# data[].attributes.body
This article inspires us to be compassionate toward other countries that are going through hardships. When these disasters happen it shows America being able to come together, regardless of our differences of opinion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria - and her 155 mph winds - wreaked havoc on Puerto Rico, causing widespread destruction and a lack of access to electricity and clean water for most of the island's residents.

Now in March, six months after the storm, signs that Puerto Rico is recovering are apparent, but the United States commonwealth is still trying to get on their feet.
LOCAL VIEW: Satellite photos show the Houston area before, after Harvey
"Helping Puerto Rico recover is a gargantuan task - FEMA has called it the 'largest federal response to a disaster' in American history," Vox reported Tuesday.

CNN reports that 103,000 people still don't have electricity and there are now 1,260 contractors working on Puerto Rico's power grid under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. FEMA reports that more than 3,500 Puerto Ricans are still living in hotels because their homes were destroyed.

"While much has been accomplished, there remains much to be done," FEMA says in a press release. "The mission is to help residents of Puerto Rico and their communities recover and build a stronger, more resilient infrastructure."
See striking before and after photos of some Puerto Rico locations in the gallery above. NO REPLY: Emails show FEMA silent as Puerto Ricco sought generator fuel
Heather Leighton is a digital reporter at She considers herself as a Jack(ie) of all trades and covers various topics from entertainment to politics. You can read more of her stories here and follow her on Twitter at @loveheathernoel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Before and after photos of Puerto Rico shows the island six months after Hurricane Maria

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria - and her 155 mph winds - wreaked havoc on Puerto Rico, causing widespread destruction and a lack of access to electricity and clean water for most of the island's residents.

# data[].attributes.body
1. How has gun control affected America's schools as a whole?
2. How has violence in the media effected our everyday lives?
3. Does media have an impact on the mental health of high-school students and does this cause school violence?

# data[].attributes.body
Anonymous and S Hubbard are the same person it just changed my name half way through :)

# data[].attributes.headline
Miami Law Professors Discuss Free Speech and the Charlottesville Melee  

# data[].attributes.subject
Miami Law Professors Discuss Free Speech and the Charlottesville Melee  

# data[].attributes.body
College students are able to look at issues that involve the public which allows them to understand how the real world applies to what they are learning for their future careers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the aftermath of the Charlottesville rallies, many of us find ourselves wondering if the right to free speech protected under the first amendment is working exactly as it should. Miami Law hosted a forum featuring a panel of six distinguished professors aimed at discussing this and other important legal questions surrounding the events in Charlottesville.

Professor Caroline Corbin, who teaches constitutional law with a specialty in the first amendment, opened the remarks with a discussion of the views expressed at the "Unite the Right" rally in the context of the legal right to free speech.

"As is true with all constitutional rights, the right to free speech is not absolute," she said. "The government may limit it in certain circumstances."

Although even the most morally repugnant hate speech is generally protected under the first amendment, Corbin holds, the incident in Charlottesville nonetheless represents a violation of the right to free speech.

"When you intentionally encourage other people to break the law, and there's a good chance that they're soon actually going to go break the law, that's incitement. Or when you intentionally make a particular person fear for their safety, that's a true threat," she said. "If your hate speech falls into one of those categories, it could be banned."

Elaborating on Corbin's analysis of the first amendment, Professor Patrick Gudridge, who also teaches constitutional law, talked about the contentious nature of the right to freedom of expression.

"When you look right under the surface of what [Professor Corbin] talked about, it is just this massive, terrifying, squirming mess of fights among people who have differing views of free speech."

Gudridge's concern with the events in Charlottesville lies in the resurfacing of the hateful, discriminatory ideologies which many had thought were left behind in the 20th century.

"Charlottesville is unnerving, in part, because of the ideas and institutions and people we want to move past," he said. "These sorts of people pop up right in our face."

Professor Mary Anne Franks saw the Charlottesville incident as a bout of first amendment fundamentalism, which she likened to religious fundamentalism. Franks is an expert in first amendment law and is currently teaching a seminar on first amendment fundamentalism.

"My suggestion is that the fundamentalist worldview is not something that is limited to religion," she said, "and that in particular we, in this country, have a fondness for first amendment fundamentalism."

Franks gave the perspective of white nationalists in Charlottesville to explain their fundamentalist ideology and the dangers that that ideology brings about.

"We are focusing on the first amendment as the right. It's the most important right, and we should consider it and honor it in a way that is to the exclusion of all other rights and values; it's an obsessive focus on the first amendment, kind of in isolation of many of the other constitutional rights and values that we might also consider."

She went on, "The passionate defense of freedom of speech in particular when it comes to this worldview, is an absolutist, anti-regulatory view, that [the first amendment] is something that must be defended at all costs."

The discussion of the first amendment amidst the increasing prevalence of white supremacy is particularly relevant in light of the University of Florida's recent move to deny Richard Spencer, a prominent alt-right leader, a platform to speak on its campus on September 12. UF President W. Kent Fuchs denied Spencer's group, citing "concerns for safety" as the reason for denial. Auburn University also denied Spencer a platform, however, a federal judge granted Spencer's request for an injunction as "Auburn presented no evidence that Mr. Spencer advocates violence," and he was allowed to speak.

It remains to be seen whether Spencer will take similar action against UF, and whether he will continue to seek out University campuses at which to spread his message.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Miami Law Professors Discuss Free Speech and the Charlottesville Melee

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the aftermath of the Charlottesville rallies, many of us find ourselves wondering if the right to free speech protected under the first amendment is working exactly as it should. Miami Law hosted a forum featuring a panel of six distinguished professors aimed at discussing this and other important legal questions surrounding the events in Charlottesville.

# data[].attributes.body
The past year has been full of large accomplishments and events that we have learned and are learning from. Many of the big steps we took for example gay pride and humans rights are just a few that will lead us to a more successful future full of accomplishments and new world findings. This project has helped us as partners become more aware of the news around us. Its also important to note that teens just like us, are making are huge impact politically and making a difference. This project allows us to see the role that current events have in our society. Being disconnected from current events causes many communication errors and can cause a lot of grief for adults in America.

# data[].attributes.headline
Eminent Human Rights Defender Lectures on Today's most pressing issues

# data[].attributes.subject
Eminent Human Rights Defender Lectures on Today's most pressing issues

# data[].attributes.body
College age students studying law were most influenced by this article because it pertains to their future careers. The ideas that Ken Roth put out there were valuable to the students listening because his ideas were logical. There is no court that is completely unbiased.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that he understood as a young lawyer that you collect the facts, write up the brief, go to court, and argue your case.

"That is exactly what I do now, but I never show up in court," the former Iran-Contra federal prosecutor said at a lecture at the University of Miami School of Law on Wednesday. "Most of the places we work, the courts are not functioning. The judges have been killed, or compromised, or are corrupt. You can't count on the courts to uphold human rights."

The leader of the world's top international human rights organization writes extensively on a wide range of human rights issues, devoting special attention to issues of international justice, counterterrorism, the foreign policies of the major powers, and the work of the United Nations. Roth also has conducted tens of human rights investigations and missions around the world.

Roth was introduced by James Nickel, professor of philosophy and law and an international scholar on human rights law and theory, and political philosophy.

Whereas much of the work of Human Rights Watch is targeted at foreign powers, recently the U.S. has been the cause.

"We don't say, for sure, that procedural changes [in U.S. policy] have caused this sudden spate of civilian casualties by the U.S. forces," Roth said. "But we asked for an investigation because we suspect that this is what is going on and we are hearing in a threat context behind the scenes that this is going on. It is possible that it is just bad luck. Mistakes happen but suddenly we've had three serious incidents within two weeks suggests that something is going on.

"Above all, the public needs to reaffirm the basic value that we should treat others the way we want them to treat us," Roth concluded. "That's the best way to ensure that we all don't end up on the wrong end of the stick when a government abandons its commitment to human rights."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Eminent Human Rights Defender Lectures on Today's Most Pressing Issues

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that he understood as a young lawyer that you collect the facts, write up the brief, go to court, and argue your case. "That is exactly what I do now, but I never show up in court," the former Iran-Contra federal prosecutor said at a lecture at the University of Miami School of Law on Wednesday.

# data[].attributes.headline
South Korea Proposes Border Talks With North Korea After Kim’s Overture

# data[].attributes.subject
South Korea Proposes Border Talks With North Korea After Kim’s Overture

# data[].attributes.body
This affects both generations as tension between those two countries will hopefully fade and happen with the U.S as well.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Speaking at the United Nations on Tuesday, the United States Ambassador, Nikki R. Haley, appeared to dismiss the potential for bilateral negotiations between North and South Korea.

"We won't take any of the talks seriously if they don't do something to ban all nuclear weapons in North Korea," she said. "We consider this to be a very reckless regime, we don't think we need a Band-Aid; we don't think we need to smile and take a picture. We think we need to have them stop nuclear weapons and they need to stop it now."

Heather Nauert, the State Department spokeswoman, said the Trump administration was still assessing whether the United States supported direct talks between South Korea and North Korea that excluded the United States.

"Right now, if the two countries decide that they want to have talks, that would certainly be their choice," she said.

Ms. Nauert added that if Mr. Kim's goal in proposing direct talks with the South was to divide the United States and South Korea, such a strategy would not succeed. "That will not happen," she said.

Cho Myoung-gyon, the South's point man on the North, proposed that the Korean governments hold their meeting next Tuesday in Panmunjom, a village straddling the border north of Seoul, the South Korean capital.

"We hope the two sides sit down for frank talks," Mr. Cho, the unification minister, said at a news conference.

If the North responds positively, it will set in motion the first official dialogue between the Koreas in two years. South Korean officials hope the talks will lead to a thaw after years of high tensions between the countries and threats of war over the North's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

But analysts cautioned that a sudden move to improve ties between the Koreas could strain relations between Seoul and Washington.

Mr. Cho said the South was closely consulting with Washington on its dealings with the North.

Panmunjom has long been a contact point for the Koreas, with both sides exchanging messages through a telephone hotline there. But the North has not used the hotline since President Moon Jae-in's conservative predecessor, the impeached President Park Geun-hye, shut down a joint industrial complex in the North Korean town of Kaesong in early 2016.

On Tuesday, Mr. Cho urged the North to restore the hotline so that both sides could discuss the agenda for the high-level talks. The governments held their last high-level dialogue in December 2015.

North Korea's offer to send a delegation to the Winter Olympics, which are to begin in February in the South Korean town of Pyeongchang, represented a breakthrough for Mr. Moon, a dogged champion of dialogue and reconciliation with the North.

Mr. Moon has repeatedly urged North Korea to join the Pyeongchang Olympics, hoping it would ease the military tensions over the North's nuclear and missile programs. Mr. Moon said the North's participation would compel the Koreas to open talks, which he hoped would lead to broader negotiations, involving Washington and others, for the North's denuclearization.

After ignoring Mr. Moon for months, calling his South Korean government an American stooge, Mr. Kim used his New Year's speech on Monday to embrace the South Korean leader's overture.

"I appreciate and welcome the North's positive response to our proposal that the Pyeongchang Olympics should be used as a turning point in improving South-North relations and promoting peace," Mr. Moon said early Tuesday, instructing his cabinet to move swiftly to open dialogue with North Korea.

With barely 40 days before the Olympics, the Koreas must sort out logistics and other details for North Korean athletes if they are allowed to participate, officials said.

South Korea has proposed that the North Korean athletes travel through the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, the world's most heavily fortified border, a route that would be rich in symbolism. It also wants to discuss the possibility of the two Korean delegations marching together in the Games' opening ceremony.

If the North participated in the Games and the Koreas march together, it would be a milestone in inter-Korean relations.

In 2000, the year the countries held their first summit meeting, their delegations marched together at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. They again marched together at the 2004 Athens Olympics, using the single name "Korea" and carrying a "Korea is one" flag. But they competed separately in 2000 and 2004.

North Korea also sent squads to cheer for its athletes in international events in South Korea in 2002, 2003 and 2005. But such scenes came to an end after the conservatives took power in the South in 2008 and instituted tougher measures against the North's nuclear weapons development.

In June, Mr. Moon, whose election in May ended the years of conservative rule, said he hoped to see the national teams of the two Koreas march together again in Pyeongchang.

The coming talks with North Korea over its Olympic participation could be a testing ground for Mr. Kim's intentions.

While proposing to send an Olympic delegation, Mr. Kim on Monday said South Korea should end its regular joint military exercises with the United States and stop letting the Americans bring bombers and other nuclear-capable military assets into the Korean Peninsula. Mr. Moon has suggested that South Korea and the United States could postpone their joint military drills until after the Olympics.

Mr. Kim also demanded that South Korea stop joining the American-led campaign to squeeze North Korea with sanctions. Instead, he said the South should work with the North to bring peace to the Korean Peninsula, while boasting that his nuclear weapons would prevent the Americans from starting a new war in Korea.

Analysts said Mr. Kim was using the North's Olympic participation to try to drive a wedge in the alliance between South Korea and the United States and between Mr. Moon and President Trump. Mr. Trump has taken a much tougher stance against the North, focusing on pressure and sanctions and once dismissing Mr. Moon's efforts for dialogue with the North as " appeasement."

In an analysis of Mr. Kim's speech, the South's Unification Ministry said Mr. Kim was seeking an "exit" from harsh sanctions by cultivating ties with South Korea.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
South Korea Proposes Border Talks With North Korea After Kim's Overture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Speaking at the United Nations on Tuesday, the United States Ambassador, Nikki R. Haley, appeared to dismiss the potential for bilateral negotiations between North and South Korea. "We won't take any of the talks seriously if they don't do something to ban all nuclear weapons in North Korea," she said.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Realization of How Many Students are Killed in School Shootings (February 2018)

# data[].attributes.subject
The Realization of How Many Students are Killed in School Shootings (February 2018)

# data[].attributes.body
This is an article about showing the realization of how many students are killed in school shootings. It compares the amount of students killed to Sandy Hook one of the largest school shooting in America. I believe that this article is being used to show people how these shootings have affected our daily lives for adults and students. It could make school boards more aware of what they could do to prevent these happenings and allow for the students to also be aware and prepared. Making people involved in these happenings aware can prepare us for the future.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
After Sandy Hook, More Than 400 People Have Been Shot in Over 200 School Shootings

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since 26 people were killed in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, a nonprofit that tracks school shootings has recorded five a month, on average.

# data[].attributes.headline
North Korea crisis: How events have unfolded under Trump

# data[].attributes.subject
North Korea crisis: How events have unfolded under Trump

# data[].attributes.body
This affects all generations as this could potentially be a second Cold War where these nuclear weapons could kill us all. As tensions rise with North Korea, so does our nuclear weapons. In the future both of our counties will have great tension and peace will be difficult to come to with these weapons just waiting to be used. Its interesting to see the increase in North Korean testing with the different presidents since 2006.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Meanwhile, leader Kim Jong Un has made no secret of the fact that his scientists are working on a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching America.

The situation is so fraught that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asked China - Pyongyang's neighbor and powerful ally - to "use their influence to convince or compel North Korea to rethink its strategic calculus."

But Pyongyang has blithely ignored warnings by Tillerson that military action is " on the table " if they continued to test intercontinental ballistic missiles.

North Korea's representative at the United Nations, Kim Im Ryong, flat-out warned that the Trump administration's get-tough strategy was creating "a dangerous situation in which thermonuclear war may break out at any moment."

For his part, Trump has dismissed as failures attempts by his White House predecessors to derail North Korea's weapons programs.

A Pukguksong-2 missile is launched at an undisclosed location in North Korea on Feb. 12. KCNA via AP

Here's a timetable of how the recent crisis has unfolded:

Feb. 12: In its first show of defiance against the Trump administration, North Korea successfully launched a solid-fueled ballistic missile called the Pukguksong-2 from a submarine.

March 6: North Korean artillery units fired four ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan as part of a simulated attack on U.S. military bases in Japan. Three landed within 200 miles of Japan's coastline and the country's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called it "an extremely dangerous action."

March 14 : The U.S. dispatched high-tech missile defense Aegis warships to the waters where the North Koreans fired the missiles for maneuvers with Japanese and South Korean warships.

March 15: Tillerson arrived in Japan for his first Asia trip as secretary of state.

March 19: The North Koreans tested a new rocket engine, claiming its part of their space program.

April 2: Trump declared the U.S. will go it "alone" if China does not help solve the North Korean nuclear problem.

"China will either decide to help us with North Korea of they won't," Trump told the Financial Times. "If they do, that will be very good for China, and if they don't, it's won't be good for anyone."

April 5: The North Koreans test fired a medium-range missile they claimed was capable of destroying a U.S. aircraft carrier. It failed.

Missiles are paraded In Pyongyang during celebrations of the 105th birth anniversary of Kim Il Sung on April 15. Wong Maye-E / AP file

April 10: The USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier, was dispatched to the region in a show of force.

April 15: The North Koreans test fired yet another KN-17 missile. It too failed. In Pyongyang, top official Choe Ryong accused Trump of "creating a war situation" by dispatching U.S. forces to the region.

"We will respond to an all-out war with an all-out war and a nuclear war with our style of nuclear attack," Choe threatened.

April 26: With tensions building, the U.S. test fired a $40 million Minuteman III missile at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. North Korea called it a provocation.

April 28: The North Koreans test fired another KN-17 missile. Once again, it was a failure.

May 2: In a telephone conversation, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed "how best to resolve the very dangerous situation in North Korea."

May 14: North Korea launched a ballistic missile that flew around 430 miles before crashing into the Sea of Japan. "With the missile impacting so close to Russian soil - in fact, closer to Russia than to Japan - the President cannot imagine that Russia is pleased," the White House said in a statement.

May 17: Two U.S. defense officials confirmed to NBC News that North Korea's launch of a KN-17 missile three days earlier was successful. The re-entry was controlled and the vehicle did not burn up, the officials said. It landed in the sea near Russia.

May 21: North Korea launched a medium-range Pukguksong-2 missile. Kim Jong Un called the launch "perfect," state run news organ KCNA reported.

May 29: The South Korean military reported that the North Koreans launched what appeared to be a short-range ballistic missile that flew for about 6 minutes and about 280 miles before landing in the Sea of Japan. It was reportedly the second time in two days that the North Koreans had test-fired a missile.

May 30: The Pentagon sent a message to North Korea by successfully launching a long-range interceptor missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It hit and destroyed an intercontinental-range missile over the Pacific Ocean fired from a test site on Kwajalein Atoll.

June 13: Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old University of Virginia undergrad, was unexpectedly released after spending more than a year in a North Korean prison. He had been arrested in January 2016 and later convicted of trying to steal a propaganda flag that was flying near his hotel in Pyongyang. He was sentenced to 15 years of prison and hard labor after a one-hour trial. His father, Fred, credited the Trump administration with his son's release. He said his boy had been " brutalized and terrorized" and suffered extensive brain damage while in North Korean custody.

June 19: Warmbier died. He was mourned by his parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier. "The awful torturous mistreatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today," the family said in a statement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
North Korea crisis: How actions have unfolded under Trump

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Meanwhile, leader Kim Jong Un has made no secret of the fact that his scientists are working on a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching America. The situation is so fraught that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asked China - Pyongyang's neighbor and powerful ally - to "use their influence to convince or compel North Korea to rethink its strategic calculus."

# data[].attributes.headline
Crossing the Border and Trump Boosting Numbers (October 2017)

# data[].attributes.subject
Crossing the Border and Trump Boosting Numbers (October 2017)

# data[].attributes.body
One of the worries people had of making Donald Trump our president was his frequent exaggeration and lying. This article is about another one of his fibs that could cause America to think differently about him. One of Trump's main arguments he made during his time as a candidate was that he would stop the extreme amount of illegal immigrants from crossing the border. Although the numbers have dropped, Trump still insists that there are a high number of illegal immigrants continuing to break the law. This could have a huge influence on the younger population because seeing a strong figure lie about certain topics could not be a good influence on younger people who are for more likely to conform to a certain way of doing something, such as lying. I do not think that what Trump was doing was reasonable and really necessary.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since taking office, President Trump has frequently claimed to have achieved large declines in illegal immigration across the Southwest border with Mexico, and the drop appear to grow with each mention. Mr. Trump has a point: Border crossings have gone down more during his administration. Yet he continues to exaggerate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Illegal Border Crossings Are Down, But Trump Still Exaggerates the Numbers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since taking office, President Trump has frequently claimed to have achieved large declines in illegal immigration across the Southwest border with Mexico, and the drop appear to grow with each mention. Mr. Trump has a point: Border crossings have gone down more during his administration. Yet he continues to exaggerate.

# data[].attributes.headline
NASA's Newest Class of Astronauts (June 2017)

# data[].attributes.subject
NASA's Newest Class of Astronauts (June 2017)

# data[].attributes.body
This is a huge step for the future of discovery for the USA and frankly the entire world. Electing this new group of NASA astronauts is allowing for more space research to take place and having new minds on the scene will allow for new ideas to be shared. This could and will be great for the future because it will only lead to new discovering.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
They don't yet know where they will be going, and they don't know how they will get there, but they do have a good chance of leaving the planet in the coming years.

Last week, NASA announced its 22nd class of astronauts - seven men and five women were chosen from more than 18,300 applicants, the most the space agency has ever received. They range in age from 29 to 42 and include an Army doctor, an engineer at SpaceX and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.

* Lt. Kayla Barron, U.S. Navy

* Zena Cardman, graduate research fellow, Pennsylvania State University

* Lt. Col. Raja Chari, U.S. Air Force

* Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Dominick, U.S. Navy

* Bob Hines, research pilot, NASA Johnson Space Center

* Warren Hoburg, assistant professor, M.I.T.

* Jonny Kim, resident physician, Massachusetts General Hospital

* Robb Kulin, launch chief engineer, SpaceX

* Maj. Jasmin Moghbeli, U.S. Marine Corps

* Loral O'Hara, research engineer, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

* Maj. Frank Rubio, U.S. Army

* Jessica Watkins, postdoctoral fellow, Caltech

Officially, they are "astronaut candidates" who will now go through two years of training before becoming full-fledged graduates. They will practice for spacewalks in a 60-foot-deep swimming pool at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, learn to fly NASA's T-38 jet planes and study the ins and outs of the International Space Station.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
national aeronautics and space administration

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
NASA's Newest Class of Astronauts Is Ready to Hit the Pool

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
They don't yet know where they will be going, and they don't know how they will get there, but they do have a good chance of leaving the planet in the coming years. Last week, NASA announced its 22nd class of astronauts - seven men and five women were chosen from more than 18,300 applicants, the most the space agency has ever received.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Equality (May 2017)

# data[].attributes.subject
How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Equality (May 2017)

# data[].attributes.body
This article really makes me think of how people have to live a certain way in order to make money. Many do believe that renting a house would be cheaper rather than buying an entire house when they are working. This article has factual information explaining how buying a house might be cheaper for someone than renting a living area, the complete opposite of what you would think it would be. This article shows how it might not always be how it really is.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The son of a minister, Ohene Asare grew up poor. His family immigrated from Ghana when he was 8 and settled down in West Bridgewater, Mass., a town 30 miles south of Boston, where he was one of the few black students at the local public school. "It was us and this Jewish family," Asare remembered. "It was a field day." His white classmates bullied him, sometimes using racial slurs. His father transferred Asare when he was 14 to Milton Academy, which awarded Asare a scholarship that covered tuition and board. His parents still had to take out loans worth about $20,000 for his living expenses. But the academy set Asare up for future success. He and his wife, Régine Jean-Charles, whom he got to know at Milton, are in their late 30s. She is a tenured professor of romance languages and literature at Boston College, and Asare is a founder of Aesara, a consulting and technology company.

Two years ago, the couple bought a new home. Set on a half-acre lot that backs up to conservation land in Milton, Mass., the 2,350-square-foot split-level has four bedrooms, three bathrooms, an open-concept kitchen and dining area, a finished basement, hardwood floors and beautiful touches throughout, like the Tennessee marble fireplace and hearth. It cost $665,000. "This is the nicest house I've ever lived in," Asare told me.

Asare and Jean-Charles have four children and earn roughly $290,000 a year, which puts them in the top 5 percent of household incomes in the country. After renting for the first years of their marriage, they participated in a home buyers' program administered by the nonprofit Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. The program allowed Asare and Jean-Charles to purchase their first home in 2009 for $360,000 with a 10 percent down payment, half of what is typically required. In 2015, they sold it for $430,000. There is a reason so many Americans choose to develop their net worth through homeownership: It is a proven wealth builder and savings compeller. The average homeowner boasts a net worth ($195,400) that is 36 times that of the average renter ($5,400).

Asare serves on the advisory board for HomeStart, a nonprofit focused on ending and preventing homelessness. Like most organizations, HomeStart is made up of people at various rungs on the economic ladder. Asare sits near the top; his salary exceeds that of anyone on staff at the nonprofit he helps advise. When Crisaliz Diaz was a staff member at HomeStart, she was at the other end of the ladder. She earned $38,000 a year, putting her near the bottom third of American household incomes. A 26-year-old Latina with thick-rimmed glasses, Diaz rents a small two-bedroom apartment in Braintree, Mass., an outer suburb of Boston. Her two sons, Xzayvior and Mayson - Zay and May, she calls them - share a room plastered with Lego posters and Mickey Mouse stickers. Her apartment is spare and clean, with ceiling tiles you can push up and views of the parking lot and busy street.

When Diaz moved in four years ago, the rent was $1,195 a month, heat included, but her landlord has since raised the rent to $1,385 a month, which takes 44 percent of her paycheck. Even with child-support payments and side jobs, she still doesn't bring in enough to pay her regular bills. She goes without a savings account and regularly relies on credit cards to buy toilet paper and soap. "There's no stop to it," she told me. "It's just a consistent thing."

Diaz receives no housing assistance. She has applied to several programs, but nothing has come through. The last time Boston accepted new applications for rental-assistance Section 8 vouchers was nine years ago, when for a few precious weeks you were allowed to place your name on a very long waiting list. Boston is not atypical in that way. In Los Angeles, the estimated wait time for a Section 8 voucher is 11 years. In Washington, the waiting list for housing vouchers is closed indefinitely, and over 40,000 people have applied for public housing alone. While many Americans assume that most poor families live in subsidized housing, the opposite is true; nationwide, only one in four households that qualifies for rental assistance receives it. Most are like Diaz, struggling without government help in the private rental market, where housing costs claim larger and larger chunks of their income.

Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations. The standard of "affordable" housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family's income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent. Yet America's national housing policy gives affluent homeowners large benefits; middle-class homeowners, smaller benefits; and most renters, who are disproportionately poor, nothing. It is difficult to think of another social policy that more successfully multiplies America's inequality in such a sweeping fashion.

Consider Asare and Diaz. As a homeowner, Asare benefits from tax breaks that Diaz does not, the biggest being the mortgage-interest deduction - or MID, in wonk-speak. All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes. In 2015, Asare and Jean-Charles claimed $21,686 in home interest and other real estate deductions, which saved them $470 a month. That's roughly 15 percent of Diaz's monthly income. That same year, the federal government dedicated nearly $134 billion to homeowner subsidies. The MID accounted for the biggest chunk of the total, $71 billion, with real estate tax deductions, capital gains exclusions and other expenditures accounting for the rest. That number, $134 billion, was larger than the entire budgets of the Departments of Education, Justice and Energy combined for that year. It is a figure that exceeds half the entire gross domestic product of countries like Chile, New Zealand and Portugal.

Recently, Gary Cohn, the chief economic adviser to President Trump, heralded his boss's first tax plan as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to do something really big." And indeed, Trump's plan represents a radical transformation in how we will fund the government, with its biggest winners being corporations and wealthy families. But no one in his administration, and only a small (albeit growing) group of people in either party, is pushing to reform what may very well be the most regressive piece of social policy in America. Perhaps that's because the mortgage-interest deduction overwhelmingly benefits the sorts of upper-middle-class voters who make up the donor base of both parties and who generally fail to acknowledge themselves to be beneficiaries of federal largess. "Today, as in the past," writes the historian Molly Michelmore in her book "Tax and Spend," "most of the recipients of federal aid are not the suspect 'welfare queens' of the popular imagination but rather middle-class homeowners, salaried professionals and retirees." A 15-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government-subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way. It is only by recognizing this fact that we can begin to understand why there is so much poverty in the United States today.

When we think of entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare immediately come to mind. But by any fair standard, the holy trinity of United States social policy should also include the mortgage-interest deduction - an enormous benefit that has also become politically untouchable.

The MID came into being in 1913, not to spur homeownership but simply as part of a general policy allowing businesses to deduct interest payments from loans. At that time, most Americans didn't own their homes and only the rich paid income tax, so the effects of the mortgage deduction on the nation's tax proceeds were fairly trivial. That began to change in the second half of the 20th century, though, because of two huge transformations in American life. First, income tax was converted from an elite tax to a mass tax: In 1932, the Bureau of Internal Revenue (precursor to the I.R.S.) processed fewer than two million individual tax returns, but 11 years later, it processed over 40 million. At the same time, the federal government began subsidizing homeownership through large-scale initiatives like the G.I. Bill and mortgage insurance. Homeownership grew rapidly in the postwar period, and so did the MID.

By the time policy makers realized how extravagant the MID had become, it was too late to do much about it without facing significant backlash. Millions of voters had begun to count on getting that money back. Even President Ronald Reagan, who oversaw drastic cuts to housing programs benefiting low-income Americans, let the MID be. Subsequent politicians followed suit, often eager to discuss reforms to Social Security and Medicare but reluctant to touch the MID, even as the program continued to grow more costly: By 2019, MID expenditures are expected to exceed $96 billion.

"Once we're in a world with a MID," says Todd Sinai, a professor of real estate and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, "it is very hard to get to a world without the MID." That's in part because the benefit helps to prop up home values. It's impossible to say how much, but a widely cited 1996 study estimated that eliminating the MID and property-tax deductions would result in a 13 to 17 percent reduction in housing prices nationwide, though that estimate varies widely by region and more recent analyses have found smaller effects. The MID allows home buyers to collect more after-tax savings if they take on more mortgage debt, which incentivizes them to pay more for properties than they could have otherwise. By inflating home values, the MID benefits Americans who already own homes - and makes joining their ranks harder.

The owner-renter divide is as salient as any other in this nation, and this divide is a historical result of statecraft designed to protect and promote inequality. Ours was not always a nation of homeowners; the New Deal fashioned it so, particularly through the G.I. Bill of Rights. The G.I. Bill was enormous, consuming 15 percent of the federal budget in 1948, and remains unmatched by any other single social policy in the scope and depth of its provisions, which included things like college tuition benefits and small-business loans. The G.I. Bill brought a rollout of veterans' mortgages, padded with modest interest rates and down payments waived for loans up to 30 years. Returning soldiers lined up and bought new homes by the millions. In the years immediately following World War II, veterans' mortgages accounted for over 40 percent of all home loans.

But both in its design and its application, the G.I. Bill excluded a large number of citizens. To get the New Deal through Congress, Franklin Roosevelt needed to appease the Southern arm of the Democratic Party. So he acquiesced when Congress blocked many nonwhites, particularly African-Americans, from accessing his newly created ladders of opportunity. Farm work, housekeeping and other jobs disproportionately staffed by African-Americans were omitted from programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance. Local Veterans Affairs centers and other entities loyal to Jim Crow did their parts as well, systematically denying nonwhite veterans access to the G.I. Bill. If those veterans got past the V.A., they still had to contend with the banks, which denied loan applications in nonwhite neighborhoods because the Federal Housing Administration refused to insure mortgages there. From 1934 to 1968, the official F.H.A. policy of redlining made homeownership virtually impossible in black communities. "The consequences proved profound," writes the historian Ira Katznelson in his perfectly titled book, "When Affirmative Action Was White." "By 1984, when G.I. Bill mortgages had mainly matured, the median white household had a net worth of $39,135; the comparable figure for black households was only $3,397, or just 9 percent of white holdings. Most of this difference was accounted for by the absence of homeownership."

This legacy has been passed down to subsequent generations. Today a majority of first-time home buyers get down-payment help from their parents; many of those parents pitch in by refinancing their own homes. As black homeowners, Asare and Jean-Charles are exceptions to the national trend: While most white families own a home, a majority of black and Latino families do not. Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nation's racial wealth gap. In 2011, the median white household had a net worth of $111,146, compared with $7,113 for the median black household and $8,348 for the median Hispanic household. If black and Hispanic families owned homes at rates similar to whites, the racial wealth gap would be reduced by almost a third.

Racial exclusion was Roosevelt's first concession to pass the New Deal; his second, to avoid a tax revolt, was to rely on regressive and largely hidden payroll taxes to fund generous social-welfare programs. A result, the historian Michelmore observes, is that we "never asked ordinary taxpayers to pay for the economic security many soon came to expect as a matter of right." In providing millions of middle-class families stealth benefits, the American government rendered itself invisible to those families, who soon came to see their success as wholly self-made. We forgot because we were not meant to remember.

Proponents of the mortgage-interest deduction often claim that the benefit is a big help to middle-class homeowners. Vincent Wisniewski Jr. is one of them. Wisniewski, 35 and white, with brown hair down to his shoulders, worked with Diaz at HomeStart, but as a program manager. He and his wife, Kelly Kristof, an emergency-room technician, make about $79,000 a year, roughly the median household income for families in the Boston metro area. They live with their 9-month-old son in a 985-square-foot condominium that Wisniewski bought three years ago for $190,000.

Set on a quiet street in Winthrop, a community hemmed in by Logan Airport on one side and the Atlantic on the other, the condo features two bedrooms, a square kitchen with white cupboards, a television room and "the quiet room," with hanging plants, guitars mounted on the wall and a large bay window. From the small back patio, the ocean is close enough to smell. The mortgage and property-tax bills are about $915 a month, and the monthly condo fee is $368, which includes expensive flood insurance. Even counting utilities, Wisniewski and Kristof spend about 22 percent of their combined income on housing costs. With what's left over, they buy items for their son, take vacations and enjoy local restaurants. "We definitely feel comfortable," Wisniewski told me.

Before moving into his condo, Wisniewski rented an apartment in urban Somerville for $1,500 a month, splitting it with a roommate. If he had continued to rent, Wisniewski would have had steeper monthly payments that would have only accelerated in subsequent years; and none of that money would have contributed to his young family's nest egg.

In 2015, Wisniewski deducted $4,789 of mortgage interest, which means he saved $39 a month. (He didn't take the deduction for 2016 because once he was married, the standard deduction was larger.) That's a pittance compared with what Asare and Jean-Charles saved, for an obvious reason: They claim a bigger deduction because they have a bigger mortgage. And they could get a bigger mortgage because they have a bigger income. This is one reason taxpayers on the coasts, where incomes and property costs are higher, typically benefit much more from the MID. The per capita MID claim for residents of Maryland and the District of Columbia, for example, is three times what it is for families living in West Virginia and Mississippi.

There is another reason most MID benefits accrue to the top, even among homeowners: You have to itemize your deductions to claim it. Most taxpayers don't bother because they don't make enough money to justify the hassle. In 2014, 1.5 million households earning between $40,000 and $50,000 a year claimed the MID, receiving an average benefit of $14 a month. That same year, 6.5 million households with earnings above $200,000 claimed the MID and enjoyed an average benefit of $391 a month. What this means in aggregate is that households with at least six-figure incomes receive more than four-fifths of the total value of mortgage interest and property-tax deductions.

Wisniewski benefits from the MID, but it didn't help him buy his condo. The biggest barrier to buying a first home is saving enough for a down payment, a problem the MID does not solve. Wisniewski's parents pitched in $5,000, and he secured additional financing through ONE Mortgage, a program offered by the Massachusetts Housing Partnership for first-time home buyers. Wisniewski didn't really consider homeowner tax breaks when shopping for his home. Defenders of the MID began arguing that it encouraged homeownership after the benefit was popularized, but numerous studies have found no support for this claim. For example, a 2002 paper by the economists Edward Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro showed that while the value of the deduction had fluctuated significantly with inflation since 1960, homeownership rates had remained more or less unchanged. "The home mortgage interest deduction," the authors write, "is a particularly poor instrument for encouraging homeownership since it is targeted at the wealthy, who are almost always homeowners." Glaeser later confirmed unequivocally that these patterns hold true today.

So why do we keep this "poor instrument" around, if the overarching goal of American federal housing policy is to create a nation of homeowners? Perhaps because the MID enjoys entrenched, unyielding support from a powerful real estate lobby. We often discuss the influence of the gun and pharmaceutical lobbies, but the real estate lobby has spent much more than either group. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the National Association of Realtors spent $64.8 million in lobbying efforts in 2016, making it second only to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in terms of dollars spent. And to 1.2 million Realtors, the mortgage-interest deduction is nonnegotiable. The association calls it a "remarkably effective tool that facilitates homeownership." Jerry Howard, the chief executive of the National Association of Home Builders, refers to the MID as "one of the cornerstones of American housing policy." Of course, industry groups have a responsibility to their members, who enjoy profiting from a government subsidy that increases the prices of homes they build and sell.

William Brown, the president of the Realtor association, said his members "aren't shy about making their voices heard" to preserve the status quo. No, they are not - and Washington has listened. After the Republican-led Ways and Means Committee proposed modifications to the MID in a draft of the Tax Reform Act of 2014, the association issued a statement saying it was "extremely disappointed." The act did not propose to eliminate the MID but simply to cap the amount of deductible mortgage debt at $500,000, as opposed to the current cap of $1 million. (Second mortgages are capped at $100,000.) The only reason the MID is capped at all is because of the "immaculate conception provision" in the 1987 budget reconciliation bill, so named because the initiator of this provision, probably out of a desire stay gainfully employed in government, never took credit for it. It was the only time in its 104-year history that the MID has been altered.

Today as in years past, MID reform is generally considered a lost cause. There have been gestures at reform - Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, keeps reintroducing a bill that would replace the MID with a 15 percent tax credit on interest paid up to $500,000 - but they have gone nowhere. Five months ago, before being confirmed as Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin announced that the new administration hoped to "cap the mortgage interest." But when Trump released his tax plan last month, the MID was untouched. Trump did propose to double the standard deduction (to $24,000 from $12,600 for married couples, for example) which would make the MID irrelevant for a vast majority of homeowners, whose mortgage interest would be less than the increased exemption, giving them almost no reason to itemize. But wealthy families living in expensive homes would still cash in. If anything, doubling the standard deduction simply exposes the MID for what it really is: a generous public-housing program for the rich. Diane Yentel, the president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, believes that in the long run this will make the MID "untenable to retain."

Yentel's coalition supports the idea of lowering the size of deductible mortgage debt to $500,000 and reallocating the savings to housing assistance for low-income families. "The solution is so obvious," Yentel says. "There are a number of programs that have proven success in ending homelessness and ending housing insecurity." The problem is not in the policies' prescriptions but in their dosage: We severely underfund programs that work. By one estimate, capping the MID at $500,000 would save $87 billion over 10 years, even though less than 6 percent of mortgages nationwide exceed half a million dollars. That savings would allow 1.2 million additional families to benefit from housing vouchers.

Of course, reforming the MID is one thing. Redirecting the savings to low-income families is quite another. "The much bigger hurdle," Yentel says, "is making sure that dollars are reaching affordable-housing programs." On this point, real estate lobbyists and affordable-housing advocates agree. "They want to cap it and put the savings in rental housing," says Joe Ventrone, the Realtor association's vice president for regulatory affairs. "Crazy, because the Congress does not operate that way. It goes in to build a battleship."

Capping the MID at $500,000 would have virtually no effect on homeownership rates. And according to the economist Glaeser, it would have only "modest effects on home prices" in supply-constrained cities like San Francisco and virtually no effect in cities with plenty of available land, like Houston. "Most homeowners wouldn't even feel it," Glaeser says, pointing out further that encouraging homeownership typically means moving people from multifamily buildings to single-family homes, which increases traffic congestion and pollution. But capping the MID at half a million dollars could cause properties in the $625,000 to $1.25 million range to drop in value.

Would we be O.K. with that? Would we support reform that provided desperately needed housing relief to millions of low-income Americans if it meant that the net worth of those who owned expensive homes took a hit? The answer is almost certainly no, at least for owners of houses valued north of $500,000. Wealth granted by a bizarre government subsidy is still wealth, and once people have it, they'd prefer to keep it. When it comes to public housing for the rich, it becomes hard to break the cycle of welfare dependency. It's why some Democratic leaders who represent districts with high housing prices, like Representative Nancy Pelosi (San Francisco) and Senator Chuck Schumer (New York), have been outspoken critics of MID reform, even if they are consistent backers of other equality-promoting initiatives.

We tend to speak about the poor as if they didn't live in the same society, as if our gains and their losses weren't intertwined. Conservatives explain poverty by pointing to "individual factors," like bad decisions or the rise of single-parent families; liberals refer to "structural causes," like the decline of manufacturing or the historical legacies of racial discrimination. Usually pitted against each other, each perspective serves a similar function: letting us off the hook by asserting that there is a deep-rooted, troubling problem - more than one in six Americans does not make enough to afford basic necessities - that most of us bear no responsibility for.

It's around this point that the conversation gets snagged in the weeds with questions about home prices, political ramifications or the administrative hurdles of reform - escape routes that allow us to lose sight of people like Cris Diaz, low-income renters who are not entitled to any housing assistance and who are giving most of their income to landlords and utility companies. To drive down poverty and promote economic mobility, the United States will need to make a major investment in affordable housing. You don't need to reform the MID to pay for that - there are plenty of other ways to raise revenue - but you have to pay for it somehow. Whatever our position on homeowner tax benefits, we should have an answer for people like Diaz.

Trump's preliminary 2018 budget includes a 13.2 percent reduction to the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the elimination of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, cuts that will almost certainly result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of housing vouchers and leave more families rent-burdened and homeless. President Barack Obama's 2017 budget proposal estimated that it would take $1 billion a year over the next 10 years to eliminate family homelessness in America - not decrease it or slice it in half, but end it. That's less than 1 percent of what we currently spend on homeowner subsidies. And yet a bill designed to provide every child in America with a home was pronounced dead on arrival in Congress. Up to this point, bills proposing modest reforms to the mortgage-interest deduction have met the same fate.

Poverty and homelessness are political creations. Their amelioration is within our grasp and budget. But those of us most likely to vote and contribute to political campaigns are least likely to support MID reform - either because it wouldn't affect our lives or because it would, by asking us to take less so that millions of Americans could be given the opportunity to climb out of poverty. It's just that we usually don't dial our elected officials when our less-fortunate neighbors are hurting, because we are not.

And yet over the course of our history, there have been times when Americans embraced a politics of sacrifice. During World War II, families volunteered to pay more taxes, ration food and give blood to serve a higher purpose. And even today, in what can feel like an age of insecurity and self-preservation, some Americans have shown a willingness to take a personal financial hit to promote social mobility and equality. Take the people of Seattle: For 36 years, they have agreed to be taxed more to raise revenue for affordable-housing programs. Last August, 70 percent of Seattle voters agreed to the largest housing levy yet, one expected to raise $290 million over the next seven years. Contributions to the levy are based on home values; a family living in a $480,000 home (the city's median value in 2015) pays an additional $122 a year in taxes. With that money, Seattle will fund emergency rental assistance, loans to first-time home buyers and the construction of housing units that must remain affordable for at least 50 years. Previous housing levies have generated over 13,000 affordable apartment units and enabled 900 low-income families to buy homes. The 2016 Housing Levy will do more because the residents of Seattle decided to invest in economic diversity and residential stability, sacrificing a pinch to help those in need.

Asare and Jean-Charles would welcome MID reform, even if it meant that they would have less in the bank at the end of the year. "There are people who sacrificed for me to be here," Asare told me. One of them was a boy named Chris Jackson, whom Asare met during his tormented years in the West Bridgewater school system. When Asare wouldn't fight back, Jackson, a fellow black student, would stick up for him. "I watched him fight and fight, get into trouble," Asare remembers. "And I'd be like, 'No, stop.' But he wouldn't, because what was right was right." Asare paused to collect himself, a hand fingering the space above his freshly shaved head. "That kind of compassion, that kind of brotherhood, is what I would ask of people: that we don't give according to what people are willing to receive; we give according to the standard for what they should have."

In February, Diaz's landlord increased her rent by $65 a month, to $1,450. The timing couldn't have been worse: Diaz had recently taken a new job as a leasing consultant at a small property management firm. The pay wasn't better, but she had reduced her commute to 30 minutes from two hours. "I get to see my kids before it gets dark," she said. But transitioning between the jobs caused her to go without income for a couple of weeks. With no savings to fall back on, she couldn't pay the increased rent and was summoned to eviction court. A month later, Diaz walked through the metal detector at the Quincy District Courthouse. "Where do you go for evictions?" she asked a clerk, who pointed to a crowd of tenants shuffling toward the same room. Some wore heavy-heeled work boots and worn jeans; some leaned on canes and walkers; some bounced babies. Diaz took a seat on a long wooden bench and looked at the clock. She had had to use her lunch break to make court and only had 45 minutes.

Once a rarity in America, eviction has become commonplace in our cities, disrupting families, schools and entire neighborhoods. Forty people a day are evicted in Milwaukee; each day in New York City brings 60 marshal evictions. An eviction could plunge Diaz and her boys into homelessness and poverty. Studies have found that evicted families lose not only their homes but their jobs, possessions and neighbors too; they relocate to substandard housing in distressed communities; they have higher rates of depression and suicide. Even if poor families avoid eviction, they still suffer, because so much of their money goes to housing costs, forcing them to buy fewer school supplies, clothes, books - and food.

In some markets, there are virtually no affordable units left. The median annual rent for a two-bedroom apartment is currently $39,600 in Boston, $49,200 in New York City and $54,720 in San Francisco. Families priced out of large cities have moved to smaller ones, and now those cities are experiencing some of the steepest rent increases in the nation. The poor used to live on the other side of the tracks. Now they live in different towns and counties entirely.

And yet we continue to give the most help to those who least need it - affluent homeowners - while providing nothing to most rent-burdened tenants. If this is our design, our social contract, then we should at least own up to it; we should at least stand up and profess, "Yes, this is the kind of nation we want." Before us, there are two honest choices: We can endorse this inequality-maximizing arrangement, or we can reject it. What we cannot do is look a mother like Diaz in the face and say, "We'd love to help you, but we just can't afford to." Because that is, quite simply, a lie.

After her name was called, Diaz stepped outside the courtroom to talk with her landlord's attorney, a white man in wire glasses. She had secured emergency assistance from the state. It wasn't enough. But the lawyer told Diaz that if she "zeroed out" by next month, paying all her back rent and April's rent in full, he would dismiss the case. Diaz wrote out a check for $583 - a start, and what amounted to $357 less than what Asare and Jean-Charles receive from the MID in two months - and raced back to work. In April, she was let go.

Thinking about the long, hard road ahead for Diaz, I remembered a conversation I had with her six months earlier. Around her small dining table, Diaz and I had calculated her monthly budget, which left her with -$221 after all the bills were paid. The process seemed to reduce her to a sadder, emptied-out version of herself. "Eventually I'm going to have to figure something out," she said softly, "whether it's a second job or a third job. I don't know."

I looked down at my empty plate, smeared with tomato sauce from the meatball sub Diaz had made me. "Do you know what the mortgage-interest deduction is?" I asked.

"I don't," she said. "I'm sorry."

After I explained what it is, she asked, "Why don't they spend it on lower-income housing?" I shrugged. After a moment, I asked, "What would you do if you only had to pay 30 percent of your income on rent?"

Diaz looked around. Her eyes paused on one of Zay's homework assignments stuck to the refrigerator. Titled "Someone Special," its words wiggled forward in a child's handwriting: "My mom is special because she helps me figure out addition and subtraction. We always cook together. We cook some spaghetti." On the other side of the fridge, held up by a clown-fish magnet, was a bill from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.

"That would be life," she said.

Do We Cover White Christian Attackers Differently? Discuss How We Reported on the Austin Bombings

In Austin, a Bomber's Rampage Exposes Racial Fault Lines Long Buried

Were the Austin Bombings Acts of Terrorism? Why Law Enforcement Says No

Julie Yip-Williams, Writer of Candid Blog on Cancer, Dies at 42

The Bomber Is Dead, but Fear of Racist Attacks Lives On

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The son of a minister, Ohene Asare grew up poor. His family immigrated from Ghana when he was 8 and settled down in West Bridgewater, Mass., a town 30 miles south of Boston, where he was one of the few black students at the local public school.

# data[].attributes.body
This directly affects children as the age to vote will be lowered. Older generations will be affected as now more younger children could potentially be changing the way America votes. The younger generation has proved that they have a voice and care about what happens in our government, so much so they have protested. Their passion questions whether or not their voices should be heard now, or to wait till the age they can vote. In the future after these events, the voting age may be lowered.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Is the minimum legal voting age of 18 years old fair and appropriate, in your opinion, or should it be lowered?

In your view, at what age should people be able to vote in the United States? Why?

In " Why We Should Lower the Voting Age to 16," Laurence Steinberg writes:

The young people who have come forward to call for gun control in the wake of the mass shooting at their high school in Parkland, Fla., are challenging the tiresome stereotype of American kids as indolent narcissists whose brains have been addled by smartphones. They offer an inspiring example of thoughtful, eloquent protest.

Unfortunately, when it comes to electing lawmakers whose decisions about gun control and other issues affect their lives, these high schoolers lack any real power. This needs to change: The federal voting age in the United States should be lowered from 18 to 16.

Skeptics will no doubt raise questions about the competence of 16-year-olds to make informed choices in the voting booth. Aren't young people notoriously impulsive and hotheaded, their brains not fully developed enough to make good judgments?

Yes and no. When considering the intellectual capacity of teenagers, it is important to distinguish between what psychologists call "cold" and "hot" cognition.

Cold cognitive abilities are those we use when we are in a calm situation, when we are by ourselves and have time to deliberate and when the most important skill is the ability to reason logically with facts. Voting is a good example of this sort of situation.

Studies of cold cognition have shown that the skills necessary to make informed decisions are firmly in place by 16. By that age, adolescents can gather and process information, weigh pros and cons, reason logically with facts and take time before making a decision. Teenagers may sometimes make bad choices, but statistically speaking, they do not make them any more often than adults do.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

- At the end of the article, Professor Steinberg writes:

The last time the United States lowered the federal voting age was in 1971, when it went from 21 to 18. In that instance, the main motivating force was outrage over the fact that 18-year-olds could be sent to fight in Vietnam but could not vote.

Do you agree with the writer's proposal to lower the voting age to 16 so that those most vulnerable to school shootings have a say in how those shootings are best prevented? Why or why not?

- Do you agree that the brain science discussed in the article supports the argument for lowering the legal voting age in the United States? If so, how and why?

- What other reasons might you have for lowering the voting age, or for keeping the status quo, and why?

- If the voting age were lowered, would you vote? Why or why not?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Is the minimum legal voting age of 18 years old fair and appropriate, in your opinion, or should it be lowered? In your view, at what age should people be able to vote in the United States? Why?

# data[].attributes.body
In 2017, gay pride was a very new and prominent celebration. In this article it takes interviews from people from the L.G.B.T.Q. to see there views on certain topics relating to them and many others. This has a huge influence on our future because it shows that everyone really has the same and similar views. Although they may be different we all have our own opinions. This change in our world is also super important for our future because it is causing people to be more excepting of others.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What does H.I.V. mean to a millennial? How has the right for same-sex couples to marry changed views on marriage? What does discrimination look like at any age? Those are some of the questions we asked people recently at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in Greenwich Village. The conversations have been edited and condensed.

Discrimination

Maliika Graham, 27

I present as femme, so some people read me as straight. It's hard to separate whether someone is discriminating against me for my race or my sexuality, especially when I'm with my girlfriend, because she is a dark-skinned black woman. When we're together, people see two black women holding hands being affectionate. We get looks.

Edgardo Diaz, 22

Having a space like this community center is definitely a blessing. It has helped me love myself more and know that if people can't really understand who you are, that's their problem, not yours. Because at the end of the day, you're in this life for yourself and only to surround yourself with positive energy and not let the haters deter you from that.

Jonah Zechariah, 19

The center gave me a place where I can just be myself. I was never able to do that back at home. I can be known as Jonah and not my old self, who I was before. It's a place where I could not feel like I have to live up to anybody's standards.

Michael Feuerstein, 76

I have to say, I don't think I ever had any problems. I had a wonderful mom and dad. When I did tell my mom - on her terrace with my father - I said, "Mom, Dad, I'm gay." My mother says to me, "Michael, it's O.K." I said, "It doesn't bother you that I'm gay?" She says, "No, you're my son and I love you very much." She turns to Sam, my father, and says "Sam, you heard that." He says, "Fine with me."

H.I.V. and AIDS

Edgardo Diaz

I definitely do think about it a lot only because, in the household I grew up in, my mom tended to say that being gay is synonymous with having H.I.V. and all these diseases. Being reminded constantly, you tend to start worrying after a while and you start not wanting to explore yourself sexually.

Maliika Graham

The amount of people in the black community with H.I.V. and AIDS who are not only gay but straight black women and straight black men - I don't think it's just a queer issue. I think that it's something that we all need to not only accept as part of our lives but also not criminalize it, not stigmatize people with H.I.V. and AIDS in our language and in our legislature.

Christian Griffin, 29

Among my gay friends, PrEP [Truvada, which virtually eliminates the risk of H.I.V. infection] is pretty standard at this point. My purpose in getting on PrEP wasn't so that I could have unprotected sex. It was because you have a drink or whatever, and your inhibitions are lowered and you're less likely to make good decisions for yourself. Admitting that condomless sex feels better means that in a lot of situations, you're going to end up exposing yourself.

Frank Amato, 57

I think young men downplay H.I.V. and AIDS somewhat. It's very easy to say, "Well, take Truvada and O.K., now you're good to go." Then we have other S.T.D.s on the rise. There is no 100-percent guarantee.

Jama Shelton, 42

I have some friends who are positive, and I lost some acquaintances who are positive. And also my work has been in L.G.B.T. youth homelessness. That's what I've done for the past 15 years. Lots of young people that I knew, I often wonder, are they still alive? For reasons related to H.I.V. and also just being homeless in New York City. And every year I do the AIDS ride to try to keep it present.

Marriage

Michael Feuerstein

When I was in my 20s, it did enter my mind, and then I said no, it was never going to happen. Nothing like this happens. But the fighting that we had all these years led to something fabulous. And there's going to be more fighting. It's not over.

Christian Griffin

I always grew up with a little bit of a fantasy of a white picket fence, family with a dog and children, and a marriage. It was a wife at first, and then it was a husband. I was really happy when marriage equality passed because it just seemed like a social injustice that had been there for a long time, and it just didn't make a lot of sense.

Leonardo Canela, 24

I feel like if two people are in love, they don't need that status quo in order for them to feel like they're in love. They can just know that they are. I'm happy and proud of the achievements that we fought for, and that we came this far to have gay marriage. But for me, I don't see it. I don't believe in gay marriage.

Edgardo Diaz

I am excited about the fact that I can get married now. I've always admired the whole tradition of being married. Granted, the whole idea of having it is more of a business, and what marriage really meant has been lost over the years. But I've always loved the idea of walking up to the altar.

Frank Amato

Young gay people don't realize the importance of marriage. I think that being young is part of it, and experience, of course. You're only going to get that with age. My relationship with my partner was with a male. We were together for 12 years when he got ill. And without having the paperwork in place and not being married, you had no say.

Maliika Graham

At first, I didn't even believe in marriage, but now I want to adopt kids, and I feel like marriage is the safest way to protect my family. I also want to have a ceremony. I want to stand in front of my family and commit my life to my partner, have a party, maybe on a beach.

Gender Expression

Jama Shelton

I think there is a lot more flexibility and fluidity that is allowable now more than before, more allowance for breaking down the binary. I don't think it's one or the other. I think the more we can work to break down what it means to be a man or a woman, the more room there is for everyone to just be who they are outside of those categories. Those are two such limiting categories, and there is such variation in each of them. We've just drawn these arbitrary lines around them.

Edgardo Diaz

Now you see men who identify as straight and they still paint their nails. They do their makeup. Does that make them gay? Not necessarily. And vice versa. You see women who don't like wearing dresses. They like to dress up in suits and stuff like that. Does that make them L.G.B.T.? No. I just hope in the future we get to a point where we can actually just learn to give each other an opportunity before we come to such rash assumptions.

Leonardo Canela

I feel really liberated to be my age and find a space like this where I can discover myself. At first, I was confused and identifying myself as bisexual. But I finally found within myself who I am and my gender expression. I go by he, she and they. Because gender is like whatever you can be. No one can tell you what you can't be.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What does H.I.V. mean to a millennial? How has the right for same-sex couples to marry changed views on marriage? What does discrimination look like at any age? Those are some of the questions we asked people recently at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in Greenwich Village.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Year of Living Angrily (December 2017) 

# data[].attributes.subject
The Year of Living Angrily (December 2017) 

# data[].attributes.body
This article shows the affects on older and younger people in America because of the many topics it addresses. Many African Americans are affected by the issues such as drug abuse, racism, representation in politics. Even though the article is a recap of the year, many people can still relate to the issues that were reviewed and apply them to their own lives.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The close of 2017 probably finds you with little residual outrage. You spent it all during a year that supplied daily - no, often quarter-hourly - occasions to look up from your cubicle and beg for mercy, deliverance, scream therapy or permanent-resident status in Iceland. New Yorkers directed whatever anger they had left for the decrepit state of the subway system. But there was plenty more to get riled up about. Here's what you might have missed:
The opioid crisis is not just the scourge of white, rural working-class America.
Heroin is devastating poor, urban communities of color. The problem has been particularly dramatic in the Bronx where heroin laced with deadly fentanyl has been increasingly prevalent on the streets. In the fall, police broke up a drug ring that was marketing a brand called "Pray for Death." If the South Bronx were a state, it would have the second highest rate of drug overdose in the country after West Virginia.

Police accountability in New York City is a big problem.

Despite the fact that Mayor Bill de Blasio recently spoke in Iowa as the national voice of progressive politics, he has not made nearly enough noise about the effort to get a state civil rights law - known as Section 50-a, shielding the disciplinary records of police officers from public view - repealed. According to a report by the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board, where grievances against New York officers are heard, most of the recommended penalties in discipline cases amounted to a brief suspension or a loss of several vacation days. This fall, in the rare instance in which a police officer who killed an unarmed black man was actually tried, a Brooklyn jury found the officer, Wayne Isaacs, not guilty of murder and manslaughter in the death of Delrawn Small. Mr. Small had been driving home from a party with his new baby in the car when he got into a traffic dispute with Mr. Isaacs, who was off duty and driving an unmarked car. Instead of rolling up his window and driving away, Mr. Isaacs shot Mr. Small three times with a semiautomatic handgun.
Economic mobility will remain a pipe dream until we improve the city's public college graduation rate.
Earlier this month, a report from the Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan policy organization, pointed out that while New York City's high-school graduation rate reached an all-time high of 76 percent in 2016, graduation rates at the city's public two- and four-year colleges - where poor, immigrant students have remade themselves for decades - remain alarmingly low. Among community-college students in the City University of New York system, only 22 percent who enter associate degree programs finish them in three years; among students at four-year schools, approximately 55 percent finish within six years.
Actually, you could pay someone's college tuition for what it costs to see "Springsteen on Broadway."
The producers behind Bruce Springsteen's wildly popular one-man show committed themselves to keeping ticket costs down through the use of a new technology meant to filter out major, bulk-purchase scalpers. They also offer a lottery for 26 tickets at $75 each for every performance. Nevertheless, secondary markets like StubHub have been flooded with astronomically expensive tickets, some in excess of $8,000. To anyone thinking of paying that much to see rock's hero of working-class struggle, just know that CUNY tuition for a full-time student at a four-year college is $6,530.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
police brutality  misconduct and shootings

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The close of 2017 probably finds you with little residual outrage. You spent it all during a year that supplied daily - no, often quarter-hourly - occasions to look up from your cubicle and beg for mercy, deliverance, scream therapy or permanent-resident status in Iceland.

# data[].attributes.body
Gun control has always been an idea that has been looked at many times but at this time now in 2018 we have taken gun control very seriously, in fact today on March 25 marches were held everywhere in order to promote this idea. Young and old, all different ages were here to support this decision.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Everytown for Gun Safety, which was founded and financed by Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire and former New York mayor, proudly declared that it had doled out more than $1 million in grants to local organizers. A nonprofit led by former Representative Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, arranged for more than 200 people from the Parkland area to attend Saturday's march in Washington, and said it had worked with the owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft, to use the N.F.L. franchise's plane to bring some people to the capital.

In Washington, volunteers staffed medical tents, the restaurateur José Andrés used one of his kitchens to prepare thousands of ham-and-cheese sandwiches, and a popular chain handed out personal-size pizzas to children.

"Our mission was to give them the biggest megaphone possible," Shannon Watts, the founder of an Everytown-affiliated group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said on Sunday. "I think what yesterday showed was every generation wants to get involved in this effort, and they want to get off the sidelines."

Established groups and high-profile supporters were not the exclusive sources of money and organizing strength nationwide. As of Sunday, a GoFundMe page affiliated with the march in Washington had raised nearly $3.5 million. Half of the crowdsourced money was expected to help pay for Saturday's protest, with the balance going to people directly affected by the Feb. 14 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.

Yet the role of leading gun control groups and advocates, and even local organizers, has plainly aggravated and frustrated critics of Saturday's marches. Breitbart, the conservative website, said the events were "directed, promoted and funded by left-wing adults and adult-led organizations."

Although adults were involved in some planning - an organizer listed on the National Park Service permit for the march in Washington, for example, is a prominent activist from California - there is little doubt that students were crucial to orchestrating Saturday's events. In Washington, the area seemed to influence the program, which included Parkland students and celebrity guests but also a choir from Baltimore and remarks from a local 11-year-old girl.

"The kids did everything," said Jenn Hoadley, 36, who helped students organize a march in Anchorage. "All I did was say, 'You want a stage? Cool. I'll find one for you. You need a sound system? Cool. I'll find one for you. You want to march in the park? I do paperwork to help you get that done.' They planned it all, and they should be given credit for that."

In New York, a Facebook group, envisioned to coordinate the efforts of about 30 friends and classmates to attend a march, swelled into the planning apparatus for the city's major event. The group's creator, Alex Clavering, a Columbia Law School student, was quickly regarded as the official organizer.

So that was what he became. He convened meetings and established a fund-raising effort. He applied for a city parade permit - at first, he recalled, for a turnout of 3,000 to 5,000 people. By the end of the first week, he had changed it to 30,000 people. (The mayor's office ultimately estimated that nearly 200,000 people marched on Saturday.)

The early days, Mr. Clavering, 26, said, were "decentralized, figuring it out, being scrappy." But more established gun control groups soon got in touch, offering to connect him to others and, eventually, to pick up expenses that included lighting, sound equipment and stages.

Mr. Clavering's GoFundMe campaign raised more than $25,000, but he said the cost for the entire event was likely around $100,000.

And although groups like Everytown provided the infrastructure and expertise, Mr. Clavering, who had never before planned an event of such scale, said they always remained hands-off. They left the decision-making to a core group of about 20 student organizers.

In Vermont, Ms. Knoop, a freshman at Johnson State College, recalled how she popped into a few Vermont-centric Facebook groups in February to see if anyone was planning an event in her state. She was quickly advised to check in with the people who would know: Women's March Vermont.

"I just messaged them and I was like, 'Do you know if anything is happening yet?' and they were like, 'No, we were waiting for a youth to come forward who wanted to lead the event.'"

Ms. Knoop said Women's March officials shared their organizing skills and spreadsheets with contact information for politicians, media outlets and other organizations that might want to help out. Ms. Knoop applied for a permit to hold a rally on the steps of the gold-topped, Greek Revival State House in Montpelier and said a group called the Peace & Justice Center handled the liability insurance. And Ms. Knoop worked with Gun Sense Vermont, which advocates tighter gun laws in the state. The group also helped with planning and managed the event's finances, including one of the grants Everytown issued.

"They handled the finances, any donations we got, they were paying for everything, which was really, really helpful," Ms. Knoop said.

And there were business contributions. Ben & Jerry's, the ice cream maker, paid for buses to shuttle demonstrators to Montpelier.

That left Ms. Knoop to attend long weekly planning meetings in Burlington, about an hour away from her school.

She used the time she had between classes to send emails and make phone calls to hammer out logistics for the rally.

"I definitely fell back in school a bit for it," Ms. Knoop said, "but to me, that was worth it."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
marjory stoneman douglas high school (parkland  fla)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
moms demand action for gun sense in america

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Alan Blinder, Jess Bidgood and Vivian Wang

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In Gun Control Marches, Students Led but Adults Provided Key Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Everytown for Gun Safety, which was founded and financed by Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire and former New York mayor, proudly declared that it had doled out more than $1 million in grants to local organizers.

# data[].attributes.headline
March For Our Lives Highlights: Students Protesting guns Say "Enough Is Enough"

# data[].attributes.subject
March For Our Lives Highlights: Students Protesting guns Say "Enough Is Enough"

# data[].attributes.body
This article has affected children as gun violence in schools has gotten out of control. Children's lives are at risk as gun laws make it easy to access a gun. This has affected older generations as they are now able to see the changing ways in our school system. This wasn't always the way schools were; which means these weapons need to have as many restrictions as possible. Through these marches they want laws passed so guns are more difficult to obtain so that these shootings don't have to keep occurring.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
March for Our Lives Highlights: Students Protesting Guns Say ‘Enough Is Enough’ (Published 2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hundreds of thousands of protesters, outraged by a recent school shooting, took to the streets in Washington and around the world, calling for action against gun violence.

# data[].attributes.body
This article would affect the younger audience because they are being presented with the idea that one of our future presidents, at the time, could be spreading false accusations. Hearing this as a young adult could make them weary of how our politicians are elected in the first place even if they are tweeting false statements.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In two evening tweets, President Donald Trump said the House Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation has the wrong target.

Instead of Trump and his associates, the committee should consider the ties that Hillary and Bill Clinton have to Russia, he said.

"Why isn't the House Intelligence Committee looking into the Bill & Hillary deal that allowed big Uranium to go to Russia, Russian speech money to Bill, the Hillary Russian 'reset,' praise of Russia by Hillary, or Podesta Russian Company," he tweeted March 27, 2017. "Trump Russia story is a hoax."

Why isn't the House Intelligence Committee looking into the Bill & Hillary deal that allowed big Uranium to go to Russia, Russian speech....
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2017

...money to Bill, the Hillary Russian "reset," praise of Russia by Hillary, or Podesta Russian Company. Trump Russia story is a hoax. #MAGA!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2017

In his tweets, Trump mixed legitimate allegations that Russia meddled in the election on his behalf - for which there is significant supporting evidence - with unproven speculation that Bill and Hillary Clinton engaged in some fishy activity.

We counted six things Trump said that are inaccurate, exaggerated or taken out of context. Let's break down his claims.
"The Bill & Hillary deal that allowed big Uranium to go to Russia"
Trump significantly distorts the uranium deal in question by calling it "the Bill and Hillary deal."

In 2010, Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, was one of nine federal agency heads to sign off on Russia's purchase of a controlling stake in Uranium One, an international mining company headquartered in Canada with operations in several U.S. states. It was part of a regular process for approving international deals involving strategic assets, such as uranium, that could have implications for national security. Uranium One's U.S. mines produced about 11 percent of the country's total uranium production in 2014, according to Oilprice.com.

But even with its control of Uranium One, Russia cannot export the material from the United States. Russia was likely more interested in Uranium One's assets in Kazakhstan, the world's largest uranium producer.

As PolitiFact and others have detailed, some investors with an interest in making the Uranium One deal go through have a long-time relationship with Bill Clinton and have donated to the Clinton Foundation. But there's no concrete evidence those relationships or donations helped make the deal go through. Most of the donations occurred before Hillary Clinton could have known she would become secretary of state. And again, the secretary of state was one of nine agency heads that had input into the final decision, which ultimately lay with President Barack Obama.
"Russian speech money to Bill"
In 2010, Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank, paid Bill Clinton $500,000 to deliver a speech, according to Hillary Clinton's 2010 financial disclosure form.

Some critics of the Clintons have suggested this speaking fee might have been an attempt by Renaissance Capital to curry favor with the State Department, which was involved in the Uranium One deal at the time.

But it's important to keep in mind that Bill Clinton regularly delivers speeches for fees of $500,000 or higher - such as a $750,000 speech in Hong Kong in 2011, paid for by a Swedish communications company, and a $600,000 speech in the Netherlands, also in 2011, paid for by a Dutch finance corporation.

Also, Renaissance Capital regularly invites world leaders to speak at its events, like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"the Hillary Russian 'reset' "
Clinton may have been involved in the Russian "reset," but the effort wasn't very successful. In his 2008 campaign, Obama said he would seek a less confrontational relationship with Russia. The official kickoff came in Geneva on March 6, 2009, when Clinton, the Obama administration's top diplomat, gave her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov a red "reset" button.

However, starting when Putin retook the presidency in 2012, the "reset" started to fall apart, in part because Putin accused Clinton personally of stoking anti-Putin protests. Without mentioning Putin specifically, Clinton had said the United States was concerned about the conduct of Russia's elections and that the Obama administration supported the rights of the Russian people.

In 2013, the relationship strained further when Russia took in Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who had leaked a large trove of sensitive intelligence. And in 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting new U.S. sanctions on Russia.
"praise of Russia by Hillary"
Trump is possibly referring to information uncovered in a trove of emails stolen from former Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and published on Wikileaks. The emails include excerpts from some of Clinton's remarks after she left the State Department, including a 2013 speech to Goldman Sachs where she said "we would very much like to have a positive relationship with Russia," and a 2013 speech to financial organization Sanford Bernstein, where she said Putin is "an engaging and, you know, very interesting conversationalist."

But in the same document, there are excerpts of speeches where Clinton condemned Russia's Ukraine invasion, called the 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia "fraudulent," questioned Putin's record on civil liberties, and said Europe should lessen its dependence on Russia for energy resources.

Putin "has used his energy weapon to intimidate Europe," she said in 2014, speaking to software company Marketo.
"Podesta Russian Company"
In 2011, Podesta joined the board of Joule Unlimited, a solar-based alternative fuel company headquartered in Massachusetts, with operations in New Mexico and the Netherlands. A few months after Podesta took on this role, Anatoly Chubais, chairman and CEO of Russia-backed investment fund RUSNANO, also joined Joule's board.

There doesn't appear to be anything untoward or illegal about the fact that Podesta sat on a corporate board with a Russian banker. Nonetheless, some of his and Clinton's critics have played it up. Conservative website the Daily Caller has alleged that Podesta didn't properly disclose his shares in Joule when he joined the Obama administration in 2014.

In any case, the company is American, not Russian.
"Trump Russia story is a hoax."
Trump is downplaying reality here. There might not be a vast conspiracy in which Trump is letting Putin pull the strings in the White House to help the Trump Organization's bottom line. But there is enough legitimate evidence that Russia meddled in the election to compel the FBI to investigate some of Trump's associates' ties to Russia, as well as bipartisan calls for a congressional inquiry.

Fueling the story is the fact that several Trump associates have specific Russia connections. Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has long ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, for example. And former national security adviser Michael Flynn - ousted for lying about the nature of his discussions with the Russian ambassador - has a relationship with Russian state media network RT.

Read our full report summarizing the slew of accusations about Trump's alleged ties to Russia.

In his tweets, Trump seems to suggest that the Clintons and their associates were working on behalf of Russia's interests. That's hard to square with the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the election in order to harm Hillary Clinton and elect Trump instead.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fact-checking Trump's tweets about Clinton and Russia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In two evening tweets, President Donald Trump said the House Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation has the wrong target. Instead of Trump and his associates, the committee should consider the ties that Hillary and Bill Clinton have to Russia, he said.