad Saudi authorities deny women the right to acquire a passport without a guardian\u2019s permission. According to Ministry of Interior regulations, a guardian must apply for and collect a passport for women and minors. The government\u2019s electronic portal requires a male guardian to make the actual application for or renewal of a woman\u2019s passport.", + " Reema, 36, told Human Rights Watch she went to renew her passport when she was separated from her husband. The women\u2019s section refused her request. Reema offered to have her father sign the paperwork, but officials insisted her husband, her guardian, must sign. Because she was unable to renew her passport, Reema had to cancel a number of workshops and meetings abroad that she had planned to attend. In addition to requiring a guardian\u2019s approval to receive or renew a passport, the Ministry of Interior prohibits Saudi women from traveling outside the country without the approval of their male guardian. One woman said that her 64-year-old widowed mother had to seek her 27-year-old son\u2019s permission to travel.", + " Khadija, 42, a former journalist, said, \u201cMy dad passed away, [so for] my mom and myself, my brother is our guardian. It is really ridiculous. If she wants to travel, she needs the permission of her son. Why? Come on, why would an elderly woman need the permission of her son or even grandson to travel or to do anything?\u201d In 2011, the Ministry of Interior set up an electronic portal, \u201cAbsher,\u201d where male guardians can issue passports to female dependents and approve their travel. The site allows guardians to provide permission for a single trip, for multiple trips or until the passport expires.", + " Khadija told Human Rights Watch: This is sort of progress in a way where the system allows for the guardian to give an open permission, rather than for every trip\u2026 but that is not the point. I am old enough to travel when I want to travel. I don\u2019t need someone else\u2019s permission. After Saudi authorities launched \u201cAbsher,\u201d they began to notify male guardians about the entry and exit of their female dependents to and from Saudi Arabia via an automatic text message. In 2012, women began to vocally critique the text message alerts on Twitter. By early 2014, the authorities announced that they suspended text notifications.", + " Maysa, 25, said, \u201cYou would think the government would use technology to move forward but instead they are moving backwards.\u201d Human Rights Watch spoke with multiple women whose guardians had threatened to or in fact refused to allow them to travel abroad. Rania, 34, came back to Saudi Arabia to visit her family after living abroad for many years. When she sought to leave, her brothers, acting as her guardians, refused to renew her travel permission. Rania said she had to resort to some drastic measures, including refusing food, until her brothers finally relented and allowed her to travel again.[46] Layla, also in her 30s,", + " told Human Rights Watch that her father used to take her travel permission slip away after fights.[47] Tala and Travel Permission Tala, in her late 20s, recently completed a Master\u2019s degree outside Saudi Arabia. Tala told Human Rights Watch that she wanted to return to visit her family but had not done so for more than three years over threats from male family members that they would prevent future travel. For example, after seeing some of Tala\u2019s posts on Twitter where she questioned her religion in 2012, her brother threatened to rip up her passport if she came back to Saudi Arabia. Tala\u2019s father also threatened to call the Saudi embassy,", + " ask them to force her to come back, and to not renew her passport or her travel permission once she had. Neither Tala\u2019s father nor brother followed through on their threats, but Tala, whose passport was set to expire in a few months at time of writing, said she did not know what to do. She told Human Rights Watch, \u201cI can\u2019t go back because I am constantly afraid that my brother and my dad will prevent me from coming back [abroad]. They have all the authority to do so.\u201d[48] Men occasionally extort female dependents for travel permission. Zeina, a successful businesswoman, told Human Rights Watch that her friend who works as an instructor at a university abroad \u201cstill struggles with the fact that her guardianship is completely controlled by her father with whom she has zero connection.\u201d Zeina said her friend had to hire a lawyer to negotiate with her father,", + " who was seeking financial compensation in return for granting his daughter travel permission. Requiring guardian permission for women to travel makes it difficult for women exposed to family violence to escape abuse. Human Rights Watch spoke with women who felt their only safe option was to leave the country after male family members abused and threatened them, but who were unable to convince their fathers to allow them to travel. Guardians revoking or withholding travel permission may also seriously hamper a woman\u2019s professional advancement. Over eight years, the guardians of at least two of Dr. Heba\u2019s colleagues prevented them from pursuing advanced degrees abroad. Maysa, 25, said that when she wanted to complete an advanced degree abroad,", + " her parents initially refused. Regardless, she applied to a foreign university. Following her acceptance, her father continuously changed his mind\u2014agreeing to let her go and then revoking his consent\u2014until two days before the flight. As Maysa said, \u201cEven though he is educated, he thinks it is one of his rights to not allow his daughter to continue her education.\u201d She went on to explain, \u201cMy other friends are hopeless. I know that they do want to go and explore the world, but for them they know there is no way out unless they get married.\u201d She noted that not all of her friends\u2019 new husbands met their expectations of greater freedoms.", + " Mahram for Scholarships Abroad The government has paid for thousands of women\u2019s education abroad through the King Abdullah Scholarship Program, instituted in 2005. According to Ministry of Education statistics, 62.3 percent of program participants were women between 2009 and 2014. Multiple women told Human Rights Watch that the scholarship program had been incredibly helpful in letting them pursue opportunities for higher education. Hanan, 36, an architect, said that education is the weapon women need to realize all of their rights, noting, \u201cIf King Abdullah did not do that, I don\u2019t know what the situation would be now\u2026 This is the most beneficial thing the government ever spent their money on.\u201d The scholarships come with requirements.", + " The Ministry of Education requires that a woman\u2019s male guardian sign a form consenting to allow her to study outside the country. The ministry also requires that a mahram (an unmarriageable male relative who may or may not also be the woman\u2019s official guardian) accompany a woman for the duration of her studies. The government provides living expenses for the mahram. Zayn and Nisreen, 24 and 25, explained that if a woman\u2019s guardian cannot accompany her, he must legally transfer authority to another male relative to serve as a mahram. Nisreen and Zayn said they had been fortunate that their brothers could travel with them as mahrams,", + " but that they knew smart, hard-working women unable to study on a scholarship because of the mahram requirement. Najma, for example, was awarded a government scholarship and worked hard to convince her father to allow her to study abroad. He finally agreed. She left the country, made friends, and fell in love. She visited her family in Saudi Arabia after a few years. Najma\u2019s mother found out she was in a relationship and took away her passport and her national ID card. Najma believed her father revoked her travel permission, and felt she had no means of legal recourse to recover her passport or travel. Najma is unable to finish her degree.", + " While the mahram requirements are not always strictly enforced, officially requiring a mahram and guardian consent are onerous requirements for women hoping to pursue further education abroad, especially where men may use it for extortion. Dr. Heba told Human Rights Watch that her divorced friend had three children, all girls. After the girls received scholarships to study abroad, the friend\u2019s ex-husband forced her to pay him thousands of Saudi riyals to accompany his daughters abroad and to serve as their mahram. Dr. Heba said her friend had no choice, as the girls\u2019 father was the only one that could give them the permission to travel and to accept the scholarship.", + " A guardian\u2019s refusal to provide permission can hamper a women\u2019s professional advancement. Khadija, 42, said that one of her employees hoped to go abroad to continue her studies. After the woman's father died, her brother became her guardian. He refused to allow his sister to follow through on her plans, forcing her to stay in the country. Restrictions on Domestic Movement Formally, women do not require guardian permission to travel anywhere inside Saudi Arabia, including flying between cities. Informally, women may require their guardian\u2019s permission to leave the home. A fatwa issued by the General Presidency for Scholarly Research and \u2018Ifta,", + " a state institution tasked with issuing Islamic legal opinions, on women\u2019s work states, \u201c[A] woman should not leave her house, except with her husband\u2019s permission.\u201d Activists told Human Rights Watch that it is very easy for male guardians to force women to remain indoors and prevent them from leaving home without their permission. Courts provide support for this practice, occasionally upholding a guardian\u2019s right to obedience from his female dependents, including the obligation to abide by his decisions regarding their movement. For example, in November 2015, a Saudi appeals court upheld a ruling of 30 lashes for a man for slapping his wife and spitting on her.", + " According to Arab News, the husband said he hit his wife because she had gone out of the house several times without seeking his permission. The judge reportedly ordered the wife to abide by her husband's request not to leave the house without his permission. The Ministry of Justice explicitly bolsters a guardian\u2019s authority to deny women freedom of movement. The ministry\u2019s website contains a list of complaints that can be filed through its electronic complaints system, including two which request that a judge order the return of a woman to a mahram or a wife to the marital home. Some universities also restrict women\u2019s movement. Female students living in university dormitories may be prohibited by school authorities from leaving campus even in cases of illness except with a legal guardian.", + " Amira, 42, told Human Rights Watch that her daughter, 22, studied in a Riyadh college and lived in a dormitory. The college required her daughter\u2019s legal guardian to sign her out of the dormitory. Amira\u2019s husband had to go to court to obtain a legal document authorizing Amira and their son to visit and allow his daughter to exit the university compound with them. As Amira\u2019s home is four hours away from Riyadh, her daughter is forced to sit inside the compound for months at a time, until either her father or someone legally authorized takes her out. She said it is \u201clike a prison.\u201d The policy sometimes prevents Amira\u2019s daughter from completing simple tasks,", + " like fixing a broken laptop. Driving Women driving leads to many evils and negative consequences\u2026. \u2014Fatwa banning driving Saudi Arabia remains the only country in the world that prohibits women from driving. The government\u2019s restrictions on driving combined with limited affordable and accessible public transportation options prevent Saudi women from fully participating in public life. Saudi Arabia had a customary ban on women driving until 1990, when it became official policy. On November 6, 1990, 47 women drove in a convoy in Riyadh in protest. The traffic police stopped the protesters, took them into custody, and released them only after their male guardians signed statements that the women would not attempt to drive again.", + " Sho\"rtl\"y after, the late Shaikh 'Abd al-\u2018Aziz bin Baz, then-chairman of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars, issued a fatwa prohibiting driving. The fatwa stated, \u201cWomen driving leads to many evils and negative consequences\u2026 [including] mixing with men without her being on her guard\u2026 Sharia prohibits all things that lead to vice. Women\u2019s driving is one of the things that leads to that. This is well-known.\u201d The fatwa on the driving ban cited the goal of preventing women from committing acts of khilwa (mixing with unrelated members of the opposite sex). Yet,", + " because of the ban, women must take taxis driven by men or hire male drivers, often foreign nationals. Then-Minister of Interior Prince Nayef officially banned women\u2019s driving by decree on the basis of this fatwa. Women who have driven in the country have subsequently been arrested. Women have continued to campaign for the right to drive. In 2011, dozens of women filmed themselves driving and posted the videos to social media as part of a campaign entitled \u201cwomen2drive.\u201d Traffic police stopped many women and made their male guardians sign pledges that they would not allow the women to drive again. Saudi authorities have issued conflicting statements regarding whether women would be allowed to drive.", + " In 2005, then-King Abdullah said in an interview that he believed \u201cthe day will come when women drive.\u201d In September 2013, the head of the Hai\u2019astated that Islamic law does not forbid women from driving. A month later, Saudi women launched the October 26 driving campaign, including publishing videos of women driving and Saudi men giving the thumbs-up sign to show their support. In response to the campaign, on October 22, 2013, more than 100 clerics visitedthe Royal Court, the office of the king, to protest \u201cthe conspiracy of women driving.\u201d The following day, a Ministry of Interior spokesperson issued a statement saying that laws would be enforced on October 26.\n\nIV.", + " Violence against Women I would rather you kill me than give the man who abuses me control over my life. \u2014Zahra, 25-year-old Saudi woman, April 7, 2016 As in many countries across the globe, many women in Saudi Arabia are regularly and repeatedly subjected to violence. This violence often occurs in the family. Over a one-year period ending October 13, 2015, the Ministry of Labor and Social Development reported that it encountered 8,016 cases of physical and psychological abuse in Saudi Arabia, most involving violence between spouses. The ministry recorded 961 cases of domestic violence in one year in one major city alone,", + " with most cases involving women and children being denied their basic rights to education, health care, or personal identification documents. Such forms of violence are clearly linked to abuse of the guardianship system. It is likely the vast majority of cases go unreported, given the isolation of victims and difficulty of reporting and seeking redress. Domestic violence prevents women from exercising a host of rights, including the right not to be subject to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, to security of the person, and, in extreme cases, to life. Saudi authorities have increasingly recognized violence against women as a public policy issue. In 2005, the government created the National Family Safety Program,", + " which focuses on ensuring that domestic violence survivors have access to shelters and protection mechanisms. In 2013, the King Khalid Foundation, a charity set up in 2001 by family members of the late king, launched a high-profilemedia campaign claiming that \u201cthe phenomenon of battered women\u201d in Saudi Arabia is \u201cmuch greater than is apparent on the surface.\u201d The same year, the king ratified a law criminalizing domestic abuse. While women told Human Rights Watch the law was a significant step forward, they also critiqued it for being overly general, not robustly enforced, and not adequately defining solutions or even options for women abused by their guardians.", + " The male guardianship system creates an environment ripe for abuse. Saudi women have repeatedly called for the immediate removal of authority from any guardian who abuses a female family member. Aisha, who has many years of experience helping domestic violence survivors, said, \u201cThis is what we called [for]: To protect [a woman] from [her] abuser, [we] need to give her the right to protect herself.\u201d As one Saudi commentator wrote, \u201cThe definition of what is allowed [to guardians] and what is not remains vague \u2026 encourag[ing] perpetrators to indulge in physical and mental abuse of women.\u201d Guardianship makes it incredibly difficult for victims of violence to seek protection or obtain legal redress for abuse.", + " The near impossibility of transferring guardianship away from abusive relatives can condemn women to a life of violence. Women occasionally struggle to report an incident to the police or access social services or the courts without a male relative. According to multiple domestic violence specialists and women\u2019s rights activists, Ministry of Labor and Social Development officials often prefer to reconcile female victims of violence with her family to other options. Prisons, juvenile detention centers, and shelters may only allow women to exit into the care of a male relative.[93] Imprisoned women whose families refuse to release them are forced to remain in prison or in shelters until they reconcile with their families or obtain a new guardian,", + " occasionally only after arranged marriages. When legal guardianship impedes redress for victims of violence, Saudi Arabia is failing to act with due diligence to prevent, investigate, and punish violence against women, putting women\u2019s health and lives in jeopardy. The UN Committee on Discrimination Against Women urged states to ensure that, \u201cin both public and family life, women will be free of the gender-based violence that so seriously impedes their rights and freedoms as individuals.\u201d Domestic Violence Legislation On August 26, 2013, the Council of Ministers approved the Protection from Abuse law, which then-King Abdullah ratified. In 2014, the Ministry of Labor and Social Development issued implementing regulations,", + " providing further guidance on how agencies should enforce the law. Prior to adoption of this law, Saudi criminal justice authorities had no written legal guidelines to treat domestic abuse as criminal behavior. In the absence of a written penal code, judges rely solely on their individual interpretations of uncodified Sharia to determine whether certain actions are defined as criminal. The Protection from Abuse law defines abuse as, \u201cAny form of exploitation or physical, psychological, or sexual ill-treatment, or threat thereof, perpetrated by one person against another which exceeds the bounds of the guardianship\u2026\u201d. The law sets the penalty for domestic abuse at between one month and one year in prison and a fine of between 5,", + "000 (US$1333) and 50,000 (US$13,330) riyals unless Sharia provides for a harsher sentence. The law defines abuse as physical, psychological, or sexual abuse, but does not explicitly state that marital rape is a crime. While the law and the implementing regulations clearly state a guardian may be guilty of abuse, the definition of abuse condones some harm by stating that abuse is only that which \u201cexceed the bounds of the guardianship.\u201d It does not clarify what actions would be permissible within the bounds of guardianship and what would exceed it. The law also does not explicitly include economic abuse as one of the elements of domestic abuse as required under international standards.", + " Failing to clearly define the bounds of guardianship is particularly problematic in Saudi Arabia, where male relatives can bring legal claims against \u201cdisobedient\u201d female dependents. Parents may bring legal claims against their children for \u2018uquq (parental disobedience), guardians may bring claims for inqiyad (asserting their right for dependents, including adult women, to submit to their authority), men can bring claims ordering their wives be returned to the marital home, and a mahram (male unmarriageable relative) can request his female relative be returned to him. Maysa, a law graduate, said that punishments for women convicted of disobedience can range from being sent home to imprisonment.", + " These claims, including \u2018uquq and inqiyad, are included on the list of complaints that can be filed through the Ministry of Justice\u2019s electronic complaints system. Women told Human Rights Watch that courts and other authorities believe guardians have the right to \u201cdiscipline\u201d their dependents. Maysa, who studied law, told Human Rights Watch that the definition of what constitutes acceptable discipline in court varies based on which judge is interpreting a case. As she put it, \u201cThere is no limit to what a guardian can do, [although] he probably can\u2019t kill her.\u201d Dr. Abeer, a medical professional who specializes in domestic violence,", + " told Human Rights Watch that many in Saudi Arabia, including some social workers, believe guardians have the right to use physical violence to discipline women and children. According to her, the definition of abuse as currently codified maintains the right of the guardian to do, \u201cbasically, whatever they want.\u201d Fortunately, she said that in her experience judges have not been interpreting the law this way and have instead increasingly recognized violence by guardians as domestic abuse. Difficulties Reporting Abuse Since the adoption of the Protection from Abuse Law of 2013, the government has facilitated reporting of abuse. The law requires individuals, including public servants, to report abuseand gives the police and Ministry of Labor and Social Development the authority to respond to reports of abuse.", + " The implementing regulations specify that guardian consent is not required to accept or respond to reports of abuse. In 2016, the Ministry of Labor and Social Development launched an all-female staffed center in Riyadh to receive reports of domestic abuse 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The center, which received 1,890 calls within the first three days of operation, refers cases of domestic abuse to protection teams across the country or, in severe cases, to the police. Despite these steps forward, women still struggle to report abuse, particularly with the police. While Human Rights Watch spoke with women who had filed complaints with the police without a male relative,", + " others said police had turned them away or they felt uncomfortable going to a police station without a male relative accompanying them. The prevailing environment of sex segregation makes women hesitant to walk into a police station. Almost all police officers are male, according to a women\u2019s rights activist. She said employing female police officers, especially to handle domestic violence cases, would be a \u201cfantastic\u201d improvement. Police officers do not require a guardian\u2019s permission to hear a complaint as a matter of law, but some officers do ask women to file a complaint with or through a guardian or another male relative. According to four women with significant experience handling domestic violence cases, police occasionally call or send women back to their guardians,", + " even when the woman is attempting to report abuse. Sana, a woman\u2019s rights activist, told Human Rights Watch that the police are far more likely to intervene in an abuse case if a woman\u2019s male relatives involve themselves and support her claim. A Saudi commentator reported in 2013 that an abused woman who had been locked in a bathroom and urinated on by her husband sought help from the police. According to the writer, the police would not accept her complaint outside the presence of a male guardian.[116] Mara, one of the abuse specialists, said, \u201cIn [the] back of [the] woman\u2019s mind, they know they have to have a [male relative]", + " with them in police stations.\u201d[117] The Protection from Abuse Law provides an important measure: The Ministry of Labor and Social Development may, in a case of severe abuse, make an \u201cemergency intervention or enter a place where abuse has taken place,\u201d including without guardian permission. Dr. Zahra said that a social worker with whom she works reported that the ministry had done so in a number of cases in her province.[118] In other provinces, however, the ministry and police had not been as responsive. Farah, a child protection specialist, told Human Rights Watch that in cases she has observed, authorities often said they could not enter a house without guardian permission or special permission from a local authority.", + " Amira, 42, told Human Rights Watch about an instance in 2015 when the police refused to enter a woman\u2019s house without her husband\u2019s permission after she reported his abuse. The law also provides that in cases where abuse is \u201cserious,\u201d the ministry may move a perpetrator out of the home. Two women\u2019s rights activists told Human Rights Watch that police will now place perpetrators in jail if a woman has been visibly beaten or has a medical record indicating abuse. Sowsan, another abuse specialist, told Human Rights Watch of a 2014 case in which a woman reported her husband, who had severely choked her, to the police.", + " The police arrested the husband, but then called the woman and told her that her husband would not do it again and that she should come to provide bail and release him. Sowsan explained that police often pressure women to forgive their husbands. She said, \u201cWomen don\u2019t leave their home unless facing death, so you can imagine the consequences.\u201d Individuals who attempt to report abuse or provide help to women subject to abuse may find themselves prosecuted. In 2013, a Saudi court convicted two women\u2019s rights activists for \u201cinciting a woman against her husband,\u201d sentencing them to 10 months in prison and two-year travel bans. They had been trying to help a woman who claimed her husband locked her in her house and denied her adequate food and water.", + " Saudi women and migrant domestic workers who report abuse, including rape, sometimes face counter accusations, leaving them open to criminal prosecution. Women may be charged with moral crimes, like khilwa (mixing with unrelated members of the opposite sex), or with fleeing from their homes. The male guardianship system, as well as the criminalization of pre-marital consensual relationships between men and women and of \u201cparental disobedience,\u201d can trap women in domestic violence situations. Intisar, for instance, told Human Rights Watch that when her mother found out she was pregnant, she forced Intisar to have an abortion. As Intisar said,", + " \u201cI had no other choice\u2026 If my dad found out or one of my brothers, I\u2019ll be killed.\u201d Intisar said her mother also confined her to the house and threatened to send her to jail. Intisar felt she had no safe options, noting that the authorities, including the police and the court system, would side with her parents. Her mother had previously threatened to bring \u201cdisobedience\u201d claims against her and family members had beaten her during arguments. Fearing for her safety, Intisar wants to leave the country, but has no means to travel without her father\u2019s consent. According to three abuse specialists,", + " the Protection from Abuse Law has made judges more responsive to abuse claims. Dr. Abeer, a psychologist who has worked on abuse cases for more than 15 years, said that individual judges have increasingly accepted psychological reports, testimony and expert opinions in custody and domestic violence cases following the implementation of the law. Dr. Zahra told Human Rights Watch that she has seen abuse cases proceed more quickly and women increasingly report to hospitals to receive medical reports of physical abuse. However, she said judges still maintain vast individual discretion and women would benefit from a clearer law. Prioritizing Reconciliation over Protection Under the Protection from Abuse Law, authorities can, in cases of abuse,", + " institute protection measures such as ensuring victims receive health care, taking steps to prevent recurrence of abuse, summoning and obliging offending parties to sign pledges, sending victims to shelters, and forcing offenders to undergo psychological treatment or rehabilitation. Even after the promulgation of the 2013 law, the authorities appear to prioritize reconciliation of the family over the safety of the woman. Basma, a woman\u2019s rights activist, told Human Rights Watch that women are hesitant to report abuse, knowing that the authorities will try to reconcile a woman with her abuser, rather than punishing him. Two women, who male family members had abused, told Human Rights Watch they would not report the abuse,", + " believing the authorities would not help them, but would instead return them to their abusers. Part of the problem is the legal guidance itself. According to article 10 of the 2013 law, \u201cpriority shall be given to preventive and counseling measures, unless the case requires otherwise.\u201d The 2014 implementing regulations state that one of the goals of the 2013 law is to provide rehabilitation programs with the aim of returning a woman to her family. This is counter to UN best practice on responding to domestic violence, which recommends that responses prioritize \u201cthe rights of the\u2026 survivor over other considerations, such as the reconciliation of families or communities.\u201d In non-severe cases,", + " the implementing regulations state a woman should remain with her family, but that the Ministry of Labor and Social Development must obtain a statement or pledge from the abuser and the head of the family that she will be protected from further abuse. Authorities required abusers to sign pledges as part of the response to abuse before the 2013 law. This proved ineffective, according to activists. In 2008, a woman fled from her home to a shelter in Riyadh, but her father and four uncles came to the shelter, arguing it was shameful for their daughter to remain there. According to a Ministry of Labor and Social Development official, \u201cThe [men]", + " made promises and signed papers that made it incumbent on them not to harm her.\u201d After releasing the woman to the men, the ministry learned the family killed her. Khadija, 42, who covered domestic violence cases as a reporter, said: It doesn\u2019t make sense to assume that [once] you\u2019ve brought in the guardian who is abusing the woman and make him promise, \u2018Oh I am not going to beat her again,\u2019 [then] things are fine and she [can be] signed out to him. Limited Shelter from Domestic Violence The Ministry of Labor and Social Development may place a victim of domestic violence, with the victim\u2019s consent,", + " in a shelter without informing or requesting permission from her guardian. But implementing regulations specify that the ministry should take women to shelters only in cases of \u201csevere\u201d abuse and where there is no other family to host her. Domestic abuse specialists agreed that shelter administrators continue to deal with women within the framework of guardianship, generally attempting to resolve the problem between the woman and her abuser, rather than working to empower her to live independently. Shelter administrations have different policies for arranging how a woman may leave a shelter. The 2014 implementing regulations state that a woman must be allowed to leave a shelter, not necessarily with her guardian, but \u201cin coordination with her family members in order to receive her.\u201d The shelter staff will encourage her family members to receive her,", + " including, if necessary, by facilitating a reconciliation process.[141] During a woman\u2019s stay in a shelter, she may leave for certain designated activities, but if she does not return at the appointed time, the shelter must immediately inform the police, absolve itself of responsibility for her case and, when there is justification, inform her family members. According to abuse specialists, shelter administrators generally prefer that a woman leaves in the care of her guardian but, if the guardian is the abuser, often allow her to leave with another mahram.[143] For example, Samar Badawi, whose father abused her, left a shelter in 2009 with the permission of the governor to live with her brother.", + " Another woman, Lulwa Abd al-Rahman, remained in a shelter for at least three years because she did not have permission from a male relative to exit, according to her fianc\u00e9. Other shelters appear to have policies that allow women to leave by themselves rather than into the care of a mahram. Dr. Abeer, a clinical psychologist, told Human Rights Watch that some shelters may \u201crelease\u201d a woman on her own if she has finalized any ongoing court cases related to the abuse. She added that it is practically difficult for women to live alone\u2014women still struggle to sign leases without a guardian and may require guardian permission to secure employment\u2014so they may return to their abusers.", + " As abuse often happens in the context of wider family dynamics, releasing a woman to another male relative other than her abuser does not necessarily ensure her safety. In 2009, Sura, a now-retired university lecturer, noticed one of her students was frequently late or absent. The student told Sura that her father sexually abused her. The student went to a shelter, but the shelter later released her to her uncle, who returned the girl to her father. According to Sura, the student told her that her father threatened her and told her he would kill her if she complained about the abuse again. Permission to Exit Prisons\u00ad\u00ad Women in Saudi prisons require a guardian to sign them out as a condition of their release.", + " As Dr. Heba explained, \u201cThe [authorities] keep a woman in jail\u2026 until her legal guardian comes and gets her, even if he is the one who put her in jail.\u201d If a family refuses to take a woman back to their home after she has finished her prison term, she must stay in prison or be transferred to a shelter. Continued detention following completion of a prison term, including forced stay at a shelter, constitutes arbitrary detention, is in breach of international standards, and is a form of discrimination and a violation of CEDAW. In November 2015, the Saudi Gazette reported that shelters took in 2,", + "706 women over a two-year period after their release from prison, most of whose families refused to take them home. The paper quoted a legal expert, who stated, \u201cThe guardianship of the fathers should be immediately revoked if they refuse to take their daughters back into their homes.\u201d Wajda, a psychologist, told Human Rights Watch that families often refuse to take back women accused of \u201cmoral\u201d crimes. Saudi Arabia punishes individuals for a range of \u201cmoral crimes\u201d which criminalize private consensual relations such as khilwa to zina (sexual relations outside marriage). Criminalizing these activities contravenes international standards and these \u201ccrimes\u201d are often applied in a manner that discriminates against women.", + " When women are released into the supervision of their families following \u201cmoral\u201d crimes, they may become victims of further violence, including so-called honor killings. Sana, a woman\u2019s rights activist, said, \u201cWhat is really horrible here is that because of this guardianship system, women can disappear and be buried in the desert and no one will do anything about it.\u201d In July 2009, a man killed his two sisters as they were signed out of a juvenile detention center by their father in Riyadh. According to Elaph newspaper, he killed his sisters after he discovered the nature of their \u201ccrime\u201d\u2014being found with two unrelated men.", + " In late 2015, Saudi Gazette reported that four women \u201cescaped\u201d from a Jeddah shelter. The four women served prison terms for \u201cethical crimes\u201d and authorities moved them to the shelter after their families refused to take them home. A source told Okaz that a court previously convicted one of the woman of huroob, or fleeing the guardian\u2019s home. After completing her sentence, her father refused to take her home. Authorities transferred her to a shelter. Her brother agreed to receive his sister, but she fled from his house, was arrested, and put back in the shelter. Okaz reported that the shelter exerted \u201csubstantial efforts\u201d before the woman\u2019s father agreed to let her marry,", + " that she stayed with her new husband for a few months and then fled. The authorities arrested her and returned her to the shelter. The woman was 19 at the time of her fourth \u201cescape\u201d from a state shelter. Instead of facilitating women\u2019s ability to live independently, the government appears to be attempting to address this problem by pushing women toward arranged marriages.[161] Six women knowledgeable about abuse cases told Human Rights Watch that authorities try to facilitate marriages for women whose families have refused to accept them following prison terms. Nada, 26, who was an inmate in a juvenile detention center, said authorities encouraged women to accept arranged marriages and noted that the men involved in these marriages often face difficult marriage prospects,", + " for example because they are non-Saudis or have \u201cdark pasts.\u201d Sowsan, an abuse specialist, said the government will find \u201cbad, random men... that just came out of prison, very dysfunctional men, who use [the women] as concubines.\u201d Nada explained that women are not forced to accept these marriages, but many do, and in such cases a judge steps in to serve as the woman\u2019s guardian authorizing the marriage. According to the six experts, women are then permitted to exit the shelter under the guardianship of their new husband. Women have the right to refuse to go back to their families or to get married,", + " but are forced to remain in the shelters if they refuse. Shelters often do not allow women to use cellphones, to exit the shelter freely, or to bring their adolescent sons with them into the shelter. Women at a Jeddah shelter reported to the National Society for Human Rights that staff occasionally mistreated women, and that the shelter was overcrowded, had poor facilities and prevented women from continuing their education or leaving the shelter. Forcing a woman who has escaped abuse by one man to choose between an arranged marriage to another, a life of imprisonment, or a return to abuse is no choice at all; it is a continuation of abuse.", + " In August 2015, a woman committed suicide in a shelter in Mecca. A note, purportedly written by her and circulated on social media, said: I decided to die to escape hell.\n\nV. Restricting Right to Equality in Marriage, Divorce, and Child Custody When a woman wants to divorce her husband, he can ask for anything [in order] to give her a divorce, even to give up custody. [While] he can \u2026 say \u201cyou are divorced\u201d through a text message. \u2014Sura, 62-year-old retired university lecturer, December 14, 2015 Inequality between men and women is deeply entrenched in Saudi marriage practices and creates an environment in which women are susceptible to family violence.", + " Unlike men, women require their guardians\u2019 permission to get married, and face a more difficult process when seeking divorce. In addition, a male relative may petition courts to forcibly divorce a marriage he deems unfit, and a woman\u2019s husband remains her legal guardian throughout the divorce process, until the divorce is finalized. While a rising divorce rate has increasingly made these issues a topic of public discussion, Saudi Arabia has failed to pass a law protecting women\u2019s rights in family issues. Saudi Arabia\u2019s discrimination against women in family relations violates CEDAW, which provides that states \u201cshall take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women in all matters relating to marriage and family relations.\u201d In particular,", + " Saudi Arabia violates women\u2019s equal right to freely enter into and to exit marriage and to ensure men and women have the same rights with regard to guardianship of children. Restricting the Right to Marry Freely Like many other Muslim-majority countries, Saudi Arabia relies on a personal law system based on Sharia, which treats marriage as a contract concluded by mutually consenting parties. Saudi law has no minimum age of marriage. Many other countries in the Middle East and North Africa that recognize Sharia as a source of law have set the marriage age at 18 or higher, with some allowing exceptions in limited circumstances. While the Shura Council discussed making 18 the minimum age of marriage along with a package of proposed personal status changes in 2013,", + " no formal rule has yet been passed. Local media continues to carry occasional reports of child marriages. Child marriage \u201cis any marriage where at least one of the parties is under 18 years of age.\u201d Child marriages violate a host of human rights and have lasting effects beyond adolescence as women and girls struggle with the health effects of becoming pregnant often and when young, their lack of education and economic independence, domestic violence, and marital rape.The UN Committee on Discrimination Against Women called on Saudi Arabia to \u201cprescribe and enforce a minimum age of marriage of 18 years.\u201d Saudi authorities limit a woman\u2019s ability to enter freely into marriage by requiring her to obtain the permission of a male guardian.", + " A woman\u2019s consent is generally given orally before a religious official officiating the marriage, and both the woman and her male guardian are required to sign the marriage contract. In 2016, the Justice Ministry issued a directive stating women must be provided a copy of the marriage contract. Men are not required to have their male guardian\u2019s consent and can marry up to four wives at one time. Despite the requirement of women\u2019s consent, forced marriages continue. According to a shadow report submitted by Saudi civil society activists to the UN Human Rights Council in 2013, forced marriages and child marriages are difficult to annul, as women must prove the absence of their consent through \u201cimpossible\u201d measures such as not attending the wedding party or not allowing their husband to consummate the marriage.", + " The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the Committee on the Rights of the Child define forced marriages as \u201cmarriages where one or both parties have not personally expressed their full and free consent to the union.\u201d The 2013 report noted that individuals filed 62 cases requesting annulment of a forced marriage with the Ministry of Justice since 1999. Aisha and Her Five Forced Marriages In August 2010, Human Rights Watch documented the case of Aisha Ali, a 28-year-old divorced mother of three. Aisha said that her brothers, threatened, beat, forcibly confined her, and forced her to marry five men in less than ten years.", + " She reported that she never chose to marry any of her five husbands, from whom she subsequently filed for divorce or they divorced her, but that her brothers repeatedly threatened and beat her when she refused to marry. According to Aisha, two of her husbands, including her third, also abused her. After filing for divorce from her third husband, she sought assistance from the National Society for Human Rights, not wishing to return home to her brothers. Aisha told Human Rights Watch that in 2006 the National Society for Human Rights helped place her in a shelter with her daughter for around three months. Aisha said the shelter \u201cresolved\u201d her case by asking her brothers to take her back to the family home.", + " After her fourth divorce, Aisha went to the police requesting protection and help entering a shelter. According to Aisha, the police called her brothers to take her home, who later forced her to marry a fifth man.[181] Male guardians have the power to prohibit female dependents from marrying. In November 2015, a Saudi commentator wrote in the Saudi Gazette about the practice of some fathers refusing to allow their daughters to marry in order to continue taking their salaries. In these circumstances, known as adhl (defined as a man using his legal authority to prevent a woman from marrying), women may file legal cases and the judge may rule that the guardian must allow the woman to get married or step in himself to serve as the guardian sanctioning the marriage.", + " According to the writer, 755 adhl cases were recorded in the country in 2014. These cases are often resolved in favor of the guardian, according to one activist, and a former judge told Human Rights Watch that judges often respect a guardian\u2019s decision regarding the suitability of a marriage. In some cases, where women have married with their male guardian\u2019s permission, other male relatives can apply to the courts to dissolve marriages of female relatives they deem unfit. In 2015, a couple, Nayef and Lina, who have two young daughters and married in 2012, were at risk of forcible divorce. Sho\"rtl\"", + "y after Lina and Nayef married with the consent of her guardian (her brother), Lina\u2019s paternal cousin brought a legal case against Nayef, requesting that a judge forcibly divorce the couple on the grounds that Nayef\u2019s tribal lineage was lower than Lina\u2019s. Lina told Human Rights Watch that in April 2013 the judge ruled in favor of her cousin, ordering the couple divorce and pay 50,000 Saudi Riyals ($13,300) to the cousin. The couple appealed the case, but the lower court ruling was upheld by an appeals court. In March 2015, the Saudi Supreme Court reversed the decision of the lower court,", + " but in April 2015, according to Lina, the lower court allowed Lina\u2019s cousin to open a new case against the couple on the same basis. In April 2005, Grand Mufti Shaikh Abd al-\u2018Aziz Al al-Shaikh, head of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars, stated, \u201cForcing a woman to marry someone she does not want and preventing her from wedding that whom she chooses... is not permissible\u201d in Sharia. Yet the government has not taken adequate steps to stop judges from preventing women from freely choosing their spouse or dissolving marriages when male relatives claim a spouse\u2019s status,", + " whether tribal lineage or otherwise, is inadequate. Inequality in Divorce Women\u2019s right to divorce is significantly more restricted than that of men. Men may unilaterally divorce their wives without condition. The man does not need to inform his wife that he intends to divorce her,nor must she be present in court in order to obtain a divorce decree. Fatima, a women\u2019s rights activist, told Human Rights Watch that unilateral divorce is often done orally without documentation by courts, and that the burden to prove the divorce falls upon the woman. Women have no right to unilateral divorce. Women must instead seek a khul\u2019 divorce, where a man generally agrees to the divorce on the condition that a woman pay back the full amount of her dowry,", + " or a woman can apply to the courts for a faskh divorce, a fault-based divorce. For a faskh divorce, a woman must prove at least one of the few available grounds for divorce, which include mistreatment by the husband. Women explained that, lacking a written family law code, judges are not given clear guidance on what constitutes mistreatment as grounds for divorce. According to Reema, a women\u2019s rights activist, physical abuse that is not life threatening or does not cause permanent damage might be considered within the rights of the husband and not valid grounds for divorce. A former judge said that women lacking clear evidence of abuse or alleging serious complaints\u2014like bankruptcy,", + " disability, or clearly apparent physical violence\u2014often struggle to convince a judge they have an adequate basis for divorce. Both khul\u2019 and faskh can require lengthy legal processes and, in the case of khul\u2019, can be expensive. Before being granted a judicial divorce, women must also first undergo mandatory mediation, usually run by two or more male religious officials. Men seeking divorce do not have the same requirement. Two activists said many women choose not to seek divorce or challenge a forced marriage, believing the effort will not succeed. Multiple individuals interviewed by Human Rights Watch noted that women are often disadvantaged during divorce proceedings, as both judges and mediators are men,", + " usually conservative, and often prioritize maintaining the marital relationship over the desires of the woman. Unlike men, who obtain divorce papers from courts within days of requesting them, women face many obstacles, including delays by judges. According to one 2014 news story, it took a woman four years to obtain a divorce because judges kept demanding that her guardian\u2014the husband who abandoned her\u2014appear in court.According to Dr. Heba, \u201cThe man can divorce in one minute. It will take him half an hour to get his paperwork done. If a woman is asking for divorce, it will take a year to get the papers.\u201d Throughout divorce proceedings,", + " a woman\u2019s husband remains her guardian, maintaining the authority to control his wife\u2019s decisions. In 2013, Dr. Heba\u2019s daughter, Wajeha, was accepted into a university abroad. Wajeha\u2019s husband, who she was in the process of divorcing, told her he would not authorize her travel. Wajeha\u2019s father went to court and asked the judge to grant Wajeha permission to leave the country, offering to stand in and serve as his daughter\u2019s guardian. The judge refused the request, noting that only Wajeha\u2019s legal guardian\u2014the husband she was divorcing\u2014could authorize her travel.", + " By the time Wajeha finalized the divorce, it was too late to accept the university\u2019s invitation. Wajeha applied to universities again, but was not admitted into her earlier, preferred choice. Sana, a woman\u2019s rights activist, explained that husbands also may abandon their wives without divorcing them, leaving women extremely vulnerable and unable to work, travel or access healthcare or other services for which she may need male guardian consent. Sana\u2019s 25-year-old female relative was in such a marriage. Sana said, \u201cShe doesn\u2019t live with him. She doesn\u2019t see him. But she still has to get all the permissions from him.\u201d Meena,", + " Marriage, and the Courts Meena, 52, married when she was 20 years old. In 2010, after 27 years of marriage, Meena learned that her husband was having an affair. He began to restrict her travel, withhold financial support and, at one point, assaulted her and threatened to kill her. In 2012, Meena moved out. She brought a legal claim against her husband for the assault. During court proceedings, her husband announced he would ask the judge to order her to return to the marital home, which a husband has authority to do under Saudi law. Instead, the judge sentenced Meena\u2019s husband to 10 lashes and three days in jail\u2014one for each day it took Meena to recover from his assault.", + " Five months later, after her husband appealed the verdict, court officials tried to convince Meena to settle the case. Meena agreed on a number of conditions, including that her husband provide her and their children financial support. At the last minute, her husband said she must also agree to be an \u201cobedient\u201d wife and drop all legal claims against him. According to Meena, \u201cThen the judges started to pressure me, and the judges and the police and everybody pressures the woman to settle, to let it go, to let go of the rights that the law gives her.\u201d Meena settled. During these proceedings, Meena\u2019s husband remained her guardian.", + " By 2015, he had revoked her travel permission and her passport had expired. In November, Meena went to the mayor, begging for travel permission. He partially agreed, sending a letter to the passport office ordering them to issue her a new passport and requesting her husband provide travel permission. When her husband refused, the passport office asked Meena\u2019s son to grant permission for his mother to travel. In July 2015, Meena procured a divorce decree outside Saudi Arabia. In late 2015, a Saudi judge told Meena he could not accept the outside decree and ordered Meena and her husband go through the official reconciliation process,", + " despite her six documented previous attempts to reconcile with her husband. The two men on the reconciliation committee recommended divorce, but only after trying to convince Meena, including through her son, to drop further legal claims against her husband. The judge told Meena he needed another two months to study the case. When she begged him to approve the divorce more quickly, he told her she was lucky\u2014two months was faster than most cases. In 2016, the judge granted Meena the divorce, but her husband appealed the ruling. At the time of writing, Meena\u2019s husband remains her guardian. She is required to request travel permission from government officials each time she wishes to leave the country.", + " Inequality in Arrangement for Children after Divorce While the courts may order children to live with their mothers following a divorce, women do not have the right to be the legal guardians of their children. The basic rules concerning where children live after divorce transfer girls who are seven or older to the father and give boys who are nine or older a choice, according to an activist. A former judge told Human Rights Watch that, regardless of the age of the child, courts are ultimately meant to base their decision on post-divorce living arrangements on the best interests of the child. He noted that, in practice, judges discriminate against women and may base their ruling on which of the two parents appears more conservative.", + " Sana, a woman\u2019s rights activist, noted that this severely disadvantages women and that the father can \u201csay crazy stuff like she practices black magic and the court will listen.\u201d In 2014, the Supreme Judicial Council took a positive step by ruling that when children are ordered to live with their mothers after divorce, she can obtain documents and conduct government business for them. In 2015, the council declared the decision applied retroactively. The decisions enabled women to register their children in schools, take them to health centers, and obtain identity documents for them. Saudi fathers, however, maintain the right to grant travel permission for children or to authorize daughters\u2019 marriages.", + " In cases where children live with their mothers, she can seek travel permission from a court for them, although victories in these cases are very rare. According to a women\u2019s rights activist, women remain significantly disadvantaged in issues involving children. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Saudi Arabia is a state party, instructs states that in all matters concerning children, \u201cthe best interest of the child shall be a primary consideration.\u201dThe Convention provides that all children have the right to be heard \u201cin any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting [them],\u201d including cases of separation and divorce, and post-divorce living arrangements. Various treaty bodies have addressed gender-based discrimination with regard to rights concerning children.", + " The UN Committee on Discrimination Against Women called on states to ensure men and women have \u201c[t]he same rights and responsibilities with regard to guardianship, wardship, trusteeship and adoption of children\u2026 in all cases the interests of the children shall be paramount.\u201d\n\nVI. Restricting the Right to Equality before the Law I should go to the court, but it is strange because in my country they don\u2019t think of a woman like a full person, so they prefer to deal with men. \u2014Hayat, a 44-year-old former school principal, December 7, 2015 The Saudi government has taken a number of steps towards recognizing women\u2019s legal capacity.", + " In 2013, the authorities granted women the right to obtain a national ID card without guardian consent, and in 2014, issued directives declaring that women can interact with the courts without a male relative to verify their identity. In 2013, the Ministry of Justice granted women licenses to practice law and, by November 2015, nearly 70 female lawyers were licensed to practice. Despite this progress, women continue to face significant challenges when attempting to conduct a range of legal transactions without a male, from signing a lease to petitioning for divorce. Many women said they still prefer to or feel they must conduct a variety of legal transactions and interact with government agencies,", + " including the courts, through or with the help of a man. At its core, the imposition of male guardianship denies Saudi women their right under CEDAW to \u201ca legal capacity identical to that of men and the same opportunities to exercise that capacity.\u201d Identity Documents Women continue to face difficulties accessing identity documents, but the government has eased restrictions on women\u2019s ability to obtain independent identity cards and, in some cases, possess family cards, which specify familial relationships and are required to conduct a number of bureaucratic tasks. Prior to 2001, there was no individual national ID card for Saudi women\u2014authorities registered all women under their father or husband\u2019s family card.", + " In 2001, the government began granting independent ID cards to Saudi women, but article 67 of the Civil Status Law stated that obtaining a national ID card was optional for women and required the consent of a woman\u2019s guardian. In 2013, the Council of Ministers issued a decision that Saudi women must have their own national ID cards and that, after seven years, this would be the only means for women to prove their identity. Due to the changes, women no longer require formal guardian approval to apply for a national ID. Women continue to face barriers when applying for national ID cards without guardian approval. According to the Interior Ministry website,", + " a woman must prove her identity to obtain an ID card, either by presenting her passport (which a woman cannot receive without guardian consent), by a male guardian confirming her identity, or through a related Saudi woman or two non-related Saudi woman. The website also states that a \u201chomemaker\u2026 must submit a statement of consent written by her husband\u201d to be granted a national ID. Women\u2019s faces must appear uncovered in their national ID photo. Two women interviewed by Human Rights Watch noted that some conservative guardians might forbid a woman from applying for an ID if he does not want her to be photographed uncovered. Other women said that many women who wear the niqab (a veil covering the face)", + " place a sticker over their uncovered ID photos and will only remove the sticker when interacting with women. Women must also present a family card to be granted a national ID. As family cards are generally issued to and held by male heads of household, women\u2019s ability to conduct a number of official transactions, including applying for a national ID, without de facto guardian approval is limited. Currently, only men can register children on family cards. Fatima, a women\u2019s rights activist, noted that some men refuse to add their wives or daughters to their family cards, rendering these women unable to prove their identity and obtain an ID card, and thus unable to access a range of government services.", + " On October 13, 2015, the Shura Council proposed amending the Civil Status Law to allow women to obtain family cards for themselves, and to allow them to register births and deaths. Possession of a family card would enable women to conduct important bureaucratic tasks for their children, including enrolling them in school. The amendments would also grant women the ability to register births and deaths. The proposal was overwhelmingly supported\u201496 votes in favor to 28 against\u2014but requires approval by the Council of Ministers to go into effect. At the time of writing, the Council of Ministers had still not approved the draft amendments. Following the Shura Council proposal,", + " the Interior Ministry announced it would begin issuing divorced and widowed women family cards. Multiple women with whom Human Rights Watch spoke praised the decision Dr. Zahra, who handles cases of domestic violence, said that the change would particularly help women whose ex-husbands occasionally punish them by keeping their children out of school. Hayat, a 44-year-old divorced woman, said granting women the family card represents a serious improvement. Seven years ago, Hayat and her teenage son were turned away from a hotel in Riyadh because they did not have a family card proving their relationship, necessary for the hotel staff to allow the mother and son to stay in the same room.", + " She said that the hotel staff threatened to report them to the Hai\u2019a. Allowing women to possess a family card, as Dr. Salma, 52, stated, \u201cDoesn\u2019t solve the problem of guardianship.\u201d Women still cannot travel with their children outside the country without the permission of the father, who remains the children's legal guardian, provide consent for their daughters to marry, or pass their nationality to their children. Dr. Salma explained, \u201cThe mother\u2026 is under the mercy of the guardianship of the father, but now she has more independence with this [family card]\u2014At last, her name is next to her children [on an identity document].\u201d Difficulty Accessing Government Services Saudi women who wear full niqab may be required to have a mu\u2019arif (a male relative who can verify their identity)", + " in order to carry out administrative tasks. For many years, government agencies, including courts, formerly required a mu\u2019arif to confirm a woman\u2019s identity. Even the most mundane tasks required a mu\u2019arif, including in some cases to buy a SIM card. Nisreen, 24, told Human Rights Watch that while most cellphone stores no longer require a mu\u2019arif, as recently as 2013 she had been asked for a mu\u2019arif when attempting to buy a SIM card in Dammam, even though her face was uncovered and she showed her national ID. Saudi Arabia has taken steps to decrease women\u2019s dependence on mu\u2019arifs.", + " In 2004, the Council of Ministers issued a directive requiring every state agency that provided services to women to create a women\u2019s section within one year. In principle, women are able to conduct business inside a women\u2019s section without a mu\u2019arif. While setting up women\u2019s sections inside government agencies has increased women\u2019s access, the directive also reinforced sex segregation and created two separate and unequal systems. Women explained that women\u2019s sections are not effective. In 2015, a Saudi commentator argued in the Saudi Gazette that women\u2019s sections are marginalized and ineffective and do not have the authority to adequately serve women, citing a Saudi official who inspects ministries.", + " As Reema, 36, a women\u2019s rights activist, said, \u201c[The government] just opened women\u2019s sections but [hasn\u2019t] give[n] them any real authority. Due to these and other difficulties, including restrictions on movement, guardians are often still required to act on behalf of women to conduct official business with government agencies. Multiple women told Human Rights Watch that men in their families carry out all business with government agencies on their behalf, including with courts. Discrimination in the Legal System Difficulty Accessing Courts Court officers do not always accept a woman\u2019s ID as a means of identification and may ask for a woman to be accompanied by a mu\u2019arif.", + " The decision to accept the ID or not is often left to the discretion of a local court officer, according to three activists. Officers may turn women away if they do not want to see their uncovered national ID photos. Aisha, in her 50s, told Human Rights Watch that she went to a Riyadh court in 2013. She presented her national ID, but the court officer placed a piece of paper over her photo, not wanting to see her face. He told her she needed to bring a mu'arif. She called her husband, but he was unable to come to the court. She then called her brother and son,", + " but neither could come. After an hour and a half of continued protest, the court officer reluctantly accepted her national ID. In February 2014, the Supreme Judicial Council issued a circular to all courts stating that women can attend court hearings using ID cards and do not require a mu\u2019arif. After reports that some judges refused to comply with the directive, the Ministry of Justice announced it would take disciplinary action against court officials who failed to comply. Yet women continue to face problems filing a case or speaking in court without a mu\u2019arif. Reema, a women\u2019s rights activist, explained that court officers continued to resist implementing the Supreme Judicial Council decision.", + " Some women resorted to printing out the decision and bringing it with them to better persuade court officers to agree to accept their national IDs without a mu\u2019arif. In 2015, Saudi Gazette reported that courts and public notaries would install a fingerprint system and women\u2019s sections to better facilitate women\u2019s access. In 2015, Amira, 42, said her sister went to a court that did not yet have a fingerprinting system. Her sister\u2019s husband and son were unable to come to serve as mu\u2019arifs, and because she could not otherwise prove her identity, she was unable to finish her legal business that day.", + " Amira noted she had been able to access the courts in 2015 without a mu\u2019arif, but that when she was in front of the judge attempting to sort out land claims, the judge asked her where her mu\u2019arif was. When she told the judge she did not need a mu\u2019arif, he began to tell her that her clothing\u2014a non-black abaya\u2014was inappropriate for court. Other women simply choose to send men to interact with the courts on their behalf in order to facilitate interaction with the courts. In 2015, Hayat, 44, a former school principal, told Human Rights Watch that she decided to transfer her guardianship from her father to her 23-year-old son.", + " \u201cMy father is so old and in every legal movement I need a man, so I had to,\u201d she said. \u201cI have a piece of paper that says my son is my legal guardian. It sounds stupid and silly, but it is the only way to make my every movement easier.\u201d She did not go to court to transfer the guardianship, but instead sent her brother and ex-husband to interact with the judge, as courts generally prefer to deal with men. She said: It can mess with your head and the way you look at yourself. How do you respect yourself or how [can] your family respect you, if he is your legal guardian?", + " Formal and Informal Restrictions on Legal Capacity Women may testify in court, but in some cases their testimony is worth half that of a man. The General Presidency for Scholarly Research and \u2018Ifta, the official state institution tasked with issuing fatwas, stated: In some cases, the testimonies of two women equal the testimony of one man, since women are more prone to forget than men due to their special nature.... On the other hand, there are some issues that are solely related to women when it is enough for one woman to testify\u2026 Two Saudi female law school graduates, 24 and 25, told Human Rights Watch that women\u2019s testimony may be treated as worth half that of a man in certain,", + " rare instances when strict evidentiary rules exist and are enforced, but that a woman may generally testify as long as she is wearing a headscarf. In their experience, a judge may discount a woman\u2019s testimony and petitioners often plead that a judge should not take a woman\u2019s testimony seriously. Judges in Saudi Arabia have vast discretion over cases, including which witnesses to hear and which testimony to accept or reject. Maysa, another recent law school graduate, told Human Rights Watch she witnessed judges allow women to testify and represent themselves in court, but that this was not necessarily the norm. On the other hand, Layla, a journalist in her 30s,", + " told Human Rights Watch, \u201cIf you go to a court in Saudi Arabia, it is the place you most feel like nothing.\u201d Layla said that court officials shouted at her and ordered her to cover her face. She could not get an audience with a judge, unlike her male colleagues. Other women told Human Rights Watch that conservative judges may force women to abide by a strict dress code or discount statements made by women as witnesses, parties, or lawyers. Difficulty Conducting Legal Transactions Women can sign contracts without restriction and there is no formal bar on women\u2019s ability to buy or rent property. Saudi women told Human Rights Watch that landlords, however,", + " generally prefer contracting with men and it is difficult for women to buy or rent property without a male relative. In November 2015, a commentator explained in the Saudi Gazette that women are often required to have a man to sign off on a lease, even when they hold a national ID or family card. The writer related the story of a woman on welfare who required a lease under her name to secure additional funds to pay her electricity bill. She called several real estate offices, offering them any type of written guarantee in return for a monthly or annual lease, but was repeatedly rejected. Rania and Renting Rania, 34, lived abroad for many years before returning to Saudi Arabia to further her career and be near her family.", + " Rania needed her brother\u2019s assistance, as he is her guardian, to conduct a range of legal transactions in 2011 and 2012: I was very frustrated in the process because I needed my brother to do everything and it is extremely debilitating because he has his family and his own life. When I wanted to rent an apartment, I couldn't rent it as a single woman, I had to get my brother to sign the lease in his name even though the owner knows I will be living there alone. When I wanted to buy my car, I had to get a photocopy of his ID with his writing, basically consenting to me buying a car (which someone else must drive for Rania,", + " as women are barred from driving). All these little, little things\u2014It just adds up. We are entrusted with raising the next generation but you can\u2019t trust us with ourselves. It doesn\u2019t make any sense. [257] Sura, 62, told Human Rights Watch that in 2011 she rented an apartment but that she needed to have her son, her guardian, accompany her, despite the fact that she was paying the rent. When buying a car later that year, she was also forced to bring her son. In 2015, Zahra, 25, searched for apartments in Riyadh with her female friend, but every \u201cdecent\u201d apartment required a male relative to sign the lease.", + " Zahra said that she and her friend were \u201chomeless for a few days\u201d before they found an incredibly run-down apartment building that allowed the women to sign a lease without a male relative.\n\nVII. Restricting the Right to Employment It is amazing how much we have achieved despite all the restrictions we face\u2026 Now that more women are working, I think there will be further changes. It is inevitable. \u2014Khadija, 42-year-old Saudi woman, November 20, 2015 One of the most significant changes to the guardianship system over recent years is in women\u2019s access to employment. Saudi authorities removed restrictions on women\u2019s work in the labor code,", + " removed requirements for women to obtain guardian permission to work, and are actively encouraging women to enter the workforce. These changes are leading to increased employment opportunities for Saudi women. The Saudi Gazette reported in 2014 that the number of Saudi women working in the private sector reached over 450,000 employees in 2013, up from only 50,000 in 2009. Women now work in a range of professions. Human Rights Watch spoke with successful female architects, film directors, journalists, businesswomen, professors, bankers and lawyers. As Maysa, a former law student, 25, told Human Rights Watch, \u201cThis is one of the areas you can see actual change happening in front of your eyes in a short amount of time.\u201d Despite these positive changes,", + " women in Saudi Arabia continue to face significant obstacles when seeking employment. According to the World Bank, women\u2019s participation in the labor force has steadily increased, but remains low\u2014rising from 18.6 percent in 2008 to 21.5 percent in 2014. In 2015, the World Economic Forum ranked Saudi Arabia 138 out of 145 countries for women\u2019s economic participation and opportunity, and the World Bank ranked Saudi Arabia one of the 15 most restrictive economies in terms of women\u2019s ability to work or establish a business. In early 2016, Arab News reported that 84 percent of women work in the education sector.", + " Authorities do not penalize private or public employers who require a guardian\u2019s consent for women to work. Some professions, like judges and drivers, remain off limits to women. In addition, strict sex segregation policies act as a disincentive to employers considering hiring women and women\u2019s limited mobility makes it difficult for them to travel to and from work. As Fatima, a women\u2019s rights activist, told Human Rights Watch, continued governmental restrictions and broader discrimination against women often limit the ability of even hardworking women to progress in their careers. As she said, \u201cI want to do better, but I can\u2019t. You can see successful women and you get to see even their hands are tied.\u201d The continued imposition of sex segregation and failure to oppose the practice of some employers to require guardian permission for women to work violates Saudi Arabia\u2019s obligations under CEDAW,", + " which stipulates that states shall take all appropriate measures to ensure women enjoy equal rights to men, including \u201cthe right to free choice of profession and employment, the right to promotion, job security and all benefits and conditions of service.\u201d Opening the Labor Market to Women In 2015, Saudi Arabia amended article 149 of the labor code, removing language that restricted women to work that was \u201csuitable to their nature.\u201d One month later, the Saudi Gazette reported that under pressure from the International Labour Organization (ILO) the Ministry of Labor and Social Development also dropped article 149 language restricting women from working in dangerous or hazardous jobs. The 2015 changes follow a series of government decisions since 2004 increasing women\u2019s access to the labor market.", + " In 2004, the Council of Ministers passed Resolution 120 aimed at expanding women\u2019s employment opportunities, including directing government agencies to issue licenses to women seeking to start businesses. The government has not sufficiently implemented these labor reforms. A report including data from interviews with 37 Saudi female entrepreneurs in Riyadh between August 2011 and December 2012 found that many women were still being told they were required to have a wakil (male agent) to open a business and to appoint a male manager. Aisha, an independent Saudi researcher, told Human Rights Watch that officials at the Commerce and Labor ministries continue to turn away some businesswomen applying for business licenses who do not have a wakil or a male manager.", + " Since 2010, Saudi Arabia has taken further steps to increase women\u2019s participation in the labor market. In 2010, the Ministry of Labor and Social Development issued a decision prohibiting discrimination between men and women in wages they receive for equivalent work. In 2011 and 2012, the Ministry of Labor and Social Development issued a series of decisions related to the employment of women in various sectors, which stated that women required no special permission to work. While these government decisions have opened greater opportunities for women to work, women continue to face a number of obstacles when seeking employment, including employers continuing to require guardian permission. Continuing Barriers to Women Working Permission to Work A 2013 Ministry of Labor and Social Development guidance document on women\u2019s work in the private sector states,", + " \u201cGuardian consent is not required for the employment of women.\u201d But the government does not prohibit individual employers from seeking guardian permission. Female professionals told Human Rights Watch that many employers in both the private and public sector continue to require female staff to obtain the permission of a male guardian to be employed. Requiring guardian permission is at the discretion of the employer. Most of the large, prominent employers, including government entities, as well as banks, health centers, universities and schools, still require guardian approval, according to women interviewed by Human Rights Watch. The women said that other employers, including some large newspapers, architecture firms, and commercial institutions, have stopped requiring guardian permission.", + " Where formal guardian approval is not required, employees might ask for women to present a family card, an official identity card listing individual family members and often held by the male head of household. According to Saudi women interviewed by Human Rights Watch, asking for a family card can be an indirect way to check if a guardian approves of a female family member\u2019s employment. Miriam, 25, currently in a position with a government ministry, told Human Rights Watch that she was required to present her family card when beginning her new job. Two female employers told Human Rights Watch that they require guardian consent to protect themselves from the possibility that a guardian will suddenly prevent a woman from continuing work.", + " Guardians have a lot of power to interfere with women\u2019s work, including preventing her from traveling abroad for work or from leaving the house to travel to work, and may do so if they object to some aspect of her work, such as mixing with men. Tala, in her late twenties, said her brother had explicitly forbidden her from working in a mixed environment, which limited her employment options. Requiring guardian consent leaves women vulnerable to exploitation. Multiple women told Human Rights Watch that guardians will occasionally condition their consent\u2014informal or formal\u2014for a woman to work on her sharing part or all of her salary with him. Sura, 62,", + " a retired university lecturer, told Human Rights Watch that the practice of husbands requiring their wives to turn over part or all of their salaries in order to work is common and ongoing and that her friend\u2019s husband had been demanding her salary for years. Dr. Haifa and Guardian Permission to Work Dr. Haifa, a director of hospital services, told Human Rights Watch that the hospitals under her supervision require guardian permission from women to work in order to prevent unexpected work disturbances. She said that she witnessed multiple cases in which women simply stopped coming to work, telling her by phone that their guardians revoked their consent. Dr. Haifa said that guardians would often revoke consent over financial disputes,", + " for example when a woman refused to turn her salary over to her guardian. She said that many guardians force women to give them their bankcards so they can directly withdraw her salary. As she put it, \u201cIf he is generous, he will give her a bit for expenses.\u201d There are no sanctions imposed on employers who require guardian permission, according to three women, including two employers, interviewed by Human Rights Watch. In the absence of formal ban on employers\u2019 requiring guardian permission or a general non-discrimination law, women are also unable to bring legal claims against employers that require guardian permission. Sex Segregation The Saudi government is unique among Muslim-majority countries in that it imposes almost complete sex segregation.", + " In practice, the policy prevents women from participating meaningfully in public life. All businesses and government agencies in Saudi Arabia are sex segregated, with the exception of Aramco and several foreign companies, which choose to ignore sex segregation regulations. While some work places, such as hospitals, banks, and larger companies, may have relaxed rules on sex segregation, for example allowing women and men to attend the same meetings, failing to abide by segregation rules can result in a company being fined or individuals arrested, although it is unclear how often or uniformly these rules are enforced. The government\u2019s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, or Hai\u2019a,", + " strictly monitors and enforces sex segregation. Government decisions since 2004 increasing women\u2019s access to the labor market have reinforced sex segregation and other discriminatory practices. For example, Section 8 of the Council of Ministers Resolution 120 (2004), one of the earlier attempts to increase women\u2019s employment, stipulated that only women would be allowed to work in shops for women\u2019s products. Since 2004, the Labor Ministry has continued to open up employment opportunities for women, while reinforcing sex segregation rules. In October 2015, the Ministry of Labor and Social Development published a table of labor code violations and their corresponding penalties. The 2015 fines demonstrate the ways in which government reforms undercut their own efficacy by maintaining and reinforcing discriminatory practices.", + " The 2015 fines simultaneously incentivize employers to hire women, imposing fines of up to SR10,000 (US$2,667) for employing men in positions earmarked for women, and disincentivize them from hiring women, imposing a fine of SR10,000 on employers who fail to provide separate areas for women to work. The fine for failing to maintain sex segregation is five times the amount an employer may be fined for holding a worker\u2019s passport and half that of an employer using child labor. Employers must also ensure men and women are not alone together at work without others present, that the work environment is suitable for women,", + " and provide written instructions on the required dress code for women, including mandatory headscarves. Women who do not abide by the dress code can be fined SR1,000 (US$267). Discussing the new fines, Zahra, 25, said, \u201cCompanies don\u2019t want to hire women. It is too much of a hassle. Job descriptions say \u2018Men only\u2019.\u201d Failing to abide by sex segregation rules can entail serious consequences. Rania, 34, told Human Rights Watch that the Hai\u2019a arrested her and two male colleagues during a lunch meeting in 2012. Rania was held at a police station for five hours and forced to sign a statement prepared by the authorities stating that she had engaged in khilwa.", + " She said the police told her they would not release her until she signed the form. When she tried to read the statement, the police officer began flipping the pages. Mobility Restrictions Mobility issues are an additional disincentive to hiring women. Employers must sometimes coordinate their female employees\u2019 transportation or raise their salaries to compensate them for their transportation costs. The driving ban often forces women to rely on male relatives or foreign drivers to transport them to work, and women have reported that the associated costs can exhaust much of their salaries. Women who cannot afford a driver must sometimes forego work and other activities outside the home. Studies conducted in Saudi Arabia have highlighted the transportation difficulties women workers face.", + " A 2013 report by the Women\u2019s Entrepreneurship Initiative found that restrictions on women\u2019s mobility put women entrepreneurs at a significant disadvantage, due to the financial burden of hiring a driver and as, at the whim of their guardian, they might be precluded from attending business meetings or training opportunities abroad. In 2015, a study conducted on female nurses noted that problems securing transportation accounted for 27 percent of work-related absences.\n\nVIII. Restricting the Right to Health You don\u2019t have power over your body\u2026 It makes you nervous every step of your life. Everything that you put so much effort and time into could just end in a second if your guardian decides.", + " \u2014Reema, 36-year-old Saudi woman, October 13, 2015 Women\u2019s fundamental right to health is jeopardized by the male guardianship system. At some hospitals in Saudi Arabia, health officials require a guardian\u2019s permission for women to be admitted or to undergo an operation. Women\u2019s universities continue to occasionally prevent paramedics from entering to treat female students.[299] The country also does not provide physical education for girls\u2019 public schools or women access to state sporting facilities. Saudi Arabia\u2019s failure to ensure that women can access health services, including emergency care, or to ensure adequate opportunities for exercise, violates its obligations under CEDAW and to ensure women\u2019s basic health rights.", + " Guardian Consent for Medical Procedures and Emergency Care Health regulations in Saudi Arabia do not prohibit women from receiving healthcare without guardian consent. A 2014 medical code of ethics prepared by a state institution declares that a woman\u2019s consent should be sufficient to receive healthcare. The requirement for guardian permission is dependent on a particular hospital\u2019s internal regulations.[303] Human Rights Watch spoke with medical professionals at private hospitals who do not require guardian permission for any procedureand others at public hospitals who require guardian permission for a woman to be operated on or admitted.[304] Ibtesam, a doctor at a public hospital, confirmed that guardian permission is required for certain medical procedures,", + " including surgery, at her hospital, but in cases of emergency, other male relatives may approve a surgical operation or the hospital may proceed without permission.[305]When guardian permission is required, it is most often for surgical operations or other major procedures, according to six women interviewed by Human Rights Watch,and the guardian is required to be present and fill out specific hospital forms for the woman.[306] Requiring guardian approval for medical procedures can subject women to prolonged pain or, in extreme cases, to life-threatening danger. Reema, 36, told Human Rights Watch that when she gave birth to her son four years ago, despite having been in labor for many hours,", + " the doctor refused to give her a caesarian section without her husband\u2019s approval.[307] Dr. Heba, in her 50s, said her daughter needed a caesarian section in 2012, but the hospital required guardian permission. Her daughter\u2019s husband was not at the hospital and the hospital was unable to proceed until they reached him by phone and obtained his verbal consent.[308] A year later, in 2013, doctors advised a woman to undergo a caesarian section and requested a signature from her husband. According to Al-Riyadh, he refused. While the woman offered to sign, the hospital claimed they needed her guardian\u2019s signature before they could operate.", + " After repeated requests from the doctors and being told the child\u2019s life could be endangered if the birth was further delayed, the husband finally agreed to sign.[309] Authorities at women\u2019s universities may require a guardian\u2019s authorization to allow ambulance personnel, who are always male, into the school. If administrators cannot reach a guardian to authorize the student\u2019s removal, her life could be at risk. Saudi media outlets regularly carry stories of women barred from access to emergency care due to sex segregation rules. In February 2014, 24-year old Amena Bawazir, a student at King Saud University in Riyadh, died of a heart attack after officials at the public university allegedly delayed allowing male paramedics to enter the women\u2019s part of campus.", + " The university denied the accusation, but Amena\u2019s sister claimed medics arrived at the campus sho\"rtl\"y after her sister fell ill, but were unable to enter the campus for two hours while university officials tried to determine how to ensure the paramedics did not mix with female students. Amena died before she reached the hospital. That same month, a student was forced to deliver her baby inside a university after officials refused to allow her to leave campus in an ambulance without a guardian accompanying her. In 2014, according to Al-Riyadh, the Saudi Red Crescent Authority was prevented from providing prompt assistance 13 times by women\u2019s schools and universities.The Red Crescent raised these issues with the Ministry of Education and requested that the ministry release instructions to these institutions to better facilitate access.\n\nAcknowledgments Kristine Beckerle,", + " Finberg Fellow of the Middle East and North Africa Division (MENA) of Human Rights Watch was the primary researcher and author of this report. An independent volunteer and two interns with the division, whom Human Rights Watch would like to thank but cannot name for security reasons, assisted in the research. Adam Coogle, researcher in MENA; and Danielle Haas, senior editor in the Program Office, edited the report. Rothna Begum, researcher in the Women\u2019s Rights Division, and Bill Van Esveld, senior researcher in the Children\u2019s Rights Division, provided specialist review, and Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor, provided legal review.", + " Sandy Elkhoury, senior associate for the MENA division, prepared this report for publication. Human Rights Watch wishes to thank those Saudi women who agreed to be interviewed for this report and who facilitated research. Without them, this report would not have been possible.\n\nAppendix I: Guardian Permission Form for Woman to Study Abroad on Government Scholarship Human Rights Watch Translation of Form Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ministry of Higher Education Umm Al-Qura University Office of Scholarship & Inter-University Relations Consent of Guardian of (Female) Scholar to Study Abroad Form (5) I pledge: [Name redacted] Number of ID/Residency: [Redacted]", + " Date: [Redacted] Source: [Redacted] Guardian of (female) assistant teacher / lecturer: [Redacted] That I consent to her being sent for scholarship outside the Kingdom, and I [Name redacted] will accompany her where she is sent throughout the period of her scholarship. Should I not abide by this promise, the University will have the right to terminate the scholarship and demand full repayment of all expenses paid. God grant you success Name: [Redacted] Relation: Husband Signature: [Redacted] Date: [Redacted] Certification of authenticity of signature Attachments: Copy of family ID, with original for matching\n\nCopy of marriage license,", + " plus copy of residency permit (for non-Saudi husband), with original for matching\n\nCopy of ID of female student\n\nCopy of ID of accompanying guardian, with original for matching P.O. Box 715, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Tel/Fax: 966-12-556515, email: scholar@uqu.edu.sa Number: Date: 143_ hijri Attachments: \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\n\nAppendix II: Guardian Permission Form for Woman to Work in Government Institution Human Rights Watch Translation of Form Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ministry of National Guard \u2013 Health Affairs Permission Form To be filled out by the (female) applicant:", + " I, the undersigned, affirm that the below-indicated guardian is my legal and valid guardian, and I confirm my responsibility for the accuracy of all information contained in this form. I understand that I will be held legally accountable for submitting false information or hiding required information, and the criminal and civil penalties that that might entail, including dismissal, which I recognize with my signature. Name of job applicant: Number of applicant\u2019s civil registry: Marital Status: Single Married Divorced Widowed Applicant signature: Date: To be filled out by guardian: I, the undersigned, affirm my capacity as legal and valid guardian for the above-mentioned [woman], and my permission for this [woman]", + " to work for the Ministry of National Guard \u2013 Health Affairs, and should it be proven otherwise in the future I will be held legally accountable for the criminal and civil penalties stipulated by regulations and codes in effect in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Name of guardian: Relationship to the applicant: Guardian\u2019s civil registry: Date: * Note: Guardian\u2019s signature should be certified by his place of work, local government, or in person [signature]\n\nAppendix III: Human Rights Watch Letter to the Minister of Interior New York, May 16, 2016 H. R. H. Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef Minister of Interior Ministry of Interior Riyadh,", + " Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Subject: Advancing the rights of women in Saudi Arabia Your Highness, We write to request a meeting to discuss the impact of the male guardianship system on the full realization of women\u2019s rights in Saudi Arabia. We also seek further information regarding the steps taken by the Ministry of Interior to better protect women\u2019s rights. Over the last seven months, we have researched the impact of the male guardianship system and sex segregation on women\u2019s rights in Saudi Arabia. We are encouraged by recent steps taken by the Ministry of Interior, including issuing family cards to divorced and widowed women. Our research has shown that the male guardianship system,", + " including restrictions on women\u2019s ability to apply for a passport, travel abroad, and to drive, continues to pose a significant challenge to women\u2019s ability to make important decisions for themselves, as well as to travel to and from work or to pursue career and academic opportunities abroad equal to men. Restrictions stemming from the male guardianship system are inconsistent with Saudi Arabia\u2019s international human rights obligations. We write to request a meeting with yourself and other government officials to discuss our findings and recommendations, including to the Ministry of Interior, which form part of a report that we will publish this year. Human Rights Watch is committed to fair and accurate reporting and is eager to meet with Saudi government officials to hear your perspectives.", + " We will, as always, reflect these perspectives fairly in our report. We also seek further information regarding the ministry\u2019s efforts to advance women\u2019s rights in the country and ask you to respond to the inquiries below so that we may reflect your response in the report we are preparing on this issue: Does the Ministry of Interior plan to abolish the requirement for guardian permission for women to travel abroad? Please provide data on the number of requests from women seeking ministry authorization to travel without guardian permission over the last five years, including where these requests were filed, how many were granted and the circumstances leading to the woman\u2019s request. Beyond the requirements within the Protection from Abuse Law,", + " has the Ministry of Interior issued any directives or guidelines regarding how police officers respond to cases of domestic violence or sanctioned any officers who required the permission or presence of a male guardian for a woman to file a police complaint? Please provide copies of relevant guidelines or directives. Please provide detailed information on any existing complaints mechanisms where women can file complaints against officers who discriminate against them, how many officers, if any, have been sanctioned for discrimination against women over the last five years and how many female officers, if any, serve at police stations. Does a woman require an official male guardian or another male relative to sign her out of prisons or jails? Please share the relevant policies,", + " regulations or other directives related to the procedures for a woman to exit a prison or jail. Please share relevant data on how many women are currently serving time in prisons or jails, how many of these women have completed their sentences but are unable to exit the facility, and how many women the ministry has assisted to exit prisons or jails over the last five years and by what means. How many and what percentage of divorced and widowed women in the country have been issued family cards? What recourse does a woman have if her husband refuses to register her on his family card or allow her to procure a national identity card? When a woman applies for a national identity card or a family card,", + " does she require guardian permission or support at any point during the process; for example, does a \u201chomemaker\u201d still need to submit proof of identity through her husband as noted on the ministry\u2019s website? Does the Ministry of Interior currently have plans to lift the ban on women\u2019s driving in the country? Please provide detailed information on any proposed timeline or concrete steps planned to ensure women can be appropriately licensed. We ask you to respond to this letter and the inquiries above on or before June 7, 2016 so that we may reflect your response in the report we are preparing on this issue and hope to release in July 2016.", + " Please do not hesitate to contact Kristine Beckerle, Middle East and North Africa Division Fellow, should you have questions. We thank you for your consideration and look forward to a positive response. Sincerely yours, Sarah Leah Whitson Executive Director Middle East and North Africa Division Human Rights Watch\n\nAppendix IV: Human Rights Watch Letter to the Minister of Health New York, May 16, 2016 Dr. Tawfiq Al-Rabiah Minister of Health Ministry of Health Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Subject: Advancing the rights of women to health in Saudi Arabia Your Excellency, We write to request a meeting to discuss the impact of the male guardianship system and sex segregation on the full realization of women\u2019s right to health in Saudi Arabia.", + " We also seek further information regarding the steps taken by the Ministry of Health to promote women\u2019s right to health. Over the last seven months, we have researched the impact of the male guardianship system and sex segregation on women\u2019s rights in Saudi Arabia. Our research has shown that the male guardianship system and sex segregation rules continue to pose significant challenges to women\u2019s health in Saudi Arabia. Restrictions stemming from the male guardianship system are inconsistent with Saudi Arabia\u2019s international human rights obligations. We write to request a meeting with yourself and other government officials to discuss our findings and recommendations, including to the Ministry of Health, which form part of a report that we will publish this year.", + " Human Rights Watch is committed to fair and accurate reporting and is eager to meet with Saudi government officials to hear your perspectives. We will, as always, reflect these perspectives fairly in our report. We also seek further information regarding the ministry\u2019s efforts to further women\u2019s right to health in the country, and ask you to respond to the inquiries below so that we may reflect your response in the report we are preparing on this issue: Has the Ministry of Health issued any guidelines or directives to hospitals regarding women\u2019s right to receive medical care, including to be admitted, undergo surgery and be discharged, without a guardian\u2019s permission? Please provide copies of any relevant guidelines or directives.", + " Where available, please provide data on how many hospitals continue to require guardian permission for women to access health, for which procedures guardian permission is required and whether or not the relevant institution is public or private. Does the Ministry of Health plan to introduce sanctions for hospitals that continue to require guardian permission from women to receive any form of medical care? Please provide any draft regulations regarding sanctions as well as details on an estimated timeline for introducing such sanctions. What steps has the Ministry of Health taken to coordinate with the Ministry of Education to ensure that paramedics may promptly enter and provide assistance to female students in the case of a medical emergency? What steps has the Ministry of Health taken to reduce physical inactivity,", + " particularly for women, in line with the commitments undertaken by Saudi Arabia as part of the World Health Organization Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases? For example, has the ministry coordinated with the Ministry of Education to study the possibility of mandating physical education in girls\u2019 public schools? If a woman enters a hospital in labor without a male guardian accompanying her, what are the procedures required for her to exit the hospital? We ask you to respond to this letter and the inquiries above on or before June 7, 2016 so that we may reflect your response in the report we are preparing on this issue and hope to publish in July 2016.", + " Please do not hesitate to contact Kristine Beckerle, Middle East fellow, should you have questions. We thank you for your consideration and look forward to a positive response. Sincerely yours, Sarah Leah Whitson Executive Director Middle East and North Africa Division Human Rights Watch\n\nAppendix V: Human Rights Watch Letter to the Minister of Justice New York, May 16, 2016 Dr. Walid bin Mohammad bin Saleh Al-Samaani Minister of Justice Ministry of Justice Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Subject: Advancing the rights of women in Saudi Arabia Your Excellency, We write to request a meeting to discuss the impact of the male guardianship system on the full realization of women\u2019s rights in Saudi Arabia.", + " We also seek further information regarding the steps taken by the Ministry of Justice to better protect women\u2019s rights. Over the last seven months, we have researched the impact of the male guardianship system and sex segregation on women\u2019s rights in Saudi Arabia. We are encouraged by recent steps taken by the Ministry of Justice, such as enabling women to access the courts without a mu\u2019arif and licensing women to practice law. Our research has shown that the male guardianship system, sex segregation and restrictions on mobility continue to pose significant challenges to women and severely undermine their right to equal treatment before the law. Restrictions stemming from the male guardianship system are inconsistent with Saudi Arabia\u2019s international human rights obligations.", + " We write to request a meeting with yourself and other government officials to discuss our findings and recommendations, including to the Ministry of Justice, which form part of a report that we will publish this year. Human Rights Watch is committed to fair and accurate reporting and is eager to meet with Saudi government officials to hear your perspectives. We will, as always, reflect these perspectives fairly in our report. We also seek further information regarding the ministry\u2019s efforts to advance women\u2019s rights in the country and ask you to respond to the inquiries below so that we may reflect your response in the report we are preparing on this issue: In what cases is a woman\u2019s testimony accorded less weight than that of a man?", + " Please provide data on cases filed in court over the last two years enforcing a guardian\u2019s authority over a woman, including claims related to \u2018uquq, inqiyad, huroob, leaving the marital home, returning a woman to her mahram and forced divorce, as well as claims for adhl, transferring of guardianship and domestic violence. For each category of claim, please include data on how many cases have been filed and in which region. When possible, please provide information on the outcome of the case and the full trial judgment. Has the Ministry of Justice sanctioned any court officers for failing to accept a women\u2019s national identification card or refusing to allow a woman to access the courts without a mu\u2019arif?", + " Please provide data on the number of court officers sanctioned, in which region they worked and the penalty enforced against them. Please also provide information on the number and percentage of courts and public notary offices that have not yet been equipped with women\u2019s sections or fingerprinting machines. Can women report cases of gender-based discrimination by government bodies, including courts, to the ministry? If so, where can women file these claims, how many claims have been filed over the last five years and what was the outcome of each case? Please indicate laws or regulations that prohibit or penalize gender-based discrimination. How many women have been granted licenses to practice law? Are there any restrictions on women\u2019s practice of law?", + " For example, can a woman represent a male criminal defendant? Can she argue a case in court before a judge? What progress, if any, has been made in passing a Personal Status Law, including setting 18 as a minimum age for marriage, ensuring all adults have the right to freely enter and exit marriage, that custody is determined on the basis of the best interests of the child, and that parents have equal rights to handle their children\u2019s affairs? Please indicate any regulations or decrees that the ministry has passed relating to setting a minimum age of marriage or other personal status matters. We ask you to respond to this letter and the inquiries above on or before June 7,", + " 2016 so that we may reflect your response in the report we are preparing on this issue and hope to release in July 2016. Please do not hesitate to contact Kristine Beckerle, Middle East and North Africa Division Fellow, should you have questions. We thank you for your consideration and look forward to a positive response. Sincerely yours, Sarah Leah Whitson Executive Director Middle East and North Africa Division Human Rights Watch\n\nAppendix VI: Human Rights Watch Letter to the Minister of Education New York, May 16, 2016 Dr. Ahmed Al-Issa Minister of Education Ministry of Education Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Subject:", + " Advancing the rights of women in Saudi Arabia Your Excellency, We write to request a meeting to discuss the impact of the male guardianship system and sex segregation on the full realization of women\u2019s right to education in Saudi Arabia. We also seek further information regarding the steps taken by the Ministry of Education to better protect women\u2019s rights. Over the last seven months, we have researched the impact of the male guardianship system and sex segregation on women\u2019s rights in Saudi Arabia. We are encouraged by steps taken by the ministry over the last ten years, including the government scholarship program which has enabled thousands of women to pursue higher education abroad. Our research has shown that the male guardianship system,", + " sex segregation rules, and restrictions on mobility continue to pose significant challenges to women\u2019s right to education in Saudi Arabia, and are inconsistent with Saudi Arabia\u2019s human rights obligations. We write to request a meeting with yourself and other government officials to discuss our findings and recommendations, including to the Ministry of Education, which form part of a report that we will publish this year. Human Rights Watch is committed to fair and accurate reporting and is eager to meet with Saudi government officials to hear your perspectives. We will, as always, reflect these perspectives fairly in our report. We also seek further information regarding the ministry\u2019s efforts to further women\u2019s rights in the country,", + " and ask you to respond to the inquiries below so that we may reflect your response in the report we are preparing on this issue: 1. Has the Ministry of Education issued any directives or guidelines to women\u2019s educational institutions requiring that male paramedics be given prompt access to women\u2019s university campuses in the case of a medical emergency? Please share any relevant directives or guidelines, including any penalties that may have been issued or implemented against universities that delayed, hindered or prevented male paramedic access over the last five years. 2. Has the Ministry of Education issued any directives, guidelines or penalties for women\u2019s universities requiring that universities do not ask adult women to provide guardian permission to enroll?", + " Do any public universities continue to require male guardian permission to enroll adult female students? Please share any relevant directives or guidelines, including any penalties that may have been issued or implemented against universities that continue to require this permission. 3. Does the government have plans to abolish requirements that women who are granted government scholarships be provided with guardian permission and have a mahram accompany them during their stay abroad? In how many cases has the ministry taken action against female students not abiding by the mahram requirement, and what action was taken in each case? 4. Do men and women have the same ability to register their children in public schools? What are the remaining barriers facing women attempting to enroll their children in school without the father\u2019s permission?", + " For example, has the decision to grant divorced and widowed women family cards eased women\u2019s ability to enroll their children in school? 5. Has the Ministry of Education complied with the Shura Council\u2019s April 2014 recommendation to study the possibility of introducing physical education in girls\u2019 public schools? If so, what were the results of the study? Please include details on any draft regulations prepared or presented by the ministry to the Shura Council or Cabinet. 6. What is the timetable for introducing physical education for girls in public schools? Please give an expected start date, and include details of measureable benchmarks, such as what percentage rate of public schools will have fully integrated girls\u2019 physical education by a certain date,", + " weekly hours spent on physical education, types of sports or exercise practiced at each level of education, and facilities used for each grade or type of school (elementary, middle, and secondary). 7. Is it currently possible for public schools to offer voluntary physical education classes to girls? What are the requirements for doing so, if any? We ask you to respond to this letter and the inquiries above on or before June 7, 2016 so that we may reflect your response in the report we are preparing on this issue and hope to release in July 2016. Please do not hesitate to contact Kristine Beckerle, Middle East and North Africa Division Fellow,", + " should you have questions. We thank you for your consideration and look forward to a positive response. Sincerely yours, Sarah Leah Whitson ExecutiveDirector Middle East andNorthAfrica Division HumanRights Watch\n\nAppendix VII: Human Rights Watch Letter to the Minister of Labor and Social Development New York, May 16, 2016 Dr. Mufrej bin Saad Al-Haqbani Minister of Labor and Social Development Ministry of Labor and Social Development and Social Development Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Subject: Advancing the rights of women in Saudi Arabia Your Excellency, We write to request a meeting to discuss the impact of the male guardianship system and sex segregation on the full realization of women\u2019s right to work in Saudi Arabia.", + " We also seek further information regarding the steps taken by the Ministry of Labor and Social Development and Social Development to better protect women\u2019s rights, including to be free from violence and to widen women\u2019s opportunities to participate in the labor market. Over the last seven months, we have researched the impact of the male guardianship system and sex segregation on women\u2019s rights in Saudi Arabia. We are encouraged by steps taken by the former Ministry of Labor and Social Development over the last ten years, including removing discriminatory provisions in the Labor Law, deciding that women no longer require male guardian permission to be employed, and incentivizing employers to hire women. We are also encouraged by recent steps taken by the former Ministry of Labor and Social Development,", + " including promulgating implementing regulations for the Protection from Abuse Law and setting up hotlines and a dedicated center where women can report abuse. Our research has shown that the male guardianship system, sex segregation rules, and restrictions on mobility continue to pose significant challenges to women hoping to enter the workforce and to women victims of domestic violence in Saudi Arabia. Restrictions stemming from the male guardianship system are inconsistent with Saudi Arabia\u2019s international human rights obligations. We write to request a meeting with yourself and other government officials to discuss our findings and recommendations, including to the Ministry of Labor and Social Development and Social Development, which form part of a report that we will publish this year.", + " Human Rights Watch is committed to fair and accurate reporting and is eager to meet with Saudi government officials to hear your perspectives. We will, as always, reflect these perspectives fairly in our report. We also seek further information regarding the ministry\u2019s efforts to further women\u2019s rights in the country, and ask you to respond to the inquiries below so that we may reflect your response in the report we are preparing on this issue: Has the ministry removed language from Article 149 of the Labor Law that banned women from working in dangerous or hazardous industries? If so, has a new Labor Law with these changes been promulgated and circulated? Does the ministry continue to require guardian permission from its female employees?", + " Is it aware of any other state institutions, including public schools, that continue to require guardian permission from female employees? Does the ministry penalize public or private employers that require guardian permission before hiring a woman? If not, does the ministry have plans to introduce these penalties? Please provide any draft regulations regarding penalties and details on an estimated timeline for introducing such penalties. Does the ministry receive complaints from women that allege gender discrimination in the workplace, including private and public sector employers requiring guardian permission for women to work or being asked by government officials to present a male manager or male agent to secure a business license? If so, please provide information on where these complaints may be filed,", + " the average processing time of a complaint, the number of discrimination-related complaints filed by women over the last five years and any steps taken by the ministry, including issuing penalties, in response to these complaints. Has the ministry undertaken any studies regarding the impact of sex segregation in the workplace on employers\u2019 likelihood of hiring women or women\u2019s ability to freely enter the labor market and advance once in a position? Please share the results of any studies so conducted. How many cases of domestic violence has the former Ministry of Labor and Social Development responded to over the last five years? Please provide data regarding the number of cases, the age and gender of the victim,", + " the age, gender and relationship to the victim of the perpetrator, the way in which the ministry intervened in the case, and the current status of the case. Please specifically note any cases in which the ministry worked with the police and entered a home or placed a perpetrator of abuse in jail in response to a report of violence. Does a woman require a male guardian or other male relative to sign her out of state-run shelters or juvenile detention centers? Please share any policies or directives related to the procedures for a woman to exit these facilities, including details on differences in exit-procedure policy, if any, between women who enter shelters fleeing from abuse,", + " women in juvenile detention centers and women transferred from prisons or jails to a shelter after completing their sentences. What steps has the ministry taken to help women exit ministry-run facilities? Please share relevant directives and data on how many women are currently unable to exit ministry facilities and how many women the ministry has assisted to exit these facilities over the last five years and by what means. Has the ministry issued any clarifications or guidelines, beyond the 2014 implementing regulations, regarding the Protection from Abuse Law? In particular, has the ministry provided guidance on the interpretation of Article 1, including what actions \u201cexceed the bounds of guardianship,\u201d Article 8,", + " including what constitutes a \u201csevere\u201d case, and Article 9, including when the ministry and police may enter a home without the permission of a guardian or the home owner? Does the ministry provide legal assistance to women in shelters or juvenile detention centers who are seeking to transfer guardianship away from an abusive guardian? We ask you to respond to this letter and the inquiries above on or before June 7, 2016 so that we may reflect your response in the report we are preparing on this issue and hope to release in July 2016. Please do not hesitate to contact Kristine Beckerle, Middle East fellow, should you have questions.", + " We thank you for your consideration and look forward to a positive response. Sincerely yours, Sarah Leah Whitson Executive Director Middle East and North Africa Division Human Rights Watch\n\nAppendix VIII: Screenshot from Ministry of Interior Travel Permission Portal ", + " Whenever I go to my local medical center for an appointment or have my young daughter receive her vaccinations I see hundreds of Saudi women sitting in waiting rooms, veiled and with young children at their feet.\n\nMost come from the outskirts of Jeddah and are seemingly very religious. For the most part they are genuinely happy with their lives. This, I say to myself, is the real Saudi Arabia.\n\nSaudi Arabia has many faces when viewed from the outside, and few of them are good: Oil-rich, empty desert, wealthy families with lavish spending habits and criminally oppressive to Saudi women just to name a few.\n\nIt\u2019s the role of the media to take a complicated social issue and break it down to the simplest explanation to make it digestible to readers and viewers.", + " People don't have the time to read multi-layered explanations the length of a university thesis to understand the complexity of women\u2019s rights in Saudi Arabia. So the news media takes on that role and reduces societies to stereotypes.\n\nCertainly, social media has taken on the role of giving the oppressed a voice. YouTube, Twitter and Instagram postings have perhaps done more than lengthy reports from international human rights organizations to expose abuses, particularly when it comes to women\u2019s rights in Saudi Arabia.\n\nBut social media cuts both ways. If one assumes the role of advocate and publicizes injustices, then that individual more or less becomes a tool of the Western media because that individual speaks to the Western narrative that Saudi women are oppressed.", + " It\u2019s not \u201csome\u201d Saudi women or \u201cmost\u201d Saudi women, but the implication is all Saudi women are oppressed. The narrative completely ignores the reality on the ground. The women I have come across at the medical center would beg to differ.\n\nCritics of Saudi Arabia would then counter, well, happy Saudi women are \u201cbrainwashed.\u201d Or my favorite Western retort, \u201ccan Saudi women be brainwashed if they don't know they are being brainwashed (by believing they are happy)?\u201d\n\nMake no mistake, women in Saudi Arabia are not given all the rights they are entitled to in Islam and the male guardianship rules are in dire need of reform.", + " This is something that I have gone on record heartily endorsing. And many Saudi women have taken to the social media in protest of male guardianship using the hashtag #TogetherToEndMaleGuardianship.\n\nSaudi women, according to CNN (that Western voice again!) are posting selfies holding signs that say things like, \u201cSlavery comes in many shapes and forms: Male guardianship is one\u201d or \u201cI'm a prisoner and my crime is that I\u2019m a Saudi woman.\u201d\n\nI have no doubt that these young women are truthful and are suffering under the current legal system. They deserve better. They are victims of a system that allows a father,", + " son or brother virtual authority over their lives, and, I might add, authority that conflicts with Islam.\n\nBut missing from the equation is the Saudi family dynamic. Each Saudi family is different and handles the guardianship issue differently. An abusive, rigid, control-freak of a father is going to be an abusive, rigid, control-freak of a guardian. A father that genuinely loves his daughter and wants the best the world has to offer her will not stand in her way and will make male guardianship for her, not against her.\n\nSaudi women are no different from their Western counterparts. We all navigate a patriarchal society whether it\u2019s the United States,", + " India, Pakistan or Mexico and the rampant global misogyny. Saudi women make adjustments in their daily lives to deal with discrimination whether it\u2019s being denied access to a public building or needing dad\u2019s permission to leave the country. American women make their own adjustments in their daily lives whether it\u2019s to avoid sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace or to make accommodations to placate that abusive, rigid, control-freak of a husband and/or father.\n\nWhen Human Rights Watch recently released its report on the abuses of male guardianship in Saudi Arabia, and CNN followed up with its special report outlining those abuses, our Western masters forgot one little detail: Saudi Arabia will not throw male guardianship into the dustbin.", + " We live in a theocracy and Islam guides us. And guardianship is part of Islam.\n\nThe question is whether we as a nation have the wherewithal and courage to correctly apply guardianship to protect and support Saudi women. If we as a nation address this question and implement reforms that better reflect Islam, then the abuse, at least when it comes to the question of guardianship, will be minimized.\n" + ], + "length": 32730, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 85, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The zingers came fast and furious in Thursday night's heated GOP debate, with most of them flying back and forth between Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. Some notable quotes, via CNN, the New York Times, Mediaite, and the Washington Post: Trump: \"You look at our borders, they're like Swiss cheese\u2014everybody pours in.\" In his opening statement. Cruz: \"In 2013, when I was [fighting] against the 'Gang of Eight' amnesty bill, where was Donald? He was firing Dennis Rodman on Celebrity Apprentice.\" Trump: \"The wall just got 10 feet taller. ... This guy used a filthy, disgusting word on television, and he should be ashamed of himself.\" On ex-Mexico President Vicente Fox's statement that he's \"not going to pay for that f---ing wall\" along the southern US border. Rubio: \"If he builds the wall the way he built Trump Towers, he'll be using illegal immigrant labor to do it,\" plus added digs on Trump's \"fake university.\" John Kasich: \"If you're in the business of commerce, conduct commerce. And if you don't agree with their lifestyle, say a prayer for them when they leave and hope they change their behavior.\" On religious liberty. Cruz: \"Let me tell you right now, Donald, I will not apologize for a minute for defending the Constitution. I will not apologize for defending the Bill of Rights.\" After Trump asked him to apologize for criticizing Trump's sister, a judge, for signing a bill. Trump: \"I don't believe anything Telemundo says.\" While being questioned by Telemundo news anchor Maria Celeste Arraras. Kasich: \"It's easier to interpret the Dead Sea scrolls than to understand your hospital bill.\" On more transparency in health care. Trump: \"At least they killed terrorists.\" Saying we'd better off if Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein were still leading Libya and Iraq. Rubio: \"I see him repeat himself every night, he says five things. Everyone's dumb, he's gonna make America great again ... we're going to win, win win, he's winning in the polls ... and the lines around the state.\" Trump: \"Very few people listen to your radio show.\" To moderator Hugh Hewitt when asked about releasing his tax returns.Other insults Trump threw out: \"choke artist\" (to Rubio) and \"liar,\" \"basket case,\" and \"crazy zealot\" regarding Cruz. Cruz: \"Falsely accusing someone of lying is itself a lie, and it's something Donald does daily.\" Rubio: \"If he hadn't inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now? Selling watches in Manhattan.\" Ben Carson: Besides his now-infamous \"fruit salad\" comment and mentioning a movie had been made about his hands, the relatively quiet Ben Carson had one of the most-applauded questions of the night in an attempt to get some speaking time: \"Can somebody attack me, please?\"\n", + "docs": [ + "During Thursday night\u2019s GOP debate at the University of Houston, conservative radio host and debate co-moderator Hugh Hewitt cornered Donald Trump about the fact that he has often said he would release his tax receipts during a Presidential run. It is an issue that has resurfaced for the Republican frontrunner who has yet to release his records, just a day after Mitt Romney identified a potential \u201cbombshell\u201d hidden in those financial reports of Trump\u2019s worth.\n\nHewitt attempted to point to an interview of his own from last February with Trump where the real estate mogul said he would have \u201cno objection\u201d to releasing the information if he ran for the Presidency.\n\n\u201cA year ago you told me on my radio show \u2014 the audio and transcript are out there on YouTube \u2014 that you would release your tax returns,\u201d offered Hewitt.\n\nAt the debate to counter Hewitt\u2019s move,", + " Trump preemptively blurted out, \u201cFirst of all, very few people listen to your radio show. That\u2019s the good news. Let me just tell you \u2014 which happens to be true. Check out the ratings.\u201d\n\nThis is not the first time that a Trump-Hewitt interaction has turned sour; in September, the GOP candidate lashed out against Hewitt after a \u201cgotcha\u201d question on The Hugh Hewitt Show (the same one that \u201cvery few people listen to\u201d) regarding the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The exchange called into question Trump\u2019s readiness on foreign policy, and left the candidate scrambling on the campaign trail for several weeks afterwards.\n\nWatch the above exchange from CNN.\n\n[image via screengrab]\n\n\u2014\n\nJ.D.", + " Durkin is the Senior Editor of Mediaite.\n\nHave a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com ", + " Photo: Eric Thayer for The New York Times; Video: By CNN\n\nFew criticisms cut at Senator Ted Cruz like being called a liar. It undermines the central tenet of his candidacy, that he is a trusted conservative, his principles inviolable.\n\nSo when Donald J. Trump did just that during the debate \u2014 \u201cThis guy is a liar,\u201d he said, meaning Mr. Cruz \u2014 the Texas senator was outraged.\n\nThe moderator, Wolf Blitzer, was ready to move on from an exchange that was already descending into bitterness and acrimony. \u201cYou\u2019re going to say that I can\u2019t respond to being called a liar?\u201d Mr.", + " Cruz demanded. Mr. Blitzer let him finish.\n\nMr. Cruz\u2019s response? Mr. Trump is the real liar.\n\n\u201cLet me tell you something,\u201d Mr. Cruz said. \u201cFalsely accusing someone of lying is itself a lie, and it\u2019s something Donald does daily.\u201d\n\nWhatever civility might have remained in that exchange eroded from there, and it ended up as a barely intelligible shouting match. And no matter which candidate may have gotten the better of the other, it was difficult to see how anyone gained anything from it. ", + " Republican presidential candidates fought over immigration reform, health care and peace in the Middle East during the CNN/Telemundo debate in Houston on Feb. 25. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)\n\nThe four Republican candidates trailing Donald Trump faced him in Houston Thursday night in the last debate before the Super Tuesday primaries next week.\n\nWe posted the complete transcript below. Washington Post reporters and readers using Genius have annotated it, and will continue to do so following the debate.\n\nTo see an annotation, click or tap the highlighted part of the transcript; if you would like to leave your own annotations, make sure you have a Genius account. Post staff annotations will appear by default;", + " others are in a menu that you can see in the upper right when you click or tap on an annotation.\n\nCNN's Wolf Blitzer introduced the candidates, laid out the rules and the debate began.\n\nBLITZER: It's time for the candidates to introduce themselves right now. You'll each have 30 seconds. Dr. Carson, you're first.\n\nCARSON: If someone had tried to describe today's America to you 30 years ago, you would have listened in disbelief. Americans know that our nation is heading off the abyss of destruction, secondary to divisiveness, fiscal irresponsibility, and failure to lead.\n\nMarco,", + " Donald, Ted, John, we will not solve any of these problems by trying to destroy each other. What we need to do is be looking for solutions tonight. It's not about us, it's about the American people.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Governor Kasich?\n\nKASICH: Well, you know, on the way over here, even getting ready earlier and sitting in the green room and watching the early coverage, you know, my father carried mail on his back and his father was a coal miner and my mother's mother was an immigrant, could barely speak English. And I'm standing on this stage. It's pretty remarkable.", + " But I want to tell you, there's a lot of young people watching tonight. You can do whatever you want to do in your life. America is an amazing country, where a kid like me can grow up to run for president of the United States and be on this stage tonight. So to all the young people that are out there, your hopes, your dreams, pursue them. Shoot for the stars. America's great, and you can do it. Thank you, Wolf.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Rubio?\n\nRUBIO: Well, thank you. This election, we have to decide the identity of America in the 2ist century,", + " but as part of this primary, we have to find out our identity as a party and as a movement.\n\nThirty-six years ago, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush began the Reagan Revolution. For a generation, they defined conservatism as limited government and free enterprise and a strong national defense. But they also appealed to our hopes and our dreams. Now we have to decide if we are still that kind of party and still that kind of movement, or if we're simply going to become a party that preys on people's angers and fears.\n\nI hope we remain that conservative movement that appeals to our hopes and our dreams and the belief that America will always be better in its future than it's been in its story history.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER:", + " Senator Cruz?\n\nCRUZ: Welcome to Texas.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHere, Texas provided my family with hope. Here, my mom became the first in her family ever to go to college. Here, my dad fled Cuba and washed dishes, making 50 cents an hour to pay his way through the University of Texas. I graduated from high school at Second Baptist not too far away from here.\n\nCRUZ: When I ran for Senate, I promised 27 million Texans I would fight for you every day, and not for the Washington bosses.\n\nAnd, I'll tell you, as I travel the state, Democrats tell me I didn't vote for you,", + " but you're doing what you said you would do. And, as president, I will do the same.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: Thank you. My whole theme is make America great again. We don't win anymore as a country. We don't win with trade, we don't win with the military. ISIS, we can't even knock out ISIS, and we will, believe me. We will.\n\nWe don't win in any capacity with healthcare. We have terrible health care, Obamacare is going to be repealed and replaced. We just don't win.\n\nYou look at our borders,", + " they're like swiss cheese, everybody pours in.\n\nWe're going to make a great country again. We're going to start winning again. We're going to win a lot, it's going to be a big difference, believe me. It's going to be a big difference.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Thank you very much. It's now time to begin questions. Voters in the first four states have spoken, and Mr. Trump has emerged as the frontrunner, but in five days the candidates will face their biggest test yet, Super Tuesday. When nearly half of the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination will be awarded,", + " and the biggest prize of the night is Texas.\n\nImmigration is a key issue in this state, for all voters nationwide, including the many people watching us on Telemundo. So, that's where we begin.\n\nMr. Trump, you've called for a deportation force to remove the 11 million undocumented immigrants from the United States. You've also promised to let what you call, \"the good ones\", come back in. Your words, \"the good ones\", after they've been deported.\n\nSenator Cruz would not allow them to come back in. He says that's the biggest difference between the two of you. He calls your plan amnesty.", + " Is it?\n\nTRUMP: First of all, he was in charge of amnesty, he was the leader, and you can ask Marco because they've been debating this every debate that we've had.\n\nAs far as coming back in, number one, you wouldn't even be talking, and you wouldn't have asked that as the first question if it weren't for me when my opening when I talked about illegals immigration. It wouldn't even be a big subject.\n\nBut, we either have a country, or we don't have a country. We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally. They will go out.", + " They will come back -- some will come back, the best, through a process. They have to come back legally. They have to come back through a process, and it may not be a very quick process, but I think that's very fair, and very fine.\n\nThey're going to get in line with other people. The best of them will come back, but they're going to come back through a process.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz, what's wrong with letting what Mr. Trump calls, \"the good ones\" come back to the United States?\n\nCRUZ: You know, the people that get forgotten in this debate over immigration are the hardworking men and women of this country -- our millions of Americans who are losing their jobs.", + " Millions of legal immigrants who are losing their jobs are seeing their wages driven down.\n\nYou know, in the past couple of weeks the Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article about the state of Arizona. Arizona put in very tough laws on illegal immigration, and the result was illegal immigrants fled the state, and what's happened there -- it was a very interesting article.\n\nSome of the business owners complained that the wages they had to pay workers went up, and from their perspective that was a bad thing. But, what the state of Arizona has seen is the dollars they're spending on welfare, on prisons, and education, all of those have dropped by hundreds of millions of dollars.", + " And, the Americans, and for that matter, the legal immigrants who are in Arizona, are seeing unemployment drop are seeing wages rise. That's who we need to be fighting for.\n\nListen, we have always welcomed legal immigrants, but I think it is a mistake to forgive those who break the law to allow them to become U.S. citizens, and that's why I've led the fight against granting citizenship to those here illegally, and that's why I will do the same thing as president.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Mr. Trump, do you want to respond to that? TRUMP: Well, I'm very glad that Ted mentioned Arizona because probably the toughest man on borders is Sheriff Joe Arpaio,", + " and two days ago he totally endorsed me, so, thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Rubio?\n\nRUBIO: Senator Cruz has called your immigration plan amnesty, and has an add out there comparing it to President Obama's. He says both of you support allowing undocumented immigrants legal status here in the United States after a background check, paying a fine, and paying taxes.\n\nAre those claims correct?\n\nRUBIO: Well, first of all, and before we do anything, I've been abundantly clear on this. When I'm president of the United States, before we do anything on immigration, we are going to secure the border.", + " And, that's not just the physical border with Mexico, it's Visa overstays. That's 45 percent of the problem right there.\n\nRUBIO: It also has to do -- that's why we need e-verify, and entry-exit tracking system, and so-forth. And, until that happens, we're not doing anything else. And then we'll see what the American people are willing to support.\n\nAnd Donald mentioned, because he mentioned me in his answer, that his position on immigration is what has driven this debate. Well, the truth is, though, that a lot of these positions that he's now taking are new to him.\n\nIn 2011,", + " he talked about the need for a pathway to citizenship. In 2012, Donald criticized Mitt Romney, saying that Mitt lost his election because of self-deportation.\n\nAnd so even today, we saw a report in one of the newspapers that Donald, you've hired a significant number of people from other countries to take jobs that Americans could have filled.\n\nMy mom and dad -- my mom was a maid at a hotel, and instead of hiring an American like her, you have brought in over a thousand people from all over the world to fill those jobs instead.\n\nSo I think this is an important issue. And I think we are realizing increasingly that it's an important issue for the country that has been debated for 30 years,", + " but finally needs to be solved once and for all.\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: Well, first of all, self-deportation is people are going to leave as soon as they see others going out. If you look at Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, they started moving people out and the rest of them left.\n\nSelf-deportation, as I really define it, and that's the way I define it, is you're going to get some to go, and the rest are going to go out.\n\nAs far as the people that I've hired in various parts of Florida during the absolute prime season,", + " like Palm Beach and other locations, you could not get help. It's the up season. People didn't want to have part-time jobs. There were part-time jobs, very seasonal, 90-day jobs, 120-day jobs, and you couldn't get.\n\nEverybody agrees with me on that. They were part-time jobs. You needed them, or we just might as well close the doors, because you couldn't get help in those hot, hot sections of Florida.\n\nRUBIO: That -- my point that I made was you had criticized Mitt Romney for self-deportation. You said that his strategy of self- deportation is why he lost the election.\n\nAnd I think people in Florida would be surprised,", + " because, in fact, the article that was today, they interviewed a number of people that would have been willing to do those jobs, if you would have been willing to hire them to do it.\n\nTRUMP: I criticized Mitt Romney for losing the election. He should have won that election. He had a failed president. He ran a terrible campaign. He was a terrible candidate. That's what I criticize Mitt Romney -- I mean, ran...\n\nRUBIO: No, he...\n\nTRUMP: Excuse me. He ran one terrible campaign. That's an election that should have been won.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO:", + " Well, in fact, I agree we should have won and I wished we would have, but, in fact, you did criticize him for using the term \"self-deportation.\" I mean, that's on the record and people can look it up right now online.\n\nBut, again, I just want to reiterate, I think it's really important, this point. I think it's fine, it's an important point that you raise and we discuss on immigration. This is a big issue for Texas, a huge issue for the country.\n\nBut I also think that if you're going to claim that you're the only one that lifted this into the campaign,", + " that you acknowledge that, for example, you're only person on this stage that has ever been fined for hiring people to work on your projects illegally.\n\nYou hired some workers from Poland...\n\nTRUMP: No, no, I'm the only one on the stage that's hired people. You haven't hired anybody.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: In fact, some of the people...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: And by the way, I've hired -- and by the way, I've hired tens of thousands of people over at my job. You've hired nobody.\n\nRUBIO: Yes, you've hired a thousand from another country...\n\nTRUMP:", + " You've had nothing but problems with your credit cards, et cetera. So don't tell me about that.\n\nRUBIO: Let me just say -- let me finish the statement. This is important.\n\nTRUMP: You haven't hired one person, you liar.\n\nRUBIO: He hired workers from Poland. And he had to pay a million dollars or so in a judgment from...\n\nTRUMP: That's wrong. That's wrong. Totally wrong.\n\nRUBIO: That's a fact. People can look it up. I'm sure people are Googling it right now. Look it up. \"Trump Polish workers,\" you'll see a million dollars for hiring illegal workers on one of his projects.", + " He did it.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: That happened.\n\nTRUMP: I've hired tens of thousands of people over my lifetime. Tens of thousands...\n\nRUBIO: Many from other countries instead of hiring Americans.\n\nTRUMP: Be quiet. Just be quiet.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Let me talk. I've hired tens of thousands of people. He brings up something from 30 years ago, it worked out very well. Everybody was happy.\n\nRUBIO: You paid a million dollars.\n\nTRUMP: And by the way, the laws were totally different. That was a whole different world.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Thank you.\n\nTRUMP: But I've hired people. Nobody up here has hired anybody.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz, you say you want to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants, but you never want to allow them to come back to the United States. What would happen to the children who are U.S.- born citizens whose parent will be deported under your plan?\n\nCRUZ: Well, existing law provides that those who are deported cannot come back here legally. U.S. citizens can come back. That's existing law.\n\nBut let me say, Wolf, I really find it amazing that Donald believes that he is the one who discovered the issue of illegal immigration.", + " I can tell you, when I ran for Senate here in the state of Texas, I ran promising to lead the fight against amnesty, promising to fight to build a wall. And in 2013, when I was fight against the \"gang of eight\" amnesty bill, where was Donald? He was firing Dennis Rodman on \"Celebrity Apprentice.\"\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nCRUZ: And indeed, if you look at the \"gang of eight,\" one individual on this stage broke his promise to the men and women who elected him and wrote the amnesty bill.\n\nCRUZ: If you look at the eight members of the Gang of Eight,", + " Donald gave over $50,000 to three Democrats and two Republicans. And when you're funding open border politicians, you shouldn't be surprised when they fight for open borders.\n\nAnd I think if you want to know who actually will secure the borders and follow through, you ought to ask who has a record before they were a candidate for president of fighting to secure the borders and stop amnesty. And I'm the only one on this stage that has that record. And by the way, Marco is exactly right that a federal court found Donald guilty of being part of a conspiracy to hire people illegally and entered a $1 million judgment against him.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER:", + " Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: I can only say this, and I've said it loud and clear and I've said it for years. And many of these people are sitting right in the audience right now -- your lobbyist and your special interest and your donors, because the audience is packed with them, and they're packed with you.\n\nI've had an amazing relationship with politicians -- with politicians both Democrat, Republican, because I was a businessman. As one magazine said, he's a world-class businessman; he was friendly with everybody. I got along with everybody.\n\nYou get along with nobody. You don't have one Republican -- you don't have one Republican senator,", + " and you work with them every day of your life, although you skipped a lot of time. These are minor details. But you don't have one Republican senator backing you; not one. You don't have the endorsement of one Republican senator and you work with these people. You should be ashamed of yourself.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz?\n\nCRUZ: You know, I actually think Donald is right. He is promising if he's elected he will go and cut deals in Washington. And he's right. He has supported -- he has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats. Anyone who really cared about illegal immigration wouldn't be hiring illegal immigrants.", + " Anyone who really cared about illegal immigration wouldn't be funding Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi; wouldn't be funding the Gang of Eight. And, you know, he is right. When you stand up to Washington, when you honor the promise you made to the men and women who elected you and say enough with the corruption, enough with the cronyism, let's actually stand for the working men and women of this country, Washington doesn't like it.\n\nAnd Donald, if you want to be liked in Washington, that's not a good attribute for a president.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: Here's a man -- Robin Hood.", + " This is Robin Hood over here. He talks about corruption. On his financial disclosure form, he didn't even put that he's borrowed money from Citibank and from Goldman Sachs, which is a total violation. He didn't talk about the fact that he pays almost no interest. He just left it off, and now he's going to protect the people from the big bad banks.\n\nGive me a break.\n\nBLITZER: All right. We're going to move on to Governor Kasich.\n\nGovernor Kasich...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Wolf, can I respond to that attack?\n\nBLITZER: You can respond,", + " but let me get Governor Kasich in. He's been waiting patiently.\n\nGovernor Kasich, the idea -- you've said this, and I want to quote you now: \"The idea that we're going to deport all these people is ludicrous and everybody knows it.\" Those are your words. Should people be allowed to break the law just because it's not feasible to stop them?\n\nKASICH: Look, we have a great president here, George Bush, the 41st president of the United States. He worked with Ronald Reagan to pass an effort to try to solve this problem -- a path to legalization. You see, that was a time when things worked.", + " It was a time when President Reagan and George Bush decided that we needed to make the country work.\n\nLook, I think there is an answer here. The answer is you complete the border. You let people know that once it's done, you don't have a right to come in. If you come in, we don't want any excuse. You're going to go back. But I favor a guest worker program. I think it's practical. And I think for the 11 million or 11.5 million Americans -- the illegals that are here, if they have not committed a crime since they've been here, I'd make them pay a fine,", + " some back taxes, maybe some community service. And at the end, I'd give them a path to legalization, but not a path to citizenship. I don't think we're going to tear families apart. I don't think we're going to ride around in people's neighborhoods and grab people out of their homes. I don't think -- first of all, I don't think it's practical and I don't think it reflects America.\n\nYou know what happened? The problem with President Reagan is we didn't get in there and actually finish the border. And I think it was probably business interests that affected it. But at the end of the day,", + " let's be practical. Let's start solving problems in this country instead of kicking them upstairs. With President Reagan and George Bush, it was a bipartisan coalition to address the issue, and I think we can and should do it again. And I will have a plan in the first 100 days to get it done and get this issue behind us.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Thank you, Governor.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nDr. Carson, you've been critical of mass deportation. You said back in November you don't think Mr. Trump's plan necessarily represents the Republican Party. Given how well Mr. Trump has been doing with the Republican primary voters,", + " do you still believe that?\n\nCARSON: I believe in liberty and justice for all. I think everything that we do should be fair. And I've already described -- you know, how we can secure the border.\n\nWe need to secure all the borders, because it's not just people coming in from South America and Mexico, but there are terrorists who want to destroy us, who are getting across our borders fairly easily. And we have to stop that.\n\nBut in terms of the people who are here already, after we -- after we stop the illegal immigration, we need to be reasonable. And I would give them a six-month period in which to get registered as a guest worker,", + " assuming that they have an acceptable record.\n\nThey have to pay a back-tax penalty, have to pay taxes going forward, but they don't have to live underground anymore. And I think they do not become American citizens, they do not vote.\n\nIf they want to become an American citizen, they go through exactly the same process that anybody else goes through. I think that's the kind of situation that is actually fair to people.\n\nAnd we have other ways of -- of utilizing our facilities and our talents as foreign aid: doing things in South America and Central America and Mexico that improve the economy there, so that they don't feel the need to come over here.", + " That would cost us a lot less than borrowing money from China, paying interest on it.\n\nBLITZER: Thank you, Dr. Carson.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMr. Trump, your campaign, as you well remember, began with the idea of building a wall along the southern border.\n\nTRUMP: (inaudible).\n\nBLITZER: It's about 315 miles southwest of where we are right now. You've said the Mexican government will pay for it.\n\nTRUMP: Correct.\n\nBLITZER: The spokesperson for the current president of Mexico says that will never happen. The last two presidents of Mexico say that will never happen.", + " In fact, the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox -- he said today, and I'm quoting him -- he said, \"I'm not going to pay for that,\" quote, \"effing wall.\"\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nSo if you don't get an actual check from the Mexican government for $8 billion or $10 billion or $12 billion, whatever it will cost, how are you going to make them pay for the wall?\n\nTRUMP: I will, and the wall just got 10 feet taller, believe me.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nIt just got 10 feet taller. I saw him make that -- I saw him make the statement.", + " I saw him use the word that he used. I can only tell you, if I would have used even half of that word, it would have been national scandal.\n\nThis guy used a filthy, disgusting word on television, and he should be ashamed of himself, and he should apologize, OK? Number one. Number two, we have a trade deficit with Mexico of $58 billion a year. And that doesn't include all the drugs that are pouring across and destroying our country.\n\nWe're going to make them pay for that wall. Now, the wall is $10 billion to $12 billion, if I do it. If these guys do it,", + " it'll end up costing $200 billion.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBut the wall is $10 billion to $12 billion. You need 1,000 -- you need 1,000 miles. The Great Wall of China, built 2,000 years ago -- 2,000, is 13,000 miles. We need 1,000, because we have a lot of natural barriers.\n\nWe can do it for $10 billion to $12 billion, and it's a real wall. This is a wall that's a heck of a lot higher than the ceiling you're looking at. This is a wall that's going to work.\n\nMexico will pay for it,", + " because they are not doing us any favors. They could stop all of this illegal trade if they wanted to...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... immediately. Mexico will pay for the wall. It's a small portion of the kind of money that we lose and the deficits that we have with Mexico.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: If the -- if the Mexicans don't pay for the wall, will you start a trade war with Mexico?\n\nTRUMP: Well, you know, I don't mind trade wars when we're losing $58 billion a year, you want to know the truth. We're losing so much. (APPLAUSE)\n\nWe're losing so much with Mexico and China -- with China,", + " we're losing $500 billion a year. And then people say, \"don't we want to trade?\" I don't mind trading, but I don't want to lose $500 billion. I don't want to lose $58 billion.\n\nMexico just took Carrier Corporation, maker of air conditioners. They just took Ford. They're building a $2.5 billion plant. They just took Nabisco out of Chicago.\n\nAnd I always say I'm not having Oreos anymore, which is true, by the way. But they just took a big plant from Nabisco into Mexico. They're taking our businesses. I don't mind.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Thank you. Senator Rubio?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: Yeah, a couple points. If he builds the wall the way he built Trump Towers, he'll be using illegal immigrant labor to do it. The second...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Such a cute sound bite.\n\nRUBIO: But it -- no, it's not a sound bite. It's a fact. Again, go online and Google it. Donald Trump, Polish workers. You'll see it.\n\nThe second thing, about the trade war -- I don't understand, because your ties and the clothes you make is made in Mexico and in China.", + " So you're gonna be starting a trade war against your own ties and your own suits.\n\nTRUMP: All right, you know what?\n\nRUBIO: Why don't you make them in America?\n\nTRUMP: Because they devalue their currency -- they devalue their currencies...\n\nRUBIO: Well, then make them in America.\n\nTRUMP:... that makes it -- well, you don't know a thing about business. You lose on everything...\n\nRUBIO: Well, make them in America.\n\nTRUMP: Let me just tell you -- they de-value their currency. They de-value their currencies.\n\nRUBIO:", + " Well then, make them in America.\n\nTRUMP: That makes it -- well, you don't know a thing about business. You lose on everything you do.\n\nRUBIO: Well, make them in America.\n\nTRUMP: Let me just tell you, they de-value their currencies. China, Mexico, everybody. Japan with the cars. They de-value their currencies to such an extent that our businesses cannot compete with them, our workers lose their jobs...\n\nRUBIO: And so you make them in China and in Russia.\n\nTRUMP: But you wouldn't know anything about it because you're a lousy businessman.\n\nRUBIO:", + " Well, I don't know anything about bankrupting four companies. You've bankrupted..\n\nTRUMP: No, I -- and you know why? You know why?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: I don't know anything about...\n\nTRUMP: You know why?\n\nRUBIO:... starting a university, and that was a fake university.\n\nBLITZER: One at a time.\n\nTRUMP: First of all...\n\nBLITZER: One at a time.\n\nTRUMP:... first of all, that's called a...\n\nRUBIO: There are people who borrowed $36,000...\n\nBLITZER:", + " Hold on. One at a time, Mr. Trump.\n\nRUBIO:... to go to Trump University, and they're suing now -- $36,000 to go to a university...\n\nTRUMP: And by the way -- and by the way...\n\nRUBIO:... that's a fake school.\n\nTRUMP:... and by the way...\n\nRUBIO: And you know what they got? They got to take a picture with a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump...\n\nTRUMP:... I've won most of the lawsuits.\n\nRUBIO: That's what they got for $36,000.\n\nBLITZER:", + " All right, I want to move on.\n\nTRUMP: And they actually did a very good job, but I've won most of the lawsuits.\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump, Senator, I want to bring in...\n\nRUBIO: Most of the lawsuits.\n\nBLITZER:... I want to bring in my colleague Maria Celeste.\n\nTRUMP: Excuse me. Hey Wolf, let me ask you. Am I allowed to respond to this?\n\nBLITZER: You're allowed -- you've been responding.\n\nTRUMP: OK. Well let -- no, I haven't. I really haven't.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nRUBIO:", + " He's talked through the whole thing.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Here's a guy -- here's a guy that buys a house for $179,000, he sells it to a lobbyist who's probably here for $380,000 and then legislation is passed. You tell me about this guy. This is what we're going to have as president.\n\nRUBIO: Here's a guy that inherited $200 million. If he hadn't inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now?\n\nTRUMP: No, no, no.\n\nRUBIO: Selling watches in (inaudible)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP:", + " (Inaudible) I took...\n\nRUBIO: That's where he would be. TRUMP: That is so wrong. We'll work on that. I took $1 million and I turned into $10 billion.\n\nRUBIO: Oh, OK. One million.\n\nTRUMP: I borrowed $1 million...\n\nRUBIO: Better release your tax returns so we can see how much money he made.\n\nTRUMP: I borrowed $1 million, I turned it into $10 billion...\n\nRUBIO: Oh, he doesn't make that money.\n\nTRUMP:... more than $10 billion.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Thank you. Thank you. I want to bring in Maria Celeste of Telemundo. Maria?\n\nCELESTE: Senator Rubio, last week, you said that on your first day in office, you will get rid of President Obama's executive action known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA for short.\n\nRUBIO: Correct.\n\nARRASAS: It is a program that has protected hundreds of thousands of young people that came here when they were children, brought to the U.S. by undocumented immigrants. This is the only home they know, and that is a dramatic change from last April when you said in Spanish, and I'm going to quote you (in Spanish)", + " which translates to DACA is going to have to end at some point, but it wouldn't be fair to cancel it immediately.\n\nSo Senator Rubio, what changed?\n\nRUBIO: It didn't change.\n\nARRASAS: Why is it now fair to cancel it on Day One?\n\nRUBIO: No, it's the same policy. It will have to end at some moment, and as I said, we will -- we will eliminate that executive order. The people that are on it now will not be allowed to renew it, and new applicants will not be allowed to apply to it. And it's not because we're not compassionate to the plight of a 2 -- someone who came here when they were 2 years old.", + " I understand. I know people that are personally impacted by this.\n\nThe problem with the executive order is it is unconstitutional. The president doesn't have the power to do that.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd he himself admitted that.\n\nARRASAS: Senator, Senator...\n\nRUBIO: I'm sorry, but let me finish my...\n\nARRASAS:... but you went -- you went from saying that it was deeply disruptive to deport them immediately to deport them on Day One.\n\nRUBIO: No, but this is not about deportation. Everybody always goes immediately to the issue of deportation. This is about DACA. DACA is an executive order that is unconstitutional.", + " I will cancel it on my first day in office, which means people who currently hold those permits will not be allowed to renew them when they expire, and new people will not be allowed to apply for them.\n\nNow, I am sympathetic to the plight of someone who came here when they were 2 or 3 years old through no fault of their own, but you can't solve it doing something that is unconstitutional. No matter how sympathetic we may be to a cause, we cannot violate the Constitution of the United States the way this president now does on a regular basis.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: Senator Rubio, you accused Senator Cruz in a previous debate of lying when he said that you said one thing in Spanish and another one in English.", + " So in what sense did he lie?\n\nRUBIO: Because it is not true that I'm not going to get rid of DACA. I am going to get rid of DACA. In the Spanish interview, you just read out the transcript in Spanish, I said, it will have to end at some point. That point will be when I eliminate the executive order and the people who have those permits when they expire will not be allowed to renew it. And new people will not be able to apply. In fact, I don't even think we should be taking new enrollees in the program now.\n\nThat is how the program ends and how you wind it down is you allow the people who are on it,", + " when the program expires, they cannot renew it, and it goes away. But I will cancel the executive order as soon as I take -- as soon as I step foot into the Oval Office.\n\nTRUMP: I have to say, he lied this time. He lied. 100 percent. 100 percent.\n\nRUBIO: You lied about the Polish workers.\n\nTRUMP: Yes, yes, yes. 38 years ago.\n\nRUBIO: You lied to the students at Trump University.\n\nARRASAS: Let Senator Cruz jump in.\n\nRUBIO: Oh, he lied 38 years ago. All right, I guess there's a statute of limitation on lies.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)", + " CRUZ: Well Maria, I would note you made the exact same point here that I made at the last debate, and you're right that Senator Rubio called me a liar for saying that.\n\nCRUZ: You know, we've both seen at home when Washington politicians say about an illegal, or unconstitutional program. Well, it'll have to end some day, not immediately, but someday in the future.\n\nThat, inevitably, is when a politician doesn't plan to end it at all.\n\nYou know, I'm reminded of that that is the same position that Marco took in Iowa on ethanol subsidies. When I campaigned in Iowa, I took on the lobbyists,", + " took on the corporate welfare and said we should have no ethanol subsidies.\n\nMarco's position was the same as it is to illegal amnesty. Well, someday it should end, just not now. And, frankly, I think we need a president who knows what he believes in, is willing to say it on day one, not at the end of his term when it's somebody else's problem.\n\nRUBIO: That's not an accurate assessment of what I said about ethanol. What I said is that ethanol will phase out, it is phasing out now. By 2022 that program expires by virtue of the existing law, and at that point it will go away.", + " I don't agree with the mandate and the program that's in place, but I think it's unfair that these people have gone out and invested all this money into this program and we're just going to yank it away from them.\n\nAnd, again, you read the statement in Spanish. I said very clearly on Spanish television, DACA will have to end at some point, and that point is -- at that time I was not a candidate for president. I said it will end in my first day in office as president, and the people who have it now will not be able to renew it. New applicants will not be able to apply.", + " That is the end of DACA.\n\nI am sympathetic to this cause, but once again, it cannot supersede the Constitution of the United States which this president habitually and routinely every single day ignores and violates.\n\n(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: Senator Cruz, you and Senator Rubio are the two candidates of hispanic descent on this stage. As a matter of fact, you are the first hispanic candidate ever to win a caucus or primary.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd yet, there is the perception in the Latino community that instead of trying to prove to Latinos who has the best plan, the best platform to help them,", + " that you two are spending the time arguing with each other. Trying to figure out which one is tougher on immigration in order to appeal to the majority of Republicans.\n\nSo, my question to you is are you missing a huge opportunity to expand the Republican base?\n\nCRUZ: Well, Maria, you are right. It is extraordinary that of five people standing on this stage that two of us are the children of Cuban immigrants. It really is the embodiment of the incredible opportunity and promise this nation provides.\n\nYou know, I would note that a lot of folks in the media have a definition of hispanics that you can only be hispanic if you're liberal.", + " That makes sense in the media, but I gotta tell you, one of the things I was most proud of when I ran for Senate here in Texas, I earned 40 percent of the hispanic vote here in Texas.\n\nAt the same time, Mitt Romney was getting clobbered with 27 percent of the hispanic vote nationwide. And, the reason is, as you know, you look at the value sin the hispanic community. The values in our community are faith, family, patriotism.\n\nYou know, we've got the highest rate of military enlistment among hispanics in any demographic in this country. And, when I campaigned,", + " and I campaigned the same here in Houston or Dallas as I did in the Rio Grande Valley, defending conservative principles, defending judeo- Christian principals, telling my father's story.\n\nTelling my Dad's story of coming to America with $100 dollars in his underwear, not speaking English, washing dishes, having hopes and dreams for the American dream. And, the truth is the Obama-Clinton economy has done enormous damage to the hispanic community. It is not working in the hispanic community, and I...\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nCRUZ:... fighting so that everyone who is struggling in the hispanic community and beyond will have a fair and even shake at the American dream.\n\nRUBIO:", + " I'm sorry I was mentioned...\n\nARRASAS:... Governor Kasich.\n\nRUBIO: Maria I was mentioned in that. I was mentioned in that statement.\n\nARRASAS: Governor Kasich, after the...\n\nRUBIO:... OK. I was mentioned -- just because of the hispanic -- and I'll be brief.\n\nA couple points, number one, I do think it's amazing that on this stage tonight there are two descendants of Cuban origin, and an African American. We are the party of diversity, not the Democratic party.\n\n(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)\n\nAnd, the second point I would make is that we have to move past this idea that somehow the hispanic community only cares about immigration.\n\nYes,", + " it's an important issue because we know and love people that have been impacted by it. But, I'm going to tell you that the most powerful sentiment in the hispanic community, as it is in every immigrant community, is the burning desire to leave your children better off than yourself...\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nRUBIO:... and, you can only do that through free enterprise. That's what we stand for, not socialism like Bernie Sanders, and increasingly Hillary Clinton.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: Governor Kasich, after the last presidential election the Republican party realized that in order to win the presidency it needed the support of latinos.", + " Guidelines as to how to accomplish that were spelled out in an autopsy (ph) report that concluded, and I'm going to quote it, \"if hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn't want them in the United States they won't pay attention to our next sentence.\"\n\nSo, do you think that your fellow Republican candidates get it?\n\nKASICH: Well, I'm not going to talk about that. I mean, I've got to tell you, I was with this little 12-year-old girl, was at a town hall meeting, and she said, you know, I don't like all this yelling and screaming at the debates.", + " My mother's thinking I might not be able to watch the thing anymore.\n\nI think we ought to move beyond that, about what they think. I'm going to tell you what I think. My position on this whole immigration issue has been clear from the beginning. I haven't changed anything with it.\n\nAnd, look, my view is, we need economic growth. Everything starts with economic growth. And how do you get it? Common sense regulations, lower taxes for both business and individuals, and, of course, a fiscal plan that balances the budget.\n\nThat gives you economic growth. I did it when I was in Washington, as the Budget Committee chairman,", + " negotiating actually with Democrats, that gave us surpluses, economic growth, and the same thing in Ohio.\n\nBut here's the thing that I believe. Economic growth is not an end unto itself. We have to make sure that everybody has a sense that they can rise.\n\nOf course, our friends in the Hispanic community, our friends in the African-American community, the promise of America is that our system, when we follow the right formula, is going to give opportunity for everyone.\n\nIt's what Jack Kemp used to say. A rising tide lifts all boats, not just some boats, but all boats. And you know what? With me and the Hispanic community,", + " I think they like me. And I appreciate that, because I want them to have the same opportunity that I and my children and my wife and the people we love have had in this country.\n\nIt's time to solve problems.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: Dr. Carson, concerning this recommendation of the report, are you, as a candidate, getting it?\n\nCARSON: I didn't hear the first part of the question?\n\nARRASAS: The first part of the question is, there was a report that recommended that in order to approach Hispanics and bring them to vote for the Republican Party, certain things needed to happen.\n\nAnd one of them was that they shouldn't feel like they were going to get kicked out of the United States,", + " otherwise they wouldn't pay attention to one more sentence from candidates.\n\nCARSON: OK, well, first of all, let me just mention that last year at the NALEO, the National Association for Latino Elected Officials, I was the only one of 17 Republican candidates to go there.\n\nAnd the reason that I don't fear going to an organization like that is because the message that I give is the same message to every group. You know, this is America. And we need to have policies that are -- that give liberty and justice to all people.\n\nAnd that's the way that I have fashioned virtually every policy, looking at that.", + " And I think that's the way the Republican Party generally thinks. We don't pick and choose winners and losers. We are compassionate.\n\nBut real compassion is providing people with a ladder of opportunity to climb up from a state of dependence and become part of the fabric of America. When we begin to emphasize that, I think we will attract everybody.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: Mr. Trump, it is common knowledge that the Hispanic vote is very important in this race. You keep saying that Hispanics love you.\n\nTRUMP: True.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nARRASAS: And, yes, you won the Hispanic vote in Nevada.\n\nTRUMP:", + " True.\n\nARRASAS: But a brand new Telemundo poll says that three out of four Hispanics that vote nationwide have a negative opinion of you. They don't like you. Wouldn't that make you an unelectable...\n\nTRUMP: No.\n\nARRASAS:... candidate in a general election?\n\nTRUMP: First of all, I don't believe anything Telemundo says.\n\nARRASAS: You used to say that you love...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nTRUMP: Number one. Number two, I currently employ thousands of Hispanics, and over the years, I've employed tens of thousands of Hispanics. They're incredible people.", + " They know, and the reason I won in Nevada, not only won the big one, but I also won subs, like, as an example, I won with women.\n\nI won with every single category. I won with men, I won with high-income, low-income, I won with Hispanics. And I got 46 percent. Nobody else was close. Because they know I'm going to bring jobs back from China, from Japan, from so many other places.\n\nThey get it. They're incredible people. They're incredible workers. They get it. And I've won many of the polls with Hispanics. I didn't maybe win the Telemundo poll.\n\nBut one thing I'm also going to do,", + " I'm going to be getting -- bringing a lot of people in who are Democrats, who are independents, and you're seeing that with the polls, because if you look at anywhere, look at any of the elections, every single election, it has been record-setting.\n\nAnd the good news is, for the Republican Party, the Democrats are getting very poor numbers in terms of bringing them in. We're getting record-setting numbers. I think I have something to do with that.\n\nTRUMP: We're getting record-setting numbers. And I won every one -- the three of them that I won, I won with record-setting numbers.\n\nTRUMP:", + " New people are coming into the Republican Party. We are building a new Republican Party, a lot of new people are coming in.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: For the record, you have said publicly that you loved Telemundo in the past. But it is not just a Telemundo poll. We have...\n\nTRUMP: I love them. I love them.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: All right. Well, it's not the only poll.\n\nTRUMP: They're fine. Do you know what? They're fine.\n\nARRASAS: Just last night -- let me -- let me finish, please.\n\nJust last night,", + " The Washington Post showed that 80 percent of Hispanic voters in their polls have a negative view of you. And concerning the Nevada victory, allow me to explain that the poll in Nevada was based on a tiny sample, statistically insignificant of only about 100 -- let me finish please -- of 100 Hispanic Republicans in the state of Nevada.\n\nTRUMP: Why did they take the poll? Why did they...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nARRASAS: I am making reference -- I am making reference to Hispanic voters nationwide in a general election.\n\nTRUMP: I'm just telling you, I'm doing very well with Hispanics. And by the way,", + " I settled my suit, as you know, with Univision. It was settled. We're good friends now. It was all settled up.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nVery happy, very happy. Very good people.\n\nI'm just telling you -- I'm just telling you that I will do really well with Hispanics. I will do better than anybody on this stage. I have respect for the people on the stage, but I will do very well with Hispanics. But I'm telling you also, I'm bringing people, Democrats over and I'm bringing independents over, and we're building a much bigger, much stronger Republican Party.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Mr. Trump, thank you.\n\nI want to turn our attention now to another critically important issue for the American people, the United States Supreme Court, where filling the vacancy left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia has become a major campaign issue. I want to bring in Salem Radio Network host, Hugh Hewitt.\n\nHugh?\n\nHEWITT: Thank you, Wolf.\n\nTo me, it's the most important issue. I'll start with you, Senator Cruz. Do you trust Mr. Trump to nominate conservative justices?\n\nCRUZ: Well, Hugh, I agree with you that it -- Justice Scalia's passing underscores the enormous gravity of this election.", + " Justice Scalia was someone I knew personally for 20 years; was privileged to be at his funeral this weekend. And with his passing, the court is now hanging in the balance. We are one liberal justice away from a five-justice radical leftist majority that would undermine our religious liberty; that would undermine the right to life; and that would fundamentally erase the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms from the Constitution.\n\nNow, I think the voters of Texas, the voters across Super Tuesday are assessing everyone standing on this -- this stage. In the past, Republican presidents always promise to nominate strict constitutionalists. So I'm certain if you took a survey,", + " everyone would say they would do that.\n\nBut the reality is, Democrats bat about 1,000. Just about everyone they put on the court votes exactly as they want. Republicans have batted worse than 500, more than half of the people we put on the court have been a disaster.\n\nI've spent my whole life fighting to defend the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. I can tell you, for voters that care about life or marriage or religious liberty or the Second Amendment, they're asking the question: Who do you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who do you know will nominate principled constitutionalists to the court?", + " I give you my word, every justice I nominate will vigorously defend the Bill of Rights for my children and for yours.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT: Mr. Trump, Senator Cruz mentioned the issue that keeps me up at night, which is religious liberty. Churches, Catholic and Christian colleges, Catholic adoption agencies -- all sorts of religious institutions fear that Hobby Lobby, if it's repealed, it was a five-four decision, they're going to have to bend their knee and provide morning-after pills. They fear that if Bob Jones is expanded, they will lose their tax exemption.\n\nWill you commit to voters tonight that religious liberty will be an absolute litmus test for anyone you appoint,", + " not just to the Supreme Court, but to all courts?\n\nTRUMP: Yes, I would. And I've been there. And I've been there very strongly. I do have to say something, and this is interesting and it's not anybody's fault. It's not Ted's fault. Justice Roberts was strongly recommended and pushed by Ted. Justice Roberts gave us Obamacare. Might as well be called Roberts-care. Two times of the Supreme Court, Justice Roberts approved something that he should have never raised his hand to approve. And we ended up with Obamacare.\n\nThat is a rough thing. And I know Ted feels badly about it. And I think he probably still respects the judge.", + " But that judge has been a disaster in terms of everything we stand for because there is no way -- no way that he should have approved Obamacare.\n\nNow, with that being said, these are the things that happen. But Ted very, very strongly pushed Judge Roberts, and Justice Roberts gave us something that we don't want.\n\nHEWITT: Ted Cruz, Senator, the chief justice got Hobby Lobby right, but what do you make of Mr. Cruz's criticism?\n\nCRUZ: Well, listen -- Donald knows that it was George W. Bush who appointed John Roberts. Yes, it's true, I supported the Republican nominee once he was made.\n\nBut I would not have nominated John Roberts.", + " I would have nominated my former boss, Mike Luttig, who was the strongest proven conservative on the court of appeals. And I'll tell you, Hugh...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... you know, it's interesting now that Donald promises that he will appoint justices who -- who will defend religious liberty, but this is a man who, for 40 years, has given money to Jimmy Carter, to Joe Biden, to Hillary Clinton, to Chuck Schumer, to Harry Reid.\n\nNobody who supports far-left liberal Democrats who are fighting for judicial activists can possibly care about having principled constitutionalists on the court.\n\nAnd what Donald has told us is he will go to Washington...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... and cut a deal.\n\nHEWITT:", + " Mr. Trump...\n\nCRUZ: So that means on Supreme Court...\n\nHEWITT:... can I...\n\nCRUZ:... he's going to look to cut a deal, rather than fight for someone who won't cut a deal on the Constitution, but will defend it faithfully.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT: Can I trust you on religious liberty?\n\nTRUMP: Well, let -- let me -- let me just say -- let me just say this. Look, I watched Ted -- and I respected it, but he gets nowhere -- stand on the Senate floor for a day or two days, and talk and talk and talk.\n\nI watched the other senators laughing and smiling.", + " And when Ted was totally exhausted, he left the Senate floor, and they went back to work. OK? We have to have somebody that's going to make deals.\n\nIt's wonderful to stand up for two days and do that. Now, Ted's been very critical -- I have a sister who's a brilliant...\n\nHEWITT: Mr. Cruz, will you make a deal about religious liberty?\n\nTRUMP:... excuse me. She's a brilliant judge. He's been criticizing -- he's been criticizing my sister for signing a certain bill. You know who else signed that bill? Justice Samuel Alito, a very conservative member of the Supreme Court,", + " with my sister, signed that bill.\n\nSo I think that maybe we should get a little bit of an apology from Ted. What do you think?\n\nHEWITT: Let me -- Senator.\n\nCRUZ: Let me tell you right now, Donald, I will not apologize for a minute for defending the Constitution. I will not apologize for defending the Bill of Rights.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd I find it amazing that your answer to Hugh and to the American people is, on religious liberty, you can't have one of the these crazy zealots that actually believes in it. You've got to be willing to cut a deal.\n\nAnd you know,", + " there is a reason why, when Harry Reid was asked, of all the people on this stage, who does he want the most, who does he like the most, Harry Reid said Donald -- Donald Trump.\n\nWhy? Because Donald has supported him in the past, and he knows he can cut a deal with him.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nYou know what, Donald...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHEWITT: Senator Rubio.\n\nCRUZ:... I don't want a Supreme Court justice that you cut a deal with Harry Reid to undermine religious liberty, because that same justice will also erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP:", + " When you say crazy zealot, are you talking about you? Crazy zealot -- give me a break.\n\nHEWITT: Senator Rubio, you've heard this exchange on religious liberty. You have said that religious liberty will trump even the ability of people to stay away from same-sex marriages, not provide flowers, not provide baked goods, et cetera. Are you satisfied with this exchange on religious liberty?\n\nRUBIO: Well, I think you ask a very important question, because the issue here -- the next president of the United States has to fill this vacancy.\n\nJustice Scalia -- in the history of the republic, there has never been anyone better than him at standing for the principle that the Constitution is not a living and breathing document -- it is supposed to be applied as originally meant.\n\nAnd the next president of the United States has to be someone that you can trust and believe in to appoint someone just as good as Scalia -- plus there may be at least two other vacancies.\n\nSo you ask Mr.", + " Trump to respond and say that he would, and he says that he would. But the bottom line is, if you look at his record over the last 25 or 30 years, on issue after issue, he has not been on our side.\n\nNow, if he's changed, we're always looking for converts into the conservative movement. But the bottom line is that, if (ph) you don't have a record there to look at and say, \"I feel at peace that when Donald Trump is president of the United States, he's going to be firmly on our side on these issues.\"\n\nIn fact, very recently, he was still defending Planned Parenthood.", + " He says he's not going to take sides in the Palestinians versus Israel. These are concerning things.\n\nAnd so, yes, I have a doubt about whether Donald Trump, if he becomes president, will replace Justice Scalia with someone just like Justice Scalia.\n\nHEWITT: Mr. Trump?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Well, let -- let me just say -- let me just say, first of all, I have great respect for Justice Scalia. I thought he was terrific. And if you talk about evolving, Ronald Reagan was a somewhat liberal Democrat. Ronald Reagan evolved into a somewhat strong conservative -- more importantly, he was a great president.", + " A great president.\n\nAs far as Planned Parenthood is concerned, I'm pro-life. I'm totally against abortion, having to do with Planned Parenthood. But millions and millions of women -- cervical cancer, breast cancer -- are helped by Planned Parenthood.\n\nSo you can say whatever you want, but they have millions of women going through Planned Parenthood that are helped greatly. And I wouldn't fund it.\n\nI would defund it because of the abortion factor, which they say is 3 percent. I don't know what percentage it is. They say it's 3 percent. But I would defund it, because I'm pro-life. But millions of women are helped by Planned Parenthood.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT:", + " Governor Kasich, back to religious liberty. You've been a little bit less emphatic. You've said, same-sex couple approaches a cupcake maker, sell them a cupcake. Can we trust you as much on religious liberty as the rest of these people?\n\nKASICH: Well, you know, of course. I mean, if -- look, I was involved in just being a pioneer in a new church. Religious institutions should be able to practice the religion that they believe in. No question and no doubt about it.\n\nNow, in regard to same-sex marriage, I don't favor it. I've always favored traditional marriage,", + " but, look, the court has ruled and I've moved on. And what I've said, Hugh, is that, look, where does it end?\n\nIf you're in the business of selling things, if you're not going to sell to somebody you don't agree with, OK, today I'm not going to sell to somebody who's gay, and tomorrow maybe I won't sell to somebody who's divorced.\n\nI mean, if you're in the business of commerce, conduct commerce. That's my view. And if you don't agree with their lifestyle, say a prayer for them when they leave and hope they change their behavior.\n\nBut when it comes to the religious institutions,", + " they are in inviolate in my mind, and I would fight for those religious institutions. And look, I've appointed over a hundred judges as governor. I even appointed adjudge to the Ohio Supreme Court.\n\nAnd you know what they are? They're conservatives. Go check it out. They are conservatives. They don't make the law. They interpret the law. That's all they do. And they stick by the Constitution. So I will do that.\n\nBut let's just not get so narrow here as to gotcha this or that. I think my position is clear.\n\nHEWITT: Dr. Carson, let me wrap it up with you.", + " Are their positions clear?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT: Are the positions you've heard clear about the First Amendment and the first freedom?\n\nCARSON: Well, first of all, let me just add my praise to Justice Scalia. I first met him when we got an honorary degree together a long time ago. A tremendous wit and intellect.\n\nAs far as religious freedom is concerned, one of the basic tenets of this nation, and I believe that the Constitution protects all of our rights. And it gives people who believe in same-sex marriage the same rights as everybody else.\n\nBut what we have to remember is even though everybody has the same rights,", + " nobody get extra rights. So nobody gets to redefine things for everybody else and then have them have to conform to it. That's unfair.\n\nAnd this is the responsibility of Congress to come back and correct what the Supreme Court has done. That's why we have divided government. And we're going to have to encourage them to act in an appropriate way, or we will lose our religious freedom.\n\nAnd as president, I would go through and I would look at what a person's life has been. What have they done in the past? What kind of judgments have they made? What kind of associations do they have? That will tell you a lot more than an interview will tell you.\n\nThe fruit salad of their life is what I will look at.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Thank you, Dr. Carson.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: All of you want to repeal and replace Obamacare, so let's talk about your plans, specific plans to replace it. I want to bring in our chief political correspondent, Dana Bash.\n\nBASH: Senator Rubio, you said yesterday, right here in Houston, that Mr. Trump thinks part of Obamacare is pretty good. So, he says he is going to repeal Obamacare. Are you saying that you're worried he won't?\n\nRUBIO: The individual mandate. He said he likes the individual mandate portion of it, which I don't believe that should be part of it.", + " That should not remain there. I think here's what we need to replace it with.\n\nWe need to repeal Obamacare completely and replace it with a system that puts Americans in charge of their health care money again. If your employer wants to buy health insurance for you, they can continue to do so from any company in America they want to buy it from.\n\nOtherwise, your employers can provide you health care money, tax- free, not treated as income, and you can use that money only for health care, but you can use it to fund health care any way you want, fully fund a health savings account, the combination of a health savings account or a private plan from any company in any state in the country.\n\nAnd if you don't have that,", + " then you will have a refundable tax credit that provides you health care money to buy your own health care coverage. And that, I think, is a much better approach than Obamacare, which, by the way, isn't just bad for health care, it's bad for our economy. It is a health care law that is basically forcing companies to lay people off, cut people's hours, move people to part-time. It is not just a bad health care law, it is a job-killing law. And I will repeal it as president and we will replace it with something substantially better for all Americans.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH:", + " Mr. Trump, Senator Rubio just said that you support the individual mandate. Would you respond?\n\nTRUMP: I just want to say, I agree with that 100 percent, except pre-existing conditions, I would absolutely get rid of Obamacare. We're going to have something much better, but pre-existing conditions, when I'm referring to that, and I was referring to that very strongly on the show with Anderson Cooper, I want to keep pre- existing conditions.\n\nI think we need it. I think it's a modern age. And I think we have to have it.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH: OK, so let's talk about pre-existing conditions.", + " What the insurance companies say is that the only way that they can cover people is to have a mandate requiring everybody purchase health insurance. Are they wrong?\n\nTRUMP: I think they're wrong 100 percent. What we need -- look, the insurance companies take care of the politicians. The insurance companies get what they want. We should have gotten rid of the lines around each state so we can have real competition.\n\nTRUMP: We thought that was gone, we thought those lines were going to be gone, so something happened at the last moment where Obamacare got approved, and all of that was thrown out the window.\n\nThe reason is some of the people in the audience are insurance people,", + " and insurance lobbyists, and special interests. They got -- I'm not going to point to these gentlemen, of course, they're part of the problem, other than Ben, in all fairness.\n\nAnd, actually, the Governor too, let's just talk about these too, OK?\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nTRUMP: Because I don't think the Governor had too much to do with this.\n\nBut, we should have gotten rid of the borders, we should have gotten rid of the lines around the state so there's great competition. The insurance companies are making a fortune on every single thing they do.\n\nI'm self-funding my campaign.", + " I'm the only one in either party self-funding my campaign. I'm going to do what's right. We have to get rid of the lines around the states so that there's serious, serious competition.\n\nBASH But, Mr. Trump...\n\nTRUMP:... And, you're going to see -- excuse me. You're going to see preexisting conditions and everything else be part of it, but the price will be done, and the insurance companies can pay. Right now they're making a fortune.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH: But, just to be specific here, what you're saying is getting rid of the barriers between states,", + " that is going to solve the problem...\n\nTRUMP: That's going to solve the problem. And, the insurance companies aren't going to say that, they want to keep it. They want to say -- they say whatever they have to say to keep it the way it is. I know the insurance companies, they're friends of mine. The top guys, they're friends of mine. I shouldn't tell you guys, you'll say it's terrible, I have a conflict of interest. They're friends of mine, there's some right in the audience. One of them was just waving to me, he was laughing and smiling.", + " He's not laughing so much anymore.\n\nHi.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nLook, the insurance companies are making an absolute fortune. Yes, they will keep preexisting conditions, and that would be a great thing. Get rid of Obamacare, we'll come up with new plans. But, we should keep preexisting conditions.\n\nRUBIO: Dana, I was mentioned in his response, so if I may about the insurance companies...\n\nBASH:... Go ahead.\n\nRUBIO: You may not be aware of this, Donald, because you don't follow this stuff very closely, but here's what happened. When they passed Obamacare they put a bailout fund in Obamacare.", + " All these lobbyists you keep talking about, they put a bailout fund in the law that would allow public money to be used, taxpayer money, to bail out companies when they lost money.\n\nAnd, we led the effort and wiped out that bailout fund. The insurance companies are not in favor of me, they hate that. They're suing that now to get that bailout money put back in.\n\nHere's what you didn't hear in that answer, and this is important guys, this is an important thing. What is your plan? I understand the lines around the state, whatever that means. This is not a game where you draw maps...\n\nTRUMP:", + "... And, you don't know what it means...\n\nRUBIO:... What is your plan, Mr. Trump?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: What is your plan on healthcare?\n\nTRUMP: You don't know.\n\nBASH: (inaudible)\n\nTRUMP:... The biggest problem...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO:... What's your plan...\n\nTRUMP:... The biggest problem, I'll have you know...\n\nRUBIO:... What's your plan... TRUMP:... You know, I watched him meltdown two weeks ago with Chris Christie. I got to tell you, the biggest problem he's got is he really doesn't know about the lines.", + " The biggest thing we've got, and the reason we've got no competition, is because we have lines around the state, and you have essentially....\n\nRUBIO:... We already mentioned that (inaudible) plan, I know what that is, but what else is part of your plan...\n\nTRUMP:... You don't know much...\n\nRUBIO:... So, you're only thing is to get rid of the lines around the states. What else is part of your healthcare plan...\n\nTRUMP:... The lines around the states...\n\nRUBIO:... That's your only plan...\n\nTRUMP:... and,", + " it was almost done -- not now...\n\nRUBIO:... Alright, (inaudible)...\n\nTRUMP:... Excuse me. Excuse me.\n\nRUBIO:... His plan. That was the plan...\n\nTRUMP:... You get rid of the lines, it brings in competition. So, instead of having one insurance company taking care of New York, or Texas, you'll have many. They'll compete, and it'll be a beautiful thing.\n\nRUBIO: Alright...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: So, that's the only part of the plan? Just the lines?\n\nBASH: (inaudible)\n\nTRUMP:", + " The nice part of the plan -- you'll have many different plans. You'll have competition, you'll have so many different plans.\n\nRUBIO: Now he's repeating himself.\n\nTRUMP: No, no, no.\n\n(LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)\n\nTRUMP: (inaudible)\n\nRUBIO: (inaudible)\n\n(CHEERING)\n\nTRUMP: (inaudible) I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago... RUBIO:... I just watched you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: I watched him meltdown on the stage like that,", + " I've never seen it in anybody...\n\nBASH:... Let's stay focused on the subject...\n\nTRUMP:... I thought he came out of the swimming pool...\n\nRUBIO:... I see him repeat himself every night, he says five things, everyone's dumb, he's gonna make America great again...\n\nBASH:... Senator Rubio...\n\nRUBIO:... We're going to win, win win, he's winning in the polls...\n\nBASH:... Senator Rubio, please.\n\nRUBIO:... And the lines around the state.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO:... Every night.\n\nBASH: Senator Rubio.\n\n(CHEERING)\n\nUNIDENTIFIED MALE:", + " I tell the truth, I tell the truth.\n\nBASH: Senator Rubio, you will have time to respond if you would just let Mr. Trump respond to what you've just posed to him...\n\nRUBIO:... Yeah, he's going to give us his plan now, right? OK...\n\nBASH:... If you could talk a little bit more about your plan. I know you talked about...\n\nTRUMP:... We're going to have many different plans because...\n\nBASH:... Can you be a little specific...\n\nTRUMP:... competition...\n\nRUBIO:... He's done it again.\n\n(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP:", + " There is going to be competition among all of the states, and the insurance companies. They're going to have many, many different plans. BASH: Is there anything else you would like to add to that...\n\nTRUMP: No, there's nothing to add.\n\n(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: What is to add?\n\nBASH: Thank you. Thank you both.\n\nRUBIO: Alright.\n\nBASH: Governor Kasich, you've said it is, quote, \"Un American to deny someone health insurance if they have a preexisting condition.\"\n\nBASH: Would you leave the individual mandate in place requiring all Americans to purchase insurance?\n\nKASICH:", + " No, I wouldn't. And -- but that doesn't matter when it comes to the issue of preexisting conditions. You don't want any American to lose their house, everything they've saved, because they get sick. Now, I think it is more complicated than what we've heard here tonight. We're actually running significant health reform in my state.\n\nI would repeal Obamacare for a variety of reasons. I would take some of the federal resources, combine it with the freed-up Medicaid program, which I would send back to the states, and cover the people who are currently the working poor because we don't want to have tens of millions of Americans losing their health insurance.\n\nAnd then we're driving towards total transparency.", + " If any of you here ever get a hospital bill, it's easier to interpret the Dead Sea scrolls than to understand your hospital bill. The fact is what we need is transparency with hospitals and with the providers.\n\nAnd I'll tell you what we will do. We are actually going to make payments to physicians and to hospitals who actually deliver healthcare with great quality at low prices. We actually are going to make the market work.\n\nBASH: Governor, let me just go back to the original question about the individual mandate. In 1994 when you were in Congress, you proposed a plan requiring an individual mandate. So what changed?\n\nKASICH:", + " Well, Dana, the Heritage Foundation had this position as well. And when I look at it, I don't think it's tenable. And we don't need to do that. Again, I'm telling you that we are going to -- we have a proposal, a plan that we're enacting now that says if you are a hospital or a doctor and you're providing very high quality at lower prices, below the midpoint -- some charge high, some charge low. If you are below the midpoint, we are going to give you a financial reward for allowing you to provide services that result in high quality for our people at lower pricess.\n\nThat is the way in which we are going to damp down the rising costs of healthcare.", + " Because if you think about your own deductibles today, they're going higher, higher and higher. And you know what? At some point, people can't afford it. Our plan will work. It uses the market. It uses transparency. It gets the patient in the middle. And guess what? We're actually doing it in my state, the seventh-largest state in the country. And if this will go -- this will go national, we will get our hands on healthcare where you will know what's going on. We will pay for quality, lower prices, and we will begin to see healthcare become affordable in America and where people will also be able to have health insurance,", + " even if they have a preexisting condition.\n\nWe don't want to throw millions of people out into the cold and not have the health insurance, Dana. So that's really what we're doing. This is not a theory. This is what we are actually doing in our state. We will begin payments next year based on episodes that we have in our lives. If our primary care physicians keep us healthy for a year, with really high quality, guess what? They will get a financial reward.\n\nOur primary care physicians need help. They need support. We're losing them. This will allow them to get a reward for doing a great job.\n\nBASH:", + " Governor Kasich, thank you.\n\nKASICH: Thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH: Dr. Carson, you have dealt with the sickest of patients. You support covering preexisting conditions. How would you change Obamacare, but maintain that coverage?\n\nCARSON: Well, first of all, healthcare is not a right. But I do believe it is a responsibility for a responsible society, and we are that. We spend almost twice as much per capita on healthcare as many other nations who have actually much better access than we do.\n\nI propose a system in which we use health empowerment accounts, which are like a health savings account with no bureaucrats.", + " And we give it to everybody from birth until death. They can pass it on when they die. We pay for it with the same dollars that we pay for traditional healthcare with. We give people the ability to shift money within their health empowerment account within their family. So dad's $500 short, mom can give it to him or a cousin or uncle.\n\nAnd it makes every family their own insurance carrier with no middle man. It gives you enormous flexibility. And also, you know, if Uncle Joe is smoking like a chimney, everybody's going to hide his cigarettes because they're all interested in what's going on there.\n\nAlso, the -- your catastrophic healthcare is going to cost a lot less money now because the only thing coming out of that is catastrophic healthcare.", + " So, it's like a homeowners policy with a large deductible, versus a homeowners policy where you want every scratch covered. One costs $1,500 a year; one costs $10,000 a year. You can buy the $1,500 one. That will take care of 75 percent of the people. The people who are indigent, how do we take care of them now? Medicaid. What's the Medicaid budget? Almost $500 billion; almost 80 million people participate, which is way too many, and that will get a lot better when we fix the economy, which I hope we get a chance to talk about.\n\nCARSON:", + " But do the math. Over $5,000 for each man, woman and child, and all -- they will have a lot more flexibility. What could you buy with that? A concierge practice.\n\nBLITZER: Thank you.\n\nCARSON: And you could still have thousands of dollars left over. And let me just finish, because I don't get to talk that much. And, you know, let's...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... you can have the money that's left over to buy your catastrophic insurance. But most importantly, we give them a menu, just like we do in Medicare Part C, and they have the choices that will allow them not only to have catastrophic health care,", + " but drug care and everything else.\n\nIt will be such a good program that nobody will want Obamacare after that, and that's probably the best way do it, although if anybody still did, I would still de-fund it.\n\nBLITZER: Thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThank you, Dr. Carson. Let's talk about the economy. Let's talk about...\n\nCRUZ: Wolf, Wolf, Wolf. Does everyone get to address Obamacare but me?\n\nBLITZER: I want to move on, but there'll be plenty of opportunities for you to address...\n\nCRUZ: It's kind of an issue I have a long history with.\n\nBLITZER:", + " I know you do. And -- all right, go ahead.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nCRUZ: Thank you, Wolf.\n\nKASICH: How do you -- how do you get that extra time, Cruz? You're very good at... CRUZ: You know, this is another issue on which Donald and I have sharp disagreements. On Planned Parenthood, he thinks Planned Parenthood is wonderful. I would instruct the Department of Justice to investigate them and prosecute any and all criminal violations.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nOn Obamacare, both Donald and I say we want to end it, but for very different reasons. I want to end it because it goes too far,", + " it's killed millions of jobs, and it's hurting people's health care. Donald wants to end it because he says it doesn't go nearly far enough. And what was amazing in that exchange that was missing is for decades Donald has been advocating socialized medicine.\n\nWhat he's said is government should pay for everyone's health care, and in fact, a couple of debates ago, he said, if you don't support socialized health care, you're heartless. Now, liberal Democrats have been saying that for years. Now let me tell you if you're a small business owner, Donald Trump's socialized medicine, putting the government in charge of your health care would kill more jobs than Obamacare,", + " and if you're elderly, the results of socialized medicine in every country on earth where it's been implemented has been rationing, has been the government saying, no, you don't get that hip replacement, you don't get that knee replacement, the government is in charge of your health care.\n\nI'll tell you this. As president...\n\nBLITZER: Senator...\n\nCRUZ:... I will repeal every word of Obamacare.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Thank you, thank you. Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: I do not want socialized medicine, just so you understand. He goes around saying oh,", + " he wants it. I do not want socialized medicine. I do agree with him that it's going to be a disaster, Obamacare, for the economy.\n\nIn 2017, it will be impossible for us to pay for it if you look at what's going on. That's why it has to be repealed, for a lot of reasons, Number one, it doesn't work, number two, premium. You look at premiums going up, 25, 35, even 45 percent, and more. We have to get rid of Obamacare. It is going to destroy our economy completely. Our economy is not doing well.", + " It is going to destroy our economy greatly. And on that, I agree.\n\nCRUZ: Donald, true or false, you've said the government should pay for everyone's health care.\n\nTRUMP: That's false.\n\nCRUZ: You've never said that?\n\nTRUMP: No, I said it worked in a couple of countries...\n\nCRUZ: But you've never stood on this debate stage and says it works great in Canada and Scotland and we should do it here.\n\nTRUMP: No, I did not. No I did not.\n\nCRUZ: Did you say if you want people to die on the streets, if you don't support socialized health care,", + " you have no heart.\n\nTRUMP: Correct. I will not let people die on the streets if I'm president.\n\nCRUZ: Have you said you're a liberal on health care?\n\nTRUMP: Excuse me. Let me talk. If people...\n\nCRUZ: Talk away. Explain your plan, please.\n\nTRUMP: If people -- my plan is very simple. I will not -- we're going to have private -- we are going to have health care, but I will not allow people to die on the sidewalks and the streets of our country if I'm president. You may let it and you may be fine with it...\n\nCRUZ:", + " So does the government pay for everyone's health care?\n\nTRUMP:... I'm not fine with it. We are going to take those people...\n\nCRUZ: Yes or no. Just answer the question.\n\nTRUMP: Excuse me. We are going to take those people and those people are going to be serviced by doctors and hospitals. We're going to make great deals on it, but we're not going to let them die in the streets.\n\nCRUZ: Who pays for it?\n\nRUBIO: Well, can I just clarify something?\n\nBLITZER: Gentleman, please.\n\nRUBIO: Wolf, no.", + " I want to clarify something.\n\nBLITZER: Gentlemen please. I want to move on.\n\nRUBIO: This is a Republican debate, right? Because that attack about letting people die in the streets...\n\nBLITZER: I want to talk about the economy.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: Gentleman, gentleman. All of you have agreed -- Senator Cruz...\n\nTRUMP: You know what? Call it what you want.\n\nCRUZ: It's a yes or no.\n\nTRUMP: Call it what you want, people are not going to be dying on the sidewalk.\n\nBLITZER:", + " All of you have agreed -- all of you have agreed to the rules. I want to move on. We're talking about the economy right now. Mr. Trump, you want to cut taxes more than President Ronald Reagan did, more than President George W. Bush did. The Independent Tax Foundation says the cost to the country of your proposal would be about $10 trillion, and that takes into account the economic growth that would emerge from your proposed tax cuts.\n\nHow would you cut $10 trillion over 10 years, but make sure the country isn't saddled with even more debt?\n\nTRUMP: Because the country will become a dynamic economy.", + " We'll be dynamic again. If you look at what's going on, we have the highest taxes anywhere in the world. We pay more business tax, we pay more personal tax. We have the highest taxes in the world.\n\nIt's shutting off our economy. It's shutting off our country. We have trillions of dollars outside that we can't get in. Yes, we will do my tax plan, and it will be great. We will have a dynamic economy again.\n\nBLITZER: What specific cuts will you make to pay for that tax cut?\n\nTRUMP: We're going to make many cuts in business. We're getting rid of -- we're going to get rid of so many different things.", + " Department of Education -- Common Core is out. We're going local. Have to go local.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nEnvironmental protection -- we waste all of this money. We're going to bring that back to the states. And we're going to have other (inaudible) many things. (APPLAUSE)\n\nWe are going to cut many of the agencies, we will balance our budget, and we will be dynamic again.\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump -- Mr. Trump. If you eliminate completely the Department of Education, as you have proposed, that's about $68 billion. If you eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency,", + " that's about $8 billion. That's about $76 billion for those two agencies.\n\nThe current deficit this year is $544 billion. Where are you going to come up with the money?\n\nTRUMP: Waste, fraud and abuse all over the place. Waste, fraud and abuse.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nYou look at what's happening with Social Security, you look -- look at what's happening with every agency -- waste, fraud and abuse. We will cut so much, your head will spin.\n\nBLITZER: Governor Kasich.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nWhen you were in Congress, you were chairman of the Budget Committee. You helped craft the last balanced budget the United States had.", + " Can Mr. Trump's plan work?\n\nKASICH: Well, I think it takes three things, Wolf. And I've done it. I mean, I -- we got the budget balanced. We cut the capital gains tax. You see, in order to get this economy moving again, you have to grow the economy, and you have to restrain the spending.\n\nAnd when I was chairman, we cut that capital gains tax and we instituted a significant program to get to balance. We had a balanced budget four years in a row, had to take on every interest group in Washington -- every single one of them -- and we paid down a half a trillion of the national debt.\n\nAnd why do you do it?", + " Because you want job growth. If you don't have regulatory reform, common-sense regulations, reasonable tax cuts, which I have, and a fiscal plan, you won't get there. You will never be able to do it.\n\nNow, I -- I inherited an an $8 billion hole in Ohio, I have common-sense regulations, I have tax cuts -- the biggest of any governor in the country -- and we have a fiscal plan.\n\nAnd it's not all -- it's not always cutting. It's innovating -- it's producing a better product at, frankly, a lower price. Now we have a $2 billion surplus.", + " Our credit is strong, our pensions are strong.\n\nAnd, look -- I've got a plan to take to Washington, and I will have it there in the first hundred days, and it will include shifting welfare, education, transportation, Medicaid and job training back to us, so we can begin, in the states, to be the laboratories of innovation.\n\nI've done it -- I did it in Washington -- four years of balanced budgets. No one could even believe it happened.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nI've done it in Ohio, we're growing, the jobs are up and people are having opportunity. And I will go back to Washington and do it again for the American people.", + " I promise you that.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nWithin the first hundred days, we will have the plan to get this done.\n\nBLITZER: Thank you. Thank you, governor.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSpeaking of taxes...\n\nTRUMP: I just want to say -- and I'm a big fan of the governor, but they also struck oil, OK, so that helped Iowa a lot.\n\nKASICH: OK, let me -- let me -- let me just talk about that, because I know that -- that Donald believes the energy industry is important. So do I. But of the over 400,000 jobs that we've created in the state,", + " we think maybe 15,000 are connected to this industry, because it's early-stage.\n\nSee, what we've done in Ohio, and what a president needs to do, is to have a cabinet and a whole operation that's jobs-friendly. We have diversified our economy.\n\nWe -- we do have energy, we have medical devices, we have financial services, we have I.T., we just got Amazon -- their Cloud computing in the Midwest. You know why it's happening?\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nBecause we're balanced budgets, we're strong, we're job-friendly, we don't raise their taxes, and if we have a president that does that in America,", + " we will get the economic growth, and that is what this country needs. Jobs, jobs and jobs, period.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump, yesterday, the last Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, called on you to release your back tax returns, and said, and I'm quoting him now, \"there is good reason to believe there is a bombshell in them.\"\n\nRomney said either you're not as wealthy as you say you are, said maybe you haven't paid the kind of taxes we would expect you to pay, or you haven't been giving the money to veterans or disabled people. Are any of those accusations that he has leveled true?\n\nTRUMP:", + " All right. First of all, let me just explain. I was the first one to file a financial disclosure form -- almost 100 pages. You don't learn anything about somebody's wealth with a tax return. You learn it from statements.\n\nTRUMP: I filed -- which shows that I'm worth over $10 billion. I built a great company with very little debt. People were shocked, the people in the back, the reporters, they were shocked when they went down. And I filed it on time. I didn't ask for five 45-day extensions, which I would have been entitled to.\n\nSo as far as that's concerned,", + " I filed it. And that's where you find out what kind of a company. You don't learn anything from a tax return.\n\nI will say this. Mitt Romney looked like a fool when he delayed and delayed and delayed. And Harry Reid baited him so beautifully. And Mitt Romney didn't file his return until a September 21st of 2012, about a month-and-a-half before the election. And it cost him big league.\n\nAs far as my return, I want to file it, except for many years, I've been audited every year. Twelve years, or something like that. Every year they audit me,", + " audit me, audit me.\n\nNobody gets audited -- I have friends that are very wealthy people. They never get audited. I get audited every year. I will absolutely give my return, but I'm being audited now for two or three years, so I can't do it until the audit is finished, obviously. And I think people would understand that.\n\nBLITZER: Hugh, go ahead.\n\nHEWITT: Mr. Trump. You told me...\n\nTRUMP: Are you going to ask anybody else that question?\n\nCARSON: Yes, amen, amen.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nTRUMP: Every single question comes to me?\n\nHEWITT:", + " Mr. Trump...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: I know I'm here for the ratings, but it's a little bit ridiculous.\n\n(LAUGHTER) HEWITT: Mr. Trump, a year ago you told me on my radio show, the audio and the transcript are out there on YouTube, that you would release your tax returns.\n\nTRUMP: True.\n\nHEWITT: Are you going back on your commitment?\n\nTRUMP: No, I'm not. First of all, very few people listen to your radio show. That's the good news.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nTRUMP: Let me just tell you,", + " let me just -- which happens to be true. Check out the ratings.\n\nLook, let me just tell you something. Let me just tell you something. I want to release my tax returns but I can't release it while I'm under an audit. We're under a routine audit. I've had it for years, I get audited.\n\nAnd obviously if I'm being audited, I'm not going to release a return. As soon as the audit is done, I love it.\n\nHEWITT: So, Senator Rubio, Mitt Romney also called upon to you release your tax returns. Your campaign said last spring that you would release your returns that you had not previously released.", + " And you said, coming out any day momentarily. When are we going to see your returns?\n\nRUBIO: Yes, tomorrow or Saturday, in fact, is our plan to release them. And there's nothing really that interesting in them. So I have no problem releasing them. And luckily I'm not being audited this year, or last year, for that matter.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO: But this is my time. I want to go back to this question you asked about the debt. This is an important issue. It's a huge issue, OK? In less than five years, 83 percent of our entire budget will be made up of Social Security,", + " Medicare, Medicaid, and the interest on the debt.\n\nThat means only 17 percent of our budget will be for things like the military or the Department of Education or environmental protection issues.\n\nYou cannot balance our budget unless you deal with that 83 percent, which is why I've been repeatedly talking about since my time running for the Senate in Florida, where there are a lot of people like my mother that depend on Social Security and Medicare, on the need to save those programs, by reforming the way they work for future generations.\n\nAnd I think if we -- the longer we take to do this, the closer we are going to get to a debt crisis.", + " And, Wolf, you did not get an answer to your question. This debt issue is -- the next president of the United States will not be able to serve four to eight years without dealing with the national debt.\n\nIt is not a question of if, it is a question of when we have a debt crisis. And we should not leave the stage here tonight without hearing a serious answer from every single one of us about how we are going to deal bring the national debt under control once and for all.\n\nHEWITT: Thank you, Senator Rubio. But I am...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT: I'm being fair to all of the candidates.\n\nSenator Cruz,", + " Tuesday is five days away. Why haven't voters seen your 2012, 2013, and 2014 returns?\n\nCRUZ: So, I've released five years of tax returns already. We will have two more years available tomorrow. And I would note that this question really goes -- you know, Donald says he's being audited.\n\nWell, I would think that would underscore the need to release those returns. If he has said something that was false and that an audit is going to find was fraudulent, the voters need to know.\n\nAnd listen, people across this country, we recognize our country is in crisis. The most important question is how do we win the general election in November,", + " 2016. And roughly 65 percent of Republicans think Donald is not the right candidate to go against Hillary Clinton.\n\nNow, part of the reason in the last 10 polls...\n\nTRUMP: Eighty-five percent say you, big difference.\n\nCRUZ:... RealClearPolitics he has lost to Hillary on eight of them. In the last 10 polls on RealClearPolitics, I either tied or beat Hillary. And this is an example.\n\nYou know, the mainstream media is laying off Donald now. They're going to pick apart his taxes. They're going to pick apart his business deals.\n\nAnd let's take, for example,", + " one of Hillary's great vulnerabilities, the corruption at the Clinton Foundation, the fact that she had CEOs and foreign companies giving her money while she was secretary of state.\n\nCRUZ: The next Republican nominee needs to be able to make that case against Hillary. And if Donald tried to did it, Hillary would turn to Donald and say, \"but gosh, Donald, you gave $100,000 to the Clinton foundation. I even went to your wedding.\"\n\nHe can't prosecute the case against Hillary, and we can't risk another four years of these failed Obama policies by nominating someone who loses to Hillary Clinton in November.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP:", + " So at the beginning, I said openly to everybody that I contribute to many, many politicians, both Republican and Democrat. And I have, over the years. I'm a businessman. I have, over the years.\n\nAnd I sort of have to laugh when Ted makes a big deal out of the fact that he's doing well in the polls. Well, I'm beating him in virtually every poll. I'm tied in Texas, by the way, which I shouldn't be. But I think I'll do very well.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBut a poll just came out -- a Bloomberg poll -- where I am beating him so badly that it's,", + " like, embarrassing even for me to say I'm beating him that badly.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd -- and here's the thing -- it was sort of funny -- 65 percent of the people don't like you -- I just got 36 percent of the vote, right? I just got 46 percent on another one. I got 38 percent...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... on another one. That means -- and he got 20 and 22, and he lost in South Carolina so badly -- that was going to be his stronghold. He said a year ago, \"I can't lose South Carolina.\" I beat him in a landslide.\n\nLast week in Nevada,", + " I beat him in a landslide, and he sang (ph) about the polls. One other thing -- Hillary Clinton -- take a look at USA Today, take a look at the Q poll. I beat her, and I beat her badly. And I -- and I haven't even started at her. I only had one little interchange...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... I only had one little interchange, and that was...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... four weeks ago, when she said I was sexist. And believe me, they had a rough weekend that weekend, between Bill and Hillary. They had a rough weekend.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER:", + " Gentlemen. Gentlemen. Gentlemen.\n\nCRUZ: Hold on. He -- he attacked me, Wolf. I get a response.\n\nBLITZER: I was about to say -- Senator Cruz, respond.\n\nCRUZ: Thank you. Thank -- thank -- thank you very much.\n\nYou know, it's interesting -- Donald went -- went on -- on an extended tirade about the polls, but he didn't respond to any of the substance. He has yet to say -- he can release past year's tax returns. He can do it tomorrow.\n\nHe doesn't want to do it, because presumably there's something in there...\n\nTRUMP:", + " Nothing.\n\nCRUZ:... that is bad. If there's nothing, release them tomorrow.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: They're already prepared. The only reason he's not releasing them...\n\nTRUMP: You -- you don't...\n\nCRUZ:... is because he's afraid that he will get hit.\n\nTRUMP: I'm not afraid (inaudible).\n\nCRUZ: You know, Marco made reference earlier to the litigation against Trump University. It's a fraud case. His lawyers have scheduled the trial for July.\n\nI want you to think about, if this man is the nominee, having the Republican nominee...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... on the stand in court,", + " being cross-examined about whether he committed fraud. You don't think the mainstream media will go crazy on that?\n\nAnd on substance, how do we nominate a candidate who has said Hillary Clinton was the best secretary of state of modern times, who agreed with her on foreign policy, who agrees with Bernie Sanders on health care, who agreed with Barack Obama on the Wall Street bailout?\n\nBLITZER: All right (ph)...\n\nCRUZ: If -- we've got to win this election, and we can't do it with a candidate who agrees with Hillary Clinton and can't take it to her and beat her on the debate stage and at the polls.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Mr. Trump. Mr, -- hold on. Mr. Trump -- Mr. Trump...\n\nTRUMP:... first of all, he's talking about the polls. I'm beating him awfully badly in the polls.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: But you're not beating Hillary. You're not beating Hillary.\n\nTRUMP: Well, then, if I can't -- if -- hey, if I can't beat her, you're really going to get killed, aren't you?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ: So -- so let me ask you this, because you're really getting beaten badly. I know you're embarrassed -- I know you're embarrassed,", + " but keep fighting -- keep swinging, man (ph). Swing for the fences.\n\nLet me just tell you -- let me just tell you, the Trump University case is a civil case. Not a -- it's a civil case. It's a case where people want to try and get -- it's a case that is nonsense.\n\nIt's something I could have settled many times. I could settle it right now for very little money, but I don't want to do it out of principle. The people that took the course all signed -- most -- many -- many signed report cards saying it was fantastic, it was wonderful, it was beautiful.\n\nAs -- and believe me,", + " I'll win that case. That's an easy case. Civil case. Number two, as far as the taxes are concerned, I'm being audited. It's a very routine audit, and it's very unfair, because I've been audited for, I think, over 12 years.\n\nEvery year, because of the size of my company, which is very, very large, I'm being audited -- which is a very large company.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nBLITZER: Thank you.\n\nTRUMP: I'm being audited 12 years in a row, at least.\n\nNow, until that audit's done,", + " and I don't think anybody would blame me, I'm not giving it...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ:... the years you're not being audited? Will you release those years?\n\nBLITZER: Gentlemen, gentlemen, thank you.\n\nTRUMP: (inaudible) audited for those years.\n\nCRUZ: Which years? Which years are you being audited?\n\nBLITZER: Gentlemen...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER:... we actually have rules -- we're trying to obey these rules that all of you agreed. We're going to take a quick break. We have a lot more -- many more critically important issues to discuss.\n\nOur coverage of this tenth Republican presidential debate from the University of Houston continues in a moment.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nBLITZER:", + " Welcome back to the Republican presidential debate here at the University of Houston.\n\nGentlemen, I want to turn our attention right now to key issues involving foreign policy and national security. And Mr. Trump, I'll begin with you.\n\nTRUMP: Shocking.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBLITZER: You said this about the ongoing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians -- I'm quoting you now: \"Let me be sort of a neutral guy. I don't want to say whose fault it is, I don't think it helps.\"\n\nTRUMP: Right.\n\nBLITZER: Here's the question. How do you remain neutral when the U.S.", + " considers Israel to be America's closest ally in the Middle East?\n\nTRUMP: Well, first of all, I don't think they do under President Obama because I think he's treated Israel horribly, all right? I think he's treated Israel horribly.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: I was the grand marshall down 5th Avenue a number of years ago for the Israeli Day Parade, I have very close ties to Israel. I've received the Tree of Life Award and many of the greatest awards given by Israel.\n\nAs president, however, there's nothing that I would rather do to bring peace to Israel and its neighbors generally.", + " And I think it serves no purpose to say that you have a good guy and a bad guy.\n\nNow, I may not be successful in doing it. It's probably the toughest negotiation anywhere in the world of any kind. OK? But it doesn't help if I start saying, \"I am very pro-Israel, very pro, more than anybody on this stage.\" But it doesn't do any good to start demeaning the neighbors, because I would love to do something with regard to negotiating peace, finally, for Israel and for their neighbors.\n\nAnd I can't do that as well -- as a negotiator, I cannot do that as well if I'm taking big,", + " big sides. With that being said, I am totally pro-Israel.\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ: Well, this is another area on which Donald agrees with Hillary Clinton and on which I disagree with them both strongly. Both Donald and Hillary Clinton want to be neutral, to use Donald's word, between Israel and the Palestinians.\n\nLet me be clear. If I'm president, America will stand unapologetically with the nation of Israel.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd the notion of neutrality is based upon the left buying into this moral relativism that is often pitched in the media. Listen, it is not equivalent.", + " When you have terrorist strapping dynamite around their chest, exploding and murdering innocent women and children, they are not equivalent to the IDF officers protecting Israel. And I will not pretend that they are.\n\nJust today, Iran announced they're going to pay $7,000 to each suicide bomber. And I would note, missing from Donald's answer was anything he has done in his nearly 70 years of living defending Israel. I have over and over again led the fight to defend Israel, to fight for Israel. And this -- if you want to know who will stand with Israel, we ought to start with who has stood with Israel when the heat was on.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER:", + " Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: Well, I can only say -- look, I can only say I've been a big contributor to Israel over the years. I've received many, many awards from Israel, as I've said before. I have a great relationship with Israel. And I'm going to keep it that way. And if I could bring peace, that would be a fantastic thing. It would be one of my greatest achievements as president.\n\nBLITZER: Governor Kasich, I want you to weigh in.\n\nKASICH: Well, I mean, well, I was in Congress for 18 years on the Defense Committee.", + " And then, you know, after 9/11, the secretary of defense called me in to help out with some things. And I've been a supporter of Israel -- a strong supporter of Israel longer than anybody on this stage. I didn't give as much money as Donald gave, but I've been standing with the Israelis for a very long time.\n\nAnd frankly, I think the problem we have in foreign policy right now, Wolf, is that we are not certain with who we stand with. Our allies are not sure what to make of us, and our enemies are moving. And one -- are moving because they're not sure what we will do.\n\nIt's a very interesting development here within the 24 hours.", + " We said to the South Koreans that we would give them the high altitude defense system. It really rattled the Chinese, and for the first time since we took positive action, the Chinese are beginning to take action against North Korea.\n\nWhen we stand firm and we let the world know who we're with, who we stand for, and we bring our allies together, that is the road forward.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: We're going to get to North Korea in a moment. But Senator Rubio, what's wrong with the U.S. being an honest broker in a negotiation, as Mr. Trump is proposing?\n\nRUBIO:", + " Because -- and I don't know if Donald realizes this. I'm sure it's not his intent perhaps. But the position you've taken is an anti-Israel position. And here's why. Because you cannot be an honest broker in a dispute between two sides in which one of the sides is constantly acting in bad faith. The Palestinian Authority has walked away from multiple efforts to make peace, very generous offers from the Israels. Instead, here's what the Palestinians do. They teach their four- year-old children that killing Jews is a glorious thing. Here's what Hamas does. They launch rockets and terrorist attacks again Israel on an ongoing basis.", + " The bottom line is, a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, given the current makeup of the Palestinians, is not possible.\n\nAnd so the next president of the United States needs to be someone like me who will stand firmly on the side of Israel. I'm not -- I'm not going to sit here and say, \"Oh, I'm not on either side.\" I will be on a side. I will be on Israel's side every single day because they are the only pro-American, free enterprise democracy in the entire Middle East.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: I'm a negotiator.", + " I've done very well over the years through negotiation. It's very important that we do that. In all fairness, Marco is not a negotiator. I watched him melt down and I'll tell you, it was one of the saddest things I've ever seen. He's not going down -- excuse me...\n\nRUBIO: He thinks a Palestinian is a real estate deal.\n\nTRUMP:... wait a minute, and these people may even be tougher than Chris Christie. OK?\n\nRUBIO: The Palestinians are not a real estate deal, Donald.\n\nTRUMP: OK, no, no, no -- a deal is a deal.", + " Let me tell you that. I learned a long time ago.\n\nRUBIO: A deal is not a deal when you're dealing with terrorists. Have you ever negotiated with terrorists?\n\nTRUMP: You are not a negotiator. You are not a negotiator.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: And, with your thinking, you will never bring peace. You will never bring peace...\n\nRUBIO:... Donald, might be able to (inaudible) Palestinians and Arabs, but it's not a real estate deal...\n\nTRUMP:... Excuse me, I want to be able to bring peace...\n\nBLITZER:", + "... Senator.\n\nTRUMP: He will never be able to do it. I think I may be able to do it, although I will say this. Probably the toughest deal of any kind is that particular deal.\n\nBLITZER: Let's move on to talk about North Korea. You raised it, Governor Kasich. The threat posed by North Korea to the United States and its sallies, the commander of American forces in South Korea said that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would use a weapon of mass destruction if he thought his regime was being threatened. You have said the United States should start examining a strategy of regime change in North Korea.\n\nLet's be clear.", + " Are you talking about getting rid of Kim Jong Un?\n\nKASICH: When you talk about regime change, Wolf, it means regime change. That's what it means. Even though there's so much chaos in North Korea right now, there's a lot of reports of uncertainty, and instability in that government.\n\nBut, look, here's what I think we ought to do -- like, immediately. And, we've been kicking the can down the road on this for, I don't know, 15 years. We should be intercepting the ships that are leaving North Korea so they're not selling this material, or this technology,", + " or giving it to someone else.\n\nSecondly, the same goes with the aircraft.\n\nThirdly, we need to slap even tougher sanctions on North Korea because we really don't have the toughest sanctions on North Korea. We ought to talk about arming South Korea with ballistic missile technology. And, of course, also Japan with ballistic missile technology. Because we're now starting to take a firm position. We have the attention of the Chinese. The Chinese are the best way to calm that regime down and get them in a position of where they back off.\n\nBut, when I say regime change, I don't have to talk exactly what that means.", + " Look, I've been involved in national security for a long time. You don't have to spell everything out, but what I'm telling you is you look for any means you can to be able to solve that problem in North Korea, and in the meantime put the pressure on the Chinese. And, what we're doing is beginning to work against them.\n\nThey are the key to being able to settle this situation.\n\nBLITZER: I just want to be precise, Governor Kasich, this is critically important. There are a million North Korean troops North of the DMZ...\n\nKASICH:... I'm very well aware of that.\n\nBLITZER:", + " A million South Korean troops, 28,000 U.S. troops along the DMZ, right in between. Would you risk war for a regime change?\n\nKASICH: Wolf, again, it would depend exactly what, you know, what was happening. What the situation was. But, if there was an opportunity to remove the leader of North Korea and create stability? Because, I'll tell you, you keep kicking the can down the road we're going to face this sooner or later.\n\nBut, in the meantime, I'm also aware of the fact that there's 10 million people living in Seoul. So, you don't just run around making charges.", + " I have put it on the table that I would leave to see regime change in North Korea.\n\nNow, perhaps the Chinese can actually accomplish that with this man who is now currently the leader, but the fact is we have to bring everything to bear. We have to be firm, and we've got to unite those people in that part of the world to stand firmly against North Korea, and make sure we have the ballistic...\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nKASICH:... ballistic missile technology to defend ourselves.\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: One thing I'd like to add to what the Governor's saying,", + " I think that we are now in a position -- are $19 trillion dollars because of the horrible omnibus budget that was approved six weeks ago, it's going to be $21 trillion dollars. We can no longer defend all of these countries, Japan, Germany, South Korea.\n\nYou order televisions, you order almost anything, you're getting it from these countries. Whether it's a Mercedes-Benz, or whether it's an air conditioning unit. They're coming out of these countries. They are making a fortune. Saudi Arabia, we are defending Saudi Arabia. Before the oil went down, now they're making less, but they're making plenty.", + " They were making $1 billion dollars a day.\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nWe defend all of these countries for peanuts. You talk about budgets. We have to start getting reimbursed for taking care of the military services for all of these countries.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nKASICH: Hey, Wolf, Wolf...\n\nBLITZER: Dr. Carson.\n\nKASICH: Hey, Wolf, let me just say this because he mentioned this. Look, we're all in agreement that the Japanese need to do more. We're all in agreement that the Europeans need to do more, but I hate to just tell everybody we are the leader of the world and we should put the pressure on them to do their job.", + " There is no question about it.\n\nBut, at the same time, we also have to rebuild the military. Look, I have a balanced budget plan that cuts taxes, reforms regulations, but also builds the military, puts a $100 billion dollars more in defense. We need to rebuild our defenses,\n\nBut, I must also tell you, a long time reformer of the Pentagon, we must reform that building.\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nWe can't have a weapon system take 22 and a half years. We have 800,000 bureaucrats working for DOD, performing bureaucratic functions when we ought to be putting...\n\nBLITZER:", + "... Thank you...\n\nKASICH:... these resources into strengthening the military. So, we can do it all...\n\nBLITZER: Dr. Carson, how would you deal with North Korea?\n\nCARSON: OK. Well first of all, people say that I whine a lot because I don't get time. I'm going to whine because I didn't get asked about taxes, I didn't get asked about Israel. Hugh, you said you're going to be fair to everybody, you didn't ask me about taxes. I had something to say about that.\n\nNow...\n\nBLITZER: Go ahead. This is your moment.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCARSON:", + " OK. We have a system of taxation in this country that is horribly wrong. You know, I never had an audit until I spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, and then all of a sudden, they came in, they said we just want to look at your real estate dealings. And then they didn't find anything, so they said let's look at the whole year. And they didn't find anything, so they said let's look at the next year and the next year. They didn't find anything and they won't find anything because I'm a very honest person.\n\nBut he fact of the matter is the IRS is not honest and we need to get rid of them.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd as far as Israel is concerned,", + " you know, when I was there several months ago, I talked to a lot of people. I couldn't find a single one who didn't think that we had turned our backs on Israel. You know, they are a strategic partner for us but also recognize that we have a Judeo Christian foundation, and the last thing we need to do is to reject Israel. It doesn't mean that we can't be fair to other people. We can always be fair to other people, but, you know, it's like when you have a child, you know, you want to be fair to all the children around but you have a special attention for your own child.\n\nAnd now,", + " as far as North Korea is concerned, you know, Kim Jung Un is an unstable person, but he does understand strength. And I think we have to present strength to him. We should be encouraging the alliance with Japan and South Korea. We should be encouraging the placement of the THAAD, the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, that seems to disturb not only the North Koreans but the Chinese as well.\n\nAnd we also need to have a much more robust naval presence in that area, and I think we need to be developing strategic defense initiative because this man is going to have long-range missiles, he is going to have nuclear capabilities.", + " We need to be able to defend ourselves. And lastly, we should make sure that he knows that if he ever shoots a missile at us, it will be the last thing he ever does.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Thank you. Thank you. We're going to continue with national security. Go ahead, Hugh.\n\nHEWITT: Thank you, Wolf. Mr. Trump, we are less than 24 hours away from a ceasefire in Syria that has been brokered between the U.S. and Russia. Do you support this ceasefire?\n\nTRUMP: I really don't because it not working and the countries aren't agreeing to it and the rebels aren't agreeing and Syria is not agreeing.", + " So It's a meaningless ceasefire.\n\nI love the idea of a ceasefire. I love the idea of -- with a total cessation. But it's not working, as you know very well. It's not working. If -- we can do what we want with Russia but nobody else is adhering to it.\n\nSo I certainly support it, I would certainly love it, but all parties have to be part of it.\n\nHEWITT: Senator Cruz, your opinion on the ceasefire.\n\nCRUZ: Well look. We're certainly hopeful that the violence will cease, but there's reason to be highly skeptical. Russia has enhanced its position because of Obama's weakness in the Middle East,", + " weakness in Syria. And you know, as we're headed to November, we need no nominate a Republican candidate that can lay out a clear difference with both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on foreign policy.\n\nOne of the real challenges with both Donald and Senator Rubio is that they have agreed over and over again with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So for example, in Libya, both of them agreed with the Obama/Clinton policy of toppling the government in Libya. That was a disaster. It gave the country over to radical Islamic terrorism and it endangered America.\n\nAnother example is John Kerry. John Kerry -- Senator Rubio voted to confirm John Kerry as secretary of State.", + " I voted against him. And Donald Trump supported John Kerry against George W. Bush in 2004, gave him a check. And John Kerry has been the most anti-Israel secretary of State this country has ever seen. His diplomacy has been a disaster. And if we nominate someone who agreed with John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on foreign policy, we're not in a strong position to win the general election.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT: A response, Mr. Trump, then Mr. Rubio.\n\nTRUMP: Again, I think I gave them both checks to be exactly honest. I think they both liked me very much.", + " But the fact is that...\n\nCRUZ: But you called for Bush to be impeached.\n\nTRUMP: Well, I think Bush did a hell of a bad as far as that's concerned. You know it and so do I.\n\nCRUZ: But you gave him a check and called for him to be impeached.\n\nTRUMP: Be honest. Be honest. No, this was before. The check came early.\n\nTRUMP: But let me just tell you, Syria, he's saying that I was in favor of Syria. He said I was in favor of Libya? I never discussed that subject. I was in favor of Libya?", + " We would be so much better off if Gadhafi were in charge right now.\n\nIf these politicians went to the beach and didn't do a thing, and we had Saddam Hussein and if we had Gadhafi in charge, instead of having terrorism all over the place, we'd be -- at least they killed terrorists, all right?\n\nAnd I'm not saying they were good because they were bad, they were really bad, but we don't know what we're getting. You look at Libya right now, ISIS, as we speak, is taking over their oil. As we speak, it's a total mess.\n\nWe would have been better off if the politicians took a day off instead of going into war.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT:", + " Senator Rubio.\n\nRUBIO: Yes, a couple of points. Number one, on the Libya situation, we didn't topple Gadhafi, the Libyan people toppled Gadhafi. The only choice before America that this president had to make is, does it happen quickly or does it take a long time?\n\nAnd I argued if it takes a long time, you're going to have rebel forces emerge like these radical Islamists to take advantage of the vacuum. And that's what happened. That's where the term \"lead from behind\" came. And that's the foreign policy that apparently Senator Cruz appears to agree with.\n\nOn John Kerry,", + " yes, you know why, because every day John Kerry wasn't appointed was another day Hillary Clinton was still in charge of the State Department. And she was absolutely horrible.\n\nI couldn't imagine that they were going to find somebody even worse than her, but this president never ceases to amaze.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: And the last point I would make on South Korea, now this is important, because we're asking to be commander-in-chief. Donald is asking to be commander-in-chief. And he's saying these guys need to do more.\n\nSouth Korea contributes $800 million a year to that effort.", + " And Japan contributes as well. And here's why our commitment to that regional security is so critical, Donald, because if we walk away from them, both Japan and South Korea will become nuclear weapons powers.\n\nThey can do that very quickly. And that's what they will do if the American defense agreements wither away, which is why we have to rebuild the military, but why we can't walk away from our Asia-Pacific defense status.\n\nHEWITT: Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: I never said walk away. I wouldn't want to walk away. I want them to pay us much more money. We cannot afford to subsidize...\n\nRUBIO:", + " How much?\n\nTRUMP: A lot. I'll negotiate a lot more money than you'll ever get.\n\nAs far as John Kerry is concerned, there has been no tougher critic of this man, I think he negotiated one of the worst deals in the history of our country, the Iran deal, where they get their $150 billion and all of the other things that take place.\n\nIt is a disaster for this country, and speaking of Israel, it's a disaster for Israel. I'm no fan of John Kerry.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: Hold on, hold on, Governor.\n\nSenator Cruz.\n\nCRUZ:", + " You know, it's interesting, Donald just said that he never came out in favor of toppling Gadhafi in Libya. Well, he stated that in an interview that will be on our Web site, tedcruz.org.\n\nYou can see and hear the exact words from Donald's mouth. And I assume when he sees that interview, maybe he forgot about it, but I assume Donald will apologize where he sees that he said exactly that.\n\nWith regard to John Kerry, I will say John Kerry's foreign policy has been a disaster for decades. That's why I voted against him when he came up. And the fact that Donald Trump would write him a check and support him against George W.", + " Bush shows exceptionally poor foreign policy judgment.\n\nAnd I'll give one more example on Israel. When the Obama administration canceled civilian air flights into the national of Israel, when Hamas was raining rockets down on them, I publicly asked, is this an economic boycott against Israel?\n\nThe next day Michael Bloomberg, another New York billionaire, got on a plane, a commercial flight, and flew to Israel from London. Together the heat and light that was put on the State Department was so great that within 36 hours they lifted the ban on air flights into Israel.\n\nDuring that entire battle, and indeed during every battle on Israel the natural question is, where was Donald?", + " If this is something he cares about, why has he supported anti-Israel politicians from Jimmy Carter to Hillary Clinton to John Kerry for four decades?\n\nIf you care about Israel, you don't write checks to politicians who are undermining Israel. Instead you stand and support the national security of America and the alliance with Israel.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nKASICH: There's a critical point that needs to be made here.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Governor, Governor, Governor, he attacked Mr. Trump.\n\nMr. Trump has a right to respond.\n\nTRUMP: Well, look, my response is very simple. There is nobody on this stage that has done more for Israel than I have.", + " Nobody. You might say, you might talk, you're politicians, all talk, no action.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: I've been watching it all my life. You are all talk and no action.\n\nCRUZ: Then name one specific thing you've done.\n\nTRUMP: What I've seen up here -- I mean, first of all, this guy is a choke artist, and this guy is a liar. You have a combination...\n\nRUBIO: This guy always goes for...\n\nTRUMP: You have a combination of factors. He can't do it...\n\nRUBIO: This is so typical.\n\nTRUMP:", + "... for the obvious reason, and he can't do it because he doesn't know how to tell the truth. Other than that, I rest my case.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: One at a time, gentlemen.\n\nGovernor Kasich, you have the floor. Governor...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: You will have a response. But I promised Governor Kasich he could respond.\n\nCARSON: Can somebody attack me, please?\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nKASICH: There's something -- I want to -- I want to point out something here today that is -- it's so critically important -- about how the Obama administration has really done such a ridiculous,", + " feckless job here in foreign policy.\n\nFirst of all, we should have been supporting the rebels long ago. They could have taken Assad out, and because we did nothing, the Russians are in, and they're sitting in the catbird seat.\n\nWe should have been helping them. I'm thankful that the aid trucks are finally getting into Syria. But the fact is, had we had acted, we would have solved that problem.\n\nNow, let's talk about Libya. Libya didn't go down because there was some people revolution. Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and all these other people convinced the president to undermine Gadhafi. They undermined him,", + " and now they have created a cesspool in Libya.\n\nAnd let me just say to you -- we have ISIS beginning get -- get a foothold in Libya. We're gonna have to deal with it. There are not many major cities in Libya. They're on the coast, which -- mostly, it's desert, but it's a problem.\n\nThen we have ISIS in -- in Syria, and we have ISIS in Iraq. Because this administration has not had a strong and firm foreign policy, we are going to inherit -- one of us here is going to inherit a total mess...\n\nBLITZER: All right...\n\nKASICH:", + "... and we're going to have to work our way out of it, including...\n\nBLITZER: Let's continue.\n\nKASICH:... the need to arm the Ukrainians. They have been ignored, and we need to help them as well...\n\nBLITZER: Let us continue.\n\nKASICH:... and assert ourselves as America.\n\nBLITZER: Let's continue the questioning on ISIS. Maria.\n\nCRUZ: Hold on, Wolf. You said I got a response.\n\nBLITZER: You'll have a chance. Maria will pick up...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Hold on.", + " He called me a liar. You're saying I can't respond to being called a liar?\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: Go ahead and respond.\n\nCRUZ: You know, what we're seeing with Donald is actually the pattern of Washington -- the pattern of Washington deal makers, which is they make promises, they break their words, and then when anyone calls them on it, they call you a liar.\n\nAnd so that's Donald's pattern over and over again. He said, for example, seven months ago -- this is Donald speaking, quote -- \"I, Donald Trump, was a member of the establishment.\"\n\nThere's a reason Harry Reid thinks he's the best Republican up here.", + " There's a reason Jimmy Carter said he would support Donald Trump over me, because he said Donald Trump is malleable, he has no fixed set of beliefs...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... whereas Ted Cruz is not malleable. And every time anyone points at Donald's actual record...\n\nBLITZER: Thank you.\n\nCRUZ:... what he said on national television, Donald yells \"liar.\" Let me tell you something -- falsely accusing someone of lying is itself a lie...\n\nBLITZER: Go ahead, Mr. Trump.\n\nCRUZ:... and it's something Donald does daily.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Go ahead, Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: I watched -- I watched...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP:... the lobbyists. I watched what this man did to Dr. Ben Carson, who I respect, in Iowa, where he said that Ben Carson is out of the race -- he has left Iowa and he's out of the race. And I thought it was disgraceful.\n\nAnd got a lot of votes because of that -- a lot of votes. Took them away from Ben Carson. I watched that. Probably took them away from me, too. But I watched it.\n\nI also watched where he did a forum that looked like it came right out of a government agency,", + " and it said on top, \"Voter Violation,\" and then it graded you...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... and it scared the hell out of people, and it said the only way you clear up the violation, essentially, is to go and vote for Ted Cruz. I watched that fraudulent document, and I said it's the worst thing I've ever seen in politics.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nTo me, that was even worse than what he did to Ben.\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: I know politicians -- I know politicians, believe it or not, better than you do.", + " And it's not good.\n\nCRUZ: I believe it. No, no. I believe you know politicians much better than I do, because for 40 years, you've been funding liberal Democratic politicians. And by the way...\n\nTRUMP: I funded you. I funded him. Can you believe it?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ:... the reason is -- you're welcome to have the check back.\n\nTRUMP: I funded this guy. I gave him a check.\n\nCRUZ: Yeah, you gave me $5,000.\n\nTRUMP: I gave him a check. He never funded me.\n\nCRUZ: And -- and by the way,", + " let's be clear.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nDonald claims -- Donald claims to care about...\n\nTRUMP: You know why? I didn't want to, but he sent me his book with his autograph...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Donald. Donald. Donald. I understand rules are very hard for you. They're very confusing.\n\nTRUMP: Mr. Trump, you're doing a great job. I have his book.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: Thank you -- thank you for the book. Go ahead.\n\nCRUZ: Donald, you can get back on your meds now.\n\nTRUMP: This is a lot of fun up here tonight,", + " I have to tell you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThank -- thank you for the book. I really appreciate (ph).\n\nCRUZ: Donald -- Donald, relax.\n\nTRUMP: Go ahead. I'm relaxed. You're the basket case.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nGo ahead.\n\nCRUZ: Donald...\n\nTRUMP: Go ahead. Don't get nervous.\n\nCRUZ: (inaudible)...\n\nTRUMP: Go ahead.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: I promise you, Donald, there's nothing about you...\n\nTRUMP: I've seen you.\n\nCRUZ:... that makes anyone nervous.\n\nTRUMP: You're losing so badly you -- I want to...\n\nCRUZ:", + " You know, people are actually watching this at home.\n\nTRUMP:... I -- you don't know what's happening.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: Gentlemen, gentlemen.\n\nCRUZ: Wolf, I'm going to ask my time not be deducted when he's yelling at me.\n\nBLITZER: You've gotta stop this.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: The latest debate -- gentlemen, please.\n\nCRUZ: Hold on, I'm going to get my answer. He doesn't get to yell the whole time. BLITZER: I want to move -- I want to move on.", + " These are the rules.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Excuse me, he called me a liar, then interrupted the whole time. Am I allowed to...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ: Wolf, do I not get a response? Do I not get a response without being interrupted?\n\nBLITZER: You'll get -- you'll get plenty of response, so stand by.\n\nCARSON: My name was mentioned.\n\nBLITZER: I want to talk -- I want to talk about ISIS right now, and the federal government -- how much best to keep Americans safe from ISIS.\n\nBLITZER:", + " There's a huge battle underway right now between the tech giant Apple and the federal government. The federal government wants Apple to unlock the phone used by that San Bernardino terrorist to prevent future attacks. Apple has refused, saying it would compromise the security of all of its customers. And just this afternoon, they went to court to block the judge's order.\n\nDana Bash, pick up the questioning.\n\nBASH: Senator Rubio, you say it's complicated, and that, quote, \"Apple isn't necessarily wrong to refuse the court order.\" Why shouldn't investigators have everything at their disposal?\n\nRUBIO: No, in fact what I have said is the only thing -- the FBI made this very clear 48 hours ago -- the only thing they are asking of Apple is that Apple allow them to use their own systems in the FBI to try to guess the password of the San Bernardino killer.", + " Apple initially came out saying, \"We're being ordered to create a back door to an encryption device.\" That is not accurate.\n\nThe only thing they're being asked to do, and the FBI made this very clear about 48 hours ago, is allow us to disable the self- destruct mode that's in the Apple phone so that we can try to guess using our own systems what the password of this killer was.\n\nAnd I think they should comply with that. If that's all they're asking for, they are not asking for Apple to create a back door to encryption.\n\nBASH: So just to be clear, you did say on CNN a couple of weeks ago this is a complicated issue;", + " Apple is not necessarily wrong here.\n\nRUBIO: Because at the time, Apple was portraying that the court order was to create a back door to an encryption device.\n\nBASH: But just to be clear -- just to be clear, if you are president, would you instruct your Justice Department to force Apple to comply or not?\n\nRUBIO: To comply with an order that says that they have to allow the FBI the opportunity to try to guess the password?\n\nBASH: Correct.\n\nRUBIO: Absolutely. That Apple phone didn't even belong to the killer. It belonged to the killer's employee (sic) who have agreed to allow him to try to do this.", + " That is all they're asking them to do is to disable the self-destruct mode or the auto-erase mode on one phone in the entire world. But Apple doesn't want to do it because they think it hurts their brand.\n\nWell, let me tell you, their brand is not superior to the national security of the United States of America.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH: Senator Cruz, Apple CEO Tim Cook says this would be bad for America. Where do you stand: national security or personal privacy?\n\nCRUZ: Well, as you know, at that same CNN forum, both Marco and I were asked this question. His answer, he was on both sides of the fence.", + " He's now agreeing with me. And so I'm glad.\n\nWhat I said is yes, Apple should be forced to comply with this court order. Why? Because under the Fourth Amendment, a search and seizure is reasonable if it has judicial authorization and probable cause. In this instance, the order is not put a back door in everyone's cell phone. If that was the order, that order would be problematic because it would compromise security and safety for everyone.\n\nI would agree with Apple on that broad policy question. But on the question of unlocking this cell phone of a terrorist, we should enforce the court order and find out everyone that terrorist at San Bernardino talked to on the phone,", + " texted with, e-mailed. And absolutely, Apple doesn't have a right to defy a valid court order in a terrorism investigation.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH: Dr. Carson, Tim Cook, again, the CEO of Apple, says that this would be bad for America. What do you think?\n\nCARSON: I think allowing terrorist to get away with things is bad for America.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nYou know, we have the -- we have a Constitution. We have a Fourth Amendment. It guards us against illegal and unreasonable search and seizure. But we have mechanisms in place with the judicial system that will allow us to gain material that is necessary to benefit the nation as a whole or the community as a whole.", + " And that's why we have FISA courts and things of that nature.\n\nSo absolutely, I would -- I would expect Apple to comply with the court order. If they don't comply with that, you're encouraging chaos in our system.\n\nBASH: Mr. Trump...\n\n(APPLAUSE) KASICH: I want to weigh in on this please. I want to just tell you that the problem is not right now between the administration and Apple. You know what the problem is? Where's the president been? You sit down in a back room and you sit down with the parties and you get this worked out. You don't litigate this on the front page of the New York Times,", + " where everybody in the world is reading about their dirty laundry out here.\n\nThe president of the United States should be convening a meeting, should have convened a meeting with Apple and our security forces. And then you know what you do when you're the president? You lock the door and you say you're not coming out until you reach an agreement that both gives the security people what they need and protects the rights of Americans. This is a failure of his leadership to get this done as an executive should be doing it.\n\nAnd I'll tell you, that's why you want a governor. I do this all the time. And we reach agreements all the time.", + " Because as an executive, you've got to solve problems instead of fighting on the front page of the newspaper.\n\nARRASAS: Thank you, Governor.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nKASICH: Thank you.\n\nARRARAS: Mr. Trump, you have been very vocal about securing the Mexican border, but ISIS has called upon its supporters to conduct attacks on our neighbor to the North, Canada.\n\nAs a matter of fact, U.S. officials have warned that it is the Canadian border which is the most significant threat. You have said that you will not build a wall in Canada. When it comes to national security, and the threat of terrorism,", + " why does Mexico need a wall, and Canada doesn't? Isn't that, like, closing the front door, and leaving the back door open?\n\nTRUMP: First of all, you're talking about a border that's many, many times longer. You're talking about a massive border.\n\nWe have far less problem with that border than we do with our Southern border, and tremendous amounts -- you know, I won, I had the privilege of winning by a landslide, by the way, New Hampshire.\n\nYou go to New Hampshire, the first thing they talk about is heroin and drugs pouring in. And, you wouldn't think this beautiful place -- it's beautiful.", + " With the trees and the roads, and the countryside. Their biggest problem is heroin, and it's such a shame to see it.\n\nThey're pouring in from the Southern border, so I'm talking about great security. I'm talking about a wall that can absolutely be built, and I'll build it on time, on budget. It'll be a very high wall, a great wall. It's going to be built, it's going to be built. It's going to be paid for by Canada, by the way -- maybe I'll get Canada to pay? Got to be paid for by Mexico.\n\nThe problem with Canada, you're talking about a massively long piece.", + " You're talking about a border that would be about four times longer. It would be very, very hard to do, and we -- it is not our biggest problem. I don't care what anyone says. It is not our big problem. Our big problem is not only people coming in, and in many cases the wrong people, it's the tremendous amount of drugs that are coming in.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRARAS: I want to talk to you, Senator Rubio, about Puerto Rico. As you know, Puerto Rico's in the midst of financial collapse, unable to pay it's debt of $72 billion dollars. Puerto Rico is asking for bankruptcy protection which would give Puerto Rico,", + " and Puerto Ricans, which are U.S. citizens, you know that -- the tools to restructure the debt. That is the same debt the other 50 states have.\n\nYou oppose granting Puerto Rico that bankruptcy protection. You say that it is only a last resort measure, but the government of Puerto Rico has said that bankruptcy is it's last resort. That that's where they are now. How do you explain this very strong stance to the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans that vote across the U.S., and particularly in your state of Florida?\n\nRUBIO: Sure, because bankruptcy doesn't work unless you change the way you're operating,", + " or you're going to be bankrupt again. And, the problem with Puerto Rico is it's economy is not growing. It has a massive exodus of professionals and others that are leaving to my home state of Florida, and all over the country.\n\nThey're coming to the mainland from Puerto Rico because the economy there is not growing, it's too expensive to do business there. The tax rate is too high. The government regulations are too extensive.\n\nThis year alone, with all the problems they're having, they barely cut their budget from one year to the next. So, I think the leadership on the island has to show their willingness to get their house in order and put in place measures allow the economy there to grow again.", + " If the economy of Puerto Rico does not grow they will never generate the revenue to pay this debt, or the billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities that they have on their books of promises they've made to future generations to make payments.\n\nSo, yes, if they do all of those things then we can explore the use of bankruptcy protection, but not as the first resort, which is what they're asking for, because it will not solve the problems on the island and you're going to continue to see hundreds of thousands of people leave that beautiful place, and coming to the mainland.\n\nThey're United States citizens, they're obviously entitled to do so,", + " and we welcome them, but we would also prefer to see a Puerto Rico that once again is growing economically, and is robust. And, the leaders in charge there now are doing a terrible job.\n\nTheir previous governor, Louis Fortuno was doing a great job until he barely lost that election to...\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nRUBIO:... to someone who has taken a big government stance (ph) once again...\n\nBLITZER:... Senator, thank you very much.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: I want our viewers to stay with us right now, including the last pitch in the final debate before Super Tuesday.\n\n(APPLAUSE)", + " (CHEERING)\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Welcome back to the University of Houston. It's time now for closing statements. All of you will have 30 seconds. Dr. Carson, we'll start with you.\n\nCARSON: Well first of all, I want people to think about what kind of leader do you want and what kind of person do you want your kids to emulate. Think about that.\n\nSecondly, several years ago, a movie was made about these hands. These hands by the grace of God have saved many lives and healed many families. And I'm asking you tonight,", + " America, to join hands with me to heal, inspire and revive America. If not us, who? And if not now, when?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Governor Kasich.\n\nKASICH: Well, the last USA Today poll had me beating Hillary Clinton by 11 points, more than anybody on this stage. Secondly, I hope you saw tonight that executive experience really matters. It matters in terms of growing our economy, balancing budgets, cutting taxes, reforming regulations. I've done it in Washington, I've done it in Ohio, and I can go back to Washington and do it again.\n\nBut I hope you also noticed tonight that I do have the foreign policy experience,", + " not just a few years, but a lot of years in working with some of the great, great minds in this country to develop the expertise, the confidence, the firmness, the toughness and the ability to bring people together.\n\nI hope you all think about giving me your vote. I would appreciate it very much. And I tell you, we won't have to spend time figuring what we're going to do. I will hit the ground running and we will get America moving again. Thank you all very much.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Rubio. RUBIO: Well, thank you for having us tonight.", + " You know, this campaign has come a long way. It was just a few months ago there were 15 or 11 us on the stage and now it's narrowed and the votes are starting to count. And we have an incredible decision to make, not just about the direction of America, but the identity of our party and of the conservative movement.\n\nRUBIO: The time for games is over.\n\nI know you've had a lot of choices to make, but now it's time to narrow it down. And I'm asking you to get behind me, go on our Web site and join you our effort, marcorubio.com,", + " so we can bring an end to this silliness, this looniness, and once again re-embrace all the things that made America and the Republican Party the bearer of the conservative movement in this country.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz.\n\nCRUZ: Washington deals are bankrupting this country. There are several deal-makers on this stage but there is only one person who has consistently stood up to both parties, fighting for the American people against the Washington deals.\n\nIf I'm elected president, on the first day in office I will rescind every single illegal and unconstitutional executive action. I will instruct the Department of Justice to open an investigation into Planned Parenthood and prosecute any criminal violations.\n\nI will instruct every federal agency that the persecution of religious liberty ends today.", + " I will rip to shreds the Iranian -- catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal. And I will begin the process of moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.\n\nWe will repeal Obamacare, abolish of IRS, secure the border, and bring back jobs.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: Thank you.\n\nNobody knows politicians better than I do. They're all talk, they're no action, nothing gets done. I've watched it for years. Take a look at what's happening to our country.\n\nAll of the things that I've been talking about, whether it's trade, whether it's building up our depleted military,", + " whether it's taking care of our vets, whether it's getting rid of Common Core, which is a disaster, or knocking out Obamacare and coming up with something so much better, I will get it done. Politicians will never, ever get it done. And we will make America great again. Thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump, thank you.\n\nAnd thanks to each of the candidates, on behalf of everyone here at CNN and Telemundo. We also want to thank the Republican National Committee and the University of Houston. My thanks also to Hugh Hewitt, Maria Celeste, and Dana Bash.\n\nSuper Tuesday is only five days away.\n" + ], + "length": 33313, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 86, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Hillary Clinton made a major accusation against Donald Trump at Saturday night's Democratic debate\u2014and was late coming back from a possible bathroom break. Those are among the media takeaways from Saturday night's Democratic debate at St. Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire, between Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O'Malley: Clinton's \"above-the-fray posture in the debate\" revealed her confidence that \"neither of her Democratic rivals would prove a significant obstacle,\" the New York Times reports. By targeting Donald Trump, the Wall Street Journal says, she \"sought to cast herself as the likely nominee, playing down any threat posed by Mr. Sanders\u2019 upstart campaign.\" Clinton accused Trump of \"becoming ISIS's best recruiter,\" saying the militant group is \"showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.\" But as the AP points out, her campaign hasn't shown evidence of specific videos being used that way. For his part, Sanders apologized to Clinton for his campaign having taken information about her supporters. He also offered a way to get Middle Eastern countries to help fight ISIS: \"Tell Qatar, instead of spending $200 billion on the World Cup, maybe they should pay attention to ISIS, which is on their doorstep,\" Slate quotes him as saying. O'Malley \"sought to promote himself as the technocratic voice of a new generation,\" writes John Cassidy at the New Yorker. \"Occasionally, however, he overdid the youthful bit: after all, at the age of fifty-two, he is hardly a stripling.\" Oh, and Clinton returned late from a commercial break with the debate already underway. \"Sorry,\" she said with a smile. Read the debate transcript (with interactive highlights) at the Washington Post, or see why Sanders had a great day this week.\n", + "docs": [ + "But from her opening statement on, she took every opportunity \u2014 and even created some \u2014 to ignore her adversaries onstage and go after what she suggested was the true opposition.\n\nHer above-the-fray posture in the debate, held at St. Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., signaled Mrs. Clinton\u2019s confidence, just weeks before the first votes in Iowa, that neither of her Democratic rivals would prove a significant obstacle on her march to the nomination.\n\n\u201cBringing Donald Trump back into it,\u201d she said at one point, \u201cyou don\u2019t want to alienate the very countries and people you need to be part of the coalition\u201d \u2014 referring to the Muslim nations that would be sought as military allies in fighting the Islamic State,", + " also known as ISIS or ISIL.\n\nMr. Sanders and Mr. O\u2019Malley both did their best to anger Mrs. Clinton. Mr. O\u2019Malley claimed that she changed her views on guns \u201cevery election year,\u201d and Mr. Sanders reminded viewers of her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.\n\n\u201cOur differences are fairly deep on this issue; we disagreed on the war in Iraq,\u201d Mr. Sanders said, accusing Mrs. Clinton of being overly hawkish in embroiling the United States in overseas conflicts. \u201cSecretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be.\u201d\n\nMrs.", + " Clinton criticized Mr. Sanders for his previous opposition to bills backed by supporters of gun control, but was at her fiercest after he challenged her on national security.\n\n\u201cWith all due respect, senator, you voted for regime change with respect to Libya,\u201d she said, before mentioning the former Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. \u201cYou joined the Senate in voting to get rid of Qaddafi, and you asked that there be a Security Council validation of that with a resolution.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nBoth her rivals argued that the United States needed to fight the Islamic State, but not necessarily to depose President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.\n\n\u201cIt is not Assad who is attacking the United States,\u201d Mr.", + " Sanders said.\n\nMr. O\u2019Malley agreed. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be the ones declaring Assad must go,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have a role to play, but it is not the role of traveling the world looking for new monsters to destroy.\u201d\n\nMrs. Clinton all but accused her rivals of na\u00efvet\u00e9. \u201cI think it\u2019s fair to say Assad has killed, by last count, about 250,000 Syrians,\u201d she said, adding that she had wanted to arm the moderate Syrian opposition years ago to avoid the creation of a dangerous power vacuum. \u201cI wish it could be either-or,\u201d she said.\n\nMr. O\u2019Malley,", + " who has been lagging badly behind both of his rivals, proved an irritant to Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton. He faulted them both for being insufficiently courageous on gun control and made a point of noting his relative youth next to Mr. Sanders, 74, and Mrs. Clinton, 68.\n\n\u201cMay I offer a different generation\u2019s perspective on this?\u201d Mr. O\u2019Malley, 52, interjected at one point.\n\nLater, in an exchange about assault weapons, he said, \u201cISIL training videos are telling lone wolves the easiest way to buy a combat assault weapon in America is at a gun show,", + " and it\u2019s because of the flip-flopping political approach of Washington that both of my two colleagues on the stage have represented there for the last 40 years.\u201d\n\nMrs. Clinton has spent much of this year repositioning herself to appeal to her party\u2019s progressive base, but she bypassed the best chance she had Saturday to embrace the sort of populism that is Mr. Sanders\u2019s calling card.\n\nWhen she was asked, \u201cShould corporate America love Hillary Clinton?\u201d \u2014 a reference to a magazine article during her 2008 presidential campaign \u2014 she spread her arms.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cEverybody should,\u201d she said, grinning.", + " \u201cI have said I want to be the president for the struggling, the striving and the successful.\u201d She spoke at length about wanting to strengthen the economy and offered praise for responsible employers, noting that her father had been a small-business man.\n\nMr. Sanders, finally stepping in after Mrs. Clinton was finished, was blunt about his views but only glancingly criticized her ties to corporate interests.\n\nPhoto\n\n\u201cThey ain\u2019t going to like me,\u201d Mr. Sanders said of the business community. \u201cAnd Wall Street is going to like me even less.\u201d\n\nMr. O\u2019Malley did criticize Mrs. Clinton for her Wall Street connections, recalling that at the Democratic debate last month in Iowa,", + " she defended her fund-raising from the financial industry by suggesting those donors supported her efforts to rebuild Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.\n\nMrs. Clinton said again on Saturday that donations from Wall Street made up a small percentage of her contributions, then turned the question around by noting that Mr. O\u2019Malley had gladly raised money from Wall Street as head of the Democratic Governors Association.\n\nNewsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.", + " Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.\n\nThere were a few such tense moments, but the disputes were tamer than those that have become routine on the Republican debate stage, and were entirely on policy grounds.\n\nMrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Sanders for proposing expensive government programs without providing details of how to fund them. She estimated that his proposals to make health care and college free would require a 40 percent increase in federal spending, or $18 trillion to $20 trillion. \u201cI think we\u2019ve got to be really thoughtful about how we\u2019re going to afford what we propose,\u201d she said.", + " \u201cWhich is why everything I propose, I explain exactly how I\u2019m going to pay for it.\u201d\n\nMr. Sanders said his plans would help middle- and working-class families and likened them to Social Security and the New Deal. Pressed repeatedly on how he would pay for them, Mr. Sanders cracked a wry smile and said, \u201cNow, this is getting to be fun.\u201d\n\nMr. Sanders said his plans would require an increase in taxes but would ultimately save working Americans money. He said a three-month family leave for working families would amount to only $1.61 a week in higher taxes. Mr. O\u2019Malley also would not rule out potentially raising taxes.\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\nMrs.", + " Clinton, casting an eye toward tax-averse general election voters, made a firm pledge not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year.\n\nAt another point, Mr. Sanders attacked Mrs. Clinton\u2019s ties to Wall Street. But he also pointed to the policies of the presidential administration of her husband, Bill Clinton, including the dismantling of part of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, leading to the commingling of commercial and investment banks. \u201cI led the effort,\u201d Mr. Sanders said, \u201cagainst Alan Greenspan, against a guy named Bill Clinton \u2014 maybe you know him, maybe you don\u2019t.\u201d\n\nBut Mrs.", + " Clinton scarcely wanted to engage her rivals, except when sharply attacked, and the three Democrats found much to agree on. Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton both, for example, proposed building a coalition of Muslim countries to help fight the Islamic State.\n\n\u201cTell Yemen, go to war against ISIS,\u201d Mr. Sanders said. \u201cI would tell Qatar, instead of paying $200 billion on the World Cup, spend it on fighting ISIS, which is at your doorstep.\u201d\n\nThere were even moments when undiluted comity broke out.\n\nAsked whether it was time for the role of the presidential spouse to be redefined, Mrs. Clinton said that her husband would not,", + " as first gentleman, pick out the china or flowers for state dinners, but would offer advice on policy issues, particularly \u201chow we\u2019re going to get the economy working for everybody, which he knows a little bit about.\u201d\n\nMr. Sanders used the question to heap praise on Mrs. Clinton, saying she \u201cnot only did an outstanding job as our first lady but redefined what that role could be.\u201d\n\nAt the outset, Mr. Sanders was asked about the revelation that at least one of his aides had gained access to and copied information about Mrs. Clinton\u2019s supporters from the Democratic Party\u2019s voter database. But neither he nor Mrs. Clinton showed any appetite to relitigate it.\n\nAsked by the ABC News moderators whether Mrs.", + " Clinton, who looked on icily as Mr. Sanders explained the data breach, deserved an apology, Mr. Sanders said, \u201cYes, I apologize.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement Continue reading the main story\n\n\u201cI very much appreciate that comment, Bernie,\u201d Mrs. Clinton said. \u201cIt really is important that we go forward on this.\u201d\n\nMr. Sanders called for an independent investigation of the breach, which prompted the Democratic National Committee to bar his campaign temporarily from the party\u2019s voter file. He noted that one campaign worker had already been fired and said he would fire any other aide found to have acted improperly. (After the debate, his spokesman, Michael Briggs,", + " said two other aides had been suspended Saturday in connection with the data breach.)\n\nBut Mr. Sanders said that his aides might not have been the only ones viewing information they should not have seen.\n\n\u201cI am not convinced that information from our campaign may not have ended up in her campaign,\u201d Mr. Sanders added.\n\nYet even the unsubstantiated suggestion of impropriety by Mrs. Clinton\u2019s campaign was not enough to lure her into a back-and-forth on the subject.\n\nAs in the first two debates, Mrs. Clinton was the focal point throughout \u2014 even when she was not actually on stage. As the moderators resumed after a long commercial break,", + " both her opponents returned to their places to answer questions about the economy, but Mrs. Clinton\u2019s podium stood empty.\n\n\u201cSorry,\u201d she said with a grin as she returned.\n\nBoth Mr. Sanders and Mr. O\u2019Malley used their closing statements to compare the Democratic trio favorably with the Republican field. \u201cI think we have a lot more to offer the American people than the right-wing extremists,\u201d Mr. Sanders said.\n\nBut Mrs. Clinton, emerging from another debate unscathed, seemed to acknowledge that much of the American public was probably more absorbed, on the Saturday night before Christmas, by the return of the \u201cStar Wars\u201d franchise.\n\n\u201cThank you,", + " good night, and may the force be with you,\u201d she said, beaming. ", + " Democrat Hillary Clinton is increasingly framing her presidential pitch with an eye toward Donald Trump, showing how the Republican businessman has come to dominate the debate in both parties and signaling an inflection point in the campaign as 2016 nears.\n\nWith just six weeks until the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Trump\u2019s blunt talk and controversial proposals\u2014such as his plan to bar all Muslims from entry to the U.S.\u2014are driving much of the political conversation. In the third Democratic debate Saturday, Mrs. Clinton largely... ", + " Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley went head-to-head on gun control, Syria and the economy at a debate in Manchester, N.H. Dec. 19. Here are the key moments. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)\n\nThree Democratic candidates participated in tonight's ABC presidential primary debate at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley.\n\nWe posted the complete transcript below, with insight from the crew here at The Fix as well as the Fact Checker's Michelle Lee.\n\nClick or tap the highlighted part of the transcript to see an annotation; if you would like to leave your own annotations,", + " make sure you have a Genius account. Post staff annotations will appear by default; others are in a menu that you can see in the upper right when you click or tap on an annotation.\n\nThe debate began after ABC's Martha Raddatz and David Muir introduced the candidates.\n\nRaddatz: Good evening to you all. The rules for tonight are very basic and have been agreed to by all three campaigns in advance. Candidates can take up to a minute-and-a-half to respond directly to a question. For a rebuttal, for a follow-up, 45 seconds will be allowed. There are green, yellow, and red lights that each candidate will see to signal when time is running out and when they're supposed to be finished with their answers.\n\nMUIR:", + " We will be tackling many critical issues right here tonight, and we begin with opening statements, in alphabetical order, and Secretary Clinton.\n\nCLINTON: Well, thank you. And I'm delighted to be here in New Hampshire for this debate.\n\nYou know, the American president has to both keep our families safe and make the economy grow in a way that helps everyone, not just those at the top. That's the job. I have a strategy to combat and defeat ISIS without getting us involved in another ground war, and I have plans to raise incomes and deal with a lot of the problems that keep families up at night.\n\nI'm very clear that we have a distinct difference between those of us on this stage tonight and all of our Republican counterparts.", + " From my perspective, we have to prevent the Republicans from rolling back the progress that we've made. They would repeal the Affordable Care Act, not improve it. They would give more tax breaks to the super-wealthy and corporations, not to the middle class. And they would, despite all their tough talk about terrorism, continue to let people who are on the no-fly list buy guns.\n\nSo we have a lot of work to do in this campaign to make it clear where we stand in the Democratic Party, what we will do for our country, and I look forward to this evening's discussion of real issues that face the American people.\n\nThank you.\n\nRADDATZ:", + " Thank you, Secretary Clinton.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nGovernor O'Malley?\n\nO'MALLEY: Martha, thank you. Tonight we have a different debate than the debates that we have been allowed to have so far, because tonight is different because of this reason, that in the course of this presidential campaign America has again been attacked by jihadi terrorists, American lives taken from us. So, yes, we must talk about our ideas to move our economy forward, but the first job of the president of the United States is to protect the people of the United States.\n\nI visited with a number of our neighbors in Northern Virginia at a mosque last Friday.", + " And as I looked out there at the eyes of our neighbors, I also looked in the eyes of veterans. I looked into the eyes of Boy Scouts. I looked into the eyes of moms and dads who would do anything in their power to protect our country's values and our freedoms.\n\nWhat our nation needs right now is to realize that, while we face a terrible danger, we also face a different sort of political danger. And that is the danger that democracies find themselves susceptible to when unscrupulous leaders try to turn us upon each other. What our country needs right now is new leadership that will bring us together around the values that unite us and the freedoms that we share as Americans.\n\nWe will rise to challenge of ISIL and we will rise together to the challenges that we face in our economy.", + " But we will only do so if we hold true to the values and the freedoms that unite us, which means we must never surrender them to terrorists, must never surrender our Americans values to racist, must never surrender to the fascist pleas of billionaires with big mouths.\n\nWe are a better country than this. Our enduring symbol is not the barbed wire fence, it is the Statue of Liberty. And America's best days are in front of us if we move forward together.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR: Senator Sanders.\n\nSANDERS: Good evening.\n\nI am running for president of the United States because it is too late for establishment politics and establishment economics.", + " I'm running for president because our economy is rigged because working people are working longer hours for lower wages and almost all of new wealth and income being created is going to the top one percent. I'm running for president because I'm going to create an economy that works for working families not just billionaires.\n\nI'm running for president because we have a campaign finance system which is corrupt, where billionaires are spending hundreds of millionaires of dollars to buy candidates who will represent their interests rather than the middle class and working families. I'm running because we need to address the planetary crisis of climate change and take on the fossil fuel industry and transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.\n\nI'm running for president because I want a new foreign policy;", + " one that takes on Isis, one that destroys ISIS, but one that does not get us involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East but rather works around a major coalition of wealthy and powerful nations supporting Muslim troops on the ground. That's the kind of coalition we need and that's the kind of coalition I will put together.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR: Senator Sanders thank you and thank you all.\n\nWe do have a lot of important issues to get here tonight and we want to address the controversy of the last 24 hours right off the top because we heard some of the most heated rhetoric of the campaign so far between two of the campaigns on this stage tonight.\n\nSenator Sanders,", + " you fired a campaign staffer you have sued the Democratic National Committee; all of this after your campaign acknowledge that some of your staffers quote, \"irresponsibly accessed data from another campaign.\" The Clinton campaign called this a very egregious breech of data of ethics and said, quote, \"our data was stolen.\"\n\nDid they overstate this or were your staffers essentially stealing part of the Clinton playbook?\n\nSANDERS: David, let me give you a little bit of background here.\n\nThe DNC has hired vendors. On two occasions, there were breeches in information two months ago. Our staff found information on our computers from the Clinton campaign. And when our staffers said,", + " \"whoa, what's going here?\" They went to the DNC quietly.\n\nThey went to the vendor and said, \"hey, something is wrong,\" and that was quietly dealt with. None of that information was looked at. Our staffer at that point did exactly the right thing.\n\nA few days ago a similar incident happened. There was a breach because the DNC vendor screwed up, information came to our campaign. In this case, our staff did the wrong thing -- they looked a that information. As soon as we learned that they looked at that information - we fired that person. We are now doing an independent internal investigation to see who else was involved.\n\nThirdly,", + " what I have a really problem, and as you mentioned - this is a problem, I recognize it as a problem. But what the DNC did arbitrarily without discussing it with us is shut off our access to our information crippling our campaign. That is an egregious act. I'm glad that late last night, that was resolved.\n\nSANDERS: Fourthly, I work -- look forward to working with Secretary Clinton for an investigation, an independent investigation, about all of the breaches that have occurred from day one in this campaign, because I am not convinced that information from our campaign may not have ended up in her campaign. Don't know that.\n\nBut we need an independent investigation,", + " and I hope Secretary Clinton will agree with me for the need of that.\n\nLast point. When we saw the breach two months, we didn't go running to the media and make a big deal about it. And it bothers me very much that, rather than working on this issue to resolve it, it has become many press releases from the Clinton campaign later.\n\nMUIR: But Senator, you do mention the DNC -- the vender. But you said of your staff that they did the wrong thing.\n\nSANDERS: Absolutely.\n\nAt ABC's Democratic presidential debate, candidate Bernie Sanders apologized to rival Hillary Clinton for a scandal involving key voter data.", + " (ABC News)\n\nMUIR: So, does Secretary Clinton deserve an apology tonight?\n\nSANDERS: Yes, I apologize.\n\nMUIR: Secretary Clinton...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSANDERS: Not only -- not only do I apologize to Secretary Clinton -- and I hope we can work together on an independent investigation from day one -- I want to apologize to my supporters. This is not the type of campaign that we run.\n\nAnd if I find anybody else involved in this, they will also be fired.\n\nMUIR: Secretary Clinton, he has apologized. How do your react?\n\nCLINTON: I very much appreciate that comment,", + " Bernie. It really is important that we go forward on this.\n\nI know that you now have your data back, and that there has been an agreement for an independent inquiry into what did happen.\n\nObviously, we were distressed when we learned of it, because we have worked very hard -- I said in the beginning of this campaign, we want to reach as many voters as possible, and we have tens of thousands of volunteers doing that, and entering data all the time to keep up with what people are telling us.\n\nAnd so, now that, I think, you know, we have resolved your data, we have agreed on an independent inquiry,", + " we should move on. Because I don't think the American people are all that interested in this.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nI think they're more interested in what we have to say about all the big issues facing us.\n\nO'MALLEY: Yeah, David, look, for crying out loud, our country has been attacked, we have pressing issues involving how we're going to adapt to this changing era of warfare.\n\nOur economy -- people are working harder and being left behind. You want to know why things don't get done in Washington? Because for the last 24 hours, with those issues being so urgent to people as they tune in tonight,", + " wondering how they're even be able to buy presents for their kids.\n\nInstead, we're listening to the bickering back and forth. Maybe that is normal politics in Washington, but that is not the politics of higher purpose that people expect from our party.\n\nWe need to address our security issues, we need to address the economic issues around the kitchen table. And if people want a more high-minded politics and want to move our country forward, go on to martinomalley.com and help my campaign move our country forward.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR (?): All three candidates are weighing in.\n\nSANDERS: Let me agree with Governor O'Malley and let me agree with Secretary Clinton.", + " You know, we had this incident before, Secretary, with your famous e-mails. Right?\n\nAnd what I said and I think what Governor O'Malley is saying, and I hope you say, is when the middle class of this country is disappearing, when we have massive income and wealth inequality, when we're the only major country on earth not guaranteeing health care to all people, all the issues that the governor talked about, the secretary talked about, those are the issues. Media notwithstanding.\n\nThose are the issues that the American people want discussed. I hope those are the issues we'll discuss.\n\nMUIR: Good let's move on -- Senator Sanders,", + " let's move on right to some of those issues.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nIt is just six days before Christmas, as we all know in this country. It's typically a joyful time, as it is this year, as well. But it's also an anxious time. President Obama has acknowledged that what we saw in San Bernardino was an act of terrorism. But we remember the president said, right before Thanksgiving, there is no known specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland.\n\nWe now know that this couple had assembled an arsenal. They were not on law enforcement's radar. They were completely undetected. So as we approach another holiday,", + " with the president again saying, late this week, no credible threat, Secretary Clinton, how confident should the American people be, that there aren't others like that couple right now in the U.S. going undetected?\n\nAnd what would you do as president to find them?\n\nCLINTON: Well, first, the most important job of being president is obviously to keep our country safe and to keep the families of America safe.\n\nI have a plan that I've put forward to go after ISIS. Not to contain them, but to defeat them. And it has three parts. First, to go after them and deprive them of the territory they occupy now in both Syria and Iraq.\n\nCLINTON:", + " Secondly, to go after and dismantle their global network of terrorism. And thirdly, to do more to keep us safe. Under each of those three parts of my plan, I have very specific recommendations about what to do.\n\nObviously, in the first, we do have to have a -- an American-led air campaign, we have to have Arab and Kurdish troops on the ground. Secondly, we've got to go after everything from North Africa to South Asia and beyond.\n\nAnd then, most importantly, here at home, I think there are three things that we have to get right. We have to do the best possible job of sharing intelligence and information.", + " That now includes the internet, because we have seen that ISIS is a very effective recruiter, propagandist and inciter and celebrator of violence.\n\nThat means we have to work more closely with our great tech companies. They can't see the government as an adversary, we can't see them as obstructionists. We've got to figure out how we can do more to understand who is saying what and what they're planning.\n\nAnd we must work more closely with Muslim-American communities. Just like Martin, I met with a group of Muslim-Americans this past week to hear from them about what they're doing to try to stop radicalization. They will be our early warning signal.", + " That's why we need to work with them, not demonize them, as the Republicans have been doing.\n\nO'MALLEY: David, I am the very first...\n\nMUIR: (inaudible) thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nI am the very first post-9/11 mayor and the very first post-9/11 governor. I understand, from the ground up, that when attacks like San Bernardino happen, when attacks like the attacks of 9/11 happen, that when people call 911, the first people to show up are the local first responders.\n\nMany of the things Secretary Clinton said are absolutely true,", + " but they underscore a lack of investment that we have, as a nation, failed to make over these last 15 years in intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis, intelligence sharing. Not only in theater, in Syria and Iraq and other places where we embalk (ph) ourselves in toppling dictators without having any idea what comes next, but here in the homeland, as we protect people from this threat of the lone wolves and these changing tactics and strategies.\n\nI believe that what's happened here is that the president had us on the right course, but it's a lack of battle tempo. We have to increase the battle tempo, we have to bring a modern way of getting things done and forcing the sharing of information and do a much better job of acting on it in order to prevent these sorts of attacks in the future.\n\nMUIR:", + " And we're going to break down these issues tonight, but I do want to go to Senator Sanders because the concern going into Christmas is significant, as you know. A new ABC News poll shows 77 percent of Americans have little or no confidence in the government's ability to prevent a lone wolf attack. How would you specifically find would-be terrorist who are going undetected?\n\nSANDERS: I'm one of the 77 percent. I think this is a very difficult issue. Let me agree with much of what the secretary and the governor have said. Let me tell you what I think we have got to do. I think it's a two-pronged issue.\n\nNumber one,", + " our goal is to crush and destroy ISIS. What is the best way to do it? Well, I think there are some differences of opinion here, perhaps between the secretary and myself. I voted against the war in Iraq because I thought unilateral military action would not produce the results that were necessary and would lead to the kind of unraveling and instability that we saw in the Middle East.\n\nI do not believe in unilateral American action. I believe in action in which we put together a strong coalition of forces, major powers and the Muslim nations. I think one of the heroes in a real quagmire out there, in a dangerous and difficult world,", + " one of the heroes who we should recognize in the Middle East is King Abdullah II of Jordan. This small country has welcomed in many refugees.\n\nAnd Abdullah said something recently, very important. He said, \"Yes, international terrorism is by definition an international issue, but it is primarily an issue of the Muslim nations who are fighting for the soul of Islam. We the Muslims should lead the effort on the ground.\" And I believe he is absolutely right.\n\nMUIR: Senator, thank you.\n\nRADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, in the wake of the San Bernardino attack, you all emphasized gun control. But our latest poll shows that more Americans believe arming people,", + " not stricter gun laws, is the best defense against terrorism. Are they wrong?\n\nCLINTON: Well, I think you have to look at both the terrorism challenge that we face abroad and certainly at home and the role that guns play in delivering the violence that stalks us. Clearly, we have to have a very specific set of actions to take. You know, when Senator Sanders talks about a coalition, I agree with him about that. We've got to build a coalition abroad. We also have to build a coalition at home. Abroad, we need a coalition that is going to take on ISIS. I know how hard that is.", + " I know it isn't something you just hope people will do and I've worked on that...\n\nRADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, can we stick to gun control?\n\nCLINTON: Yes, I'm getting...\n\nRADDATZ: Are they wrong?\n\nCLINTON:... I'm getting to that. Because I think if you only think about the coalition abroad you're missing the main point, which is we need a coalition here at home. Guns, in and of themselves, in my opinion, will not make Americans safer. We lose 33,000 people a year already to gun violence, arming more people to do what I think is not the appropriate response to terrorism.\n\nI think what is...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nIs creating much deeper,", + " closer relations and, yes, coalitions within our own country. The first line of defense against radicalization is in Muslim-American community. People who we should be welcoming and working with.\n\nI worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here in the United States and literally around the world that there is a \"clash of civilizations,\" that there is some kind of Western plot or even \"war against Islam,\" which then I believe fans the flames of radicalization.\n\nSo guns have to be looked at as its own problem, but we also have to figure out how we're going to deal with the radicalization here in the United States.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRADDATZ:", + " Senator Sanders -- wait just a moment, please, Governor O'Malley.\n\nSenator Sanders, we've seen those long lines of people buying guns in record numbers after the Paris attacks. Would you discourage people from buying a gun?\n\nSANDERS: It's a country in which people choose to buy guns. I think half of the -- more than half of the people in my own state of Vermont, my guess here in New Hampshire, are gun owners. That's the right of people.\n\nBut this is what I do believe. I believe that when we have some 300 million guns in this country, I believe that when we have seen these horrific mass killings,", + " not only in San Bernardino, but in Colorado and movie theaters in Colorado, I think we have got to bring together the vast majority of the people who do in fact believe in sensible gun safety regulations.\n\nFor example, talking about polls, a poll recently came out, overwhelming majority of the American people say we should strengthen the instant background check. Who denies that it is crazy...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nWho denies that it is crazy to allow people to own guns who are criminals or are mentally unstable? We've got to eliminate the gun show loophole. In my view, we have got to see that weapons designed by the military to kill people are not in the hands of civilians.\n\nI think there is a consensus.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nI think -- I'm not going to say that everybody is in agreement.", + " It's a divided country on guns. But there is a broad consensus on sensible gun safety regulations that I, coming from a state that has virtually no gun control, will do my best to bring together.\n\nO'MALLEY: Martha, if I may...\n\nRADDATZ: Thank you, Senator Sanders.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRADDATZ: I think we're going to go on...\n\nO'MALLEY: Excuse me, no.\n\nMUIR: Governor, we have to abide the rules here, we'll call on you here shortly, but...\n\nO'MALLEY: I am the only person on this stage who has actually...\n\nMUIR:", + " But I do want pick up on something...\n\nO'MALLEY:... passed comprehensive gun safety legislation with a ban on combat assault weapons, David.\n\nAnd, look, there are profound differences...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nO'MALLEY: Senator Sanders voted against the Brady Bill. Senator Sanders voted to give immunity to gun dealers. And Senator Sanders voted against even research dollars to look into this public health issue.\n\nSecretary Clinton changes her position on this every election year, it seems, having one position in 2000 and then campaigning against President Obama and saying we don't need federal standards.\n\nLook, what we need on this issue is not more polls.", + " We need more principle. When ISIL does training videos that say the easiest way to get a combat assault weapon in the United States of America is at a gun show, then we should all be waking up. We need comprehensive gun safety legislation and a ban on assault weapons.\n\nRADDATZ: Governor, now -- and let me stay with gun control for a minute, then. You talk about assault weapons. Even if you were able to ban the purchase of assault weapons tomorrow, Americans already own an estimated 7 to 10 million semi-automatic rifles.\n\nWould you make it illegal to own those weapons, force people to turn them in? And if not,", + " how would banning the sales really make a difference?\n\nO'MALLEY: Because, Martha, it would prevent people like the guy that just got charged yesterday perhaps from being able to buy combat assault weapons. You know, we are the only nation, only developed nation on the planet...\n\nRADDATZ: But, again, I'm not talking about buying. Would you have them confiscated? The ones that are already here?\n\nO'MALLEY: No, Martha, I would not. And that's not what we did in Maryland. But you know what we did in Maryland? We overcame the NRA's objections. We overcame all of the crowds that were coming down there.\n\nWe did our own rallies.", + " And at least if we enact these laws in a prospective way, we can address a major vulnerability in our country. ISIL videos, ISIL training videos are telling lone wolves the easiest way to buy a combat assault weapon in America is at a gun show.\n\nAnd it's because of the flip-flopping, political approach of Washington that both of my two colleagues on this stage have represented there for the last forty years.\n\nSANDERS: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's calm down a little bit, Martin.\n\nCLINTON: Yes, let's tell the truth, Martin.\n\nO'MALLEY: I am telling the truth.\n\nSANDERS:", + " First of all, let's have some rules here, commentators.\n\nMUIR: We will.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nSANDERS: All right.\n\nMUIR: But let me just establish that for you, senator. Really quickly governor, we are going to call on you tonight and it's very clear you have a lot to say but please wait until you're called upon. And senator, he invoked your record and I'll let you respond.\n\nSANDERS: He sure did.\n\nMUIR: I'll let you respond.\n\nCLINTON: He invoked mine as well.\n\nMUIR: And you will get some to as well.\n\nSANDERS:", + " Sure did. All right. First off, we can do all the great speeches we want but you're not going to succeed unless there is a consensus. In 1988, just to set the record straight governor, I ran for the U.S. House. We have one House member from Vermont, three candidates in the race. One candidate said, you know what, I don't think it's a great idea that we sell automatic weapons in this country that are used by the military to kill people very rapidly.\n\nGun people said, there were three candidates in the race, you vote for one of the others, but not Bernie Sanders.", + " I lost that election by three percentage points. Quite likely, for that reason. So please, do not explain to me, coming from a state where democratic governors and republican governors have supported virtually no gun control.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nExcuse me. Do not tell me that I have not shown courage in standing up to the gun people, in voting to ban assault weapons, voting for instant background checks, voting to end the gun show loop hole and now we're in a position to create a consensus in America on gun safety.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR: Senator, thank you. I want to move on here. Secretary Clinton,", + " you brought up Donald Trump a short time ago.\n\nCLINTON: I do and this is an important issue and I know we'll get to a lot of other critical ones as well. I actually agree with Governor O'Malley about the need for common sense gun safety measures. And I applaud his record in Maryland. I just wish he wouldn't misrepresent mine. I have been for the Brady bill, I have been against assault weapons.\n\nI have voted not to give gun makers and sellers immunity. And I also know that -- and I'm glad to see this -- Senator Sanders has really moved in face of the facts about what we're confronting in our country.", + " I know that he has said in the two previous that he wants to take on this immunity issue because we need to send a strong message to the gun manufacturers, to the sellers, to the gun lobby.\n\nAnd I would hope, Senator Sanders, that you would join the Democrats who are trying to close the Charleston loophole, that you would sponsor or co-sponsor legislation to remove the absolute immunity. We need to move on this consensus that exists in the country. It's no longer enough just to say the vast majority of Americans want common sense gun safety measures including gun owners.\n\nWe need, and only the three of us will do this, nobody on the Republican side will even admit there's a problem.", + " And in whatever way the three of us can we need to move this agenda forward and begin to deal with the gun lobby and the intimidation that they present.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR: Secretary Clinton, thank you. We're going to move on from guns here and go back to something you mentioned a short time ago. You brought up Donald Trump first here this evening. We've now seen the polling done well after his proposed ban on Muslims coming to America. Thirty-six percent of Americans, more than a third, agree with him.\n\nYou have weighed in already on Donald Trump. You've weighed in on the proposed ban. But what would you say to the millions of Americans watching tonight who agree with him?", + " Are they wrong?\n\nCLINTON: Well I think a lot of people are understandably reacting out of fear and anxiety about what they're seeing. First what they saw in Paris, now what they have seen in San Bernardino. And Mr. Trump has a great capacity to use bluster and bigotry to inflame people and to make think there are easy answers to very complex questions.\n\nSo what I would say is, number one, we need to be united against the threats that we face. We need to have everybody in our country focused on watching what happens and reporting it if it's suspicious, reporting what you hear. Making sure that Muslim Americans don't feel left out or marginalized at the very moment when we need their help.\n\nCLINTON:", + " You know, I was a senator from New York after 9/11, and we spent countless hours trying to figure out how to protect the city and the state from perhaps additional attacks. One of the best things that was done, and George W. Bush did this and I give him credit, was to reach out to Muslim Americans and say, we're in this together. You are not our adversary, you are our partner.\n\nAnd we also need to make sure that the really discriminatory messages that Trump is sending around the world don't fall on receptive ears. He is becoming ISIS's best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.", + " So I want to explain why this is not in America's interest to react with this kind of fear and respond to this sort of bigotry.\n\nMUIR: Secretary, thank you.\n\nSenator Sanders, I did want to ask you about a neighbor in San Bernardino who reportedly witnessed packages being delivered to that couple's home, that it set off red flags, but they didn't report it because they were afraid to profile. What would you say to Americans afraid to profile? Is it ever acceptable?\n\nSANDERS: Well, the answer is, obviously, if you see suspicious activity, you report it. That's kind of a no-brainer.", + " You know, somebody is loading guns and ammunition into a house, I think it's a good idea to call 911. Do it.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nMUIR: But I'm asking about -- I'm asking about profiling. Because a lot of people are afraid of that.\n\nSANDERS: But I want to talk -- I want to talk about something else, because Secretary Clinton I think made some interesting and good points. What you have now is a very dangerous moment in American history.\n\nThe secretary is right: Our people are fearful. They are anxious on a number of levels. They are anxious about international terrorism and the possibility of another attack on America.", + " We all understand that.\n\nBut you know what else they're anxious about? They're anxious about the fact that they are working incredibly long hours, they're worried about their kids, and they're seeing all the new income and wealth -- virtually all of it -- going to the top 1 percent. And they're looking around them, and they're looking at Washington, and they're saying the rich are getting much richer, I'm getting poorer, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do for my kids?\n\nAnd somebody like a Trump comes along and says, \"I know the answers. The answer is that all of the Mexicans,", + " they're criminals and rapists, we've got to hate the Mexicans. Those are your enemies. We hate all the Muslims, because all of the Muslims are terrorists. We've got to hate the Muslims.\" Meanwhile, the rich get richer.\n\nSo what I say to those people who go to Donald Trump's rallies, understand: He thinks a low minimum wage in America is a good idea. He thinks low wages are a good idea.\n\nI believe we stand together to address the real issues facing this country, not allow them to divide us by race or where we come from. Let's create an America that works for all of us, not the handful on top.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR:", + " Senator, thank you.\n\nRADDATZ: I want to move to another...\n\nO'MALLEY: Martha, may I -- Martha, may I...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRADDATZ: No, no, not yet, Governor O'Malley.\n\nO'MALLEY: Can I share this quick story?\n\nRADDATZ: No, not yet, Governor O'Malley.\n\nO'MALLEY: Oh. All right.\n\nRADDATZ: I'll come to you when we call on you. Thank you very much.\n\nO'MALLEY: When you come back to me, I'll share that story.\n\nRADDATZ:", + " You'll be happy. I'll let -- I'll let you talk then.\n\nSecretary Clinton, I want to talk about a new terrorist tool used in the Paris attacks, encryption. FBI Director James Comey says terrorists can hold secret communications which law enforcement cannot get to, even with a court order.\n\nYou've talked a lot about bringing tech leaders and government officials together, but Apple CEO Tim Cook said removing encryption tools from our products altogether would only hurt law-abiding citizens who rely on us to protect their data. So would you force him to give law enforcement a key to encrypted technology by making it law?\n\nCLINTON: I would not want to go to that point.", + " I would hope that, given the extraordinary capacities that the tech community has and the legitimate needs and questions from law enforcement, that there could be a Manhattan-like project, something that would bring the government and the tech communities together to see they're not adversaries, they've got to be partners.\n\nIt doesn't do anybody any good if terrorists can move toward encrypted communication that no law enforcement agency can break into before or after. There must be some way. I don't know enough about the technology, Martha, to be able to say what it is, but I have a lot of confidence in our tech experts.\n\nAnd maybe the back door is the wrong door,", + " and I understand what Apple and others are saying about that. But I also understand, when a law enforcement official charged with the responsibility of preventing attacks -- to go back to our early questions, how do we prevent attacks -- well, if we can't know what someone is planning, we are going to have to rely on the neighbor or, you know, the member of the mosque or the teacher, somebody to see something.\n\nCLINTON: I just think there's got to be a way, and I would hope that our tech companies would work with government to figure that out. Otherwise, law enforcement is blind -- blind before, blind during,", + " and, unfortunately, in many instances, blind after.\n\nSo we always have to balance liberty and security, privacy and safety, but I know that law enforcement needs the tools to keep us safe. And that's what i hope, there can be some understanding and cooperation to achieve.\n\nRADDATZ: And Governor O'Malley, where do you draw the line between national security and personal security?\n\nO'MALLEY: I believe that we should never give up our privacy; never should give up our freedoms in exchange for a promise of security. We need to figure this out together. We need a collaborative approach. We need new leadership.\n\nThe way that things work in the modern era is actually to gather people around the table and figure these things out.", + " The federal government should have to get warrants. That's not some sort of passe you know, antique sort of principle that safeguards our freedoms.\n\nBut at the same time with new technologies I believe that the people creating these projects -- I mean these products also have an obligation to come together with law enforcement to figure these things out; true to our American principles and values.\n\nMy friend Kashif, who is a doctor in Maryland; back to this issue of our danger as a democracy of turning against ourselves. He was putting his 10 and 12-year-old boys to bed the other night. And he is a proud American Muslim. And one of his little boys said to him,", + " \"Dad, what happens if Donald Trump wins and we have to move out of our homes?\" These are very, very real issues. this is a clear and present danger in our politics within.\n\nWe need to speak to what unites us as a people; freedom of worship, freedom of religion, freedom of expression. And we should never be convinced to give up those freedoms in exchange for a promise of greater security; especially from someone as untried and as incompetent as Donald Trump.\n\nRADDATZ: Thank you, Governor O'Malley.\n\nMUIR: Martha, we're going to turn now to refugees coming to America.", + " And on the subject of refugees, more than half of all Americans now say they oppose taking in refugees from Syria and across the Middle East.\n\nSecretary Clinton, you have said that it would undermine who we are as Americans, shutting our doors. But New Hampshire's governor, where we are right here tonight, a democrat and a supporter of yours, is among more than 30 governors who are now concerned. Governor Maggie Hassan says, \"we should halt acceptance of Syrian refugees until U.S. authorities can assure the vetting process, halt Syrian refugees.\" Is she wrong?\n\nCLINTON: Well, I agree that we have to have the toughest screening and vetting...\n\nMUIR:", + " But a halt?\n\nCLINTON: I don't think a halt is necessary. What we have to do is put all of our resources through the Department of Homeland Security, through the State Department, through our intelligence agencies, and we have to have an increased vetting and screening. Now, this takes, David, 18 months to 24 months, two years.\n\nSo I know it's not going to happen overnight and everything that can be done should be done. But the process should move forward while we are also taking on ISIS, putting together the kind of strategy that I've advocated for, and making sure that the vetting and the screening is as tough as possible.", + " Because I do believe that we have a history and a tradition, that is part of our values system and we don't want to sacrifice our values.\n\nWe don't want to make it seem as though we are turning into a nation of fear instead of a nation of resolve. So I want us to have a very tough screening process but I want that process to go forward. And if at the end of 18 months, 24 months there are people who have been cleared, and I would prioritize widows, and orphans, and the elderly, people who may have relatives, families, or have nowhere else to go. I would prioritize them.\n\nAnd that would I think give the American public a bit more of a sense of security about who is being processed and who might end up coming as refugees.\n\nMUIR:", + " Governor O'Malley, obviously you were governor yourself at one time. What would you say to New Hampshire's governor tonight? Is she wrong on this?\n\nO'MALLEY: No, what I would say is this is look, I was the first of the three of us to call for America to accept the 65,000 refugees we were asked to accept. And if this humanitarian crisis increases, we should accept more.\n\nMUIR: So the idea of a halt or a pause?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nO'MALLEY: David, there are wider vulnerabilities than when it comes to refugees. I met recently with some members of the Chaldean Christian communities and the wait times are a year,", + " 18 months, 24 months. There is a pretty excruciating process that refugees go through. We need to invest more in terms of the other sort of visas and the other sort of waivers.\n\nO'MALLEY: What these Chaldean families told me was that their families in Syria, when ISIS moves into their town, they actually paint a red cross across the door and mark their homes for demolition, and that tells the family you'd better get out now. The sort of genocide and brutality that the victims are suffering, these are not the perpetrators.\n\nWe need to be the nation whose enduring symbol is the Statue of Liberty,", + " and we need to act like the great country we are, according to our values.\n\nMUIR: Governor, thank you.\n\nRADDATZ: Senator Sanders -- Senator Sanders, we're going to move on. We're going to move on.\n\nSANDERS: Excuse me. May I have a chance to respond to this issue?\n\nRADDATZ: We're going to move on to the fight against ISIS. You're the one who told us we have to follow the rules and break it off.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nSANDERS: Yeah, but the rule includes equal -- got it. All right.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nRADDATZ:", + " OK. Let's keep going. Thank you.\n\nSANDERS: All right. Let's keep going. OK.\n\nRADDATZ: Thank you. I do want to move to the fight against ISIS.\n\nSANDERS: Yeah.\n\nRADDATZ: For the people of New Hampshire, the brutality of ISIS is personal. James Foley grew up here. The first hostage, a journalist, brutally executed last year. You've all said ISIS is a ruthless enemy and must be stopped. Al Qaida as well.\n\nSenator Sanders, you voted to send U.S. ground forces to fight in the coalition to help destroy Al Qaida in Afghanistan.", + " Can you then explain you why don't support sending U.S. combat troops to join a coalition to fight ISIS?\n\nSANDERS: And I also voted and helped lead the effort against the war in Iraq, which will go down in history as one of the worst foreign blunders -- foreign policy blunders in the history of our country.\n\nI voted against the first Gulf War, which set the stage, I believe, for the second Iraq war. And what I believe right now, and I believe this is terribly important, is the United States of America cannot succeed, or be thought of as the policeman of the world, that when there's an international crisis all over the world,", + " in France and in the U.K. Or -- hey, just call up the American military and the American taxpayers, they're going to send the troops.\n\nAnd if they have to be in the Middle East for 20 or 30 years no problem.\n\nRADDATZ: But why Al Qaida, why not ISIS?\n\nSANDERS: I have a problem with that, Martha. What I believe has got to happen is there must be an international coalition, including Russia, a well-coordinated effort.\n\nBut I agree, as I mentioned a moment ago, with King Abdullah. This is a war for the soul of Islam. The troops on the ground should not be American troops.", + " They should be Muslim troops. I believe that countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have got to step up to the plate, have got to contribute the money that we need, and the troops that we need, to destroy ISIS with American support.\n\nRADDATZ: The administration has tried that over and over again. If it doesn't work and this threat is so great, what's your plan B?\n\nSANDERS: My plan is to make it work, to tell Saudi Arabia that instead of going to war in Yemen, they, one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, are going to have to go to war against ISIS.\n\nTo tell Qatar,", + " that instead of spending $200 billion on the World Cup, maybe they should pay attention to ISIS, which is at their doorstep.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, you too have ruled out a large U.S. combat force, yet you support sending in special operations forces to Syria, and sending those 100 to 200 troops to Iraq to do exploitation kill raids.\n\nWe've already lost one Delta Force member in a raid. It has looked very much to me like we're already in ground combat on frequent trips I've made there.\n\nSo, are you fooling Americans when you say, we're not putting American combat troops back into Syria or Iraq?\n\nCLINTON:", + " No. Not at all. I think that what we're facing with ISIS is especially complicated. It was a different situation in Afghanistan. We were attacked from Afghanistan. Al Qaida was based in Afghanistan. We went after those who had attacked us.\n\nWhat's happening in Syria and Iraq is that, because of the failures in the region, including the failure of the prior government in Baghdad, led by Maliki, there has been a resurgence of Sunni activities, as exemplified by ISIS. And we have to support Sunni-Arab and Kurdish forces against ISIS, because I believe it would be not only a strategic mistake for the United States to put ground combat troops in,", + " as opposed to special operators, as opposed to trainers, because that is exactly what ISIS wants.\n\nThey've advertised that. They want American troops back in the Middle East. They want American soldiers on the ground fighting them, giving them many more targets, and giving them a great recruiting opportunity.\n\nCLINTON: So, I think it's absolutely wrong policy for us to be even imagining we're going end up putting tens of thousands of American troops into Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS.\n\nAnd we do have to form a coalition. I know how hard that is. I have formed them. I put together a coalition, including Arabs, with respect to Libya and a coalition to put sanctions onto Iran.", + " And you have to really work hard at it.\n\nAnd the final thing I would say, bringing Donald Trump back into it, if you're going to put together a coalition in the region to take on the threat of ISIS you don't want to alienate the very countries and people you need to be part of the coalition. And so that is part of the reason why this is so difficult.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, I want -- I want to follow up on that. You do support sending special operations forces there. You support what the president has done already. One of the lessons people draw from Vietnam and war since is that a little force can turn into a little more and a little more.", + " President Obama certainly didn't expect to be sending 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan the first year of his presidency.\n\nAre you prepared to run the risk of a bigger war to achieve your goals to destroy ISIS, or are you prepared to give up on those goals if it requires a larger force?\n\nCLINTON: Well, I just think you're asking a question with a false choice. I believe if we lead an air coalition, which we are now in the position of doing and intensify it, if we continue to build back up the Iraqi army, which has had some recent success in Ramadi, as you know, if we get back talking to the tribal sheiks in Anbar to try to rebuild those relationships,", + " which were very successful, in going after Al Qaida in Iraq, if we get the Turks to pay more attention to ISIS than they're paying to the Kurds, if we do put together the kind of coalition with the specific tasks that I am outlining, I think we can be successful in destroying ISIS.\n\nSo that's what I'm focused on, that's what I've outlined and that's what I would do as president.\n\nRADDATZ: Governor O'Malley.\n\n(APPLAUSE) You've emphasized the need for more human intelligence on the ground. What is it our intelligence community is not doing now that needs to be done?\n\nO'MALLEY:", + " Well, we have invested nowhere near what we should be investing in human intelligence on the ground. And what I'm talking about is not only the covert CIA intelligence, I'm also talking about diplomatic intelligence. I mean, we've seen time and time again, especially in this very troubled region of nation-state failures, and then we have no idea who the next generation of leaders are that are coming forward.\n\nSo what I would say is not only do we need to be thinking in military terms, but we do our military a disservice when we don't greatly dial up the investment that we are making in diplomacy and human intelligence and when we fail to dial up properly,", + " the role of sustainable development in all of this. As president, I would make the administrator of USAID an actual cabinet member. We have to act in a much more whole of government approach, as General Dempsey said.\n\nAnd I do believe, and I would disagree somewhat with one of my colleagues, this is a genocidal threat. They have now created a safe haven in the vacuum that we allowed to be partly and because of our blunders, to be created to be created in the areas of Syria and Iraq. We cannot allow safe havens, and as a leader of moral nations around this Earth, we need to come up with new alliances and new ways to prepare for these new sorts of threats,", + " because Martha, this will not be the last region where nation-states fail.\n\nAnd you've seen a little bit of this emerging in the -- in the African Union and the things that they have done to better stabilize Somalia. We need to pay attention here in Central America as well. So this is the new type of threats that we're facing and we need to lead as a nation in confronting it and putting together new alliances and new coalitions.\n\nCLINTON: Well, I just want to quickly add...\n\nRADDATZ: Thank you.\n\nCLINTON: Martha, that -- you know, one of the reasons why I have advocated for a no-fly zone is in order to create those safe refuges within Syria,", + " to try to protect people on the ground both from Assad's forces, who are continuing to drop barrel bombs, and from ISIS. And of course, it has to be de-conflicted with the Russians, who are also flying in that space.\n\nI'm hoping that because of the very recent announcement of the agreement at the Security Council, which embodies actually an agreement that I negotiated back in Geneva in June of 2012, we're going to get a diplomatic effort in Syria to begin to try to make a transition. A no-fly zone would prevent the outflow of refugees and give us a chance to have some safe spaces.\n\nRADDATZ:", + " Secretary Clinton, I'd like to go back to that if I could. ISIS doesn't have aircraft, Al Qaida doesn't have aircraft. So would you shoot down a Syrian military aircraft or a Russian airplane?\n\nCLINTON: I do not think it would come to that. We are already de-conflicting air space. We know...\n\nRADDATZ: But isn't that a decision you should make now, whether...\n\nCLINTON: No, I don't think so. I am advocating...\n\nRADDATZ:... if you're advocating this?\n\nCLINTON: I am advocating the no-fly zone both because I think it would help us on the ground to protect Syrians;", + " I'm also advocating it because I think it gives us some leverage in our conversations with Russia.\n\nNow that Russia has joined us in the Security Council, has adopted an agreement that we hashed out a long day in Geneva three years ago, now I think we can have those conversations. The no-fly zone, I would hope, would be also shared by Russia. If they will begin to turn their military attention away from going after the adversaries of Assad toward ISIS and put the Assad future on the political and diplomatic track, where it belongs.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nMUIR: I want to take this to Senator -- I'm going to take this to Senator Sanders next,", + " because I think there...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nSANDERS: I have a difference of opinion with Secretary Clinton on this. Our differences are fairly deep on this issue. We disagreed on the war in Iraq. We both listened to the information from Bush and Cheney. I voted against the war.\n\nBut I think -- and I say this with due respect -- that I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be.\n\nYes, we could get rid of Saddam Hussein, but that destabilized the entire region. Yes, we could get rid of Gadhafi,", + " a terrible dictator, but that created a vacuum for ISIS. Yes, we could get rid of Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS. So I think, yeah, regime change is easy, getting rid of dictators is easy. But before you do that, you've got to think about what happens the day after. And in my view, what we need to do is put together broad coalitions to understand that we're not going to have a political vacuum filled by terrorists, that, in fact, we are going to move steadily -- and maybe slowly -- toward democratic societies, in terms of Assad, a terrible dictator.", + " But I think in Syria the primary focus now must be on destroying ISIS and working over the years to get rid of Assad. That's the secondary issue.\n\nCLINTON: That is exactly...\n\nMUIR: Senator, thank you.\n\nCLINTON: That is exactly what I just said and what I just described.\n\nMUIR: Yeah, but, Secretary Clinton -- Secretary Clinton...\n\nCLINTON: And that is important, because now we have a U.N. Security Council that will enable us to do that. And, you know, with all due respect, Senator, you voted for regime change with respect to Libya. You joined the Senate in voting to get rid of Gadhafi,", + " and you asked that there be a Security Council validation of that with a resolution.\n\nAll of these are very difficult issues. I know that; I've been dealing with them for a long time. And, of course, we have to continue to do what is necessary when someone like Gadhafi, a despot with American blood on his hands, is overturned. But I'll tell you what would have happened, if we had not joined with our European partners and our Arab partners to assist the people in Libya, you would be looking at Syria. Now the Libyans are turning their attention to try to dislodge ISIS from its foothold and begin to try to move together to have a unified nation.\n\nSANDERS:", + " I was not the secretary of state...\n\nMUIR: Senator Sanders, Senator Sanders, hold on. One moment, please. I'm going to ask the secretary here, because there does appear to be some daylight here between the policies, at least in respect to when you take out Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Right now or do you wait? Do you tackle ISIS first?\n\nYou have said, Secretary Clinton, that you come to the conclusion that we have to proceed on both fronts at once. We heard from the senator just this week that we must put aside the issue of how quickly we get rid of Assad and come together with countries,", + " including Russia and Iran, to destroy ISIS first. Is he wrong?\n\nCLINTON: I think we're missing the point here. We are doing both at the same time.\n\nMUIR: But that's what he's saying, we should put that aside for now and go after ISIS.\n\nCLINTON: Well, I don't agree with that, because we will not get the support on the ground in Syria to dislodge ISIS if the fighters there who are not associated with ISIS, but whose principal goal is getting rid of Assad, don't believe there is a political, diplomatic channel that is ongoing. We now have that.", + " We have the U.N. Security Council adopting a resolution that lays out a transition path. It's very important we operate on both at the same time.\n\nAnd let me just say a word about coalition-building, because I've heard Senator Sanders say this. I know how hard it is to build coalitions. I think it would be a grave mistake to ask for any more Iranian troops inside Syria. That is like asking the arsonist to come and pour more gas on the fire.\n\nThe Iranians getting more of a presence in Syria, linking with Hezbollah, their proxy in Lebanon, would threaten Israel and would make it more difficult for us to move on a path to have a transition that at some point would deal with Assad's future.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nSANDERS:", + " I happen to think...\n\nO'MALLEY: I'd like to offer a...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR: She says we have to proceed on both fronts at once.\n\nSANDERS: Secretary Clinton is right. This is a complicated issue. I don't think anyone has a magical solution.\n\nBut this is what I do believe. Yes, of course Assad is a terrible dictator. But I think we have got to get our foreign policies and priorities right. The immediate -- it is not Assad who is attacking the United States. It is ISIS. And ISIS is attacking France and attacking Russian airliners.\n\nThe major priority, right now,", + " in terms of our foreign and military policy should be the destruction of ISIS.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd I think -- and I think we bring together that broad coalition, including Russia, to help us destroy ISIS. And work on a timetable to get rid of Assad, hopefully through Democratic elections. First priority, destroy ISIS.\n\nMUIR: Senator sanders, thank you.\n\nO'MALLEY: May I offer a different generation's perspective on this?\n\nMUIR: Governor O'Malley?\n\nO'MALLEY: During the Cold War -- during the Cold War, we got into a bad habit of always looking to see who was wearing the jersey of the communists,", + " and who was wearing the U.S. jersey. We got into a bad habit of creating big bureaucracies, old methodologies, to undermine regimes that were not friendly to the United States. Look what we did in Iran with Mosaddegh. And look at the results that we're still dealing with because of that. I would suggest to you that we need to leave the Cold War behind us, and we need to put together new alliances and new approaches to dealing with this, and we need to restrain ourselves.\n\nI mean, I know Secretary Clinton was gleeful when Gadhafi was torn apart. And the world, no doubt is a better place without him.", + " But look, we didn't know what was happening next. And we fell into the same trap with Assad, saying -- as if it's our job to say, Assad must go.\n\nWe have a role to play in this world. But we need to leave the Cold War and that sort of antiquated thinking behind.\n\nMUIR: But -- you criticized -- you criticized Secretary Clinton for what came next. What's your proposal for what comes after Assad?\n\nO'MALLEY: I believe that we need to focus on destroying ISIL. That is the clear and present danger. And I believe that we can springboard off of this new U.N.", + " resolution, and we should create, as Secretary Clinton indicated, and I agree with that, that there should be a political process.\n\nBut we shouldn't be the ones declaring that Assad must go. Where did it ever say in the Constitution, where is it written that it's the job of the United States of America or its secretary of State to determine when dictators have to go?\n\nWe have a role to play in this world. But it is not the world -- the role of traveling the world looking for new monsters to destroy.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nSANDERS: David...\n\nCLINTON: Since he has been making all kinds of comments.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nI think it's fair to say,", + " Assad has killed, by last count, about 250,000 Syrians. The reason we are in the mess we're in, that ISIS has the territory it has, is because of Assad.\n\nI advocated arming the moderate opposition back in the day when I was still secretary of State, because I worried we would end up exactly where we are now.\n\nAnd so, when we look at these complex problems, I wish it could be either/or. I wish we could say yes, let's go destroy ISIS and let's let Assad continue to destroy Syria, which creates more terrorists, more extremists by the minute.\n\nNo. We now finally are where we need to be.", + " We have a strategy and a commitment to go after ISIS, which is a danger to us as well as the region... SANDERS (?): Secretary...\n\nCLINTON: And we finally have a U.N. Security Council Resolution bringing the world together to go after a political transition in Syria.\n\nSANDERS: Could I just say -- just say this...\n\nCLINTON: If the United States does not lead, there is not another leader. There is a vacuum.\n\nSANDERS: Can I just say this...\n\nCLINTON: And we have to lead, if we're going to be successful.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR:", + " Senator Sanders, please. Go ahead.\n\nSenator Sanders, a last word on this.\n\nSANDERS: Of course the United States must lead. But the United States is not the policeman of the world. The United States must not be involved in perpetual warfare in the Middle East. The United States, at the same time, cannot successfully fight Assad and ISIS.\n\nISIS, now, is the major priority. Let's get rid of Assad later. Let's have a Democratic Syria. But the first task is to bring countries together to destroy ISIS.\n\nMUIR: Senator Sanders, thank you. When we come back here tonight, the other major issues of this election:", + " jobs, the economy, health care.\n\nWhich candidates will make the best case for the middle class, as our coverage of the Democratic debate, here in New Hampshire, continues right after this on ABC.\n\nANNOUNCER: ABC News coverage of the New Hampshire Democratic debate will continue in a moment.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nMUIR: Welcome back tonight. As you can see, we have a packed audience here in New Hampshire and we're going to continue. We've already had a spirited conversation here at the top of the broadcast about ISIS, about the concerns of terror here on the homefront and as we await Secretary Clinton backstage,", + " we're going to begin on the economy.\n\nWe want to turn to the American jobs, wages and raises in this country. And we believe Secretary Clinton will be coming around the corner any minute. But in the mean time we want to start with this eye-opening number. And Senator Sanders, this question goes to you first, anyway.\n\nIn 1995, the median American household income was $52,600 in today's money. This year, it's $53,600. That's 20 more years on the job with just a 2 percent raise. In a similar time-frame, raises for CEOs went up more than 200 percent.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCLINTON:", + " Sorry.\n\nMUIR: We're going to continue here, and Secretary, you'll get a chance on this too.\n\nBut as I pointed out the CEO pay, 200 percent of their time -- for that family of just 2 percent. You've all said, \"you would raise the minimum wage.\" But Senator Sanders what else - speak to that household tonight. 20 years, just a 2 percent raise, how as president would you get them a raise right away?\n\nSANDERS: First of all, we recognize that we have a rigged economy, as you've indicated. Middle class in this country for the last 40 years has been disappearing;", + " are we better of today then we were when Bush left office? Absolutely. But as you've indicated for millions of American workers, people in New Hampshire -- all over America, they're working longer hours for lower wages deeply worried about their kids. So what do we do?\n\nFirst statement is, we tell the billionaire class, \"they cannot have it all.\" For a start, they're going to start to pay their fair share of taxes. Second of all what we do, is you raise the minimum wage to living wage, 15 bucks an hour over the next several years. Next thing we do, pay equity for women workers. Women should not be making 79 cents on the dollar compared to that.\n\nNext thing that we do,", + " real unemployment -- official unemployment, 5 percent, real employment 10 percent, youth unemployment, off the charts. We rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, our roads our bridges, our rail systems, we create 13 million jobs with a trillion-dollar investment.\n\nFurthermore, in a competitive global economy, it is imperative that we have the best educated workforce in the world. That is why I'm going to have a tax on Wall Street speculation to make certain that public colleges and universities in America are tuition free.\n\nMUIR: Senator Sanders, thank you.\n\nGovernor O'Malley, what would propose that would be different, how would you get the middle class a raise and without waiting another 20 years for another 2 percent.\n\nO'MALLEY:", + " Look these are the things that we did in own state through the recession. We actually passed a living wage. We raised the minimum wage. We actually raised it to the highest goals of any state in the nation also in minority and women participant goals because we understood that the way you reinvigorate and make fair market American capitalism work, is to make the choices and the investments that include more people more full in the economic success of your state.\n\nAll through the recession, we defended the highest median income in America and the second highest median income for African American families. How? By actually doing more for education. We increased education funding by 37 percent.\n\nWe were the only state in American that went four years in a row without a penny increase in college tuition.", + " We invested more in our infrastructure and we squared our shoulders to the great business opportunity of this era and that is moving our economy to a 100 percent clean electric energy future. We created 2,000 new jobs in the solar industry and we fought every single day to adopt more inclusive economic practices.\n\nO'MALLEY: So David, the conclusion of all of those things is this; they weren't hopes, they weren't dreams, they weren't amorphous goals out there. We actually took action to do these things and as president, I have put forward 15 strategic goals that will make wages go up again for all American families.", + " Universal national service is an option for every kid in America to cut youth employment.\n\nAnd I'm the only candidate on this stage to put forward a new agenda for America's cities so we can employ more people in the heart of great American cities and get them back to work.\n\nMUIR: Governor, thank you. Secretary Clinton...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAs you were walking in, I was talking about the median American household getting a two percent raise over the last 20 years, that CEO pay in that same time frame has gone up 200 percent. So for those families watching tonight, how do you get them a raise if you're president?\n\nCLINTON:", + " Well, I've been talking to a lot of these families, and this is such an outrage, both because it's bad for our economy, we're a 70 percent consumption economy, people need to feel optimistic and confident, they need to believe their hard work is going to be rewarded, and it's bad for our democracy. It's absolutely the case that if people feel that the game is rigged, that has consequences.\n\nI think it's great standing up here with the senator and the governor talking about these issues, because you're not going to hear anything like this from any of the Republicans who are running for president.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThey don't want to raise the minimum wage,", + " they don't want to do anything to increase incomes. At the center of my economic policy is raising incomes, because people haven't been able to get ahead, and the cost of everything, from college tuition to prescription drugs, has gone up.\n\nOf course we have to raise the minimum wage. Of course we have to do more to incentivize profit sharing, like we see with Market Basket right here in New Hampshire and New England, where all of the employees get a chance to share in the profits.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd we've got to do more on equal pay for equal work. That means pass the Paycheck Fairness Act so we have transparency about how much people are making.", + " That's the way to get women's wages up, and that's good for them and good for their families and good for our communities.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd there is a lot we can do in college affordability. I have debt-free tuition plans, free community college plans, getting student debt down. I also am very committed to getting the price of drugs down. And there's a lot. You can go to my website...\n\nMUIR: Secretary...\n\nCLINTON:... hillaryclinton.com, and read about it. But I guess the final thing that -- that I would say is this is the kind of debate we need to take to the Republicans in the fall.\n\nMUIR:", + " Secretary, thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCLINTON: This is the election...\n\nMUIR: We're going to -- we're going to...\n\nCLINTON:... issues they have to respond to.\n\nMUIR: And we're going to talk about college education in a moment. But Secretary Clinton, I did want to ask you, the last time you ran for president, Fortune Magazine put you on its cover with the headline Business Loves Hillary, pointing out your support for many CEOs in corporate America. I'm curious, eight years later, should corporate America love Hillary Clinton?\n\nCLINTON: Everybody should.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nLook,", + " I have said I want to be the president for the struggling, the striving and the successful. I want to make sure the wealthy pay their fair share, which they have not been doing. I want the Buffett Rule to be in effect, where millionaires have to pay 30 percent tax rates instead of 10 percent to nothing in some cases. I want to make sure we rein in the excessive use of political power to feather the nest and support the super wealthy.\n\nBut I also want to create jobs and I want to be a partner with the private sector. I'm particularly keen on creating jobs in small business. My dad was a small businessman,", + " a really small business. I want to do more to help incentivize and create more small businesses. So if -- if people who are in the private sector know what I stand for, it's what I fought for as a senator, it's what I will do as president, and they want to be part of once again building our economy so it works for everybody, more power to them, because they are the kind of business leaders who understand that if we don't get the American economy moving and growing, we're not going to recognize our country and we're not going to give our kids the same opportunities that we had.\n\nMUIR:", + " Secretary, thank you. Senator Sanders...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nI want to stay on this and ask you how big a role does corporate America play in a healthy economy and will corporate America love a President Sanders?\n\nSANDERS: No, I think they won't.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSo Hillary and I have a difference. The CEOs of large multinationals may like Hillary. They ain't going to like me and Wall Street is going to like me even less.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd the reason for that is we've got to deal with the elephant in the room, which is the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street.", + " When you have six financial institutions in this country that issue two-thirds of the credit cards and one-third of the mortgages, when three out of four of them are larger today than when we bailed them out because they are too big to fail, we've got to re- establish Glass-Steagall, we have got to break the large financial institutions up.\n\nSANDERS: So I don't think...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... having said that, I don't think I'm going to get a whole lot of campaign contributions from Wall Street. I don't have a super PAC. I don't want campaign contributions from corporate America.\n\nAnd let me be clear:", + " While there are some great corporations creating jobs and trying to do the right thing, in my view -- and I say this very seriously -- the greed of the billionaire class, the greed of Wall Street is destroying this economy and is destroying the lives of millions of Americans. We need an economy that works for the middle class, not just a handful of billionaires, and I will fight and lead to make that happen.\n\nMUIR: Senator, thank you. I want to...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nMUIR: Governor, let me just ask you, though, because it is an important question, how important a role do you think corporate America plays in a healthy economy here in the U.S.", + "?\n\nO'MALLEY: Look, I look at our economy as an ecosystem. And the fact of the matter is that the more fully people participate, the more our workers earn, the more they will spend, the more our economy will grow. And most heads of businesses -- large, medium and small -- understand that.\n\nBut there is a better way forward than either of those offered by my two opponents here on this stage. We're not going to fix what ails our economy, we're not going to make wages go up for everyone by either trying to replace American capitalism with socialism -- which, by the way, the rest of the world is moving away from -- nor will we fix it by submitting to sort of Wall Street-directed crony capitalism.\n\nAnd for my part,", + " I have demonstrated the ability to have the backbone to take on Wall Street in ways that Secretary Clinton never, ever has. In fact, in the last debate, very shamefully, she tried to hide her cozy relationship with Wall Street big banks by invoking the attacks of 9/11.\n\nI believe that the way forward for our country is to actually reinvigorate our antitrust department with the directive to promote fair competition. There's mergers that are happening in every aspect of our country that is bad for competition and it's bad for -- for upward mobility of wages.\n\nAnd the worst type of concentration, Secretary Clinton, is the concentration of the big banks,", + " the big six banks that you went to and spoke to and told them, oh, you weren't responsible for the crash, not by a long shot.\n\nAnd that's why today you still cannot support, as I do, breaking up the big banks and making sure that we pass a modern-day Glass- Steagall, like we had in late 1999, before it was repealed and led to the crash, where so many millions of families lost their jobs and their homes. And I was on the front lines of that, looking into the eyes of my neighbors...\n\nCLINTON: OK...\n\nMUIR: Governor O'Malley,", + " thank you.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nMUIR: I do want to ask you, Secretary Clinton. Let me just ask you...\n\nCLINTON: Let me respond...\n\nMUIR: We did -- we did -- Secretary Clinton, let me just ask you...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCLINTON: Under the rules, I have been -- I have been invoked, David, so let me respond very quickly. Number one...\n\nMUIR: And in particular...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCLINTON: Number one, there are currently two hedge fund billionaires running ads against me here in New Hampshire. They started in Iowa.", + " Now, you'd have to ask yourself, why are they running ads against me? And the answer is: Because they know I will go right after them, that I will not let their agenda be America's agenda.\n\nSecondly, I think it's important to point out that about 3 percent of my donations come from people in the finance and investment world. You can go to opensecrets.org and check that. I have more donations from students and teachers than I do from people associated with Wall Street.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nNow, number three -- and let me say this -- when Governor O'Malley was heading the Democratic Governors Association,", + " he had no trouble at all going to Wall Street to raise money to run campaigns for Democratic governors. And he also had no trouble appointing an investment banker to be in charge of his consumer protection bureau when he was governor.\n\nSo, you know, again, the difference between us and the Republicans is night and day. And there is only one person on this stage who voted to take away authority from the SEC and the Commodities Future Trading Commission that they could no longer regulate what are called swaps and derivatives, which actually contributed to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and that was Senator Sanders.\n\nSo if we're going to be talking like this,", + " we can -- and maybe we can score some political points -- but the fact is: Every one of us stands for the kind of economy that will work better for every American. And if that means taking on Wall Street, I have a plan that is tough and comprehensive and praised by a lot of folks who say it goes further than what both Senator Sanders and Governor O'Malley are proposing.\n\nSANDERS: Let me just -- let me just...\n\nMUIR: Secretary Clinton, thank you.\n\nSANDERS: Let me just jump in. My name was invoked.\n\nMUIR: Senator?\n\nSANDERS: So with that invocation,", + " let me say a few words.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nSecretary Clinton, I don't have a super PAC. I don't get any money from Wall Street. You have gotten a whole lot of money over the years from Wall Street. But most importantly, when you look at what happened in the 1990s, go to berniesanders.com. I'll advertise my Web site as well.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nAnd what you'll find is that I led -- helped lead the effort as a member of the House financial committee against Alan Greenspan, against a guy named Bill Clinton, maybe you know him, maybe you don't.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nAgainst the Republican leadership,", + " who all thought it would be a great idea to merge investor banks and commercial banks and large insurance companies. What a brilliant idea that would be.\n\nGo to YouTube. Find out what I said to Greenspan. At the end of the day, if Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, and the governor makes a good point about trade, anti-trade, anti-monopoly activities.\n\nWall Street today has too much political power. It has too much economic power. To get deregulated -- listen to this, they spent $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions over a 10-year period.\n\nMUIR: Senator Sanders...\n\nSANDERS: Wall Street is a threat to the economy.", + " They've got to be broken up.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR: Thank you, Senator. RADDATZ: And we're going to move on to health care.\n\nSecretary Clinton, the Department of Health and Human Services says more than 17 million Americans who are not insured now have health coverage because of Obamacare. But for Americans who already had health insurance the cost has gone up 27 percent in the last five years while deductibles are up 67 percent, health care costs are rising faster than many Americans can manage.\n\nWhat's broken in Obamacare that needs to be fixed right now? And what would you do to fix it?\n\nCLINTON:", + " Well, I would certainly build on the successes of the Affordable Care Act and work to fix some of the glitches that you just referenced.\n\nNumber one, we do have more people who have access to health care. We have ended the terrible situation that people with pre- existing conditions were faced with where they couldn't find at any affordable price health care.\n\nWomen are not charged more than men any longer for our health insurance. And we keep young people on our policies until they turn 26.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThose are all really positive developments. But out-of-pocket costs have gone up too much and prescription drug costs have gone through the roof.", + " And so what I have proposed, number one, is a $5,000 tax credit to help people who have very large out-of-pocket costs be able to afford those.\n\nNumber two, I want Medicare to be able to negotiate for lower drug prices just like they negotiate with other countries' health systems.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nWe end up paying the highest prices in the world. And I want us to be absolutely clear about making sure the insurance companies in the private employer policy arena as well as in the Affordable Care exchanges are properly regulated so that we are not being gamed.\n\nAnd I think that's an important point to make because I'm going through and analyzing the points you were making,", + " Martha. We don't have enough competition and we don't have enough oversight of what the insurance companies are charging everybody right now.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRADDATZ: But you did say those were glitches.\n\nCLINTON: Yes.\n\nRADDATZ: Just glitches?\n\nCLINTON: Well, they're glitches because...\n\nRADDATZ: Twenty-seven percent in the last five years, deductibles up 67 percent?\n\nCLINTON: It is. Because part of this is the startup challenges that this system is facing. We have fought, as Democrats, for decades to get a health care plan. I know.", + " I've got the scars to show from the effort back in the early '90s.\n\nWe want to build on it and fix it. And I'm confident we can do that. And it will have effects in the private market. And one of the reasons in some states why the percentage cost has gone up so much is because governors there would not extend Medicaid.\n\nAnd so people are still going to get health care, thankfully, in emergency rooms, in hospitals. Those costs are then added to the overall cost, which does increase the insurance premiums for people in the private system.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRADDATZ: Senator Sanders,", + " I want you to respond to what she was saying, but you're instead calling for single-payer health care.\n\nSANDERS: Yes, exactly, exactly.\n\nRADDATZ: You note people won't have to pay deductibles or premiums but they will have to pay new taxes. Can you tell us specifically how much people will be expected to pay?\n\nSANDERS: Yes, well, roughly. Let me say this. As a member of the Health Education Committee that helped write the Affordable Care Act, much of what Secretary Clinton said about what we have done, among other things, ending the obscenity of this pre-existing situation is a step forward.\n\nSeventeen more million more people have health care.", + " It is a step forward. A step forward.\n\nBut this is what we also have to say. Not only are deductibles rising, 29 million Americans still have no health insurance and millions of people can't afford to go to the doctor. Major crisis and primary health care. Here is the bottom line. Why is it that the United States of America today is the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care to all people as a right?\n\nWhy is it...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSANDERS: Why is it that we are -- why is it that we spend almost three times per capita as to what they spend in the U.K., 50 percent more than what they pay in France,", + " countries that guarantee health care to all of their people and in many cases, have better health care outcomes. Bottom line.\n\nThis ties into campaign finance reform. The insurance companies, the drug companies are bribing the United States Congress. We need to pass a Medicare for all single payer system. It will lower the cost of health care for a middle-class family by thousands of dollars a year.\n\nRADDATZ: Senator Sanders, you didn't really tell us specifically how much people will be expected to pay...\n\nSANDERS: But they will not be paying, Martha, any private insurance. So it's unfair to say in total...\n\nRADDATZ:", + " But you can't tell us this specifically, even if you were...\n\nSANDERS: I can tell you that adding up the fact you're not paying any private insurance, businesses are not paying any private insurance. The average middle-class family will be saving thousands of dollars a year. RADDATZ: OK. Let's go to talk about the high cost of college education and for that we turn to the executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, right here at Saint Anselm college, Neil Levesque.\n\nNeil?\n\nLEVESQUE: Here to New Hampshire again. As you know, this auditorium is filled with many Saint Anselm college students.", + " They know the outstanding student debt right now in America is $1.3 trillion. That private education costs have gone up in the last decade 26 percent, and 40 percent for public education.\n\nSo knowing that, we know you want to make public education more affordable but how do you really lower the cost? Senator Sanders, you mentioned a few minutes ago that you want free tuition for public colleges.\n\nSANDERS: And universities.\n\nLEVESQUE: How does that really lower the cost other than just shifting the cost to taxpayers?\n\nSANDERS: Well, Neil, I think we've got to work on a two-pronged approach.", + " And your point is absolutely well taken. The cost of college education is escalating a lot faster than the cost of inflation. There are a lot of factors involved in that.\n\nAnd that is that we have some colleges and universities that are spending a huge amount of money on fancy dormitories and on giant football stadiums. Maybe we should focus on quality education with well-paid faculty members. But...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSANDERS: And I understand in many universities a heck of a lot of vice presidents who earn a big salary. But, bottom line is this is the year 2015. If we are going to be competitive in the global economy we need the best educated workforce.\n\nIt is insane to my mind,", + " hundreds of thousands of young people today, bright qualified people, cannot go to college because they cannot afford -- their families cannot afford to send them. Millions coming out of school as you indicated, deeply in debt. What do we do?\n\nMy proposal is to put a speculation tax on wall street, raise very substantial sums of money, not only make public colleges and universities tuition-free, but also substantially lower interest rates on student debt. You have families out there paying 6 percent, 8 percent, 10 percent on student debt, refinance their homes at 3 percent.\n\nWhat sense is that? So I think we need radical changes in the funding of higher education.", + " We should look at college today the way high school was looked at 60 years ago. All young people who have the ability should be able to get a college education. (APPLAUSE)\n\nLEVESQUE: Governor O'Malley, how do you propose -- Governor O'Malley, how do you propose lowering some of these costs associated with higher education?\n\nO'MALLEY: Yes, this one falls under the category of, I have actually done this. As a governor we actually made the greater investments so that we could go four years in a row without a penny's increase to college tuition.\n\nMy plan actually goes further than Senator Sanders because a big chunk of the cost is actually room and board and books and fees.", + " So as a nation we need to increase what we invest in Pell grants. Yes, we need to make it easier for parents to refinance.\n\nO'MALLEY: But states need to do more as well. And I propose a block grant program that will keep the states in the game as well. I believe that all of our kids should go into an income-based repayment plan.\n\nI'm joined tonight by two daughters, Tara and Grace. My oldest daughter's a teacher. Man (ph), their mother's here as well. We were proud of them on graduation day, weren't we, Katie? And we're going to be proud every month for the rest of our lives.\n\nI mean,", + " we had to borrow so much money to send them to college and were not the only ones. There're families all across America who aren't able to contribute to our economy because of this crushing student loan. I also propose that we can pay for this with a tax on high volume trades and we need to because my dad came to college after World War II on a G.I. Bill.\n\nBut today, we're the only nation on the planet that's saddling our kids with a lifetime of bills. That's a drag on the economy. It's one of the key investments we need to make. I was flattered that Secretary Clinton two months later borrowed so many of my proposals to incorporate into hers.", + " And in our party, unlike the Republican party, we actually believe that the more our people learn, the more they will earn and higher education should be a right for every kid.\n\nMUIR: Secretary Clinton.\n\nCLINTON: Right.\n\nMCELVEEN: Secretary Clinton, how does your plan differentiate from your opponents?\n\nCLINTON: Well, I have what I call the new college compact. Because I think everybody has to have some skin in this game, you know.\n\nNumber one, States have been dis-investing in higher education. In fact, I think New Hampshire, in state tuition for public colleges and universities,", + " is among the highest if not the highest in the country. So states over a period of decades have put their money elsewhere; into prisons, into highways, into things other than higher education. So under my compact, the federal government will match money that the states begin to put back in to the higher education system.\n\nSecondly, I don't believe in free tuition for everybody. I believe we should focus on middle-class families, working families, and poor kids who have the ambition and the talent to go to college and get ahead. So I have proposed debt free tuition, which I think is affordable and I would move a lot of the Pell Grant and other aid into the arena where it could be used for living expense.", + " So I put all of this together, again, on my website and I've gotten such a good response.\n\nBut I want to quickly say, one of the areas that Senator Sanders touched on in talking about education and certainly talking about health care is his commitment to really changing the systems. Free college, a single payer system for health, and it's been estimated were looking at 18 to $20 trillion, about a 40 percent in the federal budget.\n\nAnd I have looked at his proposed plans for health care for example, and it really does transfer every bit of our health care system including private health care, to the states to have the states run.", + " And I think we've got to be really thoughtful about how we're going to afford what we proposed, which is why everything that I have proposed I will tell you exactly how I'm going to pay for it; including college.\n\nMCELVEEN: Thank you Secretary Clinton, thank you.\n\nSANDERS: May I respond to the critique on the...\n\nMCELVEEN: Back to you David.\n\nMUIR: We're going to get right into this Senator but I want to ask about taxes next. This is included.\n\nSANDERS: I would just...\n\nMUIR: She was asking about that...\n\nSANDERS:", + " But Secretary Clinton is wrong.\n\nAs you know, because I know you know a lot about health care. You know that the United States per capita pays far and away more than other country. And it is unfair simply to say how much more the program will cost without making sure that people know that, we are doing away with cost of private insurance and that the middle class will be paying substantially less for health care on the single payer than on the Secretary's Clinton proposal.\n\nCLINTON: Well, the only thing - the only thing I can go on Senator Sanders...\n\nMUIR: Are we back on health care - Secretary Clinton hold one moment.", + " Senator Sanders...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCLINTON: Your proposal is to go and send the health care system to the state.\n\nMUIR: Secretary Clinton, please.\n\nCLINTON: And my analysis is, that you are going to get more taxes out of middle class families. I'm the only person...\n\nMUIR: So let's ask about it.\n\nSecretary Clinton, let's turn to the taxes.\n\nCLINTON:... saying, no middle class tax raises. That's off the table...\n\nMUIR: This is where we are going next, we are going next to taxes here...\n\nSANDERS:", + " Now, this is getting to be fun.\n\nMUIR: This is fun.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThis is democracy at work.\n\nSecretary Clinton, let me ask you about your tax plan because from the crushing cost of college education, the next question most families have; is will my taxes go up under the next president? You have said it's your goal not to raise taxes on families making under $200,000 a year a goal. But can you say that's a promise as you stand here tonight?\n\nCLINTON: That is a pledge that I'm making. I made it when I ran in 2008.\n\nMUIR:", + " A promise?\n\nCLINTON: Yes, and it was the same one that President Obama made. Because I don't think we should be imposing new big programs that are going to raise middle class families' taxes.\n\nWe just heard that most families haven't had a wage increase since 2001. Since, you know, the end of the last Clinton administration when incomes did go up for everybody. And we've got to get back to where people can save money again, where they can invest in their families, and I don't think a middle-class tax should be part of anybody's plan right now.\n\nSANDERS: Let me respond to...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR:", + " Secretary Clinton...\n\nSANDERS: Let me respond to...\n\nMUIR: Please.\n\nSANDERS: Number one, most important economic reality of today is that over the last 30 years, there has been a transfer of trillions of dollars from the middle class to the top one-tenth of one percent who are seeing a doubling of the percentage of wealth that they own.\n\nNow, when Secretary Clinton says, \"I'm not going raise taxes on the middle class,\" let me tell you what she is saying. She is disagreeing with FDR on Social Security, LBJ on Medicare and with the vast majority of progressive Democrats in the House and the Senate,", + " who today are fighting to end the disgrace of the United States being the only major country on Earth that doesn't provide paid family and medical leave.\n\nWhat the legislation is is $1.61 a week. Now, you can say that's a tax on the middle class. It will provide three months paid family and medical leave for the working families of this country. I think, Secretary Clinton, $1.61 a week is a pretty good invest.\n\nMUIR: Senator, thank you. Let me bring in Governor O'Malley...\n\nCLINTON: Senator, I have been -- I have been fighting for paid...\n\nMUIR:", + " You've heard...\n\nCLINTON:... family leave for a very long time...\n\nMUIR: Secretary Clinton.\n\nSANDERS: David, thank you.\n\nCLINTON: I have a way to pay for it that actually makes the wealthiest pay for it...\n\nSANDERS: Then (inaudible)...\n\nCLINTON:... not everybody else.\n\nSANDERS: Every (inaudible) Democrat and senator in support of this proposal introduced by your good friend and my good friend, Kirsten Gillibrand, Rosa DeLauro, got ears (ph) to legislation out there that will finally provide family and medical leave.\n\nMUIR:", + " Thank you. I want to bring in Governor O'Malley on this. We heard the promise from Secretary Clinton because people want to know about their taxes, will they go up. She has now promised here tonight not to raise them on families making $250,000 or less. Can you make that same promise if you're elected?\n\nO'MALLEY: No, I've never made a promise like that. But unlike either of these two fine people, I've actually balanced a budget every single year. I was one -- I was the only -- one of only seven states that had a AAA bond rating. By the time I left,", + " the average tax burden on Maryland families was the same as when I started.\n\nBut I did pass a more progressive income tax and asked the highest-earning people to pay another 14 percent. David, look, this is the big -- I agree, by the way, that we should have paid family leave. And I agree with Senator Sanders on that. And just like Social Security and unlike the Republicans, I think we should actually expand Social Security and increase average monthly benefits.\n\nBut look, there's one big entitlement we can no longer afford as a country, and that is the entitlement that the super wealthy among us, those earning more than a million dollars,", + " feel that they're entitled to pay lower income tax rates and a far lower preferred income tax rate when it comes to capital gains.\n\nIf we were to raise the marginal rate to 45 percent for people earning more than a million dollars and if we tax capital gains essentially the same we do earnings from hard work and sweat and toil, you could generate $800 billion over the next ten years and that would do so much good for affordable college, debt-free college, cutting youth unemployment in half, investing in our cities again.\n\nSo the things I have done in office are the things that actually invest in growing our economy and making wages go up.", + " That's the issue that we need to tackle as Americans, and we can do it and we know how.\n\nMUIR: Governor O'Malley, thank you. A spirited debate on taxes. And there will be more with the Democratic debate in New Hampshire, when we come back right here on ABC. More in a moment.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nMUIR: Welcome back tonight to New Hampshire. The Democratic debate continues here on ABC.\n\nAnd Secretary Clinton, we want to turn to race, now, in America. There is a real concern in this country from Black Lives Matter and from other community groups that we're just now seeing,", + " with smartphones and cell phones, what many have been dealing with for years when they come in contact with police.\n\nBut you also have many in law enforcement who now say there has been a so-called Ferguson effect, police holding back because they're afraid of backlash.\n\nMUIR: In fact, the FBI director is calling it a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement. So, if elected president, how would you bridge the divide between the two?\n\nCLINTON: Well, David, I think this is one of the most important challenges facing not just our next president but our country. We have systemic racism and injustice and inequities in our country and in particular,", + " in our justice system that must be addressed and must be ended.\n\nI feel very strongly that we have to reform our criminal justice system and we have to find ways to try to bring law enforcement together again with the communities that they are sworn to protect. Trust has been totally lost in a lot of places.\n\nAt the same time, we know that in many parts of our country police officers are bridging those divides and they're acting heroically. The young officer who was killed responding to the Planned Parenthood murders. The officer who told the victims of the San Bernardino killings that he would take a bullet before them.\n\nSo I think that we need to build on the work of the policing commissioner that President Obama impaneled.", + " We need to get a bipartisan commitment to work together on this.\n\nAnd we need to hear the voices of those men and women and boys and girls who feel like strangers in their own country and do whatever is necessary to not only deal with the immediate problems within the criminal justice system, but more opportunities, more jobs, better education so that we can begin to rebuild that very valuable asset known as trust.\n\nMUIR: Secretary, thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR: Governor O'Malley, how would you bridge the divide?\n\nO'MALLEY: There is no issue in American public policy that I have worked on more day in and day out than this painful issue of policing,", + " of law enforcement, criminal justice and race in America.\n\nWhen I ran in 1999, David, for mayor of Baltimore, our city by that year had become the most addicted, violent, and abandoned in America. But we came together. I brought people together over some very deep racial divides. And we were able to put our city on the path for the biggest reduction in crime of any major city in America over the next ten years.\n\nAs governor, we continued to work together. We reduced violent crime to 30-year lows. But get this. We also reduced incarceration rates to 20-year lows. So it is possible actually,", + " to find the things that actually work, that we did, increasing drug treatment, using big data to better protect the lives of young people, cut juvenile crime in half, and it's also possible to improve how we police our police.\n\nBut there wasn't a single day as mayor of Baltimore that I wasn't asked whether I was delivering on the promise I made to police the police. We reported excessive force, discourtesy, use of lethal force. In fact, drove down to three of the four lowest years on record police use of lethal force.\n\nAs a nation, we have to embrace this moment and make our departments more open, more transparent,", + " and more accountable. Just as we require every major department, every county to report its major crimes, we should require police departments to report their discourtesy, brutality, excessive force.\n\nThere's so much work that can be done, so much we've learned to do better. We need to do it now as a nation. This is our time and our opportunity to do that.\n\nMUIR: Governor, thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR: And Senator Sanders, when you hear the FBI director calling it a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement, does that concern you as well when you --\n\nSANDERS: Well,", + " this whole issue concerns me. And I agree with much of what the secretary and the governor have said. But let's be clear. Today in America we have more people in jail than any other country on earth, 2.2 million people. Predominantly African-American and Hispanic.\n\nWe are spending $80 billion a year locking up our fellow Americans. I think, and this is not easy, but I think we need to make wage a major effort, to come together as a country and end institutional racism. We need major, major reforms of a very broken criminal justice system. Now, what does that mean?\n\nWell, for a start it means that police officers should not be shooting unarmed people,", + " predominantly African-Americans.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSANDERS: It means that we have to rethink the so-called war on drugs which has destroyed the lives of millions of people, which is why I have taken marijuana out of the Controlled Substance Act. So that it will not be a federal crime.\n\nSANDERS: That is why we need to make...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThat is why we need to make police -- and I speak as a former mayor. I was a mayor for eight years, worked very closely with a great police department. And what we did is try to move that department toward community policing, so that the police officers become part of the community and not,", + " as we see, in some cities an oppressive force.\n\nWe need to make police departments look like the communities they serve in terms of diversity. We need to end minimal sentencing. We need, basically, to pledge that we're going to invest in this country, in jobs and education, not more jails and incarceration.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR: Senator, thank you. We want to turn now to an issue.\n\nThis next issue has destroyed so many families across the country, and in particular right here in New Hampshire, heroin. And there's a stunning new figure out. A recent poll -- 48 percent here, in this state alone,", + " say they know someone who has abused heroin.\n\nWe're going to turn tonight to Dan Tuohy of the New Hampshire Union Leader who has this question.\n\nQUESTION: New Hampshire has been hard hit by the heroin epidemic, and we're on track to have twice as many overdose deaths this year as in 2013.\n\nWhat specifically would you do to address this crisis?\n\nMUIR: Senator Sanders, I'm going to take this to you first because you've seen what's happened with heroin right on the border in your own state.\n\nSANDERS: Yes. Look, this is a tragedy for New Hampshire. It is a tragedy for my state of Vermont.", + " It is a tragedy all over this country. The number of heroin deaths are growing very, very significantly.\n\nWhat do we do? Well, for a start, this may seem like a radical idea, but I think we have got to tell the medical profession and doctors who are prescribing opiates and the pharmaceutical industry that they have got to start getting their act together, we cannot have this huge number of opiates out there throughout this country, where young people are taking them, getting hooked, and then going to heroin.\n\nSecond of all, and the reason I believe in a health care for all program, we need to understand that addiction is a disease,", + " not a criminal activity.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd that means -- and that means radically changing the way we deal with mental health and addiction issues. When somebody is addicted and seeking help, they should not have to wait three, four months in order to get that help. They should be able to walk in the door tomorrow and get a variety of treatments that work for them.\n\nSo those are some of the areas that I think we've got to move on.\n\nMUIR: Senator, thank you. Secretary Clinton?\n\nCLINTON: You know, on my very first visit to New Hampshire in this campaign, I was in Keene,", + " and I was asked what are you going to do about the heroin epidemic? And all over New Hampshire, I met grandmothers who are raising children because they lost the father or the mother to an overdose. I met young people who are desperately trying to get clean and have nowhere to go, because there are not enough facilities.\n\nSo this is a major epidemic, and it has hit New Hampshire and Vermont particularly hard. I've had had two town halls, one in Keene, one in Laconia, dedicated exclusively to talking about what we can do. And I've heard some great ideas about how law enforcement is changing its behavior,", + " how the recovery community is reaching out.\n\nAnd I was proud to get the endorsement of Mayor Walsh of Boston, who has made his struggle with alcoholism a real clarion call for action in this arena.\n\nSo, I've laid out a five-point plan about what we can do together. I would like the federal government to offer $10 billion over ten years to work with states, and I really applaud Governor Hassan for taking up this challenge and working with the legislature here to come up with a plan.\n\nWe need to do more on the prescribing end of it. There are too many opioids being prescribed, and that leads directly now to heroin addiction.", + " And we need to change the way we do law enforcement, and of course, we need more programs and facilities, so when somebody is ready to get help, there's a place for them to go.\n\nAnd every law enforcement should carry the antidote to overdose, Naloxone, so that they can save lives that are on the brink of expiring.\n\nMUIR: Secretary, thank you. O'MALLEY: And you know, I actually know a great deal about this issue. And I have a dear friend, played music with him for years, remember when his -- when he came home with his baby girl, and now she's no longer with us,", + " because of addiction and overdose.\n\nThe last time in New Hampshire, I had to take a break shortly after landing and call home and comfort a friend whose mother had died of an overdose.\n\nO'MALLEY: Drugs have taken far too many of our citizens. It's a huge public health challenge. In our own city, I mentioned before, we had become the most addicted city in America.\n\nBut together, every single year, I expanded drug treatment funding within our city and then I expanded it in our state, and we were saving lives every single year doing the things that work, intervening earlier, understanding the continuum of care that's required until we got hit like every other state in the state -- in the United States,", + " especially in New Hampshire and in the northeast with this opioid addiction, the over-prescribing.\n\nI agree, we need better -- we need to rein in the over- prescribing, but I have put forward on my -- in my plan a $12 billion federal investment. We have to invest in the local partnerships, and the best place to intervene, the best indicator of when a person is actually on the verge of killing themselves because of an addiction, is at the hospital. That very first time they show up with a near miss, we should be intervening there. That's what I said to my own public health people. What would we do if this were ebola?", + " How would we act?\n\nSo many more Americans have been killed by the combination of heroin and these highly addictive pain pills, and yet, we refuse to act. There are thing that can be done. Go on to my website. My plan is there. It's one of 15 strategic goals I've set out to make our country a better place by cutting these sort of deaths in half in the next five years.\n\nMUIR: Governor O'Malley, thank you.\n\nMartha?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, I want to circle back to something that your opponents here have brought up. Libya is falling apart.", + " The country is a haven for ISIS and jihadists with an estimated 2,000 ISIS fighters there today. You advocated for that 2011 intervention and called it smart power at its best. And yet, even President Obama said the U.S. should have done more to fill the leadership vacuum left behind. How much responsibility do you bear for the chaos that followed elections?\n\nCLINTON: Well, first, let's remember why we became part of a coalition to stop Gadhafi from committing massacres against his people. The United States was asked to support the Europeans and the Arab partners that we had and we did a lot of due diligence about whether we should or not,", + " and eventually, yes, I recommended and the president decided that we would support the action to protect civilians on the ground and that led to the overthrow of Gadhafi.\n\nI think that what Libya then did by having a full free election, which elected moderates, was an indication of their crying need and desire to get on the right path. Now, the whole region has been rendered unstable, in part because of the aftermath of the Arab Spring, in part because of the very effective outreach and propagandizing that ISIS and other terrorist groups do.\n\nBut what we're seeing happening in Libya right now is that there has been a fragile agreement to put aside the differences that exist among Libyans themselves to try to dislodge ISIS from Sirte,", + " the home town of Gadhafi, and to begin to try to create a national government.\n\nYou know, this is not easy work. We did a lot to help. We did as much as we could because the Libyans themselves had very strong feelings about what they wished to accept. But we're always looking for ways about what more we can do to try to give people a chance to be successful.\n\nRADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, I want to go back. That -- government lacked institutions and experience. It had been a family business for 40 years. On the security side, we offered only a modest training effort and a very limited arms buy-back program.", + " Let me ask you the question again. How much responsibility do you bear for the chaos that followed those elections?\n\nCLINTON: Martha, we offered a lot more than they were willing to take. We offered a lot more. We also got rid of their chemical weapons, which was a big help, and we also went after a lot of the shoulder-fired missiles to round them up. You know, we can't -- if we're not going to send American troops, which there was never any idea of doing that, then to try to send trainers, to try to send experts, is something we offered, Europeans offered, the U.N.", + " offered, and there wasn't a lot of responsiveness at first.\n\nI think a lot of the Libyans who had been forced out of their country by Gadhafi who came back to try to be part of a new government, believed they knew what to do and it turned out that they were no match for some of the militaristic forces inside that country. But I'm not giving up on Libya and I don't think anybody should. We've been at this a couple of years.\n\nRADDATZ: But were mistakes made?\n\nCLINTON: Well, there's always a retrospective to say what mistakes were made. But I know that we offered a lot of help and I know it was difficult for the Libyans to accept help.", + " What we could have done if they had said yes would have been a lot more than what we were able to have done.\n\nSANDERS: But what...\n\nRADDATZ: Senator Sanders.\n\nSANDERS: Look, the secretary is right. This is a terribly complicated issue. There are no simple solutions. But where we have a disagreement is that I think if you look at the history of regime changes, you go back to Mossaddegh (ph) in Iran, you go back to Salvador Allende who we overthrew in Chile, you go back to overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, you go back to where we are today in Syria with a dictator named Assad.\n\nThe truth is it is relatively easy for a powerful nation like America to overthrow a dictator but it is very hard to predict the unintended consequences and the turmoil and the instability that follows after you overthrow that dictator.\n\nSo I think secretary Clinton and I have a fundamental disagreement.", + " I'm not quite the fan of regime change that I believe she is.\n\nO'MALLEY: Martha -- I would just repeat that --\n\nCLINTON: Well, I would just repeat that.\n\nRADDATZ: Secretary Clinton.\n\nCLINTON: Wait a minute. I think it's only fair to put on the record, Senator Sanders voted in the Senate for a resolution calling for ending the Gadhafi regime and asking that the U.N. be brought in, either a congressional vote or a U.N. Security Council vote. We got a U.N. Security council vote.\n\nNow, I understand that this is very difficult.", + " And I'm not standing here today and saying that Libya is as far along as Tunisia. We saw what happened in Egypt. I cautioned about a quick overthrow of Mubarak, and we now are back with basically an army dictatorship.\n\nThis is a part of the world where the United States has tried to play two different approaches. One, work with the tough men, the dictators, for our own benefit and promote democracy. That's a hard road to walk. But I think it's the right road for us to try to travel.\n\nO'MALLEY: And Martha...\n\nRADDATZ: Quick Governor O'Malley.\n\nO'MALLEY:", + "... and in this case, we probably let our lust for regime toppling get ahead of the practical considerations for stability in that region. And I believe that one of the big failings in that region is a lack of human intelligence. We have not made the investments that we need to make to understand and to have relationships with future leaders that are coming up.\n\nThat's what Chris Stevens was trying to do. But without the tools, without the support that was needed to that. And now what we have is a whole stretch now, of the coast of Libya, 100 miles, 150 miles, that has now become potentially the next safe haven for ISIL.", + " They go back and forth between Syria and this region. We have to stop contributing to the creation of vacuums that allow safe havens to develop.\n\nRADDATZ: Thank you very much. Thank you. We're going to move on here. Governor O'Malley, thank you very much for that. And we're going to make a very sharp turn as we wrap things up here.\n\nSecretary Clinton, first ladies, as you well know, have used their position to work on important causes like literacy and drug abuse. But they also supervise the menus, the flowers, the holiday ornaments and White House decor. I know you think you know where I'm going here.\n\nYou have said that Bill Clinton is a great host and loves giving tours but may opt out of picking flower arrangements if you're elected.", + " Bill Clinton aside, is it time to change the role of a president's spouse?\n\nCLINTON: Well, the role has been defined by each person who's held it. And I am very grateful for all my predecessors and my successors because each of them not only did what she could to support her husband and our country but often chose to work on important issues that were of particular concern.\n\nObviously, Mrs. Obama has been a terrific leader when it comes to young people's health, particularly nutrition and exercise. And I think has had a big impact. So whoever is part of the family of a president has an extraordinary privilege of not only having a front row seat on history but making her or maybe his contribution.\n\nAnd with respect to my own husband,", + " I am probably still going to pick the flowers and the china for state dinners and stuff like that. But I will certainly turn to him as prior presidents have for special missions, for advice, and in particular, how we're going to get the economy working again for everybody, which he knows a little bit about.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCandidates Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders talked about the roles their spouses would play in helping run the Oval Office at the third Democratic presidential debate. (ABC News)\n\nMUIR: I do want to follow up here for each of you. And a similar line of questioning. Senator Sanders,", + " your wife Jane shares an office at your campaign headquarters in Burlington. We've seen the pictures, the desks right next to each other. Would she have a desk close by in the west wing?\n\nSANDERS: Given the fact that she's a lot smarter than me, yes, she would.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nAnd let me, by the way, take this moment to congratulate Hillary Clinton, who I thought not only did an outstanding job as our first lady, but redefined what that role could be.\n\nSo, I thank you very much for that.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nMy wife, Jane, has been -- way back when before I knew her,", + " a foster parent. Many, many kids came into her home and received the kind of love that they desperately needed. And she turned around many lives.\n\nShe is the best parent and grandmother that I know. She has devoted her life, when I was mayor of the city of Burlington, actually when I first met her, we started a youth office, which started a after-school programs for kids, started a child care center, started a youth newspaper. We got the kids involved in a whole lot of issues.\n\nShe led that effort. So I think, at a time when so many of our kids are desperately looking for constructive activity, where too many of our kids are hanging around on street corners,", + " potentially getting into trouble, I think we need a forceful advocate for the children, for teenagers, for the little children, to deal with the dysfunctional child care system, and I think my wife would do a great job in helping me accomplish those goals.\n\nMUIR: Senator, thank you.\n\nGovernor O'Malley -- Governor O'Malley, you have talked about your wife, Katie, here tonight. She's a district court judge. And the question for you is, would she have to give that up as first lady, or will she share an office in the west wing as well? O'MALLEY: Well, that would be totally up to her.", + " I mean, Katie has never been a person who let her husband's professional choices get in the way of following her dreams.\n\nAnd I think she got that from her mother, actually.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThe -- and I readily admit that she is a far more accomplished lawyer than I was ever able to become, before I took my detour. She is a district court judge in Maryland. She puts in a full day there. We've raised four terrific kids. And yet, when she was first lady of the state, not only would she go to work every day and sit there through a lot of sad and gut-wrenching cases,", + " but then she'd put in additional time being an advocate against domestic violence.\n\nMaryland made great strides on that because of her advocacy, and her understanding of how the court process works. She was an advocate against bullying and implementing anti-bullying things. So Katie O'Malley will do whatever Katie O'Malley wants to do, regardless of her husband's success in getting elected president.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR: Governor O'Malley, thank you, (inaudible).\n\nO'MALLEY: Thank you.\n\nMUIR: Governor, thank you. We'll be back with much more from New Hampshire. The Democratic debate continues right after this.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nMUIR:", + " Welcome back tonight. It's been an evening of lively discussion among the candidates and it's time for closing statements. We began in alphabetical order, so we'll reverse the order at the end and begin with you, Senator Sanders.\n\nSANDERS: Well, thank you very much for hosting this debate, and let me applaud my colleagues up here. Because I think frankly, maybe I'm wrong, but on our worst day, I think we have a lot more to offer the American people than the right wing's extremists.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSANDERS: My father came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 without a nickel in his pocket,", + " which sparked my interest in the need for immigration reform because I know what it's like to be the son of an immigrant.\n\nWe grew up in a three-and-a-half-room, rent controlled apartment in Brooklyn, New York. My mother's dream -- and she died very young, but my mother's dream for her whole life was to be able to get out of that rent-controlled apartment and own a home of her own. She never lived to see that.\n\nSANDERS: But what my parents did accomplish is they were able to send both of their sons to college. We were the first in the family. So I know something about economic anxiety and living in a family does not have sufficient income.\n\nAnd that is why I am pledged,", + " if elected president of the United States, to bring about a political revolution where millions of people begin to stand up and finally say enough is enough, this great country and our government belong to all of us, not just a handful of billionaires. Thank you very much.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRADDATZ: Governor O'Malley?\n\nMartha, thank you. I want to thank all of the people who have tuned in tonight. I want to thank the great people of New Hampshire, where despite all of the cynicism about big money and big banks taking over our politics, here in New Hampshire, the individual matters.\n\nYou know, my wife Katie and I have four terrific kids,", + " and like you, there's probably nothing we wouldn't do to give them a future that's safer, that's healthier, where they have more opportunity than our parents and grandparents gave to us. Tonight, what you listened to was a healthy exchange of ideas about how we'd do that, that which we have always proven, the capacity to do better than any nation in the world, to take actions that include more of our people more fully in the economic, social and political life of our country.\n\nWhen you listened to the Republican debate the other night, you heard a lot of anger and you had a lot of fear. Well, they can have their anger and they can have their fear,", + " but anger and fear never built America. We build our country by adopting wage and labor policies, including comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway of citizenship for all. We do it by investing in our country, by investing in infrastructure, by investing in the skills and the talents of our people with debt-free college, and we can do it again.\n\nAnd we also create a better future for our kids when we square our shoulders to the great challenges of our times, whether it's terror trying to undermine our values or Republican presidential candidates trying to get us to surrender our freedoms and our values in the face of this threat.\n\nThe other big challenge we have is climate change.", + " The greatest business opportunity to come to the United States of America in 100 years. We need to embrace this. I have put forward a plan that does this, that moves us to 100 percent clean electric grid by 2050. Join this campaign for the future. New leadership is what our country needs to move us out of these divided and polarized times. Thank you.\n\nMUIR: Governor, thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSecretary Clinton?\n\nCLINTON: On January 20th, 2017, the next president of the United States will walk into the White House. If, heaven forbid, that next president is a Republican,", + " I think it's pretty clear we know what will happen. A lot of the rights that have been won over years, from women's rights to voter rights to gay rights to worker rights, will be at risk.\n\nSocial Security, which Republicans call a Ponzi scheme, may face privatization. Our vets may see the V.A. hospital that needs to be improved and made better for them turned over to privatization. Planned Parenthood will be defunded. The list goes on because the differences are so stark.\n\nYou know, everybody says every election's important, and there's truth to that. This is a watershed election. I know how important it is that we have a Democrat succeed President Obama in the White House.", + " And I will do all that I can in this campaign to reach out and explain what I stand for and what I will do as president.\n\nYou know, I became a grandmother 15 months ago, and so I spent a lot of time thinking about my granddaughter's future. But as president, I will spend even more time thinking about the futures of all the kids and the grandchildren in this country because I want to make sure every single child has a chance to live up to his or her God-given potential. If you will join me in this campaign, we will make that a mission. Thank you, good night and may the force be with you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMUIR:", + " Thank you to the candidates tonight. Thank you to the audience here in New Hampshire here at St. Anselm. And thank you to the audience at home. We wish all of you at home a happy and safe holiday week ahead and we wish all the candidates a happy and safe holiday with your families. ", + " WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Hillary Clinton had no evidence to back up her claim in the latest Democratic presidential debate that the Islamic State group is using video of Donald Trump to recruit Muslims to its cause.\n\nBernie Sanders, left, speaks as Hillary Clinton listens during a Democratic presidential primary debate shown on TV screens in the media filing room, Saturday, Dec. 19, 2015, at Saint Anselm College in... (Associated Press)\n\nBernie Sanders, left, and Hillary Clinton speak during an exchange during the Democratic presidential primary debate Saturday, Dec. 19, 2015, at Saint Anselm College in Manchester,", + " N.H. (AP Photo/Jim... (Associated Press)\n\nIt's an assertion reminiscent of Trump's insistence that video showed thousands of Muslims in the U.S. cheering the 9/11 attacks, which has been debunked for weeks. During Saturday's debate, Clinton stated that the Republican presidential contender is \"becoming ISIS's best recruiter,\" with the group attracting people by showing videos of him. Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri acknowledged Sunday the campaign is aware of no such IS video and that jihadis are capitalizing on Trump's comments about Muslims through social media.\n\nHere's a look at some of the claims in the debate Saturday night and how they compare with the facts:\n\nCLINTON:", + " \"He is becoming ISIS's best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.\"\n\nTHE FACTS: What's true is that Trump's provocative comments about Muslims, including his call to ban them from coming to the U.S., have been widely played across the Middle East \u2014 in the hothouse of social media and beyond. Plenty of people \u2014 his Republican rivals among them \u2014 see his positions as playing into the hands of terrorists and raising the risk of radicalizing Muslims in the West as well as in the Middle East. It's also true that IS has a sophisticated propaganda operation and it can't be ruled out that the group has spread such videos under the Western radar.\n\nBut if so,", + " Clinton doesn't know about them.\n\n\"If you go back and look at social media, if you look at what's going on, they are definitely pointing at Mr. Trump,\" her campaign chairman, John Podesta, said on NBC's \"Meet the Press.\" But he cited no IS videos.\n\nPalmieri said on ABC's \"This Week,\" ''She didn't have a particular video in mind, but he is being used in social media.\"\n\nWhen his claim about a video showing \"thousands and thousands\" of Muslims celebrating 9/11 was debunked weeks ago, Trump dug in his heels on the assertion about \"plenty of people cheering.\" He repeated that position Sunday.", + " Asked about IS recruitment videos, he told ABC: \"She just made it up.\"\n\nClinton's statement that Trump is becoming the \"top recruiter\" for IS also is hard to square with the complex realities motivating its adherents.\n\nAttackers connected to or inspired by IS often say their actions are in response to the airstrike campaign against Islamic State militants, whose focus is on Syria and Iraq. Shiite Muslims have been their primary target since the beginning and in their online videos, they often call out to their followers to attack infidels \u2014 Shiite Muslims in particular.\n\nThe Islamic State group is known by various names, ISIS and ISIL among them.\n\n___\n\nBERNIE SANDERS:", + " \"The cost of college education is escalating a lot faster than the cost of inflation. There are a lot of factors involved in that. And that is that we have some colleges and universities that are spending a huge amount of money on fancy dormitories and on giant football stadiums.\"\n\nCLINTON: \"States have been disinvesting in higher education... So states over a period of decades have put their money elsewhere; into prisons, into highways, into things other than higher education.\"\n\nTHE FACTS: Clinton comes closest to diagnosing the problem accurately. College expenses are unsustainably high, but luxurious dorms aren't the big driver that Sanders portrays.", + " Public universities are charging more because they receive less in state government support.\n\nDemos, a left-leaning think tank, said in a May study that the decline in state funding accounted for 79 percent of tuition hikes between 2001 and 2011. Just 6 percent was due to construction costs.\n\nSanders would make up that lost government money by providing free tuition, paid for with a tax on financial transactions. Clinton would offer federal dollars to encourage states to do more and keep students from having to borrow. It's unclear how either plan would control colleges' costs, though.\n\n___\n\nCLINTON on rising premiums and out-of-pocket costs for the privately insured after enactment of Obama's health care law:", + " \"I would certainly build on the successes of the Affordable Care Act and work to fix some of the glitches.\"\n\nSANDERS on his proposed single-payer health care system: \"The average middle-class family will be saving thousands of dollars a year.\"\n\nTHE FACTS: Obama's law was mainly about expanding coverage for the uninsured, and even former officials of his administration say major work still has to be done on cost control. In other words, rising costs are more than \"glitches.\"\n\nOne of the health care law's main brakes on costs \u2014 a tax on high-value workplace coverage \u2014 has been put on hold by the new federal budget deal.", + " Clinton had called for complete repeal of that levy, known as the Cadillac tax. Many economists believe the tax would help keep costs in check by forcing people into leaner insurance plans.\n\nSanders says his plan for a government-run health care system along the lines of Canada's and Western Europe's would save money for families and taxpayers. But such a major transition would involve winners and losers, as well as new taxes in place of premiums.\n\nWhen the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office looked at the concept back in the early 1990s, it concluded that a single-payer system had the potential to save money but that wasn't guaranteed. Moreover,", + " individuals would have less freedom to choose their insurance packages, a trade-off that not everyone would accept.\n\n___\n\nSANDERS, apologizing for his campaign improperly gaining access to Clinton campaign data, raised the possibility that Clinton's campaign may have done the same thing. \"I am not convinced that information from our campaign may not have ended up in her campaign,\" he said.\n\nTHE FACTS: Sanders is speculating, at best. There's no evidence so far that Clinton's campaign has accessed Sanders' voter lists.\n\nDuring a conference call with reporters on Friday, Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, said he could \"unequivocally tell you that no member of our staff stole data from theirs.\" And the contractor that manages the campaign data for the Democratic Party,", + " NGP-VAN, issued a statement Friday saying \"our team removed access to the affected data, and determined that only one campaign took actions that could possibly have led to it retaining data to which it should not have had access.\"\n\n___\n\nCLINTON: \"Assad has killed 250,000 Syrians.\"\n\nTHE FACTS: Clinton appears to be blaming the entire estimated death toll of the Syrian civil war on just one side: the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Yet no matter how vicious his forces have been, deaths have come at the hands of all sides in the nearly 5-year-old multifront civil war.\n\nThe Syrian conflict began with anti-government protests before spiraling into a war with many groups emerging in opposition to the brutal regime crackdown.", + " Rebels in some of these groups are fighting and killing each other, in some cases with no involvement by Assad-backed troops.\n\nThe United Nations has estimated a death toll of 220,000 since 2011; other estimates are higher, and Clinton's figure is roughly in line with them. But the death toll is attributable to all parties, not just to Assad.\n\n___\n\nAssociated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Josh Boak contributed to this report. ", + " Andrew Burton\n\nThere are undoubtedly better zingers and hotter quotes being flung around elsewhere on this holiday-season Saturday night. But here are the best ones from the third Democratic debate.\n\nMartin O\u2019Malley on why he should be president:\n\nI looked into the eyes of Boy Scouts.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nBernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton about his campaign looking at her campaign\u2019s information after a data breach:\n\nYes, I apologize.\n\nHillary Clinton on Donald Trump\u2019s anti-Muslim bigotry:\n\nHe is becoming ISIS\u2019s best recruiter.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nSanders on how he would get Middle Eastern countries to lead the fight against ISIS:\n\nTell Qatar, instead of spending $200 billion on the World Cup,", + " maybe they should pay attention to ISIS, which is on their doorstep.\n\nO\u2019Malley, 52, on the question of regime change in Syria, responding to Sanders, 74:\n\nMay I offer a different generation\u2019s perspective on this.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nClinton on why she\u2019d like to speak, after O\u2019Malley:\n\nSince he has been making all kinds of, um, comments.\n\nClinton, walking back onto the stage post-commercial break after the debate had already begun:\n\nSorry.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nClinton, responding to moderator David Muir\u2019s question, \u201cShould corporate America love Hillary Clinton?\u201d\n\nEverybody should!\n\nClinton, responding to O'Malley's attack on her for not having the \"backbone to take on Wall Street\"", + " that he has had:\n\nWhen Governor O'Malley was heading the Democratic Governors Association, he had no trouble at all going to Wall Street to raise money to run campaigns for Democratic governors. And he also had no trouble appointing an investment banker to be in charge of his consumer protection bureau when he was governor.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nSanders on how to address the heroin crisis:\n\nWe need to understand that addiction is a disease and not a criminal activity.\n\nO\u2019Malley on the heroin problem (and, really, his answer to every question):\n\nI actually know a great deal about this issue.\n\nClinton, closing out the night:\n\nThank you, good night,", + " and may the force be with you. ", + " The Democratic National Committee made a big mistake staging the third Presidential-primary debate, which was held at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, on a Saturday night, when millions of potential viewers wouldn\u2019t be watching. The debate was lively, informative, and civil. Apart from a brief diversion into whether former President Bill Clinton, should he become the first First Gentleman of the United States, would be entrusted with selecting flowers and menus for official occasions\u2014his wife said that he wouldn\u2019t\u2014it was also substantive. And excluding, for a moment, Martin O\u2019Malley, it reaffirmed the choice facing Democratic voters: experience, moderate reformism,", + " and vigorous engagement abroad (Hillary Clinton) versus passion, an assault on privilege, and an abiding skepticism about overseas military engagements (Bernie Sanders).\n\nAll three of the participants had reason to be pleased with their performances. Clinton, who went in with a big lead in the polls, projected calm, confidence, and a command of the issues. About the only slip-up she made was being a bit late back from a bathroom break, which left her lectern briefly unoccupied. Throughout the debate, she seemed almost as intent on appealing to voters in the general election as she was on cementing her position atop the Democratic polls. To this end,", + " she issued a firm pledge not to raise taxes on households earning less than a quarter of a million dollars a year, said some kind words about American enterprise, and insisted that she has a workable plan to defeat ISIS and protect the United States against the threat of terrorism.\n\nSanders was also in fine fettle. He railed against an economic and political system that had been \u201crigged\u201d for the benefit of the ultra-wealthy. He gave a rousing defense of his progressive domestic agenda, which includes breaking up the big banks, abolishing tuition fees at public universities, and investing a trillion dollars in infrastructure. Somewhat unusually for Sanders,", + " he also invoked some personal details, describing his humble upbringing, in Brooklyn, and calling on Americans to join his effort to bring about a \u201cpolitical revolution.\u201d He, too, promised to crush ISIS, but he differentiated himself from Clinton by saying that this goal must take precedence over removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power.\n\nO\u2019Malley sought to promote himself as the technocratic voice of a new generation, much like Bill Clinton did when he faced George H. W. Bush, in the 1992 general election. The former Maryland governor made some good points, especially about the need to preserve liberal values in the fight against terrorism. Occasionally,", + " however, he overdid the youthful bit: after all, at the age of fifty-two, he is hardly a stripling. At one point, he was showered with boos from supporters of the two senior citizens in the race.\n\nThe subject of ISIS and terrorism dominated the first half of the debate. All three candidates were understandably keen to criticize the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, and they each made a good show of it. O\u2019Malley didn\u2019t wait long. In his opening statement, he rolled out the F-bomb, saying that America would defeat the challenge of ISIS but only \u201cif we hold true to the values and the freedoms that unite us,", + " which means we must never surrender them to terrorists, must never surrender our Americans values to racists, must never surrender to the fascist pleas of billionaires with big mouths.\u201d\n\nClinton was a bit more diplomatic, but only a bit. Asked if the millions of Americans who agree with Trump about his proposed ban on non-American Muslims entering the United States were wrong, she said, \u201cMr. Trump has a great capacity to use bluster and bigotry to inflame people and to make them think there are easy answers to very complex questions,\u201d she said. A bit later on, Clinton claimed that statements by Republicans, and especially Trump, fan the \u201cflames of radicalization.\u201d And she also said,", + " \u201cHe is becoming ISIS \u2019s best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.\u201d\n\nSanders said that Trump\u2019s popularity reflected the fact that Americans are fearful of another terrorist attack, but he also placed it in the context of stagnant wages, rising inequality, and widespread disaffection with the political process. \u201cSomebody like a Trump comes along and says, \u2018I know the answers. The answer is that all of the Mexicans, they\u2019re criminals and rapists. We\u2019ve got to hate the Mexicans. Those are your enemies. We hate all the Muslims, because all of the Muslims are terrorists.", + " We\u2019ve got to hate the Muslims.\u2019 Meanwhile, the rich get richer,\u201d Sanders said.\n\nOn Syria, all of the candidates agreed on the need to strike ISIS from the air and to raise a Sunni army to attack jihadi fighters on the ground. As usual, Clinton sounded the most gung ho. She expressed support for the Obama Administration\u2019s policy of sending special-operations forces and ground trainers to Iraq and Syria. She also repeated her call for the establishment of no-fly zones inside Syria, which she said wouldn\u2019t necessarily involve shooting down Russian and Syrian government planes because the zones would be \u201cde-conflicted\u201d\u2014whatever that means.\n\nSanders was far more skeptical about extending American involvement beyond bombing.", + " He quoted Jordan\u2019s King Abdullah II, who has said that Muslim troops should do the fighting, and (echoing Trump on this issue, strangely enough) he asserted that the United States could not fight ISIS and Assad at the same time. After expressing concern that \u201cSecretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be,\u201d Sanders went on: \u201cYes, we could get rid of Saddam Hussein, but that destabilized the entire region. Yes, we could get rid of Qaddafi, a terrible dictator, but that created a vacuum for ISIS. Yes, we could get rid of Assad tomorrow,", + " but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS.\u201d\n\nWhen the discussion turned to domestic issues, it produced more contrasts between Clinton and Sanders. In confirming her pledge not to raise taxes on any households making less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, Clinton said, \u201cI don\u2019t think we should be imposing new big programs that are going to raise middle-class families\u2019 taxes.\u201d Sanders, however, was quick to point out an important implication of this commitment, which would exempt all but the richest two or three per cent of American families from the possibility of paying more to the Treasury: it rules out the introduction of any new programs modelled along the lines of Social Security and Medicare,", + " which are financed by universal taxes.\n\n\u201cShe is disagreeing with F.D.R. on Social Security, L.B.J. on Medicare, and with the vast majority of progressive Democrats in the House and the Senate, who today are fighting to end the disgrace of the United States being the only major country on Earth that doesn\u2019t provide paid family and medical leave,\u201d Sanders said. He claimed that his own proposal for paid leave would cost the typical household just $1.61 a week. \u201cNow, you can say that\u2019s a tax on the middle class. It will provide three months paid family and medical leave for the working families of this country.", + " I think, Secretary Clinton, $1.61 a week is a pretty good investment,\u201d he said.\n\nClinton insisted that she could finance paid leave by raising taxes on the wealthy. In general, though, she didn\u2019t pay as much lip service to the anti-Wall Street, soak-the-rich wing of the Party as she had in previous debates. When ABC\u2019s David Muir asked her, \u201cShould corporate America love Hillary Clinton?\u201d she replied, \u201cEverybody should.\u201d It was a good line, and it drew laughs from the audience, but it also carried a political message. \u201cLook,\u201d Clinton went on, \u201cI have said I want to be the President for the struggling,", + " the striving, and the successful.\u201d Sanders weighed in with a much less modulated response: \u201cThe C.E.O.s of large multinationals may like Hillary,\u201d he said. \u201cThey ain\u2019t going to like me, and Wall Street is going to like me even less.\u201d\n\nWhen the yakking was done, most of the insta-pundits predicted that it wouldn\u2019t make much difference to the horse race. They may well be right, although I\u2019m not quite so sure. At time when many Democrats, particularly younger ones, have moved to the left, Clinton\u2019s efforts to appeal to the middle ground could conceivably cost her some votes in the primaries.", + " On the other hand, with the spectre of a President Trump or a President Ted Cruz looming over them, many Democrats may decide that it is time to unite behind the candidate whom the Republicans fear most.\n\nIn any case, Clinton, in her closing statement, seemed to have her eyes firmly set on the general election, or even beyond. Raising the possibility that, with a Republican President in the White House, the G.O.P. would privatize Social Security, overturn gay rights, and defund Planned Parenthood, she said, \u201cI know how important it is that we have a Democrat succeed President Obama in the White House. And I will do all that I can in this campaign to reach out and explain what I stand for and what I will do as President.\u201d She talked about her granddaughter and said that her mission in the White House would be \u201cto make sure every single child has a chance to live up to his or her God-given potential.\u201d Then she ended with a \u201cStar Wars\u201d joke:", + " \u201cThank you, good night, and may the force be with you.\u201d\n\nIt wasn\u2019t the most original quip, but it was timely. And compared with the vitriol and negativity that had been offered up at this week\u2019s G.O.P. debate it represented a welcome change of tone.\n" + ], + "length": 33099, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 87, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The soldier arrested for allegedly providing secret Pentagon material to Wikileaks may be undergoing more than one crucial transition. Boing Boing has analyzed an IM dialogue between busted Army PFC Bradley Manning, 22, and a hacker who turned Bradley into the feds for signs that the soldier is about to undergo a sex change. The effeminate-looking Manning says he wouldn't mind serving life except for \"having pictures of me plastered all over the world press ... as a boy.\" He adds: \"I just wanted enough time to figure myself out ... to be myself.\" Bradley also comments that \"the CPU is not made for this motherboard.\" Manning was reportedly about to be discharged from the army because of an unnamed \"adjustment disorder.\" The statements aren't conclusive, acknowledges Xeni Jardin in Boing Boing, but a representative in the transgender community says the dialogue is \"packed with with trans code words and lingo and analogies,\" particularly the glitchy \"motherboard\" comment. What does it all mean? Maybe nothing, But it could \"suggest the profile of a person clearly at a crossroads,\" who has \"taken a very troubling path,\" noted the transgender source.\n", + "docs": [ + "Was alleged Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning's crisis also one of personal identity?\n\nYesterday, I published a what purported to be more detailed versions of IM logs between alleged whistleblower US Army PFC Bradley Manning and hacker Adrian Lamo, revealing specific countries and issues implicated in military documents Manning is alleged to have leaked to Wikileaks.\n\nJournalists such as Washingtonian's Shane Harris have speculated that the \"adjustment disorder\" for which Manning was reportedly about to be discharged might indicate a \"Don't Ask, Don't Tell\" issue within the military.\n\nBut these logs suggest that Manning's state of crisis involved gender identity.\n\nShortly after I published the logs,", + " a comment appeared on my post:\n\n\"I had no idea Bradley Manning was a transsexual\n\nuntil I read this. That's got to put a fellow\n\ninto a strange headspace in the first place.\"\n\nI asked our moderators to not publish the comment, in keeping with our moderation guidelines. It appeared to be off-topic, and an attempt at a personal attack. But shortly after that comment appeared, someone I do not know who identified themselves as a transgender person tweeted at me:\n\nCongratulations. You just outed Manning.\n\nAs transgender? Two pings one after another, from apparently different readers? What was going on, and what could I have failed to see?", + " What could I have missed in the chat logs?\n\nI went back to the logs, to try and make sense...\n\n(1:11:54 PM) bradass87: and... its important that it gets out... i feel,\n\nfor some bizarre reason\n\n(1:12:02 PM) bradass87: it might actually change something\n\n(1:13:10 PM) bradass87: i just... dont wish to be a part of it... at least\n\nnot now... im not ready... i wouldn't mind going to prison for the rest of\n\nmy life, or being executed so much, if it wasn't for the possibility of\n\nhaving pictures of me... plastered all over the world press... as boy...\n\n(", + "1:14:11 PM) bradass87: i've totally lost my mind... i make no sense...\n\nthe CPU is not made for this motherboard...\n\n(1:14:42 PM) bradass87: s/as boy/as a boy\n\n(1:30:32 PM) bradass87: >sigh<\n\n(1:31:40 PM) bradass87: i just wanted enough time to figure myself out...\n\nto be myself... and be running around all the time, trying to meet someone\n\nelse's expectations\n\n(1:32:01 PM) bradass87: *and not be\n\n(", + "1:33:03 PM) bradass87: im just kind of drifting now...\n\n(1:34:11 PM) bradass87: waiting to redeploy to the US, be discharged...\n\nand figure out how on earth im going to transition\n\n(1:34:45 PM) bradass87: all while witnessing the world freak out as its\n\nmost intimate secrets are revealed\n\n(1:35:06 PM) bradass87: its such an awkward place to be in, emotionally\n\nand psychologically\n\nThe phrase around \"as a boy\" and the use of the verb \"transition,\" jumped out,", + " and reading through again, dots seemed to connect: is Manning struggling with gender identity? If these chat logs really are authentic, and if Manning wasn't punking Adrian Lamo, could Manning (\"bradass87\") have meant,\n\n\"I can accept prison or the death sentence as punishment for\n\nleaking these documents, I just can't accept the possibility\n\nof going through that before I've fully transitioned to being\n\nseen by others as female, which is how I already see myself.\"\n\n\n\nWhen I read the \"somewhat less redacted\" Lamo/Manning logs before publishing them on Boing Boing, I thought the use of the word \"transition\"", + " meant transitioning from military to civilian life -- nothing more. Manning said he was about to be discharged from the military. The \"as a boy\" line struck me as odd, but the notion that any of this had anything to do with being trans never entered my mind. But now, that passage suggested that the Boing Boing commenter and the person on Twitter might be on to something.\n\nThe phrases that seemed to support the commenters' theory that Manning was pre-transition transgender were redacted from Boing Boing. A note that a redaction had taken place was added to the post.\n\nNews reports have typically describe the logs as 'boasting,' but that seems far from a complete picture of Manning's tone in these exchanges.\n\nI don't have access to complete,", + " verifiably authentic chat logs between Manning and Lamo. None of us, probably not even the people who do have access to those logs, have a clue as to what Manning's motives might have been. While speculation runs wild, we don't know what, if anything, Manning actually leaked to Wikileaks.\n\nBut if the personal crisis suggested here were true, it would certainly broaden the scope of Manning's motives and state of mind, and reveal a wealth of internally conflicted human drives that recontextualize the story.\n\nWe still wouldn't know why Manning may have done what he is reported to have done. But we might have a better idea of factors contributing to Manning's distress,", + " and why he might \"confess\" to Lamo, who is reported to have then turned Manning in to authorities.\n\nWas Bradley Manning a transgender person unable to transition because s/he was active duty military? Did Manning, in isolation and distress while stationed in Iraq, reach out to Adrian Lamo in part because Manning believed Lamo \u2014whom the internet-searchable public record shows has been an active member of the LGBT community\u2014would be empathetic to a fellow geek going through a gender identity crisis?\n\nThere's no evidence suggesting this other than what we believe to be Manning's own ambigious IMs to Lamo, which may have have been a kind of gambit.\n\nWe can't very well ask Manning,", + " who is now reported to be in military detention in Kuwait.\n\nIn previous news accounts and interviews with Lamo, the hacker said that Manning simply found him after searching for the term \"wikileaks\" on Twitter, then initiating contact via instant message. That doesn't seem to make much sense.\n\nLamo is reported to have then identified himself to Manning as both a journalist and a minister, citing confidentiality obligations of both professions for \"sources\" or persons who \"confess.\" Perhaps this, combined with a sense of shared identity and kinship in the LGBT community, could have encouraged Manning to share more information than he might have otherwise.\n\n\"To me,", + " the most telling line is 'The CPU is not made for this motherboard,\" said a source with deep ties in the LGBT community.\n\n\"It's such an unusual phrase, and it's the one that jumps out at me most strongly, besides the use of the word 'transition,' which is very prevalent among trans people. We even use it as a verb. That portion of the exchange is pretty tightly packed with trans code words and lingo and analogies.\"\n\n\"It doesn't sound like it's just about gender identity, either, but also about Manning's identity as an aspiring hacker, as a military person, and this transition of social identity from military to civilian.", + " All of it suggests the profile of a person who is clearly at a crossroads in life. And they've unfortunately taken a very troubling path.\"\n\n(Rob Beschizza contributed to this report) ", + " Comments\n\nHi there, You\u2019ve done a great job. I will certainly digg it and personally recommend to my friends. I am sure they\u2019ll be benefited from this site. 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Jessica shopping frenzy does not belong to the girl, she likes to enjoy a leisurely way to try on clothes in the environment.\n\nLink Beijing: Palace Hotel\n\nbag bargains focus:", + " a world-class brand of seasonal goods, but also enjoy five-star shopping environment. discount store dressing room to be some period of long lines, very annoying.\n\nCarina Lau\n\nmop Location: Central, The Landmark\n\nshopping points: famous discount, the Carina is often the first time in the Landmark in Central to buy some clothes. waiting there almost every day, paparazzi photographed celebrities visiting the shop shapes and sizes. If there were paparazzi be exposed Shu Qi in the Landmark bought the former boyfriend Dawn LV purse.\n\nlink Beijing: International Trade\n\nbag bargains focus: mature women have the economic strength of the F1 layer of the LV,", + "cheap jordan shoes, Max & Mara and other big discount, absolutely immense interest.\n\nShirley\n\n1. Fast shipping,Best quaity products,\n\n2. 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Shoes Street stores selling NIKE, ADIDAS and so on of the newest sports and leisure shoes are usually sold at prices of seven Bazhe it off for the birth does not know how frugal is Ekin Cheng It is a very economical choice, so he does not shoot as long as it will go to buy a few pairs of sneakers Street favorite shoes home.\n\nlink Beijing: SOGO Oriental Plaza Sports 100\n\nbag bargains Focus: Sports class clothing. Movement like you, discount,mbt shoes be sure to buy some more.\n\nShe Poetry Man\n\nraids Location:", + " Harbour City, Tsim Sha Tsui shopping\n\npoints: Poetry Man She always busy filming, not so ordinary girl visit this store a lot of time, so she likes to Harbour City, you can also see the works of famous fashion designers and international famous brand stores, discount focus when, against a lot of things to be able to Amoy.\n\nLink Beijing: World all Stores\n\nbag bargains focus: people who do not have much time, the best brands on all of this high place,replica Rolex, one will be able to scrape together almost.\n\n1. Fast shipping,Best quaity products,\n\n2. Payment Method : Accept Paypal,", + "Western Union,Money Gram,\n\n3. and give free shipping, Accept the smallest order,\n\n4. EMS,DHL,TNT,FEDEX etc.\n\nWelcome into our WEB: http://www.cheapsneakercn.com\n\nor http://www.newsneakerswholesale.com\n\nPosted by: sneakercn, Jun 29, 2011 03:33:56 AM 7 At the end of the air filled with the desire to shop, windows everywhere Sale, the people involved in purchasing again and again the tide. As long as you look accurate, it is cheaper to buy a variety of favorite long can the good goods.", + " can be concentrated in such raids without reckoning wanton procurement, but also easy to lose, so their reduced to \"junk woman\".\n\nshopping, celebrities have always charge the former, experience is particularly rich. The stars of the shopping in Hong Kong after discount on large numbers of summer vacation in Hong Kong were more strongly into China. But the star, after all, not a fashion designer, was at a higher level, the reason gold, this issue also invite more place the most active designers and fashion people, personally surgeon, to help you sort out the change of the fashion pulse of new and old, peeling silkworm spinning,", + " out of season rush to buy discount focus and dedication from their losses and gains experience.\n\nCecilia\n\nraids Location: Times Square, Causeway Bay shopping\n\nfocus: the rebate, is cost-effective to buy cosmetics. In addition, Times Square, selling all kinds of girls clothing all year round, it is suitable for Cecilia\u2019s style.\n\nlink Beijing: China Friendship Department Store < br> bag bargains key: even if a discount, the top big things, or very expensive. Therefore, learning to Cecilia, a down to meet their own tastes, purchasing power of local girls shopping for their installed it.\n\nVision Xuan\n\n1.", + " Fast shipping,Best quaity products,\n\n2. Payment Method : Accept Paypal,Western Union,Money Gram,\n\n3. and give free shipping, Accept the smallest order,\n\n4. EMS,DHL,TNT,FEDEX etc.\n\nWelcome into our WEB: http://www.cheapsneakercn.com\n\nor http://www.newsneakerswholesale.com\n\nraids Location: Pacific Place shopping\n\nfocus: Jessica, said: \"buying things, the mood is most important, a discount is still followed. discount when the mind to keep the wrong reason will not buy a shirt. \"seasonal, the Pacific Place and other brands such as D & G will hit 5 discount,", + " shoppers are crazy. Jessica shopping frenzy does not belong to the girl, she likes to enjoy a leisurely way to try on clothes in the environment.\n\nLink Beijing: Palace Hotel\n\nbag bargains focus: a world-class brand of seasonal goods, but also enjoy five-star shopping environment. discount store dressing room to be some period of long lines, very annoying.\n\nCarina Lau\n\nmop Location: Central, The Landmark\n\nshopping points: famous discount, the Carina is often the first time in the Landmark in Central to buy some clothes. waiting there almost every day, paparazzi photographed celebrities visiting the shop shapes and sizes.", + " If there were paparazzi be exposed Shu Qi in the Landmark bought the former boyfriend Dawn LV purse.\n\nlink Beijing: International Trade\n\nbag bargains focus: mature women have the economic strength of the F1 layer of the LV,cheap jordan shoes, Max & Mara and other big discount, absolutely immense interest.\n\nShirley\n\n1. Fast shipping,Best quaity products,\n\n2. Payment Method : Accept Paypal,Western Union,Money Gram,\n\n3. and give free shipping, Accept the smallest order,\n\n4. EMS,DHL,TNT,FEDEX etc.\n\nWelcome into our WEB: http://www.cheapsneakercn.com\n\nor http://www.newsneakerswholesale.com\n\nraids Location:", + " City Plaza shopping\n\npoints: Shirley admitted that discount when buying more for the family, prefer the design of flu in some famous small jewelry, see the chic, will be more to buy some souvenirs. Shirley that time to the mid-range priced discount shopping, more affordable, cost-effective.\n\nlink Beijing: Oriental Plaza\n\nbag bargains focus :louis vuitton handbags There are many new jewelry store in particular is worth watching.nike shoes\n\nTsang\n\nraids Location: Causeway Bay shopping Crawford\n\nkey: Do not look to see Eric Tsang, in fact, but his authentic \"human fashion. \"discount in August each year seven seasons,", + " Crawford boutique often as low as 6 fold, Eric Tsang usually discounted selection of men\u2019s time,replica IWC, including attending events to wear suits, usually wear casual clothes when shopping and so on.\n\nLink Beijing: Lufthansa\n\nbag bargains focus: Lufthansa Men do not fancy, but definitely has the quality of content, clothing brands such as BOSS, Xenia class brand, should be the successful man not to be missed Taobao focus.\n\nAnthony Wong\n\nraids Location: Causeway Bay SOGO SOGO shopping\n\nfocus: shopping is clearly not just a small girl\u2019s patent, even if it rough as Anthony Wong\u2019s \"character man\"", + " is also keen to Shopping, I once SOGO SOGO Department Store in Causeway Bay and saw Anthony Wong, accompanied by the Assistant buy clothes. He admitted that from time to time the discount SOGO activities is to attract one of the reasons he went. Anthony Wong preference with punk-style clothing, hand-painted T-shirts and with nail jeans will let Anthony Wong put it down.\n\nlink Beijing: SOGO, Parkson\n\nbag bargains key: do not discount timing activities,mbt shoes give you a lot of value for money windfall.\n\nEkin Cheng\n\nmop Location: Sai Yee Street, (Shoes Street)\n\nshopping focus:", + " not so in love with actress and cosmetics to buy pretty dresses everywhere, like the movement of Ekin Cheng usually buy more emphasis on sports and leisure shoes, so Sneaker Street in Mong Kok he must be free to visit the place. Shoes Street stores selling NIKE, ADIDAS and so on of the newest sports and leisure shoes are usually sold at prices of seven Bazhe it off for the birth does not know how frugal is Ekin Cheng It is a very economical choice, so he does not shoot as long as it will go to buy a few pairs of sneakers Street favorite shoes home.\n\nlink Beijing: SOGO Oriental Plaza Sports 100\n\nbag bargains Focus:", + " Sports class clothing. 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As part of a transit and highway funding bill currently being negotiated in Congress, the provision would allow the feds to revoke, deny, or limit a person's passport if he or she owes more than $50,000 in \"seriously delinquent tax debt\" (including interest and penalties), CNNMoney reports. Only people against whom the IRS has filed a lien or levy would be subject to lose their passport under the provision, which will take effect Jan. 1 if it passes, and the State Department could issue exceptions for individuals contesting the tax bill or working with the IRS (e.g., setting up an installment plan), as well as for those traveling for humanitarian or emergency purposes. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the provision will raise nearly $400 million over 10 years, the Wall Street Journal reports. Although it may seem odd to tie important travel documents to a beef with the taxman, Forbes compares it to having a pile of unpaid parking tickets and not being able to register a car or renew a driver's license. An LA attorney who thinks the measure is too harsh tells CNN that $50,000 can build up quickly and that there may still be holdups as higher-ups deem whether a situation qualifies as an emergency, for example. For Americans living overseas, a new foreign tax act could complicate matters further. A lawyer who advises a US expatriate group tells the Journal that \"Americans abroad need their passports for many routine activities of daily life, such as banking, registering in a hotel, or registering a child for school, and mistakes could be disastrous.\" A DC accounting firm partner agrees, noting if the measure passes, \"it will be imperative for Americans traveling \u2026 or living abroad to pay attention to IRS notices\u2014assuming they receive them.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "When you owe the IRS tens of thousands of dollars in past-due taxes, you can expect to owe big penalties and interest.\n\nAnd soon you could even lose your U.S. passport.\n\nLawmakers are in the final stages of negotiation over a bill to provide funding for U.S. highways and transit programs. One provision in it would let the federal government revoke, deny or limit a U.S. citizen's passport if the person owes more than $50,000 in \"seriously delinquent tax debt,\" including penalties and interest.\n\nIt would only apply to those people whom the IRS has filed a lien or levy against and who have not yet worked out a repayment plan to satisfy the debt.", + " An exception could be made for anyone who is actively disputing their case or who needs to travel for emergency or humanitarian purposes.\n\nShould the provision pass next month, it would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2016.\n\nRelated: Millions of Americans might need passports to fly domestic\n\nYou may wonder what past-due taxes and passports have to do with funding transportation infrastructure. The answer is pretty much nothing, except that the measure is estimated to raise nearly $400 million over a decade. And that can defray some of the bill's cost since lawmakers decided, among other things, not to raise the federal gas tax.\n\n\"This is going to have an extraordinary impact [in terms of getting people to pay up],\" said Los Angeles-based tax lawyer Dennis Brager,", + " a former IRS trial attorney who thinks the measure is too draconian.\n\nFor starters, Brager said, it's not that hard to owe $50,000 because penalties and interest can add up very quickly.\n\nSecond, people faced with a big tax bill tend to get overwhelmed and postpone dealing with it for awhile. But the IRS typically issues a levy or lien six months after sending the initial bill. So even if a delinquent taxpayer eventually does come forward to set up a repayment plan, they may lose their passport for a time anyway.\n\nAnd third, Brager said, while the measure allows for certain emergency exceptions -- perhaps letting someone travel to be with an ill parent in another country -- who's to say how long it will take the State Department to rule on that exception?\n\nRelated:", + " You've never seen IRS penalties like these\n\nOne group who may be most vulnerable to the provision are the roughly 8 million Americans living abroad, who rely on their passports far more heavily than their domestically based compatriots.\n\n\"Their financial affairs are, typically, far more complex than their counterparts back home,\" said Nigel Greene in a statement. Greene runs the deVere Group, one of the world's largest independent financial advisory companies.\n\nThe relatively new Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) -- which requires other countries' financial institutions to report back to the IRS on accounts held by U.S. taxpayers -- may add to that complexity,", + " Greene added.\n\n\"I would urge U.S. citizens abroad... to ensure that their financial affairs are in order and compliant by the New Year,\" he said. ", + " Congress is poised to enact a law denying or revoking passports for U.S. citizens who haven\u2019t paid their taxes.\n\nUnder a new law expected to take effect in January, the State Department will block Americans with \u201cseriously delinquent\u201d tax debt from receiving new passports and will be allowed to rescind existing passports of people who fall into that category. The list of affected taxpayers will be compiled by the Internal Revenue Service using a threshold of $50,000 of unpaid federal taxes, including penalties and interest,... ", + " Array ( [actionDate] => 2015-07-30 [displayText] => Passed/agreed to in Senate: Passed Senate with an amendment and an amendment to the Title by Yea-Nay Vote. 65 - 34. Record Vote Number: 260. [externalActionCode] => 17000 [description] => Passed Senate )\n\nArray ( [actionDate] => 2015-01-06 [displayText] => Passed/agreed to in House: On motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: (2/3 required): 412 - 0 (Roll no.", + " 7).(text: CR H29) [externalActionCode] => 8000 [description] => Passed House )\n\nArray ( [actionDate] => 2015-02-12 [displayText] => Committee on Finance. Reported by Senator Hatch without amendment. With written report No. 114-3. [externalActionCode] => 14000 [description] => Introduced )\n\nHere are the steps for Status of Legislation:\n\nThis bill has the status Became Law\n\nThere are 5 summaries for H.R.22. Public Law (12/04/2015) Passed Senate amended (07/30/2015) Reported to Senate without amendment (02/", + "12/2015) Passed House without amendment (01/06/2015) Introduced in House (01/06/2015) Bill summaries are authored by CRS\n\nShown Here:\n\nPublic Law No: 114-94 (12/04/2015)\n\nFixing America's Surface Transportation Act or the FAST Act\n\nDIVISION A--SURFACE TRANSPORTATION\n\n(Sec. 1002) Directs the Department of Transportation (DOT) to reduce the amount apportioned for a surface transportation program, project, or activity for FY2016 by amounts apportioned or allocated under any extension of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-", + "21) for the period beginning October 1, 2015, and ending upon enactment of this Act.\n\nTITLE I--FEDERAL-AID HIGHWAYS\n\nSubtitle A--Authorizations and Programs\n\n(Sec. 1101) Reauthorizes through FY2020:\n\ncertain core federal-aid highway programs;\n\nthe transportation infrastructure finance and innovation program;\n\nthe federal lands, tribal transportation, and federal lands transportation and access programs;\n\nthe territorial and Puerto Rico highway program; and\n\nnationally significant freight and highway projects.\n\nRequires the expenditure of at least 10% of amounts made available for federal-aid highways and public transportation programs through small business concerns owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.\n\nDirects states to compile annual lists of small disadvantaged business enterprises according to minimum uniform criteria established by DOT.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1102) Prescribes obligation ceilings for certain federal-aid highway and highway safety construction programs, with specified exceptions.\n\nPrescribes requirements, including a formula, and restrictions for certain FY2016-FY2020 distributions from the obligation limitation for federal-aid highways.\n\nDirects DOT to redistribute to the states any federal-aid highway program funds that, because of any imposed obligation limitation, will not be allocated or otherwise made available to them for obligation for surface transportation program projects.\n\n(Sec. 1104) Authorizes appropriations through FY2020 for Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) administrative expenses.\n\nRevises and renames the surface transportation program as the surface transportation block grant program (STBGP)", + " (as established by section 1109 of this Act).\n\nRequires DOT to set-aside specified amounts of a state's base apportionment of core program funds for the national highway freight program and metropolitan transportation planning.\n\nDirects DOT also to reserve certain amounts to states for:\n\nthe national highway performance program for FY2019 and FY2020, and\n\nthe STBGP through FY2020.\n\n(Sec. 1105) Authorizes DOT to make competitive grants to a state or group of states, a metropolitan planning organization (MPO) that serves an urbanized area with a population of more than than 200,000 individuals,", + " a unit of local government or group of local governments, or other specified entities to furnish financial assistance for nationally significant freight and highway projects.\n\nRequires DOT to reserve out of such grant amounts for each fiscal year:\n\n10% for small projects, and\n\nat least 25% for projects in rural areas.\n\nMakes the maximum federal share of project costs 60%.\n\n(Sec. 1106) Revises requirements for the national highway performance program.\n\nAuthorizes DOT, upon request, to allow a state to use its apportionment of national highway performance program funds to pay subsidy and administrative costs of Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA)", + " program secured loans, loan guarantees, or credit for surface transportation projects for a state, local government, public authority, public-private partnership, or any other legal entity.\n\nAllows a state's apportionment to be obligated for projects:\n\nfor the reconstruction or rehabilitation of federal-aid highway bridges (non-National Highway System bridges), and\n\nto reduce the risk of failure of critical transportation infrastructure.\n\n(Sec. 1107) Revises requirements for the emergency relief fund program.\n\nTreats as an eligible expense for emergency relief program funding the costs of disaster debris removal for projects for the repair or reconstruction of federal-aid highways on tribal transportation facilities,", + " federal lands transportation facilities, or other federally-owned roads that are open to public travel.\n\n(Sec. 1108) Revises and reauthorizes requirements for the set-aside of highway safety improvement program funds for states for the same period for the elimination of hazards and the installation of protective devices at railway-highway crossings.\n\n(Sec. 1109) Establishes in DOT an surface transportation block grant program (STBGP).\n\nRequires states to obligate for each fiscal year specified graduated percentages of apportioned funds in:\n\nurbanized areas with a population of over 200,000, and\n\nrural areas with a population greater than 5,", + "000.\n\nDirects DOT to reserve certain amounts of the state apportionment of funds for each fiscal year for surface transportation projects or activities or transportation alternatives projects.\n\nRequires states to obligate an amount of reserved funds for each fiscal year equal to the amount apportioned to the state for the surface transportation program for FY2009 for recreational trails projects.\n\n(Sec. 1110) Reduces the amount DOT must deduct from FHWA administrative funds each fiscal year for highway use tax evasion projects.\n\n(Sec. 1111) Prescribes requirements for the bundling of two or more similar projects for the replacement or repair of structurally deficient bridges.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1112) Revises formulae for certain allocations of funds to states for construction of ferry boats and ferry terminal facilities.\n\nReauthorizes the program through FY2020. Certain funds are made available for the National Ferry Database.\n\n(Sec. 1113) Revises the highway safety improvement program.\n\nMakes eligible as highway safety improvement projects any installation of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication equipment, pedestrian hybrid beacons, roadway improvements that provide separation between pedestrians and motor vehicles, and other types of infrastructure safety projects.\n\nAuthorizes states to elect not to collect certain data on unpaved public roads regarding the model inventory of roadways if certain requirements are met.\n\nEliminates the definition of \"state highway safety improvement programs.\"\n\nRequires DOT to review best practices for implementation of roadway safety infrastructure improvements to reduce the number or severity of commercial motor vehicle accidents.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1114) Revises congestion mitigation and air quality improvement (CMAQ) program requirements.\n\nAuthorizes states to obligate the apportionment of CMAQ program funds for projects for the installation of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication equipment in nonattainment or maintenance areas for particulate matter.\n\nDeclares that requirements for priority use of congestion mitigation and air quality project funds in PM2.5 nonattainment or maintenance areas shall not apply in any state with a population density of 80 or fewer persons per square mile of land area if certain criteria are met.\n\nAuthorizes states or metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) also to elect to obligate PM2.", + "5 priority funds to the most cost-effective CMAQ projects to reduce emissions from port-related landside nonroad or on-road equipment that operates within a PM2.5 nonattainment or maintenance area.\n\n(Sec. 1115) Increases the authorization of appropriations for the Puerto Rico highway and territorial highway programs.\n\n(Sec. 1116) Revises national freight program requirements.\n\nRenames the national freight network the National Highway Freight Network.\n\nAuthorizes the MPO representative in an urbanized area with a population of 500,000 or more to designate a public road within the borders of that area of the state as a critical urban freight corridor.", + " Authorizes the state to do the same for an urbanized area with a population under 500,000.\n\nRequires states that have not met, or made significant progress toward meeting, certain performance targets related to freight movement of the state to report biennially to DOT on actions the state will undertake to achieve the targets.\n\nPrescribes requirements for the use of apportioned funds, including development of intelligent freight transportation systems. The term \"intelligent freight transportation system\" means:\n\ninnovative or intelligent technological transportation systems, infrastructure, or facilities; or\n\ncommunications or information processing systems that improve the efficiency or safety of freight movements on the federal-", + "aid highway system.\n\n(Sec. 1117) Revises the federal lands and tribal transportation programs.\n\nRequires entities carrying out a project under the tribal transportation program to report annually to DOT and to the Department of the Interior on specified project data.\n\nDirects DOT to:\n\nreport to Congress on the quality of transportation safety data collected by states, counties, and Indian tribes for transportation systems and its relevance to improving the collection and sharing of data on crashes on Indian reservations; and\n\nidentify and evaluate in a separate study any options for improving safety on public roads on Indian reservations.\n\n(Sec. 1118) Revises funding requirements for the tribal transportation program to:\n\nreduce from 6%", + " to 5% of authorized program funds the maximum amount that either DOT or Interior may use for certain administrative expenses, and\n\nincrease from 2% to 3% of such funds the allocation for specified bridge projects.\n\n(Sec. 1119) Extends the federal lands transportation program and its funds allocations to the transportation systems of Interior's Bureau of Land Management.\n\n(Sec. 1120) Authorizes DOT to conduct cooperative research and technology deployment in coordination with federal land management agencies for transportation planning of federal lands and tribal transportation facilities projects.\n\nRequires DOT to combine and use no more than 5% of federal lands transportation program and federal lands access program funds for transportation planning activities for federal lands transportation facilities,", + " federal lands access transportation facilities, and other federally-owned roads open to public travel.\n\nAllows the use of such funds also for:\n\ninspections of federally-owned bridges even if not included in the national federal lands transportation facility inventory, and\n\ntransportation planning activities carried out by federal land management agencies.\n\n(Sec. 1121) Directs DOT to establish a tribal transportation self-governance program via a compact with an Indian tribe, subject to negotiated annual written funding arrangements with the tribe.\n\nRequires any funding agreement to authorize the Indian tribe to plan, conduct, consolidate, administer, and receive full tribal share funding, tribal transit formula funding, and funding to tribes from DOT-administered discretionary and competitive grants for all programs,", + " services, functions, and activities to carry out tribal transportation programs and DOT-administered programs, services, functions, and activities.\n\n(Sec. 1122) Directs DOT to issue guidance on working with state departments of transportation that request assistance from FHWA division offices to:\n\nreview principal arterials within a state that were added to the National Highway System (NHS) as of October 1, 2012, and\n\nidentify any necessary functional classification changes to rural and urban principal arterials.\n\nRequires DOT to:\n\nreview the NHS modification process, and\n\nensure that a state may submit requests to modify the NHS by withdrawing a road from it.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1123) Directs DOT to establish a program to fund construction, reconstruction, or rehabilitation of nationally significant federal lands and tribal transportation projects.\n\nAuthorizes appropriations through FY2020.\n\nSubtitle B--Planning and Performance Management\n\n(Sec. 1201) Revises requirements for metropolitan transportation planning.\n\nPrescribes requirements for selection of MPO officials or representatives.\n\nAuthorizes MPOs serving a transportation management area to develop a congestion management plan that includes projects and strategies that will be considered in the MPO's transportation improvement program.\n\nTreats the Bi-State MPO Region as:\n\nan MPO,\n\na transportation management area, and\n\nan urbanized area (comprising a population of 145,", + "000 in California and a population of 65,000 in Nevada).\n\nPrescribes formulae for the suballocation of STBGP and transportation alternatives program funds for a fiscal year for the Bi-State MPO Region.\n\n(Sec. 1202) Revises requirements for statewide and nonmetropolitan transportation planning.\n\nSubtitle C--Acceleration of Project Delivery\n\n(Sec. 1301)Prescribes requirements for DOT in highway and public transportation planning to preserve certain historic sites, especially by aligning, to the maximum extent practicable, specified preservation requirements with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) and any avoidance alternative analysis it requires.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1303) Exempts from consideration for parkland, wildlife and waterfowl refuge, and historic site preservation purposes any common post-1945 concrete or steel bridge or culvert already exempt from individual review of its effect on any historic property.\n\n(Sec. 1304) Prescribes procedures for accelerating the project delivery decisionmaking process regarding:\n\nenvironmental review of highway, public transportation, or multimodal projects;\n\ncoordination among relevant agencies in meeting project deadlines;\n\npublic availability of the status and progress of projects requiring compliance with NEPA review and other federal, state, or local approval;\n\nintegration of planning and environmental review of projects between the lead agency (DOT)", + " and participating federal and non-federal agencies;\n\nadoption of departmental environmental assessments or environmental impact statements of other operating administrations; and\n\nfederal coordination of the environmental review and permitting process for transportation projects.\n\nGrants DOT, as federal lead agency in the environmental review process for a highway, public transportation capital, or multimodal project, authority and responsibility to consider and respond to comments received from participating federal and non-federal agencies on matters within their special expertise or jurisdiction.\n\n(Sec. 1305) Revises requirements for the integration of planning and environmental review.\n\n(Sec. 1306) Changes from discretionary to mandatory the authority of federal agencies responsible for the environmental review of a transportation project to give substantial weight to recommendations in the programmatic mitigation plans of states and MPOs.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1307) Requires DOT, upon state request, to give technical assistance to a state assuming responsibility for making categorical exclusion determinations for highway or related projects.\n\n(A \"categorical exclusion\" under NEPA is a category of actions which do not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the human environment and which have been found to have no such effect in procedures adopted by a federal agency in implementing environmental regulations and for which, therefore, neither an Environmental Assessment nor an Environmental Impact Statement is required.)\n\n(Sec. 1308) Revises requirements for termination of a state from the surface transportation project delivery program, increasing from 30 to 120 days the time DOT must give a state to take corrective action.\n\nAuthorizes DOT,", + " in cooperation with state officials, to carry out education, training, peer-exchange, and other initiatives to assist states in developing capacity building for environmental review of projects under NEPA.\n\n(Sec. 1309) Directs DOT to establish a pilot program to authorize states to conduct environmental review of projects under state laws instead of NEPA.\n\n(Sec. 1310) Revises requirements for application of categorical exclusions for multimodal projects, including acceleration of decisionmaking in environmental reviews.\n\n(Sec. 1312) Authorizes a public entity receiving DOT financial assistance for one or more projects, or for a program of projects, for a public purpose to request DOT to allow it to furnish funds to federal agencies,", + " including DOT, state agencies, and Indian tribes participating in the environmental planning and review process for the project, projects, or program, but only to support activities that directly and meaningfully contribute to expediting and improving permitting and review processes.\n\n(Sec. 1313) Directs DOT, in coordination with federal agencies likely to have substantive review or approval responsibilities under federal law, to develop a coordinated and concurrent environmental review and permitting process for transportation projects, meeting specified criteria, when initiating an environmental impact statement.\n\n(Sec. 1314) Amends MAP-21 to require inflation adjustments to specified dollar amounts indicating the maximum federal assistance to certain federal-", + "aid highway projects which must be categorically excluded from the requirements relating to environmental assessments or environmental impact statements.\n\n(Sec. 1315) Directs DOT to develop a template programmatic agreement with states that provides for efficient procedures for evaluating categorical exclusion determinations.\n\n(Sec. 1316) Directs DOT to:\n\nallow states to assume DOT responsibilities for project design, plans, specifications, estimates, contract awards, and inspection of projects, on both a project-specific and programmatic basis; and\n\nrecommend to Congress legislation to permit the assumption of additional authorities by states, including about real estate acquisition and project design.\n\n(Sec. 1317)", + " Directs DOT to examine ways to modernize and improve the NEPA environmental review process for federal-aid highway projects.\n\n(Sec. 1318) Directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to assess progress made under this Act, MAP-21, and the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) to accelerate the delivery of federal-aid highway and highway safety construction projects and public transportation capital projects by streamlining the environmental review and permitting process.\n\nSubtitle D--Miscellaneous\n\n(Sec. 1401) Prohibits, through FY2020,", + " the use of a state's apportionment of highway safety improvement program funds to purchase, operate, or maintain an automated traffic enforcement system, except any located in school zones.\n\nDefines \"automated traffic enforcement system\" to mean any camera that captures an image of a vehicle for purposes of traffic law enforcement.\n\n(Sec. 1402) Requires DOT to compile and make available on the DOT public website any data on the amounts of federal-aid highway program funds made available under this title for each fiscal year.\n\n(Sec. 1403) Requires DOT to make available certain additional funds deposited into the HTF Highway Account or Mass Transit Account for federal-", + "aid highway programs.\n\nReauthorizes appropriations through FY2020.\n\n(Sec. 1404) Requires a design for new construction or rehabilitation of NHS highways to take into account, in addition to other specified criteria, the environment and safety for other modes of transportation, as well as cost savings by utilizing flexibility in current design guidance and regulations.\n\n(Sec. 1405) Requires any requested or required justification report for a project that would add a point of access to, or exit from, the Interstate System to include new or modified freeway-to-crossroad interchanges inside a transportation management area.\n\n(Sec. 1407) Makes eligible for funding under the National Highway Performance Program and the Surface Transportation Program any projects for the installation of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication equipment.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1409) Declares that, for Interstate System (IS) vehicle weight limitation purposes, any vehicle carrying fluid milk products shall be considered a load that cannot be easily dismantled or divided, and so are eligible for a special permit.\n\n(Sec. 1410) Exempts certain heavy-duty tow and recovery vehicles traveling on federal highways from federal vehicle weight limitations.\n\nAllows federal truck weight limitations to remain in place on specified highways in Texas and Arkansas.\n\nDirects DOT to waive federal vehicle weight limitations for certain logging vehicles operating on IS highways in Wisconsin and Minnesota.\n\nProhibits states from enforcing against an emergency vehicle a vehicle weight limit (up to a maximum vehicle weight of 86,", + "000 pounds) of less than:\n\n24,000 pounds on a single steering axle,\n\n33,500 pounds on a single drive axle,\n\n62,000 pounds on a tandem axle, or\n\n52,000 pounds on a tandem rear drive steer axle.\n\nDefines the term \"emergency vehicle\" to mean a vehicle designed to be used under emergency conditions to:\n\ntransport personnel and equipment, and\n\nsupport the suppression of fires and mitigation of other hazardous situations.\n\nAllows natural gas vehicles to exceed any vehicle weight limit (up to a maximum vehicle weight of 82,000 pounds) by an amount equal to the difference between:\n\nthe weight of the vehicle attributable to the vehicle's natural gas tank and fueling system,", + " and\n\nthe weight of a comparable diesel tank and fueling system.\n\n(Sec. 1411)Revises requirements for the toll roads, bridges, tunnels, and ferries program.\n\nRequires over-the-road buses that serve the public to have access to toll facilities equal to that of public transportation buses.\n\nDefines the term \"over-the-road bus\" to mean a bus characterized by an elevated passenger deck located over a baggage compartment.\n\nRevises certain exceptions to high occupancy vehicle (HOV) facility requirements.\n\nAuthorizes the public authority to allow a public transportation vehicle use of HOV facilities if it provides equal access for all public transportation vehicles and over-the-road buses serving the public.\n\nAuthorizes the public authority also to allow use of HOV facilities by:\n\nvehicles if a toll is paid and the authority ensures that over-the-road buses serving the public have the same access as public transportation buses,", + " and\n\nalternative fuel vehicles and new qualified plug-in electric drive motor vehicles provided certain requirements are met.\n\nRequires a public authority to submit to DOT for approval, within 180 days after a HOV facility is considered degraded, a plan to bring the facility back into compliance with the minimum average operating speed. (\"Degraded\" means failure of vehicles operating on HOV lanes to maintain minimum average operating speed 90% of the time over a consecutive 180-day period during morning and/or evening weekday peak hour periods.)\n\nAmends the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century to revise requirements for the interstate system reconstruction and rehabilitation pilot program. Prescribes requirements for final approval of state applications to collect tolls on highways,", + " bridges, or tunnels for projects for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of interstate highway corridors.\n\n(Sec. 1412) Authorizes payment from the state apportionment of federal-aid highway program funds for projects at railway-highway grade crossings to eliminate hazards posed by blocked grade crossings due to idling trains.\n\n(Sec. 1413) Directs DOT to designate national electric vehicle charging and hydrogen, propane, and natural gas fueling corridors that identify the need for electric vehicle charging, hydrogen fueling, propane fueling, and natural gas fueling infrastructures at strategic locations along major national highways.\n\nAuthorizes the General Services Administration (GSA)", + " to install (on a reimbursable basis) battery recharging stations in GSA-owned parking areas for vehicles of GSA employees, tenant federal agencies, and other authorized individuals. Requires the GSA or the federal agency the charge fees to individuals to use such stations.\n\n(Sec. 1414) Revises federal requirements for minimum state penalties for repeat offenders for driving while intoxicated or driving under the influence.\n\nAdds a 24-7 sobriety program to criteria for state repeat offender laws.\n\nSpecifies exceptions to the requirement of an ignition interlock device on a vehicle of an individual with restricted driving privileges\n\n(Sec. 1415)", + " Authorizes as an eligible cost for a federal-aid highway construction project the cost of improving habitat and forage for pollinators (i.e., bees, birds, bats, Monarch and other butterflies) on rights-of-way adjacent to such highways.\n\nRequires DOT, in conjunction with willing states, to carry out programs that encourage:\n\nintegrated vegetation management practices on roadsides and other transportation rights-of-way, including reduced mowing; and\n\nthe development of habitat and forage for pollinators through planting of native forbs and grasses, including noninvasive, native milkweed species.\n\n(Sec. 1416) Amends the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA)", + " to revise the high priority Raleigh-Norfolk Corridor of the NHS between Raleigh, North Carolina, and Norfolk, Virginia, to include Rocky Mount, Williamston, and Elizabeth City, North Carolina.\n\nIncludes Texas State Highway 44 from United States Route 59 at Freer, Texas, to Texas State Highway 358 as part of the high priority Lower Rio Grande Valley Corridor of the NHS in Texas.\n\nDesignates as a high priority corridor on the NHS, as part of Interstate Route I-11, the Intermountain West Corridor from the vicinity of Las Vegas, Nevada, extending north along U.S. Route 95, terminating at Interstate Route 80.\n\nU.S.", + " Route 117/Interstate Route 795 from U.S. Route 70 in Goldsboro, Wayne County, North Carolina, to Interstate Route 40 west of Faison, Sampson County, North Carolina;\n\nU.S. Route 70 from its intersection with Interstate Route 40 in Garner, Wake County, North Carolina, to the Port at Morehead City, Carteret County, North Carolina;\n\nSonoran Corridor along State Route 410 connecting Interstate Route 19 and Interstate Route 10 south of the Tucson International Airport;\n\nthe Central Texas Corridor commencing at the logical terminus of Interstate 10, and generally following portions of U.S.", + " Route 190 eastward passing in the vicinity Fort Hood, Killeen, Belton, Temple, Bryan, College Station, Huntsville, Livingston, Woodville, and to the logical terminus of Texas Highway 63 at the Sabine River Bridge at Burrs Crossing;\n\nInterstate Route 81 in New York from its intersection with Interstate Route 86 to the United States-Canadian border;\n\nInterstate Route 70 from Denver, Colorado, to Salt Lake City, Utah;\n\nOregon 99W Newberg-Dundee Bypass Route between Newberg, Oregon, and Dayton, Oregon; and\n\nInterstate Route 205 in Oregon from its intersection with Interstate Route 5 to the Columbia River.\n\nDeclares as high priority corridors on the NHS as well as segments of the IS:\n\nAmends the SAFETEA-LU Technical Corrections Act of 2008 to direct DOT to designate as a future Interstate Route 69 Spur,", + " the Audubon Parkway between Henderson, Kentucky, and Owensboro, Kentucky, and as a future Interstate Route 65 and 66 Spur, the William H. Natcher Parkway between Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Owensboro, Kentucky.\n\n(Sec. 1417) Makes eligible for work zone safety training program grants the development, updating, and delivery of training courses on guard rail installation, maintenance, and inspection.\n\n(Sec. 1418) Amends MAP-21 to direct DOT to set-aside for each of FY2016-FY2020 a specified amount of highway safety improvement program funds before making any apportionment for FHWA administrative expenses.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1419) Amends ISTEA to repeal the requirement for annual reports to Congress on continuing studies of the fundamental chemical and physical properties of petroleum asphalts and modified asphalts used in highway construction.\n\nAmends SAFETEA-LU to repeal the requirement for an annual report to Congress on the express lanes demonstration program.\n\n(Sec. 1420) Authorizes DOT to exercise all existing flexibilities under and exceptions to the requirements for federal-aid highway projects and other DOT administered requirements, in whole or in part.\n\n(Sec. 1421) Requires DOT, in cooperation with states, to develop guidance that encourages the use of programmatic approaches to project delivery,", + " expedited procurement techniques, and other best practices for states and the FHWA to facilitate the timely expenditure of federal funds for federal-aid highway projects.\n\n(Sec. 1422) Directs the FHWA to commission the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences to study the performance of bridges funded under the innovative bridge research and construction program in meeting program goals.\n\n(Sec. 1423) Authorizes a state transportation agency to relinquish park-and-ride lot facilities, or portions of them, to a local government agency for highway purposes if authorized to do so under state law, and the relinquishment meets certain requirements.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1424) Authorizes the FHWA to establish a pilot program that allows a state to utilize innovative approaches to maintain the right-of-way of federal-aid highways.\n\n(Sec. 1425) Authorizes states to allow on the IS the maintenance of service club, charitable association, or religious service signs of a certain size, provided the state notifies the FHWA.\n\n(Sec. 1426) Requires the FHWA to appoint a Motorcyclist Advisory Council on infrastructure issues of concern to motorcyclists.\n\n(Sec. 1427) Expresses the sense of Congress that the FHWA should do all it can to protect the safety of construction workers in highway work zones.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1428) Directs DOT to encourage the FHWA to use durable, resilient, and sustainable materials and practices, including the use of geosynthetic materials and other innovative technologies for federal-aid highway projects.\n\n(Sec. 1429) Requires DOT to study methods for evaluating roadside highway safety hardware devices to improve the data collected on the devices.\n\n(Sec. 1430) Expresses the sense of Congress that DOT should utilize modeling and simulation technology to analyze highway and public transportation projects to ensure that they will reduce congestion and be cost effective.\n\n(Sec. 1431) Directs DOT to:\n\nestablish a National Advisory Committee on Travel and Tourism Infrastructure,", + " and\n\ndevelop and post on the DOT website a national travel and tourism infrastructure strategic plan.\n\n(Sec. 1432) Exempts from further environmental reviews, approvals, licensing, and permit requirements under specified laws any road, highway, or bridge in operation or under construction that is damaged by a declared emergency and reconstructed in the same location with the same dimensions and design as before the emergency.\n\n(Sec. 1433) Directs the GAO to report to Congress on FHWA administrative expenses funded from the HTF for the last three fiscal years.\n\n(Sec. 1434) Directs DOT to make every required report available on its public website.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1435) Amends MAP-21 to reauthorize the federal share of costs for Appalachian development highway system projects through FY2050. Allows the federal share (currently a flat 100%) to be 100% or less, as determined by the state.\n\n(Sec. 1436) Reauthorizes through FY2020 the Appalachian Regional Development Program.\n\nAuthorizes the Appalachian Regional Commission to give technical assistance, make grants, and enter into contracts in the Appalachian region for projects to increase affordable access to broadband networks throughout the Appalachian region and for related projects and activities. Authorizes funding.\n\n(Sec. 1437) Authorizes the governor of a state that shares a border with Canada or Mexico to designate up to 5%", + " of its apportionment of STBGP funds for each fiscal year for border infrastructure projects.\n\n(Sec. 1438) Rescinds permanently on July 1, 2020, $7.569 billion of unobligated federal-aid highway funds apportioned among the states, except certain funds for the highway improvement, railway-highway crossings, and certain other highway programs. Prescribes formulae for determining the amounts to be rescinded among the states and within a state.\n\n(Sec. 1439) Authorizes the take of nesting swallows, between April 1 and August 31 of any year, without individual permit requirements,", + " to facilitate bridge construction or repair projects, provided the Department of the Interior promulgates a regulation under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to allow this.\n\n(Sec. 1440) Allows recipients or subrecipients of federal-aid highway funds to:\n\nincur preliminary preconstruction development and engineering costs for an eligible project before receiving project authorization from the state, and\n\nrequest reimbursement of federal funds after project authorization is received.\n\n(Sec. 1441) Directs DOT to establish a regional infrastructure demonstration program to assist entities in developing improved infrastructure priorities and financing strategies for accelerated development of TIFIA-funded projects.\n\nAuthorizes appropriations.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1442) Requires DOT to encourage each state and MPO to adopt design standards and best practices for surface transportation projects that provide safety for users of the surface transportation network.\n\n(Sec. 1443) Expresses the sense of Congress that Congress recognizes the valuable contributions made by the U.S. engineering industry to provide critical technical expertise, innovation, and local knowledge to federal and state agencies in order to deliver surface transportation projects to the public.\n\n(Sec. 1444) Directs the FHWA to continue the Every Day Counts initiative to work with states, local transportation agencies, and industry stakeholders to identify and deploy proven innovative best practices and products that accelerate transportation innovation deployment and project delivery as well as improve the environment and roadway safety.\n\n(Sec.", + " 1445) Amends the Water Resources Reform and Development Act of 2004 to repeal the prohibition against the direct or indirect financing of water resources infrastructure projects receiving federal credit assistance with proceeds of any:\n\nobligation the interest on which is tax-exempt, or\n\nregarding which a qualified tax credit bond or a Build America Bond is allowable.\n\n(Sec. 1446) Makes various technical corrections to federal transportation laws.\n\nTITLE II--INNOVATIVE PROJECT FINANCE\n\n(Sec. 20001) Amends TIFIA to authorize as an eligible transportation infrastructure project cost the capitalizing of a rural projects fund using proceeds of secured loans made to state infrastructure banks to make loans for rural infrastructure projects.\n\nRevises TIFIA program eligibility requirements,", + " adding projects for:\n\npublic infrastructure near a fixed guideway transit facility, passenger rail station, intercity bus station, or intermodal facility; and\n\ncapitalization of a rural projects fund.\n\nRequires DOT to make an expedited application process available to entities seeking secured loans under the TIFIA program.\n\nRequires the reservation of $2 million of TIFIA program funds for highway infrastructure projects anticipated not to exceed $75 million.\n\nRevises and reauthorizes through FY2020 the state infrastructure bank program.\n\n(Sec. 2002) Authorizes DOT to make payments to states pursuant to a long-term concession agreements for construction costs incurred on federal-", + "aid highway projects.\n\nTITLE III--PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION\n\nFederal Public Transportation Act of 2015\n\n(Sec. 3003) Revises requirements for metropolitan as well as statewide and nonmetropolitan transportation planning.\n\nPrescribes requirements for selection of MPO representatives or officials.\n\nAuthorizes MPOs serving a transportation management area to develop a congestion management plan that includes projects and strategies that will be considered in the MPO's transportation improvement program.\n\nTreats the Bi-State MPO Region (in and around Lake Tahoe, California and Nevada) as:\n\nan MPO,\n\na transportation management area, and\n\nan urbanized area (comprising a population of 145,", + "000 in California and of 65,000 in Nevada).\n\n(Sec. 3004) Revises requirements for the urbanized area formula public transportation grant program for an urbanized area with a population of at least 200,000.\n\nAllows each public transportation system that is a party to a written agreement with one or more other public transportation systems within the urbanized area to allocate funds for the operating cost of equipment and facilities by a method other than by measuring vehicle revenue hours to follow the terms of the written agreement without regard to measured vehicle revenue hours.\n\n(Sec. 3005) Revises requirements for the fixed guideway capital investment grants program.\n\nIncreases the caps on the cost and level of federal assistance for small start new fixed guideway capital projects or corridor-based bus rapid transit projects eligible for financing under fixed guideway capital investment grants.\n\nEliminates the prerequisite for a new fixed guideway capital project to advance to the engineering phase that it be supported by policies and land use patterns that promote public transportation.\n\nRequires DOT to make necessary benefit,", + " federal investment, and local financial commitment evaluations and ratings of small start projects, upon project sponsor request, upon completion of an environmental assessment under NEPA.\n\nIncludes small start projects in programs of interrelated projects (together with new fixed guideway capital projects and core capacity improvement projects, as currently).\n\nAuthorizes DOT to award such grants for new fixed guideway capital projects and core capacity improvement projects for both public transportation and intercity passenger rail service. Sets the federal share of project costs at up to 80%.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to award up to eight capital investment grants to states and local governments to assist in financing new fixed guideway capital projects or small start projects and core capacity improvement projects.", + " Prescribes requirements for the expedited approval of such projects. Limits grants for such a project to 25% of the net capital project cost.\n\n(Sec. 3006) Requires DOT to collect from, review, and disseminate best practices and other specified information to public transportation agencies for such projects.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to award pilot program grants to eligible recipients to assist in financing innovative projects for the transportation of seniors and disabled individuals that improve the coordination of transportation services and non-emergency medical transportation services. Sets the federal share of project costs at up to 80%.\n\nDirects the DOT Interagency Transportation Coordinating Council on Access and Mobility to publish a strategic plan that:\n\noutlines federal agency role and responsibilities regarding local transportation coordination,", + " including non-emergency medical transportation, for seniors and individuals with disabilities;\n\naddresses certain Council recommendations, including a cost-sharing policy for grantees; and\n\nexamines and proposes changes to federal laws that will eliminate federal barriers to local transportation coordination.\n\n(Sec. 3007) Revises requirements for the nonurbanized formula grant program.\n\nRequires DOT to apportion specified amounts of rural formula grants each fiscal year for public transportation on Indian reservations.\n\nPrescribes requirements for the allocation of such grants to multiple Indian tribes providing public transportation on tribal lands in a single Tribal Statistical Area.\n\n(Sec. 3008) Replaces the research, development,", + " demonstration, and deployment grant program with a public transportation innovation grant program.\n\nRequires DOT to award grants for projects and activities to advance innovative public transportation research and development.\n\nRequires demonstration, deployment, or evaluation projects in public transportation to seek, among other things, the deployment of low or no emission vehicles, zero emission vehicles, or associated advanced technology.\n\nProhibits any DOT grants for the demonstration, deployment, or evaluation of a vehicle that is in revenue service unless the project makes significant technological advancements in the vehicle.\n\nRequires DOT to enter into a contract or cooperative agreement with, or make a grant to, at least one institution of higher education to operate a facility to assess components for use in low or no emission vehicles.\n\nEstablishes a public transportation cooperative research program.", + " Authorizes DOT to make grants to, and cooperative agreements with, the National Academy of Sciences to carry out public transportation research, development, and technology transfer activities.\n\n(Sec. 3009) Revamps the technical assistance and standards development grant program as the technical assistance and workforce development grant program.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to establish a competitive grant program to assist the development of innovative activities that address human resource needs to train and develop the public transportation workforce. Sets the federal share of project costs at 50%.\n\nDirects DOT to establish a national transit institute, and award grants to four-year degree-granting institutions of higher education to carry out institute duties,", + " including to develop training and educational programs for federal, state, and local transportation employees, U.S. citizens, and foreign nationals engaged in federally-assisted public transportation work.\n\n(Sec. 3011) Prohibits the use of grants or loans for public transportation to pay incremental costs of incorporating art or non-functional landscaping into facilities, including the costs of an artist on the design team.\n\nRevises Buy America requirements for public transportation projects. Allows DOT to waive such requirements when procuring rolling stock (including train control, communication, traction power equipment, and rolling stock prototypes) whose cost of components and subcomponents produced in the United States for:\n\nFY2016 and FY2017,", + " is more than 60% (as under current law) of the cost of all components of the rolling stock;\n\nFY2018 and FY2019, is more than 65% of the cost of all such components; and\n\nFY2020 and each fiscal year thereafter, is more than 70% of the cost of all components of such stock.\n\nPrescribes requirements for:\n\ncalculation of the domestic content of certain rolling stock frames or car shells for waiver purposes, and\n\na certification of domestic supply for denied waiver applications.\n\n(Sec. 3012) Directs DOT to prescribe regulations for project management oversight that include:\n\na requirement that oversight be limited to quarterly reviews of recipient compliance with the project management plan unless the recipient requires more frequent oversight because of specified failures,", + " and\n\na process for recipients that require more frequent oversight to return to quarterly reviews.\n\n(Sec. 3013) Revises requirements for the public transportation safety program.\n\nIncludes among the contents of the national public transportation safety plan minimum safety standards, meeting specified criteria, for the safe operation of public transportation systems.\n\nDirects DOT to administer state safety oversight programs for rail fixed guideway public transportation systems determined inadequate of enforcing federal safety regulations or incapable of preventing substantial risk of death or personal injury until the state develops a program as meeting certain requirements.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to withhold grants to develop state safety oversight programs from states with programs deemed insufficient, including up to 5%", + " of a state's apportionment of formula public transportation grants for urbanized areas with a population under 200,000.\n\nAuthorizes DOT also to take certain enforcement action against a recipient that does not comply with federal law regarding the safety of a public transportation system, including withholding up to 25% of a state's apportionment of urbanized area formula public transportation grants.\n\nRequires DOT to issue restrictions and prohibitions if an unsafe condition or practice is determined to exist and be a substantial risk of death or personal injury in a public transportation system.\n\n(Sec. 3014) Revises formulae for the apportionment of formula public transportation grants to states with urbanized areas with a population of at least 200,", + "000 and urbanized areas with a population under 200,000.\n\nRequires a set-aside of $30 million for each fiscal year for passenger ferry grants.\n\n(Sec. 3015) Sets the federal share of costs at 80% for state of good repair capital projects for high intensity fixed guideways and for high intensity motorbuses.\n\n(Sec. 3016) Reauthorizes through FY2020 the research, development demonstration, and deployment program.\n\nExtends:\n\nformula grants for public transportation, including allocations for specified projects;\n\ntechnical assistance and standards development and training grants;\n\ncapital investment grants; and\n\nauthorization for administrative expenditures.\n\n(Sec.", + " 3017) Allocates certain amounts to states and territories for FY2016-FY2020 for formula bus and bus facilities grants.\n\nRequires DOT to carry out a state pool pilot grant program for eligible recipients or state or local governmental entities in urbanized areas with a population of between 200,000 and 999,999 to support their transit asset management plans.\n\nRevises requirements for competitive grants to eligible recipients for bus and bus facilities capital projects. Authorizes competitive grants for low or no emission bus projects.\n\n(Sec. 3018) Limits obligational ceilings for FY2016-FY2020 for:\n\nformula grants for public transportation,", + " including allocations for specified projects; and\n\ngrants for installation of positive train control systems.\n\n(Sec. 3019) Authorizes states (lead procurement agencies) and grantees of public transportation assistance may enter into a cooperative procurement contracts with one or more vendors for the purchase of rolling stock (railroad cars) and related equipment.\n\nDirects DOT to establish a pilot program for lead nonprofit entities similarly to enter into such contracts for such stock and equipment.\n\nAuthorizes grantees to enter into capital leases for:\n\nthe costs of rolling stock or related equipment, and\n\ncertain zero emission vehicle components.\n\n(Sec. 3020)", + " Directs DOT to:\n\nbegin a review of the efficacy of existing safety standards and protocols used in rail fixed guideway public transportation systems, and\n\nevaluate the need to establish additional federal minimum public transportation safety standards after conducting the review.\n\n(Sec. 3021) Requires DOT to enter into an agreement with the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to evaluate whether it is in the public interest to withhold certain evidentiary public transportation safety program information in federal and state court proceedings.\n\n(Sec. 3022) Directs DOT, after publication of a report required by Sec. 3020, to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking on protecting public transportation operators from the risk of assault.\n\n(Sec.", + " 3023) Declares that any paratransit systems currently coordinating complementary paratransit service for more than 40 fixed route agencies shall be permitted to continue using an existing tiered, distance-based coordinated paratransit fare system if the fare is not increased by a greater percentage than any increase to the fixed route fare for the largest transit agency in the complementary paratransit service area.\n\n(Sec. 3024) Requires DOT to report to Congress on the potential of the Internet of Things to improve transportation services in rural, suburban, and urban areas. (The Internet of Things is the network of physical devices, vehicles,", + " buildings and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data.)\n\n(Sec. 3025) Requires DOT to study parking safety at specified alternative transportation facilities and locations.\n\n(Sec. 3026) Grants DOT sole authority to appoint Federal Directors to the Board of Directors of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA).\n\nDirects parties to the WMATA Compact to amend it to reflect such authority.\n\n(Sec. 3027) Directs the GAO to evaluate the impact that MAP-21 changes had on public transportation, including the effectiveness of public transportation agencies to:\n\nfurnish public transportation to low-income workers in accessing jobs and use reverse commute services;", + " and\n\nsupport services to low-income riders to access jobs, medical services, and other life necessities.\n\n(Sec. 3028) Makes $199 million available from the HTF Mass Transit Account for FY2017 for competitive grants for the installation of PTC systems.\n\n(Sec. 3030) Amends MAP-21 to repeal:\n\nthe pilot program for expedited new fixed guideway capital project or a core capacity improvement project delivery,\n\nthe transit cooperative research program,\n\nrequirements for public transportation facility projects for bicycles, and\n\nhuman resources and training programs in public transportation.\n\nTITLE IV--HIGHWAY TRAFFIC SAFETY\n\n(Sec.", + " 4001) Reauthorizes appropriations from the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) (other than the Mass Transit Account) for FY2016-FY2020 for National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) safety programs, including:\n\nthe highway safety research and development program,\n\nnational priority safety programs,\n\nthe National Driver Register,\n\nthe High Visibility Enforcement Program, and\n\nNHTSA administrative expenses.\n\n(Sec. 4002) Revises highway safety program requirements.\n\nRequires state highway safety programs to increase driver awareness of commercial motor vehicles to prevent crashes and reduce injuries and fatalities.\n\nRequires states with installed automated traffic enforcement systems to expend the apportionment of highway safety program funds to conduct a biennial survey of such systems,", + " and make it available on DOT's website.\n\nDirects DOT, in coordination with the Governors Highway Safety Association, to develop procedures to allow states to submit highway safety plans electronically.\n\nReduces from 60 to 45 the number of days during which DOT must review and approve state highway safety plans it has received.\n\nRevises teen traffic safety requirements.\n\n(Sec. 4003) Revises the highway safety research and development program.\n\nDirects NHTSA (which currently is merely authorized) to carry out collaborative research on in-vehicle alcohol detection technology to prevent alcohol-impaired driving. Directs DOT to obligate up to a certain amount of funds for the period FY2017-FY2020 to related research.\n\nRequires DOT to establish procedures and guidelines to ensure that persons participating in a program or activity that collects data on drug or alcohol use by motor vehicle drivers are informed that the program or activity is voluntary.\n\nSets the federal share of project costs at 100%.\n\n(Sec.", + " 4004) Directs DOT to establish a high-visibility enforcement program under which at least three high-visibility traffic safety law enforcement campaigns will be carried out for FY2016-FY2020.\n\nRequires each campaign to achieve at least one of the following objectives:\n\nreduce alcohol-impaired or drug-impaired driving, and\n\nincrease the use of seatbelts.\n\n(Sec. 4005) Revises national priority safety programs requirements.\n\nSpecifies allocations of national priority safety program funds for occupant protection, state traffic safety information system improvements, impaired driving countermeasures, distracted driving, motorcyclist safety, state graduated driver licensing laws,", + " and nonmotorized safety.\n\nIncreases from 75% to 100% the amount of the apportionment of occupant protection grants a state may use for state highway safety programs.\n\nRevises requirements for impaired driving countermeasures incentive grants.\n\nRequires DOT to award separate grants to each state that:\n\nadopts and is enforcing a law that requires all individuals convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol or driving while intoxicated to receive a restriction on driving privileges, and\n\nprovides a 24-7 sobriety program.\n\nPrescribes funding requirements.\n\nDirects DOT to award distracted driving incentive grants to states that include distracted driving awareness as part of the state's driver's license examination,", + " and enact and enforce a law that:\n\nprohibits drivers (including those under age 18) from texting through a personal wireless communications device (including a cell phone, but not a global navigation satellite [GPS] system receiver) while driving (with specified emergency exceptions),\n\nmakes a violation a primary offense,\n\nestablishes a minimum fine, and\n\ndoes not provide an exemption that allows a driver to text through a personal wireless communication device while stopped in traffic.\n\nRevises motorcyclist safety incentive grant requirements.\n\nRequires the allocation of motorcyclist safety grant funds to a state to be in proportion to the state's apportionment of highway safety program funds for FY2009,", + " except that the grant amount may not exceed 25% of the apportionment for FY2009.\n\nDirects DOT to update and give states model language to use in traffic safety education courses, driver's manuals, and other driver training materials instructing motor vehicle operators on the importance of sharing the road safely with motorcyclists.\n\nRevises minimum requirements for state graduated driver licensing incentive grant programs.\n\nRequires DOT to award incentive grants to states with graduated driving licensing laws that require novice drivers under age 18 (currently, under age 21) to comply with a two-stage licensing process before receiving an unrestricted driver's license.\n\nRequires such laws,", + " at a minimum, to include a learner's permit stage that:\n\nmakes a violation of the prohibition against using a personal wireless communications device while driving (with specified emergency exceptions) a primary offense,\n\nrequires applicants to pass a vision and knowledge assessment before receiving a learner's permit,\n\nrequires the driver to be accompanied and supervised at all times while operating the motor vehicle by a licensed driver at least age 21 or by a state-certified driving instructor,\n\nrequires the driver to complete a state-certified driver education or training course or obtain at least 50 hours of behind-the-wheel training (with at least 10 hours at night), with a licensed driver;", + " and\n\nremains in effect until the driver attains age 16 and enters the intermediate stage, or attains 18.\n\nRequires such laws also to include an intermediate permit stage that:\n\nbegins immediately after successful completion of a driving skills assessment,\n\nmakes a violation of the prohibition against using a personal wireless communications device while driving (with specified emergency exceptions) a primary offense,\n\nrestricts driving at night between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. when not supervised by a licensed driver age 21 or older (with specified exceptions) for the first six months of the intermediate stage, and\n\nremains in effect until the driver attains age 17.\n\nDirects DOT to award nonmotorized safety grants to states for projects to decrease pedestrian and bicycle fatalities and injuries resulting from crashes with motor vehicles.", + " Sets the federal share of project costs at up to 80%.\n\n(Sec. 4006) Directs DOT to develop a process to identify and mitigate possible systemic issues across state and regional offices by reviewing recommendations identified in triennial state management reviews of state highway safety programs.\n\n(Sec. 4007) Prohibits DOT from providing grants or funds to any state, county, town, township, Indian tribe, municipality, or other local government for use in any program to check helmet usage or create checkpoints for a motorcycle driver or passenger.\n\n(Sec. 4008) Directs DOT to study marijuana-impaired driving.\n\n(Sec.", + " 4009) Directs the NTHSA to identify and carry out additional actions it should undertake to assist state efforts to increase public awareness of the dangers of drug-impaired driving, including the dangers of driving while under the influence of heroin or prescription opioids.\n\n(Sec. 4010) Directs DOT to make available to the public on the DOT website information on states awarded national priority safety program grants.\n\n(Sec. 4011) Amends SAFETEA-LU regarding grants to states for costs of collecting and evaluating traffic stop data based on race of motor vehicle driver and any passenger.\n\nRepeals authority to use grant funds to develop and implement programs to reduce the occurrence of racial profiling,", + " including programs to train law enforcement officers.\n\nDirects DOT to set-aside $7.5 million of highway safety research and development funds for each of FY2017-FY2020 to carry out this grant program.\n\nAuthorizes reallocation of such amounts remaining available before the end of the fiscal year to increase the amounts made available to carry out other highway safety research and development activities.\n\n(Sec. 4012) Directs DOT to report to Congress on NTHSA progress toward reviewing and implementing recommendations made in a GAO report on the National Roadside Survey of alcohol and drug use by drivers.\n\n(Sec. 4013) Directs NHTSA to report on any barriers to collecting data on the prevalence of the use of wireless communications devices while driving.\n\nTITLE V--MOTOR CARRIER SAFETY\n\nSubtitle A--Motor Carrier Safety Grant Consolidation\n\n(Sec.", + " 5101) Revises requirements for the motor carrier safety assistance grant program.\n\nDirects DOT to publish approved state multiple-year motor carrier safety improvement plans, and annual updates, on the DOT public website.\n\nAuthorizes DOT, in lieu of withdrawing approval of noncompliant state plans, to withhold from such states, for the fiscal year, graduated percentages of grant program funds.\n\nDirects DOT to administer a financial assistance program for discretionary grants to and cooperative agreements with states, local governments, federally-recognized Indian tribes, and other persons to carry out high priority motor carrier safety activities and projects.\n\nRequires DOT to establish a program of discretionary grants to states for the innovative technology deployment of commercial motor vehicle information systems and networks.\n\nRevises requirements for reimbursement of a state,", + " from a related grant, for 80% of the costs of developing and implementing programs to improve commercial motor vehicle safety and enforce commercial motor vehicle regulations, standards, or orders. Replaces this program with commercial motor vehicle operators grants to programs to train individuals in the safe operation of commercial motor vehicles.\n\nAuthorizes appropriations from the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) (other than the Mass Transit Account) for FY2017-FY2020 for FMCSA Financial Assistance Programs, including:\n\nthe motor carrier safety assistance grant program,\n\nthe high priority activities program,\n\nthe commercial motor vehicle operators grant program, and\n\nthe commercial driver's license program implementation grant program (established in this title).\n\nRepeals specified commercial motor vehicle safety programs.\n\n(Sec.", + " 5102) Renames the performance and registration information program as the performance and registration information systems management program.\n\n(Sec. 5103) Reauthorizes appropriations from HTF (other than the Mass Transit Account) for FY2016-FY2020 for FMCSA administrative expenses.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to conduct an outreach and education program administered by the FMCSA.\n\n(Sec. 5104) Revises the program of financial assistance grants to states to implement the commercial driver's license program.\n\nRepeals the authorization for grants in a fiscal year to state agencies, local governments, or persons to cover 100% of the costs of priority research,", + " development or testing, demonstration projects, public education, or other special activities relating to commercial driver's licensing and motor vehicle safety.\n\n(Sec. 5105) Reauthorizes appropriations from the HTF (other than the Mass Transit Account) for FY2016 for the motor carrier safety assistance grant program.\n\nAmends SAFETEA-LU to reauthorize through FY2016 appropriations from the HTF (other than the Mass Transit Account) for FMCSA programs, including:\n\nthe commercial driver's license program improvement grants program,\n\nborder enforcement grants,\n\nthe performance and registration information systems management grant program,\n\nthe commercial vehicle information systems and networks deployment program (also known as the innovative technology deployment program), and\n\nsafety data improvement grants.\n\nExtends through FY2016 the set-", + "aside of certain funds for:\n\nhigh priority activities and projects to improve commercial motor vehicle safety and compliance with federal commercial motor vehicle safety regulations; and\n\nnew entrant motor carrier audit grants.\n\nReauthorizes through FY2016 appropriations from the HTF (other than the Mass Transit Account) for the commercial motor vehicle operators grant program.\n\n(Sec. 5106) Directs DOT to establish a motor carrier safety assistance program formula working group to analyze requirements and factors for a new motor carrier safety assistance program allocation formula based on specified factors.\n\nPrescribes requirements for program funding before development of a new allocation formula.\n\n(Sec. 5107) Directs DOT,", + " if a new allocation formula has not been established for the pertinent fiscal year, to calculate for FY2017 and ensuing fiscal years the maintenance of effort baseline for funding the lead state agency responsible for administering the motor carrier safety assistance plan.\n\nAllows DOT, at state request, beginning when a new allocation formula for the program is established, to waive or modify the baseline maintenance of effort required of the state if a waiver or modification:\n\nis equitable due to reasonable circumstances,\n\nwill ensure the continuation of commercial motor vehicle enforcement activities in the state, and\n\nis necessary to ensure that the total amount of state maintenance of effort and matching expenditures required does not exceed a specified sum.\n\nSubtitle B--Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Reform\n\nPart I--Regulatory Reform\n\n(Sec.", + " 5201) Revises requirements for a notice to DOT of cancellation of liability insurance for motor carriers, brokers, or freight forwarders. Grants DOT authority to suspend, as an alternative to revoking, the registration of the motor carrier, broker, or freight forwarder because of the lapse and subsequent cancellation of liability insurance.\n\n(Sec. 5202) Prescribes requirements for public participation, particularly participation by segments of the motor carrier industry, in FMCSA rulemaking as well as for an impact analysis of every proposed or final rule.\n\n(Sec. 5303) Requires each FMCSA guidance document to:\n\ncontain certain information,", + " including point of contact information; and\n\nbe published on the DOT website.\n\nDirects the FMCSA, at least once every five years, to review its guidance documents to determine whether they are consistent and clear, uniformly and consistently enforced, and still necessary.\n\nDefines \"guidance document\" to mean a FMCSA document that:\n\npresents an interpretation of a FMCSA regulation, or\n\nincludes a FMCSA enforcement policy.\n\n(Sec. 5204) Directs the FMCSA to publish on the DOT website a summary of all submitted petitions for regulatory action, and respond to petitions within 180 days of publication.\n\n(Sec.", + " 5205) Directs the FMCSA to revise federal safety fitness regulations for motor carriers to incorporate by reference the certification standards for roadside inspectors issued by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.\n\n(Sec. 5206) Authorizes DOT to grant an exemption from commercial motor vehicle safety regulations for up to five years, with renewals for an additional five years.\n\nAuthorizes DOT also to make permanent certain exemptions for:\n\nperishable construction products,\n\ntransport of commercial bee hives, and\n\nsafe transport of livestock.\n\nPart II--Compliance, Safety, Accountability Reform\n\n(Sec. 5221) Directs the FMCSA to commission the National Research Council of the National Academies to study the the Compliance,", + " Safety, Accountability (CSA) program and the Safety Measurement System (SMS).\n\nRequires the Council, in conducting this study, to analyze:\n\nthe accuracy with which the Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASIC) identify high risk carriers and predict future crash risk or other safety indicators for motor carriers and the highest risk carriers; and\n\nexisting data collection gaps or data sufficiency problems and their impact on the efficacy of the CSA program.\n\nDirects the FMCSA, after submission of a report identifying any deficiency or opportunity for improvement in the CSA program or SMS, to submit a corrective action plan to Congress that identifies how the FMCSA will address those deficiencies or opportunities.\n\n(Sec.", + " 5222) Directs the FMCSA to develop a process for identifying and reviewing advanced safety equipment, enhanced driver fitness measures, fleet safety management tools, technologies, and programs, and other standards for use by motor carriers to receive recognition, credit, or an improved SMS percentile.\n\n(Sec. 5223) Declares that no information regarding analysis of violations, not-at-fault commercial motor vehicle crashes, alerts, or the relative percentile for each BASIC developed through the CSA program may be made available to the general public until the DOT Inspector General certifies that, among other things, any deficiencies identified in the report containing the results of the correlation study required by this subtitle have been addressed and the corrective action plan has been implemented.\n\n(Sec.", + " 5224) Directs the FMCSA to develop functional specifications to ensure the consistent and accurate input of data into systems and databases relating to the CSA program.\n\n(Sec. 5225) Directs the FMCSA, not later than one year after making the certification required under this subtitle, to task the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee with reviewing the treatment of preventable crashes under the SMS. Requires the Committee to make recommendations to DOT on a process to allow motor carriers and drivers to request the FMCSA to make a determination regarding the preventability of a crash.\n\nSubtitle C--Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety\n\n(Sec. 5301)", + " Directs DOT to revise certain federal regulations prohibiting obstructions to a driver's field of view to exempt from those prohibitions the voluntary mounting on a windshield of vehicle safety technology likely to achieve a level of safety equivalent to or greater than what would be achieved without the exemption.\n\n(Sec. 5302) Directs the FMCSA to prioritize the completion of each outstanding statutory rulemaking before beginning any other rulemaking unless there is a significant need for the other rulemaking and Congress is notified.\n\n(Sec. 5303) Directs GAO to report to Congress on the cost and feasibility of establishing a self-reporting system for commercial motor vehicle drivers or motor carriers regarding en route equipment failures.\n\n(Sec.", + " 5304) Directs DOT to assess the effectiveness of the new operator safety review program and publish the results, including any recommendations, on DOT's website.\n\n(Sec. 5305) Requires DOT to ensure that a review is completed on each motor carrier that demonstrates through performance data for four consecutive months that it poses the highest safety risk.\n\n(Sec. 5306) Directs DOT to convene a working group of state representatives or state law enforcement officials, as well as representatives of industry, labor, safety advocates, and other interested individuals, to review the data elements of post-accident reports for tow-away accidents involving commercial motor vehicles that are reported to the federal government.\n\n(Sec.", + " 5307) Directs DOT to report to Congress regarding each commercial motor vehicle safety rulemaking:\n\nwith a statutory deadline, an explanation of why the deadline was not met as well as the expected date of completion, and\n\nwithout a statutory deadline, an expected date of completion.\n\nSubtitle D--Commercial Motor Vehicle Drivers\n\n(Sec. 5401) Directs DOT to modify federal minimum standards for safety fitness of commercial motor vehicle operators to:\n\nexempt former armed forces or reserve members over age 21 from part or all of a driving test if they had prior armed forces or reserve experience driving vehicles similar to a commercial motor vehicle,\n\nallow members to apply for an exemption during the one-year period after the member separated from service,", + " and\n\ncredit the training and knowledge received by members driving vehicles similar to commercial vehicles during their service for purposes of satisfying minimum standards for training and knowledge for the safe operation of commercial motor vehicles.\n\n(Sec. 5402) Revises the requirement that motor carriers conduct preemployment, reasonable suspicion, random, and post-accident testing of commercial motor vehicle operators for controlled substances or alcohol.\n\nAllows motor carriers to use hair testing as an acceptable alternative to mandatory urinalysis for detecting use of controlled substances by an operator, but only for preemployment testing and random testing (and the latter only if the motor carrier tested the operator at preemployment using the same method).\n\nRequires DOT to permit an exemption from hair testing for operators with established religious beliefs that prohibit the cutting or removal of hair.\n\nRequires DOT to develop requirements for laboratories and testing procedures for controlled substances that include mandatory guidelines that establish,", + " among other things, laboratory protocols and cut-off levels for hair testing to detect the use of such a substance.\n\nDirects the Department of Health and Human Services to issue scientific and technical guidelines for hair testing as a method for detecting the use of controlled substances.\n\n(Sec. 5403) Authorizes a qualified Department of Veterans Affairs physician to perform a medical examination and provide a medical certificate to comply with medical standards and guidelines for the physical qualifications of operators of commercial motor vehicles.\n\nDirects DOT to develop a process for including qualified physicians on the National Registry of Medical Examiners.\n\n(Sec. 5404) Directs DOT to establish a commercial driver pilot program to study the feasibility,", + " benefits, and safety impacts of allowing a covered driver to operate a commercial motor vehicles.\n\nDefines \"covered driver\" to mean an individual:\n\nbetween 18 and 21,\n\nwho is a member of the armed forces or reserves, and\n\nqualified in a Military Occupational Specialty to operate a commercial motor vehicle or similar vehicle.\n\nDirects DOT to collect and analyze data relating to accidents involving drivers participating in the pilot program.\n\nProhibits drivers from:\n\ntransporting passengers or hazardous cargo, or\n\noperating a vehicle in special configuration.\n\nDirects DOT to establish a working group to evaluate the pilot program.\n\nSubtitle E--General Provisions\n\n(Sec.", + " 5501) Directs the DOT Inspector General to report to Congress on the average length of time that commercial motor vehicle operators are delayed before the loading and unloading of vehicles and at other points in the pick-up and delivery process.\n\n(Sec. 5502) Directs the DOT to establish a working group to determine best practices for expeditious state approval of special permits for emergency response and recovery vehicles that exceed federal and state truck length or width limits to operate safely on designated emergency routes.\n\n(Sec. 5503) Directs DOT to establish a working group to develop recommendations on how best to convey to consumers information on federal laws about the interstate transportation of household goods by motor carrier.\n\n(Sec.", + " 5504) Directs GAO to conduct an analysis of FMCSA's information technology and data collection and management systems.\n\n(Sec. 5505) Directs DOT to report to Congress on DOT actions to process motor carrier registration applications within 30 days after receipt.\n\n(Sec. 5506) Directs the FMCSA to report to Congress on skills testing delays for commercial driver's license applicants.\n\n(Sec. 5507) Revises electronic logging device requirements.\n\nPermits a motor carrier to require its drivers to comply with federal hours of service requirements by using either a paper record of duty status form or an electronic logging device when transporting a motor home or recreation vehicle trailer in a driveaway-towaway operation (in which an empty or unladen motor vehicle with one or more sets of wheels is being transported between specified business facilities).\n\n(Sec.", + " 5509) Directs DOT to take certain actions before initiating a rulemaking to change the minimum levels of financial responsibility for motor carriers of property and motor carriers of passengers.\n\n(Sec. 5510) Directs DOT to study the safety operations, fire suppression capability, tire loads, and pavement impacts of operating a double-decker motorcoach with rear-attached passenger luggage rack.\n\n(Sec. 5511) Directs GAO to submit to Congress a review of school bus safety.\n\n(Sec. 5512) Authorizes the FMCSA to request the chief driver licensing official of a state to provide driver record information on an individual from the National Driver Register in connection with an FMCSA safety investigation.\n\n(Sec.", + " 5513) Directs DOT to report to Congress regarding the design, development, testing, and implementation of wireless roadside inspection systems.\n\n(Sec. 5514) Waives federal preemption to allow states to regulate tow truck operations performed without the prior consent or authorization of the owner or operator of the towed motor vehicle.\n\n(Currently, states are allowed to regulate only the price of for-hire motor vehicle transportation by a tow truck if the transportation is performed without the prior consent or authorization of the owner or operator of the motor vehicle.)\n\n(Sec. 5515) Directs the FMCSA to study the safety effects of motor carrier operator commutes exceeding 150 minutes.\n\n(Sec.", + " 5516) Requires South Dakota to be given the opportunity to update designated routes on the federal-aid primary system highways, as long as the update shifts routes to divided highways or does not increase centerline miles more than 5%, and is expected to increase safety performance.\n\n(Sec. 5517) Directs DOT to publish on its website a report on federal minimum financial responsibility requirements for motor carriers transporting property.\n\n(Sec. 5518) Revises requirements exempting certain farm vehicles from federal commercial motor vehicle safety requirements.\n\n(Sec. 5519) Declares that the maximum hours of service for a commercial motor vehicle driver of an internal rail flaw detection vehicle equipped with flange hi-rails (hi-rail vehicle)", + " shall not include time in transportation to or from a duty assignment provided it:\n\ndoes not exceed 2 hours per day or a total of 30 hours per month, and\n\nis fully accounted for in the motor carrier records and are made available upon request of the FMCSA or the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA).\n\n(Sec. 5520) Revises federal vehicle length limitations for trucks.\n\nDeclares that an automobile transporter shall not be prohibited from transporting cargo or general freight on a backhaul (the return trip of a vehicle transporting cargo or general freight, especially when carrying goods back over all or part of the same route), so long as it complies with federal weight limitations for truck tractors and semitrailer combinations operating on any segment of the Dwight D.", + " Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways and qualifying federal-aid primary system highways.\n\nProhibits states from prescribing or enforcing a regulation that imposes a vehicle length limitation of less than 80 feet on a stinger-steered automobile transporter with a front overhang of less than 4 feet and a rear overhang of less than 6 feet.\n\n(Sec. 5521) Declares that certain commercial motor vehicle safety reporting and recordkeeping requirements shall not apply to drivers of ready mixed concrete delivery vehicles provided certain requirements are met.\n\n(Sec. 5522) Amends the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999 to exempt from federal maximum driving and on-duty time requirements drivers of trucks transporting construction materials and equipment to or from an active construction site within a 75 (currently,", + " 50) air mile radius of the driver's normal work reporting location.\n\nAuthorizes a state, upon notice to DOT, to establish a different air mile radius limitation if the limitation is between 50 and 75 air miles and driver movements are taken place entirely within the state.\n\n(Sec. 5523) Revises federal vehicle length limitations to prohibit states from prescribing or enforcing a regulation that imposes an overall length limitation of less than 82 feet on a towaway trailer transporter combination operating on any segment of the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways and qualifying federal-aid primary system highways.\n\nDefines \"trailer transporter towing unit\"", + " as a power unit not used to carry property when operating in a towaway trailer transporter combination.\n\nDefines \"towaway trailer transporter combination\" as a combination of vehicles consisting of a trailer transporter towing unit and two trailers or semitrailers:\n\nwith a total weight not exceeding 26,000 pounds; and\n\nwhich carry no property and constitute inventory property of a manufacturer, distributor or dealer of such trailers or semitrailers.\n\n(Sec. 5524) Prescribes requirements to exempt certain welding trucks used in the pipeline industry from specified federal commercial motor vehicle requirements for motor carrier registration, driver qualifications, commercial motor carrier safety, maintenance and repair,", + " and maximum driving hours and on duty time.\n\n(Sec. 5525) Directs DOT to report to Congress on the safety and enforcement impacts of specified sections of this Act.\n\nTITLE VI--INNOVATION\n\nTransportation for Tomorrow Act of 2015\n\n(Sec. 6002) Authorizes appropriations out of the HTF (other than the Mass Transit Account) for FY2016-FY2020 for:\n\nthe highway research and development program,\n\nthe technology and innovation deployment program,\n\ntraining and education,\n\nthe intelligent transportation systems (ITS) program,\n\nthe university transportation centers program,\n\nthe Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), and\n\nFHWA administration.\n\n(Sec.", + " 6003) Directs DOT to obligate specified funds for FY2016-FY2020 for the accelerated implementation and deployment of pavement technologies program.\n\nDirects DOT to report annually on the cost and benefits from deployment of new technology and innovations that result from the program.\n\n(Sec. 6004) Directs DOT to establish an advanced transportation and congestion management technologies deployment initiative to award grants to a state or local government, transit agency, metropolitan planning organization representing a population over 200,000, or other state or local government subdivisions or a multijurisdictional group or consortia of research institutional or academic institutions.\n\n(Sec.", + " 6005) Revises certain ITS purposes, goals, and reporting requirements.\n\n(Sec. 6010) Prescribes requirements for development of ITS infrastructure.\n\n(Sec. 6011) Establishes the position of Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Research and Technology.\n\n(Sec. 6012) Repeals the authorization and mandate for a Research and Innovative Technology Administration.\n\n(Sec. 6013) Directs DOT to maintain an online course curriculum to train public sector emergency response and preparedness teams in hazardous material (hazmat) transportation.\n\n(Sec. 6014) Authorizes DOT, as part of the hazardous material technical assessment,", + " research and development, and analysis program, to carry out cooperative research on hazmat transport.\n\n(Sec. 6015) Eliminates the Office of Intermodalism of the Research and Innovative Technology Administration [Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology of DOT].\n\n(Sec. 6016) Revises requirements for the university transportation centers program.\n\n(Sec. 6017) Declares that the BTS shall not be required to obtain the approval of any other officer or employee of:\n\nDOT with respect to the collection or analysis of any information, or\n\nthe U.S. government, before publication, with respect to the substance of any statistical technical reports or press releases lawfully prepared by the BTS.\n\nGrants the BTS a significant role in the disposition and allocation of its authorized budget,", + " including:\n\nall hiring, grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts awarded by the BTS; and\n\nthe disposition and allocation of amounts paid to the BTS for cost-reimbursable projects.\n\n(Sec. 6018) Directs the BTS to establish a port performance statistics program to provide nationally consistent measures of performance of at least the nation's top 25 ports by tonnage, its top 25 ports by 20-foot equivalent unit, and its top 25 ports by dry bulk.\n\nDirects the BTS to collect monthly port performance measures for each specified U.S. port that receives federal assistance or is subject to federal regulation to report annually to the BTS on statistics on capacity and throughput.\n\n(Sec.", + " 6019) Requires the head of each DOT modal administration and joint program office to submit an annual modal research plan for approval to the DOT Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology (Assistant Secretary).\n\nProhibits DOT from expending funds on research determined by the Assistant Secretary to be duplicative unless:\n\nthe research is required by an Act of Congress,\n\nit was part of a contract funded before enactment of this Act,\n\nit updates previously commissioned research, or\n\nthe Assistant Secretary certifies to Congress that it is necessary.\n\nDirects DOT shall publish annually, on a public website, a comprehensive database of all DOT research projects, including research funded through University Transportation Centers.\n\nRequires DOT to develop a five-year transportation research and development (R&D)", + " strategic plan.\n\n(Sec. 6020) Directs DOT to establish a program to award grants to states to demonstrate user-based alternative revenue mechanisms that utilize a user fee structure to maintain the long-term solvency of the HTF.\n\n(Sec. 6021) Directs DOT to enter into an agreement with the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies to study actions needed to upgrade and restore the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways to its role as a premier system network that meets the growing and shifting demands of the 21st century.\n\n(Sec. 6022) Authorizes DOT to study the impact of pavement durability and sustainability on vehicle fuel consumption,", + " vehicle wear and tear, road conditions, and road repairs.\n\n(Sec. 6023) Authorizes DOT to convene a transportation technology policy interagency working group.\n\n(Sec. 6024) Authorizes DOT to solicit the support of other federal research agencies and national laboratories to assist in the pursuit and resolution of identified research challenges.\n\n(Sec. 6025) Directs GAO to assess the status of autonomous transportation technology policy developed by U.S. public entities.\n\n(Sec. 6026) Authorizes DOT to conduct research on the reduction of traffic congestion.\n\n(Sec. 6027) Authorizes DOT to study digital technologies and information technologies,", + " including shared mobility, data, transportation network companies, and on-demand transportation services to develop best practices for use of such information and technology in the planning of smart cities.\n\n(Sec. 6028) Directs the FHWA to develop data sets and analysis tools to assist MPOs, states, and the FHWA in carrying out performance management analyses of federal-aid highways.\n\nTITLE VII--HAZARDOUS MATERIALS TRANSPORTATION\n\nHazardous Materials Transportation Safety Improvement Act of 2015\n\nSubtitle A--Authorizations\n\n(Sec. 7101) Reauthorizes DOT hazmat transportation safety projects for FY2016-FY2020.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to make certain expenditures,", + " including an amount for hazmat training grants, from the Hazardous Materials Emergency Preparedness Fund.\n\nDirects DOT to withhold a specified amount of funds for each fiscal year for competitive community safety grants.\n\nSubtitle B--Hazardous Material Safety and Improvement\n\n(Sec. 7201) Revises requirements for safe hazmat transportation.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to waive compliance with federal hazmat transportation safety standards, without prior notice and comment, if DOT determines that:\n\nit is in the public interest and not inconsistent with the safety of transporting hazmat, and\n\nis necessary for the safe movement of hazmat into, from, and within an area declared a major disaster or emergency under the Robert T.", + " Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act.\n\n(Sec. 7202) Prohibits DOT from denying a non-temporary safety permit to a motor carrier transporting hazmat based on a comprehensive review of the carrier triggered by safety management system scores or out-of-service disqualification standards, unless:\n\nthe carrier has the opportunity, before the denial, to submit a corrective action plan; and\n\nthe plan is insufficient to address safety concerns in the course of the review.\n\n(Sec. 7203) Revises requirements for DOT planning and training grants to states and Indian tribes to:\n\ncarry out hazmat emergency plans, and\n\ntrain public sector employees to respond to hazmat accidents and incidents.\n\n(Sec.", + " 7204) Requires DOT to:\n\npublish, and make public on DOT's website, notice of the filing of an application for a new special permit (under current law, application for a special permit) or a modification to an existing special permit authorizing a variance from federal regulations for the transportation of hazmat, and\n\ngive the public an opportunity to inspect the safety analysis and comment on the application for 15 days.\n\nDecreases from 180 days to 120 days (after the first day of the month following the filing of an application) the deadline by which DOT must issue, renew, or deny a special permit.\n\nDirects DOT periodically,", + " but at least every 120 days, to:\n\npublish notice of the final disposition of each application for a new special permit, modification to an existing special permit, or approval during the preceding quarter; and\n\nmake publicly available on the DOT website notice of the final disposition of any other special permit during the preceding quarter.\n\n(Sec. 7205) Directs DOT to make available biennially on the DOT website (instead of to specified congressional committees) a comprehensive report on hazmat transportation for the preceding two calendar years.\n\n(Sec. 7206) Directs DOT to withdraw a certain proposed rule described in the notice of proposed rulemaking issued on January 27,", + " 2011, entitled \"Safety Requirements for External Product Piping (wetlines) on Cargo Tanks Transporting Flammable Liquids.\"\n\nDeclares that nothing in this requirement shall prohibit DOT from issuing standards or regulations regarding the safety of wetlines on cargo tanks transporting flammable liquids after the withdrawal is carried out.\n\n(Sec. 7207) Directs GAO to study the standards, metrics, and protocols that DOT uses to regulate the performance of persons (\"third-party labs\") approved to recommend hazard classifications for the transportation of new explosives.\n\n(Sec. 7208) Directs DOT to allow states, at their discretion, to waive the requirement for a holder of a Class A commercial driver's license to obtain a hazmat endorsement,", + " as long as certain requirements are met.\n\nSubtitle C--Safe Transportation of Flammable Liquids by Rail\n\n(Sec. 7301) Directs DOT to establish a competitive program for the award of community safety grants to nonprofit organizations for:\n\nnational outreach and training programs to assist communities in preparing for and responding to accidents and incidents involving the transportation of hazardous materials, including Class 3 flammable liquids by rail; and\n\ntraining state and local personnel responsible for enforcing the safe transportation of hazmat, including Class 3 flammable liquids by rail.\n\n(Sec. 7302) Directs DOT to issue regulations requiring Class I railroads transporting hazmat to:\n\ngenerate accurate,", + " real-time, and electronic train consist information, including emergency response information;\n\ngrant each applicable fusion center secure access to such information;\n\nrequire each such fusion center to supply that information to state and local first responders, emergency response officials, and law enforcement personnel involved in the response to or investigation of an accident, incident, or public health or safety emergency involving the rail transportation;\n\nrequire each Class I railroad to give advanced notification and information on high-hazard flammable trains to each state emergency response commission; and\n\nprescribe requirements for further transmission of such information to specified first responders, officials, and personnel.\n\n(Sec. 7303) Directs GAO to study whether weaknesses exist in the emergency response information carried by train crews transporting hazmat.\n\n(Sec.", + " 7304) Requires the phase-out by specified deadlines of all DOT-111 specification (non-pressurized) railroad tank cars transporting Class 3 flammable liquids not retrofitted to meet DOT-117, DOT-117P, or DOT-117R design specifications established by the May 2015 final rule for the safe transportation of flammable liquids by rail.\n\n(Sec. 7305) Directs DOT to issue regulations to require each tank car built to meet the DOT-117 specification and each non-jacketed tank car modified to meet the DOT-117R specification to be equipped with an insulating blanket with at least one-half inch thick DOT-approved material.\n\n(Sec.", + " 7306) Requires top fittings for DOT-117R tank cars, with specified exceptions, to be located inside a protective housing not less than one-half inch in thickness and constructed of material having a tensile strength not less than 65 kilopound per square inch and meeting certain other specifications.\n\n(Sec. 7307) Directs DOT to notify Congress on the status of a certain rulemaking on oil spill response plans.\n\n(Sec. 7308) Directs DOT to implement a reporting requirement to monitor industry-wide progress toward modifying rail tank cars transporting Class 3 flammable liquids by specified deadlines.\n\n(Sec. 7309)", + " Directs the Department of Energy, in cooperation with DOT, and within 180 days after completion of the comprehensive Crude Oil Characteristics Research Sampling, Analysis, and Experiment Plan study at Sandia National Laboratories, to report to Congress on it and its recommendations.\n\n(Sec. 7310) Directs DOT to initiate a study on the levels and structure of insurance for railroad carriers transporting hazmat.\n\n(Sec. 7311) Directs the GAO to evaluate independently any electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brake systems, pilot program data, and DOT research and analysis on the costs, benefits, and effects of such systems.\n\nDirects DOT to enter into an agreement with the National Academy of Sciences to complete testing of ECP brake systems during emergency braking application,", + " including more than 1 scenario involving the uncoupling of a train with 70 or more DOT-117 specification or DOT-117R specification tank cars.\n\nDefines \"ECP brake system\" as a train power braking system actuated by compressed air and controlled by electronic signals from the locomotive or an Depancreatizing device to the cars in the consist for service and emergency applications in which the brake pipe is used to provide a constant supply of compressed air to the reservoirs on each car but does not convey braking signals to the car.\n\nRequires DOT to incorporate evaluation results fully and update the regulatory impact analysis of the final rule issued on May 8,", + " 2015, entitled \"Enhanced Tank Car Standards and Operational Controls for High-Hazard Flammable Trains,\" especially the costs, benefits, and effects of the applicable ECP brake system requirements.\n\nTITLE VIII--MULTIMODAL FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION\n\n(Sec. 8001) Directs DOT to develop, update every five years, and publish on its website a national freight strategic plan.\n\nRevises requirements for the National Multimodal Freight Network, freight investment plans and transportation investment data and planning tools.\n\nTITLE IX--NATIONAL SURFACE TRANSPORTATION AND INNOVATIVE FINANCE BUREAU\n\n(Sec.", + " 9001) Directs DOT to establish:\n\na National Surface Transportation and Innovative Finance Bureau to promote innovative financing best practices and provide assistance from infrastructure finance programs, the railroad rehabilitation and improvement financing program, and allocations for qualified highway or surface freight transfer facilities; and\n\na Council on Credit and Finance to review and make recommendations on applications for such assistance.\n\nTITLE X--SPORT FISH RESTORATION AND RECREATIONAL BOATING SAFETY\n\n(Sec. 10001) Amends the Dingell-Johnson Sport Fish Restoration Act to reauthorize through FY2021 appropriations from the Sport Fish Restoration and Boating Trust Fund for various fish,", + " boating, and coastal wetlands restoration programs. Revises also amounts allocated from the Fund to various programs, including amounts for programs concerning: (1) coastal wetlands, (2) boating safety, and (3) boating infrastructure.\n\n(Sec. 10002) Sets aside a separate amount each fiscal year through FY2021 for the Coast Guard's administration of the national recreational boating safety program.\n\nTITLE XI--RAIL\n\nPassenger Rail Reform and Investment Act of 2015\n\nSubtitle A--Authorizations\n\n(Sec. 11001) Authorizes appropriations to DOT for FY2016-FY2020 for the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak)", + " for:\n\nthe Northeast Corridor Improvement Fund account,\n\nthe National Network account,\n\nconsolidated rail infrastructure and safety improvements grants,\n\nfederal-state partnership for state of good repair grants,\n\nrestoration and enhancement grants, and\n\nthe Office of the Inspector General.\n\nRequires set-asides of specified funds for FY2016-FY2017 to:\n\nconvene the Gulf Coast rail service working group, and\n\nimplement the small business participation study.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to withhold a specified amount for each fiscal year for:\n\nthe State-Supported Route Committee, and\n\nthe Northeast Corridor Commission.\n\nSubtitle B--Amtrak Reforms\n\n(Sec. 11201)", + " Directs DOT to establish an account structure and improvements to accounting methodologies to support the Northeast Corridor and National Network accounts.\n\n(Sec. 11202) Directs Amtrak to establish internal controls to ensure its costs and revenues are allocated to either the Northeast Corridor or the National Network.\n\nDirects DOT to establish substantive and procedural requirements for Northeast Corridor and National Network investment capital grant requests.\n\n(Sec. 11203) Requires Amtrak to submit to Congress and DOT final 5-year business line plans and 5-year capital asset plans.\n\n(Sec. 11204) Directs DOT to establish the State-Supported Route Committee to promote mutual cooperation and planning pertaining to the rail operations of Amtrak and related activities of trains operated by Amtrak on state-supported routes.\n\n(Sec.", + " 11205) Revises requirements for, and increases from 9 to 10 the number of, members of Amtrak's Board of Directors.\n\n(Sec. 11206) Amends the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 to revise requirements with respect to methodologies for Amtrak route and service planning decisions an independent entity must develop and recommend for Amtrak to use in the planning of intercity rail passenger transportation routes and services.\n\n(Sec 11207) Directs Amtrak to develop a plan to eliminate the operating loss for food and beverage service on board its trains.\n\nBars the use of federal funds, beginning five years after enactment of this Act,", + " to cover any such loss on a route operated either by Amtrak or a rail carrier that operates a route in lieu of Amtrak.\n\n(Sec. 11208) Requires Amtrak, before entering into contracts exceeding $100 million to procure rolling stock and locomotives, to submit to DOT and Congress a business case analysis on the utility of such procurements.\n\n(Sec. 11209) Directs Amtrak to establish a pilot program for a state or states that sponsor a state-supported route operated by Amtrak to facilitate:\n\nonboard purchase and sale of local food and beverage products, and\n\npartnerships with local entities to hold promotional events on trains or in stations.\n\n(Sec.", + " 11210) Directs Amtrak to:\n\ndevelop a pilot program to allow passengers to transport domesticated cats or dogs on certain Amtrak trains, and\n\ncollect fees for each cat or dog (except service animals) transported by a ticketed passenger.\n\nBars the use of federal funds to implement this program.\n\n(Sec. 11211) Directs Amtrak to request proposals from qualified persons or entities to utilize right-of-way and real estate owned by Amtrak for telecommunications systems, energy distribution systems, and other appropriate activities. Authorizes Amtrak to enter into an agreement to implement any such proposal or proposals.\n\n(Sec. 11212)", + " Requires Amtrak to report to Congress on options to enhance economic development and accessibility of and around Amtrak stations and terminals.\n\nDirects Amtrak to request proposals from qualified persons, including small business concerns owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals and veteran-owned small businesses, to lead, participate, or partner with Amtrak, a station owner, and other entities in enhancing economic development in and around such stations and terminals using these options.\n\n(Sec. 11213) Directs the Amtrak Inspector General to:\n\nevaluate Amtrak's boarding procedures for passengers, including those using or transporting nonmotorized transportation, such as bicycles, at its 15 stations through which the most people pass;", + " and\n\nmake certain comparisons and recommendations to improve such procedures.\n\n(Sec. 11214) Amends the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 to extend indefinitely specified authority to restructure long-term Amtrak debt and capital leases. Limits any such restructuring to the extent provided in advance in appropriations Acts.\n\nProhibits Amtrak from incurring more debt after the enactment of this Act without the express advance approval of DOT (as under current law), unless that debt receives credit assistance (including direct loans and loan guarantees) under the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Act of 1976.\n\n(Sec. 11215) Prescribes requirements for elimination of duplicative Amtrak reporting requirements.\n\nSubtitle C--Intercity Passenger Rail Policy\n\n(Sec.", + " 11301) Authorizes DOT to make grants to a state (or group of states), an Interstate Compact, a public agency, a state political subdivision, Amtrak or other rail carrier providing intercity rail passenger transportation, a Class I or Class II railroad, or other specified entities to assist in financing the cost of rail projects to improve the safety, efficiency, or reliability of passenger and freight rail transportation systems.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to establish performance measures for grant recipients to assess progress in achieving certain strategic goals and objectives.\n\nMakes at least 25% of appropriations for such grants available for projects in rural areas.\n\nRequires DOT to allocate an appropriate portion for grants to states:\n\nfor freight rail capital projects in cases where there is no intercity passenger rail service,", + " or\n\nwhere the rail transportation system is not physically connected to rail systems in the continental United States or may not qualify for a grant for transportation-related capital projects.\n\n(Sec. 11302) Directs DOT to develop a federal-state partnership program for issuing competitive grants to a state (or group of states), an Interstate Compact, a public agency, a state political subdivision, or Amtrak for capital projects to replace, rehabilitate, or repair major infrastructure assets for providing intercity passenger rail service.\n\n(Sec. 11303) Directs DOT to develop a program for issuing three-year competitive operating assistance grants to a state (or group of states), an Interstate Compact,", + " a public agency, a state political subdivision, Amtrak, or a rail carrier to initiate, restore, or enhance intercity rail passenger service.\n\n(Sec. 11304) Directs DOT to convene a working group to evaluate the restoration of intercity rail passenger service in the Gulf Coast region between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Orlando, Florida.\n\n(Sec. 11305) Revises the purpose of the Northeast Corridor Commission to require it to promote mutual cooperation and planning pertaining to rail infrastructure investments of the Northeast Corridor.\n\nRevises membership composition of the Commission to include individuals from the Office of the Secretary of Transportation and the Federal Transit Administration.\n\nRequires the Commission to update periodically its statement of goals concerning the future of Northeast Corridor rail infrastructure and operations and to submit it to Congress,", + " along with with annual performance reports and recommendations for improvements for commuter, intercity, and freight rail transportation along the Corridor, as well as a Northeast Corridor capital investment plan.\n\n(Sec. 11306) Directs the Commission to develop:\n\na capital investment plan for the Northeast Corridor main line between Boston, Massachusetts, and the Virginia Avenue interlocking in the District of Columbia, and the Northeast Corridor branch lines connecting to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Springfield, Massachusetts, and Spuyten Duyvil, New York; and\n\na Northeast Corridor service development plan, updated at least once every 10 years.\n\nRequires Amtrak and each state and public transportation entity that owns infrastructure providing intercity rail passenger transportation on the Northeast Corridor to develop an asset management system and develop,", + " and update as necessary, a Northeast Corridor asset management plan.\n\n(Sec. 11307) Directs DOT to implement a pilot program for the competitive selection of a rail carrier or rail carriers owning infrastructure over which Amtrak operates a long-distance route, a state (or group of states), or state-supported joint powers authority or other sub-state governance entity providing intercity rail passenger transportation over such long-distance routes in lieu of Amtrak to operate three long-distance routes.\n\n(Sec. 11308) Requires DOT to:\n\nissue a request for proposals meeting certain performance standards for the financing and construction of a high-speed passenger rail system within specified high-speed rail corridors,", + " and\n\nestablish a commission for each corridor with one or more proposals that satisfy specified requirements to review and report on the proposals.\n\nRequires DOT then to select any proposal that provides substantial benefits to the public and the national transportation system, is cost-effective, offers significant advantages over existing services, and meets other relevant factors.\n\n(Sec. 11309) Prescribes requirements for the award of large capital project grants in excess of $1 billion.\n\n(Sec. 11310) Directs DOT to study the availability and use of small businesses owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals and veteran-owned small businesses in publicly funded intercity rail passenger transportation projects.\n\n(Sec.", + " 11311) Directs DOT to study:\n\nthe shared use of right-of-way by passenger and freight rail systems; and\n\nthe operational, institutional, and legal structures that would best support improvements to both systems.\n\n(Sec. 11312) Directs the Commission to study the feasibility of and options for permitting through-ticketing between Amtrak service and commuter rail services on the Northeast Corridor.\n\nDirects DOT, in cooperation with the Commission, Amtrak, and commuter rail transportation authorities on the Northeast Corridor, to study the potential benefits of joint procurement by Amtrak and those authorities of common materials, assets, and equipment when spending federal funds.\n\n(Sec.", + " 11313) Directs DOT to conduct a data needs assessment to support development of an intercity passenger rail network.\n\n(Sec. 11314) Grants the Amtrak Inspector General authority to investigate alleged activities meant to defraud the United States.\n\nDirects the Inspector General to initiate an assessment of whether Amtrak's current expenditures or procurements use competitive, market-driven provisions to fulfill the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.\n\nSubtitle D--Safety\n\n(Sec. 11401) Directs the FRA to:\n\ndevelop a model of a state-specific highway-rail grade crossing action plan meeting specified requirements,\n\ndistribute the plan to each state,", + " and\n\npromulgate a rule requiring each state and implement its own action plan.\n\n(Sec. 11402) Directs DOT to:\n\ndetermine whether limitations or weaknesses exist regarding the availability and usefulness for safety purposes of data on private highway-rail grade crossings, and\n\nevaluate existing engineering practices on such grade crossings.\n\n(Sec. 11403) Requires the GAO to evaluate the final rule issued on August 17, 2006, entitled \"Use of Locomotive Horns at Highway-Rail Grade Crossings.\"\n\n(Sec. 11404) Requires DOT, after certifying that each Class I railroad carrier and each entity providing regularly scheduled intercity or commuter rail passenger transportation complies with positive train control (PTC)", + " requirements, to study the possible effectiveness of PTC and related technologies on reducing collisions at highway-rail grade crossings.\n\n(Sec. 11405) Amends the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 to authorize a state or local government to request DOT for a public version of any bridge inspection report generated under a track owner's bridge safety management program for a bridge located in its jurisdiction.\n\n(Sec. 11406) Directs each railroad carrier providing intercity rail passenger transportation or commuter rail passenger transportation to survey its entire system and identify:\n\neach main track location where there is a reduction of more than 20 miles per hour from the approach speed to a curve,", + " bridge, or tunnel; and\n\nthe maximum authorized operating speed for passenger trains at that curve, bridge, or tunnel.\n\nRequires each railroad carrier, after completing the survey, to submit for DOT approval an action plan that:\n\nidentifies each main track location where there is a reduction of more than 20 miles per hour from the approach speed to a curve, bridge, or tunnel as well as the maximum authorized operating speed for passenger trains at that location;\n\ndescribes appropriate actions to enable warning and enforcement of the maximum authorized speed for passenger trains at each identified location;\n\ncontains milestones and target dates for implementing each appropriate action; and\n\nensures compliance with the maximum authorized speed at each identified location.\n\nAuthorizes DOT,", + " however, to exempt from these requirements each segment of track for which operations are governed by a certified PTC system or any other safety technology or practice that would achieve an equivalent or greater level of safety in reducing derailment risk.\n\n(Sec. 11407) Directs DOT to promulgate a rule to require a working alerter in the controlling locomotive of each passenger train in intercity rail passenger transportation or commuter rail passenger transportation. Authorizes an alternative safety measure that would achieve an equivalent or greater level of safety in providing additional signal protection.\n\n(Sec. 11408) Directs DOT to initiate a rulemaking to require that on-track safety regulations,", + " whenever practicable and consistent with other safety requirements and operational considerations, include requiring implementation of redundant signal protection for maintenance-of-way work crews who depend on a train dispatcher to provide signal protection.\n\nRequires DOT to consider exempting from any final requirements each segment of track for which operations are governed by a certified PTC system or any other safety technology or practice that would achieve an equivalent or greater level of safety in providing additional signal protection.\n\n(Sec. 11409) Directs DOT to evaluate track inspection regulations to determine if a railroad carrier providing commuter rail passenger transportation on high density commuter railroad lines should be required to inspect the lines in the same manner as is required for other commuter railroad lines.\n\nAuthorizes DOT,", + " after this evaluation, to promulgate a rule for high density commuter railroad lines, considering the following regulatory requirements for such lines:\n\nat least once every two weeks traverse each main line by vehicle or inspect it on foot, and\n\nat least once each month traverse and inspect each siding by vehicle or by foot.\n\n(Sec. 11410) Directs DOT, in cooperation with the NTSB and Amtrak, to conduct a post-accident assessment of the Amtrak Northeast Regional Train #188 crash on May 12, 2015, adhering to specified requirements.\n\n(Sec. 11411) Directs DOT to promulgate regulations to require each railroad carrier that provides regularly scheduled intercity rail passenger or commuter rail passenger transportation to the public to install inward-", + " and outward-facing image recording devices in all controlling locomotive cabs and cab car operating compartments in such passenger trains.\n\nProhibits the use of an in-cab audio or image recording obtained by a railroad carrier to retaliate against an employee.\n\n(Sec. 11412) Revises authorities of and requirements for railroad police officers. Applies them to officers either directly employed by or contracted by a rail carrier.\n\nRequires such a railroad police officer, who is certified or commissioned as a police officer under the laws of a state, who transfers primary employment or residence from the certifying or commissioning state to another state or jurisdiction to apply within one year after the transfer to be certified or commissioned as a police office under the laws of the state of new primary employment or residence.\n\nDeclares that a state may recognize as meeting its basic police officer certification or commissioning requirements for qualification as a rail police officer any individual who successfully completes a program at a state-", + "recognized police training academy in another state or at a federal law enforcement training center, and who is certified or commissioned as a police officer by that other state.\n\nRequires DOT to revise certain regulations to permit a railroad to designate an individual, who is commissioned in the individual's state of legal residence or state of primary employment and directly employed by or contracted by a railroad to enforce state laws for the protection of railroad property, personnel, passengers, and cargo, to serve in the states in which the railroad owns property.\n\n(Sec. 11413) Authorizes DOT to receive and expend cash, or receive and utilize spare parts and similar items, from non-federal government sources to repair damages to or replace federal government-owned automated track inspection cars and equipment as a result of third-party liability for such damages.", + " Requires any amounts collected to be credited directly to the FRS Railroad Safety and Operations account and remain available until expended for the repair, operation, and maintenance of automated track inspection cars and equipment in connection with the automated track inspection program.\n\nRepair and replacement of damaged track inspection equipment.\n\n(Sec. 11414) Requires DOT to report to Congress on FRA research into developing a system that measures vertical track deflection from a moving rail car, including the system's ability to identify poor track support from fouled ballast, deteriorated cross ties, or other conditions.\n\n(Sec. 11415) Declares $295 million (adjusted for inflation)", + " to be the maximum aggregate allowable awards to all rail passengers, against all defendants, for all claims, including claims for punitive damages, arising from a single accident or incident involving Amtrak occurring on May 12, 2015.\n\nSubtitle E--Project Delivery\n\nTrack, Railroad, and Infrastructure Network Act or the TRAIN Act\n\n(Sec. 11502) Exempts improvements to, maintenance, rehabilitation, or operation of railroad or rail transit lines that are in use (including bridges or tunnels located on railroad or transit lines on which service has been discontinued or that have been railbanked or otherwise reserved for goods or passenger transportation), or were historically used for the transportation of goods or passengers,", + " from federal policies and requirements for the preservation of public park and recreation lands, wildlife and waterfowl refuges, and historic sites. Allows such improvements, however, regarding stations or bridges or tunnels located on abandoned or unused lines.\n\n(Sec. 11503) Directs DOT to:\n\napply specified project development procedures, to the greatest extent feasible, to any railroad project that requires DOT approval under NEPA, and\n\nincorporate aspects of such procedures into agency regulations and procedures in a manner that increases the efficiency of the review of railroad projects.\n\nRequires DOT also to survey FRA use of categorical exclusions in transportation projects since 2005 and publish in the Federal Register a review of the survey that describes:\n\nthe types of actions categorically excluded;", + " and\n\nany actions DOT is considering for new categorical exclusions, including those that would conform to those of other modal administrations.\n\nDirects DOT to publish, one year after enactment of this Act, a notice of proposed rulemaking to propose new and existing categorical exclusions for railroad projects that require DOT approval under NEPA and develop a process for considering new categorical exclusions.\n\n(Sec. 11504) Directs DOT to submit to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, one year after enactment of this Act, a proposed exemption, and 180 days later, a final exemption of railroad rights-of-way from review for their effect on historic property consistent with a specified exemption for interstate highways approved on March 10,", + " 2005.\n\nSubtitle F--Financing\n\nRailroad Infrastructure Financing Improvement Act\n\n(Sec. 11603) Amends the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976 to direct DOT to make direct loans and loan guarantees to joint ventures that include, instead of at least one railroad, at least one railroad, state or local government, interstate compact, or government sponsored authority or corporation (entity).\n\n(Sec. 11604) Requires direct loans and loan guarantees for railroad rehabilitation to:\n\ncover pre-construction costs;\n\nreimburse planning and design expenses relating to specified activities; and\n\nfinance economic development during a specified four-year period,", + " including commercial and residential development, and related infrastructure and activities, that incorporate private investment and meet certain other specifications.\n\nDirects DOT to require a non-federal match of at least 25% for transit-oriented development projects.\n\n(Sec. 11605) Divides into 30 days and 60 days the current 90 day deadline for approval or disapproval of a loan or loan guarantee application. Requires DOT to notify direct loan or loan guarantee applicants within 30 days if their applications are incomplete, and within another 60 days to approve or disapprove a resubmitted application.\n\nAuthorizes the collection of charges for certain costs additional to the evaluation of applications.", + " Repeals the current formula cap on such a charge.\n\n(Sec. 11606) Allows the term for repayment of a direct loan or loan guarantee to extend from a maximum of 35 years to a maximum of the lesser of:\n\n35 years after the date of substantial completion of the project; or\n\nthe estimated useful life of the rail equipment or facilities to be acquired, rehabilitated, improved, developed, or established.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to allow, for up to one year over the duration of the direct loan, an obligor to add unpaid principal and interest to the outstanding balance if at any time after the date of substantial completion the project is unable to generate sufficient revenues to pay the scheduled loan repayments of principal and interest on a direct loan.", + " Allows also prepayments without penalty.\n\nAuthorizes DOT, after notifying the obligor, also to sell to another entity or reoffer into the capital markets a direct loan for the project if the sale or reoffering has a high probability of being made on favorable terms. Prohibits any change to the original terms and conditions of the secured loan without the obligor's prior written consent.\n\nDeclares that a direct loan shall not be subordinated to the claims of any holder of project obligations in the event of the obligor's bankruptcy, insolvency, or liquidation. Permits waiver of this prohibition against subordination for a public agency borrower that is financing ongoing capital programs and has outstanding senior bonds under a preexisting indenture for an A-rated direct loan that meets specified security and other criteria.\n\n(Sec.", + " 11607) Repeals authority for cohorts of loans.\n\nAllows a direct loan or loan guarantee applicant to propose, and requires DOT to accept as a basis for determining the amount of a credit risk premium any of the following in addition to the value of any tangible asset:\n\nthe net present value of a future stream of state or local subsidy income or other dedicated revenues to secure the direct loan or loan guarantee;\n\nadequate coverage requirements to ensure repayment, on a non-recourse basis, from cash flows generated by the project or any other dedicated revenue source;\n\nan investment-grade rating on the direct loan or loan guarantee (which must be from at least two rating agencies if the loan or guarantee exceeds $75 million); or\n\na rating on the direct loan or loan guarantee.\n\n(Sec.", + " 11608) Authorizes DOT to enter into a master credit agreement (to make one or more direct loans or loan guarantees at future dates for a program of related projects secured by a common security pledge) contingent upon prior satisfaction of specified conditions.\n\n(Sec. 11609) Requires DOT, in granting direct loans and loan guarantees, among other priority projects to give priority to those for improving railroad stations and passenger facilities and increasing transit-oriented development.\n\n(Sec. 11611) Directs the GAO to analyze how the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing Program can be used to improve passenger rail infrastructure.\n\nDIVISION B--COMPREHENSIVE TRANSPORTATION AND CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT OF 2015\n\nTITLE XXIV[sic]", + "--MOTOR VEHICLE SAFETY\n\nSubtitleA--Vehicle Safety\n\n(Sec. 24101) Reauthorizes through FY2020 the administration of DOT motor vehicle safety requirements and requirements for consumer information, bumper standards, odometers, automobile fuel economy, and theft prevention.\n\n(Sec. 24102) Requires the DOT Inspector General to report periodically to specified congressional committees on whether and what progress has been made to implement the recommendations in the Office of Inspector General Audit Report issued June 18, 2015 (ST-2015-063).\n\nRequires the NHTSA to brief these committees periodically on the actions it has taken to implement those recommendations,", + " and submit a final report on implementation of all of the recommendations within one year after enactment of this Act.\n\n(Sec. 24103) Directs DOT to meet specified requirements to implement current information technology, web design trends, and best practices that will help ensure that motor vehicle safety recall information available to the public on the federal website is readily accessible and easy to use.\n\nRequires the GAO to study the current consumer, dealer, and manufacturer use of the safety recall information made available to the public, including the usability and content of the federal and manufacturers' websites and NHTSA efforts to publicize and educate consumers about safety recall information.\n\nAmends MAP-", + "21 to require DOT to:\n\nupdate periodically the method of conveying recall information to consumers, dealers, and manufacturers, such as through public service announcements; and\n\nmake available to the public on the Internet detailed guidance for consumers submitting safety complaints.\n\n(Sec. 24104) Directs DOT to prescribe a final rule revising the regulations for manufacturer's recall for a defect relating to motor vehicle safety or a noncompliance with a federal motor vehicle safety standard. Requires any recall to include notification by electronic means in addition to notification by first class mail.\n\n(Sec. 24105) Directs DOT to implement a two-year pilot program of grants to states to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of a state process for informing consumers of open motor vehicle recalls at the time of motor vehicle registration in the state.\n\n(Sec.", + " 24106) Extends a manufacturer's recall obligations to filing of a petition in bankruptcy under chapter 7 (Liquidation).\n\n(Sec. 24107) Prescribes owner or requester notification requirements for a dealer to meet in order to obtain reimbursement from a manufacturer fair reimbursement for providing a remedy without charge under the manufacturer's recall.\n\n(Sec. 24108) Extends from 60 days to 180 days the time after receipt of a recall notice for a tire owner or purchaser to present a defective or noncomplying tire to the manufacturer to remedy the defect or noncompliance.\n\n(Sec. 24109) Raechel and Jacqueline Houck Safe Rental Car Act of 2015\n\nAuthorizes a rental company that receives a notification (approved by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)", + " from the manufacturer of a covered rental vehicle about any equipment defect, or noncompliance with federal motor vehicle safety standards, to rent or sell the vehicle or equipment only if the defect or noncompliance is remedied.\n\nSpecifies any rental vehicle: (1) rated at 10,000 pounds gross vehicle weight or less, (2) rented without a driver for an initial term of under 4 months, and (3) that is part of a motor vehicle fleet of 5 or more motor vehicles used for rental purposes by a rental company.\n\nPrescribes a special rule to require rental companies to comply with specified limitations on sale, lease,", + " or rental of a motor vehicle as soon as practicable, but within 24 hours after the earliest receipt of the manufacturer's notification of a defect or noncompliance with vehicle safety standards, whether by electronic means or first class mail. Extends the 24-hour deadline for complying with such limitations to 48 hours if the notification covers more than 5,000 motor vehicles in the rental company's fleet.\n\nPermits a rental company to rent (but not sell or lease) a motor vehicle subject to recall if the defect or noncompliance remedy is not immediately available and the company takes any actions specified in the notice to alter the vehicle temporarily to eliminate the safety risk posed.\n\nMakes these special rules for rental companies inapplicable to junk automobiles.\n\nProhibits a rental company from knowingly making inoperable any safety devices or elements of design installed on or in a compliant motor vehicle or vehicle equipment unless the company reasonably believes the vehicle or equipment will not be used when the devices or elements are inoperable.\n\nAuthorizes the Secretary,", + " upon request, to inspect records of a rental company with respect to a safety investigation. Authorizes the Secretary to require a rental company to keep records or make reports for purposes of compliance with federal motor vehicle safety orders or regulations.\n\nAuthorizes the Secretary to study the effectiveness of the amendments made by this Act and of other activities of rental companies.\n\nAmends the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) to require the mandatory study of the safety of rental trucks during a specified seven-year period to evaluate the completion of safety recall remedies on rental trucks.\n\nDirects the Secretary to solicit comments regarding the implementation of this Act from members of the public,", + " including rental companies, consumer organizations, automobile manufacturers, and automobile dealers.\n\nDeclares that nothing in this Act shall: (1) be construed to create or increase any liability for a manufacturer who manufactures or imports a motor vehicle that is subject to defect or noncompliance recall requirements; or (2) supersede or otherwise affect the contractual obligations, if any, between such manufacturer and a rental company.\n\n(Sec. 24110) Increases from $5,000 to $21,000 maximum civil penalties for certain violations of motor vehicle safety, and from $35 million to $105 million the maximum civil penalty for a series of violations.\n\n(Sec.", + " 24111) Authorizes a state, without DOT approval, to allow electronic odometer disclosures meeting certain requirements relating to the transfer of vehicles.\n\n(Sec. 24112) Directs DOT (which currently is merely authorized) to promulgate rules requiring a senior official responsible for safety in any company submitting information to the Secretary in response to a request for information in a safety defect or compliance investigation to make specified certifications.\n\n(Sec. 24113) Requires DOT to report on the feasibility of a technical system that would operate in each new motor vehicle to indicate when it is subject to an open manufacturer's recall.\n\n(Sec. 24114)", + " Changes from discretionary to mandatory the authority of DOT to initiate research into effective ways to minimize the risk of hyperthermia or hypothermia to children or other unattended passengers in rear seating positions.\n\n(Sec. 24115) Directs DOT, within one year after enactment of this Act, to publish a proposed rule that:\n\nupdates standards pertaining to tire pressure monitoring systems to ensure that such a system installed in a new motor vehicle after the effective date of the updated standards cannot be overridden, reset, or recalibrated in such a way that the system will no longer detect when the inflation pressure in one or more of the vehicle's tires has fallen to or below a significantly underinflated pressure level;", + " and\n\ndoes not contain any provision that has the effect of prohibiting the availability of direct or indirect tire pressure monitoring systems that meet the requirements of the updated standards.\n\nRequires DOT, within two years after enactment of this Act and with sufficient notice and comment opportunity, to issue a final rule based on the proposed rule that:\n\nallows a manufacturer to install a tire pressure monitoring system that can be reset or recalibrated to accommodate the repositioning of tire sensor locations on vehicles with split inflation pressure recommendations, tire rotation, or replacement tires or wheels of a different size than the original equipment tires or wheels; and\n\nensures that a tire pressure monitoring system that is reset or recalibrated according to the manufacturer's instructions would illuminate the low tire pressure warning telltale when a tire is significantly underinflated until the tire is no longer significantly underinflated.\n\n(Sec.", + " 24116) Requires a manufacturer required to furnish a report for a defect or noncompliance in a motor vehicle or in an item of original or replacement equipment to include specified information on any specific component or components involved in the recall.\n\nSubtitle B--Research And Development And Vehicle Electronics\n\nSec. 24201) Directs DOT to report to specified congressional committees on the operations of the Council for Vehicle Electronics, Vehicle Software, and Emerging Technologies, especially its accomplishments, its role in integrating and aggregating electronic and emerging technologies expertise across the NHTSA, its role in coordinating with other federal agencies, and its priorities over the next five years.\n\n(Sec.", + " 24202) Directs DOT, in carrying out motor vehicle and highway safety research, development, and testing programs and activities, and in coordination with Department of State, to enter into cooperative agreements and collaborative research and development agreements with foreign governments.\n\nRequires the DOT Inspector General to audit DOT management and oversight of cooperative agreements and collaborative research and development agreements, including any cooperative agreements with foreign governments.\n\nSubtitle C--Miscellaneous Provisions\n\nPart I--Driver Privacy Act of 2015\n\nDriver Privacy Act of 2015\n\n(Sec. 24302) Declares that any data in an event data recorder required to be installed in a passenger motor vehicle (as provided for under Department of Transportation [DOT]", + " regulations concerning the collection, storage, and retrievability of onboard motor vehicle crash event data) is the property of the owner or lessee of the vehicle in which the recorder is installed, regardless of when the vehicle was manufactured.\n\nProhibits a person, other than the owner or lessee of the motor vehicle, from accessing data recorded or transmitted by such a recorder unless:\n\na court or other judicial or administrative authority authorizes the retrieval of such data subject to admissibility of evidence standards;\n\nan owner or lessee consents to such retrieval for any purpose, including vehicle diagnosis, service, or repair;\n\nthe data is retrieved pursuant to certain authorized investigations or inspections of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)", + " or DOT;\n\nthe data is retrieved to determine the appropriate emergency medical response to a motor vehicle crash; or\n\nthe data is retrieved for traffic safety research, and the owner's or lessee's personally identifiable information and the vehicle identification number are not disclosed.\n\n(Sec. 24303) Directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, after completing a study and submitting a report to Congress, to promulgate regulations concerning the amount of time event data recorders installed in passenger motor vehicles may capture and record vehicle-related data to provide accident investigators with pertinent crash-related information.\n\nPart II--Safety Through Informed Consumers Act Of 2015\n\nSafety Through Informed Consumers Act of 2015\n\n(Sec.", + " 24322) Revises passenger motor vehicle information program requirements.\n\nDirects DOT to promulgate a rule to ensure that passenger motor vehicle crash avoidance information is indicated next to crashworthiness information on stickers placed on motor vehicles by their manufacturers.\n\nPart III--Tire Efficiency, Safety, and Registration Act of 2015\n\nTire Efficiency, Safety, and Registration Act of 2015 or the TESR Act\n\n(Sec. 24332) Requires DOT to promulgate regulations for:\n\ntire fuel efficiency minimum performance standards, and\n\ntire wet traction minimum performance standards.\n\n(Sec. 34433) Directs DOT to initiate a rulemaking to require independent distributors or dealers of tires to maintain records containing certain information on sales of tires.\n\n(Sec.", + " 34434) Directs DOT to examine the feasibility of requiring all tire manufacturers that must maintain purchaser records and procedures to:\n\ninclude electronic identification on every tire that reflects all of the information currently required in the tire identification number, and\n\nensure that the same type and format of electronic information technology is used on all tires.\n\n(Sec. 34435) Directs DOT to establish a publicly available electronic tire recall database.\n\nPart IV--Alternative Fuel Vehicles\n\n(Sec. 24341) Directs the EPA to revise certain regulations for calculating average fuel economy and average carbon-related exhaust emissions for natural gas dual fuel model type vehicles to accelerate the mandatory application of a combined model type fuel economy determined according to a specified formula starting model years after 2016 instead of starting model years after 2019.\n\nPart V--Motor Vehicle Safety Whistleblower Act\n\nMotor Vehicle Safety Whistleblower Act\n\n(Sec.", + " 24352) Prescribes certain whistleblower incentives and protections for motor vehicle manufacturer, part supplier, or dealership employees or contractors who voluntarily give DOT information relating to any motor vehicle defect, noncompliance, or any violation of any notification or reporting requirement which is likely to cause unreasonable risk of death or serious physical injury.\n\nAuthorizes DOT to pay awards to one or more whistleblowers in an aggregate amount of up to between 10% and 30% of total monetary sanctions collected pursuant to an administrative or judicial action resulting in aggregate monetary sanctions exceeding $1 million.\n\nDenies an award to any whistleblower who:\n\nis convicted of a criminal violation related to such administrative or judicial action;\n\ncontributes to the alleged violation of a requirement under this Act;\n\nsubmits to DOT information based on facts previously submitted by another whistleblower;\n\nfails to provide original information to DOT in the appropriate form;", + " or\n\nfails to report or attempt to report the information internally through an internal reporting mechanism to the motor vehicle manufacturer, parts supplier, or dealership, unless the whistleblower reasonably believed it would have resulted in retaliation or was already known by the manufacturer, part supplier, or dealership, or unless DOT has good cause to waive this requirement.\n\nProhibits also an award to any whistleblower who knowingly and intentionally makes false representations. Subjects such a whistleblower to criminal penalties.\n\nRequires nondisclosure of a whistleblower's identity, except in specified circumstances.\n\nAuthorizes a whistleblower to appeal DOT determinations in the appropriate U.S. court of appeals.\n\nSubtitle D--Additional Motor Vehicle Provisions\n\n(Sec.", + " 24401) The NHTSA shall publish annually on its website, and file with specified congressional committees, an annual plan for the next year detailing its projected activities, including:\n\nits policy priorities,\n\nany rulemakings projected to be commenced,\n\nany plans to develop guidelines,\n\nany plans to restructure NHTSA or to establish or alter working groups,\n\nany planned NHTSA projects or initiatives, including its working groups and advisory committees, and\n\nany projected dates or timetables associated with any of these items.\n\n(Sec. 24402) Declares that the requirement that a remedy be provided without charge for a defect or noncompliance does not apply if the motor vehicle or replacement equipment was bought by the first purchaser more than 15 (currently,", + " more than 10) calendar years before the notice of a defect or noncompliance is given.\n\n(Sec. 24403) DOT shall issue a final rule requiring each manufacturer of motor vehicles or motor vehicle equipment to retain all motor vehicle safety records, as required by specified federal regulations, for a period of at least 10 calendar years from the date on which they were generated or acquired by the manufacturer. Applies such a rule, however, only to any record in the manufacturer's possession on the rule's effective date.\n\n(Sec. 24404) Declares that certain prohibitions on manufacturing, selling, and importing noncomplying motor vehicles and equipment shall not apply to the introduction of a motor vehicle in interstate commerce solely for purposes of testing or evaluation by a manufacturer that agrees not to sell or offer it for sale at the conclusion of the testing or evaluation,", + " and that before the enactment of this declaration:\n\nhas manufactured and distributed motor vehicles into the United States that are certified to comply with all applicable federal motor vehicle safety standards;\n\nhas submitted to DOT appropriate manufacturer identification information meeting specified criteria; and\n\nif applicable, has identified an agent for service of process.\n\n(Sec. 24405) Directs DOT to exempt from Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards applicable to motor vehicles (but not those pertaining to motor vehicle equipment) up to 325 replica motor vehicles per year manufactured or imported by a registered low-volume manufacturer (other than an importer) whose annual worldwide production, including by the manufacturer's parent or subsidiary,", + " is not more than 5,000 motor vehicles.\n\nDefines \"replica motor vehicle\" as one produced by a low-volume manufacturer and that:\n\nis intended to resemble the body of another motor vehicle manufactured at least 25 years earlier; and\n\nis manufactured under a license for the product configuration, trade dress, trademark, or patent, for the motor vehicle that is intended to be replicated from the original manufacturer, its successors or assignees, or current owner of such product configuration, trade dress, trademark, or patent rights.\n\nAmends the Clean Air Act to exempt form vehicle emission standards, and allow the installation of, a motor vehicle engine (including all engine emission controls)", + " in an exempted specially produced motor vehicle if the motor vehicle engine meets certain requirements and is from a motor vehicle covered by:\n\na certificate of conformity issued by the EPA for the model year in which the exempted specially produced motor vehicle is produced, or\n\nan executive order subject to regulations promulgated by the California Air Resources Board for the model year in which the exempted specially produced motor vehicle is produced.\n\n(Sec. 24406) Declares that no DOT motor vehicle safety guidelines shall confer any rights on any person, state, or locality, nor operate to bind DOT or any person to the approach recommended in such guidelines.\n\nRequires DOT,", + " in any enforcement action regarding motor vehicle safety, to allege a violation of a provision of this subtitle, a motor vehicle safety standard issued under this subtitle, or another relevant statute or regulation.\n\nProhibits DOT from basing an enforcement action on, or executing a consent order based on, practices alleged to be inconsistent with any such guidelines, unless the practices allegedly violate this subtitle, a motor vehicle safety standard issued under it, or another relevant statute or regulation.\n\n(Sec. 24407) Directs DOT to revise the NHTSA crash investigation data collection system to include the collection of the following data in connection with vehicle crashes whenever a child restraint system was in use in a vehicle involved in a crash:\n\nthe type or types of child restraint systems in use during the crash in any vehicle involved in the crash,", + " including whether a five-point harness or belt-positioning booster; and\n\nif a five-point harness child restraint system was in use during the crash, whether the child restraint system was forward-facing or rear-facing in the vehicle concerned.\n\nDIVISION C--FINANCE\n\nTITLE XXXI[sic]--HIGHWAY TRUST FUND AND RELATED TAXES\n\nSubtitle A--Extension of Trust Fund Expenditure Authority and Related Taxes\n\n(Sec. 31101) Amends the Internal Revenue Code to extend through September 30, 2020, authority for expenditures from, and transfers to: (1) the Highway Trust Fund Highway and Mass Transit Accounts,", + " (2) the Sport Fish Restoration and Boating Trust Fund, and (3) the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund.\n\n(Sec. 31102) Extends through September 30, 2022: (1) excise taxes on fuel used by certain buses, certain alcohol fuels, gasoline (other than aviation gasoline) and diesel fuel or kerosene, certain heavy trucks and trailers, and tires, and (2) the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund financing rate.\n\nExtends: (1) the tax on the use of certain heavy motor vehicles, (2) the period for claiming floor tax refunds, (3)", + " exemptions from tax of certain sales of petroleum products and use of highway motor vehicles by states and localities, and (4) the authority for transfers of taxes to the Highway Trust Fund and transfers from such Fund of motorboat and small-engine fuel taxes.\n\nSubtitle B--Additional Transfers to Highway Trust Fund\n\n(Sec. 31201) Authorizes additional transfers of funds to the Highway and Mass Transit Accounts in the Highway Trust Fund.\n\n(Sec. 31202) Authorizes the transfer of motor vehicle safety penalties to the Highway Trust Fund.\n\n(Sec. 31203) Authorizes the transfer of amounts in the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund to the Highway Account in the Highway Trust Fund.\n\nTITLE XXXII:", + " OFFSETS\n\nSubtitle A--Tax Provisions\n\n(Sec. 32101) Amends the Internal Revenue Code to require the Department of the Treasury, upon receiving certification by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that any individual has a seriously delinquent tax debt in excess of $50,000, to transmit the certification and disclose certain tax return information to the Department of State for action with respect to denial, revocation, or limitation of a passport for the individual. Prohibits State, upon receiving such certification, from issuing a passport to such an individual except in emergency circumstances or for humanitarian reasons. Requires State to revoke a passport previously issued to the individual;", + " but to allows permitting a limited passport for return travel to the United States.\n\nAuthorizes State to deny a passport application or revoke a passport if the application does not include the applicant's Social Security number, or includes an incorrect or invalid number willfully, intentionally, negligently, or recklessly provided by the applicant.\n\n(Sec. 32102) Directs the IRS to: (1) enter into qualified tax collection contracts to collect outstanding inactive tax receivables; (2) establish a program to hire, train, and employ special compliance personnel to collect taxes using the automated collection system; and (3) report to specified congressional committees on qualified tax collection contracts and the hiring and training of special compliance personnel.\n\n(Sec.", + " 32104) Amends the Surface Transportation and Veterans Health Care Choice Improvement Act of 2015 to repeal the requirement that Treasury modify appropriate regulations to set maximum extension for the tax returns of employee benefit plans filing Form 5500 at an automatic three-and-a-half-month period ending on November 15 for calendar year plans.\n\nSubtitle B--Fees and Receipts\n\n(Sec. 32201) Amends the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 to require Treasury to make an annual adjustment for inflation to fees for certain custom services.\n\nMakes collected fees available for reimbursement of customs services and inspections costs, but only to the extent provided in appropriations Acts.\n\n(Sec.", + " 32202) Amends the Federal Reserve Act to limit the amount of surplus funds of federal reserve banks to $10 billion. Requires transfer of any amounts of surplus funds exceeding this limit to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve Board) for transfer to the Department of the Treasury for deposit in the general fund of the Treasury.\n\n(Sec. 32203) Prescribes a formula for determining the annual dividend of stockholders of federal reserve banks whose total consolidated assets exceed $10 billion. Requires the dividend to be the smaller of:\n\nthe current 6% of paid-in capital stock, or\n\nthe rate equal to the high yield of the 10-year Treasury note auctioned at the last auction held before payment of the dividend.\n\nReserves the current 6%", + " dividend for a stockholder with total consolidated assets of $10 billion or less.\n\nRequires the Federal Reserve Board to adjust the dollar amounts of total consolidated assets annually for inflation to reflect the change in the Gross Domestic Product Price Index.\n\n(Sec. 32204) Directs DOE to draw down and sell from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) the quantity of barrels of crude oil appropriate to maximize the financial return to United States taxpayers for each of FY2016-FY2017.\n\nSpecifies the numbers of barrels of crude oil to be drawn down from the SPR during FY2023-FY2025, ranging from 16 million (FY2023)", + " to 25 million barrels (FY2025).\n\nProhibits DOE from drawing down and selling crude oil in quantities that would limit DOE authority to sell petroleum products in the full quantity authorized for prevention or reduction of the adverse impact of severe domestic energy supply interruptions.\n\nAuthorizes DOE to increase the drawdown and sales of crude oil during each of these fiscal years as appropriate to maximize the financial return to United States taxpayers.\n\nProhibits any drawdown or sales after a total of $6.2 billion has been deposited in the Treasury general fund from sales authorized under this section.\n\n(Sec. 32205) Amends the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 to repeal,", + " as of the date of enactment of that Act, its amendment to the Federal Crop Insurance Act requiring the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to renegotiate the Standard Reinsurance Agreement by December 31, 2016, and at least once every five years thereafter.\n\n(The Standard Reinsurance Agreement is an agreement between the USDA and the private companies that administer the federal crop insurance program. It specifies details such as administrative and operating expense reimbursements and risk sharing between the USDA and the companies in the operation of the program. The repealed amendment establishes an 8.9% cap on the overall rate of return for insurance providers under the agreement, which is a decrease from the current negotiated rate of approximately 14.", + "5%.)\n\nSubtitle C--Outlays\n\n(Sec. 32301) Amends the Federal Oil and Gas Royalty Management Act of 1982 to eliminate the payment of interest on overpayments under leases of oil and gas on federal lands.\n\nSubtitle D--Budgetary Effects\n\n(Sec. 32401) Prohibits the budgetary effects of this Act from being entered on either PAYGO scorecard maintained pursuant to the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010.\n\nDIVISION D--MISCELLANEOUS\n\nTITLE XLI[sic]--FEDERAL PERMITTING IMPROVEMENT\n\nRevises the process for federal approval of major infrastructure projects by establishing best practices,", + " requiring coordination of federal agency review of projects, and shortening the period for challenges to final decisions for issuing project permits.\n\n(Sec. 41001) Sets forth definitions of terms used in this title, including the definition of \"covered project\" as any activity in the United States that requires authorization or environmental review by a federal agency involving construction of infrastructure for renewable or conventional energy production, electricity transmission, surface transportation, aviation, ports and waterways, water resource projects, broadband, pipelines, manufacturing, or any other sector as determined by a majority vote of the Federal Infrastructure Permitting Improvement Steering Council established by this Act and that:\n\nis subject to the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA);\n\nis likely to require a total investment of more than $200 million;\n\ndoes not qualify for abbreviated authorization or environmental review processes under any applicable law;", + " or\n\ninvolves a project the size and complexity of which make it likely to benefit from enhanced oversight and coordination, including a project likely to require authorization from, or environmental review involving, more than two agencies or the preparation of an environmental impact statement under NEPA.\n\nExcludes from coverage by this title: (1) highway or transportation projects, and (2) water resources development projects subject to environmental review.\n\n(Sec. 41002) Establishes the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, to be chaired by an Executive Director appointed by the President.\n\nRequires the Executive Director to:\n\nestablish an inventory of covered projects that are pending environmental review or authorization by the head of any federal agency;\n\ncategorize the projects in the inventory based on sector and project type;\n\nfor each category,", + " identify the types of environmental reviews and authorizations most commonly involved;\n\nadd a covered project to the inventory after receiving a notice of the initiation of a proposed covered project by a project sponsor; and\n\ndesignate a facilitating agency for each category of covered projects and publish a list of such agencies.\n\nRequires the Council to issue recommendations on an annual basis on best practices relating to the permitting process, including best practices for enhancing early stakeholder engagement, coordination between federal and non-federal governmental entities, information collection, transparency, and training.\n\nRequires the chief environmental review and permitting officer of each agency to: (1) act as an advisor to his or her agency's council members on matters related to environmental review and authorizations;", + " (2) provide technical support; (3) analyze agency environmental review and authorization processes, policies, and authorities; and (4) review and develop training programs for agency staff.\n\nRequires the Office of Management and Budget to designate a federal agency to provide support for projects that are not covered projects and administrative support and staff for the Executive Director.\n\n(Sec. 41003) Allows for the initiation of a covered project by a project sponsor after notice to the Executive Director and the facilitating agency (the agency receiving notice from the project sponsor).\n\nRequires the Executive Director to maintain an online database known as the Permitting Dashboard to track the status of federal environmental reviews and authorizations for covered projects and shall make a specific entry for a project on the Dashboard.\n\nRequires a facilitating or lead agency to establish a Coordinated Project Plan for coordinating public and agency participation in,", + " and completion of, any required federal environmental review and authorization for a covered project. Requires the Plan to include a permitting timetable that sets deadlines for action on any federal environmental review or authorization required for a project. Requires the Executive Director to mediate any disputes relating to the permitting timetables.\n\nDirects the facilitating or lead agencies to provide an expeditious process for project sponsors to consult with each cooperating and participating agency.\n\n(Sec. 41004) This section grants the consent of Congress for three or more contiguous states to enter into an interstate compact establishing regional infrastructure development agencies to facilitate authorization and review of covered projects.\n\n(Sec. 41005)", + " This section requires agencies to complete environmental reviews required under NEPA for covered projects in a timely, coordinated, and environmentally responsible manner.\n\n(Sec. 41006) This section directs federal agencies with statutory authority to authorize a state to issue or administer a permit program to initiate a national process to determine whether best practices developed by the Council are generally applicable to state permitting processes.\n\n(Sec. 41007) Limits the period for challenges to an authorization of a covered project to no more than two years after the date of publication in the Federal Register of the final decision, unless a shorter period is specified in federal law.\n\n(Sec. 41008)", + " Directs the Executive Director to report annually to Congress over a 10-year period on progress under this Act during the previous fiscal year. Requires the report to assess the performance of each participating agency and lead agency. Directs the GAO also to report to Congress on agency progress in making improvements consistent with best practices and agency compliance with performance schedules.\n\n(Sec. 41009) Authorizes specified agencies, after public notice and opportunity for comment, to issue regulations establishing a fee structure for reimbursing the United States for reasonable costs incurred in conducting environmental reviews and authorizations for covered projects. Requires the deposit of such fees into an Environmental Review Improvement Fund for use by the Executive Director solely to administer,", + " implement, and enforce this Act. Requires the regulations to ensure that the use of fees will not impact impartial decision-making with respect to environmental reviews or authorizations.\n\n(Sec. 41010) Applies this Act to any covered project for which: (1) a notice of initiation is filed, or (2) an application or other request for a federal authorization is pending before a federal agency 90 days after enactment of this Act.\n\n(Sec. 41011) Requires the GAO to report to congressional committees whether the provisions of this title could be adapted to streamline the federal permitting process for smaller projects that are not covered projects.\n\n(Sec.", + " 41012) States that nothing in this title amends NEPA.\n\n(Sec. 41013) Requires the termination of this title seven years after its enactment.\n\nTITLE XLII--ADDITIONAL PROVISIONS\n\n(Sec. 42001) Directs the GAO to study and report on payments made to vendors of kerosene used in noncommercial aviation.\n\nTITLE XLIII--PAYMENTS TO CERTIFIED STATES AND INDIAN TRIBES\n\n(Sec. 43001) Amends the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 to require increased and accelerated payments to certified states and Indian tribes to carry out abandoned mine reclamation projects.\n\nDIVISION E--EXPORT-", + "IMPORT BANK OF THE UNITED STATES\n\nExport-Import Bank Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2015\n\nTITLE LI[sic]--TAXPAYER PROTECTION PROVISIONS AND INCREASED ACCOUNTABILITY\n\n(Sec. 51001) Amends the Export-Import Bank Act of 1945 to set at $135 billion, for each of FY2015-FY2019, the authorized aggregate amount of loans, guarantees, and insurance the Export-Import Bank may have outstanding at any time.\n\nDeclares that, if the rate at which borrowing entities are in default on a payment obligation (default rate) is 2%", + " or more for a quarter, the Bank may not exceed the amount of loans, guarantees, and insurance outstanding on the last day of that quarter until the default rate becomes less than 2%.\n\n(Sec. 51002) Directs the Bank to build to and hold in reserve, to protect against future losses, at least 5% of its aggregate amount of disbursed and outstanding loans, guarantees, and insurance.\n\n(Sec. 51003) Amends the Export-Import Bank Reauthorization Act of 2012 (EIBRA) to require the Government Accountability Office's quadrennial review of the adequacy of the design and effectiveness of the Bank's fraud controls to include review of the Bank's compliance with these controls.\n\n(Sec.", + " 51004) Establishes an Office of Ethics within the Bank to recommend administrative actions to establish or enforce standards of official conduct.\n\n(Sec. 51005) Establishes a Chief Risk Officer of the Bank to oversee all issues relating to risk within the Bank.\n\n(Sec. 51006) Establishes also a Risk Management Committee to:\n\noversee periodic stress testing on the entire Bank portfolio and the monitoring of industry, geographic, and obligor exposure levels; and\n\nreview all required reports on the Bank's default rate.\n\n(Sec. 51007) Directs the Bank's Inspector General to conduct an audit or evaluation of the Bank's portfolio risk management procedures,", + " including its implementation of the duties assigned to the Chief Risk Officer.\n\n(Sec. 51008) Authorizes the Bank to establish a pilot program for reinsurance under which it may enter into contracts and other arrangements to share risks associated with its provision of guarantees, insurance, or credit, or participation in the extension of credit.\n\nDeclares that the aggregate amount of liability the Bank may transfer through risk-sharing under a contract or other arrangement may not exceed $1 billion, nor a total of $10 billion during a fiscal year.\n\nTITLE LII--PROMOTION OF SMALL BUSINESS EXPORTS\n\n(Sec. 52001) Directs the Bank to:\n\nincrease from 20%", + " to 25% of its lending authority the amount made available to finance direct exports by small business concerns, and\n\ninclude in its annual report to Congress a report on its programs for U.S. businesses with less than $250 million in annual sales.\n\nTITLE LIII--MODERNIZATION OF OPERATIONS\n\n(Sec. 53001) Requires the Bank to implement policies to accept electronic payments and transaction documents.\n\n(Sec. 53002) Extends through FY2019 the Bank's authority to use a portion of its surplus to update its information technology systems.\n\nTITLE LIV--GENERAL PROVISIONS\n\n(Sec. 54001)", + " Reauthorizes through FY2019 the Bank, the Sub-Saharan Africa Advisory Committee, and authority for dual use exports (of nonlethal defense articles or services primarily for civilian use).\n\n(Sec. 54002) Limits to $25 million the principal amounts of medium-term financing by the Bank.\n\nIncreases from a minimum of $10 million to a minimum of $25 million the amounts of:\n\nlong-term loans or loan guarantees the Bank shall seek to ensure that U.S. insurance companies have a fair and open competitive opportunity to insure in connection with any transaction for which the loan or guarantee is provided,\n\nworking capital export loans and guarantees to small businesses,", + " and\n\nlong-term support for projects to which certain procedures apply regarding the potential beneficial and adverse environmental effects of goods and services for which direct lending and guarantee support is requested.\n\nDeclares that, if the long-term support for projects subject to environmental effects consideration is less than $25 million, the minimum threshold shall be the one established pursuant to international agreements, including the Common Approaches for Officially Supported Export Credits and Environmental and Social Due Diligence, as adopted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Council on June 28, 2012, and the risk-management framework (\"Equator Principles\") adopted by financial institutions for determining, assessing,", + " and managing environmental and social risk in projects.\n\nTITLE LV--OTHER MATTERS\n\n(Sec. 55001) Prohibits the Bank from:\n\ndenying an application for financing based solely on the industry, sector, or business that the application concerns; or\n\npromulgating or implementing policies that discriminate against an application based solely on the industry, sector, or business that the application concerns.\n\nApplies these prohibitions only to applications for Bank financing for projects concerning the exploration, development, production, or export of energy sources and the generation or transmission of electrical power, or combined heat and power, regardless of the energy source involved.\n\n(Sec.", + " 55002) Amends the EIBRA to require the President instead of the Department of the Treasury to initiate and pursue negotiations to end export credit financing.\n\nDirects the President to propose to Congress a strategy to pursue with other major exporting countries, including Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members and non-OECD members, to eliminate over a 10-year period subsidized export-financing programs, tied aid, export credits, and all other forms of government-supported export subsidies.\n\n(Sec. 55003) Directs the Bank to study the extent to which products it offers are available and used by companies that export information and communications technology services and related goods.\n\nDIVISION F--ENERGY SECURITY\n\n(Sec.", + " 61001) Directs the Department of Energy (DOE) to adopt procedures to:\n\nimprove communication and coordination between DOE's energy response team, federal partners, and industry;\n\nleverage the Energy Information Administration's subject matter expertise within DOE's energy response team to improve supply chain situation assessments;\n\nestablish company liaisons and direct communication with DOE's energy response team to improve situation assessments;\n\nstreamline and enhance processes for obtaining temporary regulatory relief to speed up emergency response and recovery;\n\nfacilitate and increase engagement among states, the oil and natural gas industry, and DOE in developing state and local energy assurance plans;\n\nestablish routine education and training programs for key government emergency response positions with DOE and states;", + " and\n\ninvolve states and the oil and natural gas industry in comprehensive drill and exercise programs.\n\nIncludes among these activities collaborative efforts with state and local government officials and the private sector.\n\n(Sec. 61002) Amends the Federal Power Act to require the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to ensure that any emergency order that may result in conflict with federal, state, or local environmental law or regulations:\n\nrequires generation, delivery, interchange, or transmission of electricity only during hours necessary to meet the emergency and serve the public interest;\n\nbe consistent with applicable environmental law; and\n\nminimizes any adverse environmental impacts to the maximum extent practical.\n\nDeclares that any necessary action or omission in such an emergency that does not comply with federal,", + " state, or local environmental law or regulation shall not be considered a violation of it, or subject the party involved to any related requirement, civil or criminal liability, or a citizen suit.\n\nRequires such emergency orders to expire within 90 days. Authorizes FERC to renew or reissue an order for subsequent periods of no more than 90 days each as necessary to meet the emergency and serve the public interest.\n\nAuthorizes a municipality engaged in the transmission or sale of electricity, and not otherwise subject to FERC jurisdiction, to make temporary connections during an emergency with public utilities that are subject to FERC jurisdiction, and construct necessary or appropriate temporary electricity transmission facilities,", + " without becoming subject to FERC jurisdiction by reason of that temporary connection or construction.\n\n(Sec. 61003) Amends the Federal Power Act to authorize DOE, with or without notice, hearing, or report, to issue orders for emergency measures to protect or restore the reliability of either critical electric infrastructure or defense critical electric infrastructure whenever the President issues a written directive or determination identifying an imminent grid security emergency. Requires the President to notify specified congressional committees promptly upon issuing such a directive.\n\nDefines \"critical electric infrastructure\" to mean a system or asset of the bulk-power system, whether physical or virtual, whose incapacity or destruction would negatively affect national security,", + " economic security, public health or safety, or any combination of such matters.\n\nDefines \"defense critical electric infrastructure\" to mean any electric infrastructure located in the United States (including the territories) that serves a DOE-designated facility, but is not owned or operated by the facility owner or operator.\n\nRequires DOE to designate any such facilities that are: (1) critical to the defense of the United States, and (2) vulnerable to a disruption of the supply of electric energy provided by an external provider.\n\nRequires DOE, before issuing an order for emergency measures, to the extent practicable in light of the nature of the grid security emergency and the urgency of the need for action,", + " to consult with governmental authorities in Canada and Mexico, certain entities, the Electricity Sub-sector Coordinating Council, and other appropriate federal agencies regarding implementation of the emergency measures.\n\nPrescribes: (1) implementation procedures (including expiration and reissuance of emergency orders); and (2) related cost recovery measures affecting owners, operators, or users of the bulk-power system.\n\nDirects DOE, to the extent practicable and consistent with obligations to protect classified information, to provide temporary access to classified information relating to a grid security emergency to key personnel of relevant entities in order to optimize communications between them and federal agencies.\n\nExempts critical electric infrastructure information from mandatory disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.\n\nDirects FERC to:", + " (1) designate critical electric infrastructure information, and (2) prescribe regulations and orders prohibiting its unauthorized disclosure but also authorizing appropriate voluntary sharing with federal, state, local, and tribal authorities.\n\nAuthorizes DOE also to designate critical electric infrastructure information.\n\nStates that critical electric infrastructure information may not be designated as such, however, for longer than five years, and any designation shall be subject to judicial review.\n\nDeclares that no cause of action shall lie or be maintained in any federal or state court for sharing or receiving information in accordance with this Act.\n\nMakes DOE the lead Sector-Specific Agency for cybersecurity for the energy sector to:\n\ncoordinate with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)", + " and other relevant federal departments and agencies;\n\ncollaborate with critical electric infrastructure owners and operators as well as independent regulatory agencies and state, local, tribal, and territorial entities;\n\nserve as a day-to-day federal interface for the dynamic prioritization and coordination of sector-specific activities;\n\ncarry out incident management responsibilities;\n\nprovide, support, or facilitate technical assistance and consultations for the energy sector to identify vulnerabilities and help mitigate incidents; and\n\ngive DHS annually sector-specific critical electric infrastructure information to support its reporting requirements.\n\n(Sec. 61004) Directs DOE, acting through the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, to submit to Congress a plan to establish a Strategic Transformer Reserve for the storage,", + " in strategically located facilities, of spare large power transformers and emergency mobile substations in sufficient numbers to temporarily replace critically damaged large power transformers and substations that are critical electric infrastructure or serve defense and military installations to mitigate significant impacts to the electric grid resulting from physical attack, cyber attack, electromagnetic pulse attack, geomagnetic disturbances, severe weather, or seismic events.\n\n(Sec. 61005) Directs DOE also to develop and report to specified congressional committees, after public notice and comment, recommended U.S. energy security valuation methods.\n\nRequires the report to:\n\nevaluate and define U.S. energy security to reflect modern domestic and global energy markets and the collective needs of the United States and its allies and partners;\n\nidentify procedures and criteria to ensure that energy-related actions that significantly affect the supply,", + " distribution, or use of energy are evaluated with respect to their potential impact on energy security, consumers and the economy, energy supply diversity and resiliency, well-functioning and competitive energy markets, the U.S. trade balance, and national security objectives; and\n\nrecommend an implementation strategy meeting specified requirements.\n\nDIVISION G--FINANCIAL SERVICES\n\nTITLE LXXI[sic]--IMPROVING ACCESS TO CAPITAL FOR EMERGING GROWTH COMPANIES\n\n(Sec. 71001) Amends the Securities Act of 1933 to reduce from 21 to 15 the number of days before a \"road show\"", + " that an emerging growth company (EGC), before its initial public offering (IPO) date, may publicly file a draft registration statement for confidential nonpublic review by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).\n\n(A financial \"road show\" is an offer [other than a statutory prospectus or a portion of one] that contains a presentation regarding an offering by one or more members of the issuer's management and includes discussion of one or more of the issuer, such management, and the securities being offered. Typically, a road show is a series of meetings across different cities, often before an IPO, in which top executives from a company have the opportunity to talk with current or potential investors.)\n\n(Sec.", + " 71002) Prescribes a grace period during which an issuer that was an EGC at the time it filed a confidential registration statement (or, in lieu of that, a publicly filed registration statement) for SEC review, but ceases to be an EGC, shall continue to be treated as an emerging market growth company for one year or, if earlier, until consummation of its IPO.\n\n(Sec. 71003) Amends the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act to direct the SEC to prescribe conditions under which a registration statement filed (or submitted for confidential review) by an issuer before its IPO may omit financial disclosure information for historical periods otherwise required.\n\nTITLE LXXII--DISCLOSURE MODERNIZATION AND SIMPLIFICATION\n\n(Sec.", + " 72001) Directs the SEC to issue regulations permitting issuers to submit a summary page on annual and transition report form 10-K if each item on that page cross-references electronically or otherwise the material contained in form 10-K to which the item relates.\n\n(Sec. 72002) Directs the SEC to revise regulation S-K (Standard Instructions for Filing Forms under the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975) in order to:\n\nreduce the burden on smaller issuers, including emerging growth companies, accelerated filers, and smaller reporting companies (while still providing all material information to investors); and\n\neliminate duplicative,", + " overlapping, outdated, or unnecessary provisions.\n\n(Sec. 72003) Requires the SEC to study ways to: (1) modernize and simplify requirements in regulation S-K, and (2) evaluate information delivery and presentation methods as well as explore methods to discourage repetition and disclosure of immaterial information.\n\nDirects the SEC also to issue a proposed rule to implement any recommendations it makes to Congress based upon the study.\n\nTITLE LXXIII--BULLION AND COLLECTIBLE COIN PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY AND COST SAVINGS\n\n(Sec. 73001) Repeals: (1) the authority of the Secretary of the Treasury to change the design of certain gold bullion coins,", + " and (2) requirements for the protective covering for certain bullion coins.\n\nRepeals the copper content requirements for quarter dollar coins, and requires the silver content to be at least 90%.\n\nMakes technical revisions to the requirements for palladium bullion investment coins.\n\n(Sec. 73002) Requires proof and uncirculated versions of American Eagle silver coins issued during calendar year 2016 to have a smooth edge incused with a designation that notes the 30th anniversary of the first issue of such coins.\n\nTITLE LXXIV--SBIC ADVISERS RELIEF\n\n(Sec. 74001) Amends the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 to exempt specified advisers of small business investment companies (SBICs)", + " from certain: (1) SEC registration requirements with respect to the provision of investment advice relating to venture capital funds, and (2) SEC registration and reporting requirements with respect to assets under management of private funds.\n\n(Sec. 74003) Extends the same exemption to specified SBIC advisers with respect to any state or local law requiring the registration, licensing, or qualifications of investment advisers.\n\nTITLE LXXV--ELIMINATE PRIVACY NOTICE CONFUSION\n\n(Sec. 75001) Amends the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to exempt from its annual privacy policy notice requirement any financial institution which: (1)", + " provides nonpublic personal information only in accordance with specified requirements, and (2) has not changed its policies and practices with regard to disclosing nonpublic personal information from those disclosed in the most recent disclosure sent to consumers.\n\nTITLE LXXVI--REFORMING ACCESS FOR INVESTMENTS IN STARTUP ENTERPRISES\n\n(Sec.76001) Amends the Securities Act of 1933 to exempt from security registration requirements, and related prohibitions against using interstate commerce and the mails for the sale or delivery of securities after sale, any transaction where:\n\neach purchaser is an accredited investor;\n\nneither the seller, nor any person acting on the seller's behalf,", + " offers or sells securities by general solicitation or advertising;\n\nthe seller and prospective purchaser obtain from an issuer meeting certain criteria reasonably current specified information;\n\nthe transaction is not for the sale of a security whose seller is neither an issuer nor a subsidiary of the issuer;\n\nneither the seller, nor any person receiving remuneration for participating in the offer or sale of the securities, is subject to certain legal disqualification (bad actor);\n\nthe issuer is engaged in business, is not in the organizational stage or in bankruptcy or receivership, and is not a blank check, blind pool, or shell company with no specific business plan or purpose or has indicated that the issuer's primary business plan is to engage in a merger or combination of the business with,", + " or an acquisition of, an unidentified person;\n\nthe transaction does not involve a security that constitutes the whole or part of an unsold allotment to, or a subscription or participation by, a broker or dealer as an underwriter of the security or a redistribution; and\n\nthe transaction does involve a security of a class authorized and outstanding for at least 90 days before the transaction.\n\nDeems any securities acquired in such exempt transactions to: (1) have been acquired in a transaction not involving any public offering, (2) not be a distribution involving an underwriter, and (2) be restricted securities not subject to certain transaction requirements.\n\nExempts all transactions under this Act from state regulation of securities offerings.\n\nTITLE LXXVII--PRESERVATION ENHANCEMENT AND SAVINGS OPPORTUNITY\n\n(Sec.", + " 77001) Amends the Low-Income Housing Preservation and Resident Homeownership Act of 1990 (LIHPRHA) with respect to a plan of action the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) may approve for extension of the low-income affordability restrictions on any eligible low-income housing.\n\nEntitles the owner of a property subject to a plan of action or use agreement to distribute:\n\nannually all surplus cash generated by the property, but only if the owner is in material compliance with the use agreement, including compliance with prevailing physical condition standards established by HUD; and\n\nany funds accumulated in a residual receipts account, notwithstanding any conflicting provision in the use agreement,", + " but only if the individual is in material compliance with the use agreement and has completed, or set aside sufficient funds to complete, any capital repairs identified by the most recent third party capital needs assessment.\n\nRequires an owner distributing any such amounts to:\n\ncontinue to operate the property in accordance with the affordability requirements of its use agreement for its remaining useful life;\n\ncontinue to renew or extend any project-based rental assistance contract for at least 20 years, as required by the property's plan of action; and\n\nhave the option to extend the contract to a 20-year term, if he or she has an existing multi-year project-based rental assistance contract for less than 20 years.\n\n(Sec.", + " 77002) Prohibits the LIHPRHA, or any plan of action or use agreement implementing it, from restricting an owner from obtaining a new loan or refinancing an existing loan secured by a low-income housing project, or from distributing the proceeds of such a loan, except that, in conjunction with such refinancing:\n\nthe owner shall provide for adequate rehabilitation pursuant to a capital needs assessment to ensure long-term sustainability of the property satisfactory to the lender or bond issuance agency;\n\nany resulting budget-based rent increase shall include debt service on the new financing, commercially reasonable debt service coverage, and replacement reserves as required by the lender; and\n\nany rent increases resulting from the refinancing transaction for units not covered by a project-based rental subsidy contract shall be limited to 10%, with the following exception.\n\nProhibits requiring any tenant who occupies a dwelling unit as of the time of the refinancing,", + " and gives the owner proof of income, to pay for rent and utilities, for the duration of the tenancy, any amount exceeding the greater of: (1) 30% of the tenant's income, or (2) the amount the tenant paid for rent and utilities immediately before the refinancing.\n\n(Sec. 77003) Directs HUD to issue any guidance necessary to carry out this Act within 120 days after its enactment.\n\nTITLE LXXVIII--TENANT INCOME VERIFICATION RELIEF\n\n(Sec. 78001) Amends the United States Housing Act of 1937 with respect to annual review of low-income families'", + " income for eligibility requirements for certain federal assisted housing programs.\n\nDeclares that, after the initial review of any family's fix income, a public housing agency (PHA) or owner may not be required to review its income for any year for which the family certifies, in accordance with specified requirements as HUD shall establish.\n\nRequires the PHA or the owner to review each such family's income at least once every three years.\n\nRequires PHAs also to review the income of a family receiving Section 8 (rental assistance voucher program) assistance at least once every three years (currently, at least annually).\n\nTITLE LXXIX--HOUSING ASSISTANCE EFFICIENCY\n\n(Sec.", + " 79001) Amends the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act to allow (in addition to a state, local government, or public housing agency) a private nonprofit organization to administer permanent housing rental assistance provided through the Continuum of Care Program under the Act.\n\n(Sec. 79002) Requires HUD, at least once (currently, twice) during each fiscal year, to reallocate any housing assistance provided from the Emergency Solutions Grants Program that is unused or returned or that becomes available after the minimum allocation requirements under the Act.\n\nTITLE LXXX--CHILD SUPPORT ASSISTANCE\n\n(Sec. 80001) Amends the Fair Credit Reporting Act,", + " with respect to the permissible purposes of consumer reports, to authorize a consumer reporting agency to furnish a consumer report in response to a request by the head of a state or local child support enforcement agency (or an authorized state or local government official), if the requester certifies that the report is needed for enforcing a child support order, award, agreement, or judgment.\n\nRepeals the requirement for 10 days' prior notice to a consumer whose report is requested.\n\nTITLE LXXXI--PRIVATE INVESTMENT IN HOUSING\n\n(Sec. 81001) Directs HUD to establish a demonstration program under which, in FY2016 through FY2019,", + " it may execute budget-neutral, performance-based agreements (for up to 12 years each) that result in a reduction in energy or water costs with appropriate entities to carry out projects for energy or water conservation improvements at up to 20,000 residential units in multifamily buildings participating in:\n\nSection 8 project-based rental assistance programs under the United States Housing Act of 1937, other than Section 8 (voucher program) assistance;\n\nsupportive housing for the elderly programs under the Housing Act of 1959; or\n\nsupportive housing for persons with disabilities programs under the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act.\n\nPrescribes requirements for payment under an agreement,", + " which shall be contingent on documented utility savings, as well as for agreement terms, eligibility, geographical diversity, and funding for the program.\n\nLimits this demonstration program to properties subject to affordability restrictions, which may be through an affordability agreement under a new housing assistance payments contract with HUD, or through an enforceable covenant with the property owner, for at least 15 years after completion of any conservation improvements made under the program.\n\nRequires HUD to submit to specified congressional committees a detailed plan for the implementation of this Act.\n\nAuthorizes HUD, for each fiscal year during which an agreement is in effect, to use any appropriated funds for the renewal of contracts under the program.\n\nTITLE LXXXII--CAPITAL ACCESS FOR SMALL COMMUNITY FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS\n\n(Sec.", + " 82001) Amends the Federal Home Loan Bank Act to treat certain privately insured credit unions as insured depository institutions for purposes of determining eligibility for membership in a federal home loan bank.\n\nDeclares that a credit union which lacks federal deposit insurance and has applied for membership in a federal home loan bank may be treated as meeting all the eligibility requirements for federal deposit insurance if the supervisor of the chartering state has determined that it meets all federal deposit insurance eligibility requirements.\n\nDeems such a credit union to have met the eligibility criteria for federal home loan bank membership if, six months after its application date, the state supervisor has failed to act upon the application.\n\nDeclares that no state law authorizing a conservator or liquidating agent of a credit union to repudiate contracts may apply to any:", + " (1) extension of credit from a federal home loan bank to a credit union which is a member of that bank, or (2) security interest in the assets of the credit union securing such extension of credit.\n\nDeclares that if a federal home loan bank makes an advance to a state-chartered credit union that is not federally insured:\n\nthe bank's interest in any collateral securing that advance has the same priority and is afforded the same standing and rights that the security interest would have had if the advance had been made to a federally-insured credit union, and\n\nthe bank has the same right to access such collateral that it would have had if the advance had been made to a federally-insured credit union.\n\nAmends the Federal Deposit Insurance Act to require private deposit insurers of credit unions that are members of a federal home loan bank to submit copies of their audit reports within seven days to the Federal Housing Finance Agency.\n\n(Sec.", + " 82002) Directs the Government Accountability Office to study: (1) the adequacy of insurance reserves held by a private deposit insurer that insures deposits in an insured credit union or any credit union eligible to apply to become one, and (2) such credit unions' compliance with federal regulations governing disclosure of a lack of federal deposit insurance.\n\nTITLE LXXXIII--SMALL BANK EXAM CYCLE REFORM\n\n(Sec. 83001) Amends the Federal Deposit Insurance Act to increase from $500 million to $1 billion the asset size of small insured depository institutions eligible for 18-month on-site examination cycles.\n\nQualifies such an institution also for the 18-month cycle if its total assets are at most $200 million (currently $100 million)", + " and the most recent examination found its composite condition to be good rather than outstanding.\n\nGrants a federal banking agency discretion to increase this assets ceiling amount from $200 million to $1 billion (currently from $100 million to $500 million) if that greater asset size would be consistent with the principles of safety and soundness.\n\nTITLE LXXXIV--SMALL COMPANY SIMPLE REGISTRATION\n\n(Sec. 84001) Directs the SEC to revise Form S-1 so that a smaller reporting company may incorporate by reference in a registration statement filed on that form any documents it files with the SEC after the registration statement's effective date.\n\nTITLE LXXXV--HOLDING COMPANY REGISTRATION THRESHOLD EQUALIZATION\n\n(Sec.", + " 85001) Amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to require an issuer that is a savings and loan holding company to register with the SEC if: (1) its assets exceed $10 million, and (2) it has a class of equity security held of record by 2,000 or more persons.\n\nRequires this registration to be terminated after a savings and loan holding company certifies that its holders of record of that class of security have been reduced to fewer than 1,200 persons.\n\nDeclares that the duty of a savings and loan holding company to file supplementary and periodic information shall be suspended automatically if the securities of each class to which the registration statement relates (other than any class of asset-backed securities)", + " are held of record by fewer than 1,200 persons.\n\nTITLE LXXXVI--REPEAL OF INDEMNIFICATION REQUIREMENTS\n\n(Sec. 86001) Amends the Commodity Exchange Act to repeal the requirement that specified entities agree to indemnify the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for any expenses arising from litigation relating to certain information about swaps cleared by derivatives clearing organizations which is shared with the entities before the CFTC may share the information with them.\n\nRepeals a similar requirement for the same entities with which a swap data repository may share swap data to agree to indemnify the repository and the CFTC for any expenses arising from similar litigation.\n\nAmends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to repeal a similar requirement for the same entities (plus the CFTC)", + " with which a securities-based swap data repository may share securities-based swap data to agree to indemnify the repository and the SEC for any expenses arising from similar litigation.\n\nMakes these repeals take effect retroactively to enactment of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.\n\nTITLE LXXXVII--TREATMENT OF DEBT OR EQUITY INSTRUMENTS OF SMALLER INSTITUTIONS\n\n(Sec. 87001) Amends the Financial Stability Act of 2010 with respect to the date for determining the consolidated assets of smaller depository institution holding companies supervised by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.\n\nExempts from otherwise required capital deductions,", + " pursuant to mandatory minimum leverage and risk-based capital requirements, any debt or equity instruments issued before May 19, 2010, by depository institution holding companies with total consolidated assets of less than $15 billion as of March 31, 2010 (currently as of December 31, 2009).\n\nTITLE LXXXVIII--STATE LICENSING EFFICIENCY\n\nState Licensing Efficiency Act of 2015\n\n(Sec. 88002) Amends the S.A.F.E. Mortgage Licensing Act of 2008 to require the Attorney General to give access to all criminal history information to state officials responsible for regulating, not only state-", + "licensed loan originators (as under current law), but also other financial service providers, to the extent such checks are required under the laws of the state for the licensing of such other financial service providers.\n\nTITLE LXXXIX--HELPING EXPAND LENDING PRACTICES IN RURAL COMMUNITIES\n\nHelping Expand Lending Practices in Rural Communities Act of 2015 or the HELP Rural Communities Act of 2015\n\n(Sec. 89002) Directs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to establish an application process under which a person who lives or does business in a state may apply to have the CFPB identify as rural an area it has not already so identified.\n\nSpecifies factors for the CFPB to take into consideration when evaluating such an application.", + " Permits the CFPB to disregard any designation of the area as nonrural by another federal agency.\n\nSubjects any application to 90 days of public comment. Requires the CFPB to make a decision on a designation application within 90 days after the end of the public comment period.\n\n(Sec. 89003) Amends the Truth in Lending Act to modify the requirements for a qualified mortgage or an escrow or impound account relating to certain consumer credit transactions secured by a first lien on the consumer's principal dwelling.\n\nAuthorizes the CFPB to include as a qualified mortgage, with respect to the presumption that the consumer has a reasonable ability to repay it,", + " a balloon loan extended by any creditor that operates in rural or underserved areas, whether predominantly or not. (Currently the creditor must operate predominantly in rural or underserved areas.)\n\nAuthorizes the CFPB also to exempt a creditor, in connection with a consumer credit transaction secured by a first lien on the consumer's principal dwelling, from the requirement to establish an escrow or impound account for the consumer if the creditor operates in rural or underserved areas, whether predominantly or not. (Currently the creditor must operate predominantly in such areas.)\n" + ], + "length": 37656, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 89, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 In 1988, Ed Graf was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for killing his stepsons Joby, 9, and Jason, 8, in 1986 by locking them in a shed, dousing it with gasoline, and setting it on fire. Everything was there to prove the case against the Texas man, per an exhaustive analysis in Slate: the motive (a failing marriage he reportedly wanted to save, financial problems that may have been solved with the boys' life insurance policies), loads of circumstantial evidence, and his less-than-stellar reputation (he was said to be a bad husband, father, and employee, accused of embezzlement). There was also the arson science used as evidence against him\u2014\"junk science\" that's since been debunked and that led to Graf's retrial last year, thanks to a push by Texas fire experts to review old arson cases based on fire-science advances, many of which present a compelling case for Graf's innocence. What the retrial hinged on: whether jurors would lean toward the strictly scientific strategy of Graf's new defense team or toward the prosecution's circumstantial evidence, motive, and emotional witness testimony. Using the new arson standards, fire experts now said it was more likely the boys were playing with fire and left the shed door open while the fire burned (if the door had been closed, there wouldn't have been enough oxygen to fuel more than a flash fire). Others mention the high carbon monoxide levels in the boys' blood, suggesting it couldn't have been a gas fire intentionally set by Graf, since those fires burn out quickly. The final result, after a deadlocked jury with two holdouts, was shocking: Graf suddenly pleaded guilty\u2014right before the jury decided he was guilty\u2014taking advantage of an obscure legal loophole based on time served that even the prosecutor didn't know about and that set him free on parole eight days after his plea. Read the fascinating story on Slate.\n", + "docs": [ + "Gerald L.\n\nHurst\n\nConsulting Chemist \u2013 Fires and Explosions September 26, 2008 ANALYSIS OF THE FIRE ORIGIN AND CAUSE EVIDENCE IN TEXAS V EDWARD GRAF Fire Incident Synopsis On August 26, 1986 at about 4:40 PM, Mr. Edward Graf arrived at his home in Hewitt, Texas with his sons, Joby (9) and Jason (8.). Approximately 15 minutes later, smoke and flames were seen issuing from a storage shed in the back yard of the residence. When the fire department arrived at about 5:00 PM, the shed was fully involved in fire.", + " After extinguishing the fire, firefighters found the charred bodies of the two boys in the back of the shed. The local fire department fire marshal, acting more out of compassion than reason, arranged with his fellow firemen to remove all the fire debris to a pit in the local dump on the evening of the fire. Within a few days of the fire, the family and friends of Graf\u2019s wife began a campaign to influence the District Attorney to prosecute Mr. Graf. The joint effort was led by Mrs. Graf\u2019s sister-in-law, Del Gerdes, who prepared an 8-1/2 page voluntary statement for the Prosecutor following consultation with family members and friends.", + " Carol Schaefer, Mrs. Graf\u2019s long-time friend, joined Mrs. Gerdes in the effort to persuade the District Attorney by furnishing 6 pages of notes casting suspicion on Mr. Graf. On September 3, the local authorities called the Texas State Fire Marshals Office to request a fire investigation. Deputy State Fire Marshal Porter arrived in Hewitt on September 4, to discuss the case. The fire scene had been completely obliterated long before that time. The Fire Marshal was only able to view the fire debris in a jumbled pile from the edge of an inaccessible pit, where it had been mixed with other materials. Prior to the trial in 1988,", + " the prosecution hired a private expert from New York, Mr. King. Mr. King and Fire Marshal Porter undertook to determine the origin and cause of the fire based solely on a limited number of essentially amateur photographs of the postfire debris. The term \u201csolely\u201d is applied here because both of these investigators stressed that their conclusions were reached without factoring in eyewitness testimony lest it introduce bias into their interpretation of what they believed was infallible fire pattern evidence.\n\n1\n\nThe Shed Door Bolt Issue The only physical fire investigation was conducted during a half-hour period in the late afternoon of the fire by volunteer firefighters Lucenay (Assistant Fire Chief), Clark (Fire Marshal), Robertson and Howard.", + " The investigators found two slide bolts or latches associated with the double four foot wide doors of the shed, one in the open position and one in the closed (locked) position. In determining the bolt positions, Lucenay operated the bolt mechanisms: Lucenay SOF 36 A. We sifted through the Christmas decorations, and we looked by the doors or the major part of the--most burned part of the fire was. Right by one of the front doors there was a slide latch, kind of like a bolt lock. One was in the locked position. Q. Now, how could you tell, sir, it was in a locked position?", + " A. When you the pull the slide latch up and move it back, the discoloration of the latch itself showed that it was in the locked position. Q. Okay. A. There was another one a couple of feet from it that was in the open position. And we could tell the same way. When you pushed it up and closed it or locked that one, the discoloration showed it was in the open position due to the heat. Lucenay and Clark took photographs of the shed area which include the bolts appearing as tiny objects occupying about 1/5,000 of the area of the pictures (State\u2019s Exhibits 60,", + " 61). State Fire Marshal Porter, who was unaware of Lucenay\u2019s physical examination of the bolts, would later testify in elaborate detail that he could ascertain from the poorquality photographs that both bolts were in the locked position. He used this erroneous conclusion to convince the court that the children had been deliberately locked in the double-door shed after the ignition of the fire. The shed door latch issue was a lynch pin in the State\u2019s case for arson/murder. If one or more exterior bolts on the left-hand door could be shown to have been in the closed position during the fire, it would follow that that the children had been locked in the shed after the fire began.", + " In order to prove this theory, State Fire Marshal Porter relied solely on the two pictures introduced as State\u2019s Exhibits 60 and 61, from which he claimed to be able to ascertain the position of the bolt mechanisms during the fire. Mr. Porter had such unquestioning faith in his ability to read fire patterns from even distant photographs that he had adopted a protocol in which he abstained from the study of any eye-witness reports or statements which might influence his judgment.\n\n2\n\nPorter SOF 937 A. My job as an arson investigator requires me to eliminate all possible accidental fire sources prior to making any kind of decisions Therefore I must enter every fire that I go to with the idea that it's an accidental fire,", + " and I cannot be influenced by any outside information. Q. Cannot be influenced by what? A. Any outside information. Q. And what will be considered outside information, witness statements and things? A. Witness statements, accusations from people, rumors. It makes my job more difficult when all of that stuff is thrown in. Because of Mr. Porter\u2019s inadvisable protocol of ignoring eyewitness evidence, he did not know that State\u2019s Exhibit 61 was a photograph which had been taken by Lucenay and Clark of a bolt which Lucenay had previously inspected by manipulating the slide mechanism and had determined first hand that the bolt was in the unlocked position during the fire.", + " The Lucenay photo, which is identifiable as such by the automatic date signature, shows that the lock is free of ashes and debris and was therefore handled before the photo was taken. Mr. Porter believed he had established logically inescapable evidence that the left door had been locked during the fire: Porter SOF 993 Since it's my opinion that both of these latches were in the locked position at the time that the fire occurred, and my discussions with Mr. Graf at his home I was told that there were two latches on the outside of the door and one on the inside, at least one of those two latches had to be mounted on the exterior surface of the door and had to be in the locked position at the time of the fire.", + " Porter\u2019s reasoning was wrong because it was based on the false premise that both of the pictured latches were in the closed position and also because it relied on the assumption that there were no other latches in the structure other than the three he had listed. Porter\u2019s deduction at trial that the shed door was bolted was based on the false premise that the total number of door bolts was three. He had apparently failed to review his own fire investigation report prior to going to trial some two years after the investigation. In that report, he recorded the number of bolts as four, two on the outside and two on the inside:\n\n3\n\nPorter Fire Investigation Report,", + " September 18, 1986, page 1, paragraph 3 (Emphasis mine) The only point of entry into the structure was at the southwest corner of the shed, where two four-foot wide doors were located on the south wall. These doors were wood-framed and covered by the same material (masonite sheet-siding) as the remainder of the structure. The doorway could be locked in three locations from the outside. Two slide-bolts were located on the exterior sides of the doors. One approximately two feet above ground level and the second approximately seven feet above ground level. The third lock was a ring-and-hasp lock,", + " located at a level of approximately five feet above the ground. The door on the left, facing the doors, could also be locked inside into the closed position by vertically placed slide bolts at the top and bottom of that door. No other points of entry or exit were present on the structure, as there were no windows. Compounding his errors, Porter got the positions of the inside and outside bolts of the two doors transposed to some extent in both the Report and in his trial testimony. Given that the left door was the normal entry, the two inside latches would have followed the standard pattern and been located on the inside of the right hand door with the exterior bolts being mounted on the left hand door At trial,", + " the Prosecutor pointed out part of the error in Porter\u2019s testimony regarding the positioning of the exterior bolts. Porter SOF 983 A. All latches on the right front door from our conversation were on the exterior of the shed. Q. And this is what you understood from Mr. Graf? A. Yes, sir. Q. So we're talking about three slide bolt locks? A. Yes, sir. That's all I was made aware of. Q. From your examination of State's Exhibit 58 are you able to see the location, approximate location of the locks? A. I can see the exterior locks. Q. Okay.", + " A. In this photograph I can see that there is a slide lock near the top of the door here, a ring and hasp lock in the center, and another slide lock down here near the base. Q. Okay. Now, assume if you would -- and I am showing State's Exhibit 58. Assume If you would, sir, that you misunderstood Mr. Graf or were misinformed. Graf did not misinform Porter. It was Graf who gave Porter Exhibit 58, which clearly shows the two slide bolts on the exterior of the left door. Mr. Porter did not do his homework on the bolt issue in preparation for trial.\n\n4\n\nWithout any implication of reliance on statements by the Defendant,", + " it is still worth noting that he testified that there were 5 interior bolts associated with the right hand door. Two of these latches retained a removable center stud against which the two doors closed. It appears unlikely that the Defendant would have lied about a matter which would have made him readily subject to impeachment by information the Prosecutor could readily have obtained from Mrs. Graf, who was cooperating with the prosecution. The Defendant\u2019s testimony about the number of latches present on the right door was not challenged by the prosecution. Whether there were five interior latches as stated by the Defendant or two as written by Porter in his report or only one as stated by Porter at trial,", + " it is evident that the extensive testimony of Fire Marshal Porter regarding the alleged proof that the left door was bolted from the outside was devoid of merit. Only one bolt was found in the closed position and at least one closed bolt would have been present under any scenario whether the left door was open or not. The Left Shed Door Position Issue The prosecution theory that the victims were locked in the shed at the beginning of the fire required that that both doors be closed during the fire. Fire Marshal Porter applied the same photographic metal color-analysis technique to the left door hinges which had failed him with regard to the door bolt of State\u2019s Exhibit 61. In this portion of his analysis he reasoned that the left door must have been closed during the fire because the hinge pin areas of the lower two left hinge did not appear to him to be discolored with respect to the wing areas.", + " Porter SOF 974 Okay. When I went back to look at the hinge area on this photograph, I noticed that the hinge in both sections, the top or the bottom and the middle, which I am only looking at two of the three hinges on the door, I noticed that they appear to be very evenly affected by the heat. In other words, there is not any abnormal discoloration in one area that's not located in an other part of the hinge. Based on that, 1was able to realize that if a door is in the open position, then the hinge pin area is going to be an exposed area to more heat than the wing area that is mounted on the exterior surface of the wood.", + " Porter\u2019s reasoning is absurd for two very sound and very obvious reasons: 1. The photograph is overexposed with respect to the hinges and numerous other metal objects such as the various metal structures, including the lawnmowers and bed frames components in the same view. This overexposure results in loss of contrast, making smooth surfaces appear to be featureless. In the referenced\n\n5\n\npicture, one also immediately notes false hues of the black charcoal, which appears to range from white to gray to black depending on the angle of the impinging light. The \u201cwhite\u201d charcoal is an illusion caused by reflected light. In order to photograph a fire scene,", + " it is necessary to increase the exposure to prevent the char patterns from appearing as solid black areas with no detail. The photographs show excellent detail in the charred areas, which means that all light areas will appear as a washed out beige color. In order to photograph the hinges properly, the photographer would have had to reset the exposure to a lower level and moved much closer to the target hinges. 2. The hinge pins may have been exposed to heat at an earlier time in the fire than were the wing areas, but as the fire progressed, both the wings and hinge pin areas were bathed in wood flames. This fact is obvious because both hinges are mounted on wooden members which have been heavily charred by flames.", + " Any color contrast which may have been present during the early fire stages would have been annihilated by the later total exposure to fire. A much better approach to the question of whether the door was closed or open is to employ elementary fire dynamics and fire chemistry. The experts in this case gave estimates of the amount of alleged flammable liquid poured on the floor ranging from about 2 quarts to two gallons: Prosecution Closing Argument SOF 2052 But we do know from our experts that a flammable liquid was used, from their experts that two gallons of flammable liquid was used. Charlie King would say it was a large quantity, more than a couple,", + " three quarts. He didn't want to pin it down how large. Their expert said two gallons. Now where did the gas come from? This gas can, this is a new one but the one that this represents, was sitting right here, see? And the expert testimony is that it had gasoline in it... It is undisputed that there was no explosion associated with the ignition of the fire, that is, there was no explosive damage to the structure or noise produced until later in the fire when several aerosol cans exploded with loud reports but no consequential mechanical effect on the structure. If we assume that the prosecution theory of the fire is correct,", + " the hypothetical perpetrator poured a quantity of flammable liquid on the floor of the shed, ignited it and closed the door. For purposes of analysis, assume that the quantity of flammable liquid was less than half of the lowest expert estimate or approximately 1.25 liters (= 1.3 quarts, weighing 0.93 kg)\n\n6\n\nof gasoline or other flammable liquid. The 12X16 foot shed would contain about 50 kg of air prior to ignition. At the then ambient temperature gasoline reacts completely with air in the weight ratio of approximately 15.5 parts air to one part gasoline. Shortly after ignition, that is,", + " within a few tens of seconds, the spilled gasoline would react with 0.93*15.5/50*100 = 29% of the air in the shed, which is to say that it would remove 29% of the oxygen in the structure. The air remaining in the shed would have a maximum average concentration of oxygen reduced from its initial 23% by weight to (1-0.29)*23 = 16%. The residual oxygen concentration would actually be much lower than 16% because of the thermal expansion of air out of the shed and also the contribution of other burning materials to the removal of oxygen in the first minute.", + " Once the initial, brief surge of rapid burning was over, the fire would either smother for lack of sufficient oxygen or continue to burn or smolder at an extremely slow rate for a very prolonged period of time. A drop in oxygen concentration from the atmospheric value of 23% to 16% has an enormously disproportionate effect on the rate of burning of all common materials. The principle fuel in the shed was cellulosic materials such as the Masonite walls, plywood flooring, exposed studs and rafters, cardboard boxes and the like. The effect of reduced oxygen concentration on the rate of burning of such materials is shown in Figure 1,", + " which depicts experimental data from the Society of Fire Prevention Engineering Handbook, Second Edition:\n\nFigure 1\n\n7\n\nIt should be noted that at 16.7% oxygen, the cellulosic fuel sputters out after releasing only a tiny fraction of its potential fire energy. Once the oxygen has been rapidly scavenged from a structure such as the shed by a flammable liquid \u2013 a process requiring less than 60 seconds \u2013 continued burning of the less flammable contents depends on air leakage and must proceed at a very low rate. In order to enter the full involvement stage which characterized the shed fire, it is highly unlikely that such an anemic fire could have burned the very large opening in the wall structure which would have been necessary to provide sufficient ventilation for full involvement in the short time frame of the subject fire.", + " The above description of the effects of flammable liquids in inhibiting fire growth through oxygen starvation in closed rooms has been verified by full scale burn tests. The following relevant 10th conclusion was excerpted from the report of an extensive research program conducted in 1997, USFA Fire Burn Pattern Tests, FA 178, 7/97, page 67: 10. The use of a volatile ignitable liquid, such as gasoline, as an accelerant will cause rapid consumption of the oxygen in a room. Depending on the available ventilation this may deplete the oxygen in the room, reduce the heat release rate of the fire,", + " and prevent flashover. In this situation, patterns indicative of the accelerant use were easily recognized and residue of the accelerant could still be smelled. If the left door of the shed was open when the fire began, the opening would have been sufficient to allow the building to reach full involvement well within the available time frame and support an ongoing fire fueled by indigenous materials. This observation is supported by a large body of data from experimental fires which has established the mathematical relationship between ventilations parameters and full involvement, also known as post-flashover burning. This area of fire technology was not understood by fire investigators prior to about 1991 and became slowly introduced into the field over the following decade.", + " The oxygen starvation of structure fires is frequently encountered in house fires which may go undetected until days after the occurrence of the fire if the initial fire fails to break a window and thereby furnish the necessary oxygen to begin the process of growth to full involvement. The shed had no windows and thus was not subject to this mechanism which requires that the ventilation hole extend vertically to allow the ingress of fresh air through the bottom portion of the vent and the simultaneous egress of hot gases from top portion. The obvious conclusion is that the door was open from the beginning of the fire regardless of the nature of initial material ignited.\n\n8\n\nAuguring with Charcoal The field of fire investigation has always been plagued by what are often termed \u201cold wives tales\u201d relating to supposed principles which can be applied to determine the origin and cause of fires.", + " Three of the most common myths relate to the appearance of the charcoal blisters or \u201calligatoring\u201d which is formed when wood chars. These false principles hold that: 1. Fires caused by flammable liquids burn hotter than wood and therefore cause large charcoal blisters. 2. Flammable liquid fires produce shiny blisters whereas \u201cnormal\u201d fires produce matte or dull blisters. 3. The direction in which a fire progresses can be determined by the orientation of the cracks between the charcoal blisters. Upward burning or \u201cnormal\u201d fires produce horizontal cracks whereas downward burning or \u201cabnormal\u201d fires caused by flammable liquids create vertical cracks.", + " There is no basis for any of these three myths. Experiments involving the charring of wood have repeatedly shown that the size and luster of charcoal blisters are not determined by the nature of the burning fuel or the direction of fire. The major cracks between blisters occur at 90 degrees to the grain of the wood. Thus wooden studs in which the grain is perpendicular exhibit horizontal cracks. Floor joists have a horizontal grain orientation and thus exhibit vertical cracks. In the present case, the State Fire Marshal, Porter, delivered long treatises to the jury invoking each of the above myths repeatedly in his testimony. Porter used the crack orientation and blister size to \u201cprove\u201d that the fire had burned both upward at high temperature and downward into the floor joists and therefore allegedly involved a flammable liquid on the floor.", + " The use of the myths was so frequent that it is impractical to quote each instance. Typical examples are cited below, including the contribution of the Prosecution\u2019s consultant, King. Porter Fire Investigation Report, page 3, paragraph 3: This process began by an examination of the degree and type of charring that was present near the area of origin. This examination revealed that the charring to the beams below the flooring was very heavy. The \"ALLIGATOR\" pattern in this area was observed to be deep seated and divided into large patch sections. This pattern is commonly associated with an intense, fast burning fire. Porter Fire Investigation Report,", + " page 3, paragraph 4: Indications of a fast burning and intense fire were not consistent with the fire load that was present in the area of origin. Appearance of the charring to be glossy is\n\n9\n\nindicative of the presence of a liquid hydrocarbon accelerant substance being in the area of origin. Porter SOF 952: Q. And when a fire is burning down, you are telling us that those lines will be vertical up and down? A. Correct. Q. Okay. A. And in a fire that buns from the bottom up, you are going to have a different pattern in which your main lines of progression of the alligator patterning,", + " the separation lines are going to run horizontal. Q. So what you are telling us, if the fire burns the way it normally does, up and out in this V shape as you described earlier, that the deeper lines left are going to be horizontal? A. Correct. Q. Is that one of the tools you use in analyzing a fire is to look at these patterns? A. Yes, sir. Q. Is that what you did in this case? A. Yes, sir. I did. Porter SOF 955 Q. All right, what about when an accelerant is used? What does it do? A Well,", + " the fire is progressing so fast and so hot from one area to another that it is -- you're actually getting a much larger square or a much larger patch of alligatoring in each area. King SOF 1107 Q. If you could back up just a little so these jurors can see, and show them the ridges [cracks] on the doorway. A. This is the piece of wood here that we're looking at, which is the front entrance doorway, bottom frame of it. And this enhancement gives you a fairly good idea of how deep the ridges are, and the intensity and the heavy attack on the wood.", + " And it\u2019s burning in a downward direction because these alligations or these ridges are vertical. So that was another thing in my mind which convinced me that there was some type flammable liquid used there. King SOF 1114 Q.Which way did the ridges run? A. They ran up and down.\n\n10\n\nQ. What does an up and down ridge mean? A. This burning [1st first floor hole] was the sane as this burning [2nd floor hole]. Q. What does that mean? A. So this fire was burning downward, which is flammable liquid. All of the above opinions are baseless inventions which have been repeatedly disproved since the time of the subject trial.", + " The old wives tales on which they are based are frequently included in published lists of arson myths. See the chapter entitled \u201cThe Mythology of Arson Investigation\u201d in Scientific Protocols in Fire Investigation by John Lentini, 2006. NFPA 921, the de facto standard of care in fire investigation, contains the following strong warnings against reliance on the appearance of char blisters as indicators of the presence of an accelerant: 6.2.4.3 Appearance of Char. In the past, the appearance of the char and cracks had been given meaning by the fire investigation community beyond what has been substantiated by controlled testing.", + " The presence of large shiny blisters (alligator char) is not evidence that a liquid accelerant was present during the fire, or that a fire spread rapidly or burned with greater intensity. These types of blisters can be found in many different types of fires. There is no justification for the inference that the appearance of large, curved blisters is an indicator of an accelerated fire. Figure 6.2.4.3, showing boards exposed to the same fire, illustrates the variability of char blister. 6.2.4.3.1 It is sometimes claimed that the surface appearance of the char, such as dullness,", + " shininess, colors, or appearance under ultraviolet light sources, has some relation to the use of a hydrocarbon accelerant or the rate of fire growth. There is no scientific evidence that such a correlation exists, and the investigator is advised not to claim indications of accelerant or a rapid fire growth rate on the basis of the appearance of the char. The Holes in the Floor It appears that everyone involved in this case, including the defense lawyers and the defense expert were convinced that the large areas burned completely through the floor in the vicinity of the doorway and a smaller area several feet removed could only have been the direct result of a flammable liquid spill burning downward.", + " The idea that a gasoline puddle on a plywood floor, once ignited, will burn through the floor sounds plausible to most people who have never tried the process experimentally. It is an unfortunate fact that for many years a large proportion of rank-and-file investigators tended to interpret holes burned through floors as evidence of ignitable liquid spills.\n\n11\n\nThe simple fact is that ignited gasoline spills on plywood do little or no significant damage to the wood beyond sometimes producing occasional very shallow surface char. The level of damage to the surface is mitigated by the fact that the evaporating flammable liquid tends to cool the wood under it until it has all evaporated and then the burning stops.", + " A second mitigating factor is that a typical spill only burns for about 60 seconds, sending most of the generated heat upward away from the wood. A wooden floor will not continue to burn once the gasoline is gone and 60 seconds is much to short a time span to burn through a half inch of wood. Clearly, from time to time the occasional fire investigator may have tested gasoline on plywood and noted that there was no burn-through. There must have been some collective sense among the rest that the matter was not quite as simple as it was being presented in courts. There arose a theory which seemed to allay the doubts about the hole-burning abilities of gasoline.", + " The new explanation, which one can still find in the occasional publication, was that flammable liquids burn downward into wood if they are allowed to soak in for a period before ignition The soaking liquid theory of hole-burning was no more valid than some of the other old wives tales in the industry but it had apparent scientific credentials. The first reasonably scientific textbook in fire investigation was written by Professor Leland Kirk in 1969 as the First Edition of Kirk\u2019s Fire Investigation. In this otherwise most excellent book, Kirk described experiments in which he found that some ignitable liquids produce more char on the surface of wood than do others. He speculated that this might be the result of some liquids penetrating the wood better than others.", + " This speculation turned out to be wrong, but it provided a stepping stone to the logical but incorrect extrapolation that longer soaking with a given liquid would lead to deeper penetration and thus deeper charring. The author of this report has tested the burning properties of wood which has been soaked in hydrocarbon liquids for 24 hours versus wood freshly wetted with the accelerants and found that there is no significant difference in the level of charring. The two types of samples were also carefully weighed and no significant difference was found in the tiny quantity of hydrocarbon liquid absorbed. In 1988, the two prosecution experts, King and Porter, believed that flammable liquids which have been allowed to soak into plywood for a period of time somehow acquire the ability to burn downward through a half inch of wood.", + " Fire Marshal Porter testified that the required soaking period was at least a few minutes, whereas Consultant King opined that the time required was closer to the 30 to 60 minute range. Porter SOF 982 Q. So then is your testimony that the pour pattern and the liquid would have had time -- that we were discussing earlier, would have had time to soak in? A. Yes, sir. Q. And how much time usually is needed for that?\n\n12\n\nA. It wouldn't have taken more than a few minutes. King SOF 1211 Q. Thank you, sir. Now there's been a lot of discussion about the pour patterns both around the point of origin A and point of origin B,", + " [Note that A and B are holes in the floor] A.Yes, sir. Q. Pour patterns created by a flammable liquid. A. Yes, sir. Q. Tell the Jury how long does it take for a flammable liquid to soak into a plywood surface in order to create that kind of patterning once it's ignited? A. Once it's ignited? I think -Q. I mean, it would create the pattern only after it's burned, correct? A. Yes. Q. My question is how long would the flammable liquid have to stay on the board before ignition in order to create pour pattern? A.", + " It would have to soak on the board. The exact time I would not know, but it couldn't be poured and then immediately ignited because it wouldn't seep down. Q. Are you talking about a matter of hours or a matter of minutes? A. It would be very difficult to put parameters on it but it would have to soak for a while, certainly more than a few minutes in my opinion. Q. Okay. A. Because there again, vapor ignites, not the liquid, so the liquid would have to be a period of time to be absorbed into the floor. Q. Okay. A. The exact time I don't know.", + " Q. Less than an hour, less than thirty minutes? A. About that. Probably no more, certainly no less. King\u2019s testimony is another example of the pitfalls of treating fire pattern reading as some sort of pure science which should not be contaminated by knowledge of eyewitness observations. King did not realize that the Defendant had been home less than 30 minutes at the time of the fire. The testimony of the two prosecution experts about the purported mechanism by which the alleged flammable liquid had managed to burn the joists under the floor was creatively speculative at best. King envisaged a mechanism by which the gasoline \u201cseeped\u201d through the \u201cporous\u201d plywood and somehow attacked the joists despite the lack of ventilation under the floor \u2013 a clearly impossible phenomenon:", + " King SOF 114 If there were just something on the plywood section, you would have some scorching on the plywood and the fire would burn away. But with flammable liquid it seeps below.\n\n13\n\nIn this testimony, King is not referring to seepage through wood joints because he is dealing with large sheets of plywood. Leakage through the few joins present in the room would, at most, produce only local charring to joists not the widespread and uniform general damage observed. This testimony also illustrates the false paradigms in the mind of the investigator which imbues flammable liquids with almost magical powers to penetrate wood and burn through surfaces conventional solid fuels can only \u201cscorch.\u201d In this instance King has reversed the actual burning abilities of ordinary solid materials versus liquid accelerants,", + " As early as 1969, Professor Kirk conducted experiments with solids and liquids and found that indigenous materials common in fires could severely char wooden planks which flammable liquids could only scorch. An example of his work is shown in figure 2, which demonstrates that a flaming curtain is much more effective in burning through wooden flooring than is a highly volatile flammable liquid. The same is true for virtually all burning solids such as wood and paper products. Kirk\u2019s Fire Investigation, 1st Edition, page 216, 1969\n\nFigure 2 This early work should have been a wake-up call for fire investigators who had become convinced that flammable liquids could burn downward through wooden flooring and tended to underestimate the role played by common household materials,", + " but the myth persisted and is still encountered occasionally in contemporary cases. More recent work by various researchers has shown the limitations of downward burning of flammable liquids on wooden floors as compared with the effects of ordinary indigenous fuel loads and flaming solid \u201cfall down,\u201d that is, burning structural materials,\n\n14\n\nfurniture and household items which collapse on or radiate at floors during the course of a fire. The 5th edition of Kirk\u2019s Fire Investigation shows graphic illustrations of spilled gasoline burning on a plywood sheet and the aftermath of the fire (Figures 3.4, 7.18a). The plywood survives the large fire with almost no surface damage,", + " as contrasted with the effect of a burning cardboard box containing crumpled newspaper, which produces heavy charring (Figure 7.18c). Experiments with burning gasoline on wooden floors were conducted under the auspices of the National Institute of Justice and published in 2001 as Flammable and Combustible Liquid Spill Burn Patterns, NIJ Report 604-00. The study showed that quart-sized gasoline spills on wooden flooring burned for approximately 60 seconds, producing brief, towering flames but only superficial damage to the wood floor. Gasoline spills were also tested on carpeting with the result that the fires failed to burn through the fiber backing.", + " The lesson of these experiments for the subject fire is that indigenous materials would have had the potential to burn holes through the plywood floor which would have been impervious to a burning flammable liquid. In light of the experimental work which has been conducted since the time of the Graf fie, it is obvious that the prosecution theory that a flammable liquid burned downward through the shed floor is untenable. The Pyrolysis Zone Theory State Fire Marshal Porter offered extensive testimony claiming that he could differentiate flammable liquid burn patterns on wood flooring from patterns caused by \u201cnormal\u201d materials by the width of the pyrolysis zone at the edge of the pattern.", + " The pyrolysis zone is the area of partially decomposed and therefore discolored wood always present at the edge of char patterns. Porter SOF 954 A Okay, Like I said before, in a slow, normal burning fire you're going to get a pyrolysis area that's wide, generally about one and a half times the width of the charring area or the alligatored area. In a faster burning fire that area is going to be cut down, and it will maintain a very close contact with that area that is charred. Also instead of fading from one color into the color of the wood,", + " that line is going to be very distinct. It will almost be like the line you see here. It will go straight from a dark color to a light color. Q In your experience as a fire investigator, what can you determine from these differences in pyrolysis other than\n\n15\n\nwhether it was a fast or slow burning fire? A. I can determine whether or not there was some kind of accelerant or some kind of product that allowed that fire to burn more quickly in that area. Porter\u2019s testimony is nonsense. The nature of the fire source cannot be determined from the width of the pyrolysis zone. Materials indigenous to every household can and do produce floor fire patterns with very sharp edges and thin pyrolysis zones.", + " An excellent example is given in figure 3, a photograph excerpted from the 2002 edition of NFPA 921 which shows how perfectly a burning cardboard box can create the illusion of the presence of a flammable liquid. The burning box produced an excellent \u201cpour pattern\u201d with an extremely thin pyrolysis zone and damage which greatly exceeded that which would be produced by a comparable spill of gasoline.\n\nFigure 3. Apparent \u201cPour Pattern\u201d from Burning Cardboard Box Flashover and Full Involvement When a substantial fuel load such as a piece of furniture burns in a room, the resulting plume of smoky gases from the fire forms a hot layer against the ceiling.", + " The layer grows thicker as the fire progresses. The smoke particles in the upper layer radiate heat in all directions, including downward. If the temperature of the smoke layer remains well below about 500 degrees Celsius, the floors, room contents and lower walls may remain relatively unaffected by the radiation for a prolonged period of time. However, if the fire 16\n\nsource is powerful enough to raise the temperature of the upper layer to 500-600 Celsius, all combustible lower-level surfaces exposed to the increased radiation will begin to emit flammable vapors which have the appearance of steam. Subsequently, ignition of the flammable vapors occurs and flame spreads across the entire room in a matter of seconds The resulting fire is no longer localized but extends over every exposed combustible surface in the room.", + " The transition from a localized fire to one in which the entire room is set aflame is called \u201cflashover.\u201d If the room has adequate ventilation from an open door or from windows breaking under the influence of heat, the fire will continue to burn on a scale which is limited only by the rate at which fresh air can pour in from the ventilation openings. This stage of a fire is known as \u201cpost-flashover burning\u201d or \u201cfull involvement,\u201d and it is characterized by greatly increased temperatures, high radiation and the ability to burn downward through combustible surfaces such as wooden floors. At the time of the subject fire, the properties of post-flashover fires were virtually unknown.", + " Investigators had been trained in the basic mantra that \u201cnatural fires burn up and out.\u201d For decades they had viewed low burn patterns, holes in floors, melted threshold plates, spalled concrete floors and other low burn artifacts as indicators of the presence of flammable liquids. Their beliefs were compounded by a grossly exaggerated view of supposed differences between \u201cnormal\u201d fuel loads and the imagined power of liquid accelerants. Beginning in the 1990\u2019s, a series of research projects were undertaken to explore the behavior and end effects of post-flashover fires. The first important discovery was that if two identical rooms are ignited using gasoline as an accelerant in one and no flammable liquid in the other,", + " there was very little discernible difference in the fire patterns generated after flashover. Full-involvement burning for even a brief period produces overwhelming low-level burn patterns which mimic liquid pour patterns. Laboratory experiments showed that wood flooring subjected to the levels of radiation in full involvement fires could burn through in a matter of minutes. During the same period, experiments with flammable liquids poured on wooden flooring demonstrated that those liquids could only superficially char the surfaces. Prior to the better understanding of flashover, so-called \u201cfast fires\u201d were usually attributed the presence of gasoline. However, as more and more flashover experiments were conducted, it became apparent that ordinary fuel loads such as chairs,", + " sofas, cabinetry, trash bags, stacks of cardboard boxes and the like were capable of bringing a room to flashover within a period of a few minutes. Today there are readily available videos of test fires in which a single piece of furniture is shown to bring a room to flashover within 3-5 minutes of ignition. For an example of the rapid rise of a conventional fire to flashover in the absence of flammable liquids see the National Institute of Science and Technology video at:\n\n17\n\nhttp://www.faberc.org/Library/?action=view&item=item&collectionID=BFRL_M M&itemID=LivingFlashover In this video,", + " a sofa ignited by a small flame, brings a living room to flashover in approximately three minutes. Once a room has gone through flashover and entered the full-involvement stage, the rate of burning, the nature of the fire patterns created and the location of maximum damage becomes more and more independent of the actual area of origin. The areas of maximum damage are determined by the access of the various fuel loads in the room to oxygen. This means that heavy damage often occurs in the vicinity of doorways through which fresh air is drawn in. This area of low-lying damage may progress along the floor, following the flow of incoming air.", + " The outgoing upper-level fuel-rich gases and incoming air-rich streams interact along the floor creating a blowtorch effect which can easily burns holes in the floor and may continue to the back wall opposite the door or even from room to room, leaving trails which suggest poured liquid accelerant. The ventilation effects described above have been noted in full-scale burn tests. See USFA Fire Burn Pattern Tests, FA 178 7/97. This extensive work published in 1997 confirms the important points made above. The following excerpts from the conclusions of this learned treatise are relevant to the current case (emphasis mine): 1. The ventilation of the room of fire origin has a great effect on the growth and heat release rate of a fire and,", + " for this reason, greatly affects pattern formation. Patterns which indicated areas of intense burning but were remote from the point of origin were observed and were determined to be from ventilation effects only. This was observed in rooms which had flashover conditions where clean burn areas were produced under windows away from the origin. This was also observed on walls opposite door openings. In this case, observations indicated that the fresh air being drawn into the room through the lower portion of the door mixed with excess fuel and produced a jet of flame or hot gases which continued to travel across the floor and impact the wall. At the point of impact of this floor jet, a clean burn pattern was produced with its base at floor level.", + " 3. The presence of floor patterns in a room which has had flashover conditions is not a reliable indicator of the presence of an ignitable liquid introduced for incendiary purposes. It was observed that floor patterns were consistently produced on different floor surfaces by the pyrolysis and combustion of the floor surface caused by flashover, with and without the use of an accelerant, 7. When flashover conditions have been produced in a room, patterns which are located at low levels on the walls as low as the floor may be produced in areas not related to the origin. These low patterns may be produced by the burning of furniture items or ventilation effects.", + " Accurate origin determination can not be\n\n18\n\nmade based solely on the presence of areas of low burning when flashover conditions existed. Flashover and the Subject Shed It is undisputed that the shed was fully involved when the fire department arrived. Even in the absence of eyewitness evidence, a contemporary fire investigator would recognize the clear fire pattern indicators which show low widespread low charring in all areas which were exposed to the intense effects of post-flashover radiation. The damage necessarily occurred within a total burning period of less than 30 minutes after ignition and probably less than 20 minutes. It was this supposedly \u201cfast\u201d fire growth which led the investigators to believe that a flammable liquid had been used as an accelerant.", + " Their error in believing that the relatively short time period was an abnormal phenomenon was the result of the lack of knowledge of flashover effects in the 1980s. The shed was an ideal candidate for flashover. The walls were bare, flammable pressboard (Masonite) with open studs and the floor was half-inch plywood. The contents of the shed included, among many other items, stacks of cardboard boxes, an upholstered chair and a roll-away bed with mattress in the vertical position. The shed had an internal surface area of about 74 square meters. With the 4 foot-wide left door open, the heat release rate required to bring the shed to flashover within 5 minutes would have been less than two megawatts,", + " a figure well within the potential peak burning rates of the larger fuel loads, in particular that of the bed or the bed coupled with the adjacent cardboard boxes and flammable wall surface. The expected jet of floor-level flame from the doorway (as described in USFA conclusion 1 above) would be associated with turbulent mixing, very high temperatures and resulting high local radiation and convection on the plywood floor and later on the underlying joists. This mechanism operating in conjunction with the already high background radiation would account for the burning of the joists. The joists would also be burned on both sides by the embers from the plywood floor. Unlike the joists in the pier and beam construction of a house,", + " the shed joists rested directly on the ground. Thus, falling embers and firebrands from the plywood floor would remain in contact with the joists. All of the alleged indicators of the presence of a flammable liquid cited by the investigators are readily explained by the natural occurrence of flashover. The Position of the Bodies Both Fire Marshal Porter and Consultant King expressed strong opinions that the positions of the bodies on their backs was highly unusual based on their personal (anecdotal) experience. They concluded that the two victims must have been rendered unconscious prior to the fire and placed in the face-up position by the perpetrator.\n\n19\n\nNeither of the two investigators was qualified to testify about either the relative rarity of any given fire-victim body position or the state of consciousness of the victim.", + " Porter SOF 994 A. Yes, Sir. I was very concerned because both bodies, both victims in this fire were found lying on their back face up in a rather relaxed posture. In my experience as a fire investigator and in studying cases after cases after cases, it's very unusual to find a victim that is making an effort to protect their self or making an effort to escape from a fire lying on their back because their natural position\u2014when you stand up when you fall, you are going to fall to a forward position; if you're crawling, you're going to fall down onto your stomach. Porter SOF 995 Q.", + " I take it from your experience you're talking about finding any fire victim on their back that's conscious; is that right? A. Any fire victim that is awake and alert during the fire and makes any effort to escape, the odds are very, very high that they will always be found face down. You will very, very seldom find one face up. King SOF 1128 This was a view of he child and removed from that area. My concern was that it's in a almost relaxed position. It\u2019s in a position of acceptance. The children I've seen in fires you won't find this way. You don't find them on their back.", + " King SOF 1167 A. I think that they were unconscious at the time of the fire or incapacitated, yes, that is correctQ. Do you think sir that that was done accidentally by something they might have taken in that shed, or are you trying to tell the Jury that my client did it or some other person did it? A. I made no accusation against your client. I would believe that someone made them incapacitated or unconscious at the time of the fire, yes, sir, that is correct. Both King and Porter made a mistake that was common in the 19th century in believing that the \u201crelaxed\u201d position of the bodies somehow reflected the status of those bodies before loss of consciousness or death.", + " When a person passes out from smoke inhalation,\n\n20\n\nthe muscles relax and the limbs fall from whatever position they were in while the person was still awake. Later, the heat of the fire causes the contraction of the muscles and changes the attitude of the body. The belief that one can tell what the person was feeling or how they were reacting prior to loss of consciousness or death has been fostered by the extensive influence of the Sherlock Holmes novels on many contemporary investigators. The author conducted a brief random review of a number of reported fire cases across the country and found numerous fire incident reports in which deceased victims of accidental fires were found lying on their backs on the floor of the burned structure.", + " The following excerpt from the learned treatise Advances in Forensic Taphonomy by William D. Haglund and Marcella H. Sorg, CRC Press, 2001, page 462 describe an especially relevant case in which two boys who died in an accidental fire were found in different positions, one on his side and one on his back: The in situ recovery consisted of removing a number of layers of burnt rubble from atop the two victims. Following exposure of the bodies, a plan view map was made of the scene, including the position and orientation of the victims and the associated physical evidence (Fig 23.5). The individual farthest from the closet door was on his side while the other boy was lying on his back\u2026 \u2026The boys\u2019 trachea were soot-filled,", + " providing evidence that the boys were still alive when the fire began. The lack of perimortem trauma (aside from fire-related damage) in combination with the contextual reconstruction (including the final position and orientation of the boys) strongly suggested that the manner of death was accidental. The boys may have been playing with matches in their room, and, rather than calling their parents when the fire started, panicked and hid in the closet. The investigators claims that they could deduce arson and murder from the fact that the subject victims were found on their backs is obviously a case of too much inference from data with no probative value and apparent reliance on fictional forensic science.", + " Conclusions 1. The investigator, Fire Marshal Porter, erred in concluding that the left shed door was bolted from the outside. His finding was based on poor-quality photographs and contradicted the findings of the Assistant Fire Chief who had actually examined the bolts and made the photographs on which he was relying. He also remembered incorrectly the number of bolts present on the double door system and their locations. Even if his photographic study had been correct, he could not logically have proved the door was locked. 2. Both investigators King and Porter incorrectly concluded that the doors of the shed were closed during the fire. If the doors of the shed had been both closed,", + " the fire would have died or proceeded at a rate far too slow to reach full involvement in the observed time frame. If a flammable liquid had been used to start the fire, it would have\n\n21\n\nexacerbated the depletion of oxygen in the windowless shed and the fire would quickly have sputtered out or been reduced to a trivial or smoldering level without breaching the walls or doors. 3. The char appearance indicators used by both prosecution investigators have all been shown to be arson myths by research conducted subsequent to the time of trial. These myths include the luster of the char, the orientation of the char cracks,", + " the size of the char blisters and the width of the pyrolysis zone at the edges of char patterns and holes. None of these so-called indicators have any relationship to the use of a flammable liquid. 4. The Holes in the floor were not caused by a flammable liquid burning downward through the plywood. Flammable liquids do not burn downward through wooden flooring, but at most only cause light surface charring. The theory that flammable liquids soak into flooring over time and then are somehow able to burn downward is an old wives tale. Soaking has little or no effect on the level of char damage. 5.", + " The fact, that the shed was fully involved in fire within a period of less than 30 minute and that the charring inside the shed appears on all exposed surfaces proves that the shed underwent flashover. 6. The holes in the floor were a natural consequence of post-flashover burning. A second cause of holes in the floor was the action of burning indigenous solid materials (fall down). Burning solids can produce holes in wooden flooring which is impervious to the action of spilled ignitable liquids. 7. Flashover and the transition to full involvement could reasonably have been expected to occur within five minutes of ignition of indigenous materials in the shed with a match or lighter.", + " 8. All of the observations of burn damage as well as the rate of growth of the fire can be readily explained as normal consequences of a conventional fire involving flashover and subsequent full involvement. 9. The position of the bodies on their backs is not an unusual occurrence in accidental fires. The position of the extremities does not reflect their position prior to the loss of consciousness or even prior to the actual burning of the bodies. The so-called \u201crelaxed\u201d appearance of the bodies does not reflect the attitude of the victims prior to succumbing to smoke inhalation but is simply a consequence of the natural relaxation of muscle tension with loss of consciousness.", + " 10. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the theory that the subject fire involved the use of a flammable liquid. In the absence of a positive laboratory analysis for a flammable liquid, the prosecution\u2019s theory for the presence of such a material is nothing more than speculation. The State\u2019s arson debris analyst testified to the presence of toluene and xylene isomers in a sample of fire debris which included a shoe. His testimony was irrelevant because these substance are not only commonly found in shoes\n\n22\n\nbut are also generated in ample quantities in most structure fires involving the ubiquitous plastics, synthetic fabrics, paint, rubber, wood finishes and the like,", + " which were present in abundance in the shed. 11. There is no element of physical evidence in this case which is not generally common to accidental or child-initiated post-flashover structure fires.\n\n23 ", + " 1 Angel Fire\n\nEd Graf was a bad employee. While working at Community Bank in Texas in the 1980s, he allegedly embezzled from his employer, eventually paying the bank more than $75,000 to avoid prosecution.\n\nEd Graf was a bad husband. His ex-wife, Clare, would call him \u201cthe most possessive person I\u2019ve ever known.\u201d Clare\u2019s best friend, Carol Schafer, said her husband, Earl, saw Graf having sex with another woman the night of Graf\u2019s bachelor party.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nEd Graf was, according to Clare and her family, a bad father. Two of Clare\u2019s family members accused him of beating his adopted stepsons,", + " Joby and Jason, with a board and belt.\n\nIn 1988, a Texas jury found that Ed Graf was also a murderer. Prosecutors argued that two years earlier, on Aug. 26, 1986, Graf had knocked out Joby, 9, and Jason, 8, and placed the boys in the back of their family shed. Graf had then spread gasoline, locked the shed, and set the boys ablaze.\n\nThe two inseparable, athletic, blond-haired brothers died of smoke inhalation and severe burns in the backyard of their home. The address was 505 Angel Fire Drive.\n\nTrial evidence photo presented by the state of Texas\n\nOn the day of the fire,", + " Graf broke the news to his wife, telling Clare that both boys had been lost in the blaze. But Graf had been informed that the body of one child had been found, not both. It was one of many pieces of circumstantial evidence that prosecutors would pile up to present Graf as a calculating, greedy, and callous monster who murdered the children in a desperate attempt to keep his troubled marriage together.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nOther small clues seemed to point to Graf\u2019s guilt. Multiple witnesses say they saw a gasoline container on the porch, not far from the kids\u2019 bikes. Graf also acted strangely after the fire. He suggested the boys be buried in one coffin,", + " according to multiple witnesses. He didn\u2019t offer his wife consolation, or apologize that they died in his care. A few weeks after the fire, Graf returned about $50 worth of Joby and Jason\u2019s new school clothes that he had previously insisted they keep the tags on. There was more of what others saw as signs of foreknowledge. The normally meticulous Graf, who was said to keep lists for everything, neglected to buy the boys\u2019 cereal or fill Jason\u2019s Dimetapp prescription the week of their deaths.\n\nIn addition to the circumstantial evidence, prosecutors were able to present motive. Weeks before the fire, Graf had taken out $100,", + "000 worth of combined life insurance on the boys if they were to die in an accident. The policies had been mailed out the day before the fire.\n\nThe real motive, prosecutors argued, was to get the boys\u2014a source of regular bickering between Graf and his wife\u2014out of their lives. His wife testified that shortly before the fire, she had threatened to leave him over his strict discipline of Joby and Jason, sons from a previous marriage, and to take their newborn third son, Edward III, with her.\n\nThe case was still largely circumstantial, though. The thing that likely clinched Graf\u2019s conviction was the scientific testimony of a pair of forensic examiners.", + " Joseph Porter, an investigator with the State Fire Marshal\u2019s Office, testified that, based on his analysis of photos of the remains of the scene, the door of the shed must have been locked from the outside at the time of the fire, which would indicate foul play. He also said there were obvious charring patterns on the floor of the shed left by an accelerant. \u201cThe fire was definitely incendiary,\u201d Porter declared. The prosecution\u2019s other expert, a top fire investigator from New York known for his report on the Osage Avenue fire, a notorious fire set by Philadelphia officials that destroyed a primarily black neighborhood, was brought in to testify that there was \u201cno doubt\u201d that this was arson.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nIf the fire was intentionally set,", + " then Graf was the only suspect with means, motives, and opportunity. Even if there was no direct evidence connecting him to the crime, the circumstantial evidence and the word of two arson experts was enough. The jury deliberated for four hours before pronouncing him guilty of capital murder.\n\nThe jurors then had to decide the punishment. The district attorney, Vic Feazell, said that the \u201cfacts of the case cry out\u201d for the death penalty\u2014two boys burned alive, murdered by a trusted parent.\n\nDefense attorney Charles McDonald gave an impassioned plea that the jurors had convicted an innocent man and would make the injustice irreversible if they chose execution over life in prison.", + " \u201cI\u2019m asking for this man\u2019s life because if you did make a mistake there\u2019s going to be some folks, somewhere down the line, it may be years \u2026 but maybe the mistake can be corrected,\u201d McDonald argued. \u201cIf you take this man\u2019s life, there ain\u2019t no way to ever correct it.\u201d\n\nThe jurors must have found this argument compelling, because they spared Ed Graf\u2019s life.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nTwenty-five years later, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided that a mistake had, in fact, been made. The investigators who testified the fire was arson used what in the years since has been discredited as junk science. A state review panel set up to examine bad forensic science in arson cases said that the evidence did not point to an incendiary fire.", + " A top fire scientist in the field went one step further: The way the boys had died, from carbon monoxide inhalation rather than burns, proved the fire couldn\u2019t have been set by Graf spreading an accelerant, and was thus likely accidental. The defense\u2019s theory was that the boys, who multiple witnesses said had a history of playing with matches and cigarettes, had set the fire themselves, attempted to put it out, and been quickly overcome by carbon monoxide poisoning.\n\nPhoto courtesy of the Todd Willingham family\n\nThe reason Ed Graf\u2019s case was reviewed a quarter of a century after he barely escaped the death chamber was because of one man:", + " Cameron Todd Willingham. He was convicted, based on similarly faulty scientific evidence and the testimony of a jailhouse informant who later recanted and said he was bribed, of murdering his three children by setting their home on fire two days before Christmas in 1991. Willingham was executed 11 years ago. Only after Willingham\u2019s death was it revealed publicly that the forensic evidence used to convict him was bunk. In 2009, the New Yorker\u2019s David Grann wrote a groundbreaking article describing Texas\u2019 flawed case against Willingham. The story sparked a national uproar over forensic science and the death penalty.\n\nThen Texas did something surprising.", + " While the state has not budged in its use of the death penalty\u2014just last year topping 500 executions since the state brought back capital punishment in 1982\u2014it has reinvented itself as a leader in arson science and investigation. A new fire marshal, Chris Connealy, revamped the state\u2019s training and investigative standards. He also set up a panel comprised of some of the top fire scientists in the country to reconsider old cases that had been improperly handled by the original investigators.\n\nGraf\u2019s case was one of the first up for review, and it was determined that the original investigators had made critical mistakes. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed,", + " overturning the original conviction.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nGraf\u2019s successful appeal proved that Texas was serious about correcting past forensic errors, but his story was far from over. Prosecutors in Waco were not convinced of his innocence. They felt that they had enough evidence to reconvict. Just because the forensic science was flawed didn\u2019t change the fact that, in the eyes of prosecutors, Ed Graf was a bad employee, a bad husband, and a bad father\u2014a man capable of murdering his adopted children.\n\nSo there was a new trial, and Graf became the first man in Texas to be retried for an arson murder that had been overturned thanks to advances in fire science.", + " His new trial set up a clash between modern forensics and the old way of pursuing criminal justice in Texas, a state where prosecutors have often gone to questionable lengths to win convictions against high profile murder defendants\u2014including multiple men later proved innocent.\n\nProsecutors in Graf\u2019s retrial spared no effort to win a second conviction in a strange and dramatic retrial last October. The trial\u2019s surreal and unforeseeable conclusion would have a profound impact not just on the fate of Ed Graf, but on the lives of other prisoners who in the wake of the Willingham case held out new hope that their convictions might be overturned and their innocence acknowledged.\n\n2 New Memories\n\nWhen T.J.", + " Clinch first took the witness stand for Ed Graf\u2019s defense, back in 1988, he had been a nervous 10-year-old. A couple of months before Joby and Jason died, the brothers had been playing at Clinch\u2019s house when they found some matches and lit a cup of grass on fire. Clinch got scared, and they quickly blew it out. Defense attorneys used Clinch\u2019s testimony, and that of multiple other witnesses, to portray the two boys as having a fascination with fire. When Jason and Joby\u2019s mother, whose name is now Clare Bradburn, remembers what was said about her children, it angers her.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s hard to sit there and listen to things that you know are not true,\u201d she told me as her ex-husband awaited his new trial.", + " She didn\u2019t believe what the neighbors and teachers were saying about her kids. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to hear somebody saying ugly things and trying to make your children sound like they\u2019re little heathens,\u201d she said. \u201cThey were just kids. They were just little boys.\u201d\n\nTwenty-six years later, on Oct. 7, 2014, Clinch was called back to Waco\u2019s 54th District courtroom, this time to testify for the prosecution. He had become a thin, serious-looking 37-year-old real estate agent. His facial features were boyish, and when he got up to talk about his childhood friends,", + " Clinch seemed to revert back to that small, nervous kid.\n\n\u201cThe story of them being this bad person, playing with fire all the time\u2014there was one instance we played with matches, or fire,\u201d he said. \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t have been playing in that shed,\u201d Clinch added, before breaking down in tears.\n\nOne person had said she\u2019d seen one of the brothers go into the shed, though, only four or five days before the fire. In November 1986, 9-year-old Teri Wills told a detective that Joby had taken her to the shed the week before the fire, and that he even knew where the key to the shed was kept.", + " Joby had, according to Teri, told her not to mention it to his father because he wasn\u2019t allowed in there.\n\nGraphic by Lisa Larson-Walker. Document via City of Hewitt Police Department.\n\n\n\nIn 2014, Teri, whose last name is now Rinewalt, was testifying against Graf. She said that she didn\u2019t remember Joby ever bringing her to the shed. She remembered something else, though. She remembered going to the Grafs\u2019 home the day of the fire, knocking on the door for the boys to come out and play, and no one answering. Prosecutors would argue that Graf was too busy killing his stepsons at the time to answer the door.\n\nIn 1986,", + " the police didn\u2019t record anything about Teri mentioning that no one answered the door to the Graf residence. When she and T.J. spoke to investigators the day of the fire, they both said they had been playing with the two boys earlier in the afternoon, according to a police report. A few weeks after the fire, police reported that \u201cneither [Teri], nor T.J. Clinch, or any of the other regular playmates of Jason and Joby Graf had been over at the Graf house the day of the fire.\u201d When I spoke with Rinewalt after her testimony, she told me she is certain of her memory of going to the door,", + " because she remembers feeling guilt as a child that she could have done more to save her friends. \u201cI can physically remember walking up the steps to their front door,\u201d she said to me.\n\nClinch and Rinewalt were among a number of critical witnesses who would come forward with damning new testimony that hadn\u2019t been shared in the 28 prior years. This new testimony would be emotionally powerful, form the basis for much of the prosecution, and\u2014for the most part\u2014prove very difficult to verify. Even in the best of circumstances, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable; at Graf\u2019s second trial, the testimony was offered 28 years after the fact,", + " and multiple key witnesses had been young children at the time of the alleged crime.\n\nRinewalt acknowledges that there are things that she\u2019s forgotten over the years. \u201cCould there have been a time that I did [go to the shed] and it just wasn\u2019t a big enough deal for me to remember it now? Maybe, but I don\u2019t have any recollection of ever really playing in their backyard,\u201d she told me. \u201cI feel like if I had spent time in that shed, I would have remembered that.\u201d\n\nAs Rinewalt testified in between sobs about her best friend \u201cFrog Legs\u201d\u2014her nickname for Jason\u2014prosecutors showed photos of Joby and Jason posing in their soccer uniforms,", + " socks pulled over their knees and wearing goofy grins. There was also a photo of the two boys in tuxes at their aunt\u2019s wedding, an image that had been blown up and displayed between their caskets at their funeral. Family testified at both trials that Graf was so cheap that he had not wanted to pay to have it enlarged. The photo hung over their mother\u2019s mantel for years, and lead prosecutor Michael Jarrett kept it in his office during the trial, he told me, to remind him what he was fighting for.\n\nPhoto by Jeremy Stahl\n\nAnother early witness who would set the tenor for the trial by coming forward with new information was Jason and Joby\u2019s cousin.", + " Jenny Lilly was 6 at the time of the fire and hadn\u2019t testified in the first trial. But she now told jurors that Graf had beaten her cousins with a belt 10 to 15 times in a single sitting for not taking a nap. To add to his cruelty, Graf had made the little girl watch. Lilly hadn\u2019t told anyone, not even her mother, about the beating until a month before Graf\u2019s new trial.\n\nIt was difficult for Graf\u2019s defense team to counteract the emotional power of his accusers. Although a string of witnesses testified that Graf was a loving, devoted father and a good man, their accounts had less resonance than the prosecutors\u2019 gut-wrenching story of two little boys stolen from their family and friends.", + " Defense attorneys promised a dry case built almost exclusively on science. Graf\u2019s lead attorney Walter Reaves told me over the phone that he chose this science-focused strategy because it was the \u201cmost viable one\u201d and the \u201cone that was supported by the evidence and the experts,\u201d in addition to being the strategy that got Graf\u2019s case reversed and sent back to trial in the first place. The downside of that choice was that, from the start of the trial, the defense was incredibly reliant on technical jargon to make its case. \u201cIs it difficult to sell to juries?\u201d Reaves told me. \u201cIt can be.\u201d\n\nGraf maintained an excruciating display of composure during the trial.\n\nThe defense faced another significant hurdle:", + " It couldn\u2019t mention Graf\u2019s previous trial, the 26 years he had spent in prison, or the fact that the original conviction had been overturned. The judge had ruled that such information might bias the jury. This decision led to bizarre scenarios in which witnesses were asked to compare their present-day statements to previous sworn testimony of unstated origins. Even more strangely, several now deceased or otherwise absent witnesses had their testimony reread for the court by lawyers acting as their ghostly embodiments. These witnesses tended to be for the defense, and their words were far less emotionally resonant than those of witnesses who appeared in person.\n\nThere was one exception to this pattern.", + " Graf maintained an excruciating display of composure during the trial (he barely blinked when his own son, who had disowned him more than a decade earlier, testified against him). The only time he almost broke down was when a defense lawyer read the testimony of his mother, whose death and funeral he had missed while in prison. \u201cHe loved them very much. He was very good to those children. He played with them. He worked with them. He took them places,\u201d the testimony went. \u201cThere is no way on God\u2019s earth that he could have hurt those babies.\u201d Graf rubbed his eyes and shifted his head.\n\nPhoto by Steve Earley/Waco Tribune Herald via AP Photo.\n\nGraf did have one advantage at the start of the trial,", + " however. Defense attorneys successfully argued that the accusation of embezzlement, for which Graf was never tried or convicted, was prejudicial character evidence, and therefore inadmissible. The logic of keeping this sort of evidence of past bad behavior out is simple: Just because Graf was an alleged embezzler, it didn\u2019t mean he murdered his stepsons.\n\nStill, the jury was allowed to hear that Graf owed the bank more than $75,000 in the year before the boys\u2019 deaths. He paid it all back half a year before the fire with the help of his parents, but he had to cash in his pension to do so.", + " These financial woes, along with his purchase of the universal life insurance shortly before the fire, combined to form the alleged motive.\n\nGraf had his own explanation for the insurance. He claimed he had purchased it as a savings vehicle for all three of his kids. Graf had paid for his own college education using funds his parents had saved through an insurance plan. His brother and some of their family friends also claimed to have taken out insurance on their own kids, also as savings vehicles. On cross-examination, Clare Bradburn acknowledged that Graf had been talking about getting life insurance even before their youngest son was born, more than six months before the fire.", + " The insurance letter that Graf and his wife were sent the day before the fire described the investment plainly: \u201c[T]hese contracts make an excellent place to store cash. \u2026 I would suggest that you make this your first choice when thinking of saving dollars for the children.\u201d\n\n3 New Science\n\nWas the shed door open or locked shut? That question has always been critical to whether or not Jason and Joby Graf were murdered. If the door was locked from the outside, then they had clearly been trapped. In 1988, the fire investigators testified that they had found indications that the door had been locked from the outside. That evidence has been found faulty by modern fire science.", + " The new science used in Graf\u2019s appeal and retrial was the result of a decades-long revolution in the field. The question Ed Graf\u2019s case posed was whether that revolution would be enough to set a man free.\n\nPhoto by Jeremy Stahl\n\nGerald Hurst, the first arson scientist to discover the flaws in the Willingham conviction, issued a report in 2008 on the Graf case saying that the door was likely open at the time of the fire. Had it been closed, the fire probably would have been starved of oxygen.\n\n\u201cThis should have been an undetermined fire,\u201d Hurst told me months before Graf\u2019s second trial (he died this past March). \u201cThere\u2019s not any proof.", + " Nothing.\u201d A classification of undetermined means just that: You can\u2019t identify whether the fire was intentionally ignited or an accident.\n\nHurst\u2019s theory was that the boys were playing with matches and accidentally set on fire a fold-up bed stored in the shed. If the boys were in the back of the shed when such a fire was set, the fumes might have overwhelmed them too quickly for them to escape.\n\nAt Graf\u2019s new trial, another fire science expert, Doug Carpenter, testified that the heightened levels of carbon monoxide in the boys\u2019 blood indicated that they had passed out in the way Hurst described.\n\nCarpenter spoke with me before the trial at the Maryland offices of his company Combustion Science & Engineering Inc.", + " A gasoline fire, like the one prosecutors alleged Ed Graf started, would run out of air and die down sooner than a non-gasoline fire, he said. \u201cBut they\u2019re both gonna die unless something changes in the ventilation.\u201d Carpenter modeled the fire using a government simulation to show that the shed door was likely open.\n\nThe new science used in Graf\u2019s appeal and retrial was the result of a decades-long revolution in the field.\n\nThe original investigators claimed that the fire started around the door because that was the area with the hottest burns. They reasoned this was where gasoline must have been poured. But when, a couple of weeks after the fire,", + " chemists tested soil samples from the ground beneath the shed along with items from the shed and clothing from the children, the gas chromatograph found the presence of paint thinner (which had been stored in the shed), but no gasoline. Modern analysis shows that ventilation from an open door, not gasoline, would have explained the burn patterns around the door.\n\nCarpenter told me he felt the case should never have been prosecuted. An important indicator for him that this was an accident was the high levels of carbon monoxide found in the boys\u2019 blood. High carbon monoxide levels are associated with death by smoke inhalation, often far from the origin of a fire.", + " People who die near a fire tend to succumb to thermal burns from the flames and stop breathing before they can inhale that much carbon monoxide. There were several items in the shed that could have caught fire and then released large amounts of carbon monoxide. Carpenter said the list includes an upholstered chair, a fold-up bed, a tire, or one of the shelves in the back of the shed.\n\nPhoto by Jeremy Stahl\n\nThese types of fires often befuddle investigators. \u201cWe\u2019ve had fires where we\u2019ve been brought in and the fire department goes, \u2018We\u2019ve got four people dead in this apartment, we\u2019ve got soot everywhere,", + " we\u2019ve burned out a base cabinet near the stove, we don\u2019t get it. How did these people die? They should\u2019ve been able to walk out of this fire,\u2019 \u201d Carpenter said. He showed me an example, which he presented during the Graf appeal hearing, of an Australian woman who died of smoke inhalation in a room that she should have easily been able to escape. The fire was located almost entirely under a knee-level nightstand.\n\n\u201cMost people would walk in and go, \u2018How did this happen, for this small fire?\u2019 \u201d Carpenter said. The answer is that the high levels of carbon monoxide incapacitate the victim.", + " Depending on what materials are being burned, hydrogen cyanide could also be released, which would disorient and incapacitate a person even faster than carbon monoxide. The process could take a few minutes or less.\n\nHydrogen cyanide is more difficult to test for than carbon monoxide. It was not tested for in the autopsies of Joby and Jason Graf. Hydrogen cyanide release is typical, though, in smoldering fires involving furniture upholstered with polyurethane foam. \u201cThe highest number of fatal fires occur when a cigarette and upholstered furniture are involved,\u201d Carpenter told me. There were at least two items in the shed\u2014the fold-up bed and the reclining chair\u2014that were likely to have been upholstered with polyurethane foam.", + " If the boys had tried to put out a chair or mattress fire because they knew they would get in trouble for having started it, not to mention for being in the shed in the first place, then they might have quickly passed out.\n\nBy contrast, if the initial fuel for the fire had been gasoline, the boys would have had to inhale the fumes for at least 45 minutes, according to Carpenter\u2019s analysis, to reach the levels of carbon monoxide found in their bodies. The fire was put out within 15 minutes of being discovered, and the boys were home from school for only 20 to 30 minutes before anyone noticed the fire.", + " The only hypothesis that makes sense to Carpenter is that the fire released enough carbon monoxide or hydrogen cyanide to quickly knock the boys out and kill them.\n\nHe was convinced of this to a \u201creasonable degree of scientific certainty.\u201d That\u2019s as certain as he could be. \u201cScience basically says \u2018This is the best answer we can get,\u2019 \u201d he said.\n\n\u201cIs a jury gonna be able to go back to the room and summarize what I said? The likelihood of that is pretty nil.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe justice system, however, likes definitive answers. Carpenter\u2019s cautious self-skepticism\u2014an ideal quality in a scientist\u2014might read as wavering to a jury.", + " After talking to him for three hours, I wasn\u2019t 100 percent convinced of his hypothesis, which is based on new research that\u2014although it has been peer-reviewed\u2014isn\u2019t yet widely accepted in the fire science community. The panel for the state of Texas that re-examined the case said that the original investigators had made mistakes and that the scene was too compromised to determine what the cause was, but that\u2019s as far as it would go.\n\nCarpenter\u2019s cautiousness wasn\u2019t the only problem for Graf\u2019s defense team. His use of technical terms such as flashover, artificial stratification, burn bag velocity, stoichiometric points,", + " and radiant energy revealed an impressive degree of knowledge. But these terms would be incomprehensible for a lot of jurors.\n\n\u201cIs a jury gonna be able to go back to the room and summarize what I said? The likelihood of that is pretty nil,\u201d Carpenter admitted. \u201cSo that\u2019s why the outcomes of these juries sometimes are such that they\u2019ll be like, \u2018I don\u2019t understand that, but I\u2019m gonna grasp onto something I think I understand.\u2019 \u201d Like an insurance policy, Carpenter said.\n\n4 The Volunteer Firefighters\n\nThe fire on Aug. 26, 1986 that killed Joby and Jason Graf was initially thought to be a horrible accident.", + " So much so that the charred debris of the shed was taken to the dump that same night by neighbors who were trying to spare the boys\u2019 parents the sight of it. Their empathy destroyed the possible crime scene. The disappearance of that scene gave added importance to eyewitness testimony, testimony that was often contradicted by prior statements and the facts on the ground. Ed Graf\u2019s fate would hinge, in part, on whether the jury put more faith in fire science or in the recollections of the men who fought the fire in his backyard 28 years before.\n\nTrial evidence photo presented by the state of Texas via the Arson Project\n\nAmong the first witnesses to the fire was a volunteer fireman named Tom Lucenay,", + " who lived on a street adjacent to Ed Graf\u2019s house. Lucenay had been doing yard work when he noticed the fire, and he rushed to his neighbor\u2019s aid barefoot and shirtless. The population of Hewitt in the 1980s was less than 10,000 people, and the town relied on an entirely volunteer fire department. Lucenay was the deputy chief.\n\nWhen he arrived, the gate to the backyard privacy fence was chained shut. Graf showed up with his baby in his arms and started to kick down the fence from the inside, helping Lucenay and other neighbors gain access to the backyard to combat the fire.\n\nOne of those neighbors,", + " Wilfred Wondra, would be a critical witness for Ed Graf\u2019s defense in both trials. In a statement to police given less than 10 days after the fire, Wondra said that while he was waiting to try to get into the backyard he noticed \u201cthe door of the shed was open and flames and heavy gray smoke was rolling out the opening.\u201d\n\nAt the new trial, 28 years later, the electrician, by then 82, said that the door wasn\u2019t wide open, but just \u201ca little bit open.\u201d Wondra wore a scraggly beard and seemed to have a harder time than other witnesses remembering things\u2014he had to be reminded repeatedly of what he had said in his 1986 statement.\n\nAnother neighbor,", + " William Flake, testified at the first trial that he, too, had seen the shed door open. Flake also testified then that he had seen the boys smoking on \u201cseveral\u201d occasions, and his son Timothy Flake testified at the new trial that he had seen the boys playing with matches once before. Parts of William Flake\u2019s old testimony were read to the new jury because he wasn\u2019t healthy enough to attend the trial.\n\nTom Lucenay was the first of a parade of volunteer firemen who would testify on the fourth day of Graf\u2019s retrial that the shed door was closed and locked.\n\nLooking at photos of the scene, Lucenay described evidence that the door had been locked.", + " That day, he had found two slide latches in the debris, picked them both up, and manipulated them. The burn patterns on one indicated that it had been in the open position. The burn patterns on the other indicated it was in the closed position. In his report, Gerald Hurst explained the closed slide latch by noting that there had been interior latches on the double doors that could have been in the closed position whether or not one of the double doors was open, but Graf\u2019s lawyers didn\u2019t raise this point in their cross-examination.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s an absolute scientific impossibility that the doors were closed and the fire progressed to the point where it did,\u201d Reaves,", + " Graf\u2019s lead counsel, told me when I asked him why Hurst\u2019s latch point wasn\u2019t brought up, saying he felt the latch evidence was not significant. Reaves is one of the best appellate lawyers in the state, and maybe even the country. His work on the Willingham and Graf cases had almost single-handedly won Graf a new trial, and thus earned him the right to lead this high-profile defense (he is also a vice president of the Innocence Project of Texas). But he and the rest of Graf\u2019s defense team were stymied by the series of stout, convincing, retired volunteer firemen. (You can watch video of the firemen in this 1986 footage from KWTX.)\n\n\n\nFor his part,", + " the district attorney, Abel Reyna, was an impressive questioner with a theatrical method: pausing for effect, emphasizing his skepticism at key points, and even stomping about the courtroom in dramatic re-enactments of how the fire might have occurred.\n\nShortly after Lucenay testified, another former fireman, William Sprung, took the stand to say that the doors were closed. Like several of the firemen called by the prosecution, Sprung recalled events that were now decades old, but much of his testimony was brand-new, describing the events of 1986 in greater detail than had been recorded in previous statements. Sprung didn\u2019t testify at the first trial,", + " but he had given a written statement a week after the fire. In September 1986, he wrote that as he approached the door side of the shed\u2014while manning the nozzle that eventually put the fire out\u2014he noticed it was burned on the outside, and went to the opposite side of the shed to gain entry. This was all he had ever officially said at the time of the fire regarding the door. In 2014, though, Sprung testified that the double door was closed when they approached the fire, and he was certain of this. He said they would have started pumping water through the door had it been open. Instead,", + " they used pike poles to try to pull down the shed walls. Sprung\u2019s recollection was confirmed shortly thereafter by another ex-fireman, Jim Sutter, who had also never before testified if the door was open or closed. He now said that if the doors had been open, they would not have had to use the poles. In his original testimony, though, Sutter had described the front side of the shed as already being \u201cburned down\u201d when they arrived at the scene, indicating there was an opening there to fight the fire. (Sprung did not return a message for comment left with his wife. Sutter did not respond to phone and email messages requesting comment.)\n\nGraf\u2019s defense team was stymied by the series of stout,", + " convincing, retired volunteer firemen.\n\nSutter, a Vietnam veteran and retired military policeman, had been the liaison between the firemen and the family the night the boys died. He was the one who heard Graf tell his wife that both boys were dead when she first arrived home, before Sutter had informed Graf of the discovery of the second body.\n\nThere were other possible explanations of how Graf might have known, or at least intuited, that both boys had died in the shed without having placed them there himself. First, everyone who knew Joby and Jason described them as inseparable. According to Graf\u2019s statements, they had left the house that afternoon together.", + " Second, Hewitt\u2019s fire marshal, Jimmy Clark, had said to Graf moments before he was told about the first boy\u2019s death, \u201cDon\u2019t worry, everything is going to be all right. They found the boys.\u201d Clark had thought the boys had been found alive. When he went back to the yard, with Graf right behind him, Clark was told by another volunteer fireman, \u201cYou don\u2019t want to go in there.\u201d Clark responded, \u201cOh, God, don\u2019t tell me that.\u201d All of this was within earshot of Graf. Minutes later, Sutter told Graf officially that one body had been found. (On the stand in 2014,", + " Sutter said that Graf gave \u201cno response\u201d when he told him this. In 1988, though, Sutter had recalled it differently. He\u2019d testified that Graf replied, \u201cOh, my God.\u201d)\n\nClark testified at both trials that the only padlock discovered on the scene was found in the unlocked position. That padlock would have been attached to a hasp lock that connected the shed\u2019s double doors from the outside. If anyone had seen that the hasp lock was shut when the fire was put out, then that would prove that the boys had been locked in the shed, almost certainly by Graf. But no witness had ever testified,", + " or given any kind of statement, to that effect.\n\nPhoto by Jeremy Stahl\n\nThat is until Harold Sokolove, the final firefighter on the fourth day of the trial, came forward. Appearing on the stand wearing a floral patterned polo shirt and having travelled from his home in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, Sokolove was a stunning witness and a contrast from the staid Texans who had appeared before him. He hadn\u2019t testified at the first trial, and his only previous statement gave nothing in the way of helpful information. But now, Sokolove said for the first time publicly that he remembered that the hasp lock to the shed door was in the secure,", + " closed position. When defense attorney Michelle Tuegel asked why Sokolove hadn\u2019t put that crucial bit of information in his original statement in 1986, he responded that he had only been told to write down what he did, not what he saw.\n\nSokolove\u2019s testimony ran counter to the investigations of Gerald Hurst and Doug Carpenter, not to mention the contemporaneous eyewitness testimony of William Flake and Wilfred Wondra that the door was open. After his testimony, Sokolove told me that he had initially thought he had mentioned the locked hasp in his 1986 statement. It was only when he realized, in 2014,", + " that the hasp lock wasn\u2019t in his report that he reasoned that he must have been told to put down what he did, not what he witnessed, and had followed the instructions too literally.\n\n\u201cThey\u2019re asking me to remember what I did and what I saw almost 30 years ago. It\u2019s a little bit of a challenge.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cAt this point I\u2019ve reached the conclusion that my statement must\u2019ve been based on the instructions to write down what I did,\u201d he told me. \u201cYou sort of work backward and think, \u2018Well why didn\u2019t I put it in there?\u2019 \u201d\n\nIn other words, he presented the reason for his limited original statement as a memory on the witness stand,", + " but described it to me as a rationalization after the fact. Sokolove acknowledges there\u2019s a chance he could be misremembering the state of the hasp lock, though he believes it to be very slim: \u201cI would give it a 99.9 percent that what I saw on that shed is what I saw on that shed,\u201d he told me.\n\n\u201cThey\u2019re asking me to remember what I did and what I saw almost 30 years ago. It\u2019s a little bit of a challenge,\u201d he added. \u201cBut that part was clear. It\u2019s almost like there was a spotlight on the hasp lock, and I can see it,", + " I mean it\u2019s like, as clear as day. Everything else that was going on, you know, may be a little fuzzy, but that part for some reason sticks out in my mind, and it always has.\u201d\n\n5 The Reformers\n\nThe first edition of what is now considered the fire investigator\u2019s bible, a document called NFPA 921, \u201cGuide for Fire and Explosion Investigations,\u201d was published in 1992. The manual dispelled many of the myths investigators had relied upon for decades. \u201cThe howls of protest from fire investigation \u2018professionals\u2019 were deafening,\u201d fire scientist John Lentini wrote of the initial response to NFPA 921.", + " \u201cIf what was printed in that document were actually true, it meant that hundreds or thousands of accidental fires had been wrongly determined to be incendiary fires. No investigator wanted to admit to the unspeakable possibility that they had caused an innocent person to be wrongly convicted.\u201d\n\nPhoto by Jeremy Stahl\n\nLentini conducted a landmark 1992 study that proved that certain supposed arson indicators could be produced in accidental fires. He was also among the first forensic scientists to re-examine the Willingham case. He found there was no evidence that anyone had intentionally lit Willingham\u2019s home on fire. At least seven other experts looked into the case and agreed.", + " Willingham had been convicted largely on the word of two fire investigators who had claimed to find more than 20 indicators of arson. All of them were based on junk science.\n\nAs late as 2010, the State Fire Marshal\u2019s Office and the governor\u2019s office were still fighting the NFPA 921 standards, at least in the case of Willingham. After David Grann\u2019s story about the many scientific flaws in the Willlingham case, then-Gov. Rick Perry attempted to shut down an ongoing investigation by the state\u2019s Forensic Science Commission into the problems with that case. \u201cI\u2019m familiar with the latter-day supposed \u2018experts\u2019 on the arson side of it,\u201d Perry told reporters,", + " using finger quotes. He appointed a political ally named John Bradley to replace the sitting chairman of the FSC. Bradley proceeded to delay testimony by a top scientist in the field named Craig Beyler about mistakes that led to Willingham\u2019s execution and that were ignored by Perry\u2014the testimony would not be heard until after Perry\u2019s primary challenge by Kay Bailey Hutchison had been defeated. (Bradley declined to be interviewed for this story. \u201cI am proud of the work we did and the contribution it made to the improvement of science in Texas,\u201d he wrote in an email.) After the scientists on the Forensic Science Commission rebelled against Bradley and his reappointment failed in the legislature,", + " Perry\u2019s attorney general, Greg Abbott, bailed Perry out by releasing a legally binding opinion decreeing that the FSC lacked jurisdiction to investigate old cases such as Willingham\u2019s. \u201cAbbott is a political hack, and he made his decision to suit Gov. Perry,\u201d Lentini said. (Abbott is now the governor of Texas.)\n\nThe FSC did, however, issue a final report describing six different flawed indicators used in the original Willingham investigation. It also released a damning 55-page report by Beyler, the expert whose testimony had been postponed. \u201cThe investigators had poor understandings of fire science,\u201d Beyler wrote.", + " \u201cTheir methodologies did not comport to the scientific method.\u201d The finding of arson \u201ccould not be sustained.\u201d\n\nA Slate Plus Special Feature: Texas Executed an Almost Certainly Innocent Man The Texas Forensic Science Commission chairman tried to convince Texas Cameron Todd Willingham was a monster. Did politics trump truth?\n\nTexas\u2019 handling of the Willingham case was a scandal, but the Forensic Science Commission\u2019s thwarted review resulted in one major achievement. The commission gave 17 recommendations to revamp the State Fire Marshal\u2019s Office, including a proposal that the fire marshal review old arson cases where questionable science was used\u2014exactly what Abbott had told the FSC it couldn\u2019t do.", + " Surprisingly, the state\u2019s new fire marshal accepted every single one of those recommendations, including the work of reviewing old cases. Ed Graf\u2019s case was among the first up for review.\n\n\u201cNo investigator wanted to admit \u2026 that they had caused an innocent person to be wrongly convicted.\u201d\n\nThe forensic myths used in Graf\u2019s 1988 trial were mistakes common to investigations of fires that reached a stage called flashover, which is when everything in a room has caught fire. The key indicator used against Graf was \u201calligator\u201d charring, one of the kinds of evidence most commonly misinterpreted by investigators evaluating a fire in a wooden structure. \u201cAlligatoring\u201d is when wood blisters to the point that it looks like alligator skin.", + " Large rolling alligator blisters were long believed to indicate that a fire had been fast and hot, and was thus the result of a liquid accelerant. NFPA 921 explicitly discredited these patterns as arson indicators.\n\nFalse arson indicators like \u201calligatoring\u201d were taught to fire investigators across the country, who were usually not trained as scientists and had little basis for challenging what they learned. This education gap has made the field more susceptible to junk science than fields practiced by degreed scientists, such as forensic pathology and DNA testing.\n\nSince NFPA 921 started to gain widespread acceptance as the standard in the late 1990s, the number of fires determined to be arsons in this country has decreased dramatically.", + " Between 1999 and 2008, arsons dropped from 15 percent to 6 percent of fires nationwide. A study by former Texas Observer editor Dave Mann, who was the first reporter to cover the faulty fire science used in the Graf case, showed that Texas had a 60 percent decrease in incendiary fires between 1997 and 2007. There are probably multiple reasons for this trend, but one obvious explanation is that fewer false arson determinations are being made based on bad science.\n\nSince the Willingham execution and its ugly aftermath, Texas finally started taking arson science more seriously. In 2012, Chris Connealy,", + " a former Houston fire chief, took over the state\u2019s battered Fire Marshal\u2019s Office and quickly made it into a model for fire investigators around the country. He had none of the baggage of previous officials who had sided with the Perry administration during the Forensic Science Commission\u2019s controversial Willingham investigation. In addition to starting the review panels, Connealy doubled training budgets for his office\u2019s investigators, added an electrical engineer and criminal analyst to his staff, and made his investigators take part in mock hearings to see if their expertise would hold up in court.\n\nShortly after entering office, he sent a letter to fire officials throughout the state, promising changes, including a more hardline stance on investigators who were unable to prove their scientific expertise to judges during legal proceedings.", + " \u201cA fire investigator that fails to be acknowledged by the court as an expert will likely no longer have a career as a fire investigator,\u201d he warned.\n\nPhoto by Sebron Snyder\n\nIt wasn\u2019t just tough talk. Within a year, 20 percent of his office\u2019s staff had left, many unable or unwilling to meet the new training standards. When I met Connealy at the end of 2013, he told me that five members of his office had departed, and one had announced his retirement that day. We met over cheeseburgers and beer at Londoners Pub in Plano, where he was running a quarterly training conference he had set up as part of his response to the Willingham report.", + " During these conferences, the state\u2019s arson review panel looked at old cases brought to them by the Innocence Project of Texas. With Connealy were friends from the Louisiana State Fire Marshal\u2019s Office, including Fire Marshal Butch Browning, and two of the most renowned fire scientists in the country, John DeHaan and David Icove. The scientists had been called in by Connealy to speak at the training seminar and serve on the review panel.\n\nAs the Louisiana fire contingent watched the New Orleans Saints on Monday Night Football, DeHaan and Icove chatted about the latest major arson exoneration. An Arizona man had been released from prison that past April after serving 41 years for a hotel fire that killed 29 people.", + " Icove and DeHaan lamented the fact that the exoneree, Louis Taylor, did not get a dime from the state in restitution. The district attorney had threatened to re-prosecute him, so Taylor pleaded no contest in order to ensure that he would win his freedom. \u201cHe just wanted his life back,\u201d DeHaan said.\n\nConnealy had more prosaic worries. \u201cA very large urban fire department\u201d in Texas had an annual training budget of just $3,000\u2014Connealy\u2019s training budget was more than 150 times that size\u2014and still, that city had more people investigating fires than Connealy\u2019s office did,", + " people who could potentially perpetuate arson myths. \u201cThat\u2019s a concern,\u201d he had told me in an earlier interview. \u201cTraining is how you overcome these myths and know the current science.\u201d\n\nConnealy\u2019s actions to change the state\u2019s culture have earned him widespread recognition. In 2013, he was a finalist for the Dallas Morning News\u2019 Texan of the Year. \u201cConnealy has done as much as, if not more than, anyone else in Texas law enforcement to seek out the truth, improve our system and push our state forward,\u201d wrote Innocence Project of Texas policy director Cory Session in putting forward Connealy\u2019s nomination.", + " The fact that this endorsement was coming from the state\u2019s Innocence Project, which had been severely critical of the previous fire marshal, spoke to Connealy\u2019s efforts to collaborate with them. The arson review panel was the first, and still the only, of its kind in the nation. Last August, Connealy was awarded the National Association of State Fire Marshals\u2019 top honor. And at the end of 2014, Governing magazine named him one of its public officials of the year.\n\nPhoto by Jeremy Stahl\n\nI attended Connealy\u2019s quarterly training session in December 2013, where the topic was how to use dogs to detect accelerants.", + " Dogs are excellent tools for fire investigators\u2014the positive rate for lab samples from the State Fire Marshal\u2019s Office increased significantly when canines were used to pull samples, according to one analysis described at the conference\u2014but they are by no means perfect. For example, dogs can\u2019t always discriminate between petroleum-based products and intentionally placed ignitable liquids. Over the course of the conference, the standard of NFPA 921\u2014that unless a canine alert is confirmed by lab analysis, it should not be considered valid\u2014was emphasized repeatedly. DeHaan mentioned during the presentation that prosecutors still pressure dog handlers to ignore these scientific guidelines and testify to alerts that were not confirmed by lab results.", + " \u201cWhen I get on the stand and I start talking about dogs, you see people wake up in the jury box,\u201d said canine unit captain Tommy Pleasant to a room full of 80 or so firefighters and investigators. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to let these 12 people that weren\u2019t smart enough to get out of jury duty determine somebody\u2019s civil liberties\u2014whether or not they\u2019re going to spend the rest of their life in prison\u2014we got to do it right.\u201d\n\nDeHaan had investigated the Ed Graf case back in 2010, and like Carpenter and Hurst had found that \u201cif the doors were latched close \u2026 there would be insufficient ventilation to permit more than an initial flash fire.\u201d In a report he put together for Graf\u2019s lawyer Walter Reaves,", + " DeHaan described how the high level of carbon monoxide inhaled by Jason and Joby would not have made sense in a set gasoline fire, which concurred with Carpenter\u2019s findings.\n\nIn the middle of DeHaan\u2019s presentation at the quarterly training session, he had a lengthy exchange with a skeptical fire investigator. The questioner asked if he thought a dog alert should never be considered valid without a lab confirmation, and DeHaan was adamant that, yes, he did. The questioner then described a case where a suspect had confessed to pouring an accelerant exactly where a dog had detected, but a lab test had failed.\n\n\u201cYou can\u2019t argue,", + " \u2018well, he said it was there, and therefore the canine is right and the lab was wrong,\u2019 \u201d DeHaan responded. \u201cYou just have to say there\u2019s no evidence of it.\u201d\n\nWhen the questioning investigator pressed him, DeHaan went even further.\n\n\u201cConfessions are really, really unreliable,\u201d the brusque California scientist preached to the room of Texas law enforcement officials. \u201cI get involved in all kinds of cases today: \u2018Well, he confessed.\u2019 And I point out at least seven people confessed to being Jack the Ripper. That means at least six of them were lying. So confessions to me mean virtually nothing.\u201d\n\n\u201cIf we\u2019re going to send somebody to jail for life,", + " or to the death penalty,\u201d he continued, \u201cwe better be absolutely certain.\u201d\n\nThe fact that the state had actually executed someone on the basis of unreliable arson science\u2014the very reason that these training conferences were taking place\u2014was the subtext of the entire two-day seminar. During his remarks, Connealy only hinted at why they were there, talking about \u201crebuilding the reputation\u201d of the State Fire Marshal\u2019s Office and using the \u201cForensic Science Commission report\u201d\u2014that is, the Willingham report\u2014to accomplish this. \u201cWe got some negative publicity,\u201d is how another speaker, investigator Tommy Sing, put it to the assembled crowd.\n\n\u201cI can tell you looking at the Graf case,", + " there\u2019s no forensic evidence to support the conclusion that the fire was intentional,\u201d Sing told me between conference sessions. \u201cNot then, not now.\u201d Sing, a 40-year veteran firefighter and investigator, had investigated the case at the appellate stage for the McLennan County prosecutor\u2019s office. Still, he was sure to offer the caveat that this was a forensic science point of view and not a \u201ccriminal investigation point of view.\u201d In all of his 2,000-plus criminal investigations, though, Sing had never had a prosecutor charge someone with a crime in an undetermined fire. As for Willingham, Sing seemed to acknowledge that the execution was a travesty of justice without saying he was innocent.\n\n\u201cWe can\u2019t go back and change anything that\u2019s already happened\u2014we can\u2019t change Willingham,\u201d Sing told me.", + " \u201cBut today,\u201d he continued, taking a deep sigh, \u201ctoday I\u2019m glad it\u2019s in the forefront. Because it\u2019s getting better training for my investigators.\u201d\n\nA Slate Plus Special Feature: Texas Killed a Man Based on Faulty Forensics. His Family Is Pushing for Reform. A profile of Cameron Todd Willingham\u2019s family and their campaign to have him exonerated.\n\nThe new message seemed to be getting across. \u201cNobody likes having their work reviewed, but I think in this day and age it\u2019s necessary,\u201d said Austin Lieutenant Investigator Brooks Frederick.\n\nFrederick has been an investigator for 30 years, most recently as a canine handler,", + " and when he joined the force he was taught many of the same shoddy investigative techniques that were used in the Graf and Willingham cases. Now he remembers his first arson class as a rookie investigator in January 1984 and can\u2019t believe what was being taught.\n\nInvestigators used to say that tar and soot on a glass window meant that an accelerant had been used. \u201cThat\u2019s bullshit,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s typical of most fires.\u201d\n\nIn 1992, another myth about \u201ccrazed\u201d glass was used to prove that Willingham had killed his children. \u201cIf you saw the crazing, cracked or irregular [glass], \u2018my God ignitable liquid,\u2019 \u201d Frederick remembered.", + " \u201cBullshit! A fire hose will do that.\u201d When cold water hits a hot window, the windowpane will crack.\n\nConcrete marked by chips, holes, or discoloration used to indicate that a fire had burned hotter than normal. \u201cOh man that was ignitable liquid right there, buddy,\u201d Frederick said. \u201cBullshit!\u201d\n\nEven Joseph Porter, one of the original investigators on the Graf case, agreed that the science had changed enough to warrant his work getting a re-examination. \u201cSome of the issues that were used in the first trial\u2014such as the burn patterns, and alligatoring, and charring,", + " and things like that\u2014aren\u2019t the reliable things that we thought they were in 1986,\u201d he said. Porter still believed in Graf\u2019s guilt and was unhappy that neither Connealy\u2019s panel nor the state\u2019s prosecutors had spoken to him about the case, but he acknowledged that relying on photos to make his determination might not have been the right approach. (He also said that he was so reluctant at the time of his initial investigation to go ahead to trial based on the evidence he had that he insisted a second fire investigator be brought on to confirm his findings. \u201cI did not feel comfortable saying that, just based on the hearsay and the background circumstances\u2014I was very uncomfortable taking that to a jury in a case that would be a murder case,\u201d Porter told me.)\n\nPhoto by Tamir Kalifa\n\nNearly everyone I spoke with about the arson review panel described it as something that should be adopted across the country.", + " \u201cTexas is leading the way on this,\u201d said the then-executive director of the Innocence Project of Texas, Nick Vilbas, who was in Plano to attend the conference. (Vilbas left the Innocence Project of Texas in June.) His group had combed through 700 old arson convictions to identify cases for the review panel to re-evaluate.\n\nVilbas, a 32-year-old criminal defense attorney, wears multiple ear piercings and tattoos. One of his tattoos is a Texas map, with a Texas flag behind it, two yellow roses, a blue bonnet and thistle with a banner that reads \u201cDeep in the Heart.\u201d (\u201cAs much Texas as you can fit into a tattoo,\u201d Vilbas says.) Another is a bald eagle with the slogan \u201cLiberty Justice for All\u201d with a big bold asterisk.", + " Everyone in Texas can get behind the idea of being the best at something, he says, even when that something is criminal justice reform. \u201cIf there\u2019s one thing that I think Texans can appreciate, it\u2019s being willing to lead the charge,\u201d Vilbas said. \u201cThat\u2019s what we are as a state.\u201d\n\n6 A Turn in the Trial\n\nDespite the new testimony from the firefighters about the lock on the shed door, the outcome of Graf\u2019s second trial seemed hard to predict at the end of the first week. The prosecution had shown that Graf was thoughtless toward his wife in the aftermath of the boys\u2019 deaths. It had shown that he stood to benefit financially from the boys\u2019 deaths.", + " But it hadn\u2019t demonstrated that Graf had killed Joby and Jason. It also hadn\u2019t yet called its star witness, Graf\u2019s ex-wife Clare Bradburn.\n\nLater in Graf\u2019s second trial, friends, neighbors, and the boys\u2019 teachers would testify that Graf appeared to have been a good dad. He had chosen to adopt the boys, whose biological father had relinquished custody after failing to pay child support. He was proud of them taking his name, and he was an active parent, cooking for them, taking them to sporting events, playing an active role in school, and helping them with homework.\n\nPhoto by Jerry Larson/Waco Tribune Herald via AP Images\n\nClare Bradburn\u2019s direct examination painted a different image.", + " She testified that he was a domineering presence, a man who was so obsessed with her as to insist that she kept the door open when she went to the bathroom. Her family, meanwhile, depicted Graf as a militaristic disciplinarian who physically abused the children on at least two occasions.\n\nBradburn was a compelling witness\u2014a beautiful, kindly elementary school teacher who had devoted her life to children only to have her first two sons ripped away from her. On cross-examination, however, defense attorney Mark Dyer worked hard to demonstrate her biases.\n\n\n\nDyer had history with Graf\u2019s case: He had been at Baylor Law School and had worked as a \u201cresearch grunt\u201d for Graf\u2019s defense team in 1988.", + " At the time, everything except for the forensic evidence had convinced him that Graf had been innocent. \u201cThe circumstantial evidence \u2026 didn\u2019t resonate to me as being evidence that he committed a crime,\u201d Dyer told me before the second trial. The only thing that gave him pause was the certainty of the forensic experts. Dyer believed that if it hadn\u2019t been for that forensic evidence, which has proved to be faulty, Graf would have been acquitted.\n\nDyer eventually became a partner at a major civil firm in Dallas. When he heard Graf was getting a new trial, he called Reaves and volunteered his services pro bono, his first criminal case since Graf\u2019s original trial.", + " Now Dyer was cross-examining Clare Bradburn on the stand, and question after question was landing. He portrayed her as a woman in denial for her refusal to believe her sons might have set the fire. Under questioning, she acknowledged that during her career she had taught good kids who had made bad choices and that there\u2019d been times when parents of misbehaving students had told her \u201cmy kid would never do that.\u201d\n\nHe also got her to admit Graf shared responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, and taking the kids to school. It was his idea to adopt the boys, and their grades and behavior improved once he came into their lives.", + " He bought the boys an Atari. He took them to the Texas coast and Six Flags and church and Sunday dinners at his mom\u2019s house. When Jason got pneumonia, Graf stayed with him overnight at the hospital while Clare took care of the baby and Joby at home. Graf attended soccer and T-ball games with them. He acted like he cared for them.\n\n\u201cYou might as well declare that man guilty now, that is how prejudicial that is.\u201d\n\nBradburn had testified that not only would the boys have never played in the shed, they didn\u2019t play in the backyard, which she said was \u201cdry\u201d and full of thorns. But again,", + " on cross-examination, Dyer poked holes in Bradburn\u2019s account. One month before their deaths, Graf had bought the boys a tetherball set as a present and installed it in the backyard, digging a hole in the yard, pouring concrete in the ground and setting it. Under Dyer\u2019s questioning, Bradburn remembered her sons playing with the tetherball.\n\nOn the stand, Bradburn admitted that the life insurance purchase had not been a secret and that they were both beneficiaries. She said it was true that she had \u201cbitterness and bias\u201d against Ed Graf and that she refused to acknowledge the possibility that the fire was an accident.\n\nDyer\u2019s cross-examination was a seemingly devastating challenge of the state\u2019s most important witness.", + " It was also when the proceedings seemed to turn against Graf.\n\nDuring Bradburn\u2019s testimony, the prosecution had asked her how many times she and Graf had been \u201cintimate\u201d in the lead-up to the fire. The point was to show that their marriage was failing. She responded only \u201cthree or four\u201d times between February and August. \u201cWe had many weaknesses, that was one of them,\u201d she said.\n\nDyer returned to the sensitive issue. He noted that doctors recommended waiting six to eight weeks before having sex after a C-section (which Bradburn had for her third son), and that new parents are generally wiped out. He asked her about her breast-", + "feeding habits and implied the lack of sleep might have been what kept them from having marital relations. Dyer didn\u2019t succeed in proving that Clare and Ed had had a good marriage, but he challenged Bradburn\u2019s account of their struggles. It was a particularly harsh portion of a harsh round of questioning.\n\nPhoto by Jeremy Stahl\n\nWhen Bradburn\u2019s cross-examination was over, the prosecution made a surprising request. They moved to have the evidence of Graf\u2019s embezzlement admitted, midtrial. This testimony had never been allowed in court, except in the sentencing phase of the first trial, because it was viewed as prejudicial. Now,", + " though, while the jury was out of the courtroom, prosecutors argued that the defense had opened the door for it by describing vacations and the Atari that Graf had bought the boys, which prosecutors said painted a misconception about Graf\u2019s finances and mattered for the purposes of his alleged motive.\n\n\u201cThe fact that he got an Atari does not open the door on embezzlement,\u201d Dyer countered. He argued that allowing the embezzlement evidence would so turn the jury against Graf that the rest of the trial wouldn\u2019t even be necessary. \u201cYou might as well declare that man guilty now, that is how prejudicial that is,\u201d he said.\n\nAfter hearing arguments from both sides,", + " the judge made an extraordinary ruling: He decided to reverse himself and admit the evidence of Graf\u2019s embezzlement. \u201cI\u2019m going to lift the order,\u201d he said, and adjourned the court for the day. Graf and his legal team were devastated, and Dyer spent the entire night looking for an argument that might change the judge\u2019s mind. When he was unable to do so, Dyer asked for a hearing so that the judge might explain why the embezzlement was now relevant to the proceedings.\n\n\u201cYou\u2019re asking me to explain my ruling? The court of appeals explains my rulings,\u201d Judge Matt Johnson responded.\n\nThe prosecution was supposed to restrict its references to the embezzlement to questions regarding Graf\u2019s financial motive,", + " but it was used repeatedly as character evidence throughout the rest of the trial. Many of the remaining witnesses were asked some variation of the question \u201cif you had known that this man had stolen from his employer for 12 years, wouldn\u2019t it have made you suspicious of him?\u201d The defense objected every time, and the judge overruled them every time, eventually granting a running objection to be recorded for appellate purposes. Johnson\u2019s office did not respond to a request for an interview.\n\n7 The Snitch\n\nAfter Clare Bradburn\u2019s testimony, the prosecution had one more ace up its sleeve.\n\nIn April 2014, with a trial date for Ed Graf just weeks away,", + " McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna began receiving letters from a prisoner named Fernando Herrera. He was a new cellmate of Graf\u2019s, and according to his letters, Graf had confessed to murdering Joby and Jason, describing the crime in astonishing detail. At the start of May, Reyna requested and was granted a continuance that pushed the trial back past the summer. Herrera would become a crucial witness in his prosecution against Graf. He would testify at trial that he had come forward with this information without any expectation of reward. (Reyna\u2019s office declined repeated requests for an interview about the case before and after the trial. During the trial,", + " he couldn\u2019t comment on the record because of a gag order by the judge.)\n\nOn the seventh day of Graf\u2019s trial, with the courtroom\u2019s window shades drawn so that no members of the media could snap the inmate\u2019s photo or film him, Herrera took the stand to say that Graf had described exactly how he had committed the crime and why, including such minute details as his not filling a Dimetapp prescription for Jason.\n\nThe 38-year-old Herrera had a long criminal record, which was laid out at trial by both sides. As the lead prosecutor himself described it, Herrera had \u201cquite a r\u00e9sum\u00e9.\u201d He had been in and out of prison since he was 18,", + " had at least 14 criminal convictions according to the Waco Tribune, and had used at least a half-dozen aliases with authorities. Herrera had four charges in McLennan County of theft and drug possession pending against him when he testified. Among Herrera\u2019s crimes were at least five separate prior convictions for lying to authorities, including multiple charges of giving false information to a police officer.\n\nOn the stand, Herrera demonstrated an almost encyclopedic understanding of the prosecution\u2019s case against Graf. But at times he seemed to depart from one version of events and then reverse himself, or be interrupted by the prosecutor in the midst of an apparent detour.", + " And on occasion Herrera\u2019s testimony matched previous testimony verbatim. \u201cWhat Hererra has to say is what the state wishes they could prove but can\u2019t,\u201d the defense team would argue afterward, noting apparent holes in his story.\n\nEarly in Herrera\u2019s testimony, the lead prosecutor, Michael Jarrett, asked him why he decided to come forward. \u201cI remember kind of getting intrigued by the case because of the women that were testifying against [Graf],\u201d he said, at which point Jarrett cut him off. It sounded as though Herrera was describing having read about testimony in Graf\u2019s previous trial, or perhaps even having seen a trial transcript.", + " If Herrera\u2019s testimony was based on anything other than his conversations with Graf, then it could have been thrown out.\n\nDrawing by Tom Lucenay\n\nHerrera also brought back a long-abandoned claim, for which there was no forensic evidence, that the boys had been tied up. \u201c[Graf] mentioned how he strategically placed the rope so he couldn\u2019t be convicted of it,\u201d Herrera said. \u201cThey were just put in there in a way that nobody could say that he tied anybody or anything up.\u201d If Ed Graf did confess to tying up the boys, he was confessing to something that contradicted the autopsy report, which showed no indications the boys had been tied or drugged,", + " and the assessment of the initial firefighter at the scene, Tom Lucenay, who said in the first trial that he saw no such evidence. One potential reason for Herrera to mention this debunked theory: In Lucenay\u2019s sketch of the fire scene, available online when you Google the case, there is a drawing labeled \u201crope\u201d near the boys\u2019 bodies. (Another potential explanation is that in Ed Graf\u2019s testimony from his first trial he mentioned that Clare had accused him of tying up the boys. Graf\u2019s legal team said he kept portions of the transcript with him in jail, unsecured and easily accessible.)\n\nIn addition, Herrera brought up \u201calligator skin\u201d charring,", + " saying that Graf had used special arson techniques so \u201cthey wouldn\u2019t be able to pinpoint the start of the fire.\u201d Though \u201calligator charring\u201d was not a feature of this new trial because it had been debunked, it was mentioned frequently in previous public records and accounts of the case. Apparently, if Herrera\u2019s account is to be understood, Graf\u2019s master plan was to use specially acquired arson skills to set an \u2018undetectable\u2019 fire by creating a pattern that\u2014after he had spent a quarter-century in jail\u2014would prove key to helping him win a new trial once it was identified as a faulty forensic indicator thanks to modern science.\n\nAdditionally,", + " Herrera claimed that Graf told him he\u2019d set the fire, strategically locked the shed door for long enough to have \u201cmade it seem\u201d like asphyxiation killed the boys, then opened it so that the early witnesses on the scene would see an open door. Again, this line of testimony suggested that Graf had taken actions in 1986 that anticipated advances in fire science not made until decades later.\n\nHerrera also attributed to Graf a handful of crude quotes that seemed irrelevant to Graf\u2019s guilt or innocence. Graf allegedly told Herrera that he was planning to \u201cpull an O.J.\u201d and that if the \u201cglove don\u2019t fit you must acquit.\u201d Herrera testified that Graf called Abel Reyna a \u201cchicken-shit motherfucker.\u201d Reyna,", + " who was previously sitting at the bench impassively while the assistant DA questioned Herrera, gave a side-glance toward Ed Graf at this moment.\n\nScreenshot of Vic Feazell\u2019s website\n\nAt one point, Herrera described how firemen had asked Graf if they could take away the shed because it was being described as an \u201ceyesore.\u201d Lucenay had used the word \u201ceyesore\u201d in his second trial testimony four days prior to Herrera\u2019s testimony\u2014and months after Graf\u2019s alleged confession\u2014and had been quoted using the word in the Waco Tribune.\n\nIn fact, much of the information in Herrera\u2019s description of the confession was readily available elsewhere.", + " In his testimony and in correspondence, Herrera told authorities dozens of details that were either on the website of the former prosecutor, in articles about the case online, or in original trial transcripts and documents Graf\u2019s legal team says he kept among his personal belongings in jail, easily accessible to other inmates. (When he was asked whether or not he had gotten into Graf\u2019s stuff, Herrera at one point said \u201cif he had any of that in his box, then something was wrong with him, wouldn\u2019t you agree?\u201d)\n\nIn one letter to Reyna, given to me by defense attorneys, Herrera makes it clear that he\u2019s at least aware of specific documentation about the case.", + " \u201cI know about the letter that was sent to you on behalf of his case from the Texas Insurance Group, State Fire Marshall, and Hewitt Police Department, and about the scientific evidence,\u201d Herrera wrote. (He claimed elsewhere that Graf told him about this document.)\n\nHerrera also appeared to mislead the jury about whether or not he would have had the ability to get such information. He said that he did not have access to the Internet or Facebook, where he might have found public information about the case. But there is evidence, including his own testimony, that Herrera did have the ability to get information from the Web. One week after first contacting Reyna,", + " Herrera wrote to his jailer with a request: He asked the prison guard to \u201clet me know\u201d what an unnamed district attorney had said about the \u201cinfo\u201d and added \u201cI got the correct Facebook address now if you still want it.\u201d On the stand he admitted that he could and did get Web information, such as Facebook addresses, by contacting friends on the outside\u2014seemingly contrary to his earlier testimony about lack of Internet access.\n\nThree days later, Herrera wrote to his jailer \u201cI have the rest of the information ready to give the DA if you can set up a time for me to write it out, I\u2019m ready.\u201d The next day he sent a five-page letter to Abel Reyna that would form the basis of his testimony against Graf.", + " Later he wrote again directly to Reyna asking for help: \u201cWhen you get time I\u2019d like to talk to you personally about some agreements we could come to,\u201d Herrera told the DA. \u201cI come to you in the most modest, humble, and respectable way and I\u2019m willing to go to whatever lengths according to the law and your stipulations on this matter.\u201d\n\nGraphic by Lisa Larson-Walker. Document courtesy of Mark Dyer.\n\nWhich raises another potential problem with Herrera\u2019s testimony: He appears to have benefited from it and to have vigorously pursued those benefits. (Slate requested comment from Herrera through his lawyer and his mother; his mother told us that he was wondering if we would pay him for an interview.", + " We told her it wasn\u2019t Slate\u2019s practice to pay for interviews; she eventually told us, \u201cHe said he wasn\u2019t going to do it unless y\u2019all paid him.\u201d Herrera\u2019s lawyer also told me that prosecutors did not offer him any plea deal in exchange for his testimony.) Herrera had been an informant in a handful of other cases in recent years\u2014including at least one other murder\u2014and described in writing his hopes for rewards for sharing information with authorities in several cases.\n\nOn the stand Herrera said he had no expectation that he would be helped in return for his testimony in this case and had not been promised any reward. An official from McLennan County Sheriff\u2019s Office also testified that Herrera had not been given any benefits in exchange for his promise of testimony.", + " (Prosecutors are legally obligated to disclose such deals.) But the record implies something different.\n\nMcLennan County has an ugly history of using jailhouse snitches to get convictions that were later overturned when the snitches recanted and said they were bribed. Graf\u2019s original trial was the fourth murder conviction in a capital case won by former district attorney Vic Feazell to later be overturned. In the three previous instances, revelations about faulty jailhouse testimony and multiple accusations of quid pro quo deals with inmates (including some claims of conjugal visits being among the benefits to cooperating inmates) came to light. In one case that relied heavily on jailhouse witnesses,", + " two men were released many years into serving life sentences for a murder and sexual assault that DNA evidence ultimately proved another man had committed. (Feazell declined a request for an interview.)\n\nIt was difficult not to be reminded of this troubling past while considering Herrera\u2019s testimony. Before volunteering to testify against Graf, Herrera had made repeated pleas to become a trusty at the McLennan County jail between August 2013 and April 2014, but had been denied every time. Jailhouse trusties get better prison jobs, better accommodations, visits with family, and time credited toward their sentences. Herrera\u2019s requests were rejected because rules said that inmates needed medium security status in order to be classified as trusties,", + " and Herrera was a maximum-security inmate. In his request forms, five of which were written in a month-long span a few weeks before he started cooperating on the Graf case, Herrera\u2019s desperation to become a trusty is palpable. In one form on March 15, he specifically links a trusty request to cooperation in a separate case saying that an officer \u201csaid that after the statement I signed y\u2019all would get me in.\u201d It wasn\u2019t the first time he had specifically requested something in exchange for cooperation. In August 2012, he told jailers \u201cI have some info for you. \u2026 I will cooperate if you will help me.", + " Ask about me and you will see I\u2019m telling the truth.\u201d (On the stand, he said the help he was requesting was to be \u201cmoved to a better cell\u201d in order to avoid a fight.)\n\nHerrera was ultimately made a trusty in mid-June and had his security status reduced to medium security, according to Dyer\u2019s description in court, after he began communicating with Reyna in April and before he testified at Graf\u2019s trial in October.\n\nMeanwhile, while seeking trusty status in 2014, Herrera had also pursued at least one other avenue of aid from his jailers\u2014and this one he explicitly linked in writing to his cooperation in the Graf case.", + " After volunteering to help on the Graf case, he sent a note to law enforcement officials asking for his bond to be reduced, noting his cooperation in this case and others as a reason for the judge to reduce it. The bond request was dropped, but Dyer argued in court\u2014outside the hearing of the jury\u2014that it was reasonable to ask Herrera if the bond request mentioning Graf and the trusty status that Dyer said happened \u201cright after\u201d were linked. \u201cAfter the last letter is done then he makes trusty, that\u2019s just too coincidental,\u201d Dyer argued. \u201c[It\u2019s] not just what he\u2019s gotten, it\u2019s about what he thinks he\u2019s getting.\u201d The prosecution objected because they said it was an \u201cattempt to poison the jury\u201d and Dyer did not end up asking that specific question in front of the jury.\n\nAt one point on the stand,", + " Herrera seemed almost to acknowledge that he hoped he would be rewarded for his testimony before reversing himself. When he was asked by the prosecution if \u201cdeep down\u201d he thought something good was going to happen to him, he started to answer \u201cI want to be able to\u2014\u201d before cutting himself off and concluding \u201cnot in exchange for this, no.\u201d\n\nThere was one final problem with Graf\u2019s alleged confession: It was incredibly recent. Ed Graf had maintained his innocence throughout the lead-up to his first trial and for at least 25 years afterward. The supposed confession to Herrera was made in county jail, where Graf was waiting for a new trial that could potentially set him free,", + " scheduled for just weeks away. No other inmate had made such a claim from the entire time Graf was locked up in the state penitentiary.\n\n\n\nJudge Johnson did not allow Graf\u2019s attorneys to ask Herrera why Graf would maintain his innocence for more than two decades and then, on the verge of winning his freedom, decide to confess a double murder of his adopted children to a cellmate he had known for a couple of weeks. This question, Johnson ruled, would alert the jury to the fact that this was Graf\u2019s second trial, which Johnson had previously said could bias them. Johnson\u2019s order meant this one crucial question to Herrera\u2014why did Graf keep his mouth shut for so long in prison and then talk to you\u2014was out of bounds.\n\n8 Verdict\n\nFernando Herrera was telling the truth about at least one thing:", + " Ed Graf really did say several of the lines Herrera attributed to him. Graf said that he and his lawyers were going to \u201cpull an O.J.\u201d in his trial and that \u201cif the gloves don\u2019t fit you must acquit.\u201d He really did call the district attorney that was prosecuting his case a \u201cchickenshit motherfucker.\u201d He also said of the lead prosecutor in his case, \u201cwhatever dumbass came up with [my eight-count] indictment is a dumbass.\u201d We know all this because Graf was caught on tape saying these things to his friend Rick Grimes during visitation sessions. He never confessed on these tapes,", + " and he maintained his innocence to his friend. But all of the above statements matched parts of Fernando Herrera\u2019s testimony.\n\nThese quotations don\u2019t necessarily validate that testimony\u2014Herrera could have acquired this information by other means (the defense team noted that the phone conversations occurred in a very public space), and then used these details to give his testimony some added authenticity. But at the end of closing arguments, Grimes\u2019 conversation with Graf was used to demonstrate that everything Herrera had said was true. No matter how he came to know them, Herrera being able to repeat these small details\u2014things that were otherwise irrelevant to the case\u2014made him appear believable in the eyes of the jury.", + " Patricia, a juror who asked that I not reveal her surname, said that she was skeptical of Herrera\u2019s testimony until Grimes\u2019s testimony. \u201cI wasn\u2019t real sure that it was real credible at first until I heard the last witness,\u201d Patricia said. \u201cHearing that made me decide that his information that he gave was partially true.\u201d\n\nPhoto by Jeremy Stahl\n\nThe defense\u2019s case was not nearly as dramatic as Herrera\u2019s testimony. Many of the defense witnesses were unable to attend, and the ones that did sometimes had difficulty with their memories. One witness changed his story to say that he caught Jason playing with matches three times instead of the one time he originally testified to in the first trial.", + " Still, at least four witnesses testified\u2014or had previous testimony read for the court\u2014that they had seen the boys play with matches or cigarettes. Another witness, whose previous testimony was read at trial, was a maid who said she\u2019d found cigarettes in the family\u2019s guest room and a cigarette butt in the boys\u2019 room, and another witness testified that Jason walked across hot coals during a camping trip.\n\nThe defense\u2019s star witness was the fire scientist Doug Carpenter. He presented his theory that the large amount of carbon monoxide in the boys\u2019 lungs indicated that they were likely knocked out by the fire\u2019s fumes before dying, and were trapped that way rather than by being placed in the shed and having the door locked.", + " But the prosecution was able to ding that theory by bringing up a capital murder case where his carbon monoxide theory did not convince a jury and another case\u2014which Carpenter never analyzed\u2014where a murder confession appeared to contradict it.\n\nCarpenter spent a large part of his early testimony trying to lay down some basic facts about the history of the scientific method and fire science that frequently became arcane and hard to follow. (At one point he explained, \u201cthe sun is a hot body that can radiate energy to the Earth.\u201d). For the most part, the jurors did not understand the scientific arguments, according to Patricia, the juror I spoke with,", + " and got bogged down by jargon like \u201cflashover,\u201d which they had trouble understanding. \u201cHe spoke above all of our heads with his terminology,\u201d she said.\n\nCarpenter also discussed a computer model he used to show that the doors had to have been open for sufficient air to feed the fire, but the judge blocked him from showing the model in court or describing it as a government system due to prosecution objections. Prosecutors were able to convince jurors that his modeling\u2014which had been affirmed by pioneering fire scientist Gerald Hurst and was never really challenged up until that point\u2014was not precise enough. \u201cTo plug variables into a computer and say this is how this happened\u2014I just didn\u2019t belie\u2014not that I didn\u2019t believe it\u2014it just didn\u2019t \u2026 convince me,\u201d Patricia said after the trial.", + " \u201cI wrote a lot of the information down, but I never went back to it.\u201d Most of the jury agreed the door was likely closed, she said.\n\n\u201cHe spoke above all of our heads with his terminology.\u201d\n\nI was not at the final day of proceedings, but the closing arguments were a \u201chome run\u201d for the district attorney\u2019s office, according to longtime Waco journalist John Carroll. The KWTX reporter, who also covered the original Graf trial in 1988, told me Reyna was able to tie all of his narrative threads together and dent Carpenter\u2019s credibility. Carroll expected \u201cshort\u201d deliberations and a quick guilty verdict.\n\nSo it came as a surprise when around 90 minutes after deliberation began,", + " the jurors sent their first note out asking this question: \u201cHow many jurors does it take to reach a unanimous verdict?\u201d The judge responded that it took all 12 and that they should keep deliberating. The point was apparent to any court watcher, though: There was at least one holdout. One hour later, the jury sent out another note: We are at a standstill 10\u20132 and would like some guidance.\n\nAt this point it became evident that 10 people wanted a quick, most likely guilty, verdict, and the two holdouts were adamant enough to prompt a pair of frustrated notes from the majority. (I confirmed that this was the case with a juror after the fact.) The judge ordered them,", + " after less than three hours of deliberations, to keep working. Behind the scenes, the two holdouts would not explain why they thought Graf was innocent, but they were resolute, according to the juror Patricia, who had voted guilty from the start.\n\nPhoto by Jerry Larson/Waco Tribune Herald via AP\n\nMore than six hours into deliberations, the jury was still deadlocked, to the surprise of many, and they recessed for the evening. The jury deliberated for five more hours the next day without returning a verdict. Then something shocking happened. Eleven hours into deadlocked deliberations, when it seemed very possible that the trial would end in a hung jury,", + " Ed Graf pleaded guilty to murdering his two adopted sons.\n\nThe plea made no sense. It appeared that Graf was admitting guilt in exchange for virtually nothing. He was already serving a life sentence with the eligibility for parole, and he confessed in exchange for two 60-year sentences to run concurrently with credit given for time served during the past 2\u00bd decades. But Graf, 62, was left with more than 30 years to go on his sentence, which essentially made it a life sentence. As Abel Reyna noted in announcing the verdict to the jury, the parole board was not going to look kindly on a twice-convicted double child-murderer who had falsely protested his innocence for so long.", + " Family members of the victims were ready to feverishly contest any request for parole, including Graf\u2019s own son, who had testified against his biological father at trial, despite having been a baby at the time of his brothers\u2019 deaths. Prosecutors also promised to contest parole at each attempt. Reyna reportedly said he expected the first such opportunity to come one year or more after the trial and said he would fight it tooth and nail.\n\nSo it appeared that Graf had confessed to murder, forfeited his right to proclaim his innocence on the basis of scientific evidence, forfeited his right to a new trial in the case of a hung jury, and forfeited his right to appeal any guilty verdict that could possibly be overturned\u2014all in exchange for nothing.", + " Had the scientific evidence been wrong? Was he guilty after all? Had his conscience finally got the better of him?\n\nOn the last question, it appears that the answer is no. Ed Graf was released on parole eight days after his guilty plea. What Graf and his attorneys knew\u2014and the district attorney apparently did not\u2014is that there is a loophole in Texas\u2019 parole law for capital crimes that took place prior to 1987. In such cases, parole must be granted automatically when an inmate\u2019s time served and his credited time for good behavior add up to his sentence. After his first trial, Graf had been sentenced to life, meaning he would not be able to take advantage of this loophole\u2014no sum of years can add up to a life sentence.", + " But his new plea deal put a number on his sentence\u201460 years\u2014and Graf had more than enough time served and time credited for good behavior to go free on parole immediately, and automatically\u2014no matter what the district attorney did or said. (Even though the plea deal was struck in 2014, it was the resolution of a 1986 incident, and thus still governed by the laws as they were written at the time. The loophole that freed Graf has since been closed.)\n\nGraf\u2019s lawyer Walter Reaves told me the defense attorneys had never planned on taking a plea\u2014Graf had always publicly maintained his innocence and his lawyers believed they either would be able to prove it,", + " or they wouldn\u2019t have to because prosecutors would drop the charges. But by the end of the trial Graf seemed resigned to the idea that the best he was going to do was get a hung jury and another difficult trial, or worse, a guilty verdict and another lengthy appeal from prison. In the midst of jury deliberations, he broached the possibility of a deal with his lawyers, who were taken aback. \u201cIt was extremely surprising to us,\u201d Reaves said. \u201cI think Ed had given it a lot of thought, and I think he had his mind made up by the time he even talked to us about it.\u201d Graf seems to have realized that if he didn\u2019t take a deal he would likely lose the possibility of exploiting the mandatory release loophole.\n\nEverything Reyna said immediately after the trial suggested that he was unaware of that loophole and believed that Graf would be returning to prison,", + " at least for a time. The DA told Bradburn that Graf would not be going free immediately, but might go free within a year on parole, which he and the family would vigorously contest. Bradburn told me that she did not learn about the mandatory release until after the plea. \u201cHow can a twice-convicted double child-murderer, who\u2019s lied for that period of time, and then confessed to brutally burning my young sons alive... how can he\u2014how can this happen?\u201d she said. \u201cI just feel that it was a travesty of justice to the victims and families.\u201d (Bradburn also said that\u2014even with the hindsight knowledge that her husband had gone free because of the plea\u2014she would still agree to have the prosecutor\u2019s office go through with the deal.", + " \u201cI don\u2019t regret it because he confessed to the murders of my two little boys after he professed his innocence for 28 years,\u201d she said. \u201cWho would ever confess to murders if you didn\u2019t do it?\u201d) If Reyna was unaware that his deal would set Graf free, it would not be surprising, considering how obscure this particular parole law is. \u201cThis is an area of law that DAs don\u2019t think about,\u201d said Texas parole lawyer Bill Habern, who helped devise the strategy for Graf\u2019s release. (Before Graf\u2019s release, when Habern was told that Reyna was promising to fight the outcome, he was adamant that the prosecutor didn\u2019t have a leg to stand on:", + " \u201cWhat\u2019s he going to do, appeal his own plea bargain?\u201d)\n\nWhat made Graf\u2019s release even more surreal was that the jury had reached a guilty verdict on murder just as the plea deal was being entered, one that would likely have negated his opportunity for mandatory release by sentencing him again to life. By the middle of the morning, one of the not-guilty jurors had begun to slip. By the afternoon\u2019s vote, there was only one person standing in the way of Graf\u2019s return to prison. The 12 jurors went for one final vote, with the one remaining holdout going last. \u201cI could tell that she really didn\u2019t want to say murder,", + " but she did,\u201d the juror Patricia told me. The bailiff took the verdict, and was waiting outside the door of the courtroom to hand it to the judge as the plea deal was being entered. The possibility of the guilty verdict was obviously a motivating factor in pushing Graf to accept the plea, but the fact that the two things happened simultaneously is astonishing.\n\nBy confessing to murdering his two sons, Ed Graf became a free man.\n\n9 Epilogue\n\nI don\u2019t know if Ed Graf is an innocent man wrongfully convicted. But the fact that he confessed in order to escape jail does not mean that he was necessarily guilty.\n\n\u201cHis feeling was\u2014I think\u2014it was a desperation,", + " and I think he saw, all of a sudden we had new witnesses that were saying new things, that didn't say things in 1988,\u201d his lawyer Mark Dyer said, \u201cand he just thought \u2018it's gonna be more of the same if I got another trial.\u2019 \u201d\n\nPhoto by LM Otero/AP Images\n\n\u201cMentally, I just didn't know if he could make it,\u201d Dyer said. \u201cI\u2019ve never dealt with a case with so much emotion\u2014on both sides\u2014and just human drama, and tragedy, and anguish. I think he was so beaten down that even if we succeeded and got back to where we were,", + " that I don\u2019t know whether he would have made it.\u201d Now, Graf\u2014who is under one of the most intensive monitoring programs in Texas as part of his parole\u2014has his own apartment, his own car, and even a construction job that was given to him by a friend. He even has his own phone and is learning how to call, text, and write emails. (\u201cHe picked it up pretty quick,\u201d his brother Craig told me after Graf was freed.) His family and friends regularly visit him, and they still have faith in his innocence even if he has renounced that claim himself as part of his plea. \u201cPeople are going to look at him in that light that don\u2019t know him,", + " but we know, his friends know and still support him and believe in him,\u201d Craig said. (Ed Graf did not speak to me for this story. Before the trial his lawyers didn\u2019t want him speaking on the phone with me out of fear that the conversation might be recorded and used against him. After the trial, his lawyers and brother told me that he was not interested in an interview.)\n\nAn alleged criminal pleading guilty to a horrific crime in order to win a lighter sentence is not uncommon. As the Innocence Project notes, in 10 percent of its rape and murder exonerations, the exonerated pleaded guilty. Of course,", + " just because it was in Graf\u2019s best interests to plead guilty, that doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s innocent, either. \u201cThere was some peace and some closure, because he was made to [confess],\u201d said Joby and Jason\u2019s friend Teri Rinewalt. \u201cBut then to find out that there\u2019s this loophole that I\u2019m sure he knew about the entire time was pretty nauseating. I cannot for the life of me figure out why that was an option.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe are very pleased with the Justice we were able to obtain for Joby and Jason Graf, Clare Bradburn and the rest of their family,\u201d Reyna said in a statement issued to me after the trial.", + " \u201cAn extremely difficult case was made more difficult by changes in arson science. Despite those and other challenges, we were able to bring an admission to a 28 year old crime and confirmation of a mother's instinct after so many years.\u201d\n\nIn response to request for a statement that included questions about whether he knew about the mandatory release in advance, Reyna also seemed to indicate that he did without directly addressing the question. \u201cRegardless of how Mr. Graf and his team rationalize his plea of guilty, two facts remain constant,\u201d Reyna\u2019s statement read. \u201cFirst, all information and potential possibilities regarding the plea were known to all parties and,", + " second, some criminals may claim to have taken blame for a crime they didn't commit such as theft or possession of drugs, but never when it comes to crimes against innocent children.\u201d\n\nAfter the trial, the fire marshal\u2019s science advisory workgroup asked Graf\u2014through one of his attorneys\u2014to explain to them how he set the fire, which might indicate what\u2014if anything\u2014they got wrong. Graf declined.\n\nDespite the result, Doug Carpenter stood by his hypothesis that the fire was accidental. He said he understood why Graf might have pleaded guilty in order to go free, but also said that the conviction would hurt arson science in the future. \u201cThe state just asked the jury to use common sense and ignore the science,\u201d Carpenter said.", + " \u201cThis will be the new strategy when the science does not work. People do not see that this sets the stage for wrongful convictions and it could happen to them.\u201d\n\nPhoto courtesy of the Todd Willingham family\n\nWhether Graf\u2019s plea damages the good work of Chris Connealy\u2019s review panels remains to be seen, but the prosecution\u2019s successful attempts to present a case in direct contradiction to scientific evidence does appear like it could have the negative impact that Carpenter had told me he fears. Certainly Graf, when he looked at his options, didn\u2019t have faith that the jury would favor science over circumstance\u2014and he was right to be skeptical.\n\nPerhaps the most disturbing thing about the judicial proceedings in these cases is how close Graf came to being sentenced to death,", + " and how Cameron Todd Willingham\u2019s unjust killing by the state has remained unacknowledged. (Not everybody feels that way. \u201cI felt from the beginning, as many others did, he should\u2019ve gotten the death penalty,\u201d Bradburn told me. \u201cHe should not be breathing right now.\u201d After the Willingham controversy erupted following the publication of Grann\u2019s story, meanwhile, his ex-wife Stacy Kuykendall said he confessed to her, which contradicted previous statements to reporters.) Every last bit of evidence used against Willingham has fallen apart, but there have been no repercussions for the execution of a man who was almost certainly innocent.", + " The most extreme punishment Willingham prosecutor John Jackson currently faces is disbarment for his alleged role in concocting a false confession. (Request for comment to Jackson\u2019s office went unreturned, but he has previously denied the accusation that he helped fabricate a confession.)\n\nDespite this, and despite polls that show Texas continues to support the death penalty, national Innocence Project co-founder Barry Scheck believes the state is evolving on the issue. \u201cI think that Texas has changed now. They included the option of life without parole so jurors know about it, and death sentences in Texas have begun to go down,\u201d Scheck told me last year.", + " \u201cI think it\u2019s disturbing to people in Texas, as it is across the country, that the risk of executing innocent people is real. It\u2019s demonstrable in Texas, it\u2019s not just Todd Willingham.\u201d\n\nTexas is already making great strides on correcting bad forensic science, led by the Forensic Science Commission, the State Fire Marshal\u2019s Office, and the state\u2019s Innocence Project. \u201cThe reality is, science is as factual and real as you can get,\u201d Vilbas said when we first spoke during the fire marshal\u2019s training sessions. \u201cScience is gonna advance, whether a DA, or a defense attorney, or a politician wants to face it or not.", + " \u2026 At some point, you\u2019re gonna have to face the facts that you\u2019ve got cases based on bad science. You\u2019re either gonna do something about it or not, and we\u2019re going about it in a way that we\u2019re able to get the stakeholders involved to actually look at it and go \u2018yeah, that\u2019s not good, let\u2019s do what we\u2019re supposed to do.\u2019 \u201d\n\nAfter the Graf trial, Vilbas told me the Innocence Project of Texas and the State Fire Marshal\u2019s Office are presenting the results of the science advisory workgroup at conferences around the country. Vilbas says one outstanding case that was reviewed by the workgroup reminds him of the Graf case because of the complete lack of scientific evidence and what he expects will be a heavy reliance on character evidence in any potential retrial.", + " The original prosecutor who tried the case about 20 years ago is still in office and Vilbas believes he\u2019d probably take a new trial forward if the Innocence Project of Texas was able to get the original conviction overturned based on the science advisory workgroup\u2019s findings. Chris Connealy, meanwhile, is doing his part to spread his forensic reviews around the country, stumping for them at conferences and encouraging smaller counties in Texas to review some of their own cases using his pre-established workgroup. So far, no counties have taken him up on it and no other state has adopted his model. But after Connealy presented the results of his reviews at the international training conference for the International Association of Arson Investigators\u2014the world\u2019s largest organizing body for fire investigators\u2014in May,", + " the group\u2019s board unanimously endorsed Connealy\u2019s approach last month as a national model. \u201cWhat they\u2019re doing is great and we should be trying to strive to have other people do that,\u201d IAAI president Daniel Heenan told me. The IAAI is planning to try to assist other interested states in setting up post-conviction reviews like the one in Texas. Connealy was hopeful that this endorsement would be the spark for other states to follow Texas\u2019 lead, which could result in bad arson convictions across the country being reviewed and eventually overturned. What happens from there would obviously depend on the individual prosecutor.\n\nMeanwhile, at least some in the Texas legislature are working,", + " with limited success, to try to curtail the use of jailhouse informants. Earlier this year, Houston Rep. Harold Dutton proposed a bill that would ban incentivized informant testimony in death penalty cases and require that testimony made by fellow inmates be corroborated by electronic recording. Right now, the law simply requires that prosecutors disclose deals, but the Graf case shows just how much leeway prosecutors can take in defining what constitutes a \u201cdeal.\u201d (Dutton\u2019s bill reportedly faced skepticism during an April committee hearing and, according to Dutton\u2019s chief of staff, never made it onto the legislative calendar for a debate. A nearly identical bill he proposed in 2012 also died in committee.)\n\nEven if forensic reviews are adopted nationwide,", + " it might not matter to people convicted by bad fire science.\n\nFernando Herrera\u2019s testimony was not considered part of any deal. But preferential treatment in prison was not the only thing that Herrera received after he cooperated in the case against Ed Graf. For all of his pending charges Herrera was facing a potential minimum sentence of two years and maximum sentence of 16 years in prison, according to his attorney Chelsea Tijerina. On Nov. 13, 2014, less than a month after Ed Graf\u2019s guilty plea, Herrera entered his own guilty plea with the McLennan County district attorney\u2019s office, which would see him get substantially less time than the two-year minimum he was facing.", + " \u201cThe prosecution did not offer him a plea in exchange for his testimony,\u201d Tijerina told me over email. \u201cHowever, after he testified in the Ed Graf case, the prosecution offered him 12 months,\u201d on all of his charges, one of which was reduced. \u201cHe already had accumulated quite a bit of back time while in the McLennan County jail; therefore, with a 12 month state jail offer, he almost had time served when he plead to the cases,\u201d Tijerina told me. At the end of February, he was released from prison. The prosecutor who struck Herrera\u2019s plea bargain was Michael Jarrett,", + " the lead prosecutor in Graf\u2019s case. \u201cOriginally, [another prosecutor] was handling the case, but Michael Jarrett took over when they learned Fernando might be a witness in the murder trial,\u201d Tijerina told me. (Last week, Herrera was arrested again for credit card abuse. As of the time this story was published, he was back in jail.)\n\nUltimately, the implications of the Ed Graf case are that even if the sort of comprehensive forensic reviews that Chris Connealy has established in Texas are adopted nationwide, it might not matter to people who have been convicted on the basis of bad fire science. Both the Graf and Willingham cases demonstrate the flaws in a system that entrusts our district attorneys with overwhelming power;", + " that allows inmates to testify against each other even when they have every incentive to lie; and a system in which dry forensics from experts can\u2019t compete with emotional memories from eyewitnesses. The best science is still no match for a judicial system bent on delivering convictions at almost any cost.\n" + ], + "length": 32380, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 90, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 More than 1,000 people gathered at Harvard's Sanders Theatre yesterday to celebrate the 24th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which includes such traditions as throwing paper airplanes and seeing who wins a date with a Nobel laureate. But the real treat is the science itself\u2014which, in addition to being funny or preposterous, can also be extremely useful; it's not unheard of for someone who wins an Ig Nobel to go on to win an actual Nobel Prize, reports NBC News. (There is, for instance, the University of Manchester's Andre Geim, who both claimed an Ig Nobel for studying levitating frogs and later a Nobel for physics due to his research on graphene.) Here's a quick list of some of the highlights from the 2014 Ig Nobel winners: The Physics prize goes to a team that measured the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin and then a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor. The Neuroscience prize goes to a team that attempted to dissect the inner workings of the brains of people who see Jesus in their toast. The Biology prize goes to a team that discovered when dogs poop and pee, they tend to align their body axis with Earth's north-south geomagnetic field lines. The Medicine prize goes to a team that was able to treat \"uncontrollable\" nosebleeds using strips of cured pork. The Arctic Science prize goes to a team that observed how reindeer behave upon seeing humans disguised as polar bears. (Check out last year's winners, which involved swallowing a parboiled dead shrew whole and outlining the best ways to surgically remove a penis as long as it hasn't been chomped by a duck.)\n", + "docs": [ + "Even seemingly silly science can be useful \u2014 for example, it's good to know that if you're experiencing a raging nosebleed, shoving a slice of cured pork up your nose just might save your life. Or that it's normal to see the face of Jesus on a piece of toast.\n\nThose published scientific findings, and many more, won the highest honors at the 24th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, conducted at Harvard's Sanders Theater on Thursday. The Ig Nobels are traditionally given out during the buildup to the real Nobel Prize announcements, under the auspices of a humor magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research.\n\n\"", + "Every winner has done something that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think,\" said Marc Abrahams, the magazine's editor and impresario for the event.\n\nSome of the winners go on to win honest-to-goodness Nobels \u2014 such as the University of Manchester's Andrei Geim, who won an Ig Nobel for his work with levitating frogs and then shared the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics, thanks to his work with graphene.\n\nPlay Facebook\n\nTwitter\n\nGoogle Plus\n\nEmbed TODAY anchors test the \u2018selfie toaster\u2019 1:14 autoplay autoplay Copy this code to your website or blog\n\nThe winners of the Ig Nobel Prize for neuroscience may not get a Nobel for their research into what happens in the brains of people who see Jesus'", + " face in toast. But the University of Toronto's Kang Lee, one of the laureates, said the study could provide those people with valuable reassurance.\n\n\"You're completely normal if you see non-existent faces in everyday objects,\" Lee told the crowd.\n\nIn fact, if you can't see patterns where they don't really exist, you may be lacking in the creativity department, Lee said. But he offered a remedy: \"I just found out you can buy a Jesus-face toaster on eBay,\" he said.\n\nIn contrast, the pork-in-the-nose trick was truly a life-and-death matter. Physicians at Detroit Medical Center used strips of cured pork as a treatment of last resort when they treated a 4-year-old girl with an uncontrollable nosebleed.", + " The girl had a rare genetic condition known as Glanzmann thrombasthena, which causes prolonged bleeding.\n\nCured pork has been used in the past as a folk remedy for nosebleeds. The physicians remembered that, and discovered that the remedy really, really worked, thanks to clotting factors in the pork as well as the salt's tendency to draw out fluids from the nose.\n\nIt's not the recommended therapy, but one of the winners of the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine, Sonal Saraiya, told The Associated Press that \"we had to do some out-of-the-box thinking.\"\n\nThursday's ceremony had the usual Ig Nobel trappings,", + " including the traditional throwing of paper airplanes and a \"Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate\" contest. (A rendezvous with 1986 chemistry laureate Dudley Herschbach was the prize.) In accordance with this year's food theme, the event featured a three-act mini-opera about faddish pill diets, titled \"What's Eating You\"; and a quickie talk by Rob Rhinehart, the inventor of Soylent instant all-in-one food.\n\nHere's the full list of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes:\n\nPhysics: Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai,", + " for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor. Scientific reference: Mabuchi et al.\n\nNeuroscience: Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. Scientific reference: Liu et al. In the news: \"Why it's perfectly normal to see Jesus in toast.\"\n\nPsychology: Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones and Minna Lyons,", + " for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning. Scientific reference: Jonason et al. In the news: \"Night owls are more likely to be jerks, new study suggests.\"\n\nPlay Facebook\n\nTwitter\n\nGoogle Plus\n\nEmbed Night owl or early bird? Here\u2019s what it means 3:02 autoplay autoplay Copy this code to your website or blog\n\nPublic health: Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havlicek, Jitka Hanusova-Lindova, David Hanauer,", + " Naren Ramakrishnan and Lisa Seyfried, for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat. Scientific references: Fleger and Havlicek, Fleger et al., Hanauer et al. In the news: \"Cat poop parasite controls minds early \u2014 and permanently, study finds.\"\n\nBiology: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Novakova, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladim\u00edr Hanzal, Milos Jezek, Tomas Kusta, Veronika Nemcova, Jana Adamkova, Katerina Benediktova, Jaroslav Cerveny and Hynek Burda,", + " for carefully documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth's north-south geomagnetic field lines. Scientific reference: Hart et al. In the news: \"Do dogs have a poop compass?\"\n\nArt: Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro and Paolo Livrea, for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot (in the hand) by a powerful laser beam. Scientific reference: de Tommaso et al. In the news: \"Beautiful art eases pain.\"\n\nEconomics: ISTAT, the Italian government's National Institute of Statistics,", + " for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling and other unlawful financial transactions. Reference: ISTAT website.\n\nMedicine: Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for treating \"uncontrollable\" nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork. Scientific reference: Humphreys et al. In the news: \"Is bacon a cure-all for nosebleeds?\"\n\nArctic science: Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftest\u00f8l,", + " for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears. Scientific reference: Reimers and Eftestol.\n\nNutrition: Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofr\u00e9, Bel\u00e9n Mart\u00edn, Teresa Aymerich and Margarita Garriga, for their study titled \"Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages.\" Scientific reference: Rubio et al. In the news: \"Baby-poop bacteria help make healthy sausages.\" ", + " Winners of the Ig\u00ae Nobel Prize\n\nFor achievements that first make people LAUGH\n\nthen make them THINK\n\n\n\n2019 2018 2017 2016\n\n2015 2014 2013 2012 2011\n\n2010 2009 2008 2007 2006\n\n2005 2004 2003 2002 2001\n\n2000 1999 1998 1997 1996\n\n1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 Winners by year:\n\nThe 2019 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes will be awarded at the 29th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony,", + " on Thursday, September 12, 2019, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. TICKETS will go on sale in July..\n\nThe 2018 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2018 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at the 28th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, on Thursday, September 13, 2018, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE [USA] \u2014 Marc Mitchell and David Wartinger, for using roller coaster rides to try to hasten the passage of kidney stones.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Validation of a Functional Pyelocalyceal Renal Model for the Evaluation of Renal Calculi Passage While Riding a Roller Coaster,\" Marc A.", + " Mitchell, David D. Wartinger, The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, vol. 116, October 2016, pp. 647-652.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dave Wartinger\n\nANTHROPOLOGY PRIZE [SWEDEN, ROMANIA, DENMARK, THE NETHERLANDS, GERMANY, UK, INDONESIA, ITALY] \u2014 Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, and Elainie Madsen, for collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often,", + " and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Spontaneous Cross-Species Imitation in Interaction Between Chimpanzees and Zoo Visitors,\" Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, and Elainie Madsen, Primates, vol. 59, no. 1, January 2018, pp 19\u201329.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Tomas Persson, Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE [SWEDEN, COLOMBIA, GERMANY, FRANCE, SWITZERLAND]", + " \u2014 Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Erika Wallin, Erik Hedenstrom, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Marie Bengtsson, Volker Jorger, and Peter Witzgall, for demonstrating that wine experts can reliably identify, by smell, the presence of a single fly in a glass of wine.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Scent of the Fly,\" Paul G. Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Erika A. Wallin, Erik Hedenstrom, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Marie Bengtsson, Volker Jorger, and Peter Witzgall,", + " bioRxiv, no. 20637, 2017.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Paul Becher, Sebastien Lebreton, Felipe Borrero-Echeverry, Peter Witzgall\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE [PORTUGAL] \u2014 Paula Rom\u00e3o, Ad\u00edlia Alarc\u00e3o and the late C\u00e9sar Viana, for measuring the degree to which human saliva is a good cleaning agent for dirty surfaces.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Human Saliva as a Cleaning Agent for Dirty Surfaces,\" by Paula M. S. Rom\u00e3o, Ad\u00edlia M. Alarc\u00e3o and C\u00e9sar A.N.", + " Viana, Studies in Conservation, vol. 35, 1990, pp. 153-155.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video.\n\nMEDICAL EDUCATION PRIZE [JAPAN] \u2014 Akira Horiuchi, for the medical report \"Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned From Self-Colonoscopy.\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned From Self-Colonoscopy by Using a Small-Caliber, Variable-Stiffness Colonoscope,\" Akira Horiuchi and Yoshiko Nakayama, Gastrointestinal Endoscopy,", + " vol. 63, No. 1, 2006, pp. 119-20.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Akira Horiuchi\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE [AUSTRALIA, EL SALVADOR, UK] \u2014 Thea Blackler, Rafael Gomez, Vesna Popovic and M. Helen Thompson, for documenting that most people who use complicated products do not read the instruction manual.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products,\" Alethea L. Blackler, Rafael Gomez, Vesna Popovic and M.", + " Helen Thompson, Interacting With Computers, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 27-46.\n\nWHO PLANS TO ATTEND THE CEREMONY: Thea Blackler\n\nNUTRITION PRIZE [ZIMBABWE, TANZANIA, UK] \u2014 James Cole, for calculating that the caloric intake from a human-cannibalism diet is significantly lower than the caloric intake from most other traditional meat diets.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Assessing the Calorific Significance of Episodes of Human Cannibalism in the Paleolithic,\" James Cole, Scientific Reports,", + " vol. 7, no. 44707, April 7, 2017.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: James Cole\n\nPEACE PRIZE [SPAIN, COLOMBIA] \u2014 Francisco Alonso, Cristina Esteban, Andrea Serge, Maria-Luisa Ballestar, Jaime Sanmart\u00edn, Constanza Calatayud, and Beatriz Alamar, for measuring the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Shouting and Cursing While Driving: Frequency, Reasons, Perceived Risk and Punishment,\" Francisco Alonso, Cristina Esteban,", + " Andrea Serge and Maria-Luisa Ballestar, Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 1, no. 12017, pp. 1-7.\n\nREFERENCE: \"La Justicia en el Tr\u00e1fico: Conocimiento y Valoraci\u00f3n de la Poblaci\u00f3n Espa\u00f1ola\" [\"Justice in Traffic: Knowledge and Valuation of the Spanish Population\")], F. Alonso, J. Sanmart\u00edn, C. Calatayud, C. Esteban, B. Alamar, and M. L. Ballestar, Cuadernos de Reflexi\u00f3n Attitudes, 2005.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Francisco Alonso\n\nREPRODUCTIVE MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, JAPAN, SAUDI ARABIA, EGYPT, INDIA, BANGLADESH] \u2014 John Barry, Bruce Blank, and Michel Boileau, for using postage stamps to test whether the male sexual organ is functioning properly\u2014as described in their study \"Nocturnal Penile Tumescence Monitoring With Stamps.\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"Nocturnal Penile Tumescence Monitoring With Stamps,\" John M. Barry, Bruce Blank, Michael Boileau, Urology, vol. 15, 1980, pp.", + " 171-172.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: John M. Barry, Bruce Blank, Michel Boileau\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE [CANADA, CHINA, SINGAPORE, USA] \u2014 Lindie Hanyu Liang, Douglas Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D. Lance Ferris, and Lisa Keeping, for investigating whether it is effective for employees to use Voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Righting a Wrong: Retaliation on a Voodoo Doll Symbolizing an Abusive Supervisor Restores Justice,\" Lindie Hanyu Liang,", + " Douglas J. Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D. Lance Ferris, and Lisa M. Keeping, The Leadership Quarterly, February 2018.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Hanyu Liang, Douglas J. Brown, Huiwen Lian, D. Lance Ferris, and Lisa M. Keeping\n\nThe 2017 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2017 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 14, 2017 at the 27th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast.\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE [FRANCE,", + " SINGAPORE, USA] \u2014 Marc-Antoine Fardin, for using fluid dynamics to probe the question \"Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"On the Rheology of Cats,\" Marc-Antoine Fardin, Rheology Bulletin, vol. 83, 2, July 2014, pp. 16-17 and 30.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Marc-Antoine Fardin\n\nPEACE PRIZE [SWITZERLAND, CANADA, THE NETHERLANDS, USA] \u2014 Milo Puhan, Alex Suarez, Christian Lo Cascio,", + " Alfred Zahn, Markus Heitz, and Otto Braendli, for demonstrating that regular playing of a didgeridoo is an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea and snoring.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Didgeridoo Playing as Alternative Treatment for Obstructive Sleep Apnoea Syndrome: Randomised Controlled Trial,\" Milo A. Puhan, Alex Suarez, Christian Lo Cascio, Alfred Zahn, Markus Heitz and Otto Braendli, BMJ, vol. 332 December 2006.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Milo Puhan, Christian Lo Cascio, Markus Heitz, Alex Suarez.", + " NOTE: Alex Suarez was the first patient, and was the inspiration for the study.\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE [AUSTRALIA, USA] \u2014 Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer, for their experiments to see how contact with a live crocodile affects a person's willingness to gamble.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Never Smile at a Crocodile: Betting on Electronic Gaming Machines is Intensified by Reptile-Induced Arousal,\" Matthew J. Rockloff and Nancy Greer, Journal of Gambling Studies, vol. 26, no. 4, December 2010, pp. 571-81.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer\n\nANATOMY PRIZE [UK] \u2014 James Heathcote, for his medical research study \"Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?\" James A. Heathcote, British Medical Journal, vol. 311, 1995, p. 1668.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: James Heathcote\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE [JAPAN, BRAZIL, SWITZERLAND] \u2014 Kazunori Yoshizawa, Rodrigo Ferreira, Yoshitaka Kamimura, and Charles Lienhard,", + " for their discovery of a female penis, and a male vagina, in a cave insect.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Female Penis, Male Vagina and Their Correlated Evolution in a Cave Insect,\" Kazunori Yoshizawa, Rodrigo L. Ferreira, Yoshitaka Kamimura, Charles Lienhard, Current Biology, vol. 24, no. 9, 2014, pp. 1006-1010.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: They delivered a short video acceptance speech, filmed in a cave.\n\nFLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] \u2014 Jiwon Han,", + " for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee. REFERENCE: \"A Study on the Coffee Spilling Phenomena in the Low Impulse Regime,\" Jiwon Han, Achievements in the Life Sciences, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016, pp. 87-101.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Jiwon (\"Jesse\") Han\n\nNOTE: Jiwon Han was a high school student when he wrote the paper, at Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, Gangwon-do,", + " Republic of Korea.\n\nNUTRITION PRIZE [BRAZIL, CANADA, SPAIN] \u2014 Fernanda Ito, Enrico Bernard, and Rodrigo Torres, for the first scientific report of human blood in the diet of the hairy-legged vampire bat\n\nREFERENCE: \"What is for Dinner? First Report of Human Blood in the Diet of the Hairy-Legged Vampire Bat Diphylla ecaudata,\" Fernanda Ito, Enrico Bernard, and Rodrigo A. Torres, Acta Chiropterologica, vol. 18, no. 2, December 2016, pp. 509-", + "515.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK] \u2014 Jean-Pierre Royet, David Meunier, Nicolas Torquet, Anne-Marie Mouly, and Tao Jiang, for using advanced brain-scanning technology to measure the extent to which some people are disgusted by cheese.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Neural Bases of Disgust for Cheese: An fMRI Study,\" Jean-Pierre Royet, David Meunier, Nicolas Torquet, Anne-Marie Mouly and Tao Jiang, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol.", + " 10, October 2016, article 511.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video.\n\nCOGNITION PRIZE [ITALY, SPAIN, UK] \u2014 Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari, Maria Antonietta Stazi, and Salvatore Maria Aglioti, for demonstrating that many identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Is That Me or My Twin? Lack of Self-Face Recognition Advantage in Identical Twins,\" Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari, Maria Antonietta Stazi, Salvatore Maria Aglioti,", + " PLoS ONE, vol. 10, no. 4, 2015: e0120900.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari\n\nOBSTETRICS PRIZE \u2014 [SPAIN] \u2014 Marisa L\u00f3pez-Teij\u00f3n, \u00c1lex Garc\u00eda-Faura, Alberto Prats-Galino, and Luis Pallar\u00e9s Aniorte, for showing that a developing human fetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother's vagina than to music that is played electromechanically on the mother's belly.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Fetal Facial Expression in Response to Intravaginal Music Emission,\" Marisa L\u00f3pez-", + "Teij\u00f3n, \u00c1lex Garc\u00eda-Faura, and Alberto Prats-Galino, Ultrasound, November 2015, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 216\u2013223.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Fetal Acoustic Stimulation Device,\" patent ES2546919B1, granted September 29, 2015 to Luis y Pallar\u00e9s Aniorte and Maria Luisa L\u00f3pez-Teij\u00f3n P\u00e9rez.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Marisa L\u00f3pez-Teij\u00f3n, \u00c1lex Garc\u00eda-Faura, Alberto Prats-Galino, and Luis Pallar\u00e9s Aniorte\n\nNOTE:", + " They also offer a product based on this research The product is named \"Babypod\".\n\nThe 2016 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 22, 2016 at the 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast.\n\nREPRODUCTION PRIZE [EGYPT] \u2014 The late Ahmed Shafik, for studying the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats, and for conducting similar tests with human males.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Effect of Different Types of Textiles on Sexual Activity.", + " Experimental study,\" Ahmed Shafik, European Urology, vol. 24, no. 3, 1993, pp. 375-80.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Contraceptive Efficacy of Polyester-Induced Azoospermia in Normal Men,\" Ahmed Shafik, Contraception, vol. 45, 1992, pp. 439-451.\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE [NEW ZEALAND, UK] \u2014 Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Brand Personality of Rocks:", + " A Critical Evaluation of a Brand Personality Scale,\" Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes,and Shelagh Ferguson, Marketing Theory, vol. 14, no. 4, 2014, pp. 451-475.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Mark Avis and Sarah Forbes\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE [HUNGARY, SPAIN, SWEDEN, SWITZERLAND] \u2014 G\u00e1bor Horv\u00e1th, Mikl\u00f3s Blah\u00f3, Gy\u00f6rgy Kriska, Ram\u00f3n Heged\u00fcs, Bal\u00e1zs Gerics, R\u00f3bert Farkas, Susanne \u00c5kesson,", + " P\u00e9ter Malik, and Hansruedi Wildermuth, for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.\n\nREFERENCE: \"An Unexpected Advantage of Whiteness in Horses: The Most Horsefly-Proof Horse Has a Depolarizing White Coat,\" G\u00e1bor Horv\u00e1th, Mikl\u00f3s Blah\u00f3, Gy\u00f6rgy Kriska, Ram\u00f3n Heged\u00fcs, Bal\u00e1zs Gerics, R\u00f3bert Farkas and Susanne \u00c5kesson, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 277 no. 1688,", + " pp. June 2010, pp. 1643-1650.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Ecological Traps for Dragonflies in a Cemetery: The Attraction of Sympetrum species (Odonata: Libellulidae) by Horizontally Polarizing Black Grave-Stones,\" G\u00e1bor Horv\u00e1th, P\u00e9ter Malik, Gy\u00f6rgy Kriska, Hansruedi Wildermuth, Freshwater Biology, vol. 52, vol. 9, September 2007, pp. 1700\u20139.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Susanne \u00c5kesson\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE [GERMANY]", + " \u2014 Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.\n\nREFERENCE: \"EPA, California Notify Volkswagen of Clean Air Act Violations\", U.S. Environmental Protection Agency news release, September 18, 2015.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE [GERMANY] \u2014 Christoph Helmchen, Carina Palzer, Thomas M\u00fcnte, Silke Anders, and Andreas Sprenger, for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Itch Relief by Mirror Scratching. A Psychophysical Study,\" Christoph Helmchen, Carina Palzer, Thomas F. M\u00fcnte, Silke Anders, Andreas Sprenger, PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no 12, December 26, 2013, e82756.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Andreas Sprenger\n\nPSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [BELGIUM, THE NETHERLANDS, GERMANY, CANADA, USA] \u2014 Evelyne Debey, Maarten De Schryver, Gordon Logan, Kristina Suchotzki, and Bruno Verschuere,", + " for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers.\n\nREFERENCE: \"From Junior to Senior Pinocchio: A Cross-Sectional Lifespan Investigation of Deception,\" Evelyne Debey, Maarten De Schryver, Gordon D. Logan, Kristina Suchotzki, and Bruno Verschuere, Acta Psychologica, vol. 160, 2015, pp. 58-68.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Bruno Verschuere\n\nPEACE PRIZE [CANADA, USA] \u2014 Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne,", + " Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang for their scholarly study called \"On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit\".\n\nREFERENCE: \"On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit,\" Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang, Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549\u2013563.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Gordon Pennycook, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE [UK]", + " \u2014 Awarded jointly to: Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.\n\nREFERENCE: GoatMan; How I Took a Holiday from Being Human, Thomas Thwaites, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1616894054.\n\nREFERENCE: Being a Beast, by Charles Foster, Profile Books, 2016,", + " ISBN 978-1781255346.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Charles Foster, Thomas Thwaites. [NOTE: Thomas Thwaites's goat suit was kindly released for Ig Nobel purposes from the exhibition 'Platform - Body/Space' at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and will be back on display at the museum from 4 October 2016 till 8 January 2017.]\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE [SWEDEN] \u2014 Fredrik Sj\u00f6berg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " The Fly Trap is the first volume of Fredrik Sj\u00f6berg's autobiographical trilogy, En flugsamlares v\u00e4g (\"The Path of a Fly Collector\"), and the first to be published in English. Pantheon Books, 2015, ISBN 978-1101870150.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Fredrik Sj\u00f6berg\n\nPERCEPTION PRIZE [JAPAN] \u2014 Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Perceived size and Perceived Distance of Targets Viewed From Between the Legs:", + " Evidence for Proprioceptive Theory,\" Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, Vision Research, vol. 46, no. 23, November 2006, pp. 3961\u201376.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Atsuki Higashiyama\n\nThe 2015 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2015 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 17th, 2015 at the 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast.\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE \u2014 Callum Ormonde and Colin Raston [AUSTRALIA], and Tom Yuan,", + " Stephan Kudlacek, Sameeran Kunche, Joshua N. Smith, William A. Brown, Kaitlin Pugliese, Tivoli Olsen, Mariam Iftikhar, Gregory Weiss [USA], for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Shear-Stress-Mediated Refolding of Proteins from Aggregates and Inclusion Bodies,\" Tom Z. Yuan, Callum F. G. Ormonde, Stephan T. Kudlacek, Sameeran Kunche, Joshua N. Smith, William A. Brown, Kaitlin M.", + " Pugliese, Tivoli J. Olsen, Mariam Iftikhar, Colin L. Raston, Gregory A. Weiss, ChemBioChem, vol. 16, no. 3, February 9, 2015, pp. 393\u2013396.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Callum Ormonde, Tivoli Olsen, Colin Raston, Greg Weis\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE \u2014 Patricia Yang [USA and TAIWAN], David Hu [USA and TAIWAN], and Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo [USA], for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds).\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Duration of Urination Does Not Change With Body Size,\" Patricia J. Yang, Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo, and David L. Hu, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111 no. 33, August 19, 2014, pp. 11932\u201311937.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Patricia Yang, David Hu, Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE \u2014 Mark Dingemanse [THE NETHERLANDS, USA], Francisco Torreira [SPAIN, THE NETHERLANDS, BELGIUM, USA, CANADA], and Nick J.", + " Enfield [AUSTRALIA, THE NETHERLANDS], for discovering that the word \"huh?\" (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language \u2014 and for not being completely sure why.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Is 'Huh?' a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items,\" Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira, and Nick J. Enfield, PLOS ONE, 2013. [a video accompanies the paper.]\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The authors were unable to attend the ceremony; they sent a video acceptance speech. They received their prize at a special event (The European Ig Nobel Show)", + " in Amsterdam, The Netherlands on October 3.\n\nMANAGEMENT PRIZE \u2014 Gennaro Bernile [ITALY, SINGAPORE, USA], Vineet Bhagwat [USA, INDIA], and P. Raghavendra Rau [UK, INDIA, FRANCE, LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY, JAPAN], for discovering that many business leaders developed during childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and wildfires) that \u2014 for them \u2014 had no dire personal consequences.\n\nREFERENCE: \"What Doesn't Kill You Will Only Make You More Risk-Loving:", + " Early-Life Disasters and CEO Behavior,\" Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, and P. Raghavendra Rau, accepted for publication in the Journal of Finance, 2015.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Gennaro Bernile and P. Raghavendra Rau\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE \u2014 The Bangkok Metropolitan Police [THAILAND], for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes.\n\nREFERENCE: Numerous news reports.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE \u2014 Awarded jointly to two groups: Hajime Kimata [JAPAN, CHINA]; and to Jaroslava Durdiakov\u00e1 [SLOVAKIA,", + " US, UK], Peter Celec [SLOVAKIA, GERMANY], Nat\u00e1lia Kamodyov\u00e1, Tatiana Sedl\u00e1\u010dkov\u00e1, Gabriela Repisk\u00e1, Barbara Svie\u017een\u00e1, and Gabriel Min\u00e1rik [SLOVAKIA], for experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities).\n\nREFERENCE: \"Kissing Reduces Allergic Skin Wheal Responses and Plasma Neurotrophin Levels,\" Hajime Kimata, Physiology and Behavior, vol. 80, nos. 2-3, November 2003, pp. 395-", + "8.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Reduction of Allergic Skin Weal Responses by Sexual Intercourse in Allergic Patients,\" Hajime Kimata, Sexual and Relationship Therapy, vol 19, no. 2, May 2004, pp. 151-4.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Kissing Selectively Decreases Allergen-Specific IgE Production in Atopic Patients,\" Hajime Kimata, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, vol. 60, 2006, pp. 545\u2013 547.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Prevalence and Persistence of Male DNA Identified in Mixed Saliva Samples After Intense Kissing,\" Nat\u00e1lia Kamodyov\u00e1,", + " Jaroslava Durdiakov\u00e1, Peter Celec, Tatiana Sedl\u00e1\u010dkov\u00e1, Gabriela Repisk\u00e1, Barbara Svie\u017een\u00e1, and Gabriel Min\u00e1rik, Forensic Science International Genetics, vol. 7, no. 1, January 2013, pp. 124\u20138.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Jaroslava Durdiakov\u00e1 and Peter Celec will be at the ceremony. Hajime Kimata will be at the Ig Informal Lectures, on Saturday, Sept 19 (a prior commmitment prevented him from attending the Thursday ceremony); he sent a video acceptence speech which was played at the Thursday night ceremony.\n\nMATHEMATICS PRIZE \u2014 Elisabeth Oberzaucher [AUSTRIA,", + " GERMANY, UK] and Karl Grammer [AUSTRIA, GERMANY], for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Case of Moulay Ismael-Fact or Fancy?\" Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer, PLOS ONE, vol. 9, no. 2, 2014, e85292.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Elisabeth Oberzaucher\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE \u2014 Bruno Grossi,", + " Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. V\u00e1squez [CHILE], Jos\u00e9 Iriarte-D\u00edaz [CHILE, USA], for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Walking Like Dinosaurs: Chickens with Artificial Tails Provide Clues about Non-Avian Theropod Locomotion,\" Bruno Grossi, Jos\u00e9 Iriarte-D\u00edaz, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. V\u00e1squez, PLoS ONE,", + " vol. 9, no. 2, 2014, e88458. [NOTE: The paper is accompanied by a video.>\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Bruno Grossi, Jos\u00e9 Iriarte-D\u00edaz, Omar Larach, Rodrigo A. V\u00e1squez\n\nDIAGNOSTIC MEDICINE PRIZE \u2014 Diallah Karim [CANADA, UK], Anthony Harnden [NEW ZEALAND, UK, US], Nigel D'Souza [BAHRAIN, BELGIUM, DUBAI, INDIA, SOUTH AFRICA, US, UK], Andrew Huang [CHINA,", + " UK], Abdel Kader Allouni [SYRIA, UK], Helen Ashdown [UK], Richard J. Stevens [UK], and Simon Kreckler [UK], for determining that acute appendicitis can be accurately diagnosed by the amount of pain evident when the patient is driven over speed bumps.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Pain Over Speed Bumps in Diagnosis of Acute Appendicitis: Diagnostic Accuracy Study,\" Helen F. Ashdown, Nigel D'Souza, Diallah Karim, Richard J. Stevens, Andrew Huang, and Anthony Harnden, BMJ, vol. 345, 2012, e8012.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Diallah Karim, Anthony Harnden, Helen Ashdown, Nigel D'Souza, Abdel Kader Allouni\n\nPHYSIOLOGY and ENTOMOLOGY PRIZE \u2014 Awarded jointly to two individuals: Justin Schmidt [USA, CANADA], for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith [PANAMA, US, UK, THE NETHERLANDS], for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull,", + " middle toe tip, and upper arm). and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).\n\nREFERENCE: \"Hemolytic Activities of Stinging Insect Venoms,\" Justin O. Schmidt, Murray S. Blum, and William L. Overal, Archives of Insect Biochemistry and Physiology, vol. 1, no. 2, 1983, pp. 155-160.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Honey Bee Sting Pain Index by Body Location,\" Michael L. Smith, PeerJ, 2014, 2:e338.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Justin Schmidt and Michael Smith\n\nThe 2014 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2014 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 18th, 2014 at the 24th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live.\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE [JAPAN]: Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that's on the floor.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Frictional Coefficient under Banana Skin,\" Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, Tribology Online 7, no. 3, 2012, pp. 147-151.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Kiyoshi Mabuchi\n\nNEUROSCIENCE PRIZE [CHINA, CANADA]: Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, and Kang Lee, for trying to understand what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Seeing Jesus in Toast: Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Face Pareidolia,\" Jiangang Liu, Jun Li, Lu Feng, Ling Li, Jie Tian, Kang Lee, Cortex, vol. 53, April 2014, Pages 60\u201377. The authors are at School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Xidian University, the Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, and the University of Toronto, Canada.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Kang Lee\n\nPSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [UK, FINLAND, AUSTRALIA, USA]: Peter K.", + " Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Creatures of the Night: Chronotypes and the Dark Triad Traits,\" Peter K. Jonason, Amy Jones, and Minna Lyons, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 55, no. 5, 2013, pp. 538-541.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Peter Jonason\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC,", + " JAPAN, USA, INDIA]: Jaroslav Flegr, Jan Havl\u00ed\u010dek and Jitka Hanu\u0161ova-Lindova, and to David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried, for investigating whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat.\n\nREFERENCE: \" Changes in personality profile of young women with latent toxoplasmosis,\" Jaroslav Flegr and Jan Havlicek, Folia Parasitologica, vol. 46, 1999, pp. 22-28.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Decreased level of psychobiological factor novelty seeking and lower intelligence in men latently infected with the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii Dopamine,", + " a missing link between schizophrenia and toxoplasmosis?\" Jaroslav Flegr, Marek Preiss, Ji\u0159\u0131\u0301 Klose, Jan Havl\u0131\u0301\u010dek, Martina Vit\u00e1kov\u00e1, and Petr Kodym, Biological Psychology, vol. 63, 2003, pp. 253\u2013268.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Describing the Relationship between Cat Bites and Human Depression Using Data from an Electronic Health Record,\" David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan, Lisa Seyfried, PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 8, 2013, e70585. WHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Jaroslav Flegr, David Hanauer, Naren Ramakrishnan\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE [CZECH REPUBLIC, GERMANY, ZAMBIA]: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nov\u00e1kov\u00e1, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladim\u00edr Hanzal, Milo\u0161 Je\u017eek, Tom\u00e1\u0161 Ku\u0161ta, Veronika N\u011bmcov\u00e1, Jana Ad\u00e1mkov\u00e1, Kate\u0159ina Benediktov\u00e1, Jaroslav \u010cerven\u00fd and Hynek Burda, for carefully documenting that when dogs defecate and urinate, they prefer to align their body axis with Earth's north-south geomagnetic field lines.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth's magnetic field,\" Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nov\u00e1kov\u00e1, Erich Pascal Malkemper, Sabine Begall, Vladim\u00edr Hanzal, Milo\u0161 Je\u017eek, Tom\u00e1\u0161 Ku\u0161ta, Veronika N\u011bmcov\u00e1, Jana Ad\u00e1mkov\u00e1, Kate\u0159ina Benediktov\u00e1, Jaroslav \u010cerven\u00fd and Hynek Burda, Frontiers in Zoology, 10:80, 27 December 27, 2013.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Vlastimil Hart, Petra Nov\u00e1kov\u00e1, Pascal Malkemper,", + " Sabine Begall, Veronika N\u011bmcov\u00e1, Hynek Burda\n\nART PRIZE [ITALY]: Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, for measuring the relative pain people suffer while looking at an ugly painting, rather than a pretty painting, while being shot [in the hand] by a powerful laser beam.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Aesthetic value of paintings affects pain thresholds,\" Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro, and Paolo Livrea, Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 17, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1152-1162.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Marina de Tommaso\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE [ITALY]: ISTAT \u2014 the Italian government's National Institute of Statistics, for proudly taking the lead in fulfilling the European Union mandate for each country to increase the official size of its national economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and all other unlawful financial transactions between willing participants.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Cambia il Sistema europeo dei conti nazionali e regionali - Sec2010\", ISTAT, 2014.\n\nREFERENCE: \"European System of National and Regional Accounts (ESA 2010),\" Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2013.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE [USA,", + " INDIA]: Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for treating \"uncontrollable\" nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Nasal Packing With Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient with Glanzmann Thrombasthenia,\" Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, vol. 120, no.", + " 11, November 2011, pp. 732-36.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Sonal Saraiya\n\nARCTIC SCIENCE PRIZE [NORWAY, GERMANY, USA, CANADA]: Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftest\u00f8l, for testing how reindeer react to seeing humans who are disguised as polar bears.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Response Behaviors of Svalbard Reindeer towards Humans and Humans Disguised as Polar Bears on Edge\u00f8ya,\" Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftest\u00f8l, Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research,", + " vol. 44, no. 4, 2012, pp. 483-9.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Eigil Reimers, Sindre Eftest\u00f8l\n\nNUTRITION PRIZE [SPAIN]: Raquel Rubio, Anna Jofr\u00e9, Bel\u00e9n Mart\u00edn, Teresa Aymerich, and Margarita Garriga, for their study titled \"Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages.\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages,\" Raquel Rubio,", + " Anna Jofr\u00e9, Bel\u00e9n Mart\u00edn, Teresa Aymerich, Margarita Garriga, Food Microbiology, vol. 38, 2014, pp. 303-311.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners were unable to attend the ceremony; they delivered their acceptance speech via video.\n\nThe 2013 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2013 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 12th, 2013 at the 23rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE:", + " Masateru Uchiyama [JAPAN], Xiangyuan Jin [CHINA, JAPAN], Qi Zhang [JAPAN], Toshihito Hirai [JAPAN], Atsushi Amano [JAPAN], Hisashi Bashuda [JAPAN] and Masanori Niimi [JAPAN, UK], for assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients who are mice.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells,\" Masateru Uchiyama,", + " Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi, Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, vol. 7, no. 26, epub. March 23, 2012.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Masanori Niimi\n\nPSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Laurent B\u00e8gue [FRANCE], Brad Bushman [USA, UK, the NETHERLANDS, POLAND], Oulmann Zerhouni [FRANCE], Baptiste Subra [FRANCE], and Medhi Ourabah [FRANCE], for confirming,", + " by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive.\n\nREFERENCE: \"'Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder': People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive,\" Laurent B\u00e8gue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, Medhi Ourabah, British Journal of Psychology, epub May 15, 2012.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Brad Bushman, Laurent B\u00e8gue, Medhi Ourabah\n\nJOINT PRIZE IN BIOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY: Marie Dacke [SWEDEN,", + " AUSTRALIA], Emily Baird [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA, GERMANY], Marcus Byrne [SOUTH AFRICA, UK], Clarke Scholtz [SOUTH AFRICA], and Eric J. Warrant [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA, GERMANY], for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation,\" Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Clarke H. Scholtz, Eric J. Warrant, Current Biology,", + " epub January 24, 2013.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Eric Warrant\n\nSAFETY ENGINEERING PRIZE: The late Gustano Pizzo [USA], for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers \u2014 the system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane's specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. US Patent #3811643, Gustano A.", + " Pizzo, \"anti hijacking system for aircraft\", May 21, 1972.\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: Alberto Minetti [ITALY, UK, DENMARK, SWITZERLAND], Yuri Ivanenko [ITALY, RUSSIA, FRANCE], Germana Cappellini [ITALY], Nadia Dominici [ITALY, SWITZERLAND, THE NETHERLANDS], and Francesco Lacquaniti [ITALY], for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond \u2014 if those people and that pond were on the moon.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Humans Running in Place on Water at Simulated Reduced Gravity,\" Alberto E.", + " Minetti, Yuri P. Ivanenko, Germana Cappellini, Nadia Dominici, Francesco Lacquaniti, PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 7, 2012, e37300.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Alberto Minetti and Yuri Ivanenko\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Shinsuke Imai [JAPAN], Nobuaki Tsuge [JAPAN], Muneaki Tomotake [JAPAN], Yoshiaki Nagatome [JAPAN], H. Sawada [JAPAN],Toshiyuki Nagata [JAPAN,", + " GERMANY], and Hidehiko Kumagai [JAPAN], for discovering that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is even more complicated than scientists previously realized.\n\nREFERENCE: \"An Onion Enzyme that Makes the Eyes Water,\" S. Imai, N. Tsuge, M. Tomotake, Y. Nagatome, H. Sawada, T. Nagata and H. Kumagai, Nature, vol. 419, no. 6908, October 2002, p. 685.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: All the co-authors.\n\nARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE:", + " Brian Crandall [USA] and Peter Stahl [CANADA, USA], for parboiling a dead shrew, and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days \u2014 all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system, and which bones would not.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton,\" Peter W. Stahl and Brian D. Crandall, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 22, November 1995, pp. 789\u201397.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Brian Crandall\n\nPEACE PRIZE:", + " Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.\n\nPROBABILITY PRIZE: Bert Tolkamp [UK, the NETHERLANDS], Marie Haskell [UK], Fritha Langford [UK, CANADA], David Roberts [UK], and Colin Morgan [UK], for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?\" Bert J. Tolkamp, Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, Colin A. Morgan, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 124, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 1\u201310.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Bert Tolkamp\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Kasian Bhanganada, Tu Chayavatana, Chumporn Pongnumkul, Anunt Tonmukayakul, Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn,", + " Krit Komaratal, and Henry Wilde, for the medical techniques described in their report \"Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam\" \u2014 techniques which they recommend, except in cases where the amputated penis had been partially eaten by a duck. [THAILAND]\n\nREFERENCE: \"Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam,\" by Kasian Bhanganada, Tu Chayavatana, Chumporn Pongnumkul, Anunt Tonmukayakul, Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn, Krit Komaratal,", + " and Henry Wilde, American Journal of Surgery, 1983, no. 146, pp. 376-382.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Nobel laureate Eric Maskin read aloud the acceptance speech sent by the winners.\n\nThe 2012 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2012 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 20th, 2012 at the 22rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan [THE NETHERLANDS]", + " and Tulio Guadalupe [PERU, RUSSIA, and THE NETHERLANDS] for their study \"Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller\"\n\nREFERENCE: \"Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation,\" Anita Eerland, Tulio M. Guadalupe and Rolf A. Zwaan, Psychological Science, vol. 22 no. 12, December 2011, pp. 1511-14.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Tulio Guadalupe.", + " [NOTE: Two days after the ceremony, Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan married each other, in the Netherlands.]\n\nPEACE PRIZE: The SKN Company [RUSSIA], for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Igor Petrov\n\nACOUSTICS PRIZE: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating the SpeechJammer \u2014 a machine that disrupts a person's speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.\n\nREFERENCE: \"SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback\", Kazutaka Kurihara,", + " Koji Tsukada, arxiv.org/abs/1202.6106. February 28, 2012.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada\n\nNEUROSCIENCE PRIZE: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere \u2014 even in a dead salmon.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction,\" Craig M.", + " Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, poster, 15th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, San Francisco, CA, June 2009.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Multiple Comparisons Correction,\" Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-", + "5.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Johan Pettersson [SWEDEN and RWANDA]. for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Andersl\u00f6v, Sweden, people's hair turned green.\n\nATTENDING THE THE CEREMONY: Johan Pettersson\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies,\" US Government General Accountability Office report GAO-", + "12-480R, May 10, 2012.\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: Joseph Keller [USA], and Raymond Goldstein [USA and UK], Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball [UK], for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Shape of a Ponytail and the Statistical Physics of Hair Fiber Bundles.\" Raymond E. Goldstein, Patrick B. Warren, and Robin C. Ball, Physical Review Letters, vol. 198, no. 7, 2012.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Ponytail Motion,\" Joseph B. Keller, SIAM [Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics]", + " Journal of Applied Mathematics, vol. 70, no. 7, 2010, pp. 2667\u201372.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Joseph Keller, Raymond Goldstein, Patrick Warren, Robin Ball\n\nFLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE: Rouslan Krechetnikov [USA, RUSSIA, CANADA] and Hans Mayer [USA] for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Walking With Coffee: Why Does It Spill?\" Hans C. Mayer and Rouslan Krechetnikov,", + " Physical Review E, vol. 85, 2012.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Rouslan Krechetnikov\n\nANATOMY PRIZE: Frans de Waal [The Netherlands and USA] and Jennifer Pokorny [USA] for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception\" Frans B.M. de Waal and Jennifer J. Pokorny, Advanced Science Letters, vol. 1, 99\u2013103, 2008.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY:", + " Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Colonic Gas Explosion During Therapeutic Colonoscopy with Electrocautery,\" Spiros D Ladas, George Karamanolis, Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, World Journal of Gastroenterology, vol. 13, no. 40, October 2007, pp. 5295\u20138.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Argon Plasma Coagulation in the Treatment of Hemorrhagic Radiation Proctitis is Efficient But Requires a Perfect Colonic Cleansing to Be Safe,\" E.", + " Ben-Soussan, M. Antonietti, G. Savoye, S. Herve, P. Ducrott\u00e9, and E. Lerebours, European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, vol. 16, no. 12, December 2004, pp 1315-8.\n\nATTENDING THE THE CEREMONY: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan\n\nSPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: We are now, in 2012, correcting an error we made in the year 1999, when we failed to include one winner's name. We now correct that, awarding a share of the 1999 physics prize to Joseph Keller.", + " Professor Keller is also a co-winner of the 2012 Ig Nobel physics prize, making him a two-time Ig Nobel winner.\n\nThe corrected citation is:1999 PHYSICS PRIZE: Len Fisher [UK and Australia] for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit, and Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck [UK and Belgium] and Joseph Keller [USA], for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Physics Takes the Biscuit\", Len Fisher, Nature, vol. 397, no. 6719, February 11, 1999, p. 469.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Pouring Flows,\" Jean-Marc Vanden\u2010Broeck and Joseph B. Keller, Physics of Fluids, vol. 29, no. 12, 1986, pp. 3958-61.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Pouring Flows With Separation,\" Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck and Joseph B. Keller, Physics of Fluids A: Fluid Dynamics, vol. 1, no. 1, 1989, pp. 156-158.\n\nThe 2011 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 29th,", + " 2011 at the 21rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nPHYSIOLOGY PRIZE:Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of THE NETHERLANDS, HUNGARY, and AUSTRIA), Isabella Mandl (of AUSTRIA) and Ludwig Huber (of AUSTRIA) for their study \"No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.\"\n\nREFERENCE: 'No Evidence Of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise Geochelone carbonaria,\" Anna Wilkinson,", + " Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandl, Ludwig Huber, Current Zoology, vol. 57, no. 4, 2011. pp. 477-84.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Ludwig Huber\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency,", + " and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.\n\nREFERENCE: US patent application 2010/0308995 A1; filing date: Feb 5, 2009. Product info [from Seems, Inc.].\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Makoto Imai, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE: Mirjam Tuk (of THE NETHERLANDS and the UK), Debra Trampe (of THE NETHERLANDS) and Luk Warlop (of BELGIUM). and jointly to Matthew Lewis,", + " Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (of the USA), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (of AUSTRALIA) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things \u2014 but worse decisions about other kinds of things\u201a when they have a strong urge to urinate.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains,\" Mirjam A. Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 5, May 2011, pp. 627-", + "633.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults,\" Matthew S. Lewis, Peter J. Snyder, Robert H. Pietrzak, David Darby, Robert A. Feldman, Paul T. Maruff, Neurology and Urodynamics, vol. 30, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 183-7.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Mirjam Tuk, Luk Warlop, Peter Snyder, Robert Feldman, David Darby\n\nPSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo,", + " NORWAY, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Is a Sigh 'Just a Sigh'? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task,\" Karl Halvor Teigen, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 49, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49\u201357.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Karl Halvor Teigen\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important,", + " using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.\n\nREFERENCE: \"How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done,\" John Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 1996. Later republished elsewhere under the title \"Structured Procrastination.\"\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Colleague Deborah Wilkes accepted the prize on behalf of Professor Perry.\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne (of CANADA and AUSTRALIA and the UK and the USA) and David Rentz (of AUSTRALIA and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females (Coleoptera),\" D.T. Gwynne, and D.C.F. Rentz, Journal of the Australian Entomological Society, vol. 22,, no. 1, 1983, pp. 79-80\n\nREFERENCE: \"Beetles on the Bottle,\" D.T. Gwynne and D.C.F. Rentz, Antenna: Proceedings (A) of the Royal Entomological Society London, vol. 8, no. 3, 1984, pp. 116-", + "7.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru (of FRANCE), and Herman Kingma (of THE NETHERLANDS), for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Dizziness in Discus Throwers is Related to Motion Sickness Generated While Spinning,\" Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru and Herman Kingma, Acta Oto-laryngologica,", + " vol. 120, no. 3, March 2000, pp. 390\u20135.\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: The winners accepted via recorded video.\n\nMATHEMATICS PRIZE: Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6,", + " 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.\n\nPEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.\n\nREFERENCE: VIDEO and OFFICIAL CITY INFO\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Arturas Zuokas\n\nPUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face,", + " blinding him.\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Attentional Demand of Automobile Driving,\" John W. Senders, et al., Highway Research Record, vol. 195, 1967, pp. 15-33. VIDEO\n\nATTENDING THE CEREMONY: John Senders\n\nThe 2010 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2010 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 30th, 2000 at the 20th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nENGINEERING PRIZE:", + " Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.\n\nREFERENCE: \"A Novel Non-Invasive Tool for Disease Surveillance of Free-Ranging Whales and Its Relevance to Conservation Programs,\" Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin and Diane Gendron, Animal Conservation, vol. 13, no. 2, April 2010,", + " pp. 217-25.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin, Diane Gendron\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Rollercoaster Asthma: When Positive Emotional Stress Interferes with Dyspnea Perception,\" Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest, Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol.", + " 45, 2006, pp. 977\u201387.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest\n\nTRANSPORTATION PLANNING PRIZE: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design,\" Atsushi Tero,", + " Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Dan P. Bebber, Mark D. Fricker, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Science, Vol. 327. no. 5964, January 22, 2010, pp. 439-42. [VIDEO]\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Kentaro Ito, Atsushi Tero, Mark Fricker, Dan Bebber [NOTE: THE FOLLOWING ARE CO-WINNERS BOTH THIS YEAR AND IN 2008 when they were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for demonstrating that slime molds can solve puzzles:", + " Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero]\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Preventing Winter Falls: A Randomised Controlled Trial of a Novel Intervention,\" Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest, New Zealand Medical Journal. vol. 122, no, 1298, July 3, 2009,", + " pp. 31-8.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Lianne Parkin\n\nPEACE PRIZE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Swearing as a Response to Pain,\" Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston, Neuroreport, vol. 20, no. 12, 2009, pp. 1056-60.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Richard Stephens\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office,", + " Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men,\" Manuel S. Barbeito, Charles T. Mathews, and Larry A. Taylor, Applied Microbiology, vol. 15, no. 4, July 1967, pp. 899\u2013906.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Manuel S. Barbeito was unable to travel, due to health reasons. A representative read his acceptance speech for him.\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE: The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG,", + " Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money \u2014 ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP [British Petroleum], for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Review of Deep Oil Spill Modeling Activity Supported by the Deep Spill JIP and Offshore Operator\u2019s Committee. Final Report,\" Eric Adams and Scott Socolofsky,", + " 2005.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Eric Adams, Scott Socolofsky, and Stephen Masutani\n\nMANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \u201cThe Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,\u201d Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp.", + " 467-72.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo.\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE: Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time,\" Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou,", + " Shuyi Zhang and Libiao Zhang, PLoS ONE, vol. 4, no. 10, e7595.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Gareth Jones\n\nThe 2009 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2009 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 1st, 2009 at the 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nVETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne,", + " UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Exploring Stock Managers' Perceptions of the Human-Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production,\" Catherine Bertenshaw [Douglas] and Peter Rowlinson, Anthrozoos, vol. 22, no. 1, March 2009, pp. 59-69. DOI: 10.2752/175303708X390473.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Peter Rowlinson. Catherine Douglas was unable to travel because she recently gave birth; she sent a photo of herself,", + " her new daughter dressed in a cow suit, and a cow.\n\nPEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining \u2014 by experiment \u2014 whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?\" Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P.", + " Kneubuehl, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, vol. 16, no. 3, April 2009, pp. 138-42. DOI:10.1016/j.jflm.2008.07.013.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Stephan Bolliger\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks \u2014 Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland \u2014 for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa \u2014 and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " Report of the Special Investigation Commission, issued April 12, 2010.\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Ap\u00e1tiga, and Victor M. Casta\u00f1o of Universidad Nacional Aut\u00f3noma de M\u00e9xico, for creating diamonds from liquid \u2014 specifically from tequila.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila,\" Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M. Castano, 2008, arXiv:0806.1485. Also published as Reviews on Advanced Materials Science, vol. 22, no. 1, 2009, pp. 134-8.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Javier Morales and Miguel Ap\u00e1tiga\n\n\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand \u2014 but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand \u2014 every day for more than sixty (60) years.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?\", Donald L. Unger, Arthritis and Rheumatism, vol. 41, no. 5, 1998, pp. 949-50.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Donald Unger\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins,\" Katherine K. Whitcome, Liza J. Shapiro & Daniel E. Lieberman, Nature, vol. 450, 1075-1078 (December 13, 2007). DOI:10.1038/nature06342.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Katherine Whitcome and Daniel Lieberman\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland's police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country \u2014 Prawo Jazdy \u2014 whose name in Polish means \"Driving License\".\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: [Karolina Lewestam, a Polish citizen and holder of a Polish driver's license, speaking on behalf of all her fellow Polish licensed drivers, expressed her good wishes to the Irish police service.]\n\n\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago,", + " Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: U.S. patent # 7255627, granted August 14, 2007 for a \u201cGarment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks.\u201d\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Elena Bodnar.\n\nMATHEMATICS PRIZE: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe\u2019s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers \u2014 from very small to very big \u2014 by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01)", + " to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Zimbabwe's Casino Economy \u2014 Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges, Gideon Gono, ZPH Publishers, Harare, 2008, ISBN 978-079-743-679-4.\n\n\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Microbial Treatment of Kitchen Refuse With Enzyme-", + "Producing Thermophilic Bacteria From Giant Panda Feces,\" Fumiaki Taguchia, Song Guofua, and Zhang Guanglei, Seibutsu-kogaku Kaishi, vol. 79, no 12, 2001, pp. 463-9. [and abstracted in Journal of Bioscience and Bioengineering, vol. 92, no. 6, 2001, p. 602.]\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Microbial Treatment of Food-Production Waste with Thermopile Enzyme-Producing Bacterial Flora from a Giant Panda\" [in Japanese], Fumiaki Taguchi,", + " Song Guofu, Yasunori Sugai, Hiroyasu Kudo and Akira Koikeda, Journal of the Japan Society of Waste Management Experts, vol. 14, no. 2, 2003, pp., 76-82.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Fumiaki Taguchi\n\nThe 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 2nd, 2008 at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nNUTRITION PRIZE.", + " Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness ofPotato Chips,\" Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence,Journal of Sensory Studies, vol. 19, October 2004, pp. 347-63.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Massimiliano Zampini.", + " unable to attend the ceremony, was presented with the prize at a special ceremony, later in the month, at the Genoa Science Festival.\n\nPEACE PRIZE. The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Dignity of Living Beings With Regard to Plants. Moral Consideration of Plants for Their Own Sake\"\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Urs Thurnherr, member of the committee.\n\nARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and Jos\u00e9 Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de S\u00e3o Paulo,", + " Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach,\" Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and Jos\u00e9 Carlos Marcelino, Geoarchaeology, vol. 18, no. 4, April 2003, pp. 433-60.\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse,", + " France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis (Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835),\" M.C. Cadiergues, C. Joubert, and M. Franc, Veterinary Parasitology, vol. 92, no. 3, October 1, 2000, pp. 239-", + "41.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Marie-Christine Cadiergues and Christel Joubert, unable to attend the ceremony, were presented with the prize at a special ceremony, later in the month, at the Genoa Science Festival.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE. Dan Ariely of Duke University (USA), Rebecca L. Waber of MIT (USA), Baba Shiv of Stanford University (USA), and Ziv Carmon of INSEAD (Singapore) for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine..\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy,\" Rebecca L.", + " Waber; Baba Shiv; Ziv Carmon; Dan Ariely, Journal of the American Medical Association, March 5, 2008; 299: 1016-1017.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dan Ariely\n\nCOGNITIVE SCIENCE PRIZE. Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University, Japan, Hiroyasu Yamada of Nagoya, Japan, Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University, Atsushi Tero of Presto JST, Akio Ishiguro of Tohoku University, and \u00c1got\u00e1 T\u00f3th of the University of Szeged,", + " Hungary, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Intelligence: Maze-Solving by an Amoeboid Organism,\" Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, and \u00c1gota T\u00f3th, Nature, vol. 407, September 2000, p. 470. [VIDEO]\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that professional lap dancers earn higher tips when they are ovulating.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?\" Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan, Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 28, 2007, pp. 375-81.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Geoffrey Miller and Brent Jordan\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String,\" Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 42, October 16, 2007, pp. 16432-7.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dorian Raymer\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE. Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide,", + " and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Effect of 'Coke' on Sperm Motility,\" Sharee A. Umpierre, Joseph A. Hill, and Deborah J. Anderson, New England Journal of Medicine, 1985, vol. 313, no. 21, p. 1351.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Spermicidal Potency of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola,\" C.Y. Hong, C.C.", + " Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang, Human Toxicology, vol. 6, no. 5, September 1987, pp. 395-6. [NOTE: THE JOURNAL LATER CHANGED ITS NAME. NOW CALLED \"Human & experimental toxicology\"]\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Deborah Anderson, and C.Y. Hong's daughter Wan Hong\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE. David Sims of Cass Business School. London, UK, for his lovingly written study \"You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations,\" David Sims, Organization Studies, vol. 26, no. 11, 2005, pp. 1625-40.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: David Sims\n\nAt the 2007 ceremony, Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Dan Meyer punctuates his and Brian Witcombe's joint one-minute-long acceptance speech. Meyer and Dr. Witcombe (who is not visible in this photo, having stepped back to give his colleague breathing room) were honored for studying the medical side-effects of sword-swallowing. Nobel Laureates William Lipscomb,", + " Robert Laughlin and Dudley Herschbach can be seen here analyzing Mr. Meyer's speech. Photo Credit: Alexey Eliseev.\n\nThe 2007 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 4th, 2007 at the 17th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nMEDICINE PRIZE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report \"Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects,\" Brian Witcombeand Dan Meyer, British Medical Journal, December 23, 2006, vol. 333, pp. 1285-7.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer\n\nPHYSICS PRIZE: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.\n\n\n\nREFERENCES: \"Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension,\" E. Cerda, K. Ravi-Chandar, L. Mahadevan,", + " Nature, vol. 419, October 10, 2002, pp. 579-80.\n\n\"Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling,\" E. Cerda and L. Mahadevan, Physical Review Letters, fol. 90, no. 7, February 21, 2003, pp. 074302/1-4.\n\n\"Elements of Draping,\" E. Cerda, L. Mahadevan and J. Passini, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 7, 2004, pp. 1806-10.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY:", + " Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca's sister Mariela.\n\nBIOLOGY PRIZE: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.\n\n\n\nREFERENCES: \"Huis, Bed en Beestjes\" [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde,", + " vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31.\n\n\"Het Stof, de Mijten en het Bed\" [Dust, Mites and Bedding]. J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk Vakblad voor Biologen, vol. 53, no. 2, 1973, pp. 22-5.\n\n\"Autotrophic Organisms in Mattress Dust in the Netherlands,\" B. van de Lustgraaf, J.H.H.M. Klerkx, J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Acta Botanica Neerlandica,", + " vol. 27, no. 2, 1978, pp 125-8.\n\n\"A Bed Ecosystem,\" J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Lecture Abstracts -- 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk\n\nCHEMISTRY PRIZE: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from Livestock Excrement Using Subcritical Water Reaction,\" Mayu Yamamoto, International Journal of Chemical Engineering, 2008.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Mayu Yamamoto\n\nPRESS NOTE: Toscanini's Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called \"Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist.\"\n\nLINGUISTICS PRIZE: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and N\u00faria Sebasti\u00e1n-Gall\u00e9s,", + " of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats,\" Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and N\u00faria Sebasti\u00e1n-Gall\u00e9s, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: The winners could not travel to the ceremony, so they instead delivered their acceptance speech via recorded video\n\nLITERATURE PRIZE:", + " Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word \"the\" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index Entries,\" Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp. 119-22.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Glenda Browne\n\nPEACE PRIZE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called \"gay bomb\"", + " -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals,\" Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.\n\nNUTRITION PRIZE: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake,\" Brian Wansink, James E. Painter and Jill North,", + " Obesity Research, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 93-100.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink Bantom Books, 2006, ISBN 0553804340.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Brian Wansink.\n\nECONOMICS PRIZE: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: U.S. patent #6,219,", + "959, granted on April 24, 2001, for a \"net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately.\"\n\nNOTE: The Ig Nobel Board of Governors attempted repeatedly to find Mr. Hsieh, but he seemed to have vanished mysteriously. Some days after the ceremony came news that he is alive and well.\n\nAVIATION PRIZE: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Sildenafil Accelerates Reentrainment of Circadian Rhythms After Advancing Light Schedules,\" Patricia V.", + " Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 23, June 5 2007, pp. 9834-9.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE CEREMONY: Diego A. Golombek\n\nThe 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2006 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 5th, 2006 at the 16th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nORNITHOLOGY:", + " Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Cure for a Headache,\" Ivan R Schwab, British Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 86, 2002, p. 843.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Woodpeckers and Head Injury,\" Philip R.A. May, JoaquinM. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7957, February28,", + " 1976, pp. 454-5.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Woodpeckers and Head Injury,\" Philip R.A. May, JoaquinM. Fuster, Paul Newman and Ada Hirschman, Lancet, vol. 307, no. 7973, June 19,1976, pp. 1347-8.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Ivan Schwab\n\nNUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Dung Preference of the Dung Beetle Scarabaeus cristatus Fab (Coleoptera-Scarabaeidae) from Kuwait,\" Wasmia Al-Houty and Faten Al-Musalam, Journal of Arid Environments, vol. 35, no. 3, 1997, pp. 511-6.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Faten Al-Musalam\n\nPEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant -- a device that makes annoying high-pitched noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults;", + " and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but probably not to their teachers.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: http://www.compoundsecurity.co.uk\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Howard Stapleton planned to attend, but his plans were interrupted by a family medical situation.\n\nACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University), Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University) and James Hillenbrand (of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University) for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound,\" D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand, Perception and Psychophysics, vol. 39,1986, pp. 77-80.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Lynn Halpern and Randolph Blake\n\nMATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Blink-Free Photos, Guaranteed,\" Velocity,", + " June 2006,\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes\n\nLITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report \"Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,\" Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 20, no. 2, March 2006, pp. 139-56.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY:", + " Daniel Oppenheimer\n\nMEDICINE: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report \"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage\"; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled \"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage,\" Francis M. Fesmire, Annals of Emergency Medicine,", + " vol. 17, no. 8, August 1988 p. 872.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage,\"\n\nMajed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven, Journal of Internal Medicine, vol. 227, no. 2, February 1990, pp. 145-6. They are at the Department of Internal Medicine, Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Hiccups and Digital Rectal Massage,\" M. Odeh and A. Oliven, Archives of Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery,", + " vol. 119, 1993, p. 1383.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Francis Fesmire\n\nPHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Universit\u00e9 Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half,\" Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch, Physical Review Letters, vol. 95, no.", + " 9, August 26, 2005, pp. 95505-1 to 95505-1.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Video and other details at \n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch\n\nCHEMISTRY: Antonio Mulet, Jos\u00e9 Javier Benedito and Jos\u00e9 Bon of the University of Valencia, Spain, and Carmen Rossell\u00f3 of the University of Illes Balears, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, for their study \"Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature,\" Antonio Mulet, Jos\u00e9 Javier Benedito, Jos\u00e9 Bon, and Carmen Rossell\u00f3, Journal of Food Science, vol. 64, no. 6, 1999, pp. 1038-41.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: The winners delivered their acceptance speech via video recording.\n\nBIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency,", + " in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"On Human Odour, Malaria Mosquitoes, and Limburger Cheese,\" Bart. G.J. Knols, The Lancet, vol. 348, November 9, 1996, p. 1322.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \u201cBehavioural and electrophysiological responses of the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae (Diptera:", + " Culicidae) to Limburger cheese volatiles,\u201d Bulletin of Entomological Research, B.G.J. Knols, J.J.A. van Loon, A. Cork, R.D. Robinson, et al., vol. 87, 1997, pp. 151-159.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Limburger Cheese as an Attractant for the Malaria Mosquito Anopheles gambiae s.s.,\" B.G,J. Knols and R. De Jong, Parasitology Today, yd. 12, no. 4, 1996, pp. 159-61.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Selection of Biting Sites on Man by Two Malaria Mosquito Species,\" R. De Jong and B.G.J. Knols, Experientia, vol. 51, 1995, pp. 80\u201384.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY: Bart Knols\n\nThe 2005 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 6th, 2005 at the 15th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nAGRICULTURAL HISTORY:", + " James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, \"The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley\u2019s Exploding Trousers. \"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers: Reflections on an Aspect of Technological Change in New Zealand Dairy-Farming between the World Wars,\" James Watson, Agricultural History, vol. 78, no. 3, Summer 2004, pp. 346-60.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: James Watson\n\nPHYSICS: John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland,", + " Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The Pitch Drop Experiment,\" R. Edgeworth, B.J. Dalton and T. Parnell, European Journal of Physics, 1984, pp. 198-200.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Mainstone\n\nMEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles -- artificial replacement testicles for dogs,", + " which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.\n\n\n\nREFERENCES: US Patent #5868140, and the book Going Going NUTS!, by Gregg A. Miller, PublishAmerica, 2004, ISBN 1413753167.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: The winner was unable to travel, and delivered his acceptance speech via video.\n\nLITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha,", + " Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.\n\nPEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie \"Star Wars.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Orthopteran DCMD Neuron: A Reevaluation of Responses to Moving Objects. I. Selective Responses to Approaching Objects,\" F.C.", + " Rind and P.J. Simmons, Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 68, no. 5, November 1992, pp. 1654-66.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Claire Rind\n\nECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Gauri Nanda\n\nCHEMISTRY: Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin,", + " for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water?\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Will Humans Swim Faster or Slower in Syrup?\" American Institute of Chemical Engineers Journal, Brian Gettelfinger and E. L. Cussler, vol. 50, no. 11, October 2004, pp. 2646-7.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Brian Gettelfinger and Edward Cussler\n\nBIOLOGY: Benjamin Smith of the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Toronto, Canada and the Firmenich perfume company,", + " Geneva, Switzerland, and ChemComm Enterprises, Archamps, France; Craig Williams of James Cook University and the University of South Australia; Michael Tyler of the University of Adelaide; Brian Williams of the University of Adelaide; and Yoji Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"A Survey of Frog Odorous Secretions, Their Possible Functions and Phylogenetic Significance,\" Benjamin P.C. Smith, Craig R. Williams, Michael J. Tyler, and Brian D. Williams, Applied Herpetology,", + " vol. 2, no. 1-2, February 1, 2004, pp. 47-82.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Chemical and Olfactory Characterization of Odorous Compounds and Their Precursors in the Parotoid Gland Secretion of the Green Tree Frog, Litoria caerulea,\" Benjamin P.C. Smith, Michael J. Tyler, Brian D. Williams, and Yoji Hayasaka, Journal of Chemical Ecology, vol. 29, no. 9, September 2003.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Ben Smith and Craig Williams\n\nNUTRITION:", + " Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats of Tokyo, Japan, for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting).[See the movie \"The Invention of Dr. Nakamats\", 2009]\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats\n\nFLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu, Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Lor\u00e1nd E\u00f6tv\u00f6s University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin,", + " as detailed in their report \"Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation.\"\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED IN: Polar Biology, vol. 27, 2003, pp. 56-8.\n\n\n\nACCEPTING: The winners were unable to attend the ceremony because they could not obtain United States visas to visit the United States. Dr. Meyer-Rochow sent an acceptance speech via video.\n\nThe 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2004 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 30th, 2004 at the 14th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.", + " The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nMEDICINE: Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published report \"The Effect of Country Music on Suicide.\"\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED IN: Social Forces, vol. 71, no. 1, September 1992, pp. 211-8.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: James Gundlach.\n\nPHYSICS: Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory,", + " for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping,\" Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael T. Turvey, Biological Cybernetics, vol. 90, no. 3, March 2004, pp. 176-90.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael Turvey.\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH: Jillian Clarke of the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for investigating the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"If You Drop It, Should You Eat It? Scientists Weigh In on the 5-Second Rule,\" ACES College News, September 2, 2003.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Jillian Clarke\n\nCHEMISTRY: The Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain, for using advanced technology to convert ordinary tap water into Dasani, a transparent form of water, which for precautionary reasons has been made unavailable to consumers.\n\nENGINEERING: Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida, USA, for patenting the combover (U.S.", + " Patent #4,022,227).\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Donald Smith's son, Scott Jackson Smith, and daughter, Heather Smith.\n\nLITERATURE: The American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Pamela Chestek, the daughter of ANRL director Helen Fisher.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY: Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something,", + " it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Gorillas in Our Midst,\" Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, vol. 28, Perception, 1999, pages 1059-74.\n\n\n\nDEMO: \n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.\n\nECONOMICS: The Vatican, for outsourcing prayers to India.\n\nPEACE: Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo,", + " Japan, for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Daisuke Inoue.\n\nBIOLOGY: Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Sounds Produced by Herring (Clupea harengus)", + " Bubble Release,\" Magnus Wahlberg and H\u00e5kan Westerberg, Aquatic Living Resources, vol. 16, 2003, pp. 271-5.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Pacific and Atlantic Herring Produce Burst Pulse Sounds,\" Ben Wilson, Robert S. Batty and Lawrence M. Dill, Biology Letters, vol. 271, 2003, pp. S95-S97.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Lawrence Dill, Robert Batty, Magnus Whalberg, Hakan Westerberg.\n\n\n\nThe 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2003 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night,", + " September NNth, 2003 at the 13th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nENGINEERING: The late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols, for jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law, the basic engineering principle that \"If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it \"(or, in other words: \"If anything can go wrong, it will\").\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"The Fastest Man on Earth,\" Nick T. Spark, Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 9, no. 5, Sept/Oct 2003.] VIDEO\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: (1) Author Nick T. Spark, on behalf of John Paul Stapp's widow, Lilly. (2) Edward Murphy's Edward A. Murphy III, on behalf of his late father. (3) George Nichols, via audio tape.\n\nPHYSICS: Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia,", + " for their irresistible report \"An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.\"\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED IN: Applied Ergonomics, vol. 33, no. 6, November 2002, pp. 523-31.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Culvenor.\n\nMEDICINE: Eleanor Maguire, David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner, Richard Frackowiak, and Christopher Frith of University College London, for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens.\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED IN:", + " \"Navigation-Related Structural Change In the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,\" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97, no. 8, April 11, 2000, pp. 4398-403. Also see their subsequent publications.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Eleanor Maguire.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY: Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli of the University of Rome, and Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, for their discerning report \"Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities.\"\n\n\n\nPUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol.", + " 385, February 1997, p. 493.\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Philip Zimbardo.\n\nCHEMISTRY: Yukio Hirose of Kanazawa University, for his chemical investigation of a bronze statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that fails to attract pigeons.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Yukio Hirose.\n\nLITERATURE: John Trinkaus, of the Zicklin School of Business, New York City, for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him\n\n(such as:", + " What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front; What percentage of pedestrians wear sport shoes that are white rather than some other color; What percentage of swimmers swim laps in the shallow end of a pool rather than the deep end; What percentage of automobile drivers almost, but not completely, come to a stop at one particular stop-sign; What percentage of commuters carry attach\u00e9 cases; What percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket's express checkout lane; and What percentage of students dislike the taste of Brussels sprouts.)\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: 86 of Professor Trinkaus's publications are listed in \"Trinkaus -- An Informal Look,\" Annals of Improbable Research,", + " vol. 9, no. 3, May/Jun 2003.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Trinkaus.\n\nECONOMICS: Karl Schw\u00e4rzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: and and \n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Karl Schw\u00e4rzler.\n\nINTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH:", + " Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist of Stockholm University, for their inevitable report \"Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans.\"\n\n\n\n[PUBLISHED IN: Human Nature, vol. 13, no. 3, 2002, pp. 383-9.]\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: All three co-authors.\n\nPEACE: Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives;", + " and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People.\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Lal Bihari overcame the handicap of being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian government so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize. However, the U.S. government refused to allow him into the country. His friend Madhu Kapoor therefore came to the Ig Nobel Ceremony and accepted the Prize on behalf of Lal Bihari. Several weeks later, the Prize was presented to Lal Bihari himself in a special ceremony in India. [NOTE: Filmmaker Satish Kaushik will be making a film about the life (and death and life)", + " of Lal Bihari.]\n\nBIOLOGY: C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.\n\n\n\n[REFERENCE: \"The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)\" C.W. Moeliker, Deinsea, vol. 8, 2001, pp. 243-7.]\n\n\n\nWHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Kees Moeliker.\n\nThe 2002 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2002 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night,", + " October 3rd, 2002 at the 12th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nBIOLOGY: N. Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, Phil Bowers, and D. Charles Deeming of the United Kingdom, for their report \"Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain.\"\n\n[REFERENCE: \"Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches (Struthio camelus) Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain,\" Norma E.", + " Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, P. Bowers, D.C. Deeming, British Poultry Science, vol. 39, no. 4, September 1998, pp. 477-481.]\n\nPHYSICS: Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay.\n\n[REFERENCE: \"Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth,\" Arnd Leike, European Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26.]\n\nINTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH:", + " Karl Kruszelnicki of The University of Sydney, for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint -- who gets it, when, what color, and how much.\n\nCHEMISTRY: Theodore Gray (USA and Switzerland), for gathering many elements of the periodic table, and assembling them into the form of a four-legged periodic table table.\n\nMATHEMATICS: K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report \"Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants.\" [REFERENCE: \"Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants (Elephas maximus indicus),\" K.P.", + " Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan, Veterinary Research Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, 1990, pp. 5-17.]\n\nLITERATURE: Vicki Silvers Gier and David S. Kreiner of Central Missouri State University, for their colorful report \"The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension.\" [ PUBLISHED IN: Reading Research and Instruction, vol. 36, no. 3, 1997, pp. 217-23.]\n\nPEACE: Keita Sato, President of Takara Co., Dr. Matsumi Suzuki,", + " President of Japan Acoustic Lab, and Dr. Norio Kogure, Executive Director, Kogure Veterinary Hospital, for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device.\n\nHYGIENE: Eduardo Segura, of Lavakan de Aste, in Tarragona, Spain, for inventing a washing machine for cats and dogs.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Station for Preparing Cleaning Disinfecting Delousing and Hydromassaging Animals,\" US patent 7011044B2.\n\nECONOMICS: The executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron,", + " Lernaut & Hauspie [Belgium], Adelphia, Bank of Commerce and Credit International [Pakistan], Cendant, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynegy, Gazprom [Russia], Global Crossing, HIH Insurance [Australia], Informix, Kmart, Maxwell Communications [UK], McKessonHBOC, Merrill Lynch, Merck, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Reliant Resources, Rent-Way, Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Tyco, Waste Management, WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen, for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world. [NOTE:", + " all companies are U.S.-based unless otherwise noted.]\n\nMEDICINE: Chris McManus of University College London, for his excruciatingly balanced report, \"Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture.\" [PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 259, February 5, 1976, p. 426.]\n\nThe 2001 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2001 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 4th, 2001 at the 11th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live.", + " You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nMEDICINE: Peter Barss of McGill University, for his impactful medical report \"InjuriesDue to Falling Coconuts.\"\n\n[PUBLISHED IN: The Journal of Trauma, vol. 24, no. 11, 1984, pp. 990-1.]\n\nPHYSICS: David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts for his partial solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards.\n\nBIOLOGY: Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape.\n\nECONOMICS:", + " Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia [and who has since moved to Columbia University], for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax.\n\n[REFERENCE:\"Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity,\" National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, March 2001.]\n\nLITERATURE: John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY:", + " Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential research report \"An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children.\"\n\n[PUBLISHED IN: Child Development, vol. 46, no. 1, March 1975, pp. 53-61.]\n\nASTROPHYSICS: Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell.\n\n[REFERENCE: The March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the \"Jack Van Impe Presents\"", + " program. (at about the 12 minute mark).]\n\nPEACE: Viliumas Malinauskus of Grutas, Lithuania, for creating the amusement park known as \"Stalin World.\"\n\nTECHNOLOGY: Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012. [NOTE: Several years after this prize was awarded, the patent office quietly revoked Mr. Keogh's patent.]\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH: Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences,", + " Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents.\n\n[REFERENCE: \"A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample,\" Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 62, no. 6, June 2001, pp. 426-31.]\n\nThe 2000 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 2000 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 5th, 2000 at the 10th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY:", + " David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois, for their modest report, \"Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.\" [Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no. 6, December 1999, pp. 1121-34.]\n\nLITERATURE: Jasmuheen (formerly known as Ellen Greve) of Australia, first lady of Breatharianism, for her book \"Living on Light,\" which explains that although some people do eat food,", + " they don't ever really need to.\n\nBIOLOGY: Richard Wassersug of Dalhousie University, for his first-hand report, \"On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica.\" [Published in The American Midland Naturalist, vol. 86, no. 1, July 1971, pp. 101-9.]\n\nPHYSICS: Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University (UK), for using magnets to levitate a frog. [REFERENCE: \"Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons\"", + " by M.V. Berry and A.K. Geim, European Journal of Physics, v. 18, 1997, p. 307-13.]\n\n[REFERENCE: VIDEO]\n\nNOTE: Ten years later, in 2010, Andre Geim won a Nobel Prize in physics (for research on another subject).\n\nCHEMISTRY: Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi, and Giovanni B. Cassano of the University of Pisa, and Hagop S. Akiskal of the University of California (San Diego), for their discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.", + " [REFERENCE: \"Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love,\" Marazziti D, Akiskal HS, Rossi A, Cassano GB, Psychological Medicine, 1999 May;29(3):741-5.]\n\nECONOMICS: The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, for bringing efficiency and steady growth to the mass-marriage industry, with, according to his reports, a 36-couple wedding in 1960, a 430-couple wedding in 1968, an 1800-couple wedding in 1975, a 6000-couple wedding in 1982, a 30,", + "000-couple wedding in 1992, a 360,000-couple wedding in 1995, and a 36,000,000-couple wedding in 1997.\n\nMEDICINE: Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, and Eduard Mooyaart of Groningen, The Netherlands, and Ida Sabelis of Amsterdam, for their illuminating report, \"Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal.\" [Published in British Medical Journal, vol. 319, 1999, pp 1596-1600.]\n\nCOMPUTER SCIENCE:", + " Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard.\n\nPEACE: The British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout \"Bang!\"\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH: Jonathan Wyatt, Gordon McNaughton, and William Tullett of Glasgow, for their alarming report, \"The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow.\" [Published in the Scottish Medical Journal, vol. 38, 1993, p. 185.]\n\n\n\nThe 1999 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 1999 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night,", + " September 30th, 1999 at the 9th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nSOCIOLOGY: Steve Penfold, of York University in Toronto, for doing his PhD thesis on the sociology of Canadian donut shops.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"The social life of donuts: Commodity and community in postwar Canada,\" Steven Penfold, York University Ph.D. thesis, 2002.\n\nPHYSICS: Len Fisher [UK and Australia] for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit, and Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the [UK and Belgium], and Joseph Keller [USA]", + " for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Physics Takes the Biscuit\", Len Fisher, Nature, 397, no. 6719, February 11, 1999, p. 469.\n\nREFERENCE: \"Pouring Flows,\" Jean-Marc Vanden\u2010Broeck and Joseph B. Keller, Physics of Fluids vol. 29, no. 12, 1986, pp. 3958-61.\n\nLITERATURE: The British Standards Institution for its six-page specification (BS-6008) of the proper way to make a cup of tea.\n\nSCIENCE EDUCATION:", + " The Kansas State Board of Education and the Colorado State Board of Education, for mandating that children should not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution any more than they believe in Newton's theory of gravitation, Faraday's and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Pasteur's theory that germs cause disease.\n\nMEDICINE: Dr. Arvid Vatle of Stord, Norway, for carefully collecting, classifying, and contemplating which kinds of containers his patients chose when submitting urine samples. (REFERENCE: \"Unyttig om urinpr\u00f8ver,\" Arvid Vatle, Tidsskift for Den norske laegeforening [The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association], no.", + " 8, March 20, 1999, p. 1178.)\n\nCHEMISTRY: Takeshi Makino, president of The Safety Detective Agency in Osaka, Japan, for his involvement with S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.\n\nBIOLOGY: Dr. Paul Bosland, director of The Chile Pepper Institute, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, for breeding a spiceless jalapeno chile pepper.\n\nENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION: Hyuk-ho Kwon of Kolon Company of Seoul, Korea, for inventing the self-perfuming business suit.\n\nPEACE:", + " Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower. (Patent WO/1999/032331, \"A Security System for a Vehicle\")\n\nMANAGED HEALTH CARE: The late George and Charlotte Blonsky of New York City and San Jose, California, for inventing a device (US Patent #3,216,423) to aid women in giving birth \u2014 the woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.\n\n\n\nThe 1998 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 1998 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at the 8th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony,", + " at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live.\n\nSAFETY ENGINEERING: Troy Hurtubise, of North Bay, Ontario, for developing, and personally testing a suit of armor that is impervious to grizzly bears. [REFERENCE: \"Project Grizzly\", produced by the \"National Film Board of Canada. ALSO: Bear Man: The Troy Hurtubise Saga, by Troy Hurtubise, Raven House Publishing, Westbrook, ME, USA, 2011.]\n\nBIOLOGY: Peter Fong of Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac.\n\n[", + "REFERENCE: \"Induction and Potentiation of Parturition in Fingernail Clams (Sphaerium striatinum) by Selective Serotonin Re- Uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs),\" Peter F. Fong, Peter T. Huminski, and Lynette M. D'urso, \"Journal of Experimental Zoology, vol. 280, 1998, pp. 260-64.]\n\nPEACE: Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, for their aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs.\n\nCHEMISTRY:", + " Jacques Benveniste of France, for his homeopathic discovery that not only does water have memory, but that the information can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet.\n\n[NOTE: Benveniste also won the 1991 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize.]\n\n\n\n[REFERENCE:\"Transatlantic Transfer of Digitized Antigen Signal by Telephone Link,\" J. Benveniste, P. Jurgens, W. Hsueh and J. Aissa, \"Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology - Program and abstracts of papers to be presented during scientific sessions AAAAI/AAI.CIS Joint Meeting February 21-26,", + " 1997\"]\n\nSCIENCE EDUCATION: Dolores Krieger, Professor Emerita, New York University, for demonstrating the merits of therapeutic touch, a method by which nurses manipulate the energy fields of ailing patients by carefully avoiding physical contact with those patients.\n\n'REFERENCE: \"The Therapeutic Touch,\" Dolores Krieger, Erik Peper, and Sonia Ancoli, The American Journal of Nursing, vol. 79, no. 4, 1979, pp. 660-662.]\n\nSTATISTICS: Jerald Bain of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski of the University of Alberta for their carefully measured report,", + " \"The Relationships Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size.\"\n\n[REFERENCE: \"Annals of Sex Research,\" vol. 6, no. 3, 1993, pp. 231-5.\n\nPHYSICS. Deepak Chopra of The Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.\n\n\n\n[REFERENCE: Deepak Chopra's books \"Quantum Healing,\" \"Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,\" etc.]\n\nECONOMICS. Richard Seed of Chicago for his efforts to stoke up the world economy by cloning himself and other human beings.\n\nMEDICINE:", + " To Patient Y and to his doctors, Caroline Mills, Meirion Llewelyn, David Kelly, and Peter Holt, of Royal Gwent Hospital, in Newport, Wales, for the cautionary medical report, \"A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled Putrid for 5 Years.\" [Published in \"The Lancet,\" vol. 348, November 9, 1996, p. 1282.]\n\nLITERATURE: Dr. Mara Sidoli of Washington, DC, for her illuminating report, \"Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread.\"\n\n\n\n[REFERENCE: \"Journal of Analytical Psychology,\" vol.", + " 41, no. 2, 1996, pp. 165-78.]\n\n\n\nThe 1997 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 1997 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at the 7th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live.\n\nBIOLOGY: T. Yagyu, J. Wackermann, T. Kinoshita, T. Hirota, K. Kochi, I. Kondakor, Thomas K\u00f6nig, and D. Lehmann, from the University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland, from Kansai Medical University in Osaka,", + " Japan, and from Neuroscience Technology Research in Prague, Czech Republic, for measuring people's brainwave patterns while they chewed different flavors of gum. [Published as \"Chewing gum flavor affects measures of global complexity of multichannel EEG,\" T. Yagyu, et al., Neuropsychobiology, vol. 35, 1997, pp. 46-50.]\n\nENTOMOLOGY: Mark Hostetler of the University of Florida, for his scholarly book, \"That Gunk on Your Car,\" which identifies the insect splats that appear on automobile windows. [The book is\n\npublished by Ten Speed Press.]\n\nASTRONOMY:", + " Richard Hoagland of New Jersey, for identifying artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the moon. [REFERENCE: \"The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever,\" by Richard C. Hoagland, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA,1996.]\n\nCOMMUNICATIONS: Sanford Wallace, president of Cyber Promotions of Philadelphia -- neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night have stayed this self-appointed courier from delivering electronic junk mail to all the world.\n\nPHYSICS: John Bockris of Texas A&M University,", + " for his wide-ranging achievements in cold fusion, in the transmutation of base elements into gold, and in the electrochemical incineration of domestic rubbish.\n\nLITERATURE: Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg of Israel, and Michael Drosnin of the United States, for their hairsplitting statistical discovery that the bible contains a secret, hidden code.[REFERENCE: Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg,'s original research was published as\"Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis,\" \"Statistical Science,\" Vol. 9, No. 3, 1994,", + " pp. 429-38. Drosnin's popular book, \"The Bible Code,\" was published by Simon & Schuster.]\n\nMEDICINE: Carl J. Charnetski and Francis X. Brennan, Jr. of Wilkes University, and James F. Harrison of Muzak Ltd. in Seattle, Washington, for their discovery that listening to elevator Muzak stimulates immunoblobulin A (IgA) production, and thus may help prevent the common cold.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Effect of music and auditory stimuli on secretory immunoglobulin A (IgA),\" Carl J. Charnetski, Francis X.", + " Brennan, Jr. and James F. Harrison, Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 87, 1998, pp. 1163-70.\n\nECONOMICS: Akihiro Yokoi of Wiz Company in Chiba, Japan and Aki Maita of Bandai Company in Tokyo, the father and mother of Tamagotchi, for diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets.\n\nPEACE: Harold Hillman of the University of Surrey, England for his lovingly rendered and ultimately peaceful report \"The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods.\" [Published in Perception 1993,", + " vol 22, pp. 745-53.]\n\nMETEOROLOGY: Bernard Vonnegut of the State University of Albany, for his revealing report, \"Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed.\" [Published in \"Weatherwise,\" October 1975, p. 217.]\n\n\n\nThe 1996 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 1996 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 3rd, 1996 at the 6th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch archived video on C-SPAN.\n\nBIOLOGY:", + " Anders Barheim and Hogne Sandvik of the University of Bergen, Norway, for their tasty and tasteful report, \"Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"British Medical Journal,\" vol. 309, Dec 24-31, 1994, p. 1689.\n\nMEDICINE: James Johnston of R.J. Reynolds, Joseph Taddeo of U.S. Tobacco, Andrew Tisch of Lorillard, William Campbell of Philip Morris, Edward A. Horrigan of Liggett Group, Donald S. Johnston of American Tobacco Company, and the late Thomas E.", + " Sandefur, Jr., chairman of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. for their unshakable discovery, as testified to the U.S. Congress, that nicotine is not addictive.\n\nPHYSICS: Robert Matthews of Aston University, England, for his studies of Murphy's Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast often falls on the buttered side.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Tumbling toast, Murphy's Law and the fundamental constants,\" \"European Journal of Physics,\" vol.16, no.4, July 18, 1995, p. 172-6.\n\nPEACE: Jacques Chirac, President of France, for commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific.\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH:", + " Ellen Kleist of Nuuk, Greenland and Harald Moi of Oslo, Norway, for their cautionary medical report \"Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Genitourinary Medicine,\" vol. 69, no. 4, Aug. 1993, p. 322.\n\nCHEMISTRY: George Goble of Purdue University, for his blistering world record time for igniting a barbeque grill-three seconds, using charcoal and liquid oxygen.\n\nBIODIVERSITY: Chonosuke Okamura of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan, for discovering the fossils of dinosaurs,", + " horses, dragons, princesses, and more than 1000 other extinct \"mini-species,\" each of which is less than 1/100 of an inch in length.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: the series \"Reports of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory,\" published by the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan during the 1970's and 1980's.\n\nLITERATURE: The editors of the journal Social Text, for eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: The paper was \"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,\" Alan Sokal,", + " Social Text, Spring/Summer 1996, pp. 217-252.\n\nECONOMICS: Dr. Robert J. Genco of the University of Buffalo for his discovery that \"financial strain is a risk indicator for destructive periodontal disease.\n\n\n\nREFERENCES: (published after winning the prize): \"Models to Evaluate the Role of Stress in Periodontal Disease,\" Robert J. Genco, et al., Annals of Periodontology, vol. 3, no. 1, July 1998, pp. 288-302. \"Relationship of Stress, Distress, and Inadequate Coping Behaviors to Periodontal Disease,\" Robert J.", + " Genco, et al., Journal of Periodontology, vol. 70, 1999, pp. 711-23.\n\nART: Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for his ornamentally evolutionary invention, the plastic pink flamingo.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Pink Flamingos: Splendor on the Grass\"\n\n\n\nThe 1995 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nThe 1995 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, October 6th, 1995 at the 5th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. The ceremony was webcast live. You can watch the video on our youTube Channel.\n\nNUTRITION:", + " John Martinez of J. Martinez & Company in Atlanta, Georgia, for educating the world about Luak Coffee, the world's most expensive coffee, which is made from coffee beans ingested and excreted by the luak (aka, the palm civet), a bobcat-like animal native to Indonesia.\n\nPHYSICS: D.M.R. Georget, R. Parker, and A.C. Smith, of the Institute of Food Research, Norwich, England, for their rigorous analysis of soggy breakfast cereal, published in the report entitled \"A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " Powder Technology, November, 1994, vol. 81, no. 2, pp. 189-96.\n\nECONOMICS: Awarded jointly to Nick Leeson and his superiors at Barings Bank and to Robert Citron of Orange County, California, for using the calculus of derivatives to demonstrate that every financial institution has its limits.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: \"Barings Lost : Nick Leeson and the Collapse of Barings Plc,\" and \"Big Bets Gone Bad\"\n\nMEDICINE: Marcia E. Buebel, David S. Shannahoff-Khalsa, and Michael R. Boyle, for their invigorating study entitled \"The Effects of Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing on Cognition.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " International Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 57, 1991, pp. 239-249.\n\nLITERATURE: David B. Busch and James R. Starling, of Madison Wisconsin, for their deeply penetrating research report, \"Rectal foreign bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature.\" The citations include reports of, among other items: seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire spring; a snuff box; an oil can with potato stopper; eleven different forms of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs; a jeweler's saw; a frozen pig's tail;", + " a tin cup; a beer glass; and one patient's remarkable ensemble collection consisting of spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch and a magazine.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Surgery, September 1986, pp. 512-519.\n\nPEACE: The Taiwan National Parliament, for demonstrating that politicians gain more by punching, kicking and gouging each other than by waging war against other nations.\n\nPSYCHOLOGY: Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita, of Keio University, for their success in training pigeons to discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet.\n\n\n\nREFERENCE:", + " \"Pigeons' Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and Picasso,\"Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, vol. 63, 1995, pp. 165-174.\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH: Martha Kold Bakkevig of Sintef Unimed in Trondheim, Norway, and Ruth Nielsen of the Technical University of Denmark, for their exhaustive study, \"Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Ergonomics, vol 37, no. 8, Aug. 1994, pp. 1375-89.\n\nDENTISTRY: Robert H.", + " Beaumont, of Shoreview, Minnesota, for his incisive study \"Patient Preference for Waxed or Unwaxed Dental Floss.\"\n\n\n\nREFERENCE: Journal of Periodontology, vol. 61, no. 2, Feb. 1990, pp. 123-5.]\n\nCHEMISTRY: Bijan Pakzad of Beverly Hills, for creating DNA Cologne and DNA PERFUME, neither of which contain deoxyribonucleic acid, and both of which come in a triple helix bottle.\n\n\n\nThe 1994 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nBIOLOGY: W. Brian Sweeney, Brian Krafte-Jacobs,", + " Jeffrey W. Britton, and Wayne Hansen, for their breakthrough study, \"The Constipated Serviceman: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops,\" and especially for their numerical analysis of bowel movement frequency. [Published in \"Military Medicine,\" vol. 158, August, 1993, pp. 346-348.]\n\nPEACE: John Hagelin of Maharishi University and The Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, promulgator of peaceful thoughts, for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C.\n\n[REFERENCE: \"Interim Report:", + " Results of the National Demonstration Project to Reduce Violent Crime and Improve Governmental Effectiveness In Washington, D.C., June 7 to July 30, 1993, Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, Fairfield, Iowa\"]\n\nMEDICINE: This prize is awarded in two parts. First, to Patient X, formerly of the US Marine Corps, valiant victim of a venomous bite from his pet rattlesnake, for his determined use of electroshock therapy -- at his own insistence, automobile sparkplug wires were attached to his lip, and the car engine revved to 3000 rpm for five minutes.", + " Second, to Dr. Richard C. Dart of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center and Dr. Richard A. Gustafson of The University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, for their well-grounded medical report: \"Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation.\" [Published in Annals of Emergency Medicine, vol. 20, no. 6, June 1991, pp. 659-61.]\n\nENTOMOLOGY: Robert A. Lopez of Westport, NY, valiant veterinarian and friend of all creatures great and small, for his series of experiments in obtaining ear mites from cats, inserting them into his own ear,", + " and carefully observing and analyzing the results. [Published as \"Of Mites and Man,\" The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, vol. 203, no. 5, Sept. 1, 1993, pp. 606-7.]\n\nPSYCHOLOGY: Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, practitioner of the psychology of negative reinforcement, for his thirty-year study of the effects of punishing three million citizens of Singapore whenever they spat, chewed gum, or fed pigeons.\n\nLITERATURE: L. Ron Hubbard, ardent author of science fiction and founding father of Scientology, for his crackling Good Book,", + " \"Dianetics,\" which is highly profitable to mankind or to a portion thereof.\n\nCHEMISTRY: Texas State Senator Bob Glasgow, wise writer of logical legislation, for sponsoring the 1989 drug control law which make it illegal to purchase beakers, flasks, test tubes, or other laboratory glassware without a permit.\n\nECONOMICS: Jan Pablo Davila of Chile, tireless trader of financial futures and former employee of the state-owned Codelco Company, for instructing his computer to \"buy\" when he meant \"sell,\" and subsequently attempting to recoup his losses by making increasingly unprofitable trades that ultimately lost.", + "5 percent of Chile's gross national product. Davila's relentless achievement inspired\\ his countrymen to coin a new verb: \" davilar,\" meaning, \"to botch things up royally.\"\n\nMATHEMATICS: The Southern Baptist Church of Alabama, mathematical measurers of morality, for their county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama citizens will go to Hell if they don't repent.\n\n[Click here for additional details.]\n\n\n\nThe 1993 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nPSYCHOLOGY: John Mack of Harvard Medical School and David Jacobs of Temple University, mental visionaries, for their leaping conclusion that people who believe they were kidnapped by aliens from outer space,", + " probably were \u2014 and especially for their conclusion \"the focus of the abduction is the production of children. [REFERENCE: \"Secret Life : Firsthand, Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions\"]\n\nCONSUMER ENGINEERING: Ron Popeil, incessant inventor and perpetual pitchman of late night television, for redefining the industrial revolution with such devices as the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, Mr. Microphone, and the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler. [REFERENCE: \"The Salesman of the Century : Inventing, Marketing, and Selling on TV: How I Did It and How You Can Too!", + "\"]\n\nBIOLOGY: Paul Williams Jr. of the Oregon State Health Division and Kenneth W. Newell of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, bold biological detectives, for their pioneering study, \"Salmonella Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs.\" [Published in American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health, vol. 60, no. 5, May 1970, pp. 926-9.]\n\nECONOMICS: Ravi Batra of Southern Methodist University, shrewd economist and best-selling author of \"The Great Depression of 1990\" ($17.95) and \"Surviving the Great Depression of 1990\"", + " ($18.95), for selling enough copies of his books to single-handedly prevent worldwide economic collapse.\n\nPEACE: The Pepsi-Cola Company of the Phillipines, suppliers of sugary hopes and dreams, for sponsoring a contest to create a millionaire, and then announcing the wrong winning number, thereby inciting and uniting 800,000 riotously expectant winners, and bringing many warring factions together for the first time in their nation's history.\n\nVISIONARY TECHNOLOGY: Presented jointly to Jay Schiffman of Farmington Hills, Michigan, crack inventor of AutoVision, an image projection device that makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same time,", + " and to the Michigan state legislature, for making it legal to do so. REFERENCE: US patent #5061996A.\n\nCHEMISTRY: James Campbell and Gaines Campbell of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, dedicated deliverers of fragrance, for inventing scent strips, the odious method by which perfume is applied to magazine pages.\n\nLITERATURE: Eric Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong, and their 972 co-authors, for publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages. [The study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine,", + " vol. 329, no. 10, September 2, 1993, pp. 673-82. The authors are from the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.]\n\n[Click here for additional details.]\n\nMATHEMATICS: Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina, farsighted and faithful seer of statistics, for calculating the exact odds (710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1) that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist.", + " [REFERENCE: \"Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?\"]\n\nPHYSICS: Louis Kervran of France, ardent admirer of alchemy, for his conclusion that the calcium in chickens' eggshells is created by a process of cold fusion. REFERENCE: \"Biological Transmutations and their applications in: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Ecology, Medicine, Nutrition, Agronomy, Geology\"]\n\nMEDICINE: James F. Nolan, Thomas J. Stillwell, and John P. Sands, Jr., medical men of mercy, for their painstaking research report, \"Acute Management of the Zipper-", + "Entrapped Penis.\" [Published in Journal of Emergency Medicine, vol. 8, no. 3, May/June 1990, pp. 305-7.]\n\n\n\nThe 1992 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nMEDICINE: F. Kanda, E. Yagi, M. Fukuda, K. Nakajima, T. Ohta and O. Nakata of the Shisedo Research Center in Yokohama, for their pioneering research study \"Elucidation of Chemical Compounds Responsible for Foot Malodour,\" especially for their conclusion that people who think they have foot odor do, and those who don't,", + " don't. [Published in British Journal of Dermatology, vol. 122, no. 6,\n\nJune 1990, pp. 771-6.]\n\nARCHEOLOGY: Eclaireurs de France, the Protestant youth group whose name means\"those who show the way,\" fresh-scrubbed removers of grafitti, for erasing the ancient paintings from the walls of the Meyrieres Cave near the French village of Bruniquel.\n\nECONOMICS: The investors of Lloyds of London, heirs to 300 years of dull prudent management, for their bold attempt to insure disaster by refusing to pay for their company's losses.\n\nBIOLOGY:", + " Dr. Cecil Jacobson, relentlessly generous sperm donor, and prolific patriarch of sperm banking, for devising a simple, single-handed method of quality control. [REFERENCE: \"The\n\nBabymaker : Fertility Fraud and the Fall of Dr. Cecil Jacobson\"]\n\nCHEMISTRY: Ivette Bassa, constructor of colorful colloids, for her role in the crowning achievement of twentieth century chemistry, the synthesis of bright blue Jell-O.\n\nPHYSICS: David Chorley and Doug Bower, lions of low-energy physics, for their circular contributions to field theory based on the geometrical destruction of English crops.\n\nPEACE:", + " Daryl Gates, former Police Chief of the City of Los Angeles, for his uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together.\n\nNUTRITION: The utilizers of Spam, courageous consumers of canned comestibles, for 54 years of undiscriminating digestion.\n\nLITERATURE: Yuri Struchkov, unstoppable author from the Institute of Organoelemental Compounds in Moscow, for the 948 scientific papers he is credited with publishing between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days.\n\nART: Presented jointly to Jim Knowlton, modern Renaissance man, for his classic anatomy poster \"Penises of the Animal Kingdom,\" and to the U.S.", + " National Endowment for the Arts for encouraging Mr. Knowlton to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book.\n\nThe 1991 Ig Nobel Prize Winners\n\nCHEMISTRY: Jacques Benveniste, prolific proseletizer and dedicated correspondent of \"Nature,\" for his persistent discovery that water, H2O, is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating to his satisfaction that water is able to remember events long after all trace of those events has vanished.\n\nMEDICINE: Alan Kligerman, deviser of digestive deliverance, vanquisher of vapor, and inventor of Beano, for his pioneering work with anti-gas liquids that prevent bloat,", + " gassiness, discomfort and embarassment.\n\nEDUCATION: J. Danforth Quayle, consumer of time and occupier of space, for demonstrating,better than anyone else, the need for science education.\n\nBIOLOGY: Robert Klark Graham, selector of seeds and prophet of propagation, for his pioneering development of the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that accepts donations only from Nobellians and Olympians.\n\nECONOMICS: Michael Milken, titan of Wall Street and father of the junk bond, to whom the world is indebted.\n\nLITERATURE: Erich von Daniken, visionary raconteur and author of \"Chariots of the Gods,\" for explaining how human civilization was influenced by ancient astronauts from outer space.\n\nPEACE:", + " Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and first champion of the Star Wars weapons system, for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.\n\nDid They Really Do These Things?\n\nAre these things real? Yes, indeed. You can look it up. That's why we give you the references.\n\nThe only exceptions came in 1991, the very first year of the ceremony, and 1994. In 1991, three additional Prizes were given for apocryphal achievements. In 1994, one prize was based on what turned out to be erroneous press accounts. Those four apocryphal achievements are not included in the list on this page.", + " ALL the other Prizes, in all years, were awarded for genuine achievements.\n\nFor extensive background info and additional reference for many of the past winners, see the books Marc Abrahams has written about Ig Nobel Prizes.\n" + ], + "length": 36965, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 91, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 The latest woman to accuse Harvey Weinstein of inappropriate sexual behavior was just 17 when the alleged incident occurred. In a lengthy Instagram post, Kate Beckinsale recounts an experience she had with Weinstein at the Savoy Hotel (the age of consent in the UK is 16). \"He opened the door in his bathrobe. I was incredibly naive and young and it did not cross my mind that this older, unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him,\" she writes. \"After declining alcohol and announcing that I had school in the morning I left, uneasy but unscathed.\" Years later, \"he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn't remember if he had assaulted me or not.\" She also says a male friend was ostracized by Weinstein after warning another young actress about him; that woman ended up sleeping with Weinstein. Beckinsale's account comes as cops in both the US and the UK confirm they're investigating allegations against Weinstein, the Guardian reports. London police are looking into a sexual abuse allegation made against him and received by the department Wednesday. The NYPD, meanwhile, says it's \"conducting a review to determine if there are any additional complaints relating to the Harvey Weinstein matter\" based on allegations in news reports. \"No filed complaints have been identified as of this time,\" the NYPD statement notes. Actresses in the US and abroad have accused Weinstein of sexual harassment or assault. Weinstein, who's reportedly in an Arizona treatment facility, has insisted he believed any sexual encounters were consensual. The Washington Post, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Variety, among many others, are keeping running lists of the women coming forward.\n", + "docs": [ + "Mike Windle/Getty Images for Airbnb; Gabe Ginsberg/Getty Images; Jemal Countess/Getty Images; Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM\n\nAn egregious pattern of sexual allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has emerged through a series of bombshell investigations published by the New York Times and the New Yorker, as well as a variety of other outlets. Compiled below is a timeline of all the specific sexual assault and harassment accusations against Weinstein that have surfaced so far, currently totaling more than 60 accusations of varying degrees of harassment (including at least 16 allegations he exposed himself) and 27 accusations of sexual assault. Reporting by Jodi Kantor,", + " Megan Twohey, and Rachel Abrams in the New York Times and by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker suggests there have been other incidents for which the reporters could not disclose details.\n\nWeinstein\u2019s office has issued blanket denials about potential crimes committed by Weinstein, saying, \u201cAny allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances. He will not be available for further comments, as he is taking the time to focus on his family, on getting counseling and rebuilding his life.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nWeinstein himself has acknowledged inappropriate conduct without offering any details,", + " saying to Page Six\u2019s Emily Smith, \u201cI admit to a whole way of behavior that is not good. I can\u2019t talk specifics, but I put myself in positions that were stupid.\u201d\n\nWe will continue updating this list as new information becomes available.\n\nLate 1970s: Weinstein allegedly raped Hope Exiner d\u2019Amore, an employee of his concert promotion company, in Park Lane Hotel in Manhattan, after claiming that there had been a reservation mistake that meant they\u2019d have to share a hotel room.\n\nLate 1970s: Weinstein allegedly made the actress Cynthia Burr, then in her early 20s, perform oral sex on him in a hallway in New York City.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\n1980:", + " While working on his first movie, The Burning, Weinstein allegedly discarded his clothes and asked intern Paula Wachowiak for a massage when she dropped by his hotel room to deliver checks. Later, he said to Wachowiak, \u201cSo, was seeing me naked the highlight of your internship?\u201d\n\n1984: Weinstein invited college junior Tomi-Ann Roberts to his hotel in New York for a meeting ostensibly about a role in an upcoming film, and allegedly he summoned her to the bathtub, where he was nude, and pressured her to take off her clothes.\n\n1984: Weinstein allegedly kissed a female crew member of Playing for Keeps. She resisted,", + " but he forced her onto a bed and tried to perform oral sex on her. She told lead producer Alan Brewer what had happened but declined to file a police report, saying she didn\u2019t want to lose her job.\n\nLate 1980s: After allegedly grabbing actress Lysette Anthony at his rented home in Chelsea, Weinstein later appeared at Anthony\u2019s home and raped her, the actress says. Afterward, she felt obligated by her career to continue meeting with the producer. Anthony reported the crime to the London Metropolitan Police on Oct. 11, 2017.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\nLate 1980s: While at the Savoy Hotel,", + " Weinstein asked former office assistant and aspiring actress Lisa Rose for a massage. Rose had been warned of his behavior, so she rejected him and moved to a different room.\n\n1989: Weinstein allegedly forced former actress Heather Kerr to touch his genitals during a Los Angeles meeting. Kerr subsequently quit acting.\n\nLate 1980s-early 1990s: Weinstein allegedly showed up naked to a female Miramax executive\u2019s bedroom in London. The woman told a producer, Elizabeth Karlsen, about the encounter and later reached an out-of-court settlement and departed from the company.\n\nAround 1990: Weinstein summoned actress Kate Beckinsale, then 17,", + " to his room at the Savoy Hotel, allegedly meeting with her while wearing only a bathrobe and offering her alcohol. Uncomfortable, she gave an excuse for leaving. \u201cA few years later he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn't remember if he had assaulted me or not,\u201d she recalled this week. Beckinsale says her subsequent rejections of his advances over the years \u201cundoubtably harmed my career.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\n1990: Weinstein allegedly pushed actress Sophie Dix onto a bed at the Savoy Hotel and pulled at her clothes. Dix then locked herself in the bathroom,", + " and when she opened the door, she found Weinstein facing her and masturbating. Dix spoke to colleagues about the \u201cdamaging\u201d incident, and months later, Weinstein called her to demand she \u201cstop talking.\u201d\n\n1990: Weinstein allegedly behaved inappropriately toward and then reached a settlement with an unnamed assistant in New York.\n\nEarly 1990s: Weinstein allegedly asked actress Rosanna Arquette for a massage and tried to put her hand on his penis. When she rejected him, he said, \u201cYou\u2019re making a big mistake.\u201d Subsequently, Arquette faced career struggles; Weinstein \u201cmade things very difficult to me for years,\u201d she told the New Yorker.\n\nEarly 1990s:", + " Following an interaction with Weinstein, a young woman unexpectedly left the company, later getting a settlement.\n\nAdvertisement\n\n\n\n1990s: After artist and director Tara Subkoff was informally offered a role in a Weinstein movie, the producer allegedly pulled her onto his lap at a premiere party. Noticing his erection, Subkoff moved away, and Weinstein propositioned her. Subkoff immediately left the gathering and found herself blacklisted by rumors and removed from the new role.\n\n1990s: During a tour of his Tribeca office, Weinstein placed aspiring actress Louise Godbold's hand on his crotch, she wrote in a blog post.", + " At a later meeting in Los Angeles, he allegedly pressured her into giving him a massage in his hotel bed.\n\n1991: Weinstein allegedly badgered former employee Laura Madden for massages at various hotels in Dublin and London.\n\nAround 1991: Weinstein allegedly exposed himself to actress Sean Young while on the set of Love Crimes, a Miramax-produced film.\n\nAround 1992: Weinstein allegedly violently raped actress Annabella Sciorra after dropping her off at her New York apartment. After the incident, she faced professional difficulties for three years, which she attributes to the \u201cHarvey machine.\u201d Later, Weinstein continued to make unwelcome sexual advances,", + " including showing up at Sciorra\u2019s hotel room in his underwear, banging on her door, calling, and sending cars to pick her up.\n\n1992: Weinstein allegedly assaulted a woman in London, according to a report received by the London Metropolitan Police.\n\n1993: Weinstein allegedly exposed himself and chased Swingers actress Katherine Kendall around a room in his apartment. Kendall says the traumatic encounter diminished the allure of working in the entertainment industry.\n\nAround 1994: Weinstein allegedly made a sexual advance toward Gwyneth Paltrow, then in her 20s, in his hotel suite. After Brad Pitt, Paltrow\u2019s boyfriend at the time,", + " confronted Weinstein, the producer allegedly warned her to stay silent about the encounter.\n\n1994: Weinstein allegedly sexually assaulted a woman in London. The case is currently under investigation by the London Metropolitan Police.\n\nMid-1990s: Weinstein allegedly assaulted a woman in London, according to the London Metropolitan Police.\n\nMid-1990s: Weinstein allegedly propositioned actress Claire Forlani repeatedly at dinners and asked her to massage him during meetings at the Peninsula Hotel. \u201cAll I remember was I ducked, dived and ultimately got out of there without getting slobbered over, well just a bit,\u201d she recalled.\n\nMid-to-late 1990s:", + " After Weinstein helped British writer Liza Campbell get a job as a freelance script reader, he met with her in his London hotel room and allegedly asked her to bathe with him.\n\n1995: At the Toronto International Film Festival, Weinstein allegedly harassed actress Mira Sorvino. Later, Weinstein allegedly arrived at her apartment late one night for a marketing meeting he\u2019d suggested, only to leave once she lied that her new boyfriend was heading over.\n\n1995: After repeated invitations from Weinstein and pressure from her agent to meet with the producer, French actress Florence Darel visited Weinstein's room at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Despite's his then-wife's presence in the room next door,", + " the Miramax mogul allegedly asked Darel to become his occasional mistress so she could continue to work with him.\n\nAround 1996: Weinstein allegedly propositioned actress Ashley Judd in his hotel suite, and she rejected him. She has since appeared in Miramax movies but only years after the incident.\n\n1996: Weinstein allegedly harassed French actress Judith Godr\u00e8che while in Cannes. When she called the female executive who\u2019d been present at an earlier meeting, the woman told her not to speak out, as it might hurt the success of a soon-to-be-released film in which she'd starred.\n\n1997: Weinstein reached a $100,", + "000 settlement with actress Rose McGowan after she alleged an incident in a hotel room at the Sundance Film Festival. While she wasn\u2019t quoted in the New Yorker and New York Times expos\u00e9s, in a tweet Thursday aimed at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, McGowan wrote, \u201cI told the head of your studio that HW raped me. Over & over I said it.\u201d\n\n1997: After a Cannes party, Weinstein and his entourage brought model Zo\u00eb Brock to the Hotel Du Cap. When Weinstein\u2019s hotel room emptied, he allegedly removed his clothes and asked for a massage and then chased Brock when she fled for the bathroom. After Brock demanded to go home,", + " Weinstein\u2019s assistant told her, \u201cOf all the girls he does this to you are the one I really felt bad about [sic].\u201d\n\n1997: Italian actress Asia Argento says Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her after she arrived at Weinstein\u2019s hotel thinking she was attending a Miramax party. Argento later had a relationship with Weinstein, during which she agreed to have sex with him because she felt \"obliged,\" but says she was always haunted by the initial rape.\n\n1998: Weinstein allegedly harassed actress Angelina Jolie in a hotel room.\n\n1998: At a meeting with filmmaker Sarah Polley, her publicist,", + " and one of Weinstein\u2019s employees, the Guinevere actress, then 19, says Weinstein encouraged her to form a \u201cclose relationship\u201d with him to further her career.\n\n1998: Weinstein settled with London assistant Zelda Perkins after she threatened to pursue legal recourse or publicly share Weinstein\u2019s inappropriate interactions with her and other female colleagues.\n\nLate 1990s: Weinstein allegedly used the bathroom and took a shower while talking business with actress Lauren Holly at his hotel, then approached her naked and suggested they give each other massages. Holly says he warned her it would be a \"bad decision\" to leave the room. When she shared her experience with fellow industry insiders at a dinner later that day,", + " Holly says they told her that since it hadn't been assault, she should keep quiet.\n\n1999: Allegedly Weinstein repeatedly propositioned actress and writer Marisa Coughlan, then 25, during meetings at the Peninsula and a L.A. restaurant, trying to \"barter sex for movie roles,\" she says. Coughlan rejected him multiple times and ultimately didn't get the part she and Weinstein had discussed.\n\n2000: During the filming of Get Over It, Weinstein allegedly blocked the door of his hotel room and refused to let actress Melissa Sagemiller, then 24, leave until she\u2019d kissed him. Later, she says,", + " he \u201ckidnapped\u201d her bags from her airport flight so she\u2019d be forced to join him and others on his private plane. While Sagemiller talked with the cast, Weinstein\u2019s producing partner told her, \u201cDon\u2019t say anything \u2026 it will definitely hurt your career. This is Harvey.\u201d\n\nAround 2000: At a hotel meeting, Weinstein allegedly asked Canadian actress Larissa Gomes, then 21, to show him her breasts, massaged her over her complaints, and tried to kiss her.\n\nEarly 2000s: Weinstein offered Heather Graham her choice of a movie role, then talked about an open-relationship agreement he had with his wife,", + " implying, Graham thought, that he would give her work in exchange for sex. Later Weinstein lied to try to get Graham into a one-on-one meeting that she cancelled.\n\nEarly 2000s: Weinstein banged on actress Daryl Hannah\u2019s hotel-room door in Cannes two nights in a row. Later, in the Hassler Roma hotel, he allegedly asked Hannah to let him feel her breasts. Hannah \u201cexperienced instant repercussions,\u201d including a cancelled hotel room and flights.\n\nEarly 2000s: Weinstein allegedly groped Australian actress Natalie Mendoza during the filming of The Great Raid, and she threatened to punch him.\n\n2000s: While on a yacht at Cannes,", + " model Angie Everhart awoke from a nap to see Weinstein allegedly masturbating and blocking a door. He warned her to stay quiet about it, but when Everhart told friends, they replied, \u201cOh that\u2019s just Harvey.\u201d\n\nAround 2001: Weinstein wore only a bathrobe for a meeting at the Savoy Hotel in London with actress Romola Garai about a role in Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. While she went on to appear in the film, the episode left the actress feeling \u201cviolated.\u201d\n\n2002: Actress Alice Evans says Weinstein asked her to go with him to a bathroom at a Cannes Film Festival party. \"I want to touch your tits.", + " Kiss you a little,\" Weinstein allegedly said, and when she rejected his advances, implied that her refusal would cost her then-boyfriend, fellow actor Ioan Gruffudd, a part for which he'd recently auditioned. Gruffudd did not get the part.\n\n2003: Weinstein allegedly offered aspiring actress Dawn Dunning roles in upcoming films in exchange for a threesome. She says that when she refused, he told her, \u201cYou\u2019ll never make it in this business.\u201d\n\n2003: After making sexual comments over dinner about model Samantha Panagrosso on a yacht at Cannes, Weinstein allegedly went to her room, pushed her onto the bed,", + " and groped her. When Panagrosso told friends in the industry, they wrote off the producer\u2019s behavior as typical.\n\nEarly-to-mid 2000s: After making eye contact with Weinstein at a party hosted by Vogue editor Anna Wintour, model Trish Goff was invited to have lunch with Weinstein at the Tribeca Grill. While dining in a private room, he allegedly groped and attempted to kiss her, not relenting until Goff escaped into the public dining area.\n\n2004: Despite Ashley (Anderson) Matthau\u2019s protests that she was engaged, Weinstein allegedly brought the Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights dancer to his Puerto Rico hotel room,", + " fondled her breasts, then straddled and masturbated on her. Prior to the encounter, Matthau says she told the production team of her worry about Weinstein\u2019s pushy invitations, but no one offered guidance. Afterward, Weinstein\u2019s legal team told Matthau, \u201cWe\u2019ll drag you through the mud by your hair\u201d if she went public, so she ultimately signed a settlement of more than $100,000.\n\nSummer 2004: Aspiring actress Lucia Stoller (now Lucia Evans), then a rising senior at Middlebury College, was allegedly made to perform oral sex on Weinstein during a daytime meeting at Miramax\u2019s Tribeca office.", + " After the incident, Weinstein continued to call her late at night.\n\n2004: Weinstein allegedly moved a public meeting with Katya Mtsitouridze, a prominent figure in the Russian film industry, to his Venice hotel room, greeted her in a bathrobe, and suggested a massage. A decade later, she ran into the producer, who she says told her, \"Don't even think about saying anything.\"\n\n2005: After meeting Lena Headey at the Cannes Film Festival, Weinstein allegedly propositioned the English actress. She refused him and has not appeared in another Miramax film since. Years later, the Game of Thrones actress says the producer invited her to his hotel room in L.A.", + " When she made clear to him in the elevator that the meeting was to be strictly professional, Weinstein became enraged and warned her to tell no one.\n\n2005: Weinstein placed his hand on actress Connie Nielsen\u2019s thigh at a dinner celebrating the opening night of The Great Raid, Nielsen wrote in Variety. She had previously warned co-stars to stay away from the producer.\n\nMid-2000s: Weinstein allegedly grabbed Canadian actress Erika Rosenbaum by the back of her neck in a Toronto hotel room and masturbated behind her. She said he\u2019d made aggressive advances toward her with her in earlier meetings.\n\n2006: Allegedly, after several previous advances,", + " Weinstein invited a production assistant, Mimi Haleyi, to his New York City home and \u201corally forced himself on me while I was on my period,\u201d Haleyi said.\n\n2007: Weinstein allegedly groped Brazilian model Juliana De Paula and forced her to kiss other models, then followed her around naked as she tried to leave his New York City apartment.\n\n2007: When New York journalist Lauren Sivan dodged an unwanted kiss, Weinstein allegedly masturbated in front of her at the Cafe Socialista restaurant.\n\nJanuary 2008: During at pitch meeting in his hotel room at Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Weinstein allegedly exposed himself to screenwriter and actress Louisette Geiss and entreated her to watch him masturbate in the nearby hot tub.\n\nFebruary 2008:", + " Weinstein allegedly showed up to actress and model Natassia Malthe\u2019s London hotel room and raped her. At a later meeting, Malthe said, he tried to initiate a threesome.\n\n2008: Weinstein interviewed a potential babysitter, actress and writer Sarah Ann Masse, while in his boxers and undershirt at his Connecticut home. He allegedly ended the meeting\u2014during which he made his children leave the room\u2014with an uncomfortably long hug and told Masse, \u201cI love you.\u201d She ultimately didn't get the job.\n\nAround 2010: After Vietnamese actress and model Vu Thu Phuong\u2019s scenes were cut from one of his films,", + " Weinstein, wearing only a towel, allegedly offered to teach actress how to perform sex scenes, as his upcoming movies required them. Phuong turned him down, and the episode discouraged her from further pursuing acting.\n\n2010: Weinstein allegedly revealed himself and demanded sex from French actress Emma de Caunes after a lunch meeting. Later that day, he called repeatedly and offered her gifts.\n\n2010: At a dinner in the Peninsula Hotel with director Lina Esco, Weinstein allegedly pressured Esco for a kiss; she refused repeatedly. Later, he helped her secure an editor for her film Free the Nipple.\n\n2010: Weinstein offered masseuse Juls Bindi a book deal,", + " then at a later appointment, allegedly masturbated before her and groped her breasts.\n\nNovember 2010: Allegedly Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on and then masturbated in front of actress and model Dominique Huett at a meeting in the Peninsula Hotel. Huett has now sued the Weinstein Company for its negligence in failing to protect her from Weinstein\u2019s assault.\n\nAround 2010: Weinstein allegedly propositioned actress Eva Green in his hotel room, and she had to push him off. Green\u2019s mother says he then intimidated her daughter with talk of retaliation.\n\n2010, 2011, and 2015: Weinstein allegedly assaulted a woman in London,", + " according to a report she filed to London police on Oct. 14, 2017.\n\n2010s: After meeting actress L\u00e9a Seydoux, Weinstein insisted they get drinks. That night, sitting on a couch in his hotel room, he allegedly climbed onto her to force a kiss, prompting Seydoux to push him off. During subsequent encounters, Weinstein made comments about her that Seydoux describes as \u201cmisogynistic,\u201d and he bragged openly about his sexual conquests.\n\nJanuary 2011: Weinstein allegedly pressured actress Jessica Barth to give him a naked massage at the Peninsula Hotel. She rejected his advances.", + " As Barth left, he gave her the contact information of a female executive to appease her.\n\nMarch 2011: While attending the Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong, the producer allegedly asked Singaporean actress Caitanya Tan to read scripts in his hotel room. When she replied that felt uncomfortable going to his room, Weinstein said, \u201cDo you know who I am? Do you know how I can make you very famous?\u201d\n\nOctober 2011: Weinstein allegedly groped Lacey Dorn, an aspiring filmmaker who\u2019d recently graduated from Stanford, at a Halloween party at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Dorn\u2019s friends dismissed the unwanted contact as a \u201crite of passage\u201d in the industry.\n\nAround 2011:", + " Weinstein allegedly asked to massage actress Lupita Nyong\u2019o, then a student at the Yale School of Drama, while hosting a screening at his Connecticut home. The actress offered to massage him instead, then made a quick exit when he moved to remove his pants. Weinstein and Nyong\u2019o met professionally again, and in an op-ed in the New York Times, the actress writes that he tried to move a lunch at the Tribeca Grill to a private room and noted how he\u2019d helped other actress\u2019 careers. Nyong\u2019o refuted his advances and vowed never to act in a Weinstein movie.\n\nEarly-to-mid-2010s:", + " After a meeting with a director about a potential upcoming role, Weinstein allegedly asked actress Cara Delevingne, who is bisexual, to kiss a woman in his hotel room and, as Delevingne left, attempted to kiss the actress himself. Delevingne ultimately got the part.\n\n2012, 2013, 2014: Weinstein assaulted allegedly a woman three separate times, once outside of England and twice in London. Local police are investigating the allegations.\n\nFebruary 2013: An anonymous Italian model-actress says that Weinstein unexpectedly showed up to her hotel, the Mr. C Beverly Hills, grabbed her hair, and allegedly raped her.", + " The anonymous woman, now 38, reported the incident to the Los Angeles Police Department on October 19, 2017.\n\n2013: Weinstein allegedly propositioned actress Amber Anderson and tried to move her hand to touch him inappropriately. He also warned her that telling others of the private meeting would affect her \u201copportunities.\u201d\n\n2013: After a tea with Weinstein at the Peninsula Hotel, actress and comic Chelsea Skidmore alleges Weinstein requested a massage and, when she turned him down, masturbated in front of her. At three meetings over the next three years, Weinstein exposed himself or pushed Skidmore to \u201cget physical,\u201d in the words of a Washington Post article,", + " with other women.\n\n2014: Weinstein allegedly asked writer and actress Brit Marling to shower with him during a meeting in his hotel room, Marling wrote in the Los Angeles Times.\n\nDecember 2014: Weinstein allegedly propositioned temporary front-desk assistant Emily Nestor repeatedly in a breakfast meeting her second day of work. A friend alerted human resources, but Nestor didn\u2019t push the complaint further and ultimately decided not to go into the entertainment industry.\n\n2015: At the same hotel, Weinstein allegedly pressured a different assistant into giving him a naked massage.\n\nMarch 2015: Weinstein allegedly groped Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez at what was supposed to be a business meeting at his office.", + " Battilana Gutierrez reported the assault to the New York Police Department and extracted a taped admission of Weinstein\u2019s behavior, but the Manhattan district attorney\u2019s office ultimately decided not to file charges. Weinstein later reached a settlement with the model.\n\n2015: Lauren O\u2019Connor, then 28, wrote a memo to company executives about Weinstein\u2019s actions creating a \u201ctoxic environment for women\u201d and her experience of feeling \u201csexualized and diminished.\u201d Weinstein made a settlement with her before the board could hire a lawyer to investigate.\n\nDate unknown: Weinstein allegedly offered Friday Night Lights actress Minka Kelly a lavish life as his girlfriend during a business lunch at his hotel,", + " an offer she refused.\n\nDate unknown: Actress Mia Kirshner wrote in an op-ed that Weinstein \u201cattempted to treat me like chattel\u201d during a hotel meeting. Afterwards, she warned other actors of his behavior.\n\nDate unknown: Weinstein allegedly exposed himself to Italian actress Giovanna Rei at what was supposed to be a group gathering at the Hessler Roma hotel.\n\nDate unknown: Former Miramax Books employee Ivana Lowell wrote in her memoir, Why Not Say What Happened?, that Weinstein showed up at her apartment unannounced and asked for a massage. When the book was published, Weinstein threatened to sue her. ", + " In a statement sent to journalist Yashar Ali, actress and model Cara Delevigne shared her experience with Weinstein. Delevigne also shared her story on Instagram :\n\n\"When I first started to work as an actress, I was working on a film and I received a call from\u200e Harvey Weinstein asking if I had slept with any of the women I was seen out with in the media. It was a very odd and uncomfortable call....I answered none of his questions and hurried off the phone but before I hung up, he said to me that if I was gay or decided to be with a woman especially in public that I'd never get the role of a straight woman or make it as an actress in Hollywood.", + " A year or two later, I went to a meeting with him in the lobby of a hotel with a director about an upcoming film. The director left the meeting and Harvey asked me to stay and chat with him. As soon as we were alone he began to brag about all the actresses he had slept with and how he had made their careers and spoke about other inappropriate things of a sexual nature. He then invited me to his room. I quickly declined and asked his assistant if my car was outside. She said it wasn't and wouldn't be for a bit and I should go to his room. At that moment I felt very powerless and scared but didn't want to act that way hoping that I was wrong about the situation.", + " When I arrived I was relieved to find another woman in his room and thought immediately I was safe. He asked us to kiss and she began some sort of advances upon his direction. I swiftly got up and asked him if he knew that I could sing. And I began to sing....I thought it would make the situation better....more professional....like an audition....I was so nervous. After singing I said again that I had to leave. He walked me to the door and stood in front of it and tried to kiss me on the lips. I stopped him and managed to get out of the room. I still got the part for the film and always thought that he gave it to me because of what happened.", + " Since then I felt awful that I did the movie. I felt like I didn't deserve the part. I was so hesitant about speaking out....I didn't want to hurt his family. I felt guilty as if I did something wrong. I was also terrified that this sort of thing had happened to so many women I know but no one had said anything because of fear.\" ", + " In the past week, The New York Times and The New Yorker have both published detailed expos\u00e9s about Hollywood titan Harvey Weinstein in which multiple women share accounts of their encounters with the famed producer over decades, alleging rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment.\n\n\n\nMany of the stories bear similarities: Weinstein would arrange a hotel meet-up under the guise of business, he would request a massage, make intimidating sexual advances or masturbate in front of his subject. Reports corroborate that Weinstein often preyed on young actresses and offered the promise of fame or career ruin. Since the allegations have surfaced, other alleged victims have come forward with stories of their experiences with Weinstein,", + " including Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow.\n\nHere is a running list of the accounts, that we\u2019ll keep updated should more stories come out.\n\nActress Ashley Judd recalled a hotel breakfast meeting with Weinstein while shooting Kiss the Girls. (NYT)\n\nMr. Weinstein soon issued invitation after invitation, she said. Could he give her a massage? When she refused, he suggested a shoulder rub. She rejected that too, she recalled. He steered her toward a closet, asking her to help pick out his clothing for the day, and then toward the bathroom. Would she watch him take a shower? she remembered him saying.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nFormer Weinstein and Company employee Lauren O\u2019Connor filed an internal memo about Weinstein\u2019s coercive behavior.", + " (NYT)\n\nThough Ms. O\u2019Connor had been writing only about a two-year period, her memo echoed other women\u2019s complaints. Mr. Weinstein required her to have casting discussions with aspiring actresses after they had private appointments in his hotel room, she said, her description matching those of other former employees. She suspected that she and other female Weinstein employees, she wrote, were being used to facilitate liaisons with \u201cvulnerable women who hope he will get them work.\u201d\n\nFormer Weinstein employee Emily Nestor said she dealt with repeated sexual advances.\n\nVia The New Yorker:\n\n\n\nHe asked to hold her hand; she said no. In Nestor\u2019s account of the exchange,", + " Weinstein said, \u201cOh, the girls always say \u2018no.\u2019 You know, \u2018No, no.\u2019 And then they have a beer or two and then they\u2019re throwing themselves at me.\u201d In a tone that Nestor described as \u201cvery weirdly proud,\u201d Weinstein added \u201cthat he\u2019d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby.\u201d She assumed that he meant he\u2019d never drugged a woman. \u201cIt\u2019s just a bizarre thing to be so proud of,\u201d she said. \u201cThat you\u2019ve never had to resort to doing that. It was just so far removed from reality and normal rules of consent.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nVia The New York Times:\n\nIn 2014,", + " Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Mr. Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her \u201ccrying and very distraught,\u201d wrote a colleague, Lauren O\u2019Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.\n\n\u201cThere is a toxic environment for women at this company,\u201d Ms.", + " O\u2019Connor said in the letter, addressed to several executives at the company run by Mr. Weinstein.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nEx-employee Lauren Madden recalled locking herself in a bathroom. (NYT)\n\nMs. Madden later told Karen Katz, a friend and colleague in the acquisitions department, about Mr. Weinstein\u2019s overtures, including a time she locked herself in the bathroom of his hotel room, sobbing. \u201cWe were so young at the time,\u201d said Ms. Katz, now a documentary filmmaker. \u201cWe did not understand how wrong it was or how Laura should deal with it.\u201d\n\n\n\nAdvertisement\n\nWeinstein reached a settlement with actress Rose McGowan in 1997.", + " (NYT)\n\nThe $100,000 settlement was \u201cnot to be construed as an admission\u201d by Mr. Weinstein, but intended to \u201cavoid litigation and buy peace,\u201d according to the legal document, which was reviewed by The Times.\n\nDays after that piece came out, McGowan wrote on Twitter that \u201cthat HW raped me.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nZelda Perkins, a former assistant in Weinstein\u2019s London office, confronted Weinstein about his conduct in 1998. (NYT)\n\nAccording to former colleagues, she and several co-workers had been regularly subjected to inappropriate requests or comments in hotel rooms, and she was particularly concerned about the treatment of another woman in the office.", + " She told Mr. Weinstein that he had to stop, according to the former colleagues, and that she would go public or initiate legal action unless he changed his behavior.\n\nItalian actress Lucia Stoller (who now goes by Lucia Evans) said Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex during an office meeting. (The New Yorker)\n\n\u201cAt that point, after that, is when he assaulted me,\u201d Evans said. \u201cHe forced me to perform oral sex on him.\u201d As she objected, Weinstein took his penis out of his pants and pulled her head down onto it. \u201cI said, over and over, \u2018I don\u2019t want to do this, stop,", + " don\u2019t,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cI tried to get away, but maybe I didn\u2019t try hard enough. I didn\u2019t want to kick him or fight him.\u201d In the end, she said, \u201cHe\u2019s a big guy. He overpowered me.\u201d\n\n\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Asia Argento said Weinstein coerced her into oral sex in his hotel room. (The New Yorker)\n\nArgento said that, after she reluctantly agreed to give Weinstein a massage, he pulled her skirt up, forced her legs apart, and performed oral sex on her as she repeatedly told him to stop. Weinstein \u201cterrified me, and he was so big,\u201d she said.", + " \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t stop. It was a nightmare.\u201d At some point, Argento said, she stopped saying no and feigned enjoyment, because she thought it was the only way the assault would end. \u201cI was not willing,\u201d she told me. \u201cI said, \u2018No, no, no.\u2019... It\u2019s twisted. A big fat man wanting to eat you. It\u2019s a scary fairy tale.\u201d Argento, who insisted that she wanted to tell her story in all its complexity, said that she didn\u2019t physically fight him off, something that has prompted years of guilt.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nIt\u2019s twisted. A big fat man wanting to eat you.", + " It\u2019s a scary fairy tale.\n\nActress Mira Sorvino recalled Weinstein showing up to her apartment. (The New Yorker)\n\n\u201cHe started massaging my shoulders, which made me very uncomfortable, and then tried to get more physical, sort of chasing me around,\u201d she recalled. She scrambled for ways to ward him off, telling him it was against her religion to date married men. (At the time, Weinstein was married to Eve Chilton, a former assistant.) Then she left the room.\ufeff\n\nAdvertisement\n\nModel Ambra Battilana Gutierrez reported her sexual assault and then worked with NYPD on a sting operation targeting Weinstein, which was recorded.", + " (The New Yorker)\n\nGutierrez says no repeatedly; Weinstein persists, and after a while she accedes to his demand to go upstairs. But, standing in the hallway outside his room, she refuses to go farther. In an increasingly tense exchange, he presses her to enter. Gutierrez says, \u201cI don\u2019t want to,\u201d \u201cI want to leave,\u201d and \u201cI want to go downstairs.\u201d She asks him directly why he groped her breasts the day before.\n\nFrench actress Emma de Caunes said Weinstein emerged from a shower naked and erect and instructed her to lie on the bed. (The New Yorker)\n\n\u201cI was very petrified,\u201d de Caunes said.", + " \u201cBut I didn\u2019t want to show him that I was petrified, because I could feel that the more I was freaking out, the more he was excited.\u201d She added, \u201cIt was like a hunter with a wild animal. The fear turns him on.\u201d De Caunes told Weinstein that she was leaving, and he panicked. \u201cWe haven\u2019t done anything!\u201d she remembered him saying. \u201cIt\u2019s like being in a Walt Disney movie!\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Rosanna Arquette said Weinstein exposed himself in his hotel room. (The New Yorker)\n\nArquette recalled that, when she arrived at the room, Weinstein opened the door wearing a white bathrobe.", + " Weinstein said that his neck was sore and that he needed a massage. She told him that she could recommend a good masseuse. \u201cThen he grabbed my hand,\u201d she said. He put it on his neck. When she yanked her hand away, she told me, Weinstein grabbed it again and pulled it toward his penis, which was visible and erect. \u201cMy heart was really racing. I was in a fight-or-flight moment,\u201d she said. She told Weinstein, \u201cI will never do that.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Jessica Barth said Weinstein made suggestive advances in a hotel room. (The New Yorker)\n\nBarth said that, in the conversation that followed,", + " he alternated between offering to cast her in a film and demanding a naked massage in bed. \u201cSo, what would happen if, say, we\u2019re having some champagne and I take my clothes off and you give me a massage?\u201d she recalled him asking. \u201cAnd I\u2019m, like, \u2018That\u2019s not going to happen.\u2019 \u201d\n\nWhen she moved toward the door to leave, Weinstein lashed out, saying that she needed to lose weight \u201cto compete with Mila Kunis,\u201d and then, apparently in an effort to mollify her, promising a meeting with one of his female executives.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nTV reporter Lauren Sivan recalled Weinstein masturbating in front of her.", + " (Megyn Kelly Today, NBC)\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s when he cornered me in this vestibule and leaned in and tried to kiss me, which I immediately rebuffed, and said, \u2018Whoa, whoa, whoa, I had no idea what this was, I\u2019m sorry, I have a very serious boyfriend and I\u2019m not interested,\u2019\u201d Sivan said. \u201cI thought it would end there.\u201d Instead, Sivan says, Weinstein refused to let her leave. \u201cThat\u2019s when he blocked the entrance,\u201d she said, \u201cAnd said, \u2018Just stand there and be quiet.\u2019\u201d Shocked, Sivan said she \u201cstood there dumbfounded\u201d as Weinstein exposed himself and began masturbating.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Romola Garai said Weinstein came to the hotel room door in his robe.", + " (The Guardian)\n\n\u201cI remember the feeling of seeing him opening the door in the dressing gown and thinking, \u2018Oh god, this is a casting couch\u2019. But I guess it\u2019s now only as a much older woman that I understood what it meant. At the time I understood myself to be a commodity and that my value in the industry rested almost exclusively on the way I looked and I didn\u2019t really think of myself to be any more than that.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nLouise Godbold, who runs the non-profit Echo Parenting & Education, wrote about an encounter with Weinstein that involved a massage request.\n\nThe details of what I have learned was not unique to me are out there now \u2013 the office tour that became an occasion to trap me in an empty meeting room,", + " the begging for a massage, his hands on my shoulders as I attempted to beat a retreat\u2026 all while not wanting to alienate the most powerful man in Hollywood.\n\nGwyneth Paltrow said Weinstein sexually harassed her when she was 22 years old filming Emma. (NYT)\n\nBefore shooting began, he summoned her to his suite at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for a work meeting that began uneventfully. It ended with Mr. Weinstein placing his hands on her and suggesting they head to the bedroom for massages, she said. \u201cI was a kid, I was signed up, I was petrified,\u201d she said in an interview,", + " publicly disclosing that she was sexually harassed by the man who ignited her career and later helped her win an Academy Award.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAngelina Jolie recalled Weinstein making sexual advances in a hotel room. (NYT)\n\n\u201cI had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did,\u201d Ms. Jolie said in an email. \u201cThis behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Katherine Kendall said Weinstein chased her around a hotel room. (NYT)\n\nMs. Kendall said she was nervous, but it was daytime,", + " and she relaxed when she saw pictures of his wife on the wall. \u201cHe\u2019s keeping it professional, he makes me a drink, we talk about movies and art and books for about an hour,\u201d she recalled. \u201cI thought: He\u2019s taking me seriously.\u201d He went to the bathroom, came back in a robe and asked her to give him a massage, she said. \u201cEverybody does it,\u201d he said, according to Ms. Kendall, and mentioned a famous model\u2019s name. She refused; he left the room, and returned nude, she said.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nTomi-Ann Roberts, a then-aspiring actress, said Weinstein tried to get her to take her top off in front of him.", + " (NYT)\n\nWhen she arrived, he was nude in the bathtub, she recalled. He told her that she would give a much better audition if she were comfortable \u201cgetting naked in front of him,\u201d too, because the character she might play would have a topless scene. If she could not bare her breasts in private, she would not be able to do it on film, Ms. Roberts recalled Mr. Weinstein saying.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nFrench actress Judith Godr\u00e8che said Weinstein requested a massage in his hotel room. (NYT)\n\nUpstairs, he asked to give her a massage, Ms. Godr\u00e8che said. She said no.", + " He argued that casual massages were an American custom \u2014 he gave them to his secretary all the time, Ms. Godr\u00e8che recalled him saying. \u201cThe next thing I know, he\u2019s pressing against me and pulling off my sweater,\u201d she said. She pulled away and left the suite.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nCostume designer Dawn Dunning said Weinstein coerced her in his hotel room while wearing a bathrobe. (NYT)\n\nThen his assistant invited her to a meal with Mr. Weinstein at a Manhattan hotel. Ms. Dunning headed to the restaurant, where she was told that Mr. Weinstein\u2019s earlier meeting was running late, so she should head up to his suite.", + " There was no meeting. Mr. Weinstein was in a bathrobe, behind a coffee table covered with papers. He told her they were contracts for his next three films, according to Ms. Dunning. But she could only sign them on a condition: She would have to have three-way sex with him.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nHeather Graham recalled Weinstein making a sexually suggestive comment that made her uncomfortable. (Variety)\n\nIn the early 2000s Harvey Weinstein called me into his office. There was a pile of scripts sitting on his desk. \u201cI want to put you in one of my movies,\u201d he said and offered to let me choose which one I liked best.", + " Later in the conversation, he mentioned that he had an agreement with his wife. He could sleep with whomever he wanted when he was out of town. I walked out of the meeting feeling uneasy. There was no explicit mention that to star in one of those films I had to sleep with him, but the subtext was there.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nCara Delevingne stated that Weinstein tried to kiss her on the lips in a hotel room and bragged about actresses he\u2019d slept with.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress L\u00e9a Seydoux said Weinstein tried to kiss her in a hotel room and she had to fight him off. (The Guardian)\n\n\u201cWe were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me,\u201d she told the Guardian.", + " \u201cI had to defend myself. He\u2019s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him. \u201cHe tried more than once,\u201d she added, describing Weinstein as \u201cvery domineering\u201d and \u201closing control\u201d. \u201cI pushed him physically. I think he respected me because I resisted him.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nKate Beckinsale said Weinstein offered her alcohol in his hotel room when she was 17 and that she repeatedly declined his sexual advances over the years. (Instagram)\n\nHe opened the door in his bathrobe. I was incredibly naive and young and it did not cross my mind that this older, unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him.", + " After declining alcohol and announcing that I had school in the morning I left, uneasy but unscathed. A few years later he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn\u2019t remember if he had assaulted me or not. I had what I thought were boundaries - I said no to him professionally many times over the years -some of which ended up with him screaming at me calling me a cunt and making threats, some of which made him laughingly tell people oh \u201cKate lives to say no to me.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Claire Folani said Weinstein suggested a massage in his hotel room and that she \u201cescaped\u201d him five times.", + " (Twitter)\n\nYou see, nothing happened to me with Harvey \u2014 by that I mean, I escaped 5 times. I had two Peninsula Hotel meetings in the evening with Harvey and all I remember was I ducked, dived and ultimately got out of there without getting slobbered over, well just a bit. Yes, massage was suggested. The three dinners with Harvey I don\u2019t really remember the time period, I was 25. I remember him telling me all the actresses who had slept with him and what he had done for them.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nFrench actress Florence Darel said Weinstein propositioned her in a hotel room while his wife was next door.", + " (People, via Le Parisien)\n\nThings quickly took a turn though, according to Darel. After yelling there was no jacuzzi in his room, Darel claimed Weinstein began to make moves on her \u2014 seemingly unbothered by the fact that his wife was next door. \u201cHe started to tell me that he found me very attractive and wanted to have relations with me,\u201d Darel told Le Parisien. \u201cI told him I was very in love with my companion. He replied that didn\u2019t bother him at all and offered to have me be his mistress a few days a year. That way we could continue to work together.", + " Basically, it was \u2018If you want to continue in America, you have to go through me.\u2019 \u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Tara Subkoff recalled Weinstein pulling her onto his lap while erect at a party. (Variety)\n\n\u201cThat night I was offered the role, and I went out to a premiere after party that Harvey Weinstein was also at,\u201d she told Variety. \u201cHe motioned for me to come over to him, and then grabbed me to sit me on his lap. I was so surprised and shocked I couldn\u2019t stop laughing because it was so awkward. But then I could feel that he had an erection. I got quiet,", + " but got off his lap quickly. He then asked me to come outside with him and other things I don\u2019t want to share, but it was implied that if I did not comply with doing what he asked me to do that I would not get the role that I had already been informally offered. I laughed in his face as I was in shock and so uncomfortable. I left the party right after that.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Sarah Ann Masse said Weinstein conducted an interview and hugged her while in his underwear. (Variety)\n\nAfter about a month of pre-interviews, Masse said she was informed that Weinstein wanted to meet her.", + " \u201cThey arranged for me to go to his house in Connecticut, so I drove out there.\u201d When she arrived, she said, \u201cHarvey Weinstein opened the door in his boxer shorts and an undershirt. My first thought was, \u2018Oh, this is weird. Maybe he forgot this interview is happening. Maybe he thought I was the mailman. I\u2019m sure he\u2019ll be embarrassed and excuse himself and get changed.\u2019 But he didn\u2019t.\u201d She said that Weinstein had her sit down in his living room and conducted the rest of the interview in his underwear. As a young actress, meeting Weinstein already intimidated Masse, she explained,", + " but his behavior made her feel particularly strange. \u201cI tried to tell myself it was just an odd quirk, that it was fine, and to keep going with the interview.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Minka Kelly said Weinstein propositioned her with promises of lavish gifts if she would be his girlfriend. (Instagram)\n\nI met Harvey at an industry party. The following day, my agent said he wanted to see me for a general meeting. The location was set for his hotel room. I wasn\u2019t comfortable with going to his room & said so. The following day, we sat down with an assistant in the hotel restaurant. He bullshit me for 5 minutes re:", + " movies he could put me in, then asked the assistant to excuse us. As she walked away, he said, \u201cI know you were feeling what I was feeling when we met the other night\u201d and then regaled me with offers of a lavish life filled with trips around the world on private planes etc. IF I would be his girlfriend. Or, \u201cWe could just keep this professional.\u201d All I knew was not to offend this very powerful man and to get out of the situation as quickly as possible.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Angie Everhart said Weinstein masturbated in front of her to completion. (KLOS)\n\n\u201cI went to the Venice Film Festival and I was on somebody\u2019s boat,", + " and I had just arrived, and I was sleeping. It was in my bed, and you know boats aren\u2019t very big spaces sometimes. And I wake up, and Harvey is standing above my bed. That alone is frightening... All of a sudden he takes his pants down, and starts doing his stuff. And he\u2019s blocking the door, I can\u2019t get out \u2026 I don\u2019t know how to say this on the radio, but [he] finishes on the carpet on the floor.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Eva Green said that she had to \u201cpush him off\u201d at a meeting. (Variety)\n\n\u201cI wish to address comments made by my mother in a recent interview regarding Harvey Weinstein.", + " I met him for a business meeting in Paris where he behaved inappropriately and I had to push him off. I got away without it going further, but the experience left me shocked and disgusted.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nOn Friday the 13th, Green\u2019s mother Marlene Jobert said in a radio interview that Weinstein \u201cthreatened to destroy her professionally\u201d:\n\n\u201cHe operated with her the exact same way he acted with all the others, under the pretext of a professional meeting, of a script that had to get to her with a nice part into the bargain... \u201cSince his office was also in his hotel suite, [Eva] followed him,", + " and the exact same thing happened to her as to the others. She managed to escape, but he threatened to destroy her professionally.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nBritish actress Lysette Anthony has told the London Metropolitan police that in the 1980s, Harvey Weinstein stalked her and raped her in her home. (The Sunday Times)\n\n\u201cIn her account, published for the first time today by The Sunday Times, she claims that she became friendly with Weinstein after meeting him in New York. But everything changed when she met him for a drink at his rented home in Chelsea a few years later. \u2018The next thing I knew he was half undressed and he grabbed me,\u2019 she said.", + " \u2018It was the last thing I expected and I fled. That was when the predatory stalking began.\u2019 One day he turned up at her flat at about 10am: \u2018He pushed me inside and rammed me up against the coat rack... He was trying to kiss me and shove inside me.\u2019 She pushed him away but he was too heavy: \u2018Finally I just gave up.\u2019 \u2018As he ground himself against me and shoved inside me, I kept my eyes shut tight, held my breath and just let him get on with it... \u2018He came over my leg like a dog and then left. It was pathetic, revolting...I remember lying in the bath,", + " crying.\u2019\n\nAdvertisement\n\nFollowing Anthony\u2019s interview, a second unnamed woman reported serial assaults in 2010, 2011, and 2015 to the London police, and a third anonymous woman came forward with allegations of assault in 1992. (CNN)\n\nAn unnamed former Miramax employee said that 25 years ago, Weinstein raped her in the basement of Miramax\u2019s London mansion, in a bedroom for visiting employees. (The Daily Mail)\n\n\u2018He grabbed me and he was so big and powerful. He just ripped my clothes away and pushed me, threw me down.\n\n\u2018Then\u2026 I kept shouting, \u2018No! Stop!\u2019 and tried to push him off.", + " But he forced himself on me. \u2018And I remember, this is the one thing I remember most clearly: I thought, I have to keep saying \u2018No!\u2019 I was very aware that if a woman says no, it means no. \u2018And that was the one thing going through my mind throughout, \u2018No, no, no, no!\u2019 It was over very quickly and then he just said, \u2018Get out!\u2019 \u2018I remember walking home that night and it was cold and sodden. I was mortified and ashamed. I didn\u2019t tell anyone.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Louisette Geiss said Weinstein asked her to watch him masturbate.", + " (NY Daily News)\n\n\u201cHe returned in nothing but a robe with the front open, and he was buck naked. When I finished my pitch, I was obviously nervous, and he just kept asking me to watch him masturbate...\u201cHe quickly got out of the tub and grabbed my forearm as I was trying to grab my purse. He led me to his bathroom, pleading that I just watch him masturbate. My heart was racing and I was very scared.\u201d\n\nPaula Wachowiak, a former intern for Weinstein, said he exposed himself to her and requested a massage. (Buffalo News)\n\nWachowiak said Weinstein took the folder and dropped the towel.", + " He was naked. She said she kept her eyes on his face, in the email. \u201cHe sat on the bed with the folder over his groin and pointed to checks and asked me why we were paying for this or that. There was one check for break-away glass that was very expensive and I had to explain how difficult it was to transport,\u201d she recounted. Then Weinstein began complaining about having a kink in his shoulder and asked for a massage, Wachowiak said.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nCanadian actress Lauren Holly said Weinstein approached her while naked during a hotel meeting. (The Loop)\n\n\u201cHe told me I looked stressed. He said that maybe he thought I could use a massage.", + " Maybe I could give him a massage. I began sort of babbling like I was a child. I think it was fear. I said, \u2018I don\u2019t know how to give a massage, I don\u2019t have a massage license. Maybe if I called the front desk I could get a masseuse to come here.\u2019 I didn\u2019t know what to do, honestly. And then he began to get angry. And I began to get really afraid to be honest. I had to get out of there.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Lena Headey recalled Weinstein making a suggestive gesture the first time she met him. (Twitter)\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Marisa Coughlan said Weinstein propositioned her and asked if she wanted to be one of his \u201cspecial friends.\u201d (The Hollywood Reporter)\n\nCoughlan laughs recalling her earnest preparation for the meeting:", + " She brought a notebook filled with ideas of projects they could do and roles she was interested in taking on. Weinstein talked about F. Scott Fitzgerald, his favorite films and suggested she read The Last Tycoon. He also said that Miramax had a film in development and \u201che wanted me to be the lead in that.\u201d Then came a proposition. \u201cHe told me that he has a lot of \u2018special friends\u2019 and they give each other massages,\u201d Coughlan states. \u201cIt was a full-court press. He wanted me to be one of his \u2018special friends\u2019 and go into the bedroom. I told him that I had a serious boyfriend and reminded him that he was married and that we should keep this professional.", + " I was so blindsided. Not one ounce of me anticipated it. It was the weirdest meeting I\u2019ve ever had in my life.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Lupita Nyong\u2019o said Weinstein invited her to his home, then asked if he could give her a massage while his kids were in the other room. Later, he propositioned her again, asking her to join him in a \u201cprivate room.\u201d (NYT)\n\n\u201cBefore the starters arrived, he announced: \u201cLet\u2019s cut to the chase. I have a private room upstairs where we can have the rest of our meal.\u201d I was stunned. I told him I preferred to eat in the restaurant.", + " He told me not to be so na\u00efve. If I wanted to be an actress, then I had to be willing to do this sort of thing. He said he had dated Famous Actress X and Y and look where that had gotten them.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Sean Young said Weinstein once exposed himself to her. (The Hollywood Reporter)\n\n\u201cMy basic response was, \u2018You know, Harvey, I really don\u2019t think you should be pulling that thing out, it\u2019s not very pretty,\u2019\u201d Young said. \u201cAnd then leaving, and then never having another meeting with that guy again, because it was like, \u2018What on earth?\u2019\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Heather Kerr said Weinstein forced her to touch his penis during a private meeting.", + " (Variety)\n\n\u201cHe asked me if I was good,\u201d Kerr said. \u201cI started to tell him about my training and acting experience and he said, \u2018No. I need to know if you\u2019re good.\u2019 He said if he was going to introduce me around town, he needed to know if I was \u2018good.\u2019 He kept repeating that word.\u201d Kerr, who appeared on \u201cFacts of Life\u201d and \u201cMama\u2019s Family,\u201d said, while she was sitting on a couch with Weinstein, he unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, grabbed her hand, forced it onto his organ, and held it there.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAn Italian model-", + "actress reportedly met with Los Angeles detectives with sexual assault allegations from an incident in a hotel in 2013. (Los Angeles Times)\n\nFormer Brazilian model Juliana De Paula says that Weinstein groped her and forced her to kiss other models in his New York loft. (Los Angeles Times)\n\nWhen she tried to leave, she said, he chased her through the apartment, naked. She fended him off with a broken glass. \u201cHe looked at me and he started to laugh,\u201d she recalled. \u201cI was shocked. I was completely in disbelief.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nItalian model Samantha Panagrosso said Weinstein touched her legs in a swimming pool at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival (Los Angeles Times)\n\nWhen Weinstein began touching her legs under the water at a hotel pool and she rebuffed him,", + " he pointed at another model, she recalled in an interview with The Times. \u201cLook at her, I\u2019m going to have her come to my room for a screen test,\u201d she said Weinstein told her. When Panagrosso told friends about his continuing advances, she said, they laughed it off: \u201cSam, don\u2019t be so na\u00efve, you know Harvey can make you a star.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAustralian model Zo\u00eb Brock claims that Weinstein took her to an isolated hotel and gave her a \u201cmassage\u201d before she ran for the bathroom (Los Angeles Times)\n\nWhen she finally made her way back to the yacht where she was staying around 5:", + "30 a.m., she said, she felt \u2014 and looked \u2014 like \u201ca whore.\u201d \u201cI was wearing yesterday\u2019s dress, with yesterday\u2019s makeup, and messed hair,\u201d she said. \u201cHaving to crawl back into the boat looking like that made me look like the sort of person who would have slept with Harvey Weinstein to further my career. And I am not that person.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nA former employee claims that the pool of aspiring models featured on Project Runway was designed as a trough for Weinstein. (Los Angeles Times)\n\nFearful of Weinstein\u2019s reaction \u2014 because the show featured designers with sewing machines and not models \u2014 the producers figured they needed to amp up the participation of beautiful women.", + " The producers concocted an awkward competition within the show that allowed designers to pick the model they found most appealing, which resulted in aspiring models, occasionally in tears, being dismissed. \u201cThat was designed as a vestigial element for Harvey,\u201d the television executive said.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Brit Marling says Weinstein suggested they shower together during a meeting in a hotel room. (The Atlantic)\n\nI, too, went to the meeting thinking that perhaps my entire life was about to change for the better. I, too, was asked to meet him in a hotel bar. I, too, met a young, female assistant there who said the meeting had been moved upstairs to his suite because he was a very busy man.", + " I, too, felt my guard go up but was calmed by the presence of another woman my age beside me. I, too, felt terror in the pit of my stomach when that young woman left the room and I was suddenly alone with him. I, too, was asked if I wanted a massage, champagne, strawberries. I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me? It was clear that there was only one direction he wanted this encounter to go in, and that was sex or some version of an erotic exchange.", + " I was able to gather myself together\u2014a bundle of firing nerves, hands trembling, voice lost in my throat\u2014and leave the room.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nA former Weinstein assistant described repeated instances of sexual harassment and said, \u201cI often had to wake him up in the hotel in the mornings and he would try to pull me into bed.\u201d (Financial Times)\n\nNorwegian actress Natassia Malthe said Weinstein sexually assaulted her in her hotel room in 2008. (Deadline)\n\n\u201cWhen I opened the door, he barged into the room,\u201d and, she said, after she made it clear she did not want to have any kind of sexual relationship with him,", + " he assaulted her against her will. \u201cI played dead\u201d during the assault, she said. \u201cAfterwards, I laid there in complete disgust.\u201d Asked if the London attack fit the definition of rape, Allred said it qualified as sexual assault that involved non-consensual penetration.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAnnabella Sciorra of The Sopranos says that she still sleeps with a baseball bat near her bed since Weinstein raped her in her apartment over 20 years ago. (The New Yorker)\n\n\n\nWeinstein, she continued, \u201cwalked in like it was his apartment, like he owned the place, and started unbuttoning his shirt.", + " So it was very clear where he thought this was going to go. And I was in a nightgown. I didn\u2019t have much on.\u201d He circled the apartment; to Sciorra, it appeared that he was checking whether anyone else was there.... \u201cHe shoved me onto the bed, and he got on top of me.\u201d Sciorra struggled. \u201cI kicked and I yelled,\u201d she said, but Weinstein locked her arms over her head with one hand and forced sexual intercourse on her. \u201cWhen he was done, he ejaculated on my leg, and on my nightgown.\u201d It was a family heirloom,", + " handed down from relatives in Italy and embroidered in white cotton. \u201cHe said, \u2018I have impeccable timing,\u2019 and then he said, \u2018This is for you.\u2019 \u201d Sciorra paused. \u201cAnd then he attempted to perform oral sex on me. And I struggled, but I had very little strength left in me.\u201d Sciorra said that her body started to shake violently. \u201cI think, in a way, that\u2019s what made him leave, because it looked like I was having a seizure or something.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nSciorra alleges that years later, he showed up at her hotel room in his underwear \u201cholding a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a tape,", + " a movie, in the other.\u201d She called room service to save her.\n\nDaryl Hannah says that Weinstein pounded on her hotel room door multiple times, once so loudly that once she barricaded it with furniture. Years later, he entered her room unannounced. (The New Yorker)\n\n\u201cHe had a key,\u201d Hannah recalled. \u201cHe came through the living room and into the bedroom. He just burst in like a raging bull. And I know with every fibre of my being that if my male makeup artist [Steeve Daviault] was not in that room, things would not have gone well. It was scary.\u201d\n\n\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Cynthia Burr says Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on him in a hallway in the late \u201970s.", + " (The New York Times)\n\n\u201cIt was just him and me alone,\u201d she said. \u201cI was fearful I didn\u2019t have the wherewithal to get away.\u201d It was the late 1970s, and Ms. Burr was an actress in her early 20s. Mr. Weinstein was in his mid-20s and a \u201creal up-and-comer,\u201d Ms. Burr remembers. Her manager said they should meet. After the encounter, she recalls feeling ashamed. \u201cThe way he forced me made me feel really bad about myself,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat are you going to do when you are a girl just trying to make it as an actress?", + " Nobody would have believed me.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nHope Exiner d\u2019Amore, a former employee of Weinstein\u2019s concert promotion company in the late \u201970s, says he raped her in a hotel room. (The New York Times)\n\n\u201cI told him no. I kept pushing him away. He just wouldn\u2019t listen,\u201d Ms. Exiner d\u2019Amore said. \u201cHe just forced himself on me.\u201d She said he forcibly performed oral sex and intercourse on her. She did not tell her boyfriend, feeling ashamed, but she did confide in her next-door neighbors in Buffalo. She did not specifically say she was raped, but the couple,", + " David and Irene Sipos, told The Times that they remembered her being extremely upset and crying when she told them about Mr. Weinstein and the hotel room.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nDancer Ashley Matthau says forced himself on top of her in a hotel room and masturbated. (The New York Times)\n\n\u201c\u2018Don\u2019t worry,\u2019\u201d Ms. Matthau, now 36, remembers him saying as they sat in the back seat. \u201c\u2018Nothing is going to happen. We\u2019re just going to discuss future projects.\u2019\u201d She said they went to his hotel room, where talk quickly became sexual: Mr. Weinstein told her that he had helped launch the careers of high-profile actresses who had slept with him,", + " and that she should consider doing the same. When she declined, Mr. Weinstein pushed her onto the bed and fondled her breasts, she said. He then stripped, straddled her and masturbated on top of her. \u201cI kept telling him, \u2018Stop, I\u2019m engaged,\u2019 but he kept saying: \u2018It\u2019s just a little cuddling. It\u2019s not a problem. It\u2019s not like we\u2019re having sex.\u2019\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nLacey Dorn says Weinstein groped her at a party in 2011. (The New York Times)\n\n\u201cGreat meeting you,\u201d he wrote in the subject line of an otherwise blank email sent to her at 12:", + "26 a.m. On her way out of the party, Ms. Dorn said goodbye to Mr. Weinstein. As she turned her back to him, he grabbed between her legs, touching her buttocks and crotch through her clothes. \u201cI was so na\u00efve, I didn\u2019t say anything. And he didn\u2019t say anything either,\u201d she said. \u201cI just got out of the party as fast as possible.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nActress Paz de la Huerta says Weinstein raped her twice in 2010. (Vanity Fair)\n\nIn de la Huerta\u2019s account of the night, Weinstein arrived at her apartment demanding to come inside and have a drink.", + " \u201cThings got very uncomfortable very fast,\u201d the actress, now 33, told Vanity Fair in a phone interview on Wednesday. \u201cImmediately when we got inside the house, he started to kiss me and I kind of brushed [him] away,\u201d de la Huerta said. \u201cThen he pushed me onto the bed and his pants were down and he lifted up my skirt. I felt afraid.... It wasn\u2019t consensual... It happened very quickly.... He stuck himself inside me.... When he was done he said he\u2019d be calling me. I kind of just laid on the bed in shock.\u201d\n\nAdvertisement\n\nAn unnamed female film executive in London has filed a civil suit alleging Weinstein sexually assaulted her.", + " (via Deadline)\n\nThe civil claim has been made against Weinstein as well as The Weinstein Company and The Weinstein Company UK and has been filed as damages for personal injury, expenses, consequential loss including aggravated and exemplary damages and interest arising out of a series of sexual assaults inflicted on the claimant by the defendant.\ufeff\n\nActress Kadian Noble filed a federal lawsuit against Weinstein under sex trafficking laws, alleging that he lured her to a hotel room in Cannes were he assaulted her. (Variety) ", + " London\u2019s Metropolitan police have opened an inquiry into the Hollywood producer\u2019s alleged actions and the NYPD is reviewing for \u2018additional complaints\u2019\n\nPolice on both sides of the Atlantic are investigating Harvey Weinstein as the scandal surrounding the disgraced film producer deepens.\n\nIn London, the Metropolitan police are assessing a sexual abuse allegation made against Weinstein, while in his home town of New York police are carrying out a \u201creview\u201d looking for new complaints.\n\nScotland Yard told the Guardian on Thursday: \u201cThe Met has been passed an allegation of sexual abuse by Merseyside police on Wednesday 11 October. The allegation will be assessed by officers from the child abuse and sexual offences command.\u201d There is no indication the complaint relates to child abuse.\n\nHarvey Weinstein:", + " all of the women who have accused him so far Read more\n\nLt John Grimpel of the NYPD said in a statement: \u201cBased on information referenced in published news reports the NYPD is conducting a review to determine if there are any additional complaints relating to the Harvey Weinstein matter.\n\n\u201cNo filed complaints have been identified as of this time and as always, the NYPD encourages anyone who may have information pertaining to this matter to call the CrimeStoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS.\u201d\n\nUnderworld star Kate Beckinsale joined the large group of women accusing Weinstein \u2013 producer of Oscar winners Shakespeare in Love, The Artist and The English Patient,", + " and patron to Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh \u2013 of inappropriate conduct on Thursday in a deeply personal Instagram post.\n\nThe British actor, who starred in several Weinstein Company films, recalled her first meeting with the producer when she was 17.\n\nLike more than a dozen of the women who have now come forward to speak on Weinstein\u2019s pattern of inappropriate behavior, she recalls being sent to his hotel room for a business meeting where he greeted her in a bathrobe.\n\n\u201cA few years later he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn\u2019t remember if he had assaulted me or not,\u201d Beckinsale wrote in the post.\n\nBeckinsale concluded her post with a plea to the industry:", + " \u201cLet\u2019s stop allowing our young women to be sexual cannon fodder, and let\u2019s remember that Harvey is an emblem of a system that is sick, and that we have work to do.\u201d\n\nBeckinsale follows a string of other high-profile actors, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, L\u00e9a Seydoux and Cara Delevingne, who have accused the producer of sexual harassment or assault. Three women have accused Weinstein of rape.\n\nWeinstein has said many of the details of those public accounts are inaccurate, and has denied accusations of criminal sexual harassment, rape and sexual assault.\n\nSallie Hofmeister,", + " a spokeswoman for Weinstein, said on Tuesday: \u201cAny allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr Weinstein \u2026 With respect to any women who have made allegations on the record, Mr Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual.\u201d\n\nIn a statement issued on Wednesday in response to his wife\u2019s decision to leave him following the allegations, Weinstein said: \u201cI support her decision, I am in counselling and perhaps, when I am better, we can rebuild. Over the last week, there has been a lot of pain for my family that I take responsibility for.\u201d\n\nHe was reported to be heading for treatment in Arizona. Before he left,", + " Weinstein told photographers in LA: \u201cGuys, I\u2019m not doing OK but I\u2019m trying. I gotta get help \u2026 You know, we all make mistakes \u2026 second chance I hope.\u201d\n\nBut he added: \u201cAnd you know what? I\u2019ve always been loyal to you guys,\u201d he told the paparazzi photographers who captured his remarks, adding \u201cnot like those fucking pricks who treat you like shit. I\u2019ve been the good guy.\u201d\n\nAs pressure grew on Hollywood celebrities to explain what they had known about Weinstein\u2019s alleged conduct over a period of decades, Jane Fonda said she had been told about accusations against him last year, and regretted not speaking out about them.\n\n\u201cI wish I had spoken out,\u201d the Oscar winner told the BBC.", + " \u201cI will admit I should have been braver, I think from now on I will be when I hear such stories.\n\n\u201cI think it\u2019s because if I had I would have had to out someone that wasn\u2019t prepared to speak out. She subsequently has. If it had happened to me I would now.\u201d\n\nThe NYPD\u2019s reference to \u201cadditional complaints\u201d may relate to the March 2015 case in which Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez accused Weinstein of groping her breasts and putting his hand up her skirt during a meeting at his office.\n\n'I had to defend myself': the night Harvey Weinstein jumped on me | L\u00e9a Seydoux Read more\n\nShe filed a complaint with the NYPD,", + " and the next night met with Weinstein again, supported by an NYPD undercover operation and while wearing a wire, according to the New Yorker, recording the producer appearing to confess to groping her.\n\nThe NYPD said it investigated a misdemeanor sexual abuse complaint against Weinstein and the case was referred to the Manhattan district attorney\u2019s office. The office decided not to file charges.\n\nQuestioned about that decision at a public appearance in New York on Wednesday, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, said: \u201cIt\u2019s obviously sickening. But at the end of the day we operate in a courtroom of law, not the court of public opinion, and our sex crime prosecutors made a determination that this was not going to be a provable case.\u201d\n\nThe International Business Times has reported that David Boies,", + " a prominent defense attorney who has represented Weinstein\u2019s company, though was not doing so at the time of the alleged groping incident, donated $10,000 to Vance \u2013 an elected official \u2013 in 2015, after the alleged incident.\n\nNYPD officials denied published reports that they were investigating a specific 2004 incident involving Weinstein, calling that claim \u201cinaccurate\u201d.\n\nMeanwhile the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it would hold a special meeting on Saturday to discuss allegations against Weinstein, as speculation grew that it would follow the lead of its British equivalent, Bafta, in suspending his membership.\n\n\u201cThe Academy finds the conduct described in the allegations against Harvey Weinstein to be repugnant,", + " abhorrent, and antithetical to the high standards of the Academy and the creative community it represents,\u201d it said in a statement.\n\nWeinstein could face five to 25 years in prison on sexual assault charges if the latest abuse allegations are tried in criminal court, legal experts told the Guardian. Specifically, the claims described by Lucia Evans, a former aspiring actor, rise to the level of a felony rape under New York laws.\n\nBecause a criminal conviction could be difficult to achieve, however, prosecutors may be reluctant to file criminal charges. ", + " UPDATED: The New Yorker published an expose on movie mogul Harvey Weinstein on Tuesday that alleges the producer raped three women. The report follows an Oct. 5 New York Times investigation documenting three decades of sexual harassment allegations against Weinstein.\n\nRonan Farrow\u2019s New Yorker article contains on-the-record accounts from actresses who reported Weinstein forcibly received or performed sexual acts on women. More women, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, came forward on Tuesday to detail their accounts with the New York Times. Since, dozens of women have shared claims of sexual assault or harassment by Weinstein.\n\nHere are the women who have gone on the record with their stories:\n\nPaula Wachowiak (1980)\n\nWachowiak,", + " who is now 62, alleges Weinstein exposed himself to her when she was his intern in 1980. According to the Buffalo News, Wachowiak was working as a production assistant on Weinstein\u2019s first film, \u201cThe Burning.\u201d One day, Wachowiak was asked to take a bunch of checks in a manila folder to Weinstein\u2019s hotel room to get them signed. He answered the door with a hand towel around his waist. Wachowiak said Weinstein then dropped the towel after taking the manila folder from her. \u201cHe sat on the bed with the folder over his groin and pointed to checks and asked me why we were paying for this or that,\u201d she said.", + " Eventually, Weinstein asked her to massage a kink in his shoulder. She told him, \u201cthat\u2019s not in my job description.\u201d He eventually signed the checks, and when Wachowiak left, she said she burst into tears. She said she reported the incident to the accountant and production supervisor but continued her internship until it ended. She ran into Weinstein only once more during her tenure, and he asked her, \u201cSo, was seeing me naked the highlight of your internship?\u201d she said. Wachowiak responded, \u201cActually, Harvey, I think you\u2019re disgusting,\u201d to which he laughed and walked away.\n\nLysette Anthony (1982)\n\nThe British actress claimed Weinstein raped her in her London home in the 1982,", + " while he was doing publicity for the movie \u201cKrull.\u201d She described the attack as \u201cpathetic and revolting\u201d and said it left her feeling \u201cdisgusted and embarrassed.\u201d Anthony told the Sunday Times, via her friend Charlotte Metcalf, \u201cHe pushed me inside and rammed me up against the coat rack in my tiny hall and started fumbling at my gown. He was trying to kiss me and shove inside me. It was disgusting,\u201d she said. \u201cFinally I just gave up. At least I was able to stop him kissing me. As he ground himself against me and shoved inside me, I kept my eyes shut tight,", + " held my breath, just let him get on with it. He came over my leg like a dog and then left. It was pathetic, revolting. I remember lying in the bath later and crying. There hadn\u2019t been a knife. He wasn\u2019t a stranger. I was disgusted and embarrassed, but I was at home. I thought I should just forget the whole disgusting incident. I blamed myself. I\u2019d been an idiot to think he and I were just friends.\u201d\n\nTomi-Ann Roberts (1984)\n\nWhen Roberts was a 20-year-old junior in college, she waited tables in New York and hoped to start a career acting.", + " One of her customers, Weinstein, urged her to audition for a movie. He sent her scripts and asked her to meet him where he was staying to discuss the film. When she got there, he was naked in the bathtub. He told her she would give a better audition if she were comfortable \u201cgetting naked in front of him,\u201d as well, for the character she might play. Roberts left, telling Weinstein she was too prudish to go along.\n\nHeather Kerr (1989)\n\nThe actress said Weinstein exposed himself to her and forced himself on her in a meeting in 1989. \u201cHe asked me if I was good.", + " I started to tell him about my training and acting experience and he said, \u2018No. I need to know if you\u2019re good.\u2019 He said if he was going to introduce me around town, he needed to know if I was \u2018good.\u2019 He kept repeating that word,\u201d she recounted during a news conference. Kerr said while she was sitting on a couch with Weinstein, he unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, and forced it onto her hands. \u201cHe said this is how things work in Hollywood and all actresses who\u2019d made it, did it this way,\u201d she said. Kerr said she was \u201cterrified\u201d and quit pursuing a career as an actress shortly after the incident.\n\nPaula Williams (1990)\n\nWilliams alleged Weinstein exposed himself to her in 1990.", + " \u201cThe reason why I didn\u2019t like talking about it and the reason why I would never come public with it before is, it was a deep shame,\u201d Williams told ABC\u2019s 20/20. \u201c[When] Gwyneth [Paltrow] said something in the press about it, and she had experiences as well. And all of a sudden I just felt it lifted.\u201d\n\nRosanna Arquette (early 1990s)\n\nArquette took a business meeting with Weinstein that escalated into being sexually propositioned. In the New Yorker article, Arquette said Weinstein opened the door of his hotel room wearing a white bathrobe. There,", + " he tried to initiate a neck massage. \u201cThen he grabbed my hand,\u201d she said. He put her hand on his neck, and when she pulled away, he grabbed her hand again and pulled it toward his penis. \u201cMy heart was really racing. I was in a fight-or-flight moment,\u201d she recalled. She told Weinstein, \u201cI will never do that.\u201d\n\nAshley Judd (1990s)\n\nJudd was among the first to go on record in the Times expose. In 2015, the actress shared her story with Variety, though she declined to name Weinstein. She said she was in her twenties when she was summoned to Weinstein\u2019s hotel room under the pretenses of talking about roles in his movies.", + " Instead, Weinstein asked her for a massage, and after she declined, he asked her to watch him shower. \u201cI said no, a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he always came back at me with some new ask,\u201d she told the Times.\n\nLouise Godbold (1990s)\n\nGodbold, co-executive director of the non-profit Echo Parenting & Education in Los Angeles, penned a blog post where she described an encounter with Weinstein in the \u201990s. She wrote she had taken an \u201coffice tour that became an occasion to trap me in an empty meeting room, the begging for a massage, his hands on my shoulders as I attempted to beat a retreat \u2026 all while not wanting to alienate the most powerful man in Hollywood.\u201d According to Godbold,", + " Weinstein later contacted the friend who introduced them to make sure Gobold wouldn\u2019t \u201cmake a complaint about his behavior.\u201d\n\nTara Subkoff (1990s)\n\nThe actress alleged Weinstein sexually harassed her in the 1990s when she was up for a part in one of his movies. \u201cThat night I was offered the role, and I went out to a premiere after party that Harvey Weinstein was also at,\u201d she told Variety. \u201cHe motioned for me to come over to him, and then grabbed me to sit me on his lap. I was so surprised and shocked I couldn\u2019t stop laughing because it was so awkward.", + " But then I could feel that he had an erection. I got quiet, but got off his lap quickly. He then asked me to come outside with him and other things I don\u2019t want to share, but it was implied that if I did not comply with doing what he asked me to do that I would not get the role that I had already been informally offered. I laughed in his face as I was in shock and so uncomfortable. I left the party right after that.\u201d In 2015, Subkoff stepped back into entertainment and made her directorial debut with the feature film \u201c#Horror.\u201d \u201cThe Weinstein company executives snuck into a cast and crew screening of my film and told me they loved it,\u201d she recalled.", + " \u201cThen they took it to Harvey, who then refused to watch it but then bad-mouthed it to everyone all over Cannes.\u201d\n\nLauren Holly (1990s)\n\nHolly shared encounter she had in the late 1990s when she was in her 30s. She previously worked with Weinstein on \u201cBeautiful Girls\u201d and interacted with him in social settings before a meeting was set up at a hotel room to talk about her future with his company. After some small talk, Holly said Weinstein asked to be excused and wearing a hotel bathrobe, which she thought was odd, she recalled on Canadian talk show \u201cThe Social.\u201d He began discussing business before dropping his robe and going to the bathroom.", + " \u201cHe keeps the conversation going, he finishes, he turns on the shower, he gets in the shower. He\u2019s continually talking to me, he\u2019s in the shower washing himself. Leaning out, asking me for responses. My head is going crazy at this point. He\u2019s acting like the situation is normal. He\u2019s acting like we\u2019re having a normal encounter. I\u2019m thinking to myself, \u2018Am I just a prude? Am I supposed to be more open minded?\u2019 I didn\u2019t quite know how to handle myself at that moment,\u201d she said. After, Weinstein got out of the shower, dried off, and began approaching her while still naked.", + " \u201cThe adrenaline rush I felt, I wanted to flee, I was scared. He told me that I looked stressed and he thought maybe I could use a massage, maybe I could give him a massage. I began just sort of babbling like I was a child, I think it was just the fear.\u201d When she denied, Holly said Weinstein began to threaten her, stating that she needed to \u201ckeep him as [her] ally\u201d and that it would be a \u201cbad decision\u201d if she left the room. At that point, Holly said, she \u201cpushed him and ran.\u201d\n\nLaura Madden (1991)\n\nMadden, a former employee of Weinstein\u2019s,", + " said starting in 1991, Weinstein would ask her to give him massages in hotel rooms. She said he was manipulative, and once she even locked herself in his hotel bathroom while she was crying. She said, \u201cYou constantly question yourself \u2014 am I the one who is the problem?\u201d\n\nSean Young (1992)\n\nThe \u201cBlade Runner\u201d star alleges Weinstein exposed himself to her while working on the 1992 film \u201cLove Crimes,\u201d which was produced by Weinstein\u2019s former company, Miramax. Young recounted the experience on the Dudley and Bob With Matt Show podcast in Austin, Texas, and said on set, she \u201cpersonally experienced him pulling his you-know-", + "what out of his pants in order to shock me.\u201d \u201cMy basic response was, \u2018You know, Harvey, I don\u2019t really think you should be pulling that thing out, it\u2019s not very pretty,'\u201d Young recalled. \u201cAnd then leaving, and then never having another meeting with that guy again, because it was like, \u2018What on earth?'\u201d She said she got a bad reputation for saying no. \u201cThe minute you actually stand up for yourself in Hollywood, you\u2019re the crazy one,\u201d she said.\n\nKatherine Kendall (1993)\n\nDuring a meeting in 1993, Kendall said Weinstein gave her scripts and invited her to a screening,", + " which turned out to be a solo trip with Weinstein. After, he asked if they could stop by his apartment to pick something up. Kendall said she was nervous, but he kept it professional. Then, he went to the bathroom, came back in a robe, and asked her to give him a massage, saying, \u201cEverybody does it.\u201d When she refused, she said, \u201cHe literally chased me. He wouldn\u2019t let me pass him to get to the door.\u201d Weinstein asked if he would show her breasts, if nothing else, though she still denied.\n\nMira Sorvino (1995)\n\nSorvino won an Oscar for \u201cMighty Aphrodite,\u201d which was produced by Weinstein\u2019s company Miramax.", + " Sorvino said Weinstein \u201charassed her\u201d and pressured her to have a sexual relationship while she acted in Miramax films. She claims Weinstein came by her apartment at night after making advances weeks before at the Toronto Film Festival in 1995. In Toronto, Sorvino said Weinstein \u201c\u2026 started massaging my shoulders, which made me very uncomfortable, and then tried to get more physical, sort of chasing me around.\u201d\n\nLiza Campbell (1995)\n\nThe British artist and writer started working with the Weinstein Co. in 1995 as a freelance script writer after receiving a call out of the blue from Weinstein. The two initially met in the 1980s after sharing a cab in London by chance.", + " \u201cHe offered me freelance script-reading for Miramax, his company,\u201d she said. \u201cIt sounded like a godsend. Soon I was sent the script of \u2018Shakespeare in Love\u2019 to summarize and critique, followed by \u2018The Usual Suspects.\u2019 And then the scripts stopped coming. I rang the Miramax offices, but nothing happened.\u201d A few months later, Weinstein called and asked how work was going. When she explained, he invited her to his hotel room, where assistants left upon her arrival. They spoke for a few minutes before he went to the bathroom. \u201cI could hear him moving around and suddenly the sound of bath taps running.", + " \u2018What do you say we both jump in the bath?\u2019 he hollered. I could hear the thump of shoes being taken off and felt shocked that the meeting had turned sleazy.\u201d Before she responded, he said, \u201cCome on, it\u2019ll be fun. We can drink champagne. You can soap me \u2014 whaddaya say?\u201d She countered saying, \u201cIf you come back into this room with no clothes on I\u2019m going to f\u2014ing lose my temper.\u201d Campbell tried to leave but the doors were locked. She said it took her \u201cdays to calm down from the anger [she] felt and the crushing realization that there never was a job;", + " only a hidden hook.\u201d\n\nFlorence Darel (1995)\n\nDarel alleges Weinstein pursued her after his company bought the 1993 film she starred in, \u201cFausto.\u201d She said Weinstein asked her to meet him at a suite in The Ritz in 1995, where he propositioned her, despite Weinstein\u2019s wife being in the room next door. \u201cHe started to tell me that he found me very attractive and wanted to have relations with me,\u201d Darel told People. \u201cI told him I was very in love with my companion. He replied that [it] didn\u2019t bother him at all, and offered to have me be his mistress a few days a year.", + " That way we could continue to work together. Basically, it was \u2018If you want to continue in America, you have to go through me.'\u201d She added, \u201cWhat could I do? Could I go to the police and say, \u2018This disgusting man made me an indecent proposal in his hotel room at The Ritz?\u2019 They would have laughed at me. Even when you are raped it is difficult to prove, and society, in many cases, puts the burden of proof on women.\u201d\n\nGwyneth Paltrow (1996)\n\nOne of Paltrow\u2019s first big roles was on \u201cEmma,\u201d the 1996 adaption of Jane Austen\u2019s novel.", + " Before shooting, she told the New York Times, he met with her for what she thought was a work meeting at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel. The interaction ended with Weinstein suggesting they head to his bedroom for massages. She refused his come-on, and confided in her then-boyfriend Brad Pitt. Pitt confronted Weinstein, who warned Pitt not to tell anyone about his advances. \u201cI was a kid, I was signed up, I was petrified,\u201d said Paltrow, who was 22 at the time. \u201cI thought he was going to fire me.\u201d\n\nJudith Godreche (1996)\n\nGodreche didn\u2019t know who Weinstein was when he invited her to breakfast at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.", + " He just acquired her movie \u201cRidicule,\u201d and he wanted to discuss it. They had breakfast with a female Miramax executive. When the executive left, Weinstein invited Godreche up to his suite to see the view and discuss the film\u2019s marketing campaign. In his hotel room, he asked to give her a massage. When she said no, he told the French actress that casual massages were an American custom. \u201cThe next thing I know, he\u2019s pressing against me and pulling off my sweater,\u201d she recalled. She pulled away and left. Godreche later called the female Miramax executive, who told her not to say anything.\n\nRose McGowan (1997)\n\nThe initial Times bombshell revealed McGowan had reached a $100,", + "000 settlement with Weinstein after an encounter in a hotel room during Sundance Film Festival in 1997. Later, the actress revealed Weinstein raped her. On Twitter she wrote the she told the head of Amazon Studios, who didn\u2019t believe her. \u201cI told the head of your studio that HW raped me,\u201d she tweeted. \u201cOver & over I said it. He said it hadn\u2019t been proven. I said I was the proof.\u201d\n\nAsia Argento (1997-1999)\n\nArgento was 21 when she met Weinstein, whose company Miramax was distributing her film \u201cB. Monkey.\u201d The Italian actress said she entered a \u201cconsensual\u201d relationship in fear that their rapport would worsen if she refused.", + " She told Farrow about the first assault, where Weinstein began praising her work. He left the room, and then returned in a bathrobe, holding a bottle of lotion and asked for a massage. After she reluctantly agreed, he forced her legs apart, and performed oral sex on her as she repeatedly told him to stop. Weinstein \u201cterrified me, and he was so big,\u201d she said. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t stop. It was a nightmare.\u201d Argento said she stopped saying no and pretended to enjoy it in hopes that the assault would end. Her 2000 movie \u201cScarlet Diva\u201d depicted a similar scene, and she said many women asked if the character was based on Weinstein.", + " Weinstein saw the movie and thought it was funny but was \u201csorry for whatever happened,\u201d she recalled.\n\nAngelina Jolie (1998)\n\nJolie said she was propositioned in a hotel room during the release of 1998\u2019s \u201cPlaying by Heart.\u201d Weinstein made sexual advances that Jolie rejected. \u201cI had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did,\u201d Jolie said in an email to the Times. \u201cThis behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.\u201d\n\nZelda Perkins (1998)\n\nWeinstein\u2019s London assistant confronted her boss in 1998.", + " According to former colleagues, she and her co-workers had been regularly subjected to inappropriate comments or requests in hotel rooms. Concerned abut the treatment of another female in the office, Perkins told Weinstein she would go public or initiate legal action unless he changed his behavior. She later broke a non-disclosure agreement when she came forward with more information during an interview with the Financial Times. Perkins said Weinstein would disrobe in front of her on a regular basis, asking that she give him a massage and watch him take a bath. \u201cThis was his behavior on every occasion I was alone with him. I often had to wake him up in the hotel in the mornings and he would try to pull me into bed,\u201d she said.", + " Perkins took a stand against Weinstein when he allegedly assaulted her friend. \u201cShe was white as a sheet and shaking and in a very bad emotional state,\u201d Perkins said of her friend. \u201cShe told me something terrible had happened. She was in shock and crying and finding it very hard to talk. I was furious, deeply upset and very shocked. I said: \u2018We need to go to the police\u2019 but she was too distressed. Neither of us knew what to do in a foreign environment.\u201d\n\nHeather Graham (early 2000s)\n\nGraham told Variety that in the early 2000s, she was indirectly propositioned by Weinstein.", + " He called her into his office and said he wanted to put her in one of his movies. Later in the conversation, he mentioned an agreement he had with his wife where he could sleep with whomever he wanted while he was out of town. While he never explicitly mentioned she needed to sleep with him to star in his film, Graham said the subtext was there. She later canceled a follow-up meeting they had scheduled, and was never hired for one of his movies. \u201cMy hope is that this moment starts a dialogue on redefining sexual harassment in the workplace and empowers women to speak out when they feel uncomfortable in a situation,\u201d she wrote.\n\nRomola Garai (2000)\n\nThe British actress claimed Weinstein had her privately audition for him in a hotel room while he was wearing a bathrobe.", + " \u201cLike every other woman in the industry, I\u2019ve had an \u2018audition\u2019 with Harvey Weinstein, where I\u2019d actually already had the audition but you had to be personally approved by him,\u201d Garai said. \u201cSo I had to go to his hotel room in the Savoy, and he answered the door in his bathrobe. I was only 18. I felt violated by it, it has stayed very clearly in my memory.\u201d\n\nMelissa Sagemiller (2000)\n\nWhile she was filming \u201cGet Over It,\u201d distributed by Miramax in 2000, Sagemiller said Weinstein invited her to his hotel room, asked for a massage,", + " and refused to let her leave the room until she kissed him. \u201cI remember that\u2019s when it turned from \u2018Oh, ha ha, I can handle this guy\u2019 to \u2018Well, O.K., he\u2019s blocking the door, sort of\u2019 \u2014 \u2018he\u2019d walked over and put his hand on the door,\u201d she told the Huffington Post. \u201cHe just wouldn\u2019t stop. It was relentless\u2026 I said fine and kissed him on the lips. He sort of held my head and made me kiss him, and then he\u2019s like, \u2018O.K., you can go now. That\u2019s all I wanted. Just do what I say and you can get your way.'\u201d\n\nDawn Dunning (2003)\n\nDunning met Weinstein in 2003 when she was waitressing in a nightclub.", + " She said Weinstein was friendly, professional, and supportive. He offered her to a screen test at Miramax, invited her to lunch and dinner to talk about her films, and gave her and her boyfriend tickets to see \u201cThe Producers\u201d on Broadway. Then, his assistant invited her to a meal with Weinstein at his hotel in Manhattan. She was told Weinstein was running late, so she should head up to his suite. When she arrived, he was sitting in a bathrobe behind a coffee table covered with papers. He told her they were contracts for his next three films, but she could only sign them if she would have three-way sex with him.", + " Dunning said she assumed he was joking, and when she laughed, he told her, \u201cYou\u2019ll never make it in this business. This is how the business works.\u201d\n\nLucia Evans (2004)\n\nEvans was intending to meet with a female executive the summer before her senior year of college, but the meeting turned out to be with Weinstein alone, she told Farrow. During the meeting, he told her she could be good on \u201cProject Runway\u201d if she lost weight. \u201cAt that point, after that, is when he assaulted me,\u201d Evans recalled. \u201cHe forced me to perform oral sex on him.\u201d She tried to resist but was overpowered.", + " \u201cI tried to get away, but maybe I didn\u2019t try hard enough. I didn\u2019t want to kick him or fight him,\u201d she said. \u201cHe\u2019s a big guy. He overpowered me.\u201d She added, \u201cI just sort of gave up. That\u2019s the most horrible part of it, and that\u2019s why he\u2019s been able to do this for so long to so many women: people give up, and then they feel like it\u2019s their fault.\u201d\n\nMimi Haleyi (2006)\n\nHaleyi, who formerly worked as a production assistant on a Weinstein Company television series, said the mogul forced himself onto her in 2006,", + " while she was on her period. Haleyi disclosed the graphic details of her interactions with Weinstein during a New York press conference. She met Weinstein in 2004 during a movie premiere and saw him a second time at Cannes Film Festival. Haleyi said she was planning to spend time in New York, so she asked Weinstein if she could help on any of his productions there. Similar to accounts from other women, she met Weinstein for a meeting in his hotel room, where he asked her for a massage. She declined, but agreed to meet with him again, hoping to form a business connection with Weinstein since she was eager to break into the entertainment industry.", + " After more interactions, Haleyi met with him again at his home in SoHo for business purposes. When she got there, they watched TV before Weinstein started to make sexual advances and force himself onto her. \u201cThen I said, \u2018I am on my period. There is no way this is going to happen.\u2019 He wouldn\u2019t take no for an answer and took me into a bedroom\u2026that looked like a kids bedroom with drawings on the wall,\u201d Haleyi shared. \u201cHe was extremely persistent and physically overpowering. He then orally forced himself on me, while I was on my period. He even pulled my tampon out. I was mortified.", + " I was in disbelief and disgusted. I would not have wanted anyone to do that to me, even if that person had been a romantic partner.\u201d She continued, \u201cI remember Harvey rolling over and saying, \u2018Don\u2019t you feel like we\u2019re so much closer now?'\u201d\n\nLauren Sivan (2007)\n\nWeinstein trapped the journalist in the hallway of a restaurant that was closed to the public. After rejecting a kiss, Sivan recalled, \u201cThat\u2019s when he blocked the entrance and said, \u2018Just stand there and be quiet.'\u201d Weinstein then masturbated in front of her until he ejaculated. \u201cI could not believe what I was witnessing.", + " It was disgusting and kind of pathetic, really,\u201d she said. \u201cBut more than the disgusting act itself, which of course was gross, the demeaning part of it all \u2014 that just 20 minutes earlier, he was having this great conversation with me, and I felt so great and flattered by it.\u201d\n\nSarah Ann Masse (2008)\n\nMasse was working as a nanny when she met Weinstein. She said her agency notified her of a job to babysit Weinstein\u2019s three children. \u201cI first had a few pre-interviews with his assistants, who were nice young women,\u201d Masse said. \u201cIt was on my resume that I was an actor.", + " I was open about that from the beginning. But I also told them that I don\u2019t use my nanny work as an opportunity to try to advance my acting career. I keep them separate.\u201d After numerous pre-interviews, Masse interviewed with Weinstein at his house in Connecticut. When she got there, he opened the door in his boxers. \u201cMy first thought was, \u2018Oh, this is weird. Maybe he forgot this interview is happening. Maybe he thought I was the mailman. I\u2019m sure he\u2019ll be embarrassed and excuse himself and get changed.\u2019 But he didn\u2019t.\u201d Weinstein conducted the rest of the interview in his underwear.", + " At one point, two of his children ran into the room to see who was visiting, and he screamed at them to leave. He addressed her pursuit of an acting career, and Masse said it wouldn\u2019t conflict with her nanny job. After the interview was over, Masse said Weinstein instead grabbed her and \u201cgave me this really tight, close hug that lasted for quite a long period of time. He was still in his underwear. Then he told me he loved me. I left right after that.\u201d Masse said she left feeling uncomfortable. \u201cI thought, \u2018Gosh, maybe this is just how they treat everyone \u2026 Maybe it\u2019s just that Hollywood schmooze thing.\u2019 But I just didn\u2019t feel right about it.\u201d A couple days later,", + " Weinstein\u2019s assistant notified Masse she didn\u2019t get the job because she was an actress.\n\nLouisette Geiss (2008)\n\nDuring a press conference alongside attorney Gloria Allred, Geiss recalled meeting Weinstein at Sundance Film Festival in 2008. There, he set up a meeting to discuss a script she was pitching. He moved the meeting to his hotel room, and Geiss said the meeting went well until he excused himself and returned wearing a bathrobe. She said he promised to help her career if she watched him masturbate, so she left.\n\nEmma de Caunes (2010)\n\nAt Cannes Film Festival, Weinstein told the French actress she would be perfect for an adaptation of a book he had in his hotel room.", + " As she recounted to Farrow, she received a phone call, and Weinstein went into the bathroom. \u201cWhen I hung up the phone, I heard the shower go on in the bathroom,\u201d she said. \u201cI was, like, What the f\u2014, is he taking a shower?\u201d He walked out naked and she asked, \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d Weinstein demanded that she lie on the bed and told her that many other women had done the same. She left \u201cpetrified,\u201d and said Weinstein insisted nothing happened and showered her with gifts.\n\nJuls Bindi (2010)\n\nBindi alleged Weinstein masturbated in front of her and groped her chest in 2010.", + " \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018Please, this is not appropriate, I do not feel comfortable. No. Do not do this in front of me. This is not OK. This is not professional behavior,'\u201d Bindi said on ABC\u2019s 20/20. \u201cHe continued to do it, and I tried to get by him. He grabbed me, started groping on my chest, and he kept going, and I pushed him away.\u201d\n\nJessica Barth (2011)\n\nBarth also met with Weinstein in his hotel room for what she thought was a business meeting. Instead, the meeting \u201calternat[ed] between offering to cast her in a film and demanding a naked massage in bed.\u201d When she tried to leave,", + " he told her she needed to lose weight to \u201ccompete with Mila Kunis.\u201d He then promised her a meeting with one of his female executives. \u201cHe gave me her number, and I walked out and I started bawling,\u201d she said.\n\nLea Seydoux (2012)\n\nThe French actress said Weinstein assaulted her in his hotel room in Paris during Paris Fashion Week. When his assistant left the room, she said Weinstein started \u201closing control.\u201d \u201cWe were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me. I had to defend myself,\u201d she said. \u201cHe\u2019s big and fat,", + " so I had to be forceful to resist him. I left his room, thoroughly disgusted. I wasn\u2019t afraid of him, though. Because I knew what kind of man he was all along.\u201d Seydoux said she had seen Weinstein hit on female guests at a number of industry events in London and New York before her incident occurred. \u201cI\u2019ve seen how he operates: the way he looks for an opening,\u201d Seydoux wrote. \u201cThe way he tests women to see what he can get away with \u2026 I\u2019ve been at dinners with him where he\u2019s bragged openly about Hollywood actresses he has had sex with. He\u2019s also said misogynistic things to me over the years.", + " \u2018You\u2019d be better if you lost weight,\u2019 he said. That comment shocked me.\u201d\n\nEmily Nestor (2014)\n\nNestor, an assistant at Weinstein Co., was also cited in the New York Times article, and said she was warned off the bat that she was Weinstein\u2019s \u201ctype.\u201d Weinstein asked her to get drinks and offered to relocate her to the London office so she could be his girlfriend. Instead, the two got coffee, which Nestor said was \u201cthe most excruciating and uncomfortable hour of my life.\u201d She said she was left feeling embarrassed and shaken.\n\nBrit Marling (2014)\n\nThe \u201cOA\u201d actress recounted her story to the Atlantic and detailed a meeting Weinstein requested with her in 2014.", + " Like many Weinstein accusers, Marling said her meeting with the producer was relocated to his hotel suite. \u201cI, too, felt terror in the pit of my stomach when that young woman left the room and I was suddenly alone with him. I, too, was asked if I wanted a massage, champagne, strawberries. I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me?,\u201d she wrote. It was clear Weinstein was looking for \u201csex or some version of an erotic exchange,\u201d Marling recalled.", + " \u201cI was able to gather myself together \u2014 a bundle of firing nerves, hands trembling, voice lost in my throat \u2014 and leave the room.\u201d After leaving his hotel room, she cried. \u201cI wept because I had gone up the elevator when I knew better,\u201d she said. \u201cI wept because I had let him touch my shoulders. I wept because at other times in my life, under other circumstances, I had not been able to leave.\u201d\n\nAmbra Battilana Gutierrez (2015)\n\nGutierrez filed sexual assault charges in 2015 after Weinstein grabbed her breast during one of their meetings. The charges were dropped by NYPD,", + " but initially, Gutierrez worked with the police to try and catch Weinstein confessing to the crime on tape the next day. After boasting actresses whose career he helped and offering to get Gutierrez a dialect coach, he pressured her to shower with him. She repeatedly said no. During the recording, Gutierrez asked him why he groped her breasts the day before. Weinstein responded saying, \u201cOh, please, I\u2019m sorry, just come on in. I\u2019m used to that. Come on. Please.\u201d\n\nCara Delevingne\n\nOn Instagram, Delevingne recalled an instance where Weinstein made an advance on her and tried to get her to kiss another actress in front of him.", + " \u201cWhen I first started to work as an actress, I was working on a film and I received a call from Harvey Weinstein asking if I had slept with any of the women I was seen out with in the media. It was a very odd and uncomfortable call \u2026 I answered none of his questions and hurried off the phone but before I hung up, he said to me that if I was gay or decided to be with a woman especially in public that I\u2019d never get the role of a straight woman or make it as an actress in Hollywood.\u201d She continued, \u201cA year or two later, I went to a meeting with him in the lobby of a hotel with a director about an upcoming film.", + " The director left the meeting and Harvey asked me to stay and chat with him. As soon as we were alone he began to brag about all the actresses he had slept with and how he had made their careers and spoke about other inappropriate things of a sexual nature. He then invited me to his room. I quickly declined and asked his assistant if my car was outside. She said it wasn\u2019t and wouldn\u2019t be for a bit and I should go to his room. The actress said she felt \u201cvery powerless.\u201d \u201cWhen I arrived I was relieved to find another woman in his room and thought immediately I was safe,\u201d she said. \u201cHe asked us to kiss and she began some sort of advances upon his direction.\u201d Delevingne said she tried to avert the conversation by offering to sing to make the situation more professional.", + " After singing, she said she had to leave. \u201cHe walked me to the door and stood in front of it and tried to kiss me on the lips. I stopped him and managed to get out of the room. I still got the part for the film and always thought that he gave it to me because of what happened. Since then I felt awful that I did the movie. I felt like I didn\u2019t deserve the part. I was so hesitant about speaking out \u2026 I didn\u2019t want to hurt his family. I felt guilty as if I did something wrong. I was also terrified that this sort of thing had happened to so many women I know but no one had said anything because of fear.\u201d\n\nKate Beckinsale\n\nWhen Beckinsale was 17 years old,", + " she was called to meet with Weinstein. \u201cI assumed it would be in a conference room which was very common. When I arrived, reception told me to go to his room,\u201d she wrote. \u201cHe opened the door in his bathrobe.\u201d However, she said it \u201cdid not cross my mind that this older, unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him.\u201d Beckinsale mentioned she declined alcohol. \u201cA few years later, he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn\u2019t remember if he had assaulted me or not,\u201d she said. She also \u201csaid no to him professionally many times over the years.\u201d She said he screamed at her,", + " called her a c\u2014, made \u201cthreats,\u201d and he joked about her consistent rejection.\n\nClaire Forlani\n\nThe actress appeared in \u201cBoys and Girls,\u201d a 2000 film distributed by Weinstein\u2019s company Miramax. \u201cYou see, nothing happened to me with Harvey \u2014 by that I mean, I escaped 5 times,\u201d she wrote on Twitter. \u201cI had two Peninsula Hotel meetings in the evening with Harvey and all I remember was I ducked, dived and ultimately got out of there without getting slobbered over, well just a bit. Yes, massage was suggested. The three dinners with Harvey I don\u2019t really remember the time period,", + " I was 25. I remember him telling me all the actresses who had slept with him and what he had done for them. I wasn\u2019t drinking the cool aid [sic], I knew Harvey was a master manipulator. He also announced to me at the last dinner I had with him at Dominic\u2019s that his pilot knew to be on standby because he could never get me to sleep with him, to which I did what I always did, make light of the situation, a joke here or there and moved on. You see, I always thought I was a pro at handling these guys, I\u2019d had a fair amount of experience. Sometimes I got angry,", + " really angry. I wondered why I had Prey stamped on my forehead but this I kept to myself.\u201d\n\nEva Green\n\nGreen tweeted her experience with sexual harassment by Weinstein, writing, \u201cI met him for a business meeting in Paris at which he behaved inappropriately and I had to push him off. I got away without it going further, but the experience left me shocked and disgusted. I have not discussed this before because I wanted to maintain my privacy, but I understand it is important to do so as I hear about other women\u2019s experiences.\u201d\n\nAngie Everhart\n\nThe actress and swimsuit model told TMZ that Weinstein broke into her room and blocked the door as he masturbated in front of her.", + " \u201cI was on a friend\u2019s boat. Harvey walked in, walked in front of me, took his pants down, did his thing, exited on the floor, if you know what I mean, pulled his pants back up, said \u2018You\u2019re a really nice girl. Don\u2019t tell anybody about this,\u2019 and left. She said when she told people, they were cavalier about the situation. \u201cI told people on the boat. I told people at the dinner I was at. Everybody was like, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s just Harvey.'\u201d\n\nErika Rosenbaum\n\nThe Canadian actress told CBC about three meetings with Weinstein where the producer \u201cbehaved inappropriately.\u201d She said he asked her to give him a massage after she rejected his sexual advances in a hotel room both in his office and at the Toronto International Film Festival.", + " \u201cHe asks me to come to the washroom with him while he gets ready\u2026 and I flat out say I\u2019m not staying while you take a shower,\u201d she said. \u201cHe was pissed that I was trying to back out of it\u2026 I follow him to the opened door of the bathroom and the toilet seat has been broken like a giant smashed it\u2026 He grabs me by \u2014 he holds me by the back of the neck and faces me to the mirror, and very quietly tells me that he just wants to look at me. And he starts to masturbate standing behind me. And I stood there, and I did nothing. I think I was just too shocked to move or say anything.", + ".. He really took something from me.\u201d\n\nMinka Kelly\n\nKelly posted on Instagram describing a general meeting she had scheduled with Weinstein. \u201cThe location was set for his hotel room,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI wasn\u2019t comfortable with going to his room & said so. The following day, we sat down with an assistant in the hotel restaurant. He bullsh\u2013 me for five minutes re: movies he could put me in, then asked the assistant to excuse us. As she walked away, he said, \u2018I know you were feeling what I was feeling when we met the other night\u2019 and then regaled me with offers of a lavish life filled with trips around the world on private planes etc.", + " IF I would be his girlfriend.\u201d\n\nSophie Dix\n\nThe British actress was 22 when she said Weinstein invited her to his room to watch footage from a film in which she was appearing. \u201cAs soon as I was in there, I realized it was a terrible mistake. I got to the hotel room, I remember talk of a massage and I thought that was pretty gross. I think he showed me his big back and I found that pretty horrid,\u201d she told the Guardian. \u201cThen before I knew it, he started trying to pull my clothes off and pin me down and I just kept saying, \u2018No, no, no.\u2019 But he was really forceful.", + " I remember him pulling at my trousers and stuff and looming over me and I just sort of \u2014 I am a big, strong girl and I bolted\u2026 ran for the bathroom and locked the door.\u201d She continued, \u201cI was in there for a while, I think. He went very quiet. After a while I remember opening the door and seeing him just there facing the door, masturbating, so I quickly closed the door again and locked it. Then when I heard room service come to the door, I just ran.\u201d\n\nLena Headey\n\nHeadey described an instance that took place at the Venice Film Festival. \u201cAt one point Harvey asked me to take a walk down to the water,", + " I walked down with him and he stopped and made some suggestive comment, a gesture, I just laughed it off, I was genuinely shocked,\u201d she recalled on Twitter. \u201cI remember thinking, it\u2019s got to be a joke, I said something like.. \u2018Oh come on mate?!?? It\u2019d be like kissing my dad!! Let\u2019s go get a drink, get back to the others.\u2019 I was never in any other Miramax film.\u201d Another encounter with Weinstein took place years later in Los Angeles. The two met for what Headey thought would be a meeting to discuss potential work, she said. \u201cHe asked me a few questions about the state of my love life,\u201d she said.", + " \u201cI shifted the conversation back to something less personal. Then he went to the loo. He came back and said, \u2018Let\u2019s go up to the room, I want to give you a script.\u2019 We walked to the lift and the energy shifted, my whole body went into high alert, the lift was going up and I said to Harvey, \u2018I\u2019m not interested in anything other than work, please don\u2019t think I got in here with you for any other reason, nothing is going to happen.\u2019 I don\u2019t know what possessed me to speak out at that moment, only that I had such a strong sense of don\u2019t come near me.\u201d After,", + " she said Weinstein furiously marched her out of the hotel and told her not to tell anyone about their exchange. \u201cI felt completely powerless,\u201d she wrote, concluding, \u201cI got into my car and I cried.\u201d\n\nZo\u00eb Brock\n\nThe model shared her story on British daytime show \u201cThis Morning.\u201d Brock said she went to his hotel room with a group of people after an evening out. Everyone left the room after a few minutes, and once it was just the two of them alone, Weinstein left and returned without clothing on. \u201cHe chased me naked,\u201d she said. Brock said she hid in the bathroom and locked the door. When she went to leave,", + " she said she found Weinstein sitting on the bed \u201csobbing and apologizing.\u201d\n\nLina Esco\n\nEsco said Weinstein propositioned her and suggested they kiss during a business dinner. \u201cHe tried to insinuate that everything would be easier for me if I went along,\u201d she told the Washington Post.\n\nMia Kirshner\n\nKirshner wrote for Globe and Mail, \u201cI could waste this precious space on Harvey Weinstein by describing my own ordeal with him. An ordeal in a hotel room where he attempted to treat me like chattel that could be purchased with the promise of work in exchange for being his disposable orifice. But I\u2019m not giving that man,", + " a newly crowned figurehead of sexual abuse, the privilege of more ink. There are broader and more urgent issues to address. And if we don\u2019t address them now, I fear that when the headlines about Harvey Weinstein fade, what will remain is a disease in my own industry.\u201d\n\nChelsea Skidmore\n\nSkidmore told the Washington Post that Weinstein masturbated in front of her and exposed himself to her on multiple occasions. \u201cHe had just a very forceful way of going about things,\u201d she said. \u201cHe forces himself on you, talks you into it and doesn\u2019t leave you with an option.\u201d\n\nLupita Nyong\u2019o\n\nNyong\u2019o penned an New York Times op-ed detailing her experiences with Weinstein starting when she was a student at the Yale School of Drama.", + " One of the first instances of predatory behavior was during a meal where Weinstein tried to force Nyong\u2019o to drink alcohol. Following dinner, she went to Weinstein\u2019s house to screen a film with his family. Before the movie ended, Weinstein asked her to accompany him outside the room. \u201cHarvey led me into a bedroom \u2014 his bedroom \u2014 and announced that he wanted to give me a massage,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI thought he was joking at first. He was not. For the first time since I met him, I felt unsafe. I panicked a little and thought quickly to offer to give him one instead: It would allow me to be in control physically,", + " to know exactly where his hands were at all times.\u201d At the time, she said, \u201cI reasoned that it had been inappropriate and uncalled-for, but not overtly sexual. I was entering into a business where the intimate is often professional and so the lines are blurred.\u201d Nyong\u2019o\u2019s experiences with Weinstein culminated during a dinner in New York. She alleges Weinstein propositioned her, and when she turned him down, he threatened the future of her career.\n\nConnie Nielsen\n\nIn a column for Variety, Neilsen recounted working on the Weinstein-produced \u201cThe Great Raid.\u201d She said she warned a young co-star not to take Weinstein up on drinks unless the whole group was there.", + " \u201cI had no issues on the film, nor when I met Harvey at social events around the world,\u201d she wrote, clarifying that his actions were simply well known within the industry. \u201cIt was therefore a real shock when Harvey proceeded to put his hand on my thigh at dinner during the opening night of \u201cGreat Raid,\u201d at which both my boyfriend and my brother were present,\u201d Neilsen wrote. \u201cI grabbed his hand and squeezed it violently to hurt him and proceeded to hold it in place on his own thigh. I steered clear of him as soon as I could for the rest of the evening but soon forgot about it, until the New York Times and New Yorker pieces set off a landslide.\u201d ", + " Since The New York Times published its first explosive report about Harvey Weinstein, 63 women and counting have stepped forward with allegations about his sexual misconduct. Many of their allegations are similar: they say that Weinstein invited them to a private room, where he either asked for a naked massage or sexually assaulted them. The majority of the time, Weinstein\u2019s alleged targets were young, aspiring actresses\u2014whom he reportedly preyed upon using his colleagues and his powerful title to cushion against any blowback.\n\nFrom Angelina Jolie to Rose McGowan to Cara Delevingne to Kate Beckinsale, here are the women who have told their stories thus far.", + " This list will be updated if and when more women come forward.\n\nHope Exiner d\u2019Amore:\n\nIn the late 1970s, Exiner d\u2019Amore was working for Weinstein\u2019s Buffalo-based pre-Miramax concert promotion company when she went with Weinstein on a business trip to New York City. There, she says, Weinstein forced sex and oral sex on her: \u201cI told him no. I kept pushing him away. He just wouldn\u2019t listen. He just forced himself on me.\u201d Following the alleged incident, she says, Weinstein kept pursing her; when she declined his offers, she says, she was fired.\n\nCynthia Burr:\n\nThe actress told The New York Times that in the late 1970s,", + " her manager set up a meeting between her and Weinstein; they met in an elevator, says Burr, where she says Weinstein tried to kiss her and forced her to perform oral sex on him. \u201cThe way he forced me made me feel really bad about myself,\u201d she told the Times. \u201cWhat are you going to do when you are a girl just trying to make it as an actress? Nobody would have believed me.\u201d\n\nAshley Matthau:\n\nThe dancer says that she met Weinstein in 2004, when he visited the set of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights and began pressuring her to take a private meeting with him. Eventually, she relented,", + " and went with him to his hotel room, where Weinstein allegedly bragged about other actresses he had supposedly slept with before groping her and masturbating on top of her. \u201cI kept telling him, \u2018Stop, I\u2019m engaged,\u2019 but he kept saying: \u2018It\u2019s just a little cuddling. It\u2019s not a problem. It\u2019s not like we\u2019re having sex,\u2019\u201d she told the Times. Matthau subsequently retained a lawyer\u2014but when they met with Weinstein and one of his lawyers, Matthau says, she was told her name would be smeared if she tried to bring action against Weinstein. Matthau then agreed to enter into a settlement for more than $100,", + "000.\n\nLacey Dorn:\n\nDorn told the Times that after meeting Weinstein at a party in 2011, the producer asked for her e-mail address, then groped her. \u201cI was so na\u00efve, I didn\u2019t say anything. And he didn\u2019t say anything either,\u201d she said. \u201cI just got out of the party as fast as possible.\u201d\n\nDaryl Hannah:\n\nHannah told The New Yorker that she had several encounters with Weinstein: two in which he pounded incessantly on her hotel-room door until she left the room by a back entrance (the first time) or barricaded the door (the second); another in which he barged into her hotel room \u201clike a raging bull.", + " And I know with every fibre of my being that if my male makeup artist was not in that room, things would not have gone well. It was scary.\u201d Weinstein allegedly then told Hannah to attend a party downstairs; when she arrived at the room he had mentioned, she says, it was empty save Weinstein. When Hannah asked for an explanation, she says Weinstein replied, \u201cAre your tits real?\u201d before asking if he could touch them.\n\nAnnabella Sciorra:\n\nThe Sopranos actress told The New Yorker that Weinstein violently raped her in her apartment in the early 90s, then harassed her repeatedly for the next several years.", + " Initially, she had been reluctant to discuss the alleged assault with writer Ronan Farrow: \u201cI was so scared. I was looking out the window of my living room, and I faced the water of the East River. I really wanted to tell you. I was like, \u2018This is the moment you\u2019ve been waiting for your whole life.\u2019\u201d Sciorra says she felt enormous guilt following the alleged incident: \u201cLike most of these women, I was so ashamed of what happened. And I fought. I fought. But still I was like, Why did I open that door? Who opens the door at that time of night?", + " I was definitely embarrassed by it. I felt disgusting. I felt like I had fucked up.\u201d Years later, she says, Weinstein came to her hotel room at the Cannes Film Festival, \u201cin his underwear, holding a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a tape, a movie, in the other.\u201d Sciorra says that time, she ran.\n\nNatassia Malthe:\n\nIn a press conference with Gloria Allred, the actress accused Weinstein of raping her in 2008. She said he went into her London hotel room and began masturbating, then allegedly forced himself on her. \u201cIt was not consensual. He did not use a condom,\u201d she said,", + " later adding, \u201cI believe I disassociated during that time that he was having sex with me... I played dead.\u201d\n\nMimi Haleyi:\n\nIn a press conference with Allred, former production assistant Haleyi accused Weinstein of performing oral sex on her without her consent. She first met him at the European premiere of The Aviator, then later worked on a Weinstein television project. Haleyi claims that in 2006, Weinstein backed her into a room, physically overpowered her, and performed oral sex on her. She was on her period at the time, she said, noting that Weinstein pulled out her tampon before the alleged act.", + " \u201cI was mortified,\u201d she said.\n\nBrit Marling:\n\nIn an essay for The Atlantic, Marling wrote that Weinstein requested a meeting with her in 2014. Her story resembles so many others: \u201cI, too, was asked to meet him in a hotel bar. I, too, met a young, female assistant there who said the meeting had been moved upstairs to his suite because he was a very busy man. I, too, felt my guard go up but was calmed by the presence of another woman my age beside me. I, too, felt terror in the pit of my stomach when that young woman left the room and I was suddenly alone with him.", + " I, too, was asked if I wanted a massage, Champagne, strawberries. I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me? It was clear that there was only one direction he wanted this encounter to go in, and that was sex or some version of an erotic exchange,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI was able to gather myself together\u2014a bundle of firing nerves, hands trembling, voice lost in my throat\u2014and leave the room.\u201d\n\nAlice Evans:\n\nIn an essay for The Telegraph, the British actress recounted hearing \u201cendless stories about massages and hand-jobs in hotel rooms\u201d with regard to Weinstein\u2014but not suspecting that Weinstein would try anything similar with her when,", + " she said, he approached her at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002. Evans said that Weinstein asked her to come to the bathroom with him, allegedly saying, \u201cJust go. I\u2019m right behind you. I want to touch your tits. Kiss you a little.\u201d Evans said she declined\u2014and in the essay, wondered if that decision had a negative effect on her career, and that of her husband, Ioan Gruffudd.\n\nSarah Polley:\n\nIn an essay for The New York Times, the actress and director said that when she was 19 and filming a Miramax movie, she was brought to Weinstein\u2019s office. There,", + " she said, \u201cMr. Weinstein wasted no time. He told me, in front of the publicist and a co-worker beside him, that a famous star, a few years my senior, had once sat across from him in the chair I was in now. Because of his \u2018very close relationship\u2019 with this actress, she had gone on to play leading roles and win awards. If he and I had that kind of \u2018close relationship,\u2019 I could have a similar career. \u2018That\u2019s how it works,\u2019 I remember him telling me. The implication wasn\u2019t subtle. I replied that I wasn\u2019t very ambitious or interested in acting, which was true.\u201d\n\nAmber Anderson:\n\nThe actress wrote on Instagram that she was 20 years old when Weinstein allegedly coerced her into a private meeting,", + " \u201cindicating I could not take anyone along with me and dismissing staff who were present.\u201d She said that he then propositioned her, proposing that they enter into \u201ca \u2018personal\u2019 relationship to further my career whilst bragging about other actresses he had \u2018helped\u2019 in a similar way.\u201d Anderson said that Weinstein tried to place her hand on his lap, which is when she left the room.\n\nMarisa Coughlan:\n\nThe actress told The Hollywood Reporter that in 1999, after she had shot the Miramax film Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Weinstein asked her to meet him at the Peninsula hotel, where \u201che told me that he has a lot of \u2018special friends\u2019 and they give each other massages.", + " It was a full-court press. He wanted me to be one of his \u2018special friends\u2019 and go into the bedroom. I told him that I had a serious boyfriend and reminded him that he was married and that we should keep this professional. I was so blindsided. Not one ounce of me anticipated it. It was the weirdest meeting I\u2019ve ever had in my life.\u201d Ultimately, said Coughlan, she left the room, and later allegedly rejected another advance after another meeting.\n\n__ Katya Mtsitouridze:__\n\nThe Russian TV hostess told The Hollywood Reporter that she scheduled a meeting with Weinstein at the cafe of the Excelsior hotel in Venice.", + " Upon arriving, she was told by an assistant to meet Weinstein in his room instead, where, she said, she found Weinstein wearing nothing but a bathrobe; he then allegedly told her, \u201cI waited for the masseuse, but she\u2019s late. We can have fun without her. Let\u2019s relax.\u201d Mtsitouridze said that when a waiter entered the room, she took the opportunity to turn and run.\n\nHeather Kerr:\n\nAt a press conference, the actress said that Weinstein exposed himself to her and assaulted her during a private meeting in an unspecified year. \u201cHe asked me if I was good,\u201d Kerr said. \u201cHe kept repeating that word.", + " I offered to provide him with a reel. He had this sleazy smile on his face. Because he was sitting so close on this couch I started to get a sick feeling in my stomach. The next thing I knew, he unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis.\u201d Kerr said that Weinstein then \u201cgrabbed her hand and forced it onto penis and held it there,\u201d before telling her that \u201cthis is how things work in Hollywood and all actresses who\u2019d made it did it this way.\u201d She said she left the industry shortly afterwards.\n\nSean Young:\n\nThe star of Blade Runner and Wall Street told the Dudley and Bob with Matt Show podcast that while working on the 1992 film Love Crimes,", + " she \u201cpersonally experienced\u201d Weinstein \u201cpulling his you-know-what out of his pants in order to shock me. And my basic response was, \u2018You know, Harvey, I don\u2019t really think you should be pulling that thing out, it\u2019s not very pretty,\u2019\u201d Young said. \u201cAnd then leaving, and then never having another meeting with that guy again, because it was like, \u2018What on earth?\u2019\u201d\n\nLupita Nyong\u2019o:\n\nNyong\u2019o\u2019s various interactions with Weinstein, as revealed in an explosive New York Times story, will sound familiar to anyone who has been following the Weinstein saga; the Oscar winner says she endured meetings in hotel rooms,", + " requests for massages, complicity from Weinstein\u2019s female accomplices/assistants, and the promise of career advancement as quid pro quo. When she first met the mogul in 2011, Nyong\u2019o writes, she was still a student at the Yale School of Drama. Not knowing much about Weinstein, she asked a female producer (who goes unnamed in the article) what to do when the studio head was introduced to her. \u201cKeep Harvey in your corner,\u201d was the advice, as well as the warning: \u201cHe is a good man to know in the business, but just be careful around him.\u201d\n\nIn the most disturbing detail,", + " she writes about an alleged encounter in which \u201cHarvey led me into a bedroom \u2014 his bedroom\u2014and announced that he wanted to give me a massage. I thought he was joking at first. He was not. For the first time since I met him, I felt unsafe. I panicked a little and thought quickly to offer to give him one instead... I could rationalize giving him one and keep a semblance of professionalism in spite of the bizarre circumstance. He agreed to this and lay on the bed. I began to massage his back to buy myself time to figure out how to extricate myself from this undesirable situation. Before long he said he wanted to take off his pants.", + " I told him not to do that... He put his shirt on and again mentioned how stubborn I was. I agreed with an easy laugh, trying to get myself out of the situation safely. I was after all on his premises, and the members of his household, the potential witnesses, were all (strategically, it seems to me now) in a soundproof room.\u201d\n\nLena Headey:\n\nThe Game of Thrones star opened up about her experience with Weinstein on Twitter, saying that the producer made a suggestive comment to her after she appeared in The Brothers Grimm. \u201cI just laughed it off, I was genuinely shocked,\u201d she wrote.", + " \u201cI remember thinking, \u2018It\u2019s got to be a joke.\u2019 I said something like, \u2018Oh come on mate?! It\u2019d be like kissing my dad! Let\u2019s go get a drink, get back to the others.\u2019 I was never in any other Miramax film.\u201d Years later, she continued, Weinstein asked her to meet for breakfast, then asked her to come to his hotel room.\n\n\u201cWe walked to the lift and the energy shifted,\u201d wrote Headey. \u201cMy whole body went into high alert. The lift was going up and I said to Harvey, \u2018I\u2019m not interested in anything other than work, please don\u2019t think I got in here with your any other reason,", + " nothing is going to happen.\u2019 I don\u2019t know what possessed me to speak out at that moment, only that I had such a strong sense of \u2018don\u2019t come near me.\u2019 He was silent after I spoke, furious. We got out of the lift and walked to his room. His hand was on my back, he was marching me forward, not a word. I felt completely powerless, he tried his key card and it didn\u2019t work. Then he got really angry. He walked me back to the lift, through the hotel to the valet, by grabbing and holding tightly to the back of my arm. He paid for my car and whispered in my ear,", + " \u2018Don\u2019t tell anyone about this, not your manager, not your agent.\u2019 I got into my car and I cried.\u201d\n\nVu Thu Phuong:\n\nThe Vietnamese actress wrote in a Facebook post\u2014translated by the Web site Saigoneer\u2014that Weinstein asked her to meet him in a hotel room, where she says he approached her wearing only a towel. She says he then asked her if she was comfortable doing sex scenes on film. \u201cI can teach you, don\u2019t worry. Many stars have also been through this,\u201d Phuong says Weinstein told her. \u201cJust treat this as necessary experiences so that you\u2019ll have a stronger foundation in the future.\u201d Afterward,", + " she writes, the actress gave up on achieving stardom in America and eventually left the film industry altogether.\n\nLauren Holly:\n\nThe actress, who appeared in the Miramax film Beautiful Girls, says that Weinstein set up a meeting with her in a hotel room; though he appeared fully clothed at first, she says, at one point he left the room and came back wearing a bathrobe. After more business talk, Holly says, Weinstein used the toilet, then began taking a shower\u2014continuing to talk to her all the while. \u201cMy head is going crazy at this point. He\u2019s acting like the situation is normal. He\u2019s acting like we\u2019re having a normal encounter.", + " I\u2019m thinking to myself, \u2018Am I just a prude? Am I supposed to be more open-minded?\u2019 I didn\u2019t quite know how to handle myself at that moment,\u201d she told Variety.\n\nThen, after drying himself off, Holly says that Weinstein approached her: \u201cThe adrenaline rush I felt, I wanted to flee, I was scared. He told me that I looked stressed and he thought maybe I could use a massage, maybe I could give him a massage. I began just sort of babbling like I was a child, I think it was just the fear.\u201d She says that when she demurred, Weinstein said that she needed to keep him as an ally,", + " and that leaving him would be a \u201cbad decision\u201d; she says she then pushed him away and ran.\n\nChelsea Skidmore:\n\nThe actress and comedian told The Washington Post that she had at least four encounters with Weinstein in which he variously asked her for a massage, masturbated in front of her, exposed himself to her, and tried to convince her to get intimate with other women in front of him. \u201cHe had just a very forceful way of going about things,\u201d Skidmore said. \u201cHe forces himself on you, talks you into it and doesn\u2019t leave you with an option.\u201d With Weinstein\u2019s prompting, one of the other women attempted to convince Skidmore to participate in sex acts by saying,", + " \u201cOh, but he\u2019s helped out so many girls.\u201d\n\nLina Esco:\n\nAt a dinner in 2010, the actress and director says that Weinstein propositioned her: \u201cI think we should see a movie in the theater, like back in the day, and we should kiss,\u201d he allegedly said. \u201cHe tried to insinuate that everything would be easier for me if I went along,\u201d Esco told The Washington Post.\n\nTrish Goff:\n\nThe model says that Weinstein quickly got physical when she had lunch with him in 2003: \u201cThen he started asking me if I had a boyfriend, and if we had an open relationship.", + " I said I wasn\u2019t interested in an open relationship, but he was relentless, and I kept trying to shut that down and move on,\u201d she told The New York Times. \u201cThen he started putting his hands on my legs, and I said, \u2018Can you stop doing that?\u2019 When we finally stood up to go, he really started groping me, grabbing my breasts, grabbing my face and trying to kiss me. I kept saying, \u2018Please stop, please stop, but he didn\u2019t until I managed to get back into the public space. The horrible thing is, as a model, it wasn\u2019t that unusual to be in a weird situation where a photographer or someone feels they have a right to your body.\u201d\n\nMia Kirshner:\n\nThe Canadian actress wrote in the Globe and Mail that she had an \u201cordeal\u201d with Weinstein in a hotel room:", + " \u201cI could waste this precious space on Harvey Weinstein by describing my own ordeal with him,\u201d she said. \u201cAn ordeal in a hotel room where he attempted to treat me like chattel that could be purchased with the promise of work in exchange for being his disposable orifice.\u201d\n\nLysette Anthony:\n\nThe British actress tells the Sunday Times, via her friend Charlotte Metcalf, that Weinstein raped her in 1982, when he was in London doing publicity for the movie Krull: \u201cHe pushed me inside and rammed me up against the coat rack in my tiny hall and started fumbling at my gown. He was trying to kiss me and shove inside me.", + " It was disgusting,\u201d she says. \u201cFinally I just gave up. At least I was able to stop him kissing me. As he ground himself against me and shoved inside me, I kept my eyes shut tight, held my breath, just let him get on with it. He came over my leg like a dog and then left. It was pathetic, revolting. I remember lying in the bath later and crying. There hadn\u2019t been a knife. He wasn\u2019t a stranger. I was disgusted and embarras\u00adsed, but I was at home. I thought I should just forget the whole disgusting incident. I blamed myself.", + " I\u2019d been an idiot to think he and I were just friends.\u201d\n\nPaula Wachowiak::\n\nWhile working as a production assistant on Weinstein\u2019s very first movie, The Burning, Wachowiak says she was asked to bring some checks to Weinstein\u2019s hotel room so that he could sign them. \u201cHe let me in, but he was behind the door when it opened,\u201c Wachowiak told the Buffalo News. \u201cWhen I got into the room I realized that he was holding a hand towel around his waist.\u201c She says that Weinstein then dropped the towel and asked Wachowiak to give him a massage. \u201cHe tried to encourage me by telling me what a fantastic opportunity it was for me to be part of this project.", + " I told him that I was happy to be part of the project but I would not touch him. He finally gave up and signed all the checks.\u201c Later, she says, Weinstein approached her on set and asked her a question: \u201cSo, was seeing me naked the highlight of your internship?\u201c\n\nEva Green:\n\nAfter Green\u2019s mother, actress Marl\u00e8ne Jobert, said on Europe 1 Radio that her daughter had been sexually harassed by Weinstein for two years, Green herself corroborated the account: \u201cI met him for a business meeting in Paris at which he behaved inappropriately and I had to push him off,\u201d she wrote on Twitter.", + " \u201cI got away without it going further, but the experience left me shocked and disgusted. I have not discussed this before because I wanted to maintain my privacy, but I understand it is important to do so as I hear about other women\u2019s experiences.\u201c\n\nAngie Everhart:\n\nThe actress and swimsuit model told TMZ that while on a yacht with Weinstein, the producer broke into her room and blocked the door as he masturbated in front of her: \u201cI was on a friend\u2019s boat. Harvey walked in, walked in front of me, took his pants down, did his thing, exited on the floor, if you know what I mean,", + " pulled his pants back up, said \u2018You\u2019re a really nice girl. Don\u2019t tell anybody about this,\u2019 and left.\u201d What\u2019s more, Everhart added, she told the people around her about the incident\u2014and they did nothing in response: \u201cI told people on the boat. I told people at the dinner I was at. Everybody was like, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s just Harvey.\u2019\u201d\n\nErika Rosenbaum:\n\nIn an interview with the CBC, Canadian actress Rosenbaum recounted three meetings with Weinstein in which she says he \u201cbehaved inappropriately,\u201c by asking her to give him a massage after she rejected his sexual advances in a hotel room,", + " attempting to get intimate with her in his office, and, at the Toronto International Film Festival, assaulting her: \u201cHe asks me to come to the washroom with him while he gets ready... and I flat out say I'm not staying while you take a shower,\u201d she said. \u201cHe was pissed that I was trying to back out of it... I follow him to the opened door of the bathroom and the toilet seat has been broken like a giant smashed it... He grabs me by\u2014he holds me by the back of the neck and faces me to the mirror, and very quietly tells me that he just wants to look at me.", + " And he starts to masturbate standing behind me. And I stood there and I did nothing. I think I was just too shocked to move or say anything... He really took something from me.\u201c\n\nTara Subkoff:\n\nThe actress told Variety that Weinstein harassed her at a premiere party in the 1990s: \u201cHe motioned for me to come over to him, and then grabbed me to sit me on his lap. I was so surprised and shocked I couldn\u2019t stop laughing because it was so awkward. But then I could feel that he had an erection. I got quiet, but got off his lap quickly. He then asked me to come outside with him and other things I don\u2019t want to share,", + " but it was implied that if I did not comply with doing what he asked me to do that I would not get the role that I had already been informally offered. I laughed in his face as I was in shock and so uncomfortable. I left the party right after that.\u201d Subkoff believes that after she rejected Weinstein, she was blacklisted by the industry: \u201cMy reputation was ruined by false gossip, and I was called \u2018too difficult to work with.\u2019 It became impossible for me to get work as an actress after this.\u201d\n\nMinka Kelly:\n\nThe actress recalls a meeting with Weinstein in which the producer \u201cregaled me with offers of a lavish life filled with trips around the world on private planes etc.", + " IF I would be his girlfriend,\u201c she wrote on Instagram. Kelly says she declined.\n\nMelissa Sagemiller:\n\nIn the summer of 2000, while she was filming the Miramax-distributed Get Over It, Sagemiller says Weinstein invited her into his hotel room, where he asked for a massage and refused to let her leave the room until she kissed him. \u201cI remember that\u2019s when it turned from \u2018Oh, ha ha, I can handle this guy\u2019 to \u2018Well, O.K., he\u2019s blocking the door, sort of\u2019\u2014\u2018he\u2019d walked over and put his hand on the door,\u201d she told the Huffington Post.", + " \u201cHe just wouldn\u2019t stop. It was relentless.... I said fine and kissed him on the lips. He sort of held my head and made me kiss him, and then he\u2019s like, \u2018O.K., you can go now. That\u2019s all I wanted. Just do what I say and you can get your way.\u2019\u201d\n\nSophie Dix:\n\nBritish actress Dix was 22 when Weinstein allegedly invited her to his room at the Savoy Hotel, ostensibly to watch footage from a film in which she was appearing. \u201cAs soon as I was in there, I realized it was a terrible mistake. I got to the hotel room,", + " I remember talk of a massage and I thought that was pretty gross. I think he showed me his big back and I found that pretty horrid,\u201d she told The Guardian. \u201cThen before I knew it, he started trying to pull my clothes off and pin me down and I just kept saying, \u2018No, no, no.\u2019 But he was really forceful. I remember him pulling at my trousers and stuff and looming over me and I just sort of\u2014I am a big, strong girl and I bolted... ran for the bathroom and locked the door.\n\n\u201cI was in there for a while, I think. He went very quiet.", + " After a while I remember opening the door and seeing him just there facing the door, masturbating, so I quickly closed the door again and locked it. Then when I heard room service come to the door, I just ran.\u201d\n\nFlorence Darel:\n\nThe French actress told Le Parisien that Weinstein allegedly pursued her after his company bought the 1993 film Fausto, in which Darel starred. In 1995, she says, Weinstein asked her to meet him at a suite in The Ritz, where he allegedly propositioned her\u2014even though his wife at the time was in the next room: \u201cHe started to tell me that he found me very attractive and wanted to have relations with me,\u201d Darel said.", + " \u201cI told him I was very in love with my companion. He replied that didn\u2019t bother him at all and offered to have me be his mistress a few days a year. That way we could continue to work together. Basically, it was \u2018If you want to continue in America, you have to go through me.\u2019\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat could I do? Could I go to the police and say, \u2018This disgusting man made me an indecent proposal in his hotel room at The Ritz?\u2019 \u201d Darel told People. \u201cThey would have laughed at me. Even when you are raped it is difficult to prove, and society, in many cases,", + " puts the burden of proof on women.\u201d\n\nClaire Forlani:\n\nForlani, star of the Miramax movie Boys and Girls, alleges that she \u201cescaped\u201d Weinstein\u2019s advances five times: \u201cI had two Peninsula Hotel meetings in the evening with Harvey and all I remember was I ducked, dived and ultimately got out of there without getting slobbered over, well just a bit. Yes, massage was suggested,\u201d she wrote on Twitter. \u201cThe three dinners with Harvey I don\u2019t really remember the time period, I was 25. I remember him telling me all the actresses who had slept with him and what he had done for them.\u201d Forlani also said that she declined to participate in Ronan Farrow\u2019s New Yorker story about Weinstein,", + " which she now regrets: \u201cToday I sit here feeling some shame, like I\u2019m not a woman supporting other women. I just read Mira Sorvino\u2019s article in Time and she writes of how scared she was to speak out and participate. I take little solace in that.\u201d\n\nKate Beckinsale:\n\nWhen Beckinsale was 17, she alleges, she was invited to meet with Weinstein at the Savoy Hotel. Though she assumed the meeting would be in a conference room, she says she was sent to the producer\u2019s room instead. \u201cHe opened the door in his bathrobe,\u201d she wrote in an Instagram post. \u201cI was incredibly naive and young and it did not cross my mind that this older,", + " unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him. After declining alcohol and announcing that I had school in the morning I left, uneasy but unscathed. A few years later he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn't remember if he had assaulted me or not.\u201d Beckinsale then recalls allegedly being propositioned by Weinstein \u201cmany times over the years\u2014some of which ended up with him screaming at me calling me a cunt and making threats.\u201d\n\nCara Delevingne:\n\nAfter meeting with Weinstein and a director in a hotel lobby to discuss a movie role,", + " \u201cHarvey asked me to stay and chat with him,\u201d Delevingne wrote in a statement shared on Twitter. \u201cAs soon as we were alone he began to brag about all the actresses he had slept with and how he had made their careers and spoke about other inappropriate things of a sexual nature. He then invited me to his room. I quickly declined and asked his assistant if my car was outside. She said it wasn\u2019t and wouldn\u2019t be for a bit and I should go to his room. At that moment I felt very powerless and scared but didn\u2019t want to act that way hoping that I was wrong about the situation. When I arrived I was relieved to find another woman in his room and thought immediately I was safe.", + " He asked us to kiss and she began some sort of advances upon his direction. I swiftly got up... I said again that I had to leave. He walked me to the door and stood in front of it and tried to kiss me on the lips. I stopped him and managed to get out of the room.\u201d\n\nL\u00e9a Seydoux:\n\n\u201cHe invited me to come to his hotel room for a drink. We went up together. It was hard to say no because he\u2019s so powerful. All the girls are scared of him. Soon, his assistant left and it was just the two of us. That\u2019s the moment where he started losing control,\u201d the French actress wrote in The Guardian.\n\n\u201cWe were talking on the sofa,\u201d Seydoux alleges,", + " \u201cwhen he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me. I had to defend myself. He\u2019s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him. I left his room, thoroughly disgusted. I wasn\u2019t afraid of him, though. Because I knew what kind of man he was all along.\u201d\n\nGwyneth Paltrow:\n\nAfter casting the actress in Emma, Weinstein allegedly asked Paltrow to meet with him in a suite at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, where she says he put his hands on her and suggested \u201cthey head to the bedroom for massages,\u201d according to The New York Times. \u201cI was a kid,", + " I was signed up, I was petrified,\u201d says Paltrow.\n\nAngelina Jolie:\n\n\u201cI had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did,\u201d Jolie told The New York Times. \u201cThis behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.\u201d\n\nAshley Judd:\n\nTwenty years ago, says Judd, Weinstein invited her to a breakfast meeting at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel; though she thought they would be meeting somewhere public, Weinstein allegedly invited her to his suite, where she found Weinstein wearing a bathrobe. She says he then asked if he could give her a massage or if she could watch him take a shower.", + " \u201cI said no, a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he always came back at me with some new ask,\u201d Judd told the Times. \u201cIt was all this bargaining, this coercive bargaining.\u201d\n\nIn 2015, she first described the alleged incident without naming Weinstein: \u201cHe was very stealth and expert about it,\u201d Judd told Variety. \u201cHe groomed me, which is a technical term\u2014Oh, come meet at the hotel for something to eat. Fine, I show up. Oh, he\u2019s actually in his room. I\u2019m like, Are you kidding me? I just worked all night.", + " I\u2019m just going to order cereal. It went on in these stages. It was so disgusting. He physically lured me by saying, \u2018Oh, help me pick out what I\u2019m going to wear.\u2019 There was a lot that happened between the point of entry and the bargaining. There was this whole process of bargaining\u2014\u2018Come do this, come do this, come do this.\u2019 And I would say, \u2018No, no, no.\u2019 I have a feeling if this is online and people have the opportunity to post comments, a lot of the people will say, \u2018Why didn\u2019t you leave the room?\u2019, which is victim-blaming.", + " When I kept saying no to everything, there was a huge asymmetry of power and control in that room.\n\nRose McGowan:\n\nIn 2016, McGowan alleged on Twitter that she had been raped by a studio executive years ago\u2014one whose lecherous behavior was \u201can open secret in Hollywood/Media.\u201d In a BuzzFeed interview, McGowan also discussed an unnamed \u201cserial predator\u201d in the industry. Though the actress has not explicitly spoken about having an abusive encounter with Weinstein, and has not formally and by name accused him of being a serial predator, the first Times report about Weinstein alleges that the producer paid McGowan a settlement in 1997\u2014and since the scandal went public,", + " McGowan has tweeted numerous times about the Weinstein allegations, asking if the public can now call Weinstein a \u201crapist.\u201d On Twitter Tuesday, McGowan also shared audio obtained by The New Yorker of Weinstein admitting to groping model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez; while reposting the clip, McGowan added: \u201cNow imagine his huge size, his monster face/body closing in on you. In one second your life path is not yours. You have been stolen.\u201d\n\nHeather Graham:\n\n\u201cIn the early 2000s Harvey Weinstein called me into his office,\u201d Graham wrote in Variety. \u201cThere was a pile of scripts sitting on his desk.", + " \u2018I want to put you in one of my movies,\u2019 he said and offered to let me choose which one I liked best. Later in the conversation, he mentioned that he had an agreement with his wife. He could sleep with whomever he wanted when he was out of town. I walked out of the meeting feeling uneasy. There was no explicit mention that to star in one of those films I had to sleep with him, but the subtext was there.\n\n\u201cA few weeks later, I was asked to do a follow-up meeting at his hotel. I called one of my actress friends to explain my discomfort with the situation, and she offered to come with me.", + " En route, she called me to say she couldn\u2019t make it. Not wanting to be at the hotel alone with him, I made up an excuse\u2014I had an early morning and would have to postpone. Harvey told me that my actress friend was already at his hotel and that both of them would be very disappointed if I didn\u2019t show. I knew he was lying, so I politely and apologetically reiterated that I could no longer come by.\u201d\n\nTomi-Ann Roberts:\n\nRoberts says that Weinstein, who used to come to the restaurant where she worked in her twenties, asked her to meet him at his hotel to discuss a movie part.", + " Upon arriving, Roberts told the Times, she found a naked Weinstein in the bathtub, where he allegedly told Roberts \u201cthat she would give a much better audition if she were comfortable \u2018getting naked in front of him,\u2019 too, because the character she might play would have a topless scene.\u201d\n\nRosanna Arquette:\n\nArquette says that Weinstein asked her to come to his room at the Beverly Hills Hotel to pick up a script. There, she told the Times, he greeted her in a bathrobe and asked her for a massage. \u201cThen he grabbed my hand,\u201d Arquette told The New Yorker, and pulled it toward his erect penis,", + " before allegedly bragging about a pair of famous women he had previously slept with. Arquette remembers saying, \u201cI\u2019m not that girl; I will never be that girl\u201d as she left the room.\n\nKatherine Kendall:\n\nKendall, an actress, says Weinstein invited her to a screening, then brought her to his apartment, where he allegedly changed into a bathrobe and asked for a massage. When she declined, he left and returned without the robe. \u201cHe literally chased me,\u201d she told the Times. \u201cHe wouldn\u2019t let me pass him to get to the door.... I just thought to myself: I can\u2019t believe you\u2019re doing this to me.", + " I\u2019m so offended\u2014we just had a meeting.\u201d\n\nJudith Godr\u00e8che:\n\nFrench actress Godr\u00e8che says that following a meeting at the Cannes Film Festival, Weinstein invited her to his suite at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, where he allegedly asked to give her a massage. \u201cThe next thing I know, he\u2019s pressing against me and pulling off my sweater,\u201d she told the Times. Godr\u00e8che then left the suite.\n\nDawn Dunning:\n\nCostume designer Dunning says that Weinstein offered her a screen test before inviting her to a meal; upon arriving at the restaurant, she says, Dunning \u201cwas told that Mr.", + " Weinstein\u2019s earlier meeting was running late, so she should head up to his suite,\u201d according to the Times. There, Dunning found a bathrobe-clad Weinstein, who allegedly offered her contracts for three films on the condition that she have three-way sex with him. \u201cYou\u2019ll never make it in this business,\u201d she says he replied when she laughed in response. \u201cThis is how the business works.\u201d\n\nEmily Nestor:\n\nNestor was allegedly harassed while working as a temp for Weinstein. According to the Times, Weinstein invited Nestor to his hotel room at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, where he allegedly bragged about sleeping with famous actresses and badgered her into giving him a massage.", + " The meeting was the \u201cmost excruciating and uncomfortable hour of my life,\u201d Nestor told The New Yorker. \u201cHe said, \u2018You know, we could have a lot of fun. I could put you in my London office, and you could work there and you could be my girlfriend.\u2019\u201d\n\nNestor said Weinstein also told her \u201cthat he\u2019d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby,\u201d apparently meaning that he hadn\u2019t had to drug any women. Weinstein Company employee Lauren O\u2019Connor later detailed Weinstein\u2019s alleged harassment of Nestor in an internal memo obtained by the Times. \u201cThere is a toxic environment for women at this company,\u201d O\u2019Connor wrote,", + " saying that Weinstein and Nestor\u2019s alleged encounter left the young woman \u201ccrying and very distraught.\u201d\n\nLaura Madden:\n\nFormer Weinstein Company employee Madden told the Times that Weinstein asked for massages on more than one occasion: \u201cIt was so manipulative. You constantly question yourself\u2014am I the one who is the problem?\u201d\n\nZelda Perkins:\n\nLondon Weinstein assistant Perkins allegedly confronted her boss in 1998, saying that she would initiate legal action or go public if he did not change his inappropriate behavior, according to the Times. A Miramax lawyer allegedly negotiated a settlement with her; she declined to comment on Weinstein or her work at Miramax for the Times.\n\nAmbra Battilana Gutierrez:\n\nItalian model Gutierrez is one of the few Weinstein accusers to publicly seek legal action:", + " in 2015, she told New York authorities that Weinstein had groped her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt during a meeting in his Tribeca office. Police then gave Gutierrez a wire to wear so that she could attempt to wring a confession or incriminating comments from Weinstein during a subsequent meeting.\n\nIn the resulting audio, obtained by The New Yorker, Weinstein can be heard admitting that he groped her as he tries to cajole Gutierrez into coming into his hotel room: \u201cOh, please, I\u2019m sorry, just come on in,\u201d says Weinstein. \u201cI\u2019m used to that. Come on.", + " Please... I won\u2019t do it again.\u201d Manhattan\u2019s District Attorney\u2019s office ultimately declined to file charges against Weinstein.\n\nLucia Evans:\n\nIn 2004, Evans was an aspiring actress who met Weinstein at the club Cipriani Upstairs. She says he invited her to a meeting at his Miramax office in Tribeca. When she arrived, he was in the room alone, then allegedly forced her to perform oral sex on him, she told The New Yorker. \u201cI said, over and over, \u2018I don\u2019t want to do this, stop, don\u2019t.\u2019 I tried to get away, but maybe I didn\u2019t try hard enough.", + " I didn\u2019t want to kick him or fight him,\u201d she said. \u201cHe\u2019s a big guy. He overpowered me.\u201d\n\nAsia Argento:\n\nIn 1997, actress and director Argento was invited to a Miramax party at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, on the French Riviera. When she arrived at the event, she says, the only people there were a producer and Weinstein. The producer then left, leaving Argento and Weinstein alone\u2014and soon, she alleges, Weinstein was in a bathrobe holding a bottle of lotion. Argento told The New Yorker that Weinstein asked her for a massage; at first,", + " she refused. She eventually relented, and shortly afterward, he \u201cforced her legs apart, and performed oral sex on her as she repeatedly told him to stop,\u201d according to The New Yorker. Though it was a \u201cnightmare,\u201d said Argento, she maintained a relationship with Weinstein for years: \u201dI felt I had to,\u201d she said. \u201dWhen I see him, it makes me feel little and stupid and weak. After the rape, he won.\u201d\n\nMira Sorvino:\n\nThe actress, who starred in a string of Miramax movies in the 90s, told The New Yorker that in 1995, Weinstein was alone with her in a hotel room,", + " and proceeded to massage her shoulders, which made her \u201cvery uncomfortable.\u201d She alleges that he then chased her around the room. A few weeks later, says Sorvino, Weinstein abruptly showed up at her apartment in New York after midnight. Sorvino says she told him her boyfriend was en route\u2014a lie that persuaded Weinstein to leave. She believes that night negatively impacted her career: \u201dI definitely felt iced out and that my rejection of Harvey had something to do with it.\u201d\n\nEmma de Caunes:\n\nDe Caunes, a French actress, told The New Yorker that she went to a lunch meeting with Weinstein at the Ritz in Paris in 2010,", + " to discuss a film adaptation of a book. She says that he claimed not to remember the book, then told her a copy of it was in his room, and asked her to go with him to get it. She eventually did. He then went into the bathroom and allegedly emerged nude and erect, telling her to lie down on the bed and adding that many other actresses have done it. De Caunes remembers being \u201cpetrified\u201d and refusing. Though she says she left immediately, Weinstein allegedly called her \u201crelentlessly\u201d throughout the day, sending gifts and \u201crepeating that nothing had happened.\u201d\n\nJessica Barth:\n\nThe actress says she met Weinstein for a business meeting at his suite at the Peninsula in 2011.", + " Throughout their conversation, he \u201calternated between offering to cast her in a film and demanding a naked massage in bed,\u201d per The New Yorker. When she tried to leave, she says, he barked that she should lose weight \u201cto compete with Mila Kunis,\u201d then gave her the number of a female executive.\n\nLauren Sivan:\n\nThe journalist told the Huffington Post that 10 years ago, she met Weinstein at a dinner with friends and associates. After the meal, they all went to Socialista, a club and restaurant where Weinstein was an investor. Weinstein allegedly invited to take Sivan on a tour of the facility. According to her account,", + " when they went down to the kitchen, Weinstein made the staff leave, then allegedly exposed himself in front of Sivan and started masturbating\u2014preventing her from leaving until he had finished. \u201dI could not believe what I was witnessing. It was disgusting and kind of pathetic, really,\u201d Sivan told Megyn Kelly Monday on Today. \u201cBut more than the disgusting act itself, which of course was gross, the demeaning part of it all\u2014that just 20 minutes earlier, he was having this great conversation with me, and I felt so great and flattered by it.\u201d\n\nRomola Garai:\n\nIn an interview with the The Guardian,", + " the actress said she had her own experience \u201cauditioning\u201d for Weinstein when she was 18 years old. After a formal tryout, she was told she had to be \u201cpersonally approved by him,\u201d Garai recalls. \u201cI had to go to his hotel room in the Savoy, and he answered the door in his bathrobe... I felt violated by it, it has stayed very clearly in my memory... The transaction was just that I was there, the point was that he could get a young woman to do that, that I didn\u2019t have a choice, that it was humiliating for me and that he had the power.\u201d\n\nLouisette Geiss:\n\nScreenwriter and actress Geiss alleged in a press conference Tuesday that Weinstein had masturbated in front of her without her consent.", + " Geiss said that Weinstein invited her to his office\u2014\u201cadjacent to his hotel room\u201d\u2014to discuss a script she\u2019d written. \u201cAfter about 30 minutes, he asked to excuse himself and go to the bathroom. He returned in nothing but a robe with the front open and he was buck naked,\u201d she continued. Weinstein allegedly then got into a bathtub and asked Geiss to continue pitching her script. \u201cWhen I finished my pitch I was obviously nervous, and he just kept asking me to watch him masturbate,\u201d she said. \u201cI told him I was leaving. He quickly got out of the tub and grabbed my forearm as I was trying to grab my purse and led me to his bathroom,", + " pleading that I just watch him masturbate.\u201d\n\nGeiss is being represented by lawyer Gloria Allred, whose daughter, Lisa Bloom, worked as an adviser to Weinstein before resigning on Saturday.\n\nSarah Ann Masse:\n\nMasse, an actress, comedian, and writer, told Variety that in 2008, she was still an aspiring performer who worked as a nanny in New York City to support herself. She was asked to do an interview with Weinstein at his Connecticut home to babysit for his three children (with former wife Eve Chilton). Weinstein allegedly answered the door in his undershirt and underwear and remained in that attire while he interviewed her.", + " At the end, he \u201cgave me this really tight, close hug that lasted for quite a long period of time... Then he told me he loved me. I left right after that,\u201d she says.\n\nLiza Campbell:\n\nCampbell, a writer and artist, wrote in The Times of London that in 1995, Weinstein called her out of the blue and invited her to meet with him about potential work in his hotel room. There, she alleges, he asked her to \u201cjump in the bath\u201d with him.\n\nZo\u00eb Brock:\n\nModel Brock said in a Medium blog post that she \u201cwas only 23 when[she]", + "I was \u2018Harveyed\u2019\u201d in 1997, at the Cannes Film Festival. She claims that Weinstein took her to his suite at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc with a few other people, who eventually left, leaving her alone with the producer. \u201cHarvey left the room, but not for long,\u201d she writes. \u201cHe re-emerged naked a couple of minutes later and asked if I would give him a massage. Panicking, in shock, I remember weighing up the options and wondering how much I needed to placate him to keep myself safe. He asked if I would like a massage instead, and for a second I thought this might be a way to give him an inch without him taking a mile.\u201d\n\nEventually,", + " she says, he dressed, and she left the suite when an assistant arrived. \u201cI\u2019m so sorry,\u201d Brock says the assistant told her. \u201cI want you to know that of all the girls he does this to you are the one I really felt bad about. You deserve better.\u201d\n\nLouise Godbold:\n\nGodbold, who directs a nonprofit, wrote in a blog post that in the early 90s, Weinstein allegedly took her on an \u201coffice tour that became an occasion to trap me in an empty meeting room,\u201d before Weinstein asked her for a massage, \u201chis hands on my shoulders as I attempted to beat a retreat..", + ". all while not wanting to alienate the most powerful man in Hollywood.\u201d ", + " Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Prof John Ashton called for a national debate on lowering the age of consent\n\nThe prime minister has rejected a call from a leading expert on public health to lower the age of consent to 15.\n\nFaculty of Public Health president Prof John Ashton said society had to accept that about a third of all boys and girls were having sex at 14 or 15.\n\nHe said the move would make it easier for 15-year-olds to get sexual health advice from the NHS.\n\nDowning Street said the current age of 16 was in place to protect children and there were \"no plans to change it\".\n\nOfficial figures suggest up to a third of teenagers have sex before the age of consent.\n\nAge of consent Australia:", + " 16 or 17 (depending on territory)\n\nCanada: 16\n\nGermany: 14\n\nIreland: 17\n\nItaly: 14\n\nRomania: 18\n\nSweden: 15\n\nProf Ashton said lowering the age by a year could \"draw a line in the sand\" against sex at 14 or younger.\n\n'Recognise the facts'\n\nHe said: \"We need a debate here. It's time the adults started talking about the situation to take these enormous pressures off children and young people from becoming sexually active too early.\n\n\"Also to recognise the facts of what's going on by the age of 14 or 15 so that we can respond helpfully to them and support them on this journey into adult life.\"\n\nHe said lowering the age to 15 might make teachers and other people who work with teenagers \"feel on a firmer footing\"", + " about telling them where to get advice on issues like contraception and disease.\n\nMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Prof Ashton says society needs \"open discussions in a sensible environment\"\n\nAnd he said in countries with a lower age of consent, young people got involved in sex at a later age and teenage pregnancy rates were lower.\n\n\"They are doing it and we need to be able to support them and protect them,\" he told the BBC's Breakfast.\n\n\"The negotiation of your first adult relationship in your mid-teens some time is something that will set the record for the rest of your life.\n\n\"At the moment youngsters are getting the most incredible messages from pornography,", + " from social media. What we are seeing is more physical abuse and mental abuse in relationships.\"\n\nDo I think simply a blanket reduction in the age of consent is the answer to this difficult dilemma? No Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister\n\nHe said pornography was causing young people to have \"strange expectations\" of their relationships and this needed to be \"corrected\" by open discussion in a sensible environment.\n\nHe also called for more resources to go into sexual and relationships education in schools.\n\n'Bombarded'\n\nDeputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said he was concerned about \"high levels of teenage pregnancy\" but he said lowering the age of consent was not the answer.\n\n\"I'm worried,", + " like everybody's worried, about the sexualisation of the culture and the information that so many young people are bombarded with at the moment. That's why I do want see action,\" he told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show.\n\n\"I'm constantly urging (Education Secretary) Michael Gove and the Department for Education to update and modernise sex education in schools which hasn't kept up with the internet age.\n\n\"But do I think simply a blanket reduction in the age of consent is the answer to this difficult dilemma? No.\"\n\nLuciana Berger, Labour's shadow public health minister, said the party opposed lowering the age of consent.\n\nShe said it was \"not the way to tackle teenage pregnancy\"", + " and said the government had failed to support Labour amendments calling for mandatory sex and relationship education in schools.\n\nThe Faculty of Public Health, part of the Royal Colleges of Physicians, gives independent advice to the government.\n\n'Legitimacy' warning\n\nDavid Tucker, head of policy at the NSPCC, said it would be prepared to engage in debate on the issue after considering Prof Ashton's arguments.\n\nBut Mr Tucker added: \"Has there really been a significant change in the amount of young people having sex over the past 20 or 30 years? If it has changed, then is reducing the age of consent the most sensible way to deal with it?\"\n\nA lawyer representing 72 of the victims of Jimmy Savile warned against any move to reduce the age of consent.\n\nLiz Dux said:", + " \"Predatory adults would be given legitimacy to focus their attentions on even younger teenagers and there is a real risk that society would be sending out the message that sex between 14- to 15-year-olds is also acceptable.\"\n\nA police report has said former TV presenter Savile, who died in 2011, was a \"prolific, predatory sex offender\".\n\nThe age of consent for sexual activity in the UK is 16.\n\nIn England and Wales, the age of sexual consent for women has been set at 16 since 1885, when campaigners fought to raise it from 13 to prevent child prostitution.\n\nOther countries have set the legal age at anything from 12 to 20.\n\nIn 2001,", + " the age of consent for gay men in England and Wales was reduced from 18 to 16, bringing it in line with heterosexuals for the first time. Lesbians, who until then faced no statutory age of consent, were also included in that legislation.\n\nScotland and Northern Ireland made 16 the age of consent for gay and straight men and women later that decade. ", + " \u201cThe next thing I know, he\u2019s pressing against me and pulling off my sweater,\u201d she said to The Times, adding that managed to escape and leave the room.\n\nDawn Dunning\n\nDawn Dunning said she was 24 when she met Mr. Weinstein in 2003. During a meeting in a hotel room, he offered her acting work if she would agree to have three-way sex with him, she said to The Times, adding that he grew angry after she laughed it off.\n\n\u201cYou\u2019ll never make it in this business,\u201d she said he told her as she was leaving the room.\n\nLucia Evans\n\nLucia Evans told The New Yorker that Mr.", + " Weinstein assaulted her at a Miramax office in 2004. There for a professional meeting, Ms. Evans said she soon found herself alone in an office with Mr. Weinstein when he forced her to perform oral sex on him, she said. \u201cHe\u2019s a big guy. He overpowered me,\u201d she said.\n\nLaura Madden\n\nLaura Madden, who works in film production, told The Times that starting in 1991, Mr. Weinstein had asked her for massages at multiple hotels. \u201cIt was so manipulative,\u201d she said. \u201cYou constantly question yourself \u2014 am I the one who is the problem?\u201d\n\nAsia Argento\n\nAsia Argento said to The New Yorker that Mr.", + " Weinstein forced himself on her in 1997, kicking off what she acknowledged was a complicated relationship, involving subsequent sexual relations. She said she felt trapped by the power he had over her career. \u201cAfter the rape, he won,\u201d she said.\n\nLauren Sivan\n\nLauren Sivan, 39, a television news reporter, told HuffPost that Mr. Weinstein cornered her in the kitchen of a restaurant, tried to kiss her and then masturbated in front of her. She said that when she objected, he told her to \u201cstand there and shut up.\u201d\n\nMira Sorvino\n\nMira Sorvino told The New Yorker that Mr.", + " Weinstein pursued her in his hotel room and showed up at her apartment late one night. She had a professional relationship with Mr. Weinstein for years afterward, but the earlier incidents continued to affect her, she said. Ultimately, she suspected that her rejection of him had hurt her career.\n" + ], + "length": 37969, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 92, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 An old-school form of discipline remains popular in Alabama. The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has found that almost 19,000 children\u20142.5% of the state's students\u2014got paddled in public schools during the 2013-2014 school year, reports AL.com. Boys get hit more than girls, and black children were paddled at a disproportionate rate compared to whites. It's a long-standing (and legal) disciplinary tradition in the state that locals don't seem terribly motivated to change: The National Education Association wants the practice banned, but the Alabama Education Association has stayed mum\u2014despite the fact that it's illegal to paddle an adult in the state, per an opinion piece on AL.com. UNICEF's \"Violence Against Children\" report doesn't exactly support paddling enthusiasts, noting that studies have linked corporal punishment to poor mental health, social issues, and academic problems. And many educational and child advocacy groups, including the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, agree it's ill-advised. But a 1977 Supreme Court decision ruled corporal punishment was not cruel and unusual and that schools could decide whether to use it\u2014and in 1995, Alabama lawmakers gave public schools the right to do so. Most of the states that allow paddling (21 states reported it in the 2013-'14 school year) are in the South. (Fifty years of spanking studies analyzed here.)\n", + "docs": [ + "U.S. Supreme Court\n\nIngraham v. Wright, 430 U.S. 651 (1977)\n\nIngraham v. Wright\n\nNo. 75-6527\n\nArgued November 2, 1976\n\nDecided April 19, 1977\n\n430 U.S. 651\n\nCERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS\n\nFOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT\n\nSyllabus\n\nPetitioners, pupils in a Dade County, Fla., junior high school, filed this action in Federal District Court pursuant to 42 U.S.C. \u00a7\u00a7 1981-", + "1988 for damages and injunctive and declaratory relief against respondent school officials, alleging that petitioners and other students had been subjected to disciplinary corporal punishment in violation of their constitutional rights. The Florida statute then in effect authorized corporal punishment after the teacher had consulted with the principal or teacher in charge of the school, specifying that the punishment was not to be \"degrading or unduly severe.\" A School Board regulation contained specific directions and limitations, authorizing punishment administered to a recalcitrant student's buttocks with a wooden paddle. The evidence showed that the paddling of petitioners was exceptionally harsh. The District Court granted respondents'", + " motion to dismiss the complaint, finding no basis for constitutional relief. The Court of Appeals affirmed.\n\nHeld:\n\n1. The Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause of the Eighth Amendment does not apply to disciplinary corporal punishment in public schools. Pp. 430 U. S. 664-671.\n\n(a) The history of the Eighth Amendment and the decisions of this Court make it clear that the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment was designed to protect those convicted of crime. Pp. 430 U. S. 664-668.\n\n(b) There is no need to wrench the Eighth Amendment from its historical context and extend it to public school disciplinary practices.", + " The openness of the public school and its supervision by the community afford significant safeguards against the kinds of abuses from which that Amendment protects convicted criminals. These safeguards are reinforced by the legal constraints of the common law, whereby any punishment going beyond that which is reasonably necessary for the proper education and discipline of the child may result in both civil and criminal liability. Pp. 430 U. S. 668-671.\n\n2. The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not require notice and hearing prior to imposition of corporal punishment as that practice is authorized and limited by the common law. Pp. 430 U. S. 672-", + "682.\n\nPage 430 U. S. 652\n\n(a) Liberty within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment is implicated where public school authorities, acting under color of state law, deliberately punish a child for misconduct by restraint and infliction of appreciable physical pain. Freedom from bodily restraint and punishment is within the liberty interest in personal security that has historically been protected from state deprivation without due process of law. Pp. 430 U. S. 672-674.\n\n(b) Under the longstanding accommodation between the child's interest in personal security and the traditional common law privilege, there can be no deprivation of substantive rights as long as the corporal punishment remains within the limits of that privilege.", + " The child nonetheless has a strong interest in procedural safeguards that minimize the risk of wrongful punishment and provide for the resolution of disputed questions of justification. Pp. 675-676.\n\n(c) The Florida scheme, considered in light of the openness of the school environment, affords significant protection against unjustified corporal punishment of school children. The teacher and principal must exercise prudence and restraint when they decide that corporal punishment is necessary for disciplinary purposes. If the punishment is later found to be excessive, they may be held liable in damages or be subject to criminal penalties. Where the State has thus preserved what \"has always been the law of the land,\" United States v.", + " Barnett, 376 U. S. 681, 376 U. S. 692, the case for administrative safeguards is significantly less compelling than it would otherwise be. Pp. 430 U. S. 676-680.\n\n(d) Imposing additional administrative safeguards as a constitutional requirement would significantly intrude into the area of educational responsibility that lies primarily with the public school authorities. Prior procedural safeguards require a diversion of educational resources, and school authorities may abandon corporal punishment as a disciplinary measure rather than incur the burdens of complying with procedural requirements. The incremental benefit of invoking the Constitution to impose prior notice and a hearing cannot justify the costs.", + " Pp. 430 U. S. 680-682.\n\n525 F.2d 909, affirmed.\n\nPOWELL, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which BURGER, C.J., and STEWART, BLACKMUN, and REHNQUIST, JJ., joined. WHITE, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which BRENNAN, MARSHALL, and STEVENS, JJ., joined, post, p. 430 U. S. 683. STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, post, p. 430 U. S.", + " 700.\n\nPage 430 U. S. 653\n\nMR. JUSTICE POWELL delivered the opinion of the Court.\n\nThis case presents questions concerning the use of corporal punishment in public schools: first, whether the paddling of students as a means of maintaining school discipline constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment; and, second, to the extent that paddling is constitutionally permissible, whether the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires prior notice and an opportunity to be heard.\n\nI\n\nPetitioners James Ingraham and Roosevelt Andrews filed the complaint in this case on January 7, 1971,", + " in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. [Footnote 1] At the time, both were enrolled in the Charles R. Drew Junior High School in Dade County, Fla., Ingraham in the eighth grade and Andrews in the ninth. The complaint contained three counts, each alleging a separate cause of action for deprivation of constitutional rights under 42 U.S.C. \u00a7\u00a7 1981-1988. Counts one and two were individual actions for damages by Ingraham and Andrews based on paddling incidents that allegedly occurred in October, 1970, at Drew Junior High School. Count three was a class action for declaratory and\n\nPage 430 U.", + " S. 654\n\ninjunctive relief filed on behalf of all students in the Dade County schools. [Footnote 2] Named as defendants in all counts were respondents Willie J. Wright (principal at Drew Junior High School), Lemmie Deliford (an assistant principal), Solomon Barnes (an assistant to the principal), and Edward L. Whigham (superintendent of the Dade County School System). [Footnote 3]\n\nPetitioners presented their evidence at a week-long trial before the District Court. At the close of petitioners' case, respondents moved for dismissal of count three \"on the ground that,", + " upon the facts and the law, the plaintiff has shown no right to relief,\" Fed.Rule Civ.Proc. 41(b), and for a ruling that the evidence would be insufficient to go to a jury on counts one and two. [Footnote 4] The District Court granted the motion as to all three counts, and dismissed the complaint without hearing evidence on behalf of the school authorities. App. 142-150.\n\nPage 430 U. S. 655\n\nPetitioners' evidence may be summarized briefly. In the 1970-1971 school year, many of the 237 schools in Dade County used corporal punishment as a means of maintaining discipline pursuant to Florida legislation and a local School Board regulation.", + " [Footnote 5] The statute then in effect authorized limited corporal punishment by negative inference, proscribing punishment which was \"degrading or unduly severe\" or which was inflicted without prior consultation with the principal or the teacher in charge of the school. Fla.Stat.Ann. \u00a7 232.27 (1961). [Footnote 6] The regulation, Dade County School Board Policy\n\nPage 430 U. S. 656\n\n5144, contained explicit, directions and limitations. [Footnote 7] The authorized punishment consisted of paddling the recalcitrant student on the buttocks with a flat wooden paddle measuring less than two feet long,", + " three to four inches wide, and about one-half inch thick. The normal punishment was limited to one to five \"licks\" or blows with the paddle, and resulted in\n\nPage 430 U. S. 657\n\nno apparent physical injury to the student. School authorities viewed corporal punishment as a less drastic means of discipline than suspension or expulsion. Contrary to the procedural requirements of the statute and regulation, teachers often paddled students on their own authority without first consulting the principal. [Footnote 8]\n\nPetitioners focused on Drew Junior High School, the school in which both Ingraham and Andrews were enrolled in the fall of 1970.", + " In an apparent reference to Drew, the District Court found that\n\n\"[t]he instances of punishment which could be characterized as severe, accepting the students' testimony as credible, took place in one junior high school.\"\n\nApp. 147. The evidence, consisting mainly of the testimony of 16 students, suggests that the regime at Drew was exceptionally harsh. The testimony of Ingraham and Andrews, in support of their individual claims for damages, is illustrative. Because he was slow to respond to his teacher's instructions, Ingraham was subjected to more than 20 licks with a paddle while being held over a table in the principal's office.", + " The paddling was so severe that he suffered a hematoma [Footnote 9] requiring medical attention and keeping him out of school for several days. [Footnote 10] Andrews was paddled several times for minor infractions. On two occasions, he was struck on his arms, once depriving him of the full use of his arm for a week. [Footnote 11]\n\nPage 430 U. S. 658\n\nThe District Court made no findings on the credibility of the students' testimony. Rather, assuming their testimony to be credible, the court found no constitutional basis for relief. With respect to count three,", + " the class action, the court concluded that the punishment authorized and practiced generally in the county schools violated no constitutional right. Id. at 143, 149. With respect to counts one and two, the individual damages actions, the court concluded that, while corporal punishment could in some cases violate the Eighth Amendment, in this case, a jury could not lawfully find\n\n\"the elements of severity, arbitrary infliction, unacceptability in terms of contemporary standards, or gross disproportion which are necessary to bring 'punishment' to the constitutional level of 'cruel and unusual punishment.'\"\n\nId. at 143.\n\nA panel of the Court of Appeals voted to reverse.", + " 498 F.2d 248 (CA5 1974). The panel concluded that the punishment was so severe and oppressive as to violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and that the procedures outlined in Policy 5144 failed to satisfy the requirements of the Due Process Clause. Upon rehearing, the en banc court rejected these conclusions and affirmed the judgment of the District Court. 525 F.2d 909 (1976). The full court held that the Due Process Clause did not require notice or an opportunity to be heard:\n\n\"In essence, we refuse to set forth, as constitutionally mandated, procedural standards for an activity which is not substantial enough,", + " on a constitutional level, to justify the time and effort which would have to be expended by the school in adhering to those procedures or to justify further interference by federal courts into the internal affairs of public schools.\"\n\nId. at 919. The court also rejected the petitioners' substantive contentions. The Eighth Amendment, in the court's view, was simply inapplicable to corporal punishment in public\n\nPage 430 U. S. 659\n\nschools. Stressing the likelihood of civil and criminal liability in state law, if petitioners' evidence were believed, the court held that\n\n\"[t]he administration of corporal punishment in public schools,", + " whether or not excessively administered, does not come within the scope of Eighth Amendment protection.\"\n\nId. at 915. Nor was there any substantive violation of the Due Process Clause. The court noted that\n\n\"[p]addling of recalcitrant children has long been an accepted method of promoting good behavior and instilling notions of responsibility and decorum into the mischievous heads of school children.\"\n\nId. at 917. The court refused to examine instances of punishment individually:\n\n\"We think it a misuse of our judicial power to determine, for example, whether a teacher has acted arbitrarily in paddling a particular child for certain behavior or whether,", + " in a particular instance of misconduct, five licks would have been a more appropriate punishment than ten licks....\"\n\nIbid.\n\nWe granted certiorari, limited to the questions of cruel and unusual punishment and procedural due process. 425 U.S. 990. [Footnote 12]\n\nII\n\nIn addressing the scope of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, this Court has found it useful to refer to \"[t]raditional common law concepts,\" Powell v. Texas, 392 U. S. 514, 392 U. S. 535 (1968) (plurality opinion), and to the \"attitude[s]", + " which our society has traditionally taken.\" Id. at 392 U. S. 531. So, too, in defining the requirements\n\nPage 430 U. S. 660\n\nof procedural due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Court has been attuned to what \"has always been the law of the land,\" United States v. Barnett, 376 U. S. 681, 376 U. S. 692 (1964), and to \"traditional ideas of fair procedure.\" Greene v. McElroy, 360 U. S. 474, 360 U. S. 508 (1959). We therefore begin by examining the way in which our traditions and our laws have responded to the use of corporal punishment in public schools.\n\nThe use of corporal punishment in this country as a means of disciplining schoolchildren dates back to the colonial period.", + " [Footnote 13] It has survived the transformation of primary and secondary education from the colonials' reliance on optional private arrangements to our present system of compulsory education and dependence on public schools. [Footnote 14] Despite the general abandonment of corporal punishment as a means of punishing criminal offenders, [Footnote 15] the practice continues to play a role in the public education of schoolchildren in most parts of the country. [Footnote 16] Professional and public opinion is sharply divided on the practice, [Footnote 17] and has been for more than\n\nPage 430 U. S. 661\n\na century.", + " [Footnote 18] Yet we can discern no trend toward its elimination.\n\nAt common law, a single principle has governed the use of corporal punishment since before the American Revolution: teachers may impose reasonable but not excessive force to discipline a child. [Footnote 19] Blackstone catalogued among the \"absolute rights of individuals\" the right \"to security from the corporal insults of menaces, assaults, beating, and wounding,\" 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries *134, but he did not regard it a \"corporal insult\" for a teacher to inflict \"moderate correction\" on a child in his care.", + " To the extent that force was \"necessary to answer the purposes for which [the teacher] is employed,\" Blackstone viewed it as \"justifiable or lawful.\" Id. at *453; 3 id. at *120. The basic doctrine has not changed. The prevalent rule in this country today privileges such force as a teacher or administrator \"reasonably believes to be necessary for [the child's] proper control, training, or education.\" Restatement (Second) of Torts \u00a7 147(2) (1965); see id. \u00a7 153(2). To the extent that the force is excessive or unreasonable, the educator in virtually all States is subject to possible civil and criminal liability.", + " [Footnote 20]\n\nPage 430 U. S. 662\n\nAlthough the early cases viewed the authority of the teacher as deriving from the parents, [Footnote 21] the concept of parental delegation has been replaced by the view -- more consonant with compulsory education laws -- that the State itself may impose such corporal punishment as is reasonably necessary \"for the proper education of the child and for the maintenance of group discipline.\" 1 F. Harper & F. James, Law of Torts \u00a7 3.20, p. 292 (1956). [Footnote 22] All of the circumstances are to be taken into account in determining whether the punishment is reasonable in a particular case.", + " Among the most important considerations are the seriousness of the offense, the attitude and past behavior of the child, the nature and severity of the punishment, the age and strength of the child, and the availability of less severe but equally effective means of discipline. Id. at 290-291; Restatement (Second) of Torts \u00a7 150, Comments c-e, p. 268 (1965).\n\nOf the 23 States that have addressed the problem through legislation, 21 have authorized the moderate use of corporal punishment in public schools. [Footnote 23] Of these States, only a few\n\nPage 430 U.", + " S. 663\n\nhave elaborated an the common law test of reasonableness, typically providing for approval or notification of the child's parents, [Footnote 24] or for infliction of punishment only by the principal [Footnote 25] or in the presence of an adult witness. [Footnote 26] Only two States, Massachusetts and New Jersey, have prohibited all corporal punishment in heir public schools. [Footnote 27] Where the legislatures have at acted, the state courts have uniformly preserved the common law rule permitting teachers to use reasonable force in disciplining children in their charge. [Footnote 28]\n\nAgainst this background of historical and contemporary approval of reasonable corporal punishment,", + " we turn to the constitutional question before us.\n\nPage 430 U. S. 664\n\nIII\n\nThe Eighth Amendment provides: \"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.\" Bail, fines, and punishment traditionally have been associated with the criminal process, and, by subjecting the three to parallel limitations, the text of the Amendment suggests an intention to limit the power of those entrusted with the criminal law function of government. An examination of the history of the Amendment and the decisions of this Court construing the proscription against cruel and unusual punishment confirms that it was designed to protect those convicted of crimes.", + " We adhere to this longstanding limitation, and hold that the Eighth Amendment does not apply to the paddling of children as a means of maintaining discipline in public schools.\n\nA\n\nThe history of the Eighth Amendment is well known. [Footnote 29] The text was taken, almost verbatim, from a provision of the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, which in turn derived from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. The English version, adopted after the accession of William and Mary, was intended to curb the excesses of English judges under the reign of James II. Historians have viewed the English provision as a reaction either to the \"Bloody Assize,\" the treason trials conducted by Chief Justice Jeffreys in 1685 after the abortive rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth,", + " [Footnote 30] or to the perjury prosecution of Titus Oates in the same year. [Footnote 31] In\n\nPage 430 U. S. 665\n\neither case, the exclusive concern of the English version was the conduct of judges in enforcing the criminal law. The original draft introduced in the House of Commons provided: [Footnote 32]\n\n\"The requiring excessive bail of persons committed in criminal cases and imposing excessive fines, and illegal punishments, to be prevented.\"\n\nAlthough the reference to \"criminal cases\" was eliminated from the final draft, the preservation of a similar reference in the preamble [Footnote 33]", + " indicates that the deletion was without substantive significance. Thus, Blackstone treated each of the provision's three prohibitions as bearing only on criminal proceedings and judgments. [Footnote 34]\n\nThe Americans who adopted the language of this part of the English Bill of Rights in framing their own State and Federal Constitutions 100 years later feared the imposition of torture and other cruel punishments not only by judges acting beyond their lawful authority, but also by legislatures engaged in making the laws by which judicial authority would be measured. Weems v. United States, 217 U. S. 349, 217 U. S. 371-373 (1910). Indeed,", + " the principal concern of the American Framers appears to have been with the legislative definition of crimes and punishments. In re Kemmler, 136 U. S. 436, 136 U. S. 446-447 (1890);\n\nPage 430 U. S. 666\n\nFurman v. Georgia, 408 U. S. 238, 408 U. S. 263 (1972) (BRENNAN, J., concurring). But if the American provision was intended to restrain government more broadly than its English model, the subject to which it was intended to apply -- the criminal process -- was the same.\n\nAt the time of its ratification,", + " the original Constitution was criticized in the Massachusetts and Virginia Conventions for its failure to provide any protection for persons convicted of crimes. [Footnote 35] This criticism provided the impetus for inclusion of the Eighth Amendment in the Bill of Rights. When the Eighth Amendment was debated in the First Congress, it was met by the objection that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause might have the effect of outlawing what were then the common criminal punishments of hanging, whipping, and earcropping. 1 Annals of Cong. 754 (1789). The objection was not heeded, \"precisely because the legislature would otherwise have had the unfettered power to prescribe punishments for crimes.\" Furman v.", + " Georgia, supra at 408 U. S. 263.\n\nB\n\nIn light of this history, it is not surprising to find that every decision of this Court considering whether a punishment is \"cruel and unusual\" within the meaning of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments has dealt with a criminal punishment.\n\nPage 430 U. S. 667\n\nSee Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U. S. 97 (1976) (incarceration without medical care); Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153 (1976) (execution for murder); Furman v. Georgia, supra,", + " (execution for murder); Powell v. Texas, 392 U. S. 514 (1968) (plurality opinion) ($20 fine for public drunkenness); Robinson v. California, 370 U. S. 660 (1962) (incarceration as a criminal for addiction to narcotics); Trop v. Dulles, 356 U. S. 86 (1958) (plurality opinion) (expatriation for desertion); Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U. S. 459 (1947) (execution by electrocution after a failed first attempt); Weems v.", + " United States, supra, (15 years' imprisonment and other penalties for falsifying an official document); Howard v. Fleming, 191 U. S. 126 (1903) (10 years' imprisonment for conspiracy to defraud); In re Kemmler, supra, (execution by electrocution); Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U. S. 130 (1879) (execution by firing squad); Pervear v. Commonwealth, 5 Wall. 475 (1867) (fine and imprisonment at hard labor for bootlegging).\n\nThese decisions recognize that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause circumscribes the criminal process in three ways:", + " first, it limits the kinds of punishment that can be imposed on those convicted of crimes, e.g., Estelle v. Gamble, supra; Trop v. Dulles, supra; second, it proscribes punishment grossly disproportionate to the severity of the crime, e.g., Weems v. United States, supra; and third, it imposes substantive limits on what can be made criminal and punished as such, e.g., Robinson v. California, supra. We have recognized the last limitation as one to be applied sparingly.\n\n\"The primary purpose of [the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause] has always been considered,", + " and properly so, to be directed at the method or kind of punishment imposed for the violation of criminal statutes....\"\n\nPowell v. Texas, supra at 392 U. S. 531-532 (plurality opinion).\n\nIn the few cases where the Court has had occasion to confront claims that impositions outside the criminal process constituted cruel and unusual punishment, it has had no difficulty\n\nPage 430 U. S. 668\n\nfinding the Eighth Amendment inapplicable. Thus, in Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U. S. 698 (1893), the Court held the Eighth Amendment inapplicable to the deportation of aliens on the ground that \"deportation is not a punishment for crime.\" Id.", + " at 149 U. S. 730; see Mahler v. Eby, 264 U. S. 32 (1924); Bugajewitz v. Adams, 228 U. S. 685 (1913). And in Uphaus v. Wyman, 360 U. S. 72 (1959), the Court sustained a judgment of civil contempt, resulting in incarceration pending compliance with a subpoena, against a claim that the judgment imposed cruel and unusual punishment. It was emphasized that the case involved \"essentially a civil remedy designed for the benefit of other parties... exercised for centuries to secure compliance with judicial decrees.'\" Id.", + " at 360 U. S. 81, quoting Green v. United States, 356 U. S. 165, 356 U. S. 197 (1958) (dissenting opinion). [Footnote 36]\n\nC\n\nPetitioners acknowledge that the original design of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause was to limit criminal punishments, but urge nonetheless that the prohibition should be extended to ban the paddling of schoolchildren. Observing that the Framers of the Eighth Amendment could not have envisioned our present system of public and compulsory education, with its opportunities for noncriminal punishments, petitioners contend that extension of the prohibition against cruel punishments is necessary lest we afford greater protection\n\nPage 430 U.", + " S. 669\n\nto criminals than to school children. It would be anomalous, they say, if school children could be beaten without constitutional redress, while hardened criminals suffering the same beatings at the hands of their jailers might have a valid claim under the Eighth Amendment. See Jackson v. Bishop, 404 F.2d 571 (CA8 1968); cf. Estelle v. Gamble, supra. Whatever force this logic may have in other settings, [Footnote 37] we find it an inadequate basis for wrenching the Eighth Amendment from its historical context and extending it to traditional disciplinary practices in the public schools.\n\nThe prisoner and the school child stand in wholly different circumstances,", + " separated by the harsh facts of criminal conviction and incarceration. The prisoner's conviction entitles the State to classify him a a \"criminal,\" and his incarceration deprives him of the freedom \"to be with family and friends and to form the other enduring attachments of normal life.\" Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U. S. 471, 408 U. S. 482 (1972); see Meachum v. Fano, 427 U. S. 215, 427 U. S. 224-225 (1976). Prison brutality, as the Court of Appeals observed in this case, is\n\n\"", + "part of the total punishment to which the individual is being subjected for his crime and, as such, is a proper subject for Eighth Amendment scrutiny.\"\n\n525 F.2d at 915. [Footnote 38] Even so, the protection afforded\n\nPage 430 U. S. 670\n\nby the Eighth Amendment is limited. After incarceration, only the \"unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain,'\" Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. at 429 U. S. 103, quoting Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. at 428 U. S. 173, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment forbidden by the Eighth Amendment.\n\nThe school child has little need for the protection of the Eighth Amendment.", + " Though attendance may not always be voluntary, the public school remains an open institution. Except perhaps when very young, the child is not physically restrained from leaving school during school hours; and at the end of the school day, the child is invariably free to return home. Even while at school, the child brings with him the support of family and friends, and is rarely apart from teachers and other pupils who may witness and protest any instances of mistreatment.\n\nThe openness of the public school and its supervision by the community afford significant safeguards against the kinds of abuses from which the Eighth Amendment protects the prisoner. In virtually every community where corporal punishment is permitted in the schools,", + " these safeguards are reinforced by the legal constraints of the common law. Public school teachers and administrators are privileged at common law to inflict only such corporal punishment as is reasonably necessary for the proper education and discipline of the child; any punishment going beyond the privilege may result in both civil and criminal liability. See 430 U. S. supra. As long as the schools are open to public scrutiny, there is no reason to believe that the common law constraints will not effectively remedy and deter excesses such as those alleged in this case. [Footnote 39]\n\nPage 430 U. S. 671\n\nWe conclude that, when public school teachers or administrators impose disciplinary corporal punishment,", + " the Eighth Amendment is inapplicable. The pertinent constitutional question is whether the imposition is consonant with the requirements of due process. [Footnote 40]\n\nPage 430 U. S. 672\n\nIV\n\nThe Fourteenth Amendment prohibits any state deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Application of this prohibition requires the familiar two-stage analysis: we must first ask whether the asserted individual interests are encompassed within the Fourteenth Amendment's protection of \"life, liberty or property\"; if protected interests are implicated, we then must decide what procedures constitute \"due process of law.\" Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U.S.", + " at 408 U. S. 481; Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U. S. 564, 408 U. S. 569-572 (1972). See Friendly, Some Kind of Hearing, 123 U.Pa.L.Rev. 1267 (1975). Following that analysis here, we find that corporal punishment in public schools implicates a constitutionally protected liberty interest, but we hold that the traditional common law remedies are fully adequate to afford due process.\n\nA\n\n\"[T]he range of interests protected by procedural due process is not infinite.\" Board of Regents v. Roth,", + " supra at 408 U. S. 570. We have repeatedly rejected \"the notion that any grievous loss visited upon a person by the State is sufficient to invoke the procedural protections of the Due Process Clause.\" Meachum v. Fano, 427 U.S. at 427 U. S. 224. Due process is required only when a decision of the State implicates an interest within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment. And\n\n\"to determine whether due process requirements apply in the first place, we must look not to the 'weight,' but to the nature, of the interest at stake.\"\n\nRoth, supra at 408 U.", + " S. 570-571.\n\nThe Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, later incorporated into the Fourteenth, was intended to give Americans\n\nPage 430 U. S. 673\n\nat least the protection against governmental power that they had enjoyed as Englishmen against the power of the Crown. The liberty preserved from deprivation without due process included the right \"generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.\" Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390, 262 U. S. 399 (1923); see Dent v. West Virginia, 129 U.", + " S. 114, 129 U. S. 123-124 (1889). Among the historic liberties so protected was a right to be free from, and to obtain judicial relief for, unjustified intrusions on personal security. [Footnote 41]\n\nWhile the contours of this historic liberty interest in the context of our federal system of government have not been defined precisely, [Footnote 42] they always have been thought to encompass\n\nPage 430 U. S. 674\n\nfreedom from bodily restraint and punishment. See Rochin v. California, 342 U. S. 165 (1952). It is fundamental that the state cannot hold and physically punish an individual except in accordance with due process of law.\n\nThis constitutionally protected liberty interest is at stake in this case.", + " There is, of course, a de minimis level of imposition with which the Constitution is not concerned. But at least where school authorities, acting under color of state law, deliberately decide to punish a child for misconduct by restraining the child and inflicting appreciable physical pain, we hold that Fourteenth Amendment liberty interests are implicated. [Footnote 43]\n\nB\n\n\"[T]he question remains what process is due.\" Morrissey v. Brewer, supra at 408 U. S. 481. Were it not for the common law privilege permitting teachers to inflict reasonable corporal punishment on children in their care, and the availability of the traditional remedies for abuse,", + " the case for requiring advance procedural safeguards would be strong indeed. [Footnote 44] But here we deal with a punishment -- paddling -- within that tradition,\n\nPage 430 U. S. 675\n\nand the question is whether the common law remedies are adequate to afford due process.\n\n\"'[D]ue process,' unlike some legal rules, is not a technical conception with a fixed content unrelated to time, place and circumstances.... Representing a profound attitude of fairness..., 'due process' is compounded of history, reason, the past course of decisions, and stout confidence in the strength of the democratic faith which we profess.", + "...\"\n\nAnti-Fascist Comm. v. McGrath, 341 U. S. 123, 341 U. S. 162-163 (1951) (Frankfurter, J., concurring). Whether, in this case, the common law remedies for excessive corporal punishment constitute due process of law must turn on an analysis of the competing interests at stake, viewed against the background of \"history, reason, [and] the past course of decisions.\" The analysis requires consideration of three distinct factors:\n\n\"first, the private interest that will be affected... ; second, the risk of an erroneous deprivation of such interest.", + ".. and the probable value, if any, of additional or substitute procedural safeguards; and finally, the [state] interest, including the function involved and the fiscal and administrative burdens that the additional or substitute procedural requirement would entail.\"\n\nMathews v. Eldridge, 424 U. S. 319, 424 U. S. 335 (1976). Cf. Arnett v. Kennedy, 416 U. S. 134, 416 U. S. 167-168 (1974) (POWELL, J., concurring).\n\n1\n\nBecause it is rooted in history, the child's liberty interest in avoiding corporal punishment while in the care of public school authorities is subject to historical limitations.", + " Under the common law, an invasion of personal security gave rise to a right to recover damages in a subsequent judicial proceeding. 3 W. Blackstone, Commentaries *120-121. But the right of recovery was qualified by the concept of justification. Thus, there could be no recovery against a teacher who gave only \"moderate correction\" to a child. Id. at *120. To the\n\nPage 430 U. S. 676\n\nextent that the force used was reasonable in light of its purpose, it was not wrongful, but rather \"justifiable or lawful.\" Ibid.\n\nThe concept that reasonable corporal punishment in school is justifiable continues to be recognized in the laws of most States.", + " See 430 U. S. supra. It represents \"the balance struck by this country,\" Poe v. Ullman, 367 U. S. 497, 367 U. S. 542 (1961) (Harlan, J., dissenting), between the child's interest in personal security and the traditional view that some limited corporal punishment may be necessary in the course of a child's education. Under that longstanding accommodation of interests, there can be no deprivation of substantive rights as long as disciplinary corporal punishment is within the limits of the common law privilege.\n\nThis is not to say that the child's interest in procedural safeguards is insubstantial.", + " The school disciplinary process is not \"a totally accurate, unerring process, never mistaken and never unfair....\" Goss v. Lopez, 419 U. S. 565, 419 U. S. 579-580 (1975). In any deliberate infliction of corporal punishment on a child who is restrained for that purpose, there is some risk that the intrusion on the child's liberty will be unjustified, and therefore unlawful. In these circumstances, the child has a strong interest in procedural safeguards that minimize the risk of wrongful punishment and provide for the resolution of disputed questions of justification.\n\nWe turn now to a consideration of the safeguards that are available under applicable Florida law.\n\n2\n\nFlorida has continued to recognize,", + " and indeed has strengthened by statute, the common law right of a child not to be subjected to excessive corporal punishment in school. Under Florida law, the teacher and principal of the school decide in the first instance whether corporal punishment is reasonably necessary under the circumstances in order to discipline\n\nPage 430 U. S. 677\n\na child who.has misbehaved. But they must exercise prudence and restraint. For Florida has preserved the traditional judicial proceedings for determining whether the punishment was justified. If the punishment inflicted is later found to have been excessive -- not reasonably believed at the time to be necessary for the child's discipline or training -- the school authorities inflicting it may be held liable in damages to the child and,", + " if malice is shown, they may be subject to criminal penalties. [Footnote 45]\n\nAlthough students have testified in this case to specific instances of abuse, there is every reason to believe that such mistreatment is an aberration. The uncontradicted evidence suggests that corporal punishment in the Dade County schools was, \"[w]ith the exception of a few cases,... unremarkable in physical severity.\" App. 147. Moreover, because paddlings are usually inflicted in response to conduct directly\n\nPage 430 U. S. 678\n\nobserved by teachers in their presence, the risk that a child will be paddled without cause is typically insignificant.", + " In the ordinary case, a disciplinary paddling neither threatens seriously to violate any substantive rights nor condemns the child \"to suffer grievous loss of any kind.\" Anti-Fascist Comm. v. McGrath, 341 U.S. at 341 U. S. 168 (Frankfurter, J., concurring).\n\nIn those cases where severe punishment is contemplated, the available civil and criminal sanctions for abuse -- considered in light of the openness of the school environment -- afford significant protection against unjustified corporal punishment. See supra at 430 U. S. 670. Teachers and school authorities are unlikely to inflict corporal punishment unnecessarily or excessively when a possible consequence of doing so is the institution of civil or criminal proceedings against them.", + " [Footnote 46]\n\nIt still may be argued, of course, that the child's liberty interest would be better protected if the common law remedies were supplemented by the administrative safeguards of prior notice and a hearing. We have found frequently that some kind of prior hearing is necessary to guard against arbitrary impositions on interests protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.\n\nPage 430 U. S. 679\n\nSee, e.g., Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. at 408 U. S. 569-570; Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U. S. 539, 418 U. S.", + " 557-558 (1974); cf. Friendly, 123 U.Pa.L.Rev. at 1275-1277. But where the State has preserved what \"has always been the law of the land,\" United States v. Barnett, 376 U. S. 681 (1964), the case for administrative safeguards is significantly less compelling. [Footnote 47]\n\nThere is a relevant analogy in the criminal law. Although the Fourth Amendment specifically proscribes \"seizure\" of a person without probable cause, the risk that police will act unreasonably in arresting a suspect is not thought to require an advance determination of the facts.", + " In United States v. Watson, 423 U. S. 411 (1976), we reaffirmed the traditional common law rule that police officers may make warrantless public arrests on probable cause. Although we observed that an advance determination of probable cause by a magistrate would be desirable, we declined\n\n\"to transform this judicial preference into a constitutional rule when the judgment of the Nation and Congress has for so long been to authorize warrantless public arrests on probable cause....\"\n\nId. at 423 U. S. 423; see id. at 423 U. S. 429 (POWELL, J., concurring). Despite the distinct possibility that a police officer may improperly assess the facts and thus unconstitutionally deprive an individual of\n\nPage 430 U.", + " S. 680\n\nliberty, we declined to depart from the traditional rule by which the officer's perception is subjected to judicial scrutiny only after the fact. [Footnote 48] There is no more reason to depart from tradition and require advance procedural safeguards for intrusions on personal security to which the Fourth Amendment does not apply.\n\n3\n\nBut even if the need for advance procedural safeguards were clear, the question would remain whether the incremental benefit could justify the cost. Acceptance of petitioners' claims would work a transformation in the law governing corporal punishment in Florida and most other States. Given the impracticability of formulating a rule of procedural due process that varies with the severity of the particular imposition,", + " [Footnote 49] the prior hearing petitioners seek would have to precede any paddling, however moderate or trivial.\n\nSuch a universal constitutional requirement would significantly burden the use of corporal punishment as a disciplinary measure. Hearings -- even informal hearings -- require time, personnel, and a diversion of attention from normal school pursuits. School authorities may well choose to abandon corporal punishment rather than incur the burdens of complying with the procedural requirements. Teachers, properly concerned with maintaining authority in the classroom, may well prefer to rely on other disciplinary measures -- which they may view as less effective -- rather than confront the\n\nPage 430 U. S.", + " 681\n\npossible disruption that prior notice and a hearing may entail. [Footnote 50] Paradoxically, such an alteration of disciplinary policy is most likely to occur in the ordinary case, where the contemplated punishment is well within the common law privilege. [Footnote 51]\n\nElimination or curtailment of corporal punishment would be welcomed by many as a societal advance. But when such a policy choice may result from this Court's determination of an asserted right to due process, rather than from the normal processes of community debate and legislative action, the societal costs cannot be dismissed as insubstantial. [Footnote 52]", + " We are reviewing here a legislative judgment, rooted in history and reaffirmed in the laws of many States, that corporal punishment serves important educational interests. This judgment must be viewed in light of the disciplinary problems commonplace in the schools. As noted in Goss v. Lopez, 419 U.S. at 419 U. S. 580: \"Events calling for discipline are frequent occurrences, and sometimes require immediate, effective action.\" [Footnote 53] Assessment\n\nPage 430 U. S. 682\n\nof the need for, and the appropriate means of maintaining, school discipline is committed generally to the discretion of school authorities subject to state law.\n\n\"[T]", + "he Court has repeatedly emphasized the need for affirming the comprehensive authority of the States and of school officials, consistent with fundamental constitutional safeguards, to prescribe and control conduct in the schools.\"\n\nTinker v. Des Moines School Dist., 393 U. S. 503, 393 U. S. 507 (1969). [Footnote 54]\n\n\"At some point, the benefit of an additional safeguard to the individual affected... and to society in terms of increased assurance that the action is just, may be outweighed by the cost.\"\n\nMathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. at 424 U. S.", + " 348. We think that point has been reached in this case. In view of the low incidence of abuse, the openness of our schools, and the common law safeguards that already exist, the risk of error that may result in violation of a school child's substantive rights can only be regarded a minimal. Imposing additional administrative safeguards as a constitutional requirement might reduce that risk marginally, but would also entail a significant intrusion into an area of primary educational responsibility. We conclude that the Due Process Clause does not require notice and a hearing prior to the imposition of corporal punishment in the public schools, as that practice is authorized and limited by the common law.", + " [Footnote 55]\n\nPage 430 U. S. 683\n\nV\n\nPetitioners cannot prevail on either of the theories before us in this case. The Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment is inapplicable to school paddlings, and the Fourteenth Amendment's requirement of procedural due process is satisfied by Florida's preservation of common law constraints and remedies. We therefore agree with the Court of Appeals that petitioners' evidence affords no basis for injunctive relief, and that petitioners cannot recover damages on the basis of any Eighth Amendment or procedural due process violation.\n\nAffirmed.\n\n[Footnote 1]\n\nAs Ingraham and Andrews were minors,", + " the complaint was filed in the names of Eloise Ingraham, James' mother, and Willie Everett, Roosevelt's father.\n\n[Footnote 2]\n\nThe District Court certified the class, under Fed.Rules Civ.Proc. 23(b)(2) and (c)(1), as follows:\n\n\"'All students of the Dade County School system who are subject to the corporal punishment policies issued by the Defendant, Dade County School Board....'\"\n\nApp. 17. One student was specifically excepted from the class by request.\n\n[Footnote 3]\n\nThe complaint also named the Dade County School Board as a defendant,", + " but the Court of Appeals held that the Board was not amenable to suit under 42 U.S.C. \u00a7\u00a7 1981-1988, and dismissed the suit against the Board for want of jurisdiction. 525 F.2d 909, 912 (CA5 1976). This aspect of the Court of Appeals' judgment is not before us.\n\n[Footnote 4]\n\nPetitioners had waived their right to jury trial on the claims for damages in counts one and two, but respondents had not. The District Court proceeded initially to hear evidence only on count three, the claim for injunctive relief. At the close of petitioners'", + " case, however, the parties agreed that the evidence offered on count three (together with certain stipulated testimony) would be considered, for purposes of a motion for directed verdict, as if it had also been offered on counts one and two. It was understood that respondents could reassert a right to jury trial if the motion were denied. App. 142.\n\n[Footnote 5]\n\nThe evidence does not show how many of the schools actually employed corporal punishment as a means of maintaining discipline. The authorization of the practice by the School Board extended to 231 of the schools in the 1970-1971 school year, but at least 10 of those schools did not administer corporal punishment as a matter of school policy.", + " Id. at 137-139.\n\n[Footnote 6]\n\nIn the 1970-1971 school year, \u00a7 232.27 provided:\n\n\"Each teacher or other member of the staff of any school shall assume such authority for the control of pupils as may be assigned to him by the principal and shall keep good order in the classroom and in other places in which he is assigned to be in charge of pupils, but he shall not inflict corporal punishment before consulting the principal or teacher in charge of the school, and in no case shall such punishment be degrading or unduly severe in its nature....\"\n\nEffective July 1,", + " 1976, the Florida Legislature amended the law governing corporal punishment. Section 232.27 now reads:\n\n\"Subject to law and to the rules of the district school board, each teacher or other member of the staff of any school shall have such authority for the control and discipline of students as may be assigned to him by the principal or his designated representative and shall keep good order in the classroom and in other places in which he is assigned to be in charge of students. If a teacher feels that corporal punishment is necessary, at least the following procedures shall be followed:\"\n\n\"(1) The use of corporal punishment shall be approved in principle by the principal before it is used,", + " but approval is not necessary for each specific instance in which it is used.\"\n\n\"(2) A teacher or principal may administer corporal punishment only in the presence of another adult who is informed beforehand, and in the student's presence, of the reason for the punishment.\"\n\n\"(3) A teacher or principal who has administered punishment shall, upon request, provide the pupil's parent or guardian with a written explanation of the reason for the punishment and the name of the other [adult] who was present.\"\n\nFla.Stat.Ann. \u00a7 232.27 (1977) (codifier's notation omitted). Corporal punishment is now defined as\n\n\"", + "the moderate use of physical force or physical contact by a teacher or principal as may be necessary to maintain discipline or to enforce school rules.\"\n\n\u00a7 228.041(28). The local school boards are expressly authorized to adopt rules governing student conduct and discipline, and are directed to make available codes of student conduct. \u00a7 230.23(6). Teachers and principals are given immunity from civil and criminal liability for enforcing disciplinary rules, \"[e]xcept in the case of excessive force or cruel and unusual punishment....\" \u00a7 232.275.\n\n[Footnote 7]\n\nIn the 1970-1971 school year,", + " Policy 5144 authorized corporal punishment where the failure of other means of seeking cooperation from the student made its use necessary. The regulation specified that the principal should determine the necessity for corporal punishment, that the student should understand the seriousness of the offense and the reason for the punishment, and that the punishment should be administered in the presence of another adult in circumstances not calculated to hold the student up to shame or ridicule. The regulation cautioned against using corporal punishment against a student under psychological or medical treatment, and warned that the person administering the punishment \"must realize his own personal liabilities\" in any case of physical injury. App. 15.\n\nWhile this litigation was pending in the District Court,", + " the Dade County School Board amended Policy 5144 to standardize the size of the paddles used in accordance with the description in the text, to proscribe striking a child with a paddle elsewhere than on the buttocks, to limit the permissible number of \"licks\" (five for elementary and intermediate grades and seven for junior and senior grades), and to require a contemporaneous explanation of the need for the punishment to the student and a subsequent notification to the parents. App. 126-128.\n\n[Footnote 8]\n\n498 F.2d 248, 255, and n. 7 (1974) (original panel opinion), vacated on rehearing,", + " 525 F.2d 909 (1976); App. 48, 138, 146; Exhibits 14, 15.\n\n[Footnote 9]\n\nStedman's Medical Dictionary (23d ed.1976) defines \"hematoma\" as\n\n\"[a] localized mass of extravasated blood that is relatively or completely confined within an organ or tissue... ; the blood is usually clotted (or partly clotted), and, depending on how long it has been there, may manifest various degrees of organization and decolorization.\"\n\n[Footnote 10]\n\nApp. 3-", + "4, 18-20, 68-85, 129-136.\n\n[Footnote 11]\n\nId. at 4-5, 104-113. The similar experiences of several other students at Drew, to which they individually testified in the District Court, are summarized in the original panel opinion in the Court of Appeals, 498 F.2d at 257-259.\n\n[Footnote 12]\n\nWe denied review of a third question presented in the petition for certiorari:\n\n\"Is the infliction of severe corporal punishment upon public school students arbitrary, capricious and unrelated to achieving any legitimate educational purpose,", + " and therefore violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?\"\n\nPet. for Cert. 2.\n\n[Footnote 13]\n\nSee I. Falk, Corporal Punishment 11-48 (1941); N. Edwards & H. Richey, The School in the American Social Order 115-116 (1947).\n\n[Footnote 14]\n\nPublic and compulsory education existed in New England before the Revolution, see id. at 50-68, 78-81, 97-113, but the demand for free public schools as we now know them did not gain momentum in the country as a whole until the mid-", + "1800's, and it was not until 1918 that compulsory school attendance laws were in force in all the States. See Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 347 U. S. 489 n. 4 (1954), citing Cubberley, Public Education in the United States 408-423, 563-565 (1934 ed.); cf. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205, 406 U. S. 226, and n. 15 (1972).\n\n[Footnote 15]\n\nSee Jackson v.", + " Bishop, 404 F.2d 571, 580 (CA8 1968); Falk, supra at 85-88.\n\n[Footnote 16]\n\nSee K. Larson & M. Karpas, Effective Secondary School Discipline 146 (1963); A. Reitman, J. Follman, & E. Ladd, Corporal Punishment in the Public Schools 2-5 (ACLU Report 1972).\n\n[Footnote 17]\n\nFor samplings of scholarly opinion on the use of corporal punishment in the schools, see F. Reardon & R. Reynolds, Corporal Punishment in Pennsylvania 1-", + "2, 34 (1975); National Education Association, Report of the Task Force on Corporal Punishment (1972); K. James, Corporal Punishment in the Public Schools 8-16 (1963). Opinion surveys taken since 1970 have consistently shown a majority of teachers and of the general public favoring moderate use of corporal punishment in the lower grades. See Reardon & Reynolds, supra at 2, 23-26; Delaware Department of Public Instruction, Report on the Corporal Punishment Survey 48 (1974); Reitman, Follman, & Ladd, supra at 34-", + "35; National Education Association, supra at 7.\n\n[Footnote 18]\n\nSee Falk, supra, 66-69; cf. Cooper v. McJunkin, 4 Ind. 290 (1853).\n\n[Footnote 19]\n\nSee 1 F. Harper & F. James, Law of Torts \u00a7 3.20, pp. 288-292 (1956); Proehl, Tort Liability of Teachers, 12 Vand.L.Rev. 723, 734-738 (1959); W. Prosser, Law of Torts 136-137 (4th ed.", + "1971).\n\n[Footnote 20]\n\nSee cases cited n 28, infra. The criminal codes of many States include provisions explicitly recognizing the teacher's common law privilege to inflict reasonable corporal punishment. E.g., Ariz.Rev.Stat.Ann. \u00a7 13-246(A)(1) (1956); Conn.Gen.Stat. \u00a7 53a-18 (1977); Neb.Rev.Stat. \u00a7 28-840(2) (1975); N.Y. Penal Law \u00a7 35.10 (McKinney 1975 and Supp. 1976); Ore.Rev.Stat. \u00a7 161.", + "205(1) (1975).\n\n[Footnote 21]\n\nSee Proehl, supra at 726, and n. 13.\n\n[Footnote 22]\n\nToday, corporal punishment in school is conditioned on parental approval only in California. Cal.Educ.Code \u00a7 49001 (West Supp. 1977). Cf. Morrow v. Wood, 35 Wis. 59 (1874). This Court has held in a summary affirmance that parental approval of corporal punishment is not constitutionally required. Baker v. Owen, 423 U.S. 907 (1975), aff'g 395 F.Supp.", + " 294 (MDNC).\n\n[Footnote 23]\n\nCal.Educ.Code \u00a7\u00a7 49000-49001 (West Supp. 1977); Del.Code Ann., Tit 14, \u00a7 701 (Supp. 1976); Fla.Stat.Ann. \u00a7 232.27 (1977); Ga.Code Ann. \u00a7\u00a7 32-835, 32-836 (1976); Haw.Rev.Stat. \u00a7\u00a7 298-16 (1975 Supp.), 703-309(2) (Spec. Pamphlet 1975); Ill.Ann.Stat., c. 122, \u00a7\u00a7 24-", + "24, 34-84a (1977 Supp.); Ind.Code Ann. \u00a7 28.1-5-2 (1975); Md.Ann.Code, Art. 77, \u00a7 98B (1975) (in specified counties); Mich.Comp.Laws Ann., \u00a7 340.756 (1970); Mont.Rev.Codes Ann. \u00a7 75-6109 (1971); Nev.Rev.Stat. \u00a7 392.465 (1973); N.C.Gen.Stat. \u00a7 115-146 (1975); Ohio Rev.Code Ann. \u00a7 3319.41 (1972); Okla.Stat.Ann., Tit.", + " 70, \u00a7 6-114 (1972); Pa.Stat.Ann., Tit. 24, \u00a7 13-1317 (Supp. 1976); S.C.Code \u00a7 59-63-260 (1977); S.D. Compiled Laws Ann. \u00a7 13-32-2 (1975); Vt.Stat.Ann., Tit. 16, \u00a7 1161 (Supp. 1976); Va.Code Ann. \u00a7 22-231.1 (1973); W.Va.Code, \u00a7 18A-5-1 (1977); Wyo.Stat. \u00a7 21.", + "1-64 (Supp. 1975).\n\n[Footnote 24]\n\nCal.Educ.Code \u00a7 49001 (West Supp. 1977) (requiring prior parental approval in writing); Fla.Stat.Ann. \u00a7 232.27(3) (1977) (requiring a written explanation on request); Mont.Rev.Codes Ann. \u00a7 75-6109 (1971) (requiring prior parental notification).\n\n[Footnote 25]\n\nMd.Ann.Code, Art. 77, \u00a7 98B (1975).\n\n[Footnote 26]\n\nFla.Stat.Ann.", + " \u00a7 232.27 (1977); Haw.Rev. Stats. \u00a7 298-16 (1975 Supp.); Mont.Rev.Codes Ann. \u00a7 75-6109 (1971).\n\n[Footnote 27]\n\nMass.Gen.Laws Ann., c. 71, \u00a7 37G (Supp. 1976); N.J.Stat.Ann. \u00a7 18A:6-1 (1968).\n\n[Footnote 28]\n\nE.g., Suits v. Glover, 260 Ala. 449, 71 So.2d 49 (1954); La Frentz v.", + " Gallagher, 105 Ariz. 255, 462 P.2d 804 (1969); Berry v. Arnold School Dist., 199 Ark. 1118, 137 S.W.2d 256 (1940); Andreozzi v. Rubano, 145 Conn.280, 141 A.2d 639 (1958); Tinkham v. Kole, 252 Iowa 1303, 110 N.W.2d 258 (1961); Carr v. Wright, 423 S.W.2d 521 (Ky.1968); Christman v. Hickman,", + " 225 Mo.App. 828, 37 S.W.2d 672 (1931); Simms v. School Dist. No. 1, 13 Ore.App. 119, 508 P.2d 236 (1973); Marlar v. Bill, 181 Tenn. 100, 178 S.W.2d 634 (1944); Prendergast v. Masterson, 196 S.W. 246 (Tex.Civ.App. 1917). See generally sources cited n19, supra.\n\n[Footnote 29]\n\nSee Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.", + " S. 153, 428 U. S. 168-173 (1976) (joint opinion of STEWART, POWELL, and STEVENS, JJ.) (hereinafter joint opinion); Furman v. Georgia, 408 U. S. 238, 408 U. S. 316-328 (1972) (MARSHALL, J., concurring); Granucci, \"Nor Cruel and Unusual Punishments Inflicted:\" The Original Meaning, 57 Calif.L.Rev. 839 (1969).\n\n[Footnote 30]\n\nSee I. Brant, The Bill of Rights 155 (1965).\n\n[Footnote 31]\n\nSee Granucci,", + " supra, at 852-860.\n\n[Footnote 32]\n\nId. at 855.\n\n[Footnote 33]\n\nThe preamble reads in part:\n\n\"WHEREAS the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counselors, judges, and ministers employed by him, did endeavor to subvert and extirpate... the laws and liberties of this kingdom.\"\n\n\"* * * *\"\n\n\"10. And excessive bail hath been required of persons committed in criminal cases, to elude the benefit of the laws made for the liberty of the subjects.\"\n\n\"11. And excessive fines have been imposed; and illegal and cruel punishments inflicted.", + "...\"\n\nR. Perry & J. Cooper, Sources of Our Liberties 245-246 (1959).\n\n[Footnote 34]\n\n4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries *297 (bail), *379 (fines and other punishments).\n\n[Footnote 35]\n\nAbraham Holmes of Massachusetts complained specifically of the absence of a provision restraining Congress in its power to determine \"what kind of punishments shall be inflicted on persons convicted of crimes.\" 2 J. Elliot, Debates on the Federal Constitution 111 (1876). Patrick Henry was of the same mind:\n\n\"What says our [Virginia] bill of rights?", + " -- 'that excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.' Are you not, therefore, now calling on those gentlemen who are to compose Congress, to prescribe trials and define punishments without this control? Will they find sentiments there similar to this bill of rights? You let them loose; you do more -- you depart from the genius of your country....\"\n\n3 id. at 47.\n\n[Footnote 36]\n\nIn urging us to extend the Eighth Amendment to ban school paddlings, petitioners rely on the many decisions in which this Court has held that the prohibition against \"cruel and unusual\"", + " punishments is not \"fastened to the obsolete, but may acquire meaning as public opinion becomes enlightened by a humane justice.'\" Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. at 428 U. S. 171 (joint opinion); see, e.g., Trop v. Dulles, 356 U. S. 86, 356 U. S. 100-101 (1958) (plurality opinion); Weems v. United States, 217 U. S. 349, 217 U. S. 373, 217 U. S. 378 (1910). This reliance is misplaced.", + " Our Eighth Amendment decisions have referred to \"evolving standards of decency,\" Trop v. Dulles, supra at 356 U. S. 101, only in determining whether criminal punishments are \"cruel and unusual\" under the Amendment.\n\n[Footnote 37]\n\nSome punishments, though not labeled \"criminal\" by the State, may be sufficiently analogous to criminal punishments in the circumstances in which they are administered to justify application of the Eighth Amendment. Cf. In re Gault, 387 U. S. 1 (1967). We have no occasion in this case, for example, to consider whether or under what circumstances persons involuntarily confined in mental or juvenile institutions can claim the protection of the Eighth Amendment.\n\n[Footnote 38]\n\nJudge Friendly similarly has observed that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause\n\n\"", + "can fairly be deemed to be applicable to the manner in which an otherwise constitutional sentence... is carried out by an executioner, see Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U. S. 459... (1947), or to cover conditions of confinement which my make intolerable an otherwise constitutional term of imprisonment.\"\n\nJohnson v. Glick, 481 F.2d 1028, 1032 (CA2), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 1033 (1973) (citation omitted).\n\n[Footnote 39]\n\nPutting history aside as irrelevant, the dissenting opinion of MR.", + " JUSTICE WHITE argues that a \"purposive analysis\" should control the reach of the Eighth Amendment. Post at 430 U. S. 686-688. There is no support whatever for this approach in the decisions of this Court. Although an imposition must be \"punishment\" for the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause to apply, the Court has never held that all punishments are subject to Eighth Amendment scrutiny. See n 40, infra. The applicability of the Eighth Amendment always has turned on its original meaning, as demonstrated by its historical derivation. See Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. at 428 U.", + " S. 169-173 (joint opinion); Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. at 408 U. S. 315-328 (MARSHALL, J., concurring).\n\nThe dissenting opinion warns that, as a consequence of our decision today, teachers may \"cut off a child's ear for being late to class.\" Post at 430 U. S. 684. This rhetoric bears no relation to reality or to the issues presented in this case. The laws of virtually every State forbid the excessive physical punishment of school children. Yet the logic of the dissent would make the judgment of which disciplinary punishments are reasonable and which are excessive a matter of constitutional principle in every case,", + " to be decided ultimately by this Court. The hazards of such a broad reading of the Eighth Amendment are clear.\n\n\"It is always time to say that this Nation is too large, too complex and composed of too great a diversity of peoples for any one of us to have the wisdom to establish the rules by which local Americans must govern their local affairs. The constitutional rule we are urged to adopt is not merely revolutionary -- it departs from the ancient faith based on the premise that experience in making local laws by local people themselves is by far the safest guide for a nation like ours to follow.\"\n\nPowell v. Texas, 392 U. S.", + " 514, 392 U. S. 547-548 (1968) (opinion of Black, J.).\n\n[Footnote 40]\n\nEighth Amendment scrutiny is appropriate only after the State has complied with the constitutional guarantees traditionally associated with criminal prosecutions. See United States v. Lovett, 328 U. S. 303, 328 U. S. 317-318 (1946). Thus, in Trop v. Dulles, 356 U. S. 86 (1958), the plurality appropriately took the view that denationalization was an impermissible punishment for wartime desertion under the Eighth Amendment,", + " because desertion already had been established at a criminal trial. But in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U. S. 144 (1963), where the Court considered denationalization as a punishment for evading the draft, the Court refused to reach the Eighth Amendment issue, holding instead that the punishment could be imposed only through the criminal process. Id. at 372 U. S. 162-167, 372 U. S. 186, and n. 43. As these cases demonstrate, the State does not acquire the power to punish with which the Eighth Amendment is concerned until after it has secured a formal adjudication of guilt in accordance with due process of law.", + " Where the State seeks to impose punishment without such an adjudication, the pertinent constitutional guarantee is the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.\n\n[Footnote 41]\n\nSee 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries *134. Under the 39th Article of the Magna Carta, an individual could not be deprived of this right of personal security \"except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.\" Perry & Cooper, supra, n 33, at 17. By subsequent enactments of Parliament during the time of Edward III, the right was protected from deprivation except \"by due process of law.\" See Shattuck,", + " The True Meaning of the Term \"Liberty,\" 4 Harv.L.Rev. 365, 372-373 (1891).\n\n[Footnote 42]\n\nSee, e.g., Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U. S. 535, 316 U. S. 541 (1942) (sterilization); Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11 (1905) (vaccination); Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U. S. 250, 141 U. S. 251-252 (1891)", + " (physical examinations); cf. ICC v. Brimson, 154 U. S. 447, 154 U. S. 479 (1894).\n\nThe right of personal security is also protected by the Fourth Amendment, which was made applicable to the States through the Fourteenth because its protection was viewed as \"implicit in the concept of ordered liberty'... enshrined in the history and the basic constitutional documents of English-speaking peoples.\" Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U. S. 25, 338 U. S. 27-28 (1949). It has been said of the Fourth Amendment that its \"overriding function.", + ".. is to protect personal privacy and dignity against unwarranted intrusion by the State.\" Schmerber v. California, 384 U. S. 757, 384 U. S. 767 (1966). But the principal concern of that Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures is with intrusions on privacy in the course of criminal investigations. See Whalen v. Roe, 429 U. S. 589, 429 U. S. 604 n. 32 (1977). Petitioners do not contend that the Fourth Amendment applies, according to its terms, to corporal punishment in public school.\n\n[Footnote 43]\n\nUnlike Goss v.", + " Lopez, 419 U. S. 565 (1975), this case does not involve the state-created property interest in public education. The purpose of corporal punishment is to correct a child's behavior without interrupting his education. That corporal punishment may, in a rare case, have the unintended effect of temporarily removing a child from school affords no basis for concluding that the practice itself deprives students of property protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.\n\nNor does this case involve any state-created interest in liberty going beyond the Fourteenth Amendment's protection of freedom from bodily restraint and corporal punishment. Cf. Meachum v. Fano,", + " 427 U. S. 215, 427 U. S. 225-227 (1976).\n\n[Footnote 44]\n\nIf the common law privilege to inflict reasonable corporal punishment in school were inapplicable, it is doubtful whether any procedure short of a trial in a criminal or juvenile court could satisfy the requirements of procedural due process for the imposition of such punishment. See United States v. Lovett, 328 U.S. at 328 U. S. 317-318; cf. Breed v. Jones, 421 U. S. 519, 421 U. S. 528-529 (1975).\n\n[Footnote 45]\n\nSee supra at 430 U.", + " S. 655-657, 430 U. S. 661. The statutory prohibition against \"degrading\" or unnecessarily \"severe\" corporal punishment in former \u00a7 232.27 has been construed as a statement of the common law principle. See 1937 Op.Fla.Atty.Gen., Biennial Report of the Atty.Gen. 169 (1937-1938); cf. 1957 Op.Fla.Atty.Gen., Biennial Report of the Atty.Gen. 7, 8 (1957-1958). Florida Stat.Ann. \u00a7 827.03(3) (1976)", + " makes malicious punishment of a child a felony. Both the District Court, App. 144, and the Court of Appeals, 525 F.2d at 915, expressed the view that the common law tort remedy was available to the petitioners in this case. And petitioners conceded in this Court that a teacher who inflicts excessive punishment on a child may be held both civilly and criminally liable under Florida law. Brief for Petitioners 33 n. 11, 34; Tr. of Oral Arg. 17, 52-53.\n\nIn view of the statutory adoption of the common law rule, and the unanimity of the parties and the courts below,", + " the doubts expressed in MR. JUSTICE WHITE's dissenting opinion as to the availability of tort remedies in Florida can only be viewed as chimerical. The dissent makes much of the fact that no Florida court has ever \"recognized\" a damages remedy for unreasonable corporal punishment. Post at 430 U. S. 694 n. 11, 430 U. S. 700. But the absence of reported Florida decisions hardly suggests that no remedy is available. Rather, it merely confirms the common sense judgment that excessive corporal punishment is exceedingly rare in the public schools.\n\n[Footnote 46]\n\nThe low incidence of abuse,", + " and the availability of established judicial remedies in the event of abuse, distinguish this case from Goss v. Lopez, 419 U. S. 565 (1975). The Ohio law struck down in Goss provided for suspensions from public school of up to 10 days without \"any written procedure applicable to suspensions.\" Id. at 419 U. S. 567. Although Ohio law provided generally for administrative review, Ohio Rev.Code Ann. \u00a7 2506.01 (Supp. 1973), the Court assumed that the short suspensions would not be stayed pending review, with the result that the review proceeding could serve neither a deterrent nor a remedial function.", + " 419 U.S. at 419 U. S. 581 n. 10. In these circumstances, the Court held the law authorizing suspensions unconstitutional for failure to require \"that there be at least an informal give-and-take between student and disciplinarian, preferably prior to the suspension....\" Id. at 419 U. S. 584. The subsequent civil and criminal proceedings available in this case may be viewed as affording substantially greater protection to the child than the informal conference mandated by Goss.\n\n[Footnote 47]\n\n\"[P]rior hearings might well be dispensed with in many circumstances in which the state's conduct,", + " if not adequately justified, would constitute a common law tort. This would leave the injured plaintiff in precisely the same posture as a common law plaintiff, and this procedural consequence would be quite harmonious with the substantive view that the fourteenth amendment encompasses the same liberties as those protected by the common law.\"\n\nMonaghan, Of \"Liberty\" and \"Property,\" 62 Cornell L.Rev. 405, 431 (1977) (footnote omitted). See Bonner v. Coughlin, 517 F.2d 1311, 1319 (CA7 1975), modified en banc, 545 F.", + "2d 565 (1976), cert. pending, No. 76-6204.\n\nWe have no occasion in this case, see supra at 430 U. S. 659, and n. 12, to decide whether or under what circumstances corporal punishment of a public school child may give rise to an independent federal cause of action to vindicate substantive rights under the Due Process Clause.\n\n[Footnote 48]\n\nSee also Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1 (1968). The reasonableness of a warrantless public arrest may be subjected to subsequent judicial scrutiny in a civil action against the law enforcement officer or in a suppression hearing to determine whether any evidence seized in the arrest may be used in a criminal trial.\n\n[Footnote 49]\n\n\"[P]", + "rocedural due process rules are shaped by the risk of error inherent in the truthfinding process as applied to the generality of cases, not the rare exceptions....\"\n\nMathews v. Eldridge, 424 U. S. 319, 424 U. S. 344 (1976).\n\n[Footnote 50]\n\nIf a prior hearing, with the inevitable attendant publicity within the school, resulted in rejection of the teacher's recommendation, the consequent impairment of the teacher's ability to maintain discipline in the classroom would not be insubstantial.\n\n[Footnote 51]\n\nThe effect of interposing prior procedural safeguards may well be to make the punishment more severe by increasing the anxiety of the child.", + " For this reason, the school authorities in Dade County found it desirable that the punishment be inflicted as soon as possible after the infraction. App. 449.\n\n[Footnote 52]\n\n\"It may be true that procedural regularity in disciplinary proceedings promotes a sense of institutional rapport and open communication, a perception of fair treatment, and provides the offender and his fellow students a showcase of democracy at work. But... [r]espect for democratic institutions will equally dissipate if they are thought too ineffectual to provide their students an environment of order in which the educational process may go forward....\"\n\nWilkinson,", + " Goss v. Lopez: The Supreme Court as School Superintendent, 1975 Sup.Ct.Rev. 25, 71-72.\n\n[Footnote 53]\n\nThe seriousness of the disciplinary problems in the Nation's public schools has been documented in a recent congressional report, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Challenge for the Third Century: Education in a Safe Environment -- Final Report on the Nature and Prevention of School Violence and Vandalism, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. (Comm.Print 1977).\n\n[Footnote 54]\n\nThe need to maintain order in a trial courtroom raises similar problems.", + " In that context, this Court has recognized the power of the trial judge \"to punish summarily and without notice or hearing contemptuous conduct committed in his presence and observed by him.\" Taylor v. Hayes, 418 U. S. 488, 418 U. S. 497 (1974), citing Ex parte Terry, 128 U. S. 289 (1888). The punishment so imposed may be as severe as six months in prison. See Codispoti v. Pennsylvania, 418 U. S. 506, 418 U. S. 513-515 (1974); cf. Muniz v.", + " Hoffman, 422 U. S. 454, 422 U. S. 475-476 (1975).\n\n[Footnote 55]\n\nMR. JUSTICE WHITE's dissenting opinion offers no manageable standards for determining what process is due in any particular case. The dissent apparently would require, as a general rule, only \"an informal give-and-take between student and disciplinarian.\" Post at 430 U. S. 693. But the dissent would depart from these \"minimal procedures\" -- requiring even witnesses, counsel, and cross-examination -- in cases where the punishment reaches some undefined level of severity. Post at 430 U.", + " S. 700 n. 18. School authorities are left to guess at the degree of punishment that will require more than an \"informal give-and-take\" and at the additional process that may be constitutionally required. The impracticality of such an approach is self-evident, and illustrates the hazards of ignoring the traditional solution of the common law.\n\nWe agree with the dissent that the Goss procedures will often be, \"if anything, less than a fair-minded school principal would impose upon himself.\" Post at 430 U. S. 700, quoting Goss, 419 U.S. at 419 U.", + " S. 583. But before this Court invokes the Constitution to impose a procedural requirement, it should be reasonably certain that the effect will be to afford protection appropriate to the constitutional interests at stake. The dissenting opinion's reading of the Constitution suggests no such beneficial result and, indeed, invites a lowering of existing constitutional standards.\n\nMR. JUSTICE WHITE, with whom MR JUSTICE BRENNAN, MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL, and MR. JUSTICE STEVENS join, dissenting.\n\nToday the Court holds that corporal punishment in public schools, no matter how severe, can never be the subject of the protections afforded by the Eighth Amendment.", + " It also holds\n\nPage 430 U. S. 684\n\nthat students in the public school systems are not constitutionally entitled to a hearing of any sort before beatings can be inflicted on them. Because I believe that these holdings are inconsistent with the prior decisions of this Court and are contrary to a reasoned analysis of the constitutional provisions involved, I respectfully dissent.\n\nI\n\nA\n\nThe Eighth Amendment places a flat prohibition against the infliction of \"cruel and unusual punishments.\" This reflects a societal judgment that there are some punishments that are so barbaric and inhumane that we will not permit them to be imposed on anyone, no matter how opprobrious the offense.", + " See Robinson v. California, 370 U. S. 660, 370 U. S. 676 (1962) (Douglas, J., concurring). If there are some punishments that are so barbaric that they may not be imposed for the commission of crimes, designated by our social system as the most thoroughly reprehensible acts an individual can commit, then, a fortiori, similar punishments may not be imposed on persons for less culpable acts, such as breaches of school discipline. Thus, if it is constitutionally impermissible to cut off someone's ear for the commission of murder, it must be unconstitutional to cut off a child's ear for being late to class.", + " [Footnote 2/1] Although there were no ears cut off in this case, the\n\nPage 430 U. S. 685\n\nrecord reveals beatings so severe that, if they were inflicted on a hardened criminal for the commission of a serious crime, they might not pass constitutional muster.\n\nNevertheless, the majority holds that the Eighth Amendment \"was designed to protect [only] those convicted of crimes,\" ante at 430 U. S. 664, relying on a vague and inconclusive recitation of the history of the Amendment. Yet the constitutional prohibition is against cruel and unusual punishments; nowhere is that prohibition limited or modified by the language of the Constitution.", + " Certainly, the fact that the Framers did not choose to insert the word \"criminal\" into the language of the Eighth Amendment is strong evidence that the Amendment was designed to prohibit all inhumane or barbaric punishments, no matter what the nature of the offense for which the punishment is imposed.\n\nNo one can deny that spanking of school children is \"punishment\" under any reasonable reading of the word, for the similarities between spanking in public schools and other forms of punishment are too obvious to ignore. Like other forms of punishment, spanking of school children involves an institutionalized response to the violation of some official rule or regulation proscribing certain conduct and is imposed\n\nPage 430 U.", + " S. 686\n\nfor the purpose of rehabilitating the offender, deterring the offender and others like him from committing the violation in the future, and inflicting some measure of social retribution for the harm that has been done.\n\nB\n\nWe are fortunate that, in our society, punishments that are severe enough to raise a doubt as to their constitutional validity are ordinarily not imposed without first affording the accused the full panoply of procedural safeguards provided by the criminal process. [Footnote 2/2] The effect has been that\n\n\"every decision of this Court considering whether a punishment is 'cruel and unusual' within the meaning of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments has dealt with a criminal punishment.\"\n\nAnte at 430 U.", + " S. 666. The Court would have us believe from this fact that there is a recognized distinction between criminal and noncriminal punishment for purposes of the Eighth Amendment. This is plainly wrong. \"[E]ven a clear legislative classification of a statute as non-penal' would not alter the fundamental nature of a plainly penal statute.\" Trop v. Dulles, 356 U. S. 86, 356 U. S. 95 (1958) (plurality opinion). The relevant inquiry is not whether the offense for which a punishment is inflicted has been labeled as criminal, but whether the purpose of the deprivation is among those ordinarily associated\n\nPage 430 U.", + " S. 687\n\nwith punishment, such as retribution, rehabilitation, or deterrence. [Footnote 2/3] Id. at 356 U. S. 96. Cf. Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U. S. 144 (1963)\n\nIf this purposive approach were followed in the present case, it would be clear that spanking in the Florida public schools is punishment within the meaning of the Eighth Amendment. The District Court found that\n\n\"[c]orporal punishment is one of a variety of measures employed in the school system for the correction of pupil behavior and the preservation of order.\"\n\nApp 146.", + " Behavior correction and\n\nPage 430 U. S. 688\n\npreservation of order are purposes ordinarily associated with punishment.\n\nWithout even mentioning the purposive analysis applied in the prior decisions of this Court, the majority adopts a rule that turns on the label given to the offense for which the punishment is inflicted. Thus, the record in this case reveals that one student at Drew Junior High School received 50 licks with a paddle for allegedly making an obscene telephone call. Brief for Petitioners 13. The majority holds that the Eighth Amendment does not prohibit such punishment, since it was only inflicted for a breach of school discipline. However,", + " that same conduct is punishable as a misdemeanor under Florida law, Fla.Stat.Ann. \u00a7 365.18 (Supp. 177), and there can be little doubt that, if that same \"punishment\" had been inflicted by an officer of the state courts for violation of \u00a7 365.16, it would have had to satisfy the requirements of the Eighth Amendment.\n\nC\n\nIn fact, as the Court recognizes, the Eighth Amendment has never been confined to criminal punishments. [Footnote 2/4] Nevertheless, the majority adheres to its view that any protections afforded by the Eighth Amendment must have something to do with\n\nPage 430 U.", + " S. 689\n\ncriminals, and it would therefore confine any exceptions to its general rule that only criminal punishments are covered by the Eighth Amendment to abuses inflicted on prisoners. Thus, if a prisoner is beaten mercilessly for a breach of discipline, he is entitled to the protection of the Eighth Amendment, while a school child who commits the same breach of discipline and is similarly beaten is simply not covered.\n\nThe purported explanation of this anomaly is the assertion that school children have no need for the Eighth Amendment. We are told that schools are open institutions, subject to constant public scrutiny; that school children have adequate remedies under state law; [Footnote 2/", + "5] and that prisoners suffer the social stigma of being labeled as criminals. How any of these policy considerations got into the Constitution is difficult to discern, for the Court has never considered any of these factors in determining the scope of the Eighth Amendment. [Footnote 2/6]\n\nPage 430 U. S. 690\n\nThe essence of the majority's argument is that school children do not need Eighth Amendment protection, because corporal punishment is less subject to abuse in the public schools than it is in the prison system. [Footnote 2/7] However, it cannot be reasonably suggested that, just because cruel and unusual punishments may occur less frequently under public scrutiny,", + " they will not occur at all. The mere fact that a public flogging or a public execution would be available for all to see would not render the punishment constitutional if it were otherwise impermissible. Similarly, the majority would not suggest that a prisoner who is placed in a minimum security prison and permitted to go home to his family on the weekends should be any less entitled to Eighth Amendment protections than his counterpart in a maximum security prison. In short, if a punishment is so barbaric and inhumane that it goes beyond the tolerance of a civilized society, its openness to public scrutiny should have nothing to do with its constitutional validity.\n\nNor is it an adequate answer that school children may have other state and constitutional remedies available to them.", + " Even assuming that the remedies available to public school students are adequate under Florida law, [Footnote 2/8] the availability of state remedies has never been determinative of the coverage or of the protections afforded by the Eighth Amendment. The reason is obvious. The fact that a person may have a\n\nPage 430 U. S. 691\n\nstate law cause of action against a public official who tortures him with a thumbscrew for the commission of an antisocial act has nothing to do with the fact that such official conduct is cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Indeed, the majority's view was implicitly rejected this Term in Estelle v.", + " Gamble, 429 U. S. 97 (1976), when the Court held that failure to provide for the medical needs of prisoners could constitute cruel and unusual punishment even though a medical malpractice remedy in tort was available to prisoners under state law. Id. at 429 U. S. 107 n. 15.\n\nD\n\nBy holding that the Eighth Amendment protects only criminals, the majority adopts the view that one is entitled to the protections afforded by the Eighth Amendment only if he is punished for acts that are sufficiently opprobrious for society to make them \"criminal.\" This is a curious holding in view of the fact that the more culpable the offender,", + " the more likely it is that the punishment will not be disproportionate to the offense, and consequently, the less likely it is that the punishment will be cruel and unusual. [Footnote 2/9] Conversely, a public school student who is spanked for a mere breach of discipline may sometimes have a strong argument that the punishment does not fit the offense, depending upon the severity of the beating, and therefore that it is cruel and unusual. Yet the majority would afford the student no protection no matter how inhumane and barbaric the punishment inflicted on him might be.\n\nThe issue presented in this phase of the case is limited to whether corporal punishment in public schools can ever be prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.", + " I am therefore not\n\nPage 430 U. S. 692\n\nsuggesting that spanking in the public schools is, in every instance, prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. My own view is that it is not. I only take issue with the extreme view of the majority that corporal punishment in public schools, no matter how barbaric, inhumane, or severe, is never limited by the Eighth Amendment. Where corporal punishment becomes so severe as to be unacceptable in a civilized society, I can see no reason that it should become any more acceptable just because it is inflicted on children in the public schools.\n\nII\n\nThe majority concedes that corporal punishment in the public schools implicates an interest protected by the Due Process Clause -- the liberty interest of the student to be free from \"bodily restraint and punishment\"", + " involving \"appreciable physical pain\" inflicted by persons acting under color of state law. Ante at 430 U. S. 674. The question remaining, as the majority recognizes, is what process is due.\n\nThe reason that the Constitution requires a State to provide \"due process of law\" when it punishes an individual for misconduct is to protect the individual from erroneous or mistaken punishment that the State would not have inflicted had it found the facts in a more reliable way. See, e.g., Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U. S. 319, 424 U. S. 335, 344 (1976). In Goss v.", + " Lopez, 419 U. S. 565 (1975), the Court applied this principle to the school disciplinary process, holding that a student must be given an informal opportunity to be heard before he is finally suspended from public school.\n\n\"Disciplinarians, although proceeding in utmost good faith, frequently act on the reports and advice of others, and the controlling facts and the nature of the conduct under challenge are often disputed. The risk of error is not at all trivial, and it should be guarded against if that may be done without prohibitive cost or interference\n\nPage 430 U. S. 693\n\nwith the educational process.\"\n\nId.", + " at 419 U. S. 580. (Emphasis added.) To guard against this risk of punishing an innocent child, the Due Process Clause requires not an \"elaborate hearing\" before a neutral party, but simply \"an informal give-and-take between student and disciplinarian\" which gives the student \"an opportunity to explain his version of the facts.\" Id. at 419 U. S. 580, 419 U. S. 582, 419 U. S. 584.\n\nThe Court now holds that these \"rudimentary precautions against unfair or mistaken findings of misconduct,\" id. at 419 U.", + " S. 581, are not required if the student is punished with \"appreciable physical pain,\" rather than with a suspension, even though both punishments deprive the student of a constitutionally protected interest. Although the respondent school authorities provide absolutely no process to the student before the punishment is finally inflicted, the majority concludes that the student is nonetheless given due process because he can later sue the teacher and recover damages if the punishment was \"excessive.\"\n\nThis tort action is utterly inadequate to protect against erroneous infliction of punishment for two reasons. [Footnote 2/10] First, under Florida law, a student punished for an act he did not commit cannot recover damages from a teacher \"proceeding\n\nPage 430 U.", + " S. 694\n\nin utmost good faith... on the reports and advice of others,\" supra at 430 U. S. 692; the student has no remedy at all for punishment imposed on the basis of mistaken facts, at least as long as the punishment was reasonable from the point of view of the disciplinarian, uninformed by any prior hearing. [Footnote 2/11] The \"traditional\n\nPage 430 U. S. 695\n\ncommon law remedies\" on which the majority relies, ante at 430 U. S. 672, thus do nothing to protect the student from the danger that concerned the Court in Goss -- the risk of reasonable,", + " good faith mistake in the school disciplinary process.\n\nSecond, and more important, even if the student could sue for good faith error in the infliction of punishment, the lawsuit occurs after the punishment has been finally imposed. The infliction of physical pain is final and irreparable; it cannot be undone in a subsequent proceeding. There is every reason to require, as the Court did in Goss, a few minutes of \"informal give-and-take between student and disciplinarian\"\n\nPage 430 U. S. 696\n\nas a \"meaningful hedge\" against the erroneous infliction of irreparable injury. 419 U.S.", + " at 419 U. S. 583-584. [Footnote 2/12]\n\nThe majority's conclusion that a damages remedy for excessive corporal punishment affords adequate process rests on the novel theory that the State may punish an individual without giving him any opportunity to present his side of the story, as long as he can later recover damages from a state official if he is innocent. The logic of this theory would permit a State that punished speeding with a one-day jail sentence to make a driver serve his sentence first without a trial and then sue to recover damages for wrongful imprisonment. [Footnote 2/13] Similarly, the State could finally take away a prisoner's good-time credits for alleged disciplinary infractions and require him to bring a damages suit after he was eventually released.", + " There is no authority for this theory, nor does the majority purport to find any, [Footnote 2/14] in the procedural due process\n\nPage 430 U. S. 697\n\ndecisions of this Court. Those cases have\n\n\"consistently held that some kind of hearing is required at some time before a person is finally deprived of his property interests..., [and that] a person's liberty is equally protected....\"\n\nWolff v. McDonnell, 418 U. S. 539, 418 U. S. 557-558 (1974). (Emphasis added.)\n\nThe majority attempts to support its novel theory by drawing an analogy to warrantless arrests on probable cause,", + " which the Court has held reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. United States v. Watson, 423 U. S. 411 (1976). This analogy fails for two reasons. First, the particular requirements of the Fourth Amendment, rooted in the \"ancient common law rule[s]\" regulating police practices, id. at 423 U. S. 418, must be understood in the context of the criminal justice system for which that Amendment was explicitly tailored. Thus, in Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U. S. 103 (1975), the Court, speaking through MR. JUSTICE POWELL, rejected the argument that procedural protections required in Goss and other due process\n\nPage 430 U.", + " S. 698\n\ncases should be afforded to a criminal suspect arrested without a warrant.\n\n\"The Fourth Amendment was tailored explicitly for the criminal justice system, and its balance between individual and public interests always has been thought to define the 'process that is due' for seizures of person or property in criminal cases, including the detention of suspects pending trial.... Moreover, the Fourth Amendment probable cause determination is, in fact, only the first stage of an elaborate system, unique in jurisprudence, designed to safeguard the rights of those accused of criminal conduct. The relatively simple civil procedures (e.g., prior interview with school principal before suspension)", + " presented in the [procedural due process] cases cited in the concurring opinion are inapposite and irrelevant in the wholly different context of the criminal justice system.\"\n\nId. at 420 U. S. 125 n. 27. (Emphasis in last sentence added.) While a case dealing with warrantless arrests is perhaps not altogether \"inapposite and irrelevant in the wholly different context\" of the school disciplinary process, such a case is far weaker authority than procedural due process cases such as Goss v. Lopez, 419 U. S. 565 (1975), that deal with deprivations of liberty outside the criminal context.\n\nSecond,", + " contrary to the majority's suggestion, ante at 430 U. S. 680 n. 48, the reason that the Court has upheld warrantless arrests on probable cause is not because the police officer's assessment of the facts \"may be subjected to subsequent judicial scrutiny in a civil action against the law enforcement officer or in a suppression hearing....\" The reason that the Court has upheld arrests without warrants is that they are the \"first stage of an elaborate system\" of procedural protections, Gerstein v. Pugh, supra at 420 U. S. 125 n. 27, and that the State is not free to continue the deprivation beyond this first stage without procedures.", + " The Constitution requires the State to provide\n\nPage 430 U. S. 699\n\n\"a fair and reliable determination of probable cause\" by a judicial officer prior to the imposition of \"any significant pretrial restraint of liberty\" other than \"a brief period of detention to take the administrative steps incident to [a warrantless] arrest.\" Id. at 420 U. S. 114, 420 U. S. 125. (Footnote omitted; emphasis added.) This \"practical compromise\" is made necessary because\n\n\"requiring a magistrate's review of the factual justification prior to any arrest... would constitute an intolerable handicap for legitimate law enforcement,\"\n\nid.", + " at 420 U. S. 113; but it is the probable cause determination prior to any significant period of pretrial incarceration, rather than a damages action or suppression hearing, that affords the suspect due process.\n\nThere is, in short, no basis in logic or authority for the majority's suggestion that an action to recover damages for excessive corporal punishment \"afford[s] substantially greater protection to the child than the informal conference mandated by Goss.\" [Footnote 2/15] The majority purports to follow the settled principle that what process is due depends on\n\n\"'the risk of an erroneous deprivation of [the protected]", + " interest... and the probable value, if any, of additional or substitute procedural safeguards;' [Footnote 2/16]\"\n\nit recognizes, as did Goss, the risk of error in the school disciplinary process [Footnote 2/17] and concedes that \"the child has a strong interest in procedural safeguards that minimize the risk of wrongful punishment...,\" ante at 430 U. S. 676;\n\nPage 430 U. S. 700\n\nbut it somehow concludes that this risk is adequately reduced by a damages remedy that never has been recognized by a Florida court, that leaves unprotected the innocent student punished by mistake,", + " and that allows the State to punish first and hear the student's version of events later. I cannot agree.\n\nThe majority emphasizes, as did the dissenters in Goss, that even the \"rudimentary precautions\" required by that decision would impose some burden on the school disciplinary process. But those costs are no greater if the student is paddled, rather than suspended; the risk of error in the punishment is no smaller; and the fear of \"a significant intrusion\" into the disciplinary process, ante at 430 U. S. 682 (cf. Goss, supra at 419 U. S. 585 (POWELL,", + " J., dissenting)), is just as exaggerated. The disciplinarian need only take a few minutes to give the student\n\n\"notice of the charges against him and, if he denies them, an explanation of the evidence the authorities have and an opportunity to present his side of the story.\"\n\n419 U.S. at 419 U. S. 581. In this context, the Constitution requires, \"if anything, less than a fair-minded school principal would impose upon himself\" in order to avoid injustice. [Footnote 2/18] Id. at 419 U. S. 583.\n\nI would reverse the judgment below.\n\n[Footnote 2/", + "1]\n\nThere is little reason to fear that, if the Eighth Amendment is held to apply at all to corporal punishment of school children, all paddlings, however moderate, would be prohibited. Jackson v. Bishop, 404 F.2d 571 (CA8 1968), held that any paddling or flogging of prisoners, convicted of crime and serving prison terms, violated the cruel and unusual punishment ban of the Eighth Amendment. But aside from the fact that Bishop has never been embraced by this Court, the theory of that case was not that bodily punishments are intrinsically barbaric or excessively severe, but that paddling of prisoners is \"degrading to the punisher and to the punished alike.\" Id.", + " at 580. That approach may be acceptable in the criminal justice system, but it has little if any relevance to corporal punishment in the schools, for it can hardly be said that the use of moderate paddlings in the discipline of children is inconsistent with the country's evolving standards of decency.\n\nOn the other hand, when punishment involves a cruel, severe beating or chopping off an ear, something more than merely the dignity of the individual is involved. Whenever a given criminal punishment is \"cruel and unusual\" because it is inhumane or barbaric, I can think of no reason why it would be any less inhumane or barbaric when inflicted on a school child,", + " as punishment for classroom misconduct.\n\nThe issue in this case is whether spankings inflicted on public school children for breaking school rules is \"punishment,\" not whether such punishment is \"cruel and unusual.\" If the Eighth Amendment does not bar moderate spanking in public schools, it is because moderate spanking is not \"cruel and unusual,\" not because it is not \"punishment\" as the majority suggests.\n\n[Footnote 2/2]\n\nBy no means is it suggested that just because spanking of school children is \"punishment\" within the meaning of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, the school disciplinary process is in any way \"criminal,\" and therefore subject to the full panoply of criminal procedural guarantees.", + " See 430 U. S. infra. Ordinarily, the conduct for which school children are punished is not sufficiently opprobrious to be called \"criminal\" in our society, and even violations of school disciplinary rules that might also constitute a crime, see infra at 430 U. S. 688, are not subject to the criminal process. See Baxter v. Palmigiano, 425 U. S. 308 (1976), where the Court held that persons who violate prison disciplinary rules are not entitled to the full panoply of criminal procedural safeguards, even if the rule violation might also constitute a crime.\n\n[Footnote 2/", + "3]\n\nThe majority cites Trop as one of the cases that \"dealt with a criminal punishment,\" but neglects to follow the analysis mandated by that decision. In Trop, the petitioner was convicted of desertion by a military court-martial and sentenced to three years at hard labor, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and a dishonorable discharge. After he was punished for the offense he committed, petitioner's application for a passport was turned down. Petitioner was told that he had been deprived of the \"rights of citizenship\" under \u00a7 401(g) of the Nationality Act of 1940 because he had been dishonorably discharged from the Armed Forces.", + " The plurality took the view that denationalization in this context was cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.\n\nThe majority would have us believe that the determinative factor in Trop was that the petitioner had been convicted of desertion; yet there is no suggestion in Trop that the disposition of the military court-martial had anything to do with the decision in that case. Instead, while recognizing that the Eighth Amendment extends only to punishments that are penal in nature, the plurality adopted a purposive approach for determining when punishment is penal.\n\n\"In deciding whether or not a law is penal, this Court has generally based its determination upon the purpose of the statute.", + " If the statute imposes a disability for the purposes of punishment -- that is, to reprimand the wrongdoer, to deter others, etc. -- it has been considered penal. But a statute has been considered nonpenal if it imposes a disability not to punish, but to accomplish some other legitimate governmental purpose.\"\n\n356 U.S. at 356 U. S. 96 (footnotes omitted). Although the quoted passage is taken from the plurality opinion of Mr Chief Justice Warren, joined by three other Justices, MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN, in a concurring opinion, adopted a similar approach in concluding that \u00a7 401(g)", + " was beyond the power of Congress to enact.\n\n[Footnote 2/4]\n\nAnte at 430 U. S. 669. In Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U. S. 97 (1976), a case decided this Term, the Court held that \"deliberate indifference to the medical needs of prisoners\" by prison officials constitutes cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Such deliberate indifference to a prisoner's medical needs clearly is not punishment inflicted for the commission of a crime; it is merely misconduct by a prison official. Similarly, the Eighth Circuit has held that whipping a prisoner with a strap in order to maintain discipline is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.", + " Jackson v. Bishop, 404 F.2d 571 (1968) (Blackmun, J.). See also Knecht v. Gillman, 488 F.2d 1136, 1139-1140 (CA8 1973) (injection of vomit-inducing drugs as part of aversion therapy held to be cruel and unusual); Vann v. Scott, 467 F.2d 1235, 1241241 (CA7 1972) (Stevens, J.) (Eighth Amendment protects runaway children against cruel and inhumane treatment, regardless of whether such treatment is labeled \"rehabilitation\"", + " or \"punishment\").\n\n[Footnote 2/5]\n\nBy finding that bodily punishment invades a constitutionally protected liberty interest within the meaning of the Due Process Clause, the majority suggests that the Clause might also afford a remedy for excessive spanking independently of the Eighth Amendment. If this were the case, the Court's present thesis would have little practical significance. If, rather than holding that the Due Process Clause affords a remedy by way of the express commands of the Eighth Amendment, the majority would recognize a cause of action under 42 U.S.C. \u00a7 1983 for a deprivation of \"liberty\" flowing from an excessive paddling,", + " the Court's opinion is merely a lengthy word of advice with respect to the drafting of civil complaints.\n\nPetitioners in this case did raise the substantive due process issue in their petition for certiorari, ante at 430 U. S. 659 n. 12, but consideration of that question was foreclosed by our limited grant of certiorari. If it is probable that school children would be entitled to protection under some theory of substantive due process, the Court should not now affirm the judgment below, but should amend the grant of certiorari and set this case for reargument.\n\n[Footnote 2/6]\n\nIn support of its policy considerations,", + " the only cases from this Court cited by the majority are Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U. S. 471 (1972), and Meachum v. Fano, 427 U. S. 215 (1976), both cases involving prisoners' rights to procedural due process.\n\n[Footnote 2/7]\n\nThere is no evidence in the record that corporal punishment has been abused in the prison systems more often than in the public schools. Indeed, corporal punishment is seldom authorized in state prisons. See Jackson v. Bishop, supra at 580, where MR. JUSTICE (then Judge) BLACKMUN noted:", + " \"[O]nly two states still permit the use of the strap [in prisons]. Thus almost uniformly has it been abolished.\" By relying on its own view of the nature of these two public institutions, without any evidence being heard on the question below, the majority today predicates a constitutional principle on mere armchair speculation.\n\n[Footnote 2/8]\n\nThere is some doubt that the state law remedies available to public school children are adequate. See n. 11, infra.\n\n[Footnote 2/9]\n\nFor a penalty to be consistent with the Eighth Amendment \"the punishment must not be grossly out of proportion to the severity of the crime.\" Gregg v.", + " Georgia, 428 U. S. 153, 428 U. S. 173 (1976) (joint opinion of STEWART, POWELL, and STEVENS, JJ.).\n\n[Footnote 2/10]\n\nHere, as in Goss v. Lopez, 419 U. S. 565, 419 U. S. 580-581, n. 9 (1975), the record suggests that there may be a substantial risk of error in the discipline administered by respondent school authorities. Respondents concede that some of the petitioners who were punished \"denied misconduct,\" and that, \"in some cases,", + " the punishments may have been mistaken....\" Brief for Respondents 60-61. The Court of Appeals panel below noted numerous instances of students punished despite claims of innocence, 498 F.2d 248, 256-258 (CA5 1974), and was \"particularly disturbed by the testimony that whole classes of students were corporally punished for the misconduct of a few.\" Id. at 268 n. 36. To the extent that the majority focuses on the incidence of and remedies for unduly severe punishments, it fails to address petitioners' claim that procedural safeguards are required to reduce the risk of punishments that are simply mistaken.\n\n[Footnote 2/", + "11]\n\nThe majority's assurances to the contrary, it is unclear to me whether and to what extent Florida law provides a damages action against school officials for excessive corporal punishment. Giving the majority the benefit of every doubt, I think it is fair to say that the most a student punished on the basis of mistaken allegations of misconduct can hope for in Florida is a recovery for unreasonable or bad faith error. But I strongly suspect that even this remedy is not available.\n\nAlthough the majority does not cite a single case decided under Florida law that recognizes a student's right to sue a school official to recover damages for excessive punishment, I am willing to assume that such a tort action does exist in Florida.", + " I nevertheless have serious doubts about whether it would ever provide a recovery to a student simply because he was punished for an offense he did not commit. All the cases in other jurisdictions cited by the majority, ante at 430 U. S. 663 n. 28, involved allegations of punishment disproportionate to the misconduct with which the student was charged; none of the decisions even suggest that a student could recover by showing that the teacher incorrectly imposed punishment for something the student had not done. The majority appears to agree that the damages remedy is available only in cases of punishment unreasonable in light of the misconduct charged. It states:\n\n\"In those cases where severe punishment is contemplated,", + " the available civil and criminal sanctions for abuse... afford significant protection against unjustified corporal punishment.\"\n\nAnte at 430 U. S. 678. (Emphasis added.)\n\nEven if the common law remedy for excessive punishment extends to punishment that is \"excessive\" only in the sense that it is imposed on the basis of mistaken facts, the school authorities are still protected from personal liability by common law immunity. (They are protected by statutory immunity for liability for enforcing disciplinary rules \"[e]xcept in the case of excessive force or cruel and unusual punishment.\" Fla.Stat.Ann. \u00a7 232.275 (1976).)", + " At a minimum, this immunity would protect school officials from damages liability for reasonable mistakes made in good faith.\n\n\"Although there have been differing emphases and formulations of the common law immunity of public school officials in cases of student expulsion or suspension, state courts have generally recognized that such officers should be protected from tort liability under state law for all good faith, nonmalicious action taken to fulfill their official duties.\"\n\nWood v. Strickland, 420 U. S. 308, 420 U. S. 318 (1975) (adopting this rule for \u00a7 1983 suits involving school discipline) (footnote omitted); see id.", + " at 420 U. S. 318 n. 9 (citing state cases). Florida has applied this rule to a police officer's determination of probable cause to arrest; the officer is not liable in damages for an arrest not based on probable cause if the officer reasonably believed that probable cause existed. Miami v. Albro, 120 So.2d 23, 26 (Fla.Dist.Ct.App. 1960); cf. Middleton v. Fort Walton Beach, 113 So.2d 431 (Fla.Dist.Ct.App. 1959) (police officer would be personally liable for intentional tort of making an arrest pursuant to warrant he knew to be void); Wilson v.", + " O'Neal, 118 So.2d 101 (Fla.Dist.Ct.App. 1960) (law enforcement officer not liable in damages for obtaining an arrest warrant on the basis of an incorrect identification). There is every reason to think that the Florida courts would apply a similar immunity standard in a hypothetical damages suit against a school disciplinarian.\n\nA final limitation on the student's damages remedy under Florida law is that the student can recover only from the personal assets of the official; the school board's treasury is absolutely protected by sovereign immunity from damages for the torts of its agents. Buck v. McLean, 115 So.", + "2d 764 (Fla.Dist.Ct.App. 1959). A teacher's limited resources may deter the jury from awarding, or prevent the student from collecting, the full amount of damages to which he is entitled. Cf. Bonner v. Coughlin, 517 F.2d 1311, 1319 n. 23 (CA7 1975), modified en banc, 545 F.2d 565 (1976), cert pending, No. 76-6204 (state law remedy affords due process where no sovereign or official immunity bars tort suit for negligence by prison guard).\n\n[Footnote 2/", + "12]\n\nCf. G. M. Leasing Corp. v. United States, 429 U. S. 338, 429 U. S. 351-359 (1977). The Court there held that, in levying on a taxpayer's assets pursuant to a jeopardy assessment, revenue agents must obtain a warrant before searching the taxpayer's office, but not before seizing his property in a manner that involves no invasion of privacy. G. M. Leasing thus reflects the principle that the case for advance procedural safeguards (such as a magistrate's determination of probable cause) is more compelling when the Government finally inflicts an injury that cannot be repaired in a subsequent judicial proceeding (invasion of privacy)", + " than when it inflicts a temporary injury which can be undone (seizure of property). The infliction of bodily punishment, like the invasion of privacy, presents this most compelling case for advance procedural safeguards\n\n[Footnote 2/13]\n\nTo the extent that the majority attempts to find \"a relevant analogy in the criminal law\" -- warrantless arrests on probable cause -- to its holding here, ante at 430 U. S. 679-680 (and see infra at 430 U. S. 697-699), it has chosen the wrong analogy. If the majority forthrightly applied its present due process analysis to the area of criminal prosecutions,", + " the police officer not only could arrest a suspect without a warrant, but also could convict the suspect without a trial and sentence him to a short jail term. The accused would get his due process in a tort suit for false imprisonment.\n\n[Footnote 2/14]\n\nFor the proposition that the need for a prior hearing is \"significantly less compelling\" where the State has preserved \"common law remedies,\" ante at 430 U. S. 679, 430 U. S. 678, the majority cites only one case, Bonner v. Coughlin, supra, dismissing an allegation by a prisoner that prison guards acting under color of state law had deprived him of property without due process of law by negligently failing to close the door of his cell after a search,", + " with the foreseeable consequence that his trial transcript was stolen. The panel held that the right to recover under state law for the negligence of state employees provided the prisoner with due process of law. The decision is distinguishable from the instant case on two grounds. First, recovery was not barred by sovereign or official immunity, and the state remedy ensured that the prisoner would be \"made whole for any loss of property.\" 517 F.2d at 1319, and n. 23. Cf. Regional Rail Reorganization Act Cases, 419 U. S. 102, 419 U. S. 156 (1974). The point here,", + " of course, is that the student cannot be made whole for the infliction of wrongful punishment. Second, the State cannot hold a pre-deprivation hearing where it does not intend to inflict the deprivation; the best it can do to protect the individual from an unauthorized and inadvertent act is to provide a damages remedy. 517 F.2d at 1319 n. 25. Here, the deprivation is intentional, and a prior hearing altogether feasible.\n\n[Footnote 2/15]\n\nAnte at 430 U. S. 678 n. 46.\n\n[Footnote 2/16]\n\nAnte at 430 U.", + " S. 675, quoting Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U. S. 319, 424 U. S. 335 (1976).\n\n[Footnote 2/17]\n\nAnte at 430 U. S. 676, quoting Goss, 419 U.S. at 419 U. S. 579-580. Elsewhere in its opinion the majority asserts that the risk of error is \"typically insignificant\" because \"paddlings are usually inflicted in response to conduct directly observed by teachers in their presence.\" Ante at 430 U. S. 677-678. But it cites no finding or evidence in the record for this assertion,", + " and there is no such restriction in the statute or regulations authorizing corporal punishment. See ante at 430 U. S. 655 n. 6, 430 U. S. 656 n. 7. Indeed, the panel below noted specific instances in which students were punished by an assistant to the principal who was not present when the alleged offenses were committed. 498 F.2d at 257, 259.\n\n[Footnote 2/18]\n\nMy view here expressed that the minimal procedures of Goss are required for any corporal punishment implicating the student's liberty interest is, of course, not meant to imply that this minimum would be constitutionally sufficient no matter how severe the punishment inflicted.", + " The Court made this reservation explicit in Goss by suggesting that more elaborate procedures such as witnesses, counsel, and cross-examination might well be required for suspensions longer than the 10-day maximum involved in that case. 419 U.S. at 419 U. S. 583-584. A similar caveat is appropriate here.\n\nMR. JUSTICE STEVENS, dissenting.\n\nMR. JUSTICE WHITE's analysis of the Eighth Amendment issue is, I believe, unanswerable. I am also persuaded that his analysis of the procedural due process issue is correct. Notwithstanding my disagreement with the Court's holding\n\nPage 430 U.", + " S. 701\n\non the latter question, my respect for MR. JUSTICE POWELL's reasoning in 430 U. S.\n\nThe constitutional prohibition of state deprivations of life, liberty, or property without due process of law does not, by its express language, require that a hearing be provided before any deprivation may occur. To be sure, the timing of the process may be a critical element in determining its adequacy -- that is, in deciding what process is due in a particular context. Generally, adequate notice and a fair opportunity to be heard in advance of any deprivation of a constitutionally protected interest are essential. The Court has recognized,", + " however, that the wording of the command that there shall be no deprivation \"without\" due process of law is consistent with the conclusion that a post-deprivation remedy is sometimes constitutionally sufficient. [Footnote 3/1]\n\nWhen only an invasion of a property interest is involved, there is a greater likelihood that a damages award will make a person completely whole than when an invasion of the individual's interest in freedom from bodily restraint and punishment has occurred. In the property context, therefore, frequently a post-deprivation state remedy may be all the process that the Fourteenth Amendment requires. It may also be true -- although I do not express an opinion on the point -- that an adequate state remedy for defamation may satisfy the due process requirement when a State has impaired an individual's interest in his reputation.", + " On that hypothesis, the Court's analysis today gives rise to the thought that Paul v. Davis, 424 U. S. 693, may have been correctly decided on an incorrect rationale. Perhaps the Court will one day\n\nPage 430 U. S. 702\n\nagree with MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN s appraisal of the importance of the constitutional interest at stake in id. at 424 U. S. 720-723, 424 U. S. 734 (dissenting opinion), and nevertheless conclude that an adequate state remedy may prevent every state-inflicted injury to a person's reputation from violating 42 U.S.C.", + " \u00a7 1983. [Footnote 3/2]\n\n[Footnote 3/1]\n\nCalero-Toledo v. Pearson Yacht Leasing Co., 416 U. S. 663; Fuentes v. Shevin, 407 U. S. 67, 407 U. S. 82, 407 U. S. 90-92; Ewing v. Mytinger & Casselberry, 339 U. S. 594, 339 U. S. 598-600; Phillips v. Commissioner, 283 U. S. 589, 283 U.", + " S. 595-599; Lawton v. Steele, 152 U. S. 133, 152 U. S. 140-142; cf. Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U. S. 103, 420 U. S. 113-114.\n\n[Footnote 3/2]\n\nCf. Bonner v. Coughlin, 517 F.2d 1311, 1318-1320 (CA7 1975), modified en banc, 545 F.2d 565 (1976), cert. pending, No. 76-", + "6204; see also Judge Swygert's thoughtful opinion, id. at 569-578. ", + " The speech always began with one of a few variations.\n\n\"Do you know what's wrong with (Insert: this country, this state or this city) today?\" then-Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford would say. \"We just don't beat the kids like we used to.\"\n\nLike a preacher from a pulpit, he'd give his testimony, telling everyone how his mother once caught him shoplifting cookies from a store after a barber snitched on him. She tied him to a bedpost with pantyhose and whipped him so badly with the cord from her iron that his stepfather had to take him to the hospital.\n\nOn the way home,", + " Langford said, his stepfather drove by the Birmingham jail to show him where all the other crooks went.\n\nToday Langford is in prison, having been convicted of federal corruption charges after he took money, clothes and jewelry in exchange for Jefferson County bond business. I guess he never learned better than to take things he shouldn't.\n\nBut I'm telling this story now because, while I heard Langford deliver that speech at least a half dozen times, every time he gave it, from somewhere out in the crowd came an \"Amen!\"\n\nBut here's the thing. That whole speech was a lie. In Alabama, we do still beat the kids like we used to,", + " at least in places. And while the rest of the country has moved into the 21st century, Alabama has lingered in the past and been left behind.\n\nI've heard variations of Langford's speech all my life, and not just from him.\n\nNot long after I graduated, there was a fight at my high school that some folks in my hometown were even calling a \"race riot.\"\n\nThis was 1997.\n\nThere were conflicting accounts of what happened, but the most congruent version of events was that a white kid had been wearing a rebel flag bandana and some black kids had been giving him grief about it in the high school parking lot.", + " The white kid apparently called them the n-word. A fight ensued.\n\nAs it happened, I was home from college during fall break when the school board called an emergency meeting, so out of curiosity, I went. While the board members met in an executive session, I sat quietly among parents, white and black, who sat somewhat uncomfortably across from each other at cafetorium tables.\n\nI'm not sure what I expected. Maybe some hand-wringing over whether the peaceful and successful integration of the school system was coming unwound.\n\nBut nah, instead, they were all talking about how the new principal didn't beat the kids.\n\nNot only that,", + " but a weird one-upmanship followed -- a nostalgia for borderline child abuse.\n\nOur grandmama used to make us cut the switch.\n\nMy daddy had a belt this wide and this long.\n\nMy momma chased me around the house with a two-by-four.\n\nA consensus crystallized. If the school board brought back paddling, everything would be fine.\n\nBut I had gone to that school, just a couple years before, when teachers and administrators did paddle, and I knew what all these parents were mouthing off about was wrong.\n\nWhen I had been in junior high, our school had a weekend detention called Saturday school. If you've seen the Breakfast Club,", + " you've pretty much got the picture.\n\nEverybody hated Saturday school. Not just the students, but the administrators and teachers, most of all. So when faced with a punishment, most students got a choice -- three licks or three hours.\n\nEverybody took the licks.\n\nWhile I was still a student there, the school system ended Saturday school and the bargain changed -- three licks or three days suspension.\n\nEverybody still took the licks.\n\nSo here's the thing -- if you're offering students a choice of punishment, doesn't it stand to reason that the option they avoid is the greater deterrent?\n\nUltimately, the school wasn't paddling students because it was an effective deterrent.", + " They were paddling students because it was cheap and easy.\n\nIn college, I told classmates that my high school still paddled students and nobody believed me. It hadn't occurred to me before then that the educational environment I'd come up in was no longer considered normal.\n\nAgain, that was in 1997.\n\nIn the almost two decades since then, some schools in Alabama have moved away from corporal punishment. As Trisha Powell Crain reported for AL.com this week the state paddled nearly 40,000 students in 2000. Since then, that number has dropped by about half.\n\nHowever, corporal punishment is still legal.", + " And common.\n\nIt's not legal to paddle a grown person, mind you, even in an Alabama prison. But in schools, many still take the wood to even small children.\n\nTake a step back -- figuratively from space -- and look at the the map of schools that do and don't strike their students, and one thing is clear -- there is no discernable benefit to striking students instead other forms of punishment, just as those states where corporal punishment is illegal haven't turned into lawless dystopian hellholes.\n\nIf corporal punishment did have any positive effect on student performance, Alabama wouldn't sit near the bottom of national academic rankings.", + " It would be number two.\n\nRight behind Mississippi. ", + " Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ", + " Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ", + " Alabama Corporal Punishment in Public Schools Laws\n\nThe term corporal punishment refers to the use of physical force, such as spanking or slapping, as a means of discipline or to control a potentially dangerous situation. Every state has its own approach to the use of corporal punishment in public schools, from outright bans to more localized control. States that allow corporal punishment in public schools usually provide statutory details of what is considered reasonable, including the circumstances in which it's used. But states that don't allow the practice typically make an exception for emergency situations.\n\nSee FindLaw's School Discipline section for related articles and resources, including School Discipline History.\n\nWhat Are Alabama's Laws on Corporal Punishment in Public Schools?\n\nAlabama legislation passed in 1995 allows the use of corporal punishment in public schools,", + " but directs local school boards to adopt their own codes of conduct and disciplinary procedures. The statute doesn't provide much detail, but prohibits any \"excessive force or cruel and unusual punishment.\"\n\nCode Section 16-1-24.1 Punishment Allowed Local school boards to adopt code for conduct and discipline of students. Circumstances Allowable Except in the case of excessive force or cruel and unusual punishment, no certified or noncertified employee of the State Board of Education or any local board of education shall be civilly liable for any action carried out in conformity with state law and system or school rules regarding the control, discipline, suspension, and expulsion of students.\n\nNote:", + " State laws are constantly changing, usually through either new legislation, ballot initiatives, or court rulings. Make sure you contact an Alabama education attorney or conduct your own legal research to verify the state law(s) you are researching.\n\nExamples of Corporal Punishment Policies in Alabama\n\nThe majority of public school districts in Alabama use corporal punishment as a regular part of the discipline process, often with the use of a wooden paddle. Most of these policies discourage the use paddling as the first response and allow parents to opt-out. Below are some examples of corporal punishment policies in Alabama:\n\nAlexander City Schools: A maximum of \"three licks administered to a student's buttocks\"", + " is reserved as a last resort before a student is suspended or expelled. A parent may ask that their child not be subject to corporal punishment, but the principal may use it without parental consent under some circumstances.\n\nA maximum of \"three licks administered to a student's buttocks\" is reserved as a last resort before a student is suspended or expelled. A parent may ask that their child not be subject to corporal punishment, but the principal may use it without parental consent under some circumstances. Autagua County School System: Corporal punishment is allowed in elementary and secondary school for minor offenses, limited to \"three licks to the buttocks.\" Refusal to be paddled can result in suspension or expulsion.\n\nCorporal punishment is allowed in elementary and secondary school for minor offenses,", + " limited to \"three licks to the buttocks.\" Refusal to be paddled can result in suspension or expulsion. Brewton City Schools: Only the principal or assistant principal may apply corporal punishment, and parents may excuse their children from physical punishment through written request.\n\nResearch the Law\n\nAlabama Law\n\n\n\nOfficial State Codes - Links to the official online statutes (laws) in all 50 states and DC.\n\nAlabama Laws on Corporal Punishment in Public Schools: Related Resources ", + " When advising families about discipline strategies, pediatricians should use a comprehensive approach that includes consideration of the parent\u2013child relationship, reinforcement of desired behaviors, and consequences for negative behaviors. Corporal punishment is of limited effectiveness and has potentially deleterious side effects. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents be encouraged and assisted in the development of methods other than spanking for managing undesired behavior.\n\nParents often ask pediatricians for advice about the provision of appropriate and effective discipline. In fact, 90% of pediatricians report that they include advice about discipline when providing anticipatory guidance to families.1 The American Academy of Pediatrics held a consensus conference on corporal punishment,", + " the report of which was published in Pediatricsand serves as one major source of information for this statement.2\n\nThe word discipline, which comes from the root word disciplinare\u2014to teach or instruct\u2014refers to the system of teaching and nurturing that prepares children to achieve competence, self-control, self-direction, and caring for others.3 An effective discipline system must contain three vital elements: 1) a learning environment characterized by positive, supportive parent\u2013child relationships; 2) a strategy for systematic teaching and strengthening of desired behaviors (proactive); and 3) a strategy for decreasing or eliminating undesired or ineffective behaviors (reactive). Each of these components needs to be functioning adequately for discipline to result in improved child behavior.\n\nAs children grow older and interact with wider,", + " more complex physical and social environments, the adults who care for them must develop increasingly creative strategies to protect them and teach them orderly and desirable patterns of behavior. As a result of consistent structure and teaching (discipline), children integrate the attitudes and expectations of their caregivers into their behavior. Preschoolers begin to develop an understanding of rules, and their behavior is guided by these rules and by the consequences associated with them. As children become school age, these rules become internalized and are accompanied by an increasing sense of responsibility and self-control. Responsibility for behavior is transferred gradually from the caregiving adult to the child, and is especially noticeable during the transition to adolescence.", + " Thus, parents must be prepared to modify their discipline approach over time, using different strategies as the child develops greater independence and capacity for self-regulation and responsibility. The process can be more challenging with children who have developmental disabilities and may require additional or more intense strategies to manage their behavior.\n\nThe main parental discipline for infants is to provide generally structured daily routines but also to learn to recognize and respond flexibly to the infant's needs. As infants become more mobile and initiate more contact with the environment, parents must impose limitations and structure to create safe spaces for them to explore and play. Equally important, parents must protect them from potential hazards (eg,", + " by installing safety covers on electric outlets and by removing dangerous objects from their reach) and introduce activities that distract their children from potential hazards. Such proactive behaviors are central to discipline for toddlers. Communicating verbally (a firm no) helps prepare the infant for later use of reasoning, but parents should not expect reasoning, verbal commands, or reprimands to manage the behavior of infants or toddlers.\n\nThe earliest discipline strategy is passive and occurs as infants and their caregivers gradually develop a mutually satisfactory schedule of feeding, sleeping, and awakening. Biologic rhythms tend to become more regular and adapt to family routines. Signals of discomfort, such as crying and thrashing,", + " are modified as infants acquire memories of how their distress has been relieved and learn new strategies to focus attention on their emerging needs. 4\n\nSTRATEGIES FOR EFFECTIVE DISCIPLINE\n\nEffective discipline requires three essential components: 1) a positive, supportive, loving relationship between the parent(s) and child, 2) use of positive reinforcement strategies to increase desired behaviors, and 3) removing reinforcement or applying punishment to reduce or eliminate undesired behaviors. All components must be functioning well for discipline to be successful.\n\nPromoting Optimal Parent\u2013Child Relationships and Reinforcing Positive Behaviors For discipline techniques to be most effective, they must occur in the context of a relationship in which children feel loved and secure.", + " In this context, parents' responses to children's behavior, whether approving or disapproving, are likely to have the greatest effect because the parents' approval is important to the children. Parental responses within the context of loving and secure relationships also provide children with a sense that their environment is stable and that a competent adult is taking care of them, which leads to the development of a sense of personal worth. As children respond to the positive nature of the relationship and consistent discipline, the need for frequent negative interactions decreases, and the quality of the relationship improves further for both parents and children. To this end, the best educators of children are people who are good role models and about whom children care enough to want to imitate and please.", + " Certain conditions in the parent\u2013child relationship have been found to be especially important in promoting positive child behavior, including: maintaining a positive emotional tone in the home through play and parental warmth and affection for the child 5 ;\n\nproviding attention to the child to increase positive behavior (conversely ignoring, removing, or withholding parent attention to decrease the frequency or intensity of undesirable behaviors). 6 For older children, attention includes being aware of and interested in their school and other activities;\n\nproviding consistency in the form of regular times and patterns for daily activities and interactions to reduce resistance, convey respect for the child, and make negative experiences less stressful 7 ;\n\nresponding consistently to similar behavioral situations to promote more harmonious parent\u2013 child relationships and more positive child outcomes 8 ; and\n\nbeing flexible,", + " particularly with older children and adolescents, through listening and negotiation to reduce fewer episodes of child noncompliance with parental expectations.8 Involving the child in decision-making has been associated with long-term enhancement in moral judgment.9 These factors are important in developing a positive, growth-enhancing relationship between parent and child. Even in the best relationships, however, parents will need to provide behavioral limits that their children will not like, and children will behave in ways that are unacceptable to parents. Disagreement and emotional discord occur in all families, but in families with reinforcing positive parent\u2013child relationships and clear expectations and goals for behavior, these episodes are less frequent and less disruptive.\n\nRewarding Desirable or Effective Behaviors The word discipline usually connotes strategies to reduce or eliminate undesirable behaviors.", + " However, more successful child-rearing systems use procedures to both increase desirable behaviors and decrease undesirable behaviors. Eliminating undesirable behavior without having a strategy to stimulate more desirable behavior generally is not effective. The most critical part of discipline involves helping children learn behaviors that meet parental expectations, are effective in promoting positive social relationships, and help them develop a sense of self-discipline that leads to positive self-esteem. Behaviors that the parents value and want to encourage need to be identified by the parents and understood by their children. Many desirable behavioral patterns emerge as part of the child's normal development, and the role of adults is to notice these behaviors and provide positive attention to strengthen and refine them.", + " Other desirable behaviors are not part of a child's natural repertoire and need to be taught, such as sharing, good manners, empathy, study habits, and behaving according to principles despite the fact that immediate rewards for other behaviors (eg, lying or stealing) may be present. These behaviors must be taught to children through modeling by parents and shaping skills through parental attention and encouragement. It is much easier to stop undesired behaviors than to develop new, effective behaviors. Therefore, parents must identify the positive behaviors and skills that they want for their children and make a concerted effort to teach and strengthen these behaviors. Strategies for parents and other caregivers that help children learn positive behaviors include:", + " providing regular positive attention, sometimes called special time (opportunities to communicate positively are important for children of all ages);\n\nlistening carefully to children and helping them learn to use words to express their feelings;\n\nproviding children with opportunities to make choices whenever appropriate options exist and then helping them learn to evaluate the potential consequences of their choice;\n\nreinforcing emerging desirable behaviors with frequent praise and ignoring trivial misdeeds; and\n\nmodeling orderly, predictable behavior, respectful communication, and collaborative conflict resolution strategies.10 Such strategies have several potential benefits: the desired behavior is more likely to become internalized, the newly learned behavior will be a foundation for other desirable behaviors,", + " and the emotional environment in the family will be more positive, pleasant, and supportive.\n\nReducing and Eliminating Undesirable Behavior When undesirable behavior occurs, discipline strategies to reduce or eliminate such behavior are needed.11 Undesirable behavior includes behavior that places the child or others in danger, is noncompliant with the reasonable expectations and demands of the parents or other appropriate adults (eg, teachers), and interferes with positive social interactions and self-discipline. Some of these behaviors require an immediate response because of danger or risk to the child. Other undesirable behaviors require a consistent consequence to prevent generalization of the behavior to other situations. Some problems,", + " particularly those that involve intense emotional exchanges, may be handled best by taking a break from the situation and discussing it later when emotions have subsided, developing alternative ways to handle the situation (removing attention), or, in many cases, avoiding these situations altogether. Extinction including time-out and removal of privileges, and punishment are two common discipline approaches that have been associated with reducing undesired behavior. These different strategies, sometimes both confusingly called punishment, are effective if applied appropriately to specific behaviors. Although they both reduce undesired behavior, they work in very different ways and have very different short- and long-term effects. For both strategies, the following factors may increase the effectiveness:", + " clarity on the part of the parent and child about what the problem behavior is and what consequence the child can expect when this behavior occurs;\n\nproviding a strong and immediate initial consequence when the targeted behavior first occurs;\n\nconsistently providing an appropriate consequence each time a targeted problematic behavior occurs;\n\ndelivering instruction and correction calmly and with empathy; and\n\nproviding a reason for a consequence for a specific behavior, which helps children beyond toddler age to learn the appropriate behavior12 and improves their overall compliance with requests from adults.13 Occasionally, the consequence for an undesired behavior is immediate, without parental involvement (eg, breaking one's own toy), and may be effective in teaching children to change their behavior.", + " When this consequence is combined with parental reprimand, there is an increase in the likelihood that the child's behavior will be affected for future similar situations. ", + " By Trisha Powell Crain\n\nThis story was written for AL.com by independent journalist Trisha Powell Crain of Alabama School Connection.\n\nWhile most of the nation long ago stopped striking children, Alabama principals continue to boast one of the highest batting percentages in the nation, paddling one child every four minutes.\n\nAcross Alabama public schools, nearly 19,000 students were paddled in the 2013-2014 school year, according to newly available data from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. The count is of individual students and does not indicate how many were paddled more than once.\n\nUnlike in most of the developed world,", + " Alabama law explicitly allows adults to administer corporal punishment, and education leaders in Alabama find no problem with paddling in schools.\n\n\"I don't anticipate this being the focus of change that Alabama needs to move our student achievement higher,\" said Rep. Terri Collins, R-Decatur, chair of the Education Policy committee in the Alabama House of Representatives.\n\nCollins said no one has brought up the subject of paddling in the legislature. \"As a child paddled, and as a parent who paddled, I've not experienced the negative side of corporal punishment personally, only the positive side,\" Collins said in a statement.\n\nWhile no studies exist showing improvement of student achievement after corporal punishment is banned,", + " many studies show the negative impact paddling has on children's attitudes toward and achievement in school. After decades of research, all major children's advocacy and medical groups have called for an end to corporal punishment.\n\nBut the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of public schools to administer corporal punishment to students in 1977. The new federal data shows that most states decline to use the option, as Alabama is one of just 21 states to report any paddling in any public school.\n\nAlabama is one of just 15 states with a state law that explicitly allows for corporal punishment. Another 29 states specifically ban the practice.\n\nIn Alabama,", + " the new data also shows disproportionate usage, as boys are far more likely to be paddled than girls, and black and multi-race students are more likely to be paddled than white students. Though black males made up only 24 percent of the population in the schools that paddle, they accounted for 35 percent of the boys who were paddled.\n\nWhile the number of total swings is far lower for girls, the racial disparity was higher. About a quarter of the girls in schools that paddle are African-American, but nearly half of the girls who were paddled were African-American.\n\nDr. Amir Whitaker, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center who has studied the effects of paddling,", + " says that Alabama policy contradicts national research. \"It's a very convenient and knee-jerk reaction to discipline. And it does nothing but harm the child. All the research shows that, and all the experts know that,\" Whitaker said.\n\n\"Research clearly says you're more likely to be aggressive if someone is aggressive with you. You're more likely to physically abuse someone if someone has physically abused you,\" he said.\n\nWhitaker points out that if he, as an adult, hit a child with a board, he'd be charged with aggravated assault, yet Alabama law allows adult educators to hit children at school.\n\n\n\n\n\nNo debate in Alabama\n\nMeanwhile,", + " 49 nations, including most of Europe and South America, have outlawed the use of corporal punishment both in schools and in the home, according to the Global Initiative to End Corporal Punishment.\n\nAnd while pressure has mounted on holdouts, such as France, there has been little public debate in Alabama or neighboring states.\n\n\"Proper corporal punishment isn't abuse, and we should be clear about that,\" said Mary Scott Hunter, a member of the state Board of Education.\n\nHunter said she had not reviewed any research on the subject, nor had she ever been asked about paddling while serving on the state board. But she said she knows many parents and school leaders who use corporal punishment on children,", + " adding she defers to their judgment about its use in a school setting.\n\n\"We often see misbehavior in children that comes straight from the home, and I'd like to see some parents lined up and paddled for that,\" said Hunter. \"Habitual tardiness and truancy comes to mind.\"\n\nHeaviest hitters in the South\n\nOf the 21 states that paddled in 2013-2014, a dozen are in the South.\n\nAnd when it comes to frequency of paddling, seven of the top ten heaviest hitters are also in the South. Alabama lands at number three in the nation for percentage of students who are paddled,", + " behind Mississippi and Arkansas.\n\nIn Alabama, federal data shows 18,749 students were paddled in 2013-2014. That's about 2.5% of all students in Alabama.\n\nBut the paddle is not invoked evenly across the state nor across school districts. More than half of all schools in Mississippi paddled students, but just under half in Alabama use corporal punishment.\n\nThis first map shows the number of students paddled at least once.\n\nMeanwhile, American education and child advocacy groups, including the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Bar Association, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers,", + " the National Association for Secondary School Principals, and the American Civil Liberties Union, continue to call for a ban, citing harmful long-term effects of paddling on children and the need to keep physical violence out of the educational environment.\n\nThe American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry policy statement against corporal punishment, reads in part: \"Corporal punishment signals to the child that a way to settle interpersonal conflicts is to use physical force and inflict pain... Supervising adults who willfully humiliate children and punish by force and pain are often causing more harm than they prevent.\"\n\nThe federal definition of corporal punishment is \"paddling, spanking,", + " or other forms of physical punishment imposed on a student\". Alabama leaves its definition to local boards of education.\n\nHere's what Alabama law says about corporal punishment:\n\n\"No student has a right to be unruly in his or her classroom to the extent that such disruption denies fellow students of their right to learn. The teacher in each classroom is expected to maintain order and discipline. Teachers are hereby given the authority and responsibility to use appropriate means of discipline up to and including corporal punishment as may be prescribed by the local board of education.\"\n\nIn practice, spanking largely falls to principals and assistant principals, rather than classroom teachers.\n\nAlabama growing cautious\n\nThe Alabama Board of Education just hired a new state superintendent from Massachusetts,", + " a state that banned corporal punishment in 1971. State Superintendent Michael Sentance, who starts work today, could not be reached for comment.\n\nRequests for comment from the Alabama State Department of Education were not successful.\n\nBut Dr. Eric Mackey, director of the School Superintendents of Alabama (SSA), said he believes the decision to paddle belongs at the district and school level. Mackey has worked in school districts that paddled students and in those that don't. \"I can certainly see both sides of the debate,\" he said.\n\nMaintaining order in the classroom is necessary to ensure students have a good learning environment,", + " Mackey said. He said he believes Alabama school officials have grown cautious about using corporal punishment due in part to the litigious nature of society, but also due to the national trend away from paddling.\n\nFor their part, he said, SSA cautions school superintendents to make certain teachers and administrators know what the local board policy allows and to ensure employees follow local board policy.\n\nWhile the National Education Association has called for a ban on paddling, the Alabama Education Association has not done so. Efforts to reach AEA President Sheila Remington Hocutt to determine why AEA has remained silent on this issue were not successful.\n\nInside the numbers\n\nIn Alabama in 2013-", + "2014, boys were paddled at a 4.5-to-1 rate over girls.\n\nThe federal data showed that 107 of Alabama's 133 school districts engaged in the practice. (Two small city school districts, Satsuma and Troy, were not included in the federal data.)\n\nHere's a look at which districts paddled students. Use the drop-down menu to choose whether you want to see the actual number of students paddled or the rate (or percentage) of students paddled.\n\nEven within districts, some schools paddled far more often than others.\n\nNearly half, or 657 of Alabama's 1,367 schools,", + " saw at least one incident of paddling. More than 400 of those schools that used corporal punishment enrolled elementary-aged children.\n\nBecause grade levels vary widely within schools across Alabama, it's hard to say exactly at which grades most of the paddling happened, but 10,550, or 56% of the students who were paddled attended schools that enrolled kindergartners up to at least fifth graders.\n\nHere's a map of all schools that paddled students during the 2013-2014 school year.\n\nWhen looking at schools where paddling was practiced, black males received the highest rate of paddling, at 13 percent of black males enrolled.", + " Though black males only made up 24 percent of the population, they accounted for 35 percent of the total male students that were paddled. Alabama's numbers mirror national numbers as black males make up 22 percent of the population nationwide and accounted for 38 percent of the total male students paddled nationwide.\n\nAmong males of two or more races, one in ten was paddled, double the rate for Hispanic males, and three times the rate for Asian males. Six percent of American Indian males were paddled.\n\nAbout 8 percent of white males were paddled. Overall, white males made up 66 percent of the total student population in schools where students were paddled,", + " and accounted for 60 percent of the students who were paddled.\n\nBlack girls are being paddled at even more disproportionate rates. Though they make up only a quarter of the population at schools where students are paddled, they accounted for 47 percent of all girls who were paddled. White girls, making up 66 percent of the population in schools where students are paddled, also accounted for 47 percent of girls who were paddled.\n\nStudents with disabilities were not paddled disproportionately more than students without disabilities statewide. Although within some schools, the numbers show students with disabilities were paddled at higher rates than those without disabilities.\n\nTrending Downward\n\nThough Alabama is still near the top of the list nationally when it comes to use of corporal punishment,", + " the state's numbers have shown a long-term downward trend.\n\nIn 2000, nearly 40,000 students were paddled, according to federal data. That number was nearly 30,000 in the 2009-2010 school year, and in the latest data that number is below 20,000. (It should be noted that a representative sample of schools was used prior to the 2011-2012 collection, when every school was required to report discipline data to the U.S. Department of Education.)\n\nNumbers are also trending downward in two Alabama districts that were among the heaviest users of the paddle in 2013-", + "2014.\n\nIn Selma City Schools, the Middle CHAT Academy, now known as R.B. Hudson Middle School, landed at the top of the state list for the percentage of students being paddled. Nearly 65%, or 301 of the school's 464 students were paddled. Males took most of the corporal punishment, with 200 of the 234 male students being paddled. Still, out of 230 female students, 101 were paddled.\n\nThroughout the Selma district as a whole, nearly one in four students was paddled. But that appears to have changed.\n\nDr. Angela Mangum became superintendent of Selma City Schools in April of 2015.", + " When asked about these numbers, Mangum provided 2015-2016 numbers showing only 178 incidents of paddling for the 3,588 students in the district, or one in 20 students, a difference she called \"dramatic\".\n\n\"One of the primary priorities in our district this year is to improve the socio-emotional well-being of students,\" Mangum wrote in an email response. \"We are addressing this priority through improving the climate and culture of our classrooms and schools, and by implementing advisory programs in grade K-12 that emphasizes character development and positive relationships with others.\"\n\n\"We are moving away from the use of corporal punishment,\" echoed Mackey with the Alabama Superintendent association.\n\nThe use of alternative strategies,", + " such as positive behavioral intervention supports (known as PBIS), are showing promise, he said. However, funding has \"decreased precipitously\" for teacher training within school districts, and training for programs like PBIS is suffering, he said.\n\n\"As a state, we're not investing in those behavioral interventions and professional development like we were ten years ago,\" Mackey said.\n\nHighest rate in Alabama\n\nWhile Selma may have claimed the highest rate for a single school, Conecuh County saw the highest rate of paddling by an entire district.\n\nConecuh County Schools in south Alabama paddled more students at a higher rate than any other district in Alabama.", + " Of the 1,463 students enrolled, 341, or 23.3%, were paddled during the 2013-2014 school year. That was just slightly higher than Selma.\n\nThat means all students in Conecuh stood roughly a one in four chance of being paddled. Leading the way in Conecuh, with a 43% rate of paddling, was Thurgood Marshall Middle School in Evergreen, Alabama.\n\nDr. Zickeyous Byrd, superintendent in Conecuh County Schools, said \"Corporal punishment is allowed in Conecuh County Schools with several restrictions. The very first,", + " and most important one, is that any parent can 'opt out' of corporal punishment for his or her child.\" Byrd said it only takes a simple note from home.\n\nBut Byrd also spoke of a move away from corporal punishment. He said since he became superintendent in March 2015, paddling is now used as a \"last resort,\" adding \"only after all other corrective actions have been tried do we administer corporal punishment.\"\n\nConecuh County's student code of conduct sets out guidelines for how paddling is to be done and specifies \"the employee will use a Board issued paddle\" and the number of \"licks\"", + " will be determined by the principal or his/her designee.\" Also, \"at no time more than three (3) licks will be administered.\"\n\nThis map shows the rate of Alabama students paddled at each school by gender. The rate is the percent of students in that school and of that gender that were paddled. https://public.tableau.com/views/CorporalPunishment2013-2014OCRData/RateofStudentsbySchool?:embed=y&:display_count=yes\n\nWhy 2013-2014 numbers?\n\nWithout the federal civil rights database on school discipline, it is difficult to see what has happened since the 2013-", + "2014 school year. Though many states provide disciplinary actions through their state department of education web sites, Alabama does not.\n\nDiscipline data belongs to local school districts, and representatives from the Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) have said they do not have access to the data to be able to determine how many students were paddled during a school year.\n\nBut paddling students has a long history in Alabama. Much has been said about how southerners tend to spank their children, both at home and at school, more than those living in other areas of the country.\n\nA recent study of all available research, called a \"meta-analysis\", on the effects of corporal punishment shows that paddling is not effective at controlling behaviors.", + " \"Instead of helping children to develop the desire and motivation to behave well of their own accord, corporal punishment teaches children that it is desirable not to get caught: rather than behaving differently next time, they are therefore likely to repeat the undesired behavior and use strategies to avoid being caught.\"\n\nA recent international study linked corporal punishment with lower grades in school.\n\nWhitaker at the Southern Poverty Law Center said that cultural acceptance of spanking children in the South makes it difficult to end the practice at school.\n\n\"As a society, we've acknowledged that bullying in schools should not be tolerated. Arming administrators and teachers with weapons and telling them it's okay to use their physical dominance on children,", + " it's a form of bullying that shouldn't be tolerated,\" he said. \"It sends a message that physical violence is an acceptable way to resolve conflict. In no other area is it acceptable to resolve conflict through violence. It shouldn't be tolerated in schools.\"\n\nData was extracted from the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2013-2014 school year. Rates and proportions were calculated for purposes of this article.\n\nMore than 95,000 schools across the United States and its territories self-report the numbers on many topics including discipline, advanced course offerings and enrollment, chronic absenteeism among students and teachers. School officials must certify the accuracy of the data.\n\nData is collected every two years.", + " Council voted to adopt the following resolution on corporal punishment:\n\nWhereas the resort to corporal punishment tends to reduce the likelihood of employing more effective, humane, and creative ways of interacting with children;\n\nWhereas it is evident that socially acceptable goals of education, training, and socialization can be achieved without the use of physical violence against children, and that children so raised, grow to moral and competent adulthood;\n\nWhereas corporal punishment intended to influence \"undesirable responses\" may create in the child the impression that he or she is an \"undesirable person\"; and an impression that lowers self-esteem and may have chronic consequences;\n\nWhereas research has shown that to a considerable extent children learn by imitating the behavior of adults,", + " especially those they are dependent upon; and the use of corporal punishment by adults having authority over children is likely to train children to use physical violence to control behavior rather than rational persuasion, education, and intelligent forms of both positive and negative reinforcement;\n\nWhereas research has shown that the effective use of punishment in eliminating undesirable behavior requires precision in timing, duration, intensity, and specificity, as well as considerable sophistication in controlling a variety of relevant environmental and cognitive factors, such that punishment administered in institutional settings, without attention to all these factors, is likely to instill hostility, rage, and a sense of powerlessness without reducing the undesirable behavior;\n\nTherefore,", + " be it resolved that the American Psychological Association opposes the use of corporal punishment in schools, juvenile facilities, child care nurseries, and all other institutions, public or private, where children are cared for or educated (Conger, 1975).\n" + ], + "length": 34930, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 93, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Law enforcement agencies made more arrests for marijuana possession last year than for all violent crimes combined, despite decriminalization and outright legalization in some states, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch and the ACLU. The report is harshly critical of drug policies that have 137,000 Americans behind bars on any given day for possessing marijuana or other drugs for their own personal use. Many of them are in pretrial detention in local jails, and those who are convicted end up with criminal records that \"lock them out of jobs, housing, education, welfare assistance, voting, and much more,\" the report states. The researchers found that black Americans smoke marijuana at around the same rate as whites but are four times as likely to be arrested for possessing small amounts of the drug, the New York Times reports. \"It's been 45 years since the war on drugs was declared, and it hasn't been a success,\" lead author Tess Borden of Human Rights Watch tells the Washington Post. \"Rates of drug use are not down. Drug dependency has not stopped. Every 25 seconds, we're arresting someone for drug use.\" The report calls for the government to take steps such as treating drug use as a health problem and decriminalizing the possession of drugs for personal use.\n", + "docs": [ + "\n\n(European Pressphoto Agency)\n\nOn any given day in the United States, at least 137,000 people sit behind bars on simple drug-possession charges, according to a report released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch.\n\nNearly two-thirds of them are in local jails. The report says that most of these jailed inmates have not been convicted of any crime: They're sitting in a cell, awaiting a day in court, an appearance that may be months or even years off, because they can't afford to post bail.\n\n\"It's been 45 years since the war on drugs was declared, and it hasn't been a success,\" lead author Tess Borden of Human Rights Watch said in an interview.", + " \"Rates of drug use are not down. Drug dependency has not stopped. Every 25 seconds, we're arresting someone for drug use.\"\n\n[Marijuana really can be deadly, but not in the way you probably expect]\n\nFederal figures on drug arrests and drug use over the past three decades tell the story. Drug-possession arrests skyrocketed, from fewer than 200 arrests for every 100,000 people in 1979 to more than 500 in the mid-2000s. The drug-possession rate has since fallen slightly, according to the FBI, hovering near 400 arrests per 100,000 people.\n\nDefenders of harsh penalties for drug possession say they are necessary to deter people from using drugs and to protect public health.", + " But despite the tough-on-crime push that led to the surge in arrests in recent decades, illicit drug use today is more common among Americans age 12 and older than it was in the early 1980s. Federal figures show no correlation between drug-possession arrests and rates of drug use during that time.\n\nBut the ACLU and Human Rights Watch report shows that arrests for drug possession continue to make up a significant chunk of modern-day police work.\n\n\"Around the country, police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other crime,\" the report finds, citing FBI data. \"More than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement is for drug possession,", + " amounting to more than 1.25 million arrests each year.\"\n\nIn fact, police make more arrests for marijuana possession alone than for all violent crimes combined.\n\n[Drug cops raid an 81-year-old woman's garden to take out a single marijuana plant]\n\nThe report finds that the laws are enforced unequally, too. Over their lifetimes, black and white Americans use illicit drugs at similar rates, according to federal data. But black adults were more than 2\u00bd times as likely to be arrested for drug possession.\n\n\"We can't talk about race and policing in this country without talking about the No. 1 arrest offense,\" Borden said.\n\nThe report calls for decriminializing the personal use and possession of drugs,", + " treating it as a public-health matter instead of a criminal one.\n\n\"Rather than promoting health, criminalization can create new barriers to health for those who use drugs,\" the report says. \"Criminalization drives drug use underground; it discourages access to emergency medicine, overdose prevention services, and risk-reducing practices such as syringe exchanges.\"\n\nThe report reinforces its point by noting the lengthy sentences handed down in some states for possession of small amounts of drugs.\n\nFor example, it sketches the history of Corey J. Ladd, who was arrested for possessing half an ounce of marijuana during a 2011 traffic stop in New Orleans. Because he had convictions for two prior offenses involving the possession of small amounts of hydrocodone and LSD,", + " he was sentenced in 2013 to 17 years in prison as a \"habitual offender.\" He is currently appealing the sentence to Louisiana's Supreme Court.\n\n\"Corey's story is about the real waste of human lives, let alone taxpayer money, of arrest and incarceration for personal drug use,\" Borden said. \"He could be making money and providing for his family.\"\n\nHow marijuana legalization in Washington, Colorado and Oregon is working out so far. (Daron Taylor,Danielle Kunitz/The Washington Post)\n\n[The DEA wants to ban another plant. Researchers say the plan is 'insane.']\n\nBut Ladd's treatment is far from the harshest drug-possession sentence uncovered by ACLU and Human Rights Watch researchers,", + " who conducted analyses of arrest and incarceration data from Florida, New York and Texas.\n\nIn Texas, for instance, 116 people are currently serving life sentences on charges of simple drug possession. Seven of those people earned their sentences for possessing quantities of drugs weighing between 1 gram and 4 grams, or less than a typical sugar packet. That's because Texas also has a habitual-offender law, allowing prosecutors to seek longer-than-normal sentences for people who have two prior felonies.\n\n\"In 2015, more than 78 percent of people sentenced to incarceration for felony drug possession in Texas possessed under a gram,\" the report found. ", + " He said he had been turned down by a fast-food restaurant because of his marijuana conviction, as well as at the restaurant where he worked before his last arrest as a fry cook and dishwasher. \u201cI\u2019ve kind of stopped trying,\u201d said Cory, who is African-American.\n\nTess Borden, a fellow at Human Rights Watch and the A.C.L.U., who wrote the report, found that despite the steep decline in crime rates over the last two decades \u2014 including a 36 percent drop in violent crime arrests from 1995 to 2015 \u2014 the number of arrests for all drug possessions, including marijuana, increased 13 percent.\n\nThe emphasis on making marijuana arrests is worrisome,", + " Ms. Borden said.\n\n\u201cMost people don\u2019t think drug possession is the No. 1 public safety concern, but that\u2019s what we\u2019re seeing,\u201d she said.\n\nCriminologists say that African-Americans are arrested more often than whites and others for drug possession in large part because of questionable police practices.\n\nPolice departments, for example, typically send large numbers of officers to neighborhoods that have high crime rates. A result is that any offense \u2014 including minor ones like loitering, jaywalking or smoking marijuana \u2014 can lead to an arrest, which in turn drives up arrest rate statistics, leading to even greater police vigilance.\n\n\u201cIt is selective enforcement,", + " and the example I like to use is that you have all sorts of drug use inside elite college dorms, but you don\u2019t see the police busting through doors,\u201d said Inimai M. Chettiar, director of the Justice Program at New York University\u2019s Brennan Center for Justice.\n\nAfrican-Americans may also be more apt to face arrest, according to researchers, because they might be more likely to smoke marijuana outdoors, attracting the attention of the police. ", + " Summary Neal Scott may die in prison. A 49-year-old Black man from New Orleans, Neal had cycled in and out of prison for drug possession over a number of years. He said he was never offered treatment for his drug dependence; instead, the criminal justice system gave him time behind bars and felony convictions\u2014most recently, five years for possessing a small amount of cocaine and a crack pipe. When Neal was arrested in May 2015, he was homeless and could not walk without pain, struggling with a rare autoimmune disease that required routine hospitalizations. Because he could not afford his $7,500 bond, Neal remained in jail for months,", + " where he did not receive proper medication and his health declined drastically\u2014one day he even passed out in the courtroom. Neal eventually pled guilty because he would face a minimum of 20 years in prison if he took his drug possession case to trial and lost. He told us that he cried the day he pled, because he knew he might not survive his sentence. VIDEO: HRW/ACLU Say Decriminalize Drug Possession The massive enforcement of laws criminalizing personal drug use and possession in the United States causes devastating harm. *** Just short of her 30th birthday, Nicole Bishop spent three months in jail in Houston for heroin residue in an empty baggie and cocaine residue inside a plastic straw.", + " Although the prosecutor could have charged misdemeanor paraphernalia, he sought felony drug possession charges instead. They would be her first felonies. Nicole was separated from her three young children, including her breastfeeding newborn. When the baby visited Nicole in jail, she could not hear her mother\u2019s voice or feel her touch because there was thick glass between them. Nicole finally accepted a deal from the prosecutor: she would do seven months in prison in exchange for a guilty plea for the 0.01 grams of heroin found in the baggie, and he would dismiss the straw charge. She would return to her children later that year, but as a \u201cfelon\u201d and \u201cdrug offender.\u201d As a result,", + " Nicole said she would lose her student financial aid and have to give up pursuit of a degree in business administration. She would have trouble finding a job and would not be able to have her name on the lease for the home she shared with her husband. She would no longer qualify for the food stamps she had relied on to help feed her children. As she told us, she would end up punished for the rest of her life. *** Every 25 seconds in the United States, someone is arrested for the simple act of possessing drugs for their personal use, just as Neal and Nicole were. Around the country, police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other crime.", + " More than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement is for drug possession, amounting to more than 1.25 million arrests each year. And despite officials\u2019 claims that drug laws are meant to curb drug sales, four times as many people are arrested for possessing drugs as are arrested for selling them. As a result of these arrests, on any given day at least 137,000 men and women are behind bars in the United States for drug possession, some 48,000 of them in state prisons and 89,000 in jails, most of the latter in pretrial detention. Each day, tens of thousands more are convicted,", + " cycle through jails and prisons, and spend extended periods on probation and parole, often burdened with crippling debt from court-imposed fines and fees. Their criminal records lock them out of jobs, housing, education, welfare assistance, voting, and much more, and subject them to discrimination and stigma. The cost to them and to their families and communities, as well as to the taxpayer, is devastating. Those impacted are disproportionately communities of color and the poor. This report lays bare the human costs of criminalizing personal drug use and possession in the US, focusing on four states: Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and New York. Drawing from over 365 interviews with people arrested and prosecuted for their drug use,", + " attorneys, officials, activists, and family members, and extensive new analysis of national and state data, the report shows how criminalizing drug possession has caused dramatic and unnecessary harms in these states and around the country, both for individuals and for communities that are subject to discriminatory enforcement. There are injustices and corresponding harms at every stage of the criminal process, harms that are all the more apparent when, as often happens, police, prosecutors, or judges respond to drug use as aggressively as the law allows. This report covers each stage of that process, beginning with searches, seizures, and the ways that drug possession arrests shape interactions with and perceptions of the police\u2014including for the family members and friends of individuals who are arrested.", + " We examine the aggressive tactics of many prosecutors, including charging people with felonies for tiny, sometimes even \u201ctrace\u201d amounts of drugs, and detail how pretrial detention and long sentences combine to coerce the overwhelming majority of drug possession defendants to plead guilty, including, in some cases, individuals who later prove to be innocent. The report also shows how probation and criminal justice debt often hang over people\u2019s heads long after their conviction, sometimes making it impossible for them to move on or make ends meet. Finally, through many stories, we recount how harmful the long-term consequences of incarceration and a criminal record that follow a conviction for drug possession can be\u2014separating parents from young children and excluding individuals and sometimes families from welfare assistance,", + " public housing, voting, employment opportunities, and much more. Families, friends, and neighbors understandably want government to take actions to prevent the potential harms of drug use and drug dependence. Yet the current model of criminalization does little to help people whose drug use has become problematic. Treatment for those who need and want it is often unavailable, and criminalization tends to drive people who use drugs underground, making it less likely that they will access care and more likely that they will engage in unsafe practices that make them vulnerable to disease and overdose. While governments have a legitimate interest in preventing problematic drug use, the criminal law is not the solution. Criminalizing drug use simply has not worked as a matter of practice.", + " Rates of drug use fluctuate, but they have not declined significantly since the \u201cwar on drugs\u201d was declared more than four decades ago. The criminalization of drug use and possession is also inherently problematic because it represents a restriction on individual rights that is neither necessary nor proportionate to the goals it seeks to accomplish. It punishes an activity that does not directly harm others. Instead, governments should expand public education programs that accurately describe the risks and potential harms of drug use, including the potential to cause drug dependence, and should increase access to voluntary, affordable, and evidence-based treatment for drug dependence and other medical and social services outside the court and prison system.", + " After decades of \u201ctough on crime\u201d policies, there is growing recognition in the US that governments need to undertake meaningful criminal justice reform and that the \u201cwar on drugs\u201d has failed. This report shows that although taking on parts of the problem\u2014such as police abuse, long sentences, and marijuana reclassification\u2014is critical, it is not enough: Criminalization is simply the wrong response to drug use and needs to be rethought altogether. Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union call on all states and the federal government to decriminalize the use and possession for personal use of all drugs and to focus instead on prevention and harm reduction.", + " Until decriminalization has been achieved, we urge officials to take strong measures to minimize and mitigate the harmful consequences of existing laws and policies. The costs of the status quo, as this report shows, are too great to bear. A National Problem All US states and the federal government criminalize possession of illicit drugs for personal use. While some states have decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, other states still make marijuana possession a misdemeanor or even a felony. In 42 states, possession of small amounts of most illicit drugs other than marijuana is either always or sometimes a felony offense. Only eight states and the District of Columbia make possession of small amounts a misdemeanor.", + " Not only do all states criminalize drug possession; they also all enforce those laws with high numbers of arrests and in racially discriminatory ways, as evidenced by new analysis of national and state-level data obtained by Human Rights Watch. Aggressive Policing More than one of nine arrests by state law enforcement are for drug possession, amounting to more than 1.25 million arrests per year. While the bulk of drug possession arrests are in large states such as California, which made close to 200,000 arrests for drug possession in 2014, Maryland, Nebraska, and Mississippi have the highest per capita drug possession arrest rates. Nationwide, rates of arrest for drug possession range from 700 per 100,", + "000 people in Maryland to 77 per 100,000 in Vermont. Despite shifting public opinion, in 2015, nearly half of all drug possession arrests (over 574,000) were for marijuana possession. By comparison, there were 505,681 arrests for violent crimes (which the FBI defines as murder, non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault). This means that police made more arrests for simple marijuana possession than for all violent crimes combined. Data presented for the first time in this report shows stark differences in arrest rates for drug possession even within the same state. For example, data provided to us by Texas shows that 53 percent of drug possession arrests in Harris County (in and around Houston)", + " were for marijuana, compared with 39 percent in nearby Dallas County, despite similar drug use rates in the two counties. In New York State, the counties with the highest drug possession arrest rates by a large margin were all in and around urban areas of New York City and Buffalo. In Florida, the highest rates of arrest were spread around the state in rural Bradford County, urban Miami-Dade County, Monroe County (the Keys), rural Okeechobee County, and urban Pinellas County. In Texas, counties with the highest drug possession arrest rates were all small rural counties. Kenedy County, for example, has an adult population of 407 people,", + " yet police there made 329 arrests for drug possession between 2010 and 2015. In each of these states, there is little regional variation in drug use rates. The sheer magnitude of drug possession arrests means that they are a defining feature of the way certain communities experience police in the United States. For many people, drug laws shape their interactions with and views of the police and contribute to a breakdown of trust and a lack of security. This was particularly true for Black and Latino people we interviewed. Racial Discrimination Over the course of their lives, white people are more likely than Black people to use illicit drugs in general, as well as marijuana,", + " cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and prescription drugs (for non-medical purposes) specifically. Data on more recent drug use (for example, in the past year) shows that Black and white adults use illicit drugs other than marijuana at the same rates and that they use marijuana at similar rates. Yet around the country, Black adults are more than two-and-a-half times as likely as white adults to be arrested for drug possession. In 2014, Black adults accounted for just 14 percent of those who used drugs in the previous year but close to a third of those arrested for drug possession. In the 39 states for which we have sufficient police data,", + " Black adults were more than four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white adults. In every state for which we have sufficient data, Black adults were arrested for drug possession at higher rates than white adults, and in many states the disparities were substantially higher than the national rate\u2014over 6 to 1 in Montana, Iowa, and Vermont. In Manhattan, Black people are nearly 11 times more likely than white people to be arrested for drug possession. Darius Mitchell, a Black man in his 30s, was among those targeted in Louisiana. He recounted his story to us as follows: Late one night in Jefferson Parish,", + " Darius was driving home from his child\u2019s mother\u2019s house. An officer pulled him over, claiming he was speeding. When Darius said he was sure he was not, the officer said he smelled marijuana. He asked whether he could search, and Darius said no. Another officer and a canine came and searched his car anyway. They yelled, \u201cWhere are the pounds?\u201d suggesting he was a marijuana dealer. The police never found marijuana, but they found a pill bottle in Darius\u2019 glove compartment, with his child\u2019s mother\u2019s name on it. Darius said that he had driven her to the emergency room after an accident, and she had been prescribed hydrocodone,", + " which she forgot in the car. Still, the officers arrested him and he was prosecuted for drug possession, his first felony charge. He faced up to five years in prison. Darius was ultimately acquitted at trial, but months later he remained in financial debt from his legal fees, was behind in rent and utilities bills, and had lost his cable service, television, and furniture. He still had an arrest record, and the trauma and anger of being unfairly targeted. Small-Scale Drug Use: Prosecutions for Tiny Amounts We interviewed over 100 people in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and New York who were prosecuted for small quantities of drugs\u2014in some cases,", + " fractions of a gram\u2014that were clearly for personal use. Particularly in Texas and Louisiana, prosecutors did more than simply pursue these cases\u2014they often selected the highest charges available and went after people as hard as they could. In 2015, according to data we analyzed from Texas courts, nearly 16,000 people were sentenced to incarceration for drug possession at the \u201cstate jail felony\u201d level\u2014defined as possession of under one gram of substances containing commonly used drugs, including cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, PCP, oxycodone, MDMA, mescaline, and mushrooms (or between 4 ounces and 5 pounds of marijuana). One gram,", + " the weight of less than one-fourth a sugar packet, is enough for only a handful of doses for new users of many drugs. Data presented here for the first time suggests that in 2015, more than 78 percent of people sentenced to incarceration for felony drug possession in Texas possessed under a gram. Possibly thousands more were prosecuted and put on probation, potentially with felony convictions. In Dallas County, the data suggests that nearly 90 percent of possession defendants sentenced to incarceration were for under a gram. The majority of the 30 defendants we interviewed in Texas had substantially less than a gram of illicit drugs in their possession when they were arrested:", + " not 0.9 or 0.8 grams, but sometimes 0.2, 0.02, or a result from the lab reading \u201ctrace,\u201d meaning that the amount was too small even to be measured. One defense attorney in Dallas told us a client was charged with drug possession in December 2015 for 0.0052 grams of cocaine. The margin of error for the lab that tested it is 0.0038 grams, meaning it could have weighed as little as 0.0014 grams, or 35 hundred-thousandths (0.00035) of a sugar packet. Bill Moore,", + " a 66-year-old man in Dallas, is serving a three-year prison sentence for 0.0202 grams of methamphetamines. In Fort Worth, Hector Ruiz was offered six years in prison for an empty bag that had heroin residue weighing 0.007 grams. In Granbury, Matthew Russell was charged with possession of methamphetamines for an amount so small that the laboratory result read only \u201ctrace.\u201d The lab technician did not even assign a fraction of a gram to it. A System that Coerces Guilty Pleas In 2009 (the most recent year for which national data is available), more than 99 percent of people convicted of drug possession in the 75 largest US counties pled guilty.", + " Our interviews and data analysis suggest that in many cases, high bail\u2014particularly for low-income defendants\u2014and the threat of long sentences render the right to a jury trial effectively meaningless. Data we obtained from Florida and Alabama reveals that, at least in those two states, the majority of drug possession defendants were poor enough to qualify for court-appointed counsel. Yet in 2009, drug possession defendants in the 75 largest US counties had an average bail of $24,000 (for those detained, average bail was $39,900). For lower-income defendants, such high bail often means they must remain in jail until their case is over. For defendants with little to no criminal history,", + " or in relatively minor cases, prosecutors often offer probation, relatively short sentences, or \u201ctime served.\u201d For those who cannot afford bail, this means a choice between fighting their case from jail or taking a conviction and walking out the door. In Galveston, Texas, Breanna Wheeler, a single mother, pled to probation and her first felony conviction against her attorney\u2019s advice. They both said she had a strong case that could be won in pretrial motions, but her attorney had been waiting months for the police records, and Breanna needed to return home to her 9-year-old daughter. In New York City, Deon Charles told us he pled guilty because his daughter had just been born that day and he needed to see her.", + " For others, the risk of a substantially longer sentence at trial means they plead to avoid the \u201ctrial penalty.\u201d In New Orleans, Jerry Bennett pled guilty to possession of half a gram of marijuana and a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence, because he faced 20 years if he lost at trial: \u201cThey spooked me out by saying, \u2018You gotta take this or you\u2019ll get that.\u2019 I\u2019m just worried about the time. Imagine me in here for 20 years. They got people that kill people. And they put you up here for half a gram of weed.\u201d For the minority of people we interviewed who exercised their right to trial,", + " the sentences they received in Louisiana and Texas were shocking. In New Orleans, Corey Ladd was sentenced as a habitual offender to 17 years for possessing half an ounce of marijuana. His prior convictions were for possession of small amounts of LSD and hydrocodone, for which he got probation both times. In Granbury, Texas, after waiting 21 months in jail to take his case to trial, Matthew Russell was sentenced to 15 years for a trace amount of methamphetamines. According to him and his attorney, his priors were mostly out-of-state and related to his drug dependence. Incarceration for Drug Possession At year-end 2014,", + " over 25,000 people were serving sentences in local jails and another 48,000 were serving sentences in state prisons for drug possession nationwide. The number admitted to jails and prisons at some point over the course of the year was significantly higher. As with arrests, there were sharp racial disparities. In 2002 (the most recent year for which national jail data is available), Black people were over 10 times more likely than white people to be in jail for drug possession. In 2014, Black people were nearly six times more likely than white people to be in prison for drug possession. Our analysis of data from Florida, Texas,", + " and New York, presented here for the first time, shows that the majority of people convicted of drug possession in these states are sentenced to some form of incarceration. Because each dataset is different, they show us different things. For example, our data suggests that in Florida, 75 percent of people convicted of felony drug possession between 2010 and 2015 had little to no prior criminal history. Yet 84 percent of people convicted of these charges were sentenced to prison or jail. In New York State, between 2010 and 2015, the majority of people convicted of drug possession were sentenced to some period of incarceration. At year-end 2015,", + " one of sixteen people in custody in New York State was incarcerated for drug possession. Of those, 50 percent were Black and 28 percent Latino. In Texas, between 2012 and 2016, approximately one of eleven people in prison had drug possession as their most serious offense; two of every three people serving time for drug charges were there for drug possession; and 116 people had received life sentences for drug possession, at least seven of which were for an amount weighing between one and four grams. For people we spoke to, the prospect of spending months or years in jail or prison was overwhelming. For most, the well-being of family members in their absence was also a source of constant concern,", + " sometimes more vivid for them than the experience of jail or prison itself. Parents told us they worried about children growing up without them. Some described how they missed seeing their children but did not let them visit jail or prison because they were concerned the experience would be traumatizing. Others described the anguish of no-contact jail visits, where they could see and hear but not reach out and touch their young children\u2019s hands. Some worried about partners and spouses, for whom their incarceration meant lost income and lost emotional and physical support. In Covington, Louisiana, Tyler Marshall\u2019s wife has a disability, and he told us his absence took a heavy toll. \u201cMy wife,", + " I cook for her, clean for her, bathe her, clothe her\u2026. Now everything is on her, from the rent to the bills, everything\u2026. She\u2019s behind [on rent] two months right now. She\u2019s disabled and she\u2019s doing it all by herself.\u201d In New Orleans, Corey Ladd was incarcerated when his girlfriend was eight months pregnant. He saw his infant daughter Charlee for the first time in a courtroom and held her for the first time in the infamous Angola prison. She is four now and thinks she visits her father at work. \u201cShe asks when I\u2019m going to get off work and come see her,\u201d Corey told us.", + " He is a skilled artist and draws Charlee pictures. In turn, Charlee brings him photos of her dance recitals and in the prison visitation hall shows him new dance steps she has learned. Corey, who is currently serving 17 years for marijuana possession, may never see her onstage. Probation, Criminal Justice Debt, and Collateral Consequences Even for those not sentenced to jail or prison, a conviction for drug possession can be devastating, due to onerous probation conditions, massive criminal justice debt, and a wide range of restrictions flowing from the conviction (known in the literature as \u201ccollateral consequences\u201d). Many defendants, particularly those with no prior convictions,", + " are offered probation instead of incarceration. Although probation is a lesser penalty, interviewees in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas told us they felt \u201cset up to fail\u201d on probation, due to the enormous challenges involved in satisfying probation conditions (for example, frequent meetings at distant locations that make it impossible for probationers to hold down a job, but require that they earn money to pay for travel and fees). Some defense attorneys told us that probation conditions were so onerous and unrealistic that they would counsel clients to take a short jail or prison sentence instead. A number of interviewees said if they were offered probation again, they would choose incarceration;", + " others said they knew probation would be too hard and so chose jail time. At year-end 2014, the US Department of Justice reported that 570,767 people were on probation for drug law violations (the data does not distinguish between possession and sales), accounting for close to 15 percent of the entire state probation population around the country. In some states, drug possession is a major driver of probation. In Missouri, drug possession is by far the single largest category of felony offenses receiving probation, accounting for 9,500 people or roughly 21 percent of the statewide probation total. Simple possession is also the single largest driver in Florida,", + " accounting for nearly 20,000 cases or 14 percent of the statewide probation total. In Georgia, possession offenses accounted for 17 percent of new probation starts in 2015 and roughly 16 percent of the standing probation population statewide at mid-year 2016. In addition to probation fees (if they are offered probation), people convicted of drug possession are often saddled with crippling court-imposed fines, fees, costs, and assessments that they cannot afford to pay. These can include court costs, public defender application fees, and surcharges on incurred fines, among others. They often come on top of the price of bail (if defendants can afford it), income-", + "earning opportunities lost due to incarceration, and the financial impact of a criminal record. For those who choose to hire an attorney, the costs of defending their case may have already left them in debt or struggling to make ends meet for months or even years to come. A drug conviction also keeps many people from getting a job, renting a home, and accessing benefits and other programs they may need to support themselves and their families\u2014and to enjoy full civil and social participation. Federal law allows states to lock people out of welfare assistance and public housing for years and sometimes even for life based on a drug conviction. People convicted of drug possession may no longer qualify for educational loans;", + " they may be forced to rely on public transport because their driver\u2019s license is automatically suspended; they may be banned from juries and the voting booth; and they may face deportation if they are not US citizens, no matter how many decades they have lived in the US or how many of their family members live in the country. In addition, they must bear the stigma associated with the labels of \u201cfelon\u201d and \u201cdrug offender\u201d the state has stamped on them, subjecting them to private discrimination in their daily interactions with landlords, employers, and peers. A Call for Decriminalization As we argue in this report, laws criminalizing drug use are inconsistent with respect for human autonomy and the right to privacy and contravene the human rights principle of proportionality in punishment.", + " In practice, criminalizing drug use also violates the right to health of those who use drugs. The harms experienced by people who use drugs, and by their families and broader communities, as a result of the enforcement of these laws may constitute additional, separate human rights violations. Criminalization has yielded few, if any, benefits. Criminalizing drugs is not an effective public safety policy. We are aware of no empirical evidence that low-level drug possession defendants would otherwise go on to commit violent crimes. And states have other tools at their disposal\u2014for example, existing laws that criminalize driving under the influence or child endangerment\u2014to address any harmful behaviors that may accompany drug use.", + " Criminalization is also a counterproductive public health strategy. Rates of drug use across drug types in the US have not decreased over the past decades, despite widespread criminalization. For people who struggle with drug dependence, criminalization often means cycling in and out of jail or prison, with little to no access to voluntary treatment. Criminalization undermines the right to health, as fear of law enforcement can drive people who use drugs underground, deterring them from accessing health services and emergency medicine and leading to illness and sometimes fatal overdose. It is time to rethink the criminalization paradigm. Although the amount cannot be quantified, the enormous resources spent to identify,", + " arrest, prosecute, sentence, incarcerate, and supervise people whose only offense has been possession of drugs is hardly money well spent, and it has caused far more harm than good. Some state and local officials we interviewed recognized the need to end the criminalization of drug use and to develop a more rights-respecting approach to drugs. Senior US officials have also emphasized the need to move away from approaches that punish people who use drugs. Fortunately, there are alternatives to criminalization. Other countries\u2014and even some US states with respect to marijuana\u2014are experimenting with models of decriminalization that the US can examine to chart a path forward. Ending criminalization of simple drug possession does not mean turning a blind eye to the misery that drug dependence can cause in the lives of those who use and of their families.", + " On the contrary, it requires a more direct focus on effective measures to prevent problematic drug use, reduce the harms associated with it, and support those who struggle with dependence. Ultimately, the criminal law does not achieve these important ends, and causes additional harm and loss instead. It is time for the US to rethink its approach to drug use.\n\nKey Recommendations Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union call on federal and state legislatures to end the criminalization of the personal use of drugs and the possession of drugs for personal use. In the interim, we urge government officials at the local, state, and federal levels to adopt the recommendations listed below.", + " These are all measures that can be taken within the existing legal framework to minimize the imposition of criminal punishment on people who use drugs, and to mitigate the harmful collateral consequences and social and economic discrimination experienced by those convicted of drug possession and by their families and communities. At the same time, officials should ensure that education on the risks and potential harms of drug use and affordable, evidence-based treatment for drug dependence are available outside of the criminal justice system. Until full decriminalization is achieved, public officials should pursue the following: State legislatures should amend relevant laws so that a drug possession conviction is never a felony and cannot be used as a sentencing enhancement or be enhanced itself by prior convictions,", + " and so that no adverse collateral consequences attach by law for convictions for drug possession.\n\nLegislatures should allocate funds to improve and expand harm reduction services and prohibit public and private discrimination in housing or employment on the basis of prior drug possession arrests or convictions.\n\nTo the extent permitted by law and by limits on the appropriate exercise of discretion, police should decline to make arrests for drug possession and should not stop, frisk, or search a person simply to find drugs for personal use. Police departments should not measure officer or department performance based on stop or arrest numbers or quotas and should incentivize and reward officer actions that prioritize the health and safety of people who use drugs.\n\nTo the extent permitted by law and by limits on the appropriate exercise of discretion,", + " prosecutors should decline to prosecute drug possession cases, or at a minimum should seek the least serious charge supported by the facts or by law. Prosecutors should refrain from prosecuting trace or residue cases and should never threaten enhancements or higher charges to pressure drug possession defendants to plead guilty. They should not seek bail in amounts they suspect defendants will be unable to pay.\n\nTo the extent permitted by law and by limits on the appropriate exercise of discretion, judges should sentence drug possession defendants to non-incarceration sentences. Judges should release drug possession defendants on their own recognizance whenever appropriate; if bail is required, it should be set at a level carefully tailored to the economic circumstances of individual defendants.\n\nTo the extent permitted by law and by limits on the appropriate exercise of discretion,", + " probation officers should not charge people on probation for drug offenses with technical violations for behavior that is a result of drug dependence. Where a legal reform has decreased the sentences for certain offenses but has not made the decreases retroactive, parole boards should consider the reform when determining parole eligibility.\n\nThe US Congress should amend federal statutes so that no adverse collateral consequences attach by law to convictions for drug possession, including barriers to welfare assistance and subsidized housing. It should appropriate sufficient funds to support evidence-based, voluntary treatment options and harm reduction services in the community.\n\nThe US Department of Justice should provide training to state law enforcement agencies clarifying that federal funding programs are not intended to and should not be used to encourage or incentivize high numbers of arrests for drug possession,", + " and emphasizing that arrest numbers are not a valid measure of law enforcement performance.\n\nMethodology This report is the product of a joint initiative\u2014the Aryeh Neier fellowship\u2014between Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union to strengthen respect for human rights in the United States. The report is based on more than 365 in-person and telephone interviews, as well as data provided to Human Rights Watch in response to public information requests.\n\nBetween October 2015 and March 2016, we conducted interviews in Louisiana, Texas, Florida, and New York City with 149 people prosecuted for their drug use. Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union identified individuals who had been subjected to prosecution in those jurisdictions through outreach to service providers,", + " defense attorneys, and advocacy networks as well as through observation of courtroom proceedings. In New York City, the majority of our interviews were conducted at courthouses or at the site of harm reduction and reentry programs. In Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, we met interviewees at detention facilities, drug courts, harm reduction and reentry programs, law offices, and restaurants in multiple counties. In the three southern states, we conducted 64 interviews with people who were in custody\u2014in local jails, state prisons, department of corrections work release or trustee facilities, and courthouse lock-ups across 13 jurisdictions. Within the jails and prisons, interviews took place in an attorney visit room to ensure confidentiality.", + " Most interviews were conducted individually and in private. Group interviews were conducted with three families and with participants in drug court programs in New Orleans (in drug court classrooms) and St. Tammany Parish (in a private room in the courthouse). All individuals interviewed about their experience provided informed consent, and no incentive or remuneration was offered to interviewees. For interviewees with pending charges, we interviewed them only with approval from their attorney and did not ask any questions about disputed facts or issues. In those cases, we explained to interviewees that we did not want them to tell us anything that could be used against them in their case. To protect the privacy and security of these interviewees,", + " a substantial number of whom remain in custody, we decided to use pseudonyms in all but two cases. In many cases, we also withheld certain other identifying information. Upon their urging and because of unique factors in their cases, we have not used pseudonyms for Corey Ladd and Byron Augustine in New Orleans and St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, respectively. In addition, we conducted 23 in-person interviews with current or former state government officials, including judges, prosecutors, law enforcement, and corrections officers. We also had phone interviews and/or correspondence with US Department of Justice officials and additional state prosecutors. We interviewed nine family members of people currently in custody,", + " as well as 180 defense attorneys, service providers (including those working for harm reduction programs such as syringe exchanges, voluntary treatment programs, and court-mandated treatment programs), and local and national advocates. Where attorneys introduced us to clients with open cases, we reviewed court documents wherever possible and corroborated information with the attorney. In other cases, we also reviewed case files provided by defendants or available to the public online. However, because of the sheer number of interviews we conducted, limited public access to case information in some jurisdictions, and respect for individuals\u2019 privacy, we did not review case information or contact attorneys for all interviewees. We also could not seek the prosecutor\u2019s perspective on specific cases because of confidentiality.", + " We therefore present people\u2019s stories mostly as they and their attorneys told them to us. Human Rights Watch submitted a series of data requests regarding arrests, prosecutions, case outcomes, and correctional population for drug offenses to a number of government bodies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and various state court administrations, statistical analysis centers, sentencing commissions, departments of correction, clerks of court, and other relevant entities. We chose to make data requests based on which states had centralized systems and/or had statutes or criminal justice trends that were particularly concerning. Attempts to request data were made through email, facsimile, and/or phone to one or more entities in the following states:", + " Alabama, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin. Among those, the FBI, Alabama Sentencing Commission, Florida Office of State Court Administrator, New York Division of Criminal Justice Services, New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and Texas Office of Court Administration provided data to us. Because of complications with the data file the FBI provided to us, we used the same set of data provided to and organized by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. We also analyzed data available online from the US Department of Justice\u2019s Bureau of Justice Statistics and some state agencies.", + " As this report was going to press, the FBI released aggregated 2015 arrest data. We have used this 2015 data to update all nationwide arrest estimates for drug possession and other offenses in this report. However, for all state-by-state arrest and racial disparities analyses, we relied on 2014 data, as these analyses required disaggregated data as well as data from non-FBI sources and 2014 remained the most recent year for which such data was available. Although the federal government continues to criminalize possession of drugs for personal use, in practice comparatively few federal prosecutions are for possession. This report therefore focuses on state criminalization,", + " although we call for decriminalization at all levels of government. A note on state selection: We spent a month at the start of this project defining its scope and selecting states on which we would focus, informed by phone interviews with legal practitioners and state and national advocates, as well as extensive desk research. We chose to highlight Louisiana, Texas, Florida, and New York because of a combination of problematic laws and enforcement policies, availability of data and resources, and positive advocacy opportunities. This report focuses on Louisiana because it has the highest per capita imprisonment rate in the country and because of its problematic application of the state habitual offender law to drug possession,", + " resulting in extreme sentences for personal drug use. The report focuses on Texas because of extensive concerns around its pretrial detention and jail system, its statutory classification of felony possession by weight, and its relatively softer treatment of marijuana possession as compared to other drugs. We also emphasize the potential for substantial criminal justice reform in both states\u2014which stakeholders and policymakers are already considering\u2014and the opportunity for state officials at all levels to set an example for others around the country. While this report focuses more heavily on Louisiana and Texas, we draw extensively from data and interviews in Florida and New York. We selected Florida because of its experience with prescription painkiller laws and the codification of drug possession over a certain weight as \u201ctrafficking.\u201d We selected New York as an example of a state in which low-level (non-marijuana)", + " drug possession is a misdemeanor and does not result in lengthy incarceration, and yet criminalization continues to be extremely disruptive and harmful to those who use drugs and to their broader communities. New York shows us that reclassification of drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, while a positive step, is insufficient to end the harms of criminalization, especially related to policing and arrests. As described in the Background section, all states criminalize drug possession, and the majority make it a felony offense. As our data shows, most if not all states also arrest in high numbers for drug possession and do so with racial disparities. Thus, although we did not examine the various stages of the criminal process in more than these four states,", + " we do know that the front end (the initial arrest) looks similar in many states. It is likely, as people move through the criminal justice system, that many of the problems that we documented in New York, Florida, Texas, and Louisiana are also experienced to varying degrees in other states. At the same time, there may be additional problems in other states that we have not documented. Wherever possible throughout the report, we draw on data and examples from other states and at the national level. We are grateful to officials in Texas, Florida, and New York for their transparency in providing us remarkable amounts of data at no cost. We regret our inability to obtain data from Louisiana.", + " For 15 of Louisiana\u2019s 41 judicial districts, plus the Orleans Criminal District Court, we made data requests to the clerk of court by phone, email, and/or facsimile. None was able to provide the requested information, and those who responded said they did not retain such data. A note on terminology: Although most states have a range of offenses that criminalize drug use, this report focuses on criminal drug possession and drug paraphernalia as the most common offenses employed to prosecute drug use (other offenses in some states include, for example, ingestion or purchase of a drug). Our position on decriminalization\u2014and the harm wrought by enforcement of drug laws\u2014extends more broadly to all offenses criminalizing drug use.", + " When we refer to \u201cdrug possession\u201d in this report, we mean possession of drugs for personal use, as all state statutes we are aware of do. Like legal practitioners and others, we sometimes refer to it synonymously as \u201csimple possession.\u201d Possession of drugs for purposes other than personal use, such as for distribution, is typically noted as such in laws and conversation (for example, \u201cpossession with intent to distribute,\u201d which we discuss in this report as well). Not all drugs are criminalized: many substances are regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but are not considered \u201ccontrolled substances\u201d subject to criminalization.", + " This report is about \u201cillicit drugs\u201d as they are understood in public discourse, the so-called \u201cwar on drugs,\u201d and state and federal laws such as the Controlled Substances Act. For simplicity, however, when we refer to \u201cdrugs\u201d in this report, we mean illicit drugs. Many people who use drugs told us the language of addiction was stigmatizing to them, whether or not they were dependent on drugs. Because drug dependence is a less stigmatizing term, we used it where appropriate in our interviews and in this report to discuss the right to health implications of governments\u2019 response to drug use and interviewees\u2019 self-", + "identified conditions. In so doing, we relied upon the definition of substance dependence as laid out in the American Psychiatric Association\u2019s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth Edition) (also known as DSM-IV). Factors for a diagnosis of dependence under DSM-IV focus on individuals\u2019 loss of ability to control their drug use.\n\nI. The Human Rights Case for Decriminalization Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union oppose the criminalization of personal use of drugs and possession of drugs for personal use. We recognize that governments have a legitimate interest in preventing societal harms caused by drugs and in criminalizing harmful or dangerous behavior, including where that behavior is linked to drug use.", + " However, governments have other means beyond the criminal law to achieve those ends and need not pursue a criminalization approach, which violates basic human rights and, as this report documents, causes enormous harm to individuals, families, and communities. On their face, laws criminalizing the simple possession or use of drugs constitute an unjustifiable infringement of individuals\u2019 autonomy and right to privacy. The right to privacy is broadly recognized under international law, including in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights. Limitations on the right to privacy, and more broadly on an individual\u2019s autonomy, are only justifiable if they serve to advance a legitimate purpose;", + " if they are both proportional to and necessary to achieve that purpose; and if they are non-discriminatory. Criminalizing drug use fails this test. Governments and policymakers have long argued that laws criminalizing drug use are necessary to protect public morals; to deter problematic drug use and its sometimes corrosive effects on families, friends, and communities; to reduce criminal behavior associated with drugs; and to protect drug users from harmful health consequences. While these are legitimate government concerns, criminalization of drug possession does not meet the other criteria. It is not proportional or necessary to achieve those government goals and is often implemented in discriminatory ways. Indeed, it has not even proven effective:", + " more than four decades of criminalization have apparently had little impact on the demand for drugs or on rates of use in the United States. Criminalization can also undermine the right to health of those who use. Instead, governments have many non-penal options to reduce harm to people who use drugs, including voluntary drug treatment, social support, and other harm reduction measures. Criminalization of drug use is also not necessary to protect third parties from harmful actions performed under the influence of drugs, and the notion that harmful or criminal conduct is an inevitable result of drug use is a fallacy. Governments can and do criminalize negligent or dangerous behavior (such as driving under the influence or endangering a child through neglect)", + " linked to drug use, without criminalizing drug use itself. This is precisely the approach US laws take with regard to alcohol consumption. Those who favor criminalization of drug use often emphasize harms to children. While governments have important obligations to take appropriate measures\u2014legislative, administrative, social, and educational\u2014to protect children from the harmful effects of drug use, imposing criminal penalties on children for using or possessing drugs is not the answer. States should not criminalize adult drug use on the grounds that it protects children from drugs. Worldwide, the practical realities of governments\u2019 efforts to enforce criminal prohibitions on drug use have greatly compounded the urgent need to end those prohibitions.", + " Criminalization has often gone hand-in-hand with widespread human rights violations and adverse human rights impacts\u2014while largely failing to prevent the possession or use of drugs. And rather than protecting health, criminalization of drug use has in fact undermined it. These grim realities are on stark display in the United States. This report describes the staggering human rights toll of drug criminalization and enforcement in the US. Not only has the government\u2019s \u201cwar on drugs\u201d failed on its own terms, but it has needlessly ruined countless lives through the crushing direct and collateral impacts of criminal convictions, while also erecting barriers that stand between people struggling with drug dependence and the treatment they may want and need.", + " In the United States the inherent disproportionality of criminalizing drug use has been greatly amplified by abusive laws. Sentences imposed across the US for drug possession are often so excessive that they would amount to disproportionate punishment in violation of human rights law even if criminalization were not per se a human rights problem. In many US states these excessive sentences take the form of lengthy periods of incarceration (especially when someone is sentenced as a \u201chabitual offender\u201d for habitual drug use), onerous probation conditions that many interviewees called a set-up for failure, and sometimes crippling fines and fees. This report also describes a range of other human rights violations and harms experienced by people who use drugs and by entire families and communities as a result of criminalization,", + " in addition to the punishments imposed by law. For instance, enforcement of drug possession laws has a discriminatory racial impact at multiple stages of the criminal justice process, beginning with selective policing and arrests. In addition, enforcement of drug possession laws unfairly burdens the poor at almost every step of the process, from police encounters, to pretrial detention, to criminal justice debt and collateral consequences including exclusion from public benefits, again raising questions about equal protection rights. Many of the problems described in this report are not unique to drug cases; rather, they reflect the broader human rights failings of the US criminal justice system. That fact serves only to underscore the practical impossibility of addressing these problems through incremental changes to the current criminalization paradigm.", + " It also speaks to the urgency of removing drug users\u2014people who have engaged in no behavior worthy of criminalization\u2014from a system that is plagued with broader and deeply entrenched patterns of human rights abuse and discrimination. Rather than criminalizing drug use, governments should invest in harm reduction services and public education programs that accurately convey the risks and potential harms of drug use, including the potential to cause drug dependence. Harm reduction is a way of preventing disease and promoting health that \u201cmeets people where they are\u201d rather than making judgments about where they should be in terms of their personal health and lifestyle. Harm reduction programs focus on limiting the risks and potential harms associated with drug use and on providing a gateway to drug treatment for those who seek it.", + " Implementing harm reduction practices widely is not just sound public health policy; it is a human rights imperative that requires strong federal and state leadership. The federal government has taken some important steps to promote harm reduction, as have some state and local entities. However, the continued focus on criminalization of drug use\u2014and the aggressiveness with which that is pursued by many public officials\u2014runs counter to harm reduction. This report calls for a radical shift away from criminalization, towards health and social support services. Human rights principles require it.\n\nII. Background The \u201cWar on Drugs\u201d For four decades, federal and state measures to battle the use and sale of drugs in the US have emphasized arrest and incarceration rather than prevention and treatment.", + " Between 1980 and 2015, arrests for drug offenses nearly tripled, rising from 580,900 arrests in 1980 to 1,488,707 in 2015. Of those total arrests, the vast majority (78 percent in 1980 and 84 percent in 2015) have been for possession. Yet drug possession was not always criminalized. For much of the 19th century, opiates and cocaine were largely unregulated in the US. Regulations began to be passed towards the end of the 19th and at the start of the 20th century\u2014a time when the US also banned alcohol.", + " Early advocates for prohibitionist regimes relied on moralistic arguments against drug and alcohol use, along with concerns over health and crime. But many experts also point to the racist roots of early prohibitionist efforts, as certain drugs were associated in public discourse with particular marginalized races (for example, opium with Chinese immigrants). The US has also been a major proponent of international prohibition, and helped to push for the passage of the three major international drug control conventions beginning in the 1960s. The purpose of the conventions was to combat drug abuse by limiting possession, use, and distribution of drugs exclusively to medical and scientific purposes and by implementing measures against drug trafficking through international cooperation.", + " In 1971, President Richard Nixon announced that he was launching a \u201cwar on drugs\u201d in the US, dramatically increasing resources devoted to enforcing prohibitions on drugs, using the criminal law. He proclaimed, \u201cAmerica\u2019s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.\u201d There are reasons to believe that the declaration of the \u201cwar on drugs\u201d was more political in nature than a genuine response to a public health problem. Over the next decade, the \u201cwar on drugs\u201d combined with a larger \u201ctough on crime\u201d policy approach,", + " whose advocates believed harsh mandatory punishments were needed to restore law and order to the US. New laws increased the likelihood of a prison sentence even for low-level offenses, increased the length of prison sentences, and required prisoners to serve a greater proportion of their sentences before any possibility of review. These trends impacted drug offenses as well as other crimes. The new drug laws contributed to a dramatic rise in the prison population. Between 1980 and 2003 the number of drug offenders in state prisons grew twelvefold. By 2014, an estimated 208,000 men and women were serving time in state prisons for drug offenses, constituting almost 16 percent of all state prisoners.", + " Few of those entering prison because of drug offenses were kingpins or major traffickers. A substantial number were convicted of no greater offense than personal drug use or possession. In 2014, nearly 23 percent of those in state prisons for drug offenses were incarcerated simply for drug possession. Because prison sentences for drug possession are shorter than for sales, rates of admission are even more telling: in 2009 (the most recent year for which such data is available), about one third of those entering state prisons for drug offenses (for whom the offense was known) were convicted of simple drug possession. Drug Use in the United States More than half of the US adult population report having used illicit drugs at some point in their lifetime,", + " and one in three adults reports having used a drug other than marijuana.[44] The US Department of Health and Human Services\u2019 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) conducts an annual survey of nearly 70,000 Americans over the age of 12 to produce the standard data used to research drug use. According to SAMHSA, 51.8 percent of adults reported lifetime use in 2014.[45] Moreover, 16.6 percent of the adult population had used illicit drugs in the past year, while one in ten had used such drugs in the past month.[46] Lifetime rates of drug use are highest among white adults for all drugs in total,", + " and for specific drugs such as marijuana, cocaine (including crack), methamphetamine, and non-medical use of prescription drugs. Latino and Asian adults use most drugs at substantially lower rates.[47] For more recent drug use, for example use in the past year, Black, white, and Latino adults use drugs other than marijuana at very similar rates. For marijuana, 16 percent of Black adults reported using in the past year compared to 14 percent of white adults and about 11 percent of Latino adults: State Drug Possession Laws All US states currently criminalize the possession of illicit drugs. Different states have different statutory schemes, choosing between misdemeanors and felonies,", + " making distinctions based on type and/or quantities of drugs, and sometimes treating second or subsequent offenses more harshly. State sentences range from a fine, probation, or under one year in jail for misdemeanors, up to a lengthy term in prison\u2014for example, 10 or 20 years\u2014for some felony possession offenses or, when someone is sentenced under some states\u2019 habitual offender laws, potentially up to life in prison. While some states have decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, other states still make marijuana possession a misdemeanor or even a felony. No state has decriminalized possession of drugs other than marijuana. As to \u201cschedule I and II\u201d drugs (which include heroin,", + " cocaine, methamphetamines, and most commonly known illicit drugs), eight states and the District of Columbia treat possession of small amounts a misdemeanor, including New York. In the remaining 42 states, possession of small amounts of most illicit drugs other than marijuana is either always or sometimes a felony offense. In addition to the \u201cconvicted felon\u201d label, many felony possession laws provide for lengthy sentences. Of the states we visited, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas classify possession of most drugs other than marijuana as a felony, no matter the quantity, and provide for the following sentencing ranges. In Florida, simple possession of most drugs carries up to five years in prison.", + " Florida drug trafficking offenses are based simply on quantity triggers: simple possession can be enough, without any evidence of trafficking other than the quantity. In Louisiana, possession of most drugs other than heroin carries up to five years in prison, and heroin carries a statutory minimum of four years in prison, up to a possible ten years. In Texas, possession of under a gram of substances containing commonly known drugs including cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, PCP, oxycodone, MDMA, mescaline, and mushrooms (or between four ounces and five pounds of marijuana) carries six months to two years. One to four grams carries two to ten years.", + " Texas judges may order the sentence to be served in prison or may suspend the sentence and require a term of probation instead. On top of these baseline ranges, some states allow prosecutors to enhance the sentence range for drug possession by applying habitual offender laws that treat defendants as more culpable\u2014and therefore deserving of greater punishment\u2014because they have prior convictions. For example, in Louisiana a person charged with drug possession who has one or two prior felony convictions faces up to 10 years in prison. With three prior felony convictions, a person charged with drug possession faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years to life in prison. In Texas, a person with two prior felony convictions who is charged with possession of one to four grams of drugs faces 25 years to life.", + " In 2009 (the most recent year for which such data is available), 50 percent of people arrested for felony possession offenses in the 75 largest US counties had at least one prior felony conviction, mostly for non-violent offenses. Thus the scope of potential application of the habitual offender laws to drug possession cases is extensive for states that employ them.\n\nIII. The Size of the Problem: Arrests for Drug Use Nationwide Possession Arrests by the Numbers Across the United States, police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other crime. Drug possession accounts for more than one of every nine arrests by state law enforcement agencies around the country.", + " Although all states arrest a significant number of people for drug possession each year, police focus on it more or less heavily in different states. For example, in California, one of every six arrests in 2014 was for drug possession, while in Alaska the rate was one of every 27. In 2015, state law enforcement agencies made more than 1.25 million arrests for drug possession\u2014and because not all agencies report data, the true number of arrests is higher. Even this estimate reveals a massive problem: 1.25 million arrests translates into an arrest for drug possession every 25 seconds of each day. Some states arrest significantly more people for drug possession than other states:", + " While the bulk of drug possession arrests are in large states such as California, Texas, and New York, the list of hardest-hitting states looks different when mapped onto population size. Maryland, Nebraska, and Mississippi have the highest per capita drug possession arrest rates. For comparison, the rate of arrest for drug possession ranged from 700 per 100,000 people in Maryland to 77 per 100,000 in Vermont: The differences in drug arrest rates at the state level are all the more striking because drug use rates are fairly consistent across the country. SAMHSA data shows that about 3 percent of US adults used an illicit drug other than marijuana in the past month.[64]", + " There is little variation at the state level, where past month use ranges from about 2 percent in Wyoming to a little over 4 percent in Colorado. For marijuana, there is slightly greater variation. About 8 percent of US adults used marijuana in the past month, but this ranged from about 5 percent in South Dakota to 15 percent in Colorado.[65] While many public officials told us drug law enforcement is meant to get dealers off the streets, the vast majority of people arrested for drug offenses are charged with nothing more than possessing a drug for their personal use. For every person arrested for selling drugs in 2015, four were arrested for possessing or using drugs\u2014and two of those four were for marijuana possession.", + " Despite shifting public opinion on marijuana, about half of all drug possession arrests are for marijuana. In 2015, there were over 574,640 arrests just for marijuana possession. By comparison, there were 505,681 arrests for violent crimes (which the FBI defines as murder, non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault). This means that police made almost 14 percent more arrests for simple marijuana possession than for all violent crimes combined. Some police told us that they have to make an arrest if they see unlawful conduct, but this glosses over the key question of where and upon whom the police are focusing their attention to begin with.", + " Differences in arrest rates for drug possession within a state reveal that individual police departments have substantial discretion in how they enforce the law, resulting in stark contrasts. For example, data provided to us by Texas shows that 53 percent of drug possession arrests in Harris County (in and around Houston) were for marijuana, compared with 39 percent in nearby Dallas County. Yet a nearly identical proportion of both counties\u2019 populations used drugs in the past year.[72] Additionally, certain jurisdictions within a state place a stronger focus on policing drug possession. In New York State, the counties with the highest drug possession arrest rates by a large margin were all in and around urban areas of New York City and Buffalo.", + " In Florida, the highest rates of arrest were spread around the state in rural Bradford County, urban Miami-Dade County, Monroe County (the Keys), rural Okeechobee County, and urban Pinellas County. Within both states, drug use rates vary little between regions.[75] In Texas, the counties with the highest drug possession arrest rates are all small rural counties. Kenedy County, for example, has an adult population of 407 people, yet police there made 329 arrests for drug possession between 2010 and 2015. Racial Disparities Rather than stumbling upon unlawful conduct, when it comes to drug use and possession,", + " police often aggressively search it out\u2014and they do so selectively, targeting low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. As criminal justice practitioners, social science experts, and the US public now recognize all too well, racially disparate policing has had devastating consequences. Research has consistently shown that police target certain neighborhoods for drug law enforcement because drug use and drug sales occur on streets and in public view. Making arrests in these neighborhoods is therefore easier and less resource-intensive. Comparably few of the people arrested in these areas are white. Harrison Davis, a young Black man who was charged with possession of cocaine in Shreveport, Louisiana, recalled how the arresting officer had defended what Harrison considered racial profiling during a preliminary examination:", + " \u201c\u2018I pulled him over because he was in a well-known drug area,\u2019 the police officer says to the judge. But I\u2019ve been living there for 27 years. It\u2019s nothing but my family.\u201d Black adults are more than two-and-a-half times as likely as white adults to be arrested for drug possession in the US. In 2014, Black people accounted for just 14 percent of people who used drugs in the previous year, but close to a third of those arrested for drug possession. In the 39 states for which we have sufficient police data, Black adults were more than four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession as white adults.[83]", + " The disparities in absolute numbers or rates of arrests cannot be blamed on a few states or jurisdictions. While numerous studies have found racial disparities in marijuana arrests, analyses of state- and local-level data provided to Human Rights Watch show consistent disparities across the country for all drugs, not just marijuana. In every state for which we have sufficient police data, Black adults were arrested for drug possession at higher rates than white adults, and in many states the disparities were substantially higher than the national rate\u2014over 6 to 1 in Montana, Iowa, and Vermont.[85] These figures likely underestimate the racial disparity nationally, because in three states with large Black populations\u2014Mississippi,", + " Louisiana, and Alabama\u2014an insufficient proportion of law enforcement agencies reported data and thus we could not include them in our analysis. Our in-depth analysis of Florida and New York data show that disparities are not isolated to a few municipalities or urban centers, though they are considerably starker in some localities than in others. In Florida, 60 of 67 counties arrested Black people for drug possession at higher rates than white people.[86] In Sarasota County, the ratio of Black to white defendants facing drug possession charges was nearly 8 to 1 when controlling for population size. Down the coast in comparably sized Collier County, the ratio,", + " while still showing a disparity, was less than 3 to 1. In New York, 60 of 62 counties arrested Black people for drug possession at higher rates than white people. In Manhattan (New York County), there were 3,309 arrests per 100,000 Black people compared to 306 per 100,000 white people between 2010 and 2015. In other words, Black people in Manhattan were nearly 11 times more likely than white people to be arrested for drug possession. Under international human rights law, prohibited racial discrimination occurs where there is an unjustifiable disparate impact on a racial or ethnic group,", + " regardless of whether there is any intent to discriminate against that group. Enforcement of drug possession laws in the US reveals stark racial disparities that cannot be justified by disparities in rates of use. Incentives for Drug Arrests Department cultures and performance metrics that incentivize high numbers of arrests may drive up the numbers of unnecessary drug arrests and unjustifiable searches in some jurisdictions. In some cases, department culture may suggest to individual officers that the way to be successful and productive, and earn promotions, is to have high arrest numbers. In turn, a focus on arrest numbers may translate into an emphasis on drug arrests, because drug arrests are often easier to obtain than arrests for any other type of offense,", + " especially if certain neighborhoods are targeted. As Randy Smith, former Slidell Chief of Police and current Sheriff for St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, told us, [Suppose I say,] \u201cI want you to go out there and bring me in [more arrests]. Your numbers are down, last month you only had 10 arrests, you better pick that up or else I\u2019m going put you in another unit.\u201d You\u2019re going to go out there and do what? You\u2019re going [to go] out there to make drug arrests. Although the practice is outlawed in several states, some police departments operate a system of explicit or implicit arrest quotas.", + " Whether arrest numbers are formalized into quotas or understood as cultural expectations of a department, they may put some officers under immense pressure not only to make regular stops and arrests but to match or increase their previous numbers, in order to be seen as adequately \u201cproductive.\u201d In August 2015, twelve New York Police Department officers filed a class-action lawsuit against the department for requiring officers to meet monthly arrest and summons quotas, with one plaintiff noting that after being told he was \u201cdragging down the district\u2019s overall arrest rate,\u201d he was given more undesirable job assignments. In an Alabama town, an officer claimed in 2013 to have been fired after publicly criticizing the police department\u2019s new ticket quota directives,", + " which included making roughly 72,000 contacts (including arrests, tickets, warnings, and field interviews) per year in a town of 50,000 people. Such departmental pressure to meet arrest quotas can easily lead to more arbitrary stops and searches. In the aftermath of Michael Brown\u2019s death in Ferguson, Missouri, the US Department of Justice\u2019s Civil Rights Division recommended that the Ferguson Police Department change its stop and search policies in part by prohibiting \u201cthe use of ticketing and arrest quotas, whether formal or informal,\u201d and focus instead on community protection. Randy Smith told us he opposes putting \u201cexpectations\u201d or quotas on officers. \u201cIt kills you,\u201d he explained:", + " I think sometimes you start building numbers and stats, and you kind of lose the ability to make better decisions on getting someone help, [when] getting a stat is putting them in jail. I\u2019ve been there, and I\u2019ve seen. You start having some serious problems. He said when officers understand that they are expected to make high arrest numbers, they often focus on drug possession: So you\u2019re going to stop 10 cars in maybe a not so good neighborhood. Out of 10 cars, you might get one out of those 10 that you get some dope or marijuana or a joint in the ash tray, or a Xanax in your purse\u2026. If you dump [any]", + " purse out, there\u2019s probably some kind of anti-depression medicine in there, which is a felony [potentially]. And we know it, we\u2019ve seen it, where those street crime guys will get out there and bring you to jail on a felony for a schedule four without a prescription, just because they got a stat. They\u2019re tying up the jail. It\u2019s ridiculous. That shit has got to stop\u2026. You\u2019ve got to look at the big picture. If you put quotas\u2014which is a bad word\u2014[officers] are going to start bum rapping people. The guy we got with the one pill, the one stop out of 10,", + " what did I do with those other nine people that weren\u2019t doing nothing? I stopped them. I harassed them. I asked them if they had guns in their car. I asked them if they had any illegal contraband. I\u2019m asking them to search their car. What am I doing to the general citizen? Federal Funding, an Opportunity for Leadership In recent years, many advocates have expressed concern that high arrest numbers were incentivized by federal grant monies to state and local law enforcement through the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) program, administered by the Department of Justice\u2019s Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). Although funding is allocated based on a non-discretionary formula,", + " grant recipients must report back to BJA on how they use the funds, including\u2014historically\u2014reporting as a \u201cperformance measure\u201d the number of individuals arrested. Many groups were concerned that this sent a message to state and local law enforcement agencies that high arrests numbers meant more federal funds, and that it in turn incentivized drug arrests. Recognizing that arrest numbers are not meaningful measures of law enforcement performance, BJA undertook a thorough revision of JAG performance measures, now called \u201caccountability measures.\u201d As of fiscal year 2015, law enforcement agencies receiving JAG funds no longer must report on arrest numbers as a measure of performance or as accountability for funds received.", + " BJA Director Denise O\u2019Donnell told us, \u201cArrests can easily misrepresent what is really going on in criminal justice practice, and be misleading as to what we are really interested in seeing supported with JAG funds, namely evidence-based practices. So BJA has moved away from arrests as a metric, instead focusing on evidence-based practices, such as community collaboration, prevention, and problem-solving activities.\u201d This move is commendable. In the extensive training and technical assistance BJA provides to state law enforcement agencies, through JAG and other funding streams, BJA should reiterate that arrest numbers are not a sound measure of police performance.", + " BJA should also encourage state agencies to pass the message along to local law enforcement agencies, which must still apply to the state agency for their share of the federal fund allocations. In many cases, that process continues to be discretionary and application-based and, in at least one recent call for applications, may still improperly emphasize drug arrests.\n\nIV. The Experience of Being Policed They disrupt, disrupt, disrupt our lives\u2026. From the time the cuffs are put on you, from the time you\u2019re confronted, you feel subhuman. You\u2019re treated like garbage, talked to unprofessionally. Just the arrest is aggressive to subdue you as a person,", + " to break you as a man. \u2014Cameron Barnes, arrested repeatedly for drug possession by New York City police from the 1980s until 2012 The sheer magnitude of drug possession arrests means that they are a defining feature of the way people experience police in the United States. For people we interviewed, drug laws shaped their interactions with and views of the police and contributed to a breakdown of trust. Instead of experiencing police as protectors, arrestees in all four states we visited described experiences in which police officers intimidated and humiliated them. They described having their pockets searched, their cars ransacked, being subjected to drug-sniffing dogs,", + " and being overwhelmed by several officers at once. This led some people to feel under attack and \u201cout of a movie.\u201d Prosecutor Melba Pearson in the Miami-Dade State Attorney\u2019s office said, \u201cThe way we treat citizens when we encounter them is wrong. If they expect to have their rights violated, of course there\u2019s going to be hatred of the police\u2026. You can\u2019t take an invading-a-foreign-country mentality into the neighborhood.\u201d Pretextual Stops and Searches without Consent Many people we interviewed said police used pretextual reasons to stop and search them, told them to take things out of their pockets, otherwise threatened or intimidated them to obtain \u201cconsent\u201d to search,", + " and sometimes physically manhandled them. These stories are consistent with analyses by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups that have extensively documented the failures of police in many jurisdictions to follow legal requirements for stops and searches. US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has argued in dissent that the Court\u2019s interpretation of US law \u201callow[s] an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants\u2014so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact\u2026. When we condone officers\u2019 use of these devices without adequate cause, we give them reason to target pedestrians in an arbitrary manner.\u201d These fears certainly accord with the realities facing many heavily policed communities.", + " Defendants and attorneys we interviewed described a litany of explanations offered by the police to justify stopping a person on the street or in a car, many of which appeared to them to be pretextual: failure to signal, driving in the left lane on an interstate, driving with a license plate improperly illuminated or with a window tint that is too dark, walking in the opposite direction of traffic, failing to cross the street at the crosswalk or a right angle, or walking in the street when a sidewalk is provided. In many jurisdictions, these reasons are not sufficient in themselves to allow the officer to search the person or vehicle. Yet in police reports we reviewed for several cases in Texas and Florida,", + " officers stopped the defendant for a traffic violation, did not arrest for that violation, but conducted a search anyway. They cited as justification that they smelled marijuana, that consent to search was provided, or that the person voluntarily produced drugs from their pockets for the officer to seize. These justifications often stand in stark contradiction to the accounts of the people who were searched. The Smell of Marijuana The criminalization of marijuana in many states has given officers a powerful and widely-used pretext for searching people\u2019s cars. Will Pryor, the prosecutor responsible for screening cases in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, told us that most drug possession cases he sees result from traffic stops where the officer allegedly smells marijuana.", + " Where the possession of marijuana is criminal\u2014as it remains in most states\u2014the odor of marijuana often gives law enforcement probable cause to search a car,typically anywhere that marijuana could be found (including car doors, consoles, glove compartments, trunks, and containers and bags inside the car). People within the car can then be charged for possessing anything illegal found as a result of the search, even when no marijuana is discovered. A number of interviewees in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas described arrests that followed this pattern, and we reviewed other police reports that cited the odor of marijuana. Miami prosecutor Melba Pearson told us, If I hear one more time,", + " \u201cI smelled marijuana,\u201d and the subsequent search revealed no marijuana! \u2026 I work with police officers every day. A large majority are wonderful, fair people. However, there is a mentality in certain departments that tends to draw individuals who are action junkies, the \u201cjump out boys.\u201d\u2026 Some officers believe the ends justify the means [and don\u2019t] consider it a problem because their job is to get drugs off the street without worrying about whether or not the case is prosecutable, or if there is a long term positive effect on the community. Miami Judge Dennis Murphy told us, \u201cEasily one out of four [police] stops,", + " [I see] \u2018defendant ran a stop sign, [officer] approached, there was a distinct odor of marijuana, so I searched and arrested for [other] drugs.\u2019\u201d Once stopped, some of the people we interviewed did not realize they had a right not to acquiesce to police searches, or felt they could not exercise it in the face of the officer\u2019s authority. A few allowed officers to search a vehicle because they did not think there were any drugs inside. In many other cases, interviewees told us, they never consented at all, and police simply did what they pleased. We reviewed arrest reports in Texas and Florida where police accounts of how they obtained consent for a search were highly implausible.", + " Police described defendants voluntarily emptying their pockets and revealing drugs, sometimes without being asked to do so; freely consenting to a search of their person when they had drugs on them; and admitting that they were about to use drugs before the officer found drugs on them. Prosecutor Melba Pearson told us, \u201cI have had [defendants] who sometimes do give up the drugs\u2026. However, many times where we get a story [from police] about how consent was obtained or drugs were located pursuant to a search [it is problematic].\u201d Other interviewees described police tactics that they said allowed officers to manipulate their way around the requirements of the law.", + " In Brevard County, Florida, Isabel Evans told us that she was arrested in 2015 for the first time for hydromorphine possession and that she felt unable to disobey the officer: He said my pocket was bulged. He said, \u201cReach in there and take it out.\u201d I pulled it out, and he handcuffed me. The cop knew what he was doing. He couldn\u2019t pull it out himself, so he took advantage of my ignorance of the law, of a first-timer like me. I\u2019m not going to say you can\u2019t do that. I\u2019m scared. In Shreveport,", + " Louisiana, Glenda Hughes was charged with felony possession of Klonopin in 2015. She told us, \u201cIf you say no to the search, that gives them suspicion\u2026. If I had known more, maybe it would have come out differently. It\u2019s not my fault though that I don\u2019t know the legal system and the laws.\u201d Feeling Targeted All of the people arrested for drug possession we interviewed said they experienced fear, anger, or deep feelings of being unfairly targeted when police confronted, searched, and arrested them. Many interviewees said that because they had been targeted or profiled in the past, they experienced a heightened sense of vulnerability to police intervention and insecurity in their person whenever they were in public.", + " They described constantly feeling the need to look over their shoulder and exercise hyper-vigilance in all their actions, regardless of whether they had drugs on them. Leonard Lewis, a 28-year-old Black man in Houston, had been arrested and convicted of drug possession in the past. He said he felt that made him more likely to be stopped again and more likely to be arrested once police ran his name. He said the fact that he is big and Black makes him more vulnerable. His mother told us, \u201c[It] mess[es] with his mind. [Leonard] drives like a grandpa, like how an old man drives.", + " He turns on his signals, he stops [before stop signs]. Even when he is pulling into the house, the boy turns on his signal. He says, \u2018Mama, the police are never gonna have a reason to stop me.\u2019\u201d In the Bronx, Angel Suarez explained to us: I consider myself an addict and sometimes I worry when I\u2019m using, because they search you for no reason. The cops know me; most of the time they see me they stop and search me. It makes it harder to live life when you\u2019re walking down the street watching your back, but at the same time when you don\u2019t have your drug it makes you sick.", + " Drug enforcement practices do not only affect people who use or have used drugs. They broadly impact people who live in heavily policed neighborhoods, people who are homeless, and people police claim to regard as \u201csuspicious\u201d for whatever reason\u2014sometimes solely because of their race. Damian\u2019s Story Damian Williams related his story to us as follows: In 2016, Damian and his girlfriend were living out of his car in Houston and trying to make ends meet. He said, \u201cWe were just working [all the time]. I was going to work during the day; she goes to work at nighttime. It was hectic, it was hard,", + " but it was life.\u201d They had just been approved to rent an apartment when Damian was pulled over for failure to signal. The officer said he smelled marijuana, and while Damian waited in handcuffs, he ransacked the car for 45 minutes, tearing through their bags, throwing their belongings on the ground. The officer finally emerged with half of a pill, and no marijuana. Damian said he did not know where the half-pill came from and thought it was a joke at first, but the officer told him it was a felony. Damian was taken to booking and charged with felony possession of Ecstasy. Damian appeared before a judge at 3 or 4 a.m.", + " and his girlfriend bonded him out the next morning. She had rented a hotel room, because the car they used to sleep in had been impounded. He got out of jail before the buses ran, so he took a taxi straight to Walmart to buy clothes and soap because everything he owned was in his impounded car. Then he went to the hotel room to lie down for half an hour, before he had to catch the bus back to court. He said that all the money they lost on the impoundment, bond, and hotel meant they were no longer able to rent the apartment for which they had been approved. \u201cIt\u2019s making me feel a little paranoid every time I see a police officer\u2026. I didn\u2019t think I was doing nothing then,", + " and then I was put in jail and am paying all this money,\u201d he said. On his girlfriend\u2019s urging, Damian cut off his dreadlocks while out on bond and started dressing differently. He said appearance matters to the police. *** Darius\u2019 Story Darius Mitchell, a Black man in his 30s, said he does not use drugs. From Darius and many other interviewees, we heard a similar story: Police stop a Black man walking or driving in a \u201cbad\u201d neighborhood, citing a minor and sometimes pretextual reason; they treat him as if he is a suspected drug dealer and insist on searching his person or his car without first obtaining consent;", + " they find a small amount of drugs and arrest him for possession; and his life is put into upheaval by a prosecution. Darius recounted his arrest to us as follows: Late one night in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, an officer pulled Darius over as he was leaving his child\u2019s mother\u2019s house. The officer said he had been speeding. When Darius replied that he certainly had not, the officer said he smelled marijuana. He asked whether he could search, and Darius said no. Another officer and canine came and searched his car anyway. They yelled, \u201cWhere are the pounds?\u201d suggesting he was a marijuana dealer. The officers eventually found a pill bottle in the glove compartment of Darius\u2019 car,", + " with his child\u2019s mother\u2019s name on it. Darius said that he had driven her to the emergency room after an accident, and she had been prescribed hydrocodone, which she forgot in the car. The police kept him in their vehicle for an hour as they discussed what to do. When they eventually took him in, he was prosecuted for possession of hydrocodone, his first felony charge. The prosecutor filed charges and took the case all the way to a verdict, despite Darius\u2019 explanation of why he had the pill bottle. Bail was set at $1,000, and Darius was able to bond out. He paid another $2,", + "000 to hire a lawyer. Darius was ultimately acquitted at trial, but even months later he remained in financial debt from his legal fees, was behind in rent and utilities bills, and had lost his cable service, television, furniture, and other comforts. He told us: I was pulling money [from wherever I could]. I had three jobs at the time because I had to pay all these fees, because I still had my own apartment [to pay for and] had to take care of my kids. I was already living paycheck to paycheck. I was making it, but with fines and fees I was really pinching then. I was not paying this to pay that\u2026. It was embarrassing for myself like that.", + " [I had] court fees, lawyer fees, the light bill, rent.\u2026 They took the TV, the sofa set. I couldn\u2019t pay it. [I was acquitted] but I still lost a lot. I still had to go through a lot of misery. Darius added, \u201cOn my record, they show that I didn\u2019t get convicted, but it still shows that I got arrested.\u201d Although Darius \u201cwalked free,\u201d he still feels bound by his criminal justice debt and his arrest record.\n\nV. Aggressive Prosecutions I loved to prosecute. I was the avenging angel. I was doing God\u2019s work.", + " I was getting the riff-raff off the street. Time proved me to be wrong. So I don\u2019t consider those years to be a badge of honor. Guilt. A feeling that I did some things I shouldn\u2019t have done\u2026. I have been on both sides of the fence: the War on Drugs is lost. I\u2019m really disgusted with the continuation of the prosecutions. I\u2019m really disappointed. \u2013Marty Stroud, former assistant district attorney and current defense attorney, Shreveport, Louisiana, February 2016 After police arrest a person, prosecutors have enormous discretion in deciding whether to prosecute, what charges to bring, and how the person will experience the criminal justice system.", + " Because any given set of facts can often support different kinds of charges, if prosecutors decide to prosecute a drug use case, they typically have a range of charges to choose from\u2014from misdemeanor drug paraphernalia to, in most states, felony possession to possession with intent to distribute. The National District Attorneys Association advises, \u201cIn making a charging decision, the prosecutor should keep in mind the power he or she is exercising at that point in time. The prosecutor is making a decision that will have a profound effect on the lives of the person being charged, the person\u2019s family \u2026 and the community as a whole.\u201d Despite these opportunities for discretion, many prosecutors are far too willing to throw the book at people who use drugs,", + " to charge them high and to seek the highest possible sentences. While each prosecutor exercises discretion in his or her own cases, office culture often encourages prosecutors to adopt a default position of charging unreasonably high, instead of applying charges that speak appropriately to the facts of the case or declining to charge at all. As discussed later in this report, in many cases this appears to be a deliberate tactic aimed at coercing defendants into pleading guilty to a lesser offense\u2014an inherently abusive application of prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutor Melba Pearson said she believed prosecutors have an obligation to use their discretion to address racial disparities in the cases police bring them: It\u2019s incumbent upon the state to report to the police that we\u2019re having this disparity.", + " To say, what can we do about this?... It is a policing issue if you\u2019re stopping a kid 15 times a month for a [car window] tint. [I can say,] \u201cDon\u2019t bring me that case. You\u2019re clearly racially profiling.\u201d Where the circumstances of a stop are such that there are issues of constitutionality, when you don\u2019t prosecute, police will notice. When you tacitly approve it, police will continue. In some cases, prosecutors not only fail to confront this problem but compound it by exercising their own discretion in racially biased or at least racially disparate ways, for instance by charging Black defendants with more serious crimes or seeking sentencing enhancements more often when the defendant is Black.", + " Different prosecutors\u2019 offices applying the same state laws may prosecute drug possession differently, revealing another layer of potential arbitrariness in who is prosecuted for drug use. In Florida, among the counties with at least 5,000 possession cases, there were striking disparities in the rate at which prosecutors declined to prosecute drug cases. For example, Polk County prosecutors declined to prosecute 57 percent of drug possession cases brought to them while Broward County prosecutors declined only 13 percent. Going after the Small Stuff We interviewed over 100 people in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and New York who were prosecuted for small quantities of drugs\u2014in some cases, fractions of a gram\u2014that were clearly for personal use.", + " Particularly in Texas and Louisiana, prosecutors did more than simply pursue these cases\u2014our interviewees reported that prosecutors often selected the highest charges available and went after people as hard as they could. Possession Charges in Texas for Fractions of a Gram Perhaps nothing better illustrates the harmful realities of aggressive prosecution and a charge-them-high philosophy than state jail felony cases in Texas. Our data analysis suggests that in 2015, nearly 16,000 people were convicted and sentenced to incarceration for state jail drug possession offenses. State jail felony drug possession is possession of less than one gram of substances containing common drugs such as cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, PCP,", + " oxycodone, MDMA, mescaline, and mushrooms. This means they received a felony conviction and time behind bars for possessing less than a gram of drugs\u2014the weight of less than one-fourth of a sugar packet. Depending on the type of drug, its strength and purity, and the tolerance of the user, one gram may be a handful of doses or even a dose or less of many drugs. Data provided to Human Rights Watch by the Texas Office of Court Administration, and presented here for the first time, shows case outcomes for all felony drug possession cases in Texas courts. Although the data does not differentiate between felony degrees, we can extrapolate based on state law and sentencing options.", + " Based on these extrapolations, the data suggests that in Texas in 2015, over 78 percent of people sentenced to incarceration for felony drug possession in Texas were convicted of a state jail felony. That means some 16,000 people were sentenced to time behind bars for possessing less than one gram of commonly used drugs. Because this figure represents only those sentenced to incarceration, the number of people prosecuted and potentially convicted of state jail felony drug possession is likely thousands more, since Texas law requires that all persons convicted of first time state jail felony drug possession receive probation, and judges may impose probation in other cases as well. The majority of the 30 defendants we interviewed in Texas had substantially less than a gram in their possession when they were arrested:", + " not 0.9 or 0.8 grams, but sometimes 0.2 or 0.02, or even a result from the lab reading \u201ctrace,\u201d meaning that the amount was too small even to be measured. One defense attorney in Dallas told us a client was charged with drug possession in December 2015 for 0.0052 grams of cocaine. To put it into perspective, that is equivalent to the weight of 13 ten-thousandths (.0013) of a sugar packet. The margin of error for the lab that tested it is 0.0038 grams, meaning it could have weighed as little as 0.", + "0014 grams, or 35 hundred-thousandths (0.00035) of a sugar packet. These numbers are almost incomprehensibly small. In Dallas County, the data suggests that nearly 90 percent of people sentenced to jail or prison for possession in 2015 were convicted of possessing less than a gram. In fact, throughout the state, the overwhelming proportion of drug possession defendants were sentenced to incarceration for fractions of a gram: Bill Moore, a 66-year-old man in Dallas, was prosecuted for third degree felony possession (normally one to four grams) for what the laboratory tested as 0.0202 grams of methamphetamines.", + " The charge was enhanced to a third degree offense under the habitual offender law because of his prior possession charges, which he said were all under a gram as well. He spoke to us after he had pled to three years in prison for that 0.0202 grams: \u201cIt was really small; you wouldn\u2019t even believe what I\u2019m talking about. It\u2019s unbelievable that they would even charge me with it.\u201d He added, \u201cIt\u2019s about five dollars\u2019 worth of drugs\u2026. Now think about how many thousands of dollars are wasted over five dollars of that stuff.\u201d In Fort Worth, Hector Ruiz was prosecuted for an empty bag that had heroin residue weighing 0.", + "007 grams. Apparently believing that he deserved aggressive charges, the prosecutor sought enhancements based on Hector\u2019s prior state jail convictions, increasing the high end of his sentencing range from two to ten years. The prosecutor offered him six years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea. Leonard Lewis was charged with third degree felony possession (one to four grams) in Houston for two tobacco cigarettes dipped in PCP. Because he had two prior felonies, he faced 25 years to life in prison. He told us the actual weight of the liquid PCP on the cigarettes was microscopic. Although his attorney convinced the prosecutors to discount the filter, she said they still counted the weight of the rest of both cigarettes (tobacco and paper), resulting in a final weight of 1.", + "4 grams combined. Tobacco in an average cigarette weighs around 0.65 to 1 gram on its own, meaning the trace amount of PCP on Leonard\u2019s two cigarettes must have been nearly weightless. Nevertheless, Leonard ended up receiving four years in prison for it. In Dallas, Gary Baker was charged with 0.1076 grams of cocaine. Although he was arrested for outstanding traffic tickets, he and his attorney said the police searched his car for 45 minutes without finding anything. At his arraignment, the judge informed him he was also charged with possession of a controlled substance. Apparently, after Gary had been taken to booking,", + " an officer reported finding what Gary remembered being described as \u201ccrumbs of crack cocaine\u201d on the car console. Gary told us he did not know where the crumbs came from: \u201cFor the little amount of cocaine they found in my car, if I put it in your car, you wouldn\u2019t even notice it. Some \u2018crumbs\u2019?\u201d The 0.1 grams allegedly discovered by the police is the equivalent in weight of 28 thousandths of a sugar packet. In Granbury, Texas, Matthew Russell was charged with possession of methamphetamines for an amount so small that the laboratory result read only \u201ctrace.\u201d The lab technician did not even assign a fraction of a gram to it.", + " Matthew said the trace amount was recovered from inside his girlfriend\u2019s house, while he was outside. Under the circumstances, he speculated\u2014quite reasonably\u2014that he was charged because of his history of drug use: \u201cI\u2019m not guilty of what they charged me with. I didn\u2019t have any drugs in my possession. Am I guilty of being a drug user? Yes, I am. Did I use drugs the day before? Yes, I did. I admitted that. But I didn\u2019t have any drugs on me. I shouldn\u2019t be here.\u201d The prosecutor sought enhancements because Matthew had prior felony convictions, mostly out-of-state and related to his drug dependence,", + " Matthew told us. Because of his priors, Matthew faced 2 to 20 years for this trace amount. The prosecutor did not have to seek these enhancements. He also could have offered Matthew a gentler plea deal. Instead, he offered a 3-year discount off the statutory maximum in exchange for a guilty plea: 17 years for a trace case. Matthew refused and insisted on his right to trial. After 21 months of pretrial detention, Matthew finally went to trial in August 2016. A jury convicted him of possessing a trace amount of methamphetamines and sentenced him to 15 years in prison. Explaining why prosecutors pursue so many state jail possession cases,", + " Galveston prosecutor Chris Henderson told us, \u201cThe idea behind it is that we want to prevent the bigger cases that may come down the line\u2026. So we want to try to get to those people early. We want to prevent the murder in a drug deal gone wrong, theft, child endangerment, the larger cases\u2026. If we decided not to prosecute small drug cases, we\u2019d see situations like that more often.\u201d However, we are aware of no empirical evidence that low-level drug possession defendants would otherwise go on to commit violent crimes such as murder, and the theft and child endangerment cases can be addressed with the laws that criminalize them.", + " When we asked him whether he thought state jail prosecutions were working to stop crime, he added, \u201cNo, I don\u2019t think so.\u201d Paraphernalia Charged as Possession In a handful of cases we investigated in Texas and Louisiana, defendants had drug paraphernalia, such as pipes, straws, syringes, or even empty baggies, in their possession when they were confronted by the police. But instead of simply charging them with misdemeanor drug paraphernalia\u2014or letting them go\u2014the police arrested them for drug possession because of the residue or trace amount of drugs left in or on the paraphernalia. And rather than questioning the utility of those arrests,", + " prosecutors formally charged and prosecuted the defendants for drug possession. Former District Attorney Paul Carmouche explained that the police typically make the initial decision to charge paraphernalia as possession, but that they have discretion not to arrest in those cases at all: \u201cIf it were good cops \u2026 they would say, \u2018This is BS, we\u2019re not going to do that.\u2019 So, residue \u2026 I don\u2019t think it ought to be charged. The problem for the DA\u2019s office is, it\u2019s going to come in as a possession of cocaine [because] the police are always going to charge the most serious under the facts of the case.\u201d In such scenarios,", + " the prosecutor still has the authority to reduce the charges, or to dismiss the case altogether. Yet in practice prosecutors often do not deviate in their charges from what is listed on the police report. For example, our data shows that in 93 percent of all drug use/possession cases that were filed in Florida, prosecutors did not deviate from the police arrest charge. In Miami, where drug possession carries up to five years in prison, Melba Pearson told us, [As to] residue prosecutions, it\u2019s ridiculous to potentially incarcerate for five years when you don\u2019t even have the substance on you. The theory is you just smoked it,", + " but we don\u2019t know that\u2019s necessarily true. When you don\u2019t even have it in your possession, to charge it as a felony, the punishment doesn\u2019t fit the crime. It\u2019s a bad use of resources. Prosecutors are overburdened and resources are better directed to more serious crime. Enforcing residue cases is a philosophy reflective of \u201clock everyone up.\u2019\u2019 The consequences of that philosophy play out in terms of human lives. In St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, District Defender John Lindner told us he was still seeing residue cases where needles were charged as heroin possession, which in the state carries a minimum of four years and up to ten years in prison.", + " For example, Amanda Price and her friend were arrested for a needle in St. Tammany Parish. After she had spent two months in pretrial detention, Amanda\u2019s charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, but only after her friend (and co-defendant) said the needle was his and took the heroin possession conviction himself. Prosecutors have even pursued felony indictments and accepted guilty pleas for drug possession in the absence of any evidence. Jason Gaines said he was arrested in Granbury, Texas, for having one syringe cap in his pocket and three unused needles near him, one of which was missing a cap. He said after he had been handcuffed,", + " the police asked if he used meth, and he said yes. According to his attorney, the lab report showed that the syringes were never actually tested, and no meth was found on Jason\u2019s person. On these facts, the prosecutor should not have charged Jason at all; if the needles were unused, there was no real evidence he had committed any crime, only that he might eventually inject drugs sometime in the future\u2014and that he was preparing to do so safely with clean needles. But even if the prosecutor insisted on charging Jason, he could have charged misdemeanor drug paraphernalia. Instead, the prosecutor pursued a felony charge and 89 days after Jason was arrested\u2014one day short of the maximum 90 days Texas prosecutors have to obtain a felony indictment\u2014Jason was indicted for his first felony:", + " possession of methamphetamines. He said: I was thinking, I told them I was a meth user, which explains why on the indictment it came back methamphetamine. If I were to have told them heroin, it makes me think my indictment would have said heroin, because the needles were brand new; there is no way they could have tested for methamphetamine. Jason pled to four years\u2019 probation on the same day the indictment was read to him in court, before he knew that the lab had never performed a drug test. Jason ultimately had his probation revoked for failure to report to his probation officer, and he pled to 20 months in a Texas state jail facility.", + " Alyssa Burns was arrested in Houston for a meth pipe and charged with drug possession, her first felony. She said police performed a field test on the pipe, pouring a liquid inside that turned blue to show residue. Trace cases need to be reevaluated. If you\u2019re being charged with a.01 for a controlled substance, the fact that it turned blue, even if there\u2019s nothing in it, that\u2019s an empty baggie, that\u2019s an empty pipe. There used to be something in it. They are ruining people\u2019s lives over it. In Galveston, Breanna Wheeler\u2019s lawyer said she waited 79 minutes while officers called a canine unit and searched the car in which she was a passenger.", + " Breanna told us they found an empty plastic bag under her seat which they alleged belonged to her and had methamphetamine residue on it. After a period of pretrial detention because she could not afford bail, Breanna, a single mother, pled to her first felony conviction and time served so she could return home to her young daughter. In Houston, Nicole Bishop was charged with two counts of felony possession for heroin residue in an empty baggie and cocaine residue in a plastic straw. The charges meant she was separated from her three children, including her breastfeeding baby. She had been in pretrial detention for two months already when we interviewed her in March 2016.", + " Miami Judge Dennis Murphy told us judges can take an active role to ensure defendants are not charged with possession for mere drug paraphernalia: There\u2019s so much space for judicial discretion. The police and SA\u2019s [State Attorney\u2019s] office will typically arrest for residue and charge for paraphernalia and possession. When a defendant is arraigned in my division and the lab report says merely residue, the defendant is invited to [move to] dismiss the possession [charge]\u2026. So I dismiss the possession and let them plead to paraphernalia. Despite case law from the Third District [Court of Appeal] saying [residue] is still possession,", + " I disagree. Medications Made into Felonies A number of interviewees were charged with felony drug possession for medications for which they could not provide the prescription. Some interviewees said they were prescribed the medication in question but had allowed the prescription to lapse. Others had a partner\u2019s or friend\u2019s medication in their possession when they were arrested. None of them were formally accused of dealing or committing fraud in obtaining the medications. And none of them felt they should be considered criminals simply for possessing pills many other people in the United States keep in their medicine cabinets. Possession of certain prescription medications without evidence of the prescription is criminalized, sometimes at the felony level,", + " in most states. Although this may derive from a legislative intent to curb misuse and unlawful sale of prescription medicines, and is particularly relevant today with respect to prescription painkillers, its enforcement can be overbroad. Some of the cases we learned about suggest a lack of reasonableness and prosecutorial investigation that might have revealed mitigating facts, where prosecutors failed to exercise discretion to decline cases or to seek lesser charges and instead pursued cases aggressively. Defendants we met were prosecuted with felony charges for possession of commonly prescribed medications including Adderall, Vyvanse, Xanax, and Klonopin. Anita Robinson, 25, was charged with felony drug possession in Houston for seven Adderall pills.", + " She said that, from the prosecutor\u2019s perspective, \u201cit doesn\u2019t matter that it\u2019s Adderall. [They treat it] like it could be meth or cocaine or whatever; it\u2019s just classified with those same drugs.\u201d Furthermore, in some Texas cases we examined in March 2016, prosecutors sought sentencing enhancements for these offenses or chose to charge according to the total weight of the pills, rather than the strength of the medication within them. For example, Adderall pills come in 5 to 30 mg strengths, but because the prosecutor considered the entire weight of the pills, George Morris\u2019 possession of seven 20 mg strength Adderall pills translated into a third degree felony under Texas law.", + " George Morris\u2019 story George Morris told us his story as follows: When he was 17 years old, George was convicted of burglary. George said he entered the open window of a friend who owed him money and took a PlayStation 2, and that he was prosecuted for burglary even though his friend\u2019s mother tried to get the charges dropped. He served three years in prison. Ten years later, George was arrested in The Colony, Texas, when police found seven 20 mg Adderall pills in his car. George told us the pills were prescribed to his girlfriend. Because of his prior felony, he faced up to 20 years in prison for possession of the seven pills,", + " despite the fact that the combined strength of the pills was a mere 0.14 grams. Prosecutors chose to enhance George\u2019s charge with the PlayStation 2 conviction so that he faced up to 20 years for the pills. They ultimately offered him six years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea. Although six years is significantly less than a possible 20, it is a very long time from any other perspective and is a grossly disproportionate punishment for George\u2019s \u201ccrime.\u201d When he spoke to us, George was out on bond and had not decided whether to take the offer, but he said this case had already destroyed his life. He said it caused him to go into a depression for which he was hospitalized.", + " His relationship with his girlfriend of 12 years was strained and eventually ended. His depression was so severe that he left his job and lost his house. He told us, \u201cWhen I caught that charge, it took so much out of me because I was not doing anything to break the law, not doing anything to affect or hurt anyone around me\u2026. Six years of your life \u2026 for seven Adderall pills.\u201d Before being prosecuted, George said he had a small grass-cutting and construction business; he woke up every day at 8 a.m. and worked all day. He told us everybody knew they could make a little money on the side if they sold drugs but that he refused to do so:", + " I made a vow to God \u2026 I am not going to have these drugs; I am not going to sell no drugs; I am not going to do any drugs. I am going to focus on what I need to focus on, and that is cutting green grass and building fences. So that\u2019s what I did\u2026. But I gave up on [that] when I caught that case. I was just like, there\u2019s no point in living.... I stay in my room and I sleep. We met many others like George. One of them was Amit Goel, a 19-year-old college sophomore in Dallas who had been prescribed Adderall since high school but said that he let his prescription run out the previous month.", + " He was arrested with eight pills of Adderall and Vyvanse, another ADHD medication, and was facing a third degree felony for drug possession, which carries two to ten years in prison. He told us he got his prescription renewed the month after his arrest, but the prosecutor continued to pursue felony charges, on what would be Amit\u2019s first felony conviction. Months after our visit to Texas, practitioners told us it had been discovered that possession of Adderall and Vyvanse was \u201cmistakenly\u201d no longer a felony offense, due to the \u201cunintended consequences\u201d of a Texas bill passed in 2015. According to the Texas District and County Attorneys Association,", + " \u201cThe upshot of all this is that after September 1, 2015, most (all?) Adderall and Vyvanse crimes became misdemeanors, not felonies.\u201d The three Texas cases above were all being prosecuted as felonies in March. In Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Darius Mitchell, profiled in section IV, was charged with his first felony for hydrocodone pills he said his son\u2019s mother had left in his car after their visit to the Emergency Room. In Shreveport, Glenda Hughes pled guilty to her first felony for possession of pills that she said were her husband\u2019s. She told us she was arrested in her nightgown,", + " without shoes, having run out the door with her purse after her husband beat her. She said that her husband was prescribed Klonopin and, because he would misuse them, she carried them for him to help him comply with the prescribed dosage. Glenda told us her husband said the pills were his and tried to explain things to the prosecutor. Charging Distribution in Possession Cases In all four states we visited, some defendants were arrested in possession of drugs that they said were for their own use, but prosecutors chose to charge distribution or possession with intent to distribute (PWID)\u2014without making any effort, as far as defendants or their lawyers could tell,", + " to investigate whether the drugs were in fact for personal use. Pursuing distribution charges for facts supporting simple possession is yet another example of prosecutors\u2019 charging as aggressively as possible. A Caddo Parish defense attorney summed up what many had told us in all four states we visited: \u201cThey overbill the PWID charges. Anything approaching the weight [of distribution], anything with baggies. [Because] if the charge is PWID, it\u2019s a higher bond.\u201d Because a higher bond means defendants are more likely to have to wait in jail until their case is disposed, and because PWID carries longer sentences, many interviewees felt the charge was meant to force their hands so they would accept a plea offer on simple possession,", + " a topic explored in more depth in the next section. In most states, PWID is usually proved based on circumstantial evidence such as the presence of individually packaged bags; scales, ledgers, or records of sales; and, more problematically, the presence of cash. In some states, drug quantity alone is presumptive evidence of possession with intent to distribute or of distribution. In Florida, possession over certain thresholds is considered drug trafficking. Although individually packaged bags, scales, ledgers, and sales records may be sound evidence of distribution in some cases, cash or quantity alone is problematic. As Judge Murphy told us in Miami, \u201cMore than half the time,", + " those PWIDs [should] become possession charges.... You get people on payday [so they have cash]. There goes your rent check, your food check.\u201d Using the presence of cash as evidence of distribution is flawed, both as a matter of evidence and as a matter of fairness. It is clearly not illegal to carry cash; without more, a person\u2019s possession of significant sums in cash is at best extremely dubious evidence of criminal activity of any kind. At worst, it is a flimsy pretext to bolster charges that lack real evidence to support them. In fact, poor people may be more likely to carry cash on them, not because they are drug dealers but because they are less likely to maintain a bank account.", + " A large percentage of poor people are unbanked (having no bank account) or underbanked (relying more heavily on alternative financial providers than on their bank). Black and Latino households are significantly more likely to be unbanked or underbanked than white households. In a case in Shreveport, a defendant and his attorney reported that prosecutors used the fact that the defendant had $800 cash on him to increase the charges against him to include distribution of drugs, and that they did so even after he showed them he had just cashed a check from an insurance claim from a car accident. David Ross said he was arrested in 2013 with a couple of grams of methamphetamines and eight to ten Percocet pills.", + " Although there was no evidence of actual dealing, he was charged with two separate counts of distribution because he had drugs and money on him. In the courtroom, David told us, the prosecutor offered to lower the charges to possession if he took 10 years in prison\u20145 on each charge, run consecutively. David accepted on the spot, and the police kept his $800 through civil forfeiture. He said: [My cases were] always possession, because I\u2019ve had a drug problem since I was 16 or 17 years old\u2026. They\u2019re going to say you\u2019re distributing when they know you\u2019re not, so that when it comes to make a deal with you they will drop it down to simple possession and max you out.", + " And you\u2019re happy to take it, as you\u2019d rather do 5 than 30. In addition to the problems of relying solely on cash as evidence, a number of interviewees argued it is a mistake to assume a larger quantity of drugs means the person is necessarily distributing. They said they buy a larger amount because it is cheaper and so that they do not need to return so frequently to their dealer, which can be dangerous and intimidating. Carla James was arrested in Dallas in 2010 for possession of seven grams of methamphetamines. Although she said the police wrote it up as drug possession, she was indicted on distribution charges because of the quantity.", + " But she explained the meth was for personal use: I bought a large quantity because I didn\u2019t like going to the dope house\u2026. You get more for your money when you get a higher amount\u2026. It\u2019s just like going to the grocery store\u2026. You know you need a gallon of milk to make it to Friday. A gallon costs $2.50, and a half gallon costs $1.75. Why would you buy the half gallon, knowing it\u2019s only going to last half of the week, when the full gallon is only [75 cents] more? Why buy a gram for $100 when you could buy 7 for $300?", + " [189] Where judges call foul, some prosecutors amend the charge down to possession. In Caddo Parish, Louisiana, Judge Craig Marcotte said he had intervened in this way: Now, have I seen cases charged with possession with intent when they should have been possession? Sure. You can say this looks like possession to me, not possession with intent, which I have done before. A lot of the times, they say, \u201cOkay, judge\u201d [and they downgrade the charge]. You can just tell \u2026 you know, having done this for so long, having seen thousands and thousands of these cases.\n\nVI. Pretrial Detention and the False Choice of a Plea Deal Bail is very wrong here,", + " very wrong. It\u2019s always too high. That causes at least two problems that I see. Number one, it causes more people to have to stay in jail. [Number two,] when people are sitting in jail they\u2019re much more prone to say, \u201cWell, I\u2019ll plead because I\u2019ll get out.\u201d\u2026 [But] they shouldn\u2019t have been there in the first place. They should have had an unsecured promise to come to court. Because [pleading] is going to come to haunt you down the line. \u2015Paul Carmouche, former district attorney for Caddo Parish, Louisiana, February 2016 Pretrial detention in drug cases contributes significantly to soaring jail and prison admissions and the standing incarcerated population in the United States.", + " In 2014, approximately 64,000 people per day were detained pretrial for drug possession, many of them in jail solely because they could not afford to post bail. As detailed in this section, this fact gives prosecutors significant leverage to coerce plea deals. Pretrial detention, an inherently negative experience, also separates many defendants from their families and jobs and threatens lasting harm or disruption to their lives. To avoid all of this\u2014or because long sentences otherwise hang over their head if they lose at trial\u2014many defendants plead guilty simply to secure their release, in cases where they might otherwise want to go to trial. Pretrial Detention During the pretrial stages of a criminal case,", + " judges can either release defendants on their own recognizance or set a money bond (also known as bail). Release on own recognizance (ROR), also known as a personal recognizance (PR) bond, permits someone to be released until the next court date simply on a promise to appear; they must pay the specified bond amount if they fail to do so. For people we interviewed in Texas and Louisiana, a PR bond was not offered, even though it was statutorily available to the judge. Instead, bail was set at thousands of dollars. Defendants who cannot afford to pay the full bail amount often use a bondsman instead.", + " Under this scheme, defendants pay a fee to a private bondsman company (sometimes 10 to 13 percent of the total bail amount), and the bondsman then takes on the obligation to ensure their reappearance. Defendants never receive the bondsman\u2019s payment back, so the system has the effect of imposing financial costs on low-income defendants that people who possess the independent means to post bail do not incur. If defendants lack the financial resources to post bail, either through a bondsman or on their own, they remain incarcerated either until they come up with the money or until case disposition. That effect is wide-reaching. In the two states for which we received court data containing attorney information,", + " the majority of drug possession defendants were indigent\u2014in other words, poor enough that they qualified for court-appointed counsel. In Florida, 64 percent of felony drug possession defendants relied on court-appointed rather than retained counsel. In Alabama, the rate was 70 percent, including marijuana as well as felony drug possession. And these numbers are conservative, because indigent defendants who qualify for court-appointed counsel may still choose to sacrifice other resources and needs to pay for an attorney. High rates of pretrial detention reflect the reality that judges set bail so high that many defendants cannot afford it. In 2009, the most recent year for which the US Department of Justice has published data,", + " 34 percent of possession defendants were detained pretrial in the 75 largest counties. Nearly all of those detained pretrial (91.4 percent) were held on bail, meaning that if they had had the means to pay, they would have been released.[197] That same year, possession defendants in the 75 largest counties had an average bail of $24,000. Because the higher the bail, the more likely someone will not be able to afford it, the average bail for those detained was even higher. For those defendants, the average was $39,900. The money bail system is premised on the idea that defendants will pay to get out of jail and that,", + " if the amount is high enough, they will return to court to get their money back. In theory, the principal goal is to ensure that defendants return: in other words, to prevent flight. Yet data shows that drug possession defendants released pretrial do come back to court. Human Rights Watch has previously examined the myth that released defendants evade justice in New York. Failure to appear rates are similarly low in other jurisdictions and for drug possession specifically. In the 75 largest US counties in 2009, 78 percent of people charged with possession and released pretrial made all their appearances in court; another 18 percent returned to court after their missed appearance(s). This means that in total 96 percent of all possession defendants ultimately came back to court.", + " Although the data does not indicate whether these defendants posted bail or were released on their own recognizance, it certainly counsels in favor of affordable bond that enables release. When judges set bond, the amount should be individually tailored, reflecting an individualized determination not only of the flight risk posed by a particular defendant but also of that person\u2019s ability to pay. But in many jurisdictions we visited, interviewees said judges did not take their individual circumstances into account. In St. Tammany Parish, interviewees said their bonds were set even before they had met their appointed counsel, without a formal hearing. In a number of jurisdictions in Louisiana,", + " bond is routinely set high, and it is up to the defense counsel to file a motion to reduce bond, which is then scheduled for a hearing sometime later. For low-income defendants unable to pay a high bond, this means they remain detained at least until the bond is reduced some weeks later. In Texas and Louisiana, we interviewed approximately 30 defendants who could not afford the bondsman amount, let alone their full bail, and as a result were forced to remain in pretrial detention until their case was resolved. For some people, taking a case to trial may mean languishing in detention for over a year. Even for those ready to enter a plea deal,", + " many had to spend months in detention before the prosecutor made an offer. In 2009, the median time between arrest and adjudication for possession defendants in the 75 largest counties was 65 days, which would be spent in jail if a person could not afford bond. For people we interviewed, the wait was often much longer. Jason Gaines was charged with drug possession in Granbury, Texas, and said his bond was set at $7,500. He told us, \u201cIt was important to bond out because I didn\u2019t want to be stuck in here forever. It takes at least three months to go to court for your first offer.\u201d In our jail interviews in Texas and Louisiana,", + " some pretrial detainees were waiting in jail while their attorneys investigated the case and filed pretrial motions, so that if they were going to consider pleading guilty, they could do so with a better sense of the strengths and weaknesses of their case. Other interviewees remained in pretrial detention because they wanted to go to trial or because they were hoping to get a better offer from the prosecutor. Some said they ultimately gave up, because fighting a case\u2014either at trial or through pretrial motions such as for suppression of evidence\u2014meant waiting too many months. Delays can be caused by overburdened courts and public defender systems, laboratory testing,", + " and lack of communication between offices. When we met him, Matthew Russell had been waiting in pretrial detention for 16 months to take his \u201ctrace\u201d possession case to trial. He said, \u201c[If I didn\u2019t have priors,] I\u2019d be looking at 24 months. I\u2019ve done 16 [pretrial]\u2026. I spent my 39th birthday here, my 40th birthday here in this jail \u2026 waiting to go to trial.\u201d Bond Schedules In Texas jurisdictions we visited, bail was set according to bond schedules that provided presumptive amounts of bail according to the charge, sometimes with enhancements for criminal history, but regardless of ability to pay.", + " As a one-size-fits-all model, bond schedules deprive defendants of individualized determinations. In litigation, the US has emphasized that it would be unconstitutional for detention to depend solely on a person\u2019s ability to pay the schedule amount. Yet the use of bond schedules is prevalent nationwide. A 2009 study of the 112 most populous counties found that 64 percent of those jurisdictions relied on them. Presumptive bail amounts may also vary greatly between jurisdictions within a state, increasing the arbitrariness and inequality of the practice. For example, the ACLU of California reported in 2012 that there were 58 different bond schedules in use across the state.", + " For simple drug possession, presumptive bail amounts were $5,000 in Fresno and Sacramento, $10,000 in Alameda and Los Angeles, and $25,000 in San Bernardino and Tulare. Although, in theory, judges can depart from the schedule in individual cases, defense attorneys told us that as a matter of practice they rarely do. High bonds also mean that some people we spoke with were detained pretrial even though they were only facing probation post-conviction. In Texas, a first offense state jail felony requires mandatory probation if the person is convicted. Yet many people are detained pretrial, sometimes even for months, before they are convicted and sentenced to probation.", + " This means that someone ends up doing jail time in a case for which the legislature, judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney all agree any period of incarceration as a form of punishment is unwarranted. Waiting on Charges in Louisiana Defense attorneys in Louisiana told us defendants experienced long waits in detention before the prosecutor charged them through a formal bill of information or indictment. Under international human rights law, authorities cannot hold individuals for extended periods without charge; to do so amounts to arbitrary detention. The US Supreme Court has held that within 48 hours of arrest, a judge or magistrate must make a probable cause determination that the detainee has committed some crime. But beyond the 48-hour rule,", + " the prosecutor has still more time to decide which charges to bring\u2014the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on how long this period may be, and jurisdictions vary widely in how they regulate it. Under Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure article 701, the district attorney\u2019s (DA) office has 60 days to \u201caccept\u201d the charges in the police report for a felony defendant detained pretrial\u2014far in excess of the period many other US states allow. That means for two months, a defendant who cannot afford bond, and who has not been formally charged\u2014let alone convicted\u2014of any crime, is forced to wait in jail without even knowing the charges against him or her.", + " Judge Calvin Johnson told us, \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t be arresting a person on January 1 and charging him in March. I mean that just shouldn\u2019t be.\u201d[213] In St. Tammany and Calcasieu Parishes, public defenders told us that prosecutors regularly would not file charges within the mandatory 60 days, and were routinely granted extensions of time by the court\u2014typically another 30 days\u2014to make their charging decision. Defendants and practitioners call this period of pretrial detention \u201cdoing DA time.\u201d Studies show that case outcomes for those fighting their charges from outside of jail are across the board more favorable than for those who are detained pretrial.", + " According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the 75 largest counties in 2009, fewer than 60 percent of defendants charged with drug offenses were convicted if they were released pretrial; however, close to 80 percent of those detained were convicted. Analyzing 60,000 cases in Kentucky from 2009 and 2010, the Arnold Foundation found that defendants detained for the entire pretrial period were over four times more likely to receive a jail sentence and over three times more likely to receive a prison sentence than those released at some point pretrial. Sentences were nearly three times as long for defendants sentenced to jail and more than twice as long for those sentenced to prison than defendants released pretrial.", + " One of the main reasons pretrial detention correlates with worse case outcomes is that detainees may be more likely to plead guilty when they are already in jail. In fact, our research suggests that prosecutors in some jurisdictions seek and judges set bail at an amount they expect defendants will not be able to pay in order to ensure they end up in pretrial detention, which makes them likely to accept a plea deal faster. Joyce Briggs told us, \u201cThey hold you until you plead. That impacts people\u2019s decision to plead. It impacts mine. I know I\u2019m not going to get more than three years and I\u2019ve already done a half a year, so\u2014that\u2019s how our minds work.\u201d Conditioning loss of liberty on ability to pay infringes on the right to equality under the law and amounts to wealth discrimination.", + " Human rights law requires that pretrial restrictions be consistent with the right to liberty, the presumption of innocence, and the right to equality under the law. Pretrial detention imposed on criminal defendants accused of drug possession solely because they cannot afford bail is inconsistent with those rights. The stress and suffering interviewees charged with drug possession endured in detention simply because of their low-income status is unfair, unnecessary, and inconsistent with human rights. Coerced Guilty Pleas They forced me. I mean there\u2019s no doubt in my mind they forced me. \u2015David Ross, on pleading guilty to drug possession in Caddo Parish, Louisiana Like all criminal defendants in the United States,", + " people charged with drug possession have a right to trial by jury. In practice, however, jury trials are exceedingly rare, with the majority of defendants at the state and federal levels\u2014across all categories of crime\u2014resolving their cases through guilty pleas. In 2009, between 99 and 100 percent of individuals convicted of drug possession in the 75 largest counties nationwide pled guilty. In Texas, approximately 97 percent of all felony possession convictions between September 2010 and January 2016 were obtained by a guilty plea. In Florida, more than nine out of every ten people facing drug possession charges in court (both misdemeanor and felony)", + " between 2010 and 2015 pled guilty.[223] Only 1 percent of all drug possession defendants in the state went to trial.[224] In New York, such trials were almost nonexistent: 99.8 percent of the 143,986 adults convicted of drug possession between 2010 and 2015 accepted plea deals.[225] For scores of individuals interviewed for this report, the right to a jury trial was effectively meaningless. For them, the idea of a trial was more of a threat than a right, often because it meant further pretrial incarceration until trial and/or a \u201ctrial penalty\u201d in the form of a substantially longer sentence if they exercised that right and lost.", + " Part of the problem is that the criminal justice system is overburdened, which means not only that prosecutors and judges are busy, but also that public defenders\u2014who are often substantially underfunded\u2014do not have sufficient time and resources to devote to each case, disparately impacting poor defendants, who make up the majority of those charged with drug possession. So long as dockets remain as crowded as they are today, there will be a powerful incentive for prosecutors to secure pleas in as many cases as possible\u2014including by strong-arm means. As explained by former chief prosecutor Paul Carmouche, \u201cIf every defendant said, \u2018Hey, we\u2019re going to trial,\u2019 then the system stops.", + " It would be jammed up. You got to plead.\u201d According to one Texas prosecutor, prosecutors feel pressure to move cases quickly, and the pressure sometimes comes from judges: It\u2019s so unfair: Everybody in the criminal justice system knows that if a person can\u2019t bond out he\u2019s more likely to plead and you\u2019ll have your case moved\u2026. Judges will campaign on efficiency [and] in order to do that, to say \u201cI have the smallest docket of all judges,\u201d they force the prosecutors to plead more cases and force the defendants to plead to them, by issuing high bonds and refusing to lower them.\u2026 That external pressure feeds the lock-them-up system.", + " A Crowded Court Docket\u2014Full of Drug Possession Cases Some of the system \u201cjam\u201d is attributable to the large volume of drug possession cases prosecuted and disposed of by state courts. For example, from September 2010 through January 2016, Texas courts disposed of 893,439 drug cases (misdemeanors and felonies). Of all these drug cases, 78 percent (almost 700,000 cases) were for simple possession. Among felony drug cases, 81 percent were for possession. More than half of Texas\u2019 drug cases during this period were misdemeanor cases (such as possession of marijuana or drug paraphernalia). Three quarters of all misdemeanor drug cases in the state were for marijuana possession only.", + " In other words, there were approximately 371,000 marijuana possession cases prosecuted and disposed of in a little over five years. In total, drug possession cases accounted for over 15 percent of all county and district court criminal dockets in Texas. In Florida, drug possession was the most serious charge in about 14 percent of all cases filed by prosecutors in county or district court. There is nothing inherently wrong with plea deals as long as the plea process is not coercive. Coercion arises when prosecutors leverage the threat of an egregiously long sentence to induce defendants to plead guilty to a lesser one, or when unreasonably high bail means that the only way to escape lengthy pretrial detention is to plead to probation,", + " time served, or relatively short incarceration. Before a judge accepts the defendant\u2019s guilty plea, the judge must perform a \u201cplea colloquy\u201d with the defendant\u2014a series of questions to defendants to ensure they are knowingly and voluntarily waiving their right to a jury trial. Among those questions is some version of the following, which is constitutionally required in every state and federal system: \u201cHas anyone forced or threatened you to plead guilty, or offered you any promises other than what\u2019s contained in your plea agreement?\u201d To a number of interviewees, this felt disingenuous. They knew they had to answer \u201cno\u201d to have their plea accepted,", + " but said it was precisely a combination of coercion, threats, and promises that led them to plead. Oscar Washington told us, \u201cI remember everything of what the judge said [in] the plea [colloquy]. I felt like my back was against the wall, like the judge had me by the neck when he said, \u2018Did anyone force you to take this plea?\u2019 I couldn\u2019t say yes.\u201d Interviewees in every jurisdiction we visited said they pled because the cost to their lives of waiting for trial in jail, or of risking the unreasonably steep penalties prosecutors threatened them with should they go to trial and lose, was too high.", + " Pressuring Defendants with \u201cExploding Offers\u201d In many cases we examined in Louisiana and Texas, defendants were pressured into pleading guilty before they had seen the evidence against them or knew anything about the strength of the prosecutor\u2019s case. In several jurisdictions, defense attorneys told us that prosecutors would sometimes make an \u201cexploding offer\u201d\u2014a plea deal that was available only if the defendant took it immediately, sometimes the first time the person appeared in court. In other cases, the offer would be off the table if the defendant filed any pretrial motions, for example a motion to suppress. In Dallas, defense attorneys said plea offers were good only until grand jury indictment,", + " which is the formal charging document. In Slidell, Louisiana, Joel Cunningham, a Navy veteran, said he pled to 15 years in prison at his 2012 arraignment for possession of marijuana and possession of one gram of cocaine with intent to distribute. At the time he pled, he said he had not seen the evidence against him; it was his first day in court, when the charges are read against a defendant. \u201cThe bill of information was filed. Eight days later I was arraigned. Two hours later I pled. The 15-year deal would come off the table if I didn\u2019t plead immediately.\u201d Now that Joel had seen the evidence,", + " he told us he would have challenged it with pretrial motions. In Caddo Parish, Louisiana, David Ross pled to 10 years for two possession charges. He said he had less than 10 minutes to accept the prosecutor\u2019s offer: \u201cThey made me take 10 years that day, or they would have taken me to trial [on distribution] and I would have got a life sentence \u2026 because if you lose in Caddo Parish at trial, you\u2019re getting a life sentence.\u201d These practices add to the pressures, threats, and promises that lead defendants to plead guilty when they might otherwise exercise their right to require the government to prove its case.", + " Pleading to Get Out of Jail For drug possession defendants with little to no criminal history, or in relatively minor cases, prosecutors in each state we visited often made offers of probation or relatively short incarceration terms. A short sentence may effectively mean \u201ctime served,\u201d since defendants usually get credit against their sentence for time spent in pretrial detention. Numerous defendants recounted being faced with a choice: fight the case and stay in jail, or take a conviction and walk out the door with their family. A Texas prosecutor told us: Dangling probation out there when a defendant can\u2019t afford to bond out is something prosecutors do to plead cases out. Especially in weaker cases,", + " for example when there are multiple people in the car, or identity is an issue; you might dangle probation out there just to get a conviction and if the person screws up on probation you can go back and get the punishment you wanted. That\u2019s the reality, because the vast majority of people are not going to be successful on probation. Numerous defense attorneys told us that they had counseled their clients on the risks of taking a conviction, the onerous conditions of probation, and/or the strength of their case should they choose to fight it and not take a plea. Moreover, if they pled to a felony, it could serve as a predicate for enhancement of a subsequent charge down the road,", + " or an even worse plea coercion. But taking a case to trial until verdict may take months, all of which defendants must spend waiting in jail if they cannot afford bond. Their choice is ultimately between the right to a trial and the promise of freedom. John Lindner, District Defender in St. Tammany Parish, summarized the problem: Innocent people plead all the time. Not only here, but nationwide. It\u2019s a matter of, if I stick you in jail, and you\u2019ve been in jail for four or five months, and I come to you, \u201cHey, you can go home today, all you have to say is \u2018yeah,", + " I\u2019m guilty,\u2019 and you get to go home on probation.\u201d You might jump on that. Interviewees explained why it was an obvious choice to plead guilty when they were in detention, although they would have fought their case if they had been on pretrial release: In New York City, Deon Charles told us he pled guilty to possession with intent to distribute cocaine because his daughter had just been born that day: \u201cI never sold drugs \u2026 it was bogus. [But] I didn\u2019t have the funds to afford to fight [and] my daughter was born [that] day\u2026. I pled because I wanted to see my daughter. And when I pled I got to go home.", + " But I lost my job [as an EMT] because of it.\u201d\n\nAlyssa Burns, charged in Houston with residue in a meth pipe, said if she could bond out she would take the case to trial. \u201cI would probably win at trial, but I talked to a girl yesterday and she had been sitting here for 11 months waiting for labs\u2026. I can\u2019t do it. This place is awful. So now I\u2019m just gonna sign for a felony, flush my degree down the toilet and just see what happens.\u201d\n\nBreanna Wheeler, a single mother in Galveston, never showed up to chaperone her 9-year-old daughter\u2019s school trip.", + " She had been arrested the night before with residue on a plastic bag. Against her attorney\u2019s advice, she pled to probation and her first felony conviction. They both said she had a strong case that could be won in pretrial motions, but her attorney had been waiting months for the police records and Breanna needed to return to her daughter. Afterwards, her attorney said, \u201cShe\u2019s home with her kid, but she\u2019s a felon.\u201d\n\nAlso in Galveston, Jack Hoffman was detained pretrial for meth possession. He told us, \u201cI don\u2019t have money to bond out\u2026. I don\u2019t want to sign [for this felony], but if it means getting out there to my life and my family,", + " I\u2019ll do whatever it takes\u2026. If I could bond out and still work and support my family, then I would fight it. But from in here? \u2026 It\u2019s kind of a catch-22 situation, damned if you do, damned if you don\u2019t.\u201d Dhu Thompson, a former New Orleans and Caddo Parish prosecutor, warned that a decision to plead to probation, though it seems obvious at the time, may haunt the defendant down the road: Say you have an individual charged with possession of cocaine. But the individual has now been in jail for 25 days and will plead to anything to get out. He comes to court,", + " and the prosecutor offers him a felony plea. Nine out ten times they\u2019re going to take it. [But now] they have that first felony on their record. They can\u2019t vote. They can\u2019t get a job. You know, family may ostracize them. That may create a problem where now you\u2019re a repeat offender because this individual is desperate and does something in a desperate situation. Pleading to Avoid the Trial Penalty Prosecutors wield so much power in the plea system that defendants often have no expectation or hope that they will receive a proportionate sentence if they lose at trial. Many prosecutors use the threat of adding, or the promise of dropping,", + " charges or sentencing enhancements to pressure defendants to give up their rights to trial. Concerned about how a pled-to felony makes clients vulnerable under Louisiana\u2019s harsh habitual offender law, public defender Barksdale Hortenstine, Jr. said, \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how many clients [I\u2019ve had where] at the end of the representation, I\u2019ve told them, \u2018I will buy you the ticket, I will do anything I can, will you please leave this state? You cannot afford the risk involved in living here.\u2019\u201d The Threat of Enhancements In cases we examined in Louisiana and Texas, prosecutors used habitual offender laws to enhance a defendant\u2019s sentence range based on prior convictions and then offered to drop the enhancements in exchange for a guilty plea.", + " This tactic was used\u2014even in cases where defendants had only drug possession priors or other non-violent, low-level convictions such as theft\u2014either to scare them into a plea deal or, when they refused, to penalize them for going to trial. Interviewees in Louisiana and Texas described how prosecutors used fear of enhancements to scare them into accepting plea offers that, in some cases, were horrible \u201cdeals\u201d but that seemed reasonable to them nevertheless in light of the trial penalty they faced as habitual offenders. In the New Orleans Public Defender\u2019s Office, Barksdale Hortenstine, Jr. explained, \u201cThe risk associated with [the habitual offender law]", + " is so high that any rational lawyer has to advise vigorously to take deals that otherwise would seem absurd. So you end up pleading to five years in prison or eight years in prison [for possession]. Those numbers are commonly passed around.\u201d When the Prosecutor, Not the Judge, Selects the Sentence In Louisiana, the habitual offender law provides for mandatory minimums, meaning that the judge typically has no discretion to sentence below them. Mandatory minimums take sentencing authority away from the judge and place it in the hands of prosecutors instead. Judges in Louisiana acknowledged that this meant the prosecutor wields a powerful tool\u2014\u201ca huge hammer,\u201d according to Caddo Parish Judge Marcotte.", + " Numerous government officials in Louisiana told us the habitual offender law is used mostly for drug dealers and not for those charged with simple possession charges, or that it is used for defendants with violent criminal histories or other serious felony priors and \u201cthen the straw that breaks the camel\u2019s back is the possession.\u201d However, we documented cases in Louisiana and also in Texas where prosecutors used the habitual offender law for defendants whose only prior convictions were for drugs, such as Leroy Carter. After suffering an injury while serving in the Navy, Leroy Carter was given a medical discharge and prescribed pain medications. He became dependent on the medications, and eventually he turned to other drugs.", + " Now Leroy is serving 10 years on a plea deal for possession of marijuana and heroin. He pled guilty in 2012 in New Orleans because he was facing 20 years to life in prison if he lost at trial. His priors were all drug convictions: two marijuana possessions in the early 2000s, a heroin possession in 1999, and a marijuana distribution conviction in 1998. When we spoke to him on the phone, we asked how much time he had to talk. He answered, \u201cTen years.\u201d In Texas, defendants told us the habitual offender enhancements made them feel they had no choice but to plead:", + " In Fort Worth, Hector Ruiz faced 25 to life for heroin possession because of his two prior felonies. \u201cIf I lose at trial, they start at 25\u2026. It\u2019s a scare tactic so you don\u2019t go to trial. \u2018You better not go to trial because if you lose, this is what happens! So take the five right now!\u2019 This is not fair.\u201d\n\nIn Granbury, Matthew Russell faced 20 years for a trace amount of methamphetamines. He told us, \u201cI\u2019m so stressed out that some days it almost makes me want to kill myself\u2026. [20 years,] that scares me. And that is what they are made on.", + " They are made on a man\u2019s mental capacity, trying to pervert you by fear. This court system is a game of manipulation.\u201d\n\nDouglas Watson was arrested in Dallas for what field tested as 0.1 gram of heroin and 0.2 grams of meth found inside a pipe. He was not charged with the paraphernalia. Because he had two prior state jail felonies for possession, his sentencing range was enhanced to two to 10 years in prison. In a split second Douglas decided to plead, waiving laboratory testing and grand jury indictment, because the prosecutor offered him two years in prison. Although it is shorter than many of the other sentences we documented,", + " it was still time behind bars and two felony convictions for a minuscule amount of drugs whose weight Douglas did not even have time to challenge.\n\nIn Dallas, Bill Moore, 66, pled to three years in prison because he faced two to 10 years on what the laboratory tested as 0.0202 grams of meth. He noted that after testing a speck that weighed two hundredths of a gram, the prosecution \u201cwouldn\u2019t have had anything left to show as evidence if [I\u2019d] gone to trial. But what if they did, and they\u2019d given me 10 years instead of three? I wouldn\u2019t have any chance of getting out anytime soon that I know of.", + " [I would have been] in my 70s. It\u2019s hard for me to even say that.\u201d Relatively few people test whether the prosecutor and judge will follow through with the trial penalty: nationwide, as described above, between 99 and 100 percent of drug possession defendants plead guilty. But Jennifer and Corey were among the 1 percent who insisted on their right to trial, even in the face of the trial penalty. When they lost, they were sentenced to two decades behind bars, of which Louisiana law required they serve every day. Jennifer\u2019s Story In 2016 in Covington, Louisiana, Jennifer Edwards was charged with heroin possession for a residue amount.", + " The prosecutor made her a plea offer of seven years in prison. Because of her three drug possession priors (for Xanax, cocaine, and Ecstasy), she faced 20 years to life in prison if she refused the offer and lost at trial. With such a high trial penalty, her lawyer encouraged her to take the plea, but Jennifer insisted on her innocence. She told us, \u201cI got about five minutes [to think about the offer]. That\u2019s it\u2026. I asked if I could please have the night to think about it, and they said, \u2018Nope, the jury\u2019s out there, you either taking this deal or you\u2019re going to trial.\u2019\u201d Jennifer took her case to trial,", + " and the jury convicted her. When we spoke to her, she was waiting for the judge to choose a sentence between 20 years and life in prison: I remember when they said I was guilty in the courtroom, the wind was knocked out of me. I went, \u201cThe rest of my life?\u201d I still can\u2019t believe it. All I could think about is that I could never do anything enjoyable in my life again. Never like be in love with someone and be alone with them. Just anything, you know\u2026. I\u2019ll never be able to use a cell phone... take a shower in private, use the bathroom in private. Like all those things,", + " I can never do those things\u2026. I told [my attorney] during trial, no matter what happens, they can keep sticking me in here but they can never convince me what I\u2019m doing is wrong. Jennifer told us that other detainees viewed her case as a cautionary tale: There\u2019s 60 people in my cell, and only one of us has gone to trial. They are afraid to be in my situation. The [prosecutors] threaten everybody. I\u2019ve seen people take 10 years flat, 15 years flat. I don\u2019t even understand it. Ten years flat? Might as well take a chance with the jury.", + " [If everybody went to trial,] I think it would make the negotiating stronger on our end, but nobody does it. Because if [everyone] did that, they wouldn\u2019t be able to bring everyone to trial\u2026. Everybody has to stick together and say, \u201cNo,\u201d and, \u201cI want a speedy trial.\u201d *** Corey\u2019s Story In 2011, 25-year-old Corey Ladd was arrested in New Orleans with a plastic baggie containing a half-ounce of marijuana. Years before, Corey had pled guilty to two felony convictions, for hydrocodone possession at age 18 and LSD possession at age 21, and had been sentenced to probation for each.", + " This time, the prosecutor sought serious prison time. Because of his priors, the prosecutor chose to charge Corey as a third-time offender, so that he faced a minimum of 13 years and 4 months, up to a maximum of 40 years in prison for marijuana possession. Corey told us he was offered 10 years in exchange for a guilty plea. Despite the risk of such a high penalty, Corey refused the prosecutor\u2019s offer and insisted on his right to trial. In 2013, the jury returned a guilty verdict. The judge imposed the penalty: For possessing a half-ounce of marijuana, she sentenced Corey to 20 years in prison without parole.", + " Corey appealed his sentence to the state appeals court, which found in 2014 that 20 years was not \u201cexcessive\u201d for marijuana possession for a third-time offender. Corey then appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which found in 2015 that the trial judge had failed to state her reasons and sent the case back to her for resentencing. Two of the four Supreme Court judges expressed concern that \u201cthis sentence on its face seems very harsh.\u201d When the trial judge resentenced Corey to 17 years without parole, he appealed yet again to the state appeals court. This time, in April 2016, it was the state appeals court that reversed the 17-year sentence and sent Corey\u2019s case back to the trial judge for resentencing.", + " The appeals court wrote: The laws nationwide are changing, as is public perception. As mentioned above, this defendant would conceivably be in his forties before he is released. Although the defendant\u2019s seventeen-year sentence is within the range of permissible sentences, on its face, the sheer harshness of the sentence shocks the conscience. In spite of this history, the prosecutor held his ground. He objected to the appeals court\u2019s reversal and filed an appeal of his own to the Louisiana Supreme Court. As of this writing, Corey is waiting for that decision. He has been in prison for 4 years and has never held his 4-year-old daughter outside of prison walls.", + " Why Habitual Offender Laws Do Not Make Sense for Drug Possession In the context of drug possession, the effect of habitual offender laws is to punish habitual drug use. Although any criminal sanction for drug use is inappropriate, habitual offender sentencing delivers especially disproportionate punishment. If a person is facing a subsequent conviction for drug possession, it is simply an indication that the criminal justice system has failed to stop drug use, not that the person deserves a longer sentence. Moreover, it risks punishing some people for \u201crecidivism\u201d who may in fact be drug dependent, a health rather than a criminal justice issue. Several Louisiana officials, recognizing this fact, argued that habitual offender enhancements should not be applied to drug possession.", + " As Judge Calvin Johnson, formerly on the bench in New Orleans, told us, \u201cThe rationale for it again is that individuals who commit multiple offenses are bad, bad people and they should be convicted accordingly\u2026. My knee jerk reaction is no.\u2026 The fact that a drug user has been arrested for drugs multiple times means only that that person has had drugs multiple times. It doesn\u2019t impact you, or me, or anyone in this room.\u201d He told us he \u201cwould take [drug possession] out\u201d of the criminal justice system entirely, \u201cbut a step towards that would be to move drug possessors out of the multi-bill statute.\u201d[", + "271] Reviewing Corey Ladd\u2019s possession case, the Louisiana Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit delivered a striking condemnation of the prosecutor\u2019s decision to use the habitual offender law: [The habitual offender law] dramatically limits judges\u2019 ability to consider the human element and the life-time impact of harsh sentences on both defendants and their families, not to mention the State\u2019s economic interest. Sentences should be sufficient but not greater than necessary to meet the goals and expectations of sentencing. Is it deterrence? Is it punitive? Far too much authority has been usurped from judges under the pretext of appearing \u201ctough\u201d on crime and allowing the habitual offender statute to become what now appears to be an archaic draconian measure.", + " Our state, Louisiana, has some of the harshest sentencing statutes in these United States. Yet, this state also has one of the highest rates of incarceration, crime rate and recidivism. It would appear that the purpose of the habitual offender statutes to deter crime is not working and the State\u2019s finances are being drained by the excessive incarcerations, particularly those for non-violent crimes. [272] For all these reasons, sentences for drug possession should not be subject to enhancement under habitual offender laws, regardless of the prior offense type, and past convictions for drug possession should not be used as predicates for enhancements of sentences for any other offense.", + " The Threat of Higher Charges Instead of the threat of enhancements at trial, some defendants face higher charges if they insist on their trial rights, and are offered a plea to the lesser charge of possession if they give up those rights. We heard frequently that prosecutors would charge possession with intent (or distribution) for what otherwise could be considered simple possession and that those cases typically ended in a plea to simple possession. This raises concerns that prosecutors may be overcharging defendants in order to coerce pleas. A significant number of distribution charges are disposed of with pleas to simple possession. For example, in New York, over half of all possession with intent to distribute arrests and a third of sales arrests were disposed of with guilty pleas to possession charges.", + " In some of these cases, people actually guilty of selling may be getting good deals. However, we documented cases where the more serious initial charges appear instead to represent an attempt at coercing defendants to plead guilty to the more appropriate charge. Jerry\u2019s Story Jerry Bennett told us he pled guilty to two-and-a-half years in prison for half a gram of marijuana because the prosecutor threatened to charge him with distribution. Jerry was arrested in New Orleans in March 2015 and charged with possession of half a gram of marijuana that was found in the backseat of the truck in which he was a passenger. Because he had prior marijuana possession convictions, it was a felony charge.", + " He sat in jail for over eight months while his trial date was set and reset. In the intervening time, his attorney won a motion to suppress evidence. Then the prosecutor made Jerry a plea offer of two-and-a-half years, which Jerry did not want. His attorney recalls the prosecutor\u2019s words: \u201cIf he doesn\u2019t take this today, we\u2019re going to take that offer off the table. There will be no offer. We\u2019ll just go to trial, and we\u2019re going to change the charge from possession to distribution.\u201d Jerry told us, \u201cHalf a gram! There ain\u2019t no way you could distribute half a gram.\u201d He chose not to take the offer and instead go to trial.", + " When Jerry returned to court at the end of January 2016\u2014almost 11 months after his arrest, during all of which he had been in jail\u2014the prosecutor had a new tactic for getting him to take the two-and-a-half years. He would charge Jerry with both possession and distribution (for the same half gram of marijuana). Jerry would be sure to lose on one of them if he went to trial and, when he did, the minimum he would face would be 20 years. The prosecutor offered Jerry the two-and-a-half years instead. Jerry had been detained pretrial in a jail that was a four-hour drive from his lawyer,", + " his girlfriend, and his 3-year-old daughter. He had not had time to speak to them, but the prosecutor gave him only 10 minutes to decide. His girlfriend had not made it to court in time, but she sent text messages to him via his attorney, begging him to think of their daughter: \u201cMan, just take it, because if they mess with you, you\u2019re going to see none of her life.\u201d As Jerry\u2019s attorney recalled, \u201cWe had a very frank conversation about the fact that, as much as he on principle didn\u2019t want to take this, and also didn\u2019t want to have to do another year and a half in jail,", + " and he had promised his girlfriend that he was not going to miss the next birthday of his daughter \u2026 it was like, you can miss one more birthday, or you can potentially miss her entire childhood.\u201d Jerry took the two-and-a-half years for marijuana possession, and the prosecutor dropped the distribution charge. When we talked to Jerry in jail the next day, he explained, \u201cThey spooked me out by saying, \u2018You gotta take this or you\u2019ll get that.\u2019 I\u2019m just worried about the time. Imagine me in here for 20 years. They got people that kill people. And they put you up here for half a gram of weed.\u201d Pleading When Innocent Numerous interviewees in each state we visited said they had pled guilty even though they were innocent.", + " Many said they did not feel they had any other real choice. Defendants, defense attorneys, judges, and prosecutors in different jurisdictions used the language of gambling: would the defendant \u201croll the dice\u201d and go to trial? Most defendants said no, because the odds were against them and the stakes were too high. Tyler\u2019s Plea Tyler Marshall was arrested in Louisiana, charged with possession of marijuana, convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The transcript of his plea colloquy plainly indicates that he either did not understand or did not want to plead guilty: By the court: Okay, listen to my question again sir. Do you wish to waive your constitutional rights and plead guilty because you have in fact committed this crime?", + " [Defendant]: But I didn\u2019t do it. [Defense counsel]: You are pleading guilty. [Defendant]: I am pleading guilty. By the court: Okay. And in pleading guilty today you are waiving your constitutional rights. Is that correct? [Defendant]: Yes ma\u2019am. By the court: And you are pleading guilty because you committed this crime. [Defendant]: No ma\u2019am. [Defense counsel]: Say yes, please. [Defendant]: Oh, I have to? Yeah. But I\u2019d be lying though. In Texas, where defense attorneys said laboratory scandals and faulty roadside drug tests had raised concerns,", + " Harris County began testing drugs in possession cases that had already been closed. Since 2010, there have been at least 73 exonerations in Harris County for drug possession or sale where the defendant pled guilty for something that turned out not to be a crime at all. In 2015 alone, there were 42. Of the 42 exonerees in 2015, only six were white. Most or all had been adjudged indigent, meaning they could not afford an attorney and had either a public defender or another attorney appointed for them. One of those attorneys, Natalie Schultz, said a significant number of them were homeless.", + " When the laboratory finally tested their drugs, it found only legal substances or nothing at all. For example, in July 2014, police arrested Isaac Dixon, 26, for possession of a substance that field tested positive for Ecstasy. Two days later, Isaac pled guilty to felony drug possession and was sentenced to 90 days in the Harris County Jail. More than 14 months later, the substance was tested by a laboratory, and the field test was proved faulty. No drugs were found\u2014only antihistamine and caffeine. Like Isaac\u2019s conviction for drug possession, dozens more in Harris County in 2015 were ultimately vacated and the charges dismissed,", + " but only because authorities took the time to have the drugs tested, after the case dispositions. The exonerations required laboratory testing, defense and prosecution filings for habeas corpus relief, trial court recommendations, and eventual dismissal by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. In the meantime, defendants had to endure pretrial detention, probation, sometimes a jail sentence, and the prospect of a felony conviction for action that was lawful. As the exonerations in Harris County demonstrate, people plead guilty to drug possession even when they are innocent, because the system makes them feel they have no choice. These cases also show that field tests often produce false positives and yet are sometimes the only evidence of drug possession.", + " Fortunately for the defendants, Harris County invested the time and resources to test drugs after conviction. Harris County Public Defender Alex Bunin told us that if other jurisdictions undertook the same effort, he expected we would see that around the country indigent defendants plead guilty to drug possession when they are innocent. Reducing Charges\u2014Discretionarily, for White Defendants Data from New York State suggests that prosecutors\u2019 discretion to reduce charges through plea deals is exercised differently in different jurisdictions, and often with racially disparate impact. Between 2010 and 2015, 38 percent of drug possession arrests in New York State were disposed of at a reduced level.", + " There were striking disparities between jurisdictions across the state and, within New York City, even among boroughs. In the Bronx, 38 percent of arrests ended in convictions on reduced charges while in Manhattan (New York County) the figure was 25 percent. The majority of downgraded arrests involved misdemeanor charges disposed of as violations. The data also shows racial disparities between those who benefit from reductions in or dismissal of charges and those who do not. In New York, for non-marijuana A misdemeanors, the second most common possession arrest charge after marijuana B misdemeanors, white defendants received reduced or dismissed charges at greater rates than Black defendants in all New York City counties,", + " and in the aggregate of all other New York State counties combined.\n\nVII. Sentencing by the Numbers If we go back to why we punish\u2014deterrence, protection of the community\u2014long term, jail isn\u2019t doing those things. But no one is thinking long term about it. [There\u2019s a saying,] \u201cInsanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.\u201d \u2026 The general community doesn\u2019t understand it\u2019s not working. They don\u2019t know it\u2019s the same 90 people we keep picking up and putting in the system.[288] \u2014A judge in Central Florida, on the mismatch between criminal law and drug use,", + " December 2015 At year-end 2014, more than 25,000 people were serving sentences in jails and another 48,000 in state prisons for drug possession.[289] The number being admitted to jails and prisons to serve sentences at some point over the course of the year was significantly higher.[290] In many cases, particularly for people convicted of their first offense, sentences for drug possession can be comparatively short. However, both our interviews and our analysis of sentencing data reveal that some jurisdictions impose very long sentences\u2014even life sentences in Texas\u2014for drug possession. Miami Judge Dennis Murphy told us that some judges impose disproportionate sentences because \u201cthey want to be seen as tough,", + " but studies show that long sentences result in nothing but costliness.\u201d[291] Racial Disparities in Incarceration In examining who is incarcerated for drug possession, we found that stark racial disparities mark both jail and prison populations. Of the total jail population nationwide (convicted and unconvicted) in 2002 (the most recent year for which such jail data is available), 31,662 Black inmates, 19,203 white inmates, and 14,206 Latino inmates were jailed for drug possession.[292] Given that Black people made up 13 percent and white people 82 percent of the US population in 2002,", + " these numbers mean that Black people were more than 10 times as likely as white people to be jailed for drug possession, even though the drug use rate for each group is roughly equivalent.[293] Of the total state prison population at year-end 2014, 18,800 Black inmates, 17,700 white inmates, and 11,400 Latino inmates were imprisoned for drug possession.[294] These numbers mean that Black people were nearly six times more likely than white people to be in prison for drug possession.[295] Because the US Census Bureau does not include race data for Latinos, we could not assess disparities in their incarceration. Human Rights Watch analyzed sentencing data for people convicted of drug possession in Florida,", + " New York, and Texas. This section outlines our findings. In Florida between 2010 and 2015, 84 percent of defendants convicted of felony drug possession were sentenced to prison or jail (about a quarter to state prison and three-quarters to county jail). For misdemeanors, 68 percent of those convicted were sentenced to confinement, almost all going to county jail. Whether or not a person is sentenced to prison in Florida depends not only on the conviction offense but also on past criminal record, based on a scoring or points system. A person whose first conviction is for drug possession would not \u201cscore out\u201d to prison time under this system,", + " though he or she may be sentenced to county jail.[297] Roughly three of every four felony drug possession defendants were sentenced to terms in county jail or were not sentenced to incarceration at all, suggesting they had little or no significant prior criminal history. Yet even individuals sentenced to county jail for drug possession spend substantial time behind bars, especially those convicted of felonies:\n\nIn Texas between September 2010 and January 2016, more than three-quarters of felony drug possession defendants were sentenced to incarceration: 30,268 to prison, 42,957 to state jails, and 35,564 to county jails.[303] A significant proportion of the rest likely were released on probation because the prosecutor and judge had no choice:", + " Texas law makes probation mandatory for a first-time conviction of drug possession when classified as a state jail felony.[304] This suggests that prosecutors and judges chose not to exercise their discretion to offer probation in the vast majority of cases in which they had some choice.In New York State between 2010 and 2015, the majority (53 percent) of people convicted of drug possession were sentenced to some period of incarceration (33 percent for marijuana and 65 percent for other drugs). The average jail sentence was 44 days for marijuana possession and 63 days for other drugs. Approximately 155 adults were sentenced to one year in jail\u2014the maximum sentence for a misdemeanor\u2014for marijuana possession.", + " Approximately 1,441 adults were sentenced for possession of drugs other than marijuana, and 88 percent of these cases were misdemeanors. Among felony drug possession cases, the average prison sentence was 41 months.[301] At year-end 2015, one of 16 people in custody in New York State was incarcerated for drug possession. Of those, 50 percent were Black, 28 percent Latino, and 20 percent white.[302] Between 2012 and 2016, approximately one of 11 people held by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) was convicted of a drug possession charge as their most serious offense.[305]", + " Two of every three people serving time in a TDCJ facility for drug charges were there for drug possession.[306] Human Rights Watch examined charge and sentence length information for the 49,092 people incarcerated by TDCJ for drug possession during six snapshot days.[307] For the convictions where the drug amount was provided in the data, half were for possession of under one gram (state jail felony), and another 25 percent for possession of one to four grams (third degree felony).[308] Among the 20 counties that have the largest number of drug possession cases in Texas, there are significant disparities in the types of sentences received for similar charges,", + " showing arbitrariness associated with geography as well as significant opportunity for prosecutorial discretion: Nearly 44 percent of drug possession inmates in Texas were serving sentences of two years or less (the maximum sentence for a state jail felony is two years). A quarter were serving sentences greater than 5 years. Third degree offenses (possession of one to four grams) had an average sentence of 5.3 years (the sentence range is two to ten years).[309] There were clear county disparities in the sentences for drug possession inmates. In counties with 300 or more unique TDCJ inmates, the median sentences varied greatly by county, for all offenses and also for state jail felonies specifically.", + " Life in Prison in Texas for Drug Possession According to Texas Department Criminal Justice data we analyzed, 116 people were serving life sentences in Texas for drug possession as of February 2016. Ten percent of them (11 people) were sentenced in Smith County, a county that sentenced only 1.7 percent of the state\u2019s overall drug possession inmates. Furthermore, in Texas between 2005 and 2014 at least seven people were sentenced to life in prison for simple possession of an amount of drugs weighing between one and four grams (third degree felony possession)\u2014the weight of less than a sugar packet.[310] Under Texas law, third degree drug possession has a normal sentence range of two to ten years,[311]", + " but if a person has two prior felonies, the habitual offender law gives prosecutors the option to enhance the range to a minimum of 25 years up to 99 years, or life in prison.[312] Although prosecutors need not seek the habitual offender enhancements, they did in these seven possession cases. Moreover, since the sentence is described as a range, not mandatory life in prison, the jury and/or the judge may still impose the minimum sentence, 25 years, or any number of years greater than 25 but short of life imprisonment. In one of the seven cases, public documents suggest the defendant pled guilty, yet he still received a life sentence for simple possession.", + " In the six other cases, a jury decided a life sentence was appropriate, and the judge let it stand.[313] *** Drug Sentencing Reform and Non-Retroactivity A significant number of states have decriminalized marijuana possession, as described in section XI. For possession of other drugs, some states have implemented reforms reducing drug sentences, though not decriminalizing. These reforms are positive developments, but in many cases they are not retroactive, so thousands of people remain incarcerated, continuing to bear the costs of a felony conviction for actions that the state no longer criminalizes or that it sanctions less severely. For example, in 2015 Louisiana amended its marijuana laws to make the first two marijuana possession convictions misdemeanors and the third a felony punishable by up to 2 years.", + " This means that the most Corey Ladd\u2014serving 17 years for half an ounce of marijuana\u2014could now face, given his two prior drug possession felonies, is 4 years. Yet he has not benefited from the new law. In 2015, Alabama passed Senate Bill 67, adding a new, lowest felony class D that includes drug possession and carries lesser penalties than felony class C, at which it was previously classified. But these reforms are also not retroactive, meaning that people sentenced more harshly under the previous law remain unaffected. Data we received from the Alabama Sentencing Commission indicated that as of October 2015,", + " 14,000 people had been convicted of class C drug possession since 2010 and had received sentences that would keep them in prison beyond SB 67 enactment\u2014meaning retroactivity could have had enormous impact.[316] As a third example, 32 states and the District of Columbia now have Good Samaritan laws that immunize people from prosecution if they seek emergency medical care after someone has overdosed, but again many if not all of these laws lack retroactivity provisions.[317] Thus Byron Augustine is still in a Louisiana prison. Byron called 911 and saved the life of a friend who had overdosed on heroin. Yet Byron was charged with possession of that heroin and was sentenced to 20 years shortly before Louisiana passed its Good Samaritan law.[318]", + " His friend ultimately overdosed again and died while Byron was incarcerated.[319] Human rights law requires retroactive application of new laws that reduce sentences.[320] Retroactivity is particularly important in this context because the changes to existing law reflect a widespread understanding that sentences imposed prior to the reforms were disproportionately harsh and fundamentally unjust.\n" + ], + "length": 37112, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 94, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Looking for a podcast about the joys of eating or drinking? Michael Jordan of Urlesque runs down his top 5: Wine Library TV: It's the \"go-to source for blunt, entertaining, and un-aristocratic wine information.\" Even those with only a passing interest will enjoy it. CoffeeGeek: With news of all things coffee, including product reviews and bean criticism, this is the site for java lovers. Good Beer Show: It travels to a different beer hall every week for reviews, with a focus on micro, craft, and imported brews. \"An absolute blast.\" The Restaurant Guys: Features interviews with chefs and critics, and \"sophisticated food conversation\" in general. Grace Before Meals: Emphasizes how meals can help our relationships, and maybe even our souls.\n", + "docs": [ + "We here at Urlesque know how intimidating the podcast-o-sphere can be. There are literally millions of podcasts floating through the pod-tubes \u2013 far too many for any one person to sort through on their own! Lucky for you, we've painstakingly combed through the best of the best food and drink podcasts to figure out what you should listen to when you feel like chowing down.\n\n\n\nAfter the break, check out our list of the 5 best food and drink podcasts.\n\n\n\n\n\nWinner of the 2008 Podcast Award for Best Food and Drink Podcast, Grace Before Meals is a podcast that revolves around \"one fundamental concept: the simple act of creating and sharing a meal can strengthen all kinds of relationships.\" It's a program that really gets to the bottom of the important role that food can -- and should -- play in your life.", + "Obviously not the most irreverent food and drink podcast -- if you're looking for that, check out some of our other entries -- Grace Before Meals does its best to strengthen the bonds of community while promoting the joy of good food. The show has been so successful that it has grown from a podcast into a book and now a TV pilot.Run by long time restaurateurs and wine dealers Mark Pascal and Francis Schott, The Restaurant Guys brings humor and intelligent food conversation to the discerning listener. The show includes conversations with famous chefs, food writers and critics, and even features the occasional giveaway. Restaurant Guys is based out of central New Jersey,", + " specifically the New Brunswick theater district, but the show is so articulate, fascinating, and good-natured that its appeal is much broader. If sophisticated food conversation is your bag, you should definitely check it out.Two time Podcast Award winner for Best Food and Drink Podcast, the Good Beer Show claims to be the oldest beer-related podcast. It's certainly an august (by internet standards) and quality institution. Each week, the show's host, Jeffrey Meyer, drags his audio equipment down to one of the largest beer halls in the Midwest, and gets right down to reviewing beers. He sticks mostly to micro, craft, and imported brews,", + " and the show features plenty of music and ribald talk. It's an absolute blast overall and a must-listen podcast for any beer nut.Proud recipient of the 2007 Podcast Award for Best Food and Drink Podcast, CoffeeGeek is the definite coffee podcast. Everything gets covered from the world of high end coffee and espresso, with a depth of knowledge suitable for pros and a convivial atmosphere suitable for newcomers. There are product and bean reviews, news updates from the world of coffee and fascinating interviews from industry experts. If you're the type who needs their java fix, you need CoffeeGeek.Wine Library TV is one of the most successful podcasts ever and a go-to source for blunt,", + " entertaining, and un-aristocratic wine information. Run by Gary Vaynerchuk, proprietor of a wine retail shop in New Jersey (and rabid Jets fan), the show's express intent is to demystify the world of wine. The reviews are brash, ecstatic, and unbelievably entertaining, with Gary often screaming into the camera in excitement. If you have even a passing interest in wine, you owe it to yourself to watch at least one episode of Wine Library TV. Chances are, after that you'll be hooked. ", + " \u201cI\u2019ve told so many people that [ Restaurant Guys Radio ] is basically Car Talk for Food, and I mean that in the most positive way. I don\u2019t know how often you guys listen to Car Talk but that\u2019s quite a compliment.\u201d >> Listen: hi | lo\n\nShow Guide\n\niTunes version 4.9 or greater, click here.\n\nIf you use another podcast reader, click here for our RSS feed.\n\n4/25/2013: Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown: Mark and Francis welcome Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown to the show to discuss their new book, The Deans of Drink,", + " historic cocktails, cocktail museums, and how Europe is different from the US, not....>> More\n\n3/6/2013: Susan McKenna Grant: Mark and Francis open the show with another discussion about photography in restaurants. Their guest is Susan McKenna Grant, owner of La Petraia, in Rada, Chianti and author of the new book, Dinamica....>> More\n\n2/20/2013: Josh Ozersky: Mark and Francis start the show discussing the recent firing of an Applebee's employee after she posted a copy of someone's receipt on her website after that person crossed out her added gratu....>> More\n\n2/", + "6/2013: Jimmy Cronk, Sean Hosty, and John Durna: What should a restaurateur do if a guest can't pay? Mark and Francis discuss what happened recently at Smith and Wollensky in New York when an Italian tourist could not pay. What do you think sh....>> More\n\n1/31/2013: Cynthia Lauren Tewes: The Guys are joined today by Cynthia Lauren Tewes. Ms Tewes played Julie McCoy on The Love Boat and is appearing at The George Street Playhouse (right next to The Restaurant Guys restaurants) in Good....>> More\n\n1/16/", + "2013: Kevin Zraly: Mark and Francis welcome back Kevin Zraly to the show to discuss the 27th Edition of his best-selling wine book, Windows on the World Complete Wine Course. The new version includes videos by way of QR....>> More\n\n12/19/2012: Sean Muldoon: Francis first encountered Sean Muldoon's work many years ago in Belfast City. We dare say that Francis may have been the first American Cocktailian to wander in to the cocktail palace built in th....>> More\n\n11/14/2012: Bill Wolsey: The Guys Start off the segment with a lively discussion about Pete Well's recent '-1 star review'", + " of Guy Fieri's American Kitchen and Bar in The New York Times. Was it justified? Did i....>> More\n\n11/7/2012: Robert Simonson: In their first show post-Superstorm Sandy, the guys welcome New York Times cocktail columnist Robert Simonson to the show.\n\nRobert Simonson writes about spirits, cocktails, and wine for the New Y....>> More\n\n10/3/2012: Josh Schonwald: Mark and Francis discuss Francis's recent trip to Ireland and Belfast Restaurant Week. Their guest is Josh Schonwald, author of The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food.", + " They di....>> More\n\n9/26/2012: Andrew Smith: Mark and Francis discuss Francis's recent brunch outing in New York. Their guest is Andrew Smith, author of American Tuna: The Rise and Fall of an Improbable Food. They discuss the history of tu....>> More\n\n9/21/2012: Barb Stuckey: Mark and Francis welcome Barb Stuckey, author of Taste What You're Missing. Barb Stuckey is a food developer at Mattson and outlines the kinds of tasters and how to train yourself to be a better....>> More\n\n9/7/2012:", + " Rum in New Orleans: The Guys recorded yet another show at Tales of The Cocktail in New Orleans. Back in the 9th Ward of the city, you will find the city's only rum distillery, the only rum distillery in The Big Easy....>> More\n\n8/29/2012: Antoinette Bruno: Mark and Francis welcome Antoinette Bruno on the show to discuss the Star Chefs International Chefs Congress. Star Chefs ICC is one of a kind, and it's back: a three-day culinary symposium that g....>> More\n\n8/22/2012: Ted Lange: An unexpected pleasure of Tales of The Cocktail 2012 in New Orleans:", + " Francis and Mark met one of the worlds most iconic bartenders. Ted Lange played Isaac on The Love Boat. He was probably the firs....>> More\n\n8/1/2012: Don Feinberg and Wendy Littlefield: Mark and Francis welcome Don Feinberg and Wendy Littlefield, owners of the beer import company, Vanberg & De Wulf to the show. They discuss how Belgian beer became popular in the US, Belgian beer....>> More\n\n7/25/2012: Michael Green and Ricky Crawford: Mark and Francis welcome Michael Green and Ricky Crawford to the show. Michael Green joins them to talk about his plays,", + " as well as about the exciting Spanish wine region of La Mancha. Ricky Crawfor....>> More\n\n7/18/2012: Dean Foster: Mark and Francis welcome Dean Foster to the show. Dean Foster is the head of Dean Foster Associates and is the author of the \"Global Etiquette Guide\" series of books. Mr Foster joins the g....>> More\n\n7/11/2012: Johnny Schuler: Francis talks about his recent visit to Bulgaria. Mark and Francis welcome Johnny Schuler of Pisco Porton to the show to discuss Pisco Porton and the difference between Chilean and Peruvian Pisco an....>> More\n\n7/", + "3/2012: Ann Tuennerman: Mark and Francis discuss a recent slew of articles about cocktails from the New York Times food section, particularly an article about food and cocktail pairing. Their guest is Ann Tuennerman, founde....>> More\n\n6/27/2012: Michael Beattie: Mark and Francis talk about Niman Ranch beef and an event they went to recently. Their guest is Michael Beattie, the head of the American Wagyu Association. They discuss the recent article in Forbes....>> More\n\n6/20/2012: Frank Brunacci: Mark and Francis welcome Frank Brunacci to the show to discuss truffles,", + " namely the fantastic Australian truffles they are getting in the restaurant.....>> More\n\n6/13/2012: Ron Cooper: Ron Cooper, founder of Del Maguey, a company specializing in single village Mezcals, joins Mark and Francis to discuss the differences between tequila, sotol, and mezcal, what these villages are like,....>> More\n\n6/6/2012: Eric Ripert: Mark and Francis welcome Eric Ripert back to the show to discuss Le Bernardin's most recent 4 star New York Times review, the new remodel of Le Bernardin, cocktails and their place in fine dining,", + "....>> More\n\n5/23/2012: Jim Lahey: Mark and Francis recap their visit to the Manhattan Cocktail Classic and profile some new spirits Francis discovered. Their guest is Jim Lahey, owner of Sullivan Street Bakery and Co. Restaurant in N....>> More\n\n5/9/2012: Sebastian Beckwith: Mark and Francis discuss tea with Sebastian Beckwith, one of the foremost tea experts in the United States and owner of the company, In Pursuit of Tea. They discuss the differences in kinds of tea, h....>> More\n\n5/2/2012: Paul Virant: Mark and Francis discuss their recent trip to DeBragga and Spitler and what they learned about aging meat.", + " Their guest is Michelin-starred chef, Paul Virant, author of the new book The Preservation K....>> More\n\n4/18/2012: Tracie McMillan: Mark and Francis discuss how summer camps are different from when they were kids. Their guest is Tracie McMillan, author of The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebees, Farm Fields,....>> More\n\n4/11/2012: Lesley Townsend: Mark and Francis discuss old-school cocktails they found in an old cocktail book written by African-American bartender, Tom Bullock. Their guest is Lesley Townsend, founder of the Manhattan Cocktail....>> More\n\n4/", + "4/2012: Taggart Siegel: Mark and Francis welcome Taggart Siegel, director of Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us? Their discussion covers everything related to the honeybee -- from how bees procreate to how monoc....>> More\n\n3/29/2012: Grant Achatz: Mark and Francis welcome Grant Achatz, acclaimed chef of Alinea, Next, and the Aviary in Chicago. They discuss molecular gastronomy, creativity in the kitchen and the dining room, and how being a lit....>> More\n\n3/14/2012: Floyd Cardoz:", + " Mark and Francis welcome Chef Floyd Cardoz, of the newly open North End Grill in New York City. They discuss the different kinds of grills out there and how Chef Cardoz is putting them all to work.....>> More\n\n3/7/2012: Gerald Asher: Mark and Francis welcome Gerald Asher, author of A Carafe of Red, to the show to discuss Missouri wines, wine rating scales, and other interesting topics from his newest book....>> More\n\n2/29/2012: George Faison: George Faison, co-owner of DeBragga and Spitler, joins Mark and Francis to discuss sustainable meat production.", + " They discuss antibiotic use in animals, as well as why hormones in beef production can....>> More\n\n2/22/2012: Charles Neal: Charles Neal joins the guys to discuss his new book, Calvados: The Spirit of Normandy. They discuss the people of Normandy, Cider, and the great spirit they produce there -- Calvados -- and the appl....>> More\n\n2/15/2012: David Hanson: Mark and Francis welcome David Hanson, co-author of Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival with Edwin Marty and Michael Hanson. They discuss the problems people face when urban far....>> More\n\n2/", + "8/2012: Steve Olson: Mark and Francis discuss the \"innovative\" new packaging of whiskey in a can and its possible pitfalls. Their guest is wine and spirits expert Steve Olson. They discuss responsible drinking....>> More\n\n1/31/2012: Dale DeGroff: The guys are joined by preeminent cocktailian Dale DeGroff and talk about the State of the Cocktail Union and bar trends for 2012!....>> More\n\n1/18/2012: Bloody Marys; Brian Miller: Mark and Francis discuss Bloody Marys and different garnishes that you could put on them. Their guest is Brian Miller,", + " of Tiki Mondays at Lani Kai. They discuss all things Tiki and what makes a bart....>> More\n\n1/11/2012: Nancy Huehnergarth: Mark and Francis discuss the word \"artisanal\" and how some companies are misappropriating its use for things that are not, in fact, artisanal. Their guest is Nancy Huehnergarth, author of a....>> More\n\n1/4/2012: Happy New Year!: Happy New Year from the Restaurant Guys!....>> More\n\n12/28/2011: Randy Clemens: Mark and Francis discuss the upcoming New Year's Eve celebrations across the US and specifically,", + " in New Brunswick, NJ. Their guest is Randy Clemens, co-author of The Craft of Stone Brewing Co: L....>> More\n\n12/21/2011: Doug Frost, MS, MW: Mark and Francis welcome Doug Frost, MS, MW to the show to discuss being a sommelier in today's market and the importance of cocktails in general. They talk about wine ratings, selling wine to co....>> More\n\n12/14/2011: Sam Mogannam: Mark and Francis welcome Sam Mogannam of Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco. They discuss the role of the supermarket in a community, why big business supermarkets are different from small supermarkets,", + "....>> More\n\n12/7/2011: Natalie MacLean: Mark and Francis welcome Natalie MacLean, the Canadian wine writer. They discuss Natalie's new book, Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World's Best Bargain Wines. They discuss what makes a....>> More\n\n11/30/2011: Allegra McEvedy: Mark and Francis being the show with a discussion of spirits competitions and a spirit they recently tried blind and is now coming onto the market. Their guest is Allegra McEvedy, author of Bought, B....>> More\n\n11/23/2011:", + " Kathleen Flinn: Mark and Francis reminisce about their days of eating fast food in high school and college. Their guest is Kathleen Flinn, author of the Kitchen Counter Cooking School, a book that followed home cook....>> More\n\n11/16/2011: Daniel Humm: Mark and Francis welcome Daniel Humm to the show to discuss the book he's written with Will Guidara, the Eleven Madison Park Cookbook. They talk about the book, about running a four star restaura....>> More\n\n11/9/2011: Jim Meehan: Mark and Francis discuss spirits, especially Calvados and Eau de Vie and some of the exciting things they're doing with them in the restaurants.", + " Their guest is Jim Meehan, author of the PDT Cockt....>> More\n\n11/2/2011: Kathy Gunst: Mark and Francis discuss why super fine dining restaurants are on the decline in popularity and how what people are looking for in restaurants has changed over the years they've been in the busine....>> More\n\n10/26/2011: Marissa Guggiana: Mark and Francis start the show with a discussion about the kinds of deep fried foods you can eat at state fairs across the country. Mark and Francis welcome Marissa Guggiana, author of Off the Menu:....>> More\n\n10/", + "19/2011: Jon Taffer: Mark and Francis begin the show with a discussion on the place of migrant workers in the American economy and the role they play on farms across America. For their interview, they welcome Jon Taffer,....>> More\n\n10/12/2011: Lucy Lean: Mark and Francis discuss Francis's recent visit to the New York City restaurant Tertulia. Their guest is Lucy Lean, author of the new book Made in America: Our Best Chefs Reinvent Comfort Food.....>> More\n\n10/5/2011: Gerald Asher: Gerald Asher joins Mark and Francis to discuss his years as wine writer at Gourmet Magazine and his new book,", + " A Vineyard in My Glass. They talk a lot about the importance of place when it comes to wi....>> More\n\n9/29/2011: Antoinette Bruno: Antoinette Bruno of StarChefs.com joins the guys to discuss the upcoming Chef's Congress happening in New York City October 2, 3 & 4. They discuss mixology, the various events, and the Rising....>> More\n\n9/28/2011: Jennifer McLagan: In their debut on the Heritage Radio Network, Mark and Francis interview Jennifer McLagan, a two-time James Beard Award winning cookbook author. Her new book is Odd Bits:", + " How to Cook the Rest of the....>> More\n\n7/15/2011: Heather Shouse: Heather Shouse joins the guys to discuss her book, Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes from the Kitchens on Wheels. Food Trucks is a book that profiles some 50 different food truck operations from ac....>> More\n\n6/20/2011: John Mariani: John Mariani, food writer for Esquire Magazine, joins Mark and Francis to discuss his new book, How Italian Food Conquered the World. They discuss Italian food, both in the United States and abroad;....>> More\n\n5/4/", + "2011: Gabrielle Hamilton: Are there still great Mom and Pop restaurants out there? Mark and Francis discuss the lack of truly great everyday restaurants in resort areas and ask that you send us your favorites. Their guest to....>> More\n\n4/28/2011: Bob Waggoner: Today's show is all about chefs. Mark and Francis start the show by discussing a reviewer who wasn't as impartial as he should have been when reviewing restaurants for his college newspaper.....>> More\n\n3/28/2011: Kevin Zraly: Mark and Francis announce their guest judging appearance on Ucook! with Chef Bob, which is coming soon to a PBS station near you.", + " Their guest is Kevin Zraly, author of the Windows on the World Comple....>> More\n\n3/14/2011: Aki Kamozawa: Aki Kamozawa, co-author of Ideas in Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work joins Mark and Francis to discuss the science behind recipes and why bread rises, how to make sauces have a certain mouthfeel,....>> More\n\n2/24/2011: Nick Fauchald: Mark and Francis start the show with a discussion of genetically modified foods and the effect they are having on weeds and the advent of roundup resistant weeds and corn as a weed. Their guest is Ni....>> More\n\n2/", + "14/2011: David Wondrich: Mark and Francis begin the show with a discussion of possible new legislation in New York that would prohibit smoking on public sidewalks and in parks. Their guest is David Wondrich. They discuss all....>> More\n\n2/3/2011: Colman Andrews: Mark and Francis discuss tipping. Their guest is Colman Andrews. He was the cofounder and a former editor in chief of Saveur, and is the author of four acclaimed cookbooks, including Catalan Cuisine....>> More\n\n1/25/2011: Terry Theise: Cat food on the cover of the New York Times?", + " Mark and Francis discuss the recent pet-centric articles in the food section of the New York Times, as well as the upcoming Manhattan Cocktail Classic. T....>> More\n\n1/17/2011: Rowan Jacobsen: Mark and Francis start the show off with a discussion about genetically engineered fish and the potential pitfalls of its possible legalization. Their guest is Rowan Jacobsen. Rowan Jacobsen is the Ja....>> More\n\n12/15/2010: Eric Ripert: The guys start the show with a discussion of the upcoming New Year's Eve festivities in New Brunswick. Their guest is Eric Ripert, chef at Le Bernardin star of the PBS show,", + " Avec Eric, and author....>> More\n\n12/6/2010: Lidia Bastianich: Mark and Francis start the show with a discussion of the mystery of the red bees of Red Hook, Brooklyn. Lidia Bastianich is one of the most-loved chefs on television, a best-selling cookbook author,....>> More\n\n11/17/2010: Karen Bussen: The guys start the show with a discussion of at home winemaking companies and the different pitfalls and pleasures of amateur wine-making. Their guest for the day is Karen Bussen, a well-known New Yor....>> More\n\n11/", + "10/2010: Dushan Zaric: The guys start off the show with a discussion of some of Mark's favorite meals in the last six months. Their guest is Dushan Zaric. Dushan Zaric is co-owner of the Macao Trading Company and Empl....>> More\n\n10/25/2010: David Broom, Whisky: To start off the show, the guys discuss the new New York Times rating system for restaurants in New Jersey and some possible better alternatives. Then the guys chat with Dave Broom, the author of The....>> More\n\n10/18/2010: Angela Miller:", + " The guys start the show by discussing the benefits of having cameras in the restaurant and how they've helped them to catch various misdeeds on camera, including a recent incident with some constr....>> More\n\n9/28/2010: La Petraia: La Petraia: Mark and Francis travel to La Petraia, an agrotourismo in the Chinati Classico region of Italy. They walk through the property with Susan McKenna Grant and Marco Panichi and discuss the....>> More\n\n9/15/2010: Antoinette Bruno: Antoinette Bruno of StarChefs.com joins the guys to discuss the upcoming Chef's Congress happening in New York City September 20,", + " 21, and 22. They discuss mixology, the various events, and the Ri....>> More\n\n8/2/2010: Ben Hewitt: Ben Hewitt is the author of The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food. He joins the guys to discuss living in Vermont, the situation in Hardwick Vermont, and the state....>> More\n\n7/27/2010: Janit London/ Amy Sutherland: Janit London joins the guys to discuss her food co-op, Purple Dragon. Amy Sutherland joins the guys to discuss cook-offs in America.....>> More\n\n7/", + "19/2010: Lionello Marchese: Lionello Marchese joins Mark and Francis at Vinitaly to discuss his wine, Castello di Monastero. They discuss Lionello's previous businesses and how that business experience relates to the busine....>> More\n\n7/13/2010: Michael Gelb: Michael J Gelb is the author of the book Wine Drinking for Inspired Thinking. He is a pioneer in the fields of creative thinking, accelerated learning and innovatve leadership. He joins the guys to....>> More\n\n7/7/2010: Vinitaly Wine Conference-- DeGrazia, Skurnik & Vanucci:", + " Mark and Francis travel to the Vinitaly wine conference in Verona Italy, one of the most important wine conferences in the world, and interview some very important people from each link of the chain t....>> More\n\n7/5/2010: Ana Sofia Joanes: Fresh: The Movie Fresh, celebrates the farmers, thinkers, and business people across America who are reinventing our food system. Producer, Ana Sofia Joanes grew up in Switzerland, but attended coll....>> More\n\n6/22/2010: Daniel Okrent: Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time,", + " Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. He worked in book publishing as an editor at Knopf and Viking, and....>> More\n\n6/11/2010: Giovanni Bonmartini Fini: Giovanni Bonmartini Fini joins the guys to discuss the Pinot Grigio and Merlot that he makes at his family's estate in Alto Adige. They discuss the differences between DOC and IGT wines and their....>> More\n\n5/30/2010: Johnny Iuzzini: Johnny Iuzzini is the executive pastry chef of the world-renowned Jean Georges restaurant in New York City, won the award for Outstanding Pastry Chef from the James Beard Foundation in 2006.", + " He joins....>> More\n\n5/19/2010: Greg Boehm: Greg Boehm is an established cocktail expert hailing from Chelsea in New York City. He owns Mud Puddle Books and its child company Cocktail Kingdom, which sells historical bartending guides, exotic m....>> More\n\n5/6/2010: Stephen Fried: Mark and Francis discuss a new study from Princeton University on high fructose corn syrup and its effect on obesity. They also interview Stephen Fried, an award-winning investigative journalist, es....>> More\n\n4/21/2010: Tony Abou Ganim: Tony Abou Ganim joins us today to discuss his new book,", + " The Modern Mixologist: Contemporary Classic Cocktails. Tony Abou Ganim created the cocktail program at the Bellagio Resort. He is also the Nat....>> More\n\n4/8/2010: David Gumpert: Dinner in a Garage? That's right! Mark and Francis joined some friends at Brooklyn's Fette Sau, a bbq place in a refurbished (slightly) commercial garage. The food is great as is the beer sele....>> More\n\n3/30/2010: Lesley Townsend: Lesley Townsend is the Founder and director of the Manhattan Cocktail Classic and the founding director of Astor Center.", + " A devout believer in the healing properties of madeira and a proud defender of....>> More\n\n3/9/2010: ExpenseASteak.com and Randall Grahm: The Guys begin the show with a discussion of www.ExpenseASteak.com (http://www.expenseasteak.com/). It's crazy! Randall Grahm is one of the most interesting and intelligent winemakers in the....>> More\n\n12/31/2009: Nicholas Harary: Mark and Francis talk about the new rating system implemented by the New York times regional section. What once was a two star rating (a good rating in Mark and Francis'", + " mind) is reduced to OK in....>> More\n\n12/16/2009: Chad Ward: Chad Ward is an accomplished North-Carolina-based, writer and blogger, who mainly showcases his knowledge about food and kitchen gear. His most recent work, \"An Edge in the Kitchen\" is an c....>> More\n\n11/13/2009: Steven Rinella: In the first part of this episode, join The Guys as they recap their trip to New Orleans and Tales of Cocktail this summer. The American Buffalo is a key part of the history of the U.S. in addition t....>> More\n\n11/3/", + "2009: Jill DeGroff: The guys welcome Jill DeGroff. Jill is married to Dale DeGroff and has just published a wonderful new book of illustrations and stories of famous cocktailians from around the world. She joins the gu....>> More\n\n10/26/2009: Mark Kurlansky: The Guys respond to NY Times writer Frank Bruni's conjecture as to how the economy is causing restaurants to be understaffed in the first segment of this show. Mark and Francis have their own idea....>> More\n\n10/16/2009: Double Cross Vodka: The Guys begin this episode by discuss \"truth in advertising\"", + " and discuss the wild claims product advertising make, such as the \"best burger you will ever taste,\"and what they real....>> More\n\n9/14/2009: Anne Mendelson: The Guys start off the show with a discussion of Food Industry's \"Health Choices\" program (hardly). They then welcome Anne Mendelson, Author of The Surprising Story of Milk Through the....>> More\n\n9/11/2009: Lesley Townsend & Hayden Lambert: The Guys welcome Lesley Townsend from The Manhattan Cocktail Classic to talk about the upcoming event in New York. Then, they reach across the pond to their friend Hayden Lambert,", + " a top mixologists f....>> More\n\n8/31/2009: Robert Kenner: Food Inc.: Erich Schlosser and Robert Kenner have made one of the most explosive film ever about how our food is made and who own it all. Time Magazine calls the film \"Bracing, compassionate, thrilling and....>> More\n\n8/25/2009: Michael Ruhlman: Michael Ruhlman joins the guys to discuss his exciting new book Ratio. From Booklist: Ruhlman, who explained the basic ingredients, tools, and cookbooks essential to the home chef in The Elements of C....>> More\n\n8/", + "18/2009: Kim Severson: Kim Severson has been a food writer and cultural commentator at the New York Times since 2004. Before that, she wrote and edited at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she received the Casey Medal for....>> More\n\n8/11/2009: Gael Greene: The Guys Discuss Geese in New Jersey. Why don't we eat them? Famed food critic Gael Greene returns to talk about her new role as Judge in the Bravo television series Top Chef Masters and the gr....>> More\n\n8/5/2009: Dushan Zaric & Jason Kosmas: Dushan Zaric & Jason Kosmas own and operate several bars and restaurants.", + " Their flagship Employees Only is the highest grossing-per-square-foot seller of cocktails in the world. The Guys have b....>> More\n\n7/22/2009: Lisa Laird Dunn: The Laird Family has been producing Applejack in Scobeyville since the 1600's. The commercial distillery was established in 1780 and is America's oldest native distillery. There were once hu....>> More\n\n7/9/2009: Mark Canlis: Mark Canlis is the middle of the three Canlis sons and is proud to have grown up in a restaurant family. In addition to being a Cornell graduate and former Captain in Air Force Special Operations,", + " Mar....>> More\n\n6/24/2009: Ann Tuennerman / Jim Weaver: Ann Tuennerman is founder of the New Orleans based event, Tales of the Cocktail, which has celebrating the art of well-crafted cocktails since 2003. Ann's love of cocktails, cuisine, history and N....>> More\n\n6/5/2009: Best Ice Cream / Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace: Bon Appetite Magazine recently named some of America's best ice cream shoppes. In New York - it's a fleet of ice cream trucks - Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream (the ice cream is also available i....>> More\n\n5/", + "29/2009: TV Food Network Names Stage Left \"Best Burger in New Jersey\" / Nina Planck Returns: Food Network Magazine determined the best burger in every state of The Union. The winner for NJ: Stage Left, of course. So now The Food Network and NY Magazine have joined the chorus who recognize o....>> More\n\n5/22/2009: Charlie Trotter: Charlie Trotter is a legendary culinary figure and owner of one of the nation's finest restaurants Charlie Trotter's in Chicago. Eight-time winner of the James Beard award, Trotter also boasts....>> More\n\n5/13/2009: Thomas Keller:", + " Thomas Keller is, indisputably, one of the nation's most reputable and recognized chefs and restaurateurs. As owner of the French Laundry in Napa Valley, California and the per se in New York City....>> More\n\n3/10/2009: Damien Brassel: The Guys welcome Chef Damien Brassel of Knife & Fork Restaurant in New York City. By 20 he was the head chef at Peacock Alley, a Michelin star restaurant in Dublin. Knife + Fork is Damien Brassel&....>> More\n\n2/27/2009: David Waltuck: David Waltuck is one the world's preeminent chefs and owner of the restaurant,", + " Chanterelle, in SoHo NYC. With wife and business partner, Karen, at his side, the duo has transformed the restaurant....>> More\n\n2/20/2009: Eric Ripert: Eric Ripert is the chef and part owner of Le Bernardin, awarded 4 stars by the New York Times, three stars by the Michelin Guide, rated best restauarant in NYC by Zagat, and best restaurant in America....>> More\n\n2/12/2009: Dana Cowin: As Editor in Chief of Food & Wine magazine since 1995, Dana Cowin has exercised leadership to transform the magazine into an indispensable piece of popular media-a must-read for restaurant lovers,", + "....>> More\n\n2/5/2009: Dale DeGroff: Dale DeGroff returns to the show to talk about the cocktail renaissance and the long and varied history of cocktails. He will be joining us for a Friday Night Cocktail party in Catherine Lombardi on....>> More\n\n1/28/2009: Paul Hobbs: Paul Hobbs is one of the most sought-after winemakers on three continents. The Wine Spectator hailed Paul among the top winemakers in California as well as Argentina and Chile. (They're right, of....>> More\n\n1/22/2009: Scott Beattie:", + " Scott Beattie is bar manager at Cyrus Restaurant in Healdsburg, California and has used his experience to author Artisanal Cocktails: Drinks Inspired by the Seasons from the Bar at Cyrus. Scott makes....>> More\n\n1/15/2009: Michael Ruhlman: Michael Ruhlman is a freelance journalist who authors a popular blog and whose work has appeared in the New York Times. Ruhlman has co-authored several cookbooks with some of the country's leading....>> More\n\n1/7/2009: Tilar Mazzeo: Tilar J. Mazzeo is the author of The Widow Clicquot:", + " The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (Collins 2008) and of the forthcoming guides to the Back-Lane Wineries of Sonoma and Bac....>> More\n\n12/31/2008: Susan McKenna Grant: Susan McKenna Grant is a culinary expert who specializes in \"slow food\" cooking, pastry making, and artisanal baking. After retiring as founder of computer graphic company Alias Research, Mc....>> More\n\n12/26/2008: Rowan Jacobsen: Rowan Jacobsen writes about food, the environment, and the connections between the two. He has written for the New York Times,", + " Newsweek, Harper's, Saveur, Eating Well, Wondertime, The Art of Eatin....>> More\n\n12/18/2008: Jacqui Naylor: The Wall Street Journal wrote: \"The process, which Ms. Naylor calls \"acoustic smashing,\" marked a turning point in her career.\" NPR said: \"Jacqui Naylor has brought new twist....>> More\n\n12/11/2008: Anthony Giglio: Anthony Giglio is a New York based sommelier, journalist and accomplished freelance writer. He recently authored the Food & Wine: Wine Guide 2009 and edited the 67th edition of Mr.", + " Boston Official....>> More\n\n12/4/2008: Andrew Carmellini: Andrew Carmellini has created an innovative new cookbook entitled 'Urban Italian: Simple Recipes & True Stories from a Life in Food' to go along with his innovative genre of Italian-Americ....>> More\n\n11/20/2008: Tanya Wenman Steele: Tanya Wenman Steele is editor in chief of the award-winning food website Epicurious.com. She is also the winner of a James Beard foundation journalism award and a regular guest on Today. She has writt....>> More\n\n11/17/2008: Pat Willard: Pat Willard is the author of the recently published,", + " 'America Eats!--On the Road with the WPA. She has written three other books about food and has written numerous articles and maintains her webs....>> More\n\n11/5/2008: Patricia Wells Returns: Patricia Wells has lived in Paris with her husband, Walter Wells, for nearly 30 years. She runs a popular cooking school in Paris and is the author of over 10 books. She was also the restaurant crit....>> More\n\n10/22/2008: Aldo Sohm: To say that Aldo Sohm knows wine is an understatement. The Austrian-born Sohm, who is currently the wine director at New York's Le Bernardin,", + " was named the Best Sommelier in the world in May of th....>> More\n\n9/18/2008: Livio Felluga: Livio Felluga is an Italian winemaker whose estate reaches over 160 hectares in the hill country of Collio and Colli Orientali del Friuli. His wines range from dry to sweet and from red to white. Hi....>> More\n\n9/3/2008: Michaele Weissman: Michaele Weissman is a journalist and author who writes about food, families, business, and American culture. Her work appears frequently in publications such as the New York Times,", + " the Washington Po....>> More\n\n8/27/2008: Georgeanne Brennan: There are certain words which come to mind when you hear the name Georgeanne Brennan. Cookbook author, food journalist, cooking teacher. Prolific. Winner of a James Beard Foundation Award. Brennan pub....>> More\n\n8/20/2008: George Naylor: George Naylor is a corn and soybean farmer from Churdan, Iowa. He is best known from Michael Pollan's best-selling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. George was featured as a family farmer trying t....>> More\n\n8/7/", + "2008: The Last Call-In Show: The Guys take calls on the last regular weekday show on WCTC-AM. They are taking it a bit easy for the summer and producing one show a week. They will ramp up production again in the fall. On this....>> More\n\n7/16/2008: Sergio Esposito: Sergio Esposito is the owner of Italian Wine Merchants in New York City. He speaks at and hosts wine dinners throughout the country, has a much-visited Web site, and writes a popular e-mail newsletter....>> More\n\n6/30/2008: Stephanie Izard:", + " Most people know our next guest by her first name. Her fans love her food, her grace, and of course her smile. We're proud to introduce Bravo TV's Season Four \"Top Chef,\" Stephanie I....>> More\n\n6/25/2008: Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan: Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned conservation scientist. He is the author of countless books about America's environmental biology and a many-times-over winner of science awards, notably a....>> More\n\n6/20/2008: Taras Grescoe: Taras Grescoe has written articles on travel for The Times,", + " Independent, Conde Nast Traveller (U.K.), National Geographic Traveler and the New York Times. His bestselling first book Sacre Blues: An Un....>> More\n\n6/11/2008: Dr. Daphne Miller: Dr. Daphne Miller is the author of The Jungle Effect, which is not the ordinary diet book. Instead of miracles, Dr. Miller explains how returning to an indigenous diet will help Western society from d....>> More\n\n6/5/2008: Frederick Kaufman: Frederick Kaufman is a professor of English at the City University of New York. He has written about American food culture and other subjects for Harper's Magazine,", + " the New Yorker, Gourmet, Gastro....>> More\n\n5/29/2008: Mark Kurlansky: Mark Kurlansky is an award-winning and best-selling author who has written more than a dozen books -- most of which explore the history of food and humanity. He's with us today to expand a bit mo....>> More\n\n5/22/2008: Alan Richman: Alan Richman is a contributing writer for GQ, Conde Nast Traveler, and Bon Appetit, as well as the Dean of Food Journalism at the French Culinary Institute. He joins us today to discuss his recent a....>> More\n\n5/", + "16/2008: Cat Cora: Cat Cora isn't just one of the best female chefs, she's one of the country's biggest culinary superstars, period. Cat has starred in a number of TV shows and has written several books, bu....>> More\n\n5/15/2008: Judith Jones: Judith Jones is senior editor and vice president at Alfred A Knopf, where she has worked since 1957. She is co-author with Evan Jones of three books. Recently, she has contributed to Vogue, Saveur,....>> More\n\n5/9/2008: David Wondrich: David Wondrich is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost authorities on cocktails and their history.", + " He is one of the founders of Beverage Alcohol Resource, has worked with the Museum o....>> More\n\n5/8/2008: Corby Kummer: Corby Kummer is one of the country's most respected food journalists. He is a writer for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of the book \"Joy of Coffee\", which was heralded by the New Y....>> More\n\n5/7/2008: Kim Haasarud and Jeanne Kelley: She's \"the Liquid Chef,\" a professional beverage mixologist. Her name is Kim Haasarud, and she is the founder of Liquid Architecture, creating original beverage and bar concepts from Los....>> More\n\n4/", + "30/2008: Michael White: Michael White has taken over the reigns as Executive Chef for two of New York's top Italian Restaurants L'Impero and Alto. He also is Chef -Partner at Due Terre in Bernardsville New Jersey.....>> More\n\n4/28/2008: Eric Asimov: Eric Asimov is the Chief Wine Critic for the New York Times. Although he formerly edited the renowned paper's \"Living\" and \"Style\" sections, he is most known for his reviews o....>> More\n\n4/22/2008: Bradford Rand: Bradford Rand is the President/", + "CEO of Expo International and RAND International. Bradford and his talented team have produced over 500 tradeshows and special events over the last 14 years spanning a m....>> More\n\n4/21/2008: Ania Catalano: Ania Catalano, owner of The Gourmet Whole Foods Catering and Cooking School. She was diagnosed with hypoglycemia which led to her learning about agave nectar, an unrefined natural sweetener. Catalano....>> More\n\n4/18/2008: Marc Vetri / Dr Elizabeth Babcock: Marc Vetri is chef/owner of Vetri and Osteria Restaurants in Philadelphia.", + " He has won the James Beard award for \"Best Chef -- Midatlantic\" and has been named one of America's top ten ne....>> More\n\n4/17/2008: Andrew Zimmern: Andrew Zimmern is currently the host (creator and co-producter )of 'Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern' the hit show on The Travel Channel. In addition he is a chef, teacher, former restaurant....>> More\n\n4/14/2008: David Wondrich: David Wondrich is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost authorities on cocktails and their history. He is one of the founders of Beverage Alcohol Resource,", + " has worked with the Museum o....>> More\n\n4/11/2008: Dan Koeppel: Dan Koeppel is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir To See Every Bird on Earth. His stories have appeared in National Geographic, Adventure, Wired, Audubon, and Popular Science. He has tri....>> More\n\n4/9/2008: Will Allen: Will Allen has been described as a visionary in organic farming. Allen co-manages the organic Cedar Circle Farm in Vermont and is the author of The War on Bugs, an expose on the fertilizer and pestici....>> More\n\n4/7/", + "2008: Paul Grieco: Paul Grieco, General Manager of Hearth Restaurant in New York City. He spent many of his early years in the company of his family perfecting the details of service. His career in New York City began a....>> More\n\n4/4/2008: Cary Fowler: Enough rice, maize and wheat to feed an army -- well, that's the hope (someday)! Nearly 3 weeks ago the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, with 100 million....>> More\n\n4/2/2008: Suzanne Goin: Suzanne Goin was named Best Creative Chef by Boston magazine in 1994,", + " one of the Best New Chefs by Food & Wine in 1999, and was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2003, 2004, and 2005. She and h....>> More\n\n3/26/2008: Jack Babin and Tony Forder: Jack Babin and Tony Forder are the co founders and publishers of The Ale Street News, the most circulated beer newspaper in America. Since 1992 Babin and Forder have been putting their love of beer an....>> More\n\n3/21/2008: Frederick Kaufmann: Frederick Kaufmann is a professor of English at the City University of New York.", + " He has written about American food culture and other subjects for Harper's Magazine, the New Yorker, Gourmet, Gastr....>> More\n\n3/19/2008: Bill Kurtis: Bill Kurtis is an acclaimed broadcast journalist who has worked in the profession for 40 years. Kurtis was the co-anchor for CBS Morning News, and the host of countless series and specials, most notab....>> More\n\n3/14/2008: Terrance Brennan: Terrance Brennan is the Chef-Proprietor of Picholine Restaurant and Artisanal Bistro and Wine Bar, two highly acclaimed restaurants in New York City,", + " and the founder of Artisanal Premium Cheese, a who....>> More\n\n3/12/2008: Jose Andres: If you've recently ordered tapas at your favorite trendy restaurant -- you can probably thank Chef Jose Andres for popularizing the Spanish 'appetizer.' For a number of years now, he'....>> More\n\n3/7/2008: Eric Felten: Eric Felten writes the celebrated cocktail column \"How's Your Drink?\" for the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. In May 2007, he was honored with a James Beard Foundation award....>> More\n\n3/4/2008:", + " Vickie Smith: Vickie Smith is the webmistress of www.missvickie.com, a frontrunner on the Internet for pressure-cooking websites. Since April 2001 her site has seen over two million visitors, and in January of this....>> More\n\n2/29/2008: Frank Evans - North American Truffles: Frank Evans lives in Portland Oregon. He received a BSEE from the University of California at Berkeley. He is now retired after forty years of engineering in fields including instrumentation for hum....>> More\n\n2/26/2008: James MacKinnon: James MacKinnon is the co-author (along with Alisa Smith)", + " of Plenty: One Man, One Woman and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. He is also the author of Dead Man in Paradise which won the 2006 Charles....>> More\n\n2/21/2008: Simon Hopkinson: Simon Hopkinson was once called the best cook in Britain. He was the founding chef at Bibendum in London and has won awards for his column in The Independent. He is here today to discuss a book recent....>> More\n\n2/13/2008: Julie Reiner: Julie Reiner, owner of The Flatiron Lounge, was born in Hawaii and worked as a cocktail server prior to moving to San Francisco,", + " and ultimately Manhattan. She calls her style of drink-making \"ne....>> More\n\n2/8/2008: Amy Standen - Meatpaper: Carnivores of the world unite: Meatpaper is a new magazine out of San Francisco that is getting a lot of buzz. The \"Journal of Meat Culture\" takes beef, pork, and all kinds of meat super-s....>> More\n\n2/6/2008: Margaret M. Wittenberg: Margaret M. Wittenberg is an acclaimed authority on natural and organic foods and environmental sustainability. She is VP of Communications and Quality Standards for Whole Foods Market Inc., the natio....>> More\n\n2/", + "4/2008: Rob Ilvento: They have sold more than 300 million chicken wings -- and it all started here in the Garden State! If you went to college in New Jersey in the last 15 years -- you probably ate at a Cluck U franchise....>> More\n\n1/29/2008: Gael Greene: For more than three decades, the impeccable tastebuds of Gael Greene spawned each weekly edition of her \"The Insatiable Critic\" column for New York magazine. Now, she remains on staff and c....>> More\n\n1/24/2008: Josh Ozersky: Josh Ozersky is the online food editor for New York Magazine,", + " helming the \"Grub Street\" blog. The former food writer for Newsday magazine, Mr. Ozersky is the author of three books: Archie Bu....>> More\n\n1/22/2008: Paul Hobbs: Paul Hobbs is one of the most sought-after winemakers on three continents. The Wine Spectator has hailed Paul among the top winemakers in California as well as in Argentina and Chile. The chef has som....>> More\n\n1/12/2008: Don Harris: Don Harris is the owner of La Tienda Importers, one of the most instrumental importers of the infamous and quite coveted,", + " Jamon Iberico. Today, Don is here to talk with us about the long anticipated a....>> More\n\n1/11/2008: Johannes Selbach: The ancestors of the Selbach family have been cultivating Riesling since 1661. Today, Johannes Selbach and his wife Barbara are running the winery with passion for the wines and in respect of the long....>> More\n\n1/4/2008: Ben Schott: Ben Schott is the bestselling author of Schott's Original Miscellany, Schott's Almanacs, Schott's Sporting, Gaming, and Idling Miscellany as well as Schott's Food & Drink Miscellan....>> More\n\n1/", + "2/2008: Craig Shelton: Craig Shelton is one of the nation's most celebrated chefs: the first person to grace the cover of Gourmet magazine, a James Beard Award winner, and the man behind the Garden State's first fo....>> More\n\n12/28/2007: Bill Buford on Chocolate: Not only does chocolate stir up so many emotions in countless people, but simply saying the words \"dark-chocolate\" to cocoa-philes is like saying something erotic: when dark chocolate hits....>> More\n\n12/20/2007: Jacqui Naylor: Jacqui Naylor has been called the \"new voice of jazz\"", + " by Vogue. Jazz Times writes, \"In the never-ending, 'next big thing' sweepstakes, bet on Jacqui Naylor.\" She is a tre....>> More\n\n12/19/2007: Robert Tinnell: Robert Tinnell is a prolific comic and graphic novel writer who also had a \"prior\" life as a Hollywood director (his movies starred Burt Reynolds, Elisha Cuthbert and Ryan Gosling). His Fea....>> More\n\n12/18/2007: Ben Kinmont: Ben Kinmont is considered one of the United States' top dealers in rare and antique books on the topic of gastronomy.", + " He is also a multimedia conceptual artist and has written many books and creat....>> More\n\n12/14/2007: Father Greg Boyle: Homeboys Bakery's motto is \"job, not jails,\" and it's a project created by a Los Angeles-area priest that trains former gang-bangers baking and culinary skills. The men and women in....>> More\n\n12/12/2007: Wes Brustad: Wes Brustad President and CEO of the State Theatre located in the heart of New Brunswick is here today to talk about some very exciting holiday events coming up in the next few days and weeks.....>> More\n\n12/", + "11/2007: Natalie MacLean Holiday Wines: Sometimes the toughest part about the holiday season is calculating how many pounds of turkey you'll need for all your guests, which vegetables to serve as side dishes, and whether your mother-in-....>> More\n\n12/7/2007: Kathleen Flinn: Kathleen Flinn is a journalist and food writer based in Seattle. Ms. Flinn's eccentrically titled memoir, The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry, details her experiences after emptying her savin....>> More\n\n12/5/2007: Kim Severson Returns: Kim Severson is one of the Restaurant Guys favorite repeat offenders.", + " She's been a food writer and cultural commentator at the New York Time Since 2004. Before that, she wrote and edited at the S....>> More\n\n12/3/2007: Michael Green: \"Wine Lovers: The Musical\" is the world's first, interactive wine-tasting musical, premiered off-Broadway the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It was the brainchild (or shall we say it cam....>> More\n\n12/1/2007: Traci Des Jardins: The news season of Food Network's \"The Next Iron Chef\" brings together eight of the nation's best chefs. These aren't \"up and comers.\" They are established masters of....>> More\n\n11/", + "30/2007: Sanibel Sea School and Q Tonic: Dr. James Bruce Neill is a marine biologist who is currently the Executive Director of the Sanibel Sea School. Neill dedicates his time to promote marine conservation through experiential education. H....>> More\n\n11/27/2007: Iron Chef Michael Symon: Michael Symon is one of America's leading chefs. Owner of restaurants Lola and Lolita in Cleveland, Symon has garnered recognition from Food & Wine magazine among other major publications. He....>> More\n\n11/23/2007: Liz Pearson of Saveur Magazine Returns: Liz Pearson is a returning guest to the show she is the director of the test kitchen at Saveur Magazine and also the writer of the Pantry section.", + " She became the director in September of 2005 after ha....>> More\n\n11/23/2007: Lettie Teague: Lettie Teague is an executive editor at Food & Wine magazine. She writes a monthly column for the magazine, \"Wine Matters,\" for which she won the 2003 James Beard M. F. K. Fisher Disting....>> More\n\n11/20/2007: James McWilliams: The concept of \"Eating Local\" is gaining in popularity every year. The movement is more recently getting connected to the crisis of global warming: the idea being that if you ship your foo....>> More\n\n11/", + "19/2007: Herb Eckhouse: Herb and Kathy Eckhouse are the owners of La Quercia a company that creates artisan prosciutto, based in Iowa. They are a \"green\" and partially organic company that produces and delivers smo....>> More\n\n11/16/2007: Next Iron Chefs: Marou Ouattara and Gavin Kaysen: Morou is the chef and owner of Farrah Olivia Restaurant in Alexandria, Virgina. Growing up on the Ivory Coast, Morou's first inspiration in the kitchen came from his mother. Combining African, Fre....>> More\n\n11/15/", + "2007: Chris Cosentino: The new season of Food Network's \"The Next Iron Chef\" brings together eight of the nation's best chefs. These aren't \"up and comers.\" They are established masters of....>> More\n\n11/14/2007: Michael Psilakis: Among big league restaurateurs and celebrity chefs, his is a household name. It might be hard to pronounce, but Michael Psilakis is fast-becoming one of the top chefs in the nation. And his name --....>> More\n\n11/6/2007: Next Iron Chef Aaron Sanchez: Aaron Sanchez is a leading contemporary Latin chef in the United States.", + " He co-hosted \"Melting Pot\" on the Food Network with fellow Chef Alex Garcia. He has opened several restaurants, inclu....>> More\n\n10/26/2007: Jill Davie: The new season of Food Network's \"The Next Iron Chef\" brings together eight of the nation's best chefs. These aren't \"up and comers.\" They are established masters of....>> More\n\n10/25/2007: Melanie Dunea: Melanie Dunea is a world-renowned photographer, with her work featured in publications such as Vanity Fair, People, Newsweek, and Gourmet among many others. She has received many awards for her work i....>> More\n\n10/", + "24/2007: Roger Sherman: Roger Sherman was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary, short subject for his film, The Garden of Eden. His newest film is The American Brew, which tells the history of beer in America. He jo....>> More\n\n10/19/2007: Tom Philpott: This year, the nation is slated to get a brand new Farm Bill, and of course, not everyone is championing the government's various proposals. The Dept. of Agriculture introduced the 180-plus page....>> More\n\n10/18/2007: Gary Allen: Gary Allen is a food writer, an adjunct professor at the State University of New York's Empire State College,", + " and presides as Web Master over the internet presence of the Study of Food and Society....>> More\n\n10/17/2007: Rowan Jacobsen: Rowan Jacobsen is a staff writer for the Art of Eating. He is also the author of Chocolate Unwrapped. He joins us today to discuss his new book, A Geography of Oysters: The Connoisseur's Guide t....>> More\n\n10/12/2007: Ray Isle Returns: Ray Isle is the Senior Editor of Wine at Food & Wine magazine, where his \"Tasting Room\" column is published monthly. He previously held the position of Managing Editor at Wine & Spir....>> More\n\n10/", + "11/2007: Andrew Knowlton: The Iron Chef phenomenon began in Japan, and quickly grew into several syndicated shows and spinoffs. The latest Iron Chef reincarnation: Food Network's \"New Next Iron Chef,\" set to de....>> More\n\n10/10/2007: Top Chef Hung Huynh: Hung Huynh works as the Executive Sous Chef at one of the most expensive restaurants in Las Vegas, Guy Savoy. Born in Vietnam and trained in classic French and Asian cuisine, Hung Huynh believes in co....>> More\n\n10/4/2007: Steven Witherly: Steven Witherly has a PhD in human nutrition and over 23 years of experience as a food scientist.", + " He is the current CEO and president of Technical Products Inc. and has just published a new book \"....>> More\n\n10/3/2007: John Brunnquell: John Brunnquell is a leading expert in the United States egg industry. He is the president of Egg Innovations, a farm operation held by his family for three generations. His company is 100% cage-free....>> More\n\n9/26/2007: Jairemarie Pomo: Jairemarie Pomo teaches oyster appreciation and cooking classes and leads writing workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area. She joins us today to discuss her book,", + " The Hog Island Oyster Lover's Co....>> More\n\n9/25/2007: Phoebe Damrosch: Phoebe Damrosch is the author of Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter in which she describes her experience as a female captain at world-famous restaurant Per Se. She joins u....>> More\n\n9/24/2007: Dale Degroff: The Guys welcome back Dale DeGroff, the worlds preeminent bartender (mixologist), this time from Shinn Vineyards on Long Island. For years he was the head bartender at New York's famed Rainbow Ro....>> More\n\n9/", + "20/2007: Claudia Roden: Claudia Roden is a food writer who travels widely to research her award-winning cookbooks. Born and brought up in Cairo, Ms. Roden has been compiling recipes and investigating their context from a ver....>> More\n\n9/14/2007: Fritz Haeg: Fritz Haeg is a L.A.-based architect and social designer who initiated the Edible Estates project which mutates front lawns into gardens of art and produce. Haeg's other projects include the Fritz....>> More\n\n9/13/2007: Kurt Wenzel: An old friend of Mark and Francis,", + " Kurt Wenzel has just release his third novel, a satirical thriller set in Los Angeles.....>> More\n\n9/12/2007: Terrance Brennan: Terrance Brennan is the owner of Picholine on 64th st in New York. He is the Chef-Proprietor of two highly acclaimed restaurants and Artisanal Premium Cheese, Terrance Brennan has established a solid....>> More\n\n9/7/2007: Barbara Shinn: David Page & Barbara Shinn are partners in life and in business. They opened Home Restaurant on Cornelia Street in The Village 14 years ago offering \"neighborhood cuisines.\" While they s....>> More\n\n9/", + "6/2007: David Page: David Page & Barbara Shinn are partners in life and in business. They opened Home Restaurant on Cornelia Street in The Village 14 years ago offering \"neighborhood cuisines.\" While they s....>> More\n\n8/30/2007: Roger Sherman: Roger Sherman was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary, short subject for his film, The Garden of Eden. His newest film is The American Brew, which tells the history of beer in America. He jo....>> More\n\n8/29/2007: Julia Flynn Siler: Julia Flynn Siler received her MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Business.", + " She had written for The New York Times and had been a London-based correspondent for Business Week and The Wall S....>> More\n\n8/24/2007: Ted Breaux Returns: Ted Breaux is a chemist and environmental microbiologist, who, in his spare time, has become one of the foremost authorities on absinthe. Besides being a knowledgeable source on the subject, he is al....>> More\n\n8/23/2007: Dorothy Hamilton: Dorothy Hamilton is the founder and CEO of the French Culinary Institute. She is the recently appointed chairwoman of board for the James Beard Foundation, chairwoman emeritus for life of the American....>> More\n\n8/", + "22/2007: Evan Goldstein on Eatertainment: Evan Goldstein is a James Beard Award-winning sommelier and author Perfect Pairing: A Master Sommelier's Practical Advice for Partnering Wine with Food. Having been the youngest to pass the master....>> More\n\n8/10/2007: Rebecca Mead: Rebecca Mead is a staff writer at the New Yorker. She joins us today to discuss her new book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.....>> More\n\n8/9/2007: Wayne Curtis: Wayne Curtis is a contributing editor to Preservation magazine, and his stories on travel,", + " architecture, and history have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, an....>> More\n\n8/8/2007: Stephane Reynaud: Author Stephane Reynaud has written the cookbook Pork and Sons, filled with fantastically vivid pictures of porcine delights. The book was awarded French Cookbook of the Year in 2006, but the title is....>> More\n\n8/3/2007: Tom Valenti: The Guys welcome Tom Valenti to the show. Tom is chef/owner of Restaurant Ouest on The Upper West Side of Manhattan and has been one of the most important chefs in New York for a generation.", + " His foo....>> More\n\n8/1/2007: Margo True: Margo True is an editor at Sunset Magazine. She's written and edited for Saveur, Gourmet, and many other publications. The daughter of a foreign service officer, she spent much of her childhood tr....>> More\n\n7/30/2007: Marian Betancourt: Marian Betancourt is a freelance writer based in New York City. She writes food features for the Associated Press and has written for other publications, including Chocolatier and Travel & Leisur....>> More\n\n7/19/2007: Todd Lefkovic:", + " Todd Lefkovic is the owner of the Foods of New York Tours. He started the Village Walking and Tasting Tour eighteen years ago to let people know about good, affordable restaurants in the area. Expandi....>> More\n\n7/13/2007: Patricia Wells: Patricia Wells is one of the leading American authorities on French cuisine. She is a teacher and an award winning assembler of fine cookbooks. Her latest project is Vegetable Harvest: Vegetables at t....>> More\n\n7/11/2007: Jeff Roberts: Jeff Roberts helped establish the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese at the University of Vermont. He is a national director with Slow Food USA and co-", + "chaired \"Artisan Cheeses of America\"....>> More\n\n7/9/2007: Art Seavey: Art Seavey is the co-head of the Monterey Abalone Company in California. He works with Trevor S. Fay in the farming and harvesting of seven types of Abalone. He also serves as the director for the C....>> More\n\n6/29/2007: Nancy Silva: Nancy Silva is a licensed naturopathic physician in the state of California specializing in clinical nutrition, herbal medicine, and lifestyle counseling. Having earned her Doctorate in Naturopathic m....>> More\n\n6/", + "27/2007: Ann Rogers: As an advocate in preserving the dining and drinking history of New Orleans, Ann Rogers created the New Orleans Culinary and Cultural Preservation Society, Southern Comfort Cocktail Tour, and Tales of....>> More\n\n6/26/2007: Joe Gannascoli: Joe Gannascoli is an experienced actor, chef and culinary entrepreneur. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and became a professional chef at 24. Following attempt at starting an acting caree....>> More\n\n6/22/2007: Farmer John Peterson: The film \"The Real Dirt on Farmer John\" documents the dramatic failure of Farmer John's conventional farming operation and its resurrection into a thriving,", + " organic CSA farm! The critica....>> More\n\n6/21/2007: Natalie MacLean (returns): Natalie MacLean is a wine writer and an accredited sommelier. She has won numerous awards including four James Beard Journalism Awards and she had been names the World's best drink writer. Her wri....>> More\n\n6/20/2007: Steve Rinella Returns: Steven Rinella is a Michigan native and a correspondent for Outside Magazine. He is a nature writer. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Nerve Double Take and The Best American Travel Wr....>> More\n\n6/19/2007:", + " Trevor Corson: Trevor Corson has written articles for Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe. His work as a lobsterman and his subsequent research on the science of lobsters led to a feature art....>> More\n\n6/15/2007: Liz Pearson: Liz Pearson joined Saveur in September 2005 as its kitchen director after having been both an intern and a freelancer for the magazine. A graduate of both Bard College and the Culinary Institute of Am....>> More\n\n6/14/2007: Sasha Eisenberg: In \"The Sushi Economy\", Philadelphia-based journalist Sasha Issenberg roams the globe in search of sushi and takes the reader on a cultural,", + " historical and economic journey through the raw-f....>> More\n\n6/13/2007: Tim O'Shea: Tim O'Shea is the co-founder of CleanFish(tm), a company building the US market for artisan fisheries for both wild and cultivated seafood. In the face of large-scale industrial practices that da....>> More\n\n6/11/2007: Andrew Zimmern: Andrew Zimmern is a food writer, dining columnist and restaurant critic, radio talk show host, TV personality-writer-producer, chef and teacher. Zimmern is an associate editor, food critic, and resta....>> More\n\n6/", + "8/2007: Alan Brown: Alan Brown is the recipient of many writing awards, including National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, and the Pacific Rim Book Prize. His award-w....>> More\n\n6/5/2007: Gail Sokol: Gail D. Sokol is an award-winning professional in the culinary arts industry with demonstrated success in baking and pastry arts, supervision and training, and classical cuisine. Chef Sokol brings her....>> More\n\n6/1/2007: Tony Soter: Tony Soter is one of the most talented and influential wine makers in the world.", + " Tony's fascination with the process of grape growing and wine making began when he first came to Napa Valley in 197....>> More\n\n5/31/2007: Jens Schmidt: Today we welcome to the show, Jens Schmidt, a renowned expert on Italian wines who offers his services to producers around the world. Along with his work as an international broker, Schmidt also is th....>> More\n\n5/30/2007: Fedele Bauccio: After a career in foodservice, Fedele Bauccio opened his own company in 1987, Bon Appetit Management Company. They serve 44 corporate clients and 39 educational institutions in 12 states and are comm....>> More\n\n5/", + "24/2007: Marco Pierre White: Marco Pierre White was the youngest chef to achieve three Michelin stars and also the first chef to achieve three Michelin stars in England. Known as much for his quick temper as for his exceptional....>> More\n\n5/17/2007: Mimi Sheraton: Mimi Sheraton was born into a food-loving family in Brooklyn. Her mother was an excellent cook and her father was a commission merchant in the Washington Market, a wholesale produce market. Growing up....>> More\n\n5/16/2007: Fuchsia Dunlop: Fuchsia Dunlop was educated at Magdalene College,", + " Cambridge University, and trained as a Chinese chef at China's leading cooking school, the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu, where s....>> More\n\n5/15/2007: Lynne Olver / The Food Timeline: A reference librarian with a passion for food history. Food history credentials include contributorship to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. Ms. Olver consults regularly with food....>> More\n\n5/10/2007: John Kapon: John Kapon is the co-owner and president of auctions, Acker, Merrall, & Condit. He writes a newsletter on wine called Vintage Tastings,", + " in which he rates rare and older wines on a 100-point scale....>> More\n\n5/9/2007: Adam Perry Lang Returns: Adam Perry Lang has been on the foodie circuit for quite some time, with stints at Le Cirque, Daniel, and Chanterelle. He is now the proud owner of Daisy Mays BBQ USA and the Executive Chef of Robert&....>> More\n\n5/8/2007: Nicholas Harary: Are most great dates related to food? The Guys ponder. Then they are joined but their friend and fellow restaurateur, Nicholas Harary of Restaurant Nicholas for a lively discussion on culinary educat....>> More\n\n5/", + "3/2007: Steve Ettlinger: Steve Ettlinger has been an author, editor, and book producer since 1985, and has helped create over forty books. Just a dozen of those titles account for over a million copies. Six books relate dire....>> More\n\n5/2/2007: Michael Petrone / AAA: Michael Petrone has 30 years of experience working in association with the Hospitality Industry. He is a certified executive chef by the American Culinary Federation. The ACF is the largest and most....>> More\n\n5/1/2007: Andrea Strong: Andrea Strong writes Articles for the New York Post,", + " Bloomberg news and the New York Times. She co wrote \"Sparks in the Kitchen\" with Katy Sparks. Andrea is a well known and respected source....>> More\n\n4/30/2007: Eric Ripert: Joining us today is Eric Ripert, executive chef and part owner of Le Bernardin in New York City. In 1995, Ripert earned a four star rating from the New York Times, and has subsequently been praised i....>> More\n\n4/26/2007: Bruce Blumberg / George Staikos: Too many calories and too little exercise are undeniably the major factors contributing to the obesity epidemic,", + " but several recent animal studies suggest that environmental exposure to widely used ch....>> More\n\n4/25/2007: Fred Plotkin: Fred Plotkin divides his time between New York and the Italian Riviera. His writing concentrates on the subjects of Italy and opera.. Fred Plotkin is author of Italy for the Gourmet Traveler; Italy To....>> More\n\n4/24/2007: Tim Olson: One of The Guys favorite California winemakers, Tim, joins the guys to talk about Pinot Noir and Syrah, the Wine Country and even global warming. You can meet this talented and charming wine-maker on....>> More\n\n4/", + "23/2007: Marcus Samuelsson: Marcus Samuelsson is the chef and co-owner of Aquavit, a restaurant offering innovative interpretations of classic Scandinavian cuisine that marries the traditional with the contemporary. He is also....>> More\n\n4/19/2007: Nanci Alexander: Nanci Alexander has been a leader and visionary working for a more compassionate worldly outlook for animals. Nanci has been noted as saying she has always been concerned about animals and their right....>> More\n\n4/18/2007: Grant Achatz: Grant Achatz is the executive chef and owner of the number one restaurant in America,", + " Alinea. Achatz has won nearly every major award, including being named \"the best rising star chef\" by t....>> More\n\n4/17/2007: Kim Severson: Kim Severson, a New York Times reporter before that she worked for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of The Trans Fats Solution: Cooking and Shopping to Eliminate the Deadliest Fat from Your Die....>> More\n\n4/13/2007: Eric Asimov: Eric Asimov is the chief wine critic of the New York Times. He is the co-author of The New York Times Guide to Restaurants 2004.", + " He's reviewed many restaurants in the $25-and-Under column for The....>> More\n\n4/11/2007: Gael Greene Returns: Food and Wine Magazine has published its list of the Best Cocktails in America and The Best Cocktail Bars in America. Guess who's on it? The....>> More\n\n4/9/2007: Barry Estabrook: Barry Estabrook is a freelance writer for various publications. He has also published a novel entitled Bahama Heat. He joins us today to discuss his recent article in Gourmet Magazine,", + " \"Do I da....>> More\n\n4/6/2007: Cynthia Clampitt: Cynthia Clampitt is above all things a writer of food. With notable work on several internet websites and small columns in countless others, Clampitt is currently a writer for Hungry Magazine working....>> More\n\n4/4/2007: Anya Von Bremzen: Russian-born Anya von Bremzen is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure magazine, where she writes about restaurants around the world. She is the coauthor of Please to the Table:The Russian Cookboo....>> More\n\n4/2/2007: Nick Fauchald:", + " Nick Fauchald, senior associate editor of Food & Wine. Born and raised in Minnesota. Went to school at St. Olaf College, worked at a Minneapolis city/regional magazine after college, moved to New....>> More\n\n3/30/2007: Sheila Bowman: Sheila Bowman is here to speak with us today about Sea Food Watch at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Sea Food Watch is a program of Monterey Bay Aquarium designed to raise consumer awareness about the impo....>> More\n\n3/28/2007: Greg Christian: Greg Christian is the founder of the Organic School Project. Inspired by the success he had from introducing an all-", + "organic diet to his children, he decided to team with schools to improve the health....>> More\n\n3/26/2007: Iain Ball: Iain Ball was born in Britain. For reasons that he can't quite recall he moved to Mumbai, India in November 2002, where he worked at the Indian Express newspaper before joining Time Out Mumbai mag....>> More\n\n3/23/2007: Lettie Teague: Lettie Teague is an executive editor at Food & Wine magazine. She writes a monthly column for the magazine, \"Wine Matters,\" for which she won the 2003 James Beard M.F.K.", + " Fisher Distingui....>> More\n\n3/22/2007: Barry Glassner: Barry Glassner has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, and has written for the New York Times, The wall Street Journal and the Los Angelos Times. He is a professor of sociology at YSC.....>> More\n\n3/21/2007: Tanya Steel: Tanya Wenman Steel is Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning Epicurious.com, CondeNet's premier food web site. This site incorporates editorial content from Gourmet, Bon Appetit and Self magazines a....>> More\n\n3/14/2007:", + " Ilan Hall: No secret, The Guys are fans of \"Top Chef\" the reality cooking competition television series on Bravo TV. In the past we've had Judge Tom Colicchio, producer Randy Berstein and the 1st....>> More\n\n3/6/2007: Antoinette Bruno: Antoinette Bruno brings more than a decade of experience in the foodservice industry to StarChefs.com, the first online food magazine which celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2005. Since taking charge....>> More\n\n3/5/2007: Jon Rowley: Jon Rowley has received national marketing awards and considerable media coverage for programs he has initiated such as Bruce Gore Signature Salmon and fresh Copper River King Salmon.", + " He has a particu....>> More\n\n2/27/2007: Hungry Planet with Faith D'Aluisio and Peter Menzel: Photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D'Aluisio traveled the world, inviting themselves to dine with 30 families in 24 countries, from Darfur to Cuba to Poland. But before dinner, they shop t....>> More\n\n2/22/2007: Pew Intiative on Biotechnology and Food: The Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology was established in 2001 to be an independent and objective source of credible information on agricultural biotechnology for the public, media and policymak....>> More\n\n2/", + "21/2007: Robyn Flipse: In \"Fighting the Freshman Fifteen\" Robyn Flipse warns us about the danger of overeating, overdrinking and under indulging when one enters college. This book is meant to serve as a road map f....>> More\n\n2/20/2007: Linda Faillace: Fran Wood, columnist for the Newark Star Ledger, recently was outraged by one NJ towns approach to ridding itself of pesky Canadian geese. The geese were lured into a box and then quickly, their necks....>> More\n\n2/16/2007: Wenonah Hauter of Food & Water Watch;", + " Truffle Season: It is white truffle season. We love these delicious (and pricey) morsels (sold by the gram). There are a number of places in New York where you can enjoy them: Sapori d'Ischia (55-15 37th Ave., a....>> More\n\n2/15/2007: Leslie Sbracco: Leslie Sbrocco is an award-winning author, writer, speaker, and television host whose entertaining approach makes learning about wine and food fun. Her first book, WINE FOR WOMEN: A GUIDE TO BUYING,....>> More\n\n2/14/2007:", + " John Scharffenberger: John Scharffenberger founded Sharffenberger Cellars, one of the premier sparkling wine cellars in the United States. He sold his interest in the winery, and in 1996 he and Steinberg founded Scharffen....>> More\n\n2/13/2007: Jeff Hollinger and Rob Schwartz: Jeff Hollinger and Rob Schwartz have a combined 16 years of bartending experience, including more than 6 years at Absinthe Brasserie & Bar in San Francisco, CA. They join us today to discuss thei....>> More\n\n2/13/2007: Walter Scheib:", + " As Executive Chef at the White House, Chef Scheib's duties include managing and preparing all menus and meals for the First Family and their private entertaining, as well as official and state fun....>> More\n\n2/12/2007: Peter Meehan: Peter Meehan writes the Under $25 column for the New York Times and contributes to Life magazine. He helped bring the popular public television series How to Cook Everything: Bittman Takes on America....>> More\n\n2/8/2007: Michel Nischan: Michel Nischan is a renowned chef, bestselling cookbook author and avid proponent of sustainable farming.", + " He is credited with creating a cuisine of well-being. His cuisine is focused on a respect fo....>> More\n\n2/7/2007: Jacques Torres: At twenty-six years old Chef Jacques Torres achieved the distinction of becoming the youngest recipient of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France Patissier Award. Since joining The FCI in 1993, Torres has sha....>> More\n\n2/6/2007: Cathy Corison: Cathy discovered her passion for wine while pursuing a bachelor's degree in biology at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Inspired by the notion that wine is \"alive at every level,&qu....>> More\n\n2/", + "5/2007: Justin Hartung: As the Restaurants Editor for Citysearch.com, Justin Hartung is responsible for covering the entire New York dining scene including new restaurants as well as uncovering seasonal culinary trends. Prio....>> More\n\n2/2/2007: Lettie Teague: Lettie Teague is the Wine Editor at Food & Wine Magazine. She is here today to talk to The Guys about the magazine's American Wine Awards as well as a recent article she wrote, \"The Secr....>> More\n\n2/1/2007: Bob Lape & Joanna Pruess: Seduced by bacon: Seduced by Bacon contains 19 delicious bacon recipes for every meal of the day.", + " Seduced by Bacon not only contains recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, desserts and snacks but &quo....>> More\n\n1/30/2007: Dushan Zaric and Jason Kosmas: Dushan Zaric and Jason Kosmas have almost thirty years of bartending experience between them. They are the owners of Employees Only, the hottest cocktail bar in Manhattan's West Village, and the....>> More\n\n1/29/2007: Janet Mandel and The Food of La Mancha: Janet Mandel is a freelance Journalist. Although, she was born in America she has spent the last forty years living and experiencing Spain.", + " She has devoted herself to the cuisine and culture of Spain.....>> More\n\n1/26/2007: Todd Stein: Todd Stein is the executive Chef at MK in Chicago. In Cleveland he opened and developed three of its most successful restaurants: Piccolo Mondo, Sans Souci and Vivo. His work and the resulting buzz ea....>> More\n\n1/25/2007: Iano DeGrazia: Marc de Grazia Selections has been promoting fine Italian wines since 1980. Represented are over ninety small estates from fourteen Italian wine regions with an emphasis on significant \"terroir&q....>> More\n\n1/", + "24/2007: Warren Belasco: Warren Belasco, Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, is author of Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry and Americans on the Ro....>> More\n\n1/23/2007: Alard Tardi: Alan Tardi began his career at Chantrelle and then Lafayette. In 1992 he opened up his restaurant Follonico, in New York City. The restaurant was praised for its Italian cooking. After the restaurant....>> More\n\n1/22/2007: Sally Schneider: Sally Schneider is a former chef turned writer.", + " She has written a syndicated newspaper column called \"A New Way to Cook\" and has been a contributor to such publications as Food and Wine and....>> More\n\n1/18/2007: Leslie Brenner: LESLIE BRENNER is the author of five books about food and wine, as well as the highly acclaimed novel, Greetings From the Golden State. A finalist for the Prix Medicis, the coveted French award for fi....>> More\n\n1/17/2007: Kim Severson: Kim Severson writes for The New York Times. She's author of The Trans Fats Solution: Cooking and Shopping to Eliminate the Deadliest Fat from Your Diet.", + " She's one of The Guys favorite food jo....>> More\n\n1/16/2007: Clifford A. Wright: Clifford A. Wright is an author who specializes in the regional cuisine of the Mediteranean and Italy. His cook book A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Me....>> More\n\n1/15/2007: James & Kay Salter: James Salter, one of America's greatest authors (including the novel A Sport and A Pastime and the collection Dusk and Other Stories) along with his wife Kay Salter (journalist and playwright who....>> More\n\n1/", + "12/2007: Dana Cowin: Dana Cowin, Food & Wine magazine's editor in chief since 1995, has been covering the world of food, style and design for more than 20 years. Under her leadership, Food & Wine has become a....>> More\n\n1/7/2007: Anthony Giglio: Anthony Giglio is a journalist, sommelier and author of Cocktails in New York and the Mr. Boston All-New Official Bartender's Guide. He has just recently returned from hosting a tour of wineries....>> More\n\n1/5/2007: Craig Minowa of the Organic Consumers Association:", + " Craig Minowa has been an actively working as a researcher and writer for environmental nonprofits for over a decade. He is an Environmental Scientist with the Organic Consumers Association. He is here....>> More\n\n1/3/2007: Craig LaBan: Craig LaBan is the restaurant critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer. His writing is sharp and insightful. He recieved The James Beard Award for Journalism in 2000. He didn't show up at the banquet....>> More\n\n12/29/2006: Kate Krader: So Francis had a great time in New York with dinner at Hearth and Cocktails at Angel's Share. Mark on the other hand was hoping to have a nice dinner with his lovely wife Jen.", + " Staying close to hom....>> More\n\n12/26/2006: Sean Harrison: Straight from the WCTC Newsroom: Hamburgers gone wild! The Guys review some \"interesting\" twists on the classic including serving a bacon cheese burger on a bun fashioned out of a Krispy Kre....>> More\n\n12/20/2006: Climate Change and Wine: Gregory V. Jones is an associate professor and research climatologist in the Geography Department at Southern Oregon University who specializes in the study of how climate variability and change impac....>> More\n\n12/18/2006: Adam Perry Lang of Daisy May's BBQ:", + " Adam Perry Lang has been on the foodie circuit for quite some time, with stints at Le Cirque, Daniel, and Chanterelle. He is now the proud owner of Daisy Mays BBQ USA located on 11th Ave in NYC. He jo....>> More\n\n12/15/2006: Corby Kummer: Corby Kummer is one of the country's most respected food journalists. He is a writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of the books \"Joy of Coffee\" and \"The Pleasure of Slow Food&q....>> More\n\n12/12/2006: Brian Snyder: Brian Snyder is Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA), a position he has held since 2001.", + " Mr. Snyder hails originally from the state of Indiana where bo....>> More\n\n12/11/2006: Antoinette Bruno Returns - Does Michelin Matter?: Looking for a job in Oregon's wine country? An acquaintance of Francis' is looking for someone to manage their wine bar in McMinnville, Oregon. Francis said it is a beautiful town. If you are....>> More\n\n12/8/2006: Jacqui Naylor: Jacqui has been called the \"new voice of jazz\" by Vogue. Jazz Times writes, \"In the never-ending, 'next big thing' sweepstakes, bet on Jacqui Naylor.\" She is a tremendous....>> More\n\n12/", + "7/2006: Andrea Strong - The New Strong Buzz: Andrea Strong writes Articles for the New York Post, Bloomberg news and the New York Times. She co wrote \"Sparks in the Kitchen\" with Katy Sparks. Andrea is a well known and respected source....>> More\n\n12/6/2006: Seth Roberts: Seth Roberts, Ph.D. is a professor of phychology at the University of California at Berkeley. He serves on the editorial advisory board of the journal Nutrition and has published dozens of articles o....>> More\n\n11/30/2006: G. Bruce Knecht: Part high seas adventure adventure,", + " part courtroom drama \"Hooked: A True Story of Pirates, Poaching, and the Perfect Fish,\" chronicles how a California fish merchant renamed the ugly Patagon....>> More\n\n11/29/2006: Rowan Jacobsen - Umami: Rowan Jacobsen is Managing Editor of The Art of Eating and a frequent contributor to the magazine. He has written on topics ranging from tropical fruit to wasabi, umami, lobsters, and mead. As a ghost....>> More\n\n11/29/2006: Adam Seger: Adam Seger is the General Manager and Sommelier of Chicago's Nuevo Latino restaurant,", + " Nacional 27. He's a leader in a new movement of mixology that is bridging the gap between the bar and the....>> More\n\n11/28/2006: Cara De Silva: CARA DE SILVA is an award-winning journalist who specializes in writing about food, travel, culture, and ethnicity. Most recently, In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin, which sh....>> More\n\n11/24/2006: Danny Meyer: Danny Meyer is the co-author with executive chef/partner Michael Romano of The Union Square Cafe Cookbook and Second Helpings From the Union Square Cafe and founder and co-owner of eleven New York est....>> More\n\n11/", + "22/2006: Floyd Cardoz Returns: Floyd Cardoz is the executive chef of Tabla in New York City. With Floyd at the helm, Tabla has received many accolades from the media including The New York Times -- Three stars, Bon Appetit \"Ou....>> More\n\n11/21/2006: Sam Gugino Talks Turkey: Sam Gugino was once the restaurant critic for the Philadelphia Daily News and then food editor of the San Jose Mercury News. He's now safely back in Philadelphia. He is a contributing editor to....>> More\n\n11/20/2006: Tom Colicchio:", + " Tom Colicchio is a highly renowned and respected chef. He is co-founder and former executive chef of the Gramercy Tavern in N.Y. He is also the owner and founder of the Craft restaurants: Craftbar, Wi....>> More\n\n11/17/2006: Christine Lavin: Christine Lavin has won one NAIRD award, two New York Music Awards, five ASCAP composer awards, the Kate Wolf Memorial Award, and her songs have been performed by such diverse artists as Tony Award-w....>> More\n\n11/15/2006: Steven Rinella: Talk about a sugar high! Francis recently went on a dessert safari in New York with Executive Chef Anthony Bucco and Stage Left Sous Chef Jason Ramos.", + " Some hot spots for dessert include \"Room 4 D....>> More\n\n11/14/2006: Alpana Singh: Alpana Singh is the director of wine and spirits for Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises. She is also the host of the Chicago-based television show, Check, Please! Ms. Singh became the youngest woman....>> More\n\n11/13/2006: French Bread: Steven L. Kaplan is the Goldwin Smith Professor of European History at Cornell. He has published widely in French and English on eighteenth-century France, food and foodways, the French Revolution and....>> More\n\n11/", + "13/2006: Charlie Palmer Returns: Charlie Palmer is one of the most highly regarded chefs in America today. He is chef/owner of Aureole Restaurants in both New York and Las Vegas. Aureole New York was opened in 1988 at the dawn of con....>> More\n\n11/10/2006: Macaroni & Cheese and Honey: Sarita Ekya loved Kraft Macaroni & Cheese growing up in Halifax. She and her husband Cesar enjoyed going to dinner at Peanut Butter & Co, a restaurant that specializes in, you guessed it, pean....>> More\n\n11/8/2006:", + " Gary Regan: Gary Regan is the author of The Joy of Mixology: The Consummate Guide to the Bartender's Craft, is the author of a column called \"The Cocktilian\" that runs in the San Francisco Chronicle....>> More\n\n11/6/2006: Foie Gras, Trans Fats and Caviar with Jane Black: Now, in addition to the proposed ban on foie gras (proposed by Vegetarian Assemblyman Michael Panter), Vegetarian Senator Ellen Karcher has proposed banning trans fats in restaurants. It is time for....>> More\n\n11/3/2006:", + " Peter Hoffman and Jessica Prentice: Peter has had a great influence on our own restaurants. He was an early proponent of seasonally driven, local-market-driven cuisine. He has served in the governance of The Union Square greenmarket in....>> More\n\n11/3/2006: Ray Isle: Senior wine editor at Food & Wine, Ray Isle writes the monthly \"Tasting Room\" column. Formerly the managing editor of Wine & Spirits Magazine, his articles about wine, food and spiri....>> More\n\n11/1/2006: Cliff Crooks: Cliff Crooks is the Executive Chef at Salute!, a New Jersey native (Essex County no less)", + " and a competitor on season two of Bravo TV's highly successful \"Top Chef\". This show is a favor....>> More\n\n10/18/2006: Karen Hudson: Karen Hudson lives on a fifth generation family farm in Illinois. She is a graduate of Illinois State University and has a Bachelors Degree in education. She is President of F.A.R.M. (Families Against....>> More\n\n10/16/2006: Ed Behr: Ed Behr started life as a carpenter, but abandoned that to become a food writer in the 1980s. He has been publishing the journal \"The Art of Eating\"", + " since 1986. In 1992, he published a col....>> More\n\n10/6/2006: Don and Pedie Kladstrup: Donald Kladstrup, a foreign correspondent for ABC and CBS television news, is the winner of three Emmys and the Alfred I. DuPont--Columbia University, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, and Overseas Press Cl....>> More\n\n10/4/2006: Time Out New York: Time Out New York (TONY) will host Eat Out 06, its fourth annual eating and drinking celebration on October 10th at Tribeca's chic Skylight Studio.", + " The evening will highlight TONYs Eat Out section....>> More\n\n10/3/2006: Melissa Clark: Guys along with some family and friends went to the \"Big Pig Gig\" at Daisy May's. A great experience. The pig was perfect! Food Writer Melissa Clark, \"Chef Interrupted\", retur....>> More\n\n10/2/2006: Poppy Tooker of Slow Food; Paul Roberts, MS, The French Laundry: On October 5, 2006, Slow Food USA will host its second annual gala, Fertile Ground: Celebrating Our Food Community. Slow Food founder and president,", + " Carlo Petrini, will be on hand to present the firs....>> More\n\n9/29/2006: $64 Tomato: Follow William Alexander through as he turns from a small time gardener to farmer. In his memoirs Alexander recounts all his hilarious experiences as he finds himself in a struggle with nature. Alexan....>> More\n\n9/27/2006: Dan Barber: Dan Barber began farming and cooking for family and friends at Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires. It was there that he was first introduced to and gained respect for locally grown and seasonal produce....>> More\n\n9/25/2006:", + " Andrea Strong: Andrea Strong writes Articles for the New York Post, Bloomberg news and the New York Times. She co wrote \"Sparks in the Kitchen\" with Katy Sparks. Andrea is a well known and respected source....>> More\n\n9/22/2006: Michael Ruhlman: Reach of a Chef: It's that time of year again! Francis and Chef Anthony Bucco attended the \"Fancy Food Show\" in New York. Not so fancy any more! Word of warning: Don't be suckered in by inferior pr....>> More\n\n9/20/2006: Karen Bussen: Karen Bussen's designs and advice have appeared in national and regional magazines including Home,", + " Food & Wine, Interior Design and Country Living. She is a top event designer and planner. Sh....>> More\n\n9/18/2006: Steven Witherly Returns: Steven Witherly joins The Guys to discuss his soon to be published book, \"Why People Like Junk Food: Food Pleasure Explained.\" In this book, Witherly examines the techniques and approaches o....>> More\n\n9/15/2006: Mary Ewing Mulligan: Mary Ewing-Mulligan is a prominent wine educator, author, and wine writer. She is one of the first American Masters of Wine (MW) and the first female to hold that title.", + " She also President of the Int....>> More\n\n9/15/2006: Phil Kline: Phil Kline is a senior Fisheries Policy advisor for Oceana. Prior to moving to DC, he spent 26 years as a commercial fisherman. For three years (1994-96), he served on the Groundfish Advisory Panel to....>> More\n\n9/13/2006: Marion Nestle: Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. Her degrees include a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health n....>> More\n\n9/", + "11/2006: Biro: It's not too early to start planning for New Year's Eve. The Guys are putting on a great show featuring fabulous dinners in both Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi and a concert starring Jacqui....>> More\n\n9/8/2006: Kevin Zraly: Kevin Zraly is the author of The Windows on The World Wine Course Book, the best selling wine book in history. Kevin was wine director at Windows on the world from 1976 till 2001 where he built the l....>> More\n\n9/6/2006: Evan Goldstein: Evan Goldstein has worked in the kitchens of the Restaurant Le Saintongeaid and the Hotel Lancaster in Paris,", + " Aubergu du Soleil in Napa Valley and Chez Panisse Cafe in Berkley. In 1987 he became the e....>> More\n\n8/30/2006: Jay Weinstein \"The Ethical Gourmet\": With the recent holiday Francis was invited to a \"bar-b-que\" which actually was a \"cook out\". Yes there is a difference. Some of \"The Guys\" favorie places for Bar-b-que i....>> More\n\n8/28/2006: Beau Timken: Beau Timken is a self taught sake aficionado. He has two acquired professional tasting licenses and master sake sommelier license.", + " He is the owner of the first retail store dedicated solely to sake, &....>> More\n\n8/23/2006: John Fischer: Look for his book At Your Service. Professor Fischer joins us from the campus of the preeminent culinary school in America to talk about service, the state of dining in America and professional career....>> More\n\n8/21/2006: Ed Hamilton on Rum: In the spring of '93 Ed Hamilton was preparing his first sloop Tafia for the annual pilgrimage south for hurricane season. A few days before setting sail he attended the monthly full moon party on....>> More\n\n8/18/", + "2006: Corby Kummer: Corby Kummer is one of the country's most respected food journalists. He is a writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of the book \"Joy of Coffee\" and \"The Pleasure of Slow Food.&q....>> More\n\n8/16/2006: Dwayne Ridgaway: Dwayne Ridgaway likes to write niche cookbooks. He is the author of \"Indoor Grilling,\" \"Perfect One Dish Meals,\" \"Pizza,\" and \"Sandwiches Panninis and Wraps.\" H....>> More\n\n8/11/2006: Charles Wilson \"Chew on This\": Charles Wilson is the co-author of Chew on This:", + " Everything You Don't Want to Know about Fast Food, an adaptation of one of the most influential books on food in years, Eric Schlosser's Fast F....>> More\n\n8/9/2006: Bill Buford: Bill Buford is the former fiction editor of The New Yorker. He is also the author of the bestselling book, Among the Thugs. His latest book is Heat, which tells the story of his experiences as a lin....>> More\n\n8/7/2006: Todd Wickstrom: Todd Wickstrom founded Heritage Foods with Patrick Martins in 2001, a business dedicated to helping farmers market their artisan foods and providing an alternative to industrial agriculture.", + " Todd is t....>> More\n\n8/4/2006: Nina Planck: The Guys talk about the benefits of local honey. Did you know that there is evidence that eating local honey could help reduce the effects of allergies? Some of The Guys favorite honey is imported by....>> More\n\n8/3/2006: Dean Goodman: Robert M. Goodman is a plant biologist active in finding practical applications for academic research, he is the Dean of the Rutgers University Cook College. Goodman, is alson an executive dean of agr....>> More\n\n8/2/2006: Absinthe: Up until recently in New York State one could only produce spirits after the purchase of a $50,", + "000 industrial license. Now you can get a license for $1450 that allows you to produce up to 35,000 gallo....>> More\n\n7/31/2006: Nathanael Johnson: Nathanael Johnson is a freelance journalist in San Francisco. He covers a variety of topics, especially the nexus of science, technology, environment, culture and agriculture. With an interest in fo....>> More\n\n7/28/2006: Trevor Corson: Trevor Corson has written articles for Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe. His work as a lobsterman and his subsequent research on the science of lobsters led to a feature art....>> More\n\n7/", + "26/2006: Antionette Bruno / Chefs' Congress and Dessert Trends: On their website H\u00e4agen-Dazs Ice Cream says its philosophy is simple: \"Find the purest and finest ingredients in the world and craft them into the best ice cream, sorbet and frozen yogurt availab....>> More\n\n7/24/2006: Anthony Bourdain: Anthony Bourdain is executive chef at Les Halles. He is a renowned author of seven books, including the bestselling kitchen Confidential and a Cooks Tour. He is the host of No Reservations on the disc....>> More\n\n7/19/2006:", + " Rick Moonen: From his days at Water Cafe and Oceana to his own \"RM Seafood\" in New York Chef Moonen is one of America's best chefs. He and The Guys have known each other for years and Rick has cooke....>> More\n\n7/17/2006: Susan Linn: The Guys discuss marketing to children with Susan Linn, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children's Center and is al....>> More\n\n7/14/2006: Obesity: Kelly Brownell is Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University,", + " where he also serves as Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health and as Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy a....>> More\n\n7/12/2006: Nora Pouillon: Nora Pouillon is a social entrepreneur and champion of organic cuisine. Born and raised in Austria, she spent several years on a self-sufficient farm, which influenced her understanding of the role of....>> More\n\n7/10/2006: Fabio Trabocchi: Backed by an impressive European pedigree, Fabio Trabocchi has landed at the Ritz-Carlton Tysons Corner where he's turning out food that can only be described as extraordinary.", + " The Guys have enjoy....>> More\n\n7/7/2006: Audrey Saunders: Audrey Saunders is the high priestess of cocktails in New York. Her Pegu Club is a favourite of The Guys and many New Yorkers. It is a place where all are welcome, celebrities do not get any special....>> More\n\n7/5/2006: Geoff Gardner: Chef Geoff Gardner is the executive chef and co-owner of restaurant Sel de la Terre. Prior to this Chef Geoff Gardner spent eight years as the sous chef at Boston's acclaimed L'Espalier restau....>> More\n\n6/30/2006: Annie Wayte:", + " In Keep It Seasonal, acclaimed chef Annie Wayte shows cooks that ingredients that are truly fresh, local, and in season are better tasting and better for you. Think of a fresh, crisp fall apple, a ten....>> More\n\n6/28/2006: Thomas Keller: Thomas Keller is the internationally renowned chef/owner of The French Laundry in Yountville, CA, Per Se in New York, and Bouchon in both California and Las Vegas. He is the author of several cookboo....>> More\n\n6/27/2006: Cafe d'Alsace, Sula Wines and Macaroni & Cheese:", + " Frank Bruni of the New York Times recently reviewed Cafe d'Alsace and gave the brasserie two stars. The restaurant features the cuisine of Alsace and New York's first \"beer sommelier\u201d. T....>> More\n\n6/26/2006: Anthony Giglio: The Guys welcome back food writer Anthony Giglio. Anthony has recently edited the \"Mr. Boston All-New Official Bartender's and Party Guide\" and wrote \"Cocktails in New York. Anthony....>> More\n\n6/23/2006: Christopher Lee, Executive Chef Striped Bass in Philadelphia: The cocktails are coming! The cocktails are coming!", + " Francis, Mark, Executive Chef Anthony Bucco, and Maitre 'd Samantha Darling have been busy researching cocktails and perfecting recipes for what....>> More\n\n6/21/2006: Anthony Giglio Goes to Sicily: Food Writer Anthony Giglio joins The Guys to talk about his upcoming trip to Sicily and the wines and food and culture of that unique Island. You can actually join Anthony on a wine tour he will guide....>> More\n\n6/19/2006: Jane Stern \"Road Food\": JANE and MICHAEL STERN are contributing editors to Gourmet, where they write the James Beard Award-winning monthly column \"Roadfood.\" They also do a weekly \"Two for the Road\"", + " segme....>> More\n\n6/16/2006: Antonio Galloni: The Piedmont Report: Antonio Galloni is Editor and Publisher of The Piedmont Report: a quarterly publication, with readers in 25 countries. He joins The Guys today to talk about the great wines of Piedmont.....>> More\n\n6/14/2006: Nicholas Harary: Nicholas Harary is one of the most highly regarded and acclaimed chefs in New Jersey. He is the owner an chef of highly acclaimed restaurant \"Nicholas\" in Red Bank New Jersey. \"Nicholas....>> More\n\n6/13/2006: Farmer John Peterson:", + " THE REAL DIRT ON FARMER JOHN is the award-winning true story of third-generation American farmer John Peterson's hero's journey of success, tribulation, failure and rebirth, through his childh....>> More\n\n6/12/2006: Nicholas Harary and John Kafarski: Hooray: Soft drink manufacturers have agreed to remove all sodas from grammar schools and have only sugar free soft drinks in high schools. The announcement was made by the William J. Clinton Foundati....>> More\n\n6/9/2006: Joy Manning of Philadelphia Style Magazine: The City of Brotherly Love has a hot restaurant scene.", + " Joining the guys to talk about gastro pubs, BYO restaurants and the empire of Stephen Starr is Joy Manning senior editor at Philadelphia STYLE ma....>> More\n\n6/6/2006: Gael Greene: Gael Greene's, New York Magazine's \"Insatiable Critic\" from 1968 to 2000 joins The Guys once again to talk about her book Insatiable, which last weekend won a rave review from The Ne....>> More\n\n6/5/2006: Ariane Daguin: Ariane Daguin is a native of the Gascon region of France. She is the owner of D'", + "Artagnan restaurant in New York, which specialized in the food of the French southwest. Her interest in foie gras is....>> More\n\n6/2/2006: \"Top Chef\" Harold Dieterle: Harold Dieterle has been catapulted from obscurity to celebrity. A graduate of The Culinary Institute and formerly the Sous Chef at Tribeca's \"The Harrison,\" Harold was named the \"....>> More\n\n5/31/2006: Gerry Dawes and the Food & Wine of Spain: Gerry Dawes is America's pre-eminent authority on Spanish food, wine and culture. After spending twenty years purveying fine wines to top Manhattan restaurants,", + " Dawes left the wine trade to devot....>> More\n\n5/29/2006: Eric V. Orange and Carol Byrd-Bredbenner: The ten worst restaurant trends according to epicurious.com happen to be some of the things The Guys think are a good idea. Some of the items sited as \"bad trends\" include foam, unisex bathr....>> More\n\n5/26/2006: Jimmy Bannos: So there's a lot of buzz about Stephen Starr's Morimoto New York restaurant. The Guys went to check it out and while they did not dine and cannot comment on the food they had plenty to say abo....>> More\n\n5/", + "23/2006: Maya Van Rossum \"The Delaware Riverkeeper\": Maya Van Rossum is \"The Delaware Riverkeeper\" and it her job to be the voice of the Delaware river which is 330 miles long and its watershed covers 13,000 square miles and includes portions....>> More\n\n5/22/2006: Mark Kurlansky: Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling and James A. Beard Award-winning author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; Salt: A World History; 1968: The Year that Rocked the W....>> More\n\n5/", + "19/2006: Kate Krader - Food & Wine's Best New Chefs: Kate Krader is a Senior Editor at Food & Wine magazine, overseeing its news, trend and restaurant coverage. During her long tenure at the monthly magazine, she has lead Food & Wine's annua....>> More\n\n5/17/2006: Colman Andrews on Campbelltown Scotch: Colman Andrews writes about food, wine and spirits. He is editor-in-chief of Saveur Magazine (one of the Guys' favorite food magazines). His cookbooks are Catalan Cuisine and Flavors of the Rivie....>> More\n\n5/15/2006:", + " Randy Bernstein: Top Chef is the one and only Reality TV cooking show that The Guys actually like! The success of the show is in part due to the fact that there are actual chefs cooking actual food in this competition....>> More\n\n5/12/2006: Chefs and Manufactured Flavors; Paul Hobbs on Oak Aging and Filtration: Here's a wine-geek show: The Guys welcome back long time friend and wine world rock star Paul Hobbs to talk about the philosophy and advantages of oak aging and fining or filtrating wines. Rega....>> More\n\n5/11/2006: Garrett Oliver:", + " Garrett Oliver is the brew master at the Brooklyn Brewery. He is a renowned and respected authority on traditional beer. Over the past nine years, he has commissioned a new brew house and expanded Bro....>> More\n\n5/10/2006: Andy Sharpless: A graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the London School of Economics, Andy Sharpless was one of the founding managers of RealNetworks, the Seattle-based pioneer in the field of online....>> More\n\n5/8/2006: Katy Sparks: Farm-raised vs. wild Salmon: A recent report concludes the benefits of Omega 3 outweigh the negative impact of PCBs found in some farm raised fish.", + " A helpful source of information for making seafood p....>> More\n\n5/5/2006: Tom Colicchio: Tom Colicchio is co-owner, founder and executive chef of Gramercy Tavern in N.Y. He also owns the Craft restaurants: Craft, Craftbar, 'Wichcraft and Craftsteak with two location in N.Y and Las Veg....>> More\n\n5/3/2006: Ted Haigh: Ted Haigh, also known, as Dr. Cocktail, is a renowned and influential cocktail historian. He has been researching the cocktail since the 1980s, but made his premier as a true cocktail historian and Dr....>> More\n\n5/", + "2/2006: Litter Tax: The Oakland, California City Council recently approved a tax that will force some businesses on litter-choked streets to help pay to clean up trash their customers left behind. Jane Brunner, member of....>> More\n\n5/1/2006: Erica Renaud: Erica Renaud is the Research and Farm Manager for Seeds of Change. She has obtained extensive experience over the last 14 years as an organic farmer and researcher. Erica was the Sustainability and E....>> More\n\n4/28/2006: Paul Lukacs & Stephen Starr goes to NYC: The Guys read Andrea Strong's (of thestrongbuzz.com and former show guest)", + " review of Philadelphia Restaurateur Stephen Starr's foray into New York City. Here's a piece of her review: MY....>> More\n\n4/27/2006: Vino-Loc and Skylark Diner: Recently The Guys came across a new kind of wine closure on a favorite wine. The Vino-Loc closure is a glass stopper with a tiny \"o\" ring that seals a bottle of wine elegantly, without the....>> More\n\n4/26/2006: Salmon and Murder Rate; Pam Schoenfeld on The Nutrional Value of Traditional Diets: Does poor diet lead to violent behaviour?", + " The Guys review a recent article from the New York Times which reviews a study done in a British Prison. \"Bernard Gesch, a senior research scientist at O....>> More\n\n4/25/2006: Rick Tramonto: Rick Tramonto's 25-year restaurant career has been a climb to the stars. \"Tramonto is a blend of mad scientist and magician in the kitchen. He is innovative, creative and somewhat an illusion....>> More\n\n4/24/2006: Erika Lesser and Allen Katz of Slow Food USA: Around St. Patrick's Day, Francis' mind turns to Irish Whiskey.", + " What's the difference between Irish and Scotch Whiskey: An old Scottish adage holds that Irish whiskey is unfinished whisky.....>> More\n\n4/19/2006: Diesel Engines running on Vegetable Oil; Terry Theise on German and Austrian Wines: Local listener, Dan Greenhouse contacted the Guys to see if he could get used cooking oil from the restaurant to run his car. Seems that Dan has gone \"green\" and is running his car on vegeta....>> More\n\n4/17/2006: Gael Greene: Gael Greene's \"Insatiable Critic\" column ran in New York Magazine from 1968 to 2000 and was one of the most influential food columns in America.", + " Mark and Francis read it religiously. Ga....>> More\n\n4/14/2006: Paul Lang: Paul Lang has had a varied and interesting career. From working as a cook for a Count and Contessa in Tuscany to being a sommelier at Mario Batali's restaurant, Babbo, Paul has now launched his o....>> More\n\n4/13/2006: Bill Niman and \"Peeps\": With Easter fast approaching our attention turns to those wonderful marshmallow confections, Peeps! Quite a cult following have these little edible duckies! Niman Ranch started its business nearly th....>> More\n\n4/", + "12/2006: Jane Black; Poaching Lobsters: The Guys tell the story of lobster poaching and vigilante justice! You can't make this stuff up! The Guys welcome Jane Black, who oversees the Boston Magazine's food and wine coverage. She ha....>> More\n\n4/10/2006: Perfume and Wendy Orent; Bird Flu: Want your woman to smell like Sauternes? Bordeaux negociant Ginestet has designed a line of perfumes derived from wine molecules. Now if you add David Burke's flavor spray your sweetheart can smel....>> More\n\n4/7/2006: Ron Cooper:", + " Mezcal has had a long history in Mexico. Made from agave, this was once a highly prized and controlled beverage used in weddings, funeral, births, etc. Anyone drinking it outside of these sanctioned o....>> More\n\n4/5/2006: Burger America: We love Burgers! In fact Stage Left is know for having one of the best burgers around. What better guest to talk about Burgers with than George Motz, director of the film \"Hamburger America\"....>> More\n\n4/3/2006: Antoinette Bruno: Antoinette Bruno is the CEO of Starchefs.com, a profitable website catering to the restaurant and hospitality industry.", + " Their newsletter, The Dish Rag, is full of great information and interesting in....>> More\n\n3/31/2006: Melissa Clark: The Guys talk about some events upcoming in their restaurants, including \"The Last Smoker at Stage Left\" before the smoking ban goes into effect. Also planning a Cocktail Dinner at Catherine....>> More\n\n3/29/2006: Nicholas Joly; Alison Barshak: The guys opening segment touches on biodynamic wines and specifically, one of their favorite winemakers Nicholas Joly. His book, Wine from Sky to Earth is the most famous book on the subject. His win....>> More\n\n3/", + "27/2006: David Samuels: The Fulton Fish Market was a New York institution. The Fish Market was in the same location since 1982. Last year, the market relocated to a new, state-of-the-art facility in Hunts Point in The Bronx.....>> More\n\n3/24/2006: Jerry Traunfeld: The Guys welcome Chef and Author Jerry Traunfeld of \"The Herbfarm\" in Woodinville, Washington. Herbs are a great way to add flavor and complexity to dishes without adding calories. Chef Trau....>> More\n\n3/22/2006: Patrick O'Connell:", + " The Inn at Little Washington is considered one of the finest places to stay and dine in the world. Years ago, Mark and Francis enjoyed a couple of evenings there and they feel it was extraordinary. Ch....>> More\n\n3/20/2006: Star Power: Long considered the premier guide in Europe Michelin has just released its first guide to New York. From Michelin Three Star Restaurants to the nearest star in the solar system The Guys talk about s....>> More\n\n3/15/2006: Bunny Crumpacker: Is there a better combination than sex and food? Author Bunny Crumpacker looks into the wonderful history of food as aphrodisiac.", + " The Guys also talk to Bunny about what makes a great first date restau....>> More\n\n3/10/2006: Dr. Ron Schmid: Ron Schmid is a licensed naturopathic physician who has taught at all four of the nations accredited naturopathic medical schools. He practices in Connecticut and he was also the first Clinical Direc....>> More\n\n3/8/2006: Robert Tinnell: The guys review their recent \"review\" of Catherine Lombardi in the New York Times. \"Very Good\" is in fact good news. Could have been \"excellent\" but we still need to twea....>> More\n\n3/", + "6/2006: Cathy Corison: Cathy Corison is one of the Guys' favorite winemakers in California. She makes some of the most elegant and age-worthy cabernet sauvignon in all of California. She also makes some very unusual a....>> More\n\n3/4/2006: Susan Ridley: Susan Ridley of The Hendry Ranch joins The Guys to talk about George Hendry's upcoming dinner at Stage Left this very week.....>> More\n\n3/3/2006: Daniel Young: \"The best place in the world to have dinner on a Tuesday night is Paris.\" So claims Daniel Young, former restaurant reviewer for the New York Daily News and author of \"The Bistros,", + " Bras....>> More\n\n3/1/2006: Stephen Beaumont: Stephen Beaumont has been writing about beer for over 15 years and was Canada's first national beer columnist. As he describes it \"I sit around, drink beer and get paid for it.\" How cool....>> More\n\n2/27/2006: Michael Ruhlman: Our first review for Catherine Lombardi: 3 1/2 Stars from Cody Kendall of the Newark Star Ledger. To quote Mark, \"YIPPEE!!!\" The Guys welcome back Michael Ruhlman, author of several books....>> More\n\n2/24/", + "2006: New Jersey Wines; Dunkin Donuts: The wines of New Jersey. If you have an opinion about them it better be a good one! Food writer and frequent Restaurant Guys guest Anthony Giglio wrote an article in New Jersey Life magazine recently....>> More\n\n2/22/2006: Conrad Miller: Counterfeit olive oil ring busted in New Jersey! Yes it's true - some unscrupulous folks were trying to pass off soy bean oil as olive oil. The \"switch\" is worth about $100,000! If you a....>> More\n\n2/20/2006: Susan Spungen:", + " Menus aren't just for ordering food any more. Oceanographers are using menus from 100 years ago to help determine the changes to fish populations around the world. Researchers could gage which pop....>> More\n\n2/13/2006: Eric Asimov: Did you hear the news! Time Out New York named \"The Restaurant Guys\" one of the best food-related podcasts! Thanks for listening and downloading. Mark and Francis welcome New York Times Chi....>> More\n\n2/10/2006: Grass-Fed Beef: It's easy to see where Mark got his smarts from! The Guys welcome Mark's Dad,", + " Christian Pascal to talk about organic products and the benefits of grass-fed beef. Christian has long been a prop....>> More\n\n2/8/2006: Deborah Koons Garcia Returns: The Guys welcome back Deborah Koons Garcia, widow of the late Jerry Garcia and documentarian. Her latestest film, The Future of Food, is now available on DVD.....>> More\n\n2/6/2006: Del Posto; Neo-Soul: Mark and Francis share some impressions of their visit to Mario Batali's new restaurant, Del Posto. Granted, parties larger than 4 have to jump through hoops to get a reservation,", + " leave a deposit....>> More\n\n2/3/2006: Adele Douglass: Humane Farm Animal Care is a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide viable, credible, duly monitored standards for humane food protection and ensuring consumers that certified products me....>> More\n\n2/1/2006: Jerry Miller; Charles Kuperus: Jerry Miller of Ohio likes playing match maker. That's why he launched the website farmersonly.com. Miller created the site in May after listening to a divorced farmer speak of her dating woes who....>> More\n\n1/30/2006: Brian Halweil: Mark and Francis welcome Brian Halweil of the World Watch Institute to the show.", + " Brian is a Senior researcher for the organization specializing in Food, Agriculture, Organic Farming, Biotechnology and....>> More\n\n1/27/2006: Mercury in Fish: Oceana vs. Fishscam: Recently we've seen a lot of news about the reports from the EPA warning of high levels of contamination in fish and warnings of the FDA that pregnant women and children especially should limit th....>> More\n\n1/23/2006: John Stauber: John Stauber, Author of Mad Cow U.S.A. gives an updage on the state of affairs. To date, 160 people (that we know of)", + " have died world wide from mad cow disease. That may not seem like a lot but this d....>> More\n\n1/19/2006: Paul Hobbs: From his humble beginnings as one of 11 children in upstate New York Paul Hobbs has emerged as one of the world's great wine makers. His wines are some of the most saught after in the world. Start....>> More\n\n1/13/2006: Rosie Saferstein: Mark and Francis continue talking about food and restaurants trends predicted for 2006. To talk about the restaurant scene in New Jersey, The Guys welcome back Rosie Saferstein to talk about restauran....>> More\n\n1/", + "11/2006: Tom Weatherly: People in New Orleans like to do two things: eat and talk about what they eat. Restaurants are in integral party of New Orleans and their comeback is key to the rebuilding of the city. The Guys welcom....>> More\n\n1/9/2006: Andrea Strong: David Burke has gone over to the dark side. Mark tried his new flavor spray on air. Not real food. Not very tasty. Andrea Strong is a food writer and \"eater\". She contributes to the New Yo....>> More\n\n1/4/2006: Jean Luc Le Du: As the long-time sommelier at Restaurant Danielle in New York,", + " Jean Luc Le Du was one of the best-known sommelier in the country. He has now left the restaurant business for the retail world. This is....>> More\n\n12/30/2005: Anthony Giglio: The Guys welcome back their favorite food-writer, Anthony Giglio, restaurant reviewer for New Jersey Life Magazine and The New York Sun, wine columnist for Boston Magazine and author of several books.....>> More\n\n12/28/2005: Kevin Zraly: Kevin Zraly is one of the most interesting, dynamic and influential people in the wine world. He founded the wine program at Windows on the World back in 1975.", + " His book, \"The Windows on The Wor....>> More\n\n12/19/2005: Chris Goodhart: So you think the life of a restrauteur is a glamorous one? Just tell that to Mark and Francis who were doing battle with a broken hot water heater! Yikes!.You know you are having a bad day when the pi....>> More\n\n12/13/2005: Wild American Shrimp: Mark and Francis talk to Kim Chauvin, a third generation shrimper from Louisiana. She and her husband Chuck own and operate the Mariah Jade Shrimp Company. They have just received the first ever \"....>> More\n\n12/", + "8/2005: Bob Bayer; Glen Burtnik and Tony Shanahan: The Guys are joined by Bob Bayer, Director of the Lobster Institute of Maine to talk about the Maine Lobster Fishery, which has been called the most well managed fishery of any kind in the world. The....>> More\n\n12/7/2005: Caffeine; James Cahill, Mayor of New Brunswick, NJ: Caffeinated energy drinks are the fastest-growing sector of the $93 billion domestic beverage industry, but are some youths hooked? Mark and Francis talk about the boom in energy drinks and the manufa....>> More\n\n12/", + "5/2005: Peter Schleimer: Mark and Francis welcome their old friend, Austrian Restaurant Critic and Wine Writer Peter Schleimer to the show to talk about the food and wine scene in Austria and Austrian food and wine in America....>> More\n\n12/2/2005: Dale DeGroff: Talk about a bad idea! Mark and Francis have fun reading a recent scathing review of Ninja New York, a very expensive theme restaurant. With tasting menus ate $80 - $200 per person, Mark expects a cl....>> More\n\n11/28/2005: Anthony Giglio: The Guys welcome back Anthony Giglio,", + " wine columnist for Boston Magazine and restaurant critic for New Jersey Life Magazine and the New York Sun. Anthony has recently edited the 70th anniversary editi....>> More\n\n11/25/2005: No Kids Aloud; Sam Gugino: \"I'd like to sit in the no children section please.\" Mark and Francis discuss the policy recently instituted by a Chicago coffee shop which posts a sign \"Children of all ages must u....>> More\n\n11/23/2005: Jackie Savits: In January 2001, the FDA issued a warning that pregnant women, women who may become pregnant, nursing mothers, and small infants to avoid fish that may contain unsafe levels of methyl mercury.", + " These f....>> More\n\n11/21/2005: Dr. Peter Whybrow: Mark and Francis take aim at those who protest Montana's Bison Hunt, where it seems all sides of the controversy are a little bit ridiculous. Bison, once near extinction have made a miraculous com....>> More\n\n11/18/2005: Beth Lowell of Oceana: Oceana campaigns to protect and restore the world's oceans. Among their current campaigns, Oceana is fighting to see that House of Representatives Resolution 38-24 recently passed the House by a v....>> More\n\n11/16/2005: Anthony Giglio:", + " Francis is psyched! Jamon Iberico is coming!! This special ham, made from the Iberian black footed pig, gets its unique flavor from the pigs diet: acorns. Up to now this product could not be imported....>> More\n\n11/14/2005: Natalie MacLean: The Guys welcome Canadian Wine Expert Natalie MacLean to talk about her successful website, unique career path and a variety of wine topics. Natalie went from successful high tech marketer to wine exp....>> More\n\n11/11/2005: Jacqui Naylor: Jacqui Naylor has been called the \"new voice of jazz\"", + " by Vogue. Jazz Times writes, \"In the never-ending, 'next big thing' sweepstakes, bet on Jacqui Naylor.\" She is a tre....>> More\n\n11/9/2005: Todd Wickstrom: It's time to talk turkey and The Guys have a recommendation for the finest tasting turkeys for your holiday table. Todd Wickstrom of Heritage Foods USA joins The Guys to talk about \"Heritage....>> More\n\n11/7/2005: Oscar Schofield: The Guys started the show by talking about canned tuna. Not the starkist \"5 pack bags\" (one for every day of the week -- if you are fasting on weekends)", + " but rather delicious Ventresca Tuna,....>> More\n\n11/4/2005: Susan Samson: Catherine Lombardi is opening soon! Part of the process in getting the restaurant open is hiring an entire staff. Mark & Francis have been holding marathon interview sessions to find people with &....>> More\n\n11/2/2005: Rudolph Chelminski: Bernard Loiseau was at the top of the culinary world in France. At the age of 52 he was proprietor of La C\u00f4te d'Or in the provincial Burgundy town of Saulieu, the restaurant he had almost si....>> More\n\n11/", + "2/2005: Craig Cicciari: Ever think about making your own wine? Home winemaking is going through a bit of a renaissance. The Guys welcome Craig Cicciari of California Wine Works, located in Ramsey, NJ. Craig consults with his....>> More\n\n10/31/2005: Charlie Palmer: As one of the most highly regarded chefs in America today, Charlie Palmer has received critical acclaim for his signature progressive American cuisine. Chef/Owner of such landmark restaurants as Aureo....>> More\n\n10/26/2005: Doug Psaltis and Julia Powell: Two authors join Mark and Francis to discuss their books.", + " Doug Psaltis has gained recent notoriety with the publication of his book The Seasoning of a Chef where he recounts working in the kitchens of....>> More\n\n10/19/2005: Elin McCoy: The Guys welcome author Elin McCoy who has chronicled the world of wine for thirty years. She is wine and spirits columnist for Bloomberg Markets, and a long-time contributing editor at Food & Win....>> More\n\n10/17/2005: Lies, Damned Lies, and StopLabelingLies.com: While The Guys are all for truth in labeling, a lawsuit has been filed against the dairy industry,", + " in which the complainants want milk to have a warning label that states milk may be hazardous to peop....>> More\n\n10/14/2005: Michael Ruhlman: Michael Ruhlman has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Gourmet and Food Arts magazines. Among his many books, there are several on food and cooking. The Making of a Chef was writ....>> More\n\n10/13/2005: Mark Bittman: Mark Bittman writes The Minimalist column for the New York Times. He is also one of America's best selling cookbook authors. Among his many books,", + " \"How to Cook Everything\" won a James....>> More\n\n10/12/2005: Dr. Paul Rozin: The Guys welcome Dr. Paul Rozin, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the nature of cuisine in various cultures. In one study he aksed participants what they think....>> More\n\n10/10/2005: Restaurants Help with Hurricane Katrina: The Guys welcome Deborah Dowdell of the New Jersey Restaurant Association to talk about the effects of Hurricane Katrina and how the restaurant industry is helping out. One in ten people in New Orlean....>> More\n\n10/7/2005:", + " Cocktails in New York: The Guys muse on the topic of the cocktail. Recently they took several of their bartenders on a Cocktail Safari in New York. Listen to the guys relate their views on this category of libation and ta....>> More\n\n10/5/2005: Chris Paladino: They Guys talk about the city that houses their restaurants and the role of restaurants in a community, particularly what role restaurants can play in a city's redevelopment. Chris Paladino joins....>> More\n\n10/5/2005: Jamon Iberico: The Guys celebrate the announcement that pork from Spanish black-footed pigs will soon be available in America.", + " In two years time (the time it takes a ham to cure) we'll have the prized Jamon Iber....>> More\n\n10/3/2005: Bill Grimes: Bill Grimes was once The Drinking Man columnist for Esquire Magazine. He's written for The New York Time where he was restaurant critic from 1997-2003. He's also authored, among other works,....>> More\n\n9/28/2005: Nicholas Harary: Nicholas Harary is one of the most highly regarded chefs in New Jersey--and that's not just Mark and Francis' opinion but also that of the New York Times,", + " which recently said that very thing i....>> More\n\n9/23/2005: Deborah Koons Garcia: You may know of Deborah Koons Garcia as the widow of Jerry Garcia. But she is also the writer and director of the riveting new documentary, THE FUTURE OF FOOD. It's a riveting and in-depth inv....>> More\n\n9/20/2005: Launny Steffens: The Guys talk about the caloric value of several popular cocktails. On the high end: Pina Colada weighs in with 644 calories, Long Island Ice Tea a whopping 780 calories! Much more reasonable: Mohito....>> More\n\n9/", + "19/2005: Dave Wasenda: The Guys welcome Dave Wasenda from the Forsdate Country Club to talk about their upcoming charity golf event. The 2005 Forsgate Foundation Charity Golf Outing benefiting Special Olympics of New Jersey....>> More\n\n9/16/2005: Road Food: Michael Stern, together with his wife Jane, publishes Road Food; a coast to coast guide to 600 of the best barbeque joints, lobster shacks, ice cream parlors and highway diners in the country. Jane a....>> More\n\n9/13/2005: Chef Scott Conant: Chef Scott Conant of L'", + "Impero and Alto Restaurants in New York City does his own take on Italian cooking in New York City and The Guys are fans. They talk about Italian restaurants, regional Ital....>> More\n\n8/24/2005: OCA: The Guys welcome Craig Minowa, Environmental Scientist of The Organic Consumers Organization. They help all causes related to organic and family farming. Some argue that we need genetically modified f....>> More\n\n8/23/2005: Restaurant Auctions: The Guys reminisce about their experiences with restaurant auctions as both buyers and sellers. Some great buys are to be had--they could not have opened Stage Left without buying items at auction.", + " St....>> More\n\n8/19/2005: Business Etiquette for Executives: Maureen Wild of High Road Solutions talks about Business Etiquette. Ms. Wild started her business after attending The Protocol School in Washington D.C. She started teaching etiquette to children, wor....>> More\n\n8/18/2005: Bad Food: Bad Food Ideas that didn't work. New Coke, Coffee flavored Jell-o, Gerber Singles for Adults, Garlic Cake: Dessert or What? Jones Turkey and Gravy Soda, Green Bean Casserole Soda, Seaweed & S....>> More\n\n8/", + "17/2005: Free Range Graphics: Louis Fox is Creative Director of Free Range Graphics a company that uses \"Viral Flash Animation\" as a way of getting various messages out. In this form of marketing they create clever anima....>> More\n\n8/16/2005: Richard Grausman: Richard Grausman--cookbook author, culinary instructor and founder of C-CAP (Careers through the Culinary Arts Program) a school-to-career program that links public high schools to the foodservice ind....>> More\n\n8/15/2005: Flavor Spray, Cultured Meat and Port and Madeira:", + " Flavor Spray?? Why do we need to spray flavor? OK no calories but is it a good idea to divorce flavor from food? Are we supposed to eat like in Star Trek? Should we want to? The Guys also discuss....>> More\n\n8/12/2005: The Obesity Debate: The guys talk with Paul Campos, professor of law at the University of Colorado and a nationally recognized expert on America's war on fat. In his book \"The Diet Myth\" Campos argues that....>> More\n\n8/11/2005: Liza Queen: Liza Queen, a chef/restaurateur from Brooklyn, is getting a lot of attention for her no nonsense entirely market-based cuisine.", + " Conceived as a bare-bones, neighborhood restaurant with a menu made up....>> More\n\n8/9/2005: Blake Spalding & Jen Castle: Blake Spalding and Jen Castle own and operate Hell's Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah. Boulder has a population of just 180; while at the same time, it is the largest town geographically in Utah,....>> More\n\n8/8/2005: Anthony Giglio: The Guys talk about the potential hazards of cooking with Teflon. Francis and Mark prefer Steel, Cast Iron or coated cast iron like Le Creuset Cookware. The Guys welcome their favorite food & wi....>> More\n\n8/", + "5/2005: Trout: Agust Gudmundsson, President of the New Jersey Chapter of Trout Unlimited talks about the benefits of stocking trout. Some people think that stocking trout is not a good idea - that it squeezes out th....>> More\n\n8/4/2005: Larry Stone: The coveted Master Sommelier degree is held by fewer than 80 Americans. When the MS was conferred on dynamic and talented Larry Stone, he was the just the seventh American Master Sommelier. He has h....>> More\n\n8/3/2005: Tipping: Professor Wm. Michael Lynn of Cornell University is an expert on tipping.", + " He joined The Guys to discuss regional and international differences in tipping customs. Different countries have different ti....>> More\n\n8/2/2005: Tabla: Chef Floyd Cardoz, Executive Chef of Tabla (rated best Indian restaurant in New York by Zagat), was born in Bombay and studied cooking in both his native India and in Europe. As a child he wondered w....>> More\n\n8/1/2005: Guillermo Payet: Guillermo Payet is the founder and president of Local Harvest the largest directory of family farms and businesses such as farm markets and restaurants that support family farms. The directory include....>> More\n\n7/", + "29/2005: Advertising to Kids: Did you know that the FTC has no regulations or guidelines pertaining to advertising to children? Restrictions were removed in 1980. So the FTC can regulate advertising to adults but does not have any....>> More\n\n7/28/2005: Roger Dagorn, M.S.: Roger Dagorn is one of the leading authorities on wine in America. One of fewer than 100 people who hold the title of Master Sommelier in the entire U.S., he is not only one of the best, but also per....>> More\n\n7/27/2005: Seasonal Restaurants; Restaurant Consulting:", + " David Craig, whose family owns and runs The Washington Inn and The Pelican Club in Cape May, talks to The Guys about seasonal dining. The Washington Inn was just voted Best Wine List in South Jersey b....>> More\n\n7/26/2005: Richard Manning: Author Richard Manning talks about modern agriculture and sustainability, especially with regard to the prairie. Was the prairieland of this country more productive in its natural state? Areas of the....>> More\n\n7/25/2005: American Caviar: Have you heard of that new travel guide called Carnet? Mark and Francis think it's the most pretentious thing they have ever seen,", + " surpassed only by the ridiculousness and foppery of its founders....>> More\n\n7/22/2005: Mark Doherty: The Guys welcome Mark Doherty to trace his path from restaurant manager in New Jersey (where Francis worked for him way back when) to winemaker at the prestigious Hirsch Vineyards in Sonoma. Hirsch Vi....>> More\n\n7/21/2005: John Stauber: They said it could never happen here. Then in December of 2003 a cow in Washington State was diagnosed with Mad Cow Disease. Then they said it wasn't a big deal. They are still saying that.", + " Inve....>> More\n\n7/19/2005: Michael Ginor: Michael joined The Guys to talk about foie gras from breeding to marketing. Ginor says, \"We use everything but the quack\" said. Several states, including New York, are looking at banning t....>> More\n\n7/15/2005: Restaurant TV and Preserving Fruit: Mark and Francis talk about restaurant based \"reality\" shows such as \"The Restaurant\" Fox's \"Hell's Kitchen\" featuring Gordon Ramsay and PBS's \"Cooking U....>> More\n\n7/14/2005: Dehydration, Hyponatremia (Over Hydration)", + " & working out with Dr. Jack Kripsak;\n\nSeth Goldman, Founder of Honest Tea: Dr. Kripsak is the Director of Sports Medicine at The Somerset Medical Center Sports Performance and Rehabilitation Center. He joins The Guys to talk about the importance of the right type of hydratio....>> More\n\n7/13/2005: Fancy Food Show: On Monday Mark and Francis went to the Fancy Food Show at the Javits Center in New York City. The show was heavy on branding and marketing and short on \"real food\". Mark described many items....>> More\n\n7/12/2005: Oreos, Moraga Wines and More!: Big News:", + " Kraft, the maker of Oreo cookies has decided to make their cookies more like real food! Gone will be the trans-fats that help preserve the product! Tom Jones of Moraga Vineyards joins Mark....>> More\n\n7/11/2005: Red Tide: Oscar Schofield, Associate Professor of Marine Biology and Ocean Optics discusses Red Tide, its effects on the ocean environment and seafood. Some evidence suggests that the frequency of red tide or &....>> More\n\n7/7/2005: South Dakota Beef with Governor Mike Rounds: South Dakota has launched a new certification program to distinguish its beef--and bring more revenue to its ranchers.", + " Mark and Francis talk to Governor Mike Rounds about \"South Dakota Certified....>> More\n\n7/5/2005: Big Apple Barbecue: Mark and Francis discuss the wonders of barbeque. Francis and Chef Anthony Bucco ventured to NYC to discover the real deal at the Big Apple Barbecue festival at Madison Square Park. On their journey t....>> More\n\n7/1/2005: Steven Witherly: Steven Witherly joins The Guys to discuss his current project, a book entitled, \"Why People Like Junk Food: Food Pleasure Explained.\" Listen to an in depth discussion of how taste works and....>> More\n\n7/", + "1/2005: Barbara Shinn and David Page: Barbara and David have owned the renowned Home Restaurant on Cornelia Street in New York City since 1993 and have received much well-deserved critical acclaim for their innovative Neighborhood America....>> More\n\n7/1/2005: Kent Rasmussen: Kent says, \"The wine business provides a life vertically integrated - from working the land, to making the wine, to running the business, to selling the wine--A Wonderful Life.\" We agree. Ke....>> More\n\n7/1/2005: Fritz Maytag: Fritz is the renaissance man of spirituous libations in America.", + " He founded Anchor Distilling, invented steam beer at Anchor Steam and founded York Creek Vineyards in California. He joins us to disc....>> More\n\n7/1/2005: Peter Hoffman: Peter has had a great influence on our own restaurants. He was an early proponent of seasonally driven, local-market-driven cuisine. He has served in the governance of The Union Square greenmarket in....>> More\n\n7/1/2005: Nicholas and Melissa Harary: Nicholas and Melissa own and operate one of the finest restaurants in New Jersey, just North or Red Bank. They have worked all across America in some of the finest restaurants.", + " Their elegant restauran....>> More\n\n7/1/2005: James A Wassas: James discusses his invention of this fabulous new slightly sweet spirit that has all but taken over the Latin American spirits market and is poised to make its mark in The USA.....>> More\n\n7/1/2005: Eric Zillier: Eric is heading up the wine program at the still pending Restaurant Alto in NYC. More to come.....>> More\n\n7/1/2005: John Benjamin: John is the Executive Chef at Restaurant Latour in Hamburg, NJ 973-827-1587....>> More\n\n7/1/", + "2005: Deborah Dowdell: Deborah Dowdell of the New Jersey Restaurant Association joins us to talk about pending legislation that would ban smoking outright in bars and restaurant s in NJ and similar legislation throughout th....>> More\n\n7/1/2005: George Staikos: George is an old friend and noted wine consultant. He has worked for the finest restaurants and wineries alike. His wine education programs are interesting and fun. George joins us to talk about the s....>> More\n\n7/1/2005: John Cunnell: John and Andrea Cunnell own and operate the transgenerational, and inspirational local treasure known as Birnn Chocolate.", + " John joins us and talks about the love of chocolate and running a family busin....>> More\n\n6/24/2005: Summer Beverages and Summer Wines: Mark and Francis rant about artificial flavors and \"fake food\". Ever notice that grape soda doesn't take anything like grapes? Beware of High Fructose Corn Syrup (your Grandmother never....>> More\n\n6/23/2005: Vermont Institute of Artisan Cheese: The Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese (VIAC) at the University of Vermont is the country's first comprehensive center devoted to artisan cheese. Director Jeffrey Roberts talks to Mark and Franc....>> More\n\n6/", + "21/2005: Rosie Saferstein: From index cards to the internet Rosie, the \"Scoopstress\" of the New Jersey restaurant scene, has long been on top of all things happening in the restaurant business. Rosie discusses how she....>> More\n\n6/20/2005: Coffee With Sam Gugino: Sam Gugino, food and wine writer for such magazines as Wine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado talks about coffee, the 2nd largest commodity in the world. Sam visited Costa Rica and Nicaragua for his in d....>> More\n\n6/16/2005: Salmon: Tony Webber of Pescamax Industries in Alaska talks about fabulous Yukon River Salmon and Fair Trade certification.", + " Look for the Kwikpac logo (right) for purchasing Yukon River Salmon. Profits go to he....>> More\n\n6/13/2005: Alaskan Morels and Operation Salami Drop: Mike Brummer of Hobby's Delicatessen & Restaurant joined Mark and Francis to talk about \"Operation Salami Drop\" - a drive to send over 20,000 salamis to troops stationed with the 42n....>> More\n\n6/13/2005: Junk Food In Schools: Mark and Francis discuss recent legislation sponsored by Assemblyman Craig Stanley of Essex County. This legislation would prohibit the sale of junk food and soda in our public schools.....>> More\n\n6/", + "10/2005: Randall Grahm: Randall's Bonny Doon Winery is one of the most unconventional wineries in California. Randall is the reason of course. One of the most interesting and intelligent winemakers in the world, he joins....>> More\n\n5/10/2005: Todd Wickstrom: Todd is prominent in the Slow Food Movement and a self-described culinary activist. He founded Heritage Foods USA to make top notch foods sustainably produced available to everyone. What is good for....>> More\n\n5/5/2005: Tim Olson: Tim is not nearly as well-known a winemaker as he should be.", + " We have been friends with Tim from about 1999. We have watched him progress from home winemaker to garagiste to small production commercial....>> More\n\n4/28/2005: Anthony Giglio: Anthony is the wine columnist for Boston Magazine, was restaurant reviewer for NJ Monthly Magazine for 10 years, is currently restaurant reviewer for The New York Sun and NJ Life Magazine. Check out....>> More\n\n4/22/2005: Steve Parker: Steve comes on to discuss Whole Foods' revolutionary approach to business. Their business practices with their employees are so open that all employees are considered \"insiders\" by the S....>> More\n\n4/", + "19/2005: Joe Hurliman: The Herzog family has pioneered the development of premium kosher wines in American. The Herzog Wines of California are excellent wines in their own right, made from European grape varieties like Cabe....>> More\n\n4/19/2005: Harmon Skurnik: Harmon, with his brother Michael operates Michael Skurnik Wines, an importer of estate bottled wines from small producers. These guys represent some of the most highly sought-after wines in the world.....>> More\n\n4/18/2005: Joe Procacci: While we usually focus on small producers, the Procacci Brothers are a rather large distributor and grower of produce.", + " Joe joins The Guys to explain The UglyRipe tomato and why it is being kept from y....>> More\n\n4/14/2005: Cathy Corison: Cathy is one of the most talented winemakers in California. She has been working in Napa since 1978, when she was an intern at Freemark Abbey. From there, she spent three vintages at Yverdon on Spring....>> More\n\n4/13/2005: Ansley Coale: Along with his distiller-partner, Hubert Germain-Robin, Ansley Coale produces and brings to market the finest American brandy.", + " Their methods of production are revolutionary in that they are hundreds o....>> More\n\n4/6/2005: Glenn Roberts: Anson Mills preserves, grows and mills antebellum varieties of corn, wheat, masa and rice into old fashioned hand-cleaned grits, polenta, wheat flour and other products. The quality of the products is....>> More\n\n4/5/2005: Dale DeGroff: Dale is the preeminent authority on cocktails in America. Lectures and consults all over the world, especially in New York, London and New Orleans. Since the days when he played an integral role in th....>> More\n\n3/", + "25/2005: Anthony Bucco: Anthony is The Restaurant Guys' Executive chef at Stage Left Restaurant in New Brunswick, NJ. He an invaluable resource and an extremely talented chef who has helped the restaurant achieve its cur....>> More\n\n3/22/2005: Karen King: Karen is a noted wine expert and service manager. She has worked for Danny Meyer for years, heading up the wine program at Union Square, then at Gramercy Tavern and now she is Beverage Director at Th....>> More\n\n3/16/2005: David Saint: David Saint is the exciting and charming and talented and extremely well connected Artistic Director of The George Street Playhouse,", + " located in New Brunswick, NJ. During his tenure, GSP has been on th....>> More\n\n3/14/2005: Amy Meyer: Amy Meyer came to wine as a second career and has made a stir blazing new trails. She has many great wines in her portfolio but of particular note are the extremely high quality Canadian wines, especi....>> More\n\n3/8/2005: Nicolette Hahn Niman: Nicolette Hahn's Op-Ed piece on humane animal husbandry was insightful and informative. She owns with her husband, Niman Ranch, the lead ranch in a network of family operations practicing sustain....>> More\n\n2/", + "14/2005: Burgers with Mark and Francis: Melissa Muller of NJ Life Magazine reports: Stage Left's Burger Most Delicious in The State: \"Wait,\" he says dramatically. \"I have to warn you: You'll never enjoy another burger....>> More\n\n2/14/2005: Paul Samier: Paul's company has pioneered transcontinental shipping of freshly caught Hawaiian using technology developed for the space program. Some of the finest fish in the world can arrive fresh at your do....>> More\n\n2/14/2005: Max McCalman: Max is more responsible than any other person for the emergence of high quality artisanal cheese on American fine dining menus.", + " He is unmatched in his passion for, and knowledge of cheese. We first me....>> More\n\n2/14/2005: Mary Ann Esposito: One of America's most loved and longest running television chefs, Mary Ann Esposito joins The Restaurant Guys to reminisce with Mark about their common Italian culinary heritage, to discuss Italia....>> More\n\n2/14/2005: Charlie Trotter: The Wine Spectator Magazine said that Charlie Trotters Chicago restaurant is the best restaurant in the world for matching food and wine! Charlie spends an hour with Mark and Francis talking about wha....>> More\n\n2/14/", + "2005: Ruth Reichl: Ruth joins Mark and Francis to discuss her tenure at The Times, living life in disguise, challanging assumptions, changing the way New York eats and her new book, Garlic and Sapphires. It's a liv....>> More\n\n2/14/2005: Ted Hall: Long Meadow Ranch produces world class red wine, olive oil, grass fed beef and organic vegetables using simple sustainable farming methods. The Hall family has re-established vineyards first planted i....>> More\n\n2/14/2005: Neal Rosenthal: In our opinion, Neal is one of most important wine importers in America.", + " His wines are archetypal and we have learned more about the wine world from drinking Neal's wine that from any book we have....>> More\n\n2/14/2005: Melissa Hamilton: Melissa talks with us about food the way people cook it at home all over the world. She talks with the guys about real food and taste; about food and cuisine binding communities and her own roots in....>> More\n\n2/14/2005: Craig LaBan: The Meanest Man in Philadelphia? The Terror of Eastern PA Restaurateurs, Craig has been lionized and villified but very few people have a middling opinion of him.", + " His writing is sharp and insightful....>> More\n\n2/1/2005: Ariane Daguin: Ariane helped to found foie gras production in The USA and her company now sells many important specialty meats. She is charming and intelligent and joins us to talk about Foie Gras, Ducks, Humane An....>> More\n\n2/1/2005: Peter Schleimer: Peter discusses Austrian wine in America. It's all the rage. Vintages Peter Recommends: 2004: Dry, Bouncy, Light 2001, 2002: Little Lighter and Little Higher In Acidity 2003,", + " 2000: Fuller....>> More\n\n2/1/2005: Chris Cree: Chris is one of only 23 MW's in The United States. This makes him one of the top experts on wine in America. We talk with him about wine in general but also about how one goes about acquiring th....>> More\n\n1/31/2005: Dun Luria of Dine Originals: After years of holiday chefs and poultry lovers grousing that the federal government's safe-cooking recommendations left their birds too dry, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has lowered the int....>> More ", + " The web archive collection relating to Purdue University, its schools, colleges, and administrative units. This collection also includes websites not created by Purdue but which cover the events and communities of the campus and the surrounding Greater Lafayette Indiana area.\n" + ], + "length": 34568, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 95, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 For those wondering who was going to go after who in Thursday night's GOP debate in Houston, it was pretty clear early on that both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were focused on front-runner Donald Trump\u2014and he gave what they sent his way right back, specifically on the topic of immigration. When Rubio accused Trump of flip-flopping on the issue, Trump responded: \"I'm the only one on the stage that's hired people,\" per the New York Times, adding he had hired \"tens of thousands of people\" over his career. Rubio perked up and continued the \"fireworks,\" as the Washington Post put it, telling the audience to Google \"Trump and Polish workers\" about Trump's hiring of foreign workers and how he'd been fined for it. Trump mentioned how it had been hard to find workers in the hottest parts of Florida and that they were part-time seasonal workers. Enter Cruz, who didn't waste his opportunity to jump in and note that he was leading the fight against amnesty in 2013 while Trump was \"firing Dennis Rodman on Celebrity Apprentice,\" per the Times. Trump's immediate eyeroll came in the form of: \"I've had an amazing relationship with politicians both Democrat [and] Republican because I was a businessman,\" he said, per the Post. \"You get along with nobody,\" he told Cruz. \"You don't have one Republican senator backing you ... and you work with them every day of your life, although you skipped a lot of time. ... You should be ashamed of yourself.\" On the CNN live blog, Leigh Munsil of the Blaze ponders, \"Watching Cruz and Rubio team up to take on Trump makes you wonder what the race would look like if they'd done it sooner.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "Photo: Eric Thayer for The New York Times; Video: By CNN\n\nFew criticisms cut at Senator Ted Cruz like being called a liar. It undermines the central tenet of his candidacy, that he is a trusted conservative, his principles inviolable.\n\nSo when Donald J. Trump did just that during the debate \u2014 \u201cThis guy is a liar,\u201d he said, meaning Mr. Cruz \u2014 the Texas senator was outraged.\n\nThe moderator, Wolf Blitzer, was ready to move on from an exchange that was already descending into bitterness and acrimony. \u201cYou\u2019re going to say that I can\u2019t respond to being called a liar?\u201d Mr.", + " Cruz demanded. Mr. Blitzer let him finish.\n\nMr. Cruz\u2019s response? Mr. Trump is the real liar.\n\n\u201cLet me tell you something,\u201d Mr. Cruz said. \u201cFalsely accusing someone of lying is itself a lie, and it\u2019s something Donald does daily.\u201d\n\nWhatever civility might have remained in that exchange eroded from there, and it ended up as a barely intelligible shouting match. And no matter which candidate may have gotten the better of the other, it was difficult to see how anyone gained anything from it. ", + " Republican presidential candidates fought over immigration reform, health care and peace in the Middle East during the CNN/Telemundo debate in Houston on Feb. 25. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)\n\nThe four Republican candidates trailing Donald Trump faced him in Houston Thursday night in the last debate before the Super Tuesday primaries next week.\n\nWe posted the complete transcript below. Washington Post reporters and readers using Genius have annotated it, and will continue to do so following the debate.\n\nTo see an annotation, click or tap the highlighted part of the transcript; if you would like to leave your own annotations, make sure you have a Genius account. Post staff annotations will appear by default;", + " others are in a menu that you can see in the upper right when you click or tap on an annotation.\n\nCNN's Wolf Blitzer introduced the candidates, laid out the rules and the debate began.\n\nBLITZER: It's time for the candidates to introduce themselves right now. You'll each have 30 seconds. Dr. Carson, you're first.\n\nCARSON: If someone had tried to describe today's America to you 30 years ago, you would have listened in disbelief. Americans know that our nation is heading off the abyss of destruction, secondary to divisiveness, fiscal irresponsibility, and failure to lead.\n\nMarco,", + " Donald, Ted, John, we will not solve any of these problems by trying to destroy each other. What we need to do is be looking for solutions tonight. It's not about us, it's about the American people.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Governor Kasich?\n\nKASICH: Well, you know, on the way over here, even getting ready earlier and sitting in the green room and watching the early coverage, you know, my father carried mail on his back and his father was a coal miner and my mother's mother was an immigrant, could barely speak English. And I'm standing on this stage. It's pretty remarkable.", + " But I want to tell you, there's a lot of young people watching tonight. You can do whatever you want to do in your life. America is an amazing country, where a kid like me can grow up to run for president of the United States and be on this stage tonight. So to all the young people that are out there, your hopes, your dreams, pursue them. Shoot for the stars. America's great, and you can do it. Thank you, Wolf.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Rubio?\n\nRUBIO: Well, thank you. This election, we have to decide the identity of America in the 2ist century,", + " but as part of this primary, we have to find out our identity as a party and as a movement.\n\nThirty-six years ago, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush began the Reagan Revolution. For a generation, they defined conservatism as limited government and free enterprise and a strong national defense. But they also appealed to our hopes and our dreams. Now we have to decide if we are still that kind of party and still that kind of movement, or if we're simply going to become a party that preys on people's angers and fears.\n\nI hope we remain that conservative movement that appeals to our hopes and our dreams and the belief that America will always be better in its future than it's been in its story history.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER:", + " Senator Cruz?\n\nCRUZ: Welcome to Texas.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHere, Texas provided my family with hope. Here, my mom became the first in her family ever to go to college. Here, my dad fled Cuba and washed dishes, making 50 cents an hour to pay his way through the University of Texas. I graduated from high school at Second Baptist not too far away from here.\n\nCRUZ: When I ran for Senate, I promised 27 million Texans I would fight for you every day, and not for the Washington bosses.\n\nAnd, I'll tell you, as I travel the state, Democrats tell me I didn't vote for you,", + " but you're doing what you said you would do. And, as president, I will do the same.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: Thank you. My whole theme is make America great again. We don't win anymore as a country. We don't win with trade, we don't win with the military. ISIS, we can't even knock out ISIS, and we will, believe me. We will.\n\nWe don't win in any capacity with healthcare. We have terrible health care, Obamacare is going to be repealed and replaced. We just don't win.\n\nYou look at our borders,", + " they're like swiss cheese, everybody pours in.\n\nWe're going to make a great country again. We're going to start winning again. We're going to win a lot, it's going to be a big difference, believe me. It's going to be a big difference.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Thank you very much. It's now time to begin questions. Voters in the first four states have spoken, and Mr. Trump has emerged as the frontrunner, but in five days the candidates will face their biggest test yet, Super Tuesday. When nearly half of the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination will be awarded,", + " and the biggest prize of the night is Texas.\n\nImmigration is a key issue in this state, for all voters nationwide, including the many people watching us on Telemundo. So, that's where we begin.\n\nMr. Trump, you've called for a deportation force to remove the 11 million undocumented immigrants from the United States. You've also promised to let what you call, \"the good ones\", come back in. Your words, \"the good ones\", after they've been deported.\n\nSenator Cruz would not allow them to come back in. He says that's the biggest difference between the two of you. He calls your plan amnesty.", + " Is it?\n\nTRUMP: First of all, he was in charge of amnesty, he was the leader, and you can ask Marco because they've been debating this every debate that we've had.\n\nAs far as coming back in, number one, you wouldn't even be talking, and you wouldn't have asked that as the first question if it weren't for me when my opening when I talked about illegals immigration. It wouldn't even be a big subject.\n\nBut, we either have a country, or we don't have a country. We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally. They will go out.", + " They will come back -- some will come back, the best, through a process. They have to come back legally. They have to come back through a process, and it may not be a very quick process, but I think that's very fair, and very fine.\n\nThey're going to get in line with other people. The best of them will come back, but they're going to come back through a process.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz, what's wrong with letting what Mr. Trump calls, \"the good ones\" come back to the United States?\n\nCRUZ: You know, the people that get forgotten in this debate over immigration are the hardworking men and women of this country -- our millions of Americans who are losing their jobs.", + " Millions of legal immigrants who are losing their jobs are seeing their wages driven down.\n\nYou know, in the past couple of weeks the Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article about the state of Arizona. Arizona put in very tough laws on illegal immigration, and the result was illegal immigrants fled the state, and what's happened there -- it was a very interesting article.\n\nSome of the business owners complained that the wages they had to pay workers went up, and from their perspective that was a bad thing. But, what the state of Arizona has seen is the dollars they're spending on welfare, on prisons, and education, all of those have dropped by hundreds of millions of dollars.", + " And, the Americans, and for that matter, the legal immigrants who are in Arizona, are seeing unemployment drop are seeing wages rise. That's who we need to be fighting for.\n\nListen, we have always welcomed legal immigrants, but I think it is a mistake to forgive those who break the law to allow them to become U.S. citizens, and that's why I've led the fight against granting citizenship to those here illegally, and that's why I will do the same thing as president.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Mr. Trump, do you want to respond to that? TRUMP: Well, I'm very glad that Ted mentioned Arizona because probably the toughest man on borders is Sheriff Joe Arpaio,", + " and two days ago he totally endorsed me, so, thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Rubio?\n\nRUBIO: Senator Cruz has called your immigration plan amnesty, and has an add out there comparing it to President Obama's. He says both of you support allowing undocumented immigrants legal status here in the United States after a background check, paying a fine, and paying taxes.\n\nAre those claims correct?\n\nRUBIO: Well, first of all, and before we do anything, I've been abundantly clear on this. When I'm president of the United States, before we do anything on immigration, we are going to secure the border.", + " And, that's not just the physical border with Mexico, it's Visa overstays. That's 45 percent of the problem right there.\n\nRUBIO: It also has to do -- that's why we need e-verify, and entry-exit tracking system, and so-forth. And, until that happens, we're not doing anything else. And then we'll see what the American people are willing to support.\n\nAnd Donald mentioned, because he mentioned me in his answer, that his position on immigration is what has driven this debate. Well, the truth is, though, that a lot of these positions that he's now taking are new to him.\n\nIn 2011,", + " he talked about the need for a pathway to citizenship. In 2012, Donald criticized Mitt Romney, saying that Mitt lost his election because of self-deportation.\n\nAnd so even today, we saw a report in one of the newspapers that Donald, you've hired a significant number of people from other countries to take jobs that Americans could have filled.\n\nMy mom and dad -- my mom was a maid at a hotel, and instead of hiring an American like her, you have brought in over a thousand people from all over the world to fill those jobs instead.\n\nSo I think this is an important issue. And I think we are realizing increasingly that it's an important issue for the country that has been debated for 30 years,", + " but finally needs to be solved once and for all.\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: Well, first of all, self-deportation is people are going to leave as soon as they see others going out. If you look at Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, they started moving people out and the rest of them left.\n\nSelf-deportation, as I really define it, and that's the way I define it, is you're going to get some to go, and the rest are going to go out.\n\nAs far as the people that I've hired in various parts of Florida during the absolute prime season,", + " like Palm Beach and other locations, you could not get help. It's the up season. People didn't want to have part-time jobs. There were part-time jobs, very seasonal, 90-day jobs, 120-day jobs, and you couldn't get.\n\nEverybody agrees with me on that. They were part-time jobs. You needed them, or we just might as well close the doors, because you couldn't get help in those hot, hot sections of Florida.\n\nRUBIO: That -- my point that I made was you had criticized Mitt Romney for self-deportation. You said that his strategy of self- deportation is why he lost the election.\n\nAnd I think people in Florida would be surprised,", + " because, in fact, the article that was today, they interviewed a number of people that would have been willing to do those jobs, if you would have been willing to hire them to do it.\n\nTRUMP: I criticized Mitt Romney for losing the election. He should have won that election. He had a failed president. He ran a terrible campaign. He was a terrible candidate. That's what I criticize Mitt Romney -- I mean, ran...\n\nRUBIO: No, he...\n\nTRUMP: Excuse me. He ran one terrible campaign. That's an election that should have been won.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO:", + " Well, in fact, I agree we should have won and I wished we would have, but, in fact, you did criticize him for using the term \"self-deportation.\" I mean, that's on the record and people can look it up right now online.\n\nBut, again, I just want to reiterate, I think it's really important, this point. I think it's fine, it's an important point that you raise and we discuss on immigration. This is a big issue for Texas, a huge issue for the country.\n\nBut I also think that if you're going to claim that you're the only one that lifted this into the campaign,", + " that you acknowledge that, for example, you're only person on this stage that has ever been fined for hiring people to work on your projects illegally.\n\nYou hired some workers from Poland...\n\nTRUMP: No, no, I'm the only one on the stage that's hired people. You haven't hired anybody.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: In fact, some of the people...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: And by the way, I've hired -- and by the way, I've hired tens of thousands of people over at my job. You've hired nobody.\n\nRUBIO: Yes, you've hired a thousand from another country...\n\nTRUMP:", + " You've had nothing but problems with your credit cards, et cetera. So don't tell me about that.\n\nRUBIO: Let me just say -- let me finish the statement. This is important.\n\nTRUMP: You haven't hired one person, you liar.\n\nRUBIO: He hired workers from Poland. And he had to pay a million dollars or so in a judgment from...\n\nTRUMP: That's wrong. That's wrong. Totally wrong.\n\nRUBIO: That's a fact. People can look it up. I'm sure people are Googling it right now. Look it up. \"Trump Polish workers,\" you'll see a million dollars for hiring illegal workers on one of his projects.", + " He did it.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: That happened.\n\nTRUMP: I've hired tens of thousands of people over my lifetime. Tens of thousands...\n\nRUBIO: Many from other countries instead of hiring Americans.\n\nTRUMP: Be quiet. Just be quiet.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Let me talk. I've hired tens of thousands of people. He brings up something from 30 years ago, it worked out very well. Everybody was happy.\n\nRUBIO: You paid a million dollars.\n\nTRUMP: And by the way, the laws were totally different. That was a whole different world.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Thank you.\n\nTRUMP: But I've hired people. Nobody up here has hired anybody.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz, you say you want to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants, but you never want to allow them to come back to the United States. What would happen to the children who are U.S.- born citizens whose parent will be deported under your plan?\n\nCRUZ: Well, existing law provides that those who are deported cannot come back here legally. U.S. citizens can come back. That's existing law.\n\nBut let me say, Wolf, I really find it amazing that Donald believes that he is the one who discovered the issue of illegal immigration.", + " I can tell you, when I ran for Senate here in the state of Texas, I ran promising to lead the fight against amnesty, promising to fight to build a wall. And in 2013, when I was fight against the \"gang of eight\" amnesty bill, where was Donald? He was firing Dennis Rodman on \"Celebrity Apprentice.\"\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nCRUZ: And indeed, if you look at the \"gang of eight,\" one individual on this stage broke his promise to the men and women who elected him and wrote the amnesty bill.\n\nCRUZ: If you look at the eight members of the Gang of Eight,", + " Donald gave over $50,000 to three Democrats and two Republicans. And when you're funding open border politicians, you shouldn't be surprised when they fight for open borders.\n\nAnd I think if you want to know who actually will secure the borders and follow through, you ought to ask who has a record before they were a candidate for president of fighting to secure the borders and stop amnesty. And I'm the only one on this stage that has that record. And by the way, Marco is exactly right that a federal court found Donald guilty of being part of a conspiracy to hire people illegally and entered a $1 million judgment against him.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER:", + " Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: I can only say this, and I've said it loud and clear and I've said it for years. And many of these people are sitting right in the audience right now -- your lobbyist and your special interest and your donors, because the audience is packed with them, and they're packed with you.\n\nI've had an amazing relationship with politicians -- with politicians both Democrat, Republican, because I was a businessman. As one magazine said, he's a world-class businessman; he was friendly with everybody. I got along with everybody.\n\nYou get along with nobody. You don't have one Republican -- you don't have one Republican senator,", + " and you work with them every day of your life, although you skipped a lot of time. These are minor details. But you don't have one Republican senator backing you; not one. You don't have the endorsement of one Republican senator and you work with these people. You should be ashamed of yourself.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz?\n\nCRUZ: You know, I actually think Donald is right. He is promising if he's elected he will go and cut deals in Washington. And he's right. He has supported -- he has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats. Anyone who really cared about illegal immigration wouldn't be hiring illegal immigrants.", + " Anyone who really cared about illegal immigration wouldn't be funding Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi; wouldn't be funding the Gang of Eight. And, you know, he is right. When you stand up to Washington, when you honor the promise you made to the men and women who elected you and say enough with the corruption, enough with the cronyism, let's actually stand for the working men and women of this country, Washington doesn't like it.\n\nAnd Donald, if you want to be liked in Washington, that's not a good attribute for a president.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: Here's a man -- Robin Hood.", + " This is Robin Hood over here. He talks about corruption. On his financial disclosure form, he didn't even put that he's borrowed money from Citibank and from Goldman Sachs, which is a total violation. He didn't talk about the fact that he pays almost no interest. He just left it off, and now he's going to protect the people from the big bad banks.\n\nGive me a break.\n\nBLITZER: All right. We're going to move on to Governor Kasich.\n\nGovernor Kasich...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Wolf, can I respond to that attack?\n\nBLITZER: You can respond,", + " but let me get Governor Kasich in. He's been waiting patiently.\n\nGovernor Kasich, the idea -- you've said this, and I want to quote you now: \"The idea that we're going to deport all these people is ludicrous and everybody knows it.\" Those are your words. Should people be allowed to break the law just because it's not feasible to stop them?\n\nKASICH: Look, we have a great president here, George Bush, the 41st president of the United States. He worked with Ronald Reagan to pass an effort to try to solve this problem -- a path to legalization. You see, that was a time when things worked.", + " It was a time when President Reagan and George Bush decided that we needed to make the country work.\n\nLook, I think there is an answer here. The answer is you complete the border. You let people know that once it's done, you don't have a right to come in. If you come in, we don't want any excuse. You're going to go back. But I favor a guest worker program. I think it's practical. And I think for the 11 million or 11.5 million Americans -- the illegals that are here, if they have not committed a crime since they've been here, I'd make them pay a fine,", + " some back taxes, maybe some community service. And at the end, I'd give them a path to legalization, but not a path to citizenship. I don't think we're going to tear families apart. I don't think we're going to ride around in people's neighborhoods and grab people out of their homes. I don't think -- first of all, I don't think it's practical and I don't think it reflects America.\n\nYou know what happened? The problem with President Reagan is we didn't get in there and actually finish the border. And I think it was probably business interests that affected it. But at the end of the day,", + " let's be practical. Let's start solving problems in this country instead of kicking them upstairs. With President Reagan and George Bush, it was a bipartisan coalition to address the issue, and I think we can and should do it again. And I will have a plan in the first 100 days to get it done and get this issue behind us.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Thank you, Governor.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nDr. Carson, you've been critical of mass deportation. You said back in November you don't think Mr. Trump's plan necessarily represents the Republican Party. Given how well Mr. Trump has been doing with the Republican primary voters,", + " do you still believe that?\n\nCARSON: I believe in liberty and justice for all. I think everything that we do should be fair. And I've already described -- you know, how we can secure the border.\n\nWe need to secure all the borders, because it's not just people coming in from South America and Mexico, but there are terrorists who want to destroy us, who are getting across our borders fairly easily. And we have to stop that.\n\nBut in terms of the people who are here already, after we -- after we stop the illegal immigration, we need to be reasonable. And I would give them a six-month period in which to get registered as a guest worker,", + " assuming that they have an acceptable record.\n\nThey have to pay a back-tax penalty, have to pay taxes going forward, but they don't have to live underground anymore. And I think they do not become American citizens, they do not vote.\n\nIf they want to become an American citizen, they go through exactly the same process that anybody else goes through. I think that's the kind of situation that is actually fair to people.\n\nAnd we have other ways of -- of utilizing our facilities and our talents as foreign aid: doing things in South America and Central America and Mexico that improve the economy there, so that they don't feel the need to come over here.", + " That would cost us a lot less than borrowing money from China, paying interest on it.\n\nBLITZER: Thank you, Dr. Carson.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nMr. Trump, your campaign, as you well remember, began with the idea of building a wall along the southern border.\n\nTRUMP: (inaudible).\n\nBLITZER: It's about 315 miles southwest of where we are right now. You've said the Mexican government will pay for it.\n\nTRUMP: Correct.\n\nBLITZER: The spokesperson for the current president of Mexico says that will never happen. The last two presidents of Mexico say that will never happen.", + " In fact, the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox -- he said today, and I'm quoting him -- he said, \"I'm not going to pay for that,\" quote, \"effing wall.\"\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nSo if you don't get an actual check from the Mexican government for $8 billion or $10 billion or $12 billion, whatever it will cost, how are you going to make them pay for the wall?\n\nTRUMP: I will, and the wall just got 10 feet taller, believe me.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nIt just got 10 feet taller. I saw him make that -- I saw him make the statement.", + " I saw him use the word that he used. I can only tell you, if I would have used even half of that word, it would have been national scandal.\n\nThis guy used a filthy, disgusting word on television, and he should be ashamed of himself, and he should apologize, OK? Number one. Number two, we have a trade deficit with Mexico of $58 billion a year. And that doesn't include all the drugs that are pouring across and destroying our country.\n\nWe're going to make them pay for that wall. Now, the wall is $10 billion to $12 billion, if I do it. If these guys do it,", + " it'll end up costing $200 billion.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBut the wall is $10 billion to $12 billion. You need 1,000 -- you need 1,000 miles. The Great Wall of China, built 2,000 years ago -- 2,000, is 13,000 miles. We need 1,000, because we have a lot of natural barriers.\n\nWe can do it for $10 billion to $12 billion, and it's a real wall. This is a wall that's a heck of a lot higher than the ceiling you're looking at. This is a wall that's going to work.\n\nMexico will pay for it,", + " because they are not doing us any favors. They could stop all of this illegal trade if they wanted to...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... immediately. Mexico will pay for the wall. It's a small portion of the kind of money that we lose and the deficits that we have with Mexico.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: If the -- if the Mexicans don't pay for the wall, will you start a trade war with Mexico?\n\nTRUMP: Well, you know, I don't mind trade wars when we're losing $58 billion a year, you want to know the truth. We're losing so much. (APPLAUSE)\n\nWe're losing so much with Mexico and China -- with China,", + " we're losing $500 billion a year. And then people say, \"don't we want to trade?\" I don't mind trading, but I don't want to lose $500 billion. I don't want to lose $58 billion.\n\nMexico just took Carrier Corporation, maker of air conditioners. They just took Ford. They're building a $2.5 billion plant. They just took Nabisco out of Chicago.\n\nAnd I always say I'm not having Oreos anymore, which is true, by the way. But they just took a big plant from Nabisco into Mexico. They're taking our businesses. I don't mind.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Thank you. Senator Rubio?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: Yeah, a couple points. If he builds the wall the way he built Trump Towers, he'll be using illegal immigrant labor to do it. The second...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Such a cute sound bite.\n\nRUBIO: But it -- no, it's not a sound bite. It's a fact. Again, go online and Google it. Donald Trump, Polish workers. You'll see it.\n\nThe second thing, about the trade war -- I don't understand, because your ties and the clothes you make is made in Mexico and in China.", + " So you're gonna be starting a trade war against your own ties and your own suits.\n\nTRUMP: All right, you know what?\n\nRUBIO: Why don't you make them in America?\n\nTRUMP: Because they devalue their currency -- they devalue their currencies...\n\nRUBIO: Well, then make them in America.\n\nTRUMP:... that makes it -- well, you don't know a thing about business. You lose on everything...\n\nRUBIO: Well, make them in America.\n\nTRUMP: Let me just tell you -- they de-value their currency. They de-value their currencies.\n\nRUBIO:", + " Well then, make them in America.\n\nTRUMP: That makes it -- well, you don't know a thing about business. You lose on everything you do.\n\nRUBIO: Well, make them in America.\n\nTRUMP: Let me just tell you, they de-value their currencies. China, Mexico, everybody. Japan with the cars. They de-value their currencies to such an extent that our businesses cannot compete with them, our workers lose their jobs...\n\nRUBIO: And so you make them in China and in Russia.\n\nTRUMP: But you wouldn't know anything about it because you're a lousy businessman.\n\nRUBIO:", + " Well, I don't know anything about bankrupting four companies. You've bankrupted..\n\nTRUMP: No, I -- and you know why? You know why?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: I don't know anything about...\n\nTRUMP: You know why?\n\nRUBIO:... starting a university, and that was a fake university.\n\nBLITZER: One at a time.\n\nTRUMP: First of all...\n\nBLITZER: One at a time.\n\nTRUMP:... first of all, that's called a...\n\nRUBIO: There are people who borrowed $36,000...\n\nBLITZER:", + " Hold on. One at a time, Mr. Trump.\n\nRUBIO:... to go to Trump University, and they're suing now -- $36,000 to go to a university...\n\nTRUMP: And by the way -- and by the way...\n\nRUBIO:... that's a fake school.\n\nTRUMP:... and by the way...\n\nRUBIO: And you know what they got? They got to take a picture with a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump...\n\nTRUMP:... I've won most of the lawsuits.\n\nRUBIO: That's what they got for $36,000.\n\nBLITZER:", + " All right, I want to move on.\n\nTRUMP: And they actually did a very good job, but I've won most of the lawsuits.\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump, Senator, I want to bring in...\n\nRUBIO: Most of the lawsuits.\n\nBLITZER:... I want to bring in my colleague Maria Celeste.\n\nTRUMP: Excuse me. Hey Wolf, let me ask you. Am I allowed to respond to this?\n\nBLITZER: You're allowed -- you've been responding.\n\nTRUMP: OK. Well let -- no, I haven't. I really haven't.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nRUBIO:", + " He's talked through the whole thing.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Here's a guy -- here's a guy that buys a house for $179,000, he sells it to a lobbyist who's probably here for $380,000 and then legislation is passed. You tell me about this guy. This is what we're going to have as president.\n\nRUBIO: Here's a guy that inherited $200 million. If he hadn't inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now?\n\nTRUMP: No, no, no.\n\nRUBIO: Selling watches in (inaudible)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP:", + " (Inaudible) I took...\n\nRUBIO: That's where he would be. TRUMP: That is so wrong. We'll work on that. I took $1 million and I turned into $10 billion.\n\nRUBIO: Oh, OK. One million.\n\nTRUMP: I borrowed $1 million...\n\nRUBIO: Better release your tax returns so we can see how much money he made.\n\nTRUMP: I borrowed $1 million, I turned it into $10 billion...\n\nRUBIO: Oh, he doesn't make that money.\n\nTRUMP:... more than $10 billion.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Thank you. Thank you. I want to bring in Maria Celeste of Telemundo. Maria?\n\nCELESTE: Senator Rubio, last week, you said that on your first day in office, you will get rid of President Obama's executive action known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA for short.\n\nRUBIO: Correct.\n\nARRASAS: It is a program that has protected hundreds of thousands of young people that came here when they were children, brought to the U.S. by undocumented immigrants. This is the only home they know, and that is a dramatic change from last April when you said in Spanish, and I'm going to quote you (in Spanish)", + " which translates to DACA is going to have to end at some point, but it wouldn't be fair to cancel it immediately.\n\nSo Senator Rubio, what changed?\n\nRUBIO: It didn't change.\n\nARRASAS: Why is it now fair to cancel it on Day One?\n\nRUBIO: No, it's the same policy. It will have to end at some moment, and as I said, we will -- we will eliminate that executive order. The people that are on it now will not be allowed to renew it, and new applicants will not be allowed to apply to it. And it's not because we're not compassionate to the plight of a 2 -- someone who came here when they were 2 years old.", + " I understand. I know people that are personally impacted by this.\n\nThe problem with the executive order is it is unconstitutional. The president doesn't have the power to do that.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd he himself admitted that.\n\nARRASAS: Senator, Senator...\n\nRUBIO: I'm sorry, but let me finish my...\n\nARRASAS:... but you went -- you went from saying that it was deeply disruptive to deport them immediately to deport them on Day One.\n\nRUBIO: No, but this is not about deportation. Everybody always goes immediately to the issue of deportation. This is about DACA. DACA is an executive order that is unconstitutional.", + " I will cancel it on my first day in office, which means people who currently hold those permits will not be allowed to renew them when they expire, and new people will not be allowed to apply for them.\n\nNow, I am sympathetic to the plight of someone who came here when they were 2 or 3 years old through no fault of their own, but you can't solve it doing something that is unconstitutional. No matter how sympathetic we may be to a cause, we cannot violate the Constitution of the United States the way this president now does on a regular basis.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: Senator Rubio, you accused Senator Cruz in a previous debate of lying when he said that you said one thing in Spanish and another one in English.", + " So in what sense did he lie?\n\nRUBIO: Because it is not true that I'm not going to get rid of DACA. I am going to get rid of DACA. In the Spanish interview, you just read out the transcript in Spanish, I said, it will have to end at some point. That point will be when I eliminate the executive order and the people who have those permits when they expire will not be allowed to renew it. And new people will not be able to apply. In fact, I don't even think we should be taking new enrollees in the program now.\n\nThat is how the program ends and how you wind it down is you allow the people who are on it,", + " when the program expires, they cannot renew it, and it goes away. But I will cancel the executive order as soon as I take -- as soon as I step foot into the Oval Office.\n\nTRUMP: I have to say, he lied this time. He lied. 100 percent. 100 percent.\n\nRUBIO: You lied about the Polish workers.\n\nTRUMP: Yes, yes, yes. 38 years ago.\n\nRUBIO: You lied to the students at Trump University.\n\nARRASAS: Let Senator Cruz jump in.\n\nRUBIO: Oh, he lied 38 years ago. All right, I guess there's a statute of limitation on lies.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)", + " CRUZ: Well Maria, I would note you made the exact same point here that I made at the last debate, and you're right that Senator Rubio called me a liar for saying that.\n\nCRUZ: You know, we've both seen at home when Washington politicians say about an illegal, or unconstitutional program. Well, it'll have to end some day, not immediately, but someday in the future.\n\nThat, inevitably, is when a politician doesn't plan to end it at all.\n\nYou know, I'm reminded of that that is the same position that Marco took in Iowa on ethanol subsidies. When I campaigned in Iowa, I took on the lobbyists,", + " took on the corporate welfare and said we should have no ethanol subsidies.\n\nMarco's position was the same as it is to illegal amnesty. Well, someday it should end, just not now. And, frankly, I think we need a president who knows what he believes in, is willing to say it on day one, not at the end of his term when it's somebody else's problem.\n\nRUBIO: That's not an accurate assessment of what I said about ethanol. What I said is that ethanol will phase out, it is phasing out now. By 2022 that program expires by virtue of the existing law, and at that point it will go away.", + " I don't agree with the mandate and the program that's in place, but I think it's unfair that these people have gone out and invested all this money into this program and we're just going to yank it away from them.\n\nAnd, again, you read the statement in Spanish. I said very clearly on Spanish television, DACA will have to end at some point, and that point is -- at that time I was not a candidate for president. I said it will end in my first day in office as president, and the people who have it now will not be able to renew it. New applicants will not be able to apply.", + " That is the end of DACA.\n\nI am sympathetic to this cause, but once again, it cannot supersede the Constitution of the United States which this president habitually and routinely every single day ignores and violates.\n\n(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: Senator Cruz, you and Senator Rubio are the two candidates of hispanic descent on this stage. As a matter of fact, you are the first hispanic candidate ever to win a caucus or primary.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd yet, there is the perception in the Latino community that instead of trying to prove to Latinos who has the best plan, the best platform to help them,", + " that you two are spending the time arguing with each other. Trying to figure out which one is tougher on immigration in order to appeal to the majority of Republicans.\n\nSo, my question to you is are you missing a huge opportunity to expand the Republican base?\n\nCRUZ: Well, Maria, you are right. It is extraordinary that of five people standing on this stage that two of us are the children of Cuban immigrants. It really is the embodiment of the incredible opportunity and promise this nation provides.\n\nYou know, I would note that a lot of folks in the media have a definition of hispanics that you can only be hispanic if you're liberal.", + " That makes sense in the media, but I gotta tell you, one of the things I was most proud of when I ran for Senate here in Texas, I earned 40 percent of the hispanic vote here in Texas.\n\nAt the same time, Mitt Romney was getting clobbered with 27 percent of the hispanic vote nationwide. And, the reason is, as you know, you look at the value sin the hispanic community. The values in our community are faith, family, patriotism.\n\nYou know, we've got the highest rate of military enlistment among hispanics in any demographic in this country. And, when I campaigned,", + " and I campaigned the same here in Houston or Dallas as I did in the Rio Grande Valley, defending conservative principles, defending judeo- Christian principals, telling my father's story.\n\nTelling my Dad's story of coming to America with $100 dollars in his underwear, not speaking English, washing dishes, having hopes and dreams for the American dream. And, the truth is the Obama-Clinton economy has done enormous damage to the hispanic community. It is not working in the hispanic community, and I...\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nCRUZ:... fighting so that everyone who is struggling in the hispanic community and beyond will have a fair and even shake at the American dream.\n\nRUBIO:", + " I'm sorry I was mentioned...\n\nARRASAS:... Governor Kasich.\n\nRUBIO: Maria I was mentioned in that. I was mentioned in that statement.\n\nARRASAS: Governor Kasich, after the...\n\nRUBIO:... OK. I was mentioned -- just because of the hispanic -- and I'll be brief.\n\nA couple points, number one, I do think it's amazing that on this stage tonight there are two descendants of Cuban origin, and an African American. We are the party of diversity, not the Democratic party.\n\n(APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)\n\nAnd, the second point I would make is that we have to move past this idea that somehow the hispanic community only cares about immigration.\n\nYes,", + " it's an important issue because we know and love people that have been impacted by it. But, I'm going to tell you that the most powerful sentiment in the hispanic community, as it is in every immigrant community, is the burning desire to leave your children better off than yourself...\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nRUBIO:... and, you can only do that through free enterprise. That's what we stand for, not socialism like Bernie Sanders, and increasingly Hillary Clinton.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: Governor Kasich, after the last presidential election the Republican party realized that in order to win the presidency it needed the support of latinos.", + " Guidelines as to how to accomplish that were spelled out in an autopsy (ph) report that concluded, and I'm going to quote it, \"if hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn't want them in the United States they won't pay attention to our next sentence.\"\n\nSo, do you think that your fellow Republican candidates get it?\n\nKASICH: Well, I'm not going to talk about that. I mean, I've got to tell you, I was with this little 12-year-old girl, was at a town hall meeting, and she said, you know, I don't like all this yelling and screaming at the debates.", + " My mother's thinking I might not be able to watch the thing anymore.\n\nI think we ought to move beyond that, about what they think. I'm going to tell you what I think. My position on this whole immigration issue has been clear from the beginning. I haven't changed anything with it.\n\nAnd, look, my view is, we need economic growth. Everything starts with economic growth. And how do you get it? Common sense regulations, lower taxes for both business and individuals, and, of course, a fiscal plan that balances the budget.\n\nThat gives you economic growth. I did it when I was in Washington, as the Budget Committee chairman,", + " negotiating actually with Democrats, that gave us surpluses, economic growth, and the same thing in Ohio.\n\nBut here's the thing that I believe. Economic growth is not an end unto itself. We have to make sure that everybody has a sense that they can rise.\n\nOf course, our friends in the Hispanic community, our friends in the African-American community, the promise of America is that our system, when we follow the right formula, is going to give opportunity for everyone.\n\nIt's what Jack Kemp used to say. A rising tide lifts all boats, not just some boats, but all boats. And you know what? With me and the Hispanic community,", + " I think they like me. And I appreciate that, because I want them to have the same opportunity that I and my children and my wife and the people we love have had in this country.\n\nIt's time to solve problems.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: Dr. Carson, concerning this recommendation of the report, are you, as a candidate, getting it?\n\nCARSON: I didn't hear the first part of the question?\n\nARRASAS: The first part of the question is, there was a report that recommended that in order to approach Hispanics and bring them to vote for the Republican Party, certain things needed to happen.\n\nAnd one of them was that they shouldn't feel like they were going to get kicked out of the United States,", + " otherwise they wouldn't pay attention to one more sentence from candidates.\n\nCARSON: OK, well, first of all, let me just mention that last year at the NALEO, the National Association for Latino Elected Officials, I was the only one of 17 Republican candidates to go there.\n\nAnd the reason that I don't fear going to an organization like that is because the message that I give is the same message to every group. You know, this is America. And we need to have policies that are -- that give liberty and justice to all people.\n\nAnd that's the way that I have fashioned virtually every policy, looking at that.", + " And I think that's the way the Republican Party generally thinks. We don't pick and choose winners and losers. We are compassionate.\n\nBut real compassion is providing people with a ladder of opportunity to climb up from a state of dependence and become part of the fabric of America. When we begin to emphasize that, I think we will attract everybody.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: Mr. Trump, it is common knowledge that the Hispanic vote is very important in this race. You keep saying that Hispanics love you.\n\nTRUMP: True.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nARRASAS: And, yes, you won the Hispanic vote in Nevada.\n\nTRUMP:", + " True.\n\nARRASAS: But a brand new Telemundo poll says that three out of four Hispanics that vote nationwide have a negative opinion of you. They don't like you. Wouldn't that make you an unelectable...\n\nTRUMP: No.\n\nARRASAS:... candidate in a general election?\n\nTRUMP: First of all, I don't believe anything Telemundo says.\n\nARRASAS: You used to say that you love...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nTRUMP: Number one. Number two, I currently employ thousands of Hispanics, and over the years, I've employed tens of thousands of Hispanics. They're incredible people.", + " They know, and the reason I won in Nevada, not only won the big one, but I also won subs, like, as an example, I won with women.\n\nI won with every single category. I won with men, I won with high-income, low-income, I won with Hispanics. And I got 46 percent. Nobody else was close. Because they know I'm going to bring jobs back from China, from Japan, from so many other places.\n\nThey get it. They're incredible people. They're incredible workers. They get it. And I've won many of the polls with Hispanics. I didn't maybe win the Telemundo poll.\n\nBut one thing I'm also going to do,", + " I'm going to be getting -- bringing a lot of people in who are Democrats, who are independents, and you're seeing that with the polls, because if you look at anywhere, look at any of the elections, every single election, it has been record-setting.\n\nAnd the good news is, for the Republican Party, the Democrats are getting very poor numbers in terms of bringing them in. We're getting record-setting numbers. I think I have something to do with that.\n\nTRUMP: We're getting record-setting numbers. And I won every one -- the three of them that I won, I won with record-setting numbers.\n\nTRUMP:", + " New people are coming into the Republican Party. We are building a new Republican Party, a lot of new people are coming in.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: For the record, you have said publicly that you loved Telemundo in the past. But it is not just a Telemundo poll. We have...\n\nTRUMP: I love them. I love them.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRASAS: All right. Well, it's not the only poll.\n\nTRUMP: They're fine. Do you know what? They're fine.\n\nARRASAS: Just last night -- let me -- let me finish, please.\n\nJust last night,", + " The Washington Post showed that 80 percent of Hispanic voters in their polls have a negative view of you. And concerning the Nevada victory, allow me to explain that the poll in Nevada was based on a tiny sample, statistically insignificant of only about 100 -- let me finish please -- of 100 Hispanic Republicans in the state of Nevada.\n\nTRUMP: Why did they take the poll? Why did they...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nARRASAS: I am making reference -- I am making reference to Hispanic voters nationwide in a general election.\n\nTRUMP: I'm just telling you, I'm doing very well with Hispanics. And by the way,", + " I settled my suit, as you know, with Univision. It was settled. We're good friends now. It was all settled up.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nVery happy, very happy. Very good people.\n\nI'm just telling you -- I'm just telling you that I will do really well with Hispanics. I will do better than anybody on this stage. I have respect for the people on the stage, but I will do very well with Hispanics. But I'm telling you also, I'm bringing people, Democrats over and I'm bringing independents over, and we're building a much bigger, much stronger Republican Party.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Mr. Trump, thank you.\n\nI want to turn our attention now to another critically important issue for the American people, the United States Supreme Court, where filling the vacancy left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia has become a major campaign issue. I want to bring in Salem Radio Network host, Hugh Hewitt.\n\nHugh?\n\nHEWITT: Thank you, Wolf.\n\nTo me, it's the most important issue. I'll start with you, Senator Cruz. Do you trust Mr. Trump to nominate conservative justices?\n\nCRUZ: Well, Hugh, I agree with you that it -- Justice Scalia's passing underscores the enormous gravity of this election.", + " Justice Scalia was someone I knew personally for 20 years; was privileged to be at his funeral this weekend. And with his passing, the court is now hanging in the balance. We are one liberal justice away from a five-justice radical leftist majority that would undermine our religious liberty; that would undermine the right to life; and that would fundamentally erase the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms from the Constitution.\n\nNow, I think the voters of Texas, the voters across Super Tuesday are assessing everyone standing on this -- this stage. In the past, Republican presidents always promise to nominate strict constitutionalists. So I'm certain if you took a survey,", + " everyone would say they would do that.\n\nBut the reality is, Democrats bat about 1,000. Just about everyone they put on the court votes exactly as they want. Republicans have batted worse than 500, more than half of the people we put on the court have been a disaster.\n\nI've spent my whole life fighting to defend the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. I can tell you, for voters that care about life or marriage or religious liberty or the Second Amendment, they're asking the question: Who do you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who do you know will nominate principled constitutionalists to the court?", + " I give you my word, every justice I nominate will vigorously defend the Bill of Rights for my children and for yours.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT: Mr. Trump, Senator Cruz mentioned the issue that keeps me up at night, which is religious liberty. Churches, Catholic and Christian colleges, Catholic adoption agencies -- all sorts of religious institutions fear that Hobby Lobby, if it's repealed, it was a five-four decision, they're going to have to bend their knee and provide morning-after pills. They fear that if Bob Jones is expanded, they will lose their tax exemption.\n\nWill you commit to voters tonight that religious liberty will be an absolute litmus test for anyone you appoint,", + " not just to the Supreme Court, but to all courts?\n\nTRUMP: Yes, I would. And I've been there. And I've been there very strongly. I do have to say something, and this is interesting and it's not anybody's fault. It's not Ted's fault. Justice Roberts was strongly recommended and pushed by Ted. Justice Roberts gave us Obamacare. Might as well be called Roberts-care. Two times of the Supreme Court, Justice Roberts approved something that he should have never raised his hand to approve. And we ended up with Obamacare.\n\nThat is a rough thing. And I know Ted feels badly about it. And I think he probably still respects the judge.", + " But that judge has been a disaster in terms of everything we stand for because there is no way -- no way that he should have approved Obamacare.\n\nNow, with that being said, these are the things that happen. But Ted very, very strongly pushed Judge Roberts, and Justice Roberts gave us something that we don't want.\n\nHEWITT: Ted Cruz, Senator, the chief justice got Hobby Lobby right, but what do you make of Mr. Cruz's criticism?\n\nCRUZ: Well, listen -- Donald knows that it was George W. Bush who appointed John Roberts. Yes, it's true, I supported the Republican nominee once he was made.\n\nBut I would not have nominated John Roberts.", + " I would have nominated my former boss, Mike Luttig, who was the strongest proven conservative on the court of appeals. And I'll tell you, Hugh...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... you know, it's interesting now that Donald promises that he will appoint justices who -- who will defend religious liberty, but this is a man who, for 40 years, has given money to Jimmy Carter, to Joe Biden, to Hillary Clinton, to Chuck Schumer, to Harry Reid.\n\nNobody who supports far-left liberal Democrats who are fighting for judicial activists can possibly care about having principled constitutionalists on the court.\n\nAnd what Donald has told us is he will go to Washington...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... and cut a deal.\n\nHEWITT:", + " Mr. Trump...\n\nCRUZ: So that means on Supreme Court...\n\nHEWITT:... can I...\n\nCRUZ:... he's going to look to cut a deal, rather than fight for someone who won't cut a deal on the Constitution, but will defend it faithfully.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT: Can I trust you on religious liberty?\n\nTRUMP: Well, let -- let me -- let me just say -- let me just say this. Look, I watched Ted -- and I respected it, but he gets nowhere -- stand on the Senate floor for a day or two days, and talk and talk and talk.\n\nI watched the other senators laughing and smiling.", + " And when Ted was totally exhausted, he left the Senate floor, and they went back to work. OK? We have to have somebody that's going to make deals.\n\nIt's wonderful to stand up for two days and do that. Now, Ted's been very critical -- I have a sister who's a brilliant...\n\nHEWITT: Mr. Cruz, will you make a deal about religious liberty?\n\nTRUMP:... excuse me. She's a brilliant judge. He's been criticizing -- he's been criticizing my sister for signing a certain bill. You know who else signed that bill? Justice Samuel Alito, a very conservative member of the Supreme Court,", + " with my sister, signed that bill.\n\nSo I think that maybe we should get a little bit of an apology from Ted. What do you think?\n\nHEWITT: Let me -- Senator.\n\nCRUZ: Let me tell you right now, Donald, I will not apologize for a minute for defending the Constitution. I will not apologize for defending the Bill of Rights.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd I find it amazing that your answer to Hugh and to the American people is, on religious liberty, you can't have one of the these crazy zealots that actually believes in it. You've got to be willing to cut a deal.\n\nAnd you know,", + " there is a reason why, when Harry Reid was asked, of all the people on this stage, who does he want the most, who does he like the most, Harry Reid said Donald -- Donald Trump.\n\nWhy? Because Donald has supported him in the past, and he knows he can cut a deal with him.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nYou know what, Donald...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHEWITT: Senator Rubio.\n\nCRUZ:... I don't want a Supreme Court justice that you cut a deal with Harry Reid to undermine religious liberty, because that same justice will also erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP:", + " When you say crazy zealot, are you talking about you? Crazy zealot -- give me a break.\n\nHEWITT: Senator Rubio, you've heard this exchange on religious liberty. You have said that religious liberty will trump even the ability of people to stay away from same-sex marriages, not provide flowers, not provide baked goods, et cetera. Are you satisfied with this exchange on religious liberty?\n\nRUBIO: Well, I think you ask a very important question, because the issue here -- the next president of the United States has to fill this vacancy.\n\nJustice Scalia -- in the history of the republic, there has never been anyone better than him at standing for the principle that the Constitution is not a living and breathing document -- it is supposed to be applied as originally meant.\n\nAnd the next president of the United States has to be someone that you can trust and believe in to appoint someone just as good as Scalia -- plus there may be at least two other vacancies.\n\nSo you ask Mr.", + " Trump to respond and say that he would, and he says that he would. But the bottom line is, if you look at his record over the last 25 or 30 years, on issue after issue, he has not been on our side.\n\nNow, if he's changed, we're always looking for converts into the conservative movement. But the bottom line is that, if (ph) you don't have a record there to look at and say, \"I feel at peace that when Donald Trump is president of the United States, he's going to be firmly on our side on these issues.\"\n\nIn fact, very recently, he was still defending Planned Parenthood.", + " He says he's not going to take sides in the Palestinians versus Israel. These are concerning things.\n\nAnd so, yes, I have a doubt about whether Donald Trump, if he becomes president, will replace Justice Scalia with someone just like Justice Scalia.\n\nHEWITT: Mr. Trump?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: Well, let -- let me just say -- let me just say, first of all, I have great respect for Justice Scalia. I thought he was terrific. And if you talk about evolving, Ronald Reagan was a somewhat liberal Democrat. Ronald Reagan evolved into a somewhat strong conservative -- more importantly, he was a great president.", + " A great president.\n\nAs far as Planned Parenthood is concerned, I'm pro-life. I'm totally against abortion, having to do with Planned Parenthood. But millions and millions of women -- cervical cancer, breast cancer -- are helped by Planned Parenthood.\n\nSo you can say whatever you want, but they have millions of women going through Planned Parenthood that are helped greatly. And I wouldn't fund it.\n\nI would defund it because of the abortion factor, which they say is 3 percent. I don't know what percentage it is. They say it's 3 percent. But I would defund it, because I'm pro-life. But millions of women are helped by Planned Parenthood.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT:", + " Governor Kasich, back to religious liberty. You've been a little bit less emphatic. You've said, same-sex couple approaches a cupcake maker, sell them a cupcake. Can we trust you as much on religious liberty as the rest of these people?\n\nKASICH: Well, you know, of course. I mean, if -- look, I was involved in just being a pioneer in a new church. Religious institutions should be able to practice the religion that they believe in. No question and no doubt about it.\n\nNow, in regard to same-sex marriage, I don't favor it. I've always favored traditional marriage,", + " but, look, the court has ruled and I've moved on. And what I've said, Hugh, is that, look, where does it end?\n\nIf you're in the business of selling things, if you're not going to sell to somebody you don't agree with, OK, today I'm not going to sell to somebody who's gay, and tomorrow maybe I won't sell to somebody who's divorced.\n\nI mean, if you're in the business of commerce, conduct commerce. That's my view. And if you don't agree with their lifestyle, say a prayer for them when they leave and hope they change their behavior.\n\nBut when it comes to the religious institutions,", + " they are in inviolate in my mind, and I would fight for those religious institutions. And look, I've appointed over a hundred judges as governor. I even appointed adjudge to the Ohio Supreme Court.\n\nAnd you know what they are? They're conservatives. Go check it out. They are conservatives. They don't make the law. They interpret the law. That's all they do. And they stick by the Constitution. So I will do that.\n\nBut let's just not get so narrow here as to gotcha this or that. I think my position is clear.\n\nHEWITT: Dr. Carson, let me wrap it up with you.", + " Are their positions clear?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT: Are the positions you've heard clear about the First Amendment and the first freedom?\n\nCARSON: Well, first of all, let me just add my praise to Justice Scalia. I first met him when we got an honorary degree together a long time ago. A tremendous wit and intellect.\n\nAs far as religious freedom is concerned, one of the basic tenets of this nation, and I believe that the Constitution protects all of our rights. And it gives people who believe in same-sex marriage the same rights as everybody else.\n\nBut what we have to remember is even though everybody has the same rights,", + " nobody get extra rights. So nobody gets to redefine things for everybody else and then have them have to conform to it. That's unfair.\n\nAnd this is the responsibility of Congress to come back and correct what the Supreme Court has done. That's why we have divided government. And we're going to have to encourage them to act in an appropriate way, or we will lose our religious freedom.\n\nAnd as president, I would go through and I would look at what a person's life has been. What have they done in the past? What kind of judgments have they made? What kind of associations do they have? That will tell you a lot more than an interview will tell you.\n\nThe fruit salad of their life is what I will look at.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Thank you, Dr. Carson.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: All of you want to repeal and replace Obamacare, so let's talk about your plans, specific plans to replace it. I want to bring in our chief political correspondent, Dana Bash.\n\nBASH: Senator Rubio, you said yesterday, right here in Houston, that Mr. Trump thinks part of Obamacare is pretty good. So, he says he is going to repeal Obamacare. Are you saying that you're worried he won't?\n\nRUBIO: The individual mandate. He said he likes the individual mandate portion of it, which I don't believe that should be part of it.", + " That should not remain there. I think here's what we need to replace it with.\n\nWe need to repeal Obamacare completely and replace it with a system that puts Americans in charge of their health care money again. If your employer wants to buy health insurance for you, they can continue to do so from any company in America they want to buy it from.\n\nOtherwise, your employers can provide you health care money, tax- free, not treated as income, and you can use that money only for health care, but you can use it to fund health care any way you want, fully fund a health savings account, the combination of a health savings account or a private plan from any company in any state in the country.\n\nAnd if you don't have that,", + " then you will have a refundable tax credit that provides you health care money to buy your own health care coverage. And that, I think, is a much better approach than Obamacare, which, by the way, isn't just bad for health care, it's bad for our economy. It is a health care law that is basically forcing companies to lay people off, cut people's hours, move people to part-time. It is not just a bad health care law, it is a job-killing law. And I will repeal it as president and we will replace it with something substantially better for all Americans.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH:", + " Mr. Trump, Senator Rubio just said that you support the individual mandate. Would you respond?\n\nTRUMP: I just want to say, I agree with that 100 percent, except pre-existing conditions, I would absolutely get rid of Obamacare. We're going to have something much better, but pre-existing conditions, when I'm referring to that, and I was referring to that very strongly on the show with Anderson Cooper, I want to keep pre- existing conditions.\n\nI think we need it. I think it's a modern age. And I think we have to have it.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH: OK, so let's talk about pre-existing conditions.", + " What the insurance companies say is that the only way that they can cover people is to have a mandate requiring everybody purchase health insurance. Are they wrong?\n\nTRUMP: I think they're wrong 100 percent. What we need -- look, the insurance companies take care of the politicians. The insurance companies get what they want. We should have gotten rid of the lines around each state so we can have real competition.\n\nTRUMP: We thought that was gone, we thought those lines were going to be gone, so something happened at the last moment where Obamacare got approved, and all of that was thrown out the window.\n\nThe reason is some of the people in the audience are insurance people,", + " and insurance lobbyists, and special interests. They got -- I'm not going to point to these gentlemen, of course, they're part of the problem, other than Ben, in all fairness.\n\nAnd, actually, the Governor too, let's just talk about these too, OK?\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nTRUMP: Because I don't think the Governor had too much to do with this.\n\nBut, we should have gotten rid of the borders, we should have gotten rid of the lines around the state so there's great competition. The insurance companies are making a fortune on every single thing they do.\n\nI'm self-funding my campaign.", + " I'm the only one in either party self-funding my campaign. I'm going to do what's right. We have to get rid of the lines around the states so that there's serious, serious competition.\n\nBASH But, Mr. Trump...\n\nTRUMP:... And, you're going to see -- excuse me. You're going to see preexisting conditions and everything else be part of it, but the price will be done, and the insurance companies can pay. Right now they're making a fortune.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH: But, just to be specific here, what you're saying is getting rid of the barriers between states,", + " that is going to solve the problem...\n\nTRUMP: That's going to solve the problem. And, the insurance companies aren't going to say that, they want to keep it. They want to say -- they say whatever they have to say to keep it the way it is. I know the insurance companies, they're friends of mine. The top guys, they're friends of mine. I shouldn't tell you guys, you'll say it's terrible, I have a conflict of interest. They're friends of mine, there's some right in the audience. One of them was just waving to me, he was laughing and smiling.", + " He's not laughing so much anymore.\n\nHi.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nLook, the insurance companies are making an absolute fortune. Yes, they will keep preexisting conditions, and that would be a great thing. Get rid of Obamacare, we'll come up with new plans. But, we should keep preexisting conditions.\n\nRUBIO: Dana, I was mentioned in his response, so if I may about the insurance companies...\n\nBASH:... Go ahead.\n\nRUBIO: You may not be aware of this, Donald, because you don't follow this stuff very closely, but here's what happened. When they passed Obamacare they put a bailout fund in Obamacare.", + " All these lobbyists you keep talking about, they put a bailout fund in the law that would allow public money to be used, taxpayer money, to bail out companies when they lost money.\n\nAnd, we led the effort and wiped out that bailout fund. The insurance companies are not in favor of me, they hate that. They're suing that now to get that bailout money put back in.\n\nHere's what you didn't hear in that answer, and this is important guys, this is an important thing. What is your plan? I understand the lines around the state, whatever that means. This is not a game where you draw maps...\n\nTRUMP:", + "... And, you don't know what it means...\n\nRUBIO:... What is your plan, Mr. Trump?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: What is your plan on healthcare?\n\nTRUMP: You don't know.\n\nBASH: (inaudible)\n\nTRUMP:... The biggest problem...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO:... What's your plan...\n\nTRUMP:... The biggest problem, I'll have you know...\n\nRUBIO:... What's your plan... TRUMP:... You know, I watched him meltdown two weeks ago with Chris Christie. I got to tell you, the biggest problem he's got is he really doesn't know about the lines.", + " The biggest thing we've got, and the reason we've got no competition, is because we have lines around the state, and you have essentially....\n\nRUBIO:... We already mentioned that (inaudible) plan, I know what that is, but what else is part of your plan...\n\nTRUMP:... You don't know much...\n\nRUBIO:... So, you're only thing is to get rid of the lines around the states. What else is part of your healthcare plan...\n\nTRUMP:... The lines around the states...\n\nRUBIO:... That's your only plan...\n\nTRUMP:... and,", + " it was almost done -- not now...\n\nRUBIO:... Alright, (inaudible)...\n\nTRUMP:... Excuse me. Excuse me.\n\nRUBIO:... His plan. That was the plan...\n\nTRUMP:... You get rid of the lines, it brings in competition. So, instead of having one insurance company taking care of New York, or Texas, you'll have many. They'll compete, and it'll be a beautiful thing.\n\nRUBIO: Alright...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: So, that's the only part of the plan? Just the lines?\n\nBASH: (inaudible)\n\nTRUMP:", + " The nice part of the plan -- you'll have many different plans. You'll have competition, you'll have so many different plans.\n\nRUBIO: Now he's repeating himself.\n\nTRUMP: No, no, no.\n\n(LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE) (CHEERING)\n\nTRUMP: (inaudible)\n\nRUBIO: (inaudible)\n\n(CHEERING)\n\nTRUMP: (inaudible) I watched him repeat himself five times four weeks ago... RUBIO:... I just watched you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: I watched him meltdown on the stage like that,", + " I've never seen it in anybody...\n\nBASH:... Let's stay focused on the subject...\n\nTRUMP:... I thought he came out of the swimming pool...\n\nRUBIO:... I see him repeat himself every night, he says five things, everyone's dumb, he's gonna make America great again...\n\nBASH:... Senator Rubio...\n\nRUBIO:... We're going to win, win win, he's winning in the polls...\n\nBASH:... Senator Rubio, please.\n\nRUBIO:... And the lines around the state.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO:... Every night.\n\nBASH: Senator Rubio.\n\n(CHEERING)\n\nUNIDENTIFIED MALE:", + " I tell the truth, I tell the truth.\n\nBASH: Senator Rubio, you will have time to respond if you would just let Mr. Trump respond to what you've just posed to him...\n\nRUBIO:... Yeah, he's going to give us his plan now, right? OK...\n\nBASH:... If you could talk a little bit more about your plan. I know you talked about...\n\nTRUMP:... We're going to have many different plans because...\n\nBASH:... Can you be a little specific...\n\nTRUMP:... competition...\n\nRUBIO:... He's done it again.\n\n(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP:", + " There is going to be competition among all of the states, and the insurance companies. They're going to have many, many different plans. BASH: Is there anything else you would like to add to that...\n\nTRUMP: No, there's nothing to add.\n\n(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: What is to add?\n\nBASH: Thank you. Thank you both.\n\nRUBIO: Alright.\n\nBASH: Governor Kasich, you've said it is, quote, \"Un American to deny someone health insurance if they have a preexisting condition.\"\n\nBASH: Would you leave the individual mandate in place requiring all Americans to purchase insurance?\n\nKASICH:", + " No, I wouldn't. And -- but that doesn't matter when it comes to the issue of preexisting conditions. You don't want any American to lose their house, everything they've saved, because they get sick. Now, I think it is more complicated than what we've heard here tonight. We're actually running significant health reform in my state.\n\nI would repeal Obamacare for a variety of reasons. I would take some of the federal resources, combine it with the freed-up Medicaid program, which I would send back to the states, and cover the people who are currently the working poor because we don't want to have tens of millions of Americans losing their health insurance.\n\nAnd then we're driving towards total transparency.", + " If any of you here ever get a hospital bill, it's easier to interpret the Dead Sea scrolls than to understand your hospital bill. The fact is what we need is transparency with hospitals and with the providers.\n\nAnd I'll tell you what we will do. We are actually going to make payments to physicians and to hospitals who actually deliver healthcare with great quality at low prices. We actually are going to make the market work.\n\nBASH: Governor, let me just go back to the original question about the individual mandate. In 1994 when you were in Congress, you proposed a plan requiring an individual mandate. So what changed?\n\nKASICH:", + " Well, Dana, the Heritage Foundation had this position as well. And when I look at it, I don't think it's tenable. And we don't need to do that. Again, I'm telling you that we are going to -- we have a proposal, a plan that we're enacting now that says if you are a hospital or a doctor and you're providing very high quality at lower prices, below the midpoint -- some charge high, some charge low. If you are below the midpoint, we are going to give you a financial reward for allowing you to provide services that result in high quality for our people at lower pricess.\n\nThat is the way in which we are going to damp down the rising costs of healthcare.", + " Because if you think about your own deductibles today, they're going higher, higher and higher. And you know what? At some point, people can't afford it. Our plan will work. It uses the market. It uses transparency. It gets the patient in the middle. And guess what? We're actually doing it in my state, the seventh-largest state in the country. And if this will go -- this will go national, we will get our hands on healthcare where you will know what's going on. We will pay for quality, lower prices, and we will begin to see healthcare become affordable in America and where people will also be able to have health insurance,", + " even if they have a preexisting condition.\n\nWe don't want to throw millions of people out into the cold and not have the health insurance, Dana. So that's really what we're doing. This is not a theory. This is what we are actually doing in our state. We will begin payments next year based on episodes that we have in our lives. If our primary care physicians keep us healthy for a year, with really high quality, guess what? They will get a financial reward.\n\nOur primary care physicians need help. They need support. We're losing them. This will allow them to get a reward for doing a great job.\n\nBASH:", + " Governor Kasich, thank you.\n\nKASICH: Thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH: Dr. Carson, you have dealt with the sickest of patients. You support covering preexisting conditions. How would you change Obamacare, but maintain that coverage?\n\nCARSON: Well, first of all, healthcare is not a right. But I do believe it is a responsibility for a responsible society, and we are that. We spend almost twice as much per capita on healthcare as many other nations who have actually much better access than we do.\n\nI propose a system in which we use health empowerment accounts, which are like a health savings account with no bureaucrats.", + " And we give it to everybody from birth until death. They can pass it on when they die. We pay for it with the same dollars that we pay for traditional healthcare with. We give people the ability to shift money within their health empowerment account within their family. So dad's $500 short, mom can give it to him or a cousin or uncle.\n\nAnd it makes every family their own insurance carrier with no middle man. It gives you enormous flexibility. And also, you know, if Uncle Joe is smoking like a chimney, everybody's going to hide his cigarettes because they're all interested in what's going on there.\n\nAlso, the -- your catastrophic healthcare is going to cost a lot less money now because the only thing coming out of that is catastrophic healthcare.", + " So, it's like a homeowners policy with a large deductible, versus a homeowners policy where you want every scratch covered. One costs $1,500 a year; one costs $10,000 a year. You can buy the $1,500 one. That will take care of 75 percent of the people. The people who are indigent, how do we take care of them now? Medicaid. What's the Medicaid budget? Almost $500 billion; almost 80 million people participate, which is way too many, and that will get a lot better when we fix the economy, which I hope we get a chance to talk about.\n\nCARSON:", + " But do the math. Over $5,000 for each man, woman and child, and all -- they will have a lot more flexibility. What could you buy with that? A concierge practice.\n\nBLITZER: Thank you.\n\nCARSON: And you could still have thousands of dollars left over. And let me just finish, because I don't get to talk that much. And, you know, let's...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... you can have the money that's left over to buy your catastrophic insurance. But most importantly, we give them a menu, just like we do in Medicare Part C, and they have the choices that will allow them not only to have catastrophic health care,", + " but drug care and everything else.\n\nIt will be such a good program that nobody will want Obamacare after that, and that's probably the best way do it, although if anybody still did, I would still de-fund it.\n\nBLITZER: Thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThank you, Dr. Carson. Let's talk about the economy. Let's talk about...\n\nCRUZ: Wolf, Wolf, Wolf. Does everyone get to address Obamacare but me?\n\nBLITZER: I want to move on, but there'll be plenty of opportunities for you to address...\n\nCRUZ: It's kind of an issue I have a long history with.\n\nBLITZER:", + " I know you do. And -- all right, go ahead.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nCRUZ: Thank you, Wolf.\n\nKASICH: How do you -- how do you get that extra time, Cruz? You're very good at... CRUZ: You know, this is another issue on which Donald and I have sharp disagreements. On Planned Parenthood, he thinks Planned Parenthood is wonderful. I would instruct the Department of Justice to investigate them and prosecute any and all criminal violations.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nOn Obamacare, both Donald and I say we want to end it, but for very different reasons. I want to end it because it goes too far,", + " it's killed millions of jobs, and it's hurting people's health care. Donald wants to end it because he says it doesn't go nearly far enough. And what was amazing in that exchange that was missing is for decades Donald has been advocating socialized medicine.\n\nWhat he's said is government should pay for everyone's health care, and in fact, a couple of debates ago, he said, if you don't support socialized health care, you're heartless. Now, liberal Democrats have been saying that for years. Now let me tell you if you're a small business owner, Donald Trump's socialized medicine, putting the government in charge of your health care would kill more jobs than Obamacare,", + " and if you're elderly, the results of socialized medicine in every country on earth where it's been implemented has been rationing, has been the government saying, no, you don't get that hip replacement, you don't get that knee replacement, the government is in charge of your health care.\n\nI'll tell you this. As president...\n\nBLITZER: Senator...\n\nCRUZ:... I will repeal every word of Obamacare.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Thank you, thank you. Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: I do not want socialized medicine, just so you understand. He goes around saying oh,", + " he wants it. I do not want socialized medicine. I do agree with him that it's going to be a disaster, Obamacare, for the economy.\n\nIn 2017, it will be impossible for us to pay for it if you look at what's going on. That's why it has to be repealed, for a lot of reasons, Number one, it doesn't work, number two, premium. You look at premiums going up, 25, 35, even 45 percent, and more. We have to get rid of Obamacare. It is going to destroy our economy completely. Our economy is not doing well.", + " It is going to destroy our economy greatly. And on that, I agree.\n\nCRUZ: Donald, true or false, you've said the government should pay for everyone's health care.\n\nTRUMP: That's false.\n\nCRUZ: You've never said that?\n\nTRUMP: No, I said it worked in a couple of countries...\n\nCRUZ: But you've never stood on this debate stage and says it works great in Canada and Scotland and we should do it here.\n\nTRUMP: No, I did not. No I did not.\n\nCRUZ: Did you say if you want people to die on the streets, if you don't support socialized health care,", + " you have no heart.\n\nTRUMP: Correct. I will not let people die on the streets if I'm president.\n\nCRUZ: Have you said you're a liberal on health care?\n\nTRUMP: Excuse me. Let me talk. If people...\n\nCRUZ: Talk away. Explain your plan, please.\n\nTRUMP: If people -- my plan is very simple. I will not -- we're going to have private -- we are going to have health care, but I will not allow people to die on the sidewalks and the streets of our country if I'm president. You may let it and you may be fine with it...\n\nCRUZ:", + " So does the government pay for everyone's health care?\n\nTRUMP:... I'm not fine with it. We are going to take those people...\n\nCRUZ: Yes or no. Just answer the question.\n\nTRUMP: Excuse me. We are going to take those people and those people are going to be serviced by doctors and hospitals. We're going to make great deals on it, but we're not going to let them die in the streets.\n\nCRUZ: Who pays for it?\n\nRUBIO: Well, can I just clarify something?\n\nBLITZER: Gentleman, please.\n\nRUBIO: Wolf, no.", + " I want to clarify something.\n\nBLITZER: Gentlemen please. I want to move on.\n\nRUBIO: This is a Republican debate, right? Because that attack about letting people die in the streets...\n\nBLITZER: I want to talk about the economy.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: Gentleman, gentleman. All of you have agreed -- Senator Cruz...\n\nTRUMP: You know what? Call it what you want.\n\nCRUZ: It's a yes or no.\n\nTRUMP: Call it what you want, people are not going to be dying on the sidewalk.\n\nBLITZER:", + " All of you have agreed -- all of you have agreed to the rules. I want to move on. We're talking about the economy right now. Mr. Trump, you want to cut taxes more than President Ronald Reagan did, more than President George W. Bush did. The Independent Tax Foundation says the cost to the country of your proposal would be about $10 trillion, and that takes into account the economic growth that would emerge from your proposed tax cuts.\n\nHow would you cut $10 trillion over 10 years, but make sure the country isn't saddled with even more debt?\n\nTRUMP: Because the country will become a dynamic economy.", + " We'll be dynamic again. If you look at what's going on, we have the highest taxes anywhere in the world. We pay more business tax, we pay more personal tax. We have the highest taxes in the world.\n\nIt's shutting off our economy. It's shutting off our country. We have trillions of dollars outside that we can't get in. Yes, we will do my tax plan, and it will be great. We will have a dynamic economy again.\n\nBLITZER: What specific cuts will you make to pay for that tax cut?\n\nTRUMP: We're going to make many cuts in business. We're getting rid of -- we're going to get rid of so many different things.", + " Department of Education -- Common Core is out. We're going local. Have to go local.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nEnvironmental protection -- we waste all of this money. We're going to bring that back to the states. And we're going to have other (inaudible) many things. (APPLAUSE)\n\nWe are going to cut many of the agencies, we will balance our budget, and we will be dynamic again.\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump -- Mr. Trump. If you eliminate completely the Department of Education, as you have proposed, that's about $68 billion. If you eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency,", + " that's about $8 billion. That's about $76 billion for those two agencies.\n\nThe current deficit this year is $544 billion. Where are you going to come up with the money?\n\nTRUMP: Waste, fraud and abuse all over the place. Waste, fraud and abuse.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nYou look at what's happening with Social Security, you look -- look at what's happening with every agency -- waste, fraud and abuse. We will cut so much, your head will spin.\n\nBLITZER: Governor Kasich.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nWhen you were in Congress, you were chairman of the Budget Committee. You helped craft the last balanced budget the United States had.", + " Can Mr. Trump's plan work?\n\nKASICH: Well, I think it takes three things, Wolf. And I've done it. I mean, I -- we got the budget balanced. We cut the capital gains tax. You see, in order to get this economy moving again, you have to grow the economy, and you have to restrain the spending.\n\nAnd when I was chairman, we cut that capital gains tax and we instituted a significant program to get to balance. We had a balanced budget four years in a row, had to take on every interest group in Washington -- every single one of them -- and we paid down a half a trillion of the national debt.\n\nAnd why do you do it?", + " Because you want job growth. If you don't have regulatory reform, common-sense regulations, reasonable tax cuts, which I have, and a fiscal plan, you won't get there. You will never be able to do it.\n\nNow, I -- I inherited an an $8 billion hole in Ohio, I have common-sense regulations, I have tax cuts -- the biggest of any governor in the country -- and we have a fiscal plan.\n\nAnd it's not all -- it's not always cutting. It's innovating -- it's producing a better product at, frankly, a lower price. Now we have a $2 billion surplus.", + " Our credit is strong, our pensions are strong.\n\nAnd, look -- I've got a plan to take to Washington, and I will have it there in the first hundred days, and it will include shifting welfare, education, transportation, Medicaid and job training back to us, so we can begin, in the states, to be the laboratories of innovation.\n\nI've done it -- I did it in Washington -- four years of balanced budgets. No one could even believe it happened.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nI've done it in Ohio, we're growing, the jobs are up and people are having opportunity. And I will go back to Washington and do it again for the American people.", + " I promise you that.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nWithin the first hundred days, we will have the plan to get this done.\n\nBLITZER: Thank you. Thank you, governor.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nSpeaking of taxes...\n\nTRUMP: I just want to say -- and I'm a big fan of the governor, but they also struck oil, OK, so that helped Iowa a lot.\n\nKASICH: OK, let me -- let me -- let me just talk about that, because I know that -- that Donald believes the energy industry is important. So do I. But of the over 400,000 jobs that we've created in the state,", + " we think maybe 15,000 are connected to this industry, because it's early-stage.\n\nSee, what we've done in Ohio, and what a president needs to do, is to have a cabinet and a whole operation that's jobs-friendly. We have diversified our economy.\n\nWe -- we do have energy, we have medical devices, we have financial services, we have I.T., we just got Amazon -- their Cloud computing in the Midwest. You know why it's happening?\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nBecause we're balanced budgets, we're strong, we're job-friendly, we don't raise their taxes, and if we have a president that does that in America,", + " we will get the economic growth, and that is what this country needs. Jobs, jobs and jobs, period.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump, yesterday, the last Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, called on you to release your back tax returns, and said, and I'm quoting him now, \"there is good reason to believe there is a bombshell in them.\"\n\nRomney said either you're not as wealthy as you say you are, said maybe you haven't paid the kind of taxes we would expect you to pay, or you haven't been giving the money to veterans or disabled people. Are any of those accusations that he has leveled true?\n\nTRUMP:", + " All right. First of all, let me just explain. I was the first one to file a financial disclosure form -- almost 100 pages. You don't learn anything about somebody's wealth with a tax return. You learn it from statements.\n\nTRUMP: I filed -- which shows that I'm worth over $10 billion. I built a great company with very little debt. People were shocked, the people in the back, the reporters, they were shocked when they went down. And I filed it on time. I didn't ask for five 45-day extensions, which I would have been entitled to.\n\nSo as far as that's concerned,", + " I filed it. And that's where you find out what kind of a company. You don't learn anything from a tax return.\n\nI will say this. Mitt Romney looked like a fool when he delayed and delayed and delayed. And Harry Reid baited him so beautifully. And Mitt Romney didn't file his return until a September 21st of 2012, about a month-and-a-half before the election. And it cost him big league.\n\nAs far as my return, I want to file it, except for many years, I've been audited every year. Twelve years, or something like that. Every year they audit me,", + " audit me, audit me.\n\nNobody gets audited -- I have friends that are very wealthy people. They never get audited. I get audited every year. I will absolutely give my return, but I'm being audited now for two or three years, so I can't do it until the audit is finished, obviously. And I think people would understand that.\n\nBLITZER: Hugh, go ahead.\n\nHEWITT: Mr. Trump. You told me...\n\nTRUMP: Are you going to ask anybody else that question?\n\nCARSON: Yes, amen, amen.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nTRUMP: Every single question comes to me?\n\nHEWITT:", + " Mr. Trump...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: I know I'm here for the ratings, but it's a little bit ridiculous.\n\n(LAUGHTER) HEWITT: Mr. Trump, a year ago you told me on my radio show, the audio and the transcript are out there on YouTube, that you would release your tax returns.\n\nTRUMP: True.\n\nHEWITT: Are you going back on your commitment?\n\nTRUMP: No, I'm not. First of all, very few people listen to your radio show. That's the good news.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nTRUMP: Let me just tell you,", + " let me just -- which happens to be true. Check out the ratings.\n\nLook, let me just tell you something. Let me just tell you something. I want to release my tax returns but I can't release it while I'm under an audit. We're under a routine audit. I've had it for years, I get audited.\n\nAnd obviously if I'm being audited, I'm not going to release a return. As soon as the audit is done, I love it.\n\nHEWITT: So, Senator Rubio, Mitt Romney also called upon to you release your tax returns. Your campaign said last spring that you would release your returns that you had not previously released.", + " And you said, coming out any day momentarily. When are we going to see your returns?\n\nRUBIO: Yes, tomorrow or Saturday, in fact, is our plan to release them. And there's nothing really that interesting in them. So I have no problem releasing them. And luckily I'm not being audited this year, or last year, for that matter.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO: But this is my time. I want to go back to this question you asked about the debt. This is an important issue. It's a huge issue, OK? In less than five years, 83 percent of our entire budget will be made up of Social Security,", + " Medicare, Medicaid, and the interest on the debt.\n\nThat means only 17 percent of our budget will be for things like the military or the Department of Education or environmental protection issues.\n\nYou cannot balance our budget unless you deal with that 83 percent, which is why I've been repeatedly talking about since my time running for the Senate in Florida, where there are a lot of people like my mother that depend on Social Security and Medicare, on the need to save those programs, by reforming the way they work for future generations.\n\nAnd I think if we -- the longer we take to do this, the closer we are going to get to a debt crisis.", + " And, Wolf, you did not get an answer to your question. This debt issue is -- the next president of the United States will not be able to serve four to eight years without dealing with the national debt.\n\nIt is not a question of if, it is a question of when we have a debt crisis. And we should not leave the stage here tonight without hearing a serious answer from every single one of us about how we are going to deal bring the national debt under control once and for all.\n\nHEWITT: Thank you, Senator Rubio. But I am...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT: I'm being fair to all of the candidates.\n\nSenator Cruz,", + " Tuesday is five days away. Why haven't voters seen your 2012, 2013, and 2014 returns?\n\nCRUZ: So, I've released five years of tax returns already. We will have two more years available tomorrow. And I would note that this question really goes -- you know, Donald says he's being audited.\n\nWell, I would think that would underscore the need to release those returns. If he has said something that was false and that an audit is going to find was fraudulent, the voters need to know.\n\nAnd listen, people across this country, we recognize our country is in crisis. The most important question is how do we win the general election in November,", + " 2016. And roughly 65 percent of Republicans think Donald is not the right candidate to go against Hillary Clinton.\n\nNow, part of the reason in the last 10 polls...\n\nTRUMP: Eighty-five percent say you, big difference.\n\nCRUZ:... RealClearPolitics he has lost to Hillary on eight of them. In the last 10 polls on RealClearPolitics, I either tied or beat Hillary. And this is an example.\n\nYou know, the mainstream media is laying off Donald now. They're going to pick apart his taxes. They're going to pick apart his business deals.\n\nAnd let's take, for example,", + " one of Hillary's great vulnerabilities, the corruption at the Clinton Foundation, the fact that she had CEOs and foreign companies giving her money while she was secretary of state.\n\nCRUZ: The next Republican nominee needs to be able to make that case against Hillary. And if Donald tried to did it, Hillary would turn to Donald and say, \"but gosh, Donald, you gave $100,000 to the Clinton foundation. I even went to your wedding.\"\n\nHe can't prosecute the case against Hillary, and we can't risk another four years of these failed Obama policies by nominating someone who loses to Hillary Clinton in November.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP:", + " So at the beginning, I said openly to everybody that I contribute to many, many politicians, both Republican and Democrat. And I have, over the years. I'm a businessman. I have, over the years.\n\nAnd I sort of have to laugh when Ted makes a big deal out of the fact that he's doing well in the polls. Well, I'm beating him in virtually every poll. I'm tied in Texas, by the way, which I shouldn't be. But I think I'll do very well.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBut a poll just came out -- a Bloomberg poll -- where I am beating him so badly that it's,", + " like, embarrassing even for me to say I'm beating him that badly.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd -- and here's the thing -- it was sort of funny -- 65 percent of the people don't like you -- I just got 36 percent of the vote, right? I just got 46 percent on another one. I got 38 percent...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... on another one. That means -- and he got 20 and 22, and he lost in South Carolina so badly -- that was going to be his stronghold. He said a year ago, \"I can't lose South Carolina.\" I beat him in a landslide.\n\nLast week in Nevada,", + " I beat him in a landslide, and he sang (ph) about the polls. One other thing -- Hillary Clinton -- take a look at USA Today, take a look at the Q poll. I beat her, and I beat her badly. And I -- and I haven't even started at her. I only had one little interchange...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... I only had one little interchange, and that was...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... four weeks ago, when she said I was sexist. And believe me, they had a rough weekend that weekend, between Bill and Hillary. They had a rough weekend.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER:", + " Gentlemen. Gentlemen. Gentlemen.\n\nCRUZ: Hold on. He -- he attacked me, Wolf. I get a response.\n\nBLITZER: I was about to say -- Senator Cruz, respond.\n\nCRUZ: Thank you. Thank -- thank -- thank you very much.\n\nYou know, it's interesting -- Donald went -- went on -- on an extended tirade about the polls, but he didn't respond to any of the substance. He has yet to say -- he can release past year's tax returns. He can do it tomorrow.\n\nHe doesn't want to do it, because presumably there's something in there...\n\nTRUMP:", + " Nothing.\n\nCRUZ:... that is bad. If there's nothing, release them tomorrow.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: They're already prepared. The only reason he's not releasing them...\n\nTRUMP: You -- you don't...\n\nCRUZ:... is because he's afraid that he will get hit.\n\nTRUMP: I'm not afraid (inaudible).\n\nCRUZ: You know, Marco made reference earlier to the litigation against Trump University. It's a fraud case. His lawyers have scheduled the trial for July.\n\nI want you to think about, if this man is the nominee, having the Republican nominee...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... on the stand in court,", + " being cross-examined about whether he committed fraud. You don't think the mainstream media will go crazy on that?\n\nAnd on substance, how do we nominate a candidate who has said Hillary Clinton was the best secretary of state of modern times, who agreed with her on foreign policy, who agrees with Bernie Sanders on health care, who agreed with Barack Obama on the Wall Street bailout?\n\nBLITZER: All right (ph)...\n\nCRUZ: If -- we've got to win this election, and we can't do it with a candidate who agrees with Hillary Clinton and can't take it to her and beat her on the debate stage and at the polls.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Mr. Trump. Mr, -- hold on. Mr. Trump -- Mr. Trump...\n\nTRUMP:... first of all, he's talking about the polls. I'm beating him awfully badly in the polls.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: But you're not beating Hillary. You're not beating Hillary.\n\nTRUMP: Well, then, if I can't -- if -- hey, if I can't beat her, you're really going to get killed, aren't you?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ: So -- so let me ask you this, because you're really getting beaten badly. I know you're embarrassed -- I know you're embarrassed,", + " but keep fighting -- keep swinging, man (ph). Swing for the fences.\n\nLet me just tell you -- let me just tell you, the Trump University case is a civil case. Not a -- it's a civil case. It's a case where people want to try and get -- it's a case that is nonsense.\n\nIt's something I could have settled many times. I could settle it right now for very little money, but I don't want to do it out of principle. The people that took the course all signed -- most -- many -- many signed report cards saying it was fantastic, it was wonderful, it was beautiful.\n\nAs -- and believe me,", + " I'll win that case. That's an easy case. Civil case. Number two, as far as the taxes are concerned, I'm being audited. It's a very routine audit, and it's very unfair, because I've been audited for, I think, over 12 years.\n\nEvery year, because of the size of my company, which is very, very large, I'm being audited -- which is a very large company.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nBLITZER: Thank you.\n\nTRUMP: I'm being audited 12 years in a row, at least.\n\nNow, until that audit's done,", + " and I don't think anybody would blame me, I'm not giving it...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ:... the years you're not being audited? Will you release those years?\n\nBLITZER: Gentlemen, gentlemen, thank you.\n\nTRUMP: (inaudible) audited for those years.\n\nCRUZ: Which years? Which years are you being audited?\n\nBLITZER: Gentlemen...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER:... we actually have rules -- we're trying to obey these rules that all of you agreed. We're going to take a quick break. We have a lot more -- many more critically important issues to discuss.\n\nOur coverage of this tenth Republican presidential debate from the University of Houston continues in a moment.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nBLITZER:", + " Welcome back to the Republican presidential debate here at the University of Houston.\n\nGentlemen, I want to turn our attention right now to key issues involving foreign policy and national security. And Mr. Trump, I'll begin with you.\n\nTRUMP: Shocking.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBLITZER: You said this about the ongoing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians -- I'm quoting you now: \"Let me be sort of a neutral guy. I don't want to say whose fault it is, I don't think it helps.\"\n\nTRUMP: Right.\n\nBLITZER: Here's the question. How do you remain neutral when the U.S.", + " considers Israel to be America's closest ally in the Middle East?\n\nTRUMP: Well, first of all, I don't think they do under President Obama because I think he's treated Israel horribly, all right? I think he's treated Israel horribly.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: I was the grand marshall down 5th Avenue a number of years ago for the Israeli Day Parade, I have very close ties to Israel. I've received the Tree of Life Award and many of the greatest awards given by Israel.\n\nAs president, however, there's nothing that I would rather do to bring peace to Israel and its neighbors generally.", + " And I think it serves no purpose to say that you have a good guy and a bad guy.\n\nNow, I may not be successful in doing it. It's probably the toughest negotiation anywhere in the world of any kind. OK? But it doesn't help if I start saying, \"I am very pro-Israel, very pro, more than anybody on this stage.\" But it doesn't do any good to start demeaning the neighbors, because I would love to do something with regard to negotiating peace, finally, for Israel and for their neighbors.\n\nAnd I can't do that as well -- as a negotiator, I cannot do that as well if I'm taking big,", + " big sides. With that being said, I am totally pro-Israel.\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ: Well, this is another area on which Donald agrees with Hillary Clinton and on which I disagree with them both strongly. Both Donald and Hillary Clinton want to be neutral, to use Donald's word, between Israel and the Palestinians.\n\nLet me be clear. If I'm president, America will stand unapologetically with the nation of Israel.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd the notion of neutrality is based upon the left buying into this moral relativism that is often pitched in the media. Listen, it is not equivalent.", + " When you have terrorist strapping dynamite around their chest, exploding and murdering innocent women and children, they are not equivalent to the IDF officers protecting Israel. And I will not pretend that they are.\n\nJust today, Iran announced they're going to pay $7,000 to each suicide bomber. And I would note, missing from Donald's answer was anything he has done in his nearly 70 years of living defending Israel. I have over and over again led the fight to defend Israel, to fight for Israel. And this -- if you want to know who will stand with Israel, we ought to start with who has stood with Israel when the heat was on.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER:", + " Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: Well, I can only say -- look, I can only say I've been a big contributor to Israel over the years. I've received many, many awards from Israel, as I've said before. I have a great relationship with Israel. And I'm going to keep it that way. And if I could bring peace, that would be a fantastic thing. It would be one of my greatest achievements as president.\n\nBLITZER: Governor Kasich, I want you to weigh in.\n\nKASICH: Well, I mean, well, I was in Congress for 18 years on the Defense Committee.", + " And then, you know, after 9/11, the secretary of defense called me in to help out with some things. And I've been a supporter of Israel -- a strong supporter of Israel longer than anybody on this stage. I didn't give as much money as Donald gave, but I've been standing with the Israelis for a very long time.\n\nAnd frankly, I think the problem we have in foreign policy right now, Wolf, is that we are not certain with who we stand with. Our allies are not sure what to make of us, and our enemies are moving. And one -- are moving because they're not sure what we will do.\n\nIt's a very interesting development here within the 24 hours.", + " We said to the South Koreans that we would give them the high altitude defense system. It really rattled the Chinese, and for the first time since we took positive action, the Chinese are beginning to take action against North Korea.\n\nWhen we stand firm and we let the world know who we're with, who we stand for, and we bring our allies together, that is the road forward.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: We're going to get to North Korea in a moment. But Senator Rubio, what's wrong with the U.S. being an honest broker in a negotiation, as Mr. Trump is proposing?\n\nRUBIO:", + " Because -- and I don't know if Donald realizes this. I'm sure it's not his intent perhaps. But the position you've taken is an anti-Israel position. And here's why. Because you cannot be an honest broker in a dispute between two sides in which one of the sides is constantly acting in bad faith. The Palestinian Authority has walked away from multiple efforts to make peace, very generous offers from the Israels. Instead, here's what the Palestinians do. They teach their four- year-old children that killing Jews is a glorious thing. Here's what Hamas does. They launch rockets and terrorist attacks again Israel on an ongoing basis.", + " The bottom line is, a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, given the current makeup of the Palestinians, is not possible.\n\nAnd so the next president of the United States needs to be someone like me who will stand firmly on the side of Israel. I'm not -- I'm not going to sit here and say, \"Oh, I'm not on either side.\" I will be on a side. I will be on Israel's side every single day because they are the only pro-American, free enterprise democracy in the entire Middle East.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: I'm a negotiator.", + " I've done very well over the years through negotiation. It's very important that we do that. In all fairness, Marco is not a negotiator. I watched him melt down and I'll tell you, it was one of the saddest things I've ever seen. He's not going down -- excuse me...\n\nRUBIO: He thinks a Palestinian is a real estate deal.\n\nTRUMP:... wait a minute, and these people may even be tougher than Chris Christie. OK?\n\nRUBIO: The Palestinians are not a real estate deal, Donald.\n\nTRUMP: OK, no, no, no -- a deal is a deal.", + " Let me tell you that. I learned a long time ago.\n\nRUBIO: A deal is not a deal when you're dealing with terrorists. Have you ever negotiated with terrorists?\n\nTRUMP: You are not a negotiator. You are not a negotiator.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: And, with your thinking, you will never bring peace. You will never bring peace...\n\nRUBIO:... Donald, might be able to (inaudible) Palestinians and Arabs, but it's not a real estate deal...\n\nTRUMP:... Excuse me, I want to be able to bring peace...\n\nBLITZER:", + "... Senator.\n\nTRUMP: He will never be able to do it. I think I may be able to do it, although I will say this. Probably the toughest deal of any kind is that particular deal.\n\nBLITZER: Let's move on to talk about North Korea. You raised it, Governor Kasich. The threat posed by North Korea to the United States and its sallies, the commander of American forces in South Korea said that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would use a weapon of mass destruction if he thought his regime was being threatened. You have said the United States should start examining a strategy of regime change in North Korea.\n\nLet's be clear.", + " Are you talking about getting rid of Kim Jong Un?\n\nKASICH: When you talk about regime change, Wolf, it means regime change. That's what it means. Even though there's so much chaos in North Korea right now, there's a lot of reports of uncertainty, and instability in that government.\n\nBut, look, here's what I think we ought to do -- like, immediately. And, we've been kicking the can down the road on this for, I don't know, 15 years. We should be intercepting the ships that are leaving North Korea so they're not selling this material, or this technology,", + " or giving it to someone else.\n\nSecondly, the same goes with the aircraft.\n\nThirdly, we need to slap even tougher sanctions on North Korea because we really don't have the toughest sanctions on North Korea. We ought to talk about arming South Korea with ballistic missile technology. And, of course, also Japan with ballistic missile technology. Because we're now starting to take a firm position. We have the attention of the Chinese. The Chinese are the best way to calm that regime down and get them in a position of where they back off.\n\nBut, when I say regime change, I don't have to talk exactly what that means.", + " Look, I've been involved in national security for a long time. You don't have to spell everything out, but what I'm telling you is you look for any means you can to be able to solve that problem in North Korea, and in the meantime put the pressure on the Chinese. And, what we're doing is beginning to work against them.\n\nThey are the key to being able to settle this situation.\n\nBLITZER: I just want to be precise, Governor Kasich, this is critically important. There are a million North Korean troops North of the DMZ...\n\nKASICH:... I'm very well aware of that.\n\nBLITZER:", + " A million South Korean troops, 28,000 U.S. troops along the DMZ, right in between. Would you risk war for a regime change?\n\nKASICH: Wolf, again, it would depend exactly what, you know, what was happening. What the situation was. But, if there was an opportunity to remove the leader of North Korea and create stability? Because, I'll tell you, you keep kicking the can down the road we're going to face this sooner or later.\n\nBut, in the meantime, I'm also aware of the fact that there's 10 million people living in Seoul. So, you don't just run around making charges.", + " I have put it on the table that I would leave to see regime change in North Korea.\n\nNow, perhaps the Chinese can actually accomplish that with this man who is now currently the leader, but the fact is we have to bring everything to bear. We have to be firm, and we've got to unite those people in that part of the world to stand firmly against North Korea, and make sure we have the ballistic...\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nKASICH:... ballistic missile technology to defend ourselves.\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: One thing I'd like to add to what the Governor's saying,", + " I think that we are now in a position -- are $19 trillion dollars because of the horrible omnibus budget that was approved six weeks ago, it's going to be $21 trillion dollars. We can no longer defend all of these countries, Japan, Germany, South Korea.\n\nYou order televisions, you order almost anything, you're getting it from these countries. Whether it's a Mercedes-Benz, or whether it's an air conditioning unit. They're coming out of these countries. They are making a fortune. Saudi Arabia, we are defending Saudi Arabia. Before the oil went down, now they're making less, but they're making plenty.", + " They were making $1 billion dollars a day.\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nWe defend all of these countries for peanuts. You talk about budgets. We have to start getting reimbursed for taking care of the military services for all of these countries.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nKASICH: Hey, Wolf, Wolf...\n\nBLITZER: Dr. Carson.\n\nKASICH: Hey, Wolf, let me just say this because he mentioned this. Look, we're all in agreement that the Japanese need to do more. We're all in agreement that the Europeans need to do more, but I hate to just tell everybody we are the leader of the world and we should put the pressure on them to do their job.", + " There is no question about it.\n\nBut, at the same time, we also have to rebuild the military. Look, I have a balanced budget plan that cuts taxes, reforms regulations, but also builds the military, puts a $100 billion dollars more in defense. We need to rebuild our defenses,\n\nBut, I must also tell you, a long time reformer of the Pentagon, we must reform that building.\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nWe can't have a weapon system take 22 and a half years. We have 800,000 bureaucrats working for DOD, performing bureaucratic functions when we ought to be putting...\n\nBLITZER:", + "... Thank you...\n\nKASICH:... these resources into strengthening the military. So, we can do it all...\n\nBLITZER: Dr. Carson, how would you deal with North Korea?\n\nCARSON: OK. Well first of all, people say that I whine a lot because I don't get time. I'm going to whine because I didn't get asked about taxes, I didn't get asked about Israel. Hugh, you said you're going to be fair to everybody, you didn't ask me about taxes. I had something to say about that.\n\nNow...\n\nBLITZER: Go ahead. This is your moment.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCARSON:", + " OK. We have a system of taxation in this country that is horribly wrong. You know, I never had an audit until I spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, and then all of a sudden, they came in, they said we just want to look at your real estate dealings. And then they didn't find anything, so they said let's look at the whole year. And they didn't find anything, so they said let's look at the next year and the next year. They didn't find anything and they won't find anything because I'm a very honest person.\n\nBut he fact of the matter is the IRS is not honest and we need to get rid of them.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd as far as Israel is concerned,", + " you know, when I was there several months ago, I talked to a lot of people. I couldn't find a single one who didn't think that we had turned our backs on Israel. You know, they are a strategic partner for us but also recognize that we have a Judeo Christian foundation, and the last thing we need to do is to reject Israel. It doesn't mean that we can't be fair to other people. We can always be fair to other people, but, you know, it's like when you have a child, you know, you want to be fair to all the children around but you have a special attention for your own child.\n\nAnd now,", + " as far as North Korea is concerned, you know, Kim Jung Un is an unstable person, but he does understand strength. And I think we have to present strength to him. We should be encouraging the alliance with Japan and South Korea. We should be encouraging the placement of the THAAD, the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, that seems to disturb not only the North Koreans but the Chinese as well.\n\nAnd we also need to have a much more robust naval presence in that area, and I think we need to be developing strategic defense initiative because this man is going to have long-range missiles, he is going to have nuclear capabilities.", + " We need to be able to defend ourselves. And lastly, we should make sure that he knows that if he ever shoots a missile at us, it will be the last thing he ever does.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Thank you. Thank you. We're going to continue with national security. Go ahead, Hugh.\n\nHEWITT: Thank you, Wolf. Mr. Trump, we are less than 24 hours away from a ceasefire in Syria that has been brokered between the U.S. and Russia. Do you support this ceasefire?\n\nTRUMP: I really don't because it not working and the countries aren't agreeing to it and the rebels aren't agreeing and Syria is not agreeing.", + " So It's a meaningless ceasefire.\n\nI love the idea of a ceasefire. I love the idea of -- with a total cessation. But it's not working, as you know very well. It's not working. If -- we can do what we want with Russia but nobody else is adhering to it.\n\nSo I certainly support it, I would certainly love it, but all parties have to be part of it.\n\nHEWITT: Senator Cruz, your opinion on the ceasefire.\n\nCRUZ: Well look. We're certainly hopeful that the violence will cease, but there's reason to be highly skeptical. Russia has enhanced its position because of Obama's weakness in the Middle East,", + " weakness in Syria. And you know, as we're headed to November, we need no nominate a Republican candidate that can lay out a clear difference with both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on foreign policy.\n\nOne of the real challenges with both Donald and Senator Rubio is that they have agreed over and over again with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So for example, in Libya, both of them agreed with the Obama/Clinton policy of toppling the government in Libya. That was a disaster. It gave the country over to radical Islamic terrorism and it endangered America.\n\nAnother example is John Kerry. John Kerry -- Senator Rubio voted to confirm John Kerry as secretary of State.", + " I voted against him. And Donald Trump supported John Kerry against George W. Bush in 2004, gave him a check. And John Kerry has been the most anti-Israel secretary of State this country has ever seen. His diplomacy has been a disaster. And if we nominate someone who agreed with John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on foreign policy, we're not in a strong position to win the general election.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT: A response, Mr. Trump, then Mr. Rubio.\n\nTRUMP: Again, I think I gave them both checks to be exactly honest. I think they both liked me very much.", + " But the fact is that...\n\nCRUZ: But you called for Bush to be impeached.\n\nTRUMP: Well, I think Bush did a hell of a bad as far as that's concerned. You know it and so do I.\n\nCRUZ: But you gave him a check and called for him to be impeached.\n\nTRUMP: Be honest. Be honest. No, this was before. The check came early.\n\nTRUMP: But let me just tell you, Syria, he's saying that I was in favor of Syria. He said I was in favor of Libya? I never discussed that subject. I was in favor of Libya?", + " We would be so much better off if Gadhafi were in charge right now.\n\nIf these politicians went to the beach and didn't do a thing, and we had Saddam Hussein and if we had Gadhafi in charge, instead of having terrorism all over the place, we'd be -- at least they killed terrorists, all right?\n\nAnd I'm not saying they were good because they were bad, they were really bad, but we don't know what we're getting. You look at Libya right now, ISIS, as we speak, is taking over their oil. As we speak, it's a total mess.\n\nWe would have been better off if the politicians took a day off instead of going into war.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHEWITT:", + " Senator Rubio.\n\nRUBIO: Yes, a couple of points. Number one, on the Libya situation, we didn't topple Gadhafi, the Libyan people toppled Gadhafi. The only choice before America that this president had to make is, does it happen quickly or does it take a long time?\n\nAnd I argued if it takes a long time, you're going to have rebel forces emerge like these radical Islamists to take advantage of the vacuum. And that's what happened. That's where the term \"lead from behind\" came. And that's the foreign policy that apparently Senator Cruz appears to agree with.\n\nOn John Kerry,", + " yes, you know why, because every day John Kerry wasn't appointed was another day Hillary Clinton was still in charge of the State Department. And she was absolutely horrible.\n\nI couldn't imagine that they were going to find somebody even worse than her, but this president never ceases to amaze.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nRUBIO: And the last point I would make on South Korea, now this is important, because we're asking to be commander-in-chief. Donald is asking to be commander-in-chief. And he's saying these guys need to do more.\n\nSouth Korea contributes $800 million a year to that effort.", + " And Japan contributes as well. And here's why our commitment to that regional security is so critical, Donald, because if we walk away from them, both Japan and South Korea will become nuclear weapons powers.\n\nThey can do that very quickly. And that's what they will do if the American defense agreements wither away, which is why we have to rebuild the military, but why we can't walk away from our Asia-Pacific defense status.\n\nHEWITT: Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: I never said walk away. I wouldn't want to walk away. I want them to pay us much more money. We cannot afford to subsidize...\n\nRUBIO:", + " How much?\n\nTRUMP: A lot. I'll negotiate a lot more money than you'll ever get.\n\nAs far as John Kerry is concerned, there has been no tougher critic of this man, I think he negotiated one of the worst deals in the history of our country, the Iran deal, where they get their $150 billion and all of the other things that take place.\n\nIt is a disaster for this country, and speaking of Israel, it's a disaster for Israel. I'm no fan of John Kerry.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: Hold on, hold on, Governor.\n\nSenator Cruz.\n\nCRUZ:", + " You know, it's interesting, Donald just said that he never came out in favor of toppling Gadhafi in Libya. Well, he stated that in an interview that will be on our Web site, tedcruz.org.\n\nYou can see and hear the exact words from Donald's mouth. And I assume when he sees that interview, maybe he forgot about it, but I assume Donald will apologize where he sees that he said exactly that.\n\nWith regard to John Kerry, I will say John Kerry's foreign policy has been a disaster for decades. That's why I voted against him when he came up. And the fact that Donald Trump would write him a check and support him against George W.", + " Bush shows exceptionally poor foreign policy judgment.\n\nAnd I'll give one more example on Israel. When the Obama administration canceled civilian air flights into the national of Israel, when Hamas was raining rockets down on them, I publicly asked, is this an economic boycott against Israel?\n\nThe next day Michael Bloomberg, another New York billionaire, got on a plane, a commercial flight, and flew to Israel from London. Together the heat and light that was put on the State Department was so great that within 36 hours they lifted the ban on air flights into Israel.\n\nDuring that entire battle, and indeed during every battle on Israel the natural question is, where was Donald?", + " If this is something he cares about, why has he supported anti-Israel politicians from Jimmy Carter to Hillary Clinton to John Kerry for four decades?\n\nIf you care about Israel, you don't write checks to politicians who are undermining Israel. Instead you stand and support the national security of America and the alliance with Israel.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nKASICH: There's a critical point that needs to be made here.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Governor, Governor, Governor, he attacked Mr. Trump.\n\nMr. Trump has a right to respond.\n\nTRUMP: Well, look, my response is very simple. There is nobody on this stage that has done more for Israel than I have.", + " Nobody. You might say, you might talk, you're politicians, all talk, no action.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: I've been watching it all my life. You are all talk and no action.\n\nCRUZ: Then name one specific thing you've done.\n\nTRUMP: What I've seen up here -- I mean, first of all, this guy is a choke artist, and this guy is a liar. You have a combination...\n\nRUBIO: This guy always goes for...\n\nTRUMP: You have a combination of factors. He can't do it...\n\nRUBIO: This is so typical.\n\nTRUMP:", + "... for the obvious reason, and he can't do it because he doesn't know how to tell the truth. Other than that, I rest my case.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: One at a time, gentlemen.\n\nGovernor Kasich, you have the floor. Governor...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: You will have a response. But I promised Governor Kasich he could respond.\n\nCARSON: Can somebody attack me, please?\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nKASICH: There's something -- I want to -- I want to point out something here today that is -- it's so critically important -- about how the Obama administration has really done such a ridiculous,", + " feckless job here in foreign policy.\n\nFirst of all, we should have been supporting the rebels long ago. They could have taken Assad out, and because we did nothing, the Russians are in, and they're sitting in the catbird seat.\n\nWe should have been helping them. I'm thankful that the aid trucks are finally getting into Syria. But the fact is, had we had acted, we would have solved that problem.\n\nNow, let's talk about Libya. Libya didn't go down because there was some people revolution. Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and all these other people convinced the president to undermine Gadhafi. They undermined him,", + " and now they have created a cesspool in Libya.\n\nAnd let me just say to you -- we have ISIS beginning get -- get a foothold in Libya. We're gonna have to deal with it. There are not many major cities in Libya. They're on the coast, which -- mostly, it's desert, but it's a problem.\n\nThen we have ISIS in -- in Syria, and we have ISIS in Iraq. Because this administration has not had a strong and firm foreign policy, we are going to inherit -- one of us here is going to inherit a total mess...\n\nBLITZER: All right...\n\nKASICH:", + "... and we're going to have to work our way out of it, including...\n\nBLITZER: Let's continue.\n\nKASICH:... the need to arm the Ukrainians. They have been ignored, and we need to help them as well...\n\nBLITZER: Let us continue.\n\nKASICH:... and assert ourselves as America.\n\nBLITZER: Let's continue the questioning on ISIS. Maria.\n\nCRUZ: Hold on, Wolf. You said I got a response.\n\nBLITZER: You'll have a chance. Maria will pick up...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Hold on.", + " He called me a liar. You're saying I can't respond to being called a liar?\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: Go ahead and respond.\n\nCRUZ: You know, what we're seeing with Donald is actually the pattern of Washington -- the pattern of Washington deal makers, which is they make promises, they break their words, and then when anyone calls them on it, they call you a liar.\n\nAnd so that's Donald's pattern over and over again. He said, for example, seven months ago -- this is Donald speaking, quote -- \"I, Donald Trump, was a member of the establishment.\"\n\nThere's a reason Harry Reid thinks he's the best Republican up here.", + " There's a reason Jimmy Carter said he would support Donald Trump over me, because he said Donald Trump is malleable, he has no fixed set of beliefs...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... whereas Ted Cruz is not malleable. And every time anyone points at Donald's actual record...\n\nBLITZER: Thank you.\n\nCRUZ:... what he said on national television, Donald yells \"liar.\" Let me tell you something -- falsely accusing someone of lying is itself a lie...\n\nBLITZER: Go ahead, Mr. Trump.\n\nCRUZ:... and it's something Donald does daily.\n\nBLITZER:", + " Go ahead, Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: I watched -- I watched...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP:... the lobbyists. I watched what this man did to Dr. Ben Carson, who I respect, in Iowa, where he said that Ben Carson is out of the race -- he has left Iowa and he's out of the race. And I thought it was disgraceful.\n\nAnd got a lot of votes because of that -- a lot of votes. Took them away from Ben Carson. I watched that. Probably took them away from me, too. But I watched it.\n\nI also watched where he did a forum that looked like it came right out of a government agency,", + " and it said on top, \"Voter Violation,\" and then it graded you...\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\n... and it scared the hell out of people, and it said the only way you clear up the violation, essentially, is to go and vote for Ted Cruz. I watched that fraudulent document, and I said it's the worst thing I've ever seen in politics.\n\n(BELL RINGS)\n\nTo me, that was even worse than what he did to Ben.\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: I know politicians -- I know politicians, believe it or not, better than you do.", + " And it's not good.\n\nCRUZ: I believe it. No, no. I believe you know politicians much better than I do, because for 40 years, you've been funding liberal Democratic politicians. And by the way...\n\nTRUMP: I funded you. I funded him. Can you believe it?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ:... the reason is -- you're welcome to have the check back.\n\nTRUMP: I funded this guy. I gave him a check.\n\nCRUZ: Yeah, you gave me $5,000.\n\nTRUMP: I gave him a check. He never funded me.\n\nCRUZ: And -- and by the way,", + " let's be clear.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nDonald claims -- Donald claims to care about...\n\nTRUMP: You know why? I didn't want to, but he sent me his book with his autograph...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Donald. Donald. Donald. I understand rules are very hard for you. They're very confusing.\n\nTRUMP: Mr. Trump, you're doing a great job. I have his book.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: Thank you -- thank you for the book. Go ahead.\n\nCRUZ: Donald, you can get back on your meds now.\n\nTRUMP: This is a lot of fun up here tonight,", + " I have to tell you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThank -- thank you for the book. I really appreciate (ph).\n\nCRUZ: Donald -- Donald, relax.\n\nTRUMP: Go ahead. I'm relaxed. You're the basket case.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nGo ahead.\n\nCRUZ: Donald...\n\nTRUMP: Go ahead. Don't get nervous.\n\nCRUZ: (inaudible)...\n\nTRUMP: Go ahead.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: I promise you, Donald, there's nothing about you...\n\nTRUMP: I've seen you.\n\nCRUZ:... that makes anyone nervous.\n\nTRUMP: You're losing so badly you -- I want to...\n\nCRUZ:", + " You know, people are actually watching this at home.\n\nTRUMP:... I -- you don't know what's happening.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: Gentlemen, gentlemen.\n\nCRUZ: Wolf, I'm going to ask my time not be deducted when he's yelling at me.\n\nBLITZER: You've gotta stop this.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nBLITZER: The latest debate -- gentlemen, please.\n\nCRUZ: Hold on, I'm going to get my answer. He doesn't get to yell the whole time. BLITZER: I want to move -- I want to move on.", + " These are the rules.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Excuse me, he called me a liar, then interrupted the whole time. Am I allowed to...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCRUZ: Wolf, do I not get a response? Do I not get a response without being interrupted?\n\nBLITZER: You'll get -- you'll get plenty of response, so stand by.\n\nCARSON: My name was mentioned.\n\nBLITZER: I want to talk -- I want to talk about ISIS right now, and the federal government -- how much best to keep Americans safe from ISIS.\n\nBLITZER:", + " There's a huge battle underway right now between the tech giant Apple and the federal government. The federal government wants Apple to unlock the phone used by that San Bernardino terrorist to prevent future attacks. Apple has refused, saying it would compromise the security of all of its customers. And just this afternoon, they went to court to block the judge's order.\n\nDana Bash, pick up the questioning.\n\nBASH: Senator Rubio, you say it's complicated, and that, quote, \"Apple isn't necessarily wrong to refuse the court order.\" Why shouldn't investigators have everything at their disposal?\n\nRUBIO: No, in fact what I have said is the only thing -- the FBI made this very clear 48 hours ago -- the only thing they are asking of Apple is that Apple allow them to use their own systems in the FBI to try to guess the password of the San Bernardino killer.", + " Apple initially came out saying, \"We're being ordered to create a back door to an encryption device.\" That is not accurate.\n\nThe only thing they're being asked to do, and the FBI made this very clear about 48 hours ago, is allow us to disable the self- destruct mode that's in the Apple phone so that we can try to guess using our own systems what the password of this killer was.\n\nAnd I think they should comply with that. If that's all they're asking for, they are not asking for Apple to create a back door to encryption.\n\nBASH: So just to be clear, you did say on CNN a couple of weeks ago this is a complicated issue;", + " Apple is not necessarily wrong here.\n\nRUBIO: Because at the time, Apple was portraying that the court order was to create a back door to an encryption device.\n\nBASH: But just to be clear -- just to be clear, if you are president, would you instruct your Justice Department to force Apple to comply or not?\n\nRUBIO: To comply with an order that says that they have to allow the FBI the opportunity to try to guess the password?\n\nBASH: Correct.\n\nRUBIO: Absolutely. That Apple phone didn't even belong to the killer. It belonged to the killer's employee (sic) who have agreed to allow him to try to do this.", + " That is all they're asking them to do is to disable the self-destruct mode or the auto-erase mode on one phone in the entire world. But Apple doesn't want to do it because they think it hurts their brand.\n\nWell, let me tell you, their brand is not superior to the national security of the United States of America.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH: Senator Cruz, Apple CEO Tim Cook says this would be bad for America. Where do you stand: national security or personal privacy?\n\nCRUZ: Well, as you know, at that same CNN forum, both Marco and I were asked this question. His answer, he was on both sides of the fence.", + " He's now agreeing with me. And so I'm glad.\n\nWhat I said is yes, Apple should be forced to comply with this court order. Why? Because under the Fourth Amendment, a search and seizure is reasonable if it has judicial authorization and probable cause. In this instance, the order is not put a back door in everyone's cell phone. If that was the order, that order would be problematic because it would compromise security and safety for everyone.\n\nI would agree with Apple on that broad policy question. But on the question of unlocking this cell phone of a terrorist, we should enforce the court order and find out everyone that terrorist at San Bernardino talked to on the phone,", + " texted with, e-mailed. And absolutely, Apple doesn't have a right to defy a valid court order in a terrorism investigation.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBASH: Dr. Carson, Tim Cook, again, the CEO of Apple, says that this would be bad for America. What do you think?\n\nCARSON: I think allowing terrorist to get away with things is bad for America.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nYou know, we have the -- we have a Constitution. We have a Fourth Amendment. It guards us against illegal and unreasonable search and seizure. But we have mechanisms in place with the judicial system that will allow us to gain material that is necessary to benefit the nation as a whole or the community as a whole.", + " And that's why we have FISA courts and things of that nature.\n\nSo absolutely, I would -- I would expect Apple to comply with the court order. If they don't comply with that, you're encouraging chaos in our system.\n\nBASH: Mr. Trump...\n\n(APPLAUSE) KASICH: I want to weigh in on this please. I want to just tell you that the problem is not right now between the administration and Apple. You know what the problem is? Where's the president been? You sit down in a back room and you sit down with the parties and you get this worked out. You don't litigate this on the front page of the New York Times,", + " where everybody in the world is reading about their dirty laundry out here.\n\nThe president of the United States should be convening a meeting, should have convened a meeting with Apple and our security forces. And then you know what you do when you're the president? You lock the door and you say you're not coming out until you reach an agreement that both gives the security people what they need and protects the rights of Americans. This is a failure of his leadership to get this done as an executive should be doing it.\n\nAnd I'll tell you, that's why you want a governor. I do this all the time. And we reach agreements all the time.", + " Because as an executive, you've got to solve problems instead of fighting on the front page of the newspaper.\n\nARRASAS: Thank you, Governor.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nKASICH: Thank you.\n\nARRARAS: Mr. Trump, you have been very vocal about securing the Mexican border, but ISIS has called upon its supporters to conduct attacks on our neighbor to the North, Canada.\n\nAs a matter of fact, U.S. officials have warned that it is the Canadian border which is the most significant threat. You have said that you will not build a wall in Canada. When it comes to national security, and the threat of terrorism,", + " why does Mexico need a wall, and Canada doesn't? Isn't that, like, closing the front door, and leaving the back door open?\n\nTRUMP: First of all, you're talking about a border that's many, many times longer. You're talking about a massive border.\n\nWe have far less problem with that border than we do with our Southern border, and tremendous amounts -- you know, I won, I had the privilege of winning by a landslide, by the way, New Hampshire.\n\nYou go to New Hampshire, the first thing they talk about is heroin and drugs pouring in. And, you wouldn't think this beautiful place -- it's beautiful.", + " With the trees and the roads, and the countryside. Their biggest problem is heroin, and it's such a shame to see it.\n\nThey're pouring in from the Southern border, so I'm talking about great security. I'm talking about a wall that can absolutely be built, and I'll build it on time, on budget. It'll be a very high wall, a great wall. It's going to be built, it's going to be built. It's going to be paid for by Canada, by the way -- maybe I'll get Canada to pay? Got to be paid for by Mexico.\n\nThe problem with Canada, you're talking about a massively long piece.", + " You're talking about a border that would be about four times longer. It would be very, very hard to do, and we -- it is not our biggest problem. I don't care what anyone says. It is not our big problem. Our big problem is not only people coming in, and in many cases the wrong people, it's the tremendous amount of drugs that are coming in.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nARRARAS: I want to talk to you, Senator Rubio, about Puerto Rico. As you know, Puerto Rico's in the midst of financial collapse, unable to pay it's debt of $72 billion dollars. Puerto Rico is asking for bankruptcy protection which would give Puerto Rico,", + " and Puerto Ricans, which are U.S. citizens, you know that -- the tools to restructure the debt. That is the same debt the other 50 states have.\n\nYou oppose granting Puerto Rico that bankruptcy protection. You say that it is only a last resort measure, but the government of Puerto Rico has said that bankruptcy is it's last resort. That that's where they are now. How do you explain this very strong stance to the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans that vote across the U.S., and particularly in your state of Florida?\n\nRUBIO: Sure, because bankruptcy doesn't work unless you change the way you're operating,", + " or you're going to be bankrupt again. And, the problem with Puerto Rico is it's economy is not growing. It has a massive exodus of professionals and others that are leaving to my home state of Florida, and all over the country.\n\nThey're coming to the mainland from Puerto Rico because the economy there is not growing, it's too expensive to do business there. The tax rate is too high. The government regulations are too extensive.\n\nThis year alone, with all the problems they're having, they barely cut their budget from one year to the next. So, I think the leadership on the island has to show their willingness to get their house in order and put in place measures allow the economy there to grow again.", + " If the economy of Puerto Rico does not grow they will never generate the revenue to pay this debt, or the billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities that they have on their books of promises they've made to future generations to make payments.\n\nSo, yes, if they do all of those things then we can explore the use of bankruptcy protection, but not as the first resort, which is what they're asking for, because it will not solve the problems on the island and you're going to continue to see hundreds of thousands of people leave that beautiful place, and coming to the mainland.\n\nThey're United States citizens, they're obviously entitled to do so,", + " and we welcome them, but we would also prefer to see a Puerto Rico that once again is growing economically, and is robust. And, the leaders in charge there now are doing a terrible job.\n\nTheir previous governor, Louis Fortuno was doing a great job until he barely lost that election to...\n\n(BELL RINGING)\n\nRUBIO:... to someone who has taken a big government stance (ph) once again...\n\nBLITZER:... Senator, thank you very much.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: I want our viewers to stay with us right now, including the last pitch in the final debate before Super Tuesday.\n\n(APPLAUSE)", + " (CHEERING)\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Welcome back to the University of Houston. It's time now for closing statements. All of you will have 30 seconds. Dr. Carson, we'll start with you.\n\nCARSON: Well first of all, I want people to think about what kind of leader do you want and what kind of person do you want your kids to emulate. Think about that.\n\nSecondly, several years ago, a movie was made about these hands. These hands by the grace of God have saved many lives and healed many families. And I'm asking you tonight,", + " America, to join hands with me to heal, inspire and revive America. If not us, who? And if not now, when?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Governor Kasich.\n\nKASICH: Well, the last USA Today poll had me beating Hillary Clinton by 11 points, more than anybody on this stage. Secondly, I hope you saw tonight that executive experience really matters. It matters in terms of growing our economy, balancing budgets, cutting taxes, reforming regulations. I've done it in Washington, I've done it in Ohio, and I can go back to Washington and do it again.\n\nBut I hope you also noticed tonight that I do have the foreign policy experience,", + " not just a few years, but a lot of years in working with some of the great, great minds in this country to develop the expertise, the confidence, the firmness, the toughness and the ability to bring people together.\n\nI hope you all think about giving me your vote. I would appreciate it very much. And I tell you, we won't have to spend time figuring what we're going to do. I will hit the ground running and we will get America moving again. Thank you all very much.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Rubio. RUBIO: Well, thank you for having us tonight.", + " You know, this campaign has come a long way. It was just a few months ago there were 15 or 11 us on the stage and now it's narrowed and the votes are starting to count. And we have an incredible decision to make, not just about the direction of America, but the identity of our party and of the conservative movement.\n\nRUBIO: The time for games is over.\n\nI know you've had a lot of choices to make, but now it's time to narrow it down. And I'm asking you to get behind me, go on our Web site and join you our effort, marcorubio.com,", + " so we can bring an end to this silliness, this looniness, and once again re-embrace all the things that made America and the Republican Party the bearer of the conservative movement in this country.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Senator Cruz.\n\nCRUZ: Washington deals are bankrupting this country. There are several deal-makers on this stage but there is only one person who has consistently stood up to both parties, fighting for the American people against the Washington deals.\n\nIf I'm elected president, on the first day in office I will rescind every single illegal and unconstitutional executive action. I will instruct the Department of Justice to open an investigation into Planned Parenthood and prosecute any criminal violations.\n\nI will instruct every federal agency that the persecution of religious liberty ends today.", + " I will rip to shreds the Iranian -- catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal. And I will begin the process of moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.\n\nWe will repeal Obamacare, abolish of IRS, secure the border, and bring back jobs.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump.\n\nTRUMP: Thank you.\n\nNobody knows politicians better than I do. They're all talk, they're no action, nothing gets done. I've watched it for years. Take a look at what's happening to our country.\n\nAll of the things that I've been talking about, whether it's trade, whether it's building up our depleted military,", + " whether it's taking care of our vets, whether it's getting rid of Common Core, which is a disaster, or knocking out Obamacare and coming up with something so much better, I will get it done. Politicians will never, ever get it done. And we will make America great again. Thank you.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBLITZER: Mr. Trump, thank you.\n\nAnd thanks to each of the candidates, on behalf of everyone here at CNN and Telemundo. We also want to thank the Republican National Committee and the University of Houston. My thanks also to Hugh Hewitt, Maria Celeste, and Dana Bash.\n\nSuper Tuesday is only five days away.", + " THE CONTENDERS | Between 8:45 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. Thursday night, Marco Rubio learned how to box.\n\nIn the first few minutes, after Wolf Blitzer rang the bell to start the fight at the GOP debate in Houston, Rubio threw punch after punch after punch at Donald Trump, barely letting one land before he moved on to the next one. Campaigns put together portfolios of attacks that plan to use, called \u201coppo books.\u201d Marco Rubio pulled every sheet out of that book and then tossed the empty cover at Trump, too, for good measure.\n\nThat was nerves. Less than an hour later,", + " Rubio was landing strategic, gleeful blows, and Trump was flustered. Rubio\u2019s best line was the one about how if Trump hadn\u2019t gotten an inheritance, he\u2019d be selling watches. But the one that grated on Trump the most was when he noted Trump\u2019s habit of repeating himself. Over that hour, it was like Rubio leveled up.\n\nDuring that first flurry, it was clear which point Rubio thought would be the most effective. He repeatedly told viewers to Google \u201cTrump Polish workers\u201d or \u201cDonald Trump Polish workers,\u201d so that people would read the details of a suit filed against the developer involving the construction of Trump Tower. That suit,", + " which was eventually settled, accused Trump of knowingly employing and abusing illegal Polish immigrants to work on building the structure.\n\nPeople went to Google. But what they were searching for was one of the other little punches Marco Rubio tossed into the mix: Trump University.\n\nYou can see the spike on the Google search chart here. It came during that first fight.\n\nBut you can see it more clearly below. When Ted Cruz mentioned it later in the debate \u2014 more clearly landing his blows \u2014 searches spiked even higher.\n\n(The Polish workers didn\u2019t move the needle at all.)\n\nThe issue at hand is a lawsuit filed against Trump in regard to a \u201cuniversity\u201d that carried his name.", + " The Post\u2019s Emma Brown covered the story last year. Brown wrote:\n\nNever licensed as a school, Trump University was in reality a series of real estate workshops in hotel ballrooms around the country, not unlike many other for-profit self-help or motivational seminars. Though short-lived, it remains a thorn in Trump\u2019s side nearly five years after its operations ceased: In three pending lawsuits, including one in which the New York attorney general is seeking $40 million in restitution, former students allege that the enterprise bilked them out of their money with misleading advertisements.\n\nAs Cruz noted, Trump may be a witness when the case comes to court later this year.\n\nRubio\u2019s initial flurry was rushed and anxious,", + " but it appears to have been a spaghetti-on-the-wall moment. What stuck? Trump University.\n" + ], + "length": 33522, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 96, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 With each Republican presidential candidate sharing the stage with nine others\u2014and sharing the GOP field with 13 rivals\u2014Wednesday night's debate participants needed to get tough, be bold, and say something that would help them stay at the top, or claw their way there. Here's how they did that, via the Washington Post and AP: Donald Trump set his sights on a new target, John Kasich: \"John got lucky [in Ohio] with a thing called 'fracking.' He hit oil. Believe me, that is why Ohio is doing well. ... He was so nice. He was such a nice guy, and then his poll numbers tanked. That\u2019s why he\u2019s (standing) on the end.\u201d Jeb Bush on Marco Rubio's record of missed votes: \"Marco, when you signed up for this, this is a six-year term, and you should be showing up to work. I mean, literally, the Senate\u2014what is it, like a French work week? You get, like, three days where you have to show up? Or just resign, and let somebody else take the job.\" Rubio's retort: \u201cSomeone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.\u201d Bush's kiss: \"You find a Democrat that's for cutting spending $10? I'll give him a warm kiss.\" Kasich on his rivals' tax plans: \"Why don't we just give a chicken in every pot, while we're, you know, coming up\u2014coming up with these fantasy tax schemes. ... Folks, we gotta wake up. We cannot elect somebody that doesn\u2019t know how to do the job. \" Ted Cruz on how the CNBC moderators are doing: \"This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions: 'Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?' 'Ben Carson, can you do math?' ' John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?' ' Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?' 'Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?' How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?\" Rubio on the media: \"The Democrats have the ultimate SuperPac. It's called the mainstream media.\" Chris Christie on a question posed about fantasy football: \"We have a government involved in fantasy football? We have ISIS and al-Qaeda attacking us and we\u2019re talking about fantasy football? Enough on fantasy football. Let people play! Who cares?\" Mike Huckabee: \"You know, everybody has an 'only guy'\u2014'I'm the only guy this; I'm the only guy that.' Well, let me tell you one thing that I am the only guy: The only guy that has consistently fought the Clinton machine every election I was ever in over the past 26 years. And not only did I fight them, but I beat them.\" Carly Fiorina: \"I\u2019m Hillary Clinton\u2019s worst nightmare. In your heart of hearts, you want to see a debate between Carly Fiorina and Hillary Clinton.\" Ben Carson stayed true to form: \"I do, however, believe in Reagan's 11th commandment, and will not be engaging in awful things about my compatriots here.\" Rand Paul on the budget deal: \"I will spend every ounce of energy to stop it. I will begin tomorrow to filibuster it.\"\n", + "docs": [ + "Republican presidential candidates sparred over experience, took jabs at their Democratic opponents and even shared a few laughs during CNBC's main debate in Boulder, Colo., on Oct. 28. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)\n\nWednesday night, 10 candidates participated in the third Republican debate: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), former Florida governor Jeb Bush, former tech executive Carly Fiorina, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.).\n\nWe've posted the transcript below, with insight from the crew here at The Fix as well as the Fact Checker's Michelle Lee.\n\nClick or tap the highlighted part of the transcript to see an annotation;", + " if you would like to leave your own annotations, make sure you have a Genius account. Post staff annotations will appear by default; others are in a menu that you can see in the upper right when you click or tap on an annotation.\n\nCNBC debate moderator Carl Quintanilla, along with CNBC's John Harwood and Becky Quick, introduced the candidates.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nQUINTANILLA: A lot to get to tonight. So let's get started. This first is an open question.\n\nThis series of debates is essentially a job interview with the American people. And in any job interview, you know this: you get asked,", + " \"what's your biggest weakness?\" So in 30 seconds, without telling us that you try too hard or that you're a perfectionist...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n...what is your biggest weakness and what are you doing to address it? We'll go left to right. Governor Kasich, 30 seconds.\n\nKASICH: Good question, but I want to tell you, my great concern is that we are on the verge, perhaps, of picking someone who cannot do this job.\n\nI've watched to see people say that we should dismantle Medicare and Medicaid and leave the senior citizens out -- out in the -- in the cold. I've heard them talk about deporting 10 or 11 -- people here from this country out of this country,", + " splitting families. I've heard about tax schemes that don't add up, that put our kids in -- in a deeper hole than they are today.\n\nWe need somebody who can lead. We need somebody who can balance budgets, cut taxes...\n\nQUINTANILLA: Governor?\n\nKASICH: You know, frankly, I did it in Washington, in Ohio, and I will do it again in Washington, if I'm president, to get this country moving again.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Governor Huckabee.\n\nHUCKABEE: Well, John, I don't really have any weaknesses that I can think of.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBut my wife is down here in the front,", + " and I'm sure, if you'd like to talk to her later, she can give you more than you'll ever be able to take care of.\n\nIf I have a weakness, it's that I try to live by the rules. I try to live by the rules, no matter what they are, and I was brought up that way as a kid. Play by the rules.\n\nAnd I'll tell you what a weakness is of this country: there are a lot of people who are sick and tired because Washington does not play by the same rules that the American people have to play by.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Thank you, Governor.", + " Governor Bush.\n\nBUSH: You know, I am by my nature impatient. And this is not an endeavor that rewards that. You gotta be patient. You gotta be -- stick with it, and all that.\n\nBut also, I can't fake anger. I believe this is still the most extraordinary country on the face of the Earth. And it troubles me that people are rewarded for tearing down our country. It's never been that way in American politics before.\n\nBUSH: I can't do it. I just don't believe that this country's days are going to be deeply -- you know, going down. I think we're on the verge of the greatest time,", + " and I want to fix the things to let people rise up.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Senator Rubio.\n\nRUBIO: Thank you for that question. I would begin by saying that I'm not sure it's a weakness, but I do believe that I share a sense of optimism for America's future that, today, is eroding from too many of our people.\n\nI think there's a sense in this country today that somehow our best days are behind us. And that doesn't have to be true.\n\nOur greatest days lie ahead if we are willing to do what it takes now. If we're willing to do what it takes now,", + " the 21st century is going to be the new American century, greater than any other era we've had in the history of this great nation.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: I think maybe my greatest weakness is that I trust people too much. I'm too trusting. And when they let me down, if they let me down, I never forgive. I find it very, very hard to forgive people that deceived me. So I don't know if you would call that a weakness, but my wife said \"let up.\"\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nQUINTANILLA: Dr. Carson?\n\nCARSON:", + " Probably in terms of the applying for the job of president, a weakness would be not really seeing myself in that position until hundreds of thousands of people began to tell me that I needed to do it. I do, however, believe in Reagan's 11th commandment, and will not be engaging in awful things about my compatriots here.\n\nAnd recognizing that it's so important, this election, because we're talking about America for the people versus America for the government.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Mrs. Fiorina?\n\nFIORINA: Well, gee, after the last debate, I was told that I didn't smile enough.", + " (LAUGHTER)\n\nQUINTANILLA: Fixed it.\n\nFIORINA: But I also think that these are very serious times; 75 percent of the American people think the federal government is corrupt. I agree with them. And this big powerful, corrupt bureaucracy works now only for the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well-connected. Meantime, wages have stagnated for 40 years. We have more Americans out of work or just Americans who quit looking for work for 40 years.\n\nOurs was intended to be a citizen government. This is about more than replacing a D with an R. We need a leader who will help us take our government back.\n\nQUINTANILLA:", + " Senator Cruz?\n\nCRUZ: I'm too agreeable, easy going.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nYou know, I think my biggest weakness is exactly the opposite. I'm a fighter. I am passionate about what I believe. I've been passionate my whole life about the Constitution. And, you know, for six-and-a-half years, we've had a gigantic party. If you want someone to grab a beer with, I may not be that guy. But if you want someone to drive you home, I will get the job done and I will get you home.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Governor Christie?\n\nCHRISTIE: I don't see a lot of weakness on this stage,", + " quite frankly. Where I see the weakness is in those three people that are left on the Democratic stage. You know, I see a socialist, an isolationist and a pessimist. And for the sake of me, I can't figure out which one is which.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nBut I will -- but I will tell you this, the socialist says they're going to pay for everything and give you everything for free, except they don't say they're going to raise it through taxes to 90 percent to do it. The isolationist is the one who wants to continue to follow a foreign policy that has fewer democracies today than when Barack Obama came into office around the world.\n\nBut I know who the pessimist is.", + " It's Hillary Clinton. And you put me on that stage against her next September, she won't get within 10 miles of the White House. Take it to the bank.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Senator Paul?\n\nPAUL: You know, I left my medical practice and ran for office because I was concerned about an $18 trillion debt. We borrow a million dollars a minute. Now, on the floor of the Congress, the Washington establishment from both parties puts forward a bill that will explode the deficit. It allows President Obama to borrow unlimited amounts of money.\n\nI will stand firm. I will spend every ounce of energy to stop it.", + " I will begin tomorrow to filibuster it. And I ask everyone in America to call Congress tomorrow and say enough is enough; no more debt.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Thanks to all the candidates.\n\nJohn?\n\nHARWOOD: Mr. Trump, you've done very well in this campaign so far by promising to build a wall and make another country pay for it.\n\nTRUMP: Right.\n\nHARWOOD: Send 11 million people out of the country. Cut taxes $10 trillion without increasing the deficit.\n\nTRUMP: Right.\n\nHARWOOD: And make Americans better off because your greatness would replace the stupidity and incompetence of others.\n\nTRUMP:", + " That's right.\n\nHARWOOD: Let's be honest.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nIs this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?\n\nTRUMP: No, not a comic book, and it's not a very nicely asked question the way you say that.\n\nLarry Kudlow is an example, who I have a lot of respect for, who loves my tax plan. We're reducing taxes to 15 percent. We're bringing corporate taxes down, bringing money back in, corporate inversions. We have $2.5 trillion outside of the United States which we want to bring back in.\n\nAs far as the wall is concerned,", + " we're going to build a wall. We're going to create a border. We're going to let people in, but they're going to come in legally. They're going to come in legally. And it's something that can be done, and I get questioned about that. They built the great wall of China. That's 13,000 miles. Here, we actually need 1,000 because we have natural barriers. So we need 1,000.\n\nTRUMP: We can do a wall. We're going to have a big, fat beautiful door right in the middle of the wall. We're going to have people come in,", + " but they're coming in legally. And Mexico's going to pay for the wall because Mexico -- I love the Mexican people; I respect the Mexican leaders -- but the leaders are much sharper, smarter and more cunning than our leaders.\n\nAnd just to finish, people say, how will you get Mexico to pay? A politician other than the people in the states -- I don't want to -- a politician cannot get them to pay. I can. We lose, we have a trade imbalance...\n\nExcuse me, John.\n\n... of $50 billion...\n\nHARWOOD: We're at the 60 seconds.\n\nTRUMP:... believe me the world is peanuts by comparison.\n\nHARWOOD:", + " We're at 60 seconds, but I gotta ask you, you talked about your tax plan. You say that it would not increase the deficit because you cut taxes $10 trillion in the economy would take off like...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHARWOOD: Hold on, hold on. The economy would take off like a rocket ship.\n\nTRUMP: Right. Dynamically.\n\nHARWOOD: I talked to economic advisers who have served presidents of both parties. They said that you have as chance of cutting taxes that much without increasing the deficit as you would of flying away from that podium by flapping your arms.\n\nTRUMP: Then you have to get rid of Larry Kudlow,", + " who sits on your panel, who's a great guy, who came out the other day and said, I love Trump's tax plan.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHARWOOD: The Tax Foundation says -- has looked at all of our plans and -- and his creates, even with the dynamic effect, $8 trillion dollar deficit... QUICK: Gentlemen -- we'll -- we'll get back to this -- just a minute -- just a minute we're gonna continue this.\n\nI wanna talk taxes...\n\nQUINTANILLA: Hold it. We'll cut it back to you in just a minute. Becky's moving on.\n\nQUICK: Dr.", + " Carson, let's talk about taxes.\n\nYou have a flat tax plan of 10 percent flat taxes, and -- I've looked at it -- and this is something that is very appealing to a lot of voters, but I've had a really tough time trying to make the math work on this.\n\nIf you were to took a 10 percent tax, with the numbers right now in total personal income, you're gonna come in with bring in $1.5 trillion. That is less than half of what we bring in right now. And by the way, it's gonna leave us in a $2 trillion hole.\n\nSo what analysis got you to the point where you think this will work?\n\nCARSON:", + " Well, first of all, I didn't say that the rate would be 10 percent. I used the tithing analogy.\n\nQUICK: I -- I understand that, but if you -- if you look at the numbers you probably have to get to 28.\n\nCARSON: The rate -- the rate -- the rate is gonna be much closer to 15 percent.\n\nQUICK: 15 percent still leaves you with a $1.1 trillion hole.\n\nCARSON: You also have to get rid of all the deductions and all the loopholes. You also have to some strategically cutting in several places.\n\nRemember, we have 645 federal agencies and sub-agencies.", + " Anybody who tells me that we need every penny and every one of those is in a fantasy world.\n\nSo, also, we can stimulate the economy. That's gonna be the real growth engine. Stimulating the economy -- because it's tethered down right now with so many regulations...\n\nQUICK: You'd have to cut -- you'd have to cut government about 40 percent to make it work with a $1.1 trillion hole.\n\nCARSON: That's not true.\n\nQUICK: That is true, I looked at the numbers.\n\nCARSON: When -- when we put all the facts down, you'll be able to see that it's not true,", + " it works out very well.\n\nQUICK: Dr. Carson, thank you.\n\nKASICH: Listen, I want to just comment.\n\nHARWOOD: Governor Kasich, hold it, I'm coming to you right now. The...\n\nKASICH: Well I want to comment on this. This is the fantasy...\n\nHARWOOD: Well, I'm asking you about this.\n\nKASICH: This is the fantasy that I talked about in the beginning.\n\nHARWOOD: I'm about to ask you about this.\n\nThat is, you had some very strong words to say yesterday about what's happening in your party and what you're hearing from the two gentlemen we've just heard from.", + " Would you repeat it?\n\nKASICH: I'm the only person on this stage that actually was involved in the chief architect of balancing the Federal Budget.\n\nYou can't do it with empty promised. You know, these plans would put us trillions and trillions of dollars in debt.\n\nI actually have a plan. I'm the only one on this stage that has a plan that would create jobs, cut taxes, balance the budget and can get it done because I'm realistic. You just don't make promises like this.\n\nWhy don't we just give a chicken in every pot, while we're, you know, coming up -- coming up with these fantasy tax schemes.", + " We'll just clean it up. Where are you gonna clean it up?\n\nYou have to deal with entitlements, you have to be in a position to control discretionary spending. You gotta be creative and imaginative.\n\nNow, let me just be clear, John. I went into Ohio where we had an $8 billion hole and now we have a $2 billion surplus. We're up 347,000 jobs.\n\nWhen I was in Washington, I fought to get the budget balanced. I was the architect. It was the first time we did it since man walked on the moon. We cut taxes and we had a $5 trillion projected surplus when I left.\n\nThat's was hard work.", + " Fiscal discipline, know what you're doing. Creativity.\n\nThis stuff is fantasy. Just like getting rid of Medicare and Medicaid. Come on, that's just not -- you scare senior citizens with that. It's not responsible.\n\nHARWOOD: Well, let's just get more pointed about it. You said yesterday that you were hearing proposals that were just crazy from your colleagues.\n\nWho were you talking about?\n\nKASICH: Well, I mean right here. To talk about we're just gonna have a 10 percent tithe and that's how we're gonna fund the government? And we're going to just fix everything with waste,", + " fraud, and abuse? Or that we're just going to be great? Or we're going to ship 10 million Americans -- or 10 million people out of this country, leaving their children here in this country and dividing families?\n\nFolks, we've got to wake up. We cannot elect somebody that doesn't know how to do the job. You have got to pick somebody who has experience, somebody that has the know-how, the discipline.\n\nAnd I spent my entire lifetime balancing federal budgets, growing jobs, the same in Ohio. And I will go back to Washington with my plan.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Governor -- Governor.", + " thank you, Governor.\n\nKASICH: And I will have done it within 100 days, and it will pass. And we will be strong again. Thank you.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Mr. Trump, 30 seconds.\n\nTRUMP: First of all, John got lucky with a thing called fracking, OK? He hit oil. He got lucky with fracking. Believe me, that is why Ohio is doing well. Number -- and that is important for you to know.\n\nNumber two, this was the man that was a managing general partner at Lehman Brothers when it went down the tubes and almost took every one of us with it,", + " including Ben and myself, because I was there and I watched what happened.\n\nAnd Lehman Brothers started it all. He was on the board. And he was a managing general partner.\n\nAnd just thirdly, he was so nice. He was such a nice guy. And he said, oh, I'm never going to attack. But then his poll numbers tanked. He has got -- that is why he is on the end.\n\n(LAUGHTER) And he got nasty. And he got nasty. So you know what? You can have him.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nKASICH: Let me just -- let me respond.", + " First of all, Ohio does have an energy industry, but we're diversified. We're one of the fastest growing states in the country. We came back from the dead. And you know what? It works very, very well.\n\nAnd secondly, when you talk about me being on the board of Lehman Brothers, I wasn't on the board of Lehman Brothers. I was a banker and I was proud of it. And I traveled the country and learned how people made jobs.\n\nWe ought to have politicians who not only have government experience but know how the CEOs and the job creators work. My state is doing great across the board.", + " And guess what, in 2011, I got a deal...\n\nQUICK: Governor...\n\nKASICH:... an agreement with the...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nKASICH:... that he tried to take credit for four years later. It's a joke.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Thank you, Governor.\n\nQUICK: Dr. Carson, let me get 30 seconds with Dr. Carson...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCARSON: Since I was attacked too.\n\nQUICK: Thank you.\n\nCARSON: Let me just say, if you're talking about an $18 trillion economy, you're talking about a 15 percent tax on your gross domestic product.", + " You're talking about $2.7 trillion. We have a budget closer to $3.5 trillion.\n\nBut if you also apply that same 15 percent to several other things, including corporate taxes, and including the capital gains taxes, you make that amount up pretty quickly. So that is not by any stretch a pie in the sky.\n\nCRUZ: Becky, if you want a 10 percent flat tax where the numbers add up, I rolled out my tax plan today, you can find it on line at tedcruz.org. It is a simple flat tax where for individuals, a family of four pays nothing on the first $36,", + "000.\n\nAfter that you pay 10 percent as a flat tax going up. The billionaire and the working man, no hedge fund manager pays less than his secretary.\n\nOn top of that, there is a business flat tax of 16 percent. Now that applies universally to giant corporations that with lobbyists right now are not paying taxes, and as small business.\n\nAnd you wanted to know the numbers, the Tax Foundation, which has scored every one of our plans, shows that this plan will allow the economy to generate 4.9 million jobs, to raise wages over 12 percent, and to generate 14 percent growth.\n\nAnd it costs,", + " with dynamic scoring, less than a trillion dollars. Those are the hard numbers. And every single income decile sees a double-digit increase in after-tax income.\n\nQUICK: Senator -- Senator, thank you.\n\nCRUZ: Growth is the answer. And as Reagan demonstrated, if we cut taxes, we can bring back growth.\n\nQUICK: Gentlemen, I'm sorry, we need to...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUINTANILLA: We're going to try to move on.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nFIORINA: Let me just say on taxes, how long have we been talking about tax reform in Washington, D.C.? We have been talking about it for decades.", + " We now have a 73,000-page tax code.\n\nThere have been more than 4,000 changes to the tax plan since 2001 alone. There are loads of great ideas, great conservative ideas from wonderful think tanks about how to reform the tax code.\n\nThe problem is we never get it done. We have talked about tax reform in every single election for decades. It never happens. And the politicians always say it is so complicated, nobody but a politician can figure it out.\n\nThe truth is this, the big problem, we need a leader in Washington who understands how to get something done, not to talk about it, not to propose it,", + " to get it done.\n\nQUINTANILLA: You want to bring 70,000 pages to three?\n\nFIORINA: That's right, three pages.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Is that using really small type?\n\nFIORINA: You know why three?\n\nQUINTANILLA: Is that using really small type?\n\nFIORINA: No. You know why three? Because only if it's about three pages are you leveling the playing field between the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well-connected who can hire the armies of lawyers and accountants and, yes, lobbyists to help them navigate their way through 73,", + "000 pages.\n\nThree pages is about the maximum that a single business owner or a farmer or just a couple can understand without hiring somebody. Almost 60 percent of American people now need to hire an expert to understand their taxes.\n\nSo yes, you're going to hear a lot of talk about tax reform --\n\nQUINTANILLA: Mrs. Fiorina --\n\nFIORINA: -- the issue is who is going to get it done.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUINTANILLA: We're going to --\n\nQUICK: We're going to move on.\n\nQUINTANILLA: We will come around the bend, I promise. This one is for Senator Rubio.", + " You've been a young man in a hurry ever since you won your first election in your 20s. You've had a big accomplishment in the Senate, an immigration bill providing a path to citizenship the conservatives in your party hate, and even you don't support anymore. Now, you're skipping more votes than any senator to run for president. Why not slow down, get a few more things done first or least finish what you start?\n\nRUBIO: That's an interesting question. That's exactly what the Republican establishment says too. Why don't you wait in line? Wait for what? This country is running out of time.", + " We can't afford to have another four years like the last eight years.\n\nWatching this broadcast tonight are millions of people that are living paycheck to paycheck. They're working as hard as they ever have, everything costs more, and they haven't had a raise in decades.\n\nYou have small businesses in America that are struggling. For the first time in 35 years, we have more businesses closing than starting. We have a world that's out of control and has grown dangerous and a president that is weakening our military and making our foreign policy unstable and unreliable in the eyes of our allies. And our adversaries continue to grow stronger.\n\nWe have a -- they say there's no bipartisanship in Washington?", + " We have a $19 trillion bipartisan debt and it continues to grow as we borrow money from countries that do not like us to pay for government we cannot afford.\n\nThe time to act is now. The time to turn the page is now. If we -- if we don't act now, we are going to be the first generation in American history that leaves our children worse off than ourselves.\n\nQUINTANILLA: So when the Sun-Sentinel says Rubio should resign, not rip us off, when they say Floridians sent you to Washington to do a job, when they say you act like you hate your job, do you?\n\nRUBIO:", + " Let me say, I read that editorial today with a great amusement. It's actually evidence of the bias that exists in the American media today.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Well, do you hate your job?\n\nRUBIO: Let me -- let me answer your question on the Sun-Sentinel editorial today. Back in 2004, one of my predecessors to the Senate by the name of Bob Graham, a Democrat, ran for president missing over 30 percent of his votes. I don't recall them calling for his resignation --\n\nQUINTANILLA: Is that the standard?\n\nRUBIO: Later that year, in 2004,", + " John Kerry ran for president missing close to 60 to 70 percent of his votes. I don't recall the Sun -- in fact, the Sun-Sentinel endorsed him. In 2008, Barack Obama missed 60 or 70 percent of his votes, and the same newspaper endorsed him again. So this is another example of the double standard that exists in this country between the mainstream media and the conservative movement.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nQUINTANILLA: Senator, thank you. John.\n\nBUSH: Could I -- could I bring something up here, because I'm a constituent of the senator and I helped him and I expected that he would do constituent service,", + " which means that he shows up to work. He got endorsed by the Sun-Sentinel because he was the most talented guy in the field. He's a gifted politician.\n\nBut Marco, when you signed up for this, this was a six-year term, and you should be showing up to work. I mean, literally, the Senate -- what is it, like a French work week? You get, like, three days where you have to show up? You can campaign, or just resign and let someone else take the job. There are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck in Florida as well, they're looking for a senator that will fight for them each and every day.\n\nRUBIO:", + " I get to respond, right?\n\nQUICK: Thirty seconds.\n\nRUBIO: Well, it's interesting. Over the last few weeks, I've listened to Jeb as he walked around the country and said that you're modeling your campaign after John McCain, that you're going to launch a furious comeback the way he did, by fighting hard in New Hampshire and places like that, carrying your own bag at the airport. You know how many votes John McCain missed when he was carrying out that furious comeback that you're now modeling after?\n\nBUSH: He wasn't my senator.\n\nRUBIO: No Jeb, I don't remember -- well,", + " let me tell you. I don't remember you ever complaining about John McCain's vote record. The only reason why you're doing it now is because we're running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.\n\nBUSH: Well, I've been --\n\nRUBIO: Here's the bottom line.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nI'm not -- my campaign is going to be about the future of America, it's not going to be about attacking anyone else on this stage. I will continue to have tremendous admiration and respect for Governor Bush. I'm not running against Governor Bush, I'm not running against anyone on this stage.", + " I'm running for president because there is no way we can elect Hillary Clinton to continue the policies of Barack Obama.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Thank you, Senator.\n\nTRUMP: I think you're --\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHARWOOD: Hold on. I think there's a -- I've got question for --\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nKASICH: John Harwood, there's a bigger issue here.\n\nHARWOOD: Hold on, Governor. I've got a question for Governor Bush.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHARWOOD: No, we're moving to Governor Bush. Governor, the fact that you're at the fifth lectern tonight shows how far your stock has fallen in this race,", + " despite the big investment your donors have made.\n\nHARWOOD: You noted recently, after slashing your payroll, that you had better things to do than sit around and be demonized by other people. I wanted to ask you --\n\nBUSH: No, no. What I said was I don't believe that I would be president of the United States and have the same dysfunction that exists in Washington, D.C. now.\n\nHARWOOD: OK.\n\nBUSH: Don't vote for me if you want to keep the gridlock in Washington, D.C.\n\nHARWOOD: Got it.\n\nBUSH: But if you want someone who has a proven,", + " effective leadership, that was a governor of a state, that transformed the culture there, elect me so I can fight for the American people and change the culture in Washington, D.C.\n\nHARWOOD: But it's a -- OK. It's a -- it's a question about why you're having difficulty. I want to ask you in this context.\n\nBen Bernanke, who was appointed Fed chairman by your brother, recently wrote a book in which he said he no longer considers himself a Republican because the Republican Party has given in to know- nothingism. Is that why you're having a difficult time in this race?\n\nBUSH:", + " (inaudible), the great majority of Republicans and Americans believe in a hopeful future. They don't believe in building walls and a pessimistic view of the future.\n\nThey're concerned that Washington is so dysfunctional it is holding them back. There are lids on people's aspirations. Think about it: six and a half million people working part-time. Workforce participation rates lower than they were in 1977.\n\nSix million more people living in poverty than the day that Barack Obama got elected president, and the left just wants more of the same. We have to offer a compelling alternative that is based on hope and optimism and grounded in serious policy,", + " which I've laid out.\n\nAnd you can go get it at jeb2016.com.\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Governor.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHARWOOD: We're gonna get down the line. Becky's got a question.\n\nQUICK: We'll get to everyone.\n\nMs. Fiorina, I -- I'd like to ask you a question. You are running for president of the United States because of your record running Hewlett-Packard. But the stock market is usually a fair indicator of the performance of a CEO, and the market was not kind to you.\n\nSomeone who invested a dollar in your company the day you took office had lost half of the dollar by the day you left.", + " Obviously, you've talked in the past about what a difficult time it was for technology companies, but anybody who was following the market knows that your stock was a much worse performer, if you looked at your competitors, if you looked at the overall market.\n\nI just wonder, in terms of all of that -- you know, we look back, your board fired you. I just wondered why you think we should hire you now.\n\nFIORINA: You know, the NASDAQ dropped 80 percent -- 80 percent -- and it took 15 years for the NASDAQ to recover. I was recruited to H.P. to save a company.\n\nIt was a company that had grown into a bloated,", + " inept bureaucracy that cost too much and delivered too little to customers and shareholders. It had missed, before I had arrived, expectations for nine quarters in a row.\n\nAs an outsider, I tackled H.P.'s entrenched problems head-on. I cut the bureaucracy down to size, re-introduced accountability, focused on service, on innovation, on leading in every market, in every product segment.\n\nAnd yes, it was a very difficult time. However, we saved 80,000 jobs and we went on to grow to 160,000 jobs, and scores of technology companies literally went out of business -- like Gateway -- taking all their jobs with them.\n\nThe truth is I had to make some tough calls in some tough times.", + " I think, actually, people are looking for that in Washington now. And yes, I was fired over a disagreement in the boardroom. There are politics in the boardroom as well.\n\nAnd yet the man who led my firing, Tom Perkins, an icon of Silicon Valley, has come out publicly and said, \"you know what? We were wrong. She was right. She was a great CEO. She'd be a great president of the United States because the leadership she brought to H.P. is exactly the leadership we need in Washington, D.C.\n\nQUICK: Mrs. Fiorina, it's interesting that you bring up Mr.", + " Perkins, because...\n\n(APPLAUSE)...he said a lot of very questionable things. Last year, in an interview, he said that he thinks wealthy people should get more votes than poor people.\n\nI think his quote was that, \"if you pay zero dollars in taxes, you should get zero votes. If you pay a million dollars, you should get a million votes.\" Is this the type of person you want defending you?\n\nFIORINA: Well, this is one of the reasons why Tom Perkins and I had disagreements in the boardroom, Becky.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nNevertheless, one of the things that I think people don't always understand is how accountable a CEO actually is.\n\nSo you know,", + " I had to report results every 90 days in excruciating detail. I had to answer every single question about every single result and every single projection in public until there were no more questions.\n\nAnd if I misrepresented those results or those projections in any way, I was held criminally liable. Imagine -- imagine -- if a politician were held to that standard of account.\n\nI will run on my record all day long.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd I believe people need a leader who is prepared to make tough calls in tough times and stand up...\n\nQUICK: Mrs. Fiorina.\n\nFIORINA:...and be held accountable.\n\nQUICK:", + " Thank you, we're out of time. Thank you, Mrs. Fiorina.\n\nCarl.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Senator Cruz. Congressional Republicans, Democrats and the White House are about to strike a compromise that would raise the debt limit, prevent a government shutdown and calm financial markets that fear of -- another Washington-created crisis is on the way.\n\nDoes your opposition to it show that you're not the kind of problem-solver American voters want?\n\nCRUZ: You know, let me say something at the outset. The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media.\n\n(APPLAUSE)", + " This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions -- \"Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?\" \"Ben Carson, can you do math?\" \"John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?\" \"Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?\" \"Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?\"\n\nHow about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nQUINTANILLA: (inaudible) do we get credit (inaudible)?\n\nCRUZ: And Carl -- Carl, I'm not finished yet.\n\nCRUZ: The contrast with the Democratic debate, where every fawning question from the media was,", + " \"Which of you is more handsome and why?\"\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nAnd let me be clear.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUINTANILLA: So, this is a question about (inaudible), which you have 30 seconds left to answer, should you choose to do so.\n\nCRUZ: Let me be clear. The men and women on this stage have more ideas, more experience, more common sense than every participant in the Democratic debate. That debate reflected a debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nAnd nobody watching at home believed that any of the moderators had any intention of voting in a Republican primary.", + " The questions that are being asked shouldn't be trying to get people to tear into each other. It should be what are your substantive positions...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUINTANILLA: OK. (inaudible) I asked you about the debt limit and I got no answer.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: You want me to answer that question? I'm happy to answer the question...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Let me tell you how that question...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCRUZ: Let me tell you how that question...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHARWOOD: Senator Paul, I've got a question for you on the same subject.\n\nCRUZ:", + "... so you don't actually want to hear the answer, John?\n\nHARWOOD: Senator Paul?\n\nCRUZ: You don't want to hear the answer. You just want to...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHARWOOD: You used your time on something else.\n\nSenator Paul?\n\nCRUZ: You're not interested in an answer.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHARWOOD: Senator Paul, the budget deal crafted by Speaker Boehner and passed by the House today makes cuts in entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security disability, which are the very programs conservatives say need cutting to shrink government and solve our country's long-term budget deficit. Do you oppose that budget deal because it doesn't cut those programs enough?\n\nPAUL:", + " No, I oppose it because you're taking money from the entitlement and then spending it immediately on other items. That's what they're doing. They're taking money from Social Security and they're going to spend it on the military and they're going to spend it on domestic spending.\n\nHere's the thing. When you look at raising the debt limit, it should be leverage to try to reform government. In 2011, the sequester was passed as a reform to slow down the rate of government. Instead, the Washington establishment raised both. We raised the military spending, took from entitlements, and raised domestic spending and the deficit will explode under this.", + " This is the unholy alliance that people need to know about between right and left. Right and left are spending us into oblivion. We should use the debt ceiling, as precisely to Don, to force upon them budgetary reforms.\n\nHARWOOD: Senator, if what you just said is true, why did Speaker Boehner craft this deal and why did Paul Ryan, who has a strong reputation for fiscal discipline, vote for it?\n\nPAUL: Well, that's a real question. Is there going to be any change in the House with new leadership? I frankly don't think there will be much change because I think what's going to happen is you're going to get more of the same.", + " People in Washington think they were sent there to be adults and govern and do all this. Well, you know what I'm worried about? Not keeping the government open. I'm worried about bankrupting the American people.\n\nWe're borrowing a million dollars a minute. That is important. And that's what we have to contrast. Keeping the government open and continuing to borrow a million dollars a minute.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Senator (inaudible).\n\nQUICK: Governor Christie, I'd like to (inaudible) a question next. Actually, I have a question for you (inaudible).\n\nIn your tell it like it is campaign,", + " you've said a lot of tough things. You've said that we need to raise the retirement age for Social Security. You think that we need to cut benefits for people who make over $80,000 and eliminate them entirely for seniors who are making over $200,000.\n\nGovernor Huckabee, who is here on the stage, has said that you and others who think this way are trying to rob seniors of the benefits that they've earned. It raises the question: When it is acceptable to break a social compact?\n\nCHRISTIE: Well, I wish you would have asked that question years ago when they broke it. I mean,", + " let me be honest with the people who are watching at home. The government has lied to you and they have stolen from you. They told you that your Social Security money is in a trust fund. All that's in that trust fund is a pile of IOUs for money they spent on something else a long time ago.\n\nAnd they've stolen from you because now they know they cannot pay these benefits and Social Security is going to be insolvent in seven to eight years. We're sitting up here talking about all these other things; 71 percent of federal spending today is on entitlements, and debt service. And, that's with zero percent interest rates.\n\nNow,", + " I'm the only person that's put out a detailed plan on how to deal with entitlements. And we'll save a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. And, here's the difference between me and Hillary Clinton. What Hillary Clinton's going to say, and has said before is, she wants to raise Social Security taxes.\n\nNow, let me ask you a question everybody, and, this is for the guy, you know, who owns a landscaping business out there. If somebody's already stolen money from you, are you going to give them more? Or, are you going to deal with the problem by saying, I'm going to give people who've done well in this country less benefit on the backend.", + " We need to get realistic about this. We're not -- the American people -- forget about anything else, they've already been lied to and stolen from. And...\n\nQUICK:...Governor...\n\nCHRISTIE:...I'm going to go to Washington to stop it...\n\nQUICK:...Thank you.\n\nQUINTANILLA: We promised we would get to everyone this block. Governor Huckabee, I'm going to give you 60 seconds on this.\n\nHUCKABEE: Well, I would really appreciate that. First of all, yes, we've stolen. Yes, we've lied to the American people about Social Security,", + " and Medicare.\n\nBut, you know what we're not telling them? It's their money. This isn't the governments money. This is not entitlement, it's not welfare. This is money that people have confiscated out of their paychecks. Everytime they got a paycheck, the government reached in and took something out of it before they ever saw it. Now, we're going to blame the people.\n\nToday congress decided to take another $150 billion dollars away from Social Security so they can borrow more money. That makes no sense to everybody. And, they're always going to say, \"Well, we're going to fix this one day.\"\n\nNo their not.", + " It's like a 400 pound man saying, \"I'm going to go on a diet, but I'm eating a sack of Krispy Kremes before I do.\"\n\nAnd, people are sick of believing that the government is never going to really address this. But, let me tell you who not to blame. Let's quit blaming the people on Social Security. Let's quit making it a problem for them. It's like them getting mugged, and then us saying, well, we're going to mug you some more. You ought to just be able to get over it, get used to it...\n\nQUINTANILLA:", + "...Governor...\n\nHUCKABEE:...No, sir...\n\nQUINTANILLA:...Thank you, Governor...\n\nHUCKABEE:...we need to honor our promises...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUINTANILLA:...Senator Cruz...\n\nHUCKABEE:...before I go. This is the only time I've had a chance, let me finish.\n\nQUINTANILLA: OK, alright.\n\nHUCKABEE:...This is a matter not of math, this is a matter of morality. If this country that does not keep its promise to seniors then what promise can this country hope to be trusted to keep?", + " And, the fact is, none of them.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nMALE: And, by the way, Carl...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHUCKABEE: And, the only way -- no...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCHRISTIE:...The only way we're going to be morale, the only way we're going to keep our promise to seniors is start by following the first rule we should all follow, which is to look at them, treat them like adults, and tell them the truth.\n\nIt isn't there anymore, Mike. They stole it. It got stolen from them. It's not theirs anymore.", + " The government stole it, and spent it a long time ago...\n\nHUCKABEE:...Chris...\n\nCHRISTIE: So, let's stop fooling around about this, let's tell people the truth. For once, let's do that, and stop trying to give them some kind of fantasy that's never going to come true.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Senator Cruz...\n\nHUCKABEE:...Chris...\n\nQUINTANILLA:...Before we go to break, we're clearly not having that beer you mentioned, but I'll give you 30 more seconds...\n\nCRUZ:...Then I'll buy you a tequila...\n\nQUINTANILLA:", + " OK.\n\nCRUZ:...Or, even some famous Colorado brownies.\n\nQUINTANILLA: I'll give you 30 seconds to respond...\n\n(CHEERING)\n\nQUINTANILLA: (INAUDIBLE)\n\nHUCKABEE: Since he brought me up, do I not get to respond?\n\nQUINTANILLA: Respond on the debt limit, or an answer to the governor, which ever you choose.\n\nCRUZ: Well, sure. This deal in Washington is an example of why Washington's broken. Republican leadership joined with every single Democrat, add $80 trillion to our debt to do nothing to fix the problems.\n\nAnd,", + " let me now on Social Security because we were getting into a good substantive exchange, and I want to say I think both Chris, and Mike are right. Governor Huckabee's exactly right, we need to honor the promises made to our seniors, but for younger workers -- look. I'm 44 years old.\n\nIt is hard to find someone in my generation that thinks Social Security will be there for us. We can save and preserve and strengthen Social Security by making no changes for seniors, but for younger workers gradually increasing the retirement age, changing the rate of growth so that it matches inflation, and critically allowing younger workers to keep a portion of our tax payments in a personal account that we own,", + " we control them, we can pass on to our kids.\n\nQUINTANILLA: 30 seconds, Governor Huckabee.\n\nHUCKABEE: John, listen, let's keep in mind that for one-third of the 60 million Americans on Social Security it represents 90 percent of their income. And, when I hear people talking about means testing, let's just remember what that means. If we means test Social Security, it means that the government decides whether or not I deserve it. If a person lives in a seven room house, does the government get to say you don't need seven rooms, we're going to take two of them away?\n\nHUCKABEE:", + " Folks, the government has no business stealing even more from the people who have paid this in. I just want to remind you, people paid their money. They expect to have it. And, if this government doesn't pay it, than tell me what's different between the government and Bernie Madolf, who sits in prison today for doing less than what the government has done to the people on social security and Medicare in this country.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nQUINTANILLA: Governor, thank you. We will take a break. The Republican Presidential debate, live from Boulder, Colorado, coming back after a break on CNBC.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nQUICK:", + " Welcome back to the presidential debate for the Republicans. We are live in Boulder, Colorado, right here on CNBC.\n\nFolks, we'll get right back into this.\n\nMr. Trump, let's talk a little bit about bankruptcies. Your Atlantic City casinos filed for bankruptcy four times. In fact, Fitch, the ratings agency, even said that they were serial filers for all of this. You said that you did great with Atlantic City, and you did. But some of the individuals -- the bondholders, some of the contractors who worked for you, didn't fare so well.\n\nBankruptcy is a broken promise. Why should the voters believe the promises that you're telling them right now?\n\nTRUMP:", + " Well, first of all, like many other very big businessmen, I could name them here, but I'm not going to do that for a lot of obvious reasons, but the biggest, and almost all of them, they've all used the chapter laws, the bankruptcy laws to their own benefit.\n\nBefore this, I was a very successful person as a developer and as a businessman. Atlantic City has gone bad. I mean, Chris will know about that. I'm not blaming Chris, by the way, but he will know about that. Caesar's -- excuse me -- Caesar's, the Rolls-Royce, as you know, is in bankruptcy.", + " Almost every hotel in Atlantic City has either been in bankruptcy or will be in bankruptcy -- the biggest.\n\nBut also the biggest people (ph) -- now I've used that to my advantage as a business man, for my family, for myself. I never filed for bankruptcy. But many, many people did. What happened with Atlantic City is very, very disgraceful.\n\nNow hundreds of companies I've opened. I've used it three times, maybe four times. Came out great. But I guess I'm supposed to come out great. That is what I could do for the country. We owe $19 trillion, boy am I good at solving debt problems.", + " Nobody can solve it like me.\n\nBut I will tell you this, Atlantic City, you're using that, hundreds of companies that I have opened have thrived. I built a net worth of way over $10 billion, and I have done it four times out of hundreds. And I'm glad I did it.\n\nI used the laws of the country to my benefit, I'm sorry.\n\nQUICK: Mr. Trump, thank you.\n\nTRUMP: Thank you.\n\nCRAMER: Dr. Carson, in recent weeks, a number of pharmaceutical companies has been accused of profiteering, for dramatically raising the prices of life-saving drugs.", + " You have spent a lifetime in medicine.\n\nHave these companies gone too far? Should the government be involved in controlling some of these price increases?\n\nCARSON: Well, there is no question that some people go overboard when it comes to trying to make profits, and they don't take into consideration the American people. What we have to start thinking about, as leaders, particularly in government, is what can we do for the average American? And you think about the reasons that we're having such difficulty right now with our job market.\n\nWell, the average small manufacturer, whatever they're manufacturing, drugs or anything, if they have less than 50 employees,", + " the average cost in terms of regulations is $34,000 per employee. Makes it a whole lot easier for them to want to go somewhere else.\n\nSo what we're going to have to start doing instead of, you know, picking on this group or this group, is we're going to have to have a major reduction in the regulatory influence that is going on.\n\nThe government is not supposed to be in every part of our lives, and that is what is causing the problem.\n\nCRAMER: Thank you, Dr. Carson.\n\nGovernor Christie, there has been a lot of political rhetoric that some bank executives should have gone to jail for the 2008 financial crisis.\n\nBut General Motors paid more than $1 billion in fines and settlements for its ignition switch defect.", + " One hundred and twenty- four people died as a result of these faulty switches. No one went to jail.\n\nAs a former prosecutor, do you believe the people responsible for the switch and the cover-up belong behind bars?\n\nCHRISTIE: You bet they do. And if I were the prosecutor, that is exactly where they would be. The fact is that this Justice Department under this president has been a political Justice Department.\n\nIt has been a Justice Department that decided that they want to pick who the winners and losers are. They like General Motors, so they give them a pass. They don't like somebody else like David Petraeus, they prosecute them and send a decorated general on to disgrace.", + " It's a political Justice Department.\n\nAnd, Jim, you know full well that in the seven years I was U.S. attorney we went after pharmaceutical companies. We went after companies that were ripping off shareholders. We went after companies that were doing things that were against the law.\n\nAnd to expand on Mr. Carson's -- or Dr. Carson's question, let's face it, we have laws already. We don't need newer (ph) laws. We don't need Hillary Clinton's price controls for -- again, does anybody out there think that giving Washington, D.C., the opportunity to run the pharmaceutical industry is a good idea,", + " given how well they have done running the government?\n\nSo what we do, though, is, if there is somebody who is price- gouging, we have laws for prosecutors to take that on. Let's let a Justice Department -- and I will make an attorney general who will enforce the law and make justice more than just a word. It will be a way of life.\n\nCRAMER: Thank you, Governor Christie.\n\nHARWOOD: Jim, thanks.\n\nGovernor Bush, in a debate like this four years ago, every Republican running for president pledged to oppose a budget deal containing any tax increase even if it had spending cuts ten times as large.\n\nA few months later,", + " you told Congress, put me in, coach, you said you would take that deal. Still feel that way?\n\nBUSH: Well, the deal was done. Barack Obama got his massive tax increase, and there was no spending cuts. You just see the recent deal announced today or yesterday, more spending, more tax increasing, more regulation. And now we have to accept 2 percent, the new normal for economic growth.\n\nAnd the net result is the middle class has $2,300 less in their pockets than the day that Barack Obama got elected president. And now they see Hillary Clinton proposing a third term of economic policy for our country.\n\nWe need to reverse that.", + " And my record was one of cutting taxes each and every year. You don't have to guess about it, because I actually have a record. $19 billion of tax cuts, 1.3 million jobs created. We were one of two states to go to AAA bond rating, and our government spending was far less than the spending in people's income.\n\nHARWOOD: But to -- to the point that you made to Congress, if you were president and you were offered a bipartisan deal that had one dollar...\n\nBUSH: You find me...\n\nHARWOOD:...one dollar of tax increases per ten dollars of spending cuts, would you take it?\n\nBUSH:", + " You find me a Democrat -- you find me a Democrat that will cut spending ten dollars? Heck, find me a Republican in Congress that would cut spending ten dollars. I'll talk to them.\n\nHARWOOD: So you don't want the coach to put you in any more?\n\nBUSH: Look, the -- the deal is already done. The biggest tax increase happened under the watch of Barack Obama, and spending's gone up. You find a Democrat that's for cutting taxes -- cutting spending ten dollars, I'll give them a warm kiss.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, governor.\n\nCarl?\n\nQUINTANILLA:", + " Mrs. Fiorina, in 2010, while running for Senate in Tech Ridge (ph), California, you called an Internet sales tax a bad idea. Traditional brick and mortar stores obviously disagree. Now that the Internet shopping playing field has matured, what would be a fair plan to even that playing field?\n\nFIORINA: You know, I want to go back for a moment to what we were just talking about. Crony capitalism is alive and well, and has been so in Washington, D.C. for decades.\n\nWhat's crony capitalism? Crony capitalism is what happens when government gets so big and so powerful that only the big and the powerful can handle it.\n\nSo why are the pharmaceutical companies consolidating?", + " Why are there five even bigger Wall Street banks now, instead of the ten we used to have on Wall Street? Because when government gets big and powerful, the big feel like they need to get even bigger to deal with all that power, and meanwhile, the small and the powerless -- in this case, 1,590 community banks -- go out of business.\n\nYou see, folks, this is how socialism starts. Government causes a problem, and then government steps in to solve the problem. This is why, fundamentally, we have to take our government back.\n\nThe student loan problem has been created by government. Government trying to level the playing field between Internet and brick-and-mortar creates a problem.", + " The FCC jumping in now and saying, \"we're going to put 400 pages of regulation over the Internet,\" is going to create massive problems.\n\nBut guess who pushed for that regulation? The big Internet companies. This is what's going on. Big and powerful use big and powerful government to their advantage.\n\nIt's why you see Walgreens buying Rite Aid. It's why you see the pharmaceuticals getting together. It's you see the health insurance companies getting together. It's why you see the banks consolidating.\n\nAnd meanwhile, small businesses are getting crushed. Community- based businesses and farms are getting crushed. Community banks are going out of business.", + " Big government favors the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well-connected, and crushes the small and the powerless.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Mrs. Fiorina.\n\nFIORINA: It is why we have to simplify. It is why we have to reduce the size and power of government.\n\nQUINTANILLA: OK.\n\nFIORINA: It's the only way to level the playing field between big and powerful and small and powerless.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Thank you very much.\n\n(APPLAUSE) QUICK: Senator Rubio, you yourself have said that you've had issues. You have a lack of bookkeeping skills.", + " You accidentally inter-mingled campaign money with your personal money. You faced (ph) foreclosure on a second home that you bought. And just last year, you liquidated a $68,000 retirement fund. That's something that cost you thousands of dollars in taxes and penalties.\n\nIn terms of all of that, it raises the question whether you have the maturity and wisdom to lead this $17 trillion economy. What do you say?\n\nRUBIO: Well, you just -- you just listed a litany of discredited attacks from Democrats and my political opponents, and I'm not gonna waste 60 seconds detailing them all. But I'm going to tell you the truth.\n\nHere's the truth.", + " I didn't inherit any money. My dad was a bartender, my mother was a maid. They worked hard to provide us the chance at a better life.\n\nThey didn't save enough money for us to go to school. I had to work my way through school. I had to borrow money to go to school. I tried (ph), early in my marriage, explaining to my wife why someone named Sallie Mae was taking $1,000 out of our bank account every month.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nI know what it's like to owe that money, and we've worked hard. We've worked hard our whole life to provide a better family -- a better life for our family.\n\nWe own a home four blocks away from the place that I grew up in.", + " My four children have been able to receive a good Christian education, and I've been able to save for them to go to college so they never have to have the loans that I did.\n\nBut I'm not worried about my finances, I'm worried about the finances of everyday Americans who today are struggling in an economy that is not producing good paying jobs while everything else costs more. And that's what this economy needs to -- that's what this debate needs to be about.\n\nThis debate needs to be about the men and women across this country that are struggling on a daily basis to provide for their families the better future that we've always said this country is all about.\n\nQUICK:", + " Senator, I understand all of that. I had a lot of student loans when I got out, too. But you've had a windfall that a lot of Americans haven't. You made over a million dollars on a book deal, and some of these problems came after that.\n\nRUBIO: And I used it to pay off my loans. And it's available on paperback, if you're interested in buying my book.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nQUICK: But you -- but you liquidated that retirement account after the fact, and that cost you about $24,000 out of that in taxes and feed. That -- that was after you'd already come into that windfall.", + " That's why I raised the question.\n\nRUBIO: Yeah, again, as I said, we're raising a family in the 21st century and it's one of the reasons why my tax plan is a pro- family tax plan.\n\nIt increases the per child tax credit, because I didn't read about this in a book. I know for a fact how difficult it is to raise children, how expensive it's become for working families. And I make a lot more than the average American. Imagine how hard it is for these people out there that are making 40, 50, $60,000 a year, and they're trying to provide for their families at a time when this economy is not growing.\n\nWe can't afford another four years of that.", + " Which is what we're gonna get if we elect a big government liberal like Hillary Clinton to the White House.\n\nThank you, senator.\n\nHARWOOD: Governor John Kasich, you've called for abolishing the Export Import Bank, which provides subsidies to help American companies compete with overseas competitors. You call that corporate welfare.\n\nOne of the largest newspapers in your state wrote an editorial, said they found that strange, writing, that if that's corporate welfare, what does Kasich call the millions of dollars in financial incentives doled out to attract or retain jobs by his development effort -- jobs Ohio.\n\nIf subsidies are good enough for Ohio companies, why aren't they good enough for companies trying to compete overseas?\n\nKASICH:", + " Well, first of all, when we talk about the Import Export Bank, it's time to clean up corporate welfare. If we're gonna reform welfare for poor people, we ought to reform it for rich people, as well. Secondly, in our state, we went from a loss of 350,000 jobs to, now, a gain of 347,000 jobs to the positive. Our wages are growing faster than the national average, and I've cut taxes more than any sitting governor in this state -- $5 billion, including no taxes on small business and killing the death tax.\n\nI want to go back to what we were talking about earlier,", + " this budget deal in Washington.\n\nThis is the same old stuff since I left.\n\nYou spend the money today and then you hope you're going to save money tomorrow.\n\nI don't know if people understand, but I spent a lifetime with my colleagues getting us to a federal balanced budget. We actually did it. And I have a road map and a plan right now to get us to balance.\n\nReforming entitlements, cutting taxes. You see, because if you really want to get to a balanced budget, you need to reduce your expenses and you need to grow your economy. So what I will tell you about our incentives -- our incentives are tight,", + " and at the end of the day we make sure that we gain more from the creation of jobs than what we lose.\n\nAnd you know what? Ohio, one of the best growing places in the country -- I not only did it in Washington, I did it in Ohio, and I'll go back to Washington, and there will be no more silly deals...\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Governor.\n\nKASICH:... If I become President because we'll have a Constitutional Amendment to require a federally balanced budget so they will do their job.\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Governor. Thank you.\n\nQUICK: Yes, thank you John.\n\nSenator Cruz,", + " working women in this country still earn just 77 percent of what men earn. And I know that you've said you've been very sympathetic to our cause. But you've also you said that the Democrats' moves to try and change this are the political show votes.\n\nI just wonder what you would do as President to try and help in this cause?\n\nCRUZ: Well, we've gotta turn the economy around for people who are struggling.\n\nThe Democrats' answer to everything is more government control over wages, and more empowering trial lawyers to file lawsuits.\n\nYou know, you look at women working. I'll tell you, in my family there are a lot of single moms in my family.", + " My sister was a single mom, both of my aunts who were a single moms. My mom who's here today, was a single mom when my father left us when I was 3 years old.\n\nNow, thank God, my father was invited to a Bible study and became born again and he came back to my mom and me and we were raised together. But I -- the struggle of single moms is extraordinary. And you know, when you see Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and all the Democrats talking about wanting to address the plight of working women, not a one of them mentioned the fact that under Barack Obama, 3.7 million women have entered poverty.\n\nNot a one of them mentioned the fact that under Barack Obama and the big government economy,", + " the median wage for women has dropped $733. The the truth of the matter is, big government benefits the wealthy, it benefits the lobbyists, it benefits the giant corporations. And the people who are getting hammered are small businesses, it's single moms, it's Hispanics. That is who I'm fighting for. The people that Washington leaves behind.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nFIORINA: Becky, it is the height of hypocrisy for Mrs. Clinton to talk about being the first woman President, when every single policy she espouses, and every single policy of President Obama has been demonstrably bad for women.\n\nFIORINA: 92 percent -- 92 percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama's first term belonged to women.", + " Senator Cruz is precisely right. Three million women have fallen into poverty under this administration. The number of women --\n\nQUICK: Mrs. Fiorina --\n\nFIORINA: -- living in extreme poverty is the highest level on record. I am a conservative because I know our values, our principles and our policies --\n\nQUICK: Mrs. Fiorina, we will come back to you.\n\nFIORINA: -- work better to lift everyone up, men and women.\n\nQUICK: Thank you, Mrs. Fiorina. Carl?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nQUINTANILLA: Dr. Carson, we know you as a physician, but we wanted to ask you about your involvement on some corporate boards,", + " including Costco's. Last year, a marketing study called the warehouse retailer the number one gay-friendly brand in America, partly because of its domestic partner benefits.\n\nWhy would you serve on a company whose policies seem to run counter to your views on homosexuality?\n\nCARSON: Well, obviously, you don't understand my views on homosexuality. I believe that our Constitution protects everybody, regardless of their sexual orientation or any other aspect. I also believe that marriage is between one man and one woman. And there is no reason that you can't be perfectly fair to the gay community.\n\nThey shouldn't automatically assume that because you believe that marriage is between one man and one woman that you are a homophobe.", + " And this is one of the myths that the left perpetrates on our society, and this is how they frighten people and get people to shut up. You know, that's what the PC culture is all about, and it's destroying this nation.\n\nThe fact of the matter is we the American people are not each other's enemies, it's those people who are trying to divide us who are the enemies. And we need to make that very clear to everybody.\n\n(APPLAUSE) QUINTANILLA: One more question. This is a company called Mannatech, a maker of nutritional supplements, with which you had a 10-year relationship.", + " They offered claims that they could cure autism, cancer, they paid $7 million to settle a deceptive marketing lawsuit in Texas, and yet you're involvement continued. Why?\n\nCARSON: Well, that's easy to answer. I didn't have an involvement with them. That is total propaganda, and this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda.\n\nI did a couple of speeches for them, I do speeches for other people. They were paid speeches. It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of a relationship with them.\n\nDo I take the product? Yes. I think it's a good product.\n\nQUINTANILLA:", + " To be fair, you were on the homepage of their website with the logo over your shoulder --\n\nCARSON: If somebody put me on their homepage, they did it without my permission.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Does that not speak to your vetting process or judgment in any way.\n\nCARSON: No, it speaks to the fact that I don't know those --\n\n(AUDIENCE BOOS)\n\nSee? They know.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nQUINTANILLA: Apparently. We will take a break. We'll be back in Boulder in just a minute.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\nHARWOOD: Welcome back to the Republican presidential debate on CNBC,", + " live from Boulder, Colorado at the University of Colorado.\n\nSenator Huckabee, I mean -- excuse me -- Senator Rubio, Wired magazine recently carried the heading, \"Marco Rubio wants to be the tech industry's savior.\" It noted your support for dramatically increasing immigration visas called H1B, which are designed for workers with the special skills that Silicon Valley wants.\n\nBut your Senate colleague, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, says in reality, the tech industry uses this program to undercut hiring and wages for highly qualified Americans. Why is he wrong?\n\nRUBIO: Well, first of all, if a company gets caught doing that, they should never be able to use the program again.", + " If you get caught abusing this program, you should never be able to use it again.\n\nThe second thing I said is we need to add reforms, not just increase the numbers, but add reforms. For example, before you hire anyone from abroad, you should have to advertise that job for 180 days. You also have to prove that you're going to pay these people more than you would pay someone else, so that you're not undercutting it by bringing in cheap labor.\n\nBut here's the best solution of all. We need to get back to training people in this country to do the jobs of the 21st century. Why,", + " for the life of me, I do not understand why did we stop doing vocational education in America, people that can work with their hands; people you can train to do this work while they're still in high school so they can graduate ready to go work. But the best way to close this gap is to modernize higher education so Americans have the skills for those jobs. But in the interim, in the absence of that, what's happening is some of these tech companies are taking those -- those centers (ph) to Canada because they can get people to go over there instead of here.\n\nBut the ideal scenario is to train Americans to do the work so we don't have to rely on people from abroad.\n\nHARWOOD:", + " It sounds like you think Senator Sessions is wrong to believe there is enough abuse in that program that we shouldn't...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO: Well, I believe that there are abuses, those companies should be permanently barred from ever using the program again and we should put strict standards in place to ensure that they're not being abused, like the prevailing wage requirement and like the advertising requirement.\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Senator.\n\nBecky?\n\nQUICK: Mr. Trump, let's stay on this issue of immigration. You have been very critical of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook who has wanted to increase the number of these H1Bs.\n\nTRUMP:", + " I was not at all critical of him. I was not at all. In fact, frankly, he's complaining about the fact that we're losing some of the most talented people. They go to Harvard. They go to Yale. They go to Princeton. They come from another country and they're immediately sent out.\n\nI am all in favor of keeping these talented people here so they can go to work in Silicon Valley.\n\nQUICK: So you're in favor of...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: So I have nothing at all critical of him.\n\n' QUICK: Where did I read this and come up with this that you were...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP:", + " Probably, I don't know -- you people write the stuff. I don't know where you...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: And if I could say just one thing. I am the only person in either campaign that's self-funding. I'm putting up 100 percent of my own money. And right now, I will be putting up a tremendous -- so far, I've put up less than anybody and I have the best results. Wouldn't that be nice if the country could do that?\n\nBut I will be putting -- I will be putting up, you know, tremendous amounts of money. SuperPacs are a disaster.", + " They're a scam. They cause dishonesty. And you better get rid of them because they are causing a lot of bad decisions to be made by some very good people. And I'm not blaming these folks -- well, I guess I could.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nVery good people are making very bad decisions right now. And if anything comes out of this whole thing with some of these nasty and ridiculous questions, I will tell you, you better get rid of the SuperPacs because they causing a big problem with this country, not only in dishonesty and what's going on, but also in a lot of bad decisions that have been made for the benefit of lobbyists and special interests.\n\nQUICK:", + " You know, Mr. -- you know, Mr. Trump, if I may (inaudible). You've been -- you have been -- you had talked a little bit about Marco Rubio. I think you called him Mark Zuckerberg's personal senator because he was in favor of the H1B.\n\nTRUMP: I never said that. I never said that.\n\nQUICK: So this was an erroneous article the whole way around?\n\nTRUMP: You've got another gentleman in Florida, who happens to be a very nice guy, but not...\n\nQUICK: My apologies. I'm sorry.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP:... he's really doing some bad...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO:", + " Since I've been mentioned, can I respond?\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUICK: Yes, you can.\n\nRUBIO: OK. I know the Democrats have the ultimate SuperPac. It's called the mainstream media who every single day...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n... and I'll tell you why. Last week, Hillary Clinton went before a committee. She admitted she had sent e-mails to her family saying, \"Hey, this attack at Benghazi was caused by Al Qaida-like elements.\" She spent over a week telling the families of those victims and the American people that it was because of a video. And yet the mainstream media is going around saying it was the greatest week in Hillary Clinton's campaign.\n\nIt was the week she got exposed as a liar.", + " It was the week that she got exposed as a liar...\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBut she has her super PAC helping her out, the American mainstream media.\n\nQUICK: Senator Rubio, thank you very much.\n\nI would like to introduce my colleague, Rick Santelli, he has some comments as well, sir.\n\nSANTELLI: Senator Cruz, let's focus on our central bank, the Federal Reserve. You've been a fierce critic of the Fed, arguing for more transparency. Where do you want to take that?\n\nDo you want to get Congress involved in monetary policy, or is it time to slap the Fed back and downsize them completely?", + " What are your thoughts? What do you believe?\n\nCRUZ: Well, Rick, it's a very important question. I have got deep concerns about the Fed. The first thing I think we need to do is audit the Fed. And I am an original co-sponsor of Rand Paul's audit the Fed legislation.\n\nThe second thing we need to do is I think we need to bring together a bipartisan commission to look at getting back to rules- based monetary policy, end this star chamber that has been engaging in this incredible experiment of quantitative easing, QE1, QE2, QE3, QE- infinity.\n\nAnd the people who are being impacted,", + " you know, a question that was asked earlier, Becky asked, was about working women. You know, it's interesting, you look at on Wall Street, the Fed is doing great. It's driving up stock prices. Wall Street is doing great.\n\nYou know, today, the top 1 percent earn a higher share of our income than any year since 1928. But if you look at working men and women. If you look at a single mom buying groceries, she sees hamburger prices have gone up nearly 40 percent.\n\nShe sees her cost of electricity going up. She sees her health insurance going up. And loose money is one of the major problems.", + " We need sound money. And I think the Fed should get out of the business of trying to juice our economy and simply be focused on sound money and monetary stability, ideally tied to gold.\n\nSANTELLI: Senator Paul, the same question to you.\n\nPAUL: Well, thank you very much. I would like to thank Ted for co-sponsoring my bill, audit the Fed. And I think it's precisely because of the arrogance of someone like Ben Bernanke, who now calls us all know-nothings, that is precisely why we need audit the Fed.\n\nI think it is really very much a huge problem that an organization as powerful as the Fed comes in,", + " lobbies against them being audited on the Hill. I would prevent them lobbying Congress. I don't think the Fed should be involved with lobbying us.\n\nI think we should examine how the Fed has really been part of the problem. You want to study income inequality, let's bring the Fed forward and talk about Fed policy and how it causes income inequality.\n\nLet's also bring the Fed forward and have them explain how they caused the housing boom and the crisis, and what they've done to make us better or worse. I think the Fed has been a great problem in our society.\n\nWhat you need to do is free up interest rates.", + " Interest rates are the price of money, and we shouldn't have price controls on the price of money.\n\nSANTELLI: Thank you, Senator.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nDr. Carson, you told The Des Moines Register that you don't like government subsidies, it interferes with the free market. But you've also said that you're in favor of taking oil subsidies and putting them towards ethanol processing.\n\nIsn't that just swapping one subsidy for another, Doctor?\n\nCARSON: Well, first of all, I was wrong about taking the oil subsidy. I have...\n\n... the best results, wouldn't that be nice if the country could do that?\n\nBut I will be putting -- I will be putting up,", + " you know, tremendous amounts of money. Super PACs are a disaster. They're a scam. They cause dishonesty. And you had better get rid of them, because they are causing a lot of bad decisions to be made by some very good people.\n\nAnd I'm not blaming these folks -- but I guess I could.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nVery good people are making very bad decisions right now. And if anything comes out of this whole thing with some of these nasty and ridiculous questions, I will tell you, you had better get rid of the super PACs, because they're causing a big problem with this country, not only in dishonesty and what's going on,", + " but also in a lot of bad decisions that are being made for the benefit of lobbyists and special interests.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUICK: You know, Mr. Trump, if I may...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUICK: Just a minute, Ms. Fiorina, let me follow up on this for just a moment.\n\nYou talked a little bit about Marco Rubio. I think you called him \"Mark Zuckerberg's personal senator\" because he was in favor H- 1B...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: I never said that. I never said that.\n\nQUICK: So this was an erroneous article the whole way around?\n\nTRUMP:", + " He has got another gentleman in Florida, who happens to be a very nice guy, but not...\n\nQUICK: My apologies. I'm sorry...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: Everybody is really doing some bad fact...\n\nRUBIO: Since I've been mentioned, can I respond?\n\nQUICK: Yes. Yes, you may.\n\nRUBIO: OK. You know, the Democrats who have the ultimate super PAC, it's called the mainstream media. (CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)\n\nAnd I'll tell you why, last week, Hillary Clinton went before a committee, she admitted she had sent emails to her family saying,", + " hey, this attack in Benghazi was caused by al Qaeda-like elements.\n\nShe spent over a week telling the families of those victims and the American people that it was because of a video. And yet the mainstream media is going around saying it was the greatest week in Hillary Clinton's campaign.\n\nIt was the week she got exposed as a liar. It was the week that she got exposed as a liar...\n\n(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)\n\nBut she has her super PAC helping her out, the American mainstream media.\n\nQUICK: Senator Rubio, thank you very much.\n\nI would like to introduce my colleague, Rick Santelli, he has some comments as well,", + " sir.\n\nSANTELLI: Senator Cruz, let's focus on our central bank, the Federal Reserve. You've been a fierce critic of the Fed, arguing for more transparency. Where do you want to take that?\n\nDo you want to get Congress involved in monetary policy, or is it time to slap the Fed back and downsize them completely? What are your thoughts? What do you believe?\n\nCRUZ: Well, Rick, it's a very important question. I have got deep concerns about the Fed. The first thing I think we need to do is audit the Fed. And I am an original co-sponsor of Rand Paul's audit the Fed legislation.\n\nThe second thing we need to do is I think we need to bring together a bipartisan commission to look at getting back to rules-", + " based monetary policy, end this star chamber that has been engaging in this incredible experiment of quantitative easing, QE1, QE2, QE3, QE- infinity.\n\nAnd the people who are being impacted, you know, a question that was asked earlier, Becky asked, was about working women. You know, it's interesting, you look at on Wall Street, the Fed is doing great. It's driving up stock prices. Wall Street is doing great.\n\nYou know, today, the top 1 percent earn a higher share of our income than any year since 1928. But if you look at working men and women. If you look at a single mom buying groceries,", + " she sees hamburger prices have gone up nearly 40 percent.\n\nShe sees her cost of electricity going up. She sees her health insurance going up. And loose money is one of the major problems. We need sound money. And I think the Fed should get out of the business of trying to juice our economy and simply be focused on sound money and monetary stability, ideally tied to gold.\n\nSANTELLI: Senator Paul, the same question to you.\n\nPAUL: Well, thank you very much. I would like to thank Ted for co-sponsoring my bill, audit the Fed. And I think it's precisely because of the arrogance of someone like Ben Bernanke,", + " who now calls us all know-nothings, that is precisely why we need audit the Fed.\n\nI think it is really very much a huge problem that an organization as powerful as the Fed comes in, lobbies against them being audited on the Hill. I would prevent them lobbying Congress. I don't think the Fed should be involved with lobbying us.\n\nI think we should examine how the Fed has really been part of the problem. You want to study income inequality, let's bring the Fed forward and talk about Fed policy and how it causes income inequality.\n\nLet's also bring the Fed forward and have them explain how they caused the housing boom and the crisis,", + " and what they've done to make us better or worse. I think the Fed has been a great problem in our society.\n\nWhat you need to do is free up interest rates. Interest rates are the price of money, and we shouldn't have price controls on the price of money.\n\nSANTELLI: Thank you, Senator.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nDr. Carson, you told The Des Moines Register that you don't like government subsidies, it interferes with the free market. But you've also said that you're in favor of taking oil subsidies and putting them towards ethanol processing.\n\nIsn't that just swapping one subsidy for another, Doctor?\n\nCARSON:", + " Well, first of all, I was wrong about taking the oil subsidy. I have studied that issue in great detail. And what I have concluded is that the best policy is to get rid of all government subsidies, and get the government out of our lives, and let people rise and fall based on how good they are.\n\nAnd -- you know, all of this too big to fail stuff and picking and choosing winners and losers -- this is a bunch of crap, and it is really causing a great deal of -- great deal of problems for our society right now.\n\nAnd -- and -- you know, it goes back to the whole concept of regulations,", + " which are in everything. The reason that I -- I hate them so much is because every single regulation costs in terms of goods and services.\n\nThat cost gets passed on to the people. Now, who are the people who are hurt by that? It's poor people and middle class. Doesn't hurt rich people if their bar of soap goes up ten cents, but it hurts the poor and the middle class.\n\nAnd Bernie Sanders will tell them that it's because of the rich. Well, I'll tell you something: you can take everything from the top 1 percent, and you apply it to our fiscal gap, and you won't even make a dent in it.\n\nSANTELLI:", + " Thank you, Doctor.\n\nBecky?\n\nQUICK: Rick, thank you very much.\n\nGovernor Huckabee, you have railed against income inequality. You've said that some Wall Street executives should have gone to jail over the roles that they played during the financial crisis.\n\nApart from your tax plan, are there specific steps you would require from corporate America to try and reduce the income inequality.\n\nHUCKABEE: I don't think it's so much about when the government orders a corporation to do something. In fact, that's part of the problem. If you saw that blimp that got cut loose from Maryland today, it's a perfect example of government.\n\nI mean,", + " what we had was something the government made -- basically a bag of gas -- that cut loose, destroyed everything in its path, left thousands of people powerless, but they couldn't get rid of it because we had too much money invested in it, so we had to keep it.\n\nThat is our government today. We saw it in the blimp.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nThat's exactly what we saw. So look, corporations ought to exercise some responsibility. When CEO income has risen 90 percent above the average worker, when the bottom 90 percent of this country's economy has had stagnant wages for the past 40 years, somebody is taking it in the teeth.\n\nAnd it's not the folks on Wall Street.", + " I'm not anti-Wall Street, but I don't believe the government ought to wear a team jersey, pick winners and losers.\n\nQUICK: Governor?\n\nHUCKABEE: The government ought to wear a striped shirt and just make sure the game...\n\nQUICK: Governor?\n\nHUCKABEE:...is paid -- played fairly.\n\nQUICK: Thank you. Now, everybody else has fudged their time and gone over, so please, don't cut me off too quick, Becky.\n\nQUICK: All right, Governor Huckabee.\n\nHUCKABEE: Let me just close it out this way.\n\nQUICK: How about 15 more seconds?\n\nHUCKABEE:", + " We need to be focusing on what fixes this country. And I'll tell you one thing that we never talk about -- we haven't talked about it tonight.\n\nWhy aren't we talking about -- instead of cutting benefits for old people, cutting benefits for sick people -- why don't we say, \"let's cure the four big cost-driving diseases...\n\nQUICK: Governor?\n\nHUCKABEE:...\"diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's?\"\n\nQUICK: Governor, I'm sorry...\n\nHUCKABEE: If you do that, you don't just change the economy, you transform the lives of millions of hurting Americans.\n\nQUICK:", + " Governor, thank you.\n\nHUCKABEE: Gosh, I'd love for us to talk about something like that. Thank you. QUICK: Governor, thank you. Appreciate it.\n\nJohn?\n\nHARWOOD: Governor Bush, the tax reform bill that Ronald Reagan signed in 1986 cut the top personal income tax rate to 28 percent -- just like your plan does. But President Reagan taxed capital gains at the same rate, while you would tax them at just 20 percent.\n\nGiven the problems we've been discussing, growing gap between rich and poor, why would you tax labor at a higher rate than income from investments?\n\nBUSH:", + " Look, the -- the simple fact is that my plan actually gives the middle class the greatest break: $2,000 per family. And if you make $40,000 a year, a family of four, you don't pay any income tax at all.\n\nSimplifying the code and lowering rates, both for corporations and -- and personal rates, is exactly what we need to do. You think about the regulatory cost and the tax cost -- that's why small businesses are closing, rather than being formed in our country right now.\n\nThe big corporations have the scale to deal with all of this. And what I think all of us are saying is,", + " our monetary policy, our tax policy, regulatory policy needs to be radically changed so we can create high sustained growth for income to rise.\n\nThe government has tried it their way. Under -- under Barack Obama and the proposals of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and others, they've tried it their way, and it has failed miserably.\n\nWe need to take a new approach of taxing -- reforming how we tax, and reforming the regulations in our -- in our country before it's too late.\n\nHARWOOD: Senator Rubio, 30 seconds to you.\n\nThe Tax Foundation, which was alluded to earlier, scored your tax plan and concluded that you give nearly twice as much of a gain in after-tax income to the top 1 percent as to people in the middle of the income scale.\n\nSince you're the champion of Americans living paycheck-to-", + " paycheck, don't you have that backward?\n\nRUBIO: No, that's -- you're wrong. In fact, the largest after- tax gains is for the people at the lower end of the tax spectrum under my plan. And there's a bunch of things my tax plan does to help them.\n\nNumber one, you have people in this country that...\n\nHARWOOD: The Tax Foundation -- just to be clear, they said the...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO:...you wrote a story on it, and you had to go back and correct it.\n\nHARWOOD: No, I did not.\n\nRUBIO:", + " You did. No, you did.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nHARWOOD: Senator, the Tax Foundation said after-tax income for the top 1 percent under your plan would go up 27.9 percent.\n\nRUBIO: Well, you're talking about -- yeah.\n\nHARWOOD: And people in the middle of the income spectrum, about 15 percent.\n\nRUBIO: Yeah, but that -- because the math is, if you -- 5 percent of a million is a lot more than 5 percent of a thousand. So yeah, someone who makes more money...\n\nHARWOOD: (inaudible)\n\nRUBIO:", + "...numerically, it's gonna be higher. But the greatest gains, percentage-wise, for people, are gonna be at the lower end of our plan, and here's why: because in addition to a general personal exemption, we are increasing the per-child tax credit for working families.\n\nWe are lowering taxes on small business. You know, a lot of business activity in America is conducted like the guy that does my dry cleaning. He's an S corporation. He pays on his personal rate, and he is paying higher than the big dry-cleaning chain down the street, because he's paying at his personal rate.\n\nRUBIO:", + " Under my plan, no business, big or small, will pay more than 25 percent flat rate on their business income. That is a dramatic tax decrease for hard-working people who run their own businesses.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nRUBIO:...The other thing I'd like to make about our plan, one more point, it is the most pro growth tax plan that I can imagine because it doesn't tax investments at all. You know why? Because the more you tax something, the less of it you get.\n\nI want to be in -- I want America to be the best...\n\nPAUL:...John...\n\nRUBIO:", + "...in the world for people...\n\nHARWOOD: Senator, thank you.\n\nPAUL: John, I'd like to address this? John, could I follow up on this?\n\nQUINTANILLA:...We'll come back around. I want to get to governor Kasich.\n\nPAUL: What are the rules on who gets to follow up. How do we decide on who gets to follow up? I've seen plenty of other people follow up?\n\nQUICK: It's at the moderator discretion.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Governor Kasich, let's talk...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUINTANILLA:...about Marijuana, Governor Kasich...\n\nPAUL:", + " I'd like to just mention something about my tax plan, and how it relates to the discussion...\n\nQUINTANILLA: Alright, but 30 seconds, you made a case. Sure, 30 seconds.\n\nPAUL: Alright. Much of the discussion is centered over whether or not the different tax plans help, or affect the middle class. In fact, it's the chief argument by democrats against many of the different flat tax proposals. Mine is unique in the sense that my tax plan actually gets rid of the payroll tax as well. It shifts it to the business, and it would allow middle class people to get a tax cut.\n\nIf you just cut their income tax,", + " there isn't much income tax to cut. Mine actually cuts the payroll tax, and I think it would spread the tax cut across all socioeconomic levels, and would allow then it to be something that would be broadly supported by the public in an election.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Senator, thank you.\n\nCRUZ: Let me say on that...\n\nQUINTANILLA: Oh, no, no, no...\n\nCRUZ:...Rand is exactly right. His plan is a good plan, and I will note that my 10% plan also eliminates the payroll tax, eliminates the death tax,\n\nQUINTANILLA:...Ok...\n\nCRUZ:", + "...eliminates the business...\n\nMALE: (INAUDIBLE)\n\nCRUZ:...income tax...\n\nMALE: What are you doing?\n\nCRUZ:...10% flat rate...\n\nQUINTANILLA:...We're going to go to...\n\nCRUZ:...is the lowest personal rate any candidate up here has, and what it would also enable us to do is for every citizen to fill out their taxes on a postcard so we can eliminate the IRS.\n\n(CHEERING) (APPLAUSE)\n\nQUINTANILLA: OK. Thank you, Senator. Governor Kasich, let's talk about marijuana. We're broadcasting from Colorado which has seen $150 million in new revenue for the state since legalizing last year.", + " Governor Hickenlooper is not a big fan of legalization, but he's said the people who used to be smoking it are still smoking it, they're just now paying taxes.\n\nGiven the budget pressures in Ohio, and other states, is this a revenue stream you'd like to have?\n\nKASICH: Well, first of all, we're running a $2 billion dollar surplus, we're not having a revenue problem right now. And, sending mixed signals to kids about drugs is a disaster. Drugs is one of the greatest scourge in this country, and I spent five years of my administration working with my team to do a whole sort of things to try to reign in the problem of overdoses,", + " and it goes on and on. We could do a whole show on that.\n\nI want to go back for a second thought on this issue of income inequality. My program would move the 104 programs of the federal Department of Education into four block grants, and send them back to the states because income inequality is driven by a lack of skills when kids don't get what they need to be able to compete and win in this country.\n\nThe fact is, in order to get this economy moving again, I call for freezing regulations for a year except for the problem of public safety. I believe that we need to cut these taxes down, we need to be on a roadmap to balancing the budget,", + " and we need to send power, money, and influence, the welfare department, the education department, job training, infrastructure, Medicaid, all of that out of Washington back to the states so we can run these programs from where we live to the top, not a one size fits all mentality that they have in Washington.\n\nAnd, that will get to the nub of opportunity for our children, and an ability to see wages rise. Again...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nKASICH:...One more time, in Ohio, our wages are growing faster than the national average. We've cut taxes, balanced budgets, changed the regulatory environment.", + " Folks, you want to --\n\nQUINTANILLA: Thank you, Governor.\n\nKASICH: -- fix America, this is the formula. It worked for Reagan and it works for our team in Ohio. Thank you.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Thank you. We'll be back from Boulder, Colorado in just a moment.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(BREAK)\n\nQUICK: Welcome back to the University of Colorado and the Republican presidential debate right here on CNBC.\n\nMr. Trump, I want to go back to an issue that we were talking about before, the H-1B visas. I found where I read that before. It was from the donaldjtrump.com website and it says -- it says that again,", + " Mark Zuckerburg's personal senator, Marco Rubio has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities. Are you in favor of H-1Bs or are you opposed to them?\n\nTRUMP: I'm in favor of people coming into this country legally. And you know what? They can have it anyway you want. You can call it visas, you can call it work permits, you can call it anything you want. I've created tens of thousands of jobs, and in all due respect -- and actually some of these folks I really like a lot -- but I'm the only one that can say that.", + " I have created tens of thousands of jobs, and I'll be creating many millions of jobs if I'm given -- if I'm given the opportunity to be president.\n\nAs far as Mark is concerned, as far as the visas are concerned, if we need people, they have -- it's fine. They have to come into this country legally. We have a country of borders. We have a country of laws. We have to obey the laws. It's fine if they come in, but they have to come in legally.\n\nQUICK: Thank you, sir.\n\nRUBIO: I was mentioned in the question.\n\nQUICK: You were.", + " You get 30 seconds.\n\nRUBIO: Thank you.\n\nWell, I've learned the rules on this.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nLook, in addition to what Donald was saying is we also need to talk about the legal immigration system for permanent residents. Today, we have a legal immigration system for permanent residency that is largely based on whether or not you have a relative living here. And that's the way my parents came legally in 1956.\n\nBut in 2015, we have a very different economy. Our legal immigration system from now on has to be merit-based. It has to be based on what skills you have,", + " what you can contribute economically, and most important of all, on whether or not you're coming here to become an American, not just live in America, but be an American.\n\nQUICK: Thank you, Senator. Thank you, Senator.\n\nCarl?\n\nQUINTANILLA: Mr. Trump, you've said you have a special permit to carry a gun in New York.\n\nTRUMP: Yes.\n\nQUINTANILLA: After the Oregon mass shooting on October 1st, you said, \"By the way, it was a gun-free zone. If you had a couple of teachers with guns, you would have been a hell of a lot better off.\"\n\nTRUMP:", + " Or somebody else. Right.\n\nQUINTANILLA: Would you feel more comfortable if your employees brought guns to work?\n\nTRUMP: Yes, I might feel more comfortable. I would say that I would and I have a permit, which is very unusual in New York -- a permit to carry. And I do carry on occasion, sometimes a lot. But I like to be unpredictable so that people don't know exactly... (LAUGHTER)\n\nQUINTANILLA: Are you carrying one now?\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: By the way, unlike our country where we're totally predictable and the enemy,", + " whether it's ISIS or anybody else, they know exactly what we're doing because we have the wrong leadership.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBut I feel that the gun-free zones and, you know, when you say that, that's target practice for the sickos and for the mentally ill. That's target. They look around for gun-free zones. You know, we could give you another example -- the Marines, the Army, these wonderful six soldiers that were killed. Two of them were among the most highly decorated -- they weren't allowed on a military base to have guns. And somebody walked in and shot them, killed them. If they had guns,", + " he wouldn't be around very long. I can tell you, there wouldn't have been much damage.\n\nSo, I think gun-free zones are a catastrophe. They're a feeding frenzy for sick people.\n\nQUINTANILLA: We called a few Trump resorts, a few Trump properties that -- that do not allow guns with or without a permit. Would you change those policies?\n\nTRUMP: I would change them. I would change them.\n\nQUINTANILLA: OK. All right. Thank you.\n\nJohn?\n\nHARWOOD: Governor Huckabee, you've written about the huge divide in values between middle America and the big coastal cities like New York and Los Angeles.", + " As a preacher as well as a politician, you know that presidents need the moral authority to bring the entire country together.\n\nThe leading Republican candidate, when you look at the average of national polls right now, is Donald Trump. When you look at him, do you see someone with the moral authority to unite the country?\n\nHUCKABEE: You know, of the few questions I've got, the last one I need is to give him some more time. I love Donald Trump. He is a good man. I'm wearing a Trump tie tonight. Get over that one, OK?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\n(", + "UNKNOWN): Is it made in Mexico? HUCKABEE: I don't know.\n\n(UNKNOWN): Where's it made? Is it made in China?\n\n(UNKNOWN): Is it made in China or Mexico?\n\nHUCKABEE: I have no idea.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nTRUMP: Such a nasty -- such a nasty question, but thank you, Governor.\n\nHUCKABEE: You're welcome.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nLet me tell you, Donald Trump would be a president every day of the week and twice on Sunday, rather than Hillary. I've spent a lifetime in politics fighting the Clinton machine.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nYou want to talk about what we're going to be up against next year?", + " I'm the only guy on this stage -- you know, everybody has an \"only guy\" -- \"I'm the only guy this; I'm the only guy that.\" Well, let me tell you one thing that I am the only guy: The only guy that has consistently fought the Clinton machine every election I was ever in over the past 26 years. And not only did I fight them, but I beat them.\n\nSomebody says \"I'm a fighter.\" Well, I want to know, did you win? Well, I did. And not only did I fight them and win, I lived to tell about it and I'm standing on this stage tonight as evidence of that.", + " And I think that ought to be worth something.\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Governor.\n\nCHRISTIE: John, I'll tell you something. You want to talk about moral authority. Let's talk about something that happened this week in the news. You know, the FBI director, the president's appointed FBI director has said this week that because of a lack of support from politicians like the president of the United States, that police officers are afraid to get out of their cars; that they're afraid to enforce the law. And he says, the president's appointee, that crime is going up because of this.\n\nAnd when the president of the United States gets out to speak about it,", + " does he support police officers? Does he stand up for law enforcement? No, he doesn't. I'll tell you this, the number one job of the president of the United States is to protect the safety and security of the American people. This president has failed, and when I'm in the Oval Office, police officers will know that they will have the support of the president of the Untied States. That's real moral authority that we need in the Oval Office.\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Governor.\n\nDon't forget my colleague, Sharon Epperson.\n\nEPPERSON: Thank you, John.\n\nMrs. Fiorina,", + " you were the CEO of a large corporation that offers a 401(k) to its employees. But more than half of American have no access to an employer sponsored retirement plan.\n\nThat includes the workers at small businesses, and the growing ranks of Uber drivers and other part-timers in the freelance economy.\n\nShould the Federal Government play a larger role in helping to set up retirement plans for these workers?\n\nFIORINA: No, the Federal Government should not play a larger role.\n\nLook, every time the Federal Government gets engaged in something it gets worse. And then the Government steps in to try and solve the problem and we get a little further down to that progressive vision that Hillary Clinton is talking about.\n\nCompanies should,", + " if they want to attract the best workers, provide a good set of benefits. But honestly, if you're a small business owner today you are being crushed. We have 400,000 small businesses forming every year in this country. How great is that? They are employing themselves, they are potentially employing others.\n\nThe bad news is, we have 470,000 going out of business every year. And why? They cite Obamacare.\n\nThey are refusing to...\n\nEPPERSON: So you wouldn't agree -- you wouldn't agree with a start for 401(k) for businesses or anything like that?\n\nFIORINA: I think it's a wonderful that that businesses start a 401(k). The point I'm making is this,", + " the Federal Government should not be in a lot of things.\n\nThere is no Constitutional role for the Federal Government in setting up -- retirement plans. There is no Constitutional role for the Federal Government to be setting minimum wages...\n\nEPPERSON: Thank you very much.\n\nFIORINA:... The more the Government gets engaged in the economy, the slower the economy becomes. The more the Government gets engaged in the economy, it is demonstrably true...\n\nEPPERSON: Thank you, the rules say one minute.\n\nFIORINA:... The more the big, the powerful, the wealthy and the well-connected are advantaged.\n\nEPPERSON:", + " Thank you, Ms. Fiorina. We appreciate it. Thank you, thank you.\n\nI want to turn my attention now, to you now, Governor Kasich.\n\nMost people can't get a college degree without going into debt. Over 40 million Americans have student loans and many of them cannot pay them back.\n\nThis country has over $100 billion in student loan defaults. That's billion with a b.\n\nWhat will you do to make sure that students, their families, taxpayers, won't feel the economic impact of this burden for generations?\n\nWell, first of all, in Ohio we're changing the whole system. Universities will not get paid one dime unless the student graduates or -- graduates or completes a course.\n\nSecondly,", + " you can be in high school and complete almost an entire first year before you go to college and get credit to do that. And, of course, in addition to that, we are working now to go after the cost drivers in our universities. And let me give you an example. Universities today have so many non-academic assets. At Ohio State they sold the parking garage and the parking lot, and they got $500 million because they shouldn't be in the parking lot business. They shouldn't be in the ding business, they shouldn't be in the dorm business.\n\nAnd, of course, we need to take advantage of on-line education to reduce these costs and begin to dis-intermediate the cost of four years.\n\nNow,", + " for those who that have these big high costs, I think we can seriously look at an idea of where you can do public service. I mean legitimate, public service and begin to pay off some of that debt through the public service that you do. And in the meantime, it may inspire us to care more about our country, more about ourselves.\n\nThis is a big moral issue in America. Living a life bigger than yourself, and being a center of healing and justice. And people can learn it through public service.\n\nEPPERSON: Thank you, thank you.\n\nBUSH: We don't need the federal government to be involved in this at all.\n\nQUICK:", + " Higher education is the example...\n\nBUSH: We don't need the Federal Government to be involved in this, because when they do we create a $1.2 trillion debt.\n\nIn Florida, we have the lowest in-state tuition of any state, because there's accountability, just as John said. Let the states do this. You'll create a much better graduation rate at a lower cost, and you won't in debt the next generation with recourse debt on their backs.\n\nIt's always a solution of the left to create more Government from the Federal Government. It is broke, it is not working.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUINTANILLA:", + " Governor Bush, daily fantasy sports has become a phenomenon in this country, will award billions of dollars in prize money this year. But to play you have to assess your odds, put money at risk, wait for an outcome that's out of your control. Isn't that the definition of gambling, and should the Federal Government treat it as such?\n\nBUSH: Well, first of all, I'm 7 and 0 in my fantasy league.\n\nQUINTANILLA: I had a feeling you were going to brag about that.\n\nBUSH: Gronkowski is still going strong. I have Ryan Tannehill, Marco, as my quarterback,", + " he was 18 for 19 last week. So I'm doing great. But we're not gambling.\n\nAnd I think this has become something that needs to be looked at in terms of regulation. Effectively it is day trading without any regulation at all. And when you have insider information, which apparently has been the case, where people use that information and use big data to try to take advantage of it, there has to be some regulation.\n\nIf they can't regulate themselves, then the NFL needs to look at just, you know, moving away from them a little bit. And there should be some regulation. I have no clue whether the federal government is the proper place,", + " my instinct is to say, hell no, just about everything about the federal government.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nCHRISTIE: Carl, are we really talking about getting government involved in fantasy football?\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nWe have -- wait a second, we have $19 trillion in debt. We have people out of work. We have ISIS and al Qaeda attacking us. And we're talking about fantasy football? Can we stop?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nCHRISTIE: How about this? How about we get the government to do what they're supposed to be doing, secure our borders, protect our people, and support American values and American families.", + " Enough on fantasy football. Let people play, who cares?\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUICK: I want to go back, if I can, to the issue of...\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUICK: I want to go back, if I may, to the... HARWOOD: Governor Christie, you've said something that many in your party do not believe, which is that climate change is undeniable, that human activity contributes to it, and you said, quote: \"The question is, what do we do to deal with it?\".\n\nSo what do we do?\n\nCHRISTIE: Well, first off, what we don't do is do what Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and Barack Obama want us to do,", + " which is their solution for everything, put more taxes on it, give more money to Washington, D.C., and then they will fix it.\n\nWell, there is no evidence that they can fix anything in Washington, D.C.\n\nHARWOOD: What should we do?\n\nCHRISTIE: What we should do is to be investing in all types of energy, John, all types of energy. I've laid out...\n\nHARWOOD: You mean government?\n\nCHRISTIE: No, John. John, do you want me to answer or do you want to answer?\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nHow are we going to do this?\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBecause,", + " I've got to tell you the truth, even in New Jersey what you're doing is called rude. So...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nWe've laid out a national energy plan that says that we should invest in all types of energy. I will tell you, you could win a bet at a bar tonight, since we're talking about fantasy football, if you ask who the top three states in America are that produce solar energy: California and Arizona are easy, but number three is New Jersey.\n\nWhy? Because we work with the private sector to make solar energy affordable and available to businesses and individuals in our state.\n\nWe need to make sure that we do everything across all kinds of energy:", + " natural gas, oil, absolutely. But also where it's affordable, solar, wind in Iowa has become very affordable and it makes sense.\n\nThat is the way we deal with global warming, climate change, or any of those problems, not through government intervention, not through government taxes, and for God's sake, don't send Washington another dime until they stop wasting the money they're already sending there.\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Governor.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHARWOOD: Becky.\n\nQUICK: Senator Paul, among the leading conservative opponents to the creation of Medicare back in the 1960s was Ronald Reagan. He warned that it would lead to socialism.", + " Considering the mounting cost of Medicare, was he right to oppose it?\n\nPAUL: The question always is, what works better, the private marketplace or government? And what distributes goods better? It always seems to be the private marketplace does a better job.\n\nIs there an area for a safety net? Can you have Medicare or Social Security? Yes. But you ought to acknowledge the government doesn't do a very good job at it.\n\nThe main problem with Medicare right now is that the average person pays in taxes over their whole lifetime about $100,000. But the average person takes out about $350,000. We have this enormous mismatch because we have smaller and smaller families.\n\nWhen people ask me,", + " whose fault is it? Whose fault is it that Medicare is broken, out of money, that Social Security is broken, out of money? And I say, look, it's not Republicans' fault, it's not Democrats' fault, it's your grandparents' fault for having too many damn kids.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nAfter the war we had all of these kids, Baby Boomers. Now we're having smaller families. We used to have 16 workers for one retiree, now you have three workers for one retiree.\n\nIt's not working. I have a bill to fix Medicare. I've a bill to fix Social Security.", + " For both of them you have to gradually raise the age. If you're not willing to do that, nobody wants to do it, but if you're not willing to gradually raise the age, you're not serious about fixing either one of them.\n\nQUICK: Senator, thank you.\n\nUNIDENTIFIED MALE: Becky, may I...\n\nQUINTANILLA: This is the-- well, we're going to take a break. We want to save time for closing statements after the break.\n\nSo this is the Republican presidential debate in Boulder, and we'll be right back.\n\n(COMMERCIAL BREAK)\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nQUICK:", + " Welcome back to Boulder, Colorado and the Republican presidential debate right here on CNBC.\n\nGovernor Huckabee, you wanted to respond to the points that Senator Rand Paul was just making when it comes to Social Security. Your time, sir.\n\nHUCKABEE: Well, and specifically to Medicare, Becky, because 85 percent of the cost of Medicare is chronic disease. The fact is if we don't address what's costing so much, we can't throw enough money at this. And it's why I've continued to focus on the fact that we need to declare war on the four big cost drivers because 80 percent of all medical costs in this country are chronic disease.", + " We don't have a health care crisis in America, we have a health crisis.\n\nAnd until we deal with the health of Americans and do what we did with polio -- when I was a little kid, we eradicated it. You know how much money we spent on polio last year in America? We didn't spend any. We've saved billions of dollars.\n\nYou want to fix Medicare? Focus on the diseases that are costing us the trillions of dollars. Alzheimers, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Eradicate those and you fix Medicare and you've fixed America, its economy and you've made people's lives a heck of a lot better.\n\nBUSH:", + " Becky --\n\nQUICK: Thank you, Governor.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nBUSH: -- the governor's absolutely right. But we also need to reform Medicare and Social Security. We can't just allow it to continue on its current path the way that Hillary Clinton wants to do because there'll be major reductions in benefits in the next decade if we do nothing.\n\nI have a concrete plan to do just that, which allows people to keep HSAs to encourage savings, it allows for people that are retiring with Social Security to be able to get a minimum of 125 percent of the poverty level so that there is a baseline that in this generous country of ours no one goes below.\n\nHARWOOD:", + " Governor Bush, Mr. Trump says that he is capable of growing the economy so much that Social Security and Medicare don't have to be touched. Do you want to explain how that is going to happen, Mr. Trump?\n\nTRUMP: Yes, it's very simple. We're going to make a really dynamic economy from what we have right now, which is not at all dynamic. We're going to bring jobs back from Japan, we're going to bring jobs back from China, we're going to bring, frankly, jobs back from Mexico where, as you probably saw, Nabisco is leaving Chicago with one of their biggest plants,", + " and they're moving it to Mexico.\n\nWe're going to bring jobs and manufacturing back. We're going to cut costs. We're going to save Social Security, and we're going to save Medicare.\n\n(UNKNOWN): Governor, you just heard him.\n\nBUSH: You have to reform Social Security, and the simple way to do it is to make sure that the wealthiest don't receive the same benefits as people that are lower-income.\n\nAnd make sure you enhance savings in the private market. The idea of 401(k)s. I have a small business that I set up. It took -- it took an arm and a leg to be able to set up a 401(k). Because of all the federal mandates and federal laws,", + " it was too expensive.\n\nWe need to incent private savings and make sure that Social Security is protected for those that have it.\n\nKASICH: John.\n\nBUSH: But the idea that you can't -- that you're just gonna grow your way out of this -- I have a plan to grow the economy at 4 percent, but you're gonna have to make adjustments for both Medicare and Social Security.\n\n(UNKNOWN): Governor Kasich, do you want 30 seconds?\n\nKASICH: I wanna tell you, in my state, we took Medicaid, the hardest program to control, and we took it from a 10 percent growth rate to 2.", + "5 percent without taking one person off the rolls or cutting one single benefit.\n\nAnd so much of what we did -- to force competition, to use technology, to stand down the special interest groups -- can you imagine taking Medicaid from 10 to 2.5 percent?\n\nWe can take many of those same procedures, we can apply it to Medicare. We can make a stronger program. But I agree with Jeb, you can't just do this by growing the economy. You can't grow your way out of demographics.\n\nBut we can give people better health care. And finally, on health care, why don't we start treating -- keep giving...\n\nQUICK:", + " Governor.\n\nKASICH:...incentives for people to keep people healthy, rather than giving the incentives to treat them when they're sick?\n\nQUICK: Governor, thank you.\n\nSenator Paul, let's go back to you. Do these solutions sound like they work?\n\nPAUL: Say again?\n\nQUICK: Do these solutions sound like they would work?\n\nPAUL: You can't do nothing. And that's what I hear from some people, \"we'll do nothing and it will just be fixed.\" That's absurd, and I think people who don't want to fix it, really, or unwilling to take the chance to say,", + " \"something has to change,\" are missing the boat here.\n\nThe age will have to gradually rise, there is no question. It's the only way you fix Medicare, the only way you fix Social Security. You will also have to means-test the benefits and declare there's not enough money.\n\nIt isn't \"I put money in, I'm getting it back.\" There is no money, it's a stack of paper. There is no money in the Social Security account. There is no money in the Medicare account. There's only a promise to pay by the next generation, and the next generation's not big enough to pay it.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\n(", + "UNKNOWN):...to deal with this. We did it 200 days ago.\n\nHARWOOD: Hold on, Governor. I've got a question for -- for Dr. Carson.\n\nCARSON: About Medicare?\n\nHARWOOD: Yes. You've said that you would like to replace Medicare with a system of individual family savings accounts, so that families could cover their own expenses.\n\nObviously, that would be a very controversial idea. Explain how that would work, exactly.\n\nCARSON: Well, first of all the -- the plan gives people the option of -- of opting out. But I think they will see a very good option here.", + " You know, the annual Medicare budget is over $600 billion. And there are 48 million people involved -- 40 million, 65 and over, and 8 million other.\n\nDivide that out. That comes out to $12,500 for each one. Now, I can tell you there are a lot of private-sector things that you could do with $12,500, which will get you a lot more than you get from this government program.\n\nAnd that's really a theme of a lot of the things that I'm talking about. How do we utilize our intellect rather than allowing the government to use its, quote, \"intellect,\" in order to help us to be able to live healthier and better lives?\n\nIt was never intended that the government should be in every aspect of our lives.", + " This is a country that is of, for and by the people.\n\nQUICK: Thank you, Dr. Carson.\n\nGovernor?\n\nCHRISTIE: And -- and -- and I -- you know, Ben is absolutely right in saying that what we don't need to do is to send more money to Washington, D.C. to fix this problem.\n\nAnd that's what you'll hear from Hillary Clinton -- and I've already heard from her -- is that, send more money in Social Security, send more money in Medicare taxes, send more money for Medicaid, and that's gonna solve the problem.\n\nWhat we know is we're living longer.", + " That's a blessing. It's a blessing that we're living longer, so we have to increase the retirement age to reflect that blessing.\n\nWe need to make sure that people understand, as Jeb said before, that if you've done extraordinarily well in this country, do you want them to take more out of your taxes now and think they're gonna give it back to you later? Or would you rather take less later on?\n\nQUINTANILLA: Senator Rubio...\n\nHARWOOD: Governor, do you also think that...\n\nQUINTANILLA:...yeah, I just wanted (inaudible).\n\nHARWOOD:...that Dr.", + " Carson's right, that we can replace Medicare with individual savings accounts?\n\nRUBIO: No. No. What I said was that I think that Dr. Carson's ideas are good ideas. They're not my ideas, and I don't necessarily agree with all of them.\n\nBut this is what you're seeing in the Republican debate that you didn't see in that Democrat debate.\n\nYou didn't see it for a minute. You didn't see these kind of ideas being batted around, and being batted around in a way that's civil and smart and that's trying to help to inform the voter out there.\n\nWhat you saw was a parade of,", + " \"I'll give you this for free; I'll give you that for free.\"\n\nLet me tell you, everybody, when they say they want to give it to you for free, keep your hands on your wallets because they're coming to you to pay for it. And that's why I think these ideas up here are great, and that's what we should have is have more discussions like this and less gotcha.\n\n(CROSSTALK)\n\nQUINTANILLA: I want to give you 30 seconds here.\n\nRUBIO: I want to take off from that point and argue the same thing. And that is that one of the things you're watching tonight are 11 quality candidates debating an important issue.", + " The Republican Party is blessed to have 11 good candidates, (inaudible) 10 good candidates. The Democrats can't even come up with one.\n\nAnd on this issue of the Medicare in particular, it's important because they're going to demagogue what we're saying here tonight. Everyone up here tonight that's talking about reforms, I think and I know for myself I speak to this, we're all talking about reforms for future generations. Nothing has to change for current beneficiaries. My mother is on Medicare and Social Security. I'm against anything that's bad for my mother.\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\nSo, we're talking about -- we're talking about reform for people like me and people like Senator Cruz,", + " as he talked about earlier, who are years away from retirement that have a way to plan for these changes, and way that's very reasonable. And it's not too much to ask of our generation after everything our parents and our grandparents did for us.\n\nFIORINA: John, I -- if I -- a lot of people have jumped in here. I'd like to jump in. A lot of people have jumped in here.\n\nHARWOOD: Mrs. Fiorina, we're right at the end of our time.\n\nFIORINA: I understand.\n\nHARWOOD: You all wanted us to limit (inaudible).\n\nAll right.", + " Go ahead.\n\nFIORINA: I would just say that...\n\n(LAUGHTER)\n\n... I would just say this, we've heard a lot of great ideas up here, and I agree with what Senator Rubio said. Every election we talk about this. Every election we talk about Medicare and Social Security reform. It never happens.\n\nI would like to start with a basic. Let us actually go to zero- based budgeting so we know where the money is being spent. It's kind of basic. There is a bill sitting in the House that would actually pass and have us go to zero-based budgeting so we know where every dime of your money is being spent instead of only talking about how much more we're going to spend year after year after year.\n\nMy point is this.", + " While there are lots of good ideas for reform, we have never tackled the basics. And we finally need to tackle the basics to cut this government down to size and hold it accountable. So let's start by knowing where your money is being spent by the federal government.\n\nHARWOOD: We have now reached the point in the program where candidates are going to give their closing statements, 30 seconds apiece. We're going to go right to left and start with you, Senator Paul.\n\nPAUL: Liberty thrives when government is small. I want a government so small I can barely see it. I want a government so small that the individual has a chance to thrive and prosper.", + " I think, though, government is too big now. And what you're going to see in Washington this week is establishment Republicans have made an agreement with the president to raise the debt ceiling in an unlimited fashion; no limit to the debt ceiling raise.\n\nThis is extraordinary. It's extraordinarily wrong. You'll see me on the floor of the Senate tomorrow filibustering this and saying enough is enough, no more debt.\n\nHARWOOD: Governor Christie?\n\nCHRISTIE: I want to talk to the folks at home. I want to ask you: Are you fed up with how Washington taxes you? Are you fed up with how Washington wastes your money?", + " Are you concerned like I am that the debt and deficits of Washington, D.C. are endangering America's future?\n\nI've got one more question for you then. Are you serious about this election? Because if you are, you need to elect someone who's deadly serious about changing this culture. I am deadly serious about changing this culture. I changed it in New Jersey. I'm deadly serious about doing this job the right way.\n\nI'm prepared. I'm tested. I'm ready. And I want to make this our government. For the people who say we can't do it, I say hell no, we can do it together.\n\nHARWOOD:", + " Thank you, Governor.\n\nSenator Cruz?\n\nCRUZ: You know, everyone here talks about the need to take on Washington. The natural next question is who actually has done so. Who actually has stood up not just to Democrats, but to leaders in our own party? When millions of Americans rose up against Obamacare, I was proud to lead that fight. When millions of Americans rose up against amnesty, I was proud to lead that fight. When millions of Americans rose up against Planned Parenthood, I was proud to lead that fight.\n\nIf people are promising they're going to take on Washington and cronyism, you need to look to who has been doing it.", + " In my family, my dad fled oppression in Cuba to come to America. Freedom is personal for me, and I will always keep my word and fight for freedom.\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Senator.\n\nMrs. Fiorina?\n\nFIORINA: You know, every election we hear a lot of talk. We hear a lot of good plans. We hear actually a lot of good intentions. But somehow for decades, nothing really has changed. What we need now is a proven leader who has produced results. That's how you go from secretary to CEO. You lead and you produce results. I will cut this government down to size and hold it accountable,", + " simplify the tax code, roll back the regulations that have been spewing out of Washington, D.C. for 50 years.\n\nI may not be your dream candidate just yet, but I can assure you I am Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare. And in your heart of hearts, you cannot wait to see a debate between Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina. I will tell you this, I will beat Hillary Clinton. And with your vote and your support and your prayers, I will lead with the citizens of this great nation the resurgence of this great nation.\n\nHARMAN: Thank you, Mrs. Fiorina.\n\nDr. Carson?\n\nCARSON:", + " I just want to thank all my colleagues here for being civil, and not falling for the traps. And, I also just want to thank the audience for being attentive, and noticing the questions, and the noticing the answers. And, this is what I am finding throughout America.\n\nPeople are waking up because it is going to be us who will determine the direction of our country. And, it was made for we the people, we are the ones who decide who we are, and we should never give away the values and principles that made America into a great nation for the sake of political correctness.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHARWOOD: Mr.", + " Trump?\n\nTRUMP: Our country doesn't win anymore. We used to win, we don't win anymore. We lose on trade. We lose with ISIS. We lose with one of the worst deals I've ever seen negotiated of any kind, that's our recent catastrophe with Iran. We don't win.\n\nLet me give you one quick example. These folks, CNBC, they had it down at three, three and a half hours. I just read today in the New York Times, $250,000 for a 30 second ad. I went out and said, it's ridiculous. Nobody -- I could stand up here all night.", + " Nobody wants to watch three and a half, or three hours. It was a back sacrifice, and I have to hand it to Ben.\n\nWe called Ben, he was with me 100%. We called in, we said, that's it. We're not doing it. They lost a lot of money, everybody said it couldn't be done. Everybody said it was going to be three hours, three and a half, including them, and in about two minutes I renegotiated it so we can get the hell out of here. Not bad.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nTRUMP: And, I'll do that with the country. We will make America great again.", + " And, thank you everybody. Just for the record.\n\nHARWOOD: Just for the record, the debate was always going to be two hours. Senator Rubio?\n\nTRUMP: That's not right. That is absolutely not right. You know that. That is not right.\n\nMALE: Thank you.\n\nHARWOOD: Senator Rubio.\n\nRUBIO: You know, America doesn't owe me anything. I have a debt to America I'll never repay. This isn't just the country I was born in, this is the nation that literally changed the history of my family. My parents in this country were able to give me the chance to do all the things they never did.", + " We call that the American Dream, although, it's built on the universal dream of a better life.\n\nThe fact that it's happened for so many people here throughout our history, that's what makes us special. But, now for millions of Americans, it's slipping away. And, we have a government and leaders in government that are completely out of touch, and that's why I'm running for president. Because we can't just save the American Dream, we can expand it to reach more people, and change more lives than ever before.\n\nAnd, that's why tonight I'm asking you for your vote.\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you,", + " Senator. Governor Bush?\n\nBUSH: America's at a crossroads. The D.C. politicians continue to make things worse. I have a proven record of success, 32 years in business, and 8 years as Governor of the state of Florida.\n\nI will change the culture in Washington, just as I changed the culture in Tallahassee. I will do so in a way that will bring people together. We need a unifier, not a cynical divider in chief, and that's exactly what I will do.\n\nImagine a country where people are lifted out of poverty again. Imagine a country where the middle class can get rising income again.", + " I know we can do this because we're still the most extraordinary country on the face of the Earth.\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Governor. Governor Huckabee.\n\nHUCKABEE: You know, I know to a lot of people in the media, this is just a great big game, and we're the players. And, we come out here, and we do our thing. And, sometimes we're held up in contempt by people who write columns, but, I guarantee you to every person on this stage there's something deep inside of us that would cause us to give up our livelihoods and step out on this stage and fight for the people of America.\n\nI've got five grandkids.", + " I do not want to walk my five grandkids through the charred remains of a once great country called America, and say, \"Here you go, $20 trillion dollars of debt. Good luck making something out of this mess.\"\n\nAnd, for those of us who are serious enough to run for president, think long and hard why we're here, and hopefully you'll know we're not here for ourselves. We honest to god are here to get this country back on track. I know this, I certainly am.\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you...\n\nHUCKABEE:...Thank you.\n\nHARWOOD: Governor Kasich?\n\nKASICH:", + " I was on morning Joe at a town hall and a young student stood up and said, \"Can I still be idealistic?\"\n\nI said, absolutely, you can still change the world. And, you know the old inscription, if you save one life, you've changed the world. Folks, we have a problem here with the leadership in Washington, but I'll tell you another problem. We need to rebuild our families. We need to have stronger families. We need to know who our neighbors are. We need to come together as a country because we have to realize that America is great, not from the top-down. Oh yeah,", + " we want to elect a good president, but America is great from the bottom-up, and the bottom-up is us in our families, in our communities, in our neighborhoods. We will renew America if we work together, and I am totally confident that we will. And God bless America.\n\n(APPLAUSE)\n\nHARWOOD: Thank you, Governor.\n\nQUINTANILLA: That concludes tonight's debate. On behalf of my colleagues Becky Quick, John Harwood, Sharon Epperson, Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer, we'd like to our host, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Republican National Committee, the candidates and,", + " of course, tonight's audience. ", + " BOULDER, Colo. (AP) \u2014 The Republican presidential candidates are debating for the third time in the 2016 nomination contest, this time in battleground Colorado, as they compete to narrow down the wide-open contest.\n\nRepublican presidential candidates, from left, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, and Rand Paul take the stage during... (Associated Press)\n\nBobby Jindal, left, looks on as Rick Santorum makes a point during the CNBC Republican presidential debate at the University of Colorado, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2015,", + " in Boulder, Colo. (AP Photo/Mark J.... (Associated Press)\n\nChris Christie, left, and Donald Trump talk during a break in the CNBC Republican presidential debate at the University of Colorado, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2015, in Boulder, Colo. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill) (Associated Press)\n\nRepublican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, right, makes a point as George Pataki reacts during the CNBC Republican presidential debate at the University of Colorado, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2015, in... (Associated Press)\n\nRepublican presidential candidates, from left, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee,", + " Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Ted Cruz take the stage during the CNBC Republican presidential... (Associated Press)\n\nRepublican presidential candidates, from left, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, George Pataki, and Lindsey Graham take the stage during the CNBC Republican presidential debate at the University of Colorado,... (Associated Press)\n\nChris Christie speaks during the CNBC Republican presidential debate at the University of Colorado, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2015, in Boulder, Colo. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill) (Associated Press)\n\nHere are the latest developments (all times local):\n\n8:", + "37 p.m.\n\nThe chairman of the Republican National Committee says CNBC \"should be ashamed\" of how its moderators handled the third GOP presidential debate.\n\nReince Priebus (ryns PREE'-bus) says that the moderators did a disservice to their network, the candidates and the viewers. The two hours were dominated by candidates complaining that the moderators' questions were hostile and based on inaccurate premises.\n\nPriebus is calling the questioning \"unfortunate\" and says he will \"fight to ensure future debates allow a more robust exchange.\"\n\n___\n\n8:25 p.m.\n\nFormer Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says none of Republican candidates on the debate stage is running for president because of ego.", + " Instead, he says they're making the sacrifice to run so they can get America back on track.\n\nFormer Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is promising to be a \"unifier.\" Bush says he will \"change the culture in Washington, just as I changed the culture in Tallahassee.\" Bush describes himself as an outsider and says politicians from Washington \"continue to make things worse.\"\n\n___\n\n8:21 p.m.\n\nDonald Trump says America has him to thank for keeping the third Republican presidential debate to two hours, rather than three hours or more. Trump says in his closing statement that he could stand on stage all night, but no one wants to watch a three-hour debate.\n\nThe original plan had been two hours of debate,", + " not counting commercials. Both Trump and Ben Carson sent CNBC a letter demanding that the debate be kept to two hours total.\n\nJohn Kasich is ending the debate the way he began, with an animated appeal to communities to take on a bigger role in solving their problems, rather than the federal government.\n\nThe Ohio governor says: \"America is not great from the top down. America is great from the bottom up.\"\n\nAnd Marco Rubio is closing his debate performance by promising to \"expand\" the American dream. The Florida senator says he can never repay his \"debt to America\" and says he is running because wants to make sure that the same opportunities are there for others.\n\n___\n\n8:", + "19 p.m.\n\nNew Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is using his closing statement to look into the camera and ask voters two questions: \"Are you fed up?\" and \"Are you serious about this election?\"\n\nHe says he's the one who can change the culture in Washington.\n\nKentucky Sen. Rand Paul is using his closing statement to give a preview of his filibuster against a debt ceiling deal in Congress. Paul says he objects to raising the federal debt ceiling, because he wants \"a government so small I can barely see it.\"\n\nFormer CEO Carly Fiorina says the election is about more than \"a lot of plans\" and a lot of \"good intentions.\"\n\nShe promises,", + " if elected, to \"cut this government to size and hold it accountable.\"\n\n___\n\nRetired neurosurgeon Ben Carson says his candidacy is proof that Americans are \"waking up\" and recognizing the value in a citizen government. He is telling voters not to throw away the values that have made America a great nation \"for the sake of political correctness.\"\n\nTed Cruz says he is a proven fighter in Washington. In his closing remarks, Cruz notes his stances against the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood and says he will always \"fight for freedom.\"\n\n___\n\n7:58 p.m.\n\nForget attacking the other candidates, Chris Christie is taking a whack at the moderators.\n\nThe New Jersey governor has fighting words for CNBC correspondent John Harwood after several persistent questions about climate change during the Wednesday night debate.\n\n\"", + "Even in New Jersey what you're doing is called rude,\" Christie says.\n\nOn climate change, Christie says investment in \"all types of energy\" is important. He notes that New Jersey has worked with the private sector to boost solar energy.\n\n___\n\n7:52 p.m.\n\nJeb Bush and Chris Christie are big football fans, and are among the millions of Americans who manage fantasy football teams. But they line up on the other side of the ball when it comes to regulating fantasy football.\n\nAsked whether it amounts to gambling, and whether the government should regulate, Bush says, \"My instinct is to say, hell no.\"\n\nBut he is acknowledging that regulating fantasy football probably needs to be looked into.\n\nHe says his team is undefeated.\n\nBut Christie,", + " with a look of exasperation, says to the moderators: \"We have $19 trillion in debt... and you're talking about fantasy football\"\n\nThe comment ignited a burst of applause in the auditorium, including from Sen. Ted Cruz, standing to Christie's right.\n\nChristie snorts: \"Let people play. Who cares?\"\n\n___\n\n7:50 p.m.\n\nChris Christie is using a dispute between the White House and the FBI to accuse President Obama of being weak on crime.\n\nThe New Jersey governor says Obama hasn't given police officers the support they need.\n\nHe noted FBI Director James Comey's recent claim that police officers have become afraid to enforce the law thanks to ever-present cellphones and the threat of viral videos.", + " In a speech last week, Comey claimed the anxiety is contributing to a rise in violent crime.\n\nThe White House says it disagrees with Comey's analysis. But Christie says Obama should have backed up his FBI chief. He says the president's top job is \"to protect the safety and security of the American people\" and \"the president has failed.\"\n\nChristie says as president he'd support law enforcement, adding, \"That's real moral authority.\"\n\n___\n\n7:40 p.m.\n\nFormer Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is upset about being asked whether he thinks Donald Trump has the moral authority to unite the country.\n\nThe question during the third Republican presidential debate drew groans and boos from the audience.\n\nHuckabee says:", + " \"The few questions I've got, the last one I need is to give him more time. I love Donald Trump. He is a good man.\"\n\nThen Huckabee jokes: \"I'm wearing a Trump tie tonight. Get over that.\"\n\nTrump calls the question \"nasty.\"\n\nHuckabee says \"Donald Trump would be a better president every day of the week and twice on Sunday rather than Hillary.\"\n\n___\n\n7:38 p.m.\n\nDonald Trump has a permit to carry a gun in New York. And he says more people should follow his lead.\n\nIn the third Republican debate, Trump calls gun-free zones a \"catastrophe,\" describing them as \"target practice for sickos and the mentally ill.\"\n\nTrump says he carries a gun on occasion,", + " but adds, \"I like to be unpredictable.\"\n\nTold that some Trump resorts and properties don't allow guns, Trump says he'd consider a new policy. \"I would change it,\" he said.\n\n___\n\n7:42 p.m.\n\nJohn Kasich says the state of Ohio doesn't need to legalize marijuana as a source of revenue. Even if it did, he says it's a bad practice to send \"mixed signals\" to kids about drugs by legalizing marijuana.\n\nBut that's about all Kasich has to say on the subject. Instead, he's the discussion to income inequality. He says he'd move to give more power back to the states,", + " particularly in education, to give children better access to skills they can use to get ahead.\n\n___\n\n7:42 p.m.\n\nRivals Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio agree on the importance of lower taxes.\n\nBoth Republican presidential candidates have proposed tax cuts that largely benefit the wealthy and drive up the deficit. But at the third Republican presidential debate they defended their ideas as best for the economy.\n\nBush says higher taxes on wealthier Americans are hurting the economy. Bush says: \"The government has tried it their way. Under their proposals it has failed miserably.\"\n\nRubio says that because the rich pay so much more in taxes than the poor, any tax cut will inevitably favor them.", + " Rubio says, \"The more you tax something the less you get.\"\n\nKentucky Sen. Rand Paul jumped in to tout his flat tax proposal. He argues that it's fairer because it ditches the payroll tax, which bites more heavily into the middle class.\n\n___\n\n7:40 p.m.\n\nSens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have found a common enemy: the Federal Reserve.\n\nBoth Cruz and Paul say they'd like to audit the Fed and expose how its monetary policy is damaging the economy.\n\nCruz is blasting the central bank's policies of keeping interest rates low, calling it an \"incredible experiment.\" He says \"the Fed should get out of the business of trying to juice our economy.\"\n\nPaul says he wants to bar the Fed from lobbying Congress.", + " He says he want to \"bring the Fed forward\" and expose its role in the housing crisis and the rise of income inequality. He says \"we should not have price control on the price of money.\"\n\nFor Paul, complaining about the Fed is a family tradition. Paul's father, former Rep. Ron Paul, campaigned for president with the slogan \"End the Fed.\"\n\n___\n\n7:35 p.m.\n\nFlorida Sen. Marco Rubio says Hillary Rodham Clinton and Democrats have the biggest super PAC in the presidential race: \"It's called the mainstream media.\"\n\nRubio says he believes Clinton \"got exposed as a liar\" last week during her testimony before a House select committee examining the Benghazi attacks.\n\nBut he says the media cast her appearance as a triumph.\n\nOther Republicans are also criticizing the press during the debate.", + " Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says questions being asked by the CNBC moderators are unfair and not focused on substantive issues.\n\n___\n\n7:33 p.m.\n\nMarco Rubio says programs that bring in more immigrants as high-tech workers are valuable.\n\nThe Florida senator argues that companies who abuse the visa program should be penalized.\n\nDonald Trump's campaign website has called Rubio \"Mark Zuckerberg's personal senator\" for supporting the tech visas.\n\nTrump has contended the program short-changes American workers. But at the debate he claims he never made the statement and says he wants to keep skilled immigrant tech employees in the United States.\n\n___\n\n7:28 p.m\n\nBen Carson is pushing back on questions about his involvement with a medical supplement company that has come under legal scrutiny.\n\nCarson says he made a few paid speeches for Texas-based Mannatech Inc.", + " and uses its products, but calls it \"absurd\" to say he has a relationship with them.\n\nAsked why his picture was on the home page for the company, Carson says they must have used it without his permission. When he was pushed over whether that betrayed any issues with his \"vetting process,\" the crowd began to boo.\n\nCarson smiled. \"They know,\" he said.\n\n___\n\n7:25 p.m.\n\nFormer technology executive Carly Fiorina says it is the \"height of hypocrisy\" for Hillary Rodham Clinton to talk about being the first woman president when \"every single policy\" she endorses is \"demonstrably bad for women.\"\n\nFiorinia is joining Texas Sen.", + " Ted Cruz in going after Clinton in the third Republican presidential debate.\n\nFiorina says 92 percent of the jobs lost during President Barack Obama's first term belonged to women. And Cruz says 3.7 million women went into poverty during Obama's presidency.\n\nCruz says big government benefits the wealthy, lobbyists and giant corporations. He says he is fighting for Hispanics, women and single mothers.\n\n___\n\n7:23 p.m.\n\nOhio Gov. John Kasich isn't going to let voters forget he helped lead efforts to balance the federal budget while serving in Congress in the 1990s.\n\nHe calls the budget deal passed by the House on Wednesday a \"silly deal\"", + " that is more of \"the same old stuff.\" If elected president, he says he'd push for a balanced budget amendment to make sure the government doesn't spend more than what is has.\n\nKasich says his time in Congress and two terms as Ohio's governor serve as proof of his ability to manage a growing economy and write responsible budgets. He brings up his time working on the balanced budget in Congress often on the debate stage and on the campaign trail.\n\n___\n\n7:15 p.m.\n\nMarco Rubio is dismissing questions about whether his history of personal financial woes disqualifies him from being in charge of the federal government.\n\nA bank once moved to foreclose one of Rubio's homes.", + " He couldn't account for thousands of expenses from political committees he ran. Last year he sold retirement funds to pay bills despite earning millions over the past decade.\n\nRubio dismisses those problems as discredited attacks from Democrats.\n\nHe says his struggles to provide for his four children are the reason he is pushing a tax plan that would help families. He also recounts his humble upbringing as the son of immigrant parents who worked as a bartender and a housekeeper.\n\n___\n\n7:12 p.m.\n\nJeb Bush is dodging a question he had no problem answering four years ago: Would you sign a budget deal that cut $10 for every $1 in taxes raised?\n\nBefore,", + " he said it was a deal he'd take. This time, he's not giving a definitive answer.\n\nInstead, Bush is talking about the recently agreed-to budget deal between the White House and GOP leaders in Congress.\n\nHe adds: \"Now we see Hillary Clinton proposing a third term of economic policy for our country. We need to reverse that. And my record was one of cutting taxes each and every year.\"\n\nSticking with his attack on Congress, he says: \"You find me a Democrat that will cut spending $10 \u2014 heck, find me a Republican in Congress that would cut spending $1 \u2014 I'll talk to him.\"\n\nZeroing in on Democrats,", + " Bush says: \"You find a Democrat that's for cutting spending $10? I'll give him a warm kiss.\"\n\n___\n\n7:08 p.m.\n\nChris Christie says the Justice Department under President Obama has been a \"political Justice Department.\"\n\nChristie says the department has let politics drive prosecutions and given some favored companies \"a pass\" while coming down unnecessarily hard on others.\n\nThe New Jersey governor and former prosecutor made the assertion when asked whether he thought some General Motors executives should go jail for their role in a deadly ignition-switch defect scandal.\n\nChristie says they should and adds, \"If I were a prosecutor that's exactly where'd they be.\"\n\nChristie is also criticizingthe department's decision to prosecute CIA chief David Petraeus for sharing classified information.\n\n__\n\n7:", + "05 p.m.\n\nBen Carson says regulation is choking small businesses in America.\n\nAsked about drug prices, Carson focused his answer on business oversight. He says job creation is limited because businesses are dealing with excessive regulations.\n\nCarson says that instead of focusing on one specific group, the country needs a \"major reduction\" in \"regulatory influence.\"\n\n___\n\n7:03 p.m.\n\nNew Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is returning to his debate style of talking directly to viewers, suggesting to Americans they'd be fleeced on Social Security under a Democratic president.\n\nOn raising Social Security taxes to close the looming gap, Christie asks, \"If someone has already stolen money from you,", + " are you going to give them more?\"\n\nChristie says, \"Social Security is going to be insolvent in seven to eight years.\"\n\nIgnoring his fellow candidates and the CNBC panelists, Christie says he's speaking to \"the guy that has a landscaping business.\"\n\nFormer Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee compares the federal government to convicted investor Bernie Madoff. He says: \"Yes, we've been stolen from. Yes, we've been lied to.\"\n\n___\n\n7:00 p.m.\n\nDonald Trump says his firms' record of declaring bankruptcy shows he's good at dealing with debt problems.\n\nFour of Trump's Atlantic City companies have filed for bankruptcy. Trump is defending that at the third Republican presidential debate.", + " He says the problem is the economic collapse of Atlantic City.\n\nTrump adds that he had the legal right to file bankruptcy.\n\nTrump concludes by noting the nation's financial woes and saying, \"Boy, am I good at solving debt problems.\"\n\n___\n\n6:55 p.m.\n\nKentucky Sen. Rand Paul says he's more worried about Congress bankrupting the American people than he is about a government shutdown.\n\nPaul says he opposes the budget deal passed Wednesday evening in the House of Representatives, which raises the county's borrowing limit as well as spending caps.\n\nHe says Democrats and Republicans backing the deal are part of an \"unholy alliance\" to spend the country \"into oblivion.\"\n\nPaul says the deal gives him little hope that Wisconsin Rep.", + " Paul Ryan, likely to be the next House speaker, will bring meaningful change.\n\n___\n\n6:51 p.m.\n\nTexas Sen. Ted Cruz has a beef with the media.\n\nCruz says the questions being asked him and other Republican candidates in the third debate are unfair.\n\nHe says they \"illustrate why the American people don't trust the media. This is not a cage match.\"\n\nHe says the CBNC moderators are more interested in pitting the candidates against one another rather than \"talking about the substantive issues people care about.\"\n\nCruz says the Republican debate is a stark contrast with the Democratic contest, \"where every fawning question\"", + " was about \"which one of you is more handsome and wise?\"\n\nHis response came to a question about whether his opposition to a budget deal in Congress shows that he's not a problem-solver.\n\n___\n\n6:50 p.m.\n\nCarly Fiorina says her record as former CEO of Hewlett-Packard isn't a liability, but proof of her leadership skills.\n\nDuring the third Republican debate, Fiorina was asked about her time at the helm of HP, where she laid off 30,000 workers and was fired by the board.\n\nFiorina says she was brought in to be a change agent and had to make some \"tough calls.\" She also touts the fact that former HP board member Tom Perkins has recently spoken up on her behalf.\n\nFiorina says she is prepared to \"run on my record all day long.\"\n\n___\n\n6:", + "49 p.m.\n\nFlorida Sen. Marco Rubio is defending his job performance against criticism from one of his constituents \u2014 Jeb Bush.\n\nBush is joining critics who say Rubio has skipped too many votes in the Senate as he campaigns for president.\n\nBush says Rubio should do his job. He says \"this was a 6-year term and you should be showing up to work.\"\n\nBush adds that if Rubio didn't want to show up for votes, he should \"just resign and let someone else take the job.\"\n\nThe attack was the harshest of the debate so far and was Bush's first chance to stand out on the crowded stage.\n\nRubio is pushing back hard.", + " He says media criticism of his voting record is an example of bias against conservatives. And Bush is only piling on because \"we're running for the same position and someone has convinced you that attacking me will help you.\"\n\n___\n\n6:44 p.m.\n\nFormer Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is attacking Marco Rubio for missing Senate votes.\n\nCritics have gone after Rubio for missing a lot of votes during his first term in Congress. Bush took it a step further in the Republican Party's debate Wednesday night.\n\nBush told Rubio he signed up for a six-year term and \"should be showing up for work.\"\n\n___\n\nRetired neurosurgeon Ben Carson says he would get rid of all income tax deductions and loopholes if he were president.\n\nCarson says during the third Republican presidential debate that there also needs to be strategic cutting.", + " He says anyone who believes savings couldn't be found in federal agencies is living in a \"fantasy world.\"\n\nCarson says his tax plan would result in a flat tax around 15 percent.\n\n___\n\nOhio Governor John Kasich says economic proposals from his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination are \"just fantasy.\"\n\nHe slammed proposals from neurosurgeon Ben Carson and developer Donald Trump as unrealistic and deficit-busting. Kasich has proposed a large tax cut as well and promised to balance the budget through unspecified cuts.\n\nTrump quips that Kasich's poll numbers are so bad he barely qualified for the debate.\n\n___\n\nDonald Trump sounds like he'd like to fire CNBC debate moderator John Harwood.\n\nHarwood's first question to the real estate mogul suggested Trump's promises were so huge they were cartoonish.", + " Harwood asked Trump if he was running a \"comic book version of a presidential campaign.\"\n\nTrump rejected the phrase and added, \"it's not a very nicely asked question.\"\n\nTrump says his proposals are realistic. He says if China can build a 13,000-mile Great Wall, he can build a wall along 1,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexican border.\n\nTrump also says he can force Mexico to pay for the wall. He says \"a politician cannot get them to pay, I can.\"\n\n___\n\n6:37 p.m.\n\nTexas Sen. Ted Cruz says his biggest weakness is that he's \"too agreeable.\" He's kidding.\n\nThe notably fiery Cruz,", + " who often stands against his own party in Congress, says his biggest weakness is actually that he's a fighter who is passionate about the Constitution.\n\nHe says he doesn't care if he's not the guy voters want to have a beer with, because he's the one who will make sure they get home.\n\n___\n\nChris Christie is wasting no time in lashing out at Democrats.\n\nThe New Jersey governor is using an opening question about his greatest weakness to clobber the three Democratic candidates for president.\n\nChristie lists the GOP's possible opponents as \"the socialist,\" ''the isolationist\" and \"the pessimist.\"\n\nVermont Senator Bernie Sanders is a self-declared socialist.", + " It's not clear who is the isolationist but Christie says Hillary Clinton is the pessimist.\n\nChristie promises \"you put me on the stage with her next September and she won't get within 10 miles of the White House.\"\n\n___\n\nDr. Ben Carson is subtly belittling his Republican rivals at the GOP debate in Boulder, by promising not to engage in negative campaigning.\n\nYet he says in discussing his greatest weakness that he doesn't really see himself \"in that position\" of president of the United States.\n\nCarson, leading in Iowa and national polls, says he didn't see himself as president until the \"hundreds of thousands of people\"", + " who are supporting him persuaded him to run.\n\n___\n\nDonald Trump says his greatest weakness is that he is too trusting.\n\nIn his first answer of the third Republican debate, Trump is responding to a question about his biggest weakness by saying that he trusts \"people too much.\"\n\nBut on the flip side, Trump says if people let him down, \"I never forgive.\"\n\n___\n\nJeb Bush says he's impatient and he can't fake anger.\n\nThe former Florida governor says those are his biggest weaknesses. Bush and the other Republican presidential candidates were asked to name their biggest weakness during the first question of their third debate in Colorado.\n\nBush says he believes \"this is still the most extraordinary country on the face of the earth and it troubles me that people are rewarded for tearing down this country.\"\n\nHe says,", + " \"It's never been that way in American politics before and I can't do it.\"\n\n___\n\nOhio Governor John Kasich says proposals from his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination are \"just fantasy.\"\n\nHe slammed proposals from neurosurgeon Ben Carson and developer Donald Trump as unrealistic and deficit-busting. Kasich has proposed a large tax cut as well and promised to balance the budget through unspecified cuts.\n\nTrump quips that Kasich's poll numbers are so bad he barely qualified for the debate.\n\n___\n\n6:17 p.m.\n\nThe third debate of the GOP nomination fight is underway, 17 minutes after it was set to start.\n" + ], + "length": 35071, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 97, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Ready or not, the Pulitzer Prizes are out, with a fairly small newspaper winning the most prestigious prize for reporting. The Post and Courier of Charleston, SC, staffed by 80 people, won the gold medal for public service for its series \"Till Death Do Us Part,\" about the high number of fatalities resulting from domestic abuse in South Carolina, the New York Times reports. Eric Lipton won for investigative reporting, thanks to his Times series on lobbyists and lawyers pressuring attorneys general to make things easy on their clients. The Wall Street Journal shared the prize for its \"Medicare Unmasked\" project, which revealed confidential information on health care providers' behavior and motivations, the AP reports. Among other winners: National Reporting: Carol Leonnig for her Washington Post series on security lapses at the Secret Service, the Post reports. (See samples here, here, and here.) The repercussions led to President Obama replacing the Secret Service's director and other top officers. Breaking News Reporting: The Seattle Times for its stories on a landslide that left 43 people dead. Explanatory Reporting: Zachary Mider for an account at Bloomberg News of how US lawmakers struggle to stop corporations from dodging taxes. Non-journalism prizes include: Fiction: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr; History: Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth Fenn; General Nonfiction: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert; Drama: Between Riverside and Crazy by Stephen Adly Guirgis; Biography or Autobiography: The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe by David Kertzer. See the complete list of winners and finalists at the AP.\n", + "docs": [ + "This Sept. 5, 2014, photo by New York Times photographer Daniel Berehulak, part of a winning series, shows James Dorbor, 8, suspected of being infected with Ebola, being carried by medical staff to an... (Associated Press)\n\n___\n\nJOURNALISM\n\nPublic Service: The Post and Courier, of Charleston, South Carolina, for \"Till Death Do Us Part,\" a riveting series that probed why South Carolina is among the deadliest states in the union for women and put the issue of what to do about it on the state's agenda. Finalists: The Boston Globe for its stories,", + " videos, photos and graphics exposing a poorly regulated, profit-driven housing system that subjected thousands of college students in Boston to unsafe, and even deadly, conditions; and The Wall Street Journal for \"Deadly Medicine,\" a stellar reporting project that documented the significant cancer risk to women of a common surgery and prompted a change in the prescribed medical treatment.\n\nBreaking News Reporting: The Seattle Times staff for its digital account of a landslide that killed 43 people and the impressive follow-up reporting that explored whether the calamity could have been avoided. Finalists: The Buffalo News staff for a superbly reported and written account of a lake-effect snowstorm, using human detail to illuminate the story and multimedia elements to help readers through the storm;", + " and the Los Angeles Times staff for a quick but thoughtful response to a shooting spree, beginning with minute-by-minute digital storytelling and evolving into print coverage that delved into the impact of the tragedy.\n\nInvestigative Reporting: The Wall Street Journal staff for \"Medicare Unmasked,\" a pioneering project that gave Americans unprecedented access to previously confidential data on the motivations and practices of their health care providers; and Eric Lipton, of The New York Times, for reporting that showed how the influence of lobbyists can sway congressional leaders and state attorneys general, slanting justice toward the wealthy and connected. Finalists: David Jackson, Gary Marx and Duaa Eldeib of the Chicago Tribune for their expos\u00e9 of the perils faced by abused children placed in Illinois's residential treatment centers.\n\nExplanatory Reporting:", + " Zachary R. Mider, of Bloomberg News, for a painstaking, clear and entertaining explanation of how so many U.S. corporations dodge taxes and why lawmakers and regulators have a hard time stopping them. Finalists: John Ingold, Joe Amon and Lindsay Pierce, of The Denver Post, for an intimate and troubling portrayal of how Colorado's relaxed marijuana laws have drawn hundreds of parents to the state to seek miracle cures for desperately ill children; and Joan Biskupic, Janet Roberts and John Shiffman, of Reuters, for using data analysis to reveal how an elite cadre of lawyers enjoy extraordinary access to the U.S.", + " Supreme Court, raising doubts about the ideal of equal justice.\n\nLocal Reporting: Rob Kuznia, Rebecca Kimitch and Frank Suraci, of the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., for their inquiry into widespread corruption in a small, cash-strapped school district, including impressive use of the paper's website. Finalists: Joe Mahr, Joseph Ryan and Matthew Walberg, of the Chicago Tribune, for their probe into government corruption in a Chicago suburb, using public records, human stories and shoe-leather reporting to lay out the consequences; and Ziva Branstetter and Cary Aspinwall, of the Tulsa World, for courageous reporting on the execution process in Oklahoma after a botched execution - reporting that began a national discussion.\n\nNational Reporting:", + " Carol D. Leonnig, of The Washington Post, for her smart, persistent coverage of the Secret Service, its security lapses and the ways in which the agency neglected its vital task: the protection of the president of the United States. Finalists: Marisa Taylor, Jonathan Landay and Ali Watkins, of McClatchy Newspapers, for timely coverage of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture, demonstrating initiative and perseverance in overcoming government efforts to hide the details; and Walt Bogdanich and Mike McIntire, of The New York Times, for stories exposing preferential police treatment for Florida State University football players who are accused of sexual assault and other criminal offenses.\n\nInternational Reporting:", + " The New York Times staff for courageous front-line reporting and vivid human stories on Ebola in Africa, engaging the public with the scope and details of the outbreak while holding authorities accountable. Finalists: Richard Marosi and Don Bartletti, of the Los Angeles Times, for reporting on the squalid conditions and brutal practices inside the multibillion-dollar industry that supplies vegetables from Mexican fields to American supermarkets; and Ned Parker and a team from Reuters for intrepid reports of the disintegration of Iraq and the rise of ISIS, linking the developing catastrophe to a legacy of sectarianism, corruption and violence seeded by the U.S. invasion.\n\nFeature Writing:", + " Diana Marcum, of the Los Angeles Times, for her dispatches from California's Central Valley offering nuanced portraits of lives affected by the state's drought, bringing an original and empathic perspective to the story. Finalists: Sarah Schweitzer, of The Boston Globe, for her masterful narrative of one scientist's mission to save a rare whale, a beautiful story fortified by expansive reporting, a quiet lyricism and disciplined use of multimedia; and Jennifer Gonnerman, of The New Yorker, for a taut, spare, devastating re-creation of the three-year imprisonment of a young man at Rikers Island, much of it spent in solitary confinement,", + " after he was arrested for stealing a backpack.\n\nCommentary: Lisa Falkenberg, of the Houston Chronicle, for vividly written, groundbreaking columns about grand jury abuses that led to a wrongful conviction and other egregious problems in the legal and immigration systems. Finalists: the late David Carr, of The New York Times, for columns on the media whose subjects range from threats to cable television's profit-making power to ISIS's use of modern media to menace its enemies; and Matthew Kaminski, of The Wall Street Journal, for columns from Ukraine, sometimes reported near heavy fighting, deepening readers' insights into the causes behind the conflict with Russia and the nature and motives of the people involved.\n\nCriticism:", + " Mary McNamara, of the Los Angeles Times, for savvy criticism that uses shrewdness, humor and an insider's view to show how both subtle and seismic shifts in the cultural landscape affect television. Finalists: Manohla Dargis, of The New York Times, for film criticism that rises from a sweeping breadth of knowledge - social, cultural, cinematic - while always keeping the viewer front and center; and Stephanie Zacharek, of The Village Voice, a New York City weekly, for film criticism that combines the pleasure of intellectual exuberance, the perspective of experience and the transporting power of good writing.\n\nEditorial Writing:", + " Kathleen Kingsbury, of The Boston Globe, for taking readers on a tour of restaurant workers' bank accounts to expose the real price of inexpensive menu items and the human costs of income inequality. Finalists: Tony Messenger and Kevin Horrigan, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for editorials that brought insight and context to the national tragedy of Ferguson, Missouri, without losing sight of the community's needs; and Jill Burcum, of the Star Tribune, Minneapolis, for well-written and well-reported editorials that documented a national shame by taking readers inside dilapidated government schools for Native Americans.\n\nEditorial Cartooning: Adam Zyglis,", + " of The Buffalo News, who used strong images to connect with readers while conveying layers of meaning in a few words. Finalists: Kevin Kallaugher, of The Baltimore Sun for simple, punchy cartoons with a classic feel lampooning the hypocrisy of not just his subjects but also his readers; and Dan Perkins, drawing as Tom Tomorrow, of Daily Kos, for cartoons that create an alternate universe \u2014 an America frozen in time whose chorus of conventional wisdom is at odds with current reality.\n\nBreaking News Photography: St. Louis Post-Dispatch photography staff for powerful images of the despair and anger in Ferguson, Missouri, stunning photojournalism that served the community while informing the country.", + " Finalists: Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev and Uriel Sinai, of The New York Times, for photographs that portrayed the conflict in Ukraine in an intimate way, showing how the battle for power crushed the lives of people; and Tyler Hicks, Sergey Ponomarev and Wissam Nassar, of The New York Times, for capturing key moments in the human struggle in Gaza and providing a fresh take on a long, bloody conflict.\n\nFeature Photography: Daniel Berehulak, freelance photographer for The New York Times, for his gripping, courageous photographs of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Finalists: Bulent Kilic,", + " of Agence France-Presse in Washington, D.C., for his compelling photographs of Kurds fleeing ISIS attacks in small Kurdish towns on the Syrian-Turkish border; and Bob Owen, Jerry Lara and Lisa Krantz, of the San Antonio Express-News, for chilling photographs that document the hard road Central American migrants must follow to seek refuge in the United States.\n\n___\n\nLETTERS AND DRAMA\n\nFiction: \"All the Light We Cannot See\" by Anthony Doerr (Scribner), an imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.", + " Finalists: \"Let Me Be Frank with You,\" by Richard Ford (Ecco), an unflinching series of narratives, set in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, insightfully portraying a society in decline; \"The Moor's Account,\" by Laila Lalami (Pantheon), a creative narrative of the ill-fated 16th century Spanish expedition to Florida, compassionately imagined out of the gaps and silences of history; and \"Lovely, Dark, Deep,\" by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco), a rich collection of stories told from many rungs of the social ladder and distinguished by their intelligence, language and technique.\n\nDrama:", + " \"Between Riverside and Crazy,\" by Stephen Adly Guirgis, a nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death. Finalists: \"Marjorie Prime,\" by Jordan Harrison, a sly and surprising work about technology and artificial intelligence told through images and ideas that resonate, and \"Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, 3),\" by Suzan-Lori Parks, a distinctive and lyrical epic about a slave during the Civil War that deftly takes on questions of identity, power and freedom with a blend of humor and dignity.\n\nHistory:", + " \"Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People,\" by Elizabeth A. Fenn (Hill and Wang), an engrossing, original narrative showing the Mandans, a Native American tribe in the Dakotas, as a people with a history. Finalists: \"Empire of Cotton: A Global History,\" by Sven Beckert (Alfred A. Knopf), a work of staggering scholarship arguing that slavery was crucial to the dynamism of the industrial revolution; and \"An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America,\" by Nick Bunker (Alfred A.Knopf), a bifocal perspective on the countdown to the American Revolution,", + " placing the war within a broader crisis of globalization.\n\nBiography or Autobiography: \"The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe,\" by David I. Kertzer (Random House), an engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms. Finalists: \"Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism,\" by Thomas Brothers (W.W. Norton), the masterfully researched second volume of a life of the musical pioneer, effectively showing him in the many milieus where he lived and worked in the 1920s and 1930s;", + " and \"Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,\" by Stephen Kotkin (Penguin Press), a superbly researched tour de force of pre- and post-revolutionary Russian history told through the life of Joseph Stalin.\n\nPoetry: \"Digest,\" by Gregory Pardlo (Four Way Books), clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private. Finalists: \"Reel to Reel,\" by Alan Shapiro (University of Chicago Press), finely crafted poems with a composure that cannot conceal the troubled terrain they traverse;", + " and \"Compass Rose,\" by Arthur Sze (Copper Canyon Press), a collection in which the poet uses capacious intelligence and lyrical power to offer a dazzling picture of our inter-connected world.\n\nGeneral Nonfiction: \"The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,\" by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt), an exploration of nature that forces readers to consider the threat posed by human behavior to a world of astonishing diversity. Finalists: \"No Good Men Among the Living,\" by Anand Gopal (Metropolitan Books), a remarkable work of nonfiction storytelling that exposes the cascade of blunders that doomed America's misbegotten intervention in Afghanistan;", + " and \"Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China,\" by Evan Osnos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the story of a vast country and society in the grip of transformation, calmly surveyed, smartly reported and portrayed with exacting strokes.\n\n___\n\nMUSIC\n\n\"Anthracite Fields,\" by Julia Wolfe, premiered on April 26, 2014, in Philadelphia by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Mendelssohn Club Chorus, a powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century (Red Poppy Music/G.", + " Schirmer Inc.). Finalists: \"Xiaoxiang,\" by Lei Liang, premiered on March 28, 2014, in Boston by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, a concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra, inspired by a widow's wail and blending the curious sensations of grief and exhilaration (Schott Music Corporation); and \"The Aristos,\" by John Zorn, premiered on Dec. 21, 2014, in New York City, a parade of stylistically diverse sounds for violin, cello and piano that create a vivid demonstration of the brain in fluid, unpredictable action. ", + " SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email\n\nThe only operetta ever written about Subpart F of the Internal Revenue Code made its debut on a rainy Sunday evening in May 1990, in a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. In bow ties and spring blazers, partners of the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell dined on lobster prepared by a Milanese chef. Then everyone gathered around a piano, and a pair of professional opera singers, joined by the few Davis Polk men who could carry a tune, performed what sounded like a collaboration of Gilbert & Sullivan and Ernst & Young.\n\nThe 13-minute operetta, Charlie\u2019s Lament,", + " told how the party\u2019s host, John Carroll Jr., invented a whole category of corporate tax avoidance and successfully defended it in a fight with the Internal Revenue Service. The lawyers sang:\n\nThe Feds may be screaming,\n\nBut we all are beaming\n\n\u2019Cause we\u2019ll never pay taxes,\n\nWe\u2019ll never pay taxes,\n\nNever pay taxes again!\n\nThe first corporate \u201cinversion,\u201d as Carroll\u2019s maneuver came to be known, was obscure then and is all but forgotten now. Yet at least 45 companies have followed the lead of Carroll\u2019s client, New Orleans-based construction company McDermott International, and shifted their legal addresses to low-tax foreign nations.", + " Total corporate savings so far: at least $9.8 billion\u2014money that otherwise would have gone to the U.S. government.\n\nThis year, inversions have received more attention than ever, as well-known companies such as Burger King and Pfizer announced plans to change their addresses. (Pfizer didn\u2019t follow through.) In July, President Obama called the practice an \u201cunpatriotic tax loophole\u201d and urged Congress to put a stop to it. In September, the Department of the Treasury tightened regulations to discourage the deals. \u201cMy attitude is, I don\u2019t care if it\u2019s legal,\u201d Obama said in July. \u201cIt\u2019s wrong.\u201d\n\nIf history is any guide,", + " the stiffer regulations won\u2019t stop the exodus. Ever since the McDermott deal, inversions have been the subject of legions of congressional hearings, bills, and regulations, yet companies continue to find ways to circumvent them and escape the U.S. tax system.\n\nJohn Patrick Carroll,\n\nYou\u2019re the man for me.\n\nYou have a firm that is first-rate.\n\nYou have the skill to solve\n\nthis tax quandary\n\n(Although you come in\n\nto work very late).\n\nAround the Manhattan offices of Davis Polk, Carroll was known as a wit and a curmudgeon. To keep fellow lawyers on their toes,", + " he slipped nonsense words, such as \u201cphlaminimony,\u201d into legal documents. He always seemed to do his best work in the middle of the night. His office was a mess. He didn\u2019t own a television set. If someone asked how he was doing, he\u2019d reply, \u201cThey haven\u2019t caught me yet.\u201d\n\nA Brooklyn native who served in the Marine Corps in China during World War II, Carroll attended Cornell University and Harvard Law School. He worked at the IRS before joining Davis Polk in 1957, when the firm still required its men\u2014there were no women partners as yet\u2014to wear hats. A committed liberal,", + " he was one of the few members of his firm to oppose the war in Vietnam. He once considered leaving the practice to work for antiwar candidate George McGovern\u2019s 1972 presidential campaign. \u201cHe would stop by my office and say, \u2018Let\u2019s go commit lunch.\u2019 He had all sorts of wonderfully fictional phrases for noncriminal crimes, like \u2018mopery in the second degree,\u2019\u201d says M. Carr Ferguson, a colleague. \u201cI simply adored him.\u201d\n\nCarroll proved to be a brilliant pioneer in corporate law. He helped open the North Sea to oil exploration and invented a financial instrument known as the currency swap, now a $2 trillion-a-day market.", + " Carroll was modest about that achievement. When a book credited him with inventing the swaps, he penned a tongue-in-cheek letter explaining that, although he attended the London brainstorming sessions where the idea was hatched, he was merely \u201ca foreigner who attended most meetings principally for beer and free lunch.\u201d He named five others who he said deserved more credit.\n\nAround 1980, Carroll got a call from a client: Charles Kraus, the tax director at McDermott, a construction and engineering giant with a thriving business in building offshore oil rigs. Throughout the 1970s, high oil prices, helped by the Arab oil embargo and the revolution in Iran,", + " had kept its tugboat crews and welders busy from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia. McDermott was the biggest company in Louisiana\u2019s booming oil-services industry. It occupied half of a downtown skyscraper and, at its peak, employed more than 40,000 people around the world.\n\nMy name\u2019s Charlie. Here\u2019s my problem:\n\nOur subsidiary\n\nPays too much in bloody taxes.\n\nIt\u2019s dying fiscally.\n\nAs Kraus explained to Carroll, McDermott\u2019s profits had created a big tax problem. Most of the income had been earned abroad, and the parent company in New Orleans couldn\u2019t touch it without first paying U.S.", + " taxes on it\u2014at a rate of as much as 46 percent. The earnings were piling up in Treasury bonds offshore. When they came back, the total bill would be about $220 million.\n\nJohn, be a hero; cut our\n\ntax down to zero,\n\nBecause if your plan\u2019s not inspired,\n\nNext month we may all be fired!\n\nAfter months of kicking around ideas, Kraus and Carroll hit upon an elegant but untested solution: Simply flip the company structure, so its main foreign subsidiary, incorporated in Panama, becomes the parent. Just like that, all those offshore profits would slip out from under the U.S. corporate tax system.", + " Carroll nicknamed it the Panama Scoot. There was something screwy about the plan, like a daughter legally adopting her own mother, and the details were staggeringly complicated, involving share swaps, dividends, and debt guarantees. But Kraus and Carroll were convinced it would work.\n\nKraus, now 85, is a slight man who relishes the arcana of tax accounting. He once dreamt of becoming a concert pianist, and he used to spend his free time rehearsing Chopin\u2019s polonaises on his baby grand piano. During an interview in his pink-brick home in the Louisiana woods, he recalls using a different name for the novel deal he helped put together.", + " \u201cWe called it the Flip Flop,\u201d he says, laughing, his hands folded behind his head. \u201cThere was a loophole in the law, and we capitalized on it legitimately.\u201d\n\nKraus\u2019s boss, John Lynott, McDermott\u2019s chief financial officer at the time, says he sometimes puzzled over Carroll\u2019s motivations. \u201cIt was always an enigma to me,\u201d Lynott says. \u201cWe knew this guy was a Democrat, and yet he would take on the government in a New York minute over a tax issue. There was nothing liberal about his thinking as far as the tax code was concerned.\u201d\n\nJohn\u2019s really flipped this time.\n\nHe\u2019s surely lost his mind.\n\nIf we should do it,\n\nI know we shall rue it.\n\nWe\u2019ll pay interest,", + " penalties and fines.\n\nThe McDermott team knew the deal would face resistance. Shareholders needed to approve the transaction, requiring a public announcement and a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would inevitably forward the papers to the IRS.\n\nThen there was the U.S. Navy. McDermott was a major supplier of nuclear fuel and boilers for the fleet. When Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, caught wind of the plan, he was alarmed enough to summon Lynott and another executive to Washington. Lynott says he and his colleague spent half a day waiting outside Rickover\u2019s office until they realized the admiral was snubbing them and had left the building.", + " They flew back to New Orleans on their private jet without meeting Rickover. Eventually, the Navy set aside its concerns about Panama, Lynott says. \u201cThey were reassured there was nothing there but a post office box,\u201d he says. \u201cWe weren\u2019t moving anything.\u201d\n\nMcDermott disclosed the plan publicly on Oct. 28, 1982. The next day, the New Orleans Times-Picayune quoted the company\u2019s chairman, who assured the community that \u201cno changes in the operations and management of the company are planned, and the principal executive offices will remain in New Orleans.\u201d Shareholders had no objection, and by December,", + " the address change was official. Kraus hung a skull and crossbones in his office, a nod to Panama\u2019s piratical past.\n\nOnce the deal was announced, McDermott rushed to complete it as quickly as possible, according to Carr Ferguson, who was a federal tax prosecutor before he joined Davis Polk. They were hoping to reduce the chance the Treasury Department would learn about it and ask Congress to block it. As it was, no one heard from the Treasury until the following January, when Ferguson got a call from a top tax official he knew there.\n\n\u201cCarr, you can\u2019t do this,\u201d Ferguson remembers the official saying.\n\n\u201cThat was my first impression,\u201d Ferguson replied,", + " \u201cbut we worked at it pretty carefully, and we think we can.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou\u2019re going to have to prove that in court to me.\u201d\n\nMove down to Panama!\n\nThink of our painful chagrin:\n\nThe Feds will be cheerful,\n\nand we will be tearful\n\n\u2019Cause we\u2019ll all end up in the pen!\n\nThe IRS fought the case for seven years, giving up in 1989 only after a federal appeals court upheld a U.S Tax Court decision in the company\u2019s favor.\n\nIn 1984, Congress passed a law specifically designed to prevent more McDermott-type arrangements. But don\u2019t bet against the imagination of tax lawyers.", + " A decade later, a company in El Paso that made curling irons and hair dryers found a way to create a foreign parent in Bermuda without triggering the McDermott rule. More laws and regulations followed, in 1994, 2004, and 2009, but the deals just kept coming, each permutation more complicated than the last. Somewhere along the way, tax lawyers started calling them inversions, because they turn a company\u2019s corporate structure upside down.\n\nHowever helpful the Panama Scoot was for avoiding taxes, the new address couldn\u2019t protect McDermott from getting clobbered by an oil slump. Lower energy prices and an economic downturn led to a series of losses during the 1980s,", + " Kraus says. Later, the unit that supplied the Navy\u2019s nuclear fuel was engulfed by asbestos claims. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, McDermott moved its corporate headquarters to Houston. It closed its remaining office in downtown New Orleans last year.\n\nIn a way, Admiral Rickover\u2019s beef with McDermott got a second life in 2007, when Congress passed a law banning federal contracts for inverted companies. Eventually, McDermott was forced to spin off the unit that worked with the Navy to avoid losing all its contracts.\n\nKraus says he hasn\u2019t thought much about inversions since his retirement in 1989,", + " nor has he followed the debate in Washington this year. He remains proud of his work. When a congressional committee in the 1980s complained that the McDermott deal made a \u201cmockery\u201d of the tax code, Kraus says, he half-jokingly called it \u201cthe crowning achievement of my career.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe law is an unintelligible monstrosity, and it\u2019s Congress\u2019s fault,\u201d says Kraus, who still has a small Lucite trophy commemorating the Panama deal. He uses it as a paperweight.\n\nA few months after Carroll\u2019s victory over the IRS, he and his wife, Luceil,", + " threw the party at their apartment. A video survives of the moment when, to his surprise, his colleagues began performing Charlie\u2019s Lament, named for Kraus. A musically inclined lawyer in the tax department, William Weigel, wrote the libretto and recruited a professional tenor and soprano through his church choir. Carroll listened from an armchair, and at the finale he clapped and rose. Somebody called for a speech.\n\n\u201cI wrap myself in the American flag,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I say, without the slightest fear of successful contradiction\u2014blah, blah, blah, blah!\u201d\n\nCarroll retired later that year. He didn\u2019t play a role in the copycat deals that eventually followed McDermott,", + " nor did he seek any recognition. In a tax journal in 2007, a law professor referred to the McDermott deal\u2019s creator as \u201ca brilliant tax lawyer (I don\u2019t know who).\u201d\n\nOne of Carroll\u2019s two sons, Brian, recalls that his father, toward the end of his career, reflected on his role in making the tax system even more convoluted. \u201cLook, I did all these crazy things,\u201d Carroll told him. \u201cI would really like to see the tax code completely scrapped. The whole business of trying to define income and deductions is pure madness. And I\u2019ve got no one to thank except myself for creating that.\u201d\n\nCarroll died in 2009 at the age of 84.", + " Following his wishes, in lieu of a funeral there were parties with food and wine, including one for his many friends at Davis Polk\u2019s Manhattan headquarters. Amid the talk and laughter came the familiar strains, playing over and over again on a TV in the next room:\n\nThe Feds may be screaming\n\nBut we all are beaming\n\n\u2019Cause we\u2019ll never pay taxes no,\n\nNever pay taxes,\n\nNever pay taxes again!\n\nThis feature is part of a 2014 Pulitzer-Prize winning series for Explanatory Reporting. See the rest of the series here. ", + " Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ", + " {comment_count=null, correction_html=, keywords=[pulitzer prize, carol leonnig, secret service pulitzer prize, secret service washington post], web_headline=Washington Post\u2019s Carol Leonnig wins Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Secret Service lapses, deck=, site_service={in_the_news={in_the_news_usefeature=null, in_the_news_usebasepage=/in-the-news-forsections/, in_the_news_usesectionbar=true}, site={pagebuilder_path_for_native_apps=/news/style-blog/, site_url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style-blog/, site_keywords=Style, site_description=Style,", + " site_title=Style}, navigation={nav_title=Style Blog, display_in_top_strip=false, nav_display=false}, _admin={alias_ids=[/lifestyle/style]}, inactive=false, name=Style, story_list={story_list_content={}}, _id=/lifestyle/style, _comments_config={comments_config={includetabs=true, markersfeatured=featured_comment}}}, source=The Washington Post, taxonomy={keywords=[pulitzer prize, carol leonnig, secret service pulitzer prize, secret service washington post], categories=null, custom_taxonomy=null, tags=[]}, type=article, uuid=1b3af9e6-e76a-", + "11e4-9767-6276fc9b0ada, primary_slot={resize_base=https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/, gallery_caption=Winners of the 2015 Pulitzer Prizes include Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, for her work exposing Secret Service lapses. 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All the Light We Cannot See,\" by Anthony Doerr.\" data-buy=\"false\" data-credit=\"Scribner/AP\" data-title=\"Fiction\" data-max-width=\"450\" data-image=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2015/04/20/National-Enterprise/Images/Pulitzers-0c0c5-1741.jpg?env=A\" data-ratio=\"0.", + "658\">
The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe,\" by David I. Kertzer.\" data-buy=\"false\" data-credit=\"Random House/AP\" data-title=\"Biography\" data-max-width=\"795\" data-image=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2015/04/20/National-Enterprise/Images/Pulitzers-0d5b3.jpg?env=A\" data-ratio=\"0.", + "663\">
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History", + ",\" by Elizabeth Kolbert. \" data-buy=\"false\" data-credit=\"Henry Holt and Company/AP\" data-title=\"General Nonfiction\" data-max-width=\"1893\" data-image=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2015/04/20/National-Enterprise/Images/Pulitzers-04133-1742.jpg?env=A\" data-ratio=\"0.659\">
Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People,\" by Elizabeth A. Fenn. \" data-buy=\"false\" data-credit=\"Hill and Wang/AP\" data-title=\"History\"", + " data-max-width=\"1837\" data-image=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2015/04/20/National-Enterprise/Images/Pulitzers-0d39f.jpg?env=A\" data-ratio=\"0.667\">
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Washington Post\u2019s Carol Leonnig wins Pulitzer Prize
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Winners of the 2015 Pulitzer Prizes include Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig,", + " who won the prize for National Reporting for her work exposing Secret Service lapses. Here\u2019s a look at this year\u2019s winners.
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Winners of the 2015 Pulitzer Prizes include Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, for her work exposing Secret Service lapses. Here\u2019s a look at this year\u2019s winners.
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National Reporting Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig hugs Managing Editor Kevin Merida, left, as her editor Peter Wallsten, center, and Executive Editor Marty Baron, right, celebrate. \"It takes a very gutsy journalist to dig under an organization like the Secret Service,\" Baron said. Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post
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For reporter Carol Leonnig, patience, timing and some extraordinary effort paid handsome returns.

The Washington Post journalist spent months gaining the trust of normally reticent Secret Service agents to produce a series of bombshell stories last year about lapses in presidential security.", + " In the wake of her reporting, which shook the faith in what was commonly viewed as an elite and selfless agency, President Obama replaced more than half of the service\u2019s senior leadership, including its director.

On Monday, Leonnig, 49, was awarded journalism\u2019s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize, for her revelations about the Secret Service. She was recognized in the national reporting category in an announcement by Columbia University in New York, which administers the awards.

[Leonnig\u2019s Pulitzer-winning entry]

The New York Times won three Pulitzers, two of them for reporting on the Ebola crisis in Africa, and the Los Angeles Times was a double winner, collecting Pulitzers in criticism and feature writing. The New York Times staff was recognized in the international category for its Ebola stories and for the feature photography of a free\u00adlancer, Daniel Berehulak, who documented the epidemic in West Africa.", + " Times reporter Eric Lipton won in the investigative reporting category, which had a second winner, the Wall Street Journal staff. Lipton won for stories about lobbyists\u2019 influence over state attorneys general. The Journal\u2019s Pulitzer \u2014 its first since Rupert Murdoch\u2019s News Corp. took over the paper in 2007 \u2014 was about flaws in the Medicare system.

The Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on Monday for uncovering security lapses within the Secret Service.", + " Executive Editor Martin Baron, Leonnig and others celebrated with speeches in the newsroom. (The Washington Post)

The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., won the gold medal for public service, arguably the most prestigious of the 14 journalism categories, for a five-part series titled \u201cTill Death Do Us Part.\u201d The stories, which the Pulitzer judges said were \u201criveting,\u201d explored the state\u2019s lax enforcement and weak penalties for domestic abuse. It spurred state legislators to fast-track \u00adlegislation to overhaul domestic-violence laws.

", + "

[Full list of Pulitzer winners and finalists]

Leonnig\u2019s path to the Pulitzer began in early 2012 when she began reporting on the aftermath of a scandal involving 12 Secret Service agents.", + " The agents brought prostitutes to their hotel rooms in Cartagena, Colombia, while making security arrangements for Obama\u2019s visit to the city.

Leonnig turned up more than just embarrassment among the agents she contacted about the episode; several expressed deeper concerns about the Secret Service\u2019s ability to guard the president, his family and senior members of the government.

\u201cThey saw serious security risks,\u201d said Leonnig, a 15-year veteran of the newspaper. \u201cThere was a lot of distrust among the rank-and-file agents about the people who were running the agency.\u201d

", + "

So Leonnig began collecting names, developing contacts and gaining the trust of agents, who rarely interact with reporters and risk being fired for doing so. \u201cIt was like the [shampoo] commercial,\u201d Leonnig said. \u201cOne person told two friends [about her] who told two friends and so on.\u201d Eventually, she built \u201ca small town\u201d of inside sources.

Wary that her phone and \u00ade-mail contacts with agents could be unveiled, Leonnig and her sources began using code names to refer to officers and officials.", + " Leonnig\u2019s concern grew out of her reporting in 2013 on the National Security Agency\u2019s extensive surveillance programs; she was part of a team of Post reporters who won a Pulitzer for those revelations last year.

Her patience eventually produced a stack of full notebooks and a long list of story ideas. Leonnig and her editors were most intrigued by a tip about the Secret Service\u2019s fumbling response to an attack on the White House in November 2011.

Leonnig spent much of last summer piecing together details of the incident,", + " in which a gunman, Oscar R. Ortega-Hernandez, fired seven shots at the mansion, damaging parts of it but causing no injuries. Her investigation \u2014 in which she unearthed \u201ca treasure trove\u201d of official documents that prompted a late rewrite \u2014 revealed that the Secret Service had been slow to respond to the gunfire; one agent assumed it was merely the backfire from a construction vehicle and ordered others to stand down.

The story, published Sept. 27, also reported that it took the Secret Service four days to realize that shots had hit the White House.", + " The discovery was prompted by a housekeeper, who noticed broken glass and a chunk of concrete on the floor.

[Secret Service fumbled response after gunman hit White House residence in 2011", + "]

It was just the beginning of a series of rapid-fire scoops and important developments.

Two days later, Leonnig revealed that an armed man, Omar Gonzalez, had overpowered a Secret Service agent and made it deep inside the White House after jumping the perimeter fence on Sept. 19. The Secret Service had initially said that Gonzalez had been arrested just inside the front door.

[<", + "a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-fence-jumper-made-it-far-deeper-into-building-than-previously-known/2014/09/29/02efd53e-47ea-11e4-a046-120a8a855cca_story.html\" title=\"www.washingtonpost.com\">White House fence-jumper made it far deeper into building than previously known]

The next day, Leonnig and the Washington Examiner newspaper revealed another major security breach: An armed security guard with an arrest record was permitted to share an elevator with Obama during a presidential visit to Atlanta in mid-", + "September.

Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy subsequently testified that \u201ca lack of due diligence\u201d led to the incident and that the agency that day had \u201cfailed our procedures.\u201d Obama said later that he learned of the episode only from the newspaper accounts.

(An initial Post report that relied on sources in describing the security guard as a felon was later corrected. The correction was disclosed to the Pulitzer jurors.)

[<", + "a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/armed-former-convict-was-on-elevator-with-obama-in-atlanta/2014/09/30/76d7da24-48e3-11e4-891d-713f052086a0_story.html\" title=\"www.washingtonpost.com\">Armed contractor with arrest record was on elevator with Obama in Atlanta]

The stories raised serious questions about the agency\u2019s leadership and led to bipartisan criticism of it during a House hearing on Sept.", + " 30. A day later, Obama reversed his support for Secret Service Director Julia Pierson, prompting her resignation.

\u201cIt takes a gutsy journalist to dig beneath the surface of an organization like the Secret Service,\u201d said The Post\u2019s executive editor, Martin Baron. \u201cIt\u2019s anything but transparent. It deflects and stonewalls inquiries from the press. It closes ranks when challenged, determined to maintain its Hollywood image. But Carol documented startling weaknesses and failures at the agency that had gone unaddressed and undisclosed. Her work led to sweeping leadership changes at the agency and will translate into greater safety for the president and others protected by the Secret Service.\u201d

", + "

The Pulitzer capped a string of journalism honors for Leonnig, a native of Upper Marlboro in Prince George\u2019s County. She won the prestigious George Polk Award for her Secret Service reporting in February and was a finalist for the Selden Ring Award for investigative journalism the same month.

\u201cI feel a little strange being the centerpiece of [the Pulitzer] because it involved so many other journalists and involved so many risks by public servants who entrusted me with their confidence and their information,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause of them,", + " we were able to peel back the layers of this secretive agency and get the administration to focus on the very strong likelihood that the agency was not all it pretended to be and that posed serious risks for the president.\u201d

Leonnig hasn\u2019t heard from Obama, but that may change later this week. On Saturday, she\u2019ll accept an award from the White House Correspondents\u2019 Association at its annual dinner. The honor includes a private reception with the president beforehand.

Among the other journalism winners announced Monday:

", + "

\u25cf Los Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara was honored in the criticism category and Diana Marcum won in feature writing for stories about California\u2019s drought.

\u25cf The breaking news award went to the Seattle Times\u2019 staff for its digital account of a landslide that killed 43 people and for its follow-up reporting.

\u25cf Bloomberg News reporter Zachary R. Mider won the explanatory reporting prize for \u201ca painstaking, clear and entertaining explanation\u201d of how so many U.S.", + " corporations dodge taxes.

\u25cf Three reporters from the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., (Rob Kuznia, Rebecca Kimitch and Frank Suraci) shared the prize for local reporting for articles about corruption in a local school district.

\u25cf The St. Louis Post-Dispatch\u2019s photography staff won the breaking news photography award for its images of the events surrounding the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., following the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

\u25cf The commentary prize was awarded to Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle for columns about grand-jury abuses.

\u25cf The editorial cartooning winner was Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News.

\u25cf Kathleen Kingsbury of the Boston Globe won the editorial writing prize for her work about fast-food workers and income inequality.

, last_modified=1429613904, slug=media0421, site_service_lookup=/lifestyle/style, created_date_num=1429540320,", + " thumbnail={aspect_ratio=1.5011441647597255, featured={aspect_ratio=1.5011441647597255, credit_line=Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post, credit_organization=The Washington Post, raw_caption=WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 20: Portrait of Washington Post reporter Carol D. Leonnig, who was awarder the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on April 20, 2015 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post), credit_name=Ricky Carioti, width=3280, caption=Carol Leonnig. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post), credit=null,", + " url=https://img.washingtonpost.com/rw/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2015/04/20/Interactivity/Images/crop_358pulitzer21429560251.jpg, height=2185}, credit_line=Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post, credit_organization=The Washington Post, raw_caption=WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 20: Portrait of Washington Post reporter Carol D. Leonnig, who was awarder the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on April 20, 2015 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post), credit_name=Ricky Carioti,", + " width=3280, caption=Carol Leonnig. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post), credit=null, url=https://img.washingtonpost.com/rw/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2015/04/20/Interactivity/Images/crop_358pulitzer21429560251.jpg, height=2185}, tertiary_slot=null, meta_title=null, include_in_site_search=true, published_date_num=1429556640, comment_count_fuzzy=null, canonical_url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/washington-posts-carol-leonnig-wins-pulitzerprize-for-reporting-on-secret-service-lapses/", + "2015/04/20/1b3af9e6-e76a-11e4-9767-6276fc9b0ada_story.html, mobile_headline=Washington Post\u2019s Carol Leonnig wins Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Secret Service lapses, web_sked={datetime_updated=0, images=[], will_have_graphic=false, description=, videos=[], graphics=[], reported_datetime=0, will_have_video=false, killed=false, has_video=false, datetime=1429564320, stub_only=false, has_image=false, tbd=false, will_have_image=false, print_only=false, exclude=false,", + " has_gallery=false, galleries=[], will_have_gallery=false, has_graphic=false}, html_data={img_count=0, graf_count=37, char_count=9163}, tags=[], _service_=com.washingtonpost.webapps.pagebuilder.services.ArticleContentService, social_headline=Washington Post\u2019s Carol Leonnig wins Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Secret Service lapses, display_date=1429564320, meta={review_info={decibels=, phone_no=, website=, movie_runtime=, movie_contains=, price=none, operating_hours=, critic_ratings=, decibel_descriptor=, editor_picks=", + ", mpaa_rating=1}}, _id=http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/washington-posts-carol-leonnig-wins-pulitzerprize-for-reporting-on-secret-service-lapses/2015/04/20/1b3af9e6-e76a-11e4-9767-6276fc9b0ada_story.html, publication_start=null, redirect_url=null, primary_slot_as_full_width_html=
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Winners of the 2015 Pulitzer Prizes include Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig,", + " who won the prize for National Reporting for her work exposing Secret Service lapses. Here\u2019s a look at this year\u2019s winners.
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Winners of the 2015 Pulitzer Prizes include Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, for her work exposing Secret Service lapses. Here\u2019s a look at this year\u2019s winners.
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National Reporting Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig hugs Managing Editor Kevin Merida, left, as her editor Peter Wallsten, center, and Executive Editor Marty Baron, right, celebrate. \"It takes a very gutsy journalist to dig under an organization like the Secret Service,\" Baron said. Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post
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Winners of the 2015 Pulitzer Prizes include Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, for her work exposing Secret Service lapses. Here\u2019s a look at this year\u2019s winners.
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The Washington Post's Carol D.", + " Leonnig was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on Monday for uncovering security lapses within the Secret Service. Executive Editor Martin Baron, Leonnig and others celebrated with speeches in the newsroom. (The Washington Post)
, created_date=1429540320, publication_end=null, published_date=1429556640, commercial_node=/lifestyle/style, kicker={name=Style, url=/lifestyle/style}}\n" + ], + "length": 36042, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 98, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 Shares for two big corrections companies took a deep dive Thursday after a report that the Justice Department is moving away from using private prisons, with the eventual goal of no private prisons under its umbrella at all, CNBC reports. Prison companies GEO and Corrections Corporation of America saw more than 40% drops in their share prices after a memo issued by Deputy AG Sally Yates was reported by the Washington Post, with instructions for prison officials to not renew contracts with private operators or to \"substantially reduce\" what the contracts cover. The end goal: \"reducing\u2014and ultimately ending\u2014our use of privately operated prisons,\" upon which the federal Bureau of Prisons spent $639 million in fiscal 2014, per an Office of the Inspector General report issued this month. Yates' memo notes the 13 private prisons under the bureau's watch, holding about 12% of the bureau's total prison population, aren't as safe as those run by the feds, don't offer notable cost-savings, and don't have the \"same level of correctional services, programs, and resources\" as government-run facilities. An in-depth report by Mother Jones in its July/August issue by a journalist who went undercover to work in a private Louisiana prison highlighted some of those issues. The three private companies that run the contracts for the private prisons, which David Shapiro calls a \"public shame\" in the Chicago Sun-Times, are already expressing discontent with the IG's report, with the president of Management and Training Corporation writing in response that comparing private prisons to federally run ones is like \"comparing apples and oranges.\" (Bernie Sanders is against private prisons.)\n", + "docs": [ + "When most people think of the Justice Department, they are likely to imagine the most visible parts of our job \u2013 the law enforcement agents who investigate crimes or the lawyers who prosecute them. But the department\u2019s core responsibilities go beyond investigation and prosecution. Unlike most states, the federal government puts its law enforcement agents, criminal prosecutors, and correctional officers all in a single department. We handle every step from the start of an investigation to the end of a prison sentence. Our work to house and rehabilitate individuals incarcerated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons is an important part of our responsibility and operations, accounting for 25 percent of the department\u2019s budget every year.\n\nThe federal prison population increased by almost 800 percent between 1980 and 2013,", + " often at a far faster rate than the Bureau of Prisons could accommodate in their own facilities. In an effort to manage the rising prison population, about a decade ago, the bureau began contracting with privately operated correctional institutions to confine some federal inmates. By 2013, as both the federal prison population and the proportion of federal prisoners in private facilities reached their peak, the bureau was housing approximately 15 percent of its population, or nearly 30,000 inmates, in privately operated prisons.\n\n2013 was also the year that the Department of Justice launched its Smart on Crime Initiative after identifying reforms that would ensure more proportional sentences and effective use of federal resources.", + " Today, in part as a result of that initiative, we are experiencing declining numbers in our prison population. We now have approximately 195,000 inmates in bureau or private contract facilities down from a high in 2013 of approximately 220,000. This decline in the prison population means that we can better allocate our resources to ensure that inmates are in the safest facilities and receiving the best rehabilitative services \u2013 services that increase their chances of becoming contributing members of their communities when they return from prison.\n\nToday, I sent a memo to the Acting Director of the Bureau of Prisons directing that, as each private prison contract reaches the end of its term,", + " the bureau should either decline to renew that contract or substantially reduce its scope in a manner consistent with law and the overall decline of the bureau\u2019s inmate population. This is the first step in the process of reducing\u2014and ultimately ending\u2014our use of privately operated prisons. While an unexpected need may arise in the future, the goal of the Justice Department is to ensure consistency in safety, security and rehabilitation services by operating its own prison facilities.\n\nToday\u2019s memo reflects important steps that the bureau has already taken to reduce our reliance on private prisons, including a decision three weeks ago to end a private prison contract for approximately 1,200 beds. Taken together,", + " these steps will reduce the private prison population by more than half from its peak in 2013 and puts the Department of Justice on a path to ensure that all federal inmates are ultimately housed at bureau facilities. ", + "\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\"The DOJ plan notes that there are 13 private prisons run by companies like GEO and CXW. It does not impact state contracts, ICE contracts or US Marshall contracts,\" Meliker said in the note, which pointed out that GEO has 11 percent exposure to the federally contracted private prisons and CXW has 9 percent exposure.\n\n\n\nSunTrust Robinson Humphrey analysts also said in a Thursday note that the sell-off was \"overdone\" and that contracts with the DOJ will likely be reviewed individually over time, spreading out the risk of revenue loss. The firm has a \"neutral\" rating on CXW and a \"buy\" on GEO.\n\nTo be sure,", + " states' use of private prisons has been under protest.\n\n\n\nExposure to those state operations is declining. Corrections Corp said in a 10-K filing last year that state customer business constituted 42 percent of total revenue in 2015, down from 49 percent in 2013.\n\nThe news was initially reported by The Washington Post, which cited a memo from Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates instructing officials to either not renew private prison contracts or \"substantially reduce\" their scope.\n\nThe goal is to ultimately end the Justice Department's use of the privately operated prisons as they provide lower quality services and are less cost efficient, the report said.\n\nEnding federal use of private prisons is part of Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton's justice reform platform.", + " Looking for news you can trust?\n\nSubscribe to our free newsletters.\n\nChapter 1: \u201cInmates Run This Bitch\u201d\n\nHave you ever had a riot?\u201d I ask a recruiter from a prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).\n\n\u201cThe last riot we had was two years ago,\u201d he says over the phone.\n\n\u201cYeah, but that was with the Puerto Ricans!\u201d says a woman\u2019s voice, cutting in. \u201cWe got rid of them.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhen can you start?\u201d the man asks.\n\nI tell him I need to think it over.\n\nI take a breath. Am I really going to become a prison guard? Now that it might actually happen,", + " it feels scary and a bit extreme.\n\nI started applying for jobs in private prisons because I wanted to see the inner workings of an industry that holds 131,000 of the nation\u2019s 1.6 million prisoners. As a journalist, it\u2019s nearly impossible to get an unconstrained look inside our penal system. When prisons do let reporters in, it\u2019s usually for carefully managed tours and monitored interviews with inmates. Private prisons are especially secretive. Their records often aren\u2019t subject to public access laws; CCA has fought to defeat legislation that would make private prisons subject to the same disclosure rules as their public counterparts. And even if I could get uncensored information from private prison inmates,", + " how would I verify their claims? I keep coming back to this question: Is there any other way to see what really happens inside a private prison?\n\nCCA certainly seemed eager to give me a chance to join its team. Within two weeks of filling out its online application, using my real name and personal information, several CCA prisons contacted me, some multiple times.\n\nThey weren\u2019t interested in the details of my r\u00e9sum\u00e9. They didn\u2019t ask about my job history, my current employment with the Foundation for National Progress, the publisher of Mother Jones, or why someone who writes about criminal justice in California would want to move across the country to work in a prison.", + " They didn\u2019t even ask about the time I was arrested for shoplifting when I was 19.\n\nWhen I call Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, the HR lady who answers is chipper and has a smoky Southern voice. \u201cI should tell you upfront that the job only pays $9 an hour, but the prison is in the middle of a national forest. Do you like to hunt and fish?\u201d\n\n\u201cI like fishing.\u201d\n\n\u201cWell, there is plenty of fishing, and people around here like to hunt squirrels. You ever squirrel hunt?\u201d\n\n\u201cNo.\u201d\n\n\u201cWell, I think you\u2019ll like Louisiana. I know it\u2019s not a lot of money,", + " but they say you can go from a CO to a warden in just seven years! The CEO of the company started out as a CO\u201d\u2014a corrections officer.\n\nUltimately, I choose Winn. Not only does Louisiana have the highest incarceration rate in the world\u2014more than 800 prisoners per 100,000 residents\u2014but Winn is the oldest privately operated medium-security prison in the country.\n\nI phone HR and tell her I\u2019ll take the job.\n\n\u201cWell, poop can stick!\u201d she says.\n\nI pass the background check within 24 hours.\n\nSubscribe to our award-winning magazine today for just $12.\n\nTwo weeks later, in November 2014,", + " having grown a goatee, pulled the plugs from my earlobes, and bought a beat-up Dodge Ram pickup, I pull into Winnfield, a hardscrabble town of 4,600 people three hours north of Baton Rouge. I drive past the former Mexican restaurant that now serves drive-thru daiquiris to people heading home from work, and down a street of collapsed wooden houses, empty except for a tethered dog. About 38 percent of households here live below the poverty line; the median household income is $25,000. Residents are proud of the fact that three governors came from Winnfield. They are less proud that the last sheriff was locked up for dealing meth.\n\nThirteen miles away,", + " Winn Correctional Center lies in the middle of the Kisatchie National Forest, 600,000 acres of Southern yellow pines crosshatched with dirt roads. As I drive through the thick forest, the prison emerges from the fog. You might mistake the dull expanse of cement buildings and corrugated metal sheds for an oddly placed factory were it not for the office-park-style sign displaying CCA\u2019s corporate logo, with the head of a bald eagle inside the \u201cA.\u201d\n\nAt the entrance, a guard who looks about 60, a gun on her hip, asks me to turn off my truck, open the doors, and step out.", + " A tall, stern-faced man leads a German shepherd into the cab of my truck. My heart hammers. I tell the woman I\u2019m a new cadet, here to start my four weeks of training. She directs me to a building just outside the prison fence.\n\n\u201cHave a good one, baby,\u201d she says as I pull through the gate. I exhale.\n\nI park, find the classroom, and sit down with five other students.\n\n\u201cYou nervous?\u201d a 19-year-old black guy asks me. I\u2019ll call him Reynolds. (I\u2019ve changed the names and nicknames of the people I met in prison unless noted otherwise.)\n\n\u201cA little,\u201d I say.", + " \u201cYou?\u201d\n\nCCA RUNS 61 FACILITIES ACROSS THE UNITED STATES: These include 34 state prisons, 14 federal prisons, 9 immigration detention centers, and 4 jails.\n\nstate prisons, federal prisons, immigration detention centers, and jails. It owns 50 of these sites.\n\nof these sites. 38 hold men, 2 hold women, 20 hold both sexes, and 1 holds women and children.**\n\nhold men, hold women, hold both sexes, and holds women and children.** 17 are in Texas, 7 are in Tennessee, and 6 are in Arizona.\n\n\u201cNah,", + " I been around,\u201d he says. \u201cI seen killin\u2019. My uncle killed three people. My brother been in jail, and my cousin.\u201d He has scars on his arms. One, he says, is from a shootout in Baton Rouge. The other is from a street fight in Winnfield. He elbowed someone in the face, and the next thing he knew he got knifed from behind. \u201cIt was some gang shit.\u201d He says he just needs a job until he starts college in a few months. He has a baby to feed. He also wants to put speakers in his truck. They told him he could work on his days off,", + " so he\u2019ll probably come in every day. \u201cThat will be a fat paycheck.\u201d He puts his head down on the table and falls asleep.\n\nThe human resources director comes in and scolds Reynolds for napping. He perks up when she tells us that if we recruit a friend to work here, we\u2019ll get 500 bucks. She gives us an assortment of other tips: Don\u2019t eat the food given to inmates; don\u2019t have sex with them or you could be fined $10,000 or get 10 years at hard labor; try not to get sick because we don\u2019t get paid sick time. If we have friends or relatives incarcerated here,", + " we need to report it. She hands out fridge magnets with the number of a hotline to use if we feel suicidal or start fighting with our families. We get three counseling sessions for free.\n\nI studiously jot down notes as the HR director fires up a video of the company\u2019s CEO, Damon Hininger, who tells us what a great opportunity it is to be a corrections officer at CCA. Once a guard himself, he made $3.4 million in 2015, nearly 19 times the salary of the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. \u201cYou may be brand new to CCA,\u201d Hininger says, \u201cbut we need you.", + " We need your enthusiasm. We need your bright ideas. During the academy, I felt camaraderie. I felt a little anxiety too. That is completely normal. The other thing I felt was tremendous excitement.\u201d\n\nI look around the room. Not one person\u2014not the recent high school graduate, not the former Walmart manager, not the nurse, not the mother of twins who\u2019s come back to Winn after 10 years of McDonald\u2019s and a stint in the military\u2014looks excited.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t think this is for me,\u201d a postal worker says.\n\n\u201cDo not run!\u201d\n\nThe next day, I wake up at 6 a.m. in my apartment in the nearby town where I decided to live to minimize my chances of running into off-duty guards.", + " I feel a shaky, electric nervousness as I put a pen that doubles as an audio recorder into my shirt pocket.\n\nIn class that day, we learn about the use of force. A middle-aged black instructor I\u2019ll call Mr. Tucker comes into the classroom, his black fatigues tucked into shiny black boots. He\u2019s the head of Winn\u2019s Special Operations Response Team, or SORT, the prison\u2019s SWAT-like tactical unit. \u201cIf an inmate was to spit in your face, what would you do?\u201d he asks. Some cadets say they would write him up. One woman, who has worked here for 13 years and is doing her annual retraining,", + " says, \u201cI would want to hit him. Depending on where the camera is, he might would get hit.\u201d\n\nMr. Tucker pauses to see if anyone else has a response. \u201cIf your personality if somebody spit on you is to knock the fuck out of him, you gonna knock the fuck out of him,\u201d he says, pacing slowly. \u201cIf a inmate hit me, I\u2019m go\u2019 hit his ass right back. I don\u2019t care if the camera\u2019s rolling. If a inmate spit on me, he\u2019s gonna have a very bad day.\u201d Mr. Tucker says we should call for backup in any confrontation. \u201cIf a midget spit on you,", + " guess what? You still supposed to call for backup. You don\u2019t supposed to ever get into a one-on-one encounter with anybody. Period. Whether you can take him or not. Hell, if you got a problem with a midget, call me. I\u2019ll help you. Me and you can whup the hell out of him.\u201d\n\n\u201cIf a inmate hit me, I\u2019m go\u2019 hit his ass right back. I don\u2019t care if the camera\u2019s rolling.\u201d\n\nHe asks us what we should do if we see two inmates stabbing each other.\n\n\u201cI\u2019d probably call somebody,\u201d a cadet offers.\n\n\u201cI\u2019d sit there and holler \u2018stop,'\u201d says a veteran guard.\n\nMr.", + " Tucker points at her. \u201cDamn right. That\u2019s it. If they don\u2019t pay attention to you, hey, there ain\u2019t nothing else you can do.\u201d\n\nHe cups his hands around his mouth. \u201cStop fighting,\u201d he says to some invisible prisoners. \u201cI said, \u2018Stop fighting.'\u201d His voice is nonchalant. \u201cY\u2019all ain\u2019t go\u2019 to stop, huh?\u201d He makes like he\u2019s backing out of a door and slams it shut. \u201cLeave your ass in there!\u201d\n\n\u201cSomebody\u2019s go\u2019 win. Somebody\u2019s go\u2019 lose. They both might lose, but hey, did you do your job?", + " Hell yeah!\u201d The classroom erupts in laughter.\n\nWe could try to break up a fight if we wanted, he says, but since we won\u2019t have pepper spray or a nightstick, he wouldn\u2019t recommend it. \u201cWe are not going to pay you that much,\u201d he says emphatically. \u201cThe next raise you get is not going to be much more than the one you got last time. The only thing that\u2019s important to us is that we go home at the end of the day. Period. So if them fools want to cut each other, well, happy cutting.\u201d\n\nWhen we return from break, Mr. Tucker sets a tear gas launcher and canisters on the table.", + " \u201cOn any given day, they can take this facility,\u201d he says. \u201cAt chow time, there are 800 inmates and just two COs. But with just this class, we could take it back.\u201d He passes out sheets for us to sign, stating that we volunteer to be tear-gassed. If we do not sign, he says, our training is over, which means our jobs end right here. (When I later ask CCA if its staff members are required to be exposed to tear gas, spokesman Steven Owen says no.) \u201cAnybody have asthma?\u201d Mr. Tucker says. \u201cTwo people had asthma in the last class and I said,", + " \u2018Okay, well, I\u2019ma spray \u2019em anyway.\u2019 Can we spray an inmate? The answer is yes.\u201d\n\nFive of us walk outside and stand in a row, arms linked. Mr. Tucker tests the wind with a finger and drops a tear gas cartridge. A white cloud of gas washes over us. The object is to avoid panicking, staying in the same place until the gas dissipates. My throat is suddenly on fire and my eyes seal shut. I try desperately to breathe, but I can only choke. \u201cDo not run!\u201d Mr. Tucker shouts at a cadet who is stumbling off blindly. I double over.", + " I want to throw up. I hear a woman crying. My upper lip is thick with snot. When our breath starts coming back, the two women linked to me hug each other. I want to hug them too. The three of us laugh a little as tears keep pouring down our cheeks.\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t ever say thank you\u201d\n\nOur instructors advise us to carry a notebook to keep track of everything prisoners will ask us for. I keep one in my breast pocket and jet into the bathroom periodically to jot things down. They also encourage us to invest in a watch because when we document rule infractions it is important that we record the time precisely.", + " A few days into training, a wristwatch arrives in the mail. One of the little knobs on its side activates a recorder. On its face there is a tiny camera lens.\n\nOn the eighth day, we are pulled from CPR class and sent inside the compound to Elm\u2014one of five single-story brick buildings where the prison\u2019s roughly 1,500 inmates live. When we go through security, we are told to empty our pockets and remove our shoes and belts. This is intensely nerve-wracking: I send my watch, pen, employee ID, and pocket change through the X-ray machine. I walk through the metal detector and a CO runs a wand up and down my body and pats down my chest,", + " back, arms, and legs.\n\nThe other cadets and I gather at a barred gate and an officer, looking at us through thick glass, turns a switch that opens it slowly. We pass through, and after the gate closes behind us, another opens ahead. On the other side, the CCA logo is emblazoned on the wall along with the words \u201cRespect\u201d and \u201cIntegrity\u201d and a mural of two anchors inexplicably floating at sea. Another gate clangs open and our small group steps onto the main outdoor artery of the prison: \u201cthe walk.\u201d\n\nFrom above, the walk is shaped like a \u201cT.\u201d It is fenced in with chain-link and covered with corru\u00adgated steel.", + " Yellow lines divide the pavement into three lanes. Clustered and nervous, we cadets travel up the middle lane from the administration building as prisoners move down their designated side lanes. I greet inmates as they pass, trying hard to appear loose and unafraid. Some say good morning. Others stop in their tracks and make a point of looking the female cadets up and down.\n\nWe walk past the squat, dull buildings that house visitation, programming, the infirmary, and a church with a wrought-iron gate shaped into the words \u201cFreedom Chapel.\u201d Beyond it there is a mural of a fighter jet dropping a bomb into a mountain lake,", + " water blasting skyward, and a giant bald eagle soaring overhead, backgrounded by an American flag. At the top of the T we take a left, past the chow hall and the canteen, where inmates can buy snacks, toiletries, tobacco, music players, and batteries.\n\nThere are almost never more than two floor officers in a general population unit. That\u2019s one per 176 inmates.\n\nThe units sit along the top of the walk. Each is shaped like an \u201cX\u201d and connected to the main walk by its own short, covered walk. Every unit is named after a type of tree. Most are general population units,", + " where inmates mingle in dorm-style halls and can leave for programs and chow. Cypress is the high-security segregation unit, the only one where inmates are confined to cells.\n\nIn Dogwood, reserved for the best-behaved inmates, prisoners get special privileges like extra television time, and many work outside the unit in places like the metal shop, the garment factory, or the chow hall. Some \u201ctrusties\u201d even get to work in the front office, or beyond the fence washing employees\u2019 personal cars. Birch holds most of the elderly, infirm, and mentally ill inmates, though it doesn\u2019t offer any special services. Then there are Ash and Elm,", + " which inmates call \u201cthe projects.\u201d The more troublesome prisoners live here.\n\nWINN CORRECTIONAL CENTER Medium-security prison for inmates serving 50 years or less Inmate population: About 1,500\n\n75% black, 25% white or other\n\nblack, white or other Average inmate age: 36\n\nAverage sentence: 19 years\n\nAverage time served: 5.7 years\n\nDaily rate charged to state per inmate (2015): $34 INMATE OFFENSES Violent crimes: 55%\n\nDrug crimes: 19%\n\nProperty crimes: 13%\n\nOther: 13%\n\nWe enter Elm and walk onto an open,", + " shiny cement floor. The air is slightly sweet and musty, like the clothes of a heavy smoker. Elm can house up to 352 inmates. At the center is an enclosed octagonal control room called \u201cthe key.\u201d Inside, a \u201ckey officer,\u201d invariably a woman, watches the feeds of the unit\u2019s 27-odd surveillance cameras, keeps a log of significant occurrences, and writes passes that give inmates permission to go to locations outside the unit, like school or the gym. Also in the key is the office of the unit manager, the \u201cmini-warden\u201d of the unit.\n\nThe key stands in the middle of \u201cthe floor.\u201d Branching out from the floor are the four legs of the X;", + " two tiers run down the length of each leg. Separated from the floor by a locked gate, every tier is an open dormitory that houses up to 44 men, each with his own narrow bed, thin mattress, and metal locker.\n\nToward the front of each tier, there are two toilets, a trough-style urinal, and two sinks. There are two showers, open except for a three-foot wall separating them from the common area. Nearby are a microwave, a telephone, and a Jpay machine, where inmates pay to download songs onto their portable players and send short, monitored emails for about 30 cents each. Each tier also has a TV room,", + " which fills up every weekday at 12:30 p.m. for the prison\u2019s most popular show, The Young and the Restless.\n\nAt Winn, staff and inmates alike refer to guards as \u201cfree people.\u201d Like the prisoners, the majority of the COs at Winn are African American. More than half are women, many of them single moms. But in Ash and Elm, the floor officers\u2014who more than anyone else deal with the inmates face-to-face\u2014are exclusively men. Floor officers are both enforcers and a prisoner\u2019s first point of contact if he needs something. It is their job to conduct security checks every 30 minutes,", + " walking up and down each tier to make sure nothing is awry. Three times per 12-hour shift, all movement in the prison stops and the floor officers count the inmates. There are almost never more than two floor officers per general population unit. That\u2019s one per 176 inmates. (CCA later tells me that the Louisiana Department of Corrections, or DOC, considered the \u201cstaffing pattern\u201d at Winn \u201cappropriate.\u201d)\n\nIn Elm, a tall white CO named Christian is waiting for us with a leashed German shepherd. He tells the female cadets to go to the key and the male cadets to line up along the showers and toilets at the front of the tier.", + " We put on latex gloves. The inmates are sitting on their beds. Two ceiling fans turn slowly. The room is filled with fluorescent light. Almost every prisoner is black.\n\nA small group of inmates get up from their beds and file into the shower area. One, his body covered with tattoos, gets in the shower in front of me, pulls off his shirt and shorts, and hands them to me to inspect. \u201cDo a one-finger lift, turn around, bend, squat, cough,\u201d Christian orders. In one fluid motion, the man lifts his penis, opens his mouth, lifts his tongue, spins around with his ass facing me,", + " squats, and coughs. He hands me his sandals and shows me the soles of his feet. I hand him his clothes and he puts his shorts on, walks past me, and nods respectfully.\n\nLike a human assembly line, the inmates file in. \u201cBeyend, squawt, cough,\u201d Christian drawls. He tells one inmate to open his hand. The inmate uncurls his finger and reveals a SIM card. Christian takes it but does nothing.\n\nStaff and inmates alike refer to guards as \u201cfree people.\u201d More than half are women, many of them single moms.\n\nEventually, the TV room is full of prisoners.", + " A guard looks at them and smiles. \u201cTear \u2019em up!\u201d he says, gesturing down the tier. Each of us, women included, stops at a bed. Christian tells one cadet to \u201cshake down bed eight real good\u2014just because he pissed me off.\u201d He tells us to search everything. I follow the other guards\u2019 lead, opening bottles of toothpaste and lotion. Inside a container of Vaseline, I find a one-hitter pipe made out of a pen and ask Christian what to do with it. He takes it from me, mutters \u201ceh,\u201d and tosses it on the floor. I go through the mattress,", + " pillow, dirty socks, and underwear. I flip through photos of kids, and of women posing seductively. I move on to new lockers: ramen, chips, dentures, hygiene products, peanut butter, cocoa powder, cookies, candy, salt, moldy bread, a dirty coffee cup. I find the draft of a novel, dedicated to \u201call the hustlers, bastards, strugglers, and hoodlum childs who are chasing their dreams.\u201d\n\nOne instructor notices that I am carefully putting each object back where I found it and tells me to pull everything out of the lockers and leave it on the beds. I look down the tier and see mattresses lying on the floor,", + " papers and food dumped across beds. The middle of the floor is strewn with contraband: USB cables refashioned as phone chargers, tubs of butter, slices of cheese, and pills. I find some hamburger patties taken from the cafeteria. A guard tells me to throw them into the pile.\n\nInmates are glued up against the TV room window, watching a young white cadet named Miss Stirling pick through their stuff. She\u2019s pretty and petite, with long, jet-black hair. The attention makes her uncomfortable; she thinks the inmates are gross. Earlier this week, she said she would refuse to give an inmate CPR and won\u2019t try the cafeteria food because she doesn\u2019t want to \u201ceat AIDS.\u201d The more she is around prisoners,", + " though, the more I notice her grapple with an inner conflict. \u201cI don\u2019t want to treat everyone like a criminal because I\u2019ve done things myself,\u201d she says.\n\nMiss Stirling says she sometimes wonders if her baby\u2019s dad will end up here. She doesn\u2019t like doing chokehold escapes in class because they bring back memories of him. He cooked meth in their toolshed and once beat her so badly he dislocated her shoulder and knee. \u201cYou know that bone at the bottom of your neck? He pushed it up into my head,\u201d she says.\n\nSenior Reporter Shane Bauer can be reached by email at sbauer@motherjones.com.", + " Have a scoop for Mother Jones? Send it here.\n\nIf he ends up in this prison, another cadet assures her, \u201cwe could make his life hell.\u201d\n\nAs we shake down the tier, a prisoner comes out of the TV room to get a better look at Miss Stirling, and she yells at him to go back in. He does.\n\n\u201cThank you,\u201d she says.\n\n\u201cDid she just say thank you?\u201d Christian asks. A bunch of COs scoff.\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t ever say thank you,\u201d a woman CO tells her. \u201cThat takes the power away from it.\u201d\n\n\u201cAin\u2019t no order here\u201d\n\nMost of our training is uneventful.", + " Some days there are no more than two hours of classes, and then we have to sit and run the clock to 4:15 p.m. We pass the time discussing each other\u2019s lives. I try mostly to stay quiet, but when I slip into describing a backpacking trip I recently took in California, a cadet throws her arms in the air and shouts, \u201cWhy are you here?!\u201d I am careful to never lie, instead backing out with generalities like, \u201cI came here for work,\u201d or \u201cYou never know where life will take you,\u201d and no one pries further.\n\nFew of my fellow cadets have traveled farther than nearby Oklahoma.", + " They compare towns by debating the size and quality of their Walmarts. Most are young. They eat candy during break time, write their names on the whiteboard in cutesy lettering, and talk about different ways to get high.\n\nMiss Doucet, a stocky redheaded cadet in her late 50s, thinks that if kids were made to read the Bible in school, fewer would be in prison, but she also sticks pins in a voodoo doll to mete out vengeance. \u201cI swing both ways,\u201d she says. She lives in a camper with her daughter and grandkids. With this job, she\u2019s hoping to save up for a double-wide trailer.\n\nThe shoulders of a young cadet are slumping.", + " He says his check was for $577, after they took $121 in taxes.\n\nShe worked at the lumber mill in Winnfield for years, but worsening asthma put an end to that. She\u2019s been hospitalized several times this year and says she almost died once. \u201cThey don\u2019t even want me to bring this in,\u201d she whispers, leaning in, pulling her inhaler out of her pocket. \u201cI\u2019m not supposed to, but I do. They ain\u2019t takin\u2019 it away from me.\u201d She takes a long drag from her cigarette.\n\nMiss Doucet and others from the class ahead of mine go to the front office to get their paychecks for their first two weeks of work.", + " When they return, the shoulders of a young cadet are slumping. He says his check was for $577, after they took $121 in taxes.\n\n\u201cDang. That hurts,\u201d he says.\n\nMiss Doucet says they withheld $114 from her check.\n\n\u201cThey held less for you?!\u201d the young cadet says.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m may-ried!\u201d she says in a singsong voice. \u201cI got a chi-ild!\u201d\n\nOutwardly, Miss Doucet is jovial and cocky, but she is already making mental adjustments to her dreams. The double-wide trailer she imagines her grandkids spreading out in becomes a single-wide.", + " She figures she can get $5,000 for the RV.\n\nCCA Facilities\n\nAt the end of one morning of doing nothing, the training coordinator tells us we can go to the gym to watch inmates graduate from trade classes. Prisoners and their families are milling around with plates of cake and cups of fruit punch. An inmate offers a piece of red velvet to Miss Stirling.\n\nI stand around with Collinsworth, an 18-year-old cadet with a chubby white baby face hidden behind a brown beard and a wisp of bangs. Before CCA, Collinsworth worked at a Starbucks. When he came to Winnfield to help out with family,", + " this was the first job he could get. Once, Collinsworth was nearly kicked out of class after he jokingly threatened to stab Mr. Tucker with a plastic training knife. He\u2019s boasted to me about inmate management tactics he\u2019s learned from seasoned officers. \u201cYou just pit \u2019em against each other and that\u2019s the easiest way to get your job done,\u201d he tells me. He says one guard told him that inmates should tell troublemakers, \u201c\u2018I\u2019m gonna rape you if you try that shit again.\u2019 Or something; whatever it takes.\u201d\n\nAs Collinsworth and I stand around, inmates gather to look at our watches. One, wearing a cocked gray beanie,", + " asks to buy them. I refuse outright. Collinsworth dithers. \u201cHow old you is?\u201d the inmate asks him.\n\n\u201cYou never know,\u201d Collinsworth says.\n\n\u201cMan, all these fake-ass signals,\u201d the inmate says. \u201cThe best thing you could do is get to know people in the place.\u201d\n\n\u201cI understand it\u2019s your home,\u201d Collinsworth says. \u201cBut I\u2019m at work right now.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s your home for 12 hours a day! You trippin\u2019. You \u2019bout to do half my time with me. You straight with that?\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s probably true.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt ain\u2019t no \u2018probably true.\u2019 If you go\u2019 be at this bitch,", + " you go\u2019 do 12 hours a day.\u201d He tells Collinsworth not to bother writing up inmates for infractions: \u201cThey ain\u2019t payin\u2019 you enough for that.\u201d Seeming torn between whether to impress me or the inmate, Collinsworth says he will only write up serious offenses, like hiding drugs.\n\n\u201cDrugs?! Don\u2019t worry \u2019bout the drugs.\u201d The inmate says he was caught recently with two ounces of \u201cmojo,\u201d or synthetic marijuana, which is the drug of choice at Winn. The inmate says guards turn a blind eye to it. They \u201cain\u2019t trippin\u2019 on that shit,\u201d he says.", + " \u201cI\u2019m telling you, it ain\u2019t that type of camp. You can\u2019t come change things by yourself. You might as well go with the flow. Get this free-ass, easy-ass money, and go home.\u201d\n\n\u201cI\u2019m just here to do my job and take care of my family,\u201d Collinsworth says. \u201cI\u2019m not gonna bring stuff in \u2018cuz even if I don\u2019t get caught, there\u2019s always the chance that I will.\u201d\n\n\u201cThey ain\u2019t got shit for us here. What you think gonna happen when a man got nuttin\u2019 to do?\n\n\u201cNah. Ain\u2019t no chance,\u201d the inmate says.", + " \u201cI ain\u2019t never heard of nobody movin\u2019 good and low-key gettin\u2019 caught. Nah. I know a dude still rolling. He been doin\u2019 it six years.\u201d He looks at Collinsworth. \u201cEasy.\u201d\n\nThe inmates\u2019 families file out the side entrance. A couple of minutes after the last visitors leave, the coach shouts, \u201cAll inmates on the bleachers!\u201d A prisoner tosses his graduation certificate dramatically into the trash. Another lifts the podium over his head and runs with it across the gym. The coach shouts, exasperated, as prisoners scramble around.\n\n\u201cYou see this chaos?\u201d the inmate in the beanie says to Collinsworth.", + " \u201cIf you\u2019d been to other camps, you\u2019d see the order they got. Ain\u2019t no order here. Inmates run this bitch, son.\u201d\n\nA week later, Mr. Tucker tells us to come in early to do shakedowns. The sky is barely lit as I stand on the walk at 6:30 with the other cadets. Collinsworth tells us another prisoner offered to buy his watch. He said he\u2019d sell it for $600. The inmate declined.\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t sell it to him anyway,\u201d Miss Stirling admonishes him. \u201cYou might get $600, but if they find out, you ain\u2019t go\u2019 get no more paychecks.\u201d\n\n\u201cNah,", + " I wouldn\u2019t actually do it. I just said $600 because I know they don\u2019t got $600 to give me.\u201d\n\n\u201cShit,\u201d a heavyset black cadet named Willis says. He\u2019s our main authority on prison life. He says he served seven and a half years in the Texas State Penitentiary; he won\u2019t say what for. (CCA hires former felons whom it deems not to be a security risk; it says all Winn guards\u2019 background checks were also reviewed by the DOC.) \u201cDudes was showing me pictures,\u201d says Willis. \u201cThey got money in here. One dude in here, don\u2019t say nothin\u2019, but he got like six to eight thousand dollars.", + " They got it on cards. Little money cards and shit.\u201d\n\nCollinsworth jumps up and down. \u201cDude, I\u2019ma find me one of them damn cards! Hell yeah. And I will not report it.\u201d\n\nOfficially, inmates are only allowed to keep money in special prison-operated accounts that can be used at the canteen. In these accounts, prisoners with jobs receive their wages, which may be as little as 2 cents an hour for a dishwasher and as much as 20 cents for a sewing-machine operator at Winn\u2019s garment factory. Their families can also deposit money in the accounts.\n\nThe prepaid cash cards Willis is referring to are called Green Dots,", + " and they are the currency of the illicit prison economy. Connections on the outside buy them online, then pass on the account numbers in encoded messages through the mail or during visits. Inmates with contraband cellphones can do all these transactions themselves, buying the cards and handing out strips of paper as payments for drugs or phones or whatever else.\n\nMiss Stirling divulges that an inmate gave her the digits of a money card as a Christmas gift. \u201cI\u2019m like, damn! I need a new MK watch. I need a new purse. I need some new jeans.\u201d\n\n\u201cThere was this one dude in Dogwood,\u201d she continues. \u201cHe came up to the bars and showed me a stack of hundred-dollar bills folded up,", + " and it was like this\u2014\u201d She makes like she\u2019s holding a wad of cash four inches thick. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018I\u2019m not go\u2019 say anything.'\u201d\n\n\u201cDude! I\u2019ma shake him the fuck down!\u201d Collinsworth says. \u201cI don\u2019t care if he\u2019s cool.\u201d\n\n\u201cHe had a phone,\u201d Miss Stirling says, \u201cand he\u2019s like, \u2018I don\u2019t have the time of day to hide it. I just keep it in the open. I really don\u2019t give a fuck.'\u201d\n\nMr. Tucker tells us to follow him. We shake down tiers all morning. By the time we finish at 11,", + " everyone is exhausted. \u201cI\u2019m not mad we had to do shakedowns. I\u2019m just mad we didn\u2019t find anything,\u201d Collinsworth says. Christian pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket and reads off a string of numbers in a show-offy way. \u201cA Green Dot,\u201d he says. Christian hands the slip of paper to one of the cadets, a middle-aged white woman. \u201cYou can have this one,\u201d he says. \u201cI have plenty already.\u201d She smiles coyly.\n\n\u201cWe are going to win this unit back\u201d\n\n\u201cWelcome to the hellhole,\u201d a female CO greeted me the first time I visited the segregation unit.", + " A few days later I\u2019m back at Cypress with Collinsworth and Reynolds to shadow some guards. The metal door clicks open and we enter to a cacophony of shouting and pounding on metal. An alarm is sounding and the air smells strongly of smoke.\n\nOn one wall is a mural of a prison nestled among dark mountains and shrouded in storm clouds, lightning striking the guard towers and an enormous, screeching bald eagle descending with a giant pair of handcuffs in its talons. Toward the end of a long hall of cells, an officer in a black SWAT-style uniform stands ready with a pepper-ball gun. Another man in black is pulling burnt parts of a mattress out of a cell.", + " Cypress can hold up to 200 inmates; most of the eight-by-eight-foot cells have two prisoners in them. The cells look like tombs; men lie in their bunks, wrapped in blankets, staring at the walls. Many are lit only by the light from the hallway. In one, an inmate is washing his clothes in his toilet.\n\n\u201cHow are you doing?\u201d says a smiling white man dressed business casual. He grips my hand. \u201cThank you for being here.\u201d Assistant Warden Parker is new to CCA, but he was once the associate warden of a federal prison. \u201cI know it seems crazy back here now,", + " but you\u2019ll learn the ropes,\u201d he assures me. \u201cWe are going to win this unit back. It\u2019s not going to happen in an hour. It\u2019s gonna take time, but it will happen.\u201d Apparently the segregation unit has been in a state of upheaval for a while, so corporate headquarters has sent in SORT officers from out of state to bring it back under control. SORT teams are trained to suppress riots, rescue hostages, extract inmates from their cells, and neutralize violent prisoners. They deploy an array of \u201cless lethal\u201d weapons like plastic buckshot, electrified shields, and chili-pepper-filled projectiles that burst on contact.\n\nI get a whiff of feces that quickly becomes overpowering.", + " On one of the tiers, a brown liquid oozes out of a bottle on the floor. Food, wads of paper, and garbage are all over the ground. I spot a Coke can, charred black, with a piece of cloth sticking out of it like a fuse. \u201cI use my political voice!\u201d an inmate shouts. \u201cI stand up for my rights. Hahaha! Ain\u2019t nowhere like this camp. Shit, y\u2019all\u2019s disorganized as fuck up in here.\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s why we are here,\u201d a SORT member says. \u201cWe are going to change all that.\u201d\n\nThe cells look like tombs.", + " Men lie in their bunks, wrapped in blankets, staring at the walls.\n\n\u201cY\u2019all can\u2019t change shit,\u201d the prisoner yells back. \u201cThey ain\u2019t got shit for us here. We ain\u2019t got no jobs. No rec time. We just sit in our cells all day. What you think gonna happen when a man got nuttin\u2019 to do? That\u2019s why we throw shit out on the tier. What else are we going to do? You know how we get these officers to respect us? We throw piss on \u2019em. That\u2019s the only way. Either that or throw them to the floor. Then they respect us.\u201d\n\nI ask one of the regular white-shirted COs what an average day in seg looks like.", + " \u201cTo be honest with you, normally we just sit here at this table all day long,\u201d he tells me. They are supposed to walk up and down the eight tiers every 30 minutes to check on the inmates, but he says they never do that. (CCA says it had no knowledge of guards at Winn skipping security checks before I inquired about it.)\n\nCollinsworth is walking around with a big smile on his face. He\u2019s learning how to take inmates out of their cells for disciplinary court, which is inside Cypress. He\u2019s supposed to cuff them through the slot in the bars, then tell the CO at the end of the tier to open the gate remotely.", + " \u201cFuck nah, I ain\u2019t coming out of this cell!\u201d an inmate shouts at him. \u201cYou go\u2019 have to get SORT to bring me up out of here. That\u2019s how we do early in the morning. I\u2019ll fuck y\u2019all up.\u201d The prisoner climbs up on the bars and pounds on the metal above the cell door. The sound explodes down the cement hallway.\n\nCollinsworth and the CO he is shadowing move another inmate from his cell. The inmate tries to walk ahead as the CO holds him. \u201cIf that motherfucker starts pulling away from me like that again, I\u2019m gonna make him eat concrete,\u201d the CO says to Collinsworth.\n\n\u201cI kind of hope he does mess around again,\u201d Collinsworth says,", + " beaming. \u201cThat would be fun!\u201d\n\nI take a few inmates out of their cells, too, walking each one a hundred feet or so to disciplinary court with my hand around one of his elbows. One pulls against my grip. \u201cWhy you pulling on me, man?\u201d he shouts, spinning around to stand face-to-face with me. A SORT officer rushes over and grabs him. My heart races.\n\nMother Jones is a nonprofit. Your support allows us to go where others in the media do not: Make a tax-deductible monthly or one-time gift.\n\nOne of the white-shirted officers takes me aside. \u201cHey, don\u2019t let these guys push you around,\u201d he says.", + " \u201cIf he is pulling away from you, you tell him, \u2018Stop resisting.\u2019 If he doesn\u2019t, you stop. If he keeps going, we are authorized to knee him in the back of the leg and drop him to the concrete.\u201d\n\nInmates shout at me as I walk back down the tier. \u201cHe has a little twist in his walk. I like them holes in your ears, CO. Come in here with me. Give me that booty!\u201d\n\nAt lunchtime, Collinsworth, Reynolds, and I go back to the training room. \u201cI love it here,\u201d Collinsworth says dreamily. \u201cIt\u2019s like a community.\u201d\n\nMother Jones is a nonprofit.", + " Your support allows us to go where others in the media do not: Make a tax-deductible donation today.\n\nChapter 2: Prison Experiments\n\nPeople say a lot of negative things about CCA,\u201d the head of training, Miss Blanchard, tells us. \u201cThat we\u2019ll hire anybody. That we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Which is not really true, but if you come here and you breathing and you got a valid driver\u2019s license and you willing to work, then we\u2019re willing to hire you.\u201d She warns us repeatedly, however, that to become corrections officers, we\u2019ll need to pass a test at the end of our four weeks of training.", + " We will need to know the name of the CEO, the names of the company\u2019s founders, and their reason for establishing the first private prison more than 30 years ago. (Correct answer: \u201cto alleviate the overcrowding in the world market.\u201d)\n\nTo prepare us, Miss Blanchard shows a video in which CCA founders T. Don Hutto and Thomas Beasley playfully tell their company\u2019s origin story. In 1983, they recount, they won \u201cthe first contract ever to design, build, finance, and operate a secure correctional facility in the world.\u201d The Immigration and Naturalization Service gave them just 90 days to do it.", + " Hutto recalls how the pair quickly converted a Houston motel into a detention center: \u201cWe opened the facility on Super Bowl Sunday the end of that January. So about 10 o\u2019clock that night we start receiving inmates. I actually took their pictures and fingerprinted them. Several other people walked them to their \u2018rooms,\u2019 if you will, and we got our first day\u2019s pay for 87 undocumented aliens.\u201d Both men chuckle.\n\nThere is much about the history of CCA the video does not teach. The idea of privatizing prisons originated in the early 1980s with Beasley and fellow businessman Doctor Robert Crants. The two had no experience in corrections,", + " so they recruited Hutto, who had been the head of Virginia\u2019s and Arkansas\u2019 prisons. In a 1978 ruling, the Supreme Court had found that a succession of Arkansas prison administrations, including Hutto\u2019s, \u201ctried to operate their prisons at a profit.\u201d Guards on horseback herded the inmates, who sometimes did not have shoes, to the fields. The year after Hutto joined CCA, he became the head of the American Correctional Association, the largest prison association in the world.\n\nTo Beasley, the former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, the business of private prisons was simple: \u201cYou just sell it like you were selling cars,", + " or real estate, or hamburgers,\u201d he told Inc. magazine in 1988. Beasley and Crants ran the business a lot like a hotel chain, charging the government a daily rate for each inmate. Early investors included Sodexho-Marriott and the venture capitalist Jack Massey, who helped build Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wendy\u2019s, and the Hospital Corporation of America.\n\nThe 1980s were a good time to get into the incarceration business. The prison population was skyrocketing, the drug war was heating up, the length of sentences was increasing, and states were starting to mandate that prisoners serve at least 85 percent of their terms.", + " Between 1980 and 1990, state spending on prisons quadrupled, but it wasn\u2019t enough. Prisons in many states were filled beyond capacity. When a federal court declared in 1985 that Tennessee\u2019s overcrowded prisons violated the Eighth Amendment\u2019s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, CCA made an audacious proposal to take over the state\u2019s entire prison system. The bid was unsuccessful, but it planted an idea in the minds of politicians across the country: They could outsource prison management and save money in the process. Privatization also gave states a way to quickly expand their prison systems without taking on new debt.", + " In the perfect marriage of fiscal and tough-on-crime conservatism, the companies would fund and construct new lockups while the courts would keep them full.\n\nPrivate and public prison populations, 1990-2014\n\nWhen CCA shares appeared on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1986, the company was operating two juvenile detention centers and two immigrant detention centers. Today, it runs more than 60 facilities, from state prisons and jails to federal immigration detention centers. All together, CCA houses at least 66,000 inmates at any given time. Its main competitor, the GEO Group, holds more than 70,000 inmates in the United States.", + " Currently, private prisons oversee about 8 percent of the country\u2019s total prison population.\n\nWhatever taxpayer money CCA receives has to cover the cost of housing, feeding, and rehabilitating inmates. While I work at Winn, CCA receives about $34 per inmate per day. In comparison, the average daily cost per inmate at the state\u2019s publicly run prisons is about $52. Some states pay CCA as much as $80 per prisoner per day. In 2015, CCA reported $1.9 billion in revenue; it made more than $221 million in net income\u2014more than $3,300 for each prisoner in its care.", + " CCA and other prison companies have written \u201coccupancy guarantees\u201d into their contracts, requiring states to pay a fee if they cannot provide a certain number of inmates. Two-thirds of the private-prison contracts recently reviewed by the anti-privatization group In the Public Interest had these prisoner quotas. Under CCA\u2019s contract, Winn was guaranteed to be 96 percent full.\n\n\u201cIf you come here and you breathing and you got a valid driver\u2019s license and you willing to work, then we\u2019re willing to hire you.\u201d\n\nThe main argument in favor of private prisons\u2014that they save taxpayers money\u2014remains controversial. One study estimated that private prisons cost 15 percent less than public ones;", + " another found that public prisons were 14 percent cheaper. After reviewing these competing claims, researchers concluded that the savings \u201cappear minimal.\u201d CCA directed me to a 2013 report\u2014funded in part by the company and GEO\u2014that claimed private prisons could save states as much as 59 percent over public prisons without sacrificing quality.\n\nPrivate prisons\u2019 cost savings are \u201cmodest,\u201d according to one Justice Department study, and are achieved mostly through \u201cmoderate reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.\u201d Wages and benefits account for 59 percent of CCA\u2019s operating expenses. When I start at Winn, nonranking guards make $9 an hour,", + " no matter how long they\u2019ve worked there. The starting pay for guards at public state prisons comes out to $12.50 an hour. CCA told me that it \u201cset[s] salaries based on the prevailing wages in local markets,\u201d adding that \u201cthe wages we provided in Winn Parish were competitive for that area.\u201d\n\nBased on data from Louisiana\u2019s budget office, the cost per prisoner at Winn, adjusted for inflation, dropped nearly 20 percent between the late \u201990s and 2014. The pressure to squeeze the most out of every penny at Winn seems evident not only in our paychecks, but in decisions that keep staffing and staff-intensive programming for inmates at the barest of levels.", + " When I asked CCA about the frequent criticism I heard from both staff and inmates about its relentless focus on the bottom line, its spokesman dismissed the assertion as \u201ca cookie-cutter complaint,\u201d adding that it would be false \u201cto claim that CCA prioritizes its own economic gain over the needs of its customers\u201d or the safety of its inmates.\n\nThe escape\n\nTwo weeks after I start training, Chase Cortez (his real name) decides he has had enough of Winn. It\u2019s been nearly three years since he was locked up for theft, and he has only three months to go. But in the middle of a cool, sunny December day,", + " he climbs onto the roof of Birch unit. He lies down and waits for the patrol vehicle to pass along the perimeter. He is in view of the guard towers, but they\u2019ve been unmanned since at least 2010. Now, a single CO watches the video feeds from at least 30 cameras.\n\nCortez sees the patrol van pass, jumps down from the back side of the building, climbs the razor-wire perimeter fence, and then makes a run for the forest. He fumbles through the dense foliage until he spots a white pickup truck left by a hunter. Lucky for him, it is unlocked, with the key in the ignition.\n\nIn the control room,", + " an alarm sounds, indicating that someone has touched the outer fence, a possible sign of a perimeter breach. The officer reaches over, switches the alarm off, and goes back to whatever she was doing. She notices nothing on the video screen, and she does not review the footage. Hours pass before the staff realizes someone is missing. Some guards tell me it was an inmate who finally brought the escape to their attention. Cortez is caught that evening after the sheriff chases him and he crashes the truck into a fence.\n\nThe prison is on lockdown. Staff are worried CCA is going to lose its contract.\n\nWhen I come in the next morning,", + " the prison is on lockdown. Staff are worried CCA is going to lose its contract with Louisiana. \u201cWe were already in the red, and this just added to it,\u201d the assistant training director tells me. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of tension right now.\u201d\n\nCCA said nothing publicly about the escape; I heard about it from guards who had investigated the incident or been briefed by the warden. (The company later told me it conducted a \u201cfull review\u201d of the incident and fired a staff member \u201cfor lack of proper response to the alarm.\u201d When I asked CCA about its decision to remove guards from Winn\u2019s watchtowers, its spokesman replied that \u201cnewer technologies\u2026are making guard towers largely obsolete.\u201d)\n\nLater that day,", + " Reynolds and I bring food to Cypress, the segregation unit. It is dinnertime, but inmates haven\u2019t had lunch yet. A naked man is shouting frantically for food, mercilessly slapping the plexiglass at the front of his cell. In the cell next to him, a small, wiry man is squatting on the floor in his underwear. His arms and face are scraped with little cuts. A guard tells me to watch him.\n\nIt is Cortez. I offer him a packet of Kool-Aid in a foam cup. He says thank you, then asks if I will put water in it. There is no water in his cell.\n\nWhen inmates are written up for breaking the rules,", + " they are sent to inmate court, which is held in a room in the corner of Cypress unit. One day, our class files into the small room to watch the hearings. Miss Lawson, the assistant chief of security, is acting as the judge, sitting at a desk in front of a mural of the scales of justice. \u201cEven though we treat every inmate like they are guilty until proven innocent, they are\u2026?\u201d She pauses for someone to fill in the answer.\n\n\u201cInnocent?\u201d a cadet offers.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s right. Innocent until proven guilty.\u201d\n\nThis is not a court of law, although it issues punishments for felonies such as assault and attempted murder.", + " An inmate who stabs another may end up facing new criminal charges. He may be transferred, yet prisoners and guards say inmates who stab others typically are not shipped to a higher-security prison. The consequences for less serious offenses are usually stints in seg or a loss of \u201cgood time,\u201d sentence reduction for good behavior. According to the DOC, Winn inmates charged with serious rule violations are found guilty at least 96 percent of the time.\n\n\u201cInmate counsel, has your defendant appeared before the court?\u201d Miss Lawson asks a prisoner standing at the podium.\n\n\u201cNo, ma\u2019am, he has not,\u201d he replies. The inmate counsel represents other inmates in the internal disciplinary process.", + " Every year, he is taken to a state-run prison for intensive training. Miss Lawson later tells me that inmate counsel never really influences her decisions.\n\nFor removing a broom from a closet at the wrong time, this inmate will stay in prison an extra 30 days.\n\nThe absent inmate is accused of coming too close to the main entrance. \u201cWould the counsel like to offer a defense?\u201d\n\n\u201cNo, ma\u2019am.\u201d\n\n\u201cHow does he plead?\u201d\n\n\u201cNot guilty.\u201d\n\n\u201cMr. Trahan is found guilty.\u201d The entire \u201ctrial\u201d lasts less than two minutes.\n\nThe next defendant is called.\n\nHe is being considered for release from segregation. \u201cDo you know your Bible?\u201d Miss Lawson asks.\n\n\u201cYes,", + " ma\u2019am.\u201d\n\n\u201cDo you remember in the Gospel of John when the adulteress was brought before Jesus? What did he say?\u201d\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t remember that, ma\u2019am.\u201d\n\n\u201cHe says, \u2018Sin no more.'\u201d She points for him to leave the room.\n\nThe next inmate, an orderly in Cypress, enters. He is charged with being in an unauthorized area because he took a broom to sweep the tier during rec time, which is not the authorized time to sweep the tier. He starts to explain that a CO gave him permission. Miss Lawson cuts him off. \u201cHow would you like to plead?\u201d\n\n\u201cGuilty, I guess.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou are found guilty and sentenced to 30 days\u2019 loss of good time.\u201d\n\n\u201cMan!", + " Y\u2019all\u2014this is fucked up, man. Y\u2019all gonna take my good time!?\u201d He runs out of the room. \u201cThey done took my good time!\u201d he screams in the hall. \u201cThey took my good time! Fuck them!\u201d For removing a broom from a closet at the wrong time, this inmate will stay in prison an extra 30 days, for which CCA will be paid more than $1,000.\n\nTrue colors\n\nOne day in class we take a personality test called True Colors that\u2019s supposed to help CCA decide how to place us. Impulsive \u201corange\u201d people can be useful in hostage negotiations because they don\u2019t waste time deliberating.", + " Rule-oriented \u201cgold\u201d people are chosen for the daily management of inmates. The majority of the staff, Miss Blanchard says, are gold\u2014dutiful, punctual people who value rules. My results show that green is my dominant color (analytical, curious) and orange is my secondary (free and spontaneous). Green is a rare personality type at Winn. Miss Blanchard doesn\u2019t offer any examples of how greens can be useful in a prison.\n\nThe company that markets the test claims that people who retake it get the same results 94 percent of the time. But Miss Blanchard says that after working here awhile, people often find their colors have shifted.", + " Gold traits tend to become more dominant.\n\nStudies have shown that personalities can change dramatically when people find themselves in prison environments. In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted the now-famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which he randomly assigned college students to the roles of prisoners and guards in a makeshift basement \u201cprison.\u201d The experiment was intended to study how people respond to authority, but it quickly became clear that some of the most profound changes were happening to the guards. Some became sadistic, forcing the prisoners to sleep on concrete, sing and dance, defecate into buckets, and strip naked. The situation became so extreme that the two-week study was cut short after just six days.", + " When it was over, many \u201cguards\u201d were ashamed at what they had done and some \u201cprisoners\u201d were traumatized for years. \u201cWe all want to believe in our inner power, our sense of personal agency, to resist external situational forces of the kinds operating in this Stanford Prison Experiment,\u201d Zimbardo reflected. \u201cFor many, that belief of personal power to resist powerful situational and systemic forces is little more than a reassuring illusion of invulnerability.\u201d\n\nPersonalities can change dramatically when people find themselves in prison environments.\n\nThe question the study posed still lingers: Are the soldiers of Abu Ghraib, or even Auschwitz guards and ISIS hostage-takers,", + " inherently different from you and me? We take comfort in the notion of an unbridgeable gulf between good and evil, but maybe we should understand, as Zimbardo\u2019s work suggested, that evil is incremental\u2014something we are all capable of, given the right circumstances.\n\nOne day during our third week of training I am assigned to work in the chow hall. My job is to tell the inmates where to sit, filling up one row of tables at a time. I don\u2019t understand why we do this. \u201cWhen you fill up this side, start clearing them out,\u201d the captain tells me. \u201cThey get 10 minutes to eat.\u201d CCA policy is 20 minutes.", + " We just learned that in class.\n\nInmates file through the chow line and I point them to their tables. One man sits at the table next to the one I directed him to. \u201cRight here,\u201d I say, pointing to the table again. He doesn\u2019t move. The supervisor is watching. Hundreds of inmates can see me.\n\n\u201cHey. Move back to this table.\u201d\n\n\u201cHell nah,\u201d he says. \u201cI ain\u2019t movin\u2019.\u201d\n\n\u201cYes, you are,\u201d I say. \u201cMove.\u201d He doesn\u2019t.\n\nI get the muscle-bound captain, who comes and tells the inmate to do what I say. The inmate gets up and sits at a third table.", + " He\u2019s playing with me. \u201cI told you to move to that table,\u201d I say sternly.\n\n\u201cMan, the fuck is this?\u201d he says, sitting at the table I point to. I\u2019m shaky with fear. Project confidence. Project power. I stand tall, broaden my shoulders, and stride up and down the floor, making enough eye contact with people to show I\u2019m not intimidated, but not holding it long enough to threaten them. I tell inmates to take off their hats as they enter. They listen to me, and a part of me likes that.\n\nFor the first time, for just a moment, I forget that I am a journalist.", + " I watch for guys sitting with their friends rather than where they are told to. I scan the room for people sneaking back in line for more food. I tell inmates to get up and leave while they are still eating. I look closely to make sure no one has an extra cup of Kool-Aid.\n\n\u201cHey, man, why you gotta be a cop like that?\u201d asks the inmate whom I moved. \u201cThey don\u2019t pay you enough to be no cop.\u201d\n\n\u201cHey Bauer, go tell that guy to take his hat off,\u201d Collinsworth says, pointing to another inmate. \u201cI told him and he didn\u2019t listen to me.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou tell him,\u201d I say.", + " \u201cIf you\u2019re going to start something, you got to finish it.\u201d A CO looks at me approvingly.\n\nThe dog team\n\nOut in the back of the prison, not far from where Chase Cortez hopped the fence, there is a barn. Miss Blanchard, another cadet, and I step inside the barn office. Country music is playing on the radio. Halters, leashes, and horseshoes hang on the walls. Three heavyset white COs are inside. They do not like surprise visits. One spits into a garbage can.\n\nThe men and their inmate trusties take care of a small herd of horses and three packs of bloodhounds.", + " The horses don\u2019t do much these days. The COs used to mount them with shotguns and oversee hundreds of inmates who left the compound every day to tend the grounds. The shotguns had to be put to use when, occasionally, an inmate tried to run for it. \u201cYou don\u2019t actually shoot to kill; you shoot to stop,\u201d a longtime staff member told me one day. \u201cOops! I killed him,\u201d she said sarcastically. \u201cI told him to stop! We can always get another inmate, though.\u201d\n\nPrisoners and officers alike talk nostalgically about the time when the men spent their days working outside, coming back to their dorms drained of restless energy and aggression.", + " CCA\u2019s contract requires that Winn inmates are assigned to \u201cproductive full time activity\u201d five days a week, but few are. The work program was dropped around the same time that guards were taken out of the towers. Many vocational programs at Winn have been axed. The hobby shops have become storage units; access to the law library is limited. The big recreation yard sits empty most of the time: There aren\u2019t enough guards to watch over it. (Asked about the lack of classes, recreation, and other activities at Winn, CCA insisted \u201cthese resources and programs were largely available to inmates.\u201d It said the work program was cut during contract negotiations with the DOC,", + " and it acknowledged some gaps in programming due to \u201cbrief periods of staffing vacancies.\u201d)\n\nPrisoners and officers talk nostalgically about when the men worked outside, coming back to dorms drained of aggression.\n\n\u201cThings ain\u2019t like they used to be,\u201d Chris, the officer who runs the dog team, tells us. \u201cIt\u2019s a frickin\u2019 mess.\u201d\n\n\u201cCan\u2019t whup people\u2019s ass like we used to,\u201d another officer named Gary says.\n\n\u201cYeah you can! We did!\u201d Chris says. He then sulks a little: \u201cYou got to know how to do it, I guess.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou got to know where to do it also,\u201d Miss Blanchard says,", + " referring, I assume, to the areas of the prison the cameras don\u2019t see.\n\n\u201cWe got one in the infirmary,\u201d Chris says. \u201cHaha! Gary gassed him.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou always using the gas, man,\u201d the third officer says.\n\n\u201cIf one causes me to do three or four hours of paperwork, I\u2019m go\u2019 put somethin\u2019 on his ass,\u201d Gary says. \u201cHe\u2019s go\u2019 get some gas. He\u2019s go\u2019 get the full load. I ain\u2019t go\u2019 do just a light use of force on him; I\u2019m go\u2019 handle my business with him. Of course, y\u2019all the new class.", + " I\u2019m sitting here telling y\u2019all wrong. Do it the right way. But sometimes, you just can\u2019t do it the right way.\u201d\n\nWith no work program to oversee, the men\u2019s main job is to take the horses and the packs of bloodhounds anywhere across 13 nearby parishes to help the police chase down suspects or prison escapees. They\u2019ve apprehended armed robbers and murder suspects.\n\nWhen we step inside the kennel, the bloodhounds bay and howl. Gary kicks the door of one cage and a dog lunges at his foot. \u201cIf they can get to him, they go\u2019 to bite him,\u201d he says.", + " \u201cThey deal with \u2019em pretty bad.\u201d\n\nBack in the barn office, Gary pulls a binder off the shelf and shows us a photo of a man\u2019s face. There is a red hole under his chin and a gash down his throat. \u201cI turn inmates loose every day and go catch \u2019em,\u201d Chris says, rubbing the stubble on his neck. \u201cAnd that was the result to one of \u2019em.\u201d\n\n\u201cA dog, when he got too close to him, bit him in the throat,\u201d Gary says.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s an inmate?\u201d I ask.\n\n\u201cYeah. What we\u2019ll do is we\u2019ll take a trusty and we\u2019ll put him in them woods right out there.\u201d He points out the window.", + " The trusty wears a \u201cbite suit\u201d to protect him from the dogs. \u201cWe\u2019ll tell him where to go. He might walk back here two miles. We\u2019ll tell him what tree to go up, and he goes up a tree.\u201d Then, after some time passes, they \u201cturn the dogs loose.\u201d\n\nHe holds up the picture of the guy with the throat bite. \u201cThis guy here, he got too close to \u2019em.\u201d Christian walks in the door.\n\n\u201cThat looks nasty,\u201d I say.\n\n\u201cEh, it wasn\u2019t that bad,\u201d Christian cuts in. \u201cI took him to the hospital. It wasn\u2019t that bad.\u201d (CCA says the inmate\u2019s injuries were \u201cminor.\u201d)\n\nGary,", + " still holding out the picture, says, \u201cHe was a character.\u201d\n\n\u201cHe was a piece of crap,\u201d Christian says. \u201cInstigator.\u201d\n\n\u201cI gave him his gear and he didn\u2019t put it on correctly. That\u2019s on him,\u201d Chris says with a shrug.\n\n\u201cPart of the bid\u2019ness\u201d\n\n\u201cI would kill an inmate if I had to,\u201d Collinsworth says to me during a break one day. We are standing around outside; most cadets are smoking cigarettes. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t feel bad about it, not if they were attacking me.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou got to feel some kinda remorse if you a human being,\u201d Willis says.\n\n\u201cI can\u2019t see why you\u2019d need to kill anyone,\u201d Miss Stirling says.\n\n\u201cYou might have to,\u201d says Collinsworth.\n\n\u201cI do what needs to get done,\u201d says a fortysomething,", + " chubby-faced white officer. He wears a baseball cap low over his eyes. \u201cI just had a use of force on an inmate who just got out of open-heart surgery. It\u2019s all part a the bid\u2019ness.\u201d (CCA says it cannot confirm this incident.)\n\nThe officer\u2019s name is Kenny. He\u2019s been working here for 12 years, and he views inmates as \u201ccustomers.\u201d While teaching class, he lectures us on CCA\u2019s principle of \u201ccost-effectiveness,\u201d which requires us to \u201cprovide honest and fair, competitive pricing to our partner and deliver value to our shareholders.\u201d A part of being cost-effective is not getting sued too often.", + " \u201cOne thing the Department of Corrections does is they give us a certain amount of money to manage this facility,\u201d Kenny explains. \u201cThey set a portion of money back for lawsuits, but if we go over budget, it\u2019s kind of like any other job. We got 60-something-plus facilities. If they not making no money at Winn Correctional Center, guess what? We not go\u2019 be employed.\u201d\n\n\u201cI just had a use of force on an inmate who just got out of open-heart surgery. It\u2019s all part a the bid\u2019ness.\u201d\n\nKenny is detached and cool. He says he used to have a temper but he\u2019s learned to control it.", + " He doesn\u2019t sit in bed at night writing up disciplinary reports while his wife sleeps, like he did years ago. Now, if an inmate gives him a smart mouth or doesn\u2019t keep a tidy bed, he\u2019ll throw him in seg to set an example. There are rules, and they are meant to be followed. This goes both ways: When he has any say, he makes sure inmates get what they are entitled to. He prides himself on his fairness. \u201cAll them inmates ain\u2019t bad,\u201d he reminds us. Everyone deserves a chance at redemption.\n\nStill, we must never let inmates forget their place. \u201cWhen you a inmate and you talk too much and you think you free,", + " it\u2019s time for you to go,\u201d he says. \u201cYou got some of these guys, they smart. They real educated. I know one and I be talkin\u2019 to him and he smarter than me. Now he might have more book sense, but he ain\u2019t got more common sense. He go\u2019 talk to me at a inmate level, not at no staff level. You got to put \u2019em in check sometimes.\u201d\n\nKenny makes me nervous. He notices that I am the only one in class who takes notes. One day, he tells us that he sits on the hiring committee. \u201cWe don\u2019t know what you here for,\u201d he says to the class.", + " He then glances at me. \u201cThere might be somebody in this room here hooked up wit\u2019 a inmate.\u201d Throughout the day, he asks my name on several occasions. \u201cMy job is to monitor inmates; it\u2019s also to monitor staff. I\u2019m a sneaky junker.\u201d He turns and looks me directly in the eyes. \u201cI come up here and tell you I don\u2019t know what your name is? I know what your name is. That\u2019s just a game I\u2019m playing with you.\u201d I feel my face flush. I chuckle nervously. He has to know. \u201cI play games just like they play games.", + " I test my staff to test their loyalty. I report to the warden about what I see. It\u2019s a game, but it\u2019s also a part of the bid\u2019ness.\u201d\n\nMail call\n\nOver Christmas week, I am stationed in the mail room with a couple of other cadets to process the deluge of holiday letters. The woman in charge, Miss Roberts, demonstrates our task: Slice the top of each envelope, cut the back off and throw it in the trash, cut the postage off the front, staple what remains to the letter, and stamp it: Inspected.\n\nMiss Roberts opens a letter with several pages of colorful child\u2019s drawings.", + " \u201cNow, see like this one, it\u2019s not allowed because they\u2019re not allowed to get anything that\u2019s crayon,\u201d she says. I presume this is for the same reason we remove stamps; crayon could be a vehicle for drugs. There are so many letters from children\u2014little hands outlined, little stockings glued to the inside of cards\u2014that we rip out and throw in the trash.\n\nOne reads:\n\nI love you and miss you so much daddy, but we are doing good. Rick Jr. is bad now. He gets into everything. I have not forgot you daddy. I love you.\n\nAround the mail room, there are bulletins posted of things to look out for:", + " an anti-imperialist newsletter called Under Lock and Key, an issue of Forbes that comes with a miniature wireless internet router, a CD from a Chicano gangster rapper with a track titled \u201cDeath on a CO.\u201d I find a list of books and periodicals that aren\u2019t allowed inside Louisiana prisons. It includes Fifty Shades of Grey; Lady Gaga Extreme Style; Surrealism and the Occult; Tai Chi Fa Jin: Advanced Techniques for Discharging Chi Energy; The Complete Book of Zen; Socialism vs Anarchism: a Debate; and Native American Crafts & Skills. On Miss Roberts\u2019 desk is a confiscated book: Robert Greene\u2019s 48 Laws of Power,", + " a self-help book favored by 50 Cent and Donald Trump. Other than holy books, this is the most common text I see in inmates\u2019 lockers, usually tattered and hidden under piles of clothes. She says this book is banned because it\u2019s considered \u201cmind-bending material,\u201d though she did enjoy it herself. There are also titles on the list about black history and culture, like Huey: Spirit of the Panther; Faces of Africa; Message to the Blackman in America, by Elijah Muhammad; and an anthology of news articles called 100 Years of Lynchings.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s the craziest girl I ever seen,\u201d Miss Roberts says of the woman who wrote the letter she holds in her hand.", + " She is familiar with many of the correspondents from reading about the intimate details of their lives. \u201cShe\u2019s got his whole name tattooed across her back, all the way down to her hip bone. When his ass gets out\u2014whenever he gets out, \u2018cuz he\u2019s got 30 or 40 years\u2014if he ever gets out, he ain\u2019t going to her.\u201d\n\nThere are so many letters from children that we throw in the trash.\n\nI feel like a voyeur, but the letters draw me in. I am surprised at how many are from former inmates with lovers still at Winn. I read one from a man currently incarcerated in Angola,", + " Louisiana\u2019s infamous maximum-security prison:\n\nOur anniversary is in 13 more days on Christmas and we could have been married for 2 years why can\u2019t you see that I want this to work between us?\u2026Bae, [remember] the tattoo on my left tittie close to my heart that won\u2019t never get covered up as long as I have a breath in my body and I\u2018m about to get your name again on my ass cheek.\n\nAnother is from a recently released inmate to his lover:\n\nHope everything is going well with you. Very deeply in love with you\u2026 I won\u2019t be able to spend x-mass with my family either.", + " Baby my heart is broken and I am so unhappy. I always had a great fear of being homeless\u2026And even if I did find a job and had to work nights or work the evening shift, then I wouldn\u2019t have anywhere to sleep because the shelter won\u2019t let you in to sleep after hours. In order to get my bed every night I have to check in before 4pm. After that you lose your bed so the program is designed to keep you homeless. It don\u2019t make sense\u2026 I bet that this is a sad letter. I wish that I had good news. This will be a short letter because I don\u2019t have a lot of paper left.", + " Merry Christmas baby. Very deeply in love with you.\n\nThe front of one card reads, \u201cAlthough your situation may seem impossible\u2026\u201d and continues on the inside, \u201cthrough Christ, all things are Him-possible!\u201d It contains a letter from the wife of an inmate:\n\nHere I am once again w/ thoughts of you. I hate it here everything reminds me of you. I miss u dammit! It\u2019s weird this connection we have its as if I carry you in my soul. It terrifies me the thought of ever losing you. I pray you haven\u2019t replaced me. I know I haven\u2019t been the most supporting but baby seriously you don\u2019t know the hell I\u2019ve been through since we got torn apart And I guess my family got fed up w/", + " seeing me kill myself slowly I attempted twice 90 phenobarb 2 roxy 3 subs. I lived. 2nd after I hung up w/ you 60 Doxepin 90 propananol i lived WTF? God has a sense of humor i don\u2019t have anyone but u, u see no one cares whether I live die hurt am hungry, well, or safe\u2026So I\u2019ve been alone left to struggle to survive on my income in and out mental wards and running from the pain of you bein there\u2026 Your my everything always will be Love your wife.\n\nThis note and its list of pills haunt me all weekend.", + " What if no one else knows this woman tried to commit suicide? I decide I need to tell Miss Roberts, but when I return to work, I sit in the parking lot and have a hard time summoning the courage. What if word gets out that I\u2019m soft, not cut out for this work?\n\nAfter I pass through the scanner, I see her. \u201cHey, Miss Roberts?\u201d I say, walking up behind her.\n\n\u201cYes,\u201d she says sweetly.\n\n\u201cI wanted to check with you about something. I meant to do it on Friday, but, uh\u2026\u201d She stops and gives me her full attention, looking me in the eyes.", + " \u201cWhen we had a class by the mental health director, she told us to report if there was any kind of suicidal\u2014\u201d\n\nShe cuts me off, waving her hand dismissively, and starts walking away.\n\n\u201cNo, but it was like a letter thing\u2014\u201d\n\n\u201cYeah, don\u2019t even worry about that,\u201d she says, still walking toward her door.\n\n\u201cReally?\u201d\n\n\u201cMmmhmmm. That\u2019s if you see something going on down there,\u201d she says, pointing toward the units. \u201cYeah, don\u2019t worry about it. All right.\u201d She enters the mail room.\n\nWe can go after stories that no one else will,", + " thanks to our donors. Underwrite our reporting with a tax-deductible monthly or one-time gift.\n\nWe can go after stories that no one else will, thanks to readers like you. Underwrite our reporting with a tax-deductible gift.\n\nAfter Christmas, we take our final test. It is intimidating. The test was created by CCA; we never take the qualification exam given to the state\u2019s guards. Ninety-two questions ask us about the chain of command, the use-of-force policy, what to do if we are taken hostage, how to spot a suicidal inmate, the proper way to put on leg irons, the color designation for various chemical agents.", + " We went through most of these topics so cursorily there\u2019s no way I could answer half of them. Luckily, I don\u2019t need to worry. The head of training\u2019s assistant tells us we can go over the test together to make sure we get everything right.\n\n\u201cI bet no one ever doesn\u2019t get the job because they fail the test,\u201d I say.\n\n\u201cNo,\u201d she says. \u201cWe make sure your file looks good.\u201d (CCA says this was not consistent with its practices.)\n\nAbout a third of the trainees I started with have already quit. Reynolds is gone. Miss Doucet decides she can\u2019t risk an asthma attack, so she quits too.", + " Collinsworth goes to Ash on the night shift. Willis works the night shift too; he will be fired after he leaves the prison suddenly one day and a bunch of cellphones are found at his post. Miss Stirling gets stationed in Birch on the day shift. She won\u2019t last either. Two and a half months from now, she will be escorted from the prison for smuggling contraband and writing love letters to an inmate.\n\nChapter 3: \u201cThe CCA Way\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s the end of December, and I come in at 6 a.m. for my first of three days of on-the-job training, the final step before I become a full-fledged CO.", + " The captain tells an officer to take me to Elm. We move slowly down the walk. \u201cOne word of advice I would give you is never take this job home with you,\u201d he says. He spits some tobacco through the fence. \u201cLeave it at the front gate. If you don\u2019t drink, it\u2019ll drive you to drinking.\u201d\n\nResearch shows that corrections officers experience above-average rates of job-related stress and burnout. Thirty-four percent of prison guards suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a study by a nonprofit that researches \u201ccorrections fatigue.\u201d That\u2019s a higher rate than reported by soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.", + " COs commit suicide two and a half times more often than the population at large. They also have shorter life spans. A recent study of Florida prison guards and law enforcement officers found that they die 12 years earlier than the general population; one suggested cause was job-related stress.\n\nThe walk is eerily quiet. Crows caw, fog hangs low over the basketball courts. The prison is locked down. Programs have been canceled. With the exception of kitchen workers, none of the inmates can leave their dorms. Usually, lockdowns occur when there are major disturbances, but today, with some officers out for the holidays, guards say there just aren\u2019t enough people to run the prison.", + " (CCA says Winn was never put on lockdown due to staffing shortages.) The unit manager tells me to shadow one of the two floor officers, a burly white Marine veteran. His name is Jefferson, and as we walk the floor an inmate asks him what the lockdown is about. \u201cYou know half of the fucking people don\u2019t want to work here,\u201d Jefferson tells him. \u201cWe so short-staffed and shit, so most of the gates ain\u2019t got officers.\u201d He sighs dramatically. (CCA claims to have \u201cno knowledge\u201d of gates going unmanned at Winn.)\n\n\u201cWe so short-staffed and shit, so most of the gates ain\u2019t got officers.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s messed up,\u201d the prisoner says.\n\n\u201cMan,", + " it\u2019s so fucked up it\u2019s pitiful,\u201d Jefferson replies. \u201cThe first thing the warden asked me [was] what would boost morale around here. The first two words out of my mouth: pay raise.\u201d He takes a gulp of coffee from his travel mug.\n\n\u201cThey do need to give y\u2019all a pay raise,\u201d the prisoner says.\n\n\u201cWhen gas is damn near $4 a gallon, what the fuck is $9 an hour?\u201d Jefferson says. \u201cThat\u2019s half yo\u2019 check fillin\u2019 up your gas!\u201d\n\nAnother inmate, whom Jefferson calls \u201cthe unit politician,\u201d demands an Administrative Remedy Procedure form. He wants to file a grievance about the lockdown\u2014why are inmates being punished for the prison\u2019s mismanagement?\n\n\u201cWhat happens to those ARPs?\u201d I ask Jefferson.\n\n\u201cIf they feel their rights have been violated in some way,", + " they are allowed to file a grievance,\u201d he says. If the captain rejects it, they can appeal to the warden. If the warden rejects it, they can appeal to the Department of Corrections. \u201cIt\u2019ll take about a year,\u201d he says. \u201cOnce it gets to DOC down in Baton Rouge, they throw it over in a pile and forget about it. I\u2019ve been to DOC headquarters. I know what them sonsabitches do down there: nothin\u2019.\u201d (Miss Lawson, the assistant chief of security, later tells me that during the 15 years she worked at Winn, she saw only one grievance result in consequences for staff.", + " )\n\nI do a couple of laps around the unit floor and then see Jefferson leaning against the threshold of an open tier door, chatting with a prisoner. I walk over to them. \u201cThis your first day?\u201d the prisoner asks me, leaning up against the bars.\n\n\u201cYeah.\u201d\n\n\u201cWelcome to CCA, boy. You seen what the sign say when you first come in the gate? It says, \u2018The CCA Way.\u2019 Know what that is?\u201d he asks me. There is a pause. \u201cWhatever way you make it, my boy.\u201d\n\nJefferson titters. \u201cSome of them down here are good,\u201d he says. \u201cI will say dat.", + " Some of \u2019em are jackasses. Some of \u2019em just flat-out ain\u2019t worth a fuck.\u201d\n\n\u201cJust know at the end of the day, how y\u2019all conduct y\u2019all selves determines how we conduct ourselves,\u201d the prisoner says to me. \u201cYou come wit\u2019 a shit attitude, we go\u2019 have a shit attitude.\u201d\n\n\u201cI have three rules and they know it,\u201d Jefferson says as he grips the bars with one hand. \u201cNo fightin\u2019. No fuckin\u2019. No jackin\u2019 off. But! What they do after the lights are out? I don\u2019t give a fuck, \u2018cuz I\u2019m at the house.\u201d\n\nThe next day,", + " I\u2019m stationed in Ash, a general population unit. The unit manager is a black woman who is so large she has trouble walking. She is brought in every morning in a wheelchair pushed by an inmate. Her name is Miss Price, but inmates call her The Dragon. It\u2019s unclear whether her jowls, her roar, or her stern reputation earned her that name. Prisoners relate to her like an overbearing mother, afraid to anger her and eager to win her affection. She\u2019s worked here since the prison opened in 1991, and one CO says that in her younger days, she was known to break up fights without backup.", + " Another CO says that last week an inmate \u201cwhipped his thing out and was playing with himself right in front of her. She got out of her wheelchair, grabbed him by the neck, threw him up against the wall. She said, \u2018Don\u2019t you ever fucking do that to me again!'\u201d\n\nIn the middle of the morning, Miss Price tells us to shake down the common areas. I follow one of the two COs into a tier and we do perfunctory searches of the TV room and tables, feeling under the ledges, flipping through a few books. I bend over and feel around under a water fountain. My hand lands on something loose.", + " I get on my knees to look. It\u2019s a smartphone. I don\u2019t know what to do\u2014do I take it or leave it? My job, of course, is to take it, but by now I know that being a guard is only partially about enforcing the rules. Mostly, it\u2019s about learning how to get through the day safely, which requires decisions like these to be weighed carefully.\n\nA prisoner is watching me. If I leave the phone, everyone on the tier will know. I will win inmates\u2019 respect. But if I take it, I will show my superiors I am doing my job. I will alleviate some of the suspicion they have of every new hire.", + " \u201cThose ones who gets along with \u2019em\u2014those ones are the ones I really have to watch,\u201d SORT commander Tucker told us in class. \u201cThere is five of y\u2019all. Two and a half are gonna be dirty.\u201d\n\nI take the phone.\n\nMiss Price is thrilled. The captain calls the unit to congratulate me. The other COs couldn\u2019t care less. When I do count later, each inmate on that tier stares at me with his meanest look. Some step toward me threateningly as I pass.\n\nLater, at a bar near my apartment, I see a man in a CCA jacket and ask him if he works at Winn.", + " \u201cUsed to,\u201d he says.\n\n\u201cI just started there,\u201d I say.\n\nHe smiles. \u201cLet me tell you this: You ain\u2019t go\u2019 like it. When you start working those 12-hour shifts, you will see.\u201d He takes a drag from his cigarette. \u201cThe job is way too fucking dangerous.\u201d I tell him about the phone. \u201cOh, they won\u2019t forget your face,\u201d he says. \u201cI just want you to know you made a lot of enemies. If you work in Ash, you gonna have a big-ass problem because now they go\u2019 know, he\u2019s gonna be the guy who busts us all the time.\u201d\n\nHe racks the balls on the pool table and tells me about a nurse who gave a penicillin shot to an inmate who was allergic to the medicine and died.", + " The prisoner\u2019s friends thought the nurse did it intentionally. \u201cWhen he came down the walk, they beat the shit out of him. They had to airlift him out of there.\u201d (CCA says it has no knowledge of this incident.) He breaks and sinks a stripe.\n\nSuicide watch\n\nOn my first official day as a CO, I am stationed on suicide watch in Cypress. In the entire prison of more than 1,500 inmates, there are no full-time psychiatrists and just one full-time social worker: Miss Carter. In class, she told us that a third of the inmates have mental health problems, 10 percent have severe mental health issues,", + " and roughly a quarter have IQs under 70. She said most prison mental health departments in Louisiana have at least three full-time social workers. Angola has at least 11. Here, there are few options for inmates with mental health needs. They can meet with Miss Carter, but with her caseload of 450 prisoners, that isn\u2019t likely to happen more than once a month. They can try to get an appointment with the part-time psychiatrist or the part-time psychologist, who are spread even thinner. Another option is to ask for suicide watch.\n\nA CO sits across from the two official suicide watch cells, which are small and dimly lit and have plexiglass over the front.", + " My job is to sit across from two regular segregation cells being used for suicide watch overflow, observe the two inmates inside, and log their behavior every 15 minutes. \u201cWe never document anything around here on the money,\u201d Miss Carter taught us a month ago. \u201cNothing should be 9:00, 9:15, 9:30, because the auditors say you\u2019re pencil-whipping it. And truth be known, we do pencil-whip it. We can\u2019t add by 15 because that really puts you in a bind. Add by 14. That looks pretty come audit time.\u201d One guard told me he just filled in the suicide watch log every couple of hours and didn\u2019t bother to watch the prisoners.", + " (CCA\u2019s spokesman says the company is \u201ccommitted to the accuracy of our record keeping.\u201d)\n\nOne guard told me he just filled in the log every couple of hours and didn\u2019t bother to watch the prisoners.\n\nFor one inmate, Skeen, I jot down the codes for \u201csitting\u201d and \u201cquiet.\u201d For the other, Damien Coestly (his real name), the number for \u201cusing toilet.\u201d He is sitting on the commode, underneath his suicide blanket, a tear-proof garment that doubles as a smock. \u201cAh hell nah, you can\u2019t sit here, man!\u201d he shouts at me. Other than the blanket,", + " he is naked, his bare feet on the concrete. There is nothing else allowed in his cell other than some toilet paper. No books. Nothing to occupy his mind.\n\nThe sparse conditions are intended to be \u201ca deterrent as well as protection,\u201d Miss Carter said. Some inmates claim to be suicidal because, for one reason or another, they want out of their dorms and don\u2019t want to go to protective custody, where they would be labeled as snitches. Inmates on suicide watch don\u2019t get a mattress; they have to sleep on a steel bunk. They also get worse food. The official ration is one \u201cmystery meat\u201d sandwich,", + " one peanut butter sandwich, six carrot sticks, six celery sticks, and six apple slices per meal. Assuming this meal contains no nutritional supplements, I calculate that eating it three times a day provides at least 250 calories less than the US Department of Agriculture\u2019s daily recommendation for sedentary adult men younger than 41 years old. (CCA says suicide watch meals are of \u201cequivalent nutritional value\u201d to general-population meals. It also says suicide watch \u201cis designed for the safety of the inmate and nothing else.\u201d)\n\nNowhere else does a single guard oversee one or two inmates. If more than two inmates are on constant watch for more than 48 hours,", + " the prison has to ask the regional corporate office for permission to continue, Miss Carter tells us. (CCA says this is inaccurate.) Sometimes the regional office says no, she says, and the prisoners are put back on the tiers or in seg.\n\n\u201cCome on, man, get the fuck out of here,\u201d shouts Coestly. \u201cYou know what I\u2019m about to do is, get up on top of this bed and jump straight onto my motherfucking neck if y\u2019all don\u2019t get the fuck out from the front of my cell.\u201d\n\nI look over to the cell to the right and see Skeen sitting on his metal bed,", + " staring at me and masturbating under his suicide blanket.\n\nI tell him to stop.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m having some mental health issues, man.\u201d He has a wild look in his eyes and he speaks intensely, but quietly.\n\n\u201cMove your chair, then. I\u2019m just doing my thing.\u201d He keeps going.\n\nI get up and grab a pink slip to write him up, my first disciplinary report.\n\n\u201cYou making a mistake,\u201d he says. \u201cYou fuck with me like that, I\u2019m gonna go all night.\u201d\n\n\u201cAll right,\u201d I say.\n\n\u201cWrite that bitch. I don\u2019t give a fuck. I\u2019m on extended lockdown.\u201d He tells me he\u2019s been in Cypress for three years.", + " He starts singing and dancing in his cell. \u201cAll night, all niiiiiight.\u201d Prisoners down the tier laugh. \u201cI\u2019ll add that to my collection. I have about a hundred write-ups. I don\u2019t give a fuck!\u201d\n\nSomeone down the tier calls for me. He\u2019s not on suicide watch, just regular segregation. \u201cI\u2019m having some mental health issues, man,\u201d he says. He has a wild look in his eyes and he speaks intensely, but quietly. \u201cI\u2019m not suicidal or homicidal necessarily, but it\u2019s hard for me to be around people.\u201d There is another man in his cell with him,", + " sitting on the top bunk, shaving his face. \u201cAnd, and, and the voices, demons, whatever you want to call them, want me to wait till y\u2019all come down here and throw defecation or urine or something. I don\u2019t want to do that, okay?\u201d He says he wants to go on suicide watch as a preventive measure. \u201cUntil I figure out what\u2019s going on here\u201d\u2014he taps the sides of his head with his index fingers\u2014\u201dthen that\u2019s where I need to be.\u201d His request is denied by the unit manager. With four inmates on suicide watch, we are already over capacity.\n\n\u201cWe are gonna have a Mexican standoff,\u201d Coestly says.", + " \u201cEver seen one of those? I get off the bed, jump off that mothafucker headfirst.\u201d He says he\u2019s having a mental health emergency, which I am required to report. When I tell the key officer, she rolls her eyes. In class, Miss Carter told us that \u201cunless he\u2019s psychotic and needs a shot to keep him from doing the behavior, then I just let them get it out of their system.\u201d It takes six hours for a psychiatrist to show up.\n\nOne of the other inmates on suicide watch, who\u2019s been silent until now, starts yelling through his food slot. \u201cWorld war!\u201d he shouts.", + " \u201cI got some niggas who need to tell the CIA something, since they already got their eye in the sky, the satellite orbiting in space processing global information.\u201d His voice has a demonic quality to it and he occasionally hits the plexiglass to punctuate his sentences. The CO sitting directly across from him twiddles his thumbs and gazes ahead blankly.\n\nIn the neighboring cell, Skeen is staring at me, completely naked, masturbating vigorously. I tell him to stop. He gets up, comes to the bars, and strokes himself five feet in front of me. I leave and come back with the pink sheet and he shouts,", + " \u201cStop looking like that \u2018cuz you making my dick hard!\u201d I don\u2019t respond. \u201cStop looking like that \u2018cuz you making my dick hard! Stop looking like that \u2018cuz you making my dick hard!\u201d The seemingly schizophrenic man next to him hits the plexiglass over and over. \u201cThat\u2019s what the devil\u2019s doing to you, in the invisible world\u2014sticking his invisible dick in your white or black ass and fucking you with it.\u201d My heart is pounding. For an hour, I stare at a cup on the floor and study the blotches in the concrete.\n\nA few hours later, a SORT officer walks a cuffed man onto the tier.", + " The man\u2019s eyes are tightly closed and snot is dripping off his upper lip. He was pepper-sprayed after punching my old instructor Kenny in the face as Kenny sat in his office doing paperwork. Kenny\u2019s in the hospital now\u2014after he confiscated another inmate\u2019s cellphone, the prisoner put a paid hit out on him.\n\nBuilding rapport\n\nKenny is gone for days, recovering from his busted nose. The message his assailant sent was clear: Keep your hands off our phones. Meanwhile, the fact that I took the phone in Ash showed Miss Price that I\u2019m a strong officer who plays by the rules, so she asked the warden if I could be posted there permanently.", + " Now I work there, on the floor, almost every day. I immediately try to smooth over the phone thing with the inmates. I tell a few of them that I took it because I didn\u2019t have a choice and suggest they should try to hide their contraband better. \u201cYou ain\u2019t no police?\u201d one asks me. \u201cNah. I ain\u2019t here to be police,\u201d I reply. \u201cIf people ain\u2019t fucking with me, I ain\u2019t got a problem with them.\u201d\n\nDon\u2019t be like your partner Bacle, they tell me. In some units and on some shifts, the pairing of floor officers changes day to day,", + " but for whatever reason Bacle and I become a regular pair. (He has allowed me to use his real name.) I tell the inmates I\u2019ll never be like him, all that shouting and hollering.\n\nThe truth is, Bacle\u2019s temper tantrums make us laugh. One inmate asks him for his Social Security number every day just to set him off. If he were not a squat, hobbling 63-year-old, Bacle\u2019s occasional fantasies about putting shock collars on inmates or shoving his keys down their throats might not seem so harmless. But he hates the company too. \u201cAll you are is a fucking body to \u2019em.", + " That\u2019s the way I feel,\u201d he says. He counts the days until his Social Security kicks in and he no longer needs to work here to supplement his retirement checks from the Coast Guard.\n\nEvery day, I come to know him more and more. He is a reader of old westerns and an aficionado of Civil War reenactments. He uses words like \u201cgadzooks\u201d and phrases like \u201cuseful as tits on a boar hog.\u201d Back before the hobby shops closed, he liked to buy his wife gifts made by prisoners. Once, he bought her a handmade saddle for her toy unicorns. \u201cWhen she seen it,", + " she was tickled pink. We are still fat, dumb, and happy over it!\u201d His breath smells perpetually of menthol chewing tobacco, a fleck of which is always stuck in the corner of his mouth.\n\nBacle becomes a teacher of sorts. \u201cYou got to have what I call a rapport with some of the inmates,\u201d he says. Mostly, he is referring to the orderlies, the prisoners selected for special roles inside each unit. When an orderly passes out toothpaste, Bacle tells me to follow the inmate\u2019s lead. \u201cI just kind of modify it from when I was in the service. I might have rank over someone,", + " but I don\u2019t want to step on their toes.\u201d\n\nWithout the orderlies, the prison would not function. Each unit has a key orderly, whose job is to keep the key clean and pack up the property of any prisoner sent to seg. Count room orderlies deliver the tallies from each unit to the room where they\u2019re tabulated. Tier orderlies, floor orderlies, yard orderlies, walk orderlies, and gym orderlies keep the prison clean. Orderlies typically maintain a friendly relationship with the guards but take every opportunity to make it clear to other inmates they are not snitches. And they rarely are. It is much more likely for them to be movers of contraband.", + " They cozy up to guards who will bring it in, and their freedom of movement allows them to distribute the goods. I will see some of the most trusted orderlies get busted while I\u2019m here.\n\nBacle regularly gives his lunch to the muscular key orderly. We are not allowed to do this, so he does it discreetly. \u201cIt\u2019s a habit I got into when I started,\u201d he says. Bacle isn\u2019t afraid to bend the rules to keep things under control. When one inmate starts marching around angrily, saying \u201cfuck white people\u201d and we\u2019re too afraid to try to get him into his tier, Bacle buys cigarettes from another inmate,", + " gives them to the agitated prisoner, and says, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you go have a smoke on your bed to calm your nerves?\u201d And it works. When Miss Price isn\u2019t watching, Bacle lets a guy called Corner Store off his tier so he can run deodorant and chewing tobacco and sugar and coffee between inmates on different tiers. They aren\u2019t allowed to trade commissary items, but they do anyway, so when we let Corner Store handle it, they stop pestering us with ploys to get off the tier, like faking medical emergencies.\n\nCorner Store is a 37-year-old black man who looks 55.", + " His hair is scraggly, his uniform tattered, his face puffy. He walks with the clipped gait of a stiff-legged old man who is late for a meeting he doesn\u2019t really want to attend. He\u2019s been in prison for half his life, though I don\u2019t know what for. I rarely know what anyone is in for. I do know that he used to sell crack, that he saw his friend get shot to death when he was eight, and that he once had a firefight with some white men in Mississippi who called him a \u201cnigger.\u201d At least that\u2019s what he tells me. Fourteen of his 18 years behind bars have been at Winn.\n\nCorner Store has to hustle because he has no family support.", + " He learned early that little comes without strings in prison.\n\nCorner Store does not inspire fear, yet he is confident. He tells COs to open the tier door for him; he does not ask. On his pluckier days, he flaunts his status by sitting in the guards\u2019 chairs and smoking. He talks to us as if we are office colleagues from different departments. And unlike the floor orderly who protects his reputation by loudly proclaiming that rats deserve to get stabbed, Corner Store doesn\u2019t need to make a show of his loyalty to inmates, yet it is unwavering. When I ask him to teach me some prison lingo,", + " he refuses gently.\n\nThe first time I meet Corner Store, he walks through the metal detector at the entrance of the unit. It beeps, but neither Bacle nor I do anything; its sound is one of the many we tune out. The device was installed not long before I started working here, in an effort to cut down on the number of inmates carrying shanks, but functionally it is a piece of furniture. We never use it since it takes at least two officers to get inmates to line up, walk through it, and get patted down whenever they enter or exit the unit, which leaves no one to let inmates into their tiers.", + " When Corner Store makes it beep, he calls over to me: \u201cHey, watch this here! I\u2019m going to go back through this thing and it won\u2019t go off.\u201d He jumps through it sideways, and it doesn\u2019t make a sound. I laugh. \u201cThis is something my granddaddy taught me years ago,\u201d he says. \u201cAnything that a man makes can always be altered. Always.\u201d\n\nHe had to learn to hustle because he has no money and no support from his family. For his courier services, inmates kick him cigarettes, coffee, and soup. He doesn\u2019t take charity; he learned early that little comes without strings in prison.", + " Sexual predators prey on needy inmates, giving them commissary or drugs, seemingly as gifts, but eventually recalling the debt. If you don\u2019t have money, the only way to pay is with your body. \u201cWhen I first come to prison, I had to fight about five times for my ass,\u201d Corner Store says. \u201cThis is how it starts: You\u2019re scared of being in prison because of the violence or whatever. You go to people for protection. But this is the No. 1 thing you don\u2019t do. You have to be a man on your own.\u201d He tries to discourage vulnerable inmates from seeking help and says he\u2019s gotten into fights to stop new prisoners from being sexually assaulted.", + " \u201cIt just hurts me to see it happen. A kid who really don\u2019t even understand life yet, you turn and fuck his life up even more?\u201d\n\nHe says there have been periods when he\u2019s had to pack a shank. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s best, because you got some bullheaded people in prison who don\u2019t understand nothin\u2019 but violence. When you show them you can get on the same level they gettin\u2019 on, they leave you the fuck alone.\u201d\n\n\u201cThey always talking about how prison rehabilitates you,\u201d he says. \u201cPrison don\u2019t rehabilitate you. You have to rehabilitate yourself.\u201d When Miss Price is around,", + " Bacle and I are careful not to make it obvious we are letting Corner Store out, and he makes sure to stay out of her sight.\n\nInstructors like Kenny preached against giving concessions to inmates, but in reality most guards think you have to cooperate with them. Frankly, there just aren\u2019t enough staff members to do otherwise. Bacle and I don\u2019t have time, for example, to keep watch over the corrections counselor when she is in her office, where there are no security cameras, so she uses two inmates as her bodyguards. (CCA says this went against its policy.) COs are always under pressure to impress on the supervisors that everything is under control.", + " We rely on inmates for this, too, letting some stand out in front of the unit to warn us when a ranking officer is coming so we can make sure everything is in order.\n\nIt can be a slippery slope. In 2007, a Tennessee inmate, Gary Thompson, sued CCA, claiming that guards, including a captain, periodically ordered him to beat up other inmates to punish them, giving him the best jobs and privileges as a reward. On one occasion, he claimed, guards called him the \u201clargest nigger,\u201d put him with a mentally ill inmate who\u2019d cut a swastika into his arm, and ordered Thompson to \u201crough [him]", + " up.\u201d When Thompson filed a complaint, he was put in the hole. CCA denied his allegations but settled the case.\n\nIn Idaho, CCA was accused of ceding control to prison gangs to save money on wages. A lawsuit filed in 2012 by eight inmates at the Idaho Correctional Center alleged there was effectively \u201ca partnership between CCA and certain prison gangs,\u201d in which gang members were used to discipline inmates. A subsequent FBI investigation found that employees had falsified records and understaffed mandatory positions.* A confidential Idaho Department of Correction memo shared with CCA that was disclosed in the case showed that by August 2008,", + " inmate-on-inmate assaults and other incidents of violence had \u201csteadily increased to the point that there are four incidents for every one that occurs in the rest of the Idaho state operated facilities combined.\u201d (CCA points to a later analysis by an independent monitor that concluded that the rate of violence at ICC over the entire first eight months of 2008 was not disproportionate to that of other facilities.) No charges were brought against CCA, nor were any sanctions levied against it. But the state ended automatic renewal of its contract, and reopened it to bidders. CCA did not bid.\u2020 \u201cIt was a lot better than this place,\u201d an out-of-state guard who worked in Idaho at the time told me.\n\nIn a prison that is 75 percent black,", + " people of different races sit together in the chow hall.\n\nThere are no gangs at Winn, but that has more to do with Louisiana prison culture than the management of the prison. In most prisons around the country, the racial divide is stark and internal politics are determined by racialized prison gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia. But Louisiana is an anomaly. Here, there are no prison gangs. In a prison that is 75 percent black and less than 25 percent white, people of different races sit together in the chow hall, hang out on the yard, and sleep in the same dorms.\n\nThroughout my time at Winn,", + " I meet guards from CCA prisons around the country who talk up the benefits of gangs. Two SORT members filling in from Oklahoma speak to each other in Sure\u00f1o sign language that they learned from prisoners transferred from California. The influx of gang members is a \u201cgood thing,\u201d one of the SORT guys tells me, because gang culture is highly disciplined. \u201cWith their politics, they have to clean their cells. They have to maintain cleanliness. If they don\u2019t, they get stabbed. If they acted the way these guys act, they\u2019d get stabbed.\u201d\n\nI quickly learn it\u2019s no longer possible to be the silent observer I was in training, so I try to find the middle ground between appearing soft and being draconian.", + " When I write up one inmate after he runs off the tier against my orders, I think about it all weekend, wondering if he will get sent to Cypress. I feel guilty and decide I will only write up inmates for two things: threatening me and refusing to get on their tier after they enter the unit. The floor is where most assaults happen, and if a lot of inmates are out there, things can get out of hand. That\u2019s not why I choose to write them up for it, though. I write them up because my main job is to keep inmates off the floor, and if I don\u2019t establish authority, I end up having to negotiate with each prisoner over how long he can wander the unit,", + " which is exhausting.\n\nI spend free moments leaning up against the bars, making chitchat with prisoners about their lives. I tell one, Brick, that I am from Minnesota. He says he has friends there. \u201cWe got to hook up!\u201d he says. I cultivate these relationships; having gray-haired, charming inmates like him in my good graces helps me because younger, harder prisoners follow their lead. I do favors for others\u2014I let a cop killer outside when it\u2019s not yard time because he seems to have influence over some of the inmates. Guys like him and Corner Store teach me how to win inmates\u2019 respect. They teach me how to make it in here.\n\nInvestigating and fact-checking this story took 18 months of nonstop work.", + " If you agree it was worth it, become a monthly donor\u2014or make a one-time gift.\n\nInvestigating and fact-checking this story took 18 months of nonstop work. If you agree it was worth it, make a tax-deductible contribution today.\n\nI try to address every request and respond to every inmate who yells \u201cMinnesota,\u201d my new nickname. The microwaves on some tiers are broken, so I help out by carrying cups of water for soup or coffee to Brick\u2019s tier, where he heats them up. When Corner Store isn\u2019t working and people ask if I can let them off the tier for a minute so they can run and exchange a honey bun for a few cigarettes,", + " I unlock the door. \u201cYou\u2019re cool,\u201d one inmate says to me. \u201cReal laid-back.\u201d I let people out to see the corrections counselor when they need a mattress or need to call their lawyers, even when she tells me she doesn\u2019t want to field these requests, which is most of the time.\n\nBrick can see that I get tired striking across the unit from one place to the next for 12 hours a day. He sees that by the end of the day my feet and back hurt and I start to ignore the inmates. He knows that two people aren\u2019t enough to run this floor. \u201cThis shit don\u2019t work,\u201d he says to me.", + " We bump fists.\n\nChapter 4: \u201cYou Got to Survive\u201d\n\nThere is a looming sense of crisis at Winn. Shortly after Cortez escaped, the warden decreed that the security staff should meet at the start of every shift. So at 6 a.m. each day, everyone is shepherded into a conference room, where they brood over coffee and Monster Energy drinks. \u201cI apologize if it seems as though we\u2019re coming down on y\u2019all all the time,\u201d says Assistant Warden Parker, who introduced himself to me in Cypress four weeks ago. He\u2019s sitting on a table, the picture of a guy-next-door,", + " we\u2019re-in-this-together type of boss. \u201cUnfortunately, due to a series of events that took place over 2014, culminating with that escape, there is a high, high level of scrutiny on how you do your job.\u201d\n\nHe doesn\u2019t get into specifics, but guards tell me there was a rash of stabbings over the summer that CCA didn\u2019t report to the Louisiana DOC. (The company\u2019s spokesman says it reported all assaults.) \u201cSomeone said this place has slid downhill for a long time,\u201d the assistant warden says to us. \u201cHere\u2019s what we have before us: We have to climb up that hill extremely fast.\u201d\n\nPRIVATE PRISONS HOLD 7%", + " of state inmates\n\nof state inmates 19% of federal inmates\n\nof federal inmates 62% of immigration detainees\n\nof immigration detainees 31% of juvenile detainees.\n\nThe DOC, which has ultimate authority over all prisons in the state, has been taking a closer look at Winn\u2019s day-to-day operations. (According to DOC documents I later obtained, the department had just written to CCA about \u201ccontract compliance\u201d and areas where Winn\u2019s \u201cbasic correctional practices\u201d needed improvement.) Wardens from publicly run state prisons have appeared out of nowhere, watching over COs as they work, asking them questions. The newer guards fret about losing their jobs.", + " Old-timers shrug it off\u2014they say they\u2019ve seen Winn weather tough times before.\n\nAt each morning meeting, we are given a new \u201cgame plan\u201d: keep inmates off the bars of the tiers, move them quicker out to chow, keep them off the floor, finish count faster. We never discuss the problem that both guards and inmates complain about most: There aren\u2019t enough employees. Corporate has tried to mitigate the problem by bringing officers in from out of state. The economics of this are never clear to me\u2014it seems far more expensive to pay for their transportation and lodging than to hire more locals or raise wages. In addition to the SORT members,", + " there are an average of five guards filling in for a month or so at a time from places like Arizona and Tennessee.\n\nAccording to CCA\u2019s contract with Louisiana, 36 guards are expected to show up for work at 6 a.m. every day. Twenty-nine of them fill mandatory 12-hour positions that require a body in them at all times\u2014these include unit floor officers, front-gate officers, perimeter patrol, supervisors, and infirmary officers. I make a habit of counting the number of security staff at the meetings. Some days there are 28, some days 24, but there are almost always fewer than 29.\n\nIt\u2019s possible that employees working overtime from the night shift aren\u2019t there or that others trickle in late.", + " But it still appears there are often fewer people on the shift than contractually required to keep the prison open, let alone running smoothly. CCA\u2019s spokesman later tells me I was too low on the totem pole to have an accurate understanding of staffing at Winn. (He adds that \u201csecurity is everyone\u2019s job\u201d and a \u201cteam effort\u201d involving even employees who are not guards.) Correspondence between CCA and the DOC shows that in early 2015 Winn had 42 vacancies for regular guards and 9 vacancies for ranking officers. Miss Lawson, the assistant chief of security, says that when officials from the DOC were scheduled to visit,", + " \u201cwe would be tripping over each other, but it was just because we were paying people overtime to come in and work extra.\u201d\n\nWardens from state prisons have appeared out of nowhere, watching over guards as they work.\n\nOften, the only guards in a 352-inmate unit are the two floor officers and the key officer. There is supposed to be an officer controlling the gate that connects each unit walk to the main walk, but often there isn\u2019t. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, every unit should have two case managers, who manage rehabilitation and reentry programs, two corrections counselors,", + " who are in charge of resolving inmates\u2019 daily issues, and a unit manager, who supervises everything. Not once do I see all these positions filled in a unit.\n\nDuring my time at Winn, I witness corners cut daily. Key officers, who are charged with documenting activities in the units, routinely record security checks that do not occur. I hear that these logbooks are audited by the state and are the only evidence of whether guards walk up and down the tiers every half-hour. I almost never see anyone do such a security check unless DOC officials are around. Collinsworth tells me that when he worked in the key he was told repeatedly to record security checks every 15 to 30 minutes,", + " even though they weren\u2019t being done. Miss Lawson later says she was once reprimanded by a warden for refusing to log checks that did not occur. \u201cI\u2019m just going to write down that you are doing your security checks every 30 minutes,\u201d a ranking officer once told me. \u201cThat\u2019s just how it\u2019s been done, so until someone up top tells me different, that\u2019s how we\u2019ll do it.\u201d (CCA\u2019s spokesman says the company had no knowledge of security checks being skipped or logbooks being falsified.)\n\nEven with the guards filling in from out of state, we are required to work extra days, which means that for up to five days in a row,", + " I have just enough time to drive home, eat, sleep, and come back to the prison. Sometimes I have to stay longer than 12 hours because there is no one to take over for me. A guard I relieve one morning is ending a four-day stretch; in a 48-hour period he worked 42 hours at the warden\u2019s insistence, he says. He didn\u2019t sleep the whole time. (CCA says no such incident occurred.)\n\nAssistant Warden Parker tells us the DOC has required CCA\u2019s corporate office in Nashville, Tennessee, to report what CCA is doing to fix the mess at Winn. An obvious remedy would be to raise the pay of nonranking officers to the level of DOC officers\u2014which starts at $12.", + "50 per hour, $3.50 more than ours\u2014and reinstate rehabilitative and recreational programs for inmates. Miss Lawson says such requests hit a roadblock at the corporate level. \u201cThere were years that the wardens would beg for more money, and it was like, \u2018Okay, on to the next subject,'\u201d she tells me.\n\n\u201cIf inmates want to act stupid, then we\u2019ll give them some pain to help increase their intelligence level.\u201d\n\nInstead, corporate takes a different approach to show it means business: A few days after I worked suicide watch, it removed the local officers from Cypress and turned the unit entirely over to members of the company\u2019s national SORT team.", + " These are guys who \u201cuse force constantly,\u201d Assistant Warden Parker says at a morning meeting. \u201cI believe that pain increases the intelligence of the stupid, and if inmates want to act stupid, then we\u2019ll give them some pain to help increase their intelligence level.\u201d DOC data shows that during the first 10 months of 2015, which includes part of the time I worked there, Winn reported twice as many \u201cimmediate\u201d uses of force as the eight other Louisiana prisons combined. (\u201cCCA expressly forbids retaliatory force,\u201d its spokesman tells me.)\n\nOver the next four months, Winn will report using chemical agents 79 times, a rate seven times higher than that reported by Angola.", + " Collinsworth recalls an inmate who insulted a SORT officer\u2019s mother. The officer cuffed him, stood him in his underwear out of view of the cameras, and covered his whole body with pepper spray for \u201cabout eight seconds or so.\u201d When Collinsworth filed a report, standard procedure following a use of force, he says he was ridiculed by members of the SORT team, who told him \u201cthat I should have said I didn\u2019t see anything.\u201d He says an assistant supervisor admonished him for \u201ctattling.\u201d (CCA says the officer who sprayed the inmate was fired.)\n\nI enter Cypress briefly after SORT takes over. At 6:", + "30 in the morning, the air is so saturated with pepper spray that tears stream down my face. The key officer is doing paperwork in a gas mask. A man screams and flails naked in a shower, his body drenched with pepper spray. Cockroaches run around frantically to escape the burning.\n\nSex and violence\n\nOne day, as prisoners go to chow, Bacle runs past me shouting, \u201cCode Blue outside!\u201d I dash out the front door of Ash, through a crowd of inmates. A couple of prisoners are pinning each other up against the fence, and a frail-looking, young white guy is rolling around on the ground.\n\nI run to him.", + " He rolls from side to side, whimpering and heaving in panic, grasping at small cuts and lumps on his arms. They are not deep like stab wounds; they are shallow and there are many. Under them there is a multitude of tiny scars, cut crosswise\u2014the trademark self-mutilation of the sexually abused.\n\nAssaults behind bars 19% of all male inmates in US prisons say they\u2019ve been physically assaulted by other inmates.\n\nof all male inmates in US prisons say they\u2019ve been physically assaulted by other inmates. 21% say they\u2019ve been assaulted by prison staff.\n\nsay they\u2019ve been assaulted by prison staff.", + " Officials reported fewer than 8,800 incidents of rape and other sexual victimization in all American prisons and jails in 2011.\n\nincidents of rape and other sexual victimization in all American prisons and jails in 2011. Yet between 3 percent and 9 percent of male inmates say they have been sexually assaulted behind bars, which suggests more than 180,000 current prisoners may have been victimized.\n\nof male inmates say they have been sexually assaulted behind bars, which suggests more than 180,000 current prisoners may have been victimized. Former inmates of private state prisons are half as likely to say they have been sexually victimized by another inmate as those who were in public state prisons.", + " However, they are nearly twice as likely to report being sexually victimized by staff.\n\nto say they have been sexually victimized by another inmate as those who were in public state prisons. However, they are nearly to report being sexually victimized by staff. 66% of incidents of sexual misconduct by prison staff involve sexual relationships with inmates who \u201cappeared to be willing,\u201d according to authorities.\n\nWOMEN ARE:\n\nof incidents of sexual misconduct by prison staff involve sexual relationships with inmates who \u201cappeared to be willing,\u201d according to authorities. 7% of the total prison population\n\nof the total prison population 22% of all victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization\n\nof all victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization 33%", + " of all victims of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization\n\n\u201cCalm down, man,\u201d I say, leaning over him. \u201cWe are going to take care of you. Just calm down.\u201d He keeps rolling and crying.\n\n\u201cHe didn\u2019t get nothing he ain\u2019t deserve!\u201d someone shouts from down the walk.\n\nA sergeant and the captain come and cuff the inmate who\u2019s been pinned to the fence. When the crowd around him clears, I am shocked. It\u2019s Brick. The guy on the ground is probably about 25 years old. As Brick is taken off to Cypress, he calls the man a \u201cbitch.\u201d\n\nA couple of officers look down at the young man disdainfully,", + " pull him off the ground, and take him away. Brick beat him with a lock in a sock. He was angry because the young man had stayed in Cypress for seven months, partly by his own choice. He was supposed to come back to Brick. He is Brick\u2019s punk.\n\nThere are many things about this incident that I don\u2019t know\u2014intimacy and rape in prison are complex issues. Did the young man stay in Cypress to escape Brick? Does he belong to Brick like a sex slave? Or would he say the relationship is consensual in the way a battered woman might say she stays with her husband because she loves him?", + " Did he agree to exchange sex for protection? Did he understand that once he crossed that bridge, there would be no going back?\n\nOnce a punk, always a punk. Miss Carter, the mental health director, told us she\u2019s seen just two inmates reverse their punk status in the eight years she\u2019s been here, and both cases involved stabbing a lot of people. Guards here do not turn a blind eye to overt rape, but the more subtle abuse of punks is accepted. Inmates and COs know a punk when they see one. He will do menial tasks when someone demands it. He is expected to keep his face clean-shaven at all times.", + " He has to pee sitting down or by backing up to the urinal with his penis tucked between his legs. He must shower facing the wall.\n\nSince 2003, the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) has required prisons to take measures to prevent sexual assaults. At Winn, this includes teaching new cadets about the law. \u201cWhy is the law so important?\u201d our instructor Kenny asked us during training. \u201cLiability.\u201d It was never fully clear whether the goal was to eliminate rape or to suppress homosexuality in the prison. Even consensual sex could lead to time in seg. \u201cDon\u2019t even go there and entertain nicknames,\u201d Kenny said.", + " \u201cThere\u2019s homosexuals down here got nicknames: Princess, Malibu, Tiki, Coco, Nicki. By calling them nicknames, that\u2019s entertainment. They think they got you goin\u2019 along with what they got goin\u2019 on. We can\u2019t stop 100 percent of the homosexuality that goes on down there, but we try to prevent and slow it down as much as possible.\u201d\n\nNationwide, as many as 9 percent of male inmates report being sexually assaulted behind bars, but given the anti-snitch culture of prison, the real number might be higher. According to the Louisiana budget office, Winn reported 546 sex offenses in the 2014 fiscal year,", + " a rate 69 percent higher than that of Avoyelles Correctional Center, a publicly operated prison of comparable size and security level.\n\nA survey by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) showed that in 2011 the rate of substantiated rapes and other \u201cnonconsensual sexual acts\u201d between inmates in a sampling of CCA prisons was similar to that of public prisons. CCA prisons reported less serious incidents of \u201cabusive sexual contact\u201d at more than twice the rate of public prisons. CCA says this data may be inaccurate because it predates the final implementation of the PREA standards. The company states it has \u201ca zero-tolerance policy with regard to sexual abuse.\u201d\n\nPrison has a reputation as a place of homosexual predation,", + " but it\u2019s not that simple. Inmates like Brick rarely see themselves as gay and typically go back to pursuing women once they get out. Self-identified gay or transgender prisoners are, however, often on the receiving end of abuse: Federal data shows that 39 percent of gay ex-prisoners reported being sexually assaulted by another inmate. One study found that 59 percent of transgender women in California\u2019s prisons for men reported being assaulted.\n\nBut not all sex in prison is violent; many of the letters from male lovers I read in the mail room were full of tenderness and longing. Take, for example, this one from a man in Angola,", + " written to one of the most flamboyant men at Winn:\n\nYou are the only same sex person in my life. So you have to never worry about anyone taking your place, not even a female\u2026Sweetie, you are a good wife. I don\u2019t give a damn what anybody said because I saw the good in you; the true you. That\u2019s why when we had sex I\u2019d always look you in the eyes. To truly understand you was my hardest goal but when I did our relationship got so good.\n\nAn hour after the young man who was attacked went to the infirmary, he walks into Ash, his arms still bleeding.", + " It\u2019s not clear whether Brick\u2019s absence is good or bad for him. Now, he has no protection. A couple of well-muscled inmates stand at the bars and look at him lustfully, telling him to try to get placed on their tier. He speaks with Miss Price and she abruptly tells me to put him on B1\u2014Brick\u2019s dorm. Inmates have complained to me about this sort of thing; even people who have stabbed each other are sometimes put back in the same dorm. I open the gate and watch him walk down the tier.\n\nMinutes later, he asks me to let him out. I do. He talks to Miss Price,", + " telling her that he is in danger. People think he\u2019s a rat. Maybe they think he snitched on Brick to get away from him. Miss Price doesn\u2019t give it a moment of consideration, telling him to get back on the tier. When I open the door, a large, bearded man inside pushes him back out onto the floor. \u201cYou was asking her to put you on another tier?\u201d he says. \u201cIf you think you can\u2019t live in here, you can\u2019t live in here. We don\u2019t need that kind of shit on the tier anyway.\u201d He slams the bars behind him.\n\nThe young man has two options:", + " Go back on the tier or go to the count room, where they will assign him to another unit.\n\nMiss Price tells me to take him out.\n\n\u201cYou gotta go,\u201d I tell him halfheartedly.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t want to go on no PC, man,\u201d he says to me. He thinks they are going to put him in protective custody.\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t know what to tell you,\u201d I say. I really don\u2019t.\n\nConsider the options swirling in his mind: He could go back to his tier, where a man twice his size has made it very clear he is not welcome. There, he would risk nights as a punk without a protector.", + " He might get robbed. He might get raped. He might get stabbed.\n\nThen there is the alternative, the only one that Winn, like many other prisons, offers to inmates like this: the protective custody wing in Cypress. He would be put in a cell, maybe alone, maybe with another man, for 23 hours a day. He would be branded a snitch just for going there, which means that when he eventually left, the odds of getting stabbed would be high.\n\nHe storms past me, back to the key. \u201cI ain\u2019t going on no PC, man,\u201d he shouts at Miss Price. \u201cI just came from Cypress!\u201d He paces back and forth,", + " working himself up. \u201cY\u2019all go\u2019 have to drag me out this bitch, man. Real talk. I ain\u2019t trippin\u2019 on what the fuck y\u2019all fixing to do to me,\u201d he says, pointing at Bacle and me. \u201cReal talk! \u2018Cuz I ain\u2019t going on no PC.\u201d Miss Price screams for him to get out.\n\n\u201cMan, I can live on any fucking tier you put me on!\u201d he shouts. I escort him out of the unit; he\u2019s eventually placed in another one.\n\nDuring our training, Kenny warned us how easy it was to be manipulated into sex by inmates. Even male guards \u201cfall victim to bein\u2019 involved in a relationship wit\u2019 a inmate,\u201d he said.", + " \u201cWe got some folks come in here with relationships on the outside, and it just blows my mind how these inmates get in that ear and they wind up falling victim. That\u2019s just the way it is. They don\u2019t call \u2019em cons for no reason.\u201d He warned us to be vigilant because even in a consensual relationship, the guard could be classified as a sex offender. He told us about one captain at Winn, Charlie Roberts (his real name), who got \u201cinvolved wit\u2019 a inmate. Havin\u2019 oral sex wit\u2019 him. So guess where he is sittin\u2019 at? A federal institution.\u201d\n\nThis story came up several times as an example of a guard who had to face the consequences of his weak will.", + " Nothing was ever said about the inmate who gave Roberts blow jobs. When I looked at the files from Roberts\u2019 case, I learned the inmate was a transgender woman who went by the name China. She had identified as a girl from age 11. Her father beat her repeatedly, and by the time she turned 13 she had left home and begun stripping on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. In 2000, she was sentenced to four years in prison for a \u201ccrime against nature\u201d\u2014oral sex for pay\u2014and sent to Winn. During her first year, she was serving a stint in seg for a dirty urine test when, she later testified,", + " Roberts shackled her, brought her to an office, and told her to give him a blow job. If she didn\u2019t, he said he would put her in a cell with an inmate who would \u201chandle\u201d things. When she later told two administrators what had happened, one allegedly told her that if she ever lied about one of his guards again, he would \u201cplant [her] ass under Cypress.\u201d\n\nOver the next two years, China said, she was raped several times by inmates, but she kept it to herself. \u201cI was ridiculed and picked on by the staff, and that made it to where I couldn\u2019t go to the staff for help at all,\u201d she said in a deposition.", + " \u201cIf an inmate did want to rape me\u2026who could I turn to?\u201d She became another inmate\u2019s punk. One day in 2003, Miss Price sent her to the count room for having an \u201coutrageous\u201d feminine haircut. There, an officer ordered her to take another urine test by peeing in a cup while standing. China had been through this with him before\u2014she\u2019d told him she couldn\u2019t pee standing up. After a long standoff, Roberts showed up and told her she could sit on the toilet. The other guards left. As she peed, Roberts entered the bathroom and closed the door behind him.", + " He told her that if she didn\u2019t give him oral sex again, he would taint her urine test and send her back to Cypress.\n\nOver the next two years, China said, she was raped several times by inmates, but she kept it to herself.\n\n\u201cStop playing,\u201d China said. Roberts slapped her in the face. She dropped to her knees and did what he asked. When she finished, he said, \u201cBitch, you better swallow.\u201d\n\n\u201cI would die before I ever fucking swallowed anything he put in my mouth,\u201d she later recalled. She held the semen in her mouth and spit it out onto her shirt. After she filed a grievance and contacted the American Civil Liberties Union,", + " she called the FBI. An agent came to the prison, took the shirt, and interviewed Roberts. The next day, CCA shipped China off to a publicly operated state prison, where she was held in a solitary cell \u201cno bigger than a broom closet\u201d and never let out for exercise. She was released from prison 11 months later.\n\n\u201cIf I knew that the prison was going to shave me bald and send me to another prison and put me on maximum- security lockdown,\u201d she later testified, \u201cI would have swallowed.\u201d Even harder than the solitary was knowing that, had she swallowed, she would have been able to finish her auto body class,", + " which might have kept her from having to live on the streets and going back to sex work when she got out. \u201cI would have swallowed and I would have kept on swallowing until I got that piece of paper.\u201d\n\nCCA denied all of China\u2019s allegations, but it settled the case out of court for an undisclosed amount. Roberts also denied her allegations when the FBI interviewed him, but the bureau found that the semen on her shirt was his. Roberts ultimately pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting China and making false statements to the FBI, and he was sentenced to six years in federal prison and a $5,000 fine. I have not been able to track down China.", + " Roberts served his sentence and was released in 2012.\n\nNearly half of all allegations of sexual victimization in prisons involve staff. In the 2011 BJS survey, CCA prisons reported a rate of substantiated staff-on-inmate sexual assault similar to that of public facilities. However, CCA prisons\u2019 rate of reported staff-on-inmate sexual harassment was five times higher. Another federal report found that former inmates of private state prisons are twice as likely to report being sexually victimized by staff members as inmates who were in public prisons.\n\nPrisoners also sexually harass and abuse officers. A recurring issue is inmates standing at the bars and masturbating at women guards sitting in the key.", + " I see some women\u2019s reports of sexual abuse by prisoners handled swiftly, but I hear other female guards complain that their sexual-harassment charges have gone nowhere. (CCA says it \u201ctakes any allegation of sexual harassment very seriously and has strong policies and practices in place for investigating such claims.\u201d) I once write up an inmate for masturbating in front of a nurse, a violation that should cause him to be moved to Cypress, but he isn\u2019t. I regularly see the macho culture of prison transcend the division between guards and inmates\u2014male officers routinely ignore the harassment of their female colleagues. \u201cSome of them staff, they\u2019ll wear clothes so tight you can see everything they got,\u201d Kenny lectured in class.", + " \u201cThey\u2019ll walk down there and they just struttin\u2019 they stuff. We got one, shoot, trying to sue the company \u2018cuz an inmate touched her on the butt. Man, you was down here every day shaking your stuff! If you do all this trying to draw attention to yourself, you go\u2019 get some, and if you ain\u2019t mindful, you\u2019ll get more than what you asked for.\u201d\n\nIn a class on \u201cinmate manipulation,\u201d Kenny told us that when he was a unit manager, there was a female officer he didn\u2019t like. Many prisoners didn\u2019t like her either, and one in particular was \u201cbound and determined to get this girl fired.\u201d One night,", + " the woman fell asleep in a chair on a unit floor, he said. She had also left the inmate\u2019s tier door open. The inmate crept out of his tier, pulled his penis out, and \u201cwent to town wit\u2019 it\u201d inches from her head. Not long afterward, the inmate was released, and he sent a letter to the prison, telling them to look at the surveillance footage from that night. CCA fired the guard for sleeping on the job and for leaving the tier door open, Kenny recalled.\n\n\u201cAin\u2019t nuttin\u2019 we could do to him,\u201d Kenny said of the inmate. \u201cThat\u2019s over wit\u2019. He gone home.\u201d (CCA says it is unaware of such an incident and that it would have reported the inmate to law enforcement.) \u201cI laughed,", + " but it\u2019s also kind of scary. I don\u2019t want nothing bad to happen to nobody.\u201d But, he added, \u201cWe was lookin\u2019 to get her too. He got her for us. It worked out on both ends.\u201d\n\nCracking down\n\nIn the morning meeting, the supervisor and Assistant Warden Parker admonish us about the topic they\u2019ve been lecturing about all week\u2014cracking down on sagging pants and homemade clothing. They are frustrated because no one is doing it. In private, the officers grumble that if the supervisors don\u2019t want inmates to wear bleach-stained jeans instead of their \u201cCCA blues,\u201d they should confiscate the pants themselves.", + " Why should the guards put themselves on the line? Parker seems to be aware of this, and he\u2019s keen to show he\u2019s not a front-office kind of guy. His personal goal is to become \u201clord of the do-rags,\u201d taking the prohibited head coverings whenever he sees them.\n\n\u201cDoes anybody know why we don\u2019t want them to individualize their uniform?\u201d Parker asks us. \u201cWe want them institutionalized. You guys ever heard that term? We want them institutionalized, not individualized. Is that sort of a mind game? Yup. But you know what? It\u2019s worked over the couple hundred years that we\u2019ve had prisons in this country.", + " So that\u2019s why we do it. We do not want them to feel as though they are individuals. We want them, for lack of a better term, to feel like a herd of cattle. We\u2019re just moving \u2019em from point A to point B, letting them graze in the dining hall and then go back to the barn. Okay?\u201d\n\n\u201cWe do not want them to feel as though they are individuals. We want them to feel like a herd of cattle.\u201d\n\nParker says the DOC wardens have been pestering him. \u201cAre they scared, Mr. Parker?\u201d he mimics. \u201cAre you not providing the adequate training that your staff members need,", + " Mr. Parker, to be strong enough to take clothing away from an inmate? Are they that scared, Mr. Parker?\u201d\n\nHis tone softens. \u201cI don\u2019t know when it last dawned on me in the last couple weeks\u2014I actually care about this institution and I care about all of you. I\u2019m tired of people telling me that people at Winn aren\u2019t doing their jobs. A term that was used a couple of weeks ago that was very embarrassing to me was: They don\u2019t even understand basic prison management at Winn.\u201d Some of the guards shake their heads. \u201cAnybody feel good about that one? I know I sure as hell don\u2019t.\u201d\n\nAfter the meeting,", + " everyone moves slowly down the walk. Edison, a big white CO with a bull neck, says he\u2019s tired of this \u201c\u2018Kumbaya\u2019 bullshit.\u201d He was removed from his post in Cypress when the SORT team took it over. Suggesting he can\u2019t handle his own is about the worst insult you could give him. \u201cI\u2019m sick and tired of doin\u2019 this shit,\u201d he says. \u201cThe security in this place is pathetic. They need to tighten up on the tier doors, re-man the towers, and reinstitute the inmate work out in the field and the inmate programs, and give these fools something to do besides sit in their beds,", + " eat, watch TV, and figure out how to fuck with us.\u201d He blames the \u201civory tower\u201d in Nashville\u2014CCA\u2019s corporate headquarters\u2014for Winn\u2019s problems. \u201cThose fools ain\u2019t got nothing in their mind but the bottom line.\u201d\n\nToday, the supervisor tells Edison to join Bacle and me in Ash. Having a new guard come to Ash is like having a visitor to our twisted household. This morning, standing around, waiting for the day to begin, Bacle complains about the most mundane of issues: Some inmates don\u2019t sit on their bunks during count like they are supposed to.\n\n\u201cHow\u2019s your fighting skills, Bauer?\u201d Edison asks.", + " The question makes me nervous. This is the opposite of the approach I\u2019m trying to take in here.\n\n\u201cAll right,\u201d I say.\n\n\u201cThey need to give these fools something to do besides eat, watch TV, and figure out how to fuck with us.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou\u2019re with me,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re going to give these motherfuckers an eye-opener today. I don\u2019t play that bullshit. You get your ass on the bunk.\u201d\n\n\u201cYou\u2019re not into this playing shit,\u201d Bacle says sympathetically.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d Edison says.\n\n\u201cYou\u2019re a grade A1 asshole when it needs to be,\u201d Bacle says.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m a grade A1 drill instructor when I have to be.\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s what this place needs!\u201d\n\n\u201cI know it does,\u201d Edison says.", + " \u201cIt needs to go back to about 1960. Give a goddamn PR-24\u2033\u2014a police baton\u2014\u201dand hand a can of gas to everybody. You get stupid, you get beat down. You get big and stupid, you get gassed and beat down. Either way, you learn your fucking place.\u201d\n\nEdison has been here for a year and a half. \u201cWith my skill set, and with where I moved to, it was the only fuckin\u2019 thing open,\u201d he says. He is an Army Rangers veteran and was once a small-town police chief. He says he retired when \u201cthe city council got afraid of me.\u201d \u201cWhen I was a cop,", + " I knew damn well that I would shoot your ass. I didn\u2019t carry two extra clips, I carried four. When I went to work, I went to war. When I got off, I still went to war. I carried two clips on me regardless of what I was wearing. I carried at least my Glock 40 underneath my arm, and usually I had a Glock.45 on my ankle. Go ahead, play with me.\u201d\n\nWe walk the floor. He stops. We stop. \u201cYou know what is stupid?\u201d he says. \u201cI see murderers. I see rapists. I see robbers. And then I see,", + " the vast majority is in here for bein\u2019 stupid enough to smoke a joint too close to a school. Twenty-five years, federal mandatory. Then you got somebody that slaughtered a whole fucking family gets 25 to life and he\u2019s out in six to eight.\u201d (About one-fifth of Winn inmates are in for drug-related crimes. Getting busted with a joint near a school will typically land you about six years, not 25.) Edison\u2019s indignation about drug criminalization surprises me. \u201cNow, where\u2019s the fucking justice in that? And we\u2019re paying how much per inmate per day?\u201d\n\n\u201cCount time!\u201d the woman in the key yells.", + " I unlock the door of B1 tier and Edison walks in. An inmate is standing at the sink, brushing his teeth. \u201cGet on your bunk,\u201d Edison barks. The inmate keeps his back turned to Edison. \u201cOr would you like to do it in Cypress?\u201d Edison steps in toward him. \u201cStep out!\u201d Edison shouts, pointing to the door. He\u2019s seriously sending a prisoner to seg for this?\n\nThe inmate walks out, still brushing his teeth. \u201cThis man is going on about some bullshit,\u201d he says, waving his toothbrush around. A spot of toothpaste lands on Edison\u2019s jacket, which is hanging on a nearby chair.\n\n\u201cGo ahead!", + " Be dumb! Let\u2019s go!\u201d Edison yells, turning his hat backward. \u201cPlease be stupid enough to touch me. I\u2019m already taking your ass to Cypress.\u201d The inmate continues to brush his teeth.\n\nI walk down the tier and do count. \u201cThat Crip boy go\u2019 to tear his ass up,\u201d one inmate says as I pass. \u201cYour work partner going to get stabbed.\u201d\n\nI can\u2019t keep count straight in my head. I just want to get off the tier.\n\nWhen we leave the tier everyone comes up to the bars and yells at Edison. \u201cYou want to go next?\u201d he shouts. \u201cBehind the wall!\u201d They don\u2019t budge.", + " \u201cEvery one of y\u2019all is going to Cypress.\u201d\n\n\u201cSuck my dick!\u201d\n\nThe captain and a sergeant enter the unit. The captain tells Edison to step aside so he can talk to the inmates and try to ease the tension. \u201cThis pacification bullshit,\u201d Edison mutters to me. \u201cYeah, we knew how to pacify \u2019em in Vietnam. We dropped a fuckin\u2019 500-pounder on \u2019em. That pacifies.\u201d The captain tells Edison to come with him. \u201cIt\u2019s not warm and fuzzy enough,\u201d Edison says to me as he leaves.\n\nThe sergeant, whose name is King, pulls me aside.", + " \u201cI\u2019m here for you, bro,\u201d he says. In the past, I\u2019ve heard him complain that the supervisors don\u2019t back the line officers enough. \u201cDon\u2019t ever think I\u2019m against you. \u2018Cuz I\u2019m gonna knock one of \u2019em out if I have to. And we go\u2019 to write that report like he was trying to kill me and it was self-defense. Hahahaha!\u201d\n\nKing has only been working at Winn for five months, but he\u2019s been in corrections for eight years. As a kid, he spent time in juvenile hall. Like Edison, he is an Army vet, and he credits the military for correcting his delinquent ways.", + " After 22 years in the service, he got a job in a juvenile correctional facility in Texas. One day, he told a boy to get off the basketball court and the kid grabbed his throat and tried to strangle him. \u201cI damn near beat the piss out of him. Sixteen years old, 6 foot 3. As soon as you put your hands on me, you\u2019re not a teenager, you\u2019re a man. I put that uppercut on his ass and the superintendent said, \u2018I strongly suggest that you resign, sarge.\u2019 I fucked him up pretty good.\u201d\n\n\u201cOh well!\u201d Bacle says.\n\n\u201cAll of this I shattered,\u201d he says,", + " pointing to his jaw and mouth.\n\n\u201cOh well!\u201d\n\nPink Shades\n\nDuring count, I tally bodies, not faces. If I look at faces, it means I have to keep the numbers straight while constantly calibrating sternness and friendliness in my eyes for each individual. When I go down the tier, I make a point to walk in a fast, long stride with a slight pop in my left step, trying to look tough. I practiced this in the mirror because inmates comment every day on a twist in my walk that I never knew existed. Sometimes prisoners whistle at me as I pass. In my normal life, I try to diffuse any macho tendencies.", + " Now, I try to annihilate anything remotely feminine about me. As I walk and count, I tighten my core to keep my hips from moving.\n\nI steel myself for A1 tier. For some reason, inmates on this tier are always testing me, and as I walk down one side, someone makes a comment about my \u201cpanties\u201d as I pass. \u201cYou like that dick. You like that dick,\u201d someone sings as I go by. I ignore it. Another comments that I look like a model. I pretend I don\u2019t hear him. On my way back toward the front, I hear again, \u201cYou like that dick.", + " You like that dick.\u201d\n\nThis has been going on for weeks, but this time something snaps. I stop count and march back to the guy calling out to me, a thirtysomething black man with pink sunglasses and tattoos crawling up his neck. \u201cWhat did you say to me?\u201d I shout.\n\n\u201cI ain\u2019t said nothin\u2019.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhy are you always saying shit like that? You are always focusing so much on me, maybe you like the dick! Bitch ass!\u201d\n\n\u201cSay that again?\u201d\n\n\u201cMaybe you like the dick!\u201d I shout. I am completely livid.\n\n\u201cHe doesn\u2019t know how big a mistake he just made,\u201d another inmate says as I storm out.\n\n\u201cI ain\u2019t got nothing against any of y\u2019all officers.", + " I understand that you gotta live. You got to survive.\u201d\n\nWhen we finish count, I go back to Pink Shades\u2019 tier. \u201cGive me your ID,\u201d I say to him. He refuses. \u201cGive me your ID! Now!\u201d I shout at the top of my lungs. He doesn\u2019t. I get his name from another officer and write him up for making sexual comments. He says he\u2019s going to file a PREA grievance on me.\n\nI try to cool down. My heart is still hammering 10 minutes later. \u201cAre you all right, sarge?\u201d a prisoner asks me. Slowly, my rage turns to shame and I go into the bathroom and sit on the floor.", + " Where did those words come from? I rarely ever shout. I am not homophobic. Or am I? I feel utterly defeated. I go back to A1 and call Pink Shades to the bars.\n\n\u201cLook, I just want you to understand I don\u2019t have a problem with any of y\u2019all,\u201d I tell him. \u201cI think a lot of you are in here for sentences that are too long. I\u2019m not like these other guys, all right?\u201d\n\n\u201cAll right,\u201d he says.\n\n\u201cBut, you know, when people disrespect me like that for no reason, I can\u2019t just take that\u2014you know what I mean?\u201d\n\nHe tries to deny taunting me,", + " but I won\u2019t back down. \u201cLook, you going to have inmates talkin\u2019 crazy,\u201d he says.\n\n\u201cBut you don\u2019t want me talking crazy to you, right?\u201d There are inmates staring at us in astonishment.\n\n\u201cI feel you,\u201d he says. \u201cYou came here and talked to me like a man. And I apologize. I ain\u2019t got nothing against any of y\u2019all officers. You feel me? I understand that you gotta live. You got to survive. Those words hurt you. I feel you. I mean I was singing a song, but you probably took it the wrong way. It triggered something in you.\u201d He\u2019s right.", + " Something about being here reminds me of being in junior high, getting picked on for my size and the fact that I read books, getting called a faggot.\n\nI tear up his disciplinary report and throw it in the trash. When I walk back down the tier for the next count, no one pays any attention to me.\n\nMan down\n\nOne day in Ash, a few inmates shout, \u201cMan down! Man down!\u201d A large man, Mason, is lying on his bed in C2, his right hand over his bare chest. His eyes are closed and his left leg is moving back and forth slowly.\n\n\u201cWe just put him on his bed.", + " He had fell off this side of his fucking bed just now, bro,\u201d an inmate says to me. \u201cHe\u2019s fucked up.\u201d I radio for a stretcher.\n\nMason starts to cry. His left hand is a fist. His back arches. \u201cI\u2019m scared,\u201d he mouths. Someone puts a hand on his arm for the briefest moment: \u201cI know, son. They finna come see you now.\u201d\n\nA stretcher finally arrives. The nurses and their orderlies move slowly. \u201cThey weren\u2019t supposed to send that man back down here,\u201d an inmate says to me. Earlier today Mason was playing basketball and fell to the ground in pain,", + " he explains. He went to the infirmary, where they told him that he had fluid in his lungs.\n\nThree inmates pick up Mason in his sheet and put him on the stretcher. His hands are crossed over his chest like a mummy as two prisoners wheel him away.\n\nWithin a few hours he is sent back to the tier.\n\n\u201cThey told me I got fluid on my lungs and they won\u2019t send me to the hospital.\u201d\n\nDays later, I see Mason dragging his feet, his arms around his chest. I tell him to take my chair. He sits and hunches over, putting his head in his lap. It feels like a \u201cthrobbing pain in my chest,\u201d he says.", + " We call for a wheelchair. \u201cThey told me I got fluid on my lungs and they won\u2019t send me to the hospital,\u201d he says. \u201cThat shit crazy.\u201d\n\nA nurse happens to be in the unit, passing out pills. I tell her they keep sending Mason to the infirmary but won\u2019t take him to the hospital. She insists \u201cnothing serious\u201d is wrong with him.\n\n\u201cWhen I saw him last week, he was almost passed out,\u201d I say. \u201cHe was in a lot of pain.\u201d\n\nShe looks at me sidelong. \u201cBut the doctor still ain\u2019t going to send him to the hospital just \u2019cause of that.\u201d\n\nIf he were sent to the hospital,", + " CCA would be contractually obligated to pay for his stay. For a for-profit company, this presents a dilemma. Even a short hospital stay is a major expense for an inmate who brings the company about $34 per day. And that\u2019s aside from the cost of having two guards keep watch over him. Medical care within the prison is expensive, too. CCA does not disclose its medical expenses, but in a typical prison, health care costs are the second-biggest expense after staff. On average, a Louisiana prison puts 9 percent of its budget toward health care. In some states it can be much higher; health care is 31 percent of a California prison\u2019s budget.", + " Nearly 40 percent of Winn inmates have a chronic disease such as diabetes, heart disease, or asthma, according to Louisiana\u2019s budget office. About 6 percent have a communicable disease such as HIV or hepatitis C.\n\nOne day, I meet a man with no legs in a wheelchair. His name is Robert Scott. (He consented to having his real name used.) He\u2019s been at Winn 12 years. \u201cI was walking when I got here,\u201d he tells me. \u201cI was walking, had all my fingers.\u201d I notice he is wearing fingerless gloves with nothing poking out of them. \u201cThey took my legs off in January and my fingers in June.", + " Gangrene don\u2019t play. I kept going to the infirmary, saying, \u2018My feet hurt. My feet hurt.\u2019 They said, \u2018Ain\u2019t nothin\u2019 wrong wicha. I don\u2019t see nothin\u2019 wrong wicha.\u2019 They didn\u2019t believe me, or they talk bad to me\u2014\u2019I can\u2019t believe you comin\u2019 up here!'\u201d\n\nHis medical records show that in the space of four months he made at least nine requests to see a doctor. He complained of sore spots on his feet, swelling, oozing pus, and pain so severe he couldn\u2019t sleep. When he visited the infirmary,", + " medical staff offered him sole pads, corn removal strips, and Motrin. He says he once showed his swollen foot, dripping with pus, to the warden. On one of these occasions, Scott alleges in a federal lawsuit against CCA, a nurse told him, \u201cAin\u2019t nothing wrong with you. If you make another medical emergency you will receive a disciplinary write-up for malingering.\u201d He filed a written request to be taken to a hospital for a second opinion, but it was denied.\n\nHis fingertips and toes turned black and wept pus. Inmates began to fear his condition was contagious.\n\nEventually, numbness spread to his hands,", + " but the infirmary refused to treat him. His fingertips and toes turned black and wept pus. Inmates began to fear his condition was contagious. When Scott\u2019s sleeplessness kept another inmate awake, the inmate threatened to kill him if he was not moved to another tier. A resulting altercation drew the attention of staff, who finally sent him to the local hospital.\n\n\u201cBut when I got my legs cut off they didn\u2019t come back and say, \u2018Robert, I\u2019m sorry.\u2019 I done taked my lickin\u2019. Part of being locked up.\u201d He is now suing CCA for neglect, claiming that inmates are denied medical care because the company operates the prison \u201con a \u2018skeleton crew\u2019 for profitable gain.\u201d\n\n\u201cWhere do you think is one of the No.", + " 1 areas that we get hit on as a confinement business?\u201d Assistant Warden Parker asks us at a staff meeting. \u201cMedical! Inmates have this thing that if they have a sniffle they are supposed to be flown to a specialist somewhere and be treated immediately for that sniffle.\u201d His tone becomes incredulous. \u201cBelieve it or not, we are required by law to take care of them.\u201d\n\nIt\u2019s true: Under Supreme Court rulings citing the Eighth Amendment, prisons are required to provide inmates with adequate health care. Yet CCA has found ways to minimize its obligations. At the out-of-state prisons where California ships some of its inmates,", + " CCA will not accept prisoners who are over 65 years old, have mental health issues, or have serious conditions like HIV. The company\u2019s Idaho prison contract specified that the \u201cprimary criteria\u201d for screening incoming offenders was \u201cno chronic mental health or health care issues.\u201d The contracts of some CCA prisons in Tennessee and Hawaii stipulate that the states will bear the cost of HIV treatment. Such exemptions allow CCA to tout its cost-efficiency while taxpayers assume the medical expenses for the inmates the company won\u2019t take or treat.\n\nIn 2010, the company and Immigration and Customs Enforcement settled a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU that asserted immigration detainees at a CCA-run facility in California were routinely denied prescribed medical treatment.", + " (CCA admitted no wrongdoing.) In a rare case that made its way to trial in 2001, the company was found to have violated the 8th and 14th Amendments and ordered to pay $235,000 to an inmate whose broken jaw was left wired shut for 10 weeks. (He removed the wires himself with nail clippers while guards watched.) The jury wrote they hoped the message sent by the ruling would \u201cecho throughout the halls of your corporate offices as well as your corporate housing facilities.\u201d (CCA appealed and settled for an undisclosed amount.)\n\nSubjects of lawsuits filed against CCA\n\nCCA has also been the subject of medical malpractice cases involving pregnant inmates.", + " In 2014, it settled a case for $690,000 over the death of a prisoner\u2019s baby at a county jail in Chattanooga, Tennessee. When the inmate went into labor, she was put in a cell with no mattress and left there for three hours as she bled heavily onto the floor. CCA employees did not call an ambulance until approximately five hours after the prisoner asked for help. Her newborn baby died shortly thereafter. In court proceedings, the warden testified that surveillance footage showed no signs of an emergency. But before the footage could be reviewed, CCA claimed it had been accidentally erased. The court sanctioned the company for destroying evidence.\n\nCCA settled another case for $250,", + "000 after a pregnant woman being held in a jail in Nashville complained of vaginal bleeding and severe abdominal pain. She said medical staff demanded \u201cproof,\u201d so they put her in solitary and turned off the water so her blood loss could be \u201cmonitored.\u201d She claimed they did nothing to alleviate her pain as she endured contractions, filling the toilet with blood. The next morning, the inmate was shackled and taken to a hospital, where doctors found that she was already dilated. While prison guards watched, she gave birth and was immediately sedated. When she woke up, medical staff brought her the dead baby. She said she was not allowed to call her family and was given no information about the disposal of her son\u2019s body.\n\nAt least 15 doctors at Winn have been sued for delivering poor medical care.", + " The prison hired several of them even after the state had disciplined them for misconduct. One, Aris Cox, was hired in the \u201990s, after his license was temporarily suspended for writing prescriptions to support his tranquilizer addiction. While Mark Singleton was at Winn, the Louisiana board of medical examiners discovered that he had failed \u201cto meet the standard of care\u201d at his previous position in New Mexico. He was put on probation, but CCA kept him on. Winn hired Stephen Kuplesky after his license had been temporarily suspended for prescribing painkillers to a family member with no medical condition. Robert Cleveland was working at Winn when he was put on medical probation for his involvement in a kickback scheme with a wheelchair company.", + " He was later disciplined for prescribing narcotics from his home and vehicle. (It\u2019s not clear if he was working at Winn at the time. CCA says all doctors at Winn had \u201cappropriate credentials.\u201d)\n\nData collected by Prison Legal News on more than 1,200 state and federal suits against CCA shows that 15 percent of them were related to medical care. (This sample is not a complete list of complaints against the company; in 2010 alone, CCA faced more than 600 pending cases. Between 1998 and 2008, the company settled another 600 cases.) Since most inmates can\u2019t afford legal counsel,", + " it\u2019s nearly impossible for them to prevail in court. When I made public-records requests in a couple of states for a more recent accounting of lawsuits settled by CCA, the company intervened, arguing that a list of settlements involving claims of medical malpractice, wrongful deaths, assaults, and the use of force \u201cconstitutes trade secrets.\u201d\n\nMy reconciliation with Pink Shades encouraged me. Every time I have a problem with a prisoner, I try the same approach and eventually we tap knuckles to show each other respect. Still, these breakthroughs are fleeting. In the moment, they feel like a glimmer of a possibility that we can appreciate each other\u2019s humanity,", + " but I come to understand that our positions make this virtually impossible. We can chat and laugh through the bars, but inevitably I need to flex my authority. My job will always be to deny them the most basic of human impulses\u2014to push for more freedom. Day by day, the number of inmates who are friendly with me grows smaller.\n\nThere are exceptions, like Corner Store, but were I to take away the privileges Bacle and I have granted him, I know that he, too, would become an enemy.\n\nMy priorities change. Striving to treat everyone as human takes too much energy. More and more, I focus on proving I won\u2019t back down.", + " I am vigilant; I come to work ready for people to catcall me or run up on me and threaten to punch me in the face. I show neither fear nor compunction. Sometimes prisoners call me racist, and it stings, but I try as hard as I can not to flinch because to do so would be to show a pressure point, a button that can be pressed when they want to make me bend.\n\nStriving to treat everyone as human takes too much energy. More and more, I focus on proving I won\u2019t back down.\n\nNearly every day the unit reaches a crescendo of frustration because inmates are supposed to be going somewhere like the law library,", + " GED classes, vocational training, or a substance abuse group, but their programs are canceled or they are let out of the unit late. Inmates tell me that at other prisons, the schedule is firm. \u201cThat door would be opening up and everybody would be on the move,\u201d an inmate who\u2019s been incarcerated throughout the state says. Here, there is no schedule. We wait for the call over the radio; then we let the inmates go. They could eat at 11:30 a.m. They could eat at 3 p.m. School might happen, or maybe not. It\u2019s been years since Winn has had the staff to run the big yard.", + " Sometimes we let the inmates onto the small yard attached to the unit. Often we don\u2019t. Canteen and law library hours are canceled regularly. There just aren\u2019t enough officers to keep everything going.\n\nGuards bond with prisoners over their frustrations. Prisoners tell us they understand we are powerless to change these high-level management problems. Yet the two groups remain locked in battle like soldiers in a war they don\u2019t believe in.\n\nWhenever I open a tier door, I demand that everyone shows me his pass, and I use my body to stop the flood of people from pouring out. Some just push through.\n\nI catch one. \u201cGet back in!\u201d I shout.", + " \u201cI\u2019m writing you up right now if you don\u2019t get back in there right now. You hear me?\u201d\n\nHe walks back in, staring me down. \u201cWhite dude all on a nigga\u2019s trail, man,\u201d he says. I shut the door, ignoring him. \u201cYou better get the fuck from down here before I end up hurtin\u2019 one of y\u2019all,\u201d he shouts at me. \u201cYou green as a motherfucker!\u201d\n\nI\u2019m tired.\n\nAn inmate comes around the key. Bacle is following him and calls for me to stop him. I stand in the inmate\u2019s path. I know him, the one with the mini-dreads.", + " I feel threatened, frankly, whenever I see him. \u201cThis way,\u201d I say, pointing back to where he came from. He tries to walk past me. I lock eyes with him. \u201cThis way!\u201d I command. He turns back and walks slowly away. I walk behind him. He stops, spins around, throws his hands in the air, and shouts, \u201cGet the fuck off my trail, dog!\u201d I know he\u2019s testing me. I open his tier door. He walks in, stands just inside, and stares me down hard. I grab the door and slam it shut\u2014bang!\u2014in his face.\n\nI turn and step back into the throng of inmates milling around the floor.", + " \u201cMotherfucker\u2019s going to end up dead!\u201d he shouts after me. I stop and turn around. He just stares. I grab the radio on my shoulder, then pause. Was I ever taught what to do when something like this happens? I know how to press the button and speak into the radio, but whom do I call? I think of King, the officer who smashed the kid\u2019s jaw. \u201cSergeant King, could you come down to Ash?\u201d I say into my shoulder.\n\n\u201cEn route.\u201d\n\nWhen he arrives, I take him into B1 tier. I find Mini-Dreads.\n\n\u201cHe needs to get locked up,\u201d I say,", + " looking him in the eyes.\n\nKing cuffs him. I tell King he threatened my life. He needs to go to seg.\n\n\u201cWhat happened?! I ain\u2019t said nuttin\u2019!\u201d the inmate shouts. I walk away.\n\nI go back to chasing the others into their tiers. \u201cWhat you lock that dude up for?\u201d an inmate asks me. \u201cDude was \u2019bout to go home,\u201d another says. \u201cHe ain\u2019t go\u2019 go home now.\u201d I walk away, unyielding. In the back of my mind, however, there is a voice: Did you see him say anything? Wasn\u2019t your back turned? Are you sure what you heard?", + " It doesn\u2019t matter, really. He wanted to intimidate me and it was about time I threw someone in the hole. They need to know I am not weak.\n\nOne morning, Ash smells like feces. On D2, liquid shit is oozing out of the shower drain and running down the tier. \u201cIt\u2019s been here over 12 hours,\u201d one inmate says.\n\n\u201cMan, you got worms and everything on the floor. Real talk.\u201d\n\n\u201cThis is a health and safety violation!\u201d\n\n\u201cMan, this is cruel and unusual punishment!\u201d\n\nWe let inmates out to go to the small yard. As they flow out of the tiers,", + " I see a large group run to A1 tier. Bacle pushes the tier door shut and calls a Code Blue over the radio. Inside the tier, two prisoners are grappling, their bodies pressed up against the bars. Each is gripping a shank in one hand while holding the other\u2019s arm to keep him from swinging. Drops of blood spatter the floor. The surrounding scene is oddly calm. Inmates stand around and watch, not saying anything.\n\n\u201cBreak it up,\u201d Bacle says indifferently. \u201cBreak it up.\u201d\n\nThe two combatants are speaking to each other quietly, almost at a whisper.\n\nOne man breaks his hand free,", + " swings it up, and jams his shank into the side of the other man\u2019s neck.\n\n\u201cCome on,\u201d one says. \u201cCome on with it, big dog.\u201d\n\n\u201cI\u2019ma do you like you did me.\u201d\n\nThey grapple some more.\n\n\u201cBreak it up!\u201d Bacle yells.\n\n\u201cCome on!\u201d I shout, feeling utterly impotent.\n\nBacle, Miss Price, a CCA employee from out of state, and I stand just two feet from them, separated by the bars, and watch the two try to press their knives into each other.\n\nOne man breaks his hand free, swings it up, and jams his shank into the side of the other man\u2019s neck.", + " My breath stops for a moment, and I utter a gagging sound. \u201cIt ain\u2019t sharp enough, big dog,\u201d says the guy who was just stabbed. \u201cLet me show you where the sharp one is.\u201d\n\nBacle reaches through the bars and grabs the stabber by his hood as the other inmate struggles to break loose. For the first time, the other prisoners make noise. \u201cHey, man, you\u2019re gonna get him killed like that!\u201d one shouts at Bacle. Bacle lets go, and the two men tumble across the floor, landing in a heap by the toilet, blocked from our view by a short wall.", + " They keep scuffling. An arm swings up and jabs down. One prisoner walks over to the urinal two feet from them and pees as they keep stabbing.\n\nThe fight lasts nearly four minutes, until a SORT member comes in with a can of pepper spray. \u201cDon\u2019t fucking move,\u201d he barks. \u201cEverybody lay the fuck down.\u201d He sprays the men as they try to stab each other. One, who\u2019s had a bit of his ear sliced off, is taken to the hospital. The other goes to seg.\n\nThe smell of pepper spray fades, but the smell of shit does not. It\u2019s not until the afternoon that someone comes in to fix the toilets and finds a shank stuck in the plumbing.\n\nLater,", + " I recount to a sergeant how one of the inmates was poking the knife into the other guy\u2019s neck. \u201cDid you learn something from that?\u201d he asks me.\n\n\u201cNot really.\u201d\n\nThe inmate could have slit the other guy\u2019s throat if he wanted to, he says. But he didn\u2019t. \u201cBoth of \u2019em scared. That\u2019s the reason for having\u2019 them shanks in the first place, \u2018cuz they are scared.\u201d\n\nThe audit\n\nAt the end of my shift, I stride briskly down the dark walk. I am relieved to be going home, but after two weeks on the job as a full-time CO,", + " I\u2019m afraid in a way I wasn\u2019t at first. The longer I work here, the more people have grudges against me. As I head down the walk, inmates are coming and going from various parts of the prison and I can\u2019t see any other guards around. I don\u2019t have a radio\u2014I am required to give it to the officer who relieves me. I\u2019ve seen the surveillance footage, and I doubt it would be clear enough to identify anyone who might jump me in this darkness.\n\nThe gate before the exit is locked and I am routed through the visitation area. There, 20 or so officers from my shift are sitting at the tables,", + " frowning. Two inmates are serving pizza. We\u2019ve been trapped in a company meeting. Assistant Warden Parker is there. The chief of security. HR. I grab some pizza and sit down, frustrated.\n\n\u201cHow many people here got less than a year in?\u201d Parker asks. I raise my hand. \u201cYou\u2019ve probably seen a lot of bad days, okay? We\u2019re gonna change that. And it takes all of us working together. It really, really does. As long as we stay as a decent team and we remember that the bad guys are the guys who stay here 24/7 and don\u2019t get to leave.\u201d\n\nOn the wall is a painting of a black kid and a white kid lying on their bellies on a grassy hillside,", + " looking at a rainbow. Next to it is another mural of a lion and a tiger tearing through an American flag with a bald eagle flying overhead. \u201cThe CCA Way\u201d is written above it.\n\n\u201cThe company took a look at things and they realized that we need to do a little bit better for the staff here at Winn. I\u2019m not going to say that we\u2019ve waved a magic wand and everybody\u2019s walking out of here, gonna go buy new cars, but the hourly wage for a correctional officer is going to go up to $10 an hour. So congratulations to everybody sitting inside this room.\u201d He starts clapping and a few people join unenthusiastically.", + " \u201cThis is going to be one of those proud moments,\u201d he says.\n\n\u201c\u2018ACA\u2019s coming. We gotta panic! Hit the panic button!'\u201d\n\n\u201cDoes anybody know what the ACA is?\u201d Parker asks. \u201cHave you been hearing about \u2018We got ACA coming up. Ooooh! ACA\u2019s coming. We gotta panic! Hit the panic button!'\u201d\n\n\u201cThe American Correctional Association,\u201d someone volunteers.\n\n\u201cOkay, why do we care about ACA?\u201d Parker asks.\n\n\u201cWe need our jobs. We need to pass.\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s a theme that goes with it. Years and years and years ago, I think it was 1870,", + " there was a governor upset with what he thought was cruel and unusual punishment,\u201d he lectures. \u201cSo he started drafting up a little group of people that would go around and they would check on prisons and prison conditions to ensure that the people who were confined were not being treated cruelly. After time they started developing a sophisticated auditing process. So, a third-party person who has no dog in the fight, so to speak, comes in and they take a look at how are we treating our inmates. And they give us a stamp of, \u2018You\u2019re treating them with proper care.\u2019\n\n\u201cThat way when we go to court and the inmate says,", + " \u2018Oh, they made me eat Pizza Hut pizza! That\u2019s cruel and unusual punishment! It should have been Domino\u2019s!\u2019\u2014when it goes to court, we pull up our ACA files and say, \u2018Hey, look, here\u2019s how we prepare our food in the kitchen. We prepare the food in our kitchen under these standards.'\u201d\n\nThe ACA is a trade association, but it\u2019s also the closest thing we have to a national regulatory body for prisons. More than 900 public and private correctional facilities and detention centers are accredited under its standards. Winn was the first prison to be accredited in Louisiana. Shortly after T. Don Hutto co-founded CCA,", + " he became the president of ACA.\n\nOver the next few weeks, inmates repaint every unit in preparation for the ACA audit. The maintenance man is run ragged as he tries to fix busted vents, plumbing, and cell and tier doors. (\u201cWe didn\u2019t own the facility,\u201d CCA\u2019s spokesman told me, noting that major maintenance issues at Winn were the DOC\u2019s responsibility. CCA\u2019s contract states that it was responsible for routine and preventive maintenance.)\n\nIn anticipation of the audit, I read the ACA standards. How will the auditors deal with the fact that the cells in segregation are at least 20 square feet smaller than required? Or that inmates only get 10 minutes to eat,", + " not the mandated 20? There are many other ACA standards and recommendations Winn does not appear to meet: We rarely have the required number of positions staffed; guards\u2019 pay is not comparable to the pay of state corrections officers; guards rarely ever use the metal detectors at the entrances to the housing units; prisoners often don\u2019t get one hour of daily access to exercise space; suicide watch meals are below caloric requirements; there aren\u2019t enough toilets in the dorms. (The ACA did not respond to a request for comment.)\n\nThen again, Winn passed its last ACA audit, in 2012, with a near-perfect score of 99 percent,", + " the same score it received in its previous audit three years earlier. In fact, CCA\u2019s average score across all its accredited prisons is also 99 percent.\n\nOn the morning of the audit, we wake everyone up and tell them to make their beds and take any pictures of women off their lockers. Two well-dressed white men enter Ash unit and do a slow lap around the floor. The only questions they ask Bacle and me are what our names are and how we\u2019re doing. They do not examine our logbook, nor do they check our entries against the camera footage. If they did, they would find that some of the cameras don\u2019t work.", + " They do not check the doors. If they did, they would see they need to be yanked open by hand because most of the switches don\u2019t work. They don\u2019t check the fire alarm, which automatically closes smoke doors over the tiers, some of which must be jimmied back open by two guards. They do not ask to go on a tier. They do not interview any inmates. They do a single loop and they leave.\n\nSupport fearless investigative journalism with a tax-deductible monthly or one-time donation to Mother Jones today.\n\nSupport fearless investigative journalism with a tax-deductible donation to Mother Jones today.\n\nAfter nearly two decades,", + " Corner Store is about to be free. He has just six weeks to go before he qualifies for early release with the \u201cgood time\u201d he\u2019s earned. How does someone reenter the world after two decades behind bars, with no friends on the outside and no money to his name? His first step, he says, will be to stay in a shelter until he can get on his feet. He doesn\u2019t know where he will go yet. He tells me he doesn\u2019t want to count the days. \u201cIt stresses me out. Anxiety sets in. Your mind goes, working and thinking about stuff. How am I going to do this?", + " How am I going to do that? It causes a panic attack. When I walk, I walk.\u201d\n\nBut fantasies creep into his mind. \u201cI\u2019ma get me a big bottle of Kaopectate, a big German chocolate cake, five-gallon thing of milk,\u201d he says. \u201cJust get out the way, that\u2019s all I\u2019ma tell you.\u201d We are outside, talking through the fence; he\u2019s on the small yard and I\u2019m on the Ash walk. \u201cAfter that, I want me a seafood platter, a real seafood platter about the size of the kitchen table, just for me and Mom.", + " It\u2019s all about Mom when I go home.\u201d\n\nHe puts his hand on the fence and leans in. \u201cWhat I\u2019m sayin\u2019 is this here, man: I just wanna go have fun, boy. And fun does not mean me-gettin\u2019-in-trouble fun. Fun means just enjoying life. I wanna be able to take my mothafuckin\u2019 shoes off and socks off and walk in the sand. I wanna be able to just go outside in my shorts and just my house slippers and stand in the rain and just\u2014\u201d he spreads his arms, points his face to the sky, and opens his mouth.", + " \u201cThem thangs I miss. You can\u2019t do that in here. Alls I\u2019m sayin\u2019 is this here: When I get out, I don\u2019t want to have to poke my chest out any longer. It hurts to poke my chest out. It\u2019s a weight on my shoulders I\u2019ve been toting for the last 20-somethin\u2019 years, and I\u2019m ready to drop that weight because the load is heavy.\u201d\n\nChapter 5: Lockdown\n\nOn my fifth week on the job, I\u2019m asked to train a new cadet. He is a short white man in his 40s with peppered black hair.", + " He says he worked as a security contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan for Triple Canopy and Blackwater. He is hoping to go back to Afghanistan soon. \u201cI had terrorists who blew up schools and shit that I had to take care of. It wasn\u2019t all PC like it is here.\u201d Prisoners here, he says, get treated with kid gloves. \u201cThey got rights and all this crap. Fuck that.\u201d\n\nI show him how to open the doors and do callouts, and I tell him we are going to start letting people out for chow soon. \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d he says, suddenly looking frightened. \u201cYou are just going to open the doors and let them out?", + " I can\u2019t believe that!\u201d\n\nHe doesn\u2019t think they should go out at all. \u201cFuck \u2019em. Not unless you have absolutely an emergency. Or you\u2019re on a work plan or some shit like that. I\u2019d make prison so bad that you would never want to come back. When I was growing up, my mom used to live in Mississippi. They had all the work gangs and they were all in orange and all chained up. Chain gangs and shit like that. That\u2019s how it should be. Make it so bad, you\u2019d never want to come back.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s pretty bad in here,\u201d I tell him. \u201cPeople get stabbed here all the time.\u201d At least seven inmates have been stabbed in the last six weeks.", + " As people come in from chow, I hear on the radio, \u201cCode Blue in Elm! Code Blue in Elm!\u201d A CO is frantically calling for a stretcher. Several inmates are stabbing each other; they can\u2019t count how many.\n\nSeveral people were injured, and I hear one was stabbed about 30 times. Miraculously, no one dies.\n\n\u201cEveryone on the tier!\u201d Bacle shouts to the prisoners milling about. \u201cFuck all that,\u201d one says. \u201cWe\u2019ll have another Code motherfucking Blue.\u201d Bacle blows his whistle. We get everyone in and I head out onto the Ash walk to see what is happening.\n\nA minute later,", + " a bleeding man is wheeled by on a work cart and I return inside. Several people were injured, and I hear one was stabbed about 30 times. Miraculously, no one dies.\n\nThree days later, I see two inmates stab each other in Ash.\n\nA week after that, another inmate is stabbed and beaten by multiple people in Elm. People say he was cut more than 40 times. During this time, Miss Price quits after nearly 25 years of service. She says she\u2019s tired of this work. (We will go without a unit manager in Ash for weeks.) Not long after she leaves, someone is beaten unconscious and stabbed through the cheek in Birch and another inmate is stabbed in Cypress.\n\nIt is difficult to imagine how someone gets stabbed in segregation.", + " How do shanks get in? How do inmates get to each other? The morning after the stabbing in Cypress, I hear Assistant Warden Parker call over the radio for maintenance to come and fix the cell doors there. A month ago, he told us that inmates in the unit could pull some cell doors off their tracks. A month before that, Mr. Tucker, the SORT commander, told us something similar. Apparently this problem still hasn\u2019t been fixed.\n\nMiss Calahan (her real name), the Ash key officer, tells me they had the same problem in the unit before I started. She points at D1 tier and says that for two months,", + " she and Bacle told the higher-ups to fix the door. At least one inmate filed a grievance about it. \u201cI popped it several times using my foot,\u201d Bacle says. He even showed the warden how it was done. Then, one evening, two inmates shook the tier door open from the outside, apparently unnoticed by the floor officers. One was carrying an eight-inch knife, the other an ice pick. According to a legal complaint, the two inmates found another inmate who lived on the tier and stabbed him 12 times in the head, mouth, eye, and body. One of the attackers warned that he would kill anyone who alerted the guards,", + " so the victim lay bleeding, waiting for a CO to come through for the mandatory half-hour security check. Unsurprisingly, no one did. He bled for an hour and a half until a guard came by for count. He spent nine days in the infirmary.\n\n\u201cChild, next day they was out here fixing that door!\u201d Miss Calahan says.\n\nBacle says he wishes an investigative reporter would come and look into this place. He complains about how, in other prisons, inmates get new charges for stabbing someone. Here, they are put in seg, but they rarely get shipped to another prison with tighter security. \u201cCCA wants that fucking dollar!\u201d Bacle says through clenched teeth.", + " \u201cThat\u2019s the reason why we play hell on getting a damn raise, because all they want is that dollar in their pocket.\u201d\n\nHigh levels of violence have been documented at several CCA prisons. At Ohio\u2019s Lake Erie Correctional Institution, which CCA bought in 2011, inmate-on-inmate assaults increased 188 percent and inmate-on-staff assaults went up more than 300 percent between 2010 and 2012, according to a state report. (A 2015 report by the state prison inspector, provided by CCA, noted that Lake Erie had \u201cdrastically improved\u201d and said the facility was \u201coutperforming some of the state institutions.\u201d)", + "\u2020 In 2009, Kentucky declined to raise CCA\u2019s per diem rate at one facility because the company\u2019s prison was twice as violent as its state-run counterpart and because a suicidal employee smuggled in a gun and shot herself in the warden\u2019s office. There is no current data on how violence in public prisons compares with violence in private ones. The last study released by the Department of Justice was in 2001, and it found that the rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults was 38 percent higher at private prisons than at public prisons.\n\nThe stabbings start to happen so frequently that the prison goes on indefinite lockdown.", + " No inmates leave their tiers.\n\nBut are any of these numbers accurate? If I were not working at Winn and were reporting on the prison through more traditional means, I would never know how violent it is. While I work here, I keep track of every stabbing that I see or hear about from supervisors or eyewitnesses. During the first two months of 2015, at least 12 people are shanked. The company is required to report all serious assaults to the DOC. But DOC records show that for the first 10 months of 2015, CCA reported only five stabbings. (CCA says it reports all assaults and that the DOC may have classified incidents differently.)\n\nReported or not,", + " by my seventh week as a guard the violence is getting out of control. The stabbings start to happen so frequently that, on February 16, the prison goes on indefinite lockdown. No inmates leave their tiers. The walk is empty. Crows gather and puddles of water form on the rec yards. More men in black are sent in by corporate. They march around the prison in military formation. Some wear face masks.\n\nThe new SORT team, composed of officers from around the country, shakes down the prison bit by bit. The wardens from the DOC continue to wander around, and CCA also sends in wardens of its own from out of state.", + " Tension is high. No inmates except kitchen workers can leave the tiers. Passing out food trays becomes a daily battle. Prisoners rush the food cart and take everything.\n\n\u201cCCA is not qualified to run this place,\u201d an inmate shouts to me a day into the lockdown. \u201cYou always got to shut the place down. You can\u2019t function. You can\u2019t run school or nothing because you got everybody on lockdown.\u201d\n\nAnother inmate cuts in. \u201cSince I been here, there\u2019s been nothing but stabbings,\u201d he says. \u201cIt don\u2019t happen like this at other prisons because they got power. They got control. Ain\u2019t no control here,", + " so it\u2019s gonna always be something happening. You got to start from the top to the bottom, you feel me? If [the warden] really want to control this prison\u2014goddamn!\u2014why ain\u2019t you go\u2019 call and get some workers? But you know what it\u2019s all about? It\u2019s about the money. \u2018Let them kill theyselves.\u2019 They don\u2019t give a fuck.\u201d\n\nOne day, a former public jail warden visits Ash. \u201cI don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on down here, but it\u2019s not good,\u201d he says to me. \u201cThere\u2019s something fucked up, I can tell you that.\u201d\n\n\u201cI been doing this for 16 years.", + " This is a free jail to me. Too much shit going on down here.\u201d\n\nI ask if Winn seems different from publicly operated prisons. \u201cOh, hell yeah,\u201d he says. \u201cToo lax.\u201d If this were his prison, he says, there would be four officers on the floor, not two. At his public facility, officers start at $12.50 an hour. When they go to police academy, they get another $500 a month. Every time they pass a quarterly fitness test, they get $300. The initial training is 90 days. I tell him it was 30 days here. \u201cThis is a joke,\u201d he says.", + " \u201cI been doing this for 16 years. This is a free jail to me. Too much shit going on down here. Not no consequences.\u201d He says CCA could lose its contract.\n\nOne day, the visiting SORT team comes to Ash. One masked officer keeps watch over everyone with a pepper-ball gun. Other SORT members stand around, eating Twinkies and Oatmeal Creme Pies and drinking Mountain Dew. They tear up the tiers, throwing things out, slicing up mattresses. They find drugs and cellphones. Bacle tries to stop them from taking inmates\u2019 coffee or destroying their matchstick crafts. Their overzealousness riles him.", + " \u201cSome people here think just because they\u2019re locked up they\u2019re a bunch of shitheads. I look at it, they fucked up and they\u2019re doing their damn time.\u201d\n\nAs soon as SORT leaves, inmates scream over each other to tell me what was taken, cursing me for not standing up for them.\n\nDuring the lockdown, Corner Store asks me to let him out of his tier. With the canteen closed, his services are badly needed. Everyone\u2019s commissary is getting low; many inmates are in search of cigarettes. They ask me to ferry things from one tier to the next, but I refuse, mostly because I know that once I do,", + " the requests will never stop. I don\u2019t let Corner Store out. I tell him it\u2019s too risky with all these eyes around. For days, he just lies on his bed, staring at the ceiling.\n\nHis release date is five days away, but he still doesn\u2019t know where he\u2019s going when he gets out.\n\n\u201cIsn\u2019t it Tuesday you are getting out?\u201d\n\n\u201cSupposedly,\u201d he says. Louisiana law doesn\u2019t allow early release unless the inmate has an address to go to. New parolees have to stay in the state, and his mother doesn\u2019t live in Louisiana. With no one outside to assist him, he has to rely on CCA to make arrangements with a shelter.", + " The prison\u2019s coach was trying to help, but Corner Store says he got \u201croadblocked\u201d by the administration.\n\n\u201cSo they just keep you here?\u201d I say, incredulous.\n\n\u201cYeah, basically. I\u2019m not even angry, man. I just know my day is coming. I\u2019ve waited years for this. I\u2019m not mad.\u201d\n\nI ask Corner Store\u2019s case manager what is happening with him. \u201cHe might be supposed to be getting out,\u201d he says, but \u201cas long as he don\u2019t have that [address], his feet will not hit outside that gate. It ain\u2019t nothin\u2019 I can do for him.\u201d\n\n\u201cThey don\u2019t want nobody to leave,\u201d Corner Store tells me.", + " \u201cThe longer they keep you, the more money they make. You understand that?\u201d\n\nOne of the SORT members tells me they\u2019ll be at Winn for months. Yesterday, they found 51 shanks in Elm, roughly one for every seven men. DOC records show that during the first four months of 2015, CCA reported finding nearly 200 weapons at Winn. That made it the state\u2019s most heavily armed prison, with more than five times more confiscated weapons per inmate than GEO\u2019s similarly sized Allen Correctional Center, and 23 times more than Angola. \u201cThey getting ready to start a war,\u201d one officer says in a morning meeting.\n\nSergeant King stops by Ash.", + " As he makes to leave, people start shouting from their tiers. \u201cWhat\u2019s up with the fuckin\u2019 store?\u201d It\u2019s been three weeks since anyone here went to canteen. Inmates are up at the bars, looking angry. \u201cYou \u2019bout to start a whole riot,\u201d one says to King.\n\nBacle seems nervous. \u201cIf they start throwing shit, you step right up here where they can\u2019t gitcha,\u201d he tells me, pointing toward the entrance. Less than a week ago, inmates rioted in a privately operated immigrant detention center in Texas. I saw prisoners here watching it on the news.\n\nI walk over to one of the tiers.\n\n\u201cThere ain\u2019t go\u2019 be no count or no nothing!\u201d one shouts at me.\n\n\u201cAin\u2019t no COs coming in this bitch until we go to canteen.\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s up.", + " We all standing behind that.\u201d\n\n\u201cIf this shit don\u2019t get handled, y\u2019all going to have a fuckin\u2019 riot on y\u2019all hands.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe gonna put this bitch on the channel eight news.\u201d\n\n\u201cY\u2019all risking your fucking life around here playing these fucking games!\u201d\n\n\u201cFuck the count! Bring the warden down here.\u201d\n\nKing comes over to one of the tiers. \u201cY\u2019all gotta give me an opportunity. Before y\u2019all start bucking. Before y\u2019all start refusing. Because here\u2019s what\u2019s going to happen: They\u2019re gonna bring the SORT force down here.\u201d\n\n\u201cWe don\u2019t give a fuck!\u201d\n\n\u201cI ain\u2019t got no fucking soap!", + " No nothing! No deodorant! No fucking cigarettes! This place is shit!\u201d\n\nI don\u2019t want to give the impression we are afraid, so I walk the floor. Everyone, everywhere, is pissed. I feel an explosion coming and I want to flee. \u201cI\u2019m surprised ain\u2019t nobody got you yet,\u201d a white inmate with a shaved head says to me, his eyes cold and focused. \u201cThey go\u2019 get you.\u201d\n\nA few years ago, a riot erupted in a low-security CCA prison in Mississippi over what inmates saw as inadequate health care and poor food. A guard was beaten to death. When Alex Friedmann,", + " a former CCA inmate and a company shareholder, asked for a moment of silence for the guard at a corporate meeting in 2013, the board chair refused to honor the request. (At the time, CCA said it had \u201chonored his memory a number of ways.\u201d)\n\nKing calls Bacle and me to the door. \u201cListen, it\u2019s a lot of tension down here,\u201d he says.\n\n\u201cNo shit,\u201d Bacle says.\n\n\u201cThey found 75 shanks in two days. These sonsabitches is dangerous, y\u2019all. I don\u2019t want y\u2019all goin\u2019 in them tiers. I don\u2019t want y\u2019all lettin\u2019 nobody out.", + " As of right now, if this shit don\u2019t get handled, y\u2019all going to have a fuckin\u2019 riot on y\u2019all hands. All the black suits ain\u2019t going to do nothin\u2019 but pepper-ball and gas all of they asses.\u201d He leaves.\n\nA while later, a CCA warden from Tennessee comes and talks to the inmates. \u201cY\u2019all saying that y\u2019all are being mistreated. I got plenty of people here. If we want to act like refugees and animals, then we can do it that way.\u201d The prisoners don\u2019t back down.\n\nA couple of hours later, SORT comes and escorts the inmates to the canteen.\n\nA drastic change\n\nThe lockdown lasts a total of 11 days.", + " When it ends, Corner Store stands at the bars, waiting for me to let him out to work the floor. I ignore him. He pleads, but I am unbending. I have become convinced that he thinks he has influence over me, though I can\u2019t articulate why. I become suspicious of his friendliness and wonder if he is manipulating me. I start to talk to him like every other inmate and he looks at me with confusion. When he lingers too long as I hold the gate open for chow, I slam it shut and let him stew. He calls my name as I walk away. I feel a twinge of guilt,", + " but it lasts only momentarily.\n\nHis release date comes and goes. When I do count, I see him lying on his bunk. Eventually, he stops making eye contact as I pass.\n\nAn inmate orderly corners me. \u201cListen, what\u2019s the problem?\u201d he says, leaning against his broom.\n\n\u201cWhat problem?\u201d I say curtly.\n\n\u201cListen, be cool. Be cool. We talking. Relax. Why you so aggressive when I talk to you? You\u2019re too snappy.\u201d\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not aggressive, man!\u201d\n\n\u201cNo, no, no. There\u2019s been a drastic change in you. What the fuck went wrong?\u201d\n\nThings I used to view as harmless transgressions I now view as personal attacks.\n\nI tell him we are under pressure from management to tighten up.", + " This is true, but there is more. I see conspiracies brewing. Things I used to view as harmless transgressions I now view as personal attacks. When a physically disabled man doesn\u2019t leave the shower in time for count, I am certain he is testing me, trying to break me down, to dominate me. The same is true when I see prisoners lying under their blankets during the daytime or standing at the bars. I don\u2019t care about the rules, per se; many of them seem arbitrary. But I become obsessed with the notion that people are breaking them in front of me to whittle away at my will. I write inmates up all day long.", + " One paper after another, I stack them, sometimes more than 25 disciplinaries in a day. Some inmates are clever; they know how to get under my skin without breaking the rules. So I shake down their beds and look for a reason to punish them.\n\nI carry all this with me. Some days, when I stop for gas on the way home from work I notice myself, for a split second, casing the black men who enter the gas station. When I shoot pool at the local bar, I imagine\u2014I hope\u2014that the white man in hunting camouflage who\u2019s playing against me will do something to spark a fight.\n\nOne day,", + " the key officer tells me to go to the captain\u2019s office. I am nervous; this has never happened before. He is sitting alone at his desk. \u201cI think you are a very strong officer,\u201d he says. I relax\u2014it\u2019s my employee evaluation. \u201cI think you are a very detailed officer. You got a knack for this. You got a \u2018it\u2019 factor for this. It\u2019s just who you are as a person. So, like you went down there to Ash and you just took the bull by the horns and just ran with it. It seems like them guys are starting to understand now\u2014this is how this unit is go\u2019 run.", + " This is how CO Bauer go\u2019 run it.\u201d\n\nThe computer screen in front of him reads, \u201cHe is an outstanding officer. He has a take-charge attitude. He is dependable and stern. He would be an excellent candidate for promotion.\u201d\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s how we feel about you. I just think that you need to stay consistent with what you are doing. Don\u2019t break.\u201d Despite myself, I crack a smile.\n\nEven after the lockdown ends, SORT does not leave. They patrol the walk, frisking random inmates, and shake down tiers relentlessly. One morning, I spot white buses parked outside the prison as I pull in for work.", + " At the morning meeting, there are about 15 wardens and COs from public prisons across the state. The Winn warden steps up to the podium. \u201cOur friends here from the Louisiana Department of Corrections have come to help us out,\u201d he says. This is the moment everyone has feared. Are they taking over? Will we lose our jobs?\n\nA warden and a couple of officers from Angola follow Bacle and me to Ash. One tells us they are taking inmates who are too friendly with staff and shipping them to other prisons. He also says they\u2019ve been administering lie detector tests to officers. Several have already refused to take one and walked off the job.", + " When he says this, I get nervous. I go into the bathroom and flip through my notebook. I rip out my notes. I throw them in the toilet and hold the handle down for a good 10 seconds.\n\nWhen it\u2019s count time, the COs from Angola blow a whistle and bark for everyone to sit up straight on their bunks. We\u2019ve never done this. They tell us that if we get used to counting people sleeping under their blankets, we might eventually count someone who is dead. All the inmates sit up without hesitation. As long as the DOC officers are here, everything is quiet and smooth. They make inmates walk through the metal detector as they enter the unit,", + " and Bacle and I put them in their tiers. I feel less worried about getting attacked, and some inmates tell me things are better for them, too. But others say that as soon as the DOC is gone, things will go back to the way they were. \u201cIt\u2019s like Mommy and Daddy back home,\u201d one prisoner says. \u201cBut when they go back on vacation, the kids is back out.\u201d\n\nThe Winn COs are deferential to the DOC officers, but in private they describe them as elitist pricks. It feels like incompetence has been replaced with overzealousness. The DOC officers chide us for letting inmates smoke inside,", + " and when they spot someone smoking on camera, they find him and strip-search him in front of everyone. When I sit on a chair to take a break, a DOC officer, staring at the monitor inside the key, tells me to go into the TV room in one of the tiers. There is an inmate in there whose pants are sagging. He orders me to tell the man to pull them up.\n\n\u201cIt gets in your blood\u201d\n\nThree days later, the DOC officers leave, and the order they imposed vanishes with them. COs slide back into their old routines and prisoners resist more than usual. Assistant Warden Parker, however,", + " is jubilant: CCA has hung onto the prison. \u201cThe great state of Louisiana came in with both guns a-blazing,\u201d he tells us during a morning meeting. \u201cThey were ready to tear Winn apart.\u201d In interviews with staff, the DOC learned that staff members had been \u201cbringing in mountains and mountains of mojo\u201d\u2014synthetic marijuana\u2014and having sex with inmates. \u201cOne person actually said that they trusted the inmates more than they trusted me, the warden. One staff member said, \u2018The inmate made me feel pretty. Why wouldn\u2019t I love him? Why wouldn\u2019t I bring him things he needs because you all won\u2019t let him have it?'\u201d\n\nLater that morning,", + " I clench up when my old instructor Kenny enters the unit and approaches me. \u201cThe warden told me to find somebody that\u2019s knowledgeable and ready for leadership,\u201d he says, smiling slightly. \u201cOut of all y\u2019all\u2019s crew down here, I\u2019m gonna handpick you. If you are interested in moving on up, I\u2019m go\u2019 make it happen. I\u2019m going to train you for the next level.\u201d I\u2019ve been on the job for two months.\n\nIn the following days, I walk up and down the tiers at count time, barking at inmates to sit up on their bunks. If they are asleep, I kick their beds.", + " Some refuse to obey, so I write them up.\n\n\u201cSomeone asked me if we were pretty picky about who we hire. I said, \u2018Well, I\u2019d love to tell you yes, but we take \u2019em six-legged and lazy.\u2019\u201d\n\nAt the end of a long day, I head down the walk. On my way out, I meet Miss Carter, the mental health director.\n\n\u201cHow do you like it so far?\u201d she asks.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s okay. It can be exciting,\u201d I say.\n\n\u201cIt gets in your blood, doesn\u2019t it? Someone asked me if we were pretty picky about who we hire,\u201d Miss Carter continues as we pass through the front gate.", + " \u201cI said, \u2018Well, I\u2019d love to tell you yes, but we take \u2019em six-legged and lazy.\u2019 We take whatever we can get!\u201d she says with a laugh. \u201cWhen you get down like this, you\u2019ll take whatever. But then we come across a few good people like yourself. That\u2019s not the norm.\u201d\n\nOutside, there is a chorus of frogs and crickets. The air is sweet and balmy. Like I do every night when I get off work, I take a breath and try to remember who I am. Miss Carter is right. It is getting in my blood. The boundary between pleasure and anger is blurring.", + " To shout makes me feel alive. I take pleasure in saying \u201cno\u201d to prisoners. I like to hear them complain about my write-ups. I like to ignore them when they ask me to cut them a break. When they hang their clothes to dry in the TV room, an unauthorized area, I confiscate the laundry and get a thrill when they shout from down the tier as I take it away. During the lockdown, when Ash threatened to riot, I hoped the SORT team would come in and gas the whole unit. Everyone would be coughing and gasping, including me, and it would be good because it would be action.", + " All that matters anymore is action.\n\nUntil I leave. When I drive home, I wonder who I am becoming. I feel ashamed of my lack of self-control, my growing thirst for punishment and vengeance. I\u2019m getting afraid of the expanding distance between the person I am at home and the one behind the wire. My glass of wine with dinner regularly becomes three. I hear the sounds of Ash unit as I fall asleep. I dream of monsters and men behind bars.\n\nLate one night in the middle of March, my wife wakes me. James West, my Mother Jones colleague who\u2019s recently come to Louisiana to shoot video for my story, has not returned from trying to get a nighttime shot of the outside of Winn.", + " Something is wrong. The sheriff of Winn Parish answers James\u2019 phone. James, he says, will be in jail for a while. I feel the blood drain from my face. Then I wonder, \u201cWill they come for me?\u201d We scramble to pack up everything that has anything to do with my reporting and check into a hotel at 2 a.m. A few hours later, I call in sick.\n\nThe same morning, James tells the sheriff he needs to make a call. \u201cYou can tell them we didn\u2019t shoot you at dawn!\u201d the sheriff says. James is later taken in leg irons into a room for questioning. \u201cWe don\u2019t care if you are doing an expos\u00e9 on CCA,\u201d a deputy tells him.", + " \u201cWe have nothing to do with them. They have given us trouble in the past.\u201d A state trooper adds, \u201cI don\u2019t care if that guy works in the prison.\u201d James assumes he is referring to me but says nothing.\n\nJames is charged with trespassing. By evening, a $10,000 bond is posted and he is released. \u201cSend me a copy of the article when it\u2019s done,\u201d one of the cops tells him.\n\nWe pick up James at a gas station at the edge of Winnfield and drive out of town. The next morning, as I get coffee in the hotel lobby, I see a SORT officer standing outside in a black uniform,", + " flex-cuffs hanging from his belt. Are they looking for me? We exit through a side door, and as I pull my truck out I see another man I recognize from the prison. We go back to the apartment, hurriedly throw everything in plastic bags, and leave. We drive across the border to Texas. I feel, oddly, sad.\n\nA couple of days later, I call HR at Winn. \u201cThis is CO Bauer. I\u2019m calling because I\u2019ve decided to resign.\u201d\n\n\u201cOh! Mr. Bauer, I hate to hear that!\u201d the HR woman says. \u201cI hate to lose you. Your evaluation looked good and it looked like you were willing to hang in there and hopefully promote.", + " Well, I hate it, Mr. Bauer. I truly do. In the future, if you decide to change your mind, you know the process.\u201d\n\nEPILOGUE\n\nWhen Bacle pulled into Winn\u2019s front gate after I left town, the guard told him the assistant warden wanted to see him. \u201cWhat the hell did I do?\u201d he thought. In his office, Assistant Warden Parker asked Bacle what he knew about me. \u201cHe was a good partner,\u201d Bacle told him. \u201cI enjoyed working with the dude. He has no problem writing \u2019em up.\u201d He asked what was wrong, but Parker wouldn\u2019t say.", + " On his way out, Bacle asked the officer at the front gate, \u201cWhat\u2019s going on with Bauer?\u201d\n\n\u201cYou ain\u2019t heard?\u201d the officer said. \u201cHe was an undercover reporter!\u201d\n\nBacle recounted this to me on the phone 10 months later. \u201cOh, I laughed,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know if you remember, but I told you once that it would be nice to have an investigative reporter out there.\u201d\n\nWord about me got out quick. The day after I quit, the Winnfield newspaper reported that I had been working at the prison. National media picked up the story and CCA issued a statement saying my approach \u201craises serious questions about his journalistic standards.\u201d A couple of guards I worked with reached out to me right away.", + " Miss Calahan, who\u2019d quit before me because she thought the job was getting too dangerous, wrote to me on Facebook: \u201cHey boy you got they ass lol.\u201d Another sent me an email: \u201cWow, Bauer! I\u2019m honored. I don\u2019t even know what to say.\u201d\n\nOne concern raised by the Department of Corrections was a bonus paid to Winn\u2019s warden that \u201ccauses neglect of basic needs.\u201d\n\nI attempted to contact everyone who\u2019s mentioned in this story to ask them about their experiences at Winn. Some refused outright. Others didn\u2019t respond to my phone calls and letters, and a few I could not track down. A surprising number,", + " however, were eager to talk. Corner Store insisted he and other inmates knew something was up all along. \u201cI just don\u2019t know no CO to pull out his pad every five minutes,\u201d he told me. \u201cEverybody\u2019s like, \u2018Oh man, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.'\u201d Collinsworth said that when he found out I was a reporter, he \u201cthought it was cool.\u201d Christian thought \u201cpretty much what most people thought: Can\u2019t wait to read the story!\u201d\n\nSome people whom I would never have expected spoke to me. One was Miss Lawson, who\u2019d been the assistant chief of security. \u201cThey were scared to death of who you were,\u201d she told me.", + " \u201cAfter they found out you were a reporter, it was like, \u2018Oh my God. Oh my God.'\u201d The DOC quickly required the staff to undergo fresh background checks. CCA\u2019s corporate office sent people to Winn to open what she described as an \u201cextensive\u201d investigation on me. They gathered \u201ceverything that had your name on it,\u201d Miss Lawson said. Ironically, the investigation narrowed in on the item that, in my mind, had symbolized my transformation from an observer into a real prison guard: the cellphone I had confiscated in Ash. \u201cI got called like four or five times for that one phone from corporate,\u201d Miss Lawson said.", + " \u201cIt was like they were insinuating that you brought the phone in or there was some information in the phone. I\u2019m like, \u2018No, he found it in a water fountain.'\u201d\n\nAfter I\u2019d filled out the paperwork about the phone and handed it off to Miss Price, it had disappeared somewhere in the chain of command. The mystery of the missing cellphone grew into a broader probe in which Christian and Miss Lawson were fired for allegedly selling phones to inmates. Both deny it, and CCA did not pursue legal action against them.\n\nMiss Lawson also told me that Assistant Warden Parker texted her a photo of me, asking if she knew who I was.", + " After she identified me, Miss Lawson says, Parker told her to delete the photo and \u201cforget I sent it to you.\u201d She kept it, however, and emailed it to me. The image was a shot of a laptop screen on which a video of me was playing. I recognized the footage immediately: James had filmed it on the afternoon before he was arrested.\n\nWhen James was detained, he was careful to protect his camera and the footage on it, even as he was surrounded by SORT officers from the prison and Winn Parish deputies. Police body-cam footage that I later obtained shows one deputy grabbing James\u2019 camera as James struggles to hang on to it,", + " telling the officer that searching his camera and memory cards would be illegal. After James was cuffed and put in a police cruiser, two officers left their body cameras on. The video shows a SORT member scrolling through the images on James\u2019 camera. The sheriff never obtained a search warrant for my colleague\u2019s belongings, but someone apparently searched them anyway. Geolocation data on the photo Miss Lawson sent me points to the sheriff\u2019s office. (The Winn Parish sheriff says he was \u201cnot aware\u201d of anyone searching James\u2019 things.)\n\nIn April 2015, about two weeks after I left Winn, CCA notified the DOC that it planned to void its contract for the prison,", + " which had been set to expire in 2020. According to documents that the DOC later sent me, in late 2014 the department had reviewed CCA\u2019s compliance with its contract and asked it to make immediate changes at Winn. Several security issues were identified, including broken doors and cameras, and unused metal detectors. The DOC also asked CCA to increase inmate recreation and activities, improve training, hire more guards, hire more medical and mental health employees, and address a \u201ctotal lack of maintenance.\u201d Another concern raised by the DOC, CCA\u2019s chief corrections officer acknowledged, was a bonus paid to Winn\u2019s warden that \u201ccauses neglect of basic needs.\u201d The DOC also noted that CCA had charged inmates for state-supplied toilet paper and toothpaste and made them pay to clip their nails.", + " In a message to its shareholders, the company gave no hint of any problems at Winn; it only said the prison wasn\u2019t making enough money. LaSalle Corrections, a Louisiana-based company, took over in September.\n\nThe Department of Corrections also noted that CCA had charged inmates for state-supplied toilet paper and toothpaste.\n\nSome guards stayed on with the new company, but many left. Bacle got a job at a lumber mill. Miss Calahan became a CO at a local jail. One went on to Army basic training. Another took a security guard job in Texas. Some are still unemployed. Assistant Warden Parker took a similar position at another CCA prison.", + " Some Winn prisoners have been transferred across the state and some have been released. Robert Scott is still suing over his amputated legs. I still don\u2019t know what most of them were in for, but I was shocked to find out that Corner Store was in for armed robbery and forcible rape.\n\nOne inmate\u2019s mother read about me in the news and asked an attorney to connect us. When the lawyer told me her son\u2019s name\u2014Damien Coestly\u2014it took me back to my first day on the job, when I was working suicide watch. It had been a year since I\u2019d pulled my chair across from him as he sat on the toilet,", + " his entire body hidden under his suicide blanket. He had told me to \u201cget the fuck out of here\u201d and threatened that if I didn\u2019t he would \u201cget up on top of this bed and jump straight onto [his] motherfucking neck.\u201d He had gone on hunger strike repeatedly to protest the limited dietary options and inadequate mental health services. In June 2015, he hanged himself. His autopsy said he weighed 71 pounds.\n\nFive months after I left Winn, Mother Jones received a letter from a law firm representing CCA. The letter dropped hints that the company had been monitoring my recent communications with inmates and was keeping an eye on my social-media presence.", + " CCA\u2019s counsel claimed I was bound by the company\u2019s code of conduct, which states, \u201cAll employees must safeguard the company\u2019s trade secrets and confidential information.\u201d Since guards are not privy to confidential business information, the implication is that what I experienced and observed inside Winn should remain secret.\n\nCCA insisted on receiving a \u201cmeaningful opportunity to respond\u201d to this story prior to its publication. Yet when I asked for an in-person interview, the company refused. CCA did eventually reply to the more than 150 questions I sent; its responses are included throughout this article. In one letter to me, CCA\u2019s spokesman scolded me 13 times for my \u201cfundamental misunderstanding\u201d of the company\u2019s business and \u201ccorrections in general.\u201d He also suggested that my reporting methods were \u201cbetter suited for celebrity and entertainment reporting.\u201d\n\nIn March 2016,", + " Corner Store walked free. He stayed in prison a full year while CCA was supposed to help him find a place to go. A lawyer eventually tracked down his father\u2019s address and arranged for him to stay there. He rode a Greyhound bus to Baton Rouge. His mother drove from Texas to see him. He got his seafood platter. He walked in the rain. He got a job detailing cars. Sometimes he would hop on a bus, any bus, and ride the entire route just to see the city.\n\nTwo weeks after he gets out, James and I visit him at his house on a quiet street near the airport. His father invites us in.\n\n\u201cYou all taking [him]", + " somewhere?\u201d his father asks us as we sit on the couch waiting for Corner Store to get ready.\n\n\u201cYeah, we were going to see if he wants to go anywhere,\u201d I say.\n\n\u201cYou all ain\u2019t come here to arrest him?\u201d\n\nCorner Store comes out of his room and walks directly outside. He tells us to get straight in the car\u2014no talking in the street. He\u2019s tense.\n\n\u201cHey, this no names involved, huh?\u201d\n\n\u201cWhat are you worried about?\u201d I ask.\n\n\u201cLet\u2019s just say something happens and I go back.\u201d\n\n\u201cWho would you be worried about?\u201d\n\n\u201cThe free people.\u201d He means the guards.\n\n\u201cDo you think you might go back?\u201d\n\n\u201cAnything is possible,\u201d he says.", + " The smallest parole violation could land him back in prison. \u201cIf they were ever to see me again, they wouldn\u2019t have too much of a liking for me. They feel like you shouldn\u2019t even be talking about this.\u201d\n\nWhen we pick up Corner Store the next day, he tells me he hasn\u2019t seen the Mississippi yet. He used to fish in it, growing up. We head to the river. After we sit and talk awhile, he stops scoping out everyone who passes by, and he stares out at the glistening surface. A tugboat chugs past. He walks down to the bank, scoops up some water,", + " brings it to his nose, and breathes in deep.\n\nStory by Shane Bauer Shane Bauer is a senior reporter at Mother Jones. He has previously reported on solitary confinement, police militarization, and the Middle East. He is the co-author, with Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal, of A Sliver of Light, an account of his two years as a prisoner in Iran. Videos by James West Edited by Dave Gilson Researchers: Becca Andrews, Gregory Barber, Brandon Ellington Patterson, and Madison Pauly Senior Research Editor: Maddie Oatman Creative Director: Ivylise Simones; Art Director: Carolyn Perot Photo Editor:", + " Mark Murrmann Developer: Ben Breedlove Web Editor: Jahna Berry Funding for this project has been provided in part by the Puffin Foundation, the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation, the Glaser Progress Foundation, and the ongoing support of Mother Jones readers like you.\n\n*This sentence has been revised for accuracy.\n\n**Correction: A production error that caused an incorrect figure has been fixed.\n\n\u2020These sentences have been clarified. ", + " Opinion: Private prisons are a public shame\n\nA new law signed by Gov. Rauner would promote more mentally ill people being transferred from jails and prisons to treatment facilities. | AP file photo\n\nWhy have private prisons at all?\n\nThat is the question to ask in the wake of a new U.S. Department of Justice report that has revealed elevated safety and security incidents at privatized federal prisons. The 80-page report by the DOJ\u2019s inspector general confirms what has long been suspected: Private prisons are often less safe than publicly operated prisons.\n\nThe private prison industry has expanded exponentially in the past quarter-century. The number of inmates in private prisons increased by roughly 1,", + "600 percent between 1990 and 2009. Today, some 130,000 men and women live in for-profit prisons in the United States \u2014 and that number doesn\u2019t include those locked up in private local jails and immigration prisons. As incarceration skyrocketed due to the war on drugs, three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentences, the private prison industry reaped lucrative rewards. The more people for-profit prisons lock away, the more money they make.\n\nOPINION\n\nFrom a human rights standpoint, privatized incarceration presents a serious threat. A private prison in Idaho was dubbed the \u201cGladiator School\u201d due to extreme levels of violence.", + " A private juvenile prison in Mississippi was once described by a federal judge as \u201ca picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world.\u201d\n\nSome of the safety concerns at private prisons may reflect the higher rate of staff turnover, which can result in inexperienced guards walking the tiers. After an infamous escape from an Arizona private prison in 2010, for example, the Arizona Department of Corrections reported that at the prison, staff were \u201cgreen,\u201d not proficient with weapons and had a rather dangerous habit: ignoring sounding alarms.\n\nWhile the for-profit prison industry claims that governments can save money through privatization, private prisons often fail to deliver demonstrable fiscal benefits and can even cost taxpayers more than publicly operated institutions.", + " Numerous studies by researchers, state governments and federal agencies contradict the supposed economic benefits touted by industry supporters.\n\nAlthough Illinois bans private prisons, the sheer scale of the industry and the masses of people locked up in private prisons make it unrealistic to think that these institutions will vanish from the national scene anytime soon. But there is much that can be done to curtail prison privatization\u2014including the enactment of federal legislation banning new private prison construction across the country. With new evidence of private prison dysfunction coming from the Justice Department report, there is no time like the present to enact this important reform.\n\nThe DOJ inspector general\u2019s report recommended improved monitoring and oversight of federal contract prisons.", + " That\u2019s the least DOJ should do. The more appropriate response would be to phase out private prisons and limit incarceration to publicly operated jails and prisons directly accountable to local, state and federal elected leaders.\n\nDavid M. Shapiro is director of appellate litigation at the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law where he is a clinical assistant professor of law.\n\nFollow the Editorial Board on Twitter: Follow @csteditorials\n\nTweets by @CSTeditorials\n\nSend letters to letters@suntimes.com\n" + ], + "length": 47978, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 99, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 In what will likely be the day's second-biggest talker, Esquire and the Center for Investigative Reporting have published an interview with the SEAL Team 6 member who shot Osama bin Laden. Phil Bronstein, the executive chair of CIR, spent a year talking to the anonymous shooter (referred to as \"the Shooter\"), ultimately producing a nearly 15,000-word piece titled, \"The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden ... Is Screwed.\" The headline encapsulates the two-fold nature of the piece: recounting the \"most definitive account\" (verified by a number of sources, including other SEALS) \"of those crucial few seconds\" in which the Shooter put three bullets into bin Laden's head; and tackling this incongruity: \"that a man with hundreds of successful war missions, one of the most decorated combat veterans of our age, who capped his [16-year] career by terminating bin Laden, has no landing pad in civilian life.\" Bronstein catalogs the absent opportunities, like the $25 million bounty on bin Laden's head that won't go to the team and the movies and books from which it won't benefit; and the single offer from SEAL command that he could drive a beer truck in Milwaukee under a new identity. And while a private security job might be a valid route, \"many of these guys, including the Shooter, do not want to carry a gun ever again for professional use.\" Bronstein also catalogs what the Shooter lacks: pension (he left service 36 months short of the necessary 20 years), healthcare (though he battles arthritis, eye damage, tendonitis, and blown disks), protection for his family (from a retaliatory attack), disability benefits (he's waiting), a healthy marriage (he and his wife have split, under the pressure of a job that took him away as many as 300 days a year), and communication from the VA (computer-generated form letters aside). And as CIR's executive director explains in an editor's note, while the Shooter faces \"exceptional\" issues upon his re-entry to society, they're \"similar to those many veterans face when leaving the service.\" See the full piece for many more fascinating details, or read about an unusual development at the site of bin Laden's assassination.\n", + "docs": [ + "Click for larger image Credit: Getty Images\n\nThe Navy SEAL who says he killed Osama bin Laden is unemployed and waiting for disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.\n\nIn an exclusive story for Esquire by Phil Bronstein of the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Shooter adds many details to what already is known about the death of the al-Qaida leader. His name is withheld to protect his identity.\n\nThe Shooter told Bronstein, CIR\u2019s executive chairman, that he alone killed the terrorist leader, recounting minute details of those brief seconds. As the second Navy SEAL up a staircase, he saw bin Laden inside a room.\n\n\u201cFor me it was a snapshot of a target ID,", + " definitely him,\u201d he said. \u201cEven in our kill houses where we train, there are targets with his face on them. This was repetition and muscle memory. That\u2019s him, boom, done.\u201d\n\nBut perhaps the Shooter\u2019s most explosive revelation is that nearly six months after leaving the military, he feels abandoned by the government. Physically aching and psychologically wrecked after hundreds of combat missions, he left the military a few years short of the retirement requirement with no pension and no job.\n\n\"Navy SEALs go through a highly demanding selection process. They are selected for physical, mental and psychological qualities that are exceptional. The fact that this hero,", + " with these qualities, cannot find employment is shocking to me,\" said retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command.\n\nLike 820,000 other veterans, the Shooter has a disability claim that is stuck in a seemingly interminable backlog at the VA, where the average wait time currently exceeds nine months, based on the agency\u2019s own data.\n\nThe speedier special track for Special Forces veterans appears to have eluded him, and so his neck, back and eye injuries remain uncompensated, removing a chance for a modicum of financial stability.\n\nSince a required medical exam in August, which he said he attended in full dress uniform including his gold SEAL Trident and combat awards,", + " the Shooter\u2019s only communication from the VA has been computer-generated form letters.\n\n\u201cIt is our sincere desire to decide your case promptly. However, as we have a great number of claims, action on yours may be delayed,\u201d reads one letter dated Dec. 10. \u201cIf we need anything else from you, we will contact you, so there is no need to contact us.\u201d\n\nThe fact that even bin Laden\u2019s killer has to wait for his benefits \u201cjust underscores how much you\u2019re squandering the talents of the generation,\u201d said Paul Rieckhoff, founder and CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.\n\n\u201cThere is a widespread frustration with the inability of veterans to get their benefits when they come home,", + " and that includes SEALS,\u201d he added.\n\nThe VA did not immediately return calls seeking comment.\n\nIn an interview, Col. Tim Nye, spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., said the Shooter was treated according to military regulations. He did not deserve a pension, Nye said, because he served for 16 years, not the required 20.\n\n\u201cThose are the rules that are in place, and he was well aware of those,\u201d Nye said. \u201cClearly, the best of the best, he has done everything that was asked of him and more \u2013 but that\u2019s what he signed up to do.\u201d\n\nBut in the U.S.", + " Capitol, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee from both parties expressed concern.\n\n\u201cWe obviously owe him a lot, and we\u2019ve got to find a way to help folks who serve a long time but less than the retirement age and find some way for them to transition,\u201d said Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who leads the committee.\n\nOne of the country\u2019s most prominent veterans, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said, \u201cThe country owes him its gratitude and the benefits we can provide him to assist him in anyway possible.\u201d\n\nLate Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., announced that he would be holding hearings next month on what he called \"a broken claims system.\"\n\n\"It is simply not acceptable for any veteran to wait many months or years for the benefits that they are entitled to receive,\" Sanders,", + " chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, said in a statement.\n\nAccording to the Shooter\u2019s account of the May 2011 mission, bin Laden stood in front of him, an AK-47 within reach. The terrorist, he said, pushed his youngest wife, Amal, in front of him in the pitch-black room. The Navy SEAL, wearing night-vision goggles, had to raise his gun higher than he expected before shooting three bullets into bin Laden\u2019s forehead at close range.\n\n\u201cHe looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting,\u201d the Shooter said.\n\nIn that moment, the Shooter said he felt a deep inner conflict,", + " about whether he had done the right thing by killing the world\u2019s most wanted man.\n\n\u201cI remember as I watched him breathe out the last part of air, I thought: Is this the best thing I\u2019ve done, or the worst thing I\u2019ve ever done?\u201d he said. \u201cHis forehead was gruesome. It was split open in a shape of a V. I could see his brains spilling out over his face. The American public doesn\u2019t want to know what that looks like.\u201d\n\nThe Shooter\u2019s account differs from other descriptions of bin Laden\u2019s death and contradicts some statements by Matt Bissonnette, another member of Navy SEAL Team 6.", + " In his book, \u201cNo Easy Day,\u201d Bissonnette said he stood directly behind the SEAL team\u2019s point man when the point man shot bin Laden.\n\nAccording to the Shooter, the point man took a shot or two at bin Laden when bin Laden peeked around a curtain in the hallway a floor above them, but even after that the terrorist leader was still standing and moving. The point man was not in the room when bin Laden was killed, the Shooter said, because he had tackled two women into the hallway, believing they were wearing suicide vests.\n\n\u201cIt was the most heroic thing I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d he said.\n\nAddressing the differences,", + " CIR Executive Director Robert J. Rosenthal said: \u201cThe Shooter\u2019s version of events is not the only one out there. But we believe his version of events is the most credible.\u201d\n\nThe Shooter does not dispute Bissonnette\u2019s account that Bissonnette entered the third-floor room after bin Laden already was fatally wounded, and along with another SEAL, continued to fire shots into the al-Qaida leader until his body was torn apart.\n\nTogether with Bronstein, the Shooter saw \u201cZero Dark Thirty,\u201d the Oscar-nominated film by Kathryn Bigelow about the killing of bin Laden. While Bigelow \u201cHollywooded it up some,\u201d most of the Shooter\u2019s criticisms of the film were minor.", + " The stairs inside bin Laden\u2019s compound were not properly configured, he said, and none of the SEALs uttered the al-Qaida leader\u2019s name.\n\n\u201cThe mission in the damn movie took way too long,\u201d the Shooter said. But the portrayal of \u201cMaya,\u201d the CIA operative who identified the complex where bin Laden was hiding, was right on target, he said, adding, \u201cThey made her a tough woman, which she is.\u201d\n\nThe Shooter said the CIA operative broke down in tears at the sight of bin Laden\u2019s body back at the Afghanistan base and that he gave her his magazine, which still contained 27 shots, as a souvenir.\n\n\u201cWe looked down and I asked,", + " \u2018Is that your guy?\u2019 \u201d he said.\n\nAfter the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the Shooter served one more deployment in Afghanistan and then left the military.\n\n\u201cI wanted to see my children graduate and get married,\u201d he said. He hoped to sleep through the night for the first time in years. \u201cI was burned out,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I realized that when I stopped getting an adrenaline rush from gunfights, it was time to go.\u201d\n\nBrandon Webb, a former course manager for the U.S. Navy SEAL sniper program, said the Shooter\u2019s inability to earn his pension was perplexing, representing a failure of both the system and the sailor.\n\n\u201cI find it very strange that this SEAL took it upon himself to leave the Navy when he could have stayed in another four years and retired,\u201d Webb said.", + " \u201cSomething is not right here.\u201d\n\nThe VA offers five years of virtually free health care for every veteran honorably discharged after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, even when he or she leaves the military early. But the Shooter told Bronstein that none of the counselors who came to SEAL Command told him that. That coverage also would not extend to his family.\n\n\u201cFamilies aren\u2019t being cared for,\u201d said Barbara Cohoon, deputy director of government relations for the National Military Family Association.\n\nHer group, based in Virginia, is expected to testify Wednesday before the House Veterans\u2019 Affairs Committee to push for increased access to health care, particularly mental health services,", + " for military families.\n\n\u201cOftentimes, they lose their support systems the moment a service member leaves the military,\u201d she said.\n\nNationwide, VA documents show that nearly 681,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans discharged from the military have not sought health care from the VA. According to a study last year from the Urban Institute, 291,000 are uninsured \u2013 with neither private health insurance nor VA coverage.\n\nThe Shooter says his disability claim is less about the money it would provide than the right to free health care it would bring. While the VA now provides five years of virtually free health care to all honorably discharged Iraq and Afghanistan veterans,", + " they can face bureaucratic nightmares later on if their conditions are not deemed service-connected.\n\nDespite 16 years serving his country, the Shooter says he has never accessed \u2013 or been informed of \u2013 unique services available to Special Forces veterans, including an effort called the Care Coalition launched by Special Operations Command in 2005.\n\nThe Shooter also says he has seen no evidence that he has been routed through a special track for disability claims that the Department of Veterans Affairs set up for Special Forces veterans in 2009.\n\nUnder this policy, if a veteran files a disability claim based on involvement in a secret mission, VA claims examiners are supposed to turn files over to a special liaison at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa,", + " Fla., where Special Operations Command is located.\n\nThe move was meant to speed processing of claims by Special Forces veterans, who had difficulty proving their injuries were caused by military service because of the classified nature of their work.\n\nNow out of the military, the Shooter has separated from his wife, but the two still live together for financial reasons. Since the raid in Abbottabad, the story says, \u201che has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house.\u201d He keeps a shotgun on the armoire and a knife on the dresser. The military provides no protection.\n\nNye,", + " the spokesman for U.S. Special Operation\u2019s Command, said that if the Shooter was concerned for his safety, he should have not spoken to the media.\n\n\u201cHe\u2019s made himself a public figure,\u201d Nye said. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t track that well.\u201d\n\nBobby Caina Calvan contributed to this report from Washington. ", + " In light of the controversial claims in Seymour Hersh's new story on the death of Osama bin Laden, here is \"The Shooter,\" Phil Bronstein's definitive account of the SEAL Team 6 operation that killed the al Qaeda leader, from the March 2013 issue. (Originally kept anonymous to protect him and his family, \"the Shooter\" has since the story's publication identified himself as SEAL veteran Robert O'Neill.)\n\n***\n\nThis article was published in the March 2013 issue.\n\nPhil Bronstein is the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and currently serves as executive chairman of the Center for Investigative Reporting. This piece was reported in cooperation with CIR.\n\nNote:", + " A correction is appended to the end of this story.\n\n***\n\nThe man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care.\n\nIt was a mild spring day, April 2012, and our small group, including a few of his friends and family, was shielded from the sun by the patchwork shadows of maple trees. But the Shooter was sweating as he talked about his uncertain future, his plans to leave the Navy and SEAL Team 6.\n\nHe stood up several times with an apologetic gripe about the heat,", + " leaving a perspiration stain on the seat-back cushion. He paced. I didn't know him well enough then to tell whether a glass of his favorite single malt, Lagavulin, was making him less or more edgy.\n\nWe would end up intimately familiar with each other's lives. We'd have dinners, lots of Scotch. He's played with my kids and my dogs and been a hilarious, engaging gentleman around my wife.\n\nIn my yard, the Shooter told his story about joining the Navy at nineteen, after a girl broke his heart. To escape, he almost by accident found himself in a Navy recruiter's office. \"He asked me what I was going to do with my life.", + " I told him I wanted to be a sniper.\n\n\"He said, 'Hey, we have snipers.'\n\n\"I said, 'Seriously, dude. You do not have snipers in the Navy.' But he brought me into his office and it was a pretty sweet deal. I signed up on a whim.\"\n\n\"That's the reason Al Qaeda has been decimated,\" he joked, \"because she broke my fucking heart.\"\n\nI would come to know about the Shooter's hundreds of combat missions, his twelve long-term SEAL-team deployments, his thirty-plus kills of enemy combatants, often eyeball to eyeball. And we would talk for hours about the mission to get bin Laden and about how,", + " over the celebrated corpse in front of them on a tarp in a hangar in Jalalabad, he had given the magazine from his rifle with all but three lethally spent bullets left in it to the female CIA analyst whose dogged intel work and intuition led the fighters into that night.\n\nWhen I was first around him, as he talked I would always try to imagine the Shooter geared up and a foot away from bin Laden, whose life ended in the next moment with three shots to the center of his forehead. But my mind insisted on rendering the picture like a bad Photoshop job \u2014 Mao's head superimposed on the Yangtze,", + " or tourists taking photos with cardboard presidents outside the White House.\n\nBin Laden was, after all, the man CIA director Leon Panetta called \"the most infamous terrorist in our time,\" who devoured inordinate amounts of our collective cultural imagery for more than a decade. The number-one celebrity of evil. And the man in my backyard blew his lights out.\n\nST6 in particular is an enterprise requiring extraordinary teamwork, combined with more kinds of support in the field than any other unit in the history of the U.S. military.\n\nSimilarly, NASA marshaled thousands of people to put a man on the moon, and history records that Neil Armstrong first set his foot there,", + " not the equally talented Buzz Aldrin.\n\nEnough people connected to the SEALs and the bin Laden mission have confirmed for me that the Shooter was the \"number two\" behind the raid's point man going up the stairs to bin Laden's third-floor residence, and that he is the one who rolled through the bedroom door solo and confronted the surprisingly tall terrorist pushing his youngest wife, Amal, in front of him through the pitch-black room. The Shooter had to raise his gun higher than he expected.\n\nThe point man is the only one besides the Shooter who could verify the kill shots firsthand, and he did just that to another SEAL I spoke with.", + " But even the point man was not in the room then, having tackled two women into the hallway, a crucial and heroic decision given that everyone living in the house was presumed to be wearing a suicide vest.\n\nBut a series of confidential conversations, detailed descriptions of mission debriefs, and other evidence make it clear: The Shooter's is the most definitive account of those crucial few seconds, and his account, corroborated by multiple sources, establishes him as the last man to see Osama bin Laden alive. Not in dispute is the fact that others have claimed that they shot bin Laden when he was already dead, and a number of team members apparently did just that.\n\nWhat is much harder to understand is that a man with hundreds of successful war missions,", + " one of the most decorated combat veterans of our age, who capped his career by terminating bin Laden, has no landing pad in civilian life.\n\nBack in April, he and some of his SEAL Team 6 colleagues had formed the skeleton of a company to help them transition out of the service. In my yard, he showed everyone his business-card mock-ups. There was only a subtle inside joke reference to their team in the company name.\n\nUnlike former SEAL Team 6 member Matt Bissonnette (No Easy Day), they do not rush to write books or step forward publicly, because that violates the code of the \"quiet professional.\" Someone suggested they might sell customized sunglasses and other accessories special operators often invent and use in the field.", + " It strains credulity that for a commando team leader who never got a single one of his men hurt on a mission, sunglasses would be his best option. And it's a simple truth that those who have been most exposed to harrowing danger for the longest time during our recent unending wars now find themselves adrift in civilian life, trying desperately to adjust, often scrambling just to make ends meet.\n\nAt the time, the Shooter's uncle had reached out to an executive at Electronic Arts, hoping that the company might need help with video-game scenarios once the Shooter retired. But the uncle cannot mention his nephew's distinguishing feature as the one who put down bin Laden.\n\nSecrecy is a thick blanket over our Special Forces that inelegantly covers them,", + " technically forever. The twenty-three SEALs who flew into Pakistan that night were directed by their command the day they got back stateside about acting and speaking as though it had never happened.\n\n\"Right now we are pretty stacked with consultants,\" the video-game man responded. \"Thirty active and recently retired guys\" for one game: Medal of Honor Warfighter. In fact, seven active-duty Team 6 SEALs would later be punished for advising EA while still in the Navy and supposedly revealing classified information. (One retired SEAL, a participant in the bin Laden raid, was also involved.)\n\nWith the focus and precision he's learned, the Shooter waits and watches for the right way to exit,", + " and adapt. Despite his foggy future, his past is deeply impressive. This is a man who is very pleased about his record of service to his country and has earned the respect of his peers.\n\n\"He's taken monumental risks,\" says the Shooter's dad, struggling to contain the frustration that roughs the edges of his deep pride in his son. \"But he's unable to reap any reward.\"\n\nIt's not that there isn't one. The U.S. government put a $25 million bounty on bin Laden that no one is likely to collect. Certainly not the SEALs who went on the mission nor the support and intelligence experts who helped make it all possible.", + " Technology is the key to success in this case more than people, Washington officials have said.\n\nThe Shooter doesn't care about that. \"I'm not religious, but I always felt I was put on the earth to do something specific. After that mission, I knew what it was.\"\n\nOthers also knew, from the commander-in-chief on down. The bin Laden shooting was a staple of presidential-campaign brags. One big-budget movie, several books, and a whole drawerful of documentaries and TV films have fortified the brave images of the Shooter and his ST6 Red Squadron members.\n\nThere is commerce attached to the mission, and people are capitalizing.", + " Just not the triggerman. While others collect, he is cautious and careful not to dishonor anyone. His manners come at his own expense.\n\n\"No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job,\" Barack Obama said last Veterans' Day, \"or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home.\"\n\nBut the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:\n\nNothing. No pension,", + " no healthcare for his wife and kids, no protection for himself or his family.\n\nSince Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon's butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.\n\nThen there is the \"bolt\" bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.\n\n\"", + "Personally,\" his wife told me recently, \"I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago,\" when her husband joined ST6.\n\nWhen the White House identified SEAL Team 6 as those responsible, camera crews swarmed into their Virginia Beach neighborhood, taking shots of the SEALs' homes.\n\nAfter bin Laden's face appeared on their TV in the days after the killing, the Shooter cautioned his older child not to mention the Al Qaeda leader's name ever again \"to anybody. It's a bad name, a curse name.\" His kid started referring to him instead as \"Poopyface.\" It's a story he told affectionately on that April afternoon visit to my home.\n\nHe loves his kids and tears up only when he talks about saying goodbye to them before each and every deployment.", + " \"It's so much easier when they're asleep,\" he says, \"and I can just kiss them, wondering if this is the last time.\" He's thrilled to show video of his oldest in kick-boxing class. And he calls his wife \"the perfect mother.\"\n\nIn fact, the couple is officially separated, a common occurrence in ST6. SEAL marriages can be perilous. Husbands and fathers have been mostly away from their families since 9/11. But the Shooter and his wife continue to share a house on very friendly, even loving terms, largely to save money.\n\n\"We're actually looking into changing my name,\" the wife says.", + " \"Changing the kids' names, taking my husband's name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other.\"\n\nWhen the family asked about any kind of government protection should the Shooter's name come out, they were advised that they could go into a witness-protection-like program.\n\nJust as soon as the Department of Defense creates one.\n\n\"They [SEAL command] told me they could get me a job driving a beer truck in Milwaukee\" under an assumed identity. Like Mafia snitches, they would not be able to contact their families or friends. \"We'd lose everything.\"\n\n\"These guys have millions of dollars'", + " worth of knowledge and training in their heads,\" says one of the group at my house, a former SEAL and mentor to the Shooter and others looking to make the transition out of what's officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group. \"All sorts of executive function skills. That shouldn't go to waste.\"\n\nThe mentor himself took a familiar route \u2014 through Blackwater, then to the CIA, in both organizations as a paramilitary operator in Afghanistan.\n\nPrivate security still seems like the smoothest job path, though many of these guys, including the Shooter, do not want to carry a gun ever again for professional use. The deaths of two contractors in Benghazi,", + " both former SEALs the mentor knew, remind him that the battlefield risks do not go away.\n\nBy the time the Shooter visited me that first time in April, I had come to know more of the human face of what's called Tier One Special Operations, in addition to the extraordinary skill and icy resolve. It is a privileged, consuming, and concerning look inside one of the most insular clubs on earth.\n\nAnd I understood that he would face a world very different from the supportive one President Obama described at Arlington National Cemetery a few months before.\n\nAs I watched the Shooter navigate obstacles very different from the ones he faced so expertly in four war zones around the globe,", + " I wondered: Is this how America treats its heroes? The ones President Obama called \"the best of the best\"? The ones Vice-President Biden called \"the finest warriors in the history of the world\"?\n\nThe Shooter's gear.\n\n1 APRIL 2011: THE MISSION\n\nThe reason we knew this was a special mission, the Shooter said as our interviews about the bin Laden operation began, is because we'd just finished an Afghanistan deployment and were on a training trip, diving in Miami, when a few of us got recalled to the Command in Virginia Beach. Another ST6 team was on official standby \u2014 normally that's the team that blows out for a contingency operation.", + " But they were not chosen, to better cloak what was going to happen.\n\nThere was so much going on \u2014 the Libya thing, the Arab Spring. We knew something good was going to go down. We didn't know how good.\n\nThe first day's briefing, they actually kind of lied to us, being very vague. They mentioned underwater cables because of the earthquake in Japan or some craziness. They hinted at Libya. They said it was a compound somewhere in a bowl and we were going to have two aircraft get us there and we don't know how many are inside but we have to get something out. You won't have any air support.\n\nI assumed it was WMD,", + " a nuke, because why else are they sending us to Libya?\n\nEvery question the Red Squadron ST6 members asked was answered with, \"Well, we can't tell you that.\" Or: \"We don't know.\"\n\nIt was also weird that the entire Red Squadron was in town, but they kicked everyone out of the briefing except those guys who were going, twenty-three and four backups. We'd leave the room to get coffee and stuff, and the other guys were like, \"Well, what are you guys doing?\" We were telling them, \"I have no idea.\"\n\nThe Shooter was a mission team leader. Almost everyone chosen had a one or two ranking in the squadron,", + " the most experienced guys. The group was split into four tactical teams, with the Shooter as leader of the external-security group \u2014 the dog, Cairo, two snipers, and a CIA interpreter to keep whoever might show up in the area out of the internal action.\n\nThe group left Virginia on a Sunday morning, April 10, to drive to the CIA's Harvey Point, North Carolina, center for another briefing and the start of training. The Master Chief was saying JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] would be there, the Secretary of Defense might be there, the Pak/Afghan CIA desk, too. That's when the wheels started spinning for me:", + " This is big.\n\nI've had some close calls with death, bullets flying past my head. Even just driving, weird stuff. Every time, I would tell my mother, \"There's no way I'm going to die, because I'm here to do something.\" I've been saying that for twenty years. I don't know what it is, but it's something important.\n\nBy Monday the team was assembled in a big classroom inside a one-story building. They actually had security sitting outside. No one else was allowed in. A JSOC general, Pak/Afghan and other D.C. officials, and the ST6 commanding officer were there.", + " The SEAL commander, cool as ever, said, \"Okay, we're as close as we've ever been to UBL.\" And that was it. He kind of looked at us and we looked at him and nodded. There was none of that cheering bullshit. We were thinking, Yeah, okay, good. It's about time that we kill this motherfucker. It was simple.\n\nThis is what I came for. Jealousies aside, one of us is going to have the best chance of killing this guy.\n\nDuring the daylong briefing, the SEALs heard how the government found the compound in Abbottabad, how they were watching it,", + " analyzing it, why they believed bin Laden might be there. He, UBL, had become known as the Pacer, the tall guy in satellite imagery who neither left nor mixed with the others.\n\nIt was the CIA woman, now immortalized in books and movies, who gave the briefing. \"Yeah,\" she told us. \"We got him. This is him. This is my life's work. I'm positive.\"\n\nBy then, government and military officials had been considering four options. They were either going to bomb the piss out of the compound with two-thousand-pound ordnance, they were going to send us in, do some kind of joint thing with the Pakis,", + " or try what was called a \"hammer throw,\" where a drone flies by and chucks one fucking bomb at the guy. But they didn't want any collateral damage. And they wanted to make sure he was dead and not in a cave or a safe room.\n\nAfter the group settled into \"motel-like\" rooms, with common areas that had TVs and a kitchen, the team started strategizing with a model of the compound on a large table. Then they drove to a full-scale mock-up for a walk-through. The next day the helos came and we started doing iteration training based on how we wanted to hit it.\n\nOnce I realized what was going on,", + " I actually moved myself to one of the assault teams, even if I was no longer a team leader. We didn't need that many guys on the exterior team, and I'll go fast-rope on the roof with what I started calling the Martyrs Brigade, because as soon as we landed, I figured the house was going to blow up. But we were also going to be the guys in there first to kill him.\n\nOne sniper would also be on the roof to lean over and try to take a shot upside down. The rest of the team would rope again down to the third-floor windows and get your gun up fast because he's probably standing there with his gun.", + " If you fell, it would suck.\n\nIf the group made it inside, there were other issues. I've been in houses before with IEDs in them designed to blow everything up. They'd hang them in the middle of the room so it's a bigger explosion.\n\nI was usually the guy to joke around when we were planning these things \u2014 we all dick around a lot. But I was like, \"Hey guys, we have to take this fucking serious. There's a 90 percent chance this is a one-way mission. We're gonna die, so let's do this right.\"\n\nThe discussions went on, almost a luxury.", + " We're used to going on the fly, five, six nights a week on deployment. Here's your target, we're leaving in twenty minutes. Come up with a plan. This compound was pretty easy, though we had no clue about the inside layout.\n\nThe group reviewed contingencies: How do we handle cars? What if a helo went down? What do we do if the helo doors don't open? Shit like that.\n\nThe first helicopter was going to land in front of the house. We were going to put our external security out and our bird was going to go back up and we'd fast-rope onto the roof.", + " So we'd have one assault team from the other chopper coming up the stairs, and we'd be going down.\n\nIt was March 2012, a blossoming time of year in the capital of the free world. The intimate dinner party was already under way at a stylish split-level apartment one block from the Washington Hilton. The hostess was a military contractor, and there was a lobbyist there, along with another young woman, a Capitol Hill veteran.\n\nThe Shooter's mentor was behind the kitchen counter, putting a final grill-sauce flair on some huge slabs of red meat when four men, all of them imposing and fit, came through the front door.\n\nThe Shooter is thick,", + " like a power lifter, with an audacious set of tattoos. He can be curt and dismissive as his default, but also wickedly funny. It's instantly easy to see why he's considered both a rebellious, pushy pain in the ass by his command and even some of his colleagues, but also a natural leader. An outgoing, charismatic, and determined alpha male in the ultimate alpha crowd.\n\nHe and his three friends were all active ST6 members that night, though none of the others present had been on the bin Laden mission.\n\nThis was my first face-to-face meeting with the Shooter, following several phone conversations and much checking on my journalism background,", + " especially in war zones. In a corner, pouring drinks, he and I established some rules. He would consider talking to me only after his last, upcoming four-month deployment to Afghanistan had ended and he had exited the Navy. And he would not go public; he would not be named. That would be counter to the team's code, and it would also put a huge \"kill me\" target on his back.\n\nDuring the dinner, he told mostly personal stories and took care not to talk in terms of operational security: the deal about the gun magazine and the CIA analyst, the experience of eyeballing bin Laden.\n\n\"Three of us were driving to our first briefing on the mission,\" he said.", + " \"We were thinking maybe it was Libya, but we knew there would be very high-level brass there. One of my guys says, 'I bet it's bin Laden.'\" Another guy told the Shooter, \"If it's Osama bin Laden, dude, I will suck yo' dick.\"\n\n\"So after I shoot UBL, I bring him over to see his body. 'Okay,' I told him, 'now is as good a time as any.'\"\n\nThe group talked about hairy moments during other missions, stories soldiers and foreign correspondents enjoy swapping. But from the start something was obvious, not just about the Shooter but about his fellow SEALs,", + " too: These men who had heroically faced death and exercised extraordinary violence in almost continuous battle for years on end were fearful of life after war.\n\nThis is a problem that is becoming more critical as the \"best of the best\" start leaving the most extended wartime careers in the history of the United States. And it is a problem not just for these men and their families but for the American government, which has come to rely heavily on a steady stream of Tier One special operators (including the Army's Delta Force and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron) \u2014 men of rarefied toughness and training like these \u2014 to maintain a sense of international security in an asymmetrical battlefield.", + " The American way of war has changed radically in the past decade, so that in the future, \"boots on the ground\" will more and more mean special operators. Which means that there will be increasing numbers of vets in the Shooter's circumstance: abandoned, with limited choices.\n\nThat night, one of the Shooter's comrades, lantern-jawed, articulate, with a serious academic pedigree, told me: \"I've seen a lot of combat, been in some pretty grisly circumstances. But the thing that scares me the most after fifteen years in the SEALs?\n\n\"Civilian life.\"\n\nNational Security Archive\n\n2. \"100 PERCENT, HE'S ON THE THIRD FLOOR.\"\n\nThe Shooter and the rest of the team made one last night run on the mock-up of the compound in North Carolina, then drove back to their homes and headquarters in Virginia for a brief break.\n\nThere were goodbyes to his wife and sleeping children. Normally she'd say, 'I'm fine, just go.' This time there was nothing fine about her. Like this would be the last time we'd see each other.\n\nSaying goodbye is just horrible.", + " I don't even want to talk about it... this is the last time I'm going to see these children.\n\nThe Shooter had bought himself $350 Prada sunglasses over the weekend, and much less expensive gifts for his kids. Which makes me a horrible father. But really, he just figured he'd die with some style on.\n\nAnd think of the ad campaign: \"If you only have one day to live...\"\n\nWhen we got to Nevada a few days later, where the team trained on another full-scale compound model, but this one crudely fashioned from shipping containers, we turned the corner, saw the helos we'd actually use,", + " and I started laughing. I told the guys, \"The odds just changed. There's a 90 percent chance we'll survive.\" They asked why. I said, \"I didn't know they were sending us to war on a fucking Decepticon.\"\n\nFor the mission, they'd be slipping through the night in the latest model of stealth Black Hawk helicopters.\n\nThere were days more training, run after run, punctuated by briefings by military brass. They asked us if we were ready. We told them, \"Yeah, absolutely. This is going to be easy.\"\n\nThis was ultimately an assault mission like hundreds he'd been on,", + " different in only one respect.\n\nA critical moment for the mission came when the tireless SEAL Red Team Squadron leader briefed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen and Pentagon undersecretary Mike Vickers. He was going to sell it right then. Not just to his superiors but, through them, to the president.\n\nWe're all in uniform to look professional, and our CO, working on no sleep for days, hit it out of the park. There's no doubt in my mind we're going to go because of his presentation.\n\nThe group discussed what would happen if they were surrounded by Pakistani troops. We would surrender. The original plan was to have Vice-President Biden fly to Islamabad and negotiate our release with Pakistan's president.\n\nThis is hearsay,", + " but I understand Obama said, Hell no. My guys are not surrendering. What do we need to rain hell on the Pakistani military? That was the one time in my life I was thinking, I am fucking voting for this guy. I had a picture of him lying in bed at night, thinking, You're not fucking with my guys. Like, he's thinking about us.\n\nWe got word that we'd be scrambling jets on the border to back us up.\n\nAn Ambien, a C-17 cargo-plane ride, a short stop in Germany, and they were in Afghanistan.\n\nAt Jalalabad, the Shooter saw the CIA analyst pacing.", + " She asked me why I was so calm. I told her, We do this every night. We go to a house, we fuck with some people, and we leave. This is just a longer flight. She looked at me and said, \"One hundred percent he's on the third floor. So get to there if you can.\" She was probably 90 percent sure, and her emotion pushed that to 100.\n\nAnother SEAL squadron, which was already in Afghanistan and would have normally been the assaulters, were very welcoming to us. They would form the Quick Reaction Force flying in behind, on the 47's. The Red Team visitors stayed in \"transient\"", + " housing.\n\nDuring the day, the group would work with our gear, work out. Nighttime was poker and refreshments, or what is called \"fellowship,\" while they waited for a go from Obama himself. On the treadmill, the Shooter listened to \"Red Nation\" by the rapper Game. It's about leaving blood on the ground. We were the Red Team and we were going to leave some blood.\n\nOther guys ginned up some mixed-martial-arts practice or stretched over foam rollers to keep their joints in good shape.\n\nWe all wrote letters. I had my shitty little room and I'm sitting on my Pelican case with all my gear,", + " a manila envelope on my bed, and I'm writing letters to my kids. They were to be delivered in case of my death, something for them to read when they're thirty-five. I have no idea what I said except I'm explaining everything, that it was a noble mission and I hope we got him. I'm saying I wish I could be there for them.\n\nAnd the tears are hitting the page, because we all knew that none of us were coming back alive. It was either death or a Pakistani prison, where we'd be raped for the rest of our lives.\n\nHe gave the letters to an intel guy not on the mission,", + " with instructions. He would shred them if he made it back.\n\nYou write it, it's horrible, you hand it off, and it's like, Okay, that part's over. And I'm back, ready to roll.\n\nBy early September of last year, the Shooter was out, officially. Retired.\n\nHe had survived his last deployment, and there was a barbecue near his house to celebrate with about thirty close friends from \"the community.\" The Redskins were on, his favorite team, and there was lots of Commando ale, brewed by a former SEAL.\n\n\"I left SEALs on Friday,\" he said the next time I saw him.", + " It was a little more than thirty-six months before the official retirement requirement of twenty years of service. \"My health care for me and my family stopped at midnight Friday night. I asked if there was some transition from my Tricare to Blue Cross Blue Shield. They said no. You're out of the service, your coverage is over. Thanks for your sixteen years. Go fuck yourself.\"\n\nThe government does provide 180 days of transitional health-care benefits, but the Shooter is eligible only if he agrees to remain on active duty \"in a support role,\" or become a reservist. Either way, his life would not be his own. Instead,", + " he'll buy private insurance for $486 a month, but some treatments that relieve his wartime pains, like $120 for weekly chiropractic care, are out-of-pocket. Like many vets, he will have to wait at least eight months to have his disability claims adjudicated. Or even longer. The average wait time nationally is more than nine months, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.\n\nGetty Images Pete Souza/The White House\n\n3.\"HEY, MAN, I JUST SHOT A WOMAN.\"\n\nWaiting in Jalalabad, the teams were getting feedback from Washington. Gates didn't want to do this, Hillary didn't want to do that.\n\nThe Shooter still thought,", + " We'd train, spin up, then spin down. They'd eventually tank the op and just bomb it.\n\nBut then the word came to Vice Admiral William McRaven, head of Joint Special Operations Command. The mission was on, originally for April 30, the night of the White House Correspondents' dinner in Washington.\n\nMcRaven figured it would look bad if all sorts of officials got up and left the dinner in front of the press. So he came up with a cover story about the weather so we could launch on Sunday, May 1, instead.\n\nThere was one last briefing and an awesome speech from McRaven comparing the looming raid and its fighters to the movie Hoosiers.\n\nThen they're gathered by a fire pit,", + " suiting up. Just before he got on the chopper to leave for Abbottabad, the Shooter called his dad. I didn't know where he was, but I found out later he was in a Walmart parking lot. I said, \"Hey, it's time to go to work,\" and I'm thinking, I'm calling for the last time. I thought there was a good chance of dying.\n\nHe knew something significant was up, though he didn't know what. The Shooter could hear him start to tear up. He told me later that he sat in his pickup in that parking lot for an hour and couldn't get out of the car.\n\nThe Red Team and members of the other squad hugged one another instead of the usual handshakes before they boarded their separate aircraft.", + " The hangars had huge stadium lights pointing outward so no one from the outside could see what was going on.\n\nI took one last piss on the bushes.\n\nNinety minutes in the chopper to get from Jalalabad to Abbottabad. The Shooter noted when the bird turned right, into Pakistani airspace.\n\nI was sitting next to the commanding officer, and he's relaying everything to McRaven.\n\nI was counting back and forth to a thousand to pass the time. It's a long flight, but we brought these collapsible camping chairs, so we're not uncomfortable. But it's getting old and you're ready to go and you don't want your legs falling asleep.\n\nEvery fifteen minutes they'd tell us we hadn't been painted [made by Pakistani radar].\n\nI remember banking to the south,", + " which meant we were getting ready to hit. We had about another fifteen minutes. Instead of counting, for some reason I said to myself the George Bush 9/11 quote: Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended. I could just hear his voice, and that was neat. I started saying it again and again to myself. Then I started to get pumped up. I'm like: This is so on.\n\nI was concerned for the two [MH-47 Chinook] big-boat choppers crossing the Pakistani border forty-five minutes after we did, both full of my guys from the other squadron,", + " the backup and extraction group. The 47's have some awesome antiradar shit on them, too. But it's still a school bus flying into a sovereign nation. If the Pakistanis don't like it, they can send a jet in to shoot them down.\n\nFlying in, we were all just sort of in our own world. My biggest concern was having to piss really bad and then having to get off in a fight needing to pee. We actually had these things made for us, like a combination collapsible dog bowl and diaper. I still have mine; I never used it. I used one of my water bottles instead.", + " I forgot until later that when I shot bin Laden in the face, I had a bottle of piss in my pocket.\n\nI would have pissed my pants rather than trying to fight with a full bladder.\n\nAbove the compound, the Shooter could hear only his helo pilot in the flight noise. \"Dash 1 going around\" meant the other chopper was circling back around. I thought they'd taken fire and were just moving. I didn't realize they crashed right then. But our pilot did. He put our five perimeter guys out, went up, and went right back down outside the compound, so we knew something was wrong. We weren't sure what the fuck it was.\n\nWe opened the doors,", + " and I looked out.\n\nThe area looked different than where we trained because we're in Pakistan now. There are the lights, the city. There's a golf course. And we're, This is some serious Navy SEAL shit we're going to do. This is so badass. My foot hit the ground and I was still running [the Bush quote] in my head. I don't care if I die right now. This is so awesome. There was concern, but no fear.\n\nI was carrying a big-ass sledgehammer to blow through a wall if we had to. There was a gate on the northeast corner and we went right to that.", + " We put a breaching charge on it, clacked it, and the door peeled like a tin can. But it was a fake gate with a wall behind it. That was good, because we knew that someone was defending themselves. There's something good here.\n\nWe walked down the main long wall to get to the driveway to breach the door there. We were about to blow that next door on the north end when one of the guys from the bird that crashed came around the other side and opened it.\n\nSo we were moving down the driveway and I looked to the left. The compound was exactly the same. The mock-up had been dead-on.", + " To actually be there and see the house with the three stories, the blacked-out windows, high walls, and barbed wire \u2014 and I'm actually in that security driveway with the carport, just like the satellite photos. I was like, This is really cool I'm here.\n\nWhile we were in the carport, I heard gunfire from two different places nearby. In one flurry, a SEAL shot Abrar al-Kuwaiti, the brother of bin Laden's courier, and his wife, Bushra. One of our guys involved told me, \"Jesus, these women are jumping in front of these guys. They're trying to martyr themselves.", + " Another sign that this is a serious place. Even if bin Laden isn't here, someone important is.\"\n\nWe crossed to the south side of the main building. There the Shooter ran into another team member, who told him, \"Hey, man, I just shot a woman.\" He was worried. I told him not to be. \"We should be thinking about the mission, not about going to jail.\"\n\nFor the Shooter personally, bin Laden was one bookend in a black-ops career that was coming to an end. But the road to Abbottabad was long, starting with the guys who tried and failed to make it into the SEALs in the first place.", + " Up to 80 percent of applicants wash out, and some almost die trying.\n\nIn fact, during the Shooter's Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in the mid-nineties, the torture-chamber menu of physical and emotional resistance and resolve required to get into the SEALs, there was actually a death and resurrection.\n\n\"One of the tests is they make you dive to the bottom of a pool and tie five knots,\" the Shooter says. \"One guy got to the fifth knot and blacked out underwater. We pulled him up and he was, like, dead. They made the class face the fence while they tried to resuscitate him.", + " The first words as he spit out water were 'Did I pass? Did I tie the fifth knot?' The instructor told him, 'We didn't want to find out if you could tie the knots, you asshole, we wanted to know how hard you'd push yourself. You killed yourself. You passed.'\"\n\n\"I've been drown-proofed once, and it does suck,\" the Shooter says.\n\nThen there is Green Team, the lead-heavy door of entry for SEAL Team 6. Half of the men who are already hardened SEALs don't make it through. \"They get in your mind and make you think fast and make decisions during high stress.\"\n\nThere have been SEAL teams since the Kennedy years,", + " when they got their first real workout against the Vietcong around Da Nang and in the Mekong Delta, and even during periods of relative peace since Vietnam, SEAL teams have been deployed around the world. But at no time have they been more active than in the period since 2001, in the longest war ever fought by Americans.\n\nIf the surge in Iraq ordered by President Bush in 2007 was at all successful, that success is owed significantly to the night-shift work done by SEAL Team 6.\n\n\"We would go kill high-value targets every night,\" the Shooter tells me. He and other ST6 members who would later be on the Abbottabad trip lived in rough huts with mud floors and cots.", + " \"But we were completely disrupting Al Qaeda and other Iraqi networks. If we only killed five or six guys a night, we were wasting our time. We knew this was the greatest moment of our operational lives.\"\n\nFrom Al Asad to Ramadi to Baghdad to Baquba \u2014 Al Qaeda central at the time \u2014 the SEALs had latitude to go after \"everyone we thought we had to kill. That's really a major reason the surge was going so well, because terrorists were dying strategically.\"\n\nDuring one raid, accompanied by two dogs, the Shooter says that he and his team wiped out \"an entire spiderweb network.\" Villagers told Iraqi newspapers the next day that \"Ninjas came with lions.\"\n\nIt is important to him to stress that no women or children were killed in that raid.", + " He also insists that when it came to interrogation, repetitive questioning and leveraging fear was as aggressive as he'd go. \"When we first started the war in Iraq, we were using Metallica music to soften people up before we interrogated them,\" the Shooter says. \"Metallica got wind of this and they said, 'Hey, please don't use our music because we don't want to promote violence.' I thought, Dude, you have an album called Kill 'Em All.\n\n\"But we stopped using their music, and then a band called Demon Hunter got in touch and said, 'We're all about promoting what you do.' They sent us CDs and patches.", + " I wore my Demon Hunter patch on every mission. I wore it when I blasted bin Laden.\"\n\nOn deployment in Afghanistan or Iraq, they would \"eat, work out, play Xbox, study languages, do schoolwork.\" And watch the biker series Sons of Anarchy, Entourage, and three or four seasons of The Shield.\n\nThey were rural high school football stars, backwoods game hunters, and Ivy League graduates thrown together by a serious devotion to the cause, and to the action. Accessories, upbringing, and cultural tastes were just preamble, though, to the real work. As for the Shooter, he jokes that his choice in life was to \"go to the SEALs or go to jail.\" Not that he would have ever found himself behind bars,", + " but he points out traits that all SEALs seem to have in common: the willingness to live beyond the edge, and to do anything, and the resolve to never quit.\n\nThe bin Laden mission was far from the most dangerous of his career. Once, he was pinned down near Asadabad, Afghanistan, while the SEALs were trying to disrupt Al Qaeda supply lines used to ambush Americans.\n\n\"Bullets flew between my gun and my face,\" he says, just as he was inserting some of his favorite Copenhagen chew and then open-field sprinting to retrieve some special equipment he had dropped. That fight ended when he called in air strikes along the eastern Afghan border to light up the enemy.\n\nOpening a closet door once,", + " team members found a boy inside. \"The natural response was 'C'mon kid.' Then, boom, he blows himself up. Suicide bombers are fast. Other rooms and other places, \"we'd go in and a guy would be sleeping. Up against the wall were his cologne, deodorant, soap, suicide vest, AK-47, and grenades.\"\n\nHe's also had to collect body parts of his close friends, most notably when a SEAL team chopper was shot down in Afghanistan's Kunar province in June 2005, killing eight SEALs. \"We go to a lot of funerals.\"\n\nBut for all the big battle boasts that become a sort of currency among SEALs,", + " the Shooter has a deep fondness for the comedy that comes from being around the bunch of guys who are the only people in the world with whom you have so much in common and the only people in the world who can know exactly what you do for a living.\n\n\"I realized when I joined I had to be a better shot and step up my humor. These guys were hilarious.\"\n\nThere are the now-famous pranks with a giant dildo \u2014 they called it the Staff of Power \u2014 discovered during training in an abandoned Miami building. SEALs would find photos of it inserted into their gas masks or at the bottom of a barrel of animal crackers they were eating.", + " Goats were put in their personal cages at ST6 headquarters. Uniforms were borrowed and dyed pink. Boots were glued to the floor. Flash-bang grenades went off in their gear.\n\nThe area near the Shooter's cage was such a target for outlandish stunts that it was called the Gaza Strip.\n\nEven in action, with all their high state of expertise and readiness, \"we're normal people. We fall off ladders, land on the wrong roof, get bitten by dogs.\" In Iraq, a breacher was putting a charge on a door to blow it off its hinges when he mistakenly leaned against the doorbell.", + " He quickly took off the charge and the target opened the door. We were like, \"You rang the fucking doorbell?!\" Maybe we should try that more often, the Shooter thought to himself.\n\nThe dead can also be funny, as long as it's not your guys. \"In Afghanistan we were cutting away the clothes on this dead dude to see if he had a suicide vest on, only to find that he had a huge dick, down to his knees. From then on, we called him Abu Dujan Holmes.\n\nAnd then there was the time that the Shooter shit himself on a tandem jump with a huge SEAL who outweighed him by sixty pounds.", + " \"The goddamn main chute yanked so hard he slipped two disks in his neck and I filled my socks with human feces. I told him, 'Hey, dude, this is a horrible day.' He said if I went to our reserve chute, 'you're gonna fucking kill me.' He was that convinced his head was going to rip off his body.\n\n\"Okay, so I'm flying this broken chute, shitting my pants with this near-dead guy connected to me. And we eat shit on the landing. We're lying there and the chute is dragging us across the ground. I hear him go, 'Yeah,", + " that's my last jump for today.' And I said, 'That's cool. Can I borrow your boxers?'\n\n\"We jumped the next day.\"\n\nThe Shooter's willingness to endure comes from a deep personal well of confidence and drive that seems to also describe every one of his peers. But his odyssey through countless outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq to skydives into the Indian Ocean \u2014 situations that are always strewn with violence and with his own death always imminent \u2014 is grounded by a sense of deep confederacy.\n\n\"I'm lucky to be with these guys. I'm not going to let them down. I was going to go in for a few years,", + " but then I met these other guys and stuck around because of them.\" He and one buddy made their first kills at exactly the same time, in Ramadi. Shared bloodletting is as much a bonding agent as shared blood.\n\nAfter Team 6 SEAL Adam Brown was killed in March 2010, Brown's squadron members approached the dead man's kids at the funeral. They were screaming and inconsolable. \"You may have lost a father,\" one of them said, \"but you've gained twenty fathers.\"\n\nMost of those SEALs would be killed the next year when their helicopter was shot down in eastern Wardak province.\n\nThe Shooter feels both the losses and connections no less keenly now that he's out.", + " \"One of my closest friends in the world I've been with in SEAL Team 6 the whole time,\" he says.\n\nThe Shooter's friend is also looking for a viable exit from the Navy. As he prepared to deploy again, he agreed to talk with me on the condition that I not identify him.\n\n\"My wife doesn't want me to stay in one more minute than I have to,\" he says. But he's several years away from official retirement. \"I agree that civilian life is scary. And I've got a family to take care of. Most of us have nothing to offer the public. We can track down and kill the enemy really well,", + " but that's it.\n\n\"If I get killed on this next deployment, I know my family will be taken care of.\" (The Navy does offer decent life-insurance policies at low rates.) \"College will be paid for, they'll be fine.\n\n\"But if I come back alive and retire, I won't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out for the rest of my life. Sad to say, it's better if I get killed.\"\n\n4.\"IS THIS THE BEST THING I'VE EVER DONE, OR THE WORST?\"\n\nWhen we entered the main building, there was a hallway with rooms off to the side.", + " Dead ahead is the door to go upstairs. There were women screaming downstairs. They saw the others get shot, so they were upset. I saw a girl, about five, crying in the corner, first room on the right as we were going in. I went, picked her up, and brought her to another woman in the room on the left so she didn't have to be just with us. She seemed too out of it to be scared. There had to be fifteen people downstairs, all sleeping together in that one room. Two dead bodies were also in there.\n\nNormally, the SEALs have a support or communications guy who watches the women and children.", + " But this was a pared-down mission intended strictly for an assault, without that extra help. We didn't really have anyone that could stay back.\n\nSo we're looking down the hallway at the door to the stairwell. I figured this was the only door to get upstairs, which means the people upstairs can't get down. If there had been another way up, we would have found it by then.\n\nWe were at a standstill on the ground floor, waiting for the breacher to do his work.\n\nWe'd always assumed we'd be surrounded at some point. You see the videos of him walking around and he's got all those jihadis.", + " But they weren't prepared. They got all complacent. The guys that could shoot shot, but we were on top of them so fast.\n\nRight then, I heard one of the guys talking about something, blah, blah, blah, the helo crashed. I asked, What helo crashed? He said it was in the yard. And I said, Bullshit! We're never getting out of here now. We have to kill this guy. I thought we'd have to steal cars and drive to Islamabad. Because the other option was to stick around and wait for the Pakistani military to show up. Hopefully, we don't shoot it out with them.", + " We're going to end up in prison here, with someone negotiating for us, and that's just bad. That's when I got concerned.\n\nI've thought about death before, when I've been pinned down for an hour getting shot at. And I wondered what it was going to feel like taking one of those in the face. How long was it going to hurt? But I didn't think about that here.\n\nOne of the snipers who'd seen the disabled helo approached just before they went into the main building. He said, \"Hey, dude, they've got an awesome mock-up of our helo in their yard.\" I said,", + " \"No, dude. They shot one of ours down.\" He said, \"Okay, that makes more sense than the shit I was saying.\"\n\nThe breacher had to blast the door twice for it to open. We started rolling up.\n\nTeam members didn't need much communication, or any orders, once they were on line. We're reading each other every second. We've gotten so good at war, we didn't need anything more.\n\nI was about five guys back on the stairway when I saw the point man holding up. He'd seen Khalid, bin Laden's [twenty-three-year-old] son. I heard him whisper,", + " \"Khalid... come here...\" in Arabic, then in Pashto. He used his name. That confused Khalid. He's probably thinking, \"I just heard shitty Arabic and shitty Pashto. Who the fuck is this?\" He leaned out, armed with an AK, and he got blasted by the point man. That call-out was one of the best combat moves I've ever seen. Khalid had on a white T-shirt and, like, white pajama pants. He was the last line of security.\n\nI remember thinking then: I wish we could live through this night, because this is amazing. I was still expecting all kinds of funky shit like escape slides or safe rooms.\n\nThe point man moved past doors on the second floor and the four or five guys in front of me started to peel off to clear those rooms,", + " which is always how the flow works. We're just clearing as we go, watching our backs.\n\nThey step over and past Khalid, who's dead on the stairs.\n\nThe point man, at that time, saw a guy on the third floor, peeking around a curtain in front of the hallway. Bin Laden was the only adult male left to find. The point man took a shot, maybe two, and the man upstairs disappeared back into a room. I didn't see that because I was looking back.\n\nI don't think he hit him. He thinks he might have.\n\nSo there's the point man on the stairs, waiting for someone to move into the number-two position.", + " Originally I was five or six man, but the train flowed off to clear the second floor. So I roll up behind him. He told me later, \"I knew I had some ass,\" meaning somebody to back him up. I turn around and look. There's nobody else coming up.\n\nOn the third floor, there were two chicks yelling at us and the point man was yelling at them and he said to me, \"Hey, we need to get moving. These bitches is getting truculent.\" I remember saying to myself, Truculent? Really? Love that word.\n\nI kept looking behind us, and there was still no one else there.\n\nBy then we realized we weren't getting more guys.", + " We had to move, because bin Laden is now going to be grabbing some weapon because he's getting shot at. I had my hand on the point man's shoulder and squeezed, a signal to go. The two of us went up. On the third floor, he tackled the two women in the hallway right outside the first door on the right, moving them past it just enough. He thought he was going to absorb the blast of suicide vests; he was going to kill himself so I could get the shot. It was the most heroic thing I've ever seen.\n\nI rolled past him into the room, just inside the doorway.\n\nThere was bin Laden standing there.", + " He had his hands on a woman's shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was his youngest wife, Amal.\n\nThe SEALs had nightscopes, but it was coal-black for bin Laden and the other residents. He can hear but he can't see.\n\nHe looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting. He had a cap on and didn't appear to be hit. I can't tell you 100 percent, but he was standing and moving. He was holding her in front of him. Maybe as a shield, I don't know.\n\nFor me,", + " it was a snapshot of a target ID, definitely him. Even in our kill houses where we train, there are targets with his face on them. This was repetition and muscle memory. That's him, boom, done.\n\nI thought in that first instant how skinny he was, how tall and how short his beard was, all at once. He was wearing one of those white hats, but he had, like, an almost shaved head. Like a crew cut. I remember all that registering. I was amazed how tall he was, taller than all of us, and it didn't seem like he would be, because all those guys were always smaller than you think.\n\nI'm just looking at him from right here [he moves his hand out from his face about ten inches]. He's got a gun on a shelf right there,", + " the short AK he's famous for. And he's moving forward. I don't know if she's got a vest and she's being pushed to martyr them both. He's got a gun within reach. He's a threat. I need to get a head shot so he won't have a chance to clack himself off [blow himself up].\n\nIn that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time as he's going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! same place. That time I used my EOTech red-dot holo sight.", + " He was dead. Not moving. His tongue was out. I watched him take his last breaths, just a reflex breath.\n\nAnd I remember as I watched him breathe out the last part of air, I thought: Is this the best thing I've ever done, or the worst thing I've ever done? This is real and that's him. Holy shit.\n\nEverybody wanted him dead, but nobody wanted to say, Hey, you're going to kill this guy. It was just sort of understood that's what we wanted to do.\n\nHis forehead was gruesome. It was split open in the shape of a V. I could see his brains spilling out over his face.", + " The American public doesn't want to know what that looks like.\n\nAmal turned back, and she was screaming, first at bin Laden and then at me. She came at me like she wanted to fight me, or that she wanted to die instead of him. So I put her on the bed, bound with zip ties. Then I realized that bin Laden's youngest son, who is about two or three, was standing there on the other side of the bed. I didn't want to hurt him, because I'm not a savage. There was a lot of screaming, he was crying, just in shock. I didn't like that he was scared.", + " He's a kid, and had nothing to do with this. I picked him up and put him next to his mother. I put some water on his face.\n\nThe point man came in and zip-tied the other two women he'd grabbed.\n\nThe third-floor action and killing took maybe fifteen seconds.\n\nThe Shooter's oldest child calls the place his dad worked \"Crapghanistan,\" maybe because his deployments meant he regularly missed Christmases, birthdays, and other holidays.\n\n\"Our marriage was definitely a casualty of his career,\" says the Shooter's wife. They are officially split but still live together. Separate bedrooms, low overhead. \"Somewhere along the line we lost track of each other.\" She holds his priorities partially responsible:", + " SEAL first, father second, husband third.\n\nThis part of the Shooter's story is, as his wife puts it, \"unique to us but unfortunately not unique in the community.\"\n\nSEAL operators are gone up to three hundred days a year. And when they're not in theater, they're training or soaking in the company of their buds in the absorbing clubhouse atmosphere of ST6 headquarters.\n\n\"We can't talk with anyone else about what we do,\" the Shooter says, \"or about anything else other than maybe skydiving and broken spleens. When it comes to socializing, it's really tight.\"\n\nHis wife understands that \"so much of their survival is dependent on the fact that their friends and their jobs are so intertwined.\" And that \"we lived our lives under a veil of secrecy.\"\n\nSEAL Team 6 spouses are nicknamed the Pink Squadron,", + " because the women also rely on their hermetic connections to other wives. When you have no idea where your husband is or what he's doing, other than that it's mortally dangerous, and you can't discuss it \u2014 not even with your own mother \u2014 your world can feel desperately small.\n\nBut his wife's concerns, and her own narrative, convey a faithfulness that extends beyond marital fidelity.\n\nShe has comforted him when he was \"inconsolable\" after a mission in which he shot the parents of a boy in a crossfire. \"He was reliving it, as a dad himself, when he was telling me.\" Not long after,", + " she tended to him when she found him heavily sedated with an open bottle of Ambien and his pistol nearby.\n\nThe command had mandatory psych evaluations. During one of those, the Shooter told the psychologist, \"I was having suicidal thoughts and drinking too much.\" The doctor's response? \"He told me this was normal for SEALs after combat deployment. He told me I should just drink less and not hurt anybody.\"\n\nThe Shooter's wife is indignant. \"That's not normal!\" Though she knows that \"every time you send your husband off to war, you get a slightly different person back.\"\n\nThe alone times are deeply trying.\n\nSeveral years ago,", + " a SEAL friend had died in a helicopter crash. The Shooter's wife had just been to his funeral, consoling his widow. The Shooter was on the same deployment, and she had not heard anything about his status.\n\n\"I came home and was inside holding our infant child. Our front door is all glass, and I see a man in a khaki uniform coming up the steps. All I could do was think, I'd better put the baby down because I'm going to faint. So I set the baby on the floor and answered the door. It was a neighbor with a baby bib I'd dropped outside. I swore at him and slammed the door in his face.\"\n\nIt was four days more before she heard that her husband was safe.\n\nGiven all of that,", + " she has a surprising equanimity about her life. Talking with them separately, the couple's love for each other is evident and deep. \"We've grown so much together,\" she says. \"We'll always be best friends. I'll love him till the day I die.\"\n\nShe remains in awe of \"the level of brilliance these men have. To be surrounded by that caliber of people is something I'll always be grateful for.\"\n\nHer husband's retirement has been no less jarring for her. \"He gave so much to his country, and now it seems he's left in the dust. I feel there's no support, not just for my family but for other families in the community.", + " I honestly have nobody I can go to or talk to. Nor do I feel my husband has gotten much for what he's accomplished in his career.\"\n\nExactly what, if any, responsibility should the government have to her family?\n\nThe loss of income and insurance and no pension aside, she can no longer walk onto the local base if she feels a threat to her family. They've surrendered their military IDs. If something were to happen, the Shooter has instructed her to take the kids to the base gate anyway and demand to see the commanding officer, or someone from the SEAL team. \"He said someone will come get us.\"\n\nBecause of the mission,", + " she says that \"my family is always going to be at risk. It's just a matter of finding coping strategies.\"\n\nThe Shooter still dips his hand in his pocket when they're in a store, checking for a knife in case there's an emergency. He also keeps his eyes on the exits.\n\nHe's lost some vision, he can't get his neck straight for any period of time. Right now, she's just waiting to see what he creates for himself in this new life.\n\nAnd she's waiting to see how he replaces even the $60,000 a year he was making (with special pay bonuses for different activities). Or how they can afford private health insurance that covers spinal injections she needs for her own sports injuries.\n\n\"This is new to us,", + " not having the team.\"\n\n5.\"WE ALL DID IT.\"\n\nWithin another fifteen seconds, other team members started coming in the room. Here, the Shooter demurs about whether subsequent SEALs also fired into bin Laden's body. He's not feeding raw meat to what is an increasingly strict government focus on the etiquette of these missions. But I would have done it if I'd come in the room later. I knew I was going to shoot him if I saw him, regardless.\n\nI even joked about that with the guys before we were there. \"I don't give a shit if you kill him \u2014 if I come in the room, I'm shooting his ass.", + " I don't care if he's deader than fried chicken.\"\n\nIn the compound, I thought about getting my camera, and I knew we needed to take pictures and ID him. We had a saying, \"You kill him, you clean him.\" But I was just in a little bit of a zone. I had to actually ask one of my friends who came into the room, \"Hey, what do we do now?\" He said, \"Now we go find the computers.\" And I remember saying, \"Yes! I'm back! Got it!\" Because I was almost stunned.\n\nThen I just wanted to go get out of the house.", + " We all had a DNA test kit, but I knew another team would be in there to do all that. So I went down to the second floor where the offices were, the media center. We started breaking apart the computer hard drives, cracking the towers. We were looking for thumb drives and disks, throwing them into our net bags.\n\nIn each computer room, there was a bed. Under the beds were these huge duffel bags, and I'm pulling them out, looking for whatever. At first I thought they were filled with vacuum-sealed rib-eye steaks. I thought, They're in this for the long haul. They've got all this food.", + " Then, wait a minute. This is raw opium. These drugs are everywhere. It was pretty funny to see that. Altogether, he helped clean three rooms on the second floor.\n\nThe Shooter did not see bin Laden's body again until he and the point man helped two others carry it, already bagged, down the building's hallways and out into the courtyard by the front gate. I saw a sniper buddy of mine down there and I told him, \"That's our guy. Hold on to him.\" Others took the corpse to the surviving Black Hawk.\n\nWith one helo down, the Shooter was relieved to hear the sound of the 47 Chinook transports arriving.", + " His exfil (extraction) flight out was on one of the 47's, which had almost been blown out of the sky by the SEALs' own explosive charges, set to destroy the downed Black Hawk.\n\nOne backup SEAL Team 6 member on the flight asked who'd killed UBL. I said I fucking killed him. He's from New York and says, \"No shit. On behalf of my family, thank you.\" And I thought: Wow, I've got a Navy SEAL telling me thanks?\n\n\"You probably thought you'd never hear this,\" someone piped through the intercom system over an hour into the return flight,", + " \"but welcome back to Afghanistan.\"\n\nBack at the Jalalabad base, we pulled bin Laden out of the bag to show McRaven and the CIA. That's when McRaven had a tall SEAL lie down next to bin Laden to assess his height, along with other, slightly more scientific identity tests.\n\nWith the body laid out and under inspection, you could see more gunshot wounds to bin Laden's chest and legs.\n\nWhile they were still checking the body, I brought the agency woman over. I still had all my stuff on. We looked down and I asked, \"Is that your guy?\" She was crying. That's when I took my magazine out of my gun and gave it to her as a souvenir.", + " Twenty-seven bullets left in it. \"I hope you have room in your backpack for this.\" That was the last time I saw her.\n\nFrom there, the team accompanied the body to nearby Bagram Airfield. During the next few hours, the thought that hit me was \"This is awesome. This is great. We lived. This is perfect. We just did it all.\"\n\nThe moment truly struck at Bagram when I'm eating a breakfast sandwich, standing near bin Laden's body, looking at a big-screen TV with the president announcing the raid. I'm sitting there watching him, looking at the body, looking at the president,", + " eating a sausage-egg-cheese-and-extra-bacon sandwich thinking, \"How the fuck did I get here? This is too much.\"\n\nI still didn't know if it would be good or bad. The good was having done something great for my country, for the guys, for the people of New York. It was closure. An honor to be there.\n\nI never expected people to be screaming \"U.S.A.!\" with Geraldo outside the White House.\n\nThe bad part was security. He was their prophet, basically. Now we killed him and I have to worry about this forever. Al Qaeda, especially these days, is 99 percent talk.", + " But that 1 percent of the time they do shit, it's bad. They're capable of horrific things.\n\nWe listened to the Al Qaeda phone calls where one guy is saying, \"We gotta find out who ratted on bin Laden.\" The other guy says, \"I heard he did it to himself. He was locked up in that house with three wives.\" Funny terrorists.\n\nAt Bagram, the point man asked, \"Hey, was he hit when you went into the room? I thought I shot him in the head and his cap flew off.\" I said I didn't know, but he was still walking and he had his hat on.", + " The point man was like \"Okay. No big deal.\"\n\nBy then we had showered and were having some refreshments. We weren't comparing dicks. I've been in a lot of battles with this guy. He's a fucking amazing warrior, the most honorable, truthful dude I know. I trust him with my life.\n\nThe Shooter said he and the point man participated in a shooters-only debrief with military officials around a trash can in Jalalabad and then a long session at Bagram Airfield, but they left some details ambiguous. The point man said he took two shots and thought one may have hit bin Laden. He said his number two went into the room \"and finished him off as he was circling the drain.\" This was not exactly as it had gone down,", + " but everyone seemed satisfied.\n\nEarly government versions of the shooting talked about bin Laden using his wife as protection and being shot by a SEAL inside the room. But subsequent accounts, from officials and others like Bissonnette, further muddied the story and obscured the facts.\n\nWhat the two SEALs did discuss after the action was why there'd been a short gap before more assaulters joined them on the third floor. \"Where was everybody else?\" the point man asked. I told him we just ran thin.\n\nGuys went left and right on the second floor and it was just us. Everything happened really fast. Everybody did their jobs. Any team member would have done exactly what I did.\n\nAt Jalalabad,", + " as we got off the plane there was an air crew there, guys who fix helicopters. They hugged me and knew I'd killed him. I don't know how the hell word spread that fast.\n\nMcRaven himself came over to me, very emotional. He grabbed me across the back of my neck like a proud father and gave me a hug. He knew what had happened, too.\n\nNot long after, a senior government official had an unofficial phone call with the mentor. \"Your boy was the one,\" the mentor says he was told. The Shooter was alternately shocked and pleased to know that word got back to the States before I did.", + " \"Who killed bin Laden?\" was the first question, and then the name just flies.\n\nAnd it was the Shooter who, when an Obama administration official asked for details during the president's private visit with the bin Laden team at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, said \"We all did it.\"\n\nThe SEAL standing next to the Shooter would say later, \"Man, I was dying to tell him it was you.\"\n\nFrom the moment reporters started getting urgent texts hours before President Obama's official announcement on May 1, 2011, the bin Laden mission exploded into public view. Suddenly, a brilliant spotlight was shining where shadows had ruled for decades.\n\nTV trucks descended on the SEAL Team 6 community in Virginia Beach,", + " showing their homes and hangouts.\n\n\"The big mission changed a lot of attitudes around the command,\" the Shooter says. \"There were suspicions about whether anyone was selling out.\"\n\nIt had begun \"when we were still in the Jalalabad hangar with our shit on. There was a lot of 'Don't let this go to your head, don't talk to anyone,' not even our own Red Team guys who hadn't gone with us.\"\n\nThe assaulters \"were immediately put in a box, like a time-out,\" says the Shooter's close friend, who was not on the mission. \"'Don't open your mouth.' I would have flown them to Tahoe for a week.\"\n\nBut even with the SEALs'", + " strong history of institutional modesty, there was no unringing this bell.\n\nThe potential for public fame was too great, and suspicion was high inside SEAL Team 6.\n\nThe Shooter was among those reprimanded for going out to a bar to celebrate the night they got back home. And he was supposed to report for work the next morning, but instead took the day off to spend with his kids.\n\nTwenty-four hours later came the offer of witness protection, driving the beer truck in Milwaukee. \"That was the best idea on the table for security.\"\n\n\"Maybe some courtesy eyes-on checks\" of his home, he thought. \"Send some Seabees over to put in a heavier,", + " metal-reinforced front door. Install some sensors or something. But there was literally nothing.\"\n\nHe considered whether to get a gun permit for life outside the perimeter.\n\nThe SEALs are proud of being ready for \"anything and everything.\" But when it came to his family's safety? \"I don't have the resources.\"\n\nWith gossip and finger-pointing continuing over the mission, the Shooter made a decision \"to show I wasn't a douchebag, that I'm still part of this team and believe in what we're doing.\"\n\nHe re-upped for another four-month deployment. It would be in the brutal cold of Afghanistan's winter.\n\nBut he had already decided this would be his last deployment,", + " his SEAL Team 6 sayonara.\n\n\"I wanted to see my children graduate and get married.\" He hoped to be able to sleep through the night for the first time in years. \"I was burned out,\" he says. \"And I realized that when I stopped getting an adrenaline rush from gunfights, it was time to go.\"\n\nMay 1, 2012, the first anniversary of the bin Laden mission. The Shooter is getting ready to go play with his kids at a water park. He's watching CNN.\n\n\"They were saying, 'So now we're taking viewer e-mails. Do you remember where you were when you found out Osama bin Laden was dead?' And I was thinking:", + " Of course I remember. I was in his bedroom looking down at his body.\"\n\nThe standing ovation of a country in love with its secret warriors had devolved into a news quiz, even as new generations of SEALs are preparing for sacrifice in the Horn of Africa, Iran, perhaps Mexico.\n\nThe Shooter himself, an essential part of the team helping keep us safe since 9/11, is now on his own. He is enjoying his family, finally, and won't be kissing his kids goodbye as though it were the last time and suiting up for the battlefield ever again.\n\nBut when he officially separates from the Navy three months later,", + " where do his sixteen years of training and preparedness go on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9? Who in the outside world understands the executive skills and keen psychological fortitude he and his First Tier colleagues have absorbed into their DNA? Who is even allowed to know? And where can he go to get any of these questions answered?\n\nThere is a Transition Assistance Program in the military, but it's largely remedial level, rote advice of marginal value: Wear a tie to interviews, not your Corfam (black shiny service) shoes. Try not to sneeze in anyone's coffee. There is also a program at MacDill Air Force Base designed to help Special Ops vets navigate various bureaucracies.", + " And the VA does offer five years of health care benefits\u2014through VA physicians and hospitals\u2014for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but it offers nothing for the shooter's family.\n\n\"It's criminal to me that these guys walk out the door naked,\" says retired Marine major general Mike Myatt. \"They're the greatest of their generation; they know how to get things done. If I were a Fortune 500 company, I'd try to get my hands on any one of them.\" The general is standing in the mezzanine of the Marines Memorial building he runs in San Francisco. He's had to expand the memorial around the corner due to so many deaths over the past eleven years of war.\n\nHe is furious about the high unemployment rate among returning infantrymen,", + " as well as homelessness, PTSD, and the other plagues of new veterans. General Myatt believes \"the U.S. military is the best in the world at transitioning from civilian to military life and the worst in the world at transitioning back.\" And that, he acknowledges, doesn't even begin to consider the separate and distinct travesty visited on the Shooter and his comrades.\n\nThe Special Operations men are special beyond their operations. \"These guys are self-actualizers,\" says a retired rear admiral and former SEAL I spoke with. \"Top of the pyramid. If they wanted to build companies, they could. They can do anything they put their minds to.", + " That's how smart they are.\"\n\nBut what's available to these superskilled retiring public servants? \"Pretty much nothing,\" says the admiral. \"It's 'Thank you for your service, good luck.'\"\n\nOne third-generation military man who has worked both inside and outside government, and who has fought for vets for decades, is sympathetic to the problem. But he notes that the Pentagon is dealing with two hundred thousand new veterans a year, compared with perhaps a few dozen SEALs. \"Can and should the DOD spend the extra effort it would take to help the superelite guys get with exactly the kind of employers they should have?", + " Investment bankers, say, value that competition, drive, and discipline, not to mention people with security clearances. They [Tier One vets] should be plugged in at executive levels. Any employers who think about it would want to hire these people.\"\n\nFor officials, however, everyone signing out of war is a hero, and even for the masses of retirees, programs are sporadic and often ineffectual. Michelle Obama and Jill Biden have both made transitioning vets a personal cause, though these efforts are largely gestural and don't reach nearly high enough for the skill sets of a member of SEAL Team 6.\n\nThe Virginia-based Navy SEAL Foundation has a variety of supportive programs for the families of SEALs,", + " and the foundation spends $3.2 million a year maintaining them. But as yet they have no real method or programs for upper-level job placement of their most practiced constituency.\n\nA businessman associated with the foundation says he understands that there is a need the foundation does not fill. \"This is an ongoing thing where lots of people seem to want to help but no one has ever really done it effectively because our community is so small. No one's ever cracked it. And there real-ly needs to be an education effort well before they separate [from the service] to tell them, 'The world you're about to enter is very different than the one you've been operating in the last fifteen or twenty years.'\" One former SEAL I spoke with is a Harvard MBA and now a very successful Wall Street trader whose career path is precisely the kind of example that should be evangelized to outgoing SEALs.", + " His own life reflects that \"SpecOps guys could be hugely value-added\" to civilian companies, though he says business schools \u2014 degrees in general \u2014 might be an important step. \"It would be great to get a panel of CEOs together who are ready to help these guys get hired.\" Some big companies do have veteran-outreach specialists \u2014 former SEAL Harry Wingo fills that role at Google.\n\nBut these individual and scattered shots still do not provide what is needed: a comprehensive battle plan.\n\nIn San Francisco recently, I talked about the Special Ops issue with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and venture capitalist and Orbitz chairman Jeff Clarke. Both are very interested in offering a business luminary hand to help clandestine operators make their final jump.", + " There is enthusiastic consensus among the business and military people I have canvassed that this kind of outside help is required, perhaps a new nonprofit financed and driven by the Costolos and Clarkes of the world.\n\nEven before he retired, the Shooter's new business plan dissolved when the SEAL Team 6 members who formed it decided to go in different directions, each casting for a civilian professional life that's challenging and rewarding. The stark realities of post-SEAL life can make even the blood of brothers turn a little cold.\n\n\"I still have the same bills I had in the Navy,\" the Shooter tells me when we talk in September 2012.", + " But no money at all coming in, from anywhere.\n\n\"I just want to be able to pay all those bills, take care of my kids, and work from there,\" he says. \"I'd like to take the things I learned and help other people in any way I can.\"\n\nIn the last few months, the Shooter has put together some work that involves a kind of discreet consulting for select audiences. But it's a per-event deal, and he's not sure how secure or long-term it will be. And he wants to be much more involved in making the post \u2014 SEAL Team 6 transition for others less uncertain.\n\nThe December suicide of one SEAL commander in Afghanistan and the combat death of another \u2014 a friend \u2014 while rescuing an American doctor from the Taliban underscore his urgent desire to make a difference on behalf of his friends.\n\nHe imagines traveling back to other parts of the world for a few days at a time to do dynamic surveys for businesses looking to put offices in countries that are not entirely safe,", + " or to protect employees they already have in place.\n\nBut he is emphatic: He does not want to carry a gun. \"I've fought all the fights. I don't have a need for excitement anymore. Honestly.\"\n\nAfter all, when you've killed the world's most wanted man, not everything should have to be a battle.\n\n\"They torture the shit out of people in this movie, don't they? Everyone is chained to something.\"\n\nThe Shooter is sitting next to me at a local movie theater in January, watching Zero Dark Thirty for the first time. He laughs at the beginning of the film about the bin Laden hunt when the screen reads,", + " \"Based on firsthand accounts of actual events.\"\n\nHis uncle, who is also with us, along with the mentor and the Shooter's wife, had asked him earlier whether he'd seen the film already.\n\n\"I saw the original,\" the Shooter said. As the action moves toward the mission itself, I ask the Shooter whether his heart is beating faster. \"No,\" he says matter-of-factly. But when a SEAL Team 6 movie character yells, \"Breacher!\" for someone to blow one of the doors of the Abbottabad compound, the Shooter says loudly, \"Are you fucking kidding me? Shut up!\"\n\nHe explains afterward that no one would ever yell,", + " \"Breacher!\" during an assault. Deadly silence is standard practice, a fist to the helmet sufficient signal for a SEAL with explosive packets to go to work.\n\nDuring the shooting sequence, which passes, like the real one, in a flash, his fingers form a steeple under his chin and his focus is intense.\n\nBut his criticisms at dinner afterward are minor.\n\n\"The tattoo scene was horrible,\" he says about a moment in the film when the ST6 assault group is lounging in Afghanistan waiting to go. \"Those guys had little skulls or something instead of having some real ink that goes up to here.\" He points to his shoulder blade.\n\n\"It was fun to watch.", + " There was just little stuff. The helos turned the wrong way [toward the target], and they talked way, way too much [during the assault itself]. If someone was waiting for you, they could track your movements that way.\"\n\nThe tactics on the screen \"sucked,\" he says, and \"the mission in the damn movie took way too long\" compared with the actual event. The stairs inside bin Laden's building were configured inaccurately. A dog in the film was a German shepherd; the real one was a Belgian Malinois who'd previously been shot in the chest and survived. And there's no talking on the choppers in real life.\n\nThere was also no whispered calling out of bin Laden as the SEALs stared up the third-floor stairwell toward his bedroom.", + " \"When Osama went down, it was chaos, people screaming. No one called his name.\"\n\n\"They Hollywooded it up some.\"\n\nThe portrayal of the chief CIA human bloodhound, \"Maya,\" based on a real woman whose iron-willed assurance about the compound and its residents moved a government to action, was \"awesome\" says the Shooter. \"They made her a tough woman, which she is.\"\n\nThe Shooter and the mentor joke with each other about the latest thermal/night-vision eyewear used in the movie, which didn't exist when the older man was a SEAL.\n\n\"Dude, what the fuck? How come I never got my four-eye goggles?\"\n\n\"We have those.\" \"Are you kidding me?\"\n\n\"", + "SEAL Team 6, baby.\"\n\nThey laugh, at themselves as much as at each other.\n\nThe Shooter seems smoothed out, untroubled, as relaxed as I've seen him.\n\nBut the conversation turns dark when they discuss the portrayal of the other CIA operative, Jennifer Matthews, who was among seven people killed in 2009 when a suicide bomber was allowed into one of their black-ops stations in Afghanistan.\n\nThey both knew at least one of the paramilitary contractors who perished with her.\n\nThe supper table is suddenly flooded with the surge of strong emotions. Anguish, really, though they both hide it well. This is not a movie.", + " It's real life, where death is final and threats last forever.\n\nThe blood is your own, not fake splatter and explosive squibs.\n\nMovies, books, lore \u2014 we all helped make these men brilliant assassins in the name of liberty, lifted them up on our shoulders as unique and exquisitely trained heroes, then left them alone in the shadows of their past.\n\nUncertainty will never be far away for the Shooter. His government may have shut the door on him, but he is required to live inside the consequences of his former career.\n\nOne line from the film kept resonating in my head.\n\nAn actor playing a CIA station chief warns Maya about jihadi vengeance.\n\n\"", + "Once you're on their list,\" he says, \"you never get off.\"\n\nCorrection: A previous version of this story misstated the extent of the five-year health care benefits offered to cover veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Department of Veterans Affairs offers comprehensive health care to eligible veterans during that period, though not to their families. In light of this change, we have also revised an earlier passage in the story referring to the shooter's post-service benefits. Also, the original version of this story did not include a few sentences that ran in the issue printed last week. They have now been restored.\n\nPLUS: David Granger on 'The Shooter'", + " in D.C. ", + " \u201cThe Shooter,\u201d today\u2019s story about the Navy SEAL who says he killed Osama bin Laden, was published in cooperation with Esquire. It is part of the Center for Investigative Reporting\u2019s ongoing coverage of the challenges veterans face after leaving military service.\n\nPhil Bronstein, CIR's executive chairman and a longtime journalist, met the Shooter more than a year ago. Over the course of the last year, they have had a series of interviews and, recently, the Shooter agreed that his powerful story could be told, but his identity could not be revealed.\n\nWe agreed to protect his identity because of the inherent risks to the Shooter and his family if he were to be named.", + " We realize that by publishing this story, his identity may be revealed, but our agreement with him is that we will take no part in that unless he chooses to come forward.\n\nCIR has a strict policy against using anonymous sources \u2013 unless the information is deemed to have overwhelming news value and it is determined that the information cannot be told any other way. We believe the Shooter\u2019s story met the test of newsworthiness, even though we could not persuade other sources with firsthand knowledge to corroborate his retelling of the story. This is his story and his story alone.\n\nAfter conducting interviews with the Shooter and other military personnel who were familiar with the events surrounding the raid,", + " Bronstein became convinced that the Shooter had the most definitive account of those crucial few seconds when bin Laden was killed.\n\nThe Shooter\u2019s version of events is not the only one. In the book \u201cNo Easy Day,\u201d a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, since identified in published reports as Matt Bissonnette, wrote that another unnamed SEAL fired the fatal shots \u2013 although Bissonnette acknowledges that he did not witness the actual shooting. The book was written under the pen name Mark Owen.\n\nThere is a broader story here. Many of the issues the Shooter has faced upon re-entry into the civilian world, while exceptional because of his membership in SEAL Team 6,", + " are similar to those many veterans face when leaving the service.\n\nWhile we cannot use his name, we can tell his story \u2013 through words and video \u2013 to reach those who need to hear it.\n\nLess than 1 percent of Americans are active in the military, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Volunteers make up our armed forces fighting our wars abroad. Their service time, and especially their involvement in combat, does not simply dissipate into vague memory when they are physically removed from that danger. The aftermath of war stays with them.\n\nAt CIR, we believe that telling the stories of veterans and exposing problems they face when they come home is important and relevant to all of us as Americans.", + " There are solutions, but if the problems veterans face lie hidden, removed from our national dialogue, they will never be solved. ", + " This article was published in the March 2013 issue.\n\nPhil Bronstein is the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and currently serves as executive chairman of the Center for Investigative Reporting. This piece was reported in cooperation with CIR.\n\nNote: A correction is appended to the end of this story.\n\nThe man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care.\n\nIt was a mild spring day, April 2012, and our small group, including a few of his friends and family, was shielded from the sun by the patchwork shadows of maple trees.", + " But the Shooter was sweating as he talked about his uncertain future, his plans to leave the Navy and SEAL Team 6.\n\nHe stood up several times with an apologetic gripe about the heat, leaving a perspiration stain on the seat-back cushion. He paced. I didn't know him well enough then to tell whether a glass of his favorite single malt, Lagavulin, was making him less or more edgy.\n\nWe would end up intimately familiar with each other's lives. We'd have dinners, lots of Scotch. He's played with my kids and my dogs and been a hilarious, engaging gentleman around my wife.\n\nIn my yard,", + " the Shooter told his story about joining the Navy at nineteen, after a girl broke his heart. To escape, he almost by accident found himself in a Navy recruiter's office. \"He asked me what I was going to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be a sniper.\n\n\"He said, 'Hey, we have snipers.'\n\n\"I said, 'Seriously, dude. You do not have snipers in the Navy.' But he brought me into his office and it was a pretty sweet deal. I signed up on a whim.\"\n\n\"That's the reason Al Qaeda has been decimated,\" he joked, \"because she broke my fucking heart.\"\n\nI would come to know about the Shooter's hundreds of combat missions,", + " his twelve long-term SEAL-team deployments, his thirty-plus kills of enemy combatants, often eyeball to eyeball. And we would talk for hours about the mission to get bin Laden and about how, over the celebrated corpse in front of them on a tarp in a hangar in Jalalabad, he had given the magazine from his rifle with all but three lethally spent bullets left in it to the female CIA analyst whose dogged intel work and intuition led the fighters into that night.\n\nWhen I was first around him, as he talked I would always try to imagine the Shooter geared up and a foot away from bin Laden, whose life ended in the next moment with three shots to the center of his forehead.", + " But my mind insisted on rendering the picture like a bad Photoshop job \u0097 Mao's head superimposed on the Yangtze, or tourists taking photos with cardboard presidents outside the White House.\n\nBin Laden was, after all, the man CIA director Leon Panetta called \"the most infamous terrorist in our time,\" who devoured inordinate amounts of our collective cultural imagery for more than a decade. The number-one celebrity of evil. And the man in my backyard blew his lights out.\n\nST6 in particular is an enterprise requiring extraordinary teamwork, combined with more kinds of support in the field than any other unit in the history of the U.S.", + " military.\n\nSimilarly, NASA marshaled thousands of people to put a man on the moon, and history records that Neil Armstrong first set his foot there, not the equally talented Buzz Aldrin.\n\nEnough people connected to the SEALs and the bin Laden mission have confirmed for me that the Shooter was the \"number two\" behind the raid's point man going up the stairs to bin Laden's third-floor residence, and that he is the one who rolled through the bedroom door solo and confronted the surprisingly tall terrorist pushing his youngest wife, Amal, in front of him through the pitch-black room. The Shooter had to raise his gun higher than he expected.\n\nThe point man is the only one besides the Shooter who could verify the kill shots firsthand,", + " and he did just that to another SEAL I spoke with. But even the point man was not in the room then, having tackled two women into the hallway, a crucial and heroic decision given that everyone living in the house was presumed to be wearing a suicide vest.\n\nBut a series of confidential conversations, detailed descriptions of mission debriefs, and other evidence make it clear: The Shooter's is the most definitive account of those crucial few seconds, and his account, corroborated by multiple sources, establishes him as the last man to see Osama bin Laden alive. Not in dispute is the fact that others have claimed that they shot bin Laden when he was already dead,", + " and a number of team members apparently did just that.\n\nWhat is much harder to understand is that a man with hundreds of successful war missions, one of the most decorated combat veterans of our age, who capped his career by terminating bin Laden, has no landing pad in civilian life.\n\nBack in April, he and some of his SEAL Team 6 colleagues had formed the skeleton of a company to help them transition out of the service. In my yard, he showed everyone his business-card mock-ups. There was only a subtle inside joke reference to their team in the company name.\n\nUnlike former SEAL Team 6 member Matt Bissonnette (No Easy Day), they do not rush to write books or step forward publicly,", + " because that violates the code of the \"quiet professional.\" Someone suggested they might sell customized sunglasses and other accessories special operators often invent and use in the field. It strains credulity that for a commando team leader who never got a single one of his men hurt on a mission, sunglasses would be his best option. And it's a simple truth that those who have been most exposed to harrowing danger for the longest time during our recent unending wars now find themselves adrift in civilian life, trying desperately to adjust, often scrambling just to make ends meet.\n\nAt the time, the Shooter's uncle had reached out to an executive at Electronic Arts,", + " hoping that the company might need help with video-game scenarios once the Shooter retired. But the uncle cannot mention his nephew's distinguishing feature as the one who put down bin Laden.\n\nSecrecy is a thick blanket over our Special Forces that inelegantly covers them, technically forever. The twenty-three SEALs who flew into Pakistan that night were directed by their command the day they got back stateside about acting and speaking as though it had never happened.\n\n\"Right now we are pretty stacked with consultants,\" the video-game man responded. \"Thirty active and recently retired guys\" for one game: Medal of Honor Warfighter. In fact, seven active-duty Team 6 SEALs would later be punished for advising EA while still in the Navy and supposedly revealing classified information.", + " (One retired SEAL, a participant in the bin Laden raid, was also involved.)\n\nWith the focus and precision he's learned, the Shooter waits and watches for the right way to exit, and adapt. Despite his foggy future, his past is deeply impressive. This is a man who is very pleased about his record of service to his country and has earned the respect of his peers.\n\n\"He's taken monumental risks,\" says the Shooter's dad, struggling to contain the frustration that roughs the edges of his deep pride in his son. \"But he's unable to reap any reward.\"\n\nIt's not that there isn't one. The U.S.", + " government put a $25 million bounty on bin Laden that no one is likely to collect. Certainly not the SEALs who went on the mission nor the support and intelligence experts who helped make it all possible. Technology is the key to success in this case more than people, Washington officials have said.\n\nThe Shooter doesn't care about that. \"I'm not religious, but I always felt I was put on the earth to do something specific. After that mission, I knew what it was.\"\n\nOthers also knew, from the commander-in-chief on down. The bin Laden shooting was a staple of presidential-campaign brags. One big-budget movie,", + " several books, and a whole drawerful of documentaries and TV films have fortified the brave images of the Shooter and his ST6 Red Squadron members.\n\nThere is commerce attached to the mission, and people are capitalizing. Just not the triggerman. While others collect, he is cautious and careful not to dishonor anyone. His manners come at his own expense.\n\n\"No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job,\" Barack Obama said last Veterans' Day, \"or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home.\"\n\nBut the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy,", + " his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:\n\nNothing. No pension, no healthcare for his wife and kids, no protection for himself or his family.\n\nSince Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon's butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door,", + " if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.\n\nThen there is the \"bolt\" bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.\n\n\"Personally,\" his wife told me recently, \"I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago,\" when her husband joined ST6.\n\nWhen the White House identified SEAL Team 6 as those responsible, camera crews swarmed into their Virginia Beach neighborhood, taking shots of the SEALs' homes.\n\nAfter bin Laden's face appeared on their TV in the days after the killing,", + " the Shooter cautioned his older child not to mention the Al Qaeda leader's name ever again \"to anybody. It's a bad name, a curse name.\" His kid started referring to him instead as \"Poopyface.\" It's a story he told affectionately on that April afternoon visit to my home.\n\nHe loves his kids and tears up only when he talks about saying goodbye to them before each and every deployment. \"It's so much easier when they're asleep,\" he says, \"and I can just kiss them, wondering if this is the last time.\" He's thrilled to show video of his oldest in kick-boxing class. And he calls his wife \"the perfect mother.\"\n\nIn fact,", + " the couple is officially separated, a common occurrence in ST6. SEAL marriages can be perilous. Husbands and fathers have been mostly away from their families since 9/11. But the Shooter and his wife continue to share a house on very friendly, even loving terms, largely to save money.\n\n\"We're actually looking into changing my name,\" the wife says. \"Changing the kids' names, taking my husband's name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other.\"\n\nWhen the family asked about any kind of government protection should the Shooter's name come out,", + " they were advised that they could go into a witness-protection-like program.\n\nJust as soon as the Department of Defense creates one.\n\n\"They [SEAL command] told me they could get me a job driving a beer truck in Milwaukee\" under an assumed identity. Like Mafia snitches, they would not be able to contact their families or friends. \"We'd lose everything.\"\n\n\"These guys have millions of dollars' worth of knowledge and training in their heads,\" says one of the group at my house, a former SEAL and mentor to the Shooter and others looking to make the transition out of what's officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group. \"All sorts of executive function skills.", + " That shouldn't go to waste.\"\n\nThe mentor himself took a familiar route \u0097 through Blackwater, then to the CIA, in both organizations as a paramilitary operator in Afghanistan.\n\nPrivate security still seems like the smoothest job path, though many of these guys, including the Shooter, do not want to carry a gun ever again for professional use. The deaths of two contractors in Benghazi, both former SEALs the mentor knew, remind him that the battlefield risks do not go away.\n\nBy the time the Shooter visited me that first time in April, I had come to know more of the human face of what's called Tier One Special Operations,", + " in addition to the extraordinary skill and icy resolve. It is a privileged, consuming, and concerning look inside one of the most insular clubs on earth.\n\nAnd I understood that he would face a world very different from the supportive one President Obama described at Arlington National Cemetery a few months before.\n\nAs I watched the Shooter navigate obstacles very different from the ones he faced so expertly in four war zones around the globe, I wondered: Is this how America treats its heroes? The ones President Obama called \"the best of the best\"? The ones Vice-President Biden called \"the finest warriors in the history of the world\"?\n\n\n\nThe Shooter's gear.\n\n1 APRIL 2011:", + " THE MISSION\n\nThe reason we knew this was a special mission, the Shooter said as our interviews about the bin Laden operation began, is because we'd just finished an Afghanistan deployment and were on a training trip, diving in Miami, when a few of us got recalled to the Command in Virginia Beach. Another ST6 team was on official standby \u0097 normally that's the team that blows out for a contingency operation. But they were not chosen, to better cloak what was going to happen.\n\nThere was so much going on \u0097 the Libya thing, the Arab Spring. We knew something good was going to go down. We didn't know how good.\n\nThe first day's briefing,", + " they actually kind of lied to us, being very vague. They mentioned underwater cables because of the earthquake in Japan or some craziness. They hinted at Libya. They said it was a compound somewhere in a bowl and we were going to have two aircraft get us there and we don't know how many are inside but we have to get something out. You won't have any air support.\n\nI assumed it was WMD, a nuke, because why else are they sending us to Libya?\n\nEvery question the Red Squadron ST6 members asked was answered with, \"Well, we can't tell you that.\" Or: \"We don't know.\"\n\nIt was also weird that the entire Red Squadron was in town,", + " but they kicked everyone out of the briefing except those guys who were going, twenty-three and four backups. We'd leave the room to get coffee and stuff, and the other guys were like, \"Well, what are you guys doing?\" We were telling them, \"I have no idea.\"\n\nThe Shooter was a mission team leader. Almost everyone chosen had a one or two ranking in the squadron, the most experienced guys. The group was split into four tactical teams, with the Shooter as leader of the external-security group \u0097 the dog, Cairo, two snipers, and a CIA interpreter to keep whoever might show up in the area out of the internal action.\n\nThe group left Virginia on a Sunday morning,", + " April 10, to drive to the CIA's Harvey Point, North Carolina, center for another briefing and the start of training. The Master Chief was saying JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] would be there, the Secretary of Defense might be there, the Pak/Afghan CIA desk, too. That's when the wheels started spinning for me: This is big.\n\nI've had some close calls with death, bullets flying past my head. Even just driving, weird stuff. Every time, I would tell my mother, \"There's no way I'm going to die, because I'm here to do something.\" I've been saying that for twenty years.", + " I don't know what it is, but it's something important.\n\nBy Monday the team was assembled in a big classroom inside a one-story building. They actually had security sitting outside. No one else was allowed in. A JSOC general, Pak/Afghan and other D.C. officials, and the ST6 commanding officer were there. The SEAL commander, cool as ever, said, \"Okay, we're as close as we've ever been to UBL.\" And that was it. He kind of looked at us and we looked at him and nodded. There was none of that cheering bullshit. We were thinking, Yeah, okay,", + " good. It's about time that we kill this motherfucker. It was simple.\n\nThis is what I came for. Jealousies aside, one of us is going to have the best chance of killing this guy.\n\nDuring the daylong briefing, the SEALs heard how the government found the compound in Abbottabad, how they were watching it, analyzing it, why they believed bin Laden might be there. He, UBL, had become known as the Pacer, the tall guy in satellite imagery who neither left nor mixed with the others.\n\nIt was the CIA woman, now immortalized in books and movies, who gave the briefing.", + " \"Yeah,\" she told us. \"We got him. This is him. This is my life's work. I'm positive.\"\n\nBy then, government and military officials had been considering four options. They were either going to bomb the piss out of the compound with two-thousand-pound ordnance, they were going to send us in, do some kind of joint thing with the Pakis, or try what was called a \"hammer throw,\" where a drone flies by and chucks one fucking bomb at the guy. But they didn't want any collateral damage. And they wanted to make sure he was dead and not in a cave or a safe room.\n\nAfter the group settled into \"motel-like\"", + " rooms, with common areas that had TVs and a kitchen, the team started strategizing with a model of the compound on a large table. Then they drove to a full-scale mock-up for a walk-through. The next day the helos came and we started doing iteration training based on how we wanted to hit it.\n\nOnce I realized what was going on, I actually moved myself to one of the assault teams, even if I was no longer a team leader. We didn't need that many guys on the exterior team, and I'll go fast-rope on the roof with what I started calling the Martyrs Brigade, because as soon as we landed,", + " I figured the house was going to blow up. But we were also going to be the guys in there first to kill him.\n\nOne sniper would also be on the roof to lean over and try to take a shot upside down. The rest of the team would rope again down to the third-floor windows and get your gun up fast because he's probably standing there with his gun. If you fell, it would suck.\n\nIf the group made it inside, there were other issues. I've been in houses before with IEDs in them designed to blow everything up. They'd hang them in the middle of the room so it's a bigger explosion.\n\nI was usually the guy to joke around when we were planning these things \u0097 we all dick around a lot.", + " But I was like, \"Hey guys, we have to take this fucking serious. There's a 90 percent chance this is a one-way mission. We're gonna die, so let's do this right.\"\n\nThe discussions went on, almost a luxury. We're used to going on the fly, five, six nights a week on deployment. Here's your target, we're leaving in twenty minutes. Come up with a plan. This compound was pretty easy, though we had no clue about the inside layout.\n\nThe group reviewed contingencies: How do we handle cars? What if a helo went down? What do we do if the helo doors don't open?", + " Shit like that.\n\nThe first helicopter was going to land in front of the house. We were going to put our external security out and our bird was going to go back up and we'd fast-rope onto the roof. So we'd have one assault team from the other chopper coming up the stairs, and we'd be going down.\n\nIt was March 2012, a blossoming time of year in the capital of the free world. The intimate dinner party was already under way at a stylish split-level apartment one block from the Washington Hilton. The hostess was a military contractor, and there was a lobbyist there, along with another young woman,", + " a Capitol Hill veteran.\n\nThe Shooter's mentor was behind the kitchen counter, putting a final grill-sauce flair on some huge slabs of red meat when four men, all of them imposing and fit, came through the front door.\n\nThe Shooter is thick, like a power lifter, with an audacious set of tattoos. He can be curt and dismissive as his default, but also wickedly funny. It's instantly easy to see why he's considered both a rebellious, pushy pain in the ass by his command and even some of his colleagues, but also a natural leader. An outgoing, charismatic, and determined alpha male in the ultimate alpha crowd.\n\nHe and his three friends were all active ST6 members that night,", + " though none of the others present had been on the bin Laden mission.\n\nThis was my first face-to-face meeting with the Shooter, following several phone conversations and much checking on my journalism background, especially in war zones. In a corner, pouring drinks, he and I established some rules. He would consider talking to me only after his last, upcoming four-month deployment to Afghanistan had ended and he had exited the Navy. And he would not go public; he would not be named. That would be counter to the team's code, and it would also put a huge \"kill me\" target on his back.\n\nDuring the dinner, he told mostly personal stories and took care not to talk in terms of operational security:", + " the deal about the gun magazine and the CIA analyst, the experience of eyeballing bin Laden.\n\n\"Three of us were driving to our first briefing on the mission,\" he said. \"We were thinking maybe it was Libya, but we knew there would be very high-level brass there. One of my guys says, 'I bet it's bin Laden.'\" Another guy told the Shooter, \"If it's Osama bin Laden, dude, I will suck yo' dick.\"\n\n\"So after I shoot UBL, I bring him over to see his body. 'Okay,' I told him, 'now is as good a time as any.'\"\n\nThe group talked about hairy moments during other missions,", + " stories soldiers and foreign correspondents enjoy swapping. But from the start something was obvious, not just about the Shooter but about his fellow SEALs, too: These men who had heroically faced death and exercised extraordinary violence in almost continuous battle for years on end were fearful of life after war.\n\nThis is a problem that is becoming more critical as the \"best of the best\" start leaving the most extended wartime careers in the history of the United States. And it is a problem not just for these men and their families but for the American government, which has come to rely heavily on a steady stream of Tier One special operators (including the Army's Delta Force and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron)", + " \u0097 men of rarefied toughness and training like these \u0097 to maintain a sense of international security in an asymmetrical battlefield. The American way of war has changed radically in the past decade, so that in the future, \"boots on the ground\" will more and more mean special operators. Which means that there will be increasing numbers of vets in the Shooter's circumstance: abandoned, with limited choices.\n\nThat night, one of the Shooter's comrades, lantern-jawed, articulate, with a serious academic pedigree, told me: \"I've seen a lot of combat, been in some pretty grisly circumstances. But the thing that scares me the most after fifteen years in the SEALs?\n\n\"Civilian life.\"\n\n2.", + " \"100 PERCENT, HE'S ON THE THIRD FLOOR.\"\n\nThe Shooter and the rest of the team made one last night run on the mock-up of the compound in North Carolina, then drove back to their homes and headquarters in Virginia for a brief break.\n\nThere were goodbyes to his wife and sleeping children. Normally she'd say, 'I'm fine, just go.' This time there was nothing fine about her. Like this would be the last time we'd see each other.\n\nSaying goodbye is just horrible. I don't even want to talk about it... this is the last time I'm going to see these children.\n\nThe Shooter had bought himself $350 Prada sunglasses over the weekend,", + " and much less expensive gifts for his kids. Which makes me a horrible father. But really, he just figured he'd die with some style on.\n\nAnd think of the ad campaign: \"If you only have one day to live...\"\n\nWhen we got to Nevada a few days later, where the team trained on another full-scale compound model, but this one crudely fashioned from shipping containers, we turned the corner, saw the helos we'd actually use, and I started laughing. I told the guys, \"The odds just changed. There's a 90 percent chance we'll survive.\" They asked why. I said, \"I didn't know they were sending us to war on a fucking Decepticon.\"\n\nFor the mission,", + " they'd be slipping through the night in the latest model of stealth Black Hawk helicopters.\n\nThere were days more training, run after run, punctuated by briefings by military brass. They asked us if we were ready. We told them, \"Yeah, absolutely. This is going to be easy.\"\n\nThis was ultimately an assault mission like hundreds he'd been on, different in only one respect.\n\nA critical moment for the mission came when the tireless SEAL Red Team Squadron leader briefed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen and Pentagon undersecretary Mike Vickers. He was going to sell it right then. Not just to his superiors but,", + " through them, to the president.\n\nWe're all in uniform to look professional, and our CO, working on no sleep for days, hit it out of the park. There's no doubt in my mind we're going to go because of his presentation.\n\nThe group discussed what would happen if they were surrounded by Pakistani troops. We would surrender. The original plan was to have Vice-President Biden fly to Islamabad and negotiate our release with Pakistan's president.\n\nThis is hearsay, but I understand Obama said, Hell no. My guys are not surrendering. What do we need to rain hell on the Pakistani military? That was the one time in my life I was thinking,", + " I am fucking voting for this guy. I had a picture of him lying in bed at night, thinking, You're not fucking with my guys. Like, he's thinking about us.\n\nWe got word that we'd be scrambling jets on the border to back us up.\n\nAn Ambien, a C-17 cargo-plane ride, a short stop in Germany, and they were in Afghanistan.\n\nAt Jalalabad, the Shooter saw the CIA analyst pacing. She asked me why I was so calm. I told her, We do this every night. We go to a house, we fuck with some people, and we leave. This is just a longer flight.", + " She looked at me and said, \"One hundred percent he's on the third floor. So get to there if you can.\" She was probably 90 percent sure, and her emotion pushed that to 100.\n\nAnother SEAL squadron, which was already in Afghanistan and would have normally been the assaulters, were very welcoming to us. They would form the Quick Reaction Force flying in behind, on the 47's. The Red Team visitors stayed in \"transient\" housing.\n\nDuring the day, the group would work with our gear, work out. Nighttime was poker and refreshments, or what is called \"fellowship,\" while they waited for a go from Obama himself.", + " On the treadmill, the Shooter listened to \"Red Nation\" by the rapper Game. It's about leaving blood on the ground. We were the Red Team and we were going to leave some blood.\n\nOther guys ginned up some mixed-martial-arts practice or stretched over foam rollers to keep their joints in good shape.\n\nWe all wrote letters. I had my shitty little room and I'm sitting on my Pelican case with all my gear, a manila envelope on my bed, and I'm writing letters to my kids. They were to be delivered in case of my death, something for them to read when they're thirty-five.", + " I have no idea what I said except I'm explaining everything, that it was a noble mission and I hope we got him. I'm saying I wish I could be there for them.\n\nAnd the tears are hitting the page, because we all knew that none of us were coming back alive. It was either death or a Pakistani prison, where we'd be raped for the rest of our lives.\n\nHe gave the letters to an intel guy not on the mission, with instructions. He would shred them if he made it back.\n\nYou write it, it's horrible, you hand it off, and it's like, Okay, that part's over.", + " And I'm back, ready to roll.\n\nBy early September of last year, the Shooter was out, officially. Retired.\n\nHe had survived his last deployment, and there was a barbecue near his house to celebrate with about thirty close friends from \"the community.\" The Redskins were on, his favorite team, and there was lots of Commando ale, brewed by a former SEAL.\n\n\"I left SEALs on Friday,\" he said the next time I saw him. It was a little more than thirty-six months before the official retirement requirement of twenty years of service. \"My health care for me and my family stopped at midnight Friday night. I asked if there was some transition from my Tricare to Blue Cross Blue Shield.", + " They said no. You're out of the service, your coverage is over. Thanks for your sixteen years. Go fuck yourself.\"\n\nThe government does provide 180 days of transitional health-care benefits, but the Shooter is eligible only if he agrees to remain on active duty \"in a support role,\" or become a reservist. Either way, his life would not be his own. Instead, he'll buy private insurance for $486 a month, but some treatments that relieve his wartime pains, like $120 for weekly chiropractic care, are out-of-pocket. Like many vets, he will have to wait at least eight months to have his disability claims adjudicated.", + " Or even longer. The average wait time nationally is more than nine months, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.\n\n\n\nThe Center for Investigative Reporting's interactive map of U.S. veterans still waiting for help due to backlogged disability claims.\n\nAnyone who leaves early also gets no pension, so he is without income. Even if he had stayed in for the full twenty, his pension would have been half his base pay: $2,197 a month. The same as a member of the Navy choir.\n\nStill, on this early fall weekend, he does not want to commit to publishing any information from or about him. The book by a friend and fellow ST6 member,", + " Matt Bissonnette, who claims to have shot bin Laden in the chest when the Al Qaeda leader was already down and bleeding profusely, will go on sale in a few days. The Department of Defense was threatening legal action over breach of confidentiality agreements and revelation of supposedly classified material. And the Shooter refuses to identify Bissonnette by name or confirm that he is the colleague who wrote the book. \"I still want him and his family to be safe no matter what,\" he says. \"If he didn't want [his name] out, I shouldn't either. That is my thinking, anyway.\"\n\nMany in the community are also infuriated,", + " the Shooter says. \"There's a shitstorm around this.\" It has also come to his attention that Bissonnette's account tends to gloss over \u0097 if not erase \u0097 the Shooter's central role in bin Laden's death.\n\n\"I don't know why he'd do that,\" the Shooter says.\n\nAlmost since the mission was done, the Shooter himself was suspected by the SEAL command and other team members of being the one who was writing a book, the one who would be first to market, spinning gold off Abbottabad.\n\nCIA and FBI officials called to ask whether he was going to appear with Bissonnette on 60 Minutes.\n\nWhen it became clear that he wasn't the opportunist,", + " there was an official effort at apology from his superiors and some individual SEALs.\n\nThe Shooter had long ago decided not to write a book out of the gate, though he is keenly aware that Bissonnette's book will make millions. There is still loyalty and safety to consider. He also wanted to see how Bissonnette fared with his colleagues, the U.S. government, and others.\n\nBissonnette's pseudonym \u0097 Mark Owen \u0097 lasted about a day before his real name surfaced and was promptly posted on a jihadi Web site.\n\nBut it was his official separation from the Navy that convinced the Shooter that he should get his story down somewhere,", + " both for history and for a potential \"greater good,\" to both humanize his warrior friends as something more complex than Jason Bourne cartoon superheroes, and call attention to what retiring SEALs don't get in their complex bargain with their country.\n\n\n\nThe White House/Flickr\n\nThe scene in the Situation Room on May 1, 2011.\n\n3.\"HEY, MAN, I JUST SHOT A WOMAN.\"\n\nWaiting in Jalalabad, the teams were getting feedback from Washington. Gates didn't want to do this, Hillary didn't want to do that.\n\nThe Shooter still thought, We'd train, spin up, then spin down.", + " They'd eventually tank the op and just bomb it.\n\nBut then the word came to Vice Admiral William McRaven, head of Joint Special Operations Command. The mission was on, originally for April 30, the night of the White House Correspondents' dinner in Washington.\n\nMcRaven figured it would look bad if all sorts of officials got up and left the dinner in front of the press. So he came up with a cover story about the weather so we could launch on Sunday, May 1, instead.\n\nThere was one last briefing and an awesome speech from McRaven comparing the looming raid and its fighters to the movie Hoosiers.\n\nThen they're gathered by a fire pit,", + " suiting up. Just before he got on the chopper to leave for Abbottabad, the Shooter called his dad. I didn't know where he was, but I found out later he was in a Walmart parking lot. I said, \"Hey, it's time to go to work,\" and I'm thinking, I'm calling for the last time. I thought there was a good chance of dying.\n\nHe knew something significant was up, though he didn't know what. The Shooter could hear him start to tear up. He told me later that he sat in his pickup in that parking lot for an hour and couldn't get out of the car.\n\nThe Red Team and members of the other squad hugged one another instead of the usual handshakes before they boarded their separate aircraft.", + " The hangars had huge stadium lights pointing outward so no one from the outside could see what was going on.\n\nI took one last piss on the bushes.\n\nNinety minutes in the chopper to get from Jalalabad to Abbottabad. The Shooter noted when the bird turned right, into Pakistani airspace.\n\nI was sitting next to the commanding officer, and he's relaying everything to McRaven.\n\nI was counting back and forth to a thousand to pass the time. It's a long flight, but we brought these collapsible camping chairs, so we're not uncomfortable. But it's getting old and you're ready to go and you don't want your legs falling asleep.\n\nEvery fifteen minutes they'd tell us we hadn't been painted [made by Pakistani radar].\n\nI remember banking to the south,", + " which meant we were getting ready to hit. We had about another fifteen minutes. Instead of counting, for some reason I said to myself the George Bush 9/11 quote: Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended. I could just hear his voice, and that was neat. I started saying it again and again to myself. Then I started to get pumped up. I'm like: This is so on.\n\nI was concerned for the two [MH-47 Chinook] big-boat choppers crossing the Pakistani border forty-five minutes after we did, both full of my guys from the other squadron,", + " the backup and extraction group. The 47's have some awesome antiradar shit on them, too. But it's still a school bus flying into a sovereign nation. If the Pakistanis don't like it, they can send a jet in to shoot them down.\n\nFlying in, we were all just sort of in our own world. My biggest concern was having to piss really bad and then having to get off in a fight needing to pee. We actually had these things made for us, like a combination collapsible dog bowl and diaper. I still have mine; I never used it. I used one of my water bottles instead.", + " I forgot until later that when I shot bin Laden in the face, I had a bottle of piss in my pocket.\n\nI would have pissed my pants rather than trying to fight with a full bladder.\n\nAbove the compound, the Shooter could hear only his helo pilot in the flight noise. \"Dash 1 going around\" meant the other chopper was circling back around. I thought they'd taken fire and were just moving. I didn't realize they crashed right then. But our pilot did. He put our five perimeter guys out, went up, and went right back down outside the compound, so we knew something was wrong. We weren't sure what the fuck it was.\n\nWe opened the doors,", + " and I looked out.\n\nThe area looked different than where we trained because we're in Pakistan now. There are the lights, the city. There's a golf course. And we're, This is some serious Navy SEAL shit we're going to do. This is so badass. My foot hit the ground and I was still running [the Bush quote] in my head. I don't care if I die right now. This is so awesome. There was concern, but no fear.\n\nI was carrying a big-ass sledgehammer to blow through a wall if we had to. There was a gate on the northeast corner and we went right to that.", + " We put a breaching charge on it, clacked it, and the door peeled like a tin can. But it was a fake gate with a wall behind it. That was good, because we knew that someone was defending themselves. There's something good here.\n\nWe walked down the main long wall to get to the driveway to breach the door there. We were about to blow that next door on the north end when one of the guys from the bird that crashed came around the other side and opened it.\n\nSo we were moving down the driveway and I looked to the left. The compound was exactly the same. The mock-up had been dead-on.", + " To actually be there and see the house with the three stories, the blacked-out windows, high walls, and barbed wire \u0097 and I'm actually in that security driveway with the carport, just like the satellite photos. I was like, This is really cool I'm here.\n\nWhile we were in the carport, I heard gunfire from two different places nearby. In one flurry, a SEAL shot Abrar al-Kuwaiti, the brother of bin Laden's courier, and his wife, Bushra. One of our guys involved told me, \"Jesus, these women are jumping in front of these guys. They're trying to martyr themselves.", + " Another sign that this is a serious place. Even if bin Laden isn't here, someone important is.\"\n\nWe crossed to the south side of the main building. There the Shooter ran into another team member, who told him, \"Hey, man, I just shot a woman.\" He was worried. I told him not to be. \"We should be thinking about the mission, not about going to jail.\"\n\nFor the Shooter personally, bin Laden was one bookend in a black-ops career that was coming to an end. But the road to Abbottabad was long, starting with the guys who tried and failed to make it into the SEALs in the first place.", + " Up to 80 percent of applicants wash out, and some almost die trying.\n\nIn fact, during the Shooter's Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in the mid-nineties, the torture-chamber menu of physical and emotional resistance and resolve required to get into the SEALs, there was actually a death and resurrection.\n\n\"One of the tests is they make you dive to the bottom of a pool and tie five knots,\" the Shooter says. \"One guy got to the fifth knot and blacked out underwater. We pulled him up and he was, like, dead. They made the class face the fence while they tried to resuscitate him.", + " The first words as he spit out water were 'Did I pass? Did I tie the fifth knot?' The instructor told him, 'We didn't want to find out if you could tie the knots, you asshole, we wanted to know how hard you'd push yourself. You killed yourself. You passed.'\"\n\n\"I've been drown-proofed once, and it does suck,\" the Shooter says.\n\nThen there is Green Team, the lead-heavy door of entry for SEAL Team 6. Half of the men who are already hardened SEALs don't make it through. \"They get in your mind and make you think fast and make decisions during high stress.\"\n\nThere have been SEAL teams since the Kennedy years,", + " when they got their first real workout against the Vietcong around Da Nang and in the Mekong Delta, and even during periods of relative peace since Vietnam, SEAL teams have been deployed around the world. But at no time have they been more active than in the period since 2001, in the longest war ever fought by Americans.\n\nIf the surge in Iraq ordered by President Bush in 2007 was at all successful, that success is owed significantly to the night-shift work done by SEAL Team 6.\n\n\"We would go kill high-value targets every night,\" the Shooter tells me. He and other ST6 members who would later be on the Abbottabad trip lived in rough huts with mud floors and cots.", + " \"But we were completely disrupting Al Qaeda and other Iraqi networks. If we only killed five or six guys a night, we were wasting our time. We knew this was the greatest moment of our operational lives.\"\n\nFrom Al Asad to Ramadi to Baghdad to Baquba \u0097 Al Qaeda central at the time \u0097 the SEALs had latitude to go after \"everyone we thought we had to kill. That's really a major reason the surge was going so well, because terrorists were dying strategically.\"\n\nDuring one raid, accompanied by two dogs, the Shooter says that he and his team wiped out \"an entire spiderweb network.\" Villagers told Iraqi newspapers the next day that \"Ninjas came with lions.\"\n\nIt is important to him to stress that no women or children were killed in that raid.", + " He also insists that when it came to interrogation, repetitive questioning and leveraging fear was as aggressive as he'd go. \"When we first started the war in Iraq, we were using Metallica music to soften people up before we interrogated them,\" the Shooter says. \"Metallica got wind of this and they said, 'Hey, please don't use our music because we don't want to promote violence.' I thought, Dude, you have an album called Kill 'Em All.\n\n\"But we stopped using their music, and then a band called Demon Hunter got in touch and said, 'We're all about promoting what you do.' They sent us CDs and patches.", + " I wore my Demon Hunter patch on every mission. I wore it when I blasted bin Laden.\"\n\nOn deployment in Afghanistan or Iraq, they would \"eat, work out, play Xbox, study languages, do schoolwork.\" And watch the biker series Sons of Anarchy, Entourage, and three or four seasons of The Shield.\n\nThey were rural high school football stars, backwoods game hunters, and Ivy League graduates thrown together by a serious devotion to the cause, and to the action. Accessories, upbringing, and cultural tastes were just preamble, though, to the real work. As for the Shooter, he jokes that his choice in life was to \"go to the SEALs or go to jail.\" Not that he would have ever found himself behind bars,", + " but he points out traits that all SEALs seem to have in common: the willingness to live beyond the edge, and to do anything, and the resolve to never quit.\n\nThe bin Laden mission was far from the most dangerous of his career. Once, he was pinned down near Asadabad, Afghanistan, while the SEALs were trying to disrupt Al Qaeda supply lines used to ambush Americans.\n\n\"Bullets flew between my gun and my face,\" he says, just as he was inserting some of his favorite Copenhagen chew and then open-field sprinting to retrieve some special equipment he had dropped. That fight ended when he called in air strikes along the eastern Afghan border to light up the enemy.\n\nOpening a closet door once,", + " team members found a boy inside. \"The natural response was 'C'mon kid.' Then, boom, he blows himself up. Suicide bombers are fast. Other rooms and other places, \"we'd go in and a guy would be sleeping. Up against the wall were his cologne, deodorant, soap, suicide vest, AK-47, and grenades.\"\n\nHe's also had to collect body parts of his close friends, most notably when a SEAL team chopper was shot down in Afghanistan's Kunar province in June 2005, killing eight SEALs. \"We go to a lot of funerals.\"\n\nBut for all the big battle boasts that become a sort of currency among SEALs,", + " the Shooter has a deep fondness for the comedy that comes from being around the bunch of guys who are the only people in the world with whom you have so much in common and the only people in the world who can know exactly what you do for a living.\n\n\"I realized when I joined I had to be a better shot and step up my humor. These guys were hilarious.\"\n\nThere are the now-famous pranks with a giant dildo \u0097 they called it the Staff of Power \u0097 discovered during training in an abandoned Miami building. SEALs would find photos of it inserted into their gas masks or at the bottom of a barrel of animal crackers they were eating.", + " Goats were put in their personal cages at ST6 headquarters. Uniforms were borrowed and dyed pink. Boots were glued to the floor. Flash-bang grenades went off in their gear.\n\nThe area near the Shooter's cage was such a target for outlandish stunts that it was called the Gaza Strip.\n\nEven in action, with all their high state of expertise and readiness, \"we're normal people. We fall off ladders, land on the wrong roof, get bitten by dogs.\" In Iraq, a breacher was putting a charge on a door to blow it off its hinges when he mistakenly leaned against the doorbell.", + " He quickly took off the charge and the target opened the door. We were like, \"You rang the fucking doorbell?!\" Maybe we should try that more often, the Shooter thought to himself.\n\nThe dead can also be funny, as long as it's not your guys. \"In Afghanistan we were cutting away the clothes on this dead dude to see if he had a suicide vest on, only to find that he had a huge dick, down to his knees. From then on, we called him Abu Dujan Holmes.\n\nAnd then there was the time that the Shooter shit himself on a tandem jump with a huge SEAL who outweighed him by sixty pounds.", + " \"The goddamn main chute yanked so hard he slipped two disks in his neck and I filled my socks with human feces. I told him, 'Hey, dude, this is a horrible day.' He said if I went to our reserve chute, 'you're gonna fucking kill me.' He was that convinced his head was going to rip off his body.\n\n\"Okay, so I'm flying this broken chute, shitting my pants with this near-dead guy connected to me. And we eat shit on the landing. We're lying there and the chute is dragging us across the ground. I hear him go, 'Yeah,", + " that's my last jump for today.' And I said, 'That's cool. Can I borrow your boxers?'\n\n\"We jumped the next day.\"\n\nThe Shooter's willingness to endure comes from a deep personal well of confidence and drive that seems to also describe every one of his peers. But his odyssey through countless outposts in Afghanistan and Iraq to skydives into the Indian Ocean \u0097 situations that are always strewn with violence and with his own death always imminent \u0097 is grounded by a sense of deep confederacy.\n\n\"I'm lucky to be with these guys. I'm not going to let them down. I was going to go in for a few years,", + " but then I met these other guys and stuck around because of them.\" He and one buddy made their first kills at exactly the same time, in Ramadi. Shared bloodletting is as much a bonding agent as shared blood.\n\nAfter Team 6 SEAL Adam Brown was killed in March 2010, Brown's squadron members approached the dead man's kids at the funeral. They were screaming and inconsolable. \"You may have lost a father,\" one of them said, \"but you've gained twenty fathers.\"\n\nMost of those SEALs would be killed the next year when their helicopter was shot down in eastern Wardak province.\n\nThe Shooter feels both the losses and connections no less keenly now that he's out.", + " \"One of my closest friends in the world I've been with in SEAL Team 6 the whole time,\" he says.\n\nThe Shooter's friend is also looking for a viable exit from the Navy. As he prepared to deploy again, he agreed to talk with me on the condition that I not identify him.\n\n\"My wife doesn't want me to stay in one more minute than I have to,\" he says. But he's several years away from official retirement. \"I agree that civilian life is scary. And I've got a family to take care of. Most of us have nothing to offer the public. We can track down and kill the enemy really well,", + " but that's it.\n\n\"If I get killed on this next deployment, I know my family will be taken care of.\" (The Navy does offer decent life-insurance policies at low rates.) \"College will be paid for, they'll be fine.\n\n\"But if I come back alive and retire, I won't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out for the rest of my life. Sad to say, it's better if I get killed.\"\n\n4.\"IS THIS THE BEST THING I'VE EVER DONE, OR THE WORST?\"\n\nWhen we entered the main building, there was a hallway with rooms off to the side.", + " Dead ahead is the door to go upstairs. There were women screaming downstairs. They saw the others get shot, so they were upset. I saw a girl, about five, crying in the corner, first room on the right as we were going in. I went, picked her up, and brought her to another woman in the room on the left so she didn't have to be just with us. She seemed too out of it to be scared. There had to be fifteen people downstairs, all sleeping together in that one room. Two dead bodies were also in there.\n\nNormally, the SEALs have a support or communications guy who watches the women and children.", + " But this was a pared-down mission intended strictly for an assault, without that extra help. We didn't really have anyone that could stay back.\n\nSo we're looking down the hallway at the door to the stairwell. I figured this was the only door to get upstairs, which means the people upstairs can't get down. If there had been another way up, we would have found it by then.\n\nWe were at a standstill on the ground floor, waiting for the breacher to do his work.\n\nWe'd always assumed we'd be surrounded at some point. You see the videos of him walking around and he's got all those jihadis.", + " But they weren't prepared. They got all complacent. The guys that could shoot shot, but we were on top of them so fast.\n\nRight then, I heard one of the guys talking about something, blah, blah, blah, the helo crashed. I asked, What helo crashed? He said it was in the yard. And I said, Bullshit! We're never getting out of here now. We have to kill this guy. I thought we'd have to steal cars and drive to Islamabad. Because the other option was to stick around and wait for the Pakistani military to show up. Hopefully, we don't shoot it out with them.", + " We're going to end up in prison here, with someone negotiating for us, and that's just bad. That's when I got concerned.\n\nI've thought about death before, when I've been pinned down for an hour getting shot at. And I wondered what it was going to feel like taking one of those in the face. How long was it going to hurt? But I didn't think about that here.\n\nOne of the snipers who'd seen the disabled helo approached just before they went into the main building. He said, \"Hey, dude, they've got an awesome mock-up of our helo in their yard.\" I said,", + " \"No, dude. They shot one of ours down.\" He said, \"Okay, that makes more sense than the shit I was saying.\"\n\nThe breacher had to blast the door twice for it to open. We started rolling up.\n\nTeam members didn't need much communication, or any orders, once they were on line. We're reading each other every second. We've gotten so good at war, we didn't need anything more.\n\nI was about five guys back on the stairway when I saw the point man holding up. He'd seen Khalid, bin Laden's [twenty-three-year-old] son. I heard him whisper,", + " \"Khalid... come here...\" in Arabic, then in Pashto. He used his name. That confused Khalid. He's probably thinking, \"I just heard shitty Arabic and shitty Pashto. Who the fuck is this?\" He leaned out, armed with an AK, and he got blasted by the point man. That call-out was one of the best combat moves I've ever seen. Khalid had on a white T-shirt and, like, white pajama pants. He was the last line of security.\n\nI remember thinking then: I wish we could live through this night, because this is amazing. I was still expecting all kinds of funky shit like escape slides or safe rooms.\n\nThe point man moved past doors on the second floor and the four or five guys in front of me started to peel off to clear those rooms,", + " which is always how the flow works. We're just clearing as we go, watching our backs.\n\nThey step over and past Khalid, who's dead on the stairs.\n\nThe point man, at that time, saw a guy on the third floor, peeking around a curtain in front of the hallway. Bin Laden was the only adult male left to find. The point man took a shot, maybe two, and the man upstairs disappeared back into a room. I didn't see that because I was looking back.\n\nI don't think he hit him. He thinks he might have.\n\nSo there's the point man on the stairs, waiting for someone to move into the number-two position.", + " Originally I was five or six man, but the train flowed off to clear the second floor. So I roll up behind him. He told me later, \"I knew I had some ass,\" meaning somebody to back him up. I turn around and look. There's nobody else coming up.\n\nOn the third floor, there were two chicks yelling at us and the point man was yelling at them and he said to me, \"Hey, we need to get moving. These bitches is getting truculent.\" I remember saying to myself, Truculent? Really? Love that word.\n\nI kept looking behind us, and there was still no one else there.\n\nBy then we realized we weren't getting more guys.", + " We had to move, because bin Laden is now going to be grabbing some weapon because he's getting shot at. I had my hand on the point man's shoulder and squeezed, a signal to go. The two of us went up. On the third floor, he tackled the two women in the hallway right outside the first door on the right, moving them past it just enough. He thought he was going to absorb the blast of suicide vests; he was going to kill himself so I could get the shot. It was the most heroic thing I've ever seen.\n\nI rolled past him into the room, just inside the doorway.\n\nThere was bin Laden standing there.", + " He had his hands on a woman's shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was his youngest wife, Amal.\n\nThe SEALs had nightscopes, but it was coal-black for bin Laden and the other residents. He can hear but he can't see.\n\nHe looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting. He had a cap on and didn't appear to be hit. I can't tell you 100 percent, but he was standing and moving. He was holding her in front of him. Maybe as a shield, I don't know.\n\nFor me,", + " it was a snapshot of a target ID, definitely him. Even in our kill houses where we train, there are targets with his face on them. This was repetition and muscle memory. That's him, boom, done.\n\nI thought in that first instant how skinny he was, how tall and how short his beard was, all at once. He was wearing one of those white hats, but he had, like, an almost shaved head. Like a crew cut. I remember all that registering. I was amazed how tall he was, taller than all of us, and it didn't seem like he would be, because all those guys were always smaller than you think.\n\nI'm just looking at him from right here [he moves his hand out from his face about ten inches]. He's got a gun on a shelf right there,", + " the short AK he's famous for. And he's moving forward. I don't know if she's got a vest and she's being pushed to martyr them both. He's got a gun within reach. He's a threat. I need to get a head shot so he won't have a chance to clack himself off [blow himself up].\n\nIn that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time as he's going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! same place. That time I used my EOTech red-dot holo sight.", + " He was dead. Not moving. His tongue was out. I watched him take his last breaths, just a reflex breath.\n\nAnd I remember as I watched him breathe out the last part of air, I thought: Is this the best thing I've ever done, or the worst thing I've ever done? This is real and that's him. Holy shit.\n\nEverybody wanted him dead, but nobody wanted to say, Hey, you're going to kill this guy. It was just sort of understood that's what we wanted to do.\n\nHis forehead was gruesome. It was split open in the shape of a V. I could see his brains spilling out over his face.", + " The American public doesn't want to know what that looks like.\n\nAmal turned back, and she was screaming, first at bin Laden and then at me. She came at me like she wanted to fight me, or that she wanted to die instead of him. So I put her on the bed, bound with zip ties. Then I realized that bin Laden's youngest son, who is about two or three, was standing there on the other side of the bed. I didn't want to hurt him, because I'm not a savage. There was a lot of screaming, he was crying, just in shock. I didn't like that he was scared.", + " He's a kid, and had nothing to do with this. I picked him up and put him next to his mother. I put some water on his face.\n\nThe point man came in and zip-tied the other two women he'd grabbed.\n\nThe third-floor action and killing took maybe fifteen seconds.\n\nThe Shooter's oldest child calls the place his dad worked \"Crapghanistan,\" maybe because his deployments meant he regularly missed Christmases, birthdays, and other holidays.\n\n\"Our marriage was definitely a casualty of his career,\" says the Shooter's wife. They are officially split but still live together. Separate bedrooms, low overhead. \"Somewhere along the line we lost track of each other.\" She holds his priorities partially responsible:", + " SEAL first, father second, husband third.\n\nThis part of the Shooter's story is, as his wife puts it, \"unique to us but unfortunately not unique in the community.\"\n\nSEAL operators are gone up to three hundred days a year. And when they're not in theater, they're training or soaking in the company of their buds in the absorbing clubhouse atmosphere of ST6 headquarters.\n\n\"We can't talk with anyone else about what we do,\" the Shooter says, \"or about anything else other than maybe skydiving and broken spleens. When it comes to socializing, it's really tight.\"\n\nHis wife understands that \"so much of their survival is dependent on the fact that their friends and their jobs are so intertwined.\" And that \"we lived our lives under a veil of secrecy.\"\n\nSEAL Team 6 spouses are nicknamed the Pink Squadron,", + " because the women also rely on their hermetic connections to other wives. When you have no idea where your husband is or what he's doing, other than that it's mortally dangerous, and you can't discuss it \u0097 not even with your own mother \u0097 your world can feel desperately small.\n\nBut his wife's concerns, and her own narrative, convey a faithfulness that extends beyond marital fidelity.\n\nShe has comforted him when he was \"inconsolable\" after a mission in which he shot the parents of a boy in a crossfire. \"He was reliving it, as a dad himself, when he was telling me.\" Not long after,", + " she tended to him when she found him heavily sedated with an open bottle of Ambien and his pistol nearby.\n\nThe command had mandatory psych evaluations. During one of those, the Shooter told the psychologist, \"I was having suicidal thoughts and drinking too much.\" The doctor's response? \"He told me this was normal for SEALs after combat deployment. He told me I should just drink less and not hurt anybody.\"\n\nThe Shooter's wife is indignant. \"That's not normal!\" Though she knows that \"every time you send your husband off to war, you get a slightly different person back.\"\n\nThe alone times are deeply trying.\n\nSeveral years ago,", + " a SEAL friend had died in a helicopter crash. The Shooter's wife had just been to his funeral, consoling his widow. The Shooter was on the same deployment, and she had not heard anything about his status.\n\n\"I came home and was inside holding our infant child. Our front door is all glass, and I see a man in a khaki uniform coming up the steps. All I could do was think, I'd better put the baby down because I'm going to faint. So I set the baby on the floor and answered the door. It was a neighbor with a baby bib I'd dropped outside. I swore at him and slammed the door in his face.\"\n\nIt was four days more before she heard that her husband was safe.\n\nGiven all of that,", + " she has a surprising equanimity about her life. Talking with them separately, the couple's love for each other is evident and deep. \"We've grown so much together,\" she says. \"We'll always be best friends. I'll love him till the day I die.\"\n\nShe remains in awe of \"the level of brilliance these men have. To be surrounded by that caliber of people is something I'll always be grateful for.\"\n\nHer husband's retirement has been no less jarring for her. \"He gave so much to his country, and now it seems he's left in the dust. I feel there's no support, not just for my family but for other families in the community.", + " I honestly have nobody I can go to or talk to. Nor do I feel my husband has gotten much for what he's accomplished in his career.\"\n\nExactly what, if any, responsibility should the government have to her family?\n\nThe loss of income and insurance and no pension aside, she can no longer walk onto the local base if she feels a threat to her family. They've surrendered their military IDs. If something were to happen, the Shooter has instructed her to take the kids to the base gate anyway and demand to see the commanding officer, or someone from the SEAL team. \"He said someone will come get us.\"\n\nBecause of the mission,", + " she says that \"my family is always going to be at risk. It's just a matter of finding coping strategies.\"\n\nThe Shooter still dips his hand in his pocket when they're in a store, checking for a knife in case there's an emergency. He also keeps his eyes on the exits.\n\nHe's lost some vision, he can't get his neck straight for any period of time. Right now, she's just waiting to see what he creates for himself in this new life.\n\nAnd she's waiting to see how he replaces even the $60,000 a year he was making (with special pay bonuses for different activities). Or how they can afford private health insurance that covers spinal injections she needs for her own sports injuries.\n\n\"This is new to us,", + " not having the team.\"\n\n5.\"WE ALL DID IT.\"\n\nWithin another fifteen seconds, other team members started coming in the room. Here, the Shooter demurs about whether subsequent SEALs also fired into bin Laden's body. He's not feeding raw meat to what is an increasingly strict government focus on the etiquette of these missions. But I would have done it if I'd come in the room later. I knew I was going to shoot him if I saw him, regardless.\n\nI even joked about that with the guys before we were there. \"I don't give a shit if you kill him \u0097 if I come in the room,", + " I'm shooting his ass. I don't care if he's deader than fried chicken.\"\n\nIn the compound, I thought about getting my camera, and I knew we needed to take pictures and ID him. We had a saying, \"You kill him, you clean him.\" But I was just in a little bit of a zone. I had to actually ask one of my friends who came into the room, \"Hey, what do we do now?\" He said, \"Now we go find the computers.\" And I remember saying, \"Yes! I'm back! Got it!\" Because I was almost stunned.\n\nThen I just wanted to go get out of the house.", + " We all had a DNA test kit, but I knew another team would be in there to do all that. So I went down to the second floor where the offices were, the media center. We started breaking apart the computer hard drives, cracking the towers. We were looking for thumb drives and disks, throwing them into our net bags.\n\nIn each computer room, there was a bed. Under the beds were these huge duffel bags, and I'm pulling them out, looking for whatever. At first I thought they were filled with vacuum-sealed rib-eye steaks. I thought, They're in this for the long haul. They've got all this food.", + " Then, wait a minute. This is raw opium. These drugs are everywhere. It was pretty funny to see that. Altogether, he helped clean three rooms on the second floor.\n\nThe Shooter did not see bin Laden's body again until he and the point man helped two others carry it, already bagged, down the building's hallways and out into the courtyard by the front gate. I saw a sniper buddy of mine down there and I told him, \"That's our guy. Hold on to him.\" Others took the corpse to the surviving Black Hawk.\n\nWith one helo down, the Shooter was relieved to hear the sound of the 47 Chinook transports arriving.", + " His exfil (extraction) flight out was on one of the 47's, which had almost been blown out of the sky by the SEALs' own explosive charges, set to destroy the downed Black Hawk.\n\nOne backup SEAL Team 6 member on the flight asked who'd killed UBL. I said I fucking killed him. He's from New York and says, \"No shit. On behalf of my family, thank you.\" And I thought: Wow, I've got a Navy SEAL telling me thanks?\n\n\"You probably thought you'd never hear this,\" someone piped through the intercom system over an hour into the return flight,", + " \"but welcome back to Afghanistan.\"\n\nBack at the Jalalabad base, we pulled bin Laden out of the bag to show McRaven and the CIA. That's when McRaven had a tall SEAL lie down next to bin Laden to assess his height, along with other, slightly more scientific identity tests.\n\nWith the body laid out and under inspection, you could see more gunshot wounds to bin Laden's chest and legs.\n\nWhile they were still checking the body, I brought the agency woman over. I still had all my stuff on. We looked down and I asked, \"Is that your guy?\" She was crying. That's when I took my magazine out of my gun and gave it to her as a souvenir.", + " Twenty-seven bullets left in it. \"I hope you have room in your backpack for this.\" That was the last time I saw her.\n\nFrom there, the team accompanied the body to nearby Bagram Airfield. During the next few hours, the thought that hit me was \"This is awesome. This is great. We lived. This is perfect. We just did it all.\"\n\nThe moment truly struck at Bagram when I'm eating a breakfast sandwich, standing near bin Laden's body, looking at a big-screen TV with the president announcing the raid. I'm sitting there watching him, looking at the body, looking at the president,", + " eating a sausage-egg-cheese-and-extra-bacon sandwich thinking, \"How the fuck did I get here? This is too much.\"\n\nI still didn't know if it would be good or bad. The good was having done something great for my country, for the guys, for the people of New York. It was closure. An honor to be there.\n\nI never expected people to be screaming \"U.S.A.!\" with Geraldo outside the White House.\n\nThe bad part was security. He was their prophet, basically. Now we killed him and I have to worry about this forever. Al Qaeda, especially these days, is 99 percent talk.", + " But that 1 percent of the time they do shit, it's bad. They're capable of horrific things.\n\nWe listened to the Al Qaeda phone calls where one guy is saying, \"We gotta find out who ratted on bin Laden.\" The other guy says, \"I heard he did it to himself. He was locked up in that house with three wives.\" Funny terrorists.\n\nAt Bagram, the point man asked, \"Hey, was he hit when you went into the room? I thought I shot him in the head and his cap flew off.\" I said I didn't know, but he was still walking and he had his hat on.", + " The point man was like \"Okay. No big deal.\"\n\nBy then we had showered and were having some refreshments. We weren't comparing dicks. I've been in a lot of battles with this guy. He's a fucking amazing warrior, the most honorable, truthful dude I know. I trust him with my life.\n\nThe Shooter said he and the point man participated in a shooters-only debrief with military officials around a trash can in Jalalabad and then a long session at Bagram Airfield, but they left some details ambiguous. The point man said he took two shots and thought one may have hit bin Laden. He said his number two went into the room \"and finished him off as he was circling the drain.\" This was not exactly as it had gone down,", + " but everyone seemed satisfied.\n\nEarly government versions of the shooting talked about bin Laden using his wife as protection and being shot by a SEAL inside the room. But subsequent accounts, from officials and others like Bissonnette, further muddied the story and obscured the facts.\n\nWhat the two SEALs did discuss after the action was why there'd been a short gap before more assaulters joined them on the third floor. \"Where was everybody else?\" the point man asked. I told him we just ran thin.\n\nGuys went left and right on the second floor and it was just us. Everything happened really fast. Everybody did their jobs. Any team member would have done exactly what I did.\n\nAt Jalalabad,", + " as we got off the plane there was an air crew there, guys who fix helicopters. They hugged me and knew I'd killed him. I don't know how the hell word spread that fast.\n\nMcRaven himself came over to me, very emotional. He grabbed me across the back of my neck like a proud father and gave me a hug. He knew what had happened, too.\n\nNot long after, a senior government official had an unofficial phone call with the mentor. \"Your boy was the one,\" the mentor says he was told. The Shooter was alternately shocked and pleased to know that word got back to the States before I did.", + " \"Who killed bin Laden?\" was the first question, and then the name just flies.\n\nAnd it was the Shooter who, when an Obama administration official asked for details during the president's private visit with the bin Laden team at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, said \"We all did it.\"\n\nThe SEAL standing next to the Shooter would say later, \"Man, I was dying to tell him it was you.\"\n\nFrom the moment reporters started getting urgent texts hours before President Obama's official announcement on May 1, 2011, the bin Laden mission exploded into public view. Suddenly, a brilliant spotlight was shining where shadows had ruled for decades.\n\nTV trucks descended on the SEAL Team 6 community in Virginia Beach,", + " showing their homes and hangouts.\n\n\"The big mission changed a lot of attitudes around the command,\" the Shooter says. \"There were suspicions about whether anyone was selling out.\"\n\nIt had begun \"when we were still in the Jalalabad hangar with our shit on. There was a lot of 'Don't let this go to your head, don't talk to anyone,' not even our own Red Team guys who hadn't gone with us.\"\n\nThe assaulters \"were immediately put in a box, like a time-out,\" says the Shooter's close friend, who was not on the mission. \"'Don't open your mouth.' I would have flown them to Tahoe for a week.\"\n\nBut even with the SEALs'", + " strong history of institutional modesty, there was no unringing this bell.\n\nThe potential for public fame was too great, and suspicion was high inside SEAL Team 6.\n\nThe Shooter was among those reprimanded for going out to a bar to celebrate the night they got back home. And he was supposed to report for work the next morning, but instead took the day off to spend with his kids.\n\nTwenty-four hours later came the offer of witness protection, driving the beer truck in Milwaukee. \"That was the best idea on the table for security.\"\n\n\"Maybe some courtesy eyes-on checks\" of his home, he thought. \"Send some Seabees over to put in a heavier,", + " metal-reinforced front door. Install some sensors or something. But there was literally nothing.\"\n\nHe considered whether to get a gun permit for life outside the perimeter.\n\nThe SEALs are proud of being ready for \"anything and everything.\" But when it came to his family's safety? \"I don't have the resources.\"\n\nWith gossip and finger-pointing continuing over the mission, the Shooter made a decision \"to show I wasn't a douchebag, that I'm still part of this team and believe in what we're doing.\"\n\nHe re-upped for another four-month deployment. It would be in the brutal cold of Afghanistan's winter.\n\nBut he had already decided this would be his last deployment,", + " his SEAL Team 6 sayonara.\n\n\"I wanted to see my children graduate and get married.\" He hoped to be able to sleep through the night for the first time in years. \"I was burned out,\" he says. \"And I realized that when I stopped getting an adrenaline rush from gunfights, it was time to go.\"\n\nMay 1, 2012, the first anniversary of the bin Laden mission. The Shooter is getting ready to go play with his kids at a water park. He's watching CNN.\n\n\"They were saying, 'So now we're taking viewer e-mails. Do you remember where you were when you found out Osama bin Laden was dead?' And I was thinking:", + " Of course I remember. I was in his bedroom looking down at his body.\"\n\nThe standing ovation of a country in love with its secret warriors had devolved into a news quiz, even as new generations of SEALs are preparing for sacrifice in the Horn of Africa, Iran, perhaps Mexico.\n\nThe Shooter himself, an essential part of the team helping keep us safe since 9/11, is now on his own. He is enjoying his family, finally, and won't be kissing his kids goodbye as though it were the last time and suiting up for the battlefield ever again.\n\nBut when he officially separates from the Navy three months later,", + " where do his sixteen years of training and preparedness go on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9? Who in the outside world understands the executive skills and keen psychological fortitude he and his First Tier colleagues have absorbed into their DNA? Who is even allowed to know? And where can he go to get any of these questions answered?\n\nThere is a Transition Assistance Program in the military, but it's largely remedial level, rote advice of marginal value: Wear a tie to interviews, not your Corfam (black shiny service) shoes. Try not to sneeze in anyone's coffee. There is also a program at MacDill Air Force Base designed to help Special Ops vets navigate various bureaucracies.", + " And the VA does offer five years of health care benefits\u0097through VA physicians and hospitals\u0097for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but it offers nothing for the shooter's family.\n\n\"It's criminal to me that these guys walk out the door naked,\" says retired Marine major general Mike Myatt. \"They're the greatest of their generation; they know how to get things done. If I were a Fortune 500 company, I'd try to get my hands on any one of them.\" The general is standing in the mezzanine of the Marines Memorial building he runs in San Francisco. He's had to expand the memorial around the corner due to so many deaths over the past eleven years of war.\n\nHe is furious about the high unemployment rate among returning infantrymen,", + " as well as homelessness, PTSD, and the other plagues of new veterans. General Myatt believes \"the U.S. military is the best in the world at transitioning from civilian to military life and the worst in the world at transitioning back.\" And that, he acknowledges, doesn't even begin to consider the separate and distinct travesty visited on the Shooter and his comrades.\n\nThe Special Operations men are special beyond their operations. \"These guys are self-actualizers,\" says a retired rear admiral and former SEAL I spoke with. \"Top of the pyramid. If they wanted to build companies, they could. They can do anything they put their minds to.", + " That's how smart they are.\"\n\nBut what's available to these superskilled retiring public servants? \"Pretty much nothing,\" says the admiral. \"It's 'Thank you for your service, good luck.'\"\n\nOne third-generation military man who has worked both inside and outside government, and who has fought for vets for decades, is sympathetic to the problem. But he notes that the Pentagon is dealing with two hundred thousand new veterans a year, compared with perhaps a few dozen SEALs. \"Can and should the DOD spend the extra effort it would take to help the superelite guys get with exactly the kind of employers they should have?", + " Investment bankers, say, value that competition, drive, and discipline, not to mention people with security clearances. They [Tier One vets] should be plugged in at executive levels. Any employers who think about it would want to hire these people.\"\n\nFor officials, however, everyone signing out of war is a hero, and even for the masses of retirees, programs are sporadic and often ineffectual. Michelle Obama and Jill Biden have both made transitioning vets a personal cause, though these efforts are largely gestural and don't reach nearly high enough for the skill sets of a member of SEAL Team 6.\n\nThe Virginia-based Navy SEAL Foundation has a variety of supportive programs for the families of SEALs,", + " and the foundation spends $3.2 million a year maintaining them. But as yet they have no real method or programs for upper-level job placement of their most practiced constituency.\n\nA businessman associated with the foundation says he understands that there is a need the foundation does not fill. \"This is an ongoing thing where lots of people seem to want to help but no one has ever really done it effectively because our community is so small. No one's ever cracked it. And there real-ly needs to be an education effort well before they separate [from the service] to tell them, 'The world you're about to enter is very different than the one you've been operating in the last fifteen or twenty years.'\" One former SEAL I spoke with is a Harvard MBA and now a very successful Wall Street trader whose career path is precisely the kind of example that should be evangelized to outgoing SEALs.", + " His own life reflects that \"SpecOps guys could be hugely value-added\" to civilian companies, though he says business schools \u0097 degrees in general \u0097 might be an important step. \"It would be great to get a panel of CEOs together who are ready to help these guys get hired.\" Some big companies do have veteran-outreach specialists \u0097 former SEAL Harry Wingo fills that role at Google.\n\nBut these individual and scattered shots still do not provide what is needed: a comprehensive battle plan.\n\nIn San Francisco recently, I talked about the Special Ops issue with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and venture capitalist and Orbitz chairman Jeff Clarke. Both are very interested in offering a business luminary hand to help clandestine operators make their final jump.", + " There is enthusiastic consensus among the business and military people I have canvassed that this kind of outside help is required, perhaps a new nonprofit financed and driven by the Costolos and Clarkes of the world.\n\nEven before he retired, the Shooter's new business plan dissolved when the SEAL Team 6 members who formed it decided to go in different directions, each casting for a civilian professional life that's challenging and rewarding. The stark realities of post-SEAL life can make even the blood of brothers turn a little cold.\n\n\"I still have the same bills I had in the Navy,\" the Shooter tells me when we talk in September 2012.", + " But no money at all coming in, from anywhere.\n\n\"I just want to be able to pay all those bills, take care of my kids, and work from there,\" he says. \"I'd like to take the things I learned and help other people in any way I can.\"\n\nIn the last few months, the Shooter has put together some work that involves a kind of discreet consulting for select audiences. But it's a per-event deal, and he's not sure how secure or long-term it will be. And he wants to be much more involved in making the post \u0097 SEAL Team 6 transition for others less uncertain.\n\nThe December suicide of one SEAL commander in Afghanistan and the combat death of another \u0097 a friend \u0097 while rescuing an American doctor from the Taliban underscore his urgent desire to make a difference on behalf of his friends.\n\nHe imagines traveling back to other parts of the world for a few days at a time to do dynamic surveys for businesses looking to put offices in countries that are not entirely safe,", + " or to protect employees they already have in place.\n\nBut he is emphatic: He does not want to carry a gun. \"I've fought all the fights. I don't have a need for excitement anymore. Honestly.\"\n\nAfter all, when you've killed the world's most wanted man, not everything should have to be a battle.\n\n\"They torture the shit out of people in this movie, don't they? Everyone is chained to something.\"\n\nThe Shooter is sitting next to me at a local movie theater in January, watching Zero Dark Thirty for the first time. He laughs at the beginning of the film about the bin Laden hunt when the screen reads,", + " \"Based on firsthand accounts of actual events.\"\n\nHis uncle, who is also with us, along with the mentor and the Shooter's wife, had asked him earlier whether he'd seen the film already.\n\n\"I saw the original,\" the Shooter said. As the action moves toward the mission itself, I ask the Shooter whether his heart is beating faster. \"No,\" he says matter-of-factly. But when a SEAL Team 6 movie character yells, \"Breacher!\" for someone to blow one of the doors of the Abbottabad compound, the Shooter says loudly, \"Are you fucking kidding me? Shut up!\"\n\nHe explains afterward that no one would ever yell,", + " \"Breacher!\" during an assault. Deadly silence is standard practice, a fist to the helmet sufficient signal for a SEAL with explosive packets to go to work.\n\nDuring the shooting sequence, which passes, like the real one, in a flash, his fingers form a steeple under his chin and his focus is intense.\n\nBut his criticisms at dinner afterward are minor.\n\n\"The tattoo scene was horrible,\" he says about a moment in the film when the ST6 assault group is lounging in Afghanistan waiting to go. \"Those guys had little skulls or something instead of having some real ink that goes up to here.\" He points to his shoulder blade.\n\n\"It was fun to watch.", + " There was just little stuff. The helos turned the wrong way [toward the target], and they talked way, way too much [during the assault itself]. If someone was waiting for you, they could track your movements that way.\"\n\nThe tactics on the screen \"sucked,\" he says, and \"the mission in the damn movie took way too long\" compared with the actual event. The stairs inside bin Laden's building were configured inaccurately. A dog in the film was a German shepherd; the real one was a Belgian Malinois who'd previously been shot in the chest and survived. And there's no talking on the choppers in real life.\n\nThere was also no whispered calling out of bin Laden as the SEALs stared up the third-floor stairwell toward his bedroom.", + " \"When Osama went down, it was chaos, people screaming. No one called his name.\"\n\n\"They Hollywooded it up some.\"\n\nThe portrayal of the chief CIA human bloodhound, \"Maya,\" based on a real woman whose iron-willed assurance about the compound and its residents moved a government to action, was \"awesome\" says the Shooter. \"They made her a tough woman, which she is.\"\n\nThe Shooter and the mentor joke with each other about the latest thermal/night-vision eyewear used in the movie, which didn't exist when the older man was a SEAL.\n\n\"Dude, what the fuck? How come I never got my four-eye goggles?\"\n\n\"We have those.\" \"Are you kidding me?\"\n\n\"", + "SEAL Team 6, baby.\"\n\nThey laugh, at themselves as much as at each other.\n\nThe Shooter seems smoothed out, untroubled, as relaxed as I've seen him.\n\nBut the conversation turns dark when they discuss the portrayal of the other CIA operative, Jennifer Matthews, who was among seven people killed in 2009 when a suicide bomber was allowed into one of their black-ops stations in Afghanistan.\n\nThey both knew at least one of the paramilitary contractors who perished with her.\n\nThe supper table is suddenly flooded with the surge of strong emotions. Anguish, really, though they both hide it well. This is not a movie.", + " It's real life, where death is final and threats last forever.\n\nThe blood is your own, not fake splatter and explosive squibs.\n\nMovies, books, lore \u0097 we all helped make these men brilliant assassins in the name of liberty, lifted them up on our shoulders as unique and exquisitely trained heroes, then left them alone in the shadows of their past.\n\nUncertainty will never be far away for the Shooter. His government may have shut the door on him, but he is required to live inside the consequences of his former career.\n\nOne line from the film kept resonating in my head.\n\nAn actor playing a CIA station chief warns Maya about jihadi vengeance.\n\n\"", + "Once you're on their list,\" he says, \"you never get off.\"\n\nCorrection: A previous version of this story misstated the extent of the five-year health care benefits offered to cover veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Department of Veterans Affairs offers comprehensive health care to eligible veterans during that period, though not to their families. In light of this change, we have also revised an earlier passage in the story referring to the shooter\u0092s post-service benefits. Also, the original version of this story did not include a few sentences that ran in the issue printed last week. They have now been restored.\n\nPLUS: David Granger on 'The Shooter'", + " in D.C.\n" + ], + "length": 40096, + "hardness": null + }, + { + "id": 100, + "question": null, + "answer": "\u2013 About 4% of US hospital patients acquire an infection while hospitalized, which added up to 648,000 people in 2011\u201475,000 of whom died, the Washington Post reports. The most common infections, according to a CDC survey: pneumonia (22%), surgical site injections (22%), and gastrointestinal infections (17%). Hospitals have curbed the problem somewhat, but throw in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and hospital patients have something to worry about. \"Today and every day, more than 200 Americans with healthcare-associated infections will die during their hospital stay,\" said CDC Director Tom Frieden. A second CDC report included some good news\u2014that infections from \"central lines\" inserted in major blood vessels have dropped 44% since 2008, and 10 surgical procedures saw a 20% drop, Medical News Today reports. What's more, President Obama's proposed 2015 budget allots money to lower antibiotic resistance, and 25 drug-makers agreed today to new guidelines prohibiting the use of antibiotics to beef up livestock, Reuters reports. But until hospitals become safer, what can patients do? An advocate advises people to insist that care-givers\u2014even senior doctors\u2014remain \"compulsive\" about hand hygiene.\n", + "docs": [ + "One in 25 patients in U.S. hospitals has an infection acquired as part of his or her care despite modest progress in controlling those pathogens inside medical facilities, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Wednesday in its most comprehensive look at a stubborn and lethal health-care problem.\n\nThe CDC's 2011 survey of 183 hospitals showed that an estimated 648,000 patients nationwide suffered 721,000 infections, and 75,000 of them died -- though it is impossible to tell from the data how many deaths were directly attributable to the acquired infection, said Michael Bell, deputy director of CDC's division of health care quality promotion. Nevertheless,", + " \"today and every day, more than 200 Americans with healthcare-associated infections will die during their hospital stay,\" CDC Director Tom Frieden said in a news release.\n\nClostridium difficile. (Courtesy of CDC)\n\nThe most common infections are pneumonia (22 percent), surgical site infections (22 percent), gastrointestinal infections (17 percent), urinary tract infections (13 percent), and bloodstream infections (10 percent), the agency reported in the study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.\n\nWhen coupled with the growing risks posed by of antibiotic resistant bacteria, the prevalence of hospital-acquired infections remains a serious problem for care-givers, one that the CDC is continuing to battle on a state-by-state and even hospital-by-hospital basis,", + " Bell said in a news conference Wednesday afternoon.\n\n\"Sooner or later everyone is likely to become a patient somewhere,\" he said. \"We go to the hospital hoping to become better, and mostly we do, but not always.\"\n\nAtop the list of pathogens acquired in hospitals is the bacterium clostridium difficile (commonly know as c. diff), which can cause gastroenterological illnesses so severe that removal of a patient's colon is sometimes required, Bell said. It was responsible for 12.1 percent of the infections turned up by the survey. Also common was methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a staph infection that has become resistant to common antibiotics.\n\nSuch infections -- rather than ones associated with devices such as central catheters,", + " urinary catheters and ventilators, comprised the majority of the health-care-related infections revealed by the survey. Indeed, Bell said, the rate of infections from \"central lines\" that are placed into patients' major blood vessels has been cut nearly in half since 2008, and the infection rate after surgery has declined by 20 percent in the same time.\n\nBut urinary tract infections, which are not as dangerous, remain persistent, he said.\n\nAbout 34 million people were admitted to U.S. acute care hospitals in 2012, according to the study, which did not look at other in-patient settings such as nursing homes. The infection rate declined when compared with the results tallied by the CDC in 2007,", + " but those were based on historical data rather than a survey, Bell said.\n\nAt the news conference, Victoria Nahum, executive director of the Safe Care Campaign, urged hospital patients to insist on \"compulsive hand hygiene\" and other best practices by their care-givers, including physicians, and visitors. That may mean patients will have to overcome the fear of questioning doctors about their hygiene while hospitalized, or have a relative or friend do it for them, she and Bell said.\n\nNahum's son, Joshua, died in 2006 at age 27 of a health-care-related infection just two months after two other members of her family suffered complications from similar infections.\n\nPresident Obama's proposed fiscal 2015 budget includes money to battle antibiotic resistance.", + " Bell said the continuing effort will require hospitals to remain judicious about the use of antibiotics in order to gradually lessen resistance to them, in the hope that some will become effective again. He said the problem of widespread resistance also is prompting new approaches to controlling bacteria.\n\n\"I remain extremely cautious regarding the growing threat of antibiotic resistance,\" Nahum said. ", + " At any given time, approximately 1 in 25 patients in the US has at least one infection acquired during their hospital stay, say the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who have released two new reports highlighting the need to improve patient safety by eliminating this threat to patients.\n\nThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have updated their previous estimates of health care-associated infections (HAI) through the two reports, one of which is published in the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM and details 2011 hospital infection estimates from a survey of hospitals in 10 states.\n\nThe other is a 2012 annual report on national and state-specific progress toward the HAI prevention goals of the US Health and Human Services.\n\nCombined,", + " the CDC say these reports show that, while some progress has been made, more work is needed to eliminate the threat of hospital infections for patients.\n\nSpeaking of this need, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden says:\n\n\"Although there has been some progress, today and every day, more than 200 Americans with health care-associated infections will die during their hospital stay. The most advanced medical care won't work if clinicians don't prevent infections through basic things such as regular hand hygiene.\"\n\nHe adds that health care workers should follow standard infection control practices all the time to ensure patient safety.\n\nMost common germs from a family of drug-resistant bacteria\n\n\n\nExperts say health care workers can ensure patient safety by following standard infection control practices at all times.", + " Experts say health care workers can ensure patient safety by following standard infection control practices at all times.\n\nFor the NEJM study, the researchers used data from 183 hospitals in the US during 2011 in order to estimate the burden of hospital infections.\n\nDuring that year, around 721,800 infections occurred in 648,000 patients, around 75,000 of whom died with HAIs.\n\nThe researchers say the breakdown of the most common infections was as follows: 22% pneumonia, 22% surgical site infections, 17% gastrointestinal infections, 13% urinary tract infections and 10% bloodstream infections.\n\nAdditionally, the most common germs involved in these infections were C.", + " difficile, Staphylococcus aureus (which includes MRSA), Klebsiella, E. coli, Enterococcus, and Pseudomonas.\n\nThe team notes that both Klebsiella and E. coli are members of a bacteria family called Enterobacteriaceae, which is increasingly becoming resistant to last-resort antibiotics known as carbapenems.\n\n'Thousands of lives saved,' but more work to be done\n\nThe second report, which focused on a subset of infection types that are required to be reported to the CDC, revealed decreases in certain infections on a national level.\n\nThe main findings from this report revealed:\n\nBetween 2008 and 2012,", + " there was a 44% decrease in central-line associated bloodstream infections.\n\nDuring this same time period, there was a 20% decrease in infections related to 10 surgical procedures tracked in the analysis.\n\nBetween 2011 and 2012, there was a 4% decrease in hospital-initiated MRSA infections.\n\nDuring this time, there was also a 2% decrease in hospital-initiated C. difficile infections.\n\nDr. Patrick Conway, chief medical officer for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), says:\n\n\"Our nation is making progress in preventing health care-associated infections through three main mechanisms: financial incentives to improve quality, performance measures and public reporting to improve transparency,", + " and the spreading and scaling of effective interventions.\"\n\nThe CDC say the federal government has made the elimination of HAIs a \"top priority,\" initiating a number of ongoing efforts to protect patients. Additionally, the FY 2015 President's Budget requests funding for the CDC to increase detection of drug-resistant infections and improve protection for patients from these infections.\n\nDr. Conway says the prevention efforts undertaken by the whole nation \"represents thousands of lives saved, prevented patient harm, and the associated reduction in costs across our nation.\"\n\nMedical News Today recently reported on a study in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society that suggested an antibiotic-resistant type of bacteria is infecting an increasing number of children in the US.\n\nWritten by Marie Ellis ", + " 1 Jackson S. Musuuza, Tonya J. Roberts, Pascale Carayon, Nasia Safdar.. (2017) Assessing the sustainability of daily chlorhexidine bathing in the intensive care unit of a Veteran\u2019s Hospital by examining nurses\u2019 perspectives and experiences. BMC Infectious Diseases 17:1.\n\n\n\n2 Missiani Ochwoto, Lucy Muita, Keith Talaam, Cecilia Wanjala, Frank Ogeto, Faith Wachira, Saida Osman, James Kimotho, Linus Ndegwa.. (2017) Anti-bacterial efficacy of alcoholic hand rubs in the Kenyan market,", + " 2015. Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control 6:1.\n\n\n\n3 Jocelyn Qi-Min Teo, Samuel Rocky Candra, Shannon Jing-Yi Lee, Shannon Yu-Hng Chia, Hui Leck, Ai-Ling Tan, Hui-Peng Neo, Kenneth Wei-Liang Leow, Yiying Cai, Rachel Pui-Lai Ee, Tze-Peng Lim, Winnie Lee, Andrea Lay-Hoon Kwa.. (2017) Candidemia in a major regional tertiary referral hospital \u2013 epidemiology, practice patterns and outcomes. Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control 6:", + "1.\n\n\n\n4 Tzipi Braun, Ayelet Di Segni, Marina BenShoshan, Roy Asaf, James E. Squires, Sarit Farage Barhom, Efrat Glick Saar, Karen Cesarkas, Gill Smollan, Batia Weiss, Sharon Amit, Nathan Keller, Yael Haberman.. (2017) Fecal microbial characterization of hospitalized patients with suspected infectious diarrhea shows significant dysbiosis. Scientific Reports 7:1.\n\n\n\n5 Vicki Parker, Michelle Giles, Laura Graham, Belinda Suthers, Wendy Watts, Tony O\u2019Brien, Andrew Searles..", + " (2017) Avoiding inappropriate urinary catheter use and catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI): a pre-post control intervention study. BMC Health Services Research 17:1.\n\n\n\n6 Lynne V. McFarland.. (2017) Primary prevention of Clostridium difficile infections \u2013 how difficult can it be?. Expert Review of Gastroenterology & Hepatology 11:6, 507-521.\n\n\n\n7 Sanjay K. Jain.. (2017) The Promise of Molecular Imaging in the Study and Treatment of Infectious Diseases. Molecular Imaging and Biology 19:3, 341-347.\n\n\n\n8 Ramar Perumal Samy,", + " Bradley G. Stiles, Octavio L. Franco, Gautam Sethi, Lina H.K. Lim.. (2017) Animal venoms as antimicrobial agents. Biochemical Pharmacology 134, 127-138.\n\n\n\n9 Scott R. Curry.. (2017) Clostridium difficile. Clinics in Laboratory Medicine 37:2, 341-369.\n\n\n\n10 Mallory J. Suhr, Jo\u00e3o Carlos Gomes-Neto, Nabaraj Banjara, Diana F. Florescu, David F. Mercer, Peter C. Iwen, Heather E. Hallen-", + "Adams.. (2017) Epidemiological investigation of Candida species causing bloodstream infection in paediatric small bowel transplant recipients. Mycoses 60:6, 366-374.\n\n\n\n11 Jill L Campbell, Fiona M Coyer, Alison M Mudge, Ivan M Robertson, Sonya R Osborne.. (2017) Candida albicans colonisation, continence status and incontinence-associated dermatitis in the acute care setting: a pilot study. International Wound Journal 14:3, 488-495.\n\n\n\n12 J. Wang, J. Hu, S. Harbarth, D. Pittet,", + " M. Zhou, W. Zingg.. (2017) Burden of healthcare-associated infections in China: results of the 2015 point prevalence survey in Dong Guan City. Journal of Hospital Infection 96:2, 132-138.\n\n\n\n13 C. Magno Castelo Branco Fortaleza, M.C. Padoveze, C.R. Veiga Kiffer, A.L. Barth, Irna C. do Ros\u00e1rio Souza Carneiro, H.I. Garcia Giamberardino, J.L. Nobre Rodrigues, L. Santos Filho, M.J. Gon\u00e7alves de Mello,", + " M. Severino Pereira, P. Pinto Gontijo Filho, M. Rocha, E.A. Servolo de Medeiros, A.C. Campos Pignatari.. (2017) Multi-state survey of healthcare-associated infections in acute care hospitals in Brazil. Journal of Hospital Infection 96:2, 139-144.\n\n\n\n14 A. Deptu\u0142a, E. Trejnowska, G. Dubiel, M. \u017bukowski, A. Misiewska-Kaczur, T. Ozorowski, W. Hryniewicz.. (2017) Prevalence of healthcare-associated infections in Polish adult intensive care units:", + " summary data from the ECDC European Point Prevalence Survey of Hospital-associated Infections and Antimicrobial Use in Poland 2012\u20132014. Journal of Hospital Infection 96:2, 145-150.\n\n\n\n15 Kostantinos Malizos, Michael Blauth, Adrian Danita, Nicola Capuano, Riccardo Mezzoprete, Nicola Logoluso, Lorenzo Drago, Carlo Luca Roman\u00f2.. (2017) Fast-resorbable antibiotic-loaded hydrogel coating to reduce post-surgical infection after internal osteosynthesis: a multicenter randomized controlled trial. Journal of Orthopaedics and Traumatology 18:", + "2, 159-169.\n\n\n\n16 M.A. Pfaller, R.K. Flamm, L.R. Duncan, R.E. Mendes, R.N. Jones, H.S. Sader.. (2017) Antimicrobial activity of tigecycline and cefoperazone/sulbactam tested against 18,386 Gram-negative organisms from Europe and the Asia-Pacific region (2013\u20132014). Diagnostic Microbiology and Infectious Disease 88:2, 177-183.\n\n\n\n17 KL McCarthy, DL Paterson.. (2017) Increased risk of death with recurrent Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteremia.", + " Diagnostic Microbiology and Infectious Disease 88:2, 152-157.\n\n\n\n18,,. (2017) Revisiting Species Distribution and Antifungal Susceptibility of Candida Bloodstream Isolates from Latin American Medical Centers. Journal of Fungi 3:2, 24.\n\n\n\n19 Lauren Morata, Carrie Ogilvie, Jackie Yon, Allison Johnson.. (2017) Decreasing Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter Use With Ultrasound-Guided Peripheral Intravenous Lines. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration 47:6, 338-344.\n\n\n\n20 Ross C.", + " Puffer, Meghan Murphy, Patrick Maloney, Daryl Kor, Ahmad Nassr, Brett Freedman, Jeremy Fogelson, Mohamad Bydon.. (2017) Increased Total Anesthetic Time Leads to Higher Rates of Surgical Site Infections in Spinal Fusions. SPINE 42:11, E687-E690.\n\n\n\n21 Jingjin Xie, Qiang Chen, Poornima Suresh, Subrata Roy, James F. White, Aaron D. Mazzeo.. (2017) Paper-based plasma sanitizers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114:20, 5119-", + "5124.\n\n\n\n22 Yiying Cai, Indumathi Venkatachalam, Nancy W. Tee, Thean Yen Tan, Asok Kurup, Sin Yew Wong, Chian Yong Low, Yang Wang, Winnie Lee, Yi Xin Liew, Brenda Ang, David C. Lye, Angela Chow, Moi Lin Ling, Helen M. Oh, Cassandra A. Cuvin, Say Tat Ooi, Surinder K. Pada, Chong Hee Lim, Jack Wei Chieh Tan, Kean Lee Chew, Van Hai Nguyen, Dale A. Fisher, Herman Goossens, Andrea L.", + " Kwa, Paul A. Tambyah, Li Yang Hsu, Kalisvar Marimuthu.. (2017) Prevalence of Healthcare-Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Use Among Adult Inpatients in Singapore Acute-Care Hospitals: Results From the First National Point Prevalence Survey. Clinical Infectious Diseases 64:suppl_2, S61-S67.\n\n\n\n23 Chunhui Li, Juping Duan, Sidi Liu, Xiujuan Meng, Chenchao Fu, Cui Zeng, Anhua Wu.. (2017) Assessing the risk and disease burden of Clostridium difficile infection among patients with hospital-acquired pneumonia at a University Hospital in Central China.", + " Infection 55.\n\n\n\n24 Luciana C. Vitorino, Layara A. Bessa.. (2017) Technological Microbiology: Development and Applications. Frontiers in Microbiology 8.\n\n\n\n25 Jo C Dumville, Gill Norman, Maggie J Westby, Jane Blazeby, Emma McFarlane, Nicky J Welton, Louise O'Connor, Julie Cawthorne, Ryan P George, Zhenmi Liu, Emma J Crosbie, Jo C Dumville.. 2017. Intra-operative interventions for preventing surgical site infection: an overview of Cochrane reviews. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.\n\n\n\n26 Mark L.", + " Metersky, Andre C. Kalil.. (2017) New guidelines for nosocomial pneumonia. Current Opinion in Pulmonary Medicine 23:3, 211-217.\n\n\n\n27 Adam Seth Litwin, Ariel C. Avgar, Edmund R. Becker.. (2017) Superbugs versus Outsourced Cleaners. ILR Review 70:3, 610-641.\n\n\n\n28 Shixuan Chen, Liangpeng Ge, Aubrey Mueller, Mark A. Carlson, Matthew J. Teusink, Franklin D. Shuler, Jingwei Xie.. (2017) Twisting electrospun nanofiber fine strips into functional sutures for sustained co-delivery of gentamicin and silver.", + " Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine 13:4, 1435-1445.\n\n\n\n29 Cara B. Thurman, Maura Abbott, Jinfang Liu, Elaine Larson.. (2017) Risk for Health Care\u2013Associated Bloodstream Infections in Pediatric Oncology Patients With Various Malignancies. Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing 34:3, 196-202.\n\n\n\n30 Sonali D. Advani, Rachael A. Lee, Mariann Schmitz, Bernard C. Camins.. (2017) Impact of Changes to the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) Definition on Catheter-", + "Associated Urinary Tract Infection (CAUTI) Rates in Intensive Care Units at an Academic Medical Center. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 38:05, 621-623.\n\n\n\n31 Richard R. Watkins, Pranab K. Mukherjee, Jyotsna Chandra, Mauricio A. Retuerto, Chrissy Guidry, Nairmeen Haller, Charudutt Paranjape, Mahmoud A. Ghannoum.. (2017) Admission to the Intensive Care Unit is Associated With Changes in the Oral Mycobiome. Journal of Intensive Care Medicine 32:", + "4, 278-282.\n\n\n\n32 Diana Vilar-Compte, Adri\u00e1n Camacho-Ortiz, Samuel Ponce-de-Le\u00f3n.. (2017) Infection Control in Limited Resources Countries: Challenges and Priorities. Current Infectious Disease Reports 19:5.\n\n\n\n33 Michael A. Pfaller, Matteo Bassetti, Leonard R. Duncan, Mariana Castanheira.. (2017) Ceftolozane/tazobactam activity against drug-resistant Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa causing urinary tract and intraabdominal infections in Europe: report from an antimicrobial surveillance programme (2012\u201315). Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 72:", + "5, 1386-1395.\n\n\n\n34 Peter Bischoff, N Zeynep Kubilay, Benedetta Allegranzi, Matthias Egger, Petra Gastmeier.. (2017) Effect of laminar airflow ventilation on surgical site infections: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 17:5, 553-561.\n\n\n\n35 Afif N. Kulaylat, Dorothy V. Rocourt, Abigail B. Podany, Brett W. Engbrecht, Marianne Twilley, Mary C. Santos, Robert E. Cilley, Christopher S. Hollenbeak,", + " Peter W. Dillon.. (2017) Costs of Clostridium difficile infection in pediatric operations: A propensity score\u2013matching analysis. Surgery 161:5, 1376-1386.\n\n\n\n36 Lester Caudill, Barry Lawson.. (2017) A unified inter-host and in-host model of antibiotic resistance and infection spread in a hospital ward. Journal of Theoretical Biology 421, 112-126.\n\n\n\n37 Judith L. Clayton.. (2017) Indwelling Urinary Catheters: A Pathway to Health Care\u2013Associated Infections. AORN Journal 105:5, 446-", + "452.\n\n\n\n38 Moo-Jin Suh, Sarah L. Keasey, Ernst E. Brueggemann, Robert G. Ulrich.. (2017) Antibiotic-dependent perturbations of extended spectrum beta-lactamase producing Klebsiella pneumoniae proteome. PROTEOMICS 17:9, 1700003.\n\n\n\n39 F. Pianka, A. L. Mihaljevic.. (2017) Vermeidung postoperativer Infektionen. Der Chirurg 88:5, 401-407.\n\n\n\n40 Nathan D. Gundacker,", + " Jeremey B. Walker, Ashutosh Tamhane, Casey D. Morrow, J. Martin Rodriguez.. (2017) Comparative Effectiveness of Faecal Microbiota Transplant by Route of Administration. Journal of Hospital Infection.\n\n\n\n41 Emily Toth Martin, Samran Haider, Maria Palleschi, Sommer Eagle, Delfin V. Crisostomo, Pamela Haddox, Laura Harmon, Robin Mazur, Judy Moshos, Dror Marchaim, Keith S. Kaye.. (2017) Bathing hospitalized dependent patients with prepackaged disposable washcloths instead of traditional bath basins:", + " A case-crossover study. American Journal of Infection Control.\n\n\n\n42 Yingying Hong, Peter J. Teska, Haley F. Oliver.. (2017) Effects of contact time and concentration on bactericidal efficacy of 3 disinfectants on hard nonporous surfaces. American Journal of Infection Control.\n\n\n\n43 Brett W. Carter.. (2017) Bacterial Contamination of CT Equipment. Academic Radiology.\n\n\n\n44 Cherisse L. Hall, Betsy L. Lytle, Davin Jensen, Jessica S. Hoff, Francis C. Peterson, Brian F. Volkman, Christopher J. Kristich..", + " (2017) Structure and dimerization of IreB, a negative regulator of cephalosporin resistance in Enterococcus faecalis. Journal of Molecular Biology.\n\n\n\n45 E.K. Johnson, N.R. Malhotra, R. Shannon, D.L. Jacobson, J. Green, C.K. Rigsby, J.L. Holl, E.Y. Cheng.. (2017) Urinary tract infection after voiding cystourethrogram. Journal of Pediatric Urology.\n\n\n\n46 Jack C. He, Brenda M. Zosa, David Schechtman, Brian Brajcich, Jonathan C.", + " Savakus, Amanda L. Wojahn, Derek Z. Wang, Jeffrey A. Claridge.. (2017) Leaving the Skin Incision Open May Not Be as Beneficial as We Have Been Taught. Surgical Infections 18:4, 431-439.\n\n\n\n47 Stijn W. de Jonge, Quirine J.J. Boldingh, Joseph S. Solomkin, Benedetta Allegranzi, Matthias Egger, E. Patchen Dellinger, Marja A. Boermeester.. (2017) Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials Evaluating Prophylactic Intra-", + "Operative Wound Irrigation for the Prevention of Surgical Site Infections. Surgical Infections 18:4, 508-519.\n\n\n\n48 Nongyao Kasatpibal, Joanne D. Whitney, E. Patchen Dellinger, Bala G. Nair, Kenneth C. Pike.. (2017) Failure to Redose Antibiotic Prophylaxis in Long Surgery Increases Risk of Surgical Site Infection. Surgical Infections 18:4, 474-484.\n\n\n\n49 Jae Hyun Shin, Cirle A. Warren.. (2017) Collateral damage during antibiotic treatment of C. difficile infection in the aged host:", + " Insights into why recurrent disease happens. Gut Microbes 59, 1-7.\n\n\n\n50 Zachary M. Burcham, Heather R. Jordan.. 2017. History, current, and future use of microorganisms as physical evidence. Forensic Microbiology, 25-55.\n\n\n\n51 Meander E. Sips, Marc J. M. Bonten, Maaike S. M. van Mourik.. (2017) Semiautomated Surveillance of Deep Surgical Site Infections After Primary Total Hip or Knee Arthroplasty. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 89, 1-", + "4.\n\n\n\n52 Geb W. Thomas.. (2017) How bedside feedback improves head-of-bed angle compliance for intubated patients. IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering 7:2, 73-80.\n\n\n\n53 Mohd. H. Abdul-Aziz, Jeffrey Lipman, Jason A. Roberts.. (2017) Antibiotic dosing for multidrug-resistant pathogen pneumonia. Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases 30:2, 231-239.\n\n\n\n54 Ying M. Tang, Christian D. Stone.. (2017) Clostridium difficile infection in inflammatory bowel disease: challenges in diagnosis and treatment.", + " Clinical Journal of Gastroenterology 10:2, 112-123.\n\n\n\n55 Ye Tian, Zhongyu Jian, Jianzhong Wang, Wei He, Qinyu Liu, Kunjie Wang, Hong Li, Hong Tan.. (2017) Antimicrobial activity Study of triclosan-loaded WBPU on Proteus mirabilis in vitro. International Urology and Nephrology 49:4, 563-571.\n\n\n\n56 A. P. MEIJS, J. A. FERREIRA, S. C. DE GREEFF, M. C. VOS,", + " M. B. G. KOEK.. (2017) Incidence of surgical site infections cannot be derived reliably from point prevalence survey data in Dutch hospitals. Epidemiology and Infection 145:05, 970-980.\n\n\n\n57 Adam B. Raff, Qing Yu Weng, Jeffrey M. Cohen, Nicole Gunasekera, Jean-Phillip Okhovat, Priyanka Vedak, Cara Joyce, Daniela Kroshinsky, Arash Mostaghimi.. (2017) A predictive model for diagnosis of lower extremity cellulitis: A cross-sectional study. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology 76:", + "4, 618-625.e2.\n\n\n\n58 Sangeeta Sastry, Nadia Masroor, Gonzalo Bearman, Rana Hajjeh, Alison Holmes, Ziad Memish, Britta Lassmann, Didier Pittet, Fiona Macnab, Rachel Kamau, Evelyn Wesangula, Paras Pokharel, Paul Brown, Frances Daily, Fatma Amer, Jaime Torres, Miguel O\u2019Ryan, Revathi Gunturu, Andre Bulabula, Shaheen Mehtar.. (2017) The 17th International Congress on Infectious Diseases workshop on developing infection prevention and control resources for low-", + " and middle-income countries. International Journal of Infectious Diseases 57, 138-143.\n\n\n\n59 Marin H. Kollef.. (2017) Rebuttal From Dr Kollef. Chest 151:4, 744-745.\n\n\n\n60 Mark E. Hamill, Christopher R. Reed, Sandy L. Fogel, Eric H. Bradburn, Kinga A. Powers, Katie M. Love, Christopher C. Baker, Bryan R. Collier.. (2017) Contact Isolation Precautions in Trauma Patients: An Analysis of Infectious Complications. Surgical Infections 18:3, 273-", + "281.\n\n\n\n61 Jackson S. Musuuza, Ajay K. Sethi, Tonya J. Roberts, Nasia Safdar.. (2017) Implementation of daily chlorhexidine bathing to reduce colonization by multidrug-resistant organisms in a critical care unit. American Journal of Infection Control.\n\n\n\n62 Walter Zingg, Susan Hopkins, Ang\u00e8le Gayet-Ageron, Alison Holmes, Mike Sharland, Carl Suetens, Maria Almeida, Jolanta Asembergiene, Michael A. Borg, Ana Budimir, Shona Cairns, Robert Cunney, Aleksander Deptula, Pilar Gallego Berciano,", + " Olafur Gudlaugsson, Avgi Hadjiloucas, Na\u00efma Hammami, Wendy Harrison, Elisabeth Heisbourg, Jana Kolman, Flora Kontopidou, Brian Kristensen, Outi Lyytik\u00e4inen, Pille M\u00e4rtin, Gerry McIlvenny, Maria Luisa Moro, Brar Piening, Elisabeth Presterl, Roxana Serban, Emma Smid, Nina K. Sorknes, Maria Stefkovicova, Inese Sviestina, Rita Szabo, Hana Tkadlecova, Rossitza Vatcheva-Dobrevska,", + " Delphine VerjatTrannoy.. (2017) Health-care-associated infections in neonates, children, and adolescents: an analysis of paediatric data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control point-prevalence survey. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 17:4, 381-389.\n\n\n\n63 Jean-Winoc Decousser.. (2017) Prevention of paediatric nosocomial infections: adapting before acting. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 17:4, 350-351.\n\n\n\n64 Richard J Vickers, Glenn S Tillotson, Richard Nathan, Sabine Hazan,", + " John Pullman, Christopher Lucasti, Kenneth Deck, Bruce Yacyshyn, Benedict Maliakkal, Yves Pesant, Bina Tejura, David Roblin, Dale N Gerding, Mark H Wilcox, Amit Bhan, Wayne Campbell, Teena Chopra, Kenneth Deck, Yoav Golan, Ian Gordon, Ravi Kamepalli, Sahil Khanna, Christine Lee, Christopher Lucasti, Benedict Maliakkal, Irene Minang, Kathleen Mullane, Richard Nathan, Matthew Oughton, Yves Pesant, John Phillips, John Pullman, Paul Riska, Christian Schrock,", + " Jonathan Siegel, Alon Steinberg, David Talan, Stephen Tamang, Michael Tan, Karl Weiss, Chia Wang, Bruce Yacyshyn, Jo-Anne Young, Jonathan Zenilman.. (2017) Efficacy and safety of ridinilazole compared with vancomycin for the treatment of Clostridium difficile infection: a phase 2, randomised, double-blind, active-controlled, non-inferiority study. The Lancet Infectious Diseases.\n\n\n\n65 Michael Mazzeffi, James Gammie, Bradley Taylor, Sarah Cardillo, Nicholina Haldane-Lutterodt,", + " Anthony Amoroso, Anthony Harris, Kerri Thom.. (2017) Healthcare-Associated Infections in Cardiac Surgery Patients With Prolonged Intensive Care Unit Stay. The Annals of Thoracic Surgery 103:4, 1165-1170.\n\n\n\n66 Xiuhua Z. Bell, Katherine A. Hinderer, Dorothea M. Winter, Erica A. Alessandrini.. (2017) Preventing sternal wound infections after open-heart surgery. Nursing 47:4, 61-64.\n\n\n\n67 Diego R. Falci, Claudio M. B. Stadnik,", + " Alessandro C. Pasqualotto.. (2017) A Review of Diagnostic Methods for Invasive Fungal Diseases: Challenges and Perspectives. Infectious Diseases and Therapy 16.\n\n\n\n68 Keita Morikane.. (2017) Epidemiology and risk factors associated with surgical site infection after different types of hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery. Surgery Today 370.\n\n\n\n69 Kevin B. Spicer, Jennifer Green, Barnesh Dhada.. (2017) Hospital-acquired infections in paediatric medical wards at a tertiary hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Paediatrics and International Child Health 31, 1-", + "7.\n\n\n\n70 Lisanne Catherine Cruz, Jeffrey S. Fine, Subhadra Nori.. (2017) Barriers to discharge from inpatient rehabilitation: a teamwork approach. International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance 30:2, 137-147.\n\n\n\n71 Megan Garland, Sebastian Loscher, Matthew Bogyo.. (2017) Chemical Strategies To Target Bacterial Virulence. Chemical Reviews 117:5, 4422-4461.\n\n\n\n72 Emily K Moser, Natania S Field, Paula M Oliver.. (2017) Aberrant Th2 inflammation drives dysfunction of alveolar macrophages and susceptibility to bacterial pneumonia.", + " Cellular & Molecular Immunology 140.\n\n\n\n73 Deborah D. Garbee, Stephanie S. Pierce, Jennifer Manning.. (2017) Opportunistic Fungal Infections in Critical Care Units. Critical Care Nursing Clinics of North America 29:1, 67-79.\n\n\n\n74 Caroline Green, Jeremy C. Pamplin, Kristine N. Chafin, Clinton K. Murray, Heather C. Yun.. (2017) Pulsed-xenon ultraviolet light disinfection in a burn unit: Impact on environmental bioburden, multidrug-resistant organism acquisition and healthcare associated infections. Burns 43:", + "2, 388-396.\n\n\n\n75 Paul A. Anderson, James Bernatz, Nasia Safdar.. (2017) Clostridium difficile Infection. Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons 25:3, 214-223.\n\n\n\n76 Jerry Jacob, Jingwei Wu, Jennifer Han, Deborah B. Nelson.. (2017) Clostridium difficile in an Urban, University-Affiliated Long-Term Acute-Care Hospital. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 38:03, 294-299.\n\n\n\n77 Alexandra E. Paharik, Marta Kotasinska,", + " Anna Both, Tra-My N. Hoang, Henning B\u00fcttner, Paroma Roy, Paul D. Fey, Alexander R. Horswill, Holger Rohde.. (2017) The metalloprotease SepA governs processing of accumulation-associated protein and shapes intercellular adhesive surface properties in S taphylococcus epidermidis. Molecular Microbiology 103:5, 860-874.\n\n\n\n78 Thomas A. Dombrowsky, Linda Frye.. (2017) Preconceptions about the infection process among prenursing students. American Journal of Infection Control 45:", + "3, 330-332.\n\n\n\n79 Aurora Pop-Vicas, Jackson S. Musuuza, Michelle Schmitz, Ahmed Al-Niaimi, Nasia Safdar.. (2017) Incidence and risk factors for surgical site infection post-hysterectomy in a tertiary care center. American Journal of Infection Control 45:3, 284-287.\n\n\n\n80 John Childress, Debborah Burch, Cheryl Kucharski, Carol Young, Ella A. Kazerooni, Matthew S. Davenport.. (2017) Bacterial Contamination of CT Equipment. Academic Radiology.\n\n\n\n81 Dani O.", + " Gonzalez, Erica Ambeba, Peter C. Minneci, Katherine J. Deans, Benedict C. Nwomeh.. (2017) Surgical site infection after stoma closure in children: outcomes and predictors. Journal of Surgical Research 209, 234-241.\n\n\n\n82 Eric Langfitt, Jennifer E. Prittie, Yekaterina Buriko, Janine M. Calabro.. (2017) Disorders of micturition in small animal patients: clinical significance, etiologies, and management strategies. Journal of Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care 27:2, 164-", + "177.\n\n\n\n83 Kaiwen Ni, Bingbing Chen, Hui Jin, Qingxin Kong, Xiaoping Ni, Hong Xu.. (2017) Knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding environmental cleaning among environmental service workers in Chinese hospitals. American Journal of Infection Control.\n\n\n\n84 O. Fasugba, J. Koerner, B.G. Mitchell, A. Gardner.. (2017) Systematic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of antiseptic agents for meatal cleaning in the prevention of catheter-associated urinary tract infections. Journal of Hospital Infection 95:3, 233-242.\n\n\n\n85 John Bak,", + " Jason Le, Toshio Takayama, Angela Gibson, Sara Zerbel, Nasia Safdar, Jon S. Matsumura.. (2017) Effect of 2% Chlorhexidine Gluconate-Impregnated Cloth on Surgical Site Infections in Vascular Surgery. Annals of Vascular Surgery.\n\n\n\n86 Mazen S Bader, Mark Loeb, Annie A Brooks.. (2017) An update on the management of urinary tract infections in the era of antimicrobial resistance. Postgraduate Medicine 129:2, 242-258.\n\n\n\n87 Han Du, Sumant Puri, Andrew McCall,", + " Hannah L. Norris, Thomas Russo, Mira Edgerton.. (2017) Human Salivary Protein Histatin 5 Has Potent Bactericidal Activity against ESKAPE Pathogens. Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology 7.\n\n\n\n88 Danielle Ahn, Alice Prince.. (2017) Host-Pathogen Interface: Progress in Understanding the Pathogenesis of Infection Due to Multidrug-Resistant Bacteria in the Intensive Care Unit. The Journal of Infectious Diseases 215:suppl_1, S1-S8.\n\n\n\n89 Marin H. Kollef, Matteo Bassetti,", + " Bruno Francois, Jason Burnham, George Dimopoulos, Jose Garnacho-Montero, Jeffrey Lipman, Charles-Edouard Luyt, David P. Nicolau, Maarten J. Postma, Antonio Torres, Tobias Welte, Richard G. Wunderink.. (2017) The intensive care medicine research agenda on multidrug-resistant bacteria, antibiotics, and stewardship. Intensive Care Medicine.\n\n\n\n90 Kai Yu, Joey C.Y. Lo, Mei Yan, Xiaoqiang Yang, Donald E. Brooks, Robert E.W. Hancock, Dirk Lange, Jayachandran N. Kizhakkedathu.", + ". (2017) Anti-adhesive antimicrobial peptide coating prevents catheter associated infection in a mouse urinary infection model. Biomaterials 116, 69-81.\n\n\n\n91 Matthew B. Rogers, Victoria Aveson, Brian Firek, Andrew Yeh, Brandon Brooks, Rachel Brower-Sinning, Jennifer Steve, Jillian F. Banfield, Amer Zureikat, Melissa Hogg, Brian A. Boone, Herbert J. Zeh, Michael J. Morowitz.. (2017) Disturbances of the Perioperative Microbiome Across Multiple Body Sites in Patients Undergoing Pancreaticoduodenectomy.", + " Pancreas 46:2, 260-267.\n\n\n\n92 B Radha Krishnan, Kenneth D James, Karen Polowy, B J Bryant, Anu Vaidya, Steve Smith, Christopher P Laudeman.. (2017) CD101, a novel echinocandin with exceptional stability properties and enhanced aqueous solubility. The Journal of Antibiotics 70:2, 130-135.\n\n\n\n93 Andreia S. Azevedo, Carina Almeida, Luciana C. Gomes, Carla Ferreira, Filipe J. Mergulh\u00e3o, Lu\u00eds F. Melo,", + " Nuno F. Azevedo.. (2017) An in vitro model of catheter-associated urinary tract infections to investigate the role of uncommon bacteria on the Escherichia coli microbial consortium. Biochemical Engineering Journal 118, 64-69.\n\n\n\n94 Sanjeev Mariathasan, Man-Wah Tan.. (2017) Antibody\u2013Antibiotic Conjugates: A Novel Therapeutic Platform against Bacterial Infections. Trends in Molecular Medicine 23:2, 135-149.\n\n\n\n95 Zorana M. Djordjevic, Marko M. Folic, Slobodan M.", + " Jankovic.. (2017) Distribution and antibiotic susceptibility of pathogens isolated from adults with hospital-acquired and ventilator-associated pneumonia in intensive care unit. Journal of Infection and Public Health.\n\n\n\n96 Rodrigo Rodrigues, Grant E. Barber, Ashwin N. Ananthakrishnan.. (2017) A Comprehensive Study of Costs Associated With Recurrent Clostridium difficile Infection. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 38:02, 196-202.\n\n\n\n97 Ana Cecilia Bardossy, Rachna Jayaprakash, Anjali C. Alangaden, Patricia Starr, Odaliz Abreu-Lanfranco,", + " Katherine Reyes, Marcus J. Zervos, George J. Alangaden.. (2017) Impact and Limitations of the 2015 National Health and Safety Network Case Definition on Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection Rates. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 38:02, 239-241.\n\n\n\n98 Margaret A. Olsen, Fang Tian, Anna E. Wallace, Katelin B. Nickel, David K. Warren, Victoria J. Fraser, Nandini Selvam, Barton H. Hamilton.. (2017) Use of Quantile Regression to Determine the Impact on Total Health Care Costs of Surgical Site Infections Following Common Ambulatory Procedures.", + " Annals of Surgery 265:2, 331-339.\n\n\n\n99 Brian P. Blackwood, Catherine J. Hunter, Julia Grabowski.. (2017) Variability in Antibiotic Regimens for Surgical Necrotizing Enterocolitis Highlights the Need for New Guidelines. Surgical Infections 18:2, 215-220.\n\n\n\n100 Alessandra Fusco, Lorena Coretti, Vittoria Savio, Elisabetta Buommino, Francesca Lembo, Giovanna Donnarumma.. (2017) Biofilm Formation and Immunomodulatory Activity of Proteus mirabilis Clinically Isolated Strains.", + " International Journal of Molecular Sciences 18:2, 414.\n\n\n\n101 Ronen Ben-Ami, Judith Berman, Ana Novikov, Edna Bash, Yael Shachor-Meyouhas, Shiri Zakin, Yasmin Maor, Jalal Tarabia, Vered Schechner, Amos Adler, Talya Finn.. (2017) Multidrug-Resistant Candida haemulonii and C. auris, Tel Aviv, Israel. Emerging Infectious Diseases 23:2.\n\n\n\n102 Laura Pedersen, Kimberly Elgin, Barbara Peace, Nadia Masroor,", + " Michelle Doll, Kakotan Sanogo, Wilhelm Zuelzer, Gene Peterson, Michael P. Stevens, Gonzalo Bearman.. (2017) Barriers, perceptions, and adherence: Hand hygiene in the operating room and endoscopy suite. American Journal of Infection Control.\n\n\n\n103 Wilcox, Mark H., Gerding, Dale N., Poxton, Ian R., Kelly, Ciaran, Nathan, Richard, Birch, Thomas, Cornely, Oliver A., Rahav, Galia, Bouza, Emilio, Lee, Christine, Jenkin, Grant, Jensen, Werner, Kim, You-Sun,", + " Yoshida, Junichi, Gabryelski, Lori, Pedley, Alison, Eves, Karen, Tipping, Robert, Guris, Dalya, Kartsonis, Nicholas, Dorr, Mary-Beth,.. (2017) Bezlotoxumab for Prevention of Recurrent Clostridium difficile Infection. New England Journal of Medicine 376:4, 305-317.\n\n\n\n104 Marie Pichenot, Rozenn H\u00e9quette-Ruz, Remi Le Guern, Bruno Grandbastien, Cl\u00e9ment Charlet, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Wallet, Sophie Schiettecatte,", + " Fanny Loeuillet, Benoit Guery, Tatiana Galperine.. (2017) Fidaxomicin for treatment of Clostridium difficile infection in clinical practice: a prospective cohort study in a French University Hospital. Infection.\n\n\n\n105 H. M. Sharon Goh, M. H. Adeline Yong, Kelvin Kian Long Chong, Kimberly A. Kline.. 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Pletz.. 2017. Principles of Anti-infective Therapy and Surgical Prophylaxis. Infectious Diseases, 1145-1161.e2.\n\n\n\n110 David J.", + " Weber, William A. Rutala.. (2017) Response to letter to the editor regarding \u201cOccupational health risks associated with the use of germicides in health care\u201d. American Journal of Infection Control 45:1, 97-98.\n\n\n\n111 Randy A. Taplitz, Michele L. Ritter, Francesca J. Torriani.. 2017. Infection Prevention and Control, and Antimicrobial Stewardship. Infectious Diseases, 54-61.e1.\n\n\n\n112 Shawn H. MacVane.. (2017) Antimicrobial Resistance in the Intensive Care Unit. Journal of Intensive Care Medicine 32:", + "1, 25-37.\n\n\n\n113 David A. Enoch, Huina Yang, Sani H. Aliyu, Christianne Micallef.. 2017. The Changing Epidemiology of Invasive Fungal Infections. Human Fungal Pathogen Identification, 17-65.\n\n\n\n114 P Holmstrup, B Klausen.. (2017) The growing problem of antimicrobial resistance. 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American Journal of Infection Control 45:1, 6-7.\n\n\n\n119 Joseph E. Pellegrini, Paloma Toledo, David E. Soper,", + " William C. Bradford, Deborah A. Cruz, Barbara S. Levy, Lauren A. Lemieux.. (2017) Consensus Bundle on Prevention of Surgical Site Infections After Major Gynecologic Surgery. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing 46:1, 100-113.\n\n\n\n120 Tariku Gebre Haile, Eshetu Haileselassie Engeda, Abdella Amano Abdo.. (2017) Compliance with Standard Precautions and Associated Factors among Healthcare Workers in Gondar University Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, Northwest Ethiopia. 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Han, Aiwu Luo, Binghua Zhu, Bo Wang, Bo Zhang, Chaoyang Wen, Guocong Zhang, Haiqing Yang, Hong Zhang, Hongyan Zhai, Hui Wang, Jieran Shi, Jing Pan, Jing Xia, Jing Yang, Jinguang Luo, Juan Yao, Lijuan Li, Lili Chen, Liping Gao,", + " Lixia Wu, Maihong He, Ming Yang, Mingzhen Cai, Nan Wang, Qi Gong, Qing Tan, Qiongshu Wang, Shiyu Cao, Sumin Guan, Suping Ran, Wei Li, Wei Tian, Weihong Jian, Wenjie Ma, Wenjun Jiang, Wenqin Cheng, Xiaolian Lu, Xiaoyu Li, Xintian Kong, Xuesong Qian, Yan Li, Yan Long, Yan Wang, Yingchun Shi, Yongjing Wang, Yu Ai, Yuan Zheng, Yumei Zhuang, Zhigang Wang, Zhiying Ju,", + " Zuofang Wang.. (2017) A point-prevalence survey of healthcare-associated infection in fifty-two Chinese hospitals. Journal of Hospital Infection 95:1, 105-111.\n\n\n\n123 S. W. de Jonge, J. J. Atema, J. S. Solomkin, M. A. Boermeester.. (2017) Meta-analysis and trial sequential analysis of triclosan-coated sutures for the prevention of surgical-site infection. British Journal of Surgery 104:2, e118-e133.\n\n\n\n124 Joseph E. Pellegrini, Paloma Toledo,", + " David E. Soper, William C. Bradford, Deborah A. Cruz, Barbara S. Levy, Lauren A. Lemieux.. (2017) Consensus Bundle on Prevention of Surgical Site Infections After Major Gynecologic Surgery. Anesthesia & Analgesia 124:1, 233-242.\n\n\n\n125 Kristen V. Dicks, Deverick J. Anderson, Arthur W. Baker, Daniel J. Sexton, Sarah S. Lewis.. (2017) Clinical Outcomes and Healthcare Utilization Related to Multidrug-Resistant Gram-Negative Infections in Community Hospitals. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 38:", + "01, 31-38.\n\n\n\n126 Nasia Safdar, Sharmila Sengupta, Jackson S. Musuuza, Manisha Juthani-Mehta, Marci Drees, Lilian M Abbo, Aaron M. Milstone, Jon P. Furuno, Meera Varman, Deverick J. Anderson, Daniel J. Morgan, Loren G. Miller, Graham M. Snyder,.. (2017) Status of the Prevention of Multidrug-Resistant Organisms in International Settings: A Survey of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America Research Network. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 38:", + "01, 53-60.\n\n\n\n127 Kang-Kyun Wang, Bong-Jin Kim, Il-Heo, Seong-Jin Jung, Jeong-Wook Hwang, Yong-Rok Kim.. (2017) Fabrication and characterization of antimicrobial surface-modified stainless steel for bio-application. Surface and Coatings Technology 310, 256-262.\n\n\n\n128 Gaurav Kistangari, Rocio Lopez, Bo Shen.. (2017) Frequency and Risk Factors of Clostridium difficile Infection in Hospitalized Patients With Pouchitis. Inflammatory Bowel Diseases 23:4, 661.\n\n\n\n129 Preetida J.", + " Bhetariya, Neha Sharma, Pragati Singh, Priyanka Tripathi, Santosh K. Upadhyay, Poonam Gautam.. 2017. Human Fungal Pathogens and Drug Resistance Against Azole Drugs. Drug Resistance in Bacteria, Fungi, Malaria, and Cancer, 387-428.\n\n\n\n130 A.Yu Lubnin, K.A. Popugaev.. 2017. Universal Precautions in the Intensive Care Unit. Essentials of Neuroanesthesia, 945-949.\n\n\n\n131 Mouna Doufair, Catherine Eckert, Laurence Drieux,", + " Come Amani-Moibeni, Liliane Bodin, Michel Denis, Jean Didier Grange, Guillaume Arlet, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Barbut.. (2017) Clostridium difficile bacteremia: Report of two cases in French hospitals and comprehensive review of the literature. IDCases 8, 54-62.\n\n\n\n132 David K. Warren, Katelin B. Nickel, Anna E. Wallace, Daniel Mines, Fang Tian, William J. Symons, Victoria J. Fraser, Margaret A. Olsen.. (2017) Risk Factors for Surgical Site Infection After Cholecystectomy. Open Forum Infectious Diseases 4:", + "2.\n\n\n\n133 Mindy G. Schuster, Angela A. Cleveland, Erik R. Dubberke, Carol A. Kauffman, Robin K. Avery, Shahid Husain, David L. Paterson, Fernanda P. Silveira, Tom M. Chiller, Kaitlin Benedict, Kathleen Murphy, Peter G. Pappas.. 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Obstetrics & Gynecology 129:1, 50-61.\n\n\n\n137 Yvette H van Beurden, Pieter F de Groot, Els van Nood, Max Nieuwdorp, Josbert J Keller, Abraham Goorhuis.. (2016) Complications, effectiveness, and long term follow-up of fecal microbiota transfer by nasoduodenal tube for treatment of recurrent Clostridium difficile infection. United European Gastroenterology Journal, 205064061667809.\n\n\n\n138 Iryna Janssen,", + " Paul Cooper, Katrin Gunka, Maja Rupnik, Daniela Wetzel, Ortrud Zimmermann, Uwe Gro\u00df.. (2016) High prevalence of nontoxigenic Clostridium difficile isolated from hospitalized and non-hospitalized individuals in rural Ghana. International Journal of Medical Microbiology 306:8, 652-656.\n\n\n\n139 Bionca M. Davis, Jingjing Yin, Doug Blomberg, Isaac Chun-Hai Fung.. (2016) Impact of a prevention bundle on Clostridium difficile infection rates in a hospital in the Southeastern United States.", + " American Journal of Infection Control 44:12, 1729-1731.\n\n\n\n140 Briana R. Wilson, Alexander R. Bogdan, Masaki Miyazawa, Kazunori Hashimoto, Yoshiaki Tsuji.. (2016) Siderophores in Iron Metabolism: From Mechanism to Therapy Potential. Trends in Molecular Medicine 22:12, 1077-1090.\n\n\n\n141 Brad S. Oriel, Kamal M.F. Itani.. (2016) Surgical Hand Antisepsis and Surgical Site Infections. Surgical Infections 17:6, 632-", + "644.\n\n\n\n142 Michail Karavolos, Alina Holban.. (2016) Nanosized Drug Delivery Systems in Gastrointestinal Targeting: Interactions with Microbiota. Pharmaceuticals 9:4, 62.\n\n\n\n143 Annie H. Cheung Lam, Natalie Sandoval, Ritambhara Wadhwa, Janine Gilkes, Thai Q. Do, William Ernst, Su-Ming Chiang, Suzanne Kosina, H. Howard Xu, Gary Fujii, Edith Porter.. 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(2016) Comparison of molecular typing methods for the analyses of Acinetobacter baumannii from ICU patients. Diagnostic Microbiology and Infectious Disease 86:4, 345-350.\n\n\n\n147 Christine Bui, Elizabeth Zhu, Monica A.", + " Donnelley, Machelle D. Wilson, Margaret Morita, Stuart H. Cohen, Jennifer Brown.. (2016) Antimicrobial stewardship programs that target only high-cost, broad-spectrum antimicrobials miss opportunities to reduce Clostridium difficile infections. American Journal of Infection Control 44:12, 1684-1686.\n\n\n\n148 Benedetta Allegranzi, Peter Bischoff, Stijn de Jonge, N Zeynep Kubilay, Bassim Zayed, Stacey M Gomes, Mohamed Abbas, Jasper J Atema, Sarah Gans, Miranda van Rijen,", + " Marja A Boermeester, Matthias Egger, Jan Kluytmans, Didier Pittet, Joseph S Solomkin.. (2016) New WHO recommendations on preoperative measures for surgical site infection prevention: an evidence-based global perspective. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 16:12, e276-e287.\n\n\n\n149 Matthew Paul Muller.. (2016) Measuring hand hygiene when it matters. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 16:12, 1306-1307.\n\n\n\n150 Hongbing Jia, Pengcheng Du, Hui Yang, Yuanyuan Zhang, Jing Wang, Wen Zhang,", + " Guiling Han, Na Han, Zhiyuan Yao, Haiyin Wang, Jing Zhang, Zhen Wang, Qingming Ding, Yujun Qiang, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Barbut, George F. Gao, Yongtong Cao, Ying Cheng, Chen Chen.. (2016) Nosocomial transmission of Clostridium difficile ribotype 027 in a Chinese hospital, 2012\u20132014, traced by whole genome sequencing. BMC Genomics 17:1.\n\n\n\n151 Vinod B. Damodaran, N. Sanjeeva Murthy.. (2016) Bio-inspired strategies for designing antifouling biomaterials.", + " Biomaterials Research 20:1.\n\n\n\n152 Matthias T. Buhmann, Philipp Stiefel, Katharina Maniura-Weber, Qun Ren.. (2016) In Vitro Biofilm Models for Device-Related Infections. Trends in Biotechnology 34:12, 945-948.\n\n\n\n153 Rohit Gupta, Emily Hannon, Shirish Huprikar, Adel Bassily-Marcus, Anthony Manasia, John Oropello, Roopa Kohli-Seth.. (2016) Getting to zero: Reduction in the incidence of multidrug-resistant organism infections using an integrated infection control protocol in an intensive care unit.", + " American Journal of Infection Control 44:12, 1695-1697.\n\n\n\n154 Carol E. Chenoweth, Sanjay Saint.. (2016) Urinary Tract Infections. Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 30:4, 869-885.\n\n\n\n155 Yaowen Zhang, Jing Zhang, Dong Wei, Zhirong Yang, Yanyan Wang, Zhiyuan Yao.. (2016) Annual surveys for point-prevalence of healthcare-associated infection in a tertiary hospital in Beijing, China, 2012-2014. BMC Infectious Diseases 16:1.\n\n\n\n156 Louise Talley,", + " Jennifer Lamb, Jami Harl, Heather Lorenz, Lindsey Green.. (2016) HAP prevention for nonventilated adults in acute care. 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BMC Infectious Diseases 16:1.\n\n\n\n170 Chenjie Tang, Lunbiao Cui, Yuqiao Xu, Le Xie, Pengfei Sun, Chengcheng Liu, Wenying Xia, Genyan Liu.. (2016) The incidence and drug resistance of Clostridium difficile infection in Mainland China: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Scientific Reports 6:1.\n\n\n\n171 Cristina Becerra-Castro, Gon\u00e7alo Macedo, Adrian M.T. Silva, C\u00e9lia M. Manaia,", + " Olga C. Nunes.. (2016) Proteobacteria become predominant during regrowth after water disinfection. Science of The Total Environment 573, 313-323.\n\n\n\n172 Jason A. Lee, Nicole Robbins, Jinglin L. Xie, Troy Ketela, Leah E. Cowen, Clarissa Nobile.. (2016) Functional Genomic Analysis of Candida albicans Adherence Reveals a Key Role for the Arp2/3 Complex in Cell Wall Remodelling and Biofilm Formation. PLOS Genetics 12:11, e1006452.\n\n\n\n173 E. Peter Magennis, Andrew L.", + " Hook, Paul Williams, Morgan R. Alexander.. 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Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, dkw422.\n\n\n\n176 Clare F Heal, Jennifer L Banks, Phoebe D Lepper, Evangelos Kontopantelis, Mieke L van Driel, Clare F Heal.. 2016. Topical antibiotics for preventing surgical site infection in wounds healing by primary intention. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.\n\n\n\n177 Maha Talaat, Mona El-Shokry, Jehan El-Kholy, Ghada Ismail,", + " Sara Kotb, Soad Hafez, Ehab Attia, Fernanda C. Lessa.. (2016) National surveillance of health care\u2013associated infections in Egypt: Developing a sustainable program in a resource-limited country. American Journal of Infection Control 44:11, 1296-1301.\n\n\n\n178 A.R. Ruis, David Williamson Shaffer, Daniel K. Shirley, Nasia Safdar.. (2016) Teaching health care workers to adopt a systems perspective for improved control and prevention of health care\u2013associated infections. American Journal of Infection Control 44:11, 1360-", + "1364.\n\n\n\n179 Todd J. Kowalski, Shanu N. Kothari, Michelle A. Mathiason, Andrew J. Borgert.. (2016) Impact of Hair Removal on Surgical Site Infection Rates: A Prospective Randomized Noninferiority Trial. Journal of the American College of Surgeons 223:5, 704-711.\n\n\n\n180 Mark E. Rupp, Peg Gilbert, Elizabeth Lyden, Peggy Luebbert.. (2016) Statewide assessment of use of infection prevention techniques and technologies. American Journal of Infection Control 44:11, 1393-", + "1395.\n\n\n\n181 David M Faleck, Hojjat Salmasian, E Yoko Furuya, Elaine L Larson, Julian A Abrams, Daniel E Freedberg.. (2016) Proton Pump Inhibitors Do Not Increase Risk for Clostridium difficile Infection in the Intensive Care Unit. The American Journal of Gastroenterology 111:11, 1641-1648.\n\n\n\n182 Lisa Zubkoff, Julia Neily, Beth J. King, Mary Ellen Dellefield, Sarah Krein, Yinong Young-Xu, Shoshana Boar, Peter D. Mills..", + " (2016) Virtual Breakthrough Series, Part 1: Preventing Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection and Hospital-Acquired Pressure Ulcers in the Veterans Health Administration. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety 42:11, 485-AP2.\n\n\n\n183 Jeffrey J Coleman, Tomomi Komura, Julia Munro, Michael P Wu, Rakhee R Busanelli, Angela N Koehler, M\u00e9ryl Thomas, Florence F Wagner, Edward B Holson, Eleftherios Mylonakis.. (2016) Activity of caffeic acid phenethyl ester in Caenorhabditis elegans.", + " Future Medicinal Chemistry 8:17, 2033-2046.\n\n\n\n184 Rachel I. Adams, Seema Bhangar, Karen C. Dannemiller, Jonathan A. Eisen, Noah Fierer, Jack A. Gilbert, Jessica L. Green, Linsey C. Marr, Shelly L. Miller, Jeffrey A. Siegel, Brent Stephens, Michael S. Waring, Kyle Bibby.. (2016) Ten questions concerning the microbiomes of buildings. Building and Environment 109, 224-234.\n\n\n\n185 Hua-ping Huang, Bin Chen, Hai-Yan Wang, Me He.", + ". (2016) The efficacy of daily chlorhexidine bathing for preventing healthcare-associated infections in adult intensive care units. The Korean Journal of Internal Medicine 31:6, 1159-1170.\n\n\n\n186 Matteo Bassetti, Maddalena Peghin, Jean-Francois Timsit.. (2016) The current treatment landscape: candidiasis. Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 71:suppl 2, ii13-ii22.\n\n\n\n187 Cameron C. Jones, Steffi Valdeig, Raymond M. Sova, Clifford R. Weiss.. (2016) Inside-out Ultraviolet-C Sterilization of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilm In Vitro.", + " Photochemistry and Photobiology 92:6, 835-841.\n\n\n\n188 Christopher S. Kovacs, Cynthia Fatica, Robert Butler, Steven M. Gordon, Thomas G. Fraser.. (2016) Hospital-acquired Staphylococcus aureus primary bloodstream infection: A comparison of events that do and do not meet the central line\u2013associated bloodstream infection definition. American Journal of Infection Control 44:11, 1252-1255.\n\n\n\n189 Shannon M. Hinsa-Leasure, Queenster Nartey, Justin Vaverka, Michael G. Schmidt.. (2016) Copper alloy surfaces sustain terminal cleaning levels in a rural hospital.", + " American Journal of Infection Control 44:11, e195-e203.\n\n\n\n190 (2016) Comparison of susceptibility patterns using commercially available susceptibility testing methods performed on prevalent Candida species. Journal of Medical Microbiology.\n\n\n\n191 Nadim Cassir, Jean-Christophe Delarozi\u00e8re, Gregory Dubourg, Marion Delord, Jean-Christophe Lagier, Phillipe Brouqui, Florence Fenollar, Didier Raoult, Pierre Edouard Fournier.. (2016) A Regional Outbreak of Clostridium difficile PCR-Ribotype 027 Infections in Southeastern France from a Single Long-Term Care Facility.", + " Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:11, 1337-1341.\n\n\n\n192 Gustavo H. Dayan, Naglaa Mohamed, Ingrid L. Scully, David Cooper, Elizabeth Begier, Joseph Eiden, Kathrin U. Jansen, Alejandra Gurtman, Annaliesa S. Anderson.. (2016) Staphylococcus aureus : the current state of disease, pathophysiology and strategies for prevention. Expert Review of Vaccines 15:11, 1373-1392.\n\n\n\n193 N. Monteserin, E. Larson.. (2016)", + " Temporal trends and risk factors for healthcare-associated vancomycin-resistant enterococci in adults. Journal of Hospital Infection 94:3, 236-241.\n\n\n\n194 Leonard R. Duncan, Jennifer I. Smart, Robert K. Flamm, Helio S. Sader, Ronald N. Jones, Rodrigo E. Mendes.. (2016) Telavancin activity tested against a collection of Staphylococcus aureus isolates causing pneumonia in hospitalized patients in the United States (2013\u20132014). Diagnostic Microbiology and Infectious Disease 86:3, 300-302.\n\n\n\n195 Alessandro Cassini,", + " Diamantis Plachouras, Tim Eckmanns, Muna Abu Sin, Hans-Peter Blank, Tanja Ducomble, Sebastian Haller, Thomas Harder, Anja Klingeberg, Madlen Sixtensson, Edward Velasco, Bettina Wei\u00df, Piotr Kramarz, Dominique L. Monnet, Mirjam E. Kretzschmar, Carl Suetens, Stephan Harbarth.. (2016) Burden of Six Healthcare-Associated Infections on European Population Health: Estimating Incidence-Based Disability-Adjusted Life Years through a Population Prevalence-Based Modelling Study.", + " PLOS Medicine 13:10, e1002150.\n\n\n\n196 Dhammika H. M. L. P. Navarathna, Ruvini U. Pathirana, Michail S. Lionakis, Kenneth W. Nickerson, David D. Roberts, Martine BASSILANA.. (2016) Candida albicans ISW2 Regulates Chlamydospore Suspensor Cell Formation and Virulence In Vivo in a Mouse Model of Disseminated Candidiasis. PLOS ONE 11:10, e0164449.\n\n\n\n197 Sahil Khanna, Darrell S. Pardi.", + ". (2016) Clinical implications of antibiotic impact on gastrointestinal microbiota and Clostridium difficile infection. Expert Review of Gastroenterology & Hepatology 10:10, 1145-1152.\n\n\n\n198 Timothy J. Break, Kevin W. Hoffman, Muthulekha Swamydas, Chyi-Chia Richard Lee, Jean K. Lim, Michail S. Lionakis.. (2016) Batf3-dependent CD103 + dendritic cell accumulation is dispensable for mucosal and systemic antifungal host defense. Virulence 7:7, 826-835.\n\n\n\n199 Jane Kirk,", + " Anson Kendall, James F. Marx, Ted Pincock, Elizabeth Young, Jillian M. Hughes, Timothy Landers.. (2016) Point of care hand hygiene\u2014where's the rub? A survey of US and Canadian health care workers' knowledge, attitudes, and practices. American Journal of Infection Control 44:10, 1095-1101.\n\n\n\n200 S. Khanna, E. Montassier, B. Schmidt, R. Patel, D. Knights, D. S. Pardi, P. C. Kashyap.. (2016) Gut microbiome predictors of treatment response and recurrence in primary Clostridium difficile infection.", + " Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics 44:7, 715-727.\n\n\n\n201 Kathlyn E. Fletcher, Jeanne T. Tyszka, Molly Harrod, Karen E. Fowler, Sanjay Saint, Sarah L. Krein.. (2016) Qualitative validation of the CAUTI Guide to Patient Safety assessment tool. American Journal of Infection Control 44:10, 1102-1109.\n\n\n\n202 Maziar M. Nourian.. (2016) The Motor in the Machine: A Lesson in Surgical Processing. Journal of Graduate Medical Education 8:4, 619-619.\n\n\n\n203 Damien Keogh,", + " Wei Hong Tay, Yao Yong Ho, Jennifer L. Dale, Siyi Chen, Shivshankar Umashankar, Rohan B.H. Williams, Swaine L. Chen, Gary M. Dunny, Kimberly A. Kline.. (2016) Enterococcal Metabolite Cues Facilitate Interspecies Niche Modulation and Polymicrobial Infection. Cell Host & Microbe 20:4, 493-503.\n\n\n\n204 Can\u00e1 L. Ross, Jennifer K. Spinler, Tor C. Savidge.. (2016) Structural and functional changes within the gut microbiota and susceptibility to Clostridium difficile infection.", + " Anaerobe 41, 37-43.\n\n\n\n205 Brad S. Oriel, Qi Chen, Kamal M.F. Itani.. (2016) The impact of surgical hand antisepsis technique on surgical site infection. The American Journal of Surgery.\n\n\n\n206 G. Winzor, R.P.D. Cooke.. (2016) Infection prevention and control in the paediatric setting: the challenges. Journal of Hospital Infection 94:2, 157-158.\n\n\n\n207 Andrew Gostine, David Gostine, Cristina Donohue, Luke Carlstrom.. (2016) Evaluating the effectiveness of ultraviolet-C lamps for reducing keyboard contamination in the intensive care unit:", + " A longitudinal analysis. American Journal of Infection Control 44:10, 1089-1094.\n\n\n\n208 Vic Eton, Liliya Sinyavskaya, Yves Langlois, Jean Fran\u00e7ois Morin, Samy Suissa, Paul Brassard.. (2016) Effect of Pre-Operative Use of Medications on the Risk of Surgical Site Infections in Patients Undergoing Cardiac Surgery. Surgical Infections 17:5, 557-562.\n\n\n\n209 Florian Wagenlehner, Zafer Tandogdu, Riccardo Bartoletti, Tommaso Cai, Mete Cek,", + " Ekaterina Kulchavenya, B\u00e9la K\u00f6ves, Kurt Naber, Tamara Perepanova, Peter Tenke, Bj\u00f6rn Wullt, Florian Bogenhard, Truls Erik Bjerklund Johansen.. (2016) The Global Prevalence of Infections in Urology (GPUI) Study: A Worldwide Surveillance Study in Urology Patients. European Urology Focus 2:4, 345-347.\n\n\n\n210 Mimonah Al Qathrady, Ahmed Helmy, Khalid Almuzaini.. (2016) Infection tracing in smart hospitals.", + " 2016 IEEE 12th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob), 1-8.\n\n\n\n211 Keita Morikane, Hitoshi Honda, Satowa Suzuki.. (2016) Factors Associated With Surgical Site Infection Following Gastric Surgery in Japan. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:10, 1167-1172.\n\n\n\n212 Rishi Parikh, Daniel Pollock, Jyotirmay Sharma, Jonathan Edwards.. (2016) Is There Room for Prevention? Examining the Effect of Outpatient Facility Type on the Risk of Surgical Site Infection.", + " Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:10, 1179-1185.\n\n\n\n213 Joshua T. Swan, Carol M. Ashton, Lan N. Bui, Vy P. Pham, Beverly A. Shirkey, Jolene E. Blackshear, Jimmy B. Bersamin, Rubie May L. Pomer, Michael L. Johnson, Audrey D. Magtoto, Michelle O. Butler, Shirley K. Tran, Leah R. Sanchez, Jessica G. Patel, Robert A. Ochoa, Shaikh A. Hai, Karen I. Denison, Edward A. Graviss,", + " Nelda P. Wray.. (2016) Effect of Chlorhexidine Bathing Every Other Day on Prevention of Hospital-Acquired Infections in the Surgical ICU. Critical Care Medicine 44:10, 1822-1832.\n\n\n\n214 Marin Vincent, Philippe Hartemann, Marc Engels-Deutsch.. (2016) Antimicrobial applications of copper. International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health 219:7, 585-591.\n\n\n\n215 Tara Konicki, Elaine Miller.. (2016) Use of a simulation intervention to examine differences in nursing students' hand hygiene knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors.", + " Nurse Education Today 45, 96-101.\n\n\n\n216 Lauren Diegel-Vacek, Catherine Ryan.. (2016) Promoting Hand Hygiene With a Lighting Prompt. HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal 10:1, 65-75.\n\n\n\n217 Faidad Khan, Xueqing Wu, Gideon L. Matzkin, Mohsin A. Khan, Fuminori Sakai, Jorge E. Vidal.. (2016) Streptococcus pneumoniae Eradicates Preformed Staphylococcus aureus Biofilms through a Mechanism Requiring Physical Contact. Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology 6.\n\n\n\n218 Sarah Tschudin-Sutter,", + " Olivier Braissant, Stefan Erb, Anne Stranden, Gernot Bonkat, Reno Frei, Andreas F. Widmer, Abhishek Deshpande.. (2016) Growth Patterns of Clostridium difficile \u2013 Correlations with Strains, Binary Toxin and Disease Severity: A Prospective Cohort Study. PLOS ONE 11:9, e0161711.\n\n\n\n219 Marisa Anne D'Angeli, Joe B. Baker, Douglas R. Call, Margaret A. Davis, Kelly J. Kauber, Uma Malhotra, Gregory T. Matsuura, Dale A. Moore,", + " Chris Porter, Paul Pottinger, Virginia Stockwell, Carol Wagner, Ron Wohrle, Jonathan Yoder, Leah Hampson Yoke, Peter Rabinowitz.. (2016) Antimicrobial stewardship through a one health lens. International Journal of Health Governance 21:3, 114-130.\n\n\n\n220 Christina M. Papageorge, Gregory D. Kennedy.. (2016) Strategies to Reduce Postoperative Urinary Tract Infections. Advances in Surgery 50:1, 79-91.\n\n\n\n221 Salima Sadallah, Laurent Schmied, Ceylan Eken, Hojjatollah Nozad Charoudeh,", + " Francesca Amicarella, J\u00fcrg A. Schifferli.. (2016) Platelet-Derived Ectosomes Reduce NK Cell Function. The Journal of Immunology 197:5, 1663-1671.\n\n\n\n222 Brittany Andruszko, Elizabeth Dodds Ashley.. (2016) Antifungal Stewardship: an Emerging Practice in Antimicrobial Stewardship. Current Clinical Microbiology Reports 3:3, 111-119.\n\n\n\n223 Emily E. Sickbert-Bennett, Lauren M. DiBiase, Tina M. Schade Willis, Eric S. Wolak,", + " David J. Weber, William A. Rutala.. (2016) Reduction of Healthcare-Associated Infections by Exceeding High Compliance with Hand Hygiene Practices. Emerging Infectious Diseases 22:9, 1628-1630.\n\n\n\n224 Sorabh Dhar, Evelyn Cook, Mary Oden, Keith S. Kaye.. (2016) Building a Successful Infection Prevention Program. Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 30:3, 567-589.\n\n\n\n225 Katelyn C. Jelden, Shawn G. Gibbs, Philip W. Smith, Angela L. Hewlett, Peter C.", + " Iwen, Kendra K. Schmid, John J. Lowe.. (2016) Comparison of hospital room surface disinfection using a novel ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) generator. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene 13:9, 690-698.\n\n\n\n226 Geeta Sood, Trish M. Perl.. (2016) Outbreaks in Health Care Settings. Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 30:3, 661-687.\n\n\n\n227 Maureen Spencer, Denise Uettwiller-Geiger, Jennifer Sanguinet, Helen Boehm Johnson, Denise Graham.", + ". (2016) Infection preventionists and laboratorians: Case studies on successful collaboration. American Journal of Infection Control 44:9, 964-968.\n\n\n\n228 Alexa R. Weingarden, Chi Chen, Ningning Zhang, Carolyn T. Graiziger, Peter I. Dosa, Clifford J. Steer, Megan K. Shaughnessy, James R. Johnson, Michael J. Sadowsky, Alexander Khoruts.. (2016) Ursodeoxycholic Acid Inhibits Clostridium difficile Spore Germination and Vegetative Growth, and Prevents the Recurrence of Ileal Pouchitis Associated With the Infection.", + " Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology 50:8, 624-630.\n\n\n\n229 Fleur E.E. De Vries, Elon D. Wallert, Joseph S. Solomkin, Benedetta Allegranzi, Matthias Egger, E. Patchen Dellinger, Marja A. Boermeester.. (2016) A systematic review and meta-analysis including GRADE qualification of the risk of surgical site infections after prophylactic negative pressure wound therapy compared with conventional dressings in clean and contaminated surgery. Medicine 95:36, e4673.\n\n\n\n230 Sherry Glied, Bevin Cohen, Jianfang Liu,", + " Matthew Neidell, Elaine Larson.. (2016) Trends in mortality, length of stay, and hospital charges associated with health care\u2013associated infections, 2006-2012. American Journal of Infection Control 44:9, 983-989.\n\n\n\n231 M.S. Kumar, A.P. Das.. (2016) Molecular identification of multi drug resistant bacteria from urinary tract infected urine samples. Microbial Pathogenesis 98, 37-44.\n\n\n\n232 Julius Pochhammer, Marie-Pascale Weller, Michael Sch\u00e4ffer.. (2016) Polihexanide for prevention of Wound Infection in Surgery.", + " Is the contact time essential? POLIS-trial: A historic controlled, clinical pilot trial. Wound Medicine 14, 19-24.\n\n\n\n233 Christopher P. Stefan, Jeffrey W. Koehler, Timothy D. Minogue.. (2016) Targeted next-generation sequencing for the detection of ciprofloxacin resistance markers using molecular inversion probes. Scientific Reports 6:1.\n\n\n\n234 Katja Dralle Mjos, Elena Polishchuk, Michael J. Abrams, Chris Orvig.. (2016) Synthesis, characterization, and evaluation of the antimicrobial potential of copper(II) coordination complexes with quinolone and p -xylenyl-linked quinolone ligands.", + " Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry 162, 280-285.\n\n\n\n235 Paula King, Long K. Pham, Shannon Waltz, Dan Sphar, Robert T. Yamamoto, Douglas Conrad, Randy Taplitz, Francesca Torriani, R. Allyn Forsyth, Yung-Fu Chang.. (2016) Longitudinal Metagenomic Analysis of Hospital Air Identifies Clinically Relevant Microbes. PLOS ONE 11:8, e0160124.\n\n\n\n236 Gabriela Tirado-Conte, Afonso B. Freitas-Ferraz, Luis Nombela-Franco,", + " Pilar Jimenez-Quevedo, Corina Biagioni, Ana Cuadrado, Ivan Nu\u00f1ez-Gil, Pablo Salinas, Nieves Gonzalo, Carlos Ferrera, David Vivas, Javier Higueras, Ana Viana-Tejedor, Maria Jose Perez-Vizcayno, Isidre Vilacosta, Javier Escaned, Antonio Fernandez-Ortiz, Carlos Macaya.. (2016) Incidence, Causes, and Impact of In-Hospital Infections After Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation. The American Journal of Cardiology 118:3,", + " 403-409.\n\n\n\n237 Panayiotis D. Ziakas, Nina Joyce, Ioannis M. Zacharioudakis, Fainareti N. Zervou, Richard W. Besdine, Vincent Mor, Eleftherios Mylonakis.. (2016) Prevalence and impact of Clostridium difficile infection in elderly residents of long-term care facilities, 2011. Medicine 95:31, e4187.\n\n\n\n238 Joany van Balen, Lyndsay Bottichio, Kurt Stevenson, Shu-Hua Wang, Rocio Nava-Hoet, Armando E.", + " Hoet.. (2016) Understanding the introduction and circulation of environmental methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in a large academic medical center during a nonoutbreak, year-long period. American Journal of Infection Control 44:8, 925-930.\n\n\n\n239 Jennifer L. Brower.. (2016) The Threat and Response to Infectious Diseases (Revised). Microbial Ecology.\n\n\n\n240 Salma Abbas, Sangeeta Sastry.. (2016) Chlorhexidine: Patient Bathing and Infection Prevention. Current Infectious Disease Reports 18:8.\n\n\n\n241 Jennifer K. Spinler,", + " Aaron Brown, Can\u00e1 L. Ross, Prapaporn Boonma, Margaret E. Conner, Tor C. Savidge.. (2016) Administration of probiotic kefir to mice with Clostridium difficile infection exacerbates disease. Anaerobe 40, 54-57.\n\n\n\n242 Moinuddin Hassan, Elizabeth Gonzalez, Victoria Hitchins, Ilko Ilev.. (2016) Detecting bacteria contamination on medical device surfaces using an integrated fiber-optic mid-infrared spectroscopy sensing method. Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical 231, 646-654.\n\n\n\n243 Danir Fanisovich Bayramov,", + " Jennifer Ann Neff.. (2016) Beyond conventional antibiotics \u2014 New directions for combination products to combat biofilm. Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews.\n\n\n\n244 Bernardo C\u00e1novas-Segura, Manuel Campos, Antonio Morales, Jose M. Juarez, Francisco Palacios.. (2016) Development of a clinical decision support system for antibiotic management in a hospital environment. Progress in Artificial Intelligence 5:3, 181-197.\n\n\n\n245 David J. Weber, Hajime Kanamori, William A. Rutala.. (2016) \u2018No touch\u2019 technologies for environmental decontamination. Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases 29:", + "4, 424-431.\n\n\n\n246 Sahil Khanna, Arjun Gupta, Larry M. Baddour, Darrell S. Pardi.. (2016) Epidemiology, outcomes, and predictors of mortality in hospitalized adults with Clostridium difficile infection. Internal and Emergency Medicine 11:5, 657-665.\n\n\n\n247 E. Patchen Dellinger.. (2016) Prevention of Hospital-Acquired Infections. Surgical Infections 17:4, 422-426.\n\n\n\n248 Ehsan S. Mousavi, Kevin R. Grosskopf.. (2016) Secondary exposure risks to patients in an airborne isolation room:", + " Implications for anteroom design. Building and Environment 104, 131-137.\n\n\n\n249 Luis J. Bastarrachea, Julie M. Goddard.. (2016) Self-healing antimicrobial polymer coating with efficacy in the presence of organic matter. Applied Surface Science 378, 479-488.\n\n\n\n250 Edward Septimus, Jason Hickok, Julia Moody, Ken Kleinman, Taliser R. Avery, Susan S. Huang, Richard Platt, Jonathan Perlin.. (2016) Closing the Translation Gap: Toolkit-based Implementation of Universal Decolonization in Adult Intensive Care Units Reduces Central Line\u2013associated Bloodstream Infections in 95 Community Hospitals.", + " Clinical Infectious Diseases 63:2, 172-177.\n\n\n\n251 Dora J. Melber, Arianne Teherani, Brian S. Schwartz.. (2016) A Comprehensive Survey of Preclinical Microbiology Curricula Among US Medical Schools. Clinical Infectious Diseases 63:2, 164-168.\n\n\n\n252 Jeffrey C. Hageman, Carmen Hazim, Katie Wilson, Paul Malpiedi, Neil Gupta, Sarah Bennett, Amy Kolwaite, Abbigail Tumpey, Kristin Brinsley-Rainisch, Bryan Christensen, Carolyn Gould, Angela Fisher, Michael Jhung,", + " Douglas Hamilton, Kerri Moran, Lisa Delaney, Chad Dowell, Michael Bell, Arjun Srinivasan, Melissa Schaefer, Ryan Fagan, Nedghie Adrien, Nora Chea, Benjamin J. Park.. (2016) Infection Prevention and Control for Ebola in Health Care Settings \u2014 West Africa and United States. MMWR Supplements 65:3, 50-56.\n\n\n\n253 Fariha H. Ramay, Anthony Amoroso, Erik C. von Rosenvinge, Kapil Saharia.. (2016) Fecal Microbiota Transplantation for Treatment of Severe,", + " Recurrent, and Refractory Clostridium difficile Infection in a Severely Immunocompromised Patient. Infectious Diseases in Clinical Practice 24:4, 237-240.\n\n\n\n254 Hiroshi Morioka, Aki Hirabayashi, Mitsutaka Iguchi, Yuka Tomita, Daizo Kato, Naokazu Sato, Miyuki Hyodo, Naoko Kawamura, Takuya Sadomoto, Kazuya Ichikawa, Takayuki Inagaki, Yoshiaki Kato, Yuichi Kouyama, Yoshinori Ito, Tetsuya Yagi.. (2016)", + " The first point prevalence survey of health care\u2013associated infection and antimicrobial use in a Japanese university hospital: A pilot study. American Journal of Infection Control 44:7, e119-e123.\n\n\n\n255 Jae Hyun Shin, Kevin P. High, Cirle A. Warren.. (2016) Older Is Not Wiser, Immunologically Speaking: Effect of Aging on Host Response to Clostridium difficile Infections. The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences 71:7, 916-922.\n\n\n\n256 Aaron C. Miller, Linnea A. Polgreen, Joseph E. Cavanaugh,", + " Philip M. Polgreen.. (2016) Hospital Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) incidence as a risk factor for hospital-associated CDI. American Journal of Infection Control 44:7, 825-829.\n\n\n\n257 J. Francois Eid.. (2016) Penile Implant: Review of a \u201cNo-Touch\u201d Technique. Sexual Medicine Reviews 4:3, 294-300.\n\n\n\n258 Edward van Opstal, Glynis L. Kolling, John H. Moore, Christine M. Coquery, Nekeithia S. Wade, William M. Loo, David T.", + " Bolick, Jae Hyun Shin, Loren D. Erickson, Cirle A. Warren.. (2016) Vancomycin Treatment Alters Humoral Immunity and Intestinal Microbiota in an Aged Mouse Model of Clostridium difficile Infection. Journal of Infectious Diseases 214:1, 130-139.\n\n\n\n259 Zafer Tandogdu, Truls E. Bjerklund Johansen, Riccardo Bartoletti, Florian Wagenlehner.. (2016) Management of the Urologic Sepsis Syndrome. European Urology Supplements 15:4,", + " 102-111.\n\n\n\n260 Lindsey M. Weiner, Scott K. Fridkin, Zuleika Aponte-Torres, Lacey Avery, Nicole Coffin, Margaret A. Dudeck, Jonathan R. Edwards, John A. Jernigan, Rebecca Konnor, Minn M. Soe, Kelly Peterson, L. Clifford McDonald.. (2016) Vital Signs: Preventing Antibiotic-Resistant Infections in Hospitals - United States, 2014. American Journal of Transplantation 16:7, 2224-2230.\n\n\n\n261 Tania N. Bubb, Corrianne Billings,", + " Dorine Berriel-Cass, William Bridges, Lisa Caffery, Jennifer Cox, Moraima Rodriguez, Jessica Swanson, Maureen Titus-Hinson.. (2016) APIC professional and practice standards. American Journal of Infection Control 44:7, 745-749.\n\n\n\n262 Paula Regina Luna de Ara\u00fajo J\u00e1come, Agenor Tavares J\u00e1come-J\u00fanior, L\u00edlian Rodrigues Alves, Maria Jesu\u00edta Bezerra da Silva, Jailton Lobo da Costa Lima, Ana Catarina S. Lopes, Paulo S\u00e9rgio Ramos Ara\u00fajo, Maria Am\u00e9lia Vieira Maciel.", + ". (2016) Detection of bla SPM-1, bla KPC, bla TEM and bla CTX-M genes in isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter spp. and Klebsiella spp. from cancer patients with healthcare-associated infections. Journal of Medical Microbiology 65:7, 658-665.\n\n\n\n263 Elizabeth Cerceo, Steven B. Deitelzweig, Bradley M. Sherman, Alpesh N. Amin.. (2016) Multidrug-Resistant Gram-Negative Bacterial Infections in the Hospital Setting: Overview, Implications for Clinical Practice,", + " and Emerging Treatment Options. Microbial Drug Resistance 22:5, 412-431.\n\n\n\n264 Patricia Geddie, Victoria Wochna Loerzel, Anne Norris.. (2016) Family Caregiver Knowledge, Patient Illness Characteristics, and Unplanned Hospital Admissions in Older Adults With Cancer. Oncology Nursing Forum 43:4, 453-463.\n\n\n\n265 Jessica M. Stempel, Dimitrios Farmakiotis, Jeffrey J. Tarrand, Dimitrios P. Kontoyiannis.. (2016) Time-to-reporting of blood culture positivity and central venous catheter-associated Candida glabrata fungemia in cancer patients.", + " Diagnostic Microbiology and Infectious Disease 85:3, 391-393.\n\n\n\n266 H. R. MART\u00cdNEZ-MOREL, J. SANCHEZ-PAY\u00c1, P. GARC\u00cdA-SHIMIZU, J. L. MENDOZA-GARC\u00cdA, I. TENZA-IGLESIAS, J. C. RODR\u00cdGUEZ-D\u00cdAZ, E. MERINO-DE-LUCAS, A. NOLASCO.. (2016) Effectiveness of a programme to reduce the burden of catheter-related bloodstream infections in a tertiary hospital.", + " Epidemiology and Infection 144:09, 2011-2017.\n\n\n\n267 Areeba Kara, Cynthia S. Johnson, Michelle Murray, Jill Dillon, Siu L. Hui.. (2016) Can the identification of an idle line facilitate its removal? A comparison between a proposed guideline and clinical practice. Journal of Hospital Medicine 11:7, 489-493.\n\n\n\n268 Chunlu Gao, Jing Tong, Kaijiang Yu, Zhidan Sun, Ran An, Zhimin Du.. (2016) Pharmacokinetics of cefoperazone/sulbactam in critically ill patients receiving continuous venovenous hemofiltration.", + " European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 72:7, 823-830.\n\n\n\n269 J.Y. Liu, Y.H. Wu, M. Cai, C.L. Zhou.. (2016) Point-prevalence survey of healthcare-associated infections in Beijing, China: a survey and analysis in 2014. Journal of Hospital Infection 93:3, 271-279.\n\n\n\n270 Kristen V. Dicks, Eric Lofgren, Sarah S. Lewis, Rebekah W. Moehring, Daniel J. Sexton, Deverick J. Anderson.. (2016) A Multicenter Pragmatic Interrupted Time Series Analysis of Chlorhexidine Gluconate Bathing in Community Hospital Intensive Care Units.", + " Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:07, 791-797.\n\n\n\n271 Isaac See, Julia Chang, Nicole Gualandi, Genevieve L. Buser, Pamela Rohrbach, Debra A. Smeltz, Mary Jo Bellush, Susan E. Coffin, Jane M. Gould, Debra Hess, Patricia Hennessey, Sydney Hubbard, Andrea Kiernan, Judith O\u2019Donnell, David A. Pegues, Jeffrey R. Miller, Shelley S. Magill.. (2016) Clinical Correlates of Surveillance Events Detected by National Healthcare Safety Network Pneumonia and Lower Respiratory Infection Definitions\u2014Pennsylvania,", + " 2011\u20132012. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:07, 818-824.\n\n\n\n272 Michael Klompas.. (2016) Hospital-Acquired Pneumonia in Nonventilated Patients: The Next Frontier. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:07, 825-826.\n\n\n\n273 Jeremy T. Affolter, W. Charles Huskins, Michele Moss, Evelyn M. Kuhn, Rainer Gedeit, Thomas B. Rice.. (2016) The Association of Central-Line\u2013Associated Bloodstream Infections With Central-Line Utilization Rate and Maintenance Bundle Compliance Among Types of PICUs*. Pediatric Critical Care Medicine 17:", + "7, 591-597.\n\n\n\n274 Brooke A. Schlappe, Jennifer J. Mueller, Oliver Zivanovic, Ginger J. Gardner, Kara Long Roche, Yukio Sonoda, Dennis S. Chi, Roisin E. O'Cearbhaill.. (2016) Cited rationale for variance in the use of primary intraperitoneal chemotherapy following optimal cytoreduction for stage III ovarian carcinoma at a high intraperitoneal chemotherapy utilization center. Gynecologic Oncology 142:1, 13-18.\n\n\n\n275 Christopher Duncan, Scott O. Trerotola.. (2016) Outcomes of a Percutaneous Technique for Shortening of Totally Implanted Indwelling Central Venous Chest Port Catheters.", + " Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology 27:7, 1034-1037.\n\n\n\n276 Bas G.J. Surewaard, Justin F. Deniset, Franz J. Zemp, Matthias Amrein, Michael Otto, John Conly, Abdelwahab Omri, Robin M. Yates, Paul Kubes.. (2016) Identification and treatment of the Staphylococcus aureus reservoir in vivo. The Journal of Experimental Medicine 213:7, 1141-1151.\n\n\n\n277 Gi Byoung Hwang, Elaine Allan, Ivan P. Parkin.. (2016)", + " White Light-Activated Antimicrobial Paint using Crystal Violet. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 8:24, 15033-15039.\n\n\n\n278 Sharon R Lewis, Andrew R Butler, David JW Evans, Phil Alderson, Andrew F Smith, Sharon R Lewis.. 2016. Chlorhexidine bathing of the critically ill for the prevention of hospital-acquired infection. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.\n\n\n\n279 Alexandra S. Sim\u00f5es, Isabel Couto, Cristina Toscano, Elsa Gon\u00e7alves, Pedro P\u00f3voa, Miguel Viveiros, Lu\u00eds V. Lap\u00e3o.. (2016) Prevention and Control of Antimicrobial Resistant Healthcare-", + "Associated Infections: The Microbiology Laboratory Rocks!. Frontiers in Microbiology 7.\n\n\n\n280 Maria Pardos de la Gandara, Marie Curry, Judith Berger, David Burstein, Phyllis Della-Latta, Virgina Kopetz, John Quale, Eric Spitzer, Rexie Tan, Carl Urban, Guiqing Wang, Susan Whittier, Herminia de Lencastre, Alexander Tomasz, Paul J Planet.. (2016) MRSA Causing Infections in Hospitals in Greater Metropolitan New York: Major Shift in the Dominant Clonal Type between 1996 and 2014.", + " PLOS ONE 11:6, e0156924.\n\n\n\n281 Christos A. Grigoras, Fainareti N. Zervou, Ioannis M. Zacharioudakis, Constantinos I. Siettos, Eleftherios Mylonakis, Abhishek Deshpande.. (2016) Isolation of C. difficile Carriers Alone and as Part of a Bundle Approach for the Prevention of Clostridium difficile Infection (CDI): A Mathematical Model Based on Clinical Study Data. PLOS ONE 11:6, e0156577.\n\n\n\n282 Saint, Sanjay, Greene,", + " M. Todd, Krein, Sarah L., Rogers, Mary A.M., Ratz, David, Fowler, Karen E., Edson, Barbara S., Watson, Sam R., Meyer-Lucas, Barbara, Masuga, Marie, Faulkner, Kelly, Gould, Carolyn V., Battles, James, Fakih, Mohamad G.,.. (2016) A Program to Prevent Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection in Acute Care. New England Journal of Medicine 374:22, 2111-2119.\n\n\n\n283 Quanhathai Kaewpoowat, Nagakrishnal Nachimuthu,", + " Luis Ostrosky-Zeichner.. (2016) Fungal Diagnostics: A Practical Approach. Current Clinical Microbiology Reports 3:2, 103-110.\n\n\n\n284 Amelia K. Sofjan, Rachel J. Musgrove, Kevin W. Garey.. (2016) Impact of New Diagnostic Approaches for Invasive Candidiasis on Antifungal Stewardship. Current Fungal Infection Reports 10:2, 68-77.\n\n\n\n285 James W. Arbogast, Laura Moore-Schiltz, William R. Jarvis, Amanda Harpster-Hagen, Jillian Hughes,", + " Albert Parker.. (2016) Impact of a Comprehensive Workplace Hand Hygiene Program on Employer Health Care Insurance Claims and Costs, Absenteeism, and Employee Perceptions and Practices. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 58:6, e231-e240.\n\n\n\n286 Tolulope A. Oyetunji, Dani O. Gonzalez, Katherine W. Gonzalez, Benedict C. Nwomeh, Shawn D. St. Peter.. (2016) Wound classification in pediatric surgical procedures: Measured and found wanting. Journal of Pediatric Surgery 51:6, 1014-1016.\n\n\n\n287 Priya Sampathkumar,", + " Jean Wentink Barth, Maureen Johnson, Nick Marosek, Maren Johnson, Wendy Worden, Jill Lembke, Heather Twing, Tamara Buechler, Sarah Dhanorker, Danielle Keigley, Rodney Thompson.. (2016) Mayo Clinic Reduces Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections Through a Bundled 6-C Approach. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety 42:6, 254-AP4.\n\n\n\n288 Nancy Fu, Titus Wong.. (2016) Clostridium difficile Infection in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease.", + " Current Infectious Disease Reports 18:6.\n\n\n\n289 Nikola Nestorov, Peter Hughes, Nuala Healy, Niall Sheehy, Neil OHare.. (2016) Application of Natural User Interface Devices for Touch-Free Control of Radiological Images During Surgery. 2016 IEEE 29th International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS), 229-234.\n\n\n\n290 Scott D. Kobayashi, Adeline R. Porter, David W. Dorward, Amanda J. Brinkworth, Liang Chen, Barry N. Kreiswirth, Frank R. DeLeo.. (2016)", + " Phagocytosis and Killing of Carbapenem-Resistant ST258 Klebsiella pneumoniae by Human Neutrophils. Journal of Infectious Diseases 213:10, 1615-1622.\n\n\n\n291 Dusan Licina, Seema Bhangar, Brandon Brooks, Robyn Baker, Brian Firek, Xiaochen Tang, Michael J. Morowitz, Jillian F. Banfield, William W. Nazaroff, Jeffrey Shaman.. (2016) Concentrations and Sources of Airborne Particles in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. PLOS ONE 11:5,", + " e0154991.\n\n\n\n292 Lynne V. McFarland.. (2016) Therapies on the horizon for Clostridium difficile infections. Expert Opinion on Investigational Drugs 25:5, 541-555.\n\n\n\n293 Floris Imhann, Marc Jan Bonder, Arnau Vich Vila, Jingyuan Fu, Zlatan Mujagic, Lisa Vork, Ettje F Tigchelaar, Soesma A Jankipersadsing, Maria Carmen Cenit, Hermie J M Harmsen, Gerard Dijkstra, Lude Franke, Ramnik J Xavier,", + " Daisy Jonkers, Cisca Wijmenga, Rinse K Weersma, Alexandra Zhernakova.. (2016) Proton pump inhibitors affect the gut microbiome. Gut 65:5, 740-748.\n\n\n\n294 David J. Weber, Stephanie A. Consoli, William A. Rutala.. (2016) Occupational health risks associated with the use of germicides in health care. American Journal of Infection Control 44:5, e85-e89.\n\n\n\n295 Sunmoo Yoon, Bevin Cohen, Kenrick D. Cato, Jianfang Liu, Elaine L.", + " Larson.. (2016) Visualization of Data Regarding Infections Using Eye Tracking Techniques. Journal of Nursing Scholarship 48:3, 244-253.\n\n\n\n296 Tammy A. Beyfus, Nancy L. Dawson, Cynthia H. Danner, Bhupendra Rawal, Paul E. Gruber, Steven P. Petrou.. (2016) The use of passive visual stimuli to enhance compliance with handwashing in a perioperative setting. American Journal of Infection Control 44:5, 496-499.\n\n\n\n297 Amy L. Pakyz, Leticia R. Moczygemba, Lynn M.", + " VanderWielen, Michael B. Edmond.. (2016) Fecal microbiota transplantation for recurrent Clostridium difficile infection: The patient experience. American Journal of Infection Control 44:5, 554-559.\n\n\n\n298 Isaiah R. Turnbull, Sarbani Ghosh, Anja Fuchs, Julia Hilliard, Christopher G. Davis, Grant V. Bochicchio, Robert E. Southard.. (2016) Polytrauma Increases Susceptibility to Pseudomonas Pneumonia in Mature Mice. SHOCK 45:5, 555-563.\n\n\n\n299 Afif N.", + " Kulaylat, Brett W. Engbrecht, Dorothy V. Rocourt, John M. Rinaldi, Mary C. Santos, Robert E. Cilley, Christopher S. Hollenbeak, Peter W. Dillon.. (2016) Measuring Surgical Site Infections in Children: Comparing Clinical, Electronic, and Administrative Data. Journal of the American College of Surgeons 222:5, 823-830.\n\n\n\n300 Jessica P. Ridgway, Xiaowu Sun, Ying P. Tabak, Richard S. Johannes, Ari Robicsek.. (2016) Performance characteristics and associated outcomes for an automated surveillance tool for bloodstream infection.", + " American Journal of Infection Control 44:5, 567-571.\n\n\n\n301 Brett G. Mitchell, Oyebola Fasugba, Wendy Beckingham, Noleen Bennett, Anne Gardner.. (2016) A point prevalence study of healthcare associated urinary tract infections in Australian acute and aged care facilities. Infection, Disease & Health 21:1, 26-31.\n\n\n\n302 David J. Weber, William A. Rutala, Deverick J. Anderson, Luke F. Chen, Emily E. Sickbert-Bennett, John M. Boyce.. (2016) Effectiveness of ultraviolet devices and hydrogen peroxide systems for terminal room decontamination:", + " Focus on clinical trials. American Journal of Infection Control 44:5, e77-e84.\n\n\n\n303 B.G. Mitchell, J.K. Ferguson, M. Anderson, J. Sear, A. Barnett.. (2016) Length of stay and mortality associated with healthcare-associated urinary tract infections: a multi-state model. Journal of Hospital Infection 93:1, 92-99.\n\n\n\n304 S. VALLABHANENI, O. ALMENDARES, M. M. FARLEY, J. RENO, Z. T. SMITH, B. STEIN, S. S.", + " MAGILL, R. M. SMITH, A. A. CLEVELAND, F. C. LESSA.. (2016) Epidemiology and factors associated with candidaemia following Clostridium difficile infection in adults within metropolitan Atlanta, 2009\u20132013. Epidemiology and Infection 144:07, 1440-1444.\n\n\n\n305 Stefano Di Bella, Paolo Ascenzi, Steven Siarakas, Nicola Petrosillo, Alessandra di Masi.. (2016) Clostridium difficile Toxins A and B: Insights into Pathogenic Properties and Extraintestinal Effects.", + " Toxins 8:5, 134.\n\n\n\n306 Liang Qin Liu, Sinead Mehigan.. (2016) The Effects of Surgical Hand Scrubbing Protocols on Skin Integrity and Surgical Site Infection Rates: A Systematic Review. AORN Journal 103:5, 468-482.\n\n\n\n307 Nicole B\u00e9zay, Andrea Ayad, Katrin Dubischar, Christa Firbas, Romana Hochreiter, Sigrid Kiermayr, Istv\u00e1n Kiss, Fritz Pinl, Bernd Jilma, Kerstin Westritschnig.. (2016)", + " Safety, immunogenicity and dose response of VLA84, a new vaccine candidate against Clostridium difficile, in healthy volunteers. Vaccine 34:23, 2585-2592.\n\n\n\n308 Jackson S. Musuuza, Anna Barker, Caitlyn Ngam, Lia Vellardita, Nasia Safdar.. (2016) Assessment of Fidelity in Interventions to Improve Hand Hygiene of Healthcare Workers: A Systematic Review. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:05, 567-575.\n\n\n\n309 Anthony D. Harris, Sarah S. Jackson, Gwen Robinson, Lisa Pineles,", + " Surbhi Leekha, Kerri A. Thom, Yuan Wang, Michelle Doll, Melinda M. Pettigrew, J. Kristie Johnson.. (2016) Pseudomonas aeruginosa Colonization in the Intensive Care Unit: Prevalence, Risk Factors, and Clinical Outcomes. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:05, 544-548.\n\n\n\n310 David K. Warren, Martin Prager, Satish Munigala, Meghan A. Wallace, Colleen R. Kennedy, Kerry M. Bommarito, John E. Mazuski, Carey-Ann D.", + " Burnham.. (2016) Prevalence of qacA/B Genes and Mupirocin Resistance Among Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Isolates in the Setting of Chlorhexidine Bathing Without Mupirocin. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:05, 590-597.\n\n\n\n311 Melinda M. Pettigrew, J. Kristie Johnson, Anthony D. Harris.. (2016) The human microbiota: novel targets for hospital-acquired infections and antibiotic resistance. Annals of Epidemiology 26:5, 342-", + "347.\n\n\n\n312 Arjun Gupta, Darrell S Pardi, Larry M Baddour, Sahil Khanna.. (2016) Outcomes in children with Clostridium difficile infection: results from a nationwide survey. Gastroenterology Report, gow007.\n\n\n\n313 Federico Perez, Nadim G. El Chakhtoura, Krisztina M. Papp-Wallace, Brigid M. Wilson, Robert A. Bonomo.. (2016) Treatment options for infections caused by carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae : can we apply \u201cprecision medicine\u201d to antimicrobial chemotherapy?. Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy 17:", + "6, 761-781.\n\n\n\n314 Tamegnon Victorien Dougnon, Honore Sourou Bankole, Roch Christian Johnson, Gildas Hounmanou, Idarath Moussa Toure, Christelle Houessou, Michel Boko, Lamine Baba-Moussa.. (2016) Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections at a Hospital in Zinvie, Benin (West Africa). International Journal of Infection 3:2.\n\n\n\n315 Sarah K. Hilton, Eduardo Castro-Nallar, Marcos P\u00e9rez-Losada, Ian Toma, Timothy A. McCaffrey,", + " Eric P. Hoffman, Marc O. Siegel, Gary L. Simon, W. Evan Johnson, Keith A. Crandall.. (2016) Metataxonomic and Metagenomic Approaches vs. Culture-Based Techniques for Clinical Pathology. Frontiers in Microbiology 7.\n\n\n\n316 Matteo Bassetti, Elda Righi, Alessia Carnelutti.. (2016) Bloodstream infections in the Intensive Care Unit. Virulence 7:3, 267-279.\n\n\n\n317 Kelly M. Fulton, Jeffrey C. Smith, Susan M. Twine.. (2016)", + " Clinical applications of bacterial glycoproteins. Expert Review of Proteomics 13:4, 345-353.\n\n\n\n318 Sydne Muratore, Catherine Statz, J.J. Glover, Mary Kwaan, Greg Beilman.. (2016) Risk Adjustment for Determining Surgical Site Infection in Colon Surgery: Are All Models Created Equal?. Surgical Infections 17:2, 173-178.\n\n\n\n319 Hilary Barnes, Jessica Rearden, Matthew D. McHugh.. (2016) Magnet\u00ae Hospital Recognition Linked to Lower Central Line-Associated Bloodstream Infection Rates. Research in Nursing & Health 39:", + "2, 96-104.\n\n\n\n320 Sarah Stanley, Frank Scholle, Jiadeng Zhu, Yao Lu, Xiangwu Zhang, Xingci Situ, Reza Ghiladi.. (2016) Photosensitizer-Embedded Polyacrylonitrile Nanofibers as Antimicrobial Non-Woven Textile. Nanomaterials 6:4, 77.\n\n\n\n321 Jonathan L. Drew, Joseph Turner, Joshua Mugele, Greg Hasty, Taylor Duncan, Rebekah Zaiser, Dylan Cooper.. (2016) Beating the Spread. Simulation in Healthcare: The Journal of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare 11:", + "2, 100-105.\n\n\n\n322 Kathleen A. Quan, Sarah M. Cousins, Darlene D. Porter, Margaret O'Brien, Scott Rudkin, Brian Lambertson, Dennis Hoang, Amish A. Dangodara, Susan S. Huang.. (2016) Electronic health record solutions to reduce central line-associated bloodstream infections by enhancing documentation of central line insertion practices, line days, and daily line necessity. American Journal of Infection Control 44:4, 438-443.\n\n\n\n323 H.J. G\u00f3mez-Vallejo, B. Uriel-Latorre, M. Sande-Meijide,", + " B. Villamar\u00edn-Bello, R. Pav\u00f3n, F. Fdez-Riverola, D. Glez-Pe\u00f1a.. (2016) A case-based reasoning system for aiding detection and classification of nosocomial infections. Decision Support Systems 84, 104-116.\n\n\n\n324 Michelle Hughes, Taha Qazi, Adam Berg, Janice Weinberg, Xinhua Chen, Ciaran P. Kelly, Francis A. Farraye.. (2016) Host Immune Response to Clostridium difficile Infection in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Patients. Inflammatory Bowel Diseases 22:", + "4, 853-861.\n\n\n\n325 Sarah Santos Gon\u00e7alves, Ana Carolina Remondi Souza, Anuradha Chowdhary, Jacques F. Meis, Arnaldo Lopes Colombo.. (2016) Epidemiology and molecular mechanisms of antifungal resistance in Candida and Aspergillus. Mycoses 59:4, 198-219.\n\n\n\n326 Chanunya Srihawan, Rodrigo Lopez Castelblanco, Lucrecia Salazar, Susan H. 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Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:04, 466-468.\n\n\n\n330 Lindsay Croft,", + " James Ladd, Michelle Doll, Daniel J. Morgan.. (2016) Inappropriate Antibiotic Use and Gastric Acid Suppression Preceding Clostridium difficile Infection. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:04, 494-495.\n\n\n\n331 E.P. Magennis, A.L. Hook, M.C. Davies, C. Alexander, P. Williams, M.R. Alexander.. (2016) Engineering serendipity: High-throughput discovery of materials that resist bacterial attachment. Acta Biomaterialia 34, 84-92.\n\n\n\n332 Claudio Marcassa, Massimo Pistono,", + " Renato Maserati, Andrea Giordano, Pantaleo Giannuzzi.. (2016) Disability after cardiac surgery is the major predictor of infections occurring in the rehabilitation phase. European Journal of Preventive Cardiology 23:6, 584-592.\n\n\n\n333 Lindsey M. Weiner, Scott K. Fridkin, Zuleika Aponte-Torres, Lacey Avery, Nicole Coffin, Margaret A. Dudeck, Jonathan R. Edwards, John A. Jernigan, Rebecca Konnor, Minn M. Soe, Kelly Peterson, L. Clifford McDonald.. (2016) Vital Signs:", + " Preventing Antibiotic-Resistant Infections in Hospitals \u2014 United States, 2014. MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 65:9, 235-241.\n\n\n\n334 Lindsey M. Weiner, Scott K. Fridkin, Zuleika Aponte-Torres, Lacey Avery, Nicole Coffin, Margaret A. Dudeck, Jonathan R. Edwards, John A. Jernigan, Rebecca Konnor, Minn M. Soe, Kelly Peterson, L. Clifford McDonald.. (2016) Vital Signs: Preventing Antibiotic-Resistant Infections in Hospitals \u2014 United States,", + " 2014. MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 65:9.\n\n\n\n335 Ephraim L. Tsalik, Yanhong Li, Lori L. Hudson, Vivian H. Chu, Tiffany Himmel, Alex T. Limkakeng, Jason N. Katz, Seth W. Glickman, Micah T. McClain, Karen E. Welty-Wolf, Vance G. Fowler, Geoffrey S. Ginsburg, Christopher W. Woods, Shelby D. Reed.. 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N. Ananthakrishnan.. (2016) Clostridium difficile associated risk of death score (CARDS): a novel severity score to predict mortality among hospitalised patients with C.", + " difficile infection. Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics 43:6, 725-733.\n\n\n\n343 M. Todd Greene, Sanjay Saint.. (2016) Followership characteristics among infection preventionists in U.S. hospitals: Results of a national survey. American Journal of Infection Control 44:3, 343-345.\n\n\n\n344 Todd P. McCarty, Peter G. Pappas.. (2016) Invasive Candidiasis. Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 30:1, 103-124.\n\n\n\n345 Matthew Taylor, Bruce McCollister, Daewon Park.. (2016)", + " Highly Bactericidal Polyurethane Effective Against Both Normal and Drug-Resistant Bacteria: Potential Use as an Air Filter Coating. Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology 178:5, 1053-1067.\n\n\n\n346 Linnea K. Ista, Qian Yu, Anand Parthasarathy, Kirk S. Schanze, Gabriel P. L\u00f3pez.. (2016) Reusable nanoengineered surfaces for bacterial recruitment and decontamination. Biointerphases 11:1, 019003.\n\n\n\n347 Katherine A. Auger, Emily L. Mueller, Steven H. Weinberg,", + " Catherine S. Forster, Anita Shah, Christine Wolski, Grant Mussman, Anna J. Ipsaro, Matthew M. Davis.. (2016) A Validated Method for Identifying Unplanned Pediatric Readmission. The Journal of Pediatrics 170, 105-112.e2.\n\n\n\n348 Haruhisa Fukuda, Manabu Kuroki.. (2016) The Development of Statistical Models for Predicting Surgical Site Infections in Japan: Toward a Statistical Model\u2013Based Standardized Infection Ratio. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 37:03, 260-271.\n\n\n\n349 Larry K.", + " Kociolek, Dale N. Gerding.. (2016) Breakthroughs in the treatment and prevention of Clostridium difficile infection. Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology 13:3, 150-160.\n\n\n\n350 Erik R. Dubberke, Margaret A. Olsen, Dustin Stwalley, Ciar\u00e1n P. Kelly, Dale N. Gerding, Yinong Young-Xu, Cedric Mah\u00e9, Abhishek Deshpande.. (2016) Identification of Medicare Recipients at Highest Risk for Clostridium difficile Infection in the US by Population Attributable Risk Analysis.", + " PLOS ONE 11:2, e0146822.\n\n\n\n351 A. Smith, L.R. Taggart, G. Lebovic, N. Zeynalova, A. Khan, M.P. Muller.. (2016) Clostridium difficile infection incidence: impact of audit and feedback programme to improve room cleaning. Journal of Hospital Infection 92:2, 161-166.\n\n\n\n352 Jos\u00e9 Mill\u00e1n O\u00f1ate-Guti\u00e9rrez, Mar\u00eda Virginia Villegas, Adriana Correa.. (2016) Prevalencia y factores relacionados con la infecci\u00f3n por Clostridium difficile en un centro hospitalario de alta complejidad en Cali (Colombia). Infectio.\n\n\n\n353 David Padua,", + " Charalabos Pothoulakis.. (2016) Novel approaches to treating Clostridium difficile -associated colitis. Expert Review of Gastroenterology & Hepatology 10:2, 193-204.\n\n\n\n354 Patrizia Spigaglia, Fabrizio Barbanti, Matteo Morandi, Maria Luisa Moro, Paola Mastrantonio.. (2016) Diagnostic testing for Clostridium difficile in Italian microbiological laboratories. Anaerobe 37, 29-33.\n\n\n\n355 Karen Jones, Jehad Sibai, Rebecca Battjes, Mohamad G.", + " Fakih.. (2016) How and when nurses collect urine cultures on catheterized patients: A survey of 5 hospitals. American Journal of Infection Control 44:2, 173-176.\n\n\n\n356 Zafer Tandogdu, Florian M.E. Wagenlehner.. (2016) Global epidemiology of urinary tract infections. Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases 29:1, 73-79.\n\n\n\n357 Maged Muhammed, Marios Arvanitis, Eleftherios Mylonakis.. (2016) Whole animal HTS of small molecules for antifungal compounds. Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery 11:", + "2, 177-184.\n\n\n\n358 S. Alex Rottgers, Liliana Camison, Rick Mai, Sameer Shakir, Lorelei Grunwaldt, Andrew J. Nowalk, Megan Natali, Joseph E. Losee.. (2016) Antibiotic Use in Primary Palatoplasty. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 137:2, 574-582.\n\n\n\n359 Evelyn Alvarez, Daniel Z. Uslan, Timothy Malloy, Peter Sinsheimer, Hilary Godwin.. (2016) It is time to revise our approach to registering antimicrobial agents for health care settings.", + " American Journal of Infection Control 44:2, 228-232.\n\n\n\n360 Meghan M. Cirulis, Mitchell T. Hamele, Chris R. Stockmann, Tellen D. Bennett, Susan L. Bratton.. (2016) Comparison of the New Adult Ventilator-Associated Event Criteria to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Pediatric Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia Definition (PNU2) in a Population of Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury Patients*. Pediatric Critical Care Medicine 17:2, 157-164.\n\n\n\n361 Jeremy L. Warner, Peijin Zhang, Jenny Liu, Gil Alterovitz.", + ". (2016) Classification of hospital acquired complications using temporal clinical information from a large electronic health record. 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Edmond, Alexandre Rodrigues Marra, Luis Fernando Aranha Camargo, Ricardo Andreotti Siqueira, Vivian Pereira da Mota, Arnaldo Lopes Colombo, Anuradha Chowdhary.. (2016) Epidemiology and Microbiologic Characterization of Nosocomial Candidemia from a Brazilian National Surveillance Program. PLOS ONE 11:1, e0146909.\n\n\n\n365 M. Swamydas, J.-L. Gao,", + " T. J. Break, M. D. Johnson, M. Jaeger, C. A. Rodriguez, J. K. Lim, N. M. Green, A. L. Collar, B. G. Fischer, C.-C. R. Lee, J. R. Perfect, B. D. Alexander, B.-J. Kullberg, M. G. Netea, P. M. Murphy, M. S. Lionakis.. (2016) CXCR1-mediated neutrophil degranulation and fungal killing promote Candida clearance and host survival. Science Translational Medicine 8:", + "322, 322ra10-322ra10.\n\n\n\n366 Anthony O. Gaca, Michael S. Gilmore.. (2016) Killing of VRE Enterococcus faecalis by commensal strains: Evidence for evolution and accumulation of mobile elements in the absence of competition. Gut Microbes 7:1, 90-96.\n\n\n\n367 Nathaniel D. Bastian, Hyojung Kang, Harriet B. Nembhard, Andrew Bloschichak, Paul M. Griffin.. (2016) The Impact of a Pay-for-Performance Program on Central Line\u2013Associated Blood Stream Infections in Pennsylvania.", + " Hospital Topics 94:1, 8-14.\n\n\n\n368 Michael A Pfaller, Donna M Wolk, Thomas J Lowery.. (2016) T2MR and T2Candida: novel technology for the rapid diagnosis of candidemia and invasive candidiasis. Future Microbiology 11:1, 103-117.\n\n\n\n369 Joshua W. Leung, Derek Croote, Anubhav Tripathi, Stephanie L. Angione, Leonard A. Mermel.. (2016) Single fluorophore melting curve analysis for detection of hypervirulent Clostridium difficile.", + " Journal of Medical Microbiology 65:1, 62-70.\n\n\n\n370 Keiji Okinaka.. (2016) Candidemia in Cancer Patients: Focus Mainly on Hematological Malignancyand Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation. Medical Mycology Journal 57:3, J117-J123.\n\n\n\n371 EunGyeong Kim, Ihnsook Jeong, Shakuntala Thanju.. 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Journal of Medical Systems 40:1.\n\n\n\n383 Florian Wagenlehner..", + " (2016) Antibiotic Resistance and Novel Antibiotics for the Treatment of Urinary Tract Infections. Urogenital Tract Infection 11:2, 43.\n\n\n\n384 Adam C. Sheka, Sarah Tevis, Gregory D. Kennedy.. (2016) Urinary tract infection after surgery for colorectal malignancy: risk factors and complications. The American Journal of Surgery 211:1, 31-39.\n\n\n\n385 K. Zycinska, M. Chmielewska, B. Lenartowicz, M. Hadzik-Blaszczyk, M. Cieplak,", + " Z. Kur, R. Krupa, K.A. Wardyn.. 2016. Antibiotic Treatment of Hospitalized Patients with Pneumonia Complicated by Clostridium Difficile Infection. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology.\n\n\n\n386 Rayo Morfin-Otero, Elvira Garza-Gonzalez, Sara A. Aguirre-Diaz, Rodrigo Escobedo-Sanchez, Sergio Esparza-Ahumada, Hector R. Perez-Gomez, Santiago Petersen-Morfin, Esteban Gonzalez-Diaz, Adrian Martinez-Melendez, Eduardo Rodriguez-Noriega.. (2016)", + " Clostridium difficile outbreak caused by NAP1/BI/027 strain and non-027 strains in a Mexican hospital. The Brazilian Journal of Infectious Diseases 20:1, 8-13.\n\n\n\n387 K. Zycinska, M. Chmielewska, B. Lenartowicz, M. Hadzik-Blaszczyk, M. Cieplak, Z. Kur, R. Krupa, K. A. Wardyn.. 2016. Antibiotic Treatment of Hospitalized Patients with Pneumonia Complicated by Clostridium Difficile Infection.", + " Advancements in Clinical Research, 59-64.\n\n\n\n388 Raquel Moure, \u00c1ngeles Ca\u00f1izares, Mar\u00eda Mu\u00ed\u00f1o, Margarita Lobato, Ana Fern\u00e1ndez, Mar\u00eda Rodr\u00edguez, Ma Jos\u00e9 Gude, Maria Tom\u00e1s, Germ\u00e1n Bou.. (2016) Use of the cobas 4800 system for the rapid detection of toxigenic Clostridium difficile and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Journal of Microbiological Methods 120, 50-52.\n\n\n\n389 Julie Ann Smith.. 2016. Perioperative Infection Control.", + " Head, Neck, and Orofacial Infections, 438-451.\n\n\n\n390 P.L. 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(2015) Identification of population at risk for future Clostridium difficile infection following hospital discharge to be targeted for vaccine trials. Vaccine 33:46, 6241-6249.\n\n\n\n428 (2015) Vital Signs: Estimated Effects of a Coordinated Approach for Action to Reduce Antibiotic-Resistant Infections in Health Care Facilities - United States. American Journal of Transplantation 15:11, 3002-3007.\n\n\n\n429 Edward M. Drozd, Timothy J. Inocencio, Shamonda Braithwaite,", + " Dayo Jagun, Hemal Shah, Nicole C. Quon, Kelly C. Broderick, Joseph L. Kuti.. (2015) Mortality, Hospital Costs, Payments, and Readmissions Associated With Clostridium difficile Infection Among Medicare Beneficiaries. Infectious Diseases in Clinical Practice 23:6, 318-323.\n\n\n\n430 Julia Y. Co, Thomas Crouzier, Katharina Ribbeck.. (2015) Probing the Role of Mucin-Bound Glycans in Bacterial Repulsion by Mucin Coatings. Advanced Materials Interfaces 2:17,", + " 1500179.\n\n\n\n431 Carrie Arnold.. (2015) Outbreak Breakthrough: Using Whole-Genome Sequencing to Control Hospital Infection. Environmental Health Perspectives 123:11.\n\n\n\n432 M. Cloutier, D. Mantovani, F. Rosei.. (2015) Antibacterial Coatings: Challenges, Perspectives, and Opportunities. Trends in Biotechnology 33:11, 637-652.\n\n\n\n433 Terri Townsend, Pamela Anderson.. (2015) Decreasing the risk of catheter-associated urinary tract infections. Nursing Critical Care 10:6, 36-41.\n\n\n\n434 Vanessa Perez,", + " Kristina D. Mena, Heather N. Watson, R. Burt Prater, John L. McIntyre.. (2015) Evaluation and quantitative microbial risk assessment of a unique antimicrobial agent for hospital surface treatment. American Journal of Infection Control 43:11, 1201-1207.\n\n\n\n435 Carolyn V. Gould, Thomas M. File, L. Clifford McDonald.. (2015) Causes, Burden, and Prevention of Clostridium difficile Infection. Infectious Diseases in Clinical Practice 23:6, 281-288.\n\n\n\n436 X. Liu, X. Duan, J.", + " Xu, Q. Jin, F. Chen, P. Wang, Y. Yang, X. Tang.. (2015) Impact of intra-operative intraperitoneal chemotherapy on organ/space surgical site infection in patients with gastric cancer. Journal of Hospital Infection 91:3, 237-243.\n\n\n\n437 Sarah Tschudin-Sutter, Karen C. Carroll, Pranita D. Tamma, Madeleine L. Sudekum, Reno Frei, Andreas F. Widmer, Brandon C. Ellis, John Bartlett, Trish M. Perl.. (2015) Impact of Toxigenic Clostridium difficile Colonization on the Risk of Subsequent C.", + " difficile Infection in Intensive Care Unit Patients. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:11, 1324-1329.\n\n\n\n438 Seungwon Lee, Priya Prasad, Matthew Lin, Susan Garritson, Amy Nichols, Catherine Liu.. (2015) Ertapenem Prophylaxis Associated With an Increased Risk of Clostridium difficile Infection Among Surgical Patients. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:11, 1351-1354.\n\n\n\n439 Adoracion Pegalajar-Jurado, Kathryn A. Wold, Jessica M. Joslin, Bella H.", + " Neufeld, Kristin A. Arabea, Lucas A. Suazo, Stephen L. McDaniel, Richard A. Bowen, Melissa M. Reynolds.. (2015) Nitric oxide-releasing polysaccharide derivative exhibits 8-log reduction against Escherichia coli, Acinetobacter baumannii and Staphylococcus aureus. Journal of Controlled Release 217, 228-234.\n\n\n\n440 Xiaojie Chen, Dandan Hou, Lu Wang, Qian Zhang, Jiahan Zou, Gang Sun.. (2015) Antibacterial Surgical Silk Sutures Using a High-", + "Performance Slow-Release Carrier Coating System. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 7:40, 22394-22403.\n\n\n\n441 Kullberg, Bart JanArendrup, Maiken C.. (2015) Invasive Candidiasis. New England Journal of Medicine 373:15, 1445-1456.\n\n\n\n442 Matthias Steglich, Andreas Nitsche, Lutz von M\u00fcller, Mathias Herrmann, Thomas A. Kohl, Stefan Niemann, Ulrich N\u00fcbel, Abhishek Deshpande.. (2015) Tracing the Spread of Clostridium difficile Ribotype 027 in Germany Based on Bacterial Genome Sequences.", + " PLOS ONE 10:10, e0139811.\n\n\n\n443 Zuli Zhang, Jun Duan.. (2015) Nosocomial pneumonia in non-invasive ventilation patients: incidence, characteristics, and outcomes. Journal of Hospital Infection 91:2, 153-157.\n\n\n\n444 Patricia W Stone, Monika Pogorzelska-Maziarz, Julie Reagan, Jacqueline A Merrill, Brad Sperber, Catherine Cairns, Matthew Penn, Tara Ramanathan, Elizabeth Mothershed, Elizabeth Skillen.. (2015) Impact of laws aimed at healthcare-associated infection reduction: a qualitative study. BMJ Quality & Safety 24:", + "10, 637-644.\n\n\n\n445 Maureen Spencer, Sue Barnes, Jorge Parada, Scott Brown, Luci Perri, Denise Uettwiller-Geiger, Helen Boehm Johnson, Denise Graham.. (2015) A primer on on-demand polymerase chain reaction technology. American Journal of Infection Control 43:10, 1102-1108.\n\n\n\n446 S. P. Costello, M. A. Conlon, M. S. Vuaran, I. C. Roberts-Thomson, J. M. Andrews.. (2015) Faecal microbiota transplant for recurrent Clostridium difficile infection using long-term frozen stool is effective:", + " clinical efficacy and bacterial viability data. Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics 42:8, 1011-1018.\n\n\n\n447 Hajime Kanamori, David J. Weber, Lauren M. DiBiase, Emily E. Sickbert-Bennett, Rebecca Brooks, Lisa Teal, David Williams, Elizabeth M. Walters, William A. Rutala.. (2015) Longitudinal Trends in All Healthcare-Associated Infections through Comprehensive Hospital-wide Surveillance and Infection Control Measures over the Past 12 Years: Substantial Burden of Healthcare-Associated Infections Outside of Intensive Care Units and \u201cOther\u201d Types of Infection.", + " Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:10, 1139-1147.\n\n\n\n448 Kristy Weinshel, Angela Dramowski, \u00c1gnes Hajdu, Saul Jacob, Basudha Khanal, Masz\u00e1rovics Zolt\u00e1n, Katerina Mougkou, Chimanjita Phukan, Maria In\u00e9s Staneloni, Nalini Singh.. (2015) Gap Analysis of Infection Control Practices in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:10, 1208-1214.\n\n\n\n449 Amilcar F. Cardona, Samuel E.", + " Wilson.. (2015) Skin and Soft-Tissue Infections: A Critical Review and the Role of Telavancin in Their Treatment. Clinical Infectious Diseases 61:suppl 2, S69-S78.\n\n\n\n450 Silvia Caballero, Rebecca Carter, Xu Ke, Bo\u017ee Su\u0161ac, Ingrid M. Leiner, Grace J. Kim, Liza Miller, Lilan Ling, Katia Manova, Eric G. Pamer, Andreas J Baumler.. (2015) Distinct but Spatially Overlapping Intestinal Niches for Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococcus faecium and Carbapenem-", + "Resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae. PLOS Pathogens 11:9, e1005132.\n\n\n\n451 J. Musau, A. Baumann, C. Kolotylo, T. O'Shea, A. Bialachowski.. (2015) Infectious disease outbreaks and increased complexity of care. International Nursing Review 62:3, 404-411.\n\n\n\n452 Mary R. Mulcare, Tony Rosen, Sunday Clark, Kartik Viswanathan, Jaime Lynn Hayes, Michael E. Stern, Neal E. Flomenbaum, Kennon Heard.. (2015) A Novel Clinical Protocol for Placement and Management of Indwelling Urinary Catheters in Older Adults in the Emergency Department.", + " Academic Emergency Medicine 22:9, 1056-1066.\n\n\n\n453 Shelley S. Magill, Ghinwa Dumyati, Susan M. Ray, Scott K. Fridkin.. (2015) Evaluating Epidemiology and Improving Surveillance of Infections Associated with Health Care, United States. Emerging Infectious Diseases 21:9, 1537-1542.\n\n\n\n454 Julia S. Sammons, Philip Toltzis.. (2015) Pitfalls in Diagnosis of Pediatric Clostridium difficile Infection. Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 29:3, 465-476.\n\n\n\n455 Harold W.", + " Horowitz.. (2015) Infection control: Public reporting, disincentives, and bad behavior. American Journal of Infection Control 43:9, 989-991.\n\n\n\n456 Daniel J. Morgan, Surbhi Leekha, Lindsay Croft, Carey-Ann D. Burnham, J. Kristie Johnson, Lisa Pineles, Anthony D. Harris, Erik R. Dubberke.. (2015) The Importance of Colonization with Clostridium difficile on Infection and Transmission. Current Infectious Disease Reports 17:9.\n\n\n\n457 James L. Hadler, Richard N. Danila,", + " Paul R. Cieslak, James I. Meek, William Schaffner, Kirk E. Smith, Matthew L. Cartter, Lee H. Harrison, Duc J. Vugia, Ruth Lynfield.. (2015) Emerging Infections Program\u2014State Health Department Perspective. Emerging Infectious Diseases 21:9, 1510-1515.\n\n\n\n458 Nina N. Semsarzadeh, Kashyap K. Tadisina, John Maddox, Karan Chopra, Devinder P. Singh.. (2015) Closed Incision Negative-Pressure Therapy Is Associated with Decreased Surgical-Site Infections.", + " Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 136:3, 592-602.\n\n\n\n459 C. Thongprayoon, W. Cheungpasitporn, P. Phatharacharukul, P. J. Edmonds, Q. Kaewpoowat, P. Mahaparn, J. Bruminhent, S. B. Erickson.. (2015) Chronic kidney disease and end-stage renal disease are risk factors for poor outcomes of Clostridium difficile infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis. International Journal of Clinical Practice 69:9, 998-1006.\n\n\n\n460 Carolyn Sipes,", + " Joy Don Baker.. (2015) Technology in the OR: AORN Members\u2019 Perceptions of the Effects on Workflow Efficiency and Quality Patient Care. AORN Journal 102:3, 289.e1-289.e19.\n\n\n\n461 H. Hu, K. Johani, I.B. Gosbell, A.S.W. Jacombs, A. Almatroudi, G.S. Whiteley, A.K. Deva, S. Jensen, K. Vickery.. (2015) Intensive care unit environmental surfaces are contaminated by multidrug-resistant bacteria in biofilms: combined results of conventional culture, pyrosequencing,", + " scanning electron microscopy, and confocal laser microscopy. Journal of Hospital Infection 91:1, 35-44.\n\n\n\n462 Christine Greene, Gayathri Vadlamudi, Marisa Eisenberg, Betsy Foxman, James Koopman, Chuanwu Xi.. (2015) Fomite-fingerpad transfer efficiency (pick-up and deposit) of Acinetobacter baumannii\u2014with and without a latex glove. American Journal of Infection Control 43:9, 928-934.\n\n\n\n463 Deborah Horwitz, Tyler McCue, Abigail C. Mapes, Nadim J. Ajami,", + " Joseph F. Petrosino, Robert F. Ramig, Barbara W. Trautner.. (2015) Decreased microbiota diversity associated with urinary tract infection in a trial of bacterial interference. Journal of Infection 71:3, 358-367.\n\n\n\n464 Chunhui Li, Sidi Liu, Pengcheng Zhou, Juping Duan, Qingya Dou, Rui Zhang, Hong Chen, Ying Cheng, Anhua Wu.. (2015) Emergence of a Novel Binary Toxin\u2013Positive Strain of Clostridium difficile Associated With Severe Diarrhea That Was Not Ribotype 027 and 078 in China.", + " Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:09, 1112-1114.\n\n\n\n465 Lindsay D. Croft, Anthony D. Harris, Lisa Pineles, Patricia Langenberg, Michelle Shardell, Jeffrey C. Fink, Linda Simoni-Wastila, Daniel J. Morgan.. (2015) The Effect of Universal Glove and Gown Use on Adverse Events in Intensive Care Unit Patients. Clinical Infectious Diseases 61:4, 545-553.\n\n\n\n466 Bradley L. Carpenter, Frank Scholle, Hasan Sadeghifar, Aaron J. Francis, Jonathan Boltersdorf, Walter W.", + " Weare, Dimitris S. Argyropoulos, Paul A. Maggard, Reza A. Ghiladi.. (2015) Synthesis, Characterization, and Antimicrobial Efficacy of Photomicrobicidal Cellulose Paper. Biomacromolecules 16:8, 2482-2492.\n\n\n\n467 Rachel B. Slayton, Damon Toth, Bruce Y. Lee, Windy Tanner, Sarah M. Bartsch, Karim Khader, Kim Wong, Kevin Brown, James A. McKinnell, William Ray, Loren G. Miller, Michael Rubin, Diane S.", + " Kim, Fred Adler, Chenghua Cao, Lacey Avery, Nathan T.B. Stone, Alexander Kallen, Matthew Samore, Susan S. Huang, Scott Fridkin, John A. Jernigan.. (2015) Vital Signs: Estimated Effects of a Coordinated Approach for Action to Reduce Antibiotic-Resistant Infections in Health Care Facilities \u2014 United States. MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 64:30, 826-831.\n\n\n\n468 Jesmond Dalli, Nan Chiang, Charles N Serhan.. (2015) Elucidation of novel 13-series resolvins that increase with atorvastatin and clear infections.", + " Nature Medicine 21:9, 1071-1075.\n\n\n\n469 Federico Perez, Maria Virginia Villegas.. (2015) The role of surveillance systems in confronting the global crisis of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases 28:4, 375-383.\n\n\n\n470 Wendy Irene Sligl, Tatiana Dragan, Stephanie Wrenn Smith.. (2015) Nosocomial Gram-negative bacteremia in intensive care: epidemiology, antimicrobial susceptibilities, and outcomes. International Journal of Infectious Diseases 37, 129-134.\n\n\n\n471 Kelly B. Flett, Al Ozonoff,", + " Dionne A. Graham, Thomas J. Sandora, Gregory P. Priebe.. (2015) Impact of Mandatory Public Reporting of Central Line\u2013Associated Bloodstream Infections on Blood Culture and Antibiotic Utilization in Pediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care Units. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:08, 878-885.\n\n\n\n472 Carolyn J. Khong, James Baggs, David Kleinbaum, Ronda Cochran, John A. Jernigan.. (2015) The Likelihood of Hospital Readmission Among Patients With Hospital-Onset Central Line\u2013Associated Bloodstream Infections. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:", + "08, 886-892.\n\n\n\n473 Jes\u00fas L\u00f3pez-Alcalde, Marta Mateos-Maz\u00f3n, Marcela Guevara, Lucieni O Conterno, Ivan Sol\u00e0, Sheila Cabir Nunes, Xavier Bonfill Cosp, Jes\u00fas L\u00f3pez-Alcalde.. 2015. Gloves, gowns and masks for reducing the transmission of meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in the hospital setting. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.\n\n\n\n474 Carolyn A. Edelstein, Zain Kassam, Jamie Daw, Mark B. Smith, Colleen R.", + " Kelly.. (2015) The regulation of fecal microbiota for transplantation: An international perspective for policy and public health. Clinical Research and Regulatory Affairs 32:3, 99-107.\n\n\n\n475 Keith S. Kaye, George Udeani, Phillip Cole, Hillel David Friedland.. (2015) Ceftaroline fosamil for the treatment of hospital-acquired pneumonia and ventilator-associated pneumonia. Hospital Practice 43:3, 144-149.\n\n\n\n476 Guglielmo Borgia, Alberto Enrico Maraolo, Maria Foggia, Antonio Riccardo Buonomo, Ivan Gentile.", + ". (2015) Fecal microbiota transplantation for Clostridium difficile infection: back to the future. Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy 15:7, 1001-1014.\n\n\n\n477 Ra\u00fal Hern\u00e1ndez-Garc\u00eda, Elvira Garza-Gonz\u00e1lez, Mark Miller, Giovanna Arteaga-Muller, Alejandra Mar\u00eda Galv\u00e1n-de los Santos, Adri\u00e1n Camacho-Ortiz.. (2015) Application of the ATLAS score for evaluating the severity of Clostridium difficile infection in teaching hospitals in Mexico. The Brazilian Journal of Infectious Diseases 19:4,", + " 399-402.\n\n\n\n478 N Daneman, A Guttmann, X Wang, X Ma, D Gibson, TA Stukel.. (2015) The association of hospital prevention processes and patient risk factors with the risk of Clostridium difficile infection: a population-based cohort study. BMJ Quality & Safety 24:7, 435-443.\n\n\n\n479 Catherine Murphy, Jacqui Prieto, Mandy Fader.. (2015) \u201cIt's easier to stick a tube in\u201d: a qualitative study to understand clinicians\u2019 individual decisions to place urinary catheters in acute medical care. BMJ Quality & Safety 24:", + "7, 444-450.\n\n\n\n480 S. Di Bella, C. Nisii, N. Petrosillo.. (2015) Is tigecycline a suitable option for Clostridium difficile infection? Evidence from the literature. International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents 46:1, 8-12.\n\n\n\n481 Shawna White, Lisa Spruce.. (2015) Perioperative Nursing Leaders Implement Clinical Practice Guidelines Using the Iowa Model of Evidence-Based Practice. AORN Journal 102:1, 50-59.\n\n\n\n482 Zhiqiu Ye, Dana B. Mukamel, Susan S.", + " Huang, Yue Li, Helena Temkin-Greener.. (2015) Healthcare-Associated Pathogens and Nursing Home Policies and Practices: Results From a National Survey. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:07, 759-766.\n\n\n\n483 Simon Lax, Jack A Gilbert.. (2015) Hospital-associated microbiota and implications for nosocomial infections. Trends in Molecular Medicine 21:7, 427-432.\n\n\n\n484 Eric Wenzler, Surafel Mulugeta, Larry Danziger.. (2015) The Antimicrobial Stewardship Approach to Combating Clostridium Difficile.", + " Antibiotics 4:2, 198-215.\n\n\n\n485 Alpesh N Amin, Dennis Deruelle.. (2015) Healthcare-associated infections, infection control and the potential of new antibiotics in development in the USA. Future Microbiology 10:6, 1049-1062.\n\n\n\n486 Peter H. Gilligan.. (2015) Optimizing the Laboratory Diagnosis of Clostridium difficile Infection. Clinics in Laboratory Medicine 35:2, 299-312.\n\n\n\n487 (2015) APIC advocacy on health information technology. American Journal of Infection Control 43:6, 548-", + "550.\n\n\n\n488 Scott D. Kobayashi, Natalia Malachowa, Frank R. DeLeo.. (2015) Pathogenesis of Staphylococcus aureus Abscesses. The American Journal of Pathology 185:6, 1518-1527.\n\n\n\n489 V. Williams, A.E. Simor, A. Kiss, A. McGeer, Z. Hirji, O.E. Larios, C. Moore, K. Weiss.. (2015) Is the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant organisms changing in Canadian hospitals? Comparison of point-prevalence survey results in 2010 and 2012.", + " Clinical Microbiology and Infection 21:6, 553-559.\n\n\n\n490 Mohammed J. Saeed, Erik R. Dubberke, Victoria J. Fraser, Margaret A. Olsen.. (2015) Procedure-specific surgical site infection incidence varies widely within certain National Healthcare Safety Network surgery groups. American Journal of Infection Control 43:6, 617-623.\n\n\n\n491 Andrej Steyer, Ion Guti\u00e9rrez-Aguirre, Nejc Ra\u010dki, Sara Beigot Glaser, Barbara Brajer Humar, Marjeta Stra\u017ear, Igor \u0160krjanc, Mateja Polj\u0161ak-Prijatelj,", + " Maja Ravnikar, Maja Rupnik.. (2015) The Detection Rate of Enteric Viruses and Clostridium difficile in a Waste Water Treatment Plant Effluent. Food and Environmental Virology 7:2, 164-172.\n\n\n\n492 Sarah L Krein, Karen E Fowler, David Ratz, Jennifer Meddings, Sanjay Saint.. (2015) Preventing device-associated infections in US hospitals: national surveys from 2005 to 2013. BMJ Quality & Safety 24:6, 385-392.\n\n\n\n493 Jingjing Shang, Patricia Stone, Elaine Larson.", + ". (2015) Studies on nurse staffing and health care\u2013associated infection: Methodologic challenges and potential solutions. American Journal of Infection Control 43:6, 581-588.\n\n\n\n494 Ying P. Tabak, Richard S. Johannes, Xiaowu Sun, Carlos M. Nunez, L. Clifford McDonald.. (2015) Predicting the Risk for Hospital-Onset Clostridium difficile Infection (HO-CDI) at the Time of Inpatient Admission: HO-CDI Risk Score. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:06, 695-701.\n\n\n\n495 C.", + " T. Evans, S. Johnson.. (2015) Prevention of Clostridium difficile Infection With Probiotics. Clinical Infectious Diseases 60:suppl 2, S122-S128.\n\n\n\n496 C. T. Evans, N. Safdar.. (2015) Current Trends in the Epidemiology and Outcomes of Clostridium difficile Infection. Clinical Infectious Diseases 60:suppl 2, S66-S71.\n\n\n\n497 Arunee Nakhongsri, Gregory Crow.. (2015) Virtual nursing grand rounds. Nursing 45:5, 18-21.\n\n\n\n498 George Allen.", + ". (2015) Infection Prevention: A Patient Safety Imperative for the Perioperative Setting. AORN Journal 101:5, 508-510.\n\n\n\n499 Charles E. Edmiston, Ojan Assadian, Maureen Spencer, Russell N. Olmsted, Sue Barnes, David Leaper.. (2015) To Bathe or Not to Bathe With Chlorhexidine Gluconate: Is It Time to Take a Stand for Preadmission Bathing and Cleansing?. AORN Journal 101:5, 529-538.\n\n\n\n500 Sandy Bogucki, Alexander Isakov, David C.", + " Cone.. (2015) Patients Under Investigation for Ebola Virus Disease in the United States: Hospital Preparedness Planning and Alternate Care Facilities. Academic Emergency Medicine 22:5, 600-604.\n\n\n\n501 J. Otter.. (2015) Journal Roundup: Ebola, antibiotic use and abuse, and the usual suspects. Journal of Hospital Infection 90:1, 85-86.\n\n\n\n502 Florian M Wagenlehner, Obiamiwe Umeh, Judith Steenbergen, Guojun Yuan, Rabih O Darouiche.. (2015) Ceftolozane-tazobactam compared with levofloxacin in the treatment of complicated urinary-", + "tract infections, including pyelonephritis: a randomised, double-blind, phase 3 trial (ASPECT-cUTI). The Lancet 385:9981, 1949-1956.\n\n\n\n503 Daniel J. Morgan, Valerie M. Deloney, Allison Bartlett, Susan E. Boruchoff, Renato Camagros Couto, Michael Oji, Aruna Poojary, Gwen Rogers, Carol Sulis, Aaron M. Milstone.. (2015) The Expanding Role of the Hospital Epidemiologist in 2014: A Survey of the Society for Hospital Epidemiology of America (SHEA)", + " Research Network. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:05, 605-608.\n\n\n\n504 Jeffrey M. Bender, Mary Virgallito, Jason G. Newland, Julia S. Sammons, Emily A. Thorell, Susan E. Coffin, Andrew T. Pavia, Thomas J. Sandora, Adam L. Hersh.. (2015) Infection Prevention and Control Practices in Children\u2019s Hospitals. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:05, 597-600.\n\n\n\n505 Amanda J. Brinkworth, Carl H. Hammer, L. Renee Olano, Scott D.", + " Kobayashi, Liang Chen, Barry N. Kreiswirth, Frank R. DeLeo, Jos\u00e9 A. Bengoechea.. (2015) Identification of Outer Membrane and Exoproteins of Carbapenem-Resistant Multilocus Sequence Type 258 Klebsiella pneumoniae. PLOS ONE 10:4, e0123219.\n\n\n\n506 Trent Larson, Ravindra Gudavalli, Dean Prater, Scott Sutton.. (2015) Critical analysis of common canister programs: a review of cross-functional considerations and health system economics. Current Medical Research and Opinion 31:", + "4, 853-860.\n\n\n\n507 G. Patel, F. Perez, A.M. Hujer, S.D. Rudin, J.J. Augustine, G.H. Jacobs, M.R. Jacobs, R.A. Bonomo.. (2015) Fulminant endocarditis and disseminated infection caused by carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii in a renal-pancreas transplant recipient. Transplant Infectious Disease 17:2, 289-296.\n\n\n\n508 H. Humphreys, P.J. Jenks.. (2015) Surveillance and management of ventriculitis following neurosurgery.", + " Journal of Hospital Infection 89:4, 281-286.\n\n\n\n509 S. Brusaferro, L. Arnoldo, G. Cattani, E. Fabbro, B. Cookson, R. Gallagher, P. Hartemann, J. Holt, S. Kalenic, W. Popp, G. Privitera, V. Prikazsky, C. Velasco, C. Suetens, C. Varela Santos.. (2015) Harmonizing and supporting infection control training in Europe. Journal of Hospital Infection 89:4, 351-356.\n\n\n\n510 F.", + " Barbut.. (2015) How to eradicate Clostridium difficile from the environment. Journal of Hospital Infection 89:4, 287-295.\n\n\n\n511 A.J. Furlong, N.L. Clark, J.L. Schmalzel.. (2015) Configurable device to combat the spread of hospital acquired infections. 2015 41st Annual Northeast Biomedical Engineering Conference (NEBEC), 1-2.\n\n\n\n512 Stefano Di Bella, Theodore Gouliouris, Nicola Petrosillo.. (2015) Fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) for Clostridium difficile infection:", + " Focus on immunocompromised patients. Journal of Infection and Chemotherapy 21:4, 230-237.\n\n\n\n513 Fang Gao, Yan-yan Wu, Jun-ning Zou, Ming Zhu, Jie Zhang, Hai-yan Huang, Li-juan Xiong.. (2015) Impact of a bundle on prevention and control of healthcare associated infections in intensive care unit. Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Technology [Medical Sciences] 35:2, 283-290.\n\n\n\n514 Calvin Williams, Patty McGraw, Elyse E. Schneck, Anna LaFae, Jesse T.", + " Jacob, Daniela Moreno, Katherine Reyes, G. Fernando Cubillos, Daniel H. Kett, Ronald Estrella, Daniel J. Morgan, Anthony D. Harris, Marci Drees.. (2015) Impact of Universal Gowning and Gloving on Health Care Worker Clothing Contamination. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:04, 431-437.\n\n\n\n515 Stephanie R. Black, Kingsley N. Weaver, Robert A. Weinstein, Mary K. Hayden, Michael Y. Lin, Mary Alice Lavin, Susan I. Gerber.. (2015) Regional Infection Control Assessment of Antibiotic Resistance Knowledge and Practice.", + " Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:04, 381-386.\n\n\n\n516 Rupak Datta, N. Neely Kazerouni, Jon Rosenberg, Vinh Q. Nguyen, Michael Phelan, John Billimek, Chenghua Cao, Patricia McLendon, Kate Cummings, Susan S. Huang.. (2015) Substantial Variation in Hospital Rankings after Adjusting for Hospital-Level Predictors of Publicly-Reported Hospital-Associated Clostridium difficile Infection Rates. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:04, 464-466.\n\n\n\n517 Mary Janice Jones, Niles P.", + " Donegan, Irina V. Mikheyeva, Ambrose L. Cheung, Herminia de Lencastre.. (2015) Improving Transformation of Staphylococcus aureus Belonging to the CC1, CC5 and CC8 Clonal Complexes. PLOS ONE 10:3, e0119487.\n\n\n\n518 E. Mylonakis, C. J. Clancy, L. Ostrosky-Zeichner, K. W. Garey, G. J. Alangaden, J. A. Vazquez, J. S. Groeger,", + " M. A. Judson, Y.-M. Vinagre, S. O. Heard, F. N. Zervou, I. M. Zacharioudakis, D. P. Kontoyiannis, P. G. Pappas.. (2015) T2 Magnetic Resonance Assay for the Rapid Diagnosis of Candidemia in Whole Blood: A Clinical Trial. Clinical Infectious Diseases 60:6, 892-899.\n\n\n\n519 D Eyre, L Tracey, B Elliott, C Slimings, P Huntington, R Stuart, T Korman, G Kotsiou, R McCann,", + " D Griffiths, W Fawley, P Armstrong, K Dingle, A Walker, T Peto, D Crook, M Wilcox, T Riley.. (2015) Emergence and spread of predominantly community-onset Clostridium difficile PCR ribotype 244 infection in Australia, 2010 to 2012. Eurosurveillance 20:10, 21059.\n\n\n\n520 Rachel A. Smith, Nkuchia M. M\u2019ikanatha, Andrew F. Read.. (2015) Antibiotic Resistance: A Primer and Call to Action. Health Communication 30:3, 309-", + "314.\n\n\n\n521 Michelle Traverse, Helen Aceto.. (2015) Environmental Cleaning and Disinfection. Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice 45:2, 299-330.\n\n\n\n522 Dale N. Gerding, Fernanda C. Lessa.. (2015) The Epidemiology of Clostridium difficile Infection Inside and Outside Health Care Institutions. Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 29:1, 37-50.\n\n\n\n523 Susan F. Paparella.. (2015) When Bugs and Drugs Converge: Promoting Safe Practices in the Emergency Department. Journal of Emergency Nursing 41:", + "2, 141-143.\n\n\n\n524 Adam J. Friedant, Brittany M. Gouse, Amelia K. Boehme, James E. Siegler, Karen C. Albright, Dominique J. Monlezun, Alexander J. George, Timothy Mark Beasley, Sheryl Martin-Schild.. (2015) A Simple Prediction Score for Developing a Hospital-Acquired Infection after Acute Ischemic Stroke. Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases 24:3, 680-686.\n\n\n\n525 Ioannis M Zacharioudakis, Fainareti N Zervou, Elina Eleftheria Pliakos,", + " Panayiotis D Ziakas, Eleftherios Mylonakis.. (2015) Colonization With Toxinogenic C. difficile Upon Hospital Admission, and Risk of Infection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. The American Journal of Gastroenterology 110:3, 381-390.\n\n\n\n526 Rhonda E. Colombo, Jose Vazquez.. (2015) Echinocandins for Primary Therapy of Candidemia: Time for a Paradigm Shift?. Current Fungal Infection Reports 9:1, 15-22.\n\n\n\n527 Robin L. P. Jump,", + " Curtis J. Donskey.. (2015) Clostridium difficile in the Long-Term Care Facility: Prevention and Management. Current Geriatrics Reports 4:1, 60-69.\n\n\n\n528 Sanjay Saint, Karen E. Fowler, Kelley Sermak, Elissa Gaies, Molly Harrod, Penny Holland, Suzanne F. Bradley, J. Brian Hancock, Sarah L. Krein.. (2015) Introducing the No Preventable Harms campaign: Creating the safest health care system in the world, starting with catheter-associated urinary tract infection prevention. American Journal of Infection Control 43:", + "3, 254-259.\n\n\n\n529 Jennie H. Kwon, Margaret A. Olsen, Erik R. Dubberke.. (2015) The Morbidity, Mortality, and Costs Associated with Clostridium difficile Infection. Infectious Disease Clinics of North America 29:1, 123-134.\n\n\n\n530 Marya D. Zilberberg, Andrew F. Shorr, Scott T. Micek, Marin H. Kollef.. (2015) Clostridium difficile Recurrence Is a Strong Predictor of 30-Day Rehospitalization Among Patients in Intensive Care.", + " Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:03, 273-279.\n\n\n\n531 Anupama Neelakanta, Sarit Sharma, Vishnu Priya Kesani, Madiha Salim, Amina Pervaiz, Nida Aftab, Tal Mann, Nader Tashtoush, Shigehiko Karino, Sorabh Dhar, Keith S. Kaye.. (2015) Impact of Changes in the NHSN Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection (CAUTI) Surveillance criteria on the Frequency and Epidemiology of CAUTI in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:", + "03, 346-349.\n\n\n\n532 Lessa, Fernanda C., Mu, Yi, Bamberg, Wendy M., Beldavs, Zintars G., Dumyati, Ghinwa K., Dunn, John R., Farley, Monica M., Holzbauer, Stacy M., Meek, James I., Phipps, Erin C., Wilson, Lucy E., Winston, Lisa G., Cohen, Jessica A., Limbago, Brandi M., Fridkin, Scott K., Gerding, Dale N., McDonald, L. Clifford,", + ".. (2015) Burden of Clostridium difficile Infection in the United States. New England Journal of Medicine 372:9, 825-834.\n\n\n\n533 Panayiotis D. Ziakas, Ioannis M. Zacharioudakis, Fainareti N. Zervou, Christos Grigoras, Elina Eleftheria Pliakos, Eleftherios Mylonakis, Abhishek Deshpande.. (2015) Asymptomatic Carriers of Toxigenic C. difficile in Long-Term Care Facilities: A Meta-Analysis of Prevalence and Risk Factors.", + " PLOS ONE 10:2, e0117195.\n\n\n\n534 M.-L. Lambert, R. Bruyndonckx, H. Goossens, N. Hens, M. Aerts, B. Catry, F. Neely, D. Vogelaers, N. Hammami.. (2015) The Belgian policy of funding antimicrobial stewardship in hospitals and trends of selected quality indicators for antimicrobial use, 1999-2010: a longitudinal study. BMJ Open 5:2, e006916-e006916.\n\n\n\n535 Feroze Sidhwa, Kamal M.F.", + " Itani.. (2015) Skin Preparation Before Surgery: Options and Evidence. Surgical Infections 16:1, 14-23.\n\n\n\n536 Mohamed El Hassan, Asim Ahmed Elnour, Farah Hamad Farah, Abdulla Shehab, Naama M. Al Kalbani, Sahar Asim, Omer Abdulla Shehab, Rauda Abdulla.. (2015) Clinical pharmacists\u2019 review of surgical antimicrobial prophylaxis in a tertiary hospital in Abu Dhabi. International Journal of Clinical Pharmacy 37:1, 18-22.\n\n\n\n537 R. Latibeaudiere,", + " R. Rosa, P. Laowansiri, K. Arheart, N. Namias, L. S. Munoz-Price.. (2015) Surveillance Cultures Growing Carbapenem-Resistant Acinetobacter baumannii Predict the Development of Clinical Infections: A Retrospective Cohort Study. Clinical Infectious Diseases 60:3, 415-422.\n\n\n\n538 Anucha Apisarnthanarak, Nalini Singh, Aila Nica Bandong, Gilbert Madriaga.. (2015) Triclosan-Coated Sutures Reduce the Risk of Surgical Site Infections:", + " A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:02, 169-179.\n\n\n\n539 Y. Inoue, A. Hagi, T. Nii, Y. Tsubotani, H. Nakata, K. Iwata.. (2015) Novel antiseptic compound OPB-2045G shows potent bactericidal activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus both in vitro and in vivo: a pilot study in animals. Journal of Medical Microbiology 64:Pt_1, 32-", + "36.\n\n\n\n540 C. Eckert, A. Emirian, A. Le Monnier, L. Cathala, H. De Montclos, J. Goret, P. Berger, A. Petit, A. De Chevigny, H. Jean-Pierre, B. Nebbad, S. Camiade, R. Meckenstock, V. Lalande, H. Marchandin, F. Barbut.. (2015) Prevalence and pathogenicity of binary toxin\u2013positive Clostridium difficile strains that do not produce toxins A and B. New Microbes and New Infections 3,", + " 12-17.\n\n\n\n541 Kohta Katayama, Manami Suzuki, Yukiko Seki, Nanami Mori, Takao Kanai, Yasuharu Tokuda.. (2015) Causes of New Onset Fever among Hospitalized Patients and Predictors for In-Hospital Mortality in a Teaching Hospital in Japan. General Medicine 16:2, 84-89.\n\n\n\n542 Prashant Bhatia.. (2015) Alternative empiric therapy to carbapenems in management of drug resistant gram negative pathogens: a new way to spare carbapenems. Research Journal of Infectious Diseases 3:", + "1, 2.\n\n\n\n543 Joel Coffel, Eric Nuxoll.. (2015) Magnetic nanoparticle/polymer composites for medical implant infection control. J. Mater. Chem. B 3:38, 7538-7545.\n\n\n\n544 Luc Bissonnette, Michel G. Bergeron.. 2015. POC Tests in Microbial Diagnostics. Current and Emerging Technologies for the Diagnosis of Microbial Infections, 87-110.\n\n\n\n545 Noha Nafee.. 2015. Nanocarriers Against Bacterial Biofilms. Nanotechnology in Diagnosis, Treatment and Prophylaxis of Infectious Diseases,", + " 167-189.\n\n\n\n546 Brian Le\u00f3n, F. P. Jake Haeckl, Roger G. Linington.. (2015) Optimized quinoline amino alcohols as disruptors and dispersal agents of Vibrio cholerae biofilms. Org. Biomol. Chem. 13:31, 8495-8499.\n\n\n\n547 Gregory M. Susla.. (2015) Antibiotic Dosing in Critically Ill Patients Undergoing Renal Replacement Therapy. AACN Advanced Critical Care 26:3, 244-251.\n\n\n\n548 Carlo de Werra, Sergio Aloia, Rosa di Micco,", + " Roberto del Giudice, Roberto Tramontano, Francesco Mangani, Ludovica Maria Esposito, Gabriele di Filippo.. (2015) SSIs in Italy: Prevention and Surveillance during the Last Five Years. Surgical Science 06:08, 383-394.\n\n\n\n549 Zaid M. Abdelsattar, Greta Krapohl, Layan Alrahmani, Mousumi Banerjee, Robert W. Krell, Sandra L. Wong, Darrell A. Campbell, David M. Aronoff, Samantha Hendren.. (2015) Postoperative Burden of Hospital-Acquired Clostridium difficile Infection.", + " Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 36:01, 40-46.\n\n\n\n550 Harvey Rubin, Trevor Selwood, Takahiro Yano, Damian G. Weaver, H. Marie Loughran, Michael J. Costanzo, Richard W. Scott, Jay E. Wrobel, Katie B. Freeman, Allen B. Reitz.. (2015) Acinetobacter baumannii OxPhos inhibitors as selective anti-infective agents. Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters 25:2, 378-383.\n\n\n\n551 Clare F Heal, Mieke L van Driel, Phoebe D Lepper,", + " Jennifer L Banks, Clare F Heal.. 2014. Topical antibiotics for preventing surgical site infection in wounds healing by primary intention. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.\n\n\n\n552 Ying P. Tabak, William R. Jarvis, Xiaowu Sun, Cynthia T. Crosby, Richard S. Johannes.. (2014) Meta-analysis on central line\u2013associated bloodstream infections associated with a needleless intravenous connector with a new engineering design. American Journal of Infection Control 42:12, 1278-1284.\n\n\n\n553 Kerrie A Davies, Christopher M Longshaw, Georgina L Davis, Emilio Bouza,", + " Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Barbut, Zsuzsanna Barna, Michel Delm\u00e9e, Fidelma Fitzpatrick, Kate Ivanova, Ed Kuijper, Ioana S Macovei, Silja Mentula, Paola Mastrantonio, Lutz von M\u00fcller, M\u00f3nica Oleastro, Efthymia Petinaki, Hanna Pituch, Torbj\u00f6rn Nor\u00e9n, Elena Nov\u00e1kov\u00e1, Otakar Ny\u010d, Maja Rupnik, Daniela Schmid, Mark H Wilcox.. (2014) Underdiagnosis of Clostridium difficile across Europe: the European, multicentre,", + " prospective, biannual, point-prevalence study of Clostridium difficile infection in hospitalised patients with diarrhoea (EUCLID). The Lancet Infectious Diseases 14:12, 1208-1219.\n\n\n\n554 Daithi S. Heffernan, Elizabeth D. Fox.. (2014) Advancing Technologies for the Diagnosis and Management of Infections. Surgical Clinics of North America 94:6, 1163-1174.\n\n\n\n555 Zain Kassam, Christine H. Lee, Richard H. Hunt.. (2014) Review of the Emerging Treatment of Clostridium difficile Infection with Fecal Microbiota Transplantation and Insights into Future Challenges.", + " Clinics in Laboratory Medicine 34:4, 787-798.\n\n\n\n556 Joseph L. Fitzwater, Alan T.N. Tita.. (2014) Prevention and Management of Cesarean Wound Infection. Obstetrics and Gynecology Clinics of North America 41:4, 671-689.\n\n\n\n557 Sean W. Pawlowski.. (2014) Clostridium difficile Infection Update for the Hospital-Based Physician. Current Emergency and Hospital Medicine Reports 2:4, 214-223.\n\n\n\n558, Chung-Jong Kim, Hong-Bin Kim, Myoung-don Oh,", + " Yunhee Kim, Arim Kim, Sung-Hee Oh, Kyoung-Ho Song, Eu Suk Kim, Yong Kyun Cho, Young Hwa Choi, Jinyong Park, Baek-Nam Kim, Nam-Joong Kim, Kye-Hyung Kim, Eun Jung Lee, Jae-Bum Jun, Young Keun Kim, Sung min Kiem, Hee Jung Choi, Eun Ju Choo, Kyung-mok Sohn, Shinwon Lee, Hyun Ha Chang, Ji Hwan Bang, Su Jin Lee, Jae Hoon Lee, Seong Yeon Park, Min Hyok Jeon,", + " Na Ra Yun.. (2014) The burden of nosocomial staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infection in South Korea: a prospective hospital-based nationwide study. BMC Infectious Diseases 14:1.\n\n\n\n559 Briony Elliott, Kate E. Dingle, Xavier Didelot, Derrick W. Crook, Thomas V. Riley.. (2014) The Complexity and Diversity of the Pathogenicity Locus in Clostridium difficile Clade 5. Genome Biology and Evolution 6:12, 3159-3170.\n\n\n\n560 Gail Geller, Rachel Dvoskin, Chloe L Thio,", + " Priya Duggal, Michelle H Lewis, Theodore C Bailey, Andrea Sutherland, Daniel A Salmon, Jeffrey P Kahn.. (2014) Genomics and infectious disease: a call to identify the ethical, legal and social implications for public health and clinical practice. Genome Medicine 6:11.\n\n\n\n561 Paula Gardner, Matthew P. Muller, Betty Prior, Ken So, Jane Tooze, Linda Eum, Oksana Kachur.. (2014) Wheelchair cleaning and disinfection in Canadian health care facilities: \u201cThat's wheelie gross!\u201d. American Journal of Infection Control 42:11,", + " 1173-1177.\n\n\n\n562 R. M. Donlan.. (2014) A New Approach to Mitigate Biofilm Formation on Totally Implantable Venous Access Ports. Journal of Infectious Diseases 210:9, 1345-1346.\n\n\n\n563 Arjun Gupta, Robin Patel, Larry M. Baddour, Darrell S. Pardi, Sahil Khanna.. (2014) Extraintestinal Clostridium difficile Infections: A Single-Center Experience. Mayo Clinic Proceedings 89:11, 1525-1536.\n\n\n\n564 Chunhui Li, Ximao Wen,", + " Nan Ren, Pengcheng Zhou, Xun Huang, Ruie Gong, Li Feng, Hongman Wu, Zhenru Liu, Chenchao Fu,.. (2014) Point-Prevalence of Healthcare-Associated Infection in China in 2010: A Large Multicenter Epidemiological Survey. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 35:11, 1436-1437.\n\n\n\n565 K. K. Trivedi, C. Dumartin, M. Gilchrist, P. Wade, P. Howard.. (2014) Identifying Best Practices Across Three Countries: Hospital Antimicrobial Stewardship in the United Kingdom,", + " France, and the United States. Clinical Infectious Diseases 59:suppl 3, S170-S178.\n\n\n\n566 Wendy Nickel, Sanjay Saint, Russell N. Olmsted, Eugene Chu, Linda Greene, Barbara S. Edson, Scott A. Flanders.. (2014) The Interdisciplinary Academy for Coaching and Teamwork (I-ACT): A novel approach for training faculty experts in preventing healthcare-associated infection. American Journal of Infection Control 42:10, S230-S235.\n\n\n\n567 Vismay Thakkar, George M. Ghobrial, Christopher M. Maulucci, Saurabh Singhal,", + " Srinivas K. Prasad, James S. Harrop, Alexander R. Vaccaro, Caleb Behrend, Ashwini D. Sharan, Jack Jallo.. (2014) Nasal MRSA colonization: Impact on surgical site infection following spine surgery. Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery 125, 94-97.\n\n\n\n568 Jennie L. Mayfield.. (2014) Infection Prevention and Perioperative Professionals: A Crucial Partnership. AORN Journal 100:4, 435-438.\n\n\n\n569 Yonit Wiener-Well, Eli Ben-Chetrit, Mustafa Abed-Eldaim,", + " Marc V. Assous, Tamar Miller-Roll, Amos Adler.. (2014) Clinical and Molecular Characteristics of an Outbreak Caused by the Pandemic (BI/NAP1/027) Clostridium difficile Clone in a Single Center in Israel. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 35:10, 1306-1308.\n\n\n\n570 Linus K. Ndegwa, Mark A. Katz, Kelly McCormick, Z. Nganga, Ann Mungai, Gideon Emukule, M.K.H.M. Kollmann, Lilian Mayieka, J. Otieno,", + " Robert F. Breiman, Joshua A. Mott, Katherine Ellingson.. (2014) Surveillance for respiratory health care\u2013associated infections among inpatients in 3 Kenyan hospitals, 2010-2012. American Journal of Infection Control 42:9, 985-990.\n\n\n\n571 Margaret VanAmringe.. (2014) A View from The Joint Commission Perspective: Updated Compendium Will Continue to Help Reduce Healthcare-Associated Infections. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 35:S2, S18-S20.\n\n\n\n572 Deborah S. Yokoe, Deverick J. Anderson, Sean M.", + " Berenholtz, David P. Calfee, Erik R. Dubberke, Katherine D. Eilingson, Dale N. Gerding, Janet P. Haas, Keith S. Kaye, Michael Klompas, Evelyn Lo, Jonas Marschall, Leonard A. Mermel, Lindsay E. Nicolle, Cassandra D. Salgado, Kristina Bryant, David Classen, Katrina Crist, Valerie M. Deloney, Neil O. Fishman, Nancy Foster, Donald A. Goldmann, Eve Humphreys, John A. Jernigan, Jennifer Padberg, Trish M. Perl,", + " Kelly Podgorny, Edward J. Septimus, Margaret VanAmringe, Tom Weaver, Robert A. Weinstein, Robert Wise, Lisa L. Maragakis.. (2014) A Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute Care Hospitals: 2014 Updates. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 35:S2, S21-S31.\n\n\n\n573 Hanan H. Balkhy, Walter Zingg.. (2014) Update on infection control challenges in special pediatric populations. Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases 27:4, 370-378.\n\n\n\n574 Deborah S. Yokoe,", + " Deverick J. Anderson, Sean M. Berenholtz, David P. Calfee, Erik R. Dubberke, Katherine D. Ellingson, Dale N. Gerding, Janet P. Haas, Keith S. Kaye, Michael Klompas, Evelyn Lo, Jonas Marschall, Leonard A. Mermel, Lindsay E. Nicolle, Cassandra D. Salgado, Kristina Bryant, David Classen, Katrina Crist, Valerie M. Deloney, Neil O. Fishman, Nancy Foster, Donald A. Goldmann, Eve Humphreys, John A. Jernigan,", + " Jennifer Padberg, Trish M. Perl, Kelly Podgorny, Edward J. Septimus, Margaret VanAmringe, Tom Weaver, Robert A. Weinstein, Robert Wise, Lisa L. Maragakis.. (2014) A Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute Care Hospitals: 2014 Updates. American Journal of Infection Control 42:8, 820-828.\n\n\n\n575 Mary Lou Manning.. (2014) The urgent need for nurse practitioners to lead antimicrobial stewardship in ambulatory health care. Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners 26:", + "8, 411-413.\n\n\n\n576 Alison L Galdys, Scott R Curry, Lee H Harrison.. (2014) Asymptomatic Clostridium difficile colonization as a reservoir for Clostridium difficile infection. Expert Review of Anti-infective Therapy 12:8, 967-980.\n\n\n\n577 Margaret VanAmringe.. (2014) A View from The Joint Commission Perspective: Updated Compendium Will Continue to Help Reduce Healthcare-Associated Infections. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 35:08, 964-966.\n\n\n\n578 Deborah S. Yokoe, Deverick J.", + " Anderson, Sean M. Berenholtz, David P. Calfee, Erik R. Dubberke, Katherine D. Ellingson, Dale N. Gerding, Janet P. Haas, Keith S. Kaye, Michael Klompas, Evelyn Lo, Jonas Marschall, Leonard A. Mermel, Lindsay E. Nicolle, Cassandra D. Salgado, Kristina Bryant, David Classen, Katrina Crist, Valerie M. Deloney, Neil O. Fishman, Nancy Foster, Donald A. Goldmann, Eve Humphreys, John A. Jernigan, Jennifer Padberg, Trish M.", + " Perl, Kelly Podgorny, Edward J. Septimus, Margaret VanAmringe, Tom Weaver, Robert A. Weinstein, Robert Wise, Lisa L. Maragakis.. (2014) A Compendium of Strategies to Prevent Healthcare-Associated Infections in Acute Care Hospitals: 2014 Updates. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology 35:08, 967-977.\n\n\n\n579 (2014) Survey of Health Care\u2013Associated Infections. New England Journal of Medicine 370:26, 2542-2543.\n\n\n\n580 Sebastian Haller, Tim Eckmanns, Justus Benzler, Kristin Tolksdorf,", + " Hermann Claus, Andreas Gilsdorf, Muna Abu Sin, Vittoria Colizza.. (2014) Results from the First 12 Months of the National Surveillance of Healthcare Associated Outbreaks in Germany, 2011/2012. PLoS ONE 9:5, e98100.\n\n\n\n581 Jae Hyung Ryu, Tae-Hyoung Kim, Oh Joo Kweon, Mi-Kyung Lee.. (2014) Profiles of Yeast Isolated from Urinary Tracts with and without Catheter during 2011-2013. The Korean Journal of Urogenital Tract Infection and Inflammation 9:", + "2, 93.\n\n\n\n582 Kathryn S. Whitcomb.. (2014) Using a Multidimensional Approach to Improve Quality Related to Students\u2019 Hand Hygiene Practice. Nurse Educator 39:6, 269-273.\n\n" + ], + "length": 46739, + "hardness": null + } +] \ No newline at end of file