1043: Chuck Hole

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Thu, 14 Jun 2018 22:01

| June 14, 2018 02:01 PM

So many FBI officials are talking to the press and attending "social events" with the media that it's impossible to say who might have leaked confidential information to the media during the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private emails, according to a report from the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General.

That report said the IG has "profound concerns about the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered during our review.''

One mission of the IG was to see who might have leaked information from the FBI during the Clinton email probe. But it said that investigation had to continue, in part because so many FBI officials are talking to the press.

[READ: DOJ inspector general's report on Hillary Clinton emails investigation]

''We frequently find that the universe of Department and FBI employees who had access to sensitive information that has been leaked is substantial, often involving dozens, and in some instances, more than 100 people,'' the IG said.

Despite FBI policy limiting the employees who are authorized to speak to the media, the IG found the policy was ''widely ignored."

"We identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters,'' the IG said. ''The large number of FBI employees who were in contact with journalists during this time period impacted our ability to identify the sources of leaks.''

That number of FBI employees is in the dozens, said the report.

The IG also found social interactions between FBI personnel and journalists that ''were, at a minimum, inconsistent with FBI policy and Department ethics rules.''

''[W]e identified instances where FBI employees received tickets to sporting events from journalists, went on golfing outings with media representatives, were treated to drinks and meals after work by reporters, and were the guests of journalists at nonpublic social events.''

The investigations into the leaks are ongoing, said the IG, and a report will be issued when concluded.

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 19:28

The president and his allies have seized on newly revealed text messages between two agents to justify their war on federal investigators.

Natasha Bertrand Jun 15, 2018 FBI Director Christopher Wray leaves a news conference on the new Inspector General report on Thursday. Yuri Gripas / ReutersIn a long-awaited report, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that the FBI's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation was not influenced by political bias, and that any hostility certain officials may have felt toward then-candidate Donald Trump didn't affect their handling of that probe.

But for Trump and his allies, that may not matter: While the overarching report undercut key parts of their conspiracy theories around the email probe, they've seized on one finding to fuel unfounded suspicions of a ''deep state'' scheme to undermine Trump's candidacy. By focusing on this one aspect of the report, they're able to keep arguing that the FBI has had it in for Trump from the start'--no matter what the IG says.

Trump allies have homed in on a text-message exchange between two FBI officials that was revealed for the first time in the report. In the messages, FBI agent Peter Strzok told former FBI lawyer Lisa Page that ''we'll stop'' Trump from becoming president. ''[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!'' Page wrote to Strzok in August 2016, according to copies of their texts that were included in the report. ''No. No he won't. We'll stop it,'' Strzok replied. At the time, both were working on the investigation into Russia's election interference, and Strzok would later join Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team. Both had also worked on the Clinton email probe.

Strzok told investigators that he did ''not mean to suggest that he would do something to impact the investigation,'' and the IG itself concluded that no such impact registered. Trump and his supporters, however, have fixated upon Strzok and Page's communications ever since they were first released to select reporters by the Justice Department's Office of Public Affairs in December. The texts, which included multiple negative comments about Trump, have repeatedly been used as evidence of a plot by law-enforcement and intelligence officials to undermine'--and potentially even overthrow'--Trump's administration, even though Strzok was removed from Mueller's team in July and Page has left the FBI altogether.

In January, Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida described their texts as evidence of a ''palace coup,'' and Fox News host Jeanine Pirro tweeted that Strzok and Page needed ''to be taken out in cuffs.'' Amid his attacks on the FBI as a ''criminal deep state,'' Trump has used Page and Strzok's messages to bolster his claim that the FBI was improperly spying on his campaign, and has referred to the agents as ''the incompetent & corrupt FBI lovers'''--a reference to their extramarital affair.

Shortly after the report's release on Thursday, the newly revealed Strzok text began to take on a life of its own, giving Trump's allies another excuse to question the integrity of federal investigators. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told Fox News's Sean Hannity on Thursday night that Strzok, who has not been charged with a crime or accused of criminal wrongdoing, ''should be in jail by the end of next week.'' He also said that Mueller ''should be suspended,'' and ''honest people should be brought in '... to investigate these people like Peter Strzok.''

Trump's first comment responding to the sprawling IG report was about the Strzok text. ''FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who headed the Clinton & Russia investigations, texted to his lover Lisa Page, in the IG Report, that 'we'll stop' candidate Trump from becoming President,'' Trump tweeted on Friday morning. ''Doesn't get any lower than that!'' He followed up with a tweet arguing the report was a ''total disaster'' for the FBI, among other parties.

Some GOP lawmakers, meanwhile, accused the DOJ of purposefully keeping the text from congressional investigators. ''This Peter Strzok text about 'stopping' Donald Trump was hidden from Congressional investigators. We never had it. Absolutely unreal,'' Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina tweeted on Thursday. ''Why didn't Rosenstein disclose this to Congress when we asked for the texts?'' Representative Ron DeSantis of Florida wrote, referring to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. A footnote in the report says that the IG did not obtain the texts in question until last month because of a glitch in the FBI's text-message-preservation software. It was eventually recovered through a ''forensic analysis of a folder found on Page's and Strzok's Samsung S5 devices'' and was provided to the DOJ, a spokesman said.

While the IG report found that Strzok's politics did not affect his handling of the Clinton email probe, it did not downplay the significance of the text. The message was ''not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate's electoral prospects,'' the report concluded. Still, the IG ''did not find documentary or testimonial evidence'' that Strzok acted on that bias, at least with regard to the Clinton email investigation. (The IG did not review the handling of the Russia investigation, which is ongoing.)

Contrary to conspiracy theories that Page and Strzok were part of a deep-state conspiracy to damage Trump's campaign using the Russia investigation, Strzok once said, according to the new texts, that he wasn't convinced there was any ''there there'' to the allegations that Trump's campaign colluded with Russia. ''I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there,'' Strzok told Page in May 2017, after working on the investigation for nearly a year. He was at that point still weighing whether to join Mueller's team.

Former FBI agents who knew and worked with Strzok have acknowledged to me in the past that both officials should have been more circumspect with their comments to each other, given the highly politicized nature of both the Clinton and Russia probes. On the new ''we'll stop it'' text, a person familiar with Page's thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, said that Strzok's message was ''unfortunate'' and ''hard to defend.'' But the former agents have broadly characterized the duo, and Strzok in particular, as professionals who never expressed political opinions when conducting investigations. And they emphasized that one agent does not have the power to change the course of an entire investigation, no matter what Trump's allies might continue to argue.

Even if ''there was something he could actually do, he was one gear in a big machine,'' former FBI agent Frank Montoya Jr. told me on Thursday night. ''He could make recommendations, he could advocate for different courses of action, but he was just one among many in a team that could do that. He was not the senior decision-maker.'' Montoya made a similar point to one that Strzok and Page made to investigators, according to the report: While the Trump investigation was kept a secret, the Clinton investigation was effectively reopened just days before the election. ''If Strzok really wanted to 'stop' Trump before the election, why not leak the Russia investigation?'' Montoya asked. Still, he said, ''while everyone, even FBI employees, have right to an opinion, his texts were dumb. No other way to color it.''

Natasha Bertrand is a staff writer at

The Atlantic where she covers national security and the intelligence community.

You mentioned tracking vehicles and remotely turning off and

I wanted to let you know this is actually from the finance company. My

girlfriend (10+yrs) works for a credit union and told me that if they finance

to someone with a low credit rating they will install a GPS unit in it so they

can repo if needed. I presume some other finance companies will install a kill

switch of some sorts as well. So that old Lexus, if financed with bad credit,

would be tracked and probably have something installed to disable it.

Keep up the great work and have a great weekend.

Kenneth

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 13:32

A Brief History and Next StepsThe Ninth Circuit is currently considering an appeal by the U.S. government of the 2015 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California that the federal government violated a settlement agreement by detaining children in family immigration detention centers with their parents.

The Original Flores SettlementIn 1985, two organizations filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of immigrant children who had been detained by the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) challenging procedures regarding the detention, treatment, and release of children. After many years of litigation, including an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, the parties reached a settlement in 1997.

The Flores Settlement Agreement (Flores) imposed several obligations on the immigration authorities, which fall into three broad categories:

The government is required to release children from immigration detention without unnecessary delay to, in order of preference, parents, other adult relatives, or licensed programs willing to accept custody.If a suitable placement is not immediately available, the government is obligated to place children in the ''least restrictive'' setting appropriate to their age and any special needs.The government must implement standards relating to the care and treatment of children in immigration detention.According to advocates, as well as the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, the INS did not immediately comply with the terms of the Agreement. It was only after the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) assumed responsibility for the care and custody of unaccompanied children in 2003'--a product of years of advocacy on the part of human rights organizations, religious groups, and political leaders'--that noticeable changes were implemented.

ORR, like the former INS and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has failed to issue regulations implementing the terms of the settlement, as required by the parties' 2001 stipulation extending the agreement.

Accompanied ChildrenThe situation of accompanied children, on the other hand, went largely under the radar (the legislation requiring the change in custody from INS to ORR only applied to unaccompanied children). One exception was a lawsuit challenging the deplorable conditions at the former T. Don Hutto facility in Texas, which detained accompanied children with their parents. The federal government agreed to close the controversial Hutto facility in 2009 and only one family detention center remained in the United States, in Berks County, Pennsylvania.

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 13:37

WASHINGTON '-- House Republicans could move to strictly limit the Trump administration's policy of separating children from their parents at the border under immigration legislation expected to be considered next week.

Democrats, however, object to other parts of the legislative package and say the administration could end the policy of separating children from their parents at any time without additional legislation.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., said Thursday that he disagrees with the new policy of splitting up immigrant families. He agreed with administration officials, however, that fixing the problem requires legislation.

The administration's new zero-tolerance policy, which requires prosecution of people arriving illegally at the border, has driven up the number of immigrant children in government shelters in the nearly two months since it began. That has led to a public outcry as stories of children being ripped from their parents' arms fill headlines.

''We don't want kids to be separated from their parents,'' Ryan said. ''We believe because of the court ruling, this will require legislative change,'' he added, referring to a 1997 court case that limited how long the government can hold children in detention centers.

Democrats and other opponents of the administration's policy say that case is not the root of the problem, noting that separating families was the exception, not the rule, for most of the two decades since the case was resolved with an agreement called the Flores settlement. The settlement does not require the government to separate families who arrive together, and previous administrations have not interpreted it that way.

Previously, border agents tried to keep families together by sending all members to the same family detention facility. Now, under the new policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in early May, in most cases parents are prosecuted, while children are sent to a separate refugee facility.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., questioned why Republicans haven't put legislation forward already if they think it is needed.

''This is barbaric, this is not who America is, and this is the policy of the Trump administration,'' she said, referring to the family separations. ''The casual attitude that they're having about this '... they could weigh in with the administration and stop it on a dime.''

Ryan brokered an agreement among House Republicans to vote next week on two immigration bills '-- a hard-line conservative measure and an alternative that Ryan and other GOP leaders have been negotiating with the many GOP factions in the House. Even supporters of the more conservative bill say it is not likely to pass the House. It's unclear whether the leadership's alternative can pass, either.

Democrats have been left out of the negotiations, and the bill, a draft of which was released Thursday, contains some provisions they consider unacceptable. Other parts of the measure would enact policies that conservative Republicans have balked at.

''We won't guarantee passage,'' Ryan said. ''I do hope this passes. I think it's a very good bill. I think it's a very good compromise and this can make law.''

''The concrete has been poured,'' Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the leader of the House Freedom Caucus, said Wednesday. ''You can still make handprints in it, you can still write your name in it. It is far from set.''

The draft bill includes $25 billion for border security, including money to begin building President Donald Trump's proposed border wall.

It would include a legal fix for the so-called Dreamers, young people who came to this country illegally as children. Their status has been in limbo since Trump ordered an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Obama-era effort to shield Dreamers against deportation.

Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., said the bill would cover all of the estimated 1.8 million Dreamers, not just the smaller subset who received coverage under DACA.

The current version of the bill would provide Dreamers with visas that would allow them, after six years, to apply for citizenship.

But two conservative provisions are likely to prevent nearly all Democrats, and perhaps some moderate Republicans, from supporting the bill.

One would withhold visas from Dreamers if Congress fails to appropriate money for the border wall. The other would offset the visas for Dreamers by cutting existing, legal immigration categories. It would end the current diversity lottery and eliminate family reunification visas for adult children.

Bills that would have made similar cuts in legal immigration failed earlier this year in the Senate, suggesting that even if the proposed package gets through the House, it would have a difficult path toward ultimate passage.

''Everything we've heard has been very negative, I don't even know if they have the votes to pass the bill on their side,'' Pelosi said. ''But, they're certainly not going to use mothers nursing their babies as a draw.''

One other provision takes direct aim at California's law that limits the ability of sheriffs and prison officials to cooperate with immigration officials.

The bill would allow victims and their families to sue jurisdictions that don't comply with federal requests to hold an illegal immigrant for deportation if the person is released and later commits rape, murder or sexual assault.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said the Senate would consider a House-passed bill that the president supports. But passage in the Senate would require some Democratic support to meet the 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster. The White House reiterated Thursday that if the House bill includes all of the president's priorities, he'll back it.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeated in Thursday's briefing the president's false claim that federal law requires the administration to separate immigrant children from their parents and said Trump would like a solution.

''The separation of illegal alien families is the product of the same legal loopholes that Democrats refuse to close, and these laws are the same that have been on the books for over a decade. The president is simply enforcing them,'' Sanders said.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited the Bible on Thursday in his defense of his border policy that is resulting in hundreds of immigrant children being separated from their parents after they enter the U.S. illegally.

Sessions, speaking in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on immigration, pushed back against criticism he had received over the policy. On Wednesday, a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church said that separating mothers from their babies was ''immoral.''

Sessions said many of the recent criticisms were not ''fair or logical and some are contrary to law.''

''I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,'' he said. ''Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.''

Last month, the attorney general announced a ''zero tolerance'' policy that any adult who enters the country illegally is criminally prosecuted. U.S. protocol prohibits detaining children with their parents because the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 650 children were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border during a two-week period in May.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday that she hadn't seen Sessions' comments but affirmed that the Bible did back up the administration's actions.

''I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible,'' she said. ''It's a moral policy to follow and enforce the law.''

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the archbishop of Galveston-Houston, told the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Wednesday that he was joining other religious leaders in opposing the government's border policy.

''Our government has the discretion in our laws to ensure that young children are not separated from their parents and exposed to irreparable harm and trauma,'' DiNardo said in a statement.

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 20:18

.

Consent DecreeA settlement of a lawsuit or criminal case in which a person or company agrees to take specific actions without admitting fault or guilt for the situation that led to the lawsuit.

A consent decree is a settlement that is contained in a court order. The court orders injunctive relief against the defendant and agrees to maintain jurisdiction over the case to ensure that the settlement is followed. (Injunctive relief is a remedy imposed by a court in which a party is instructed to do or not do something. Failure to obey the order may lead the court to find the party in Contempt and to impose other penalties.) Plaintiffs in lawsuits generally prefer consent decrees because they have the power of the court behind the agreements; defendants who wish to avoid publicity also tend to prefer such agreements because they limit the exposure of damaging details. Critics of consent decrees argue that federal district courts assert too much power over the defendant. They also contend that federal courts have imposed conditions on state and local governments in Civil Rights Cases that usurp the power of the states.

Most civil lawsuits are settled before going to trial and most settlements are private agreements between the parties. Typically, the plaintiff will file a motion to dismiss the case once the settlement agreement has been signed. The court then issues a dismissal order and the case is closed. However, if the defendant does not live up to the terms of the settlement agreement the plaintiff cannot reactivate the old lawsuit. This means filing a new lawsuit with the court and going to the end of the line in order to process the case.

In more complex civil lawsuits that involve the conduct of business or industry, and in actions by the government against businesses that have allegedly violated regulatory laws, consent decrees are regularly part of the settlement agreement. A court will maintain jurisdiction and oversight to make sure the terms of the agreement are executed. The threat of a contempt order may keep defendants from dragging their feet or seeking to evade the intent of the agreement. In addition, the terms of the settlement are public.

Certain types of lawsuits require a court to issue a consent decree. In Class Action settlements, Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Procedure mandates that a federal district court must determine whether a proposed settlement is fair, adequate, and reasonable before approving it. Under the Antitrust Procedures and Penalties Act (the Tunney Act), 15 U.S.C.A. § 16(b)-(h), the court must review proposed consent decrees in antitrust suits filed by the Justice Department. The statute directs the court to review certain items, including whether the decree advances the public interest.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Local No.93, Int'l Ass'n of Firefighters v. City of Cleveland, 478 U.S. 501, 106 S.Ct. 3063, 92 L.Ed.2d 405 (1986), ruled that consent decrees "have attributes both of contracts and of judicial decrees." The division between contracts and judicial decrees suggests that consent decrees are contracts that resolve some issues through the consent of the parties. However, for some issues, the decree contains judicial acts rendered by the judge, not the parties. Commentators have noted that these dual attributes require a court to determine when it is appropriate to "rubber-stamp" a proposed settlement and when it is more appropriate for the court to treat the proposal as it would any judicial order.

The federal courts have been criticized for using consent decrees to reform prison systems, school systems, and other government agencies. Some courts have maintained oversight of agencies for many years and have imposed conditions that have cost state and local governments substantial amounts of money. Congress intervened in one litigation area when it passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (Pub.L. 104-134, 110 Stat. 1321). The law imposed strict limits on what federal courts could do in the future to improve prison conditions through the use of consent decrees. In addition, it gave government agencies the right to seek the termination of consent decrees, many of which had lasted for decades.

Further readingsKane, Mary Kay. 1996. Civil Procedure in a Nutshell. 4th ed. St. Paul, Minn.: West.

Mengler, Thomas M. 1988. "Consent Decree Paradigms: Models Without Meaning." Boston College Law Review 29.

Cross-referencesCivil Action.

consent decreen. an order of a judge based upon an agreement, almost always put in writing, between the parties to a lawsuit instead of continuing the case through trial or hearing. It cannot be appealed unless it was based upon fraud by one of the parties (he lied about the situation), mutual mistake (both parties misunderstood the situation) or the court does not have jurisdiction over the case or the parties. Obviously, such a decree is almost always final and non-appealable since the parties worked it out. A consent decree is a common practice when the government has sued to make a person or corporation comply with the law (improper securities practices, pollution, restraints of trade, conspiracy) or the defendant agrees to the consent decree (often not to repeat the offense) in return for the government not pursuing criminal penalties. In general a consent decree and a consent judgment are the same. (See: consent judgment)

consent decreenoun an order accepted by the parries, an order acquiesced by the parties, an order agreed to by the parties, an order approved by the parties, an order consented to by the parties, an order endorsed by the parries, an order supported by the parties, an order with the accord of the parties, consent orderAssociated concepts: consent rule

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 20:05

Legal process Edit The process of introducing a consent decree begins with negotiation.[5] One of the three happens: a lawsuit is filed and the parties concerned reach an agreement prior to adjudication of the contested issues; a lawsuit is filed and actively contested, and the parties reach an agreement after the court has ruled on some issues; or the parties settle their dispute prior to the filing of a lawsuit and they simultaneously file a lawsuit and request that the court agree to the entry of judgment.[5][10][11] The court is meant to turn this agreement into a judicial decree.[11][12][13] In many cases, the request for entry of a consent decree prompts judges to sign the documents presented then and there.[5][13] In some cases, however, such as criminal cases, the judge must make some sort of assessments before the court's entry of the agreement as a consent decree.[5]

The usual consent decree is not self-executing.[12] A consent decree is implemented when the parties transform their agreements from paper to reality.[5][11] The judge who signed the decree may have no involvement or may monitor the implementation.[5][13] The judge can only step in to assist in enforcement if a party complains to the court that an opponent has failed to perform as agreed.[5] In this case, the offending party would be committed for contempt.[12]

Decrees by consent are more binding than those issued in invitum, or against an unwilling party,[16] which are subject to modification by the same court, and reversal by higher courts.[12] The decree issued by consent cannot be modified, except by consent. If the decree was obtained by means of fraud or given by mistake, it may be set aside by a court.[12] Errors of law or of inferences from the facts may invalidate it completely.[12][13]

Typically, a consent decree dispenses with the necessity of having proof in court, since by definition the defendant agrees to the order. Thus, the use of a consent decree is not a sentence or admission of guilt.[12][17] Likewise, the consent decree prevents a finding of facts, so the decree cannot be pleaded as res adjudicata.[11][12]

History Edit Because judicial decrees are part of government civil enforcement in settlements that two parties typically agree to before litigation is filed, they act as a hybrid between a judicial order and a settlement without a party conceding criminal responsibility.[9][20]

Frederick Polluck and Frederic Maitland describe how courts during the twelfth century of Medieval Europe used "fines" as a form of court orders to settle land disputes among litigants with the punitive power and legitimacy of courts through the use of consent decree.[5][21] In the United States, 19th and 20th century legal treatises[22][23][24] show that consent decrees and the role of the court in the parties' settlement was ambiguous. The 1947 Corpus Juris Secundum declares that although consent decrees are "not the judgment of the court," they do have the "force and effect of a judgment."[5][25]

Federal Rules of Civil and Criminal Procedure Edit The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which both went into effect in 1938,[5] lay many of the legal foundations that govern the use of consent decree.[26][27] Creating space for courts, which are important actors in implementing a consent decree, to enter into a settlement, Rule 23[28] of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure gives federal district courts the power to approve class action settlements as long as they are "fair, reasonable, and adequate."[5][9][26] Rule 54(b) defines judgment, which refers to consent decree, and allows the court to "direct entry of a final judgment" when multiple parties are involved,[29] and Rule 58 describes the procedure of how parties may enter judgment.[30][31] Additionally, Rule 60 describes conditions under which parties can be granted "relief from a judgment or order" (such as a consent decree).[32] As Rule 48 in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, stipulates that dismissals in criminal cases may not occur without "leave of court,"[5][34] simultaneously, Rule 41 allows, if all the parties agree, the court to dismiss any suit (besides class action suits, shareholder derivative suits, or bankruptcy action).[6][35] Many of these rules create the space for consent decree by establishing the role of judges within the settlement of two parties.[26][36]

Precedents Edit Many of the early court cases involving consent decree set precedents for the roles that judges would play in the negotiating, approving, interpreting, and modifying a settlement between two parties.[5][9][27] The role of the judge in regard to consent decree wavers between "rubber stamping" versus applying their own judgments to a proposed settlement.[9][38] In 1879, Pacific Railroad of Missouri v. Ketchum bound the court's role in consent decrees to simply supporting to an agreement that parties have already established on their own.[5][39] In regard to antitrust decrees, the first consent decree used in antitrust regulation under the Sherman Antitrust Act was Swift & Co. v. United States.[40][41] With Swift & Co. v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that a consent decree could be modified or terminated only when new developments over time bring out a "grievous wrong" in how the ruling of the consent decree affects the parties of the suit.[40][42][31] The Supreme Court supported this limited flexibility of consent decrees in United States v. Terminal R.R. Ass'n: "[A] decree will not be expanded by implication or intendment beyond the meaning of its terms when read in the light of the issues and the purposes for which the suit was brought."[6][43]

In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. United Shoe Machinery Corp., that to promote finality, a court's changes to consent a decree should be rare'--but the courts can modify a consent decree or frame injunctive relief to ensure the litigation achieves its purpose.[6][44] Before a judge can enter a consent decree, according to the rulings in Firefighters v. City of Cleveland[6][45] and Firefighters v. Stotts[46] they must have subject-matter jurisdiction, and they cannot modify a consent decree when one of the parties object.[5][47] The Supreme Court's position on how much authority a judge possesses in regard to influencing how the settlement is agreed upon is conflicting. In Firefighters v. City of Cleveland, the Supreme Court ruled that consent decrees "have attributes both of contracts and of judicial decrees", so consent decrees should be treated differently for different purposes.[9][31][45] In Rufo v. Inmates of Suffolk County Jail,[48] the Supreme Court decided that courts could take into account the changing times and circumstances for more flexibility in the administration of consent decrees.[31][42]

In regard to litigation in performance rights organizations such as American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and Broadcast Music, Inc. in United States v. ASCAP, which began in 1941, the Department of Justice used consent decrees (which are amended according to the times and technology) to regulate how they issued blanket licenses to ensure that trade is not restrained and that the prices of licenses would not be competitive.[49][50][51][52]

Most frequent uses Edit Antitrust law Edit Violations of antitrust law are typically resolved through consent decrees, which began to be more widely used after 1914 with the enactment of the Clayton Antitrust Act.[53] This act began to address the complexities of antitrust economic regulation by recognizing the use of consent decrees as a method for the enforcement of federal antitrust legislation.[55] In amending the antitrust statutes laid out in the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and its supplement, the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914),[49] the Tunney Act further specified how consent decrees could be used by establishing that the courts must demonstrate that consent decrees serve the "public interest" in antitrust cases filed by the Justice Department.[5][9][42] In regard to antitrust decrees, the first consent decree used in antitrust regulation under the Sherman Antitrust Act was Swift & Co. v. United States[41] in which the Court used its power under the Commerce Clause to regulate the Chicago meat trust as an unlawful economic monopoly.[40][57] In Standard Oil Company of New Jersey v. United States, the government used consent decrees to dissolve the horizontal monopoly that John D. Rockefeller had established.[40][42] Other examples of antitrust consent decrees can be found in a wide range of areas, including their involvement in corporations specializing in technology,[59][42] the film industry,[60][61] and the motor vehicle industry.[9][62][63]

Structural reform Edit School desegregation Edit The effort to desegregate American public schools began in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. This landmark Supreme Court case established that racial segregation of children in public schools was in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires that states must not "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."[64] To properly enforce this legislation, the Supreme Court allowed district courts to use desegregation decrees obligating states to actively transition into racially nondiscriminatory school systems, with "all deliberate speed".[65] Since the original decree did not include specific ways this could be done, beginning with Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1971, the Supreme Court specifically defined the objective as eliminating "all vestiges of state imposed segregation"[66] within school systems, including the limited use of busing,[67][68]racial quotas,[69] the creation of magnet schools and judicial placement of new schools,[70] and the redrawing of school attendance zones.[71] To stop judicial intervention in schools and end the consent decree through a court order, districts must demonstrate desegregation within six criteria defined in the Green v. County School Board[72] ruling'--which include, student assignment, faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities, and facilities.[73]

Police use of violence Edit Consent decrees have been signed by a number of cities concerning their police departments' use of force policies and practices,[75] including New Orleans,[76]Oakland,[77]Los Angeles'--whose consent decree was lifted in 2013[78]'--and Albuquerque.[79]

Public law Edit Consent decrees have been used to remedy various social issues that deal with public and private organizations, where a large number of people are often concerned even if they may not be members of either party involved. Examples have included Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and environmental safety provisions.

Edit Title VII prohibits discrimination by employers on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, or national origin.[81] Most often, the remedies to workplace discrimination carried out under this Act take place in the form of consent decrees, where employers may have to provide monetary awards or introduce policies and programs that eliminate and prevent future discrimination.[82][83] These may include decrees that require the creation of new recruitment and hiring procedures to gain a more diverse pool of job applicants,[84][85] upgrading job and promotion assignment systems,[86][87] or offering training programs focusing on discrimination and diversity[88][89] Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was created to be a major advocate and enforcer of the previously mentioned Title VII remedies.[90] In a landmark decision in 1973, the EEOC, Department of Labor and AT&T compromised on a consent decree that phased out discrimination within recruiting, hiring and employment methods in regard to minorities and women.[91] This established a precedent for other large, private U.S companies to avoid litigation and government oversight by creating decrees in cooperation with Title VII.[92][93]

Americans with Disabilities Act Edit The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a civil rights law passed in 1990 that prohibits discrimination and ensures that people with disabilities have equal access to the opportunities and benefits available to the wider American population.[94][95] Institutions that violate the requirements of the ADA enter consent decrees typically resulting in a payment from the corporation to those wronged, which may serve to discourage future discrimination, in addition to a change in policy to avoid future payouts.[96] Examples of altered practices through the use of a decree have included restructuring building property[97][98] or the removal of barriers[99] to allow for physical accessibility for all persons, providing supplemental communication tools such as sign language interpreters[100] for those that are hard of hearing, and eliminating discriminatory practices against those that have a disability.[101]

Environmental law Edit Consent decrees have been used to alter environmental policy, one example being the "Flannery Decision", or the Toxics Consent Decree, entered into by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.[102] This decree, signed in 1976, highly restructured the way the EPA dealt with harmful substances by requiring the agency to list and regulate 65 toxic pollutants and to regulate harmful substances on an industry-by-industry basis rather than by singular pollutants.[103][104] This decree went on to shape the regulations and administration procedures of water policy within the United States, particularly through the Clean Water Act.[105][106]

Effects Edit Scholars find advantages and disadvantages to using the consent decree. In addition, consent decrees can impact those outside of the litigants, such as third parties and public interests.[112]

Advantages and disadvantages Edit The following are advantages of using consent decrees:

Save financial costs of litigation: Consent decrees forgo a court trial that allows for both parties and the courts to save legal expenses.[116]Save the time of prolonged litigation: The parties and the courts save the time it would take for a court trial to occur and the courts more quickly clear their dockets.Ability to get results of a trial: The parties are able to obtain similar results of a court trial, specifically where a change is required to appease the dispute.Parties avoid the uncertainties of a trial: Consent decrees forgo a trial and its unknown outcome, the necessity of proof, and any guilt is taken for granted (because no one is accused by the consent decree).Parties have control of the remedial plan: Consent decrees allow both parties to have greater latitude in deciding how to remedy their issues. This is an advantage "because the parties, not the court, determine the remedy, [and] the assumption is that the remedy is better suited to the parties' needs."More compliance and authoritativeness: Both parties more voluntarily implement their agreements if obtained by consent than by force. Moreover, to fail to act under the consent decree seems to be more a violation of the "law" than if under a contract because the parties are "bound" and not "obligated" by the consent decree. Its authoritativeness is reinforced by the practice that a return to court for a consent decree has a priority in the court queue.Sustained judicial oversight and interpretation: Courts can supervise that consent decrees are upheld for an indefinite period of time.In contrast, the following are disadvantages of using consent decrees:

Duration: Some argue that "consent decrees often last for too long a period." Although consent decrees are a solution to a particular issue, the context around that issue or the issue itself may change. However, the consent decree is neither as easy to modify nor adapt and thus can become inadequate.Ambition: Consent decrees can be an avenue for those seeking to enact a future-oriented change that is more general and not case-specific. Consent decrees are thus used "as a tool of enforcement [that is] less expensive, and sometimes more far-reaching, than adjudication," especially in antitrust cases and those involving public institutions.Complexity: Consent decrees can be complex in questions of modification, either before or after it is enacted: "the decree issued by consent cannot be modified, except by consent. Only where the consent has been obtained by fraud or given by mistake will a bill be entertained to set it aside."Ambiguity: There is ambiguity in the source of power of the consent decree, the role of judges, and the guidelines for a consent decree. Some see that "neither judges, lawyers, nor parties know exactly what they give or get when a consent decree is entered...[which may bear] testimony to the negative consequences of the ambiguity that surrounds consent decrees."Third parties and public interests Edit The consent decree can impact those outside of the parties, who resolve their disputes with a consent decree, especially in settling institutional reform and antitrust cases. From Rufo v. Inmates of the Suffolk County Jail[48] and Swift & Co. v. United States,[40] the Supreme Court acknowledges that "the effects of the decree on third parties and the public interest should be taken into account when determining whether or not a change in fact warrants... the decree." There is criticism that "the antitrust consent decree is an opaque form of government regulation that operates without many of the checks and balances that constrain and shape ordinary regulatory programs." So, some argue that the use of consent decrees in antitrust cases and with public institutions can negatively affect third parties and public interests.

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 13:28

Image copyright Reuters Image caption The number of people trying to cross into the US has risen sharply recently US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has defended the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico, a measure that has faced increasing criticism.

The "zero-tolerance" policy he announced last month sees adults who try to cross the border, many planning to seek asylum, being placed in custody and facing criminal prosecution for illegal entry.

As a result, hundreds of minors are now being housed in detention centres, and kept away from their parents.

What is happening?Over a recent six-week period, nearly 2,000 children were separated from their parents after illegally crossing the border, figures released on Friday said.

Mr Sessions said those entering the US irregularly would be criminally prosecuted, a change to a long-standing policy of charging most of those crossing for the first time with a misdemeanour offence.

As the adults are being charged with a crime, the children that come with them are being separated and deemed unaccompanied minors.

Advocates of separations point out that hundreds of children are taken from parents who commit crimes in the US on a daily basis.

As such, they are placed in custody of the Department of Health and Human Services and sent to a relative, foster home or a shelter - officials at those places are said to be already running out of space to house them.

Image copyright Reuters Image caption Many of the families fled violence in their countries and planned to seek asylum in the US In recent days, a former Walmart in Texas has been converted into a detention centre for immigrant children.

Officials have also announced plans to erect tent cities to hold hundreds more children in the Texas desert where temperatures regularly reach 40C (105F).

Local lawmaker Jose Rodriguez described the plan as "totally inhumane" and "outrageous", adding: "It should be condemned by anyone who has a moral sense of responsibility."

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials estimate that around 1,500 people are arrested each day for illegally crossing the border.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media caption Migrant boys detained in a former Walmart in TexasIn the first two weeks of the "zero-tolerance" new approach, 658 minors - including many babies and toddlers - were separated from the adults that came with them, according to the CBP.

The practice, however, was apparently happening way before that, with reports saying more than 700 families had been affected between October and April.

Not only the families crossing irregularly are being targeted, activists who work at the border say, but also those presenting themselves at a port of entry.

Image copyright US Government Image caption The Casa Padre shelter in Brownsville, Texas is a former Walmart Image copyright US Government Image caption Murals adorn the walls of the converted Walmart "This is really extreme, it's nothing like we have seen before," said Michelle Bran(C), director of Migrant Rights and Justice at the Women's Refugee Commission, a New York-based non-governmental organisation that is helping some of these people.

In many of the cases, the families have already been reunited, after the parent was released from detention. However, there are reports of people being kept apart for weeks and even months.

Family separations had been reported in previous administrations but campaigners say the numbers then were very small.

Who's fault is it?Mr Trump has blamed Democrats for the policy, saying "we have to break up the families" because of a law that "Democrats gave us".

It is unclear what law he is referring to, but no law has been passed by the US Congress that mandates that migrant families be separated.

Fact-checkers say that the only thing that has changed is the Justice Department's decision to criminally prosecute parents for a first-time border crossing offense. Because their children are not charged with a crime, they are not permitted to be jailed together.

Under a 1997 court decision known as the Flores settlement, children who come to the US alone are required to be released to their parents, an adult relative, or other caretaker.

If those options are all exhausted, then the government must find the "least restrictive" setting for the child "without unnecessary delay".

The case initially applied to unaccompanied child arrivals, but a 2016 court decision expanded it to include children brought with their parents.

According to the New York Times, the government has three options under the Flores settlement - release whole families together, pass a law to allow for families to be detained together, or break up families.

It is worth noting that Mr Trump's chief of staff John Kelly - who previously served as the head of Homeland Security - said in 2017 that the White House was considering separating families as a means of deterring parents from trying to cross the border.

What do the figures show?The number of families trying to enter the US overland without documentation is on the rise. For the fourth consecutive month in May, there was an increase in the number of people caught crossing the border irregularly - in comparison with the same month of 2017, the rise was of 160%.

"The trends are clear: this must end," Mr Sessions said last month.

It is not clear, though, if the tougher measures will stop the migrants. Most are fleeing violence and poverty in Central American countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and staying, for many, could mean a death sentence.

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Media caption Lorry full of migrants found in TexasHuman rights groups, campaigners and Democrats have sharply criticised the separations, warning of the long-term trauma on the children. Meanwhile the UN Human Rights Office called on the US to "immediately halt" them.

But Mr Sessions has defended the measure, saying the separations were "not our goal" but it was not always possible to keep parents and children together.

What is the policy in other countries?No other country has a policy of separating families who intend to seek asylum, activists say.

In the European Union, which faced its worst migrant crisis in decades three years ago, most asylum seekers are held in reception centres while their requests are processed - under the bloc's Dublin Regulation, people must be registered in their first country of arrival.

Measures may vary in different member states but families are mostly kept together.

Image copyright Reuters Image caption Most of the families have been separated while trying to cross illegally, activists say Even in Australia, which has some of the world's most restrictive policies, including the detention of asylum seekers who arrive by boat in controversial offshore centres, there is no policy to separate parents from their children upon arrival.

Meanwhile, Canada has a deal with the US that allows it to deny asylum requests from those going north. It has tried to stem the number of migrants crossing outside border posts after a surge of Haitians and Nigerians coming from its neighbour. However, there were no reports of families being forcibly separated.

"What the US is doing now, there is no equivalent," said Michael Flynn, executive director of the Geneva-based Global Detention Project, a non-profit group focused on the rights of detained immigrants. "There's nothing like this anywhere".

Republicans in the House of Representatives have unveiled legislation to keep families together but it is unlikely to win the support of its own party or the White House.

More on US immigration

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Media caption The US-Mexican family split by the border

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 13:52

MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS &CONSTITUTIONAL LAWCarlos Holgu­n (Cal. Bar No. 90754)Peter A. Schey (Cal. Bar No. 58232)Marchela Iahdjian (Cal. Bar No. 295595)256 South Occidental BoulevardLos Angeles, CA 90057Telephonke: (213) 388-8693Facsimile: (213) 386-9484Email: crholguin@centerforhumanrights.orgpschey@centerforhumanrights.orgmarchela@centerforhumanrights.orgWILLIAM A. MOLINSKI (STATE BAR NO. 145186)wmolinski@orrick.comT. WAYNE HARMAN (STATE BAR NO. 254089)wharman@orrick.comELENA GARCIA (STATE BAR NO. 299680)egarcia@orrick.comORRICK, HERRINGTON & SUTCLIFFE LLP777 South Figueroa StreetSuite 3200Los Angeles, California 90017Telephone: +1-213-629-2020Facsimile: +1-213-612-2499Attorneys for Plaintiffs(listing continues on following page)UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURTCENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIAWESTERN DIVISIONJenny Lisette Flores,et al.,Plaintiffs,v.Jeh Johnson, Secretary, U.S. Departmentof Homeland Security,et al.,Defendants.Case No. CV 85-4544-RJK(Px)MEMORANDUM IN SUPPORTOF MOTION TO ENFORCESETTLEMENT OF CLASSACTIONHearing: March 9, 2015Time: TBDDept: TBDCase 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 1 of 29 Page ID #:846

MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728Plaintiffs' counsel, continued:LARAZACENTROLEGAL,INC.Michael S. Sorgen (Cal. Bar No. 43107)474 Valencia Street, #295San Francisco, CA 94103Telephone: (415) 575-3500Of counsel:YOUTHLAWCENTERAlice Bussiere (Cal. Bar No. 114680)Virginia Corrigan (Cal. Bar No. 292035)200 Pine Street, Suite 300'¨San Francisco, CA 94104Telephone: (415) 543-3379 x 3903Ranjana Natarajan (Cal. Bar No. 230149)UNIVERSITY OFTEXASSCHOOL OFLAWCivil Rights Clinic727 E. Dean Keeton St.Austin, TX 78705Telephone: (512) 232-7222Email: rnatarajan@law.utexas.eduCase 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 2 of 29 Page ID #:847

TABLE OF CONTENTSPage- i -12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................... 1THIS COURT HAS JURISDICTION TO ENFORCE THE SETTLEMENTAS A CONTRACT AND CONSENT DECREE. .......................................... 3ARGUMENT ............................................................................................................. 5I ICE'S NO-RELEASE POLICY IS A MATERIAL BREACH OF THESETTLEMENT. .............................................................................................. 5A ICE's new no-release policy breaches the Settlement'srequirement that defendants minimize the detention of children. ........ 5B ICE must consider releasing class members with their preferredcustodians: their mothers. ................................................................... 11II ICE'S ROUTINE CONFINEMENT OF CHILDREN IN SECURE,UNLICENSED FACILITIES BREACHES THE SETTLEMENT.............. 14III DEFENDANTS VIOLATE THE SETTLEMENT BY REGULARLYEXPOSING CHILDREN IN BORDER PATROL CUSTODY TOHARSH, SUBSTANDARD CONDITIONS AND TREATMENT. ............ 17IV CONCLUSION ............................................................................................. 21Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 3 of 29 Page ID #:848

- ii -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728TABLE OF AUTHORITIESPage(s)CasesMatter of Adeniji,22 I. &N. Dec. 1102 (BIA 1999)......................................................................... 11Airline Stewards v. Trans World Airlines, Inc.,713 F.2d 319 (7th Cir. 1983) ................................................................................. 5Buckhannon Board & Care Home v. West Virginia Dep't of Healthand Human Resources,532 U.S. 598; 121 S. Ct. 1835; 149 L. Ed. 2d 855 (2001) .................................... 4City of Las Vegas v. Clark County,755 F.2d 697 (9th Cir. 1985) ................................................................................. 5In re D-J-,23 I. & N. Dec. 572 (A.G. 2003) ........................................................................... 8Demore v. Kim,538 U.S. 510; 123 S. Ct. 1708; 155 L. Ed. 2d 724 (2003) .............................. 7, 11Flanegan v. Arizona,143 F.3d 540 (9th Cir. 1998) ................................................................................. 4Flores v. Meese,681 F. Supp. 665 (C.D. Cal. 1988) .................................................................. 1, 11Flores v. Meese,934 F.2d 991 (9th Cir. 1990) ................................................................................. 1Flores v. Meese,942 F.2d 1352 (9th Cir. 1992) ............................................................................... 1Matter of Guerra,24 I. & N. Dec. 37 (BIA 2006) ............................................................................ 11Jeff D. v. Andrus,899 F.2d 753 (9th Cir. 1989) ................................................................................. 4Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 4 of 29 Page ID #:849

- iii -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728Kennewick Irrigation Dist. v. United States,880 F.2d 1018 (9th Cir. 1989) ......................................................................... 5, 13Kokkonen v. Guardian Life Ins. Co.,511 U.S. 375; 114 S. Ct. 1673; 128 L. Ed. 2d 391 (1994) .................................... 4Nodine v. Shiley Inc.,240 F.3d 1149 (9th Cir. 2001) ............................................................................... 5Nordlinger v. Hahn,505 U.S. 1; 112 S. Ct. 2326; 120 L.Ed.2d 1 (1992) ............................................ 14Matter of Patel,15 I. & N. Dec. 666 (BIA 1976).......................................................................... 11Plummer v. Chemical Bank,668 F.2d 654 (2d Cir. 1982) .................................................................................. 5R.I.L.R., v. Johnson,No. 15-00011 ....................................................................................................... 11Reno v. Flores,507 U.S. 292; 113 S.Ct.1439; 123 L.Ed.2d 1 (1993) ...................................... 1, 11Rufo v. Inmates of Suffolk County Jail,502 U.S. 367; 112 S. Ct. 748; 116 L. Ed. 2d 867 (1992) ...................................... 4Smith v. Organization of Foster Families,431 U.S. 816; 97 S. Ct. 2094; 53 L. Ed. 2d 14 (1977) ........................................ 13Stockton Dry Goods v. Girsh,36 Cal.2d 677; 227 P.2d 1 (1951) ....................................................................... 10TNT Marketing, Inc. v. Agresti,796 F.2d 276 (9th Cir. 1986) ................................................................................. 5United States v. Armour & Co.,402 U.S. 673; 91 S. Ct. 1752; 29 L. Ed. 2d 256 (1971) ........................................ 5United States v. Atlantic Refining Co.,360 U.S. 19; 79 S. Ct. 944; 3 L. Ed. 2d 1054 (1959) .......................................... 10United States v. ITT Continental Baking Co.,420 U.S. 223; 95 S. Ct. 926; 43 L. Ed. 2d 148 (1975) ........................................ 10Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 5 of 29 Page ID #:850

- iv -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728Walnut Creek Pipe Distrib., Inc. v. Gates Rubber Co. Sales Div.,228 Cal.App.2d 810; 39 Cal.Rptr. 767 (1964) ...................................................... 9Walsh v. Schlecht,429 U.S. 401; 50 L. Ed. 2d 641; 97 S. Ct. 679 (1977) ........................................ 13Williams v. Vukovich,720 F.2d 909 (6th Cir. 1983) ................................................................................. 5Zadvydas v. Davis,533 U.S. 678 (2001) .............................................................................................. 7Constitutional AuthoritiesFifth Amendment ...................................................................................................... 14Statutes, Rules and Regulations6 U.S.C. § 279....................................................................................................... 1, 178 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)(B)(iii)(IV) ............................................................................. 128 U.S.C. § 1226(a) .............................................................................................. 12, 1342 U.S.C. § 5633(a)(12)(B) ................................................................................ 14, 15Ariz. Rev. Stat. § 546-134-2 ....................................................................................... 3Cal. Admin. Code § 80000 ......................................................................................... 3Cal. Health & Safety Code § 1500 ............................................................................. 3Cal. Welf. & Inst. Code § 206 .................................................................................... 3Equal Access to Justice Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2412(d) ................................................... 21Homeland Security Act, Pub. L. 107-296 .................................................................. 1HSA 1512(a)(1) .......................................................................................................... 1HSA §1512 ................................................................................................................. 1HSA § 462(f)(2).......................................................................................................... 1Immigration and Nationality Act.............................................................................. 11Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 6 of 29 Page ID #:851

- v -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627288 C.F.R. § 1236.1(c)(8)............................................................................................. 128 C.F.R. § 1236.3(b) ............................................................................................. 9, 11Fed.R.Civ. Proc. 23..................................................................................................... 1Fed. R. Civ. Proc. 23(e)(1)(A), ................................................................................... 4H.R. 5005 .................................................................................................................... 1Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 7 of 29 Page ID #:852

- 1 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728INTRODUCTIONOn January 28, 1997, this Court approved a class-wide settlement of thisaction pursuant to Rule 23, Fed.R.Civ.Proc. Plaintiffs' First Set of Exhibits inSupport of Motion to Enforce Settlement, filed herewith, Exhibit 1 (''Settlement'').1The agreement sets minimum national standards for the detention, release,treatment and housing of children detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection(''CBP'') or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (''ICE'') on suspicion ofbeing present in the U.S. without authorization.For nearly 18 years2the Settlement has guaranteed class member children (1)safe and appropriate placement during federal custody; and (2) a fair opportunityfor release on bond or recognizance pending proceedings to determine whether theyare lawfully entitled to be in the United States. These provisions give effect to1Opinions in this action preceding the Settlement includeFlores v. Meese, 681 F.Supp. 665 (C.D. Cal. 1988);Flores v. Meese, 934 F.2d 991 (9th Cir. 1990);Floresv. Meese, 942 F.2d 1352 (9th Cir. 1992) (en banc); andReno v. Flores, 507 U.S.292; 113 S.Ct. 1439; 123 L.Ed.2d 1 (1993).S2Although the agreement contains a five-year sunset clause, on December 7, 2001,the parties stipulated that the Settlement remain binding until ''45 days followingdefendants' publication of final regulations implementing this Agreement.'' Exhibit3. Defendants have never published such regulations.In 2002, the Homeland Security Act, Pub. L. 107-296 (H.R. 5005) (''HSA''),dissolved the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (''INS'') andtransferred most INS functions to the Department of Homeland Security (''DHS'')and its subordinate agencies, including CBP and ICE. 6 U.S.C. § 279. The HSAincluded ''savings'' provisions providing,inter alia, that the Settlement shouldremain in effect as to the successor agencies. HSA §§ 462(f)(2), 1512(a)(1), 1512.The Settlement binds the INS and Department of Justice, as well as ''their agents,employees, contractors, and/or successors in office.'' Settlement ¶ 1. Defendantshave repeatedly acknowledged that the Settlement binds DHS.See, e.g., Report toCongress on the Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights andCivil Liberties (2007), at 20,available atwww.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/crcl-fy07annualreport.pdf (last checked December 9, 2014).Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 8 of 29 Page ID #:853

- 2 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728defendants' oft-professed resolve to treat ''all minors in its custody with dignity,respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.'' Settlement¶ 11.Beginning in the summer of 2014, ICE reacted to a temporary ''surge'' ofCentral Americans arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border by adopting a policy todetain all female-headed families, including children, in secure, unlicensed facilitiesfor howsoever long as it takes to determine whether they are entitled to remain inthe U.S. Class member children and their mothers now fill secure facilities inLeesport, Pennsylvania, Karnes City, Texas, and a new mega-facility in Dilley,Texas, which will eventually ''house up to 2,400 individuals''...'' Exhibit 9.3Defendants' no-release policy and housing children in secure facilities breachthe Settlement in three principal ways:First, the Settlement requires ICE to take affirmative steps to release a childto a parent, close adult relative, or other qualified custodian, except where anindividual child's detention is required ''either to secure his or her timelyappearance before the INS (now ICE) or the immigration court, or to ensure theminor's safety or that of others'...'' Settlement ¶ 14. ICE's no-release policy asapplied against class members apprehended with their mothers breachesdefendants' duty to minimize children's detention. In addition, the Settlementaffords class members the right to be released first to their parents. Settlement ¶ 14.ICE's categorical refusal to consider releasing class members' mothers denies classmembers their right to release to the care and protection of their preferredcustodian.Second, except for delinquents or serious flight risks, the Settlement obligesdefendants to house children, usually no more than 72 hours after arrest, in non-secure facilities that are licensed to care for dependent (as opposed to delinquent)3The Government recently closed a similar detention facility in Artesia, NewMexico.Id.Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 9 of 29 Page ID #:854

- 3 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728children. Settlement ¶¶ 12, 19. ICE's family detention facilities meet neither ofthese requirements.Third, the Settlement requires U.S. Customs and Border Protection (''CBP'')to hold recently apprehended children in facilities that are ''safe and sanitary andthat are consistent with the [Government's] concern for the particular vulnerabilityof minors.'' Settlement ¶ 12. In breach of this provision, defendants routinelyexpose class members to unacceptably harsh conditions during Border Patrolcustody, including cold, overcrowding, inadequate food and drink, sleepdeprivation, and poor sanitation.THISCOURT HAS JURISDICTION TO ENFORCE THESETTLEMENT AS A CONTRACT ANDCONSENT DECREE.This class action challenged the former-INS's policies (1) to releaseapprehended children only to parents or legal guardians; and (2) to house childrenin facilities in which they were provided no education, recreation, or visitation, andin which they were commingled with unrelated adults.44On November 30, 1987, this Court approved a partial settlement in which theGovernment pledged to remedy the ''deplorable conditions'' affecting detainedminors in western states.SeeMemorandum of Understanding, etc., Nov. 30, 1987,Exhibit 26 (MOU). The MOU required defendants to house minors in ''specialchild-care facilities'':i.e., '''community based shelter care programs' that will'provide a safe and appropriate environment' ... [meeting] 'state licensingrequirements for the provision of shelter care '... and related services to dependentchildren.'''Id. at 2 and 11.In contrast to juvenile halls and like institutions for youthful offenders, nearly allstates require thatdependentchildren be placed only in non-secure facilities.E.g.,Cal. Welf. & Inst. Code § 206; Cal. Health & Safety Code §§ 1500,et seq.; Cal.Admin. Code §§ 80000et seq.;Ariz. Rev. Stat. § 546-134-2.The Settlement supersedes and expands upon the MOU, but likewise requiresdefendants to house the general population of detained minors in non-securefacilities licensed to care for dependent children.Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 10 of 29 Page ID #:855

- 4 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728After several years' litigation, the parties settled. The Settlement, which theCourt approved in January 1997, protects children, whether accompanied orunaccompanied, detained anywhere in the country. Settlement ¶ 9 (''The certifiedclass in this action shall be defined as follows: 'All minors who are detained in thelegal custody of the INS.''').InKokkonen v. Guardian Life Ins. Co., 511 U.S. 375; 114 S. Ct. 1673; 128 L.Ed. 2d 391 (1994), the Court held that a proceeding to enforce a settlement requiresits own basis of jurisdiction.Id. at 378. ''Such a basis for jurisdiction may befurnished by separate provision (such as a provision retaining jurisdiction over thesettlement agreement) or by incorporating the terms of the settlement agreement inthe order.''Flanegan v. Arizona, 143 F.3d 540, 544 (9th Cir. 1998).Here, the Settlement and,a fortiori, this Court's order approving it,5reservejurisdiction in this Court to redress class-wide violations. Settlement ¶ 37 (''Thisparagraph provides for the enforcement, in this District Court, of the provisions ofthis Agreement except for claims brought under Paragraph 24.''); Order, January28, 1997, Exhibit 2.6The law guiding enforcement of the Settlement is well-established. TheSettlement is a contract,Rufo v. Inmates of Suffolk County Jail, 502 U.S. 367, 378;112 S. Ct. 748; 116 L. Ed. 2d 867 (1992), and is therefore generally construed andenforced as such.Jeff D. v. Andrus, 899 F.2d 753, 759 (9th Cir. 1989).The Settlement is also an order of the Court and therefore a consent decree.See Buckhannon Board & Care Home v. West Virginia Dep't of Health and HumanResources, 532 U.S. 598, 604 n.7; 121 S. Ct. 1835; 149 L. Ed. 2d 855 (2001);Rufo,5The Settlement resolves a certified class action, and the Court was accordinglyrequired to find the accord consistent with law and the public interest. Rule23(e)(1)(A), Fed. R. Civ. Proc.6Paragraph 24 of the Settlement provides for judicial review of placement decisionsaffecting individual class members in any judicial district with venue. Paragraph 37therefore requires that claims of class-wide violations be brought in this Court.Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 11 of 29 Page ID #:856

- 5 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728supra, 502 U.S. at 378 (settlement ''a judicial decree that is subject to the rulesgenerally applicable to other judgments and decrees.''). The prospective provisionsof the Settlement operate as an injunction.See Plummer v. Chemical Bank, 668F.2d 654, 659 (2d Cir. 1982);Williams v. Vukovich, 720 F.2d 909, 920 (6th Cir.1983).Whether enforced as a contract or consent decree, the Court's task is largelythe same.City of Las Vegas v. Clark County, 755 F.2d 697, 702 (9th Cir. 1985) (''Aconsent decree, which has attributes of a contract and a judicial act, is construedwith reference to ordinary contract principles.'').7Foremost, the Court enforces theagreement ''according to the plain meaning of its terms.''Nodine v. Shiley Inc., 240F.3d 1149, 1154 (9th Cir. 2001) (emphasis supplied);United States v. Armour &Co., 402 U.S. 673, 682; 91 S. Ct. 1752; 29 L. Ed. 2d 256 (1971) (settlement'srequirements ''must be discerned within its four corners, '...'').If the agreement is breached, the Court may issue orders ''commanding orenjoining particular conduct.''TNT Marketing, Inc. v. Agresti, 796 F.2d 276, 278(9th Cir. 1986).ARGUMENTI ICE'S NO-RELEASE POLICY IS A MATERIAL BREACH OF THESETTLEMENT.A ICE's new no-release policy breaches the Settlement's requirementthat defendants minimize the detention of children.In Part VI of the Settlement, ''General Policy Favoring Release,'' defendantsagreed that detention is detrimental to children and that they would thereforerelease a child to a qualified custodian ''without unnecessary delay'' whenever7Generally, ''the construction and enforcement of settlement agreements aregoverned by principles of local law'...''Airline Stewards v. Trans World Airlines,Inc., 713 F.2d 319, 321 (7th Cir. 1983) (citation omitted). However, ''federal lawcontrols the interpretation of a contract entered pursuant to federal law when theUnited States is a party.''Kennewick Irrigation Dist. v. United States, 880 F.2d1018, 1032 (9th Cir. 1989). Here, federal and state law accord.Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 12 of 29 Page ID #:857

- 6 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728continued ''detention of the minor is not required either to secure his or her timelyappearance before the INS or the immigration court, or to ensure the minor's safetyor that of others '...'' Settlement ¶ 14.Further ensuring that detaining children would be a last resort, the Settlementrequires defendants to take affirmative steps to find qualified custodians fordetained children:Upon taking a minor into custody, the INS, or the licensed program inwhich the minor is placed,shall make and record the prompt andcontinuous efforts on its part toward family reunification and the releaseof the minorpursuant to Paragraph 14 above. Such efforts at familyreunification shall continue so long as the minor is in INS custody.Settlement ¶ 18 (emphasis added).8These provisions place defendants under an affirmative obligation to locatesuitable custodians'--preferably parents'--and to release children to such custodiansexcept as otherwise provided in the Settlement. Since the summer of 2014,however, ICE has detained children apprehended with their mothersen masseregardless of whether they are flight-risks, dangerous, or whether qualifiedcustodians are available to care for them:8The Settlement also directs defendants to release a child ''in order of preference to'--A. a parent;B. a legal guardian;C. an adult relative (brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or grandparent);D. an adult individual or entity designated by the parent or legal guardian ascapable and willing to care for the minor's well-being in (i) a declarationsigned under penalty of perjury before an immigration or consular officer or(ii) such other document(s) that establish(es) to the satisfaction of the INS, inits discretion, the affiant's paternity or guardianship;E. a licensed program willing to accept legal custody; orF. an adult individual or entity seeking custody, in the discretion of the INS,when it appears that there is no other likely alternative to long term detentionand family reunification does not appear to be a reasonable possibility.''Settlement ¶ 14.Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 13 of 29 Page ID #:858

- 7 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728Prior to June 2014, ICE's general practice was to release children andparents upon a determination that those individuals were not a signficantflight risk or danger to the public. Generally, delays in releasing childrenand their parents were not significant. '... Since June, ICE has begundetaining all Central American families without the possibility of releaseon bond, recognizance, supervision or parole if it believes that thosefamilies arrived in the United States as part of the ''surge'' orunauthorized entrants'--mostly children'--that purportedly began in thesummer of 2014.Declaration of Bridget Cambria, November 7, 2014, Exhibit 10 ¶¶ 3-5 (Cambria).9The Settlement, however, posits only two exceptions to defendants'obligation to seek out qualified custodians and to release children to their care: (1) aminor is demonstrably dangerous; or (2) extraordinarily likely to abscond, such thatdetention is ''required''to secure his or her appearance. Settlement ¶ 14 (emphasissupplied).10Yet '--ICE applies its current no-release policy indiscriminately to all CentralAmerican children and their mothers. ICE does not consider the individual9See also, e.g.,Declaration of Barbara Hines, Jan. 31, 2014, Exhibit 17 (Hines) ¶ 12(''Since DHS began detaining families at the Karnes City facility, DHS has insistedon categorical detention of all of the families of mothers and children who arebrought to the facility.''); Declaration of Virginia Raymond, Dec. 13, 2014, Exhibit35 ¶ 7; Declaration of Carol Anne Donohoe, Nov. 15, 2014, Exhibit 11 (Donohoe)¶ 5.10To comport with due process, civil immigration detention must serve discretestatutory purposes and be accompanied by ''constitutionally adequate'' proceduresto ensure confinement is not erroneous.Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001);Demore v. Kim, 538 U.S. 510, 532-33; 123 S.Ct. 1708; 155 L. Ed. 2d 724 (2003)(Kennedy, J., concurring). Here, ICE's detaining children apprehended with theirmothersen masselacks a ''reasonable relation'' to the purposes for immigrationdetention:i.e.,to prevent flight or danger. ICE also detains children generally ''todeter others'' even in the absence of any reason to believe an individual child is anexceptional flight risk or danger.Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 14 of 29 Page ID #:859

- 8 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728child's age, reasons for coming to the United States, prior immigrationviolations, family ties in the United States, eligiblity for lawful status orfavorable exercise of prosecutorial discretion, credible fear of persecutionabroad, likelihood to abscond, or the child's safety or the safety of others. '...Presently, a single man has a greater chance of being released from detentionthan a Central American mother with child.Cambria ¶ 5;see also, e.g.,Donohoe ¶ 5; Hines ¶ 15.In opposing requests that immigration judges order children's release over itsobjection, ICE has repeatedly admitted and defended its no-release policy.E.g.,Exhibits 7 and 8.ICE's stock opposition features the declaration of Philip Miller, ICE'sAssistant Director of Field Operations, who asserts that ''the high probability of aprompt release, coupled with the likelihood of low or no bond, is among thereasons'' motivating Central American detainees' coming to the United States.Exhibit 8 at 5. Miller opines that ''implementation of a 'no bond' or 'high bond'policy would significantly reduce the unlawful mass migration of Guatemalans,Hondurans and Salvadoran (sic).''Id.1111Traci Lembke, ICE's Assistant Director over Investigative Programs, similarlydeclares, ''Illegal migrants to the United States who are release on a minimal bondbecome part of 'active migration networks,''... which in turn likely encouragesfurther illegal migration into the United States.''Id. at 10.ICE also customarily relies onIn re D-J-, 23 I. & N. Dec. 572 (A.G. 2003), whichupheld detention of a Haitian adult crossing by sea as a national security risk and todeter similar ''unlawful mass migrations.''Id. at 579.ICE has also sometimes defended its no-release policy as a humanitarian measure''to maintain family unity as families await the outcome of immigration hearings orreturn to their home countries.'' Exhibit 9. But this is feeble justification forstripping children of their rights under the Settlement.First, ICE's no-release policy encourages mothers and children to enter separately.Children apprehended alone or with anyone other than a parent'--whether smuggler,Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 15 of 29 Page ID #:860

- 9 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728ICE's novel no-release policy plainly breaches the Settlement.Theagreement obliges defendants to search out an appropriate custodian and, with twoexceptions, to release a child if one is available. Yet ICE makes no effort to locatecustodians for children apprehended with their mothers and refuses to release classmembers even when a qualified custodian is available.12ICE's no-release policyunilaterally revises ¶ 14 of the Settlement to provide as follows:Where the INS determines that the detention of the minor is not requiredeither to secure his or her timely appearance before the INS or theimmigration court, or to ensure the minor's safety or that of others,or theminors has been apprended with a mother and the INS determines all suchchildren should remain detained in order to deter future unauthorized entryby others,the INS shall release a minor from its custody without unnecessarydelay,'...ICE's unilateral revision is wholly unlawful. Apart from extraordinarycircumstances nowhere present here, a party may not unilaterally add to asettlement.Walnut Creek Pipe Distrib., Inc. v. Gates Rubber Co. Sales Div., 228human trafficker, or complete stranger'--remain eligible for release. ICE's policythus promotes family disintegration, not unity.Second, ICE need not detain families to keep them together. ICE can and shouldrelease mothers and children together in accordance with actual equities, just as theagency's regulations. 8 C.F.R. § 1236.3(b) (2014) (''(2) If an individual specified inparagraphs (b)(1)(i) through (iii) of this section cannot be located to accept custodyof a juvenile, and the juvenile has identified a parent, legal guardian, or adultrelative in Service detention,simultaneous release of the juvenile and the parent,legal guardian, or adult relative shall be evaluated on a discretionary case-by-casebasis.'' (Emphasis added.)12See, e.g., Declaration of R_ E_ A_, Jan. 8, 2015, Exhibit 20 ¶ 7 (R_E_A_Ex20);Declaration of J_ H_M, Sept. 20, 2014, Exhibit 12 ¶ 7 (J_H_M_Ex12); Declarationof M_ C_T, Sept. 19, 2014, Exhibit 13 ¶ 7 (M_C_T_Ex13); Declaration of M_ F_S,Sept. 19, 2014, Exhibit 14 ¶ 8 (M_F_S_Ex14).Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 16 of 29 Page ID #:861

- 10 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728Cal.App.2d 810, 816, 39 Cal.Rptr. 767 (1964) (courts should not imply additionalterms, except in cases of ''obvious necessity.'').13Defendants' no-release policy thus violates the Settlement's ''general policyfavoring release'' and its specific provisions requiring ICE to seek out qualifiedcustodians and release children to them absent exceptional circumstances.1413Additional terms may be implied only ifallof the following conditions aresatisfied:(1) the implied term must arise from the language of the contract itself or itmust be indispensable to effectuate the intention of the parties;(2) it must appear from the language used that the term was so clearly within thecontemplation of the parties that they deemed it unnecessary to express it;(3) the additional term must be justified on the grounds of legal necessity;(4) it must appear that the additional term would have been included hadattention been called to it; and(5) the additional term may not treat a subject completely covered by thecontract.Stockton Dry Goods v. Girsh, 36 Cal.2d 677, 680; 227 P.2d 1 (1951). The additiondefendants unilaterally invent meets none of these criteria.As for ''obvious necessity,'' ICE initially justified its no-release policy as a responseto the influx ofunaccompaniedminors that started in March 2014. The influx,however, proved short-lived: by October 2014, defendants apprehended 2,529unaccompanied children, fewer than the 2,986 apprehended in February 2013.Seehttp://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/secretary/14_1009_s1_border_slide_508.pdf#page=31 (last checked January 16, 2015).Of course, ICE's no-release policy targets notunaccompaniedminors, but childrenapprehended with mothers, a far smaller population: by October 2014, fewer than100 families were apprehended in the Border Patrol Rio Grande Sector, by far thesector most impacted by the surge.Id.;www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-border-unaccompanied-children-2014 (last checked Jan. 16, 2015).14Even assuming,arguendo, defendants had some basis to evade their obligationsunder the Settlement, their remedy is to ask the Court to reform the agreement, notunilaterally breach it.United States v. ITT Continental Baking Co., 420 U.S. 223,236-37; 95 S. Ct. 926; 43 L. Ed. 2d 148 (1975);United States v. Atlantic RefiningCo., 360 U.S. 19, 23; 79 S. Ct. 944; 3 L. Ed. 2d 1054 (1959) (that government'sinterpretation of consent decree might better accord with statute would ''not warrantour substantially changing the terms of a decree '... without any adjudication of theissues.'').Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 17 of 29 Page ID #:862

- 11 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728B ICE must consider releasing class members with their preferredcustodians: their mothers.The Settlement further grants class members a right to release ''in order ofpreference to '... a parent; '...'' Settlement ¶ 14.15ICE's denying their mothers anychance for release denies class members a right the Settlement explicitly confers:preferential release to a parent.16Until June 2014, defendants exercised individualized discretion to releasewomen who are statutorily eligible regardless of whether they were apprehendedwith their children. Hines ¶ 9; Cambria ¶ 2.17Women who are lawfully eligible for15As noted, defendants' own regulations require much the same.See8 C.F.R. §1236.3(b) (2015).The Supreme Court has also remarked that mothers should generally be consideredfor release along with their children:The Board of Immigration Appeals has stated that ''an alien generally '... should notbe detained or required to post bond except on a finding that he is a threat to thenational security '... or that he is a poor bail risk.''... In the case of arrested alienjuveniles, however, the INS cannot simply send them off into the night on bond orrecognizance. The parties to the present suit agree that the Service must assure itselfthat someone will care for those minors pending resolution of their deportationproceedings.That is easily done when the juvenile's parents have also beendetained and the family can be released together; '...Reno v. Flores, supra, 507 U.S. at 295 (citations omitted; emphasis added).16On January 6, 2015, a proposed class action challenging ICE's no-release policyas applied againstFloresclass members' mothers commenced in the United StatesDistrict Court for the District of Columbia.R.I.L.R., v. Johnson,No. 15-00011. Thesuit contends that ICE's no-release policy violates mothers' rights apart from thosethe Settlement confers on class members herein.SeeMemorandum in Support ofPreliminary Injunction, Exhibit 36.17The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) generally permits detention pendingremoval proceedings only where an arrestee is a danger to the community or toprevent flight where the risk of absconding cannot be mitigated through impositionof bond or other conditions.Demore v. Kim,supra, 538 U.S. at 527-28;Matter ofGuerra, 24 I. & N. Dec. 37 (BIA 2006);Matter of Adeniji, 22 I. &N. Dec. 1102(BIA 1999);Matter of Patel, 15 I. & N. Dec. 666 (BIA 1976). The INA andCase 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 18 of 29 Page ID #:863

- 12 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728release include bona fide asylum-seekers:i.e., those who prove a credible fear ofpersecution. 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)(B)(iii)(IV). The mothers ofmanyclass membersare bona fide asylum-seekers,18and until now were deemed a ''low priority'' fordetention.19Even now, women apprehended without children'--and nearly all adultmales'--receive an individualized assessment of whether detention is warranted ifthey prove a credible fear of persecution. Hines ¶ 17. Defendants reserve their mostrigid detention policy for mothers apprehended with children despite their beingstatutorily eligible for release:DHS has applied this policy and practice of categorical detention even toCentral American families who have been found to have a credible fear ofpersecution in their home countries and are eligible for release. '... I am notaware of any family detained at Karnes who despite being eligible for releaseunder 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a), and despite having received a favorable crediblefear finding, then received an DHS custody determination allowing forimplementing regulations direct ICE to exercise discretion to determine whether anon-citizen's release on bond will prove dangerous or inadequate to secure his orher appearance. 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a); 8 C.F.R. § 1236.1(c)(8).18E.g., Declaration of Anne Chandler, Dec. 1, 2014, Exhibit 28 ¶ 14 (Chandler);Declaration of Allison Boyle, Nov. 24, 2014, Exhibit 29 ¶ 15 (Boyle); Declarationof Brittany Perkins, Nov. 28, 2014, Exhibit 30 ¶ 12 (Perkins); Declaration ofClayton Matheson, Nov. 30, 2014, Exhibit 31 ¶ 11 (Matheson).19See, e.g.,ICE, Directive 11002.1,Parole of Arriving Aliens Found to Have aCredible Fear of Persecution or Torture§ 6.2 (Dec. 8, 2009),available atwww.ice.gov/doclib/dro/pdf/11002.1-hd-parole_of_arriving_aliens_found_credible_fear.pdf (last checked Jan. 18, 2015).In fiscal year 2012, DHS released 80 percent of bona fide asylum-seekers. U.S.Comm'n on Int'l Religious Freedom,Assessing the U.S. Government's Detention ofAsylum Seekers: Further Attention Needed to Fully Implement Reforms9-10 (Apr.2013),available atwww.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/resources/ERS-detention%20reforms%20report%20April%202013.pdf (last checked Jan. 18,2015).Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 19 of 29 Page ID #:864

- 13 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728release.B. Hines ¶ 14;see also,Declaration of Kate Lincoln, Dec. 2, 2014, Exhibit 32 ¶ 13;Declaration of Melissa Cuadrado, Nov. 26, 2014, Exhibit 33 ¶ 12 (Cuadrado);Declaration of Scott Williams, Dec. 1, 2014, Exhibit 34 ¶ 11.ICE's no-release policy toward mothers cannot be squared with theSettlement's granting class members a right to preferential release to a parent. A''written contract must be read as a whole and every part interpreted with referenceto the whole.''Kennewick Irrigation District v. United States, 880 F.2d 1018, 1032(9th Cir. 1989). ''Preference must be given to reasonable interpretations as opposedto those that are unreasonable, or that would make the contract illusory.''Id. ICE'sexercising discretion to release mothers as 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a) directs is essential ifchildren's right to prefential release to a parent is to have any meaning at all.Further, consent decrees should also be enforced whenever practicable so asto avoid raising constitutional questions.Cf.Walsh v. Schlecht, 429 U.S. 401, 408,50 L. Ed. 2d 641, 97 S. Ct. 679 (1977) (''Contracts should not be interpreted torender them illegal and unenforceable where the wording lends itself to a logicallyacceptable construction that renders them legal and enforceable.''). Here, construingthe Settlement to allow ICE to detain class members' mothers merely because theyhave been apprehended together would raise substantial constitutional concerns.First, ICE's releasing class members'--as the Settlement clearly requires'--while refusing even to exercise discretion to release their mothers would underminechildren's due process interest in parental care.Smith v. Organization of FosterFamilies, 431 U.S. 816, 844, 97 S. Ct. 2094, 53 L. Ed. 2d 14 (1977) (due processright of children in not being dislocated from the ''emotional attachments thatderive from the intimacy of daily association'' with the parent).Second, defendants continue to release men, women, and adolescentsapprehended separately in accordance with 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a). Detainingonlymothers merely because they were apprehended with their children bears noCase 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 20 of 29 Page ID #:865

- 14 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728relationship to any legitimate governmental purpose and would accordingly raisesubstantial equal protection concerns.Nordlinger v. Hahn, 505 U.S. 1, 10; 112S.Ct. 2326; 120 L.Ed.2d 1 (1992) (equal protection component of the FifthAmendment ''keeps governmental decisionmakers from treating differently personswho are in all relevant respects alike.'').ICE's refusing to exercise discretion to release class members' mothersaccordingly breaches the preference for parental custody ¶ 14 posits. Detainingchildren is universally recognized as inimical to their well-being, and releasetogether with a parent is not only required by ¶ 14, it is clearly in the best interestsof a particularly vulnerable population.20II ICE'S ROUTINE CONFINEMENT OF CHILDREN IN SECURE,UNLICENSEDFACILITIES BREACHES THESETTLEMENT.The Settlement stipulates that defendants shall house the general populationof children they do not release in facilities that are licensed to care fordependentminors: ''In any case in which the INS does not release a minor pursuant toParagraph 14, '... [e]xcept as provided in Paragraphs 12 or 21, such minor shall beplaced temporarily in a licensed program ...'' Settlement ¶ 19.The agreement defines a ''licensed program'' as a ''program, agency ororganization that islicensed by an appropriate State agencyto provide residential,group, or foster care services fordependent children'...'' Settlement ¶ 6 (emphasisadded).2120E.g., Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services,et al.,Flores SettlementAgreement and DHS Custody: Key Flores Provisions & DHS Noncompliance(undated), Exhibit 37 (LIRS Report).21In this regard, the Settlement is consistent with federal law regulating thedetention of juveniles. 42 U.S.C. § 5633(a)(12)(B) prohibits secure confinement ofjuveniles not charged with delinquency or crime. The U.S. Department of Justicemaintains that housing non-delinquent class members in secure facilities wouldtherefore be inconsistent with federal policy. Office of Juvenile Justice and JuvenileCase 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 21 of 29 Page ID #:866

- 15 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728The Settlement's requiring that detention facilities be licensed ensures thatdisinterested state officials with appropriate expertise are regularly monitoring andcertifying that ICE placements meet child-welfare standards.22Exceptional cases aside,23the Settlement precludes ICE from housingchildren in unlicensed facilities, and even then only if no less restrictive alternativeis available.Id. ¶ 23. Yet ICE freely admits it is routinely holding non-delinquentclass members in facilities that are not licensed to care for dependent minors.SeeDelinquency Prevention,Juveniles in Federal Custody: Recommendations andProspects for Change(1998), at 40.22Child welfare and protection expert Genevra Berger elaborates on the importanceof licensing:It bears emphasis that the state licensing agency plays a pivotal role not only ininitially assessing the standards are met but also in conducting periodic inspectionsto determine continuing compliance. '... [M]ost importantly, '... the lack of licensingmeans that no qualified and independent agency is verifying that the minimal safetyrequirements '... are being met. Nor is there any qualified and independent childwelfare agency available to receive and investigate allegations of child abuse orneglect '...Declaration of Genevra Berger, Jan. 12, 2015, Exhibit 25 ¶¶ 25, 28 (Berger).23The Settlement leaves defendants free to place delinquents and exceptionalescape-risks in unlicensed, secure facilities, such as juvenile halls. Settlement ¶ 21.The Settlement also allows defendants to place children who are neither escape-risks nor delinquent in unlicensed facilities in the event of an ''influx.''Id. ¶ 12.Defendants have not yet sought to excuse their housing class members apprehendedwith their mothers in unlicensed facilities under the influx provision. Their doing socould not possibly be excused as an influx response.First, the influx of children apprehended with their mothers ended months ago.Note 13,ante. Second, defendants continue to placeunaccompaniedminors, whohave always far outnumbered children apprehended with their mothers,id., inlicensed placements. Third, ¶ 12 of the Settlement stipulates that even ''in the eventof an '... influx of minors into the United States, '... the INS shall place all minors''in licensed settings ''as expeditiously as possible'...'' Defendants feign no effort atall to place minors apprehended with their mothers in licensed settings.Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 22 of 29 Page ID #:867

- 16 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728e.g., Defendants' response to questions re: implementation of class actionsettlement, November 3, 2014, Exhibit 6 at 12.In addition to licensing, the Settlement stipulates that ''[a]ll homes andfacilities operated by licensed programs '... shall benon-secureas required understate law ...''; that defendants ''usually house[] persons under the age of 18 in anopen setting, such as a group home,and not in detention facilities.''Id. (emphasissupplied).24Yet ICE's family detention facilities are unquestionably secure:The Karnes City facility is a large block building, which appeared to haveonly one entrance. To enter, my colleagues and I were '... directed to a sallyport, which comprised two heavy metal doors with a small room between.We passed through one door, it closed behind us; '... the second door wasopened, we walked through, and we then reached the interior of the facility.The Karnes facility is constructed of concrete block. A staff member statedthe facility had been designed to house adult male prisoners. '... [A] centralopen area '... was effectively surrounded by the high block walls of thefacility itself, denying those inside any means of ingress or egress except viathe secure entrance I earlier described. Facility staff stated that childrendetained at Karnes have never been permitted outside the facility to go to thepark, library, museum, or other public places.Declaration of Carlos Holgu­n, January 15, 2013, Exhibit 23 ¶¶ 4-5;see alsoHines¶ 63; Matheson ¶ 17; Cuadrado ¶ 6; Chandler ¶ 21; Perkins ¶ 21.24Dr. Luis Zayas, a leading child psychologist and Dean of the School of SocialWork at the University of Texas at Austin emphasizes the harm secure confinementdoes to children: ''The medical and psychiatric literature has shown thatincarceration of children, even in such circumstances as living with their mothers indetention, has long-lasting psychological, developmental, and physical effects.''Declaration of Luis Zayas, Dec. 10, 2014, Exhibit 24 ¶¶ 1-6. After interviewingchildren at ICE's Karnes detention center, Dr. Zayas found that ''children [atKarnes] are suffering emotional and other harms as a result of being detained.''Id.¶10.Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 23 of 29 Page ID #:868

- 17 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728In sum, ICE's detaining children in secure, unlicensed facilities is''detrimental to child welfare and places the detained children at grave risk ofserious harm.'' Berger ¶ 16. It also clearly breaches ICE's duty to house the generalpoplation of children it does not release in non-secure settings that are properlylicensed to care for dependent minors.III DEFENDANTS VIOLATE THESETTLEMENT BY REGULARLY EXPOSING CHILDRENINBORDERPATROL CUSTODY TO HARSH,SUBSTANDARD CONDITIONS ANDTREATMENT.The Settlement guarantees class members a minimum level of care evenwhile they await release or transfer to a licensed placement:Following arrest, the INS shall hold minors in facilities that are safe andsanitary and that are consistent with the INS's concern for the particularvulnerability of minors. Facilities will provide access to toilets and sinks,drinking water and food as appropriate, medical assistance if the minor is inneed of emergency services, adequate temperature control and ventilation, ...Settlement ¶ 12.Typically, upon apprehension class members are taken first to a BorderPatrol station. Children may spend from one to several nights in Border Patrolholding cells before they are turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, ifunaccompanied, or if accompanied, to ICE, for longer term housing.See6 U.S.C. §279. Though ¶ 12 guarantees that children will be treated in accordance withminimum standards during Border Patrol detention, reports of agonizing cold,overcrowding, and inadequate nutrition and hygiene are endemic:[W]e were first taken to a Border Patrol station near McAllen, Texas, wherewe spent three days and four nights. '... The Border Patrol put us in a cellwith perhaps 100 other women and children. There were so many of us thatonly perhaps half of us could lie down. '... We were given neither mattressnor pillow, so we did our best to sleep on the hard concrete floor, which wasCase 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 24 of 29 Page ID #:869

- 18 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728covered with dust. We were given nothing to keep warm except a cover ofaluminum foil. Neither my children nor I could sleep that first night.The cell had only two toilets for all of us to use. There were short wallssurrounding the toilets, but it was so crowded that people were sitting orlying down in the stalls, so any privacy the stall might have provided waslost. There was no waste basket in the stalls, so people had to throw usedKotex and used toilet paper on the floors. There was no soap for us to use towash our hands, and we were not permitted to bathe or brush our teeth theentire time we were there.The cell had no window to allow daylight to enter; only a window out to thecentral part of the Border Patrol station. They kept the light on all the time,and there was no clock so we lost track of whether it was day or night, but Ibelieve it was the next morning when we were finally given something to eat,which was a baloney sandwich. For the next days, we were given nothingelse to eat except baloney sandwiches three times a day. We were constantlyhungry.Declaration of D_ V_A, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit 18 ¶¶ 3-5 (D_V_A_Ex18).2525Journalists, human rights observers, and advocates have repeatedly expressedconcern over Border Patrol conditions.See, e.g.Americans for Immigrant Justice,The Hieleras: A Report on Human and Civil Rights Abuses Committed by U.S.Customs and Border Protection Agency, Aug. 2013,available athttp://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/aijustice/pages/391/attachments/original/1398795271/The_Hieleras_A_Report.pdf?1398795271; Center for InvestigativeReporting,Detained border crossers may find themselves sent to ''the freezers,''Nov. 18, 2013,available athttp://cironline.org/reports/detained-border-crossers-may-find-themselves-sent-to-freezers-5574; National Public Radio,Amid Wave ofChild Immigrants, Reports of Abuse by Border Patrol, July 24, 2014,available atwww.npr.org/2014/07/24/334041633/amid-wave-of-child-immigrants-reports-of-abuse-by-border-patrol; Complaint regarding Systemic Abuse of UnaccompaniedChildren in CBP Custody, June 11, 2014,available atwww.acluaz.org/sites/default/files/documents/DHS%20Complaint%20re%20CBP%20Abuse%20of%20UICs.pdf.Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 25 of 29 Page ID #:870

- 19 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728Detainees' accounts of harsh Border Patrol conditions are disturbinglyconsistent. Children routinely endure extreme cold and have little or no access toclothing, blankets, or beds.26Detainees consistently refer to CBP facilities as''hieleras'' or iceboxes.27Coverings, when provided, are of ''aluminum foil'' and areoften inadequate to keep children warm in ''ice box'' temperatures.28Children and their mothers regularly report being held for one to three daysin extremely overcrowded rooms with 100 or more unrelated adults and children.29In overcrowded conditions, children must frequently sleep standing up or not at all;they often lack space even to walk around.30Whatever floor space may be availableconsists of concete floors caked with mud and dirt from migrants' shoes.3126E.g.Declaration of H_R_M, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit 19 ¶ 5 (H_R_M_Ex19);Declaration of E_G_M, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit 41 ¶ 5 (E_G_M_Ex41); Declarationof M_G_S, Jan. 8, 2015, Exhibit 40 ¶ 4 (M_G_S_Ex40).27E.g.Declaration of A_F_E, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit 44 ¶ 5 (A_F_E_Ex44);H_R_M_Ex19 at ¶ 5; Declaration of C_C_C, Jan. 8, 2015, Exhibit 47 ¶ 7(C_C_C_Ex47); Declaration of S_ A_M_B, Jan. 8, 2015, Exhibit 50 ¶ 6(S_A_M_B_Ex50). CBP facility temperatures are so cold that children have fallenill. E.g. A_F_E_Ex44 ¶¶ 9-13; Declaration of S_C_M, Jan. 8, 2015, Exhibit 38 ¶ 4(S_C_M_Ex38).28E.g.Declaration of A_Z_M, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit 42 ¶ 5 (A_Z_M_Ex42);Declaration of A_C_G, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit 43 ¶ 6 (A_C_G_Ex43); A_F_E_Ex44at ¶ 5; H_R_M_Ex19 ¶ 5; Declaration of H_M_P, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit 45 ¶ 8(H_M_P_Ex45); E_G_M_Ex41 ¶ 5; Declaration of M_M_M, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit46 ¶ 5 (M_M_M_Ex46); R_E_A_Ex20 ¶ 3; D_V_A_Ex18 ¶ 4; C_C_C_Ex47 ¶ 7;Declaration of S_M_A, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit 48 ¶ 5 (S_M_A_Ex48); Declaration ofL_B_S, Jan. 8, 2015, Exhibit 49 ¶ 5 (L_B_S_Ex49); Declaration of S_B_T, Jan. 8,2015, Exhibit 39 ¶¶ 5-6 (S_B_T_Ex39).29E.g.A_F_E_Ex44 ¶ 5; M_M_M_Ex46 ¶ 5; R_E_A_Ex20 ¶ 3; D_V_A_Ex18 ¶ 4(cell shared with 100 women and children); S_C_M_Ex38 ¶ 4.30E.g.Declaration of O_ F_C_M, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit 51 ¶ 6 (O_F_C_M_Ex51);H_M_P_Ex45 ¶ 6; M_G_ S_Ex40 ¶ 4; S_C_M_Ex38 ¶ 4; S_A_M_B_Ex50 ¶ 6.Many children and their mothers report that lights are left on at night, furtherpreventing them from sleeping.E.g.O_F_C_M_Ex51 ¶ 6; H_M_P_Ex45 ¶ 6;M_M_M_Ex46 ¶ 5 (''You could not tell if it was day or night because there were noCase 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 26 of 29 Page ID #:871

- 20 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728Children have virtually no privacy in Border Patrol holding cells and mustoften use toilets that are open and visible to other detainees.32Children's access totoilets is often wholly inadequate: at times only one toilet for 50 to 100 detainees;toilets quickly become overwhelmed, and used toilet paper and sanitary napkinspiles into corners.33Children are frequently provided inadequate food and water during BorderPatrol custody.34Children and mothers report that drinking water tastes of chlorinebleach to the point that it is nearly undrinkable.35Nutrition typically consists ofsandwiches served three times daily. Special or additional meals, milk, or nutritionfor breast-feeding mothers, infants, or toddlers is out of the question.36Whether considered individually or together, Border Patrol detentionconditions are anything but ''safe and sanitary'' or ''consistent with the[Government's] concern for the particular vulnerability of minors.'' Settlement ¶ 12.Other than ''standards prescribed by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerationwindows''); R_E_A_Ex20 ¶ 4; D_V_A_Ex18 ¶ 6 (no sleep because ofovercrowding, noise, lights); S_M_A_Ex48 ¶ 5; L_B_S_Ex49 ¶ 8.31E.g.A_F_E_Ex44 at ¶ 7; D_V_A_Ex18 at ¶ 4.32E.g.A_C_G_Ex43 ¶ 6 (''Everyone could see when you used the bathroom.'');Declaration of J_E_F, Jan. 9, 2015, Exhibit 52 ¶ 6 (J_E_F_Ex52) (same);S_C_M_Ex38 ¶ 4; S_A_M_B_Ex50 ¶ 6.33E.g. A_Z_M_Ex42 ¶ 5; H_R_M_Ex19 ¶ 6 (one toilet for 125 people);E_G_M_Ex41 ¶ 5; D_V_A_Ex18 ¶ 4 (two toilets for 100; no waste baskets, soap,bathing or brushing of teeth); L_B_S_Ex49 ¶ 5 (mothers sleeping in bathroom withbabies in arms).34E.g.A_Z_M_Ex42 ¶ 5; E_G_M_Ex41 ¶ 5; M_M_M_Ex46 ¶ 5 (only two meals aday); D_V_A_Ex18 ¶ 5 (nothing to eat but sandwiches). Numerous children andmothers eating nothing more than a cold taco or ham sandwich.E.g.H_R_M_Ex19¶ 7; M_G_S_Ex40 ¶ 4; S_B_T_Ex39 ¶ 5.35E.g.J_E_F_Ex52 ¶ 11 (''The water tasted terrible, like bleach, and it was veryhard to drink.''); H_R_M_Ex19 ¶ 7 (same).36E.g.A_F_E_Ex44 ¶ 6.Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 27 of 29 Page ID #:872

- 21 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728and Air Conditioning Engineers'' for keeping holding cells at ''room temperature,''defendants report adhering tonospecific standards regulating the treatment andconditions children experience during Border Patrol custody. Exhibit 6 at 16-19.37IV CONCLUSIONFor the foregoing reasons, this Court should grant this motion and enter anorder in the form lodged concurrently herewith.3837Defendants fail to report any procedures formonitoringtemperature,overcrowding, nutrition, etc., in Border Patrol facilities.Id. CBP's reluctance totreat allegations of Border Patrol abuse seriously has been independently remarked.SeeAmerican Immigration Council,No Action Taken: Lack of CBP Accountabilityin Responding to Complaints of CBP Abuse, May 2014,available atwww.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/No%20Action%20Taken_Final.pdf.38Plaintiffs will separately move the Court to award them attorney's fees and costsincurred in the prosecution of this motion pursuant to the Equal Access to JusticeAct, 28 U.S.C. § 2412(d).Case 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 28 of 29 Page ID #:873

- 22 -MEMORANDUMINSUPPORTOFMOTIONTOENFORCESETTLEMENTOFCLASSACTIONCV85-4544-RJK(PX)12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728Dated:January 30, 2015Respectfully submitted,CENTERFORHUMANRIGHTS&CONSTITUTIONALLAWCarlos Holgu­nPeter A. ScheyMarchela IahdjianORRICK,HERRINGTON&SUTCLIFFELLPWilliam A. MolinskiT. Wayne HarmanElena Garc­aLARAZACENTROLEGAL,INC.Michael S. SorgenYOUTHLAWCENTERAlice BussiereVirginia CorriganRANJANANATARAJAN/s/ Carlos Holgu­nCarlos Holgu­n/s/ T. Wayne HarmanT.Wayne Harman/s/ Ranjana NatarajanRanjana NatarajanAttorneys for plaintiffsCase 2:85-cv-04544-DMG Document 100-1 Filed 02/02/15 Page 29 of 29 Page ID #:874

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AILA Doc. No. 14111359 | Dated July 5, 2017

July 5, 2017The court affirmed the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California's order granting the motion of a plaintiff class to enforce the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, holding that the agreement had not been abrogated by Congress, and that detained immigrant children continue to be protected by it. The court held that two statutes enacted by Congress since the government agreed to the Flores Settlement'--the Homeland Security Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act'--did not terminate the bond hearing requirement of Paragraph 24A of the agreement for unaccompanied, noncitizen minors in removal proceedings. (Flores v. Sessions, 7/5/17)

June 27, 2017In an order issued regarding the plaintiffs' motion to enforce and appoint a special monitor, Judge Gee concluded that children continue to be held longer than 20 days in secure, unlicensed facilities in defiance of the Flores settlement and the judge's previous orders, as well as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last year. The court determined that almost all Rio Grande Valley sector facilities in which children and adults were kept had unsafe and unsanitary conditions, with inadequate food, inadequate access to clean drinking water, inadequate hygiene, cold temperatures and inadequate sleeping conditions. Further the court concluded the government has failed to: make repeated efforts to release children, ensure that children are not kept in secure, non-licensed facilities (like the facility in Dilley, Texas), and release children within the court's 20-day limit. As such, the judge ordered the appointment of a Juvenile Coordinator within 30 days. For more information, read AILA's statement. (Flores v. Sessions, 6/27/17)

January 20, 2017Finding that the Office of Refugee Resettlement of the Department of Health and Human Services were in breach of the Flores agreement by denying unaccompanied immigrant children the right to a bond hearing, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee issued an order granting the plaintiffs' motion to enforce Paragraph 24A of the Flores agreement, which states that a minor in deportation proceedings shall be afforded a bond redetermination hearing before an immigration judge in every case, unless the minor indicates on the Notice of Custody Determination form that he or she refuses such a hearing. (Flores v. Lynch, 1/20/17)

September 19, 2016The plaintiffs filed a combined reply in support of their motion to enforce the Flores settlement and appoint a special monitor and in opposition to defendants' motion for an evidentiary hearing. AILA and the American Immigration Council filed an amicus brief with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in support of the plaintiffs' motion, arguing that the settlement does not allow the government to prevent the timely release of accompanied children through decisions concerning the parents. Amici also argued that the settlement must be interpreted strictly and faithfully, and that the court should compel or create mechanisms to monitor and enforce compliance with the settlement.

July 6, 2016The Ninth Circuit held that the Flores settlement agreement applies both to minors who are accompanied and unaccompanied by their parents, and that the lower court correctly refused to amend the agreement to accommodate family detention. The court also found that the lower court erred in interpreting the agreement to provide an affirmative right to release for accompanying parents, but did not preclude such release and explicitly made no determination about whether DHS is making otherwise appropriate and individualized release determinations for parents. (Flores v. Lynch, 7/6/16)

May 15, 2016 p>

The plaintiffs filed a motion to enforce the Flores settlement agreement, asserting that the Obama administration continues to detain children in deplorable and unsanitary conditions in CBP facilities in violation of the settlement and the court's orders. The motion urges the court to order the government to promptly comply with the settlement's terms and to appoint a Special Monitor to oversee the government's compliance. p>

February 23, 2016 p>

Immigration rights organizations filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs-appellees and in support of affirmation of the district court judgment in the Flores settlement agreement lawsuit, arguing against the government's position that Flores does not apply to children in family detention facilities. (AILA Doc. No. 16022411) p>

January 15, 2016 p>

The government filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit, asking the court to overturn Judge Dolly Gee's July 24, 2015, ruling, which found that the Obama administration's detention of immigrant families violated the 1997 Flores settlement agreement regulating the treatment and conditions of unaccompanied minors in federal immigration custody. The government argues that the district court erred in holding that the Flores agreement applies to accompanied noncitizen minors and their adult noncitizen parents. Alternatively, the government contends that the district court incorrectly denied the government's motion to amend the Flores agreement. (Flores v. Lynch, 1/15/16) p>

December 11, 2015 p>

The plaintiffs responded to the government's motion to expedite the briefing and hearing schedule for its appeal of Judge Dolly Gee's August 2015 order requiring DHS to comply with the Flores settlement agreement by October 23, 2015. In the response, the plaintiffs took no position on whether the court should expedite the government's appeal. However, the plaintiffs did take issue with many of the factual assertions set forth in the government's motion. p>

December 1, 2015 p>

The government filed a motion asking the Ninth Circuit to expedite the briefing, hearing, and consideration of its appeal, citing a "significant surge" of accompanied and unaccompanied migrant children over the last 90 days. p>

October 23, 2015

The court had ordered the government to bring its treatment of asylum-seeking families into compliance with the Flores settlement agreement by today, October 23. Because the government did not seek a stay, the court's order stands while the government's appeal to the Ninth Circuit moves forward, and as of today, children should be released "without unnecessary delay." (Check out this fact sheet for more information on the litigation and its impact on family detention.)

To date, DHS has not complied with Judge Gee's order. AILA and its CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project partners have called on the government to fully comply with Judge Gee's ruling. The CARA Project has determined that, as of today, approximately 195 families that it represents have been detained in Texas for more than twenty days, and an approximate 507 represented families have been detained for more than five days. These numbers only include family units represented by the CARA Project; hence, the numbers of children and mothers held in violation of the court ruling is likely significantly higher.

August 21, 2015The court filed its order denying the government's motion for reconsideration. Further, the court reiterated its conclusion that the Flores agreement encompasses both accompanied and unaccompanied minors, additionally finding that the government's argument on this point violated the local rule against repetitive arguments, characterizing them as "reheated and repackaged." p>

In sum, the court stated that children should be released from detention, as quickly as possible, preferably to a parent, even to a parent with whom they were apprehended. The court ordered the government to monitor compliance with the Agreement and this Order and to provide the plaintiffs with statistical information regarding compliance on a monthly basis. p>

August 14, 2015

The plaintiffs filed their response to the Order to Show Cause, stating ''When this Court issued its Order it was fully apprised of the parties' arguments and submissions. Defendants continue in breach to this day. They offer no rational reason why they cannot comply with the detention and release provisions of the Order starting immediately and within 90 days provide the Court with proposed standards--and procedures for monitoring compliance with such standards--for detaining class members in facilities that are safe and sanitary, consistent with concern for the particular vulnerability of minors, and consistent with Paragraph 12 of the Agreement.'' (AILA Doc. No. 15082320)

August 6, 2015

The defendants filed a response to the court's order to show cause why the remedies set forth in the court's July 24, 2015, order should not be implemented. The response requests the court to: 1) reconsider its Order; and 2) if it will not reconsider its Order, consider and adopt the proposed order attached hereto.

Also filed on August 6, 2015:

Order Implementing Remedies Pursuant to the Court's July 24, 2015, OrderDeclaration of Thomas HomanDeclaration of Ronald VitielloDeclaration of John LaffertyJuly 28, 2015

A backgrounder answering basic questions about Judge Gee's July 24 ruling that the administration's family detention policies do not comply with the Flores Settlement Agreement (AILA Doc No. 15072804).

July 24, 2015

District Court Judge Gee found DHS in breach of Flores Agreement on Friday, July 24, 2015 (AILA Doc. No. 15072500). AILA and the American Immigration Council welcomed the ruling that should signal the end of the mass incarceration of children and mothers seeking asylum in the U.S. (AILA Doc No. 15072501). This Quicktake with AILA Director Crystal Williams further explains this ruling and its implications (AILA Doc No. 15072766).

May 22, 2015

Order filed extending the deadline for the parties in Flores v. Holder (formerly known as Flores v. Reno) to meet and confer, from May 24, 2015, to June 12, 2015. The parties must file a joint status report with the district court by June 19, 2015.

March 6, 2015

On March 6, 2015, Plaintiffs filed a motion in opposition to DHS's request to modify the Flores Settlement Agreement.

February 27, 2015

On February 27, 2015, DHS filed a protective Notice of Motion to Modify the Flores Settlement Agreement, Case No. 85-4544, January 28, 1997, under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 60(b)(5) and (6). DHS also filed a response in opposition to the Plaintiffs' Motion to Enforce Settlement of Class Action.

On February 2, 2015, the plaintiffs' filed a Memorandum in Support of Motion to Enforce Settlement of Class Action.

Additional Resources

The nationwide settlement in Flores v. Reno regulates the treatment and conditions of unaccompanied minors in federal immigration custody.

11/3/14 DHS Q&As regarding implementation of the Flores AgreementA 10/15/14 Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law letter describing violations of Flores settlement agreement due to the influx of undocumented Central Americans entering the U.S. beginning in the summer of 2014U.S. District Court stipulated settlement agreement in Flores v. Reno (1997)Supreme Court decision in Reno v. Flores (3/23/93)Cite as AILA Doc. No. 14111359.

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Download Legal Document Real criminal justice reform now Take Action Now Related Issues Mass Incarceration Immigrants' Rights Immigrants' Rights and Detention

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Archived Version

Fri, 15 Jun 2018 12:05

politics

By and June 14, 2018, 1:39 PM EDT Updated on June 14, 2018, 3:16 PM EDT

European Commission chief says the label came at G-7 summit

Remark highlights U.S. allies' confusion over American leader

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said he was labeled a ''killer'' by President Donald Trump at a tumultuous Group of Seven summit in Canada, signaling the increasing personal and policy strains between the U.S. and its closest allies.

''Trump told me last week 'you are a brutal killer,''' Juncker, a Luxembourger, said during a speech to the Bavarian Parliament in Munich on Thursday. ''That's the first time that Luxembourg has grown into such a threat to the U.S. I think he meant it as a compliment, but I'm not so sure.''

The comments illustrate the confusion that Trump is sowing among U.S. allies with his protectionist tilt, withdrawal from landmark international agreements to fight climate change and to prevent Iran from developing nuclear arms, and criticism of defense spending by fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization members.

Late last month, when Trump decided to revoke a waiver for the European Union from U.S. tariffs on foreign aluminum and steel, Juncker said that ''whenever I'm thinking about Trump, I'm lost.''

Juncker's remarks on Thursday are also further evidence of the discord that occurred between the U.S. and other members of the G-7 group of leading industrialized countries at a June 8-9 summit in Quebec. Trump upended the meeting just as it wound up by disavowing a joint statement the U.S. had agreed to and lashing out at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

While on his way to Singapore for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on nuclear disarmament, Trump complained about comments made by Trudeau and called him ''very dishonest & weak.'' White House trade adviser Peter Navarro chimed in by saying there was a ''special place in hell'' for Trudeau, who had pushed back against the U.S. metal tariffs in his closing press conference at the G-7 summit.

Steel TariffsJuncker made the ''brutal killer'' comment in the context of renewed criticism of his own of those U.S. levies, which Trump has justified on national-security grounds dismissed by countries around the world. The White House didn't immediately respond to a request to comment on Juncker's remark.

''The trade problem that we have with the U.S. is sad,'' Juncker said. ''We can't let the tariffs on steel and aluminum by the American administration go unanswered.''

Earlier on Thursday in Brussels, EU governments gave the green light to the planned first phase of European retaliation against the U.S. over its metal levies, clearing the way for special duties on American goods as soon as June 20.

Representatives of the bloc's governments agreed to impose a 25 percent duty on 2.8 billion euros ($3.3 billion) of EU imports of a range of U.S. products including Harley-Davidson Inc. motorcycles, Levi Strauss & Co. jeans and bourbon whiskey. The officials also signed off on a planned 10 percent levy on one other product imported from the U.S.: playing cards.

'-- With assistance by Margaret Talev

(Updates with background, comments from second paragraph. )

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Archived Version

Fri, 15 Jun 2018 12:56

An ''antsy and bored'' Donald Trump reportedly attempted to bring his summit with Kim Jong-un of North Korea forward by a day, asking aides after his arrival in Singapore on Sunday: ''We're here now. Why can't we just do it?''

Related: Donald Trump shrugs off Kim's human rights record: 'He's a tough guy'

The one-day summit, aimed at reducing the threat from nuclear-armed North Korea, went ahead as planned on Tuesday.

But on Friday, citing two people ''familiar with preparations for the event'', the Washington Post said the president's impatience and a ''tense'' staff meeting with North Korean officials left ''left some aides fearful that the entire summit might be in peril''.

Citing ''people familiar with the talks'', the Post report said: ''Ultimately, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders persuaded Trump to stick with the original plan, arguing that the president and his team could use the time to prepare.''

''They also,'' the Post said, ''warned him that he might sacrifice wall-to-wall television coverage of his summit if he abruptly moved the long-planned date to Monday in Singapore, which would be Sunday night in the United States.''

Trump's preparation for the event was long a point of contention. In May, after North Korea criticised his vice-president, Mike Pence, Trump said the summit was cancelled. He later said his approach to the meeting was not about preparation, but ''about attitude''.

He then told a press conference in Canada before travelling to Singapore he would know ''within the first minute'' if the summit would be a success, thanks to ''just my touch, my feel''.

After meeting Kim, he told reporters he and the dictator ''got to know each other well in a very confined period of time. I know when somebody wants to deal and I know when somebody doesn't''.

The substance of the summit has been widely criticised, in most part for the failure to secure written commitment to North Korean denuclearisation, which the Trump administration had repeatedly demanded.

Trump also signalled a major concession to Pyongyang when he said he would cancel US-South Korean military exercises '' to the surprise of South Korea and the US defense department.

Footage of the president saluting a North Korean general has also been widely criticised, as has a video produced by the National Security Council to appeal to Kim and Trump's apparent dismissal of human rights concerns pertaining to the North Korean regime.

The US president repeatedly praised the North Korean leader for being ''tough''.

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Archived Version

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 14:05

CNBC

Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of Theranos leaves the Robert F. Peckham courthouse with her attorney after her arraignment in San Jose on June 14th, 2018.

Elizabeth Holmes, the college dropout who founded the blood-testing company Theranos, and the firm's ex-president Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani were indicted Friday on criminal charges related to false claims they made about the accuracy of their much-hyped testing devices.

Both Holmes, who stepped down as CEO of the financially crippled company earlier Friday, and Balwani appeared in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, for arraignment on two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud.

Both Holmes and Balwani, who surrendered Friday to the FBI, were released on $500,000 bond each and ordered to surrender their passports at the arraignment, which was attended by Holmes' parents.

The indictment accuses Holmes, 34, and then 53-year-old Balwani of engaging in a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud investors, and a separate scheme to defraud doctors and patients.

Both schemes involved efforts to promote Theranos by wildly overstating the technological capability of Theranos' blood-testing machines, as well as the company's revenue prospects and business contractual relationships, according to federal prosecutors.

Holmes and Balwani face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Theranos in 2013 had begun touting its devices as offering a less expensive and less painful option for drawing blood, from a finger stick.

The company, which at one point had a valuation of $9 billion, also claimed the devices would be able to test for a wide range of health conditions from just a few drops of blood.

Alex Tse, acting United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, said the alleged conspiracy of the duo "not only defrauded investors" but "more egregiously ... misled doctors and patients about the reliability of medical tests that endangered health and lives."

Tse's office said that Holmes and Balwani made claims in ads and solicitations to induce doctors and patients to use Theranos' blood-testing, "even though the defendants knew Theranos was not capable of consistently producing accurate and reliable results for certain blood tests."

"The tests performed on Theranos technology, in addition, were likely to contain inaccurate and unreliable results," the prosecutors' office said.

The indictment says that Holmes and Balwani also made "numerous misrepresentations to potential investors about Theranos' financial condition and its future prospects."

Those lies included claiming that the company used Theranos-made analyzers for patient tests when it was actually using third-party devices that were commercially available.

"The defendants also represented to investors that Theranos would generate over $100 million in revenues and break even in 2014 and that Theranos expected to generate approximately $1 billion in revenues in 2015 when, in truth, the defendants knew Theranos would generate only negligible or modest revenues in 2014 and 2015," according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos.

On top of that, Holmes and Balwani claimed that Theranos "has a profitable and revenue-generating business relationship with the United States Department of Defense and that Theranos' technology had deployed to the battlefield," the office said.

In reality, Theranos has "limited revenue from military contracts and was not deployed in the battlefield," according to prosecutors.

Balwani's lawyer, Jeffrey Coopersmith, said, "In over 28 years of practicing law, as both a federal prosecutor and a defense attorney, I have never seen a case like this one, where the government brings a criminal prosecution against a defendant who obtained no financial benefit and lost millions of dollars of his own money."

"Mr. Balwani committed no crimes. He did not defraud Theranos investors, who were among the most sophisticated in the world. He did not defraud consumers but instead worked tirelessly to empower them with access to their own health information. Mr. Balwani is innocent and looks forward to clearing his name at trial," Coopersmith said.

Lawyers for Holmes declined to comment to CNBC after the arraignment.

Theranos said Friday that Holmes has been replaced as chief executive officer by David Taylor, who will also remain as general counsel.

Holmes will remain as chairman of Theranos' board, according to the company.

The criminal charges come three months after Holmes was slapped with a civil lawsuit in March by the Securities and Exchange Commission that alleged "massive fraud" by her and California-based Theranos.

The SEC had alleged that Theranos raised more than $700 million from investors between late 2013 and 2015 while at the same time "deceiving investors" by overselling the ability of the company's diagnostic devices.

At the same time of that complaint, Holmes agreed to a settlement with the SEC that stripped her of voting control of Theranos, required her to return nearly 19 million shares she obtained from the company "during the fraud," and also prevents her from serving as an officer or director of a public company for a decade.

Holmes, who had founded Theranos in 2003 as a 19-year-old Stanford University dropout, also agreed to fork over a $500,000 fine.

Holmes, who in dress and demeanor consciously mimicked Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, had previously been a media darling who wooed former secretaries of state George Schultz and Henry Kissinger to her company's board, along with now-Defense Secretary James Mattis.

But the company in recent years had burned through more than $600 million invested by a number of high-profile investors, including Walmart founders the Walton family, media baron Rupert Murdoch, and the family of U.S. Education Department Secretary Betsy DeVos. According to a recent lawsuit, each had invested $100 million or more in Theranos.

In April, Holmes told most of Theranos' 125 remaining employees that they would be out of work by this past Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. And she told Theranos shareholders that the company could be liquidated by August.

Earlier this week, John Carreyrou, the Journal reporter who broke many damning articles about Theranos, said the company now has only 20 employees. At one point, 800 people had worked for the firm.

Theranos' downfall was set in motion by a series of stories in the Journal that undercut the company's high-flying claims.

The first Journal story, in October 2015, said that Theranos' machine was capable of doing only a small number of the tests it was selling customers.

Holmes fired back at the newspaper at that time, telling CNBC's Jim Cramer, "This is what happens when you work to change things. First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world."

But the SEC complaint showed the Journal was on track in its reporting.

Theranos duped investors by "hosting misleading technology demonstrations, and overstating the extent of Theranos' relationships with commercial partners," the complaint said.

At the time of those demonstrations, Theranos' technology could only do about 12 tests of the more than 200 tests the company claimed it could handle, the SEC said.

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 15:33

Fri Jun 15, 2018 / 6:50 PM EDT

(Reuters) - Theranos Inc founder Elizabeth Holmes and the embattled blood-testing company's former president were indicted on charges that they engaged in schemes to defraud investors, doctors and patients, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Friday.

The charges against Holmes, 34, and Ramesh ''Sunny'' Balwani, 53, were announced shortly after the privately held company said that she was stepping down as its chief executive.

Prosecutors said that Holmes and Balwani used advertising and solicitations to encourage doctors and patients to use its blood testing laboratory services despite knowing the company could not produce accurate and reliable results consistently.

"This conspiracy misled doctors and patients about the reliability of medical tests that endangered health and lives," FBI Special Agent in Charge John Bennett said in a statement.

The indictment also alleged that Holmes and Balwani made numerous misrepresentations about Theranos' financial condition and prospects. Balwani, who worked at Theranos from September of 2009 through 2016, had also served as chief operating officer and was a member of the board.

In a statement, Theranos said Holmes would remain chair of the company's board and David Taylor, the firm's general counsel, had been appointed CEO.

Each defendant faces two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud. Prosecutors said both entered pleas of not guilty on Friday during a hearing before a federal magistrate judge in San Jose, California.

The criminal charges came after Holmes in March settled civil fraud charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under which she was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years.

Lawyers for Holmes did not respond to requests for comment. Jeffrey Coopersmith, Balwani's attorney, said his client had committed no crimes.

"Mr. Balwani looks forward to trial because he did not defraud anyone, and it will be an honor to defend him vigorously," Coopersmith said in a statement.

Holmes, who started Theranos at the age of 19, was celebrated as a rising star of Silicon Valley until it became clear that many of the claims about the company's supposedly revolutionary blood test were bogus.

The company reached a $9 billion valuation based on its promise to disrupt the laboratory testing business.

In presentations to potential investors, to doctors at medical meetings and to the media, Holmes claimed the Theranos analyzer could perform a full range of clinical tests using tiny blood samples drawn from a finger stick, and that it could produce results that were more accurate, reliable and faster than those from conventional blood tests.

The indictment alleges that Holmes and Balwani knew their analyzer had accuracy and reliability problems, performed a limited number of tests, was slower than some competing devices, and, in some respects, could not compete with existing conventional machines.

They told investors that Theranos could generate about $1 billion in revenues in 2015 when in fact the company had generated just a few hundred thousand dollars in 2014 and 2015, the indictment said.

In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos' devices were flawed and inaccurate, setting off a downward spiral for the company that had bagged investors including venture capital firm DFJ, Walgreens (WBA.O ), media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Oracle (ORCL.N ) co-founder Larry Ellison.

(Reporting by Tamara Mathias in Bengaluru and Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Maju Samuel and Bill Berkrot)

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Fri, 15 Jun 2018 12:41

One of the companies vying for the market in SeattlePhoto: SpinDockless bike-sharing, like dockless e-scooter renting, has proliferated across the U.S. at a rapid clip that hasn't always gone over so well. Nowhere has it developed into such an issue like the City of Seattle, Wired contends today in a deeply-reported feature.

Here's a nice little bit of context to set the scene, from Wired's story:

WHEN DOCKLESS BIKE share began in Chinese cities three years ago, the downsides of the idea soon became apparent. Tens of thousands of broken or stranded bikes littered those cities before their governments cracked down, impounding bikes and setting limits on their use. Seattle's Department of Transportation wanted to avoid that mess.

So last July, the city allowed three companies'--Ofo, LimeBike, and Spin'--to deploy up to 4,000 bikes each in a six-month trial, in return for a deluge of data about their customers and operations. Seattle planners wanted to understand in granular detail how the systems would work, and how its citizens would use them. Now the data is in, much of it sourced by WIRED through a series of public records requests.

As it turns out, dockless bikes are being adopted very quickly by Seattleites, Wired found, with bikes getting used three times as much when compared to the rest of the country.

But like any new recent mobility innovation as of late, the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of bikes didn't sit well with everyone.

Again from the story:

The thousands of new bikes in circulation inevitably led to conflict with residents. According to the feedback collected by Seattle's transportation department, car owners are blaming shared bikes for scraping their vehicles. Residents are peeved that unsightly bikes are clogging up sidewalks, parks, and driveways, making the streets less navigable for pedestrians and annoying local businesses. Vandals have been systematically cutting brake cables of bikes from all three companies. Some activists are now trying to oust the bike companies.

Bikes wound up in places where, ideally, they shouldn't, like the middle of roads, and this:

They were also getting tossed into lakes. ''As soon as I saw the bikes on the roads, that same week we started seeing them in the water,'' says scuba instructor Mike Hemion, who teaches commercial divers in Seattle's bays and lakes. ''Three out of four times when we dive downtown on the waterfront now, there's a bike in the water.'' In the early days of these water retrievals, workers were expected to fish them out themselves; LimeBike workers even cobbled together a makeshift grappling hook to snare them. Now the three bike share companies just call Hemion.

You really should read this entire story, as it's really driving home a key question that seems to take a backseat when bike-sharing startups come to a new town: Can people actually be trusted with them? I really don't know if they can.

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Sun, 17 Jun 2018 04:33

The hottest investment in Silicon Valley today looks like a kids' toy, has only been tested in a few cities and is unsafe to use in heavy rain.

Venture-capital investors are pouring money into shared electric scooters at an unprecedented rate in the already fast-moving tech hub. They're making a sizable bet that these motorized two-wheelers will reshape how millions of people travel around cities.

The headfirst dive into a business that didn't exist a year ago has rattled cities and comes with numerous risks and unknowns that make large-scale success anything but assured. The funding frenzy is reminiscent of the early days of ride-hailing, when Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. slugged it out for capital, riders and drivers while battling local regulations.

This time, the money is speeding faster, even as local regulators are more aggressively imposing restrictions that limit growth. Two companies, Bird Rides Inc. and Lime, have reached $1 billion valuations less than a year and half after they were founded, raising $400 million combined in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. That makes them the fastest U.S. startups ever to reach that valuation, according to research firm PitchBook.

Both are in the process of raising additional funding. Bird is set to be valued at $2 billion with this additional infusion, one of the people said.

Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft are each plotting an entrance into the scooter world, applying for permits last week to operate them in San Francisco.

Like children's Razor scooters, these vehicles have a platform attached to small wheels and a handlebar but are souped up with electric motors. The business is rather simple. Users locate and unlock scooters on an app, paying at least $1. Riders can hum along at up to 15 miles an hour and drop them wherever they want for the next rider'--until the battery runs out.

People have flocked to them in a handful of densely populated, warm-weather cities including San Francisco and San Diego. But it isn't clear whether they will work in colder, wetter climates and in more sprawling locales with fewer bike lanes. Heavy rain makes for hazardous riding, as do steep downhills.

Meanwhile, numerous city governments have begun to limit the number of shared scooters to prevent well-funded scooter companies from flooding sidewalks like bike-share companies have done in China.

Even if those restrictions were lifted, it isn't clear how all of these companies will distinguish their scooters in a crowded market.

Despite the hurdles, the rush of scooter cash reflects the tremendous deluge of investor money that has pushed up Silicon Valley valuations lately.

Venture capitalists are driven by two main factors: strong demand and promising economics.

Even with little marketing, companies say thousands of people now regularly commute on the scooters. Trips average a bit more than a mile.

''Consumers are saying this is what they want,'' said Mark Suster, a partner at Upfront Ventures who was an early investor in Venice, Calif.-based Bird. ''I have never seen revenue grow faster in a consumer-product-oriented company.''

Investors are banking on scooters becoming as popular in the U.S. as dockless share bikes are in China. But price wars there have caused heavy losses and oversupply of bikes. Bike-share giant Mobike was valued at $2.7 billion in April despite reports of tens of millions of rides a day, while Bird's scooter count is in the thousands.

Euwyn Poon, co-founder of San Francisco-based Spin, said his company was originally focused on shared bikes, which brought in 50 cents to $1 of revenue per bike per day in Seattle. Scooters, he said, generate about $20 of revenue a day, averaging more than five trips.

Many scooters would generate more money if their batteries didn't run out by midday, he said. Spin has said it had a few hundred scooters in San Francisco before the city started implementing a permit program.

The companies tell investors they recoup the cost of the scooters, generally about $350 to $450, after about two months, or faster. The biggest daily costs are maintenance and charging'--about $10 to $15 a day per scooter, according to investors who have seen the numbers. The companies pay a force of local residents to charge the scooters in their homes, and some company trucks pick up remaining scooters at night.

The craze kicked off in September when Bird'--then valued at $18 million, per PitchBook'--scattered scooters around the streets of Santa Monica, announcing its presence to the city in a LinkedIn message to the mayor.

They became an instant hit, while also drawing the ire of residents and city officials upset with the clutter of scooters lying around, or riders on sidewalks.

But it wasn't until March, when thousands of scooters from Bird, Lime and Spin began appearing in the streets of San Francisco that venture capitalists began to swoon.

Backing Bird'--incorporated in April 2017'--is Sequoia Capital, which led a $150 million investment at a more than $1 billion valuation, up from $300 million in March. Meanwhile Alphabet Inc., through its GV venture-capital arm, is leading a $250 million investment into Lime, which started in January 2017, valuing it at about $1.1 billion, a person familiar with the matter said. Uber Technologies, by contrast, took four years to cross the $1 billion threshold, according to PitchBook.

Lime and Bird have told investors they aim to operate millions of scooters, hoping to replace many short trips by car and foot in cities around the world. Bird and Lime have followed Uber's playbook, stirring demand from consumers before regulators have a chance to draw up rules.

They also are planning rapid expansion internationally, where local rules thus far are more permissive, said Caen Contee, a vice president at Lime.

But U.S. cities are feeling emboldened to pre-empt the scooter craze after getting caught flat-footed like they did with ride and home sharing.

Cities including Nashville and Denver have started impounding scooters by the dozens. And officials in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Charlotte, N.C., and Washington, D.C., aim to limit the number of scooters and dockless bicycles, divvying up permits between multiple operators.

While transportation officials widely say they like scooters as a means to cut congestion, they want to maintain some control.

''If nothing else, we've learned from ride-sharing and home-sharing coming to Nashville, it's better to be strict on the front end,'' said Jeremy Elrod, a member of Nashville's Metro Council who is pushing for a pilot program that initially limits the number of scooters to 250 for each company. ''It's hard to claw them back,'' he said.

Another complication is that regulations like those in San Francisco put companies with vastly different sizes on the same footing, proposing to limit five companies to up to 250 scooters each. Bird said it had more than 1,000 scooters in San Francisco last month.

''Cities are taking a completely different approach with this than they did with cars,'' said Roger Lee, a partner at venture-capital firm Battery Ventures who has looked at scooter companies but hasn't invested. ''The city is determining the winners'--and it won't be driven by traditional market forces,'' he said. ''It potentially nullifies the benefits of raising billions and billions of dollars.''

Write to Eliot Brown at eliot.brown@wsj.com

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Sun, 17 Jun 2018 12:37

AFP / Vitaliy NOSACH Russian war correspondent Arkady Babchenko was shot in the back three times in Kiev on Tuesday in an apparent contract-style killingProminent Russian war reporter Arkady Babchenko, who was shot dead in the stairwell of his building in Kiev on Tuesday, is the latest Kremlin critic to be murdered in Ukraine.

Here are other high-profile killings of those who have spoken out against the Kremlin in Russia's Western neighbour.

- Denis Voronenkov -

Former Russian MP and later Kremlin critic Denis Voronenkov was shot dead in broad daylight in Kiev last year.

Voronenkov used to be a federal lawmaker with the Communist Party but, after losing his seat in 2016, moved to Ukraine with his wife, Maria Maksakova, a well-known opera singer and a lawmaker for the ruling United Russia party, under a cloud of fraud allegations.

He became openly critical of Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014, testifying in a case against Ukraine's former pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted earlier that year.

The month before his death, he told Ukrainian media he had received repeated threats from the Russian security services, saying the situation in his homeland was "like Nazi Germany".

Kiev has blamed the Russian security services for the killing and has detained two suspected accomplices, both Ukrainians.

Voronenkov's bodyguard fatally wounded the gunman, who was a Ukrainian citizen and had fought in a volunteer battalion against pro-Russian separatists in the country's east. Kiev alleged he had been recruited by Russia's FSB security service.

Prosecutors also accused Maksakova's former partner Vladimir Tyurin of having ties to Russia's security services and being behind Voronenkov's killing.

Tyurin and two additional Ukrainian suspects are being sought by Kiev.

- Amina Okuyeva -

Amina Okuyeva, the doctor wife of Chechen volunteer soldier Adam Osmayev who was accused of plotting to murder Russian President Vladimir Putin, was killed last year in an attack that also wounded her husband.

The pair's car was hit by a hail of bullets as it was crossing a railway line in a village near Kiev.

AFP / GENYA SAVILOV File picture shows investigators at the site where Amina Okuyeva was shot dead outside Kiev in October last yearOsmayev was accused by Moscow authorities of planning to kill Putin just weeks before the Russian leader's election to a third term in 2012.

He was held for two-and-a-half years in a Ukrainian prison but never extradited to Russia and was released soon after the 2014 pro-European uprising.

He and his wife then fought as volunteers alongside Ukrainian forces battling Russian-backed insurgents in the country's east.

Osmayev had already survived an assassination attempt in Kiev earlier in the year. The assailant was shot dead by Okuyeva on that occasion.

Her killing remains unsolved.

- Pavel Sheremet -

AFP / SERGEI SUPINSKY Belarus-born journalist Pavel Sheremet was killed in a car bombing in central Kiev in July 2016Independent journalist Pavel Sheremet was killed by a car bomb in 2016 while driving near his home in Kiev.

Sheremet had worked for Russian state TV but moved to live in Kiev in 2014 -- the year Moscow annexed Crimea -- over his critical views on the Kremlin's tough stance on Ukraine.

He had begun his career in his home country Belarus but left after confronting authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.

He founded the popular Belarussky Partizan opposition website after being detained and expelled from Belarus for his political attacks.

The reporter's murder remains unsolved.

burs-tm-as/am/cw

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Fri, 15 Jun 2018 12:22

In the era of President Donald Trump, pressure pays.

Besides pushing the North Korean dictatorship to abandon its nuclear weapons program and working to remake the United States' trade relationships with rivals and allies alike, American foreign policy in the Trump era has been consistent in another crucial area:

Relentlessly hammering the Islamic Republic of Iran for its support for terrorism and its own nuclear weapons programs. And despite criticism, there are signs it's paying off, even among some Trump critics.

After the weekend's G-7 summit of leading industrialized nations ended with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau engaging in a very public dispute with Trump over trade, that same Trudeau abruptly reversed his government's course toward the mullahs in Tehran to one that's much more in line with Trump's position.

According to a report in the Toronto Sun, Trudeau's turnaround was simply ''remarkable.''

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Led by a vote from the prime minister himself, Canada's ruling Liberal Party voted in the country's parliament on Tuesday to support a Conservative Party motion calling on the government to halt moves toward normalizing relations with Iran.

The same motion added the ''Revolutionary Guard Corps to Canada's list of designated terrorist entities,'' the Sun reported.

Together, they amount to a denunciation of Iran. In other words, Trudeau repudiated his own foreign policy.

''It's hard to understate just what a reversal this represents,'' wrote the Sun's Anthony Furey.

Are Trump's policies about Iran going to succeed?''Trudeau campaigned on restoring diplomatic relations with Iran, and this motion calls for the government to abandon its current plan and immediately cease any and all negotiations or discussion with the Islamic Republic of Iran to restore diplomatic relations.

''So what Trudeau did by standing up in support of an opposition MP's mere motion was to signal a complete change in the Canadian government's Iran policy. What had previously been characterized as a policy of appeasement now appears to be one rooted in toughness and holding the regime to account for their conduct.''

Now, what could account for Trudeau's stunning about-face?

Furey speculated that it might be that Trudeau and his Liberal Party have decided that Iran is serious when it makes threats about eradicating Israel or that Trudeau wanted to curry favor with Canada's Iranian dissident community.

But he also included a suggestion that ''maybe, as one national security source suggested to the Sun, U.S. President Donald Trump pressured Trudeau on the broader issue at the G7.''

RELATED: Obama Adviser Cornered: Says Paying Iran OK Because It Was the End of Obama's Term

Maybe Trump really did bring pressure personally at the summit.

But maybe it was also Trump's relentless hammering at the Iran issue, especially his walking away from President Barack Obama's Iran deal, that's finally getting the message through to Canada and other allies that the murderous mullahs of Tehran are not to be trusted.

''Or maybe it was far simpler: That Trudeau had a change of heart and decided this was the right thing to do,'' Furey wrote. ''Time will tell. But what a welcome surprise.''

Maybe that, too.

But it's a rock-solid bet that it's a surprise that wouldn't have happened if Donald Trump were not in the White House.

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Sun, 17 Jun 2018 14:43

WASHINGTON '-- The Obama administration secretly sought to give Iran access '-- albeit briefly '-- to the US financial system by sidestepping sanctions kept in place after the 2015 nuclear deal, despite repeatedly telling Congress and the public it had no plans to do so.

An investigation by Senate Republicans released Wednesday sheds light on the delicate balance the Obama administration sought to strike after the deal, as it worked to ensure Iran received its promised benefits without playing into the hands of the deal's opponents. Amid a tense political climate, Iran hawks in the US, Israel and elsewhere argued that the United States was giving far too much to Tehran and that the windfall would be used to fund extremism and other troubling Iranian activity.

The report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations revealed that under President Barack Obama, the Treasury Department issued a license in February 2016, never previously disclosed, that would have allowed Iran to convert $5.7 billion it held at a bank in Oman from Omani rials into euros by exchanging them first into US dollars. If the Omani bank had allowed the exchange without such a license, it would have violated sanctions that bar Iran from transactions that touch the US financial system.

The effort was unsuccessful because American banks '-- themselves afraid of running afoul of US sanctions '-- declined to participate. The Obama administration approached two US banks to facilitate the conversion, the report said, but both refused, citing the reputational risk of doing business with or for Iran.

''The Obama administration misled the American people and Congress because they were desperate to get a deal with Iran,'' said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, the subcommittee's chairman.

Issuing the license was not illegal. Still, it went above and beyond what the Obama administration was required to do under the terms of the nuclear agreement. Under that deal, the US and world powers gave Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for curbing its nuclear program. Last month, President Donald Trump declared the US was pulling out of what he described as a ''disastrous deal.''

The license issued to Bank Muscat stood in stark contrast to repeated public statements from the Obama White House, the Treasury and the State Department, all of which denied that the administration was contemplating allowing Iran access to the US financial system.

Shortly after the nuclear deal was sealed in July 2015, then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew testified that even with the sanctions relief, Iran ''will continue to be denied access to the world's largest financial and commercial market.'' A month later, one of Lew's top deputies, Adam Szubin, testified that despite the nuclear deal ''Iran will be denied access to the world's most important market and unable to deal in the world's most important currency.''

Yet almost immediately after the sanctions relief took effect in January 2016, Iran began to complain that it wasn't reaping the benefits it had envisioned. Iran argued that other sanctions '-- such as those linked to human rights, terrorism and missile development '-- were scaring off potential investors and banks who feared any business with Iran would lead to punishment. The global financial system is heavily intertwined with US banks, making it nearly impossible to conduct many international transactions without touching New York in one way or another.

Former Obama administration officials declined to comment for the record.

However, they said the decision to grant the license had been made in line with the spirt of the deal, which included allowing Iran to regain access to foreign reserves that had been off-limits because of the sanctions. They said public comments made by the Obama administration at the time were intended to dispel incorrect reports about nonexistent proposals that would have gone much farther by letting Iran actually buy or sell things in dollars.

The former officials spoke on condition of anonymity because many are still involved in national security issues.

As the Obama administration pondered how to address Iran's complaints in 2016, reports in The Associated Press and other media outlets revealed that the US was considering additional sanctions relief, including issuing licenses that would allow Iran limited transactions in dollars. Democratic and Republican lawmakers argued against it throughout the late winter, spring and summer of 2016. They warned that unless Tehran was willing to give up more, the US shouldn't give Iran anything more than it already had.

At the time, the Obama administration downplayed those concerns while speaking in general terms about the need for the US to live up to its part of the deal. Secretary of State John Kerry and other top aides fanned out across Europe, Asia and the Middle East trying to convince banks and businesses they could do business with Iran without violating sanctions and facing steep fines.

''Since Iran has kept its end of the deal, it is our responsibility to uphold ours, in both letter and spirit,'' Lew said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2016, without offering details.

That same week, the AP reported that the Treasury had prepared a draft of a license that would have given Iran much broader permission to convert its assets from foreign currencies into easier-to-spend currencies like euros, yen or rupees, by first exchanging them for dollars at offshore financial institutions.

The draft involved a general license, a blanket go-ahead that allows all transactions of a certain type, rather than a specific license like the one given to Oman's Bank Muscat, which only covers specific transactions and institutions. The proposal would have allowed dollars to be used in currency exchanges provided that no Iranian banks, no Iranian rials and no sanctioned Iranian individuals or businesses were involved, and that the transaction did not begin or end in US dollars.

Obama administration officials at the time assured concerned lawmakers that a general license wouldn't be coming. But the report from the Republican members of the Senate panel showed that a draft of the license was indeed prepared, though it was never published.

And when questioned by lawmakers about the possibility of granting Iran any kind of access to the US financial system, Obama-era officials never volunteered that the specific license for Bank Muscat in Oman had been issued two months earlier.

According to the report, Iran is believed to have found other ways to access its money, possibly by exchanging it in smaller quantities through another currency.

The situation resulted from the fact that Iran had stored billions in Omani rials, a currency that's notoriously hard to convert. The US dollar is the world's dominant currency, so allowing it to be used as a conversion instrument for Iranian assets was the easiest and most efficient way to speed up Iran's access to its own funds.

For example: If the Iranians want to sell oil to India, they would likely want to be paid in euros instead of rupees, so they could more easily use the proceeds to purchase European goods. That process commonly starts with the rupees being converted into dollars, just for a moment, before being converted once again into euros.

US sanctions block Iran from exchanging the money on its own. And Asian and European banks are wary because US regulators have levied billions of dollars in fines in recent years and threatened transgressors with a cutoff from the far more lucrative American market.

I have had several friends that have worked in different

food service jobs. They will never drink out of any cups directly and require a

straw. They each won't say exactly why not but they have all recommended I

always use a straw after what they have seen.

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Fri, 15 Jun 2018 13:03

Wilfredo Lee / AP

A large soft drink with a plastic straw from a McDonald's restaurant is shown, Thursday, May 24, 2018, in Surfside, Fla. McDonald's will test alternatives to plastic straws in some U.S. restaurants later this year, it announced.

A large soft drink with a plastic straw from a McDonald's restaurant is shown, Thursday, May 24, 2018, in Surfside, Fla. McDonald's will test alternatives to plastic straws in some U.S. restaurants later this year, it announced.

(Wilfredo Lee / AP)

McDonald's announced Friday that it will test alternatives to plastic straws in some U.S. restaurants later this year.

The Chicago-based fast food chain also said it was rolling out paper straws in all 1,361 restaurants in the U.K. and Ireland by next year, and will test other options in markets globally. The announcements come amid a global movement to eliminate the use of plastic straws, which are difficult to recycle and often end up in the ocean.

Last month, McDonald's shareholders overwhelmingly voted down a proposal to study alternatives to plastic straws. The company, which advised shareholders to reject the proposal, said it was already undertaking such work.

''McDonald's is committed to using our scale for good and working to find sustainable solutions for plastic straws globally,'' said Francesca DeBiase, executive vice president for global supply chain and sustainability, said in a news release. ''We hope this work will support industry wide change and bring sustainable solutions to scale.''

McDonald's said it has begun testing alternatives to plastic straws in Belgium, and will try other options in France, Sweden, Norway and Australia.

Because of its massive size, the global hamburger chain can effect significant change in the supply chain, as it did when it announced it would use eggs only from cage-free hens. McDonald's previously announced a goal to source all of its packaging from renewable, recycled or certified sources by 2025.

McDonald's

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Fri, 15 Jun 2018 19:10

McDonald's said Friday its restaurants across the U.K. and Ireland will start swapping out plastic straws for paper ones. Toby Melville/Reuters hide caption

toggle caption Toby Melville/Reuters McDonald's said Friday its restaurants across the U.K. and Ireland will start swapping out plastic straws for paper ones.

Toby Melville/Reuters McDonald's says it will start using paper straws instead of plastic at all its locations across the United Kingdom and Ireland. And it plans to test sustainable alternatives to plastic straws in some restaurants in the U.S. and elsewhere around the globe later this year.

"You asked, we listened," the chain announced on Facebook. The company says it will begin transitioning to paper straws at all of its locations in the U.K. and Ireland in September.

A petition calling for the chain to stop using plastic straws has drawn nearly a half million signatures. The company reportedly uses about 1.8 million straws a day in the U.K., and it has committed to having 100 percent of its packaging come from "renewable, recycled, or certified" sources by 2025.

Plastic straws are generally used only once, making them a prime target for environmentalists who point to the enormous amount of plastic that ends up in the world's oceans '-- the equivalent, according to one marine ecologist, of a garbage truck full of plastic every minute.

"Reflecting the broader public debate, our customers told us they wanted to see a move on straws," McDonald's told the BBC.

The company will begin phasing out the plastic straws and complete the process next year. By the end of 2019, all U.K. and Ireland locations will have facilities to recycle paper straws, The Guardian reports.

The burger empire says it will try out alternatives to plastic straws later this year in the U.S., France, Sweden, Norway and Australia, but didn't specify what the straws would be made of.

And in some markets, including Malaysia, it will experiment with a more radical approach: offering straws only upon request.

Michael Gove, U.K. Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, called the shift a "significant contribution to help our natural environment," USA Today reports. "We want more companies to say no to unnecessary single-use plastics."

The McDonald's announcment comes amid a larger move against the straws in Britain, where in April Prime Minister Theresa May proposed banning plastic straws and other single-use plastic items. A number of U.K. businesses have already stopped using them.

The movement to eliminate plastic straws is gaining momentum in the U.S., as well. Cities including Miami Beach and Malibu, Calif., have outlawed them, and a ban on plastic straws and utensils in Seattle comes into force next month. Food services company Bon App(C)tit said last month it was removing the straws from its 1,000 cafes in 33 states.

Hi Adam - great shows EVERY week - ammaaaazzzzing! My

name is not really “Ben”, but I am a monthly, low-dose contributor to the show

and I’d prefer to remain anonymous regarding this topic.

I started a doctoral program at University of Southern

California - supposedly a very prestigious private university - last year.

According to Business Insider, USC is the 8th most expensive college in the US

in 2018, with annual student costs exceeding $60,000 a year. Imagine my

surprise when I discover that - instead of a state-of-the-art in-house IT

infrastructure - I was issued a USC-branded Gmail account, the GSuite set of

tools for document production (inadequate for academic writing) and a Google

Drive to store my academic writings and intellectual and artistic products. USC

is ALL-IN on the Googles! My first thought was - how can USC be so cheap with

the tech services they provide, but then I thought - can Google scan my

communications with fellow students, professors, and administrators? When I

turn in academic writings and finished artistic projects via Gmail and GDrive -

does Google have access to my intellectual property? This is not good and what

are they doing with all that dough? Well, apparently spending it on attorneys,

now that the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights is investigating

their handling of recent sexual harassment claims.

https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/office-civil-rights-launches-investigation-university-southern-californias-handling-sexual-harassment-claims

The Facebag/Googlization of everything proceeds apace….

All the best and "In The Morning”!!!

“Ben"

Dear

John and Adam,

I

took John’s request and looked through the Learn.KQED.org

site from my perspective as an educator. I put my knowledge from my two

master's degrees to work, but this site seems to be just another drop in an

ocean of sites and curriculum programs that are designed to give students a

digital learning experience that ends with them having learned jack shit.

These kind of sites (such as Khan Academy as well) are little more than

glorified lectures with some digital bells and whistles thrown in to make

teachers feel like their students are “interacting” and “digging” into the

content when in fact they are just watching a boring ass video.

In

reality most teachers that I know are ready to throw out all technology in

their classes and go back to slate and chisels because it is a nightmare having

an authentic learning experience in the classroom when a kid can just angle

their monitor a bit and play games all class, switching windows whenever you as

the teacher get to close. They think they are being so damn sneaky but

the reality is half the time we don’t care because their computer game is about

as educational compelling as these online learning modules.

The

fact is that Common Core Standards and most state standards largely spell out

the skills that students should be developing. These types of online

learning programs use all the right buzz words about the depth of student

learning taking place, but they are at best shallow and at worse teaching

students What to think instead of How to think.

I

am a history teacher. What the hell do I need some video telling my kids

what the US Constitution means when I can have them read, discuss, and research

the Constitution themselves? We are so concerned in education about

students getting the right answer on standardized tests that we sometimes

abandon the essential core of education, which should be giving students the

tools to know how to ask their own questions and find reliable answers.

Amidst

all this teachers are figuring out how to make school a positive place where

kids actually want to learn. That is where PBIS (Positive Behavior and

Intervention Supports) comes in. The idea is to be school wide programs

to promote community. What it has turned into is the same curriculum

companies like Pearson creating shitty “anti-bullying” curriculums that schools

buy and make teachers teach. I can tell you that nothing will make a

middle schooler’s eyes roll quicker than if you try to initiate a conversation

with them about what they should do if they see bullying happening around

them. Interesting fact, did you know PBIS was originally PBS (Positive

Behavior Supports) but PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) threatened to sue for

trademark violation!

Anyway,

hope this helps put things into perspective. Technology has its uses but

it has unfortunately become just another way for companies to try to monetize

education and the ones who get hurt in the end are the students that come out

of school knowing only how to watch a 10 minute video and answer the multiple

choice questions that go with the video. There is a reason teachers are

ditching the computers left and right and rediscovering the virtues of good old

fashioned pencil and paper!

ITM

gentlemen,

Sir

Ryan Thompson

I emailed a few months ago about my experience teaching in

the hood of Nashville.

I just finished Sunday's show and I have a few thoughts:

1. All school districts are run by people 50+ who have no

clue how tech works. They think the more tech we have the better. I hear them

say things like "our students are masters at tech, and if we want them to

be successful they need as much access as possible". The reality is that

kids don't care and they hate laptops. They want to just use their phone and

write on paper. I can't tell you how many kids I've taught that want to get

away from tech and even enjoy when I take their phone.

2. Google education suite sucks and all teachers/students

know it. There are a few brain washed individuals (especially here in Seattle)

but for the most part people are catching up to the low quality of

Google.

3. John is right, behavior has always been taught in schools

cause we have to. Parents now think they don't have to feed or teach their

child. The issue is the equity programs that rank kids based on their color.

The truth again is that kids see through this crap and use the system to

benefit themselves. I've taught 5th-12th and each age knows how to work the

system. The adults are the dumb ones who think this crap will actually work.

The kids play the game long enough to not be in trouble and do whatever they

want.

Alright, rant over. Thank you again for everything you do!!

I'm now one of those people who only listen to your show for my news and I just

cancelled Netflix/Hulu so I can pay you guys a monthly amount (Teacher single

income doesn't go far).

--

Nathan

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 12:38

Google is set to announce an initiative Thursday in which its slate of services and products '-- known as G Suite, specifically G Suite Education '-- will be fully available to homeschoolers and their leaders for the first time ever.

The software tools are valuable for fostering collaboration, productivity, and creativity in a system of education that is often overlooked, according to the tech company and groups representing the home-schooled.

''One parent at a homeschool co-op [Partnership Homeschool Educational Association of Minnesota] described it as a 'life-saver,''' Jennifer Holland, senior program manager in the Google for Education division, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. ''It can improve the quality of writing by tracking how things change over time. Also, before, parents and students would have to turn in assignments by email and in person, making it hard to keep track of everything. Google classroom provided them that glue.''

Many Google enthusiasts, or general users of the internet due to the tech giant's ubiquitousness, are well aware of the free proprietary applications like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Sites, Hangouts, and Classroom.

More aptly, organizations and businesses are able to sign up for an administrator account in which they can manage those Google services for members or employees. But Google only granted such capabilities to formal education institutions initially, doing so by identifying those recognized with a ''.edu'' domain. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), a nonprofit homeschool advocacy group, reached out to Google to ask if those that it represents could be provided with such a technological capacity.

''HSLDA advocates for home-schooling because we've seen that the freedom, flexibility, and one-on-one elements of this educational option work,'' Darren Jones, staff attorney for the HSLDA and the author of the soon-to-be-published Google blog post, told TheDCNF. ''Like any teacher, homeschool co-op teachers find that ongoing interaction with students helps the children learn. Today, a lot of that interaction can occur electronically, and Google's G Suite for Education aids that learning process.''

When asked if he and his organization was initially irritated that Google did not include homeschoolers in the first place, Jones said it's not surprising or really the company's fault because ''no state accredits homeschools or homeschool co-ops.''

''So since Google was making its educational collaboration software available only to accredited schools, homeschool co-ops were not eligible,'' he continued. ''HSLDA strongly opposes discrimination against homeschool students, so we were very happy that Google has agreed to open up the software to co-ops that can use it.''

While they vary, co-ops are part of an arrangement in which anywhere from around 30 to 100 (even sometimes up to 150) students from individual homes gather weekly, biweekly or monthly to partake in educational activities that require or are benefited from team efforts, or are more hands-on.

As of 2012, there are 1,773,000 American children ages five to 17 that are home-schooled, according to data provided by the U.S. Department of Education, a 61.8 percent increase in 10 years. That means 3.4 percent of students with a grade equivalent of kindergarten through 12th grade are educated outside the public and traditional private school systems. The home-schooling movement to some observers is now more than just its more prominent manifestation in the 1980s, which seemed to be spearheaded by evangelical Christians. Now, the demographics for those taught outside standard schools are more diverse. In fact, ''race, gender, urban residence and family composition make no difference'' when accounting for the characteristics behind those who choose such a path, according to a study conducted by sociologists Nihan Kayaardi and Philip Q. Yang. Also, there are ''no significant differences'' between homeschoolers and the general U.S. population meaning pre-conceived notions may no longer apply.

''A lot of homeschooler parents see the benefit of banding together,'' Zach Yeskel, Google for Education's group product manager, told TheDCNF. ''There are also a lot of activities at home, so when they separate, they can distribute the assignments through the internet.''

Google says that Classroom is particularly beneficial because it is designed to make ''it easy for learners and instructors to connect '-- inside and outside of schools'' while also saving ''time and paper.'' Specifically, it allows teachers to send announcements and other communications through the web and assign paperless assignments for students at multiple locations.

''As homeschooling has grown, families still get together to learn,'' Jones writes in an incoming blog post for Google. ''In my work '... I advise these groups every day, and I can see how new, advancing technology could benefit students. Through technology, homeschool co-op teachers can set and change assignments on the fly, students can work together even if geographically separated, and everyone has a common format for collaboration.''

''I think that Google is a good example of how companies can change with the times by recognizing that excellent education occurs in places other than traditional schools,'' Jones told TheDCNF.

Nevertheless, there will always be privacy concerns when it comes to Google and its programs '-- particularly when it comes to data dealing with children, and especially at a time when recent events and revelations have piqued the public's profound concerns of personal information acquired by tech companies and subsequently given to third-parties.

But HSLDA, a group that has been called a powerful lobbying group and is in general the target of criticism by some, doesn't seem too worried, or at least sees the outweighing benefits of using Google's respective services.

Jones addressed those accusations against his group, that in some specific cases people use homeschool as a veil to cover up egregious acts.

''While there has been some media scrutiny lately regarding unusual cases in which parents fraudulently use home-schooling as a screen to hide behind in abusing their children, HSLDA stands firmly against child abuse and neglect,'' said Jones. ''We see it as a rejection of everything that we stand for '-- the right of parents to lovingly choose an education that fits their individual children. We believe that both child abuse and criminal laws should be enforced to the fullest.''

Jones added that regulation of home-schooling doesn't have a measurable effect on child abuse or neglect, and would likely have unintended consequences.

HSLDA isn't the only group working with Google, which says it's also been collaborating with the National Black Home Educators.

The announcement comes Thursday morning in Florida at the country's largest homeschool convention. G-Suite for Education is expected be available sometime in early to mid-June.

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Link to Article

Archived Version

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 13:08

Editor's note: Our goal at Google is to make technology that works for everyone. Last year we made Classroom available to more students and teachers, including homeschoolers, and today we're also updating the eligibility guidelines for G Suite for Education so homeschool co-ops in the U.S. can collaborate using G Suite for Education. We've worked closely with several organizations to make this happen, including National Black Home Educators and Home School Legal Defense Association. Today's guest author Darren Jones shares more about why this matters.

For decades, homeschooling families have met in groups called ''co-ops'' to offer new teaching opportunities for their children. Back in the 1980s, when I was being homeschooled, I was in one of these co-ops, learning geography, algebra and drama together with friends who were also learning at home. Homeschooling wasn't as common then as it is now, and we were spread out geographically. We'd meet for a lesson once a week, but it wasn't really possible to interact with the teacher once we got home. There was certainly no opportunity for us students to collaborate with our co-op teachers online!

As homeschooling has grown, families still get together to learn. In my work for Home School Legal Defense Association, I advise these groups every day, and I can see how new, advancing technology could benefit students. Through technology, homeschool co-op teachers can set and change assignments on the fly, students can work together even if geographically separated, and everyone has a common format for collaboration. It's because of this potential that I've been working closely with Google this year to make sure that homeschool co-ops have the same access as other schools to G Suite for Education.

G Suite for Education is a free suite of productivity and collaboration tools'--including Gmail, Google Classroom, Google Docs and Drive, Google Calendar, and more'--that lets students and teachers interact seamlessly and securely across devices. It's really exciting that homeschools will soon be able to use all of these tools to work better together, encourage creativity and practice critical thinking'--whether they're working one-on-one with an individual student or with a whole homeschool class.

Over the past few months a few homeschool co-ops have been piloting these tools, including the Partnership Homeschool Educational Association of Minnesota. Jen Crom, one of their teachers, started homeschooling in 2005 and each academic year has 110-130 students through grade 12. She's found that using G Suite has helped her save precious time and helped her students produce a better final product on their assignments'--while at the same time, exposing them to lifelong skills that they'll need for their future.

For teachers, it's just so easy to use. We didn't even have to convince them to move over'--it's easy to learn and saves us so much time. Jen Crom Homeschool Teacher

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 13:24

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 15 Jun 2018 22:50

(UPDATED WITH NERDIST STATEMENT) Chris Hardwick, the Nerdist founder and host of NBC's game show The Wall, AMC's Talking Dead aftershow and a regular emcee in Hall H at Comic-Con, has been scrubbed from the Nerdist website he founded after being accused of sexual abuse and ''long-term abuse'' by his former girlfriend Chloe Dykstra.

Legendary Entertainment, which owns Nerdist Industries where Hardwick launched his career as a comic and podcaster, just released a statement.

''Chris Hardwick had no operational involvement with Nerdist for the two years preceding the expiration of his contract in December 2017,'' it reads. ''He no longer has any affiliation with Legendary Digital Networks. The company has removed all reference to Mr. Hardwick even as the original Founder of Nerdist pending further investigation.''

Repeating the Legendary statement, Nerdist itself also address the matter online:

pic.twitter.com/E6ORD0TBw9

'-- Nerdist (@nerdist) June 15, 2018

The moves come after Dykstra, a TV personality and host, penned a first-person account of their three-year relationship that posted on Medium. Dykstra never mentioned Hardwick by name, but details about the ''mildly successful podcaster'' who grew into ''a powerhouse CEO of his own company'' suggest she was referring to him.

Dykstra, in an essay she said was part closure and part warning, detailed a relationship in which she was restricted from going out at night, having male friends, or speaking in public places, and was the victim of sexual assault. ''I was expected to be ready for him when he came home from work,'' she writes.

''I lost myself, both mentally and physically. I lost 15 lbs within weeks, started pulling out my hair (and had to get extensions regularly to hide it),'' she wrote. ''I generally stopped speaking unless spoken to while with him, drifting through life like a ghost. I would try to sleep in as late as possible so my days were shorter. I stopped listening to music entirely. I ceased to be. I was an ex-person.''

Dykstra said she left Hardwick after three years, and that after the breakup he made calls to companies ''to get me fired by threatening to never work with them,'' and that he and a female colleague ''steamrolled my career.''

Deadline has not independently confirmed Dykstra's accusations.

In March, NBC renewed its Hardwick-hosted game show The Wall for a 20-episode third season, though no premiere date was announced. AMC also just announced his summer bridge talk show Talking With Chris Hardwick returns this Sunday.

On Thursday, BBC America announced that Hardwick would moderate the network's Doctor Who panel at Comic-Con in San Diego next month. Hardwick, a Comic-Con panel host staple, is also penciled in to host AMC's The Walking Dead panel in Hall H as in years past.

NBC and AMC have not responded to requests for comment on Dykstra's post, and reps for Hardwick also declined comment.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sat, 16 Jun 2018 11:51

(Mike Blake/Reuters) This is completely ridiculous and could end up hurting more than it helps. N etflix has reportedly banned workers from looking at each other for more than five seconds as part of its new anti-harassment rules.

The new policy also bans the company's film crews from asking their colleagues for their phone numbers, according to an article in the Sun.

''Senior staff went to a harassment meeting to learn what is and isn't appropriate,'' an on-set runner told the Sun. ''Looking at anyone longer than five seconds is considered creepy.''

''You mustn't ask for someone's number unless they have given permission for it to be distributed,'' the source continued. ''And if you see any unwanted behaviour, report it immediately.''

Other new rules include: ''Don't give lingering hugs or touch anyone for a lengthy period of time,'' ''Don't ask out a colleague more than once if they have said no,'' ''Steer clear of a colleague once they have said they are not interested in you,'' and ''Don't flirt.'' The rules also encourage employees to ''Shout 'Stop, don't do that again!' if a colleague has been inappropriate.''

The on-set runner told the Sun that employees are already poking fun at the new rules: ''It has sparked jokes, with people looking at each other, counting to five, then diverting their eyes.''

Netflix hasn't confirmed or denied the new rules, but did release a statement to the Independent, saying: ''We're proud of the anti-harassment training we offer to our productions. We want every Netflix production to be a safe and respectful working environment. We believe the resources we offer empower people on our sets to speak up, and shouldn't be trivialized.''

Now, don't get me wrong '-- I'm all for ''a safe and respectful working environment.'' Everyone should feel comfortable in the workplace, and harassment of any kind has absolutely no place there. This, however, is completely ridiculous and could end up hurting more than it helps.

First of all, that ridiculous five-second rule. Of course, staring is kind of rude, but it's also something that just happens sometimes. It's certainly not always a form of harassment. I don't know about everybody else, but there have definitely been times where I've spaced out and found myself happening to stare in the same direction where there happens to be another person. When this has happened, I've just said, ''Whoops, sorry '-- I'm spacing out!'' and both of us have gotten on with our days. With a policy like this, I could potentially be subject to some sort of disciplinary action over something that no one thinks is a big deal. Of course, there's no word on what kind of action Netflix is actually planning to take against violators of the five-second staring rule, but the fact that it even exists is absurd enough.

The no-asking-for-phone-numbers rule is equally bizarre. I don't think this should be news to anyone, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to have a person's phone number that have absolutely nothing to do with dating or sex. Not to brag, but I have tons of phone contacts '-- yes, including co-workers '-- with whom I communicate on a completely platonic basis. In fact, I'm pretty sure that everyone does. Personally, I actually prefer that my co-workers be able contact me with work information via text, because that means I have to worry less about checking my email. A co-worker wanting my number wouldn't for a second strike me as flirting; it would strike me as someone initiating a convenient method of communication. Asking for the phone numbers of those with whom you need to communicate regularly is a normal, practical part of life, and Netflix is wrong to sexualize it.

Calling an innocent six-second glance 'harassment' trivializes the very real struggles of those who are actually harassed.

Harassment in the workplace is a serious and pervasive problem, and I am very glad that the #MeToo movement has done so much to bring this issue to the surface so that we can work on combating it. Ridiculous policies like these, however, do nothing to solve these problems '-- and can actually create new ones. Calling an innocent six-second glance ''harassment'' trivializes the very real struggles of those who are actually harassed, and a no-phone-numbers rule is going to make it more difficult for employees to communicate. If Netflix really wants to make the workplace as comfortable a place as it can be for its employees, then it should really consider reversing these rules.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 14:16

Photo: Jason LaVeris (Getty Images)Actress and professional cosplayer Chloe Dykstra has published a lengthy autobiographical essay on her Medium account, in which she accuses an unnamed ex-boyfriend of sexually and emotionally abusing her throughout the entire tenure of their long-term relationship. In the post, Dykstra says she's not ''intending to point my finger at the man who did it (though that may be an unfortunate consequence for him), but for a different reason,'' to get closure and move on for the sake of her own mental health.

In the post, Dkystra recalls being in her early twenties and ''falling for a man almost 20 years my senior.'' Within weeks of establishing their relationship, she says, the man forbade her to go out at night, have male friends, drink alcohol, take photos of the two of them, or speak in public places, and ''these were just a few of them.'' She adds that she ''let him sexually assault me. Regularly. I was expected to be ready for him when he came home from work.''

Dykstra takes care to not explicitly name names in her post, but she does give some big hints, such as ''I watched and supported him as he grew from a mildly successful podcaster to a powerhouse CEO of his own company'' and saying that the unnamed ex ''pressured [me] to take an on-camera job at his company I didn't want.'' She adds, ''When cameras were on us? He was a prince. Turn them off, he was a nightmare.'' During this time, she writes, her existing struggle with anorexia got worse, and:

I generally stopped speaking unless spoken to while with him, drifting through life like a ghost. I would try to sleep in as late as possible so my days were shorter. I stopped listening to music entirely. I ceased to be. I was an ex-person.

After three years, she left him, at which point he tried to exile her from their shared industry, threatening to cut off contact with companies that worked with her. ''He succeeded. I was blacklisted,'' she writes. After considering suicide, eventually ''with the help of a therapist, a psychiatrist, good people, plus a lot of hard work, I've managed to rebuild my life and I'm in a much better place.'' She gets (understandably) apprehensive towards the end of the post, anticipating the backlash that would come with ruining fans' image of a ''cheery-sounding famous guy'' and the victim-blaming question of ''why did you stay?'' She ends, appropriately enough given her personality, with a BoJack Horseman reference:

This story, post, whatever this is, serves as both closure for me as I say farewell to my twenties and stumble my way into my thirties, and it serves as a warning for every single one of you, regardless of gender. One of my favorite quotes comes from Bojack Horseman:

''You know, it's funny; when you look at someone through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.''

Please, please, keep an eye out for those red flags.

A longtime YouTube host for Nerdist Industries, Dykstra just completed her first starring film role, in the sci-fi romance Diminuendo. Earlier this morning, as her post began to spread, she tweeted thanks to her supporters:

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 14:37

NETFLIX has banned film crews from looking at anyone for over five seconds in barmy no-flirting rules.

Others include no asking for workpals' phone numbers '-- and urging staff feeling pestered to yell: ''Stop! Don't do that again!''

AP:Associated Press

Some staff at Netflix have apparently been required to attend harassment meetingsThe blitz follows the Harvey Weinstein and Me Too sex abuse storms. One of the first shows hit is sci-fi series Black Mirror, being shot in West London and on location.

An on-set runner said: ''Everyone was spoken to about #MeToo.

"Senior staff went to a harassment meeting to learn what is and isn't appropriate. Looking at anyone longer than five seconds is considered creepy.

''You mustn't ask for someone's number unless they have given permission for it to be distributed. And if you see any unwanted behaviour, report it immediately.

DEEP TROUBLE Mum plucks her toddler son alive from pool FIVE MINUTES after he tumbled in

EATEN ALIVE Mum's body cut from belly of 27ft python - after snake swallowed her whole

HORROR PLUNGE Brit tourist, 22, 'critical' after falling from Ibiza apartment block

BIG WHACK Burly dad puts woman in CHOKEHOLD while defending daughter after 'racist remark'

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IT'S RAINING TEN-TACLES Bizarre moment octopus and starfish fall from the sky during storm

''It has sparked jokes, with people looking at each other, counting to five, then diverting their eyes.''

Staff are also told to avoid lingering hugs, asking people out more than once and to steer clear if they say no.

Weinstein, 66, has denied two women's rape and sex attack claims in court. He also denies allegations from more than 70 women, one a Netflix exec.

Netflix said in a statement: We're proud of the anti-harassment training we offer to our productions. We want every Netflix production to be a safe and respectful working environment. We believe the resources we offer empower people on our sets to speak up, and shouldn't be trivialized.

Highlights from the June 2018 releases on Netflix UK

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sat, 16 Jun 2018 13:09

The prime minister says she is "disappointed" after a proposed law to make upskirting a specific criminal offence was blocked by a Tory MP.

The Voyeurism (Offences) Bill was stopped in its tracks when Christchurch MP Sir Christopher Chope objected to it being given a second reading in parliament.

The bill, which was proposed by Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse and supported by ministers, was expected to get the nod through the Commons on Friday.

After it was blocked, Theresa May said: "Upskirting is an invasion of privacy which leaves victims feeling degraded and distressed.

"I am disappointed the bill didn't make progress in the Commons today, and I want to see these measures pass through Parliament - with government support - soon."

:: Who is the MP who blocked the upskirting law?

Image: Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope blocked the bill's progressOne minister told Sky News that No 10 was going to "get upskirting sorted" and said they hoped the government would get the legislation passed before the house rises for Summer recess in mid-July.

"We're not having this unpicked by one maverick who stayed too long."

A government source said ministers had a number of options to get the upskirting laws on the statue book. No 10 could push it through in a number of ways from tabling its own bill to pushing it through as a backbench bill with government support.

"The message from government is clear: we will do what it takes to get this measure to debate and through its Commons stages as quickly as possible."

Blocking its progress only requires one MP to shout "object" when the title of a private member's bill is read out.

Sir Christopher is on the libertarian right of Conservative Party and is understood to regard many private members' bills as politically correct expressions of the nanny state.

Minister for women Victoria Atkins and Tory MP Will Quince were among those who cried "shame" after his intervention.

The bill will be debated next on 6 July, but will only take one dissenting voice to put another stop to its progress.

Ms Hobhouse told Sky News it was a "petty thing to do".

Image: Women's minister Victoria Atkins said 'shame' when the bill was blocked"I think it's very frustrating and annoying that one MP can block a consensus that had been built over several months," she said.

"It's really annoying we couldn't make progress."

She added that "every month matters", pointing out festival season was approaching.

Dawn Butler, Labour's shadow minister for women and equalities, said: "It's absolutely disgusting that a male Tory MP has blocked upskirting from becoming a criminal offence.

"One MP can block this - it's shameful, it's annoying. It's not the end of the road, but I'm very angry."@Wera_Hobhouse, the MP who tabled a new law to make "upskirting" a specific criminal offence, reacts to it being blocked in parliament. pic.twitter.com/fn1rRC0euQ

'-- Sky News Politics (@SkyNewsPolitics) June 15, 2018"If Theresa May is serious about tackling this vile practice, and injustices like sexism, she will need to show leadership and show there's no place in the Tory Party for Christopher Chope."

The Government supported today's Bill on 'up-skirting'. Disappointed that no progress today - the law needs to be reformed. But it will be.

'-- David Gauke (@DavidGauke) June 15, 2018Justice Secretary David Gauke tweeted: "The Government supported today's Bill on 'up-skirting'. Disappointed that no progress today - the law needs to be reformed. But it will be."

Upskirting victim Gina Martin, 26, launched the campaign after two men took a picture up her skirt while at a festival in 2017.

0:30 Video: MP amazed by upskirting objectionIn a statement, Ms Martin admitted she knew Sir Christopher's scepticism was a "risk" but that "I'm positive and hopeful that he will become a supporter".

Reacting to Sir Christoper scuppering the bill, justice minister Lucy Frazer said the government "has every expectation" upskirting will eventually become a criminal offence.

Do not underestimate just how furious many Tory MPs are about this. This kind of thing does far more damage to the public's view of our party than endless debates about customs arrangements https://t.co/1SCVsAo7ua

'-- Paul Masterton MP (@PM4EastRen) June 15, 2018A government spokesman echoed this, saying: "Whilst we are disappointed this Bill did not pass second reading today, we look forward to supporting these measures through the House at the earliest possible opportunity."

Victims of upskirting have been found to be as young as 10 years old.

Currently, victims in England and Wales are forced to seek prosecution through other legal avenues, such as outraging public decency or harassment.

A specific law against upskirting already exists in Scotland.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sat, 16 Jun 2018 13:09

Sir Christopher Chope has a vendetta against private members' bills and is seen as a candle holder for Thatcherism.

By Sanya Burgess, news reporter

05:57, UK, Saturday 16 June 2018

Image: Tory MP Sir Christopher Chope

Outrage and anger was sparked when a law to ban upskirting was stopped in its tracks when Sir Christopher Chope objected to it.

The Voyeurism (Offences) Bill has been prevented from being given a second reading in parliament as a result.

The Christchurch MP has a record of blocking private members' bills and is on a crusade to challenge many of them.

Who is the man with a vendetta against these bills?

Mr Chope has been branded a "maverick" by Culture Minister Margot James, who accused the 71-year-old Tory of bringing the Conservatives into disrepute.

Video: 'Shame': Moment upskirting bill blocked

He is no stranger to controversy and has moved to block a number of bills that have significant public backing.

On Friday, as well as blocking a law that would see those who take photos up women's skirts without their consent face up to two years in jail, Mr Chope delayed legislation intended to give police dogs and horses extra legal protections from attack, and talked out attempts to reform mental health units.

Image: A lion cub owned by Great British Circus at an event in Kings Langley

He has previously repeatedly blocked attempts to ban the use of wild animals in circuses.

He also acted to block the posthumous pardon for Alan Turing, the man who cracked the Enigma code to help win the Second World War. In 1952, Turing was charged with homosexual offences and was later chemically castrated.

Image: Alan Turing helped defeat the Nazis in the Second World War

Of the 10 significant gay rights votes in the House of Commons since 1998, Mr Chope has voted against every bill to promote equal gay rights.

He voted twice against making same-sex marriage legal in the UK.

Image: People celebrated with cake after same-sex marriage was voted in

By making a lengthy speech, he managed to 'talk-out' a bill to make it illegal for landlords to evict tenants who complained about housing.

Image: 'Revenge evictions' are when landlords kick out tenants who complain about living conditions

Using the same technique, Mr Chope ensured a bill to exempt carers from hospital car park charges was batted down.

Image: Calls were made to stop carers from having to pay hospital car park fees

His critics may take pleasure in knowing he regularly gets his own attempts to push through legislation rejected as well.

Mr Chope, first elected in 1983, is widely regarded as a candle holder for the Thatcher legacy.

A fervent Brexiteer, he served as the former environment and transport minister under Margaret Thatcher and John Major in the 1980s and 1990s.

The former vice chairman of the Tory Party attracted criticism when he claimed £881.25 on expenses for the repair of a sofa.

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Archived Version

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 14:23

BEIJING'--China is establishing an electronic identification system to track cars nationwide, according to records and people briefed on the matter, adding to a growing array of surveillance tools the government uses to monitor its citizens.

Under the plan being rolled out July 1, a radio-frequency identification chip for vehicle tracking will be installed on cars when they are registered. Compliance will be voluntary this year but will be made mandatory for new vehicles at the start of 2019, the people said.

Authorities have described the plan as a means to improve public security and to help ease worsening traffic congestion, documents show, a major concern in many Chinese cities partly because clogged roads contribute to air pollution.

But such a system, implemented in the world's biggest automotive market, with sales of nearly 30 million vehicles a year, will also vastly expand China's surveillance network, experts say. That network already includes widespread use of security cameras, facial recognition technology and internet monitoring.

''It's all happening in the backdrop of this pretty authoritarian government,'' said Ben Green, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society who is researching use of data and technology by city governments. ''It's really hard to imagine that the primary use case is not law enforcement surveillance and other forms of social control.''

China's Ministry of Public Security, a police agency, will implement the plan, whose standards were drafted by the ministry's Traffic Management Research Institute. Neither responded to requests for comment.

The system will register information such as the license plate number and automobile color, said one of the people briefed on the plan.

To implement the network, radio-frequency identification, or RFID, chips will be affixed to car windshields. Reading devices installed along roads will identify cars as they pass and transfer the data to the Ministry of Public Security, said one of the people. Unlike GPS tracking systems, the system won't pinpoint a car's position at all times.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, RFID chips are widely used on cars for automated toll-road payments. They are also installed in some commercial fleets, for example, trucks at ports to track their location and the goods they are carrying.

But the Chinese plan ''would certainly be the largest single program managed by one government in the world,'' said Manuel Moreno, vice president at Neology Inc., a San Diego-based company and a major provider of RFID technology systems for automobiles in the U.S. and Mexico.

Mexico, for example, has adopted plans for a national system but experts say the implementation has been scattered'--and its annual new-car sales of about 1.5 million vehicles are dwarfed by China's total. Details on China's plan for installing RFID readers weren't immediately available.

At present, authorities in China and elsewhere more commonly track cars through video images of license plates. Surveillance cameras are generally cheaper than RFID readers. But RFID has advantages such as functioning in foggy weather and faster information processing, said Sanjay Sarma, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on RFID technology.

The RFID system could also obtain the vehicle's information even if fake license plates are used, experts said, a problem in some places in China that try to curb pollution by limiting vehicle entry into certain zones based on license plate numbers.

Late last year, Beijing released some details of its car-tracking plan, which can be seen online through China's national standards disclosure system. It doesn't say why authorities are introducing this system. But older documents shed some light.

In late 2014, when the Traffic Management Research Institute unveiled the draft standards and sought public comments, it said the new system was needed to address growing problems such as traffic congestion and terrorist attacks with vehicles. It said these ''have posed serious challenges and threats to social and economic lives, especially to public safety.''

The move also would promote the domestic development of an RFID chip industry, it said, signaling that only chips made by Chinese companies would be used under the program.

Pilot programs exist in some Chinese cities. The eastern city of Wuxi said it introduced an RFID system in 2016 for taxis, trucks and public vehicles.

The southeast city of Shenzhen said it introduced a similar system in 2016. Its government said the device would collect data related to vehicles such as the license plate number and the car color, but not personal information.

''The security of citizens' privacy will be ensured,'' it said on its website.

But experts say such personally identifiable data isn't needed to run cities efficiently. For instance, congestion can be monitored by sensors that simply count the number of vehicles.

''It's kind of like another tool in the toolbox for mass-surveillance,'' said Maya Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, who studies China's surveillance programs. ''To be able to track vehicles would definitely add substantial location details to the chain of data points that they already have.''

'--Chunying Zhang in Shanghai and Xiao Xiao in Beijing contributed to this article.

Write to Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com

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Sun, 17 Jun 2018 14:38

The state of Massachusetts on Tuesday sued the maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin, which has been blamed for spawning America's opioids crisis, naming leading executives and members of the multibillionaire Sackler family that owns the pharmaceutical company.

The lawsuit accuses the company, Purdue Pharma, of spinning a ''web of illegal deceit'' to fuel the deadly drug abuse crisis while boosting profits.

Their strategy was simple: the more drugs they sold, the more money they made, and the more people died

Purdue Pharma is already defending lawsuits from several states and local governments, but Massachusetts is the first state to take the unusual step of personally naming the company's executives in a complaint, the state attorney general, Maura Healey, said. It names 16 current and former executives and board members, including the chief executive, Craig Landau, and eight members across three generations of the Sackler family that wholly owns Purdue.

The lawsuit alleges Purdue deceived patients and doctors about the risks of opioids, pushed prescribers to keep patients on the drugs longer and aggressively targeted vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and veterans.

''Their strategy was simple: the more drugs they sold, the more money they made, and the more people died,'' Healey said on Tuesday.

Purdue, based in Stamford, Connecticut, issued a statement saying it vigorously denied all the allegations and looked forward to presenting ''substantial defenses'' to the claims in the lawsuit.

''We share the attorney general's concern about the opioid crisis. We are disappointed, however, that in the midst of good faith negotiations with many states, the commonwealth [of Massachusetts] has decided to pursue a costly and protracted litigation process. We will continue to work collaboratively with the states toward bringing meaningful solutions,'' it stated.

Purdue, along with some other painkiller makers and drug distributors, is currently facing more than 300 lawsuits from city and county authorities across the country. The lawsuits have been corralled into one multi-district case in a federal court in Ohio. The judge in that case has been pushing for a huge, quick settlement to compensate victims and assist in what the government has admitted is a public health crisis, in the way the so-called ''Big Tobacco settlement'' happened against cigarette companies in the 1990s. But some experts are calling for the case to go to trial in order to oblige the pharmaceutical companies to produce more evidence in the discovery process.

The company is also being sued separately by more than 15 states, but this is the first that names individual members of the Sackler family, who are currently or were formerly on the board of Purdue.

The Sacklers being sued are: Theresa and Beverly, the widows of the brothers Mortimer and Raymond Sackler who built the company into the narcotics giant it is today; Ilene, Kathe and Mortimer David Alfons Sackler, three of Mortimer's children; Jonathan and Richard Sackler, Raymond's two sons; and David Sackler, Raymond's grandson. These family members and a number of their siblings and children are collectively worth an estimated $13bn, according to Forbes, with the vast bulk of the fortune generated from sales of OxyContin. Feuding family members have mostly declined to talk about the opioids crisis and avoid discussing their links to it.

Purdue agreed to pay $19.5m in 2007, but did not admit wrongdoing, to settle lawsuits with 26 states '' including Massachusetts '' and the District of Columbia after being accused of aggressively marketing OxyContin to doctors while downplaying the risk of addiction.

The Massachusetts lawsuit, which was filed in the Suffolk superior court, alleges that Purdue's leadership encouraged the company's ''deadly misconduct'' while lining their pockets. The sale of more than 70m doses of prescription opioids in the state over the last decade brought in more than $500m for the company, Healey says.

''It was Purdue's executives who led and directed this illegal business model, leading to addiction and deception to enrich a few while leaving a path of devastation and destruction in its wake,'' she said.

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Fri, 15 Jun 2018 19:40

As Earth's human population expands, it's harder for other mammals to avoid people during the daytime. As a result, some mammals are becoming increasingly nocturnal. Nobody knows how that shift will affect individual species and even entire ecosystems. In a new paper in the journal Science, University of California, Berkeley wildlife ecologist Kaitlyn Gaynor and her colleagues examined data on how 62 species across the world spend their days and night. From Scientific American:

For example, leopards in the Central African nation of Gabon are 46 percent nocturnal in areas without bushmeat hunting, but 93 percent nocturnal where the practice is common. In Poland wild boars go from 48 percent nocturnal in natural forests to 90 percent nocturnal in urban areas. Even activities people consider relatively innocuous, such as hiking and wildlife viewing, strongly affected animals' daily rhythms. Brown bears in Alaska live 33 percent of the day nocturnally when humans stay away, but that number goes up to 76 percent for bears exposed to wildlife-viewing tourism. ''We think that we're leaving no trace often when we're outdoors, but we can be having lasting consequences on animal behavior,'' Gaynor says...

Perhaps even more alarming is the cascade of effects that could occur in the wider ecosystem as animals switch from day to night. ''Patterns of competition and predator''prey interactions might change with the nocturnal behavioral changes,'' Gaynor says. If one species'--say a top predator'--starts hunting at night and goes after different types of prey, it will likely have innumerable trickle-down consequences for everything along the food chain. Scientists have already observed such an ecological shift in California's Santa Cruz Mountains, where coyotes have become more nocturnal in response to hikers. Researchers found these coyotes have started to alter their diets from daytime prey, such as squirrels and birds, to nocturnal prey, such as rats and rabbits.

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 14:47

Mere days before the Nov. 8 presidential election last year, thanks to WikiLeaks, high-information Americans found out that Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta partakes in a cannibalist occult ritual called spirit cooking.

WikiLeaks had released an email to John Podesta from his powerful Democrat lobbyist brother, Tony Podesta, about an invitation to the brothers from Marina Abramovic to attend a ''spirit cooking dinner''. Abramovic, 69, is a Serbian ''performance artist'' who now lives in New York. (See '' Evidence that Hillary Clinton and her associates are satanists '')

Mike Cernovich points out spirit cooking is an ''occult practice used during sex cult rituals , as explained in the book Spirit cooking with essential aphrodisiac recipes.''

As explained by Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars, ''spirit cooking'' is a ''sacrament'' in Thelema '-- a religion founded by British satanist Aleister Crowley , whose motto was ''Do As Thou Wilt'' '-- in which menstrual blood, breast milk, urine and sperm are mixed to create a ''painting.'' According to Abramovic, if the ritual is performed in an art gallery, it is merely art, but if the ritual is performed privately, then ''spirit cooking'' is a ''spiritual ceremony'' '-- ''to symbolize the union between the microcosm, Man, and the macrocosm, the Divine'' and ''a representation of one of the prime maxims in Hermeticism 'As Above, So Below','' blah, blah, blah.

Assuming that the ''dinner'' of the ''spirit cooking dinner'' '-- to which the Podesta brothers were invited '-- means dinner in the common-sense meaning of the word, that means participants ingest human blood, along with breast milk, urine and sperm. Ingestion of human blood is a form of cannibalism.

Here's a video on spirit cooking:

Assuming the container of blood that Abramovic uses for her spirit cooking painting is human, where did she get all that blood?

Some of the blood comes from those who participate in the ritual.

A WikiLeaks tweet on Nov. 4, 2016, points out that a ''spirit cooking'' dinner is ''mostly blood'' and that participants in the ritual are required to cut deeply into the middle finger of their left hand with a sharp knife.

Cutting one's finger ''deeply'' with a sharp knife would leave a wound. Here's a pic of John Podesta's gnarled and scarred fingers:

We would also expect a fresh middle-finger knife-wound to be bandaged.

On at least two occasions, Obama was observed to have a bandage on his left middle finger :

Timothy Cama for The Hill , August 31, 2014, ''President Obama took advantage of the Washington area's hot weather Sunday by playing an afternoon game of golf with three White House staffers'.... The pool reporter noted that Obama appeared to have a bandage on his left middle finger.''A Daily Mail article on August 10, 2015 on Obama hitting the golf course on the first day of his summer vacation in Martha's Vineyard, includes this pic (see below) showing a bandage around his left middle finger.Hillary Clinton also may be a spirit cooking practitioner. An Aug. 20, 2010 email exchange between Hillary (H) and Huma referenced their mutual acquaintance, ''Marina''.

That prompted speculations in online chat forums that Hillary's bizarre behaviors '-- outbursts of inappropriate laughter, unsteady stance and gait (from loss of muscle control), and seizures '-- may be signs of Kuru , the human form of mad cow disease.

Kuru is an incurable neurodegenerative disorder '-- a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy caused by proteins in the brain called prions. The word ''kuru'' derives from the Fore word kuria or guria (''to shake''), due to the body tremors that are a classic symptom of the disease and kºru itself means ''trembling''. Kuru was transmitted among members of the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea via funerary cannibalism, wherein deceased family members were cooked and eaten, to help free the spirit of the dead. Females and children usually consumed the brain, the organ in which infectious prions were most concentrated. Kuru has a long incubation period of 10 to over 50 years.

See also:

Secret Service: Hillary and Obama stink like sulfur Hillary's campaign chairman John Podesta has cannibalism painting in his office Syrian Muslims infected with Kuru, a disease of cannibals Islamic State says Muslims can cannibalize and harvest organs from live non-Muslims World-renown Islamic university teaches it's okay for Muslims to cannibalize Jews and Christians ~Eowyn

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Archived Version

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 14:32

The Department of Justice today announced the arrest of more than 2,300 suspected online child sex offenders during a three-month, nationwide, operation conducted by Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces. The task forces identified 195 offenders who either produced child pornography or committed child sexual abuse, and 383 children who suffered recent, ongoing, or historical sexual abuse or production of child pornography.

The 61 ICAC task forces, located in all 50 states and comprised of more than 4,500 federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies, led the coordinated operation known as ''Broken Heart'' during the months of March, April, and May 2018. During the course of the operation, the task forces investigated more than 25,200 complaints of technology-facilitated crimes against children and delivered more than 3,700 presentations on Internet safety to over 390,000 youth and adults.

"No child should ever have to endure sexual abuse," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. "And yet, in recent years, certain forms of modern technology have facilitated the spread of child pornography and created greater incentives for its production. We at the Department of Justice are determined to strike back against these repugnant crimes. It is shocking and very sad that in this one operation, we have arrested more than 2,300 alleged child predators and investigated some 25,200 sexual abuse complaints. Any would-be criminal should be warned: this Department will remain relentless in hunting down those who victimize our children."

The operation targeted suspects who: (1) produce, distribute, receive and possess child pornography; (2) engage in online enticement of children for sexual purposes; (3) engage in the sex trafficking of children; and (4) travel across state lines or to foreign countries and sexually abuse children.

The ICAC Program is funded through the Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). In 1998, OJJDP launched the ICAC Task Force Program to help federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies enhance their investigative responses to offenders who use the Internet, online communication systems or computer technology to exploit children. To date, ICAC Task Forces have reviewed more than 775,000 complaints of child exploitation, which resulted in the arrest of more than 83,000 individuals. In addition, since the ICAC program's inception, more than 629,400 law enforcement officers, prosecutors and other professionals have been trained on techniques to investigate and prosecute ICAC-related cases.

For more information, visit the ICAC Task Force webpage at: https://www.icactaskforce.org/. For state-level Operation Broken Heart results, please contact the appropriate state ICAC task force commander. Contact information for task force commanders are available online at: https://www.icactaskforce.org/Pages/ContactsTaskForce.aspx.

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Sun, 17 Jun 2018 11:11

A protester holds a sign against fossil fuel development during a rally against the proposed Trans Mountain pipeline project, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, May 22, 2018. Justin Tang / THE CANADIAN PRESS

The government must enforce rules allowing construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion even though opponents might die fighting it, former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge says.

''We're going to have some very unpleasant circumstances. There are some people that are going to die in protesting construction of this pipeline. We have to understand that,'' he said at an event Wednesday in Edmonton put on by law firm Bennett Jones.

''Nevertheless, we have to be willing to enforce the law once it's there '... It's going to take some fortitude to stand up.''

The federal government agreed in May to buy the existing pipeline and the expansion project from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion after the company halted work because of uncertainty over when the development will be completed.

More than 200 people have been arrested during demonstrations outside Kinder Morgan's Burnaby, B.C., work site.

Dodge wrote in a spring economic outlook he presented at the event that the impact of transportation bottlenecks on Canadian oil prices costs the economy about $10 billion a year.

He argued ''NIMBY obstruction,'' bolstered by growing community engagement in project reviews, allows Indigenous peoples, local groups and others to delay investment in projects even when they meet world-class environmental standards.

While he wouldn't speculate in an interview how fatalities might occur during the Trans Mountain expansion, he said he's worried about what will happen among the extremist minority among the pipeline foes.

''We have seen it other places, that equivalent of religious zeal leading to flouting of the law in a way that could lead to death '... Inevitably, when you get that fanaticism, if you will, you're going to have trouble,'' he said.

''Are we collectively as a society willing to allow the fanatics to obstruct the general will of the population? That then turns out to be a real test of whether we actually do believe in the rule of law.''

Regulatory uncertainty is one of the biggest issues facing Canada's energy industry at a time when the country should be exporting oil and gas and using some of the profits to help transition away from fossil fuels to fight climate change, Dodge said.

''We have to understand this is a resource where the long-term viability isn't there, not because we're running out of muck in the ground, but because we actually, collectively, as the globe, are going to have to stop using as much of this stuff.''

gkent@postmedia.com

twitter.com/GKentYEG

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Sun, 17 Jun 2018 05:04

An Earthrise over the moon's horizon, taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 on August 24th 1966. Credit NASA/LOIRP.Fifty years ago, 5 unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon, taking extremely high resolution photos of the surface. They were trying to find the perfect landing site for the Apollo missions. They would be good enough to blow up to 40 x 54ft images that the astronauts would walk across looking for the great spot. After their use, the images were locked away from the public, as at the time they would have revealed the superior technology of the USA's spy satellite cameras, which the orbiters cameras were designed from. Instead the images from that time were grainy and low resolution, made to be so by NASA.

Comparison of the Earthrise image shown to the public in 1966 on top, and the restored image directly from the tape on the bottom. The bottom image was released in 2008, 42 years after it was taken. Credit: NASA/LOIRP.These spacecraft were Lunar Orbiter I to V, and they were sent by NASA during 1966 and 67. In the late 1960's, after the Apollo era, the data that came back on analog tapes was placed in storage in Maryland. In the mid 1980's they were transferred to JPL, under the care of Nancy Evans, co-founder of the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS). The tapes were moved around for many years, until Nancy found Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing. They decided they needed to be digitised for future generations, and brought them to NASA Ames Research Centre. They set up shop in an abandoned McDonalds, offered to them as free space. They christened the place McMoon. The aim was to digitise these tapes before the technology used to read them disappeared, or the tapes destroyed.

The McDonalds nicknamed McMoon, with the trademark skull and crossbones flag denoting the ''hacker'' methodology. Credit: MIT Technology Review.The Lunar Orbiters never returned to Earth with the imagery. Instead, the Orbiter developed the 70mm film (yes film) and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/mm resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using lossless analog compression, which was yet to actually be patented by anyone. Three ground stations on earth, one of which was in Madrid, another in Australia and the other in California recieved the signals and recorded them. The transmissions were recorded on to magnetic tape. The tapes needed Ampex FR-900 drives to read them, a refrigerator sizes device that costed $300,000 to buy new in the 1960's.

The FR-900 that was used to restore the old images. A mix of old and new equipment to get the images to modern PC's. Credit: MIT Technology Review.The back of the first FR-900 has been signed by the people who brought the project to life, including Nancy Evans. Credit: MIT Technology Review.The tape drive that they found first had to be restored, beginning with a wash in the former restaurants sink. The machine needed a custom built demodulator to extract the image, an analog to digital converter, and a monitor connection to view what was happening. As the labelling system of the tapes had been forgotten, and documentation was not readily available, they had to hand decode the coordinates on the tapes. They also had a big collection from parts of other FR-900's and similar designs. The spare parts were constantly needed to keep the recorder going, there was good reason that the format didn't continue for for long.

These are just some of the reels of moon images. They use this machine to hand inspect the reels, mainly to figure out the coordinate labelling system. Credit: MIT Technology Review.In order to read the tapes, the heads of the FR-900 apply a magnetic field to the tape inducing a current through it. The current can be measured and run through the demodulator. This pulls out the image signal, that is then run through an analog to digital converter. The data is then processed on a computer using the custom system they set up. They made custom software that interfaced with Photoshop to link the relevant parts of the image together. The orbiters sent out each image in multiple transmissions, with each strip (one tin) making up part of the image. the software manages to link up the images nearly seamlessly at the full potential resolution. The best of the images can show the lunar surface at a resolution less than 1m, much better than any other orbiter that has been there.

The image shows the sheer amount of tapes that the few images are stored on. Inside McMoon you can also see a sleeping bag some poor guy had to stay in. Credit: thelivingmoon.com.They were huge files, even by today's standards. One of the later images can be as big as 2GB on a modern PC, with photos on top resolution DSLRs only being in the region of 10MB you can see how big these images are. One engineer said you could blow the images up to the size of a billboard without losing any quality. When the initial NASA engineers printed off these images, they had to hang them in a church because they were so big. The below images show some idea of the scale of these images. Each individual image when printed out was 1.58m by 0.4m.

This image shows the large thin strip images being laid out on the floor of a large room so the engineers could look for good landing spots. Credit: NASA.The image shows a NASA technician with a ream of photograph printouts used to assemble the overall image. Credit: NASA.Orbiter IV was there to produce a single big image of the front side of the moon. In pictures taken between May 11-25, 1967 the Orbiter took a number of images that span the area from the north pole to the south pole and from the eastern limb to the western limb. The complete mosaic of an image stretched 40 by 45 ft. The engineers laid it out on the floor and all the observers including the astronauts had to crawl over it and take off their shoes. The images were so good, even at this size that some astronomers used magnifying glasses. This giant image was the primary source to select the sites for Orbiter V to photograph in a higher resolution. The images taken by Orbiter V decided the exact locations for Apollo 11 to land.

The very prominent feature in this image is the Tsiolkovskiy Crater on the far side of the moon. Taken by Orbiter 3 on 19 February 1967. Credit: NASA/LOIRP.Since 2007 the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has brought back 2000 images from 1500 analog tapes. The first ever picture of an earthrise. As Keith Cowing said ''an image taken a quarter of a fucking million miles away in 1966. The Beatles were warming up to play Shea Stadium at the moment it was being taken.'' To find more of those images go to their website, but I warn you those images are huge.

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Archived Version

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 11:18

Updated Gisteren, 14:30

Gisteren, 14:16 in BUITENLAND

Brussel - De Belgische staatssecretaris van Asielzaken wil dat asielzoekers die zich in Europa melden, automatisch worden terugverwezen. Aanvragen voor verblijf in Europa moeten volgens Theo Francken in bijvoorbeeld Afrika worden afgehandeld.

De Belgische staatssecratris asielzaken wil asielaanvragen die in Europa worden gedaan afwijzen. Zo moet een eind komen aan de gevaarlijke boottochten.

''¸ AFP

De bewindsman denkt dat daarmee een eind komt aan de levensgevaarlijke oversteek met gammele bootjes.

De populairste politicus van Vlaanderen zegt in Het Nieuwsblad: 'žDit kan niet blijven duren. De asielchaos maakt de publieke opinie alleen maar kwader en kwader''.

UitwijkenItali maakte al eerder duidelijk dat het geen vluchtelingen meer te wil opvangen. Een schip met 600 opvarenden moest uitwijken naar Spanje.

Francken werkt aan een persoonlijk voorstel om de illegale migratie te stoppen. 'žZijn er in heel Noord-Afrika geen veilige plaatsen? Het automatisme van het afzetten in Europa volg ik niet meer. Die illegale migratie moet stoppen, want ze doet '' behalve bij die 15 procent die voor open grenzen is '' het draagvlak bij veel mensen smelten als sneeuw voor de zon. Mensen die helemaal niet racistisch zijn, maar wel rationeel nadenken.''

De politicus vindt dat wie Europa illegaal binnenkomt, nooit meer recht heeft op een asielaanvraag. 'žHet is toch uitzinnig dat je eerst een smokkelaar betaalt, je zo de georganiseerde misdaad rijker maakt en als je dan later wordt teruggebracht, je toch nog naar binnen mag?''

'žWij pleiten voor het Australische model. E(C)n: wie illegaal per boot het land probeert binnen te raken, wordt teruggestuurd en krijgt geen asiel. Ze komen op een zwarte lijst te staan en komen Australi niet meer binnen. Sinds dat systeem bestaat, zijn er geen doden meer'', zegt hij tegen Het Nieuwsblad.

Dagelijks tijdens de lunch het laatste nieuws in je inbox?Ongeldig e-mailadres. Vul nogmaals in aub.

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Updated Gisteren, 14:30

Gisteren, 14:16 in BUITENLAND

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Sun, 17 Jun 2018 13:46

BERLIN'--German Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling conservatives are holding last-ditch talks this weekend to defuse an escalating dispute over immigration and avert a breakup of her government.

Horst Seehofer, who is Ms. Merkel's interior minister and a party leader in her fragile coalition, has threatened to ignore a veto by the chancellor and forge ahead next week with a plan to turn away some migrants at the German border.

Doing so would effectively hand the chancellor an ultimatum: Fire Mr. Seehofer, which would fracture the coalition and prompt new elections just under 100 days after the government was sworn into office; or give in to his demands and see her authority further diminished.

Signalling the level of concern in Ms. Merkel's circle, a conservative cabinet minister told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that such an unprecedented show of defiance by a member of a government would likely lead to the collapse of Ms. Merkel's alliance.

Mr. Seehofer and his party said he would start implementing his controversial plan on Monday, even without approval from the chancellor.

The row is pitting Ms. Merkel's Christian Democratic Union against the Christian Social Union, its sister party in the southern state of Bavaria, which Mr. Seehofer leads. The two have long shared a parliamentary group, acting as a single party on the national stage. They rule together in a fragile alliance of staunch conservatives, centrists and left-leaning Social Democrats, all with diverging views on immigration.

But Mr. Seehofer's CSU has grown increasingly estranged from Ms. Merkel since her decision to open Germany to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in the summer of 2015.

The influx has since abated but the political tension it triggered has refused to go away.

The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, which was created in 2013 and polled in the low single digits for years, is now the biggest opposition party in parliament. An Infratest Dimap poll published on Thursday gave AfD 15% of voter support, 2½ points above its September election result.

Mr. Seehofer's CSU is particularly concerned about a state election in Bavaria this October. A poll by Civey this month showed that the party could lose its absolute majority, dropping to around 41% of the vote as the AfD becomes the second-biggest party with 13.5%.

Immigration policy has also reshaped political landscapes elsewhere in Europe, at times dramatically so, and strained relations between European Union members. In Austria, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has moved to tighten immigration and reduce benefits available to asylum seekers since he took office in December.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kurz joined Mr. Seehofer in a Berlin press conference and called for an ''axis of the willing'' to combat illegal migration between Austria, Italy and Germany'--the countries along the main route for irregular migrants crossing the Mediterranean.

Italy's new populist government, which has taken a hard line on asylum, has also signaled support for Mr. Seehofer. Rome prompted international condemnation this week by closing Italian ports to the Aquarius, a French ship that carried over 600 migrants rescued at sea. French President Emmanuel Macron said the Italian government had acted with ''cynicism and irresponsibility.''

Mr. Macron himself, has been no exception to the trend, announcing tighter immigration laws this year. Sweden, long Europe's most welcoming country for refugees, has all but closed its borders.

The sudden escalation in Berlin came as a surprise this week. Mr. Seehofer had been due to present a 63-point immigration plan on Tuesday when he canceled the event because of a dispute with Ms. Merkel.

At issue is a single measure that would give German border police authority to turn back anyone entering the country illegally if they have no identity documents or are found to have previously requested asylum in a different EU country.

Ms. Merkel and her supporters argue that the initiative would alienate Germany's neighbors just as she is trying to engineer a pan-European approach to asylum and refugees.

Mr. Seehofer argues that the move is compliant with international law and would only prevent people with no prospect of obtaining asylum from entering Germany.

After almost a week of talks there was no sign of compromise by Friday evening. Mr. Seehofer and the CSU said they would start implementing the plan next week, deploying police along the border with Austria. The party has said that if Mr. Seehofer loses the interior minister post it would pull out of the government.

In a sign of acrimony, legislators from the CDU and the CSU met separately in parliament for the first time. Ms. Merkel asked her party to wait until after a summit of EU leaders on June 28, so she could hammer out bilateral deals with countries who would take back migrants rejected by Germany, according to lawmakers who attended the meeting.

''I believe that we should not act unilaterally, we should not act in an uncoordinated manner and we should not act to the detriment of other countries,'' Ms. Merkel said Thursday.

Rejecting asylum seekers at the German border could trigger a domino-effect and jeopardize European integration, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, secretary-general of Ms. Merkel's CDU and widely seen as her preferred successor, wrote in an email to all party members this week.

Hinting at possible divisions within Ms. Merkel's own party, Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer exhorted party members to back the chancellor against Mr. Seehofer.

Mr. Seehofer countered in an interview with the S¼ddeutsche Zeitung daily published on Friday that it was the CDU and Ms. Merkel that had divided Europe by opening German borders to refugees in 2015.

Under EU rules, immigrants must apply for asylum in the country where they first enter the bloc. Currently, all asylum seekers are allowed to stay in Germany pending the review of their applications.

''Relations between the sister parties have never been this bad and the government is now hanging by a thread,'' said Robin Alexander, a journalist who wrote a book about the 2015 refugee crisis.

The arrival of 1.4 million people since 2015 has turned politics in what had long been one of Europe's most stable countries upside down. While Ms. Merkel won September's election, she scored her party's worst result since 1949 and took more than six months to form a government.

Crimes committed by migrants'--including rapes, killings and terrorist attacks'--have kept the issue in the news, as have allegations of mismanagement and corruption at Germany's migration agency. And while the flow of arrivals is sharply down from three years ago, some 10,000 people still enter the country illegally every month, according to government estimates.

An Infratest Dimap poll for public-sector broadcaster ARD conducted earlier this week found that 62% of Germans supported turning back some migrants at the border, while 86% backed more robust deportations of rejected asylum seekers; 63% said they weren't satisfied with the work of the coalition.

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Sun, 17 Jun 2018 14:44

A security researcher kicked off a United Airlines flight last month after tweeting about security vulnerabilities in its system had previously taken control of an airplane and caused it to briefly fly sideways, according to an application for a search warrant filed by an FBI agent.

Chris Roberts, a security researcher with One World Labs, told the FBI agent during an interview in February that he had hacked the in-flight entertainment system, or IFE, on an airplane and overwrote code on the plane's Thrust Management Computer while aboard the flight. He was able to issue a climb command and make the plane briefly change course, the document states.

"He stated that he thereby caused one of the airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of the plane during one of these flights," FBI Special Agent Mark Hurley wrote in his warrant application (.pdf). "He also stated that he used Vortex software after comprising/exploiting or 'hacking' the airplane's networks. He used the software to monitor traffic from the cockpit system."

Hurley filed the search warrant application last month after Roberts was removed from a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Syracuse, New York, because he published a facetious tweet suggesting he might hack into the plane's network. Upon landing in Syracuse, two FBI agents and two local police officers escorted him from the plane and interrogated him for several hours. They also seized two laptop computers and several hard drives and USB sticks. Although the agents did not have a warrant when they seized the devices, they told Roberts a warrant was pending.

A media outlet in Canada obtained the application for the warrant today and published it online.

The information outlined in the warrant application reveals a far more serious situation than Roberts has previously disclosed.

Roberts had previously told WIRED that he caused a plane to climb during a simulated test on a virtual environment he and a colleague created, but he insisted then that he had not interfered with the operation of a plane while in flight.

He told WIRED that he did access in-flight networks about 15 times during various flights but had not done anything beyond explore the networks and observe data traffic crossing them. According to the FBI affidavit, however, when he mentioned this to agents last February he told them that he also had briefly commandeered a plane during one of those flights.

He told the FBI that the period in which he accessed the in-flight networks more than a dozen times occurred between 2011 and 2014. The affidavit, however, does not indicate exactly which flight he allegedly caused to turn to fly to the side.

He obtained physical access to the networks through the Seat Electronic Box, or SEB. These are installed two to a row, on each side of the aisle under passenger seats, on certain planes. After removing the cover to the SEB by "wiggling and Squeezing the box," Roberts told agents he attached a Cat6 ethernet cable, with a modified connector, to the box and to his laptop and then used default IDs and passwords to gain access to the inflight entertainment system. Once on that network, he was able to gain access to other systems on the planes.

Reaction in the security community to the new revelations in the affidavit have been harsh. Although Roberts hasn't been charged yet with any crime, and there are questions about whether his actions really did cause the plane to list to the side or he simply thought they did, a number of security researchers have expressed shock that he attempted to tamper with a plane during a flight.

"I find it really hard to believe but if that is the case he deserves going to jail," wrote Jaime Blasco, director of AlienVault Labs in a tweet.

Alex Stamos, chief information security officer of Yahoo, wrote in a tweet, "You cannot promote the (true) idea that security research benefits humanity while defending research that endangered hundreds of innocents."

Roberts, reached by phone after the FBI document was made public, told WIRED that he had already seen it last month but wasn't expecting it to go public today.

"My biggest concern is obviously with the multiple conversations that I had with the authorities," he said. "I'm obviously concerned those were held behind closed doors and apparently they're no longer behind closed doors."

Although he wouldn't respond directly to questions about whether he had hacked that previous flight mentioned in the affidavit, he said the paragraph in the FBI document discussing this is out of context.

"That paragraph that's in there is one paragraph out of a lot of discussions, so there is context that is obviously missing which obviously I can't say anything about," he said. "It would appear from what I've seen that the federal guys took one paragraph out of a lot of discussions and a lot of meetings and notes and just chose that one as opposed to plenty of others."

History of Researching PlanesRoberts began investigating aviation security about six years ago after he and a research colleague got hold of publicly available flight manuals and wiring diagrams for various planes. The documents showed how inflight entertainment systems on some planes were connected to the passenger satellite phone network, which included functions for operating some cabin control systems. These systems were in turn connected to the plane avionics systems. They built a test lab using demo software obtained from infotainment vendors and others in order to explore what they could to the networks.

In 2010, Roberts gave a presentation about hacking planes and cars at the BSides security conference in Las Vegas. Another presentation followed two years later. He also spoke directly to airplane manufacturers about the problems with their systems. "We had conversations with two main airplane builders as well as with two of the top providers of infotainment systems and it never went anywhere," he told WIRED last month.

Last February, the FBI in Denver, where Roberts is based, requested a meeting. They discussed his research for an hour, and returned a couple weeks later for a discussion that lasted several more hours. They wanted to know what was possible and what exactly he and his colleague had done. Roberts disclosed that he and his colleague had sniffed the data traffic on more than a dozen flights after connecting their laptops to the infotainment networks.

"We researched further than that," he told WIRED last month. "We were within the fuel balancing system and the thrust control system. We watched the packets and data going across the network to see where it was going."

Eventually, Roberts and his research partner determined that it would take a convoluted set of hacks to seriously subvert an avionics system, but they believed it could be done. He insisted to WIRED last month, however, that they did not "mess around with that except on simulation systems." In simulations, for example, Roberts said they were able to turn the engine controls from cruise to climb, "which definitely had the desired effect on the system'--the plane sped up and the nose of the airplane went up."

Today he would not respond to questions about the new allegations from the FBI that he also messed with the systems during a real flight.

The Tweet Heard Round the WorldRoberts never heard from the FBI again after that February visit. His recent troubles began after he sent out a Tweet on April 15 while aboard a United Airlines flight from Denver to Chicago. After news broke about a report from the Government Accountability Office revealing that passenger Wi-Fi networks on some Boeing and Airbus planes could allow an attacker to gain access to avionics systems and commandeer a flight, Roberts published a Tweet that said, "Find myself on a 737/800, lets see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM,? Shall we start playing with EICAS messages? 'PASS OXYGEN ON' Anyone?" He punctuated the tweet with a smiley face.

The tweet was meant as a sarcastic joke; a reference to how he had tried for years to get Boeing and Airbus to heed warnings about security issues with their passenger communications systems. His tweet about the Engine Indicator Crew Alert System, or EICAS, was a reference to research he'd done years ago on vulnerabilities in inflight infotainment networks, vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to access cabin controls and deploy a plane's oxygen masks.

In response to his tweet, someone else tweeted to him "...aaaaaand you're in jail. :)"

Roberts responded with, "There IS a distinct possibility that the course of action laid out above would land me in an orange suite [sic] rather quickly :)"

When an employee with United Airlines' Cyber Security Intelligence Department became aware of the tweet, he contacted the FBI and told agents that Roberts would be on a second flight going from Chicago to Syracuse. Although the particular plane Roberts was on at the time the agents seized him in New York was not equipped with an inflight entertainment system like the kind he had previously told the FBI he had hacked, the plane he had flown earlier from Denver to Chicago did have the same system.

When an FBI agent later examined that Denver-to-Chicago plane after it landed in another city the same day, he found that the SEBs under the seats where Roberts had been sitting "showed signs of tampering," according to the affidavit. Roberts had been sitting in seat 3A and the SEB under 2A, the seat in front of him, "was damaged."

"The outer cover of the box was open approximately 1/2 inch and one of the retaining screws was not seated and was exposed," FBI Special Agent Hurley wrote in his affidavit.

During the interrogation in Syracuse, Roberts told the agents that he had not compromised the network on the United flight from Denver to Chicago. He advised them, however, that he was carrying thumb drives containing malware to compromise networks'--malware that he told them was "nasty." Also on his laptop were schematics for the wiring systems of a number of airplane models. All of this would be standard, however, for a security researcher who conducts penetration-testing and research for a living.

Nonetheless, based on all of the information that agents had gleaned from their previous interview with Roberts in February as well as the Tweets he'd sent out that day and the apparent signs of tampering on the United flight, the FBI believed that Roberts "had the ability and the willingness to use the equipment then with him to access or attempt to access the IFE and possibly the flight control systems on any aircraft equipped with an IFE systems, and that it would endanger public safety to allow him to leave the Syracuse airport that evening with that equipment."

When asked by WIRED if he ever connected his laptop to the SEB on his flight from Denver to Chicago, Roberts said, "Nope I did not. That I'm happy to say and I'll stand from the top of the tallest tower and yell that one."

He also questions the FBI's assessment that the boxes showed signs of tampering.

"Those boxes are underneath the seats. How many people shove luggage and all sorts of things under there?," he said. "I'd be interested if they looked at the boxes under all the other seats and if they looked like they had been tampered. How many of them are broken and cracked or have scuff marks? How many of those do the airlines replace because people shove things under there?"

Regardless of whether the authorities have a case against him, however, there has already been some fallout from the incident. Roberts told WIRED that today investors on the board of directors of One World Labs, a company he helped found, decided to withdraw their investments in the company. As a result, One World Labs had to lay off about a dozen employees today, half of its staff.

Roberts said there were other factors contributing to the board's decision but his legal situation "was probably the final straw."

"The board has deemed it a risk. So that was one factor in many that made their decision," he said. "Their decision was not to fund the organization any further."

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WESTMINSTER, Colo. -- A court document reveals new details about what investigators believe happened leading up to and during a fatal shooting outside a Westminster dental office Thursday afternoon.

The document is an affidavit for a search warrant. FOX31 received the document from the Adams County Combined Court.

According to the affidavit, Jeremy Webster, 23, followed a woman and her three children into a parking lot near West 80th Avenue and Sheridan Boulevard. Westminster police believe it was a case of road rage.

Witnesses told investigators Webster parked his car in the middle of the parking lot behind the woman's.

Webster then began arguing with the woman. He produced a handgun and shot her multiple times. When she fell to the ground, Webster then shot two of her three boys multiple times. Webster began walking back to his car before shooting one of the boys again. That boy was pronounced dead at the hospital, according to the document.

The third boy ran away and was not shot.

The affidavit said that after shooting the woman and the two boys, Webster made eye contact with a man who was sitting in his truck with his young daughter. Webster walked toward the truck and shot it multiple times, hitting the man in the arms. That victim then put his truck into reverse and sped out of the parking lot. He is expected to survive. His daughter was not hurt.

After shooting the four people, the document alleges Webster fled the scene in his Toyota Corolla, in which he was later found driving on Interstate 25 near Castle Rock. He was taken into custody.

The road rage incident started near Sheridan Boulevard and Turnpike Drive. The boy who was uninjured said his mother took a picture of Webster's license plate before they got out of the car, according to the affidavit.

Using this photo, investigators were able to identify Webster as the suspect. When shown a photo of Webster, the man who was shot in his truck identified Webster as the man who shot him.

Once apprehended, Webster admitted to police he shot the woman, the children and the man in the truck. He said he has mental health issues and began taking a new prescription Thursday. He said he used his Glock 19 handgun to shoot the victims.

"All of the victims in this case suffered serious gunshot wounds to different parts of their bodies," the affidavit said. The three people who were shot but survived the shooting -- the mother, one of her sons and the man in the truck -- are all in serious condition and undergoing surgeries.

The document lists a Colorado Springs address as Webster's residence.

Webster was booked into the Adams County jail early Friday morning and is being held for investigation of first-degree murder after deliberation with intent, first-degree murder extreme indifference, first-degree assault and criminal attempt to commit a Class 1 felony.

The victims have no relationship with Webster, police said.

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June 10th, 2018

Senator Feinstein discusses separation of illegal under Obama (screengrab)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Sunday that she ''didn't really know'' the separation of undocumented families was a problem under former President Obama.

On CNN's ''State Of The Union,'' host Jake Tapper addressed a picture of ''undocumented children in a holding cell'' from 2014 that was passed around as if it happened under the Trump administration. (RELATED: Shaun King, Linda Sarsour, Others Try To Hammer Trump On Immigration But Hit Obama Instead)

''A lot of Democrats are expressing outrage about how Trump is treating undocumented immigrants,'' said Tapper. ''We saw this photo making the rounds on social media, Los Angeles former mayor tweeting it out, it is actually from '-- it is undocumented children in a holding cell, but it is you actually from 2014 when President Obama was president. There were a lot of things done to undocumented immigrants that the immigrant community was very upset about during the Obama years, the Democrats didn't seem as outspoken about.''

''What do you say to people who are saying where was all this activism during the Obama years?'' Tapper asked.

Feinstein responded by asserting her belief that the problem was not ''to the extent that it is today,'' adding, she ''didn't really know enough about it.''

''I don't believe that it was nearly to the extent that it is today,'' said the California senator. ''And candidly, I didn't really know enough about it at that time to focus on it. I do know enough about it now.''

Feinstein then discussed her bill that would ''prohibit the taking of children in this manner and then it would provide a number of criteria to remove a child, what you'd have to have present.''

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Rick Shade navigates through the rows of trees, seamlessly disappearing into the branches, rummaging through the leaves, before finally turning around with a look of triumph. "This fruit here it's in the sweet spot," he says holding up a single dark green avocado, the stem still attached. "A tinge of color on the peel."

';var storytext = document.getElementById('storytext');var heightToSkip = 0;function resetValues(){totalHeight = 0;targetChildElement = null;}// Check if story is in the blacklist of articles to remove smartassets// [2017.07.27] Results of a one-off request from r.barbieriif(BLACKLIST[location.pathname] === true) {return}if(storytext == null){console.log("Error finding storytext element for SA embed");return;}for ( i = 0; i 0){heightToSkip -= storytext.childNodes[i].clientHeight;resetValues();}else if(heightToSkip minHeight && targetChildElement != null){//console.log("total height = " + totalHeight);//console.log("childNode = " + targetChildElement);storytext.childNodes[targetChildElement].insertAdjacentHTML('afterend', smartAssetDiv); smartasset = document.getElementById('smartasset-article'); smartasset.style.float = 'left'; // allows module to have text float to right smartasset.style.marginRight ='20px'; smartasset.style.marginBottom ='25px';//console.log(storytext.childNodes[targetChildElement]);//SMARTASSET.setDivIndex(targetChildElement);SMARTASSET.setSmartAssetScript();/* bail out since we're done */break;}}/* div with id="smartassetcontainer". Sanity check to only embed once */else if (storytext.childNodes[i].nodeName.toLowerCase() === 'div' && storytext.childNodes[i].id !== "undefined" && storytext.childNodes[i].id === "smartassetcontainer") {break;}/* div with id="ie_column" */else if (storytext.childNodes[i].nodeName.toLowerCase() === 'div' && storytext.childNodes[i].id !== "undefined" && storytext.childNodes[i].id === "ie_column") {resetValues();}/* embeds from twitter, facebook, youtube */else if (storytext.childNodes[i].nodeName.toLowerCase() === 'div' && storytext.childNodes[i].classList.contains('embed')) {resetValues();}/* cnn video player */else if (storytext.childNodes[i].nodeName.toLowerCase() === 'div' && storytext.childNodes[i].classList.contains('cnnplayer')) {resetValues();}/* images */else if (storytext.childNodes[i].nodeName.toLowerCase() === 'img') {resetValues();}/* images stored in figure tags */ else if (storytext.childNodes[i].nodeName.toLowerCase() === 'figure') {if(storytext.childNodes[i].clientWidth He would know. The fifth generation California farmer has been growing citrus and avocados his whole life.

"Now this one," Shade, 57, says gently cupping another avocado, "even though it has a little black on the peel, is not going to make the size that's in the sweet spot for us. And it takes someone who has been at it for a long time to tell the difference."

Shade will need 50 harvesters for peak season. Right now, he has 25. He's tried to hire more, but a skilled crew is becoming harder to find: The workforce he's relied on is aging and he's having a hard time finding people to replace them.

"Many of the harvesters I remember from when I was just a teenager - they're still harvesting," he says.

Even though he pays well above minimum wage, he's also lost workers to farms that can afford to pay more. The experienced harvesters at Shade's farm can make up to $400 a day, he says. The rookies start off at minimum wage and then move up to $200 to $300 a day after a few weeks.

Finding workers, especially at peak harvesting season, is a problem many of the nation's farmers face.

According to the Department of Labor, nearly half of the farm workers in the United States are undocumented immigrants. But decades of inconsistent immigration policies have helped to create a labor shortage -- and recent crackdowns at the border are further depleting the already short supply of workers.

Rick Shade in one of the avocado groves on his farm in California. Farmers can participate in the H-2A guest farm worker visa program, which provides temporary visas to workers for up to 10 months, then requires them to return home after the season. But the application system is often difficult to navigate. According to a study by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the H-2A process is so grueling, farmers have had to hire lawyers to help. Of those who made it through, 72% of growers said administrative delays caused workers to arrive weeks after the needed date.

Related: How America's immigrant workforce is changing

Plus, the program is expensive. Farmers must provide workers with housing, transportation to and from their home country and workers' compensation insurance.

"The H-2A is a difficult process, especially living in this beautiful spot in Southern California," Shade said, citing the state's high land values and tough regulations regarding housing. "When you bring in an H-2A employee or employees, you have to provide housing that is up to government specifications. If I were to hit the Lotto ... I might be able to purchase an old run down motel and convert it. But that's the order of magnitude we're talking about for labor and it's just not feasible."

To lessen their dependence on workers, farmers across the country are scrambling to mechanize. Agricultural technology -- basically using robots to replace workers -- is now a multibillion dollar industry. Investors poured $4.6 billion into food and agriculture technology startups in 2015 alone. Despite major advancements in technology, some crops, like avocados are too difficult to mechanize and require a specific skill set.

Related: Farmers say they have a lot to lose in a trade war

"The crops that are most affected are the ones that use hired labor," explains Daniel Sumner, director of the University of California, Agricultural Issues Center at UC Davis, pointing to avocados, berries and tree fruits. "It's really now through the rest of the summer that we're going to hear more and more farmers and farm workers rushing to get a harvest in with really not enough labor force to do it. And that's a real challenge. It may mean that we have crops rotting in the fields."

Back at Shade's farm, he watches a group of workers pick avocados. Equipped with a 20-foot tall poll that has a rucksack on the end, one of the men ascends into the treetops. Using one hand for stability on the teetering ladder, he swings his body out. In one fluid motion he snaps an avocado bunch and puts it into the giant canvas bag slung over his small frame.

"Every avocado has to be clipped from the tree by hand," Shade beams. "I don't care which diet you're on - Keto, Paleo, whatever - everybody still eats. We need people that are willing to work hard and sweat in agriculture to get the food to the table."

CNNMoney (Carpinteria, California) First published June 15, 2018: 10:28 AM ET

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June 16th, 2018

Rep. Cuellar On CNN (CNN, 06/16/18)

Democratic Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar admitted Saturday that the Obama administration attempted to cover up the child migrant crisis occurring at the Souther border.

WATCH:

''It was kept very quiet under the Obama Administration. There were large numbers of people coming in. The Obama administration was trying to keep this quiet,'' Cuellar told CNN's Fredricka Whitfield.

Whitfield displayed a 2014 image of migrant children held in cages at a detention center, and Cuellar said that he released similar photos of children separated from their parents.

Cuellar added that the number of children being held at the border right now is similar to the amount during the Obama administration.

''We still see the numbers,'' he said, adding that ''not all of them are being separated. Some of them are coming alone.''

''Keep in mind that under the law, you can separate a child if that person, the adult, is not the real parent or the custodian because sometimes we see situations where they'll bring a child because they know of the policy that we have over here with children.''

Cuellar scrutinized the zero-tolerance policy for separation, suggesting criminal adult immigrants have previously taken advantage of it.

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Log in Sign up CNN @ CNN Obama-era Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson: "There is no law that requires the Trump administration to separate children from their parents. If there were such a law, I would know about it"

cnn.it/2LSUcVt pic.twitter.com/urpwtcoPpN 12:48 PM - 16 Jun 2018 Twitter by: CNN @CNN 🇺🇸American Blackman🇺🇸 @ LivingDaDream27

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@CNN This is on Trump ..... nobody else

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Log in Sign up The White House @ WhiteHouse ''Americans must demand their lawmakers support the legislation we need to defeat MS-13 once and for all, and to ensure every American child in every American community can grow up in safety, and grow up in security, and in peace.''

pic.twitter.com/lZricJih8H 7:00 AM - 16 Jun 2018 Twitter by: The White House @WhiteHouse jcastro @ javmiester

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@WhiteHouse Resign racist

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@javmiester @WhiteHouse You like MS13?

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@WhiteHouse Love trump good job

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@WhiteHouse @POTUS Every child means EVERY child. Stop taking child hostages and putting them in concentration camps twitler.

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@WhiteHouse This is the MS-13 you reference?

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@WhiteHouse How do you explain this? 🐠You DO work for Putin!

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@WhiteHouse Live from New Orleans, we got a lot of problems and MS-13 ain't one of them. Just saying. Y'all?

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@WhiteHouse @YouTube Monsters!!!!

youtu.be/42iEbQHfoz4 via

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@MarceloMezquia @WhiteHouse Read up on WHY we're going to do this.

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@Jacobmr123 @WhiteHouse Idiot

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@WhiteHouse @realDonaldTrump Thank you

@realDonaldTrump for fighting hard to keep all of us safe. I hate that you're having to put up with the Democrats who won't get something done about MS-13 and illegal immigration. They are protecting illegals more than they are actual Americans.

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@WhiteHouse dammit it is reading. Probably doesn't understand anything it's saying.

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@Bernade69399918 @WhiteHouse @realDonaldTrump Christofascist

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@Mason44check @javmiester @WhiteHouse Donnie's irrational and erratic incompetence is a far bigger threat to my safety and security

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 15:29

The controversial Obama Presidential Center in Chicago will benefit from almost $200 million in taxpayer funding for work on infrastructure projects near the center on Chicago's South Side.

The Chicago Sun Times first reported Friday that Illinois lawmakers had approved $174 million for roadwork in and around Jackson Park related to the development of the center.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former Obama White House chief of staff, described the infrastructure improvements as ''money well spent.''

''Bringing the Obama Presidential Center to Chicago took leadership and vision, and we are gratified that our partners in Springfield also saw the potential for what this means for all of Illinois,'' Emanuel said in a statement Friday.

His office said that the funding would go toward meeting "the transportation infrastructure needs related to the Obama Center, from road construction to traffic mitigation to pedestrian safety to parkland enhancement."

''The state's $174 million investment in infrastructure improvements near the Obama Center on the South Side of Chicago is money well spent,'' he said.

The Washington Examiner reports that Illinois taxpayers will also shoulder half of a $50 million project to overhaul an above-ground rail stop two miles from the center. The other half will be funded via a Transportation Department grant.

The Center won approval from Chicago's city council last month, despite significant resistance and protests from its opponents, who are skeptical of the Obama Foundation's claim that the center will support thousands of new jobs and have a total economic impact of $3.1 billion in its first 10 years.

Opponents doubt that the center will yield those benefits to local residents, have expressed anger at the lack of a formal agreement with the local community, and others have challenged the use of local parkland for the project.

OBAMA CENTER FOES DECRY 'RUBBER-STAMPING' AS CHICAGO COUNCIL OKS PROJECT

The Center still has a series of approval steps to go through, including a federal review, but has also faced a lawsuit by Protect Our Parks, which alleged that the city was engaging in a ''short con shell game'' to get the 12-story museum and library built on parkland.

The lawsuit argued that while the purpose of transferring the land was to house the official Obama presidential library, the center will not include his presidential papers, only a digital copy.

"Defendants have chosen to deal with it in a classic Chicago political way, known as a short con shell game, a corrupt scheme to deceive and seemingly legitimize an illegal land grab, one that will endure for centuries to come, regardless of future changing public park needs and increasingly consequential environmental conditions,'' the lawsuit said.

But the Obama Foundation and Chicago officials have pushed back on that narrative, saying that the center will be an enormous benefit to the local community.

''The Obama Presidential Center will be a transformational project for Chicago's South Side, and this state funding demonstrates Illinois' commitment to honoring the legacy of Chicago's favorite son and daughter,'' Mayor Emanuel said.

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 14:51

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 11:17

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Sat, 16 Jun 2018 11:11

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Fri, 15 Jun 2018 15:30

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Fri, 15 Jun 2018 12:50

Fox News host Jesse Watters blasted a pair of reporters covering the White House on Thursday, suggesting they have their press credentials revoked after a contentious briefing.

Watters said during an appearance on Fox News' ''The Five'' that the two reporters, Playboy's Brian Karem and CNN's Jim Acosta, ''don't belong'' in the White House briefing room.

''They are jokes,'' Watters said during the program. "They need to start ripping press passes away. If you're going to act like a wild animal, you don't belong there.''

Acosta responded to Watters on Twitter after the segment aired.

''This from a lapdog for the White House,'' he retorted.

This from a lapdog for the White House. https://t.co/cJkJh2aZOi

'-- Jim Acosta (@Acosta) June 14, 2018Karem sparred with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders during Thursday's media briefing, questioning whether she had "any empathy" over the Trump administration's policy of separating families who illegally cross the border into the U.S.

Acosta then feuded with Sanders after she invoked the Bible as justification for separating families.

"Where in the Bible does it say that it's OK to take children away from their parents?" Acosta pressed. "You just said it's in the Bible to follow the law."

"I know it's hard for you to understand even short sentences, I guess, but please don't take my words out of context," Sanders fired back.

Asked about Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsDem senator: 'Stop pretending' law banning separation of migrant families is hard to pass Fox News' Jesse Watters: Reporters who act like 'a wild animal' should lose press passes Sessions invokes the Bible to defend separation of families at the border MORE ' claim that separating children from parents is rooted in the Bible, Sanders says "it it is very biblical to enforce the law."She then calls @Acosta dumb, saying, "I know it's hard for you to understand even short sentences." pic.twitter.com/LnQrBUvDBe

'-- Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 14, 2018Watters said Thursday evening that it was inappropriate for the reporters to interject with their opinions and have a ''meltdown.''

''I don't care if you have opinions like that,'' Watters said. ''Be an analyst. Go debate it on CNN on primetime but don't pretend to be a non-partisan correspondent and then meltdown like that and embarrass your integrity.''

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Thu, 14 Jun 2018 21:51

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Thu, 14 Jun 2018 21:47

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Thu, 14 Jun 2018 21:26

The Berkeley City Council on Tuesday night declared what it called a "climate emergency" with more global significance than World War II, and demanded an immediate effort to "humanely stabilize population" and "reverse ecological overshoot."

The resolution, which invokes the global conflict between the Axis and Allies, charges that Americans bear an "extraordinary responsibility to solve the crises" facing the environment.

"[D]uring World War II, the Bay Area came together across race, age, class, gender and other differences in an extraordinary regional mobilization, building and repairing Liberty ships, converting car assembly plants into tank manufacturing facilities," the resolution reads.

A similar effort is necessary today to confront an even greater threat, according to the document.

"[W]e can rise to the challenge of the greatest crisis in history by organizing politically to catalyze a national and global climate emergency effort, employing local workers in a mobilization effort building and installing renewable energy infrastructure," the resolution says.

More than 60 million people died during World War II, according to most estimates -- a huge portion of the global population.

But according to the Berkeley City Council, another thinning of the herd might be needed.

The resolution notes that "reversing ecological overshoot and halting the sixth mass extinction requires an effort to preserve and restore half Earth's biodiversity in interconnected wildlife corridors and to humanely stabilize population."

UC BERKELEY CONVERTS HOMELESS, DRUG-USER HAVEN INTO STUDENT HOUSING

The resolution, introduced in the ultra-progressive city by councilwoman Cheryl Davila, then invokes Pope Francis' comment that humanity is on the verge of global "suicide" and that "God's creation" is at stake.

Davila's resolution also calls for a global climate summit in San Francisco in September and a push to "educat[e] our citizens about the climate emergency."

The document's most substantial promise is for Berkeley to become a "carbon sink" by 2030 -- a term that means the city's greenhouse gas emissions will be in the negative.

In addition to population control and a national mobilization effort, according to the Berkeley City Council, residents should avoid "consumerism" and "narcissism."