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300 Veterans, Some With PTSD, Are on Death Row: Report - NBC News - 0 views

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shared by katyshannon on 11 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Courtney Lockhart's capital murder trial, the jury heard testimony that he had returned from a bloody 16-month deployment to Ramadi, Iraq, a changed man. His sweet nature was replaced by anger and paranoia, his ex-fiancee said. He hid in the closet at night, started living out of his car, drank too much and once put a gun to his own head.
  • defense argued that Lockhart, who was dishonorably discharged, was suffering from untreated PTSD and wasn't in his right mind when he abducted, robbed and fatally shot college student Lauren Burk in 2008. advertisement
  • The Alabama jury rejected the prosecution's call for the death penalty and sentenced him to life. But in a rare move, a judge overrode the panel's decision and put him on death row.
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  • The case of Lockhart — whose brigade had a dozen other men charged with murder or attempted murder after coming home from Iraq — is highlighted in a new report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that opposes capital punishment.
  • "At a time in which the death penalty is being imposed less and less, it is disturbing that so many veterans who were mentally and emotionally scarred while serving their country are now facing execution," said Robert Dunham, the center's executive director.
  • About 300 veterans are on death row nationwide, about 10 percent of all those condemned to die, the group estimates.
  • It's unclear how many have been diagnosed with PTSD or have symptoms, but Dunham says that in too many cases, a veteran's mental scars are not examined closely enough by defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges, juries and governors who can commute death sentences.
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Pardon Plea by Adolf Eichmann, Nazi War Criminal, Is Made Public - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by rachelramirez on 27 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Pardon Plea by Adolf Eichmann, Nazi War Criminal, Is Made Public
  • other original documents from the case, were made public for the first time on Wednesday by Israel’s current president, Reuven Rivlin, during an event to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
  • Mr. Rivlin, whose audience in unveiling the documents at his official residence included Holocaust survivors and people who played a role in the Eichmann case, asserted in a statement: “Not a moment of kindness was given to those who suffered Eichmann’s evil.”
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  • For many Israelis, the 1961 trial of Eichmann — who had been captured by Israeli agents in Argentina the year before — was the first time they were exposed to the shocking testimonies of Holocaust survivors.
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Obama budget rejected by House Republicans - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

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shared by katyshannon on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • President Barack Obama checked off another "last" of his White House tenure Tuesday, submitting his final budget proposal to Congress amid the growing din from the campaign trail.
  • The $4.1 trillion annual budget plan -- nearly always deemed "dead on arrival" to the Republican-controlled Congress -- appeared particularly lifeless this year: Republicans said before the document even arrived they would break the long precedent of hearing from the President's budget chief as they draft their own fiscal blueprint.
  • Like lame-duck presidents before him, Obama submitted a final budget that includes funding for his top legacy priorities, including combating climate change and expanding health insurance coverage. The plan seeks to increase revenue from taxes by $2.6 trillion over the next decade, largely by changing tax laws.
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  • Obama's budget drafters said the deficit would decrease in the next fiscal year, which begins in October, going from $616 billion to $503 billion. Over the next decade, though, they said the deficit would increase amid increased spending on older Americans' health care.
  • "The budget is a road map to a future that embodies America's values and aspirations: a future of opportunity and security for all of our families; a rising standard of living; and a sustainable, peaceful planet for our kids," Obama wrote in a message to lawmakers. "This future is within our reach. But just as it took the collective efforts of the American people to rise from the recession and rebuild an even stronger economy, so will it take all of us working together to meet the challenges that lie ahead."
  • "It is clear that this President will not put forth the budget effort that our times and our country require. Instead of hearing from an administration unconcerned with our $19 trillion in debt, we should focus on how to reform America's broken budget process and restore the trust of hardworking taxpayers," the Senate Budget Chairman Sen. Mike Enzi wrote.
  • $1 billion in new funding for treating opioid addiction, a national epidemic that's taken prominence on the presidential campaign trail, and another billion for cancer research as part of Vice President Joe Biden's "moonshot" initiative.
  • also includes bolstering spending on national security priorities, including $7.5 billion in new spending to combat ISIS and $3.4 billion to step up military presence in Europe in a bid to counter Russian President Vladimir Putin. Another $19 billion would go toward bolstering the country's cybersecurity through updating information technology systems.
  • The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House budget committees said last week they were forgoing the decades-long tradition of hearing testimony from the director of the Office of Management and Budget, claiming they expected Obama's budget to offer little in debt reduction.
  • In parts, the document reads like a "good riddance" letter to a GOP-led Congress that's offered Obama little in terms of bipartisan compromise. A $10.25-per-barrel fee on oil, meant to pay for needed infrastructure projects and a transition to green transportation systems, only enraged Republicans when it was announced last week. An increase in funding to Wall Street regulators is also unlikely to meet approval from the GOP, as is a $1.3 billion request for accelerating the use of clean energy sources.
  • The decision enraged Democrats, who said the decision broke four decades of precedent. Democrats on the Senate Budget panel noted that a hearing on the President's budget request was held even in 2004, when toxic ricin was found in a Senate office mail room."Even under those extraordinary circumstances, the committee carried out its duties," the panel's Democrats said. "The year, with no unusual circumstances to prevent us from doing our work, we have been provided with no reasonable explanation for the decision not to hold a hearing," wrote Democratic members of the House Budget panel.
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South Dakota Could Pass 'Bathroom Bill' Affecting Transgender Students | TIME - 0 views

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shared by katyshannon on 17 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • South Dakota is on the cusp of becoming the first state in the nation to require public school students to use facilities like bathrooms based on their “chromosomes and anatomy” at birth.
  • The so-called “bathroom bill,” which passed the state House in early February and is being debated by the state Senate Tuesday, marks a revival of the charged fights that played out in states across the country in 2015.
  • At least five other states have considered similar “bathroom bills” this session, and scores of other measures that LGBT rights advocates consider discriminatory are pending in legislatures around the U.S.
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  • Among them are variations on a proposal that exploded in Indiana last year, when controversy over a so-called religious freedom law became a flashpoint in the ongoing debate over religious belief and legal equality. The Hoosier State’s measure led to an estimated $60 million in lost revenue, and after weeks of economic and political pressure, Indiana Governor Mike Pence approved revisions to the law clarifying that businesses couldn’t use it to turn away LGBT patrons.
  • To many supporters, these bills are necessary to protect deeply held religious beliefs and are worth the controversy and lost revenue. To critics, however, the measures seemed aimed at allowing people to treat LGBT citizens differently, based on moral opposition to homosexuality and transgenderism, and serve as a reminder that the lessons of the Indiana fight were fleeting.
  • The fight in South Dakota echoes earlier clashes over gender identity and bathroom use of transgender people. The sponsor of the South Dakota bathroom measure, state Rep. Fred Deutsch, has argued in committee testimony that it is necessary to protect the “bodily privacy rights” of “biologic boys and girls” and that transgender students should be offered alternate accommodations if they do not wish to use the facilities that correspond to their sex assigned at birth.
  • The fight has played out at the state level largely because there is no federal law that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The Equality Act, a federal bill that would create such protections, is unlikely to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress.
  • Rebecca Dodds, the mother of a transgender son who recently graduated from high school in the state’s famed Black Hills, said compelling students to use a separate facility could force them to out themselves to their peers, which could lead to harassment or violence.
  • Though the bill does not specify what those accommodations would be, schools that have dealt with conflicts over bathroom use have often instructed transgender students to use staff or nurse facilities, or facilities in buildings separate from their peers. The Department of Justice has issued several rulings and opinions that say such treatment of transgender students amounts to sex discrimination under Title IX, though federal courts are still weighing the issue.
  • It extends protections for people with three moral beliefs that are laid out in the bill’s text: (1) Marriage is or should only be recognized as the union of one man and one woman (2) Sexual relations are properly reserved to marriage (3) The terms male or man and female or woman refer to distinct and immutable biological sexes that are determined by anatomy and genetics by the time of birth.
  • While critics worry about such bills being used to turn away LGBT people from housing, jobs or businesses, they also worry it could open the door to a broader insertion of personal morality in the public sphere. A pharmacist might, for instance, refuse to fill a birth control prescription for an unmarried woman or a child care agency might refuse to look after a boy or girl with gay parents, without risk of losing their state licenses.
  • Speaking in support of the bathroom bill, a representative from South Dakota Citizens for Liberty said the measure offers a good compromise: “It allows for the sensitive accommodation of students who are experiencing personal trials,” Florence Thompson testified at a hearing of the Senate education committee on Feb. 11. “And does so without giving preferential treatment to a tiny segment of the student population at the expense of the privacy rights of the vast majority.”
  • Meanwhile, the majority of states lack LGBT non-discrimination laws, although a bill in Pennsylvania will likely add sexual orientation and gender identity to the state’s non-discrimination protections.
  • In Georgia, where lawmakers are considering at least four religious freedom bills, a group of businesses—including Coca-Cola, AT&T and Delta—has formed to promote “inclusive” policies, explicitly mentioning sexual orientation and gender identity as qualities that should be respected.
  • In South Dakota, dollars and cents may determine whether the bathroom bill passes too, with the ACLU arguing that the passage of such a law would put the state in direct conflict with federal policy—and therefore all but guarantee costly litigation for school districts that are forced to choose to follow one or the other. Failing to comply with guidance from the Department of Education, which has said that students’ gender identities must be respected, could run the risk of costing local districts hundreds of millions in federal funds.
  • Yet supporters like Deutsch say that the guidance coming from the federal government is the reason such bills are needed, so that South Dakota won’t be pressured into providing facility access for transgender students that is not yet explicitly laid out in federal law.
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Tensions Simmer as a Small Town Seeks Answers in a Boy's Killing - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by sgardner35 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Garrett Phillips, a popular and outgoing 12-year-old, was strangled in his home in fall 2011. The murder set off a mad, all-consuming pursuit for a killer in a region where such crimes are extraordinarily rare.
  • It took more than 30 months for prosecutors to charge him with second-degree murder, in May 2014 — and months more to secure a second indictment after the first was thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct. Despite the long pursuit, the case that a jury will hear this summer is far from perfect: There is a distinct lack of hard evidence, according to police testimony — no fingerprints, no witnesses, no hair or tissue samples, seemingly no conclusive forensic evidence at all connecting Mr. Hillary to the crime.In the long lead-up to the prosecution of Mr. Hillary, his supporters have highlighted not only the absence of physical evidence but the lack of any plausible motive or history that would suggest he was capable of murdering a child. They have also said that another man, a local sheriff’s deputy who once dated Garrett’s mother, was removed from suspicion too quickly.
  • “I can’t think of any other person who would want to hurt Garrett,” Ms. Cyrus said in a statement to the police after her son died.Like the Raquette River, which splits Potsdam in two, the case has divided opinion and tested residents’ patience in St. Lawrence County, a rural and job-challenged region where 94 percent of the population is white. But the emotional impact on Potsdam is raw and evident: Garrett’s former teachers and family friends cry at his memory, while the village’s elders echo one another, saying such terrible crimes simply do not happen in places like this.“It was like a meteor hitting,” said Ron Tischler, the mayor of Potsdam, home to around 9,600 residents that is about 25 miles south of Ontario.
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  • Mr. Hillary has also accused the county prosecutor, Mary Rain, of forsaking justice in the name of keeping a campaign promise: Ms. Rain was elected in 2013, in part on the strength of campaigning with Ms. Cyrus and promising to focus the energies of her small office on Garrett’s murder.
  • The suspicions and repercussions surrounding the boy’s death have rippled through time and distance. A key defense witness, for instance, suddenly discovered “Justice for Garrett” signs posted near his new workplace and home — each hundreds of miles from Potsdam. Mr. Hillary, now free on bail, found himself rearrested in September for allegedly violating an order of protection by using a drive-through A.T.M. at the bank where Ms. Cyrus worked.
  • Garrett Phillips was an ebullient child despite an early-life tragedy: When he was a toddler, his father, Robert — an amiable grounds worker at the State University of New York at Potsdam — suffered a brain aneurysm and never recovered. He died before Garrett was 3.Though Garrett never knew his father, the boy emulated him as he grew. Like his father, he hunted and fished; played any sport involving a ball; and balanced his rowdy and respectful sides, rambunctious sometimes in public but polite to family and strangers.
  • On the afternoon of Oct. 24, 2011, Garrett was playing basketball at the middle school with some friends as rain fell intermittently. A little before 5 p.m., Tandy Cyrus called his cellphone and told him to go home to do schoolwork.
  • Garrett got on his caster board — something of a cross between a skateboard and a snowboard — and headed home, his progress captured by a series of surveillance cameras and later described in a police timeline.
  • Combing the apartment for evidence, investigators found a possible clue: The screen of the bedroom window, about 20 feet off the ground, was “bent outward,” according to the incident report. A tile seemed to be broken on the roof of a lower section of the building, about 10 feet below, and there was a gash in the grass
  • His appeal, as both a coach and a person, is evident: His energy is intense, but his smile is unencumbered. He said he had always loved the North Country region’s rural mountains and summertime greenery — when it was warm it reminded him of Jamaica — though he was aware of the cultural boundaries beyond campus.“You’re a black person,” he said in an interview. “You were viewed as such.”A year after being hired by Clarkson, Mr. Hillary found that his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Stacia Lee, the mother of his three children, was struggling. At a bar called Ton’s, he became acquainted with a bartender, Tandy Cyrus.
  • “I go, ‘Listen. Help me understand. Are you and Tandy together?’” Deputy Jones said.Ms. Cyrus, 37, declined to be interviewed for this article, but Mr. Hillary said he had been harassed because of his relationship with her. “It’s not a community with a lot of interracial relationships,” he said, adding that he had “to be mindful” when he was out. “I would go to the local restaurant,” he said, and Deputy Jones’s “friends would come up to me and like, ‘You know you’re not supposed to be dating John’s girl.’”A few months after they met, Mr. Hillary and Ms. Cyrus moved in together, forming a household of five, including his teenage daughter, Shanna-Kay, and Ms. Cyrus’s two sons.
  • Lieutenant Murray saw Mr. Duff as deeply credible.“I just can’t bring myself to fathom why a collegiate person playing on a Division III soccer team with his entire future ahead of him would lie and perjure himself on a sworn statement for no reason,” he said.On the evening after the murder, Lieutenant Murray went to watch Clarkson’s men’s soccer squad and videotaped Mr. Hillary coaching the penultimate game of a rough season. (The 2011 Clarkson squad had more losses than goals.)According to a search-warrant application, as Mr. Hillary strode along the sideline, he seemed stiff and sedate and had a “significant limp in his right leg,” something the detective inferred would have been caused by jumping from a second-story window. Last year, though, The Watertown Daily Times posted a clip from Lieutenant Murray’s video: In it, Mr. Hillary appears to walk unhindered along the sidelines.
  • As the men were being questioned, detectives searched for damning evidence. They seized Mr. Hillary’s phone and examined the contents of his pockets and his socks. Nude photographs, fingerprints and palm prints were taken. Mr. Hillary’s car was searched. (The timing of the seizures, and of the subsequent search warrants, has been a focus of Mr. Hillary’s civil suit.) The police also obtained his DNA from a coffee cup and the butt of a cigarette.
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Man who fled ISIS in Raqqa: Kids patrolled with AK-47s - CNN.com - 0 views

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shared by lenaurick on 07 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Raqqa, Syria -- ISIS's de facto capital city.
  • It's illegal to leave the so-called Islamic State.
  • Life in a warzone -- with fighter jets from Russia and the U.S.-led coalition dropping bombs on the ISIS heartland --
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  • None of them have been able to attend school -- or at least a real school.
  • There is no education. Five to 11-year-old kids are in the same class. Teachers don't show up and older kids harass them."
  • "You can count the number of doctors on one hand and they only service ISIS. Every day hundreds gather for free food hand outs. It's not a lot. You stand there being humiliated trying to get something to eat."
  • "ISIS gives anything for free to people who join them. The rest of us get nothing. There is no food, electricity or money. The people join ISIS out of hunger.
  • Electricity lasts for roughly 12 hours a day.
  • "Generally, the strikes kill a relatively low number of ISIS fighters. When we were in Raqqa city, for example, the court (was) hit three times. It was empty.
  • Following the French airstrikes, ISIS cracked down on internet usage, fearing their targets might be revealed.
  • We've seen a lot of people who've been beheaded and killed, accused of being spies."
  • Kids, some as young as 10, patrol the street. They are trained in ISIS camps."You can see a 10-year-old kid holding a Russian AK47. It's surreal," he said. "That kids can shout at you and sometimes they stop you and you can't say anything because he is a member of ISIS."
  • hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees making the dangerous journey to Europe's shores.
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Bowe Bergdahl to Face Court-Martial on Desertion Charges - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by katyshannon on 15 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • A top Army commander on Monday ordered that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl face a court-martial on charges of desertion and endangering troops stemming from his decision to leave his outpost in 2009, a move that prompted a huge manhunt in the wilds of eastern Afghanistan and landed him in nearly five years of harsh Taliban captivity.
  • According to Sergeant Bergdahl’s defense lawyers, the Army lawyer who presided over the preliminary hearing also recommended that he face neither jail time nor a punitive discharge and that he go before an intermediate tribunal known as a “special court-martial,” where the most severe penalty possible would be a year of confinement.
  • Monday’s decision rejecting that recommendation means that Sergeant Bergdahl now faces a maximum five-year penalty if ultimately convicted by a military jury of desertion, as well as potential life imprisonment on the more serious charge of misbehavior before the enemy, which in this case means endangering the troops who were sent to search for him after he disappeared.
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  • Sergeant Bergdahl has been the focus of attacks by Republicans in Congress and on the presidential campaign
  • Donald J. Trump, for one, has called the sergeant a “traitor” who should be executed, while Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has vowed to hold hearings if the sergeant is not punished.
  • No date has been set for Sergeant Bergdahl’s next court hearing, which will be held at Fort Bragg, the Army said. He is currently assigned to the Army’s Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, the site of his preliminary hearing in September.
  • In the interviews, he told the same story that he had described to the Army’s investigating officer, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, about why he left the outpost: He wanted to cause a crisis by hiking to another base 18 miles away that would allow him to have an audience with a senior Army commander where he could outline what he felt were serious leadership problems endangering his unit.
  • In the interviews, which were recorded by Mark Boal, the screenwriter and producer, Sergeant Bergdahl said that he realized within 20 minutes of leaving that he had done “something serious.”
  • General Abrams’s decision came just days after Sergeant Bergdahl was heard for the first time publicly explaining why he left his base, in taped interviews that were broadcast by the podcast “Serial” last week.
  • Sergeant Bergdahl told Mr. Boal that during his hike he had also decided to surveil Taliban fighters emplacing improvised explosive devices that could be used to kill American soldiers, and to turn that information over to commanders when he arrived at the other base. He said that he “was trying to prove to the world” that he was a top soldier, and that in some sense he even wanted to emulate someone like Jason Bourne, the spy-movie character.
  • Republicans have asserted that the swap would embolden the Taliban to kidnap other Americans and that it was done without the required notification of Congress. Some Republicans and members of Sergeant Bergdahl’s unit have also asserted that a half-dozen or more American troops died searching for him.
  • But in his testimony, General Dahl — who was recently promoted from major general to lieutenant general — said that no troops had died specifically searching for Sergeant Bergdahl and that no evidence was found to support claims that he intended to walk to China or India or that he was a Taliban sympathizer.
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Jordan Calls UN Refugee Claim 'Exaggerated' | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

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shared by lenaurick on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • U.N figure of 12,000 stranded refugees.
  • Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the kingdom to let the refugees in
  • The UNHCR has warned that the lives of the stranded refugees will be at risk in coming winter months if they are not admitted to Jordan and receive substantial assistance. 
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  • Momani says that "our borders are open for refugees" and that "we take care of humanitarian cases, particularly children and women."  
  • Jordan hosts about 630,000 of more than 4 million Syrians who have fled their homeland since 2011.
  • Jordan has permitted entry to small groups at a time, typically several dozen a day, citing the need for stringent security checks to weed out potential fighters alligned with armed groups.
  • U.N. refugee agency made a rare public appeal to Jordan to change its policy, while acknowledging the country's "tremendous contribution" to hosting refugees
  • "Testimony from Syrian refugees and international aid workers in Jordan ... suggests that hundreds of refugees have been arriving on a daily basis in recent weeks but have been denied access to Jordan by the authorities,"
  • Amman to take "immediate action" to assist them, saying failure to provide refugees with sanctuary could fuel a "humanitarian disaster." 
  • The group said the images show more than 1,450 tent structures, compared to 175 in April.
  • lenaurick on 10 Dec 15
     
    "She said women have given birth at the berm in unsanitary conditions, and that there are increasing signs of diarrhea and malnutrition among children. "
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Former Oklahoma City cop convicted on rape charges - CBS News - 0 views

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shared by katyshannon on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • A former Oklahoma City police officer was convicted Thursday of raping and sexually victimizing eight women on his police beat in a minority, low-income neighborhood.
  • Daniel Holtzclaw, who turned 29 Thursday, sobbed as the verdict was read aloud. Jurors convicted him on 18 counts involving eight of the 13 women who had accused him; the jury acquitted him on another 18 counts.
  • CBS affiliate KWTV reported the jury deliberated for 45 hours before finding Holtzclaw guilty on four counts of first-degree rape, one count of second-degree rape, six counts of sexual battery, four counts of forcible sodomy and three counts of procuring lewd acts.
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  • The first-degree rape convictions could have each carried a life sentence, but the jury recommended 30 years on each charge, and a total of 263 years in prison. Formal sentencing will take place on Jan. 21.
  • "Justice was done today, and a criminal wearing a uniform is going to prison now," Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater said. "In those counts where the not guilty verdicts came back, they determined that we didn't prove those cases beyond a reasonable doubt. It doesn't mean they didn't believe the victims."
  • The allegations against Holtzclaw brought new attention to the problem of sexual misconduct committed by law enforcement officers, something police chiefs have studied for years. The case was among those examined in an Associated Press investigation of such misconduct.
  • During a monthlong trial, jurors heard from 13 women who said Holtzclaw sexually victimized them. Most of them said Holtzclaw stopped them while out on patrol, searched them for outstanding warrants or checked to see if they were carrying drug paraphernalia, then forced himself on them.
  • Holtzclaw's attorney, meanwhile, described him as a model police officer whose attempts to help the drug addicts and prostitutes he came in contact with were distorted.
  • Among the eight women Holtzclaw was convicted of attacking was a grandmother in her 50s, who launched the police investigation and who was in the courtroom Thursday. She said she was driving home after 2 a.m. when Holtzclaw pulled her over.
  • She was the first victim to testify. The last was a teenager who was 17 when Holtzclaw attacked her. Holtzclaw was convicted of three charges related to her case: first-degree rape, second-degree rape and sexual battery.
  • Sex crimes detectives testified they identified and interviewed women Holtzclaw had searched or been in contact with during his 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift. They used GPS records from his patrol car to place him at the scene of the alleged incidents.Prosecutor Gayland Gieger accused Holtzclaw of becoming "more bold, more brazen and more violent" in the months leading up to the first accusation.
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Obama's Afghanistan call: Sanity prevails (Opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

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shared by sgardner35 on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Earlier this year the administration had announced plans to draw down to a skeleton force of around 1,000 troops in Afghanistan by the end of its term. That decision would have tied the hands of the next president as it is much easier to maintain an existing troop presence -- both from a logistical point of view as well as politically -- than it is to ramp one up substantially.
  • two-thirds of Afghans favored a long-term role for U.S. and other international forces, while the Afghan government, led by President Ashraf Ghana and CEO Abdullah Abdullah, have been imploring U.S. officials to maintain a substantial troop presence.
  • Amnesty writes: "Mass murder, gang rapes and house-to-house searches by Taliban death squads are just some of the harrowing civilian testimonies emerging from Kunduz. ...Women human rights defenders from Kunduz spoke of a 'hit list' being used by the Taliban to track down activists and others, and described how fighters had raped and killed numerous civilians."Third, an overwhelming 92% of Afghans prefer the current government to the Taliban, according to a poll taken earlier this year. In other words, not only is the United States on the right side of history in supporting the Afghan government against the Taliban, the Afghan people also overwhelmingly support this.
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  • Fourth, ISIS is establishing something of a foothold in areas of Afghanistan. ISIS has taken over portions of the eastern province of Nangarhar. ISIS executions there involve piling men alive into a mass grave and then using explosives to blow them up. ISIS fighters also torture their victims by thrusting their hands into boiling oil. ISIS' reign of terror even has ordinary Afghans pining for the Taliban!
  • Instead of constantly announcing new U.S. drawdowns from Afghanistan as the Obama administration has done repeatedly over the past few years, which has the unintended consequence of sapping Afghans' confidence, Americans should get used to the fact that the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan should be for the long term and U.S. politicians should say so publicly
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The Enduring Impact of World War I - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • the bloodiest episode of combat in human history, generating 60,000 casualties in a single day
  • but its occurrence in a television program that is acutely sensitive to historical accuracy is a sign of just how deeply, if in some ways obscurely, World War I remains embedded in the popular consciousness.
  • “the war to end all wars,” it has instead become the war to which all subsequent wars, and much else in modern life, seem to refer.
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  • novel form of organized mass death.
  • filtered through the blood, smoke and misery of those earlier engagements.
  • tablished a pattern that would continue to hold, consciously and not, for much of the 20th century.
  • a tradition that included not only martial epics and popular adventure novels but also religious and romantic allegories like John Bunyan’s
  • That soldier, in turn, with some adjustments of outfit and equipment, would march through the subsequent decades, leaving behind a corpus of remarkably consistent firsthand testimony.
  • This was clear enough to Larkin, whose patriotism rested on the notion that England was the worst place on earth with the possible exception of everywhere else.
  • The title of “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s cycle of autobiographical stories about life before, during and after combat in Vietnam,
  • “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.
  • has remained in effect even as the geography has changed.
  • arkin’s subject is less the war as such than a faded England of “archaic faces” and bygone habits, an England that ceased to exist sometime
  • arkin also suggests that it is complicated, even deceptive. Individuals like the anonymous children and husbands
  • whole, its legacy for the individual veteran will be cynicism and disillusionment.
  • last few centuries conquering most of the rest of the globe are another story. Photo
  • To imply that Britain (or for that matter any other combatant nation)
  • Another, favored at the time by a handful of vanguard intellectuals (notably the Italian Futurists)
  • ccounts of that summer, especially in France and Britain, frequently emphasize beautiful weather and holiday pleasures.
  • A lovely example of the interplay of empirical reality and literary embellishment: the meteorological record will attest to the color and clarity of the sky, but only the cruel, corrective irony of hindsight can summon the word “optimistic.”
  • chapters will also make clear the extent to which that “civilization,” so intoxicated by its own rhetoric of national glory and heroic destiny
  • argely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”
  • After Sept. 11, 2001, we were told — we told ourselves — that everything had changed. In a curious reversal of the logic of the Great War, the
  • detachment and personal whimsy” would give way to an ethic of seriousness and sincerity.
  • Ordinary soldiers were routinely referred to as “heroes” and “warriors,” even as their deaths and injuries were kept from public view.
  • But the Great War is not quite finished with us. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have wound down in bloody inconclusiveness, the men and women who served in them have started writing,
  • The book belongs in the irreverent company of “Catch-22,” which is to say on the same shelf as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Chevalier’s “Fear.”
  • “The Things They Carried.” A deceptively modest collection of linked short stories, “Redeployment” bristles with place names,
  • who derived a stark lesson from his own experience at the Battle of the Somme: “The War had won, and would go on winning.”
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    A.O. Scott
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The Peter Strzok Hearing and the Death of Shame - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...565415 decency Politics culture morality justice fbi
shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Decency and the sense of shame that comes from violating standards of decency depend upon a tacit consensus on what it means to do right by others.
  • Decency is not justice; since the tacit consensus of the 1950s did not include full civil rights for African Americans, or for that matter virtually anyone who was not a straight white male, very decent folk all over the country lived with perfect complacency in a caste society
  • Ted Poe, another Texan—another representative, that is, of the law and order capital of America—turned to Strzok and said, “You’re going to act on your bias. You’re going to ‘stop’ President Trump. How do we know that’s not rampant through the FBI?” Strzok rejoined, “A judge asks jurors, ‘Are you able to set aside your personal opinions and render a judgment based on the facts?’ and I and the men and women of the FBI every day take our personal beliefs and set them aside in vigorous pursuit of the truth wherever it lies.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • So yes, the social consensus of the 1950s depended on shrouding the most divisive issues in silence. Decency served as the nonpartisan virtue of that culture. Indeed, the supreme attribute of mid-century Hollywood films was the quiet, undemonstrative heroism of the decent man
  • Think of almost any film starring Henry Fonda. Twelve Angry Men doesn’t focus on Fonda’s politics any more than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington reveals Jimmy Stewart’s, but in the fortitude with which they stand up to prejudice, vitriol, ignorance, laziness, and impatience we recognize the mark of the decent man. No less do we recognize the substantive moral qualities of tolerance and fair-mindedness they embody.
  • In last week’s drama, it was the witness who stood up for the traditional American value of straight shooting, not to mention the moral authority of law enforcement. It was the United States Congress that played the rogue.
  • There was something genuinely astonishing in the spectacle of Republican representatives trying to reduce the FBI to the status of a fifth column, as McCarthy had tried to do to the Army
  • Yet it is only when behavior formerly seen as unexceptionable begins to become a source of shame that broader social change becomes possible. That is as true of sexual abuse today as it was of racism half a century ago.
  • Peter Strzok stands for an FBI that, whatever its faults, serves the nation rather than a political master. G-men have become the Henry Fondas, the Jimmy Stewarts, of the present day—the true believers in an archaic code.
  • I was foolish enough to write at the time that Comey’s testimony might serve to remind Americans of the value of neutral institutions and principles. No such luck: Comey’s plea for impartiality came to be seen on the right as proof of partiality
  • The alternative explanation is that the collective sense of what constitutes decent behavior outweighs ideological affinity on the left, but not on the right. Elected Democrats lined up to denounce President Bill Clinton’s private behavior during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, though none deemed it worthy of impeachment. Donald Trump’s vastly more outrageous behavior has provoked far less opprobrium from his own party.
  • Republicans aren’t less decent than Democrats; rather, they have come to see political struggle in such apocalyptic terms that no merely personal form of shameful behavior can compete with the political stakes.
  • In 2008, the Democrats nominated, and the country elected, a young, lanky, even-keeled fellow who imagined that he could restore the tarnished ideal of national decency. That didn’t turn out the way things do in the movies; eight years of Barack Obama persuaded the country to elect the most shameless man who has ever occupied the White House
  • After Strzok finished reciting the true-blue virtues that he and his fellow FBI agents try to live by, Poe leaned into the microphone and said, “And I don’t believe you.” That’s where we are today.
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Brett Kavanaugh Bears the Burden of Proof - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...571021 supreme court nomination 2018 politics
shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • The injustice, in fact, is largely optical. The question before us, after all, is not whether to punish Kavanaugh or whether to assign liability to him. It’s whether to bestow on him an immense honor that comes with great power. Kavanaugh is applying for a much-coveted job. And the burden of convincing in such situations always lies with the applicant. The standard for elevation to the nation’s highest court is not that the nominee established a “reasonable doubt” that the serious allegations against him were true.
  • There is no known standard of evidence applicable here. Realistically, senators make up their own standard, and decide whether Kavanaugh has satisfied it. For most senators, in fact, there’s no standard of evidence at all, for their support for or opposition to him does not depend on the evidence. It is ideological in character.
  • It is possible to imagine his testimony shoring up support among those who want to support him but leaving everyone else with real doubt. This would be, in my view, a disaster for anyone who believes in apolitical courts. And it is not what Kavanaugh should want
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Clearing one’s name sufficiently to convince only senators who are already ideologically aligned is not, in fact, clearing one’s name. It’s winning. And while winning may be the highest value for Trump, it isn’t actually the highest value—particularly for a justice.
  • If Kavanaugh means to behave honorably, the challenge gets even harder. Because in seeking to meet his burden about events that allegedly took place under vague circumstances 35 years ago (however one defines the standard of evidence), there are arguments that are rightly off limits to him
  • an attack on Ford’s credibility that is not devastating and complete will only worsen Kavanaugh’s problem—and such an attack should worsen it. As a general matter, Kavanaugh cannot blame or attack or seek to discredit a woman who purports to have suffered a sexual-assault at his hands. He cannot play Harvey Weinstein games if he wants to emerge from this episode as a credible figure. A Supreme Court justice is not a movie executive. Simply winning isn’t good enough.
  • Putting it all together, Kavanaugh’s task strikes me as an unenviable one. He needs to prove a negative about events long ago with sufficient persuasiveness that a reasonable person will regard his service as untainted by the allegations against him, and he needs to do so using only arguments that don’t themselves taint him.
  • Getting out does not mean admitting that Ford’s account of his behavior is accurate, something Kavanaugh should certainly not do if her account is not accurate. It means only acknowledging that there is no way to defend against it in a fashion that is both persuasive and honorable in the context of seeking elevation to a job that requires a certain moral viability. It means acknowledging that whatever the truth may be, Kavanaugh cannot carry his burden of proof given the constraints upon him.
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'It's being done to intimidate us': Israeli anti-occupation groups face crackdown | Wor... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...cupation-groups-face-crackdown Israel Palestine occupation news government
shared by knudsenlu on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Israeli MPs will this week consider two initiatives that critics say are aimed at shutting down one of the country’s most high-profile anti-occupation groups, Breaking the Silence, which records the testimonies of Israeli soldiers operating in Palestinian territories.
  • ehuda Shaul, a co-founder of Breaking the Silence, and Avner Gvaryahu, the group’s director, say they are not surprised by the latest efforts against them. “After 50 years, the occupation [of Palestinian territories] has become normalised,” said Shaul. “The only thing left fighting it is civil society groups.”
  • “The worst problems began after 2015 and the election of Israel’s most rightwing ever government,” said Shaul. He said that as a result, dissent had increasingly become concentrated among a handful of NGOs.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Levin has said the election in the US of Donald Trump, whose administration has rarely criticised the Netanyahu government, has made the proposed legislation easier to promote.
  • criticised
  • Gvaryahu and Shaul are bullish in the face of the assault but others in the Israeli human rights community are less sanguine about what they see as its implications for freedom of speech in Israel and the ability of NGOs to operate.
  • Our interest is not in legal avenues but in the moral framework of 50 years of occupation,” he said. “Everything we publish has to be screened by the Israeli military censor. That is important because the censor views potential prosecution [of Israeli soldiers] as a security issue. And it is still approved.”
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Spain's Watergate: inside the corruption scandal that changed a nation | News | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-scandal-politics-gurtel-case spain corruption scandal politics
shared by Javier E on 01 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • “Gürtel was the ‘emperor has no clothes’ moment for Spain,” said Carlos Delclós, a former indignados activist and author of a book on the movement and its political inheritor, Podemos. “Gürtel made it clear that it was not specific cases of corruption but that it was systemic. That corruption was the system.”
  • Even the royal family, it seemed, were at it: a corruption scandal centred on the then king’s son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, threw the monarchy into disrepute. In 2014, the once popular King Juan Carlos abdicated, citing health reasons, amid a sharp decline in popularity. (Last year, Urdangarin was sentenced to six years in jail for tax fraud and embezzlement.)
  • Voters were shocked by just how brazen politicians and businessmen seemed to have been. Before being jailed in 2013 for tax fraud, one PP politician in Valencia won the lottery five times. (He denies wrongdoing, claiming he was merely very lucky.)
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In court, Correa provided details of his working relationship with the PP. He would take suitcases full of cash to party headquarters, he said, never passing through reception but entering with a special access card that allowed him to come and go discreetly. “[The PP HQ] was my home,” he said. “I spent more time there than I did in my own office.”
  • For the PP, the verdict was devastating: the party itself was convicted as a direct beneficiary of the Gürtel scheme. The court found that ever since the party was founded, it had maintained a parallel accounting system to collect money from kickbacks that could be used to fund the party. The court said the testimony of Rajoy and other PP figures who denied knowing about the existence of the slush fund were “not credible”
  • Before the crisis, satisfaction with the political system in Spain was among the highest in Europe, behind only Denmark, Luxembourg and Finland. After 2010, in the wake of austerity and endless corruption scandals, trust in institutions such as political parties and banks crumbled. Gürtel, like Watergate, has convinced many voters to take a conspiratorial view of politics
  • Corruption has also shaped political debate. Catalan separatists have cited PP corruption as one justification for their proposed split from Spain, although critics point out that the former party of former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont has also been involved in its own major corruption scandal.
  • Most worryingly, the far right has begun to use corruption to rally voters.
  • Vox, many polls suggest, now stand to become a major force on the national level, potentially overtaking Podemos as Spain’s fourth largest party.
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Feminists have slowly shifted power. There's no going back | Rebecca Solnit | Opinion |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-metoo-timesup-rebecca-solnit slow revolution power women history culture US
shared by knudsenlu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The #TimesUp and #MeToo movements are a revolution that could not have taken place without decades of quiet, painstaking groundwork
  • his International Women’s Day comes five months after the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s long campaign of misogynist punishments of women first broke, and with them more things broke. Excuses broke. Silence was broken. The respectable appearance of a lot of institutions broke. You could say a dam broke, and a wall of women’s stories came spilling forth – which has happened before, but never the way that this round has. This time around, women didn’t just tell the stories of being attacked and abused; they named names, and abusers and attackers lost jobs and reputations and businesses and careers. They named names, and it mattered; people listened; their testimony had consequences. Because there’s a big difference between being able to say something and having it heard and respected. Consequences are often the difference.
  • Something had shifted
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This #TimesUp/#MeToo moment is no different; it is a revolt for which we have been preparing for decades, or perhaps it’s the point at which a long, slow, mostly quiet process suddenly became fast and loud. Part of the work was done over the past five years, more of it over the past 50. We have had a tremendous upheaval over the past few years – at the end of 2014, I wrote in these pages: “I have been waiting all my life for what this year has brought.” What this wave brought is recognition that each act of gender violence is part of an epidemic. It’s brought a (partial) end to treating these acts as isolated incidents, as the victim’s fault, as the result of mental illness or other aberrations. It’s meant a more widespread willingness to recognise that such violence is extraordinarily common and has an enormous impact, and arises from values, privileges and attitudes built into the culture.
  • But even the “we” has changed and I believe that that is central to why so much else has changed. Who determines what stories get told, who gets believed, whose words have weight, who’s in charge has changed. (Black Lives Matter was another movement to shift what is visible, whose version is heard, who matters.) We have not lost the proponents of the old worldview, in which men’s lives matter more and their words have more credibility, but we have gained people who don’t operate by those rules. Feminists have slowly, steadily gained power – and by feminists I mean everyone of whatever gender who thinks first that women deserve full equality and second that systematic misogyny remains a grave problem.
  • We are going to return to a phase in which change happens slowly and subtly enough that it is invisible to most people, though not to the people who take the long view and those who drive the change or who benefit from one small change in their home or workplace or relationship. And then the slow changes will reach a point at which there will be another rupture.
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Opinion | When Republicans Rejected John Bolton - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...john-bolton-republicans.html foreign policy partisan diplomacy trump NSC gop
shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Mr. Bolton, President Bush’s under secretary of state for arms control and international security, had a general disdain for diplomacy that rankled several Republican members of the committee, including George Voinovich of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Mr. Lugar had quietly counseled the administration not to nominate him.
  • That disdain, in and of itself, did not sink his nomination. Rather, it was the testimony we heard and evidence we uncovered that Mr. Bolton had a habit of twisting intelligence to back his bellicosity and sought to remove anyone who objected
  • Care.Advertisement
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As under secretary of state, Mr. Bolton insisted that Cuba was attempting to build a biological weapons program. The national intelligence officer for Latin America and the State Department’s top biological weapons expert disagreed. In a fit of rage, Mr. Bolton tried to have both reassigned.
  • Mr. Bolton made it something of a habit to request the identity of American officials whose names had been blacked out of sensitive intelligence intercepts. Some members of the Foreign Relations Committee were concerned that he was seeking information to use against those who disagreed with him — the very kind of improper “unmasking” that President Trump has falsely accused some members of the Obama administration of pursuing.
  • Other witnesses came forward to allege abusive behavior by Mr. Bolton during his time as a lawyer in the private sector — screaming, threatening, throwing documents and, in the words of one woman, “genuinely behaving like a madman.”
  • In a remarkable speech to his colleagues on the committee, a visibly pained Mr. Voinovich explained his decision to vote against Mr. Bolton, effectively killing the nomination. We’ve heard, he said, that Mr. Bolton is “an ideologue and fosters an atmosphere of intimidation. He does not tolerate disagreement. He does not tolerate dissent.”
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I filed one of the 83 dismissed misconduct complaints against Brett Kavanaugh. Here's w... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-88e3-989a3e456820_story.html supreme court complaint illegal gop nomination
shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • I listened on Sept. 27 while Kavanaugh peppered two hours of Senate testimony with attacks against people and groups he associated with Democrats. Kavanaugh alleged (without factual basis) that he was the victim of a vast, secret, left-wing cabal, masterminded by senators such as Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and motivated by “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” I was shocked to hear a Supreme Court nominee carry on like a crazed conspiracy theorist.
  • Turns out, there’s a rule against federal judges behaving like this. Congress passed the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act in 1980, and the rules under that act state that it’s misconduct for a federal judge to make “inappropriately partisan statements.” I may be retired, but I think I know an inappropriately partisan statement when I hear one.
  • The 10th Circuit Judicial Council finally announced its dismissal of the 83 complaints on Dec. 18, explaining its decision roughly as follows: (1) The 1980 act applies to circuit judges but not Supreme Court justices, (2) Kavanaugh was a D.C. Circuit Court judge during his confirmation hearings and when I filed my complaint, but (3) he’s a Supreme Court justice now. Evidently a circuit judge nominated to the Supreme Court can be held responsible for his partisan misconduct before the Senate, so long as the Senate fails to confirm the nominee. But if the nominee wins the approval of a partisan Senate, then his inappropriate partisanship is excused. This reasoning doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like saying we can prosecute a safecracker only if the safe proved to be empty.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Granted, the 1980 act does not apply to the conduct of Supreme Court justices. But the act fails to say what to do when a judge engages in misconduct before becoming a Supreme Court justice. Here, the Judicial Council argued that Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court was an “intervening event” under the 1980 act and its accompanying rules, and that “a misconduct proceeding can be concluded because of ‘intervening events.’ ”
  • Unfortunately, the Judicial Council truncated the relevant rule, which allows for a complaint to be dismissed if “intervening events render some or all of the allegations moot or make remedial action impossible.” Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court did not render moot the questionable behavior that helped win him that seat. Nor is remedial action impossible now that Judge Kavanaugh is Justice Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh can still issue the kind of full apology he has avoided up until now, and he can recuse himself from highly partisan cases (those with Trump as a party, for example).
  • In order to let Kavanaugh off the hook, the Judicial Council skipped around relevant commentary stating that “as long as the subject of a complaint performs judicial duties, a complaint alleging judicial conduct must be addressed.” Here, the Judicial Council interpreted “judicial duties” to refer only to duties of judges covered under the 1980 act — leading the council to the strained conclusion that a Supreme Court justice does not perform “judicial duties.” Instead of this tortured reasoning, I’d say we’ve appended yet another exception to the adage that no one is above the law.
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The Cruelty Is the Point - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...572104 cruelty trump
shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track.
  • This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials.
  • Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.
  • There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother
  • This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.
  • Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
  • The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!
  • The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.
  • It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.
  • Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright
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Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930 trump politics US
shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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